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by Frederick Forsyth

  Thus it was that one late night in September 1989, when the subject had once again come around to the loner, Mulgrew blurted out that he had heard Monk ran an agent who was “some bigwig he recruited a couple of years ago in Argentina.”

  There was no name and no code name. But the KGB could work out the rest. “Bigwig” would indicate a man of Second Secretary rank or up. For “a couple of years ago” they fixed on a period from eighteen months back to three years.

  Checks with Foreign Ministry postings to Buenos Aires culled a list of seventeen possibles. Ames’s tip that the man had not been reposted abroad cut the list to twelve.

  Unlike the CIA, the KGB’s counterintelligence arm had no squeamishness. It began looking at sudden access to money, an improved lifestyle, even the purchase of a small apartment …

  ¯

  IT was a fine day, that first of September, with a breeze off the Channel and nothing between the cliffs and the far coast of Normandy but wind-tossed white-capped waves.

  Sir Nigel strode the clifftop path between Duriston Head and St. Alban’s Head and drank in the salt-tanged air. It was his favorite walk, had been for years, and a tonic after smoky boardrooms or a night of studying classified documents. He found it cleared his head, concentrated the mind, blew away the irrelevant and the deliberately deceiving, brought into focus the essential core of a problem.

  He had spent the night bent over the two documents given him by Henry Coombs and he had been shocked by what he read. The detective work that had been carried out since a tramp had tossed something through the door of Celia Stone’s car met with his approval. It was the way he would have done it.

  He recalled Jock Macdonald vaguely, a young trainee running errands at Century House. Obviously he had come a long way. And he was convinced by the conclusion: the Black Manifesto was neither forgery nor joke.

  That brought him to the manifesto itself. If the Russian demagogue really intended to carry out that program, something would happen that took him back to a hideous memory from his youth.

  He was eighteen when, in 1943, he had at last been accepted into the British Army and sent to Italy. Wounded in the big push on Monte Cassino, he had been invalided back to Britain and on recovery, despite pleas to rejoin a combat unit, had been posted to Military Intelligence.

  It was as a lieutenant just turned twenty that he had crossed the Rhine with the Eighth Army and come across something no one of that age, or indeed of any age, should be forced to see. He was summoned by a shocked infantry major to come and look at something the infantry had found in its path. The concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen left older men than he with nightmares they would never shake off.

  He turned back inland at St. Alban’s Head, following the track to the hamlet of Acton where he would turn again and follow the lane to Langton Matravers. What to do? And with what chance of having any effect at all? Burn the documents now and be done with it all? Tempting, very tempting. Or take them to America and perhaps risk ridicule from the patriarchs with whom he would spend a week? Intimidating.

  He unlatched the garden gate and crossed the small patch where Penny raised fruit and vegetables in summer. There was a bonfire, some cuttings smoldering away. But at the heart the embers were hot and red. So easy to stuff the two files into the fire.

  Henry Coombs, he knew, would never mention the subject again; never ask what he did, nor seek any progress report. Indeed, no one would ever know whence the documents had come, for neither man would talk. It was part of the code. His wife called from the kitchen window.

  “There you are. Tea’s in the sitting room. I went into the village and got muffins and jam.”

  “Good, love muffins.”

  “I should know by now.”

  Five years his junior, Penelope Irvine had once been a raging beauty, sought after by a dozen richer men. For reasons of her own she had chosen the impecunious young intelligence officer who read poetry to her and hid behind a shy exterior a brain like a computer.

  There had been a son, just the one, their only child, long gone, fallen in the Falklands in 1982. They tried not to think about it too much, except on his birthday and the date of his death.

  Through thirty years of the Secret Service she had patiently waited for him while he ran his agents deep inside the USSR or waited in the bitter chill of the shadows of the Berlin Wall for some brave but frightened man to shuffle through the checkpoint to the lights of West Berlin. When he came home, the fire was always burning and there were muffins for tea. At seventy, he still thought she was beautiful and loved her very much.

  He sat and munched and stared at the fire.

  “You’re going away again,” she said quietly.

  “I think I must.”

  “How long?”

  “Oh, a few days in London to prepare, then America for a week. After that, I don’t know. Probably not again.”

  “Well, I’ll be all right. Plenty to do in the garden. You’ll ring when you can?”

  “Of course.”

  Then he said: “It mustn’t happen again, you know.”

  “Of course not. Now finish your tea.”

  Langley, March 1990

  IT was the CIA’s Moscow Station that sounded the first alarm. Agent Delphi had switched off. Nothing since the previous December. Jason Monk sat at his desk and pored over the cable traffic as it was decrypted and brought to him. At first he was worried, later frantic.

  If Kruglov was still all right, he was breaking all the rules. Why? Twice the Moscow-based CIA had made the appropriate chalk marks in the appropriate places to indicate they had filled a drop with something for Oracle and that he should service that hiding place. Twice the alerts had been ignored. Was he out of town, suddenly posted abroad?

  If so, then he should have given the standard reassuring “I’m okay” sign of life. They scoured the usual magazines, looking for the agreed small ad that would constitute an “I’m okay” message or the opposite: “I’m in trouble, help me.” But there was nothing.

  By March it was looking as if Oracle was either completely incapacitated by heart attack, other illness, or serious accident. Or dead. Or “taken.”

  For Monk, with his suspicious mind, there was an unanswered question. If Kruglov had been taken and interrogated, he would have told all. To resist was futile; it simply prolonged the pain.

  Therefore he would have given away the places of the drops and the coded chalk marks that alerted the CIA to the need to pick up a package of information. Why did the KGB not then use those chalk marks to catch an American diplomat in the act? It would have been the obvious thing to do. A triumph for Moscow when they really needed one, for everything else was going America’s way.

  The Soviet empire in Eastern Europe was coming apart. Romania had assassinated the dictator Ceaucescu; Poland was gone, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in open revolt, the Berlin Wall torn down the previous November. To catch an American in red-handed espionage in Moscow would have done something to offset the stream of humiliations the KGB was undergoing. And yet nothing.

  For Monk it meant one of two things. Either Kruglov’s complete disappearance was an accident that would be explained later, or the KGB was protecting a source.

  ¯

  THE United States is a land rich in many things, and not least of these are nongovernmental organizations, known as NGOs. There are thousands of them. They range from trusts to endowments for research into countless subjects, some of them of mind-numbing obscurity. There are centers for policy studies, think tanks, groups for the promotion of this and that, councils for the advancement of whatever, and foundations almost too numerous to list.

  Some are dedicated to research, some to charity, some to discussion; others devote themselves to single-issue propaganda, lobbying, publicity, the enhancement of public awareness of this, or the abolition of the other.

  Washington alone plays host to twelve hundred NGOs, and New York has a thousand more. And they all have funds. Some are funded,
in part at least, by tax dollars, others by bequests from those long dead, some by private industry and commerce, others by quixotic, philanthropic, or just plain lunatic millionaires.

  They provide nesting roosts for academics, politicians, ex-ambassadors, do-gooders, busybodies, and the occasional maniac. But they all have two things in common. They admit they exist and somewhere have a headquarters. All except one.

  Perhaps because of its tiny and closed membership, the quality of that membership, and its utter invisibility, the Council of Lincoln that summer of 1999 was probably the most influential of all.

  In a democracy power is influence. Only in the dictatorships can raw power alone exist within the law. Non-elected power in a democracy therefore lies in the ability to influence the elected machine. This may be achieved by the mobilization of public opinion, campaigns in the media, persistent lobbying, or outright financial contributions. But in its purest form such influence may simply be quiet advice to the holders of elected office from a source of unchallenged experience, integrity, and wisdom. It is called “the quiet word.”

  The Council of Lincoln, denying its own existence and so small as to be invisible, was a self-sustaining group dedicated to the contemplation of issues of moment, evaluation and discussion of such issues, and a final agreement on a resolution. Based upon the quality of its membership and the ability of those members to have access to the very pinnacles of elected office, the council probably had more real influence than any other NGO or a raft of them put together.

  Its character was Anglo-American and its origins in that deep sense of partnership in adversity that goes back to the First World War, although the council only came into being in the early eighties as a result of a dinner in an exclusive Washington club just after the Falklands War.

  Membership was by invitation only and confined to those felt by the other members to be possessed of certain qualities. Among these were long experience, utter probity, sagacity, complete discretion, and proven patriotism.

  That apart, those who had served in public office had to be retired from that office so that there could be no question of special pleading, while those in the private sector could remain at the helms of their corporations. Not all members were privately rich by any means, but at least two in the private sector were estimated to be personally worth a billion dollars.

  The private sector covered experience in commerce, industry, banking, finance, and science, while the public sector included statesmanship, diplomacy, and the civil service.

  In the summer of 1999 there were six British members including one woman, and thirty-four Americans including five women.

  By the nature of the experience of the world that they were expected to bring to the collegial discussions, they tended to be in middle to late-middle age. Few had less than sixty years experience of life and the oldest was a very fit eighty-one.

  The ethos of the council was to be found in Lincoln’s words, that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” It met once a year, by agreement reached in harmless-sounding telephone calls, and in a place of great privacy. In each case the host was one of the wealthier members, who never declined the honor. Members paid their own way to an agreed rendezvous point, after which they became the guests of their host.

  In the northwestern corner of Wyoming there is a valley known simply as Jackson Hole, named after the first trapper to have the grit to overwinter there. Bordered on the west by the towering Tetons and on the east by the Gros Ventre range, the valley is sealed in the north by Yellowstone Park. To the south the mountains converge and the Snake River rushes out between them in a canyon of white water.

  North of the small ski town of Jackson, Highway 191 runs clear up to Moran Junction past the airport, and then on to Yellowstone. Just beyond the airport is the village of Moose, where a smaller road branches off to take visitors up to Jenny Lake.

  West of that highway, in the very foothills of the Tetons, are two lakes: Bradley Lake, served by the torrent of Garnet Canyon, and Taggart Lake, served by Avalanche Canyon. Except for trail hikers the lakes are inaccessible. On the land between the two lakes, a tract backed by the vertical wall of the South Teton, a Washington-based financier called Saul Nathanson had built a hundred-acre vacation ranch.

  Its situation granted absolute privacy to the owner and any guests. The land stretched from lake to lake on each side, with the sheer mountain behind. At the front the public trails ran below the level of the ranch, which itself was on a raised plateau.

  On September 7, the first guests arrived by agreement at Denver, where they were met by Nathanson’s private Grumman and transported over the mountains to the Jackson airport. Far away from the terminal, they transferred to his helicopter for the five-minute lift to the ranch. The British contingent had gone through Immigration on the East Coast, so they too could bypass the terminal and change planes far from prying eyes.

  There were twenty cabins at the ranch, each with two bedrooms and a communal sitting room. The weather being warm and sunny, with a chill only after sundown, many guests chose to sit on the verandahs in front of each cabin.

  Food, and it was exquisite, was served in the single large lodge that formed the focal point of the complex. After meals, the tables were cleared and rearranged to permit plenum conferences.

  The staff were Nathanson’s own, utterly discreet and brought in for the event. For added security, private guards posing as campers surrounded the ranch on the lower slopes to turn back any stray hikers.

  The 1999 conference of the Council of Lincoln lasted five days, and when it was over no one knew that the guests had come, been, and gone.

  On his first afternoon, Sir Nigel Irvine unpacked, showered, changed into slacks and a twill shirt, and went to sit on the timber deck in front of the cabin he would share with a former U.S. Secretary of State.

  From his vantage point he could see some of his fellow guests stretching their legs. There were pleasant walks between the clumps of fir, birch, and lodgepole pine, and a path down to the edge of each lake.

  He caught sight of the former British Foreign Secretary and ex-Secretary-General of NATO Lord Carrington, a spare, birdlike figure walking with the banker Charles Price, one of the most popular and successful of American ambassadors ever to be sent to the Court of St. James’s. Irvine had been SIS chief when Peter Carrington was at the Foreign Office and therefore his boss. The six-foot-four-inch Price towered over the British peer. Further over, their host Saul Nathanson sat on a bench in the sun with American investment banker and former Attorney General Elliot Richardson.

  To one side Lord Armstrong, former Cabinet Secretary and head of the Home Civil Service, was knocking on the door of the cabin where Lady Thatcher was still unpacking.

  Another helicopter clattered in toward the landing pad to deposit former President George Bush, who was met by ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. At one of the tables close to the central lodge an aproned waitress brought a pot of tea to another former ambassador, the British Sir Nicholas Henderson, who shared his table and his tea with London financier and banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild.

  Nigel Irvine glanced at his schedule for the five-day conference. There would be nothing that night. On the next day the membership would as usual break into its three committees, geopolitical, strategic, and economic. They would meet separately for two days. The third would be dedicated to hearing the results of their deliberations and discussing them. Day four would be for plenary sessions. He had been allocated an hour, at his own request, toward the end of that day. The last day would be consigned to further action and recommendations.

  In the dense forests along the slopes of the Tetons a lone bull moose, sensing the coming rut, bellowed for a mate. On white-tipped wings an osprey drifted over the Snake, mewing in anger as a bald eagle invaded his fishing ground. It was an idyllic spot, thought the old spymaster, marred only by the black evil in the document he had brought with him fro
m a desktop in Russia.

  Vienna, June 1990

  THE previous December Ames’s job with External Ops of the Soviet Division had been phased out. Once again he was at a loose end and as far from the 301 files as ever. Then he landed his third job since returning from Rome. It was as branch chief for Czech Operations. But it did not authorize the computer-access codes to unlock the secret heart of the 301—the section containing the descriptions of CIA assets working inside the Soviet Bloc.

  Ames protested to Mulgrew. It was unreasonable, he argued. He had once headed the entire counterintelligence desk for that very section. Moreover, he needed to cross-check for CIA assets who, although Russian, had worked in Czechoslovakia in their careers. Mulgrew promised to help if he could. Finally, in May, Mulgrew gave his friend the access code. From then on, at his desk in Czech section, Ames could surf the files until he came up with “Monk—Assets.”

  In June 1990 Ames flew to Vienna for another meeting with his longtime handler Vlad, a.k.a. Colonel Vladimir Mechulayev. Since his return to Washington it had been deemed unsafe for him to meet any more Soviet diplomats because of the danger of FBI surveillance. So Vienna it was.

  He remained sober long enough to take possession of a huge block of cash and to make Mechulayev ecstatic. He brought with him three descriptions.

  One was of a colonel of the army, probably GRU, now in the Defense Ministry in Moscow but recruited in the Middle East in late 1985. Another was of a scientist who lived in a top-security sealed city but had been recruited in California. The third was of a colonel of the KGB, recruited outside the USSR, on the books for the past six years, now inside the Soviet Bloc but not in the USSR, who spoke Spanish.

  Within three days, back at the First Chief Directorate’s headquarters building at Yazenevo, the hunt was on.