‘I remember.’
‘You were his control then, weren’t you?’
‘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?’