Marcus — the lawyer, the interrogator, the counter-intelligence expert; the wily Scotsman who missed nothing, the Russian speaker who’d been the terror of every Soviet trawler skipper in the North Sea when he’d been in the Scottish Office: very well then; he would secure for him a quarry worthy of his talents, somebody possibly even more important than himself: an investigation that would result in his going under for a long time.
Williams left the office at exactly his usual time that evening. His two meetings earlier with Marlow had passed satisfactorily. The man had voiced a number of perfectly reasonable doubts about the scheme to “look for” Edwards, and he had seemed to think that Edwards was in Cairo already, without actually being told that this was so, but otherwise there had been a few bad moments. Marlow was a loyal fellow. If only it went as sweetly with Marcus, Williams thought.
He had always walked some distance from the office before catching a bus or tube to the King’s Road — always had a drink at any one of a number of different pubs on the way and gone on to buy an evening paper from an equal variety of news stands. It was a haphazard wandering which he had built into his routine years before — a proviso for just such an occasion as this, when he had to make contact: if he was already under surveillance he would be doing no more than he did every night, going in and out of various pubs, crossing from the saloon to the public. But tonight he would do much more — getting on to the Waterloo tube at the last possible moment, getting off and coming back to where he started, on to the street again, walking, then the same process on the Central line to Oxford Circus, engrossed in his paper, jumping off just as the doors were closing, waiting on the stairway for any footsteps behind him.
He was tired an hour later, his back against the sweaty phone box in the ticket concourse upstairs, the last of the rush hour crowds swarming past him.
“Mills here. Who’s speaking?”
Williams had almost forgotten the Cockney-Jewish Whitechapel Road voice. It wasn’t the sort of mixture one heard often nowadays, with its echoes of a Russian émigré past in the East End, so that the “Mills”, in the way he pronounced his name, became “Meals”—which wasn’t, of course, his name at all.
Williams gave his code phrase by way of reply and asked for an urgent meeting. They wasted no words on the phone.
“Come to the office then; the usual routine.”
Williams had a whisky in the bar on the Grosvenor House Hotel, left a second one unfinished, went to the gents and from there to the penthouse elevators at the rear of the hotel. He turned his back to them, pretending to look for someone, waiting for an empty car. He got off a floor below and walked up.
Mills opened the door. He was in his sixties and had the rouged and toupéed features of a man who had tried and failed to escape from the mould which nature had cast him in: that of a caricature Jew — a large nose, bulbous and hooked, wide forehead and narrowing chin, hooded eyes close together: a Disraeli from a nineteenth-century cartoon who had done his best to iron out the trademarks of his ancestry. He looked now slightly rubbery and false, like a half finished wax-work or an idea in the make-up department for a horror film. He has survived, Williams thought, because he looks so obviously devious.
But there was nothing the least shifty in his manner. He had a busy, straightforward, almost overbearing attitude, like a man who had little time to spare and took salad and a glass of milk for his lunch.
Mills ran a small film company from the office — (“Marlborough Films — a ring of confidence, don’t you think?”) — and there was recommendation from the Cork Film Festival on the wall behind his desk — “Carrot and Donkey” it had been called, a documentary about a red-headed child in Connemara. Williams had seen it once in the King’s Road Odeon. It had been better than the feature.
They sat together on a sofa under Cocteau’s poster for the Edinburgh Festival.
“There’s some soda water in the fridge?”
“Without for me.”
They drank their whisky in large Waterford glass tumblers (another award from Cork) and Mills listened to Williams’s story of his meeting with Marcus that morning.
“Well, what do you suggest then?” Mills looked upset, as though he were being put upon unnecessarily. “A fast car going down his street? We can’t risk that sort of ‘incident’—doing in your deputy. It would certainly find its way back to us, and you. And kidnapping, you surely don’t — ”
“No, of course not — ”
“We can’t really do anything to him here without risking more suspicion falling on you. He’ll almost certainly start voicing his theories about you — ”
“That’s the whole point. I want to arrange for someone else altogether to settle him — before he makes his mind up about me. I want you to bait him. Listen: he’s a lawyer, his reputation is as an interrogator; counter-intelligence — that’s his métier in our section: quizzing possible doubles, defectors: ferreting. That’s what he was brought in for. Now I want you to get Moscow to lay on a defector for him — in Cairo. Urgently. And someone important, not some station slogger. Someone he’ll want to go for. Get the man to ask for asylum at the British Consulate in Garden City. They’ll contact the Chief of Service here and he’ll ask for Marcus to go to Cairo to check the man out. That’s his job. Our Mid-East section would have to deal with that sort of thing in any case. I won’t appear to have had anything to do with it.”
“And how will that silence him?” Mills sniffed and pulled his nose, quickly and vigorously between thumb and forefinger, as though intent on plucking it away from his face without his or anyone else’s noticing.
“Marcus won’t ever get to the Consulate. He’ll be carrying the goods we’ve arranged for Marlow. We just change the two of them around: the word from Moscow to Egyptian Intelligence will be Marcus, not Marlow. Marcus will be carrying the memorandum instead; I’ll see to that. I expect he’ll get fifteen years for his trouble. Marlow we just leave to look around Cairo for Edwards, as planned; we don’t break him to the Egyptians. As for Edwards, he should have come home by now. Has there been any word?”
“No. But I wouldn’t have heard yet in any case.”
“Well, get over to the Embassy straight away. Line up your defector in Cairo, have him approach the Consulate at once, and wait till I call you to say Marcus is on the way. Then bounce him to Egyptian security there. That should be in two — three days at most, if you work fast.”
Mills was worried. He didn’t like Williams and he cared less for his plan. But there was nothing he could do about it. Williams outranked him; he was the man at the top of the pile in London, the one they could never afford to lose; and certainly he didn’t want to be the man responsible for that: all the others who’d been lost to them over the years had been pawns by comparison to this queen.
“Right then. I’ve been here too long already.”
“I’ll have to clear this with the Colonel here. Vorishil — ”
“Clear it with the Politburo — if you think you’ve got that sort of time. But do it; otherwise I’ll have to break — now. Moscow won’t like that. And there’s no reason for it: Marcus suspects at the moment, he may have me under surveillance, that’s all. He’ll be working on it — and me — for the next few days. He’ll want to be sure, absolutely sure, before he comes out and says anything, before there’s any serious investigation. So we have that time, we have forty-eight hours start on him, at least. Make the bait ripe enough — and he’ll go for it. I can guarantee it. Take his mind off me: give him a real peach to get his teeth into. And by the way, don’t swamp the air waves on the Moscow circuit up at the Embassy — that’s how they first got on to Philby. No arguments, no long correspondence with mother — just one message — help you to make it all the sharper.”