Lyudmila knows who tipped them off. She knows where all the Soviet Union’s diligent moles have built their hills and tunnels in the great institutions of the West—political, academic, military, scientific, you name it. She knows the almost laughable fact that one of Britain’s top spy catchers is, in fact, a Soviet spy himself. She knows their code names, and what they’ve done and what they’ve produced, over the years and last week, and exactly how much alcohol they drink to dull the psychological pain of committing treason against a country and a culture that consider a gentleman’s honor so sacrosanct as to be taken for granted. (Quite a lot, even by Russian standards.)

She carries all this information in her head as she sits across the table from Burgess, who lounges in his chair and chain-smokes the British cigarettes they’ve provided for him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he’s telling her. “If there were some clever high-level plot to infiltrate Moscow Centre—American or British—I’d have heard about it. Philby gets all that intelligence right from the source, and I happened to be living in Philby’s own bloody basement in Washington, not one month ago.”

“Perhaps this operation is taking place above STANLEY’s head,” she says, in her nearly flawless English—taking pains to use Kim Philby’s code name, as good tradecraft requires.

Burgess shakes his head. “Nothing takes place above Philby’s head. MI-6 trusts him like a priest. My God, they handed him the Volkov defection case, didn’t they? About as hush-hush as it gets. He speaks to the CIA head on a daily basis. He and Jim Angleton are like brothers.”

“Nevertheless. They will have been made suspicious by these telegram decryptions. They will have realized our network has penetrated their agencies and their government departments at the highest level. It is possible and even likely that they will have undertaken an operation outside of the intelligence service itself, to root out everyone who has been disloyal.”

“That’s your own paranoia talking,” Burgess says. “I assure you, the British don’t see it that way. They can’t conceive a Cambridge man passing along secrets to a foreign country. They’ll go on assuming it was some cipher room clerk from Reading who needs the money to pay off his bookie.”