The Chessboard Spies Read online

  The Chessboard Spies

  Geoffrey Davison

  © Geoffrey Davison, 1974

  Geoffrey Davison has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1974 by Robert Hale & Co.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  To Nigel

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  The two men in the car sat silently staring out of the window along the dark, dimly lit street, where the street lamps cast shrouded lights in the rain soaked atmosphere. It was a broad, cobbled street, in Istanbul. Along one side ran a narrow pavement with large, overhanging trees, from the adjoining park. On the other side was the high brick wall of an army barracks, built in the reign of Kemal Ataturk.

  The two men were both dressed alike in dark, navy gaberdine raincoats, and dark trilby hats, but the man in the passenger seat was much taller than his companion. He sat upright, stone faced, giving no indication of the anticipation that he felt. His companion was less relaxed. He glanced at the fingers on his illuminated wrist watch. It was past ten p.m.

  ‘He’s late,’ he whispered.

  The other man didn’t answer him; he had seen something in the distance.

  ‘Here he is,’ he muttered.

  The man behind the steering wheel leant forward and saw a hunched figure appear out of the darkness. He sat back and waited. As the figure came closer, the tall man pulled up the collar of his raincoat and moved to open the car door.

  ‘Wait,’ the other man hissed hurriedly. ‘There is something the matter. He is not stopping!’ He switched on the windscreen wipers. The other man held back and watched the hunched figure walk past on the opposite side of the road.

  ‘What the devil is he up to?’ he asked urgently.

  ‘He is being followed,’ the other man whispered.

  The tall man glanced along the road again and saw another figure hurrying towards them. The figure started to run. As he came alongside them, the two men in the car saw something flash in his hand.

  ‘My God!’ the tall man yelled. ‘Quick! We have to stop him.’

  Desperately the two men flung open their doors and ran onto the road. The man who had been running along the pavement had caught up with the first man. As the two men from the car crossed the roadway, a loud, piercing cry, came from the two figures, and one slumped to the ground. The other figure started to run away. One of the men from the car — the smaller one — stopped in his tracks and withdrew a revolver. He steadied himself and shot twice at the moving figure. It fell to the ground, but they were too late. The first man had a long stiletto sticking in his back!

  The tall man leant over the body and quickly withdrew the dagger.

  ‘Get the car,’ he shouted. The other man didn’t hesitate. In the barracks a number of lights had appeared and shouts could be heard. The tall man gently lifted the body into his arms. He could feel a warm trickle of blood over his hand, but there was still life in the body — very little, but it was there. Frantically the other man swung the car around and drew up to where the tall man was standing. The tall man calmly placed the body in the rear seat. He could hear more shouts coming from the barracks. They would have to get clear of the area, but first he wanted to look at the assassin. He ran up to the still form lying face downwards with two small holes below the neck. He turned the body over and shone his torch on the dead man’s face. It was a lean, thin face, with a hooked nose and fair hair. It was an unusual face, the man thought. It didn’t look Turkish. It looked more Arabic!

  The man in the car raced the engine impatiently, and the tall man quickly joined him. As he did so, a pair of headlamps appeared from the entrance to the barracks. The man behind the steering wheel slammed in the gears and shot away into the darkness.

  ‘Where to?’ he asked.

  His companion gave him an address in the old quarter of Istanbul. The driver nodded his head, understandingly, and swung into a side street and headed for the Galata Bridge. He didn’t reduce his speed until they had crossed the bridge and were hidden in the maze of narrow, deserted streets. They came to the address the other man had given him — an old terraced building close to the Blue Mosque, and parked the car in a darkened alley way.

  The tall man gently lifted the body out of the rear seat whilst the other man knocked on the door. Presently, the door opened and an old woman appeared. She looked first at the figure in the man’s arms and then into the face of the man carrying the body. Their eyes met, but she said nothing. Silently she opened the door to its full extent and stood to one side. The tall man entered the building and carried the body up a steep flight of steps. Before he had reached the top of the staircase, the entrance door had been shut and bolted behind him, and standing waiting for him on the first floor landing was the woman’s husband — a small man like his wife, with a stubbly grey beard and a pair of dark brown eyes, which watched the man’s progress from behind thick lensed spectacles. He was a Turk, and had once been a doctor, until his politics had fallen foul of the authorities. He turned and opened a side door.

  ‘In here,’ he said.

  The man carrying the body followed him into the room. It was the kitchen. The Turk quickly cleared the table and pulled it under the central electric light bulb. The tall man laid the body on the table and stood back as the Turk started his examination.

  Whatever happened, the tall man thought, the man on the table was going to die. There was no hope for him. But first he had to talk.

  The Turk came up to him.

  ‘There is nothing I can do for him,’ he whispered. ‘Perhaps a hospital could save him, but I have nothing.’

  The tall man looked straight into the Turk’s dark brown eyes, and unflinchingly said: ‘Nobody can save him. He has to die. But first he must talk.’

  The Turk shrugged.

  ‘He must,’ the man pleaded. For the first time there was a note of urgency in his voice. The Turk looked at him again.

  ‘It is essential,’ the man said. The Turk read the determination on his face.

  ‘Go into the other room,’ he said quietly. ‘I will call you if it is to be.’

  The man left the kitchen and went into the adjoining room, where his companion and the old lady were sitting. As he joined them, the old lady stood up and left the room. The other man, who was also a Turk, lit a black, strongly scented cigarette, and relaxed in his chair, unconcerned whether the body on the kitchen table lived or died. The tall man glanced around the room at the dark, ornate wallpaper and old fashioned furniture, and closed his eyes. He was a man in his early thirties, with a strong, tanned face, black hair, and steel blue eyes which belied his toughness. For like his companion, he was a man who had become hardened to the unsavoury dealings of the underworld. But he was not a Turk.

  Presently, the old lady returned with a tray of strong coffee. She handed the two men each a cup of the beverage and returned to her seat, and became engrossed in her needlework. The tall man mumbled his thanks, but didn’t engage her in conversation. He was imposing on a past friendship in bringing the dying man to their house; the least they knew about it, the better it would be for them.

  When the old Turk joined them, the look on his face told the tall man that his chances of getting anything out of their patient were slim.

  ‘You can try,’ the Turk said, ‘but he is sinking fast.’

  The tall man rushed into the temporary surgery. The body was still on the table, his head resting on a pillow, and his chest thickly bandaged.

  The man went up to him. He had seen many dying men before, but this one looked more pathetic. His face was pale and drawn, his features
more pronounced, his nostrils broad, and his eyebrows thick and untidy. It was a sad face, the tall man thought, sad and troubled. A face which had hidden the battle which had gone on in the man’s mind. A battle between conscience and loyalty. A battle in which conscience had won, but for which the man must die.

  The tall man leant over the figure on the table.

  ‘Andre,’ he whispered, ‘Andre.’

  The eyes of the man on the table opened and closed. The tall man called out his name again, this time more sharply.

  The eyes opened, blinked, and closed again.

  ‘Andre,’ the man said. ‘You are going to be all right, but you must give me your message.’ He had spoken in Russian using the dying man’s native tongue. ‘Give me your message,’ he said again, close to the dying man’s ear.

  The Russian’s eyes opened, looked into the tall man’s face and closed again. But his lips started to move.

  The man leant forward, his ear close to the Russian’s mouth.

  ‘Brez … Brez …’ the Russian whispered.

  ‘Brez what?’ the man asked urgently. ‘Breznov?’

  The Russian lay still.

  ‘Breznov!’ the man shouted. ‘Andre! Was it Breznov?’

  The voice penetrated the Russian’s dulled brain. His eyes opened wide.

  ‘Breznov?’ the man repeated the name.

  Again the Russian’s lips moved. The man leant forward and listened.

  ‘Brez … Brez … nov …’

  ‘What about him Andre? What about Breznov?’

  The Russian opened his mouth and tried to struggle forward.

  ‘K … k … k … ka … kad … kad.’

  He slumped back on the table.

  ‘Kad what?’ the man called out. ‘Kad what?’

  A shrill, guttural rattle, came from the Russian’s throat. The tall man stood up. The Russian could say no more; he was dead! The man sighed, and closed the dead man’s eyes and folded his arms over his chest. When he looked up he was surprised to see the old Turk standing close by. There was a look of concern on his face.

  ‘You heard?’ the man asked.

  The Turk indicated that he had.

  ‘There will be repercussions,’ he whispered seriously.

  The man shook his head.

  ‘Don’t worry, it will pass. They killed him themselves. So long as they find out that he is dead, they will be satisfied.’

  ‘Where will you take him?’

  The man thought for a while.

  ‘Somewhere close to where we found him,’ he said quietly, almost with reverence. ‘In that way it will look as if we picked him up, found that he was dead, and then got rid of him.’

  ‘I went through his jacket while you were speaking to him. This is all he had.’

  He handed the tall man a small amount of Turkish currency, a bunch of keys, and a newspaper cutting. The man read the newspaper cutting with interest. On one side was a list of the stock market prices of certain local and international firms. The Russian had supposedly been part of a trade mission, his business in Istanbul being to promote trade with the Soviet Union. Several of the names listed on the cutting had been underlined. Two were international firms of repute, the others were local industries. The cutting had been torn at the bottom across one of the names the Russian had underlined, as if it had been torn out of a newspaper in haste. The man mentally sighed. At least they had got something out of the meeting. The names of the firms would be of interest to his Government. He glanced at the reverse side of the cutting. Two news items were reported. One announced the arrival in Baghdad of Dr Bradshaw and a team of officials of the American Peace Corps. The other, torn at the bottom, was of a shipping order won by an Italian firm to build a two hundred and eighty thousand ton oil tanker.

  The man placed the cutting in his pockets along with the keys, and started to go through the dead man’s clothing with meticulous care. Even the seams of his jacket were opened and examined. But it was a fruitless search and the man gained no further information. He then set about removing the bandages from the dead body and other signs of medical attention, and with the help of the Turk he dressed the corpse.

  ‘Will you tell Kumel?’ he asked the Turk quietly.

  The Turk left the room and the man placed some money on the table and picked up the dead body. At the head of the flight of stairs, he hesitated and glanced into the adjoining room where the old lady was silently doing her needlework. She felt his eyes upon her and looked at him. Their eyes met. The man gave a faint smile. The old lady smiled back, but a worried expression came over her face. She saw a hardness and determination in the man’s strong face and it troubled her. She had seen it before in her husband’s face and she knew the suffering it had brought them. She dropped her eyes and returned to her needlework. The man turned and carried the body down the flight of steps.

  They placed the body in the boot of the car, and drove back across the Galata Bridge to the area in which they had picked up the Russian. In a deserted corner of the park they dumped the body and hurriedly returned to the sanctuary of the old quarter, where the two men parted company. The tall man got out of the car and the other man drove off into the rain swept night.

  The tall man turned up the collar of his raincoat, and with his hands in his pockets, set off at a brisk pace through the myriad of narrow streets. He moved silently and unobtrusively through the almost deserted alleyways, keeping to the shadows and avoiding the many pools which had formed in the uneven surface. But as he walked he kept a watchful eye that he was not being followed, and his hand in his pocket gripped an automatic in case of any sudden encounter. For the man was a spy — a British spy — a paid agent of the British Government, and in Istanbul, as in any other part of the Balkans or Middle East, the undercurrents between the two powers on either side of the Iron Curtain, became issues in which their agents fought with any weapon, and the score was not kept.

  The man’s name was Stephen Fletcher, alias Stefan Fettos, and although his face didn’t reflect any emotion, he inwardly felt a burning anger at losing the Russian. The old woman’s diagnosis had not been wrong. It was becoming a personal issue with him. The Russians had scored a victory over him, and he would not rest until he had evened the score.

  Fletcher was no stranger to Istanbul, although his normal centre of operations was Piraeus and Athens. His movements depended upon where the play was being made. At the moment it was in Istanbul, but in the turbulent countries at the eastern end of the Mediterranean it could move from country to country like a bouncing rubber ball. It was a part of the world where political intrigues and subterfuges bubbled to the surface like the rumblings of a bad tempered volcano. On occasions the volcano erupted and overflowed its fiery lava, like the Turko-Greek dispute over Cyprus, or the more violent conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis. On such occasions Britain’s Secret Service worked overtime. Fortunately their influence in the area is well established and well informed. This had been proved during the Arab-Israeli war when the combined British and American Intelligence Services were shown to be far superior than their Soviet counterpart. But in a never ending battle the pendulum swings from side to side. At the critical moment during the Arab war the pendulum was with the West, but since that time it had gradually swung back into the Soviets’ corner. In the past six months the West had suffered several setbacks, the Americans more so that the British. In addition to a number of highly damaging information leaks, there had also been a number of assassinations. Good Western agents and well placed supporters of the West mysteriously eliminated. Somehow the Russians had got the upper hand, and one of Fletcher’s jobs was to help to restore the pendulum to its former position. He didn’t work alone, nor did he work entirely on his own initiative. He was part of an organisation controlled by the Director of British Intelligence for the Balkans, Colonel John Spencer, the man Fletcher was hurrying through the darkened streets to meet. It had been Spencer who had put Fletcher on to the Russian, Andre Timovsk
y, and who had watched from the background whilst Fletcher had nurtured the Russian, like a prize gardener nurtured his latest creation until it was ready for picking. Timovsky had not been a newcomer to the game. He had lost his virginity over a year ago when he had become an informer to the American C.I.A. in Ankara. But a sudden relapse of conscience had caused a temporary barrier and the Americans had wisely lain off him, knowing they could force his hand at any time they needed.Timovsky had been sent back to Moscow and had become a back number, until he had turned up suddenly, two months previous, on a trade delegation to Istanbul. He had been immediately approached again, not by the C.I.A., but by British Intelligence, and with success. A number of secret meetings had taken place between Timovsky and Fletcher and the Russian’s confidence had been established. Their last meeting had promised to be the pay off. A secret directive from the K.G.B. headquarters in the Kremlin had been passed to all their Ambassadors in the Middle East. It was a statement of fact and future policy. Timovsky had learned of its contents and had intended to pass the information over to Fletcher at their next meeting. Fletcher, Spencer, and the masterminds of British Intelligence in London had been waiting for such a moment. Their wait and patience had been in vain.

  It didn’t take Fletcher long to reach the place he had to report to — a shuttered café in one of the many bazaars. Inside waiting for him at one of the tables, in the otherwise deserted room, were two men. One was a small, portly, military looking man, wearing a crumpled fawn suit. He sat with a large white handkerchief in his hand ready to mop his perspiring bald head. He was Colonel John Spencer, the man Fletcher worked for. The other man was of medium build, with close cropped, grey hair, and a rough tanned face. He was a man in his late fifties. A hard, tough man, who asked for no quarter and gave none. A man who matched Fletcher with his dedication, and a man for whom Fletcher had a lot of respect. His name was Maxwell — David Edward Maxwell. He was an American, born and bred in Chicago, but for the past twenty years had worked for the American C.I.A. in the Middle East. He was Spencer’s counterpart, but there the similarity ended. Spencer was a backroom operator, whereas Maxwell’s forthright manner demanded that he became more actively involved.