by Joseph Hone
‘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?’
&nbs
p; ‘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?’
