Agent Running in the Field (24 page)

‘Well, Bryn. Maybe you go first, for a change,’ I suggest, playing his own game at him, which he enjoys.

‘For my money, he was
embassy trawling
,’ he replies with satisfaction. ‘Sniffing out extra morsels of intelligence to feed his Russian addiction. He may have played the ingénu with Gamma but in my view he’s in for the long haul, if
he doesn’t make a horse’s arse of himself in the meantime. Back to you. As many questions as you like.’

There is only one question I want to ask, but instinct tells me to kick off with a soft one. I select Dom Trench.

‘
Dom!
’ he exclaims. ‘Oh my dear
Lord
!
Dom!
Outer darkness. Indefinite gardening leave without the option.’

‘Why? What’s his sin?’

‘Being recruited by us in the first place. That’s
our
sin. Sometimes our dear Office loves larceny too well. Marrying above his weight is
his
sin.
And
being caught with his pants down by a bunch of muckrakers on the dark web. They got a couple of details wrong, but too many right. Are you bonking that girl who walked out on us by the way? Florence?’ – with the most diffident of smiles.

‘I’m not bonking Florence, Bryn.’

‘Never did?’

‘Never
did.’

‘Then why call her from a public phone box and take her out to dinner?’

‘She walked out on the Haven and left her agents in the lurch. She’s a mixed-up girl and I felt I should stay in touch with her.’ Too many excuses, but never mind.

‘Well, be bloody careful from now on. She’s out of bounds and so are you. Any more questions? Take your time.’

I take my time. And more time.

‘Bryn.’

‘Dear boy?’

‘What the hell’s Operation Jericho?’ I ask.

*

To non-believers the sanctity of codeword material is hard to convey. The codewords themselves, regularly altered in midstream to confuse the enemy, are treated with the same secrecy as their content. For a member of the indoctrinated few to utter a codeword within the hearing of those outside the tent would qualify in Bryn’s lexicon
as mortal sin. Yet here am I, of all people,
demanding
of the iconic head of Russia department:
what the hell’s Jericho?

‘I mean, Christ, Bryn,’ I insist, undaunted by his rigid smile, ‘Shannon took one glance at the stuff as it went through the copier and that was it. Whatever he saw, or
thinks
he saw, that did it. What do I say if he calls me on it? Tell him I’ve no idea what he’s talking about?
That’s not showing him the error of his ways. That’s not putting a halter round his neck and leading him gently in.’ And more forcefully: ‘
Shannon
knows what Jericho is all about—’

‘Thinks he does.’

‘—and
Moscow
knows. Gamma is apparently so excited by Jericho that she takes on the job herself, with Moscow providing a full supporting cast.’

The smile widens in seeming assent but the lips remain
tight shut as if resolved that no word shall pass them.

‘A dialogue,’ he says at last. ‘A dialogue between adults.’

‘Which adults?’

He ignores the question.

‘We are a divided nation, Nat, as you will have noticed. The divisions between us across the country are neatly reflected in the divisions between our masters. No two ministers think the
same way on the same day. It would not therefore
be surprising if the intelligence requirements they hand down to us fluctuate with the moment, even to the point of contradicting each other. After all, part of our remit is to think the unthinkable. How many times have we old Russian hands done just that, sitting here in this very room, thinking the unthinkable?’

He is reaching for an aphorism. As usual, he finds one: ‘Signposts don’t
walk
in
the direction they
point
, Nat. It is we humble mortals who must choose which way to go. The signpost is not responsible for our decision. Well, is it?’

No, Bryn, it isn’t. Or it is. Either way, you’re pulling a lot of wool across my eyes.

‘But I am allowed to assume that you are KIM/1?’ I suggest. ‘As head of our mission to Washington. Or is that an assumption too far?’

‘My dear boy. Assume
what you will.’

‘But that’s all you’re proposing to tell me?’

‘What more can you possibly need to know? Here’s a snippet for you, and it’s all you get. The top-secret dialogue in question is taking place between our American cousins and ourselves. Its purpose is exploratory, a feeling-out. It is being conducted at the highest level. The Service is the intermediary, everything under discussion
is theoretical, nothing is written in stone. Shannon by his own testimony saw one piddling section of a fifty-four-page document, memorized it, probably inaccurately, and drew his own misguided conclusions, which he then conveyed to Moscow. We have no idea which piddling section. He has been caught
in flagrante
– thanks, one may add, to your endeavours, even if that was not your aim. You have
no need to engage him in any sort of dialectic. You show him the whip. You tell him you won’t use it unless you have to.’

‘And that’s all I can know?’

‘And more than you need. For a moment I allowed sentiment
to get the better of me. Take this. It’s one-to-one only. I’m shuttling back and forth to DC, so you won’t get me while I’m airborne.’

The abrupt ‘take this’ is accompanied by the clatter
of a metallic object tossed on to the drinks table between us. It is a silver-grey smartphone, the self-same model I used to give my agents. I look at it, then at Bryn, then again at the smartphone. With a show of reluctance I pick it up and, with Bryn’s eyes still upon me, consign it to my jacket pocket. His face softens and his voice resumes its geniality.

‘You’ll be Shannon’s saviour, Nat,’
he tells me for my consolation. ‘Nobody else is going to be half as gentle with him as you are. If you find yourself havering, think of the alternatives. Want me to hand him over to Guy Brammel?’

I think of the alternatives, if not quite the ones he has in mind. He stands, I stand with him. He takes my arm. He often did. He prides himself on being touchy-feely. We embark on the long march back
along the railway carriage, past portraits of ancestral Jordans in lace.

‘Family all well otherwise?’

I tell him that Steff is engaged to be married.

‘My goodness, Nat, she’s only about
nine
!’

Mutual chuckles.

‘And Ah Chan has taken up painting in a big way,’ he informs me. ‘Mega exhibition coming up in Cork Street, no less. No more bloody pastel. No more bloody watercolour. No more bloody
gouache. It’s oils or bust. Your Prue used to be quite complimentary about her work, as I remember.’

‘And still is,’ I reply loyally, although this is news to me.

We stand facing each other on the doorstep. Perhaps we share a premonition that we shan’t see each other again. I ransack my mind for an extraneous topic. Bryn as usual is ahead of me:

‘And don’t you worry your head about Dom,’ he
urges me with a chuckle. ‘The man’s fucked up everything he’s touched
in life, so he’ll be in great demand. Probably got a safe parliamentary seat waiting for him right now.’

We laugh wisely at the world’s wicked ways. As we shake hands, he pats me on the shoulder American-style, and follows me the statutory halfway down the steps. The Mondeo pulls up in front of me. Arthur drives me home.

*

Prue is sitting at her laptop. One glance at my face, she rises and without a word unlocks the conservatory door to the garden.

‘Bryn wants me to recruit Ed,’ I tell her under the apple tree. ‘The boy I told you about. My regular badminton date. The big talker.’

‘Recruit him for what on earth?’

‘As a double agent.’

‘Directed against whom or what?’

‘The Russia target.’

‘Well, doesn’t he have
to be a
single
agent first?’

‘Technically, that’s what he already is. He’s an upscale clerical assistant in our sister Service. He’s been caught red-handed passing secrets to the Russians, but he doesn’t know yet.’

A long silence before she takes refuge in her professionalism: ‘In that case the Office must collect
all
the evidence, for
and
against, hand it over to the Crown Prosecution Service
and see him
fairly
tried by his peers in
open
court. And not go preying on his friends to bully and blackmail him. You told Bryn no, I trust.’

‘I told him I’d do it.’

‘Because?’

‘I think Ed pressed the wrong bell.’

Renate was always an early riser.

It’s seven on a Sunday morning, the sun is up and the heatwave shows no sign of relenting as I stride northward over the burned tundra of
Regent’s Park to Primrose village. According to my researches – conducted on Prue’s laptop not my own, with Prue looking on in a state of half-enlightenment, since a residual loyalty to my Service coupled with a pardonable reticence about my past transgressions forbids me to indoctrinate her fully – I am looking for a block of
superbly restored Victorian mansion apartments with resident porterage
, which ought to have surprised me because diplomatic staff like to cluster round their mother ship, which in Renate’s case would have meant the German Embassy in Belgrave Square. But even in Helsinki, where she had been the number two in their Station to my number two in ours, she had insisted on living as far – and she would say as free – from the diplomatic ratpack –
Diplomatengesindel
– as
she could decently get.

I enter Primrose village. A holy stillness reigns over the pastel-painted Edwardian villas. Somewhere a church bell tolls, but only timidly. A brave Italian coffee-bar owner is cranking down his striped awning and its groans rhyme with the echo of my footsteps. I turn right, then left. Belisha Court is a grey-brick pile on six floors and occupies the dark side of a cul-de-sac.
Stone
steps lead to an arched Wagnerian portico. Its black double doors are closed against all comers. The superbly restored apartments have numbers but no names. The only bell-button is marked ‘Porter’ but a saucy handwritten note wedged behind it reads ‘Never on Sundays’. Entry is by keyholders only and the lock, surprisingly, is of the pipe-stem variety. Any Office burglar would have it open
in seconds. I would take a little longer but I have no pick. Its fascia is scratched from constant use.

I cross to the sunny side of the cul-de-sac and pretend an interest in a display of children’s clothes while I watch the reflection of the double doors. Even in Belisha Court some tenant must need an early-morning jog. Half the double door opens. Not for a jogger but for an elderly couple in
black. I surmise they are on their way to church. I let out a cry of relief and hasten across the road to them: my saviours. Like an utter fool I have left my keys upstairs, I explain. They laugh. Well now, they did it to themselves only – when was it, darling? By the time we part they are hurrying down the steps still chuckling to each other and I am heading along a windowless passage to the last
door on the left before you get to the garden door because, as in Helsinki so in London, Renate likes a large ground-floor apartment with a good back exit.

The door of number eight has a polished brass flap for letters. The envelope in my hand is addressed
For Reni only
and marked private. She knows my handwriting. Reni was what she liked me to call her. I slip the envelope through the flap,
crash the flap open and shut a couple of times, press the buzzer and hurry back along the corridor into the cul-de-sac, left and right into the High Street, pass the coffee shop with a wave and a ‘hi’ for its Italian owner, across the street, through an iron gateway and up on to Primrose Hill, which rises before me like a parched, tobacco-coloured dome. At the top of it an Indian family in bright
colours is trying to fly a four-sided giant kite but there’s hardly
wind enough to stir the arid leaves that lie around the solitary bench I select.

*

For fully fifteen minutes I wait, and by the sixteenth I have all but given up. She’s not there. She’s out running, she’s with an agent, a lover, she’s off on one of her cultural jaunts to Edinburgh or Glyndebourne or wherever her cover requires
her to show her face and press the flesh. She’s frolicking on one of her beloved beaches on Sylt. Then a second wave of possibility, potentially a lot more embarrassing: she has her husband or a lover in residence, he snatched my letter from her hand and he’s coming up the hill to get me: except at this point it isn’t the vengeful husband and lover, it’s Renate herself marching up the hill, fists
punching across her stocky little body, short blonde hair bouncing to her stride, blue eyes blazing, a miniature Valkyrie come to tell me I’m about to die in battle.

She sees me, switches course, kicking up puffs of dust in her wake. As she approaches, I stand up out of courtesy but she sweeps past me, plonks herself on the bench and waits, glowering, for me to sit beside her. In Helsinki she
had spoken reasonable English and better Russian, but when passion seized her she would throw both aside and claim the comfort of her own north German. From her opening salvo it is apparent that her English has greatly improved since I last heard it during our stolen weekends eight years ago in a rattly cottage on the Baltic seashore with a double bed and a wood stove.

‘Are you absolutely out
of your
tiny mind
, Nat?’ she demands idiomatically, glaring up at me. ‘What the hell d’you mean:
private – ears-only – off-the-record conversation
? Are you trying to recruit me or fuck me? Since I am not interested in either proposal, you can tell that to whoever sent you, because you are
totally
out of court and
off the wall
and embarrassing in all respects. Yes?’

‘Yes,’ I agree, and wait for
her to settle because the woman in Renate was always more impulsive than the spy.

‘Stephanie is okay?’ she enquires, momentarily appeased.

‘More than okay, thanks. Landed on her feet at last, engaged to be married, if you can believe it. Paul?’

Paul is not her son. Renate to her sadness has no children. Paul is her husband, or was; part mid-life playboy, part Berlin publisher.

‘Thank you,
Paul is also excellent. His women get younger and more stupid and the books on his list get lousier. So life is normal. Have you had other little loves since me?’

‘I’m fine. I’ve calmed down.’

‘And you are still with Prue, I hope?’

‘Very much.’

‘So. Are you going to tell me why you have summoned me here, or do I have to call my Ambassador and tell him our British friends are making inappropriate
proposals to his head of Station in a London park?’

‘Maybe you should tell him I’ve been slung out of my Service and I’m on a rescue mission,’ I suggest, and wait while she gathers in her body: elbows and knees tightly together, hands linked on her lap.

‘Is that true? They fired you?’ she demands. ‘This is not some stupid ploy? When?’

‘Yesterday, as far as I remember.’

‘Because of some imprudent
amour
?’

‘No.’

‘And whom have you come to rescue, may I ask?’

‘You. Not just you singular. You plural. You, your staff, your Station, your Ambassador and a bunch of people in Berlin.’

When Renate listens with her large blue eyes, you would never imagine they could blink.

‘You are serious, Nat?’

‘As never before.’

She reflects on this.

‘And you are recording our conversation for posterity,
no doubt?’

‘Actually not. How about you?’

‘Also actually not,’ she replies. ‘Now please rescue us quickly, if that is what you have come to do.’

‘If I told you that my ex-Service had information that a member of the British intelligence community here in London has been offering you information concerning a top-secret dialogue we are having with our American partners, how would you reply to
that?’

Her answer comes even faster than I’d expected. Was she preparing it as she came up the hill? Or had she taken advice from above by the time she left her flat?

‘I would reply that maybe you British are on a ridiculous fishing expedition.’

‘Of what sort?’

‘Maybe you are attempting a crude test of our professional loyalty in the light of impending Brexit. Nothing is beyond your so-called
government in the present absurd crisis.’

‘But you’re not saying that such an offer wasn’t made to you?’

‘You asked me a hypothetical question. I have given you a hypothetical answer.’

At which her mouth snaps shut to indicate that the meeting is over; except that, far from stomping off, she is sitting dead still, waiting for more without wishing to show it. The Indian family, tired of trying
to fly the kite, descends the hill. At its foot, platoons of joggers run left to right.

‘Let’s imagine his name is Edward Shannon,’ I suggest.

Dismissive shrug.

‘And, still hypothetically, that Shannon is a former member of our inter-service liaison team based in Berlin. Also that he is enraptured by Germany and has the German bug. His motivation is complex and for our mutual purposes irrelevant.
But it is not malign. It is actually well intentioned.’

‘Naturally, I never heard of this man.’

‘Naturally you haven’t. Nevertheless, he made a number of visits to your Embassy over the last few months.’ I spell out the dates for her, courtesy of Bryn. ‘Since his work in London didn’t provide him with a link to your Station here, he didn’t know who to turn to with his offer of secrets. So he
buttonholed anyone in your Embassy he could find until he got handed over to a member of your Station. Shannon is an intelligent man but in terms of conspiracy he is what you would call a
Vollidiot
. Is that a plausible scenario – hypothetically?’

‘Of course it is plausible. As a fairy tale, everything is plausible.’

‘Maybe it would help if I mentioned that Shannon was received by a member of
your staff named Maria Brandt.’

‘We have no Maria Brandt.’

‘I’m sure you haven’t. But it took your Station ten days to decide you hadn’t. Ten days of frantic deliberation before you told him you had no interest in his offer.’

‘If we told him that we had no interest – which obviously I deny – why are we sitting here? You know his name. You know he is trying to sell secrets. You know he is a
Vollidiot.
You have only to produce a fake buyer and arrest him. In such a hypothetical eventuality, my Embassy behaved correctly in all respects.’

‘
Fake buyer
, Reni?’ I exclaim in disbelief. ‘Are you telling me that Ed
named his price
? I find that hard to believe.’

The stare again, but softer, closer.

‘
Ed?
’ she repeats. ‘Is this what you call him? Your hypothetical traitor?
Ed?
’

‘It’s what
other people call him.’

‘But you too?’

‘It’s catching. It means nothing,’ I retort, momentarily on the defensive. ‘You said just now that Shannon was trying to
sell
his secrets.’

Now it is her turn to retreat:

‘I said no such thing. We were discussing your absurd hypothesis. Intelligence peddlers do not automatically name their price. First they demonstrate their wares in order to obtain the
confidence of the purchaser. Only afterwards are terms discussed. As you and I know very well, do we not?’

We do indeed know. It was a German-born intelligence peddler in Helsinki who brought us together. Bryn Jordan smelt a rat and instructed me to crosscheck with our German friends. They gave me Reni.

‘So, ten long days and nights before Berlin finally ordered you to turn him off,’ I muse.

‘You are talking total nonsense.’

‘No, Reni. I’m trying to share your pain. Ten days, ten nights of waiting for Berlin to lay its egg. There you are, head of your London Station, a glittering prize within your grasp. Shannon is offering you raw intelligence to dream of. But, oh shit, what happens if he’s blown? Think of the diplomatic fallout, our dear British press: a five-star German spy-scare
slap in the middle of Brexit!’

She starts to protest but I allow her no respite, since I am allowing myself none.

‘Did you sleep? Not you. Did your Station sleep? Did your Ambassador? Did Berlin? Ten days and nights before they inform you that Shannon must be told that his offer is unacceptable. If he approaches you again, you will report him to the appropriate
British authorities. And that’s
what Maria tells him before she disappears herself in a cloud of green smoke.’

‘There
are
no such ten days,’ she retorts. ‘You are fantasizing as usual. If such an offer was made to us, which it was not, then it was rejected immediately and irrevocably and out of hand by my Embassy. If your Service or former Service thinks otherwise, it is deluded. Am I a liar suddenly?’

‘No, Reni. You’re doing
your job.’

She is angry. With me and with herself.

‘Are you trying to charm me into submission again?’

‘Is that what I did in Helsinki?’

‘Of course you did. You charm everyone. You are known for it. That is what they hired you for. As a Romeo. For your universal homoerotic charm. You were insistent, I was young.
Voilà
.’

‘We were both young. And we were both insistent, if you remember.’

‘I remember no such thing. We have totally different recollections of the same unfortunate event. Let us agree that for once and for always.’

She is a woman. I am being overbearing and I am imposing on her. She is a professional intelligence officer in high standing. She’s cornered and doesn’t like it. I am a former lover and I belong on the cutting-room floor with the rest of us. I am a small
but precious part of her life and she will never let me go.