A Spy's Life (7 page)

Harland saw that the nature of the conversation had changed entirely. He had the impression of a very large ship edging towards its berth.

‘What’s this about, Walter?’ he asked. ‘Is there something you want to know?’

Vigo looked up from the nearly drained bowl, his eyes glittering with purpose. Harland was momentarily fascinated by the size and sensuality of his face. He remembered how someone in Century House had found a picture of a ceremonial mask from a Pacific island in one of the Sunday supplements and had pointed out that it looked exactly like Walter Vigo. For a short while afterwards he was called the Love Mask.

‘Oh yes, Bobby. There’s a lot I want to know. I want to know who was on that plane and what Griswald was taking with him to Washington. And, more particularly, I want to know whether your relationship with Griswald holds any significance. I ask myself, can it be that you really just happened upon each other in The Hague and had dinner at the Toison D’Or? Or was it that you two had some business there and in Washington? I want to know whether your presence is important on the flight, or whether it is simply Alan Griswald I should concern myself with. Yes, I would like to know the answers to these questions. Can you help?’

‘Not really, Walter,’ said Harland. ‘By the way, I didn’t mention the Toison D’Or. How did you know?’

‘I assumed it. The Golden Fleece is the only place there.’

Smooth, thought Harland, but unconvincing. ‘I have had no professional dealings with Griswald whatsoever for more than a dozen years,’ he said. ‘I liked him and that’s why I was sitting with him on the plane. Indeed, that’s why I was on the plane. There’s nothing sinister about it.’

Vigo sat motionless with his hands splayed on the table while the plates were removed.

‘I’m right in thinking that you and Griswald knew each other very well once,’ he said, when the waiter had gone. ‘You worked together in the eighties and you were both involved in that operation after the Wall came down – the operation to lift the Stasi files in East Berlin. God, what an excitement that was! And with good reason. Those files were matchless. They contained everything we could have wished to know about the East Germans and their intelligence service – absolutely everything.’

He paused, as if to catch hold of the fading memory, eyes to the ceiling, hands stroking the tablecloth. ‘Yes … they were handed over in a villa in Berlin – Karlshorst – but not to you, not to the CIA, but astonishingly to the KGB. Then Griswald’s pals in Moscow station obtained them for an exceedingly large sum of money. I recall your excellent report, describing Alan Griswald’s pivotal role in the coup, and outlining what those files would mean to West German society and to us – the understanding of the Stasi’s strategy, the highly placed agents who’d been working for the East, to say nothing of their ingenious trade-craft. They
were
good, weren’t they?’

‘Yes, I suppose they were, but it all seems so long ago. The world’s moved on, as you say yourself.’

Vigo was not easily diverted.

‘But then you and Griswald overreached yourselves and went south, to Czechoslovakia, on an extremely dubious fishing expedition to seize the files of the State Security Service in Prague. That was an occasion when you may have been driven by impulse rather than reason, I fear. But we were all carried along by your enthusiasm. Bobby Harland, the magician of the East European Controllerate, was going to bring home the bacon – everything we wanted to know about the StB. Your argument was so alluringly pitched. If I remember rightly, you pointed out that we couldn’t know what would happen in Eastern Europe. It might all be a flash in the pan, you said, so we’d better move quickly. We knew it was blue-chip intelligence, the real stuff, and we all desperately wanted it.

‘Everyone liked the idea,’ said Harland, knowing he was sounding defensive.

‘Oh yes, I know your plan was cleared by the Head of Soviet Ops and the Security Branch Officer – who incidentally had no business sanctioning such a harebrained scheme. Operational security! There was no operational security and everyone knew it. You didn’t know the set-up in Prague and our people there were extremely doubtful about the contacts you and Griswald had conjured from nowhere. But you insisted that cash would open the right doors and, well, I suppose we were all guilty of greed, weren’t we? A matter of days and you were arrested and beaten so badly you couldn’t walk. If The Bird and Macy Harp hadn’t got you out I doubt whether you would be alive today.’

Harland suddenly saw the loping figure of Cuth Avocet, known to all as The Bird, and his equally improbable partner, Macy Harp. Both MI6-trained, they’d turned freelance and during the Cold War went behind the Iron Curtain to sort out problems which were underplayed as ‘situations’ in the argot of the great game.

‘How long were you in that Austrian hospital – five, six weeks? It all still puzzles me. I felt there was more to it than met the eye. Worth further thought some day, I said to myself, because it seemed to me that they were expecting you. You weren’t held in a standard prison, were you? Some bloody house on the outskirts of the city.’

He stopped to let the waiter set down the second course, then looked down at his caviar with an expression of regret, perhaps caused by the thought that he would not be able to devote his full attention to it.

Harland fought to put the image from his mind, the image of the room where he had been held for all those days and beaten senseless. But he didn’t succeed. He saw The Bird stepping into the doorway and saying, ‘Hello, old lad. Time to be on our way, don’t you think?’ And then The Bird had freed him from the leather restraints and virtually carried him out of the deserted villa. On the way they passed two guards who had been dispatched by him. And then they found Macy Harp waiting patiently in the street behind the wheel of an old but very fast BMW, and they had driven like the blazes to the Austrian border, where The Bird had squared things with the Czech border guards. There had been others involved in the operation, but he never knew their names, and when at length he visited The Bird and Macy to thank them, they had been stubbornly mysterious about how they had found him and who else had helped. It was part of their service, they said, and they had been well paid for it. However, they would prefer not to discuss the matter any more.

Vigo was watching him now.

‘Was it the beating, Bobby? Was that what finally turned you against the Service? I know it must have been a terrible experience, but it’s not as though you went into some quieter line of business afterwards. I mean, Kurdistan in the early nineties, followed by Tajikistan and where else? Azerbaijan, Chechnya? Not a sheltered life, by any means. To tell you the truth, it always looked to me as if you were going out of your way to find danger. I used to ask myself why that might be.’ He paused to let the thought hang in the air. ‘In another man I would hazard that such compulsion was an indication of guilt.’

Harland looked at him mildly. ‘Not guilt, Walter, just a change of interest. The reason I went to those places was that I could speak Russian. As you can imagine, the Red Cross didn’t have too many Russian speakers in those days. And, you know something? We did some good in those places, which is what I liked about the job.’

Vigo returned a knowing smile and then sighed. ‘But let’s just go back to the matter in hand, if you wouldn’t mind – this thing you had with Griswald, this association, this alliance. He must have given you a hint of what he was doing. You see, we know he was bringing something to New York of great value. When I saw you were on the same flight I said to myself that this information might be the sort that Griswald would share with an old and reliable friend such as Bobby Harland.’

‘The answer is no. I really haven’t the first idea what he was up to. I guessed that it was important – in fact, he said so. But really I can’t tell you any more than that.’

‘But I have a steer that you did indeed know about it all.’

Harland remembered Guy Cushing in The Hague and wondered whether Vigo had prevailed upon him to bump into Griswald and find out what he could at the Toison D’Or. Harland was certainly not put off by the nauseous look that came into Vigo’s expression when he first mentioned Cushing. It was quite possible that Cushing had been keeping an eye on Griswald for some time. He must owe Vigo all sorts of favours after his unceremonious expulsion from the Service, which was said at the time to be a lenient punishment. Yes, he would owe Vigo, and Vigo would have pressed for repayment. That was Vigo’s way.

‘Walter, you asked me why I left the Service. It was partly to stop wasting my life on this sort of crap. Let me be clear about this. Griswald and I collaborated at one time and I really was genuinely fond of him, but our lives developed in different directions. The steer you have is a bad one.’

Vigo said nothing.

‘The other thing you’re forgetting,’ Harland continued, ‘is that the crash appears to have been an accident, which stands to reason. If you were to sabotage a plane, you would arrange for it to blow up at twenty-eight thousand feet, not at fifty feet as it was coming in to land.’ He pulled his napkin from his lap and began to work his way out of the booth. ‘Walter, I can’t give you the answers to your questions because they’re too damned silly.’

‘There’s no need to leave, Bobby,’ said Vigo, holding up both hands. ‘Please do stay. I’ll explain as much as I can. You see, we believe that Griswald had benefited from an unusual source.’

‘What kind of source?’

‘I’m not at liberty to say, but I can tell you that the source is random in focus and sometimes oddly juvenile. We are anxious to learn a little more about the source and so naturally I came to you, believing that perhaps Griswald had told you about it.’

Harland felt his temper rising. ‘Look, I had absolutely no connection with Griswald. He wouldn’t tell me what he was doing. You must understand that. Why don’t you ask this bloody source?’

Vigo considered this while adding sour cream and caviar to the mound of chopped egg on one of the blinis. When he had finished, he picked up the pancake, squeezed the sides gently and placed it in his mouth. Silence ensued. Then he spoke. ‘I can’t talk to this source because at present it’s anonymous.’

‘Look, somewhere along the line there’s a physical entity who you can grab by the throat and demand he tells you what he’s talking about.’

‘In this case we can’t. Things aren’t nearly as simple as they used to be and this is a very delicate, not to say dangerous, situation.’

‘Are you getting this all off the Web? Some crackpot intelligence site?’

‘No, it’s rather more specialised information – designed for the trade only, I suspect. I believe Griswald was in receipt of a bespoke service, if I may call it that.’

The trade only! Bespoke service! He wished Vigo would stop talking like a fucking butler. He looked at him and wondered vaguely if he had any concept of life outside the Secret Intelligence Service.

‘But this source is some kind of friendly voice?’ ventured Harland.

‘I couldn’t say.’

‘Then what the hell are you talking about?’

‘I can see you’re sceptical about all this, but I assure you that we believe it to be important.’

‘Yes, I’m sceptical, but I was also thinking that it’s a long time since I’ve had a conversation like this when I haven’t the first idea what is being said to me.’

‘Oh, come on, Bobby, you do yourself a disservice. As you well know, you are rather good at all this. Don’t tell me you’ve been converted by the happy-clappy folk at the UN, because I won’t believe you.’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Harland snapped. ‘Out there, there are vast problems of poverty and with the environment. These problems are getting worse and they need people to think about them. When it comes down to it, the intelligence community – as it is laughably called – does damn all to help.’

Vigo sat back to examine Harland with ironic amusement, his eyes popping with superiority and malice.

‘I see the philosopher spy is in the grip of a moral imperative – or is it a categorical imperative? I am never sure. However, before you get too carried away, let me just point out that a great number of people at the UN belong to the community you so despise. No less than a fifth of every national mission at the UN is devoted to the unlovely practice of your former trade. They’re ferreting around, snooping, poking, prying, stealing, poncing and generally doing their level best to find out what each other is up to. They may wear national costumes and talk humanitarianism while queuing at the vegetarian counter in the UN cafeteria, but let me tell you that a good many of them are spies, and pretty second-rate spies at that.’

Harland drank some wine and decided not to reply. Time to go.

‘Look, Walter, I’m not much company. I wish I could help you about Griswald, but I can’t. And now I really do think that I should go to bed. I’m still feeling pretty done in.’

He got up.

Vigo looked disappointed. ‘Yes, of course. I quite understand, Bobby. It’s been a pleasure to see you. I hope you haven’t minded our talk. You can probably see that it’s important to me. I hope also that you’ll understand if I have to call on you again.’ He composed himself and smiled. ‘What are you doing for Christmas? Going back to dear old England or staying here?’

‘No plans yet.’

‘Well, keep in touch. And Bobby, all of what we’ve talked about aside, I’m really very pleased to see you alive.’

Harland shrugged and thanked him for the meal. He went to collect his coat at the front desk. The girl at the coat check had some trouble finding it. As he waited he cast a look back at Vigo in the booth. His hands were just visible, leafing through the catalogue of incunabula. Then a man appeared, perhaps from a table on the opposite side of the restaurant, and went over to say something to him. Vigo did not raise his head to look at the man.

Harland walked down 48th Street towards the East River, relieved to be out of Vigo’s oppressive company and also a little angry with himself for allowing Vigo to nettle him. He was sure that the stuff about Prague, dropped like an iron bar into the conversation, was there to menace him. Of course, Vigo didn’t know anything about Prague, but he must have had suspicions at the time which he had resurrected now to use as a lever. Well, he could forget it! There was no way he was going to succumb to a clumsy threat like that.