“Again that was Wolf’s idea. He decided to use Maugham because Maugham was rich and, in spite of his age, perceived to be extremely well connected, albeit historically, to the British secret services. Many of the men who worked with him in Russia were still involved with the service. He was the soft underbelly into MI6 and, of course, easily compromised because of his homosexuality. Wolf spent a long time looking for that photograph of Maugham and Burgess, which Guy Burgess had told him about. Yes, I forgot to mention: Wolf spent several weeks talking to Burgess at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow, noting hundreds of details like that. And as soon as he found the photograph, the plan went into action. By then I was living down here and working at the Grand Hôtel, where a number of French ministers are fond of taking their holidays and mistresses. Anne’s wrong about the minister, however. Operation Othello was always accorded a much greater operational importance than entrapping one French minister of defense. Almost the minute Wolf had the photograph in his possession we knew we were finally in business. The photograph was perceived to be the best way for me to secure the old man’s trust and confidence. And the whole scheme would have worked, too, but for the girl’s crisis of conscience. I told Wolf we should have used a native German, someone with family still in East Germany whom we could have pressured if she’d even thought of defecting. That’s how the Stasi works, see? You don’t ever have a choice. You work for them or something bad happens to someone you care for. They lose their job, or worse, they get sent to a camp. Or in my case, they threaten not just to keep you in a camp, but to put you on hard labor. At the camp I was in at Johanngeorgenstadt, they put me onto a detail mining pitchblende rock, for their uranium enrichment program. I’d have been dead within a few weeks of that if I hadn’t agreed to join the Stasi. But Wolf was convinced that Anne’s background as a writer made her perfect for his plan. Frankly, I think he was sleeping with her.”

“Nonsense,” said Anne. “You bloody liar. That’s just not true.”

“Isn’t it? You seem to have slept with almost everyone else—me, Harold Hennig, an American millionaire at the hotel, your gardener, and for all I know that French minister. If I’d suspected the bar had been set so low, I would have avoided your bed and kept things between us entirely professional.”