House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(8)
The Fort consisted of three wings—the east, the west, and the main, where most of the actual training took place. Directly above the gatehouse was a suite of rooms reserved for the chief, and beyond the walls was a tennis court, a squash facility, a croquet pitch, a helipad, and an outdoor shooting range. There was an indoor range as well, though Reg suspected his passenger would not require much in the way of weapons training, firearms or otherwise. He was a soldier of the elite variety. You could see it in the shape of the body, the set of the jaw, and in the way he shouldered the canvas duffel bag before striking out across the courtyard. Without a sound, noted Reg. He was definitely the silent type. He had been places he wished to forget and had carried out missions no one talked about outside safe-speech rooms and secure facilities. He was classified, this one. He was trouble.
Just inside the entrance to the west wing was the little nook where George Halliday, the porter, waited to receive him. “Marlowe,” said the new recruit with little conviction. And then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “Peter Marlowe.” And Halliday, who was the longest serving of the Directing Staff—a holdover from the days of King Henry, according to Fort legend—ran a pale, spidery forefinger down his list of names. “Ah, yes, Mr. Marlowe. We’ve been expecting you. Sorry about the weather, but I’d get used to it if I were you.”
Halliday said this while stooping to remove a key from the row of hooks beneath his desk. “Second floor, last room on the left. You’re lucky, it has a lovely view of the sea.” He laid the key on the desktop. “I trust you can manage your bag.”
“I trust I can,” said the new recruit with something like a smile.
“Oh,” said Halliday suddenly, “I nearly forgot.” He turned and clawed a small envelope from one of the pigeonhole mailboxes on the wall behind his desk. “This arrived for you last night. It’s from ‘C.’”
The new recruit scooped up the letter and shoved it into the pocket of his watch coat. Then he shouldered his canvas duffel—like a soldier, agreed Halliday—and carried it up the flight of ancient steps that led to the residential quarters. The door to the room opened with a groan. Entering, he allowed the duffel to slide from his sturdy shoulder to the floor. With the keen eye of a close-observation specialist, he surveyed his surroundings. A single bed, a nightstand and reading lamp, a small desk, a simple armoire for his things, a private toilet and bath. A recent graduate of an elite university might have found the apartment more than adequate, but the new recruit was not impressed. A man of considerable wealth—illegitimate, but considerable nonetheless—he was used to more comfortable lodgings.
He shed his coat and tossed it on the bed, dislodging the envelope from the pocket. Reluctantly, he tore open the flap and removed the small notecard. There was no letterhead, only three lines of neat script, rendered in distinctive green ink.
Britain is better off now that you are here to look after her . . .
An ordinary recruit might have retained possession of such a note as a memento of his first day as an officer in one of the world’s oldest and proudest intelligence services. But the man known as Peter Marlowe was no ordinary recruit. What’s more, he had worked in places where such a note could cost a man his life. And so after reading it—twice, as was his custom—he burned it in the bathroom sink and washed the ashes down the drain. Then he went to the room’s small arrow-slit of a window and gazed across the sea toward the Isle of Wight. And he wondered, not for the first time, whether he had made the worst mistake of his life.
His real name, needless to say, was not Peter Marlowe. It was Christopher Keller, which was intriguing in its own right, for as far as Her Majesty’s Government was concerned, Keller had been dead for some twenty-five years. Consequently, he was thought to be the first decedent to serve in any department of British intelligence since Glyndwr Michael, the homeless Welshman whose corpse had been used by the great wartime deceivers to feed false documents to Nazi Germany as part of Operation Mincemeat.
The Directing Staff of the Fort, however, did not know any of this about their new recruit. In fact, they knew almost nothing at all. They did not know, for example, that he was a veteran of the elite Special Air Service, that he still held the record for the regiment’s forty-mile endurance trek across the rugged Brecon Beacons of South Wales, or that he had achieved the highest score ever in the Killing House, the SAS’s infamous training facility where members honed their close-quarters combat skills. A further examination of his records—all of which had been sealed by order of the prime minister himself—would have revealed that in the late 1980s, during a particularly violent period of the war in Northern Ireland, he had been inserted into West Belfast, where he lived among the city’s Roman Catholics and ran agents of penetration into the Irish Republican Army. Those same records would have mentioned, in rather vague terms, an incident at a farmhouse in South Armagh where Keller, his cover blown, had been taken for interrogation and execution. The exact circumstances surrounding his escape were murky, though it involved the death of four hardened IRA men, two of whom had been virtually cut to pieces.
After his hasty evacuation from Northern Ireland, Keller returned to SAS headquarters at Hereford for what he thought would be a long rest and a stint as an instructor. But after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, he was assigned to a Sabre desert warfare squadron and dispatched to western Iraq, where he searched for Saddam Hussein’s lethal arsenal of Scud missiles. On the night of January 28, 1991, Keller and his team located a launcher about one hundred miles northwest of Baghdad and radioed the coordinates to their commanders in Saudi Arabia. Ninety minutes later a formation of coalition fighter-bombers streaked low over the desert. But in a disastrous case of friendly fire, the aircraft attacked the SAS squadron instead of the Scud site. British officials concluded the entire unit was lost, including Keller.