The Dark Chronicles (66 page)

I would also like to thank the Confraternity of the Holy Shroud and the Museo della Sindone in Turin; the staff of the bookshops Ardengo, Tara and Open Door in Rome; Caroline Brick at the
London Transport Museum; Isobel Lee, Enrico Morriello, Sandra Cavallo, Francesca Rossi, Isabel de Vasconcellos, Sebastiano Mattei, Craig Arthur, Clare Nicholls, Evelyn Depoortere, Carla Buckley, Grant McKenzie, Helmut Schierer, Sharon and Luke Peppard, Nick Catford, Roger Whiffin, Blaine Bachman, Graham Belton, Ajay Chowdhury, Rob Ward, Phil Anderson, Phil Hatfield, Steven Savile and Tom Pendergrass for their comments, expertise and suggestions; my agent, Antony Topping, for his skilful shepherding of me to this point; my editors, Mike Jones at Simon & Schuster and Kathryn Court at Viking for their faith in Paul Dark; my parents and parents-in-law; my daughters, Astrid and Rebecca; and my wife, Johanna.

This novel is inspired by real events that took place in October 1969, and much of the information in it is drawn from declassified material, some of which has never previously been published. The document quoted in
Chapter VII
is a translation of a dossier written by the head of Soviet military intelligence in 1964.

I was asleep when they came for me. I was running through a field, palm trees in the distance, when I woke to find a man shaking my shoulders and yelling my name.

I sat bolt upright, gasping for breath, sweat pouring off me. The man was wearing a cap, and looked to be barely out of his teens. Part of my mind was still caught up in the dream: I was sure I’d been in the field before, but couldn’t think when or where. But I didn’t get the chance to consider it further because I was being hauled from the mattress by my arms. Now I could see that there were two men, both in the same uniform but one without a cap. Neither was part of my usual guard detail.

‘Get up, scum!’ shouted the one in the cap, leaning in so close that he was just a couple of inches from me. His face was squared off, with a wide jawline and a pug nose, and he was wearing some foul eau de cologne that seemed to have been impregnated with the scent of fir trees rolled in diesel. He shoved a pile of clothes into my arms.

‘Put these on, old man,’ he sneered. ‘And make it fast.’

I looked at the bundle. There was a dark suit, crumpled and baggy, a white shirt with sweat stains around the armpits, and a pair of slip-on shoes. No belt or tie.

I started to dress, my eyes still half gummed with sleep. What the hell was going on? I’d been wearing the same grey tunic and trousers since my arrival here, so why the sudden change of clothes?
Perhaps they were transferring me to another prison, or to a courtroom – Sasha had often mentioned the possibility of a trial. Or perhaps they were simply dressing me up to take me out to the woods to finish me off. I had a sudden memory of a summer’s day in 1945 in the British Zone in Germany, the jeep riding through the burnt-out roads with Shashkevich manacled in the back, until we came to the clearing; the Luger heavy in my hand as I placed it against his neck; his sweating, shaking; and my finger squeezing down on the trigger…

I shivered at the thought, but found to my surprise that I wasn’t afraid. There were worse ways to go. I wouldn’t feel it, at least. I’d been here six months but it seemed much longer, and the future held nothing for me but the gradual disintegration of my body. I was forty-four, but already felt twice that. Rather a bullet through the head than the prolonged suffering and indignity of old age and disease.

‘Faster!’ shouted the man in the cap. He must be the senior of the two. I finished buttoning the shirt and, as I leaned down to pick up the trousers, realized that both men were armed with pistols at the hip. Judging by the size of the holsters, they were Makarovs. Despite their resemblance to the Walther PP, their combat effectiveness was comparatively poor, and I began gauging the distance between the men, the angles of their bodies and their respective weights to see if there might be any possibility of catching them by surprise, taking one of their pistols and turning it on the other. But it was just a habit, a tired old spook’s reflex. I had no real intention of attempting to escape. There was nowhere to go. Even if I were able to overpower these two, there would be dozens, if not hundreds, more of them.

I adjusted the lapel of the jacket and stood to attention, ready. The suit was a couple of sizes too large for me and stank of stale urine, but it felt almost civilized to be wearing one again. The guards led me through the door of the cell and marched me down a series of corridors, until we reached a large steel door I hadn’t seen before.
Once it had been unlocked, we walked through it and, for the first time in nearly six months, I found myself outside.

*

We appeared to be on an enormous airfield. I took a deep breath, then exhaled. My breath misted: it was at least a couple of degrees below freezing.

The sky was the colour of slate, and the barbed wire and bare-branched trees formed a strange tracery against it. To my left, I could make out several large buildings. I recognized their outlines from dossiers I had read and memorized in London years before and knew, finally, where I had been held all this time. The building we had just left was nicknamed
Steklyashka
– ‘the sheet of glass’ – by its inhabitants, because two of its wings were encased in glass. A former army hospital, it now served as the headquarters of the GRU – Soviet military intelligence. It had been my first guess, but it came as a shock nevertheless. I suppose I’d made the place another world in my mind, away from the reach of dossiers.

My escorts gripped me by the arms again and we headed across the tarmac, buffeted by the wind. We passed several helicopters and armoured tanks, and I remembered that it was, by my calculations, the last week of October, and guessed they were destined for the annual parade in Red Square.

A car was waiting for us near the perimeter, its engine running. It was a polished black ZiL limousine with red flags attached to the mudguards. That was interesting: they were usually reserved for the very top brass. I recalled reading a report that there were only a couple of dozen in the whole country. The man with the cap opened the rear door and his bare-headed comrade pushed me onto a cold vinyl seat. He climbed in beside me, while his colleague walked around to the other side. Up front, a driver was seated with his hands on the wheel, and sitting next to him was Sasha. There was also someone sitting in the back seat next to me, and as I turned I saw that it was Sarah.

*

Sasha snapped at the driver to head off, and we passed through a barricade and turned onto a broad avenue. I caught the word ‘Vladimir’, and my heart sank: that was the prison east of Moscow where they had held both Greville Wynne and Gary Powers. But then he said it again and I realized that it was the name of the man with the cap and that he was asking why they had taken so long to fetch me. Vladimir replied that I’d been difficult, and Sasha grunted disapprovingly. They were in an almighty hurry, clearly, but there was something else to it – an edge of panic? I decided not to think about what it might mean: I’d find out soon enough.

I looked at Sarah. She sensed my gaze and turned to me. As our eyes met, a thousand thoughts went unspoken. She was wearing a shapeless grey dress. Although she seemed thinner and her blonde hair was cut brutally short, she looked much the same as when I’d last seen her, in the back seat of a limousine like this one about six months ago. I felt a hollowness in my stomach as I remembered it: we had come to a stop on a barricaded street, and I’d watched helplessly as she’d been swiftly bundled into another car and driven away. I’d vowed to myself that I would protect her come what may, but when the moment had arrived I’d offered no protest. But she had
survived
. I had long given up hope of that. I’d felt that they wouldn’t risk giving her any freedom for fear she might reach the British embassy and tell them everything we had learned in Italy. As a junior member of the Service, she had very little information to give them. Once they had extracted it from her, I’d reasoned, they would have seen little point in keeping her alive.

But they had. I tried not to think about what they had put her through instead, but an image of the girl Yuri had kept in his rooms in the camp in Germany, and of the way he had flicked his tongue over his lips at his first sight of Sarah, flashed into my mind nevertheless. Repulsion and rage coursed through me.