I nod at the manila envelope I left on the couch.
“All right. What have you got for me?”
To my surprise, he holds his eyelids shut for an instant or two, betraying relief. Then he opens them and reaches for the envelope.
“A little background, first,” he says, motioning me to sit, which I do. Then he sits back down, a few inches closer than before, and removes some documents from the envelope. “We began formulating plans for the extraction of the Digbys as soon as we knew they’d defected—”
“Extraction? You mean like a tooth?”
“I apologize for the jargon. You see, we’d suspected Digby’s involvement with Soviet intelligence for some time, and to be perfectly honest, his defection was a relief. We couldn’t prosecute him on the evidence we had, because most of it was classified and highly sensitive, but we couldn’t allow him to stay where he was, feeding them more information. And if the Soviets knew he was compromised, they might try to eliminate him, because they couldn’t take a chance we’d turned him.”
“Turned him?”
“Convinced him to work for us instead, as a double agent. Even if we hadn’t, they’d be afraid he would break down under interrogation and compromise his handler—that’s the KGB officer who ran him—or any other agents in the network. Instead they convinced him to defect. I expect he’d been such a valuable agent, they thought he might be some use for them at Moscow Centre. KGB headquarters,” he adds.
“Yes, I know.”
“Anyway, about four years ago, Digby started showing signs of breakdown. The Soviets had broken off the network, because of some high-level defections to our side that compromised a number of their agents in the field.”
“You mean like Alger Hiss?”
“Hiss and others. You have to understand the degree of paranoia that prevails in Moscow Centre. Well, in Soviet Russia generally, but the Communist Party and the intelligence service in particular. On top of the usual backstabbings and betrayals you find in a revolutionary government, there was a series of purges in the 1930s that decimated the army and the NKVD, as the intelligence agency was then known—”
“Yes, yes. Orlovsky told me all the stories.”
“Well, it left behind a legacy of fear. Nobody trusts anybody. So when Digby found himself adrift, cut off, his guiding purpose vanished from his life—well, he went off the rails. That was the summer of 1948. We were already on his trail at that point, waiting for him to make a move. I figured that if he broke down completely, we might be able to rescue him and possibly even turn him, risky as it was.”
“But he disappeared instead,” I say. “That was when he defected, wasn’t it? In the autumn of 1948, when he vanished with Iris and the kids.”
Fox fingers the edges of the papers in his hands. “One of our agents confirmed they’d arrived in Russia in November of 1948. Seems they were first taken to a sort of secure city outside of Moscow for a year or two, to make sure they were clean—that we hadn’t turned him—and then he seems to have been given an academic job of some kind, lecturing on foreign affairs, probably doing some instruction work with the KGB.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Local assets,” he says.
“So what’s changed? Why did Iris ask me for help? And what makes you think she wants to come back home altogether?”
Fox stands and walks to the window that overlooks the courtyard. In the manner of ancient buildings, the window is a small one, the stone walls thick, so you must stand close to really look out properly. He’s still holding the envelope and the documents in one hand, while he sets them both on his hips. Someone’s opened the window to allow in some fresh air, and the smell of lemons drifts up bright and clean from the lemon tree.
“A little over a year ago,” he says, “as you might have heard, a pair of English diplomats disappeared from a pleasure cruise off the coast of France—”
“I knew it!” I exclaim.
“—both of whom had held a series of extremely well-placed and sensitive positions within the British Foreign Office. One was already under investigation as a spy for the Soviets. The other we didn’t know about, only suspected. They successfully escaped through France and Switzerland and arrived safely in Moscow a few days later, and that’s when we first saw signs of trouble.”
“But I don’t understand. If all three of them were loyal Soviet agents, what danger could Burgess and Maclean have brought with them?”