The Devil's Alternative

A GENTLY WARMING SUN shone down on Washington that middle of May, bringing the first shirt sleeves to the streets and the first rich red roses to the garden outside the French windows of the Oval Office in the White House. But though the windows were open and the fresh smells of grass and flowers wafted into the private sanctum of the most pow­erful official in the world, the attention of the four men present was focused upon other plants in a far and foreign country.

President William Matthews sat where American presidents have always sat—his back to the south wall of the room, fac­ing northward across a wide antique desk toward the classical marble fireplace that dominates the north wall. His chair, un­like that of most of his predecessors, who had favored per­sonalized, made-to-measure seating, was a factory-made, high-backed swivel chair of the kind any senior corporate ex­ecutive might have. For “Bill” Matthews, as he insisted his publicity posters call him, had always through his successive and successful election campaigns stressed his ordinary, down-home personal tastes in clothing, food, and creature comforts. The chair, therefore, which could be seen by the scores of delegates he liked to welcome personally into the Oval Office, was not luxurious. The fine antique desk, he was at pains to point out, he had inherited, and it had become part of the precious tradition of the White House. That went down well.

But there Bill Matthews drew the line. When he was in conclave with his senior advisers, the “Bill” that his humblest constituent could call him to his face became the formal “Mr. President.” He also dropped the nice-guy tone of voice and the rumpled bird-dog grin that had originally gulled the vot­ers into putting the boy-next-door into the White House. He was not the boy-next-door, and his advisers knew it; he was the man at the top.

Seated in upright armchairs across the desk from the President were the three men who had asked to see him alone that morning. Closest to him in personal terms was his As­sistant for National Security Affairs. Variously referred to in the environs of the West Wing and the Executive Office Building as “the Doctor” or “that damned Polack,” the sharp-faced Stanislaw Poklewski was sometimes disliked but never underestimated.

They made a strange pair, to be so close: the blond white Anglo-Saxon Protestant from the Midwest, and the dark, taci­turn, devout Roman Catholic who had come over from Kra­kow as a small boy. But what Bill Matthews lacked in understanding of the tortuous psychologies of Europeans in general and Slavs in particular could be made up by the Jesuit-educated calculating machine who always had his ear. There were two other reasons why Poklewski appealed to him: he was ferociously loyal, and he had no political ambi­tions outside the shadow of Bill Matthews. But there was one reservation: Matthews always had to balance the Doctor’s suspicious dislike of the men of Moscow with the more ur­bane assessments of his Boston-born Secretary of State.

The Secretary was not present that morning at the meeting asked for personally by Poklewski. The other two men on the chairs in front of the desk were Robert Benson, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Carl Taylor.

It has frequently been written that America’s National Se­curity Agency is the body responsible for all electronic es­pionage. It is a popular idea but not true. The NSA is responsible for that portion of electronic surveillance and es­pionage conducted outside the United States on her behalf that has to do with listening: wiretapping, radio monitoring, and, above all, the plucking out of the ether of literally bil­lions of words a day in hundreds of dialects and languages for recording, decoding, translating, and analyzing. But not spy satellites. The visual surveillance of the globe by cameras mounted in airplanes and, more important, in space satellites has always been the preserve of the National Reconnaissance Office, a joint U.S. Air Force-CIA operation. Carl Taylor was its Director, and he was a two-star general in Air Force Intelligence.

The President shuffled together the pile of high-definition photographs on his desk and handed them back to Taylor, who rose to accept them and placed them back in his briefcase.

“All right, gentlemen,” Matthews said slowly, “so you have shown me that the wheat crop in a small portion of the So­viet Union, maybe even only in the few acres shown in these pictures, is coming up defective. What does it prove?”

Poklewski glanced across at Taylor and nodded. Taylor cleared his throat.

“Mr. President, I’ve taken the liberty of setting up a screening of what is coming in right now from one of our Condor satellites. Would you care to see it?”

Matthews nodded and watched Taylor cross to the bank of television sets placed in the curving west wall below the bookcases, which had been specially remodeled to accept the console of TV sets. When non-security-cleared deputations were in the room, the new row of TV screens was covered by sliding teak doors. Taylor turned on the extreme left-hand set and returned to the President’s desk. He detached one of the six telephones from its cradle, dialed a number, and said sim­ply, “Screen it.”

President Matthews knew about the Condor satellites. Fly­ing higher than anything before, using cameras of a sophisti­cation that could show a close-up of a human fingernail from two hundred miles up, through fog, rain, hail, snow, cloud, and night, the Condors were the latest and the best.

Back in the seventies, photographic surveillance, though good, had been slow, mainly because each cartridge of ex­posed film had to be ejected from the satellite at specific posi­tions, free-fall to earth in protective coverings, be retrieved with the aid of bleepers and tracing devices, be air-freighted to the NRO’s central laboratories, be developed and screened. Only when the satellite was within that arc of flight which permitted a direct line between it and the United States or one of the American-controlled tracking stations could simul­taneous TV transmissions take place. But when the satellite passed close over the Soviet Union, the curve of the earth’s surface baffled direct reception, so the watchers had to wait until it came around again.

Then, in the summer of 1978, the scientists cracked the problem with the Parabola Game. Their computers devised a cat’s cradle of infinite complexity for the flight tracks of half a dozen space cameras around the globe’s surface, to this end: whichever spy-in-the-sky the White House wanted to tap into could be ordered by signal to begin transmitting what it was seeing, and throw the images in a low-parabola arc to another satellite that was not out of vision. The second bird would throw the image on again, to a third satellite, and so on, like basketball players tossing the ball from fingertip to fingertip while they run. When the needed images were caught by a satellite over the United States, they could be beamed back down to NRO headquarters, and from there be patched through to the Oval Office.

The satellites were traveling at over forty thousand miles per hour; the globe was spinning with the hours, tilting with the seasons. The number of computations and permutations was astronomical, but the computers solved them. By 1980, at the touch of a button, the President had twenty-four-hour access by simultaneous transmission to every square inch of the world’s surface. Sometimes it bothered him. It never both­ered Poklewski; he had been brought up on the idea of the exposition of all private thoughts and actions in the confes­sional. The Condors were like confessionals, with himself as the priest he had once nearly become.

As the screen flickered into life, General Taylor spread a map of the Soviet Union on the President’s desk and pointed with a forefinger.

“What you are seeing, Mr. President, is coming to you from Condor Five, tracking here, northeastward, between Saratov and Perm, across the black-earth country.”

Matthews raised his gaze to the screen. Great tracts of land were unrolling slowly down the screen from top to bottom, a swath about twenty miles broad. The land looked bare, as in autumn after the harvest. Taylor muttered a few instructions into the telephone. Seconds later, the view concentrated, clos­ing to a band barely five miles wide. A small group of peasant shacks—wooden-plank isbas, no doubt—lost in the infinity of the steppe, drifted past on the left of the screen. The line of a road entered the picture, stayed center for a few uncertain moments, then drifted offscreen. Taylor mut­tered again; the picture closed to a track a hundred yards wide. Definition was better. A man leading a horse across the vast expanse of steppe came and went.

“Slow it down,” instructed Taylor into the telephone. The ground beneath the cameras passed less quickly. High in space, the Condor satellite was still on track at the same height and speed; inside the NRO’s laboratories the images were being narrowed and slowed. The picture came closer, slower. Against the bole of a lone tree, a Russian peasant slowly unbuttoned his fly. President Matthews was not a scientist and never ceased to be amazed at the possibilities of advanced technology. He was, he reminded himself, sitting in a warm office on a late spring morning in Washington, watching a man urinate somewhere in the shadow of the Ural mountain range. The peasant passed slowly out of vision toward the bottom of the screen. The image coming up was of a wheat field, many hundreds of acres abroad.

“And freeze,” instructed Taylor into the telephone. The picture slowly stopped moving and held.

“Close up,” said Taylor.

The picture came closer and closer until the entire yard-square screen was filled with twenty separate stalks of young wheat. Each looked frail, listless, bedraggled. Matthews had seen them like this in the dust bowls of the Midwest he had known in his boyhood, fifty years before.

“Stan,” said the President.

Poklewski, who had asked for the meeting and the screen­ing, chose his words carefully.

“Mr. President, the Soviet Union has a total grain target this year or two hundred forty million metric tons. Now, this breaks down into goal targets of one hundred twenty million tons of wheat, sixty million of barley, fourteen million of oats, fourteen million of corn, twelve million of rye, and the remaining twenty million of a mixture of rice, millet, buck­wheat, and leguminous grams. The giants of the crop are wheat and barley.”

He rose and came around the desk to where the map of the Soviet Union was still spread. Taylor flicked off the televi­sion and resumed his seat.

“About forty percent of the annual Soviet grain crop, or approximately one hundred million tons, comes from here, in the Ukraine and the Kuban area of the southern RSFSR,” Poklewski continued, indicating the areas on the map. “And it is all winter wheat. That is, it’s planted in September and October. It has reached the stage of young shoots by Novem­ber, when the first snows come. The snows cover the shoots and protect them from the bitter frosts of December and Jan­uary.”

Poklewski turned and paced away from the desk to the curved ceiling-to-floor windows behind the presidential chair. He had this habit of pacing when he talked.

The Pennsylvania Avenue observer cannot actually see the Oval Office, tucked away at the back of the tiny West Whig building, but because the tops of these south-facing tall win­dows to the office can just be observed from the Washington Monument, a thousand yards away, they have long been fitted with six-inch-thick, green-tinted bulletproof glass just in case a sniper near the monument might care to try a long shot. As Poklewski reached the windows, the aquamarine-tinted light coming through them cast a deeper pallor across his already pale face.

He turned and walked back, just as Matthews was prepar­ing to swing his chair around to keep him in vision.

“Last December, the whole of the Ukraine and the Kuban Steppe were subjected to a freak thaw during the early days of the month. They’ve had them before, but never as warm. A great wave of warm southern air swept in off the Black Sea and the Bosporus and rolled northeastward over the Ukraine and the Kuban region. It lasted a week and melted the first coverings of snow, about six inches deep, to water. The young wheat and barley stems were exposed. Ten days later, as if to compensate, the same freak weather patterns hammered the whole area with frosts going fifteen, even twenty degrees, below zero.”

“Which did the wheat no good at all,” suggested the President.

“Mr. President,” interjected Robert Benson of the CIA, “our best agricultural experts have estimated the Soviets will be lucky if they salvage fifty percent of that Ukrainian and Kuban crop. The damage was massive and irreparable.”

“So that is what you have been showing me?” asked Mat­thews.

“No, sir,” said Poklewski. “That is the point of this meet­ing. The other sixty percent of the Soviet crop, nigh on one hundred forty million tons, comes from the great tracts of the Virgin Lands in Kazakhstan, first put under the plow by Khrushchev in the middle fifties, and the black-earth country, butting up against the Urals. A small portion comes from across the mountains in Siberia. That is what we have been showing you.”

“What is happening there?” asked Matthews.

“Something odd, sir. Something strange is happening to the Soviet grain crop. All this remaining sixty percent is spring wheat, put down as seed in March and April after the thaw. It should be coming up sweet and green by now. It’s coming up stunted, sparse, sporadic, as if it had been hit by some kind of blight.”

“Weather again?” asked Matthews.

“No. They had a damp winter and spring over this area, but nothing serious. Now that the sun has come out, the weather is perfect—warm and dry.”

“How widespread is this ... blight?”

Benson came in again. “We don’t know, Mr. President. We have maybe fifty samples of film of this particular problem. We tend to focus on military concentrations, of course—troop movements, new rocket bases, arms factories. But what we have indicates it must be pretty widespread.”

“So what are you after?”

“What we’d like,” resumed Poklewski, “is your go-ahead to spend a lot more time on this problem, find out just how big it is for the Soviets. It will mean trying to send in delegations, businessmen. Diverting a lot of space surveillance from non-priority tasks. We believe it is in America’s vital interest to find out just exactly what it is that Moscow is going to have to handle here.”

Matthews considered and glanced at his watch. He had a troop of ecologists due to greet him and present him with yet another plaque in ten minutes. Then there was the Attorney General before lunch about the new labor legislation. He rose.

“Very well, gentlemen, you have it. By my authority. This is one I think we need to know. But I want an answer within thirty days.”

General Carl Taylor sat in the seventh-floor office of Robert Benson, the Director of Central Intelligence, or DCI, ten days later and gazed down at his own report, clipped to a large sheaf of photo stills, that lay on the low coffee table in front of him.

“It’s a funny one, Bob. I can’t figure it out,” he said.

Benson turned away from the great, sweeping picture win­dows that form one entire wall of the DCI’s office at Langley, Virginia, and face out north by northwest across vistas of trees toward the invisible Potomac River. Like his prede­cessors, he loved that view, particularly in late spring and early summer, when the woodlands are a wash of tender green. He took his seat on the low settee across the coffee table from Taylor.

“Neither can my grain experts, Carl. And I don’t want to go to the Department of Agriculture. Whatever is going on over there in Russia, publicity is the last thing we need, and if I bring in outsiders, it’ll be in the papers within a week. So what have you got?”

“Well, the photos show the blight, or whatever it is, is not pandemic,” said Taylor. “It’s not even regional. That’s the twister. If the cause were climatic, there’d be weather phe­nomena to explain it. There aren’t any. If it were a straight disease of the crop, it would be at least regional. If it were parasite-caused, the same would apply. But it’s haphazard. There are stands of strong, healthy, growing wheat right alongside the affected acreage. The Condor reconnaissance shows no logical pattern at all. How about you?”

Benson nodded in agreement.

“It’s illogical, all right. I’ve put a couple of assets in on the ground, but they haven’t reported back yet. The Soviet press has said nothing. My own agronomy boys have been over your photos backwards and forwards. All they can come up with is some blight of the seed or in the earth. But they can’t figure the haphazard nature of it all, either. It fits no known pattern. But the important thing is I have to produce some kind of estimate for the President for the total probable So­viet grain harvest next September and October. And I have to produce it soon.”

“There’s no way I can photograph every damn stand of wheat and barley in the Soviet Union, even with Condor,” said Taylor. “It would take months. Can you give me that?”

“Not a chance,” said Benson. “I need information about the troop movements along the China border, the buildup op­posite Turkey and Iran. I need a constant watch on the Red Army deployments in East Germany and the locations of the new SS-twenties behind the Urals.”

“Then I can only come up with a percentage figure based on what we have photographed to date, and extrapolate for a Soviet-wide figure,” said Taylor.

“It’s got to be accurate,” said Benson. “I don’t want a re­peat of 1977.”

Taylor winced at the memory, even though he had not been Director of the NRO in that year. In 1977 the Ameri­can intelligence machine had been fooled by a gigantic Soviet confidence trick. Throughout the summer, all the experts of the CIA and the Department of Agriculture had been telling the President the Soviet grain crop would reach around 215 million metric tons. Agriculture delegates visiting Russia had been shown fields of fine, healthy wheat; in fact, these had been the exceptions. Photoreconnaissance analysis had been faulty. In the autumn the then Soviet President, Leonid Brezhnev, had calmly announced the Soviet crop would be only 194 million tons.

As a result, the price of the U.S. wheat surplus over do­mestic requirements had shot up, in the certainty the Rus­sians would after all have to buy close on 20 million tons. Too late. Through the summer, acting through French-based front companies, Moscow had already bought up futures for enough wheat to cover the deficit—and at the old, low price. They had even chartered dry-cargo shipping space through front men, then redirected the ships, which were en route to Western Europe, into Soviet ports. The affair was known in Langley as “the Sting.”

Carl Taylor rose. “Okay, Bob, I’ll go on taking happy snapshots.”

“Carl.” The DCIs voice stopped him in the doorway. “Nice pictures are not enough. By July first I want the Con­dors back on military deployment. Give me the best grain-fig­ure estimates you have by the end of the month. Err, if you must, on the side of caution. And if there’s anything your boys spot that could explain the phenomenon, go back and reshoot it. Somehow we have to find out what the hell is hap­pening to the Soviet wheat.”

President Matthews’s Condor satellites could see most things in the Soviet Union, but they could not observe Harold Lessing, one of the three first secretaries in the Commercial Section of the British Embassy in Moscow at his desk the fol­lowing morning. It was probably just as well, for he would have been the first to agree he was not an edifying sight. He was pale as a sheet and feeling extremely sick.

The main embassy building of the British mission in the Soviet capital is a fine old pre-Revolution mansion facing north on Maurice Thorez Embankment, staring straight across the Moscow River at the south facade of the Kremlin wall. It once belonged to a millionaire sugar merchant in tsarist days, and was snapped up by the British soon after the Revolution. The Soviet government has been trying to get the British out of there ever since. Stalin hated the place; every morning as he rose he had to see, across the river from his private apartments, the Union Jack fluttering in the morning breeze, and it angered him greatly.

But the Commercial Section does not have the fortune to dwell in this elegant cream-and-gold mansion. It functions in a drab complex of postwar jerry-built office blocks two miles away on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, almost opposite the wedding-cake-style Ukraina Hotel. The same compound, guarded at its single gate by several watchful militiamen, contains several drab apartment buildings set aside for the flats of diplomatic personnel from a score or more of foreign embassies, and is called collectively the “Korpus Diplomatik,” or Diplomats’ Compound.

Harold Lessing’s office was on the top floor of the commer­cial office block. When he finally fainted at ten-thirty that bright May morning, it was the sound of the telephone he brought crashing to the carpet with him that alerted his secre­tary in the neighboring office. Quietly and efficiently, she summoned the commercial counselor, who had two young at­tachs assist Lessing, by this time groggily conscious again, out of the building, across the parking lot, and up to his own sixth-floor apartment in Korpus 6, a hundred yards away.

Simultaneously, the commercial counselor telephoned the main embassy on Maurice Thorez Embankment, informed the head of Chancery, and asked for the embassy doctor to be sent over. By noon, having examined Lessing in his own bed in his own flat, the doctor was conferring with the com­mercial counselor. To his surprise, the senior man cut him short and suggested they drive over to the main embassy to consult jointly with the head of Chancery. Only later did the doctor, an ordinary British general practitioner doing a three-year stint on attachment to the embassy with the rank of First Secretary, realize why the move was necessary. The head of Chancery took them all to a special room in the em­bassy building that was secure from wiretapping—something the Commercial Section was definitely not.

“It’s a bleeding ulcer,” the medico told the two diplomats. “He seemingly has been suffering from what he thought was an excess of acid indigestion for some weeks, even months. Put it down to strain of work and bunged down loads of ant­acid tablets. Foolish, really; he should have come to me.”

“Will it require hospitalization?” asked the head of Chancery, gazing at the ceiling.

“Oh yes, indeed.” said the doctor. “I think I can get him admitted here within a few hours. The local Soviet medical men are quite up to that sort of treatment.”

There was a brief silence as the two diplomats exchanged glances. The commercial counselor shook his head. Both men had the same thought; because of their need-to-know, both of them were aware of Lessing’s real function in the embassy. The doctor was not. The counselor deferred to Chancery.

“That will not be possible,” said Chancery smoothly. “Not in Lessing’s case. He’ll have to be flown to Helsinki on the afternoon shuttle. Will you ensure that he can make it?”

“But surely ...” began the doctor. Then he stopped. He realized why they had had to drive two miles to have this conversation. Lessing must be the head of the Secret Intelli­gence Service operation in Moscow. “Ah, yes. Well, now. He’s shocked and has lost probably a pint of blood. I’ve given him a hundred milligrams of pethidine as a tranquilizer. I could give him another shot at three this afternoon. If he’s chauffeur-driven to the airport and escorted all the way, yes, he can make Helsinki. But he’ll need immediate entry into hospital when he gets there. I’d prefer to go with him myself, just to be sure. I could be back tomorrow.”

The head of Chancery rose. “Splendid,” he pronounced. “Give yourself two days. And my wife has a list of little items she’s run short of, if you’d be so kind. Yes? Thank you so much. I’ll make all the arrangements from here.”

For years it has been customary in newspapers, magazines, and books to refer to the headquarters of Britain’s Secret In­telligence Service, or SIS, or MI6, as being at a certain office block in the borough of Lambeth in London. It is a custom that causes quiet amusement to the staff members of “the Firm,” as it is more colloquially known in the community of such organizations, for the Lambeth address is a sedulously maintained front.

In much the same way, a front is maintained at Leconfield House on Curzon Street, still supposed to be the home of the counterintelligence arm, MI5, to decoy the unneeded in­quirer. In reality, those indefatigable spy-catchers have not dwelt near the Playboy Club for years.

The real home of the world’s most secret Secret Intelli­gence Service is a modern-design steel-and-concrete block, al­located by the Department of the Environment, a stone’s throw from one of the capital’s principal Southern Regional railway stations, and it was taken over in the early seventies.

It was in his top-floor suite with its tinted windows looking out toward the spire of Big Ben and the Houses of Parlia­ment across the river that, just after lunch, the Director General of the SIS received the news of Lessing’s illness. The call came on one of the internal lines from the head of Personnel, who had received the message from the basement cipher room. He listened carefully.

“How long will he be off?” he asked at length.

“Several months, at least,” said Personnel. “There’ll be a couple of weeks in hospital in Helsinki, then home for a bit more. Probably several more weeks’ convalescence.”

“Pity,” mused the Director General. “We shall have to re­place him rather fast.” His capacious memory recalled to him that Lessing had been running two Russian agents, low-level staffers in the Red Army and the Soviet Foreign Ministry, re­spectively—not world-beating, but useful. Finally he said, “Let me know when Lessing is safely tucked up in Helsinki. And get me a short list of possibles for his replacement. By close of play tonight, please.”

Sir Nigel Irvine was the third successive professional intel­ligence man to rise to the post of Director General of the SIS. The vastly bigger American CIA, which had been brought to the peak of its powers by its first Director, Allen Dulles, had, as a result of abusing its strength with go-it-alone antics, in the early seventies finally been brought under the control of an outsider. Admiral Stansfield Turner. It was ironic that at exactly the same period a British government had finally done the opposite, breaking the tradition of put­ting the Firm under a senior diplomat from the Foreign Of­fice and letting a professional take over.

The risk had worked well. The Firm had paid a long penance for the Burgess, MacLean, and Philby affairs, and Sir Nigel Irvine was determined that the tradition of a profes­sional at the head of the Firm would continue after him. That was why he intended to be as strict as any of his imme­diate predecessors in preventing the emergence of any “Lone Rangers.”

“This is a service, not a trapeze act,” he used to tell the no­vices at Beaconsfield. “We’re not here for the applause.”

It was already dark by the time the three files arrived on Sir Nigel Irvine’s desk, but he wanted to get the selection finished and was prepared to stay on. He spent an hour poring over the files, but the selection seemed fairly obvious. Finally he used the telephone to ask the head of Personnel, who was still in the building, to step by. His secretary showed the staffer in, two minutes later.

Sir Nigel hospitably poured the man a whiskey and soda to match his own. He saw no reason not to permit himself a few of the gracious things of life, and he had arranged a well-ap­pointed office, perhaps to compensate for the stink of combat in 1944 and 1945, and the dingy hotels of Vienna in the late forties when he was a junior agent in the Firm, suborning So­viet personnel in the Russian-occupied areas of Austria. Two of his recruits of that period, sleepers for years, were still being run, he was able to congratulate himself.

Although the building housing the SIS was of modern steel, concrete, and chrome, the top-floor office of its Director Gen­eral was decorated with an older and more elegant motif. The wallpaper was a restful cafe au lait; the wall-to-wall carpet, burnt orange. The desk, the high chair behind it, the two up­rights in front of it, and the button-back leather Chesterfield were all genuine antiques.

From the Department of the Environment store of pic­tures, to which the mandarins of Britain’s Civil Service have access for the decoration of their office walls, Sir Nigel had collared a Dufy, a Vlaminck, and a slightly suspect Breughel. He had had his eye on a small but exquisite Fragonard, but a shifty grandee in Treasury had got there first.

Unlike the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, whose walls were hung with oils of past foreign ministers like Canning and Grey, the Firm had always eschewed ancestral portraits. In any case, whoever heard of such self-effacing men as Brit­ain’s successive spymasters enjoying having their likeness put on record in the first place? Nor were portraits of the Queen in full regalia much in favor, though the White House and Langley were plastered with signed photos of the latest President.

“One’s commitment to service of Queen and country in this building needs no further advertisement,” a dumbfound­ed visitor from the CIA at Langley had once been told. “If it did, one wouldn’t be working here, anyway.”

Sir Nigel turned from the window and his study of the lights of the West End across the water.

“It looks like Munro, wouldn’t you say?” he asked.

“I would have thought so,” answered Personnel.

“What’s he like? I’ve read the file; I know him slightly. Give me the personal touch.”

“Secretive.”

“Good.”

“A bit of a loner.”

“Blast.”

“It’s a question of his Russian,” said Personnel. “The other two have good, working Russian. Munro can pass for one. He doesn’t normally. Speaks to them in strongly accented, moderate Russian. When he drops that, he can blend right in. It’s just that, well, to run Mallard and Merganser at such short notice, brilliant Russian would be an asset.”

“Mallard” and “Merganser” were the code names for the two low-level agents recruited and run by Lessing. Russians being run inside the Soviet Union by the Firm tended to have bird names, in alphabetical order according to the date of re­cruitment. The two Ms were recent acquisitions. Sir Nigel grunted.

“Very well. Munro it is. Where is he now?”

“On training. At Beaconsfield. Tradecraft.”

“Have him here tomorrow afternoon. Since he’s not mar­ried, he can probably leave quite quickly. No need to hang about. I’ll have the Foreign Office agree to the appointment in the morning as Lessing’s replacement in the Commercial Section.”

Beaconsfield, being in the Home County of Buckingham­shire—which is to say, within easy reach of central Lon­don—was years ago a favored area for the elegant country homes of those who enjoyed high and wealthy status in the capital. By the early seventies, most of the buildings played host to seminars, retreats, executive courses in management and marketing, or even religious observation. One of them housed the Joint Services School of Russian and was quite open about it; another, smaller house, contained the training school of the SIS and was not open about it at all.

Adam Munro’s course in tradecraft was popular, not the least because it broke the wearisome routine of enciphering and deciphering. He had his class’s attention, and he knew it.

“Right,” said Munro that morning in the last week of the month. “Now for some snags and how to get out of them.”

The class was still with expectancy. Routine procedures were one thing; a sniff of some real Opposition was more in­teresting.

“You have to pick up a package from a contact,” said Munro. “But you are being tailed by the local fuzz. You have diplomatic cover in case of arrest, but your contact does not. He’s right out in the cold, a local man. He’s coming to a meet, and you can’t stop him. He knows that if he hangs about too long, he could attract attention, so he’ll wait ten minutes. What do you do?”

“Shake the tail,” suggested someone.

Munro shook his head.

“For one thing, you’re supposed to be an innocent diplo­mat, not a Houdini. Lose the tail and you give yourself away as a trained agent. Secondly, you might not succeed. If it’s the KGB and they’re using the first team, you won’t do it, short of dodging back into the embassy. Try again.”

“Abort,” said another trainee. “Don’t show. The safety of the unprotected contributor is paramount.”

“Right,” said Munro. “But that leaves your man with a package he can’t hold onto forever, and no procedure for an alternative meet.” He paused for several seconds. “Or does he ...?”

“There’s a second procedure established in the event of an abort,” suggested a third student.

“Good,” said Munro. “When you had him alone in the good old days before the routine surveillance was switched to yourself, you briefed him on a whole range of alternative meets in the event of an abort. So he waits ten minutes; you don’t show up; he goes off nice and innocently to the second meeting point. What is this procedure called?”

“Fallback,” ventured the bright spark who wanted to shake off the tail.

“First fallback,” corrected Munro. “We’ll be doing all this on the streets of London in a couple of months, so get it right.” They scribbled hard. “Okay. You have a second loca­tion in the city, but you’re still tailed. You haven’t got any­where. What happens at the first-fallback location?”

There was a general silence. Munro gave them thirty sec­onds.

“You don’t meet at this location,” he instructed. “Under the procedures you have taught your contact, the second lo­cation is always a place where he can observe you but you can stay well away from him. When you know he is watching you, from a terrace perhaps, from a cafe, but always well away from you, you give him a signal. Can be anything: scratch an ear, blow your nose, drop a newspaper and pick it up again. What does that mean to the contact?”

“That you’re setting up the third meet, according to your prearranged procedures,” said Bright Spark.

“Precisely. But you’re still being tailed. Where does the third meet happen? What kind of place?”

This time there were no takers.

“It’s a building—a bar, club, restaurant, or what you like—that has a closed front, so that once the door is closed, no one can see through any plate-glass windows from the street into the ground floor. Now, why is that the place for the exchange?”

There was a brief knock, and the head of Student Program poked his face through the doorway. He beckoned to Munro, who left his desk and went across to the door. His superior officer drew him outside into the corridor.

“You’ve been summoned,” he said quietly. “The Master wants to see you. In his office at three. Leave here at the lunch break. Bailey will take over afternoon classes.”

Munro returned to his desk, somewhat puzzled. “The Mas­ter” was the half-affectionate and half-respectful nickname for any holder of the post of Director General of the Firm.

One of the class had a suggestion to make. “So that you can walk to the contact’s table and pick up the package unobserved.”

Munro shook his head. “Not quite. When you leave the place, the tailing Opposition might leave one man behind to question the waiters. If you approached your man directly, the face of a contact could be observed and the contributor identified, even by description. Anyone else?”

“Use a drop inside the restaurant,” proposed Bright Spark. Another shake from Munro.

“You won’t have time,” he advised. “The tails will be tum­bling into the place a few seconds after you. Maybe the con­tact, who by arrangement was there before you, will not have found the right toilet cubicle free. Or the right table unoccu­pied. It’s too hit-or-miss. No, this time we’ll use the brush-pass. Note it; it goes like this.

“When your contact received your signal at the first-fallback location that you were under surveillance, he moved into the agreed procedure. He synchronized his watch to the nearest second with a reliable public clock or, preferably, with the telephone time service. In another place, you did ex­actly the same.

“At an agreed hour, he is already sitting in the agreed bar, or whatever. Outside the door, you are approaching at exactly the same time, to the nearest second. If you’re ahead of time, delay a bit by adjusting your shoelace, pausing at a shopwindow. Do not consult your watch in an obvious man­ner.

“To the second, you enter the bar and the door closes be­hind you. At the same second, the contact is on his feet, bill paid, moving toward the door. At a minimum, five seconds will elapse before the door opens again and the fuzz come in. You brush past your contact a couple of feet inside the door, making sure it is closed to block off vision. As you brush past, you pass the package or collect it. Part company and proceed to a vacant table or barstool. The Opposition will come in seconds later. As they move past him, the contact steps out and vanishes. Later the bar staff will confirm you spoke to nobody, contacted nobody. You paused at nobody’s table, nor anyone at yours. You have the package in an in­side pocket, and you finish your drink and go back to the em­bassy. The Opposition will, hopefully, report that you contacted nobody throughout the entire stroll.

“That is the brush-pass ... and that is the lunch bell. All right, we’ll scrub it for now.”

By midafternoon, Adam Munro was closeted in the secure library beneath the Firm’s headquarters, beginning to bore through a pile of buff folders. He had just five days to master and commit to memory enough background material to en­able him to take over from Harold Lessing at the Firm’s “le­gal resident” in Moscow.

On May 31 he flew from London to Moscow to take up his new appointment.

Munro spent the first week settling in. To all the embassy staff but an informed few he was just a professional diplomat and the hurried replacement for Harold Lessing. The Ambas­sador, head of Chancery, chief cipher clerk, and commercial counselor knew what his real job was. The fact of his rela­tively advanced age at forty-six years to be only a First Secretary in the Commercial Section was explained by his late entrance into the diplomatic corps.

The commercial counselor ensured that the commercial files placed before him were as unburdensome as possible. He had a brief and formal reception by the Ambassador in the latter’s private office, and a more informal drink with the head of Chancery. He met most of the staff and was taken to a round of diplomatic parties to meet many of the other dip­lomats from Western embassies. He also had a face-to-face and more businesslike conference with his opposite number at the American Embassy. “Business,” as the CIA man con­firmed to him, was quiet.

Though it would have made any staffer at the British Em­bassy in Moscow stand out like a sore thumb to speak no Russian, Munro kept his use of the language to a formal and accented version both in front of his colleagues and when talking to official Russians during the introduction process. At one party, two Soviet Foreign Ministry personnel had had a brief exchange in rapid, colloquial Russian a few feet away. He had understood it completely, and as it was mildly inter­esting, he had filed it to London.

On his tenth day, he sat alone on a park bench in the sprawling Soviet Exhibition of Economic Achievements, in the extreme northern outskirts of the Russian capital. He was waiting to make first contact with the agent from the Red Army whom he had taken over from Lessing.

Munro had been born in 1936, the son of an Edinburgh doctor, and his boyhood through the war years had been con­ventional, middle-class, untroubled, and happy. He had at­tended a local school up to the age of thirteen years and then spent five at Fettes College, one of Scotland’s best schools. It was during his period here that his senior languages master had detected in the lad an unusually acute ear for foreign languages.

In 1954, with National Service then obligatory, he had gone into the Army and after basic training secured a posting to his father’s old regiment, the First Gordon Highlanders. Transferred to Cyprus, he had been on operations against EOKA partisans in the Troodos Mountains that late summer.

Sitting in a park in Moscow, he could see the farmhouse still, in his mind’s eye. They had spent half the night crawling through the heather to surround the place, following a tip-off from an informant. When dawn came, Munro was posted alone at the bottom of a steep escarpment behind the hilltop house. The main body of his platoon stormed the front of the farm just as dawn broke, coming up the shallower slope with the sun behind them.

From above him, on the other side of the hill, he could hear the chattering of the Stens in the quiet dawn. By the first rays of the sun he could see the two figures that came tumbling out of the rear windows, in shadow until their headlong flight down the escarpment took them clear of the lee of the house. They came straight at him, as he crouched behind a fallen olive tree in the shadow of the grove, their legs flying as they sought to keep their balance on the shale. They came nearer, and one of them had what looked like a short black stick in his right hand. Even if he had shouted, he told him­self later, they could not have stopped their momentum. But he did not say that to himself at the time. Training took over; he just stood up as they reached a point fifty feet from him, and loosed off two short, lethal bursts.

The force of the bullets lifted them both, one after the other, stopped their momentum, and slammed them onto the shale at the foot of the slope. As a blue plume of cordite smoke drifted away from the muzzle of his Sten, he moved forward to look down at them. He thought he might feel sick or faint. There was nothing; just a dead curiosity. He looked at the faces. They were boys, younger than himself, and he was eighteen.

His sergeant came crashing through the olive grove.

“Well done, laddie!” he shouted. “You got ’em.”

Munro looked down at the bodies of the boys who would never marry or have children, never dance to a bouzouki or feel the warmth of sun and wine again. One of them was still clutching the black stick; it was a sausage. A piece of it hung out of the body’s mouth. He had been having breakfast Munro turned on the sergeant.

“You don’t own me!” he shouted. “You don’t bloody own me! Nobody owns me but me!”

The sergeant put the outburst down to first-kill nerves and failed to report it. Perhaps that was a mistake. For authority failed to notice that Adam Munro was not completely, not one hundred percent, obedient. Not ever again.

Six months later he was urged to consider himself as po­tential officer material and extend his time in the Army to three years so as to qualify for a short-service commission. Tired of Cyprus, he did so and was posted back to England, to the Officer Cadet Training Unit at Eaton Hall. Three months later he got his “pip” as a second lieutenant.

While form-filling at Eaton Hall, he had mentioned that he was fluent in French and German. One day he was casually tested in both languages, and his claim proved to be correct. Just after his commissioning, it was suggested he might like to apply for the Joint Services Russian language course, which in those days was situated at a camp called Little Russia at Bodmin in Cornwall. The alternative was regimental duties at the barracks in Scotland, so he agreed. Within six months he emerged not merely fluent in Russian but virtually able to pass for a Russian.

In 1957, despite considerable pressure from the regiment to stay on, he left the Army, for he had decided he wanted to be a foreign correspondent. He had seen a few of them in Cyprus and thought he would prefer the job to office work. At the age of twenty-one he joined The Scotsman in his na­tive Edinburgh as a cub reporter, and two years later moved to London, where he was taken on by Reuters, the interna­tional news agency with its headquarters at 85 Fleet Street.

In the summer of 1960 his languages again came to his rescue; he was twenty-four, and he was posted to the Reuters office in West Berlin as second man to the then bureau chief, Alfred Kluehs. That was the summer before the Wall went up, and within three months he had met Valentina, the woman he now realized to have been the only one he had ever really loved in his life. ...

A man sat down beside him and coughed. Munro jerked himself out of his reverie. Teaching tradecraft to sprogs one week, he told himself, and forgetting the basic rules a fort­night later. Never slacken attention before a meet.

The Russian looked at him uncomprehendingly, but Munro wore the necessary polka-dot tie. Slowly the Russian put a cigarette in his mouth, eyes on Munro. Corny, but it still worked. Munro took out his lighter and held the flame to the cigarette tip.

“Ronald collapsed at his desk two weeks ago,” he said softly and calmly. “Ulcers, I’m afraid. I am Michael. I’ve been asked to take over from him. Oh, and perhaps you can help me. Is it true that the Ostankino TV tower is the highest structure in Moscow?”

The Russian officer in plainclothes exhaled smoke and relaxed. The words were exactly the ones established by Lessing, whom he had known only as Ronald.

“Yes,” he replied. “It is five hundred forty meters high.”

He had a folded newspaper in his hand, which he laid on the seat between them. Munro’s folded raincoat slipped off his knees to the ground. He retrieved it, refolded it, and placed it on top of the newspaper. The two men ignored each other for ten minutes, while the Russian smoked. Finally he rose and stubbed the butt into the ground, bending as he did so.

“A fortnight’s time,” muttered Munro. “The men’s toilet under G Block at the New State Circus. During the clown Popov’s act. The show starts at seven-thirty.”

The Russian moved away and continued strolling. Munro surveyed the scene calmly for ten minutes. No one showed interest. He scooped up the mackintosh, newspaper, and buff envelope inside it and returned by Metro to Kutuzovsky Pros­pekt. The envelope contained an up-to-date list of Red Army officer postings.