The Dark Chronicles (67 page)

It had soon become clear to me that Yuri, or Colonel Fedor Fedorovich Proshin as I now knew his real name to be, had been the mastermind behind my career as a Soviet agent, from my recruitment
at the age of twenty onwards. He had greeted me in Moscow, but it was no hero’s welcome. I was one of several British double agents who had ended up here: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and George Blake. But, unlike them, I was no longer a Communist, and had been brought here against my will, whereas they had all defected by choice.

After I’d been put through a comprehensive – and extremely unpleasant – medical examination, Yuri had proceeded to interrogate me about every aspect of the twenty-four years since I had sought him out in a displaced persons camp in the British Zone of Germany. He hadn’t presented it as an interrogation at first, even installing me in fairly comfortable quarters, but the armed guards had never left me with any doubt about the truth of the situation.

He had started every morning the same way: once I was seated, he would open up my dossier and read directly from the reports my handlers had sent to Moscow at whichever point in my career we had reached. After that, the questions would begin.

‘Why did you cut off all contact for eighteen months after this meeting?’

‘Why did you not mention that Burgess and Maclean had come under suspicion?’

‘Why didn’t you tell us about Penkovsky?’

And so on, ad infinitum. Part of me had been expecting it – the documents I’d discovered in Rome had revealed that for several years they had suspected me of being a plant by the Service, feeding them carefully selected secrets along with a healthy dose of disinformation: in effect, a triple agent.

That theory had eventually been discredited in ’51 and I’d been cleared as ‘highly valuable’, but now Yuri revived it. The material I had taken so many risks to give them meant nothing to him. It was only the information I had
neglected
to hand over that he found telling. But while it was true that the higher I’d risen in the Service the greater my access to classified material had been, my seniority had often made it harder for me to hand material over, because so
few others had such access. If it had ever come to light that the Soviets had this kind of information, I would have immediately come under suspicion.

Yuri had dismissed this argument with a wave of his hand. While my actions would have had me strung up in England, from his perspective I was now an erratic agent with perplexing gaps in his story, who for good measure had betrayed several Soviet agents and even killed two of them. It didn’t help that I made no attempt to conceal that I was disgusted with myself for falling into their arms, and with him for the way in which he had recruited me.

He had finally lost patience with me in June, and it was then that I had been moved into Steklyashka, where one day I had been marched into a briefing room and been confronted by Sasha, whom I hadn’t seen since we’d arrived in Moscow. He had been my handler since the early Fifties, but any hope that he might prove to be any more understanding as a result was rapidly dispelled. He had barely acknowledged our past relationship, and was even more hostile than Yuri had been. I’d always known that his friendliness towards me was contrived, of course, as real as the intimacy a prostitute shows a wealthy and potentially long-term client, but it had still come as a shock when it was switched off so swiftly, and so absolutely. The familiar ‘My dear Paul’ had no longer issued from his lips, and his benign condescension had been replaced by a cold and sometimes frightening implacability.

At first I’d thought his behaviour was a pose, a way to get me to talk more by making me want to recapture the old bonhomie, but I’d soon realized that there was nothing forced about it, and that this was in fact his real self – or, at least, his Soviet self.

I looked at him now, partly obscured by the back of his seat, staring at the road ahead of us. He was wearing a uniform and
ushanka
, neither of which I’d ever seen him wear before, and he didn’t look right somehow. I knew every inch of his face, from the lines around the eyes to the bristles of his pointed beard, but I found it increasingly hard to associate him with the cheery fellow in the tweed
coat and polka-dot tie I had met in an assortment of pubs, cinemas and dives in London, a collector’s book of postage stamps under his arm. English Sasha had always seemed podgy and harmless, but Soviet Sasha was a burly bear of a man with an air of barely repressed violence emanating from him. Over the years he’d often told me that he loved London, and I wondered if that had simply been a lie to get me on his side, or if his recall to Moscow had hardened him, and he’d forgotten his appreciation of the good life he’d once led in the West.

Perhaps he was simply scared. My failures as an agent reflected badly on him, and possibly even placed him under suspicion of disloyalty. After Stalin’s death, Khrushchev had been, relatively speaking, benign, but Brezhnev had started pushing things back in the other direction: arresting dissidents and sending them to labour camps or into ‘internal exile’. Perhaps that was where we were all going now: to some
gulag
in Siberia where we would freeze our arses off until we died.

Whatever the reason, when Sasha had taken over my case any remaining pretence that I was simply an agent undergoing a debriefing had vanished. I was unequivocally a prisoner, placed in a small concrete cell and entitled to one bowl of thin soup and three cigarettes a day. Every morning and afternoon I had been made to write an account of my career, operation by operation, month by month. After that, I would be summoned into a small office, where he would question me at length on everything I’d written. We had reached June 1961.

The car took a sudden turn, throwing my shoulder against the door. The windows were covered by grey curtains, but there was a small gap near the edge and I peered through it at the streets speeding by. Giant portraits of Lenin lined the roads, but I saw very few other cars. It must still be quite early in the morning. Domes shone faintly in the distance, and there was a glint of copper in the sky, a refraction, I imagined, from the giant stars of the Kremlin. But then we took a turn – we didn’t seem to be heading that way.

The car slowed to a halt in front of a nondescript building painted a faded
orange, and I was dragged out by one of the men. The other stayed in the car with Sarah, and I wondered fleetingly if it would be the last time I saw her.

It had started to snow now and the wind was sharper, biting into my cheeks and stinging my eyelids. Sasha led the way to a sentry box manned by two lieutenants in light blue greatcoats, both armed with finely polished semiautomatic rifles. A pigeon pecking at the ground nearby suddenly came to a standstill and turned in the same direction, its chest puffed out, and for a moment it looked like it was imitating the sentries. All it needed was a few brass buttons and a miniature
ushanka
to complete the picture, but a moment later it returned to its pecking, and the illusion was broken.

Sasha handed some papers to one of the men, who looked through them, then turned and spoke into a small grate in the wall. There was a loud hissing noise, and I saw that the whole section of wall was, in fact, an air-locked door. With some effort, the sentry pulled it open and stepped inside. After a moment’s hesitation, Sasha motioned to me, and we followed him in.

We were in a dimly lit space, smaller than the size of my cell. I could see the sentry just ahead, wrestling with the lock of another, much larger, door. Once he had opened it, we walked into a room with concrete walls and a large blanket of green netting in the middle. The sentry knelt down and pulled this to one side, revealing a small wire cage recessed several feet into the floor. He climbed down into it and Sasha and I followed. The sentry pulled a lever in a box on the side of the cage, and we started to descend with a loud cranking noise.

It was then that I recognized the mood I hadn’t been able to identify in the car. It wasn’t panic. It was fear. They were all terrified out of their wits, and I couldn’t blame them. Those had been bomb-blast doors we had just come through.

We were entering a nuclear bunker.

As the machinery of the lift whirred, I tried to gather my thoughts. I knew very little about the Soviets’ contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack – few did – but years of surveillance by the West indicated that they had built a massive underground city in the area of Ramenki, a few miles outside Moscow. I didn’t think we were there but still beneath the capital where it was thought there was a complex of command and control points and a bunker built by Stalin before the war, all of it connected by a secret second underground railway system.

I thought we must now be inside that labyrinth, but several things were puzzling me. First, why were we going into it at all? There couldn’t have been an attack, because we had come here overground. Was it some sort of exercise, then, or simply a secret meeting? It seemed a little over the top for either, and didn’t account for the level of fear I was sensing in Sasha and the others. And secondly, why on earth were they bringing
me
here? Since my arrival in May, their treatment of me had been overwhelmingly hostile, yet now I was apparently trusted enough to be taken to one of their most secret military locations.

The lift jolted to a sudden halt. The sentry gestured for us to step out, and when we had, he pulled the lever and the cage started ascending again, leaving me alone with Sasha. Another sentry stepped from the shadows and led us into a narrow passageway with curved steel walls. Lamps riveted to the walls were spaced
every few feet, halos shimmering around them, but between them it was pitch dark. It was also unpleasantly clammy. I tried to catch my breath, but Sasha, directly behind me, pushed me forward.

We walked down the steel plankway of the passage, the echo of our footsteps flattened and tinny. After a few minutes, we reached a large door covered in a thick cushion of black leather. The sentry pushed a button on the wall and a few seconds later the door swung open. Sasha gestured to me to enter first, and I stepped through. He followed. The door immediately shut behind us, and a second later I heard the echo of the sentry’s footsteps as he began the walk back up the corridor.

I took a breath and looked up. Lights shone down from sconces in the walls, and it took a moment for my vision to adjust. We were in a huge hall, the far end of which was taken up by a circular table with a segment cut out of its centre. This was encircled by thick marble pillars that held up an elaborate painted cupola that looked like it belonged in the Vatican. Seated around the table were around thirty elderly men, some of them wearing dark suits but most in uniform. A man was standing at the table. Unlike the others he was jacketless, his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows. In one hand he clutched an amber cigarette holder, in the other a sheaf of papers he was brandishing at his audience. I didn’t recognize him at first, because he was wearing spectacles and his hair was slightly in disarray, but then he looked up through dark eyes under thick eyebrows, and I realized with a start that it was Brezhnev.

*

He stared at Sasha and me for a moment, evidently caught in mid-sentence. Then he set down his papers.

‘Who the hell is this?’ he said, his voice a deep baritone.

There was a scraping noise and I followed it to about halfway down the table, where one of the men was pushing his chair back. It was Yuri. He was wearing the uniform of a Colonel-General: it
was immaculate, perfectly pressed, with a line of glittering medals across the chest.

‘Paul Dark, General Secretary,’ he said. ‘The British agent. You may remember I suggested fetching him earlier, in case he had any knowledge pertinent to the situation. His file is in the papers, Section Five.’ He leaned over and picked up a folder from an attaché case on the table.

Brezhnev waved his hand as though swatting at a fly.

‘Be seated.’

Yuri bowed extravagantly and then beckoned me with two fingers, like an emperor summoning a slave. I glared at him, but stepped forward. Yuri gestured towards a vacant chair next to him and I installed myself, the hard wood of the seat angling into my buttocks. Yuri recoiled from me a little, wrinkling his nose: it had been a few days since I’d had a shower. I repressed the urge to place my hands around his throat and crush his windpipe.

Sasha was still standing by the door, and Yuri nodded at him.

‘Thank you, Alexander Stepanovich. That will be all.’

Sasha hesitated for a fraction of a second before saluting, but in that moment an odd expression came over his face. It wasn’t quite disappointment, I thought – more like hurt. Perhaps he had been expecting to stay. He turned and marched back out of the door.

I looked around the rest of the room. It was in the grandiose style the Soviets reserved for their upper echelons. There were oil paintings on the walls, elaborate cornices, highly polished parquet floors and, arranged on the table, a dozen or more telephones, the Bakelite glistening under the glow of Art Deco lamps. One wall was taken up with a row of clocks giving the current time in Moscow, Washington, Peking, London and several other cities. It had just gone seven o’clock in the morning here. The wall behind Brezhnev was covered in red velvet curtains; I presumed to give the illusion that there were windows behind them. A large map of the world was spread out across the table, and around it were strewn pens, papers, bottles of Borzhom mineral water and glasses. It was much
grander than the British bunkers I’d visited, which had been grim, skeletal places devoid of any luxuries – nothing but holes in the ground, as one minister had called them. But this place was just as lifeless in its way, and just as depressing. It wasn’t real life, but a simulacrum of it. I wondered how long they’d been down here; I was already feeling claustrophobic, and I’d only just arrived.

One thing was abundantly clear. This wasn’t an exercise, or a good spot for a meeting. Something had to be
seriously
wrong for Brezhnev to be in an underground bunker. Although he was in his early sixties, he looked much older. Everyone knew him to be stout, hearty and fond of a drink, as all good Russians were, but he looked a wreck. There were dark circles around his eyes, and I now saw that one hand was shaking. He looked like a bull that had been cornered: angry and ready to lash out.