Kyiv (Spoils of War) Read online

  The bar was still open, a scattering of uniforms in the battered wicker armchairs. Philby signalled to the lone waiter for a round of drinks. One of the Chief’s two colleagues turned out to be Russian. The other turned out to be Russian. He was small and squat, with greying curly hair and dirt under his fingernails. The glasses perched on the end of his button of a nose gave him a slightly comical look, but he had a sudden smile that would melt any woman’s heart and Bella liked him on sight.

  ‘My name is Glivenko.’ He spoke with a thick Leningrad accent. ‘Please call me Ilya.’

  The other man was English, uniformed, a Major in the Royal Engineers. At a nod from ‘C’, he explained that Bella was to accompany a consignment of equipment already loaded into the belly of a Halifax bomber on the apron outside. The aircraft would be leaving for Gibraltar at first light. After refuelling, it would be tracking east, making a long detour over the North African desert that would bring it to Cairo. From there, it would route north to Simferopol in the Crimea.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then, Miss Menzies, another aircraft will be waiting, Russian, smaller, more agile. The equipment will be transferred for the last leg of the journey. Under the care of our Russian friend here.’

  ‘Going where?’

  ‘Kyiv. The Germans nearly have the place surrounded but not quite. We can still get aircraft in and out.’

  ‘Da,’ Glivenko nodded. ‘Da.’

  ‘And this equipment?’ Bella was still looking at the Major. ‘Am I allowed to ask what it might be?’

  The Major exchanged looks with Menzies. The drinks had arrived.

  ‘No need,’ ‘C’ reached briskly for his whisky. ‘Normal rules, I’m afraid. Less said, the better.’

  ‘But I’m in the plane, too? Off to Kyiv?’

  ‘Good Lord, no, perish the thought. I’m sure they’ll need you back in Moscow, my dear.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Your new friends. And ours, too. Am I right, Kim? An ear to the ground? A seat at the right tables? An occasional invitation to the Kremlin? Are we not lucky to have Miss Menzies’ services again?’

  *

  Tam Moncrieff was back at the Glebe House shortly before midnight. The note on the kitchen table was brief, a Bella scrawl that barely occupied a couple of lines. Duty calls, my darling. Have been Philbied back to London and God knows wherever next. Rumours of Kyiv. I love you.

  Kyiv? Philbied? Moncrieff blinked, poured himself a whisky, read the note a second time and then stepped out into the semi-darkness of a summer night. A nearby stand of conifers were etched black against the last of the daylight and he lifted his face to the warm kiss of the wind. These last few weeks, after an exhausting operation that had taken him in and out of Portugal, his father’s house had worked its usual magic, slowing his pulse, stilling the thunder in his head, reminding him that there was still the possibility of a real life out among the bareness of his precious Cairngorms.

  He’d first met Bella Menzies in Berlin. War was still a year away and she, with a guile he’d yet to fully understand, had taken charge of him. They’d begun an affair. He’d killed a man, an American, in a park in the suburbs of Berlin, and it was Bella who managed to cover his tracks. The weeks to come were freighted with surprises, none of them pleasant, and he’d ended up in one of the basement rooms on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse that the Gestapo reserved for difficult conversations. What followed would stay with Moncrieff for the rest of his life but expulsion from Berlin had been a blessing and, as it turned out, yet another debt he owed Bella Menzies.

  Shortly afterwards, for reasons that made little sense at the time, she’d defected to the Soviet Union, and Moncrieff, like everyone else, had accepted that Comrade Bella had disappeared for good. Wrong. With his duties in Lisbon nearly discharged, she’d turned up on a flight from Moscow, official Politburo business, with time in hand to renew an acquaintance that seemed to matter to her. And so, for a second time, they’d ended up in bed together, both bruised by the last three years, both harder, more wary, yet both – in their separate ways – still curious about the other. In essence, to Moncrieff’s delight, not a great deal had changed except the raw fact of Bella’s defection to the enemy, a problem Hitler obligingly solved by invading the Soviet Union. As Bella herself had been the first to point out, they could officially be friends again.

  Kyiv. Philby.

  Moncrieff swallowed the last of the malt. Working for MI5, fighting the counter-espionage war, had changed his life, sometimes for the better, sometimes not, but one of the blessings of the job had been a growing instinct for the presence of danger. The latter came from a variety of sources, by no means all of them German. The sprawling intelligence empires on both sides of the front line bred a series of turf wars, and one of them pitched MI5 against the Secret Intelligence Service. The SIS had regarded Moncrieff’s presence in Lisbon as nothing short of an act of trespass, a land-grab, and it had fallen to Kim Philby – as the new Head of the Iberian Station – to gently warn him off. MI5, the grammar-school boys, took care of upsets at home. While SIS, the toffs, trailed their capes abroad.

  So far, so good, but what took bureaucratic prickliness to another dimension was a suspicion that there might be more to Mr Philby and his employers than met the eye. Moncrieff had spent the last few months unpicking a tangled plot to lure Hitler’s Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, to fly to Scotland. Hess had arrived with peace proposals that were music to the ears of powerful figures in the upper reaches of the Establishment. Whether or not these might have Hitler’s backing had never been clear but the threat to Churchill’s conduct of the war was only too obvious, and the PM had readily agreed that Herr Hess was mentally unbalanced, a judgement that brought the whole episode to an end. Hess was now safely tucked up in an institution in Wales, but what had lingered in the corridors of Downing Street and the Security Service was a suspicion that the SIS – MI6 – were somehow co-conspirators in this piece of comic opera.

  True? Moncrieff didn’t know, couldn’t be sure, but he had a gamekeeper’s nose for tell-tale scents, an instinct bred in these mountains, and he didn’t altogether trust Philby and the rest of the young Turks from the SIS. They were in the nation’s service to plot, to lay traps, to wrong-foot the enemy, and Moncrieff knew from experience that this kind of duplicity could have consequences rather closer to home.

  The moment he stepped back into the Glebe House, the phone in the hall began to ring. Moncrieff glanced at his watch and frowned. Half past midnight. Who’d want to phone at this hour?

  ‘It’s me. Comrade B.’

  ‘Bella?’

  ‘The same. Picture me in a little room of my own at Northolt. I’m lying in bed and there are pictures of aeroplanes everywhere. Treats for the boys, darling. You’d love it. Such a shame you’re not here. But guess who I met tonight? You’re allowed one guess, just one.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘“C”. The real thing.’

  ‘You mean Menzies?’

  ‘I do, you clever, clever man. And there’s something else you ought to know. He loves Kim. Adores the man. You can see it in his face. Strange, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘Is this a secure line?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘A little. Six have deeper pockets than your lot. Talisker Single Malt? I told them they should have bought the whole bottle. It would have been cheaper.’

  Moncrieff was smiling. He’d no idea whether this was tradecraft, a beautiful woman pretending to be loose-lipped, but it didn’t really matter. She’d always had a talent for making him laugh and now was no different.

  ‘Kyiv?’ he asked. ‘They’re serious?’

  ‘Tomorrow at dawn. But not me, alas. I get to go on to Moscow. I gather I’m an asset now.’

  ‘They’ve signed you up again?’

  ‘They think they have, or at least that’s the impression I get. Live and let live? Eternal forgiveness? These people are either deaf
or deeply cynical. I keep telling them I’m a true believer, that the comrades matter to me, but that’s something they don’t want to hear. And so, with the help of a little malt, I become the sum of all their precious assumptions. I’m white. I speak the King’s English. I’m moderately well behaved. If you ask the right questions, I might even have the right connections. And so, I must be one of theirs. Case closed.’

  ‘Theirs?’

  ‘Yours,’ she laughed. ‘But that’s because you don’t listen either, which is why a girl has to put it on paper sometimes. The bit at the end, Mr M. Take a leaf out of my book. All you have to do is believe it.’

  ‘Believe what?’

  ‘That I love you. Off now. Some other time, eh?’

  Moncrieff was staring at the phone. The precious connection had yet to break which meant that she was still listening.

  ‘A word in your ear,’ he said slowly. ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t go to Moscow.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Just don’t. I know how these things work, and I’m guessing you do, too. We all have a role to play and then the day comes when the show moves on and you find yourself in one of those basement rooms on the wrong side of the desk. You understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘Of course. And you know what they call people like that in my country? In Russia?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Camp dust.’

  3

  WEDNESDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 1941

  Camp dust.

  The two words, so graphic, so simple, so horrifying, stayed with Moncrieff for most of the night. He tossed and turned in the suddenly empty bed, trying to rid himself of the image of Bella in some penal colony deep in Siberia, but next morning her voice – lightly drunk on the phone – was still there.

  Camp dust.

  He rubbed his eyes and checked his watch. He knew the time had come to return to London but it was barely dawn and so he lay back for a moment or two, still bewildered by this latest turn of events. He thought he knew this woman, and one of the many things he admired was her candour. In conversation after conversation, in answer to his many questions, she’d been happy to describe her new life in Soviet Russia and the pictures she’d painted defied belief.

  So was Moscow really where her heart belonged? Trying to reconcile that luminous moment of conversion – to Marx, to equality, to the glorious victory of the Proletariat – with the realities of daily life under a tyrant like Stalin? Was she really prepared to lie awake at night, forever waiting for the footsteps outside her apartment in the dead of night? Replaying every chance conversation she might have had? Every reckless confidence she might have shared? Wondering about the friends or enemies who might have betrayed her? Not because she didn’t believe hard enough, but because even true believers could never be immune from the knock at the door and the madness that had kidnapped Mother Russia and carried her away?

  The latter phrase had come from the transcript of a screening interview with a Soviet exile Moncrieff had remembered during his pre-war months with MI5. The man was an academic from Leningrad, an astrophysicist of international repute. The fact that he’d spent years behind a high-powered telescope peering into deepest space was, to the NKVD, evidence of consorting with the enemy. At first, he’d dismissed the accusation as ridiculous. He’d tried to point out that distant nebulae didn’t have a counter-revolutionary thought in their heavenly bodies, but the dead-eyed interrogators at the Big House mistrusted jokes, and when they offered him the opportunity to flee he knew he had no choice but to accept. The decision to leave still rankled, but he’d decided that the much-loved country of his birth had fallen into the laps of the insane.

  When Moncrieff had shared his wry remark about the abduction of Mother Russia with Bella she’d chuckled.

  ‘It’s true,’ she’d admitted. ‘So does that make me crazy, too?’

  *

  Next morning, the train south to London was, as ever, packed. Moncrieff, who had boarded at Laurencekirk, found a compartment with an empty seat and settled his long frame into the sagging upholstery. There were seven fellow passengers. All but one were in uniform, mostly Army, and all of them were trying to sleep. The lone civilian was reading a copy of the Aberdeen Press and Journal, his face hidden behind the newspaper. The war in the East, according to the front page, was not going well. The Wehrmacht were swarming south towards the Caucasus, while the northern thrust had encircled Leningrad. Children under twelve, meanwhile, were being evacuated from Moscow.

  Moncrieff settled back, uncomfortably warm in the tobacco fug of the compartment, trying to brace himself against the sway and rumble of the train. The war, he decided, was an easy read compared to Isobel Menzies. He thought about the times they’d shared in Berlin, back in ’38; about her abrupt defection to the Soviet Union after he’d been expelled from the Reich; and about the widespread astonishment among her family and colleagues that she could ever have made such a move. Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, had brought her back to Britain – quite how and why she wouldn’t say – but he’d been deeply grateful for the days they’d just spent together. They’d had very few visitors, and none for more than an hour or so. They’d talked incessantly, heading out into the Cairngorms and following Moncrieff’s favourite trails. In the evenings, he’d insisted on doing the cooking and they’d eaten late, poached salmon off trays in front of a small fire, before stepping outside at the approach of midnight to savour the very last of the daylight.

  Over that snatched interlude, barely a week, there’d been much laughter, and much else. Work for MI5, and you learn never to trust anyone, but every conversation, every glance, every touch, told him that she was real, and when she’d confessed again – only yesterday – that she loved him, and that she needed him – he swore she meant it. And yet there still remained a locked door deep inside her, beyond which lay – he assumed – the explanation for her betrayal.

  He knew from MI5 sources that she’d been delivering top-secret material from the Berlin Embassy to a Soviet agent for more than a year. Moscow – once she’d defected – had treated her well, rolled out the red carpet, extended privileges to their newly arrived comrade. All love affairs, in the end, are tarnished by routine and the irritations of daily life, but she’d weathered Moscow’s many disappointments and showed absolutely no signs of regretting the decision she’d taken. On the contrary, she made light of the often surreal excesses of the regime. She’d experienced a kind of rebirth, she’d told Moncrieff only days ago. And that, she insisted, made her lucky.

  Really? He didn’t believe her, not for a second, and he knew the moment had arrived to find out more.

  *

  MI5, the Security Service, was headquartered in a handsome building in St James’s Street that had once belonged to MGM. There was a To Let sign attached to the railings and callers with no official business were speedily sent on their way. Ursula Barton occupied a second-floor office next to that of Guy Liddell. The Head of ‘B’ Section trusted her implicitly, offering access to material way above Moncrieff’s pay grade. It was early evening before the train had delivered Moncrieff to King’s Cross station, but Barton was still at her desk.

  Moncrieff knocked lightly on her door and stepped into the office. Studying a fan of papers on her desk, Barton looked up, not bothering to mask her surprise. She rarely started a conversation without a precautionary glance at her calendar.

  ‘It’s still September. You’re supposed to be convalescing.’

  The mention of convalescence drew a smile from Moncrieff. His time off, he reminded her, had been a thank you for the Hess operation. He’d never felt better in his life.

  ‘A settling of accounts, then?’ Barton was watching him carefully. ‘Our hero gets the reward he deserves?’

  ‘Indeed. And we enjoyed every moment.’

  ‘So I gather. She left this morning, if you’re interested. Early flight from Northolt.
’ Barton checked her watch. ‘She should be in place by now.’

  ‘Place?’

  Barton held Moncrieff’s gaze. She was fond of the ex-Royal Marine and it showed.

  ‘You’re telling me she never shared the glad news?’

  ‘I’m telling you we had better things to talk about. She mentioned Kyiv, but only as a possibility.’

  ‘So, what are you doing here?’

  ‘I need to find out more.’

  ‘Why?’ Barton was frowning. ‘Am I allowed to ask?’

  It was a question Moncrieff had anticipated. Barton was German by birth, English by marriage. She’d left her husband years ago, and she’d also parted company with MI6 after serving in the Hague out-station. Barely months after the start of the war, two of her colleagues had been lured into an artful trap and kidnapped at Venlo on the German border, a schoolboy error that had blown entire networks of agents across Europe. She’d resigned in anger, and in shame, and MI5 had been only too grateful to acquire her many talents. Now, to Moncrieff’s best knowledge, she led a solitary life in a slightly neglected West London semi with her cats and, she’d once told him, an extensive collection of Rossini LPs.

  ‘Bella and I are close.’ Moncrieff hated conversations like these. ‘And I like to think we’ve been honest with each other.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘There are still things she won’t tell me.’

  ‘Do you blame her for that?’

  ‘Not at all. Normally we leave our baggage at the bedroom door.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now’s different.’

  ‘Why?’

  Moncrieff shook his head, wouldn’t say. In the sudden silence, he caught the scrape of a chair from the office next door. Barton had heard it, too. She began to tap her fingers on the top of the desk.

  ‘She matters?’