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“They say the devil looks after his own, Nigel. From Ames’s point of view it was the best thing that he handle Monk. He could trash the report and did. In fact he went further. He counter-accused Monk of baseless scaremongering. Where was the proof for all this, he said.
“The upshot was, there was an internal inquiry. Not on the existence of a mole, but on Monk.”
“A sort of court-martial?”
Carey Jordan nodded bitterly.
“Yeah, I guess so. I would have spoken for Jason, but I wasn’t in very good graces myself around that time. Anyway, Ken Mulgrew chaired it. The outcome was they decided Monk had actually made up the Berlin meeting to advance a fading career.”
“Nice of them.”
“Very nice of them. But by then the Ops Directorate was bureaucrats wall to wall, apart from a few old warriors serving out their time. After forty years we’d finally won the Cold War; the Soviet empire was crashing down. It should have been a time of vindication, but it was all bickering and paper pushing.”
“And Monk, what happened to him?”
“They nearly fired him. Instead they busted him down. Gave him some no-no slot in Records or somewhere. Buried him. Not wanted on voyage. He should have quit, taken his pension, and gone. But he was always a tenacious bastard. He stuck it out, convinced that one day he would be proved right. He sat and rotted in that job for three long years. And eventually he was.”
“Proved right?”
“Of course. But too late.”
Moscow, January 1991
COLONEL Anatoli Grishin left the interrogation room and withdrew to his own office in a black rage.
The panel of officers who had carried out the questioning were satisfied they had it all. There would be no more sessions of the Monakh Committee. It was all on tape, the whole story right back to a small boy falling ill in Nairobi in 1983 up to the snatch at the Opera Café the previous September.
Somehow the men from the First Chief Directorate knew that Monk had been disgraced among his own people; busted, finished. That could only mean he had no more agents. Four had been the total, but what a four they had been. Now one was left alive, but not for long, Grishin was certain.
So the Monakh Committee was over, disbanded. It had done its job. It should have been a matter for triumph. But Grishin’s rage stemmed from something that had come out of the last session. One hundred yards. One hundred miserable yards. …
The report of the watcher team had been adamant. On his last day of freedom Nikolai Turkin had made no contact with enemy agents. He had spent the day inside the headquarters, taken his supper in the canteen, then unexpectedly walked out and been followed to a large café where he ordered coffee and had his shoes cleaned.
It was Turkin who had let it slip. The two watchers across the square had seen the shoeshine boy do his job and shuffle away. Seconds later the KGB cars, with Grishin beside the driver of the first car, had come around the corner. At that moment he had been just one hundred yards from Jason Monk himself on Soviet-ruled territory.
In the interrogation room every eye on the panel had swiveled around to stare at him. He had been in charge of the snatch, they seemed to be saying, and he had missed the biggest prize of all.
There would be pain, of course. Not as persuasion but as punishment. This he swore. Then he was overruled. General Boyarov had told him personally that the chairman of the KGB wanted a speedy execution, fearful that in these rapidly changing times it might be refused. He was taking the warrant to the president that day and it should be carried out the following morning.
And times were changing, with bewildering speed. From all sides his service was under accusation from scum in the newly liberated press, scum whom he knew how to deal with.
What he did not then know was that in August his own chairman, General Kryuchkov, would lead a coup d’état against Gorbachev, and it would fail. In revenge, Gorbachev would break the KGB into several fragments; and that the Soviet Union itself would finally collapse in December.
While Grishin sat in his office that day in January and brooded, General Kryuchkov laid the execution warrant for the former KGB Colonel Turkin on the president’s desk. Gorbachev lifted his pen, paused, and laid it down again.
The previous August Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. Now American jets were pounding the life out of Iraq. A land invasion was imminent. Various world statesmen were seeking to intercede, proposing themselves as international brokers of peace. It was a tempting role. One of them was Mikhail Gorbachev.
“I accept what this man has done, and that he deserves to die,” said the president.
“It is the law,” said Kryuchkov.
“Yes, but at this moment ... I think it would be inadvisable.”
He made up his mind and handed the warrant back, unsigned.
“I have the right to exercise clemency, and I do so. Seven years at hard labor.”
General Kryuchkov left in a rage. This kind of degeneracy could not go on, he vowed. Sooner or later he and others of like mind would have to strike.