House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(10)
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.