Sir Nigel had been in his office for seven years and was in his last year. Subtle, experienced, and impassive, he was held in high regard by the allied intelligence services of Europe and North America. Still, being the bearer of these tidings was going to be no joke. Not a good note on which to leave the game. He was thinking of Alan Fox, the CIA’s acerbic and occasionally sarcastic senior liaison man in London. Alan was going to make a five-course dinner out of this. Sir Nigel shrugged and smiled. “I agree with Bernard. Chummy must be a worried man. I think we can assume he will not rush to purloin another bunch of top-secret material in the next few days. It would be nice to be able to go to our allies with some sort of progress, some kind of damage assessment. I’d like to wait and see what this man Preston can do. At least for a few days.”
Sir Anthony nodded. “Damage assessment is of the essence. And that seems almost impossible until we can find Chummy and persuade him to answer a few questions. So for the moment we seem to depend on Preston’s progress.”
“Sounds like the title of a book,” muttered one of the group as they broke up, the permanent under secretaries heading to brief their ministers in closest confidence, and Sir Martin Flannery knowing he was going to have an uncomfortable few moments with the redoubtable Mrs. Margaret Thatcher.
* * *
The next day, in Moscow, another committee had its inaugural meeting.
Major Pavlov had called Philby just after lunch to say that he would collect the Comrade Colonel at six; the Comrade General Secretary of the CPSU wished to see him. Philby supposed (rightly) that the five-hour warning was so that he could be sober and properly dressed.
The roads at that hour, in driving snow, had been clogged with crawling traffic, but the Chaika with the MOC license plates had sped down the center lane reserved for the vlasti, the elite, the fat cats in what Marx had dreamed would be a classless society—it had become a society rigidly structured, layered, and class-ridden as only a vast bureaucratic hierarchy can be.
When they passed the Ukraina Hotel, Philby had thought they might be going all the way to the dacha at Usovo, but after half a mile they swung toward the barred entrance to the huge eight-story building at Kutuzovsky Prospekt 26. Philby was amazed; to enter the private living quarters of the Politburo was a rare honor.
There were plainclothes Ninth Directorate men up and down the pavement, but at the steel entrance gate they were in uniform, thick gray coats, fur shapkas with the earflaps down, and the blue insignia of the Kremlin Guards. Major Pavlov identified himself and the steel gates swung open. The Chaika crept into the courtyard of the hollow square and parked.
Without a word the major led Philby into the building, through two more identity checks, a hidden metal-detector and X-ray scanner, and into the elevator. At the third floor they stepped out; this entire floor belonged to the General Secretary. Major Pavlov knocked on a door; it opened to reveal a majordomo in white, who gestured Philby inside. The silent major stepped back and the door closed behind Philby. Stewards took his coat and hat and he was ushered into a large sitting room, very warm since old men feel the cold, but surprisingly simply furnished.
Unlike Leonid Brezhnev, who had loved the ornate, the rococo, and the luxurious, the General Secretary was known to be an ascetic man in his private tastes. The furniture was Swedish or Finnish whitewood, spare, clean cut, and functional. Apart from two no-doubt-priceless Bokhara rugs, there was nothing antique. There was a low coffee table and four chairs arranged around it, the grouping being open at one end to permit a fifth absent chair. Still standing—no one was about to sit without permission—were three men. Philby knew them all, and they nodded greetings.
One was Vladimir Ilich Krilov. He was a professor of modern history at Moscow University. His real importance was as a walking encyclopedia on the subject of the Socialist and Communist parties of Western Europe; he specialized in Britain. More important, he was a member of the Supreme Soviet, the USSR’s rubber-stamp, one-party parliament; a member of the Academy of Sciences; and a frequent consultant for the International Department of the Central Committee of which the General Secretary had once been the head.
The man in civilian clothes but with a soldierly bearing was General Pyotr Sergeivitch Marchenko. Philby knew him only vaguely, but was aware that he was a senior officer in the GRU, the Soviet armed forces’ own military intelligence arm. Marchenko was an expert on the techniques of internal security and of its counterpart, destabilization, and his particular area of interest had always been the democracies of Western Europe, whose police and internal-security forces he had studied half his life.
The third man was Dr. Josef Viktorovitch Rogov, also an academician, a physicist by discipline. But his fame lay in another title—chess grand master. He was known to be one of the General Secretary’s few personal friends, a man on whom the Soviet leader had called several times in the past when he felt he needed to use that remarkable brain in the planning stages of certain operations.
The four men had been there two minutes when the double doors at the end of the room opened and the undisputed master of Soviet Russia, her dominions, satellites, and colonies, entered.
He was in a wheelchair, pushed by a tall steward in a white jacket. The chair was propelled to the vacant space left for it.
“Please be seated,” said the General Secretary.
Philby was surprised by the changes in the man. He was seventy-five, and his face and the backs of his hands were blotched and mottled in the manner of very old men. The open-heart surgery of 1985 seemed to have worked, and the pacemaker appeared to be doing the job. And yet he looked frail. The white hair, thick and lustrous in the May Day portraits, making him look like every family’s favorite doctor, had almost vanished. There were brown smudges around both eyes.
A mile up the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, near the old village of Kuntsevo, set in a huge territory inside a two-meter timber palisade fence in the heart of a birch forest, stood the hyperexclusive Central Committee Hospital. It was a modernization and extension of the old Kuntsevo Clinic. In the grounds of the hospital stood Stalin’s old dacha, the surprisingly modest bungalow in which the tyrant had spent so much of his time and where he had finally died. The whole of this dacha had been converted into the country’s most modern intensive-care medical unit for the benefit of this man who now sat in his wheelchair studying them one by one. Six top specialists were on permanent call at the dacha at Kuntsevo, and to them each week went the General Secretary for
treatment. It was evident they were keeping him alive—just. But the brain was still there, behind the chilly eyes that looked through the gold-rimmed glasses. He blinked rarely, and then slowly, like a bird of prey.
He wasted no time with preamble. Philby knew he never did. Nodding to the other three, he said, “You Comrades have read the memorandum of our friend, Comrade Colonel Philby.”
It was not a question, but the other three nodded their assent.
“Then you will experience no surprise to learn that I regard the victory of Britain’s Labour Party, and thence of the ultra-left wing of that Party, as a priority of Soviet interest. I wish you four to form a very discreet committee to advise me on any method that might occur to you that would enable us to assist—completely covertly, of course—in that victory.
“You will discuss this with no one. Documents, if any, will be prepared by you alone. Notes will be burned. Meetings will be held in personal residences. You will not associate in public. You will consult no one else. And you will report to me by telephoning here and speaking to Major Pavlov. I will then arrange a meeting at which you can report your proposals.”
It was clear to Philby that the Soviet leader was taking the issue of confidentiality extremely seriously. He could have held this meeting at his suite of offices in the Central Committee building, the big gray block on Novaya Ploshed where all Soviet leaders have worked since Stalin’s time. But other Politburo members might have seen them arriving or leaving, or heard about their meeting. The General Secretary was evidently establishing a committee that was so totally private that no one else was to be allowed to know of it.
There was another odd thing. Apart from the General Secretary himself—and he was no longer its head—there was no one from the KGB present; yet the First Chief Directorate had massive files on Britain and experts to match. For reasons of his own, the wily leader had chosen to keep the matter outside the service of which he had once been Chairman.
“Are there any points of query?”
Philby raised a tentative hand. The General Secretary nodded.
“Comrade General Secretary, I used to drive myself around in my own Volga. Since my stroke last year, the doctors have prohibited this. Now my wife drives me. But in this instance, for the sake of confidentiality ...”
“I will assign a KGB driver to you for the duration,” said the General Secretary softly. They all knew the other three men already had drivers, as of right.