‘You satisfied her?’ demanded Kozlov.
‘I’m positive,’ said his wife, at once.
Kozlov glanced briefly across the vehicle at the woman. ‘We shouldn’t be too confident,’ he warned.
‘What’s that supposed to mean!’ she said.
‘Just what it said.’
‘That I shouldn’t be too confident!’
‘Both of us,’ said Kozlov, avoiding the dispute.
‘It was Kamakura, like you,’ said Irena. ‘She’d checked and it was obvious she didn’t like it that the CIA identification had the approval of Moscow.’
‘What about Kamakura?’
‘How we travelled,’ remembered the woman. ‘Whether I was aware of what you were doing all the time? And if you were aware of what I was doing.’
‘She believed you?’
‘I told you – she was satisfied,’ insisted Irena.
‘I think we should cover ourselves further,’ said the man.
‘How?’
‘Moscow knows how successful this apparent surveillance of the Americans has been. We should suggest extending the evaluation to the British.’
‘Why?’
‘The Americans want to meet again,’ disclosed Kozlov. ‘I’ve said the day after tomorrow.’
‘So the British have been brought in!’
‘It has to be that,’ agreed Kozlov. i want to take every precaution. Suggesting identifying the British will give us the same explanation that’s worked with the Americans.’
‘Nothing from Hayashi at the airport?’
‘Not yet. But I’ll tell him again what I want.’ Kozlov paused and said: ‘We know they’ll try to cheat. So I’ve guarded against that, too.’
‘How?’ she said.
‘I’ve got our own “safe” house,’ he said. Twisting the professional use of the word, Kozlov said: it’s going to keep you safe and it’s going to keep me safe.’
In the Rezidentura office at the Soviet embassy, Boris Filiatov rose to greet Olga Balan, smiling a greeting and offering vodka, which she refused. He didn’t take one either, because he was nervous of her reputation, like everyone else.
‘You consider we have a problem?’ he said. He was overly fat and greasy-skinned, the sort of man who perspired under the shower.
‘I do not like this operation that Irena Kozlov has initiated,’ announced the woman.
Chapter Seven
Identifying the man called Yuri Kozlov turned out to be remarkably – and in a truly literal sense comparatively – simple. And there was an irony in the fact that it was made so by the American pictures from which Washington appeared to have learned nothing. Britain’s counter-espionage service, MI5, has since 1965 maintained current and past photofiles on all known Soviet personnel who have served in any capacity, either diplomatic or trade, in the country. In 1976, for speed analysis, the entire system was computerized under a system in which photographs can be compared not side by side but from physiognomy characteristics, and four years later it was updated with technological improvements which enable a thousand images an hour to be considered. General Sir Alistair Wilson, who in the 1950s Malaysian campaign led his Ghurka troops on horseback and wore a regimental sword, was a committed believer – and user – of technology. While he was still considering the incoming cable from Charlie – before, even, they talked on the secure line – Wilson invoked the internal agency’s technical help at Director-to-Director level but guided by Charlie restricted the picture comparison to Russians appointed to trade rather than diplomatic positions.
The computer recognition is not positive; it singles out similar or matching characteristics, requiring final identification to be made by visual examination. By mid-afternoon, London time, thirty possibilities had been electronically pulled from MI5’s picture library, and by the time Wilson summoned his deputy to Earl Grey tea and digestive biscuits the photographs which Charlie had wired only hours before lay beside three separate stock prints of a Russian attached to the Highgate Trade Centre from 1976 until 1981.
‘The name then,’ disclosed Wilson, consulting the accompanying files, ‘was Gordik: Ivan Gordik.’
Harkness stood at the Director’s side, staring down. Two of the London prints illustrated the man they knew to be Kozlov at what appeared to be reception-like functions. The other, obviously snatched by a concealed camera, showed his getting into a car. ‘It’s the same man,’ Harkness said. ‘There can’t be the slightest doubt.’
‘There isn’t,’ said Wilson. ‘To be absolutely sure I’ve had our analysts confirm it. Gordik is Kozlov: or Kozlov is Gordik, whichever way you want it.’
‘What’s the record say?’ asked Harkness, going to his chair.
Wilson looked briefly up from the dossier, shaking his head. ‘Very little, factually: nothing, in fact. But what is there is fascinating, put against what we now have, from Japan.’
‘Proof?’ demanded Harkness, coming forward in his chair in unaccustomed eagerness.
‘No,’ disappointed Wilson. ‘Just supposition. Kozlov – we’ll use that name, to avoid any confusion – was among a party of Russian trade representatives kept under surveillance in March 1980, during a visit to a technology fair at the exhibition centre in Birmingham. The fair ended on March z8. On the night of March 28 a car carrying the Permanent Under Secretary to the Board of Trade, his secretary and the driver went out of control on the MI. The severity of the crash was never explained; a police scientific engineer said he couldn’t confirm that the accelerator was jammed, because of the damage, but that was his surmise. The brake drums were smashed, so it wasn’t possible to establish if they failed, either …’
‘Were they killed?’ asked Harkness.
‘The Permanent Secretary and his secretary,’ said the Director. ‘The driver lost a leg. They hit one of the bridge supports: there was another car involved, a family going on holiday. A child died.’
‘Holy Mary!’ said Harkness, a Catholic who went to mass twice on Sunday and usually extended the swearing ban to any open blasphemy.
‘There’s more,’ said Wilson. ‘The Secretary to the Board of Trade should have been in the same car: at the last moment he decided instead to go back early to his constituency, in Wales.’
‘Who was …?’
‘Harold McFairlane. He was opposing both in the House of Commons and in Cabinet a technology exchange programme which would have allowed Russian engineers, as inspectors, access to some of our restricted factories with which the Soviets had placed orders,’ completed the Director.
‘All very circumstantial and completely unproveable,’ judged Harkness.
‘Very professional, in fact, if it were an assassination attempt,’ said Wilson, making a different judgment.
‘That all?’
‘MI5 have five dossiers open on unexplained but suspicious deaths, during the period,’ said Wilson. ‘A division technician at the Fylingdales early warning station in Yorkshire whose death was ascribed to a heart attack, two months after an annual medical passed him completely fit. Harry Albert, the anti-communist president-elect of the Electricians Union, who became ill shortly after returning from an official visit to Nigeria. Pathologists at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases couldn’t identify what it was, after he died. Bill Paul was an American, based in London, who edited a right-wing magazine which the CIA funded, through a Delaware-incorporated charity foundation. His was straight murder, in his Islington home. There appeared to have been a burglary attempt. Inquest verdict was murder by a person or persons unknown. Valeri Solomatin was an exiled Ukrainian writer who’d been published by Paul’s magazine. Solomatin, who was a strong swimmer, was found drowned on a fishing holiday in Scotland …’ The Director looked briefly up from the recital. ‘And then there was McFairlane. There was open speculation of his being chosen party leader, which the way the election went would have meant prime minister. Happily married, no mistresses, no scandal, millionaire through family money, everything to live for. There was some discussion at the inquest about pressure of work, but it was no more than any other government minister: certainly not sufficient for a man with no history whatsoever of mental illness to contemplate suicide. And there was no note …’