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Authors: Andrew Croome

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Document Z (9 page)

BOOK: Document Z
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‘Good,' she said. ‘As am I.'

7

P
hilip Kislitsyn was eating bread in the kitchen of the Dominion Circuit house, examining the day's newspaper with interest. Tatiana sat opposite, dipping a slice of toast into an egg yolk. She turned seven a week from today. He told her that seven year olds did not toy with their food. She looked at him, her hair knotted and bed-messed, and grinned.

The
Canberra Times
was reporting that all meat was being declared ‘black' because an abattoir in Cowra had used non-union labour. Meat workers were downing tools and no butchers would open tomorrow. It was also reporting that Britain was soon to detonate its first atomic bomb, possibly at Monte Bello Island in Western Australia. Kislit-syn read this second story carefully and twice. To simulate the physical effects of watching the explosion, it said, stand in a dark room two inches from a hundred-watt bulb and hit the switch.

He reached for the
Sydney Morning Herald
only to find that Tatiana was scribbling over the faces on its front page. He told her he needed this paper now. She put down the pencil and swung herself from her chair.

The same news; the same advertisements for Kodak, for ‘Free Chest X-rays' to test for TB. But on page six was a different story: VANISHED DIPLOMAT'S WIFE NOW MISSING. This stopped Kislitsyn completely. The diplomat was Donald Duart Maclean. The article explained that Mrs Maclean and her three children had vanished from Switzerland two years after the disappearance of her husband and his fellow British diplomat Guy Burgess. Kislitsyn smiled. He wondered whether to risk sending his congratulations in the diplomatic bag. Maclean had been important to him: a friend, but also the cornerstone of his career. It had begun in London, 1944, when Kislitsyn was a cadre worker for the GRU. The war was being won, and they had a man, codename Homer, in Foreign Affairs. Every second week, sometimes more often, Kislitsyn's senior, Gorsky, would disappear for a rendezvous, returning to the embassy in a muddy state, always carrying a briefcase. While Gorsky changed his coat, Kislitsyn would open the case and photograph the things inside: British documents, peace policies, diplomatic agendas and so forth. This system went on for years without Kislitsyn ever knowing who Homer was. Eventually, cases were arriving every other day. The volume was too much, and someone somewhere in Moscow was chided for their slowness in processing the material and failing to provide it to the departments where it could be used. Kislitsyn was recalled and took over the job. He created a special section, his own one-man operation in a crisp room on the top floor of Dzerzhinsky Square. It was there that he learned of the others: Stanley, Hicks and Johnson, Cambridge men in high places, Stanley in the top echelon of MI6.

It was an impressive operation, and so too the size of Kislit-syn's archive. As much as he could figure, he used the indexing systems of the British departments where the original documents had been held. The other workers on the top floor called his room the British Public Service; shelves housing file after file on photographic paper, military, political and economic questions, reports on the colonies, attitudes on America, China, Russia and what to do about the coming of the atomic age. The operation's masters were the more ruthless thinkers of the First Directorate. One day they received an urgent cable from Stanley. The word in MI6 was that the FBI had Maclean and Burgess fingered. An emergency evacuation plan swung into action. The men disappeared on a Friday evening; arrived in Moscow via Paris and Prague, their plane landing in a slight and floodlit snowfall at 2 a.m. They stepped wide-eyed from the aircraft, like moon men on the surface of a distant world, and Kislitsyn drove them to their new home in the Moscow suburbs, their faces with this questioning look, what-have-we-called-home. He became their dogsbody, these two men in the service of an empire they'd never seen, and whatever they wanted, he found. That week was a welcome of the first order. Together, they toured the regime's monuments: the Kremlin, Red Square, the tomb of Vladimir Lenin. They went to the theatre and they drank and smoked. There were medals and honorary titles, parties and dinners with officials so high ranking that Kislitsyn was afraid to attend. They met Beria and Stalin. The Generalissimo shook Burgess's hand with a certain effete limpness, like some kind of inside joke. Maclean got so drunk he broke a lamp and broke down crying. Kislitsyn thought they should have jobs, and the Anglo-American section of Foreign Affairs recruited their most qualified theorists yet.

Guy Burgess asked for cigars, vodka, warmer clothing and an automatic pistol.

Donald Maclean asked for his wife and three kids.

More meetings. It was decided that the direct approach was best. A London worker tried to contact Maclean's wife for three months. Not much came of it. The watch on her was too tight: men in long coats, women talking together while pushing what were surely plastic dolls in prams. They managed to get her one word: holiday. The agent stood beside her at a crowded bus stop and said the word with his Russian accent several times so it had to have been understood. It was about this time that Kislitsyn was sent to Australia. He had one last dinner with Donald Maclean, who wanted to know whether this plan would work. Kislitsyn had assured him that it would. And now, by the look of things, it had. It was a glad feeling. Good to create a little happiness through espionage for a change.

He cut the article from the page, intending to send it to Moscow. The hole it left stared back at him and he realised that holes in the wrong hands were clues, and so he took the newspaper to the incinerator and burned it.

Petrov sat upstairs in the MVD section, jotting notes on a report and chomping on an apple. It was two o'clock and Evdokia might soon arrive, so he was considering exactly what she could do. There were some personality reports on some students at Sydney University from their agent there, Yakka. Moscow was always wanting these and so perhaps she could encode them.

His door was ajar. From downstairs came a noise. He heard children arguing and tramping down the halls. But that wasn't quite it. There was adult shouting. He got up and stood at the door and heard his name.

He met Kovaliev coming up the stairs.

‘It's your bastard dog, Volodya. He is making a disturbance.'

They went down. In the hallway, a chair had been knocked over. They heard a growl. Koslova was staring from her office. They went past her and turned and saw Jack's glossy coat flash from the antechamber and into the first secretary's room. They found him running circles, jumping and snarling and refusing to be caught.

‘Sit,' Petrov said.

The dog bounced towards him. Petrov took him by the collar and held him. The dog gave a snorting bark and flung himself to the floor.

The ambassador appeared.

‘Vladimir Mikhailovich,' he thundered. ‘What is this animal doing running amok? This is an official Soviet outpost. The Swiss ambassador visits us in moments. Is he coming to a nation or to a farm!'

Petrov said the dog must have escaped the yard. Kovaliev said that Petrov's ground-floor window was open and accused Jack of jumping through.

‘This is not fitting,' said the ambassador. ‘It will be reported.'

Petrov went to protest, but then said nothing. He took Jack home and shut him whimpering in the laundry.

The next day Moscow wrote. They had two messages. Firstly, they said that Mokras, Lydia, was unknown to them. She seemed far too erratic to be a Czech worker or a Czech illegal. They advised that he remain cautious in his relations with her. Secondly, they complained that his intelligence work was at a standstill. He was not producing discernable results. His reports concerning his agents were deficient in their formulation. He often sent them materials that they knew were gleaned from public sources, newspapers and the like. They urged him to be more daring. He should adopt a harder line.

He burned the letter. The words seeped from his mind to his gut and hung there, and he felt indignant, then apologetic, and then doomed and afraid.

That afternoon the Tass man, Pakhomov, rang from Sydney, breathing heavily, static gusts heaving down the phone.

‘What is it, Comrade?'

‘Trouble, Vladimir. Myself and Charlie—we've been given the Hollywood treatment.'

‘You've been photographed?'

‘Yes, together and brazenly.'

Petrov groaned. ‘The competitors?'

‘I don't know by whom.'

‘You're certain though? We should be certain before alerting Moscow.'

‘I am certain. I apologise.'

Petrov stared intently at a fingernail. Pakhomov was silent while he thought. In the background, he could hear Pakhomova washing dishes, cutlery and porcelain clashing in the sink.

‘Do not see him again. Not for a long time,' he said.

‘No, Comrade. It was Hyde Park. Much too open.'

‘Alright.'

‘But listen, Charlie has a message for you.'

‘Is it important?'

‘You should contact him, I think.'

‘You won't tell me?'

‘Best you hear it from him. I don't want to say it on the phone.'

When the call had disconnected, it took Petrov only a moment to pour himself a drink. He went downstairs then, to his consular office, looking for work that was easy and rhythmic, that couldn't end in mild disaster. He found his list of Russian émigrés and copied out in hand the form letter urging repatriation.
The USSR misses her children
, he wrote.
Punitive
measures against non-returnees have ceased, and now is the time
to hear the homeland's call, when there are jobs and production
is booming. Perhaps you have relatives waiting?
He enclosed an illustrated pamphlet, ‘We Returned to Our Own Land', which showed a gelatin silver photograph of smiling repatriates in the gardens of the Neskuchny Palace, pictures of ferocious corn and sunflower fields, of peasants at festival, of crowds rallying in Moscow, and of the busy floor in a radio factory. All of it real. All of it the Russia of your dreams.

The plane came with a drift from the north, sounding the bay with its chop and roar and keeling into the water. It fell from the sky midway across the alighting zone, a perfect landing, the span flight-taut before bouncing with its floats against the water. It snorted and came towards the base, the propellers on their wing-mounts. The sunset caught it from the west. There was an obvious weight in the hull and the plane sat low, as if it were a submarine travelling the surface to exhaust.

Petrov stood on the balcony of the Rose Bay Flying Boat Base. The building was white with a jetty that extended into the bay, a maintenance apron hugging the shore beyond the slipway to his right. He watched as a small launch departed for the plane, carrying two men in sailing uniforms. Below, people were milling on the jetty.

‘The skyways are today's highways,' said a voice from behind.

Petrov turned to see ‘Charlie', Rex Chiplin, wearing a scarf but no coat. He was peeling the wrapper from a boiled sweet that he must have bought from the waiting lounge. He grinned and shook Petrov's hand.

‘Hello, Rex.'

‘Vladimir.'

Chiplin looked over the bay. The air was cold. A windsock rattled above them on a mast. Chiplin threw the sweet around his mouth. ‘Ask me if I was followed,' he joked. ‘You should have seen Pakhomov after we were photographed. Scared witless.'

‘He has no diplomatic immunity.'

‘Bastard snuck up with the camera down his shorts. Two snaps. He's no one I know.' Chiplin was a writer for the Communist Party's Sydney newspaper,
Tribune
. He turned and leaned back against the rail. ‘Might have been Security. Might have been a nose for Willy Wentworth or some prick on behalf of the Pope.'

Petrov said that the embassy and the Party shouldn't meet again. Instead, they'd find an intermediary who could move between them. Chiplin said that was a terrible shame.

‘Pakhomov tells me something is urgent,' Petrov said.

Chiplin removed his scarf and re-tied it. ‘It's Walter Clayton.' He lowered his voice. ‘I was a sceptic at first—this whole notion of our own Special Branch. I thought, we're so loaded with moles that whatever we find will leak. But Clayton's running everything and doing it very quietly. He's got a committee off the books, our very own MVD. Dossiers, indoctrinations, the works. There's an office somewhere that's wall-to-wall safes and cabinets. Unless he's personally vetted you, you're not even allowed to know.'

The seaplane finally cut its engines, an iron cormorant in the swell.

Chiplin said, ‘One of his sources is a man in the Post Office, a telephone technician. When an order comes through from the police or Security, he tells us whose phone's on the tap. We can look into the embassy if you like?'

Petrov shook his head.

‘Anyway,' said Chiplin, ‘Walter's finally got an informer in Security.'

‘In counterintelligence?'

The man was nodding. ‘She's a young girl. In the dark. She's a member of the secretarial pool, which probably means she wanders the corridors making the gnomes their tea. But she is in a position to see documents, and to bring them out. Which she hasn't just yet.'

‘How in the dark?'

‘Poor girl's in love with a communist, one of Walter's new best friends. Said communist asks her what she sees, which is how we've come to know . . .' He hesitated for a moment. ‘Well, the newsflash is she's seen some kind of chart. In the section engaged with your embassy's surveillance. The name Petrova in big red letters.'

Petrov winced a little. ‘My wife?'

‘That's right.'

‘This is what you told Pakhomov?'

‘Yes.'

‘You think they suspect her?'

‘I think her name was in big red letters.'

‘And you told this to Pakhomov?'

BOOK: Document Z
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