Deep Blue Read online

  Praise for Alan Judd

  ‘Plotting in the best le Carré tradition’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘Belongs to the classic tradition of spy writing’

  Guardian

  ‘Judd infuses his writing with insider knowledge’

  New Statesman

  ‘Wonderful. One of the best spy novels ever’

  Peter Hennessy on Legacy

  ‘Entertaining and compulsively readable’

  Melvyn Bragg on A Breed of Heroes

  ‘John le Carré has no peer among contemporary spy novelists, but Judd is beginning to run the master close . . .’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Judd is a masterful storyteller, with an intricate knowledge of his subject and a sure command of suspense’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘Rivetingly accurate’

  Observer

  ‘Alan Judd writes exceedingly well’

  Evening Standard

  ‘Judd keeps plot and action centre-stage . . . he has written a novel perfect for brightening up a drizzly winter Sunday’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘This is undoubtedly Judd’s best spy novel yet – both as a thriller and in terms of its plot construction’

  Spectator

  ‘He knows that world backwards and writes with an understanding of human frailty that is rare’

  Sunday Express

  To Derek Hillier

  Chapter One

  The Present

  Agent files – paper files, anyway – told stories. It was never quite the whole story – nothing was ever that – and they could be misleading, repetitive and elliptical, but as you opened the buff covers and fingered the flimsy pages of carbon-copied letters and contact notes, and the thicker pages of Head Office minutes or telegrams from MI6 stations, a skeleton became a body and eventually a person. It was the story of a relationship; sometimes, almost, of a life. And sometimes, as with the file that Charles Thoroughgood sat hunched over that evening, it bore the ghostly impress of another story, an expurgated presence that had shaped the present one without ever being mentioned.

  Files rarely lied in terms of content; their lies were usually by omission, nearly always on security grounds. In this case Charles knew those grounds well, having written much of what was in the file, and nearly all of what wasn’t, many years before.

  Pellets of rain splattered against his office window, invisible behind the blinds he had insisted upon despite assurances that the security glass could not be seen through. Having spent much of his operational career penetrating the allegedly impenetrable, he was reluctant to accept blanket security assurances. The more confident the assertion, the less he trusted it, and now, as Chief of MI6, he was better able to assert his prejudices than at any point in his eccentric and unpredictable ascent to the top. But not as much as he would have liked; Head Office was still in Croydon and the government seemed in no hurry to fulfil its promise of a return to Whitehall.

  He was on volume three of the file, the final volume, reading more slowly as he neared the point where he had joined the case as a young officer on the Paris station during the Cold War. He was alone in the office but for the guards and a few late-stayers, having sent his private secretary home. Sarah, his wife, was also working late, the common fate of City lawyers. The file was a relief from his screen with its unending emails and spreadsheets; also an escape into a world which, because it was past, seemed now so much simpler and clearer than the present. But it had seemed neither simple nor clear then.

  There was no hint of a link to another file, no reference to papers removed. When at last he found what he sought he moved the green-shaded desk lamp closer and sat back in his chair, the file on his lap. Movement reactivated the overhead lights, which he disliked for their harshness, but if he stayed still for long enough they would go out. The desk lamp he had brought in himself, against the rules.

  The paper he sought was in two sections, the first typed in Russian in Cyrillic script, the second a translation into English by someone from the Russian desk in Century House, the old Head Office during much of the Cold War. They should not have been in this file at all, an ordinary numbered P file belonging to a dead access agent run by the Paris station. Josef, as Charles had known him, was a Russian émigré who, unusually, had been allowed out of the Soviet Union on marrying a secretary from the French Embassy. Before that he was a journalist who had committed some minor indiscretion which had earned him ten years in a labour camp, in the days when ten years was what you got for being available to fill a quota, especially if you were Jewish. Settled in France, he had come to the notice of the Paris station, which had recruited him to get alongside visiting Russians. The relationship with the Secret Intelligence Service lasted many years, sustained by snippets from Josef which usually promised more than they delivered, and by payments from SIS, before Charles was sent to terminate him. That was when the case became interesting.

  The paper did not, in fact, pertain to Josef at all, though that would not have been apparent to anyone reading the file. It was recorded that Josef had been in a labour camp, so a first-person account of a visit to the camp years after it had closed would be assumed to be his. The account had been left on Josef’s file after other papers had been silently removed, doubtless because whoever weeded the file had made the same mistaken assumption. By the time Charles had discovered it, both Josef and Badger, code-name of the author of the paper, were dead. It might have drawn attention to the Badger case to have transferred papers to it years later. Not that anyone read old paper files any more. Charles was probably the only person still serving who knew both cases.

  There was no real need for him to re-read Badger’s account of his visit to his former prison camp. Charles remembered it well enough and his renewed interest in the case now, so many years later, was not because of that. He read it partly because he was nostalgic, partly to revive his sense of the man known as Badger, whose own file he had yet to re-read, and partly in penance, acknowledgement of unfulfilled promise. The description of the camp visit was intended by Badger to be part of the memoir he never wrote, an indication of what he hoped to publish when safely resettled in the West. But he never was resettled and this was the only chapter written. Charles had promised that, if anything happened to Badger, he would see it published somewhere. And never had.

  Turning to the typewritten English translation, marked by Tippexed alterations and the translator’s margin comments in pencil, Charles read:

  Since I was in that remote region, the region of my last camp, and with time to spare before the flight back to Moscow, I told my driver to take me to it. He was puzzled. ‘There’s nothing there, it was closed years ago. Just the huts and the wire and some of the old guards who have nowhere else to go.’

  ‘Take me.’

  It was farther from the airport than I thought and there was fresh snow, unmarked by other car tracks. It was fortunate that the driver knew the way because I should never have found it, hidden in a clearing in the midst of the forest. The iron gates were open and, judging by the depth of snow piled up against them, had been so since autumn. The grey sky was breeding more snow now and on either side the high outer fence stretched into the blurred distance, sagging in places. The watchtowers stood like tall black cranes, one of them with a dangerous list. Inside the wire, the huts were squat white shapes with here and there a misshapen one where the roof had collapsed. The doors at the ends, shielded by overhangs, were mostly shut but some sagged open on rotted hinges.

  I told my driver to wait and keep the engine and heater running. Then I walked slowly through the gates. There were other footprints in the snow leading to the first hut, a larger H-shaped one which used to be the guardroom. Behind it was the inner fence with an
other set of open gates. Within that fence were the huts. The guardroom door opened before I reached it. I wasn’t surprised. The sight of a shiny black ZiL and an official in a long black overcoat with a sable astrakhan and matching gloves was not a common one for the wretches within. A hunched figure hobbled out, muffled in old clothes and using a stick. He hurried over as if afraid to miss me.

  ‘Greetings, greetings, I am Kholopov, Ivanovich Kholopov. I was sergeant here. I am your guide, if you wish.’

  He had a thin dirty face and his lips were never still, working continuously. He looked smelly. I knew he would be, I knew exactly how he would smell, but I had no need to get that close.

  ‘I know the camp well, I know everything about it, I have been here nearly thirty years. I worked here, I was sergeant of the guards.’

  I took off one glove and fished out a few coins from my coat pocket. I didn’t bother to count them. He held out his hand, his glove worn through on the palm, and I dropped them into it without touching him.

  ‘Thank you, thank you kindly. What would you like to see – the kitchen, the offices, the punishment cells, the graveyard, the huts, the bathhouse? It is all empty, all available.’

  ‘Everything. Show me everything.’

  That puzzled him. ‘Of course, of course, I can show you every hut, every bunk. Only there are very many and it will take time—’

  ‘I will tell you when to stop.’ I noticed now that he had a twitch in his left cheek.

  ‘With pleasure, it is pleasure. Please follow me.’

  We crunched through the snow together, slowly because of the curious way he hobbled. He told me about the building of the camp in the 1930s, initially by the first prisoners sent to it who lived – and often died – in holes in the ground until the huts were up. He described its expansion, then its gradual contraction after the death of Stalin until its closure in the Gorbachev era, by which time it housed only a few politicals, as he called us.

  ‘But when Comrade Gorbachev let the prisoners go the authorities forgot about us, the guards and administrators. We stayed, we had nowhere to go. How can we go anywhere? Where could we go? There is no work for us here but we cannot afford to move. Unless they open the camp again.’ His laugh became a prolonged cough. ‘We have pensions but they are a pittance, which is why we have to beg from generous visitors such as yourself.’

  We reached the first of the huts inside the inner wire. The number one was still just visible in faded white on the wooden door. ‘We can go in if you want but there is nothing there, nothing to see. They’re all the same. In this block there are numbers one to thirty-nine, the rest are in the other block. Twenty prisoners to a hut but sometimes there were more. They are all the same, the huts. So were the prisoners. Over there are the camp offices and the punishment cells and the bathhouse and the sick bay and our own quarters. They are more interesting. These are just huts.’

  I offered him a cigarette. He glanced as if to check that he had not misunderstood, then grabbed one. ‘Thank you, thank you.’ His eyes lingered on the packet, which he couldn’t read because they were American, Peter Stuyvesant. His eyes lingered too on my gold lighter. ‘Number thirty-seven,’ I said. ‘Take me to thirty-seven.’

  The cigarette seemed to give him energy and his lop-sided hobble through the rows became more rapid. The smoke was good and pungent in the cold air.

  ‘You see, they are all the same,’ he said again when we reached it.

  ‘Open it.’

  I sensed he was reluctant, probably because of the effort involved. He put his cigarette between his lips, leaned his stick against the wall, pushed down on the handle and put his shoulder to the door. It was obviously stiff at first but then opened so freely that he nearly lost his balance. He stood back so that I could look in. ‘Nothing to see, just the bunks. They’re all the same.’

  He had to move as I stepped in. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. There were sprinklings of snow on the earth floor beneath the closed wooden window-hatches. The ceiling was low, the wooden double bunks lined the sides, some with broken slats, others still with remnants of old straw. The gangway down the middle was too narrow for two to walk side by side and to get between the bunks you had to go sideways. There was an old metal bucket on the floor by the door and a musty smell. It felt colder inside than out.

  I walked two-thirds of the way down and stopped by the lower bunk on the left side. It was no different to all the others, of course. My guide hobbled behind me.

  ‘You knew someone who was here?’ he asked.

  I didn’t answer. After another minute or so of fruitless and circular contemplation, I turned back up the aisle. You live with the past but you can’t live it. I left my guide struggling to close the door and headed back towards the gates. The snow was thicker now and the outlines of distant huts rapidly became indistinct. Eventually I heard him shuffling and panting and he caught up with me.

  ‘Is there anything else – the punishment cells, the camp offices?’

  I was between the inner and outer fences, approaching the H-shaped guardroom, when he made one last effort, pointing with his stick. ‘I could show you the cookhouse. We use it. It still has the ovens and pots and pans—’

  That made me stop and think. ‘No,’ I said. ‘That was the guards’ cookhouse. The cookhouse for the prisoners was that one, there.’ I pointed at a long low building just inside the inner fence.

  He followed my gaze, then looked back at me, his lips still for once. ‘You are right. I had forgotten. I have been here too long, I am too familiar. But you, how could you—’

  ‘I was here.’

  We stared at each other in a long silence, but for the hiss of the snow. Those three words, three simple words, sunk into him like stones in a pond. Who were the prisoners, the real prisoners? And how could I be a senior official with a ZiL and furs? I took the cigarettes and the remaining coins from my pocket. He dropped his stick in the snow and held out his cupped hands. He was still staring, uncomprehending, as my car pulled away.

  At the foot of the original Russian text was a handwritten note in English, in Badger’s characteristic forward-sloping hand and his usual brown ink: So you see, Charles, we are all prisoners really, even the guards. Tell your people who doubt my motivation – is this not enough?

  Charles closed that volume of Josef’s file and put it with its mate. Then he picked up Badger’s file, a slim single volume also buff-coloured but this time with a red stripe, a different number system and a white stick-on label with heavy black lettering saying, ‘Closed. Do not digitise.’ He had stuck that on himself years before, proof of rare premonition. It meant the case had remained secret and, unlike digitised files, was fully recoverable.

  Chapter Two

  The Present

  ‘But I thought you’d have been back ages ago, before me. That’s why I left the message about the fish, so that you could be getting on with it.’ Sarah closed the oven door with unnecessary force. ‘If I’d known you were going to be so late I could have stayed and finished what I was doing.’

  ‘Sorry. I thought you were going to be later so I just carried on.’

  ‘You could’ve let me know. And now it’s gone ten and neither of us has eaten. It’s ridiculous. It’s not good to eat so late. Medically, I mean.’

  ‘Mexicans do.’

  ‘Bugger the Mexicans.’ She had to stop herself smiling. ‘I think you enjoy provoking me, don’t you?’

  ‘Keeps you young.’ He ducked the oven glove she threw. ‘Chardonnay or Sauvignon?’ In just over a year of marriage they had never had a row. They had tiptoed round each other, careful not to provoke, each watchful to see where the limits might be, aware that their being together at all was an unimaginable bonus. They had met decades before, as students, an intense relationship whose disintegration had had consequences as unimaginable as their present state. She had gone on to marry one of Charles’s friends, who had preceded him as Chief of MI6. The events leading to h
is death had brought them together, events which could still make their new-found unity feel fragile. Whenever tension threatened, they almost competed to defuse it.

  Over dinner, she said, ‘I’ve just avoided a case we would both find embarrassing. Representing the Action Against Austerity movement in a human-rights case against the government. They’ve got some very left-wing barristers involved and I got out of it by arguing that it’s really one for our litigation department rather than the kind of private-client stuff I do and that when – not if – it came out that their solicitor was married to the Chief of MI6, it could look like a conflict of interest and bring the firm into disrepute.’

  ‘Why did they come to you? Not your normal sort of work.’

  ‘No idea. Ignorance, perhaps, or if they knew maybe because they liked the idea of a little embarrassment. Anyway, you should be grateful I got out of it. Bound to be a high-profile case. Just the sort I hate.’

  ‘The Triple A, as Whitehall now knows it, came up at the National Security Council. MI5 are worried that they’re infiltrating the Scottish National Party but can’t do anything about it because MI5 don’t spy on British political parties.’

  In fact, the AAA had not been on the agenda but had been mentioned to Charles, in what bureaucrats liked to call the margins of the meeting, by Michael Dunton, MI5’s balding and genial Director General. ‘Don’t suppose the Triple A will cross your radar screen unless they become an international movement,’ Michael said, ‘but they’re posing us a few problems. Not so much in themselves; they’re the usual rag-bag of activists, anti-nuclear, anti-establishment, anti-capitalist, anti-everything except animal rights. We’re happy to ignore them unless they’re subverting parliamentary democracy or wreaking industrial havoc by violent means, in which case we’re entitled to investigate them. But they pose a problem because they seem to have infiltrated the wilder shores of the SNP, the ones calling for a Scottish breakaway, a unilateral declaration of independence, and they’ve got several secret little things on the go which are almost certainly subversive and may be downright dangerous. But we can’t investigate them without simultaneously gathering intelligence on the SNP, which is off limits, of course, and would cause enormous political ructions if it came out. So we can’t do anything. Much as the government would like us to, so long as we didn’t ask them first.’ He smiled.