The Fourth Protocol

Chapter 8

When John Preston landed at Jan Smuts Airport on the morning of March 13, the local head of station, a tall, thin, blond man named Dennis Grey, was there to meet him. From the observation terrace two South African NIS men watched his arrival but made no move to come closer.

Customs and immigration were a formality, and within thirty minutes of touchdown the two Englishmen were speeding north to Pretoria. Preston looked at the landscape of the highveld with curiosity; it did not look much like his impression of Africa—just a modern six-lane blacktop highway running across a bare plain and flanked by modern, European-style farms and factories.

“I’ve booked you into the Burgerspark,” said Grey. “In central Pretoria. I was told you wanted to stay in a hotel rather than at the residency.”

“Yes,” said Preston. “Thank you.”

“We’ll go and check in first. We have an appointment to meet ‘the Beast’ at eleven.”

The not-too-affectionate title had originally been bestowed upon General Van Den Berg, a police general and head of the former Bureau of State Security, or BOSS. After the so-called Muldergate scandal of 1979, the unhappy marriage of the South African state’s intelligence arm and its security police had been dissolved, to the great relief of the professional intelligence officers and the foreign service, some of whom had been consistently embarrassed by the BOSS’s brass-knuckle tactics.

The intelligence arm had been reconstituted under the title National Intelligence Service (NIS), and General Henry Pienaar had moved across from1 his post as head of Military Intelligence. He was not a police general, but a military one, and while he was not a life-long intelligence officer like Sir Nigel Irvine, his years garnering military intelligence had taught him there were more ways to kill a cat than by thumping it with blunt objects. General Van Den Berg had passed into retirement, still prepared to tell anyone who would listen that “the hand of God” was upon him. Unkindly, the British had passed his nickname onto the shoulders of General Pienaar.

Preston registered at the hotel on Van Der Walt Street, dumped his bags, had a quick wash and shave, and joined Grey in the lobby at half past ten. From there they drove to Union Building.

The seat of most of the South African government is a huge, long, ocher-brown sandstone block, three stories high, its four-hundred-yard frontage studded by four colonnaded projections. It stands in central Pretoria on a hill gazing south across a valley along whose bed runs Kerk Straat, and the esplanade at the front of the building commands a panoramic view across the valley to the brown hills of the highveld to the south, topped by the squat, square mass of the Voortrekker Monument.

Dennis Grey presented his identification at the reception desk and mentioned his appointment with the chief of Intelligence. In minutes a young official had appeared, to lead them to the office of General Pienaar. The headquarters of the NIS chief is on the top floor at the western end of the building. Grey and Preston were led down interminable corridors decorated in what appeared to be a standard South African civil service brown-and-cream motif with a heavy accent on dark wood paneling. The general’s office, at the end of the last corridor on the third floor, is flanked on the right by an office containing two secretaries and on the left by another containing two staff officers.

The official knocked on the last door, waited for the gruff command to enter, and showed the British visitors in. It was a fairly somber, formal office, containing a large and obviously cleared desk facing the door and with four leather club chairs grouped around a low table near the windows, which looked down toward Kerk Straat and across the valley to the hills. There were a number of apparently operational maps coyly covered by green curtains around the walls.

General Pienaar was a big, heavy man who rose as they entered, and walked forward to shake hands. Grey made the introductions and the general gestured them to the club chairs. Coffee was served, but the conversation remained at the level of small talk. Grey took the hint, made his farewells, and left. General Pienaar stared at Preston for some time.

“So, Mr. Preston,” he said in almost unaccented English, “the subject of our diplomat Jan Marais. I have already told Sir Nigel, and now I tell you: he does not work for me or my government, at least not as a controller of agents in Britain. You are here to try to find out who he does work for?”

“That’s my job, General, if I can.”

General Pienaar nodded several times. “I have given Sir Nigel my word that you will have our complete cooperation here. And I will abide by my word.”

“Thank you, General.”

“I am going to attach to you one of my two personal staff officers. He will help you in anything you need: obtain files that you may wish to examine, interpret if necessary. You speak any Afrikaans?”

“No, General, not a word.”

“Then there will be some translating to be done. Perhaps some interpreting.”

He pressed a buzzer on the table and in seconds the door opened to admit a man of the same physical size as the general but much younger. Preston put him in his early thirties.

He had ginger hair and sandy eyebrows.

“Let me introduce Captain Andries Viljoen. Andy, this is Mr. John Preston from London, the man you will be working with.”

Preston rose to shake hands. He sensed a thinly veiled hostility in the young Afrikaner, perhaps a mirror of his superior’s better-masked feelings.

“I have put at your disposal a room down the corridor,” said General Pienaar. “Well, let’s waste no more time, gentlemen. Please get on with it.”

When they were alone in the office set aside for them, Viljoen asked, “What would you like to start with, Mr. Preston?”

Preston sighed inwardly. The casual first-name informality back at Charles and Gordon was a lot easier to get along with. “The file on Jan Marais, if you please, Captain Viljoen.”

The captain’s triumph was evident as he produced it from a desk drawer. “We have, of course, been through it already,” he said. “I took it out of Foreign Ministry Personnel Registry myself some days ago.” He placed a fat file in a buff cover in front of Preston.

“Let me summarize what we have been able to glean from it, if this will help you. Marais entered the South African foreign service in Cape Town in the spring of 1946. He has been in the service for forty years—a bit more—and is due to retire in December. He comes from a perfect Afrikaner background and has never come under the slightest suspicion. That is why his behavior in London appears such a mystery.”

Preston nodded. He did not need it spelled out any more clearly. The view here was that London had made a mistake. He opened the file. Among the top documents was a sheaf of papers handwritten in English.

“That,” said Viljoen, “is his autobiography, a requirement of candidates for the foreign service. In those days, when the United Party under Jan Smuts was in power, there was a much greater use of English than today. Now such a document would be written in Afrikaans. Of course, candidates must be fluent in both languages.”

“Then I suppose we had better start with it,” said Preston. “While I read it, could you please make a synopsis of his career while in the service? Especially foreign postings—

where, when, and for how long.”

“All right”—Viljoen nodded—“if he did go rotten, if he was turned, it probably happened somewhere abroad.” Viljoen’s stress on the word if was just enough to imply his doubt, and the corrosive effect of foreigners upon good Afrikaners came out in the word abroad. Preston began to read.

I was born in August 1925 in the small farming town of Duiwelskloof in the northern Transvaal, the only son of a farmer in the Mootseki Valley just outside the town. My father, Laurens Marais, was a pure Afrikaner, but my mother, Mary, was an Anglo. It was an unusual marriage in those days, but because of it I was brought up fluent in both English and Afrikaans.

My father was considerably older than my mother, who was of frail disposition and died when I was ten in one of the typhoid epidemics that in those days swept that region from time to time. My father was forty-six when I was born, and my mother only twenty-five. He farmed potatoes and tobacco mainly, and also some chickens, geese, turkeys, cattle, sheep, and wheat. All his life he was a strong supporter of the United Party, and I was named after Marshal Jan Smuts.

Preston broke off. “I suppose all this would not have done his candidature any harm,” he suggested.

“No harm at all,” said Viljoen, looking over the passages. “The United Party was still in power then. The National Party won the country only in 1948.” Preston read on.

When I was seven I went to the local farm school in Duiwelskloof, and at the age of twelve went on to Merensky High, which had been founded five years earlier. After the outbreak of war in 1939, my father, who was a keen admirer of Britain and the empire, followed every item of news about the war in Europe on his wireless set, sitting on the stoep in the evenings after work. After my mother died we had become even closer, and I, too, soon began to yearn to take part in the war.

Two days after my eighteenth birthday, in August 1943, I said good-bye to my father and took the train to Pietersburg and then changed for the line south to Pretoria. My father came as far as Pietersburg, and my last sight of him was standing on the platform there, waving me off to the war. The next day I walked into Defense Headquarters in Pretoria, signed on, and was sent to Roberts Heights camp for basic training, kitting out, drilling, and small-arms instruction. There I also volunteered to be red-tabbed.

“What does ‘red-tabbed’ mean?” asked Preston.

Viljoen looked up from his writing. “In those days only volunteers could be sent to fight outside the borders of South Africa,” he said. “They could not be compelled. Those volunteering for combat overseas were given a red tab to wear.”

From Roberts Heights I was posted to the Witwatersrand Rifles/De La Rey Regiment, which had been amalgamated after the losses at Tobruk to form the Wits/De La Rey. We were sent by train to a transit camp at Hay Paddock, near Pietermaritzburg, and attached to reinforcements for the South African Sixth Division, awaiting transport to Italy. Finally, at Durban, we were all shipped out on the Duchess of Richmond, up through the Suez Canal, and disembarked in late January at Taranto.

Most of that Italian spring we were moving up toward Rome, arid it was with the Sixth Division, then composed of the Twelfth Motorized Brigade and the Eleventh Armored Brigade, that we in the Wits/De La Rey went through Rome and began the move on Florence. On July 13 I was forward of Monte Benichi in the Chianti Mountains with a scouting patrol from C

Company. In thickly wooded country I became separated from the rest of the patrol after dark and minutes later found myself surrounded by German troops of the Hermann Goering Division. I was, as they say, “put in the bag.”

I was lucky to stay alive, but they put me in a truck with some other Allied prisoners and took us to a “cage” or temporary camp, at a place called La Tarina, north of Florence. The senior South African NCO, I recall, was Warrant Officer Snyman. It was not to be for long. As the Allies advanced through Florence we were suddenly subjected to a brutal night evacuation. It was chaos. Some prisoners tried to escape and were shot. They were left lying in the road as the trucks rolled over them. From the trucks we were put into railcars built for cattle and went north for days through the Alps and finally to a POW camp at Moosberg, twenty-five miles north of Munich.

Even this was not for long. After only fourteen days about half of us were marched out of Moosberg and back to the railhead, where we were entrained in cattle cars again. With hardly any food or drink we rolled across Germany for six days and nights, and in late August 1944 we were finally disembarked again and marched to another and much bigger camp.

It was, we discovered, called Stalag 344, and was at Lamsdorf, near Breslau, in what was then German Silesia. I think Stalag 344 must have been the worst stalag of them all. There were 11,000 Allied POWs there, on virtual starvation rations, kept alive mainly by Red Cross parcels.

As I was then a corporal I was required to join working parties, and was sent every day with many others by truck to work at a synthetic-petrol factory twelve miles away. That winter in the Silesian plain was bitter.

One day, just before Christmas, our truck broke down. Two POWs tried to fix it while the German guards kept them covered. Some of us were allowed to jump down near the tailboard. A young South African soldier near me stared at the pine forest only thirty yards away, looked at me, and raised an eyebrow. I will never know why I did it, but the next moment we were both running through the thigh-deep snow while our comrades jostled the German guards to upset their aim. We made the forest line alive and ran on into the heart of the woods.

“Do you want to go out for lunch?” asked Viljoen. “We have a canteen here.”

“Could we have sandwiches and coffee here, do you think?” asked Preston.

“Sure. I’ll ring for it.”

Preston resumed the tale of Jan Marais.

We soon discovered that we had in effect jumped from the frying pan into the fire, except that it was not a fire but a freezing hell where the night temperatures sank to thirty below zero. We had our feet wrapped in paper inside our boots, but neither this nor our greatcoats could keep out the cold. After two days we were weak and at the point of giving ourselves up.

On the second night we were trying to sleep in a tumble-down barn when we were roughly jerked awake. We thought it must be the Germans, but with Afrikaans I could understand some German words and these voices were not German. They were Polish; we had been discovered by a band of Polish partisans. They came within an inch of shooting us as German deserters, but I screamed that we were English and one of them seemed to understand.

It appeared that while most of the urban dwellers of Breslau and Lamsdorf were ethnic Germans, the peasants were of Polish stock, and as the Russian Army advanced, numbers of them had taken to the woods to harass the retreating Germans. There were two kinds of partisans: the Communist and the Catholic. We were lucky—it was a group of Catholic resistance fighters who had taken us in. They kept us through that bitter winter as the Russian guns rumbled in the east and the advance came closer. Then, in January, my comrade caught pneumonia; I tried to nurse him through it, but without antibiotics he died and we buried him in the forest.

Preston munched his sandwiches moodily and sipped his coffee. There were only a few pages left, he noted.

In March 1945 the Russian Army was suddenly upon us. In the woods we could hear their armor rumbling westward down the roads. The Poles elected to stay in the forests, but I could take no more of it. They showed me the way to go, and one morning, with my hands above my head, I stumbled out of the forest and gave myself up to a group of Russian soldiers.

At first they thought I was a German and nearly shot me. But the Poles had told me to shout “Angleeski,” which I did repeatedly. They put up their rifles and called an officer. He spoke no English but after examining my dog tag said something to his soldiers, and they were all smiles. But if I had hoped for an early repatriation, I was wrong again. They handed me over to the NKVD.

For five months, in a series of damp and icy cells, I was accorded brutal treatment, all of it in solitary confinement. I was subjected to repeated third-degree interrogations in an attempt to make me confess I was a spy. I refused, and was sent naked back to my cell. By the late spring (the war was ending in Europe but I did not know this) my health had broken completely and I was given a pallet bed to sleep on, and better food, though still uneatable by our South African standards.

Then some word must have come from the top. In August 1945, more dead than alive, I was taken many miles in a truck and finally at Potsdam in Germany handed over to the British Army. They were more kind than I can say, and after a period in a military hospital outside Bielefeld I was sent to England. I spent a further three months at Killearn EMS Hospital, north of Glasgow, and finally in December 1945 I sailed on the Ile de France from Southampton for Cape Town, arriving in late January this year.

It was in Cape Town that I heard of the death of my dear father, my only relative left in the world. It caused me such distress that my health suffered a relapse and I entered the Wynberg Military Hospital here at Cape Town, where I stayed for a further two months.

I am now discharged, given a clean bill of health, and hereby apply to join the South African foreign service.

Preston closed the file, and Viljoen looked up.

“Well,” said the South African, “he has had a steady and blameless, if unspectacular, career since then, rising to the rank of first secretary. He has had eight foreign postings, all the countries firmly pro-Western. That’s quite a lot, but then he’s a bachelor and that can make life easier in the service, except at the level of ambassador or minister, where a wife is more or less expected. You still think he went rotten somewhere along the line?”

Preston shrugged. Viljoen leaned over and tapped the folder. “You see what those Russian bastards did to him? That’s why I think you are wrong, Mr. Preston. So he likes ice cream, and he made a wrong-number phone call. A coincidence.”

“Maybe,” mused Preston. “This life story ... There’s something odd about it.”

Captain Viljoen shook his head. “We’ve had this file in our hands ever since your Sir Nigel Irvine contacted the general. We have been over and over it. It’s absolutely accurate. Every name, date, place, Army camp, military unit, campaign, and tiny detail.

Even to the crops they used to grow before the war in the Mootseki Valley. The agriculture people confirmed that. Now they grow tomatoes and avocados up there, but in those days potatoes and tobacco. Nobody could have invented that story. No, if he went wrong at all, which I doubt, it was somewhere abroad.”

Preston looked glum. Outside the windows, dusk was falling.

“All right,” said Viljoen, “I am here to help you. Where do you want to go next?”

“I’d like to start at the beginning,” said Preston. “This place Duiwelskloof, is it far?”

“About a four-hour drive. You want to go there?”

“Yes, please. Could we start early? Say at six tomorrow morning?”

“I’ll get a car from the pool and be at your hotel at six,” said Viljoen.

It’s a long haul on the road north to Zimbabwe, but the motorway is modern and Viljoen had drawn a Chevair without insignia, the car usually driven by the NIS. It ate up the miles through Nylstroom and Potgietersrus to Pietersburg, which they reached in three hours. The drive gave Preston a chance to see the great limitless horizons of Africa that impress the European visitor accustomed to smaller dimensions.

At Pietersburg they turned east and ran for fifty kilometers over flat middle veld, with more endless horizons under a robin’s-egg blue vault of sky, until they reached the bluff called Buffalo Hill, or Buffelberg, where the middle veld drops to the Mootseki Valley.

As they started down the twisting gradient Preston drew in his breath in amazement.

Far below lay the valley, rich and lush, its open floor strewn with a thousand beehive-shaped African huts, the rondavels, surrounded by kraals, cattle pens, and mealie gardens.

Some of the rondavels were perched on the side of the Buffelberg but most were scattered across the floor of the Mootseki. Timber smoke eddied from their central smokeholes, and even from that height and distance Preston could make out the African boys tending small groups of humped cattle, and women bent over their garden patches.

This, he thought, was African Africa, at last. It must have looked much the same when the impis of Mzilikazi, founder of the Matabele nation, marched north to escape the wrath of Chaka Zulu, to cross the Limpopo and found the kingdom of the people of the long shields. The road bucked and twisted down the bluff and into the Mootseki. Across the valley was another range of hills, and in their center a deep cleft, through which the road ran. This was the Devil’s Gap, the Duiwelskloof.

Ten minutes later they were into the gap and cruising slowly past the new primary school and down Botha Avenue, the principal street of the small township.

“Where do you want to go?” asked Viljoen.

“When old farmer Marais died, he must have left a will,” mused Preston. “And that would have to be executed, and that means a lawyer. Can we find out if there is a lawyer in Duiwelskloof, and if he is available on a Saturday morning?”

Viljoen drew up to Kirstens Garage and pointed across the road at the Imp Inn. “Go and have a coffee and order one for me. I’ll fill the tank and ask around.”

He rejoined Preston in the hotel lounge five minutes later.

“There’s one lawyer,” he said as he sipped his coffee. “He’s an Anglo, name of Benson. His office is right there across the street, two doors from the garage, and he’ll probably be in this morning. Let’s go.”

Mr. Benson was in, and when Viljoen flashed a card in a plastic wallet at Benson’s secretary, the effect was immediate. She spoke in Afrikaans into an intercom and they were shown without delay into the office of Benson, a friendly and rubicund man in a tan suit. He greeted them both in Afrikaans. Viljoen replied in his heavily accented English.

“This is Mr. John Preston. He has come from London, England. He wishes to ask you some questions.”

Benson bade them be seated and resumed his chair behind the desk. “Please,” he said,

“anything I can do.”

“Can you tell me how old you are?” asked Preston.

Benson gazed at him in amazement. “All the way from London to ask how old I am?

As a matter of fact, I’m fifty-three.”

“So in 1946 you would have been twelve?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me, please, who was the lawyer here in Duiwelskloof in that year?”

“Certainly. My father, Cedric Benson.”

“Is he alive?”

“Yes. He’s over eighty and he handed the business over to me fifteen years ago. But he’s pretty spry.”

“Would it be possible to talk to him?”

For answer Benson reached for a telephone and dialed a number. His father must have answered, for the son explained there were visitors, one from London, who would like to talk to him. He replaced the receiver.

“He lives about six miles away, but he still drives, to the terror of all other road users.

He says he’ll be here directly.”

“In the interim,” asked Preston, “could you consult your files for the year 1946 and see if you, or rather your father, executed the will of a local farmer, one Laurens Marais, who died in January of that year?”

“I’ll try,” said Benson Junior. “Of course, this Mr. Marais may have been with a lawyer from Pietersburg. But local people tended to stay local in those days. The 1946 box must be around somewhere. Excuse me.”

He left the office. The secretary served coffee. Ten minutes later there were voices in the outer office. The two Bensons entered together, the son carrying a dusty cardboard box. The old man had a fuzz of white hair and looked as alert as a young kestrel. After the introductions Preston explained his problem.

Without a word the older Benson took the chair behind the desk, forcing his son to draw up another one. Old Benson placed glasses on his nose and gazed at the visitors over them. “I remember Laurens Marais,” he said. “And yes, we did handle his will when he died. I did so myself.”

The son passed him a dusty and faded document tied in pink ribbon. The old man blew the dust off it, untied the ribbon, and spread it out. He began to read it silently.

“Ah yes, I remember it now. He was a widower. Lived alone. Had one son, Jan. A tragic case. The boy had just come back from the Second World War. Laurens Marais was going down to Cape Town to visit him when he died. Tragic.”

“Can you tell me about the bequests?” asked Preston.

“Everything to the son,” said Benson simply. “Farm, house, equipment, contents of house. Oh, the usual small bequests in money to the native farmworkers, the foreman—

that sort of thing.”

“Any other bequests—anything of a personal nature?” persisted Preston.

“Humph. One here. ‘And to my old and good friend Joop Van Rensberg my ivory chess set in memory of the many contented evenings we spent playing together at the farm.’ That’s all.”

“Was the son back home in South Africa when the father died?” asked Preston.

“Must have been. Old Laurens was going down to see him. A long trip in those days.

No airliners then. One went by train.”

“Did you handle the sale of the farm and the other property, Mr. Benson?”

“The auctioneers did the sale, right out at the farm. It went to the Van Zyls. They bought the lot. All that land belongs to Bertie Van Zyl now. But I was there as chief executor of the will.”

“Were there any personal memorabilia that did not sell?” asked Preston.

The old man furrowed his brow. “Not much. It all went. Oh, I recall there was a photograph album. It had no commercial value. I believe I gave it to Mr. Van Rensberg.“

“Who was he?”

“The schoolmaster,” cut in the son. “He taught me until I went to Merensky High. He ran the old farm school until they built the primary school. Then he retired and stayed here in Duiwelskloof.”

“Is he still alive?”

“No, he died about ten years ago,” said the older Benson. “I went to the funeral.”

“But there was a daughter,” said his son helpfully. “Cissy. She was at Merensky with me. Must be the same age.”

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“Certainly. She married, years ago. A sawmill owner out on the Tzaneen road.”

“One last question”—Preston addressed himself to the old man—“why did you sell the property? Didn’t the son want it?”

“Apparently not,” said the old man. “He was in the Wynberg Military Hospital at the time. He sent me a cable. I got his address from the military authorities and they vouched for his identity. His cable asked me to dispose of the entire estate and cable the money to him.”

“He did not come for the funeral?”

“No time. January is our summer in South Africa. In those days there were few morgue facilities. Bodies had to be buried without delay. In fact I don’t think he ever returned at all. Understandable. With his father gone, there was nothing to come back for.”

“Where is Laurens Marais buried?”

“In the graveyard up on the hill,” said Benson Senior. “Is that all? Then I’ll be off to my lunch.”

The climate east and west of the mountains at Duiwelskloof varies dramatically. West of the range the rainfall in the Mootseki is about twenty inches a year. East of the range the great clouds beat up from the Indian Ocean, drift across Mozambique and the Kruger Park, and butt into the mountains, whose eastern slopes are drenched with eighty inches of rain a year. On this side the industry comes from the forests of blue gum trees. Six miles up the Tzaneen road Viljoen and Preston found the sawmill of Mr. du Plessis. It was his wife, the schoolmaster’s daughter, who opened the door; she was a plump, apple-cheeked woman of about fifty with flour on her hands and apron. She was in the throes of baking.

She listened to their problem intently, then shook her head. “I remember as a small girl going out to the farm, and my father playing chess with farmer Marais,” she said. “That would have been about 1944 or 1945. I recall the ivory chess set, but not the album.”

“When your father died, did you not inherit his effects?” asked Preston.

“No,” said Mrs. du Plessis. “You see, my mother died in 1955, leaving Daddy a widower. I looked after him myself until I married in 1958, when I was twenty-three.

After that, he couldn’t cope. His house was always a mess. I tried to keep going to cook and clean for him. But when the children came, it was too much.

“Then in 1960 his sister, my aunt, was widowed in her turn. She had lived at Pietersburg. It made sense for her to come and stay with my father and look after him. So she did. When he died I had already asked him to leave it all to her—the house, furniture, and so forth.”

“What happened to your aunt?” asked Preston.

“Oh, she still lives there. It’s a modest bungalow just behind the Imp Inn back in Duiwelskloof.”

She agreed to accompany them. Her aunt, Mrs. Winter, a bright, sparrowlike lady with blue-rinsed hair, was at home. When she had heard what they had to say, she went to a closet and pulled out a flat box. “Poor Joop used to love playing with this,” she said. It was the ivory chess set. “Is this what you want?”

“Not quite, it’s more the photograph album,” said Preston.

She looked puzzled. “There is a box of old junk up in the loft,” she said. “It went up there after he died. Just papers and things from his schoolmastering days.”

Andries Viljoen went up to the attic and brought it down. At the bottom of the yellowed school reports was the Marais family album. Preston leafed through it slowly. It was all there: the frail, pretty bride of 1920, the shyly smiling mother of 1930, the frowning boy astride his first pony, the father with pipe clamped in his teeth, trying not to look too proud, with his son by his side and the row of rabbits on the grass in front of them. At the end was a monochrome photo of a boy in cricket flannels, a handsome lad of seventeen, coming up to the wicket to bowl. The caption read Fanni, captain of cricket, Merensky High, 1943.

“May I keep this?” asked Preston.

“Certainly,” said Mrs. Winter.

“Did your late brother ever talk to you about Mr. Marais?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “They were very good friends for many years.”

“Did your brother ever say what he died of?”

She frowned. “Didn’t they tell you at the lawyer’s office? Tut. Old Cedric must be losing his wits. It was a hit-and-run accident, Joop told me. It seems old Marais had stopped to repair a puncture and he was hit by a passing truck. At the time it was thought to be some drunken kaffirs—oops”—her hand flew to her mouth and she looked at Viljoen with embarrassment—“I’m not supposed to say that anymore. Well, anyway, they never found out who was driving the truck.”

On the way back down the hill to the main road, they passed the graveyard. Preston asked Viljoen to stop. It was a pleasant, quiet plot, high above the town, fringed by pine and fir, dominated in its center by an old mwataba tree with a cleft trunk, and enclosed by a hedge of poinsettia. In one corner they found a moss-covered stone. Scraping away the moss, Preston found the epitaph carved in the granite:

Preston strolled across to the hedge, plucked a sprig of flaming poinsettia, and laid it by the stone. Viljoen looked at him oddly.

“Pretoria next, I think,” said Preston.

As they were climbing the Buffelberg on the road out of the Mootseki, Preston turned to look back across the valley. Dark gray stormclouds had built up behind the Devil’s Gap. As he watched they closed in, blotting out the little town and its macabre secret, known only to a middle-aged Englishman in a retreating car. Then he put his head back and fell asleep.

That evening, Harold Philby was escorted from the dacha’s guest suite to the sitting room of the General Secretary, where, the Soviet leader awaited him. Philby laid several documents in front of the old man. The General Secretary read them and laid them down.

“There are not many people involved,” he said.

“Permit me to make two important points, Comrade General Secretary. First, because of the extreme confidentiality of Plan Aurora I have thought it wise to keep the number of participants to an absolute minimum. On a need-to-know basis, even fewer would know what is really intended. Second, because of the extreme shortness of time there will have to be some cutting of corners. The weeks, even months, of briefing habitually required for an important ‘active measure’ will have to be telescoped into days.”

The General Secretary nodded slowly. “Explain why you need these men.”

“The key to the whole operation,” Philby continued, “is the executive officer, the man who will actually go into Britain and live there for weeks as a Britisher, and who will finally carry out Aurora.

“Supplying him with what he needs will be twelve couriers, or ‘mules.’ They will have to smuggle the items in, either through a customs point or, on occasion, through an unchecked entry point. Each will know nothing of what he is carrying, or why. Each will have memorized a rendezvous, and another as fallback in case of a nonconnect. Each will hand over the package to the executive officer and then return to our territory, to pass immediately into total quarantine. There will be one other man, apart from the executive officer, who will never return. But neither of these men should know this.

“Commanding the couriers will be the dispatching officer, with responsibility to ensure that the consignments reach the executive officer in Britain. He will be supported by a procurement/supply officer charged with securing the packages for delivery. This man will have four subordinates, each with one specialty.

“One of the subordinates will furnish the couriers’ documentation and transportation; another will concern himself with obtaining the high technology materials required; the third will provide the milled and engineered artifacts; and the fourth will assure communications. It is vital that the executive officer be able to inform us of progress, problems, and, above all, of the moment he is operationally ready; and we must be able to inform him of any change of plan, and, of course, give him the order to execute the plan.

“In the matter of communications there is one more thing to say. Because of the time element, it will not be possible to proceed through normal channels of mailed letters or personal meetings. We will communicate with the executive officer by coded Morse signals sent on Radio Moscow’s commercial wavebands, using one-time pads. But for him to reach us urgently, he is going to need a transmitter somewhere in Britain. It’s an old-fashioned and risky system, mainly intended for use in time of war. But it will have to be. You will see I have made mention of it.”

The General Secretary studied the documents again, identifying the operatives that the plan would need. Finally he looked up.

“You will get your men,” he said. “I will have them traced one by one, the very best we have, and transferred to special duties. One last thing. I do not wish anyone connected with Aurora to make contact in any form with the KGB people inside our rezidentura at the embassy in London. One never knows who is under surveillance, or—”

Whatever his other fear, he left it unsaid.

“That is all.”

Chapter 9

Preston and Viljoen convened in their office on the third floor of Union Building the next morning, at the Englishman’s request. As it was a Sunday, they had the building almost to themselves.

“Well, what next?” asked Captain Viljoen.

“I lay awake last night, thinking,” said Preston, “and there’s something that doesn’t fit.”

“You slept all the way back from the north,” said Viljoen grimly. “I had to drive.”

“Ah, but you’re so much fitter,” said Preston. That pleased Viljoen, who was proud of his physique, which he exercised regularly. He unbent somewhat. “I want to trace the other soldier,” Preston went on.

“What other soldier?”

“The one Marais escaped with. He never mentions his name. Just calls him ‘the other soldier’ or ‘my comrade.’ Why doesn’t he give him a name?”

Viljoen shrugged. “He didn’t think it necessary. He must have told the authorities at Wynberg Hospital so that the man’s next of kin could be informed.”

“That was verbal,” mused Preston. “The officers who heard him would soon have scattered into civilian life. Only the written record remains, and it mentions no name. I want to trace that other soldier.”

“But he’s dead,” protested Viljoen. “He’s been in a grave in a Polish forest for forty-two years.”

“Then I want to find out who he was.”

“Where the hell do we start?”

“Marais says they were kept alive in the POW camp mainly by Red Cross food parcels,” Preston said, as if thinking aloud. “He also says they escaped just before Christmas. That would have upset the Germans a bit. It was usual for the whole block to be punished with loss of privileges, including food parcels. Anyone in the block would be likely to remember that Christmas for the rest of his life. Can we find someone who was there?”

There is no formal organization of former prisoners-of-war in South Africa, but there is a brotherhood of war veterans, confined to those who have actually been in combat. It is called the “Order of Tin Hats,” and its members are known as “MOTHs.” MOTH branch meeting rooms are called “shell holes,” and the commanding officer is the “Old Bull.”

Using a telephone each, Preston and Viljoen began to call every shell hole in South Africa, trying to find anyone who had been in Stalag 344.

It was a wearying task. Of the 11,000 Allied prisoners in that camp, the great bulk had come from Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and America. The South Africans had been a minority.

Moreover, in the intervening years many had died. Of the MOTHs, some were out on the golf links, others away from home. They got regretful disclaimers and a host of helpful suggestions that turned out to be blind alleys. They stopped for the day at sundown and started again on Monday morning. Viljoen got his break just before noon; it came in the form of a retired meat packer in Cape Town. Viljoen, who was speaking in Afrikaans, put his hand over the receiver. “Guy here says he was in Stalag 344.”

Preston took over. “Mr. Anderson? My name is Preston. I am doing some research about Stalag 344. ... Thank you, very kind. ... Yes, I believe you were there. Do you remember Christmas 1944? Two young South African soldiers escaped from an outside work party. ... Ah, you do recall it. ... Yes, I’m sure it was pretty awful. Do you remember their names? ... Ah, not in their hut? No, of course. Well, do you remember the name of the senior South African NCO? ... Good. Warrant Officer Roberts. Any first name? Please try to remember. ... What? ... Wally. You’re sure of that? ... Many thanks indeed.”

Preston put the phone down. “Warrant Officer Wally Roberts. Probably Walter Roberts. Can we go to the Military Archive?”

The South African Military Archive is found, for some reason, under the Department of Education and is situated beneath 20 Visagie Street, Pretoria. There were more than a hundred Robertses listed, nineteen of them with the initial W, and seven named Walter.

None fitted. They went through the rest of the W. Robertses. Nothing. Preston started with the A. Roberts files and was lucky one hour later. James Walter Roberts had been a warrant officer in the Second World War; he had been captured at Tobruk and imprisoned in North Africa, Italy, and finally eastern Germany. He had stayed on in the Army after the war and risen to the rank of colonel. He had retired in 1972.

“You’d better pray he’s still alive,” said Viljoen.

“If he is, he’ll be drawing a pension,” said Preston. “The Pensions people might have him.”

They did. Colonel (Rt.) Wally Roberts was spending the autumn of his life at Orangeville, a small town set amid lakes and forests a hundred miles south of Johannesburg. It was dark out on Visagie Street when they emerged. They decided to drive down the next morning.

It was Mrs. Roberts who opened the door of the neat bungalow the following day and examined Captain Viljoen’s identity card with flustered alarm.

“He’s down by the lake, feeding the birds,” she told them, and pointed out the path.

They found the old warrior distributing morsels of bread to a grateful flock of water birds. He straightened up when they approached, and examined Viljoen’s card. Then he nodded as if to say “Carry on.”

He was in his seventies, ramrod-erect, a bristle of white across his upper lip. He was dressed in tweeds and highly polished brown shoes. He listened gravely to Preston’s question.

“Certainly I remember. I was hauled up before the German commandant, who was in the devil of a rage. The whole hut lost their Red Cross parcels for that episode. Damn young fools; we were evacuated westward on January 22, 1945, and liberated in late April.”

“Do you remember their names?” asked Preston.

“Certainly. Never forget a name. Both were young—late teens, I should think. Both were corporals. One was called Marais; the other was Brandt. Frikki Brandt. Both Afrikaners. Can’t recall their units, though. We were all so muffled up, wearing whatever we could. Hardly ever saw regimental flashes.”

They thanked him profusely and drove back to Pretoria, for another session at Visagie Street. Unfortunately, Brandt is a very common Dutch name, with its variation Brand, which lacks the terminal t but is pronounced the same. There were hundreds of them.

By nightfall, with the aid of the archive staff, they had culled six corporal Frederik Brandts, all deceased. Two had died in action in North Africa, two in Italy, and one in a capsized landing craft. They opened the sixth file.

Captain Viljoen stared wide-eyed at the open folder. “I don’t believe it,” he said softly.

“Who could have done it?”

“Who knows?” Preston replied. “But it was done a long time ago.”

The file was completely empty.

“I’m sorry about that,” said Viljoen as he drove Preston back to the Burgerspark. “But it looks like the end of the trail.”

Late that evening, from his hotel room, Preston called Colonel Roberts. “Sorry to trouble you again, Colonel. Do you recall at all whether Corporal Brandt had any special mate in that hut? My own experience in the Army is that there is usually one close friend.”

“Quite right, there usually is. I can’t recall offhand. Let me sleep on it. If I think of anything, I’ll call you in the morning.”

The helpful colonel called Preston during breakfast. The clipped voice came down the line as if he were making a battle report to headquarters. “Remembered something,” he said. “Those huts were built for about a hundred men. But we were jammed in there at the end like sardines. More than two hundred chaps to a hut. Some slept on the floor, others had to share a bunk. Nothing poofy, you know, just had to be done.”

“I understand,” said Preston. “And Brandt?”

“Shared a bunk with another corporal. Name of Levinson. RDLI.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Royal Durban Light Infantry, Levinson was.”

Visagie Street came up with the information faster this time. Levinson was not nearly so common a name, and they had a regiment. The file was out in fifteen minutes. His name was Max Levinson and he had been born in Durban. He had quit the Army at the end of the war, so there was no pension and no address. But they knew he was sixty-five years old.

Preston tried the Durban telephone directory while Viljoen had the Durban police run the name through their files. Viljoen got the first lead. There were two parking tickets and an address. Max Levinson ran a small hotel on the seafront. Viljoen called and got Mrs.

Levinson. She confirmed that her husband had been in Stalag 344. At the moment he was out fishing.

They twiddled their thumbs until nightfall, when Preston reached him by phone. The cheerful hotelier boomed down the line from the east coast.

“Sure I remember Frikki. Silly bastard did a runner into the woods. Never did hear of him again. What about him?”

“Where did he come from?” asked Preston.

“East London,” said Levinson without hesitation.

“What was his background?”

“He never said much about it,” replied Levinson. “Afrikaner, of course. Fluent Afrikaans, poor English. Working class. Oh, I remember, he said his dad was a shunter in the railway yards there.”

Preston made his good-byes and turned to Viljoen. “East London,” he said. “Can we drive there?”

Viljoen sighed. “I wouldn’t advise it,” he said, “it’s hundreds of miles. We’re a very big country, you know, Mr. Preston. If you really want, we’ll go by plane tomorrow. I’ll arrange a police car and driver to meet us.”

“Unmarked car, please,” said Preston. “And the driver in plainclothes.”

Although the headquarters of the KGB is at the “Center,” 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, in central Moscow, and though the building is not small, it would be far too cramped to contain even a portion of one of the chief directorates and departments that make up this huge organization. So the subheadquarters are scattered all over.

The First Chief Directorate is based out at Yasyenevo, on the outer ring road that circles Moscow, almost due south of the city. Almost all the FCD is housed in a modern aluminum-and-glass seven-story edifice shaped in the form of a three-pointed star, rather like the logo of Mercedes cars.

It was built by the Finns on contract, and was intended for the International Department of the Central Committee. But when it was finished, the ID people did not like it; they wanted to stay close to central Moscow; so it was given to the First Chief Directorate. It suits the FCD admirably, being well out of town and away from prying eyes.

Staffers of the FCD are officially undercover, even in their own country. Since many of them will have to go abroad (or already have been) posing as diplomats, the last thing they need is to be seen coming out of FCD headquarters by a nosy tourist who might put them on candid camera.

But there is one directorate within the FCD that is so secret it is not even based with the rest at Yasyenevo. If the FCD is secret, the S, or Illegals, Directorate is top secret. Not only do its agents not meet their FCD colleagues; they do not even meet each other. Their training and briefing is on a one-to-one basis—just the instructor and one pupil. They do not check in each morning to any office, since that way they might see each other.

The reason is simple in Soviet psychology: Russians are paranoid about secrecy and betrayal—there is nothing particularly Communist about this, it goes back to Tsarist days.

The illegals are men (and occasionally women) who are rigorously trained to go into foreign countries and live under deep cover. Unfortunately, some illegals have been caught and have cooperated with their captors; others have defected and spilled all they know. Therefore, the less they know, the better. It is axiomatic in espionage that one cannot betray what or whom one does not know.

The illegals, therefore, are scattered among scores of small flats in central Moscow and report singly for training and briefing. In order to be close to his “lads,” the head of the S Directorate still keeps his office at the Center on Dzerzhinsky Square. It is on the sixth floor, three stories above that of KGB Chairman Chebrikov and two above those of the first deputy chairmen, Generals Tsinev and Kryuchkov.

It was to this unpretentious sanctum that two men came on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 18, while Preston was talking to Max Levinson, to confront the director, a seamy old veteran who had been in clandestine espionage all his adult life.

What they presented to him did not please him.

“There is only one man who fits this bill,” he grudgingly admitted. “He is outstanding.”

One of the men from the Central Committee offered a small card. “Then, Comrade Major General, you will detach him from his duties forthwith and require him to report to this address.”

The director nodded glumly. He knew the address. When the men had gone he recalled their authorization again. It was from the Central Committee, all right, and though it did not say so in as many words, he had no doubt from whom it came with that kind of authority rating. He sighed resignedly. It was hard to lose one of the best men he had ever trained, a really exceptional agent, but there was no arguing with that particular order. He was a serving officer; it was not for him to question orders. He depressed a switch on his intercom. “Tell Major Valeri Petrofsky to report to me.”

The first plane out of Johannesburg for East London arrived on time at Ben Schoeman, the small, neat, blue-and-white airport that serves South Africa’s fourth commercial port and city. The police driver was waiting in the concourse and led them to a plain Ford sedan in the parking lot.

“Where to, Captain?” he asked. Viljoen raised an eyebrow at Preston.

“The railway headquarters,” said Preston. “More particularly, the administration building.”

The driver nodded and set off. East London’s modern railway station is on Fleet Street, and directly opposite stands a rather shabby old complex of single-story buildings in green and cream, the administration offices. Viljoen’s open-sesame identity card brought them quickly to the director of the finance department. He listened to Preston’s query.

“Yes, we do pay pensions to all retired railway staff still living in this area,” he said.

“What was the name?”

“Brandt,” said Preston. “I’m afraid I don’t have a first name. But he was a shunter, many years ago.”

The director summoned an assistant and they all trooped down dingy corridors to the records office. The assistant burrowed for a while and came up with a pension slip.

“Here he is,” he said. “The only one we have. Retired three years ago. Koos Brandt.”

“How old would he be?” asked Preston.

“Sixty-three,” said the assistant after a glance at the card.

Preston shook his head. If Frikki Brandt had been the same age as Jan Marais, and his father about thirty years older, the old man would be over ninety by now. The director and his assistant were adamant. There were no other retired Brandts.

“Then can you find me,” asked Preston, “the three oldest pensioners still alive and in receipt of their weekly check?”

“They’re not listed by age,” protested the assistant, “they’re listed alphabetically.”

Viljoen drew the director aside and spoke urgently in his ear in Afrikaans. Whatever he said had its effect. The director looked impressed. “Go ahead,” he told his assistant. “One by one. Anyone born before 1910. We’ll be in my office.”

It took an hour. The assistant produced three pension slips. “There’s one who’s ninety,” he said, “but he was a porter at the passenger terminal. One of eighty, a former cleaner. This one is eighty-one. He’s a former shunter from the marshaling yards.” The man was called Fourie and his address was given as somewhere up in the Quigney.

Ten minutes later they were driving through the Quigney, the old quarter of East London, dating back fifty years and more. Some of its humble bungalows had been well kept up; others were shabby and run-down, the homes of the poorer white working class.

From behind Moore Street they could hear the clang of the railway workshops and the shunting yards, where the big trains are assembled to haul freight from the docks of East London up to the landlocked Transvaal via Pietermaritzburg. They found the house one block off Moore Street.

An old Colored woman answered the door, her face like a pickled walnut and her white hair drawn back in a bun. Viljoen spoke to her in Afrikaans. The old woman pointed toward the horizon and muttered something before firmly closing the door. Viljoen escorted Preston back to the car.

“She says he’s up at the institute,” Viljoen told the driver. “Know what she means?”

“Yes, sir. The old Railway Institute. Now they call it Turnbull Park. Up Paterson Street. It’s the social and recreation club for railway workers.”

It turned out to be a large, one-story building adjacent to three bowling greens. Beyond the doors, they passed an array of snooker tables and TV rooms before arriving at a flourishing bar.

“Papa Fourie?” said the barman. “Sure. He’s out there watching the bowling.”

They found the old man by one of the greens, sitting in the warm autumn sunshine nursing a pint of beer. Preston put his question.

The old man stared at him for a while before nodding. “Yes, I remember Joe Brandt.

He’s been dead these many years.”

“He had a son. Frederik—Frikki.”

“That’s right. Good heavens, young man, you’re taking me back quite a bit. Nice kid.

Used to come down to the yards sometimes after school. Joe used to let him ride the engines with him. Quite a treat for a lad in those days.”

“That would be the mid- to late 1930s?” asked Preston.

The old man nodded. “About then. Just after Joe and his family came here.”

“Around 1943 the boy Frikki went away to the war,” Preston suggested.

Papa Fourie stared at him for a while from rheumy eyes that were trying to look backward through more than fifty years of an uneventful life. “That’s right,” he said.

“The boy never came back. They told Joe he had died somewhere in Germany. It broke Joe’s heart. He doted on that boy, had great plans for him. He was never the same, not after that telegram arrived at the end of the war. He died in 1950—I always reckoned of a broken heart. His wife wasn’t long after him—couple of years, perhaps.”

“Awhile ago you said, ‘Just after Joe and his family came here,’ ” Viljoen reminded him. “Which part of South Africa did they come from?”

Papa Fourie looked puzzled. “They didn’t come from South Africa.”

“But they were an Afrikaner family,” Viljoen protested.

“Who told you that?”

“The Army,” said Viljoen.

The old man smiled. “I suppose young Frikki would have passed himself off as an Afrikaner in the Army. No, they came from Germany. Immigrants. About the middle of the 1930s. Joe never spoke good Afrikaans to the day he died. Of course, the boy did.

Learned it at school.”

When they were back in the parked car, Viljoen turned to Preston and asked, “Well?”

“Where are the immigration records kept?”

“In the basement of the Union Building in Pretoria, along with the rest of the state archives,” said Viljoen.

“Could the archivists up there run a check while we wait here?” asked Preston.

“Sure. Let’s go to the police station. We can phone better from there.”

The police station is also on Fleet Street; it is a three-story yellow-brick fortress with opaque windows, right next to the drill hall of the Kaffrarian Rifles. Preston and Viljoen put in their request and lunched in the canteen, while up in Pretoria an archivist lost his lunch hour while he went through the files. Happily they had all been computerized by 1987 and the file number came up quickly. The archivist withdrew the file, typed up a résumé, and put it on the telex.

In East London the telex was brought to Preston and Viljoen over coffee. Viljoen translated it, word for word.

“Good God,” he said when he had finished. “Who would ever have thought it?”

Preston seemed pensive. He rose and crossed the canteen to speak to their driver, who was at a separate table. “Is there a synagogue in East London?”

“Yes, sir. On Park Avenue. Two minutes from here.”

The white-painted, black-domed synagogue, surmounted by the star of David, was empty this Thursday afternoon save for a Colored caretaker in an old Army greatcoat and wool cap. He gave them the address of Rabbi Blum in the suburb of Salbourne. They knocked on his door just after three o’clock. He opened it himself, a stalwart bearded man with iron-gray hair who appeared to be in his mid-fifties. One glance was enough; he was too young. Preston introduced himself and asked, “Can you tell me, please, who was the rabbi here before yourself?”

“Certainly. Rabbi Sharpiro.”

“Have you any idea if he is still alive and where I might find him?”

“You’d better come in,” said Rabbi Blum. He led the way into his house, down a corridor, and opened a door at the end. The room was a bedsitter, in which a very old man sat before a gas fire sipping a cup of black tea. “Uncle Solomon, there’s someone here to see you,” he said.

Preston left the house an hour later and joined Viljoen, who had returned to the car.

“The airport,” Preston told the driver, and to Viljoen, “Could you arrange a meeting with General Pienaar for tomorrow morning?”

That Thursday afternoon, two more men were transferred from their posts in the Soviet armed forces to special assignment.

About a hundred miles west of Moscow, just off the road to Minsk and set in a large forest is a complex of radio dish aerials and supporting buildings. It is one of the USSR’s listening posts for radio signals coming in from Warsaw Pact military units and from abroad, but it can also intercept messages between other parties far outside the Soviet borders. One section of the complex is screened off and is solely for KGB use. One of the man detached for special duty was a warrant officer radio operator from this section.

“He’s the best man I’ve got,” complained the commanding colonel to his deputy when the men from the Central Committee had left. “Good? I’ll say he’s good. Given the right equipment, he can pick up a cockroach scratching its arse in California.”

The other posted man was a colonel in the Soviet Army, and if he had been in uniform, which he seldom was, his flashes would have indicated that he was with the artillery. In fact he was more scientist than soldier, and worked in the Directorate of Ordnance, Research Division.

“So,” said General Pienaar when they were seated in the leather club chairs around the coffee table, “our diplomat, Jan Marais. Is he guilty or not?”

“Guilty,” said Preston, “as hell.”

“I think I’d like to hear you prove that, Mr. Preston. Where did he go wrong? Where was he turned?”

“He didn’t and he wasn’t,” answered Preston. “He never put a foot wrong. You have read his handwritten autobiography?”

“Yes, and as Captain Viljoen may have pointed out, we, too, have checked everything in that man’s career from his birth to the present day. We can find not one discrepancy.”

“There aren’t any,” said Preston. “The story of his boyhood is absolutely accurate to the last detail. I believe he could even today describe that boyhood for five hours without repeating himself once and without being wrong in a single detail.”

“Then it’s true. Everything that is checkable is true,” said the general.

“Everything that is checkable, yes. It is all true up to the point when those two young soldiers dropped from the tailboard of a German truck in Silesia and started running.

After that, it’s all lies. Let me explain by starting at the other end, with the story of Frikki Brandt, the man who jumped with Jan Marais.

“In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. In 1935 a German railway worker named Josef Brandt went to the South African legation in Berlin and pleaded for an emigration visa on compassionate grounds—he was in danger of persecution because he was a Jew. His appeal was heard and he was granted a visa to enter South Africa with his young family. Your own archives confirm the application and the issuance of the visa.”

“That’s right.” General Pienaar nodded. “There were many Jewish immigrants to South Africa during the Hitler period. South Africa has a good record on that issue—better than some.”

“In September 1935,” continued Preston, “Josef Brandt, with his wife, Ilse, and his ten-year-old son, Friedrich, boarded ship at Bremerhaven, and six weeks later they disembarked at East London. There was then a large German community and a small Jewish one there. Brandt elected to stay in East London, and sought a job on the railways.

A kindly immigration official informed the local rabbi of the arrival of the new family.

“The rabbi, an energetic young man named Solomon Shapiro, visited the newcomers and tried to help by encouraging them to join the Jewish community life. They refused, and he assumed they wished to try to assimilate into the Gentile community. He was disappointed but not suspicious.

“Then, in 1938, the boy, whose name was now Afrikanerized into Frederik, or Frikki, turned thirteen. It was time for his bar mitzvah, the coming-of-age for a Jewish boy.

However much the Brandts might wish to assimilate, that is an important ceremony for a man with an only son. Although none of them had ever been to shul, Rabbi Shapiro visited the family to ask if they would like him to officiate. They gave him a flea in his ear, and his suspicions hardened into certainty.”

“What certainty?” asked the general, perplexed.

“The certainty that they were not Jewish,” said Preston. “He told me so last night. At a bar mitzvah, the boy is blessed by the rabbi. First the rabbi must be convinced of the boy’s Jewishness. In the Jewish faith, that is inherited through the mother, not the father.

The mother must produce a document, called a ketubah, confirming that she is Jewish.

Ilse Brandt had no ketubah. There could be no bar mitzvah.”

“So they entered South Africa under false pretenses,” said General Pienaar. “It was a hell of a long time ago.”

“More than that,” said Preston. “I can’t prove it, but I think I’m right. Josef Brandt was correct when he told your legation all those years ago that he was under threat from the Gestapo. But not as a Jew. As a militant, activist German Communist. He knew if he told your legation that, he’d never get a visa.”

“Go on,” said the general grimly.

“By the time he was eighteen, Frikki was completely imbued with his father’s secret ideals; he was a dedicated Communist prepared to work for the Comintern.

“In 1943 two young men joined the South African Army and went to war: Jan Marais, from Duiwelskloof, to fight for South Africa and the British Commonwealth, and Frikki Brandt to fight for his ideological motherland, the Soviet Union.

“They never met in basic training, or on the troop convoy, or in Italy, or at Moosberg.

But they met at Stalag 344. I don’t know whether Brandt had worked out his escape plans by then, but he picked for his companion a young man tall and blond like himself. It was Brandt who initiated that run into the forest when the truck broke down.”

“But what about the pneumonia?” asked Viljoen.

“There was no pneumonia,” said Preston, “nor did they fall into the hands of Catholic Polish partisans. More likely they fell in with Communist partisans, to whom Brandt could talk in fluent German. They would have led Brandt to the Red Army, and thence to the NKVD, with the trusting Marais tailing along.

“It was between March and August 1945 when the switch took place. All that talk about freezing cells was rubbish. Marais would have been squeezed for every last detail of his childhood and education, and Brandt would have memorized it until, despite his poor written English, he could write that curriculum vitae with his eyes closed.

“The NKVD probably gave Brandt a crash course in English as well, changed his appearance a bit, put Marais’s dog tags around his neck, and then they were ready. With his usefulness ended, Jan Marais was probably liquidated.

“The Soviets roughed Brandt up a bit, gave him a few chemicals to make him realistically ill, and handed him to the British at Potsdam. He spent time in a hospital at Bielefeld, and more outside Glasgow. By the winter of 1945 all South African soldiers would have gone home; he was unlikely to run across anyone from the Wits/De La Rey Regiment in Britain. In December he sailed for Cape Town, arriving in January 1946.

“There was one problem. Someone at Defense HQ had sent old farmer Marais a cable to say his son was home at last, having been posted ‘missing, presumed dead.’ To Brandt’s horror a cable arrived—I admit I am guessing here, but it makes sense—urging him to return home. Of course, he could not show himself in Duiwelskloof. He made himself ill again and went into Wynberg Military Hospital.

“The old father would not be put off. He cabled again, to say he was coming all the way to Cape Town. In desperation Brandt appealed to his friends in the Comintern, and the matter was arranged. They ran the old man down on a lonely road in the Mootseki Valley, making it look like a hit-and-run accident while Marais was changing a flat tire.

After that it was plain sailing for Brandt. The young man could not get home for the funeral—everyone at Duiwelskloof understood that—and lawyer Benson had no suspicion when he was asked to sell the estate and mail the proceeds to Cape Town.”

The silence in the office was disturbed only by the buzzing of a fly on the windowpane.

The general nodded. “It makes sense,” he conceded. “But there’s no proof. We cannot prove the Brandts were not Jewish, let alone that they were Communists. Can you give me anything that puts it beyond doubt?”

Preston reached into his pocket and produced the photograph, which he laid on General Pienaar’s desk. “That is a picture—the last picture—of the real Jan Marais. As you see, he was a useful cricketer in his boyhood. He was a bowler. If you look, you will see that his fingers are gripping the ball in the manner of a spin bowler. You will also notice that he is left-handed. I have spent more than a week studying the Jan Marais in London—at close range, through binoculars. When driving, smoking, eating, drinking, he is right-handed. General, you can do many things to a man to change him; you can change his hair, his speech, his face, his mannerisms. But you cannot turn a left-handed spin bowler into a right-handed man.”

General Pienaar, who had played cricket for half his life, stared down at the photograph. “So what have we got up there in London, Mr. Preston?”

“General, you have got a dedicated, dyed-in-the-wool Communist agent who has worked inside the South African foreign service more than forty years for the Soviet Union.”

General Pienaar lifted his eyes from the desk and gazed out across the valley to the Voortrekker Monument. “I’ll break him,” he whispered, “I’ll break him into tiny pieces and stamp them into the bushveld.”

Preston coughed. “Bearing in mind that we British also have a problem because of this man, could I ask you to restrain your hand until you have talked personally to Sir Nigel Irvine?”

“Very well, Mr. Preston,” General Pienaar answered, nodding. “I will talk to Sir Nigel first. Now, what are your plans?”

“There is a flight back to London this evening, sir. I would like to be on it.”

General Pienaar rose and held out his hand. “Good day, Mr. Preston. Captain Viljoen will see you onto the plane. And thank you for your assistance.”

From the hotel, as he packed, Preston made a call to Dennis Grey, who drove up from Johannesburg and took a message for coded transmission to London. Preston had his answer two hours later. Sir Bernard Hemmings would come into the office the next day, Saturday, to meet him.

Preston and Viljoen stood in the departure lounge at just before 8:00 p.m. as the last calls for passengers on the South African Airways flight for London were made. Preston showed his boarding pass and Viljoen his all-purpose ID card. They went through to the cooler darkness of the tarmac.

“I’ll say this for you, Engelsman, you’re a damned good jagdhond.”

“Thank you,” said Preston.

“Do you know what a jagdhond is?”

“I believe,” said Preston carefully, “that the Cape hunting dog is slow, ungainly, but very tenacious.”

It was the first time that week that Captain Viljoen threw back his head and laughed.

Then he grew serious. “May I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you put a flower on the old man’s grave?”

Preston stared across at the waiting airliner, its cabin lights blazing in the semidarkness twenty yards away. The last passengers were climbing the steps.

“They had taken away his son,” he said, “and then they killed him to stop him from finding out. It seemed the thing to do.”

Viljoen held out his hand. “Good-bye, John, and good luck.”

“Good-bye, Andries.”

Ten minutes later, the flying springbok on the fin of the jetliner tilted its straining nose toward the sky and lifted off for the north and Europe.

Chapter 10

Sir Bernard Hemmings, with Brian Harcourt-Smith at his side, sat in silence and listened to Preston’s report until he had finished.

“Good God,” he said heavily, when Preston was silent, “so it was Moscow after all.

There’ll be the devil to pay. The damage must have been huge. Brian, are both men still under surveillance?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep it that way through the weekend. Make no move to close in until the Paragon Committee have had a chance to hear what we have. John, I know you must be tired, but can you have your report written up by tomorrow night?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have it on my desk first thing Monday morning. I’ll reach the various committee members at their homes and ask for an urgent meeting for Monday morning.”

When Major Valeri Petrofsky was shown into the sitting room of the elegant dacha at Usovo, he was in a spirit of extreme trepidation. He had never met the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and never had imagined he would do so.

He had had a confusing, even terrifying, four days. Since being detached for special duties by his director, he had been sequestered in a flat in central Moscow, guarded night and day by two men from the Ninth Directorate, the Kremlin Guards. Not unnaturally, he had feared the worst, without having the faintest idea what he was supposed to have done.

Then the abrupt order that Sunday evening to dress in his best suit of civilian clothes and follow the guards downstairs to a waiting Chaika, followed by the silent drive to Usovo. He had not recognized the dacha to which he was brought.

It was only when Major Pavlov had told him, “The Comrade General Secretary will see you now,” that he had realized where he was. His throat was dry as he stepped through the door into the sitting room. He tried to compose himself, telling himself he would answer respectfully and truthfully any accusations leveled at him.

Inside the room he stood rigidly at attention. The old man in the wheelchair observed him silently for several minutes, then raised a hand and beckoned him forward. Petrofsky took four smart steps and stopped again, still at attention. But when the Soviet leader spoke, the whiplash of accusation in his voice was missing. He spoke quite softly.

“Major Petrofsky, you are not a tailor’s dummy. Come forward into the light, where I can see you. And sit down.”

Petrofsky was stunned. To be seated in the presence of the General Secretary was, for a young major, unheard of. He did as he was told, perching on the edge of the indicated chair, back stiff, knees together.

“Have you any idea why I have sent for you?”

“No, Comrade General Secretary.”

“No, I suppose not. It was necessary that no one know. I will tell you.

“There is a mission that has to be performed. Its outcome will be of quite incalculable importance to the Soviet Union and the victory of the Revolution. If it succeeds, the benefits to our country will be inestimable; if it fails, the damage to us will be catastrophic. I have chosen you, Valeri Alexeivitch, to carry out that mission.”

Petrofsky’s mind whirled. His original fear that he was destined fiar disgrace and exile was replaced by an almost uncontrollable jubilation. As a brilliant scholar at Moscow University, he had been plucked from an intended career in the Foreign Ministry to become one of the First Chief Directorate’s bright young men; ever since he had volunteered for and been accepted by the elite Illegals Directorate, he had dreamed of an important mission. But his wildest fantasies had not encompassed anything like this. He allowed himself at last to look the General Secretary straight in the eye. “Thank you, Comrade General Secretary.”

“Others will brief you as to the details,” the General Secretary continued. “Time will be short, but you have already been trained to the peak of our abilities, and you will have all for the mission that you need.

“I have asked to see you for one reason. There is something that must be put to you, and I have chosen to ask it myself. If the operation succeeds—and I have no doubt it will—you will return here to promotion and honors beyond your imaginings. I will see to it.

“But if anything should go wrong, if the police and troops of the country to which you will be sent are seen to be closing in, you will have to take steps without hesitation to ensure that you are not taken alive. Do you understand, Valeri Alexeivitch?”

“Yes, I do, Comrade General Secretary.”

“To be taken alive, to be rigorously interrogated, to be broken—oh, yes, it is possible nowadays, there are no reserves of courage that can resist the chemicals—to be paraded before an international press conference—all this would be a living hell, anyway. But the damage of such a spectacle to the Soviet Union, to this your country, would be beyond estimation and beyond repair.”

Major Petrofsky took a deep breath. “I will not fail,” he said. “But if it comes to it, I will never be taken alive.”

The General Secretary pressed a buzzer beneath the table and the door opened. Major Pavlov stood there.

“Now go, young man. You will be told here in this house, by a man whom you may have seen before, what the mission involves. Then you will go to another place for intensive briefing. We will not meet again—until you return.”

When the door closed upon the two majors of the KGB, the General Secretary stared for a while into the flickering flames of the log fire. Such a fine young man, he thought.

Such a pity.

As Petrofsky followed Major Pavlov down two long corridors to the guest wing, he felt as if his ribcage could scarcely contain the emotions of expectation and pride within it.

Major Valeri Alexeivitch Petrofsky was a Russian soldier and a patriot. Steeped in the English language, he had heard the phrase “to die for God, King, and country” and he understood its meaning. He had no God, but he had been entrusted with a mission by the leader of his country, and he was determined, as he walked down that corridor at Usovo, that if the moment should ever come he would not shrink from what had to be done.

Major Pavlov stopped at a door, knocked, and pushed it open. He stood aside to let Petrofsky enter. Then he closed the door and withdrew.

A white-haired man rose from a chair beside a table covered by notes and maps, and came forward. He smiled, holding out his hand. “So you are Major Petrofsky.”

Petrofsky was surprised by the stutter. He knew the face, though they had never met. In the folklore of the FCD this man was one who younger entrants were taught was one of the “Five Stars,” a man to be respected, a man who represented one of the great triumphs of Soviet ideology over capitalism. “Yes, Comrade Colonel,” he said.

Philby had read the file until he knew it perfectly. Petrofsky was only thirty-six and had been trained for a decade to pass for an Englishman. He had twice been in Britain on familiarization trips, each time living under deep cover, each time going nowhere near the Soviet Embassy, and each time undertaking no mission at all. Such familiarization trips were intended simply to enable illegals, before they went operational, to acclimatize themselves to everything they would one day see again; simple things, opening a bank account, having a scrape with another car driver and knowing what to do, using the London Underground, and always improving the use of modern slang phrases.

Philby knew that the young man in front of him not only spoke perfect English but was tone-perfect in four regional accents and had faultless command of Welsh and Irish. He dropped into English himself.

“Sit down,” he said. “Now, I am simply going to describe to you the broad outlines of the mission. Others will give you all the details. Time will be short, desperately short, so you will have to absorb everything faster than ever before in your life.”

As they talked, Philby realized that after thirty years away from his native land, and despite reading every newspaper and magazine from Britain that he could lay hands on, it was he who was out of practice, he whose phraseology was stilted and old-fashioned. The young Russian spoke like a modern Englishman of his age.

It took two hours for Philby to outline the plan called Aurora and what it involved.

Petrofsky drank in the details. He was excited and amazed by the audacity of it.

“You will spend the next few days with a team of four men only. They will brief you on a whole range of names, places, dates, transmission times, rendezvous, and backup rendezvous. You will memorize them all. The only thing you will have to take in with you will be a block of one-time pads. Well, that’s it.”

Petrofsky sat nodding at what he had been told. “I have promised the Comrade General Secretary that I will not fail,” he said. “It will be done, as required and on time. If the components arrive, it will be done.”

Philby rose. “Good, then I will have you driven back to Moscow to the place where you will spend the time remaining until your departure.”

As Philby crossed the room to the house phone, Petrofsky was startled by a loud coo from the corner. He turned to see a large cage from which a handsome pigeon with a splint on one leg was regarding them. Philby grinned apologetically. “I call him Hopalong,” he said as he dialed for Major Pavlov to return. “Found him in the street last winter with a broken wing and leg. The wing has mended but the leg keeps giving trouble.”

Petrofsky crossed to the cage and scratched the bars with a fingernail. But the pigeon waddled away to the far side. The door opened to admit Major Pavlov. As usual he said nothing, but gestured Petrofsky to follow him.

“Until we meet again, good luck,” said Philby.

On Monday, March 23, the members of the Paragon Committee assembled to read Preston’s report.

“So,” said Sir Anthony Plumb, opening the discussion, “now at least we know what, where, when, and who. We still don’t know why.”

“Nor how much,” interposed Sir Patrick Strickland. “The damage assessment is still unattempted and we simply have got to inform our allies. Even though nothing sensitive—save for one fictitious paper—has gone on its way to Moscow since January.”

“Agreed,” said Sir Anthony. “All right, gentlemen, I think we must concur that the time for further investigation is over. How do we handle this man? Any ideas? Brian?”

Brian Harcourt-Smith was without his Director-General, and represented MI5 alone.

He chose his words carefully. “We take the view that with Berenson, Marais, and the cutout Benotti the ring is complete. It seems to the Security Service that it is unlikely there were more agents being run by this one ring. Berenson would have been so important, it seems to us likely the entire ring was set up to handle him alone.”

There were nods of agreement around the table.

“And your recommendation?” asked Sir Anthony.

“That we pick them all up, roll up the whole ring,” said Harcourt-Smith.

“There’s a foreign diplomat involved,” objected Sir Hubert Villiers of the Home Office.

“I think Pretoria may be prepared to waive immunity in this case,” said Sir Patrick Strickland. “General Pienaar must have reported all this to Mr. Botha by now. They’ll no doubt want Marais when we have had a chat with him.”

“Well, that seems decisive enough,” said Sir Anthony. “How about you, Nigel?”

Sir Nigel Irvine had been staring at the ceiling as if lost in thought. At the question he seemed to wake up. “I was just wondering,” he said quietly. “We pick them up. Then what?”

“Interrogation,” said Harcourt-Smith crisply. “We can begin damage assessment and inform our allies of the roundup of the entire ring to sweeten the pill a bit.”

“Yes,” said Sir Nigel, “it’s good. But what after that?” He began to address the secretaries of the three ministries and the Cabinet. “It seems to me we have four choices.

We can pick up Berenson and formally charge him under the Official Secrets Act, which we’ll have to do if we arrest him. But do we actually have a case that will stand up in court? We know we are right, but can we prove it against a first-class legal defense?

Apart from anything else, a formal arrest and charge would cause a major scandal, which would be certain to rebound against the government.”

Sir Martin Flannery, the Cabinet Secretary, took the point. Unlike anyone else in the room, he knew of the intention to hold a snap summer election, because the Prime Minister had told him in strictest confidence. A lifelong civil servant of the old school, Sir Martin had offered his total loyalty to the present government, as he had to three previous governments, two of them Labour. He would offer that same loyalty to any democratically elected successor government. He pursed his lips.

“Then,” resumed Sir Nigel, “we could leave Berenson and Marais in place, but seek to feed Berenson doctored documents to pass on to Moscow. But that wouldn’t work for long. Berenson is too highly placed and knowledgeable to be fooled by that.”

Sir Peregrine Jones nodded. He knew that on that point Sir Nigel was right.

“Or we could pick Berenson up and try to get his complete cooperation in damage assessment by offering him immunity from prosecution. Personally, I hate immunity for traitors. You never know whether they have told you the whole truth or have tricked you, as Blunt did. And it always gets out eventually, with an even worse scandal.”

Sir Hubert Villiers, whose ministry contained the law officers to the crown, frowned in agreement. He, too, hated immunity deals, and they all knew the Prime Minister felt the same.

“That seems to leave,” continued the Chief of the SIS smoothly, “the question of detention without trail, and rigorous interrogation. In a word, third degree. I suppose I’m just old-fashioned, but I’ve never had much confidence in it. He might admit to fifty documents, but we’d none of us know to the day we died if there weren’t another fifty.”

There was silence for a while.

“They’re all pretty unpleasant,” agreed Sir Anthony Plumb, “but it looks as if we’ll have to go with Brian’s suggestion if there aren’t any others.”

“There might just be one,” said Sir Nigel gently. “It could be, you know, that Berenson’s recruitment was a genuine false-flag approach.”

Most of those present knew what a false-flag recruitment was, but Sir Hubert Villiers of the Home Office and Sir Martin Flannery of the Cabinet frowned in puzzlement. Sir Nigel explained.

“It involves the recruitment of a source by men who pretend to be working for one country, with whom the subject is sympathetic, while in reality they are working for another. The Israeli Mossad are particular experts at this technique. Being able to produce agents who can pass for just about any nationality under the sun, the Israelis have worked some remarkable ‘stings’ with false flags.

“For example: A loyal West German working in the Middle East is approached while on furlough at home by two fellow Germans who, with impeccable supporting evidence, prove to him that they represent the BND, the West German intelligence arm. They spin him a tale to the effect that a Frenchman working on the same project as he is passing technology secrets that are patently forbidden by NATO. Would the German help his own country by reporting back on what is going on? As a loyal German he agrees, and spends years working for Mossad. Such things have happened many times.

“It makes sense, you know,” pursued Sir Nigel. “We’ve all been through Berenson’s file until we are no doubt sick of it. But with what we now know, the false-flag technique could be the answer.”

There were several nods as they recalled the contents of Berenson’s file. He had started his career, straight out of the university, in the Foreign Office. He had progressed quite well, serving abroad on three occasions and rising steadily, if not spectacularly, in the diplomatic corps.

In the mid-1960s he had married Lady Fiona Glen and shortly afterward had been posted to Pretoria, where he was accompanied by his new wife. It was probably there, confronted by the traditional and almost limitless South African hospitality, that he had developed his deep sympathy and admiration for that country. With a Labour government in power in Britain and Rhodesia in rebellion, Berenson’s increasingly outspoken admiration of Pretoria had not gone down very well at home.

On his return to Britain in 1969, word had apparently reached him that his next posting was likely to be somewhere less controversial—say, to Bolivia. The men around the table could only surmise, but it was perfectly likely that Lady Fiona, while prepared to take Pretoria in her stride, had put her foot down flatly at the idea of leaving her beloved horses and social life to spend three years halfway up the Andes.

Whatever had been the reason, George Berenson had applied for a transfer to the Ministry of Defense, which was regarded in the Foreign Office as going down-market.

But with his wife’s fortune, he didn’t care. With the constraints of the diplomatic service removed from his life, he had become a member of several pro-South African friendship societies, usually the preserve of those politically of the right wing.

Sir Peregrine Jones, at least, knew that Berenson’s known and too-overt right-wing sympathies had made it impossible for him, Jones, to recommend Berenson for a knighthood, something he now realized might well have fueled Berenson’s resentment.

When reading the report an hour earlier, the senior civil servants had assumed Berenson’s pro-South African sympathies to be the cover of a secret Soviet sympathizer.

Now Sir Nigel Irvine’s suggestion had put a different cast on things.

“A false flag?” mused Sir Paddy Strickland. “You mean he really thought he was passing secrets to South Africa?”

“I am seized by this enigma,” said the Chief of the SIS. “If he was a secret Soviet sympathizer or closet Communist all along, why didn’t the Center run him with a Soviet controller? I can think of five in their embassy who could have done the job equally well.”

“Well, I confess I don’t know,” said Sir Anthony Plumb. At that moment he glanced up and looked down the table, catching Sir Nigel’s eye. Irvine dropped one eyelid quickly down and then back up again. Sir Anthony forced his gaze back to the Berenson file in front of him. You cunning bastard, Nigel, he thought, you’re not speculating at all. You actually know.

In fact, two days earlier, Andreyev had reported something interesting. It was not much, just canteen scuttlebutt from inside the Soviet Embassy. Andreyev had been drinking with the Line N man and discussing tradecraft in general. He had mentioned the usefulness, on occasion, of false-flag recruitment; the Illegals Directorate representative had laughed, winked, and tapped the side of his nose with a forefinger. Andreyev took the gesture to mean that there was a false-flag operation going on in London at that moment of which the Line N man knew something. Sir Nigel, when he heard, had taken the same view.

Another thought occurred to Sir Anthony. If you really do know, Nigel, it must be because you have a source right inside their rezidentura. You old fox. Then another thought, which was less pleasant: Why not say so outright? They were all completely reliable around that table, were they not? A cold worm of unease stirred inside him. He looked up. “Well, I think we should seriously consider Nigel’s suggestion. It does make sense. What have you in mind, Nigel?”

“The man’s a traitor, no doubt about that. If he’s presented with the documents that were anonymously returned to us, I’ve no doubt he’ll be pretty shaken. But if he’s then given John Preston’s South Africa file to read, and he did think he was working for Pretoria, I don’t think he’ll be able to mask his collapse. However, if he was a secret Communist all along, he’ll have known the truth about Marais, so it won’t come as a surprise to him. I think a trained observer should be able to tell the difference.”

“And if it was a false-flag approach?” asked Sir Perry Jones.

“Then I think we’ll get his complete and unstinted cooperation in damage assessment.

More, I think he could be persuaded to ‘turn’ voluntarily, enabling us to mount a major disinformation operation against Moscow. Now that we could take to our allies as a big plus.”

Sir Paddy Strickland of the Foreign Office was won over. It was agreed to pursue Sir Nigel’s tactic.

“One last thing: who goes to see him?” asked Sir Anthony.

Sir Nigel coughed delicately. “Well, of course, it’s really up to Five,” he said, “but a disinformation operation against the Center would be for Six to handle. Then again, I happen to know the man. Actually, we were at school together.”

“Good Lord,” exclaimed Plumb. “He’s a bit younger than you, isn’t he?”

“Five years, actually. He used to clean my boots.”

“All right. Are we agreed? Anyone against? You’ve got it, Nigel. You take him, he’s yours. Tell us how you get on.”

On Tuesday, March 24, a South African tourist from Johannesburg arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport, where he passed through the formalities without difficulty. As he emerged from the customs hall carrying his suitcase, a young man moved forward and murmured a question in his ear. The burly South African nodded in confirmation. The younger man took his bag and led him outside to a waiting car.

Instead of heading toward London, the driver took the M25 ring road and then the M3 toward Hampshire. An hour later they drew up in front of a handsome country house outside Basingstoke. The South African, relieved of his coat, was ushered into the library.

From a seat by the fire an Englishman in country tweeds and of the same age rose to greet him.

“Henry Pienaar, how good to see you again. It’s been too long. Welcome to England.”

“Nigel, how have you been keeping?”

The heads of the two intelligence services had an hour before lunch was called, so after the usual preliminaries they settled down to discuss the problem that had brought General Pienaar to the country house maintained by the SIS for the hospitality of notable but clandestine guests.

By evening Sir Nigel Irvine had secured the agreement he sought. The South Africans would agree to leave Jan Marais in place to give Irvine a chance to mount a major disinformation exercise through George Berenson, assuming he would play ball.

The British would keep Marais under total surveillance; it was their responsibility to ensure that Marais would have no chance to do a moonlight flit to Moscow, since the South Africans now had their own damage assessment to face—forty years’ worth of it.

It was further agreed that when the disinformation exercise had run its course, Irvine would inform Pienaar that Marais was no longer needed. The South African would be called home, the British would “house” him aboard the South African jet, and Pienaar’s men would make the arrest when the jet was airborne—that is, on South African sovereign territory.

After dinner, Sir Nigel excused himself; his car was waiting. Pienaar would spend the night, do some shopping in London’s West End the next day, and take the evening flight home.

“Just don’t let him go,” said General Pienaar as he saw Sir Nigel off at the door. “I want that bastard back home by the end of the year.”

“You’ll have him,” promised Sir Nigel. “Just don’t spook him in the meantime.”

While the head of the NIS was trying to find something on Bond Street for Mrs. Pienaar, John Preston was at Charles Street for a meeting with Brian Harcourt-Smith. The Deputy Director-General was in his most eager-to-please mood.

“Well, John, I gather congratulations are in order. The committee was most impressed by your revelations from South Africa.”

“Thanks, Brian.”

“Yes, indeed. It’ll all be handled by the committee from now on. Can’t say exactly what’s to be done, but Tony Plumb asked me to pass on his personal sentiments. Now”—

he spread his hands flat and placed them on his blotter—“to the future.”

“The future?”

“You see, I’m in a bit of a dilemma. You’ve been on this case for eight weeks, some of the time out on the streets with the watchers, most of it in the basement at Cork, and then South Africa. During all this time young March, your number two, has been running C1(A), and doing very well into the bargain.

“Now, I ask myself, what am I supposed to do with him? I don’t think it would be quite fair to bang him back to the two slot—after all, he’s been around to all the ministries, made some extremely useful suggestions and a couple of very positive changes.”

He would, thought Preston. March was a young eager beaver, very much one of Harcourt-Smith’s protégés.

“Anyway, I know you’ve only been at C1(A) for eleven weeks, and that’s pretty short, but seeing as you’ve covered yourself with glory, it might be a well-judged moment to move on. I’ve had a word with Personnel, and as luck would have it, Cranley at C5(C) is taking early retirement at the end of the week. His wife, you know, has not been well for a long time and he wants to take her off to the Lake District. So he’s taking his pension and leaving. I thought it would suit you.”

Preston pondered. “C5(C)? Ports and airports?” he queried.

It was another liaison job. Immigration, Customs, Special Branch, Serious Crimes Squad, Narcotics Squad—all monitored ports and airports, checking on various kinds of unsavory characters seeking to bring themselves or their illicit cargoes into the country.

Preston suspected that C5(C) would have to try to pick up whatever did not fall into anyone else’s category.

Harcourt-Smith raised an admonitory finger. “It’s important, John. The special responsibility, of course, is to keep a weather eye open for Sovbloc illegals and couriers—and so forth. It gets one out and about—the sort of thing you like.”

And away from the head office while the struggle for the succession to the director-generalship of Five goes on, thought Preston. Preston was a Hemmings man down the line, and he was aware that Harcourt-Smith knew it. He thought of protesting, of demanding a meeting with Sir Bernard to put his case for staying where he was.

“Anyway, I want you to give it a try,” said Harcourt-Smith. “It’s still in Gordon, so you won’t have to move.”

Preston knew he was outmaneuvered. Harcourt-Smith had spent half a lifetime working the head-office system. At least, Preston thought, he could be a field man again, even if it was what he termed another “policeman’s job.”

“I’ll expect you to start on the first of the month, then,” concluded Harcourt-Smith.

That Friday, March 27, Major Valeri Petrofsky slipped quietly into Britain.

He had flown from Moscow to Zurich with Swedish identity papers, dropped them into a sealed envelope addressed to a KGB safe house in that city, and adopted the papers identifying him as a Swiss engineer that were waiting for him in another envelope deposited with the post office in the airport concourse. From Zurich he had flown to Dublin.

On the same flight was his escort, who neither knew nor cared what his charge was doing. The escort was simply carrying out his orders. In a room at Dublin’s International Airport Hotel, the two men came together. Petrofsky stripped to the skin and handed back his European-style clothes. He put on what the escort had brought in his own suitcase—

British clothes from top to toe, plus an overnight case filled with the usual medley of pajamas, toilet articles, half-read novel, and change of clothes.

The escort had already plucked an envelope from the airport’s messages board that had been prepared by the Line N man at the Dublin embassy and pinned to the notice board four hours earlier. It contained a ticket stub for the previous evening’s performance at the Eblana Theatre, a receipt for an overnight stay at the New Jury’s Hotel for the previous evening in the appropriate name, and the return half of a London-Dublin round-trip ticket on Aer Lingus.

Finally, Petrofsky was handed his new passport. When he went back to the airport concourse and checked in, not an eyebrow was raised. He was an Englishman returning home from a one-day business trip to Dublin. There are no passport checks between Dublin and London; at the London end, arriving passengers must produce their boarding pass or ticket stub as identification. They are also scrutinized by two blank-eyed Special Branch men who affect to see nothing but miss very, very little. Neither had ever seen Petrofsky’s face because he had never before entered Britain through Heathrow Airport.

Had they asked, he could have produced a perfect British passport in the name of James Duncan Ross. It was a document that could not have been faulted by the Passport Office itself, for the good and simple reason that the Passport Office itself had issued it.

Having passed through customs without a check, the Russian took a taxi to King’s Cross Station. There he went to a luggage locker for which he already had the key. The locker was one of several around the British capital maintained permanently by the Line N man in the embassy. From the locker the Russian withdrew a package, sealed exactly as when it had arrived in the diplomatic bag at the embassy two days earlier. The Line N man had not seen its contents, nor had he wanted to. He had not asked why the package had to be left in a locker in a train station either. It was not his job to question orders.

Petrofsky slipped the package unopened into his bag. He could open it later, at leisure.

He already knew what it contained. From King’s Cross he took another taxi across London to Liverpool Street Station, and there boarded an early-evening train for Ipswich, in the county of Suffolk, where, just in time for dinner, he checked into the Great White Horse hotel.

Had any curious policeman insisted on looking inside the package stowed in the hand luggage of the young Englishman on the Ipswich train, he would have been amazed. In part, it contained a Finnish Sako automatic pistol with a full magazine and the nose cone of each round carefully cut in the form of an X. The cuts had been filled with a mixture of gelatin and potassium cyanide concentrate. Not only would the rounds expand on impact with the human body, but recovery from the venom would be out of the question.

The other part of the contents consisted of the rest of the legend of James Duncan Ross.

A “legend,” in term-of-art parlance, is the fictitious life story of a nonexistent man, supported by a host of perfectly real documents of every kind and description. Usually, the person on whom the legend is built did exist once, but died under circumstances that left no trace and caused no stir. The identity is then taken over and fleshed out, as the skeleton of the dead man can never be, by supportive documentation going backward and forward over the life span.

The real James Duncan Ross, or what little was left of him, had been rotting for years in the deep bush bordering the Zambezi River. He had been born in 1950, the son of Angus and Kirstie Ross of Kilbride, Scotland. In 1951 Angus Ross, tired of the cheerless rationing of postwar Britain, had emigrated with his wife and baby son to Southern Rhodesia. An engineer, he had got a job designing agricultural implements and machinery and by 1960 was able to found his own business.

He prospered, being able to send the young James to a good preparatory school and then on to Michaelhouse. By 1971 the boy, with his national service behind him, was able to join his father in the company. But this was Ian Smith’s Rhodesia now, and the war against the guerrillas of Joshua Nkomo’s ZIPRA and Robert Mugabe’s ZANLA was getting more vicious.

Every able-bodied male was in the reserve, and periods spent in the Army became longer and longer. In 1976, serving with the Rhodesian Light Infantry, James Ross was caught in a ZIPRA ambush on the southern bank of the Zambezi and was killed. The ZIPRA guerrillas closed in, stripped the body, and vanished back to their bases in Zambia.

Ross should not have been carrying any identification at all, but just before his patrol set off he had received a letter from his girlfriend and had stuffed it into his combat jacket pocket. It came back to Zambia and fell into the hands of the KGB.

A very senior KGB officer, Vassili Solodovnikov, was then ambassador to Lusaka, and he ran various networks across all southern Africa. One of them picked up the letter addressed to James Ross, care of his parents’ home. The first checks into the deceased young officer produced a bonus: British-born, Angus Ross and his son, James, had never abandoned their British passports. So the KGB caused James Duncan Ross to live again.

When, after Rhodesian independence as Zimbabwe, Angus and Kirstie Ross left for South Africa, James apparently decided to return to Britain. Unseen hands withdrew a copy of his birth certificate from Somerset House, in London; other hands filled out and sent in the postal application for a new passport. Checks were made, and it was granted.

In the making of a good legend, scores of people and thousands of hours are expended.

The KGB has never lacked the staff or the patience. Bank accounts are opened and closed; driver’s licenses are carefully renewed before expiration; cars are bought and sold, so that the name shows up on the Vehicle Licensing Center computer. Jobs are taken and promotions earned; references are prepared, company pension funds added to.

One of the chores of junior intelligence staff is to keep this mass of documentation up to date.

Other teams go back into the past. What was the child’s nickname? Where did he go to school? What did the boys call the science teacher behind his back? What was the family dog’s name?

By the time the legend is complete—and it can take years—and by the time it has been memorized by its new bearer, it would need weeks of investigation to crack it, if it could be done at all. This was what Petrofsky carried in his head and suitcase. He was—and could prove he was—James Duncan Ross, who was moving from the West Country to take over the East Anglian representation of a Swiss-based corporation marketing computer software. He had a handsome bank balance at Barclays Bank, Dorchester, Dorset, which he was about to transfer to nearby Colchester. He had mastered the scrawled Ross signature to perfection.

Britain is a very private country. Almost alone in the world, the British do not have to carry any identification on their persons. If one is asked, the production of a letter addressed to oneself will usually do, as if that proved anything. A driver’s license, even though British licenses bear no photograph, is proof positive. A man is expected to be who he says he is.

As he dined that night in Ipswich, Valeri Alexeivitch Petrofsky was perfectly confident, and rightly so, that no one would doubt he was James Duncan Ross. After dinner, he sought from the reception desk the Yellow Pages commercial directory and turned to the section listing real-estate agents.

Chapter 11

While Major Petrofsky was dining at the Great White Horse in Ipswich, the doorbell rang at an apartment on the eighth floor of Fontenoy House in Belgravia. It was opened by the owner, George Berenson. For a second he stared in surprise at the figure in the corridor.

“Good Lord. Nigel. ...”

They knew each other vaguely, not so much from shared schooldays many years before as from having seen each other occasionally around the Whitehall circuit.

The Chief of the SIS nodded politely but formally. “’Evening, Berenson. Mind if I come in?”

“Of course, of course, by all means. ...”

George Berenson was flustered, though he had no idea of the purpose of the visit. The use by Sir Nigel Irvine of his surname without prefix indicated that the tone of the visit was to be courteous but by no means chatty. There would be no “George” and “Nigel”

informality.

“Is Lady Fiona in?”

“No, she’s gone off to one of her committee meetings. We have the place to ourselves.”

Sir Nigel knew that, anyway. He had sat in his car and watched Berenson’s wife leave before making his approach.

Relieved of his coat but retaining his briefcase, Sir Nigel was shown to a chair in the sitting room, not ten feet from the by-now-repaired wall safe behind the mirror. Berenson seated himself opposite.

“Well, now, what can I do for you?”

Sir Nigel opened his case and carefully laid ten photocopies on the glass-topped coffee table. “I think you might, with advantage, have a look at these.”

Berenson silently studied the top copy, lifted it to look at the one underneath, and then the third. At the third sheet he stopped and put them down. He had gone very pale but was still in control of himself. He kept his eyes on the papers. “I don’t suppose there is anything I can say. ...”

“Not much,” said Sir Nigel calmly. “They were returned to us some time ago. We know how you came to lose them—rather bad luck from your point of view. After they were returned, we kept you under surveillance for some weeks, watched the abstraction of the Ascension Island paper, the passing of it to Benotti and thence to Marais. It’s pretty well tied up, you know.”

A little of what he said was provable, but most was pure bluff; he had no wish to let Berenson know just how weak the legal case against him was. The Deputy Chief of Defense Procurement straightened his back and raised his eyes. Now comes the defiance, thought Irvine, the attempt at self-justification. Funny how they all run to pattern.

Berenson met his gaze. The defiance was there.

“Well, since you know it all, what are you going to do?”

“Ask a few questions,” replied Sir Nigel. “For example, how long has it been going on, and why did you start?”

Despite his effort at self-control and defiance, Berenson was still confused enough not to have wondered at one very simple point: it was not the duty of the Chief of the SIS to have this sort of confrontation. Spies for foreign powers were picked up by counterintelligence. But his desire to justify himself overcame his capacity for analysis.

“As to the first, just over two years.”

Could be worse, thought Sir Nigel. He knew Marais had been in Britain for almost three years, but Berenson might have been run by another South African pro-Soviet “sleeper” even before that. Apparently not.

“As to the second, I would have thought it was obvious.”

“Let’s assume I’m a bit slow,” suggested Sir Nigel. “Enlighten me. Why?”

Berenson drew a deep breath. Perhaps, like so many before him, he had prepared his defense inside his own head often enough, arguing before the courtroom of his own conscience—or what passed for it.

“I take the view, and have done for years, that the only struggle on this planet worth a light is the one against Communism and Soviet imperialism,” he began.

“In that struggle, South Africa forms one of the bastions. Probably the principal bastion, if not the only one, south of the Sahara. For a long time I have thought it futile and self-defeating for the Western powers, on dubious moral grounds, to treat South Africa as if she were a leper, to deprive her of any share in our joint planning to respond to the Soviet threat on a global scale.

“I have believed for years that South Africa has been shabbily treated by the Western powers, that it was both wrong and stupid to exclude her from access to NATO’s contingency planning.”

Sir Nigel nodded, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “And you thought it right and proper to redress the balance?”

“Yes, I did. And, the Official Secrets Act notwithstanding, I still do.”

The vanity, thought Sir Nigel, always the vanity, the monumental self-esteem of inadequate men. Nunn May, Pontecorvo, Fuchs, Prime—the thread ran through them all: the self-arrogated right to play God, the conviction that the traitor alone is right and all his colleagues fools, coupled with the druglike love of power derived from what he sees as the manipulation of policy, through the transfer of secrets, to the ends in which he believes and to the confusion of his supposed opponents in his own government, those who have passed him over for promotion or honors.

“Mmmm. Tell me, did you begin at your own suggestion, or at Marais’s?”

Berenson thought for a while. “Jan Marais is a diplomat, so he is beyond your power,”

he said. “There’s no harm in my answering. It was at his suggestion. We never met when I was stationed in Pretoria. We met here, just after he had arrived. We found we had a lot in common. He persuaded me that if a time of conflict with the USSR ever came, South Africa would have to stand alone in the Southern Hemisphere, astride the vital routes from the Indian Ocean to the South Atlantic, and probably with Soviet bases strung throughout black Africa. It seemed to us both that without some indication of how NATO would operate in these two spheres, South Africa would be hamstrung, even though she was our staunchest ally in those parts.”

“Powerful argument.” Sir Nigel nodded regretfully. “You know, when we traced Marais as your controller, I took a risk and put the name straight to General Pienaar. He denied Marais had ever worked for him.”

“Well, he would.”

“Yes, he would. But we sent a man down there to check out Pienaar’s claim. Perhaps you ought to look at this.” He produced from his briefcase the report Preston had written on his return from Pretoria, with the photograph of the boy Marais clipped to the top.

With a shrug Berenson began to read the seven foolscap pages. At one point he sucked in his breath sharply, pushed his knuckles into his mouth, and gnawed at one. When he had turned the last page, he put both open hands up to cover his face and rocked slowly back and forth. “Oh, my God,” he breathed, “what have I done?”

“A hell of a lot of damage, actually,” said Sir Nigel. He let Berenson absorb the full measure of his misery without interruption. He sat back and gazed without pity at the destroyed mandarin. For Sir Nigel, Berenson was just another grubby little traitor who could take a solemn oath to his Queen and country, and for his own conceit betray them all. A man of the same degree, if not the scale, of Donald Maclean.

Berenson was no longer pale, he was ashen gray. When he took his hands from his face, he had aged by many years. “Is there anything, anything at all, that I can do?”

Sir Nigel shrugged as if there was little enough that anyone could do. He decided to turn the knife a few more twists. “There’s a faction, of course, who want you and Marais arrested immediately. Pretoria has waived his immunity. You’d get a middle-class, middle-aged jury—the crown counsel would see to that. Honest people, but not devious.

They’d probably never believe in the false-flag recruitment at all. We’re talking about life—and at your age that would mean life—in Parkhurst or Dartmoor.”

He let that sink in for several minutes, then continued: “As it happens, I’ve managed to keep the hard-line faction at bay for a while. There is another way. ...”

“Sir Nigel, I will do anything, I mean it. Anything.”

How true, thought the Chief, how very true. If only you knew. “Three things, actually,”

he said out loud. “One: You continue going to the ministry as if nothing had happened, maintain the usual facade, the usual routines, let not a ripple disturb the surface of the water.

“Two: Here in this apartment, after dark and if necessary through the night, you help us with the damage assessment. The only possible way to mitigate the harm already done is for us to know everything, every single thing, that went to Moscow. You withhold one dot or comma, and it’ll be porridge and mailbags until you croak.”

“Yes, yes, of course. That I can do. I recall every single document that was passed.

Everything. ... Er, you said three things.”

“Yes,” said Sir Nigel, studying his fingernails. “The third is tricky. You maintain relations with Marais—”

“I ... what?”

“You don’t have to see him. I’d prefer you didn’t. I don’t think you’re enough of an actor to keep up the pretense in his presence. Just the usual contact through coded phone calls when you want to make a delivery.”

Berenson was genuinely bewildered. “A delivery of what?”

“Material that my people, in collaboration with others, will prepare for you.

Disinformation, if you like. Apart from your work with the Defense people on damage assessment, I want you to collaborate with me. Do some real damage to the Soviets.”

Berenson grasped, as a drowning man at a straw. Five minutes later, Sir Nigel rose.

The damage-assessment people would be around after the weekend. He let himself out.

As he walked down the corridor to the elevator, he was quietly satisfied. He thought of the broken and terrified man he had left behind. “From now on, you bastard, you work for me,” he muttered.

The young girl in the front office at Oxborrows looked up as the stranger entered. She took in his appearance with appreciation. Medium height, compact and fit-looking, with a ready smile, nut-brown hair, and hazel eyes. She liked the hazel eyes.

“Can I help you?”

“I hope so. I’m new to the district, but I’ve been told you have houses for rent.”

“Oh, yes. You’ll want to speak to Mr. Knights. He handles the rentals. What name shall I say?”

He smiled again. “Ross,” he said, “James Ross.”

She depressed a switch and spoke into the intercom. “There’s a Mr. Ross in the office, Mr. Knights. About a house. Can you see him?”

Two minutes later, James Ross was seated in the office of Mr. Knights. “I’ve just moved up from Dorset to take over East Anglia for my company,” he began easily.

“Ideally I’d like my wife and kids to come up and join me as soon as possible.”

“Perhaps you’re looking to buy a house, then?”

“Not just yet. For one thing, one wants to look around for the right house. Then, the details tend to take a bit of time. Second, I may only be here for a limited period.

Depends on the head office. You know.”

“Of course, of course.” Mr. Knights understood completely. “A short lease on a house would help you to get settled while waiting to see if you would be staying longer?”

“Exactly,” said Ross. “In a nutshell.”

“Furnished or unfurnished?”

“Furnished, if you have such a thing.”

“Quite right,” said Mr. Knights, reaching for a selection of folders. “Unfurnished houses are almost impossible to come by. You can’t always get the people out at the end of the lease. Now, we’ve got four that might suit you on the books at the moment.”

He offered Mr. Ross the brochures. Two were evidently too large to be plausible for a commercial representative and needed a lot of upkeep. The other two were possibles. Mr.

Knights had an hour and drove his client to see both. One was perfect, a small, neat brick house on a small, neat brick road in a small, neat brick housing development off the Belstead Road.

“It belongs to a Mr. Johnson,” said Mr. Knights as they came downstairs, “an engineer working on contract in Saudi Arabia for a year. But there’s only a six-month lease left to run.”

“That should do very well,” said Mr. Ross.

The address was 12 Cherryhayes Close. All the surrounding streets had names ending in “hayes,” so that the whole complex was known simply as “The Hayes.” Brackenhayes, Gorsehayes, Almondhayes, and Heatherhayes were all around. Number 12 Cherryhayes was separated from the sidewalk by a six-foot strip of grass and there was no fence. A garage was attached to one side—Petrofsky knew he would need a garage. The back garden was small and fenced, reached through a door from the tiny kitchen. The downstairs contained the glass-paneled front door, which led into a narrow hall. Straight in line with the front door was the staircase to the upper landing. Under the stairs was a broom closet.

For the rest there was the single sitting room at the front and the kitchen down the hall between the stairs and the sitting-room door. Upstairs were two bedrooms, one front and one back, and the bathroom. The house was inconspicuous and blended with all the other identical brick boxes down the street, themselves occupied mostly by young couples, he in commerce or industry, she coping with the house and one or two toddlers. The place a man waiting for his wife and children to join him from Dorset at the end of the school term would choose and not be noticed very much.

“I’ll take it,” he said.

“If we can just go back to the office and sort out the details ...” said Mr. Knights.

The details were easy. A two-sheet formal lease to be signed and witnessed, a deposit, and a month’s rent in advance. Mr. Ross produced a reference from his employers in Geneva and asked Mr. Knights to call his bank in Dorchester on Monday morning to clear the check that he wrote out there and then. Mr. Knights felt he could have the paperwork sorted to everyone’s satisfaction by Monday evening if the check and the references were in order. Mr. Ross smiled. They would be, he knew.

Alan Fox was also in his office that Saturday morning, at the special request of his friend Sir Nigel Irvine, who had called to say he needed a meeting. The English knight was ushered up the stairs at the American Embassy shortly after ten o’clock.

Alan Fox was the local head of station for the CIA and he went back a long way. He had known Nigel Irvine for twenty years.

“I’m afraid we seem to have come across a small problem,” said Sir Nigel when he was seated. “One of our civil servants in the Defense Ministry turns out to have been a bad egg.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Nigel, not another leak,” expostulated Fox.

Irvine looked apologetic. “I’m afraid that’s what it has to be,” he admitted. “Something rather like your Harper affair.”

Fox winced. The blow had struck home. Back in 1983 the Americans had been badly hurt on discovering that an engineer working in California’s Silicon Valley had blown to the Poles (and thence to the Russians) a vast tract of secret information about the Minuteman missile systems.

Sir Nigel felt that, along with the earlier Boyce spying case, the Harper affair had evened the score somewhat. The British had long tolerated rib-tickling references from the Americans about Philby, Burgess, and Maclean, not to mention Blake, Vassall, Blunt, and Prime, and even after all these years, the stigma remained. It had almost made the British feel a bit better when the Americans had had two bad ones over Boyce and Harper. At least other people had traitors as well.

“Ouch,” said Fox. “That’s what I’ve always liked about you, Nigel. You can’t see a belt without wanting to hit below it.”

Fox was known in London for his acerbic wit. He had early made his mark at a meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee, when Sir Anthony Plumb had been complaining that unlike all the others he had no nice little acronym to describe his job.

He was just the Chairman of the JIC, or the coordinator of intelligence. Why could he not have a group of initials that made up a short word in themselves?

“How about,” drawled Fox from his end of the table, “Supreme Head of Intelligence Targeting?”

Sir Anthony preferred not to be known as the SHIT of Whitehall and dropped the matter of the missing acronym.

“Okay, how bad is it?” Fox now asked.

“Not as bad as it might be,” said Sir Nigel, and told Fox the story from beginning to end.

The American leaned forward with interest. “You mean he’s really been turned right around? He’s going to pass over just what he’s told?”

“It’s either that or spending the rest of his life eating prison porridge. He’ll be under surveillance all the time. Of course, he may have a warning code for Marais that he can slip into a phone call, but I think not. He really is of the extreme Right, and it was a false-flag recruitment.”

Fox pondered for a while. “How high do reckon the Center rates this Berenson, Nigel?”

“We start damage assessment on Monday,” said Irvine, “but I think in view of his eminence in the ministry, he must be rated very high in Moscow. Maybe even as a director’s case.”

“Could we pass some of our disinformation down the same line?” asked Fox. His mind could already see some useful ploys that Langley would love to pass to Moscow.

“I don’t want to overload the circuits,” said Sir Nigel. “The rhythm of the stuff passed over must be maintained, as well as the type of material. But yes, we could cut you in on this one.”

“And you want me to persuade my people to go easy on London?”

Sir Nigel shrugged. “The damage is done. It’s very good for the ego to make a hell of a fuss. But nonproductive. I’d like us to rectify the damage and inflict some of our own.”

“Okay, Nigel, you’ve got it. I’ll tell our people to back off. We get the damage assessment right off the presses, and we’ll prepare a couple of pieces about our nuclear subs in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean that will make the Center look the wrong way. I’ll stay in touch.”

On Monday morning, March 30, Petrofsky rented a small and modest family sedan from an agency in Colchester. He explained that he was from Dorchester and was house-hunting in Essex and Suffolk. His own car was with his wife and family in Dorset, which was why he did not wish to buy a car for such a short spell. His driver’s license was in perfect order and gave a Dorchester address. Auto insurance came with the rental, of course. He wished for a long-term lease, possibly for up to three months, and opted for the budget plan. He paid a week’s rental in cash, and left a check to cover April as well.

The next problem was going to be harder and would need the services of an insurance broker. He located and visited such a man in the same town and explained his position.

He had worked abroad for some years, and prior to that had always driven a company car, so he had no regular insurance company in Britain. Now he had decided to return home and start his own business. He would need to purchase a vehicle and therefore would need insurance coverage. Could the broker assist him?

The broker would be delighted. He ascertained that the new client had a spotless driving record, an international driver’s license, a solid and respectable appearance, and a bank account which that very morning he had transferred from Dorchester to Colchester.

What sort of vehicle did he intend to buy? A motorcycle. Yes, indeed. So much easier in dense traffic. Of course, in the hands of teenagers these were difficult to insure. But for a mature professional man there would be no problem. Comprehensive insurance would be a bit difficult perhaps ... ah, the client would settle for a “third-party” policy? And the address? House-hunting at the moment. Quite understandable. But staying at the Great White Horse in Ipswich? Perfectly acceptable. Then if Mr. Ross would inform him of the registration number of his motorcycle when he made the purchase, and any change of address, he was sure he could secure third-party insurance coverage in one or two days.

Petrofsky returned in his rented car to Ipswich. It had been a busy day but he was satisfied he had raised no suspicions and yet left behind no pursuable trail. The car rental agency and the Great White Horse hotel had been given an address in Dorchester that did not exist. Oxborrows, the real-estate agency, and the insurance broker had the hotel as a temporary address, and Oxborrows knew about 12 Cherryhayes Close. Barclays Bank in Colchester also had the hotel as his address while he was “house-hunting.”

He would retain the room at the hotel until he had secured his insurance coverage from the broker, then leave. The possibility that any of the parties would ever be able to get in touch with each other was remote in the extreme. Apart from Oxborrows, the trail stopped at the hotel or at a nonexistent address in Dorchester. So long as payments were kept up on the house and the car, so long as the broker got a valid check for one year’s insurance premium on the motorcycle, none of them would think anything of him.

Barclays at Colchester had been told to send him statements once a quarter, but by the end of June he would be long gone.

He returned to the real-estate agency to sign the lease and complete the formalities.

That evening, the spearhead of the damage-assessment team arrived at George Berenson’s apartment in Belgravia to begin their work.

It was a small group of MI5 experts and Defense Ministry analysts. The first task was the identification of every single document that had been passed to Moscow. The team had with them copies of the Registry files— withdrawals and returns—in case Berenson’s memory failed him.

Later, other analysts, basing their studies on the list of documents passed, would try to assess and mitigate the harm done, proposing what could still be changed, what plans would have to be canceled, what tactical and strategic dispositions would have to be annulled, and which could stay in place.

The team worked through the night and were later able to report that Berenson had been cooperation itself. What they thought of him privately did not form part of their report, since it was unprintable.

Another group of experts, working deep inside the ministry, began to prepare the next batch of classified documents that Berenson would pass to Jan Marais and his controllers somewhere inside the First Chief Directorate at Yasyenevo.

John Preston moved into his new office as head of C5(C) on Wednesday, bringing his personal files with him. Fortunately he was moving up only one floor, to the third at Gordon. As he sat at his desk his eye caught sight of the calendar on the wall. It was April 1, April Fools’ Day. How very appropriate, he thought bitterly.

The only ray on his horizon was the knowledge that in a week his son, Tommy, would be home for the spring vacation. They would have a full week together before Julia, back from skiing with her boyfriend at Verbier, would claim him for the rest of the holiday.

For a whole week his small South Kensington flat would reverberate to the sound of twelve-year-old enthusiasms, to tales of prowess on the rugby field, jokes played on the French master, and the need for further supplies of jam and cake for illegal consumption after lights-out in the dormitory. Preston smiled at the prospect and resolved to take at least four days off. He had planned a few good father-and-son expeditions and hoped they would meet with Tommy’s approval. He was interrupted by Jeff Bright, his deputy head of section.

Bright, Preston knew, would have had his job except that his youth simply did not make it possible. Bright was another of Harcourt-Smith’s protégés, happy and flattered to be invited regularly for a quiet drink by the Deputy Director-General and to report everything that went on in the section. He would go far under the forthcoming director-generalship of Harcourt-Smith.

“I thought you might like to see the list of ports and airports we have to keep an eye on, John,” said Bright.

Preston studied the information put before him. Were there really that number of airports with flights originating or terminating outside the British Isles? And the list of ports able to receive commercial cargo vessels arriving from foreign ports went on for pages. He sighed and started to read.

The following day, Petrofsky found what he was looking for. Operating on a policy of making different purchases in different towns in the Suffolk/Essex area, he had gone to Stowmarket. The motorcycle was a BMW shaft-drive K100, not new but in excellent condition, a big, powerful machine, three years old but with only 22,000 miles on the clock. The same shop also stocked the accessories—black leather trousers and jacket, gauntlets, zip-sided jackboots, and crash helmet with dark, slide-down visor. He bought a complete outfit.

A twenty-percent deposit secured him the motorcycle, but not to take away. He asked for saddlebags to be fitted outside the rear wheel, with a lockable fiberglass box on top of them, and was told he could collect the machine with its fittings in two days.

From a phone booth he called the insurance broker in Colchester and gave him the registration number of the BMW. The broker was confident he could have temporary thirty-day insurance coverage by the next day. He would mail the policy to the Great White Horse hotel in Ipswich.

From Stowmarket, Petrofsky motored north to Thetford, just over the county border in Norfolk. There was nothing particular about Thetford; it just lay approximately in the line he needed. He found what he wanted just after lunch. On Magdalen Street, between No.

13A and the Salvation Army hall, is a recessed rectangular yard containing thirty garages.

One had a TO LET notice stuck on its door.

He traced the owner, who lived locally, and rented the garage for three months, paying in cash, and was given the key. The garage was small and musty, but would serve his purpose admirably. The owner had been happy to take tax-free cash and had asked for no form of identification. Petrofsky had therefore given him a fictitious name and address.

He stored his motorcycle leathers, helmet, and boots in the garage, and during what remained of the afternoon bought two ten-gallon plastic drums from two different shops, filled them with gasoline at two different stations, and locked them in the garage as well.

At sundown he motored back to Ipswich and told the hotel receptionist that he would be checking out the following morning.

Preston realized he was becoming bored to the point of distraction. He had been in the job only two days, and they had been spent reading files.

He sat over lunch in the canteen and thought seriously of taking early retirement. That presented two problems. First, it would not be easy for a man in his mid-forties to get good employment, the more so since his arcane qualifications were hardly the type that the big corporations would find of irresistible interest.

The second concern was his loyalty to Sir Bernard Hemmings. Preston had been in the service only six years, but the Old Man had been very good to him. He liked Sir Bernard and he knew the knives were out for the ailing Director-General.

The ultimate decision on who will be head of MI5 or Chief of MI6 in Britain lies with a committee of so-called Wise Men. In the case of MI5, these would normally be the Permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office (the ministry that controls Five), plus the PUS at Defense, the Cabinet Secretary, and the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

These would “recommend” a favored candidate to the Home Secretary and Prime Minister, the two senior politicians involved. It would be unusual for the politicians to decline the recommendation of the Wise Men.

But before they made a decision the mandarins would take soundings in their own inimitable way. There would be discreet lunches in clubs, drinks at bars, murmured discussions over coffee. In the case of the proposed Director-General of MI5, the Chief of the SIS would be consulted, but since Sir Nigel Irvine was himself moving close to retirement, he would need a very good reason for advising against a leading candidate for the other intelligence service. After all, he would not have to work with the man.

Among the most influential of the sources sounded out by the Wise Men would be the outgoing DG of Five himself. Preston knew that an honorable man like Sir Bernard Hemmings would feel bound to take a straw poll of his own heads of section throughout the six branches of the service. That straw poll would weigh heavily with him, whatever his personal feelings might be. Not for nothing had Brian Harcourt-Smith used his increasing dominance in the day-to-day running of the service to place one after another of his protégés at the head of the numerous sections.

Preston was in no doubt that Harcourt-Smith would like him to leave before the autumn, to follow two or three others who had gone into civilian life over the past twelve months.

“Sod him,” he remarked to no one in particular in a largely empty canteen. “I’ll stay.”

While Preston was at lunch, Petrofsky left the hotel, his luggage by now augmented by a large suitcase full of clothes that he had bought locally. He told the receptionist that he would be moving to the Norfolk area and that any mail arriving for him should be held pending collection. He rang the insurance broker in Colchester and learned that the temporary coverage for the motorcycle had been issued. The Russian asked the broker not to mail it; he would collect it himself. This he did immediately, and late that afternoon moved into 12 Cherryhayes Close. He spent part of the night working carefully with his one-time pads, preparing a coded message that no computer would break. Code-breaking, he knew, was based on patterns and repetitions, however sophisticated the computer used to crack the code. Using a one-time pad for each word of a short message left no patterns and no repetitions.

The next morning, Saturday, he drove to Thetford, garaged his car, and took a local taxi to Stowmarket. Here, with a certified check, he paid the balance of the price of the BMW, borrowed the toilet to change into his leathers and crash helmet, which he had brought in a canvas bag, stuffed the bag and his ordinary jacket, trousers, and shoes into the saddlebags, and rode away.

It was a long ride and took him many hours. It was not until late evening that he arrived back at Thetford, changed clothes, exchanged motorcycle for family sedan, and motored sedately back to Cherryhayes Close, Ipswich, where he arrived at midnight. He was not observed, but if he had been, it would have been as “that nice young Mr. Ross who moved into Number Twelve yesterday.”

On a Saturday evening, Master Sergeant Averell Cook of the U.S. Army would have preferred to be dating his girlfriend in nearby Bedford. Or even playing pool with friends in the commissary. Instead he was taking the swing shift at the joint British-American listening station at Chicksands.

The “head office” of the British electronic monitoring and code-breaking complex is at the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, in the south of England. But GCHQ has outstations in various parts of the country, and one of them, Chicksands, in Bedfordshire, is run jointly by GCHQ and the American National Security Agency.

The days when attentive men sat hunched into earphones trying to pick up and record the manual tapping of a Morse key operated by some German agent in Britain are long gone. In the business of listening, analyzing, filtering the innocent from the not-so-innocent, recording the latter, and decoding, computers have taken over.

Sergeant Cook was confident, and rightly so, that if any of the forest of aerials above him picked up an electronic whisper, it would pass that whisper to the banks of computers below. The scanning of the bands was automatic and the recording of any whisper in the ether that should not be there equally automatic. If such a whisper occurred, the eternally watchful computer would trigger its own hit button deep inside its own multicolored entrails, record the transmission, take an immediate bearing on its source, instruct other, brother computers across the country to take a crossbearing, and alert Sergeant Cook.

At 11:43 p.m., something caused the master computer to operate its own hit button.

Something or someone had transmitted what was not expected, and out of the whirling kaleidoscope of electronic signals that fill the air of this planet twenty-four hours in every day, the computer had noticed and traced it. Sergeant Cook noted the warning signal and reached for a telephone.

What the computer had picked up was a “squirt,” a brief shriek of sound that lasted only a few seconds and would make no sense to the human ear. A squirt is the end product of quite a laborious procedure in the sending of clandestine messages. First the message is written out in clear and made as brief as possible. Then it is encoded, but it still remains a list of letters or figures. The encoded message is tapped out on a Morse key, not to a listening world but to a tape machine. The tape is then speeded up to an extreme degree, so that the dots and dashes that make up the transmission are telescoped, to emerge as a single screech lasting only a few seconds. When the transmitter is ready to go, the operator simply sends that single screech, then packs up his set and moves sharply somewhere else.

Within ten minutes that Saturday night, the triangulators had pinpointed the spot from which the screech had come. Other computers, at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire and Brawdy in Wales, had also caught the brief squirt transmission and taken a bearing. When the local police got there, the spot turned out to be the shoulder of a lonely road high in the Derbyshire Peak District. There was no one there.

In due course the message went to Cheltenham and was slowed down to a pace at which the dots and dashes could be transcribed into letters. But after twenty-four hours of going through the electronic brains called the code-breakers, the answer was still a big zero.

“It’s a sleeper transmitter, probably somewhere in the Midlands, and he’s gone to

‘active,’ ” the chief analyst reported to the Director-General of GCHQ. “But our man seems to be using a fresh one-time pad for every word. Unless we can have a lot more of it, we won’t break it.”

It was decided to keep a close watch on the channel the secret sender had used, though if he broadcast again he would almost certainly use a different channel.

A brief flimsy recording the incident went to the desks, among others, of Sir Bernard Hemmings and Sir Nigel Irvine.

The message had been received elsewhere, notably in Moscow. Decoded with a replica of the one-time pad used in a quiet backwater of Ipswich, the message told those interested that the man on the ground had completed all his preliminary tasks ahead of schedule and was ready to receive his first courier.

Chapter 12

The spring thaw would not be long in coming, but for the moment crusted snow hung on the branches of the birch and fir trees far below. From the spectacular double-glazed window on the seventh and top floor of the First Chief Directorate building at Yasyenevo, the man gazing at the landscape could make out, across the sea of winter trees, the tip of the western end of the lake where, in summer, the foreign diplomats from Moscow liked to come and disport themselves.

That Sunday morning, Lieutenant General Yevgeni Sergeivitch Karpov would have preferred to be with his wife and teenage children at their dacha at Peredelkino, but even when one has risen as high in the service as Karpov, there are some things that have to be taken care of personally. The arrival of the bagman due home from Copenhagen was such a matter. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly noon and the man was late. Turning from the window, he sighed and threw himself into the swivel chair behind his desk.

At fifty-seven, Yevgeni Karpov was at the pinnacle of promotion and power achievable by a professional intelligence officer within the KGB, or at least within the First Chief Directorate. Fedorchuk had gone higher, right up to the chairmanship itself, and on to the MVD, but that had been on the General Secretary’s coattails. Moreover, Fedorchuk had not been FCD; he rarely left the Soviet Union; he had made his bones crushing internal dissident and nationalist movements.

But for a man who had spent years serving his country abroad—always a minus in terms of promotion to the highest offices in the USSR—Karpov had done well. A lean, fit-looking man in a beautifully cut suit (one of the perks of being FCD), he was a lieutenant general and First Deputy Head of the First Chief Directorate. As such, he was the Soviet Union’s highest-ranking professional officer in foreign intelligence, on the same level as the deputy directors of operations and intelligence at the CIA and Sir Nigel Irvine at the SIS.

Years earlier, on his accession to power, the General Secretary had plucked General Fedorchuk out of the chairmanship of the KGB to overlord the Interior Ministry, and General Chebrikov had gone up to replace him. A slot had been left vacant—Chebrikov had been one of the two first deputy chairmen of the KGB.

The vacant post of First Deputy Chairman had been offered to Colonel-General Kryuchkov, who had jumped at it. The trouble was, Kryuchkov was then head of the First Chief Directorate and he did not want to relinquish that powerful post. He wanted to hold both jobs together. Even Kryuchkov had realized—and Karpov privately thought the man as thick as two short planks—that he could not be in two places simultaneously; he could not at the same time be in his First Deputy Chairman’s office at the Center on Dzerzhinsky Square and in the office of the head of the FCD out at Yasyenevo.

What had happened was that the post of First Deputy Head of the First Chief Directorate, which had existed for years, had increased substantially in importance. It had already been a job for an officer of considerable operational experience, indeed the highest in the FCD to which a career officer could aspire. With Kryuchkov no longer resident at “the Village”—KGB house jargon for Yasyenevo—the job of his first deputy had become even more important.

When the incumbent, General B. S. Ivanov, had retired, there had been two possible candidates in line to succeed: Karpov, then a bit young but heading up the important Third Department in Room 6013, the section that covered Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia; and Vadim Vassilyevitch Kirpichenko, rather older, a bit senior, who headed the S, or Illegals, Directorate. Kirpichenko had got the job. As a sort of consolation prize, Karpov had been promoted to be head of the Illegals Directorate, a post he had held for two fascinating years.

Then, in the early spring of 1985, Kirpichenko had done the decent thing: speeding down the Sadovaya Spasskaya ring road at close to a hundred miles an hour, his car had clipped a pool of oil left by a leaking truck and had gone completely out of control. A week later there had been a quiet private ceremony at Novodevichii Cemetery, and a week after that, Karpov had got the job, rising in rank from major general to lieutenant general.

He had been happy to hand the Illegals Directorate over to old Borisov, who had been number two there for so long few cared to remember just how many years it had been, and who deserved the job, anyway.

The phone on his desk rang and he snatched it up.

“Comrade Major General Borisov on the line for you.”

Speak of the devil, Karpov thought. Then he frowned. He had a private line that did not pass through the switchboard, but his old colleague had not used it. Must be phoning from outside. Telling his secretary to bring the bagman from Copenhagen to him the moment he arrived, Karpov depressed the outside-line switch and took Borisov’s call.

“Pavel Petrovitch, how are you this fine day?”

“I tried you at home, then at the dacha. Ludmilla said you were at work.”

“So I am. It’s all right for some.” Karpov was gently pulling the older man’s leg.

Borisov was a widower who live alone and put in more working weekends than almost anyone else.

“Yevgeni Sergeivitch, I need to see you.”

“Of course. You don’t have to ask. You want to come over here tomorrow, or shall I come into town?”

“Could you make it today?”

Even odder, thought Karpov. Something must have really got into the old boy. He sounded as though he might have been drinking. “Have you been on the bottle, Pavel Petrovitch?”

“Maybe I have,” said the truculent voice on the line. “Maybe a man needs a few drams now and again. Especially when he has problems.”

Karpov realized that, whatever it was, the problem was serious. He dropped the bantering tone. “All right, Starets,” he said soothingly, “where are you?”

“You know my cottage?”

“Of course. You want me to come out there?”

“Yes, I’d be grateful,” said Borisov. “When can you make it?”

“Say about six,” proposed Karpov.

“I’ll have a bottle of pepper vodka ready,” said the voice, and Borisov hung up.

“Not on my account,” muttered Karpov. Unlike most Russians, Karpov hardly drank at all, and when he did, he preferred a decent Armenian brandy or the Scotch single malt that came to him in the bag from London. Vodka he regarded as an abomination, and pepper vodka even worse.

Bang goes my Sunday afternoon at Peredelkino, he thought, and rang to tell Ludmilla he could not make it. He made no mention of Borisov; just told her he could not get away and that he would see her at their central Moscow apartment at about midnight.

Still, he was perturbed by Borisov’s unusual truculence; they went back a long way together, too long for him to take offense, but Borisov’s mood was odd in a man habitually so genial and phlegmatic.

That Sunday afternoon, the regular Aeroflot service from Moscow came into London’s Heathrow Airport at just after five.

As with all Aeroflot crews there was one member who worked for two masters, the Soviet state airline and the KGB. First Officer Romanov was not a KGB staffer, only agyent—meaning an informer upon his colleagues and from time to time a runner of messages and errands.

The whole crew closed the aircraft down and left it in the hands of the ground staff for the night. They would fly it back to Moscow the next day. As usual, they went through the flight-crew entry procedures, and customs made a cursory check of their shoulder bags and hand luggage. Several were carrying portable transistor radios, and no one took any notice of Romanov’s Sony model on its shoulder strap. Western luxury items were part of the perks of foreign travel for Soviet citizens—everyone knew that—and although they had an extremely tight foreign-currency allowance, cassettes and players, along with radios and perfume for the wife back in Moscow, were among the top priorities.

After clearing immigration and customs formalities the whole crew boarded their minibus for the Green Park Hotel, where Aeroflot crews often stay. Whoever had given Romanov that transistor radio in Moscow just three hours before takeoff must have known that Aeroflot crews are hardly ever shadowed at Heathrow. The British counterintelligence people seem to accept that though they may constitute a risk, it must be a tolerable one compared to the mounting of a pretty major surveillance operation.

When he got to his bedroom, Romanov could not help looking at the radio with curiosity. Then he shrugged, locked it in his suitcase, and went down to the bar to join the other officers in a drink. He knew exactly what to do with it after breakfast the next day.

He would do it, then forget all about it. He did not know then that on his return to Moscow he would be going straight into quarantine.

Karpov’s car crunched up the snow-clogged track just before six o’clock, and he cursed Borisov’s insistence on having his weekend cottage in such a forsaken place.

Everyone in the service knew Borisov was one of a kind. In a society that regards all individualism or deviation from the norm, not to mention eccentricity, as extremely suspect, Borisov got away with it because he was unusually good at his job. He had been in clandestine intelligence since he was a boy, and some of the coups he had mounted against the West were legendary in the training schools and the canteens where the junior men took their lunch.

After half a mile down the track, Karpov could make out the lights of the izba, or log cabin, that Borisov favored for his retreat. Others were content, even eager, to site their weekend places in the approved zones according to their station in the pecking order, and those areas were all west of Moscow, along the curve of the river across the Uspenskoye Bridge. Not Borisov. He liked to retire on the weekends—or on those when he could get away from his desk—to play rustic peasant in a traditional izba deep in the forest well east of the capital. The Chaika came to a halt in front of the timber door.

“Wait here,” Karpov told Misha, his driver.

“I’d better turn around and get some of those logs under the wheels or we’ll stick solid,” grumbled Misha.

Karpov nodded his agreement and climbed out. He had not brought galoshes because he had not envisaged wading through snow up to the knees. He stumbled to the door and hammered on it. The door opened to reveal an oblong of yellow light, thrown apparently by paraffin lamps, and in the glow stood Major General Pavel Petrovitch Borisov, dressed in a Siberian shirt, corduroy trousers, and felt boots.

“You look like something out of a Tolstoy novel,” remarked Karpov as he was shown into the main sitting room, where a brick stove full of logs gave the cottage a womblike warmth.

“Better than something out of a Bond Street window,” grumbled Borisov as he took Karpov’s coat and hung it on a wooden peg. He uncorked a bottle of vodka so strong it poured like syrup, and filled two shot glasses. The men seated themselves, a table between them.

“Bottoms up,” Karpov offered, raising his glass, Russian style, between forefinger and thumb, pinkie extended.

“Up yours,” Borisov replied testily, and they drained the first slug.

An old peasant woman shaped like a tea cozy, looking like an incarnation of Mother Russia with her blank face and gray hair in a tight bun, came in from the back, banged down a collation of black bread, onions, gherkins, and cheese cubes, and left without a word.

“So what’s the problem, Starets?” asked Karpov.

Borisov was five years older than himself, and not for the first time Karpov was struck by the man’s close resemblance to the late Dwight Eisenhower. Borisov, unlike many in the service, was much liked by his colleagues and adored by his young agents. They had long ago given him the affectionate nickname Starets, a word that originally meant village headman but now had the connotations of the English “Old Man” and the French patron.

Borisov stared moodily across the table. “Yevgeni Sergeivitch, how long have we known each other?”

“More years than I care to remember,” said Karpov.

“And in that time, have I ever lied to you?”

“Not that I know of.” Karpov was pensive.

“And are you now going to lie to me?”

“Not if I can help it,” said Karpov carefully. What on earth had got into the old boy?

“Then what the hell are you doing to my department?” demanded Borisov loudly.

Karpov considered the question carefully. “Why don’t you tell me what is happening to your department?” he countered.

“It’s being stripped, that’s what,” snarled Borisov. “You have to be behind it. Or aware of it. How the hell am I supposed to run the S operation when my best men, my best documents, and my best facilities are being stripped from me? Bloody years of hard work—all confiscated within a matter of days.”

He had had his explosion, the thing that he had bottled up until now. Karpov sat back, lost in thought, while Borisov filled the glasses. Karpov had not risen as high as he had within the labyrinthine corridors of the KGB without developing a sixth sense for danger.

Borisov was no alarmist; there had to be something behind what he said, but Karpov quite genuinely did not know what it was. He leaned forward.

“Pal Petrovitch,” he said, dropping into the very familiar diminutive of Pavel, “as you say, we have been around for a good many years. Believe me, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Will you please stop shouting and tell me?”

Borisov was mollified, although puzzled by Karpov’s assertion of ignorance. “All right,” he said, as if explaining the obvious to a child. “First, two goons arrive from the Central Committee and demand that I hand over to them my best illegal, a man I’ve spent years training and of whom I had the greatest hopes. They say he has to be detached for

‘special duties,’ whatever that may mean. Okay, I give them my best man. I don’t like it, but I do it. Two days later they are back. They want my best legend, a story that took more than ten years to put together. Not since that damned Iranian affair have I been treated like that. You remember the Iranian business? I still haven’t recovered from that.”

Karpov nodded. He had not been with the Illegals Directorate then, but Borisov had told him all about it later when they worked together during Karpov’s tenure as its head.

In the last days of the Shah of Iran, the International Department of the Central Committee had decided it would be a nice idea to spirit the entire Politburo of the Iranian Tudeh (Communist) Party out of Iran covertly. They had raided Borisov’s magpie-hoarded files and confiscated twenty-two perfect Iranian legends, cover stories Borisov had been saving to send people into Iran, not get them out. “Stripped to the bone!” he had screamed at the time. “Just to get those flea-bitten wogs to safety.” Later he had complained to Karpov, “It didn’t do them much good, either. The Ayatollah’s in charge, the Tudeh is still banned, and we can’t even mount an operation in there anymore.”

Karpov knew that the affair still rankled, but the new business was odder. For one thing, any request for personnel or legend should have come to him. “Whom did you give them?” he asked.

“Petrofsky,” said Borisov resignedly. “I had to. They asked for the best, and he was way ahead of the others. Remember Petrofsky?”

Karpov nodded. He had headed the Illegals Directorate for two years only, but he recalled all their best names and ongoing operations. In his present post he had total access, anyway. “Whose authorization was on these requisitions?”

“Well, technically the Central Committee’s. But from the authority rating ...” Borisov pointed a rigid finger at the ceiling and, by inference, the sky.

“God?” queried Karpov.

“Almost. Our beloved General Secretary. At least, that’s my guess.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. Just after they got the legend, the same clowns came back again. This time they took the receiver crystal for one of the covert transmitters you planted in England four years ago. That was why I thought you were behind it.”

Karpov’s eyes narrowed. During the time he was head of the Illegals Directorate the NATO countries had been deploying Pershing II and Cruise missiles. Washington had been running around the world trying to reenact the last reel of every John Wayne movie ever written, and the Politburo had been worried sick. Karpov had received orders to upgrade the Illegals’ contingency planning for massive behind-the-lines sabotage operations in Western Europe, for use in the event of any actual outbreak of hostilities.

To fulfill this order he had had a number of clandestine radio transmitters placed in Western Europe, including three in Britain. The men guarding the sets and trained to operate them were all “sleepers,” ordered to lie low until activated by an agent with the proper identification codes. The sets were ultramodern, scrambling their messages as they were transmitted; to unscramble a message the receiving set would need a programmed crystal. The crystals were stored in a safe in the Illegals Directorate.

“Which transmitter?” Karpov inquired.

“The one you called ‘Poplar.’ ”

Karpov nodded. All operations, agents, and assets had official code names. But Karpov had been a specialist on Britain for so long and knew London so well that he had private codes names for his own operations, and they were based on London suburbs whose names contained two syllables. The three transmitters he had caused to be placed in Britain were, for him, “Hackney,” “Shoreditch,” and “Poplar.”

“Any more, Pal Petrovitch?”

“Sure. These guys are never satisfied. The last one they took was Igor Volkov.”

Karpov knew of this Major Volkov, formerly of the Executive Action Department.

(When the Politburo had decided that straight hit jobs—“executive actions”—were becoming too embarrassing and that the Bulgars and East Germans should be told to do the dirty work, the department had begun to concentrate on sabotage.) “What’s his specialty?” he asked.

“Bringing clandestine packages across state borders, particularly in Western Europe.”

“Smuggling.”

“All right, smuggling. He’s good. He knows more about the borders in that part of the world, the customs and immigration procedures and how to get around them, than anyone else we’ve got. Well ... had, I should say. They took him, too.”

Karpov rose and leaned forward, placing both hands on the older man’s shoulders.

“Look, Starets, I give you my word, this is not my operation. I didn’t even know about it.

But we both know it has to be very big, and that means dangerous to start poking into.

Stay cool, bite the bullet, absorb your losses. I’ll try to find out quietly what is going on and when you will get your assets back. For your part, stay buttoned up tighter than a Georgian’s purse, okay?”

Borisov raised both his hands, palms forward, in a gesture of innocence. “You know me, Yevgeni Sergeivitch, I’m going to die the oldest man in Russia.”

Karpov laughed. “I think you will, too.” He pulled on his coat and made for the door.

Borisov followed to see him out.

When he reached his car, Karpov tapped on his driver’s window. “I want to walk for a bit. Follow me until I want to get in,” he said. He started down the snowy track, oblivious of the ice that clung to his town shoes and worsted trousers. The freezing night air was refreshing on his face, driving away some of the vodka fumes, and he needed a clear head to think. What he had learned had made him very angry indeed. Someone—and he had few doubts who it might be—was mounting a private operation in Britain. Apart from the massive snub to him as First Deputy Head of the First Chief Directorate, he, Karpov, had spent so many years in Britain, or running agents there, that he regarded it as his private preserve.

As General Karpov walked down the track lost in thought, a phone rang in a small flat in Highgate, London, not five hundred yards from the tomb of Karl Marx.

“Are you there, Barry?” a woman’s voice called from the kitchen.

From the sitting room a male voice replied, “Yes, I’ll get it.”

The man walked to the hall and took the phone while his wife continued preparing their Sunday dinner.

“Barry?”

“Speaking.”

“Ah, sorry to disturb you on a Sunday evening. It’s C.”

“Oh, good evening, sir.”

Barry Banks was surprised. It was not unheard of, but not often, that the Master called one of his people at home.

“Look, Barry, what time do you normally get to Charles Street in the morning?”

“About ten, sir.”

“Could you leave an hour earlier tomorrow and drop by Sentinel to have a word with me?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Good. Then I’ll see you about nine.”

Barry Banks was K7 at the Charles Street headquarters of MI5, but he was actually an MI6 man whose job was to act as Sir Nigel Irvine’s link with the Security Service. He wondered idly, as he ate the supper his wife had prepared, what Sir Nigel Irvine could want and why it had to be asked out of hours.

Yevgeni Karpov had not a shred of doubt that a secret operation had been mounted and was being carried out, and that it concerned Britain. Petrofsky, he knew, was an expert at passing for a Britisher right in the heart of that country; the legend that had been abstracted from Borisov’s files fitted Petrofsky to a T; the Poplar transmitter was hidden away in the north Midlands of England. If Volkov had been transferred because of his expertise at smuggling packages, there must have been transfers of other specialists, but from different directorates outside Borisov’s orbit.

All of which pointed unswervingly to the likelihood that Petrofsky would be going to Britain under deep cover, or that he had already gone. Nothing strange in that, it was what he had been trained for. What was strange was that the First Chief Directorate in the form of Karpov himself had been kept rigorously out of the operation. It made little sense, bearing in mind his own personal expertise concerning Britain and British affairs.

He went back twenty years in his connection with Britain, since that evening in September 1967 when he had been trawling in the bars of West Berlin frequented by off-duty British service personnel. As a keen and rising illegal, this was his assignment at the time.

His eye had fallen on a morose, sour-looking young man farther down the bar who was in civilian clothes but whose haircut had shouted “British armed forces.” Karpov had moved in on the lonely drinker and discovered he was a twenty-nine-year-old radio operator with a signals/intelligence (monitoring) unit, serving with the Royal Air Force at Gatow. The young man was thoroughly discontented with his lot in life.

Between that September and January 1968, Karpov had worked on the RAF man, first pretending to be a German, as was his cover, and then admitting he was a Russian. It was an easy “pull,” so simple as almost to be suspect. But it was genuine, all right; the Englishman was flattered to be the subject of KGB attention, had the inadequate man’s hatred of his own service and country, and had agreed to work for Moscow. During the summer of 1968 Karpov trained him in East Berlin, getting to know and to despise him more. The man’s tour in Berlin and his contract in the RAF was coming to a close, and he was due that September to return to Britain and demobilization. It was suggested that on leaving the Air Force, he apply for a job at Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham. He agreed, and in September 1968 he did precisely that. The young man’s name was Geoffrey Prime.

Karpov, to be able to continue to run Prime, was transferred under diplomatic cover to the Soviet Embassy in London. There he controlled Prime for three years until 1971, when he came back to Moscow and handed the job over to a successor. But the case had done his career a power of good, and he was promoted to major, with a transfer back to the Third Department. From there he handled Prime’s source material throughout the mid-1970s. It is axiomatic in any intelligence service that an operation producing excellent material will be noted and praised, and the officer controlling that operation is inseparable from the praise.

In 1977 Prime resigned from GCHQ; the British knew there was a leak there somewhere and the hounds were sniffing. In 1978 Karpov went back to London, this time as head of the entire rezidentura and with the rank of colonel. Although out of GCHQ, Prime was still an agent, and Karpov sought to warn him to keep a very low profile indeed. There was, Karpov pointed out, not a shred of proof as to his pre-1977 activities.

He’d be a free man today if he’d only been able to keep his dirty hands off little girls, thought Karpov savagely. For he had long known of Prime’s inadequacy, and it was eventually a grubby indecent-assault charge that brought the police to his door and led to his confession. He’d got thirty-five years on seven charges of spying.

But London brought two bonuses to offset the reverse of the Prime affair. At a cocktail party in 1980 Karpov had been introduced to a civil servant from the British Defense Ministry. At first the man had not heard Karpov’s name correctly, and there were several minutes of polite conversation before the man realized Karpov was a Russian. When he did so, his attitude changed. Behind his abrupt and icy attitude Karpov discerned a visceral loathing of himself, both as a Russian and as a Communist.

Karpov was not upset, merely intrigued. He learned that the man’s name was George Berenson, and further inquiries over the succeeding weeks revealed that the man was a dedicated anti-Communist and a passionate admirer of South Africa. Karpov privately tagged Berenson as a possible for a false-flag approach.

In May 1981, when Karpov returned to Moscow to head the Third Department, he asked around for a possible South African pro-Soviet sleeper. The Illegals Directorate mentioned that they had two men, one an officer in the South African Navy named Gerhardt, the other a diplomat named Marais. But Marais had just returned to Pretoria after three years in Bonn.

It was in the spring of 1983 that Karpov rose to major general and became head of the Illegals Directorate, which controlled Marais. He ordered the South African to ask for a London posting to terminate his long career, and in 1984 Marais got it. Karpov personally flew to Paris under deep cover and briefed Marais himself: Marais was to cultivate George Berenson and try to recruit him for South Africa.

In February 1985, after the death of Kirpichenko, Karpov succeeded to his present post, and a month later Marais reported that Berenson was on the hook. That month, the first batch of Berenson material came through, and it was solid twenty-four-karat gold, the mother lode. Since then Karpov had personally run the Berenson/Marais operation as a director’s case, twice in two years meeting Marais in European cities to congratulate and debrief him. That very lunch hour, the bagman had brought the latest batch of Berenson material, mailed by Marais to a KGB address in Copenhagen.

The London spell from 1978 to 1981 had brought a second benefit. As was his wont, Karpov had given Prime and Berenson his personal code names: Prime had been

“Knightsbridge” and Berenson was “Hampstead.” And then there was “Chelsea” ...

Karpov respected Chelsea, as he despised Prime and Berenson. Unlike the other two, Chelsea was not an agent but a contact, a man high in his own country’s establishment and a man who, like Karpov, was a pragmatist, a man wedded to the realities of his job, his country, and the surrounding world. Karpov never ceased to be amazed at journalistic references in the West to intelligence officers living in a world of fantasy; for Karpov, it was the politicians who lived in a dream world, seduced and bemused by their own propaganda.

Intelligence officers, Karpov believed, might walk on shadowed streets, lie and deceive to carry out their missions, but if they ever wandered into the realm of fantasy, as the CIA’s covert-action people had done so often, that was when they came badly unstuck.

Chelsea had twice dropped hints that if the USSR continued on a certain course there would soon be a fearsome mess for them all to clear up; twice he had been right. Karpov, able to warn his own people of impending danger, had scored a mountain of credits when he turned out to be correct.

He stopped and forced his mind back to the present problem. Borisov was right; the General Secretary was mounting some kind of personal and private operation right under his nose, and inside Britain, but excluding the KGB from any part of it. Karpov sensed danger; despite his years as Chairman of the KGB, the General Secretary was not a professional intelligence officer. Karpov’s own career might hang in the balance, but it was vital to find out what on earth was going on. But carefully, very carefully.

He checked his watch. Half past eleven. He beckoned his driver forward, climbed into the Chaika, and was driven home to Moscow.

Barry Banks arrived at the headquarters of the SIS at ten to nine that Monday morning.

Sentinel House is a large, square, and surprisingly tawdry-looking building on the south bank of the Thames and is leased to a certain government ministry by the Greater London Council. Its elevators are erratic and around its lower floors a mosaic mural is forever shedding its tiles like ceramic dandruff.

Banks identified himself at the front desk and went straight up. The Master, bluff and genial as he always was toward aspiring underlings, received him at once.

“Do you know a chap at Five named John Preston, by any chance?” asked C.

“Yes, sir. Not well, but I’ve met him several times. Usually in the bar at Gordon, when I’ve been over there.”

“He heads C1(A), doesn’t he, Barry?”

“Not anymore. He’s been transferred to C5(C). He started there last week.”

“Oh, really? That was rather sudden. I heard he’d done rather well at C1(A).”

Sir Nigel felt no need to inform Banks that he had met Preston at the JIC meetings or that he had used him as his personal ferret in South Africa. Banks knew nothing of the Berenson affair, nor did he need to know. For his part, Banks wondered what the Master had in mind. So far as he knew, Preston had nothing to do with Six.

“Very sudden,” Banks replied. “In fact, he was only at C1(A) for a few weeks. Up till the New Year he was head of F1(D). Then he must have done something that upset Sir Bernard—or, more likely, Brian Harcourt-Smith. He was booted out of there and into C1(A). Then last month he was given the heave-ho again.”

Ah, thought Sir Nigel. Upset Harcourt-Smith, did he? Suspected as much. Wonder why. Aloud, he said, “Any idea what he could have done to annoy Harcourt-Smith?”

“I did hear something, sir. From Preston. He wasn’t talking to me, but I was close enough to hear. He was in the bar at Gordon at the time, about two weeks back. He seemed a bit upset himself. Apparently he spent years preparing a report, and submitted it last Christmas. He thought it was worth attention, but Harcourt-Smith NFA’ed it.”

“Mmmmmm. F1(D) ... that’s Extreme Left activities, isn’t it? Look, Barry, I want you to do something for me. No need to make a song and dance about it. Just quietly. Find out the file number on that report and draw it from Registry, will you? Put it in the bag and send it over here, marked for me personally.”

Banks found himself back on the street and heading north toward Charles at just before ten.

The Aeroflot crew had a leisurely breakfast and at nine-twenty-nine First Officer Romanov checked his watch and went to the men’s room. He had been there before and ascertained the cubicle he was to take. It was the second from the end. The one at the end already had its door closed and locked. He went into the adjacent one and locked the door.

At nine-thirty he placed a small card, on which he had written the prescribed six figures, on the floor next to the partition. A hand came under the partition, withdrew the card, wrote something on it, and placed it back on the floor. Romanov picked it up. On the reverse side were the six figures he had been expecting.

With identification established, he placed the transistor on the floor and the same hand drew it silently into the next cubicle. Outside, someone was using the urinal. Romanov flushed the toilet, unlocked the door, washed his hands until the urinal user had left, then followed him out. The minibus for Heathrow was at the door. Courier One had delivered.

Barry Banks phoned Sir Nigel just before the hour of noon. It was an internal line and very secure.

“It’s rather odd, sir,” he said. “I secured the file number of that report you wanted and went to Registry for it. I know the file clerk pretty well. He confirmed it’s in the NFA section. But it’s out.”

“Out?”

“Out. Withdrawn.”

“By whom?”

“A man named Swanton. I know him. The odd thing is, he’s in Finance. So I asked him if I could borrow it. That’s the second odd thing. He refused, said he wasn’t finished with it yet. According to Registry, he’s had it three weeks. Before that, it was out to someone else.”

“The lavatory attendant?” asked Sir Nigel wryly.

“Almost. Someone in Administration.”

Sir Nigel thought for a while. The best way to keep a file permanently out of circulation was to keep it on permanent withdrawal to oneself or to one’s protégés. He had little doubt Swanton and the other man were Harcourt-Smith’s own men. “Barry, I want you to find out Preston’s home address. Then meet me here at five o’clock.”

General Karpov sat at his desk that afternoon at Yasyenevo and rubbed his stiff neck. It had not been a restful night. He had lain awake most of it, with Ludmilla sleeping by his side. By dawn he had come to a conclusion, and further thought in the moments he could snatch from his daily work had not altered it.

It was the General Secretary who was behind the mysterious operation being mounted in Britain, but despite his pretensions to read and speak English, he had no knowledge of the country. He would have relied on the advice of someone who did. There were many such—in the Foreign Ministry, the International Department of the Central Committee, the GRU, and the KGB. But if he was avoiding the KGB, why not avoid the others as well?

So, a personal adviser. And the more Karpov thought, the more the name of his own bête noire kept cropping up. Years ago, as a young man making his way in the service, he had admired Philby. They all had. But with the passing years he had risen while Philby had fallen. He had also watched the English renegade deteriorate into a drunken wreck.

The fact was, Philby had not been near a British classified document (except those shown to him by the KGB) since 1951. He had quit Britain in 1955 for Beirut and had not even been in the West since his final defection in 1963. Twenty-four years. Karpov reckoned that by now he knew Britain better than Philby did.

There was more, Karpov knew that during the time the General Secretary had been at the KGB he had in some way become impressed by Philby, by his Old World mannerisms and tastes, his affectation of the English gentleman, his dislike of the modern world with all its pop music, motorcycles, and blue jeans—tastes that mirrored the General Secretary’s own. Several times, to Karpov’s certain knowledge, the General Secretary had had recourse to Philby’s advice as a sort of backup to the counsel he received from the First Chief Directorate. Why not now?

Finally, in Karpov’s catalogue, there was the tip that once—just once—Philby had let something slip, something extremely interesting. He wanted to return home. For that, if for nothing else, Karpov did not trust him. Not one inch. He recalled the lined, smiling face across the table from him at Kryuchkov’s dinner party before the New Year. What had he said about Britain then? Something about her political stability’s being overestimated here in Moscow?

There were pieces, and they were beginning to fit together. Karpov decided to check out Mr. Harold Adrian Russell Philby. But he knew that even at his level things were noted: withdrawals from Registry, official requests for information, phone calls, memoranda. His investigation had to be unofficial, personal, and, above all, verbal. The General Secretary was a very dangerous man to antagonize.

John Preston had arrived on his own street and was a hundred yards from the entrance to his apartment house when he heard the hail. He turned to see Barry Banks crossing the street toward him.

“Hello, Barry, small world. What are you doing here?” He knew that the man from K7 lived up north, in the Highgate area. Perhaps he was going to a concert at the nearby Albert Hall.

“Waiting for you, actually,” said Banks with a friendly grin. “Look, a colleague of mine wants to meet you. Would you mind?”

Preston was intrigued but not suspicious. He knew Banks was from Six, But not who might want to meet him. He allowed Banks to guide him across the street and a hundred yards down. Banks stopped at a parked Ford Granada, opened the back door, and gestured to Preston to look inside. He did so.

“Good evening, John. Do you mind if we have a couple of words?”

In surprise Preston climbed in beside the seated figure in the greatcoat. Banks closed the door and wandered away.

“Look, I know it’s an odd way to meet. But there we are. Don’t want to cause any waves, do we? I just felt I had not had a decent opportunity to thank you for the work you did down in South Africa. It was a first-class job. Henry Pienaar was most impressed. So was I.”

“Thank you, Sir Nigel.” Now, what on earth did the wily old fox want? It certainly wasn’t merely to compliment him. But C seemed lost in thought.

“There is another matter,” he said at length, as if thinking aloud. “Young Barry tells me it has come to his notice that last Christmas you put in a most interesting report about the Extreme Left in this country. I could well be wrong, but there might have been a foreign dimension to some of the funding going on, if you see what I mean. The thing is, your report was not circulated to us in the Firm. Pity, that.”

“It was NFA’ed,” said Preston quickly.

“Yes, yes, so Barry tells me. Pity, really. I’d have liked to have a glance at it. No chance of getting hold of a copy?”

“It’s in the Registry,” said Preston, puzzled. “It may be NFA’ed, but it’s on file. Barry has only got to withdraw it and send it over in the bag.”

“Actually, no,” said Sir Nigel. “It’s already been withdrawn. By Swanton. And he hasn’t finished with it. Won’t pass it over.”

“But he’s in Finance,” protested Preston.

“Yes,” murmured Sir Nigel regretfully, “and before that it was out to someone in Administration. One might almost think it was being kept out of sight.”

Preston sat there, stunned. Through the windshield he could see Banks dawdling up the street. “There is another copy,” he suggested. “My own. It’s in my office safe.”

Banks drove them. In the evening traffic it was a crawl from Kensington to Gordon Street. An hour later Preston leaned through the window of the Granada and handed his report to Sir Nigel.

Chapter 13

General Yevgeni Karpov climbed the last of the stairs to the third floor of the apartment building on Mira Prospekt and rang the buzzer. After several minutes the door opened.

Philby’s wife stood in the frame. Karpov could hear the sound of small boys at their tea inside. He had chosen 6:00 p.m. on the hunch that they would be home from school by then.

“Hello, Erita.”

She tilted her head back in a small gesture of defiance. A very protective lady, he thought. Perhaps she knew Karpov was no admirer of her husband.

“Comrade General.”

“Is Kim at home?”

“No. He’s away.”

Not “he’s out,” but “he’s away,” thought Karpov. He affected surprise. “Oh, I had hoped to catch him. Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“No. He’ll be back when he’ll be back.”

“Any idea where I might contact him?”

“No.”

Karpov frowned. Something Philby had said at the Kryuchkov dinner ... about not being allowed to drive since his stroke. Karpov had already checked the basement parking area. Philby’s Volga was there.

“I thought you drove him around these days, Erita.”

She was half smiling. Not the expression of a woman whose husband has walked out on her. More the smile of a woman whose husband has obtained a promotion. “Not anymore. He has a driver.”

“I’m impressed. Well, sorry to have missed him. I’ll try to catch him when he gets back.”

He descended the stairs deep in thought. Retired colonels did not rate personal drivers.

Back in his own flat, two blocks behind the Ukraina Hotel, Karpov called the KGB motor pool and insisted on speaking to the chief clerk. When he identified himself, the clerk’s reaction was suitably deferential. Karpov was bluff and jovial. “I’m not in the habit of handing out bouquets of carnations, but I see no reason not to when good work has been done.”

“Thank you, Comrade General.”

“That chauffeur who has been driving for my friend Comrade Colonel Philby. He speaks extremely highly of him. A very fine driver, so he says. If my own man is ever sick, I must ask for him personally.”

“Thank you again, Comrade General. I’ll tell Gregoriev myself.”

Karpov hung up. Gregoriev. Never heard of him. But a quiet talk with the man might be useful.

The next morning, April 8, the Akademik Komarov moved quietly past Greenock and into the Clyde, bound upriver for the port of Glasgow. She stopped briefly at Greenock to pick up the pilot and two customs officers. They had the usual glass in the captain’s cabin and ascertained that the ship was out of Leningrad and in ballast to pick up a cargo of heavy-duty pump accessories from Weir of Cathcart Limited. The customs men checked the crew list but did not memorize any particular name. Later it would be established that deckhand Konstantin Semyonov was on the list.

The habitual practice when Soviet illegals enter a country by ship is that their names do not appear on the crew list. The illegal arrives crouched in a tiny cubbyhole, or oubliette, that has been skillfully cut into the ship’s structure and so well hidden that the most thorough search would not uncover it. Then, if the man for operational or accidental reasons fails to go out on the same ship, there is no discrepancy in the crew list. But this had been a hurried operation. There had been no time for structural changes.

The extra crewman had arrived with the men from Moscow only hours before the Komarov was due to leave Leningrad for Glasgow on a long-scheduled freight run, and the captain and his resident political officer had had no choice but to put him on the crew list. His seaman’s paybook was in order, and he would be returning, they were told.

Nevertheless, the man had taken a cabin to himself, spent the whole voyage in it, and the two genuine deckhands whose cabin it was had become fed up with their sleeping bags on the wardroom floor. These bags were cleared away by the time the Scottish pilot came on board. Down in his cabin, tense, for evident reasons, Courier Two was waiting for midnight.

While the Clyde pilot stood on the bridge of the Komarov and the fields of Strathclyde slid by as he munched his breakfast sandwiches, it was already noon in Moscow. Karpov called the KGB motor pool again. There was a new chief clerk on duty, as he knew there would be.

“My driver looks as if he’s coming down with the flu,” he said. “He’ll see the day out, but I’m giving him tomorrow off.”

“I’ll ensure that you get a replacement, Comrade General.”

“I’d prefer Gregoriev. Is he available? I’ve heard the best reports of him.”

There was a rustle of paper as the clerk checked his files. “Yes, indeed. He’s been on temporary assignment but he’s back in the pool.”

“Good. Have him report to my Moscow flat at eight tomorrow morning, I’ll have the keys, and the Chaika will be in the basement.”

Stranger and stranger, Karpov thought as he put the phone down. Gregoriev had been ordered to drive Philby around for a while. Why? Because there was a great deal of driving to do, too much for Erita to cope with? Or so that Erita should not know where he was going? And now the man was back in the pool again. Meaning? Probably that Philby was now somewhere else and did not need a driver anymore, at least not until the end of whatever operation he was involved in.

That evening, Karpov told his grateful regular driver he could have the following day off to take his family out.

The same Wednesday evening, Sir Nigel Irvine had a dinner date with a friend in Oxford.

One of the charming things about Saint Antony’s College, Oxford, is that, like so many highly influential British institutions, so far as the general public is concerned it does not exist.

In fact it does exist but is so small and so discreet that if anyone surveying the groves of academe in the British Isles were to blink, he would probably miss it. Its Hall is small, elegant, and tucked away out of sight; it offers no degree courses, educates no students, has no undergraduates and therefore no graduates, and awards no degrees. It has a few resident professors and fellows, who sometimes dine together in Hall but live in rooms scattered around the city, and others who live elsewhere and simply visit. It occasionally invites outsiders to address the fellows—an extraordinary honor—and the professors and fellows occasionally submit papers to the higher echelons of the British establishment, where they are taken very seriously. Its funding is as private as the profile it maintains.

In fact it is a think tank where assembled intellects, often with extensive nonacademic experience, pursue the study of one single discipline: current affairs.

That evening, Sir Nigel dined in Hall with his host, Professor Jeremy Sweeting, and after an excellent repast the professor took the Master back to his rooms in an agreeable house on the outskirts of Oxford for port and coffee.

“Now, Nigel,” said Professor Sweeting when they had broached a vintage Taylor and were at ease before the fire in the study, “what can I do for you?”

“Have you by any chance, Jeremy, heard of a thing called the MBR?”

Professor Sweeting held his port in midair. He stared at it fiar a long while. “You know, Nigel, you really do have a way of spoiling a chap’s evening when you have a mind to. Where did you hear those letters?”

For answer, Sir Nigel Irvine passed over the Preston report. Professor Sweeting read it carefully, and it took him an hour. Irvine knew that the professor, unlike John Preston, was no legman. He did not get out on the ground. But he had an encyclopedic knowledge of Marxian theory and practice, of dialectical materialism, and of the teachings of Lenin on the applicability of theory to the practice of the achievement of power. His pursuit and his absorption was to read, study, collate, and analyze.

“Remarkable,” said Sweeting as he handed back the report. “A different approach, a different attitude, of course, and a completely different methodology. But we’ve come up with the same answers.”

“Care to tell me what those answers are?” asked Sir Nigel gently.

“It’s only theory, of course,” apologized Professor Sweeting. “A thousand straws in the wind that may—or may not—make up a bale of hay. Anyway, this is what I’ve been on since June 1983. ...”

He talked for two hours, and when, much later, Sir Nigel left to be driven back to London, he was a very pensive man.

The Akademik Komarov was tied up at the Finnieston Quay in the heart of Glasgow, so that the giant crane there could hoist the pumps aboard in the morning. There are no customs or immigration checks there; foreign seamen can simply walk off their ships, across the quay, and into the streets of Glasgow.

At midnight, while Professor Sweeting was still talking, deckhand Semyonov walked down the gangplank, followed the quay for a hundred yards, avoided Betty’s Bar, outside whose door a few drunken sailors were still protesting their right to just one more drink, and turned up Finnieston Street.

He was unremarkable in appearance, being dressed in a turtleneck sweater, corduroy trousers, and an anorak; his shoes were scuffed. Under one arm he clutched a canvas gunnysack held closed by a drawstring. Passing under the Clydeside Expressway, he reached Argyle Street, turned left, and followed it to Partick Cross. He consulted no map but headed on into Hyndland Road. A mile farther on, he reached another major artery, the Great Western Road. He had memorized his route days before.

Here he checked his watch; it told him he still had half an hour. The rendezvous could not be more than ten minutes’ walk ahead. He turned left and proceeded in the direction of the Pond Hotel, next to the boating lake and a hundred yards past the BP service station whose lights he could see blazing in the distance. He was almost at the bus stop at the junction of the Great Western and Hughenden roads when he saw them. They were lounging about in the passenger shelter of the bus stop. It was half past one in the morning, and there were five of them.

In some parts of Britain they call them “skinheads” or “punks,” but in Glasgow they call them “Neds.” Semyonov thought of crossing the street but he was too late. One of them called out to him, and they spilled out of the bus shelter. He could speak some English, but their broad, drink-slurred Glaswegian dialect defeated him. They blocked the sidewalk, so he stepped into the street. One of them grabbed his arm and shouted at him.

What the lout actually said was “Wha’ ha’ ya got in ya wee sack, then?”

But Semyonov could not understand, so he shook his head and tried to walk past. Then they were on him and he went down under a rain of blows. When he was in the gutter the kicking started. He dimly felt hands tearing at his gunnysack, so he clutched it to his belly with both hands and rolled over, taking the blows around the head and kidneys.

Devonshire Terrace overlooks that road junction; it is a row of solid, four-story, middle-class houses of buff and gray sandstone blocks. On the top floor of one, Mrs.

Sylvester, old, widowed, alone, and riddled with arthritis, was unable to sleep. She heard the shouts from the street below and hobbled from her bed to the window. What she saw caused her to limp across the room to the telephone, where she dialed 999 and asked for the police. She told the police operator where to send the patrol car but hung up when asked for her name and address. Respectable people—and those of Devonshire Terrace are very respectable—do not like to get involved.

Police Constables Alistair Craig and Hugh McBain were in their patrol car a mile down the Great Western at the Hillhead end when the call came through. Traffic was nearly nonexistent and they reached the bus stop in ninety seconds. When the Neds saw the headlights and heard the siren, they ceased trying to rip away the gunnysack and chose to race away across the grass verge that separates Hughenden Road from the Great Western, so the patrol car could not follow them. By the time Police Constable Craig could leap out of the car they were disappearing shadows and pursuit was useless. In any case, the priority was the victim.

Craig bent over the man. He was unconscious and huddled in the fetal position.

“Ambulance, Hughie,” Craig called across to McBain, who was already on the radio. The ambulance from the Western Infirmary came six minutes later. Meanwhile, the two officers left the injured man strictly alone, as per procedure, save that they covered him with a blanket.

The ambulance men eased the limp form onto a gurney and into the back of the vehicle. As they were tucking the blanket around the victim, Craig lifted the gunnysack and placed it in the rear of the ambulance. “You go with him, I’ll follow,” shouted McBain, so Craig climbed into the ambulance as well.

They all arrived at the hospital in less than five minutes. The ambulance men quickly wheeled the injured man through the swinging doors, down the corridor, around two corners, and into the rear of the casualty ward. As this was an emergency admission, there was no need for them to pass through the public waiting room, where the usual collection of small-hours-of-the-morning drunks nursed the cuts and bruises collected while in earlier contact with a number of unyielding objects.

Craig waited at the entrance while McBain parked the patrol car. When his partner joined him, he said, “You handle the admission forms, Hughie. I’ll go along and see if I can get you a name and address.” McBain sighed. Admission forms went on forever.

Craig collected the gunnysack and followed the gurney down the corridor to Emergency. This department at the Western Infirmary consists of a passage with swinging doors at each end and twelve curtained examination rooms, six at either side of the central corridor. Eleven of the rooms are used for examinations; the twelfth is the nurse’s office, and it is located nearest the rear entrance through which the gurneys come.

The doors at the other end have one-way mirrors in their panels and give onto the public-waiting room where the walking wounded are made to sit and wait their turn.

Leaving McBain with a sheaf of admission-forms to fill in, Craig went through the mirrored doors to see the unconscious man on his gurney, parked at the other end. The nurse gave the injured man the usual once-over—he was alive, at any rate—and asked the orderlies to put him on a table in one of the examination rooms so that the gurney could be returned to the ambulance. The cubicle they chose was the one opposite the nurse’s office.

The house physician on duty that night, an Indian named Mehta, was summoned. He had the orderlies strip the injured man to the waist—he could see no signs of blood leaking through the trousers—and made a lengthier examination before ordering an X-ray. Then he left to attend to another emergency admission from a car crash.

The nurse telephoned X-Ray but it was occupied. They would let her know when they were free. She put on her kettle to make a cup of tea.

Police Constable Craig, having ascertained that his anonymous charge was still unconscious on his back across the corridor, took the man’s anorak, entered the nurse’s office, and placed both anorak and gunnysack on her desk. “Have you a spare cup of that brew?” he asked in the jocular familiarity used by people of the night who spend their duty hours cleaning up the mess of a major city.

“I might,” she said, “but I don’t see why I should waste it on the likes of you.”

Craig grinned. He felt through the pockets of the anorak and extracted a seaman’s paybook. It bore the photograph of the man in the examination room across the way, and was in two languages, Russian and French. He understood neither. He could not read Cyrillic script, but the name was in Roman letters also, in the French-language section.

“Who’s the patient?” asked the nurse, preparing two cups of tea.

“Looks like a seaman, and a Russian at that,” said Craig, perturbed. A citizen of Glasgow roughed up by a gang of Neds was one thing; a foreigner—and a Russian, at that—could spell problems. To try to discover what ship the man could be from, Craig emptied the gunnysack. It contained simply a rolled-up, thick-knit sweater, which was wrapped around a circular, screw-top tobacco tin. Inside the tin was not tobacco but a wad of cotton that shrouded two disks of aluminum with, between them, another two-inch-diameter disk of a dull gray metal. Craig examined the three disks without interest, replaced them in their bed of cotton, screwed the tin shut again, and laid it on the table beside the paybook. What he did not know was that across the corridor the victim of the mugging attack had come to and was peering through the curtains at him. What he did know was that it was time to tell Division that he had an injured Russian on his hands.

“Use your phone, pet?” he asked the nurse, and reached out for it.

“Don’t you ‘pet’ me,” called back the nurse, who was somewhat older than the twenty-four-year-old Craig. “God, they get younger every day.”

Craig began to dial. Just what went through Konstantin Semyonov’s mind will never be known. Dazed and confused, probably suffering a concussion from the kicks to his head, he could see the unmistakable black uniform of a British policeman with his back to him across the corridor. He could see his own paybook and the consignment he had been told to bring to Britain and deliver to the agent at the boating lake sitting on the table by the policeman’s hand. He had watched the officer examine the consignment—

Semyonov himself had never dared open the tobacco tin—and now the man was phoning.

Perhaps the seaman had visions of an endless third-degree examination in some reeking cellar beneath Strathclyde police headquarters. ...

The first thing Craig knew, he was roughly elbowed aside, caught completely unawares. A bare arm pushed past him, reached for the tin, and grabbed it. Craig responded quickly, dropping the telephone and grasping the outstretched arm. “What the hell!” he shouted; then, assuming the poor fellow was hallucinating, he grabbed the man and tried to restrain him. The tin was shaken from the Russian’s hand and fell to the floor. For a moment Semyonov stared at the Scottish policeman, then panicked and ran.

Still calling, “Hey, come back here!” Craig thundered down the corridor after him.

Shortie Patterson was a drunk. A lifetime dedicated to sampling the produce of Scotland had made him unemployed and unemployable. He was no ordinary drunk; he had elevated intoxication to an art form. The previous day he had drawn his welfare allowance and gone to the nearest boozer; by midnight he had been paralyzed. In the small hours he had taken exception to the offensive attitude of a lamppost that refused to respond to his entreaties for the price of a dram, so he had hit the creature.

He had been in X-Ray with his broken hand and was going back down the corridor to his cubicle when a man with a bare and battered torso and bruised and bloody face came running out of an adjacent room pursued by a policeman. Shortie knew his duty to a fellow sufferer. He had no love for policemen, who seemed to have nothing better to do than pluck him out of perfectly comfortable gutters and hand him over to people who made him bathe. He let the running man pass him, then stuck out a foot.

“You stupid wee bugger!” shouted Craig as he crashed down. By the time he was up, he had lost ten yards on the Russian.

Semyonov came through the mirrored doors into the public waiting room, missed seeing the narrow door to the outside that lay to his left, and ran through the larger double doors to his right. This led him back into the corridor down which he had been wheeled thirty minutes earlier. He turned right again, to find approaching him a gurney surrounded by a doctor and two nurses holding up plasma bottles—Dr. Mehta’s accident victim. The gurney blocked the whole corridor; behind him Semyonov heard running boots.

To his left was a lobby containing two elevators. The door to one was just closing, and Semyonov managed to hurl himself through the gap. As the elevator rose, he heard the policeman banging impotently on the closed door. Semyonov leaned back and closed his eyes in misery.

Craig made for the stairwell and ran up. At every level he checked the lights above the elevator doors. It was still climbing. At the top and tenth floor he was hot, angry, and puffing.

Semyonov had got out at the tenth floor. He looked into one door available to him, but it opened onto a ward of sleeping patients. There was one other door, open and leading to a staircase. He ran up the stairs, only to find himself in another corridor, with shower rooms, a pantry, and storerooms along the sides. At the far end was the last door, and in the warm, humid night it stood open. It led to the flat roof of the building.

Craig had lost ground, but he made the final doorway eventually and stepped out into the night air. His eyes adjusting to the darkness, he made out the figure of a man by the north parapet. His annoyance died away. I’d probably panic if I woke up in a Moscow hospital, he thought. He started to walk toward the figure, hands held up to show they were empty.

“C’mon, Ivan, or whatever your name is. You’re all right. You got a bang on the heed, tha’s all. Come on away down wi’ me.”

Craig was accustomed to the darkness now. He could see the Russian’s face quite clearly in the glow from the city below. The man watched him approach until he was twenty feet away. Then he looked down, took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and jumped.

Craig could not believe it for several seconds, even after he heard the soggy smack of the body crashing a hundred feet down into the staff parking lot.

“Oh, Christ,” he breathed, “I’m in trouble.” With fumbling fingers he reached for his radio and called Division.

A hundred yards beyond the BP service station and half a mile from the bus stop lies a boating pond, in the shadow of the Pond Hotel. From the sidewalk a set of stone steps leads down to the walkway around the water, and close to the bottom of the steps are two wooden benches.

The silent figure in black motorcycle leathers checked his watch. Three o’clock. The rendezvous had been for two. One hour’s delay was all that was allowed. There was a second, backup rendezvous in a different place, twenty-four hours later. He would be there. If the contact failed to show up, he would have to use the radio again. He rose and left.

Police Constable McBain had missed the entire chase. He had been at his car checking exact times for the mugging attack and the logged appeal calls. The first thing he knew about it was when his “neighbor” (Glasgow slang for partner) came down into the waiting room looking pale and shaken.

“Alistair, have you got that name and address yet?” he asked.

“He is ... he was ... a Russian seaman,” said Craig.

“Oh, hell, that’s all we needed. How do you spell it?”

“Hughie, he’s just ... thrown himself off the roof.”

McBain put down his pen and stared in disbelief at his neighbor. Then the training took over. Any policeman knows that when things go wrong you cover yourself—you follow the procedures right down the line, no cowboy tactics, no clever-clever initiatives. “Have you called Division?” he asked.

“Aye, someone’s on the way over.”

“Let’s get the doctor,’ said McBain.

They found Dr. Mehta, who was already worked to fatigue by the night’s admissions.

He followed them to the parking lot, spent no more than two minutes examining the gross and burst cadaver, pronounced it dead and no longer his concern, and returned to his duties. Two orderlies brought a blanket to cover it, and thirty minutes later an ambulance took the thing to the city mortuary on Jocelyn Square by the Salt Market. There other hands would strip off the rest of the clothing—shoes, socks, trousers, underpants, belt, and wristwatch—each item to be bagged and tagged for collection by investigating officers.

Inside the hospital there were more forms to fill out—the admission forms were kept as evidence, although now useless for practical purposes—and the two police constables bagged and tagged the rest of the dead man’s possessions. They were listed as: anorak, 1; turtleneck pullover, 1; canvas gunnysack, 1; thick-knit sweater (rolled), 1; and round tobacco tin, 1.

Before they were finished, about fifteen minutes after Craig’s call, an inspector and a sergeant, both uniformed, had arrived from Division. They were loaned an empty administrator’s office and began to take statements from the two constables. After ten minutes the inspector sent the sergeant to his car to call in the duty chief superintendent.

It was then four in the morning of Thursday, April 9, but in Moscow it was eight o’clock.

General Yevgeni Karpov waited until they were out of the main traffic of southern Moscow and on the open road to Yasyenevo before he started to converse with Gregoriev. Apparently the thirty-year-old driver knew he had been singled out by the general and was eager to please him.

“How do you like driving for us?”

“Very much, sir.”

“Well, it gets you out and about, I suppose. Better than a stuffy desk job.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Been driving for my friend Colonel Philby recently, I hear.”

A slight pause. Damn, he’s been told not to mention it, thought Karpov.

“Er ... yes, sir.”

“Used to drive himself until he had his stroke.”

“So he told me, sir.”

Better get on with it. “Whereabouts did you drive him?”

A longer pause. Karpov could see the driver’s face in the mirror. He was disturbed, in a quandary.

“Oh, just around Moscow, sir.”

“Anywhere specific around Moscow, Gregoriev?”

“No, sir. Just around.”

“Pull over, Gregoriev.”

The Chaika pulled out of the privileged center lane, through the southbound traffic, and onto a shoulder.

Karpov leaned forward. “You know who I am, Gregoriev?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you know my rank in the KGB?”

“Yes, sir. Lieutenant general.”

“Then don’t play games with me, young man. Where, exactly, did you drive him?”

Gregoriev swallowed. Karpov could see he was wrestling with himself. The question was: Who had told him to stay silent as to where he had driven Philby? If it was Philby himself, Karpov outranked him. But if it was someone higher ... In fact, it had been Major Pavlov, and he had frightened Gregoriev badly. He was only a major, but to a Russian the people from the First Chief Directorate are an unknown quantity, whereas a major of the Kremlin Guards ... Still, a general was a general.

“Mostly to a series of conferences, Comrade General. Some at central Moscow apartments, but I never went inside, so I never saw which exact apartment he went to.”

“Some in central Moscow ... And the others?”

“Mainly—no sir, always, I think—at a dacha out at Zhukovka.”

Central Committee country, thought Karpov. Or Supreme Soviet. “Do you know whose?”

“No, sir. Honestly. He just gave me directions to it. Then I used to wait in the car.”

“Who else turned up at these conferences?”

“There was one occasion, sir, when two cars arrived together. I saw the man from the other car get out and enter the dacha. ...”

“And you recognized him?”

“Yes, sir. Before I joined the KGB motor pool, I was a driver in the Army. In 1985 I used to drive for a colonel of the GRU. We were based at Kandahar, in Afghanistan.

Once this officer was in the rear seat with my colonel. It was General Marchenko.”

Well, well, well, thought Karpov, my old friend Pyotr Marchenko, specialist in destabilization. “Anyone else at these conferences?”

“Just one other car, sir. We drivers chatted a bit, what with the hours of waiting and that. But he was a surly devil. All I learned was that he drove for a member of the Academy of Sciences. Honestly, sir, that’s all I know.”

“Drive on, Gregoriev.”

Karpov leaned back and watched the passing landscape of trees. So, there were four of them, meeting to prepare something for the General Secretary. The host was a member of the Central Committee, or maybe the Supreme Soviet, and the other three were Philby, Marchenko, and an unnamed academician.

Tomorrow, Friday, the vlasti finished work as early as they could and went to their dachas. Karpov knew that Marchenko had a villa close to Peredelkino, not far from his own. He also knew Marchenko’s weakness, and sighed. He had better take a lot of brandy with him. It would be a heavy session.

Chief Superintendent Charlie Forbes listened carefully and quietly to Constables Craig and McBain, and now and again interjected a soft-spoken question. Forbes had no doubt they were telling the truth, but he had been on the force long enough to know the truth does not always save your neck.

It was a bad business. Technically, the Russian had been in police custody, even though under treatment at a hospital. There had been no one else on that roof but Police Constable Craig. There was no evident reason why the man should have jumped. Forbes did not even care why, assuming, like everyone else, that the man had been severely concussed and in a state of panic due to temporary hallucination. His whole attention was on the possible perspectives for the Strathclyde police.

There would be the ship to trace, the captain to interview, formal identification of the body, the Soviet consul to be informed, and of course the press, the bloody press, some elements of whom would hint darkly at their usual hobbyhorse, police brutality. The darn thing was, when they asked their pointed questions, he did not have any answers. Why should the silly man have jumped?

At half past four there was nothing more to do at the hospital. The investigative machinery would roll into action by dawn. Forbes ordered them all back to divisional headquarters. By six o’clock the two constables had finished their lengthy statements and Charlie Forbes was in his office coping with the demands of the procedural machinery. A search—probably futile—was on for the lady who had dialed 999. Statements had been taken from the two ambulance men who had answered McBain’s call via the divisional switchboard. At least there would be no doubt about the beating the Neds had given the man.

The emergency ward nurse had told her version; the harassed Dr. Mehta had made a statement; the front desk attendant had testified to seeing the bare-chested man, pursued by Craig, run through the waiting room. After that, during the chase up to the roof, no one had seen either of them.

Forbes had identified the only Soviet ship in port as the Akademik Komarov and dispatched a police car to ask the captain to identify the body; he had woken the Soviet consul, who would be at his office at nine—protesting, no doubt. He had alerted his own chief constable, and the procurator fiscal, whose office, in Scotland, includes the duties of coroner.

The dead man’s personal effects—the “productions”—had all been bagged and were being taken to Partick police station (the mugging had occurred in Partick) to be retained under lock and key on the direction of the procurator fiscal, who had promised to authorize the postmortem for ten that morning. Charlie Forbes stretched and called the canteen for coffee and rolls.

While Chief Superintendent Forbes at the Strathclyde HQ on Pitt Street did the paperwork, Constables Craig and McBain signed their statements at Division and repaired to their canteen for breakfast. Both were worried men, and they shared their concerns with a grizzled detective sergeant from the plainclothes branch who sat at their table. After breakfast they sought and received permission to go home to sleep.

Something they said caused the detective to go to the pay phone in the hall outside the canteen and make a call. The man he disturbed—at that moment with a faceful of shaving cream—was Detective Inspector Carmichael, who listened carefully, hung up, and finished his shaving in a pensive mood. Carmichael was from Special Branch.

At half past seven, Carmichael traced the chief inspector in the uniformed branch who would be attending the postmortem and asked if he might tag along. “Be my guest,” said the chief inspector. “City morgue at ten.”

At that same morgue, at eight o’clock, the captain of the Akademik Komarov, accompanied by his inseparable political officer, stared at a videoscreen on which the battered face of deckhand Semyonov soon appeared. He nodded slowly and muttered in Russian.

“That is him,” said the political officer. “We wish to see our consul.”

“He’ll be at Pitt Street at nine o’clock,” said the uniformed sergeant who was accompanying them. Both Russians appeared shaken and subdued. It must be bad to lose a close shipmate, thought the sergeant.

At nine the Soviet consul was ushered into the Pitt Street office of Chief Superintendent Forbes. He spoke fluent English. Forbes asked him to be seated and launched into a narration of the night’s events. Before he finished, the consul was coming back at him.

“This is outrage,” the Russian began. “I must contact Soviet Embassy in London without delay. ...”

There was a knock on the door and the Komarov’s captain and his political officer were shown in. The uniformed sergeant was their escort, but another man was with them. He nodded to Forbes. “Morning, sir. Mind if I sit in?”

“Help yourself, Carmichael. I think it’s going to be a rough one.”

But no. The political officer had been in the room barely ten seconds before he drew the consul aside and whispered furiously in his ear. The consul made his excuses and the two men withdrew to the corridor. Three minutes later they were back. The consul was formal and correct. He would, of course, have to communicate with his embassy. He was sure the Strathclyde police would do all in their power to apprehend the hooligans.

Would it be possible for the body of the seaman and all his effects to depart for Leningrad on the Akademik Komarov, which was due to sail this day?

Forbes was polite but adamant. Police inquiries and efforts to arrest the muggers would continue. During that period the body would have to remain at the morgue and all the dead man’s effects would be retained under lock and key at Partick police station. The consul nodded. He, too, understood procedures. And with that, the Russians left. At ten o’clock, Carmichael entered the postmortem room, where Professor Harland was scrubbing. The chatter, as usual, was about the weather, the golf prospects, the norms of everyday life. A few feet away on a slab above the drains lay the battered and pulped body of Semyonov.

“Mind if I have a look?” asked Carmichael. The police pathologist nodded.

Carmichael spent ten minutes examining what remained of Semyonov. When he left, just as the professor was starting to cut, he went to his office at Pitt Street and made a call to Edinburgh—more precisely, to the Scottish Home and Health Department, known as the Scottish Office, at Saint Andrew’s House. There he spoke to a retired assistant commissioner who was on the staff of the Scottish Office for one reason: as liaison with MI5 in London.

At noon the phone rang in the office of C5(C) in Gordon. Bright took it, listened for a moment, and held it out to Preston. “It’s for you. They won’t talk to anyone else.”

“Who is it?”

“The Scottish Office, Edinburgh.”

Preston took the phone. “John Preston ... Yes, good morning to you. ...” He listened for several minutes, his brow furrowed. He noted the name Carmichael on a scratch pad.

“Yes, I think I’d better come up. Would you tell Inspector Carmichael I’ll be on the three o’clock shuttle, and could he meet me at Glasgow Airport? Thank you.”

“Glasgow?” asked Bright. “What have they been up to?”

“Oh, some Russian seaman who took a tumble off a roof, and who may not have been all he should have been. I’ll be back tomorrow. It’s probably nothing. Still, anything to get out of the office. ...”

Chapter 14

Glasgow Airport lies eight miles southwest of the city and is linked to it by the M8 motorway. Preston’s flight landed at just after half past four, and with only hand luggage to carry he was in the concourse ten minutes later. He went to Airport Information and they paged “Mr. Carmichael.” The detective inspector from Special Branch appeared and introduced himself. Five minutes later, they were in the inspector’s car and pulling onto the motorway leading to the darkening city.

“Let’s talk as we drive,” suggested Preston. “Start from the beginning and tell me what happened.”

Carmichael was succinct and accurate. There were a lot of gaps he could not fill, but he had had time to read the statements of the two police constables, especially that of PC

Craig, so he could recount most of it. Preston heard him out in silence.

“What caused you to phone the Scottish Office and ask for someone to come up from London?” he asked at length.

“I could be wrong, but there seems to me a possibility the man was not a merchant seaman,” said Carmichael.

“Go on.”

“It was something Craig said in the canteen at Division this morning,” said Carmichael.

“I wasn’t there, but the remark was overheard by a CID man, who called me up. What Craig said, McBain agreed with. But neither of them mentioned it in their official statements. As you know, statements are about the facts; this was the police officers’

speculation. Still, it seemed worth checking out.”

“I’m listening.”

“They said that when they found the seaman he was huddled in the fetal position, his hands clasped around the gunnysack, which was pressed into his own belly. The phrase Craig used was that ‘he seemed to be protecting it like a baby.’ ”

Preston could see the oddity. If a man is being kicked half to death, the instinct is to roll into a ball, as Semyonov had done, but to use the hands to protect the head. Why would a man take the force of the kicks on his unprotected head in order to guard a worthless canvas bag?

“Then,” resumed Carmichael, “I began to wonder about the time and place. Seamen in the port of Glasgow go to Betty’s or the Stable Bar. This man was four miles from the docks, walking up a road toward nowhere, long after closing hours, without a bar in sight.

What the hell was he doing there at that hour?”

“Good question,” said Preston. “What next?”

“At ten this morning I went to the postmortem. The body was pretty badly smashed by the fall, but the front of the face was all right except for a couple of bruises. Most of the blows from the Neds were to the back of the head and the body. I’ve seen the faces of merchant navy deckhands before. They are weather-beaten, wind-burned, brown, and lined. This man had a bland, pale face—the face of a man not accustomed to life on the foredeck.

“Then, his hands. They should have been brown on the backs, callused on the palms.

They were soft and white, like those of a desk worker. Lastly, the teeth. I’d expect a deckhand out of Leningrad to have basic dentistry, the fillings of amalgam and any false teeth of steel, Russian-style. This man had gold fillings and two gold caps.”

Preston nodded approvingly. Carmichael was sharp. They had arrived in the parking lot of the hotel where Carmichael had booked Preston for the night.

“One last thing. Small, but it may mean something,” said Carmichael. “Before the postmortem the Soviet consul went to see our chief superintendent at Pitt Street. It seems he was on the verge of lodging a protest when the captain of the ship arrived with his political officer. I was with them. The political officer pulled the consul into the hall and they had a whispered conversation. When the consul returned, he was all civility and understanding. It was as if the political officer had told him something about the dead man. I got the impression they didn’t want to make any waves at all until they had checked with the embassy in London.”

“Have you told anyone in the uniformed branch that I’m coming?” asked Preston.

“Not yet,” replied Carmichael. “Do you want me to?”

Preston shook his head. “Wait till the morning. We’ll decide then. It may be nothing.”

“Anything else you want?”

“Copies of the various statements—the lot, if you can get them. And the list of the man’s effects. By the way, where are they?”

“Locked up at Partick police station. I’ll get you the copies and drop them off here later.”

General Karpov called a friend in the GRU and spun a story to the effect that one of his bagmen had brought him a couple of bottles of French brandy from Paris. He personally never touched the stuff, but he owed Pyotr Marchenko a favor. He would drop the brandy at Marchenko’s dacha during the weekend. He just needed to know there would be someone to take it in. Did the colleague have Marchenko’s country number at Peredelkino? The GRU man did indeed. He gave it to Karpov and thought no more about it.

In most of the dachas of the Soviet elite there is a housekeeper or manservant in residence during the winter months to keep the fires alight so that the owner’s weekends do not start freezing cold. It was Marchenko’s housekeeper who answered Karpov’s phone call. Yes, the general was expected the following day, Friday; he usually arrived at about six in the evening. Karpov thanked her and hung up. He decided he would dismiss his chauffeur, drive himself, and surprise the GRU general at seven o’clock.

Preston lay awake in his bed, thinking. Carmichael had brought him all the statements taken at the Western Infirmary and at Division. Like all police-recorded depositions, they were stilted and formal, quite unlike the way people actually narrate what they have seen and heard. The facts were there, of course, but not the impressions.

What Preston could not know, because Craig had not mentioned it and the nurse had not seen it, was that before running off down the corridor between the examination rooms, Semyonov had grabbed for the round tobacco tin. Craig had simply said the injured man “pushed past me.”

Nor was the list of personal effects—the “productions”— much more helpful. It mentioned a round tobacco tin and “contents”—which could have been two ounces of shag tobacco.

Preston ran over the possibilities in his mind. First: Semyonov was an illegal being landed in Britain. Conclusion: Very unlikely. He was on the crew list of the ship and would be conspicuous by his absence when the vessel departed for Leningrad.

All right. Second: He was to come into Glasgow with the ship, and leave with it that Thursday night. What was he doing in the small hours halfway up the Great Western Road? Making a drop or keeping a rendezvous? Good. Or even collecting a package to bring back to Leningrad? Even better. But after that, Preston’s options ran out.

If Semyonov had delivered what he had come to deliver, why had he tried to protect his gunnysack as if his life depended on it? It would have been empty of its cargo.

If he had come to pick something up, but had not yet done that, the same reasoning applied. If he had already made the pickup, why had not something of considerable interest, such as a packet of papers, been found on his person?

If what he had come to deliver or collect could be concealed about a human form, why had he brought a gunnysack at all? If there was something sewn into his anorak or pants or concealed in the heel of his shoe, why not let the Neds take the sack, which was what they were after? He could have saved himself a beating, and got to his rendezvous or back to his ship (whichever direction he was heading) with no more than a couple of bruises.

Preston threw a few more possibilities into the food-mixer. Semyonov had come as a courier for a face-to-face rendezvous with a Soviet illegal already resident in Britain. To pass a verbal message? Unlikely; there were a score of better ways of passing coded information. To receive a verbal report? Same applied. To change places with a resident illegal, to replace the man? No, the photograph in his paybook was identifiably Semyonov. If he had been changing places with an illegal, Moscow would have given him a duplicate paybook with the appropriate photograph, so the man he was replacing could go out on the Komarov as deckhand Semyonov. The second paybook would have been on his person. Unless it were sewn into the lining ... of what? The lining of his jacket? Then why take a beating to protect the sack? Would it have been concealed in the canvas base of the sack itself? Much more likely.

It all seemed to come back to that damned sack. Just before midnight, Preston called Carmichael at his home.

“Can you pick me up at eight tomorrow morning?” he asked. “I want to go to Partick and have a look at the productions.”

Over breakfast that Friday morning, Yevgeni Karpov asked his wife, Ludmilla, “Can you take the kids out to the dacha in the Volga this afternoon?”

“Of course. You’ll join us straight from the office?”

He nodded absently. “I’ll be late. I’ve got to see someone from the GRU.”

Ludmilla Karpova sighed inwardly. She knew he kept a partridge-plump little secretary in a small apartment in the Arbat district. She knew because wives will talk, and in a society as stratified as theirs, most of her friends were the wives of officers of similar rank. She also knew he did not know she knew.

She was fifty and they had been married twenty-eight years. It had been a good marriage, considering the job he did, and she had been a good wife. Like others who had married officers of the FCD, she had long since lost count of the evenings she had waited up for him while he had been buried in the cipher room of an embassy on foreign soil.

She had stuck it through the endless tedium of countless diplomatic cocktail parties, although she spoke no foreign language, while her husband made the rounds, elegant, affable, fluent in English, French, and German, doing his job under embassy cover.

She had lost count of the weeks she had spent alone when the children were small and he was a junior officer, their home a tiny and cramped apartment without any daily help, and he away on a course, or an assignment, or standing in the shadows by the Berlin Wall waiting for a bagman to come home to the East.

She had known the panic and nameless fear that even the innocent feel when, at a certain foreign station, one of Karpov’s colleagues had gone over to the West, and the KR (counterintelligence) people had grilled her for hours about anything the man or his wife might have said in her hearing. She had watched in pity as the defector’s wife, a woman she had known well but now dared not approach, was escorted out to the waiting Aeroflot plane. It went with the job, Karpov had said, as he comforted her.

That had been years before. Now her Zhenia was a general; the Moscow apartment was airy and spacious; she had made the dacha lovely in the way she knew he liked, with pine and rugs, comfortable but rustic. The two boys were a credit to them; both at the university, one to be a doctor, the other a physicist. There would be no more horrid embassy apartments, and in three years he could retire with honors and a good pension.

So, if he had to have a bit of skirt one evening a week, he was no different from most of his contemporaries. It was better, perhaps, this way than if he had been a drunken brute, like some, or a passed-over major going nowhere but to one of the godforsaken Asian republics to end his career. Still, she sighed inwardly.

Partick police station is not the most glamorous edifice in the fine city of Glasgow, but Carmichael and Preston were not on an architectural tour. They were interested in the

“productions” from the previous night’s mugging/suicide, which had entered the station’s routine. The duty sergeant handed the desk to a constable and led them to the rear, where he unlocked the door to a room stacked with filing cabinets. With no expression of surprise, he accepted Carmichael’s card and his explanation that he and his colleague had to check the productions in order to complete their own reports, the dead man being a foreign seaman and all that. The sergeant knew about reports; he spent half his life filling them in. But he declined to leave the room while they opened the bags and looked over the contents.

Preston started with the shoes, checking for false heels, detachable soles, or cavities in the toecaps. Nothing. The socks took less time, as did the underpants. He had the back off the shattered wristwatch, but it was just a wristwatch. The trousers took longer; he felt all the seams and hems, looking for new stitching or a thickness that could not be accounted for by a double layer of the fabric. Nothing.

The turtleneck sweater the man had been wearing was easy; there were no seams and no hidden papers or hard lumps. He spent much longer on the anorak, but it yielded no fruit, either. By the time he got to the gunny-sack he was more convinced than before that if the mysterious Comrade Semyonov had had something with him, the answer lay here.

He started with the rolled-up sweater that had been in it, more for elimination purposes than anything. It was clean. Then he began on the sack itself. It took half an hour before he was satisfied that the base was just a double-stitched disk of canvas, the sides were of single canvas, and the eyelets at the top were not miniature transmitters or the drawstring a secret aerial.

That left the tobacco tin. It was of Russian origin, an ordinary screw-top tin that still smelled faintly of pungent tobacco. The cotton was cotton, and that left three metal disks: two shiny, like aluminum, and light in weight; the other dull and heavy, like lead. He sat staring at them for a while as they lay on the table; Carmichael looked at him, and the sergeant looked at the floor.

It was not what they were that puzzled him; it was what they were not. They were not anything. The aluminum disks had been above and below the heavy disk; the heavy one was two inches in diameter, and the lighter ones, three inches. He tried to imagine what purpose they could possibly serve, in radio communications, in coding and decoding, in photography. And the answer was—none. They were just metal disks. Still, he was more than ever convinced that a man had died rather than let them fall into the hands of the Neds—who would have thrown them into the gutter, anyway—and rather than let himself be interrogated about them.

Preston rose and suggested lunch. The sergeant, who felt he had wasted a morning, put the productions back into their bags and locked them in a filing cabinet. Then he showed them out.

During lunch at the Pond Hotel—Preston had suggested they drive past the spot of the mugging—he excused himself to make a telephone call. “It may take a while,” he told Carmichael. “Have a brandy on the Sassenachs.”

Carmichael grinned. “I’ll do that, and I’ll toast Bannockburn.”

Out of sight of the dining room, Preston left the hotel and walked over to the BP filling station, where he made several small purchases from the rack of parts in the adjacent shop. Then he went back to the hotel and made his call to London. He gave his assistant, Bright, the Partick police station’s number and told him exactly when he wanted to be called back.

Half an hour later, Preston and Carmichael were back in the police station, where a plainly disgruntled sergeant led them once again to the room where the productions were stored. Preston seated himself behind the table facing the wall phone across the room. In front of him on the table he built up a rampart of clothing from the various bags. At three o’clock the phone rang; the switchboard was putting the London call on the extension.

The sergeant took it.

“It’s for you, sir. London on the line,” he said to Preston.

“Would you mind taking it?” Preston asked Carmichael. “Find out if it’s urgent.”

Carmichael rose and crossed the room to where the sergeant held the phone. For a second both Scottish officers were facing the wall.

Ten minutes later Preston was finished for the last time. Carmichael drove him back to the airport.

“I’ll file a report, of course,” said Preston. “But I can’t see what the hell the Russian was so fussed about. How long will those productions be locked up in Partick?”

“Oh, weeks yet. The Soviet consul’s been told that. The search for the Neds is still on, but it’s a long shot. We might pick up one of them on another charge and get a squeal.

But I doubt it.”

Preston checked in for his flight. Boarding was immediate.

“You know, the stupid thing is,” said Carmichael as he saw him off, “if that Russian had stayed cool, we’d have driven him back to his ship with our apologies, him and his wee toy with him.”

When the plane was airborne, Preston went to the toilet for a bit of privacy and examined the three disks that he had wrapped in his handkerchief. They still meant nothing to him.

The three washers he had obtained from the garage shop and switched for the Russian’s “wee toys” would suffice for a while. In the meantime there was a man he wanted to look at the Russian disks. He worked outside London, and Bright should have asked him to stay on that Friday evening until Preston arrived.

Karpov arrived at General Marchenko’s dacha in darkness, at just after seven. The door was answered by the general’s batman, who showed him into the sitting room.

Marchenko was already on his feet and seemed both surprised and pleased to see his friend from the other, and bigger, intelligence service. “Yevgeni Sergeivitch,” he boomed. “What brings you to my humble cottage?”

Karpov had a shopping bag in his hand. He held it up and delved inside. “One of my boys just got back from Turkey, via Armenia,” he said. “A bright lad, he knows not to come empty-handed. Since there’s nothing to buy in Anatolia, he stopped at Erevan and put these in his suitcase.” He produced one of the four bottles the bag contained, the finest of all the Armenian brandies.

Marchenko’s eyes lit up. “Akhtamar!” he shouted. “Nothing but the best for the FCD.”

“Well,” continued Karpov easily, “I was driving to my own place up the road, and I thought: Who will take a glass of Akhtamar to help me through it? And back came the answer: Old Pyotr Marchenko. So I made a short detour. Shall we see what it tastes like?”

Marchenko roared with laughter. “Sasha! Glasses!” he shouted.

Preston landed just before five o’clock, collected his car from the short-term parking lot, and headed for the M4 motorway. Instead of turning east for London, he took the west lane, toward Berkshire. Thirty minutes brought him to his destination, an institution on the outskirts of the village of Aldermaston.

Known simply as “Aldermaston,” the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment so beloved of peace marchers looking for a target is in fact a multidiscipline unit. Its workers do, indeed, design and build nuclear devices, but it also houses researchers into chemistry, physics, conventional explosives, engineering, pure and applied mathematics, radiobiology, medicine, health and safety standards, and electronics. By the by, it has a very fine metallurgy department.

Years earlier, one of the scientists based at Aldermaston had given a lecture to a group of intelligence officers in Ulster on the kinds of metals the IRA bombmakers favored for their devices. Preston had been one of those in the audience and had remembered the scientist’s name.

Dr. Dafydd Wynne-Evans was waiting for him in the hallway. Preston introduced himself and reminded Dr. Wynne-Evans of his lecture many years before.

“Well, well, what a memory you’ve got,” the scientist said in his lilting Welsh accent.

“All right, Mr. Preston, what can I do for you?”

Preston dug into his pocket, produced the handkerchief, and held it out to show the three disks it contained. “These were taken off somebody in Glasgow,” he said. “They defeat me. I’d like to know what they are and what they could be used for.”

The doctor looked at them closely. “Nefarious purposes, you think?”

“Could be.”

“Difficult to say without tests,” said the metallurgist. “Look, I’ve got a dinner tonight and my daughter’s wedding tomorrow. Can I run them through some tests on Monday and call you?”

“Monday will do fine,” said Preston. “I’m taking a few days off, actually. I’ll be at home. Can I give you my number in Kensington?”

Dr. Wynne-Evans hurried upstairs, locked the disks in his safe for the night, bade good-bye to Preston, and hurried to his dinner. Preston drove back to London.

While Preston was on the road, the listening station at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire picked up a single squirt from a clandestine transmitter. Menwith got it first, but Brawdy in Wales and Chicksands in Bedfordshire also got a trace and computed the crossbearings.

The source was somewhere in the hills north of Sheffield.

When the Sheffield police got there, the spot turned out to be the shoulder of a lonely road between Barnsley and Pontefract. There was no one there.

Later that evening, one of the duty officers at GCHQ Cheltenham accepted a drink in the office of the duty director.

“It’s the same bugger,” the officer said. “He’s carborne and he’s got a good set. He only spent five seconds on the air, and it looks indecipherable. First the Derbyshire Peak District, now the Yorkshire hills. It looks as if he’s somewhere in the north Midlands.”

“Keep after him,” said the director. “We haven’t had a sleeper transmitter go suddenly active in ages. I wonder what he’s saying.”

What Major Valeri Petrofsky had been saying, although transmitted by his operator when he was long gone, was: Courier Two never showed. Inform soonest re arrival substitute.

The first bottle of Akhtamar stood empty on the table, and the second was well broached.

Marchenko was flushed, but he could be a two-bottle-a-day man when the mood took him, so he was still well in control.

Karpov, though he seldom drank for pleasure, and even more rarely drank alone, had seasoned his stomach for years on the diplomatic circuit. He had a good head when he needed it. Apart from that, he had forced half a pound of white butter down his throat before leaving Yasyenevo, and though he had nearly gagged on it, the fat had lined his stomach and was now retarding the onset of the alcohol’s effect.

“What are you up to these days, Petya?” he asked, dropping into the diminutive and familiar form of the name.

Marchenko’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”

“Come on, Petya, we go back a long way. Remember when I saved your ass in Afghanistan three years back? You owe me a favor. What’s going on?”

Marchenko remembered. He nodded solemnly. In 1984 he had been heading a big GRU operation against the Muslim rebels up near the Khyber Pass. There was one particularly outstanding guerrilla leader who ran raids into Afghanistan, using as his bases the refugee camps inside Pakistan. Marchenko had rashly sent a snatch-squad over the border to get him. They had run into bad trouble. The pro-Soviet Afghans had been unmasked by the Pathans and had died horribly. The single Russian accompanying them was lucky to survive; the Pathans had handed him to the Pakistani authorities of the North-West Frontier District, hoping for some arms in exchange.

Marchenko had been out on a limb. He had appealed to Karpov, then head of the Illegals Directorate, and Karpov had endangered one of his best undercover Pakistani officers in Islamabad to get the Russian sprung and back over the border. A big international incident then could have broken Marchenko, and he would have joined the long list of Soviet officers whose careers had crashed in that miserable country.

“Yes, all right, I know I owe you, Zhenia, but don’t ask what I’ve been on for the past few weeks. Special assignment, very close to the chest. Top secret—know what I mean?”

He tapped the side of his nose with a sausagelike forefinger and nodded solemnly.

Karpov leaned forward and refilled the GRU general’s glass from the third bottle.

“Sure, I know, sorry I asked,” he said reassuringly. “Won’t mention it again. Won’t mention the operation again.”

Marchenko waved an admonitory finger. His eyes were bloodshot. He reminded Karpov of a wounded boar in a thicket, his brain dimmed by alcohol instead of pain and blood loss, but dangerous nevertheless. “Not operation ... no operation ... canceled.

Sworn to secrecy ... all of us. Very high up ... higher than you could imagine. Don’t mention it again, okay?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, “ said Karpov, filling the glasses again. He was taking advantage of Marchenko’s drunkenness to put more brandy in the GRU man’s glass than in his own, but he was still finding it difficult to focus.

Two hours later, the last of the Akhtamar was a third gone. Marchenko was slumped, chin on chest. Karpov raised his glass in yet another of the endless toasts. “Here’s to oblivion.”

“Oblivion?” Marchenko shook his head in bewilderment. “I’m all right. Drink you FCD bastards under the table anytime. Not oblivious ...”

“No,” corrected Karpov. “Oblivion of the plan. We just forget it, right?”

“Aurora? Right, forget it. Bloody good idea, though.”

They drank. Karpov filled the glasses again. “Damn them all,” he proposed. “Screw Philby ... and the academician.”

Marchenko nodded in agreement, the brandy that had missed his mouth dripping off his jowls.

“Krilov? Asshole. Forget ’em all.”

It was midnight when Karpov staggered to his car. He leaned against a tree, stuck two fingers down his throat, and threw up what he could into the snow. Sucking in gulps of the freezing night air helped, but the drive to his dacha was murder. He made it with a scraped fender and two nasty scares. Ludmilla was still up, in a housecoat, and she put him to bed, terrified that he had actually driven out from Moscow in that condition.

On Saturday morning, John Preston drove down to Tonbridge to pick up his son, Tommy.

As usual when his dad collected him from school, the boy was a torrent of words, memories of the term just past, projects for the term yet to come, plans for the holiday about to begin, praise for his best friends and their virtues, scorn for the infamies of those he disliked.

For Preston, the drive back to London was bliss. He mentioned the several things he had planned for their week together and was happy they seemed to meet with Tommy’s approval. The lad’s face fell only when he recalled he would be returned after a week to the smart, brittle, and pricelessly expensive Mayfair apartment where Julia lived with her boyfriend, a dress manufacturer. The man was old enough to be Tommy’s grandfather, and Preston suspected that any breakages in the flat would lead to a severe frost in the atmosphere.

“Dad,” said Tommy as they drove over Vauxhall Bridge, “why can’t I come and stay with you all the time?”

Preston sighed. It was not easy to explain the breakup of a marriage, or the cost of it, to a twelve-year-old. “Because,” he said carefully, “your mummy and Archie aren’t actually married. If I insisted on a formal divorce, Mummy could ask for and get an allowance from me called maintenance. Which, incidentally, I couldn’t afford, not on my salary. At least, not enough to keep myself, you at school, and her. It just wouldn’t go that far. And if I couldn’t pay that allowance, the court might decide your best chances in life were with Mummy. So we wouldn’t get to see each other even as often as we do now.”

“I didn’t know it came down to money,” said the boy sadly.

“In the end, most things come down to money. Sad but true. Years ago, if I had been able to afford a better kind of life for all three of us, Mummy and I might not have broken up. I was just an Army officer, and even when I quit the Army to join the Home Office, the salary still wasn’t enough.”

“Just what do you do in the Home Office?” asked the boy. He was dropping the subject of his parents’ estrangement, the way the young will try to blank out something that hurts them.

“Oh, I’m a sort of minor civil servant,” said Preston.

“Gosh, that must be jolly dull.”

“Yes,” Preston conceded, “I suppose it is, really.”

Yevgeni Karpov woke at noon with an imperial hangover that half a dozen aspirins were only just able to contain. After lunch he felt somewhat better and decided to go for a stroll.

There was something at the back of his mind— a memory, a half-recollection, that he had heard the name Krilov somewhere in the not-too-distant past. It bothered him. One of the restricted-list reference books he kept at the dacha had given him the details of Krilov, Vladimir Ilich: historian, professor at Moscow University, lifelong member of the Party, member of the Academy of Sciences, member of the Supreme Soviet, etc., etc. All that he knew; but there was something else. He plowed through the snow, his head bowed, deep in thought.

The boys had gone off on their skis to take advantage of the last of the good powder snow before the coming thaw spoiled it all. Ludmilla Karpova trailed along behind her husband. She knew his mood and refrained from interrupting. The previous evening she had been surprised but quite happy at the state he had been in. She knew he hardly ever drank—and never that heavily—which meant he had not been visiting his girlfriend.

Perhaps he really had been with a colleague from the GRU, one of the so-called neighbors. Whatever, something had got on top of him, but it was not a partridge in the Arbat.

At just after three, whatever he had been racking his brains for came to him. He stopped several yards ahead of her, said, “Damn! Of course,” and perked up at once. All smiles, he took her arm, and they walked back to the dacha.

General Karpov knew he had some quiet research to do in his office the next morning, and that he would visit Professor Krilov in his Moscow apartment on Monday evening.

Chapter 15

The phone call on Monday morning caught John Preston just as he was about to go out with his son.

“Mr. Preston? Dafydd Wynne-Evans here.”

For a moment the name meant nothing; then Preston recalled his request of Friday evening.

“I’ve had a look at your little piece of metal. Very interesting. Can you come out here and have a chat with me?”

“Well, actually, I’m taking a few days off,” said Preston. “Would the end of the week suit?”

There was a pause from the Aldermaston end. “I think it might be better before then, if you could spare the time.”

“Er ... oh ... well, could you give me the gist of it on the phone?”

“Much better if we talk about it face-to-face,” said Dr. Wynne-Evans.

Preston thought for a moment. He was taking Tommy to the Windsor Safari Park for the day. But that was also in Berkshire. “Could I come by this afternoon—say, about five?” he asked.

“Five it is,” said the scientist. “Ask for me at the desk. I’ll have you shown up.”

Professor Krilov lived on the top floor of an apartment building on Komsomolski Prospekt that provided commanding views of the Moskva River and was handy for the university on the southern bank. General Karpov pressed the buzzer at just after six o’clock, and it was the academic himself who answered it. He surveyed his visitor without recognition.

“Comrade Professor Krilov?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Yevgeni Karpov. I wonder if we might have a word or two?”

He held out his identification. Professor Krilov studied it, taking in Karpov’s rank and the fact that the visitor came from the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Then he handed it back and gestured Karpov to enter. He led the way to a well-furnished sitting room, took his guest’s coat, and bade him be seated.

“To what do I owe this honor?” he asked when he had seated himself opposite Karpov.

He was a man of distinction in his own right, not in any way awed by a general of the KGB.

Karpov realized the professor was different. Erita Philby could be tricked into revealing the existence of the chauffeur; Gregoriev could be browbeaten by his intimidating rank; Marchenko was an old colleague and a too-heavy drinker. But Krilov was high in the Party, the Supreme Soviet, the Academy of Sciences, and the elite of the state.

Karpov decided to waste no time, but to play his cards fast and without mercy. It was the only way.

“Professor Krilov, in the interests of the state, I wish you to tell me something. I wish you to tell me what you know about Plan Aurora.”

Krilov sat as if he had been slapped. Then he flushed angrily. “General Karpov, you exceed yourself,” he snapped. “I do not know what you are talking about.”

“I believe you do,” said Karpov evenly, “and I believe you should tell me what this plan entails.”

For answer, Krilov held out a peremptory hand. “Your authorization, please.”

“My authorization is my rank and my service,” said Karpov.

“If you have no signed authorization from the Comrade General Secretary, you have none at all,” said Krilov icily. He rose and made for the telephone. “Indeed, I think it high time your line of questioning came to the attention of someone far higher in rank than yourself.”

He picked up the receiver and prepared to dial.

“That might not be a very good idea,” said Karpov. “Did you know that one of your fellow consultants, Philby, a retired colonel of the KGB, is missing?”

Krilov stopped dialing. “What do you mean, missing?” he asked. The first edge of hesitation had entered his hitherto completely assured bearing.

“Please sit down and hear me out,” said Karpov. The academic did so. In another room of the apartment, a door opened. A blare of Western jazz could be heard, which muted when the door closed.

“I mean missing,” continued Karpov, “gone from his apartment, driver dismissed, wife no idea where he is or when, if at all, he’ll be back.”

It was a gamble, and a damnably high one. But an air of worry entered the professor’s gaze. Then he reasserted himself. “There can be no question of my discussing affairs of state with you, Comrade General. I think I must ask you to leave.”

“It’s not quite that easy,” said Karpov. “Tell me, Professor, you have a son, Leonid, do you not?”

The sudden switch of topic genuinely dumbfounded the professor. “Yes,” he conceded.

“I do. So what?”

“Let me explain,” suggested Karpov.

On the other side of Europe, John Preston and his son were driving out of the Windsor Safari Park at the close of a warm spring day. “I’ve just got one call to make before we go home,” said Preston. “It’s not far and it shouldn’t take long. Have you ever been to Aldermaston.”

The boy’s eyes opened wide. “The bomb factory?” he asked.

“It’s not quite a bomb factory, “ Preston corrected, “it’s a research establishment.”

“Gosh, no. Are we going there? Will they let us in?”

“Well, they’ll let me in. You’ll have to wait in the car. But it won’t take long.” He turned north to cut into the M4 motorway.

“Your son returned nine weeks ago from a visit to Canada, where he acted as one of the interpreters for a trade delegation,” Karpov began quietly.

Krilov nodded. “So?”

“While he was there, my own KR people noted that an attractive young person was spending a good deal of time—too much time, it was judged—trying to get into conversation with the members of our delegation, notably the younger members—secretaries, interpreters, and so forth. The person concerned was photographed and finally identified as an entrapment agent—American, not Canadian, and almost certainly employed by the CIA. As a result, that young agent was put under surveillance and was observed to set up a rendezvous with your son, Leonid, in a hotel room. Not to put too fine a point on it, the pair had a brief but torrid affair.”

Professor Krilov’s face was mottled with rage. He seemed to have trouble enunciating his words. “How dare you. How dare you have the impertinence to come here and seek to subject me, a member of the Academy of Sciences and the Supreme Soviet, to crude blackmail. The Party will hear of this. You know the rule: only the Party can discipline the Party. You may be a general of the KGB, but you have overstepped your authority by a hundred miles, General Karpov.”

Yevgeni Karpov sat as if humbled, staring at the table, as the professor went on.

“So, my son screwed a foreign girl while in Canada. That the girl turned out to be an American was certainly something of which he was completely unaware. He was indiscreet, perhaps, but no more. Was he recruited by this CIA girl?”

“No,” admitted Karpov.

“Did he betray any state secrets?”

“No.”

“Then you have nothing, Comrade General, but a brief youthful indiscretion. He’ll be rebuked. But the rebuke for your counterintelligence people will be the greater. They should have warned him. As to the bedroom business, we are not so unworldly in the Soviet Union as you seem to think. Strong young men have been screwing girls since time began. ...”

Karpov had opened his attaché case and produced a large photograph, one of a sheaf that lay inside the case, and placed it on the table. Professor Krilov stared at it, and his words died. The flush went out of his cheeks, draining away until his elderly face appeared gray in the lamplight. He shook his head several times.

“I am sorry,” said Karpov very gently, “truly sorry. The surveillance was on the American boy, not on your son. It was not intended that it should come to this.”

“I don’t believe it,” croaked the professor.

“I have sons of my own,” murmured Karpov. “I believe I can understand, or try to understand, how you feel.”

The academic sucked in his breath, rose, muttered, “Excuse me,” and left the room.

Karpov sighed and replaced the photograph in his case. From down the corridor he heard the blare of jazz as a door opened, the sudden ending of the music, and voices, two voices, raised in anger. One was the roar of the father, the other a higher-pitched voice, as of a young man. The altercation ended with the sound of a slap. Seconds later, Professor Krilov reentered the room. He seated himself, eyes dull, shoulders sloping. “What are you going to do?” he whispered.

Karpov sighed. “My duty is very clear. As you said, only the Party may discipline the Party. I should by rights hand over the report and the photographs to the Central Committee. You know the law. You know what they do to ‘golden boys.’ It’s five years without remission, and ‘severe regime.’ I’m afraid that word gets around in the camps.

After that, the young man becomes—how shall I put it?—anybody’s property. A lad from a sheltered background would be hard put to survive that sort of thing.”

“But—” prompted the professor.

“But I can decide that there is a chance the CIA will seek to pursue the matter. I have that right. I can decide the Americans could become impatient and send their agent into the Soviet Union to resume contact with Leonid. I have the right to decide that the entrapment of your son could possibly be turned into an operation to trap a CIA agent.

While waiting, I would be able to keep the file in my safe, and the waiting could take a very long time. I have that authority; in operational matters, yes, I have that authority.”

“And the price?”

“I think you know that.”

“What do you want to know about Plan Aurora?”

“Just start from the beginning.”

Preston swung into the main gate at Aldermaston, found a slot in the visitors’ parking area, and got out of the car.

“Sorry, Tommy, no farther for you. Just wait for me here. I hope I won’t be long.”

He crossed in the dusk to the swinging doors and presented himself to the two men at the desk. They examined his ID card and rang Dr. Wynne-Evans, who sanctioned the visit to his office. It was three floors up. Preston was shown in and gestured to a seat facing Wynne-Evans’s desk.

The scientist regarded him over his glasses. “May I ask where you got this little exhibit?” he inquired, pointing to the heavy, leadlike disk of metal, which now sat in a sealed glass jar.

“It was taken from someone in Glasgow during the small hours of Thursday morning.

What about the other two disks?”

“Oh, they’re just ordinary aluminum, boyo. Nothing strange about them. Just used to keep this one safe and sound. This is the one that interests me.”

“Do you know what it is?” asked Preston.

Dr. Wynne-Evans seemed startled by the naiveté of the question. “Of course I know what it is,” he said. “It’s my job to know. It’s a disk of pure polonium.”

Preston frowned. He had never heard of such a metal.

“Well, it all started in early January with a memorandum submitted by Philby to the General Secretary, in which Philby maintained there existed within the British Labour Party a Hard Left wing that had grown so strong it was in a position to take over complete control of the Party machine more or less when it wished. That corresponds to my own view.”

“And mine,” murmured Karpov.

“Philby went further. He claimed that within the Hard Left wing there was a group, an inner kernel, of dedicated Marxist-Leninists who had framed an intention to do just that—not in the period before Britain’s next general election, but afterward, in the very wake of a Labour electoral victory. In short, to await the victory at the polls of Mr. Neil Kinnock and then to topple him from the Party leadership. His replacement would be Britain’s first Marxist-Leninist premier, who would institute a series of policies wholly in line with Soviet foreign and defense interests, most notably in the area of unilateral nuclear disarmament and the expulsion of all American forces.”

“Feasible,” remarked Karpov, nodding. “So a committee of four of you were called together to advise on how this electoral victory could best be achieved?”

Krilov looked up, surprised. “Yes. There were Philby, General Marchenko, myself, and Dr. Rogov.”

“The chess grand master?”

“And physicist,” added Krilov. “What we came up with was Plan Aurora, which would have been an act of massive destabilization of the British electorate by pushing millions toward a mood of determined unilateralism.”

“You say ... would have?”

“Yes. The plan was principally Rogov’s idea. He supported it strongly. Marchenko went along, with reservations. Philby—well, no one could tell what Philby was really thinking. Just kept nodding and smiling, waiting to see which way the wind blew.”

“That’s Philby,” agreed Karpov. “And then you presented it?”

“Yes. On March twelfth. I opposed the plan. The General Secretary agreed with me. He denounced it roundly, ordered all notes and files destroyed, and made all four of us swear never to mention the matter again under any circumstances.”

“Tell me, why did you oppose it?”

“It seemed to me reckless and dangerous. Apart from anything, it was in complete contravention of the Fourth Protocol. If that protocol is ever breached, God knows where the world will end up.”

“The Fourth Protocol?”

“Yes. To the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. You remember that, of course.”

“One has to remember so much,” said Karpov gently. “Please remind me.”

“I’ve never heard of polonium,” said Preston.

“No, well, you probably wouldn’t have,” said Wynne-Evans. “I mean, you don’t find it hanging about on your workbench. It’s very rare.”

“And what are its uses, Doctor?”

“Well, it is occasionally—only very occasionally, mind—used in curative medicine.

Was your man in Glasgow on his way to a medical conference or exhibition?”

“No,” said Preston firmly, “he was in no way heading for a medical conference.”

“Well, that would have accounted for a ten-percent possibility of what it was intended for—before you relieved him of his burden. Since he wasn’t going to a medical conference, I’m afraid that leaves the ninety-percent likelihood. Apart from these two functions, polonium has no known use on this planet.”

“And the other use?”

“Well, a disk of polonium this size will do nothing on its own. But if it is placed in close juxtaposition with a disk of another metal called lithium, the two combine to form an initiator.”

“A what?”

“An initiator.”

“And what the hell, pray, is that?”

“On July first, 1968,” said Professor Krilov, “the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was signed by the three (then) nuclear powers of the world, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union.

“By that treaty the three signatory nations pledged themselves not to impart the technology or the matériel capable of enabling the construction of a nuclear weapon to any nation not then in possession of such technology or matériel. Do you recall that?”

“Yes,” said Karpov, “I remember that much.”

“Well, the signing ceremonies in Washington, London, and Moscow were attended by huge and worldwide publicity. A complete absence of publicity surrounded the later signing of four secret protocols to that treaty.

“Each of the protocols foresaw the development of a possible future hazard, which was not then technically possible but which, it was then estimated, might one day become technically possible.

“Over the years, the first three protocols passed into history, either because the hazard was established to be quite impossible or because an antidote was discovered as fast as the threat became reality. But by the early 1980s the Fourth Protocol, the most secret of them all, had become a living nightmare.”

“What, exactly, did the Fourth Protocol envisage?” asked Karpov.

Krilov sighed. “We relied on Dr. Rogov for this information. As you know, he is a nuclear physicist; that is his branch of science. The Fourth Protocol foresaw techno-logical advances in the manufacture of nuclear bombs, mainly in the areas of miniaturization and simplification. This, apparently, is what has happened. In one area, the weapons have become infinitely more powerful, but more complex to construct and larger in size. Another branch of the science has gone the other way. The basic atomic bomb, which required a huge bomber for its delivery to Japan in 1945, can now be made small enough to go in a suitcase and simple enough to be assembled from a dozen prefabricated, milled and threaded components, like a child’s construction kit.”

“And that is what the Fourth Protocol banned?”

Krilov shook his head. “It went further. It forbade any of the signatory nations to introduce onto the territory of any nation a device in assembled or unassembled form by covert means, for detonation in, say, a rented house or flat in the heart of a city.”

“No four-minute warning,” mused Karpov, “no radar detection of an incoming missile, no counter strike, no identification of the perpetrator. Just a megaton explosion from a basement bedsitter.”

The professor nodded. “That’s right. That’s why I called it a living nightmare. The open societies of the West are more vulnerable, but we are none of us immune from smuggled artifacts. If the Fourth Protocol is ever breached, all those ranks of rockets and electronic countermeasures, indeed most of the military-industrial complex, become irrelevant.”

“And that was what Plan Aurora had in mind.”

Krilov nodded again. He seemed to clam up.

“But since,” pursued Karpov, “it was all stopped and prohibited, the whole plan has become what, in the service, we call ‘archival.’ ”

Krilov seemed to grasp at the word. “That’s right. It’s just archival now.”

“But tell me what it would have meant,” Karpov pressed.

“Well, the plan was to infiltrate into Britain a top-class Soviet agent who would act as the executive officer of Aurora. To him, using a variety of couriers, would have been smuggled the ten or so component parts of a small atomic bomb of about one-and-a-half-kilotons power.”

“So small? The Hiroshima bomb was ten kilotons.”

“It was not intended to cause huge damage. That would have canceled the general election. It was intended to create a supposed nuclear accident and panic the ten-percent

‘floating vote’ into supporting unilateral nuclear disarmament and voting at the polls for the only party pledged to unilateralism, the Labour Party.”

“I’m sorry,” said Karpov. “Please go on.”

“The device would have been detonated six days before polling day,” said the professor. “The place was vitally important. The one selected was the United States Air Force base at Bentwaters in Suffolk. Apparently, F-5 strike planes are based there and they carry small tactical nuclear devices for use against our massed tank divisions in the event of our invading Western Europe.”

Karpov nodded. He knew Bentwaters, and the information was correct.

“The executive officer,” Professor Krilov went on, “would have been ordered to take the assembled device by car to the very perimeter wire of the base in the small hours of the morning. The whole base, it seems, is in the heart of Rendlesham Forest. He would have set off the explosion just before dawn.

“Because of the smallness of the device, damage would have been limited to the airbase itself, which would have been vaporized, along with Rendlesham Forest, three hamlets, a village, the foreshore, and a bird sanctuary. Since the base is right next to the Suffolk coast, the cloud of radioactive dust thrown up would have drifted on the prevailing west wind out over the North Sea. By the time it had reached the coast of Holland, ninety-five percent of it would have become inert or fallen into the sea. The intent was not to cause an ecological catastrophe but to provoke fear and a violent wave of hatred of America.”

“They might not have believed it,” said Karpov. “A lot of things could have gone wrong. The executive officer could have been caught alive.”

Professor Krilov shook his head. “Rogov had thought of all that. He had worked it out like a chess game. The officer in question would have been told that after pressing the button he had two hours on the timer to drive as far as he could. In fact the timer would have been a sealed unit, set for instant detonation.”

Poor Petrofsky, thought Karpov. “And the credibility angle?” he asked.

“On the evening of the same day as the explosion,” said Krilov, “a man, who is apparently a covert Soviet agent, would have flown to Prague and held an international press conference. That man is Dr. Nahum Wisser, an Israeli nuclear physicist. It seems he works for us.”

General Karpov preserved his deadpan expression. “You amaze me,” he said. He was acquainted with Dr. Wisser’s file. The scientist had had a son on whom he doted. The youth had been a soldier in the Israeli Army, stationed in Beirut in 1982. When the Phalangists had devastated the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, the young Lieutenant Wisser had tried to intervene. He had been cut down by a bullet. Carefully constructed evidence had been presented to the grieving father, already a committed opponent of the Likud Party, that it had been an Israeli bullet that had killed his son. In his bitterness and rage, Dr. Wisser had swung a little further left and agreed to work for Russia.

“Anyway,” Krilov continued, “Dr. Wisser would have claimed to the world that he had collaborated for years with the Americans, while on exchange visits, in the development of ultra-small nuclear warheads. This, it seems, is true. He would have gone on to say that he had repeatedly warned the Americans that these ultra-small warheads were not stable enough to permit deployment. The Americans had been impatient to deploy these new warheads because their small size permitted space to take on board extra fuel and thus to increase the range of their F-5s.

“It was calculated that these claims, made on the day following the explosion, the fifth before the polling date, would turn the wave of anti-Americanism in Britain into a gale that not even the Conservatives could hope to stem.”

Karpov nodded. “Yes, I believe it would have done that. Anything more from the fertile brain of Dr. Rogov?”

“Much more,” said Krilov glumly. “He suggested that the American reaction would have been histrionic and violent denial. Thus, on the fourth day before polling, the General Secretary would have announced to the world that if the Americans intended to enter a period of insanity, that was their business. But he, for his part, had no alternative in the protection of the Soviet people but to put all our forces on red alert.

“That evening, one of our friends, a man very close to Mr. Kinnock, would have urged the Labour leader to fly to Moscow, see the General Secretary personally, and intervene for peace. Had there been any hesitation, our own ambassador would have invited him to the embassy for friendly discussions of the crisis. With the cameras on him, it was doubtful he would have resisted.

“Well, he would have been issued a visa within minutes, and flown on Aeroflot the next morning at dawn. The General Secretary would have received him before the cameras of the world’s press, and a few hours later they would have parted, both looking extremely grave.”

“As, no doubt, he would have been given cause to look,” suggested Karpov.

“Precisely. But while he was still airborne on his way back to London in the evening, the General Secretary would have issued a statement to the world: wholly and solely as a result of the plea of the British Labour leader, he, the General Secretary, was standing all Soviet forces down to green status. Mr. Kinnock would have landed in London with the stature of a global statesman.

“The day before polling, he would have made a resounding speech to the British nation on the issue of a final renunciation of the nuclear madness once and for all. It was calculated in Plan Aurora that the events of the previous six days would have shattered the traditional Anglo-American alliance, isolated the United States from all European sympathy, and swung ten percent—the vital ten percent—of the British electorate to vote Labour into office. After that, the Hard Left would have taken over. And that, General, was Plan Aurora.”

Karpov rose. “You have been very kind, Professor. And very wise. Remain silent, and I shall, also. As you say, it’s all archival now. And your son’s file will remain in my safe for a very long time. Good-bye. I do not think I shall be troubling you again.”

He leaned back against the cushions as the Chaika swept him away down Komsomolski Prospekt. Oh, yes, it’s brilliant, he thought, but is there time?

Like the General Secretary, Karpov, too, knew of the forthcoming election in Britain, slated for that June, nine weeks away. The information to the General Secretary had, after all, come through his rezidentura in the London embassy.

He ran the plan over and over in his mind, seeking the flaws. It’s good, he thought at last, damn good. Just so long as it works. ... The alternative would be catastrophic.

“An initiator, my dear man, is a sort of detonator for a bomb,” said Dr. Wynne-Evans.

“Oh,” said Preston. He felt somewhat deflated. There had been bombs before in Britain. Nasty but local. He had seen quite a few in Ireland. He had heard of detonators, primers, triggers, but never an initiator. Still, it looked as if the Russian, Semyonov, had been carrying in a component for a terrorist group somewhere in Scotland. Which group?

Tartan Army? Anarchists? Or an IRA active service unit? The Russian connection was odd; very much worth the trip to Glasgow.

“This ... er ... initiator of polonium and lithium—would it be used in an antipersonnel bomb?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, you could say so, boyo,” replied the Welshman. “An initiator, you see, is what sets off a nuke.”