The Other Woman: A Novel Read online

  “What was your father’s reaction?”

  “Outrage, of course, most of it directed at Nicholas Elliott. He thought Elliott had blundered by not placing Philby under lock and key. He later came to the conclusion it was no blunder, that Elliott and his friends in London actually wanted Philby to escape.”

  “Thus avoiding another public spectacle.”

  Seymour abruptly changed the subject. “Know much about Philby’s time in Moscow?”

  “The Russians set him up in a comfortable apartment in the Patriarch’s Pond section of the city. He read old editions of the Times that were sent to him by post, listened to the news on the BBC World Service, and drank a great deal of Johnnie Walker Red Label, almost always to the point of unconsciousness. The former Eleanor Brewster lived with him for a while, but the marriage collapsed when she found out he was having an affair with Donald Maclean’s wife. Later, Philby took a fourth wife, a Russian named Rufina, and was generally quite miserable.”

  “And his relationship with the KGB?”

  “For a time, they kept him at arm’s length. They thought he escaped from Beirut rather too easily and were convinced he might be a triple agent. Gradually, they started giving him little projects to keep him busy, including helping to train new recruits at the KGB’s Red Banner Institute.” Gabriel paused, then added, “Which is where Sasha entered the picture.”

  “Yes,” said Seymour, “the phantom Sasha.”

  “Ever heard the name?”

  “No. And with good reason,” added Seymour. “Sasha exists only in the imagination of Sergei Morosov. He spun you a tale of treachery and deceit, and you bought it hook, line, and sinker.”

  “Why would he lie?”

  “To prevent you from killing him, of course.”

  “I never threatened to kill him. I only threatened to hand him over to the Syrian opposition.”

  “That,” said Seymour, “is a distinction without a difference.”

  “And the woman?” asked Gabriel. “The communist Philby met in Beirut? The woman who bore him a child? Did Sergei Morosov invent her, too?”

  Seymour made a show of thought. “And what shall I tell the prime minister and the esteemed members of the Joint Intelligence Committee? Shall I tell them Kim Philby has risen from his grave to create one last scandal? That he turned his illegitimate child into a Russian agent?”

  “For the moment,” answered Gabriel, “you tell them nothing at all.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t.”

  A silence fell between them. There was only the rain rattling against the window.

  “But what if I were able to find her?” asked Gabriel at last. “Would you believe it then?”

  “Philby’s lover from Beirut? You’re assuming there was only one. Kim Philby was the most faithless man in history. Trust me, I know.”

  “Your father knew it, too,” said Gabriel quietly.

  “My father’s been dead for nearly twenty years now. We can’t very well ask him.”

  “Maybe we can.”

  “How?”

  “Old spies never die, Graham. They have eternal life.”

  “Where?”

  Gabriel smiled. “In their files.”

  43

  Slough, Berkshire

  For an intelligence service, the management of files is a deadly serious business. Access to information must be restricted to those who truly need to see it, and a careful log must be kept of those who read a specific file and when they read it. At MI6, this is the job of Central Registry. Current files are kept within easy reach at Vauxhall Cross, but the bulk of MI6’s institutional memory is stored in a warehouse in Slough, not far from Heathrow Airport. The warehouse is guarded at all hours and monitored by cameras, but late on a wet Tuesday evening only a single registrar called Robinson was on duty. Robinson, like Parish the caretaker at Wormwood Cottage, was old service. He had a long face and a thin mustache and wore brilliantine cream in his hair that fouled the air in his vestibule. He regarded Nigel Whitcombe and his written request with a cold eye.

  “All of them?” he asked at last.

  Whitcombe offered only a benevolent smile in reply. He had the mind of a professional criminal and the face of a country parson. It was a dangerous combination.

  “The entire output of a single officer over a seven-year period? It’s unprecedented.”

  “Look at the name of the officer.” Whitcombe tapped it with the tip of his forefinger in case Robinson, who was blind as a bat, hadn’t seen it.

  seymour, arthur . . .

  “Yes, I saw it, but it can’t be done. Not without a countersignature from the Registry Head.”

  “Chief’s prerogative. Chief’s birthright, too.”

  “Then perhaps the chief should be the one making the request.”

  This time, Whitcombe’s smile was not so benevolent. “He is the one, Robinson. Think of me as his personal emissary.”

  Robinson was squinting at the name on the chit. “One of the greats, Arthur. A pro’s pro. I knew him, you know. Oh, we weren’t friends, mind you. I wasn’t in Arthur’s category. But we were acquainted.”

  Whitcombe wasn’t surprised. The old fossil had probably known Philby, too. During the war, Central Registry had been at St. Albans, next door to Philby’s Section V. The chief registrar was a world-class boozer named William Woodfield. Philby used to fill him up with pink gin at the King Harry so he could get his files for free. At night he would copy the contents by hand at the kitchen table for delivery to his Soviet controller.

  Philby . . .

  Whitcombe felt his face flush with anger at the very thought of the traitorous bastard. Or maybe it was Robinson’s hair cream. The smell of it was making him light-headed.

  Robinson looked up at the wall clock, which read 10:53. “It’s going to take a while.”

  “How long?”

  “Two days, maybe three.”

  “Sorry, old boy, but I need them tonight.”

  “You can’t be serious! They’re scattered all over the facility. I have to find the relevant cross-references. Otherwise, I’m liable to miss something.”

  “Don’t do that,” cautioned Whitcombe. “The chief specifically requested all of his father’s files from that period. All means all.”

  “It would be helpful if you gave me the name of a specific operation or target.”

  It would indeed, thought Whitcombe. In fact, all he had to do was add Philby, H.A.R. to the chit, and Robinson would be able to locate the relevant files in a matter of minutes. But the chief wanted the search to be as broad and innocuous-sounding as possible, lest word of it reach the wrong pair of ears at Vauxhall Cross.

  “Maybe I can be of help,” suggested Whitcombe.

  “Don’t even think about it,” scolded Robinson. “There’s a staff room down the hall. You can wait there.”

  With that, he shuffled, chit in hand, into the shadows of the vast warehouse. Watching him, Whitcombe’s spirits sank. The place reminded him of the IKEA in Wembley where he’d hastily furnished his flat. He went down the hall to the staff room and fixed himself a cup of Darjeeling. It was horrible. Worse than horrible, thought Whitcombe, as he settled in for a long night. It tasted like nothing.

  Shift change at the annex was at six. The early-morning registrar was a battleax named Mrs. Applewhite who was impervious to Whitcombe’s charms, such as they were, and fearless in the face of his veiled threats. As a consequence, he was relieved when Robinson poked his head into the staff room at half past four and announced the order was complete.

  The files were contained in eight boxes, each marked with the usual warning regarding disclosure and proper handling, which forbade their removal from the facility. Whitcombe immediately violated that particular regulation by loading the files into the back of a Ford hatchback. Robinson was predictably appalled and threatened to wake the Registry Head, but here again Whitcombe prevailed. The files in question, he argued, had zero national security value. Furthermore,
they were for the chief’s private use. And the chief, he added with a lofty tone, could not be expected to read them in a drafty warehouse in Slough. Never mind that the chief was holed up in a cottage at the edge of Dartmoor. That was none of Robinson’s affair.

  Whitcombe had a reputation, well deserved, of being a lead-footed driver. He was in Andover by five thirty and had crossed the chalk plateau of Cranborne Chase before the sun came up. He stopped for a coffee and a bacon sandwich at the Esso in Sparkford, survived a biblical cloudburst in Taunton, and was careening up the drive of Wormwood Cottage by eight. From his office window, Parish watched him unloading the boxes, assisted by none other than “C” himself and the infamous chief of the Israeli secret intelligence service, who seemed to be struggling with a nagging pain at the small of his back. The great undertaking had commenced. Of that, Parish was certain.

  44

  Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor

  Taken together, the files were a secret tour of the Middle East from 1956 to 1963, a time when Britain was fading, America was rising, the Russians were encroaching, the youthful State of Israel was flexing its newfound muscle, and the Arabs were flirting with all the failed isms—Pan-Arabism, Arab Nationalism, Arab Socialism—that would eventually lead to the rise of Islamism and jihadism and the mess of the present.

  Arthur Seymour, as MI6’s chief spy in the region, had a front-row seat for all of it. Officially, he was attached to Beirut station, but in practice it was only the place where he hung his hat. His brief was the region, and his masters were in London. He was in near constant motion, breakfast in Beirut, dinner in Damascus, Baghdad the next morning. Egypt’s Nasser entertained him frequently, as did the House of Saud. He was even welcome in Tel Aviv, though the Office regarded him, with some justification, as unsympathetic to the Israeli predicament. Seymour’s grudge against the Jewish state was personal. He had been inside the King David Hotel on July 22, 1946, when a bomb planted by the extremist Irgun killed ninety-one people, including twenty-eight British subjects.

  Given the demands of Seymour’s assignment, Kim Philby was something of a hobby. His reports to London were irregular at best. He sent them directly to Dick White, Philby’s main nemesis from MI5 who was appointed chief of MI6 on the eve of Philby’s arrival in Beirut. In his telegrams, Seymour referred to Philby by the code name Romeo, which lent their correspondence a faintly comic air.

  “I bumped into Romeo on the Corniche on Wednesday last,” he wrote in September 1956. “He was in fine form and good humor. We talked, about what, I cannot recall, as Romeo somehow managed to say nothing at all.” It would be three weeks before the next update. “I attended a picnic with Romeo in the mountains outside Beirut. He became unspeakably drunk.” Then, the next month: “Romeo became insultingly drunk during a party at the home of the American Miles Copeland. I don’t know how he manages to function in his work as a correspondent. I fear for his health if present trends continue.”

  Gabriel and Graham Seymour had divided the eight boxes of files equally between them. Gabriel worked at a folding table in the sitting room, Seymour in the kitchen. They could see one another through the open communicating door, but their eyes rarely met; they were both reading as quickly as possible. Seymour might have doubted the woman’s existence, but he was determined to find her first.

  It was Gabriel, however, who discovered the first reference to Philby’s complicated love life. “Romeo has been spotted at a café called the Shaky Floor with the wife of an important American newspaper correspondent. An affair might prove harmful to British interests.” The important American correspondent was Sam Pope Brewer of the New York Times. More reports followed. “I have it on reliable authority the relationship between Romeo and the American woman is intimate. Her husband is unaware of the situation, as he is away on a long reporting trip. Perhaps someone should intervene before it is too late.” But it was already too late, as Seymour soon discovered. “I have it on good authority Romeo has informed the American correspondent of his intention to marry his wife. Apparently, the American took the news quite well, telling Philby, ‘That sounds like the best possible solution. What do you make of the situation in Iraq?’”

  The internal politics of MI6’s outpost in Beirut changed dramatically in early 1960 when Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s closest friend, was appointed Head of Station. Philby’s fortunes rose overnight, while Arthur Seymour, a known Philby doubter, was suddenly out of favor. It was no matter; he had his own back channel to Dick White in London, which he used to undermine Philby at every turn. “I’ve had occasion to review some of the intelligence Romeo is producing for H/Beirut. It is as dubious as Romeo’s newspaper reporting. I fear H/Beirut is blinded to this fact by his friendship with Romeo. They are inseparable.”

  But Elliott left Beirut in October 1962 and returned to London to become controller for North Africa. Philby’s drinking, already extreme, grew worse. “Romeo had to be carried out of a party last night,” wrote Arthur Seymour on October 14. “Truly appalling.” Three days later: “Romeo is so saturated with alcohol he becomes drunk after a single whisky.” Then, on October 27: “Romeo hurled an object of some sort at his wife. It was most embarrassing for all of us who were forced to watch. I fear the marriage is unraveling before our eyes. I am told reliably that Romeo’s wife is convinced he is having an affair.”

  Gabriel felt a tingling in his fingertips. I am told reliably that Romeo’s wife is convinced he is having an affair . . . Rising, he carried the telegram into the kitchen and placed it solicitously before Graham Seymour. “She exists,” he whispered and then withdrew once more to the sitting room. The great undertaking had entered the homestretch.

  Gabriel had a single box of files remaining, Seymour a box and a half. Unfortunately, the files were in no particular order. Gabriel lurched from year to year, place to place, crisis to crisis, with no rhyme or reason. What’s more, Arthur Seymour’s habit of adding brief postscripts to his telegrams meant that each one had to be reviewed in its entirety. At times, it made for compelling reading. In one telegram, Gabriel found a reference to Operation Damocles, a clandestine campaign by the Office to assassinate former Nazi scientists who were helping Nasser develop rockets at a secret site known as Factory 333. There was even an oblique reference to Ari Shamron. “One of the Israeli operatives,” wrote Seymour, “is a thoroughly unpleasant figure who fought for the Palmach during the war of independence. He is rumored to have taken part in the Eichmann operation in Argentina. One can almost hear chains clanking when he walks.”

  But it was Graham Seymour who found the next reference to Kim Philby’s mistress in the long-forgotten files of his father. It was contained in a telegram dated November 3, 1962. Seymour dropped it triumphantly beneath Gabriel’s nose, like an undergraduate who had just proven the unprovable. The relevant material was contained in a postscript. Gabriel read it slowly, twice. Then he read it again.

  I have been told by a source I consider reliable that the affair has been going on for some time, perhaps as long as a year . . .

  Gabriel placed the telegram atop the first one that referenced an affair and burrowed on, but once again it was Graham Seymour who unearthed the next clue.

  “It’s a message from Dick White to my father,” he called through the doorway. “White sent it on November fourth, the very next day.”

  “What does it say?”

  “He’s concerned the other woman might actually be Philby’s KGB controller. He instructed my father to find out who she is.”

  “Your father took his damn sweet time about it,” replied Gabriel a moment later.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He didn’t send a response until November twenty-second.”

  “What was it?”

  “He was reliably informed that the woman is quite young and a journalist.”

  “A freelance journalist,” added Seymour a moment later.

  “What have you got?”

  “A telegram dated the sixt
h of December.”

  “Was he reliably informed?”

  “By Richard Beeston,” answered Seymour. “The British reporter.”

  “Is there a name?”

  From the kitchen there was silence. They were getting closer, but they were both running low on files. And Arthur Seymour, though he didn’t know it, was running out of time. By the end of the first week of December 1962, he had not yet learned the identity of Philby’s lover. In a little more than a month, Philby would be gone.

  “I’ve got another one,” said Seymour. “She’s French, our girl.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says a source whose been reliable in the past. The source also says they see each other in the woman’s apartment rather than Philby’s.”

  “What’s the date?”

  “The nineteenth.”

  “December or January?”

  “December.”

  Gabriel had about an inch of documents remaining. He discovered another trace of her in a telegram dated December 28. “They were spotted together in the bar of the St. Georges. Romeo was pretending to edit something she had written. It was obviously a ruse for a romantic assignation.” And another two days after that: “She was overheard at the Normandie spouting Marxist drivel. It’s no wonder Romeo finds her attractive.”

  And then, quite suddenly, December turned to January and she was forgotten. Nicholas Elliott had returned to Beirut to interrogate Philby and extract his confession and a pledge of cooperation. And Arthur Seymour was deeply worried Philby might make a run for it. His worst fears came true on the night of the twenty-third: “Romeo is nowhere to be found. I fear he has flown the coop.”