“What is it you finally want from us, George?” he had once been asked by a high-ranking member of the KGB who later became an undersecretary to Andropov.
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
The answer had troubled the Russian; George’s charming vagueness had always troubled them. They felt they had trapped George into working for them fifteen years before but, in fact, it had not been their trap at all. George had gladly become a mole inside Auntie for a simple reason the Russians would not have understood: boredom.
He had been bored all his life.
He had been born to privilege. Privilege had eased his life, though ease had not been comfortable to him. From the nursery with the mothering care of Nanny and the servants through a brilliant and lackadaisical career at Oxford, George had expected doors to be opened to him by faceless people, and it had always been so.
He had never married because sex was a relief from boredom and marriage would have smothered that. He had experimented with homosexuality and found it wanting because it was too respectable to be a homosexual in his class. He had developed several affairs over the years and enjoyed balancing the women in his life against each other, making certain each was contained in a compartment of his own making; he enjoyed the thought that someday he might be caught out by one or another of his mistresses.
He felt contempt for his class, for its indolence and arrogance and leisure; but he had felt the same measure of contempt for the little strivers who by dint of examination and hard work and good luck were his colleagues at Oxford. “Napoleon was right,” he once said on a late evening, drinking brandy and smoking cigars with those school chums he permitted to be intimate with him: “We are a nation of shopkeepers, but the description does not go far enough. The baseness of the middle class has been bred into our class and we now are forced to admire the shopkeeper for his industry and thrift even when we, and the shopkeeper, know both values to be fraudulent. There is nothing left to strive for, but we make a great show of striving; there is no goal worthy of the sacrifice, but we regularly parade our rededication to those goals.”
No. The Russians could not understand him and they were always uncomfortable with him. Though George did not know it, an investigation had been held ten years previously to determine if George were actually a triple agent — one who worked for the British, seemed to work for the Russians as a double, but actually remained on the British payroll. If George had known it, he would have been amused. The game was all that mattered to him, the few moments of terror at the thought of being caught, the sense of thrills.
“Will you come to Moscow at the end of the game?” the Russian had asked.
“No, my God, man, I couldn’t stand it. London is my home and I’m comfortable with it. In five years’ time, I shall retire from Her Majesty’s Service — and I suppose, from your service — and be settled in my ancestral estate near Canterbury. That will be my crisis; to live out the remainder of my days in the perfect peace of absolute boredom.”
“What will you do?”
“I shall probably go out some morning to shoot birds and find it convenient to place the muzzle of the shotgun in my mouth and blow my head off,” George had said pleasantly.
George had somewhat enjoyed the previous forty-eight hours because the game had become very dangerous now, very filled with the terror that energized him. Matters had come unglued and that is why he had been summoned to the house three blocks off Trafalgar Square.
The man who waited for him inside the safe house — for that is what it was — was called Latvia (though that was only a false name) and he had met the man called George twice before — in Nice, during the previous summer, and once in Liverpool, during the hastily called conference when George had been fully briefed on the KGB plan to move Tomas Crohan out of the Soviet Union.
George was the key to the success of the plan and far too intelligent to take part in it without understanding all the elements of the scheme.
But the scheme now had apparently failed. The only option left was to save George at any cost. He was too valuable as a mole.
George knew this; he had not feared the summons.
He was also arrogantly certain he would survive this latest flap.
“Why?” asked the Russian named Latvia as they sat down at a bare table in a bare room over cups of steaming tea. “Why will this not affect you?”
“Affect me?” George raised his eyebrows, his fierce blue eyes glaring triumphantly at the sullen face of the Russian. “Of course it will affect me. But it shall not deter me, and that is all the difference.”
“Tartakoff has defected.”
“I doubt that very much. I believe he was forced to the defection by the American agents at Helsinki, this Macklin woman and November. You people have made too many blunders in this matter. This man, Antonio, for example; wherever did you drag him up?”
“Loyalty and precision are the requisites of a hit man,” the Russian said, slipping into a mix of English and American argot. “One hardly expects a hit man to be normal in all other respects.”
“Yes, but he was dreadful. I suspect that Tartakoff was moved out of Helsinki with special help, probably from that police inspector who became involved in the murders.”
“So we all suspect,” the Russian said. “There is no proof of this. You cannot push the Finns too far.”
“As your people have learned,” George said, smiling, and lighting a Panter Mignon. “But — to cases. What is it you expect to happen?”
“Tartakoff has told them everything.”
“And that includes telling them about me?”
“Yes.”
“That was careless of you, old fellow.” He inhaled the mild cigar and let the smoke filter slowly into the still, damp air of the room.
“Tartakoff was as essential as you were, George. He was in on the planning from the beginning of the operation.” The Russian frowned and picked up his cup and took a sip of the scalding liquid.
“How can you drink that without milk?”
“I do not like milk,” the Russian said.
“So the problem is: What will we do with George?”
“That is the problem,” the Russian said.
“You will do nothing with me, old fellow, because nothing will happen to me.”
“But the Americans have Tomas Crohan—”
“They shall do nothing,” George said with a smile. “You see, Latvia, none of us understood at first that we were really double-crossing each other. From the beginning, in the war. And I doubt seriously that we need to drag up this matter at this late date.”
“What do you mean?”
“Forty-eight hours have elapsed since Tartakoff was packed off to America. Accompanied, I might add, by our former British agent, Ely. I wonder what they will make of him? The trouble with the Americans is they can clean up the loose ends because they have so damned much money. Ely will doubtless find a new and sensible life as an orange-grower in California or some other equally dreadful place. But Tartakoff. Now he is an important defector, albeit a reluctant one. He alleges that I am a mole and he alleges that I was part of this plan to drive the wedge between ourselves and our American cousins. Particularly at Cheltenham. Very well. What will the Americans do with this information?”
“They have Tomas Crohan.”
“You keep insisting on that and they do not. He has not reappeared since the American woman took him out of Helsinki.”
The Russian seemed puzzled; he stared at his teacup.
George smiled again and waved the cigar in illustration of what he was saying. “We sent in Michael Brent to murder Tomas Crohan in Vienna in 1945. Crohan had been abandoned by the Americans, though God knows he may still have clung to the tired promise that the Americans would give him the Irish government after the war. We could not tolerate Crohan from the standpoint of our own security. So Brent was sent to kill him, which Brent did quite well.”