The hidden man am-2 Page 16
After a while he was posted west towards the border with Iran and became involved in some of the heaviest fighting any unit had known out there. Your father began to worry that he wasn’t going to make it back. Forgive me for saying this, Ben, but I think in a sense Mischa had become almost like a son to him. Of course he did return to Kabul and it was then that he told Christopher that several of his comrades had come into conflict with older soldiers in their unit. The Soviet army has what they call ‘stariki’, veterans who, regardless of rank or ability, have an unwritten right to make life as tough as they can for younger conscripts. If you’d served less than six months in the army, it could get rough and young recruits, some of whom were just sixteen or seventeen years old, were forced to scrub toilets with toothbrushes, run around camp wearing gas masks until they fainted or just woken up in the dead of night for no better reason than that’s what the stariki wanted. The culture was so ingrained you could even get higher ranking officers at the mercy of their subordinates simply because they were younger or had served less time. And of course if they tried to complain to their commanding officers the treatment was only going to get worse. The irony was that these soldiers were out there to fight the mujahaddin, but their real enemy turned out to be themselves.
There was one Muslim guy on Mischa’s unit who, as far as we could tell, was straight out of high school in Uzbekistan. Like I said before, there was a lot of bad feeling between the Slav majority and the ‘churkas’, Soviet Muslims from the southern republics. The bullying in this case got so bad he went missing for two days. The regiment drove themselves crazy looking for him, wondering if he’d deserted to the rebels, but eventually he got tracked back to his village in Uzbekistan. Somehow he’d managed to get a pass back home and just run away. So the Soviets put him in solitary for three weeks and then he gets called back to the front and life in the barracks deteriorates further. Bullying and punishment on a level Mischa didn’t even want to talk about. He was ashamed, I think. This is a proud son of Soviet Russia with scales falling from his eyes. Christopher later found out that the stariki beat this Muslim kid every night with an iron bar and that he was raped by another soldier on at least two separate occasions. He wrote a letter home to Uzbekistan, begging his father to get him out of there, but what could his dad do? The kid’s already gone AWOL once, he’s a stain on the family. So no help comes and the inevitable happens. One night he crept out of bed at 2 A.M., took a knife into the bathroom and slit his own throat. He was eighteen years old.
That spring, Mischa was posted back to the front, this time south towards Kandahar, but a new company commander, name of Rudovski, had been assigned to his unit because the previous guy got killed. Rudovski came with a sidekick, Domenko, a sergeant smacked out on liquor and char 24 hours every day. This was when the atrocities started, a summer of mindless slaughter to which Mischa bore terrible witness. The worst of it came in August when the unit captures a dozen Afghan kids armed only with a few bird guns, just trying to do their bit for the resistance. The Russians are only about ten clicks from their base and Mischa suggests handing them over to the Afghan Security Service. But Rudovski has other ideas. He orders the Afghan kids to strip naked and starts tying them up, hands and feet. Then he lays them on the road and Rudovski tells one of the drivers to run them over with an armoured personnel carrier. The BMP driver said he wouldn’t do it and neither would several of the other soldiers. Rudovski knew enough not to ask Mischa. So eventually he turned to Domenko and says something like ‘Show these cowards how to love the motherland’, and then Domenko climbs into the BMP and just drives over the kids and crushes them.
When Mischa got back to Kabul he told your father about all of this and the information went into a CX that was read at the highest levels of government in both the UK and the United States. But by then he was a changed man, addicted to opium, couldn’t function without it, and he’d become sloppy. Christopher, who was maybe more involved than he should have been, and too upset about what was going on, was intent on somehow getting Mischa out of Afghanistan, even if it was only as far as Islamabad. He was afraid, as I was, that Mischa would blow his cover. But he couldn’t get authorization from SIS. Nothing could be allowed to disturb the illusion that Western intelligence agencies were adopting a passive role in the Afghan conflict, offering humanitarian assistance and nothing more. No matter that the Soviets knew all about CIA and SIS activity by that stage. What happened is that Mischa was blown. The army had gotten suspicious and he was observed en route to a clandestine meeting with your father and then later executed by court martial.
This is highly classified information, Ben, but it’s central to my theory about what happened in London and I don’t think it’s right that you and Mark should be prevented from knowing the truth. When the Soviet archives were opened up and Western intelligence analysts were able to unravel many of the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War, I discovered that Mischa’s father had worked for the KGB. SIS and Christopher had always believed that he was simply a middle-ranking civil servant in Moscow, but through my old contacts at the Agency — I quit in ’92 — I was able to find out that Dimitri Kostov had operated within a First Chief Directorate section known as Department V. Department V was a relatively new section of the KGB created in the late sixties to replace the Thirteenth Department of the FCD, which organized what we used to call ‘wet jobs’. Assassinations, for want of a better word. Nominally Department V was tasked only with carrying out acts of sabotage, but under the control of Andropov there’s strong evidence to suggest that assassinations continued.
My fear is this. When Mischa was blown, SIS was concerned that he may have divulged your father’s identity to the Soviet military prior to his execution. Christopher was taken out of Afghanistan as a precaution and reassigned to China. His career never recovered and when SIS was overhauled under McColl in the early 1990s, he was pushed out. Something very similar happened to Mischa’s father, almost like a mirror. When it was discovered that his son had been betraying secrets to the British, Kostov was discharged from the KGB and sent to Minsk to process employment records. He turned to drink, lost his wife, and only came back to Moscow after the putsch when his old KGB friends, most of whom were running the country in one guise or another, were able to find him work.
That’s what I know. Kostov had numerous aliases — Kalugin, Sudoplatov, Solovyov — and I’ve never been able to track him down. Time and again I would talk to your father about the possibility of Kostov coming after him but he just wouldn’t talk about Mischa. He felt like he’d killed a man, sent him to his death. And coupled with the guilt he felt about you and Mark, the pain was often hard to bear.
Your father was a proud man and would just laugh off my concerns. ‘How would Kostov ever find me?’ he used to say. ‘He doesn’t even know my name.’ I was just a conspiracy theorist, another paranoid Yank who couldn’t let go of the job. But nobody’s identity was secure — a list of SIS officers worldwide was posted on the Internet about five years ago. Your father’s name was on that list.
I would urge you to take this information to the police if I thought they would be permitted to act on it. I tried to alert SIS to the problem a long time ago, but my bridges are burned there now. Everything falls on deaf ears.
It frustrates me to end on such a downbeat note but I loved Christopher and his loss has affected me. Please contact me at the address stated if you want to talk through any of what I’ve written here today. Together I believe we can solve this situation and maybe help to put the past behind us.
Yours sincerely,
Robert M. Bone
When he had finished reading the letter, Ben continued to stare at the base of the final page, as if expecting further words to appear. For some time he remained like this, a cross-legged figure in the centre of the room, unsure of how to proceed. Oddly, there was still an instinctive part of him that wished to remain ignorant of his father’s past, a stubborn refusal to grapple with the tr
uth. Under different circumstances, he might even have scrunched up Bone’s letter and thrown it petulantly into the nearest bin.
That, after all, was how he had survived for the best part of twenty-five years.
But almost every sentence Bone had written, every one of his recollections and theories, had been revelatory, clues not simply towards the solving of a murder, but vital pieces in the jigsaw of his father’s life. Ben immediately wanted to share the letter with Mark, and yet a part of him enjoyed the buzz of privileged information. This was the breakthrough the police had been searching for, but it was also a secret glimpse into a world that his brother could only have guessed at.
30
Mark called Bob Randall from a phone booth in the ticket hall of Leicester Square underground station. He lost his first twenty-pence piece in the teeth of a broken callbox, but reached the contact number at his next attempt. A man answered, sneezing as he picked up.
‘Can I help you?’
‘This is Blindside.’
‘Hold the line.’
Taploe was put through in under ten seconds.
‘Randall,’ he said.
‘We may have a problem.’
‘Elaborate, please.’
‘I just got to the office. Macklin’s breakfast was cancelled. Lunch as well. It looks like he’s going to be there all day. I told him I was going out for a coffee so I could get to a phone and tell you.’
‘I see. So do you still want to go ahead?’
‘Do you?’
‘There’s no problem at our end. The network will go down at 11 a.m. as arranged. We have the team standing by waiting for your call. But you sound unsettled.’
Mark had not wanted to betray any of his anxiety. Think of Dad, he had said to himself. What would my father do? He braced his foot against the wall of the callbox and said, ‘I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I just thought you should know.’
‘Well, I’m pleased to hear that. So let’s press ahead. This is information that we need. Now, where are you?’
‘Leicester Square tube.’
‘Well, it’s almost half-past. Get backto the office. We’ll expect to hear from you within the next forty minutes.’
‘Sure.’
‘And Mark?’ Taploe said.
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t forget the coffee.’
‘What?’
‘You told Macklin you were going out for a coffee. Make sure to bring one back to work.’
Half an hour later Mark was sitting in an armchair in his office when he heard the distinct rumble of a Macklin ‘Fuck’ coming through the walls. Another voice — Kathy’s — cried out, ‘What the hell happened?’ and then a door opened in the corridor.
‘Why’s the fucking email not working?’ Macklin shouted. ‘Where’s Sam?’
‘Maternity leave,’ somebody said.
‘Fucking great.’
He swerved into Mark’s office, a shirt button popped open on his belly. Mark lowered the magazine he was pretending to read and tried to look distracted.
‘Your computer working, mate?’ Macklin asked him.
‘Mine just crashed as well,’ Kathy said, coming in behind him.
Mark stood up with perhaps an exaggerated non-chalance and walked across to his desk. Hitting a key at random, his stomach a swell of nerves, he prayed for total system failure.
Granted.
The small, frowning face of an Apple icon appeared on screen and nothing Mark could do would remove it. Turning to face Macklin and Kathy he said simply, ‘Shit.’
At the reception desk, thirty feet away, Rebecca, a temp who had replaced Sam as office manager, answered a telephone call just as her own computer froze irreparably. She had been in the middle of writing a frank and erotic email to a one-night stand and was worried that it would now be discovered on the system.
‘Well, that’s fucking great, isn’t it?’ Macklin was saying. ‘I had twenty fucking messages downloading and now they’re all shot to fuck. Some cunt in the Philippines, probably, a prepubescent anorak who thinks it’s a fucking laugh infecting every computer in the civilized world with Macintosh Clap. Doesn’t he have something better to do? You know, watch football, play Virtual Cop or something?’
Mark caught Kathy’s eye and grinned. ‘It may not be that bad,’ he said. Momentarily forgetting the temp’s name, he called out to her, ‘Is yours down too?’
‘Yes,’ Rebecca replied from across the room, covering the telephone with her hand. The conspiratorial way she then soundlessly mouthed the word ‘Frozen’ made Mark wonder if she fancied him. ‘Well then, I’ll get someone to fix it,’ he said.
‘Who does Sam normally call?’ Macklin asked. ‘Of all the fucking days to be on holiday…’
‘The number’s in her magic book,’ Kathy told him. At this, Mark stepped in.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll call them,’ he announced, and then panicked that he might have sounded too enthusiastic. Why would he do it, after all, when Kathy was around and knew where to find the book? Rescue this. Say something. ‘Mack, you go next door. Kathy, make him a cup of tea. Virus or no virus, it’ll be fixed by lunch.’
‘What makes you so sure?’ Macklin asked.
‘Vibes, man,’ Mark said. ‘Just vibes.’
He was impressed by how precisely the men from A Branch looked exactly like computer technicians. For some reason he had been expecting lab engineers wearing white coats and protective helmets, but the three men who came to the Libra offices within half an hour of Mark’s call were spotty, unwashed, socially inept youths. None of them looked at Mark. They had already performed a complete dry-run of the operation the preceding weekend and knew exactly which rooms to target and where to locate the safe.
‘Is there a unit in there?’ one of them had asked Kathy, nodding towards Roth’s locked office.
‘Yeah,’ she had said.
‘Any chance of getting a look at it?’
‘Sure.’
And total access was thus provided. Over the course of the next four hours, every computer in the building was disassembled and a copy made of its hard drive. Mean while, having been shown to the basement by Mark, a security specialist plugged phoney wires into the mainframe — purely for the purposes of cover — and then calmly broke into the Libra safe, making a thorough photographic record of its contents. Mark, who had told an increasingly agitated Macklin that he would ‘keep an eye on things downstairs’, watched all this unfold from the basement doorway and felt the thrill of his participation in it. This’ll make our case, Randall had told him, and he was surely right.
Yet there was a single flaw, a problem that nobody could have foreseen. Just after two o’clock, as Macklin was leaving the office to buy himself a sandwich for lunch, he turned to Rebecca in reception and, laying the ground work for a future date, said, ‘Sorry about all the computer geeks, sweetheart. Can’t be helped, I’m afraid.’
‘That’s all right,’ she replied. ‘But it’s a bit weird, Mr Macklin. They got here so quickly.’
Macklin, who was wondering what chance he had of getting her into bed before the end of the week, only half-absorbed this observation and said simply: ‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah. Sam left me a note before she went away, basic stuff saying where everything was. I had the number for the computer technicians and called them after what happened. Only, thing is, they said they were busy, couldn’t get here till three or something. Then they go and show up twenty minutes later.’
‘Is that right?’ Macklin said. ‘Is that right?’ She now had his full attention. ‘After twenty minutes?’
‘Yeah.’
He frowned.
‘Maybe they had a cancellation. Did you ask?’
Rebecca shook her head.
Macklin eyeballed the only visible technician in the room, a twenty-four-year-old A-Branch recruit named Frankwho was pretending to rewire a circuit board outside Mark’s office.
‘Hey, mate,’ he called out.
‘How come you got here so quickly?’
Trained never to open his mouth until he knew the score, Frank continued facing the wall and replied, ‘What’s that?’
‘I said, how come you got here so quickly?’
Half-turning now, Frank frowned at Macklin and muttered, ‘Not following you, mate.’
‘Well, it’s just that the lovely Rebecca here phoned your offices this morning and you said you was busy till three.’
‘Beats me. I just go where I’m told,’ Frank said. Thinking on his feet, he added, ‘I know there was talk of a big job last night. Maybe it got called off.’
‘Right.’
Macklin seemed satisfied and looked back at Rebecca, raising a fat eyebrow in a manner he intended as flirtatious.
‘Well, there you are, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Mystery solved. So what are you doing for dinner tonight? Fancy some sushi or something?’
Afterwards they had Frankto thank for reacting as quickly as he did.
No sooner had Macklin left the building than he put his tools to one side, smiled at Rebecca, and walked calmly down to the basement. Mark, who was startled when the door opened at the top of the staircase, signalled frantically to the locksmith and leaped to his feet.
‘Problem,’ Frank said, matter-of-factly.
‘How so?’ the lock smith replied.
‘Girl upstairs, temp. She’s not as lazy as she looks. Turns out that as soon as the system went down she called the regular technical support team. As luck would have it, they were too busy to get here till three. But it’s already gone two. Unless someone gets on the phone smartish and cancels the appointment, this place is gonna be crawling with Mac technicians wondering who the fuck we are.’