would soon be noticed and reported on. The same applies to your apartment. Diplomats are watched—you know that. Hotels are watched also; no apartments are for rent here without impossible formalities. It will be difficult, Adam, very difficult.”
“Valentina, you arranged this meeting. You took the initiative. Was it just for old times’ sake? If you do not like your life here, if you do not like the men you work for ... But if you cannot leave because of Sasha, then what is it you want?”
She composed herself and thought for a while. When she spoke, it was quite calmly.
“Adam, I want to try to stop them. I want to try to stop what they are doing. I suppose I have for several years now, but since I saw you at the Bolshoi, and remembered all the freedom we had in Berlin, I began thinking about it more and more. Now I am certain. Tell me if you can—is there an intelligence officer in your embassy?”
Munro was shaken. He had handled two defectors-in-place, one from the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, the other in Vienna. One had been motivated by a conversion from respect to hatred for his own regime, like Valentina; the other by bitterness at lack of promotion. The former had been the trickier to handle.
“I suppose so,” he said slowly. “I suppose there must be.”
Valentina rummaged in the shoulder bag on the pine needles by her feet. Having made up her mind, she was apparently determined to go through with her betrayal. She withdrew a thick, padded envelope.
“I want you to give this to him, Adam. Promise me you will never tell him who it came from. Please, Adam. I am frightened by what I am doing. I cannot trust anyone but you.”
“I promise,” he said. “But I have to see you again. I can’t Just see you walk away through the gap in the wall as I did last time.”
“No, I cannot do that again, either. But do not try to contact me at my apartment. It is in a walled compound for senior functionaries, with a single gate in the wall and a policeman at it. Do not try to telephone me. The calls are monitored. And I will never meet anyone else from your embassy, not even the intelligence chief.”
“I agree,” said Munro. “But when can we meet again?”
She considered for a moment. “It is not always easy for me to get away. Sasha takes up most of my spare time. But I have my own car and I am not followed. Tomorrow I must go away for two weeks, but we can meet here, four Sundays from today.” She looked at her watch. “I must go, Adam. I am one of a house party at a dacha a few miles from here.”
He kissed her on the lips, the way it used to be. And it was as sweet as it had ever been. She rose and walked away across the clearing. When she reached the fringe of the trees, he called after her.
“Valentina, what is in this?” He held up the package.
She paused and turned.
“My job,” she said, “is to prepare the verbatim transcripts of the Politburo meetings, one for each member. And the digests for the candidate members. From the tape recordings. That is a copy of the recording of the meeting of June tenth.”
Then she was gone into the trees. Munro sat on the tombstone and looked down at the package.
“Bloody hell,” he said.
ADAM MUNRO sat in a locked room in the main building of the British Embassy on Maurice Thorez Embankment and listened to the last sentences of the tape recording on the machine in front of him. The room was safe from any chance of electronic surveillance by the Russians, which was why he had borrowed it for a few hours from the head of Chancery.
“... goes without saying that this news does not pass outside those present in this room. Our next meeting will be a week from today.”
The voice of Maxim Rudin died away, and the tape hissed on the machine, then stopped. Munro switched it off. He leaned back and let out a long, low whistle.
If it was true, it was bigger than anything Oleg Penkovsky had brought over, twenty years before. The story of Penkovsky was folklore in the SIS, the CIA, and, most of all, in the bitterest memories of the KGB. He was a brigadier general in the GRU, with access to the highest information, who, disenchanted with the Kremlin hierarchy, had approached first the Americans and then the British with an offer to provide information.
The Americans had turned him down, suspecting a trap. The British had accepted him, and for two and a half years “run” him until he was trapped by the KGB, exposed, tried, and shot. In his time he had brought over a golden harvest of secret information, but most of all at the time of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In that month the world had applauded the exceptionally skillful handling by President John F. Kennedy of the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev over the matter of the planting of Soviet missiles in Cuba. What the world had not known was that the exact strengths and weaknesses of the Russian leader were already in the Americans’ hands, thanks to Penkovsky.
When it was finally over, the Soviet missiles were out of Cuba, Khrushchev was humbled, Kennedy was a hero, and Penkovsky was under suspicion. He was arrested in November. Within a year, after a show trial, he was dead. That same winter of 1963 Kennedy, too, died, just thirteen months after his triumph. And within two years Khrushchev had fallen, toppled by his own colleagues, ostensibly because of his failure in the grain policy, in fact because his adventurism had scared the daylights out of them. The democrat, the despot, and the spy had all left the stage. But even Penkovsky had never got right inside the Politburo.
Munro took the spool off the machine and carefully rewrapped it. The voice of Professor Yakovlev was, of course, unknown to him, and most of the tape was of him reading his report. But in the discussion following the professor, there were ten voices, and three at least were identifiable. The low growl of Rudin was well enough known; the high tones of Vishnayev, Munro had heard before, watching televised speeches by the man to Party congresses; and the bark of Marshal Kerensky he had heard at May Day celebrations, as well as on film and tape.
His problem, when he took the tape back to London for voiceprint analysis, as he knew he must, was how to cover his source. He knew if he admitted to the secret rendezvous in the forest, following the typed note in the bathing towel, the question would be asked: “Why you, Munro? How did she know you?” It would be impossible to avoid that question, and equally impossible to answer it. The only solution was to devise an alternative source, credible and uncheckable.
He had been in Moscow only six weeks, but his unsuspected mastery of even slang Russian had paid a couple of dividends. At a diplomatic reception in the Czech Embassy two weeks earlier, he had been in conversation with an Indian attache when he had heard two Russians in muttered conversation behind him. One of them had said, “He’s a bitter bastard. Thinks he should have had the top slot.”
He had followed the gaze of the two who had spoken, and noted they were observing and presumably talking about a Russian across the room. The guest list later confirmed the man was Anatoly Krivoi, personal aide and right-hand man to the Party theoretician, Vishnayev. So what had he got to be bitter about? Munro checked his files and came up with Krivoi’s history. He had worked in the Party Organizations Section of the Central Committee; shortly after the nomination of Petrov to the top job, Krivoi had appeared on Vishnayev’s staff. Quit in disgust? Personality conflict with Petrov? Bitter at being passed over? They were all possible, and all interesting to an intelligence chief in a foreign capital.
Krivoi, he mused. Maybe. Just maybe. He, too, would have access, at least to Vishnayev’s copy of the transcript, maybe even to the tape. And he was probably in Moscow; certainly his boss was. Vishnayev had been present when the East German Premier had arrived a week before.
“Sorry, Anatoly, you’ve just changed sides,” he said as he slipped the fat envelope into an inside pocket and took the stairs to see the head of Chancery.
“I’m afraid I have to go back to London with the Wednesday bag,” he told the diplomat. “It’s unavoidable, and it can’t wait.”
Chancery asked no questions. He knew Munro’s job and promised to arrange it. The diplomatic bag, which actually
