Tundra Read Online Free Page A

class. He identified the locations of some of the main Soviet tank deployments in eastern Poland, among other data.’
    The harassed mother’s exhortations to her toddler were becoming more strident. Vale nodded down the snaking bank, and they began to walk.
    ‘After 1990, Wyatt was pulled out of Europe. He did some teaching and training here in London, for a while, but he was still a young man, barely thirty, and his talents as a field operative were too useful to waste. He ended up, in the late nineties, stationed in the Levant. Lebanon and Tel Aviv, mostly. He did stints in Turkey. Trips to Teheran. His focus was on the Palestinian groups, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. Once again, excellent, textbook work. With flair. He could have run the Middle East desk within the Service before he was fifty. But, as I say, he chose to leave. And the reason he gave, at the exit interview, was that he preferred to spend the remaining years of his working life following academic pursuits. He had a genuine degree in climatology, and that was what he said was his life’s passion.’
    In his pocket, Purkiss felt his phone vibrating. It would be Hannah. He didn’t answer for the moment.
    Vale continued: ‘They fought to keep him, of course. Tried to bribe him with every enticement in the book. He could follow his vocation, earn a chair at any university in the world, but he would still be valuable to SIS. The Service would work around him. Yet Wyatt was adamant. He harboured no resentment against the Service, was grateful for their employment and proud of the work he’d done for them. But it was time for him to move on.’
    They walked in silence for a minute. Purkiss sifted through the information so far. It was a kind of game they played. Vale relayed facts, and Purkiss absorbed them and searched his memory of Vale’s tone for essentials, for emphasis.
    ‘Warsaw,’ he said finally.
    ‘Yes.’ Vale took a satisfied draw on his cigarette. ‘Wyatt was turned by the KGB at some point while he was a student. Probably in 1985 or thereabouts, when he was in his middle twenties. A vulnerable age in this business. Too young to have become entirely cynical yet, but old enough for doubts to have started to creep in.’
    ‘You’re sure?’
    ‘There’s no question. For years there were suspicions. Nothing SIS could plausibly act upon, and the intelligence Wyatt was providing turned out to be wholly accurate, but he was kept under watch all the same. Then, in 1999, one of SIS’s Turkish informants obtained photographic evidence of Wyatt meeting a Russian FSB operative in Ankara. The operative had been a KGB officer in Warsaw in the eighties, his time there overlapping with Wyatt’s.’
    Purkiss mulled it over. ‘Did the Service pull him in?’
    Vale shook his head. ‘You know how it works, John. There wasn’t considered a need to remove Wyatt from active service. He was a first-rate asset, and if he was still dallying with the Russians... well, they were our friends by then, in the Yeltsin days. Things have changed, of course, and it wouldn’t be tolerated now.’
    ‘But why did Moscow allow Wyatt to relay the kind of information you said he provided? Soviet tank movements and the like? Especially if it wasn’t disinformation, and was genuine, as you mentioned.’
    Vale had a way of drawing on his cigarette that made it seem like he was shrugging. ‘Perhaps it cemented his cover. The Kremlin was willing to sacrifice a certain amount of secrecy in order to keep an asset like Wyatt in their fold.’
    Again, the two men strolled in silence. Ahead of them the Serpentine’s edge merged with the grey gloom and disappeared.
    Purkiss said: ‘So he’s a KGB double. He retires, with honour. Now what?’
    Vale took a slow turn, his gaze surveying the environment without appearing to do so. When he spoke, his voice was lower, forcing Purkiss to move closer to hear.
    ‘Wyatt’s resurfaced. For the last two months, he’s been part of an