Spy Line Read Online Free PDF Page B

you,’ said Valeri. ‘Four years.’
    Bower leaned forward to touch the radiator as if checking to see if it was warm. ‘Four years.’
    ‘About four years,’ he replied defensively.
    It was all part of the game: Bower’s studied apathy and his getting facts wrong to see if the interviewee changed or misremembered his story. Valeri knew that, and he did not enjoy the mistrust that such routines implied. None of us did. ‘Would you show me again?’ Bower asked, pushing a battered cardboard box across the table.
    Valeri opened the box and searched through a lot of dog-eared postcard-sized photographs. He took his time in doing it and I knew he was relaxing for a moment. Even for a man like this – one of our own people as far as we knew – the prolonged ordeal of questioning could tighten the strings of the mind until they snapped.
    He got to the end of the first batch of photos and started on the second pile. ‘Take your time,’ said Bower as if he didn’t know what a welcome respite it was.
    Until four years before, such identity photos had been pasted into large leather-bound ledgers. But then the KGB spread alarm and confusion in our ranks by instructing three of their doubles to select the same picture, in the sameposition on the same page, to identify a man named Peter Underlet as a spy, a KGB colonel. In fact Underlet’s photo was one of a number that had been included only as a control. Poor Underlet. His photo should never have been used for such purposes. He was a CIA case officer, and since case officers have always been the most desirable targets for both sides, Underlet was turned inside out. Even after the KGB’s trick was confirmed, Underlet never got his senior position back: he was posted to some lousy job in Jakarta. That had all happened at the time my wife Fiona went to work for the other side. If it was a way of deflecting the CIA’s fury and contempt, it worked. I suppose that diversion suited us as much as it did the KGB. At the time I’d wondered if it was Fiona’s idea: we both knew Peter Underlet and his wife. Fiona seemed to like them.
    ‘This one,’ said Valeri, selecting a photo and placing it carefully on the table apart from the others. I stood up so that I could see it better.
    ‘So that’s him,’ said Bower, feigning interest, as if they’d not been through it all before. He picked up the photo and studied it. Then he passed it to me. ‘Handsome brute, eh? Know him by any chance?’
    I looked at it. I knew the man well. He called himself Erich Stinnes. He was a senior KGB man in East Berlin. It was said that he was the liaison man between the Moscow and the East German security service. It must have been a recent photo, for he’d grown fatter since the last time I’d seen him. But he still hadn’t lost the last of his thinning hair and the hard eyes behind the small lenses of his glasses were just as fierce as ever. ‘It’s no one I’ve ever seen before,’ I said, handing the picture back to Bower. ‘Is he someone we’ve had contact with?’
    ‘Not as far as I know,’ said Bower. To Valeri he said, ‘Describe the deliveries again.’
    ‘The second Thursday of every month…The KGB courier.’
    ‘And you saw him open it?’ persisted Bower.
    ‘Only the once but everyone knows…’
    ‘Everyone?’
    ‘In his office. In fact, it’s the talk of Karlshorst.’
    Bower gave a sardonic smile. ‘That the KGB liaison is sniffing his way to dreamland on the second Thursday of every month? And Moscow does nothing?’
    ‘Things are different now,’ said Valeri adamantly, his face unchanging.
    ‘Sounds like it,’ said Bower, not concealing his disbelief.
    ‘Take it or leave it,’ said Valeri. ‘But I saw him shake the white powder into his hand.’
    ‘And sniff it?’
    ‘I was going out of the room. I told you. I shut the door quickly, I wasn’t looking for trouble.’
    ‘And yet you could see it was white powder?’
    ‘I wish I’d never mentioned the