1.Ghosts of Futures Passed

 

Akrotiri, Cyprus

1959

 

The white buildings stood ghostly in the moonlight. The whole world slept haunted only by the distant baying of a dog that echoed against the walls of the narrow Akrotiri streets and rolled out across Dreamer’s Bay.

Corporal Mike Ward pushed himself against a wall, into the shadows. His face and hands were blackened with charcoal and it would have taken a keen eye to see him, but nonetheless he waited until he was certain that the sound he had heard, a heel scuffed against loose gravel, so he thought, was no more than his heightened imagination. Once sure, he moved forward towards the two-storied, white-faced building fifty yards away. Ahead he could sense more than see Lieutenant Jay Hanson, no more than a creeping silhouette, as he made sure that the way ahead was clear. Hanson had done this a hundred times and yet never dropped his cautious, measured approach. ‘If you get caught,’ he always said in the few moments they went out, so that there was never any doubt, ‘you’re on your own. We will disown you. If foreign authorities detain you, we will deny you. If they insist on giving you back to us, we will sacrifice you like a goat.’

Ward moved forward, rolling gently from his heels to the balls of his feet with each careful step, his sole firmly on the ground, his knees bent so that he was ready to drop, straighten or run like hell. It was all myth to walk on tip-toe; if you’re going to step on a twig, stifle the sound with a good British army size eleven foot.

Hanson raised an arm. Ward fell back to the wall and froze. Ahead of them came the slap-slap-slide of feet against the gritty road as a drunk tottered unsteadily home. So, Ward had heard something. He smiled to himself with satisfaction. The man, all gut and stubble, stopped, looked furtively about, then undid his fly and urinated against the side of a house. It sounded like Niagara Falls in the silence. All it needed was for a curious home owner to hear the noise and come out shouting and he and Hanson would have to call it off. They couldn’t risk being seen or even near any sort of commotion. There was always another night.

The drunk finished his business, took an interminable time to pack everything away, wiped his hands down his shirt, then stumbled on. Hanson emerged from the shadows and waved Ward on. Once outside the target Hanson stopped. He withdrew once again into the darkness and waited for Ward to reach him.

When Ward was within a couple of feet of him, Hanson gave him the thumbs up. If necessary he would create a diversion or subdue the curious. It was unlikely at midnight in this town, in this heat, but one never knew. He had learned that lesson just the once; that was enough. He would wait outside for five minutes, time enough for Ward to do what had to be done, then work his way back to their vehicle.

Ward’s hand went instinctively to his waist, to feel for the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife. He needn’t have worried. It was there, reassuringly hard and cold, even in the stagnant, hot air of a Cyprus night. The knife was not new. It had been handed down to him by a friend who had served with the SOE and had now retired. He had been a sort of mentor to Ward and told him that, unlike people, the knife would never let him down. It had no markings but for the man’s initials; AK, engraved minutely onto the handle, just below the guard. Ward had never been tempted to substitute them for his own initials.

He returned the thumbs up to Hanson and ducked into the doorway of the house. He tried the door. It was bolted from the inside. He knew that it would be, but there was always that chance...

He had noticed an open window on the upper floor as they approached. Everybody slept with their windows open, especially at this time of year. It didn’t make much difference, the air was often so still that there was quite simply no breeze, even off the seaward side. There was a pipe that led to the window. Ward gave it a tug to see if it was secure. It was. Without a sound, he grabbed the pipe and with little effort scaled the wall to the window. He took a second at the top to check that there were no sounds from within, then hoisted himself deftly through the small window.

The floor was cool and bare, whitewashed concrete that had a mystical afterglow as the moonlight poured in through an open window opposite.

The room Ward wanted, the main bedroom, was to the right. There were two other rooms and a bathroom. He withdrew the knife, held it forward in the classic fighting position, and crept towards the main bedroom door. The door was wide open and from inside Ward could hear the sound of deep and steady breathing. There were two people, he knew that, a man and wife, the woman in her early forties the man six years her senior.

He walked through the doorway and saw the couple asleep beneath a single white sheet. The man looked younger than is years. His body was muscular, his neck thick, his shoulders round, his chest a solid wall. His hair was cropped short and he had the dark stubble that afflicted Mediterranean men, no matter how often they shaved. His face was handsome and cruel and Ward could easily imagine his thick lips twisted in anger or even sadistic pleasure. Ward had seen pictures of him in animated wakefulness and his eyes held the dark malice of one who lived his life either hunting or being hunted. His wife had long black hair that fell down over her chest, which rose and fell slowly and steadily with each deep breath. Her lips were full against her soft almost caramel skin and perfectly proportioned face. Ward was willing to bet that she was very beautiful; the grainy snapshots he had seen would not have done her justice.

She would wake up in few hours and wonder what it was that clung wetly to her in the bed, the warm stickiness that would seep onto her left side, then she would turn and see...

Ward moved forward and held the knife to the man’s throat. Smooth and deep. The cut had to be smooth and deep with the razor-sharp blade. If the job was done properly, the victim would not wake; he would merely stutter and bubble and shudder to death in his sleep as if dreaming his final dream. No one would know until the sunlight poured in through the curtainless windows.

With a single movement Ward drew the knife across Nikos Lazarou’s throat. He didn’t wait to see the outcome. He knew he had done the job properly; he could feel it.

He turned and headed for the door. The child, no more than six or seven years old, probably on his way to the toilet, stood on the landing in a pool of moonlight. He stared at Ward and at the sticky, wet, shiny blade in his hand. Ward froze. He knew the child would not recognise him if he saw him again; the camouflage he wore was as good as any mask, but there were to be no witnesses, that was a golden rule.

The boy straightened as if to run, but instead held Ward’s gaze. His eyes, aglow with silver catchlights, burned at Ward and dared him. They said that at that moment that he did not care if he lived or died, but that he would not run, like his father had never run, not in the war, not now.

Ward gripped the knife tightly and took half a step forward. The boy instinctively flinched, but then seemed to root himself even more firmly to the ground.

Ward felt the cold terror of indecision sweep through him. He knew that he could not kill a child, not in cold blood. It was his father’s war, this savage fight for independence, not his. The child was guilty of no more than just that, being a cold-hearted murderer’s child. He was not responsible for the death of that soldier; his father was and his father had to be the one to pay. If you killed a terrorist, people just shrugged and muttered philosophically about living and dying by the sword; if you killed a child, from the roots of his death sprung a hundred more willing to die.

Ward retreated down the stairs and towards the door. The boy stood silently and watched him go, watched him noiselessly slip the bolt and disappear into the shadows of the streets.

Ward walked quickly away towards the rendezvous where Hanson waited behind the wheel of a Land-Rover.

‘Job done?’ asked the lieutenant as Ward slid in beside him.

‘Job done,’ said Ward.

‘Nothing to report?’ pressed Hanson.

‘Nothing,’ said Ward. ‘Just drive...sir.’

Hanson glanced at Ward, who stared ahead in stony silence. He knew that it was better to remain quiet.

The Land-Rover’s engine choked into life and the vehicle moved off along the road out of town and into the dark distance.

Behind it the moon frosted the white buildings and fractured upon the sea as if nothing had changed but the time, while the ghosts of the future lay dead in their beds and waited to be reborn.

​

2.Thoughts Over a Full English

 

Portsmouth

1978

 

Mike Ward relished the sound as the knife cut through the perfectly fried bread. With a fastidiousness that bordered on the obsessive, he speared the fried bread with his fork and dipped it into the unbroken yolk. The membrane split and the bubble burst. The golden-yellow yolk flooded free. He allowed the underside of the bread to be covered, then dipped the tip of his knife deeper into the wonderfully gooey liquid and extracted some of the thicker yolk, which he spread onto the top of the piece of fried bread. Then he cut a couple of inches from a slice of the bacon, not so crisp that it became bitter, not so fatty that it felt like a slug in his mouth, and created a mini sandwich on his fork – egg, bread and bacon, in that order. He lifted the fork to his mouth, allowed the creaminess of the yolk to mingle with the saltiness of the bacon and the richness of the fried bread and began to chew.

It was a ridiculous but entirely pleasurable palaver. He was not a breakfast person - irregular working hours over so many years had seen to that – so he had learned to grab food when and where he could, but when one stayed in a guest house on the south coast, there was only one ritual to follow and this was it.

He had travelled the world as a journalist and eaten some very fine foods, but he would go to his grave with the firm conviction that there was nothing as good as a guest house Full English Breakfast. He would, controversially, exclude the cooked tomatoes and baked beans, often to the chagrin of his host, but he believed that there should be nothing on a Full English Breakfast plate that had the remotest possibility of contaminating the other things on the plate – except for the egg because in the Land of the Full English Breakfast, the egg was King.

This had, of course, to be accompanied by Army Tea, strong enough to stand your spoon up in, and a slow contemplative cigarette. It was all part of the package. If you were going to go for the Full English Heart Attack, this was the way to do it.

The other great thing about this particular stay was that he was not paying for it, the paper was. He had tried to bargain his way into the Royal Beach Hotel half a mile away, but the paper said that he could either stay there and forfeit his fee or stay in the B&B and get paid. He didn’t put up much of an argument; he wanted the breakfast.

He was here because of the man opposite him, seated near the open French windows with his eyes upon the Daily Mail as he munched his way through some heavily buttered toast.

The man, Brian Mayhew, spoke with a north-eastern accent, unsurprising as he had lived there for the past twenty years or so but, if you listened carefully, and Ward did listen carefully, once in while the accent slipped into a strange concoction of Euro-Geordie, something harsher, throatier sharper, and let slip an underlying identity that, no matter how hard this man tried, he could never lose.

He had a full head of nut-brown hair which Ward was certain was dyed. Even so, he looked in good shape for his sixty-seven years; Ward would have had him down as in his late fifties. His face was the right side of thin, his skin smooth, his eyes clear and sharp. His neck had the firm elegance of someone who exercised regularly and applied vanity creams and had not yet turned to the ‘turkey-neck’ of many of his peers. He was a jogger, Ward knew that. He had been following him for long enough. He had a subtle V-shape to his body, thin at the waist and broad at the shoulders. He had kept in good shape.

The staff liked him. The women stayed to chat and the young men showed him deference. Ward imagined that he would irritate someone of his own age; he had that off-putting cockiness that only someone of a similar age would recognise, that unwillingness to go down with the good ship Body as it became ravaged upon the seas of time. Yes, he would have brought out the envy in others his age. He was too much competition. He was just too much.

His real name was Roger Houdin. He was French. The name made Ward smile. Houdin. A vowel away from Houdini. He was an escape artist alright.

Houdin had been a key member of the SS Charlemagne, those French who joined the SS during the Second World War to fight for Germany. And fight he did, right to the end, along with the last sixty or so who fought in the defence of Berlin as it crumbled in the advance of the allies, the Russians in particular.

He would not surrender to the Russians. They were animals, worse than animals. They shot or tortured their prisoners, starved them to death. He would not be a part of that, but neither was he willing to die for his cause.

As the shells fell upon the Reichstag, he shot a fellow soldier in the face and substituted his credentials with those of the dead man. Now he was as good as dead. The corpse’s face, now unrecognisable, would tell no truths.

He ran. As he did so, he came across a civilian, similar in size, and killed him too. He dragged him into a side street and swapped clothes. Now he was a civilian and the dead man down the alley was just another dead SS Charlemagne officer.

Mingling with the panic that surrounded him, he stumbled away, staggered like a starving man, limped like a broken man, cowered like a man who had seen nothing but war for so long that cowering was all he knew how to do any more.

Somehow, he made it through the lines. The Russians saw him, the Americans saw him, the British saw him, but in the joy of their victory, they just ignored him. He was just another of the invisible, dispossessed millions left to tramp the roads and fields in search of a place to finally stop. When he met someone, soldier or civilian, he shied away, feigning shame for his appearance and helplessness for his cause. Several people had offered to help him, even gave him food and shelter, and he accepted, took what they had to give with sham reluctance and grovelling gratitude, then moved on and eventually crossed into Switzerland. There, he became a refugee and was sent back to France, a broken man, a martyr to his suffering, just another victim of war.

His story came to Ward via an old friend from his days posted in Paris as a correspondent. They had very little to go on, just a name and address in a village just outside Newcastle. How had his friend acquired that name and address? That in itself was a story.

Monsieur Houdin, once settled back into the ebb and flow of Parisian daily life, had become a con man. He had blagged his way from an attic in the capital to a mansion on the outskirts and an ability to sell property for profit with the keen eye of a magpie for roadkill.

His methods were dubious, to say the least but, compared to what he had done in the war, what some had labelled atrocities, this was harmless. No one died. A few tears might well have been shed and a harsh lesson learned, but it was the survival of the fittest and Houdin always intended that it should be him who was the survivor.

Then, one day, it fell apart. He concocted an elaborate plan to separate a canny man from Champagne from his money via a series of false investments. He had managed to wheedle most of the man’s vast fortune from him when the man’s son, Jean-Yves Souchin, Ward’s old friend, had cottoned on. However, by the time he had caught wind of the scheme, Houdin had smelled a rat and bolted. The police had shrugged a Gallic shrug. The old man had collapsed under the weight of his foolhardiness and greed, had a stroke and eventually died a sorry shadow of his former self. Jean-Yves had sworn to find the con-man and now he had. Only he was unable to do much about it, he was just an ordinary man who had spent what little money he had left on dubious private detectives and blind alleys until, as hope began to fade, he was given a notebook, found hidden under the floorboards at Houdin’s last known residence, by the last PI he had hired with any integrity whatsoever, who had handed it over to him with the declaration that it was of no use to man nor beast but, as he had paid for it, it now belonged to Jean-Yves.

Jean-Yves could make neither head nor tail of the notebook. Some of it was in German, some in French, some in English and some in a shorthand he did not recognise.

Before his final thread of hope melted into utter despair, he had written a heartfelt letter to Ward. He had been full of apologies – he had not kept in touch with his friend as he should have done and now he came back for only selfish reasons – but Ward did not care. Ward had never held much stock in friendship and was happy to merely keep a thin hold upon acquaintances in case they should ever be of use to him, especially those abroad who might have been useful on unfamiliar ground. He also sensed a story and, since the Catfish affair, his resignation from MI6 and his return to the journalistic fold, he had been looking for something to get his teeth into and, more importantly, bring in some money. He could have started another book, he hadn’t completed one since his days in the Indian Ocean, but he needed something more immediate, a bit of income to tide him over. On top of that, he actually liked Jean-Yves. He had the sad air of an underdog and Ward was always one for the underdog. The only condition upon receipt of the notebook was that, if Ward had the chance, he had to destroy Houdin, publicly, loudly, thoroughly. Ward replied that if he could, he would.

That notebook had been a revelation as far as getting to know Houdin was concerned. Whoever the PI was who had flicked lazily through the pages, he had missed a treat.

Ward never understood the need for people to keep notebooks and diaries, they would always be their undoing. One of the most famous spies in history, Noor Inayat Khan, AKA ‘Madeline’, who worked for SOE during the war, had kept a notebook and it had betrayed her to the Gestapo as surely as the traitor who had turned her in. It must have been either neuroses or ego that made people put pen to paper but, whatever the reason, it was inevitably a mistake.

Inside Houdin’s filthy pages, which he must have smuggled out of Berlin and across Europe, were names, dates and places, links to the Einsatzgruppen, the famous SS German death-squads, to atrocities ordered by Houdin himself, to concentration camps, to the final days in Berlin, to the end of Hitler himself, to his planned escape to England after his sixth sense warned him of Jean-Yves’s approach. The notebook had come all that way, through all those misadventures, to end up left behind under the dusty floorboards of a mansion on the edge of Paris. He must have left in a hurry.

And now here he was. Make the most of it, thought Ward. Enjoy your heavily buttered toast and your Daily Mail. Enjoy your freedom while you can, for the trap is about to be sprung.

Ward had dreamed of this moment, not just for Jean-Yves, but because he knew that something this big would be the remaking of him, would bring him back into the fold and get him more, better paid work.

As he congratulated himself and prepared to wander casually over to Houdin’s table and lay his perfidy before him (but only after the last mouthful of perfect fried bread), he heard a commotion in the corridor outside the dining room. As he turned to the door, it was kicked open with force and two men, each with a balaclava over their face, charged into the room and walked briskly towards Houdin. One of them pulled a gun while the other shouted something unintelligible at him, then, before Ward could react, a shot was fired. People screamed. Chairs fell. Tables rocked as other diners dived beneath them. A red hole open in Houdin’s forehead and the back of his head sprayed across the window and neatly tied curtains behind him, arced in a bloody red rainbow through the French windows and landed on the tidy patio. He rocked a little then fell forward onto the table.

Ward leapt forward as the two men turned to flee. He caught the unarmed man around the waist and brought him down, furious that these clowns had taken away his moment of hard-fought glory, enraged at the fact that someone would have the audacity to interrupt the final magnificent moments of his Full English and with half an eye to the fact that his story had just grown ten-fold. He rolled until he was on top of the man and brought a fist down. All the training he had been given in his time with MI6 came to the fore and he was easily able to bat away the assailant’s feeble defences.

As he was about to deliver a final, disabling blow, he felt a sharp pain behind his right ear and an even greater pain in his ribs as he was clubbed with the gun and kicked to one side. He fell away and the man beneath him wriggled free. He tried to stand, but his legs would not hold him. The room spun and his knees buckled. The men fled and Ward fell to the floor, right next to the final fork of Full English sandwich he had been creating as the two murderers had barged in.

Then he passed out.