The Deceiver

Morenz lumbered to his feet with the files. Great, he thought as he left the office. Thirty years’ loyal work for the Service, five years to retirement, and I get to baby-sitting hookers for foreigners who want a night on the town.

Early the following month, Sam McCready sat in a darkened room deep in the subbasement of Century House in London, headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS—usually miscalled by the press MI-6; referred to by insiders as “the Firm.” He was watching a flickering screen upon which the massed might (or a part of it) of the USSR rolled endlessly over Red Square. The Soviet Union likes to hold two vast parades each year in that square: one for May Day, and the other to celebrate the Great October Socialist Revolution. The latter is held on November 7, and today was the eighth. The camera left the vista of rumbling tanks and panned across the row effaces atop Lenin’s mausoleum.

“Slow down,” said McCready. The technician at his side moved a hand over the controls, and the pan-shot slowed. President Reagan’s “evil empire” (he would use the phrase later) looked more like a home for geriatrics. In the chill wind the sagging, aged faces had almost disappeared into the col­lars of their coats, whose upturned edges reached to meet the gray trilbies or fur shapkas above.

The General Secretary himself was not even there. Yuri V. Andropov, Chairman of the KGB from 1963 to 1978, who had taken the power in late 1982 following the too-long delayed death of Leonid Brezhnev, was himself dying by inches out at the Politburo Clinic at Kuntsevo. He had not been seen in public since the previous August, nor ever would he be again.

Chernenko (who would succeed Andropov in a few months) was up there, with Gromyko, Kirilenko, Tikhonov and the hatchet-faced Party theoretician Suslov. The Minister of De­fense, Ustinov, was muffled in his marshal’s greatcoat with enough medals to act as a windbreak from chin to waist. There were a few young enough to be competent—Grishin, the Moscow Party Chief, and Romanov, the boss of Lenin­grad. To one side was the youngest of them all, still an outsider, a chunky man called Gorbachev.

The camera lifted to bring into focus the group of officers behind Marshal Ustinov.

“Hold it,” said McCready. The picture froze. “That one, third from the left. Can you enhance? Bring it closer?”

The technician studied his console and fine-tuned carefully. The group of officers came closer and closer. Some passed out of eyeshot. The one McCready had indicated was moving too far to the right. The technician ran back three or four frames until he was full center, and kept closing. The officer was half hidden by a full general of the Strategic Rocket Forces, but it was the moustache, unusual among Soviet officers, that clinched it. The shoulder boards on the greatcoat said Major-General.

“Bloody hell,” whispered McCready, “he’s done it. He’s there.” He turned to the impassive technician. “Jimmy, how the hell do we get hold of an apartment block in California?”

“Well, the short answer, my dear Sam,” said Timothy Ed­wards two days later, “is that we don’t. We can’t. I know it’s tough, but I’ve run it past the Chief and the money boys, and the answer is he’s too rich for us.”

“But his product is priceless,” protested McCready. “This man’s beyond just gold. He’s a mother lode of pure plati­num.”

“No dispute,” Edwards said smoothly. He was younger than McCready by a decade, a high-flyer with a good degree and private wealth. Barely out of his thirties and already an Assistant Chief. Most men his age were happy to head up a foreign station, delighted to command a desk, yearning to rise to Controller rank. And Edwards was just under the top floor.

“Look,” he said, “the Chief’s been in Washington. He mentioned your man, just in case he got his promotion. Our Cousins have always had his product since you brought him in. They’ve always been delighted with it. Now it seems they’ll be happy to take him over, money and all.”

“He’s tetchy, prickly. He knows me. He might not work for anyone else.”

“Come now, Sam. You’re the first to agree he’s a merce­nary. He’ll go where the money is. And we’ll get the product. Please ensure there’s a smooth handover.”

He paused and flashed his most winning smile.

“By the way, the Chief wants to see you. Tomorrow morn­ing, ten A.M. I don’t think I’m out of order in telling you he has in mind a new assignment. A step up, Sam. Let’s face it—things sometimes work out for the best. Pankratin’s back in Moscow, which makes him harder for you to get at; you’ve covered East Germany for an awful long time. The Cousins are prepared to take over, and you get a well-deserved pro­motion. A desk, perhaps.”

“I’m a field man,” said McCready.

“Why don’t you listen to what the Chief has to say,” suggested Edwards.

Twenty-four hours later, Sam McCready was made Head of Dee-Dee and Psy Ops. The CIA took over the handling, running, and paying of General Yevgeni Pankratin.

It was hot in Cologne that August. Those who could had sent the wives and children away to the lakes, the mountains, the forests, or even their villas in the Mediterranean and would join them later. Bruno Morenz had no holiday home. He soldiered on at his job. His salary was not large and was not likely to increase, for with three years to retirement when he turned fifty-five, a further promotion was extremely unlikely.

He sat at an open-air terrace cafй and sipped a tall glass of keg beer, his tie undone and jacket draped over the back of his chair. No one gave him a passing glance. He had dispensed with his winter tweeds in favor of a seersucker suit that was, if anything, even more shapeless. He sat hunched over his beer and occasionally ran a hand through his thick gray hair until it was awry. He was a man who had no vanity in the area of personal appearances, or he would have put a comb through his hair, shaved a bit closer, used a decent cologne (after all, he was in the city that had invented it), and bought a well-tailored suit. He would have thrown out the shirt with the slightly frayed cuffs and straightened his shoulders. Then he would have appeared quite an authoritative figure. He had no personal vanity.

But he did have his dreams. Or rather, he had had his dreams, once, long ago. And they had not been fulfilled. At the age of fifty-two, married, the father of two grown-up children, Bruno Morenz stared gloomily at the passersby on the street. Had he known it, he was suffering from what the German call Torschlusspanik. It is a word that exists in no other language but means the panic of closing doors.

Behind the facade of the big amiable man who did his job, took his modest salary at the end of the month, and went home each night to the bosom of his family, Bruno Morenz was a deeply unhappy man.

He was locked into a loveless marriage to his wife Irmtraut, a woman of quite bovine stupidity and potatolike contours who had, as the years ebbed away, even stopped complaining of his lowly salary and lack of promotion. Of his job she knew only that he worked for one of the government agencies concerned with the civil service and couldn’t have cared less which one. If he was unkempt with frayed cuffs and a baggy suit, it was in part because Irmtraut had ceased to care about that, either. She kept their small apartment in a featureless street in the suburb of Porz more or less neat and tidy, and his evening meal would be on the table ten minutes after he arrived home, semicongealed if he was late.

His daughter Ute had turned her back on both parents almost as soon as she left school, espoused various left-wing causes (he had had to undergo a positive vetting at the office because of Ute’s politics), and was living in a squat in Dьsseldorf with various guitar-strumming hippies—Bruno could never work out with which. His son Lutz was still at home, slumped forever in front of the television set. A pimply youth who had flunked every exam he had ever taken, he now resented education and the world that set store by it, prefer­ring to adopt a punk hairstyle and clothes as his personal protest against society but stopping well short of actually accepting any job that society might be prepared to offer him.

Bruno had tried; well, he reckoned he had tried. He had done his best, such as it was. Worked hard, paid his taxes, kept his family as best he could, and had little enough fun in life. In three years—just thirty-six-months— they would pen­sion him off. There would be a small party in the office, Aust would make a speech, they would clink glasses of sparkling wine, and he would be gone. To what? He would have his pension and the savings from his “other work” that he had carefully hoarded in a variety of medium-to-small accounts around Germany under a variety of pseudonyms. There would be enough there, more than anyone thought or suspected; enough to buy a retirement home and do what he really wanted. ...