VIII

He was youngish, perhaps in his early thirties, with dark hair, blue eyes and a strong jawline: a model militsiya man. And so he hesitated. Perhaps he thought I was bluffing. I pressed the prongs of the fork into the cloth of his trousers and leaned in to his ear.

‘If you haven’t started this car by the time I’ve counted to three,’ I whispered, ‘I’ll slice your balls off and drive myself. One . . .’

His jaw was clenched in fury, but he switched on the ignition and depressed the clutch. The starter coughed for a moment, then sputtered out. Christ. Looking around the car, I saw it wasn’t in good shape: there was no mat beneath my feet, just the bare steel floor. I glanced back at the café and saw his colleague turn and spot us, alerted by the noise. He began running towards the entrance, his arms waving, shouting at us.

‘Wave to him,’ I hissed. ‘And make it convincing.’

He glanced at me, then reluctantly lifted a hand from the wheel and half-saluted his colleague, who peered at us, not understanding. I smiled at him and gestured with my hand to indicate that we were just taking a quick spin around the block. He would figure out what we were doing pretty soon, but it might just slow him down for a minute or two – and that minute might make all the difference.

Something moved in the rear-view mirror, and I saw another man already running across the street, his hands stuffed in his pockets. He had fair hair and a moustache, and I realized with a shock that it was Dawes – so much for Smale’s gentlemanly regard for my stipulations.

I leaned into the fork again, and sweat broke out on the driver’s face. But that wasn’t helping him focus, so I relented a little. He tried the ignition again and this time the starter caught and we were off. The car jumped and tilted as we caught a wheel on a pothole, before righting as we came into the lane, directly behind a taxi.

‘Put your foot down!’ I shouted at him. I was looking at Dawes in the rear-view mirror: he’d reached the other side of the road and jumped into a light grey Pobeda containing one of his colleagues, and they were now only twenty yards or so behind, with just four cars between us. We had to lose them, because I didn’t have time to be taken to the embassy and convince everyone I was telling the truth.

The driver accelerated, squinting through the windscreen. One of the wipers was broken, so it wasn’t much use against the rain; it just kept getting stuck and drawing back early like a bird with an injured wing. Apart from the taxi there were no cars in front of us and I thought he was dramatizing to give his colleague a chance to catch up. I could also see that despite the fact I was holding something very sharp to his crotch, he was itching to make a move on me: perhaps because of the holster at his hip, which contained a Makarov; perhaps because I was having to keep the prongs a little at bay in case I skewered him by mistake. So I leaned across him very fast and snatched the gun with my other hand, then rammed it against his temple, removing the fork from his groin at the same time. Something about the sensation of cold steel pressed into his skull got through, and his squint disappeared.

I handed the fork to Sarah in the back seat, and told her to keep it handy in case he got any ideas. In the meantime, he pulled out to overtake the taxi. As we passed it, I told him to take a right, but he reacted too late and had to slow to swerve into it, the back wheels skidding on the tarmac. In the rear-view, I saw the Pobeda preparing to make the same turn. The militsiya man must have sensed my anger at his delayed reactions and feared I was going to pull the trigger, or perhaps I was pressing harder than I realized, because he accelerated again as the street widened. He swung a left, and then another right, bringing us onto a boulevard, Rozhdestvensky, its neo-classical buildings flashing by us, and I shouted at him to move into the Chaika Lane, the central one reserved for party officials, which was empty.

But the Pobeda had now made the corner as well and was gaining on us, so I told him to prepare to turn again, and this time he reacted faster, taking a side street on the right that, after a few bumpy yards, brought us out onto a small square. I glimpsed the entrance of an underground station and dozens of people queuing at a small market outside it, dead chickens hanging by their necks, and then the street narrowed again.

I told him to keep going, and to take as many turns as he could, while I kept an eye on the rear-view mirror for the Pobeda. I couldn’t keep him in control like this for much longer, so I had to figure out a way to lose Dawes and friend first.

I turned back to the driver and asked him if he knew who we were. He didn’t respond, but his eyes flicked over to me. ‘I said do you know—’

‘Yes! You’re fugitives from justice.’

‘Take the next left,’ I told him, ‘and keep your eyes on the road. Of course we’re fugitives, but what else do you know about us?’

He took the turn well, and I grunted approval. The man could drive, and Dawes, or whoever he was in the car with, would have a job keeping up with us – for as long as I could keep this man under control.

‘You are English,’ he said. ‘We were given instructions to look for you.’

There was a handset next to the radio, so presumably they were using a two- or three-way communications system.

‘What were your instructions, exactly?’

‘You are to be stopped by any means. Shoot on sight. Call back-up at once if needed.’

All of that was to be expected. The rain was intensifying, so I had to raise my voice against the sound of both it and the engine.

‘Anything else?’

He registered a flicker of surprise. ‘The whole Service has been put on the highest alert for civil disorder.’

An alert for impending unrest was another sign they were preparing for an attack. The Service’s experts had predicted widespread riots and looting in Britain if it ever became clear a nuclear conflict was imminent.

‘Was there any indication as to why we are fleeing justice?’

‘That’s not our concern. If State Security says you’re fleeing from justice, you are.’

Give the order and the hounds will run.

‘What measures are in place to stop us?’

‘I can’t speak for the other Services, but we had a full alert, with every available man scrambled and told to look for you intensively.’

‘Roadblocks?’

‘Yes, I believe—’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. They are arranged by Central Control.’

A gust of wind smacked against my side of the car, and I tensed to stop myself from losing balance. The window on the passenger side would no longer close all the way, and a thin icy wind was whistling in through the gap. My hand was cramping from holding the pistol in such an awkward position, and I was getting worried that if there was another gust of wind or we went over another pothole I might accidentally pull the trigger. I locked my wrist and placed my other hand around my forearm to keep it in place, then stole another glance in the rear-view. The Pobeda was overtaking a red Moskvitch, coming into our lane, closing ground.

‘The roadblocks,’ I said to the driver. ‘You must have favoured spots in the city.’

He nodded. ‘We have sixteen points. Judging by the alert we were given, I expect most or even all of them will have been set up.’

I thought about this for a moment. That many meant there was no chance of our leaving the city without going through one. And there was no obvious way we could get through any of them, because they’d have several cars waiting and barricades blocking the way. I checked the rear-view again: the Pobeda was trying to make it past a small van, creeping ever closer.

‘Keep making turns,’ I said. ‘Sarah, take hold of the gun, please.’

She leaned forward and I transferred the grip so that she was now holding the pistol in place at the driver’s temple.

‘Shoot him if he tries anything.’ The man looked to be sneering, perhaps feeling he could overpower her. ‘She was first in her class on the shooting range three years running,’ I told him, ‘so I wouldn’t advise it.’

It was a reasonably good lie, because his sneer vanished. I leaned across and unhooked the latch of the glove compartment. Rummaging through, I saw two spare holsters and breast badges, a map and two small green booklets with gold stars pinned to the front. I took out the booklets and flicked one open. It was for his colleague. I quickly flicked open the other one, and the face of the man next to me stared up from the photograph. He was Sergeant Grigor Ivanovich Bessmertny of District C-12, and this was patrol car identification 1464. I could have got his name and rank out of him easily enough, but not the rest of it.

‘What’s the call sign of Central Control?’ I asked. ‘Lie, and I’ll tell my companion here to shoot you in the head and I’ll take over the wheel myself.’

He inhaled sharply through his nose.

‘Big Bear.’

‘And when you call in, how do you identify yourself? Fourteen Sixty-Four?’

‘One Four Six Four.’

I dropped the booklet onto my lap and grabbed the handset from the radio, then pressed the transmit button and spoke into it. ‘Big Bear, this is One Four Six Four reporting a possible sighting of the English fugitives, subject of earlier alert.’

There was a moment’s silence, and then a crackle of static burst from the receiver.

‘One Four Six Four, this is Big Bear. What is your current location, and that of the fugitives?’

I lifted the receiver again, looking out at the street signs. ‘We are on Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, at the corner of Milyutinskiy. They are in a pale grey Pobeda’ – I glanced in the rear-view mirror and read off Dawes’s licence plate – ‘which we saw them get into at a café on Neglinnaya a couple of minutes ago. Please send backup.’

Another crackle, and then: ‘Thank you, One Four Six Four. Keep up the pursuit, and I will direct all cars in the area to help you out.’

They signed off, and I placed the receiver back in its hold. A few moments later Big Bear came on repeating my information, and moments after that there was the sound of a siren somewhere behind us. Dawes must have heard it too, because the Pobeda peeled away from behind us and took the next side street. I told Bessmertny to take a left, and that was when I spotted the other car.

It had appeared behind the Moskvitch as if from nowhere, presumably having cut in from one of the side streets. Was it in pursuit, though? Its bodywork was black, and I guessed it was a GAZ-23 – the special model created just for the KGB. From the outside, it looked exactly like a 21, which was what we were in, but it had a V8 engine under its bonnet, which meant it could reach 160 horsepower, as opposed to our 65: it was the most powerful car in the Soviet Union.

As it approached us, a man leaned out of the passenger window and opened up with a machine-pistol. A shot hit a rear tyre and we started to skid, losing control fast. A moment later the car was overtaking us and made to turn in the road to block us off. The man in the passenger seat was still shooting, and this time he hit the front windscreen. I started to scream at Bessmertny to yank the wheel around but my right hand was throbbing and when I looked down at it I realized why: it was covered in blood, and a spike of glass was sticking out of the flesh between my thumb and forefinger.

The image of it sent pain shooting through me, and I clenched my eyes shut as the roar of gunfire and engines around me increased, but then I thought of Brezhnev in the bunker and forced them open again. Half the windscreen had shattered, and chips of glass were strewn across the dashboard and wheel, but Bessmertny still had his hands gripped on the latter, his jaw clenched tight and his eyes staring wildly ahead. The 23 had made its turn and I screamed at him to steer us off the road, but the distance was too short. The driver in the 23 saw what was happening and tried to reverse, but he wasn’t fast enough and our wheels locked as we began to slide towards him, the tyres squealing as they scraped across the road.

There was a massive jolt as we caught the front end of the 23 but I kept consciousness and even began to move my hands to the back of my head, until I remembered the glass and took them away again. I was being spun around, but my mind was in danger of detaching from the situation. Then panic rose to the surface as a car came from the other direction and I lunged towards the wheel, another surge of pain swelling through my hand as I did. There was a blast of the horn and then whoosh, the car had gone, but the road was still where I’d last seen it, which meant I was alive. Somehow we had righted on the road, and Bessmertny was still hunkered over, his hands in position. I leaned over and grabbed at the wheel to help him right us some more, looking in the mirror as I did and expecting to see the maniac with the gun leaning out of the window, but I saw nothing – just traffic streaming by, Moscow, life. The 23 had gone, either driven off the road or forced into a turning.

I turned to check on Sarah in the back.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘But we need to deal with your hand.’

‘Get us somewhere quiet,’ I told her, ‘away from the centre.’

She nodded, and while she instructed Bessmertny to take turnings, I examined the wound. It looked worse than it was, I thought – there was just the one large shard and although it had produced a lot of blood, it looked to be relatively clear. There was always the risk contamination would spread, but we couldn’t go to a hospital.

Soon the traffic started to thin out and we passed rows of concrete blocks of flats, squat and uniform. Sarah ordered a few more random turns until we had reached a small clearing that appeared to be an abandoned picnic area. Car tyres and pieces of rusting metal lay half-buried in a patch of overgrown grass, beyond which was a row of small wooden cabins. The stench of urine and faeces rose as we approached: public toilets. I told Bessmertny to pull up by some tree stumps, and once we had come to a standstill I took the key from the ignition and climbed out.

*

The area looked to be completely deserted, and the nearest road at least a mile away. The rain had stopped, but the clouds were still very low. I ripped away the sleeve of my jacket and balled it up and placed it in my mouth. Then, without looking at it, I yanked the spike of glass from my hand, my screams muffled as the pain seared through me in waves.

Once I’d steadied myself a little, I walked back to the car and tapped on Sarah’s window. I gestured for her to hand me the gun, then opened the driver’s door.

‘Get out,’ I said to Bessmertny. He did so, and I told him to walk towards the wooden cabins, focusing on keeping the Makarov on him steady despite using my left hand. Every muscle in my body was tensed, because if I were in his shoes I would be looking to turn suddenly and snatch the gun. So I kept a good distance from him, watching every move he made, waiting for any sign that he was about to try something. When we had gone a few yards, I told him to stop and undress. He didn’t respond.

‘Do it now!’ I shouted.

He started removing his jacket. ‘I wouldn’t advise throwing it at me or anything like that,’ I said as he reached the final button. ‘You don’t have anywhere to run. Just place it on the ground, understand?’

He nodded, sullen now or perhaps frightened, and he folded the jacket over his arm, then crouched and placed it on the ground. I told him to strip off the rest and he did, until finally it was all laid out and he was standing in front of me, shivering in billowing white underpants and a vest.

I told him to open the door of the cabin nearest him. Shivering, he did it, and I glimpsed a wooden shelf with a plastic lid.

‘In,’ I said.

He hesitated, considering whether to rush me. I kept my eyes level on his and tightened my grip on the butt of the gun.

‘I’ll shoot if you’re not in there within five seconds,’ I told him. ‘Four.’

He walked in, and I stepped forward and turned the latch, locking it. He started thumping his fists on the door, and I told him that if he carried on I’d unlock it and finish the job. There was a thudding behind me and I turned to see Sarah running over from the car.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ she shouted as she reached me. ‘You can’t lock him in there! He’ll freeze to death. It’s not—’

‘What?’ I said, turning to her. ‘Cricket? Would you rather I shot him, like you did Charles in Italy?’

I jerked my head back to avoid the slap and grabbed hold of her wrist, then twisted her round in a simple hold. She lashed out with her other arm and when that didn’t work either, she tried to kick me in the groin, but my body was too far away, so she started thrashing about angrily, screaming at me to let her go. I dropped the hold, but made sure to keep the gun steady – not aimed at her, but present.

‘You bastard,’ she said, her eyes drilling into mine. ‘You know what Charles did to me, and what he was planning to do to others. But you’re worse than he was. You’re no better than an animal.’

A thought flitted through my mind of a post-nuclear world: a few lost souls scurrying about in bunkers or foraging for food and water across contaminated ground until they finally succumbed to radiation poisoning.

‘We’re all animals,’ I said, trying not to let my temper take over. ‘We like to think we’re civilized, but that’s for peacetime. I’m sorry if this offends your sensibilities, but we are heading for nuclear war. If we take him with us, he’ll try something. If we let him go, sooner or later he’ll reach his colleagues.’

She flung her hands out in exasperation. ‘And tell them what? We just ran a KGB car off the road! Half the radio transmissions in the city will be about us.’

‘Yes, but we don’t know precisely what they’re saying. This man is a loose end. He’ll get free, in time, or someone will find him. Just not immediately.’

‘And how do you think they’ll react when they find him? They’ll probably double their efforts.’

‘They’ll have every man available after us already, and if any of them get the chance I promise you they’ll shoot us on sight and won’t hang about afterwards discussing the rights and wrongs of it. If we make it out the other side of this, we can go to the opera and pretend we’re not animals again. But until then we’ve got to do whatever it takes to survive, even if it means abandoning fair play. Now get in the car, please. If you’re not going to help me—’

‘What?’ she said, her nostrils flaring. ‘You’ll strip me to my knickers and lock me in with him?’

‘No. I’ll put you in the boot.’

She started to laugh, then caught my look. ‘You would as well, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes. We don’t have time for this, Sarah. Now which is it to be?’

She didn’t reply and the silence stretched out, but then there was the faint sound of a siren see-sawing in the distance. We both turned to it, cocking our heads to gauge whether it was getting any nearer. After a few seconds it faded away, but it seemed this had been enough to wake her up, because she turned to face me and gave the tiniest of nods.

‘Good.’ I took off my half-shredded jacket and walked across to Bessmertny’s bundle of clothes. ‘Because I need you to help me figure out what we’re going to do next.’

Her eyes widened. ‘You mean you don’t know?’

I picked up Bessmertny’s shirt and pulled it over the one I was already wearing. ‘You heard what he said. They’ve got roadblocks set up across the city, and we won’t be able to get past any of them as we are. They’ll be checking their own cars just as thoroughly, and we don’t have papers.’

I buttoned the jacket and reached for the trousers. Sarah watched me, her hands clamped under her armpits, and I picked up Bessmertny’s coat and thrust it towards her. She hesitated for a moment, then took it and put it on. It was much too large for her, and with her boyish crop of hair it made her look like a Dickensian urchin.

I put on the trousers, boots and wristwatch, then drew the leather gloves over my hands, taking it slowly to avoid reopening the wound.

‘What do you think?’ I said.

‘Convincing enough. But who are you going to say I am if we’re stopped?’

‘Climb in the back seat,’ I said. ‘I’ll claim you’re a suspect and I’m on the way to the station. But let’s hope that doesn’t happen. We need to find another form of transport fast if we’re going to get out of Moscow.’ I stopped myself from saying the next word on my lips – ‘alive’.

We got in the car, me in the front and her in the back, and sat there, our brains churning, while we waited for the heater to take effect. I’d studied this country for most of my adult life, and knew the ranks and accompanying uniforms of all its forces, and the relationships between each force and the structure of the system as a whole. So I knew what to expect. This was the ultimate secret state, with armed police patrolling the streets to stop anyone who demonstrated the slightest sign of not following the regulations. Suspicion was the natural state of affairs here, and we would have to act accordingly.

But although I had a lot of facts and figures stored in my head, my knowledge of the Soviet way of life was woefully incomplete. Most of what I knew was second-hand, theoretical – and that could be the difference between life and death. Apart from a brief stint in Prague and several months in a prison cell, I’d never been to the Soviet Union. To make matters worse, we had no support: no sleepers, safe houses or people with hidden compartments in their trucks. And we had to find a way through the Soviets’ security net while they knew we were trying to do it. It was close to impossible, and under normal circumstances I wouldn’t even have been considering it.

We were stuck in the spider’s web. But I did have some very specific knowledge that might help in this situation. I had studied the Soviets’ border controls – both their strengths and weaknesses – in depth over the years, and at regular intervals. I had, admittedly, mostly been looking at them going the other way, as part of my contingency plans in the event that I’d suddenly need to defect. I hadn’t had to put those plans into effect – as it turned out, I’d been forcibly defected after the operation in Italy, and Sarah along with me. Now I had to get from East to West, which was an entirely different prospect, and a hell of a lot more difficult.

I turned to Sarah. ‘I said “we” a moment ago, but that’s up to you. You can leave now and take your chances at the embassy or try to find your own way out of the country, or you can come along with me and help me get to the U-boat. The odds are I won’t make it. I have no idea how much time we have, or if the Russians will even believe me if I find the canisters—’

‘In which case, we’ll die in a nuclear blast. I’m coming. What about the military airfields? Could we catch them by surprise and steal a plane?’

I nodded at her commitment, then considered her suggestion. I thought of the helicopters I’d seen that morning at Steklyashka. ‘They’ll be even more guarded than usual. And even if we got to one, they’d simply shoot us down.’

She was silent for a few moments. ‘Can we get onto a fast train? Isn’t there one that goes straight to Leningrad?’

‘Yes, the Red Arrow. But they’ll have men on the platforms of all the stations checking everyone, and even if we could find a way on board they’ll be searching every nook and cranny of every carriage. The main problem is we don’t have any papers, and in this country that means you effectively can’t do anything.’

‘What about dissidents – surely they have ways of forging documents?’

I turned to look at her. ‘Do you know any dissidents?’

She shook her head. ‘But surely we can find some. What about that group in the café – you know, the girl you couldn’t tear your eyes away from and her friends? They might be able to help.’

‘I was checking we weren’t under surveillance,’ I said, and her lip curled slightly. ‘It’s a good idea, but what about the practicalities? Say they were dissidents, or at least know how to get in contact with some. And say that they’re also still sitting in that café, or that we can track them quickly by asking around. How would we convince them to help us?’

She nodded at the attaché case on the seat next to her. ‘Show them the documents.’

‘We can’t just run around Moscow flashing the contents of that case to anyone we think looks sympathetic. If they turn out not to be, we’ll be headed straight back to the Lubyanka. Even if we strike it lucky and do find some sympathizers, we’d be asking them to believe that the documents are genuine and risk their own freedom as a result. I think it’s too much to expect from strangers. Do you know anyone in Moscow? Outside the embassy, I mean?’

‘Sorry, not a soul. I mean, I once met Kim Philby at a party in Beirut, but obviously we can’t approach him.’

There was an awkward silence, as my own treason suddenly hung in the air between us. Six months ago, this woman had stumbled upon a conspiracy to kill innocent civilians in Italy, orchestrated in part by her own husband. She had also discovered that I was a Soviet agent, but for that very reason I’d been the ideal person to turn to. Now we were confronted by a much graver crisis than the one we’d faced together in Italy, but half a year in a prison cell in Moscow was a lot of time, and I guessed that she’d spent some of it dwelling on the fact that my actions had also cost innocent lives over the years.

‘Yes, Philby’s out,’ I said lightly, trying to break the tension. ‘They summoned him to the bunker before me, and by all accounts he’s still loyal to the cause. He’d hand us straight over to Yuri and Sasha, and probably take pleasure in doing it.’

I stopped, struck by a stray thought: Philby wasn’t the only other double in Moscow.

‘Maclean,’ I said.

‘Donald Maclean? Surely he’s just as loyal to the Soviets as Philby?’

‘I’m not so sure.’

I’d never met Maclean, but in many ways felt I knew him. The first I’d heard of him had been back in 1950, shortly after my arrival in Istanbul: an acquaintance at the Foreign Office had gleefully told me that the head of Chancery in Cairo and a few of his friends had got blind drunk and wrecked the flat of two girls who worked at the American embassy. That had been Maclean, the son of a distinguished Liberal MP, who had gone on to have a nervous breakdown before suddenly disappearing the following year with fellow diplomat Guy Burgess. The word had quickly travelled around the Station that both men were Soviet agents who, on the brink of being arrested by Five, had fled to Moscow.

Burgess and Maclean’s vanishing act had been my first indication that I might not be the only Soviet agent within the British establishment. The idea had both terrified and comforted me. Terrified, because their exposure could mean mine was next: I hadn’t known about them, but what if there were other doubles who knew about me? And if another double were caught by Five before fleeing the country, they might reveal what they knew under lights. But it was comforting in its way, too, because it meant I wasn’t alone in the world, and that others were treading the same path.

As the years had gone by I’d felt the noose slowly tighten around my neck as it had become clear that, far from being alone, I was in fact one of several long-term agents the Soviets had succeeded in recruiting in Britain, all of whom either had access to or were part of the upper echelons of intelligence and policy-making. In ’61, George Blake, a former SOE officer who had been the Service’s Head of Station in Seoul, had confessed to being a Soviet agent. The following year, John Vassall, a private secretary to a Conservative minister, had admitted to passing secrets to the KGB ever since they had photographed him in compromising positions with other men. In ’63, Kim Philby, at one point Head of Soviet Section and seen by many as a possible Chief, had defected to Moscow, which had been followed by the unmasking of Anthony Blunt, who had been a senior officer in Five. In ’67, the Labour MP Bernard Floud had killed himself after being interrogated by Five – some in the Service thought he’d done so because he had been presented with evidence that he had been a Soviet agent. And finally, in March of 1969, a defector in Nigeria had put paid to my peaceful life in London, and here I was as a direct result.

‘I always wondered if I would be able to defect,’ I said to Sarah. ‘Even when I thought I was working for the right side, something about heading to Moscow filled me with dread.’

‘I can’t imagine why!’ she said, and looked purposefully out of the window at the wind whipping at the tree stumps.

I smiled, despite myself. ‘Indeed. But before I had the pleasure of finding out for myself, I was very interested in what the defectors made of life out here. As Head of Soviet Section, I made sure I had access to all their letters back to England.’

Her forehead puckered. ‘Didn’t you realize that these men were hardly likely to paint a very accurate picture? The Russians would also have been monitoring what they wrote.’

‘Yes, of course I knew that. I also felt they would probably put a positive angle on their experiences anyway. Nobody likes to contemplate the idea that all their work has been for nought.’ I smiled grimly. ‘It’s not a pleasant realization. I thought they would try to convince themselves they were right all along, and fit the facts to their case. I knew all that, but I still paid close attention to their letters.’

In fact, it had been more like an obsession. Burgess had died of liver failure in ’63, but Philby, Blake and Maclean were all alive and kicking, and continued correspondences with friends and family in Britain. I’d followed all their careers keenly, which hadn’t been hard to do: the Station had spent an enormous amount of energy trying to determine what they were up to. The Americans had even concocted a plan to assassinate Maclean in the National restaurant in Moscow, but it had never materialized.

Of all the doubles, Maclean had always intrigued me the most. Blake, Burgess and Philby all seemed like adventurers in some way, turned on by the thrill of secrecy and deceit. But Maclean had always seemed to be at one remove: a traitor, yes, and according to many who’d known him, an arrogant prig and violent drunkard to boot. But I had studied his case in depth, and felt sure there was more to him.

Back in ’58, Time had run an article on him and his American wife Melinda, in which they had been interviewed in their Moscow flat, where they lived under the names Mark and Natasha Frazer. Soviet Section had dissected every sentence of this article in a series of memoranda. Many of the memos had contained fanciful speculation as to what ‘message’ Maclean and the KGB had been trying to send in the interview, as well as a level of satisfaction that he appeared to be stuck in a dead-end job with marital difficulties and a drinking problem, having lost his wife to Philby and cut off relations with Burgess. But nobody could have given the piece the level of scrutiny I did.

The article made for depressing reading, and filled me with a resolve not to end up in the Soviet Union if I could help it. I’d missed my next meet with Sasha after reading it, and with the benefit of hindsight recognized that the article spelled the beginning of a secret inner realization that I was no longer the believer I’d claimed to be when I had sought out Yuri in 1945 and volunteered to serve the Soviet Union – and that perhaps I had never truly been one.

‘And something in Maclean’s letters makes you think we can approach him now?’ said Sarah.

I nodded. ‘Prague. After Moscow invaded last spring, I paid even closer attention to the defectors’ letters. I wanted to see if it had weakened their resolve at all. Philby appeared completely unrepentant about it, and Blake’s letters steered clear of politics. But there was something odd about Maclean’s reaction. Back in ’56, he sent letters to friends defending the actions in Hungary. I’d actually been comforted by his rhetoric. But his letters about Prague were different: reading between the lines, it seemed to me he thought the whole thing had been an outrage on the Soviets’ part.’

‘That’s not enough to approach him,’ she said. ‘What if you read wrong? He’ll just turn us straight over—’

‘There’s more. For the last few years, Maclean has worked as an editor at International Affairs, which is the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s journal. That’s really a seal of approval from the big boys in the KGB. Moscow Station sends the journal to London in the diplomatic bag every month, and I used to read the bloody thing from cover to cover. Maclean writes articles on foreign policy under a pseudonym, but in the last couple of years his veneer of Party dogma has slipped. Obviously, there’s only so much you can say in such a journal, but my impression is that although he’s still a firm Communist, he’s bitterly opposed to Brezhnev’s gang. On top of that, various reports have trickled in over the last couple of years claiming that, unknown to the KGB, he has been frequenting intellectual circles, and perhaps even visited the homes of suspected dissidents.’

I listened to the sound of the radiator humming beside me.

‘Perhaps we should try Andropov’s dacha,’ she said. ‘I hear he’s also visited suspected dissidents.’

‘Not the time for humour,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying he’s another Sakharov, but faced with these documents, he might help us. Final point, and I hope this one will convince.’

‘Me, or you?’

‘Both. All the defectors keep very much to themselves, but occasionally they’re allowed to see a journalist or an old acquaintance. Maclean has had very few visitors from the West since he arrived, but those who have met him have given an increasingly strange picture. A couple of years ago, an old friend of his from Cambridge was due to come out here as part of some delegation. I got wind of it and invited him out to dinner a couple of weeks before, and discreetly suggested he try to renew the acquaintance. As soon as he got back, I took him out again, and over pheasant and port he told me he’d managed to meet Maclean for about an hour between meetings – and that it had been very odd. Maclean had generally steered clear of controversial topics, but at one point he’d suddenly asked this chap if he was “a sleeper they had never got round to waking up”.’

‘“They”, not “we”.’

‘Exactly. Maclean defected nearly twenty years ago, but still doesn’t identify himself completely with the Soviets.’

Silence again. It was slender, I knew: the friend could have been exaggerating, or not recalled the wording correctly. But we had to find a way out of this city.

‘Are you sure about this?’ she said. ‘If you’re wrong—’

‘Of course I’m not sure. But I think it’s a better bet than approaching strangers.’

She breathed in. ‘What about Yuri?’ she said. ‘He might suspect us of doing just this – Brits sticking together.’

‘I’d be surprised. We only just came up with the idea ourselves, and it’s hardly the most obvious move. And we know something about Maclean he doesn’t.’

‘All right. We need to find the journal’s offices, I suppose?’

‘Yes. There should be a map in the glove compartment.’

I turned the key in the ignition and began reversing towards the main road.