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Martin flew from London to Aberdeen and was met by a former SAS sergeant whom he knew well. He was a tough Scot who clearly had returned to his native heather in his retirement.
‘How are you keeping, boss?’ he asked, employing the old jargon for SAS men talking to an officer. He hefted Martin’s kitbag into the rear and eased out of the airport car park. He turned north at the outskirts of Aberdeen and took the A96 road in the direction of Inverness. The mountains of the Scottish Highlands enveloped them within a few miles. Seven miles after the turn he pulled left off the main road.
The signpost said simply: ‘Kemnay’. They went through the village of Monymusk and hit the Aberdeen–Alford road. Three miles later the Land-Rover turned right, ran through Whitehouse and headed for Keig. There was a river beside the road; Martin wondered whether it contained salmon or trout or neither.
Just before Keig the off-road turned across the river and up a long, winding private drive. Round two bends the stone bulk of an ancient castle sat on a slight eminence looking out over a stunning vista of wild hills and glens.
Two men emerged from the main entrance, came forward and introduced themselves.
‘Gordon Phillips. Michael McDonald. Welcome to Castle Forbes, family seat of Lord Forbes. Good trip, Colonel?’
‘It’s Mike, and you were expecting me. How? Angus here made no phone call.’
‘Well, actually we had a man on the plane. Just to be on the safe side,’ said Phillips.
Mike Martin grunted. He had not spotted the tail. He was clearly out of practice.
‘Not a problem, Mike,’ said the CIA man McDonald. ‘You’re here. Now a range of tutors have your undivided attention for eighteen weeks. Why not freshen up and after lunch we’ll start the first briefing.’
During the Cold War the CIA maintained a chain of ‘safe houses’ right across the USA. Some were inner-city apartments for the holding of discreet conferences whose participants were better not seen at head office. Others were rural retreats such as renovated farmhouses where agents back from a stressful mission could have a relaxed vacation while also being debriefed detail by detail on the time abroad.
And there were some chosen for their obscurity where a Soviet defector could be held in the kindliest of detention while checks were made on his authenticity, and where a vengeful KGB, working out of the Soviet Embassy or Consulate, could not get at him.
Agency veterans still wince at the memory of Colonel Yurchenko who defected in Rome and was amazingly allowed to dine out in Georgetown with his debriefing officer. He went to the men’s room and never came back. In fact he had been contacted by the KGB who reminded him of his family back in Moscow. Full of remorse, he was daft enough to believe the promises of amnesty and redefected. He was nev
er heard of again.
Marek Gumienny had one simple question for the small office inside Langley that runs and maintains the safe houses: ‘What is the most remote, obscure and hard-to-get-into-or-out-of facility that we have?’
The answer from his real-estate colleague took no time at all.
‘We call it the Cabin. It is lost to the human race, somewhere up in the Pasayten Wilderness of the Cascades Range.’
Gumienny asked for every detail and every picture available. Within thirty minutes of receiving the file he had made his choice and given his orders.
East of Seattle, in the wilds of Washington State, is the range of steep, forested and, in winter, snow-clothed mountains known as the Cascades. Inside the borders of the Cascades are three zones: the National Park, the logging forest and the Pasayten Wilderness. The first two have access roads and some habitations.
Hundreds of thousands of visitors go to the Park every year while it is open, and it is riddled with tracks and trails; the former viable for rugged vehicles, the latter for hikers or horses. And the wardens know every inch of it.
The logging forest is off limits to the public for safety reasons, but it too has a network of tracks along which snarling trucks habitually haul the felled tree trunks to the delivery points for the sawmills. In deep winter both have to close down because the snow makes most movement almost impossible.
But east of them both, running up to the Canadian border, is the Wilderness. Here there are no tracks, one or two trails and only in the far south of the terrain, near Hart’s Pass, a few log cabins.
Winter and summer the Wilderness teems with wildlife and game; the few cabin owners tend to summer in the Wilderness, then disconnect all systems, lock up and withdraw to their city mansions. There is probably nowhere in the USA as bleak or remote in winter, with the possible exception of the area of northern Vermont known simply as ‘the Kingdom’, where a man may vanish and be found rock-solid in the spring thaw.
Years earlier a remote log cabin had come up for sale and the CIA bought it. It was an impulse purchase, later regretted but occasionally used by senior officers for summer vacations. In October when Marek Gumienny made his enquiry it was closed and locked. Despite the looming winter and the costs, he demanded it be reopened and that its transformation begin.
‘If that’s what you want,’ said the head of the real-estate office, ‘why not use the North-west Detention Centre in Seattle?’
Despite the fact he was talking to a colleague, Gumienny had no choice but to lie.
‘It is not just a question of keeping an ultra-high-value asset away from prying eyes, nor yet preventing him from escape. I have to consider his own safety. Even in supermax jails there have been fatalities.’
The head of safe houses got the point. At least, he thought he had. Utterly and completely invisible, utterly and completely escape-proof. Totally self-contained for at least a six-month period. It was not really his speciality. He brought in the team who had devised the security at the fearsome Pelican Bay Supermax in California.
The Cabin was almost inaccessible to start with. A very basic road went a few miles north of the tiny town of Mazama and then ran out, still ten miles short. There was nothing for it but to use sky-hooks and use them extensively. With the power invested in him Marek Gumienny commandeered a Chinook heavy-lift helicopter from McChord Air Force Base south of Seattle to be used as a carthorse.
A build team from the Army’s Corps of Engineers; raw materials were purchased locally with State Police advice. Everyone was on a need-to-know basis and the legend was that the Cabin was being converted into an ultra-high-security research centre. In truth it was to become a one-man jail.