for conspiracy and espionage.
At nineteen he entered Moscow State University. On graduating magna cum laude in Physics and English he was selected for further training at a special school for sleeper agents. From the first day of his two-year course, according to his testimony, he determined to defect to whichever Western country he was assigned to, which explains why upon arrival at Edinburgh airport at ten at night he asked politely to speak to a ‘high officer of British Intelligence’.
His ostensible reasons for doing this were unimpeachable. From an early age he claimed to have secretly worshipped at the feet of such luminaries of physics and humanism as Andrei Sakharov, Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman and our own Stephen Hawking. Always he had dreamed of liberty for all, science for all, humanism for all. How then could he not hate the barbarian autocrat Vladimir Putin and his wicked works?
Sergei was also by his own admission homosexual. This fact of itself, had it become known to his fellow students or instructors, would have had him instantly chucked off the course. But according to Sergei this never happened. Somehow he preserved a heterosexual front, flirting with the girls on the course and even going to bed with a couple – according to himself, purely for cover purposes.
And in substantiation of all the above, just look at the unexpected treasure chest sitting on the table in front of his bemused debriefers: two suitcases and one backpack containing between them an entire toolkit of the authentic spy: carbons for secret writing impregnated with the nearly latest compounds; a fictional girlfriend to write to in Denmark, the covert message to be written in invisible carbon between the lines; a subminiature camera built into a fob for a key ring; three thousand pounds of start-up money in tens and twenties hidden in the base of one suitcase; a wad of one-time pads and for a bonne bouche the phone number in Paris that may be called in emergency only.
And everything tallied, right down to his pen portraits of his pseudonymous trainers and fellow trainees, the tricks of the trade he has been taught, the training gigs he has undertaken and his holy mission as a loyal Russian sleeper agent, which he reeled off like a mantra: study hard, earn the respect of your scientific colleagues, espouse their values and philosophy, write papers for their learned journals. In emergency, never under any pretext attempt to contact the depleted rezidentura at the Russian Embassy in London because nobody will have heard of you and anyway rezidenturas don’t service sleeper agents, who are an elite to themselves, hand-raised practically from birth and controlled by their own exclusive team at Moscow Centre. Rise with the tide, contact us every month and dream of Mother Russia every night.
The only point of curiosity – and for his debriefers something more than curiosity – was that there was not one grain of new or marketable intelligence in any of it. Every nugget he revealed had been revealed by previous defectors: the personalities, the teaching methods, the tradecraft, even the spies’ toys, two of which were duplicated in the black museum in the distinguished visitors’ suite on the ground floor of Head Office.
*
The debriefers’ reservations notwithstanding, Russia department under the now absent Bryn Jordan awarded Pitchfork the full defectors’ welcome, taking him out to dinners and football matches, co-drafting his monthly reports to his fictional girlfriend in Denmark about the doings of his scientific colleagues, bugging his rooms, hacking his communications and intermittently placing him under covert surveillance. And waiting.
But for what? For six, eight, twelve costly months came not one spark of life from his Moscow Centre handlers: not a letter with or without its secret under-text, not an email, phone call or magic phrase spoken on a predetermined commercial radio broadcast at a predetermined hour. Have they given him up? Have they rumbled him? Have they woken to his covert homosexuality and drawn their conclusions?
As each barren month succeeded the last, Russia department’s patience evaporated until a day when Pitchfork was turned over to the Haven for ‘maintenance and non-active development’ – or, as Giles had it, ‘to be handled with a thick pair of rubber gloves and a very long pair of asbestos tongs, because if ever I smelt triple, this boy has all the markings and then some’.
The markings maybe, but if so they were yesterday’s. Today, if experience told me anything, Sergei Borisovich was just one more poor player in