The Moscow Option

We left the car where it was and walked. After about fifteen minutes we arrived at a block of flats, the concrete painted a pale green. It was lower than the one we’d been parked outside but in the same style, square and unadorned, with rows of tiny balconies jutting out onto the street. The front door had no one guarding it, and was unlocked. Maclean didn’t break his stride; he just opened the door and walked in.

The hallway and stairwell were a shambles, the paint peeling from the walls and broken bottles and rubbish scattered around. We climbed a narrow flight of stairs and Maclean knocked on the door three times with his fist, waited a few seconds, then rapped twice. There was a shuffling noise, followed by the sound of a latch dropping, and then the door finally swung open. A man with a beard and thick spectacles peered out sceptically.

‘Good morning, Anton,’ said Maclean. ‘I’m sorry to come unannounced like this, but we met a few months ago, at Zimshin’s party. Do you remember? I need your help. I wouldn’t usually think to impose on you, but it’s of the utmost urgency.’

Anton looked us up and down for a moment, then peered over our shoulders to see if there were any more of us. Finally, he opened the door all the way and gestured us in.

We followed him through a tiny hallway and into the living room, which was dark, tiny and smelled strongly of alcohol and cigarettes. It was also a tip: piles of books and papers took up most of the available space. A few stools were arranged around a table, along with a thin bed that had a blanket strewn across it: Anton had evidently been resting there when we rang the doorbell. Greying socks and underpants hung over a radiator, which had a saucepan tied to one of its corners with string – presumably to catch any drips – while a battered tape recorder emitted Bob Dylan at low volume from the top of a glass-fronted bookcase.

Anton gestured for us to sit in the stools while he propped himself on the edge of the bed. He was wearing a frayed shirt and baggy drawstring trousers held up with braces and his thick dark hair was swept back in majestic disarray. Judging by the titles of some of the books strewn about, he was a physicist of some sort. He was also clearly a dissident, because he was about my age and it was a Monday morning, so he should be in the same sort of office I’d just fished Maclean out of. Instead, he was at home, and for a scientist in this country that meant he must be in disgrace or at least under some form of suspicion. So my information about Maclean had been right: he did move in dissident circles. But would this one be willing to stick his neck out for a complete stranger? He was already rather angry, waving his arms accusingly at Maclean.

‘Please explain yourself,’ he said. ‘And it had better be good, because I have no idea what precautions you took coming here.’

‘We weren’t tailed,’ said Maclean. ‘But these people really do need your help. They’re British, and they need to get out of the country with some very important information that affects all of us.’

‘More British spies? Are you a madman?’ He clenched his fists and stood up from the bed. ‘Sorry, I thought this was serious. Get out, all of you. Now.’

Sarah tugged at my sleeve. ‘Let’s go,’ she whispered. ‘There must be another way.’

I shook my head and walked over to a pair of glass doors that led to a small balcony. I pulled the curtains aside slowly, almost expecting to see a mushroom cloud on the skyline. Silly of me. We wouldn’t see it – it would just come. There probably wouldn’t even be a Four-Minute Warning.

I glanced down at the street a few feet below. A handful of people were trudging by, coats wrapped tight against the chill, and I watched them for a few moments. But there didn’t seem to be anything suspicious about them. I tugged the curtains back together and walked over to Anton, who looked like he was about to roll up his sleeves to fight me. I placed the attaché case on the table, opened it and took out Yuri’s threat assessment.

‘No,’ he said, after he’d read a few lines of it. ‘This appears to be a genuine military intelligence document. How did you get hold of it?’

He turned the page and read it aloud. ‘“Our assessment at this time is that we must consider launching a nuclear strike, perhaps within the next twelve hours.”’ He looked up at me, then at Maclean and Sarah. ‘There must be some mistake,’ he said. ‘This cannot be right.’

I took a breath. Stay calm. ‘If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here. I listened to Brezhnev order ballistic missiles primed less than four hours ago. He and his generals are in a bunker as we speak, contemplating a full-scale nuclear attack on the West. If they do, the West will counter-attack. We, and millions of others, will die. We want to try to stop this happening, but we need your help.’

There was silence for a moment, except for Dylan, who was continuing his lament about the state of the world in the corner of the room. Then Anton started asking me a lot of questions, but I cut him off and explained that there wasn’t any time. Maclean’s colleagues might soon be wondering where he’d got to, and I couldn’t afford to spend the day going over the intricacies of the B-52 flights and the mustard gas accident.

Maclean tilted his head. ‘I don’t want to take the chance they’re not, do you?’

Anton thought about that for a moment, then stretched out his hand to shake mine.

‘I see. Like Lenin! Well, you will need a lot of papers for that. I take it you don’t have any at all?’ I shook my head. ‘Okay. Everyone needs to have a domestic passport, with propiska. An institutional work pass, a work book and of course kharakteristika. We will just have to hope that will be enough.’

He shrugged. ‘Staying in a hotel, going to the hospital – even entering some libraries.’

Maclean left shortly afterwards – the last thing we wanted was for people to start wondering where he had got to. He agreed that if he heard anything about the situation from his colleagues he would try to return, using Anton’s door knock code again.

Once he’d gone, Sarah and I helped Anton clear some space in the living room. The bed was a folding one, and it turned out that the bookcase opened on a hinge and the bed went in it, stored upright, along with the blanket and pillows.

‘Now,’ Anton said once everything had been packed away. ‘I think it might be best if you both clean yourselves up a bit first. And let’s see if we can do something about your hand.’ I’d taken off the gloves. ‘Wait here.’

He pushed open a door to the right of the radiator and I caught a glimpse of a tiny bathroom housing a toilet and a washbasin. A few moments later he came back in with a first-aid kit. I winced as he applied antiseptic and a bandage, but thanked him for it. He motioned for Sarah to use the bathroom, and she nodded graciously and went in to wash herself. Then he turned back to me.

‘We should also change your appearance. They will have a very detailed description of you by now, I think.’

He took off his spectacles and passed them over. I placed them over my nose, and blinked at the strength of them. I removed them at once, but agreed that they were a simple and effective prop.

‘And some clothes,’ said Anton. He squeezed past a pile of books and slid out a drawer in his magical bookcase. After some rummaging around, he removed a heavily wrinkled jacket and a gaudy cheesecloth shirt. I unbuttoned Bessmertny’s shirt and put both on. Anton passed me a hairbrush, and I arranged my hair so that it fell forward.

Sarah came out of the bathroom, her face looking a lot fresher, and muffled a laugh at my appearance. Anton smiled and did some more rummaging until he had located what looked like a black transistor radio. But I saw a lens sticking out of the front, and realized that it was, in fact, a camera.

He smiled, pleased at the question. ‘It’s an instant camera,’ he said. ‘A copy of the Polaroid – very new, and very rare. I can’t tell you what I had to do to get hold of it. I’ve also had to make some very special modifications. It has completely changed the way I can make documents. Now, please stand over there.’

He pointed at an area of wall beside the bookcase. I moved towards it, and he fiddled about with the camera and positioned me as he wanted.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, but it seemed to take him quite a while to line up the shot. But once he had done it and taken the photo, he stripped off the backing sheet and we waited for the image to appear. It took about a minute. Bizarrely, instead of one image appearing, four did, precisely like passport photographs.

‘Four lenses,’ said Anton, beaming. ‘It took me almost a month to figure out how to do it.’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ I said. ‘What do we think, though? Will it pass muster?’

Sarah peered over and had a look. ‘It’s great,’ she said. ‘I doubt many people would recognize you from that.’

I grimaced. It wasn’t most people I was worried about, but men at a roadblock examining every vehicle, armed with a description. But I smiled at her nevertheless. ‘Let’s see how you fare, then.’

Anton looked up at me with surprise. ‘Oh, no!’ he said. ‘You misunderstand. I only have a set of papers that will fit you. I don’t have any way of making papers for your friend.’

I stared at him. ‘Well, that’s wonderful to hear. But how the hell do you think we’re going to get over the border if only one of us has papers?’

‘It’s all right, Paul,’ said Sarah quietly. ‘It’s best you get away – you know where the U-boat is, after all. I’ll find a way out somehow, don’t worry.’

‘Not a chance,’ I said. ‘I’m not leaving you here for the likes of Yuri to . . .’ I pressed my nails into my palms. ‘There has to be a way,’ I said to Anton. ‘You must have some documents you can adapt.’

He shook his head. ‘You’re lucky I have some that will suit you. All I can suggest is that the young lady might be able to fit in the boot of my car, if she is willing. It’s a small space, but it should be possible.’

We glanced at each other, my earlier remark about putting her in the boot of Bessmertny’s car hovering between us. But it was a good offer. It wasn’t as good as papers, but a car was much safer than trying our luck with public transport.

‘Good.’ I turned back to Anton. ‘Where’s your car and what does it look like?’

‘It’s parked on the other side of the street – a yellow Moskvitch. There are windscreen wipers in the glove compartment if you need them. And the radio has a special receiver installed. If you press the middle button, you should be able to hear what the militsiya are saying. That might come in useful.’

‘I wish I could do more. Now I have to get to work. My equipment is in the other room, and I would ask that you not observe. Please understand that this is not because I don’t trust you . . .’

I nodded. He was worried that if we were caught, the authorities would torture us to discover the techniques he’d used to forge our papers. I was pretty sure they would have other things on their mind in that case but, after all, he was risking his freedom for the sake of two strangers and I didn’t expect him to abandon his own self-interest entirely.

Christ. It seemed like an age, considering the situation I’d left behind in the bunker. But there was no way round it: without at least one set of papers, there was no way we were going to get out of the city, let alone the country.

Anton fetched a packet of stale-looking biscuits from the kitchen, poured us a couple of glasses of water and handed out two cigarettes, before retreating to the bedroom and closing the door behind him.

I lit the cigarette and gladly inhaled it. Sarah walked over to the tape recorder and found a cassette of Bach organ preludes, which she put on to replace Dylan. Something about the way she was standing, facing away from me, alerted me that something was wrong.

She nodded her head fractionally, but didn’t turn. I thought about it for a moment, and realized she was frightened. I picked up the attaché case, opened it and took out the papers, fanning them across the table.

‘I looked at some of these in the café, but there’s much more of it, as you can see. A lot of it will be guff, I’m sure, but there might be something here that helps us know how they’re thinking, and might help us stop this. Care to go through it with me?’

She turned and smiled, and I realized I’d guessed correctly: it was the inaction that was making her antsy, the waiting around. We seated ourselves as comfortably as we could and began reading through the papers. I started by tackling Ivashutin’s strategy document again, reading it through from start to finish. I couldn’t decide if he really believed that the warmongering imperialists could be overcome by the noble Soviets in their overcoats storming through a radioactive Western Europe, or whether the document was empty rhetoric that nobody in the Kremlin took seriously. I hoped for all our sakes that it was the latter.

‘You might be interested in this,’ said Sarah, and I looked up. She pushed across a thick bound dossier and I picked it up. There was a red star in a black circle on the front, and the word ‘

’ in faded type.

‘NEZAVISIMYJ’, meaning ‘independent’ – this was my file. I’d discovered the same dossier in a flat in Rome six months ago, but that version had been a lot thinner. This, then, must be the GRU’s master file, containing all the information they had on me.

I opened it up and was immediately confronted with several strips of film negatives. I held one up to the light and saw it was a photograph of me as a young man in SAS uniform, which must have been taken somewhere in the British Zone. It had been taken from some distance, and I was looking down at the ground, shielding my eyes from the sun with one arm raised. I started running through the rest of the strip. There was one of Anna, casually standing on the steps of the clinic, smoking a cigarette, and another with me and her in the ward, presumably taken with a camera she had hidden somewhere. There were dozens of the things. Presumably they had sent a few to Sasha in London for safekeeping, because he had shown me some in March to blackmail me into continuing to serve them.

I placed them to one side, exposing a document below. The cover page bore the title ‘APPENDIX I: RECRUITMENT OF “INDEPENDENT”’. I turned it over and found a slim pamphlet; the edges of the pages were yellowing and torn, but the type was still legible. It was dated 12 June 1945, and was in the form of a letter from Yuri to Kuznetsov, who had then been the head of the GRU.

I met with agent LOTUS on the 6th to discuss the progress of Operation JUSTICE, the latest report on which I have enclosed with this package (Operational Letter 16/H). At the same meeting, we discussed the matter of LOTUS’s son, whom we have codenamed INDEPENDENT (see Operational Letter 14/H).

I hereby propose that we try to recruit INDEPENDENT. The reason for doing so is simple: in the coming years, he is very likely to rise rapidly through the ranks of British Intelligence. The fact that he is the son of one of our agents gives us the means with which to recruit him, and if we succeed he may prove more valuable than any of the others we have recruited into the British network to date.

I already knew that I was ‘Independent’; it seemed Father’s codename had been ‘Lotus’, and that their operation to find and execute war criminals in the British Zone of Germany had been JUSTICE. There was something disturbing about the phrase ‘the British network to date’ – how many had been in that, and who were they?

INDEPENDENT is twenty years old and has already served with several British commando units. He is currently attached to the Allied Control Commission in Helsinki, where he is working under cover for the Special Operations Executive. He was placed there through the recommendation of LOTUS, and his performance so far has been exemplary – see my last report. LOTUS is opposed to the idea of recruiting his son, but is still afraid that we may use the compromising material we have regarding himself and BAIT. I feel confident he will be a completely willing participant in the operation.

‘BAIT’? Who the hell was that, and what was the material about them that had compromised Father? My stomach roiled as I realized that my father had never been an ideological traitor, but had been blackmailed into serving the Russians. And that despite Yuri’s claim that he was ‘a completely willing participant’, they had coerced him into trapping me, too.

The relationship between LOTUS and the target offers us a great advantage, but will have to be handled with care. LOTUS’s cover is that of a traditional right-wing member of the British upper classes and this, together with the internment of his wife for German sympathies, has led to a distance between himself and INDEPENDENT, who naturally has no idea of his father’s work for us. LOTUS has agreed that the best course would not be to try to mend this distance, which would almost certainly prove too difficult, but instead to exploit it.

I propose a variation of the basic honey-trap operation we have used many times previously, including with LOTUS and BAIT, but with a few innovations resulting from the nature of the situation.

I took a breath and tried to clear my head. So Father had been the target of a honey trap – and presumably ‘Bait’ was his lover. And they had played this trick ‘many times’. It looked like their recruitment plans had been a lot more systematic than I or anyone else had ever considered – almost routine.

And Father, behind that cold English mask of his, had apparently known all along that I resented him for his politics and for what he had done to Mother for hers. The stern handshake, the steely glare, the lack of any show of affection – had they all been part of his cover, then? Doubtless they were built in to his upbringing, but I was shocked that he had not only been aware of my feelings towards him but had also known how to exploit them; perhaps parents knew this sort of thing instinctively. But this was nevertheless a very different man to the one I thought I’d known. It showed a level of cynicism that made me resent him anew – but then I remembered the blackmail, and another picture emerged, of a man who was utterly desperate and trapped, and who was pressured into finding a way to recruit his son into the same situation.

I wasn’t sure if I could read on. Did I need to know precisely how they’d gone about recruiting me? I didn’t let myself answer the question: my fingers turned the page anyway.

PHASE ONE.

The operation should take place in the British Zone of Germany over the next six months, and run in conjunction with Operation JUSTICE. Agents LOTUS and KINDRED already have the list of Ukrainian traitors we suspect of hiding in the British Zone. LOTUS will contact INDEPENDENT and urgently request he come to Germany to support an operation of greatest secrecy. LOTUS has suggested invoking a direct order from Churchill, and I agree.

PHASE TWO.

LOTUS to introduce INDEPENDENT to KINDRED and inform him he is engaged in finding and liquidating war criminals. He will say they are Nazis who have killed British servicemen, rather than the scum who have killed our own agents.

I thought back to that first night in the safe house outside Lübeck, when Father had introduced me to Henry Pritchard and told me about the operation: the tiny sitting room lit by candles, Father talking about his meeting with Churchill, Pritchard standing to attention by the ramshackle ward robe. Could I, in my wildest imaginings, have guessed that both were working for the Soviets? No, agents ‘Lotus’ and ‘Kindred’ had played their parts well – and I’d been an easy dupe. The rest of Phase Two had taken place precisely as described: I’d helped Father trace his Nazi war criminals, unaware that they were Ukrainians who had killed Russian agents rather than British ones. And then had come the injury. Father had claimed that our final target was Gustav Meier, an SS officer who had raped and tortured members of the French Resistance, including children. All of this had been backed by forged documents he had briefly waved under my nose. Towards the end of September 1945, Father claimed to have discovered that Meier was working as a gardener near Hamburg, and we’d set off together to capture him. Naturally, it was a set-up. ‘Meier’ – even the name was included in Yuri’s plan – was in fact a Soviet agent codenamed STILETTO for his expertise with knives, who had been brought in especially and instructed on how to cut me.

The wound we envision would be to one of the kidneys and will be very painful, but shallow and will heal within a relatively short time.

It had been extremely painful. Even now, I found it hard to believe it had only been a surface wound, and that I hadn’t received genuine treatment for all those months. And then Phase Three: Father and Pritchard had taken me to the Red Cross hospital just outside Lübeck, where I was soon taken into the care of a nurse codenamed COMFORT – Anna.

You will recall COMFORT from earlier operations. She has now been at this hospital for several months and her professionalism is unparalleled. Once assigned to treating INDEPENDENT, she will befriend and woo him, playing on his youthful desires and ambitions to rebel against his father and the establishment he represents. Incidentally, LOTUS assures us his son is sexually normal and will succumb to her charms. If not, we will replace her with IRINA.

So Anna was a veteran of honey traps – and they even had a back-up model, just in case I didn’t fancy her! Well, Father had been right about my appetites. They’d found a beauty any red-blooded young male would have salivated over, especially if it were her job to make him do so. I wondered who her other victims had been: other Englishmen like myself? How many?

PHASE FOUR.

COMFORT will educate the target about our beliefs and aims, presenting them in a light he is most likely to appreciate. I have already briefed her extensively on how best to do this. If we are lucky, this alone may be enough, and she may be able to recruit him directly. But, judging from previous operations and the unusual biography of INDEPENDENT, it may prove a little more difficult. If that is the case, once she is certain that he has strong feelings for her, COMFORT will reveal to INDEPENDENT that she is one of our agents, under the guise of remorse and affection for him. She will also mention my cover name at the camp, and that I am her handler.

This strategy involves a certain amount of risk, but I am confident of INDEPENDENT’s reaction – namely that he will angrily rebuff her and contact LOTUS to tell him that the British ‘operation’ has been exposed.

PHASE FIVE.

I would request a delivery of the new K4 nerve gas from Department 12 for the next part of the operation. Please send a package with the next courier from our Zone. I will administer the dose to COMFORT to induce catalepsy. Using our usual cosmetics techniques, we will then stage a death scene at the hospital, and ensure that INDEPENDENT sees with his own eyes that she has been ‘killed’.

The next part of the operation involves the death of LOTUS. If all goes to plan, INDEPENDENT will seek an audience with his father, whom he will suspect is responsible for ordering the murder of COMFORT, due to the fact that he had recently informed him she was a foreign agent.

I have told LOTUS that the plan is for him to strenuously deny involvement to INDEPENDENT, while at the same time emphasizing that COMFORT was an enemy agent. But while I feel that plan would probably be enough to push INDEPENDENT to seek me out and offer to serve us, I do not think it would be psychologically damaging enough to sustain a long-term commitment from him. There is also the matter that LOTUS feels under substantial pressure, and is displaying predictable signs of neurosis as a result. His material has worsened lately, and in years to come he may be overlooked for promotion and have even less access to the sort of material we require.

In short, I think it is clear that INDEPENDENT is the coming man, and so propose we sacrifice LOTUS in order to guarantee his replacement by his son. So, in place of the confrontation I have outlined and rehearsed with LOTUS, I suggest that he is instead liquidated and it be made to look as though he has taken his own life. INDEPENDENT will then, I am certain, believe that his father acted through guilt at having ordered the death of COMFORT. If my calculations are correct – and I would submit that they have not yet been wrong in such matters – INDEPENDENT will then seek me out here and offer his services as our agent, and the impact of the events surrounding his recruitment will drive him to be loyal to us in perpetuity.

Several more pages followed, but I’d got the picture. I shuffled the papers together and slid the pile back into the attaché case.

I knew a lot of it already, but hadn’t run through all the ramifications. Some of it had been circling around the edges of my consciousness, where I’d let it linger, unwilling to poke the wound. And some of it had never occurred to me at all – the idea that Yuri had killed Father, for example. I had still believed it was suicide. But it was obvious, now that I thought about it: suicide wasn’t really Father’s style. And yes, the operation had been ‘psychologically damaging’, in just the way Yuri had foreseen: I had sought him out and nursed the dual wound of Anna’s death and Father’s ordering of it for years. Not in perpetuity, though. He’d got that bit wrong – not in perpetuity.

I looked up. The muscles in Sarah’s cheek were visible as she clenched her jaw – she was reading Ivashutin’s strategy document. She turned the paper over and stared at me. ‘Isn’t there someone else we can show this to? The Americans, or the French?’

I shook my head. ‘Nobody in the West is going to believe us – we have to make the Russians understand they’ve made a mistake.’

‘And we’re sure they have, I take it? What if there has been a chemical attack on these bases?’

‘It’s possible,’ I conceded. ‘But I think it’s just far too coincidental. There were thirty or more canisters of this precise chemical down there in 1945. If several have escaped to the surface and leaked towards the bases on the currents, I think you’d easily get this effect. Some novice sentry found a lump of the stuff that had washed ashore, picked it up and brought it into the base, after which others have touched it, too.’

I couldn’t. Although I’d told both Brezhnev and Maclean that I was certain the Americans weren’t planning a strike, I was far from sure of that. I was hoping they were up to something else because I thought the mustard gas must have leaked from the U-boat. But I didn’t know it.

And there was one other thing bothering me. When I’d come out of hospital in April, in the fortnight before Templeton’s funeral, there had been a brief moment of panic when the North Koreans had shot down one of the Americans’ reconnaissance planes over the Sea of Japan. For a few hours, the signals had been frantic, and Nixon had placed nuclear-armed fighters in South Korea on a fifteen-minute alert to attack the North. In the end he had changed his mind, and simply resumed the reconnaissance flights instead to signal that he wasn’t going to back down. But he had nevertheless considered a nuclear strike. Could it be for some reason I didn’t know of that he was considering it again, only this time against the Soviet Union?

‘If the Americans are planning a strike, we can’t stop them,’ I said to Sarah. ‘But if they aren’t, we might be able to stop the Russians from reacting. So we have to act on the basis that they aren’t. Does that make sense?’

She smiled, and placed her hand across the table. I took it in mine, savouring the warmth of her touch. I looked into her eyes, and remembered for a moment the sweat on her skin in the boat in Sardinia. We were a long way from there now.

‘Let’s hope he’s ready soon,’ I said. ‘Did you find anything of interest in the papers so far?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think there was anything we didn’t already know. How about you? Was that your file?’

‘Yes.’ There was little more to say about it, or little I wanted to, anyway.

‘And what about the rest of it?’ she said, pointing to some papers poking out under the dossier I had just read. ‘Anything there?’

My stomach tightened and I pushed the other dossier aside. The document beneath was simply titled ‘Report on INDEPENDENT’. I picked it up. It was dated 20 October 1969 – just a week ago.

‘Are there any cigarettes left?’ I said to Sarah, and she found the packet and lit one for me.

I stared down at the document, and breathed in the tar that might help me get through it. It looked to have been written by Sasha, and was addressed to Yuri.

Esteemed Comrade,

You asked me to give my reasons in writing for bringing INDEPENDENT to Moscow. It is my view, having been his handler for nearly twenty years, that when he was recruited in 1945, INDEPENDENT strongly believed himself to be setting out on a moral crusade. As we had hoped, he applied his adolescent sense of idealism to our cause, associating his service to us with vengeance for COMFORT’s death at the hands (as he believed) of his father.

But although INDEPENDENT was able to convince himself that he was a Communist for the first few years of his work, this soon faded. He disagreed with our actions in Hungary in 1956, for instance, and on other occasions when I discussed such issues with him it was clear that he had become a believer only in the vaguest sense of the word, in a manner similar to many of our sympathizers in the West.

Due to his position and relationship with us, INDEPENDENT has long felt that he has a central role to play in the direction of political forces in the world. For him to be of use to us, it was necessary that we sustained his belief in this delusion. However, when he was threatened with exposure in March he discovered some limited information about the nature of his recruitment, namely that COMFORT was a honey trap.

As a result, he turned against both the British and us. This entire episode has been a disaster for us and for the KGB, who I hope I am not remiss in saying acted with great malice towards us in this affair, and at great cost to the Motherland. The results of this were discussed in my previous reports.

Following the fiasco in Nigeria, which resulted in the deaths of two of our agents by INDEPENDENT’s hand, he was then targeted by a faction of neo-fascist hawks within British intelligence, whose links to covert groups in other NATO countries we have monitored for some time. Unfortunately, INDEPENDENT was not aware of our attitude towards these groups and their plans. This resulted in him nearly wrecking the hawks’ actions in Italy, which would in turn have destroyed our own long-term strategy regarding this NATO action.

As these events took place at great speed across several countries, there was no possibility for me to communicate with Centre about every development, and I was forced to make several decisions without going through the usual channels or face the possibility of more disaster. I decided that it was in the best interest of the Motherland that INDEPENDENT not make public the NATO hawks’ actions before we had deemed it politically expedient, and so I extracted him from Italy. As he was with another British agent, SARAH SEVERN, the wife of a hawk (now deceased), I decided she too must be extracted, or we would wake up to find the incidents in question across the front pages of newspapers across the world.

But I did not make this decision solely for wider strategic reasons. Since March, INDEPENDENT has effectively run amok, and I felt we needed to capture him before he could do yet more damage. A primary consideration was that he has been serving us for over two decades, and was at this time the deputy head of the British Service. In normal circumstances, this would have been a great victory for us. However, it had already become clear that INDEPENDENT had not just stopped serving us, but was working against us. By bringing him back to Centre, I felt we would be in a position to present his service to us without his interference, when and how we judged would cause the most propaganda damage to the West.

I confess that it has not worked out as easily as I had imagined. The British have so far managed to conceal the fact that he was one of our agents, reporting in the press simply that he died on assignment in Italy in May. My initial proposal was that we simply counter this with a press conference at which INDEPENDENT would appear and read a statement revealing that he has served us since 1945. I now feel that this would be unwise, mainly because INDEPENDENT is uncontrollable. Even with sedatives and the threat of the torture of SARAH SEVERN, for whom it is clear he has a sentimental attachment, I am not confident we would be able to control what he might say.

And there remains a wider problem: if we present his service to us to the international community, the propaganda benefit of revealing that such a senior figure in Western intelligence was an agent would be considerable in the short term, but in the longer term may cause us more damage than good. With previous British agents, the public revelation that they have served us has resulted in a pleasing level of anger from the Americans, and the British have yet to fully regain their trust as a result. In addition, the British cannot even trust themselves, and have spent much of their energy in recent years looking for more of our agents within their structures, to pleasingly unsuccessful effect.

In the case of INDEPENDENT, however, I feel that public exposure of such a senior figure in the Western intelligence structure would attract not only the attention of those within his own agency who have so far been concerned with trying to find members of our British network, but also others in Western intelligence. Some would no doubt conclude that INDEPENDENT must be one of several agents we have planted in their countries, and would investigate much more thoroughly than they have done to date. This would endanger many of our agents who are active or sleeping in the West.

As INDEPENDENT is no longer of use as an agent, and is rather a danger to us and a drain on resources, I suggest the time has come to liquidate him. It is probably advisable to liquidate the girl, too.

I dropped the stub of the cigarette into my glass, and placed the document to one side. So they had wanted me dead, and Sarah, too. The report had been written only a week ago, so either Yuri had disagreed with Sasha’s assessment or, more likely, he hadn’t yet decided what to do about it and the current crisis had intervened.

Sasha had been right about one thing, though: I was uncontrollable. I wanted to break his fucking neck.

I walked to the doors leading to the balcony again. It had begun to hail, tiny hard pellets. My world and Sarah’s had been reduced to this small flat, in its way no less a prison than the one from which we’d escaped. The cramped walls and ceiling made me want to run into the streets with her. But while the air would be crisp, the sky would be grey and men with steel-toed boots and loaded rifles were looking for us both with the intent to kill. And somewhere deep underground, surrounded by marble pillars and oil paintings, the walls were closing in on Brezhnev and the Supreme Command.

Soon, with any luck, we were going to try to cross a border. Which one, though? The maritime frontier was very tightly monitored by the Navy, with patrol craft along the whole stretch. They would also have stepped up their numbers and been given instructions to watch for us. But it is never possible to check all outgoing boats from a shoreline, however heavily you patrol it. Perhaps we could find a fisherman with an outboard motor willing to take us across the water. Perhaps.

We also had to decide where along the frontier to try to cross. The ‘attacks’ were in a part of the country that was closed off to anyone without a special pass, and would now be under complete lockdown, with hundreds, if not thousands, of military personnel there. So we would have to give that whole area a wide berth. Our best bet might be to try to reach the U-boat from the other direction – from Åland. It was a longer way around, but it had some advantages. Yuri and his colleagues might soon realize we were planning to head for the U-boat, but probably wouldn’t guess we would take such an indirect route. They would also be unable to coordinate the hunt for us, because if we managed to get into Finland they wouldn’t easily be able to control their men there, or the Finns for that matter.

It was a very big if, though. There were twelve miles of protection either side of that frontier – the pogranichnaya polosa, or border strip – including sentries with dogs. And even if we found a way to get past the Soviet patrols in the area, we would still have the Finns to contend with on the other side, where it was almost as heavily guarded. Despite the difficult history between the two countries, the Finns regularly handed back anyone they caught coming over the border.

Another thought that had slowly been taking shape in my mind was the question of equipment. I needed to get back down into the U-boat to find the canisters, but to do that I would have to find a way to get hold of diving gear. I knew from the war that the Germans had made sure all their U-boats had self-contained diving suits on board, complete with oxygen flasks and air purifiers, but I had to get down there in the first place. Could I break into one of the Soviets’ naval stations and steal one? It seemed a stretch. There was a naval base at Kronstadt, but that was fortified on its own island and I didn’t fancy my chances there. Perhaps I could find equipment on Åland itself? I wondered what had happened in the intervening years to Kjell Lundström, the police constable from Degerby who had helped me in 1945 – perhaps he could help me again.

And then there was the problem of what to do if I did get down there. I was hoping it would be obvious that the canisters had leaked, and that I would be able to point this out to the Russians at their consulate in Mariehamn. But I had no idea if the Soviets still had a consulate on the archipelago – perhaps they had abandoned it in the intervening years. If so, I might have to try to reach Helsinki or Stockholm. But first I would have to find the canisters, and they might well have come loose from the U-boat and be many miles from it. I would either have to find them myself or bring the Russians close enough to them that I could take someone down there with me and force them to see the evidence for themselves . . .

The door to the bedroom opened and Anton emerged, his hair sticking out at even zanier angles than previously, his hands clutching a sheaf of booklets triumphantly. He was done. He spread them out on the table for our inspection – I had no way of telling, of course, but they certainly looked the part. He went through them carefully with me, explaining the purpose of each document and why I might be asked to show it, and after we had gone through it all once more I leaned over and gave him a bear hug.

There was an awkward silence as he shuffled his feet. Then there was a sound at the door: three muffled knocks. We stood still and waited. A couple of seconds passed and two more raps came. Sarah walked towards the door.

Maclean was standing in the doorway, a sombre expression on his face. It took me a moment to understand why. Directly behind him stood two men: one was Smale, and the other was William Osborne.