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“I’d prefer to do that myself,” said Macdonald. “Just in case it’s not a hoax. You’ll see why when you read it.”
“All right, Jock. Your call. What do you want?”
“Club first. Bath, shave, dinner, and a sleep. Then come back here about midnight and work on it till opening hours. See you again then.”
Marchbanks nodded.
“All right. You’d better borrow this office. I’ll notify Security.”
By the time Jeffrey Marchbanks returned to his office just before ten the following morning, it was to find Jock Macdonald full-length on his sofa with his shoes and jacket off and tie loosened. The black file was on his desk with a pile of unbound white sheets beside it.
“That’s it,” he said. “In the language of Shakespeare. By the way, the disk is still in the machine but it should be got out and logged safely.”
Marchbanks nodded, ordered coffee, pulled on his glasses, and began to read. He looked up after a while.
“The man’s mad, of course.”
“If it is Komarov writing, then yes. Or very bad. Or both. Either way, potentially dangerous. Read on.”
Marchbanks did so. When he had finished he puffed out his cheeks and exhaled.
“It has to be a hoax. No one who meant it would ever write it down.”
“Unless he thought it was confined to his own inner core of fellow fanatics,” suggested Macdonald.
“Stolen then?”
“Possibly. Forged, possibly. But who was the tramp, and how did he get hold of it? We don’t know.”
Marchbanks pondered. He knew that if the manifesto was a forgery and a hoax, there would be nothing but grief for the SIS if they took it seriously. If it turned out to be genuine, there would be even more grief if they did not.
“I think,” he said at length, “I want to run this past the Controller, maybe even the Chief.”
The Controller, Eastern Hemisphere, David Brownlow, saw them at twelve and the Chief offered the three of them lunch in his paneled top-floor dining room with its panoramic views of the Thames and Vauxhall Bridge at 1:15.
Sir Henry Coombs was just short of sixty and in his final year as chief of the SIS. Like his predecessors he had come up through the ranks and honed his skills in the Cold War that had ended a decade earlier. Unlike the CIA, whose directors were political appointments and not always skillful ones, the SIS for thirty years had persuaded prime ministers to give them a chief who had been through the mill.
And it worked. After 1985 three successive directors of the CIA had admitted they were told hardly anything of the true awfulness of the Ames affair until they read the newspapers. Henry Coombs had the trust of his subordinates and knew all the details he needed to know. And they knew that he knew.
He read the file while sipping his vichyssoise. But he read fast and he took it all in.
“This must be very tiresome for you, Jock, but tell it again.”
He listened attentively, asking two brief questions, then nodded.
“Your views, Jeffrey?”
After the Head of Russia Division, he asked Brownlow, the Controller East. Both said much the same. Is it true? We need to know.
“What intrigues me,” said Brownlow, “is simply this: If all this is Komarov’s true political agenda, why did he write it down? We all know even the most top-secret documents can be stolen.”
Sir Henry Coombs’s deceptively mild eyes turned to his Moscow Head of Station.
“Any ideas, Jock?”
Macdonald shrugged.
“Why does anyone write down their innermost thoughts and plans? Why do people confess the unconfessable to their private diaries? Why do people keep impossibly intimate journals? Why do major services like ours store hypersensitive, material? Perhaps it was intended as a very private briefing document for his own inner circle, or just as therapy for himself. Or perhaps it is a forgery designed to damage the man. I don’t know.”