Spy Out the Land Quotes

“She walked across the street and unlocked her car. As she squeezed in behind the wheel a picture emerged in her mind, as though released by her having left the house. It floated in her consciousness like a three-dimensional tableau: Tom Gadlow’s body splayed out at the bottom of the garden in Kuala Lumpur, his eyes rolled up into his head.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“He remembered the morning of his birthday when she had given him the wallet, and Ben bounding onto the bed to give him his card, and then the three of them in Haga Park. He bit into his cheek unconsciously, his ribcage thumping as the shame and guilt and rage coursed through him. He snapped the wallet shut. All his training said he should destroy the photograph, as it could ruin his cover if found on him, but it was the only concrete link to his family he had left. Besides, he told himself, he might need it later to help find them.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“Having committed this to memory, he reflected how deluded he’d been to believe he had left his past behind and become a peaceful Swedish citizen called Erik Johansson. Within a matter of hours, he’d reverted to the dedicated operative preparing a cover story without a second thought. A few hours too late, he thought bitterly. He’d meant to investigate Claire’s past when they had met as a matter of routine, but he’d been swept up by the thrill of new love and before he had managed to catch his breath she’d become pregnant and all his remaining caution and tradecraft had deserted him, his mind preoccupied with the prospect of bringing a new life into the world.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“They’d shot at him, and they had killed the Hanssons without any apparent compunction, but they hadn’t aimed their fire at Ben or Claire. So they must want them alive. Hold on to that fact. Hold on to it, and don’t let go. It means this is a kidnap, which means there’s a very good chance they’re still alive and being kept in good health. It means the men want something. You just have to find out what it is. He smiled bitterly at his optimism. Just.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“So here he was, at Nkomo’s door to beg. But if he was going to walk straight into the lions’ den it was vital that he gain the lions’ trust, and he wasn’t going to do that bringing his bodyguards with him. Nkomo and his men could simply kill him, of course – take him somewhere and shoot him as a traitor to the cause – but he didn’t think they would. It would rid them of a potentially dangerous rival, but it would only serve to make him a martyr and was too risky for their own reputations: anyone thought to have been involved in such an act would be cast out forever.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“At the end of the avenue, a large villa was set back from the road with a surrounding fence covered in hessian. This was ‘The Vatican’, the secret headquarters of the Department of National Security and Order – ZAPU’s spy agency. It made for a more discreet location for a rendezvous than Zimbabwe House, ZAPU’s headquarters in the city, which was believed to be under constant surveillance by the Zambian authorities and perhaps others. The Vatican was an anonymous-looking four-bedroom villa, but several sentries were positioned just behind the wrought-iron front gates. As the car drew in, one of the guards called through their arrival on a radio set.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“He came to me with this operation and I provided a great deal of the money and logistics for it. You can call him to check if you like, but we don’t have much time thanks to your errors, and if you think about it for a minute you’ll see that the only other way I’d know to call this number at this time, or the fact you’re travelling under the name Frederick Collins, or that you’re holding Hope Charamba and her son in a flat just off the central square in Vällingby, would be if your operation was entirely blown, in which case I doubt we’d be chatting on the telephone, don’t you?”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“The Commander hates the Brits.’ As do I, he felt like adding. ‘He doesn’t usually stand for “God Save the Queen”, it’s true, but Roy and I go back a long way. And we happen to have complementary aims here, which is of course the continuation of white rule in Rhodesia. Strange bedfellows and all that.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“The Commander had dragged him along on a ‘fact-finding mission’ to meet him and a few others in the Service last year, but the only facts he had found were that England was still as cold and dreary as it had been when he had left it as a child and that British intelligence was run by pompous asses.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“You can tell no one about this. Not the newspapers, not your aides – nobody whatsoever. If we have any indication that you have told anyone, or indeed have even considered telling anyone, your daughter and grandson will die. If you don’t follow our demands to the letter, they will die. If you don’t agree to all of the conditions we have set out for the summit, they will die. If it becomes clear in the summit or at any other time that others know of this, they will die.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“It was one of those words that tended to brook no further questioning, and Harmigan had applied his very best evocation of Dirk Bogarde’s insouciance when delivering the line. Concern over the Service’s record had fizzled out soon after: the country was facing more pressing issues than the spooks’ ancient history. Grave errors, it was decided, had been made, but there was nothing to be gained by harping on about them and one simply slept better if one accepted that, after all, these chaps were fundamentally decent people who knew what they were doing. In this way, the Service’s deeper secrets had been protected.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“Seeing no alternative, the Service had supplied the PM and senior members of his government with information about various ‘unfortunate episodes’, but not everyone had been persuaded. The new foreign secretary had been particularly persistent in questioning Innes about his predecessor’s assassination. In the end, Sandy Harmigan had come to the rescue, taking the floor from a flustered Innes one hot Tuesday afternoon in the Cabinet Office. In a virtuoso performance, he had deflected all the foreign secretary’s complaints, saying that it had been a horrendous, unprecedented and tragic sequence of events but that he knew from agents in the field that the terrorist responsible had been killed in a clandestine operation in Rome and the group he represented ‘cauterised’.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“Within the upper echelons of the agency, The Purge had been felt a necessary emergency measure: better to remain a stripped-down core than be packed up entirely. Had they not brushed the worst horrors under the carpet, so the reasoning went, several of them might have been disgraced, or even imprisoned.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“But she’d been lucky to survive at all. The doomsday scenario Edmund Innes had outlined to her in 1969 hadn’t quite come to pass, but the Service was now a shadow of its former self. She was one of the few survivors of what was still referred to, on the rare occasions it was referred to at all, as ‘The Purge’. The prime minister had been unimpressed by Review Section’s report into Dark and the other traitors and had decided immediate root and branch reform was needed. Dozens of officers had been discreetly ‘retired’ as a result. A Conservative government had been elected a few months later, but any hope it might take a softer line had soon been dispelled by the new prime minister’s insistence that the agency immediately inform him of all the remaining skeletons in its filing cabinets or face the possibility of a full parliamentary inquiry.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“One of them threw a grenade into the air and a few seconds later it exploded below him, buffering the helicopter off course and sending spasms through Dark’s neck as he crashed into the side of the cockpit. He righted himself and pulled back on the stick. Once he had managed to steady the helicopter, he stuck his head out of the window and looked down again.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“What do you think would have happened to me if I had been captured by your men?’ ‘You would have been killed, of course.’ ‘Yes. At last we are being honest with each other. I would have been shot in the back without a trial, then left to rot where I fell. Compare that to your situation at the moment, Joshua. You were captured at a terrorist camp in possession of illegal weapons, in the very act of training terrorists to attack this country. You’ve committed treason by the laws of this land, and yet here you are talking to me. Why are you not dead?”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“You know, this “Zimbabwe” you still believe in. It’s just a dream, my friend – or rather a nightmare. You think those fools can run a country? Not a chance. They’re at each other’s throats already, and they’ll be worse if their revolution succeeds. They’re bloodthirsty, the lot of them.’ ‘So they’re savages? Murungu trained you well.’ Oka shook his head. ‘No, not savages. Ordinary men corrupted by power, leading others who have turned bloodthirsty through a lack of discipline. Through fatigue and desperation from fighting a war they cannot win. You know this as well as I do.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“Yes, he had survived, he had outlived Father, he had fallen in love and started a family. But he was still a man on the run, and he always would be. He had no right to smoke cigarettes in the sunshine, watching a boy who called him ‘Pappa’ and giggled when he rustled his head against his stomach. He should be dead, or rotting in a cell, or at the very least pissing his days away in a frozen little flat in Moscow. He remembered Donald Maclean’s sad long face, the expression of bitterness he’d had in his eyes . . .”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“He’d stood across the street for several minutes, on the verge of making a move, but in the end he’d turned away and taken the bus back to his tiny flat, and the soul-crushing despair that was weekday evening Swedish television.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“One evening after work, he had found himself walking in the diplomatic quarter of the city and passed the British embassy. He’d been oddly gripped by the urge to walk in and give himself up. It would be so easy, and would solve so many problems. ‘My name is Paul Dark.’ And then it would all be out of his hands. A secret trial, a long sentence . . . well, so? He could cope. And it would be just: he’d be repaying his debt to society, as they said.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“All he had to contend with now were his memories, which weren’t pretty. In prison, he’d managed to stave them off with dreams of survival, escape, even revenge. Now he had nothing to focus on but a stretch of cold grey days in Sweden until death. And looming over everything was guilt: for the lives he had taken directly and for those that had been taken as a result of secrets he’d betrayed”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“Intelligence from another Scout unit indicated that several members of ZANLA’s Central Committee were currently staying there. The plan was simple: drive into the camp and capture or kill as many terrs as possible. Looking over his men, Weale was confident of their success. All were dressed as ZANLA terrs, down to the tiniest detail, and were armed with AK47s, RPD light machine guns and RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers. A Unimog led a column of Ferrets and homemade armoured vehicles known as ‘pigs’, all painted in ZANLA’s camouflage patterns and with a few of their flags flying. Twenty-millimetre Hispano cannons were mounted on the front of the pigs, supported by twin MAGs on swivel mountings on the sides.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“Confident his counter-measures were as secure as he could make them, he had slowly slipped into a routine existence. The biting winter hadn’t helped – more than a few times, he found himself wondering why he hadn’t fled to the Bahamas or Monte Carlo, like the jewel thieves in Hollywood films. Stockholm was comfortable but conformist, and its long dark nights seemed to drain all meaning from life. He was finally free from the British and the Russians – but for what purpose? In the evenings, he’d wander around the city looking at people, trying to fathom what drove them, inspired them – what they were doing”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“In the following months, he had supplemented these documents with other material, including a Zastava M57 pistol, the brutish-looking Yugoslavian copy of the Tokarev TT-33, and one of Husqvarna’s discontinued bolt-action rifles, both of which he’d bought through the Palestinians’ circle. Along with three more passports and a bundle of cash, he had buried it all in a hide in a cemetery on the outskirts of the city.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“Towards the end of the year, he had heard whispers about a group of Palestinians who had set up base in an old villa in one of the quieter suburbs, where they were said to have an arsenal of explosives and sophisticated electronic equipment in the basement. These were the big boys: well-trained professional freedom fighters, or terrorists, depending on your particular ‘bag’. In the circles Dark was now hovering around, the Palestinians were most people’s bag.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“Paul Dark lit a cigarette and raised it to his mouth. The moment the tip glowed, he inhaled deeply and leaned back on his elbows. He squinted in the afternoon sunshine, taking in the view that stretched out before him. The hillside was dotted with squares of brightly coloured blankets, each of which was home to a Swedish family with young children – like small islands of social democratic prosperity, he thought. A few feet away, Ben was running around pretending to be an aeroplane with another boy, while Claire was seated cross-legged next to him on their blanket, one finger entwined in her hair as she browsed the arts section of Dagens Nyheter , a pair of sunglasses perched on her head. He leaned over and found his own pair, which he pushed tight against the bridge of his nose. So here it is, he thought. Fifty. Half a century.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“His loyalty was to Rhodesia, and he would do whatever it took to ensure it remained under white rule – ‘in civilised hands’, as Smith himself had once put it. And Campbell-Fraser was prepared to work without Smith’s knowledge, or even against him, if he felt it was in Rhodesia’s best interests.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“In recent years, Vorster had launched a charm offensive on black African leaders in an attempt to ease the international isolation South Africa faced as a result of apartheid. His idea was to rebuild diplomatic and trade links by exploiting Western fears of a Soviet takeover in the region, presenting himself as a statesman who could come to peaceful terms with his black neighbours. This stuck in Smith’s craw, as during the war Vorster had been a general in the Ossewabrandwag, a South African paramilitary group that had been so pro-Nazi it had even adopted their salute. It was there that Vorster had first met and befriended his spy chief van den Bergh. Smith hated the British with an implacable intensity, but they had at least been on the right side together during the war with Hitler.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“Shaw had thought this a brilliant way to sow dissent within ZANU, which had split from ZAPU several years earlier following power struggles within the movement. But Campbell-Fraser felt the manoeuvre had been politically naive: he would have either clearly incriminated specific targets within ZANU or left it open enough to suggest ZAPU might also have been involved, thereby creating a much wider field of suspicion. Instead, Shaw had fumbled it with a halfway house, with disastrous results. One of ZANU’s founders, Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole, had left to form a more moderate group, while a firebrand figure within ZANU, Robert Mugabe, had consolidated his power by accusing rivals of collusion in the assassination. Far from fostering divisions, Shaw’s unsanctioned operation had made ZANU stronger, more militant and, worst of all, united behind Mugabe, who Campbell-Fraser felt was much more of a threat than Sithole had ever been, let alone the murdered Chitepo.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land

“On the wall facing him was an oil painting of two Spitfires taking off, a none-too-subtle reminder of the prime minister’s war record for the British, his having flown for their air force. The painting had been a gift to the PM from a group of British supporters a decade or so earlier. A lot had happened since, although there were still a few in Britain who believed in white Rhodesia. The rest of the room was decorated in the usual heavy government style: wall-to-wall red carpet, curlicued lintels over the door and, despite the heat, thick curtains in a hideous floral pattern framing the windows.”
― Jeremy Duns, Spy Out the Land