Page 25 of The Other Woman

“Dishy Alistair Hughes.”

Seymour said nothing.

“What was the nature of the contacts?”

“The usual,” said Seymour. “What’s important is that Alistair reported each and every one of them, as he’s required to do. They were all logged in his file, with cross-references in Gribkov’s.”

“So you brought Hughes to Vauxhall Cross to get his impressions of Gribkov and what he was selling.”

“Exactly.”

“And?”

“Alistair was even more skeptical than London Control.”

“Was he really? I’m shocked to hear that.”

Seymour frowned. “By this point,” he said, “six weeks had passed since Gribkov’s initial offer of defection, and he was starting to get nervous. He made two highly inadvisable phone calls to my man in New York. And then he did something truly reckless.”

“What’s that?”

“He reached out to the Americans. As you might expect, Langley was furious at the way we’d handled the case. They put pressure on us to take Gribkov as quickly as possible. They even offered to pay a portion of the ten million. When we resisted, it turned into a full-blown family feud.”

“Who won?”

“Moscow Center,” said Seymour. “While we were bickering with our American cousins, we failed to notice when Gribkov was ordered home for urgent consultations. His wife and children returned to Russia a few days later, and the following month the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations announced the appointment of a new press attaché. Needless to say, Vladimir Vladimirovich Gribkov has never been seen or heard from since.”

“Why wasn’t I told about any of this?”

“It didn’t concern you.”

“Itconcernedme,” said Gabriel evenly, “the minute you let Alistair Hughes within a mile of my operation in Vienna.”

“It didn’t cross our mind not to let him work on the operation.”

“Why not?”

“Because our internal inquiry cleared him of any role in Gribkov’s demise.”

“I’m relieved to hear that. But how exactly did the Russians learn Gribkov was trying to defect?”

“We concluded he must have tipped them off with his behavior. The Americans agreed with our assessment.”

“Thus ending a potentially destabilizing fight among friends. But now you have another dead Russian defector on your hands. And the one common denominator is your Head of Station in Vienna, a man who carried on an extramarital affair with the wife of an American consular officer.”

“Her husband wasn’t a consular officer, he was Agency. And if marital infidelity were an accurate indicator of treason, we wouldn’t have a service. Neither would you.”

“He’s been spending a lot of time across the border in Switzerland.”

“Did your little bird tell you that, too, or have you been watching him?”

“I would never watch one of your officers without telling you, Graham. Friends don’t do that to one another. They don’t keep each other in the dark. Not when lives are at stake.”

Seymour offered no response. He looked suddenly exhausted and weary of the quarrel. Gabriel did not envy his friend’s predicament. A spymaster never won in a situation like this. It was only a question of how badly he lost.

“At the risk of putting my nose somewhere it doesn’t belong,” said Gabriel, “it seems to me you have two choices.”

“Do I?”