A Spy's Life (39 page)

Harland wondered how much the old lady had pushed Eva’s relationship.

‘Don’t be too certain,’ he said to her. ‘He attempted to kill the boy and you yourself told me how fond he was of him.’

Eva squeezed her temples and rubbed her face.

‘We’ll leave now,’ she said, looking at the floor. ‘I already have my bag packed.’

She spoke a few words in Czech to her mother, then picked up the phone and dialled. This time she spoke in German, saying without preamble that she was returning the call of fifteen minutes before. She informed the person that she was going out to give a class at the Thermal Sanatorium and to do some shopping. She would be back in the early afternoon, although she’d be on her cellphone in the meantime.

She went to get her bag and began to assemble a few more things for the journey – a book, her purse, passport, a cellphone and an envelope of money, which she took from a desk.

‘You know that Tomas was probably traced by Kochalyin because he was using a cellphone,’ he said. ‘All he needs to do is to ring you to get a fix on your position.’

Eva thought for a second.

‘We will need it,’ she said firmly.

Having rung down and told the doorman to order a cab for her, Eva led Harland to the first-floor landing and through a metal door. They took a spiral staircase to the ground floor where there was a boiler room and service area. Another metal door opened on to a shabby little street at the back of the building, piled with dirty snow. She looked left and right, then bolted across the street. Harland followed, carrying both bags. At the first turning on the right she held her keys in the air. Harland saw the side lights of the dark green BMW blink ahead of him. She got in and started the engine before he had managed to sling the bags on the back seat.

‘Now, get my phone out,’ she said, scanning the street ahead of them, ‘and also one of the credit cards in my purse.’

As they moved off, Eva wedged the phone between her ear and shoulder and asked for the British Airways number in Prague. Then she made another call. Realising she was booking flights on the afternoon service to Heathrow, he felt for his passport and held it open for her. She nodded to him as she spelled out Tristan O’Donnell’s name. Harland had an idea what she was doing, but didn’t say anything.

They left the side street and moved sedately towards the eastern fringes of the town. The traffic began to thin out. When they reached the open road Eva glanced in the mirror and put her foot down. For twenty minutes they drove at a remorseless speed, the needle of the speedometer never dipping below 140 kph. On the open stretches they moved at 180 kph. In a patch of forest they slowed down and took a turning left into a range of hills.

‘Where did you learn to drive like this?’ he shouted, as she accelerated round a corner to take the one-in-ten gradient.

‘Russia. I was on a course there once.’

He’d ask her about that later.

‘You think we’re being followed? There’s nothing behind us.’

‘I hope they believe we’re going to Prague – they will have got someone checking the flight bookings. But my instinct says they’re not going to leave this to chance. They’ll try to follow.’ She paused. ‘I guess they missed us on our last turning, but if they’re smart they’ll pick us up on the road to the north. It depends how quickly we can make it.’

She said there was a map in the pocket of his door and that he should start working out routes through northern Bohemia into Germany. She was planning to drive through Teplice and Usti. At each stage she wanted him to give an alternative route to cut through the mountains.

They passed through a forest of bare oak and beech, then dropped down to a plain, where they joined the road that would take them to the border. Harland was reminded of another trip in a BMW tearing through the Czech landscape to a border crossing. He had lain folded up in the back seat. Macy was at the wheel; The Bird was up front, but reached back and kept a hand on his shoulder for a lot of the journey. They thought they were being followed, but they were armed to the hilt and there was no question of them being stopped.

On the outskirts of a town called Chumotuv, Harland and Eva entered a region known as the Black Triangle. All about them were tar-black scars of lignite mines and chimney-stacks pouring out thick, sulphurous smoke. Each town was a monochrome study of Communist functionalism – soulless prefab blocks drenched in pollution; factories of fantastical scale and filth. Everything was blackened – the piles of snow, the surface water, the road signs. Through it all the people moved as shadows. The towns looked as if they were still being run by Communist party bosses.

The country passed by in a toxic blur. At a place called Most, they halted for petrol. As Harland filled the tank, he gazed absent-mindedly across the road at an abandoned building. A prostitute dressed as a rodeo girl lifted a leg in the doorway in half-hearted enticement. Another joined her at the window and pouted. It was then that he noticed the blue Saab flash by. From the payment booth, Eva saw him duck and waited for a few seconds before returning to the car.

‘Was it the silver Mercedes?’ she asked.

‘What Mercedes? This was a Saab.’

‘I think there’s a Mercedes also – German number plates.’

They didn’t see either car again until Usti, where the Saab fell in a few cars behind them at some lights. They jumped the lights and lost it but Eva said she didn’t think they’d shake it off for good. Five miles down the road they came to Decin, the last big town before the border. She turned into a desolate housing estate. A few hundred metres on she apparently found what she was looking for – four young toughs, three in skinhead uniform, loitering outside a bar. She got out and talked to them, gesturing and smiling. At first they looked wary, but she won them over within a few minutes. She returned with two, who sheepishly nodded to Harland, climbed in the back of the car and put the bags on their laps.

‘What the hell are we doing?’ asked Harland.

‘I think it’s better if we take the train. These boys are going to have a night out in Prague. I’ve promised them a hundred dollars. They weren’t going to accept until I said it would be dangerous.’

As they prepared to get out at the station, Harland noticed Eva take her phone from the side pocket of her bag and slip it into the tray beneath the dashboard. That was smart of her: she was leaving it for the young men to use so they’d lay a false trail.

An hour and a half later the local train pulled into Dresden. They got out and separated. Harland went and bought two tickets to Amsterdam via Berlin and Cologne. At all three cities they would have the option to get off the train and take a plane to London. Having established that the train left in thirty-five minutes, he made for the spot where they had agreed to meet. Before he got there he was aware of her at his side in the crowd.

‘I think they’re here,’ she said, looking in front of them. ‘There’s a train leaving for Warsaw in ten minutes. We’ll meet on it.’ She forged ahead of him and vanished towards the station’s main exit.

Harland turned and walked quickly in the other direction and boarded the train waiting at the nearest platform – an express bound for Munich. He moved along two carriages and became stuck in the middle of a third. Behind and in front of him were passengers sorting out their seats and stowing luggage. He pushed back past a group of soldiers to the door. But this too was blocked. Then he realised that the door on the track side of the train would be just as easy. He opened it, dropped down to the rails and ran across to the other side where he scrambled up. He made the Warsaw express with thirty seconds to spare. There was no sign of Eva.

He gave up looking for her and sat at a table with two young German priests. About half an hour later she appeared and said she had a compartment to herself at the front of the train. She had bought two tickets to Warsaw where they could make a connection which would take them back to Berlin. He nodded to the priests and followed her to the compartment, on the way passing a ticket inspector with whom Eva was clearly already on good terms. They sat down opposite each other.

Now that they were alone, a rather odd formality settled over them. Eva tried reading her book but let her gaze drift to the unbearably bleak countryside. Their eyes fastened on the same village churches and impenetrable pine forests. Soon dusk snuffed out the landscape and they were looking at each other’s reflections.

‘I saw you on television,’ she said suddenly. Her tone was matter-of-fact. ‘I saw you on television in 1989.’

‘I wasn’t on television in 1989,’ he said. ‘I was still working for SIS. Serving officers don’t go on television. It’s one of the things they taught us.’

She didn’t smile. ‘But you were on television. That’s how I knew you were in Prague. That’s why I took Tomas to Prague and stayed in my mother’s old flat. I thought I’d see you again in the streets. I must have been crazy.’

‘How do you mean, you saw me on television?’

‘It’s true. I did. You remember how it started with the soldiers beating them up?’

He nodded.

‘There was a German camera crew in Prague secretly filming in the streets all that day. They were waiting for something to happen like it did in the GDR. About four days afterwards, the film was smuggled out and shown on German TV, which we could receive where we lived. I knew it was you. I recognised your walk first. You were going away from the camera and then you stopped and someone gave you something. Your face looked directly at the camera for a few seconds, though you didn’t know it was there. You were talking to a young woman, then you turned away. Bobby, I know it was you. You were near the end of Vaclavské Namesti – Wenceslas Square – by Narodni Street. That was where the police attacked the students. Why were you there?’

‘Because of you,’ he said simply.

‘You were looking for me?’ She was puzzled.

‘No, I was there
because
of you. I was trying to eliminate my records of contact with the StB. Look, I don’t have to explain this, surely. You knew about the photograph of us in bed. They threatened to send that other material to SIS. I had to get those files before the regime collapsed.’

‘What are you talking about? There was no photograph.’

He contemplated her and wished he had a cigarette. ‘The whole thing was rigged. I think it must have been at the hotel we went to near Campo dei Fiore. But I’m not sure, except I know it wasn’t Orvieto.’

‘You must believe me, Bobby. I never cooperated in such a plan.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter now,’ he said. ‘But that was one of the things I was trying to get before everything collapsed in your country.’

‘How could you hope to do such a thing?’

‘The Stasi files were taken from East Germany at that time. The KGB ended up selling them in Moscow.’

‘Yes, but these things were protected in Czech.’

‘Less so, actually. My companion had a contact. We went to Prague to make a down-payment.’

She absorbed this and looked away. ‘Do you know who your contact was?’

‘It was my friend’s. I was representing the British side of things. But he’d let me in on the deal because we were old associates. The Americans were going to bear most of the financial weight of the transaction, although we were going to get equal access to the files.’

‘And did you get anything?’

‘A little, but not enough to eliminate all trace of me.’

She was sailing very close to the subject of his detention and torture. That might be expected of someone who didn’t know about it, but equally of a person pretending ignorance.

‘Believe me, Bobby. I did not know of the photograph. I wouldn’t have allowed it to happen.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! What about the naval attaché? You compromised him before you met me in exactly the same way. You slept with him, right? Drew Morris was his name and he was forced to pass secrets to the StB – another victory for K.’

She looked appalled. ‘How did you find out these things?’

‘I finally saw the files. Zikmund got me in this week. I traced you through your mother’s file.’

He could see her calculating what else he might know. The crease in her forehead had knotted and she wore the glazed, neutral expression that he remembered she used to hide her thoughts. A lot of him was still fascinated by her face; even in the unforgiving light of the compartment it was extraordinarily vital. For the first time he noticed half a dozen freckles on and beside her nose which were in fact tiny moles. Smile lines showed on either side of her mouth and she had one or two strands of iron grey in her hair. She was very beautiful, but for him now it was an entirely objective beauty.

‘You know everything, then.’

‘No, your file was remarkably slender. Kochalyin had long ago made sure that there was very little there.’

‘But you have to believe me. I didn’t know about the camera or the photograph.’

‘It doesn’t matter now.’

‘No, this is the truth and it’s important you accept it.’

Harland glanced at her reflection in the window.

‘Why didn’t you tell me that you were pregnant?’

‘Because I knew you wouldn’t be able to do anything. I had no choice: if I had defected, my mother would have been punished. That’s why I didn’t see you.’

‘Yes, your mother – your mother has played a big part in all this,’ he said acidly. ‘Did you know there’s a picture of her in the archive from ’68, giving Oleg Kochalyin and his crew a basket of food? It was used in the Soviet papers. That act changed our entire lives. There is just one thing I don’t understand. Was Kochalyin in the KGB then, or did he go back to the Soviet Union and train?’

‘You want to know about all that?’ she said, matching his vehemence. ‘It is very simple. Oleg was undercover KGB in the army. They were worried that the troops would not do what was necessary. Oleg, who had been in the army before the KGB, was put in as tank captain to make sure there would be no sympathy for the Czech people, that there would be no weakening of resolve among the troops. When the tanks were ordered into Prague, they had no food. Did you know that? The great Soviet military machine forgot to give its army provisions. By the third or fourth day those soldiers were desperate. They hadn’t eaten and they were out of water. It was very hot that August and they couldn’t leave their tanks to find provisions. Anyway, the Czechs were not going to give them help.’