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Macdonald went to the flat. The Ambassador had protested to the Foreign Ministry, which had hit the roof and complained to Interior. They had ordered the Moscow Prosecutor’s office to send their best investigator. A full report would be on its way as soon as possible. In Moscow that meant: Don’t hold your breath.
The message to London had been wrong in one respect. Celia Stone had not been hit by a chair leg, but by a small china figurine. It had shattered. Had it been metal she could have been dead.
There were Russian detectives in the flat and they happily answered the British diplomat’s questions. The two militiamen stationed at the entry to the courtyard had admitted no Russian car, so the men must have come on foot. The militiamen had seen no one pass them. They would say that anyway, thought Macdonald.
The door had not been forced so it must have been picked unless the burglars had had a key, which was unlikely. They were probably looking for hard currency in these difficult times. It was very regrettable. Macdonald nodded.
Privately he thought the intruders might have been from the Black Guards, but more likely it was a contract job by the local underworld. Or ex-KGB hirelings—there were enough about. Moscow burglars hardly ever touched diplomatic residences; too much fall-out. Cars on the open street were fair game, but not guarded apartments. The search had been thorough and professional, but nothing had been taken, not even some costume jewelry in the bedroom. A pro job and for a single item, not found. Macdonald feared the worst.
Back at the embassy he had an idea, rang the Prosecutor’s office, and asked if the detective assigned to the case would be kind enough to call on him. Inspector Chernov came to visit at three P.M.
“I may be able to help you,” said Macdonald.
The detective raised an eyebrow.
“I would be most grateful,” he said.
“Our young lady, Miss Stone, was feeling better this morning. Much better.”
“Deeply gratified,” said the inspector.
“So much so that she was able to give a reasonable description of one of her attackers. She saw him in the light coming from the hall just before the blow struck.”
“Her first statement indicated she saw neither of them,” said Chernov.
“Memory sometimes returns in cases like these. You saw her yesterday afternoon, Inspector?”
“Yes, at four P.M. She was awake.”
“But still dizzy, I expect. This morning she was in a clearer state of mind. Now, one of the wives of our staff here is something of an artist. With Miss Stone’s help she was able to create a picture.”
He handed over his desk a portrait in charcoal and crayon. The inspector’s face lit up.
“This is extraordinarily useful,” he said. “I will circulate it among the Burglary Squad. A man of this age must have a record.” He rose to go. Macdonald arose.
“Just pleased to be helpful,” he said. They shook hands and the detective left.
During the lunch hour both Celia Stone and the artist had been briefed on the new story. Neither understood why, but agreed to confirm it if Inspector Chernov ever interviewed them. In fact he never did.
Nor did his burglary teams, scattered across Moscow, recognize the face. But they put it on the walls of their squad rooms anyway.
Moscow, July 1985
IN the wake of the windfall harvest just arrived from Aldrich Ames, the KGB did something quite extraordinary.
It is an unbreakable rule in the Great Game that if an agency suddenly acquires a priceless asset deep in the heart of the enemy, that asset must be protected. Thus, when the asset reveals a host of turncoats, the
newly enlightened agency will pick up those turncoats very slowly and carefully, in each case creating a seemingly different reason for his capture.
Only when their asset has escaped from danger and is safely behind the lines may the agents he has betrayed be picked up all at once. To do otherwise would be the equivalent of taking a full-page advertisement in The New York Times to say: “We have just acquired a major mole right inside your outfit, and look what he has given us.”
As Ames was still very much at the heart of the CIA, with many years of good service to come, the First Chief Directorate would have liked to abide by the rules and pick up the fourteen blown turncoats slowly and carefully. In this they were completely overruled, against their almost tearful protests, by Mikhail Gorbachev.
Sorting through the harvest from Washington, the Kolokol Group realized that some of the descriptions were immediately identifiable while others would need careful checking to track down. Of the immediates, some were still posted abroad and would have to be carefully lured back home in a manner so skillful they would not smell a rat. It might take months.
One of the fourteen was actually a longtime agent of the British. The Americans never knew his name, but as London had given Langley his product, the CIA knew a bit about him and could deduce a bit more. He was actually a colonel of the KGB who had been recruited in Denmark in the early seventies and had been a British asset for twelve years. Already under some suspicion, he had nevertheless returned to Moscow from his post as Rezident at the Soviet Embassy in London for one last visit. Ames’s betrayal simply confirmed the Russian suspicions.
But Colonel Oleg Gordievsky was lucky. Seeing by July that he was under total surveillance, with the net closing and arrest imminent, he used a prearranged distress signal. The British SIS mounted a very fast extraction operation, plucked the wiry colonel off the street while he was jogging, and smuggled him out to Finland. He survived, later to be debriefed in a CIA safe house by Aldrich Ames.