One of the chores of junior intelligence staff is to keep this mass of documentation up to date.
Other teams go back into the past. What was the child’s nickname? Where did he go to school? What did the boys call the science teacher behind his back? What was the family dog’s name?
By the time the legend is complete—and it can take years—and by the time it has been memorized by its new bearer, it would need weeks of investigation to crack it, if it could be done at all. This was what Petrofsky carried in his head and suitcase. He was—and could prove he was—James Duncan Ross, who was moving from the West Country to take over the East Anglian representation of a Swiss-based corporation marketing computer software. He had a handsome bank balance at Barclays Bank, Dorchester, Dorset, which he was about to transfer to nearby Colchester. He had mastered the scrawled Ross signature to perfection.
Britain is a very private country. Almost alone in the world, the British do not have to carry any identification on their persons. If one is asked, the production of a letter addressed to oneself will usually do, as if that proved anything. A driver’s license, even though British licenses bear no photograph, is proof positive. A man is expected to be who he says he is.
As he dined that night in Ipswich, Valeri Alexeivitch Petrofsky was perfectly confident, and rightly so, that no one would doubt he was James Duncan Ross. After dinner, he sought from the reception desk the Yellow Pages commercial directory and turned to the section listing real-estate agents.
Chapter 11
While Major Petrofsky was dining at the Great White Horse in Ipswich, the doorbell rang at an apartment on the eighth floor of Fontenoy House in Belgravia. It was opened by the owner, George Berenson. For a second he stared in surprise at the figure in the corridor.
“Good Lord. Nigel. ...”
They knew each other vaguely, not so much from shared schooldays many years before as from having seen each other occasionally around the Whitehall circuit.
The Chief of the SIS nodded politely but formally. “’Evening, Berenson. Mind if I come in?”
“Of course, of course, by all means. ...”
George Berenson was flustered, though he had no idea of the purpose of the visit. The use by Sir Nigel Irvine of his surname without prefix indicated that the tone of the visit was to be courteous but by no means chatty. There would be no “George” and “Nigel”
informality.
“Is Lady Fiona in?”
“No, she’s gone off to one of her committee meetings. We have the place to ourselves.”
Sir Nigel knew that, anyway. He had sat in his car and watched Berenson’s wife leave before making his approach.
Relieved of his coat but retaining his briefcase, Sir Nigel was shown to a chair in the sitting room, not ten feet from the by-now-repaired wall safe behind the mirror. Berenson seated himself opposite.
“Well, now, what can I do for you?”
Sir Nigel opened his case and carefully laid ten photocopies on the glass-topped coffee table. “I think you might, with advantage, have a look at these.”
Berenson silently studied the top copy, lifted it to look at the one underneath, and then the third. At the third sheet he stopped and put them down. He had gone very pale but was still in control of himself. He kept his eyes on the papers. “I don’t suppose there is anything I can say. ...”
“Not much,” said Sir Nigel calmly. “They were returned to us some time ago. We know how you came to lose them—rather bad luck from your point of view. After they were returned, we kept you under surveillance for some weeks, watched the abstraction of the Ascension Island paper, the passing of it to Benotti and thence to Marais. It’s pretty well tied up, you know.”
A little of what he said was provable, but most was pure bluff; he had no wish to let Berenson know just how weak the legal case against him was. The Deputy Chief of Defense Procurement straightened his back and raised his eyes. Now comes the defiance, thought Irvine, the attempt at self-justification. Funny how they all run to pattern.
Berenson met his gaze. The defiance was there.
“Well, since you know it all, what are you going to do?”
“Ask a few questions,” replied Sir Nigel. “For example, how long has it been going on, and why did you start?”
Despite his effort at self-control and defiance, Berenson was still confused enough not to have wondered at one very simple point: it was not the duty of the Chief of the SIS to have this sort of confrontation. Spies for foreign powers were picked up by counterintelligence. But his desire to justify himself overcame his capacity for analysis.
“As to the first, just over two years.”
Could be worse, thought Sir Nigel. He knew Marais had been in Britain for almost three years, but Berenson might have been run by another South African pro-Soviet “sleeper” even before that. Apparently not.
“As to the second, I would have thought it was obvious.”
“Let’s assume I’m a bit slow,” suggested Sir Nigel. “Enlighten me. Why?”
Berenson drew a deep breath. Perhaps, like so many before him, he had prepared his defense inside his own head often enough, arguing before the courtroom of his own conscience—or what passed for it.
“I take the view, and have done for years, that the only struggle on this planet worth a light is the one against Communism and Soviet imperialism,” he began.
“In that struggle, South Africa forms one of the bastions. Probably the principal bastion, if not the only one, south of the Sahara. For a long time I have thought it futile and self-defeating for the Western powers, on dubious moral grounds, to treat South Africa as if she were a leper, to deprive her of any share in our joint planning to respond to the Soviet threat on a global scale.
“I have believed for years that South Africa has been shabbily treated by the Western powers, that it was both wrong and stupid to exclude her from access to NATO’s contingency planning.”
Sir Nigel nodded, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “And you thought it right and proper to redress the balance?”
“Yes, I did. And, the Official Secrets Act notwithstanding, I still do.”
The vanity, thought Sir Nigel, always the vanity, the monumental self-esteem of inadequate men. Nunn May, Pontecorvo, Fuchs, Prime—the thread ran through them all: the self-arrogated right to play God, the conviction that the traitor alone is right and all his colleagues fools, coupled with the druglike love of power derived from what he sees as the manipulation of policy, through the transfer of secrets, to the ends in which he believes and to the confusion of his supposed opponents in his own government, those who have passed him over for promotion or honors.
“Mmmm. Tell me, did you begin at your own suggestion, or at Marais’s?”
Berenson thought for a while. “Jan Marais is a diplomat, so he is beyond your power,”
he said. “There’s no harm in my answering. It was at his suggestion. We never met when I was stationed in Pretoria. We met here, just after he had arrived. We found we had a lot in common. He persuaded me that if a time of conflict with the USSR ever came, South Africa would have to stand alone in the Southern Hemisphere, astride the vital routes from the Indian Ocean to the South Atlantic, and probably with Soviet bases strung throughout black Africa. It seemed to us both that without some indication of how NATO would operate in these two spheres, South Africa would be hamstrung, even though she was our staunchest ally in those parts.”
“Powerful argument.” Sir Nigel nodded regretfully. “You know, when we traced Marais as your controller, I took a risk and put the name straight to General Pienaar. He denied Marais had ever worked for him.”
“Well, he would.”
“Yes, he would. But we sent a man down there to check out Pienaar’s claim. Perhaps you ought to look at this.” He produced from his briefcase the report Preston had written on his return from Pretoria, with the
