Hale was proposing to kill Kim Philby, his half-brother, and thus set into motion the chain of events that would culminate with the ghulah guardian angel ingesting the Shihab-shot from Philby’s buried corpse. “Well, Khrushchev wouldn’t be the last anyway,” Theodora said, stalling. “I doubt the Soviet empire would come crashing down immediately after the guardian angel was killed, and it doesn’t look as though Khrushchev will last out the year. Russia had a bad harvest last year, and he had to use hard currency to buy wheat from the West. The KGB had to become grain brokers, and the KGB head, Shelepin, wants Khrushchev out. Leonid Brezhnev seems to be the likeliest replacement.”
“Is my brother covering himself with glory, over there?”
“Well, no. It turns out he’s what they call a ‘secret collaborator,’ not a Soviet intelligence officer, as I’m sure they had told him he would be. He’s got a nice apartment, and access to a chauffeur-driven car, but he’s apparently drinking a good deal, and his main value to the KGB is that he’s still being debriefed, these fourteen months later. The only actual work he’s doing is for the Novosti news agency—and his work needs to be translated. He’s never learned Russian.”
“Cremation is very common in Russia,” Hale said. “If he dies years from now, as just an embarrassing old drunk left over from a previous regime, he’s likely to be cremated.”
And the precious shot pellets will be melted, thought Theodora. I won’t live that long, but it would fret me to die thinking that the main operation of my career had not come to full fruition.
“Right now,” Hale went on, “the people who vouched for him are still in charge, unwilling to concede that he’s nothing but a drunk old Englishman. If he dies a hero’s death now, a properly vindicating death, he’ll be buried with honors at one of the Moscow cemeteries. Buried.”
“What would be a hero’s death?” asked Theodora. “A vindicating death?”
“He must be shot, killed, publicly and conspicuously, by an Englishman who can be proved to have been working for the SIS. Simple logic—if we considered him worth killing, obviously he must have been a Soviet hero.”
Theodora laughed incredulously. “My dear boy, do you have any conception of the havoc that would cause? Consider the abuse the United States endured when one of their mere U-2 spy planes was shot down over Russia four years ago! It would not start World War III, I suppose, but we would lose all credibility worldwide—the present Conser vative government would collapse, we’d have Harold Wilson and the Labour Party in charge!”
“Haven’t you got—I seem to recall— ears, in Number 10 Downing Street? How likely is it that this Conservative government will survive the year in any case? The Profumo scandal drove Macmillan out last year—how long do you think Douglas-Home can hold the Conservative reins?”
“Until a general election, in October,” Theodora said glumly. “And then, yes, I do happen to know that we’ll have Harold Wilson for Prime Minister. And I have similarly good reason to believe that Wilson will not… expand the scope of the secret services.”
“Then it’s now or never,” said Hale. “The Conservatives may as well have some decisive reason for going out, don’t you think?— not just the declining pound and rising interest rates.”
Theodora was nodding, squinting out across the newly green spring lawns. “It’s impossible, my boy. You’d need a real SIS purpose in going to Moscow, a plausible cover story for Whitehall, and you could never sell the Foreign Office on any particle of what you’ve told me.”
“What would be a plausible cover story to sell to the Foreign Office?”
“Well! Just for the sake of argument—something fairly low-key, routine administration type of thing.” Theodora swiveled on his heels, crushing the thyme. “The KGB resident in London, Nikolai Grigoryevich Begrichev, has been increasing the size of the residency outrageously; and all these Tass representatives and cultural counselors are ser vicing the Soviet trade delegations and the Soviet students at our universities, all of them active agents—MI5’s mobile surveillance operations are already completely compromised. And it’s likely to go on escalating. And the Foreign Secretary knows that a Labour government will only be interested in appeasement, not any saber-rattling. And our embassy in Moscow is simply a KGB snuggery—we are required to hire all the maids, janitors, chauffeurs, even translators, from the Moscow Burobin employment agency, which is simply a branch of the KGB Second Chief Directorate, the counter-intelligence directorate. If the SIS could get some evidence of Burobin treachery, it would serve as an excuse for Douglas-Home to expel a good number of the Soviet Embassy staff in London. It would arguably be the last chance to do that.”
“Most natural thing in the world, then, for the SIS to send an agent to Moscow under journalistic cover. An old wartime leftover agent; experienced but ultimately unreliable, as it will turn out.”
Theodora revolved on the sundial, staring blankly at the lawns and high walls of Batsford House, as he estimated the flurry of decipher-yourself telegrams that would erupt from the Moscow embassy after Philby’s assassination—and then the international headlines, the outraged statements by Khrushchev, and then by Douglas-Home. Lyndon Johnson would weigh in with denunciations, McCone would scramble to distance the CIA from the lunatic British secret ser vices.
But two or three years from now, he thought, the Soviet Union would stop being a Union. The gross, artificially maintained flower of Communism would lose its hothouse protection, and it would wither in the unhindered winds of the world, and brash young weeds would spring up from the fallow Russian ground and choke it.
“You’d have to find your own gun,” he said at last. “Whitehall could not possibly provide you with the gun.”
Hale kept his face expressionless and simply nodded, but he felt the tension of the last thirty hours relax out of his shoulders. “I can find my own gun.”
“I gather you don’t intend to be caught, but you do intend to be identified, as a British SIS agent. Do you seriously think a retirement identity for you in the United Kingdom is a question that need occupy me?”
“I’ll make my way back across the Channel,” said Hale.
Theodora frowned, possibly with genuine concern. “You’ve got plenty of field experience, my boy, but you’ve never been on the wrong side of the Curtain. It’s a whole other world. Moscow was Looking-Glass Land even when I was there with Lockhart and Reilly, back in the innocent days of 1918, when our great plan was to capture Lenin and Trotsky, and then pull off their trousers and parade them through the streets in their undershorts, to make laughingstocks of them.” The old man smiled, showing the shape of his skull under the wrinkled, parchment skin. “We were MI-1C in those days, and the Petrograd station chief vetoed our idea; but I still think that would have nipped the whole Communist enterprise in the bud.”
“I’ll nip it in the… sere and yellow leaf.” Hale released the grip of the Seecamp .32 in Nigel’s trouser pocket and stretched in the chilly spring morning breeze. From somewhere high up on the stone wall he could hear pigeons cooing, and the sound made him sleepy—he hadn’t slept or eaten or changed his shirt for thirty hours, and above the spicy scent of crushed thyme he could smell his own old sweat. “Do keep in mind too that I’m the only one who can do this. If you establish the truth about me, then you won’t ever be able to do the same for Philby, much as you might one day wish to. He’s vulnerable to injury on his birthday, of course—but you know the Kremlin will keep him in a bomb-proof subterranean vault on that day, every year; and on any other day of the three-hundred-and-sixty-five, the only person who can get past his magical defenses to injure him is the one other person who also is him at least according to the angels’ silhouette-recognition cards.”