Traitor's Kiss

…Prologue

He held the package tightly, as if he were reluctant to let it go. His calloused and scarred fingers gripped the envelope of cheap brown paper; the tips indented the paper, such was the tightness with which he held it. There was no writing on the envelope, nothing to indicate to whom it should be delivered.

'I was in my cabin. We needed fuel, and I was using the calculator, working out the exchange rate, and then he was just there, no knock. One moment the door was closed, the next it was open and he was filling it, and he took this from inside his jacket, and…'

Mowbray, the veteran, said quietly, 'I think it's better, Mr Harris, if we just start at the beginning. In your own time.' He smiled reassuringly. The head of Russia Desk, Bertie Ponsford, beamed. Behind Harris, her pencil poised, Alice North sat with the shorthand pad on her knee. At the end of the table, detached from the rest of them, was the naval officer who wore slacks and a blazer and had loosened his tie as if to relax the stranger.

In a cabinet the tape-recorder was already turning, but it was general practice to keep recorders and microphones, which intimidated civilians, out of sight. It was mid-morning, and coffee and a plate of digestive biscuits were on the table. A cup had been poured by Alice for Harris, but he had not touched it: to have lifted the cup and drunk the coffee would necessitate releasing his hold on the envelope that had brought them together.

'Yes, from the beginning.' Ponsford had a deceptively gentle voice, but his features were those of a scavenging fox. 'You are Frederick Harris, part-owner with two others of the Marie Eugenie, oceangoing trawler, home port of Hull, and thirteen days ago, on the thirtieth of July, you strayed into Russian territorial waters, going after cod. Do people call you Fred or Freddie, Mr Harris?'

'Fred.'

'Well, Fred, there you are, hauling in the cod, and that's the beginning, so let's take it from there, please.'

The room chosen for the meeting was off Pall Mall. In a cul-de-sac out of sight of the gentlemen's clubs, watering-holes and restaurants, the house had a fine Georgian facade, and the ground-floor reception rooms boasted exquisite moulded ceilings, high sash windows and antique furniture — all except this room. Here, the furnishings and decor were deliberately tacky, so that the location should not appear too grand. The table was covered by a plastic sheet adorned with patterns of primroses, the chairs were steel-tube-framed with canvas seats, the thin carpet was bright yellow, except at the door where generations of feet had pounded it to a faded orange. Few of those summoned to a meeting with representatives of the Secret Intelligence Service and personnel from the military were at ease, and the presentation of the room was designed to minimize inevitable apprehension.

'Well, you know how it is.' Harris shrugged. 'It's partly the stocks and also the quotas, but the North Sea is fished out. I've got a mortgage on the boat that's killing me. I've got to go where the money is, got to take the chance. Another couple of years like the last two, and I'm gone. There's been trawling in my family for the last hundred and twenty years — it won't happen for my kids. So we go up north, give it a try there. We'd gone by the North Cape, that's Norwegian, and kept on east, got as far as the East Bank, which is Russian. We're thirty sea miles off the coast, well out into the Barents Sea, and we'd got a really good catch in. It was foul weather, just right for us, thick fog and visibility down to a hundred metres, couldn't have been better. Then, in the space of five minutes, there were two calls over the radio. The first was from their Fisheries Protection lot: we should identify ourselves. The second was from a Russian vessel: they'd a casualty on board, needed help, and giving a position. I put it all together, says to myself that we'll use the casualty as the reason for us being there, and come out smelling of roses, or sweeter.

'The catch was in the holds, the nets were stowed, and we sailed to the distress call. It was one of their research ships, on its way up to north of Spitzbergen, and a crewman had double-fractured his leg. The weather was too bad to get a helicopter out, and they didn't want to turn back and lose out on their schedule. So, we're like the Angel Michael showing up. The guy was transferred on board and I told their skipper that I'd run him straight back into Murmansk. We got a crate of vodka for our trouble. I radioed ashore and told the Fisheries Protection what I was doing. We made it into Murmansk, the guy was taken off to hospital, and instead of having the Marie Eugenie impounded and me being in court, we were everybody's favourite flavour. Get me straight, Murmansk isn't a place I'd take my wife for a weekend break, but they made us really welcome. Couldn't do enough for us — the next morning I'd one hell of a hangover.

'Fuel's dirt cheap there, a fraction of what it is at home, so I loaded up to the top. I was waiting on the tide, working out what the diesel was going to cost me, scratching through every pound sterling that I'd got on board, and what my crew had…and then he was in the door of my cabin. He was in uniform, quite a high-ranking officer of the regular navy, not merchant. We'd had harbour people on board, shabby sort of folk, but this one was immaculate. Well-pressed tunic, crease in his trousers, clean shirt, tie, like he worked in an office, not on a warship. But he looked as if he were about to shit himself — sorry — very tense and stressed up. There wasn't any preamble. I looked at him and he looked at me, big staring eyes. Just for a moment there was real fear in his face. He said, blurted it out, but a whisper, in English: "I have a communication that I request you pass to your intelligence authorities." I'm a hundred sea miles from Norwegian waters, I've got an illegal catch on board, and then he's in my cabin talking espionage. I suppose I went white. A moment like that, and the big word that belts you is provocation, or it's a setup, a sting. I didn't know what to say…

'What I can tell you? Him and me, equally, we were both about to shit ourselves. He had what I'd call an honest face — there wasn't anything devious about him. I'm not a great judge of people, I can pick a crewman but that's about it. He had a face that I reckoned sincere. He must have realized that I thought he was bad news. He looked over his shoulder, satisfied himself that we weren't overheard, then said, sort of simple: "I am taking a very much greater risk than I am asking of you." I had to believe him — but what if he were followed? What if he were being watched? I must have nodded, maybe I held my hand out. He took this envelope out from inside his jacket, and he gave it me. I asked him who he was, but he just shook his head. The only other thing he said was: "Please…please…see that it gets to those authorities…please." Then he was gone and I'd the envelope in my hand. When I looked out of the porthole I saw him scramble up on to the quay and he just walked away, like nothing had happened. My first thought was to chuck the envelope over the side. But it was his face that stopped me. Then I moved fast across my cabin, fast like I'd a ferret down my trousers. I opened my safe double quick, and I locked it in there, right at the back.

'Within an hour I'd paid off the diesel and we'd slipped the moorings. We went up the Kola inlet like we were in a regatta race, couldn't get clear of Murmansk fast enough. All the time I was thinking that if a cutter or a patrol boat came out towards us, I was going to be back in my cabin, getting the safe open and heaving that packet as far as I could chuck it — but there wasn't any cutter or patrol boat. Twenty sea miles up the inlet is Severomorsk, where the nuke submarines are and the heavy cruisers, the big naval base. I was shaking like a leaf as we passed it, couldn't hold the wheel steady, and the other boys — none of them had seen him come on board or leave — thought it was the hangover. Then I saw him. He was a tiny figure out on the end of a groin, all alone, and he must have been waiting there to see us leave. I needed the binoculars to check it was him. He didn't wave to us, just smoked a cigarette, and when we'd gone by him he turned away and kept walking.

'We nearly bust the old engine getting across the North Sea, full power, then offloaded the catch at Peterhead, and went on down south to home. My wife's cousin is a policeman there. I told him the bones of it and an inspector from Special Branch came round to the house to see me. I'd taken the envelope off the Marie Eugenie and it was under the mattress of the spare bed. I didn't tell the Branch man any more than I'd said to her cousin. He wanted to take it. No way. I said I'd deliver it personally because that's what was asked of me. So the Branch man made the arrangements and here I am.'

He pushed the envelope hard across the table.

'Well done, Fred,' Ponsford said. 'I cannot, even if I wished to, fault your actions. Alice will see you out, and your travel expenses will be met. Good sailing in the future, but not to Murmansk.'

'Thank you, Mr Harris.' Mowbray leaned forward and shook the trawler skipper's roughened hand.

Harris asked, 'What did he mean, in this day and age, about risk?'

Mowbray smiled comfortingly. 'Nothing for you to worry about. As I'm sure you will, put the whole matter out of your mind. Leave it to us.'

When the door had closed behind him and the beat of his heavy shoes had been lost in a distant corridor, the three men stared at the envelope. It lay sandwiched between a coffee cup and the plate of biscuits.

As the senior man it was Bertie Ponsford's privilege to snatch up the envelope. In his hand he seemed to weigh its significance and its bulk. He tore open the flap and spilled a sheaf of papers on to the table. The naval officer stood back, knowing his time would come. The top sheet of perhaps fifty pages was covered with a handwritten scrawl and on its reverse side were two pen-drawn maps. The pages scattered on the primroses were printed or typed, or were covered in photocopied diagrams.

Mowbray felt his pulse pound. He was in his sixty-first year but he recognized the excitement he had known on his first overseas assignment for the Service thirty-four years earlier. The handwritten page was given to him. He read, and the adrenaline coursed through him, as it had in the old days.

Mowbray's mind blurred with the images of a man whose face he could not picture, burdened with fear, isolation and the bitterness that had caused him to write this letter. He blinked.

Ponsford had shuffled together the remaining sheets and had passed them to the naval officer, who slumped down at the table with them and retrieved a pair of half-moon spectacles from his breast pocket to study them.

'Well, what does our customer think?' Ponsford boomed.

'Of course, I'll need more time.' The naval officer shrugged.

As if talking to an idiot, Ponsford repeated the question, more slowly. 'But, what do you think?'

'It's submarine material. I'd say it's a taster. Kilo-class submarines are the best part of twenty years old, but good for refitting. These top pages are about what they're doing to reduce hydrodynamic noise. Then it goes on to describe their progress in the concept of coaxial contra-rotating propellers. It's technical, it's detail, it's interesting. What's undeniable, he has access. I'd say he's a staff officer, probably a captain, third rank, and well placed.'

Mowbray didn't know about hydrodynamics, nor about coaxial contra-rotating propellers. He smiled icily. 'Is it new?'

The naval officer grimaced. 'I'd say it's new, and I'd say that it's confirmation of what we believed but could not have been sure of. Is "valuable" good enough?'

Ponsford said that 'valuable' would be satisfactory.

It was arranged that they would meet again in a week, when the customer from naval intelligence had had more time. Briefcases were filled, Alice's notepad was back in her handbag, coats were retrieved from hooks.

Mowbray bit at his lip — each year the Service spent millions — tens of millions — around the world seeking to bribe, suborn, trick, deceive military officers of potentially hostile powers into sharing their nation's closest secrets, and the money always trickled down the plughole. The ones that mattered, always, were the 'walk-ins', who just pitched up without warning or invitation. In more than three decades with the Service, Mowbray had seen millions disappear without reward and now, in the twilight of his career, a 'walk-in' had appeared. He ground his hands together, cracked and flexed his fingers, and savoured the moment.

A frown had settled on the naval officer's forehead. 'I am just trying to work out what sort of man he'd be. A little piece of scum, I suppose. I have to say, if he was one of mine I'd reckon slow garotting was too good for him.'

'But he's not one of yours, he's one of theirs,' Mowbray, tart, interrupted. 'We don't talk about scum, we talk about an asset.'

'Why? Why would he betray…?'

Mowbray stood to his full height, took the stature of a lecturer, pontificated as if to a class of recruits. 'We call it MICE. Every agent from the other side that we run is governed by MICE. That's Money, Ideology, Compromise or Ego. MICE is the formula that governs each last one of them, and frankly I don't give a damn which motivates our "Friend". See you in a week.'

Half an hour later, after the naval officer had left and after arrangements had been agreed with Bertie Ponsford, Mowbray stood on the pavement, Alice beside him, searching for a vacant taxi that would run them out to Heathrow and the plane back to his Station, Warsaw.

Alice had come up with the codename, the only time she'd spoken. The skipper had described how fast he'd gone to his safe to bury the package. It was her habit only to speak when she had something relevant to say, and that was a principal reason that he'd demanded of Personnel that she be transferred to Poland with him. Ferret, she'd said, was from the fourteenth-century old-French word furet, which in turn originated from the Latin and was literally translated as 'thief'.

It was a warm afternoon and the summer sunshine had brought smiles to the faces of the pedestrian hordes who jostled them for pavement space. He did not feel the sunshine. A cold seemed to cling to him because he reflected on a man, with neither a face nor a name, who had put trust in him. Protect me. The thief among the files of the Northern Fleet would be Codename Ferret. The cold bit at his bones. At his side, Alice waved down the taxi. He shuddered. Unless he was protected, and they rarely were, a bullet to end the pain of torture was the only long-term future of an asset. He settled heavily on to the back seat of the taxi.