We sit smoking, not looking at each other. Smelling the human stink of the inside of a troop transport, the scorch of engine oil and aviation fuel. I wonder if they know who he is, this patient. Like I told you, it’s all top secret. And believe me, the US government is going to keep this one under lock and key for some time to come. It’s a daisy, all right.
I turn my head to stare out the window at the thick clouds below. My foot keeps tapping against the deck of the airplane—I think the doctor and nurses are annoyed. But I can’t seem to stop. I’m a bundle of raw nerves that no quantity of English gin and cigarettes can soothe. And it comes to me, as I sit there strapped into my metal seat, blowing smoke from my parched mouth, that maybe this is why my sister saved my life all those ages ago, when we were eight years old.
Iris saved me for this moment.
And what I have done this summer, I have done to repay my debt—the debt I owe her, the debt I owe people like Sumner Fox, the debt I owe to civilization itself—to all who came before me and saved me without my knowing it.
Outside the window, the great humming engine changes key. The airplane drops. I stub out my cigarette and close my eyes. Within the hour, I’ll know how our story ends.
One
Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
—John le Carré
Lyudmila
May 1951
Moscow
When she was six years old, Lyudmila Ivanova watched as a trio of men in dark suits searched her family’s tiny apartment in the middle of the night and arrested her father for the crime of owning a set of English novels. He was a professor of literature, and the books were Russian translations. Still, English novels were decadent, and when his case went before the tribunal, her father refused to admit his crime and repent. Lyudmila still remembers his straight back and clear voice as he addressed the three judges on the dais before him. He was sentenced to ten years’ labor in some work camp in Siberia. The family never heard from him again.
When Lyudmila was sixteen, her older brother Piotr was recalled from Paris, where he had run a network of local intelligence agents supplying information to the international Communist Party, although everybody knew that Comintern was actually run by the Soviet espionage agency. Six months later, he was arrested because he had lived in the West and his ideological purity had therefore been corrupted. This time there was no trial. Lyudmila later learned that he had been executed by firing squad.
Two years after that, another brother simply disappeared while working for Soviet intelligence in Germany, and as a result, when Lyudmila joined the intelligence service herself—at the time, it was called the NKVD—she underwent a rigorous interrogation. Miraculously, she survived. The fact that she had been the one to denounce her brother to the NKVD worked in her favor, as did her extensive knowledge of Marxist theory, her avowed disgust of bourgeois capitalist society, and her exceptionally ascetic lifestyle.
That was in 1932. Since then Lyudmila has survived the purges of the late 1930s and the slaughter of the Great Patriotic War, from which nobody else in her entering class at the NKVD—by now reformed into the KGB—was left alive. Lyudmila survives not because she’s extraordinarily brilliant, or strategic, or well connected. She survives because she has two rules. The first is not to attract attention to herself. Comrade Stalin doesn’t know her name. Beria of the secret police doesn’t know her name. She serves them quietly, anonymously. Others who clamored for recognition are now dead, or starving to death in a Siberian gulag. Not Lyudmila. She does all the dirty work. She finds girls to supply Beria’s particular needs, for example, and she finds ways to silence the grieved family members who demand some explanation. When it comes to sniffing out heretical thoughts, nobody has a more sensitive nose than Lyudmila. She’s particularly good at extracting confessions. Never once has she claimed credit for any of these acts of patriotism. She lets others claim the credit and then watches as they, too, fall victim to some denouncement. Some discovery of impurity in thought or deed. They all fall eventually.
The second rule is even more important: trust nobody. Trust nothing! Every single person she meets, inside the KGB and outside of it, is suspect. Every piece of information that crosses her desk, gathered from networks within the Soviet Union and without, is suspect. Lyudmila has one faith—the Communist state. Everything else falls sacrifice to this one idea, even herself.
Lyudmila doesn’t trust this particular man one bit, even though he’s supplied the KGB and its predecessors with valuable information from the British Foreign Office for the past twenty years. His name is Guy Burgess, and he’s recently arrived from London with a fellow spy named Donald Maclean. They defected together, just ahead of the authorities who were about to unmask them at last.