At precisely five minutes to eight on a warm July morning, an unmarked Austin Montego sedan eased out of the gates of Britain’s Moscow embassy and drove across the bridge over the Moskva toward the center of the city.
According to the KGB report, Sam McCready was at the wheel, driving alone. Although his ginger wig and moustache were now impeccably in place, they were clearly visible to the watchers behind the windshields of their several cars. Telephoto-lens pictures were taken at the time, and several more were secured during the course of the day.
The British agent drove carefully through Moscow and out to the Park of Technological Achievement to the north of the city. On the way he made several attempts to shake any tail he may have had, but he failed. Nor did he even spot the tail. The KGB was using six cars, each intercutting with the other so that no single car was ever behind the Montego for more than a few hundred yards.
After entering the enormous park, the SIS man left his car and proceeded on foot. Two of the KGB vehicles remained on station close to the parked Montego. The crews of the other four descended and fanned out between the scientific exhibits until the Englishman was enveloped on all sides by an invisible screen.
He bought an ice cream and sat for much of the morning on a bench pretending to read a newspaper, frequently glancing at his watch as if waiting for someone to show up. No one did, except an old lady who asked him for the time. He showed her his watch without a word, she read the time, thanked him, and walked on.
She was promptly taken into custody, searched, and questioned. By the following morning, the KGB had satisfied themselves that she was an old lady who wanted to know the time. The ice cream seller was also detained.
Shortly after twelve, the agent from London took a packet of sandwiches from his pocket and slowly ate them. When he had finished he rose, dropped the wrapping paper into a waste basket, bought another ice cream, and sat down again.
The trash basket was kept under observation, but no one retrieved the wrappers until the park’s hygiene team arrived with their cart to empty the basket. The wrappers were taken by the KGB and subjected to intensive forensic analysis. Tests included those for invisible writing, microdots, and microfilm secreted between two layers of paper. Nothing was found. Traces were in evidence, however, of bread, butter, cucumber, and egg.
Long before this, just after one P.M., the London agent had risen and left the park in his car. His first rendezvous had clearly aborted. He went, apparently to keep a second or backup rendezvous, to a hard-currency beriozka shop. Two KGB agents entered the shop and loitered among the shelves to see if the Englishman would deposit a message among the exclusive goods on offer there or pick one up. Had he made a purchase, he would have been arrested, as per orders, on the grounds that his purchase probably contained a message and that the shop was being used as a dead-letter box. But he made no purchases and was left alone.
On leaving the shop, he drove back to the British Embassy. Ten minutes later, he left again, now seated in the back of a Jaguar being driven by an embassy chauffeur. As the Jaguar left the city heading for the airport, the leader of the watcher team was patched straight through to General Kirpichenko.
“He is approaching the concourse now, Comrade General.”
“He has made no contact of any kind? Any kind at all?”
“No, Comrade General. Apart from the old lady and the ice cream seller—now both in custody—he has spoken to no one, nor has anyone spoken to him. His discarded newspaper and sandwich wrappers are in our possession. Otherwise, he has touched nothing.”
“It’s a mission-abort,” thought Kirpichenko. “He’ll be back. And we’ll be waiting.”
He knew that McCready, under the guise of a British Foreign Office technician, was carrying a diplomatic passport.
“Let him go,” he said. “Watch for a brush-pass inside the airport concourse. If there is none, see him through the departure lounge and into the aircraft.”
Later, the general would examine his team’s telephoto pictures of McCready in the Montego and at the park, call for a large microscope, look again, straighten up with a face pink with anger, and shout: “You stupid pricks, that’s not McCready.”
At ten past eight on the morning of the same day, a Jaguar driven by Barry Martins, the SIS Station Head in Moscow, left the embassy and drove sedately toward the old district of the Arbat where the streets are narrow and flanked by the elegant houses of long-gone prosperous merchants. A single Moskvitch took up the tail, but this was purely routine. The British referred to these KGB agents who followed them all over Moscow in one of life’s more boring chores as “the second eleven.” The Jaguar drove aimlessly around the Arbat. The man at the wheel occasionally pulled into the curb to consult a city map.
At twenty past eight a Mercedes sedan left the embassy. At the wheel, in a blue jacket and peaked cap, was an embassy chauffeur. No one looked in the rear, so no one saw another figure crouched low down near the floor and covered with a blanket. Another Moskvitch fell in behind.
Entering the Arbat district, the Mercedes passed the parked Jaguar. At this point Martins, still consulting his city map, made up his mind and swerved out from the curb, taking space between the Mercedes and the following Moskvitch. The convoy now constituted a Mercedes, a Jaguar, and two Moskvitches, all in line astern.
The Mercedes entered a narrow one-way street, followed by the Jaguar, which then developed engine trouble, coughed, spluttered, lurched, and came to a halt. The two Moskvitches piled up behind it, spilling out KGB agents. Martins flicked the hood release, climbed out, and raised the hood. He was at once surrounded by protesting men in leather jackets.
The Mercedes disappeared down the street and turned the corner. Amused Muscovites gathered on the narrow pavements to hear the Jaguar driver saying to the KGB team leader, “Now, look here, my good man. If you think you can make the bugger work, you go right ahead.”
Nothing entertains a Muscovite as much as the sight of the chekisti making a mess of things. One of the KGB men re-entered his car and got on the radio.
Clearing the Arbat, David Thornton, at the wheel of the Mercedes, took his guidance from Sam McCready, who emerged from his blanket and gave directions, without any disguise at all and looking precisely like himself.
Twenty minutes later, on a lonely road screened by trees in the middle of Gorki Park, the Mercedes halted. At the rear, McCready ripped off the CD plate, which was secured by a quick-release snaplock, and stuck a new license plate, prepared with strong adhesive on one side, over the British plate. Thornton did the same at the front. McCready retrieved Thornton’s makeup box from the trunk and climbed into the rear seat. Thornton swapped his hard blue peaked cap for a more Russian black leather cap and got back behind the wheel.
At eighteen minutes past nine, Colonel Nikolai Gorodov left his apartment in Shabolovsky Street on foot and began to walk toward Dzerdzinsky Square and the headquarters of the KGB. He looked haggard and pale; the reason soon appeared behind him. Two men emerged from a doorway and without a pretense of subtlety took station behind him.
He had gone two hundred yards when a black Mercedes drew to the curb beside him and kept pace. He heard the hiss of an electric window coming down, and a voice said in English, “Good morning, Colonel. Going my way?”
Gorodov stopped and stared. Framed in the window, shielded by the rear curtains from the two KGB men up the street, was Sam McCready. Gorodov was stunned, but not triumphant.
“That,” thought McCready, “is the look I wanted to see.”
Gorodov recovered and said loudly enough for the KGB ferrets to hear, “Thank you, Comrade. How kind.”
Then he entered the car, which sped away. The two KGB men paused for three seconds—and lost. The reason they paused was because the license plates of the Mercedes bore the letters MOC and then two figures.
The extremely exclusive MOC plates belong only to the members of the Central Committee, and it is a bold KGB footsoldier who dares stop or harass a Central Committee man. But they took the number and frantically used their hand communicators to tell the head office.
Martins had chosen well. The particular registration plates on that Mercedes belonged to a Politburo candidate member who happened to be in the Far East, somewhere near Khabarovsk. It took four hours to find him and learn that he had a Chaika, not a Mercedes, and that it was safely garaged in Moscow. By then it was too late; the Mercedes was back in its British Embassy livery, the Union Jack jauntily fluttering from its pennant-staff.
Gorodov leaned back in the seat, his bridges now completely burned behind him.
“If you are a long-term Soviet mole, I am dead,” remarked McCready.
Gorodov considered this. “And if you are a long-term Soviet mole,” he replied, “then I am dead.”
“Why did you return?” asked McCready.
“As it turned out, a mistake,” said Gorodov. “I had promised you something, and I found I could not discover it in London. When I give my word, I like to keep it. Then Moscow summoned me back for urgent consultations. To disobey would have meant coming over to the West immediately. No excuse would have been accepted for my not returning. I thought I could come for one week, find out what I needed, and be allowed to return to London. Only when I got here did I learn that it was too late. I was under deep suspicion, my apartment and office bugged, followed everywhere, forbidden to go out to Yazenevo, confined to meaningless work in Moscow Center. By the way, I have something for you.”
He opened his attaché case and passed McCready a slim file. There were five sheets in the file, each with a photograph and a name. The first picture had beneath it Donald Maclean, and the second Guy Burgess. Both moles were by then dead and buried in their adopted Moscow. The third sheet showed the familiar face and name of Kim Philby, who was then still alive in Moscow. The fourth had the thin, ascetic features and the name of Anthony Blunt, who was then disgraced in England. McCready turned to the fifth page.
The photo was very old. It showed a thin young man with wild wavy hair and large, owlish glasses. Beneath the photo were two words. John Cairncross. McCready leaned back and sighed.
“Bloody hell, him all along.”
He knew the name. Cairncross had been a senior civil servant during and after the war, senior despite his youth. He had served in a variety of capacities—private secretary to War Cabinet Minister Lord Hankey; in signals intelligence at Bletchly Park, in the Treasury and the War Office. He had had access to nuclear secrets in the late forties. In the early fifties he had come under suspicion, conceded nothing, and been eased out. Nothing could be proved, so he was allowed to move on to the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. By 1986, he was in retirement in France.
The Fifth Man. Keepsake had made good on his promise. The thirty-five-year hunt was over, and no more innocent men need be accused.
“Sam,” asked Gorodov mildly, “where exactly are we going?”
“My horoscope,” replied McCready, “says I am to travel west today. Yours, too.”
Thornton parked again in the trees of Gorki Park, changed places with one of the men in the rear, and went to work. The other man sat in the front pretending to be the chauffeur. No one would care to interfere with a Central Committee member’s limousine, even if they saw it. Senior Party members always shrouded the rear of their cars with inner curtains, and these were now drawn. Thornton worked on his client—he always referred to those he made up as his clients—by the sunlight that filtered through the curtains.
On went the thin, inflatable undervest to give the slimmer man the sturdy bulk of Rabbi Birnbaum. Then the white shirt, black trousers, tie, and jacket. Thornton affixed the rich gray beard and moustache, dyed the client’s hair to the same color, and appended the curling gray ringlets of the orthodox rabbi to his temples. With the addition of the black homburg and single handgrip, Rabbi Birnbaum had been recreated exactly as he had arrived the previous day—except that he was a different man. Finally, the car was changed back to a British Embassy vehicle.
The rabbi was dropped off at the entrance to the National Hotel, where he had a sustaining lunch, paid in U.S. dollars, and took a cab to the airport after lunch. He was booked on the afternoon flight to London, his ticket showing that he was connecting to New York.
Thornton drove the car back into the British Embassy compound with his other client crouched under the rug in the back. He went to work again almost at once, with an identical ginger wig and moustache, foundation creams, colorants, tinted contact lenses, and tooth stain. Ten minutes after Denis Gaunt, hot and itchy under the ginger wig he had worn all day for the benefit of the KGB, drove back in his Montego, the other man left for the airport in the Jaguar, driven by a real chauffeur. Within an hour Thornton, transformed into the Queen’s Messenger, was himself driven to Scheremetyevo by Barry Martins.
The rabbi drew the usual curious glances, but his papers were in order, and he was passed through the formalities in fifteen minutes and into the departure lounge. He sat and read his Talmud, occasionally murmuring prayers in an unintelligible mutter.
The man in the ginger wig and moustache was almost escorted to the door of the departure lounge, so numerous were the KGB team trying to ensure he neither passed nor received a message or package.
Last to arrive was the Queen’s Messenger, his attaché case chained to his left wrist. This time, Thornton’s precious workbox was in his own suitcase; he did not need anyone to carry it for him, as his case could not be searched.
Denis Gaunt remained inside the embassy. Three days later, he would be exfiltrated when another SIS man posing as a messenger would enter Moscow and pass Gaunt a passport in the same name as his own—Mason. At precisely the identical moment, two Masons would pass out through the controls at different points in the concourse, and British Airways would be briefed to board two Masons for the price of one.
But that afternoon the passengers for London were boarded on time, and the British Airways flight cleared Soviet air space at five-fifteen. Shortly after that, the rabbi lumbered to his feet and walked down to the smoking section, and said to the man in the ginger wig and moustache: “Nikolai, my friend, you are now in the West.”
Then Sam McCready bought champagne for them both, and for the Queen’s Messenger. The scam had worked because McCready had noticed that he, Gaunt, and Gorodov were all of the same height and build.
With the gain in time caused by flying west, they landed at Heathrow just after seven. A team from Century House, alerted by Martins from Moscow, was there to meet them. They were enveloped as they left the aircraft and spirited away.
As a concession, Timothy Edwards allowed McCready to take Nikolai Gorodov to his own apartment in Abingdon Villas for the evening.
“I’m afraid, Colonel, the real debriefing must start in the morning. A very agreeable country house has been prepared. You will want for nothing, I assure you.”
“Thank you. I understand,” said Gorodov.
It was just after ten that evening when Joe Roth arrived, summoned by a phone call from McCready. He found two SIS heavies in the hallway and two more in the corridor outside McCready’s modest flat, which surprised him.
McCready answered his ring on the doorbell, appearing in slacks and sweater, a glass of whiskey in his hand.
“Thanks for coming, Joe. Come on in. There’s someone I have wanted you to meet for a long time. You’ll never know how much.”
He led the way into the sitting room. The man at the window turned and smiled.
“Good evening, Mr. Roth,” said Gorodov. “Good to meet you at last.”
Roth stood as if paralyzed. Then he slumped into a chair and took McCready’s proffered whiskey. Gorodov seated himself opposite Roth.
“You’d better tell it,” said McCready to the Russian. “You know it better than I.”
The Russian sipped his drink as he pondered where to begin.
“Project Potemkin started eight years ago,” he said. “The original idea came from a junior officer, but General Drozdov took it up personally. It became his personal baby. The aim was to denounce a senior CIA officer as a Soviet plant, but in a manner so convincing and with such a wealth of apparently fireproof evidence that no one could reasonably not be taken in.
“The long-term aim was to sow years of feuding inside the Agency and thus destroy morale among the staff for a decade and wreck the relationship with the SIS in Britain.
“At first, no particular officer was the target, but after half a dozen were considered, the choice fell on Calvin Bailey. There were two reasons for this. One was that we knew he was not a much-liked man inside the Agency because of his personal manner. The second was that he had served in Vietnam, a suitable place for a possible recruitment.
“Calvin Bailey was spotted as a CIA agent in Vietnam purely as routine. You know we all try to identify each other’s staffers, and when we do, their movements and progress up the promotions ladder are carefully noted. Sometimes a lack of promotion may sow resentment, which can be exploited by a cunning recruiter. Well, this you know—we all do it.
“Also like the CIA, the KGB throws nothing away. Every tiny scrap of information, every fragment, is carefully kept and stored. Drozdov’s breakthrough came when he was once again examining the material that came to us from the Vietnamese after the final fall of Saigon in 1975. Most of your papers were burned, but in the confusion some survived. One mentioned a certain Nguyen Van Troc, who had worked for the Americans.
“That paper was the end for Van Troc. He and his cousin were picked up—they had not managed to escape. The cousin was executed, but Van Troc, although brutally interrogated for many months, was finally sent to a North Vietnamese slave labor camp. That was where Drozdov found him, still alive in 1980. Under torture, he confessed he had worked for Calvin Bailey inside the Viet Cong.
“The Hanoi government agreed to cooperate, and the photo session was set up. Van Troc was taken from the camp, fattened on good food, and dressed in the uniform of a colonel of Hanoi’s intelligence arm. The photos were taken of him enjoying tea with other officers just after the invasion of Cambodia. Three separate tea-servers were used, all Hanoi agents, and then sent to the West with their photos. After that, Van Troc was liquidated.
“One of the stewards posed as a boat-person and showed his proud possession to any British officer in Hong Kong who would look at it. Finally, it was confiscated and sent to London—as planned.”
“We sent a copy to Langley,” said McCready, “just as a courtesy. It seemed to have no value.”
“Drozdov already knew Bailey had been involved in the Phoenix Program,” Gorodov resumed. “He had been spotted by our Rezident in Saigon, a man posing as a Swedish importer of liquor for the foreign community. And Drozdov learned that Bailey had been at My Lai when Bailey gave evidence at the court-martial of that young officer. You are very open with your public records in America. The KGB scours them avidly.
“Anyway, it seemed that a likely scenario for a change of allegiance in Bailey had been established. His 1970 visit to Tokyo had been noticed and noted—purely routine. Drozdov only had to brief Orlov to say that he, Drozdov himself, had been in Tokyo on a certain date to take over the running of an America CIA renegade, and when you checked—presto—the same dates. Of course, Drozdov was not there at all in 1970. That was added later.
“From that point on, the case against Bailey was built up, brick by brick. Pyotr Orlov was chosen as the disinformation agent about 1981; he has been in training and rehearsal ever since. Urchenko, when he foolishly came back and before he died, provided valuable information on exactly how you Americans treat defectors. Orlov could prepare himself to avoid the traps, beat the polygraph, and always tell you what you wanted to hear. Not too much, but enough that when you checked it out, it fit.
“After Drozdov picked Bailey as the victim, Bailey went under intensive scrutiny. Wherever he went, it was noted. After he rose in rank and began to travel to Europe and elsewhere to visit the out-stations, the bank accounts began. Bailey would be spotted in a European city, and immediately a bank account would be opened, always in a name he might choose, like that of his wife’s married sister or his maternal grandmother.
“Drozdov prepared an actor, a dead ringer for Bailey, to fly at a moment’s notice to open these accounts so that the bank teller would later recognize Bailey as the client. Later, large sums were deposited in these accounts, always in cash and always by a man with a strong Central European accent.
“Information learned from a variety of sources—loose talk, radio intercepts, phone taps, technical publications (and some of your American technical publications are incredibly open)—was attributed to Bailey. Even conversations in your own embassy in Moscow are tapped—did you know that? No? Well, more of that later.
“What Drozdov did was change the dates. Pieces of secret intelligence that we did not learn until the early eighties were, according to Orlov, acquired in the mid-seventies and attributed to Calvin Bailey. All lies, but cunning. And of course, Orlov memorized it all.
“Triumphs secured by the KGB against the CIA were attributed to Bailey. CIA operations that went sour were attributed to Bailey. And always the dates were changed so that it looked as if we had found out earlier than we possibly could have—without a CIA traitor, that is.
“But two years ago, Drozdov still lacked something. He needed inside-Langley gossip, nicknames known only inside the building—your own professional name of Hayes, Mr. Roth. Then Edward Howard defected to Russia, and Drozdov had it all. He could even name hitherto unknown successes secured by Bailey and rehearse Orlov to say they had been permitted by the KGB to secure the promotion of their agent, Sparrowhawk. Of course, these successes were not permitted by Moscow—they were hard won by Bailey.
“Finally, Orlov was allowed to come over, in a manner so bizarre that he could later claim he feared he would be stopped and betrayed by Sparrowhawk if he did it any other way. For the same reason, he had to go to the Americans, not the British. The British would have questioned him about other things.
“Then he came and denounced two KGB agents just before they were liquidated. It was all pretimed. But it looked as if there were a leak in Washington, feeding his debriefing details back to Moscow. When the customer was ready for the bait, he finally came clean with news of a Soviet mole high in the CIA. No?”
Roth nodded. He looked haggard. “That assassination attempt against Orlov at Alconbury. Why?” he asked.
“That was Drozdov overinsuring. He did not know about me, of course. He just wanted to pile on a bit more evidence. The killer was one of the best—a very dangerous lady. She was briefed to wound, not kill, then make her escape.”
There was silence in the room. Joe Roth stared at his drink. Then he rose. “I must go,” he said shortly.
McCready accompanied him out into the passage and down the stairs. In the hall he clapped the American on the back.
“Cheer up, Joe. Hell, everyone in this game makes mistakes. My Firm has made some real beauties in the past. Look on the bright side. You can go back to the embassy and cable the DCI that everything’s worked out. Bailey’s in the clear.”
“I think I’ll fly back and tell him myself,” muttered Roth, and left.
McCready escorted him to the door of the building, puzzled by his friend’s silence. When he returned to the door of his apartment, the two bodyguards parted to let him through and closed it after him. In the sitting room, he found Gorodov sitting staring at a copy of the Evening Standard that he had been glancing through while he waited. Without a word, he flicked it across the table and pointed to a series of paragraphs on page five.
Police divers today recovered the body of an American tourist from the Thames at Teddington Lock. According to an official spokesman, the body Is believed to have entered the water somewhere near Eton yesterday evening. The dead man has been identified as one Calvin Bailey, an American civil servant on holiday in London.
According to the U.S. Embassy, Mr. Bailey had been to dinner at Eton with a friend, a Second Secretary at the embassy. After dinner, Mr. Bailey felt faint and left to take a turn in the fresh air. His friend stayed to settle the bill. When he went out to rejoin Mr. Bailey, he could not find him. After waiting for an hour he assumed Mr. Bailey had decided to return to London alone. When a phone call proved this was not so, the friend consulted Eton police. A search was made of the town in the darkness, but without result.
This morning a police spokesman at Eton said it appeared Mr. Bailey had taken a stroll along the tow-path and, in the darkness, had slipped and fallen in. Mr. Bailey was a nonswimmer. Mrs. Owen Bailey was unavailable for comment. She remains under sedation at the couple’s rented apartment.
McCready put down the paper and stared toward the door.
“Oh, you bastard,” he whispered, “you poor bloody bastard.”
Joe Roth took the first morning flight to Washington and went to the Georgetown mansion. He handed in his resignation, effective twenty-four hours later. He left the DCI a wiser and chastened man. Before he left, he had made one request. The DCI granted it.
Roth reached the Ranch very late that night.
Colonel Orlov was still awake, alone in his room, playing chess against a minicomputer. He was good, but the computer was better. The computer was playing the white pieces; Orlov had the others, which, instead of being black, were a dark red. The tape deck was playing a Seekers album from 1965.
Kroll came in first, stepped to one side, and took up position by the wall. Roth followed him and closed the door behind him. Orlov looked up, puzzled.
Kroll stared at him, eyes blank, face expressionless. There was a bulge under his left armpit. Orlov took it in and looked inquiringly at Roth. Neither spoke. Roth just stared at him with very cold eyes. Orlov’s puzzlement ebbed, and a resigned awareness took its place. No one spoke.
The pure, clear voice of Judith Durham filled the room.
Fare thee well, my own true lover,
This will be our last good-bye. ...
Kroll’s hand moved sideways toward the tape deck.
For the carnival is over. ...
Kroll’s finger hit the “off” button, and silence returned. Orlov spoke one word, almost his first in Russian since he had arrived in America. He said: “Kto?” It means “Who?”
Roth said, “Gorodov.”
It was like a punch in the stomach. Orlov closed his eyes and shook his head as if in disbelief.
He looked at the board in front of him and placed the tip of one forefinger on top of the crown of his king. He pushed. The red king toppled sideways and fell, the chessplayer’s admission of capitulation. The price of the bride had been paid and accepted, but there would be no wedding. The red king rolled once and lay still.
Kroll pulled out his gun.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Then Colonel Pyotr Alexandrovich Orlov, a very brave man and a patriot, rose and went into the darkness to meet the mighty God who made him.
“Well, now, that’s all very fine, Denis, and most impressive,” said Timothy Edwards when the board reconvened on Wednesday morning. .”But we have to ask ourselves: Will these remarkable talents ever be needed in the future?”
“I don’t think I quite follow you, Timothy,” said Denis Gaunt.
Sam McCready sat back in his chair, as far as the upright chair would permit him, and allowed them to drone on. They were talking about him as if he had already become a piece of furniture, something from the past, a discussion point to muse upon during the serving of the port at the club.
He looked out at the bright blue sky of the summer day beyond the windows. There was a whole world out there, another world, one that he would soon have to join and in which he would have to make his way without the membership of his own small peer group, the intelligence officers among whom he had lived for most of his adult life.
He thought of his wife. If she had still been alive, he would have wanted to retire with her, find a small cottage by the sea in Devon or Cornwall. He had sometimes dreamed of his own small fishing boat, bobbing in a stone-walled harbor, safe from the winter gales, waiting to be taken out on a summer’s sea to bring home a supper of cod or plaice or slick, gleaming mackerel.
In his dream he would have been just Mr. McCready from the house above the harbor, or Sam, when taking his beer in the snug of the local inn with the fishermen and crabbers of the town. It was just a dream, of course, that had come to him sometimes in the dark, rain-swept alleys of Czechoslovakia or Poland as he waited for a “meet” or watched a dead-letter box to see if it had been staked out, before he moved close to reach for the message inside.
But May was gone, and he was alone in the world, cocooned only by the camaraderie of that smallest of small worlds, the other men who had chosen to serve their countries and spend their lives in the shadowed places where destruction came not in a blaze of glory but in the flash of a torch in the face and the rasp of soldiers’ boots on cobbles. He had survived them all, but he knew he would not survive the mandarins.
Besides, he would be lonely living all alone down in the southwest, far away from the other old war horses who drank their gins in the Special Forces Club at the end of Herbert Crescent. Like most men who had spent their lives in the Service, he was a loner at heart and made new friends uneasily, like an old dog fox preferring the coverts he knew to the open plain.
“I mean simply,” Timothy Edwards was saying, “that the days of slipping into and out of East Germany are a thing of the past. This October, East Germany will actually cease to exist—even today it exists only in name. Relations with the USSR have changed out of all recognition; there will be no more defectors, just honored guests—”
“Bloody hell,” thought McCready, “he really has fallen for that one. And what happens, dickbrain, when the famine strikes Moscow and the hard men close in on the embattled Mikhail Gorbachev? Never mind, you’ll see.”
He let his attention drift and thought of his son. He was a good boy, a fine lad, just out of college and wanting to be an architect. Good for him. He had a pretty blond girlfriend living with him—they all seemed to do that nowadays—no need for the pretty girl to have security clearance. And Dan came around to see him now and again. That was nice. But the boy had a life of his own, a career to head for, friendships to make, places to go and see, and he hoped they would be brighter, safer places than the ones he had seen.
He wished he had spent more time with his son when he was small, wished he had had the time to roll on the sitting-room carpet and read him bedtime stories. Too often, he had left that to May because he had been away on some godforsaken border, staring at the barbed wire, waiting for his agent to come crawling through, or listening for the klaxons that would mean the man would never be seen again.
There was so much he had missed, and so many things he had done, and seen, and places he had been that he could not really discuss with the young man who still called him Dad.
“I am most grateful, Timothy, for your suggestion, which, in a way, preempted my own.”
Denis Gaunt was doing a good job, making the bastards listen, growing in confidence as he spoke. He was a good man, a Head Office man really, but good.
“Because,” Gaunt went on, “Sam here realizes just as well as any of us that we cannot dwell in the past, chewing over the Cold War all over again. The point is, there are other menaces that threaten our country and that are on the increase. Proliferation of high-tech weaponry to highly unstable tyrants in the Third World—we all know exactly what France has been selling Iraq—and of course terrorism.
“In that regard”—he took a buff folder from the Records clerk and opened it—“let me remind you of the affair that began in April 1986 and ended, if indeed the Irish question will ever end, in the late spring of 1987. Such affairs will probably happen again, and it will be the Finn’s task to head them off—again. Get rid of Sam McCready? Frankly, gentlemen, that could be very foolish.”
The Controllers for Western Hemisphere and Domestic Operations nodded, while Edwards glowered at them. This was the sort of agreement he did not need. But Gaunt was bland as he read out the events on April 1986 that had triggered the case that took up most of the spring of 1987.
“ ‘On April 16,1986, fighters from American carriers in the Gulf of Sirte and fighter-bombers flying from British bases blasted the private living quarters of Colonel Qaddafi outside Tripoli. The good Colonel’s sleeping area was hit by a fighter flying from the USS Exeter, call-sign Iceman Four.
“ ‘Qaddafi survived, but he had a nervous breakdown. When he recovered he vowed vengeance, just as much on Britain as upon America, because we had allowed the F-111 strike bombers to fly out of our bases at Upper Heyford and Lakenheath.
“ ‘In the early spring of 1987 we learned how Qaddafi intended to extract that revenge upon Britain, and the case was given to Sam McCready. ...’ ”