Kimber looked across the desk. “I’m going to get one of our people to take you to have a meal downstairs. He’ll bring you back to me when you’ve finished. OK?”
Hayhanen nodded and stood up. Reaching into his jacket pocket he took out a Finnish five-mark coin and, as Kimber watched, the man prised the coin open with the nail of his thumb. The coin was hollowed out to take a single-frame negative from a Minox camera.
Half an hour later, after Kimber had phoned New York for a check on Sivrin and the cottage in Peekskill, it was Washington who came back to him. Seats had been booked on the night-flight from Paris for him and his visitor. He was not to interrogate him further himself. Just deliver him safely at Idlewild. He was to stay behind on the plane with Hayhanen until all the other passengers had left and a CIA deep interrogation team would come on board and take over.
When they arrived at Idlewild Kimber was amazed at the group that poured into the empty aircraft. Six or seven top men and Allan Dulles himself in the private room in the terminal building. It seemed that Hayhanen was the break they had been looking for for the last four years. He was congratulated as if it were some skill on his part that had pulled in the KGB man. There was apparently no doubt in their minds that Hayhanen really was genuinely KGB.
Two hours after his arrival in New York Hayhanen was officially handed over to the FBI and four Special Agents had interrogated him through the night to mid-afternoon. By that time he had signed a document giving his permission for the house in Peekskill to be searched.
They had to use Russian-speaking agents in the following days because Hayhanen’s poor English became unintelligible under pressure. Apart from the language problem it became obvious that Hayhanen had a very disturbed personality as well as being a heavy drinker. Questioning Hanna his wife and several local tradesmen who knew him was like cleaning an old painting. As a layer of paint or varnish came off a different picture was revealed, and another and another. Hayhanen’s life had been a strange, wild nightmare of drunken wife-beating, bizarre outbursts of public violence and then the secret life controlled by the man called Mark.
The interrogators gradually realised why Moscow had recalled him. Apart from keeping the appointments with his controller, Hayhanen had been totally indifferent to his mission. Using the money he was paid for his own purposes, unscrupulous in his demands for more funds and, as far as they could tell, never carrying out even the minor tasks that he had been ordered to undertake. But what they got from him that really mattered was the description of Mark, the places where they met and the various addresses in New York where he lived or appeared to live. As often happened when a man really hates another, Hayhanen could describe Mark in great detail.
It was the studio in the Ovington Building that they were able to identify most accurately despite the vague, rambling description, and a twenty-four-hour surveillance of the building was mounted by the FBI even before the interrogation of Hayhanen was completed. The interrogation team were going back into his recruitment and training in the Soviet Union but Hayhanen was slowly disintegrating, becoming fearful of KGB retribution for what he had done. Nervous and excitable, he refused to sign statements and insisted that even if they were able to trace the man named Mark, he would not appear personally in court as a witness to Mark’s activities.
His description of Mark had portrayed an elderly man, bald with a fringe of grey hair, a narrow face with a prominent nose and a receding chin; he thought that maybe Mark was Jewish. And always the dark straw hat with the broad white band around it.
14
Bert Harris stirred his coffee slowly as he watched the two men at the table near the service counter. One of the men was Grigor Grushko and he had no idea who the other man was. It was the second time they had met in the last two weeks. The first time they had met at a pub, the Bricklayer’s Arms near Victoria Station, and this time they were in the cafeteria on the main concourse at Euston Station.
They were talking earnestly, with Grushko tapping his finger on the table as if to emphasise some point. They weren’t quarrelling but it looked as if they were disagreeing about something. Ten minutes later Grushko stood up, standing for a moment, still speaking as if he was trying to convince the other man of something.
Harris looked at his watch. It was four-thirty and he decided, for no particular reason, to stay with the second man. But he watched as Grushko walked across the concourse and down the steps to the underground taxi rank.
Ten minutes later the second man looked around the cafeteria slowly, and Harris was sure then that the man had had anti-surveillance training. It had been done too methodically, despite the casualness. The man stood up, patted his jacket pockets as if to check that something was there, and then he walked across to the bookstall and bought a copy of the Evening Standard. He turned it sideways to look at the stop-press column on the back page, folded it slowly and strolled across to the exit to Euston Road. He stood outside looking at the passing traffic. Harris watched him from just inside the station.
When the man walked to the line of taxis Harris was close behind him. After the man closed the door of the taxi Harris let one taxi go and took the second. He flashed his ID card at the driver and pointed to the taxi he wanted followed.
They were held up by the lights in Regent Street
