Man From Barbarossa

‘Not altogether. There are ways, and we have the means which are not unlike the methods the Scales of Justice used on poor innocent Penderek.’

As if on cue, the small red telephone buzzed at M’s elbow. He answered in a low, cautious voice, then looked up quickly at Natkowitz. ‘A man who calls himself Michael appears to know you’re here, Mr Natkowitz. Would that make sense?’

The Israeli nodded. ‘Only three people know, sir. Michael is one. He wishes to speak with me?’

‘No, gave me a message for you.’ M slowly replaced the receiver.

‘Well?’

‘He says you’ll understand if I tell you Rachel is missing.’

Pete Natkowitz stood unnaturally still for a second or two, his face frozen as he drew a sharp audible breath. Then he relaxed. Unsmiling, he said, ‘Markus Leibermann has disappeared, gentlemen. Something has gone very wrong. I should speak with Tel Aviv, but this worrying news should be something kept between us. I don’t think anyone else will be officially informed just yet. In view of what you’re proposing, sir,’ he looked hard at M, ‘I think we might well have some unfortunate problems.’

4

FROGS IN THE OINTMENT

It was just before six thirty in the evening that Nigsy Meadows took the call from his junior. It was the simple code they altered once a week – more recently since the Gulf crisis – sometimes as often as three times a week.

‘Mr Meadows, sir, could you drop into the office sometime this evening,’ Williamson said as though it could not matter less. ‘Sylvia has a couple more letters for you to sign. They want them in the bag for London tomorrow.’

‘Can’t it wait till Thursday?’ Nigsy hoped he sounded bored. Shabak, the Israeli Security Service, had all the embassy and consular buildings in Tel Aviv bugged and monitored out of existence.

‘ ’Fraid not, sir. They’re part of the stuff the FS’s yelling for.’

‘All right, okay, I’ll be in later on, but don’t hang by your nails.’

Translation: there is a top secret flash from London unbutton personally. Fine, I’ll be in within the hour.

Nigsy had been looking forward to a quiet evening watching a video of a concert, taped by his wife in London and broadcast the previous week on BBC 2. The ‘eyes only’ signal, he figured, could be anything from a run-and- hide, to some panic-button crash meeting with the one man he still ran in Arafat’s shop.

He had only been on station for six weeks and knew it was temporary because his real forte was Eastern Bloc and the Soviets. Now the Service was behaving like the old army days when they used to make a cook into a gunner and an all-round athlete into an education officer.

Good old Nigsy, they had said. Got a bit of the Moscow twitch. Been over there too long. Bring him in and let him rest up in Tel Aviv for a while. ‘Only a few months,’ M said when he last saw the old man. ‘Change of scene. Do you good.’

Silly old devil, Meadows had thought. Shoving me out into the Middle East where I don’t know my arm from my elbow, and at a moment of historical crisis as well. But he did like the climate though he missed his wife because it really was not worth her while coming over if this was really going to be a short-term posting.

He listened to the radio for half-an-hour – the end of Swan Lake, followed by a Chopin Prelude – (the one Barry Manilow pinched for Could it be magic?) then time was up and he went out into the chilly night, checked the Range Rover and drove from his end of the compound to the embassy building.

Williamson, one of life’s perpetual juniors who must have been five years Meadows’s senior, unlocked the cipher room and they both used their keys to prime the machine. The flimsy was in the safe and it took Meadows fifteen minutes to work the magic.

Flash from M to Head of Tel Aviv Station. Alert all assets to possible abduction of a Markus Leibermann aka Josif Vorontsov from Tampa, Florida, to some Max Sec Town Hall Stop Be prepared to return Oxford direct within forty-eight hours Stop Relief briefing already on finals Stop Greetings M Stop

Town Hall was a catch-all for Tel Aviv, Haifa or Jerusalem. Oxford was Moscow and the rest meant that M had him marked up to whizz straight back to Moscow when his relief arrived in the next forty-eight hours, not even calling in at London on the way.

Nigsy Meadows hoped M had sent winter clothing with his relief. In Moscow at this time of the year it could get down to –44°F, cold enough, as they say, to freeze the medals off a brass general.

M had sent the flash signal to Tel Aviv and recalled Flossie Farmer from leave during a short break in the briefing. Allowing for normal signal traffic delays, he knew Meadows was unlikely to receive the instructions much before six or seven Tel Aviv time. Whatever Natkowitz had said, M was not convinced that the Mossad had no hand in Leibermann’s sudden disappearance. Just to be on the safe side, he also sent flash signals to Oxford, Banbury, Reading, Colchester, Basingstoke, Frome and Bicester (Moscow, Berlin, Prague, Paris, Bonn, Budapest and Warsaw). Later he would deal with the remainder of the old Eastern Bloc countries.

Moneypenny had grabbed him to sign the day’s mail and to draw his attention to a couple of signals which seemed to require action now. One was a ‘Confidential’ from MI5 – the Security Service – concerning something that might just have repercussions on the main matter in hand. M worried at it in the back of his mind as he returned to the briefing room, this time to deal with the small amount of intelligence they had on the Scales of Justice.

They had given up any pretence of special briefing, sitting together for a general discussion, first listening to Pete Natkowitz who related every scrap of information he had supposedly wrung from Tel Aviv. In the end it boiled down to the unpalatable fact that the Mossad surveillance and snatch teams had been left-footed and had no idea who had spirited Leibermann/Vorontsov from Florida, let alone where the man had been taken.

After these troublesome tidings, M asked Natkowitz to state the Israeli position regarding the Scales of Justice.

‘I want to make this absolutely clear,’ the Israeli began. ‘The Scales have nothing to do with the Mossad, nor do we support them in any way. The Israeli government has no lines into them and they have never sought succour from my country, though it would seem they would like people to believe we have very firm links with them.

‘Our first knowledge, like that of most people, came from GSG-9. Alert 1042/90. You’ve all seen it?’ He looked up in query.

The German Counterterrorist Unit’s Alert had indeed been among the many documents Bond had looked through when he came back from sick leave. These days, he considered, they had more terrorist Alert signals than anything else. In fact, it was no secret that the old 00 Section, which had officially ceased to exist, had become his own Service’s elite counterterrorist unit.

Just to refresh everyone’s minds, Bill Tanner thumbed through a heavy bound loose-leaf file of European Alerts until he came to the one dated October 10th, 1990.

‘On three occasions in the past month, according to the GSG-9 circular, we have had evidence of a new quasi-terrorist organisation which appears to be ill-defined and with blurred, uncertain aims. The sources come from a raid, following an informant’s tip, on a house in the Sankt Georg district of Hamburg. Two men were arrested and later admitted to belonging to a unit of the Red Army Faction. Among various pieces of the usual literature seized were two leaflets, one in German, the other in Russian. They purport to come from a group calling itself the Scales of Justice which claims to have a universal membership of six hundred spread throughout Russia, Eastern Europe, the United States of America, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Its aims are not apparent from these leaflets, but similar items, found after the arrest of two women at Frankfurt airport on September 15th, indicate that the SoJ is a group organised from within the Soviet Union. Its aims are set out in a document called Dossier Number 4 which was seized, together with a handful of names and addresses,