Authors: Jeremy Duns
It was cold in Kievskaya metro station, but Victor Kotov was sweating beneath his overcoat. He had spent weeks preparing for this moment, but he was still terrified something
would go wrong. And failure meant a firing squad.
Something moved in his peripheral vision and he looked up, but it was just a bulb flickering in one of the nearby chandeliers. The long marble hall was deserted but for him seated on this bench,
trying to stop his legs from shaking. He glanced at his watch for what felt like the hundredth time. If his calculations were correct the man should be on the next train. Just three more
minutes.
He marvelled for a moment that he had been brought to this point by a passing remark. He had long known what they called him in the office: ‘Akula’ – the Shark. Over the years
a few subordinates had mistakenly used it in his presence, but he had liked that they feared him. Taken pride in it, even. But three months ago he had overheard Masevnin explaining the origins of
his nickname to a pretty new secretary in the typing pool. ‘No, no, it’s not because he’s dangerous – he’s a pushover. It’s because of how he looks. The sheen on
those two sad grey suits he wears has become so worn over the years they look like the skin of a shark. And the eyes in that great meaty face of his, have you noticed? Tiny black pellets with no
apparent feeling or intellect behind them, just a dull malevolence towards the world. That’s why we call him the Shark!’ And the girl had laughed loudly along with Masevnin.
Kotov had immediately ordered a new suit from GUM, a blue Western-style Super 100 he could barely afford. But the comment had cut him to the quick. His eleven years as the directorate’s
respected security chief had crumbled to ashes. He wasn’t respected at all: he was a laughing stock.
He had started copying down documents a couple of weeks later, scribbling notes straight from the cipher machines whenever he could. Then last week Proshin had asked him to install one of the
new safes in his office, and he had seized the opportunity. He had stayed behind two evenings in a row and photographed every scrap of paper he could find.
There was a rumbling in the ceiling, and Kotov looked up expectantly. Passengers began flooding down the staircase and into the hallway. And yes, there he was. Kotov jumped from the bench and
hurried towards him.
‘Sir!’ he whispered in English, reaching out a hand and gripping his sleeve. The man swivelled round, his face frozen with fright. ‘I’m not a thief,’ Kotov assured
him. ‘A friend. We met before at your embassy, remember? You are Mister Peem.’
Third Secretary Angus Pimm nodded slowly, and Kotov gestured to the bench. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I just need a few moments of your time.’
Pimm glanced around anxiously, but the swathe of people were focused on one thing only – getting home as soon as possible. Kotov nodded at the rapidly emptying hall.
‘No one watches us. And you know who I am, yes? I mean, who I really am?’
Pimm nodded dully. He knew. He’d been introduced to Kotov as a press attaché, but he was GRU: Soviet military intelligence. He’d been assigned to feel him out last year but
had got nowhere and had been under the impression the man wasn’t even aware he was approaching him. It seemed he’d been wrong about that, but what madness was this, to accost him in a
metro station?
‘And I know who you are,’ said Kotov. ‘Please, we don’t have much time,’ he continued. ‘I wish to defect to England, and I have many secret documents on
me.’
‘
On
you? Christ! Where?’
Kotov was moving his hand to his coat pocket.
Pimm looked at him, aghast. ‘Christ!’ He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He tried to remember the procedures for such an occurrence. Stay calm was the first, but he
wasn’t managing that very well.
There was another rumbling sound from the ceiling. It was time. Kotov removed the envelope from his pocket and placed it in Pimm’s hands.
‘This is my first gift to you,’ he said. ‘Please make sure it reaches the right people.’
He turned and walked hurriedly up the staircase to the platform.
Monday, 17 November 1969, Century House, London
‘You can go through now.’
Rachel Gold walked across the plush carpet and pushed open the large mahogany doors. There were two men in the room: Edmund Innes was seated behind his desk, wearing a herringbone suit and
drooping polka-dotted bow tie, while Sandy Harmigan was stretched out in one of the leather armchairs by the sideboard, looking as louche as ever.
Innes looked up. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Gold.’ He got to his feet. ‘A glass of sherry, perhaps?’
‘Yes, please.’
He walked to the sideboard, and she glanced around the room nervously. Harmigan smiled at her and she looked away, her gaze finding the window offering a skyline of grimy rooftops. All the
mahogany in the world couldn’t disguise the fact they were in the drab end of Lambeth.
Innes handed her the glass. ‘Something’s come up.’
He ambled back to his desk and picked up a brown folder, which he handed to her with a tight smile.
She removed the band around the folder and a crisp page of glossy black Cyrillic type stared up at her. Her eyes scanned it hungrily. At first blush, it looked like an internal report from GRU
– specifically from its Second Chief Directorate, the department in Moscow responsible for counter-intelligence against the United States and Britain. In other words, gold dust.
She lowered herself into one of the chairs and started reading. The document was dated 3 November, and described a GRU special forces operation to apprehend a man and woman who had escaped from
custody in the Lubyanka. The team hunting them had been led by Colonel Fedor Proshin, but the report was written by his son, Alexander. It seemed the man being hunted had once been a Soviet agent,
and that Alexander Proshin had been his handler. In keeping with protocol, the agent was referred to throughout by his codename, NEZAVISIMYJ, meaning ‘Independent’, but the report
revealed several details about him: he was forty-four years old, had been a high-ranking British intelligence officer and had been in Nigeria and Italy in the previous six months.
Rachel realised at once why they’d summoned her. It could only be Paul Dark.
She thought back to June, when Innes had first called her into this office. At twenty-four, she was one of the Service’s youngest officers, and the only woman at her level of seniority,
mostly as a result of being a mathematical prodigy. But she was dissatisfied nonetheless. She had been recruited by GCHQ a few months after finishing her degree at Cambridge, when she had been
filling in as a junior don in the maths department at King’s – a pale ferret-faced man in a green duffel-coat had appeared at her rooms one afternoon and asked if he could have ‘a
quiet word’.
GCHQ had reminded her of Cambridge in many ways, perhaps because several of her colleagues had been former academics, and she had soon been itching to tackle something more concrete than
patterns on a page. As a child, she had devoured books of puzzles and codes her father had bought her, but the two that had most fascinated her were
Spy-Catcher
and
Friend or
Foe?
, the wartime memoirs of the Dutch counter-intelligence officer Oreste Pinto, who had worked with MI5 in interrogating suspected double agents. The BBC had made a television series a few
years later, but for her nothing could match the magic of the books, which had transported her into a world where solving puzzles was not simply an intellectual pursuit but a form of combat on
which the fate of nations could hinge. It had led her to GCHQ, but she was still a long way from the sharp end – she yearned to be out in the field, testing her wits against others, face to
face in the great game of espionage.
After asking around the office as discreetly as she could, she had eventually been introduced at a dinner party to someone from the Service, and in the spring of 1968, when many people her age
were busy dropping acid, she had finally joined. She had started out in the Communications Section, where despite her youth and inexperience she had quickly become known as the ‘crypto
queen’. But barely a year and a half into the job it had already started to feel like she was treading water – and the problems she was dealing with felt as abstract as they had done at
GCHQ, or King’s.
Her first meeting with Innes had changed all that. She had been indoctrinated into one of the Service’s greatest secrets – that it was about to be closed down.
Rumours had been circulating for months that the agency was in crisis. There were even whispers that the previous Chief, Farraday, had died during the memorial service for his predecessor in St
Paul’s, and if one stayed long enough after hours one heard talk of a sniper, an Italian terrorist group, of manhunts across Europe. It had all sounded too fantastical to be true, but there
had been nothing imaginary about Innes’ grim expression.
He had been appointed Chief a few weeks earlier, but nobody believed he’d last long. He had previously been head of Western European Section and was regarded as a forensic intelligence
analyst but a weak politician. Rachel had only ever seen him once before, catching a glimpse of a top hat and tails as he climbed into a limousine outside the building, like a figure from a
Trollope novel. Up close, she found he had unexpectedly kind eyes, and had felt herself wanting to please him: that sense of loyalty she had sometimes experienced with very good teachers, and with
her father when she was a child.
That afternoon, he had explained to her the true state of the Service’s predicament, which turned out to be far worse than even the wildest basement bar gossip. Farraday
had
been
killed by an Italian group, but they had been sponsored by the Russians and the assassination was tied to the disappearance of Paul Dark, the former head of Soviet Section. Everyone had been told
Dark was on extended leave, but the truth was he had been unmasked as a traitor that spring and gone on the run. The suspicion was he’d defected to Moscow, but nothing had been confirmed.
Rachel had listened in shock as Innes outlined the fiasco surrounding Dark. Several pieces of intelligence suggested the Sovs had recruited him as long ago as 1945, meaning that over two decades
of high-level secrets could have been betrayed. Worse still, the Americans had got wind of it and were furious, threatening a permanent cessation of all intelligence-sharing unless the Service
could put its house in order, and fast. It was just the latest in a long string of British spy scandals that had begun with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in the fifties and had been followed by
Kim Philby and George Blake’s defections. Dark was seen as the final straw. The prime minister had swiftly responded to the Americans’ objections, threatening to shut the Service down
completely and handing its responsibilities to Five until a new, ‘untainted’ agency could be formed.
This was the doomsday scenario, and Innes had been determined to stop it. He had promised to deliver the prime minister a thorough report into all the agency’s security lapses before the
year was out. Innes was moving thirty officers into a small command centre in Warren Street to form a new department, Review Section. He’d asked Rachel to lead the group analysing
Dark’s career, reporting directly to the head of Soviet Section, Sandy Harmigan.
Since then she had eaten, slept and breathed little but Paul Dark. Working through the files with four others, she had retraced as much of his life as possible: his racing-car driver father, his
mad Swedish aristocrat of a mother, his string of girlfriends – ‘Dark’s dolly birds’, Harmigan called them – all of whom seemed to be damaged in one way or another,
and all of whom seemed to have come to a sticky end. She’d worked long into the night, fuelled by a steady supply of coffee from the vending machine downstairs and St Moritz menthols from an
all-night offie across the street. In her more sombre moments, she despaired at the magnitude of the task. It could take years to assess what the man had done, and even then a thousand questions
might never be answered.
Guiding her through the maze of the investigation was Sandy Harmigan. He was a daily presence in the command centre, and at six foot four, with a mane of silvery hair framing a long, lean face
and dressed in bespoke Harris tweed, impossible to ignore. He was a war hero, having gained an MC at Saint-Nazaire – in the latter stages of the raid, he’d carried out a solo
reconnaissance mission in the port. He had then been captured and imprisoned by the Germans, but had broken out of his camp with a group of POWs. After the war he had written a memoir,
Safe
Conduct
, which had been filmed by Hollywood with Dirk Bogarde portraying a sensationalised version of him. Rachel had read the book in her teens – it wasn’t quite as thrilling as
Oreste Pinto, but it was close. Now Harmigan was the spook’s spook: in the corridors of Century House, he was discussed in hushed, almost reverent tones, and was widely regarded as
Innes’ inevitable successor. Rachel had found, to her dismay, that she was falling in love with him.
But the work came first, and it had borne fruit: by August her team had pinpointed several contingency plans they felt certain Dark had betrayed to Moscow, all of which were changed accordingly.
At the same time, ties had been severed with nearly a hundred agents and assets around the world. They had also discovered the true identity of Dark’s handler, Alexander Proshin, who as
‘Ivan Dimirov’ had worked as a lecturer at UCL. Unfortunately, they hadn’t got a lot further than that, as interviews with former students and tutors had turned up precious little
concrete intelligence about him. He kept to himself. He liked Dave Brubeck records. He collected stamps. Proshin had become her second obsession: the man behind the curtain, the puppet-master, the
great spy-handler.
Now, thanks to the document Innes had just handed her, she finally had some answers. It seemed that Paul Dark’s long run of evading justice had come to an end, and it had ironically been
at the hands of Proshin. In the final paragraphs of his memorandum, Proshin described how he and his team had tracked Dark and an unnamed British woman to a small island between Finland and Sweden.
A gunfight had ensued in which three had died: Colonel Proshin, the woman, and Dark. Alexander Proshin and his radio operator had flown his father’s body back to Moscow, but had left the
Brits to rot on the island – ‘I decided that the birds there deserved some meat,’ was how he had chillingly put it.