The Dark Chronicles (8 page)

Naturally, I had watched Pritchard’s entry into the Service and subsequent rise in popularity within it with considerable unease – the tall bespectacled ghost I had met in a farmhouse in Germany in 1945 was, for obvious reasons, the last person on earth I wanted
to work alongside, especially as he now seemed on a drive to find moles inside the Service. I had been appointed Head of Section at an unusually tender age, partly due to Father’s near-mythical status within the Service and partly due to Chief’s patronage. Now Pritchard had caught up with me, and although Africa was one of the smaller Sections, there was already talk of him in the corridors as a potential Deputy Chief, or even Chief, somewhere down the line.

Also seated around the table were Godsal, who headed up Middle East Section, Quiney, responsible for Western Europe, and Smale, who was standing in for Far East as Innes was on leave. They all looked harmless enough, with their schoolmasters’ faces and woollen suits, but I was under no illusions: they could be lethal. One ill-timed gesture, one misplaced word, and they would pounce. Technically, treason still warranted the death penalty. If I were exposed, I had no doubt they’d apply every technicality in the book. So: tread carefully. I needed things to go my way.

Osborne pushed a garishly cuff-linked sleeve to one side to examine his wristwatch. ‘I was hoping Chief would be able to start us off,’ he said, ‘but he doesn’t seem to have arrived yet.’ His piggy little eyes, buried behind thick black frames, darted downwards, as if he thought Chief might be about to emerge from beneath the table.

‘Strange,’ I murmured under my breath.

‘Did you say something, Paul?’

‘Sorry,’ I said, looking up sheepishly. ‘It’s just that… No. Never mind, carry on.’

‘What is it?’

‘Well… it just struck me that it’s very unlike Chief. He’s usually in well before nine on Mondays, isn’t he?’

Osborne inspected a fingernail, then nibbled at it viciously. ‘Has he called in?’ he asked Smale, who was performing his usual duties as the head of Chief’s secretariat in parallel with his new role. Smale shook his head.

‘Perhaps traffic’s bad,’ I said. ‘God knows this place is hard enough to get to from the centre of town.’

Osborne nodded: the old buildings had been a short walk from his flat.

‘It is a little peculiar,’ said Pritchard suddenly, the traces of his Morningside accent amplified by the room’s acoustics. ‘He called me in to see him last night but wasn’t there by the time I arrived.’

‘Oh?’ said Osborne, turning his head. ‘What did he want to see you about?’

‘The Slavin file – at any rate, his message was attached to that.’

‘What time did you get the message?’ asked Osborne.

‘Around seven. I’d just come back from Enfield and left straight away, but the house was deserted when I arrived.’

‘Perhaps he’d fallen asleep,’ I suggested.

‘I don’t think so. I checked pretty thoroughly.’

Yes, I thought – you did.

‘I was worried something might have happened,’ Pritchard continued, ‘but I couldn’t for the life of me remember the way to Barnes’s cottage and didn’t want to call in a Full Alert without ample reason. I suddenly remembered Chief sometimes spends weekends in London with his daughter, Vanessa. I called her flat, and her roommate – a charming young Australian girl – told me she’d just left for a club in Soho, so I thought I’d drive in to see if Chief was with her – or if she knew where he’d got to.’

‘And did she?’ asked Godsal.

‘No. She also thought he was out at Swanwick and was equally mystified. But I bumped into Paul there.’

The table’s eyes turned to me.

‘Caught red-handed,’ I said, grinning sheepishly. ‘I’ve a soft spot for jazz.’

‘Oh,’ said Pritchard, ‘is that what it was?’ Then, pointedly: ‘She seemed quite taken with you.’

I did my best to blush.

‘Perhaps we should give him a call,’ said Osborne, rescuing me.
‘Perhaps he’s simply slept in.’ He nodded at Smale quickly, before anyone could dwell too much on the unlikely image of Chief failing to set his alarm clock, and Smale walked briskly across the room and picked up a telephone sitting on one of the filing cabinets. As he dialled, I imagined the ring echoing in the empty house. To fill the silence, people conspicuously shuffled pieces of paper, fiddled with pen tops and suddenly realized they had lost their glasses cases, until Smale eventually replaced the receiver and shook his head, and we all went back to staring at him.

‘Call Barnes,’ said Osborne, and waved his hand to indicate he should do it elsewhere.

Smale nodded and slithered out of the door. And that was that: the ball was rolling. Within a couple of hours, a team of specialists would begin prowling through Chief’s living room with dogs and cameras and ink pads. Looking for evidence, looking for blood. I’d carried out last night’s work in a kind of concentrated trance. Now I was gripped by panic as the reality of it came back to me, and a series of possible lapses leapt through my mind. Had I swept every inch of the carpet? Covered the bullet-mark adequately? I had a sudden flash of Chief’s dark, frozen eyes staring up at me from the floor – could I really have removed all trace of that horror?

Osborne clapped his great hands together. ‘I think we should start. I know some of you have to prepare for the Anguilla meeting later. There is only one item on today’s agenda – the Slavin dossier, which I trust you have all now read. All other matters will be covered in our next meeting.’ He turned to Pritchard. ‘Perhaps you could start us off, Henry?’

‘By all means.’ Pritchard walked over to the door and dimmed the lights, then fiddled with the projector in the centre of the table. After some clicks and whirrs, a magnified photograph suddenly appeared on the wall facing us. A man with stooped shoulders and a widow’s peak was bending down to examine a wooden mask at a street market, a quizzical smile on his lips.

‘Meet Colonel Vladimir Mikhailovich Slavin of the KGB,’ said
Pritchard. ‘Unmarried. No children. Walked into the High Commission in Lagos on Friday and asked for a British passport in exchange for information about a double agent. In an interview with Geoffrey Manning, the Head of Station, Slavin claimed that Moscow had recruited this agent in Germany in 1945, and that he was given the code-name Radnya.’ He peered at the table over his half-moon spectacles. ‘Needless to say, if true, this would be a monumental disaster. Twenty-four years is a very long time for a double agent to remain undetected, and Christ knows what damage he could have caused.’

With a click, another photograph filled the top half of the wall. This was of a woman, three-quarters in profile, her hair swept back, no make-up. She looked older, of course – but it was her. I focused on her eyes, trying to read anything in them, but she was squinting in the harsh light and it wasn’t possible. An ancient line of poetry I’d last heard recited in a dusty classroom suddenly flashed through my mind, unbidden:
With them that walk against me, is my sun
…

‘This is the other figure we’re looking at. Irina Grigorieva, a third secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Lagos. According to Slavin, she recruited Radnya after falling in love with him.
Cherchez la femme
.’ He allowed a brief interval for polite laughter. Once a couple of people had obliged, he continued: ‘Both of these pictures, incidentally, were taken by the Station’s watchers within the last couple of years, so we can take it that this is more or less how they look today.’ He walked back to the door and turned the lights back up.

‘Do we know what their duties involve?’ asked Farraday.

‘I had a look at our records this morning, and we have Slavin down as arriving in Nigeria in ’65, under cover as a political attaché. Before that, he was in similar positions in Kinshasa and Accra, which makes him something of an Africa expert in Russian terms. Our educated guess is that his job is to formulate policy in the region – and, of course, to keep an eye on what everyone else is getting up to.’

‘Everyone else meaning us?’ asked Farraday. He seemed to be following the discussion, for a change.

Pritchard nodded. ‘Among others. I presume everyone here’s au fait with the situation in Nigeria?’ He took some smart buff folders out of his briefcase and handed them round the table – the covers boasted the grand title ‘
THE NIGERIAN CIVIL WAR: A SUMMARY AND ASSESSMENT OF THE CONFLICT TO DATE’
. ‘This is a draft of a paper we’ll be sending the Cabinet next week,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll find we’ve covered a lot of ground.’ Leafing through it, I could see he wasn’t exaggerating: there was a section on the country’s history, a detailed chronology of all the major events of the war so far, profiles of the leading personalities on both sides… I felt a pang of professional jealousy.

‘I think you all know the basics,’ Pritchard went on airily. ‘But in case you’ve got sick of following it on the news, I’ll quickly summarize the salient facts. Nigeria is our largest former colony. When it gained independence in ’60, it was the great hope of Africa – a shining new democracy of thirty-five million people, with enormous potential both as a trading partner and as a political force for good in the continent. But independence was swiftly followed by chaos and violence. Pogroms against the Ibo tribe in the east eventually led to that region seceding from the rest of the country and renaming itself the Republic of Biafra. That sparked a civil war. So far, so Africa. From our point of view, however, it’s been a complete mess, unfortunately compounded by our government’s handling of the situation. We initially refused to take sides in the war, sitting resolutely on the fence. Then, in August ’67, the Nigerians – “the Federal side” – took delivery of several Czech Delphin L-29 jet-fighters from Moscow. That sent us into a panic: nobody wants the Russians to be in control of one of Africa’s largest nations once the war ends. As a result, we’ve now painted ourselves into a corner, and are effectively competing with Moscow to provide more and more arms to the Nigerians, in the hope of gaining favour with them after the war.’

‘And what does Nigeria have to offer us?’ asked Farraday innocently.

‘Oil,’ I said.

Pritchard flashed me a contemptuous look. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers, Paul.’ It was a nice little dig – I was known for my contacts in Fleet Street. ‘Contrary to public perception, the Biafrans never had
all
of Nigeria’s oil.’

‘They had rather a lot of it, though. Rather a lot of it that we would prefer remained in our hands. No?’

He leaned forward, glowering across the table. ‘There’s much more at stake here than oil. This is about the four hundred million pounds we’ve invested in the country – and the stability of the whole region. If Nigeria falls to Communism, the rest of the continent could follow.’

‘The “domino” theory? I thought that was a Yank idea.’

He refused to be goaded. ‘Even the Yanks are occasionally right.’

‘And who are they supporting in this thing?’ said Farraday. ‘The Americans, I mean.’

Pritchard turned to him. ‘Well, so far they’ve been officially neutral, but broadly on our side. They’ve left us pretty much alone, though – too busy trying to find ways out of Vietnam and beating the Russians to the moon. That may change now, though, as Nixon made a lot of noise about the Biafrans’ plight during his election campaign. The Prime Minister has made much of the fact that he hasn’t committed British troops in Vietnam, but the Americans aren’t ecstatic about that arrangement and their good will may soon run dry. I don’t think they are going to start supporting the Biafrans – yet. However, there are plenty of
other
powers already supporting them. France has been supplying them with arms through the Ivory Coast and Gabon in increasingly large quantities in the last few months. De Gaulle would like to protect francophone influence on the continent and sees the plight of “
les pauvres biafriens
” as a way to win back popularity after the mess of the student riots last year. He also wants access to Biafran oil, of course. Then there’s
China, who are apparently lending the rebels their support simply to show up the Soviets as imperialist lapdogs for allying themselves with us and the Americans. It’s hard to gauge what impact these skirmishes they’re having with the Russians along their border might have, but it could mean that they step up their involvement in this conflict as well. Also supporting the Biafrans are the Israelis, who seem to believe that they’re stopping the next Holocaust, and Haiti, who we have reports recognized the rebel regime this weekend – we’re not quite sure what their reasons are. Finally, South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal are all selling the rebels arms simply because they’re happy to help one gang of wogs continue to butcher another.’

The room went quiet while everyone took this in.

‘And the Biafrans, knowing all this, continue to buy arms from these parties?’ Farraday asked.

‘They have little choice.’

‘Poor bastards.’

‘Poor us, rather,’ Pritchard replied. ‘As a result of support from this motley crew, the Biafrans have managed to hang on by the skin of their teeth for nearly two years. We only agreed to supply arms to the Nigerians on the calculation that the whole affair would be over in a couple of
weeks
. The British public’s disapproval of our involvement is now at an all-time high, partly because of “kwashiorkor”. That’s this disease the children get when they’ve not enough protein. It fills their stomachs with fluid – you’ll have seen the footage, I expect. The Biafrans are now calling it “Harold Wilson Syndrome” and putting that on their death certificates, because they blame him in particular and the British government in general for not allowing enough food and aid through. We also have reports of the PM’s name being used as a swear-word in Biafra.’

‘Well, it’s been that over here for a while!’ said Quiney, eliciting a few quiet chuckles around the table.

Pritchard smiled. ‘Yes, even his own party seems to be turning against him now. That’s largely down to his stance on Biafra, and
the pictures that are coming out of it. Liberal do-gooders don’t seem so worried when the starving
look
like they’re starving, but when they develop pot bellies it shocks them so much they feel compelled to organize jamborees and start marching on Trafalgar Square. Last week,
The Times
ran a series of articles claiming that the Nigerian pilots are deliberately bombing Biafran civilians. In response to increasing calls for him to resign, the PM announced he will fly out to Lagos this Thursday, supposedly to find out the facts of the war for himself and report back to Parliament.’