The Devil's Alternative

ADAM MUNRO sat in a locked room in the main building of the British Embassy on Maurice Thorez Embankment and listened to the last sentences of the tape recording on the machine in front of him. The room was safe from any chance of electronic surveillance by the Russians, which was why he had borrowed it for a few hours from the head of Chancery.

“... goes without saying that this news does not pass out­side those present in this room. Our next meeting will be a week from today.”

The voice of Maxim Rudin died away, and the tape hissed on the machine, then stopped. Munro switched it off. He leaned back and let out a long, low whistle.

If it was true, it was bigger than anything Oleg Penkovsky had brought over, twenty years before. The story of Penkov­sky was folklore in the SIS, the CIA, and, most of all, in the bitterest memories of the KGB. He was a brigadier general in the GRU, with access to the highest information, who, disenchanted with the Kremlin hierarchy, had approached first the Americans and then the British with an offer to provide in­formation.

The Americans had turned him down, suspecting a trap. The British had accepted him, and for two and a half years “run” him until he was trapped by the KGB, exposed, tried, and shot. In his time he had brought over a golden harvest of secret information, but most of all at the time of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In that month the world had ap­plauded the exceptionally skillful handling by President John F. Kennedy of the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev over the matter of the planting of Soviet missiles in Cuba. What the world had not known was that the exact strengths and weaknesses of the Russian leader were al­ready in the Americans’ hands, thanks to Penkovsky.

When it was finally over, the Soviet missiles were out of Cuba, Khrushchev was humbled, Kennedy was a hero, and Penkovsky was under suspicion. He was arrested in Novem­ber. Within a year, after a show trial, he was dead. That same winter of 1963 Kennedy, too, died, just thirteen months after his triumph. And within two years Khrushchev had fallen, toppled by his own colleagues, ostensibly because of his failure in the grain policy, in fact because his adventurism had scared the daylights out of them. The democrat, the despot, and the spy had all left the stage. But even Penkovsky had never got right inside the Politburo.

Munro took the spool off the machine and carefully rewrapped it. The voice of Professor Yakovlev was, of course, unknown to him, and most of the tape was of him reading his report. But in the discussion following the profes­sor, there were ten voices, and three at least were identifiable. The low growl of Rudin was well enough known; the high tones of Vishnayev, Munro had heard before, watching tele­vised speeches by the man to Party congresses; and the bark of Marshal Kerensky he had heard at May Day celebrations, as well as on film and tape.

His problem, when he took the tape back to London for voiceprint analysis, as he knew he must, was how to cover his source. He knew if he admitted to the secret rendezvous in the forest, following the typed note in the bathing towel, the question would be asked: “Why you, Munro? How did she know you?” It would be impossible to avoid that question, and equally impossible to answer it. The only solution was to devise an alternative source, credible and uncheckable.

He had been in Moscow only six weeks, but his unsuspect­ed mastery of even slang Russian had paid a couple of divi­dends. At a diplomatic reception in the Czech Embassy two weeks earlier, he had been in conversation with an Indian at­tache when he had heard two Russians in muttered conversa­tion behind him. One of them had said, “He’s a bitter bastard. Thinks he should have had the top slot.”

He had followed the gaze of the two who had spoken, and noted they were observing and presumably talking about a Russian across the room. The guest list later confirmed the man was Anatoly Krivoi, personal aide and right-hand man to the Party theoretician, Vishnayev. So what had he got to be bitter about? Munro checked his files and came up with Krivoi’s history. He had worked in the Party Organizations Section of the Central Committee; shortly after the nomi­nation of Petrov to the top job, Krivoi had appeared on Vishnayev’s staff. Quit in disgust? Personality conflict with Petrov? Bitter at being passed over? They were all possible, and all interesting to an intelligence chief in a foreign capital.

Krivoi, he mused. Maybe. Just maybe. He, too, would have access, at least to Vishnayev’s copy of the transcript, maybe even to the tape. And he was probably in Moscow; certainly his boss was. Vishnayev had been present when the East Ger­man Premier had arrived a week before.

“Sorry, Anatoly, you’ve just changed sides,” he said as he slipped the fat envelope into an inside pocket and took the stairs to see the head of Chancery.

“I’m afraid I have to go back to London with the Wednes­day bag,” he told the diplomat. “It’s unavoidable, and it can’t wait.”

Chancery asked no questions. He knew Munro’s job and promised to arrange it. The diplomatic bag, which actually is a bag, or at least a series of canvas sacks, goes from Moscow to London every Wednesday and always on the British Air­ways flight, never Aeroflot. A Queen’s Messenger, one of that team of men who constantly fly around the world from Lon­don picking up embassy bags and who are protected by the insignia of the crown and greyhound, comes out from Lon­don for it. The very secret material is carried in a hard-frame dispatch box chained to the man’s left wrist; the more routine stuff in the canvas sacks, the Messenger personally checks into the aircraft’s hold. Once there, it is on British territory. But in the case of Moscow, the Messenger is accompanied by an embassy staffer.

The escort job is sought after, since it permits a quick trip home to London, a bit of shopping, and a chance of a good night out. The Second Secretary who lost his place in the rota that week was annoyed but asked no questions.

The following Wednesday, British Airways Airbus-300B lifted out of the new, post-1980 Olympics terminal at Sheremetyevo Airport and turned its nose toward London. By Munro’s side the Messenger, a short, dapper, ex-Army major, withdrew straight into his hobby, composing crossword puzzles for a major newspaper.

“You have to do something to while away these endless airplane flights,” he told Munro. “We all have our in-flight hobbies.”

Munro grunted and looked back over the wing tip at the receding city of Moscow. Somewhere down there in the sun­drenched streets, the woman he loved was working and mov­ing among people she had betrayed. She was on her own right out in the cold.

The country of Norway, seen in isolation from its eastern neighbor, Sweden, looks like a great prehistoric fossilized hu­man hand stretching down from the Arctic toward Denmark and Britain. It is a right hand, palm downward to the ocean, a stubby thumb toward the east clenched into the forefinger. Up the crack between thumb and forefinger lies Oslo, its cap­ital.

To the north the fractured forearm bones stretch up to Tromso and Hammerfest, deep in the Arctic, so narrow that in places there are only forty miles from the sea to the Swedish border. On a relief map, the hand looks as if it has been smashed by some gigantic hammer of the gods, splinter­ing bones and knuckles into thousands of particles. Nowhere is this breakage more marked than along the west coast, where the chopping edge of the hand would be.

Here the land is shattered into a thousand fragments, and between the shards the sea has flowed in to form a million creeks, gullies, bays, and gorges—winding, narrow defiles where the mountains fall sheer to glittering water. These are the fjords, and it was from the headwaters of these that a race of men came out a thousand years ago who were the best sailors ever to set keel to the water or sail to the wind. Before their age was over, they had sailed to Greenland and Iceland, conquered Ireland, settled Britain and Normandy, navigated as far as North America. They were the Vikings, and their descendants still live and fish along the fjords of Norway.

Such a man was Thor Larsen, sea captain and ship’s mas­ter, who strode that mid-July afternoon past the royal palace in the Swedish capital of Stockholm from his company’s head office back to his hotel. People tended to step aside for him; he was six feet three inches tall, broad as the pavements of the old quarter of the city, blue-eyed, and bearded. Being ashore, he was in civilian clothes, but he was happy, because he had reason to think, after visiting the head office of the Nordia Line, which now lay behind him along the Ship Quay, that he might soon have a new command.

After six months attending a course at the company’s ex­pense in the intricacies of radar, computer navigation, and supertanker technology, he was dying to get back to sea again. The summons to the head office had been to receive from the hands of the personal secretary to the proprietor, chairman, and managing director of the Nordia Line his invi­tation to dinner that evening. The invitation also included Larson’s wife, who had been informed by telephone and was flying in from Norway on a company ticket. The Old Man was splashing out a bit, thought Larsen. There must be something in the wind.

He took his rented car from the hotel parking lot across the bridge on Nybroviken and drove the thirty-seven kilo­meters to the airport. When Lisa Larsen arrived in the con­course with her overnight bag, he greeted her with the delicacy of an excited St. Bernard, swinging her off her feet like a girl. She was small and petite, with dark, bright eyes, soft chestnut curls, and a trim figure that belied her thirty-eight years. And he adored her. Twenty years earlier, when he had been a gangling second mate of twenty-seven, he had met her one freezing winter day in Oslo. She had slipped on the ice; he had picked her up like a doll and set her back on her feet.

She had been wearing a fur-trimmed hood that almost hid her tiny, red-nosed face, and when she thanked him, he could see only her eyes, looking out of the mass of snow and fur like the bright eyes of a snow mouse in the forests of winter. Ever since, through their courtship and marriage and the years that had followed, he had called her his “little snow mouse.”

He drove her back into central Stockholm, asking all the way about their home in Alesund, far away on Norway’s western coast, and of the progress of their two teenage chil­dren. To the south a British Airways Airbus passed by on its great-circle route from Moscow to London. Thor Larsen nei­ther knew nor cared.

The dinner that evening was to be in the famous Aurora Cellar, built below ground in the cellar-storerooms of an old palace in the city’s medieval quarter. When Thor and Lisa Larsen arrived and were shown down the narrow steps to the cellar, the proprietor, Leonard, was waiting for them at the bottom.

“Mr. Wennerstrom is already here,” he said, and showed them into one of the private rooms, a small, intimate cavern, arched in five-hundred-year-old brick, spanned by a thick table of glittering, ancient timber, and lit by candles in cast-iron holders. As they entered, Larsen’s employer, Harald Wennerstrom, lumbered to his feet, embraced Lisa, and shook hands with her husband.

Harald (“Harry”) Wennerstrom was something of a legend in his own lifetime among the seafaring people of Scandina­via. He was now seventy-five, grizzled and craggy, with bris­tling eyebrows. Just after the Second World War, when he returned to his native Stockholm, he had inherited from his father half a dozen small cargo ships. In thirty-five years he had built up the biggest independently owned fleet of tankers outside the hands of the Greeks and the Hong Kong Chinese, The Nordia Line was his creation, diversifying from dry-cargo ships to tankers in the mid-fifties, laying out the money, building the ships for the oil needs of the sixties, backing his own judgment, often going against the grain.

They sat and ate, and Wennerstrom talked only of small things, asking after the family. His own forty-year marriage had ended with the death of his wife four years earlier; they had had no children. But if he had had a son, he would have liked him to be like the big Norwegian across the table from him, a sailor’s sailor; and he was particularly fond of Lisa.

The salmon, cured in brine and dill in the Scandinavian way, was delicious, the tender duck from the Stockholm salt marshes excellent It was only when they sat finishing their wine—Wennerstrom unhappily sipping at his balloon glass of water (“All the bloody doctors will allow me nowadays”)—that he came to business.

“Three years ago, Thor, back in 1979, I made three fore­casts to myself. One was that by the end of 1982 the solidarity of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, would have broken down. The second was that the American President’s policy of curbing the United States con­sumption of oil energy and by-products would have failed. The third was that the Soviet Union would have changed from a net oil exporter to a net oil importer. I was told I was crazy, but I was right.”

Thor Larsen nodded. The formation of OPEC and its quadrupling of oil prices in the winter of 1973 had produced a world slump that had nearly broken the economies of the West. It had also, paradoxically, sent the oil-tanker business into a seven-year decline, with millions of tons of tanker space partially built, laid up, useless, uneconomic, loss-mak­ing. It was a bold spirit who could have seen three years ear­lier the events between 1979 and 1982: the breakup of OPEC as the Arab world split into feuding factions; the revo­lutionary takeover in Iran; the disintegration of Nigeria; the rush by the radical oil-producing nations to sell oil at any price to finance arms-buying sprees; the spiraling increase in U.S. oil consumption based on the ordinary American’s con­viction of his God-given right to rape the globe’s resources for his own comforts; and the Soviet native oil industry peak­ing at such a low production figure through poor technology and forcing Russia to become once again an oil importer. The three factors had produced the tanker boom into which they were now, in the summer of 1982, beginning to move.

“As you know,” Wennerstrom resumed, “last September I signed a contract with the Japanese for a new supertanker. Down in the marketplace they all said I was mad; half my fleet laid up in Stromstad Sound, and I order a new one. But I’m not mad. You know the story of the East Shore Oil Com­pany?”

Larsen nodded again. A small Louisiana-based oil com­pany in America ten years before, it had passed into the hands of the dynamic Clint Blake. In ten years it had grown and expanded until it was on the verge of joining the Seven Sisters, the mastodons of the world oil cartels.

“Well, in the summer of next year, 1983, Clint Blake is in­vading Europe. It’s a tough, crowded market, but he thinks he can crack it. He’s putting several thousand service stations across the motorways of Europe, marketing his own brand of gasoline and oil. And for that he’ll need tanker tonnage. And I’ve got it. A seven-year contract to bring crude from the Middle East to Western Europe. He’s already building his own refinery at Rotterdam, alongside Esso, Mobil, and Chev­ron. That is what the new tanker is for. She’s big and she’s ultramodern and she’s expensive, but she’ll pay. She’ll make five or six runs a year from the Persian Gulf to Rotterdam, and in five years she’ll amortize the investment. But that’s not the reason I’m building her. She’s going to be the biggest and the best; my flagship, my memorial. And you’re going to be her skipper.”

Thor Larsen sat in silence. Lisa’s hand stole across the table and laid itself on top of his, squeezing gently. Two years before, Larsen knew, he could never have skippered a Swedish-flag vessel, being himself a Norwegian. But since the Goteborg Agreement of the previous year, which Wennerstrom had helped to push through, a Swedish shipowner could apply for honorary Swedish citizenship for exceptional Scandinavian but non-Swedish officers in his employ, so that they could be offered captaincies. He had applied successfully on behalf of Larsen.

The coffee came, and they sipped it appreciatively.

“I’m having her built at the Ishikawajima-Harima yard in Japan,” said Wennerstrom. “It’s the only yard in the world that can take her. They have the dry dock.”

Both men knew the days of ships being built on slipways and then being allowed to slide into the water were long past. The size and weight factors were too great. The giants were now built in enormous dry docks, so that when they were ready for launching, the sea was let in through dock sluices and the ships simply floated off their blocks and rode water inside the dock.

“Work began on her last November fourth,” Wennerstrom told them. “The keel was laid on January thirtieth. She’s tak­ing shape now. She’ll float next November first, and after three months at the fitting-out berth and sea trials, she’ll sail on February second. And you’ll be on her bridge, Thor.”

“Thank you,” said Larsen. “What are you calling her?

“Ah, yes. I’ve thought of that. Do you remember the sagas? Well, we’ll name her to please Niorn, the god of the sea.” He was gripping his glass of water, staring at the flame of the candle in its cast-iron holder before him. “For Niorn controls the fire and the water, the twin enemies of a tanker captain, the explosion and the sea herself.”

The water in his glass and the flame of the candle reflected in the old man’s eyes, as once fire and water had reflected in his eyes as he sat helpless in a lifeboat in the mid-Atlantic in 1942, four cables from his blazing tanker, his first command, watching his crew fry in the sea around him.

Thor Larsen stared at his patron, doubting that the old man could really believe this mythology; Lisa, being a woman, knew he meant every word of it. At last Wennerstrom sat back, pushed the glass aside with an impatient ges­ture, and filled his spare glass with red wine.

“So we will call her after the daughter of Niorn—Freya, the most beautiful of all the goddesses. We will call her Freya.” He raised his glass. “To the Freya.”

They all drank.

“When she sails,” said Wennerstrom, “the world will never have seen the like of her. And when she is past sailing, the world will never see the like of her again.”

Larsen was aware that the two biggest tankers in the world were the French Shell tankers Bellamya and Batillus, both with a capacity of just over half a million tons.

“What will be the Freya’s deadweight?” asked Larsen. “How much crude will she carry?”

“Ah, yes, I forgot to mention that,” said the old shipowner mischievously. “She’ll be carrying one million tons of crude oil.”

Thor Larsen heard a hiss of indrawn breath from his wife beside him.

“That’s big,” he said at last. “That’s very big.”

“The biggest the world has ever seen,” said Wennerstrom.

Two days later a jumbo jet arrived at London Heathrow from Toronto. Among its passengers it carried one Azamat Krim, Canadian-born son of an emigre, who, like Andrew Drake, had Anglicized his name—to Arthur Crimmins. He was one of those whom Drake had noted years before as a man who shared his beliefs completely.

Drake was waiting to meet him as he came out of the cus­toms area, and together they drove to Drake’s flat, off the Bayswater Road.

Azamat Krim was a Crimean Tatar by heritage, short, dark, and wiry. His father, unlike Drake’s, had fought in the Second World War with the Red Army rather than against it, and had been captured in combat by the Germans. His per­sonal loyalty to Russia and that of others like him had availed them nothing. Stalin had accused the entire Tatar na­tion of collaboration with the Germans, a patently unfounded charge but one that the Soviet leader employed as an excuse to deport the Tatar people to the east. Tens of thousands had died in the unheated cattle trucks, thousands more in the arid wastes of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

In a German forced-labor camp, Chingris Krim had heard of the death of his entire family. Liberated by the Canadians in 1945, he had been lucky not to be sent back to Stalin’s Russia for execution or the slave camps. He had been be­friended by a Canadian officer, a former rodeo rider from Calgary, who one day on an Austrian horse farm had ad­mired the Tatar soldier’s mastery of horses and brilliant rid­ing. The Canadian had secured Krim’s authorized emigration to Canada, where he had married and fathered a son. Azamat was the boy, now aged thirty and, like Drake, bitter against the Kremlin for the sufferings of his father’s people.

In a small flat in Bayswater, Andrew Drake explained his plan, and the Tatar agreed to join him in it. Together they put the final touches to securing the needed funds by taking out a bank in northern England.

The man Adam Munro reported to at the head office was his controller, Barry Ferndale, the head of the Soviet Section. Years before, Ferndale had done his time in the field, and had assisted in the exhaustive debriefings of Oleg Penkovsky when the Russian defector visited Britain while accompany­ing Soviet trade delegations.

He was short and rotund, pink-cheeked and jolly. He hid his keen brain and a profound knowledge of Soviet affairs be­hind mannerisms of great cheerfulness and seeming naivete.

In his office on the fourth floor of the Firm’s headquarters, he listened to the tape from Moscow from end to end. When it was over he began furiously polishing his glasses, hopping with excitement.

“Good gracious me, my dear fellow. My dear Adam. What an extraordinary affair. This really is quite priceless.”

“If it’s true,” said Munro carefully. Ferndale started, as if the thought had not occurred to him.

“Ah, yes, of course. If it’s true. Now, you simply must tell me how you got hold of it.”

Munro told his story carefully. It was true in every detail save that he claimed the source of the tape had been Anatoly Krivoi.

“Krivoi, yes, yes, know of him of course,” said Ferndale. “Well now, I shall have to get this translated into English and show it to the Master. This could be very big indeed. You won’t be able to return to Moscow tomorrow, you know, Do you have a place to stay? Your club? Excellent. First class. Well now, you pop along and have a decent dinner and stay at the club for a couple of days.”

Ferndale called his wife to tell her he would not be home to their modest house at Pinner that evening, but he would be spending the night in town. She knew his job and was accus­tomed to such absences.

Then he spent the night working on the translation of the tape, alone in his office. He was fluent in Russian, without the ultrakeen ear for tone and pitch that Munro had, which denotes the truly bilingual speaker. But it was good enough. He missed nothing of the Yakovlev report, nor of the brief but stunned reaction that had followed it among the Polit­buro members.

At ten o’clock the following morning, sleepless but shaved and breakfasted, looking as pink and fresh as he always did, Ferndale called Sir Nigel Irvine’s secretary on the private line and asked to see him. He was with the Director General in ten minutes.

Sir Nigel Irvine read the transcript in silence, put it down, and regarded the tape lying on the desk before him.

“Is this genuine?” he asked.

Barry Ferndale had dropped his bonhomie. He had known Nigel Irvine for years as a colleague, and the elevation of his friend to the supreme post and a knighthood had changed nothing between them.

“Don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s going to take a lot of checking out. It’s possible. Adam told me he met this Krivoi briefly at a reception at the Czech Embassy just over two weeks ago. If Krivoi was thinking of coming over, that would have been his chance. Penkovsky did exactly the same; met a diplomat on neutral ground and established a secret meeting later. Of course he was regarded with intense suspi­cion until his information checked out. That’s what I want to do here.”

“Spell it out,” said Sir Nigel.

Ferndale began polishing his glasses again. The speed of his circular movements with handkerchief on the lenses, so went the folklore, was in direct proportion to the pace of his thinking, and now he polished furiously.

“Firstly, Munro,” he said. “Just in case it is a trap and the second meeting is to spring the trap, I would like him to take furlough here until we have finished with the tape. The Op­position might, just might, be trying to create an incident be­tween governments.”

“Is he owed leave?” asked Sir Nigel.

“Yes, he is, actually. He was shifted to Moscow so fast at the end of May, he is owed a fortnight’s summer holiday.”

“Then let him take it now. But he should keep in touch. And inside Britain, Barry. No wandering abroad until this is sorted out.”

“Then there’s the tape itself,” said Ferndale. “It breaks down into two parts: the Yakovlev report and the voices of the Politburo. So far as I know, we have never heard Ya­kovlev speak. So no voiceprint tests will be possible with him. But what he says is highly specific. I’d like to check that out with some experts in chemical seed-dressing techniques. There’s an excellent section in the Ministry of Agriculture who deal with that sort of thing. No need for anyone to know why we want to know, but I’ll have to be convinced this accident with the lindane hopper valve is feasible.”

“You recall that file the Cousins lent us a month ago?” asked Sir Nigel. “The photos taken by the Condor satellites?”

“Of course.”

“Check the symptoms against the apparent explanation. What else?”

“The second section comes down to voiceprint analysis,” said Ferndale. “I’d like to chop that section up into bits, so no one need know what is being talked about. The language laboratory at Beaconsfield could check out phraseology, syn­tax, vernacular expressions, regional dialects, and so forth. But the clincher will be the comparison of voiceprints.”

Sir Nigel nodded. Both men knew that human voices, reduced to a series of electronically registered blips and pulses, are as individual as fingerprints. No two are ever quite alike.

“Very well,” he said, “but Barry, I insist on two things. For the moment, no one knows about this outside of you, me, and Munro. If it’s a phony, we don’t want to raise false hopes; if it’s not, it’s high explosive. None of the technical side must know the whole. Secondly, I don’t want to hear the name of Anatoly Krivoi again. Devise a cover name for this asset and use it in future.”

Two hours later Barry Ferndale called Munro after lunch at his club. The telephone line being open, they used the commercial parlance that was habitual.

“The managing director’s terribly happy with the sales re­port,” Ferndale told Munro. “He’s very keen that you take a fortnight’s leave to enable us to break it right down and see where we go from here. Have you any ideas for a spot of leave?”

Munro hadn’t, but he made up his mind. This was not a request; it was an order.

“I’d like to go back to Scotland for a while,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to walk during the summer from Lochaber up the coast to Sutherland.”

Ferndale was ecstatic. “The Highlands, the glens of Bonnie Scotland. So pretty at this time of year. Never could stand physical exercise myself, but I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. Stay in touch with me—say, every second day. You have my home number, don’t you?”

A week later, Miroslav Kaminsky arrived in England on his Red Cross travel papers. He had come across Europe by train, the ticket paid for by Drake, who was nearing the end of his financial resources.

Kaminsky and Krim were introduced, and Kaminsky given his orders.

“You learn English,” Drake told him. “Morning, noon, and night. Books and gramophone records, faster than you’ve ever learned anything before. Meanwhile, I’m going to get you some decent papers. You can’t travel on Red Cross documents forever. Until I do, and until you can make your­self understood in English, don’t leave the flat.”

Adam Munro had walked for ten days through the Highlands of Inverness, Ross, and Cromarty and finally into Sutherland County. He had arrived at the small town of Lochinver, where the waters of the North Minch stretch away westward to the Isle of Lewis, when he made his sixth call to Barry Ferndale’s home on the outskirts of London.

“Glad you called,” said Ferndale down the line. “Could you come back to the office? The managing director would like a word.”

Munro promised to leave within the hour and make his way as fast as possible to Inverness. There he could pick up a flight for London.

At his home on the outskirts of Sheffield, the great steel town of Yorkshire, Norman Pickering kissed his wife and daughter farewell that brilliant late-July morning and drove off to the bank of which he was manager.

Twenty minutes later a small van bearing the name of an electrical appliance company drove up to the house and dis­gorged two men in white coats. One carried a large card­board carton up to the front door, preceded by his companion bearing a clipboard. Mrs. Pickering answered the door, and the two men went inside. None of the neighbors took any notice.

Ten minutes later the man with the clipboard came out and drove away. His companion had apparently stayed to fix and test the appliance they had delivered.

Thirty minutes after that, the van was parked about two corners from the bank, and the driver, without his white coat and wearing a charcoal-gray business suit, carrying not a clip­board but a large attache case, entered the bank. He prof­fered an envelope to one of the women clerks, who looked at it, saw that it was addressed personally to Mr. Pickering, and took it in to him. The businessman waited patiently.

Two minutes later the manager opened his office door and looked out. His eye caught the waiting businessman.

“Mr. Partington?” he asked. “Do come in.”

Andrew Drake did not speak until the door had closed be­hind him. When he did, his voice had no trace of his native Yorkshire, but a guttural edge as if it came from Europe. His hair was carrot-red, and heavy-rimmed, tinted glasses masked his eyes to some extent.

“I wish to open an account,” he said, “and to make a with­drawal in cash.”

Pickering was perplexed; his chief clerk could have handled this transaction.

“A large account, and a large transaction,” said Drake. He slid a check across the desk. It was a bank check, the sort that can be obtained across the counter. It was issued by the Holborn, London, branch of Pickering’s own bank, and was drawn to thirty thousand pounds.

“I see,” said Pickering. That kind of money was definitely the manager’s business. “And the withdrawal?”

“Twenty thousand pounds in cash.”

“Twenty thousand pounds in cash?” asked Pickering. He reached for the phone. “Well, of course I shall have to call the Holborn branch and—”

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” said Drake, and pushed a copy of that morning’s London Times over the desk. Pickering stared at it. What Drake handed him next caused him to stare even more. It was a photograph, taken with a Polaroid camera. He recognized his wife, whom he had left ninety minutes earlier, sitting round-eyed with fear in his own fireside chair. He could make out a portion of his own sitting room. His wife held their child close to her with one arm. Across her knees was the same issue of the London Times.

“Taken sixty minutes ago,” said Drake.

Pickering’s stomach tightened. The photo would win no prizes for photographic quality, but the shape of the man’s shoulder in the foreground and the sawed-off shotgun point­ing at his family was quite clear enough.

“If you raise the alarm,” said Drake quietly, “the police will come here, not to your home. Before they break in, you will be dead. In exactly sixty minutes, unless I make a phone call to say I am safely away with the money, that man is go­ing to pull that trigger. Please don’t think we are joking; we are quite prepared to die if we have to. We are the Red Army Faction.”

Pickering swallowed hard. Under his desk, a foot from his knee, was a button linked to a silent alarm. He looked at the photograph again and moved his knee away.

“Call your chief clerk,” said Drake, “and instruct him to open the account, credit the check to it, and provide the check for the twenty-thousand-pound withdrawal. Tell him you have telephoned London and all is in order. If he expresses surprise, tell him the sum is for a very big commer­cial promotion campaign in which prize money will be given away in cash. Pull yourself together and make it good.”

The chief clerk was surprised, but his manager seemed calm enough; a little subdued, perhaps, but otherwise normal. And the dark-suited man before him looked relaxed and friendly. There was even a glass of the manager’s sherry before each of them, though the businessman had kept his light gloves on—odd for such warm weather. Thirty minutes later the chief clerk brought the money from the vault, deposited it on the manager’s desk, and left.

Drake packed it calmly into the attache case.

“There are thirty minutes left,” he told Pickering, “In twenty-five I shall make my phone call. My colleague will leave your wife and child perfectly unharmed. If you raise the alarm before that, he will shoot first and take his chances with the police later.”

When he had gone, Pickering sat frozen for half an hour. In fact, Drake phoned the house five minutes later from a call box. Krim took the call, smiled briefly at the woman on the floor with her hands and ankles bound with adhesive tape, and left. Neither used the van, which had been stolen the previous day. Krim used a motorcycle parked in readiness farther down the road. Drake took a motorcycle helmet from the van to cover his flaming red hair, and used a second mo­torcycle parked near the van. Both were out of Sheffield within thirty minutes. They abandoned the vehicles north of London and met again in Drake’s flat, where he washed the red dye out of his hair and crushed the eyeglasses to frag­ments.

Munro caught the following morning’s breakfast flight south from Inverness. When the plastic trays were cleared away, the hostess offered the passengers newspapers fresh up from London. Being at the back of the aircraft, Munro missed the Times and the Telegraph, but secured a copy of the Daily Express. The headline story concerned two unidentified men, believed to be Germans from the Red Army Faction, who had robbed a Sheffield bank of twenty thousand pounds.

“Bloody bastards,” said the English oilman from the North Sea rigs who was in the seat next to Munro. He tapped the Express headline. “Bloody Commies. I’d string them all up.”

Munro conceded that upstringing would definitely have to be considered in future.

At Heathrow he took a taxi almost to the office and was shown straight into Barry Ferndale’s room.

“Adam, my dear chap, you’re looking a new man.”

He sat Munro down and proffered coffee.

“Well now, the tape. You must be dying to know. Fact is, m’dear chap, it’s genuine. No doubt about it. Everything checks. There’s been a fearful blowup in the Soviet Agricul­ture Ministry. Six or seven senior functionaries ousted, in­cluding one we think must be that unfortunate fellow in the Lubyanka.

“That helps corroborate it. But the voices are genuine. No doubt, according to the lab boys. Now for the big one. One of our assets working out of Leningrad managed to take a drive out of town. There’s not much wheat grown up there in the north, but there is a little. He stopped his car for a pee and swiped a stalk of the afflicted wheat. It came home in the bag three days ago. I got the report from the lab last night. They confirm there is an excess of this lindane stuff present in the root of the seedling.

“So, there we are. You’ve hit what our American cousins so charmingly call pay dirt. In fact, twenty-four-carat gold. By the way, the Master wants to see you. You’re going back to Moscow tonight.”

Munro’s meeting with Sir Nigel Irvine was friendly but brief.

“Well done,” said the Master. “Now, I understand your next meeting will be in a fortnight.”

Munro nodded.

“This might be a long-term operation,” Sir Nigel resumed, “which makes it a good thing you are new to Moscow. There will be no raised eyebrows if you stay on for a couple of years. But just in case this fellow changes his mind, I want you to press for more—everything we can squeeze out Do you want any help, any backup?”

“No, thank you,” said Munro. “Now that he’s taken the plunge, the asset has insisted he’ll talk only to me. I don’t think I want to scare him off at this stage by bringing others in. Nor do I think he can travel, as Penkovsky could. Vishnayev never travels, so there’s no cause for Krivoi to, ei­ther. I’ll have to handle it alone.”

Sir Nigel nodded. “Very well, you’ve got it.”

When Munro had gone, Sir Nigel Irvine turned over the file on his desk, which was Munro’s personal record. He had his misgivings. The man was a loner, ill at ease working in a team. A man who walked alone in the mountains of Scotland for relaxation.

There was an adage in the Firm: there are old agents and there are bold agents, but there are no old, bold agents. Sir Nigel was an old agent, and he appreciated caution. This op­portunity had come swinging in from the outfield, unexpected, unprepared for. And it was moving fast. But then, the tape was genuine, no doubt of it. So was the summons on his desk to see the Prime Minister that evening at Downing Street. He had of course informed the Foreign Secretary when the tape had passed muster, and this was the outcome.

The black door of No. 10 Downing Street, residence of the British Prime Minister, is perhaps one of the best-known doors in the world. It stands on the right, two-thirds down a small cul-de-sac off Whitehall, an alley almost, sandwiched between the imposing piles of the Cabinet Office and the For­eign Office.

In front of this door, with its simple white figure 10 and brass knocker, attended by a single, unarmed police con­stable, the tourists gather to take each other’s photograph and watch the comings and goings of the messengers and the well-known.

In fact, it is the men of words who go in through the front door; the men of influence tend to use the side. The house called No. 10 stands at ninety degrees to the Cabinet Office block, and the rear corners almost touch each other, enclos­ing a small lawn behind black railings. Where the corners al­most meet, the gap is covered by a passageway leading to a small side door, and it was through this that the Director General of the SIS, accompanied by Sir Julian Flannery, the Cabinet Secretary, passed that last evening of July. The pair were shown straight to the second floor, past the Cabinet Room, to the Prime Minister’s private study.

The Prime Minister had read the transcript of the Polit­buro tape, passed to her by the Foreign Secretary.

“Have you informed the Americans of this matter?” she asked directly.

“Not yet, ma’am,” Sir Nigel answered. “Our final confir­mation of its authenticity is only three days old.”

“I would like you to do it personally,” said the Prime Min­ister. Sir Nigel inclined his head. “The political perspectives of this pending wheat famine in the Soviet Union are im­measurable, of course, and as the world’s biggest surplus wheat producer, the United States should be involved from the outset.”

“I would not wish the Cousins to move in on this agent of ours,” said Sir Nigel. “The running of this asset may be extremely delicate. I think we should handle it ourselves, alone.”

“Will they try to move in?” asked the Prime Minister.

“They may, ma’am. They may. We ran Penkovsky jointly, even though it was we who recruited him. But there were rea­sons why. This time, I think we should go it alone.”

The Prime Minister was not slow to see the value in politi­cal terms of controlling such an agent as one who had access to the Politburo transcripts.

“If pressure is brought,” she said, “refer back to me, and I will speak to President Matthews personally about it. In the meantime, I would like you to fly to Washington tomorrow and present them the tape, or at least a verbatim copy of it. I intend to speak to President Matthews tonight in any case.”

Sir Nigel and Sir Julian rose to leave.

“One last thing,” said the Prime Minister. “I fully under­stand that I am not allowed to know the identity of this agent. Will you be telling Robert Benson who it is?”

“Certainly not, ma’am.” Not only would the Director Gen­eral of the SIS refuse point-blank to inform his own Prime Minister or the Foreign Secretary of the identity of the Rus­sian, but he would not tell them even of Munro, who was running that agent. The Americans would know who Munro was, but never whom he was running. Nor would there be any tailing of Munro by the Cousins in Moscow; he would see to that as well.

“Then presumably this Russian defector has a code name. May I know it?” asked the Prime Minister.

“Certainly, ma’am. The defector is now known in every file simply as the Nightingale.”

It just happened that Nightingale was the first songbird in the N section of the list of birds after which all Soviet agents were code-named, but the Prime Minister did not know this. She smiled for the first time.

“How very appropriate.”