A Spy in the Family by Paul Henderson

Author:Paul Henderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2025-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two

Prague, Czechoslovakia, 7 January 1987

Jelinek wasted no time in putting his extraction plan into action. The mushroom picking incident had spooked him, and this time he didn’t ask if he could return to Prague – he just went. He told his spymasters that it wasn’t about the money. He wasn’t posturing to get a raise. He wanted to retire Gragert and Erwin van Haarlem.

He needn’t have bothered with the trip. His bosses ordered him to get right back to London.

“You’re imagining things,” his superiors told him when he met with them in the Czech capital. “You can’t go home. We need you outside. Getting to England is not easy. In addition, the Russians are pushing us. You have excellent news, they need it in the disarmament negotiations, we are gaining solid ground.”

It was clear that Moscow was now pulling Gragert’s strings. Prague’s power was waning, and his handlers had another big reason for him not being allowed to return anytime soon. “Do you know how many illegal people there are in England?” they asked him. “Two. Rather, there were two of you. The other betrayed us.”

His bosses told Gragert that the other illegal had fallen in love with an English girl whose father just happened to work for MI5. The father didn’t feel right about his daughter’s suitor and had him checked out. Discovering he was a Soviet Bloc agent, MI5 tried to turn him in the hope he would work as a double agent. Luckily for Gragert, Czech intelligence found out before he was able to betray anybody and dragged him back to Prague. “He doesn’t know you exist,” the StB told Jelinek. “Or if he does, he certainly doesn’t know your identity.”

Jelinek wasn’t altogether reassured but had little choice. He reasoned that disobeying his order to return to the UK would probably end up with him behind bars in Prague. Even if it all went pear-shaped in London, an English prison was preferable to a Czech one. He managed to win one more concession – to be allowed a visit home once a year – and then he flew back to London, knowing he would now need to keep a watchful eye over both shoulders.

* * *

Johanna continued to have no idea that her “Erwin” was a spy and a fraud. He showed no signs to her of distress or pressure as their mother-son relationship built over many years. They spent many intimate occasions catching up on their lives, but by Gragert’s design the conversations were one-sided and mainly delved into Johanna’s past trials and tribulations, beginning with being an unmarried mother during the war in Holland. Johanna no longer questioned his reticence about discussing the past. She accepted it would be too painful for him to roll back the years that must have given him an identity crisis. She worried that he never had the confidence-building security and love of his own biological parents, but he insisted to her that he had a happy childhood and that his adoptive parents were good to him.

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