Secret Agent Brainteasers by Sinclair McKay

Author:Sinclair McKay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: GAM007000 Games / Puzzles
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2019-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

DEADLIER THAN THE MALE

The young woman and her male colleague had ventured deeper into the building than they had perhaps intended. It was a featureless office block in the featureless Russian town of (then) Kalinin, 100 miles north of Moscow, in the mid 1950s. On the ground floor, the woman and the man had seen banks of telephones intended for the use of local citizens, and specifically for the purposes of reporting neighbours for dissident behaviour.

It was the woman who had found the staircase and she and the man were now at the end of a corridor on the first floor, looking at rows of shut doors. Suddenly, one of those doors was opened. A female Soviet official stepped out into the corridor, looked at the woman and the man, thought for a moment – then stepped back into the office and closed the door.

The woman was the first to indicate that she and her male colleague should make a bolt for it. Two British agents in the heart of the KGB’s local headquarters; capture did not bear thinking about.

The idea was that once they were out of the building, the couple could blend into the crowds on the street; their pursuers would lose them in the hubbub. As they got outside, however, they saw that the streets were actually near empty. They were aware of a commotion going on in the building behind them. The only alternative was to run.

A flight through cobbled streets in the cold air of the Russian spring; the woman realised that rather than getting lost, and run the risk of accidentally doubling back on their pursuers, she and her colleague should follow the hill down to the River Volga.

Then as they stood on the bank, they knew what they had to do. With the approaching clamour not far behind, the young woman unbuttoned her skirt, and jammed it into her attaché case; the man removed his trousers, doing likewise. And then they both jumped into the water.

By her own account, the shock was so intense it was almost like a heart attack; the river was not frozen, but was still freezing. Nonetheless, the agents allowed the strong tide to carry them around the bend of the river, far from their baffled pursuers. There they scrambled up the bank on the other side, spent an icy few minutes drying off, then dressed.

This was one episode in the life of a pioneering female MI6 spy called Daphne Park. Later in life, she was to become Baroness Park of Monmouth, the principal of Somerville College, Oxford. But for many decades the full extraordinary range of her career lay in the shadows of the Official Secrets Act.

And so inspired by not only her story, but also the surprising careers of so many pioneering female agents, the puzzles in this section owe something to the observation made that women make better spies because of their aptitude for multi-tasking. Here, single objectives will be complicated by several other factors,

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