Frederick Forsyth - The Deceiver

“Who exactly is Mr. Milton-Rice?”

The Deputy Director of MI-5 consulted his notes. “Grade-two civil servant on the staff of the Procurement Office.”

“Pretty low grade?”

“Sensitive work, though. Weapons systems, access to eval­uations of new armaments.”

“Mm,” mused the Chairman. “So what do you want?”

“The point is, Tony,” said the Director General, “we have very little to go on. Unexplained payments over a period of years into his account—not enough to hold him, let alone get a conviction. He could plead that he backs the horses, always on track, gets his cash that way. Of course, he might confess. Then again, he might not.”

The policeman nodded his agreement. Without a confes­sion, he would have a bad time trying to persuade the Crown Prosecution Office even to bring a case. He doubted the man who had denounced Milton-Rice, whoever he might be, would ever appear in court as a witness.

“We’d like to shadow him first,” said the Director General. “Around the clock. If he makes one contact with the Rus­sians, he’s in the bag, with or without a confession.”

It was agreed. The watchers, that elite team of MI-5 agents who—on their own turf, at least—are reckoned by all the Western services to be the best tailers in the world, were put on alert to envelop Anthony Milton-Rice the following morn­ing as he approached the Defense Ministry with an invisible surveillance for twenty-four hours in every day.

Anthony Milton-Rice, like so many people with a regular job, had regular habits. He was a man of routine. On workdays he left his house in Addiscombe precisely at ten to eight and walked the half-mile to East Croydon Station—unless it was raining heavily, in which case the bachelor civil servant took a bus. He boarded the same commuter train every day, flashed his season ticket, and rode into London, descending at Vic­toria Station. From there, it was a short bus ride down Victoria Street to Parliament Square. There he got off and crossed Whitehall to the ministry building.

The morning after the conference about him, he did exactly the same. He did not notice the group of youths who boarded at Norwood Junction. He noticed them when they entered his open-plan carriage, jammed with other commuters. There were screams from the women and shouts of alarm from the men as the teenagers, engaged in an orgy of casual robbery and assault called “steaming,” swept through the carriage snatching women’s handbags and jewelry, demanding men’s wallets at knifepoint, and threatening anyone who seemed to oppose, let alone resist, them.

As the train hissed into the next station up the line, the crowd of two dozen young thugs, still screaming their rage at the world, quit the train and scattered, jumping the barrier and disappearing into the streets of Crystal Palace, leaving behind them hysterical women, badly shaken men, and frus­trated Transport Police. No arrests were made—the outrage had been too fast and unforeseen.

The train was delayed, wreaking havoc on the commuter schedules as other trains backed up behind it, while Transport Police boarded to take statements. It was only when they tapped the commuter in the pale-gray raincoat dozing in the corner on his shoulder that the man toppled slowly forward onto the floor. There were further screams as the first blood from the thin stiletto wound to his heart began to seep from beneath the crumpled figure. Mr. Anthony Milton-Rice was very dead.

Ivan’s Café, appropriately named for a meeting with a Rus­sian, was situated in Crondall Street in Shoreditch, and Sam McCready, as always, arrived second, even though he had been the first in the street outside. The reason was that if anyone was being tailed, it would more likely be Keepsake than him. So he always sat for thirty minutes in his car, watched the Russian make the meet, then gave it another fifteen minutes to see if the asset from the Soviet Embassy had suddenly grown a tail.

When McCready entered Ivan’s, he took a cup of tea from the counter and wandered over to the wall where two tables were side by side. Keepsake occupied the one in the corner and was engrossed in Sporting Life . McCready unfolded his Evening Standard and proceeded to study it.

“How was the good General Drozdov?” he asked quietly, his voice lost in the babble of the café and the hissing of the tea urn.

“Amiable and enigmatic,” said the Russian, studying the form of the horses in the three-thirty at Sandown. “I fear he may have been checking us out. I will know more if K-Line decide to visit, or if my own K-Line man gets hyperactive.”

K-Line is the KGB’s internal counterintelligence and secur­ity branch, charged not so much with espionage as with keeping a check on other KGB men and looking for internal leaks.

“Have you ever heard of a man called Anthony Milton-Rice?” asked McCready.

“No. Never. Why?”

“You didn’t run him out of your Rezidentsia ? A civil servant in the Ministry of Defense?”

“Never heard of him. Never handled his product.”

“Well, he’s dead now. Too late to ask him who did run him. If anyone did. Could he have been run directly from Moscow through the Illegals Directorate?”

“If he was working for us, that’s the only explanation,” muttered the Russian. “He never worked for us in PR-Line. Not out of the London Station. As I say, we never even handled such product. He must have communicated with Moscow via a case officer based here outside the embassy. Why did he die?”

McCready sighed. “I don’t know.”

But he did know that unless it was a remarkable coinci­dence, someone had to have set it up. Someone who knew the civil servant’s routines, could brief the thugs on his regular train, his appearance—and pay them off. Possibly Milton-Rice had not even worked for the Russians at all. Then why the denunciation? Why the unaccounted-for money? Or per­haps Milton-Rice had indeed spied for Moscow but via a cut­out, unknown to Keepsake, who in turn reported directly back to the Illegals Directorate in Moscow. And General Drozdov had just been in town. And he ran the Illegals. ...

“He was denounced,” said McCready. “To us. And then he was dead.”

“Who denounced him?” asked Keepsake. He stirred his tea, though he had no intention of drinking the sweet, milky mixture.

“Colonel Pyotr Orlov,” said McCready quietly.

“Ah,” said Keepsake in a low murmur. “I have something for you there. Pyotr Alexandrovitch Orlov is a loyal and dedicated KGB officer. His defection is as phony as a three-dollar bill. He is a plant, a disinformation agent. And he is well-prepared and very good.”

Now that, thought McCready, is going to cause problems.

Timothy Edwards listened carefully. McCready’s narration and evaluation lasted thirty minutes. When he had finished, Edwards asked calmly, “And you are quite certain you be­lieve Keepsake?”

McCready had expected this question. Keepsake had worked for the British for four years since he had first ap­proached an SIS officer in Denmark and offered his services as an “agent-in-place,” but this was a world of shadows and suspicions. There was always the possibility, however remote, that Keepsake might be a “double,” his true loyalties still with Moscow. It was precisely the accusation he now made of Orlov.

“It’s been four years,” said McCready. “For four years Keepsake’s product has been tested against every known criterion. It’s pure.”

“Yes, of course,” said Edwards smoothly. “Unfortunately, if one word of this leaked to our Cousins, they would say exactly the opposite—that our man was lying and theirs was for real. The word is, Langley is deeply enamored of this Orlov.”