Spy Out the Land (17 page)

Voers looked across at her, and she turned away. She knew he was angry that he had been interrupted by his leader, the one they called Captain, when he had wanted to assault her. Angry and
resentful and ashamed – a volatile mixture. But they were under a tight schedule to catch a flight leaving the country, so she felt that she was at least safe from that horror for the time
being. Wherever it was they were taking her was a different matter.

For the hundredth time, she glanced in the rear-view mirror. The blue Vauxhall was still five cars behind them. Ben had become hysterical at being separated from her for the journey, but she had
managed to calm him down. There hadn’t been any choice. The Captain had made it plain that if she caused any trouble on the way – attracted the attention of a passer-by, alerted a
customs official – the men behind would simply stop following, and Ben would be killed. She had no reason to doubt him.

They arrived at Arlanda airport, and Voers parked the car in the long-term area. He turned to face her and smiled – oh, how she loathed his smile.

‘I wonder what food they’ll serve on the plane,’ he said, stroking his moustache with his forefinger and thumb. ‘I’m famished.’

Saturday, 23 August 1975, Lusaka, Zambia

It was approaching dawn when the driver of the black Fiat saloon took the turning into the city’s Roma suburb. Matthew Charamba peered through the rear window of the car,
searching for any signs of life. This was the first time he had left the house in weeks and his mind was hungry for something to feed on other than the fears that had been occupying it for the last
three hours. But all he could make out was a row of greyish houses and dense foliage.

At the end of the avenue, a large villa was set back from the road with a surrounding fence covered in hessian. This was ‘The Vatican’, the secret headquarters of the Department of
National Security and Order – ZAPU’s spy agency. It made for a more discreet location for a rendezvous than Zimbabwe House, ZAPU’s headquarters in the city, which was believed to
be under constant surveillance by the Zambian authorities and perhaps others.

The Vatican was an anonymous-looking four-bedroom villa, but several sentries were positioned just behind the wrought-iron front gates. As the car drew in, one of the guards called through their
arrival on a radio set. Once given the all-clear, the men began checking the car for weapons.

‘Only you go through,’ the lead sentry said when they were done, pointing at Charamba.

‘Impossible,’ said Gibo. ‘He’s not going in there alone.’

Charamba held up a hand. ‘It’s all right, Phillip.’

‘Are you sure about this, sir?’

Charamba nodded. He hadn’t told Gibo the real reason for his visit here tonight, that Hope and her son had been kidnapped. He had been too frightened to. The man with the metallic voice
had been very persuasive on that point. In his last call, he had changed his demands: he now had to confirm by noon the next day that he would be participating in the talks. Charamba had tried to
explain that he wouldn’t be able to push Nkomo and the others in such a time frame, and his first call to them hadn’t been promising – Nkomo had claimed they already had enough
people for their delegation. But the Rhodesian hadn’t listened. He hadn’t allowed him to speak to Hope or her son, either. What if something had happened to them? The man insisted that
if Charamba agreed to their demands they would be released as soon as the talks were over, but how could he trust this would happen? The caller had simply reiterated his demand and hung up.

So here he was, at Nkomo’s door to beg. But if he was going to walk straight into the lions’ den it was vital that he gain the lions’ trust, and he wasn’t going to do
that bringing his bodyguards with him. Nkomo and his men could simply kill him, of course – take him somewhere and shoot him as a traitor to the cause – but he didn’t think they
would. It would rid them of a potentially dangerous rival, but it would only serve to make him a martyr and was too risky for their own reputations: anyone thought to have been involved in such an
act would be cast out forever. Well, so he reasoned. He might have failed to consider all the angles of the current power dynamic, in which case he could be in serious, possibly mortal danger. But
bodyguards would send the wrong message, and unarmed they wouldn’t be able to stop anything from happening anyway.

He climbed out of the car and allowed himself to be escorted through the gates and into the villa. On the ground floor, the living room had been converted into an operations room, and a few
serious-looking men were loitering there huddled over telephones. Charamba had a pang as he saw how much better equipped they were than his own group, and that they were still working at this time
of night.

He was led upstairs and ushered into a windowless room. Five men wearing fatigues were waiting for him around a bare conference table. He saw with relief that none of them was armed, either. One
of the men stepped forward. It was Nkomo, whom he hadn’t seen since he had left the party just after their release from prison. He looked at ease, and well fed.

‘Hello, Matthew.’

Charamba took his hand. ‘Hello, Joshua.’

Nkomo gave a wary smile. Charamba shook hands with the others, and they seated themselves around the table. The atmosphere was loaded with unspoken tension for a minute, and then Nkomo asked the
question all of them were thinking.

‘We were surprised to hear from you. You say you want to join us in these talks. What do you hope to gain?’

‘Nothing personally,’ Charamba lied. ‘I think it is a chance for peace, and I want to help influence our country’s future in any way that I can.’

The men nodded, but looked unconvinced. Charamba tried again.

‘I think we can work better together, but also that it is important that we are seen to be working together. A more united African front will be more appreciated in the international
press, and it will put more pressure on the whites to listen to us. I am also confident that if we were to reach an agreement with Smith, we would be able to win the vote in the country.’

He delivered the final point very lightly, as it was a matter of significant resentment with Nkomo and the others that he had become a more popular figure with the public, but he had carefully
rehearsed the speech before leaving the house.

The men asked him some more questions about how he saw his role at the summit, and he answered as best he could. He didn’t reveal the position the metallic Rhodesian voice had ordered he
should adopt – that would have to wait for the summit itself, if he ever got that far.

After fifteen minutes, Nkomo made motions to finish the meeting.

‘You have some very interesting ideas, Matthew,’ he said. ‘And you seem sincere. I think some good could come of you partaking, but you must understand there is resistance to
your presence. We need to discuss this further among ourselves, but we will contact you to let you know our decision.’

‘Soon, please,’ said Charamba, straining to keep the desperation from his voice.

Nkomo nodded. ‘Of course.’

Charamba was escorted downstairs again and trudged back to the waiting car. He climbed in reluctantly – all that awaited him at the end of the drive was a sleepless night as he worried
about Hope and the grandson he had never met.

Saturday, 23 August 1975, Whitehall, London

Rachel followed Harmigan down the narrow corridor. One part of her mind was still sifting through the dossiers on Dark, while another part was wondering if she was
appropriately dressed. Sandy had told her to keep her outfit ‘sober’, her make-up light and to avoid high heels – he had said the latter because Wilson was short, but she
suspected it was also because he wanted to tower over everyone in the meeting, her included. Obedient as ever, she was wearing navy flats and a pale cream blouse, but she was having second thoughts
about the skirt, a Prince of Wales check number that probably showed off a little more of her legs than ‘sober’ accommodated.

But perhaps nobody would notice in the mounting atmosphere of tension, which was now bordering on outright panic. Scarcely half an hour had gone since Sandy had persuaded the prime minister that
he needed to be informed of developments. As a result, the meeting had been moved from a boardroom on the fourth floor to the main Cabinet Office Briefing Room, known as COBRA, a small crisis
operations centre that had been set up three years earlier amid fears the country’s infrastructure might collapse if there were widespread strikes. It seemed a little like overkill even for
Dark coming back to life, but Sandy was fond of grand gestures.

They came to a staircase and walked down it until they reached a steel blast door guarded by two uniformed guards. One of them took their passes and let them through into a long low-ceilinged
room with wood-panelled walls, a large mahogany table that barely fitted into it and dim lighting. She was pleased to note the latter, as now her skirt would be less conspicuous. And the room
wasn’t as disturbing as she had expected – talk of it in the office usually brought to mind apocalyptic science-fiction films, but while strikes hadn’t brought the country to a
collapse they had led to the three-day week, and having gone through the hunt for paraffin and candles to see her own dinner by, COBRA’s furnishings didn’t seem much bleaker than
anywhere else.

There were a few
Dr Strangelove
touches nevertheless: part of one wall was taken up with an array of radio and communications equipment, and at the far end of the room there was another
blast door. This, she knew, led to the Nuclear Release Room, where the prime minister would use the codes in its safe to give the order for a missile strike if the time ever came.

Rachel removed the dossiers from her briefcase and placed them around the table, then helped set up the projector screen with a technician from the Cabinet Office while the room filled up. There
were five spooks: the heads of Five, DIS, GCHQ and the JIC, and Harry Bradley from CIA. It was, as Sandy had promised, a crowd of abbreviations. Rounding it out were the home secretary, Roy
Jenkins, and the foreign secretary, James Callaghan, the latter of whom had apparently been very annoyed to have been called in as he was about to set off on a trout-fishing holiday in Ireland.

The prime minister was the last to arrive. He was a more formidable figure than Rachel had expected from seeing him on television and from Sandy’s pre-meeting rehearsal, and his every
gesture seemed crisp and decisive. He lit a small cigar – his pipe was his trademark, but he smoked cigars in private – and nodded at Harmigan, who quickly got to his feet.

‘Good morning, gentlemen; Prime Minister. We’re against the clock so I’ll spare the chit-chat. We’re here to discuss this man.’ An image appeared on the
wall-screen. ‘I’ll allow my colleague, Rachel Gold, to explain.’

Rachel scraped back her chair and approached the screen.

‘Good morning. This is Erik Johansson. A Swedish citizen, he works for a haulage company in Stockholm. However, he isn’t who he seems.’ She nodded at the technician, and the
photograph was replaced with another of Dark, smooth-shaven and several years younger – it was from his 1964 pass-card for Century House, which Rachel had found in Archives. ‘In fact,
we’ve ascertained that he is the former British intelligence officer Paul Dark.’

Jenkins was the first to speak, his mellifluous voice dripping with scepticism.

‘And just how have you “ascertained” this?’

Rachel smiled politely, determined not to be intimidated. ‘The camera never lies, Home Secretary. Interpol sent us a photo and we compared it with all the images we have on file.’
She raised a hand, and with a loud click the photograph of ‘Johansson’ reappeared, now laid over the photograph of Dark. ‘As you can see here, the position of the eyes, mouth and
nose in relation to each other, the eyebrows, eyelids, the angle of the forehead, the size of the jaw – all are identical. His face has become fractionally narrower in the last six years, but
it’s definitely him.’

Jenkins peered at the picture through his thick spectacles. ‘Yes, I’ll grant it looks like him, but how sure are you?’

‘I’m afraid the answer is “very”. You can find all the details between pages three and nine of the dossiers. We used a graphics tablet to input the photos into our facial
recognition system and our calculations are that the chances of this being anyone other than Paul Dark is around five billion to one – more people than there are on the planet.’

There was a respectful silence in the room as this sank in. Rachel took a breath and continued.

‘Dark turned up on Interpol’s radar a few hours ago, following a violent incident off the coast of Finland. It seems that he’s been living undisturbed in Stockholm, where he
has a girlfriend, Claire Nsoka, who holds a Zambian passport but who the authorities in Lusaka have no record of, and that they have a young son. Both Nsoka and the son have apparently been
kidnapped – we don’t know who by – and Dark has resurfaced to try to get them back.’

She looked up at the men facing her. ‘There’s a full account of Dark’s activities in your dossiers, but the thrust is this: six years ago, a KGB officer walked into our Station
in Nigeria and claimed to know the identity of a major Soviet double agent working within the Service. Dark, who was head of Soviet Section at the time, realised at once that he was about to be
exposed and went on the run. He eventually wound up in Moscow, where it seems the Russians threw him in the Lubyanka, perhaps having decided that even they couldn’t trust him any longer. Dark
managed to escape from there, which is some feat, but was killed by Soviet special forces in a remote area between Sweden and Finland in October 1969 – or so we believed until today. Clearly,
we were mistaken.’

‘Clearly,’ said Callaghan, who was now foreign secretary but had been briefed about Dark when he had been home secretary in the government’s previous term. ‘Didn’t
that information about Dark’s death come from a Russian defector? One you lot swore blind was the genuine article, if I remember correctly. Have the Soviets fooled us all this time, and if so
does that mean Dark is still working for them?’