The Deceiver

There was still a hint of fog hanging, away to their right, over the stretch of woodland known as Fox Covert, presaging a warm clear day to come.

On the knoll that dominated the rolling stretch of ground known to generations of soldiers as Frog Hill, the group of mixed military officers took their station to observe the forth­coming army maneuvers that would simulate a battle at bat­talion strength between two matched sets of opponents. Both groups would be British soldiers, divided for the sake of diplomacy not into “the Brits” and “the enemy” but into the Blues and the Greens. Even the usual designation of one group as “the Reds” had been changed, in deference to the composition of the officers on the knoll.

Across the stretch of open country at the northern edge of Salisbury Plain, so beloved by the British Army as a perfect maneuver ground much resembling the Central German Plain, over which it had been assumed the Third World War might have to be fought, umpires were scattered who would award points that would eventually decide the outcome of the battle. Men would not die that day; they would just prepare to.

Behind the officer group were the vehicles that had brought them there: several staff cars and a greater number of less comfortable Land-Rovers in camouflage stripes or dull green. Orderlies from the Catering Corps set up field kitchens to provide the succession of mugs of steaming tea and coffee that would be demanded throughout the day and began to unpack a cold collation of snacks.

The officers milled about or stood stationary in the poses and activities of observing officers anywhere in the world. Some studied maps protected by plastic sheeting, on which notations in chinagraph pencils would later be made and erased. Others studied the distant terrain through powerful field glasses. Others conferred gravely among each other.

At the center of the group was the senior British general, the commanding officer of Southern Command. Beside him stood his personal guest, the senior ranking general of the visitors. Between and slightly behind them stood a bright young Subaltern fresh out of language school, who murmured a running translation into the ears of both men.

The British group of officers was the larger, just over thirty men. They all wore an air of gravity, as if well aware of both the unusualness and the importance of the occasion. They also seemed somewhat wary, as if unable quite to shake off the habit of years. For this was the first year of perestroika, and although Soviet officers had been invited to watch British maneuvers in Germany, this was the first time they had come to the heart of England as guests of the British Army. Old habits die hard.

The Russians were as grave as the British, or more so. There were seventeen of them, and each had been carefully picked and screened. Several spoke passable English and admitted it; five spoke perfect English and pretended not to.

The speaking of English had not, however, been the first priority in their selection. Expertise was the first considera­tion. Each Soviet officer was an expert in his field and well acquainted with British equipment, tactics, and structures. Their instructions were not simply to listen to what they were told, even less to accept it; but to study hard, miss nothing, and report back exactly how good the Brits were, what equipment they used, how they used it, and if at all, where their weak points lay.

They had arrived the previous evening after a day in London, much of it spent at their own embassy. The first dinner at the Officers’ Mess at Tidworth Army Base had been fairly formal, even a trifle strained, but without incident. The jokes and the songs would come later, perhaps on their second or third evening. The Russians were aware that among the sev­enteen of them, there had to be five at least who were watching the rest, and probably each other as well.

No one mentioned this to the British group, nor did the British see fit to point out that among their own thirty mem­bers there were four who were actually from Counterintelligence, the watchers. At least the British’ watchers were only there to watch the Russians and not their fellow countrymen.

The Russian group comprised two generals, one whose insignia showed him to be from Motorized Rifles, the other from the Armored Corps; a General Staff full colonel; from Military Intelligence one colonel, one major, and one captain, all “declared,” meaning they admitted they really were from Military Intelligence; a colonel of the Airborne Forces at whose open-necked combat blouse could be seen a triangle of blue-white-striped singlet, the insignia of Spetsnaz, or Special Forces; a colonel and a captain from Infantry and the same from Armored. In addition there was a half-colonel from Ops Staff, plus a major and two captains; and a colonel and major from Signals.

The Soviet Military Intelligence Corps is known as the GRU, and the three “declared” GRU men wore their proper insignia. They alone knew that the Signals major and one of the captains from Ops Staff were also GRU but undeclared. Neither the remainder of the Russians nor the British knew this.

The British, for their part, had not felt it necessary to tell the Russians that twenty operatives from the Security Service were posted around the officers’ mess at Tidworth and would remain until the Soviet delegation departed for London and the Moscow flight on the morning of the third day. These watchers were now tending the lawns and flower beds, waiting table, or polishing bits of brass. Through the night they would “spell” each other, taking turns to keep the mess building under observation from vantage points scattered in a wider ring. As the Chief of General Staff had mentioned to the OC Southern Command at a ministry briefing several days earlier, “One really would prefer not to lose one of the buggers.”

The war game began on schedule at nine o’clock and proceeded throughout the day. The paratroop drop by Second Battalion, Parachute Regiment, took place just after lunch. A major of Two Para found himself standing next to the Soviet Airborne Colonel, who was watching with the keenest inter­est.

“I see,” observed the Russian, “that you still favor the two-inch company mortar.”

“A useful tool,” agreed the Britisher. “Effective and still reliable.”

“I agree,” said the Russian in slow, accented English. “I used them in Afghanistan.”

“Indeed. I used them in the Falklands,” said the major from Two Para. He thought, but did not say, “And the difference is, we won in short order in the Falklands, and you are losing badly in Afghanistan.”

The Russian permitted himself a grim smile. The Britisher smiled back. “Bastard,” thought the Russian. “He’s thinking how badly we are doing in Afghanistan.”

Both men kept smiling. Neither could have known that in two years the remarkable new General Secretary in Moscow would order the entire Soviet Army to withdraw from the Afghan adventure. It was early days, and old habits die hard.

That evening the dinner at Tidworth barracks was more relaxed. The wine flowed; vodka, which the British Army rarely drinks, was in evidence. Across the language barrier an element of jocularity raised its head. The Russians took their cue from their senior general, the Motorized Rifles one. He seemed to be beaming at the translated conversation from the British general, so they relaxed. The major from Ops Staff listened to a British tank man tell a joke and nearly burst out laughing before realizing he was not supposed to understand any English and had to wait for the translation.

The major from Two Para found himself next to the declared major from Soviet Military Intelligence, the GRU. He thought he would practice his smattering of Russian.

“Govoritya-vi pa-Angleeski?” he asked.

The Russian was delighted. “Ochen malinko,” he replied, then dropped into halting English. “Very little, I am afraid. I try with books at home, but it is not so good.”

“Better than my Russian, I’m sure,” said the paratrooper. “By the way, I’m Paul Sinclair.”

“Please, I am so sorry,” said the Russian. He reached around and held out his hand. “Pavel Kuchenko.”

It was a good dinner and ended with songs in the bar before the two groups of officers trooped off to their rooms at eleven o’clock. A number of them would appreciate that the follow­ing morning would permit a lie-in—the orderlies were in­structed to appear with cups of tea at seven o’clock.

In fact, Major Kuchenko was up at five and spent two hours seated quietly behind the lace curtains that covered the win­dows of his bachelor bedroom. He sat with all his lights out and studied the road that ran past the front of the officers’ mess toward the main gate leading to the Tidworth road. He spotted or thought he spotted three men in the half-gloom of very early morning who might be watchers.

He also spotted, precisely at six o’clock, Colonel Arbuthnot appear from the main doors of the mess almost beneath him and depart on what was apparently his regular morning jog­ging run. He had reason to believe it was a regular habit—he had seen the elderly colonel do exactly the same the previous morning.

Colonel Arbuthnot was not a difficult man to spot, for his left arm was missing. He had lost it years earlier while on patrol with his levies in that strange half-forgotten war in the hills of Dhofar, a campaign fought by British Special Forces and Omani levies to prevent a Communist revolution from toppling the Sultan of Oman and taking control of the Straits of Hormuz. A sentimental Army board had permitted him to stay on in the Army, and he was by then the catering officer at Tidworth officers’ mess. Every morning he kept in trim with a five-mile jog down the road and back, an accepted figure in white tracksuit with cowl hood and blue piping, the loose left sleeve neatly pinned to the fabric by his side. For the second morning, Major Kuchenko watched him thought­fully.

The second day of war games passed without incident, and finally all the officers of both nationalities agreed the umpires had done a good job in awarding a technical victory to the Greens, who had finally dislodged the Blues from their posi­tions on Frog Hill and secured Fox Covert from counterat­tack. The third dinner was very jolly, with copious toasts and later a much-applauded rendering of “Malinka” from the young Russian Ops Staff captain, who was not a spy but had a fine baritone voice. The Russian group was due to congre­gate in the main lobby after breakfast at nine A.M. the next morning to board the coach for Heathrow. The coach would come from London with two embassy staff on board to see them through the airport. During the singing of “Malinka,” no one noticed that Colonel Arbuthnot’s room, which was not locked, was entered by someone who left sixty seconds later as quietly as he had come and who later rejoined the group at the bar, coming from the direction of the men’s toilet.

At ten minutes to six the next morning a figure in white-cowled tracksuit with blue piping, the empty left sleeve pinned to the side, trotted down the steps of the mess and turned toward Main Gate. The figure was spotted by a watcher behind the glass of a window in an upper room of another building two hundred yards away. He made a note but took no action.

At the gate the Corporal of the Guard came out of the guardroom and threw up a salute to the figure as it ducked under the barrier. The runner, not wearing a cap, was unable to return the salute but raised a hand in salutation, then turned in the usual direction and jogged toward Tidworth.

At ten past six the corporal glanced up, stared, then turned to his sergeant.

“I’ve just seen Colonel Arbuthnot go past,” he said.

“So?” asked the sergeant.

“Twice,” said the corporal. The sergeant was tired. They would both be relieved in twenty minutes. Breakfast awaited. He shrugged.

“Must have forgotten something,” he said. He would regret that remark—later, at the disciplinary hearing.

Major Kuchenko ducked into some trees beside the road after half a mile and slipped out of the stolen white tracksuit and hid it in deep undergrowth. When he went back to the road he was in gray flannel slacks and tweed jacket over a shirt and tie. Only his Adidas running shoes were at odds with the outfit. He suspected but could not be sure that a mile behind him jogged an annoyed Colonel Arbuthnot, who had wasted ten fruitless minutes searching for his regular tracksuit before coming to the conclusion that his orderly must have taken it for laundering and not returned it. He was wearing his spare, and he had not yet noticed he was also missing a shirt, tie, jacket, slacks, and a pair of running shoes.

Kuchenko could easily have stayed ahead of the British colonel until Arbuthnot turned around to make his way back, but he was saved the trouble by a car that came from behind him and stopped at his wave. Kuchenko leaned toward the window on the passenger side.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he said, “but my car seems to have broken down. Back there. I was wondering whether I could get some help from a garage in North Tidworth?”

“Bit early,” said the driver, “but I can run you up there. Jump in.”

The paratroops major would have been amazed at Kuchenko’s sudden mastery of English. But the foreign accent was still there.

“Not from these parts, are you?” asked the driver by way of conversation. Kuchenko laughed.

“No. I am from Norway. Touring your British cathedrals.”

Kuchenko was dropped by the kindly driver in the center of the sleepy town of North Tidworth at ten minutes to seven. The driver drove on toward Marlborough. He would never see any reason to mention the incident again, nor would anyone ever ask him.

In the town center Kuchenko found a phone booth and at exactly one minute to seven dialed a London number, punch­ing in a fifty-pence piece to start the call. It was answered at the fifth ring.

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Roth, Mr. Joe Roth,” said Ku­chenko.

“Yeah, this is Joe Roth speaking,” said the voice at the other end.

“Pity,” said Kuchenko. “You see, I really hoped I might talk to Chris Hayes.”

In his small but elegant Mayfair apartment, Joe Roth stiff­ened, and all his professional antennae went onto red alert. He had only been awake for twenty minutes, still in pajamas, unshaven, running a bath, and preparing his first coffee of the day. He had been crossing the sitting room from the kitchen, juice in one hand, coffee in the other, when the phone rang. It was early, even for him, and he was not a late riser, even though his job as Assistant Public Affairs officer at the Amer­ican Embassy just a quarter of a mile away in Grosvenor Square did not require him to check in until ten.

Joe Roth was CIA, but he was not the Company’s Head of London Station. That honor went to William Carver, and Carver was with Western Hemisphere Division, as all station heads would be. As such, Carver was “declared,” which meant that just about everyone who mattered knew what he was and what job he did. Carver would sit, ex officio, on the British Joint Intelligence Committee, the official representa­tive of the Company in London.

Roth came from the Office of Special Projects, a bureau formed only six years ago to handle, as its name implied, projects and active measures that Langley regarded as suffi­ciently sensitive to merit the station Heads later being able to claim innocence, even to America’s allies.

All CIA officers, of whatever department they come from, have a real name and an operational or professional name. The real name, in friendly embassies, actually is real; Joe Roth really was Joe Roth and was listed as such in the Diplomatic List. But unlike Carver, Joe was undeclared, except to a tiny caucus of three or four British counterparts, in the Secret Intelligence Service. And his professional name was equally known to only that same few, plus some of his colleagues back in America. To have it thrown at him down a phone line at seven A.M., and in a voice with a non-British accent, was like a warning buzzer.

“I’m sorry,” he said carefully, “You’ve got Joe Roth here. Who is that speaking?”

“Listen carefully, Mr. Roth, or Mr. Hayes. My name is Pyotr Alexandrovitch Orlov. I am a full colonel of the KGB.”

“Look, if this is a joke—”

“Mr. Roth, my calling you by your operational name is no joke for you. My defection to the U.S.A. is no joke for me. And that is what I am offering to do. I want to get to America—fast. Very soon now, it will be impossible for me to go back to my own side. No excuse will be accepted. I have an enormous amount of information of great value to your Agency, Mr. Roth. You must make your decision quickly, or I go back while there is time.”

Roth was scribbling rapidly on a jotting pad he had clawed off his sitting-room coffee table. The pad still had the scores from the poker game he had concluded late the previous evening with Sam McCready. He recalled later thinking, “Je­sus, if Sam could hear this now, he’d go apeshit.” He cut in.

“Where exactly are you now, Colonel?”

“In a phone booth in a small town near Salisbury Plain,” said the voice. Grammatically, the English was near perfect. Only the accent was clearly foreign. Roth had been trained to discern accents, place them. This one was Slavic, probably Russian. He still wondered whether this would turn out to be one of Sam McCready’s crazy jokes, whether he would sud­denly hear peals of laughter coming down the phone at him. Dammit, it wasn’t even April Fool’s Day. It was the third.

“For three days,” said the voice, “I have been with a group of Soviet officers attending British military maneuvers on Salisbury Plain. Staying at Tidworth barracks. My cover there was as Major Pavel Kuchenko of the GRU. I walked out one hour ago. If I am not back within one hour, I cannot go back at all. It will take me half an hour to get back. You have thirty minutes to give me your decision, Mr. Roth.”

“Okay, Colonel. I’ll go with it—so far. I want you to call me back in fifteen minutes. The line will be clear. You will have your answer.”

“Fifteen minutes. Then I walk back,” said the voice, and the phone went down.

Roth’s mind was racing. He was thirty-nine, and he had spent twelve years in the Agency. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. But then, many men spent their entire working lives in the Agency and never smelted a Soviet defector. But he knew about them, they all knew about them; all field operatives were briefed and lectured and trained to be aware of the constant possibility of a Soviet defection.

Most, he knew, came after initial, tentative approaches. Usually, they came after long thought and some preparation by the defector. Messages were passed to the known Agency men in the area: “I want to meet, I want to discuss terms.” Usually the potential defector was asked to stay in place and provide a stream of information before finally “coming over.” If he refused, he was urged at least to come with a bagful of documents. The amount he could send out before coming over or bring with him would affect his standing, his rewards, his life-style. In the trade, it was called the bride-price.

Occasionally, just occasionally, you got what is called a “walk-in.” The defector simply appeared, having burned his boats behind him, unable to go back. That left little choice; you either accepted the man or cast him back into a refugee camp. The latter was rarely done, not even in the case of a rather useless, low-level defector like a merchant seaman or a private soldier with nothing to offer. It was usually done only if lie-detector tests at the point of defection proved the man was a disinformation agent. Then America would refuse to accept him. When that happened, the Russians just bit the bullet, got their agent out of the refugee camp, and took him home.

On one occasion, to Roth’s knowledge, the KGB had traced a turned-down defector to a refugee camp and liquidated him because he had failed the polygraph test, even though he had been telling the truth. The machine had interpreted his nerv­ousness as lies. Damned bad luck. Of course, that was in the old days; the lie detectors were better now.

And here was a man claiming to be a full colonel of the KGB who wanted just to walk in. No forewarning. No hag­gling. No suitcase full of documents fresh from the KGB Rezidentsia of his latest posting. And defecting right in the heart of England of all places, not the Middle East or Latin America. And to the Americans, not the Brits. Or had he already approached the Brits? Been turned down? Roth’s mind raced across the possibilities, and the minutes ticked away.

Five past seven—five past two in Washington. Everyone asleep. He ought to call Calvin Bailey, head of Special Pro­jects, his boss. Now no doubt fast asleep in Georgetown. But the time—there wasn’t time. He flipped open a wall cabinet to reveal his private computer. Swiftly, he tapped himself into the mainframe deep beneath the embassy in Grosvenor Square. He put the computer into encrypted mode and asked the mainframe to consider senior KGB officers known to the West. Then he asked: Who is Pyotr Alexandrovitch Orlov?

One of the strange things about the covert world is the almost clublike atmosphere that can exist within it. Pilots share the same sort of camaraderie, but they are allowed to. Paratroopers have it also, and Special Forces. Professionals tend to respect each other, even across the barriers of rivalry, opposition, or outright hostility. In the Second World War the fighter pilots of the Luftwaffe and the RAF seldom hated each other, leaving such sentiments to the zealots and civilians. Professionals serve their political masters and bureaucrats loyally, but would usually prefer to sink a pint of beer with others of their own arcane skills, even the opposition.

In the covert world, careful note is taken of just whom the opposition is putting up at bat this week. Promotions and transfers in allied, rival, or enemy agencies are carefully noted and filed. In any capital city the KGB Rezident will probably know who the British and American stations heads are, and vice versa. In Dar-es-Salaam once, the KGB chief at a cock­tail party came up to the British SIS station head with a whiskey and soda.

“Mr. Child,” he announced solemnly, “you know who I am, and I know who you are. Ours is a difficult profession. We should not ignore each other.” They drank to that.

The CIA mainframe computer in London is linked straight through to Langley, Virginia. In response to Roth’s question, little circuits began to run through lists of KGB officers known to the CIA. There were hundreds of “confirmed” and thou­sands of “suspected.” Mostly this knowledge came from defectors themselves, for one of the areas that debriefing officers are always keen to explore with a newly arrived defector is that of who is who these days, who has been transferred, who demoted or promoted. The knowledge grows with each new defector.

Roth knew that over the past four years, the British had been more than helpful in this regard, providing hundreds of names—many of them new, others confirmations of suspi­cions. The Brits attributed their knowledge in part to inter­cepts, in part to smart analysis, and in part to defectors like Vladimir Kuzichkin, the Illegals Directorate man they had spirited out of Beirut. Wherever Langley’s databank had got its original information, it did not waste time. Letters in green began to flash up on Roth’s small screen.

PYOTR ALEXANDROVITCH ORLOV. KGB. FULL COLO­NEL. PAST FOUR YEARS BELIEVED IN THIRD DIRECTOR­ATE. BELIEVED MASQUERADING AS GRU MAJOR IN­SIDE RED ARMY JOINT PLANNING STAFF MOSCOW. PREVIOUS POSTINGS KNOWN AS OPS PLANNING MOS­COW CENTER AND FIRST CHIEF DIRECTORATE (ILLE­GALS DIRECTORATE) YAZENEVO.

Roth whistled as the machine ended its knowledge of a man called Orlov, and he shut it down. What the voice on the phone had said made sense. The Third or Armed Forces Directorate of the KGB was that department tasked to keep a constant eye on the loyalty of the Armed Forces. As such, it was deeply resented but tolerated. AFD officers usually infil­trated the Armed Forces disguised as GRU or Military Intel­ligence officers. This would explain their being anywhere and everywhere, and asking questions, and keeping up surveil­lance. If Orlov had really been for four years posing as a GRU major on the Joint Planning Staff of the Soviet Defense Ministry, he would be a walking encyclopedia. It would also account for his being in the group of Soviet officers invited under the recent NATO-Warsaw Pact agreement to Salisbury Plain to watch the British war games.

He checked his watch. Seven-fourteen. No time to call Langley. He had sixty seconds to decide. Too risky—tell him to go back to the officers’ mess, slip into his room, and accept a nice cup of tea from a British steward. Then back to Heathrow and Moscow. Try and persuade him to do his run at Heathrow, give me time to contact Calvin Bailey in Wash­ington. The phone rang.

“Mr. Roth, there is a bus outside the phone booth. The first of the morning. I think it is taking civilian cleaning staff to Tidworth barracks. I can just get back in time, if I have to.”

Roth took a deep breath. Career on the line, boy, right on the line.

“Okay, Colonel Orlov, we’ll take you. I’ll contact my British colleagues—they’ll have you safe within thirty min­utes.”

“No.” The voice was harsh, brooking no opposition. “I come to the Americans only. I want out of here and into America fast. That is the deal, Mr. Roth. No other deal.”

“Now look, Colonel—”

“No, Mr. Roth, I want you to pick me up yourself. In two hours. The forecourt of the Andover railway station. Then to Upper Heyford USAF base. You get me on a transport to America. It’s the only deal I will take.”

“All right, Colonel. You got it. I’ll be there.”

It took Roth ten minutes to throw on street clothes, grab a passport, CIA identification, money, and car keys, and head downstairs for his car in the basement garage.

Fifteen minutes after putting down the phone, he eased his way into Park Lane and headed north for Marble Arch and the Bayswater Road, preferring that route to the scramble through Knightsbridge and Kensington.

By eight, he was past Heathrow and had turned south on the M25 then southwest along the M3, linking to the A303 to Andover. He entered the forecourt of the railway station at ten past nine. There was a stream of cars sweeping in to deposit travelers and leaving the forecourt within seconds. The travelers hurried into the station concourse. Only one man was not moving. He leaned against a wall in a tweed jacket, gray trousers, and running shoes and scanned a morn­ing paper. Roth approached him.

“I think you must be the man I have come to meet,” he said softly. The reader looked up, calm gray eyes, a hard face in its mid-forties.

“That depends if you have identification,” said the man. It was the same voice as the one on the phone. Roth tendered his CIA pass. Orlov studied it and nodded. Roth gestured to his car, engine still running, blocking several behind it. Orlov looked around as if saying good-bye for the last time to a world he had known. Without a word, he stepped into the car.

Roth had told the Embassy Duty Officer to alert Upper Heyford that he would be coming with a guest. It took nearly two hours more to cut across country to the Oxfordshire base of the USAF. Roth drove straight to the Base Commander’s office. There were two calls to Washington; then Langley cleared it with the Pentagon, who instructed the Base Com­mander. A communications flight out of Upper Heyford to Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, that afternoon at three P.M. had two extra passengers.

That was five hours after everything had hit the fan from Tidworth to London and back. Long before takeoff, there was a most imperial row going on among the British Army, the Defense Ministry, the Security Service, and the Russian Embassy.

The Soviet group had assembled for breakfast around eight o’clock in the officers’ mess dining hall, by now chatting relaxedly to their British counterparts. There were sixteen of them by eight-twenty. The absence of Major Kuchenko was noted, but not with any sense of alarm.

About ten minutes before nine, the sixteen Russians reas­sembled in the main lobby with their baggage, and again the absence of Major Kuchenko was noted. A steward was dis­patched to his room to ask him to hurry up. The coach stood outside the door.

The steward returned to say the major’s room was empty, but his gear was still there. A delegation of two British officers and two Russians went up to look for him. They established that the bed had been slept in, that the bath towel was damp, and that all Kuchenko’s clothes were apparently present, indicating he must be somewhere nearby. A search was made of the bathroom down the corridor (only the two Russian generals had been accorded private bathrooms), but the search drew a blank. Toilets were also checked, but they were empty. By now the faces of the two Russians, including the GRU colonel, had lost all trace of bonhomie.

The British were also becoming worried. A complete search of the mess building was made, but to no avail. A British Intelligence captain slipped out to talk to the invisible watch­ers from the Security Service. Their log showed that two officers in tracksuits had gone jogging that morning but only one had returned. A frantic call was made to Main Gate. The night log showed only that Colonel Arbuthnot had left and that he had returned.

To solve the problem, the Corporal of the Guard was summoned from his bed. He related the double departure of Colonel Arbuthnot, who was confronted and hotly denied he had ever left Main Gate, returned, and left again. A search of his room revealed that he was missing a white tracksuit, plus a jacket, shirt, tie, and slacks. The Intelligence captain had a hurried and whispered conversation with the senior British general, who became extremely grave and asked the senior Russian to accompany him to his office.

When the Russian general emerged, he was white with anger and demanded an immediate staff car to take him to his embassy in London. Word spread among the other fifteen Russians, who became frosty and unapproachable. It was ten o’clock. The telephoning began.

The British general raised the Chief of Staff in London and gave him a complete situation report. Another sitrep went from the senior watcher to his superiors in the Security Service headquarters at Curzon Street, London. There it went right up to the Deputy Director General, who at once sus­pected the hand of TSAR, the friendly acronym by which the Security Service sometimes refers to the Secret Intelligence Service. It stands for: Those Shits Across the River.

South of the Thames in Century House, Assistant Chief Timothy Edwards took a call from Curzon Street but was able to deny that the SIS had had anything to do with it. As he put the phone down he pressed a buzzer on his desk and barked: “Ask Sam McCready to step up here at once, would you?”

By noon, the Russian general, accompanied by the GRU colonel, was closeted in the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens with the Soviet Defense attaché, who was posing as a Major-General of Infantry but actually held the same rank in the GRU. None of the three knew that Major Kuchenko was actually Colonel Orlov of the KGB—a knowl­edge confined to a very few senior officers on the Joint Planning Staff in Moscow. In fact, all three men would have been deeply relieved to know—few things please Russian Army men as much as the KGB with egg all over its face. In London, they thought that they had lost a GRU major and were deeply unhappy at Moscow’s expected reaction.

At Cheltenham, the Government Communications Head­quarters, the nation’s listening post, noted and reported a sudden frantic increase in Soviet radio traffic between the embassy and Moscow, in both the diplomatic and the military codes.

During the lunch hour the Soviet Ambassador, Leonid Zamyatin, lodged a vigorous protest with the British Foreign Office, alleging kidnapping, and demanded immediate access to Major Kuchenko. The protest bounced straight back down from the Foreign Office to all the covert agencies, who in unison held up their lily-white hands and replied, “But we haven’t got him.”

Long before midday, the rage of the Russians was being matched by the puzzlement of the British. The manner in which Kuchenko (they were still calling him that) had made his escape was bizarre, to put it mildly. Defectors did not simply defect in order to go to a bar for a beer; they headed for sanctuary, usually one that had been prepared in advance. If Kuchenko had bolted into a police station—it had been known—the Wiltshire police would have notified London at once. With all the British agencies protesting their innocence, that left the possibility of other agencies based on British soil.

Bill Carver, the CIA station head in London, was in an impossible position. Roth had been forced to contact Langley from the air base to get clearance on the USAF flight, and Langley had informed Carver. Carver knew the rules of the Anglo-American agreement on such matters—it would be taken as deeply offensive for the Americans to spirit a Russian out of England under the nose of the Brits without telling them. But Carver was warned to delay until the military flight cleared British airspace. He took refuge in the ruse of being unavailable all morning, then asked for an urgent meeting with Timothy Edwards at three P.M., which was granted.

Carver was late—he had sat three blocks away in his car until he learned on the car phone that the flight was airborne. By the time he saw Edwards, it was ten past three and the American jet was clear of the Bristol Channel and south of Ireland, next stop Maryland.

By the time Edwards confronted him, Carver had already received a full report from Roth, brought by a USAF dispatch rider from the air base to London. Roth explained that he had been given no choice but to take Kuchenko/Orlov at zero notice or let him go back, and that Orlov would absolutely come only to the Americans.

Carver used this to try to take the sting out of the insult to the British. Edwards had long since checked with McCready and knew exactly who Orlov was—the American databank consulted by Roth just after seven A.M. had come from the SIS in the first place. Privately, Edwards knew that he too would have acted exactly as Roth had, given the opportunity of such a prize, but he remained cool and offended. Having formally received Carver’s report, he at once informed his own Defense Ministry, Foreign Office, and sister service, Security. Kuchenko (he saw no need to tell everyone that the man’s real name was Orlov—yet) was on American sovereign territory and out of any British control.

An hour later, Ambassador Zamyatin arrived at the Foreign Office in King Charles Street and was shown straight to the office of the Foreign Secretary himself. Though he purported to receive the explanation with skepticism, he was privately prepared to believe Sir Geoffrey Howe, whom he knew to be a very honorable man. With a show of continuing outrage, the Russian went back to the embassy and told Moscow. The Soviet military delegation flew home late that night, deeply dejected at the prospect of the endless interrogations that were in store for them.

In Moscow itself, a blazing row had been raging between the KGB, which accused the GRU of not exercising sufficient vigilance, and the GRU, which accused the KGB of having treasonous officers on its staff. Orlov’s wife, deeply distraught and protesting her innocence, was being interrogated, as were all Orlov’s colleagues, superiors, friends, and contacts.

In Washington, the Director of Central Intelligence took an angry phone call from the Secretary of State, who had re­ceived a deeply pained telegram from Sir Geoffrey Howe over the handling of the matter. As he put the phone down, the DCI looked across his desk at two men: the Deputy Director (Operations) and the Head of Special Projects, Calvin Bailey. It was to the latter that he spoke.

“Your young Mr. Roth. He certainly stirred up a hornets’ nest on this one. You say he acted on his own authority?”

“He did. As I understand it, the Russian gave him no time to go through channels. It was take it or leave it.”

Bailey was a thin, astringent man, not given to making close personal friendships in the Agency. People found him aloof, chilly. But he was good at his job.

“We’ve upset the Brits pretty badly. Would you have taken the same risk?” asked the DCI.

“I don’t know,” said Bailey. “We won’t know until we talk to Orlov. Really talk.”

The DCI nodded. In the covert world, as in all others, the rule was simple. If you took a gamble and it paid rich dividends, you were a smart fellow, destined for the highest office. If the gamble failed, there was always early retirement. The DCI wanted to pin it down.

“You taking responsibility for Roth? For better, for worse?”

“Yes,” said Bailey, “I will. It’s done now. We have to see what we’ve got.”

When the military flight landed at Andrews just after six P.M. Washington time, there were five Agency cars waiting on the tarmac. Before the service personnel could disembark, the two men whom none of them recognized or would ever see again were escorted off the plane and enveloped by the dark-windowed sedans waiting below. Bailey met Orlov, nod­ded coolly, and saw the Russian ensconced in the second car. He turned to Roth.

“I’m giving him to you, Joe. You brought him out, you debrief him.”

“I’m not an interrogator,” said Roth. “It’s not my spe­cialty.”

Bailey shrugged. “He asked for you. You brought him out. He owes you. Maybe he’ll be more relaxed with you. You’ll have all the backup—translators, analysts, specialists in every area he touches on. And the polygraph, of course. Start with the polygraph. Take him to the Ranch—they’re expecting you. And Joe—I want it all. As it comes, at once, my eyes only, by hand. Okay?”

Roth nodded.

Seventeen hours earlier, when he donned a white tracksuit in a bedroom in England, Pyotr Orlov, alias Pavel Kuchenko, had been a trusted Soviet officer with a home, a wife, a career, and a motherland. Now he was a bundle, a package, huddled in the back of a sedan in a strange land, destined to be squeezed for every last drop of juice, and certainly feeling, as they all do, the first pangs of doubt and maybe panic.

Roth turned to climb into the car beside the Russian.

“One last thing, Joe,” said Bailey. “If Orlov, who is now code-named Minstrel, turns out to be a no-no, the Director is going to have my ass. About thirty seconds after I have yours. Good luck.”

The Ranch was and remains a CIA safe house, a genuine farm in the horse-raising country of southern Virginia. Not too far from Washington, it is buried in deep woodland, railed and fenced, approached by a long driveway, and guarded by teams of very fit young men who have all passed the unarmed combat and weapons training courses at Quantico.

Orlov was shown to a comfortable two-room suite in restful colors and with the usual appurtenances of a good hotel—television, video, tape player, easy chairs, small dining table. Food was served—his first meal in America—and Joe Roth ate with him. On the flight over, the two men had agreed they would call each other Peter and Joe. Now it appeared their acquaintance was going to be extended.

“It won’t always be easy, Peter,” said Roth as he watched the Russian dealing with a large hamburger. He might have been thinking of the bulletproof windows that would not open, the one-way mirrors in all the rooms, the recording of every word spoken in the suite. And the rigorous debriefing to come.

The Russian nodded.

“Tomorrow we have to start, Peter. We have to talk, really talk. You have to take a polygraph test. If you pass that, you have to tell me ... many things. Everything, in fact. Every­thing you know or suspect. Over and over again.”

Orlov put down his fork and smiled.

“Joe, we are men who have lived our lives in this strange world. You do not have to”—he searched for the phrase—“mince the words. I have to justify the risk you have taken for me, to get me out. What you call the price of the bride, yes?”

Roth laughed.

“Yes, Peter, that’s what we need to have now. The price of the bride.”

In London, the Secret Intelligence Service had not been entirely inactive. Timothy Edwards had quickly learned the name of the missing man from the Ministry of Defense—Pavel Kuchenko. His own databank had quickly revealed that that was the cover-name of Colonel Pyotr Orlov of the KGB Third Directorate. That was when he summoned Sam McCready.

“I’ve screwed our American Cousins as hard as I can. Deep offense taken, outrage at all levels—that sort of thing. Bill Carver is deeply mortified—he sees his own position here as damaged. Anyway, he will press Langley to give us the lot, as and when it comes. I want to form a small group to have a look at the Orlov product when it reaches us. I’d like you to be in charge—under me.”

“Thank you,” said The Deceiver. “But I’d go for more. I’d ask for access. It could be that Orlov knows things that are specific to us. Those things won’t be high on Langley’s list. I’d like access, personal access.”

“That might be hard,” mused Edwards. “They’ve probably got him stashed in Virginia somewhere. But I can ask.”

“You’ve got the right,” insisted McCready. “We’ve been giving them a hell of a lot of product recently.”

The thought hung in the air. They both knew where most of the product had been coming from these past four years. And there was the Soviet Army War Book, handed over to Langley the previous year.

“Another thing,” said Sam. “I’d like to check on Orlov with Keepsake.”

Edwards stared hard at McCready. Keepsake was a British “asset,” a Russian working for the SIS. He was so highly placed and so sensitive that only four men in Century House were aware who he was, and less than a dozen knew that he existed at all. Those who knew his identity were the Chief himself, Edwards, the Controller Sovbloc, and McCready, his case officer, the man who “ran” him.

“Is that wise?” asked Edwards.

“I think it is justified.”

“Be careful.”

The black car, the following morning, was clearly parked on a double yellow line, and the traffic warden had no hesitation in writing out a ticket. He had just finished and slipped the polythene envelope under the windshield wiper when a slim, well-dressed man in a gray suit emerged from a nearby shop, spotted the ticket, and began to protest. It was such an everyday scene that no one noticed, even on a London street. From afar, an onlooker would have seen the normal gestic­ulations from the driver and the impervious shrugs from the traffic warden. Tugging at the warden’s sleeve, the driver urged the official to come to the back of the car and look at the plates. When he did, the warden saw the telltale CO plate of the Diplomatic Corps next to the registration plate. He had clearly missed it, but was unimpressed. Foreign diplomatic staff might be immune from the fine, but not from the ticket. He began to move off.

The driver snatched the ticket off the windshield and waved it under the warden’s nose. The warden asked a question. To prove he really was a diplomat, the driver delved into his pocket and produced an identity card, which he forced the warden to look at. The warden glanced, shrugged again, and moved away. In a rage the driver screwed up the parking ticket and hurled it into the car before climbing in and driving off.

What the onlooker would not have seen was the paper stuck inside the ID card saying: “Reading Room, British Museum, tomorrow, two P.M.” Nor would he have noticed the driver a mile later smooth out the crumpled ticket and read on the reverse side: “Colonel Pyotr Alexandrovich Orlov has de­fected to the Americans. Do you know anything about him?”

The Deceiver had just contacted Keepsake.

The treatment, or “handling,” of a defector varies widely from case to case, according to the emotional state of the defector or to the usages of the host agency undertaking the debriefing. The only common factor is that it is always a sensitive and complicated business.

The defector must first be housed in an environment that does not appear menacing but that precludes his escape, often for his own good. Two years before Orlov, the Americans had made a mistake with Vitali Urchenko, another walk-in. At­tempting to create an air of normality, they had taken him to dinner in a Georgetown, Washington, restaurant. The man changed his mind, escaped through the men’s room window, walked back to the Soviet Embassy, and gave himself up. It did him no good; he was flown back to Moscow, brutally interrogated, and shot.

Apart from the defector’s possible self-destructive tenden­cies, he must be protected from possible reprisals. The USSR—and notably the KGB—are notoriously unforgiving toward those they regard as traitors and have been wont to hunt them down and liquidate them if possible. The higher the defector’s rank, the worse the treason, and a senior KGB officer is regarded as the highest of all. For the KGB are the cream of the cream, afforded every privilege and luxury in a nation where most live hungry and cold. To reject this life­style, the most cosseted the USSR has to offer, is to show ingratitude worthy of death itself.

The Ranch offered, apparently, security against reprisals as well as self-destruction.

The principal complicating factor is the mental state of the defector himself. After the first, adrenaline-packed rush into the West, many develop rethink symptoms. The full enormity of the step they have taken sinks in, the realization of never again seeing wife, family, friends, or homeland. This can lead to depression, like the down after the high of a drug-taker.

To counteract this, many debriefings start with a leisurely survey of the defector’s past life, a complete curriculum vitae from birth and childhood onward. The narration of the early years—description of mother and father, schoolday friends, skating in the park in winter, walks in the country in sum­mer—instead of producing more nostalgia and depression, usually has a calming effect. And everything, every last detail and gesture, is noted.

One thing that debriefers are always keenly interested in is motivation. Why did you decide to come over? (The word defect is never used. It implies disloyalty rather than a reason­able decision to change one’s views.)

Sometimes the defector lies about his reasons. He may say he became utterly disillusioned by the corruption, cynicism, and nepotism of the system he served and left behind. For many, this is the genuine reason; in fact, it is by far the most common reason. But it is not always true. It may be that the defector had his hand in the cashbox and knew he faced harsh punishment from the KGB. Or he may have been on the threshold of recall to Moscow to face discipline for a tangled love life. A demotion, or a hatred of a certain superior, may have been the real reason. The host agency may be well aware of why the man really defected. The excuses are nonetheless listened to carefully and sympathetically, even though they are known to be false. And they are noted. The man may lie as to his motivations out of vanity, but he does not necessarily lie about real secret intelligence. Or does he ...?

Others tell untruths out of vainglory, seeking to embellish their own importance in their earlier life, to impress their hosts. Everything will be checked out; sooner or later, the hosts will know the real reason, the real status. For the moment, everything is listened to very sympathetically. The real cross-examination will come later, as in court.

When the area of secret intelligence is finally broached, pitfalls are set. Many, many questions are asked to which the debriefing officers already know the answers. Or if they do not, the analysts, working through the nights on the tapes, will soon find out by collating and cross-checking. There have, after all, been many defectors, and the Western agencies have a huge volume of knowledge of the KGB, the GRU, the Soviet Army, Navy, and Air Force, even of the Kremlin, on which to draw.

If the defector is seen to lie about things that, according to his declared postings, he ought to know the truth of, he immediately becomes suspect. He may be lying out of bra­vado, to impress; or because he was never privy to that information but seeks to claim he was; or because he has forgotten; or ...

It is not easy to lie to a host agency during a long and arduous debriefing. The questioning can take months, even years, depending on the amount of things the defector claims that do not seem to check out.

If something a new defector says is at variance with the believed truth, it could be that the believed truth was wrong. So the analysts check out the original source of their infor­mation again. It may be that they have been wrong all the time, and the new defector is right. The subject is dropped while checks are made, and returned to later. Again and again.

Often the defector does not realize the significance of some small piece of information he provides and to which he assigns no particular importance. But for his hosts, that seeming bagatelle may be the one missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle that has eluded them for a long time.

In among the questions to which the answers are already known are the questions to which true answers are really valuable. This is the pay dirt. Can this new defector tell the host agency anything it doesn’t already know, and if so, how important?

In the case of Colonel Pyotr Alexandrovitch Orlov, the CIA came to the view within four weeks that it had fortuitously tapped into a mother lode of pure gold. The man’s “product” was fantastic.

For one thing, he was very cool and calm from the start. He narrated to Joe Roth the story of his life from birth in a humble shack near Minsk just after the war to the day he decided, six months earlier in Moscow, that he could tolerate no more of a society and regime that he had come to despise. He never denied retaining a deep love for his motherland of Russia, and he showed the normal emotion at the knowledge he had left it behind forever.

He declared that his marriage to Gaia, a successful theater director in Moscow, had been over in all but name for three years, and he admitted with expectable anger her several affairs with handsome young actors.

He passed three separate lie-detector tests concerning his background, career, private life, and political change of heart. And he began to reveal information of the first order.

For one thing, his career had been very varied. From his four years with the Third or Armed Forces Directorate, working inside the Joint Planning Staff at Army headquarters while posing as GRU Major Kuchenko, he had a wide knowl­edge of the personalities of a range of senior military officers, of the dispositions of divisions of the Soviet Army and Air Force, and of the Navy’s ships at sea and in the yards.

He provided fascinating insights into the defeats suffered by the Red Army in Afghanistan, told of the unsuspected demoralization of the Soviet troops there and of Moscow’s growing disillusion with Afghan puppet dictator Babrak Kamal.

Prior to working in the Third Directorate, Orlov had been with the Illegals Directorate, that department inside the First Chief Directorate responsible for the running of “illegal” agents worldwide. The “illegals” are the most secret of all agents who spy against their own country (if they are nationals of it) or who live in the foreign country under deep cover. These are the agents who have no diplomatic cover, for whom exposure and capture does not entail the merely embarrassing penalty of being declared persona non grata and expelled, but the more painful therapy of arrest, harsh interrogation, and sometimes execution.

Although his knowledge was four years out of date, Orlov seemed to have an encyclopedic memory and began to blow away the very networks he had once helped establish and run, mainly in Central and South America, which had been his previous area.

When a defector arrives whose information turns out to be controversial, there usually appear among the officers of the host agency two camps: those who believe and support the new defector, and those who doubt and oppose him. In the history of the CIA the most notorious such case was that of Golytsin and Nosenko.

In 1960, Anatoli Golytsin defected and made it his business to warn the CIA that the KGB had been behind just about everything that had gone wrong in the world since the end of the Second World War. For Golytsin, there was no infamy to which the KGB would not stoop or was not even then prepar­ing. This was music to the ears of a hardline faction in the CIA headed by counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, who had been warning his superiors of much the same thing for years. Golytsin became a much-prized star.

In November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated, apparently by a left-winger, with a Russian wife, called Lee Harvey Oswald, who had once defected to the USSR and lived there for over a year. In January 1964, Yuri Nosenko defected. He declared he had been Oswald’s case officer in Russia and that the KGB had found Oswald to be a pain in the neck, had severed all contact with him, and had had nothing to do with the Kennedy slaying.

Golytsin, supported by Angleton, at once denounced his fellow Russian, who was interrogated extremely harshly but refused to change his story. The dispute tore the Agency into two camps for years and rumbled on for two decades. De­pending on the outcome of the question of who was right and who was wrong, careers were made and broken, for it is axiomatic that the careers of those behind a major success will start to rise.

In the case of Pyotr Orlov, there was no such hostile action to be found, and the glory fell upon Calvin Bailey, the head of Special Projects, the office that had brought him in.

The day after Joe Roth began to share his life with Colonel Orlov in Virginia, Sam McCready quietly entered the portals of the British Museum, which was located in the heart of Bloomsbury, and headed for the great circular reading room under its domed cupola.

There were two younger men with him, Denis Gaunt, on whom McCready was putting an increasing degree of trust and reliance, and another man called Patten. Neither of the backup team would see the face of Keepsake—they did not need to, and it might have been dangerous. Their job was simply to idle near the entrances while perusing the laid-out newspapers and ensure that their desk head would not be disturbed by interlopers.

McCready made for a reading table largely enclosed by bookshelves and courteously asked the man already seated there if he minded the intrusion. The man, his head bowed over a volume from which he took occasional notes, silently gestured to the chair opposite and went on reading. McCready waited quietly. He had selected a volume he wished to read, and in a few moments one of the reading room staff brought it to him and as quietly left. The man across the table kept his head bowed.

When they were alone McCready spoke. “How are you, Nikolai?”

“Well,” murmured the man, making a note on his pad.

“There is news?”

“We are to receive a visit next week. At the Rezidentsia.”

“From Moscow Center?”

“Yes. General Drozdov himself.”

McCready made no sign. He kept reading his book, and his lips hardly moved. No one outside the enclave of book-lined shelves could have heard the low murmur, and no one would enter the enclave. Gaunt and Patten would see to that. But he was amazed by the name. Drozdov, a short chunky man who bore a startling resemblance to the late President Eisenhower, was the head of the Illegals Directorate and rarely ventured outside the USSR. To come into the lion’s den of London was most unusual and could be very important.

“Is that good or bad?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Keepsake. “It’s certainly odd. He is not my direct superior, but he could not come unless he had cleared it with Kryuchkov.”

(General Vladimir Kryuchkov, since 1988 Chairman of the KGB, was then Head of the First Chief Directorate, the foreign intelligence arm.)

“Will he discuss with you his illegals planted in Britain?”

“I doubt it. He likes to run his illegals direct. It may be something to do with Orlov. There has been the most almighty stink over that. The two other GRU officers in the delegation are under interrogation already. The best they will get is a court martial for negligence. Or maybe ...”

“Is there another reason for his coming?”

Keepsake sighed and raised his eyes for the first time. McCready stared back. He had become a friend of the Russian over the years, trusted him, believed in him.

“It’s just a feeling,” said Keepsake. “He may be checking out the Rezidentsia over here. Nothing concrete, just an odor on the wind. Maybe they suspect something.”

“Nikolai, it cannot go on forever. We know that. Sooner or later, the pieces will add together. Too many leaks, too many coincidences. Do you want to come out now? I can arrange it. Say the word.”

“Not yet. Soon perhaps, but not yet. There is more I can send. If they really start to pull the London operation apart, I will know they have something. In time. In time to come out. But not yet. By the way, please do not intercept Drozdov. If there are suspicions, he would see it as another straw in the wind.”

“Better tell me what he is coming as, in case of a genuine accident at Heathrow,” said McCready.

“A Swiss businessman,” said the Russian. “From Zurich. British Airways, Tuesday.”

“I’ll ensure he is left completely alone,” said McCready. “Anything on Orlov?”

“Not yet,” said Keepsake. “I know of him, never met him. But I’m surprised at him defecting. He had the highest clear­ance.”

“So do you,” said McCready. The Russian smiled.

“Of course. No accounting for taste. I will find out what I can about him. Why does he interest you?”

“Nothing concrete,” said McCready. “As you said, an odor on the wind. The manner of his coming, giving Joe Roth no time to check. For a sailor jumping ship, it’s normal. For a colonel of the KGB, it’s odd. He could have done a better deal.”

“I agree,” said the Russian. “I’ll do what I can.”

The Russian’s position inside the embassy was so delicate that face-to-face meetings were hazardous, therefore infre­quent. The next was set up at a small and seedy café in Shoreditch, London’s East End. Early in the following month, May.

At the end of April, the Director of Central Intelligence had a meeting in the White House with the President. Nothing unusual in that; they met extremely regularly, either with others in the National Security Council or in private. But on this occasion the President was unusually flattering about the CIA. The gratitude that a number of agencies and depart­ments had directed toward the Agency as a result of informa­tion stemming from the Ranch in southern Virginia had reached as high as the Oval Office.

The DCI was a hard man whose career went back to the days of the OSS in the Second World War, and he was a devoted colleague of Ronald Reagan. He was also a fair man and saw no reason to withhold the general praise from the Head of Special Projects responsible for bringing in Colonel Orlov. When he returned to Langley, he summoned Calvin Bailey.

Bailey found the Director at the picture windows that occupy almost one side of the DCI’s office on top of the CIA headquarters building. He was staring out toward the valley, where the wash of green trees in spring leaf had finally obscured the winter view of the Potomac River. When Bailey entered, he turned with an expansive smile.

“What can I say? Congratulations are in order, Cal. The Navy Department loves it, says keep it coming. The Mexicans are delighted; they just wrapped up a network of seventeen agents, cameras, communication radios, the works.”

“Thank you,” said Calvin Bailey carefully. He was known as a cautious man, not given to overt displays of human warmth.

“Fact is,” said the DCI, “we all know Frank Wright is retiring at the end of the year. I’m going to need a new DDO. Maybe, Calvin, just maybe I think I know who it ought to be.”

Bailey’s morose shrouded gaze flashed into a rare smile. In the CIA the Director himself is always a political appointment and has been for three decades. Under him come the two main divisions of the Agency: Operations, headed by the Deputy Director Ops (DDO), and Intelligence (analysis), headed by the Deputy Director Intel (DDI). These two posts are the highest to which a professional can reasonably aspire. The DDO is in charge of the entire information gathering side of the Agency, while the DDI is in charge of analyzing the raw information into presentable and usable intelligence.

Having delivered his bouquet, the DCI turned to more mundane matters. “Look, it’s about the Brits. As you know, Margaret Thatcher was over.”

Calvin Bailey nodded. The close friendship between the British Prime Minister and the U.S. President was known to all.

“She brought with her Sir Christopher. ...” The DCI mentioned the name of the then chief of the British SIS. “We had several good sessions. He gave us some really good product. We owe them, Cal. Just a favor. I’d like to clean the slate. They have two beefs. They say they’re very grateful for all the Minstrel product we’ve been sending over, but they point out that as regards Soviet agents being run in England, so far it’s useful material but all code-names. Can Minstrel recall any actual names, or offices held—something to identify a hostile agent in their own pond?”

Bailey thought it over.

“He’s been asked before,” he said. “We’ve sent the Brits everything that remotely concerns them. I’ll ask him again, have Joe Roth see if he can remember a real name. Okay.”

“Fine, fine,” said the DCI. “One last thing. They keep asking for access. Over there. This time around, I’m prepared to indulge them. I think we can go that far.”

“I’d prefer to keep him over here. He’s safe here.”

“We can keep him safe over there. Look, we can put him on an American air base. Upper Heyford, Lakenheath, Alconbury. Whatever. They can see him, talk to him under super­vision, then we bring him back.”

“I don’t like it,” said Bailey.

“Cal—” there was a hint of steel in the DCI’s voice—“I’ve agreed to it. Just see to it.”

Calvin Bailey drove down to the Ranch for a personal talk with Joe Roth. They talked in Roth’s suite of rooms above the central portico of the Ranch house. Bailey found his subordi­nate tired and drawn. Debriefing a defector is a tiring busi­ness, involving long hours with the defector followed by long nights spent working through the next day’s line of question­ing. Relaxing is not usually on the menu, and when, as often happens, the defector has established a personal relationship with his chief debriefing officer, it is not easy to give that officer time off and replace him with a substitute.

“Washington is pleased,” Bailey told him. “More than pleased—delighted. Everything he says checks out. Soviet Army, Navy, and Air Force deployments, confirmed by other sources of satellite coverage. Weapons levels, readiness states, the Afghan mess—Pentagon loves it all. You’ve done well, Joe. Very well.”

“There’s still a long way to go,” said Roth. “Lots more still to come. There must be. The man’s an encyclopedia. Phenomenal memory. Sometimes stuck for a detail, but usu­ally recalls it sooner or later. But ...”

“But what? Look, Joe, he’s pulling apart years of patient KGB work in Central and South America. Our friends down there are closing down network after network. It’s okay. I know you’re tired. Just keep at it.”

He went on to tell Roth of the hint the DCI had given him about the forthcoming vacancy as Deputy Director Opera­tions. He was not usually a confiding man, but he saw no reason not to give his subordinate the same kind of boost the DCI had given him.

“If it goes through, Joe, there’ll be a second vacancy, head of Special Projects. My recommendation will count for a lot. It’ll be for you, Joe. I wanted you to know that.”

Roth was grateful but not ecstatic. He seemed more than tired. There was something else on his mind.

“Is he causing problems?” asked Bailey. “Has he got everything he wants? Does he need female company? Do you? It’s isolated down here. It’s been a month. These things can be arranged.”

He knew Roth was divorced and single. The Agency has a legendary divorce rate. As they say at Langley, it comes with the territory.

“No, I’ve offered him that. He just shook his head. We work out together. It helps. Run through the woods until we can hardly stand. I’ve never been in such good shape. He’s older, but he’s fitter. That’s one of the things that worries me, Calvin. He’s got no flaws, no weaknesses. If he got drunk, screwed around, got maudlin for thinking about his homeland, lost his temper—”

“You’ve tried to provoke him?” asked Bailey. Provoking a defector into a rage, an outburst of pent-up emotions, can sometimes work as a release, a therapy. According to the in-house psychiatrists, anyway.

“Yes. I’ve taunted him with being a rat, a turncoat. Noth­ing. He just ran me into the ground and laughed at me. Then he got on with what he calls “the job.” Blowing away KGB assets worldwide. He’s a total pro.”

“That’s why he’s the best we’ve ever had, Joe. Don’t knock it. Be grateful.”

“Calvin, that’s not the main reason he bugs me. As a guy, I like him. I even respect him. I never thought I would respect a defector. But there’s something else. He’s holding some­thing back.”

Calvin Bailey went very quiet and very still. “The poly­graph tests don’t say so.”

“No, they don’t. That’s why I can’t be sure I’m right. I just feel it. There’s something he’s not saying.”

Bailey leaned across and stared hard into Roth’s face. An awful lot hung on the question he was about to ask.

“Joe, could there be any chance, in your considered view, that despite all the tests, he might still be a phony, a KGB plant?”

Roth sighed. What had been troubling him had finally come out.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I don’t know. For me, there’s a ten-percent area of doubt. A gut feeling that he’s holding something back. And I can’t work out, if I’m right, why.”

“Then find out, Joe. Find out,” said Calvin Bailey. He did not need to point out that if there was anything phony about Colonel Pyotr Orlov, two careers in the CIA were likely to go straight into the trash can. He rose.

“Personally I think it’s nonsense, Joe. But do what you have to do.”

Roth found Orlov in his living room, lying on a settee, listening to his favorite music. Despite the fact that he was virtually a prisoner, the Ranch was equipped like a well-appointed country club. Apart from his daily runs in the forest, always flanked by four of the young athletes from Quantico, he had access to the gymnasium, the sauna and pool, an excellent chef, and a well-stocked bar that he used spar­ingly.

Soon after arriving, he had admitted to a taste for the ballad singers of the sixties and early seventies. Now, whenever he visited the Russian, Roth was accustomed to hearing Simon and Garfunkel, the Seekers, or the slow honeyed tones of Elvis Presley coming from the tape deck.

That evening when he walked in, the clear childlike voice of Mary Hopkin was filling the room. It was her one famous song. Orlov jackknifed himself off the settee with a grin of pleasure. He gestured at the tape deck.

“You like it? Listen.”

Roth listened. “ ‘Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end. ...’ ”

“Yeah, it’s nice,” said Roth, who preferred traditional and mainstream jazz.

“You know what it is?”

“That British girl, isn’t it?” said Roth.

“No, no—not the singer, the tune. You think it is British tune, yes? From the Beatles, perhaps.”

“Guess so,” said Roth, now also smiling.

“Wrong,” said Orlov triumphantly. “It is old Russian song. Dorogoy dlinnoyu da nochkoy lunayu. ‘By a long road on a moonlit night.’ You didn’t know that?”

“No, I certainly didn’t.”

The jaunty little tune ran to its end, and Orlov switched off the tape.

“You want we should talk some more?” asked Orlov.

“No,” said Roth. “I just stopped by to see if you were okay. I’m going to turn in. It’s been a long day. By the way, we are going back to England soon. Let the Limeys have a chance to talk to you for a little while. All right by you?”

Orlov frowned. “My deal was to come here. Only here.”

“It’s okay, Peter. We’ll be staying for a short while on an American Air Force base. To all intents and purposes, still in America. I’ll be there to protect you from the big bad Brits.”

Orlov did not smile at the joke.

Roth became serious. “Peter, is there a reason you don’t want to go back to England? Something I should know?”

Orlov shrugged. “Nothing specific, Joe. Just gut feeling. The farther I am away from the USSR, the safer I feel.”

“Nothing will happen to you in England. I give you my word. You going to turn in now?”

“I stay up for a while. Read, play music,” said the Russian.

In fact, the light burned in Orlov’s room until half-past one in the morning. When the KGB assassination team struck, it was a few minutes before three.

Orlov was told later that they had silenced two guards on the perimeter with powerful crossbows, traversed the lawn at the rear of the house undetected, and entered the house via the kitchens.

On the upper floor, the first Roth or Orlov heard was a burst of submachine-gun fire from the lower hall, followed by the rapid pounding of feet up the stairs. Orlov awoke like a cat, came out of his bed, and was across the living room in no more than three seconds. He opened the door to the landing and caught a brief glimpse of the night duty guard from Quantico swerving off the landing and down the main stairs. A figure in a black cat-suit and ski mask, halfway up the stairs, loosed a brief burst. The American took the blast in the chest. He sagged against the banister, his front a wash of blood. Orlov slammed his door and turned back toward the bedroom.

He knew his windows would not open; there was no escape that way. Nor was he armed. He entered the bedroom as the man in black ran through the door from the corridor, followed by an American. The last thing Orlov saw before he slammed his bedroom door shut was the KGB assassin turn and blast the American behind him. The killing gave Orlov time to throw the lock.

But it was only a respite. Seconds later, the lock was blasted away and the door kicked open. By the dim light shining in from the corridor beyond the living room, Orlov saw the KGB man throw down his empty machine-pistol and pull a Makarov 9mm automatic from his belt. He could not see the face behind the mask, but he understood the Russian word and the contempt with which it was uttered.

The figure in black gripped the Makarov two-handed, pointed it straight at Orlov’s face, and hissed, “Predatel!” Traitor.

There was a cut-glass ashtray on the bedside table. Orlov had never used it, since unlike most Russians, he did not smoke. But it was still there. In a last gesture of defiance, he swept it off the table and sent it spinning toward the Russian killer’s face. As he did so he yelled back, “Padla!” Scum.

The man in black side-stepped the heavy glassware that was scything toward his face. It cost him a fraction of a second. In that time the Quantico security-team leader stepped into the living room and fired twice with his heavy Colt .44 Magnum at the black-suited back in the bedroom doorway. The Russian was thrown forward as the front of his chest exploded in a welter of blood that sprayed the sheets and the coverlet on the bed. Orlov stepped forward to kick the Makarov from the falling man’s hand, but there was no need. No one stops two Magnum shells and keeps fighting.

Kroll, the man who had fired, crossed the sitting room to the bedroom door. He was white with rage and panting.

“You okay?” he snapped. Orlov nodded. “Someone fucked up,” said the American. “There were two of them. Two of my men are down, maybe more outside.”

A shaken Joe Roth came in, still in pajamas.

“Jesus, Peter, I’m sorry. We have to get out of here. Now. Fast.”

“Where do we go?” asked Orlov. “I thought you said this was a safe house.” He was pale but calm.

“Yeah, well, apparently not safe enough. Not anymore. We’ll try and find out why later. Get dressed. Pack your things. Kroll, stay with him.”

There was an army base only twenty miles from the Ranch. Langley fixed things with the army commander. Within two hours Roth, Orlov, and the remainder of the Quantico team had taken an entire floor of the bachelors’ quarters building. Military police ringed the block. Roth would not even drive there by road; they went by helicopter, setting down right on the lawn by the Officers’ Club and waking everyone up.

It was only temporary housing. Before nightfall, they had moved on to another CIA safe house, in Kentucky and much better protected.

While the Roth/Orlov group was in the army base, Calvin Bailey returned to the Ranch. He wanted a full report. He had already spoken to Roth by phone to hear his version of events. He listened to Kroll first, but the man whose evidence he really wanted was the Russian in the black ski mask who had confronted Orlov at point-blank range.

The young officer of the Green Berets was nursing a bruised wrist where Orlov had kicked the gun from his hand as he fell. The special-effects blood had long been wiped off him, and he had changed out of the black jumpsuit with the two holes in the front and removed the harness containing the tiny charges and sacs of realistic blood that had burst all over the bed.

“Verdict?” asked Bailey.

“He’s for real,” said the Russian-speaking officer. “Either that, or he doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. That I doubt. Most men do.”

“He didn’t suspect you?” asked Bailey.

“No, sir. I saw it right in his eyes. He believed he was going to die. He just went right on fighting. Quite a guy.”

“Any other choices?” asked Bailey.

The officer shrugged. “Only one. If he’s a phony and thought he was being liquidated by his own side, he ought to have yelled something to that effect. Assuming he cares about living, that would make him about the bravest guy I ever met.”

“I think,” Bailey said to Roth by telephone later, “that we have our answer. He’s okay, and that’s official. Try and get him to recall a name—for the Brits. You’re flying over next Tuesday, military executive jet, to Alconbury.”

Roth spent two days with Orlov at their new home, going back over the sparse details the Russian had already provided from his days in the Illegals Directorate concerning Soviet agents planted in Britain. As he had specialized in Central and South America, Britain had not been his primary concern. But he racked his memory all the same. All he could recall were code-names. Then at the end of the second day, some­thing came back to him.

A civil servant in the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall. But the money was always paid into the man’s account at the Midland Bank in Croydon High Street.

“It’s not a lot,” said the man from the Security Service, MI-5, when he was given the news. He was sitting in the office of Timothy Edwards at the headquarters of his sister service, the SIS. “He might have moved long since. Might have banked under a false name. But we’ll try.”

He went back to Curzon Street in Mayfair and set the wheels in motion. British banks do not have the right of absolute confidentiality, but they decline to hand out details of private accounts to just anybody. One institution that always secures their cooperation, by law, is the Inland Reve­nue.

The Inland Revenue agreed to cooperate, and the manager of the Midland in Croydon High Street, an outer suburb of south London, was interviewed in confidence. He was new to the job, but his computer was not.

A Security Service man sitting with the real Inland Revenue inspector took over. He had a list of every civil servant employed by the Ministry of Defense and its many out-stations over the past decade. Surprisingly, the chase was very quick. Only one MOD civil servant banked at the Mid­land in Croydon High Street. The records of the accounts were sent for. The man had two, and still lived locally. He had a checking account and a higher-rate savings account.

Over the years a total of £20,000 had been paid into his deposit account, always by him and always in cash and fairly regularly. His name was Anthony Milton-Rice.

The Whitehall conference that evening involved the Direc­tor General and Deputy Director General of MI-5 and the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in charge of Special Branch. MI-5 in Britain cannot make arrests—only the police can do that. When the Security Service wants someone picked up, the Special Branch is called in to do the honors. The meeting was chaired by the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He started the questioning.

“Who exactly is Mr. Milton-Rice?”

The Deputy Director of MI-5 consulted his notes. “Grade-two civil servant on the staff of the Procurement Office.”

“Pretty low grade?”

“Sensitive work, though. Weapons systems, access to eval­uations of new armaments.”

“Mm,” mused the Chairman. “So what do you want?”

“The point is, Tony,” said the Director General, “we have very little to go on. Unexplained payments over a period of years into his account—not enough to hold him, let alone get a conviction. He could plead that he backs the horses, always on track, gets his cash that way. Of course, he might confess. Then again, he might not.”

The policeman nodded his agreement. Without a confes­sion, he would have a bad time trying to persuade the Crown Prosecution Office even to bring a case. He doubted the man who had denounced Milton-Rice, whoever he might be, would ever appear in court as a witness.

“We’d like to shadow him first,” said the Director General. “Around the clock. If he makes one contact with the Rus­sians, he’s in the bag, with or without a confession.”

It was agreed. The watchers, that elite team of MI-5 agents who—on their own turf, at least—are reckoned by all the Western services to be the best tailers in the world, were put on alert to envelop Anthony Milton-Rice the following morn­ing as he approached the Defense Ministry with an invisible surveillance for twenty-four hours in every day.

Anthony Milton-Rice, like so many people with a regular job, had regular habits. He was a man of routine. On workdays he left his house in Addiscombe precisely at ten to eight and walked the half-mile to East Croydon Station—unless it was raining heavily, in which case the bachelor civil servant took a bus. He boarded the same commuter train every day, flashed his season ticket, and rode into London, descending at Vic­toria Station. From there, it was a short bus ride down Victoria Street to Parliament Square. There he got off and crossed Whitehall to the ministry building.

The morning after the conference about him, he did exactly the same. He did not notice the group of youths who boarded at Norwood Junction. He noticed them when they entered his open-plan carriage, jammed with other commuters. There were screams from the women and shouts of alarm from the men as the teenagers, engaged in an orgy of casual robbery and assault called “steaming,” swept through the carriage snatching women’s handbags and jewelry, demanding men’s wallets at knifepoint, and threatening anyone who seemed to oppose, let alone resist, them.

As the train hissed into the next station up the line, the crowd of two dozen young thugs, still screaming their rage at the world, quit the train and scattered, jumping the barrier and disappearing into the streets of Crystal Palace, leaving behind them hysterical women, badly shaken men, and frus­trated Transport Police. No arrests were made—the outrage had been too fast and unforeseen.

The train was delayed, wreaking havoc on the commuter schedules as other trains backed up behind it, while Transport Police boarded to take statements. It was only when they tapped the commuter in the pale-gray raincoat dozing in the corner on his shoulder that the man toppled slowly forward onto the floor. There were further screams as the first blood from the thin stiletto wound to his heart began to seep from beneath the crumpled figure. Mr. Anthony Milton-Rice was very dead.

Ivan’s Café, appropriately named for a meeting with a Rus­sian, was situated in Crondall Street in Shoreditch, and Sam McCready, as always, arrived second, even though he had been the first in the street outside. The reason was that if anyone was being tailed, it would more likely be Keepsake than him. So he always sat for thirty minutes in his car, watched the Russian make the meet, then gave it another fifteen minutes to see if the asset from the Soviet Embassy had suddenly grown a tail.

When McCready entered Ivan’s, he took a cup of tea from the counter and wandered over to the wall where two tables were side by side. Keepsake occupied the one in the corner and was engrossed in Sporting Life. McCready unfolded his Evening Standard and proceeded to study it.

“How was the good General Drozdov?” he asked quietly, his voice lost in the babble of the café and the hissing of the tea urn.

“Amiable and enigmatic,” said the Russian, studying the form of the horses in the three-thirty at Sandown. “I fear he may have been checking us out. I will know more if K-Line decide to visit, or if my own K-Line man gets hyperactive.”

K-Line is the KGB’s internal counterintelligence and secur­ity branch, charged not so much with espionage as with keeping a check on other KGB men and looking for internal leaks.

“Have you ever heard of a man called Anthony Milton-Rice?” asked McCready.

“No. Never. Why?”

“You didn’t run him out of your Rezidentsia? A civil servant in the Ministry of Defense?”

“Never heard of him. Never handled his product.”

“Well, he’s dead now. Too late to ask him who did run him. If anyone did. Could he have been run directly from Moscow through the Illegals Directorate?”

“If he was working for us, that’s the only explanation,” muttered the Russian. “He never worked for us in PR-Line. Not out of the London Station. As I say, we never even handled such product. He must have communicated with Moscow via a case officer based here outside the embassy. Why did he die?”

McCready sighed. “I don’t know.”

But he did know that unless it was a remarkable coinci­dence, someone had to have set it up. Someone who knew the civil servant’s routines, could brief the thugs on his regular train, his appearance—and pay them off. Possibly Milton-Rice had not even worked for the Russians at all. Then why the denunciation? Why the unaccounted-for money? Or per­haps Milton-Rice had indeed spied for Moscow but via a cut­out, unknown to Keepsake, who in turn reported directly back to the Illegals Directorate in Moscow. And General Drozdov had just been in town. And he ran the Illegals. ...

“He was denounced,” said McCready. “To us. And then he was dead.”

“Who denounced him?” asked Keepsake. He stirred his tea, though he had no intention of drinking the sweet, milky mixture.

“Colonel Pyotr Orlov,” said McCready quietly.

“Ah,” said Keepsake in a low murmur. “I have something for you there. Pyotr Alexandrovitch Orlov is a loyal and dedicated KGB officer. His defection is as phony as a three-dollar bill. He is a plant, a disinformation agent. And he is well-prepared and very good.”

Now that, thought McCready, is going to cause problems.

Timothy Edwards listened carefully. McCready’s narration and evaluation lasted thirty minutes. When he had finished, Edwards asked calmly, “And you are quite certain you be­lieve Keepsake?”

McCready had expected this question. Keepsake had worked for the British for four years since he had first ap­proached an SIS officer in Denmark and offered his services as an “agent-in-place,” but this was a world of shadows and suspicions. There was always the possibility, however remote, that Keepsake might be a “double,” his true loyalties still with Moscow. It was precisely the accusation he now made of Orlov.

“It’s been four years,” said McCready. “For four years Keepsake’s product has been tested against every known criterion. It’s pure.”

“Yes, of course,” said Edwards smoothly. “Unfortunately, if one word of this leaked to our Cousins, they would say exactly the opposite—that our man was lying and theirs was for real. The word is, Langley is deeply enamored of this Orlov.”

“I don’t think they should be told about Keepsake,” retorted McCready. He was very protective of the Russian in the embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. “Besides, Keep­sake feels his time may be coming to an end. He has an instinct that suspicions are growing in Moscow that they have a leak somewhere. If they become convinced, it will only be a matter of time before they home in on their London Station. When Keepsake finally comes in from the cold, we can come clean with the Cousins. For the moment, it could be very dangerous to widen the circle who know.”

Edwards made his decision.

“Sam, I agree. But I’m going to see the Chief on this one. He’s up at the Cabinet Office this morning. I’ll catch him later. Stay in touch.”

During the lunch hour, which Edwards spent eating a sparse meal with the Chief in Sir Christopher’s top-floor suite of offices, a military version of the Grumman Gulf stream III landed at the USAF base at Alconbury, situated just north of the market town of Huntingdon in the county of Cambridge­shire. It had taken off at midnight from the Air National Guard base in Trenton, New Jersey, its passengers having arrived from Kentucky and boarded under the cover of dark­ness and away from the air-base buildings.

In picking Alconbury, Calvin Bailey had chosen well. The base was the home of the 527 “Aggressor” Squadron of the USAF, whose pilots fly F-5 fighters with a very specific role. They are called the Aggressors because the F-5 has a config­uration similar to the Russian MIG-29 and the Aggressors play the role of attacking Soviet fighters in midair combat practice with their fellow American and British jet-jockeys. They themselves study and are adept at all the Soviet air-battle tactics, and they so sink themselves into their role that they constantly talk Russian to each other when aloft. Their guns and rockets may be so adapted as to score only elec­tronic hits and misses, but the rest—insignia, flight suits, maneuvers, and jargon—is all pure Russian.

When Roth, Orlov, Kroll, and the rest descended from the Grumman, they were outfitted in the flight suits of the Aggres­sor Squadron. They passed through unnoticed and were soon ensconced in a single-story building, set aside from the rest, and equipped with living quarters and kitchen, conference rooms, and one electronically bugged room for the debriefing of Colonel Orlov. Roth had a talk with the base commander, and the British team was cleared to be allowed onto the base the following morning. Then somewhat jet-lagged, the Ameri­can party turned in to get some sleep.

McCready’s phone rang at three P.M. and Edwards asked to see him again.

“Proposals accepted and agreed,” said Edwards. “We back our judgment that Keepsake is telling the truth and that the Americans have themselves a disinformation agent. That said, the problem is that whatever Orlov is here for, we don’t know yet. It seems that for the moment he is producing good product, which makes it unlikely our Cousins would believe us—the more so as the Chief agrees that we cannot reveal the existence, let alone the identity, of Keepsake. So how do you suggest we handle it?”

“Let me have him,” said McCready. “We have right of access. We can ask questions. Joe Roth is in charge, and I know Joe. He’s no fool. Maybe I can push Orlov, push him hard, before Roth cries ‘Enough.’ Sow some seeds of doubt. Get the Cousins to begin to contemplate the notion that he may not be all he seems.”

“All right,” said Edwards. “You take it.”

He made it sound like his own decision, his own act of magnanimity. The reality of his lunch with the Chief, who would be retiring at the end of the year, had been quite different. The ambitious Assistant Chief, who prided himself on his excellent personal relationship with the CIA, had in mind that one day Langley’s approval of him could be a useful aid to his appointment as Chief.

During the lunch, Edwards had proposed a far less skilled but less abrasive debriefer than Sam McCready to handle the matter of Keepsake’s embarrassing denunciation of the CIA’s new treasure. He had been overruled. Sir Christopher, a former colleague in the field, had insisted that the Deceiver whom he had himself appointed be in charge of handling Orlov.

McCready set off for Alconbury by car early the following morning. Denis Gaunt drove. Edwards had cleared Mc­Cready’s request that Gaunt sit in on the interrogation of the Russian. In the back of the car sat a woman from MI-5. The Security Service had asked urgently that they too have some­one at the meetings with the Russian, since a specific line of questioning would cover the area of Soviet agents working in and against Britain. Alice Daltry was in her early thirties, pretty, and very bright. She still seemed rather overawed by McCready. In their tight, closed world, despite the need-to-know principle, word had leaked of the previous year’s Pankratin affair.

The car also contained a secure telephone. Looking like an ordinary car phone but larger, it could be switched to en­crypted mode to communicate with London. There might well be points emerging from the talk with Orlov that would need to be checked with London.

For much of the journey McCready sat silently, staring through the windshield at the unfolding countryside in the early morning, marveling again at the beauty of England in the spring.

He ran his mind back over what Keepsake had told him. In London, according to the Russian, he had been marginally associated years earlier with the first preparatory stages for a deception operation of which Orlov could only be the final fruition. It had been code-named Project Potemkin.

An ironic title, thought McCready, a hint of KGB gallows humor. It almost certainly had been named not after the battleship Potemkin—nor even after Marshal Potemkin, whose name had been bestowed on the battleship—but after the Potemkin Villages.

Years ago, the Empress Catherine the Great, as ruthless a dictator as long-suffering Russia had ever endured, visited the newly conquered Crimea. Fearful of letting her see the shiv­ering, huddled masses in their freezing shacks, her chief minister, Potemkin, had sent carpenters, plasterers, and pain­ters ahead of her route to construct and paint handsome facades of clean, sturdy cottages with smiling, waving peas­ants in the windows. The shortsighted old queen was de­lighted by the picture of rural bliss and returned to her palace. Later, laborers dismantled the facades to reveal again the miserable shantytowns behind them. These deceptions were called Potemkin Villages.

“The target is the CIA,” Keepsake had said. He did not know who the exact victim would be or how the sting would be accomplished. The project was not then being handled directly by his department, which had been asked only for peripheral assistance.

“But this has to be Potemkin coming into operation at last,” he had said. “The proof will be in two parts. No information provided by Orlov will ever actually produce massive and irreversible damage to Soviet interests. Second, you will see an enormous loss of morale taking place inside the CIA.”

At the moment, the latter was certainly not the case, mused McCready. Recovering from the undoubted embarrassment of the Urchenko affair, his American friends were riding high, largely due to their newfound asset. He determined to concen­trate on the other area.

At the main gate of the air base, McCready offered an identification card (not in his real name) and asked for Joe Roth on a certain phone extension. Minutes later, Roth ap­peared in an Air Force jeep.

“Sam, good to see you again.”

“Nice to see you back, Joe. That was quite a vacation you took.”

“Hey, I’m sorry. I was given no choice, no chance to explain. It was a question of take the guy and run, or throw him back.”

“That’s okay,” said McCready easily. “All has been ex­plained. All is smoothed over. Let me present my two col­leagues.”

Roth reached into the car and shook hands with Gaunt and Daltry. He was relaxed and effusive. He foresaw no problems and was glad the Brits would be sharing in the goodies. He cleared the whole party with the Guard Commander, and they drove in line across the base to the isolated block where the CIA team was housed.

Like many service buildings, it was no architectural gem, but it was functional. A single corridor divided its entire length, from which doors led off to sleeping rooms, an eating room, kitchens, toilets, and conference rooms. A dozen Air Force police ringed the building, guns visible.

McCready glanced around before entering. He noted that while he and his two colleagues had excited no attention, many of the USAF personnel passing by stared curiously at the circle of armed guards.

“All they’ve managed to do,” he muttered to Gaunt, “is identify the bloody place to any KGB team with a set of binoculars.”

Roth led them to a room in the center of the block. Its windows were closed and shuttered; the only illumination was electric. Easy chairs formed a comfortable group around a coffee table in the center of the room; straight chairs and tables ringed the walls, for the note-takers.

Roth genially gestured to the British party to take the easy chairs and ordered some coffee.

“I’ll go get Minstrel,” he said, “unless you guys want to shoot the breeze first.”

McCready shook his head. “Might as well get on with it, Joe.”

When Roth was out, McCready nodded to Gaunt and Daltry to take chairs by the wall. The message was: Watch and listen, miss nothing. Joe Roth had left the door open. From down the corridor, McCready heard the haunting melody of “Bridge over Troubled Waters.” The sound stopped as someone switched off the tape deck. Then Roth was back. He ushered into the room a chunky, tough-looking man in running shoes, slacks, and a polo sweater.

“Sam, let me present Colonel Pyotr Orlov. Peter, this is Sam McCready.”

The Russian stared at McCready with expressionless eyes. He had heard of him. Most high-ranking officers of the KGB had by then heard of Sam McCready. But he gave no sign. McCready crossed the central carpet, his hand outstretched.

“My dear Colonel Orlov. I am delighted to meet you,” he said with a warm smile.

Coffee was served, and they seated themselves, McCready facing Orlov, Roth to one side. On a side table a tape machine started to turn. There were no microphones on the coffee table. They would have been a distraction. As it was, the tape machine would miss nothing.

McCready began gently, flatteringly, and kept it up for the first hour. Orlov’s answers came fluently and easily. But after the first hour McCready became more and more perplexed, or so it seemed.

“It’s all very fine, wonderful stuff,” he said. “I just have this tiny problem—well, I’m sure we all do. Everything you have given us is code-names. We have Agent Wildfowl some­where in the Foreign Office; Agent Kestrel, who may be a serving officer in the Navy or a civilian working for the Navy. My problem, you see, Colonel, is that nothing could actually lead to a detection or an arrest.”

“Mr. McCready, as I have explained many times, here and in America, my period in the Illegals Directorate was over four years ago, and I specialized in Central and South Amer­ica. I did not have access to the files of agents in Western Europe, Britain, or America. These were heavily protected, as I am sure they are here.”

“Yes, of course, silly of me,” said McCready. “But I was thinking more of your time in Planning. As we understand it, that entails preparing cover stories, ‘legends’ for people about to be infiltrated or just recruited. Also, systems for making contact, passing information—paying off agents. It involves the banks they use, the sums paid, the periods payments are made, the running costs. All this you seem to have—forgot­ten.”

“My time in Planning was even before my time in Illegals Directorate,” retorted Orlov. “Eight years ago. Bank ac­counts are in eight-figure numbers, it is impossible to recall them all.”

There was an edge to his voice. He was getting annoyed. Roth had begun to frown.

“Or even one number,” mused McCready as if thinking aloud, “or even one bank.”

“Sam.” Roth leaned forward urgently. “What are you driving at?”

“I am simply trying to establish whether anything Colonel Orlov has given you or us over the past six weeks will really do massive and irreversible damage to Soviet interests.”

“What are you talking about?” It was Orlov, on his feet, plainly angry. “I have given hour after hour of details of Soviet military planning, deployments, weapons levels, readi­ness states, personalities. Details of the Afghan affair. Net­works in Central and South America that have now been dismantled. Now you treat me like ... like a criminal.”

Roth was on his feet, too.

“Sam, could I have a word with you? Privately. Outside.”

He made for the door. Orlov sat down again and stared disconsolately at the floor. McCready rose and followed Roth. Daltry and Gaunt remained at their tables, fixated. The young CIA man by the tape machine turned it off. Roth did not stop walking until he had reached the open grassland outside the building. Then he turned to McCready.

“Sam, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

McCready shrugged. “I’m trying to establish Orlov’s bona fides,” he said. “That’s what I’m here for.”

“Let’s get this absolutely straight,” said Roth tightly. “You are not, as in ‘not,’ here to establish Minstrel’s bona fides. That has already been done. By us. Over and over again. We are satisfied that he is genuine, doing his best to recall what he can. You are here, as a concession from the DCI, to share in Minstrel’s product. That’s all.”

McCready stared dreamily at the waving fields of young wheat beyond the perimeter fence.

“And what do you think that product is really worth, Joe?”

“A lot. Just what he said: Soviet military deployments, postings, weapons levels, plans—”

“Which can all be changed,” murmured Sam, “quite quickly and easily. Provided they know what he’s telling you.”

“And Afghanistan,” said Roth.

McCready was silent. He could not tell his CIA colleague what Keepsake had told him in the café twenty-four hours earlier, but he could hear in his mind’s ear the murmuring voice from beside him.

“Sam, this new man in Moscow, Gorbachev. You know little about him, as yet. But I know him. When he was here to visit Mrs. Thatcher, before he became General Secretary, when he was just a Politburo member, I handled his security arrangements. We talked. He is unusual, very open, very frank. This perestroika he talks about, this glasnost. You know what these will mean, my friend? In two years, by 1988, maybe 1989, all these military details won’t matter anymore. He is not going to attack across the Central German Plain. He is really going to try and restructure the whole Soviet economy and society. He will fail, of course, but he will try. He will pull out of Afghanistan, pull back from Europe. All that this Orlov is telling the Americans will be for the archives in two years. But the Big Lie, when it comes—that will be important. For a decade, my friend. Wait for the Big Lie. The rest is calculated minor sacrifice by the KGB. They play good chess, my former colleagues.”

“And the networks of agents in South America,” said Roth. “Dammit—Mexico, Chile, and Peru are delighted. They’ve rolled up scores of Soviet agents.”

“All locally recruited help,” said McCready. “Not an eth­nic Russian among them. Tired, clapped-out networks, greedy agents, low-level informants. Disposable.”

Roth was staring at him hard.

“My God,” he breathed, “you think he’s phony, don’t you? You think he’s a double. Where did you get that, Sam? Do you have a source, an asset, that we don’t know about?”

“Nope,” said McCready flatly. He did not like to lie to Roth, but orders were orders. In fact, the CIA always received Keepsake’s product, but disguised and attributed to seven different sources.

“I just want to push him hard. I think he’s holding some­thing back. You’re no fool, Joe. I believe that in your deepest heart, you have the same impression.”

That shaft went home. In his secret heart, that was exactly what Roth still thought. He nodded.

“All right. We’ll ride him hard. He hasn’t come here for a vacation, after all. And he’s tough. Let’s go back.”

They resumed at a quarter to twelve. McCready returned to the question of Soviet agents in Britain.

“One I have already given you,” said Orlov. “If you can detect him. The man they called Agent Juno. The one who banked in Croydon, at the Midland.”

“We have traced him,” said McCready evenly. “His name is, or rather was, Anthony Milton-Rice.”

“So there you are,” said Orlov.

“What do you mean, was?” queried Roth.

“He’s dead.”

“I didn’t know,” said Orlov. “It has been several years.”

“That’s another of my problems,” said McCready sadly. “He didn’t die several years ago. He died yesterday morning. Murdered, liquidated, just an hour before we could get the surveillance team around him.”

There was a stunned silence. Then Roth was on his feet again, absolutely outraged. They were back outside the build­ing again in two minutes.

“What the fuck do you think you’re playing at, Sam?” he shouted. “You could have told me.”

“I wanted to see Orlov’s reaction,” said Sam bluntly. “I thought if I told you, you might break the news yourself. Did you see his reaction?”

“No, I was watching you.”

“There wasn’t one,” said McCready. “I would have thought he’d be pretty stunned. Worried, even. Bearing in mind the implications.”

“He’s got nerves of steel,” said Roth. “He’s a total pro. If he doesn’t want to show anything, he doesn’t. Is it true, by the way? Is the man dead? Or was it a ploy?”

“Oh, he’s dead all right, Joe. Knifed by one of a gang of teenagers on his way to work. We call it ‘steaming’; you call it ‘wilding.’ Which gives us a problem, doesn’t it?”

“It could have leaked at the British end.”

McCready shook his head. “No time. It took time to set up a killing like that. We only had the man’s real identity the night before last, after twenty-four hours of detective work. They got him yesterday morning. No time. Tell me, what happens to Minstrel’s product?”

“First to Calvin Bailey, direct, by hand. Then the analysts. Then the customers.”

“When did Orlov produce the product about the spy in our Defense Ministry?”

Roth told him.

“Five days,” mused McCready. “Before it reached us. Time enough. ...”

“Now just hang in there a minute,” protested Roth.

“Which gives us three choices,” McCready continued. “Either it was a remarkable coincidence, and in our job we can’t afford to believe too many of them. Or someone between you and the teletype operator leaked. Or it was set up in advance. I mean, the killing was prepared for a specific hour on a specific day. A certain number of hours before that time, Orlov had a rush of memory. Before the good guys could get their act together, the denounced agent was dead.”

“I don’t believe we have a leak in the Agency,” said Roth tightly. “And I don’t believe Orlov is a phony.”

“Then why isn’t he coming clean? Let’s go back to him,” suggested Sam gently.

When they returned, Orlov was subdued. The news that the British spy he had denounced had been so conveniently liquidated had evidently shaken him. In a change of tone, McCready spoke very gently.

“Colonel Orlov, you are a stranger in a strange land. You have anxieties about your future. So you wish to keep certain things back, for insurance. We understand that. I would do the same if I were in Moscow. We all need insurance. But Joe here informs me that your standing with the Agency is now so high, you need no more insurance. Now, are there any other real names you can offer us?”

There was utter silence in the room. Slowly, Orlov nodded. There was a general exhalation of breath.

“Peter,” said Roth coaxingly, “this really is the time to bring them out.”

“Remyants,” said Pyotr Orlov, “Gennadi Remyants.”

Roth’s exasperation was almost visible. “We know about Remyants,” he said. He looked up at McCready. “Washing­ton-based representative of Aeroflot. That’s his cover. The FBI picked him up and turned him two years ago. Been working for us ever since.”

“No,” said Orlov and raised his gaze. “You are wrong. Remyants is not a double. His exposure was arranged by Moscow. His pickup was deliberate. His turning was phony. Everything he provides has been carefully doctored by Mos­cow. It will cost America millions to repair the damage one day. Remyants is a KGB major of the Illegals Directorate. He runs four separate Soviet networks in mainland U.S.A. and knows all the identities.”

Roth whistled. “If that is true, then it is real pay dirt. If itis true.”

“Only one way to find out,” suggested McCready. “Pick Remyants up, fill him full of Pentothal, and see what falls out. And I do believe it is the lunch hour.”

“That’s two good ideas in ten seconds,” admitted Roth. “Guys, I have to go down to London to talk with Langley. Let’s take a break for twenty-four hours.”

* * *

Joe Roth got his link direct to Calvin Bailey at eight P.M. London time, three o’clock in Washington. Roth was buried deep in the cipher room below the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square; Bailey was in his office in Langley. They were speaking in clear voices, their tones slightly tinny because of the encrypting cipher technology through which both voices had to pass to cross the Atlantic with security.

“I spent the morning with the Brits up at Alconbury,” said Roth. “Their first meet with Minstrel.”

“How did it go?”

“Badly.”

“You’re joking. Ungrateful bastards. What went wrong?”

“Calvin, the debriefer was Sam McCready. He’s not anti-American, and he’s no fool. He believes Minstrel is a phony, a plant.”

“Well, bullshit to that. Did you tell him how many tests Minstrel has passed? That we are satisfied he’s okay?”

“Yes, in detail. He sticks with his view.”

“He produce any hard evidence for this fantasy?”

“No. Said it was the result of the British analysis of Minstrel’s product.”

“Jesus, that’s crazy. Minstrel’s product over a mere six weeks has been great. What’s McCready’s beef?”

“We covered three areas. On Minstrel’s military product, he said Moscow could change it all, as long as they knew what Minstrel was telling us, which they would if they had sent him.”

“Crap. Go on.”

“On Afghanistan he was silent. But I know Sam. It was as if he knew something I didn’t but wouldn’t say what it was. All I could get out of him was a ‘suppose.’ He hinted the Brits thought Moscow might pull out of Afghanistan quite soon. That all Minstrel’s stuff on Afghanistan would be for the archives if that happened. Do we have any such analysis?”

“Joe, we have no evidence the Russkies intend to pull out of Kabul, soon or ever. What else didn’t satisfy Mr. Mc­Cready?”

“He said he thought the Soviet networks rolled up in Central and South America were tired networks—clapped-out was the word he used—and all locally recruited help with not an ethnic Russian among them.”

“Look, Joe, Minstrel has blown away a dozen networks run by Moscow in four countries down there. Sure the agents were locally recruited. They’ve been interrogated—not very pleasantly, I’ll admit. Naturally, they were all run out of the Soviet embassies. A dozen Russian diplomats are being sent home in disgrace. He’s smashed up years of KGB work down there. McCready’s talking crap.”

“He did have one point. All Minstrel has given the Brits concerning Soviet agents over here are code-names. Nothing to identify a single Russian asset here. Except one, and he’s dead. You heard about that?”

“Sure. Rotten luck. A miserable coincidence.”

“Sam thinks it’s no coincidence. Thinks either Minstrel knew it was slated for a certain day and released his identifi­cation too late for the Brits to get their man, or we have a leak.”

“Bullshit to both.”

“He favors the first option. Thinks Minstrel works for Moscow Center.”

“Mr. Sam Smartass McCready offer you any hard evidence for this?”

“No. I asked him specifically if he had an asset inside Moscow who had denounced Minstrel. He denied it. Said it was just his people’s analysis of the product.”

There was silence for a while, as if Bailey were deep in thought. Which he was. Then: “Did you believe his denial?”

“Frankly, no. I think he was lying. I suspect they’re run­ning someone we know nothing about.”

“Then why don’t the Brits come clean?”

“I don’t know, Calvin. If they have an asset who has denounced Minstrel, they’re denying it.”

“Okay, listen, Joe, You tell Sam McCready from me, he has to put up or shut up. We have a major success in Minstrel, and I’m not about to let a sniping campaign out of Century House wreck it all. Not without hard evidence, and I mean really hard. Understood, Joe?”

“Loud and clear.”

“One other thing: Even if they have been tipped off that Orlov is phony, that would be standard Moscow Center practice. Moscow lost him, we got him, the Brits’ noses were put out of joint. Of course Moscow would leak to the Brits that our triumph was hollow and useless. And the Brits would be susceptible to that scam because of their annoyance at not getting Minstrel to themselves. So far as I am concerned, the British tip-off is disinformation. If they have a man, it’s their man who is lying. Ours is on the level.”

“Right, Calvin. If it arises again, can I tell Sam that?”

“Absolutely. That is Langley’s official view, and we’ll defend it.”

Neither man bothered to recall that by now the vindication of Orlov was linked to both their rising careers.

“Sam had one success,” said Joe Roth. “He came at Minstrel hard and strong—I had to pull him out of there twice—but he got Minstrel to come up with a new name. Gennadi Remyants.”

“We run Remyants,” retorted Bailey. “I’ve had his product coming across my desk for two years.”

Roth went on to reveal what Orlov had said about Remyants’s true loyalties to Moscow and McCready’s suggestion that the simple way to clear the whole thing up would be to pick up Remyants and break him.

Bailey was silent. Finally he said, “Maybe. We’ll think it over. I’ll talk to the DDO and the Bureau. If we decide to go with that one, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, keep McCready away from Minstrel. Give them both a break.”

Joe Roth invited McCready to join him for breakfast the following morning at Roth’s apartment, an invitation Mc­Cready accepted.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Roth. “I know there are some fine hotels nearby, and Uncle Sam can afford breakfast for two, but I make a pretty mean breakfast myself. Juice, eggs over easy, waffles, coffee suit you?”

McCready laughed down the phone. “Juice and coffee will do fine.”

When he arrived, Roth was in the kitchen, an apron over his shirt, proudly demonstrating his talent with ham and eggs. McCready weakened and took some.

“Sam, I wish you’d revise your opinion about Minstrel,” said Roth over the coffee. “I spoke with Langley last night.”

“Calvin?”

“Yep.”

“His reaction?”

“He was saddened by your attitude.”

“Saddened, my butt,” said McCready. “I’ll bet he used some nice old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon language about me.”

“Okay, he did. Not pleased. Figures we gave you a gener­ous break on Minstrel. I have a message. Langley’s view is this: We got Minstrel. Moscow is mad as hell. Moscow tries to discredit Minstrel by feeding London a skillful line on how Minstrel is really a Moscow plant. That’s Langley’s view. Sorry, Sam, but on this one you’re wrong. Orlov is telling the truth.”

“Joe, we’re not complete fools over here. We are not going to fall for some Johnny-come-lately piece of disinformation like that, if we had some information, the source of which we could not divulge—which we do not—it would have to predate Orlov’s defection.”

Roth put down his coffee cup and stared at McCready open-mouthed. The distorted language had not fooled him for a minute.

“Jesus, Sam, you do have an asset somewhere in Moscow. For Christ’s sake, come clean!”

“Can’t,” said Sam. “And we don’t, anyway. Have some­one in Moscow we haven’t told you about.”

Strictly speaking, he was not even lying.

“Then I’m sorry, Sam, but Orlov stays. He’s good. Our view is that your man—the one who doesn’t exist—is lying. It’s you, not us, who’s been taken for an awful ride. And that’s official. Orlov has passed three polygraph tests, for God’s sake. That’s proof enough.”

For answer, McCready produced a slip of paper from his breast pocket and laid it in front of Roth. It read:

We discovered that there were some East Europeans who could defeat the polygraph at any time. Americans are not very good at it because we are raised to tell the truth, and when we lie, it is easy to tell we are lying. But we find a lot of Europeans ... can handle the polygraph without a blip. ... There is an occasional Individual who lives in that part of the world who has spent his life lying about one thing or another and therefore becomes so good at it that he can pass the polygraph test.”

Roth snorted and tossed the paper back. “Some half-assed academic with no experience of Langley,” he said.

“Actually,” said McCready mildly, “it was said by Richard Helms two years ago.”

Richard Helms had been a legendary Director of Central Intelligence. Roth looked shaken. McCready rose.

“Joe, one thing Moscow has always longed for is to have the Brits and the Yanks fighting like Kilkenny cats. That’s exactly what we’re heading for, and Orlov’s only been in the country forty-eight hours. Think about it.”

In Washington, the DCI and the FBI had agreed that to see if there was truth in Orlov’s statement about Remyants, the only way to prove it was to pick him up. The planning took place through the day that Roth and McCready had their breakfast, and the arrest was fixed for the same evening, when Remyants left the Aeroflot office in downtown Washington, about five P.M. local time, long after dark in London.

The Russian emerged from the building a little after five and walked down the street, then cut across a pedestrian mall to where he had left his car.

The Aeroflot offices had been under surveillance, and Rem­yants was unaware of the six FBI agents, all armed, who moved in behind him as he crossed the mall. The agents intended to make the arrest as the Russian got into his car. It would be done quickly and discreetly. No one would notice.

The mall contained a series of paths between ragged and litter-strewn lawns, and various benches that had been in­tended for the good citizens of Washington to sit on while taking the sun or eating their brown-bag lunches. The city fathers could not have known that the small park would become a meeting place for drug pushers and their customers to score. On one of the benches, as Remyants crossed the mall toward the parking lot, a black man and a Cuban were negotiating a deal. Each dealer had backup men close by.

The fight was triggered by a scream of rage from the Cuban, who rose and pulled a knife. One of the black man’s body­guards drew a handgun and shot him down. At least eight others from the two gangs pulled weapons and fired at their opponents. The few noninvolved civilians nearby screamed and scattered. The FBI agents, stunned for a second by the suddenness of it all, reacted with their Quantico training, dropped, rolled, and drew their guns.

Remyants took a single soft-nosed bullet in the back of the head and toppled forward. His killer was shot at once by an FBI agent. The two gangs—the blacks and the Cubans—scattered in different directions. The whole firefight took seven seconds and left two men dead, one Cuban and the Russian killed in the crossfire.

The American way of doing things is very technology-dependent, and it is sometimes criticized for this; but no one can deny the results when the technology is working at peak.

The two dead men were removed to the nearest morgue, where the FBI took control. The handgun used by the Cuban went for forensic analysis but offered no clues. It was an untraceable Czech Star, probably imported from Central or South America. The Cuban’s fingerprints gave better harvest. He was identified as Gonzalo Appio, and he was already on file with the FBI. Cross-checking by computer speedily re­vealed that he was also known to the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Metro-Dade Police Department cov­ering Miami.

He was known as a drug dealer and contract hit man. Earlier in his miserable life he had been one of the Marielitos, those Cubans so generously “liberated” by Castro when he dispatched from the port of Mariel to Florida every criminal, psychopath, pederast, and low-life clogging up his prisons and asylums, and America was duped into taking them.

The only thing not proved about Appio, though suspected by the FBI, was that he was really a gunman for the DGI, Cuba’s KGB-dominated secret police. The evidence was based on Appio’s believed involvement in the slaying of two prominent and effective anti-Castro broadcasters who were working out of Miami.

The FBI passed the file to Langley, where it caused deep concern. It was the DDO, Frank Wright, who went over Bailey’s head and spoke to Joe Roth in London.

“We need to know, Joe. Now, fast. If there is any substance to the British reservations about Minstrel, we need to know. Gloves off, Joe. Lie-detector, the works. Get up there, Joe, and find out why things keep going wrong.”

Before he left for Alconbury, Roth saw Sam McCready again. It was not a happy meeting. He was bitter and angry.

“Sam, if you know something, really know something, you have got to come clean with me. I’m holding you responsible if we have made a bad mistake here, because you won’t level with us. We’ve leveled with you. Now come clean—what have you got?”

McCready stared at his friend blank-faced. He had played too much poker to give away anything that he did not want to. He was in a dilemma. Privately, he would have liked to tell Joe Roth about Keepsake, given him the hard evidence he needed to lose his faith in Orlov. But Keepsake was walking a very tight wire indeed, and strand by strand that wire was soon going to be cut away by Soviet counterintelligence, as soon as they got the bit between their teeth, convinced they had a leak somewhere in Western Europe. He could not, dare not, blow away Keepsake’s existence, let alone his rank and position.

“You have a problem, Joe,” he said. “Don’t blame me for it. I’ve gone as far as I can go. I think we both agree Milton-Rice might have been a coincidence, but not both.”

“There could have been a leak over here,” said Roth, and regretted it.

“No way,” said McCready calmly. “We’d have to have known time and place for the hit in Washington. We didn’t. It’s either Orlov setting them up by prearrangement, or it’s on your side. You know what I think; it’s Orlov. By the by, how many on your side have access to the Orlov product?”

“Sixteen,” said Roth.

“Jesus. You could have taken an ad in the New York Times.”

“Me, two assistants, tape-deck operators, analysts—it mounts up. The FBI knew about the Remyants pickup, but not Milton-Rice. Sixteen would have known about both—in time. I’m afraid we have a loose nut—probably low level, a clerk, cryptographer, secretary.”

“And I think you have a phony defector.”

“Whatever, I’m going to find out.”

“Can I come?” asked Sam.

“Sorry, buddy, not this time. This is CIA business now. In-house. See you, Sam.”

Colonel Pyotr Orlov noticed the change in the people around him as soon as Roth arrived back at Alconbury. Within minutes, the jocular familiarity had vanished. The CIA staff within the building became withdrawn and formal. Orlov waited patiently.

When Roth took his place opposite him in the debriefing room, two aides wheeled in a machine on a trolley. Orlov glanced at it. He had seen it before. The polygraph. His eyes went back to Roth.

“Something wrong, Joe?” he asked quietly.

“Yes, Peter, something very wrong.”

In a few brief sentences Roth informed the Russian of the fiasco in Washington. Something flickered in Orlov’s eyes. Fear? Guilt? The machine would find out.

Orlov made no protest as the technicians fitted the disks to his chest, wrists, and forehead. Roth did not operate the machine—there was a technician for that—but he knew the questions he wanted to ask.

The polygraph looks and performs something like an elec­trocardiograph found in any hospital. It records heart rate, pulse, sweating—any symptom normally produced by some­one telling lies while under pressure, and the mental pressure is exercised simply by the experience of being tested.

Roth began as always with simple questions designed to establish a response norm. The fine pen drifted lazily over the rolling paper in gentle rises and falls. Three times Orlov had been so tested, and three times he had produced no noticeable symptoms as of a man lying. Roth asked him about his background, his years in the KGB, his defection—the infor­mation he had given so far.

Then he went for the hard ones. “Are you a double agent working for the KGB?”

“No.”

The pen kept drifting slowly up and down.

“Is the information you have given so far truthful?”

“Yes.”

“Is there any last vital information you have not given us?”

Orlov was silent. Then he gripped the arms of his chair. “No.”

The fine pen swerved violently up and down several times before settling. Roth glanced at the operator and got a nod of confirmation. He rose, crossed to the machine, glanced at the paper, and told the operator to switch it off.

“I’m sorry, Peter, but that was a lie.”

There was silence in the room. Five people gazed at the Russian, who was looking at the floor. Finally, he raised his eyes.

“Joe, my friend, can I speak to you? Alone? Really alone? No microphones—just you and me?”

It was against the rules, and a risk. Roth thought it over. Why? What did this enigmatic man who had failed the lie-detector test for the first time want to say that even security-cleared staff were not to hear? He nodded abruptly.

When they were alone, all the technology disconnected, he said, “Well?”

The Russian gave a long, slow sigh.

“Joe, did you ever wonder at the manner of my defection? The speed? Not giving you a chance to check with Washing­ton?”

“Yes, I did. I asked you about it. Frankly, I was never completely satisfied with the explanations. Why did you de­fect that way?”

“Because I didn’t want to end like Volkov.”

Roth sat as if he had been punched in the belly. Everyone in the “business” knew of the disastrous Volkov case. In early September 1945, Konstantin Volkov, apparently Soviet Vice-Consul in Istanbul, Turkey, turned up at the British Consulate-General and told an astonished official that he was really the deputy head of the KGB in Turkey and wanted to defect. He offered to blow away 314 Soviet agents in Turkey and 250 in Britain. Most vital of all, he said, there were two British diplomats in the Foreign Office working for Russia and another man high in the British Secret Intelligence Service.

The news was sent to London while Volkov returned to his consulate. In London the matter was given to the head of the Russian Section. This agent took the necessary steps and flew out to Istanbul. The last that was seen of Volkov was a heavily bandaged figure being hustled aboard a Soviet transport plane bound for Moscow, where he died after hideous torture in the Lubyanka. The British Head of the Russian Section had arrived too late—not surprisingly, for he had informed Mos­cow from his London base. His name was Kim Philby, the very Soviet spy whom Volkov’s evidence would have ex­posed.

“What exactly are you saying to me, Peter?”

“I had to come over the way I came because I knew I could trust you. You were not high enough.”

“Not high enough for what?”

“Not high enough to be him.”

“I’m not following you, Peter,” said Roth, though he was.

The Russian spoke slowly and clearly, as if liberating him­self from a long-held burden.

“For seventeen years the KGB has had a man inside the CIA. I believe that by now he has risen very high.”

Joe Roth lay on his cot in his bedroom in the isolated building on Alconbury field and wondered what to do. A task that six weeks earlier had appeared fascinating and likely to advance his career by leaps and bounds had just turned into a night­mare.

For forty years, since its creation in 1948, the CIA had had one obsessive concern: to keep itself pure from the infiltration of a Soviet “mole.” To this end billions of dollars had been spent in counterintelligence precautions. All staff had been checked and checked again, given lie-detector tests, ques­tioned, vetted, and vetted again.

And it had worked. While the British had been rocked in the early fifties by the treachery of Philby, Burgess, and Maclean, the Agency had remained pure. The Philby affair had rumbled on as the ousted British SIS man had eked out a living in Beirut until his final departure to Moscow in 1963, but the Agency had remained clean.

When France was shaken by the Georges Paques affair and Britain again by George Blake in the early sixties, the CIA stayed unpenetrated. Through all of that time, the counterintelligence arm of the Agency, the Office of Security, had been headed by a remarkable man, James Jesus Angleton, a lonely, secretive, and obsessive man who lived and breathed for one thing: to keep the Agency free from Soviet infiltration.

Finally, Angleton had fallen victim to his own innate suspi­cions. He began to believe that despite his efforts, there really was a mole loyal to Moscow inside the CIA. Despite all the tests and all the vetting, he became convinced that a traitor had somehow gotten in. His reasoning seemed to be, “If there isn’t a mole, there ought to be. So there must be; so there is.” The hunt for the suspected “Sasha” took up more and more time and effort.

The paranoid Russian defector Golytsin, who held the KGB responsible for everything bad on the planet, agreed.

This was music to Angleton’s ears. The hunt for Sasha was stepped up. Rumor began that his name started with K. Officers whose name started with K found their lives being pulled apart. One resigned in disgust; others were dismissed because they could not prove their innocence—a prudent move, perhaps, but not very good for morale, which slumped. For ten more years, from 1964 to 1974, the hunt went on. Finally, Director William Colby had had enough. He eased Angleton into retirement.

The Office of Security passed into other hands. Its duties to keep the Agency free of Soviet penetration continued, but at a lower and less aggressive tenor.

Ironically, the British, having gotten rid of their older-generation ideological traitors, suffered no more spy scandals from within their intelligence community. Then the pendulum seemed to swing. America, so free of traitors since the late forties, suddenly produced a rash of them—not ideologues, but wretches prepared to betray their country for money. Boyce, Lee, Harper, Walker, and finally Howard had been inside the CIA and betrayed American agents working in their native Russia. Denounced by Urchenko before his bizarre redefection, Howard had managed to slip away to Moscow before he could be arrested. The affairs of Howard’s treachery and Urchenko’s redefection, both the previous year, had left the Agency with a very red face.

But all this was as nothing compared with the potential effect of Orlov’s claim. If it was true, the manhunt alone could tear the Agency apart. If it was true, the damage assessment would take years—the realignment of thousands of agents, codes, foreign networks, and alliances would last for a decade and cost millions. The reputation of the Agency would be badly damaged for years to come.

The question that raged through Roth’s mind as he tossed the night away was, “Who the hell can I go to?”

Just before dawn, he made up his mind, rose, dressed, and packed a suitcase. Before leaving he looked in on Orlov, who was sound asleep, and said to Kroll, “Look after him for me. No one enters, no one leaves. That man has just become incredibly valuable.”

Kroll did not understand why, but he nodded. He was a man who followed orders and never questioned why.

Roth drove to London, avoided the embassy, went to his apartment, and took a passport in a name other than his own. He secured one of the last seats on a private British carrier to Boston and connected at Logan Airport into Washington National. Even with the five-hour time saving, it was dusk when he drove a rented car into Georgetown, parked, and walked down K Street to the far end, close to the campus of Georgetown University.

The house he sought was a fine building of red brick, distinguished from others near it only by extensive security systems that scanned the street and all approaches to it. He was intercepted as he crossed the road toward the portico, and he flashed his CIA pass. At the door he asked to see the man he had come for, was told he was at dinner, and asked that a message be passed. Minutes later, he was admitted and shown into a paneled library redolent of leather-bound books and a hint of cigar. He sat and waited. Then the door opened, and the Director of Central Intelligence entered.

Though he was not accustomed to receiving youthful and relatively junior CIA staffers at his home, except on a sum­mons, he seated himself in a leather club chair, gestured Roth to sit opposite him, and quietly asked for the meaning of the visit. Carefully, Roth told him.

The DCI was over seventy, an unusual age for the post, but he was an unusual man. He had served with the OSS in World War II running agents into Nazi-occupied France and the Low Countries. After the war, with the OSS disbanded, he had returned to private life, taking over a small factory from his father and building it to a huge conglomerate. When the CIA had been formed to succeed the OSS, he had been offered a chance to join by the first Director, Allen Dulles, but had declined.

Years later, a wealthy man and a major contributor to the Republican party, he had noticed and attached himself to a rising ex-actor who was running for the governorship of California. When Ronald Reagan won the White House, he had asked his trusted friend to take over the CIA.

The DCI was a Catholic, long widowed, and a strict moral puritan, and he was known in the corridors of Langley as a tough old bastard. He rewarded talent and intelligence, but his passion was loyalty. He had known good friends go to the torture chambers of the Gestapo because they had been betrayed, and betrayal was the one thing he would not tolerate under any circumstances. For traitors, he had only a visceral loathing. For them, in the mind of the DCI, there could be no mercy.

He listened carefully to Roth’s narration, staring at the gas log fire where no flame burned on such a warm night. He gave no sign of what he felt, save a tightening of the muscles around the dewlapped jaw.

“You came straight here?” he asked when Roth finished. “You spoke to no one else?”

Roth explained how he had come, like a thief in the night into his own country, on a false passport, by a circuitous route. The old man nodded; he had once slipped into Hitler’s Europe like that. He rose and went to fill a tumbler from the brandy decanter on the antique side-table, pausing to tap Roth reassuringly on the shoulder.

“You did well, my boy,” he said. He offered brandy to Roth, who shook his head. “Seventeen years, you say?”

“According to Orlov. All my own superior officers, right up to Frank Wright, have been with the Agency that long. I didn’t know who else to come to.”

“No, of course not.”

The DCI returned to his chair and sat lost in thought. Roth did not interrupt.

Finally the old man said, “It has to be the Office of Security. But not the Chief. No doubt he’s totally loyal, but he’s a twenty-five-year man. I’ll send him on vacation. There’s a very bright young man who works as his deputy. Ex-lawyer. I doubt if he’s been with us more than fifteen.”

The DCI summoned an aide and caused several phone calls to be made. It was confirmed the deputy Head of the Office of Security was forty-one and had joined the Agency from law school fifteen years earlier. He was summoned from his home in Alexandria. His name was Max Kellogg.

“Just as well he never worked under Angleton,” said the DCI. “His name begins with K.”

Max Kellogg, flustered and apprehensive, arrived just after midnight. He had been about to go to bed when the call came, and he was stunned to hear the DCI himself on the line.

“Tell him,” said the DCI. Roth repeated his story.

The lawyer took it all in without blinking, missed nothing, asked two supplementary questions, took no notes. Finally he asked the DCI: “Why me, sir? Harry’s in town?”

“You’ve only been with us fifteen years,” said the DCI.

“Ah.”

“I have decided to keep Orlov—Minstrel, whatever we call him—at Alconbury,” said the DCI. “He’s probably as safe there, even safer, than back over here. Stall the British, Joe. Tell them Minstrel has just come up with more information of only U.S. interest. Tell them their access will be resumed as soon as we’ve checked it out.

“You’ll fly in the morning”—he checked his watch—“this morning by designated flight straight to Alconbury. No holds barred now. Too late for that. The stakes are too high. Orlov will understand. Take him apart. I want it all. I want to know two things, fast. Is it true, and if so, who?

“As of now, you two work for me—only for me. Report direct. No cut-outs. No questions. Refer them to me. I’ll handle things at this end.”

The light of combat was in the old man’s eyes again.

Roth and Kellogg tried to get some sleep on the Grumman from Andrews back to Alconbury. They were still ragged and tired when they arrived. The west-east crossing is always the worst. Fortunately, both men avoided alcohol and drank only water. They hardly paused to wash and brush up before going to Colonel Orlov’s room.

As they entered Roth heard the familiar tones of Art Garfunkel coming from the tape deck.

Appropriate, thought Roth grimly. We have come to talk with you again. But this time there will be no sounds of silence.

But Orlov was cooperation itself. He seemed resigned to the fact that he had now divulged the last piece of his precious “insurance.” The price of the bride had been offered in full. The only question was whether it would be acceptable to the suitors.

“I never knew his name,” he said in the debriefing room. Kellogg had elected to have the microphones and tape record­ers switched off. He had his own portable recorder and backed it up with his own handwritten notes. He wanted no other tape to be copied, no other CIA staff present. The technicians had been sent away; Kroll and two others guarded the passage beyond the now-soundproofed door. The techni­cians’ last job had been to sweep the room for bugs and declare it clean. They were plainly puzzled by the new regi­men.

“I swear to that. He was known only as Agent Sparrowhawk, and he was run personally by General Drozdov.”

“Where and when was he recruited?”

“I believe in Vietnam in ’68 or ’69.”

“Believe?”

“No, I know it was Vietnam. I was with Planning, and we had a big operation down there, mainly in and around Saigon. Locally recruited help was Vietnamese, of course, Viet Cong; but we had our own people. One of them reported that the Viet Cong had brought him an American who was dissatisfied. Our local Rezident cultivated the man and turned him. In late 1969 General Drozdov personally went to Tokyo to talk with the American. That was when he was code-named Sparrowhawk.”

“How do you know this?”

“There were arrangements to be made, communication links set up, funds to be transferred. I was in charge.”

They talked for a full week. Orlov recalled banks into which sums had been paid over the years, and the months (if not the actual days) on which these transfers were made. The sums increased as the years passed, probably to account for pro­motion and better product.

“When I moved to the Illegals Directorate and came di­rectly under Drozdov, my association with Case Sparrowhawk continued. But I was not now concerned with bank transfers. It was more operational. If Sparrowhawk gave us an agent working against us, I would inform the appropriate department, usually Executive Action—known as ‘wet af­fairs’—and they would liquidate the hostile agent if he was out of our territory or pick him up if he was inside. We got four anti-Castro Cubans that way.”

Max Kellogg noted everything and reran his tapes through the night. Finally he said to Roth, “There is only one career that fits all these allegations. I don’t know whose it is, but the records will prove it. It’s a question of cross-checking now. Hours and hours of cross-checking. I can only do that in Washington, in the Central Registry. I have to go back.”

He flew the following day, spent five hours with the DCI in his Georgetown mansion, then closeted himself with the re­cords. He had carte blanche, on the personal orders of the DCI. No one dared deny Kellogg anything. Despite the se­crecy, word began to spread through Langley. Something was up. There was a flap going on, and it had to do with internal security. Morale began to flag. These things can never be kept truly quiet.

At Golders Hill in North London there is a small park, an adjunct to the much larger Hampstead Heath, that contains a menagerie of deer, goats, ducks, and other wildfowl. McCready met Keepsake there on the day Max Kellogg flew back to Washington.

“Things are not so good at the embassy,” said Keepsake. “The K-Line man, on orders from Moscow, has started asking for files that go back years. I think a security investi­gation, probably of all our embassies in Western Europe, has been started. Sooner or later, it will narrow to the London embassy.”

“Is there anything we can do to help?”

“Possibly.”

“Suggest it,” said McCready.

“It would help if I could give them something really use­ful—some good news about Orlov, for example.”

When a defector-in-place like Keepsake changes sides, it would be suspicious if he produced no information for the Russians year after year. So it is customary for his new masters to give him some genuine intelligence to send home to prove what a fine fellow he is.

Keepsake had already given McCready the name of every real Soviet agent in Britain that he knew about, which was most of them. The British had clearly not picked them all up—that would have given the game away. Some had been shifted away from classified material, not in an obvious man­ner but slowly, in the course of “administrative” changes. Some had been promoted in rank but been moved out of the handling of secret matters. Some had had the material cross­ing their desks doctored so that it would do more harm than good.

Keepsake had even been allowed to recruit a few new agents to prove his worth to Moscow. One of these was a clerk in the Central Registry of the SIS itself, a man utterly loyal to Britain but who would pass on what he was told. Moscow had been quite delighted by the recruitment of Agent Wolverine. It was agreed that two days later, Wolverine would pass to Keepsake a copy of a draft memorandum in Denis Gaunt’s hand to the effect that Orlov was now ensconced at Alconbury, where the Americans had fallen for him hook, line, and sinker—and so had the British.

“How are things with Orlov?” inquired Keepsake.

“Everything has gone quiet,” said McCready. “I had one half-day with him, got nowhere. I think I sowed some seeds of doubt in Joe Roth’s mind, there and in London. He went back to Alconbury, talked again with Orlov, then shot off back to the States on a different passport. He thought we hadn’t spotted him. Seemed in a hell of a hurry. Hasn’t reappeared—at least, not through a regular airport. May have flown direct into Alconbury on a military flight.”

Keepsake stopped tossing crumbs to the ducks and turned to McCready. “They have talked to you since, invited you back to resume?”

“No. It’s been a week. Total silence.”

“Then he has produced the Big Lie, the one he came to produce. That is why the CIA is involved within themselves.”

“Any idea what it could be?”

Keepsake sighed. “If I were General Drozdov, I would think like a KGB man. There are two things the KGB has always lusted after. One is to start a major war between the CIA and the SIS. Have they started fighting you?”

“No, they are being very polite. Just noncommunicative.”

“Then it is the other. The other dream is to tear the CIA apart from the inside. Destroy its morale. Set colleague against colleague. Orlov will denounce someone as a KGB agent inside the CIA. It will be an effective accusation. I warned you; Potemkin is a long-planned affair.”

“How will we spot him if they don’t tell us?”

Keepsake began to stroll back to his car. He turned and called over his shoulder, “Look for the man to whom the CIA suddenly grows cold. That will be the man, and he will be innocent.”

Edwards was aghast.

“Let Moscow know that Orlov is now based at Alconbury? If Langley ever finds out, there’ll be a war. Why in heaven’s name do that?”

“A test. I believe in Keepsake. I’m convinced he’s genuine. I trust him. So I think Orlov is phony. If Moscow does not react, makes no attempt to harm Orlov, that will be the proof. Even the Americans will believe that. They’ll be angry, of course, but they’ll see the logic.”

“And if by any chance they attack and kill Orlov? You’re going to be the one to tell Calvin Bailey?”

“They won’t,” said McCready. “As night follows day, they won’t.”

“By the way, he’s coming here. On vacation.”

“Who?”

“Calvin. With wife and daughter. There’s a file on your desk. I’d like the Firm to offer him some hospitality. A couple of dinners with people he’d like to meet. He’s been a good friend of Britain over the years. Least we can do.”

Glumly, McCready stumped downstairs and looked at the file. Denis Gaunt sat opposite him.

“He’s an opera buff,” said McCready, reading from the file. “I suppose we can get him tickets for Covent Garden, Glyndebourne, that sort of thing.”

“Jesus, I can’t get into Glyndebourne,” said Gaunt en­viously. “There’s a seven-year waiting list.”

The magnificent country mansion in the heart of Sussex, set amid rolling lawns and containing one of the country’s finest opera houses, was and remains a most sought-after treat for any opera lover on a summer’s evening.

“You like opera?” asked McCready.

“Sure.”

“Fine. You can mother-hen Calvin and Mrs. Bailey while they’re here. Get tickets for the Garden and Glyndebourne. Use Timothy’s name. Pull rank, swing it. This miserable job must have some perks, though I’m damned if I ever get any.”

He headed for lunch. Gaunt grabbed the file.

“When’s he due?” he asked.

“In a week,” called McCready from the door. “Call him up. Tell him what you’re fixing. Ask what his favorites are. If we’re going to do it, let’s do it right.”

Max Kellogg shut himself inside the archives and lived there for ten days. His wife in Alexandria was told he was out of town and believed it. Kellogg had his food sent in, but he mainly survived on a diet of coffee and too many filter kings.

Two archive clerks were at his personal disposal. They knew nothing of his investigation but simply brought him the files he wanted, one after the other. Photographs were dug out of files long buried as being of little further use or relevance. Like all covert agencies, the CIA never threw anything away, however obscure or outdated; one never knew whether someday that tiny detail, that fragment of newsprint or photograph, might be needed. Many were needed now.

Halfway through his investigation, two agents were dis­patched to Europe. One visited Vienna and Frankfurt; the other, Stockholm and Helsinki. Each carried identification as an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration and a personal letter from the Secretary of the Treasury asking for the cooperation of a major bank in each city. Aghast at the thought that it was being used to launder drug money, each bank conferred among its directors and opened its files.

Tellers were summoned from their desks and shown a photograph. Dates and bank accounts were quoted. One teller could not remember; the other three nodded. The agents took receipt of photocopies of accounts, sums deposited, transfers made. They took away samples of signatures in a variety of names for graphology analysis back at Langley. When they had what they came for, they returned to Washington and put their trophies on the desk of Max Kellogg.

From an original group of more than twenty CIA officers who had served in Vietnam in the relevant period—and Kel­logg had expanded the time frame to include a period of two years on either side of the dates quoted by Orlov—the first dozen were quickly eliminated. One by one, the others went out of the frame.

Either they were not in the right city at the right time, or they could not have divulged a certain piece of information because they never knew it, or they could not have made a certain rendezvous because they were on the other side of the world. Except one.

Before the agents arrived back from Europe, Kellogg knew he had his man. The evidence from the banks merely con­firmed it. When he was ready, when he had it all, he went back to the house of the DCI in Georgetown.

Three days before he went, Calvin and Mrs. Bailey with their daughter, Clara, flew from Washington to London. Bailey loved London; in fact, he was a staunch anglophile. It was the history of the place that enthused him.

He loved to visit the old castles and stately mansions built in a bygone era, to wander the cool cloisters of ancient abbeys and seats of learning. He installed himself in a Mayfair apart­ment that the CIA retained for the housing of visiting VIPs, rented a car, and went to Oxford, avoiding the motorway and meandering instead through the byways, taking lunch in the sun at The Bull at Bisham, whose oak beams were set before Queen Elizabeth I was born.

On his second evening, Joe Roth stopped by for a drink. For the first time he met the remarkably plain Mrs. Bailey and Clara, a gawky child of eight with straight plaits of ginger hair, eyeglasses, and buck teeth. He had never met the Bailey family before; his superior was not the sort of man one associated with bedtime stories and barbecues on the lawn. But the frostiness of Calvin Bailey seemed to have mellowed, though whether it was the fact of enjoying an extended vaca­tion among the operas, concerts, and art galleries that he so admired, or the prospect of promotion, Roth could not tell.

He wanted to tell Bailey of the strain caused by Orlov’s bombshell, but the DCI’s orders had been adamant. No one, not even Calvin Bailey, the Head of Special Projects, was to be allowed to know—yet. When the Orlov accusation had been either shown to be false, or had been justified with hard evidence, the top echelon of the officers who ran the CIA would be personally briefed by the DCI himself. Until then, silence. Questions were asked, but none answered, and cer­tainly nothing was volunteered. So Joe Roth lied.

He told Bailey the debriefing of Orlov was progressing well but at a slower pace. Naturally, the product Orlov remem­bered most clearly had already been divulged. Now it was a question of dragging smaller and smaller details from his memory. He was cooperating well, and the British were happy with him. Areas already covered were now being gone over again and again. It took time, but each recovering of an area of product brought a few more tiny details—tiny but valuable.

As Roth sipped his drink, Sam McCready turned up at the door. He had Denis Gaunt with him, and introductions were made again. Roth had to admire his British colleague’s per­formance. McCready was flawless, congratulating Bailey on a remarkable success with Orlov, and producing a menu of proposals the SIS had come up with to enhance Bailey’s visit to Britain.

Bailey was delighted with the tickets to the operas at Covent Garden and Glyndebourne. They would form the high point of the family’s twelve-day visit to London.

“And then back to the States?” asked McCready.

“No. A quick visit to Paris, Salzburg, and Vienna, then home,” said Bailey. McCready nodded. Salzburg and Vienna both had operas that were among the pinnacles of that art form anywhere in the world.

It turned into quite a jolly evening. The overweight Mrs. Bailey lumbered around dispensing drinks; Clara came to be presented before bed. She was introduced to Roth, Gaunt, and McCready, who gave her his lopsided grin. She smiled shyly. Within ten minutes he was delighting her with conjuring tricks. He took a coin from his pocket, flicked it in the air, and caught it, but when Clara forced open his clenched fist, it was gone. Then he produced the coin from her left ear. The child shrieked with delight. Mrs. Bailey beamed.

“Where did you learn that sort of thing?” asked Bailey.

“Just one of my more presentable talents,” said McCready.

Roth had watched in silence. Privately the troubled CIA agent wondered if McCready could make the allegations made by Orlov disappear with the same ease as the coin. He doubted it.

McCready caught his eye, reading his thoughts. Gently, he shook his head. Not now, Joe. Not yet. He turned his atten­tion back to the now-devoted little girl.

The three visitors left after nine o’clock. On the pavement McCready murmured to Roth, “How goes the investigation, Joe?”

“You’re full of crap,” said Roth.

“Do be careful,” said McCready. “You’re being led up the garden path. By the nose.”

“That’s what we believe of you, Sam.”

“Who’s he nailed, Joe?”

“Back off,” snapped Roth. “As of now, Minstrel is Com­pany business. Nothing to do with you.”

He turned and walked quickly away toward Grosvenor Square.

Max Kellogg sat with the DCI in the latter’s library two nights later with his files and his notes, copies of bank drafts, and photographs, and he talked.

He was tired unto death, exhausted by a workload that would and should normally have taken a team of men double the time. Dark smudges ringed his eyes.

The DCI sat on the other side of the old oak refectory table he had caused to be placed between them to carry the paper­work. The old man seemed hunched into his velvet smoking jacket. The lights shone on his bald and wrinkled head, and beneath his brows his eyes watched Kellogg and flicked over the proffered documents like those of an aged lizard.

When Kellogg had finally finished, he asked, “There can be no doubt?”

Kellogg shook his head. “Minstrel provided twenty-seven points of evidence. Twenty-six check out.”

“All circumstantial?”

“Inevitably. Except the testimony of the three bank tellers. They have made positive ID—from photographs, of course.”

“Can a man be convicted on circumstantial evidence alone?”

“Yes, sir. It is well precedented and amply documented. You do not always need a body to convict of murder.”

“No confession needed?”

“Not necessary. And almost certainly not forthcoming. This is one shrewd, skilled, tough, and very experienced operator.”

The DCI sighed. “Go home, Max. Go home to your wife. Stay silent. I’ll send for you when I need you again. Do not return to the office until I give the word. Take a break. Rest.”

He waved a hand toward the door. Max Kellogg rose and left. The old man summoned an aide and ordered a coded telegram on an “eyes only” basis to be sent to Joe Roth in London. It said simply: “Return at once. Same route. Report to me. Same place.” It was signed with the code word that would tell Roth it came directly from the DCI.

The shadows over Georgetown deepened that summer night, as did the shadows in an old man’s mind. The DCI sat alone and thought of the old days, of friends and colleagues, bright young men and women whom he had sent beyond the Atlantic wall and who had died under interrogation because of an informer, a traitor. There had been no excuses in those days, no Max Kelloggs to sift the evidence and produce an overwhelming case. And there had been no mercy in those days—not for an informer. He stared at the photo before him.

“You bastard,” he said softly, “you double-dyed traitorous bastard.”

The following day a messenger entered Sam McCready’s office at Century House and deposited a chit from the cipher room. McCready was busy; he gestured to Denis Gaunt to open it. Gaunt read it, whistled, and passed it over. It was a request from the CIA in Langley: During his vacation in Europe, Calvin Bailey was to be provided with access to no classified information.

“Orlov?” asked Gaunt.

“Gets my vote,” said McCready. “What the hell can I do to convince them?”

He made his own decision on that. He used a dead-letter drop to get a message to Keepsake, asking for a meeting without delay.

In the lunch hour McCready was informed in a routine note from Airport Watch, a division of MI-5, that Joe Roth had left London again for Boston, still using the same phony passport.

That same evening, having gained five hours crossing the Atlantic, Joe Roth sat at the refectory table at the DCI’s mansion. The Director sat opposite him, Max Kellogg to his right. The old man looked grim, Kellogg merely nervous. At his home in Alexandria he had slept for most of the twenty-four hours between his arrival there the previous evening and the telephoned summons to return to Georgetown. He had left all his documents with the Director, but they were again in front of him now.

“Begin again, Max. At the beginning. Just the way you told it to me.”

Kellogg glanced at Roth, adjusted his eyeglasses, and took a sheet from the top of the pile.

“In May 1967, Calvin Bailey was sent as a Provincial Officer, a G-12, to Vietnam. Here is the posting. He was assigned, as you see, to the Phoenix Program. You’ve heard of that, Joe.”

Roth nodded. At the height of the Vietnam war, the Ameri­cans had mounted an operation to attempt to counter the drastic effects being secured by the Viet Cong on the local population through selective, public, and sadistic assassina­tions. The notion was to use counterterror against the terror­ists, to identify and eliminate Viet Cong activists. It was the Phoenix Program. Just how many Viet Cong suspects were sent to their maker without benefit of evidence or trial has never been established. Some have put the figure at twenty thousand; the CIA put it at eight thousand.

How many of the suspects were really Viet Cong remains even more problematic, for it soon became the practice for Vietnamese to denounce any person against whom they had a grudge. People were denounced on the basis of family feuds, clan wars, land squabbles, even debts owed and never to be collected if the creditor was dead.

Usually the denounced person was handed over to the Vietnamese secret police or the army, the ARVN. The inter­rogations they underwent and the ways they died tested even oriental ingenuity.

“There were young Americans, fresh out of the States, who saw things down there that no man should be asked to watch. Some quit, some needed professional help. One turned, in his mind, to the very philosophy of the men he had been sent to fight. Calvin Bailey was that man, as George Blake had turned in Korea. We have no proof of that because it happened inside a human head, but the evidence that follows makes the supposition totally reasonable.

“In March 1968 came what we believe to be the climactic experience. Bailey was present at the village of My Lai just four hours after the massacre. You recall My Lai?”

Roth nodded again. It was all part of his youth. He recalled it all too well. On March 16, 1968, an American infantry company came across a small village called My Lai, where they suspected there might be Viet Cong or sympathizers hiding. Exactly why they lost control and went berserk was only inadequately established later. They started firing when they could get no response to their questions, and once it started, it did not stop until at least 450 unarmed civilians—men, women, and children—lay dead in mangled heaps. It took eighteen months for the news to leak out in America, and three years almost to the day for Lieutenant William Calley to be convicted by court-martial. But Calvin Bailey had reached the spot after four hours and seen it all.

“Here is his report at the time,” said Kellogg, passing over several sheets, “written in his own hand. As you can see, it was written by a badly shaken man. Unfortunately, it seems this experience turned Bailey into a Communist sympathizer.

“Six months later, Bailey reported he had recruited two Vietnamese cousins, Nguyen Van Troc and Vo Nguyen Can, and infiltrated them into the Viet Cong’s own intelligence setup. It was a major coup, the first of many. According to Bailey, he ran these men for two years. According to Orlov, it was the other way around. They ran him. Look at this.”

He passed Roth two photographs. One photograph showed two young Vietnamese males, taken against a background of the jungle. One man had a cross over his face, indicating he was now dead. The other photograph, taken much later and in a setting of verandah with rattan chairs, showed a group of Vietnamese officers at ease, being served tea. The steward was looking up at the camera and smiling.

“The tea-server ended up as a boat-person, a refugee, at a camp in Hong Kong. The photo was his prize possession, but the British were interested in the group of officers and took it from him. Look at the man to the steward’s left.”

Roth looked. It was Nguyen Van Troc, ten years older but the same man. He wore a senior officer’s shoulder boards.

“He’s now deputy head of Vietnamese counterintelligence,” said Kellogg. “Point made.

“Next, we have Minstrel’s assertion that Bailey was passed on to the KGB right there in Saigon. Minstrel named a now-dead Swedish businessman as the KGB Rezident for Saigon in 1970. We have known since 1980 that the businessman was not who he said he was, and Swedish counterintelligence long broke his cover story. He never came from Sweden, so he probably came from Moscow. Bailey could have seen him whenever he wanted.

“Next, Tokyo. Minstrel says Drozdov himself went there in the same year, 1970, and took over Bailey, giving him the name Sparrowhawk. We cannot prove Drozdov was there, but Minstrel is dead accurate on the dates. And Bailey was there on those dates. Here is his movement order by Air America, our own airline. It all fits. He returned to America in 1971 a dedicated KGB agent.”

After that, Calvin Bailey had served in two posts in Central and South America and three in Europe, a continent he had also visited many times as he rose in the hierarchy and undertook flying visits to inspect out-stations.

“Help yourself to a drink, Joe,” growled the DCI. “It gets worse.”

“Minstrel named four banks into which his department in Moscow had made transfers of cash to the traitor. He even got the dates of the transfers right. Here are the four accounts, one in each of the banks he named: in Frankfurt, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Vienna. Here are the deposit slips, large sums and in cash. Payments all made within a month of the accounts being opened. Four tellers were shown a photo­graph; three identified it as the man who opened the accounts. This photograph.”

Kellogg slipped a photograph of Calvin Bailey across to Roth. He stared at the face as if at the face of a stranger. He could not believe it. He had eaten with the man, drunk with him, met his family. The face in the photo stared back blankly.

“Minstrel gave us five pieces of information that were in the possession of the KGB that should never have entered its possession. And he gave the times those pieces entered their possession. Each piece was known to Calvin Bailey and only a few others.

“Even Bailey’s triumphs, the coups that secured him his promotions, were fed to him by Moscow—genuine sacrifices made by the KGB to enhance their man’s standing with us. Minstrel names four successful operations conducted by Bailey. And he’s right—except that he claims they were all permitted by Moscow, and I’m afraid he’s right, Joe.

“That makes in all twenty-four precise items extracted from Orlov, and twenty-one check out. That leaves three, much more recent. Joe, when Orlov called you that day in London, what name did he use?”

“Hayes,” said Roth.

“Your professional name. How did he know it?”

Roth shrugged.

“Finally we come to the two recent killings of the agents named by Orlov. Bailey told you to get the Orlov product to him first, by hand, right?”

“Yes. But that would be normal. It was a Special Opera­tions project, bound to be serious material. He would want to check it over first.”

“When Orlov fingered the Brit, Milton-Rice, Bailey got that first?”

Roth nodded.

“The Brits three days later?”

“Yes.”

“And Milton-Rice was dead before the Brits could get to him. Same with Remyants. I’m sorry, Joe. It’s watertight. There’s just too much evidence.”

Kellogg closed his last file and left Roth staring at the material in front of him: the photos, the bank statements, the airline tickets, the movement orders. It was like a jigsaw puzzle assembled, not a piece missing. Even the motive, those awful experiences in Vietnam, was logical.

Kellogg was thanked and dismissed. The DCI stared across the table.

“What do you think, Joe?”

“You know the British think Minstrel’s a phony,” said Roth. “I told you the first time I came what London’s view was.”

The DCI made an irritable gesture of dismissal. “Proof, Joe. You asked them for hard proof. Did they give you any?”

Roth shook his head.

“Did they say they had a high-placed asset in Moscow who had denounced Minstrel?”

“No, sir. Sam McCready denied that.”

“So they’re full of shit,” said the DCI. “They have no proof, Joe—just the loser’s resentment at not having gotten Minstrel to themselves. This is proof, Joe. Pages and pages of it.”

Roth stared dumbly at the papers. To know that he had worked closely with a man who was steadily and with delib­erate malice betraying his country over many years was like having a chunk blown out of his midriff. He felt sick. Quietly he said, “What do you want me to do, sir?”

The DCI rose and paced his elegant library. “I am the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Appointed by the President himself. As such, I am asked to protect this country as best I can and may, from all her enemies. Some within, some without. I cannot and will not go to the President and tell him we have yet another massive scandal that makes all previous treacheries right back to Benedict Arnold look like nickel-and-dime affairs. Not after the recent series of breaches of security.

“I will not expose him to the savaging of the media and the ridicule of foreign nations. There can be no arrest and trial, Joe. The trial has been here, the verdict has been reached, and the sentence must be from me, God help me.”

“What do you want me to do?” repeated Roth.

“In the last analysis, Joe, I could steel myself not to worry about the broken trusts, the traduced secrets, the loss of confidence, the wrecked morale, the scavenging media, the snickering foreign nations. But I cannot expel from my mind the images of the agents blown away, the widows and the orphans. For a traitor, there can be only one verdict, Joe.

“He does not return here, ever. He does not soil this land with his feet ever again. He is consigned to outer darkness. You will return to England, and before he can skip to Vienna and thence across the border into Hungary—which is as­suredly what he has been preparing to do ever since Minstrel came over—you will do what has to be done.”

“I’m not certain I can do that, sir.”

The DCI leaned over the table, and with his hand he raised Roth’s chin so that he stared into the younger man’s eyes. His own were as hard as obsidian.

“You will do it, Joe. Because it is my order as Director, because through our President I speak for this land, and because you will do it for your country. Go back to London and do what has to be done.”

“Yes, sir,” said Joe Roth.

The steamer pulled away from Westminster Pier precisely at three and began its leisurely journey downriver toward Green­wich. A crowd of Japanese tourists lined the rail, cameras clicking like subdued machine-gun fire to record the images of the Houses of Parliament slipping away.

As the boat neared midriver, a man in a light gray suit quietly rose and walked to the stern, where he stood at the rail gazing down into the churning wake. Minutes later an­other man, in a light summer raincoat, rose from a different bench and went to join him.

“How are things at the embassy?” asked McCready quietly.

“Not so good,” said Keepsake. “The fact of a major counterintelligence operation is confirmed. So far, only the behavior of my junior staff is being gone over. But intensively. When they have been cleared, the focus of search will move higher—toward me. I am covering tracks as best I can, but there are some things, losing entire files, that would do more harm than good.”

“How long do you think you’ve got?”

“A few weeks at most.”

“Be careful, my friend. Err on the side of caution. We absolutely do not want another Penkovsky.”

In the early 1960s, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the GRU worked for the British for two and a half brilliant years. Until then and for many years afterward, he had been by far the most valuable Soviet agent ever recruited, and the most damaging to the USSR. In his brief span he passed over more than five thousand top-secret documents, culminating in vital intelligence on the Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, informa­tion that enabled President Kennedy to play a masterly hand against Nikita Khrushchev. But he overstayed his time. When urged to come out, he insisted on staying for a few more weeks, was unmasked, interrogated, tried, and shot.

Keepsake smiled. “Don’t worry, no Penkovsky affair. Not again. And how are things with you?”

“Not good. We believe Orlov has denounced Calvin Bailey.”

Keepsake whistled. “That high. Well, well. Calvin Bailey himself. So he was the target of Project Potemkin. Sam, you must persuade them they are wrong, that Orlov is lying.”

“I can’t,” said McCready. “I’ve tried. They’ve got the bit between their teeth.”

“You must try again. There is a life at stake here.”

“You don’t really think—”

“Oh yes, old friend, I do,” said the Russian. “The DCI is a passionate man. I don’t think he can allow another major scandal, bigger than all the rest put together, at this stage in his President’s career. He will take the option of ensuring silence. Forever. But of course, it won’t work. He will think, if the act is done, that it will never get out. We know better, don’t we? The rumors will start quite soon because the KGB will ensure that they start. They are very good at that.

“Ironically, Orlov has already won. If Bailey is arrested and goes on trial, with hugely damaging publicity, he has won. If Bailey is silenced and the news gets out, CIA morale will hit an all-time low and he has won. If Bailey is expelled without pension, he will claim his innocence, and the contro­versy will roll for years. Again, Orlov will have won. You must dissuade them.”

“I have tried. They still think Orlov’s product is immensely valuable and pure. They believe him.”

The Russian stared at the foaming water beneath the stern as the Dockland Redevelopment Area, then still a mass of cranes and part-demolished derelict warehouses, slid past.

“Did I ever tell you of my ashtray theory?”

“No,” said McCready, “I don’t think you did.”

“When I taught at the KGB training school, I told my pupils that you take a cut-glass ashtray and smash it into three pieces. If you recover one piece, you know only that you have a piece of glass. If you recover two, you know you have two-thirds of an ashtray, but you cannot stub out your cigarette. To have the whole and usable article, you need all three pieces of the ashtray.”

“So?”

“So everything Orlov has provided only makes up one or two pieces of a whole range of ashtrays. He has never actually given the Americans a whole ashtray. Something really secret that the USSR has treasured for years and does not want to give away. Ask them to give Orlov an acid test. He will fail it. But when I come out, I will bring the whole ashtray. Then they will believe.”

McCready pondered. Finally he asked, “Would Orlov know the name of the Fifth Man?”

Keepsake thought it over. “Almost certainly, though I do not,” he said. “Orlov spent years in the Illegals Directorate. I never did. I was always PR-Line, operating out of embassies. We have both been in the Memory Room—it is a standard part of the training. But only he would have seen the Black Book. Yes, he will know the name.”

Deep in the heart of Number 2, Dzerzhinsky Square, head­quarters of the KGB, lies the Memory Room, a kind of shrine in a godless building to commemorate the great precursors of the present generation of KGB officers. Among the revered portraits hanging there are those of Arnold Deutsch, Teodor Maly, Anatoli Gorsky, and Yuri Modin, successive recruiters and controllers of the most damaging spy ring ever recruited by the KGB among the British.

The recruitings took place mainly among a group of young students at Cambridge University in the mid- and late thirties. All had flirted with Communism, as had many others who later abandoned it. But five did not, and they went on to serve Moscow so brilliantly that to this day they are known there as the Magnificent Five, or the Five Stars.

One was Donald Maclean, who left Cambridge to join the Foreign Office. In the late forties he was in the British Em­bassy in Washington and was instrumental in passing to Moscow hundreds of the secrets of the new atomic bomb, which America was sharing with Britain.

Another in the Foreign Office was Guy Burgess, a chain-­smoking drunk and rabid homosexual who somehow managed to avoid being dismissed for far too long. He acted as runner and go-between for Maclean and their Moscow masters. Both were finally blown in 1951, avoided arrest after a tip-off, and fled to Moscow.

A third was Anthony Blunt, also gay, a superb intellect and talent-spotter for Moscow. He moved on to exploit his other talent, for the history of art, and rose to become curator of the Queen’s personal art collection and a knight of the realm. It was he who tipped off Burgess and Maclean of their pending arrest in 1951. Having successfully brazened out a series of investigations, he was finally exposed, stripped of his title, and disgraced only in the 1980s.

The most successful of all was Kim Philby, who joined the SIS and rose to control the Soviet desk. The flight of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 pointed the finger at him, too; he was interrogated, admitted nothing, and was ousted from the Service, finally quitting for Moscow, from Beirut, only in 1963.

The portraits of all four hang in the Memory Room. But there was a fifth, and the fifth portrait is a black square. The real identity of the Fifth Man was to be found only in the Black Book. The reason was simple.

Confusing and demoralizing the opposition is one of the principal aims of covert war and was the reason behind the belated formation of the Deception, Disinformation, and Psy­chological Operations desk, which McCready now headed. Since the early fifties, the British had known that there was a Fifth Man in that ring recruited so long ago, but they could never prove just who it was. This was all grist for Moscow’s mill.

Over the years—thirty-five in all—and to Moscow’s delight, the enigma wracked British Intelligence, aided by a hungry press and a series of books.

Over a dozen loyal and long-serving officers came under suspicion and had their careers curbed and their lives torn apart. The principal suspect was the late Sir Roger Hollis, who rose to become Director General of MI-5. He became the target of another obsessive like James Angleton, Peter Wright, who went on to make a fortune from a book in which he trotted out his conviction that Roger Hollis was the Fifth Man.

Others were also suspected, including two of Hollis’s dep­uties and even the deeply patriotic Lord Victor Rothschild. It was all bunk, but the puzzle went on. Was the Fifth Man still alive—perhaps still in office, highly placed in the government, the civil service, or the intelligence community? If so, it would be disastrous. The matter could rest only when the Fifth Man, recruited all those years ago, was finally identified. The KGB, of course, had jealously guarded that secret for thirty-five years.

“Tell the Americans to ask Orlov for the name,” said Keepsake. “He will not give it to you. But I will find it out and bring it with me when I come over.”

“There is the question of time,” said McCready. “How long can you hang on?”

“Not more than a few more weeks—maybe less.”

“They may not wait, if you are right about the DCI’s reaction.”

“Is there no other way you can persuade them to stay their hand?” asked the Russian.

“There is. But I must have your permission.”

Keepsake listened for several minutes. Then he nodded.

“If this Roth will give his solemn, sworn word. And if you trust him to keep it. Then yes.”

When Joe Roth stepped out of the airport terminal the next morning, having flown through the night from Washington, he was jet-lagged and not in the best of moods.

This time he had drunk heavily on the plane, and as he reached the door, he was not amused that a caricature of an Irish voice spoke in his ear.

“Top of the morning to you, Mr. Casey, and welcome back again.”

He turned. It was Sam McCready at his elbow. The bastard had evidently known about his “Casey” passport all along and had checked passenger lists at the Washington end to be sure to meet the right plane.

“Jump in,” said McCready when they reached the pave­ment. “I’ll give you a lift to Mayfair.”

Roth shrugged. Why not? He wondered what else Mc­Cready knew, or had guessed. The British agent kept the conversation to small talk until they entered London’s out­skirts. When the serious stuff came, it was without warning.

“What was the DCI’s reaction?” he asked.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Come on, Joe. Orlov has denounced Calvin Bailey. It’s horseshit. You’re not taking it seriously, are you?”

“You’re way offline, Sam.”

“We’ve had a note at Century: “Keep Bailey away from all classified material.” So we know he’s under suspicion. You’re saying it’s not because Orlov has accused him of being a Soviet agent?”

“It’s just routine, for Christ’s sake. Something about his having too many girlfriends.”

“My arse,” said McCready. “Calvin may be many things, but a philanderer he ain’t. Try another one.”

“Don’t push me, Sam. Don’t push our friendship too far. I told you before—this is Company business now. Back off.”

“Joe, for God’s sake. It’s already gone too far. It’s got out of hand. Orlov’s lying to you, and I fear you are going to do something terrible.”

Joe Roth lost his temper. “Stop the car,” he shouted. “Stop the goddamned car!”

McCready swerved the Jaguar into the curb. Roth reached into the back for his suitcase and unlatched his door. Mc­Cready grabbed his arm.

“Joe, tomorrow, two-thirty. I have something to show you. Pick you up outside your apartment block at two-thirty.”

“Get lost,” said the American.

“A few minutes of your time. Is that too much to ask? For the old times, Joe—for all the old times.”

Roth stepped out of the car and swung away down the pavement looking for a cab.

But he was there, on the pavement outside his apartment block, at half-past two the next day. McCready waited in the Jaguar until Roth climbed in and drove without saying a word. His friend was still angry and suspicious. The journey was less than half a mile. Roth thought he was being driven to his own embassy, so close did they come to Grosvenor Square, but McCready stopped in Mount Street, a block away.

Halfway down Mount Street is one of London’s finest fish restaurants, Scott’s. At three precisely, a trim man in a pale gray suit stepped out of the doors and paused just clear of the portico. A black limousine from the Soviet Embassy eased down the street to pick him up.

“You asked me twice if we had an asset in the KGB in Moscow,” said McCready quietly. “I denied it. I was not entirely lying. He’s not in Moscow—he’s here in London. You’re looking at him.”

“I don’t believe what I’m seeing,” whispered Roth. “That’s Nikolai Gorodov. He’s the head of the whole goddam KGB Rezidentura in Britain.”

“In the flesh. And he works for us, has done for four years. You’ve had all his product, source disguised, but pure. And he says Orlov is lying.”

“Prove it,” said Roth. “You’re always telling Orlov to prove it. Now you prove it. Prove he’s really yours.”

“If Gorodov scratches his left ear with his right hand before he gets into the car, he’s our man,” said McCready.

The black limousine was abreast of the portico. Gorodov never glanced toward the Jaguar. He just raised his right hand, reached across his chest, tugged at his left earlobe, and climbed in. The embassy car purred away.

Roth leaned forward and buried his face in his hands. He breathed deeply several times, then raised his face.

“I have to tell the DCI,” he said. “Personally. I can fly back.”

“No deal,” said McCready. “I have given Gorodov my word, and ten minutes ago you gave me yours.”

“I have to tell the DCI. Otherwise, the die is cast. There’s no going back now.”

“Then delay. You can get other proof, or at least grounds for delay. I want to tell you about the ashtray theory.”

He told Roth what Keepsake had told him on the river steamer two days earlier.

“Ask Orlov for the name of the Fifth Man. He knows, but he will not tell you. But Keepsake will get it and bring it with him when he comes over.”

“When is that to be?”

“Soon now. A few weeks at most. Moscow is suspicious. The net is closing.”

“One week,” said Roth. “Bailey leaves for Salzburg and Vienna in one week. He must not reach Vienna. The DCI thinks he’s going to slip into Hungary.”

“Have him recalled as a matter of urgency. Have him recalled to Washington. If he obeys, that merits a further delay. If he refuses, I’ll throw in the towel.”

Roth considered the proposition. “I’ll try it,” he said. “First I’m going to Alconbury. Tomorrow, when I get back, if Orlov has refused to name the Fifth Man, I’ll send a cable to the DCI saying the Brits have produced fresh evidence that Orlov may be lying and asking for Bailey’s instant recall to Langley. As a test. I think the DCI will grant that, at least. It will cause a delay of several weeks.”

“Enough, old friend,” said McCready. “More than enough. Keepsake will have come across by then, and we can all level with the DCI. Trust me.”

Roth was at Alconbury just after sundown. He found Orlov in his room, lying on his bed, reading and listening to music. He had exhausted Simon and Garfunkel—Kroll said the body­guard team had memorized nearly every word of the twenty top hits—and had passed on to the Seekers. He switched off “Morningtown” as Roth entered and jackknifed off the bed with a grin.

“We go back to the States?” he asked. “I am bored here. The Ranch was better, despite the risks.”

He had put on weight from the lying around without a chance of exercise. His reference to the Ranch was a joke. For a while, after the dummy assassination attempt, Roth had kept up the pretense that it was a KGB project, and that Moscow must have learned details of the Ranch from Urchenko, who had been debriefed there before he foolishly went back to the KGB. Then he had admitted to Orlov that it had all been a CIA ploy to test the Russian’s reactions. Orlov had been angry at first—“You bastards, I thought I was going to die,” he had yelled—but later he had begun to laugh at the incident.

“Soon,” said Roth. “Soon we will be finished here.”

He dined with Orlov that night and put to him the notion of the Memory Room in Moscow.

Orlov nodded. “Sure, I have seen it. All inducted officers are taken there. To see the heroes and admire them.”

Roth steered the conversation to the portraits of the Mag­nificent Five.

Chewing on a mouthful of steak, Orlov shook his head. “Four,” he said. “Only four pictures. Burgess, Philby, Ma­clean, and Blunt. Four Stars.”

“But there’s a fifth frame, with just black paper in it?” suggested Roth.

Orlov was chewing much more slowly. “Yes,” he admitted as he swallowed. “A frame, but no picture.”

“So there was a Fifth Man?”

“Apparently.”

Roth’s conversational tone did not vary, but he watched Orlov over the top of his fork.

“But you were a full major in the Illegals Directorate. You must have seen the name in the Black Book.”

Something flickered in Orlov’s eyes. “They never showed me any Black Book,” he said evenly.

“Peter, who was the Fifth Man? His name, please.”

“I do not know, my friend. I swear that to you.” He smiled again, his wide and attractive grin. “You want me to take the lie detector on it?”

Roth smiled back, but he thought, No, Peter, I rather think you can beat the lie detector—when you want to. He resolved to return to London in the morning and send his cable asking for a delay and a recall of Bailey to Washington—as a test. If there was one tiny element of doubt—and despite Kellogg’s pulverizing case, he now entertained an element of doubt—Roth would not carry out the order, not even for the DCI and his own flowering career. Some prices were just too high.

* * *

The following morning, the cleaners came in to the Alconbury quarters. These were local Huntingdon ladies, the same as those used by the rest of the base. Each had been security-cleared and given a pass to enter the cordoned area. Roth was eating breakfast opposite Orlov in the mess hall, trying to talk above the noise of a rotary floor-buffer polishing the corridor outside. The insistent hum of the machine went up and down as the buffing head swirled around and around.

Orlov wiped the coffee from his lips, mentioned that he needed to go to the men’s room, and left. In later life, Roth would never again mock the notion of a sixth sense. Seconds after Orlov had left, Roth noticed a change in the tone of the buffing machine. He walked out into the corridor to look at it. The buffer stood alone, its brushes turning, its motor emitting a single, high whine.

He had seen the cleaner when he went in for breakfast—a thin lady in print overalls, curlers in her hair, and a scarf wrapped over them. She had stepped aside to let him pass, then continued with her drudgery without raising her eyes. Now she was gone. At the end of the corridor, the men’s room door was still swinging gently.

Roth yelled, “Kroll!” at the top of his voice and raced down the corridor. She was on her knees in the middle of the men’s room floor, her plastic bucket of cleaning fluids and dusters spilled around her. In her hand she had the silenced Sig Sauer that the dusters had hidden. From the far end of the room, a cubicle door opened, and Orlov stepped out. The kneeling assassin raised the gun.

Roth did not speak Russian, but he knew a few words. He yelled “Stoi!” at the top of his voice.

She turned on her knees, Roth threw himself to the floor, there was a low phut, and Roth felt the shock waves near his head. He was still on the tiles when there was a crashing boom from behind him, and he felt more waves of reverbera­tion beating around him. An enclosed toilet is no place to loose off a .44 Magnum.

Behind him, Kroll stood in the doorway, his Colt gripped two-handed. There was no need for a second shot. The woman lay on her back on the tiles, a blooming red stain vying with the roses on her overalls. Later, they would discover the real charlady bound and gagged at her home in Huntingdon.

Orlov still stood by the door of the cubicle, white-faced.

“More games!” he shouted. “It is enough of CIA games!”

“No games,” said Roth as he eased himself up. “This was no game. This was the KGB.”

Orlov looked again and saw that the dark red pool spreading across the tiles was not Hollywood makeup. Not this time.

It took Roth two hours to secure Orlov and the rest of the team a fast passage back to America and to secure their immediate transfer to the Ranch. Orlov left gladly, taking his precious collection of ballads with him. When the Air Force transport lifted off for the States, Roth took his car and headed back to London. He was deeply and bitterly angry.

In part, he blamed himself. He should have realized that after the exposure of Bailey, Alconbury could no longer be considered a safe haven for Orlov. But he had been so busy with McCready’s intervention, it had slipped his mind. Every­one is fallible. Had it been anyone but McCready, Roth would have been a hundred-percent convinced that the Brits were wrong and that Orlov was telling the truth, but because it was McCready, Roth was still prepared to concede to his friend a five-percent chance that he was right and that Bailey was straight.

But the ball now lay firmly in McCready’s court. He won­dered why Bailey had not tipped off Moscow to arrange the assassination of Orlov sooner, before the KGB colonel had had a chance to name him. Perhaps he had hoped Orlov would not name him, did not have that information. It was Bailey’s mistake. Everyone is fallible.

Roth drove to the American Embassy. There was only one thing to do to back the claim that Gorodov was a real defector and Orlov a phony, and therefore Bailey was in the clear, an innocent man wrongly but cunningly set up. McCready would have to pull Gorodov out now so that Langley could talk to the man directly and sort it out once and for all. He went to his desk to make the call to McCready in Century House.

His head of station passed him in the corridor before he reached his desk.

“Oh, by the way,” said Bill Carver. “Something just came in, courtesy of Century. Seems our friends in Kensington Palace Gardens are moving things around. Their Rezident, Gorodov, flew back to Moscow this morning. It’s on your desk.”

Roth did not make the call to McCready. He sat at his desk. He was stunned. He was also vindicated—he and his DCI and his Agency, He even found it in his heart to be sorry for McCready. To have been so wrong, to have been so thor­oughly duped for four years, must be a devastating blow. As for himself, he was relieved in a strange sort of way, despite what must now lie ahead. He had no more doubts now, not a shred. The two events of a single morning had swept his last doubts away. The DCI was right. What had to be done had to be done.

He was still sorry for McCready. Down at Century they must be pulling him apart, he thought.

They were—or rather, Timothy Edwards was.

“I’m sorry to have to say this, Sam, but it’s an utter bloody fiasco. I’ve just had a word with the Chief, and the received wisdom is that we may now seriously have to contemplate the notion that Keepsake was a Soviet plant all along.”

“He wasn’t,” said McCready flatly,