Kolchak's gold

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Enclosed ms is not the contracted book on the Sebastopol siege. I may never finish writing that one. Hopefully you will be able to persuade McKay to publish the enclosed as a substitute for it.

The postmark will reveal I’m in Vienna but I shall be in another part of the world by the time you receive this package.

It’s very hard to try to explain, cold, how I came to this point. You’ll understand when you read the manuscript. I’ve backed into a game in which I have no second chances-a game in which I need to make the right move every time while the opposition needs to make the right move only once. I’ve become the quarry of a ludicrous number of security agencies: they want what’s in my head and they’ll kill to get it.

It might be a torrid fiction loosely based on one of my early books-the Donovan/OSS chapters or the study of MI-6 operations. But those were histories and I was only their chronicler. Now I’m the protagonist, and I am running scared. Armchair expertise from researching those cloak-and-dagger histories has kept me alive up to now but it’s the professionals who are pursuing me and I can’t warrant how long my run of luck will last. Two weeks ago in Athens I repeated Heinrich’s trick of 1944 virtually move-for-move, as verbatim as I could recall it; I must have written that one in 1964, the Aeneas book. It threw them off; it was three days before they scented my trail again.

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