“Did they know I would be there?”
“They might have.” Seymour made a show of thought. “I’m sorry, but I’m getting a bit confused. Are you accusing the Americans of leaking the information to the Russians, or us?”
“I’m accusing dishy Alistair Hughes.”
“What about the fourteen other MI6 officers who knew the address of your safe flat? How do you know it wasn’t one of them?”
“Because we’re sitting in this room. You brought me here,” said Gabriel, “because you’re afraid I might be right.”
Graham Seymour sat for a long moment in a contemplative silence, his gaze averted, as though watching the countryside marching past the window of Gabriel’s imaginary train carriage. At last, he quietly spoke a name, a Russian name, that Gabriel struggled to make out over the howling of the ventilation system.
“Gribkov,” Seymour repeated. “Vladimir Vladimirovich Gribkov. We called him VeeVee for short. He masqueraded as a press attaché at the Russian diplomatic mission in New York. Rather badly, I might add. In reality, he was an SVR officer who trolled for spies at the United Nations. Moscow Center has a massive rezidentura in New York. Our station is much smaller, and yours is smaller still. One man, actually. We know his identity, as do the Americans.”
But that, added Seymour, was neither here nor there. What mattered was that Vladimir Vladimirovich Gribkov, during an otherwise tedious diplomatic cocktail party at a posh Manhattan hotel, approached MI6’s man in New York and intimated he wished to discuss something of a highly sensitive nature. The MI6 officer, whom Seymour did not identify, duly reported the contact to London Control. “Because, as any MI6 field officer knows, the surest route to the career ash heap is to conduct an unauthorized heart-to-heart with an SVR hood.” London Control formally blessed the encounter, and three weeks after the initial contact—enough time, said Seymour, to allow Gribkov to come to his senses—the two officers agreed to meet at a remote location east of New York, on Long Island.
“Actually, it was on a smaller island off the coast, a place called Shelter Island. There’s no bridge, only car ferries. Much of the island is a nature preserve, with miles of walking trails where it’s possible to never bump into another living soul. In short, it was the perfect place for an officer of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service to meet with a Russian who was thinking about betraying his country.”
Gribkov wasted little time on preliminaries or professional niceties. He said he had become disillusioned with the SVR and with Russia under the rule of the Tsar. It was his wish to defect to England along with his wife and two children, who were living with him in New York at the Russian diplomatic compound in the Bronx. He said he could provide MI6 with a treasure trove of intelligence, including one piece of information that would make him the most valuable defector in history. Therefore, he wanted to be well compensated in return.
“How much?” asked Gabriel.
“Ten million pounds in cash and a house in the English countryside.”
“One of those,” said Gabriel contemptuously.
“Yes,” agreed Seymour.
“And the piece of information that made him worthy of such riches?”
“The name of a Russian mole working at the pinnacle of the Anglo-American intelligence establishment.”
“Did he specify which service or which side of the divide?”
Seymour shook his head.
“What was your reaction?”
“Caution bordering on skepticism, which is our default opening position. We assumed he was telling us a tall tale, or that he was an agent provocateur sent by Moscow Center to mislead us into carrying out a self-destructive witch hunt for a traitor in our midst.”
“So you told him you weren’t interested?”
“The opposite, actually. We told him we were very interested but that we needed a few weeks to make the necessary arrangements. In the meantime, we checked his references. Gribkov was no probationer. He was a veteran SVR officer who’d served in several rezidenturas in the West, most recently in Vienna, where he’d had numerous contacts with my Head of Station.”
“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.”
“It concerned me,” 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?”