The sterling affair, p.21
The Sterling Affair, page 21
Although he could not see what was going on, Alexander knew that something was afoot from the way in which the crowds’ cheering had dramatically escalated. Then he saw it: a flag was being hoisted up the pole.
The roar of commendation and approval reached a fever pitch when the flag attained the top, unfurling to reveal the red, white and black horizontal stripes of the 1952 Egyptian revolutionary flag.
A metallic crackle drew Alexander’s gaze to a loudspeaker affixed to Navy House. Then came Nasser’s voice and the crowd settled to a near silence.
‘This is an immemorial moment of a lifetime,’ he announced, to more cheers. ‘We have dreamed of this moment which had been denied to our fathers, grandfathers and our brothers, who have fought for years to achieve this moment and to see the Egyptian flag flying over our land. We pray to God that no foreign flag ever flies in our skies again. May God guide you.’
The men went wild and, for the first time, Alexander heard shouts of dissent. Not dissent towards Nasser, though, but towards the British and French. To his right came a yell about evicting British imperialists from Egypt.
Alexander suddenly felt a shudder of vulnerability. Were the sneering men pressed close to him noticing him for the first time? Or was he just being paranoid? He lowered his head, just as a crack of gunfire rang out. He flinched, as another, then another shot was fired into the air. A gun salute, he realised, as his heart raced.
It was time to leave. He turned to try to push his way through the crowds, the end of which he could now not see, then paused a moment. He thought that he had heard his name being called. He scanned around him, trying to tune out the gunfire and the city’s clamorous approving cheers. He couldn’t hear his name being called again, but that which he could hear—and now see—were several aircraft, flying in at a low altitude across the sea towards them.
‘Alexander!’
There it was afresh. Somebody was indeed calling his name. It sounded as though it had emanated from the direction of the line of soldiers.
He turned, carefully eyeing the crowd for as far as he could see. Then, through the heaving heads and shoulders in front of him, he spotted a tuft of blonde hair belonging to someone who appeared to be in difficulty with a growing number of men surrounding him. He was fairly certain that it was Alfie Archer, who was struggling to get his attention.
Using his right shoulder as a barge, Alexander shoved himself forwards, navigating a route towards Alfie, just as nine aircraft flew seemingly inches above the canal-side buildings, receiving a rapturous applause from the gathered men.
Alexander felt as though he were wading through treacle in trying to reach his colleague. As he drew closer, he could see that Alfie had been encircled by a group of men, taunting and shouting in Arabic. One of them jabbed him in the chest, sending him backwards onto another man, who then shoved him forwards.
Alexander pushed closer. Although he couldn’t understand the words that the men were using, he understood the tone well enough.
‘British scum,’ one of them spat, squaring up to Alfie. Well, the intention and meaning encapsulated in that was perfectly clear.
‘He’s not British,’ Alexander said, taking on some obscure, vaguely American accent. ‘He’s American.’
The Americans had so far kept a low profile in the escalating tensions in the Middle East and this information seemed sufficient to cause the men to pause and stare at each other, as if they were no longer sure how to proceed. Americans, generally, were well-regarded here.
Under the roar of another flypast overhead, Alexander reached in and grabbed Alfie by the arm, dragging him through the crowds. He turned to see that the men, who had been taunting Alfie, having abandoned their confrontation, were now pushing instead to get a closer view of Nasser.
‘Thanks,’ Alfie said breathlessly, as they made it to a quiet side-street. They stood under the cool shelter of a first-floor balcony. Alfie whispered, ‘I don’t like this anti-British feeling in the air with Nasser’s visit. Can we lie low at one of your family members’ houses…or maybe a friend’s place? You must have plenty of contacts here.’
‘I do,’ Alexander answered in a similar hushed tone, ‘but I don’t think the situation’s going to improve when Nasser buggers off back to Cairo. If anything, it’s going to get worse. I think we need to return to Beirut as soon as possible. Besides, it’s not safe to write from here about what we’ve seen today.’
‘True enough,’ Alfie agreed. ‘I mean, did you…’ he stopped himself short when two Egyptian men walked past them, then continued. ‘Did you see the planes they used in the flyover?’
Alexander nodded.
‘Russian MiGs, for God’s sake,’ Alfie seethed. ‘You need to get us out of this place. I’ll be outside your hotel entrance in an hour. Be ready.’ He walked quickly, keeping his head down, back to the main street.
Alexander stood, watching him leave and wondering how Alfie knew at which hotel he was staying. Despite having undertaken work for British intelligence for the last three months, they still hadn’t fully accepted him into their ranks. The pattern had been identical each time: the Observer would send him out around the Middle East, ostensibly undertaking research in order to write some innocuous article for the newspaper, but soon after each story had been commissioned, an advert would appear in the paper’s classifieds—where Mrs Strickland would be buying or selling something or seeking a new lodger—and he would telephone the number and receive instructions about what additional task he should undertake.
In Iraq, he had been required to fraternise with a female cipher clerk from the American Embassy, to try to establish the US position in the event of the UK-managed company, Iraq Petroleum’s being nationalised. In Syria, Alexander’s task had been to identify pro-Western members of the government, who could be used as scapegoats and blamed if a clandestine plan for Iraq to annex Syria were to fail. In Yemen, having identified a tractable administrator in their security services, he had bribed him for blueprints of the second residence of the country’s leader, Imam Ahmad, which Alexander had assumed was with a view to regime change. What was interesting to him now, though, was that, despite having been tasked with writing a story about the people’s view of the upcoming presidential referendum, he had yet to be called upon by Mrs Strickland for any supplementary services.
Alexander walked back to his hotel purposefully, all the while thinking about how odd the past two months in the Middle East had been. Was this how it was, working for MI6? Did spies not refer to themselves or each other in that explicit way?
In his hot hotel room, Alexander packed quickly and then sat on the bed, making notes about what had happened today. At 1.58pm, he looked over the balcony at the hotel entrance: Alfie wasn’t there, yet. He looked up and down the street, but there was no sign of him. So, he went back inside, stowed his notepad in the side pocket of his suitcase, and then returned to the balcony, thinking that he would wait there until Alfie arrived. He glanced down to the entrance to find that he was already there, looking up at him with a smile. Not only did he know in which hotel Alexander was staying but he also knew in which room, apparently.
Alexander waved, picked up his suitcase and headed out through the hotel.
‘Over to you,’ Alfie said, when Alexander had reached him. ‘Get us out of this hell-hole.’
‘Right,’ Alexander said, looking up and down the street. ‘I rather thought we’d head straight for the centre and get a bus to the border.’
‘Too risky,’ Alfie retorted. ‘On the way here, I was asked if I was English by this pair of thugs. Said I was Australian, of all things, which seemed to satisfy them. Take us the back ways—you know, the rat-runs and back alleys that nobody uses—and we’ll pay some local man with a decent Mustang to get us over to Israel.’
‘Okay, let’s go,’ Alexander said, leading the way determinedly down the thin passageway which ran beside the hotel.
‘There you go,’ Alfie said with an Australian accent, slapping Alexander between the shoulder blades. ‘That’s what I like to hear.’
The passage wound its way around the back of the hotel, to what appeared to be a courtyard servicing the rear entrances to several large buildings, including those of the oil refinery. Thankfully, the street was deserted.
‘This is more like it,’ Alfie commented, keeping up the accent, as he followed behind Alexander to where the road terminated at a narrow perpendicular path.
Alexander paused at the junction, looking in both directions.
‘Lost?’ Alfie asked.
‘No,’ Alexander answered. ‘Just deciding which way’s best.’ After deliberating a moment more, he chose to go right and they continued in that direction for some time, passing behind a long ochre apartment block and a rundown car garage.
‘How did you know where to find me?’ Alexander asked pointedly, in the hope that Alfie might finally open up about his involvement in British intelligence.
Alfie smiled. ‘Well, as Rudyard Kipling once said, “If you truly wish to find someone you have known and who travels, there are two points on the globe but to sit and wait and sooner or later your man will come there: the docks of London and Port Said.”’
Another cryptic answer which failed to answer the question. Alexander repaid Alfie’s smile with a look which he hoped expressed the uncertainty that he felt in his role out here.
They took another turning which ran behind some squat white houses, and then they reached a main road, busy with men buoyed from the recent display down at the canal zone.
Alfie reached out and grabbed Alexander’s arm. ‘But…we’re back where we started,’ he said, pointing down the street. ‘That’s the oil refinery beside the Hotel Dakhla.’
‘Oh, damn. We should have turned left back at that junction,’ Alexander admitted. ‘Bugger. Sorry.’
‘Look,’ he said, pointing to the canal zone at the end of the road, where Nasser had raised the Egyptian flag. ‘The party’s over and people are starting back in our direction. We need to get out of here, pronto. Let’s just put on our best Australian accents and get a bus out of the city as quickly as we can.’ Marching in a near-run, Alfie headed a few paces ahead of Alexander along the main road towards the bus station.
Alexander hoped that his carelessness wouldn’t be relayed to whomever Alfie Archer reported. He was being entrusted with crucial British intelligence, which he detected was about to intensify. With the unsettled times ahead, that intelligence would be gold-dust.
Five days later, Alexander headed down to St George’s Hotel, where he took a seat on the terrace, watching the red sun arcing down towards the horizon, and sipped his fourth pink gin, the taste for which he had first acquired at the meeting with GK at White’s Gentlemen’s Club. He had just finished reading the Observer from cover to cover, scanning for any references to Mrs Strickland, or any other names which might jump out at him, but there was nothing.
To his side a figure was approaching, and Alexander turned to see that it was a thin-faced man with a scraggy moustache and unkempt thinning hair. Their eyes met, but neither of them spoke, until the man had slid into the chair opposite him. ‘I have read your stories in the Observer, Mr Emmett. Very interesting,’ he murmured in a heavy Baltic accent.
‘That’s very kind of you to say so,’ Alexander replied.
‘I think you have good insight into the region’s troubles.’
Alexander eyed him, waiting for the words that he knew were coming.
‘Perhaps we could meet sometime to discuss your feelings on a common market of the Arab countries?’
‘Yes,’ Alexander replied.
‘Thank you for your time,’ the man said, rising from the table. He shook Alexander’s hand. ‘Goodbye.’
Alexander nodded, watching as the man turned to leave. He opened his hand and looked at the fragment of paper, upon which was written SU2FG.
‘Oh, by the way,’ the man said with a sniff, ‘the referendum result will be announced shortly: Nasser is the new president of Egypt.’
Alexander sat back and sank the last of his pink gin, just as the muezzin’s call to prayer wafted out over the city from the mosque’s loudspeakers. He emitted a long sigh, which expressed a mere fraction of the complexities of his upcoming role in Middle Eastern politics. He looked again at the snippet of paper to confirm that he had memorized it correctly, then rolled it into a tiny ball and jettisoned it over the wall into the sea.
With a simple but subtle hand gesture, Ellen’s Watcher colleague, Paul Reynolds, handed the surveillance of Nikita Sokolov over to her. Paul would now head back to Leconfield House and log a report on the progress of his observations this morning. The trailing of Sokolov and piecing together of his associates was now A4’s main priority. Something, which was as yet unknown to MI5, had given rise to increased activity in Sokolov’s movements in the past two months, coinciding with a quantity of high-grade secret intelligence being leaked to the Soviets. Whatever was going on today, Sokolov was going to great lengths to evade surveillance by dry-cleaning himself of pursuers or proverka, as it was termed in his own KGB jargon.
But today, A4 had managed to maintain a constant watch from his flat in Bayswater, right across to the east of London, to where he was now, striding through St James’s Park.
Through a gap in the cluster of people, which Ellen tried to maintain between them, she caught a glimpse of Sokolov’s long black overcoat. Fifty feet or so behind Ellen, was another female Watcher, ready to take over when Ellen felt that she had been pursuing him for too long, or, in the worst-case scenario, if Sokolov actually clocked her presence.
MI5 had no idea of Sokolov’s plans, but something was imminently afoot, of that Ellen was certain. You didn’t spend your entire morning zigzagging across London for an innocuous lunch with a friend, returning a library book, or to pay your electricity bill. Could he be leading them, at last, to the person responsible for getting whatever intelligence, which he had somehow obtained, out to the Soviets? MI5 were very much under the impression that Sokolov knew that he had been under twenty-four-hour surveillance and was now only acting as an intermediary.
Sokolov suddenly looked over both shoulders, forcing Ellen to side-step to the left so that the two women in matching brown suits, walking a few feet in front of her, obstructed his view; although it may have been too late. When she shifted her weight over to one side, so that she could see past one of the women, she noticed that he had stepped off the main path and was walking diagonally across the grass. He stopped and placed one hand on his hip. The other hand, acting as a sunshield, he held just above his eyes, as he started to shuffle a full circle.
He was about to get a full view of everyone who had previously been walking behind him.
Ellen increased her pace, quickly drawing alongside the two women. She beamed widely and turned to them. ‘What a miserable old day,’ she laughed.
The one farthest away simply looked at her, bewildered, whilst the closest to her smiled politely, and replied, ‘Isn’t it.’
‘Typical British summer,’ Ellen laughed, continuing to walk with the two women, as she entered into Sokolov’s line of vision.
‘I just wish it would make up its mind, one way or the other,’ the woman next to Ellen said.
‘Off anywhere nice?’ Ellen asked, hoping to keep her place beside them until she would have passed completely out of Sokolov’s sight.
‘Back to work,’ the other woman answered with a frown. ‘Why do you ask?’
Ellen laughed. ‘Oh, just being friendly.’
‘Well, if you don’t mind, we were right in the middle of a private conversation,’ the woman said.
‘Terribly sorry,’ Ellen replied, making no effort to change her speed or direction of travel. Just a few more yards and she would be behind a cluster of cherry laurels.
‘Look,’ the less friendly of the women snapped. ‘Push off, now, will you?’
‘Cheerio,’ Ellen said cheerfully, as she hastily cut behind them and cowered in the shadows of the shrubbery. She took a breath, then began to insert herself into the bushes, gradually and slowly parting the branches until a small window had formed overlooking the open stretch of grass on the other side. It took a moment for her to locate Sokolov. He was sitting on a bench, with his legs crossed at the ankles, whilst he spoke to the person sitting beside him: Flora Sterling.
Ellen was delighted to have proof that something serious was going on with Flora Sterling and Nikita Sokolov and simultaneously frustrated that the pair of them were sitting on a bench with nobody and nothing around them but a wide expanse of grass and Buckingham Palace framed in the background at a distance.
She felt completely helpless and had a cold flash-forward to the debrief with Mr Skardon, where she would be unable to tell him anything other than that the pair of them had met on a bench in St James’s Park. She could hear him now, ‘That’s proof of nothing, Miss Ingram. Any names revealed as to how state secrets are being obtained and passed to the Soviets? No? Any agents identified? No?’
Ellen removed herself from the bushes and looked around her. She spotted a young boy of perhaps eight or nine years of age, kicking a balled newspaper along the path.
‘Hey, you,’ she called to him. ‘Want to earn some money?’
He nodded.
‘I’ll give you one pound if you kick that ball of yours over to the bench on the other side of this bush, where a man in a black coat is sitting with a pretty young woman. I need you to very carefully listen to what they’re saying whilst you kick the ball in front of them, then put it in the bin beside them, then come back to me. Don’t rush, but don’t hang around, either. Make it look like you’re just dilly-dallying and not really listening to them at all.’
The boy stared at her, saying nothing and looking puzzled.
‘You mustn’t tell them anything. In fact, don’t even speak to them.’ She repeated the instructions and asked if he understood.
