The Protector: A gripping, action-packed spy thriller Read online

  “Not telling us what he thinks we want to hear, eh?”

  “Certainly not, and it’s not fibs either.” He used the current jargon for the normally ultra subtle dis-information so favoured by Moscow centre.

  “You seem very sure of that,” Tansey-Williams said. “Why?”

  Callows shrugged uncharacteristically. “Gut feel.”

  Tansey-Williams walked to the window and looked out over the light traffic, negotiating the drizzle dampened streets. He had a real respect for Callows’ gut feelings, a respect developed over the last sixteen years.

  “Done then. Clamp this right down,” he said. “I want it rated as top priority. What have you initiated?”

  “I’ve given it to John Burmeister, but he’ll need help. A sniffer. I’d like it to remain a Milburn task for the present. If the mole is in here, it will be easier to keep quiet.”

  “Did you ever meet Henry Arnold?”

  Callows shook his head, his eyes interested.

  “Retired a year ago. Ex Department ‘C’. Pragmatic, clever. Probably the best sniffer we ever had.”

  “Never even heard his name,” Callows said. “I had someone else in mind...”

  “I’ll get him recalled and attached to Milburn. Young he is not, but a mind like a steel trap. Exactly what you are looking for.”

  The following morning, Arnold agreed to return to work, ostensibly to begin compiling the official history of the service during its 1939-45 birth pangs. Century House, short of space for the tiresome request, sent him over to Milburn where, somewhat surprisingly, they seemed to have an office free. Armed with a clearance to enter all filing areas, he began shuffling the corridors, perpetually pushing his spectacles back up his long nose and humming to himself. It was during the afternoon of the first day that he asked to see the references to ‘Long Knives’, reasoning that whoever had accessed the file had either directly or indirectly triggered the contact with Moscow Centre.

  The normal staff at the Midhurst wringer had been supplemented overnight by an Acton Fairy. Another was due that evening. Mrs Hogan occasionally caught a glimpse of him as he walked a seemingly irregular patrol through the grounds of the house. She looked back to Simonov. All of the previous morning’s confident bluster was gone – and now his answers were dragged out painfully.

  “Yuri, we know you aren’t cleared for access to information like that. Your material comes in from the Directorates. That I accept. But in that material you certainly would not learn of the existence of a KGB operative inside our little gang, would you?”

  “I was mistaken,” he said softly.

  “No you weren’t, Yuri. You believed it and you still do.” She stopped to let that statement sink in for a moment before continuing. “Who are you protecting? Someone let it slip, didn’t they? Someone told you. A friend?”

  He said nothing, his watery eyes staring at the wall behind her head. Very occasionally a spark of real strength surfaced but now it seemed smothered in fear. I’m losing this, she thought. Ease off with the pressure and let’s try something a little more basic.

  “Well, let’s have a cup of tea, shall we? We have been working hard, you know. Perhaps its time for a little relaxation.”

  He looked up at her.

  “Shopping?” he asked.

  “Not today, Yuri. The man outside wouldn’t like that. Perhaps tomorrow.” She paused. “But there are things you can do here.”

  She stood and walked to look out the window.

  “You are a man. A man in your prime,” she said flatteringly. “In Moscow you must have had you pick of the girls. Perhaps we can organise some company for you?”

  He looked up at her quickly, a slightly shocked look on his face.

  “No not me, Yuri,” she chuckled, “but we have some nice girls, speak Russian, make borsch, talk about troika rides in the snow... would you like that?”

  He looked away again.

  Well, well, she thought, let’s try the other.

  “Of course, if you’d like to chat with someone who has been there recently, someone sympathetic, one of our young chaps only got in last week.”

  He looked up quickly, his eyes now displaying interest.

  Gotcha! she thought triumphantly.

  “He would be very sympathetic, Yuri. Would you like that?”

  “Well, maybe,” he mumbled. “Would he be…”

  “Very sympathetic, Yuri. I think you know what I mean. He’s only twenty four, blonde and very athletic. He’s very nice. But we would have to talk first, Yuri...”

  “It’s difficult,” he began. “I don’t…”

  “It was your lover, wasn’t it, Yuri? The friend. He told you.”

  “He didn’t love me,” Yuri said bitterly. “He’s run off with someone else. He just used me. Used to make me do things after he had been with others.”

  She walked over and sat down next to him on the couch. “Men are buggers, aren’t they?” she agreed, the pun going right over his head. “They just have no feelings.”

  Yuri Simonov began to talk.

  The central files had been computerised for some years but the service still maintained vast storage areas for the items that could never be stored on disc. Faded news clippings, photographs and letters that could never be electronically enhanced sufficiently joined the tons of case files that needed a mainframe just to index the information.

  Arnold sat with the operator, who accessed his terminal and found nine references to ‘Long Knives’: seven of them to the original group in pre-war Germany, with reference notes to the hard copy vault; one to the notes of an investigation handed over by MI5, dealing with neo-Nazis in Clapham; and one file that had been purged.

  “What does this mean?” he asked the operator.

  “Oh, normally it means the data has been dumped... but that can’t be right. We don’t purge anything here. Must be a glitch. “

  “A what?”

  “A glitch. A fault in the software.”

  “I’d like you to unglitch it,” Arnold said, his eyes narrowing, the smell of the quarry becoming strong.

  “I’ll have to get an engineer,” she replied, “but even then a purge is sometimes just that.”

  “Tell me,” he said, “who can get at this machine. To purge.” He pronounced the last word with distaste.

  At 6.17 that evening, a courier left with the day’s tapes and transcripts and Mrs Hogan – feeling tired but good – began her drive home to Guildford. The cook had prepared steak and kidney pie and, just before 8pm, Yuri sat at another kit-set pine table in the oversized dining room, with the handyman and one of the Acton Fairies for company.

  The handyman was a retired soldier – good with roses, paintbrushes and a screwdriver, but his conversation was limited. The bodyguard was eating quickly, shovelling the food into his mouth and enviously eyeing the glass of beer at Yuri’s place. Finally finished, he pushed his seat back and wordlessly went to relieve his partner.

  Yuri ate silently, smiling occasionally at the handyman and wishing that his company for the evening would arrive. He didn’t so much want to jump into bed with someone as he wanted someone to talk to. Mrs Hogan suggested it was the real reason he had finally left Russia – the secrets, the hidden smiles, the furtive embraces. Here in the west, she had said, one could be gay and proud of it. He liked that word and smiled to himself as if it was all a bit of a joke. Then he lifted another fork of Mrs Bennet’s pie to his lips.

  The two figures crossed the wall at the alarm system’s weakest point. Directional microphones set into the shrubbery at intervals backed up the pressure wires that surrounded the large garden, but where they silently dropped to the ground the mics had been removed after constant interference from the electricity substation on the road’s edge.

  The leading man, garbed in black, pointed out the line of the wire in the darkness and together they moved forward towards the house. Time was short.

  The bodyguard patrolling the grounds almost walked in
to them as he skirted the greenhouse. as he jerked his weapon up toward the moving shadow and dived down into the only available cover, he never saw the second figure, just felt the milliseconds of unbelievable pain as the nine-inch blade drove into his spinal column at the base of his skull.

  The other bodyguard was eating opposite Yuri at the table when the two men burst through the door. He rose spinning, snatching the gun off the table in one fluid motion, kicking the table over his charge as the first of the nine millimetre parabellum rounds hit him in the chest, throwing him backwards through the air like a rag doll.

  The same gunman turned his weapon on the Russian and fired a measured burst from three feet. The second man fired a scything burst that knocked the handyman backwards into the kitchen, then ran through to finish the job. There he also found Mrs Bennet, who died trying not to drop the fruit salad, a look of abject disappointment on her face as the crystal bowl shattered, splattering sticky peach juice all over her spotless floor.

  The car carrying Yuri’s company arrived forty minutes later. He was a male prostitute who had been used by MI6 on several occasions and was well compensated for his tasks, most of which he thoroughly enjoyed. His driver felt uneasy at the gates when his efforts on the horn were ignored.

  “Wait here,” he said, “and don’t fuckin’ move.” With that he climbed the gates, calling all the time to lessen the chance of being mistaken for an intruder.

  Minutes later, he was back. Without a word, he turned the car around and drove into town looking for a call box, his hands shaking on the wheel.

  The Duty Officer at Milburn took the call in the ops room and waved a hand at the two staffers present for a bit of quiet.

  “Say again,” he said, “nice clear line but I didn’t catch that,” reminding the caller that the line wasn’t secured.

  “I was bringing a fella down to Midhurst... Know who I am?” he said exasperated.

  “Yes, go ahead.”

  “He won’t be needed. What’s needed is a cleaning team from the office”

  The Duty Officer, new to the post, wasn’t up on the latest Milburn jargon.

  “A cleaning team? What on earth...”

  “Fucksakes! We’ve been hit. They’re all fuckin’ dead. Get onto Mr Black or Mr Burmeister. Get ‘em down here now and get the local nick advised to keep clear.”

  “Oh Jesus…”

  He dropped the phone and took the stairs three at a time hoping that Burmeister was still in the building.

  Burmeister arrived back at Milburn just before midnight in the company of Adrian Black, the officer in charge of counter espionage. Black was a stocky man, the son of a Yorkshire miner, who had been recruited from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch by MI5 and later transferred to MI6 after a personality clash with the head of their Counter Espionage Section. He spoke appalling German, hated computers – and was, Callows thought, the best counter intelligence officer he’d even seen, a man with the real ability to break down the component parts of a problem into their simplest form and deal with each without ever losing sight of the whole.

  In his office, Sir Martin stood in front of a small heater that blew warm air.

  “Well?” he snapped. “What the hell happened?”

  “Two men, over the wall. Took out the first man outside, entered, killed FRUIT GUM and the remainder of the staff and left immediately. No-one seems to have heard a bloody thing. Spent casings were nine mill. The lab people have what forensic evidence we could muster.”

  “Summary?” Sir Martin asked abruptly.

  “They were after FRUIT GUM. That seems certain. The rest were incidental. Very professional. Very slick.”

  “Very unlike the KGB,” Black added.

  Burmeister said nothing.

  “Say again?’

  “Too messy,” Black went on. “We’ve seen their assassinations over the years. Poisons, advanced untraceable chemicals, maybe a well-placed bullet if absolutely necessary. This butcher’s shop? No way.”

  “I disagree,” Burmeister said quickly. “This would be just like them, a break in pattern…”

  “All the risk for some middle-aged poofter analyst? Not the Centre we know and love. Not unless he knew something he shouldn’t have and...”

  “What makes you think that?” Burmeister snapped.

  “...the hit was set up very quickly,” Black concluded. “No time to import a specialist.”

  Sir Martin often used the fact that the two men disliked each other – and that both were fiercely ambitious – to his advantage, but given the brief he had issued to Burmeister the night before, he felt bound to support him.

  “I think we should assume KGB until proven otherwise. Adrian, you had better get together with 5 and SB. Brief ‘em. Let ‘em know there’s been a murder.”

  “With due respect, Sir Martin, this isn’t your normal high street murder. This was a team put together for something quite specific. The man we had in that safe house. It’s my patch. I want in on the story. I want to know what I am up against here.”

  Callows considered it for a moment. Then, with a sinking finality, he said, “I’m sorry, Adrian. You know I can’t do that.”

  The media did get hold of the story. A Midhurst policeman, having to justify his long shift, related the occurrence to his wife who used the story to excuse his non-appearance at a dinner party. Within an hour, a large National Daily short of lead stories had begun piecing together the bits – and, at 4am the following morning, the D Notice Committee immediately authorised the Director General’s request and a notice was slapped on the issue.

  Special Branch and Security Service specialists were swarming all over the safe house, Tansey-Williams having reluctantly handed the matter over to them. Operations within the Realm, he grudgingly had to agree, were their responsibility.

  He did, however, decline to make available the transcript tapes or advise the MI5 case officer of the details of Yuri Simonov’s de-brief.

  CHAPTER TWO

  His shoulder ached. It was always bad in the damp. He stretched the arm high over his head to ease it, then leant back to the icon on the scarred wooden table. With the small scalpel in his right hand, he scraped the grime from the painting’s surface. His hands were what people noticed first, those and his eyes, and the powerful aura he exuded.

  The hands were large, with powerful cords of muscle built by the constant rhythmic squeezing of a piece of India rubber that was never out of reach. Some people smoked, some drank. Titus Quayle did both and squeezed bits of rubber.

  The psychiatrists had found it interesting, a legacy of the two years in the dark filth of the Libyan prison. They likened the bond between the man and inanimate object to a child with his security blanket. But they were wrong. If they had looked into his flinty blue eyes they would have known that. He was forty-six years old but the time in the prison made him look older. Almost two years later, his skin was still scarred and his once rich black hair was laced with grey at the temples. He kept it cropped short and, as he bent over the icon, listening to the rain on the tin roof, he occasionally ran a hand across the aching shoulder.

  He stopped, leant the postcard size painting against an earthenware jug and sat back to study it, his right hand taking the piece of rubber from the bench and squeezing it.

  Born in Malaya in 1941, he was the only child of a quiet wraith-like librarian’s daughter who had uncharacteristically run off and married the seventh son of the Earl of Dagenham, Charles Moncrief Montague Quayle. Realising that, as the seventh son, he was unlikely to benefit from his father’s estate, Quayle had given the entire family the traditional two fingered salute at the dinner table one night and the next day booked passage to Singapore, collecting the librarian’s daughter en route to Tilbury docks. He was convinced that, beneath the quiet nature and ill-fitting staid dresses, there lurked a ripe body and an adventurous spirit – and by Christmas 1938 they were managing a rubber plantation in Malaya’s Cameron Highlands. Emily Quayle would of
ten walk the rows of trees with her husband, supervising the tappers. And when their son was born, she felt she could not be happier. Charles Quayle had always hated his proliferation of Christian names and his wish had been that his son should have one name and a short one at that. And so, reared on the tales of Scott’s Antarctic Expedition and the courage of Captain Oates, he had called his son Titus. For Emily, the existence was idyllic.

  But it wasn’t to last long.

  When war came to Malaya, Charles Quayle dispatched his wife and new son down to fortress Singapore, bravely took his gun and stupidly stood in the way of the entire Imperial Japanese Army – leaving his widow and child to spend the next few years in Changi prison. After the war, Emily met and later married another Englishman, an engineer who came and went from their lives as projects and the drink permitted, and with some relief she accepted the new Earl’s correspondence offer to educate young Titus in England.

  The quiet tough little chap arrived at Southampton with his mother in 1948 and was immediately enrolled in a preparatory school allied to Eton. From there on, the years flashed by, the boy showing a real aptitude for languages and history – and, in 1959, he entered Corpus Christi College at Cambridge.

  He was now alone, his mother having died several years before when a Yemeni had thrown a hand grenade into the car she was driving through Aden. His stepfather, drunk beside her after a night in the mess, had survived after the removal of a leg but in his guilt had never spoken to Titus again.

  His tutor at Cambridge was Edward Morton, a German and Russian Languages specialist. The kindly quick-witted Don soon became more than just mentor to the young man, the pair of them sitting up late at night discussing theology, politics, history, playing chess or poring over the tutor’s small collection of Russian icons.

  The art form became Quayle’s escape from the modern world and he found, in his first fumbling attempts at restoration, a real pleasure. Twenty-five years after leaving Cambridge, he could still not walk past a damaged or neglected piece without buying it to restore. There was a large cardboard box of damaged and grimy items awaiting his touch beneath the bookshelves in the main room.