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“Mr. Fields?”

‘‘Yes.’’

“Switchboard here. Someone just called asking for the Bolshoi Theatre ticket office.”

“Right, thank you.”

Gracie Fields rang Jock Macdonald. Internal extensions were regularly swept by the man from the Security Service and were deemed secure.

“My friend from Moscow’s finest just called,” he said. “He used the emergency code. He needs a callback.”

“Keep me posted,” said the Head of Station. Fields checked his watch. One hour between calls and five minutes gone. At a public phone in the lobby of a bank two blocks from the militia building, Inspector Novikov also checked his watch and decided to take a coffee to fill the intervening fifty minutes. Then he would report to another public phone a block further down and wait.

Fields left the embassy ten minutes later and drove slowly to the Kosmos Hotel on Mira Prospekt. Built in 1979, modern by Moscow standards, the Kosmos has a row of public phone booths close to the lobby.

An hour after the call came to the embassy he checked a notepad from his jacket pocket and dialed. Public booth-to-booth calls are a nightmare for counterintelligence organizations and virtually uncheckable because of the sheer numbers of them.

“Boris?” Novikov was not called Boris. His given name was Yevgeni, but when he heard “Boris” he knew it was Fields on the line.

“Yes. That drawing you gave me. Something has come up. I think we should meet.”

“All right. Join me for dinner at the Rossiya.”

Neither man had any intention of going to the vast Rossiya Hotel. The reference was to a bar called the Carousel halfway up Tverskaya Street. It was cool and dark enough to be discreet. Again the time lapse was one hour.

¯

LIKE many of the larger British embassies, the Moscow legation contains on its staff a member of the British internal security service known as M15. This is the sister service of the foreign intelligence-gathering Secret Intelligence Service, wrongly but popularly called MI6.

The task of the MI5 man is not to gather information about the host country, but to guarantee the security of the embassy, its various outstations, and its staff.

The staff do not regard themselves as prisoners and in Moscow during the summer frequent a pretty bathing spot outside the city where the River Moskva curves in a manner that exposes a small sandy beach. For diplomatic staff this is a favored picnicking and bathing spot.

Before he was elevated to the rank of inspector and transferred to Homicide, Yevgeni Novikov had been the officer in charge of that country district, including the resort area known as Serebryani Bor, or Silver Woods.

It was here he had got to know the then British security service officer, who introduced him to the newly arrived Gracie Fields.

Fields cultivated the young policeman and eventually suggested that a small monthly retainer in hard currency could make life easier for a man on a fixed salary in inflationary times. Inspector Novikov became a source, low-level it was true, but occasionally useful. During this week the homicide detective was going to repay all the effort.

“We have a body,” he told Fields as they sat in the gloom of the Carousel and sipped chilled beer. “I’m pretty sure it’s the man in the drawing you gave me. Old, steel teeth, you know. …”

He narrated the events as he had learned them from his colleague Volsky on the John Doe desk.

“Nearly three weeks, that’s a long time to be dead in this weather. The face must be ghastly,” said Fields. “It might not be the same man.”

“He was only in the forest for a week. Then nine days in a cold box. He should be recognizable.”

“I’ll need a photograph, Boris. Can you get one?”

“I don’t know. They’re all with Volsky. Do you know of a man called Inspector Chernov?”

“Yes, he’s been around to the embassy. I gave him one of the drawings too.”

“I know,” said Novikov. “Now they’re all over the place. Anyway, he’ll be back. Volsky will have told him by now. He’ll have a real photograph of the corpse’s face.”

“For himself, not for us.”

“It could be difficult.”

“Well try, Boris, try. You’re in Homicide, aren’t you? Say you want to show it around some gangland contacts. Make any excuse. This is a homicide now. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Solve murders?”

“Supposed to,” admitted Novikov gloomily. He wondered if the Englishman knew the cleanup rate for gang killings was three percent.

“There’ll be a bonus in it for you,” said Fields. “When our staff are attacked we are not ungenerous.”

“All right,” said Novikov. “I’ll try and get one.”

As it happened he did not need to bother. The mystery man file came to Homicide of its own accord and two days later he was able to abstract one of the sheaf of photos of the face taken out in the woods by the Minsk Highway.

Langley, November 1986

CAREY Jordan was in an exceptionally good mood. Such moods were brief in late 1986 because the Iran-Contra scandal was raging through Washington, and Jordan more than most others knew how deeply the CIA had been involved.

But he had just been summoned to the office of the director, William Casey, to receive the warmest plaudits. The cause of such unaccustomed benignity from the old director was the reception in the highest quarters of the news brought back from Yalta by Jason Monk.

In the very early eighties, the USSR instituted a series of highly aggressive policies against the West, its last desperate attempt to break the will of the NATO alliance by intimidation. Ronald Reagan was in the White House at the time and Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street. The two Western leaders decided they would not be browbeaten by threats.

President Andropov died, Chernenko came and went, Gorbachev came to power, but still the war of wills and industrial power went on.

Mikhail Gorbachev had become General Secretary of the party in March 1985. He was a dedicated Communist born and raised. The difference was that unlike his predecessors he was pragmatic and refused to accept the lies that they had swallowed. He insisted on knowing the real facts and figures of Soviet industry and the economy. When he saw them he was traumatized.

By the summer of 1986, deep in the heart of the Kremlin and the Defense Ministry, it was becoming clear that the military-industrial complex and the weapons procurement program were absorbing sixty percent of Soviet gross domestic product, an unsustainable figure. The people were at last becoming restive with their privations.

That summer a major examination was undertaken to see how long the Soviet Union could keep up the pace. The picture in the report could not have been blacker. Industrially, the capitalist West was outperforming the Russian dinosaur at every level. It was this report that Solomin brought on microfilm to the park bench at Yalta.

What it said, and what Solomin confirmed verbally, was that if the West could hang on for two more years, the Soviet economy would come apart at the seams, and the Kremlin would have to concede and dismantle. As in a game of poker, the Siberian had just shown the West the Kremlin’s entire hand.

The news went right into the White House and across the Atlantic to Mrs. Thatcher. Both leaders, beset by internal hostility and doubt, took heart. Bill Casey was congratulated by the Oval Office and passed the plaudits on to Carey Jordan. He summoned Jason Monk to share his congratulations. At the end of their talk Jordan brought up a topic he had raised before.

“I have a real problem with those damn files of yours, Jason. You can’t just leave them sitting in your safe. If anything happened to you, we wouldn’t know where to begin to handle these two assets, Lysander and Orion. You have to log them with the others.”

It had been over a year since the first treachery of Aldrich Ames, and six months since the disaster of the missing agents had become apparent. The culprit was by then in Rome. Technically the mole hunt still plodded on, but the urgency had gone out of it.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” pleaded Monk. “These guys are putting their lives on the line. They know me and I know them. We trust each other. Let it be.”

Jordan had known before of the strange bond that could be forged between asset and handler. It was a relationship the agency officially frowned on for two reasons. The agent runner might have to be moved to a different post, or might retire or die. A too-personal relationship could mean the asset deep in the heart of Russia might decide he could not or would not go on with a new handler. Second, if anything happened to the asset, the agency man could become too depressed to retain his usefulness. In a long career an asset might have several handlers. Monk’s one-on-one bond with his two agents worried Jordan. It was ... irregular.

On the other hand, Monk
was
irregular, one of a kind. If Jordan had but known it, which he did not, Monk made a point of ensuring that each asset inside Moscow (Turkin had left Madrid and was back home, producing amazing material from the very heart of K Directorate of the FCD) received long personal letters from him, along with the usual tasking lists.

Jordan settled for a compromise. The files containing details of the men, where and how they were recruited, how they were “serviced,” their different postings—everything but their names and yet quite enough to identify them—would be transferred to the DDO’s own personal safe. If anyone wanted to get at them, he would have to go by the DDO himself and explain why. Monk settled for that and the transfer was made.

¯

INSPECTOR Novikov was right about one thing. Inspector Chernov did indeed reappear at the embassy. He came the next morning, August 5. Jock Macdonald asked him to be escorted to his office where he masqueraded as an attaché of the Chancery section.

“We think we may have found the man who broke into your colleague’s apartment,” said Chernov.

“My congratulations, Inspector.”

“Unfortunately, he is dead.”

“Ah, but you have a photograph?”

“I do. Of the body. Of the face. And ...” he tapped a canvas bag by his side, “I have the overcoat he was probably wearing.”

He placed a glossy print on Macdonald’s desk. It was fairly gruesome, but a close match to the crayon drawing.

“Let me summon Miss Stone and see if she can identify this unfortunate man.”

Celia Stone was escorted in by Fields, who remained. Macdonald warned her what she was about to see was not pretty, but he would be grateful for her advice. She glanced at the photo and put her hand over her mouth. Chernov took out the frayed ex-army greatcoat and held it up. Celia looked desperately at Macdonald and nodded.

“That’s him. That was the man who—”

“—you saw running out of your apartment. Of course. Clearly, thieves fall out, Inspector. I am sure it is the same the world over.”

Celia Stone was escorted out.

“Let me say on behalf of the British government, Inspector, that you have done a remarkable job. We may never know the man’s name, but it matters little now. The wretch is dead. Be assured the most favorable report will be received by the Commanding General of the Moscow militia,” Macdonald told the beaming Russian.

As he left the embassy and climbed into his car Chernov was glowing. The moment he got back to Petrovka he passed the whole file from Burglary to Homicide. The fact there was supposed to be a second burglar involved was irrelevant. Without a description or the dead man’s testimony, it was a needle in a haystack.

After he had left, Fields returned to Macdonald’s office. The Head of Station was pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“What do you reckon?” he asked.

“My source says the man was beaten to death. He has a pal in the John Doe office who spotted the drawing on the wall and made the match. The postmortem report says the old boy had been about a week in the woods before he was found.”

“And that was?”

Fields consulted the notes he had written up immediately after the talk in the Carousel Bar.

“July twenty-fourth.”

“So, killed about the seventeenth or eighteenth. The day after he threw that file into Celia Stone’s car. The day I flew to London. These lads don’t waste time.”

“Which lads?”

“Well, it’s a million quid to a pint of flat beer it was the thugs commanded by that shit Grishin.”

“Komarov’s chief of personal security?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” said Macdonald. “Have you ever seen his file?”

“No.”

“You should, someday. Ex-Second Chief Directorate interrogator. Deeply nasty.”

“If it was a punishment beating, and death, who was the old man?” asked Fields. Macdonald stared out of the window, across the river to the Kremlin.

“Probably the thief himself.”

“So how did an old tramp like that get hold of it?”

“I can only suppose he was some obscure employee of one kind or another who got lucky. As it happened, extremely unlucky. You know, I really think your policeman friend is going to have to earn himself a very fat bonus.”

Buenos Aires, June 1987

IT was a bright young agent in the CIA station in the Argentine capital who first suspected Valeri Yurevitch Kruglov of the Soviet Embassy might have a flaw. The American Chief of Station consulted Langley.

The Latin America Division already had a file on him, dating from a previous Kruglov posting in the mid-seventies in Mexico City. They knew he was a Russian Latin America expert, with three such postings behind him in a twenty-year career in the Soviet Foreign Service. Because he appeared friendly and outgoing, the file even logged his career.

Born in 1944, Valeri Kruglov was the son of a diplomat, another specialist in Latin America. It was the father’s influence that got the boy into the prestigious Institute of International Relations, the MGIMO, where he learned Spanish and English. He was there from 1961 to 1966. After that he did two South American postings, in Colombia as a youth, then Mexico a decade later, before reappearing as First Secretary in Buenos Aires.

The CIA was convinced he was not KGB, but a regular diplomat. His biography was of a fairly liberal, possibly pro-Western Russian, not the usual hard-line “homo sovieticus.” The reason for the alert in the summer of 1987 had been a conversation with an Argentine official, passed on to the Americans, in which Kruglov revealed that he was returning soon to Moscow, never to travel abroad again, and that his lifestyle would plunge.