The hidden man am-2 Read online

  Ian was right. Ben was standing outside a smoky pub in Russell Square, Bone’s letter in his hand, fending off an Alice moan.

  ‘All I’m asking,’ she said, ‘is that you show me a little sympathy. I’ve been at work all day and nobody was around to help me out and I just wanted someone to understand that. All you’ve done is spent the last five minutes saying it’s not that big a problem. It’s just typical male behaviour.’

  Ben momentarily moved the phone away from his ear, staring at it in disbelief.

  ‘That’s all I was doing,’ he said. He could see McCreery staring at him from inside the pub. ‘I was trying to understand, Alice, trying to show you a little sympathy. But you aren’t interested in seeing that, in listening to what I’m saying. You just want to use your situation at work as an excuse to get angry with me, as a way of making me feel bad instead of you. And now you’re saying that it’s “typical male behaviour”. I can’t fucking believe that we’re even having this conversation…’

  He heard the squeal of the taxi’s brakes.

  ‘Are you in a cab?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Look, try to understand this.’ Ben hoped that he could end the conversation with one swift speech. ‘I am your husband. I automatically understand and share anything that affects you. That’s what it means to love somebody. You hurt when they hurt. So take it as read that I am sympathetic. Take it as read that if my wife calls me up in the pub while she’s having a shitty day at work, I am understanding. But if all you want is sympathy and a kind of mute approbation, get a dog.’ McCreery was now standing at the bar, buying them a third pint. ‘The difference between me and a cocker spaniel is that I am able to offer you something more than a dog can; that is, a solution to your problem. And I don’t know why it’s suddenly fashionable for women to consider that as some sort of male flaw. If I were you, I’d be grateful for the second opinion.’

  ‘So what is your solution?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve just told you. I told you ten minutes ago, at the start of this fucking conversation. Go home, take a bath, watch a DVD and relax. You can go back in tomorrow, get one of the work experience people to help with your research and finish the piece. Now I’m here with Jock, we’re talking about the letter. I can’t do anything about this at the moment. I have to go.’

  If he hadn’t hung up, she would have kept him on the line for another half an hour. Ben ended the call, switched off the phone and put it in his jacket pocket. McCreery was still at the bar, a pint of Guinness settling on the counter next to a tumbler of whisky.

  ‘Everything all right, old chap?’

  ‘Sure. That was Alice on the phone.’

  ‘Woman trouble?’

  ‘Woman trouble.’

  He handed the letter to McCreery.

  ‘Like I was saying before, I’m only showing you this because I think you have a right to see it. I can’t go to the police because I don’t know how the Secrets Act works. But it seems important that you should get a look at it.’

  Very calmly, McCreery extracted Bone’s letter from the envelope.

  ‘This is the photocopy?’ he said.

  ‘That’s the photocopy.’

  At a nearby table, a group of men erupted into laughter and one of them knocked over a glass. Ironic applause amid mutterings of ‘Nice one, Dave.’ McCreery frowned as he held the letter in his hand, six pages of crumpled A4.

  ‘How long did you say you’ve had this?’ he said.

  ‘Just a few days. I made the copy when I received it. For Mark,’ Ben lied. He did not yet want to tell McCreery that he had been planning to give the copy to a contact in Customs and Excise.

  ‘Mark didn’t get one himself?’

  ‘I have no idea. I haven’t spoken to him in days.’

  ‘Why don’t we sit down? I’d like to read it.’

  They returned to their table in a quieter corner of the pub. Ben felt that he had drunk too much on an empty stomach, two pints of Guinness as McCreery regaled him with stories about his father. His head felt light and dizzy. It took Jockten minutes to read the letter, his face occasionally jolting into a look of disbelief, and when he had finished, he said, ‘Do you mind if I read it again?’

  Ben took the opportunity to visit the gents. Before he returned, he bought himself a packet of cigarettes from a vending machine and some crisps and peanuts at the bar. McCreery was on the final page as he sat down.

  ‘Yes. Bob has always had some fairly potty theories about what went on in Afghanistan.’

  ‘So you knew him?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely.’

  ‘What kind of theories?’ Ben asked.

  McCreery waved his hand dismissively over the table, as if to swot them away.

  ‘Oh, I won’t bore you with that now. Suffice to say the Yanks have had it up to here with his conspiracies.’ He chopped a hand against his forehead and took a swig of his double Scotch. ‘I had a nasty feeling he’d do something like this.’

  ‘So it’s true.’

  Ben laughed nervously as he asked the question.

  ‘Oh God, no. Well, not all of it, in any event. All this stuff about Bob being Station Chief in Berlin is complete balls, for a start. I don’t know what he’s talking about. Bone was a Cousin, certainly, but very low on the food chain.’

  ‘A Cousin?’ Ben asked.

  ‘CIA.’ McCreery assumed a quieter voice. ‘He did end up in Afghanistan, but Christopher would hardly have regarded him as a friend. Far as I’m aware, they only met half a dozen times. Bob was a bit fuck struck by the Brits, to be honest, a complete Anglophile. Boodles and the Queen, all that empire jazz, made him drool like a puppy. So an old-school operator like your father would have been right up his street. Old Bobby Bone loved a bit of posh.’

  McCreery appeared to look back at the letter and emitted a gusty laugh on page four.

  ‘And this bit’s absolute cock,’ he said, waving the paper noisily in his hand. Ben couldn’t tell whether McCreery was genuinely irritated or just being loyal to the firm. ‘Neither was your father continually based in Kabul, nor was he undeclared. He simply made visits to the Afghan capital from time to time. Until later on, Bone was mostly working for an aid organization, and then only as a conduit for American funding. The Yanks were chucking so much money at the Soviet problem they didn’t know if it was arseholes or breakfast time.’

  ‘So why would Bone just make all this stuff up?’

  With a theatrical lurch of his eyebrows, McCreery intimated that the American was simply demented.

  ‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Perhaps some of it’s true. I ran agents for years that Christopher knew nothing about. That’s the business we were in. And Bob’s analysis of the Soviet army is pretty accurate. The drugs, the bullying, the corruption. But the idea that a foreign diplomat — particularly a tall, white, elegantly attired Brit like Christopher Keen — could just walk around the bazaars of Kabul calmly recruiting disgruntled Russian soldiers is frankly lunatic. One might as well try hitchhiking in Piccadilly. Your father was a pedigree intelligence officer, my God, but even that would have been beyond his considerable talents. Besides, one didn’t have authorization to go after members of the occupying forces. That wasn’t our brief. We were anxious to get our hands on Soviet military technology, certainly, but their officers were exceptionally well disciplined and very unlikely to turn. As for their subordinates, the Office already had highly placed sources in Moscow who completely negated the need to pitch lower echelons.’

  ‘Echelons’, like ‘Cousins’, was another euphemism with which Ben was unfamiliar, but he felt too embarrassed to ask for a translation. Instead, he said, ‘What about what Bone says about the SAS? About you training the mujahaddin?’

  McCreery hesitated.

  ‘Quasi-accurate, at best. We certainly sponsored de-badged British soldiers to report on the muj, and SAS did take a contingent to Scotland for training. But not to the Highlands, as our friend attests. The ex
ercises took place in the Hebrides.’

  ‘And you were there?’

  McCreery rolled his neck and implied with a glance that Ben should ask a different question.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

  ‘Oh heavens, don’t worry. I’m just not at liberty to discuss specific operations in which I may or may not have been involved. Bit old-fashioned like that. Take my responsibilities rather seriously.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Unlike dear Mr Bone, it seems, who has committed a flagrant breach of security. Still, that’s the American way. Shoot first, ask questions later.’

  ‘Friendly fire,’ Ben said, without really meaning to, and Jocksmiled. ‘So what was my father doing in Afghanistan? Can you at least tell me that? Can you tell me if there’s any link between him and this guy Kostov?’

  McCreery coughed.

  ‘Let me give you a little history lesson,’ he said. Whisky in hand, hair faintly dishevelled now, McCreery might have been a professor of poetry discussing Yeats down the pub. ‘Throughout the 1980s, the Afghan resistance received arms and ammunition from a number of different sources: China, Egypt, the Pakistani intelligence service, even bloody Gaddafi got in on the act. Additional bulk funding was provided by the Saudis, the Reagan administration and, to a lesser extent, the Frogs, the Japs and our own Conservative government. Mrs Thatcher was a huge fan of Abdul Haq, for example, a key mujahadd in figure who was eventually murdered by the Taleban. Quite an alliance, I’m sure you’d agree, but we were all aware that the Soviets were trying to surround the oil fields of the Gulf, which would have been catastrophic for the international community. At that time the CIA station in Islamabad was America’s largest international intelligence operation, far bigger than Nicaragua, Angola and El Salvador combined. Bone is right about a lot of this. Now there was a hawk in Texas, man by the name of Charles Wilson, a boneheaded Congressman of the McCarthy mould, who was paranoid up to his eyeballs about reds under the bed. Yes, for him — and for others with Reagan’s ear — Afghanistan was to be the Soviet Vietnam, no question. Wilson was a big fish in the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committee and he pushed a lot of money the way of the mujahaddin.’

  Ben was beginning to glaze over with facts. He felt suddenly cold from the open pub door and put on his coat.

  ‘Alas, Wilson and others in Congress backed the wrong horse, and America has been paying for it ever since. Bone, as a CIA man, has a vested interest in playing down those failings at the expense of my own — and your father’s — organization. Allow me, for example, to illustrate the mess that many of us are still to this day cleaning up. Bill Casey, the head of the CIA whom Bone refers to in his letter, took a liking to an individual by the name of Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, who was the leader of the most fanatical group of mujahaddin, Hezb-i-Islami. By fanatical, I mean pan-Islam, that is to say an organization virulently opposed to all things Western, from Dallas to Warren Buffett. This was an irony apparently lost on the Pentagon, who clearly thought he was Mahatma Gandhi. Both the Pakistani government and its intelligence service — without either of whom the Cousins simply couldn’t operate — were also card-carrying members of the Hekmatyar fan club, which rather explains the relationship. No matter that he’d organized the killing of other mujahaddin leaders in order to cement his power base, and had never been directly involved in any confrontation with the Soviet invasionary forces. That didn’t seem to bother the Yanks. Perhaps eventually they wanted a fundamentalist regime in Kabul to destabilize the communists in the north. Who knows? Always playing God, the Americans, never keep things simple. And, of course, these US-backed fundamentalists have had a field day ever since, knocking off Sad at in ’81, blowing up US Marines in Lebanon. When it came to the Gulf War, in fact, Hekmatyar was one of the first public figures to denounce American involvement in Kuwait. Lovely way of repaying the favour, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said, licking peanut salt off his fingers. ‘What does any of this have to do with Kostov?’

  ‘I’m coming to that, old boy.’ McCreery reacted as if Ben were being impatient. ‘I’m trying to paint a picture of blatant American incompetence which feeds into the Mischa situation.’

  ‘So Mischa did exist?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely. He must have existed. Yes.’ McCreery scratched the back of his neck. ‘Now at one stage your father helped to set up an organization called Afghan Aid, which nominally worked on medical and agricultural projects for refugees. However, it also provided support for Ahmed Shah Masood, a far more sensible and moderate muj leader who was later to command the Northern Alliance. You may recall that he was assassinated immediately prior to September eleventh.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember reading about that.’

  ‘Well, he was another favourite of Thatcher’s.’

  ‘I see.’

  But then silence. Ben had been expecting McCreery to elaborate further, to steer his little history lesson towards Mischa, but the monologue appeared to have ended. Perhaps the guarded spook who had spoken with so little candour at his father’s funeral was simply pre-programmed never to divulge useful information.

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Is what it?’

  ‘Well, what about Mischa? Did my father recruit him or not?’

  McCreery actually laughed at this to the point where Ben might have lost his temper.

  ‘What’s funny, Jock?’ he said. The use of his first name felt oddly impertinent, regardless of the fact that they had spent most of the afternoon together.

  ‘Well, I’m simply not in a position to talk about that in much detail. It’s very much still under wraps. You can understand — ’

  ‘No, I don’t really understand. Forgive me for saying so, but this is exactly what happened at the crematorium. A few carrots dangled in front of the congregation, and then you withdraw. MI6 have access to a well of memories that for some reason must remain secret, because that is what the State has decreed. Now I respect that, Jock, I really do, but I need to know about Kostov. I need to know whether Bone is telling the truth. So far all you’ve given me is a potted history of Mrs Thatcher’s affection for a couple of guys whose names I can’t pronounce.’

  McCreery gave an affectionate shrug that appeared to suggest compliance.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘You’re absolutely right. Old habits die hard. And if I appeared evasive at the funeral service, it was only because I was in the presence of one or two people who would not have taken kindly to Spycatcher from the pulpit.’ McCreery laughed at his own joke. ‘If you want to know about Mischa and Dimitri Kostov, I can tell you, but only with the cast-iron guarantee that any information divulged will go no further than this table.’

  ‘Of course, Jock…’

  ‘That means even Mark.’ McCreery looked very insistent about this. ‘And Alice, of course. Particularly Alice, as a matter of fact, in view of her chosen profession.’

  ‘I can guarantee that.’

  McCreery looked around, as if to be sure that any further conversation would be muffled by the swirl of noise in the pub.

  ‘Are we OK to talk about this here?’ Ben asked.

  ‘I think so.’ He leaned forward. ‘Mischa Kostov was a source for the Americans. An agent of the CIA.’ McCreery’s voice was a ham actor’s whisper. ‘The story Robert Bone relates is accurate in as much as it refers to an actual relationship between a Western intelligence service and a member of the Soviet armed forces. But I would recommend that for every mention of your father’s name you substitute that of a Cousin whose identity I am afraid I am not at liberty to divulge. Suffice to say that he was a close friend of Mr Bone. His mentor, in a manner of speaking.’

  McCreery shuffled forward and frowned. He seemed troubled by his leg.

  ‘Mischa’s father, Dimitri, was indeed a KGB agent whose aliases included Vladimir Kalugin and — I think I’m right about this — Leonid Sudoplatov. He was not, however, a member of Department V, and
certainly never carried out Kremlin-sponsored executive actions. That’s absolute nonsense. The other rather important thing to bear in mind about Dimitri Kostov is that he died in 1997.’

  Ben was halfway through what must have been his fifteenth cigarette of the afternoon when the lower part of his mouth just seemed to fall away, issuing a broad cloud of uninhaled smoke out in front of his face.

  ‘Kostov is dead?’

  ‘Yes. As is Mischa, though in rather more violent circumstances. Exactly as Bone attests, he was shot in Samark and by order of court martial sometime in the late 1980s.’

  ‘So my father never had anything to do with him?’

  ‘Nothing at all. The Yanks lost him. He was their joe.’ McCreery picked the letter up from the table. ‘Which makes Bone’s suggestion that Mischa was like a son to Christopher particularly unpleasant in the circumstances.’

  ‘Yeah, I could have done without that,’ Ben admitted, eating a crisp.

  ‘I’m sure you could.’

  ‘So who did kill my father?’

  It was the only question left to ask.

  McCreery paused. ‘Between you and me — and again I would ask that this is something we keep strictly entre nous — the Office has been working very closely alongside Scotland Yard to unravel that very question. Right now, we’re looking at one or two irregularities with regard to your father’s relationship with a Swiss bank.’

  Ben shook his head. ‘What does that mean?’

  McCreery shuffled forward and seemed troubled by his leg.

  ‘Shortly before he died, Christopher was doing some work for Divisar on behalf of a private bank in Lausanne. There may be a connection there. We’re also looking into a series of telephone calls that he made to a Timothy Lander in the Cayman Islands.’

  ‘That’s not a name I’ve heard before. How come the police haven’t told us about it?’

  ‘As I was saying, that part of the investigation is still very much under wraps.’

  ‘So you’re claiming that almost everything in Bone’s letter is faked-up to deflect attention away from the fact the CIA lost an agent in Afghanistan nearly twenty years ago?’