Comrade Charlie

9

A combination of circumstances and events enabled the KGB to suborne Henry Blackstone. There was a great deal of intelligence expertise. Some carelessness by someone who should not have been careless. Audacity verging upon recklessness from a very ambitious Soviet espionage officer named Vitali Losev. And some good fortune because they got away with the audacity and approached the impoverished and aggrieved Blackstone at a moment when he was particularly susceptible, at the depth of a depression.

The identity of the British firm participating in the Star Wars missile development, including the limited correspondence that had passed between them, was the information demanded by Alexandr Petrin at that first San Francisco meeting with the now hopelessly enmeshed Emil Krogh. From the covering letter accompanying outline drawing specifications came the name of the project engineer in England, Robert Springley.

That one name – and the comparative smallness of the Isle of Wight with its county capital at Newport – was more than sufficient for Losev, the balding, fussily neat KGB head of station at the Soviet embassy in London’s Kensington Palace Gardens. Losev assigned five operatives to Newport, two to hunt the name Robert Springley through the listings at the telephone headquarters there, the other three to search the entries in the Voters’ Register, which is a publicly available record of all adults qualified to vote in parliamentary elections and held at every county library. There were five Robert Springleys and it only took thirty-six hours to find them all.

By the early morning of the third day KGB observers were positioned to follow the occupants of each discovered address to their workplace. The Robert Springley they wanted turned out to be a prematurely white-haired man of forty-two who was contentedly married to a part-time teacher, with two school-age children of his own and who drove, badly, a three-year-old Rover car from a terraced Victorian house at Ryde. He also suffered from the absentminded carelessness of a scientific engineer whose thoughts were more often upon esoteric theory than upon practical reality.

The London posting was the first position of command for Losev, who was an intensely ambitious Ukrainian determined to fulfil absolutely an assignment to which, from the priority coding of his instructions, he knew Dzerzhinsky Square attached the highest importance. From that first day Springley’s every move and habit were charted by unseen observers and his carelessness instantly established because such failings are the sort of advantages constantly sought by intelligence personnel. There also appeared to be a habit associated with that carelessness.

The aerospace factory was a sprawl of buildings added to the town-centre original as the company expanded with its success. The obviously fenced and permanently guarded secure area was easily isolated by Springley’s daily parked Rover, the convenient marker for the man’s movements. Which were invariably not straight home at the end of each day. Instead the man’s routine, minutely documented by the watching Russians, was to stow his coat and briefcase and whatever else he was carrying in the locked boot of his vehicle the moment he left the protected secure section. But then to drive from that section the five hundred yards to an expansive, unrestricted car park fronting the firm’s sports and social club, of which Springley was that year’s honorary chairman. And into which, for the hour he customarily spent inside, he never carried the briefcase.

Losev and his team waited in readiness for two evenings but could move on neither because Springley parked his car too near and too obviously close to the clubhouse. But there was no such convenient space the third night and the locked boot of Springley’s car was sprung within seconds of the man entering the building. Losev’s hire car moved off at once, the rezident and a Soviet photographer hunched in the rear, working as it travelled. The photographer, Yevgenni Zazulin, was professionally trained and assigned to the London rezidentura precisely for his technical expertise. He used an ultrafast film on a wide exposure to compensate for the poor light, with a miniature Minox camera fitted with a proxile copying lens. Losev made no attempt to sort or read the contents of the picked-open briefcase, anxious to return it to the Rover before the project chief quit the club. Losev was still cautious, however, replacing each document in the way and in the space from which he had extracted it and insisting every exposure be duplicated to provide a back-up photograph as insurance against the first being marred by the car’s movement. The copying was completed in thirty minutes and the relocked case put back into the relocked boot of the Rover twenty minutes before Springley emerged, never to suspect the theft, for his delayed journey home.

Springley was not, however, so careless as to carry in his briefcase classified and therefore prohibited material. What there was proved enough, although it was not at first identified as such. At that stage the intent was still to find something manipulative about the project manager himself, so the concentration was upon the credit-card dockets and bills – some receipted, some not but none overdue – and bank statements. The only discovery was an easily manageable overdraft facility of £3,000, which certainly wasn’t manipulative. Losev did not properly appreciate the significance of the one-way correspondence file until he reached the third letter. And then fell back satisfied in his chair, immediately and correctly appreciating what he held in his hand to be the internal applications from company employees seeking secondment to the Star Wars development.

And an information goldmine.

Each application necessarily itemized the qualificational background – up to and including security clearance ratings – of every applicant. Each listed the current pay scale of the writer, by so doing showing that the secret project carried a higher-than-normal salary structure and therefore hinting at a possible, money-related reason for such application. Each set out family background and circumstances, complete with home addresses. And two thirds gave their banks – again complete with addresses – with permission for them to be approached for character references.

All of which were approached, immediately, with the request for a credit guarantee by a finance company registered and provably functioning in the Channel island of Jersey, its public operation an impenetrable cover for its proper KGB purpose of probing the financial weaknesses of potential victims. From the same Jersey company requests were also made through the Central Credit Register and to all the major credit-card companies for assurances of the credit worthiness of everyone whose name emerged from Springley’s briefcase.

The inquiry – specifically for finance guidance and not character assessment – threw up the first clue to Henry Blackstone’s problems. There was a clearly ambiguous reply from the man’s bank from which it was easy to infer that Blackstone’s income only just met his outgoings and frequently failed. And from two credit-card companies came the information of applications received but refused. These alone were enough to mark Blackstone out from the rest. And then came another public record check, initially begun upon each application.

Over the course of many years in the relentless pursuit of blackmail the KGB has become expert in the use of Britain’s national repository of births, death and marriages at St Catherine’s House, in London’s Kingsway, and it was automatic for a search to be made there upon target groups.

The marriage of Henry George Blackstone, a tracer, to Ruth Emerson, a spinster of the parish of Emsworth, in Hampshire, was recorded at Portsmouth Register Office on 6 May 1975. The marriage of Henry George Blackstone, a tracer, to Ann Crouch, a computer operator of the parish of Freshwater, Isle of Wight, was shown to have taken place at Newport Register Office on 9 January 1976. The KGB researcher had only two floors to go to complete his investigation, idly reflecting as he went from one section of the building to the other on the shortness of grief in the event of Ruth Blackstone, née Emerson, genuinely having died after such a tragically brief union. It took him less than an hour in the department listing the country’s deaths to establish, however, that Ruth hadn’t died. And that Blackstone was the bigamist he already suspected the man to be.

Although the evidence looked conclusive, Losev did not immediately try to use it, displaying unusual restraint by instead concentrating all the KGB surveillance solely upon Blackstone. The Russian was becoming disappointed by the discovery of a mundane existence of Monday-night cinema and Thursday-night darts at the pub nearest to Blackstone’s Newport home, but on the Friday was glad that he’d waited. Because that night, instead of going from the East Cowes factory to the home he’d made with Ann, Blackstone caught the Portsmouthbound ferry, bought a cheap spray of flowers from a street stall and was with Ruth in Anglesea Terrace by six thirty. And from there, the following Monday, began commuting to the island for the period he was allowing himself to be with his first wife.

Losev was never completely to know the fortunate coincidence of his actual approach to Blackstone: not how the fingers-crossed five-horse accumulator upon which Blackstone’s weekend outing with Ruth depended had failed on the same day that the man had been officially informed he was not getting the hoped-for transfer to the better-paying Star Wars project as part of Springley’s team. Losev learned soon enough about the work rejection, though: a lot of tight-lipped complaints about lack of appreciation and years of service given for bugger all and how some people didn’t deserve loyalty.

Losev had manouevred the conversation on the ferry going to Portsmouth and timed the inquiry about what Blackstone did, with chosen precision, just before the ship docked. The Russian feigned perfectly the surprise at hearing that Blackstone was an industrial tracer and said wasn’t that a coincidence and wasn’t the world a small place and did Blackstone know how difficult it was to find reliable industrial tracers, which the bemused Blackstone said he didn’t.

Losev suggested a drink at a pub called the Keppel’s Head, named after an admiral and practically on the quay against which they moored, and Blackstone looked at his watch and said all right but he only had time for one. Losev allowed Blackstone to bring the conversation back to the shortage of tracers and what, exactly, it was he wanted tracing. Losev was intentionally vague, talking generally of creating manufacturing drawings and blueprints from engineers’ specification notes and Blackstone shook his head and sniggered and agreed that it was coincidentally a small world because that was exactly the sort of work he did all the time.

‘Ever do any freelance work?’ asked Losev ingenuously.

‘Freelance work?’

‘That’s all I’m looking for at the moment.’ said Losev. ‘Someone reliable I can trust to take the load off my permanent draughtsmen and tracers; we’ve got so much work on we don’t know which way to turn.’

‘Maybe I could take something on,’ said Blackstone, in what he foolishly imagined to be an opening bargaining ploy.

‘You’re not serious!’ said the obviously delighted Losev.

‘Why not?’ shrugged Blackstone, not wanting to appear as desperately eager as he was. ‘You want a tracer. I’m a tracer. Why don’t we give it a try?’

‘You wouldn’t know how grateful I’d be: how much of a relief it would be.’

‘We’d come to some financial arrangement, of course?’

‘Of course,’ agreed Losev enthusiastically. He smiled, nudging the other man. ‘And a proper financial arrangement. Cash. No nonsense with income tax or anything like that. You interested?’

Blackstone was so excited he did not immediately trust himself to speak, so he sipped his beer to cover the gap. Then he said: ‘I wouldn’t mind giving it a go.’

‘Could we meet here again, say, tomorrow night, for me to give you the specification notes?’

‘Sure,’ agreed Blackstone. He had to ask, to get it finalized! He said: ‘What sort of money are we talking about here?’

‘This is a rush job, very important to me,’ said Losev. ‘You get a set of drawings back to me by the weekend and I’ve got a good chance of securing a contract that’s going to make me a very happy man. So you do that for me and there’s five hundred pounds in your pocket, no questions asked.’

Blackstone hid behind his beer glass again. Finally he managed: ‘Here this time tomorrow night then?’

‘I can’t believe how lucky we are to have met,’ said Losev.

‘Neither can I,’ said Blackstone, deeply sincere. ‘I don’t even know your name.’

‘Stranger,’ said Losev, reciting the Moscow-dictated legend name. ‘Mr Stranger.’

Legend name for Petrin, in San Francisco, was Friend. Both had been selected by Alexei Berenkov with much forethought.

Berenkov had the summons hand-delivered to Natalia in her office three floors below him in the First Chief Directorate headquarters on the Moscow ring road, knowing she would be there to receive it because he’d made himself responsible for her movements.

Natalia sat for several moments held by the shock, the words blurring before her, then becoming clear, then bluring again. It had finally come, she decided at once: the demand she’d feared every day since Charlie’s departure.

Natalia, who’d observed her religion even before the Gorbachev relaxations made church attendance easier, thought: Oh God! Dear God, please help me!