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Three miles down Tverskaya Street, at a point where the highway to Minsk has already changed its name twice, is the great Victory Arch, and just to one side lies Maroseyka Street. Here two big apartment houses are dedicated entirely to senior retirees of the old KGB, pensioners of the state, living out their retirement in reasonable comfort.
Among them in the winter of 1999 was one of the most formidable of Russia’s old spymasters, General Yuri Drozdov. In the high days of the Cold War he had run all KGB operations on the eastern seaboard of America, before being recalled to Moscow to head the ultra-secret Illegals Directorate.
“Illegals” are those who go into enemy territory without any diplomatic cover, burrowing into the alien society as businessmen, academics, whatever, to run the indigenous assets they have recruited. If caught, they face not expulsion but arrest and trial. Drozdov had trained and sent out the KGB’s illegals for years.
Grishin had come across him briefly when Drozdov in his last days as an active officer had headed the small and discreet group at Yazenevo assigned to analyze the tidal wave of product being sent across by Aldrich Ames. Grishin had been the chief interrogator of the spies thus betrayed.
Neither man had taken to the other. Drozdov preferred skill and subtlety to brute force, while Grishin, who had never left the USSR apart from one brief and inglorious expedition to East Berlin, despised those in the First Chief Directorate who had spent years in the West and become infected by foreign mannerisms. Nevertheless, Drozdov agreed to see him at his apartment on Maroseyka Street. Grishin placed the enlarged photograph in front of him.
“Have you ever seen him before?” he asked.
To his horror the old spymaster threw back his head and roared with laughter.
“Seen him? Not personally, no. But that face is stamped on the mind of everyone my age who ever worked at Yazenevo. Don’t you know who he is?”
“No. Or I wouldn’t be here.”
“Well, we called him The Fox. Nigel Irvine. Ran operations against us for years through the sixties and seventies, then became chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service for six years.”
“A spy.”
“A master of spies, a runner of spies,” Drozdov corrected him. “Not the same thing. And he was one of the best ever. Why are you interested?”
“He came to Moscow yesterday.”
“Good God. Do you know why?”
“No,” lied Grishin. Drozdov stared at him intently. He did not believe the answer.
“What’s it got to do with you, anyway? You’re out of it now. You run those black-uniformed thugs for Komarov, don’t you?”
“I am the Head of Security for the Union of Patriotic Forces,” said Grishin stiffly.
“Same difference,” muttered the old general. He escorted Grishin to the door.
“If he comes back, tell him to stop by for a drink,” he called after the departing Grishin. Then he muttered “Asshole,” and closed the door.
Grishin warned his informants in the Immigration Division that he needed to know if ever Sir Nigel Irvine, or Mr. Trubshaw, sought to reenter Moscow.
The following day General of the Army Nikolai Nikolayev gave an interview to Izvestia, the country’s biggest national newspaper. The paper regarded the event as something of a scoop, for the old warrior never gave interviews.
Ostensibly the interview was to mark the general’s up-and-coming seventy-fourth birthday, and it began with general inquiries about his health.
He sat bolt upright in a leather-backed chair in a private room at the Officers’ Club of the Frunze Academy and told the reporter his health was fine.
“My teeth are my own,” he barked. “I don’t need eyeglasses and I can still outmarch any whippersnapper your age.”
The reporter, who was in his early forties, believed him. The photographer, a woman in her mid-twenties, gazed at him with awe. She had heard her grandfather tell of following the young tank commander into Berlin fifty-four years before.
The conversation drifted to the state of the country.
“Deplorable,” snapped Uncle Kolya. “A bloody mess.”
“I suppose,” suggested the reporter, “you will be voting for the UPF and Igor Komarov in the January election?”
“Him, never,” snapped the general. “A bunch of Fascists, that’s all they are. Wouldn’t touch them with a sterilized barge-pole.”
“I don’t understand,” quavered the journalist, “I would have thought …”