Chapter 8

There were three of the talkative ones, side by side, in their chairs, when we approached. Adrianne asked about the lady who looked as if she had died, and the floodgates opened. I just looked out at the sea and kept watch to warn if the orderlies came out.

It was a lively conversation, with each one of them chipping in with comments. I think that Adrianne asked about the big guy and that started another round, with it finishing as one of these genteel ladies spat on the ground. When we said our cheerio’s, Adrianne told me that we were going for a walk on the beach. Once we were well out of earshot, she filled in the gaps. The dead lady had been totally silent the whole time she had been in the hospital, and one of our informants swore that she had had her tongue cut out. They had also been keeping her alive with regular heroin injections. The consensus of the husband was that he was an overbearing bully, and not a very nice person at all. One had said that she had been told that he taught English at the University. The big guy, we had discovered, was a high authority in the Russian military, and not someone to mess with. The one who had spat was a local, not at all happy with any Russian.

The tensions, in the city, were rising by the day. The University had three sections, one Abkhaz, one Georgian and one Russian. The Georgian students claimed that they were being discriminated against and went on a hunger strike in late April. They wanted a Georgian University, controlled by Tbilisi, and the authorities approved this idea in the middle of May. There was an immediate sit-in by the Abkhaz students and then an edict came down from the Supreme Soviet that Georgia had no right to a separate university, even stating that the region wasn’t big enough for two universities. The tension now was on the knife-edge.

We waited until the weather started to warm, into June, before doing anything dangerous. One day, after dark, because there was no rain forecast for some time, I dressed in a totally black outfit, put my camera and some small binoculars into a backpack, blackened my face, and Adrianne took me to the road junction, only stopping long enough for me to get off, and refix the helmet to the back rack, before carrying on.

I walked up the road, keeping clear of any houses, as my night vision improved. At the wooded area, I went off the road and made my way until I was opposite the target house. I found a spot where I could see up the driveway to the front door, then made myself a little hide. I listened to the sounds of the night, trying to hear any dogs. What I did hear was a cat fight, not far from me, and then I felt one settle itself against my side. We dozed, quietly, until dawn.

We were both awake, with the cat washing herself, when the front door opened and a blonde in a dressing gown called out. The cat immediately left my warm side and dashed across the road. With my binoculars, I could see that the front door had a cat-door, a sure sign that there were no motion sensors inside the house. I waited until they had left, and the road became quiet. Then, I wiped off my face, making sure I looked normal. I got up and went to the edge of the road, then dashed across and through the grounds to the back of the house. As I had expected, there was a window, left ajar, so that any cat smells would be dissipated.

I made sure that nothing was loose about my person, pulled on some thin gloves and worked on the window. It took only moments before I had it open and dropped into a utility room. I went through the house, room by room, finding that the two of them slept in the same bed and that he had a separate office, which he kept locked. That one took all of five minutes to open, and I walked in to examine it. There was a desk, office chair, desk-top computer with printer, a filing cabinet, and some photos on the walls. I looked behind the photos but did not find a safe.

Looking at the pictures, there were some with him and the blonde, looking happy, on the beach. There were none of me, or my mother. One showed him with the big guy, who was presenting him with a medal. Another showed him with a group of students with the notation, ‘My First English Class – all junior spooks.’ Under it, all the students were named. I took a couple of pictures of these with my Zenit, using the close-up lens, hoping that they would be clear enough for London.

I then made a thorough search of the desk. It took three hours. I found some paperwork for a number of bank accounts, some in England, so I took pictures of them and put them back as I found them. One thing that I did put in my bag was an envelope, taped to the underside of the bottom drawer. It contained two safe deposit keys, and the code numbers for a Cayman Island bank account.

One thing that was good, for me, was a silenced pistol with a full magazine. This, I tucked into the waistband of my leggings. Another thing that went into my bag was a notebook, which showed a lot of his activities while working for the Russians. I turned the computer on and took the punt that his password was Bond007. Looking through the files, I saw that he was writing his memoirs. The filing cabinet only had university folders, nothing for me.

I closed every drawer and looked around to see if anything was out of place. The only place that I thought may have something for me would be the bedrooms. One was obviously an unused spare; the second was the room that the blonde should have been sleeping in, making me think that she had been sent here as a minder, rather than a girlfriend. I took some time with my search and found her Russian Military ID in a pocket of a bag, on the top shelf of the wardrobe. This left me with no options when it came to a head. I couldn’t give her any opportunity to retaliate, so strangling was no longer on the cards. I took the ID with me when I left the room.

The master bedroom merely showed that they slept together, and the dirty sheets showed that neither of them cared enough to do the laundry. I went back down to the kitchen, made myself a sandwich and got a glass of water. After I had eaten and washed up, putting everything back as I found it, all I could do now was wait.

I made myself comfortable, next to a window that overlooked the driveway, and the cat joined me. I read through his journal. I expected them back around half past four if they were both at the university. When I saw the car drive in, I took a position behind the door of the master bedroom. If the blonde was true to her gender, the first thing she would want was a change of shoes. She opened the bedroom door and walked in, up to the bed. Then she was laying on the bed, blood pumping out of the three holes that I had put in her back.

Tucking the gun back in my waistband, I took a dart gun from my bag, a gift from our contact. My father was in the kitchen, sitting at the kitchen table with a drink in front of him, as I quietly went in. I just put a dart into his neck. It was quick working and he only had time to put his hand on his neck as he keeled over.

Now, my real work began. Taking pictures as I went along, I put the gun into his left hand, making sure that the fingerprints would be in the right place. One of the good things from being part of his family was that I knew he was left-handed. With the gun put on the table, I pressed his finger and thumb on the ID and put it next to the gun. I topped up the glass and pulled his head back, to pour the spirit down his throat. I found the dart and put it in my bag, then dabbed the spot on his neck with some clear water to clean it. I then took a plastic garbage bag that I had found in the utility room, put it over his head and tied it around his neck with a bootlace I had taken from his bedroom, using a quick knot that he could have done himself.

I sat on the other side of the table to watch him die. It took a little while, the bag moving in and out as he tried to breathe. I felt nothing, this man had rejected me all my life, worse than that, he had subjected my mother to three years of purgatory. When he stopped breathing, I made sure that every sign of me being there was gone. The utility window was back as it should have been. On the way out, I first ignored the cat, then pulled out its can of food and topped up the dish, putting the tin back.

I let myself out and, making sure no-one could see me, retrieved the bug from the car, then went over to the wooded area and pulled the gloves off, putting them in my bag. Dodging trees, I went back towards the road. Adrianne would be passing the side road, every hour, until I flagged her down. I made good progress and came out on the road well away from the scene of my crime. I waited, among the shrubbery, until I saw her come along. When she stopped, I took the helmet off the back rack, put it on and climbed on board. She knew enough not to say a word, until we were back in our room, when she held me close as I let out the feeling of grief for my mother and the shame of my father.

With our primary objective now completed, we could have started back towards home. The situation here was getting precarious and we would be blowing our cover out of the water if we had upped and left as it was getting interesting. The following week, I met with our contact, giving him the copy for the papers and the film canisters. I told him that we were staying on until things blew over. Two days later, after a meeting in the café, we moved in with our guys, something which they said was safer for us. All of the small things we shouldn’t have we put out in the backpacker bins, spread around.

With them, we had more insight to the tensions around the city, our information letting us be on hand when the shooting started. Our notes and photos would make the recipients of the films sit up and take notice. For once, we were doing honest spook work. It all came to a head in the middle of July.

The entry exams for the university were set down for the 16th. On the day before, there was a lot of Georgians in the city, with everyone thinking that they wanted to load the classes. There were a lot of fights. On the 16th, our guys were able to take us to a point in the university where we could watch the entry to the exam building. I had never seen a mob before, it was truly frightening. Many were armed. Later on, it was thought that there may have been five thousand Abkhaz rioters who stormed the building that afternoon to beat up everyone they could find who looked Georgian. Our guys managed to get us away, quietly, missing the worst of the action. By the time the Soviet military had regained some control, the day after, nearly twenty were dead and over four hundred injured, mostly Georgians.

Our guys agreed when we told them that it was too dangerous now, and that our papers wanted us home. By the end of another week, we had given the guys the scooter and taken the train that ran alongside the beach, on our way to Tbilisi. The Hungarian Embassy made bookings on the earliest plane to Sofia. I wondered why everyone was smiling and was eager to help.

When we landed at Sofia, we were greeted by a small group that included the owners of the two newspapers. That’s when we found out that our pieces that we had sent had been syndicated to other papers all over Europe. Our vignettes of hard lives were found to be fascinating; our tourist pieces would make Sukhumi a summer hotspot if it wasn’t so difficult to get to. The hard news on the tension and the fighting had been front page news with our graphic pictures backing up the stories.

Xavier let us know that none of our other pictures had gone anywhere but where they would be appreciated. Before we left Sofia, we attended a private dinner in the Hungarian Embassy. The Ambassador was generous with his thanks, awarding each of us with a bravery award. Gregor took me aside and told me that the Ambassador had his own collection of the pictures of the death of Bond. He had said that it gave him closure.

As for Gregor, the whole thing had been a lift for his, and Sofia’s, career. He told me that he was going to be transferred to a much more dangerous place, Moscow. He hugged us both, before we went back to our hotel. He told me that he was proud of his strong daughter and would be happy to see me, wherever we may meet.

The following day, we were given certificates of excellence from the print media and were told that we both had a big career in journalism, should we want it. The next day we were on a plane to Paris, and then on another, this time flown by the R.A.F. to a military airfield where we were escorted to a safe house for extensive debriefing. It took more than two weeks before they were happy with us. We were treated very well but nobody came to see us other than those debriefing us.

One day, at breakfast, we were told that we would be taken to London. We were given time to dress nicely and pack before we left in the car. At South Bank, we were given our passes back, and escorted to the big office where we were ushered in, finding Helen, Gloria, our two friendly helpers and the boss. He came over to us before anyone else could move, hugging the two of us and telling us that we had done a very professional job, in spite of the personal tensions it may have caused me.

He had our report on his desk, which he read through, with everybody giving their congratulations as he went along. Our two helpers then gave a separate report, based on the pictures I had sent back. We had been able to recover some of the money before the Russians could shut down the accounts. They were happy to have the picture of all the junior spooks and each face was added to our database.

Helen then took centre stage.

“I must say, Barbara, that you have shown yourself to be a smooth operator. There were no suspicious activities on the Russian side, that we could pick up. We don’t think that they accepted his death as a murder / suicide due to his discovery that his lover was also his guard, but there are no signs that any they had started to make any investigations. I believe that they really can’t figure out how it was done.”

“Thank you, Helen, I tried to hold myself to the job at hand. It’s not as if he was my father, and sending my mother to the other side was an act of kindness. Neither of them had any pain as they died. It’s not something I’m proud of. There is something, however, that I worry about. It’s that damn cat! I had it warming itself by my side most of the night. It was comforting. I just hope that they made sure it got a new home.”

That created a few knowing smiles. Gloria then had a question.

“Is there anything else we need to know? That part of the world looks like it is more of a powder keg than it has been. Your reports have given us an insight into a crack that is appearing in the side of the Bear. We hope that it gets bigger, to the point where the guts spill out.”

I reached into my backpack and pulled out the journal.

“I do have something that I have been holding back to bring here. He was busy writing his memoirs. Since I picked this up, I have read it and it contains a lot of information from years ago. There are names and details. I will now give it to you, sir, as anything that it produces will need to come from the top. It will be up to you who you bring in to tidy up the mess it will stir up.”

I got up and put the book on his desk, after taking out the envelope, which I handed to the older of our helpers.

“More work for you two, it may include a trip overseas.”

He opened the envelope and took out the slip of paper and the keys, smiled and asked the boss if they could leave the office. He nodded and they left, big grins on their faces.

The five of us then discussed the situation in Georgia, with the likely outcomes. Then we moved onto the covers, with the consequences of our successful stories. The boss told us that they were good enough to send us anywhere in the world, under our cover names. He then ordered me to learn some Russian, and for Adrianne to perfect her knowledge. There were going to be places we could go to, as journalists and do our jobs.

All the time, he left the book where I had put it, almost unable to pick it up and start the process of cleaning the department. I didn’t envy him. Helen then stood.

“You two are going to spend the rest of the day with our shrinks. Between you, I have counted nine deaths. We don’t have a double ‘O’ section, but, if we did, they would be spending time with the shrinks after every operation.”

She then nodded to Gloria, who led us out of the office, leaving Helen and the boss the privacy to start looking through the journal. Two levels down, we were taken to a corridor with numbers on the doors. At #8, Gloria knocked, and, when a voice called out, she opened it and ushered Adrianne inside, pulling the door shut behind her.

At #11, it was my turn to enter the office – well - consulting room. I spent four hours with a very nice woman, who took me through my childhood, my feelings for my parents, my feeling for my new father, and my feelings about killing people for a living. Her level must be almost as high as the boss because she had every scrap of information in my file, as well as the parts of the other Bond files that pertained to me. When I told her about the cat, she grabbed it, and we discussed my need for love, affection, and companionship. At the end of the session, she told me that there were a few ways we spooks could be undone. One was a deep relationship, one was losing the sense of fear, then becoming arrogant, and the final was acquiring pets.

“I have noted,” she said in her final wind-up, “That you have only actually killed, in the accepted sense of the word, a couple of times. Vlad was unconscious when the fire started, the two Russians were blown up, while Adrianne shot the other two. By my reckoning, the only innocent person who you killed in cold blood, was the Russian blonde. Why was that?”

“That’s easy. She was a trained member of their military, and if I had given her any chance, there would have been a fight which would have alerted my father. As it is, she was dead before she knew anything was wrong, so she didn’t suffer.”

“All right, Barbara, that’s enough for now. I do not look forward to any more of this type of operation for you. I am going to recommend that the two of you are sent off for simple intelligence gathering for a few years. You need the time to create a new reality.”

I met up with Adrianne, in the canteen, before going back to see Helen. She told me that her shrink had said much the same. It looked as if our immediate future would be more than boring. How wrong we were!

When we did get to sit down with Helen and Gloria, in the control room with the door firmly locked, Helen wanted to know how much of the journal Adrianne had read. We could truthfully say that she hadn’t seen it. There was some discussion regarding our covers. Gloria had looked at our journalist paperwork under the microscope and declared that the two passports were genuine, as were all the passes. We could, if we wanted to, go anywhere in the Soviet Bloc, and be accepted as who we said we were, with our reporting bolstering the facts. They wanted us to revert to the covers and go and live in Europe, taking on assignments as we were given them.

We worked through a timeline. We were both going to give up our homes, not a big problem for Adrianne. I would sell the house as Barry Bond, all to be done by mail. The Circus would be able to facilitate all of that. Once we were somewhere in Europe, we would open genuine bank accounts, with the sort of balances that a couple of girl journalists might have. Any other money would be put into numbered accounts, organised by MI6. That would be where our salaries would be paid. Any other money that we might need would be given to us in cash by our handlers. A meeting with our friendly helpers had informed us that, with all of the money that had been recovered from the various accounts and deposit boxes, topped up with a considerable sum that had been in the Caymans, we had managed to offset most of the two tons of bullion.

Then, we were both going to study Russian, to become as fluent as we could in a month. I knew that I end up with a Georgian accent. The preferred home should be central, in the Bloc, but close enough to a NATO country to be able to make an escape. Prague, in Czechoslovakia, was picked, and we made a trip over to find a suitable apartment. We found one, sparsely furnished, and signed the agreement. A couple of days buying better furniture and setting up our bank accounts made it seem more like home. We then went to Sofia and informed our papers that we would be working central Europe, should they want any copy. We gave them our bank details for any payments.

In early September 1989, we settled in and put out feelers. We interviewed the people in the street and found the feelings were much the same as we had found in Georgia. We went to Poland and managed to get an interview with Lech Walesa, the likely new President. The Solidarity movement had created a huge crack in the hide of the Bear, and Gorbachev was finding it hard to justify authoritarian tactics.

In October 1989, we were in Hungary, covering the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the removal of the border fence between Hungary and Austria. We were back in Czechoslovakia in November, to cover the early days of the Velvet Revolution, with the important meeting that led to all of the Communist Leaders resigning, paving the way to the break from Russia. Then, we were on the spot as the Berlin Wall came down.

During 1990, we travelled all over the remnants of the Soviet Bloc. Even going to Moscow, where we had a nice meal with Sofia and Gregor. We interviewed everyone we could, from the man in the street to the leaders. Our stories had been seen as neutral, even homely, and there were very few who wouldn’t talk to us. There were some who couldn’t help but boast, off the record, to a couple of pretty girls. All the while, our copy went off to Sofia, while our intelligence went by various ways to London.

In ‘91we were back in Moscow as Gorbachev oversaw the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet, and then travelled all over, getting stories about the general feelings of relief that the Bear was dead. Of course, nothing lasts for ever and we were back in Sukhumi and Tbilisi to cover the war between the Georgians and Abkhaz. Many died until that particular fighting stopped in September ’93. That peace wouldn’t last, we were sure of that.

From there, we were in Bosnia to cover the Serbian – Croatian conflict until 1995. After that, we were allowed to call it a day. We had spent six years inside conflict and revolution and had not killed a single person. We had, however, made our mark as journalists. In ’95, we let our papers know that we were taking a break. They were sad to see us go but were effusive in their praise.

Back in London, we found a totally new version of South Bank. The main management was now all younger officers, many of the older ones finding that helping a Russian spy, however minor, did not sit well on your CV.

We became managers, specialising in Central Europe. We had both now upped to a security level just below Helen. It was good to settle down and work normal hours, most days.

To prove that we had finally given up our dangerous lives, we both found nice guys from within the office, married, and found somewhere close to live so that we could get together.

There were nights when I was in heaven, lying next to my warm man with two cats curled up against my back. I was truly loved and had finally learned the one thing that it takes time to learn. I had, finally, learned how to love.

Marianne Gregory © 2023