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In twenty years with the agency before he turned traitor, Ames had had three postings outside Langley. In Turkey his Chief of Station deemed him to be a complete waste of space; the veteran Dewey Clarridge loathed and despised him from the start.

In the New York office he had a lucky break that brought him kudos. Although the Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, Arkady Shevchenko, had been working for the CIA before Ames arrived, and his final defection to the States in April 1978 was masterminded by another officer, Ames handled the Ukrainian in between. He was by then already becoming a very serious drinker.

His third posting, in Mexico, was a fiasco. He was consistently drunk, insulted colleagues and foreigners, fell down and was helped home by the Mexican police, broke every standing operating procedure imaginable, and recruited nobody.

On both the overseas postings Ames’s performance reports were appalling. In one wide-spectrum performance assessment he came 198th out of 200 officers.

Normally such a career would go nowhere near the top. By the early eighties all the senior hierarchs—Carey Jordan, Dewey Clarridge, Milton Bearden, Gus Hathaway, and Paul Redmond—thought he was a useless article. But not Ken Mulgrew, who became his friend and protector.

It was he who sanitized the dreadful performance and assessment reports, smoothed the path, and procured the promotions. As Ames’s senior he overrode the objections and, while heading up Personnel Allocations, slipped Ames into the Counterintelligence Group.

Basically, they were drinking buddies, both serial boozers who with the self-pity of the alcoholic agreed with each other that the agency was grossly unfair to both of them. It was a judgmental error that would soon cost a lot of lives.

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LEONID Zaitsev the Rabbit was dying but he did not know it. He was in great pain. This he knew.

Colonel Grishin believed in pain. He believed in pain as persuasion, pain as example to the witnesses, and pain as punishment. Zaitsev had sinned and the colonel’s orders were that he should fully comprehend the meaning of pain before he died.

The interrogation had lasted all day and there had been no call to use violence because he had told everything that was asked of him. Grishin had been alone with him most of the time, because he did not wish the guards to hear what had been stolen.

The colonel had asked him, quite gently, to start at the beginning, so he had. He had been required to repeat the story over and over again until Grishin was satisfied no detail had been left out. There was not really much to tell.

Only when he explained why he had done it was the colonel’s face masked in disbelief.

“A beer? The English gave you a
beer?”

By midday Grishin was convinced he had it all. The chances were, he reckoned, that confronted with this scarecrow the young Englishwoman would throw the file away, but he could not be sure. He dispatched a car with four trusted men to stake out the embassy and wait for the little red car, then follow it to wherever she lived and reported back.

Just after three he gave final orders to his Guards and left. As he drove out of the compound, an A-300 Airbus with British Airways livery on its tailfin turned toward northern Moscow and headed west. He did not notice. He ordered his driver to take him back to the dacha off Kiselny Boulevard.

There were four of them. The Rabbit’s legs would have buckled, but they knew that so two of them held him up, fingers digging hard into his upper arms. The other two were one front, one back. They worked slowly and placed their punches diligently.

The big fists were wrapped in heavy knobbed brass knuckles. The punches crushed his kidneys, tore his liver, and ruptured his spleen. A kick pulped his old testicles. The man at the front drove into the belly, then moved up to the chest. He fainted twice but a bucket of cold water brought him around and the pain returned. His legs ceased to function so they held his light frame on tiptoe.

Toward the end the ribs in the skinny chest cracked and sprung, two driving deep into the lungs. Something warm and sweet and sticky rose in his throat so that he could not breathe.

His vision narrowed to a tunnel and he saw not the gray concrete blocks of the room behind the camp armory, but a bright sunny day with a sandy road and pine trees. He could not see the speaker, but a voice was saying to him:

“Come on, mate, ‘ave a beer ... ‘ave a beer.”

The light faded to gray but he could still hear the voice repeating words he could not understand. “ ‘Ave a beer, ‘ave a beer ...” Then the lights went out forever.

Washington, June 1985

TWO months almost to the day after he got his first cash payment of $50,000, Aldrich Ames, in a single afternoon, destroyed almost the entire SE Division of the Ops Directorate of the CIA.

Just before lunch, having raided the top secret 301 files, he swept seven pounds of classified documents and cable traffic off his desk and into two plastic shopping bags. With these he walked down the labyrinthine corridors to the elevators, rode to the ground floor, and let himself out through the turnstiles with his laminated ID card. No guard paused to ask what was in the bags. Climbing into his car in the huge parking lot, he drove the twenty minutes to Georgetown, the elegant section of Washington renowned for its European-style restaurants.

He arrived at Chadwick’s, a bar and restaurant under the K Street Freeway on the waterfront, and met the contact designated for him by Colonel Androsov, who as the KGB Rezident knew he himself would probably have been tailed by the FBI watchers. The contact was an ordinary Soviet diplomat called Chuvakhin.

To the Russian Ames handed over what he had. He never even demanded a price. When it came it would be enormous, the first of many that would make him a millionaire. The Russians, normally stingy with valuable hard-currency dollars, never even haggled after that. They knew they had hit the mother lode.

From Chadwick’s the bags went to the embassy and thence to the Yazenevo headquarters of the First Chief Directorate. There the analysts could not believe their eyes.

The coup made Androsov an instant star and Ames the most vital asset in the firmament. The FCD’s commanding general, Vladimir Kryuchkov, originally a snoop put into the FCD by the ever-suspicious Andropov but since risen to higher things, at once ordered the formation of a top-secret group to be detached from all other tasks and assigned only to handle the Ames product. Ames was code-named Kolokol, meaning Bell, and the task force became the Kolokol Group.

In those shopping bags were descriptions of fourteen agents, almost the SE Division’s entire array of assets within the USSR. The actual names were not included, but they did not need to be.

Any counterintelligence detective, told that there is a mole inside his own network and told that the man was recruited in Bogotá, then worked in Moscow, and is now in service in Lagos, would work it out pretty fast. Only one career will match those postings. A check of the records usually suffices.

A senior CIA officer later calculated that forty-five anti-KGB operations, virtually the CIA’s entire menu, collapsed after the summer of 1985. Not a single top agent working for the CIA whose name had been on the 301 files continued to function after the spring of 1986.

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JOCK Macdonald’s first port of call on arriving in the late afternoon at Heathrow was the headquarters building of the SIS at Vauxhall Cross. He was tired, although he had dared to take a catnap on the plane, and the notion of going to his club for a bath and a real sleep was tempting. The flat he and his wife, still in Moscow, retained in Chelsea was not available, being let to others.

But he wanted the file in the briefcase still attached to his wrist under lock and key inside the HQ building before he could relax. The Service car that had met him at Heathrow dropped him in front of the green-glass and sandstone monster on the south bank of the Thames that now housed the Service since its move from shabby old Century House seven years earlier.

He penetrated the security systems at the entrance, assisted by the eager young probationer who had accompanied him from the airport, and finally lodged the file in the safe of the head of Russia Division. His colleague had welcomed him warmly but with some curiosity.

“Drink?” asked Jeffrey Marchbanks, indicating what appeared to be a wood-paneled filing cabinet but which both men knew contained a bar.

“Good idea. Been a long day, and a rough one. Scotch.”

Marchbanks opened the cabinet door and contemplated his repertoire. Macdonald was a Scot and took the brew of his ancestors neat. The divisional head poured a double tot of the Macallan, with no ice, and handed it over.

“Knew you were coming of course, but not why. Tell me.”

Macdonald narrated his story from the beginning.

“It must be a hoax, of course,” said Marchbanks at last.

“On the face of it, yes,” agreed Macdonald. “But it must be the most unsubtle bloody hoax I’ve ever heard of. Who’s the hoaxer?”

“Komarov’s political enemies, one supposes.”

“He’s got enough of them,” said Macdonald. “But what a way to present it. Damn well asking for it to be thrown away unread. It was only a fluke young Gray found it.”

“Well, the next step is to read it. You’ve read it, I suppose?”

“All last night. As a political manifesto, it’s ... unpleasant.”

“In Russian, of course?”

“Yes.”

“Mmmm. I suspect my Russian won’t be up to it. We’ll need a translation.”

“I’d prefer to do that myself,” said Macdonald. “Just in case it’s not a hoax. You’ll see why when you read it.”

“All right, Jock. Your call. What do you want?”

“Club first. Bath, shave, dinner, and a sleep. Then come back here about midnight and work on it till opening hours. See you again then.”

Marchbanks nodded.

“All right. You’d better borrow this office. I’ll notify Security.”

By the time Jeffrey Marchbanks returned to his office just before ten the following morning, it was to find Jock Macdonald full-length on his sofa with his shoes and jacket off and tie loosened. The black file was on his desk with a pile of unbound white sheets beside it.

“That’s it,” he said. “In the language of Shakespeare. By the way, the disk is still in the machine but it should be got out and logged safely.”

Marchbanks nodded, ordered coffee, pulled on his glasses, and began to read. He looked up after a while.

“The man’s mad, of course.”

“If it is Komarov writing, then yes. Or very bad. Or both. Either way, potentially dangerous. Read on.”

Marchbanks did so. When he had finished he puffed out his cheeks and exhaled.

“It has to be a hoax. No one who meant it would ever write it down.”

“Unless he thought it was confined to his own inner core of fellow fanatics,” suggested Macdonald.

“Stolen then?”

“Possibly. Forged, possibly. But who was the tramp, and how did
he
get hold of it? We don’t know.”

Marchbanks pondered. He knew that if the manifesto was a forgery and a hoax, there would be nothing but grief for the SIS if they took it seriously. If it turned out to be genuine, there would be even more grief if they did not.

“I think,” he said at length, “I want to run this past the Controller, maybe even the Chief.”

The Controller, Eastern Hemisphere, David Brownlow, saw them at twelve and the Chief offered the three of them lunch in his paneled top-floor dining room with its panoramic views of the Thames and Vauxhall Bridge at 1:15.

Sir Henry Coombs was just short of sixty and in his final year as chief of the SIS. Like his predecessors he had come up through the ranks and honed his skills in the Cold War that had ended a decade earlier. Unlike the CIA, whose directors were political appointments and not always skillful ones, the SIS for thirty years had persuaded prime ministers to give them a chief who had been through the mill.

And it worked. After 1985 three successive directors of the CIA had admitted they were told hardly anything of the true awfulness of the Ames affair until they read the newspapers. Henry Coombs had the trust of his subordinates and knew all the details he needed to know. And they knew that he knew.

He read the file while sipping his vichyssoise. But he read fast and he took it all in.

“This must be very tiresome for you, Jock, but tell it again.”

He listened attentively, asking two brief questions, then nodded.

“Your views, Jeffrey?”

After the Head of Russia Division, he asked Brownlow, the Controller East. Both said much the same. Is it true? We need to know.

“What intrigues me,” said Brownlow, “is simply this: If all this is Komarov’s true political agenda, why did he write it down? We all know even the most top-secret documents can be stolen.”

Sir Henry Coombs’s deceptively mild eyes turned to his Moscow Head of Station.

“Any ideas, Jock?”

Macdonald shrugged.

“Why does anyone write down their innermost thoughts and plans? Why do people confess the unconfessable to their private diaries? Why do people keep impossibly intimate journals? Why do major services like ours store hypersensitive, material? Perhaps it was intended as a very private briefing document for his own inner circle, or just as therapy for himself. Or perhaps it is a forgery designed to damage the man. I don’t know.”

“Ah, there you have it,” said Sir Henry. “We don’t know. But, having read it, I think we agree we must know. So many questions. How the hell did this come to be written? Is it really the work of Igor Komarov? Is this appalling torrent of madness what he intends to fulfill if, or more likely, when he comes to power? If so, how was it stolen, who stole it, and why throw it at us? Or is it all a farrago of lies?”

He stirred his coffee and stared at the documents, both the original and Macdonald’s copy, with profound distaste.

“Sorry, Jock, but we’ve got to have those answers. I can’t take this up the river until we do. Possibly not then. It’s back to Moscow, Jock. I don’t know how you are going to do it; that’s your business. But we need to know.”