The Factory (2 page)

The Director General chose Fowler as the bait in the trap he set for Whitehead. It was an exploratory mission, a trip to Paris where a cultural attaché at the Hungarian embassy had hinted at a British embassy reception that he might be willing to spy upon his imminent return to Budapest. Fowler was to make the contact, with Whitehead as the protective back-up.

No one else at the Factory was told anything about the operation, so that only Whitehead could possibly have been the informant if Fowler had been seized. He wasn't. The Director General simply reversed the roles for the test upon Fowler. This time it was to collect details of China's nuclear capability smuggled from Beijing by a disaffected junior official in the Ministry of Technology. Again it went perfectly and Bell decided that in the two men he had loyal, trustworthy officers.

Jane Snelgrove was one of the two female agents at the Factory, an attractive blonde who spoke four languages and who, five years earlier, had been actively considered for the British Olympic swimming team. Bell paired her with John Walker, a pipe-smoking, chess-playing bachelor. And once again gave each an assignment known only to the other. Jane went without incident into Warsaw to bring out an agent whom the Factory believed to be exposed and upon the point of arrest. And Walker, with Jane Snelgrove keeping watch, successfully broke into the London office of the Soviet trade organization and removed from its safe classified details of stolen British technology shipped to Russia.

And Bell crossed both names off his list and felt secure with two more loyal officers.

William Dowling, a small, clerk-like man, was the next to pass the test, escorting across the border from Russia into Finland a Soviet defector whom the Russians would most definitely have stopped if they could and if Dowling's partner, Henry Millington, had been the hunted traitor. And Millington, a slight and swarthy linguist, returned unscathed from a photographic spying assignment of Baltic shipping movements upon which he had been guarded by the other man.

To set those failed traps took a month and left Bell more unsettled than when he'd begun baiting them. Unquestionably he had confirmed the trustworthiness of six operatives. There were only another two field agents to be tested.

‘I'm going away. I don't know for how long.' It was an announcement, not a request or a question. Pamela, Bell's wife, stood challengingly in the lounge of their north London home, one hand upon her hip. She was a petite but big-busted woman conscious of everything about herself. Her blonde hair was perfectly coiffured, her make-up perfectly applied, her weight-maintained figure perfectly enhanced by a figure-hugging dress.

‘All right,' accepted Bell at once, because he wasn't interested in arguing or asking where she was going. He stood at the drinks tray, making his third – or was it the fourth? – whisky and soda.

‘A golfing holiday, in Scotland,' offered the woman anyway. ‘James is going too.'

James Whittaker had been the best man at their wedding. It was the nearest Pamela had come openly to admitting that the man was her lover.

‘That'll be nice,' said Bell, barely polite.

‘You don't mind?' demanded the woman. When she expected opposition she became bird-like, making quick, sharp movements.

‘Would it make any difference if I did?' said Bell wearily.

‘No,' said Pamela at once. ‘Are you going to stay drinking all evening?'

‘Probably.'

‘Sleep in the spare room then. You make disgusting noises when you're drunk.'

‘Sure,' agreed Bell, happy with the suggested arrangement.

‘In fact,' continued Pamela, ‘why not sleep there permanently?'

‘That's a good idea,' accepted Bell.

It was a further week before an opportunity came to set a trap for the remaining two field agents. With hindsight it was easy to find ironic comparisons with the capture of Jack Harding, who, with further ironic coincidence, was sentenced to fifteen years' hard labour in an East German jail on the day Bell briefed the two on their mission.

Elizabeth Porter was the other female officer at the Factory. She was a studious, quiet-mannered girl who wore spectacles and plain, sombre-coloured clothes. Her supposedly protective, watching companion was Anthony Marshall, and he was a complete contrast. He dressed flamboyantly and was usually the first to arrive at a party and always the last to leave. He considered himself a great lover and had pursued every female researcher and typist in the department. Bell knew that he had tried – but failed – to seduce Ann.

It was a pick-up, as it had been in East Berlin, only this time in the Czech capital of Prague. And again like East Berlin, it was near a river, from a dead-letter drop on the cathedral side of the Charles Bridge, the statue-lined, pedestrians-only walkway across the Vistula. Precisely at eight o'clock on the second Monday of the month Elizabeth Porter had to collect from beside a specific gravestone an apparently empty and discarded cigarette packet. It in fact contained a tightly folded photocopy of a Defence Ministry document setting out the troop strength of the Warsaw Pact forces stationed throughout Czechoslovakia.

The collection went without any hitch. It was on the bridge, when the girl was returning to the main part of the city, that the arrest was attempted. Counterespionage agents and police sealed both sides of the bridge, which trapped Elizabeth in the middle, but they did it clumsily, swinging lorries and high-sided vehicles to form a barrier at either end. And she saw them. She halted at once, leaning against the parapet, and dropped the packet and the photocopy into the fast-flowing river, where they were lost for ever.

The police did seize her but without any evidence were unable to make any case. London protested the detention of an innocent schoolteacher, which was Elizabeth's cover, and after three weeks the Czech authorities were forced to release her.

Samuel Bell debriefed her on the day she was repatriated to London, haggard and pale after days of interrogation but otherwise uninjured.

Bell let her talk for a long time before suddenly asking: ‘Where was Anthony Marshall?'

‘He wasn't able to reach the bridge to warn me,' said the girl. ‘The police moved very quickly: actually erected the barrier in front of him.' She paused. Then she said: ‘The bridge was crowded but I was the only one picked out. They were looking just for me. I think it was a tip-off.'

‘I think so too,' agreed the Director General. And now he knew the traitor who had given that tip-off to the Czechs. Apart from himself and the woman sitting before him only one other person had known of the operation: Anthony Marshall.

Bell made his plans quite dispassionately. He was sure that Marshall was responsible for the detection of four valued agents, men who were going to spend the rest of their lives rotting in various communist jails. So Bell felt no pity for the man he had to punish. And he decided that the punishment for a crime for which he could produce no positive evidence before an English court to get a legal verdict had to be long and hard imprisonment, the same as Marshall had inflicted upon his victims.

Bell accepted he could not move against Marshall anywhere within the communist bloc: the man was their agent so to attempt to destroy him there would, in fact, be handing him over to his true masters. For several whisky-aided days and nights Bell puzzled how to achieve what he wanted, determined against any mistake which might let Marshall go unpunished.

When the idea came he first dismissed it, regarding it as too unpredictable. But then he remembered how fanatical the regime was in Iran and changed his mind completely, deciding that because of the fanaticism it was, in fact, entirely predictable.

Bell personally briefed Marshall. On a passport describing himself as a salesman of machine-part spares Marshall was to enter Iran by road, crossing from Hakkari in Turkey, and drive as far as Hamadan. There he was to wait at the only hotel in the town until he was contacted by a man who in conversation would use the phrase: ‘The country is going through great change.' From him Marshall was to learn the true extent of opposition within Iran to the ayatollahs.

The ever-smiling, supremely confident Marshall, brightly dressed in a fawn suit with red tie and pocket handkerchief, said: ‘This is an unusual one?'

‘But important, if we get a hint that the regime in Tehran might be overthrown,' said the Director General.

The day after personally instructing the man he considered a traitor, Samuel Bell did something else personally. Anonymously he posted to the Iranian legation in London an untraceable note warning that a British businessman claiming to be a machine-parts salesman who was entering the country from Hakkari, on the Hamadan road, was really a British spy.

It was an appalling drive. Marshall flew first to Istanbul and then to Ankara, on an internal flight, but had to drive south-east from then on. The mountain roads were rutted and broken and in places not roads at all, just dirt tracks. Before he reached Hakkari he had two punctures. At the Turkish border town he had the car checked as thoroughly as he could by a doubtful garage, guessing the roads would be as bad when he got into Iran, and allowed himself a much-needed night's rest at a smelling, fly-infested hotel.

The border crossing was chaotic, a disordered mass of people, animals, ancient lorries and buses milling across the road, making it almost impossible to drive. Marshall edged forward, not really able to locate a proper queue. The sun throbbed down from a heat-white sky, soaking him in perspiration, the kicked-up dust got in his throat and eyes, and his ears ached from the shouting and the sound of car horns.

It was an hour before he even got near the border post itself, grateful that there was some order at last. Metal barriers funnelled people and vehicles into a line which slowly trickled past the uniformed inspectors. When his turn came at last Marshall handed his documents to a fat, moustached man whose uniform was black-ringed from sweat. The officer intently compared the passport photograph with Marshall himself and then demanded the hire-car documents.

‘Businessman?' the officer queried.

‘Yes,' said Marshall, his cover story prepared. ‘Machine parts.'

‘Going all the way to Tehran?'

‘I hope so,' said Marshall, which was true. After making the Hamadan meeting he was going to drive to the Iranian capital and fly back to London from there to avoid the hell of Turkish mountain roads again: he couldn't understand now why he hadn't been allowed to come in through Tehran in the first place.

‘Wait,' ordered the inspector, walking back into the customs booth.

Marshall did. The burning heat gave him an excuse constantly to mop his forehead and not appear openly nervous. He forced himself not to look towards the office, to see what checks were being made on his documents.

It seemed a very long time before the fat man returned. He handed everything back to Marshall and said: ‘OK. Go on.'

Marshall smiled and nodded and put the car in gear, feeling the apprehension lift. Easy, he thought: very easy. The congestion remained just inside the border but quickly, in less than a mile, he cleared the straggled line of people on foot or travelling with animals and the road opened. It was far better than Marshall had expected and he was able to maintain a fairly high speed. It was only when he overtook a line of slower-moving buses and lorries that he became aware of an army vehicle keeping pace with him and then, when he pulled out again, that it was not just one but two small trucks. Fear jumped through him but not seriously: there were a hundred reasons why they should have been on the same road as himself and be in as much of a hurry. The pursuit was too obvious to be professional and Marshall knew easily enough how to evade it. He saw the pull-in rest stop ahead, signalled and coasted the car to a stop, smiling as the army vehicles carried on by.

After about five minutes he started off again, vaguely irritated that a lot of the slow-moving vehicles he'd overtaken already were ahead of him once more.

Marshall was strained sideways in the car, seeking a break in the oncoming traffic, when the ambush happened. There was a corner around which he couldn't properly see and when he rounded it he saw that the road split and that the army trucks had stopped in a waiting formation. He braked and tried to hide himself in the line but knew from the instant burst of activity by soldiers around the vehicles that he'd been spotted.

Marshall panicked.

He tried at first to evade them by pretending to remain on the wider road, turning sharply at the last moment on to the other highway at the split, but it only delayed them briefly. When they began chasing him both used their sirens and flashing lights, and there were shouts magnified through an electronic megaphone system that Marshall couldn't understand but didn't need to because the only thing they could be telling him to do was stop. But he didn't. He went faster, but the vehicles behind kept up. The road started to break up into a dirt track, which slowed him, but he still took a corner too fast and skidded, the wheel jerking from his hands and the rear of the car sliding sideways. There was a thump where it hit some unseen obstruction, a rock he guessed, and then Marshall felt the car start to sink into soft sand. Blindly, stupidly, he leapt out and began to run, the amplified shouts to stop filling his head. There was a shot. And then another. The third hit him, high in the shoulder, so that he toppled practically in a complete cartwheel, staggering to his feet and stumbling a few more paces before the next bullet caught him in the back, killing him instantly.

‘The Foreign Office are making all the protests they can,' reported Thurlow. ‘I've advised them that Marshall was one of ours, of course, so there is a limit to how far they can go.'

‘There's no chance of the Iranians discovering that, though,' said the Director General. ‘They can claim he was a spy for as long as they like but there isn't the slightest proof.'