House of Spies Read online

  On the streets of nearby Portsmouth, where they performed the bulk of their field exercises, Keller’s formidable skills were harder to conceal. He cleaned out his dead drop sites without raising so much as an eyebrow; his brush contacts were textbook. Six weeks into the course, MI5 sent down a team of A4 watchers to assist in a daylong countersurveillance drill. The point of the exercise was to demonstrate that proper physical surveillance—the real thing, not the banana-republic variety—was almost impossible to detect. The other recruits failed to spot a single one of their MI5 watchers, but Keller was able to correctly identify four members of a crack team who tailed him during an excursion to the Cascades shopping center. Incredulous, MI5 demanded a second chance, but the results were the same. The next day’s session was dedicated not to identifying surveillance but shaking it. Keller dumped his team in five minutes flat and vanished without a trace. They found him later that night, singing French-accented karaoke at the Druid’s Arms in Binsteed Road. He left the pub with the name, phone number, and address of everyone in the room, along with a proposal of marriage. Next morning Quill called Personnel at Vauxhall Cross and asked where they had found the man called Peter Marlowe.

  “We didn’t find him,” said Personnel. “He’s ‘C’s’ private stock.”

  “Send me ten more just like him,” said Quill, “and Britain will rule the world again.”

  The real work of the IONEC was done in the evenings, in the recruits’ private bar and dining hall. They were encouraged to drink—alcohol, they were told, played an important part in the life of a spy—and several times each week a special guest joined them for dinner. Controllers, policy experts, legendary operatives. A few still worked for the service. Others were cobwebbed figures in crumpled suits who recalled their duels with the KGB in Berlin and Vienna and Moscow. Russia was once again MI6’s primary target and adversary—the great game, said a dried-out cold warrior, had been renewed. Quill warned his students that, in time, the Russians would make a play for each and every one of them, with flattery, with offers of money, or with blackmail. How they responded when the bear came calling would determine whether they slept at night or rotted in a self-made hell. He then played a video of Kim Philby’s famous 1955 press conference where he denied he was a KGB spy. Quill called it the finest piece of lying he had ever seen or ever would.

  James Bond might have had a license to kill, but real-world MI6 officers did not. Assassination as a tool was strictly forbidden, and most British spies rarely carried a gun, let alone fired one in the line of duty. Still, they were not merely champagne spies, not all of them at least, and the world was an increasingly dangerous place. Which meant they had to possess a basic understanding of how to operate a weapon—where one inserted the magazine, how one chambered the round, how one held the contraption so as not to shoot oneself or a fellow agent, that sort of thing. Here again, Keller’s proficiency was difficult to camouflage. On the first day of weapons training, the instructor handed him a pistol, a Browning 9mm, and told him to fire it toward the human silhouette target fifteen meters down the range. Keller raised the weapon swiftly and without seeming to take aim poured all thirteen rounds through the target’s head. When asked to repeat the exercise, he placed an entire magazine’s worth of rounds through the target’s left eye. Henceforth, he was excused from further firearms training. Nor was he required to take part in the IONEC’s rudimentary self-defense course. Not after nearly dislocating the shoulder of an instructor who had foolishly pointed an unloaded gun in his direction. After that, no one, not even Mayhew, who was built like a rugby player, would set foot on the mat with him.

  They were kept largely isolated from the civilian population around them, but Mayhew and Quill made no effort to sequester them from the outside world—far from it, in fact. A stack of British and international newspapers waited at breakfast each morning, and in the lounge was a television that received all of the global and European news networks. They huddled round it the night of the attack on London, in despair, in anger, and in the knowledge that this was the war in which they would all soon be fighting. One sooner than the rest.

  The following week the IONEC reached its conclusion. All twelve members of the intake passed easily, with Peter Marlowe receiving the highest score and Finch a respectable but distant second. That evening they dined together one last time in the company of Mayhew and Quill. And in the morning they placed their room keys on old George Halliday’s desk and carried their bags outside into the courtyard, where Reg the driver waited behind the wheel of a coach to take them, newly minted spies, up to London. One, however, was missing. They searched for him high and low, in the rooms of the east wing, the west, and the main, at the shooting range, the tennis court, the croquet pitch, and the gymnasium, until finally, at nine that morning, Reg set out for London with eleven recruits instead of twelve. It was Quill who found the length of rope beneath his window, and the tiny swatch of fabric flying like a pennant from the wire atop the perimeter fence, and the fresh footprints along the beach, made by a man in a hurry who weighed approximately two hundred well-defined pounds. A pity, thought Quill. Ten more just like him, and Britain would have ruled the world again.

  6

  Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor

  The precise route of his escape, like Saladin’s flight from America, was never reliably established. There were clues, however, such as the Volkswagen Jetta, pale blue, reported stolen from the car park of Morrisons supermarket in Gosport at a quarter past ten that same morning. It was discovered later that afternoon, some one hundred miles to the west in Devon, parked outside a post office and general store in the tiny hamlet of Coldeast. The tank had been topped off with petrol and on the dash was a note, handwritten, apologizing for any inconvenience to the owner. The Hampshire Constabulary, which had jurisdiction in the matter, commenced an investigation. It ended quite abruptly after a phone call from Tony Quill to the chief constable, who duly surrendered the note, along with all surveillance video from the Morrisons car park—though later the chief was heard to remark that he’d grown weary of the antics by the lads from King Henry’s old gray fortress. Playing spy games on the streets of Portsmouth was one thing. But stealing some poor sod’s car, even for the purposes of a training exercise, was just bad manners.

  The town of Coldeast was noteworthy only in that it lay at the edge of Dartmoor National Park. The skies were pouring with rain on the day in question and it was prematurely dark. As a result, no one noticed Christopher Keller as he set off along the Old Liverton Road, a rucksack over one shoulder. By the time he reached the Liverton Village Hall, the night was as black as India ink. It was no matter; he knew the way. He turned into a hedgerowed track and followed it due north, past the Old Leys Farm. Once, he had to step onto the verge to allow a rattletrap farm truck to pass, but otherwise it seemed as though he were the last man on the face of the earth.

  Britain is better off now that you are here to look after her . . .

  At Brimley he tacked to the west and followed a series of footpaths to Postbridge. Beyond the village was a road that appeared on no map, and at the end of the road was a gate that whispered quiet authority. Parish, the caretaker, had neglected to unlock it. Keller scaled it without a sound and hiked up the long gravel drive toward the limestone cottage that stood atop a swell in the bleak moorland. A yellow light burned like a candle over the unlocked front door. Entering, Keller wiped his feet carefully on the mat. The air smelled of meat and aromatics and potato. He peered into the kitchen and saw Miss Coventry, powdered and vaguely formidable, standing before an open oven, an apron tied around her ample waist.

  “Mr. Marlowe,” she said, turning. “We were expecting you earlier.”

  “I got a bit of a late start.”

  “No trouble, I hope.”

  “None at all.”

  “But look at you! Poor lamb. Did you walk all the way from London?”

  “Not quite,” said Keller with a smile.

  “You’r
e dripping water all over my clean floor.”

  “Can you ever forgive me?”

  “Unlikely.” She relieved him of his sodden coat. “I’ve made up your old room for you. There’s clean clothing and some kit. You’ve time for a nice hot bath before ‘C’ arrives.”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Cottage pie.”

  “My favorite.”

  “That’s why I made it. A nice cup of tea, Mr. Marlowe? Or would you like something stronger?”

  “Perhaps a little whiskey to warm the bones.”

  “I’ll see to it. Now go upstairs before you catch your death.”

  Keller left his shoes in the entrance hall and climbed the stairs to his room. A change of clothing was laid out neatly on the bed. Corduroy trousers, an olive-drab sweater, undergarments, a pair of suede brogues, all appropriately sized. There was also a pack of Marlboros and a gold lighter. Keller read the engraving. To the future . . . No salutation, no name. None was necessary.

  Keller stripped off his wet clothing and stood for a long time beneath a scalding shower. When he returned to his room, a tumbler of whiskey stood on the nightstand, atop a white MI6 doily. Dressed, he carried the drink downstairs to the drawing room, where he found Graham Seymour sitting before the fire, elegantly draped in tweed and flannel. He was listening to the news on the ancient Bakelite radio.

  “The stolen car,” he said, rising, “was a nice touch.”

  “Better to make a bit of noise in a case like this, isn’t that what you taught me back in the day?”

  “Did I?” Seymour gave a mischievous smile. “I’m only glad it was accomplished without resort to violence.”

  “An MI6 officer,” said Keller with mock severity, “never resorts to violence. And if he does feel the need to draw a weapon or throw a punch, it’s only because he hasn’t done his job properly.”

  “We might have to rethink that approach,” said Seymour. “I’m only sorry to lose a man like Peter Marlowe. I hear his IONEC scores were rather impressive. Andy Mayhew was so distraught over your disappearance he offered his resignation.”

  “But not Quill?”

  “No,” answered Seymour. “Quill’s made of sterner stuff.”

  “I hope you weren’t too hard on poor Andy.”

  “I took the blame myself, though I did order a full review of the Fort’s perimeter security.”

  “Who else knows about our little ruse?”

  “The controller for Western Europe and two of his most senior desk officers.”

  “What about Whitehall?”

  “The Joint Intelligence Committee,” said Seymour, shaking his head, “is totally in the dark.”

  The JIC were the overseers and taskmasters of MI5 and MI6. They set priorities, assessed the product, advised the prime minister, and made certain the spies played by the rules. Graham Seymour had reached the conclusion that the Secret Intelligence Service needed room to maneuver, that in a dangerous world, with threats all around, it had to get a bit of chalk on its cleats from time to time. Thus his renewed relationship with Christopher Keller.

  “You know,” said Seymour, his eyes moving over Keller’s sturdy frame, “you almost look like one of us again. It’s too bad you have to leave.”

  They went into the kitchen and sat down at the table in the snug little alcove, with its leaded windows overlooking the moorland. Miss Coventry served them the cottage pie with a claret from the well-stocked cellar, and a green salad for their digestion. Seymour spent much of the meal interrogating Keller about the IONEC. Of particular interest was the quality of the other members of the intake.

  “Don’t you see the assessments and scores?” asked Keller.

  “Of course. But I value your opinion.”

  “Finch gives snakes a bad name,” said Keller, “which means he has the makings of a fine spy.”

  “Baker’s scores were quite good, too.”

  “So was the first chapter of the thriller he’s working on.”

  “And the course itself?” asked Seymour. “Did they manage to teach you anything?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “How you intend to use me.”

  With a spy’s careful smile, Seymour declined Keller’s invitation to brief him on his maiden voyage as a full-fledged MI6 agent. Instead, as rain pelted the windows of the alcove, he spoke of his father. Arthur Seymour had spied for England for more than thirty years. But at the end of his career, when he was blown to kingdom come by Philby and the other moles and traitors, the service sent him down to the gray pile of stone by the sea to light the secret fire within the next generation of British spies. “And he hated every minute of it,” said Seymour. “He saw it for what it was, the end of the line. My father always thought of the Fort as a crypt into which the Service tossed his battered old corpse.”

  “If only your father could see you now.”

  “Yes,” said Seymour distantly. “If only indeed.”

  “He was hard on you, the old man?”

  “He was hard on everyone, especially my mother. Fortunately, I was little more than an afterthought. I was with him in Beirut in the sixties when Philby was there, too. Then he shipped me off to school. After that, he was someone I saw only a couple of times a year.”

  “He must have been disappointed when you joined MI5.”

  “He threatened to disown me. He thought MI5 were policemen and proletarian plods, as did everyone else at MI6.”

  “So why did you do it?”

  “Because I preferred to be judged on my own accomplishments. Or maybe,” said Seymour after a moment, “I didn’t want to join a service that had been gutted by traitors. Maybe I wanted to catch spies instead of recruit them. Maybe I wanted to stop IRA bombs from exploding in our streets.” He paused, then added, “Which is where you came in.”

  There was a silence.

  “We did good work together in Belfast, you and I. We stopped many attacks, saved countless lives. And what did you do? You ran off and joined Don Orsati’s little band of assassins.”

  “You left a few things out of your account.”

  “Only for the sake of time.” Seymour shook his head slowly. “I grieved for you, you bastard. And so did your parents. At your memorial service, I tried to comfort your father, but he was inconsolable. That was a terrible thing you did to them.”

  Keller ignited a cigarette and then handed the new gold lighter to Seymour. “Do you remember what the inscription says?”

  “Point taken. It’s all in the past. You’ve been fully restored, Christopher. You’re as good as new. All you need now is a nice girl to share that beautiful home of yours in Kensington.” Seymour reached for Keller’s cigarettes but stopped himself. “Eight million pounds, quite a tidy sum. By my calculation that leaves you with a mere twenty-five million, all of it earned by working for Don Orsati. At least the money is in a fine British financial institution now instead of those Swiss and Bahamian banks you were using. It’s been repatriated, just like you.”

  “We had a deal,” said Keller quietly.

  “And I intend to abide by it. Don’t worry, you can keep your ill-gotten money.”

  Keller made no reply.

  “And the girl?” asked Seymour, changing the subject. “Any prospects? We’ll have to vet her thoroughly, you realize.”

  “I’ve been a bit busy, Graham. I haven’t had a chance to meet many girls.”

  “What about the one who proposed to you at the Druid’s Arms?”

  “She was quite drunk at the time. She was also under the impression I was French.”

  Seymour smiled. “She won’t be the first to make that mistake.”

  7

  London—Corsica

  It had been fifteen years since Christopher Keller had willingly allowed his photograph to be taken. On that occasion he had been perched atop a wobbly wooden stool in a little shop high in the mountains of central Corsica. The walls of the shop had been hung with portra
its—brides, widows, patriarchs—all unsmiling, for the inhabitants of the village were a serious lot who were suspicious of outsiders and modern gadgets like cameras, which were thought to be dispensers of the evil eye. The photographer was a distant relative of Don Anton Orsati, a cousin of some sort, by marriage rather than blood. Even so, he had been fearful in the presence of the hard, silent Englishman who, it was rumored, carried out assignments for the Orsati clan that ordinary taddunaghiu could not. The photographer had taken six pictures that day; in none did Keller look remotely the same. They appeared in the six false French passports Keller used throughout his career as a professional assassin. Two of the passports were still valid. One he kept in a bank vault in Zurich, the other in Marseilles, a fact he had neglected to tell his new employers at the Secret Intelligence Service. One never knew, he reasoned, when one might require an ace in the hole.

  The technician who took Keller’s photograph for MI6 had been unnerved by his subject too and consequently had worked with unusual haste. The session took place not at Vauxhall Cross—Keller’s exposure to the building was to be strictly limited—but in a basement in Bloomsbury. The finished product showed an unsmiling man of perhaps fifty who looked as though he had recently returned from a long holiday in the sun. His name, according to the passport in which the photo was eventually placed, was Nicholas Evans, and he was not fifty years old but forty-eight. MI6 provided Keller with a British driver’s permit in the same name, along with three credit cards and an attaché case stuffed with files related to his cover, which had something to do with sales and marketing. Keller also took possession of an MI6 mobile phone, which would allow him to communicate securely with Vauxhall Cross while in the field. He assumed, rightly, that Vauxhall Cross could in turn use the phone to monitor his movements and, if necessary, eavesdrop on his conversations. Therefore, he planned to part company with the device at the first opportunity.