Illegal Action

18

He knew it was crucial to show you were in charge from the start. On the training course they had taught him that if you began with an iron fist you could lighten up later on, but that it never worked the other way around.

Michael Fane ignored the butterflies fluttering in his stomach. This was his chance to show what he could do. He looked out of the thin window at the trees above Berkeley Square. The weather had reverted: after a glorious early morning, a sepia trail of cloud moved in with the easterly wind like ominous writing in the sky.

He sat down but found he couldn’t sit still. The people here at the agency had given him their interviewing room, which was small and square, down the hall from Brigadier Cartwright’s spacious office. When Liz Carlyle announced she’d be away for a week and asked him to do the interview in her place, he was thrilled. You had to belly up to the bar sometime, he told himself, using the cowboy lingo of the westerns he loved. His father had been contemptuous of those movies, implying that he knew about the real thing. He probably did, Michael thought crossly, and doubtless this forthcoming interview would be beneath him. Geoffrey must have recruited countless agents in his time—in much more difficult circumstances. What else could he have been doing all those years abroad? Even the teenage Michael Fane had known enough to understand his father wasn’t really a cultural attaché.

Not that he’d seen much of him. There was the occasional outing—a day at Lord’s, watching the Australians in the Test; lunch at the Traveller’s Club when Michael turned sixteen—as if his father, suddenly remembering he had a son, had dutifully decided to try and “bond.” When his mother at last grew fed up with Geoffrey’s absences, always excused as a matter of work, and her patience had finally snapped, Michael didn’t blame her. Now she lived in Paris, remarried to Arnaud, an international lawyer—the kind of stable haut bourgeois she should have married in the first place.

Michael had applied to join MI5 wanting to outplay his father at his own game—but from the safe distance of a rival service. He had had a letter from him, suggesting lunch, just two weeks before he joined. At first Michael had accepted, then, when the day came, he’d left a message that he was ill. There’d been no communication since, which, thought Michael, suited him just fine.

He looked at the dossier Peggy Kinsolving had helped him put together. He’d spent the last hour practising his set recital, checking the pictures for the umpteenth time and arranging the chairs. Instead of the sofa and low table near the door, used for more informal chats, he opted to stay behind the desk at one end of the room. That should give him an air of authority.

He wished he didn’t look so young. Even the photos he’d seen of his father as a young man made Geoffrey Fane seem at twenty confident, commanding. No one had ever called his father lacking in maturity. The phrase used by Michael’s girlfriend Anna to explain why she was breaking up with him. The memory still rankled.

There was a sharp knock and the door opened. The brigadier marched in, looking stern, followed by the tall leggy woman from HR. Behind them, standing in the doorway, stood a man in a blue chauffeur’s suit. Simmons. He looked confused.

“Here he is,” announced the brigadier to Michael. “Shout if you need me.” He and the woman went out, shutting the door firmly behind them.

“Sit down, Mr. Simmons,” Michael said, pointing to the chair he’d placed in front of the desk. “My name is Magnusson,” he added mechanically, as if he’d said this countless times before.

Simmons sat down and hunched forward, his legs apart, arms hanging down between his knees. He clasped his hands loosely together and looked at Michael, his face an open anxious book.

“Can I see your passport please?” Michael asked crisply, holding out his hand.

Simmons hesitated, then slowly passed it across the desk. He had been instructed to bring it with him. “What’s all this about?”

Ignoring the question, Michael leafed through the pages. There weren’t many stamps, but passports were no real guide nowadays—Morocco, and Cyprus twice. Holiday locations. “Have you ever been to Russia?”

“Russia?” Simmons seemed caught off guard. “No. Never. Why?”

Michael shrugged and made a show of examining the passport some more. He flipped it down on to the desktop, where it spun briefly then stopped, well short of Simmons’s reach. “Have you ever known any Russians?”

“Well I don’t know about ‘known,’” said Jerry. “When I worked at the Dorchester loads of foreigners stayed there and some of them were Russians. And I work for a Russian now, you must know that, and he’s got lots of Russian friends. What’s all this about?”

“I work in the Security Service. We’ve had reason to mount a surveillance operation recently, on a member of the Russian Embassy. We followed him to a number of meetings with people, some open and public, some clandestine. One of them was with you.”

“You must be confusing me with someone else,” said Jerry. But there was colour in his cheeks, and he was clasping his hands tightly now.

“Possibly,” Michael said, “though they say the camera never lies.” He opened his dossier, lifted out two of the prints and slid them across the desk.

Jerry made a show of carefully inspecting them. “When were these taken?” he asked, as if they might be snaps from a holiday so long ago he couldn’t remember it.

“Recently,” said Michael.

“I talk to a lot of people,” said Jerry. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Of course there isn’t.” Michael smiled fleetingly, though now there was a cutting edge to his voice. “But what are we supposed to think when we find you meeting a Russian intelligence officer? Old friends talking about old times? I don’t think so.”

“I work for a Russian, for Christ’s sakes. I know a lot of Russians. I told you that.”

“I bet you do, and we’re going to talk about every one of them. But it’s this Russian”—and he stabbed his finger at the photo—“I’m interested in now.”

“Does the brigadier know why you’re talking to me?” Simmons asked. He looked to be flailing, like someone pushed out of a boat, trying to determine how deep the water was and whether there was any chance of swimming to shore.

Michael regarded Simmons knowingly. “What do you think?”

Simmons groaned, then put his head in his hands.

“However,” Michael announced, “he might overlook it. If we asked him.”

There was resignation rather than hope in Simmons’s eyes as he lifted his head. “If?” he said.

“Excuse me?” asked Fane.

“I said if. There’s always an ‘if.’ You’ll get Cartwright to keep me on if I do what you say.”

“Sure.”

“And when you’re through with me, what happens then? Do I keep my job?”

“That’s between you and the brigadier. Now why don’t you tell me when you first met Rykov?”

“Who’s Rykov?” asked Simmons, and Michael realised his bafflement was genuine. Damn, he thought, annoyed with himself for letting the name slip out. He pointed at the photo.

“Oh, Vladimir,” said Simmons with a dull nod.

“Go on. How did he first contact you?”

And twenty minutes later he had heard all about it: Rykov’s approach, the meetings with his predecessor, Andrei, during Jerry’s days at the Dorchester, what they’d wanted to know, and what Simmons was getting paid. He first denied receiving any money at all, then seemed to realise this made him look even worse.

Throughout, Michael Fane took careful notes. He did not want Jerry to know he was recording everything on a tape deck in the top desk drawer. And in any case he wasn’t sure it would capture Simmons’s low monotone.

Finished at last, Simmons looked tired.

“Good,” Fane said, doling out a titbit of praise. “Was Andrei your only other contact?”

Simmons nodded quickly, but Michael remembered Brian Ackers’ maxim that for spies, truth was an abstract notion better not put into practice. “Have another think,” he ordered. “Who knows what you might remember?”

Simmons stared back at him, but coldly now, the earlier dead look to his eyes replaced by ice. For a second Michael felt uneasy. There was something unnerving about this man, he thought, as if pressure was building inside that quiet shell, just waiting to explode. But Michael knew he mustn’t back off.

“Tell me, why do you think Vladimir is so interested in Brunovsky?” he asked.

“How should I know?” replied Simmons with a shrug.

“Are you the only one watching Brunovsky?”

Simmons’s eyes widened slightly. “What do you mean?”

“Has Vladimir got anyone else keeping tabs on him?”

“Not as far as I know,” said Simmons stiffly.

“All right,” said Michael. “I’ll want you to look at some more pictures next time to see if you can recognise anyone else.”

“Next time?” A fatalistic note had returned to Simmons’s voice.

“We’ll meet in ten days.”

“Where?” he demanded.

“Here.” He hadn’t checked, but he was sure the brigadier would allow it. “If anything else occurs to you in the meantime, you can call me on this number.” He scribbled the number down and passed it over. “I already have yours.”

Simmons pocketed the slip of paper without looking at it. “Is that all?” he said stonily.

“For now,” said Michael Fane.

Simmons stood up abruptly and left without saying a word. As the door closed behind him, Michael felt a mix of relief and elation. In a minute he would go and see the brigadier, but he sat for a bit, savouring his feeling of accomplishment. He could see now why Liz Carlyle and Peggy Kinsolving, and yes, even his father, grew so involved with their work.

He thought again of Simmons. I’ve got him where I want him, thought Michael. He’s not even going to try and lie to me.

As he left the building Jerry Simmons was seething. It was bad enough to have been found out—bloody Vladimir and his insistence on Hampstead Heath, he thought furiously. He might as well have chosen Piccadilly Circus.

Even worse was being played like a fish by this fresh-faced twerp. If his name’s Magnusson, thought Jerry bitterly, mine’s Marco Polo. He’d do what he had to do—“Magnusson” wasn’t exactly leaving him a choice, no more than Rykov had. No, he wasn’t going to tell the kid any lies. Yet as Jerry remembered the gun he’d seen in Brunovsky’s safe, he didn’t see any reason why he should tell the whole truth, either.