HALFWAY UP ST. JAMES’S STREET, HEADING NORTH WITH the one-way traffic, is an anonymous gray stone building with a blue door and some potted green shrubs outside. It bears no name. Those who know what and where it is will have no trouble finding it; those who do not will be those who have no invitation to enter, and will pass on by. Brooks’s Club does not advertise.
It is however a favorite watering hole of civil servants from Whitehall not far away. It was here that Jeffrey Marchbanks met the editor of the Daily Telegraph for lunch on July 22.
Brian Worthing was forty-eight and had been a journalist for over twenty years when, two years earlier, the Canadian proprietor Conrad Black had headhunted him from the Times to take over the vacant editorship. Worthing’s background was as a foreign and war correspondent. He had covered the Falklands War as a young man, his first real war, and later the Gulf in 1990-1991.
The table Marchbanks had secured for himself was a small one in a corner, far enough from the others not to be overheard. Not that anyone would dream of attempting such a thing. In Brooks’s a chap would never dream of eavesdropping another chap’s conversation, but old habits die hard.
“I think I probably mentioned at Spurnal that I was with the Foreign Office,” said Marchbanks over the potted shrimp.
“I recall that you did,” said Worthing. He had been of two minds about whether to accept the lunch invitation at all. His day would as always last from ten in the morning until after sundown and taking two hours out for lunch—three if you counted the haul from Canary Wharf up to the West End and back—had better be worth it.
“Well, actually I work at another building further down the river from King Charles Street and on the other side,” said Marchbanks.
“Ah,” said the editor. He knew all about Vauxhall Cross though he had never been in it. Perhaps the lunch was
going to produce something after all.
“My particular concern is Russia.”
“I don’t envy you,” said Worthing, demolishing the last shrimp with a slice of thin brown bread. He was a big man with a notable appetite. “Going to hell in a hand-basket, I would have thought.”
“Something like that. Since the death of Cherkassov the next prospect seems to be the forthcoming presidential elections.”
The two men fell silent as a young waitress brought the lamb chops and vegetables with a carafe of the house claret. Marchbanks poured.
“Bit of a foregone conclusion,” said Worthing.
“Our view precisely. The Communist revival has fizzled over the years and the reformers are at sixes and sevens. There seems to be nothing to stop Igor Komarov from taking the presidency.”
“Is that bad?” asked the editor. “The last piece I saw about him, he appeared to be talking some sense. Get the currency back in shape, halt the slide to chaos, give the mafia a hard time. That sort of thing.”
Worthing prided himself on being a man of direct speech and tended to talk in staccato.
“Exactly, sounds wonderful. But he’s still a bit of an enigma. What does he really intend to do? How, specifically does he intend to do it? He says he despises foreign credits, but how can he get by without them? More to the point, will he try to negate Russia’s debts by paying them off in worthless rubles?”
“He wouldn’t dare,” said ‘Worthing. He knew the Telegraph had a resident correspondent in Moscow but he had not filed a piece on Komarov for some time. Perhaps this lunch was not a waste after all.
“Wouldn’t he now?” countered Marchbanks. “We don’t know. Some of his speeches are pretty extreme, but then in private conversation he persuades visitors he’s not such an ogre after all. Which is the real man?”
“I could ask our Moscow man to seek an interview.”
“Unlikely to be granted, I’m afraid,” suggested the spymaster. “I believe just about every resident correspondent in Moscow does the same regularly. He only grants interviews with exceptional rarity and purports to loathe the foreign press.”
“I say, there’s treacle tart,” said Worthing. “I’ll take it.”
The British in middle age are seldom more content than when being offered the sort of food they were fed in nursery school. The waitress brought treacle tart for both.
“So, how to get at the man?” asked Worthing.
“He has a young publicity adviser whose advice he seems to listen to. Boris Kuznetsov. Very bright, educated at one of the American Ivy League colleges. If there’s a key, he’s it. We understand he reads the western press every day and particularly likes the articles by your man Jefferson.”
Mark Jefferson was a staffer and regular contributor to the main feature page of the Telegraph. He dealt with politics, domestic and foreign, was a fine polemicist and a trenchant conservative. Worthing chewed on his treacle tart.
“It’s an idea,” he said at length.
“You see,” said Marchbanks, warming to his ploy, “resident correspondents in Moscow are two a penny. But a star feature writer coming to do a major portrait of the coming leader, man-of-tomorrow sort of thing—that might appeal.”
Worthing thought it over.