Clandestine E-Book

James Quinn

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

James Quinn, author of the Gorilla Grant spy novels, will take you on a new adventure with his first short story anthology based around espionage, deception and intrigue.

A former spy investigates the murder of an old colleague – and uncovers a conspiracy that takes him back to the horrors of the Second World War.

A Close Protection Driver runs the gauntlet against assassins in the heart of Mexico City and is determined to keep his VIP alive... no matter the cost.

A Russian spymaster tells the tale of his nefarious plan to get an agent inside the Oval Office and to bring down American democracy, with devastating results for the future.

Enter a world of masterful suspense, action-packed adventures and thrilling twists with James Quinn's 'Clandestine'.

Leseprobe

Clandestine

James Quinn

Contents

Books by James Quinn

Introduction

1. Chis

2. L’Arena

3. Vagabond

4. Death Race

5. The Increment Man

6. The Watcher

7. Mr Palmer’s Extraordinary Retirement Plan

8. A Very Dangerous Affair

9. …Love, Nikita x

10. Story Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright (C) 2021 James Quinn

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2021 by Next Chapter

Published 2021 by Next Chapter

Edited by Lorna Read

Cover art by CoverMint

Large Print Edition

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

Books by James Quinn

A Game for Assassins

Sentinel Five

The Christmas Assassin

Rogue Wolves

Gorilla Warfare

Berlin Reload

This book is dedicated to the men and women of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), the Security Service (MI5) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

For Mum, with all my love

Introduction

I will let you into a little secret…

Espionage is the art of stealing secrets. It’s as simple as that. It’s shocking, I know!

It is a trade as old as time, but in order to effectively carry on doing that, spies have to operate in a clandestine manner. So for all you budding intelligence officers and secret agents, please remember that fundamentally, we are collecting information but we are doing it in such a way that no one knows that we are doing it.

And for all the technology and advancement in equipment, the same staples from hundreds of years ago, I would submit, have changed little and are still just as effective. It is the art of watching, listening and talking. It is about that human understanding of the source that you are trying to elicit information from, having that understanding of personal frailty and how best to motivate your agent. To push, to coerce, but ultimately to have empathy with your spy, for only then, if you can understand him or her and what motivates them, can you truly get the best from them.

So that is espionage in a nutshell, the stealing of secrets and it is the clandestine tradecraft that allows us to do that. Two sides of the same coin.

I will let you into another little secret…

I love the art form (and yes, it is an art form) of the short story. My guilty pleasure is an eight-hour flight somewhere and a collection of short stories to delve into; Stephen King if you have it, thank you very much… but equally a Lee Child compendium of thriller writers will do just as well. Anything heavier than that on a plane and I lose interest.

The short story is the art form of getting a concise piece of information into a specified number of pages and still painting a vivid picture of the characters and the details. Not everyone gets it right (you may find that in these pages, too!) but it is, I believe, something that every writer should practice from time to time. The much underrated short story is usually passed over for the seven hundred page mega-blockbuster novel by readers and writers alike.

But I think that is a disservice to something that has the potential to be so much fun for the reader. If you think of the novel as a five course banquet and the short story collection as a buffet lunch, well then, that gives you an idea of the fun to be had. Banquets are all well and good, but sometimes you just want to be able to pick the dishes on offer with no commitment to eat them in any order.

So for me, the short story is here to stay and long may it continue.

And yet within the ’spy genre’, the short story is something of a rarity. There are exceptions, of course; Graham Greene most certainly in his various short story collections, John LeCarré with his excellent The Secret Pilgrim (it’s actually a novel, but is really a collection of short stories connected by a main characters narration), Frederick Forsyth for No Comebacks and The Veteran, even Ian Fleming with his compendium of Bond stories in For Your Eyes Only.

But on the whole, the short story spy book has been left to wither. Which kind of intrigued me and piqued my interest…

It was 2020 (yes we all remember THAT year) and I had just finished the final novel in the Gorilla Grant series of books and wanted a palate cleanser before I started on my next big project series. So when I had the opportunity of combining the two things that I have the greatest interest in, I immediately decided to take it on as a project. And let me tell you I had so much fun writing this short story collection and I hope that you have the same amount of fun in reading it!

In these pages you will find all manner of spies, secret agents, couriers, assassins, bodyguards, intelligence peddlers, conmen and deceivers of all shapes and sizes. You may recognise some familiar faces, but you will also meet some future ones, too.

For the readers, it is a chance to peek behind the covert curtain and, for a few short hours, to dip a toe into the clandestine world that exists in our imaginations.

I hope you enjoy the journey.

James Quinn

London, UK

August 2021

Chis

They say that when you tell a story, any story, you should not start with what the weather was like. I agree completely, and in other circumstances I would not start a story like that.

But if I’m being honest with myself, the weather from that night was the thing that I keep coming back to, that I remember the most. It was that relentless rain; heavy and the kind that saturates you right through. It seeps into your bones like guilt.

I was in Liverpool on that wet, cold and rainy night, a Saturday, waiting at Central Station, one of the main train stations in the city centre. The flotsam and jetsam were passing me by; it was dark and the Saturday shoppers were on their way home, while the early bird clubbers and drinkers hadn’t descended yet. Another hour or so and the place would be filled with students, workmen, party-goers, all looking for a good time and cheap booze, but for now it was relatively quiet; a sort of social no man’s land.

I had been standing in place for nearly half an hour, pretending to check my phone and my watch to keep my cover in place. I looked like anyone else in the vicinity; jeans, heavy boots, and an anorak with a hood that held my long, greasy hair in place. Welcome to the glamour of the undercover operative, ladies and gentleman. There wasn’t a Vodka Martini in sight.

As a source handler for the British Security Service, mostly inaccurately known as MI5 these days by the press and ill-informed thriller writers, I was doing what I was paid to do and what I was good at. I was here to meet, covertly, one of my stable of CHIS’s.

And what is a CHIS, I hear you ask?

Well, CHIS is an acronym for Covert Human Intelligence Source; which translates as a spy, a tout, an informer. I am the handler, the CHIS is the spy. He passes me information, I pay him (or her) either in cash or, as is normally the case, I keep them out of prison.

Source OSMAN was Seamus McKiver, a lorry driver from Belfast who had been caught eighteen months ago smuggling in weed. A quick trip to the prison cell had left him ripe for recruitment by some unscrupulous intelligence officer, namely me. All he had to do was ingratiate himself with some of the people that he had grown up with on the Shankhill Estate. Despite the peace process, the extremists still hadn’t completely disappeared even all these years later and there was still a retinue of Loyalist killers, just like there was still a retinue of Provo killers, that were happy to take up arms and keep the conflict inflamed.

It was my job as part of the Security Service to get a peek inside their camp and find out what they were doing. Seamus was a perfect agent for this. He had grown up on the estate with most of the big men and was accommodating, under my direction, to a bit of smuggling of weapons, money and people for the Loyalists; except he was also passing all the information to me. So far in his year-long career as a spy, he had helped to avert more than half a dozen potential terrorist attacks.

The train station concourse was bland to the point of being unnoticeable; shoe repairers, a cake shop, cheap jewellery store, leather jacket clothes store and a newsagent’s. And beyond the barriers and little ticket collector were the escalators that took you down to the underground train station.

I checked my watch. Seamus was late – which, to be fair, was not like him at all. Compared to some of my informants, Seamus was a veritable Swiss Watch; always on time and never running slow. So this was… odd. I decided to do a slow amble and had completed one more tour of the concourse when I saw him sitting at a table outside a café. Except something wasn’t quite… right.

It was like not seeing a car coming at you until the last moment. You know it could be there in theory, but your mind tells you it isn’t… until it comes crashing through your front bumper. It was the same with the café. How could I not have noticed the café? But I was sure I hadn’t seen it before. The place was dark-looking, in contrast to the brightly lit train concourse. The windows had those small panes that wouldn’t let in a lot of light even on the brightest of days; it looked Dickensian in tone.

A waitress, probably no more than twenty, wearing a long, black dress made of heavy material, came out carrying a tray with a mug of something hot on it. Her face was pinched and white, her dark hair pulled back in a severe manner. Both she and the café looked out of place. A theme café, I guessed. There to give a bit of olde worlde charm to an otherwise antiseptic train station.

Seamus was sat outside at a table on his own, looking thoroughly miserable and dejected; the hood of his jacket was up over his head and the folds were wrapped around his body. Even from here I could see that he was shivering. The waitress put the hot cup in front of him and began to leave to head back into the brooding darkness of the café. But as I started to walk towards where Seamus was sat, she became aware of me, like looking through fog… distant, her lip curled into a sneer and her eyes blazed at me with hostility. It stopped me in my tracks.

What’s your fucking problem, love? I thought. She held me in place for a few heartbeats more and then turned tail and disappeared inside. Arsey bitch.

I approached him and stood over him, but he just continued staring down at the table in front of him. Oh great, I thought. He’s been on the beer and now he’s pissed.

“Seamus,” I said, attracting his attention. He slowly looked up, vaguely aware of me.

“Oh, hello, Mr Crowe. It’s been a long time,” said Seamus, his words coming out slow like molasses.

‘Crowe’ was my cover name for when I met this particular source. Not my real name, of course. Standard operating procedure for meeting agents is to have a cover name; after all, no one wants the terrorists searching through the electoral register for your real name.

“A very… very… long time,” mumbled Seamus.

Yep, definitely pissed, I thought.

But he wasn’t pissed. It was like he was exhausted or had a bout of the ‘flu. Regardless of what he was, I didn’t have time for that now. I was the source handler and I was expected to dominate and control the meeting. So I went over the usual tradecraft of covert meetings. Were you followed? Did you notice signs of anyone following you? If we are approached by people that you know, I’m Robert, Bob, an old lorry driver buddy from years ago, do you understand? If we get approached by local police, you leave it to me and I’ll take care of it. Understand?

But instead of the smart, snappy Irish brogue, all I received from my agent was vague nods and barely audible grunts. “I just feel so, so tired, like I’ve been on the Jameson’s, but I swear I haven’t touched a drop,” he mumbled.

He looked like death warmed up. “Have you been to see your sister?” I asked.

Seamus had a sister who lived in Childwall and she was married to a builder. Seamus would often drive over and stay with them every other month. It was also a perfect cover to have a contact meeting with me to pass over any intelligence that he had come across. It was less risky than operating on the streets of Belfast for both of us.

“No, no… I haven’t. Not yet. I want… I think… I’m going to visit her next,” he said.

I nodded. “Okay. I think that’s a good option. How’s the job going?”

He half smiled. “I love my truck. I had many happy times driving that rig.”

Which was a strange thing to say, but I let it slide.

“Any news on the boyos?” I asked, trying to keep things on track.

He frowned. “I remember hearing, just before they… just before…”

“Yes?”

Then he seemed to do a re-set, as if his memory had come back. “I heard about a stash of pistols and ammo. In Portadown, yes, I remember that. Look for the butcher’s shop on the high street, he’s the guy that is storing them,” he said proudly

I looked down and saw that despite his clothes being relatively dry, there was a puddle of water forming beneath his chair. He must have been saturated! I tried to ignore it, instead focusing back on the information he had. “How do we know about this, Seamus?”

He thought for a while and then perked up. “The Donnelly brothers, I went to school with them… yachh… yachhhh.”

His coughing fit jarred me. The last thing I wanted was him to throw up everywhere, but no, this was something else. Seamus was not well at all.

“Yachhh… they showed me… showed me the guns… he was showing off, so he was… trying to act the big man… yacchhh… said that he had taken a consignment from the boyos… wanted to know if I wanted to… yachhh… make a few quid smuggling them over to the UK… yachhhh… to sell to the drug gangs… yacchhh.”

I nodded. “Okay, Seamus, that’s good work. Good information. I’ll see that you get a bit extra in your payment next month.”

But Seamus appeared not to have heard, he was too busy wiping mucus from his nose. He looked deflated, like he could barely stay awake. I decided to cut the meeting short, reasoning that if he didn’t get to his bed soon and some cold flu capsules inside him, he’d be a dead man walking.

I looked down at my watch and noted that almost an hour had passed, which threw me as it seemed we’d only been talking for no more than fifteen minutes.

“Let’s get out of here. Look, I’ll walk part of the way with you,” I said.

He stood up straight, like he was hypnotised and we left the café in Central Station and headed up the ramp that brought us out onto Bold Street; a pedestrian thoroughfare that was a mixture of shops, bars and restaurants. The street was relatively deserted, perhaps due to the incessant rain, and the darkness gave the place a washed out and isolated vibe.

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll find somewhere… maybe sleep in my cab. I love my rig.”

There were few people out on the street that rainy night, but of the ones that were, they were grey, dark-clothed people; hats, coats, long dresses, stuff that my granddad would have worn when he was younger. They walked slowly, almost as if the wet and cold didn’t bother them. It was a strange look for people to wear in a modern city; especially on a Saturday night in club-land.

I ignored it and placed my hand on Seamus’s arm to steer him onto the pavement as we headed up the incline of Bold Street. Christ, his clothing was bone-numbing cold and wet through again. His body felt like ice and he squelched when he walked.

A few more steps and Seamus stopped. “You can leave me here, Mr Crowe. I don’t want you to come any further… I’ll be fine from here on out.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I don’t mind getting you to somewhere safe and dry; a hotel nearby, maybe?”

He shook his head. “No, thanks, you’ve been grand… just grand… just…”

“Okay, Seamus. You just go easy. I’ll be in touch,” I said, even more concerned about him now.

He began to stagger off up the street, the yellow of the streetlights giving him a surreal glow. He only made it a few feet when he stopped and turned. He was crying.

“I don’t blame you, Mr Crowe. Don’t blame you for a thing… this was not your fault… I got in over my head… simple as that… I’m just so, so tired… goodnight, Mr Crowe.”

And that was it; he staggered off again, leaving me with a sickly feeling in the pit of my stomach. I turned away from the shambling figure and started to walk back down Bold Street. By the time I reached the bottom, by the train station, I did a quick turn around and looked back.

But he was gone, disappeared into the rain and mist of the night.

I did a long anti-surveillance detection route for another thirty minutes, wandering around the town centre, avoiding drunks, winos and people begging. Finally, I did a walk-through in the Central Station concourse, just to retrace my steps one last time. It was busy, people filing off the trains and into the bars around the student quarter.

But as for the café, it was no longer there; the unit was closed up and the roller shutters were down. Although to be honest I didn’t remember it having roller shutters at all? I stepped back out onto the street and hailed a black cab to take me back to my hotel just outside the city centre on Edge Lane.

I had barely made it back to my budget hotel when my mobile phone rang. It was my operational phone, so if anyone was calling me on this it was definitely work-related. I checked the caller ID and saw that it was the NIO/DLO; the Northern Ireland Office/Duty Liaison Officer.

I answered with a “Yes?”

“Malcolm, you good to talk?” I recognised the voice; an old friend and work colleague from Northern Ireland.

“Sure, Tony. What’s up? I was just about to call it a night,” I said, trying to shrug off my coat at the same time.

“Well, don’t get your pyjamas on just yet, a shit storm has just blown up.”

I sighed. “Okay, go on… hit me with it.”

There was a pause, as if he was reading over some notes before he delivered the message. “Okay. Sorry to have to tell you this, mate, but you better get the next plane back to Belfast.”

“What? Why? I’ve only just bloody landed here in Liverpool; I was going to take the train down to London tomorrow to visit Head Office,” I said. My voice gave out a tone of disbelief and irritation.

“Like I said, it’s a shit show, your source…”

“Which one?”

“OSMAN.”

“OSMAN? What about him?”

Another pause before Tony delivered the coup de grace. “He’s been found. Head-jobbed. First port of call was you as his handler.”

He didn’t have to explain what ‘head-Jobbed’ meant. Anyone who has worked Northern Ireland during the troubles, and especially someone who has operated undercover running agents, knows exactly what it refers to. Basically, the informer is caught, tortured and then told to kneel. A gun is placed at the back of the skull and then the trigger is pulled. It’s an execution for spies, traitors and people who have displeased the big men of the terrorist group.

“Th-that’s impossible,” I stuttered.

“Just been confirmed, Malcolm. It’s real. Positive ID and fingerprints. Special Branch ran it through their database and got a hit,” said Tony.

Fuck! I had never lost a source, ever! My mind was thinking through if there had been a leak in the chain of command… had someone spotted him meeting with me at the train station… was there a loyalist hit squad operating here in Liverpool right now! Or was it just the fact that Seamus had gotten sloppy with his operational security and had led them to him, us, inadvertently?

But these were all questions for another time. Right now, I had to put out the potential fire that his murder could cause with the Security Service. “Okay. Give me the name of the Merseyside Police Special Branch Detective in charge and I’ll go there right now.”

“Merseyside Police? What for?” said Tony. He sounded confused about where I was going with this.

“To get the circumstances of the security breach, of course,” I stammered.

I was just about to rattle off that I had just met with OSMAN no more than an hour ago, but something had held my tongue; some sixth sense. And then I knew what I had been trying to suppress about the meeting with my agent… the strange feeling about the place… the unnerving waitress… the physical appearance of Seamus… the constant puddle of water formed around him… the eeriness of Bold Street as he wandered off into the distance. I heard a strange noise catch in my throat and my head was swimming, trying to rationalise the bizarre.

“He’s not in Liverpool,” said the DLO. “He’s been found dead in a ditch in Derry. Shot dead. Police say he’d been dead for over twelve hours!”

When a source is killed in the field, the standard operating procedure is for the source handler to be removed from the theatre of operations in case they have been compromised.

That was certainly the case for me. I was pulled out of the Source Handling Unit and moved over to be second man on one of the UK-based surveillance teams. That was fine by me; running a source can be a lonely occupation and in truth, I felt I needed to be around people again after what happened in Liverpool.

I very rarely think of Seamus anymore, can’t even remember what he looks like now. But what I can remember about that night was the rain… always the rain.

CHIS

“It was that relentless rain; heavy and the kind that saturates you right through. It seeps into your bones like guilt.”

L’Arena

DGSE Safe House, Corsica

The man who called himself merely Mr Yuri was small and waif-like. His Tatar heritage was clear in his Slavic face and his age was more towards the end of the clock than at the beginning. The name Yuri was probably not even his real name. Over the course of his life, he had gathered many names from various parts of the world; Anton, Karla, Pytor… names were but a tool of his trade.

He sat, meek and humble, almost penitent, occasionally running a hand over his balding scalp, smoothing out the fraying strands of white hair to make himself look groomed. His clothing was cheap and baggy; he wore a sombre black suit that gave him the look of a destitute priest and he carried with him, and squeezed it constantly, a small black rubber ball. It was both relaxing and unnerving how his small fist compressed it persistently.

“My doctor in France, he tells me that the rubber ball, he calls it a stress ball, will help me. That it will help with my anxiety and thus will help lower my blood pressure. He fears that my heart will be the death of me, rather than my old comrades,” he said mockingly.

She knew what he meant. Since his defection almost a year ago, there had been multiple attempts upon his life by the Russian regime; a poisoning, a car bomb, even an attempted plane crash. All, fortunately, had failed. It seemed that Russian assassins these days were not what they used to be.

“My welcome in Russia had ended with the passing of the New Czar. I knew too many secrets and the new people in the Kremlin didn’t relish the idea of having a… what is the word?… wild card out there. They do not like loose ends. So, I defected before they had a chance to murder me,” he chuckled.

They were in a DGSE, French intelligence service, safe house on the island of Corsica. The private villa was on the coastal region of Ajaccio and had been rented by the French intelligence officer handling Mr Yuri for the purpose of this CIA interview. Once it was over, Mr Yuri and his DGSE handlers would be flying back to mainland France to the small town where their defector had been re-settled. The villa was merely a disposable cut-out location.

The interview room was in the main lounge area of the villa. The blinds had been drawn and a security team from the DGSE kept guard outside the door and patrolled the grounds. Mr Yuri watched as the young CIA officer set about wiring up the digital video and audio equipment in preparation for her interview with him. Wires, cables and plug adaptors were pulled out of her case and a notepad and pen sat on the table in front of them both. A comfortable couch for him and a plush high-backed office chair for her; the table was their no man’s land.

Eleanor Keeley was part of the CIA’s Counter-Intelligence section that dealt with Soviet operations; spy-catching, playbacks, disinformation and a few other things that were above Top Secret. After months of wrangling between the CIA and the DGSE, the American Counter-Intelligence unit had been granted access to the defector. A limited time only, one session to get what you need for your records and then that’s it, the French Service had insisted.

One session is all that will be needed, came back the reply from the CIA CI Chief, a hard-bitten spycatcher called Jenkins.

It was Eleanor who had pushed for the assignment, to be the one to interview him. In fact she had practically twisted Jenkins’ arm up his back to give her authorisation. She was early thirties, petite in stature, with short dark curly hair that framed a pretty face, a legacy of her family’s Spanish bloodline, and which was partially concealed behind a pair of severe black spectacles. Today, she wore her traditional grey trouser suit with a white shirt and sensible shoes, giving her the look of a business professional. No wedding ring, no locket with a photo of her children in it. She wasn’t that type of girl.

She set up the digital video recorder on the tripod, ready to start working and sat back. She was here to conduct a soft-ball interrogation to see if anything could be learned from the creator of the Russian operation that had brought her country, almost, to its knees. Eleanor aimed the attached directional stick microphone of the camera at his head, did one more quick check that the lens was in focus and that the little Russian’s face was in full frame and then pressed RECORD on the camera.

“This is CIA officer Eleanor Keeley. The subject is Mr Yuri Poplov,” she said clearly and confidently. This was followed by reciting the date and the time for the record. She was all business now, her mind focused; there was one final look down at her notepad, a quick scribbling of the pencil and then she was away.

“So please, Mr Yuri, tell me how you came to be involved in the operation I am researching. Project Dark Poison, Temnyy Yadd, I hope I pronounced that correctly,” she said amiably.

Mr Yuri nodded, then, like a priest that he mimicked, he folded his hands in front of him and began to speak. His voice was low and humble:

“I was a Cold War Warrior; I learned my trade in the coldest places of the Cold War. I was a spy. But Russia is a fickle mistress and she can quite often spit you out when your looks fade. This was the case with me. Leaders come and go and sometimes you are exiled. For many years I was abandoned, left to rot and fester; a relic from the past. But then the New Czar unearthed me from the ruins of my own past. His people told me that I could be of use again… I could help to serve the Motherland… the new Russia… destroy our enemies and enrich our leaders.

“For nearly a decade I lived the life of the poor. My home, such as it was, was a sixth floor apartment with intermittent heating and electricity. But after spending my time in the Gulag it was a paradise. In the Gulags, I had learned who our great leader’s foes were. I had starved there, I had killed there, and I had survived there. So my little apartment, free of death and disease and sodomy, was my safe haven.”

He smiled and looked over at the young woman, as if he had forgotten some minor detail that he wished to share. “I am planning on writing my memoirs, for history, for posterity. I am hoping to work with a publisher soon. They tell me that it could be a very successful book.”

Eleanor gave him the cold, hard stare. “If you could just stick to the questions please, my time here is limited.”

“Of course, of course. I apologise,” he said, continually squeezing the rubber ball, trying to ease his discomfort.

And the camera carried on recording, its little LED light shining.

“I was awoken from my bed. It was not so late really, but when you are poor and alone there is not too much to stay awake for. Sleep was an ally when it came. I heard the banging on my apartment door and I knew who it was. In Moscow, when someone bangs on your door in the middle of the night it is usually one of two things; the Vory, or State Security. As I had never had dealings with the Mafiya, and because of my intelligence background, it could really only have been the latter.