Authors: Jeremy Duns
Rachel closed the file and placed it on her lap.
‘Where’s it from?’
Innes nodded at Harmigan, who set his glass to one side.
‘A Russian chap approached Angus Pimm in the Moscow metro on Wednesday evening. Name of Kotov – a GRU security officer. He passed Pimm an envelope, saying it was his “first
gift”. It contained microfilms of twenty documents, of which this was one.’
‘Wednesday?’ She looked between them. ‘Why are you showing it to me only now?’
Both men smiled tersely, and she blushed at her own impertinence. But Dark was hers, they knew that.
‘We were looking into it,’ said Innes gently. ‘We’ve been stung with dangles before.’
She nodded. The Soviets would sometimes send an officer to a foreign embassy claiming to want to defect. If accepted as genuine, he could feed them disinformation for months, or even years.
‘Moscow Station have interviewed Pimm extensively,’ said Innes. ‘They think Kotov’s the real thing, but as you’re the expert on Dark we wanted your view before we
decide how to proceed.’
The two men were looking at her expectantly. Innes had phrased it to flatter, but she suspected they were simply looking for confirmation of what they had already decided. If she agreed Kotov
was genuine, they would then have more support for their case. It would mean they could justify running Kotov, but also that they could sign off the report to the prime minister saying Dark had
been killed: ‘But that was in another country, and besides, the traitor’s dead.’ She was tempted to disappoint them on principle, but that would be unprofessional. Still, they
were putting her in an unpleasant situation, essentially asking her to gauge the worth of the report on sight, and devoid of any surrounding context.
‘What are the other documents Kotov handed over?’
‘Solid stuff,’ said Harmigan. ‘Most of it new to us, if not earth-shattering.’
‘Can I see them?’
‘We wanted your view on this first.’
She took a sip of the sherry. Vile, she thought – far too sweet.
‘All right. Well, it could be disinformation, of course: Moscow’s found Dark alive somewhere but they want us to believe he’s dead so they’ve concocted this report and
sent their man along with it to convince us. But I think that’s rather unlikely. If they knew for certain he were alive that would suggest they had him in their custody, in which case
they’d get much more mileage out of him by holding a press conference, like they did with Burgess and Maclean, or at least allowing him to be spotted by Western journalists, like they did
with Philby in ’63. Then there’s the mention of the woman with him. Unfortunately, that sounds very much like it’s Sarah Severn, who we know disappeared from Rome Station at the
same time as Dark was there. Finally, the memorandum claims to be written by Alexander Proshin, and it seems to me that it is. We’ve already determined that this man was Dark’s handler,
and I very much doubt they’d word disinformation as callously as they have here. It has the unpleasant ring of truth. The details he gives of handling Dark in London also fit with the other
information we have. It seems he’s now relocated to Moscow and has become fairly senior in this directorate. You may remember my reports about his father, who used to be one of
Andropov’s closest advisers and has been missing for some time. His death as described in this report and the son’s ascendency in Moscow explain a large part of what we’ve been
missing.’ She took a breath and gave a brief smile. ‘So – pending further analysis, of course – my assessment is that the report is real.’
Both men looked relieved, and she wondered how to word her next sentence. Harmigan noticed her hesitation.
‘Is something wrong?’
She shifted in her seat for a moment, then took the plunge. ‘Yes. There’s another possibility. The document could be genuine, but Dark and Severn might nevertheless still be alive.
It doesn’t need to be an attempt to feed us disinformation – Proshin could simply be lying on his own account.’
Innes’ head snapped up. ‘Why on earth would he do that?’
She gave a thin smile, unwilling to lecture the head of the Service. ‘There could be any number of reasons, sir. Political infighting we don’t know about, or simply to cover his own
back. If he and his team lost Dark in Finland, for instance, writing a report admitting it would be tantamount to signing his own death sentence.’
Harmigan reached for his drink. Innes sighed, then offered her a polite but distant smile.
‘Thank you, Miss Gold. We’ll take this from here.’
She gave a brief nod, stood and walked out of the room.
Innes wandered to the sideboard and poured two more brandies, then headed back over to Harmigan and handed one to him.
‘Well? What if she’s right?’
Harmigan looked up at him, surprised. ‘She isn’t. She’s just become too attached to the chase. And it helps if the person you’re chasing is tangible.’
Innes took a sip from his glass, swirling the liquid in his mouth before swallowing.
‘What about her idea it could be some kind of internal intrigue we don’t know about?’
The other man let out a derisive snort. ‘Edmund, you know as well as I do you can send yourself mad applying that sort of thinking to everything.’ He nodded at the dossier on the
table. ‘It’s all there in black and white.’ He tipped his head back and downed the rest of his drink, then slammed the glass down on the sideboard and made a short chopping motion
with his hand. ‘Dark’s dead. Good bloody riddance.’
Wednesday, 31 December 1969, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
It was approaching dusk by the time the dilapidated Nissan Cedric came to a stop outside the house in Kenny Hill.
‘This the one,
lah
?’
Rachel consulted her map and nodded. She paid the driver, peeling off notes from the bundle she had exchanged at the airport, and stepped out of the car. She watched as the car turned round and
headed back down the hill, leaving the street empty but for her. After the cacophony of the city centre, with the beeping horns and roaring exhausts of buses and vans and motorcycles, the
neighbourhood was eerily quiet.
She walked up to a set of iron gates. Beyond it, a gravel driveway led to a long white villa, its red roof tiles and black slatted windows giving it an incongruously Tudor look. She was reminded
of her father’s favourite pub, The Swan in Newtown.
A small card in a pillar to the right of the gates read ‘Gadlow’, and she pressed the button beneath it. In the dim light, she watched as a man in a belted uniform and peaked cap
emerged from a cabin on the other side of the gates.
‘I’m here to see the Gadlows.’
He nodded and placed a key in one of the gates to let her through, raising a hand to indicate the entrance of the house.
She thanked him. In the driveway, a small man in a safari suit was polishing the bonnet of a black Mercedes sedan with a chamois cloth. She said ‘Good evening’ and he looked up for a
moment, then returned to his polishing.
Feeling slightly foolish, she approached the front door, which was a grand oak affair with a large bronze knocker. Her stomach was roiling. Was it simply nerves, she wondered, or was this part
of the jet lag phenomenon she’d been warned of? When she’d left her flat in London it had been shortly after dawn. Now it was quarter to seven in the evening and she was suddenly just a
few hours away from a new decade.
It had also been damp and cold in London, while here it was in the high twenties, and she could feel the beads of sweat forming on her skin, stinging her eyes and pooling in the ridge of her
upper lip. She wiped it away with her hand. The humidity had hit her like a solid wall on walking out of the terminal building, and her neck still ached from having slept in an awkward position on
the flight. The drive through the city had only made her feel more jumbled up. As well as the noise, the landscape had been an incoherent mixture of wide boulevards and palm trees, concrete tower
blocks and ornate mosques. Billboards and signposts were often in several alphabets, including the Latin one, with many words near-phonetic spellings of the English equivalent. But you had to be in
the right frame of mind to see this, and it had even taken her a few seconds to twig the sign reading ‘Teksi’ in the airport. Not a good omen for the supposed crypto queen.
She rubbed her eyes and took a deep breath.
Pull yourself together – you’ve come a long way for this.
She swung the bronze knocker. After a while, an elderly Chinese woman
in a plain blue housedress and slippers opened the door a fraction and peered out. On seeing her, she gave a sharp nod and immediately turned and shuffled away again.
Rachel was debating whether to follow after her – and marvelling at the number of servants she had already encountered – when another figure stepped into the doorway. She was an
attractive woman in her late thirties. Thirty-eight, Rachel remembered from the file. Her fair hair was swept back from her forehead and she wore a turquoise shantung silk evening gown that showed
off long, tanned arms and accentuated her bust. Rachel was suddenly conscious of the wildness of her own dark curls and the pale angularity of her body beneath the cheap cotton dress she’d
bought in Gamages a few days earlier.
‘Hello? May I help?’
The voice was a bright English trill, the kind that would suit a speaker at a debutante’s ball or the presenter of a children’s programme on the BBC. Rachel straightened her back and
pasted on a smile.
‘Yes, hello. I’m looking for Tom Gadlow.’
‘And you are . . .?’
‘Rachel Gold. I’ve just flown in from London.’ She stuck out her hand.
There was a momentary hesitation, of the type she was used to whenever she said her name with its ‘biblical resonances’, as her brother, Danny, euphemistically referred to it. And
then she felt the tips of her fingers being gently shaken.
‘Oh, yes. The office told us you were coming. I’m Eleanor, Tom’s wife. He’s out on the veranda. Do come in.’
Rachel followed Eleanor Gadlow through to a spacious living room: it was filled with several brightly coloured sofas, modern abstract oil paintings and cabinets housing glass ornaments. How much
of it had been paid for by the Sovs, she wondered. The house and servants came with the job, but the décor looked a little too flashy for a Head of Station – perhaps Gadlow had a
numbered account in Zurich. Was Eleanor in on his treachery, or did she not know where the money came from?
Three weeks earlier, Rachel had been reviewing the latest batch of material passed to Moscow Station by Victor Kotov when she had discovered something extraordinary: one of the microfilm reels
had contained the minutes of meetings that had taken place in the secure room of the British embassy in Bangkok in the late fifties. Over the course of nine days, she had mapped out everyone who
had had access to those documents until she had narrowed the list to just one person who could have seen them all: Tom Gadlow, who had since become Head of Station in Kuala Lumpur.
It had taken her several more days to persuade Sandy Harmigan she was right about Gadlow. Although Review Section had been set up for precisely this sort of breakthrough, nobody on the Fourth
Floor had welcomed the news of another double agent in the ranks. Perhaps because of her insistence that Paul Dark might still be alive, Sandy had been especially sceptical. But after several
meetings, at which section heads had been brought in and charts had been set up and explained, she had convinced Sandy and the others that there could be no other possible explanation.
Once they had accepted Gadlow was guilty, the next question had been how to get him back to London for interrogation without tipping him – or the Soviets – off. Sandy had decided to
send Rachel out to fetch him. It was a risk – she had little experience in the field and he was still troubled by her refusal to back down over Dark – but she had all the details fixed
in her mind and, more importantly, wouldn’t get cold feet about bringing him in.
There had been similar missions, the most notable being the attempts to bring George Blake and Kim Philby back to London. Blake had come willingly, having been summoned by telegram for a
possible promotion, and had eventually cracked and confessed all. But Philby had managed to fool the officer sent out to fetch him into giving him time to arrange his affairs before flying home,
and had promptly fled to Moscow instead. Some felt that the officer in question, one of Philby’s oldest friends, had deliberately bungled the operation through a sense of personal loyalty.
‘Whatever happens,’ Sandy had said with startling ferocity in her last meeting with him, ‘we can’t have a repeat of that fiasco. We need to know precisely what
Gadlow’s done, so don’t let the bastard out of your sight and bring him back in one piece.’ And then he had smiled, and his usual smooth demeanour had been restored.
‘How was your flight?’
Rachel snapped out of her thoughts. ‘Oh, it was fine, thank you. But rather long – the furthest I’ve been before is Gibraltar.’
She winced at how provincial she sounded, but Eleanor Gadlow gave her an indulgent smile. ‘You were lucky this afternoon’s storm died down – sometimes they drag on for hours,
and that’s no fun to land in, believe me.’
Rachel made further polite noises, wondering if the chattiness was her natural state or a sign of anxiety.
They reached a glass door at the far end of the room. Beyond it, a grey and mauve sky stretched above a landscape of rolling hills that even in the twilight looked lush and alive.
Eleanor Gadlow caught the expression of awe on her face and smiled. ‘Yes, we’re very lucky. It all used to be plantations, of course.’ She slid the door open and called out.
‘Darling? The girl from London’s here.’
Rachel noted the dismissive description and stepped out after her, her skin prickling as the hot damp air again swathed her like an invisible blanket. A dark plume of smoke emerged from a coiled
device placed on the tiles, and she realised it was to ward off mosquitoes.
A figure rose from a scoop-backed rattan chair in the far corner of the veranda and walked towards her. He was broad-shouldered and beefy: he’d been a rugby blue, and his face bore further
testament to that fact, with a conspicuously broken nose set in an otherwise handsome, hearty face. He wore a crisp white shirt paired with a bright pink and green patterned sarong and a pair of
highly polished sandals, and his dark hair was greased back with pomade. Rachel tried not to show surprise at the absurd outfit and braced herself for the usual masculine glazing of the eyes once
he had taken her in, but instead he gave her a dazzling smile of such apparent sincerity that for one horrifying moment she wondered whether she had got everything wrong, and was here in error.