A Spy's Life (27 page)

‘That was an involuntary spasm,’ he said quietly. ‘He’ll be all right in a few moments. It’s one of the problems with locked-in syndrome, though it usually occurs when the patient is conscious. I think we ought to leave Nurse Roberts here to deal with this. Everything will be fine in a few minutes.’

They went to Smith-Canon’s room and sat on a small sofa. Harland felt exhausted.

‘This kind of episode can be avoided once we get used to the patient,’ said Smith-Canon. ‘In each case we have to learn about the kind of things which set off a spasm. Sometimes it’s associated with breathing difficulties or the use of a tracheotomy, other times with problems in the bowel.’ He sensed Harland didn’t want to hear. ‘Okay, I can see you’ve had enough for one day.’

‘Yes,’ said Harland absently.

‘Look, I’m not quite sure how to put this. But I had a visit over the weekend from a man called Walter Vigo. I must say I didn’t much take to him.’

‘Yes, I know him. What did he want?’

‘It wasn’t easy to say. He was rather an oblique fellow, if you know what I mean. He wouldn’t tell me what he did precisely, but he did stress that he was dealing with an urgent matter of national security. He was interested in Tomas’s identity and wondered if I had any clue about it. He asked if I had been contacted by any relations. And he was particularly interested in his condition – whether he was likely to die and what the future held if he lived.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I told him that it was confidential information and that it was none of his business. However, I thought you ought to know. Clearly it has some bearing on the things you were telling me the other day. I think he thought that Tomas was going to be out of action and that he was no longer of much concern to him.’

‘Thanks for that. Walter Vigo is a senior member of MI6. I’m not sure where they stand on all this. But you’re right, his interest does have a bearing on what we were talking about.’

‘Yes, I thought as much. Look, there’s one other thing.’ He opened the drawer of his desk. ‘Bearing in mind your caution about revealing your son’s identity, I decided not to hand this in to the police.’ He placed a light Terylene wallet on the table. ‘This was in your son’s jacket. Actually, I believe it was in the lining. At any rate they missed it. I think it contains a lot that will help you.’

Harland opened it and found a smaller leather card-holder which held Eva’s three identity cards and a couple of credit cards in the name of Edberg. There was some money – ten fifty-pound notes and a couple of hundred-dollar bills. ‘Thank you. I can’t hide the fact that I’m extremely relieved that you didn’t give these to Vigo or the police. It might have proved very difficult for me to trace his mother without them.’

‘Yes, I could see that. But you are, after all, his next of kin and I couldn’t imagine that the police would have a better use for it.’

Harland rose to leave.

‘I hope you find her, Mr Harland. It’s very important for the boy.’

‘I will. And thanks again.’

16

A DAY AT THE RACES

Harland caught the 10.30 Race Special from Paddington and arrived in time for the first race. But he did not see any sign of Macy Harp or The Bird until the middle of the afternoon. He hung about, watching the crowd – an untroubled mix of gentry, spivs and local farmers.

Before the 2.35 race he made his way through a wide tunnel which ran under the stands towards the paddock in the hope of spotting them. He felt a tug at his arm. It was Macy Harp who had darted from a doorway in the tunnel. ‘This way,’ he said with a conspiratorial smile. ‘The Bird’s got a private box. None of yer hoi polloi for Cuthbert Avocet these days.’

Macy hadn’t changed a bit – a roguish red face, dancing eyes and quick, furtive manner.

They found The Bird positioned at the front of the box with his binoculars trained on the crowd below. Without removing them, he flapped a hand in Harland’s direction and said, ‘Bobby, grab yourself a drink. I recommend a whisky mac on a day like this.’

After a few moments he swivelled round and stood up. ‘Good grief, Bobby, you look dreadful. Is that what aid work does for a man?’

‘And a few other things too,’ said Harland.

‘So I gather. There’s a good view from up here. We’ve been watching you plod hither and thither. We felt we ought to make sure that you hadn’t been followed here. There’re one or two suspicious characters down there but I think your coat tails are clean.’

‘They should be, after the palaver I went through leaving my sister’s house in London.’

‘Good,’ said The Bird, with an encouraging smile. ‘And I know you too well to ask whether you called from a safe phone yesterday.’

Macy planted a drink in one of Harland’s hands and a large chunk of fruitcake in the other. ‘Get that down you, laddie. It’s Veronica Harp’s renowned Christmas cake.’

They both picked up their binoculars and turned to the racecourse. ‘Ours is the blue and maroon colours,’ said Cuth. ‘Maltese cross on a blue background. Can’t miss her. She’s a gorgeous animal but doesn’t usually pull her finger out in the cold.’

Harland tried to show an interest in the fortunes of Manse Lady but was distracted by the realisation that both The Bird and Macy were extremely well turned out – tailored tweed suits, and, in Macy’s case, a coat with chocolate brown velvet collar and expensive brogues polished to a military shine. Harland hadn’t heard much of them in the last ten years but he knew that they’d extended their freelance interests in Eastern Europe into a number of enterprises that made use of their contacts behind the old Iron Curtain. They’d been into caviar, lumber, truck parts, aluminium, engineering tools – the lot.

The field laboured home with Manse Lady struggling up the hill to take third place. The Bird and Macy shouted a great deal, but to no effect.

‘Damned jockey,’ said The Bird. ‘Thinks we’re paying him to go on a nature ramble.’

Macy snapped his binocular case shut.

They had another drink and Harland began to feel the warmth of the whisky mac in his feet.

‘You two seemed to have done well for yourselves,’ he said. ‘Business is good, I gather.’

‘Can’t complain,’ said Macy, stroking a patch of blond stubble on his chin. ‘Can we?’

‘As you know, Bobby,’ Cuth added, ‘nature always smiled on us, now fate has joined her.’

They looked and spoke like a pair of amateurs, thought Harland, yet in their field they were unmatched. They were both in shape and The Bird in particular would still present a formidable challenge to anyone unwise enough to take him on.

‘So, we hear you’ve been having quite a time of it,’ said Macy. ‘What’s up?’

‘Where do you want me to start?’

‘Well, let’s get something sorted out first,’ said The Bird. ‘You said you would bring something for us – some encrypted material. We have a friend on the course who might care to take a look at it now.’

‘Really! How on earth did you fix that up?’

‘We didn’t. He’s always here. Horse fanatic. Works at GCHQ and sometimes moonlights by operating the photofinish camera. Good sort – listens to telephone conversations for a living and can decipher practically anything – except, of course, a racecard. But steady as a brass bedstead otherwise. Won’t talk.’

‘So where do I find him?’

‘You don’t. Macy will take it to him now. I told him that he was likely to need a computer. Is that right?’

Harland handed Macy the two discs, one containing the material from Ollins, the other from Sally Griswald’s e-mail. He explained they were a pair and that they only worked in tandem.

‘Now,’ said The Bird, ‘tell me what’s been going on. I know that you’ve been shot at and that you’ve been in an air crash and I gather you were jumped by some heathens in the UN building. What else?’

‘You’re well informed. How did you know about the UN thing?’

‘Word gets about. Look, why don’t you tell me the whole bloody lot? The rest of the card’s not up to much so we’ve got plenty of time.’

As Harland spoke, Cuth listened closely, his resourceful eyes darting from Harland’s face to a hamper where he picked at the fruitcake. When Harland showed him Eva’s identity cards he held each one up to the light, sniffed it and flexed it. Then he handed them back and returned to his chair to rock on the back two legs, his hands clasped round the back of his head. Harland talked for half an hour. He brought the story to a close with a description of Tomas’s condition, and explained that he urgently needed to find Eva.

The Bird lifted a slender cigarette case from an inside pocket.

‘Hell, Bobby, you’re a dark horse. I knew you had some Czech connections, but I didn’t realise you had a bloody family there.’ He laughed, then his face grew serious. ‘Vigo’s interest puzzles me. I can’t believe he’s really concerned about you boffing some Czech teenager back in the Dark Ages. Did you give the Czechs anything?’

‘Nothing of value. The odd bit that I knew they already had. I worked it to our advantage – you know how it was.’

‘Yes, but you weren’t always so canny. They turned the tables on you in 1990 and went at you hammer and tongs, didn’t they, old boy? You looked a terrible mess, I can tell you. And that meant someone was pretty upset with you. What did you do to them?’

‘I made the point to Vigo’s friends from the Security Service, who are meant to be investigating me. They were hardly likely to beat up a major communist intelligence asset.’

‘Yes,’ Cuth persisted, ‘but you didn’t quite answer my question about what you might have done to them. I mean, the Czechs weren’t into that kind of thing. They slung people into prison and roughed them up a little, sure – but torture wasn’t their style.’

‘I have no sense of having done anything to them. I imagined they were going to ransom me, then they started interrogating me about something I couldn’t have known.’ He paused, aware of The Bird’s gaze. ‘The Russians were capable of this thing. The man in the villa was Russian.’

‘And, of course, you just mentioned that the fellow who was present at the massacres in Bosnia was also Russian. Are we talking about the same man?’

‘Obviously I considered that because Griswald said I’d be particularly interested when he nailed this fellow Lipnik.’

‘But still, it doesn’t explain the motive, does it? I mean the savagery of it.’ He rubbed his thighs vigorously and poured them each another glass of whisky mac. ‘I wish Macy were here. He’s good at this sort of thing. But anyway, let’s just talk about Griswald for a moment. So, Griswald fixes up this business in Berlin which eventually results in the KGB selling the East Germans’ archives to the Americans. Then you two go off to Prague with the idea of snaffling the Czech files too. You blow into town. You find the place is seething with revolutionary fervour and commence negotiations. Is that about right?’

Harland nodded.

‘How much money did you take?’

‘Fifty thousand dollars as a down payment. Half supplied by the Americans and half by us.’

‘And who were your contacts in Prague?’

‘They were Griswald’s. I didn’t want to use the man I had dealt with over the years. Too untrustworthy, too low down the pecking order.’

‘And you didn’t see this Eva woman?’

‘No, not since ’75.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Al went off to meet his contact and the next thing I know the place we were staying at was raided and I was under arrest. I spent the first night in StB headquarters, where they didn’t seem to know what to do with me. Then I was handed over to this other lot. They took me to the villa.’

‘Who knew where you were?’

‘As far as we knew, not many, apart from our people that end and a few in Century House.’

‘And Griswald – what happened to him?’

‘He never got close to doing the deal. In fact, they took the money and left him high and dry. The Americans were pretty good about it, but Century House were not so understanding. Still, they did pay for you two to get me out.’

The Bird smiled. ‘I think the terms of our agreement with Alan Griswald permit me to say categorically that Century House did not commission us. Now that he’s dead, I can tell you that Griswald paid for the operation. There were a lot of expenses but we returned some of the money to him – having taken our standard fee, of course. I expect you can guess what he did with the rest of the money.’

Harland thought for a moment. ‘I should have thought of it before. He used it to buy the StB file on me.’

‘He certainly was a friend to you, Bobby, which makes his death all the more sad. Let’s think about those files for a second. If Vigo’s little helpers can ferret round those archives, there’s no earthly reason why you shouldn’t. That’s surely your best bet, to trace Eva through her various changes of identity. At the same time you might also usefully learn who Vigo’s people are.’ He stopped and let the chair return to its four legs. ‘You know, I think we may be able to swing this for you. But it’ll take time.’

The door opened and Macy appeared, followed by a stout woman in a blue housecoat who was holding the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner.

‘We maybe ought to make a move in the next ten minutes or so,’ he said. ‘They want to clean the box.’ The woman muttered something and left them.

‘I have just been hearing about Bobby’s troubles. They’ll make what little hair you’ve got stand on end. By the way, what’s our Nissen hut genius have to say about Bobby’s codes?’

‘He’s rather agitated – to put it mildly.’

‘Couldn’t he do anything with them?’

‘No, there was no difficulty. What’s bothering him is the type of code used. He wouldn’t say more than that. Apparently it’s the same encryption used to leak damaging information about agency operations in Europe. Everyone – the British, Americans, Germans, French and even the saintly Dutch – is affected. He wants to know where it came from. Apparently it’s a priority of GCHQ at the moment to find the source of this stuff.’

‘What’s the code say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What do you mean, nothing?’

‘It’s a photograph – a video still. A man in a uniform on the side of a mountain.’

The Bird’s gaze flicked to Harland. ‘Friend Lipnik, I imagine. But I bet it’s more than just a bloody holiday snap. Griswald wouldn’t have taken the trouble to have kept the codes separate otherwise. Can we see it?’