The Deceiver (2 page)

To his surprise Sir Mark, on his return, had found Sam McCready flourishing like the proverbial green bay tree. He seemed to be able to command an enviable and total loyalty from his own staff while not offending even the most die-hard territorial desk heads when asking for a favor.

He could talk the lingo with the other field agents when they came home for furlough or a briefing, and from them he seemed to amass an encyclopedia of information, much of which, no doubt, should never have been divulged on a need-to-know basis.

It was known he could share a beer with the technical cadres, the nuts-and-bolts men and women—a camaraderie not always available to senior officers—and from them occasionally obtain a phone tap, mail intercept, or false passport while other desk heads were still filling out forms.

All this—and other irritating foibles like bending the rules and disappearing at will—hardly caused the Establishment to become enamored of him. But what kept him in place was simple—he delivered the goods, he provided the product, he ran an operation that kept the KGB fully stocked with indigestion tablets. So he had stayed … until now.

Sir Mark sighed, climbed out of his Jaguar in the underground car park of Century House, and took the lift to his top-floor office. For the moment he need do nothing. Sir Robert Inglis would confer with his colleagues and produce the “new set of rules,” the “guidance” that would enable the troubled Chief to say, truthfully but with a heavy heart, “I have no alternative.”

It was not until early June that the “guidance”—or in reality the edict—came down from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and enabled Sir Mark to summon his two Deputies to his office.

“That’s a bit bloody stiff,” said Basil Gray. “Can’t you fight it?”

“Not this time,” said the Chief. “Inglis has got the bit between his teeth, and as you see, he has the other four Wise Men with him.”

The paper he had given his two Deputies to study was a model of clarity and impeccable logic. It pointed out that by October 3, East Germany—once the toughest and most effective of Eastern European Communist states—would literally have ceased to exist. There would be no embassy in East Berlin, the Wall was already a farce, the formidable secret police, the SSD, or
Stasi
, were in full retreat, and the Soviet forces were pulling out. An area that had once demanded a large operation by the SIS in London would become a sideshow, if any show at all.

Moreover, the paper went on, that nice Mr. Vaclav Havel was taking over in Czechoslovakia, and
their
spy service, the StB, would soon be teaching Sunday school. Add to that the collapse of Communist rule in Poland, Hungary, and Romania, its coming disintegration in Bulgaria, and one could grasp the approximate shape of the future.

“Well,” sighed Timothy Edwards, “one has to concede we won’t have the operations we used to have in Eastern Europe, or need the manpower there. They have a point.”

“How kind of you to say so,” smiled the Chief.

Basil Gray he had promoted himself, his first act on being appointed Chief in January. Timothy Edwards he had inherited. He knew Edwards was hungry to succeed him in three years’ time; knew also that he had not the slightest intention of recommending him. Not that Edwards was stupid. Far from it; he was brilliant, but …

“They don’t mention the other hazards,” grumbled Gray. “Not a word about international terrorism, the rise of the drug cartels, the private armies—and not a word about proliferation.”

In his own paper, “SIS in the Nineties,” which Sir Robert Inglis had read and apparently approved, Sir Mark had laid stress on the shifting rather than the diminishing of the global threats. At the top of these had been proliferation—the steady acquisition by dictators, some of them wildly unstable, of vast arsenals of weapons; not war-surplus pieces such as in the old days, but high-tech modern equipment, rocketry, chemical and bacteriological warheads, even nuclear access. But the paper before him now had treacherously skimmed over these matters.

“So what happens now?” asked Timothy Edwards.

“What happens,” said the Chief mildly, “is that we envisage a shift of population—our population. Back from Eastern Europe to the home base.”

He meant that the old Cold War warriors, the veterans who had run their operations, their active measures, their networks of local agents out of the embassies east of the Iron Curtain, would come home—to no jobs. They would be replaced, of course, but by younger men whose true profession would not be known and who would blend into the embassy staffs unperceived, so as not to give offense to the emergent democracies beyond the Berlin Wall. Recruitment would go on, of course—the Chief had a Service to run. But that left the problem of the veterans. Where to put them? There was only one answer—out to pasture.

“We will have to set a precedent,” said Sir Mark. “One precedent that will clear the way for the smooth passage into early retirement for the rest.”

“Anyone in mind?” asked Gray.

“Sir Robert Inglis does. Sam McCready.”

Basil Gray stared across with his mouth open. “Chief, you can’t fire Sam.”

“No one’s firing Sam,” said Sir Mark. He echoed Robert Inglis’s words. “Early retirement with generous compensation is hardly victimization.”

He wondered how heavy those thirty pieces of silver had felt when the Romans handed them over.

“It’s sad, of course, because we all like Sam,” said Edwards predictably. “But the Chief does have a Service to run.”

“Precisely. Thank you,” said Sir Mark.

As he sat there he realized for the first time exactly why he would not be recommending Timothy Edwards to succeed him one day. He, the Chief, would do what had to be done because it had to be done, and he would hate it. Edwards would do it because it would advance his career.

“We’ll have to offer him three alternative employments,” Gray pointed out. “Perhaps he’ll take one.” Privately, he sincerely hoped so.

“Possibly,” Sir Mark grunted.

“What have you in mind, Chief?” asked Edwards.

Sir Mark opened a folder, its contents the result of a conference with the Director of Personnel.

“Those available are the Commandant of the Training School, the Head of Administration/Accounts, and the Head of Central Registry.”

Edwards smiled thinly. That should do the trick, he thought.

Two weeks later the subject of all these conferences prowled around his office while his deputy, Denis Gaunt, stared gloomily at the sheet in front of him.

“It’s not all that bad, Sam,” he said. “They want you to stay on. It’s just the question of the job.”

“Someone wants me out,” said McCready flatly.

London flagged under a heat wave that summer. The office window was open, and both men had removed their jackets. Gaunt was in a smart pale-blue shirt from Turnbull and Asser; McCready had a confection from Viyella that had turned woolly from much washing. Moreover, the buttons had not been inserted into the right buttonholes so that it rode up on one side. By the lunch hour, Gaunt suspected, some secretary would have spotted the error and put it right with much tut-tutting. The women around Century House always seemed to want to do something for Sam McCready.

It baffled Gaunt, the matter of McCready and the ladies. It baffled everyone, for that matter. He, Denis Gaunt, at six feet, topped his boss by two inches. He was blond, good-looking, and as a bachelor no shrinking violet when it came to the ladies.

His desk chief was of medium height, medium build with thinning brown hair, usually awry, and clothes that always looked as if he had slept in them. He knew McCready had been widowed for some years, but he had never remarried, preferring apparently to live alone in his little flat in Kensington.

There must be somebody, Gaunt mused, to clean his flat, wash up, and do the laundry. A charlady, perhaps. But no one ever asked, and no one was ever told.

“Surely you could take one of the jobs,” said Gaunt. “Itwould cut the ground right out from under their feet.”

“Denis,” replied McCready gently, “I am not a schoolteacher, I am not an accountant, and I am not a bloody librarian. I’m going to make the bastards give me a hearing.”

“That might swing it,” agreed Gaunt. “The board won’t necessarily want to go along with this.”

The hearing inside Century House began as always on a Monday morning, and it was held in the conference room one floor down from the Chief’s office.

In the chair was the Deputy Chief, Timothy Edwards, immaculate as ever in a dark Blades suit and college tie, the man the Chief had picked to ensure the required verdict. He was flanked by the Controller of Domestic Operations and the Controller for Western Hemisphere. To one side of the room sat the Director of Personnel, next to a young clerk from Records who had a large pile of folders in front of him.

Sam McCready entered last and sat in the chair facing the table. At fifty-one, he was still lean and looked fit. Otherwise, he was the sort of man who could pass unnoticed. That was what had made him in his day so good, so damned good. That, and what he had in his head.

They all knew the rules. Turn down three “unattractive employments,” and they had the right to require you to take premature retirement. But he had the right to a hearing, to argue for a variation.

He brought with him to speak on his behalf Denis Gaunt, ten years his junior, whom he had raised over five years to the number-two slot under himself. Denis, he reckoned, with his brilliant smile and public school tie, would be able to handle them better than he could.

All the men in the room knew each other and were on first-name terms, even the clerk from Records. It is a tradition of Century House, perhaps because it is such a closed world, that everyone may call everyone by first names except the Chief who is called “Sir” or “Chief” to his face and “the Master” or other things behind his back. The door was closed, and Edwards coughed for silence. He would.

“All right. We are here to study Sam’s application for a variation of a Head Office order, not amounting to redress of grievance. Agreed?”

Everyone agreed. It was established Sam McCready had no grievance, inasmuch as the rules had been abided by.

“Denis, I believe you are going to speak for Sam?”

“Yes, Timothy.”

The SIS was founded in its present form by an admiral, Sir Mansfield Gumming, and many of its in-house traditions (though not the familiarity) still have a vaguely nautical flavor. One of these is the right of a man before a hearing to have a fellow officer speak for him, a right that is often invoked.

The Director of Personnel’s statement was brief and to the point. The powers-that-be had decided they wished to transfer Sam McCready from Dee-Dee to fresh duties. He had declined to accept any of the three on offer. That was tantamount to electing early retirement. McCready was asking, if he could not continue as Head of Dee-Dee, for a return to the field or to a desk that handled field operations. Such a posting was not on offer. QED.

Denis Gaunt rose.

“Look, we all know the rules. And we all know the realities. It’s true Sam has asked not to be assigned to the training school, or the accounts, or the files because he is a field man by training and instinct. And one of the best, if not the best.”

“No dispute,” murmured the Controller for Western Hemisphere. Edwards shot him a warning look.

“The point is,” suggested Gaunt, “that if it really wanted to, the Service could probably find a place for Sam. Russia, Eastern Europe, North America, France, Germany, Italy. I am suggesting the Service ought to make that effort, because …”

He approached the man from Records and took a file.

“Because he has four years to go to retire at fifty-five on full pension.”

“Ample compensation has been offered,” Edwards cut in. “Some might say extremely generous.”

“Because,” resumed Gaunt, “of years of service, loyal, often very uncomfortable, and sometimes extremely dangerous. It’s not a question of the money, it’s a question of whether the Service is prepared to make the effort for one of its own.”

He had, of course, no idea of the conversation that had taken place the previous month between Sir Mark and Sir Robert Inglis at the Foreign Office.

“I would like us to consider a few cases handled by Sam over the previous six years. Starting with this one.”

The man of whom they were speaking stared impassively from his chair at the rear of the room. None present could guess at the anger, even despair, beneath that weathered face.

Timothy Edwards glanced at his watch. He had hoped this affair could be terminated within the day. Now he doubted it could.

“I think we all recall it,” said Gaunt. “The matter concerning the late Soviet general, Yevgeni Pankratin. …”

May 1983

THE RUSSIAN COLONEL STEPPED OUT
of the shadows slowly and carefully, even though he had seen and recognized the signal. All meetings with his British controller were dangerous and to be avoided if possible. But this one he had asked for himself. He had things to say, to demand, that could not be put in a message in a dead-letter box. A loose sheet of metal on the roof of a shed down the railway line flapped and creaked in a puff of predawn May wind of that year, 1983. He turned, established the source of the noise, and stared again at the patch of darkness near the locomotive turntable.

“Sam?” he called softly.

Sam McCready had also been watching. He had been there for an hour in the darkness of the abandoned railway yard in the outer suburbs of East Berlin. He had seen, or rather heard, the Russian arrive, and still he had waited to ensure that no other feet were moving amidst the dust and the rubble. However many times you did it, the knotted ball in the base of the stomach never went away.

At the appointed hour, satisfied they were alone and unaccompanied, he had flicked the match with his thumbnail, so that it had flared once, briefly, and died away. The Russian had seen it and emerged from behind the old maintenance hut. Both men had reason to prefer the gloom, for one was a traitor and the other a spy.