The Fourth Protocol

Chapter 1

The man in gray decided to take the Glen Suite of diamonds at midnight. Provided they were still in the apartment safe and the occupants away. This he needed to know. So he watched and he waited. At half past seven he was rewarded.

The big, wide limousine swooped up from the subterranean parking area with the powerful grace implied by its name. It paused for an instant in the mouth of the cavern as its driver checked the street for traffic, then turned into the road and headed toward Hyde Park Corner.

Sitting across from the luxury apartment building, dressed in a chauffeur’s uniform at the wheel of the rented Volvo Estate, Jim Rawlings breathed a sigh of relief. Gazing unobserved across the Belgravia street, he had seen what he had hoped for—the husband had been at the wheel, with his wife beside him. Rawlings already had the engine running and the heater on to keep out the cold. Moving the automatic shift into Drive, he eased out of the line of parked cars and went after the Jaguar.

It was a crisp and bright morning, with a pale wash of light over Green Park in the east, and the streetlights still on. Rawlings had been at the stakeout since five o’clock, and although a few people had passed down the street, no one had taken any notice of him. A chauffeur in a big car in Belgravia, richest of London’s West End districts, attracts no attention, least of all with four suitcases and a hamper in the back, on the morning of December 31. Many of the rich would be preparing to leave the capital to celebrate the festivities at their country homes.

He was fifty yards behind the Jaguar at Hyde Park Corner and allowed a truck to move between them. Up Park Lane, Rawlings had one momentary misgiving; there was a branch of Coutts Bank there and he feared the couple in the Jaguar might pause to drop the diamonds into the night safe.

At Marble Arch he breathed a second sigh of relief. The limousine ahead of him made no turn around the arch to take the southbound carriageway back down Park Lane toward the bank. It sped straight up Great Cumberland Place, joined Gloucester Place, and kept on north. So, the occupants of the luxury apartment on the eighth floor of Fontenoy House were not leaving the items with Coutts; either they had them in the car and were taking them to the country or they were leaving them for the New Year period in the apartment. Rawlings was confident it would be the latter.

He tailed the Jaguar to Hendon, watched it speeding into the last mile before the M1 motorway, and then turned back toward central London. Evidently, as he had hoped, they were going to join the wife’s brother, the Duke of Sheffield, at his estate in north Yorkshire, a full six-hour drive away. That would give him a minimum of twenty-four hours, more than he needed. He had no doubt he could take the apartment at Fontenoy House; he was, after all, one of the best safecrackers in London.

By midmorning he had returned the Volvo to the rental company, the uniform to the costumiers, and the empty suitcases to his closet. He was back in his top-floor flat, a comfortable and expensively furnished pad atop a converted tea warehouse in his native Wandsworth. However he prospered, he was a South Londoner, born and bred, and though Wandsworth might not be as chic as Belgravia and Mayfair, it was his “manor.”

Like all of his kind, he hated to leave the security of his own manor. Within it he felt reasonably safe, even though to the local underworld and the police he was known as a

“face,” underworld slang for a criminal or villain.

Like all successful criminals, he kept a low profile around the manor, driving an unobtrusive car, his sole indulgence being the elegance of his apartment. He cultivated a deliberate vagueness among the lower orders of the underworld as to exactly what he did, and although the police accurately suspected his specialty, his “form book” was clean, apart from a short stretch of “porridge” as a teenager. His evident success and the vagueness about how he achieved it evoked reverence among the young aspirants in the game, who were happy to perform small errands for him. Even the heavy mobs who took out payrolls in broad daylight with shotguns and pickax handles left him alone.

As was necessary, he had to have a front business to account for the money. All the successful faces had some form of legitimate occupation. Favored fronts have always been the taxi business (driving or owning), grocery shops, and scrap-metal yards. All these fronts permit a lot of hidden profits, cash dealing, spare time, a range of hiding places, and the facility to employ a couple of “heavies,” or “slags.” These are hard men of little brain but considerable strength who also need an apparently legitimate employment to supplement their habitual profession as hired muscle.

Rawlings, in fact, had a scrap-metal dealership and car-wrecking yard. It gave him access to a well-equipped machine workshop, metal of all kinds, electrical wiring, battery acid, and the two big thugs he employed both in the yard and as backup should he ever run into any “aggro” from villains who might decide to make trouble for him.

Showered and shaved, Rawlings stirred Demerara crystals into his second espresso of the morning and studied again the sketch drawings Billy Rice had left him.

Billy was his apprentice, a smart twenty-three-year-old who would one day become good, even very good. He was just starting out on the fringe of the underworld and eager to do favors for a man of prestige, apart from the invaluable instruction he would get in the process. Twenty-four hours earlier, Billy had knocked at the door of the eighth-floor apartment at Fontenoy House, carrying a large bouquet of flowers and dressed in the livery of an expensive flower shop. The props had got him effortlessly past the commissionaire in the lobby, where he had also noted the exact layout of the entrance hall, the porter’s lodge, and the way to the stairs.

It was her ladyship who had answered the door personally, her face lighting up with surprise and pleasure at the sight of the flowers. They purported to come from the committee of the Distressed Veterans Benevolent Fund, of which Lady Fiona was one of the patronesses, and whose gala ball she was due to attend that very night, December 30, 1986. Rawlings figured that even if, at the ball itself, she mentioned the bouquet to any one of the committee members, he would simply assume it had been sent by another member on behalf of them all.

At the door, she had examined the attached card, exclaimed, “Oh, how perfectly lovely!” in the bright cut-crystal accents of her class, and taken the bouquet. Then Billy had held out his receipt pad and ballpoint pen. Unable to manage all three items together, Lady Fiona had withdrawn, flustered, into the sitting room to put down the bouquet, leaving Billy unattended for several seconds in the small hallway.

With his boyish looks, fluffy blond hair, blue eyes, and shy smile, Billy was a gift. He reckoned he could work his way past any middle-aged housewife in the metropolis. But his baby eyes missed very little.

Before even pressing the doorbell, he had spent a full minute scanning the outside of the door, its frame, and the surrounding wall area. He was looking for a small buzzer no larger than a walnut, or a black button or switch with which to turn the buzzer off. Only when satisfied there was none did he ring the bell.

Left alone in the doorway, he did the same again, searching the inner side of the frame and the walls for the buzzer or switch. Again there was none. By the time the lady of the house returned to the hall to sign the receipt, Billy knew the door was secured by a shunt lock, which he had gratefully identified as a Chubb rather than a Brahmah, which is reputedly unpickable.

Lady Fiona took the pad and pen and tried to sign for the flowers. No chance. The ballpoint pen had long since had its cartridge removed and any remaining ink expended on a blank piece of paper. Billy apologized profusely. With a bright smile Lady Fiona told him it was of no account, she was sure she had one in her bag, and returned beyond the sitting-room door. Billy had already noted what he sought. The door was indeed linked to an alarm system.

Protruding from the edge of the open door, high up on the hinge side, was a small plunger contact. Opposite it, set in the doorjamb, was a tiny socket. Inside the socket, he knew, would be a Pye micros witch. With the door in the closed position, the plunger would enter the socket and make a contact.

With the burglar alarm set and activated, the micro-switch would trigger the alarm if the contact was broken—that is, if the door was opened. It took Billy less than three seconds to bring out his tube of Super Glue, squirt a hefty dollop into the orifice containing the microswitch, and tamp the whole thing down with a small ball of Plasticine-and-glue compound. In four seconds more it was rock-hard, the microswitch blanked off from the entering plunger in the edge of the door. When Lady Fiona returned with the signed receipt she found the nice young man leaning against the doorjamb, from which he straightened up with an apologetic smile, smearing any surplus of glue from the ball of his thumb as he did so.

Later, Billy had given Jim Rawlings a complete description of the layout of the entrance, porter’s lodge, location of the stairs and elevators, the corridor to the apartment door, the small hallway behind the door, and what parts of the sitting room he had been able to see.

As he sipped his coffee, Rawlings was confident that four hours earlier the apartment owner had carried his suitcases into the corridor and returned to his own hallway to set his alarm. As usual, it had made no sound. Closing the front door after him, he would have turned the key fully in the mortise lock, satisfied his alarm was now set and activated. Normally, the plunger would have been in contact with the Pye microswitch.

The turning of the key would have established the complete link, activating the whole system. But with the plunger blanked from the microswitch, the door system, at least, would be inert. Rawlings was certain he could take that door lock within thirty minutes.

In the apartment itself there would be other traps. He would cope with those when he met them.

Finishing his coffee, he reached for his file of newspaper cuttings. Like all jewel thieves, Rawlings followed the society gossip columns closely. This particular file was entirely about the social appearances of Lady Fiona and the suite of perfect diamonds she had worn to the gala ball the previous evening—so far as Jim Rawlings was concerned, for the last time.

A thousand miles to the east, the old man standing at the window of the sitting room in the third-floor-front apartment at Mira Prospekt 111 was also thinking of midnight. It would herald January 1, 1987, his seventy-fifth birthday.

The hour was well past midday but he was still in a robe; there was little enough cause these days to rise early or spruce up to go to the office. There was no office to go to. His Russian wife, Erita, thirty years his junior, had taken their two boys skating along the flooded and frozen lanes of Gorki Park, so he was alone.

He caught a glance of himself in a wall mirror, and the prospect brought him no more joy than he felt at contemplating his life, or what was left of it. His face, always lined, was now deeply furrowed. His hair, once thick and dark, was now snow-white, skimpy, and lifeless. His skin, after a lifetime of titanic drinking and chain-smoking, was blotched and mottled. His eyes gazed back miserably. He returned to the window and looked down at the snow-choked street. A few muffled, huddled babushkas were sweeping away the snow, which would fall again tonight.

It had been so long, he mused, twenty-four years almost to the day, since he had quit his non-job and pointless exile in Beirut to come here. There had been no point in staying. Nick Elliot and the rest at “the Firm” had got it all together by then; he had finally admitted it to them himself. So he had come, leaving wife and children to join him later if they wished.

At first he thought it was like coming home, to a spiritual and moral home. He had thrown himself into the new life; he had truly believed in the philosophy and its eventual triumph. Why not? He had spent twenty-seven years serving it. He had been happy and fulfilled those first, early years of the 1960s. There had been the extensive debriefing, of course, but he had been revered within the Committee of State Security. He was, after all, one of the “Five Stars”—the greatest of them all—along with Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, and Blake, the ones who had burrowed into the inner core of the British establishment and betrayed it all.

Burgess, drinking and buggering his way to an early grave, had been in it before he had arrived. Maclean had lost his illusions first, but then he had been in Moscow since 1951.

By 1963 he was sour and embittered, taking it out on Melinda, who had finally quit to come here, to this apartment. Maclean had gone on, somehow, utterly disillusioned and resentful, until the cancer got him, by which time he hated his hosts and they hated him.

Blunt had been “blown” and disgraced back in England. That left him and Blake, the old man thought. In a way he envied Blake, completely assimilated, utterly content, who had invited him and Erita for New Year’s Eve. Of course, Blake had had the cosmopolitan background, Dutch father, Jewish mother.

For him there could be no assimilation; he had known that after the first five years. By then he had learned fluent Russian, written and spoken, but he still retained a remarkable English accent. Apart from that, he had come to hate the society. It was a completely, irreversibly, and unalterably alien society.

That was not the worst of it; within seven years of arriving he had lost his last political illusions. It was all a lie, and he had been smart enough to see through it. He had spent his youth and manhood serving a lie, lying for the lie, betraying for the lie, abandoning that

“green and pleasant land”—and all for a lie.

For years, provided as of right with every British magazine and newspaper, he had followed the cricket scores while advising on the inspiration of strikes, looked at the old familiar places in the magazines while preparing disinformation aimed at bringing it all to ruin, perched unobserved on a barstool in the National to listen to the Brits laughing and joking in his language while counseling the top men of the KGB, including even the Chairman himself, on how best to subvert that little island. And all the time, deep inside, these past fifteen years, there had been a great void of despair that not even the drink and the many women had been able to blank out. It was too late; he could never go back, he told himself. And yet, and yet ...

The doorbell rang. It puzzled him. Mira Prospekt 111 is a totally KGB-owned building in a quiet back street of central Moscow, with mainly senior KGB tenants and a few Foreign Ministry people. A visitor would have to check in with the concierge. It could not be Erita—she had her own key.

When he opened the door, a man stood there alone. He was youthful and looked fit, sheathed in a well-cut greatcoat and with a warm fur shapka, without insignia, on his head. His face was coldly impassive, but not from the freezing wind outside, for his shoes indicated he had stepped from a warm car into the warm apartment building; he had not trudged through icy snow. Blank blue eyes stared at the old man with neither friendship nor hostility.

“Comrade Colonel Philby?” he asked.

Philby was surprised. Close personal friends—the Blakes and half a dozen other—

called him “Kim.” For the rest, he had lived under a pseudonym for many, many years.

Only to a few at the very top was he Philby, a full KGB colonel on the retired list.

“Yes.”

“I am Major Pavlov, of the Ninth Directorate, attached to the personal staff of the General Secretary.”

Philby knew the Ninth Directorate of the KGB. It provided the bodyguards for all the top Party personnel and for the buildings in which they worked and lived. In uniform—

nowadays confined to duty inside the Party buildings and for ceremonial occasions—they would wear the distinctive electric-blue cap bands, shoulder boards, and lapel tabs, and be known also as the Kremlin Guards. Attached as personal bodyguards, they would wear beautifully cut civilian clothes; they would also be utterly fit, highly trained, icily loyal, and well armed.

“Indeed,” said Philby.

“This is for you, Comrade Colonel.”

The major held out a long envelope of high-quality paper. Philby took it.

“This also,” said Major Pavlov, and held out a small square of pasteboard with a phone number on it.

“Thank you,” said Philby. Without a further word the major inclined his head briefly, turned on his heel, and went back down the corridor. Seconds later, from his window, Philby watched the sleek black Chaika limousine with its distinctive Central Committee license plates, beginning with the letters MOC, slide away from the front entrance.

Jim Rawlings peered down at the society magazine photograph through a magnifying glass. The picture, taken a year earlier, showed the woman he had seen driving north out of London that morning with her husband. She was standing in a presentation line while the woman next to her greeted Princess Alexandra. And she was wearing the stones.

Rawlings, who studied for months before he made a hit, knew their provenance better than his own birth date.

In 1905 the young Earl of Margate had returned from South Africa, bearing with him four magnificent but uncut stones. On his marriage in 1912 he had had Cartier of London cut and set the stones as a present to his young wife. Cartier had them cut by Aascher’s of Amsterdam, then still regarded as the finest cutters in the world following their triumph in the cutting of the massive Cullinan stone. The four original gems emerged as two matching pairs of pear-shaped fifty-eight-facet stones, one pair weighing in at ten carats each, the other pair at twenty carats each.

Back in London, Cartier had set these stones in white gold, surrounded by a total of forty much smaller stones, to create a suite composed of a tiara with one of the larger of the pear-shaped gems as its centerpiece, a pendant with the other of the larger pair as its centerpiece, and matching earrings comprising the two smaller stones. Before they were ready the Earl’s father, the seventh Duke of Sheffield, died, and the Earl succeeded to the title. The diamonds became known as the Glen Diamonds, after the family name of the house of Sheffield.

The eighth Duke had passed them on his death in 1936 to his son, and he in turn had had two children, a daughter born in 1944 and a son born in 1949. It was this daughter, now aged forty-two, whose image was beneath Jim Rawlings’s magnifying glass.

“You won’t be wearing them again, darling,” said Rawlings to himself. Then he once again began checking his equipment for that evening.

Harold Philby slit the envelope with a kitchen knife, extracted the letter, and spread it on the sitting-room table. He was impressed; it was from the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union himself, handwritten in the Soviet leader’s neat, clerkish script and, of course, in Russian.

Like the matching envelope, the paper was of fine quality and unheaded. He must have written it from his own apartment at Kutuzovsky Prospekt 26, the huge building that since the time of Stalin had contained in its sumptuous quarters the Moscow homes of the very top level of Party hierarchs.

In the top right-hand corner were the words Wednesday, December 31, 1986, a.m. The text came below. It read:

The letter ended with the signature.

Philby let out his breath slowly. So, Kryuchkov’s dinner on the twenty-sixth for senior officers of the KGB had been bugged after all. He had half suspected it. As First Deputy Chairman of the KGB and head of its First Chief Directorate, Vladimir Alexandrovitch Kryuchkov was the General Secretary’s creature, body and soul. Although styled a colonel-general, Kryuchkov was no military man and not even a professional intelligence officer; he was a Party apparatchik to his bootstraps, one of those brought in by the present Soviet leader when he had been Chairman of the KGB.

Philby read the letter again, then pushed it away from him. The old man’s style hadn’t changed, he thought. Brief to the point of starkness, clear and concise, devoid of elaborate courtesies, inviting no contradiction. Even the reference to Philby’s birthday was brief enough simply to show he had called for the file, and little more.

Still, Philby was impressed. A personal letter from this most glacial and remote of men was unusual and would have had men trembling at the honor. Years ago it had been different. When the present Soviet leader had arrived at the KGB as Chairman, Philby had already been there for years and was considered something of a star, lecturing on the Western intelligence agencies in general and on the British SIS in particular.

Like all incoming Party men set to command professionals of another discipline, the new Chairman had looked to put his own in key posts. Philby, even though respected and admired as one of the Five Stars, realized that a highly placed patron would be useful in this most conspiratorial of societies. The Chairman, infinitely more intelligent and cultured than his predecessor, had shown a curiosity, short of fascination but above mere interest, about Britain.

Many times over those years he had asked Philby for an interpretation or analysis of events in Britain, its personalities and likely reactions, and Philby had been happy to oblige. It was as if the KGB Chairman wanted to check what reached his desk from the in-house Britain experts and from those at his old office, the International Department of the Central Committee, against another critique. Several times he had heeded Philby’s quiet advice on matters pertaining to Britain.

It had been five years since Philby had seen the new tsar of all the Russias face-to-face.

In May 1982 he had attended a reception to mark the Chairman’s departure from the KGB back to the Central Committee, apparently as a secretary, in fact to prepare for Brezhnev’s coming death and to mastermind his own advancement. And now he was seeking Philby’s interpretation again.

Philby’s reverie was interrupted by the return of Erita and the boys, flushed from skating and noisy as ever. Back in 1975, long after Melinda Maclean’s departure, when the higher-ups at the KGB had decided his desultory whoring and drinking had lost their charms (for the apparat, at least), Erita had been ordered to move in with him. She was a KGB girl then, Jewish (this was unusual), aged thirty-four, dark-haired, solid. They had married the same year.

After the marriage his notable personal charm had taken its toll. She had genuinely fallen in love with him and had roundly refused to report on him anymore to the KGB.

Her case officer had shrugged, reported back, and been told to drop the matter. The boys had come two and three years later.

“Anything important, Kim?” she asked as he stood and pushed the letter into his pocket. He shook his head. She went on pulling the thick quilted jackets off the boys.

“Nothing, my love,” he said. But she could see he was absorbed by something. She knew better than to insist, but she came over and kissed him on the cheek.

“Please don’t drink too much at the Blakes’ tonight.”

“I’ll try,” he said with a smile.

In fact he was going to permit himself one last bender. A lifelong toper who, when he started drinking at a party, would usually go on until he collapsed, he had ignored a hundred doctors’ warnings to quit. They had forced him to stop the cigarettes, and that had been bad enough. But not the booze. He could still quit it when he wanted, and he knew that he would have to stop for a while after this evening’s party.

He recalled the remark he had made at Kryuchkov’s dinner table and the thoughts that had prompted it. He knew what was going on, and what was intended, deep inside the heart of Britain’s Labour Party. Others had received the mass of raw intelligence that he had studied over the years and that was still passed to him as a sort of favor. But only he had been able to put all the pieces together, assembling them within the framework of the British mass psychology, to come up with the real picture. If he was going to do justice to the idea forming in his mind, he was going to have to describe that picture in words, to prepare for the Soviet leader one of the best pieces he had ever penned. At the weekend he could send Erita and the boys to the dacha. He would start, alone in the apartment, at the weekend. Before then, one last bender.

Jim Rawlings spent the hour between nine and ten that night sitting in another, smaller rented car outside Fontenoy House. He was dressed in a beautifully cut dinner jacket and attracted no attention. What he was studying was the pattern of lights high up in the apartment building. The flat he had targeted was of course in darkness, but he was happy to see that lights were on in the apartments above and below it. In each, to judge from the appearances of guests at the windows, New Year parties were getting under way.

At ten, with his car parked discreetly on a side street two blocks away, he sauntered through the front entrance of Fontenoy House. There had been so many people going in and out that the doors were closed but not locked. Inside the lobby, on the left-hand side, was the porter’s lodge, just as Billy Rice had said. Inside it the night porter was watching his Japanese portable television set. He rose and came to his doorway, as if to speak.

Rawlings was carrying a bottle of champagne decorated with a huge ribbon bow. He waved a hand in tipsy greeting.

“Evening,” he called, and added, “Oh, and Happy New Year.”

If the old porter was thinking of asking for the visitor’s identification or destination, he thought better of it. There were at least six parties going on in the building. Half of them seemed to be open house, so how was he to check guest lists?

“Oh ... er ... thank you, sir. Happy New Year, sir,” he called, but the dinner-jacketed back had gone down the corridor. The porter returned to his movie.

Rawlings used the stairs to the second floor, then the elevator to the eighth. At five past ten he was outside the door of the apartment he sought. As Billy had reported, there was no buzzer and the lock was a Chubb mortise. There was a secondary, self-closing Yale lock, for everyday use, twenty inches above the Chubb.

The Chubb mortise has a total of seventeen thousand computations and permutations. It is a five-lever lock but for a good key man not an insuperable problem, since only the first two and a half levers need to be ascertained; the other two and a half are the same but in reverse, so that the owner’s key will operate equally well when introduced from the other side of the door.

After leaving school at sixteen, Rawlings had spent ten years working with and under his uncle Albert in the latter’s hardware shop. It was a good front for the old man, himself a notable safecracker in his day. It gave the eager young Rawlings access to every known lock on the market and to most of the smaller safes. After ten years of endless practice, and with Uncle Albert’s expert coaching, Rawlings could take just about any lock in manufacture.

From his trouser pocket he produced a ring of twelve skeleton keys, all made up in his own workshop. He selected and tested three, one after the other, and settled for the sixth on the ring. Inserting it into the Chubb, he began to detect the pressure points inside the lock. Then, using a flat pack of slim steel files from his top pocket, he started to work on the softer metal of the skeleton key. Within ten minutes he had the first two and a half levers—the configuration, or profile, that he needed. In another fifteen minutes he had reproduced the same lever pattern in reverse. Inserting the finished skeleton key into the Chubb lock, he turned it slowly and carefully.

It went fully back. He waited for sixty seconds, just in case Billy’s tamp of Plasticine and Super Glue had not held inside the doorjamb. No bells. He let out a sigh and went to work on the Yale with a fine steel spike. That took sixty seconds, and the door swung quietly open. It was dark inside, but the light from the corridor gave him the outlines of the empty hallway. It was about eight feet square and carpeted.

He suspected there would be a pressure pad under it somewhere, but not too close to the door, lest the owner trigger it himself. Stepping into the hall, close to the wall, he eased the door closed behind him and put on the hall light. To his left was a door, partly open, through which he could see a bathroom. To his right, another door, almost certainly the coat closet containing the alarm control system, which he would leave alone. Taking a pair of pliers from a breast pocket, he stooped and lifted an edge of the carpet. As the square of carpet rose, he spotted the pressure pad, in the dead center of the hall. Just the one. Letting the carpet fall gently back in place, he stepped around it and opened the larger door ahead of him. As Billy had said, it was the door to the sitting room.

He stood for several minutes on the threshold of the sitting room before identifying the light switch and putting on the lights. It was a risk, but he was eight floors above the street, the owners were in Yorkshire, and he did not have the time to work in a booby-trapped room by pencil flashlight.

The room was oblong, about twenty-five by eighteen feet, richly carpeted and furnished. Ahead of him were the double-glazed picture windows facing south and over the street. To his right was a wall containing a stone fireplace and, in one corner, a door that presumably led to the master bedroom suite. To his left the opposite wall contained two doors: one open to a hallway going to the guest bedrooms; the other closed, perhaps to the dining room and kitchen.

He spent another ten minutes standing motionless, scanning the walls and ceiling. His reason was simple: there could well be a static movement alarm that Billy Rice had not seen and that would detect any body heat or movement entering the room. If bells went off, he could be out of there in three seconds. There were no bells; the system was based on a wired-up door and, probably, windows, which he did not intend to touch anyway, and on a system of pressure pads on the floor.

The safe, he was sure, would be in this room or in the master bedroom, and it would be on an outside wall, since interior walls would not be thick enough. Just before eleven o’clock he spotted it. Right in front of him, in an eight-foot piece of wall between the two wide windows, was a gilt-framed mirror; it did not hang slightly away from the wall like the pictures, which cast narrow shadows at their edges, but was flat against the wall, as if hinged.

Using his pliers to lift the edge of the carpet, he worked his way around the walls, unveiling the threadlike wires leading from the baseboards to the pads, somewhere out toward the center of the room.

When he reached the mirror he saw there was one pressure pad directly beneath it. He thought of moving it, but instead lifted a large, low coffee table from nearby and placed it over the pad, its legs clear of the edges. He now knew that if he stayed close to the walls, or stood on pieces of furniture (no furniture can stand on a pressure pad), he would be safe.

The mirror was kept close to the wall by a magnetic catch, also wired. That was no problem. He slipped a flat wafer of magnetized steel between the two magnets of the catch, one in the mirror frame and the other in the wall. Keeping his substitute flat to the wall-based magnet, he eased the mirror away from the wall. The wall magnet made no protest; it was still touching another magnet, so it did not report that the contact had been broken.

Rawlings smiled. The wall safe was a nice little Hamber Model D. He knew the door was made of half-inch-thick high-tensile hardened steel; the hinge was a vertical rod of hardened steel, going into the frame upward and downward from the door itself. The securing mechanism consisted of three hardened-steel bolts emerging from the door and entering the frame to a depth of one and a half inches. Behind the steel face of the door was a two-inch-deep tinplate box containing the three locking bolts, the vertical control bolt that governed their movements, and the three-wheel combination lock whose face was now staring at him.

Rawlings did not intend to tamper with any of this. There was an easier way—to cut the door from top to bottom on the hinge side of the combination dial. That would leave sixty percent of the door, containing the combination lock and three locking bolts, jammed into the safe’s doorframe. The other forty percent of the door would swing open, giving him enough space to get his hand inside and the contents out.

He worked his way back to the hall, where he had left his bottle of champagne, and returned with it. Squatting on the coffee table, he unscrewed the bottom of the false bottle and emptied out his supplies. Apart from an electric detonator, ensconced in cotton in a small box, a collection of small magnets, and a reel of ordinary household electric cord, he had brought a length of CLC.

Rawlings knew the best way to cut half-inch steel plate was to use the Monroe theory, named after the inventor of the shaped-charge principle. What he was holding was called in the trade CLC, or charge-linear-cutting—a V-shaped length of metal, stiff but just pliable, encased in plastic explosive, manufactured by three companies in Britain, one government-owned and the other two in the private sector. CLC was definitely not available except under stringent license, but as a professional cracksman Rawlings had a contact, a “bent” employee in one of the private-sector companies.

Quickly and expertly. Rawlings prepared the length he needed and applied it to the outside of the Hamber’s door, from top to bottom, on just one side of the combination dial. Into one end of the CLC he inserted the detonator, from which protruded two twisted copper wires. These he untwisted and separated widely, to prevent a short circuit later. To each wire he attached one of the strands from his domestic electric cord, which itself terminated in a three-pin household plug.

Unraveling the cord carefully, he worked his way backward around the room and into the corridor leading to the guest bedrooms. The lee of the hallway would give him protection from the blast. Making his way gingerly to the kitchen, he filled with water a large polyethylene bag he took from his pocket. This he fixed to the wall with thumbtacks to hang over the explosive on the safe’s door. Feather cushions, Uncle Albert had told him, are for the birds and TV. There is no shock absorber like water.

It was twenty to midnight. The party upstairs was getting noisier and noisier. Even in this luxury building, with its accent on privacy, he could clearly hear the shouting and dancing. His last act before retiring to the corridor was to turn on the television set. Inside the corridor he located a wall plug, made sure the switch was off, and plugged in his electric cord. Then he waited.

By one minute to midnight the noise above was horrendous. Then, suddenly, it lessened as somebody roared for silence. In the quiet, Rawlings could hear the television he had switched on in the sitting room. The traditional Scottish program, with its ballads and Highland dancing, changed to a static image of Big Ben atop London’s Houses of Parliament. Behind the clock’s facade was the giant bell, Great Tom, which was often mistakenly called Big Ben. The TV commentator chattered away the seconds to midnight as people across the kingdom filled their glasses. The quarters began to sound.

After the quarters there was a pause. Then Great Tom spoke: Bong! the thunderous boom of the first stroke of midnight. It echoed in twenty million homes across the land; it crashed through the apartment on the ninth floor of Fontenoy House and was itself eclipsed by the roar of cheering and “Auld Lang Syne.” As the first boom rang out on the eighth floor, Jim Rawlings flicked the electric switch to On.

The flat crack went unnoticed, save by himself. He waited sixty seconds, then unplugged his cord and began to work his way back to the safe, tidying up his gear as he went. The plumes of smoke were clearing. Of the plastic cushion and its gallon of water there was nothing left but a few damp patches. The door of the safe looked as if it had been cleft from top to bottom by a blunt ax wielded by a giant. Rawlings blew away a few wisps of smoke and with gloved hand pulled the smaller part of the door back on its hinges. The tinplate box had been torn to pieces by the blast, but all the bolts in the other section of the door were in their sockets. The opening he had made was large enough for him to peer inside. A cash box and a velvet bag; he eased out the bag, undid the drawstring, and emptied the contents onto the coffee table.

They glittered and flared in the light, as if they contained their own fire. The Glen Diamonds. Rawlings had put the remainder of his equipment—the cord, the empty detonator box, the thumbtacks, and the remainder of the CLC—back into the false champagne bottle before he realized he had an unforeseen problem. The pendant and earrings would slip into his trouser pockets, but the tiara was wider and higher than he had thought. He glanced around for a receptacle that would attract no attention. It was lying on top of a bureau a few feet away.

He emptied the contents of the attaché case—wallet, credit cards, pens, an address book, and a couple of folders—into the seat of an armchair.

The attaché case was exactly right. It accommodated the Glen Suite and the champagne bottle, which might have seemed odd if glimpsed leaving a party. With a last glance around the sitting room, Rawlings switched off the light, stepped back into the hall, and closed the door. Once in the corridor, he relocked the main door and sixty seconds later strolled past the porter’s lodge and out into the night. The old man did not even look up.

It was nearly midnight that first day of January 1987 when Harold Philby sat down at the sitting-room table in his Moscow flat. He had had his bender the previous evening at the Blakes’ party, but had not even enjoyed it. His thoughts were too locked into what he would have to write. During the morning he had recovered from the inevitable hangover and now, with Erita and the boys asleep in bed, he had the peace and quiet to try to think things out.

There was a coo from across the room; Philby rose and went over to the large cage in the corner and gazed through the bars at a pigeon with one leg in splints. Philby had always adored pets, from his vixen in Beirut through a range of canaries and parakeets in this very apartment. The pigeon waddled across the floor of its cage, the splinted leg impeding its passage.

“All right, old fellow,” said Philby through the bars, “we’ll have them off soon and you will be able to fly again.”

He returned to the table. It had better be good, he told himself for the hundredth time.

The General Secretary was a bad man to cross and a hard one to deceive. Some of those senior Air Force men who had made such a dog’s breakfast of the tracking and downing of the Korean jetliner back in 1983 had on his personal recommendation ended up in cold graves beneath the permafrost of the Kamchatka. Racked by ill health, confined to a wheelchair part of the time he might be, but the General Secretary was still the undisputed master of the USSR. His word was law, his brain was still razor-sharp, and his pale eyes missed nothing. Taking paper and pencil, Philby began to rough out the first draft of his reply.

At just before midnight of January 1, the owner of the apartment in Fontenoy House returned alone to London. A tall, graying, distinguished man in his mid-fifties, he drove straight into the basement parking area, using his own plastic admission card, and, carrying his suitcase, rode up in the elevator to the eighth floor. He was in a foul mood.

He had driven for six hours, having left his brother-in-law’s stately home three days prematurely, following a blazing row with his wife. She, angular and horsey, adored the countryside as much as he loathed it. Content to stride the bleak Yorkshire moors in midwinter, she had left him miserably cooped up indoors with her brother, the tenth Duke. Which was in a way worse, for the apartment owner, who prided himself on his appreciation of the manly virtues, was convinced the wretched fellow was gay.

The New Year’s Eve dinner had been appalling for him, surrounded as he was by his wife’s cronies, who talked hunting, shooting, and fishing the entire time, the whole being punctuated by the high, twittering laugh of the Duke and his too-handsome pals. That morning he had made some remark to his wife and she had gone off the deep end. The result was that it had been agreed he would drive south alone after tea; she would remain as long as she wished, which might be a month.

He entered the hall of his apartment and paused; the alarm system should be emitting a loud, repeated peep that should last for thirty seconds before the full alarm sounded, during which time he could reach the master control box and turn it off. Damn thing, he thought, probably out of order. He went into the coat closet and turned the whole system off with his personal key. Then he entered the sitting room and threw on the light.

He stood, with his bag behind him in the hall, and stared at the scene in openmouthed horror. The damp patches had evaporated in the warmth, and the television was not on.

What caught his eye at once was the scorched wall and cloven safe door right ahead of him. He crossed the room in several strides and peered into the safe. There was no doubt—the diamonds were gone. He looked around again, saw his possessions scattered in the armchair by the fireplace and the carpet lifted from its smooth edge against the wall. He sank into the other fireside armchair, as white as a sheet.

“Oh, my God,” he breathed. He seemed stunned by the nature of the disaster and remained in the chair for ten minutes, breathing heavily and staring at the disarray.

Finally he rose and went to the telephone. With a trembling forefinger he dialed a number. At the other end it rang and rang, but there was no reply.

The following morning, at just before eleven, John Preston walked down Curzon Street toward the headquarters of the department he worked for, around the corner from the Mirabelle restaurant, in which few of the department’s employees could afford to dine.

Most of the civil service that Friday morning was being allowed to bridge over from Thursday, New Year’s Day, which was a public holiday anyway, into the weekend. But Brian Harcourt-Smith had asked Preston to come in especially, so he had come. He suspected he knew what the Deputy Director-General of MI5 wanted to talk about.

For three years, more than half the time he had spent with MI5 since joining as a late entrant in the summer of 1981, John Preston had been in F Branch of the service, which dealt with surveillance of extremist political organizations of the Left and the Right; with research into these bodies, and with the running of agents within them. For two of those years he had been in F1, heading up D Section, which was concerned with the penetration of extreme left-wing elements into Britain’s Labour Party. His report, the result of his investigations, had been submitted two weeks earlier, just before Christmas. He was surprised it had been read and digested so quickly.

He presented himself at the front desk, proffered his card, was vetted, checked out with the DDG’s office as an expected visitor, and allowed to proceed to the top of the building.

He was sorry he would not be seeing the Director-General personally. He liked Sir Bernard Hemmings, but it was an open secret inside “Five” that the old man was ill and spending less and less time in the office. In his absences, the day-to-day running of the department was passing more and more into the hands of his ambitious deputy, a fact that did not please some of the older veterans of the service.

Sir Bernard was a Five man from way back, and had done his fieldwork once. He could establish empathy with the men who went out on the streets, staked out suspects, tailed hostile couriers, and penetrated subversive organizations. Harcourt-Smith was of the university intake, with a first-class degree, and had been mainly a head-office man, moving smoothly between the departments and steadily up the promotion ladder.

Immaculately dressed, as ever, Harcourt-Smith received Preston warmly in his office.

Preston was wary of the warmth. Others had been received just as warmly, so went the stories, and had been out of the service a week later. Harcourt-Smith seated Preston in front of his desk and himself behind it. Preston’s report lay on the blotter.

“Now, John, this report of yours. You’ll understand, of course, that I take it, along with all your work, extremely seriously.”

“Thank you,” said Preston.

“So much so,” Harcourt-Smith went on, “that I’ve spent a good part of the festivities break right here in this office to reread and consider it.”

Preston thought it wiser to remain silent.

“It is, how shall I put it, pretty radical ... no holds barred, eh? The question is—and this is the question I have to ask myself before this department proposes any kind of policy based upon it—is it all absolutely true? Can it be verified? This is what I should be asked.”

“Look, Brian, I’ve spent two years on that investigation. My people went deep, very deep. The facts, where I’ve stated them as facts, are true.”

“Ah, John. I’d never dispute any facts presented by you. But the conclusions drawn from them—”

“Are based on logic, I think,” said Preston.

“A great discipline. I used to study it,” resumed Harcourt-Smith. “But not always supported by hard evidence, wouldn’t you agree? Let’s take this thing here—” He found the place in the report and his finger ran along one line. “The MBR. Pretty extreme, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh, yes, Brian, it’s extreme. These are pretty extreme people.”

“No doubt about it. But wouldn’t it have been helpful to have a copy of the MBR attached to your report?”

“So far as I could discover, it hasn’t been written down. It’s a series of intentions—

albeit very firm intentions—in the minds of certain people.”

Harcourt-Smith sucked regretfully at a tooth. “Intentions,” he said, as though the word intrigued him, “yes, intentions. But you see, John, there are a lot of intentions in the minds of a lot of people vis-à-vis this country, not all of them friendly. But we can’t propose policy, measures, or countermeasures on the basis of these intentions.”

Preston was about to speak, but Harcourt-Smith swept on, rising to indicate that the interview was over.

“Look, John, leave this with me awhile longer. I’ll have to think on it and perhaps take a few soundings before I decide where I can best place it. By the by, how do you like F1(D)?”

“I like it fine,” said Preston, rising also.

“I may have something for you that you’ll like even more,” said Harcourt-Smith.

When Preston had gone, Harcourt-Smith stared at the door through which he had passed for several minutes. He seemed lost in thought.

Simply to shred the file, which he privately regarded as embarrassing and which might one day prove dangerous, was not possible. It had been formally presented by a section head. It had a file number. He thought long and hard. Then took his red-ink pen and wrote carefully on the cover of the Preston report. He pressed his buzzer for his secretary.

“Mabel,” he said when she entered, “take this down to Registry yourself, please. Right now.”

The girl glanced at the cover of the file. Across it were written the letters NFA and Brian Harcourt-Smith’s initials. In the service, NFA stands for “no further action.” The report was to be buried.

Chapter 2

It was not until Sunday, January 4, that the apartment owner at Fontenoy House was able to get an answer from the number he had been ringing every hour for three days. It was a brief conversation when it took place, but it resulted in his meeting with another man just before the hour of luncheon in a recessed alcove of one of the public rooms in a very discreet West End hotel.

The newcomer was about sixty, with iron-gray hair, soberly dressed, and with the air of a kind of civil servant, which in a way he was. He was the second to arrive, and seated himself with an immediate apology. “I’m terribly sorry I wasn’t available these past three days,” he said. “Being a single man, I was invited by some kind friends to spend the New Year period with them out of town. Now, what seems to be the problem?”

The apartment owner told him in short, clear sentences. He had had time to think exactly how he would convey the enormity of what had happened and he chose his phrases well. The other man considered the narrative with deepening gravity.

“You’re quite right, of course,” he said at length. “It could be very serious. When you returned on Thursday night, did you call the police? Or have you, at any time since?”

“No, I thought it better to talk to you first.”

“Ah, a pity in a way. It’s too late now, anyway. Their forensic people would establish the blowing of the safe as three or four days old. Hard to explain that. Unless—”

“Yes?” asked the apartment owner eagerly. “Unless you could maintain that the mirror was back in its place and everything in such apple-pie order that you could live there for three days and not know you had been burgled?”

“Hardly,” said the apartment owner. “The carpet had been taken up all around the edges. The bastard must have walked around the walls to avoid the pressure pads.”

“Yes,” mused the other. “They’d hardly credit a burglar so neat he even replaced the carpet as well as the mirror. So that won’t work. Nor, I fear, could one pretend you had spent the intervening three days somewhere else?”

“But where? I would have been seen. But I haven’t. Club? Hotel? I would have had to check in.”

“Precisely,” said the confidant. “No, it won’t work. For better or worse, the die is cast.

It’s too late to call in the police now.”

“Then what the hell do I do?” asked the apartment owner. “They have simply got to be recovered.”

“How long will your wife remain away from London?” asked the other.

“Who knows? She enjoys it up in Yorkshire. Some weeks, I hope.”

“Then we shall have to effect a replacement of the damaged safe with a new and identical model. Also a replica set of the Glen Diamonds. It will take time to arrange.”

“But how about what has been stolen?” asked the apartment owner desperately. “They can’t just be left somewhere out there on the loose. I’ve got to have them back.”

“True,” the other answered, nodding. “Look, as you may imagine, my people have some contacts in the world of diamonds. I’ll cause inquiries to be made. The gems will almost certainly be passed to one of the main centers for reshaping. They could not be marketed as they are. Too identifiable. I’ll see if the burglar can be traced and the things recovered.”

The man rose and prepared to leave. His friend remained seated, evidently deeply worried. The sober-suited man was equally dismayed but he hid it better.

“Do nothing and say nothing untoward,” he advised. “Keep your wife in the country as long as possible. Behave perfectly normally. Rest assured, I shall be in touch.”

The following morning, John Preston was one of those who joined the great throng of people surging back into central London after the five-day, too-long New Year break. As he lived in South Kensington, it suited him to come to work on the Underground. He disembarked at Goodge Street and made his way the remaining five hundred yards on foot, an unnoticeable man of medium height and build, aged forty-six, in a gray raincoat and hatless despite the chill.

Near the top of Gordon Street he turned into the entrance of an equally unnoticeable building that could have been an office block like any other; it was solid, but not modern, and purported to house an insurance enterprise. Only when one had entered it were the differences from other office buildings in the neighborhood discernible.

For one thing, there were three men in the lobby—one at the door, one behind the reception desk, and one by the elevator doors. All were of a size and a muscularity not normally associated with the underwriting of insurance policies. Any stray citizen seeking to do business with this particular company, and declining to be directed elsewhere, would have learned the hard way that only those presenting identification that could pass the scrutiny of the small computer terminal beneath the reception desk were permitted beyond the lobby.

The British Security Service, better known as MI5, does not live in one single place.

Discreetly, but inconveniently, it is split up into four office buildings. The headquarters are on Charles Street (and no longer at the old HQ, Leconfield House, so habitually mentioned in the newspapers).

The next-biggest establishment, on Gordon Street, is known simply as “Gordon” and nothing else, just as the head office is known as “Charles.” The other two premises are on Cork Street (known as “Cork”) and a humble annex on Marlborough Street, again known simply by the street name.

The department is divided into six branches, scattered throughout the buildings. Again, discreetly but confusingly, some of the branches have sections in different buildings. In order to avoid an inordinate use of shoe leather, all are linked by extremely secure telephone lines, with a flawless system for identification of the credentials of the caller.

“A” Branch handles in its various sections policy, technical support, property establishment, registry data processing, the office of the legal adviser, and the watcher service. The last-named is the home of that idiosyncratic group of men and (some) women, of all ages and types, streetwise and ingenious, who can mount the finest personal surveillance teams in the world. Even “hostiles” have had to concede that on their own ground MI5’s watchers are just about unbeatable.

Unlike the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), which handles foreign intelligence and has absorbed a number of Americanisms into its in-house jargon, the Security Service (MI5), which covers internal counterintelligence, bases most of its jargon on former police phrases. It avoids terms like “surveillance operative” and still calls its tracker teams simply “the watchers.”

“B” Branch handles recruitment, personnel, vetting, promotions, pensions, and finance (meaning salaries and operational expenses).

“C” Branch concerns itself with the security of the civil service (its staffers and its buildings), the security of contractors (mainly those civilian firms handling defense and communications work), military security (in close liaison with the armed forces’ own internal-security staffs), and sabotage (in reality or in prospect).

There used to be a “D” Branch, but with the arcane logic known only to its practitioners in the intelligence world, it was long ago renamed “K” Branch. It is one of the biggest, and its largest section, called Soviet, is subdivided into operations, field investigations, and order of battle. Next in K comes Soviet satellites, also divided into the same three subsections, then research, and finally agents.

As may be imagined, K devotes its not inconsiderable labors to keeping track of the huge number of Soviet and satellite agents who operate, or try to, out of the various embassies, consulates, legations, trade missions, banks, news agencies, and commercial enterprises that a lenient British government has allowed to be scattered all over the capital and (in the case of consulates) the provinces.

Also inside K Branch is a modest office inhabited by the officer whose job it is to liaise between MI5 and its sister service, MI6. This officer is in fact a “Six” man, on assignment to Charles Street in order to carry out his liaison duties. The section is known simply as K7.

“E” Branch (the alphabetical sequence resumes with E) covers international Communism and its adherents who may wish to visit Britain for nefarious reasons, or the homegrown variety who may wish to go abroad for the same purposes. Also inside E, the Far East section maintains liaison officers in Hong Kong, New Delhi, Canberra, and Wellington, while the section called All Regions does the same in Washington, Ottawa, the West Indies, and other friendly capitals.

Finally, “F” Branch, to which John Presten belonged, at least until that morning, covers political parties (extreme left and right wings), research, and agents.

F Branch lives at Gordon, on the fourth floor, and it was to his office there that John Preston made his way that January morning. He might not have thought his report of three weeks earlier would establish him as Brian Harcourt-Smith’s flavor of the month, but he still believed his report would go to the desk of the Director-General, Sir Bernard Hemmings.

Sir Bernard, Preston was confident, would feel able to impart its information—and, admittedly, partly conjectural findings—to the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee or to the Permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office, the political ministry commanding MI5. A good PUS would probably feel his minister should glance at it, and the Home Secretary could have drawn the attention of the Prime Minister to it.

The memorandum on Preston’s desk when he arrived indicated this was not going to happen. After reading the sheet he sat back, lost in thought. He was prepared to stand by that report, and if it had gone higher there would have been questions to answer. He could have answered them—would have answered them, for he was convinced he was right. He could have answered them, that is, as head of F1(D), but not after being transferred to another department.

After his transfer, it would be the new head of F1(D) who would be the one to raise the issue of the Preston report, and Preston was satisfied the man appointed to succeed him, almost certain to be one of Harcourt-Smith’s most loyal protégés, would do no such thing.

He made one call to Registry. Yes, the report had been filed. He noted the file number, just for future reference, if any. Then: “What do you mean, NFA?” he asked incredulously. “All right. ... Sorry. ... Yes, I know it’s not up to you, Charlie. I was just asking. A bit surprised, that’s all.”

He replaced the receiver and sat back, thinking deeply. Thoughts a man should not think about his superior officer, even if there was no personal empathy between them.

But the thoughts would not go away. It was possible, he conceded, that if his report had gone higher, its general burden might eventually have been imparted to Neil Kinnock, leader of the Labour Party opposition in Parliament, who might not have been pleased.

It was also possible that at the next election, due within seventeen months at the outside, Labour could win and that Brian Harcourt-Smith was entertaining the hope that one of the new government’s first acts would be to confirm him as Director-General of MI5. His not offending powerful politicians in office, or those who might come to office, was nothing new. For a man of weak and tremulous disposition or of vaulting ambition, refusal to impart bad news could be a powerful motive for inertia.

Everyone in the service recalled the affair of a former Director-General, Sir Roger Hollis. Even to this day, the mystery had never been completely solved, though partisans on both sides had their convinced opinions.

Back in 1962 and 1963, Roger Hollis had known almost from the outset of the business the full details of the Christine Keeler affair, as it came to be known. He had had on his desk, weeks if not months before the scandal blew open, reports of the Cliveden parties, of Stephen Ward, who provided the girls and who was in any case reporting back, of Soviet attaché Ivanov’s sharing the favors of the same girl as Britain’s own War Minister.

Yet he had sat back as the evidence mounted, and never sought, as was his duty, a personal meeting with his own Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan.

Without that warning, Macmillan had walked into the scandal, leading with his jaw.

The affair had festered and suppurated through the summer of 1963, hurting Britain at home and abroad, for all the world as if it had been scripted in Moscow.

Years later, the argument still raged: had Roger Hollis been a supine incompetent, or had he been much, much worse ...?

“Bollocks,” said Preston to himself, and banished his thoughts. He reread the memorandum.

It was from the head of B4 (promotions) personally, and advised him that he was as of that day transferred and promoted to head of C1(A). The tone was of the cozy friendliness that is supposed to soften the blow: “I am advised by the DDG that it would be so helpful if the New Year could begin with all fresh postings occupied ... most grateful if you could tidy up any outstanding things and hand over to young Maxwell without too much delay, even within a couple of days if possible. ... My warmest best wishes for your satisfaction with the new post. ...”

Blah, blah, blah, thought Preston. C1, he knew, was responsible for civil service personnel and buildings, and A Section meant that responsibility within the capital. He was to be in charge of security in all Her Majesty’s ministries in London.

“It’s a bloody policeman’s job,” he snorted, and began to call up his team to say good-bye.

A mile away across London, Jim Rawlings opened the door of a small but exclusive jewelry shop in a side road, not two hundred yards from the surging traffic of Bond Street. The shop was dark but its discreet lights fell on showcases containing Georgian silver, and in the illuminated counter display cabinets could be seen jewelry of a bygone era. Evidently the emporium specialized in antique pieces rather than their modern counterparts.

Rawlings was wearing a neat dark suit, silk shirt, and muted tie, and carried a dully gleaming attaché case. The girl behind the counter looked up and took him in with a glance of appreciation. At thirty-six he looked lean and fit, with an aura that was part gentleman, part tough—always a useful combination. She pushed out her chest and flashed a bright smile.

“Can I help you?”

“I’d like to see Mr. Zablonsky. Personal.”

His Cockney accent indicated he was unlikely to be a customer. Her face fell. “You a rep?” she asked.

“Just say Mr. James would like to speak to him,” said Rawlings.

But at that moment the mirrored door at the rear of the shop opened and Louis Zablonsky came out. He was a short, wizened man of fifty-six, but looked older.

“Mr. James”—he beamed—“how nice to you. Please come into my office. How have you been keeping?” He ushered Rawlings past the counter and into his inner sanctum, saying, “That’s all right, Sandra, my dear.”

Inside his small and cluttered office he closed and locked the mirrored door, through which a view of the outer shop could be had. He gestured Rawlings to the chair in front of his antique desk and took the swivel chair behind it. A single spotlight beamed down on the blotter. He eyed Rawlings keenly. “Well, now, Jim, what have you been up to?”

“Got something for you, Louis, something you’ll like. So don’t tell me it’s rubbish.”

Rawlings flicked open his attaché case. Zablonsky spread his hands.

“Jim, would I—” His words were cut off as he saw what Rawlings was placing on the blotter. When they were all there, he stared at them in disbelief.

“The Glen Suite,” he breathed, “you’ve gone and nicked the Glen Diamonds. It’s not even been in the papers yet.”

“So maybe they’re still away from London,” said Rawlings. “There was no alarm raised. I’m good, you know that.”

“The best, Jim, the best. But the Glen Suite ... Why didn’t you tell me?”

Rawlings knew it would have been easier for all if a route for disposing of the Glen Suite had been set up before the robbery. But he worked in his own way, which was extremely carefully. He trusted no one, least of all a fence, even a blue-chip, top-of-the-market fence like Louis Zablonsky. A fence, hit by a police raid and facing a long stretch of porridge, would be quite able to trade information on a coming heist against a let-off for himself. The Serious Crime Squad down at Scotland Yard knew about Zablonsky, even if he had never seen the inside of one of Her Majesty’s prisons. That was why Rawlings never preannounced one of his jobs, and always arrived unheralded. So he did not answer.

In any case, Zablonsky was lost in contemplation of the jewels that sparkled on his blotter. He knew their provenance without being told. The ninth Duke of Sheffield, who had inherited the suite in 1936, had had two offspring, a boy and a girl. By 1974, when his son was twenty-five, the saddened Duke had been forced to realize that the exotic young man was what gossip columnists are pleased to call “one of nature’s bachelors.”

There would be no more pretty young countesses of Margate or duchesses of Sheffield to wear the famed Glen Diamonds. So when the ninth Duke died in his turn, in 1980, be bequeathed them not to his son, the heir to the title, but to his daughter, Lady Fiona Glen.

Zablonsky knew that after her father’s death Lady Fiona had taken to wearing the diamonds occasionally, with the insurers’ grudging permission, usually for charity galas, at which she was a not infrequent presence. The rest of the time they lay where they had spent so many years, in darkness in the vaults of Coutts on Park Lane. He smiled. “The charity gala at Grosvenor House just before the New Year?” he asked. Rawlings shrugged. “Oh, you’re a naughty boy, Jim. But such a talented one.”

Although he was fluent in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew, Louis Zablonsky after forty years in Britain had never quite mastered English, which he spoke with a discernible Polish accent. Also, because he had learned them from books written years earlier, Zablonsky mistakenly used phrases that nowadays could be regarded as “camp.” But Rawlings knew there was nothing gay about Louis Zablonsky. In fact, Rawlings knew, because Beryl Zablonsky had told him, that the old man had been neutered in a Nazi Concentration camp as a boy.

Zablonsky was still admiring the diamonds, as a true connoisseur will admire any masterpiece. He recalled vaguely having read somewhere that in the mid-1960s Lady Fiona Glen had married a rising young civil servant who by the mid-1980s had become a senior mandarin in one of the ministries, and that the couple lived somewhere in the West End at a most elegant and luxurious standard maintained largely by the wife’s private fortune.

“So what do you think, Louis?”

“I’m impressed, my dear Jim. Very impressed. But also perplexed. These are not ordinary stones. These are identifiable anywhere in the diamond world. What am I to do with them?”

“You tell me,” said Rawlings.

Louis Zablonsky spread his hands wide.

“I will not lie to you, Jim. I will tell you straight. The Glen Diamonds probably have an insured value of seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds, which is roughly what they would fetch if sold legitimately on the open market by Cartier. But they can’t be sold like that, obviously.

“That leaves two options. One is to find a very rich buyer who would want to buy the famous Glen Diamonds knowing he could never display them or admit ownership—a rich miser content to gloat over them in privacy. There are such people, but very few.

From such a person one could get perhaps half the price I have named.”

“When could you find a buyer like that?”

Zablonsky shrugged. “This year, next year, sometime, never. You can’t just advertise in the personal columns.”

“Too long,” said Rawlings. “The other way?”

“Prise them out of their settings—that act alone would reduce the value to six hundred thousand pounds. Repolish them and sell them separately as four unmatched, individual gems. One might get three hundred thousand. But the repolisher would want his cut. If I carried those costs personally, I think I could let you have a hundred thousand—but at the end of the operation. After the sales had been completed.”

“What can you let me have up front? I can’t live on fresh air, Louis.”

“Who can?” said the old fence. “Look, for the white-gold setting I can get maybe two thousand pounds on the scrap market. For the forty small stones—put through the legitimate market—say, twelve thousand. That’s fourteen thousand pounds, which I can recover quickly. I can let you have half up front, in cash, now. What do you say?”

They talked for another thirty minutes and clinched their deal. From his safe Louis Zablonsky took £7,000 in cash. Rawlings opened the attaché case and laid the wads of used notes inside.

“Nice,” said Zablonsky, admiring the case. “You treated yourself?”

Rawlings shook his head. “Came with the heist,” he said.

Zablonsky tut-tutted and wagged a finger under Rawlings’s nose. “Get rid of it, Jim.

Never keep anything from a job. Not worth the risk.”

Rawlings considered, nodded, made his farewells, and left.

John Preston had spent the entire day seeking out the various members of his investigative team to say his good-byes. They were gratifyingly sorry to see him go. Then there was the paperwork. Bobby Maxwell, his replacement, had come in to say hello.

Preston knew him vaguely. He was an agreeable enough young man, eager to make a career in Five and seeing his best chances of promotion as lying in a policy of hitching his wagon to the rising star of Brian Harcourt-Smith. Preston could not hold that against him.

Preston himself was a late entrant, having been inducted into the service direct from the Army Intelligence Corps in 1981, at the age of forty-one. He knew he would never get to the top. Head of section was about the limit for late entrants.

Just occasionally, always to the dismay of the people who worked in Five, the post of Director-General went to someone from quite outside the service if there was no obviously suitable candidate within. But the Deputy Director-General, all the directors of the six branches, and the heads of most of the departments within the branches were by tradition lifelong staffers.

Preston had agreed with Maxwell that he would spend that day, Monday, finishing off his paperwork and the whole of the next day briefing his successor on every current file and investigation. They had parted on that note with mutual good wishes until the morning.

Preston glanced at his watch. It would be a late night. From his personal office safe he would have to get out every current file, check those that could safely go back to Registry, and spend half the night going through the current “bumpf” page by page, so that he could be ready to brief Maxwell in the morning.

First he needed a decent drink. He took the elevator down to the subbasement, where Gordon has a well-stocked and cozy bar.

Louis Zablonsky worked through Tuesday locked in his back room. Only twice did he emerge to see a customer personally. It was a slack day, for which, unusually, he was thankful.

He worked with jacket off and shirtsleeves rolled up over his almost hairless forearms, carefully easing the Glen Diamonds from their white-gold settings. The four principal stones, the two ten-carat gems from the earrings and the matched twenty-carat pair from the tiara and the pendant, came easily and took little time.

When they were out of their beds he could examine them more closely. They were truly beautiful, flaming and sparkling in the light. They were already known to be blue-whites, once also called “top river,” but now reclassified under the standardized gradings as “D flawless.” These four, when he had finished admiring them, he dropped into a small velvet bag. That done, he began the time-consuming task of easing the forty smaller stones out of the gold. As he worked, the light occasionally caught a faded mark in the form of a five-figure number on the underside of his left forearm. To anyone who knew the significance of such marks, the number meant only one thing. It was the brand of Auschwitz.

Zablonsky had been born in 1930, the third son of a Polish-Jewish jeweler of Warsaw.

He was nine when the Germans invaded, and by 1940 the ghetto of Warsaw had been enclosed; incarcerated inside it were close to 400,000 Jews, and rations were fixed at well below starvation level. On April 19, 1943, the 90,000 surviving ghetto inhabitants, led by the few able-bodied men left among them, rose in revolt. Louis Zablonsky had just turned thirteen, but he was so thin and emaciated he could well have been taken for five years younger.

When the ghetto finally fell to the Waffen SS troops of Major-General Juergen Stroop on May 16, Zablonsky was one of the few who lived through the mass shootings. The bulk of the inhabitants, some 60,000, were already dead, from bullet, shot, shell, crushed beneath falling buildings, or executed. The remaining 30,000 were almost exclusively the aged, women, and small children. Into these Zablonsky was herded. Most went off to Treblinka and died.

But in one of those freaks of circumstance that occasionally decide life and death, the engine of the train hauling Zablonsky’s cattle car broke down. The car was attached to another engine and ended up at Auschwitz.

Though destined for death, Zablonsky was spared when he gave his profession as jeweler. He was put to work sorting and classifying the trinkets still being found upon the persons of Jews in each fresh intake. Then one day he was summoned to the camp hospital and into the hands of that smiling blond man whom they called “the Angel” and who was still carrying out his manic experiments on the genitalia of pubescent Jewish youths. It was on Josef Mengele’s operating table that, without anesthetic, Louis Zablonsky was castrated.

In late 1944 the survivors of Auschwitz were force-marched westward and Zablonsky ended up in Bergen-Belsen, where, more dead than alive, he was finally freed by the British Army. After intensive hospitalization Zablonsky, having been sponsored by a North London rabbi, was brought to Britain, and after further rehabilitation he became a jeweler’s apprentice. In the early 1960s he had left his employer for his own shop in the East End. Ten years later, he had opened the present, more prosperous establishment in the West End.

It was in the East End, down in the dockland, that he had first started to handle gems imported by seamen—emeralds from Ceylon, diamonds from Africa, rubies from India, and opals from Australia. By the mid-1980s Zablonsky was a wealthy man from both his enterprises, the legitimate and the illicit. He was one of the top fences in London, a specialist in diamonds, and owned a large detached house in Golders Green, where he was a pillar of his community.

Now he tugged the last of the forty smaller stones from their settings and checked to see that he had missed none. He counted the stones and began to weigh them. Forty in all, averaging half a carat but mostly smaller. Engagement-ring stuff, but worth about

£12,000 in all. He could pass them through Hatton Garden and no one the wiser. Cash deals—he knew his contacts. He began to crush the white-gold settings into a shapeless mass.

When the gold was a mangled blob of metal, he dropped the lump into a bag along with other scrap. He saw Sandra off the premises, closed the shop, tidied up his office, and left, taking the four primary stones with him. On the way home he made a phone call from a public box to a number in Belgium, a number situated in a small village, called Nijlen, outside Antwerp. When he got home he rang British Airways and booked a flight for the morrow to Brussels.

Along the shore of the River Thames, on its southern bank, where once had stood the rotting wharves of a dying dockland, a huge redevelopment program had been continuing through the early and mid-1980s. The program had left great swaths of demolished rubble between the new buildings, moonscapes where the rank grass tangled with the fallen bricks and dust. One day, it was intended, all would be covered by new apartment buildings, shopping malls, and multistory garages, but when that would be was anybody’s guess.

In warm weather the winos camped out in these wastelands and any South London

“face” wishing to lose a piece of evidence had but to take the article to the center of these abandoned places and burn it to extinction.

Late on the evening of Tuesday, January 6, Jim Rawlings was walking across an area of several acres, stumbling in the dark as he tripped over unseen chunks of masonry. Had anyone been observing him—and no one was—he would have seen that Rawlings carried in one hand a two-gallon can of gasoline and in the other a beautiful handcrafted calfskin attaché case.

Louis Zablonsky passed through Heathrow Airport on Wednesday morning with no trouble. With heavy greatcoat and soft tweed hat, hand luggage and big briar pipe jutting from his jaw, he joined the daily flow of businessmen from London to Brussels.

On the plane, one of the stewardesses leaned over him and whispered, “I’m afraid we can’t allow you to light the pipe inside the cabin, sir.” Zablonsky apologized profusely and stuffed the briar in his pocket. He did not mind. He did not smoke, and even if he had lit it, it would not have drawn very well. Not with four pear-shaped fifty-eight-facet diamonds crammed into the base below the tamped tobacco.

At Brussels National he rented a car and headed north up the motorway out of Zaventem toward Mechelen, where he pulled right and northeast to Lier and Nijlen.

The bulk of the diamond industry in Belgium is centered upon Antwerp and is specifically located in and around the Pelikaanstraat, where the big enterprises have their showrooms and workshops. But like most industries, the diamond business depends for a part of its functioning upon a mass of small suppliers and outside workers, one-man operations working out of their ateliers, to whom can be subcontracted some of the manufacture of settings, cleaning, and repolishing.

Some of these outside workers also live in Antwerp, and Jews, many of East European origin, are predominant among them. But east of Antwerp lies an area known as Kempen, a cluster of neat villages in which are also located scores of small shops that undertake work for the Antwerp industry. In the center of Kempen lies Nijlen, astride the main road and rail lines from Lier to Herentals.

Halfway down the Molenstraat lived one Raoul Levy, a Polish Jew who had settled in Belgium after the war and who also happened to be a second cousin of Louis Zablonsky of London. Levy was a diamond polisher, a widower who lived alone in one of the small, neat, red-brick bungalows that line the western side of the Molenstraat. At the back of the house was his workshop. It was here that Zablonsky drove and met his relative a little after lunchtime.

They argued for an hour and struck their deal. Levy would repolish the four stones, losing as little of their weight as possible, but enough to disguise their identity. They settled on a fee of £50,000, half up front and half upon sale of the last stone. Zablonsky left and returned to London.

The trouble with Raoul Levy was not that he lacked skill; it was that he was lonely. So each week he looked forward to his one expedition. He loved to take the train into Antwerp, go to his favorite café, where all his cronies met in the evenings, and talk shop.

Three days later he went there and talked shop once too often.

While Louis Zablonsky was in Belgium, John Preston was installing himself in his new office on the second floor. He was glad he did not have to leave Gordon for another building.

His predecessor had retired at the end of the year, and the deputy head of C1(A) had been in charge for a few days, no doubt hoping he would be confirmed in the top man’s post. He took his disappointment well and briefed Preston copiously on what the job entailed, which seemed to Preston to be mainly grinding routine.

Left alone that afternoon, Preston cast his eye down the list of ministry buildings that came under A Section. It was longer than might be imagined, but most of the buildings were not security sensitive, save for leakages that might be politically embarrassing.

Document leaks concerning, for example, intended social security cuts were always a hazard since the civil service unions had recruited so many staffers with extreme-left political views, but they could usually be handled by the ministry’s in-house security people.

The big ones for Preston were the Foreign Office, Cabinet Office, and Defense Ministry, all of which received cosmic-rated papers. But each had pretty tight security, handled by its own internal-security team. Preston sighed. He started to make a series of phone calls, setting up getting-to-know-you meetings with the security chiefs in each of the principal ministries.

Between calls he glanced at the pile of personal stuff he had brought down from his old office, two floors above. Waiting for a call to be returned by some official otherwise engaged, he rose, unlocked his new personal safe, and put the files inside, one by one.

The last of them was his report of the previous month, his own copy. Other than the report he knew to have been NFA’ed in Registry, this was the only one in existence. He shrugged and put it at the back of the safe. It would probably never be examined again, but he saw no reason why he should not keep it, for old times’ sake. After all, his own copy had taken a hell of a lot of sweat to put together.

Chapter 3

The men, when they came to visit Raoul Levy, were four in number; big, heavy men who arrived in two cars. The first car cruised to a halt outside Levy’s bungalow on the Molenstraat, while the second halted a hundred yards up the street.

The first car disgorged two of the men, who walked briskly but quietly up the short path to the front door. The two drivers waited, lights doused, engines running. It was a bitter night, just after 7:00 p.m., pitch-dark. No one walked the Molenstraat that evening of January 15.

The men who knocked on the front door were brisk and businesslike, men with little time to waste, a job to do, and the opinion that the sooner it was over, the better. They did not introduce themselves when Levy answered the door. They just stepped inside and pulled the door closed behind them. Levy’s protest was hardly out of his mouth when it was cut off by four rigid fingers jabbing into his solar plexus.

The big men pulled Levy’s overcoat around his shoulders, clapped his hat on his head, left the front door unlocked, and walked him expertly down the path to the car, whose rear door opened as they approached. When they drove off with Levy sandwiched between them in the rear seat, only twenty seconds had elapsed.

They took him to the Kesseise Heide, a big public park just northwest of Nijlen, whose fifty acres of heather, grass, oaks, and mixed conifers were completely deserted. Well off the road, in the heart of the heath, the two cars stopped. The driver of the second vehicle, who was to be the interrogator, slipped into the front passenger seat.

He turned toward the rear of the car and nodded to his two colleagues. The man on Levy’s right swept two arms around the small diamond polisher to hold him still, and the gloved hand of one arm went across Levy’s mouth. The other man produced a pair of heavy pliers, took Levy’s left hand, and deftly crushed three knuckles, one after the other.

What frightened Levy even more than the shattering pain was that they did not ask him any questions. They seemed uninterested. When his fourth knuckle pulped in the pliers, Levy was screaming to be asked questions.

The interrogator in the front nodded casually and said, “Want to talk?”

Behind the glove Levy nodded furiously. The glove was removed. Levy let out a long, bubbling scream. When he had finished, the interrogator said, “The diamonds. From London. Where are they?” He spoke Flemish but with a marked foreign accent.

Levy told him without delay. No amount of money could compensate him for the loss of his hands and therefore his livelihood.

The interrogator considered the information soberly. “Keys,” he said.

They were in Levy’s trouser pocket. The interrogator took them and left the car.

Seconds later, his sedan crunched away across the crackling grass toward the road. It was gone for fifty minutes.

During that time Levy whimpered and held his ruined hand. The men on either side of him seemed uninterested in him. The driver sat and stared ahead, gloved hands on the wheel.

When the interrogator rejoined them, he made no mention of the four gems that by now were in his pocket. He said only, “One last question. The man who brought them.”

Levy shook his head. The interrogator sighed at the waste of time and nodded to the man on Levy’s right. The heavy men reversed roles. The one on the right took the pliers and Levy’s right hand. After the crushing of two knuckles on that hand, Levy told them.

The interrogator had a couple of short supplementary questions and then he seemed satisfied. He left the car and went back to his own vehicle. In convoy the two sedans bumped back toward the road. They drove back to Nijlen.

As they went past his house, Levy saw that it was dark. He hoped they would drop him off there, but they did not. They drove through the center of the town and out to the east.

The lights of the cafés, warm and snug against the freezing winter air, went past the car windows, but no one came running out. Levy could even see the blue neon word POLITIE

above the police station across from the church, but no one came out.

Two miles to the east of Nijlen the Looy Straat crosses the rail lines at a point where the Lier-Herentals tracks run straight as an arrow, and the big diesel-electric locomotives go through at more than seventy miles an hour. On either side of the level crossing are farm buildings. Both cars stopped short of the level crossing and doused lights and engines.

Without a word the driver opened the glove compartment, produced a bottle, and handed it back to his two colleagues. One held Levy’s nose closed and the other poured the white grain spirit of a local brand down the gagging throat. When three quarters of it was gone, they stopped and left him alone. Raoul Levy began to drift away in an alcoholic daze. Even the pain eased a bit. The three men in the car, and the one in the sedan ahead of them, waited.

At 11:15 the interrogator came from the first car and muttered something through the window. Levy was unconscious by then but moving fitfully. The men beside him hauled him out of the car and half carried him toward the tracks. At 11:20 one of them hit him hard on the head with an iron bar, and he died. They laid him on the tracks with his shattered hands on one of the rails and his broken head near it.

Hans Grobbelaar has taken the last express of the night out of Lier at 11:09 exactly, as always. It was a routine run and he would be home in his warm bed in Herentals by 1:00 a.m. It was a nonstop freight and he went through Nijlen on time at 11:19. After the crossings there, he piled on the power and went down the straight toward the Looy Straat crossing at close to seventy miles an hour, the spotlight of the big 6268 lighting up the track for a hundred yards ahead.

Just short of the Looy Straat he saw the huddled figure lying on the track and slammed on his brakes. Sheets of sparks flew out from his wheels. The freight train began to slow, but nowhere near enough. Mouth open, be watched through the windshield as the headlight flew toward the crumpled figure. Two men in the yard had had it happen to them before; whether the victims had been suicides or drunks, no one ever knew. Not afterward. With this kind of rig you don’t even feel the thud, they had said. He didn’t.

The screaming locomotive flashed over the spot at thirty miles an hour.

When he finally stopped he could not even look. He ran to one of the farms and raised the alarm. When the police came with lanterns, the mess under his wheels looked like strawberry jam. Hans Grobbelaar did not reach home until dawn.

That same morning, John Preston entered the lobby of the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall, approached the desk, and used his universal pass to identify himself. After the inevitable check call to the man he had come to see, he was escorted into the elevator and down several corridors to the office of the ministry’s head of internal security, a room high at the back of the building and overlooking the Thames.

Brigadier Bertie Capstick had changed little since Preston had last seen him, years before, in Ulster. Big, florid, and genial, with apple cheeks that made him look more like a farmer than a soldier, he came forward with a roar of “Johnny, my boy, as I live and breathe. Come in, come in.”

Although only ten years older than Preston, Bertie Capstick had a habit of calling almost anyone his junior “my boy,” which gave him an avuncular air, matched by his appearance. But he had been a tough soldier once, moving deep into terrorist country during the Malay campaign and later commanding a group of infiltration experts in the jungles of Borneo during what was now called the Indonesian emergency.

Capstick sat Preston down and produced a bottle of single malt from a filing cabinet.

“Fancy a snort?”

“Bit early,” protested Preston. It was just past eleven o’clock.

“Nonsense. For old times’ sake. Anyway, the coffee they bring you here is abysmal.”

Capstick sat himself down and pushed the glass toward Preston across his desk. “So, what have they done with you, my boy?”

Preston grimaced. “I told you on the phone what they’ve given me,” he said. “Bloody policeman’s job. No disrespect to you, Bertie.”

“Well, same with me, Johnny. Out to grass. Of course I’m retired from the Army now, so I’m not too bad. Took my pension at fifty-five and managed to get this slot. Not too bad. Potter up on the train every day, check up on all the security routines, make sure no one’s being a bad lad, and go home to the little woman. Could be worse. Anyway, here’s to the old days.”

“Cheers,” said Preston. They drank.

The old days had not been quite so genial as that, thought Preston. When last he had seen Bertie Capstick, then a full colonel, almost six years before, the deceptively extroverted officer had been Deputy Director of Military Intelligence in Northern Ireland, working out of that complex of buildings at Lisburn whose data banks can tell the inquirer which IRA man has scratched his backside recently.

Preston had been one of Capstick’s “boys,” working in civilian clothes and undercover, moving through hard-line Provo ghettos to talk with informers or pick up packages from dead drops. It was Bertie Capstick who had loyally stuck by him in the face of the wittering civil servants from Holyrood House when Preston was “burned” and nearly killed while on a mission for Capstick.

That was May 28, 1981, and the papers carried a few sparse details the following day.

Preston had been in an unmarked car and had entered the Bogside district in Londonderry on his way to a meet with an informer. Whether there had been a leak higher up, whether the car he was driving had been used once too often, or whether his face had been “made”

by the Provo intelligence people was never later established. Whatever, there was a foul-up. Just as he entered the Republican stronghold, a car containing four armed Provos had pulled out from a side street and followed him.

He had spotted them quickly in his rearview mirror and called off the rendezvous at once. But the Provos wanted more than that. Deep inside the ghetto they swerved across his front and came tumbling out of their own car, two with Armalites and one with a pistol.

With nowhere to go but heaven or hell, Preston had taken the initiative. Against the odds and to the consternation of his attackers, he came out of his own door in a fast roll, just as the Armalites riddled his vehicle. He had his Browning thirteen-shot nine-millimeter in his hand, set to Automatic. From the cobblestones he let them have it. They had expected him to die decently, and they were too close together.

On rapid fire, he had dropped two dead in their tracks and blown a chunk out of the neck of the third. The Provo driver let in his clutch and disappeared in a plume of burning tires. Preston made his way to a safe house staffed by four SAS troopers, who kept him until Capstick arrived to bring him home.

Of course, there had been the devil to pay—inquiries, interrogations, worried questions from on high. There was no question of Preston’s going on. He had been well and truly burned, to use the term-of-art—that is, identified. His usefulness was over. The surviving Provo would know his face again anywhere. They would not even let him go back to his old regiment, the Paras, at Aldershot. Who knew how many Provos hung around Aldershot?

They had offered him Hong Kong or the exit door. Then Bertie Capstick had had a talk with a friend. There was a third choice. Leave the Army as a forty-one-year-old major and become a late entrant into MI5. He had gone for that one.

“Anything particular?” Capstick was asking.

Preston shook his head. “Just a round of getting-to-know-you visits,” he said.

“Don’t worry, Johnny. Now I know you’re on the seat, I’ll call if anything crops up here that looks bigger than swiping the Christmas fund. How’s Julia, by the way?”

“I’m afraid she’s left me. Three years ago.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Bertie Capstick’s face puckered in genuine concern.

“Another fella?”

“No. Not then. There’s someone now, I think. Just the job ... you know.”

Capstick nodded grimly. “My Betty’s always been very good like that,” he ruminated.

“Been away from home half my life. She always stuck by. Kept the fire burning. Still, no life for a woman. Seen it happen before. Many times. Still, bad luck. See the boy?”

“Now, and again,” admitted Preston.

Capstick could not have struck a rawer nerve. In his small and lonely South Kensington flat, Preston kept two photographs. One showed him and Julia on their wedding day—he at twenty-six, trim in his Parachute Regiment uniform; she at twenty, beautiful in white.

The other was of his son, Tommy, who meant more to him than life itself.

They had lived a normal Army Üfe in a succession of married quarters, and Tommy had been born eight years after their wedding. His arrival had fulfilled John Preston, but not his wife. Soon after, Julia had begun to get bored by the chores of motherhood, compounded by the loneliness of his absences, and had begun to complain; of the lack of money. She chivied him to leave the Army and earn more in civilian life, refusing to understand that he loved his job and that the boredom of a desk in commerce or industry would have driven him to distraction.

He transferred to the Intelligence Corps, but that made it worse. They sent him to Ulster, where wives could not follow. Then he went underground and all contact was broken. After the Bogside incident she really made her feelings plain. They gave it one more try, living in the suburbs while he worked at Five. He was able to return almost every evening to Sydenham, and that had solved the separation question, but the marriage had gone sour. Julia wanted more than his salary as a late entrant in Five could provide.

She had taken a job as a receptionist at a fashion house in the West End when Tommy, aged eight, had gone, at her insistence, to a local private school near their small home.

That had strained the finances even more. A year later she had left completely, taking Tommy with her. Now, he knew, she was living with her boss, a man old enough to be her father but able to keep her in style and Tommy at a boarding preparatory school at Tonbridge. Now Preston hardly ever saw the twelve-year-old lad.

He had offered her a divorce, but she did not want one. After a three-year separation he could have got the divorce anyway, but she had threatened that, as he could not provide for the boy and pay maintenance, she would settle for Tommy. He was cornered and he knew it. She allowed him to have Tommy for one week in each holiday and for one Sunday each term.

“Well, I must be going, Bertie. You know where I am if anything big blows up.”

“Of course, of course.” Capstick lumbered to the door to see him out. “Take care of yourself, Johnny. There aren’t many of us good guys left anymore.”

They parted on a jocular note and Preston went back to Gordon Street.

Louis Zablonsky knew the men who arrived in a van and knocked on his front door late on Saturday night. He was alone in the house, as usual on Saturdays; Beryl was out and would not return until the small hours. He supposed they knew that.

He had been watching the late film on television when the knock came, and when he answered the door, they bulled straight into the hallway, closing the door behind them.

There were three of them. Unlike the four who had visited Raoul Levy two days earlier (an incident of which Zablonsky knew nothing, since he did not read the Belgian papers), these were hired muscle from London’s East End—“slags,” in underworld parlance.

Two were brutes, simple steak-faced thugs who would do anything they were told and would obey the orders of the third; he was slight, pocked, mean, with dirty-blond hair.

Zablonsky did not know them personally; he just “knew” them; he had seen them in the camps, in uniform. Recognition sapped his will to resist. He understood there was no point. Men like these always did what they wanted to people like him. There was no point in resisting or appealing.

They pushed him back into the sitting room and threw him into his own armchair. One of the big men stood behind the chair, leaned forward, and pinned Zablonsky into it. The other stood by, caressing one fist with the palm of the other hand. The blond man drew up a stool in front of the chair, squatted on it, and stared at the jeweler’s face. “ ’It ’im,” he said.

The slag to Zablonsky’s right swung a heavy fist straight into his mouth. The man was wearing brass knuckles. The jeweler’s mouth dissolved in a welter of teeth, lips, blood, and gum.

Blondie smiled. “Not there,” he chided gently. “ ’E’s supposed to talk, ain’t ’e? Lower down.”

The thug slammed two more haymakers into Zablonsky’s chest. Several ribs cracked.

From Zablonsky’s mouth came a high-pitched keening. Blondie smiled. He liked it when they made noise.

Zablonsky struggled feebly but he might as well not have bothered. The muscled arms from behind the chair held him fast, as the other arms had held him down on that stone table so long ago in southern Poland while the blond doctor smiled down at him.

“You been bad, Louis,” crooned Blondie. “You upset a friend of mine. ’E reckons you’ve got something of his and ’e wants it back.” He told the jeweler what it was.

Zablonsky choked back some of the blood that filled his mouth. “Not here,” he croaked.

Blondie considered. “Search the place,” he told his companions. “ ’E won’t give no trouble. Take it apart.”

The two slags searched the house, leaving Blondie with the jeweler in the sitting room.

They were thorough and it took an hour. When they had finished, every closet, drawer, nook, and cranny had been turned out. Blondie contented himself with poking the old man in his broken ribs. Just after midnight the slags returned from the attic.

“Nuffink,” said one.

“So who’s got it, Louis?” asked Blondie. Zablonsky tried not to tell him, so they hit him again and again until he did. When the one behind the chair released him, he fell forward onto the carpet and rolled onto one side. He was going blue around the lips, his eyes starting and his breath coming in short, labored gasps. The three men looked down at him.

“ ’E’s ’aving a ’eart attack,” said one curiously. “ ’E’s croaking.”

“ ’It ’im too ’ard, then, dint ya?” said Blondie sarcastically. “Come on, let’s go. We’ve got the name.”

“You reckon ’e was telling us straight?” asked one of the slags.

“Yeah, ’e was telling us straight an hour ago,” said Blondie.

The three left the house, clambered into their van, and drove off. On the road south from Golders Green, one of the slags asked Blondie, “So what we going to do now, then?”

“Shut up, I’m thinking,” said Blondie. The little sadist liked to think of himself as a commander of criminals. In fact, he was of limited intelligence and now he was in a quandary. On the other hand, the contract had been to visit just one man and recover some stolen property. On the other, they had not recovered it. Near Regent’s Park he saw a telephone booth. “Pull over,” he said. “I got to make a phone call.”

The man who had hired him had given him a telephone number, the location of a phone booth, and three specific hours at which to call. The first of them was only a few minutes ahead.

Beryl Zablonsky returned from her Saturday-evening treat just before two in the morning.

She parked her Metro across the street and, surprised to see the lights still on, let herself in.

Louis Zablonsky’s wife was a nice Jewish girl of working-class origins who had early learned that to expect everything in life is stupid and selfish. Ten years earlier, when she was twenty-five, Zablonsky had plucked her from the second-row chorus line of a no-hope musical and asked her to marry him. He had told her about his disability but she had accepted him nevertheless.

Strangely, it had been a good marriage. Louis had been immeasurably kind and treated her as if he were a too-indulgent father. She doted on him, almost as if she had been his daughter. He had given her everything he could—a fine house, clothes, trinkets, pocket money, security—and she was grateful.

There was one thing he could not give her, of course, but he was understanding and tolerant. All he asked was that he never know who, or be asked to meet any of them. At thirty-five, Beryl was a trifle overripe, a little obvious, earthy and attractive in that kind of way that appeals to younger men, a sentiment she heartily reciprocated. She maintained a small studio flat in the West End for her trysts and unashamedly enjoyed her Saturday-night treats.

Two minutes after entering the house, Beryl Zablonsky was crying and giving her address on the telephone to the ambulance service. They were there six minutes later, put the dying man on a stretcher, and tried to hold him in this life all the way to the Hampstead Free Hospital. Beryl went with him in the ambulance.

On the way he had one brief period of lucidity and beckoned her close to his bleeding mouth. Craning an ear, she caught his few words, and her brow wrinkled in puzzlement.

It was all he was able to say. By the time they got to Hampstead, Louis Zablonsky was another of the night’s dead-on-arrival cases.

Beryl Zablonsky still retained a soft spot for Jim Rawlings. She had had a brief affair with him seven years earlier, before his marriage. She knew his marriage had now broken up and that he was again living alone in the top-floor apartment in Wandsworth whose telephone number she had called often enough to have memorized it.

When she came on the line she was still crying, and at first Rawlings had some trouble, dazed with sleep as he was, in making out who was calling. She was ringing from a public booth in emergency admissions and the pips kept going as she put in fresh coins.

When he understood who it was, Rawlings listened to the message with increasing puzzlement.

“That’s all he said? Just that? All right, love. Look, I’m sorry, really very sorry. I’ll come up when the fuzz have cleared out. See if there’s anything I can do. Oh, and Beryl

... thanks.”

Rawlings replaced the receiver, thought for a moment, and placed two calls, one after the other. Ronnie, from the scrapyard, reached him first, and Syd was there ten minutes later. Both, as instructed, were tooled up, and they were just in time. The visiting party tramped up the eight flights of stairs fifteen minutes later.

Blondie had not wanted to take the second contract, but the extra money the voice on the phone had guaranteed was too much to turn down. He and his mates were East Enders and hated to go south of the river. The animus between the gangs of the East End and the mobs of South London is legendary in the capital’s underworld, and for a southerner to go “up East” uninvited, or the reverse, can be a ticket to a lot of trouble. Still, Blondie reckoned that at three-thirty in the morning things should be quiet enough and he could be back in his own manor with the job done before he was spotted.

When Jim Rawlings opened his door, a heavy hand shoved him straight back down the hallway leading to his sitting room. The two slags came in first, with Blondie bringing up the rear. Rawlings backed fast down the hallway to let them all in. When Blondie slammed the door behind him, Ronnie came out of the kitchen and leveled the first slag with a pickax handle. Syd came out of the coat closet in a rush and used a nailbar on the cranium of the second man. Both went down like felled oxen.

Blondie was scrabbling at the doorknob, trying to get back out to the safety of the landing, when Rawlings, stepping over the bodies, caught him by the scruff and slammed him face-first into a glass-fronted portrait of the Madonna, ownership of which was the nearest the little man had ever come to organized religion. The glass broke and Blondie collected several small shards in his cheeks.

Ronnie and Syd tied up the two heavies while Rawlings hauled Blondie into the sitting room. Minutes later, held at the feet by Ronnie and around the waist by Syd, Blondie was protruding several feet out of the window, eight floors above the ground.

“See that parking lot down there?” Rawlings asked him. Even in the blackness of a winter night, the man could just make out the glint of streetlights on cars a long way down. He nodded.

“Well, in twenty minutes that parking lot’s going to be full of fuzz. Standing around a plastic sheet. And guess who’s going to be under it, all squashed and nasty?”

Blondie, aware that his life expectancy was now measurable in seconds, called from his extremity, “All right, I’ll cough.”

They brought him in and sat him down. He tried to be ingratiating. “Look, we know the score, squire. I was just ’ired to do a job, right? Recover something what got nicked. ...”

“That old man in Golders Green,” said Rawlings.

“Yeah, well, ’e said you’d got it, so I come ’ere.”

“He was a mate of mine. He’s dead.”

“Well, I’m sorry, squire. I didn’t know ’e ’ad an ’eart condition. The boys only tapped

’im a couple of times.”

“You crap-eater. His mouth was all over the parish and all his ribs cracked. So what did you come for?” Blondie told him.

“The what?” asked Rawlings incredulously.

Blondie told him again. “Don’t ask me, squire. I was just paid to get it back. Or find out what ’appened to it.”

“Well,” said Rawlings, “I’m very close to having you and your mates in the Thames before sunup, wearing a nice new line in concrete underpants. Only I don’t need the aggro. So I’m letting you go. You tell your punter it was empty. Completely empty. And I burned it ... to a cinder. There’s nothing left of it. You don’t really think I’d keep something taken from a job? I’m not a complete fool. Now get out.”

At the doorway Rawlings called Ronnie back. “See them back across the river. And give the little rat a present from me, for the old man. Okay?”

Ronnie nodded. Minutes later, down in the parking lot, the more damaged of the East Enders went into the back of his own van, still trussed up. The half-conscious one was put behind the steering wheel with hands untied and told to drive. Blondie was thrown in the front passenger seat, his broken arms in his lap. Ronnie and Syd followed them to Waterloo Bridge, then turned back and went home.

Jim Rawlings was perplexed. He made himself a cup of espresso and thought things over.

He had indeed intended to burn the attaché case amid the rubble. But it was so beautifully hand-tooled; the dull, burnished leather glowed in the light of the flames like metal. He had examined it for any sign of an identification mark. There was none.

Against his better judgment and despite Zablonsky’s warning, he had decided to risk keeping it.

He went to a closet and brought it down from a high shelf. This time he went over it like a professional cracksman. It took him ten minutes to find the stud on the hinge side of the case that slid sideways when pushed hard with the ball of the thumb. From inside the case he heard a sound. When he reopened the case the base had risen half an inch at one side. With a paper knife he eased up the base and glanced inside the flat compartment between the case’s real base and the false one. With tweezers he extracted the ten sheets of paper that lay within.

Rawlings was no expert on government documents, but he could understand the rubric of the Ministry of Defense, and the words TOP SECRET are understandable in any man’s language. He sat back and whistled softly.

Rawlings was a burglar and a thief, but like much of the London underworld he would not have anyone “trash” his country. It is a fact that convicted traitors in prison, along with child molesters, have to be kept in seclusion because professional “faces,” if left alone with such a man, are likely to rearrange his component parts.

Rawlings knew whose apartment he had burgled, but the robbery had not yet been reported, and he suspected, for reasons he could only now fathom, that it might never be.

So he did not need to draw attention to it. On the other hand, with Zablonsky dead, the diamonds were probably gone forever, and his cut of their value with them. He began to hate the man who owned that apartment.

He had already handled the papers without gloves, and he knew his own prints were on file. He dared not identify himself, so he had to wipe the papers clean with a cloth, erasing the traitor’s fingerprints as well.

The next afternoon, Sunday, he mailed a plain brown envelope, well sealed and with an excess of stamps, from a post box in the Elephant and Castle. There was no collection until Monday morning and the package did not arrive at its destination until Tuesday.

That day, January 20, Brigadier Bertie Capstick called John Preston at Gordon. The bluff geniality was gone from his voice. “Johnny, remember what we were talking about the other day? If anything cropped up ...? Well, it has. And it’s not the Christmas fund. It’s big, Johnny. Someone has mailed me something in the post. ... No, not a bomb, though it might turn out worse. It looks as if we have a leak here, Johnny. And he has to be very, very high. That means it comes under your department. I think you’d better come down and take a look.”

That morning also, in the owner’s absence, but by appointment and letting themselves in with provided keys, two workmen arrived at an eighth-floor apartment at Fontenoy House. During the day they chipped the damaged Hamber safe out of the masonry of the wall and replaced it with an identical model. By nightfall they had redecorated that wall as it had been before. Then they left.

Chapter 4

The General Secretary’s response to the memorandum was surprisingly and gratifyingly prompt. Barely more than a day after Philby had consigned the memorandum into the hands of Major Pavlov, the inscrutable and cold-eyed young officer from the Ninth Directorate was back. He bore in his hands a single manila envelope, which he handed to Philby without a word before turning away.

It was another handwritten letter from the General Secretary, brief and to the point as usual.

In it the Soviet leader thanked his friend Philby for his efforts. He himself had been able to confirm the contents of the memorandum as perfectly accurate. In consequence of this, he considered the victory of the British Labour Party at the next general election to have become a matter of top priority for the USSR. He was calling into being a small, restricted advisory committee, responsible and answerable only to himself, to counsel him upon possible future courses. He required and requested Harold Philby to act as adviser to that committee.

Chapter 5

Preston sat in the office of a very worried Bertie Capstick and examined the ten photocopied sheets spread out on the desk, reading each carefully. “How many people have handled the envelope?” he inquired.

“The postman, obviously. God knows how many people in the sorting office. Inside the building, the front-office people, the messenger who brings the morning mail up to the offices, and myself. I can’t see you’ll get much joy out of the envelope.”

“And the papers inside?”

“Just myself, Johnny. Of course I didn’t know what they were until I had pulled them out.”

Preston thought for a while. “Apart from the person who mailed them they might, I suppose, contain the prints of someone else who removed them. I’ll have to ask Scotland Yard to check them out. Don’t have much hope, personally. Now for the contents. It looks like very high-level stuff”

“The tops,” said Capstick gloomily. “Nothing short of top secret, the lot. Some of it very sensitive, concerning our NATO allies; contingency plans for NATO to counter a variety of Soviet threats—that sort of stuff.”

“All right,” said Preston, “let’s just run through the possibilities. Bear with me.

Supposing this was sent back by a public-spirited citizen who for one reason or another did not want to be identified. It happens; people don’t want to get involved. Where could such a person have got these papers? A briefcase left in a cloakroom, a taxi, a club?”

Capstick shook his head. “Not legally, Johnny. This stuff should never under any circumstances have left the building, except possibly in the sealed bag to go across to the Foreign Office or the Cabinet Office. There have been no reports of a Registry bag being tampered with. Besides, they are not marked for a destination outside this building, as they would be if they had been taken legitimately. The people who would even begin to have access to this sort of stuff know the rules. No one—but no one—may carry this sort of stuff home to study. Answer your question?”

“More than somewhat,” said Preston. “It came back from outside the ministry. So it had to be taken outside. Illegally. Gross negligence? Or a deliberate attempt to leak?”

“Look at the dates of origin,” said Capstick. “These ten sheets cover a full month.

There’s no chance they all arrived on a single desk in one day. They had to be collected over a period of time.”

Preston, using his handkerchief, eased the ten documents back into their envelope of arrival. “I’ll have to take them to Charles Street, Bertie. May I use your phone?”

He called Charles Street and asked to be put straight through to the office of Sir Bernard Hemmings. The Director-General was in, and after a delay and some insistence from Preston, took the call himself. Preston simply asked for an appointment within minutes and got it. He put down the phone and turned to Brigadier Capstick.

“Bertie, for the moment don’t do or say anything. To anyone. Just carry on as if this were just another routine day,” said Preston. “I’ll be in touch.”

It was out of the question to leave the ministry with these documents but without an escort. Brigadier Capstick loaned him one of the front-hall commissionaires, a burly former guardsman, Preston left the ministry with the documents in his own briefcase and took a taxi to the Clarges Apartments; he watched the vehicle disappear down Clarges Street before walking the last two hundred yards to Charles and his head office, where he could dismiss his escort. Sir Bernard saw him ten minutes later.

The old spycatcher looked gray, as if he were in pain, which he frequently was. The disease that was growing deep inside him showed little to the observer, but the medical tests left no doubt. A year, they had said, and not operable. He was due to retire on September 1, which with terminal leave meant he could depart in mid-July, six weeks before his sixtieth birthday.

He would probably have gone already but for the personal responsibilities that bore upon him. He had a second wife who had brought to the marriage a stepdaughter on whom the childless man doted. The girl was still at school. Early retirement would severely curtail his pension, leaving his widow and the girl in straitened circumstances.

Wisely or not, he sought to carry on until the statutory retirement date in order to leave them his full pension. After a lifetime in the job, he had virtually no other asset.

Preston explained briefly and concisely what had happened at the Ministry of Defense that morning, and the view of Capstick regarding the feasibility of the documents’ departure from the ministry’s being anything other than a deliberate act.

“Oh, my God, not another,” murmured Sir Bernard. The memory of Vassall and Prime still rankled, as did the acid reaction of the Americans when they had been apprised.

“Well, John, where do you want to start?”

“I’ve told Bertie Capstick to stay silent for the moment,” said Preston. “If we have a genuine traitor inside the ministry, there’s a second mystery: Who sent the stuff back to us? Passerby? Sneak thief? Wife with feelings of remorse? We don’t know. But if we could find that person, we might find where he got the stuff. That would short-circuit a lot of inquiry. I don’t hold out much hope for the envelope—standard brown paper sold in thousands of outlets, normal stamps, address in block capitals written with felt-tip pen, and already handled by a score of anonymous people. But the papers inside might have retained prints. I’d like Scotland Yard to test them all—under supervision, of course.

After that, we may know where we go next.”

“Good thinking. You handle that side of it,” said Sir Bernard. “I’ll have to tell Tony Plumb and probably Perry Jones. I’ll try to set up a meeting over lunch with them both. It depends on what Perry Jones thinks, of course, but we have to set up the JIC on this one.

You get on with your side, John, and stay in touch with me. If the Yard comes up with anything, I shall want to know.”

Down at Scotland Yard, they were very helpful, putting one of their best lab men at Preston’s disposal. Preston stood by the civilian technician as he carefully dusted every sheet. The man could not help reading the TOP SECRET heading on each page.

“Someone been naughty down in Whitehall?” the technician asked archly.

Preston shook his head. “Stupid and lazy,” he lied. “That stuff should have been in the shredder, not a wastepaper basket. It’ll be a hell of a rap on the knuckles for the clerk responsible if we can identify the knuckles.”

The technician lost interest. When he had finished he shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Clean as a whistle. But I’ll tell you one thing. They’ve been wiped. There’s one clear set of prints, of course, probably your own.”

Preston nodded. There was no need to reveal that the single set of prints belonged to Brigadier Capstick.

“That’s the point,” said the technician. “This paper will take prints beautifully, and keep them for weeks, maybe months. There ought to be at least one other set, probably more. The clerk who touched them before you, for example. But nothing. Before they went in the wastepaper basket, they were wiped with a cloth. I can see the fibers. But no prints. Sorry.”

Preston had not even offered him the envelope. Whoever had erased the prints from the documents was not going to leave them on the envelope. Moreover, the envelope would give the lie to his cover story about the negligent clerk. He took the ten secret papers and left. Capstick’s right, he thought. It’s a leak, and a bad one. It was three in the afternoon; he went back to Charles Street and waited for Sir Bernard.

Sir Bernard, with some urging, got his lunch with Sir Anthony Plumb, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and Sir Peregrine Jones, Permanent Under Secretary at the Defense Ministry. They met in a private room at a St. James’s club. Both the other senior civil servants were perturbed by the urgency of the request from the Director-General of Five and ordered their lunch rather pensively. When the waiter had left, Sir Bernard told them what had happened. It ruined both men’s appetites.

“I wish Capstick had spoken to me,” said Sir Perry Jones with some annoyance.

“Damned unsettling to be told like this.”

“I think,” said Sir Bernard, “my man Preston asked him to stay silent awhile longer because if we have a leak high in the ministry, he mustn’t be tipped off we got the documents back.”

Sir Peregrine grunted, slightly mollified.

“What do you think, Perry?” asked Sir Anthony Plumb. “Any innocent, or simply negligent, way that stuff could have left the ministry in photocopy form?”

The top civil servant in Defense shook his head. “The leak needn’t be all that high,” he said. “All the top men have personal staffs. Copies have to be made—sometimes three or four men have to see an original document. But copies are listed as they are made, and later they are destroyed. Three copies taken, three copies shredded after use. Trouble is, a senior man can’t shred all his own stuff. He’ll give it to one of his staff to be done.

They’re vetted, of course, but no system is completely perfect. The thing is, those copies, spanning a whole month between them, being taken outside the ministry. That can’t be accidental or even negligent. That has to be deliberate. Dammit ...” He put down his knife and fork on an almost untouched meal. “I’m sorry, Tony, but I think we’ve got a bad one.”

Sir Tony Plumb looked grave. “I think I’m going to have to call into being a restricted subcommittee of the JIC,” he said. “At this stage, very restricted. Just Home Office, Foreign Office, Defense, the Cabinet Secretary, heads of Five and Six, and someone from GCHQ. I can’t get it smaller.”

It was agreed he would set up the subcommittee for a meeting the next morning and Hemmings would inform them if Preston had any luck at Scotland Yard. On that note they parted.

The full JIC is a rather large committee. Apart from half a dozen ministries and several agencies, the three armed forces, and the two intelligence services, it would also include the London-based representatives of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, of course, America’s CIA.

Plenary meetings tend to be rare and rather formal. Restricted subcommittees are more the rule, because those present, concerned with a specific issue, tend to know each other personally and can get through more work in less time.

The subcommittee Sir Anthony Plumb, as Chairman of the JIC and as the Prime Minister’s personal coordinator of intelligence, had convened on the morning of January 21 was code-named Paragon. It met at 10:00 a.m. in the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, known as COBRA, two floors below ground level in the Cabinet Office on Whitehall, a conference room that is air-conditioned, soundproof, and swept daily for listening devices.

Technically their host was the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Martin Flannery, but he deferred to Sir Anthony, who took the chair. Sir Perry Jones was there from Defense, Sir Patrick (Paddy) Strickland from the Foreign Office, and Sir Hubert Villiers from the Home Office, which politically commands MI5.

GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters, the country’s listening service down in Gloucestershire, so important for surveillance in a highly technical age that it is almost an intelligence service in its own right, had sent its Deputy Director-General, the DG being away on vacation.

Sir Bernard Hemmings came from Charles Street, bringing with him Brian Harcourt-Smith. “I thought it would be better if Brian were fully in the picture,” Hemmings had explained to Sir Anthony, Everyone understood he meant “in case I cannot attend on a future occasion.”

The last man present, sitting impassively at the end of the long table opposite Sir Anthony Plumb, was Sir Nigel Irvine, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6.

Oddly, although MI5 has a Director-General, MI6 does not. It has a Chief, known throughout the intelligence world and Whitehall simply as “C,” whatever his name may be. Nor, even more oddly, does “C” stand for Chief. The first head of MI6 was named Mansfield-Cummings, and the “C” is the initial of the second half of that name. Ian Fleming, ever tongue-in-cheek, took the other initial, “M,” for the Chief in his James Bond novels.

All in all, there were nine men around the table; seven of them were knights of the realm who among them represented more power and influence than any other seven men in the kingdom. They all knew each other well and were on first-name terms. Each could call the two deputy directors-general by their first names, but the DDGs would refer to the senior men as “sir.” It was understood.

Sir Anthony Plumb opened the meeting with a brief description of the previous day’s discovery, which evoked mutters of consternation, and passed the narrative to Sir Bernard Hemmings. The head of Five filled in more details, including the dead end on the fingerprints from Scotland Yard. Sir Perry Jones concluded with his insistence that there could have been no accidental or merely negligent departure of those photocopies from inside the ministry. It would have been deliberate and clandestine.

When he had finished, there was silence around the table. Two single words hung like a specter above them all: damage assessment. How long had it been going on? How many documents had gone missing? To what destination? (Though that seemed fairly obvious.) What kinds of documents had gone? How much damage had been done to Britain and the NATO alliance? And how the devil do we tell our allies?

“Who have you got handling it?” Sir Martin Flannery asked Hemmings.

“His name’s John Preston,” said Hemmings. “He’s C1(A). The ministry’s man, Brigadier Capstick, called him when the package arrived in the mail.”

“We could ... er ... allocate someone more ... experienced,” suggested Brian Harcourt-Smith.

Sir Bernard Hemmings frowned. “John Preston is a late entrant,” he explained. “Been with us six years. I’ve every confidence in him. There is another reason. We have to assume there is a deliberate leak.”

Sir Perry Jones nodded glumly.

“We can also assume,” continued Hemmings, “that the person responsible—I’ll call him ‘Chummy’—is aware of the loss of those documents from his possession. We can hope Chummy does not know they have been anonymously returned to the ministry. Still, Chummy is likely to be worried and lying low. If I put in a whole team of ferrets, Chummy will know it’s over. The last thing we need is a moonlight flit and a starring role at an international press conference in Moscow. I suggest for the moment we try to keep it low-profile and see if we can get an early lead. As newly appointed C1(A), Preston can reasonably make a tour of the ministries and check, in an apparently routine fashion, on procedures. It’s as good a cover as we’ll get. With a bit of luck, Chummy will think nothing of it.”

From his end of the table Sir Nigel Irvine nodded. “Makes sense,” he said.

“Any chance of a lead through one of your sources, Nigel?” asked Anthony Plumb.

“I’ll put out some feelers,” he said noncommittally. Andreyev, he was thinking; he would have to set up a meet with Andreyev. “What about our gallant allies?”

“Informing them, or some of them, will probably come to you,” Plumb reminded Irvine, “so what do you think?”

Sir Nigel had been in his office for seven years and was in his last year. Subtle, experienced, and impassive, he was held in high regard by the allied intelligence services of Europe and North America. Still, being the bearer of these tidings was going to be no joke. Not a good note on which to leave the game. He was thinking of Alan Fox, the CIA’s acerbic and occasionally sarcastic senior liaison man in London. Alan was going to make a five-course dinner out of this. Sir Nigel shrugged and smiled. “I agree with Bernard. Chummy must be a worried man. I think we can assume he will not rush to purloin another bunch of top-secret material in the next few days. It would be nice to be able to go to our allies with some sort of progress, some kind of damage assessment. I’d like to wait and see what this man Preston can do. At least for a few days.”

Sir Anthony nodded. “Damage assessment is of the essence. And that seems almost impossible until we can find Chummy and persuade him to answer a few questions. So for the moment we seem to depend on Preston’s progress.”

“Sounds like the title of a book,” muttered one of the group as they broke up, the permanent under secretaries heading to brief their ministers in closest confidence, and Sir Martin Flannery knowing he was going to have an uncomfortable few moments with the redoubtable Mrs. Margaret Thatcher.

The next day, in Moscow, another committee had its inaugural meeting.

Major Pavlov had called Philby just after lunch to say that he would collect the Comrade Colonel at six; the Comrade General Secretary of the CPSU wished to see him.

Philby supposed (rightly) that the five-hour warning was so that he could be sober and properly dressed.

The roads at that hour, in driving snow, had been clogged with crawling traffic, but the Chaika with the MOC license plates had sped down the center lane reserved for the vlasti, the elite, the fat cats in what Marx had dreamed would be a classless society—it had become a society rigidly structured, layered, and class-ridden as only a vast bureaucratic hierarchy can be.

When they passed the Ukraina Hotel, Philby had thought they might be going all the way to the dacha at Usovo, but after half a mile they swung toward the barred entrance to the huge eight-story building at Kutuzovsky Prospekt 26. Philby was amazed; to enter the private living quarters of the Politburo was a rare honor.

There were plainclothes Ninth Directorate men up and down the pavement, but at the steel entrance gate they were in uniform, thick gray coats, fur shapkas with the earflaps down, and the blue insignia of the Kremlin Guards. Major Pavlov identified himself and the steel gates swung open. The Chaika crept into the courtyard of the hollow square and parked.

Without a word the major led Philby into the building, through two more identity checks, a hidden metal-detector and X-ray scanner, and into the elevator. At the third floor they stepped out; this entire floor belonged to the General Secretary. Major Pavlov knocked on a door; it opened to reveal a majordomo in white, who gestured Philby inside. The silent major stepped back and the door closed behind Philby. Stewards took his coat and hat and he was ushered into a large sitting room, very warm since old men feel the cold, but surprisingly simply furnished.

Unlike Leonid Brezhnev, who had loved the ornate, the rococo, and the luxurious, the General Secretary was known to be an ascetic man in his private tastes. The furniture was Swedish or Finnish whitewood, spare, clean cut, and functional. Apart from two no-doubt-priceless Bokhara rugs, there was nothing antique. There was a low coffee table and four chairs arranged around it, the grouping being open at one end to permit a fifth absent chair. Still standing—no one was about to sit without permission—were three men. Philby knew them all, and they nodded greetings.

One was Vladimir Ilich Krilov. He was a professor of modern history at Moscow University. His real importance was as a walking encyclopedia on the subject of the Socialist and Communist parties of Western Europe; he specialized in Britain. More important, he was a member of the Supreme Soviet, the USSR’s rubber-stamp, one-party parliament; a member of the Academy of Sciences; and a frequent consultant for the International Department of the Central Committee of which the General Secretary had once been the head.

The man in civilian clothes but with a soldierly bearing was General Pyotr Sergeivitch Marchenko. Philby knew him only vaguely, but was aware that he was a senior officer in the GRU, the Soviet armed forces’ own military intelligence arm. Marchenko was an expert on the techniques of internal security and of its counterpart, destabilization, and his particular area of interest had always been the democracies of Western Europe, whose police and internal-security forces he had studied half his life.

The third man was Dr. Josef Viktorovitch Rogov, also an academician, a physicist by discipline. But his fame lay in another title—chess grand master. He was known to be one of the General Secretary’s few personal friends, a man on whom the Soviet leader had called several times in the past when he felt he needed to use that remarkable brain in the planning stages of certain operations.

The four men had been there two minutes when the double doors at the end of the room opened and the undisputed master of Soviet Russia, her dominions, satellites, and colonies, entered.

He was in a wheelchair, pushed by a tall steward in a white jacket. The chair was propelled to the vacant space left for it.

“Please be seated,” said the General Secretary.

Philby was surprised by the changes in the man. He was seventy-five, and his face and the backs of his hands were blotched and mottled in the manner of very old men. The open-heart surgery of 1985 seemed to have worked, and the pacemaker appeared to be doing the job. And yet he looked frail. The white hair, thick and lustrous in the May Day portraits, making him look like every family’s favorite doctor, had almost vanished.

There were brown smudges around both eyes.

A mile up the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, near the old village of Kuntsevo, set in a huge territory inside a two-meter timber palisade fence in the heart of a birch forest, stood the hyperexclusive Central Committee Hospital. It was a modernization and extension of the old Kuntsevo Clinic. In the grounds of the hospital stood Stalin’s old dacha, the surprisingly modest bungalow in which the tyrant had spent so much of his time and where he had finally died. The whole of this dacha had been converted into the country’s most modern intensive-care medical unit for the benefit of this man who now sat in his wheelchair studying them one by one. Six top specialists were on permanent call at the dacha at Kuntsevo, and to them each week went the General Secretary for treatment. It was evident they were keeping him alive—just. But the brain was still there, behind the chilly eyes that looked through the gold-rimmed glasses. He blinked rarely, and then slowly, like a bird of prey.

He wasted no time with preamble. Philby knew he never did. Nodding to the other three, he said, “You Comrades have read the memorandum of our friend, Comrade Colonel Philby.”

It was not a question, but the other three nodded their assent.

“Then you will experience no surprise to learn that I regard the victory of Britain’s Labour Party, and thence of the ultra-left wing of that Party, as a priority of Soviet interest. I wish you four to form a very discreet committee to advise me on any method that might occur to you that would enable us to assist—completely covertly, of course—in that victory.

“You will discuss this with no one. Documents, if any, will be prepared by you alone.

Notes will be burned. Meetings will be held in personal residences. You will not associate in public. You will consult no one else. And you will report to me by telephoning here and speaking to Major Pavlov. I will then arrange a meeting at which you can report your proposals.”

It was clear to Philby that the Soviet leader was taking the issue of confidentiality extremely seriously. He could have held this meeting at his suite of offices in the Central Committee building, the big gray block on Novaya Ploshed where all Soviet leaders have worked since Stalin’s time. But other Politburo members might have seen them arriving or leaving, or heard about their meeting. The General Secretary was evidently establishing a committee that was so totally private that no one else was to be allowed to know of it.

There was another odd thing. Apart from the General Secretary himself—and he was no longer its head—there was no one from the KGB present; yet the First Chief Directorate had massive files on Britain and experts to match. For reasons of his own, the wily leader had chosen to keep the matter outside the service of which he had once been Chairman.

“Are there any points of query?”

Philby raised a tentative hand. The General Secretary nodded.

“Comrade General Secretary, I used to drive myself around in my own Volga. Since my stroke last year, the doctors have prohibited this. Now my wife drives me. But in this instance, for the sake of confidentiality ...”

“I will assign a KGB driver to you for the duration,” said the General Secretary softly.

They all knew the other three men already had drivers, as of right.

There were no other points. At the General Secretary’s nod, the steward propelled the wheelchair and its occupant back through the double doors. The four advisers rose and prepared to leave.

Two days later, in the country dacha of one of the two academics, the Albion Committee went into intensive session.

Book title or not, Preston was making some progress. Even while the inaugural session of Paragon was going on, he was ensconced in the Registry, deep under the Ministry of Defense.

“Bertie,” he had told Brigadier Capstick, “so far as the staff here are concerned, I’m a new broom making a bloody nuisance of myself. Put it about that I’m only trying to make a mark with my own superiors. Routine checking of procedures, nothing to worry about, just a pain in the arse.”

Capstick had done his bit, trumpeting that the new head of C1(A) was going through all the ministries showing what an eager beaver he was. The Registry clerks rolled their eyes to heaven and cooperated with thinly veiled exasperation. But Preston was given access to the files— the withdrawals and the returns, who had seen the documents and, most important, over what dates.

He had one early break. All the papers but one would have been available at the Foreign Office or the Cabinet Office, since they all touched upon Britain’s NATO allies and the areas of joint NATO response to a variety of possible Soviet initiatives.

But one document had not gone outside the Defense Ministry. The Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Peregrine Jones, had recently returned from talks in Washington at the Pentagon; the subject had been joint patrolling by British and American nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean, Central and South Atlantic, and Indian Ocean. He had prepared a draft paper on his talks and circulated it to a score of senior mandarins inside the ministry. The fact that it was among the stolen papers, in photocopy form, meant at least that the leak was inside the one ministry.

Preston began an analysis, going back for months, of the distribution of top-secret documents. It became clear the papers in the returned package covered a period, first to last, of four weeks. It was also plain that every mandarin who had had all those documents on his desk had also had more than these. So the thief was being selective.

There were twenty-four men who could have had access to all ten, Preston established at the end of his second day. Then he began checking absences from offices, trips abroad, incidences of flu—eliminating those who could not have had access within the period of theft.

He was hampered by two things: He had to pretend to examine a host of other withdrawals in order not to draw attention to those particular ten documents. Even Registry clerks gossip, and the source of the leak could have been a low-level staffer, a secretary or typist, capable of exchanging coffee-break gossip with a clerk. Second, he could not penetrate to the floors above to check on the number of photocopies made of originals. He knew it was common for one man to have a top-secret document officially out to him by name, but that man might wish to take the advice of a colleague. So a photocopy would be run off, numbered, and given to the colleague. On its return it would be shredded—or, in this case, not. The master document would then go back to Registry.

But several pairs of eyes could have seen the photocopy.

To solve the second problem Preston returned to the ministry with Capstick after dark and spent two nights on the upper floors—empty apart from the incurious cleaning ladies—checking the number of copies run off. More eliminations were made possible where a document had gone to a senior civil servant who made no copies at all before returning it to Registry. On January 27 Preston reported back to Charles Street with an interim progress sheet.

It was Brian Harcourt-Smith who received him. Sir Bernard was away from the office again.

“Glad you’ve got something for us, John,” said Harcourt-Smith. “I’ve had two calls from Sir Anthony Plumb. It seems the Paragon people are pressing. Shoot.”

“First,” said Preston, “the documents. They were carefully selected, as if our thief were taking the sort of stuff he had been asked for. That requires expertise. I think that counts out really low-level staffers. They would operate according to the magpie syndrome, grabbing what came by. It’s tentative but it cuts down the numbers. I think it’s somebody of experience and with an awareness of content. Which counts out clerks and messengers.

In any case, the leak isn’t in Registry. No broken bag seals, no illicit withdrawals or unauthorized copying.”

Harcourt-Smith nodded. “So you think it’s upstairs?”

“Yes, Brian, I do. Here’s the second reason why. I spent two nights checking every single copy made. There are no discrepancies. So that leaves only one thing. The shredding of copies. Someone has had three copies to shred and destroyed only two, smuggling the third out of the building. Now to numbers of senior men who could have done that.

“There were twenty-four who could have had access to all ten documents. I think I can count out twelve because they got only copies—one each—on a give-me-your-advice basis. The rules are quite clear. A man receiving a photocopy on that basis must return it to the man who sent it to him. To retain one would be irregular and arouse suspicion. To retain ten would be unheard of. So we come to the twelve men who had the originals out from Registry.

“Of these, three were away for varying reasons on the days shown as the withdrawal dates on the photocopies returned by the anonymous sender. Those men made their withdrawals on other days and must be counted out. That leaves nine.

“Of these nine, four never had any copies made for advisory purposes at all, and of course unauthorized copying without logging is not possible.

“And then there were five,” murmured Harcourt-Smith.

“Right. Now, it’s only tentative, but it’s the best I can do for the moment. Three of those five, during the period, had other documents on their desks that fall well within the type of the stolen papers, and which were much more interesting, but which were not stolen. By rights they ought to have been stolen. So I come down to two men. Nothing certain, just prime suspects.”

He pushed two files across the desk to Harcourt-Smith, who looked at them with curiosity.

“Sir Richard Peters and Mr. George Berenson,” Harcourt-Smith read. “The first being the Assistant Under Secretary responsible for International and Industrial Policy, and the second the Deputy Chief of Defense Procurement. Both men would have personal staffs, of course.”

“Yes.”

“But you are not listing their staffers as suspects? May I ask why?”

“They are suspects,” said Preston. “Those two men would probably rely on their assistants to make the copies and later shred them. But that widens the net to a dozen people. If one could clear the two top men, trapping the underling with the department head’s cooperation would be child’s play. I’d like to start with the top two.”

“What are you asking for?” said Harcourt-Smith.

“Total covert surveillance on both men for a limited period, with postal intercept and telephone tap,” said Preston.

“I’ll ask the Paragon Committee,” said Harcourt-Smith. “But these are senior men.

You’d better be right.”

The second meeting of Paragon took place in the COBRA late that afternoon. Harcourt-Smith deputized for Sir Bernard Hemmings. He had a transcript of Preston’s report for everyone present. The senior men read the report in silence. When all had finished, Sir Anthony Plumb asked, “Well?”

“Seems logical,” said Sir Hubert Villiers.

“I think Mr. Preston has done well in the time,” said Sir Nigel Irvine.

Harcourt-Smith smiled thinly. “Of course, it could be neither of these two very senior men,” he said. “A clerk, given the copies to shred, could just as easily have taken ten documents.”

Brian Harcourt-Smith was the product of a very minor private school and carried on his shoulder a sizable and quite unnecessary chip. Beneath his polished veneer he had a considerable capacity for ill will. All his life he had resented the seemingly effortless ease that the men around him could bring to the business of life. He resented their endless and interwoven network of contacts and friendships, often forged long ago in schools, universities, or fighting regiments, on which they could draw when they wished. It was called the “old boy network,” or the “magic circle,” and he was annoyed most of all that he was not a member of it. One day, he had told himself many times, when he had the director-generalship and his knighthood, he would sit among these men as an equal, and they would listen, really listen to him.

Down the table, Sir Nigel Irvine, a perceptive man, caught the look in Harcourt-Smith’s eyes and was troubled. There was a capacity for anger in that man, he mused.

Irvine was a contemporary of Sir Bernard Hemmings and they went back a long way. He wondered about the DG’s successor in the autumn. He wondered about the anger in Harcourt-Smith, the hidden ambition, and where they might both lead or, perhaps, already had led.

“Well, we’ve heard what Mr. Preston wants,” said Sir Anthony Plumb. “Total surveillance. Does he get it?”

The hands went up.

Every Friday in MI5 is held what they call the “bidding” conference. The director of K Branch, he of the joint sections, is in the chair. At the bidding conference the other directors put in their requests for what they think they need—finance, technical services, and surveillance of their pet suspects. The pressure is always on the director of A Branch, who controls the watchers. That week the conference was preempted as far as the watchers were concerned. Those attending on Friday, January 30, found the cupboard was bare. Two days earlier Harcourt-Smith, at the requirement of Paragon, had allocated to Preston the watchers he wanted. At six watchers to a team (four forming the “box” and two in parked cars) and four teams in every twenty-four hours, and with two men to survey, he had taken forty-eight watchers off other duties. There was some outrage, but nobody could do anything about it.

“There are two targets,” the briefing officers in Cork told the teams. “One is married but his wife is away in the country. They live in a West End apartment and he usually walks to the ministry every morning, about a mile and a half. The other is a bachelor and lives outside Edenbridge, in Kent. He commutes by train every day. We start tomorrow.”

Technical Support took care of the telephone tap and the mail intercept, and both Sir Richard Peters and Mr. George Berenson went under the microscope.

The A team was just too late to observe the delivery by hand of a package at Fontenoy House. It was collected from the hall porter by the addressee on his return from work. It contained a replica, using zirconium stones, of the Glen Suite, which was deposited with Coutts Bank the following day.

Chapter 6

Friday the thirteenth is supposed to be an unlucky day, but for John Preston it was the opposite. It brought him his first break in the wearisome tailing of the two senior civil servants.

The surveillance had gone on for sixteen days without result. Both men were creatures of habit and neither was surveillance-conscious—that is, they did not look for a tail and therefore made the watchers’ task easy. But boring.

The Londoner left his Belgravia apartment every day at the same hour, walked to Hyde Park Corner, turned down Constitution Hill and across St. James’s Park. That brought him to Horse Guards Parade. He went across this, traversed Whitehall, and went straight into the ministry. He sometimes lunched out, sometimes inside. He spent most evenings at home or in his club.

The commuter, who lived alone in a picturesque cottage outside Edenbridge, caught the same train to London each day, strolled from Charing Cross Station to the ministry, and disappeared inside. The watchers “housed” him each night and kept chilly vigil until relieved at dawn by the first day-team. Neither man did anything suspicious. Mail intercepts and phone taps on both men showed up only the usual bills, personal mail, banal phone calls, and a modest and respectable social life. Until the thirteenth of February.

Preston, as operations controller, was in the radio-link room in the basement at Cork Street when a call came through from the B team following Sir Richard Peters.

“Joe is hailing a cab. We’re behind him in the cars.”

In watcher parlance, the target is always “Joe,” “Chummy,” or “our friend.” When the B team came off shift, Preston had a session with its leader, Harry Burkinshaw. He was a small, rotund man, middle-aged, a veteran of his job-for-life profession, who could spend hours blended into the background of a London street and then move with remarkable speed if the target tried to slip him.

He was wearing a plaid jacket and porkpie hat, carried a raincoat, and wore a camera around his neck, like an ordinary American tourist. As with all watchers, the hat, jacket, and raincoat were soft and reversible, providing six combinations. Watchers treasure their props and the various roles into which they can slip in a matter of seconds.

“So what happened, Harry?” Preston asked.

“He came out of the ministry at the usual time. We picked him up, got him in the middle of the box. But instead of walking in the usual direction, he went as far as Trafalgar Square and hailed a cab. We were at the end of the shift. We alerted our mates on the swing shift to hold station and set off after the cab.

“He dismissed it by Panzer’s Delicatessen on the Bayswater Road and ducked down Clanricarde Gardens. Halfway down, he shot into a front forecourt and went down the steps to the basement. One of my lads got close enough to see there was nothing down the steps but the door of the basement flat. He had shot in there. Then my boy had to move on—Joe was coming back out again and up the steps. He went back to the Bayswater Road, took another cab, and headed for the West End again. After that, he resumed his normal routine. We passed him to the swing shift at the bottom of Park Lane.”

“How long was he down the basement steps?”

“Thirty, forty seconds,” said Burkinshaw. “Either he was let in damn fast or he had his own key. No lights showing inside. Looked like he’d stopped by to pick up mail or check for it.”

“What kind of house?”

“Dirty-looking house, dirty-looking basement. It’ll all be in the log in the morning.

Mind if I go now? My feet are killing me.”

Preston spent the evening wondering about the incident. Why on earth would Sir Richard Peters want to visit a seedy flat in Bayswater? For forty seconds. He couldn’t see someone inside. Not enough time. Pick up mail? Or leave a message? Preston arranged for the house to be put under surveillance as well, and a car with a man and a camera was there within an hour.

Weekends are weekends. Preston could have rousted the civilian authorities to start investigating the apartment through Saturday and Sunday, but that would have caused waves. This was an ultra-covert surveillance. He decided to wait until Monday.

The Albion Committee had agreed upon Professor Krilov as its chairman and spokesman, and it was he who alerted Major Pavlov that the committee was ready to report its considerations to the General Secretary. That was on Saturday morning. Within hours, each of the four on the committee had been told to report to the Comrade General Secretary’s weekend dacha at Usovo.

The other three came in their own cars. Major Pavlov drove Philby, who was therefore able to dispense with Gregoriev, the KGB pool chauffeur who had been driving him about for the past three weeks.

West of Moscow, across the Uspenskoye Bridge and lying close to the banks of the Moskva River, is a complex of artificial villages around which are grouped the weekend retreats of the high and mighty in Soviet society. Even here the gradings are inflexible. At Peredelkino are the cottages of artists, academics, and military men; at Zhukovka are the dachas of the Central Committee and others just below the Politburo; but the last-named, the men at the supreme pinnacle, have their homes grouped around Usovo, the most exclusive area of all. The original Russian dacha was a country cottage, but these are veritable mansions of luxury, set in hundreds of acres of pine and birch forest, the territories patrolled around the clock by cohorts of Ninth Directorate bodyguards to ensure the utter privacy and security of the vlasti.

Philby knew that every member of the Politburo, on elevation to that office, secured the right to four residences. There is the family apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt that, unless the hierarch falls into disgrace, will remain in the family forever. Then there is the official villa in the Lenin Hills, always maintained with staff and comforts, inevitably bugged, and hardly ever used, save for the entertaining of foreign dignitaries. Third comes the dacha in the forests west of Moscow, which the newly promoted bigshot may design and build to his own tastes. Last, there is the summer retreat, often in the Crimea, on the Black Sea. The General Secretary, however, had long ago had his summer home built at Kislovodsk, a mineral-water spa in the Caucasus specializing in the treatment of abdominal ailments.

Philby had never seen the General Secretary’s dacha at Usovo. As the Chaika arrived that freezing evening, he observed it was long and low, of cut stone, with shingled roof, and, like the furniture at Kutuzovsky Prospekt, owed much to Scandinavian simplicity.

Inside, the temperature was very high and the General Secretary received them all in a spacious sitting room where a roaring log fire added to the heat. After the minimal formalities the General Secretary gestured to Professor Krilov to reveal to him the Albion Committee’s thinking.

“You will understand, Comrade General Secretary, that what we have sought is a means of swinging a portion of the British electorate of not less than ten percent across the nation to two cardinal viewpoints: one is a massive loss of their popular confidence in the existing Conservative government, the second a conviction that in the election of a Labour government lies their best chance for contentment and security.

“In order to simplify that search, we asked ourselves if there were not perhaps one single issue that could dominate, or be brought to dominate, the entire election. After profound consideration we have all come to the view that no economic aspect—not job losses, factory closures, increasing automation in industry, even public-service cuts— would constitute this single issue we have been seeking.

“We believe there is but one: the greatest and most emotional noneconomic political issue in Britain and all Western Europe at the present time. This is the question of nuclear disarmament. This has become huge in the West, involving millions of ordinary people. It is basically a matter of mass fear, and it is this which we feel should become the main thrust, the issue we should covertly exploit.”

“And your specific proposals?” asked the General Secretary silkily.

“You will know, Comrade General Secretary, of our efforts so far in this field. Not millions but billions of rubles have been spent encouraging the various antinuclear lobbies, in proposing to the West European people that unilateral nuclear disarmament really is synonymous with their best chance for peace. Our covert efforts and their results have been huge, but nothing compared to what we believe should now be sought and achieved.

“The British Labour Party is the only one of four contesting the next election that is committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament. Our view is that all the stops should now be pulled out, using funds, disinformation, propaganda, to persuade that minimum wavering ten percent of the British electorate to switch their vote, convinced at last that the Labour vote is the peace vote.”

The silence as they waited for the General Secretary’s reaction was almost tangible. He spoke at last. “Those efforts that we have made and of which you spoke—have they worked?”

Professor Krilov looked as if he had been hit by an air-to-air missile. Philby caught the Soviet leader’s mood and shook his head. The General Secretary noted the gesture and went on speaking.

“For eight years we have put a huge effort into destabilizing the confidence of the Western European electorates in their governments on this issue. Today, true, all the unilateralist movements are so left wing that by one means or another they have come under the control of our friends and work to our ends. The campaign has brought a rich harvest in agents of sympathy and influence. But—”

The General Secretary suddenly smacked both palms onto the arms of his wheelchair.

The violent gesture in a man normally so ice-cold shook his four listeners badly.

“Nothing has changed,” shouted the General Secretary. His voice then resumed its even tenor. “Five years ago, and four years ago, all our experts on the Central Committee and in the universities and the KGB analytical study groups told us in the Politburo that the unilateralist movements were so powerful that they could stop the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles. We believed that. We were misled. At Geneva we dug in our toes, persuaded by our own propaganda that if we held on long enough the governments of Western Europe would give in to the huge peace demonstrations we were covertly supporting and refuse to deploy Pershing and Cruise. But they did deploy, and we had to walk out.”

Philby nodded, looking suitably modest. Back in 1983 he had stuck his neck out with a paper suggesting that the peacenik movement in the West, despite noisy popular demonstrations, would not swing any major election or change any government’s mind.

He had been proved right. Things, he suspected, were moving his way.

“It rankles, Comrades, it still rankles,” said the General Secretary. “Now you are proposing more of the same. Comrade Colonel Philby, what are the results of the latest British public-opinion polls on this issue?”

“Not good, I’m afraid,” said Philby. “The last suggests that twenty percent of the British now support unilateral nuclear disarmament. But even that is confusing. Among the working class, Labour’s traditional voters, the figure is lower. It is a dismal fact, Comrade General Secretary, that the British working class is one of the most conservative groups in the world. Polls also show they are among the most patriotic, in a traditionalist way. During the Falklands affair, die-hard trade unionists threw the rule book away and worked around the clock to get the warships ready for sea. I’m afraid if one is going to face harsh reality, one must admit that the British workingman has steadily refused to see that his best interests lie with us, or at least in a weakening of Britain’s defenses. And there is no reason to think he will change his mind now.”

“Harsh reality—that is what I asked this committee to face,” said the General Secretary. He paused again for several more minutes. Then: “Go away, Comrades. Go back to your deliberations. And bring me a plan—an active measure—that will exploit as never before that mass fear of which you spoke; a plan that will persuade even levelheaded men and women to vote to get rid of nuclear weapons from their soil, and thus to vote Labour.”

When they had gone the old Russian rose and with the aid of a cane walked slowly to the window. He gazed out at the crackling birch forest beneath the snow. When he had swept to power with his predecessor still unburied, he had been personally committed to the achievement of five tasks in the time left to him. He wanted to be remembered as the man who had increased food production and its efficient distribution; who had doubled consumer goods in number and quality by a huge overhaul of a chronically inefficient industry; who had tightened Party discipline at all levels; who had extirpated the scourge of corruption that gnawed at the country’s vitals; and who had secured the final supremacy in men and arms over his country’s serried ranks of enemies. Now he knew he had failed in them all. He was an old man, and sick, and time was running out. He had always prided himself on being a pragmatic man, a realistic man, within the framework of strict Marxist orthodoxy. But even pragmatic men have their dreams, and old men have their vanities. His dream was simple: he wanted one gigantic triumph, one great monument that was his and his alone. Just how much he wanted it, that bitter winter night, he alone knew.

On Sunday, Preston took a stroll past the house in Clanricarde Gardens, a street running due north from the Bayswater Road. Burkinshaw had been right; it was one of those once-prosperous Victorian five-story houses that had gone badly to seed, the sort now let out in bedsitters. Its small front area was weed-infested; five steps ran up to a peeling front door above the street. From the front patch, a set of steps led down to a tiny basement area, with the top of a door just in view—the basement flat. Preston puzzled again as to why a senior civil servant and knight of the realm should wish to visit such a dingy place.

Somewhere in view, he knew, would be the watcher, probably in a parked vehicle with a long-lens camera at the ready. He made no attempt to spot the man, but knew he himself would have been seen. (On Monday he showed up in the log as “an undistinguished character who walked by at 11:21 and showed some interest in the house.” Thanks for nothing, Preston thought.) On Monday morning he visited the local town hall and had a look at the list of householders for that street. The owner of the house in question was a Mr. Michael Z. Mifsud. Preston was grateful for the “Z”; there could not be many of that name around.) Called up on the radio, the watcher at Clanricarde Gardens slipped across the street and checked the bell-push buttons. M. Mifsud lived on the ground floor. Owner-occupier, thought Preston, letting out the rest of the house as furnished accommodation; tenants of unfurnished property would pay their own local assessments.

In the late morning he ran Michael Z. Mifsud through the immigration computer down at Croydon. He was from Malta and had been in the country thirty years. Nothing known, but a question mark fifteen years back. Not followed up, and no explanation. Scotland Yard’s Criminal Records Office computer explained the question mark: the man had nearly been deported. Instead, he had served two years for living off immoral earnings.

After lunch Preston went to see Armstrong in Finance at Charles Street. “Can I be an Inland Revenue inspector tomorrow?” he asked.

Armstrong sighed. “I’ll try to fix it. Call back before closing time.”

Then Preston went along to Five’s legal adviser. “Would you ask Special Branch to fix me a search warrant for this address? Also I want a sergeant on call in case I want to make an arrest.” MI5 has no powers of arrest. Only a police officer can take a suspect into custody, save in emergencies, when a citizen’s arrest is possible. When MI5 wants to pick someone up, Special Branch usually obliges.

“You’re not going to do a break-in?” asked the lawyer suspiciously.

“Certainly not,” said Preston. “I want to wait until the tenant of this flat turns up, then move in and search. An arrest may be necessary, depending on what I find.”

“All right,” sighed the lawyer. “I’ll get on to our tame magistrate. You’ll have them both tomorrow morning.”

Just before five that afternoon, Preston picked up his Inland Revenue identification from Finance. Armstrong gave him another card, with a telephone number, “If there’s a query, have the suspect phone that number. It’s the Inland Revenue in Willesden Green. Ask for Mr. Charnley. He’ll vouch for you. Your name is Brent, by the way.”

“So I see,” said Preston.

Mr. Michael Z. Mifsud, interviewed the next morning, was not a nice man. Unshaven, in an undershirt, surly, and uncooperative. But he let Preston into his grubby sitting room.

“What you tell me?” protested Mifsud. “What income? All I make, I declare.”

“Mr. Mifsud, I assure you it’s a routine spot check. Happens all the time. You declare all the rents, you’ve got nothing to hide.”

“I got nothing to hide. So you take it up with my accountants,” said Mifsud defiantly.

“I can if you wish,” said Preston. “But I assure you that if I do, your accountant’s fees will eventually come to an awful lot of money. Let me be frank: if the rent roll is in order, I just go away and do another spot check on someone else. But if, God forbid, any of these flats are let out for immoral purposes, that’s different. Me, I’m concerned with income taxes. But I’d be duty bound to pass my findings on to the police. You know what living off immoral earnings means?”

“What you mean?” protested Mifsud. “Is no immoral earnings here. Is all good tenants.

They pay rents, I pay taxes. Everything.”

But he had gone a shade paler, and grudgingly produced the rent books. Preston pretended to be interested in them all. He noted that the basement was let to a Mr. Dickie at £140 per week. It took an hour to get all the details. Mifsud had never met the basement tenant. He paid by cash, regular as clockwork. But there was a typed letter that had originated the tenancy. It was signed by Mr. Dickie. Preston took the letter with him when he left, over Mifsud’s protests. By lunchtime he had handed it to Scotland Yard’s graphology people, along with copies of Sir Richard Peters’s handwriting and signature.

By close of play the Yard had rung him back. Same handwriting but disguised.

So, thought Preston, Peters himself maintains his own pied-à-terre. For cozy meetings with his controller? Most probably. Preston gave his orders: if Peters started heading toward the flat again, he, Preston, was to be alerted at once, wherever he was. The watch on the basement flat was to be maintained in case anyone else showed up.

Wednesday dragged by, and Thursday. Then, as he left the ministry on Thursday evening, Sir Richard Peters hailed a cab again and directed it toward Bayswater. The watchers contacted Preston in the bar at Gordon Street, whence he called Scotland Yard and hauled the designated Special Branch sergeant out of the canteen. He gave the man on the telephone the address. “Meet me across the street, as fast as you can, but no noise,” he said.

They all congregated in the cold darkness of the pavement opposite the suspect house.

Preston had dismissed his taxi two hundred yards up the street. The Special Branch man had come in an unmarked car, which, with its driver, was parked around a corner with no lights. Detective Sergeant Lander turned out to be young and a bit green; it was his first bust with the MI5 people and he seemed impressed. Harry Burkinshaw materialized out of the shadows.

“How long’s he been in there, Harry?”

“Fifty-five minutes,” said Burkinshaw.

“Any visitors?”

“Nope.”

Preston took out his search warrant and showed it to Lander. “Okay, let’s go in,” he said.

“Is he likely to be violent, sir?” asked Lander.

“Oh, I hope not,” said Preston. “He’s a middle-aged civil servant. He might get hurt.”

They crossed the street and quietly entered the front yard. A dim light was burning behind the curtains of the basement flat. They descended the steps in silence and Preston rang the bell. There was the clack of heels inside, and the door opened. Framed in the light was a woman.

When she saw the two men, the smile of welcome dropped from her heavily carmined lips. She tried to shut the door but Lander pushed it open, elbowed her aside, and ran past her.

She was no spring chicken, but she had done her best. Wavy dark hair falling to her shoulders framed her heavily made-up face. There had been extravagant use of mascara and shadow around the eyes, rouge on the cheeks, and a smear of bright lipstick across the mouth. Before she had time to close the front of her housecoat, Preston caught a glimpse of black stockings and garter belt, and a tight-waisted bodice picked out in red ribbon.

He guided her by the elbow down the hall to the sitting room and sat her down. She stared at the carpet. They sat in silence while Lander searched the flat. The sergeant knew that fugitives sometimes hid under beds and in closets and he did a good job. After ten minutes he emerged, slightly flushed, from the rear area.

“Not a sign of him, sir. He must have done a bunk through the back and over the garden fence to the next street.”

Just then there was a ring at the front door.

“Your people, sir?”

Preston shook his head. “Not with a single ring,” he replied.

Lander went to open the front door. Preston heard an oath and the sound of running footsteps. Later it transpired that a man had come to the door and, on seeing the detective opening it, had tried to flee. Burkinshaw’s people had closed in at the top of the steps and held the man until the pursuing Lander had got the cuffs on him. After that, the man went quietly and was led away to the police car.

Preston sat with the woman and listened to the tumult die away. “It’s not an arrest,” he said quietly, “but I think we should go to head office, don’t you?”

The woman nodded miserably. “Do you mind if I get changed first?”

“I think that would be a good idea, Sir Richard,” said Preston.

An hour later, a burly but very gay truck driver was released from Paddington Green police station, having been seriously advised on the unwisdom of answering blind-date advertisements in adult contact magazines.

John Preston escorted Sir Richard Peters to the country, stayed with him, listening to what he had to say, until midnight, drove back to London, and spent the rest of the night writing his report. This document was in front of each member of the Paragon Committee when they met at eleven in the morning of Friday, February 20. The expressions of bewilderment and distaste were general.

Good grief, thought Sir Martin Flannery, the Cabinet Secretary, to himself. First Hayman, then Trestrail, then Dunnett, and now this. Can’t these wretches ever keep their flies zipped?

The last man to finish the report looked up. “Quite appalling,” remarked Sir Hubert Villiers of the Home Office.

“Don’t think we’ll be wanting the chap back at the ministry,” said Sir Perry Jones of Defense.

“Where is he now?” asked Sir Anthony Plumb of MIS’s Director-General, who sat next to Brian Harcourt-Smith.

“In one of our houses in the country,” said Sir Bernard Hemmings. “He has already telephoned the ministry, purporting to phone from his cottage at Edenbridge, to say he slipped on a patch of ice yesterday evening and cracked a bone in his ankle. He said he’s in a cast and will be off for a fortnight. Doctor’s orders. That should hold things for a while.”

“Aren’t we overlooking one question?” murmured Sir Nigel Irvine of MI6.

“Regardless of his unusual tastes, is he our man? Is he the source of the leak?”

Brian Harcourt-Smith cleared his throat. “Interrogation, gentlemen, is in its early stages,” he said, “but it does seem likely that he is. Certainly he would be a prime candidate for recruitment by blackmail.”

“Time is becoming of the very essence,” interposed Sir Patrick Strickland of the Foreign Office. “We still have the matter of damage assessment hanging over us, and at my end the question of when and what we tell our allies.”

“We could ... er ... intensify the interrogation,” suggested Harcourt-Smith. “I believe that way we would have our answer within twenty-four hours.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. The thought of one of their colleagues, whatever he had done, being worked over by the “hard” team was a disquieting one. Sir Martin Flannery felt his stomach turn. He had a deep personal aversion to violence. “Surely that is not necessary at this stage?” he asked.

Sir Nigel Irvine raised his head from the report. “Bernard, this man Preston, the investigating officer—he seems a pretty good man.”

“He is,” affirmed Sir Bernard Hemmings.

“I was wondering ...” continued Sir Nigel with deceptive diffidence. “He seems to have spent some hours with Peters in the immediate aftermath of the events in Bayswater. I wonder if it might be helpful for this committee to have the opportunity of listening to him.”

“I debriefed him myself this morning,” interjected Harcourt-Smith rapidly. “I am sure I can answer any questions as to what happened.”

The Chief of Six was consumed with apology. “My dear Brian, there is no doubt in my mind about that,” he said. “It is just that ... well ... sometimes one can get an impression from interrogating a suspect that ill conveys itself to paper. I don’t know what the committee thinks, but we are going to have to make a decision as to what happens next. I just thought it might be helpful to listen to the one man who has talked to Peters.”

There was a succession of nods around the table. Hemmings dispatched an evidently irritated Harcourt-Smith to the telephone to summon Preston. While the mandarins waited, coffee was served.

Preston was shown in thirty minutes later. The senior men examined him with some curiosity. He was given a chair at the center of the table, opposite his own Director-General and DDG.

Sir Anthony Plumb explained the committee’s dilemma and asked, “Just what happened between you?”

Preston thought for a moment. “In the car, on the way down to the country, he broke down. Up till then he had maintained a form of composure, although under great strain. I took him down alone, driving myself. He started to cry, and to talk.”

“Yes?” prompted Sir Anthony. “What did he say?”

“He admitted his taste for transvestite fetishism, but seemed stunned by the accusation of treason. He denied it hotly, and continued to do so until I left him with the ‘minders.’ ”

“Well, he would,” said Brian Harcourt-Smith. “He could still be our man.”

“Yes, indeed, he could,” agreed Preston.

“But your impression, your gut feeling?” murmured Sir Nigel Irvine.

Preston took a deep breath. “Gentlemen, I don’t think he is.”

“May we ask why?” said Sir Anthony.

“As Sir Nigel implies, it’s just a gut feeling,” said Preston. “I’ve seen two men whose world had shattered about them and who believed they had not much left to live for.

When men in that mood talk, they tend to spill the lot. A rare man of great composure, like Philby or Blunt, can hold out. But these were ideological traitors, convinced Marxists. If Sir Richard Peters was blackmailed into treachery, I think he would either have admitted it when the house of cards came tumbling down, or at least shown no surprise at the accusation of treason. He did show complete surprise; he could have been acting, but I think he was beyond it by then. Either that, or he ought to have an Oscar.”

It was a long speech from such a junior man in the presence of the Paragon Committee, and there was silence for a while. Harcourt-Smith was looking daggers at Preston. Sir Nigel was studying Preston with interest. In view of his office, he knew about the Londonderry incident that had blown Preston’s cover as an Army undercover man. He also noted Harcourt-Smith’s gaze and wondered why the DDG at Five seemed to dislike Preston. His own opinion of the man was favorable.

“What do you think, Nigel?” asked Anthony Plumb.

Irvine nodded. “I, too, have seen the mood of utter collapse that overtakes a traitor when he is exposed. Vassall, Prime—both weak and inadequate men, and they both spilled the lot when the house came tumbling down. So, if not Peters, that seems to leave George Berenson.”

“It’s been a month,” complained Sir Patrick Strickland. “We really have got to nail the culprit one way or the other.”

“The culprit could still be a personal assistant or secretary on the staff of either of these two men,” pointed out Sir Perry Jones. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Preston?”

“Quite true, sir,” said Preston.

“Then we are going to have to clear George Berenson or prove he’s our man,” said Sir Patrick in some exasperation. “Even if he’s cleared, that leaves us Peters. And if he won’t cough, we’re back to square one.”

“May I make a suggestion?” asked Preston quietly.

There was some surprise. He had not been asked here to make suggestions. But Sir Anthony Plumb was a courteous man. “Please do,” he said.

“The ten documents returned by the anonymous sender all fell within a pattern,” said Preston.

The men around the table nodded.

“Seven of them,” Preston continued, “contained material affecting Britain’s and NATO’s naval dispositions in the Atlantic, North or South. That seems to be an area of NATO planning of particular interest to our man or his controllers. Would it be possible to cause to pass across Mr. Berenson’s desk a document of such irresistible tastiness that, if he is the guilty party, he would be sorely tempted to abstract a copy and make a move to pass it on?”

A number of heads around the table nodded thoughtfully.

“Smoke him out, you mean?” mused Sir Bernard Hemmings. “What do you think, Nigel?”

“You know, I think I like it. It might just work. Could it be done, Perry?”

Sir Peregrine Jones pursed his lips. “Actually, more realistically than you think,” he said. “When I was in America, the idea was mooted—although I haven’t passed it further yet—that we might one day need to increase to refueling and revictualing level our installations on Ascension Island, to include facilities for our nuclear submarines. The Americans were very interested, and suggested they might help with the costs if they, too, could have access to them. It would save our subs going back to Faslane and those endless demonstrations up there, and save the Yankees having to go back to Norfolk, Virginia. I suppose I could prepare a very confidential personal paper, beefing that idea up to agreed-policy level, and slip it across four or five desks, including Berenson’s.”

“Would Berenson normally see that kind of paper?” asked Sir Paddy Strickland.

“Certainly,” said Jones. “As Deputy Chief of Defense Procurement he is responsible for the nuclear side of things. He would have to get it, along with three or four others.

Some copies would be run off for close colleagues’ eyes only. Then they would be returned and shredded. Originals back to me, by hand.”

It was agreed. The Ascension Island paper would land on George Berenson’s desk on Tuesday.

As they left the Cabinet Office, Sir Nigel Irvine invited Sir Bernard Hemmings to join him for lunch.

“Good man, that Preston,” suggested Irvine, “like the cut of his jib. Is he loyal to you?”

“I’ve every reason to think so,” said Sir Bernard, puzzled.

Ah, that might explain things, thought C enigmatically.

That Sunday, the twenty-second, the British Prime Minister spent at her official country residence, Chequers, in the county of Buckinghamshire. In conditions of complete secrecy she asked three of her closest advisers in the Cabinet and the chairman of the Conservative Party to -drive over privately to see her.

What she had to say caused them all deep thought. That coming June she would have been in power for four years of her second term. She was determined to go for a third successive election victory. The economic indicators suggested a downturn in the autumn, accompanied by a wave of wage demands. There could be strikes. She wished to have no repeat of the “winter of discontent” of 1978, when a wave of work stoppages crippled the credibility of the Labour government and led to its fall in May 1979.

Furthermore, with the Social Democrat/Liberal alliance stuck in the public-opinion polls at twenty percent, Labour, with its newfound veneer of unity and moderation, had increased its popular rating to thirty-seven percent of the electorate, just six points behind the Conservatives. And the gap was closing. In short, she wanted to go for a snap June election, but without the damaging speculation that preceded and hastened her decision in 1983. A sudden, out-of-the-blue declaration and a three-week election campaign was what she wanted, not in 1988, or even in the autumn of 1987, but that very summer.

She bound her colleagues to silence, but the date she favored was the penultimate Thursday in June, the eighteenth.

On Monday, Sir Nigel Irvine had his meeting with Andreyev. It was very covert, on Hampstead Heath. A screen of Irvine’s own people was scattered over the heath to ensure Andreyev was himself not under surveillance by the Soviet Embassy’s own KR (counterintelligence) goons. But he was clean. Britain’s own cover of the Soviet diplomat’s movements had been called off.

Sir Nigel Irvine handled Andreyev as a “director’s case.” It is unusual for men as high in the service (any service) as the Chief to run an agent personally. However, it may happen because of the exceptional importance of the agent, or because the original recruiting was done before the controller became his service’s director and the agent refuses to be handled by anyone else. Such was the situation with Andreyev.

Back in February 1972, the Chief, then plain Mr. Irvine, had been head of station in Tokyo. In that month the Japanese counterterrorist people had decided to take out the headquarters of the fanatical Ultra-Left Red Army Faction, which had been located in a villa in the snow on the slopes of Mount Otakine, at a place called Asamaso. The National Police Agency actually did the job, but under the command of the redoubtable counterterrorist chief, Sassa, who was a friend of Irvine’s.

Providing some of the experience gleaned by Britain’s crack SAS units, Irvine was able to be of some advisory help to Sassa, and some of his suggestions saved a number of Japanese lives. In view of his country’s strict neutrality, Sassa could not thank Irvine in any practical way. But at a diplomatic cocktail party a month later, the brilliant and subtle Japanese had caught Irvine’s eye and nodded in the direction of a Russian diplomat across the room. Then he had smiled and moved away. Irvine closed in on the Russian and discovered that he was newly arrived in Tokyo and his name was Andreyev.

Irvine had had the man tailed and discovered he was foolishly having a clandestine affair with a Japanese girl, an offense that would immediately break him with his own people. Of course the Japanese already knew this because every Soviet diplomat in Tokyo is quietly followed whenever he leaves the embassy.

Irvine had set up a honey trap, acquired the appropriate photographs and tape recordings, and finally burst in on Andreyev, using the crash-bang-gotcha technique. The Russian had nearly collapsed, thinking he was being raided by his own people. As he pulled his trousers on, he agreed to talk to Irvine. He was something of a catch. For one thing, he was from the KGB’s Illegals Directorate, a Line N man.

The First Chief Directorate of the KGB, responsible for all overseas activities, is itself divided into directorates, special departments, and ordinary departments. Ordinary Soviet KGB agents under diplomatic cover come from one of the territorial departments (the Seventh Department happens to cover Japan). These staffers are called PR Line when on posting abroad, and they do the run-of-the-mill trawling for information, making of useful contacts, reading of technical publications, and so on.

But at the most secret heart of the First Chief Directorate lies the Illegals, or S, Directorate, which knows no territorial boundaries. This department trains and runs

“illegal” agents—those not under diplomatic immunity, those who go in on the ground, under deep cover, with false papers and on secret missions. The illegals operate outside the embassy. Nevertheless, inside every KGB rezidentura in every Soviet embassy, there is usually one S Directorate man, known on overseas posting as a Line N man. Line N

men handle special assignments only, often running spies indigenous to the country against which they are spying, or assisting, with backup and technical support, a deep-cover illegal coming in from the Soviet bloc.

Andreyev was from the S Directorate. Oddly, he was not a Japan expert, as all his Seventh Department colleagues in the embassy would have to be. He was an English-language expert, and the reason he was in Japan was to pursue a contact with a United States Air Force master sergeant who had been talent-spotted in San Diego before he was transferred to the joint USAF-Japanese base at Tashikawa. With no hope of explaining himself to his own superiors back in Moscow, Andreyev had agreed to work for Irvine.

The cozy arrangement had come to an end when the American sergeant, pushed beyond endurance, dispatched himself rather untidily with his service revolver in the commissary latrine and Andreyev was sent back to Moscow in a hurry. Irvine thought of

“burning” the man there and then, but he desisted.

And then Andreyev had shown up in London. A batch of new photographs had drifted across Sir Nigel Irvine’s desk six months earlier, and there he was. Transferred out of the S Directorate and back onto PR Line work, Andreyev was accredited as a second secretary in the Soviet Embassy. Sir Nigel had put the hooks in again. Andreyev had had little choice but to cooperate, but he had refused to be handled by anyone else, so Sir Nigel had taken him on as a director’s case.

On the matter of the leak in the British Defense Ministry, Andreyev had little to offer.

He knew of no such thing. If there was such a leak, then the man in the ministry might be controlled directly by some illegal Soviet agent resident in Britain, who would contact Moscow direct, or he might be run by one of the three Line N people inside the embassy.

But such people would not discuss a case of that importance over coffee in the canteen.

He personally had heard nothing, but he would keep his eyes and ears open. On that note, the two men on Hampstead Heath parted.

The Ascension Island paper was distributed on Tuesday, February 24, by Sir Peregrine Jones, who had spent Monday preparing it. It went to four men. Bertie Capstick had agreed to enter the ministry each night and check on legitimate photocopies made.

Preston had told his watchers he wanted to know if George Berenson scratched his neck, immediately. He told his mail-intercept people the same, and put his phone-tap team on full alert. Then they settled down to wait.

Chapter 7

On the first day, nothing happened. That night, Brigadier Capstick went into the Ministry of Defense with John Preston while the staff were sleeping and checked the number of photocopies run off. There were seven: three by George Berenson, two each by two of the other mandarins who had had the Ascension Island paper circulated to them, and none by the fourth man.

On the evening of the second day, Berenson did something strange. The watchers reported that in the middle of the evening he left his Belgravia apartment and walked to a nearby call-box. They could not tell the number he dialed, but he spoke only a few words, replaced the receiver, and walked home. Why, Preston wondered, should a man do that who had a perfectly serviceable telephone in his flat—something Preston could vouch for, since he was tapping it?

On the third day, Thursday, February 26, George Berenson left the ministry at the usual time, hailed a cab, and went to St. John’s Wood. In the High Street of this parish, with its villagelike atmosphere, was an ice-cream parlor and coffee shop. The Defense official went in, sat down, and ordered a sundae, one of the specialties of the house.

John Preston sat in the basement radio room on Cork Street and listened to the watcher team leader reporting in. It was Len Stewart, heading the A team. “I’ve got two people in there,” he said, “and two more out here on the street. Plus my cars.”

“What’s he doing in there?” asked Preston.

“Can’t see,” said Stewart over the radio. “Have to wait until the people with him get a chance to tell me.”

In fact, Berenson, ensconced in an alcove, was eating his ice-cream sundae and filling in the last squares of the crossword in the Daily Telegraph that he had produced from his briefcase. He took no notice of the two jeans-clad students canoodling in the corner.

After thirty minutes the official called for his bill, took it to the cash desk, paid, and left.

“He’s back on the street,” called Len Stewart. “My two have stayed inside. He’s walking up the High Street. Looking for a taxi, I think. I can see my people inside now.

They are paying at the desk.”

“Can you ask them just what he did in there?” asked Preston. There was something odd, he thought, about the whole episode. It might be a special ice-cream parlor, but there were others in Mayfair and the West End, in a straight line from the ministry to Belgravia. Why go north of Regent’s Park to St. John’s Wood for an ice cream?

Stewart’s voice came over the air again. “There’s a taxi coming. He’s hailing it. Hold on, here are my people from inside.” There was a pause in transmission. Then: “It seems he ate his ice cream and completed the Daily Telegraph crossword. Then he paid up and left.”

“Where’s the newspaper?” asked Preston.

“He left it when he finished. ... Hold on. ... Then the proprietor came over and cleared the table, taking the dirty bowl and paper back into the kitchen area. ... He’s inside the taxi and cruising. What do we do ... stay with him?”

Preston thought furiously. Harry Burkinshaw and the B team had been taken off Sir Richard Peters and allowed a few days’ rest. They had been out in rain, cold, and fog for weeks. There was only one team on the job now. If he split them up and lost Berenson, who then went on to make his contact somewhere else, Harcourt-Smith would have his hide nailed to a barn door. He made his decision.

“Len, leave one car and driver to tail the taxi. I know it’s not enough if he slips away on foot. But switch the rest of your people to the ice-cream parlor.”

“Will do,” said Len Stewart, and went off the air.

Preston was in luck. The taxi went straight to Berenson’s West End club and dropped him off. He went inside. But then, thought Preston, the contact could be in there.

Len Stewart entered the ice-cream shop and sat until closing time with a coffee and the Evening Standard. Nothing happened. He was asked to leave at closing time and did so.

From up and down the street the four-man team saw the staff of the shop leave, the proprietor close up, the lights go out.

From Cork Street, Preston was trying to get a phone tap on the ice-cream shop and a make on the proprietor. He turned out to be a Signor Benotti, a legal immigrant, originally from Naples, who had led a blameless life for twenty years. By midnight Preston had a tap on the ice-cream parlor and on Signor Benotti’s home in Swiss Cottage.

They produced nothing.

Preston spent a sleepless night at Cork Street. Stewart’s relief shift had moved in at 8:00 p.m. and watched the ice-cream shop and Benotti’s house through the night. At 9:00 on Friday morning, Benotti walked back to his shop, and at 10:00 it opened for business.

Len Stewart and the day shift took over at the same hour. At 11:00, Stewart called in.

“There’s a small delivery van at the front door,” he told Preston. “The driver seems to be loading gallon tubs of ice cream. It seems they do a customer-delivery service.”

Preston stirred his twentieth cup of awful coffee. His mind was fogging with lack of sleep. “I know,” he said, “there’ve been references to it on the telephone already. Detach a car and two people to stay with the van. Note every recipient of ice-cream deliveries.”

“That only leaves me a car and two people here, including myself,” said Stewart. “It’s damn thin on the ground,”

“There’s a bidding conference going on up at Charles. I’ll try to get an extra team,” said Preston.

The ice-cream van made twelve calls that morning, all in the St. John’s Wood/Swiss Cottage area, with two as far south as Marylebone.

Some of the deliveries were in apartment buildings, where it was hard for the watchers to appear inconspicuous, but they noted every address. Then the van drove back to the shop. It made no afternoon deliveries.

“Will you drop that list at Cork on your way home?” Preston asked Stewart.

That evening, the phone-tap people reported that Berenson had had four telephone calls while he was at home, including one in which the caller turned out to have a wrong number. He had made no outgoing calls. Everything was on tape. Did Preston want to play it? There was nothing remotely suspicious on it. He thought he might as well.

On Saturday morning, Preston played the longest shot of his life. Using a tape recorder set up by the Technical Support people, and a variety of excuses to the householders, he called up each one of the recipients of the ice cream, asking whenever a woman answered if he might speak to her husband. Since it was Saturday, he got all but one.

One voice seemed slightly familiar. What was it—a hint of accent? And where could he have heard it before? He checked the name of the householder. It meant nothing.

He ate a moody lunch in a café near Cork Street. The connection came to him over the coffee. He hurried back to Cork Street and played the tapes again. Possible—not conclusive, but possible.

Scotland Yard, among the copious facilities of its Forensic Science Department, has a section devoted to voice analysis, which is useful whenever a target criminal, having had his phone tapped, denies it was his voice on the tape. MI5, having no forensic facilities, has to rely on Scotland Yard for this sort of thing, an arrangement usually secured via the Special Branch.

Preston called Detective Sergeant Lander at home, and it was Lander who fixed a priority meeting in Scotland Yard’s voice-analysis section that same afternoon. There was only one technician available, and he was loath to leave his televised football game to come to work, but he did. A thin young man with thick-lensed glasses, he played Preston’s tapes half a dozen times, watching the illuminated line on the oscilloscope screen rise and fall to record the tiniest shades of tone and timbre in the voices.

“Same voice,” he said at last, “no question about it.”

On Sunday, Preston identified the owner of the accented voice by using the Diplomatic List. He also called a friend in the Physics Department of London University, spoiled his day off by asking for a considerable favor, and finally telephoned Sir Bernard Hemmings at his Surrey home.

“I think there is something that we should report to the Paragon Committee, sir,” he said, “tomorrow morning.”

The Paragon Committee met at 11:00 a.m. on Monday, March 2, and Sir Anthony Plumb asked Preston to make his report. There was an air of expectancy, although Sir Bernard Hemmings looked grave.

Preston detailed the events of the first two days following the distribution of the Ascension Island paper as briefly as he could. There was a stir of interest at the news of Berenson’s odd and very brief call from a public phone box on the previous Wednesday evening.

“Did you tape-record that call?” asked Sir Peregrine Jones.

“No, sir, we couldn’t get near enough,” replied Preston.

“Then what do you think it was for?”

“I believe Mr. Berenson was alerting his controller to a pending ‘drop,’ probably using a code to indicate the time and place.”

“Have you any proof of that?” asked Sir Hubert Villiers of the Home Office.

“No, sir.”

Preston went on to describe the visit to the ice-cream parlor, the abandonment of the Daily Telegraph, and the fact that it was cleared away by the proprietor himself.

“Did you manage to recover the paper?” asked Sir Paddy Strickland.

“No, sir. To have raided the ice-cream shop then might have caused the arrest of Mr.

Benotti, and perhaps of Mr. Berenson, but Benotti could have pleaded complete innocence that there was anything inside the newspaper, and Berenson could have pleaded that he had made a terribly careless mistake.”

“But you believe that visit to the ice-cream shop was the drop?” asked Sir Anthony Plumb.

“I’m sure of it,” said Preston. He went on to describe the delivery of one-gallon tubs of ice cream to a dozen customers the next morning, how he had obtained voice samples of eleven of them, and Berenson’s receipt of a wrong-number call that same evening. “The voice that dialed him that evening and established that the caller had obtained a wrong number, apologized, and rang off was the voice of one of the recipients of the ice cream.”

There was silence around the table.

“Could it have been a coincidence?” asked Sir Hubert Villiers doubtfully. “There are an awful lot of perfectly innocent wrong numbers dialed in this city. Get ’em myself, all the time.”

“I checked with a friend yesterday who has access to a computer,” said Preston levelly.

“The chances of a man in a city of twelve million going into an ice-cream parlor for a sundae, of that ice-cream parlor’s delivering to twelve customers the next morning, and of one of those customers speaking through a wrong number to the ice-cream eater by midnight are more than a million to one. The telephone call on Friday evening was an acknowledgment of safe receipt.”

“Let me see if I understand,” said Sir Perry Jones. “Berenson recovered from his colleagues their photocopies of my fictitious paper and pretended to shred them all. In fact, he retained one. He folded it inside his newspaper and left it in the ice-cream shop.

The proprietor collected the paper, plastic-wrapped the classified document, and delivered it next morning to the controller in a tub of ice cream. The controller then alerted Berenson that he had got it.”

“That is what I believe happened,” said Preston.

“Chances of a million to one,” mused Sir Anthony Plumb. “Nigel, what do you think?”

The Chief of the SIS shook his head. “I don’t believe in chances of a million to one,”

he said. “Not in our work—eh, Bernard? No, it was a drop, all right, from the source to the controller via a cutout, Signor Benotti. John Preston has got it right. My congratulations. Berenson’s our man.”

“What has happened since you made this connection, Mr. Preston?” asked Sir Anthony.

“I have switched the surveillance from Berenson to the controller,” said Preston. “I’ve identified him. In fact, this morning I joined the watchers and followed him from his Marylebone flat, where he lives alone as a bachelor, to his office. He is a foreign diplomat. His name is Jan Marais.”

“Jan? Sounds Czech,” said Sir Perry Jones.

“Not quite,” said Preston somberly. “Jan Marais is an accredited diplomat on the staff of the embassy of the Republic of South Africa.”

There was a stunned, disbelieving silence. Sir Paddy Strickland, in language not habitually favored by diplomats, muttered, “Bloody hell.” All eyes turned on Sir Nigel Irvine.

He sat at the end of the table, badly shaken. If it’s true, he thought privately, I’ll have his balls for cocktail olives. He was thinking of General Henry Pienaar, head of South Africa’s National Intelligence Service, successor to the late, unlamented Bureau of State Security. For the South Africans to hire a few London crooks to burgle the archives of the African National Congress was one thing; to run a spy ring inside the British Defense Ministry was, between services, a declaration of war.

“I think, gentlemen, with your indulgence I am going to have to ask for a few days to investigate this matter a little further,” said Sir Nigel.

Two days later, on March 4, one of the senior Cabinet ministers in whom Mrs. Thatcher had confided her desire to go for an early general election was having breakfast with his wife in their handsome town house in Holland Park, London. The wife was browsing through a sheaf of holiday brochures.

“Corfu is nice,” she said, “or Crete.” There was no response, so she pressed her point.

“Darling, we should try to get away for a fortnight of complete rest this summer. It’s been nearly two years, after all. What about June? Before the crush but when the weather is at its best.”

“Not June,” said the minister, without looking up.

“But June’s beautiful,” she protested.

“Not June,” he repeated, “anything but June.”

Her eyes widened. “What’s so important about June?”

“Never mind.”

“You cunning old fox,” she said breathlessly. “It’s Margaret, isn’t it? That cozy little chat at Chequers last Sunday week. She’s going to the country. Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Shush,” said her husband, but after twenty-five years she knew when she had got it right. She looked up to see Emma, their daughter, standing in the doorway.

“Are you off, darling?”

“Yeah,” said the girl, “see you.”

Emma Lockwood was nineteen, a student at art college who subscribed with all her youthful enthusiasm to the cult called “radical politics.” She abominated her father’s political views and sought to protest against them by her own life-style. To her parents’ tolerant exasperation she was never missing from antinuclear demonstrations or the noisier manifestations of left-wing protest. One of her means of personal protest was to sleep with Simon Devine, a lecturer at a polytechnic college whom she had met at a demonstration.

He was no great lover, but he impressed her with his firebrand Trotskyism and pathological hatred of the “bourgeoisie,” which appeared to include anyone who did not agree with him. Those able to disagree more effectively than the bourgeois were termed fascists. To Devine that evening, in his bedsitter, she vouchsafed the tip she had overheard while standing in the doorway of her parents’ breakfast room.

Devine was a member of a number of revolutionary study groups and contributed articles to Hard Left publications of great passion and small circulation. Two days later, he mentioned the nugget he had obtained from Emma Lockwood while he was in conference with one of the editors of a small broadsheet for which he had prepared an article calling on all freedom-loving automobile workers at Cowley to destroy the production line over the issue of one of their number who had been fired for theft.

The editor advised Devine there was not enough in the rumor to make an article for the publication but that he would discuss the information with his colleagues, and he advised Devine to keep it to himself. When Devine had gone, the editor did indeed discuss it with one of his colleagues—his conduit—and the conduit passed it on to the controller in the rezidentura inside the Soviet Embassy. On March 10, the news reached Moscow. Devine would have been appalled. As an ardent follower of Trotsky’s call for instant global revolution, he hated Moscow and all it stood for.

Sir Nigel Irvine, shaken by the revelation that the controller of a major spy within the British establishment was a South African diplomat, took up the only option left to him—a direct approach to the South African National Intelligence Service to ask for an explanation.

The relationship between the British SIS and the South African NIS (and its predecessor, the BOSS) would be described by a politician of either country as nonexistent. “Arm’s-length” would be more realistic. A relationship exists, but for political reasons it is a difficult one.

Under successive British governments, because of the widespread distaste for the apartheid doctrine, the connection has always been frowned on, more under Labour than under Conservative governments. During the Labour years between 1964 and 1979 it was allowed to continue—oddly, because of the Rhodesian imbroglio. Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson accepted that he needed all the information he could get on Ian Smith’s Rhodesia to implement his sanctions, and the South Africans had most of it.

The Conservatives were back in power in May 1979, by the time that affair was over, and the relationship continued, this time due to concern over Namibia and Angola, where, it had to be admitted, the South Africans had good networks. Nor was the relationship one-sided. It was the British who received a tip from the West Germans about the East German links of the wife of South African Navy Commodore Dieter Gerhardt—he was later arrested as a Sovbloc spy. The British, using the SIS’s encyclopedic files on such gentlemen, also tipped the South Africans about a couple of Soviet illegals entering southern Africa.

There was one unpleasant hiccup in 1967, when an agent of the BOSS, one Norman Blackburn, working as a barman at the Zambezi Club, bestowed his charms upon one of the “Garden Girls.” These are secretaries at 10 Downing Street, so called because they work in a room facing the garden.

The infatuated Helen (this name will suffice because she has long since settled down to raise a family) passed several classified documents to Blackburn before the affair was discovered. It caused a stink and let to Harold Wilson’s conviction ever afterward that whatever went wrong, from corked wine to crop failure, was due to the BOSS.

After that, the relationship steadied onto a more civilized course. The British maintain, therefore, a head of station, of whom the NIS is informed, and who is normally resident in Johannesburg. No “active measures” are conducted by the British on South African territory. The South Africans maintain several staffers at their embassy in London, of whom SIS is aware, and a few outside the embassy, on whom MI5 keeps a watchful eye.

The task of the latter is to monitor the London-end activities of various southern African revolutionary organizations, such as ANC, SWAPO, and so forth. So long as the South Africans confine themselves to this, they are left alone.

It was the British head of station in Johannesburg who sought and got a personal interview with General Henry Pienaar and reported back to his Chief in London what the head of the NIS had to say. Sir Nigel convened a meeting of the Paragon Committee on March 10.

“The great and good General Pienaar swears by all that he holds to be holy that he has no knowledge of Jan Marais. He claims Marais does not work for him and never has,” said Sir Nigel.

“Is he telling the truth?” asked Sir Paddy Strickland.

“In this game, one should never count on it. But it could be he is. For one thing, he would have known for three days now that we have uncovered Marais. If Marais is his, he would know we would take terrible revenge. He has not moved any of his people out, which I think he would if he knew he were guilty.”

“Then what the hell is Marais?” asked Sir Perry Jones.

“Pienaar claims he would like to know as much as we would,” answered C. “In fact, he has agreed to my request to receive our investigator to carry out a joint hunt with his own people. I want to send a man down there.”

“What is the position on Berenson and Marais now?” asked Sir Anthony Plumb of Harcourt-Smith, who was representing Five.

“Both men are under discreet surveillance, but no moves have been made to close in.

No break-in to either man’s apartment. Just mail intercept, phone tap, and the watchers around the clock,” replied Harcourt-Smith.

“How long do you want, Nigel?” asked Plumb.

“Ten days.”

“All right, but that’s the limit. In ten days we have to move against Berenson with whatever we have got and start into damage assessment, with his willing or unwilling cooperation.”

The next day, Sir Nigel Irvine called Sir Bernard Hemmings at his home outside Farnham, where the ailing man was confined.

“Bernard, that man of yours, Preston. I know it’s unusual—could send one of my own people, and all that—but I like his style. Could I borrow him for the South African Trip?”

Sir Bernard agreed. Preston flew to Johannesburg on the overnight flight of March 12-13. It was not until he was airborne that the information reached the desk of Brian Harcourt-Smith. He was icily angry, but knew he had been outranked.

The Albion Committee reported to the General Secretary on the evening of the twelfth, and was received in his apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

“And what, pray, have you got for me?” the Soviet leader asked quietly.

Professor Krilov, as chairman of the committee, gestured toward Grand Master Rogov, who opened the file in front of him and began to read.

As always in the presence of the General Secretary, Philby was impressed, even awed, by the sheer untrammeled power of the man. During the committee’s researches the mere mention of his name as the overriding authority could have secured them anything they wanted in the USSR and no questions asked. As a student of power and its application, Philby admired the ruthless and cunning way in which the General Secretary had secured absolute control over every tendril of life in the Soviet Union.

Years earlier, when he had been given the powerful chairmanship of the KGB, it had not been as an appointee of Brezhnev, but of the unpublicized kingmaker of the Politburo, the Party ideologue Mikhail Suslov. With this residual independence from Brezhnev and his personal “Mafia,” he had ensured that the KGB never became Brezhnev’s unquestioning poodle. When, in May 1982, with Suslov dead and Brezhnev dying, he had quit the KGB to return to the Central Committee, he had not made the same mistake.

Behind him as Chairman of the KGB he had left his own man, General Fedorchuk.

From inside the Party, the present General Secretary had consolidated his position with the Central Committee and then bided his time through the brief Andropov and Chernenko eras until his eventual succession. Within months of that accession, he had sewn up the power sources: Party, armed forces, KGB, Interior Ministry, MVD. With all the aces in his hands, no one dared oppose or conspire against him.

“We have devised a plan, Comrade General Secretary,” said Dr. Rogov, using, as they were among others, the formal term of address. “It is a concrete plan, an active measure, a proposal to cause a destabilization among the British people that would make the Sarajevo affair and the Berlin Reichstag fire pale into insignificance. We have called it Plan Aurora.”

It took him an hour to read the full details. He glanced up occasionally to see if there was any reaction, but the General Secretary was a grand master in a much bigger game of chess and his face remained blank. At last Dr. Rogov had finished. There was silence while they waited.

“It has risks,” said the General Secretary quietly. “What guarantees are there that it will not backfire like certain ... other operations?”

They all knew what he meant. He had been badly shaken by the dismal failure of the Wojtyla Affair. It had taken three years for the rumbles and accusations to die away, and it had caused the sort of global publicity the USSR definitely did not need.

In the early spring of 1981, the Bulgarian Secret Service had reported that their people among the Turkish community in West Germany had trawled a strange fish. For ethnic, cultural, and historical reasons, the Bulgars, most loyal and subservient of Russia’s satellites, were deeply involved in Turkey and the Turks. The man they had picked up was a dedicated terrorist killer who had been trained by the Ultra Left in Lebanon, had killed for the Ultra-Right Gray Wolves in Turkey, escaped from prison, and fled to West Germany.

The odd thing about him was that he had expressed a personal obsession to kill the Pope. Should they throw Mehmet Ali Agca back to the ocean or give him funds and false papers, along with a gun, and let him run?

In normal circumstances the KGB response would have been the cautious one: Kill him. But circumstances were not normal. Karol Wojtyla, the world’s first Polish Pope, was a major menace. Poland was in an uproar; Communist rule there could soon be blown apart by the dissident Solidarity movement.

The dissident Wojtyla had already visited Poland once, with disastrous results from the Soviet point of view. He had to be stopped or discredited. The KGB replied to the Bulgars: Go ahead, but we don’t want to know. In May 1981, with money, false papers, and a gun, Agca was escorted to Rome, pointed in the right direction, and given his head.

As a result, a lot of people had lost theirs.

“With respect, I do not believe the two can be compared,” said Dr. Rogov, who had been the principal architect of Plan Aurora and was prepared to defend it. “The Wojtyla Affair was a disaster for three reasons: the target did not die; the assassin was caught alive; and, worst of all, there was no highly developed, in-place disinformation conspiracy to blame—for example, the Italian or American Extreme Right. There should have been a tidal wave of believable evidence available for release, proving to the world it was the Right that put Agca up to it.”

The General Secretary nodded like an old lizard.

“Here,” proceeded Rogov, “the situation is different. There are fallbacks and cutouts at every stage. The executant would be a top professional who would end his own life before capture. The physical artifacts are mostly harmless to look at, and none can be traced back to the USSR. The executant officer cannot survive the execution of the plan.

And there are subsequent subplans to place the blame firmly and convincingly on the Americans.”

The General Secretary turned to General Marchenko. “Would it work?” he asked.

The three committee members were uncomfortable. It would be easier if they could grasp the General Secretary’s reaction, then simply agree with it. But he had given nothing away.

Marchenko took a deep breath and nodded. “It is feasible,” he agreed. “I believe it would take from ten to sixteen months to put into operation.”

“Comrade Colonel?” asked the General Secretary of Philby.

Philby’s stutter increased as he spoke. It always did when he was under stress. “As to the risks, I am not best able to judge them. Nor the question of technical feasibility. As to effect—it would, beyond any doubt, swing over ten percent of the British ‘floating’ vote into a hasty decision to vote Labour.”

“Comrade Professor Krilov?”

“I have to oppose it, Comrade General Secretary. I regard it as extremely hazardous, in execution and in its possible consequences. It is completely contrary to the terms of the Fourth Protocol. If that is ever breached, we may all suffer.”

The General Secretary seemed lost in meditation, which no one was about to disturb.

The hooded eyes brooded behind the glittering glasses for five minutes. At length he raised his head.

“There are no notes, no tape recordings, no shreds of this plan outside this room?”

“None,” agreed the four committeemen.

“Gather up the files and folders and pass them to me,” said the General Secretary.

When this was done, he went on, in his habitual monotone.

“It is reckless, crazy, adventurist, and dangerous beyond belief,” he intoned. “The Committee is disbanded. You are to return to your professions and never mention either the Albion Committee or Plan Aurora again.”

He was still sitting there, staring at the table, when the four subdued and humbled men trooped out. They put on their coats and hats in silence, hardly meeting one another’s eyes, and were led downstairs to their cars.

In the courtyard, each climbed into his own car. In his Volga, Philby waited for Gregoriev to start the engine, but the man just sat there. The three other limousines swept out of the square, under the arch, and into the boulevard. There was a tap on Philby’s window. He wound it down to see the face of Major Pavlov.

“Would you come with me, please, Comrade Colonel?”

Philby’s heart sank. He understood now that he knew too much; he was the one foreigner in the group. The General Secretary had a reputation for tying up loose ends rather permanently. He followed Major Pavlov back into the building. Two minutes later he was shown into the General Secretary’s sitting room. The old man was still in his wheelchair at the low coffee table. He gestured Philby to a seat. In trepidation the British traitor took it.

“What did you really think of it?” asked the General Secretary softly.

Philby swallowed hard. “Ingenious, audacious, hazardous, but, if it worked, effective,” he said.

“It’s brilliant,” murmured the General Secretary. “And it is going ahead. But under my personal auspices. This is to be no one else’s operation, just mine. And you will be closely involved in it.”

“May I ask one thing?” Philby ventured. “Why me? I am a foreigner. Even though I have served the Soviet Union all my life and have lived here for a third of it, I am still a foreigner.”

“Precisely,” replied the General Secretary, “and you have no patronage except mine.

You could not begin to conspire against me.

“You will take leave of your wife and family and dismiss your driver. You will take up residence in the guest suite at my dacha at Usovo. There you will put together the team that will undertake Plan Aurora. You will have any authority you need—it will come from my office at the Central Committee. You, personally, will not show yourself.” He pressed a buzzer under the table. “You will work at all times under the eye of this man. I believe you already know him.”

The door had opened. In it stood the impassive, cold Major Pavlov.

“He is highly intelligent and extremely suspicious,” said the General Secretary with approval. “He is also totally loyal. He happens to be my nephew.”

As Philby rose to accompany the major, the General Secretary held out a slip of paper to him. It was a flimsy from the First Chief Directorate marked for the personal attention of the General Secretary of the CPSU. Philby read it with disbelief.

“Yes,” said the General Secretary, “it reached me yesterday. You will not have General Marchenko’s ten to sixteen months. It appears that Mrs. Thatcher is going to make her move in June. We must make ours one week before that.”

Philby let out his breath slowly. In 1917 it had taken ten days to complete the Russian Revolution. Britain’s greatest turncoat of them all was being given just ninety days to guarantee the British one.