—them or us.”
“Them being the KGB?”
“Them being Spetsburo One—the strawberry jam makers.” Audley showed his teeth. “So now you’re going to ask me why he ran?
And the short and humiliating answer to that is—we don’t know.”
Benedikt frowned. “You mean ... he was not defecting?”
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“From them he was. But not to us, and not to the Americans either.
He went to ground, and he never surfaced—and he had time to pick and choose, too. The way it seems to have been . . . then the troubles began again the Russians sent him back to Ireland—to Dublin—to stir the pot maybe, certainly to watch out for their interests. But then something went sour.” The big man shrugged.
“What went sour—we don’t know . . . He’d been away a long time ... it was the same old enemy, but not the same old country as it was in Frank Ryan’s day . . . and he was older, so maybe he was wiser—or maybe he was just older and very tired. Only God knows now, anyway.” He looked at Benedikt. “All we know is that he ran. Because one day we wanted him—to get what he knew—
and the next day they were after him to make sure we didn’t get it.”
“But the KGB found him first.”
“Yes.” Audley grimaced. “And on our home ground too . . .
Though they had advantages we lacked, to be fair.”
“Such as?”
“He was one of theirs from way back, all nicely filed. So they knew what they were looking for. We never did.” Audley shook his head. “We never even had a decent photo of him—just one smudgy face in an International Brigade group picture that might have been him in his teens. But no real face, let alone prints or distinguishing marks. He was always a man for the shadows, not the sunlight. . . Shit!”
The uncharacteristic obscenity surprised Benedikt, and he looked questioningly at Audley.
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“I was just thinking . . . They were damn good: they let us pick up their sighs of relief after he was dead—that Kelly, Aloysius could be filed as deceased, and the matter was closed. But they must already have had a Kelly, Michael file. And we didn’t even know of his existence, let alone the connection between them. So they’ve been hunting Michael while we’ve been sitting on our arses and twiddling our thumbs—hunting him in our territory.”
Benedikt forgave the lapse, sensing more than wounded pride behind it. “So Aloysius must have passed on information to Michael.”
Audley gestured helplessly. “What other interpretation is there? He ran—and they’re after him, damn it! Damn it!”
Now there was only one thing he needed. And although Kommissar at Wiesbaden could give it to him in no more than the time it took to key the question he wanted it now. “About the Debreczen meeting?”
Audley was studying the Tiger critically as though he was seeing it for the first time, his eye running along the barrel of the deadly 8.8cm gun to the massive armoured shield which fronted its turret.
“What happened at Debreczen?” asked Benedikt.
“What happened at Debreczen?” Audley turned a critical eye towards him. “It was before your time—just about literally before your time, Captain Schneider . . . Damn it! It was before even my time, professionally speaking.”
Early to mid-1950s, that would make it, estimated Benedikt. At least, if one discounted the unconfirmed report that a very young dummy1
Lieutenant Audley had not been a simple tank commander in the last months of the war . . .
“Debreczen is out of the deeps of time—it’s still part rumour and part legend ... we didn’t even get a whiff of it until years afterwards, from the Gorbatov de-briefing, and Gorbatov’s been dead ... for a long time—” Audley smiled suddenly, reminiscently
“—of cirrhosis, I should add. In a piece of Canada which most resembled his native land ... At least the rat-catchers never caught up with him! Just the booze.”
Debreczen? Benedikt wanted to say. But he said nothing.
“It wasn’t actually in Debreczen . . . There was this old Hapsburg castle in the woods. Or ... it was more like a Ruritanian hunting lodge, though God only knows what they hunted there . . . But the Germans had added some huts, and there was perimeter wire—all mod. cons., Nazi-style . . . And, for some reason—perhaps it was accessibility, with no questions asked—for some reason the Russians liked it for what they had in mind.”
Hapsburg castles Benedikt knew, and hunting lodges and huts and perimeter wire too. But he had never visited Debreczen . . . and where was Ruritania?
“First, it was like a seminar centre for experts—not only the GB
specials, but also the foreigners that they really trusted, who could lecture on political conditions in their own countries . . . Like, what they couldn’t do and what they could do—what they’d done wrong in the past, but where the opportunities lay in the future . . . The sort of thing Philby and Co. did a few years later—okay?”
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Philby and Co. had cut the British deep—so deep that for some of them the very names were taboo. But in this, as in so many other things, Audley was different, even though as a Cambridge man himself his wound must be particularly painful.
“And then, over the next year or so, they slipped in people from the West one by one—the promising ones they wanted properly educated for the long-term future . . . Not types connected with the intelligence services—not people who were already actively working for them, nothing like that. . . . These were the young ones who had good prospects in civilian life—in business and industry, and banking and the law, and the arts and academic life . . . The sort who might go over to politics eventually, or turn up in think-tanks. The policy-makers, if you like.” The Englishman regarded Benedikt bleakly. “They came for just a week, or a fortnight at the most . . . The sort of time they could lose quite easily in a European holiday—almost untraceable ... As I well know, because I was eventually one of those who drew the shitty job of trying to short-list our Debreczen possibles. And without alerting them, that we were vetting the vacation they’d taken five or six years before . . . whether they’d really been tasting the wine in Burgundy, or skiing in Austria, or counting the Madonnas and Children in the Uffizi. And it was damn near impossible: I got two
‘certainties’— one of which turned out to be wrong . . . and two probables, both of which were probably wrong . . . and four possibles, who could be pure as driven snow but have my black question mark against their names for evermore, because I couldn’t absolutely clear them.” He scowled, and shook his head at the dummy1
memory. “The best part of four months’ work, and really only one name to show for it. I wished to God I’d never heard of Colonel Gorbatov and Debreczen by the end of it—it was a damned shitty job!”
The adjective was not inappropriate this time, thought Benedikt: an assignment which left other men soiled by unconfirmed suspicion was a dirty one, however prudent and necessary in a dirty world.
“But Aloysius Kelly was the name you obtained?”
“Good God—no!” Audley blinked at him. “Aloysius wasn’t one of the pupils—he was one of the teachers, man—one of the experts running the course. One of the trusted foreigners, don’t you see.”
One of the trusted ones—
“He’d been on the game for years by then,” Audley elaborated.
“He’d nothing to learn, but a hell of a lot to teach.”
Benedikt kicked himself. Both Aloysius Kelly’s years of service, from the Spanish Civil War onwards, and the implacability of the KGB’s pursuit pointed to that truth. And, more than that, of all men a defecting instructor could not be allowed to live: where any Debreczen ‘student’ might, or might not, have glimpsed a fellow-student, their instructors would know them all—