The Deceiver

“Well, he’s dead now. Too late to ask him who did run him. If anyone did. Could he have been run directly from Moscow through the Illegals Directorate?”

“If he was working for us, that’s the only explanation,” muttered the Russian. “He never worked for us in PR- Line. Not out of the London Station. As I say, we never even handled such product. He must have communicated with Moscow via a case officer based here outside the embassy. Why did he die?”

McCready sighed. “I don’t know.”

But he did know that unless it was a remarkable coinci­dence, someone had to have set it up. Someone who knew the civil servant’s routines, could brief the thugs on his regular train, his appearance—and pay them off. Possibly Milton-Rice had not even worked for the Russians at all. Then why the denunciation? Why the unaccounted-for money? Or per­haps Milton-Rice had indeed spied for Moscow but via a cut­out, unknown to Keepsake, who in turn reported directly back to the Illegals Directorate in Moscow. And General Drozdov had just been in town. And he ran the Illegals. ...

“He was denounced,” said McCready. “To us. And then he was dead.”

“Who denounced him?” asked Keepsake. He stirred his tea, though he had no intention of drinking the sweet, milky mixture.

“Colonel Pyotr Orlov,” said McCready quietly.

“Ah,” said Keepsake in a low murmur. “I have something for you there. Pyotr Alexandrovitch Orlov is a loyal and dedicated KGB officer. His defection is as phony as a three-dollar bill. He is a plant, a disinformation agent. And he is well-prepared and very good.”

Now that, thought McCready, is going to cause problems.

Chapter 3

Timothy Edwards listened carefully. McCready’s narration and evaluation lasted thirty minutes. When he had finished, Edwards asked calmly, “And you are quite certain you be­lieve Keepsake?”

McCready had expected this question. Keepsake had worked for the British for four years since he had first ap­proached an SIS officer in Denmark and offered his services as an “agent-in-place,” but this was a world of shadows and suspicions. There was always the possibility, however remote, that Keepsake might be a “double,” his true loyalties still with Moscow. It was precisely the accusation he now made of Orlov.

“It’s been four years,” said McCready. “For four years Keepsake’s product has been tested against every known criterion. It’s pure.”

“Yes, of course,” said Edwards smoothly. “Unfortunately, if one word of this leaked to our Cousins, they would say exactly the opposite—that our man was lying and theirs was for real. The word is, Langley is deeply enamored of this Orlov.”

“I don’t think they should be told about Keepsake,” retorted McCready. He was very protective of the Russian in the embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. “Besides, Keep­sake feels his time may be coming to an end. He has an instinct that suspicions are growing in Moscow that they have a leak somewhere. If they become convinced, it will only be a matter of time before they home in on their London Station. When Keepsake finally comes in from the cold, we can come clean with the Cousins. For the moment, it could be very dangerous to widen the circle who know.”

Edwards made his decision.

“Sam, I agree. But I’m going to see the Chief on this one. He’s up at the Cabinet Office this morning. I’ll catch him later. Stay in touch.”

During the lunch hour, which Edwards spent eating a sparse meal with the Chief in Sir Christopher’s top-floor suite of offices, a military version of the Grumman Gulf stream III landed at the USAF base at Alconbury, situated just north of the market town of Huntingdon in the county of Cambridge­shire. It had taken off at midnight from the Air National Guard base in Trenton, New Jersey, its passengers having arrived from Kentucky and boarded under the cover of dark­ness and away from the air-base buildings.

In picking Alconbury, Calvin Bailey had chosen well. The base was the home of the 527 “Aggressor” Squadron of the USAF, whose pilots fly F-5 fighters with a very specific role. They are called the Aggressors because the F-5 has a config­uration similar to the Russian MIG-29 and the Aggressors play the role of attacking Soviet fighters in midair combat practice with their fellow American and British jet-jockeys. They themselves study and are adept at all the Soviet air-battle tactics, and they so sink themselves into their role that they constantly talk Russian to each other when aloft. Their guns and rockets may be so adapted as to score only elec­tronic hits and misses, but the rest—insignia, flight suits, maneuvers, and jargon—is all pure Russian.

When Roth, Orlov, Kroll, and the rest descended from the Grumman, they were outfitted in the flight suits of the Aggres­sor Squadron. They passed through unnoticed and were soon ensconced in a single-story building, set aside from the rest, and equipped with living quarters and kitchen, conference rooms, and one electronically bugged room for the debriefing of Colonel Orlov. Roth had a talk with the base commander, and the British team was cleared to be allowed onto the base the following morning. Then somewhat jet-lagged, the Ameri­can party turned in to get some sleep.

McCready’s phone rang at three P.M. and Edwards asked to see him again.

“Proposals accepted and agreed,” said Edwards. “We back our judgment that Keepsake is telling the truth and that the Americans have themselves a disinformation agent. That said, the problem is that whatever Orlov is here for, we don’t know yet. It seems that for the moment he is producing good product, which makes it unlikely our Cousins would believe us—the more so as the Chief agrees that we cannot reveal the existence, let alone the identity, of Keepsake. So how do you suggest we handle it?”

“Let me have him,” said McCready. “We have right of access. We can ask questions. Joe Roth is in charge, and I know Joe. He’s no fool. Maybe I can push Orlov, push him hard, before Roth cries ‘Enough.’ Sow some seeds of doubt. Get the Cousins to begin to contemplate the notion that he may not be all he seems.”

“All right,” said Edwards. “You take it.”

He made it sound like his own decision, his own act of magnanimity. The reality of his lunch with the Chief, who would be retiring at the end of the year, had been quite different. The ambitious Assistant Chief, who prided himself on his excellent personal relationship with the CIA, had in mind that one day Langley’s approval of him could be a useful aid to his appointment as Chief.

During the lunch, Edwards had proposed a far less skilled but less abrasive debriefer than Sam McCready to handle the matter of Keepsake’s embarrassing denunciation of the CIA’s new treasure. He had been overruled. Sir Christopher, a former colleague in the field, had insisted that the Deceiver whom he had himself appointed be in charge of handling Orlov.

McCready set off for Alconbury by car early the following morning. Denis Gaunt drove. Edwards had cleared Mc­Cready’s request that Gaunt sit in on the interrogation of the Russian. In the back of the car sat a woman from MI-5. The Security Service had asked urgently that they too have some­one at the meetings with the Russian, since a specific line of questioning would cover the area of Soviet agents working in and against Britain. Alice Daltry was in her early thirties, pretty, and very bright. She still seemed rather overawed by McCready. In their tight, closed world, despite the need-to-know principle, word had leaked of the previous year’s Pankratin affair.

The car also contained a secure telephone. Looking like an ordinary car phone but larger, it could be switched to en­crypted mode to communicate with London. There might well be points emerging from the talk with Orlov that would need to be checked with London.

For much of the journey McCready sat silently, staring through the windshield at the unfolding countryside in the early morning, marveling again at the beauty of England in the spring.

He ran his mind back over what Keepsake had told him. In London, according to the Russian, he had been marginally associated years earlier with the first preparatory stages for a deception operation of which Orlov could only be the final fruition. It had been code-named Project Potemkin.

An ironic title, thought McCready, a hint of KGB gallows humor. It almost certainly had been named not after the battleship Potemkin—nor even after Marshal Potemkin, whose name had been bestowed on the battleship—but after the Potemkin Villages.

Years ago, the Empress Catherine the Great, as ruthless a dictator as long-suffering Russia had ever endured, visited the newly conquered Crimea. Fearful of letting her see the shiv­ering, huddled masses in their