
Only Disconnect
A SECRET ALWAYS HAS A HIDING PLACE: an unmarked house, a black lacquered box, an undisclosed conference room somewhere in misty Halifax. In retrospect they’re obvious. In Christopher Steele’s consulting office in London, the only giveaway as to the nature of his work is a set of Russian dolls, painted with the likenesses of Tolstoy, Gogol, Lermontov, and Pushkin—“as good a metaphor as any for the astonishing secret investigation Steele had recently been asked to do,” Luke Harding writes in Collusion. It’s December 2016 and Harding, a foreign correspondent for The Guardian, has arranged a meeting