“To me, the stuff about Hector McNeil is very damaging,” said Sinclair.

“Especially as he was a government minister at the time.”

“Certainly to the Labour Party if not to McNeil himself. He died last year.”

“Really?”

“Yes. He was only forty-eight.”

“Christ. Scots, of course. Working-class Glasgow. They never seem to live long, do they?”

“The information about Britain having a list of which Russian cities we might bomb in a preemptive strike is also damaging,” said Reilly. “The British people don’t like to think of themselves as aggressors. That could never have been broadcast. Not in a million years.”

“I would like to know who this man was that Deutsch and Guy met in Paris,” said Sinclair. “The one he says Deutsch was looking to recruit for the comrades.”

“The ones who’d just come back from China?” said Blunt. “Yes. That was rather interesting.”

“It sort of rings a bell with me somewhere,” said Sinclair. “But why?”

“He’d been working for a tobacco company, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find out,” said Reilly. “But what interests me more is where the tape comes from. We need to find out from the BBC if they ever received it. And if they did receive it, who gave it to them and what happened to it. One can hardly imagine they wouldn’t have been aware of its importance.”

“On the other hand, if this chap Hebel was given the tape by someone in the KGB,” said Blunt, “the question is what the Soviets can hope to achieve by letting us have it now, five years after Burgess and Maclean went to Russia. Disinformation or disclosure? It’s rather a dilemma.”

“Quite.”

“Walter has an interesting theory about the tape,” said Maugham. “Don’t you, Walter?”

“Yes, sir.” And I quickly told them about Hebel and his history as a practiced blackmailer in Germany. “This just may be a case of blackmail, pure and simple. If so, I can’t imagine anyone better equipped than Hebel to handle it for the Russians.”

“Yes, but what could they want?” asked Reilly.

“Money,” I said. “What else? The Soviet Union is desperately short of foreign currency. And they know how sensitive Anglo-American relations are right now. How anxious you would be to prevent the Americans from having ears on the tape. There’s no telling what’s on the other tapes being offered as part of the deal.”

“They could be even more embarrassing,” said Reilly. “Yes, I do see what you mean.”

“Under the circumstances,” I said, “two hundred thousand dollars looks cheap compared with the diplomatic cost of this tape and others like it appearing in the pages of the New York Times or on some foreign news network.”