Page 58 of The Other Woman

“The whispers never addressed this.”

Gabriel was tempted to press Morosov on this point, but didn’t. He had learned long ago that, when it came to debriefing a source, it was sometimes better to sit quietly and bide one’s time. And so he allowed the identity of the legendary figure to fall temporarily by the wayside and asked for the date.

“I told you, Allon, it was October.”

“Last October?”

“The October before.”

“Did he offer you tea?”

“No.”

“Black bread and vodka?”

“Sasha regards vodka as a Russian illness.”

“How long did the meeting last?”

“Meetings with Sasha are never short.”

“And the topic?”

“The topic,” said Sergei Morosov, “was a traitor named Konstantin Kirov.”

Gabriel turned to a fresh page in his notebook, indifferently, as though he were not surprised to learn that the Office’s prized SVR source had been blown for well over a year. “Why would a man like Sasha be interested in Kirov?” he asked, his pen hovering above the page. “Kirov was a nothing man.”

“Not in Sasha’s mind. Kirov’s treachery was for Sasha a great opportunity.”

“For what?”

“To protect his asset.”

“And the reason for the ominous summons?”

“Sasha wanted me to work with him.”

“You must have been honored.”

“Greatly.”

“Why do you suppose he chose you?”

“He knew my mother had worked for Andropov. As far as Sasha was concerned, I was someone who could be trusted.”

“With what?”

“Alistair Hughes.”

Moscow Center’s primary file on MI6’s Vienna Head of Station made for dull reading. It stated that Alistair Hughes was loyal to his service and his country, that he harbored no personal or sexual vices, and that he had rejected several offers of recruitment, including one made when he was still an undergraduate at Oxford and assumed—by Moscow Center at least—to be bound for a career in British intelligence.

To this meager offering, Sasha added a file of his own. It contained intimate portraits of Hughes’s wife and his two sons. There were also details of his sexual preferences, which were rather specific, and his mental health, which was not good. Hughes suffered from bipolar disorder and acute anxiety. His condition had worsened during a tour of Baghdad, and he hoped his posting to Vienna, while dull in comparison, would help restore his equilibrium. He was seeing a prominent specialist from the Privatklinik Schloss in neighboring Switzerland, a fact he was concealing from his superiors at Vauxhall Cross.

“And his wife as well,” added Sergei Morosov.

“Who was the source of the material?”

“The file didn’t say, and neither did Sasha.”