Rotten With Honour

by Derek Robinson

Genres: War & Military; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

Mikhail Starin, Head of Soviet Intelligence in London, is a ruthless, cold-hearted individual. Known to have killed 24 people, including his own mother, he's now determined to get his hands on a hard-to-stabilize nuclear formula. There's only one thing for British Intelligence to do: send him back to Russia as quickly as possible. They scheme to leak details of a top-level Western military secret - knowing that when the Russians discover the secret is a double cross, Starin is history. Unfortunately there's only one man available to oversee the job: David Hale; young, honourable, but completely out of his depth. Rotten with Honour is a Cold War espionage thriller told with the trademark wit of Derek Robinson, bestselling and Booker-shortlisted author of Goshawk Squadron.

Release date: June 19, 2014

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 224

Sample

THE RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR watched Starin trot down the steps of the Trade Mission, and felt an odd mixture of envy and distaste. The man was certainly very fit for his age; but all the same, wasn’t there something of a posture about such alertness, a sort of advertisement that he was still totally in command of his squalid job? Yes, there was. The Ambassador took a deep breath and prepared to be pleasant.

The Ambassador’s driver held the door and Starin got in, without breaking step. The door closed. The driver walked away and stood in the sunshine.

‘I was just passing,’ the Ambassador said. ‘So I thought I’d call.’

‘You could have come inside, Mr Ambassador. We’re not burning anybody with cigarette ends today. I know how the smell sets off your asthma.’ Starin sounded pleased with himself.

‘No doubt,’ the Ambassador said, ‘but I make it a rule never to go inside departments such as yours. I suppose some people might consider that cowardly, but I’ve found it eliminates a great many problems, and problems are never in short supply, are they?’

‘Ah,’ Starin said. ‘I have a feeling that we are about to come to the point.’

‘Yes, we are. You’ve probably heard that the British are becoming restless once more, and if you haven’t heard then I’m telling you now, officially.’

‘What d’you mean, “restless”?’

‘You know what I mean, Starin. They see too many people like you in London. Also too many Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, East Germans, Bulgarians, and Romanians, all of them quote diplomats unquote. They are terribly polite, the British. They keep sending us little notes about the parking problem and how much worse it becomes when we leave our cars in the wrong place. What they mean is kindly stop parking your big Communist noses in our secrets.’

‘That’s their problem, not your problem.’

‘It’ll be my problem if they decide to purge our Embassies. Again.’

Starin spread his hands. ‘If I can help in any way, Mr Ambassador,’ he said, ‘you have only to ask.’

The Ambassador looked out of the window. He was tired of this interview already; he had known that it wouldn’t work, and now it wasn’t working, so why keep trying? ‘My accounts department say they advanced a lot of money to you,’ he said. ‘And they still don’t know where it went or what we got for it’

‘We got?’

‘All right, then, you got.’ The Ambassador rapped on the window.

‘Information is what I got. That’s what I’m here for.’

‘And they’re here to balance the books. And I’m here to carry the can.’

His driver opened the door. Starin got out. He stood for a moment in the sunshine, snapping his fingers to a Latin beat, and then turned away. He spoke as he went. ‘All accountants live in the past, Mr Ambassador,’ he said. ‘They’re actually half dead. If I had my way I think I’d finish the job.’

*

‘Thank you, Stanley,’ Major Divine said. He took the six green files and propped them on the edge of his desk and the bottom of his waistcoat. Hubbard went away to the middle of the room and stood looking intelligent but not clever.

Divine read each file, grunting meaninglessly for Hubbard’s benefit as he closed one and opened the next. At the end he said, ‘And who would you choose?’

Hubbard took off his glasses and polished them with the end of his tie. ‘Eady or Boyle,’ he said. He put his glasses on to see how well he had done.

‘Splendid fellows both,’ Divine said. ‘Smart and experienced agents. In this case, I think we need somebody a bit more second-rate. I think we’ll have … Hale.’

‘David Hale? He’s not very experienced—’

‘But enough, Stanley, enough.’ Divine opened the file. ‘Twenty-six, Oxbridge, degree in languages. Cover job in merchant banking – Flekker Handyside, just down the road. No particular politics or religion. No wife, no kids, both parents dead and his next of kin is about seventeen times removed and lives in Buenos Aires. He’s as free as the wind, and nobody will give a damn if he dies tomorrow. Perfect.’ He turned the pages, glancing at the paragraph headings. ‘You don’t agree,’ he murmured.

‘I’m sure you’re right, Major. It’s just that… at twenty-six and not terribly experienced, this would seem to be a rather challenging task.’

Divine grunted; he was still stocktaking. ‘Hale had a love affair last year,’ he said. ‘His first grand passion, apparently. He spent several months in the furnace and came out looking like a piece of wrought iron.’

Hubbard clicked his tongue.

‘He’ll have got over all that by now, though,’ Divine said. ‘He’ll be all wound up and ready to go. Get him in, as soon as you can.’

*

David Hale slid a sheet of paper from his document wallet and pushed it across the desk. ‘That’s the outline of the Lavagarde deals,’ he said. ‘He and I hashed it out between us.’

Brandon, his boss, looked slightly startled. ‘Already?’ he said. He scanned the paper. ‘I thought Lavagarde was in Montreal.’

‘Yes, he is; staying at the Saint Pierre. That’s where I phoned him.’

‘Did you, by God? Whose idea was that?’

‘Mine. I got him at breakfast. I heard he’s usually at his best at breakfast.’

‘Yes, so it seems … Well, that’s not a bad start, certainly.’ He gave the paper back. ‘Lavagarde thinks the project’s worth nine million, does he? I’d have settled for eight, myself, but…’

‘As a matter of fact, he reckons it’s worth ten and a half,’ Hale said, ‘and we can go to eleven if necessary.’

Brandon raised his eyebrows. ‘More strength to your collective elbows,’ he said.

Hale went back to his office. He looked at his appointment book, at his watch, and at the man waiting for him. ‘I can only give you ten minutes, Jeremy,’ he said.

‘Right. I’ll stick to genuine scandal and leave out the wild rumours.’ He opened his briefcase.

Hale watched him and wondered where he got his information. Jeremy Sanders was a freelance financial consultant who was said to know more about the international rackets in exchange currencies than anybody still at large. Once a month he visited Flekker Handyside and briefed the account executives. He was an interesting little man, a few years older than Hale, with a face like a collapsed rubber ball: not impressive, but not without appeal, either.

‘Ready?’ Sanders said. Hale nodded. The telephone rang as Sanders opened his mouth. Hale answered it.

‘Hubbard here,’ a man said.

For a second the name meant nothing; and then it meant everything. ‘Yes indeed,’ Hale said. ‘I’ll come over straightaway.’ Already he was half-standing.

‘What a pity,’ Sanders said. ‘Just when something strange is about to happen to the Australian dollar.’ Hale waved goodbye from the door.

*

Hale felt the first flicker of excitement as he passed through the security check on the fourth floor of the office block in Tottenham Court Road. Divine’s room was on the sixth floor, which was as high as Hale had ever been; he knew that K2 had two more floors above that, but he didn’t know what went on up there.

One woman and four men were waiting to see Divine. Hubbard steered Hale past them, knuckled the door once, delicately, to remove any flies which might have been resting on the other side, and showed him in.

Divine shook his hand and at the same time gave him a glossy eight-by-six print. ‘Mikhail Starin,’ he said. ‘Taken at London Airport a couple of weeks ago while he wasn’t looking.’

Hale looked at the picture. It showed a short, strong man, about five-foot-eight or -nine, with a trim figure and a pleasant face. His mouth seemed willing to smile, there was plenty of brow, and his eyes were alert. He wore his hair short, with a modest wave at the front, and his slightly snub nose gave him a boyish air. The camera had caught a few lines at the corners of the eyes and some creases in the neck. Hale guessed he was in his fifties. The way he was standing – feet slightly apart and weight equally divided, hands clasped behind him – he might have been a games master at an up-and-coming boys’ school. ‘Mikhail Starin,’ Hale repeated.

‘A most dependable man is Starin,’ Divine said. ‘He never knocks anybody down unless he plans to kick them in the teeth. We know of a minimum twenty-four people he’s killed, not counting immediate family. He had his mother shot in 1937. She was Irish, she’d married a Russian merchant seaman and settled there. They raised Starin to be bilingual. Perhaps that’s why he hates the British so much.’ He gave Hale another photograph. ‘Tell me what you make of him.’

It was a portrait shot, full face, and the first thing Hale noticed were the eyes: pitiful and hard-done-by, the eyes of a man who has just mopped a thousand floors and watched ten thousand dirty feet march over them. The eyes were guarded by steep, suspicious brows above and dark concentric rings below, ripples pushing outwards to contact a hostile shore. But what the eyes began the rest of the face could not maintain. The nose was too long and twisted one way, the mouth was too narrow and twisted the other. The chin began a controlled retreat in the general direction of the Adam’s apple, and the retreat became a rout. It was a face that could obey but would never trust; scepticism was its last surviving privilege.

‘He looks like the man who cleans out the lavatories at Euston Station, sir,’ Hale said.

‘His name’s Kamarenski. Georg Kamarenski.’ They sat down, Divine at his desk, Hale on a sofa. ‘Couple of weeks ago Starin turned up in London and set up shop in a brand-new Trade Mission which the Russians opened in Islington, of all places. It raised a few eyebrows, because we all thought Starin was getting pensioned off, or at least busy throwing snowballs back home in deepest Disneyland.’

Divine found a telegram lying on the floor and began making an aeroplane out of it.

‘Now, one reason we’re so good at making the Russians behave themselves in this country is that we know a lot of people they send here before they ever arrive. In this case we have no idea what Starin’s up to.’ Divine squinted at Hale down the half-finished aeroplane. ‘But we do have a man inside their Mission. He’s Georg Kamarenski, and I’ve had a message to say that he’s on to something. I want you to find out what.’ Divine spoke these words flatly and finally, like a man informing his mistress that he has been unfaithful. Hale blinked.

‘How on earth did you get Kamarenski inside, sir?’ he asked. ‘I thought they always brought everybody with them.’

‘So they do. They brought Kamarenski. You’re probably too young to remember, but the RAF had a couple of airfields in Russia during the last war. Kamarenski worked at one of them. He picked up quite a bit of English, which is why they’ve brought him here now.’

‘Why is he risking his neck for us?’

Divine shrugged. ‘There’s a good reason - something typically agonizing in the way of psychological thumbscrews, which we can apply any time we want to. That’s the main reason. We also give him fifty quid a week, for the sake of appearances.’

Hale looked at Kamarenski’s photograph. ‘He doesn’t look very bright,’ he said.

‘Quite true. Kamarenski is indeed stupid, but he’s not foolish, and he has a remarkable memory. That’s how he learned his English.’ Divine studied his aeroplane, and did some more work on the wings. ‘What’s more, they’ve made him general handyman at the Mission, so he potters about and fixes things, like door handles and light bulbs and sticky windows. We’ve given him some special tools, all very battered and used-looking, with cameras hidden in the handles. He points his screwdriver one way and takes a picture the other.’

‘And you think he’s done it? He must have nerves like anchor chain, sir.’

‘Well, most men can be brave when they have no alternative. Kamarenski has something to help him: he stammers like the very devil. What good d’you think a bad stammer would be, David?’ Divine began experimenting with the tail section.

Hale said, ‘The only thing I can think of is camouflage. It must be hard to know whether a man with a stammer is panicking or just stammering.’

‘Right. A stammer is an excellent mask – which of course is the reason why stammerers do it. What other reward does your stammerer get from his affliction?’

Hale looked across at Divine. The man shaved his face right up to the cheekbones, he noticed, giving it a polished, wooden look. It was a strong, unblinking face; if you could hit it hard enough you might break it, but it would never crack or warp, never mellow. Its structure was too rectilinear: the brows ran parallel to the mouth, the angle of the nose matched the angle of the chin, the jaws and the cheeks met in flat, exact planes. His eyes were as dispassionate as a child’s; they offered nothing and concealed nothing. ‘Pity,’ Hale said with more force than he meant.

‘Right again. Stammers, stutters, cleft palates, hare-lips, amputees – I’ve used them all. They’re not only cheap, they’re foolproof. They never forget themselves. Kamarenski is a truly pathetic person. He could get past anybody’s guard.’ Divine straightened the aircraft’s nose. ‘Except, perhaps Starin’s.’

Hale stared. ‘But that’s exactly where he is, sir.’

‘Yes, that’s exactly where he is.’ Divine gave his model a final squeeze and launched it towards the light. It fell on its nose, hard, halfway across the room. ‘You’ve to meet him on Sunday in the gallery of Saint Nicholas’s Church, off Fleet Street, during Evensong. Don’t look so thrilled, I don’t suppose he’s got anything. Goodbye. Send the next customer in.’

*

Hale went to a party that night. It was given by a man who worked for Pan Am, and there were many girls there, mainly stewardesses resting between flights. By midnight Hale was sick of telling girls who had just flown from Canberra via Tahiti, Atlantis and Shangri-La that he had a job in merchant banking. He got himself a fresh drink and saw the girl in the yellow dress.

She was lithe rather than slim; her sunburnt arms in the sleeveless dress looked sleek with a kind of fluid grace which suggested strength rather than weakness. The dress was a cool-looking faded-daffodil yellow in a linen weave, beautifully fitted so that hints of the body beneath it came and went in faint, oblique lines as she moved. Her hair was blonde and long to the chin; too blonde to be true but glossy with weight, until she pushed it away from her face and broke the gloss. Her face was small and simple; it had the delicacy and toughness of a child disguised in adulthood. She was talking and smiling to a man in a dinner jacket. She looked happy.

Hale was deeply disturbed by the girl. She was so vulnerable, she invited protection; yet she was so untouchable, what could you say to her? He spent a quarter of an hour sidling about the room so that he could study her from all angles. She still looked happy. The dinner jacket danced with her. She had other friends.

Eventually Hale gave up. It was absurdly lopsided, a waste of time, he might as well forget it. He turned away and found himself in front of a girl with a see-through dress and a radiant smile. ‘If this is Thursday you must be Francesca,’ he said. She dazzled, and said nothing.

‘Can I get you a drink, or vice versa?’ he asked.

‘Oh, no.’ She dazzled some more.

‘I just strangled my grandmother.’ The girl gave a little laugh. Her earrings tinkled.

‘I’ll swop you two dead frogs for a Russian destroyer,’ he offered. She looked down, modestly. ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said, and walked away. It was time to go home. Tomorrow was a working day.

He found the Pan Am man and said good night. His coat was in the bedroom. So was the girl in the yellow dress. It seemed an amazing coincidence.

‘Are you leaving?’ he asked. She put her head on one side and considered his question, and him. He was very intense. Her eyes were wide. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Are you?’

‘I am.’

‘Then so am I.’

He helped her on with her coat. As they went down in the lift, he said, ‘You were the only interesting girl there.’

‘And you were the only interesting man. Why didn’t you come and talk to me?’

They went out into the street. It had been raining, and the cab made a high, clear, sheening sound on the soaking tarmac.

‘I’m David Hale.’

‘Carol Blazey.’

‘We should meet again.’

‘Yes, please.’ She was calm and completely enjoyable. ‘We haven’t really met at all, yet.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Yes again. You could call me. I work for the airline.’ She told him the number. He put her in a cab and watched it cruise away. He felt astonished; light-hearted. The day had ended with something of a small triumph.

*

The cultural attaché was tipsy. ‘I’ll tell you what gets on my left tit, Mikhail, old son,’ he said. ‘Goddam cocktail party last night.’ He beat himself weakly on the chest to dissipate his heartburn.

‘I know what gets on your left tit,’ Starin said.

‘No, no.’ The cultural attaché gestured negatively and ash flew from his overloaded cigarette. ‘Not the cocktail parties. Caviare. Tubs of the bloody stuff. Best quality. Know where they get it?’ He drained his already empty glass.

‘Yes,’ Starin said. ‘From us.’

‘They get it from us. We sell it to them! Now, I’m going home tomorrow. Think I’ll be able to get caviare like that at home? Think I will?’ He drained his empty glass again.

‘For God’s sake,’ Starin said, ‘pour your own.’ He put the bottle beside the cultural attaché and walked away. The cultural attaché irritated him because he got drunk too easily and then his broken-down, overweight body looked even worse. They’d taken half his stomach out and still he ate too much. Now that the alcohol had reddened his swollen face he looked like a pig, one that felt sorry for itself because it had a terrible shaving rash which it absent-mindedly picked at while it stared at nothing and thought about going home to second-rate caviare.

Starin should have been pleased that the cultural attaché was being retired; he’d known him for thirty years, on and off, and any calibre of caviare was too good for him. What angered Starin now was the fact that the cultural attaché had come to say goodbye because Starin was only a year or so younger, and he thought Starin might appreciate his views on life as they both shuffled towards retirement. That made Starin very angry.

‘Not bad stuff, this,’ the cultural attaché said. ‘French, eh? What did we give them for it?’

‘Machine tools.’

‘There you are again. Machine tools! All that labour, all that sacrifice, all those five-year plans, and where does it get us? Swopping first-class Russian machinery for a few barrels of French grape-squeezings. It gets right on my left tit, Mikhail, old son.’

‘There’s a reason for it,’ Starin said. ‘These things are worked out.’ He walked around the room, straightening files, tearing up old envelopes, squaring books.

‘No, no, no.’ The cultural attaché drank deep. ‘Time to face up to it, old son. You and I – relics of the past. Remember the good old days, eh? Remember when it was a clean, straight fight, and any dirty trick was OK as long as it worked? Remember?’ He tried to smile bravely, but that blight of a shaving rash moved with the smile and deleted it. ‘No room for old-fashioned warriors like us any more, Mikhail.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

The cultural attaché was deaf with nostalgia. ‘A man knew who his friends were in those days. Not any more. Know what my job is now? I mean, was now? Trying to stop bloody silly ballet dancers from bloody defecting. I ask you.’

‘You sound as if you’re ready to retire.’

‘Mikhail, old son – I am. More than ready. Frankly, I don’t know what’s going on any more. I don’t know whether we’re supposed to be kicking them in the crotch or kissing them on the ass. Do you?’

Starin looked at his fuddled, sincere stare with distaste. ‘No,’ he said curtly.

‘Course you don’t. And I’ll tell you why.’ He pointed his glass at Starin; wine slopped onto the carpet. “Cause we’re over the hill. Pair of old farts like us. Don’t know which way is up any more.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Starin muttered. He looked away. It sickened him to see a Russian representative so dilapidated and defeatist.

Unexpectedly, the cultural attaché chuckled. ‘Come on, be your age. We’re in a dying industry, you and I. They don’t need us any more, it’s all done with transistors these days. Obsolescent craftsmen, that’s what we are.’

‘I wish you’d damn well go.’

‘Tomorrow’s plane, old son. Plenty of time. Besides, you don’t want to waste the rest of this bottle. No, I saw it coming long ago. I shall be all right. Pottery … always been interested in pottery.’

‘Look, I have work to do.’

‘It occurred to me … since we’re neither of us married … you might like to split the cost of a cottage. I mean, I could start looking around for a place …’

‘Good Christ, no thanks.’

The cultural attaché was surprised. ‘Well, none of us goes on for ever, you know. If I were you I’d start making some plans. Honestly I would.’ He sucked at his wine, frowning. ‘It’s not like it used to be. If I were you—’

Starin grabbed an ashtray and hurled it at the cultural attaché’s head. He missed by a yard. The ashtray bounced off the wall and skidded across the waxed floorboards.

The cultural attaché gaped. Then he burst out laughing. ‘See what I mean?’ he said. ‘You’ve lost your touch, old son. Can’t afford to miss, you know.’ Still laughing, he got up and waddled away. Starin stood and listened to him cackling all the way along the corridor to the front door.

*

Hale waited for Carol outside her office block. He was restless with expectation and at the same time surprised by the force of his emotion: it was almost as if he were seventeen again, and that had been a very uncomfortable age. When she came out of the revolving doors he felt his eyebrows twitch. She stood out like a so. . .