The Envoy (19 page)

The following day dawned wet and overcast. Kit said ‘no thanks’ to breakfast and checked out. He left his bag in left luggage at the station and went for a walk along the docks. He constantly felt eyes in the back of his neck. Despite the rain, there were still large numbers of sightseers milling about on the South Railway Jetty and gawping at the
Ordzhonikidze
. If you walked to the edge of the quay, the Russian warship was almost close enough to touch. Kit looked down into the dark oily water between the grey hull and the jetty pilings: bottles, wood waste, drowned rats, chip papers and rubbish indescribable jigged along the ship’s
waterline
. For a second, Kit imagined a human face rising out of the filth. How can we do this to anyone? Kit suddenly jerked upwards and backed away from the quay’s edge. Had someone pushed him? He turned around. There was no one there at all – but the eyes were still boring into the back of his neck.

Kit pulled his collar up against the wet south-westerly wind and walked to the southern end of South Railway Jetty. He turned around and looked at the stern quarters of the
Ordzhonikidze
. Driscoll was right, it was there that she looked most slender and vulnerable. Kit wondered if the mines were still clinging to the cruiser’s undersides. Part of him wanted to run back to the ship and shout a warning to the nearest sailor. Kit turned away and looked south. The edge of the jetty was about two hundred yards from King’s Stairs. He was surprised to see that Smith’s saloon car was still there – along with another identical one. They were obviously pool vehicles. Smith was leaning against a car’s bonnet talking to a tall man wearing a trilby. Both were looking out into the harbour. Had there been another dive?

Kit turned around and retraced his steps into the town. He stopped at a restaurant called The Lighthouse for a lunch of fish and chips and strong tea. ‘Yes,’ he always told his American friends, ‘they really do put vinegar on their French fries.’ Now Kit found himself dripping the vinegar too.

Kit looked at his watch. There was still time for more
snooping
before the London train. Kit walked down Queen’s Road then turned towards King’s Stairs. He saw that the saloon cars were gone. He continued towards the jetty and harbour steps. The only evidence of drama was a scattering of cigarette butts around where the saloon cars had been parked. The only sounds were ship’s whistles, the mournful toll of bell buoys and gulls. Nothing.

It was risky, but Kit wanted to have one more look at the Sally Port Hotel. As soon as he turned the corner, he saw there were lots of cars. Some with police markings, but most were unmarked government pool cars – some looked like MoD police. Kit walked briskly down the street on the opposite side from the hotel. There was a hastily drawn sign stuck to the front entrance of the Sally Port: Temporarily Closed. Kit passed close by a uniformed policeman talking to a man in civilian clothes. The only words he picked up were ‘funny stuff’ and ‘Russians’.

Before he boarded the train, Kit made one last phone call. Vasili’s voice had laughter in it: ‘Chocolate chip cookies,’ he said. Kit hung up the phone and breathed easy. Thank God, they had found the mines.

The London train was half-full. A large number of soldiers and sailors were heading back to London for weekend leaves. They all seemed half-asleep. The British wore uniforms with
reluctance
, but with natural poise. Americans, on the other hand, tried too hard. There were other differences too. The Americans had ‘unknown soldiers’, the British had ‘unknown warriors’; the US military used ‘power’, the British wielded ‘might’. There was something about the British that was inexplicable, something
primal
and tribal. Kit leaned back in his dusty train seat – why did train carriages always seem coated in a thin film of dust? Maybe it was because of the coal. There were men on the tracks in boiler suits – men old enough to wear flat caps and jaunty scarves. Wherever you went in Britain, they were always there: a Greek chorus leaning on shovels. The engine chuffed and the train lurched forward. Ten minutes later Kit was – for the first time in three days – sound asleep.

Kit woke up after Basingstoke and set off to find the buffet car. He needed a drink, but the buffet was closed. It happened on the way back to his seat when he was passing between two carriages. The hard push in the centre of the back came a second before the words. ‘You fucking bastard.’ Kit felt his forehead slam hard against the glass window of the train door. His left arm was bent up hard against his back. He felt a blast of cold air as the door opened. It was a long drop and the blackness was passing in a loud whirl of chaos. Kit pulled free and flung himself away from the abyss. He was now facing his attacker. It was Smith. He didn’t have time to duck. Smith landed a straight right on the side of Kit’s mouth. The wind blew the door shut.

Kit collapsed on to his haunches with his hands over his head to ward off further blows. Smith started to wade in with kicks, but his foot got caught in the folds of Kit’s coat. Then a train guard opened the door between the carriages. The guard had a gold watch chain and a silver moustache. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘
gentlemen
, please. May I see your tickets?’ The guard’s manner
suggested
that stopping passengers from murdering each other was just another part of his job.

Smith gave Kit a last look. ‘Don’t worry, Fournier, we’re going to get you.’ He then opened the carriage door and disappeared towards the front of the train.

The guard then helped Kit to his feet. ‘Let’s get you back to your seat, sir.’

The news of Crabb’s disappearance broke ten days later. The Kremlin press office called the incident ‘shameful espionage’. The Soviet Embassy in London informed the British Foreign Office that it ‘would be grateful to receive an explanation’.

Kit now had a copy of the FO’s explanation on his desk and read it a second time trying to tease out the coded significance of each word. ‘Commander Crabb was engaged in diving tests and is presumed to have met his death while so engaged. The diver, who, as stated in the Soviet note, was observed from the Soviet warships to be swimming between the Soviet destroyers, was presumably Commander Crabb.’ Kit smiled. The reference to ‘diving tests’ was the flimsiest of fig leafs. In the very next sentence the Foreign Office virtually admits that Crabb was spying. ‘Presumably’ was merely inserted as a diplomatic caveat to avoid pleading guilty to a serious breach of international law. ‘Yes, your honour, it was my finger on the trigger and
presumably
I shot the bastard.’

Kit found the last sentence of the British statement the most revealing. ‘His approach to the destroyers was completely
unauthorised
and Her Majesty’s government desire to express their regret at the incident.’ No more wheedling ‘presumablies’; the key phrase is ‘completely unauthorised’. It’s a bit like inviting a couple around to dinner. Five minutes after they arrive at your house, your guest’s wife goes to powder her nose and one of your servants follows her up the stairs and sticks his hand up her dress. If you had done it, the friendship would be over and you might get punched on the nose, but since it was one of your staff – behaving in a ‘completely unauthorised’ manner – you’ve got a way out. Of course, you now have to dismiss the horny servant. Kit knew the Prime Minister had no alternative. Eden was going to have to sack the Head of MI6, Major General John Sinclair. Kit had bagged the biggest beast of his career. The self-loathing was still there, but there was exhilaration too. Is that why people became assassins? Little vermin with small dicks wanting to make their marks. He wondered if Allen Dulles would be pleased. Kit wished that he had drowned himself in Portsmouth Harbour.

Neither the British nor the Soviet statement mentioned the
Ordzhonikidze
: the cruiser was the elephant in the room. Nor would the limpet mines be mentioned – ever. That file wouldn’t see the light of day for another hundred years. But other powers and other intelligence services would pore over each word of the British apology like scholars of Biblical exegesis – and come to the conclusion that something was being held back. In terms of coded diplomatic language, the Foreign Office statement was far too repentant to be an apology for something as relatively minor as a bit of underwater spying. And everyone in the trade knew it.

Kit invented a mugging incident to explain his split lip and black eye. Only Cauldwell was sceptical about the cover story. ‘I bet you took on two Sov agents with your bare hands and crippled both of them.’

‘Actually, there were three of them.’

‘What a hero.’

‘And now I’ve got to go back to Washington so the President can give me a medal in the rose garden.’

‘Really?’

‘No, I’m fibbing. It’s just a routine consultation at the State Department. I’ll be gone about eight days.’

The Washington trip bothered him, but he wasn’t going to show it. Kit didn’t know why he’d been summoned and wasn’t looking forward to it. Another bad omen was the fact that he was being called in for an ‘interview’ by counter-intelligence. The
reason
could be anything from a minor breach of security
regulations
to suspicion of spying for a foreign power. It could be bad shit – and you were never told in advance the reasons why you were being interviewed. Counter-intelligence always wanted to keep their interviewees on the back foot so they couldn’t fabricate alibis. It also worried Kit that the interview was scheduled to take place the very day of his flight to the States – they might decide to send him back in handcuffs.

The interview room was in the embassy cellar. There were no windows, no wall coverings – not even a carpet. Nothing but exposed heating pipes, an overhead florescent light, metal desk, metal chairs, polygraph lie-detector and tape recorder.

‘How you doing, Kit?’ The interviewer, Bill Shepherd, limped over to shake hands. ‘Nice to see you.’

‘Fine, nice to see you too, Bill.’ Kit knew that Shepherd’s limp came from an injury sustained parachuting behind communist lines in Korea. No one in the Agency, absolutely no one, enjoyed more respect than Bill Shepherd. Kit was relieved to see that his interrogator would be an old friend. Bill and he had been GI Bill classmates at the University of Virginia after the war.