Icon by Frederick Forsyth Page B

tiptoe.
    Toward the end the ribs in the skinny chest cracked and sprung, two driving deep into the lungs. Something warm and sweet and sticky rose in his throat so that he could not breathe.
    His vision narrowed to a tunnel and he saw not the gray concrete blocks of the room behind the camp armory, but a bright sunny day with a sandy road and pine trees. He could not see the speaker, but a voice was saying to him:
    “Come on, mate, ‘ave a beer ... ‘ave a beer.”
    The light faded to gray but he could still hear the voice repeating words he could not understand. “ ‘Ave a beer, ‘ave a beer ...” Then the lights went out forever.
    Washington, June 1985
    TWO months almost to the day after he got his first cash payment of $50,000, Aldrich Ames, in a single afternoon, destroyed almost the entire SE Division of the Ops Directorate of the CIA.
    Just before lunch, having raided the top secret 301 files, he swept seven pounds of classified documents and cable traffic off his desk and into two plastic shopping bags. With these he walked down the labyrinthine corridors to the elevators, rode to the ground floor, and let himself out through the turnstiles with his laminated ID card. No guard paused to ask what was in the bags. Climbing into his car in the huge parking lot, he drove the twenty minutes to Georgetown, the elegant section of Washington renowned for its European-style restaurants.
    He arrived at Chadwick’s, a bar and restaurant under the K Street Freeway on the waterfront, and met the contact designated for him by Colonel Androsov, who as the KGB Rezident knew he himself would probably have been tailed by the FBI watchers. The contact was an ordinary Soviet diplomat called Chuvakhin.
    To the Russian Ames handed over what he had. He never even demanded a price. When it came it would be enormous, the first of many that would make him a millionaire. The Russians, normally stingy with valuable hard-currency dollars, never even haggled after that. They knew they had hit the mother lode.
    From Chadwick’s the bags went to the embassy and thence to the Yazenevo headquarters of the First Chief Directorate. There the analysts could not believe their eyes.
    The coup made Androsov an instant star and Ames the most vital asset in the firmament. The FCD’s commanding general, Vladimir Kryuchkov, originally a snoop put into the FCD by the ever-suspicious Andropov but since risen to higher things, at once ordered the formation of a top-secret group to be detached from all other tasks and assigned only to handle the Ames product. Ames was code-named Kolokol, meaning Bell, and the task force became the Kolokol Group.
    In those shopping bags were descriptions of fourteen agents, almost the SE Division’s entire array of assets within the USSR. The actual names were not included, but they did not need to be.
    Any counterintelligence detective, told that there is a mole inside his own network and told that the man was recruited in Bogotá, then worked in Moscow, and is now in service in Lagos, would work it out pretty fast. Only one career will match those postings. A check of the records usually suffices.
    A senior CIA officer later calculated that forty-five anti-KGB operations, virtually the CIA’s entire menu, collapsed after the summer of 1985. Not a single top agent working for the CIA whose name had been on the 301 files continued to function after the spring of 1986.
    ¯
    JOCK Macdonald’s first port of call on arriving in the late afternoon at Heathrow was the headquarters building of the SIS at Vauxhall Cross. He was tired, although he had dared to take a catnap on the plane, and the notion of going to his club for a bath and a real sleep was tempting. The flat he and his wife, still in Moscow, retained in Chelsea was not available, being let to others.
    But he wanted the file in the briefcase still attached to his wrist under lock and key inside the HQ building before he could relax. The Service car that had met him