The steamer pulled away from Westminster Pier precisely at three and began its leisurely journey downriver toward Greenwich. A crowd of Japanese tourists lined the rail, cameras clicking like subdued machine-gun fire to record the images of the Houses of Parliament slipping away.
As the boat neared midriver, a man in a light gray suit quietly rose and walked to the stern, where he stood at the rail gazing down into the churning wake. Minutes later another man, in a light summer raincoat, rose from a different bench and went to join him.
“How are things at the embassy?” asked McCready quietly.
“Not so good,” said Keepsake. “The fact of a major counterintelligence operation is confirmed. So far, only the behavior of my junior staff is being gone over. But intensively. When they have been cleared, the focus of search will move higher—toward me. I am covering tracks as best I can, but there are some things, losing entire files, that would do more harm than good.”
“How long do you think you’ve got?”
“A few weeks at most.”
“Be careful, my friend. Err on the side of caution. We absolutely do not want another Penkovsky.”
In the early 1960s, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the GRU worked for the British for two and a half brilliant years. Until then and for many years afterward, he had been by far the most valuable Soviet agent ever recruited, and the most damaging to the USSR. In his brief span he passed over more than five thousand top-secret documents, culminating in vital intelligence on the Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, information that enabled President Kennedy to play a masterly hand against Nikita Khrushchev. But he overstayed his time. When urged to come out, he insisted on staying for a few more weeks, was unmasked, interrogated, tried, and shot.
Keepsake smiled. “Don’t worry, no Penkovsky affair. Not again. And how are things with you?”
“Not good. We believe Orlov has denounced Calvin Bailey.”
Keepsake whistled. “That high. Well, well. Calvin Bailey himself. So he was the target of Project Potemkin. Sam, you must persuade them they are wrong, that Orlov is lying.”
“I can’t,” said McCready. “I’ve tried. They’ve got the bit between their teeth.”
“You must try again. There is a life at stake here.”
“You don’t really think—”
“Oh yes, old friend, I do,” said the Russian. “The DCI is a passionate man. I don’t think he can allow another major scandal, bigger than all the rest put together, at this stage in his President’s career. He will take the option of ensuring silence. Forever. But of course, it won’t work. He will think, if the act is done, that it will never get out. We know better, don’t we? The rumors will start quite soon because the KGB will ensure that they start. They are very good at that.
“Ironically, Orlov has already won. If Bailey is arrested and goes on trial, with hugely damaging publicity, he has won. If Bailey is silenced and the news gets out, CIA morale will hit an all-time low and he has won. If Bailey is expelled without pension, he will claim his innocence, and the controversy will roll for years. Again, Orlov will have won. You must dissuade them.”
“I have tried. They still think Orlov’s product is immensely valuable and pure. They believe him.”
The Russian stared at the foaming water beneath the stern as the Dockland Redevelopment Area, then still a mass of cranes and part-demolished derelict warehouses, slid past.
“Did I ever tell you of my ashtray theory?”
“No,” said McCready, “I don’t think you did.”
“When I taught at the KGB training school, I told my pupils that you take a cut-glass ashtray and smash it into three pieces. If you recover one piece, you know only that you have a piece of glass. If you recover two, you know you have two-thirds of an ashtray, but you cannot stub out your cigarette. To have the whole and usable article, you need all three pieces of the ashtray.”
“So?”
“So everything Orlov has provided only makes up one or two pieces of a whole range of ashtrays. He has never actually given the Americans a whole ashtray. Something really secret that the USSR has treasured for years and does not want to give away. Ask them to give Orlov an acid test. He will fail it. But when I come out, I will bring the whole ashtray. Then they will believe.”
McCready pondered. Finally he asked, “Would Orlov know the name of the Fifth Man?”
Keepsake thought it over. “Almost certainly, though I do not,” he said. “Orlov spent years in the Illegals Directorate. I never did. I was always PR-Line, operating out of embassies. We have both been in the Memory Room—it is a standard part of the training. But only he would have seen the Black Book. Yes, he will know the name.”
Deep in the heart of Number 2, Dzerzhinsky Square, headquarters of the KGB, lies the Memory Room, a kind of shrine in a godless building to commemorate the great precursors of the present generation of KGB officers. Among the revered portraits hanging there are those of Arnold Deutsch, Teodor Maly, Anatoli Gorsky, and Yuri Modin, successive recruiters and controllers of the most damaging spy ring ever recruited by the KGB among the British.
The recruitings took place mainly among a group of young students at Cambridge University in the mid- and late thirties. All had flirted with Communism, as had many others who later abandoned it. But five did not, and they went on to serve Moscow so brilliantly that to this day they are known there as the Magnificent Five, or the Five Stars.
One was Donald Maclean, who left Cambridge to join the Foreign Office. In the late forties he was in the British Embassy in Washington and was instrumental in passing to Moscow hundreds of the secrets of the new atomic bomb, which America was sharing with Britain.
Another in the Foreign Office was Guy Burgess, a chain-smoking drunk and rabid homosexual who somehow managed to avoid being dismissed for far too long. He acted as runner and go-between for Maclean and their Moscow masters. Both were finally blown in 1951, avoided arrest after a tip-off, and fled to Moscow.
A third was Anthony Blunt, also gay, a superb intellect and talent-spotter for Moscow. He moved on to exploit his other talent, for the history of art, and rose to become curator of the Queen’s personal art collection and a knight of the realm. It was he who tipped off Burgess and Maclean of their pending arrest in 1951. Having successfully brazened out a series of investigations, he was finally exposed, stripped of his title, and disgraced only in the 1980s.
The most successful of all was Kim Philby, who joined the SIS and rose to control the Soviet desk. The flight of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 pointed the finger at him, too; he was interrogated, admitted nothing, and was ousted from the Service, finally quitting for Moscow, from Beirut, only in 1963.
The portraits of all four hang in the Memory Room. But there was a fifth, and the fifth portrait is a black square. The real identity of the Fifth Man was to be found only in the Black Book. The reason was simple.
Confusing and demoralizing the opposition is one of the principal aims of covert war and was the reason behind the belated formation of the Deception, Disinformation, and Psychological Operations desk, which McCready now headed. Since the early fifties, the British had known that there was a Fifth Man in that ring recruited so long ago, but they could never prove just who it was. This was all grist for Moscow’s mill.
Over the years—thirty-five in all—and to Moscow’s delight, the enigma wracked British Intelligence, aided by a hungry press and a series of books.
Over a dozen loyal and long-serving officers came under suspicion and had their careers curbed and their lives torn apart. The principal suspect was the late Sir Roger Hollis, who rose to become Director General of MI-5. He became the target of another obsessive like James Angleton, Peter Wright, who went on to make a fortune from a book in which he trotted out his conviction that Roger Hollis was the Fifth Man.
Others were also suspected, including two of Hollis’s deputies and even the deeply patriotic Lord Victor Rothschild. It was all bunk, but the puzzle went on. Was the Fifth Man still alive—perhaps still in office, highly placed in the government, the civil service, or the intelligence community? If so, it would be disastrous. The matter could rest only when the Fifth Man, recruited all those years ago, was finally identified. The KGB, of course, had jealously guarded that secret for thirty-five years.
“Tell the Americans to ask Orlov for the name,” said Keepsake. “He will not give it to you. But I will find it out and bring it with me when I come over.”
“There is the question of time,” said McCready. “How long can you hang on?”
“Not more than a few more weeks—maybe less.”
“They may not wait, if you are right about the DCI’s reaction.”
“Is there no other way you can persuade them to stay their hand?” asked the Russian.
“There is. But I must have your permission.”
Keepsake listened for several minutes. Then he nodded.
“If this Roth will give his solemn, sworn word. And if you trust him to keep it. Then yes.”
When Joe Roth stepped out of the airport terminal the next morning, having flown through the night from Washington, he was jet-lagged and not in the best of moods.
This time he had drunk heavily on the plane, and as he reached the door, he was not amused that a caricature of an Irish voice spoke in his ear.
“Top of the morning to you, Mr. Casey, and welcome back again.”
He turned. It was Sam McCready at his elbow. The bastard had evidently known about his “Casey” passport all along and had checked passenger lists at the Washington end to be sure to meet the right plane.
“Jump in,” said McCready when they reached the pavement. “I’ll give you a lift to Mayfair.”
Roth shrugged. Why not? He wondered what else McCready knew, or had guessed. The British agent kept the conversation to small talk until they entered London’s outskirts. When the serious stuff came, it was without warning.
“What was the DCI’s reaction?” he asked.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Come on, Joe. Orlov has denounced Calvin Bailey. It’s horseshit. You’re not taking it seriously, are you?”
“You’re way offline, Sam.”
“We’ve had a note at Century: “Keep Bailey away from all classified material.” So we know he’s under suspicion. You’re saying it’s not because Orlov has accused him of being a Soviet agent?”
“It’s just routine, for Christ’s sake. Something about his having too many girlfriends.”
“My arse,” said McCready. “Calvin may be many things, but a philanderer he ain’t. Try another one.”
“Don’t push me, Sam. Don’t push our friendship too far. I told you before—this is Company business now. Back off.”
“Joe, for God’s sake. It’s already gone too far. It’s got out of hand. Orlov’s lying to you, and I fear you are going to do something terrible.”
Joe Roth lost his temper. “Stop the car,” he shouted. “Stop the goddamned car!”
McCready swerved the Jaguar into the curb. Roth reached into the back for his suitcase and unlatched his door. McCready grabbed his arm.
“Joe, tomorrow, two-thirty. I have something to show you. Pick you up outside your apartment block at two-thirty.”
“Get lost,” said the American.
“A few minutes of your time. Is that too much to ask? For the old times, Joe—for all the old times.”
Roth stepped out of the car and swung away down the pavement looking for a cab.
But he was there, on the pavement outside his apartment block, at half-past two the next day. McCready waited in the Jaguar until Roth climbed in and drove without saying a word. His friend was still angry and suspicious. The journey was less than half a mile. Roth thought he was being driven to his own embassy, so close did they come to Grosvenor Square, but McCready stopped in Mount Street, a block away.
Halfway down Mount Street is one of London’s finest fish restaurants, Scott’s. At three precisely, a trim man in a pale gray suit stepped out of the doors and paused just clear of the portico. A black limousine from the Soviet Embassy eased down the street to pick him up.
“You asked me twice if we had an asset in the KGB in Moscow,” said McCready quietly. “I denied it. I was not entirely lying. He’s not in Moscow—he’s here in London. You’re looking at him.”
“I don’t believe what I’m seeing,” whispered Roth. “That’s Nikolai Gorodov. He’s the head of the whole goddam KGB Rezidentura in Britain.”
“In the flesh. And he works for us, has done for four years. You’ve had all his product, source disguised, but pure. And he says Orlov is lying.”
“Prove it,” said Roth. “You’re always telling Orlov to prove it. Now you prove it. Prove he’s really yours.”
“If Gorodov scratches his left ear with his right hand before he gets into the car, he’s our man,” said McCready.
The black limousine was abreast of the portico. Gorodov never glanced toward the Jaguar. He just raised his right hand, reached across his chest, tugged at his left earlobe, and climbed in. The embassy car purred away.
Roth leaned forward and buried his face in his hands. He breathed deeply several times, then raised his face.
“I have to tell the DCI,” he said. “Personally. I can fly back.”
“No deal,” said McCready. “I have given Gorodov my word, and ten minutes ago you gave me yours.”
“I have to tell the DCI. Otherwise, the die is cast. There’s no going back now.”
“Then delay. You can get other proof, or at least grounds for delay. I want to tell you about the ashtray theory.”
He told Roth what Keepsake had told him on the river steamer two days earlier.
“Ask Orlov for the name of the Fifth Man. He knows, but he will not tell you. But Keepsake will get it and bring it with him when he comes over.”
“When is that to be?”
“Soon now. A few weeks at most. Moscow is suspicious. The net is closing.”
“One week,” said Roth. “Bailey leaves for Salzburg and Vienna in one week. He must not reach Vienna. The DCI thinks he’s going to slip into Hungary.”
“Have him recalled as a matter of urgency. Have him recalled to Washington. If he obeys, that merits a further delay. If he refuses, I’ll throw in the towel.”
Roth considered the proposition. “I’ll try it,” he said. “First I’m going to Alconbury. Tomorrow, when I get back, if Orlov has refused to name the Fifth Man, I’ll send a cable to the DCI saying the Brits have produced fresh evidence that Orlov may be lying and asking for Bailey’s instant recall to Langley. As a test. I think the DCI will grant that, at least. It will cause a delay of several weeks.”
“Enough, old friend,” said McCready. “More than enough. Keepsake will have come across by then, and we can all level with the DCI. Trust me.”
Roth was at Alconbury just after sundown. He found Orlov in his room, lying on his bed, reading and listening to music. He had exhausted Simon and Garfunkel—Kroll said the bodyguard team had memorized nearly every word of the twenty top hits—and had passed on to the Seekers. He switched off “Morningtown” as Roth entered and jackknifed off the bed with a grin.
“We go back to the States?” he asked. “I am bored here. The Ranch was better, despite the risks.”
He had put on weight from the lying around without a chance of exercise. His reference to the Ranch was a joke. For a while, after the dummy assassination attempt, Roth had kept up the pretense that it was a KGB project, and that Moscow must have learned details of the Ranch from Urchenko, who had been debriefed there before he foolishly went back to the KGB. Then he had admitted to Orlov that it had all been a CIA ploy to test the Russian’s reactions. Orlov had been angry at first—“You bastards, I thought I was going to die,” he had yelled—but later he had begun to laugh at the incident.
“Soon,” said Roth. “Soon we will be finished here.”
He dined with Orlov that night and put to him the notion of the Memory Room in Moscow.
Orlov nodded. “Sure, I have seen it. All inducted officers are taken there. To see the heroes and admire them.”
Roth steered the conversation to the portraits of the Magnificent Five.
Chewing on a mouthful of steak, Orlov shook his head. “Four,” he said. “Only four pictures. Burgess, Philby, Maclean, and Blunt. Four Stars.”
“But there’s a fifth frame, with just black paper in it?” suggested Roth.
Orlov was chewing much more slowly. “Yes,” he admitted as he swallowed. “A frame, but no picture.”
“So there was a Fifth Man?”
“Apparently.”
Roth’s conversational tone did not vary, but he watched Orlov over the top of his fork.
“But you were a full major in the Illegals Directorate. You must have seen the name in the Black Book.”
Something flickered in Orlov’s eyes. “They never showed me any Black Book,” he said evenly.
“Peter, who was the Fifth Man? His name, please.”
“I do not know, my friend. I swear that to you.” He smiled again, his wide and attractive grin. “You want me to take the lie detector on it?”
Roth smiled back, but he thought, No, Peter, I rather think you can beat the lie detector—when you want to. He resolved to return to London in the morning and send his cable asking for a delay and a recall of Bailey to Washington—as a test. If there was one tiny element of doubt—and despite Kellogg’s pulverizing case, he now entertained an element of doubt—Roth would not carry out the order, not even for the DCI and his own flowering career. Some prices were just too high.
* * *
The following morning, the cleaners came in to the Alconbury quarters. These were local Huntingdon ladies, the same as those used by the rest of the base. Each had been security-cleared and given a pass to enter the cordoned area. Roth was eating breakfast opposite Orlov in the mess hall, trying to talk above the noise of a rotary floor-buffer polishing the corridor outside. The insistent hum of the machine went up and down as the buffing head swirled around and around.
Orlov wiped the coffee from his lips, mentioned that he needed to go to the men’s room, and left. In later life, Roth would never again mock the notion of a sixth sense. Seconds after Orlov had left, Roth noticed a change in the tone of the buffing machine. He walked out into the corridor to look at it. The buffer stood alone, its brushes turning, its motor emitting a single, high whine.
He had seen the cleaner when he went in for breakfast—a thin lady in print overalls, curlers in her hair, and a scarf wrapped over them. She had stepped aside to let him pass, then continued with her drudgery without raising her eyes. Now she was gone. At the end of the corridor, the men’s room door was still swinging gently.
Roth yelled, “Kroll!” at the top of his voice and raced down the corridor. She was on her knees in the middle of the men’s room floor, her plastic bucket of cleaning fluids and dusters spilled around her. In her hand she had the silenced Sig Sauer that the dusters had hidden. From the far end of the room, a cubicle door opened, and Orlov stepped out. The kneeling assassin raised the gun.
Roth did not speak Russian, but he knew a few words. He yelled “Stoi!” at the top of his voice.
She turned on her knees, Roth threw himself to the floor, there was a low phut, and Roth felt the shock waves near his head. He was still on the tiles when there was a crashing boom from behind him, and he felt more waves of reverberation beating around him. An enclosed toilet is no place to loose off a .44 Magnum.
Behind him, Kroll stood in the doorway, his Colt gripped two-handed. There was no need for a second shot. The woman lay on her back on the tiles, a blooming red stain vying with the roses on her overalls. Later, they would discover the real charlady bound and gagged at her home in Huntingdon.
Orlov still stood by the door of the cubicle, white-faced.
“More games!” he shouted. “It is enough of CIA games!”
“No games,” said Roth as he eased himself up. “This was no game. This was the KGB.”
Orlov looked again and saw that the dark red pool spreading across the tiles was not Hollywood makeup. Not this time.
It took Roth two hours to secure Orlov and the rest of the team a fast passage back to America and to secure their immediate transfer to the Ranch. Orlov left gladly, taking his precious collection of ballads with him. When the Air Force transport lifted off for the States, Roth took his car and headed back to London. He was deeply and bitterly angry.
In part, he blamed himself. He should have realized that after the exposure of Bailey, Alconbury could no longer be considered a safe haven for Orlov. But he had been so busy with McCready’s intervention, it had slipped his mind. Everyone is fallible. Had it been anyone but McCready, Roth would have been a hundred-percent convinced that the Brits were wrong and that Orlov was telling the truth, but because it was McCready, Roth was still prepared to concede to his friend a five-percent chance that he was right and that Bailey was straight.
But the ball now lay firmly in McCready’s court. He wondered why Bailey had not tipped off Moscow to arrange the assassination of Orlov sooner, before the KGB colonel had had a chance to name him. Perhaps he had hoped Orlov would not name him, did not have that information. It was Bailey’s mistake. Everyone is fallible.
Roth drove to the American Embassy. There was only one thing to do to back the claim that Gorodov was a real defector and Orlov a phony, and therefore Bailey was in the clear, an innocent man wrongly but cunningly set up. McCready would have to pull Gorodov out now so that Langley could talk to the man directly and sort it out once and for all. He went to his desk to make the call to McCready in Century House.
His head of station passed him in the corridor before he reached his desk.
“Oh, by the way,” said Bill Carver. “Something just came in, courtesy of Century. Seems our friends in Kensington Palace Gardens are moving things around. Their Rezident, Gorodov, flew back to Moscow this morning. It’s on your desk.”
Roth did not make the call to McCready. He sat at his desk. He was stunned. He was also vindicated—he and his DCI and his Agency, He even found it in his heart to be sorry for McCready. To have been so wrong, to have been so thoroughly duped for four years, must be a devastating blow. As for himself, he was relieved in a strange sort of way, despite what must now lie ahead. He had no more doubts now, not a shred. The two events of a single morning had swept his last doubts away. The DCI was right. What had to be done had to be done.
He was still sorry for McCready. Down at Century they must be pulling him apart, he thought.
They were—or rather, Timothy Edwards was.
“I’m sorry to have to say this, Sam, but it’s an utter bloody fiasco. I’ve just had a word with the Chief, and the received wisdom is that we may now seriously have to contemplate the notion that Keepsake was a Soviet plant all along.”
“He wasn’t,” said McCready flatly,
“So you say, but the present evidence points to the clear possibility that our American Cousins have got it right and we’ve been duped. Do you know what the perspectives of that are?”
“I can guess.”
“We’ll have to rethink, reevaluate every damned thing Keepsake gave us over four years. It’s a massive task. Worse, the Cousins shared it all, so we’ll have to tell them to rethink as well. The damage assessment will take years. Apart from that, it’s a major embarrassment. The Chief is not pleased.”
Sam sighed. It was ever thus. When Keepsake’s product was flavor-of-the-month, running him was a Service operation. Now it was entirely the Deceiver’s fault.
“Did he give you any indication that he intended to return to Moscow?”
“No.”
“When was he due to quit and come across to us?”
“Two, three weeks,” said McCready. “He was going to let me know when his situation had become hopeless, then jump the fence.”
“Well, he hasn’t. He’s gone home. Presumably voluntarily. Port Watch report that he passed through Heathrow without any coercion. We have to assume now that Moscow is his real home.
“And then there’s this damned Alconbury business. What on earth could have possessed you? You said it was a test. Well, Orlov has passed it with flying colors. The bastards tried to kill him. We’re extremely lucky no one’s dead but the assassin. That’s one thing we cannot tell the Cousins, ever. Bury it.”
“I still don’t believe Keepsake was ‘bent.’ ”
“Why ever not? He’s gone back to Moscow.”
“Possibly to get one last suitcase of documents for us.”
“Damned dangerous. He must be crazy. In his position—”
“True. A mistake, perhaps. But he’s like that. He promised years ago to bring back one last big consignment before he came over. I think he’s gone back for it.”
“Any evidence for this remarkable leap of faith?”
“Gut feeling.”
“Gut feeling!” expostulated Edwards. “We can’t achieve anything on gut feeling.”
“Columbus did. Mind if I see the Chief?”
“Appeal to Caesar, eh? You’re welcome. I don’t think you’ll get any change.”
But McCready did. Sir Christopher listened to his proposal carefully, then asked, “And supposing he’s loyal to Moscow after all?”
“Then I’ll know within seconds.”
“They could pick you up,” said the Chief.
“I don’t think so. Mr. Gorbachev doesn’t seem to want a diplomatic war at the moment.”
“He won’t get one,” said the Chief flatly. “Sam, you and I go back a long way. Back to the Balkans, the Cuban missile crisis, the first days of the Berlin Wall. You were damned good then, and you still are. But Sam, I may have made a mistake in bringing you into the Head Office. This is a job for a field team.”
“Keepsake won’t trust anyone else. You know that.”
The Chief sighed. “True. If anyone goes, you go. Is that it?”
“ ’Fraid so.”
The Chief thought it over for a moment. To lose Keepsake would be a devastating blow. If there was a tenth of a chance that McCready was right and Gorodov was not a plant after all, the Service should try to pull him out of there. But the political fallout of a major scandal—the Deceiver caught red-handed in Moscow—would ruin him. He sighed and turned from the window.
“All right. Sam. You can go. But you go alone. As of now, I have never heard of you. You are on your own.”
McCready prepared to go on those terms. He just hoped Mr. Gorbachev did not know them. It took him three days to make his plans.
On the second day, Joe Roth rang Calvin Bailey.
“Calvin, I’ve just come back from Alconbury. I think we should talk.”
“Sure, Joe, come on over.”
“Actually, there’s no great hurry. Why don’t you let me offer you dinner tomorrow night?”
“Ah, well now, that’s a nice thought, Joe. But Gwen and I have a pretty full schedule. I had lunch at the House of Lords today.”
“Really?”
“Yep. With the Chief of Defense Staff.”
Roth was amazed. At Langley, Bailey was chilly, distant, and skeptical. Let him loose in London, and he was like a child in a candy store. Why not? In six days, he’d be safely across the border in Budapest.
“Calvin, I know this marvelous old inn up the Thames at Eton. Serves wonderful seafood. They say Henry VIII used to have Anne Boleyn rowed up the river for secret meetings with her there.”
“Really? That old? Okay, look, Joe, tomorrow night we’re at Covent Garden. Thursday is clear.”
“Right. Thursday, Calvin. You’ve got it. I’ll be outside your apartment at eight. Thursday it is.”
The following day, Sam McCready completed his arrangements and slept what might turn out to be his last night in London.
On Thursday, three men entered Moscow on different flights. The first in was Rabbi Birnbaum. He arrived from Zurich by Swissair. The passport control officer at Scheremetyevo was from the KGB’s Border Guards Directorate, a young man with corn-blond hair and chill blue eyes. He gazed at the rabbi at length, then turned his attention to the passport. It was American, denoting the holder to be one Norman Birnbaum, age fifty-six.
Had the passport officer been older, he would have recalled the days when Moscow and indeed all Russia had many Orthodox Jews who looked like Rabbi Birnbaum. The rabbi was a stout man in a black suit with a white shirt and black tie. He wore a full gray beard and moustache. On his face, topped by a black homburg, his eyes were masked by lenses so thick, the pupils blurred as the man peered to see. Twisted gray ringlets hung from beneath his hatband down each side of his face. The face in the passport was exactly the same, but without the hat.
The visa was in order, issued by the Soviet Consulate General in New York.
The officer looked up again. “The purpose of your visit to Moscow?”
“I want to visit my son for a short stay. He works at the American Embassy here.”
“Moment, please,” said the officer. He rose and retired. Behind a glass door he could be seen consulting with a senior officer who studied the passport. Orthodox rabbis were rare in a country where the last rabbinical school had been abolished decades earlier. The junior officer returned.
“Wait, please.” He gestured for the next in line to approach.
Phone calls were made. Someone in Moscow consulted a diplomatic list. The senior officer returned with the passport and whispered to the junior. Apparently there was a Roger Birnbaum listed at the Economic Section of the U.S. Embassy. The diplomatic list did not record, however, that Roger Birnbaum’s real father had retired to Florida and had last been to synagogue for his son’s bar mitzvah twenty years earlier. The rabbi was waved through.
They still checked his suitcase at customs. It contained the usual changes of shirt, socks, and shorts, another black suit, a washkit, and a copy of the Talmud in Hebrew. The customs officer flicked through it uncomprehendingly. Then he let the rabbi go.
Rabbi Birnbaum took the Aeroflot coach into central Moscow, drawing several curious or amused glances all the way. From the terminus building, he walked to the National Hotel on Manezh Square, entered the men’s room, used the urinal until the only other occupant left, and slipped into a cubicle.
The spirit gum solvent was located in his cologne flask. When he emerged, he was still in a dark jacket, but the reversible trousers were now medium gray. The hat was inside the suitcase, along with the bushy eyebrows, the beard and moustache, and the shirt and tie. His hair, instead of gray, was chestnut brown, and his torso was covered by a canary yellow polo-neck sweater that had been under his shirt. He left the hotel unnoticed, took a cab, and was dropped at the gates of the British Embassy, on the embankment opposite the Kremlin.
Two militia from the MVD stood guard duty outside the gates, on Soviet territory, and asked for his identification. He showed them his British passport and simpered at the young guard as it was examined. The young militiaman was embarrassed and handed it quickly back. Irritably, he gestured the gay Englishman into the grounds of his own embassy and raised his eyebrows expressively to his colleague as he did so. Seconds later, the Englishman disappeared through the doors.
In fact, Rabbi Birnbaum was neither a rabbi nor an American nor gay. His real name was David Thornton, and he was one of the best makeup artists in British films. The difference between makeup for the stage and that needed for films is that on stage the lights are fierce and the distance from the audience considerable. In films there are also lights, but the camera may have to work in tight close-up, a few inches from the face. Film makeup therefore has to be more subtle, more realistic.
David Thornton had worked for years at Pinewood Studios, where he was always in demand. He was also one of that corps of experts that the British Secret Intelligence Service seems amazingly able to draw upon when it needs one.
The second man to arrive in Moscow came direct from London by British Airways. He was Denis Gaunt, looking exactly like himself, save that his hair was gray and he looked fifteen years older than his real age. He had a slim attaché case chained discreetly to his left wrist, and he wore the blue tie bearing the motif of the greyhound, the sign of one of the Corps of Queen’s Messengers.
All countries have diplomatic couriers who spend their lives ferrying documents from embassy to embassy and back home. They are covered by the usages of the Treaty of Vienna as diplomatic personnel, and their luggage is not searched. Gaunt’s passport was in another name, but it was British and completely valid. He presented it and was waved through the formalities.
A Jaguar from the embassy met him, and he was taken at once to the embassy building, arriving there an hour after Thornton. He was then able to give Thornton all the tools of the makeup artist’s trade, which he had brought in his own suitcase.
The third to arrive was Sam McCready, on a Finnair flight from Helsinki. He, too, had a valid British passport in a false name, and he, too, was disguised. But in the heat of the aircraft, something had gone wrong.
His ginger wig had come slightly askew, and a wisp of darker hair showed from beneath it. The spirit gum that retained one corner of his equally ginger moustache seemed to have melted so that a fragment of the moustache had detached itself from his upper lip.
The passport officer stared at the picture in the passport and back at the man in front of him. The faces were the same—hair, moustache and all. There is nothing illegal about wearing a wig, even in Russia; many bald men do. But a moustache that comes unstuck? The passport officer, not the same one who had seen Rabbi Birnbaum—for Scheremetyevo is a big airport—also consulted a senior officer, who peered through a one-way mirror.
From behind the same mirror, a camera clicked several times, orders were given, and a number of men went from standby to full operation status. When McCready emerged from the concourse, two unmarked Moskvitch cars were waiting. He too was collected by a British Embassy car, of lower standing than a Jaguar, and was driven to the embassy, followed all the way by the two KGB vehicles, who reported back to their superiors in the Second Chief Directorate.
In the late afternoon the photos of the strange visitor arrived at Yazenevo, the headquarters of the KGB’s foreign intelligence arm, the First Chief Directorate. They ended up on the desk of the Deputy Head, General Vadim V. Kirpichenko. He stared at them, read the attached report about the wig and the corner of the moustache, and took them down to the photographic lab.
“See if you can remove the wig and moustache,” he ordered. The technicians went to work with the airbrush.
When General Kirpichenko saw the finished result, he almost laughed out loud. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “It’s Sam McCready.”
He informed the Second Chief Directorate that his own people would take over the tail forthwith. Then gave his orders: “Twenty-four hours in twenty-four. If he makes a contact, pick them both up. If he makes a collection from a drop, pick him up. If he farts in the direction of Lenin’s mausoleum, pick him up.”
He put down the phone and read again the details from McCready’s passport. He was supposed to be an electronics expert from London via Helsinki, come to sweep the embassy for listening devices, a regular chore.
“But what the hell are you really doing here?” he asked the picture staring up from his desk.
In the embassy on the embankment, McCready, Gaunt, and Thornton dined alone. The ambassador was not much pleased to have three such guests, but the request had come from the Cabinet Office, and he was assured that the disruption would last for only twenty-four hours. So far as His Excellency was concerned, the sooner these dreadful spooks were gone, the better.
“I hope it works,” said Gaunt over the coffee. “The Russians are extremely good at playing chess.”
“True,” said McCready soberly. “Tomorrow we’ll find out how good they are at the three-card trick.”