The Sixth Directorate

1

McCoy had never hunted someone down before, least of all an Englishman, a major Soviet agent. Yet now, in these last moments, he found he hadn’t much taste for the job. He surprised himself. After years of unrequited bullying, at school and from behind various desks in the Mid-East section, this should have been a crowning day, a day when he could lay the many ghosts that had possessed him since youth, to Port Said in 1944, through Suez twelve years later, and beyond: a time at last when he could take the men — or man, at least — who would stand for all the others who had betrayed him.

Before, in his professional life, they had just vanished — from apartments in Beirut, or top-security prisons in England — just as the day-boys whom he had caught cheating and beaten before lunch found sanctuary every afternoon at half-past three from the school where he had been a boarder. His life seemed to have been cruelly dictated by such people — boys who had known the exam questions beforehand, men who were far better up on borders, check-points and night ferries than he was — men who, like the children in his junior school, playing tag, not only made base before he did but when they got there would turn on their pinnacles and, pointing him out from all the rest, would mock him with a special and happy impudence. The child was always father to the man, it seemed, in every case but his. And McCoy felt this loss bitterly, as though he was an orphan.

Nor had it been sufficient excuse that his had always been a desk job in British Intelligence, that he had never been more than a fonctionnaire in espionage, even though he headed the Mid-East section in Holborn now. Before this promotion he had been Control to a field section centred on Cairo. He processed their reports and had no business with timetables and guns. In any case, a chronic shortsightedness made variations in his physical routine a matter for careful thought, so that years before he had accepted certain limits of action. But in his heart he had always longed to play the puppet, not the master. For only there, he thought, among the men, might he find the nursery where these instabilities bloomed — might learn what it was that led these men astray, took them in giant strides clean out of one life, over a border, and into another. If he could be part of them for once, and not their master, he might as last make fair copy, among so many botched post-mortems, of the original sin, trace it far back to some source which he knew lay beyond the political simplicities of a Cambridge student rally in the thirties.

After so many betrayals McCoy had a psychiatrist’s hunger to lay bare the initial fault. He knew that the mechanics of frailty could be displayed, as under a surgeon’s knife; that a dissembling nature could be opened up and the parts named like a chapter in Gray’s Anatomy. And he nurtured this hope obsessively, like a longed-for doctorate, for only then, he thought, in this sure delineation of another’s treachery, could his own sorrow and incomprehension be lifted.

Until now he had never had a specimen to work on. And now of all times — now that the net was closing at last, he felt the cowardice of first love come over him, as if in this longed-for, imminent penetration he would lose the puritanical strengths and flavours which had nurtured his obsession in the years of waiting. He had come so to expect unsuccess in his work that the scent of victory made him shudder. He had come now to the border for the first time himself — close to the wire that divided certainty from confusion, the sure from the frail, loyalty from dishonour.

Quite soon he would look into another country, poisoned lands that he had heard much of. In an hour or less he would face the reality of evil: a figure that would sum up dissolution. Their eyes would meet and he would be responsible for the future. A time had come when he could at last fall upon the object of his passion, and yet he could find no virtue in the day.

The day was late in April, the sky above Marylebone faintly blue, the colour scrubbed out of it by a long and vigorous winter. Clouds ran in from the west, pushed fiercely by a damp wind that had already brought two downpours before lunchtime. The last of these had driven McCoy and Croxley into Henekey’s pub in the High Street next to the Greek restaurant.

McCoy had always missed the flat white lands of the Middle East, the certain weather of scorching light under a lead-blue dome. Years before — it had been a Saturday at midday, going back to Cairo for the weekend from Alexandria along the desert road — he had suddenly taken off his glasses and driven wildly along the shoulder of the road for half a minute before careering off down a gully and into a dune. And that moment had been so long — floating like liquid into the unfocused landscape, misty yellow and without margins, released by a sand-happy sun-madness before the darkness of the crash. He remembered the incident without qualms amongst so much doubt.

‘What will you have?’ He turned to Croxley, head of the Special Branch team that lay all about them in the streets, waiting for the man.

‘White Shield, if I may, sir.’

The girl started to decant the beer slowly, tipping glass and bottle into gentle diagonals, so that a small froth bloomed and the sediment remained undisturbed. She knew her business. McCoy doubled the order.

‘You’ve been here before then, Croxley? You know the beer.’

They were in the corner of the room at the far end of the bar, drinking comfortably like good men, between one of the old mahogany arches. Two cut-glass decanters, one of port, the other of claret, stood in front of them, undisturbed, while young lunchtimers pushed and shouted all over the rest of the room, anxious for runny shepherd’s pie and thin sandwiches, and draught beer that was so weak everywhere now that it was nothing more than a gesture. People didn’t come to pubs just to drink at lunchtime in England any more. Both men, though so genuinely formal, felt awkward, even dissolute.

‘Yes, indeed. We had a long surveillance up here once. Guy Burgess had a flat round the corner. Course we didn’t know about him then. It was one of his friends we were after. Lived with him. That was during the war. We used to drop in here, changing shifts. Funny thing, you know — one night I was as near to Burgess as I am to you; just where you’re standing. By himself, wasn’t drinking. But he was drunk. There’d been a party at his flat, going on for two days, and he’d come out for a breather. Cornered me, he did, and of course you couldn’t help liking him. I mean, he really was very funny; very good company. Witty.’

Croxley drank the top off his beer and put the glass down carefully, thinking. A caricature of a man remembering: steady blue suit and quietly formal overcoat — going back to a time in the ranks in a distant war; gas masks in the cupboard under the stairs in Battersea and a conversation in the blackout with Burgess.

‘Witty? Even in drink?’

‘Oh yes. He had that ability — then. I don’t know about afterwards. I was on other work.’

‘He rather fell to pieces, I can tell you.’

‘Yes, but we never got him. He got away.’

‘He was just lucky.’

‘He had the confidence, though,’ Croxley insisted, ‘that brings the luck.’

‘A certain juvenile insouciance — that’s all.’

‘What?’ Croxley sipped again, perplexed. He was a straightforward man. The room was loud with chat and clatter but McCoy knew he’d heard him.

‘It wasn’t based on anything,’ McCoy went on. ‘He had nothing else. Just that confident good fellowship. So he had to push it like a lifeboat.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Croxley thought again, as though pondering an exam question. Then he turned, with hope: ‘Yes, he offered to get me a proper bottle of Scotch, I remember — not knowing my job of course. Cost price. Couldn’t be done with it. Said the black market was all wrong.’

‘I bet he did. Always had the right connections.’ McCoy paused, openly bitter. ‘A playboy. God knows even Moscow did their best to push him under the carpet when he got there.’

‘But he’d done his stuff by them. Covering for the others — Maclean, Philby. That was a certain skill. He knew we’d look right through a good-humoured classy drunk like him, never see a thing. Knew we’d notice his boozing, though, which would take the pressure off his friends. His indiscretions saved them all.’

McCoy turned away, curious at this sympathy. He felt a sudden unease standing next to this man who had once stood next to Burgess, in the very same spot. And though Croxley hadn’t let Burgess go, had played no part in that disaster, McCoy felt that he was somehow guilty by association, as if he had picked up some infection in that innocent drink he’d had with Burgess twenty-five years before, a disability which would tell in the coming hours with another traitor fifty yards down the street. McCoy looked round at the unchanged, ancient bar with its dark woods and barrels, its crusted panelling and ports and crystal, and thought there might be something buried here, in the wood or forever in its air — some gremlin or omen which favoured only the bad fairies, some hidden order which might reach out again at any moment, to protect the chancey, the dishonest, the laughter-makers, against all the ploys of honest people.

In fact, it was Croxley’s sympathy that had brought him to the top. He held a gentle fascination for the men he set out to trap. In another world they would have been among his closest friends at the Club. He appreciated their lying skills and secret humours, and failure to take them at the end had never soured his appetite, as it had McCoy’s.

It was so obvious, Croxley had always thought — a man, traitor to one side, was all the more necessarily hero to the other. And you had to recognise the other side of the coin whether you liked it or not. Other people had a right to their heroes, even if, as he knew, such men everywhere died miserably for little good.

They sipped their drinks again. McCoy thought he had spotted some sediment rising in his glass. But it was a trick of the light, golden motes above the counter caught in a sunbeam. The shower was dying outside.

Once they were sure the man was with the KGB, having tapped his phone, they had watched him for nearly two months, hoping to trace his contacts — from the Embassy, some other deep-cover ‘illegal’, or someone in the British forces or Intelligence. But he met no one. And no one had come near him. At first they assumed the man was sleeping or that he reported in some other extremely intermittent manner. Then, when they discovered he was making preparations to go abroad, they realised he was on transfer, marking time before his next posting, keeping his tail clean. At least, everyone except McCoy believed this. McCoy was still certain that he would make some contact before he left. And so Croxley and the others waited for orders to take him. McCoy was running the show.

‘Another week,’ McCoy had said. A fourth, then a fifth. This was the eighth week, close surveillance, round the clock, and Croxley had come to know their quarry, in his sympathetic way, like a friend one remembered in every detail but hadn’t spoken to for a long time — but a friend for all that, where the friendship would last no matter how long the parting. But he thought McCoy an optimistic fool who should have known better.

The man lived off Marylebone High Street, halfway up towards Regent’s Park, in a small flat above a firm of medical suppliers, and until a week before had gone every day to his present work as a Senior Reports Officer at the Central Office of Information in Westminster.

A week before, he’d finished his packing and there’d been a small party at his flat, saying goodbye to a few colleagues and friends. But he hadn’t left. They’d learnt that his booking on the New York boat wasn’t until a week later, and they’d watched him all the harder then — for surely, McCoy thought, this would be the week for some last contact, for some final check. But nothing happened. Even Croxley was initially surprised at this hiatus, while McCoy was incensed by it.

The man spent the week like a tourist, walking endlessly about the city, but with aims of sheer pleasure: he went to art galleries and museums in the morning, cinemas in the afternoons, theatres and restaurants at night. He had even fitted in the Tower of London and the Bridge as well. Croxley’s men had pursued him diligently, egged on by sighs of horror from McCoy. They skinned their eyes for a contact or a message drop. They had gone into public lavatories after him, rooting up tiles and destroying expensive flush systems. They had quizzed waiters, museum curators and vehement little ladies in the box-offices. They had stuck to him like clams, done everything but sleep with him, and had come up with absolutely nothing. He had spoken to no one, written nothing, dropped nothing nor picked anything up. He had fallen out of all his old life like a stone and come into pleasure like a tremendous inheritance.

McCoy had been involved in the chase from the start. The man had at one time worked indirectly for his section while he was with the British Council in Beirut. Almost certainly, McCoy thought, the KGB had recruited him there at the same time. Probably Henry Edwards had done the work. For Edwards, they’d discovered — just before his death in Cairo in 1967 — had been a senior KGB officer in British Intelligence for nearly twenty years.

And now, impossibly, like a bad joke long condemned, here was another man in that disastrous chain, one more character popping up in the big book of deceit, negligence and snobbery that had for so long characterised British Intelligence. It had started with Burgess and Maclean, then Philby, Blake and the others. And just when they’d thought it finished four years previously with Edwards, here was another ghost that had quietly laid ruin all about them, and who, when caught, would cause them more trouble still. For to catch a man like this was to publicly compound the vast defeat. Better to leave him free, some thought, with tabs on, than to win Pyrrhic victories at the Old Bailey.

But McCoy didn’t believe this. Retribution was his guiding star. So when Croxley had come to him and told him of the chase, he had put on his riding boots and grabbed a whip, like the old-stager he was, full of anger and discredit. McCoy thought he saw a chance of saving everything, never admitting that the battle had been well lost long ago far from any fields which he, in his small way, patrolled. Now he believed, with a flush of acid hope, that he could save the day by catching more than just this single traitor: through him he would feel his way along a chain, find the initial contact and take the rest one by one — deep-cover ‘illegals’ he hoped, as this man was, operating quite outside the Embassy or trade missions, few of whom had ever been caught in Britain. That would be the saving grace. McCoy saw at last a golden page for himself in the unwritten history of the service.

So it was that the man’s innocent behaviour upset him intensely; his infuriating independence came to plague all his hopes. The man had said goodbye to everyone a week before but hadn’t left and had done nothing since. Yet he must have stayed on for some clearly sinister reason, for what sane man — a Londoner from birth — could take pleasure from a constant wandering about a place he must know so well? — through streets that had been always his, among parks and buildings and trees that had stood up on his horizon for half a lifetime. And the man had looked at all these familiar shapes, and all the objects of the city, with such intensity and contentment, as a stranger might, come to a dying Venice for the first time.

McCoy couldn’t understand, but it hadn’t taken Croxley long. For Croxley knew what could come over someone before they left their country — the moods of an industrious nostalgia, the need to imprint all the last reminders, fix the solutions of a city: because you might not come back, or would be prevented, or because everything was at risk in any case: the buildings would be torn down, and the parks and trees tidied up and put away. So you banked as much pleasure as you could before you left and might take a week off, alone, to do it. But McCoy couldn’t accept such wilful licence in a man. His character, as much as his profession, condemned him to ulterior motives, while he had long ago been taught that pleasure was a permit, not a liberty.

‘I only hope you’re right,’ he said to Croxley. ‘That he’s just been looking at the city.’

‘He’s taken a week off, grubbing around. Why not?’

‘As if he knew it was his last chance.’

‘He doesn’t. He just likes to do that sort of thing. He’d do it anyway. Besides, it’s always a last chance, when you think of the buses. Or a slate from a roof. There was a job I was on once, waiting outside a pub in a bit of a wind, and this sign fell on me, bloody thing — “The George and Dragon”, inches —’

‘Yes, but why doesn’t he see anyone, though? None of his friends. Just picture galleries and matinées. And eating. You’d think he was working his way through the Good Food Guide.’

‘He’s resting.’ Croxley looked at McCoy’s puzzled face. It was his turn to explain. ‘As actors say. Pity to take him, somehow.’

‘You’ve too much feeling for him, Croxley. Too much altogether.’

‘If I didn’t feel for him, sir,’ Croxley put in with real and quiet concern, ‘if I didn’t get into his skin with feeling, we’d never get him. It’s the feeling that gets results you know. That’s how Philby and the others survived so long, playing double. They had the feeling. We kept our heads in the sand.’

McCoy looked displeased, as if the sediment had, after all, been lurking all the while in his ale, and had just then risen, souring his mouth. The big crevices in his face narrowed and his lips puckered.

‘You still think he may make some contact?’ Croxley asked with care but in an easy tone. ‘It’s two months now. There’s been nothing.’

‘One more afternoon. One never knows — some last-minute instructions, a change of plan.’ McCoy was angered by the inevitable apology in his voice.

‘I doubt it. As I’ve said before — they let a man sleep completely before a transfer. Give him an absolutely blank trail. It was only sheer luck we got onto him in the first place with that phone call. He had his last instructions six months ago and more, I shouldn’t be surprised. When he was accepted for this UN post. They’ve been preparing this move for years. With a deep-cover chap like this they take the long view, you know.’

‘All right. We’ll just see where he goes after lunch. A last shot. Then you can take him.’

‘The Wallace Collection.’

‘That’s near here, isn’t it?’

‘Round the corner.’

‘He must have been to it before then.’

‘Usually not.’ Croxley was like a doctor with sad news. ‘One never seems to get round to the sights on your doorstep. Look at me — been living next to Clapham Junction for over thirty years — and never taken a train from there.’

‘Yes — but why the Wallace?’

‘He usually does a gallery after lunch.’

‘And he’s done all the others?’ McCoy was as weary of the man’s aesthetic proclivities as he was of Croxley’s ability to forecast them. The two men seemed as master and student in a university where he had no arts.

‘Most of them.’ Croxley took out a notebook and murmured the names quickly: ‘BM, National, National Portrait, Tate, V and A, Horniman, Sir John Soane; then the private galleries: the Bond Street ones, most of them — and even the ones in the suburbs. Wimbledon — he was there yesterday. I don’t expect he’d leave the Wallace out of that collection, do you? Stands to reason, sir, not feeling.’

‘A pound to a penny, Croxley.’

‘A pound to a penny it is, sir.’

The two men looked at each other, their eyes meeting in grim measure for a second. Then they left the pub and walked down towards Hinde Street past the Greek restaurant.

2

They could see him now inside, sitting with his back towards them in the window seat. Nearly every day he had taken lunch there, before setting out on his odysseys, and each day there had been one or two of Croxley’s men with him, at some other table, but he’d always been alone and had never spoken to any other guest. McCoy had gone there himself for lunch a few days before, just to be sure, sitting in a corner as far out of the way as possible.

It was an unpretentious Cypriot place, not a kebab shop. There was linen on the tables and Mediterranean fare of some variety, even originality. If McCoy had not appreciated this, sticking rigidly to the ‘English’ side of the menu, he had been horrified at the man’s demeanour: he had used the place like a Continental, as a regular and concerned patron, knowing the waiters, speaking some of their language, savouring a decent if in no way elaborate meal — houmous, sometimes a rice soup, warm pancakes of hollow bread, followed by a pork or lamb kebab spiced with an interesting chopped garnish — always a freshly dressed salad and a half bottle of some Attic burgundy, ending with a gritty Turkish coffee. And olives: big, puffed-up black olives, glistening in their own clear oil. He never missed these, keeping a bowl of them by his plate throughout the meal, picking them out at odd moments, punctuating the other foods with relish, biting the flesh decisively from between thumb and forefinger and letting the pips drop neatly in a line along another plate.

At the end of the meal he would smoke a pipe of some mildly aromatic tobacco, Dutch perhaps, certainly not English. And the day McCoy had been there he had taken a glass of Metaxas brandy with it, though this was not a regular feature of his lunch. He left his serious drinking and eating for the evenings — nothing stupendous apparently, Croxley’s men had reported: a succession of carefully chosen menus in small restaurants of repute about the city. And his other pleasures had been carefully listed too: Monday. Furneaux Gallery, Wimbledon: Watercolours by John Bratby. Tuesday. Hayward Gallery: Art in Revolution — Soviet Art and Design after 1917. Wednesday. Marlborough: Sidney Nolan — Recent Graphics. Thursday. Mayfair Gallery: Andy Warhol — Graphics and Paintings. Friday. British Museum: Treasures from Romania: 4000 years of Art and Silver. His interest in the theatre and the movies was fully represented as well — almost every decent thing that had been on in London that month.

The man’s father had been a master printer. They’d traced that back easily enough — and no doubt that explained his interest in these graphics and suchlike, but this did nothing to ease McCoy’s temper; indeed it increased his resentment. These gastronomic and artistic concerns reinforced McCoy’s unease tenfold; made him suppose that just as the man visited so casually so many different restaurants and strange imaginations, so in the end he would give them the slip too and disappear forever into the world, where he seemed to have a season ticket, whereas a choice of sausages and suet puddings and smutty seaside postcards would inevitably have limited him and McCoy would have slept easier.

They walked quickly past the window but McCoy had time to glance again at the tweed jacket, the broad back leaning forward at that moment, reaching for an olive or glass. He wasn’t that tall but the face was like the back, McCoy remembered — a good square face, slightly leathery and tanned from years in the sun, relatively unlined for a man more than forty. He had the air of a sportsman, McCoy thought — like one of those bronzed Australian cricketers that he’d seen playing in England just after the war. Not muscle-bound; his would have been the summer games, of rules born in fine weather, played on strings and wood, on beaches and underwater: the lightly-coppered face, like the dust of travel — gestures so fluid that they seemed melted down by the years of sun and recast in a happier mould, sinews that had relaxed and lengthened with fulfilled pleasure. He was like the end of rationing, McCoy thought, the bitterness rising in him sweetly like justified tears, or a hamper from America in the famished winter of 1947.

The face was conventionally handsome in a lost way, as in some old advertisement for pipe tobacco in the thirties; the clear, open expression of a ‘good sort’ in those times: a casually tended but reliable face, gleaming spontaneously from an enamel hoarding. He might have driven a Sunbeam Talbot around Surbiton before Munich and married a little woman of those parts that blowy suburban day Chamberlain landed at Croydon with a piece of paper. There were nowhere about him clues to a contemporary life, nothing indoor or metropolitan, no smoky rooms or brandy or modern art — no suggestion anywhere of McCoy’s horror at what he had always seen as the epitome of dissolute bohemianism: an interest in graphics and oysters.

Above all there was nothing of Moscow in that quickly good-humoured face, no trace of Beria, the Berlin Wall and all the good men gone. But there it was, and McCoy realised he ought to have seen it sooner: trips to view the likes of Messrs Warhol, Nolan and Bratby were commensurate with the worst the KGB had to offer. There was no doubt they were clever people, fiends …

They came to the end of the High Street to the great grey hulk of the Methodist Church on the corner, where they met Reilly, one of Croxley’s men, who had just left the Greek restaurant. He was wiping his mouth surreptitiously, shamefacedly indeed, like a Bunter come to grief. A streak of something, some foreign gravy, ran down his lapel.

‘Nothing, sir,’ he reported. ‘Except —’ He choked a little. ‘Except those wicked little starved sardines to begin with —’ He stopped again, trying to batten down the hatches on some sickness within him.

‘Anchovy, Reilly, anchovy.’

‘Sir! Well then that flour paste, four sticks of pig, most of a bottle of Greek red biddy and a glass of that caramel water they call brandy. Quite a blow-out in fact. Think it means anything?’

‘You’re getting quite expert, you lot, aren’t you?’ Croxley said. ‘In the Greek manner.’

‘I don’t know about that, sir. I shouldn’t like to be in the Greek Special Branch, I can tell you.’ Reilly smothered a belch.

‘I expect not, Reilly. Though they do very well on it out there these days.’

‘Oh, and the olives. More than the usual quota I’d say. Piping and poking at them all through the meal he was.’

‘Summers is still inside with him?’

‘Frankly, sir, I came over a bit queasy after the meat. Needed a spot of air. Summers is looking after him.’

‘All those sheeps’ eyes rumbling about the belly a bit, eh, Reilly? Have to get you an easier pitch next time. Surveillance from a caff in the Mile End Road.’

And then the man was sick. At first it seemed he had just turned away to cough, cupping his hand over his mouth. But the cough rapidly matured into a long groaning spurt, a violent eruption of purplish liquid which shot from his mouth like a hose, all over one corner of the church steps. The two men jumped in surprise at the violence of the fit and then went for Reilly as he began to fold.

‘I’m sorry, sir, I shouldn’t —’ Reilly erupted once more, coming again like an experienced lover. ‘I shouldn’t —’

‘Well done, Croxley. Well done!’ McCoy almost shouted. ‘If he sees us now —’ McCoy danced around the steps in a wild fury. Croxley did no more than growl at him by way of reply. He was looking after one of his own men. ‘Give me a handkerchief,’ he said. ‘A clean one.’ Then he was on to Reilly again.

‘Get right down, Reilly, right down. Get it out of you!’

Reilly had his hands to his throat, gasping. He was a wretched sight.

‘It’s all right now, sir,’ he murmured after a time. ‘I should have had an omelette.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Croxley brushed him down with McCoy’s handkerchief like a parent. ‘It doesn’t matter. Probably better you had the Greek stuff, olives and all. He could well have been suspicious, seeing a man eating an omelette in that sort of restaurant. Get back to the van, take it easy. We have enough men. You know, back entrance to the Wigmore Hall, where they bring the pianos in.’

Their backs were turned when the man came to the end of the street by the church. He paused and glanced at the three wavering figures, the most unsteady man in the middle, and reflected, not for the first time, on the British tendency to public drunkenness — squiffy at midday, staggering by early afternoon. But it was a form of release he understood well enough. He had used it himself in less happy times. It was a necessary tool of his trade. You had to know how to handle it, that was all.

He re-lit his pipe, savouring the burnt sweetness for a moment, waiting for the traffic to pass. Then he crossed over, going in the opposite direction along Hinde Street, towards Manchester Square. It had been a good lunch, simple, yet full of precise flavours. And now what? Why not a glance at the Wallace Collection? How true it was, he reflected, that one never gets round to seeing the treasures on one’s own doorstep.

Summers had walked after him to the corner and now he almost ran to where the three men were standing.

‘He’s moving, sir!’ Croxley turned. ‘He’s on his way now, towards Manchester Square.’

‘The Wallace Collection.’

‘I should think so,’ Summers said. ‘Bound to be.’

Croxley turned to McCoy, but didn’t bother to take the advantage. He was serious now. In his book these games were coming to an end.

‘All right. Let’s take him.’ McCoy pruned the syllables viciously into sharp points. ‘Take him, Croxley.’ And now his words were harshly anguished like the pleas of Trojan women. ‘Take him — and let’s be done with this tomfoolery. Stop this nonsense, almighty God….’

McCoy had risen in anger, the fats about his body expanding like a cake. He looked up at the sooty portico of his church and at last cared nothing more for blasphemy. He swore then that he would fall upon this man with venom, forget a lifetime’s careful doubt. Within the hour, he would make him pay for all the bright glitter, the sins and gifts of others.

‘Bring them in, Summers. Call them in,’ Croxley said gently, as if his men were children who had strayed over the hill. ‘You know the routine. Back and front of the building. Keep the cars at a distance. When you’re ready, give us the word.’ He turned to McCoy. ‘It should go like clockwork. We planned it all before, you see.’

3

The man studied the group of Canalettos in the ante-room to the left of the hall. He had thought at first of leaving them to the end of his tour, but they had tempted him strongly, bright visions in the distance, and he was glad he’d given in. On closer inspection, he wondered if they might be deteriorating. There were cracks, minute hair-line fractures, running like waves about the placid blue arcs of sky over the canals. He felt a quick sadness, a disappointment. These perfect memorials were ephemeral as the perfect originals. Even art was not long. He stepped back for a larger view.

Then he heard the voices and had to force himself not to turn about and run.

Two voices, a man and a woman, talking in an unfamiliar Russian dialect. Estonia, Latvia, the Ukraine? He wasn’t sure — except that it was Soviet. Then he recognised a sentence — they were speaking of Canaletto and the Doge’s Palace. He relaxed and turned his head a fraction. One of the gallery attendants, a stocky fellow in his fifties with a face like a rock, was explaining Venice to a younger woman, toughly built like him, almost a gypsy woman, in her rough, unfinished bearing, her fair hair streaked with carrot. And the man was able to place them immediately — these displaced people. There had been hundreds of thousands of them just after the war, POWs for the most part, Russians who had been in prison and then refugee camps all over Germany for years after 1945; nationalist minorities who had never gone home to Mother Russia but had chosen to settle anywhere else, in countries the world over, without ever forgetting their homeland, their language or their loss.

It ruined his afternoon. For months now, prior to his transfer he had lived clear of all control and contact. He had been sleeping, without a trail, twenty-four hours a day, for many days. He had been nothing but George Graham, Senior Reports Officer at the COI in Westminster. There had been no other life but that of his cover and he had inhabited it guilelessly and completely so that he had come to forget, as was his purpose, that he was an officer with the KGB. Had he been interrogated, even tortured, during that time it is likely that he would have given nothing away. For he had, quite literally, put a curtain about his real past and future. He had been well trained in the craft — like Pelmanism or some other mnemonic game — completely to separate the real man from the false; to bury the first while the other slept.

Yet some hazard or commonplace, like words in an empty gallery, could resurrect and re-unite these halves long before their time and trigger the whole man into dangerous action. There had been no threat in the words of the old Russian exile, boring his daughter or his cousin, yet they had broken straight through into his secrets like the verbal shafts of a skilled prosecutor.

And now he saw nothing but the politics and dangers of his real commitment, his proper concern divested of all its pleasurable cover. He no longer saw the pictures, the Bouchers or Fragonards, or the green glaze, fathoms deep, on the Urbino porcelain, or the mineral wonders of the Louis Quinze mantel clocks. He looked on these marvellous gilded and enamelled artefacts but saw nothing, they meant nothing. His critical perspective disappeared; his knack of enjoyment died. All the casual pleasures that he had taken in the past weeks were soured, faded into some dull place in his mind where they lay like old and unrewarding duties. His links with the world, which had been so firm in that April of easy strolling through the fortunate weather, had been cut off suddenly; a fault had come in the middle of a precious message down the wire. Now, in the silence, the other man reared in him, whose only business was guile, alert and smelling the wind, while the happy man cursed the hour.

So it was that he was not altogether surprised when he turned in the armoury room at the end of the building and saw them. The innocuous words of the old man ten minutes before had led them to him as surely as a cord through a labyrinth: the disinherited man and the carroty woman had somehow advertised him as clearly as a shout all over the streets of Marylebone.

The two men stood in the doorway, in sensible coats and hats, behind the great medieval horseman, sword flourishing in the air above his tortuous Gothic armour. He had come into this room on a wrong turning, looking for the exit, straight into a cage of antique weaponry. An orchestra of gleaming metal lay everywhere about him. Blades from Damascus and Toledo; Italian pikes and tufted halberds, taut Bavarian crossbows and small infernal devices from France — enough to nourish a new crusade.

He put a hand out, touching the thick glass on a case of pearl-handled Arab daggers, then gently ran his fingers down the slope in the off hand gesture of some proud and fastidious collector. It is here, he seemed to say, all in one place. After a lifetime pursuit I have gathered all this violence safely up, calmed this bloody provocation, resting quietly under my fingertips. It is here, I have tamed it all and have no need of it now.

The men walked towards him, past a silver inlaid Spanish cannon that said ‘Do not Touch’ and they took him quietly by a case of arquebuses and hatchets.

His pipe fell as they frisked him and the burnt grains of tobacco skidded over the shiny floor. Croxley bent down to pick it up and thought of the blackened grain in the gut of a dead bird, shot violently out of a big sky. Summers went through his other pockets, but the man had no weapons.

‘Nothing, sir. Except this bag of olives.’

4

McCoy went round to see Croxley in his office by the Thames later next morning. He was impatient.

‘He’s in the basement. We’re starting, but it will take some time. Do you want to go down?’

‘How long?’

‘They disorientate him first.’

‘A week?’

‘Depends. It’s an army speciality. We have one of their men on it now. Depends on how long the sounds take to sink in. And the darkness, as well as the other physical — awkwardness. It’s cumulative, you know, forty-eight hours perhaps — at best.’

Croxley was embarrassed even in hinting at this psychological violence, so that he turned away from McCoy and looked over the river as a precaution. He had realised long ago the disadvantages, among outsiders, of his sympathetic approach to security interrogations. They took it for weakness. Only other professionals recognised the skill that lay behind his gentle attitudes; the tools that Croxley masked with his diffidence were those of a great interrogator. And when the army had finished, the man downstairs would recognise this too, without knowing it, and be moved by Croxley’s sympathy to outrageous confidences, as many other men had been.

McCoy came down again three days later, sooner than expected, for Croxley had a preliminary report ready for him.

‘So?’ McCoy glanced rapidly through it. ‘How so soon?’

Croxley shrugged, drawing a blank over the whole procedure and McCoy looked at the opening paragraphs:

George Graham. Born Islington, Royal Free Hospital, 14 July 1929…. These were details they knew already.

Recruited by Alexei Flitlianov, KGB Resident in Beirut, in April 1952, while he was teaching there with the British Council.

‘Well, we practically knew that.’ McCoy flicked through the pages. ‘What’s the rough outline of the rest? What’s important? Who are his contacts here? Anyone else on our side?’

‘No. Nothing of that sort, and no deep-cover Soviet illegals either. His contacts, such as they were, were all with Embassy or trade mission staff. And they were practically non-existent. No message drops or anything like that. Nothing. Very thin on the ground —’

‘But what is it all about? — what was he giving them?’ McCoy insisted. ‘It couldn’t just have been COI stuff. There’s hardly anything classified there — just a lot of Commonwealth public-relations jaw.’

‘Well, that’s the point of course. That’s what I had to press him on. He seems to have passed on nothing at all. That wasn’t his job. You see —’

‘That couldn’t have been all. They don’t keep a man on ice for so many years doing nothing. There must have been something else.’

McCoy’s impatience rose again. After all this, he thought, nothing — the man was just a complete sleeper, a back marker, nothing more than a courier perhaps — just a weak queer in love with Marx. Croxley inclined his eyes sympathetically towards the unhappy McCoy. He was the doctor once more.

‘They’ll keep someone quiet for as long as they have to,’ he said. ‘If there’s something else in mind. And there was. There was something else. They kept this man out of the way all these years on purpose, kept him clear —’

‘Because he was a dolt, a back marker, no real use to them.’

‘On the contrary. He was highly skilled; a deep-cover illegal, senior rank. They took a great deal of trouble over him. Initially in Beirut and subsequently when he taught in Cairo. He went back to Moscow during his holidays there — said he was looking round the Middle East, Petra and such like, long hikes. In fact he was doing their advanced training, what they call the “Silent School” — individual tuition, you might say, where he’d meet no other KGB men except one or two at the top. They took a lot of trouble.’

‘For what?’

‘For the job he was going to do. In the future. Always in the future. The job that was to start next week in New York.’

McCoy had taken out a pipe but quite forgot about it now. It stuck out of his puffy white face, clenched in his teeth, giving him the startled immobility of a snowman.

‘He was going to start an alternative KGB circle in America. A new network, a satellite circle. These are completely unknown to the local KGB Resident, and quite separate from any other espionage network in the country. They report only, and direct, to Moscow, almost as a freelance might do. There’s never more than, at most, half a dozen people involved. And sometimes just one person. The point of these circles is to keep tabs on the official espionage groups. They’re set up, very quietly, with that express purpose — to spy on the spies. That’s what they’ve been holding Graham for all these years — to head one of these circles.’

Croxley paused, wondering if McCoy had really followed the implications. But he had.

‘So, Graham would know the identity of the people in the other official groups?’

‘Not before he went there, he wouldn’t. Too risky.’

‘What happens?’

‘Well, he told me,’ Croxley said diffidently, as though the man had given the information over a cucumber sandwich tea, ‘he picks up the gen when he gets there. When he gets into his new cover.’

‘How?’

‘There’s always one crucial contact in the designate circle area. Either someone sent specially from Moscow, or more often what they call a “stayer”, someone already there who has absolutely no other activity other than that of passing on the names that Moscow wants a check on.’

‘Who would that be?’

‘Graham wouldn’t know that either. The contact would be completely one-sided. The “stayer” makes it. And he’d know very little about the new man. All he would know would be his name, real or assumed, what his cover was, where he worked.’

‘Then he’d make the contact?’

‘Yes. In this case all he’d have been told was that a George Graham, from London, was joining the UN as a Reports Officer in their information department round about a certain date. He’d check him over carefully beforehand, then make an approach.’

‘Check him? He’d have a photograph? Exchange a code? How would he be sure of him. That would surely be crucial.’

A plan was straining in the depths of McCoy’s mind, something which might save the day in this disappointing affair.

‘No photographs. There’d be nothing documentary, nothing on paper. If anything, it would be verbal. So — yes, there could be an exchange code.’

‘What they used to call a “password”.’ McCoy sighed for Kim and the Jungle Books.

‘Yes.’ Croxley looked at McCoy, his face full of understanding as usual, but not caring this time whether McCoy took offence or not. ‘It’s a risk you’d have to take.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You could replace this man Graham, couldn’t you? Have someone else go to New York in his place.’

‘It wouldn’t work.’ McCoy refused to admit the possibility, for it had been exactly his own thought.

‘Perhaps. On the other hand you’d really be on to something then, if you could break the “stayer”. You could work your way through an entire deep-cover network, for example, just with the “stayer’s” name, if you handled it properly.’

‘They must take very considerable pains to prevent that happening,’ McCoy said sharply.

‘They have. They have indeed. They’ve done just that. They’ve kept Graham clean as a whistle for years. It was sheer chance we got on to him in the first place. Absolute chance. No one’s been near him, possibly for years, until they told him he was on for this job they’d trained him for. He’s a loner. He had to be, at this juncture especially. Everything depended on Moscow’s keeping completely clear of him, keeping him clean, so that there could be no trail and therefore no chance of any substitution. That’s the way it works. As far as they’re concerned he’ll be on the boat to New York next week.

‘You see, the essence of the matter is that for him to be effective in his future role no one must know about him in the past. He’s completely unknown to any KGB Resident here or anywhere else. That’s the beauty of it: the man had no previous form. Among his own, he had no identity. So you can create that for him — in the shape of another man. You have a chance in a million.’

‘That’s the odds against it, I’d say, Croxley. Not the chances. I’ll read your report. Is he downstairs now?’

‘There is just one other thing — before you go,’ Croxley said. Again the deprecatory tone, as though the matter were of no real importance. ‘Graham spoke of something else — after he’d told me about his real work for the KGB.’

‘“Spoke” — willingly?’

‘Well, not exactly. No, not willingly. Not at first. It was about his communicating with his chiefs, making his reports in America. I asked him how he did it — what the form was. I, er — pressed him on that. He eventually became … incoherent, yes …’

‘Delirious?’ McCoy asked, suddenly interested.

‘He was, well, babbling rather. Yes.’

‘Goodness me!’ McCoy was thoroughly aroused. ‘How did you manage that?’

‘I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. The point was he mentioned a letter drop in New York, a private mailbox at Grand Central station, when he was cloudy, so to speak. Afterwards we … we, er, taxed him on that, when he was clearer in the head. And he denied having ever mentioned such a thing. But we had a recording. And eventually the whole thing came out: what he said was this — and I think he must have been inventing it all, as a blind — but he said he was a member of a dissident liberal group within the KGB. Gave us details — which we couldn’t possibly check. Then he came onto our side about it all. It’s in my report. He pleaded with me to let him go, to carry on with this work, saying that the West should help support this group, that it was a vital lever for change in the Soviet Union. Well, you’ll have to pass on the stuff to your political experts. It’s my view that it was sheer bluff. I can’t see the KGB riddled with dissidents. Least of all with this man Flitlianov heading them.’

‘He said that, did he? Flitlianov’s head of their Second Directorate, in charge of all internal security. Unlikely, to say the least. And this letter drop in New York — this was to communicate with the other dissidents in the group?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have the number of it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, we can put tabs on it through the FBI. See who goes there, who took the box out. That won’t be difficult. And I’ll pass that part of your report on to the politicals. But I agree, it seems a complete blind. That box was surely there for him to report on his activities against the official KGB networks in America. And that’s the horse we should ride — if we ride anything.’

Croxley nodded. ‘I should have thought so.’

‘Come on then — let’s take a look at him.’

Graham was in one of the special cells with a one-way observation glass let into the top half of the door. McCoy was surprised at his demeanour. He was sitting at a small table, pen in hand over some scribbled paper. But he was writing nothing now. The pen jumped every so often, involuntarily. His eyelids flickered continuously, twitching in awful duet with his eyebrows. A lot of his hair had come away from the top of his head, so that, from having been a Brylcreem Boy on a hoarding three days before, he now had the air of some badly eccentric academic, ten years older, a scalp ravaged like a bird’s nest after a hawk, the hairline shrunk all about his head. He still wore his tweed jacket. But there were purple stains down its back which McCoy couldn’t understand. It was as if something entirely unnatural, some terrible physical mutation, had overcome the man, enabling him to twist his head round by 180 degrees, to be violently sick in reverse. There was the remains of some uneaten, or picked at, or vomited food by a plastic bowl on the floor. One couldn’t tell what process it had undergone. A dog, it seemed, was occupying the room.

Three days ago he had been a quiet man-about-town. But those few days had done ten years’ damage to him. He was like someone who had been abroad for a long time, in a hard country; someone whom one had remembered leaving with hope and vigour and had returned unexpectedly damaged beyond repair.

‘What’s he writing?’

‘He insisted on it. His “confession”. But there’s nothing there. Nothing to confess. He gave it all before. He can’t write. Can’t really even think now. Do you want to see him? I’m afraid —’

‘No. No, there’s nothing I can do. Nothing.’ McCoy spoke quickly, like a doctor surprised in a morgue. He had thought for so long that when you caught a traitor, he would remain more or less the same man; there would still be the evidence of his treachery in him. He believed that deceit had an ineradicable lineage, and was now vastly surprised by his mistake. This man was so changed he might have been born anew. The footsteps where he had come through life had been completely erased.

Yet McCoy had thought that Graham, when caught, would release the mysteries, explain the hidden trails, give him a fair picture at last of those border lands — all the exact colours of his temptation and betrayal. Instead, he saw just a shape now, not a man, something quite mutilated which could now never be repaired, only replaced.

‘It’s not pleasant.’ Croxley looked through the one-way glass.

‘It’s what happens. I’ve no doubt it would be a lot more unpleasant elsewhere,’ McCoy said unctuously.

‘New for us, though. They developed it in Aden. And Belfast. Black bags and wind machines. We can still beat the world in some developments. Some development this …’

‘It must make your work a lot easier.’

‘Takes all the skill out of it. Like taking sweets off a seven-year old.’

‘What do you expect? Development. You said it yourself. He’s alive, after all.’

‘Of course.’

‘He’s breathing. Plenty of places where he wouldn’t be.’

‘No, he’s not dead.’

‘No. No, indeed. So?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t call it progress. Sounds more like redundancy to me.’

‘I’ll read your report.’

McCoy took a last look at the man. A collection of broken pieces. What had he ever looked like originally? McCoy could barely remember now. Yet he wanted to remember, for he wanted someone very soon to look like him — wanted a replica of that happy man who had strolled around the galleries and restaurants with a sweet tobacco drifting in his trail.

McCoy left Croxley and walked up Whitehall. The principal outlines were clear: someone around forty, well-built, with fluent Arabic; someone who had known Beirut and Cairo well, who had lived there; someone with experience, yet who had worked out of any limelight; not someone currently in the field, even if there was time, for Moscow could well have tabs on such a person. Someone at home, then, with Arabic and therefore from his own section — skilled, but at the same time relatively dispensable, for the chances of success were less than fifty-fifty. It was more than a difficult combination; such a man was a contradiction in terms.

He talked the whole matter over with his deputy, John Harper, showing him Croxley’s report, when he got back to Holborn, in the front office of the new building with the Hepworth abstract in the forecourt. And they seemed to have got nowhere by the time Rosalie brought them a second coffee at midday.

Harper had stood up and gone to the window, looking down on the stream of secretaries fluttering out into the sun, leaving for an early lunch from the front entrance. Navy Recruitment, appropriately, it was said, came and went by the back door.

Harper seemed to be picking up each of the figures with his eyes, examining them closely, turning them over in his mind, before replacing them gently on the pavement all unawares. Among other things Harper was responsible for internal security within the building. Then he turned and with unnecessary, heavy elaboration picked up his coffee cup and drew it slowly towards his lips. McCoy hated these silent dramatics that Harper went in for, hated his meddlesome, pugnacious, Australian face. Harper had the querulous, unsatisfied expression of a vet who has been struck off the register for unnatural practice.

‘Marlow,’ Harper said at last. ‘Peter Marlow that was. He has all those qualifications. Every one, except experience in the field. But then Graham doesn’t seem to have had much of that either.’

McCoy narrowed his eyes, as if about to start a difficult position in yoga.

‘Marlow. You remember. The Scapegoat. Three years ago, or was it longer? The man Williams insisted on sending down for that Cairo business. The Cairo-Albert circle. The fellow Moscow framed, using his ex-wife — got a bag over her head, put her in a plane out of Cairo and let Der Spiegel photograph her outside GUM next day. Marlow got twenty-eight years for it as I remember. A costly affair …’

‘I remember.’

‘You were his control then, weren’t you?’

‘No, that was Edwards. Marlow was in Information and Library.’

‘Of course. Reports Officer, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes.’ McCoy looked up. ‘Yes, he culled all the stuff from the Arabic press — Al Ahram and all the other socialist rags they deliver free all over Africa.’

‘And Graham — what was he?’

‘Reports Officer,’ McCoy said reluctantly, looking down again, going sour. Another hand lost.

‘Well?’ Harper moved in for the kill.

‘Would he play, though?’

Harper put his hands in his pockets and started flapping them about inside a bit, beating his thighs. Then he started to put his papers together.

‘“Would he play”? I should think so. Wouldn’t you? With twenty years ahead of you if you didn’t. On a spike, by the short and curlies.’

‘And reliable, of course?’ McCoy was grasping at straws.

‘He used to be. As I remember. Faithful as a dog. Stayed at his post till the last, went down with all hands. Though God knows what-where did he go? Durham wasn’t it? — God knows, they may have knocked the reliability out of him. You’d have to see.’

‘It’s awfully good of you, Harper. Very good of you.’ McCoy couldn’t help commenting out loud. Nor could he bother to disguise the cynical tones of his commendation.

‘Nothing at all. Just picked it out of a hat.’ Harper stared at him.

‘Get Marlow’s file out, will you?’ McCoy called through to Rosalie. Then to Harper: ‘I’ll look at it on the way up in the train.’

Harper smiled, his face hunching up into lumps and valleys, the pock-marks of some old disease expanding into little craters. When he smiled, it was no more than a short break in the weather over the stumps and mud of no-man’s-land. ‘Lunch?’ he said. ‘Let’s have some lunch. You’re onto a good thing, sir. No doubt about it. Subtle. Simple.’

‘He’s dispensable too, of course,’ McCoy said as they left the building.

‘My goodness yes. If it misfired no one this end would be any the worse off. No one at all.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Couldn’t be more so.’

‘“The George”? Half a pint?’ Harper said, raising the ghost of a thirst.

‘Why not? Why not indeed. Have to be a quick one though.’

5

It was afternoon in Moscow, faintly sunny through a darkening mist, early April, the bitter weather still more than a match against the odd incursions of spring — the small midday thaws on high roofs and small puddles, the few liquid hours, minute victories, which would soon stiffen up again like a corpse in the huge grip of the night.

The nearly-old Englishman stamped his feet on the steps of the building in Dzerzhinsky Square — as he’d been doing outside doors and buildings in the city all winter — not so much to lose the slush from his boots, for he always travelled by car on duty, but as part of a winter habit of warmth he’d picked up years before he’d come to Moscow. In the temperate climate of England, even during the mildest winters, he’d stamped his feet. It was something you did at that season before coming indoors; it went with Christmas and mulled wine from silver punch bowls and expensive cards of stage-coaches lost in snow drifts. He was a man of habits; he tended them carefully, even when they had lost all meaning, as others will retain precious but empty photographs of their youth or marriage and keep them prominently on desks or mantelpieces. He went inside and was escorted upstairs into Yuri Andropov’s office.

The visitor had an intelligent, convivial face; dark hair, just a hint overgrown at the back, and sad, bedroom eyes. Fat had come to him suddenly in his middle years and, finding no support in his cheek-bones, had seeped down into small rolls beneath his jawbone and about his neck. And the same — or was it no more than vodka and Caucasian wine? — had found an even more abundant refuge about his waist.

The eyes were the only contradiction in this well-set figure: ‘I’ve lost something,’ they seemed to say, ‘and I can’t for the life of me forget it’ — while the rest of his body, in its freshly chubby content, suggested just the opposite: ‘I had nothing, but now I have come into my due reward.’ For the moment, however, he was neither sad nor confident: he was simply a little on edge. He played minutely with his fingers and his eyebrows fidgeted as though he was anxious for a drink in company he knew to be strictly temperance. He stammered a greeting in Russian. But Yuri Andropov made a point of welcoming him in courteous, rather archaic English, as though their meeting had been in the Reform Club and not Dzerzhinsky Square.

‘Comrade Philby, how good of you to come. How are you?’ Andropov then lapsed into Russian. ‘Come, let’s sit down.’ They moved away from the desk to a small conference table by the window.

‘Sakharovsky has already outlined our problem to you, and I’d be most grateful if you could listen to my thoughts on it — and give me your opinion on them. As you know, Harper — one of our men with the British SIS, I believe you knew him slightly? — has now been able to confirm to us that a very senior man in the KGB is the chief figure in some sort of conspiracy against us. A number of other KGB officers are with him in it — we don’t know who. However, we do know the name of one of them: an Englishman working for us in London, attached to the British government’s Information Service, called George Graham. British Security picked him up a week ago, interrogated him and found out not only that he was with us but who his boss is — this senior figure we’re after.’

Philby was still fidgeting, slightly mystified. He reached for some cigarettes. ‘May I?’

‘Certainly, certainly.’ Andropov hurried on, ‘Now Harper tells us that George Graham also gave the names of a number of other KGB operatives overseas that he had contacts with — bona fide contacts, not necessarily part of this conspiracy, though of course we don’t know that yet for sure. However, one thing was clear — Graham was part of it, an important part of it, one of this man’s deputies in fact. Now the Chief — let’s call him that for the moment — we think he must have been working a chain cut-out system in his clandestine group — not a block cut-out: he recruited all his deputies — who in turn recruited their own men. The Chief knew the names of his immediate deputies but not the rest of the staff as it were.’

‘So to get the whole group you need only put the pressure on this top man? That was rather foolish of him.’ Philby puffed at his cigarette unsuccessfully. It had gone very damp at the mouth end. He lit a fresh one.

‘Possibly. But on the other hand, it means that if we fail to get anything out of him we get nowhere. The rest of his group will be blocked to us. And this is the problem: if this man chose the chain system, keeping all the links in his group to himself, it means that he thinks he can keep those secrets, under whatever pressure. Now this is where George Graham comes in: the British managed to get an extraordinary amount of information out of him. And remember he was a senior operative with us, specially trained, he’d lived successfully as a deep-cover illegal for nearly twenty years — a man who knew every counter-ploy under interrogation, who’d lived his cover in the British Information Service as successfully as you did in British Intelligence. And yet what happened? He broke in less than a week — with no circumstantial evidence against him, they found nothing on him or in his apartment. The only lead they had was a telephone conversation they broke in on quite by chance. And they nailed him on that — a few vague hints on the telephone. Now what does all this suggest to you?’

Philby smiled. ‘Who was the interrogator?’

Andropov smiled with him. ‘That’s why I asked you here this afternoon — his name was Croxley, from the British Special Branch.’

‘Detective Inspector — probably Superintendent by now — Croxley. I knew him by reputation. MI5 wanted him put on to me but there was so much interdepartmental jealousy around Whitehall ten years ago it wasn’t difficult for my section to head him off. Besides he was junior then to the man I got — Skardon. Skardon was the man everyone feared and of course he was good. But Croxley was thought to be just as good — and he was younger. And stamina plays a big part in these question-answer games.’

‘Of course, the point struck me, Philby — if Croxley got this man Graham to break, why not the head of this conspiracy? What do you think of that?’

‘Yes, possibly. How would you get this Chief to England?’

‘He travels abroad from time to time. And if not, I’m sure we could find ways of getting him there and then breaking him to the authorities. He’d be taken to Croxley, wouldn’t he?’

‘Almost certainly. He must be the number one by now. The trouble is if Croxley failed to get anything out of him you’d lose your trail to the rest of the group. They’d just bang your key figure in jail for twenty years.’

‘Yes. Now what could you do to prevent that? Or rather, what precautionary steps would you take, as another string to the plan? so that you still had a chance of following the rest of the group up?’

Philby answered almost immediately. ‘What about this man George Graham? Could you replace him? Have Harper put somone else in his shoes and wait and see what messages, if any, were passed to him from above or beneath. Send him off to do whatever assignment Graham had been given — and see where it led him to? Use him as a stalking-horse.’

‘That’s a daring idea.’ Andropov considered it as if for the first time. Then he added sagely: ‘But I think you’re right. That’s exactly what the British are going to do — Harper has suggested it already — since, of course, they’re just as anxious as we are to try and follow this trail down the line, to pick up the rest of Graham’s KGB contacts. Our interests here coincide precisely: we want to find out who these men are just as much as they do. British Intelligence may in fact be able to do most of this job for us. There’s just one more point, Philby: a possible problem. The man they’ve chosen to replace George Graham: he’s an ex-British SIS officer, used to work in their Middle East section, Peter Marlow. Did you know him?’

‘Marlow?’ Philby was surprised. ‘Hardly an officer. More a clerk. He was in Information and Library. And he’s in jail now, isn’t he? A long sentence. We used him to get Williams clear three or four years back.’

‘Yes — but they’re going to spring him quickly. Point is he doesn’t seem the best choice for this sort of job.’

‘A complete amateur — from the little I know of him.’

‘That’s the problem. A weak link. You have a phrase for it, don’t you’ — and he went on in English — ‘“Fools jump in when angels go to bed.”’

Philby looked at Andropov with some embarrassment. ‘Yes, well, er — perhaps. On the other hand, look on the bright side: he’s served us far better than he has the British in the past — as regards Williams for example. He’s natural fall-guy material — I suppose that’s why they thought of him. After all, replacing a KGB officer in this way, if the contacts he’s after discover the deception — that’s not a healthy future.’

The two men nodded in agreement. The afternoon had died outside the window. The dark had run in over the city like an accident.