“Perhaps we should think of pen-portraits of all three candidates. Keep a sort of balance.”
“Good idea,” said Marchbanks, who did not think so. “But Komarov is the one who seems to fascinate people, one way or the other. The other two are ciphers. Shall we go upstairs for coffee?”
“Yes, it’s not a bad idea,” agreed Worthing when they were seated in the upstairs drawing room beneath the portrait of the Dilettantes. “Touched as I am by your concern for our circulation figures, what do you want him asked?”
Marchbanks grinned at the directness of the editor.
“All right. Yes, we would like to know a few things that we can feed to our masters. Preferably something not in the article itself. They can also read the Telegraph, and do. What does the man really intend? What about the minority ethnic groups? There are ten million of them in Russia, and Komarov is a Russian supremacist. How does he really intend to produce the rebirth to glory of the Russian nation? In a word, the man’s a mask. What lies behind the mask? Is there a secret agenda?”
“If there is,” mused Worthing, “why should he reveal all to Jefferson?”
“One never knows. Men get carried away.”
“How does one get to this Kuznetsov?”
“Your man in Moscow will know him. A personal letter from Jefferson would probably be well received.”
“All right,” said Worthing as they descended the wide staircase to the lower hall. “I can see a center-page spread in my mind’s eye. Not bad. If the man has something to say. I’ll get on to our Moscow office.”
“If it works, I’d like to have a word with Jefferson afterward.”
“Debriefing? Huh. He’s pretty prickly, you know.”
“I shall be all olive oil,” said Marchbanks.
They parted on the pavement. Worthing’s driver spotted him and glided up from his illegal parking spot opposite the Suntory to carry him back to Canary Wharf in Dockland. The spymaster decided to walk off the treacle tart and the wine.
Washington, September 1985
BEFORE he even began spying, back in 1984, Ames had applied for the post of Soviet Branch chief at the CIA’s big station in Rome. In September 1985 he learned he had the job.
This put him in a quandary. He did not know then that the KGB was unwillingly going to put him in extreme danger by picking up all the men he had betrayed with such speed.
The Rome slot would remove him from Langley and access to the 301 files and the Soviet Branch of the Counterintelligence Group attached to the SE Division. On the other hand, Rome was considered an attractive place to live and a prime assignment. He consulted the Russians.
Their attitude was approving. For one thing they had months of investigations, arrests, and interrogations ahead of them. So vast was the harvest that Ames had brought them and, for security reasons, so small the Kolokol Group working on that material in Moscow, that the full analysis could take years.
For in the interim Ames had provided much more. Among his secondary and tertiary deliveries to his cutout, Chuvakhin, was background material on just about every case officer of any note in Langley. There were not only full résumés of each of these officers, with their postings and achievements, but photos as well. Forewarned by this, the KGB would be able to spot these CIA officers whenever and wherever they showed up.
Also, the Russians estimated that in Rome, one of the key centers in the SE Division, Ames would have access to all CIA operations and collaborations with its allies along the Mediterranean from Spain to Greece, an area of vital interest to Moscow.
Finally, they knew they could have much easier access to Ames in Rome than in Washington where there was always the danger of the FBI spotting them meeting. They urged him to take the posting.
So that same September Ames went off to language school to learn Italian.
At Langley the full import of the catastrophe about to hit the agency had not started to impinge. Two or three of their best agents in Russia had seemingly gone out of contact, which was worrying but not yet disastrous.
Among the personal dossiers Ames had passed to the KGB was that of one young man just transferred to the SE Division whom Ames referred to, because word had run like wildfire through the office, as a rising star. His name was Jason Monk.
¯
OLD Gennadi had been picking mushrooms in those woods for years. In retirement he used nature’s cost-free crop as a supplement to his pension, either taking them fresh to the best restaurants of Moscow or drying them in bunches for the few delicatessens that remained.
The thing about mushrooms is, you have to be out early in the morning, before dawn if possible. They grow in the night and after dawn the voles and squirrels get at them or, e
ven worse, other mushroom pickers. Russians love mushrooms.
On the morning of July 24 Gennadi took his bicycle and his dog and rode from the small village where he lived to a forest he knew where they tended to grow thickly on summer nights. Before the dew was gone, he expected to have a good basketful.