The Cilla Rose Affair Read Online Free PDF

was no message.”
    “Intercepted?”
    “Probably.”
    “So he was blown.”
    “Something happened.”
    “And then she sank. Very conveniently.”
    “A deliberate scuttling, we always suspected. Either to silence Mark or to conceal something aboard the Cilla Rose they were afraid we’d discover. Perhaps both.”
    Ian spiked another prawn. “So you’ve been tasked to ferret out Victor Barnfather. What does he have to do with the Cilla Rose affair?”
    “Barnfather was an up and coming young agent with MI5 in 1966. A contemporary of Simon Darrow’s. I would be very surprised if there weren’t some secrets traded…some tidbits of information that would mean nothing to the average person…but something to the principal players…”
    “So you start with Simon Darrow. And then…?”
    “Then,” Evan said, sitting down with the telephone and dialling Darrow’s number at the radio station, “we follow the little trail of crumbs all the way to the gingerbread house.”

Chapter Four
    Monday, 19 August 1991
    Evan paid his admission and rode the slow lift to the north landing, wandering casually among the exhibitions detailing the history and engineering feats of Tower Bridge, and the development of London’s docklands. He carried on to the enclosed high-level walkway that connected the north and south towers, where Simon Darrow was perusing the scatterbox jumble of London’s architecture along the mud-brown stretch of the Thames.
    He looked, Evan thought, every inch the broadcasting mogul: yacht racing and expensive gold wristwatches, comfortably cool in a blue-striped shirt and canvas-coloured trousers. “Good afternoon, Simon.”
    Darrow turned around. The walkway was hot. In the distant summer’s haze, the rounded dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral was barely recognizable. Further to the west, the slim, pointing finger of the Telecom Tower was all but invisible.
    “What can I do for you?” he said. He’d been waiting for Evan for half an hour.
    Evan produced Yuri Gregchenko’s obituary—a small mention taken from The Times .
    “Yuri Gregchenko,” Darrow said. “Never heard of him.”
    “I’m not surprised,” Evan replied. “He’d apparently heard of you, though, Simon.”
    He’d brought the manuscript with him, in a large brown envelope. Withdrawing it, he leafed through the pages, studiously and with a faint touch of the theatrical.
    “Here we are, Simon.”
    He watched the man’s face as he read Gregchenko’s account of the recruiting of a young, up and coming broadcaster named Simon Darrow who was coerced into monitoring the activities of an MI5 agent installed aboard a pirate radio ship anchored in the Thames Estuary. A broadcaster named Simon Darrow who had saved the day for the Soviets by intercepting an urgent coded message the MI5 agent was preparing to pass on to his Canadian contact.
    Evan watched the broadcaster’s face closely, but, aside from a slight twitching of the man’s lips, there was no outward betrayal of his emotions.
    “It’s fiction!” he said, finally, forcing a laugh. “Preposterous fiction. Where did you get this?”
    Evan took the manuscript back into safe-keeping. “Where do you think?”
    “Now you listen to me. I can state categorically that what you have there is a complete and utter fabrication. I don’t know what Gregchenko’s motives could have been in naming me as a Soviet informer, but he’s wrong. I don’t deny being aboard the Cilla Rose —that’s where I began my broadcasting career—but I most certainly wasn’t any sort of spy. Good heavens, I wouldn’t know the first thing about it.”
    “Not an awful lot to know about spying, Simon. Keep an eye on the target, watch what he does. Steal into his cabin while he’s on the air and remove the message you know he has hidden in the binding of Muirhead’s Short Blue Guide to London . Report your success to your KGB contact when you next go ashore. You had shore leave, in fact, the night the