Coincidence of Spies

Brian Landers

Description

'Brian Landers is the real deal'Andrew Raymond, author of the Novak and Mitchell thrillersWinter 1981.Poland is in turmoil. The Communist regime is close to collapse and the CIA wants to help it on its way. They ask for MI6 assistance but insist the MI6 Station in Warsaw is not involved. Why not? And who will the Americans accept? MI6 agent Thomas Dylan is sent from Moscow. His wife has just witnessed a murder and the Russian authorities want her out of the country. But when Thomas and Julia arrive in Warsaw the bullets start to fly. Two American agents disappear near the Polish lakes, a terrified Polish sailor jumps ship in Middlesbrough and a Polish peasant claims to have found the lost crown of a medieval King. Somebody needs to work out what's happening. And quickly. Because back in London a KGB killer is on the loose.

Informations

• Publié par: RedDoor Press
• Date de parution: 21 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839781773
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Coincidence of Spies
Brian Landers

Also by Brian Landers
Empires Apart: The Story of the American and Russian Empires
The Dylan Series:
Awakening of Spies Coincidence of Spies Exodus of Spies
Published by RedDoor
www.reddoorpress.co.uk
© 2021 Brian Landers
The right of Brian Landers to be identified as the author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design: Rawshock Design
Typesetting: Jen Parker, Fuzzy Flamingo
www.fuzzyflamingo.co.uk
Dedicated to my wife Liz, co-author of Julia’s chapter and champion of Olsztyn’s chicken cutlets


Contents
PROLOGUE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
AFTERWORD
Extract from Exodus of Spies
About the Author
PROLOGUE
MAY 1980
The street in Yaroslavl where the Turkish general, Samet Demirkan, was assassinated was wide but unremarkable.
There was an irony in the fact that the avenue had once been dedicated to Catherine the Great, the Russian empress who had devoted so much of her life to killing Turks. When the Bolsheviks came to power it had become Peasant Street. Today it bears the name of local hero Yuri Andropov who, for a mere fifteen months, was the country’s leader, or to give him his correct title, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. That last name change had not yet taken place when Demirkan was murdered. Back in 1980 Leonid Brezhnev was still in the Kremlin and Yuri Andropov was chairman of the KGB.
I wondered how Andropov reacted when told that the Turkish military attaché had been shot dead on the streets of his own home town. Did he nod in quiet satisfaction at a job well done? Or did he scream at the three KGB minders who had been shepherding our group around without noticing the killer approach nor even noticing him depart? Would the three have dared to admit that they had been distracted by the tour guide’s story about a train full of cats?
It was a story that appeared not to interest Demirkan, who was standing at the back of the group. I had looked around for my wife Julia and noticed him and the American, Ethan Jacobs, standing a little apart from the rest of us. Julia was standing in front of them.
Winter was officially over but the wind off the Volga was biting and the whole group were wrapped in their thickest clothes. The tour guide, who had introduced himself simply as Oleg and who was undoubtedly himself KGB, clearly did not enjoy showing a group of middle-ranking members of the Moscow diplomatic corps around his city. He seemed determined to provoke an argument.
The French cultural attaché refused to rise to the bait when the guide smugly related the story of the Russian princess Anna, favourite daughter of Yaroslav the Wise, who was sent to marry the French king in 1051. After signing the marriage documents in both Cyrillic and Latin script she was amazed to discover, said the guide, how backward were the nations of Europe. Her new husband, Henry I, was completely illiterate and could not even write his own name.
Only Ethan Jacobs seemed as keen to argue as the guide. He had recently arrived in Moscow and had an innocuous diplomatic title I have long forgotten. He was in fact the new chief of the CIA’s Moscow Station and had all the fervour of a true Cold War warrior. Jacobs pushed his way through our little group as the guide started explaining how Soviet education had banished superstition, as exemplified by turning the nearby Church of Elijah the Prophet into a museum of atheism.
‘Why, ’ Jacobs demanded, ‘don’t you tell us about the magnificent old cathedral I’m told used to stand here in Yaroslavl, right where the Volga and Kotorosl rivers join? Why did the Communists blow it up?’
The guide trotted out the Party line and then tried to deflect attention with a story about a train load of cats. It seemed that at the end of the Second World War the city of Leningrad was overrun with mice and rats. The inhabitants there had endured three years of siege during which they had been forced to eat all their cats. The patriotic citizens of Yaroslavl had therefore collected together all their own cats and sent them on a special train to Leningrad.
It was at that point, Julia recalled, that she heard a gentle cough behind her.
Turning around she looked directly into the eyes of Demirkan’s killer, but she only realised that later. The man was off before Julia had time to do more than register the peculiarities of his face. Demirkan was falling and Julia thought the stranger had accidentally collided with him. She reached for the general, trying to help him keep on his feet, but his legs were buckling. He was too heavy for her to do anything but cushion his fall.
The killer’s gun had been pressed deeply into his victim’s fur-lined coat and had in any case been fitted with a silencer. It was a moment or two before Julia realised how badly Demirkan was injured. Not until his wife pushed her aside did she look down and see his blood on her hands. It was then that the full realisation came: Demirkan had been shot and not only had she seen the face of the man who had pulled the trigger but she was almost certainly the only one in the group who had.
An image imprinted itself on her mind. Thin face, narrow nose, almond-shaped eyes, high forehead with short almost black hair. Most strikingly two deep, dark vertical crevices below the eyes. From more of a distance they would have looked like two identical birthmarks on the weather-beaten cheeks. It was a face she would never forget, although we were both sure Julia would never see it again.
In that we were wrong. Eighteen months later, when she had returned to her desk at the Defence Intelligence Staff in London, she would indeed see the face again. It was the face of a man the British police believed, quite wrongly as it turned out, was an IRA terrorist.





I
I had left the DIS, the Defence Intelligence Staff, at the end of 1977 in circumstances that would be unthinkable today. The new Director General was ‘rationalising’ the organisation but when he called me in it was not my departure he wanted to talk about.
‘Your wife will have to go, Mr Dylan,’ General Fearmont announced without preamble. ‘We can’t have a husband and wife working together.’
‘It’s not been a problem before.’
‘Well it is now. Many would consider it most improper that my predecessor had his niece working here at all, let alone with her husband. It certainly would not have been allowed in the Army. She will need to be reassigned as soon as possible.’
Had Julia been in the room I knew just what she would have said: she had joined the DIS before me, she was therefore the more senior and so if he wanted one of us to move on it should be me. It was a view I shared, partly because I had already decided that spending much longer working as a civilian analyst in this part of the Ministry of Defence was not for me.
‘If one of us has to leave why should it be Julia?’ I asked.
General Fearmont looked bemused. ‘You have a career here. Don’t you want that? The reports from your superiors have been excellent.’
‘So have Julia’s. What about her career here?’
It was clearly a possibility Fearmont had never considered. I wasn’t really surprised. My generation were only just starting to come to terms with women wanting their own careers, for his generation a woman’s career path was straightforward and ended in marriage and motherhood. Julia and I had married earlier that year and so, he assumed, she would soon be moving on whatever he proposed.
I didn’t know Fearmont well. He had only been in post for a matter of weeks and for much of that time I had been away starting to learn Russian at the Foreign Office language school (absurdly closed in the name of ‘efficiency’ thirty years later). I didn’t want to lose the opportunity of adding another language to my bow but the more I saw of the new DG the more I was determined to leave the DIS.
‘I will talk to Julia and see what she thinks about giving up her post,’ I said.
‘Nothing to talk about,’ responded Fearmont. ‘She’s an RAF officer, remember. She will go where she’s posted. It’s in your best interest, your wife’s best interest and most importantly in the best interest of the Service.’
When I told Julia what General Fearmont was proposing she was predictably furious. She was outraged that Fearmont had chosen to discuss her future not with her directly but with me and she had no intention of being posted off to some remote RAF station. My wife had started to realise that she was not cut out for life in the RAF but she would resign at a time that suited her. I half expected her to storm into his office but she had other ideas.
‘We’ll see,’ she responded and set about plotting. She phoned her uncle. ‘Thomas and I have a small problem,’ she told him.
Admiral Lord Grimspound, Julia’s uncle and General Fearmont’s predecessor, w