John Gardner - Man From Barbarossa

Back in the Bernadotte suite he told Tanner to order dinner from room service. ‘Just a light supper for the three of us. Then I’m going back to London.’ He fixed Meadows with bleak eyes, the colour of the North Sea in winter. ‘Nigsy, you’ll go further north. Join a couple of people up there. Chief of Staff will give you the mumbo-jumbo after he’s telephoned London. We’ll pinpoint this Lost Horizon hotel. You can try to run interference for Bond if he makes a break for it. Intuition tells me this isn’t just an internal power struggle or a genuine attempt to shame the government into putting Vorontsov on trial. There’s something more at stake here. Something which could affect all of us. Global, as the strategists say. I’m very unhappy. It feels as dangerous as trying to ride out a hurricane in a ketch.’

They had Ølebrød – that devious beer soup which is a favourite in Stockholm – followed by Janssons frestelse , a wonderfully simple casserole of potato, onion and anchovy, something which suited M’s jaded palate, and while they ate, Nigsy asked about General Berzin. ‘How, sir?’ not expecting an answer.

M filled his mouth with a forkful of the casserole, closing his eyes. It was the nearest Meadows had ever seen him to admitting that the taste of food could be a beautiful experience. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘a literal translation of this dish is Jansson’s temptation. I have a recipe at home, but nobody can make it in London.’

He ate more, washing it down with an aquavit flavoured with rowanberry and a long draught of beer as a chaser.

‘Berzin,’ he said the name and gave a grim smile. ‘You recall Berzin, Chief of Staff?’

‘Like yesterday.’

So, uncharacteristically, M told the story. ‘You remember Savall?’

‘The cipher clerk?’ Meadows knew people who had worked with Stanley Savall at the Moscow Embassy. The rumours were that he was a spy who had committed suicide.

Savall, while in Moscow, had been honey-trapped into a homosexual relationship with one of the KGB’s male prostitutes. The ones they called voron – ravens, the counterpart of their lastochka. In the space of a year they collected massive amounts of audio and photographs. This was in the late sixties. When Savall was posted back to London, the Russian service laid the news on him. They could destroy his life. So Savall agreed to do what was asked of him. Over two years he systematically stole classified information and fed it to his control in London. Then he was caught, in a routine security check. There was no fuss. The Security Service kept it quiet and spirited him off to a safe house where they dried him out. The safe house was a fifteenth-century manor house in Wiltshire, near the ancient city of Bath.

While the British and American Services did not go in for assassination, the Russians had never been shy of it, so the interrogators ringed the old manor house with experienced members of the SAS. They knew that Savall could give them a lot of information regarding KGB operational practices in the UK.

On the third night after they had moved Savall into the house, two members of the SAS stalked and caught a man dug into a skilfully concealed position, giving him a view of the garden area where Savall was allowed to exercise. The man wore a camouflage suit and carried a Dragunov SVD sniper rifle. He would answer no questions, so they passed him on to M who carried out the interrogation himself in the secure rooms underground, below the headquarters overlooking Regent’s Park.

Before he began the inquisition, M had the prisoner’s photograph run through their vast filing system which they called ‘the magic machines’. The machines put a name to the face, so, when he began the first session, M seated himself opposite this hardened, tough young soldier, offered him a cigarette and began to talk. ‘Colonel Berzin,’ he began. ‘I wonder how your wife, Natalie, and your two children, Anatol and Sophie are getting on in your quarters in Kirovograd. I would speculate they won’t be allowed to stay there for long.’ He then gave the colonel a rundown of his entire life history, his training and the present mission. He even guessed, correctly, at how Berzin had come into England, via France and Guernsey. There was no doubt what his mission had been. Then M threw a packet of cigarettes on the table and left Berzin alone for two days.

When he returned, M told the soldier what they intended to do. ‘We’re simply going to send you home. When you arrive back, you can carry on your normal life. But I have to tell you that a full report of your capture, together with a copy of the secret information you have given us in this interrogation, and a tape, will be sent to the GRU.’

‘I have told you nothing,’ Berzin laughed.

‘They’ll only have your word for that.’ M gave him a warm smile which said he loved all mankind. ‘You won’t be leaving for a week or so. In that time we shall put you under drugs and question you.’

‘I know nothing that would interest you. I am a soldier with no access to the greater secrets of the Organs.’

M nodded. ‘Probably, but we’ll have your voice on tape, and from it my technicians can produce amazing confessions. By the time we send the transcript and tape to GRU and KGB, you’ll have told us things you did not even suspect you knew.’

‘I am a soldier,’ Berzin protested again.

‘Then that will be the end of it. You will probably die like a soldier, while your wife and children will be packed off to the Gulag. Good riddance.’

Berzin broke about an hour later. He claimed that he was merely on a training exercise. He had no orders to kill Savall. Then he spilled all he knew about the training and use of Spetsnaz forces – how they would be used in any war and how they were used now as an élite force undertaking difficult military espionage and clandestine operations in the NATO countries.

‘He talked himself dry,’ M told them in the Bernadotte suite. ‘Gave me everything, then said he needed asylum for himself and facilities to get his wife and children out of Russia. We refused.’

M had asked him if he enjoyed his life as a soldier. It was all Berzin had ever wanted. He was also a high achiever who knew , as high achievers always know , that he had a marshal’s baton in his knapsack.

‘We simply told him that we wanted his happiness. He could return to Russia. We would even provide him with photographs showing that he had eliminated Savall. Already we had done a deal with him .’ Savall was to be given a new identity and shipped off to Australia once he answered all the questions. ‘He was pretty spineless,’ M said with disgust.

Before they allowed Berzin to leave, M had spent an evening with him. ‘We will never ask you to spy for us,’ he told the Spetsnaz officer. ‘But there may come a time in the future when you can be of some small service to us. I swear to you that it will never be in time of war, nor will it be against your country’s interests. If that moment ever comes, someone will be in touch with you.’ He then gave Berzin the code phrases, together with a lurid description of how he, personally, would see that a tape of all their conversations went to the right hands in Moscow if the officer did not do the favour asked.

‘There is a lesson in this,’ the wily old spy said. ‘Keep everything. Never throw anything away. Use every scrap that’s given to you. I imagine the general will come up trumps.’ He smiled gleefully now, and turned immediately to the orders he had for Meadows, letting Bill Tanner do the detailed briefing.

That night James Bond and Nina Bibikova showered together once more, to escape the fibre optic lenses and the invisible ears. ‘I know,’ Bond said, close to her ear. ‘I saw both of them. You knew they’d be here, I presume?’