Guy Winter 06 Winter's Nemesis by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-10T04:00:00+00:00

For M’s eyes only.

Very little time. The killings were Puchkov’s doing. Hurling Court not authorised... Krivitsky was wrong – there are many traitors in the service. I want...defect...wife...they are watching me always...

KERN...

There were dark stains on the paper obliterating several parts of and whole words.

Blood?

“Kernov?” Gloria asked in a hoarse whisper.

“Possibly. Whoever wrote it was probably wounded in the attack on Harris. For all we know he was the assailant. In any event I think we have to operate on the basis that the note was left on Harris’s body, possibly a spur of the moment thing, for us to find.”

Gloria had turned the note over.

“Q-Z-Y-U-H-S-F-Y’?” She asked.

“I have chaps looking at it now. They say it doesn’t make any sense. Obviously, it’s a code but if the fellow was wounded, perhaps he just ended up writing random letters?”

Gloria was memorising the sequence of letters.

Q-Z-Y-U-H-S-F-Y’.

“A fellow would have to be desperate to dash off a thing like that just after he’d killed somebody,” Hugo Montfort remarked.

Gloria was satisfied she had the test of the letter and the sequence of characters on its reverse off pat.

Q-Z-Y-U-H-S-F-Y’...

“If this Kernov wants to defect why doesn’t he just walk into the Foreign Office in Whitehall, or even the nearest police station?”

Before Knight could answer she worked it out for herself.

“His wife, of course,” she breathed. “And he’s under surveillance, or she is, all the time and he won’t come across without her.” She focused on the spymaster. “Who is this Krivitsky? How seriously do you take the suggestion that there are ‘many traitors in the service’?”

Both Gloria and Hugo could tell that their former chief – neither of them had truly accepted that they were officially back on the Section’s payroll, or the responsibilities that implied – was sat astride the horns of a particularly painful dilemma. Divulging secrets physically hurt the man and even now he was wrestling with what he liked to think, and often mistook for his conscience.

Maxwell Knight winced.

“Walter Germanovich Krivitsky, born Samuel Ginsberg in Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in June 1899,” he said lowly by means of a preamble, “was a senior Soviet intelligence officer who defected in October 1937 after the murder of his close friend, and fellow ‘illegal’ Ignace Reiss.”

Gloria leaned close because the man was speaking in a murmuring, ultra-confidential whisper.

Senior Soviet intelligence officer...

And he was an ‘illegal’; an agent operating under cover of false papers separate from Soviet diplomats abroad.

‘Senior’ in this context signified that Krivitsky was probably a ‘rezident’ or ‘control officer’ perhaps responsible for running spies in a whole country.

“He changed his name to Krivitsky when he first became involved with the Bolshevik Intelligence Service in around 1917. Among his claims he says he was active over the years in Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy and Hungary. He gave Jane Archer the names of two spies, one in America and another in Romania, and maintained that he recruited ‘many’ other agents in Europe. His final posting, in 1937, was to The Hague where

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