A Covenant Of Spies E-Book

Daniel Kemp

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

In 2007, intelligence operative Nikita Kudashov attempts to escape his native Russia after a series of top-secret spying operations.

Years later, Patrick West of MI6 is assigned to investigate the operations Kudashov took part in, and discovers a shocking connection between the former Soviet Union and the Foreign And Commonwealth Office.

Can West unravel the ambiguous connection - and the final clue that disguises the information Blythe-Smith never passed on to the Secret Intelligence Service?

Leseprobe

A Covenant of Spies

Lies And Consequences Book 4

Daniel Kemp

Copyright (C) 2019 Daniel Kemp

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2019 by Next Chapter

Published 2019 by Next Chapter

Cover art by Cover Mint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

I would like to dedicate this book to Mr Lee May, without whom I would have finished with writing a long time before this book was published.

In the absence of his unflinching support, the world as I know it would not exist.

Other Work By This Author

The Heirs and Descendants Series:

The Desolate Garden

Percy Crow

The Lies and Consequences Series:

What Happened In Vienna, Jack?

Once I Was a Soldier

The Widow's Son

Novellas:

The Story That Had No Beginning

Why? A Complicated Love

Self-Published under the Name of Danny Kemp:

A Shudder from Heaven

Falling Greenhouses and Digestive Biscuits

Teddy and Tilly's Travel Series

Chapter One

August 2007, London, England

“I knew I'd seen him before, but I didn't know where and when until I got back here and ran his name through our computers. Then it all came flooding back. I'm surprised Fraser hadn't known there was a chance I'd come across this chap before, but perhaps his memory is getting as bad as mine.”

I was forced to stop speaking by the strange scrutinising stare Hannah gave me, as if it were she and not me asking if I was a fool. “No, Hannah, you're right. If I believed that to be true, then I shouldn't be in the position I am. Fraser Ughert knew exactly what he was doing. The trouble now would be knowing why he wants to play this game?”

* * *

My name is Patrick West. I'm chairman of the United Kingdom's Joint Intelligence Committee, or JIC for short. Everyone with any connection to the security of British interests at home or abroad is answerable to me. Or at least they were, until Fraser Ughert, my predecessor as chairman of JIC—and now in receipt of a gold-lined, index-linked pension that should have paid for something to keep his nose out of the intelligence game—drove down from Chearsley, in Buckinghamshire, and disturbed the peaceful existence I had with Hannah, my wife of three years. I feared that having met with him and his mysterious guest, a Russian named Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov at Brook's, my club in St James's Street, London, their names would resonate around those ancient walls for some time to come.

Now I was in the throes of explaining the unexplainable to a woman as perceptive as I and someone more dear to me than anything had ever been. She had converted me from a committed bachelor of almost fifty-five years into a married man and, as such, had accompanied me here to the palatial offices and private rooms in the Foreign and Commonwealth building on my appointment at Christmas time in 2002. Now she was known as not only Mrs West, but as my steward. That was not my choice of description. It was the official civil service name given to the role of the personal assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

As she listened, she poured two large measures of Isle of Jura single malt into the heavy crystal glasses as we sat beside each other facing out onto St James's Park from the sitting room in our apartment, and I began trying to unravel what had occurred, and was likely to. When hearing updates of my work in the comforts of our home, she sat with her shapely legs tucked under herself and one of her slender arms stretched along the back of the sofa. Her hazel-coloured eyes were fixed on me as she swept a strand of long black hair away from her beautiful, shapely face, then laid that face on my shoulder. The time was a little after 1 p.m.

* * *

Not all of what I'd discovered in the time I'd had since the lunch at my club could I disclose to my wife for reasons I will explain as we go through this story of lies and forgotten consequences, but allow me to dissuade you from forming an opinion of me based on that honest disclosure. If you have already done so, then I hope I'm correct in saying you have judged me wrongly. Perhaps you think that withholding information is indicative of having no trust in my wife or not loving her sufficiently. That is not entirely true. However, if you believe me to be sceptical and hesitant in giving my trust, then you are smack on the button as they must say somewhere. I have never trusted a single living soul and as regards the dead, they too are not completely trustworthy.

* * *

“It was 1982 when I first came across him and neither of our names were as they are today. Back then his name was Petr Tomsa, and for the duration of the operation for which I was responsible, Control had named me Frank Douglas. The story he's peddling to Fraser Ughert and me about a NSA surveillance policy code named Data Mining is an extension of their old Echelon programme, managed under what was called the UKUSA Security Agreement, or Five Eyes Pact. That alliance of intelligence sharing was supposed to be between America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and ourselves. I was made aware of the programme in 1973 when I was offered a job in the Secret Intelligence Service by the late and great Sir Dickie Blythe-Smith, who was then the Chairman of the JIC. However, it was not until I replaced him that I became fully aware of some other aspects to the American Echelon programme.

“It was a tiny part of an umbrella initiative code named Frosting, which was established by the NSA as early as 1966 to collect and process data from communications satellites and stations around the world. Frosting had two sub-programs: Transient, for intercepting Soviet satellite transmissions and Echelon, for intercepting Intelsat satellite transmissions. In other words, an early American probe into what can be described as friends' telecommunications between each other's sovereign states. Nosey buggers, the Americans back then, and their impinging on the integrity of friends has yet to change.

“Anyway, that's not the important matter here, Kudashov, aka Petr Tomsa, wants us to extract his granddaughter from the arms of, his words, a powerful Russian politician, in exchange for what he says is her decryption of the modifications the NSA have made to Frosting and the obvious extension of its capabilities. Fraser needs me to sanction the intrusion into Moscow Central's realm of ultimate charge and play his game through. Looked at on the surface, it's a good offer from Kudashov, but I fear there's more to it than the simple exchange it appears to be.”

As she shuffled along the sofa, straightening her legs and pointing her feet in stretching movements that captured my attention for a good while, Hannah asked, “Could Fraser's friend, this Kudashov chap, have recognised you from 1982 do you think, Patrick?”

“It was twenty-five years ago and I very much doubt he would recognise me as I saw him from a distance and I can't recall him looking in my direction. We never met face to face. He was mentioned as the expensive 'go-to' man if you were to get stuck in Prague and wanted to get out of Czechoslovakia by the back door. I contemplated using his services when the operation in that country went a bit tricky, but an opportunity arose where there was no need of him. London set me up with a perfectly good route out of the country. Let me expand on that and on my train of thought at the time.” I was lying about the escape, which was far from straightforward, but I doubted the lie would be discovered. I had never totally disclosed to Hannah all that brought me to where we were and I thought now would be as good a time as ever.

“My passage to the highest position within the secret world of intelligence has been extraordinarily swift, especially considering how it started from a position far from ideal. At the time of this operation, I was very much the outsider in this intelligence community. I was not fully trusted by my peers, even though what had transpired between the more conventional branch of national security and myself had passed into antiquity some eleven years before. Memories are, of course, a requisite factor in the gathering of, and keeping of secrets; however, I had found a traitor within the Metropolitan Police who was once on the spy like me and that makes people like me suspicious, and in some cases, outwardly hostile. My working name for whatever operation to which I was assigned was always altered, but the legend never strayed from my correct age; by then I was thirty-three, and on each trip abroad my passport kept me in the same role, that of a chemical analyst.

“When I was recruited by the then plain Dickie Blythe-Smith, as he was before his knighthood, he said the service wanted me for my degree in chemical analysis; he said that would be of use, but he never said when. Immediately after signing the Official Secrets Act, yet again, I was posted to a company in London where I was employed working on bio-fuels. It was interesting work but sadly not in the same exciting sense as Jack Price and I had got up to in New York prior to my meeting with Dickie in the Traveller's Club, London. Dickie told me I would have to wait for the true excitement; first, I had to do the ground work. I did well in my industry, so much so that within three years I had progressed to working under the head of ICI's research and development team, headed up by a Professor Alan Mitchell. At the beginning, the team I was working with concentrated on specialised polymers and man-made fibres, spin-offs of the oil industry. We focused our analysis into what was out there, concentrating on the bio fuels that could be enabled through chemical engineering, or, to simplify that, changing mineral structures into something more profitable and usable as a propellant. The primary constituents for these experiments were mainly inert substances classed as macro-minerals, as our aim was to engineer those elements into refined fuel sources capable of being installed in places unreachable by conventional power supplies.

“After a few more years, they moved me away from that research and into a high value, rapidly growing market where the products produced had diverse applications in the industrial world. The biggest growth of all was in synthetic organic polymers. With some outside influence, that became my personal speciality and my sole responsibility. This was of course the so-called groundwork that Dickie had mentioned. The intensity of my work kept me fully occupied, leaving little time for contact with any branches of the intelligence services other than a few brief excursions abroad in which I played little part. I was there, I was told, to watch and learn, but it wasn't only watching. I was thrown into a couple of things. All of those precautions, along with the weekend studying and three fake annual holidays I spent at Beaulieu, down in Hampshire, became a huge benefit in the full operation I would undertake in Prague.”

Hannah still looked interested, although perhaps that was her congenital kindness or my self-importance misleading me, but either way I soldiered on. There was a part of me that wanted to just get involved with the investigations into this Russian's claims and not share the preliminary disclosures and back story with her, but that wasn't possible because of our closeness at work as well as in private.

“It didn't take much imagination to see that the whole chemical process could lead to the creation of fuel from polymers. All these polymers are manufactured from waste products, which makes the augmentation of this technique imperative for the developing world where there is no oil, or very little. That was what I was endeavouring to achieve: fuel from waste products, or existing bio-diverse products farmed for fuel. Seaweed would be a perfect example of the sustainable life that is being spoken about today, another would be certain crystals. That's how I got my ticket to be invited to Prague with Professor Mitchell. There is a part of the Czech Republic that is so rich in a particular strain of phosphates and arsenates, that with the price of crude oil climbing all the time, it made commercial sense to mine the crystallised deposits and start the engineering process in what in 1982 was then called Czechoslovakia. Apparently, the location and viability had been common knowledge in the West for some time, all that was lacking from its extraction was the ability to render it profitable. It was to be my role to set it in motion in more ways than one.”

Chapter Two

May 1982, Prague

“If every description I read in service files matched the complexity of the ones ascribed to Jana Kava and her brother, Dalek, then I would have had far more free days spent enjoying the pleasures of life than I have been able to. Despite the obvious lack of complications written on the two sheets of paper inside the thin yellowish-brown coloured file, more were hidden from view than I first appreciated.”

File coded FlyHi One: First Write 01/05/1981. Updated 01/03/1982.

Starts: Jana Kava, thirty years of age, (DOB 09/08/1951) plain appearance with greying-black hair and hazel eyes. She is old for her age. The subject has high cheekbones, with a sallow complexion to a chubby, heart-shaped face. She has no distinguishing facial features. Comely build, efficient, and reliable in both categories of work.

Her mother was born in Czechoslovakia of German parents and executed 16/07/1963. Tereza (the mother, aged 43) was killed for what was labelled subversive activities almost twelve years after the subject's birth and her father, General Anotoly Vladislav Kava, one-time head of the StB, State Security in Czechoslovakia, disappeared the same day in 1964 as the Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the site of the updated Warsaw Pact fighter aircraft and trainer, the Aero L-29 Delfín. NATO calls it The Maya. Although retired from the StB, the general was de facto in charge of security at various military sites, including this one. He was also a highly decorated war veteran.

The aircraft is manufactured in a factory on the periphery of the city of Prague, where the retired general also held a post as the Communist Party advisor before his disappearance. That was the ninth of January 1964.

Mysteriously, Khrushchev was not seen in public again in Czechoslovakia until boarding a plane for the flight back to Moscow on the eleventh of January. He was on crutches with his left ankle heavily plastered. According to the official Communist agenda, there were three other appearances scheduled during the week after showing his face at the Aero Vodochody factory. The First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had approximately nine months left in power before being replaced by Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier. All probably just a coincidence, but worth noting.

Personal Life: Jana serves on the central policy committee of the chairman of the Communist Party and at one time the Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, Jozef Lenárt. She speaks several languages fluently which she possibly practices when in bed with Lenárt. They are discreet in their relationship, but not enough to avoid our notice. He is married and has two children who are both at university in Moscow.

Home bird. She resides in the same house as that of her parents before they died. She is aware of her brother's (Dalek) growing affiliations to the banned anti-Communist movement, Solidarity, started in Poland in 1980. But, and this is vital—neither Jozef Lenárt, nor any other member of the central policy committee know of Dalek's affiliation, or her deception. …That's how things stand at present. It could be a lever.

Jana Kava is our primary target. However, her brother, Dalek, DOB 19/06/49, is also of interest to us. He holds dual nationality, Russian and Czechoslovakian, and speaks both languages fluently, as well as English and German. His political leanings are the same as his sister's, towards the centre-left; however, according to our placement, he shows significant disillusionment with his Communist Party teachings and we are of the opinion he is now accessible.

File coded FlyHiTwo: First Write 01/05/1981. Updated 01/03/1982.

Starts: Personal Life: Heavily built, but surprisingly deft and agile for his size and slight disability: six foot three inches and sixteen stone, plus a bit. Studied judo, achieving a blue belt before other things took his interest. Black hair, black eyes with a permanent sad expression, which is probably caused by his addiction to alcohol. His face carries no distinguishing marks, is unremarkable and of a dull pale colour. He walks with a limp for no medical reason that we could find, nor do we know of any other cause.

We have no information of his formative years, other than like his sister, he was raised in the family home at number 34 Sámova, Praha 10. It's a beautifully appointed three-storey home on the banks of the River Vitava befitting the offices his father once held. Subject no longer resides at that address. There is no criminal activity recorded against his name. Although he was only fifteen years old when Khrushchev visited, we do know he made quite a noise at the Aero Vodochody factory the next day following his father's, the general's, non-appearance at home. He was called to appear before the local commissar committee of junior party officials to explain his behaviour. He offered no defence and was severely reprimanded, having his junior party membership suspended for three months; however, after an intervention on his behalf by his senior chemical tutor at the Prague pre-University school he attended, that punishment was rescinded and nothing was recorded against his name. We have reason to believe it was Dalek who discovered his father's body. That was on the morning of the twelfth of January, the day after Khrushchev left the country and the committee was convened that evening. The official reason given for the lapse of time between the general's disappearance and discovery, was that he'd died from a heart attack in a part of the complex seldom used by anyone.

Dalek was educated to a higher level than normal. He left the Czechoslovakian university at the age of twenty-one with the equivalent of five first-class honours degrees. One was in chemical analysis. He has occupied the same employment position since leaving the country's education system—Premier Analyst at Bok's Chemicals, Prague. A very prestigious position. He is overall second in charge at the chemical plant and considered to be one of the rising stars in the fledgling Czech scientific industry. We would like that ascendency to be accelerated and we want to know the progression boundaries in the development of your core subject: fuel from waste products.

Sexual orientation: What intelligence we do have on this aspect comes from a source no longer available to us. It suggests both subjects are of a heterosexual persuasion. However, caution must be used with this information as we have no evidence on the ground available to substantiate or repudiate what is in the file.

To Sum Up: We want Jana's signature on our books by close of play. Time is not of essence. Extend your stay at your discretion. What we do want is her alliance detached from her brother. Security is our utmost concern. If, in achieving the compliance of FlyHi One, FlyHi Two signature can also be scribbled in our ledger, then that's an acceptable bonus, but on no account can he be offered the same signing-on fee as his sister. You must make him earn whatever bonus you see fit—within reason. Jana gets premier-class remuneration and five-star handling all the way. One other thing: discretion is of the utmost importance, Douglas. No going off script.

* * *

“That roughly covered the extent of my briefing two days before I departed for Prague, from a Miles Faversham who told me he was the file's compiler and deputy head of the Soviet Satellite desk at Century House. For reasons I'll get to, I couldn't see him on the ground in Prague, so I assumed he'd come by the file information by way of an undisclosed third party. When I left Faversham, my thoughts were centred on the difficulty of the operation. To get one of them to turn against their country was going to be hard enough, but to get two, well, I'll be honest, I doubted I'd be able to do it.

“I hadn't been trained in the persuasive arts. My limited experience at that time was more theoretical than practice. I had no knowledge of operational stuff before I was with Jack Price in New York. That operation was successful as far as Jack was concerned, but it did involve Dickie and Fraser flying out to New York where I'd killed someone and had been previously shot. They got Jack, me and another guy named Job home. Later, after Jack had passed away, I was in on a snatch assignment in Hamburg, which involved the death of an opposing agent in a messy firefight. Then came the other 'look and listen one' in Moscow where I had nothing to do. So I wasn't James Bond by a long way!

“For the job, London gave me a substantial budget to use, but as I say, I wasn't trained to talk people into swapping sides in the Cold War. I wasn't nervous in the sense of not being able to do it, but I was nervous about doing it wrong. I told myself that everyone started somewhere and this was to be my somewhere. Beaulieu was a great institution for teaching trade-craft and being able to look after yourself well enough, so I wasn't frightened by the thought of going, but I can't say I had no reservations.

“The only reason I could think of why they'd picked me for the job was my chemical industrial experience. If Dalek Kava had made such a loud commotion within the higher echelons of the Communist Party when only fifteen, then without question his name was high up on the StB's list and the Russians would have as much interest in him as them. From what I'd read of Czechoslovakia, it wouldn't be a surprise if the StB had Dalek under permanent observation; however, this was my assignment and before I left for Prague I decided to play it as it developed and if need be: ignore Faversham's instructions of getting them both.

“That wasn't my only concern. The briefing I'd been given on the exposé of Jana's affair with a leading politician was too abridged for my liking. For example, why wasn't Jozef Lenárt already 'on our books' and thereby making Jana Kava superfluous to our needs? Also, who was it who found this information and how was it all verified? I asked those question, but got the standard answer to do with pay grades and mine being below what was required. I'm not telling you any of this with the benefit of hindsight, but other things bothered me. Like the fact that Jana, although listed first and made to appear the main target to turn, would in fact be compromised irreparably by her brother's defection. If I turned him then, his sister stood no chance of escaping anyone's radar and would need no inducement to jump ship.

“Dalek held opposing views to his superiors in both the idealistic claims of Sovietism and, as I discovered more as time went on when I was out there, the functionality of Czechoslovakian industrial practices. He was an outspoken individual, owing his freedom more to his father's reputation and his sister's influence than to his own circumspection. On the paper records at the MI6 archives held on five floors of 140 Gower Street, and mysteriously not included in Faversham's briefing notes, Dalek Kava was named as a possible American StB plant. Which could explain why he was still at large. But in other files I looked in, the CIA was said to have no presence in Czechoslovakia. The Director General heading up the seventh floor at Century House Soviet Satellite counter-intelligence would surely not have withheld this information from Faversham's desk, so why would Faversham not show Dalek's status to me? The only answer I came up with was that he and his boss wanted someone flushed out and I would be ham-fisted enough to do it without making it look deliberate. Without asking, I decided to send a gun to the British Embassy in Prague by the diplomatic bag.

“Despite my misgivings with the overall evaluation, I was not going to turn down the opportunity this assignment presented and as you are well aware by now, I've never been shy in putting forward my own spin on things. Especially when it comes to following my heart rather than connecting it to whatever should be inside my brain when it mattered. That particular trait of mine was in some ways my undeniable moral undoing, but also it created a distinct success for the service, or so I thought.”

Chapter Three: The Meetings

“My cover for Operation Donor was as a legitimate part of a British delegation attending an international trade fair held in Prague for the month of May in 1982. My branch of science was included alongside a geological surveying exhibition presented by the London Institute of Mining, which in a lot of ways my chemical presentation was linked to. Altogether we were to showcase the scientific excellence Britain was achieving in a variety of ways. One excellence was in the mining of the phosphates and arsenates this country was so rich in. I was to give a speech about our combined efforts and then, at the end of its opening day, I was to be introduced to the Czechoslovakian Minister of Trade.

“Professor Mitchell and I were to be accommodated in the British Embassy and I was assigned to the less classified working laboratories at the Bok's chemical factory as a goodwill gesture. It was an elaborate cover, one I was thoroughly engrossed in. At Bok's, I was to be under the head of research, a man who had studied with Professor Mitchell and knew him well. As per the plan, Mitchell and I arrived the day before the conference and it was at the evening reception held at the Czechoslovakian Ministry of the Interior that I was introduced to Dalek Kava.

“He was an effervescent young man when our conversation turned to the subject matter I was to speak of. My referral to him being young must sound somewhat strange, as we were only a month or two apart in age, but in those far off days I never once considered myself anything but a fully mature man, and those that I came across of similar years were nothing but youngsters with a long way to go in life to catch me up. But with Kava perhaps my estimation was oversimplified as I found his questions refreshingly original and a long way from the insane stupidity of the juveniles I often came across. However, despite his enthusiasm, his overall demeanour was brusque and abrasive.

“The file had him to a tee. I soon discovered his liking for a drink. Those black eyes of his were worrying me as we each enjoyed a beer, and then the customary whisky for me and his favoured choice of vodka. They were so deeply embedded into his smooth forehead, they successfully disguised any emotion I could spot. His facial skin and hands carried no signs of an outdoor life, although there was what appeared to be a sizeable burn above the line of the shirt cuff he had buttoned down on his left arm. I did not ask about that, but I did ask about his limp. He told me it was due to a fall he had when he was twelve years of age. Despite what he'd said, I thought that to be a lie, and sometime after this initial encounter I found out that it wasn't a fall as much a push that had caused it.

“His father, the general, had a violent temper which was exacerbated by his liking for the vodka. Drinking vodka was a family trait, as Jana too enjoyed the stuff, but not in excess like her brother and father before him. The family house had a cellar in which both Dalek and his sister, Jana, were regularly incarcerated when their drunken father was so intoxicated and depressed, that was what he decided. Dalek had, like me, lost three toes on his right foot, except his loss was not caused by a bullet fired in New York. His happened when he was pushed down the stairs to the basement and his foot caught a nail that ripped his toes so badly, three had to be amputated.

“He was a great lover of mottos, was General Kava—introspection being good for the soul was his favourite, and used especially for Jana. She was locked in that cellar more often than her brother, and so Dalek's story continued one night when we were in a sleepy bar in the centre of Prague; she became used to killing rats down there with her bare hands. Jana had lost consciousness one particularly violent night when pushed down the wooden stairs into the cellar by the general and awoke only when a rat was nibbling at one of her fingers. She picked it up and repeatedly smashed it against the concrete floor until her hands were covered in its blood. She then sat motionless and silent, watching as other rats ate its body.

“I shall be completely open with you and admit that it took me a few months to discover why exactly Dalek's comments about the 'West' being decadent and leaderless were so caustic and disapproving, yet carried an air of reverence attached to them. For example, he would quote the record number of unemployed in the UK of that year compared to the full employment of his home country, then go on to deride the jobs his countrymen undertook. He called us murderers when a few days before one of our first scheduled meets, the Czechoslovakian newspaper, Lidové Noviny, reported the number of dead aboard the Argentinian cruiser, the General Belgrano, which was sunk by a Royal Navy submarine in the Falklands conflict. He then went on to say, rather reluctantly after I pressed the point, that if the Islanders wished to remain British, then the Argentinians had no right to invade.

“In June '82 he was scathing in his attack on the alleged American support for Israel in its invasion of Lebanon that was heavily reported in the press in Prague, but then amusingly added that he hated all Arabs with a vengeance. This professed disapproval of democracy was, I decided, a defence mechanism he'd constructed to deflect his admiration of the 'West' which he could not openly declare, even to his lover, Alexandr Radoslav. The sexual orientation report on Dalek was incorrect. He favoured male company, not female. However, those first few weeks spent in assimilating what I could about him, led to a disclosure that rocked more boats than just mine and also landed me with the prize London said they wanted.

“That outstanding revelation required my immediate contact with Faversham at Century House. According to Dalek, his sister had told him of a Geoffrey Prime, an Englishman, who she said had served in the Royal Airforce Force and worked at the Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ. She said he spent all that time spying for the Soviet Union. No reference of the highly damaging treason Prime had committed, nor his widespread sexual predatory, paedophilic disorder had been allowed to be published anywhere in the world, but here was a Czechoslovakian telling me about how Prime was to stand trial for treason later this year in November, in London.

“This was the first time he had mentioned his sister, so I played it dumb and told him that I didn't know he had one. He replied she had an important job where she heard things. He went on to tell me she also told him of an experimental site in the Nevada desert where the Americans built and tested specialist spy planes. He was drunk and said he hoped the Russians would bomb it, but thought that wouldn't happen because their bombers would probably not be able to fly that far. It was my estimation that the reason he'd told me these things was to appear more important than he was and, perhaps, get closer sexually.

“I asked how he thought his sister had come by the information about Geoffrey Prime and if he thought the intelligence regarding the site in Nevada had come the same way. He told me this was the first time she had said anything to him more specific about her work or any secrets she had heard. I pressed him on the point of how he was certain she had heard these rumours at work and he just said he was certain. He knew. I then asked him what work she did.

“He was vague, adding nothing more than what I'd read in Faversham's brief assessment and for some unexplainable reason I believed him when he said he had no idea how Jana had come by the knowledge she'd passed on to him. But I wanted him to go further and it was then that he opened up a little bit about what happened to his father following Khrushchev's visit to the aircraft factory where the general was in charge of security. At that stage, all I could get was that the Russian Premier fell from the highest step on an inspection ladder, hitting his arm heavily against a guardrail and breaking his ankle as he lost his footing. His father, General Anotoly Vladislav Kava, was among the party escorting Khrushchev and according to Dalek, shouted all kinds of obscenities at Khrushchev as he lay on the ground, trying to regain his composure before his minders could get to him.

“Apparently, Khrushchev and General Kava had history. Jana and Dalek's father had been in Stalingrad when Khrushchev arrived in August 1942. The battle for that city had already begun and although Khrushchev's role was not major, he and General Kava met several times to discuss strategy and logistics in the company of the city's commander, General Chuikov. The three generals were together a year later in March 1943 when Khrushchev was told of his son, Leonid, a fighter pilot, being shot down and killed in action. Khrushchev, as you would expect, was inconsolable and, in his rage, he ordered the purging of all the senior officers in his son's fighter squadron. Thirty-eight were executed on Khrushchev's orders.

“Early in 1944, as the Russians forced the Germans into a hurried retreat towards Berlin, word reached General Kava that Leonid Khrushchev had not died in combat, but had been liberated from the Nazis who had imprisoned him and where he had collaborated with his fascist captors. Being no friend of Khrushchev, General Kava made sure the news was passed along the correct channels to his friend Stalin, the autocratic ruler of all Russia and of all the Russian military. It is thought that the two friends of many years discussed the penalty to be meted out on Khrushchev's son. Despite pleas from Nikita Sergeyovitch Khrushchev for clemency, Stalin had Leonid shot for treason. General Kava's involvement with that decision was not known to any person other than Joseph Stalin.

“When the Second World War finally ended, Josef Stalin, who held General Kava in the highest regard, posted him to the Soviet political territory of Czechoslovakia to restore the country's military and to take part in overseeing the rebuilding of the country's infrastructure. It was General Kava's reward for his loyalty, but it was there in 1956, three years after Stalin had died, that the faithful general heard Khrushchev denounce his beloved Stalin in a speech he gave when assuming the Presidency of Russia, and the festering hatred grew stronger leading up to the incident that cost General Kava his life.

“The anger the general felt was overtaken by the death of his wife and the care his children needed. Dalek's mother, Tereza, had apparently passed some minor classified information on to the West Germans. Dalek was unresponsive in this matter, as was Jana when I asked her. It seemed as though espionage and subversive politics were never far from this family. It crossed my mind that Jana could be trying to draw me into the open with the information about Prime and the Nevada desert for the StB to pounce and grab me, but that was part of the excitement of being on foreign soil on active service.

“Miles Faversham was as much in the dark about Geoffrey Prime as I was. We, like most in the service, had heard of him, but whatever information there was had soon been stamped upon and the subject banished from the corridors of gossip. The claim regarding spy planes being tested in the Nevada desert stunned Faversham into silence. From the little I knew of him, that was not normal. With due diligence, he passed both items of intelligence sideways until eventually they landed on the Russian desk in the room adjoining his on the seventh floor. Demarcation lines were of paramount importance in the secret intelligence service in those far off days. The custodians of that bejewelled throne asked for Faversham's immediate appearance. When he contacted me the next day, it was all hands to the pumps and a change of course plotted. I was billeted in an old brick-built outbuilding at the British Embassy, but however old it might have looked on the outside, the interior was as modern and secure as anything we had in London, or Berlin. It was on a telephone in the radio room inside that building that Faversham and I communicated.

“My circle of work associates in those days were not influenced by my decisions as they are today, and as much as I tried not to disappoint many of them by suggesting remedies to whatever we were at odds with, I had no idea who or what had persuaded Faversham to come round to my thinking, but I was thankful he had.”

“We need to leave Jana where she is at present and we will assess the situation in due time. We do still want her. As for her brother, get as close as you can without spooking him. Inducements to come over are now our second consideration. You must do all you can to discover how this information came into Jana Kava's possession. We want you to encourage more of the same from her. Concentrate on the American Nevada desert end if possible; however, if you unnerve her or her brother, I'll have your head. Is that quite clear, Frank?” That was Faversham's closing statement before replacing the telephone receiver in London.

“Of course, as you know, this was and still is the SIS core dictum—leave them where they are and play them—and to be fair to everyone concerned, leaving them where they were was far easier for me than trying to turn them and then get them out of the country. Nevertheless, London still expressed an interest in Jana Kava and to incite anyone against their mother country is never a simple walk-in-the-park exercise. It carried immense risks to those on the ground; i.e. me. But as another of the secret intelligence service sayings goes, everything leads to everything else; I saw it as the most exhilarating and rewarding operation I'd ever been party to. It held huge opportunities for me and as soon it was the settled policy, I set about ensuring its execution; in more ways than one.

“In the commercial world, I was supposed to be in as the British representative on all things to do with energy production and conservation. I was invited a few times to meet with members of the Czechoslovakian government to explain our Foreign Office policy in regard to helping develop non-fossil fuels for the United Kingdom's commitment in preserving the environment. But nobody I spoke with in the Czech government, nor the Russian spokesman, was the slightest bit interested in the natural world. Monetary profit was the only consideration. That also was Dalek's weakness.

“Whenever possible, I championed democracy and all things Western to Dalek's fertile ears and, on the occasions she was there, to Jana as well. I did not need to arraign Communism as Dalek did a fine job of that himself. Despite knowing her brother's hostility, Jana never rebuked him, which I found odd considering her elevated position within the party, as one indiscreet moment from him could ruin her. One warm evening, when I was at Jana's home with Dalek present, enjoying a few drinks, discussing the world's problems and listening to the gentle lapping sounds of the river outside, I was asked a direct question that ended our flirtation with the truth.”

“Are you a British spy?” Jana asked aggressively from nowhere.

“Why do you ask?” I replied, but in retrospect maybe a bit too quickly and not assertively enough.

“Because of what you asked my fool of a brother. I think only a spy would want to know where the information I told him came from. In any case, Dalek thinks you are a spy. Don't you, brother dear?”

* * *

“As much as I hate to stop you in mid-stream with this tale, Patrick, you have a 4.30 meeting this afternoon. After that, your presence is expected at the Cabinet Office at 5 p.m. I'm sorry to say the rest of it will have to wait until dinner.” The look of affection on Hannah's face when she reminded me of my commitments only served to make me want to share more of my history with her, and starting in the middle as it were, in Prague in '82, was as good a place as anywhere.

Chapter Four: Dead Bodies

My mind was firmly on the streets of Prague as I sat and listened to the regular update on the situation in Afghanistan. NATO was gearing up to take overall control of security in that country, but for the time being, tensions had been steadily rising on the border of Pakistan, with Taliban militants crossing unopposed and raiding Afghan army and police positions, causing considerable casualties. British forces were still stationed in Helmand province in the south of the country, one of Afghanistan's most volatile regions, and the production of opium had reached an all-time high.

At an earlier meeting, I had made a joke about that fact, asking if it had anything to do with our continued presence, but it fell on stony ground and nobody commented or smiled. Those around the table had a spasmodic sense of humour, it seemed, regulated by who cracked the joke. There was no shared humour at this meeting as it was quickly moved along to other subjects. We had several points of intelligence inside Pakistan, all under one controller who I knew reasonably well, but I had no first-hand knowledge of the MI6 officer overseeing the only source we had inside the Taliban. All other intelligence in Afghanistan came from the Americans via various channels. I gave a short account of the declassified information on what was happening, vis-à-vis intel gathering and distribution, along with a brief summary on the results of two incursions into Taliban positions by special forces operating under the command of the SIS field Controller. The Prime Minister and his press secretary nodded their heads in recognition of my report and the various ministers around the table closed the SIS folders, and the meeting moved on to other matters.

One of the points that was discussed at the Cabinet meeting that day was what to do with the seven Polish soldiers whose artillery battery had mistakenly shelled the village of Nangar Khel in Afghanistan, tragically killing six civilians, including a pregnant woman and a baby. The British Government, along with other NATO countries, were being canvassed for their recommendations as to punishment and although none of it was within my remit, we had intelligence sources within Poland and their thoughts were being asked for. Predominately, our intel came from political sources, but there was a high-ranking military commander being run out of The Box, our name for the Vauxhall Cross home of MI6 headquarters, who was part of an operation on Russian soil I'd met some years ago when he was just a major and I was on the spy.

In essence, the collective recommendations from fellow NATO governments was that the seven soldiers should be charged with war crimes and face trial at the UN's Court of Justice in The Hague. As I put forward the approach advocated by our source inside the Polish military, I was painfully conscious of my time in Prague with the Kavas. Major-General Wójcik, my present source in Poland, wanted them to make an atonement in a practical sense, not wasted on some ceremonial display. Poland would supply the monetary resources and building materials for two schools, and his seven troops would assist in building them. If his suggestion was accepted, then perhaps their denouncement would be less allegorical and more beneficial to Afghanistan. All of this debate resonated in a personal sense to me.

I had offered no pageant nor memorial to the person I sacrificed. No stateliness to the bullet that struck the back of his head, taking most of his unlined forehead with it as it exited and lodged in the timber stanchion of the boathouse in which we met. No sound of a gun being fired was heard, nor was a bullet or casing discovered or looked for. Nor was Dalek Kava's disfigured body, which sank swiftly to the bottom of the Vltava River in the early hours of a freezing Saturday morning as I silently lowered it over the side of a small row boat. That was how I dealt with Faversham's order and his Operation Donor. Without following instructions to the letter, I used my initiative and figured that with Dalek's departure, it cleared the way for the conversion of Jana to London's vision of western ideals. But as it transpired, she had visions of her own.

* * *

“Don't patronise me, Jana. I do not deserve that.” It was Dalek who reacted first to his sister's accusation of me being a spy.

“Yes, I do think he's a spy, but if anyone can be certain it's you, isn't it? After all, you have your ears glued to Lenárt's phone extensions and your eyes in his memos. You love it, being one step ahead of us less important creatures in the rumour stakes. Can you see it in this Englishman's eyes? Is it in the way he dresses? Perhaps the image of an overcoat collar turned up, standing in a doorway with a burning cigarette between his fingers of one hand as the other rests on the butt of the gun in his inside pocket, hmm?” he croaked at his sister as he stood inches from me his face reddened by drink and flushed by rage.

Jana grabbed hold of my arm, dragging me from Dalek, leaving him alone with his mumbles and complaints of inadequacy and ineptitude of his sister and the Communist regime, to be answered from the vodka bottle he clutched to his chest. What she told me as we walked away arm in arm did not completely come as a surprise.

“He is loud about his weakness and silent about his strength. His work is magnificent, they say. He is irreplaceable or so his boss says. Said as much at all the party committees who sit and want to take his party card away, restricting his ability to work. But he talks and shouts too much and doesn't know when to stop! So far, I've kept him out of trouble and kept myself out of the shit storm that's waiting to sweep him and me away. It's only a matter of time before he's exposed, and then they will come after me.

“Each week, he gets deeper and deeper involved with this Solidarity shit and I can't be sure how long my influence will hold. I've seen some of their union literature at home and when I asked him what it was for, he said he intended distributing it around the city university with his friends as soon as they can all get together. This coming Sunday was mentioned. If that were to happen and he was to be arrested, which the State Security would definitely do, then let alone his job, my job would go as well and we'd both end up a state cell as I doubt he could keep his mouth shut.

“I know exactly how important I could be, Frank. I am in a position of trust within the highest levels of government in this country, but I can also be dangerous. It was I who told my father of Khrushchev's visit. No information like that is broadcast in this country before it needs to be. Yes, his position at the factory was important for security, and he was told of a visit, but he had no knowledge of who was coming. I heard who it was through work. I knew my father hated Khrushchev. He'd told me stories of him often enough. My father was a wicked man, but apparently not as wicked as Khrushchev in his estimation. He knew the risks he faced. He also knew that death was imminent; he'd been diagnosed with lung cancer two weeks before I told him who was the 'important person' we were expecting. Like my father, my brother knows the risks he takes, but that's where the likeness stops. Dalek does not know the consequences. I have no option but to want my brother stopped, Frank. If you want me to spy for you and continue supplying information to London, then I want you to kill my brother.”

Yes, that's what she said to me—continue supplying and kill my brother. There was more to come from her.

“I loved him, but how can I now? I have been looking for a way out of the mess he's constructing for us both to drown in, and you're it. I know I'm putting my trust in you to do it, but I have no other choice.”

* * *

My attention was back in the room where the upcoming elections in Poland had the attention of the Prime Minister. The corruption that had caused the early calling for a new government must have been foremost in his mind when he announced that the UK would side with her allies in calling for the war crimes of the Polish soldiers to be answered in the Hague, where they were to be denounced in the name of pious correctness.

My thoughts were that if you train a man to kill, don't be surprised when he does, and as men we make mistakes. That's part and parcel of being human. But correctness states that those that are killed, are only those that deserve death as judged by those whose innocence is the greater. I don't suppose the reasons for the Prime Minister's decision was that much different to Jana's in wanting me to kill her brother. Both were made to conform to an ideological orthodoxy that suited their individual aspirations, but I suffered from no ideology. I just wanted the acclaim of having Jana Kava's political convictions with her hands planted deep in the pockets of the serving Vice-Chairman of the Central Committee of the National Front of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, one Jozef Lenárt. A huge feather in my cap if I could pull it off.

* * *

It didn't take long for me to learn just how much Jana was heartless in her approach to everything and everybody in life. She was almost as bad as me. There was a selfish motive behind all she had undertaken since losing her mother, even those basement confinements were for a contrived reason. She would purposely antagonise her father into sending her below the house in order to read the letters he had written when serving in the Soviet army. He had accumulated many about the extrication from Nazi hands of Leonid Khrushchev. Leonid was held by the Nazis at Majdanek concentration camp built amongst the beautiful rolling countryside on the outskirts of the city of Lublin, in Eastern Poland. His father was told of his recapture by the advancing Soviet army and Jana found copies of the pitiful memos sent by Khrushchev Senior to Joseph Stalin, begging for his son's safe repatriation to his father's keeping. She also read a copy of Stalin's refusal, and more importantly, Khrushchev's acceptance of Stalin's order of assassination.

In 1956, General Kava was amongst the select few to hear firsthand the denunciation of Stalin, who to millions of Russians was the divine father of Soviet Russia, and the man Jana's father had faithfully served. The hairs on the back of his neck stood upright in anger as he listened alone on a private radio in the army barracks in Prague. Here was the new Soviet leader telling the Russian people that their war hero had made cataclysmic errors leading to needless deaths and economic waste. According to Nikita Khrushchev, their once worshipped God was satanic. When the full contents of Khrushchev's speech became more widely known, it shook the Soviet Union to the core, but even more so its Communist satellite allies, notably in central Europe.

General Anotoly Vladislav Kava had stored away a collection of stories in the basement listing riots throughout the USSR when Khrushchev's words were read to special meetings of party members in factories, farms, offices and universities. At such meetings in Georgia, where Stalin was born, members were outraged at the denigration by a Russian of their own national hero. Some people were killed in the ensuing uprisings, and trains arrived in Moscow from Tbilisi with their windows smashed and carriages wrecked. The general unrest in the Warsaw Pact was reaching meltdown in condemnation of new Premier Khrushchev's brand of communism.

In the autumn of 1956, Poland was ready to explode, and in Hungary an anti-Communist revolution overthrew the Stalinist party and government; General Kava pleaded restraint to the Czechoslovakian Communists and, utilising the control he had of the secret police, the StB, managed to deflect the volatile emotions being expressed throughout the country away from revolution, but he did not do that out of respect to the reforming First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He did it to save a repeat of the deaths of party leaders and political heads that happened in the other countries where bloody revolts had taken place. His opinion had not changed; he hated Khrushchev enough to want him dead.

When Jana heard who was coming to visit the aircraft factory, she started to prepare her father for her benefit with recitals from the 'Secret Speech'. It worked. She told me how the night before Khrushchev's visit, it was her father she suspected to have loosened the handrail on the inspection steps leading to the cockpit of the prototype Aero L-29 Delfín. Khrushchev fell, but only as far as to break his ankle, not his neck. Perhaps the incident might have passed as an accident of unbelievable incompetence had not General Kava voiced his pent-up frustration and disapproval of Khrushchev. He was voracious in his criticism and not selective in the words he used, all of which was probably fuelled by his favourite vodka. Jana had achieved her aim. Next on her self-survival list was Dalek with his loud mouth and his self-condemning choice of associates. She said she had no idea of his StB involvement and I had no desire to tell her. However, I provided her with the means to his removal, plus I held the keys to another kind of future for Jana.

* * *

I thought Miles Faversham was about to choke when I told him I shot and killed Dalek Kava, then weighted down his body and dumped it in the local river. Maybe it was that, or perhaps the fact that I had Jana about to eat out of my hand, but whichever one it was, he was swallowing hard at the end of the telephone connection and gagging on his spittle.

“What was that you just said, Frank?” he enquired hoarsely down the secure line in the basement of the embassy after my coded signal hit the terminal on his desk.

I repeated what I'd told him using a few suggestions as to his hearing requirements then, following an interminably long time, his reply both crushed and infuriated me at the same time.

“You will follow my instructions to the letter on this one, Frank. First we have to get you out safely.”

I interrupted, knowing precisely what was to come if my safety was paramount, but Faversham, or more likely the person I could vaguely hear in the background who was directing the conversation, would hear nothing of my claims of proficiency when it came to disposing of dead bodies in rivers.

“We hope you're right, but we're not taking any chances on it floating up and being found. There's a United Nations flight leaving Prague for Hamburg later this evening. The duty officer at your end will see to the ticket and the necessary papers; all you have to do is turn up at the airport and get on the plane. You will be met at the other end and shipped home, literally aboard a freighter leaving early Sunday for Harwich.

“I'll get a communiqué to the ambassador in Prague in an open transmit telling of a sudden death of a close relative of yours in Germany that requires your urgent attention. As it's Saturday today, there's no necessity to advise anyone outside of the Embassy of your departure until Monday. That delay will also help with Dalek's no show at work. Puts you out of the picture by the time he's missed. Now, as for Jana. This department has all its noses to the grindstone as we speak. We have a local man who we will install as her handler and control. Unusual I grant you, but we feel it's necessary.”

“Who's we?” I shouted down the phone line, seething with indignation and anger.

“I'm here on the ground and it's me who cleared her brother out of the bloody way. She's in for a smooth ride as one of ours thanks to me and I know her and, more important than anything, I have her trust. She asked for it and I delivered. There's absolutely no need to change who she answers to and deals with. I have the budget for an extension and I want to work her,” I announced, enraged, into the prolonged silence of the phone receiver.