Games Traitors Play

36

‘Nikolai Primakov was an unusual case,’ Cordingley said, stopping at a disused coastguard hut to take in the view of the bay. ‘Once in a lifetime.’ They were walking west along the cliffs towards Lamorna. Cordingley was too old to go far now, but he had insisted that they should talk in the open, away from his house. His former hostility had passed, but there was no warmth, no offer of tea. ‘The initial approach was made by Stephen,’ he continued. ‘Never forget that. He’d met Primakov a few times at cultural events in Delhi, liked him on a personal level, singled him out for company. He also sensed a deep unhappiness behind all the smiles.’ Cordingley paused. ‘Primakov wasn’t the dangle, we dangled Stephen Marchant.’

‘And you’re still sure of that?’ Fielding asked.

‘More so than ever. And I think back over it often. Once Stephen had recruited him, Primakov’s true value became apparent to us. Dynamite. K Branch, First Chief Directorate. You couldn’t get better than that. And he knew much more than his rank should have allowed, particularly about KGB operations in Britain. The problem was, he kept talking about defecting, which would have been no good to us at all. To keep him useful, he needed to be promoted, not exfiltrated, so Stephen and I devised a plan for him, something to impress his superiors in Moscow Centre.’

‘You let Stephen be recruited by Primakov.’

Another pause as they watched the seagulls circling below. ‘It was actually Stephen’s idea. Brilliant, even now. Moscow thought they’d turned a rising MI6 agent, giving Primakov an excuse to meet regularly with Stephen. There was just one problem: the intel we had to give Primakov to keep Stephen credible as a Soviet asset.’

They both knew what Cordingley meant by this, but neither wanted to speak about it. Not yet. The moment demanded a respectful pause, a lacuna. Instinctively, they looked around to see if anyone might be within earshot, then walked on. On one side the coast path was overshadowed by a steeply rising hillside of gorse, pricked with yellow flowers. On the other was the Atlantic, swelling over flat black rocks far beneath them. It would have been difficult for anyone to listen in on their conversation, except perhaps if they were on a well-equipped trawler, which both men knew was not beyond the realms of Russian tradecraft. But the last boat had now slipped past them towards Newlyn, and the bay was empty, the coast clear.

Cordingley spoke first. He had stopped again and was facing the Atlantic, his thin white hair teased by the sea breeze. ‘We couldn’t give Moscow chickenfeed. They would have been immediately suspicious. The decision to pass them high-grade American intel was never approved by anyone, never formally acknowledged. I assume it remained that way, even when the Yanks went after Stephen.’

‘Cs’ eyes only.’

Fielding thought back to his first week as Chief of MI6, the evening he had spent sifting through the files in the safe in his office. It contained the most classified documents in Legoland, unseen by anyone other than successive Chiefs. They were even more invisible than ‘no trace’ files, short, unaccountable documents that read like briefing notes from one head to the next, outlining the Service’s deniable operations, the ones that had never crossed Whitehall desks. It had reminded Fielding of the day he had become head of his house at school, more than forty years earlier. A book was passed on from one head to the next, never seen by anyone else. It identified the troublemakers and bullies, in between tips on how to deal with the housemaster’s drink problem.

‘There’s no doubt someone in Langley got enough of a sniff to distrust Stephen, but I’m confident that Primakov’s still known only to the British.’

‘So why have you come here today?’

‘He’s back.’

‘In London?’ It was the first time Cordingley had seemed surprised.

Fielding nodded. ‘Next week. I need to know if we can still trust him.’

‘Primakov only dealt with Stephen. Refused to be handled by anyone else. He must have been frightened when the Americans removed Stephen from office, and upset when he died. It’s whether he’s bitter that counts. For almost twenty years, we kept promising him a new life in the West.’

‘I think Primakov’s about to approach Stephen’s son.’