wearing the stones.
Rawlings, who studied for months before he made a hit, knew their provenance better than his own birth date.
In 1905 the young Earl of Margate had returned from South Africa, bearing with him four magnificent but uncut stones. On his marriage in 1912 he had had Cartier of London cut and set the stones as a present to his young wife. Cartier had them cut by Aascher’s of Amsterdam, then still regarded as the finest cutters in the world following their triumph in the cutting of the massive Cullinan stone. The four original gems emerged as two matching pairs of pear-shaped fifty-eight-facet stones, one pair weighing in at ten carats each, the other pair at twenty carats each.
Back in London, Cartier had set these stones in white gold, surrounded by a total of forty much smaller stones, to create a suite composed of a tiara with one of the larger of the pear-shaped gems as its centerpiece, a pendant with the other of the larger pair as its centerpiece, and matching earrings comprising the two smaller stones. Before they were ready the Earl’s father, the seventh Duke of Sheffield, died, and the Earl succeeded to the title. The diamonds became known as the Glen Diamonds, after the family name of the house of Sheffield.
The eighth Duke had passed them on his death in 1936 to his son, and he in turn had had two children, a daughter born in 1944 and a son born in 1949. It was this daughter, now aged forty-two, whose image was beneath Jim Rawlings’s magnifying glass.
“You won’t be wearing them again, darling,” said Rawlings to himself. Then he once again began checking his equipment for that evening.
Harold Philby slit the envelope with a kitchen knife, extracted the letter, and spread it on the sitting-room table. He was impressed; it was from the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union himself, handwritten in the Soviet leader’s neat, clerkish script and, of course, in Russian.
Like the matching envelope, the paper was of fine quality and unheaded. He must have written it from his own apartment at Kutuzovsky Prospekt 26, the huge building that since the time of Stalin had contained in its sumptuous quarters the Moscow homes of the very top level of Party hierarchs.
In the top right-hand corner were the words
Dear Philby,
My attention has been drawn to a remark made by you at a recent dinner party in Moscow. To wit, that “the political stability of Great Britain is constantly overestimated here in Moscow and never more so than at the present time.”
I would be happy to receive from you an expansion and clarification of this remark. Put this explanation in written form and direct it to me personally, without retaining any copies or using secretaries.
When it is ready call the number Major Pavlov has given you, ask to speak to him personally, and he will come to your residence to collect it.
My felicitations upon your birthday tomorrow.
Sincerely ...
The letter ended with the signature.
Philby let out his breath slowly. So, Kryuchkov’s dinner on the twenty-sixth for senior officers of the KGB had been bugged after all. He had half suspected it. As First Deputy Chairman of the KGB and head of its First Chief Directorate, Vladimir Alexandrovitch Kryuchkov was the General Secretary’s creature, body and soul. Although styled a colonel-general, Kryuchkov was no military man and not even a professional intelligence officer; he was a Party
Philby read the letter again, then pushed it away from him. The old man’s style hadn’t changed, he thought. Brief to the point of starkness, clear and concise, devoid of elaborate courtesies, inviting no contradiction. Even the reference to Philby’s birthday was brief enough simply to show he had called for the file, and little more.
Still, Philby was impressed. A personal letter from this most glacial and remote of men was unusual and would have had men trembling at the honor. Years ago it had been different. When the present Soviet leader had arrived at the KGB as Chairman, Philby had already been there for years and was considered something of a star, lecturing on the Western intelligence agencies in general and on the British SIS in particular.
Like all incoming Party men set to command professionals of another discipline, the new Chairman had looked to put his own in key posts. Philby, even though respected and admired as one of the Five Stars, realized that a highly placed patron would be useful in this most conspiratorial of societies. The Chairman, infinitely more intelligent and cultured than his predecessor, had shown a curiosity, short of fascination but above mere interest, about Britain.
Many times over those years he had asked Philby for an interpretation or analysis of events in Britain, its personalities and likely reactions, and Philby had been happy to oblige. It was as if the KGB Chairman wanted to check what reached his desk from the in-house Britain experts and from those at his old office, the International Department of the Central Committee, against another critique. Several times he had heeded Philby’s quiet advice on matters pertaining to Britain.
It had been five years since Philby had seen the new tsar of all the Russias face-to-face.
In May 1982 he had attended a reception to mark the Chairman’s departure from the KGB back to the Central Committee, apparently as a secretary, in fact to prepare for Brezhnev’s coming death and to mastermind his own advancement. And now he was seeking Philby’s interpretation again.
Philby’s reverie was interrupted by the return of Erita and the boys, flushed from skating and noisy as ever. Back in 1975, long after Melinda Maclean’s departure, when the higher-ups at the KGB had decided his desultory whoring and drinking had lost their charms (for the
After the marriage his notable personal charm had taken its toll. She had genuinely fallen in love with him and had roundly refused to report on him anymore to the KGB.
Her case officer had shrugged, reported back, and been told to drop the matter. The boys had come two and three years later.
“Anything important, Kim?” she asked as he stood and pushed the letter into his pocket. He shook his head. She went on pulling the thick quilted jackets off the boys.
“Nothing, my love,” he said. But she could see he was absorbed by something. She knew better than to insist, but she came over and kissed him on the cheek.
“Please don’t drink too much at the Blakes’ tonight.”
“I’ll try,” he said with a smile.
In fact he was going to permit himself one last bender. A lifelong toper who, when he started drinking at a party, would usually go on until he collapsed, he had ignored a hundred doctors’ warnings to quit. They had forced him to stop the cigarettes, and that had been bad enough. But not the booze. He could still quit it when he wanted, and he knew that he would have to stop for a while after this evening’s party.
He recalled the remark he had made at Kryuchkov’s dinner table and the thoughts that had prompted it. He knew what was going on, and what was intended, deep inside the heart of Britain’s Labour Party. Others had received the mass of raw intelligence that he had studied over the years and that was still passed to him as a sort of favor. But only he had been able to put all the pieces together, assembling them within the framework of the British mass psychology, to come up with the real picture. If he was going to do justice to the idea forming in his mind, he was going to have to describe that picture in words, to prepare for the Soviet leader one of the best pieces he had ever penned. At the weekend he could send Erita and the boys to the dacha. He would start, alone in the apartment, at the weekend. Before then, one last bender.
