The Deceiver

Thursday, when the hearing began for its fourth day, was the day that Timothy Edwards had determined would be its last. Before Denis Gaunt could begin, Edwards decided to preempt him.

Edwards had become aware that his two colleagues behind the table, the Controllers for Domestic Operations and West­ern Hemisphere, had indicated a softening of their attitudes and were prepared to make an exception in the case of Sam McCready and retain him by some ruse or other. After the close of the Wednesday hearing, his two colleagues had taken Edwards to a quiet corner of the Century House bar and made their feelings more than plain, proposing that somehow the old Deceiver be retained within the Service.

That was emphatically not in Edwards’s scenario. Unlike the others, he knew that the decision to make a class action out of the case for the early retirement of the Deceiver stemmed from the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, a man who one day would sit in conclave with four others and decide the identity of the next Chief of the SIS. It would be foolish to antagonize such a man.

“Denis, we have all listened with the greatest interest to your recall of Sam’s many services, and we are all mightily impressed. The fact is, however, that we now have to face the challenge of the nineties, a period when certain—how shall I put it?—active measures, riding roughshod over agreed pro­cedures, will have no place. Must I remind you of the brou­haha occasioned by Sam’s chosen course of action in the Caribbean last winter?”

“Not in the slightest, Timothy,” said Gaunt. “I had in mind to recall the episode myself, as my last instance of Sam’s continuing value to the Service.”

“Then please do so,” invited Edwards, relieved that this was the last plea he would have to listen to before proceeding to his unavoidable judgment. Besides, he reasoned, this epi­sode would surely sway his two colleagues to the view that McCready’s actions had been more those of a cowboy than of a local representative of her Gracious Majesty. It was all very well for the juniors to give Sam a round of applause when he walked into the Hole in the Wall bar on his return, just before the New Year, but it was he, Edwards, who had had to interrupt his festivities to smooth the ruffled feathers of Scot­land Yard, the Home Office, and the outraged Foreign Office, an interlude he still recalled with intense exasperation.

Denis Gaunt reluctantly crossed the room to the desk of the Records clerk and took the proffered folder. Despite what he had said, the Caribbean affair was the one he would most have liked to avoid. Deep though his admiration for his desk chief ran, he knew that Sam had really taken the bit between his teeth on that one.

He recalled only too well the memoranda that had rained on Century House early in the New Year, and the lengthy one-on-one meeting with the Chief to which McCready had been summoned in mid-January.

The new Chief had taken over the Service only a fortnight earlier, and his New Year present had been to have details of Sam’s Caribbean exploits land on his desk. Fortunately, Sir Mark and the Deceiver went back a long way, and after the official fireworks the Chief had, apparently, produced a six-pack of McCready’s favorite ale for a New Year toast and a promise—no more rule-bending.

Six months later, for reasons McCready could only guess at, the Chief had been much less accessible to him.

Gaunt assumed, wrongly, that Sir Mark had bided his time and waited until the summer to ease McCready out. He had no idea from how high a level the order had really come.

McCready knew. He did not need to be told, had no requirement of proof. But he knew the Chief. Like a good commanding officer, Sir Mark would tell you to your face if you were out of line, chew you off if he felt you deserved it, even fire you if things were that bad. But he would do it personally. Otherwise, he would fight like a tiger for his own people against the outsiders. So this business had come from higher up, and the Chief himself had been overruled.

As Denis Gaunt returned to his own side of the room with the file, Timothy Edwards caught McCready’s eye and smiled.

You really are a bloody menace, Sam, he thought. Bril­liantly talented, but you just don’t fit anymore. Such a pity, really. If only you’d smarten yourself up and abide by the rules, there could be a place for you. But not now. Not now that you have really upset people like Robert Inglis. It will be a different world in the nineties—my world, a world for people like me. In three years, maybe four, I shall have the Chief’s desk, and there will be no place for people like you anyway. Might as well go now, Sam, old boy. We’ll have a whole new officer group by then—bright young staffers who do what they’re told, abide by the rules, and do not upset people.

Sam McCready smiled back.

You really are a prize asshole, Timothy, he thought. You really think the gathering of intelligence is about committee meetings and computer print-outs and kissing Langley’s butt. All right, it’s good, the American signals-intelligence, and their electronic intelligence. The best in the world—they have the technology with their satellites and listening devices. But it can be fooled, Timothy, old boy.

There’s a thing called maskirovka, which you have hardly heard of. It’s Russian, Timothy, and it means the art of building phony airfields, hangars, bridges—entire tank divi­sions—out of tinplate and plywood, and it can fool the Amer­ican Big Birds. So sometimes you simply have to go in on the ground, put an agent deep inside the citadel, recruit a malcon­tent, employ a defector-in-place. Timothy, you’d never have made a field man, with all your club ties and your aristocratic wife. The KGB would have had your balls for cocktail olives in two weeks flat.

Gaunt was beginning his last defense, trying to justify what had happened in the Caribbean, trying not to lose the sympa­thy of the two Controllers who last night had appeared willing to change their minds and recommend a reprieve. McCready stared out of the window.

Things were changing, all right, but not the way Timothy Edwards thought. The world, in the aftermath of the Cold War, was going quietly crazy—the noise would come later.

In Russia, the bumper harvest was still ungathered for lack of equipment, and by the autumn it would be rotting in the sidings for lack of rolling stock. Famine would come in December, maybe January, driving Gorbachev back into the arms of the KGB and the High Command, and they would exact their price for his heresy of this summer of 1990. The year 1991 would be no fun at all.

The Middle East was a powder keg, and the best-informed agency in the region, the Israeli Mossad, was being treated like a pariah by Washington, and Timothy Edwards was taking his cue from there. McCready sighed. The hell with them all. Perhaps a fishing boat in Devon was the answer after all.

“It all really began,” said Gaunt, opening the file in front of him, “in early December, on a small island in the northern Caribbean.”

McCready was jerked back to the realities of Century House. Ah yes, the Caribbean, he thought—the bloody Car­ibbean.