“Verdict?” asked Bailey.
“He’s for real,” said the Russian-speaking officer. “Either that, or he doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. That I doubt. Most men do.”
“He didn’t suspect you?” asked Bailey.
“No, sir. I saw it right in his eyes. He believed he was going to die. He just went right on fighting. Quite a guy.”
“Any other choices?” asked Bailey.
The officer shrugged. “Only one. If he’s a phony and thought he was being liquidated by his own side, he ought to have yelled something to that effect. Assuming he cares about living, that would make him about the bravest guy I ever met.”
“I think,” Bailey said to Roth by telephone later, “that we have our answer. He’s okay, and tha
t’s official. Try and get him to recall a name—for the Brits. You’re flying over next Tuesday, military executive jet, to Alconbury.”
Roth spent two days with Orlov at their new home, going back over the sparse details the Russian had already provided from his days in the Illegals Directorate concerning Soviet agents planted in Britain. As he had specialized in Central and South America, Britain had not been his primary concern. But he racked his memory all the same. All he could recall were code-names. Then at the end of the second day, something came back to him.
A civil servant in the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall. But the money was always paid into the man’s account at the Midland Bank in Croydon High Street.
“It’s not a lot,” said the man from the Security Service, MI-5, when he was given the news. He was sitting in the office of Timothy Edwards at the headquarters of his sister service, the SIS. “He might have moved long since. Might have banked under a false name. But we’ll try.”
He went back to Curzon Street in Mayfair and set the wheels in motion. British banks do not have the right of absolute confidentiality, but they decline to hand out details of private accounts to just anybody. One institution that always secures their cooperation, by law, is the Inland Revenue.
The Inland Revenue agreed to cooperate, and the manager of the Midland in Croydon High Street, an outer suburb of south London, was interviewed in confidence. He was new to the job, but his computer was not.
A Security Service man sitting with the real Inland Revenue inspector took over. He had a list of every civil servant employed by the Ministry of Defense and its many out-stations over the past decade. Surprisingly, the chase was very quick. Only one MOD civil servant banked at the Midland in Croydon High Street. The records of the accounts were sent for. The man had two, and still lived locally. He had a checking account and a higher-rate savings account.
Over the years a total of £20,000 had been paid into his deposit account, always by him and always in cash and fairly regularly. His name was Anthony Milton-Rice.
The Whitehall conference that evening involved the Director General and Deputy Director General of MI-5 and the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in charge of Special Branch. MI-5 in Britain cannot make arrests—only the police can do that. When the Security Service wants someone picked up, the Special Branch is called in to do the honors. The meeting was chaired by the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He started the questioning.
“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.