Why had Williams wanted to jeopardise the plan? For that’s what it amounted to, Marcus decided. Was he getting too old for the job, too cautious, past making an unequivocal decision, intent always on creating innumerable “standbys” and “provisos”? Was that it? And if not was it possible that somehow, for some reason, Williams wanted Edwards to have a get out, wanted to warn him that the whole affair was a trap by offering him the clearly impractical idea of subverting Yunis? And who would want to let Edwards off the hook? Unless, like Edwards, he worked for Moscow?
It was a quarter past nine. Someone opened the door in the next room and the two men looked up, almost apprehensively, and then continued talking, but in lower, more careful tones, like conspirators. But were they both involved in the same conspiracy? Marcus wondered.
“Edwards may break,” Marcus said. “I mean not after the Israelis get him — but before. I can’t believe that anyone with his experience of the area would fall for that plan about contacting Yunis. And if Edwards has any suspicions don’t you think he’ll run the moment he hits Cairo? Or before — on the way. He’ll know we’ve cooked something up for him. A trap.”
Williams knew that this was perfectly true, just as he’d known long before anyone else that Edwards was a double, working with Moscow. He’d realized it finally when, out of the forty or so British agents in the Middle East whom Blake had shopped, only Edwards and half a dozen other minor figures had remained with their cover intact.
All had been well until Marcus had been moved from the Scottish Office and appointed as an internal watchdog by the new Minister to look into the whole question of security in the Middle East section — from then on the sands had begun to shift awkwardly.
Marcus had got to the point about Edwards with uncomfortable rapidity. He’d hit on the fact that Edwards’s cover had been left intact after Blake had shopped everyone else, he’d combed his files, turned his life inside out, grilled Crowther in retirement He just couldn’t accept that Blake could have overlooked one of their key men in the Middle East section — and he’d been right.
Petnicki, the defector the Americans had got hold of a month before, had confirmed it all. And Williams had been unable to do anything about it — except ensure that Marcus’s investigations didn’t percolate up to him, and try to get Edwards out of the way, which he couldn’t do directly, or through Moscow, since he’d cut every contact with them once Marcus had begun his ferreting. As far as Moscow was concerned Williams was “buried” for the time being, which meant he didn’t exist for them, was not to aproach them in any way, warn them, or tell them anything. That was the arrangement. It was his only chance of keeping his cover intact. After Philby and his two friends, whom he’d recruited in the early ’thirties — and then Blake and now Edwards — he was the last, the most important man left in the Citadel. It wasn’t a question now of being caught without a chair when the music stopped; he couldn’t afford to play the game any more at all. It was a matter of sitting tight and never taking one’s eyes off the orchestra.
He looked at Marcus firmly. “Edwards may run. But if he does they’ll be with him. The Israelis were going to have a man at the airport.”
“But the whole idea of his contacting Yunis — it seems to me an excellent way of warning him — no? If he has any sense, and he has, he won’t go near Yunis and hell know something’s up. We should have had him in the Scrubs by now, with another forty-two years, and not given him the chance, however slight, of getting back to Moscow.”
Williams smiled slightly and created a sigh. “Forty-two years doesn’t seem to do much good. They don’t seem to last the pace these days. And the hanging judges have all gone. This is the way to do it. Edwards won’t be many days on the Nile — and he’ll never see Moscow. The Yunis alternative is perfectly sound — perfectly in order.”
Williams lied comfortably, a slow pensive authority in his voice — the voice and the authority born of many years dealing with over-conscientious, pushy subordinates — underlining his real knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs which he knew Marcus, for all his other skills, didn’t possess. He’d been involved with the Scottish Office for too long and in negotiating that devious terrain he had found little time for any wider geography.
“We’ve gone over it all. Goodness me. And Edwards is already there. We’ve talked it out together, you should have voiced your doubts at the time.”
“I suppose so. I wasn’t so familiar with UAR affairs then. But it’s clear enough now to me. We’re warning Edwards …”
Marcus looked directly at Williams for the first time that morning: a sad look, the small blue eyes admitting failure for a moment, Williams thought. Or were they questioning him, connecting him directly with this idea that Edwards had been warned?
For that had been exactly his intention — to alert Edwards. He hoped what he’d done would be sufficient, that Edwards would get himself safely to Moscow. He would leave the Cairo flight somewhere along the line, at Rome, or more likely at Munich where he could slip into Berlin, contact the Resident there, cross over into the East city and on to Moscow. And that would be the end of it all; Edwards would go home; he would never get near the Israelis at Cairo Airport, let alone Mohammed Yunis. Without any direct contact, Williams would get him out of the way under Marcus’s nose. The message and the warning would be implicit in his directions to contact Yunis and infiltrate his Union — for nothing could be more obviously suicidaclass="underline" he was waving red flags all down the line at Edwards. He couldn’t fail to notice them.
After all, thought Williams, if he put himself in Edwards’s position, as he’d often done recently … it was surprisingly easy, professionally they were the same sort of men. And Williams reminded himself once again of how many professional characteristics they must share: the development to a fine pitch of all those senses beyond the fifth — those which created confidence and attracted luck in the worst corners, the others which warned or encouraged, pushed or stalled one, at just the right moment, so that even in the most hazy circumstances where logic was useless, one felt impelled towards the right decision. Thus equipped it was possible to survive indefinitely in two worlds, for these added dimensions of the deeply committed liar, like any gift of genius, had the effect of creating a patina of trust around one which the merely honest rarely possessed.
In these circumstances one paid court to the dissembler and mistrusted steady virtue. A licence for deceit was like cut garlic in one’s pocket: one stank of belief.
And Edwards must still have all these gifts, Williams thought. He would not have lost them — the confidence and the skills and the early warning systems born of a lifetime’s necessary disloyalty would now be more acute than ever: Edwards would run for his life. There was little to worry about there.
But there was Marlow to think about; the other half of the plan called MOUSE: the official Holborn plan which would now have to be put into operation when they met Marlow that afternoon. He was an important lever in the machine: if Israeli Intelligence in Cairo, once they got hold of Edwards, were to believe that he was a genuine Soviet defector and not just a plant, London would have to appear much more concerned at his loss; someone from the Holborn section would have to be sent chasing him, to try and stop him before he got over to the other side: a bona fide spy-catcher, a warranty of the goods being supplied; Marlow was to be that man.
Of course, it would never come to that, Williams realized; since Edwards would surely never get to Cairo Marlow would never be needed to guarantee him in this way as a defector: certainly not; Marlow’s visit to Cairo would be for another purpose altogether, something which Williams had planned and arranged long before with Moscow.