by Jeremy Duns
A thought flitted through my mind of a post-nuclear world: a few lost souls scurrying about in bunkers or foraging for food and water across contaminated ground until they finally succumbed to radiation poisoning.
‘We’re all animals,’ I said, trying not to let my temper take over. ‘We like to think we’re civilized, but that’s for peacetime. I’m sorry if this offends your sensibilities, but we are heading for nuclear war. If we take him with us, he’ll try something. If we let him go, sooner or later he’ll reach his colleagues.’
She flung her hands out in exasperation. ‘And tell them what? We just ran a KGB car off the road! Half the radio transmissions in the city will be about us.’
‘Yes, but we don’t know precisely what they’re saying. This man is a loose end. He’ll get free, in time, or someone will find him. Just not immediately.’
‘And how do you think they’ll react when they find him? They’ll probably double their efforts.’
‘They’ll have every man available after us already, and if any of them get the chance I promise you they’ll shoot us on sight and won’t hang about afterwards discussing the rights and wrongs of it. If we make it out the other side of this, we can go to the opera and pretend we’re not animals again. But until then we’ve got to do whatever it takes to survive, even if it means abandoning fair play. Now get in the car, please. If you’re not going to help me—’
‘What?’ she said, her nostrils flaring. ‘You’ll strip me to my knickers and lock me in with him?’
‘No. I’ll put you in the boot.’
She started to laugh, then caught my look. ‘You would as well, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes. We don’t have time for this, Sarah. Now which is it to be?’
She didn’t reply and the silence stretched out, but then there was the faint sound of a siren see-sawing in the distance. We both turned to it, cocking our heads to gauge whether it was getting any nearer. After a few seconds it faded away, but it seemed this had been enough to wake her up, because she turned to face me and gave the tiniest of nods.
‘Good.’ I took off my half-shredded jacket and walked across to Bessmertny’s bundle of clothes. ‘Because I need you to help me figure out what we’re going to do next.’
Her eyes widened. ‘You mean you don’t know?’
I picked up Bessmertny’s shirt and pulled it over the one I was already wearing. ‘You heard what he said. They’ve got roadblocks set up across the city, and we won’t be able to get past any of them as we are. They’ll be checking their own cars just as thoroughly, and we don’t have papers.’
I buttoned the jacket and reached for the trousers. Sarah watched me, her hands clamped under her armpits, and I picked up Bessmertny’s coat and thrust it towards her. She hesitated for a moment, then took it and put it on. It was much too large for her, and with her boyish crop of hair it made her look like a Dickensian urchin.
I put on the trousers, boots and wristwatch, then drew the leather gloves over my hands, taking it slowly to avoid reopening the wound.
‘What do you think?’ I said.
‘Convincing enough. But who are you going to say I am if we’re stopped?’
‘Climb in the back seat,’ I said. ‘I’ll claim you’re a suspect and I’m on the way to the station. But let’s hope that doesn’t happen. We need to find another form of transport fast if we’re going to get out of Moscow.’ I stopped myself from saying the next word on my lips – ‘alive’.
We got in the car, me in the front and her in the back, and sat there, our brains churning, while we waited for the heater to take effect. I’d studied this country for most of my adult life, and knew the ranks and accompanying uniforms of all its forces, and the relationships between each force and the structure of the system as a whole. So I knew what to expect. This was the ultimate secret state, with armed police patrolling the streets to stop anyone who demonstrated the slightest sign of not following the regulations. Suspicion was the natural state of affairs here, and we would have to act accordingly.
But although I had a lot of facts and figures stored in my head, my knowledge of the Soviet way of life was woefully incomplete. Most of what I knew was second-hand, theoretical – and that could be the difference between life and death. Apart from a brief stint in Prague and several months in a prison cell, I’d never been to the Soviet Union. To make matters worse, we had no support: no sleepers, safe houses or people with hidden compartments in their trucks. And we had to find a way through the Soviets’ security net while they knew we were trying to do it. It was close to impossible, and under normal circumstances I wouldn’t even have been considering it.
We were stuck in the spider’s web. But I did have some very specific knowledge that might help in this situation. I had studied the Soviets’ border controls – both their strengths and weaknesses – in depth over the years, and at regular intervals. I had, admittedly, mostly been looking at them going the other way, as part of my contingency plans in the event that I’d suddenly need to defect. I hadn’t had to put those plans into effect – as it turned out, I’d been forcibly defected after the operation in Italy, and Sarah along with me. Now I had to get from East to West, which was an entirely different prospect, and a hell of a lot more difficult.
I turned to Sarah. ‘I said “we” a moment ago, but that’s up to you. You can leave now and take your chances at the embassy or try to find your own way out of the country, or you can come along with me and help me get to the U-boat. The odds are I won’t make it. I have no idea how much time we have, or if the Russians will even believe me if I find the canisters—’
‘In which case, we’ll die in a nuclear blast. I’m coming. What about the military airfields? Could we catch them by surprise and steal a plane?’
I nodded at her commitment, then considered her suggestion. I thought of the helicopters I’d seen that morning at Steklyashka. ‘They’ll be even more guarded than usual. And even if we got to one, they’d simply shoot us down.’
She was silent for a few moments. ‘Can we get onto a fast train? Isn’t there one that goes straight to Leningrad?’
‘Yes, the Red Arrow. But they’ll have men on the platforms of all the stations checking everyone, and even if we could find a way on board they’ll be searching every nook and cranny of every carriage. The main problem is we don’t have any papers, and in this country that means you effectively can’t do anything.’
‘What about dissidents – surely they have ways of forging documents?’
I turned to look at her. ‘Do you know any dissidents?’
She shook her head. ‘But surely we can find some. What about that group in the café – you know, the girl you couldn’t tear your eyes away from and her friends? They might be able to help.’
‘I was checking we weren’t under surveillance,’ I said, and her lip curled slightly. ‘It’s a good idea, but what about the practicalities? Say they were dissidents, or at least know how to get in contact with some. And say that they’re also still sitting in that café, or that we can track them quickly by asking around. How would we convince them to help us?’
She nodded at the attaché case on the seat next to her. ‘Show them the documents.’
‘We can’t just run around Moscow flashing the contents of that case to anyone we think looks sympathetic. If they turn out not to be, we’ll be headed straight back to the Lubyanka. Even if we strike it lucky and do find some sympathizers, we’d be asking them to believe that the documents are genuine and risk their own freedom as a result. I think it’s too much to expect from strangers. Do you know anyone in Moscow? Outside the embassy, I mean?’
‘Sorry, not a soul. I mean, I once met Kim Philby at a party in Beirut, but obviously we can’t approach him.’
There was an awkward silence, as my own treason suddenly hung in the air between us. Six months ago, this woman had stumbled upon a conspiracy to kill innocent civilians in Italy, orchestrated in part by her own husband. She had also disc
overed that I was a Soviet agent, but for that very reason I’d been the ideal person to turn to. Now we were confronted by a much graver crisis than the one we’d faced together in Italy, but half a year in a prison cell in Moscow was a lot of time, and I guessed that she’d spent some of it dwelling on the fact that my actions had also cost innocent lives over the years.
‘Yes, Philby’s out,’ I said lightly, trying to break the tension. ‘They summoned him to the bunker before me, and by all accounts he’s still loyal to the cause. He’d hand us straight over to Yuri and Sasha, and probably take pleasure in doing it.’
I stopped, struck by a stray thought: Philby wasn’t the only other double in Moscow.
‘Maclean,’ I said.
‘Donald Maclean? Surely he’s just as loyal to the Soviets as Philby?’
‘I’m not so sure.’
I’d never met Maclean, but in many ways felt I knew him. The first I’d heard of him had been back in 1950, shortly after my arrival in Istanbul: an acquaintance at the Foreign Office had gleefully told me that the head of Chancery in Cairo and a few of his friends had got blind drunk and wrecked the flat of two girls who worked at the American embassy. That had been Maclean, the son of a distinguished Liberal MP, who had gone on to have a nervous breakdown before suddenly disappearing the following year with fellow diplomat Guy Burgess. The word had quickly travelled around the Station that both men were Soviet agents who, on the brink of being arrested by Five, had fled to Moscow.
Burgess and Maclean’s vanishing act had been my first indication that I might not be the only Soviet agent within the British establishment. The idea had both terrified and comforted me. Terrified, because their exposure could mean mine was next: I hadn’t known about them, but what if there were other doubles who knew about me? And if another double were caught by Five before fleeing the country, they might reveal what they knew under lights. But it was comforting in its way, too, because it meant I wasn’t alone in the world, and that others were treading the same path.
As the years had gone by I’d felt the noose slowly tighten around my neck as it had become clear that, far from being alone, I was in fact one of several long-term agents the Soviets had succeeded in recruiting in Britain, all of whom either had access to or were part of the upper echelons of intelligence and policy-making. In ’61, George Blake, a former SOE officer who had been the Service’s Head of Station in Seoul, had confessed to being a Soviet agent. The following year, John Vassall, a private secretary to a Conservative minister, had admitted to passing secrets to the KGB ever since they had photographed him in compromising positions with other men. In ’63, Kim Philby, at one point Head of Soviet Section and seen by many as a possible Chief, had defected to Moscow, which had been followed by the unmasking of Anthony Blunt, who had been a senior officer in Five. In ’67, the Labour MP Bernard Floud had killed himself after being interrogated by Five – some in the Service thought he’d done so because he had been presented with evidence that he had been a Soviet agent. And finally, in March of 1969, a defector in Nigeria had put paid to my peaceful life in London, and here I was as a direct result.
‘I always wondered if I would be able to defect,’ I said to Sarah. ‘Even when I thought I was working for the right side, something about heading to Moscow filled me with dread.’
‘I can’t imagine why!’ she said, and looked purposefully out of the window at the wind whipping at the tree stumps.
I smiled, despite myself. ‘Indeed. But before I had the pleasure of finding out for myself, I was very interested in what the defectors made of life out here. As Head of Soviet Section, I made sure I had access to all their letters back to England.’
Her forehead puckered. ‘Didn’t you realize that these men were hardly likely to paint a very accurate picture? The Russians would also have been monitoring what they wrote.’
‘Yes, of course I knew that. I also felt they would probably put a positive angle on their experiences anyway. Nobody likes to contemplate the idea that all their work has been for nought.’ I smiled grimly. ‘It’s not a pleasant realization. I thought they would try to convince themselves they were right all along, and fit the facts to their case. I knew all that, but I still paid close attention to their letters.’
In fact, it had been more like an obsession. Burgess had died of liver failure in ’63, but Philby, Blake and Maclean were all alive and kicking, and continued correspondences with friends and family in Britain. I’d followed all their careers keenly, which hadn’t been hard to do: the Station had spent an enormous amount of energy trying to determine what they were up to. The Americans had even concocted a plan to assassinate Maclean in the National restaurant in Moscow, but it had never materialized.
Of all the doubles, Maclean had always intrigued me the most. Blake, Burgess and Philby all seemed like adventurers in some way, turned on by the thrill of secrecy and deceit. But Maclean had always seemed to be at one remove: a traitor, yes, and according to many who’d known him, an arrogant prig and violent drunkard to boot. But I had studied his case in depth, and felt sure there was more to him.
Back in ’58, Time had run an article on him and his American wife Melinda, in which they had been interviewed in their Moscow flat, where they lived under the names Mark and Natasha Frazer. Soviet Section had dissected every sentence of this article in a series of memoranda. Many of the memos had contained fanciful speculation as to what ‘message’ Maclean and the KGB had been trying to send in the interview, as well as a level of satisfaction that he appeared to be stuck in a dead-end job with marital difficulties and a drinking problem, having lost his wife to Philby and cut off relations with Burgess. But nobody could have given the piece the level of scrutiny I did.
The article made for depressing reading, and filled me with a resolve not to end up in the Soviet Union if I could help it. I’d missed my next meet with Sasha after reading it, and with the benefit of hindsight recognized that the article spelled the beginning of a secret inner realization that I was no longer the believer I’d claimed to be when I had sought out Yuri in 1945 and volunteered to serve the Soviet Union – and that perhaps I had never truly been one.
‘And something in Maclean’s letters makes you think we can approach him now?’ said Sarah.
I nodded. ‘Prague. After Moscow invaded last spring, I paid even closer attention to the defectors’ letters. I wanted to see if it had weakened their resolve at all. Philby appeared completely unrepentant about it, and Blake’s letters steered clear of politics. But there was something odd about Maclean’s reaction. Back in ’56, he sent letters to friends defending the actions in Hungary. I’d actually been comforted by his rhetoric. But his letters about Prague were different: reading between the lines, it seemed to me he thought the whole thing had been an outrage on the Soviets’ part.’
‘That’s not enough to approach him,’ she said. ‘What if you read wrong? He’ll just turn us straight over—’
‘There’s more. For the last few years, Maclean has worked as an editor at International Affairs, which is the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s journal. That’s really a seal of approval from the big boys in the KGB. Moscow Station sends the journal to London in the diplomatic bag every month, and I used to read the bloody thing from cover to cover. Maclean writes articles on foreign policy under a pseudonym, but in the last couple of years his veneer of Party dogma has slipped. Obviously, there’s only so much you can say in such a journal, but my impression is that although he’s still a firm Communist, he’s bitterly opposed to Brezhnev’s gang. On top of that, various reports have trickled in over the last couple of years claiming that, unknown to the KGB, he has been frequenting intellectual circles, and perhaps even visited the homes of suspected dissidents.’
I listened to the sound of the radiator humming beside me.
‘Perhaps we should try Andropov’s dacha,’ she said. ‘I hear he’s also visited suspected dissidents.’
‘Not the time for humour,’ I said. ‘I’m not sa
ying he’s another Sakharov, but faced with these documents, he might help us. Final point, and I hope this one will convince.’
‘Me, or you?’
‘Both. All the defectors keep very much to themselves, but occasionally they’re allowed to see a journalist or an old acquaintance. Maclean has had very few visitors from the West since he arrived, but those who have met him have given an increasingly strange picture. A couple of years ago, an old friend of his from Cambridge was due to come out here as part of some delegation. I got wind of it and invited him out to dinner a couple of weeks before, and discreetly suggested he try to renew the acquaintance. As soon as he got back, I took him out again, and over pheasant and port he told me he’d managed to meet Maclean for about an hour between meetings – and that it had been very odd. Maclean had generally steered clear of controversial topics, but at one point he’d suddenly asked this chap if he was “a sleeper they had never got round to waking up”.’
‘“They”, not “we”.’
‘Exactly. Maclean defected nearly twenty years ago, but still doesn’t identify himself completely with the Soviets.’
Silence again. It was slender, I knew: the friend could have been exaggerating, or not recalled the wording correctly. But we had to find a way out of this city.
‘Are you sure about this?’ she said. ‘If you’re wrong—’
‘Of course I’m not sure. But I think it’s a better bet than approaching strangers.’
She breathed in. ‘What about Yuri?’ she said. ‘He might suspect us of doing just this – Brits sticking together.’
‘I’d be surprised. We only just came up with the idea ourselves, and it’s hardly the most obvious move. And we know something about Maclean he doesn’t.’
‘All right. We need to find the journal’s offices, I suppose?’
‘Yes. There should be a map in the glove compartment.’
