Agent Running in the Field (26 page)

Affecting to have difficulties getting a signal on my mobile, I step into the street and make a second call to Prue, adopting the same airy tone. A white van is parked across the road.

‘What’s the problem now?’ she asks.

‘None really. Just checking,’ I reply, and feel stupid.

I return
to our table and confirm that Prue is back from her law shop and agog to receive us. My announcement is overheard by a male couple at the next table, both slow eaters. Mindful of their tradecraft they keep masticating as we leave.

It is bluntly stated in my personal file at Head Office that while I am capable of first-rate operational thinking on my feet, the same cannot always be said of my
paperwork. As the three of us perambulate arm in arm the few hundred yards to my house – Ed, the better for a half-bottle of spumante and insisting that as his best man I suffer the clutch of his bony left hand – it occurs to me that while I may have been doing some first-rate
operational thinking, all will now depend on the quality of my paperwork.

*

I have been sparing till now in my portrayal
of Prue, but only because I was waiting for the clouds of our enforced estrangement to blow over and our regard for each other to emerge in its rightful colours, which thanks to Prue’s life-saving policy statement on the morning following my inquisition by my
chers collègues
it has now done.

If our marriage is not generally understood, neither is Prue. Outspoken, left-leaning lawyer to the poor
and oppressed; intrepid champion of class actions; Battersea Bolshevik; none of the easy tag-lines that follow her around does justice to the Prue I know. For all her blue-chip background, she is self-made. Her father the judge was a bastard who hated competition in his children, made life hell for them and refused to support Prue at university or law school. Her mother died of alcohol. Her brother
went to the devil. Her humanity and good sense need no underlining as far as I am concerned, but for others, particularly my
chers collègues
, sometimes they do.

*

The ecstatic greetings are over. The four of us are installed in the sunroom of our house in Battersea, talking happy banalities. Prue and Ed have the sofa. Prue has opened the doors to the garden to let in whatever breeze is around.
She has set out candles and unearthed a box of fancy chocolates from her gift drawer for the bride and groom to be. She has rustled up a bottle of old Armagnac I didn’t know we possessed, and made
coffee in the big picnic Thermos. But there is something that, amid all the fun, she needs to get off her mind:

‘Nat, darling, forgive me, but
please
don’t forget you and Steff have that bit of urgent
business to discuss. I think you said nine o’clock’ – which is my cue to look at my watch, leap to my feet and, with a hasty ‘thank God you reminded me, back in two shakes’, hasten upstairs to my den.

Taking from the wall a framed photograph of my late father in ceremonial drag, I place him face upward on my desk, extract a wad of writing paper from a drawer and lay it one sheet at a time on
the glass surface in order to leave no imprint. It does not occur to me until later that I am observing ancient Office practice while setting out to break every rule in the Office book.

I write first a summary of the intelligence so far available against Ed. I then set out ten field instructions, one clear paragraph at a time, no bloody adverbs as Florence would say. I top the document with her
former Office symbol and tail it with my own. I re-read what I have written, find no fault with it, fold the page twice, insert it in a plain brown envelope and write
Invoice for Mrs. Florence Shannon
on it in an uneducated hand.

I return to the sunroom to discover I am redundant. Prue has already cast Florence as her fellow escapee from the Office’s grasp, albeit an undeclared one, and therefore
a woman with whom she has an immediate if unspecified rapport. The topic of the moment is builders. Florence, nursing a stiff glass of old Armagnac despite her professed addiction to red burgundy, is holding the floor while Ed dozes next to her on the sofa and periodically opens his eyes to adore her.

‘I mean
honestly
, Prue, dealing with Polish masons and Bulgarian carpenters and a Scottish foreman,
I’m thinking, give me bloody
subtitles
!’ Florence announces to hoots of her own laughter.

She needs a pee. Prue shows her the way. Ed watches them out of the room, then bows his head over his knees, puts his hands between them and lapses into one of his reveries. Florence’s leather jacket hangs over the back of a chair. Unnoticed by Ed, I pick it up, take it to the hall, slip my brown envelope
into the right-hand pocket and hang it beside the front door. Florence and Prue return. Florence notices her jacket is missing and glances at me questioningly. Ed still has his head down.

‘Oh. Your jacket,’ I say. ‘I had a sudden fear you would forget it. There was something jutting out of the pocket. It looked horribly like a bill.’

‘Oh shit,’ she replies with scarcely a blink. ‘Probably the
Polish electrician.’

Message received.

Prue delivers herself of a capsule account of her running battle with the barons of Big Pharma. Florence responds with a vigorous ‘They’re the worst of the worst. Fuck them all.’ Ed is half asleep. I suggest it’s time for all good children to go to bed. Florence agrees. They live the other side of London, she tells us, as if I didn’t know: one mile as the
bicycle rides from Ground Beta, to be precise, but she doesn’t say that part. Perhaps she doesn’t know. Using my family mobile, I order an Uber. It arrives with eerie haste. I help Florence into her leather jacket. Their departure, after the many thank-yous, is mercifully swift.

‘Really, really great, Prue,’ says Florence.

‘Fab,’ Ed agrees through a fog of sleep, spumante and old Armagnac.

We stand on the doorstep waving at their departing car. We keep waving till it’s out of sight. Prue takes my arm. How about a stroll in the park on this perfect summer’s night?

*

There’s a bench on the northern edge of the park that is set back from the footpath on its own bit of space between the river and a clump of willow trees. Prue and I call it
our bench
and it’s where we like to sit and
roost after a dinner party if the weather’s right and we’ve got rid of our guests at a reasonable hour. It’s my memory that, by some leftover instinct from our Moscow days, we didn’t exchange one compromising word until were sitting on it, our voices drowned by the clatter of the river and the grumble of the night city.

‘Do you reckon it’s real?’ I ask her after a lengthy silence between us that
I am the first to break.

‘You mean the two of them together?’

Prue, normally so cautious in her judgements, has no doubt on the matter.

‘They were a pair of drifting corks and now they’ve found each other,’ she declares in her forthright way. ‘That’s Florence’s view and I’m happy to share it. They were cut from the same cork tree at birth and for as long she believes that they’re fine because
he’ll believe whatever she does. She hopes she’s pregnant, but isn’t sure. So whatever you’ve been cooking up for Ed, just remember we’ll be doing it for all three of them.’

*

Prue and I may diverge about which of us thought what or said what in the murmured exchange that followed, but I remember very clearly how our two voices sank to Moscow level as if we were sitting on a bench in Gorky Central
Park of Culture and Leisure rather than Battersea. I told her everything that Bryn had told me, everything that Reni had told me, and she listened without comment. I scarcely bothered with Valentina and the saga of Ed’s unmasking, since that was already in the far past. The issue, as so often with operational planning, was how to use the enemy’s
resources against him, although I was less eager
than Prue to define the Office as enemy.

And I remember that I was filled with simple gratitude, as we embarked on the fine-tuning of what gradually became our master plan, for the way our thoughts and words merged into a single flow where ownership became irrelevant. But Prue, for all the best reasons, doesn’t want to hear that. She points to the preparatory steps I had already taken, citing
my all-important handwritten letter of instructions to Florence. In her version I am the driving force and she is trailing in my slipstream: just anything, as far as she’s concerned, rather than concede that the Office spouse of her youth and the lawyer of her maturity are even distantly related.

What is certain is that by the time I stood up from our bench and strode a few yards along the river
path while careful to remain within Prue’s hearing, and touched the key for Bryn Jordan on the doctored mobile he had given me, Prue and I were, as she would have it, in full and frank agreement on all matters of substance.

*

Bryn had warned me that he might be on his way between London and Washington, but the background clamour I am hearing in the earpiece tells me that he is on terra firma,
has people round him, mostly men, and they’re American. My presumption therefore is that he is in Washington DC and I am interrupting a meeting, which means that with any luck I may not have his full attention.

‘Yes, Nat. How are we?’ – the habitually kindly tone, tinged with impatience.

‘Ed’s getting himself married, Bryn,’ I inform him flatly. ‘On Friday. To my former number two at the Haven.
The woman
we talked about. Florence. At a Register Office in Holborn. They left our house a few moments ago.’

He offers no surprise. He knows already. He knows more than I do. When didn’t he? But I am not his to command any more. I’m my own man. He needs me more than I need him. So remember it.

‘He wants me to be his best man, if you can believe it,’ I add.

‘And you accepted?’

‘What do you
expect me to do?’

Offstage burbles while he dispatches some pressing matter. ‘You had a full hour alone with him at the Club,’ Bryn reminds me testily. ‘Why the hell didn’t you go for him?’

‘How was I supposed to do that?’

‘Tell him that before you accept the job of best man, there are a couple of things he ought to know about himself, and take it from there. I’ve a bloody good mind to give
the job to Guy. He won’t piss about.’

‘Bryn, will you listen to me please? The wedding is four days away. Shannon’s on a different planet. It isn’t a question of who approaches him. It’s a question of whether we approach him now or wait till he’s got himself married.’

I too am being testy. I’m a free man. From our bench five yards along the river path, Prue awards me a silent nod of approval.

‘Shannon’s as high as a flute, Bryn. If I make a pass at him now, he’ll tell me to get lost and to hell with the consequences. Bryn?’

‘Wait!’

I wait.

‘You listening?’

Yes, Bryn.

‘I am
not
allowing Shannon to make another treff with Gamma or anyone else until we own him. Got that?’

Treff
for clandestine encounter. German spy jargon. And Bryn’s.

‘And I am seriously supposed to
tell
him that?’
I retort indignantly.

‘You’re supposed to get on with the fucking job and not waste any more time,’ he snaps back as the temperature between us rises.

‘I’m telling you, Bryn. He’s totally unmanageable in his present mood. Period. I’m not going there till he comes down to earth.’

‘Then where the hell
are
you going?’

‘Let me talk to his bride, Florence. She’s the only viable route to him.’

‘She’ll tip him off.’

‘She’s Office-trained and she worked for me. She’s savvy and she knows the odds. If I spell out the situation to her, she’ll spell it out to Shannon.’

Background grumble before he comes back hard.

‘Is she
conscious
? The girl. To what her man’s up to.’

‘I’m not sure it matters what she is, Bryn. Not once I’ve spelt out the position to her. If she’s complicit, she’ll know
she’s for the high jump too.’

His voice eases slightly.

‘How do you propose to approach her?’

‘I’ll invite her to lunch.’

More off-stage clatter. Then a vehement comeback: ‘You’ll
what
?’

‘She’s a grown-up, Bryn. She doesn’t do hysterics and she likes fish.’

Voices off, but Bryn’s not among them.

Finally: ‘Where will you take her, for Christ’s sake?’

‘The same place I took her before.’
Time to pull a bit more temperament. ‘Look, Bryn, if you don’t like what I’m suggesting,
fine by me, give the bloody job to Guy. Or come back and do it yourself.’

From our bench, Prue is drawing a finger across her throat as a signal to hang up, but Bryn, with a terse ‘Report back to me the moment you’ve spoken to her,’ has beaten me to it.

Heads down, arm in arm, we stroll back to the house.

‘I think she may have an
inkling
, all the same,’ Prue reflects. ‘She may not
know
a lot, but she knows quite enough to worry her.’

‘Well, she’ll have more than an inkling now,’ I reply brutally, as I picture Florence hunched alone amid the builders’ debris of their flat in Hoxton, reading my ten-point letter while Ed sleeps the sleep of the just.

It didn’t surprise me – I would have been a lot more surprised if it hadn’t been the case – that I had never seen Florence’s face so taut or so devoid of expression: not even
when she was sitting across the table from me in this same restaurant reciting the charge sheet against Dom Trench and his charitable baroness.

As to my own face, reflected in the many mirrors, well: operational deadpan best describes it.

The restaurant is L-shaped. In the smaller section there is a bar with padded benches for guests who have been told their tables aren’t quite ready, so why
not sit and drink champagne at twelve quid a flute. And that’s what I am doing now, as I wait for Florence to make her entry. But I am not the only one who is waiting for her. Gone the sleepy-wasp waiters. Today’s crew are obliging to a fault, beginning with the maître d’hôtel who can’t wait to show me the table I have reserved, or to enquire whether I or Madame will be having any dietary requirements
or special needs. Our table is not in the window as I had requested – unfortunately all our window tables were long taken, sir – but he dares to hope that this quiet corner will be acceptable to me. He might have added ‘and acceptable to Percy Price’s microphones’ because according to Percy your windows, when there’s heavy background chatter to contend with, can play the very devil with your
reception.

But not even Percy’s wizards can cover every nook and corner of a crowded bar, hence the maître d’s next question of me, couched in the prophetic tense beloved of his trade:

‘And will we be thinking come straight to our table and enjoy our aperitif in peace and quiet, or will we be taking our chances at the bar, which
can
get a bit too lively for some?’

Lively being precisely what
I need and Percy’s microphones don’t, I opt for taking our chances at the bar. I choose a plush sofa for two and order a large glass of red burgundy in addition to my twelve-pound flute of champagne. A group of diners enters, as like as not supplied by Percy. Florence must have attached herself to them because the first thing I know she is sitting beside me with scarcely an acknowledgement. I indicate
her glass of red burgundy. She shakes her head. I order water with ice and lemon. In place of Office fatigues, she wears her smart trouser suit. In place of the scruffy silver ring on her wedding finger, nothing.

For my part, I am sporting a navy-blue blazer and grey flannels. In the right pocket of my blazer I am carrying a lipstick in a cylindrical brass holder. It is of Japanese manufacture
and Prue’s one indulgence. Cut away the bottom half of the lipstick and you have a cavity deep and wide enough to accommodate a generous strip of microfilm or, in my case, a handwritten message on pared-down typing paper.

Florence’s demeanour is faux-casual, precisely as it should be. I have invited her to lunch, but my tone was cryptic and in the legend she has yet to learn why: am I inviting
her in my capacity as her future husband’s best man, or as her former superior? We trade banalities. She is polite, but on her guard. Keeping my voice below the hubbub, I advance to the matter in hand:

‘Question one,’ I say.

She takes a breath and tilts her head so close to mine that I feel the prickle of her hair.

‘Yes, I still want to marry him.’

‘Next question?’

‘Yes, I told him to do
it, but I didn’t know what it was.’

‘But you encouraged him,’ I suggest.

‘He said there was something he’d got to do to stop an anti-European conspiracy but it was against regulations.’

‘And you?’

‘If he felt it, do it and fuck regulations.’

Ignoring my questions, she plunges straight on.

‘After he’d done it – that was Friday – he came home and wept and wouldn’t say why. I told him that
whatever he’d done was all right if he believed in it. He said he believed in it. I said, well you’re all right then, aren’t you?’

Forgetting her earlier resolve, she takes a pull of her burgundy.

‘And if he found out who he’s been dealing with?’ I prompt.

‘He’d turn himself in or kill himself. Is that what you want to hear?’

‘It’s information.’

Her voice starts to rise. She brings it down.

‘He can’t lie, Nat. The truth is all he knows. He’d be useless as a double even if he agreed to do it, which he never would.’

‘And your wedding plans?’ I prompt her again.

‘I’ve invited the whole world and its brother to join us in the pub afterwards, as per your instructions. Ed thinks I’m insane.’

‘Where are you going for your honeymoon?’

‘We’re not.’

‘Book a hotel in Torquay as soon as
you get home. The Imperial or equivalent. The bridal suite. Two nights. If they want a deposit, pay it. Now find a reason to open your handbag and put it between us.’

She opens her handbag, extracts a tissue, dabs her eye, carelessly leaves the handbag open between us. I take a sip of my
champagne and, with my left arm across my body, drop in Prue’s lipstick.

‘The moment we’re in the dining
room we’re on air,’ I tell her. ‘The table’s wired and the restaurant is crammed with Percy’s people. Be as bloody difficult as you always were, then some. Understood?’

Distant nod.

‘Say it.’

‘
Understood, for fuck’s sake
,’ she hisses back at me.

The maître d’ is waiting for us. We settle to our nice corner table opposite each other. The maître d’ assures me I have the best view in the room.
Percy must have sent him to charm school. The same enormous menus. I insist we have hors d’oeuvres. Florence demurs. I urge smoked salmon on her and she says all right. We agree on turbot for our main course.

‘So it’s both the same for us today, sir,’ the maître d’ exclaims, as if that makes a change from all the other days.

Until now she has managed not to look at me. Now she does.

‘Do you
mind telling me why the
fuck
you dragged me here?’ she demands into my face.

‘Very willingly,’ I reply in similarly clenched tones. ‘The man you are living with and apparently wish to marry has been identified by the Service you once belonged to as a willing asset of Russian intelligence. But perhaps that isn’t news to you? Or is it?’

Curtain up. We’re on. Shades of Prue and myself faking it
for the microphones in Moscow.

*

They had told me at the Haven that Florence had a temper on her but until now I’d only seen it in action on the badminton court. Ask me whether it was real or simulated, I can only reply
that she was a natural. This was improvisation on the grand scale: ad lib as art, inspired, spontaneous, merciless.

First she hears me out in deathly stillness, face rigid.
I tell her we have unchallengeable visual and aural evidence of Ed’s betrayal. I tell her she’s welcome to a private view of the footage, a straight lie. I say we have every good reason to believe that by the time she crashed out of the Office she was consumed with hatred for Britain’s political elite and it therefore comes as no surprise to me to learn that she has bonded with an embittered loner
on a vengeance jag who is offering our hottest secrets to the Russians. I tell her that despite this act of supreme folly or worse I am authorized to offer her a lifeline:

‘You first explain to Ed in simple English that he’s blown skyhigh. You tell him we have cast-iron proof, cooked all ways. You inform him that his own Service is thirsting for his blood, but there’s a path to salvation open
to him if he agrees to collaborate unreservedly. And in case he doubts it, the alternative to collaboration is prison for a very long time.’

All this quietly spoken, you understand, no dramatics, interrupted once only by the arrival of the smoked salmon. I can tell by her continuing stillness that she is working herself into a froth of righteous anger, but nothing I have seen or heard of her
till now prepares me for the scale of the detonation. Ignoring entirely the unequivocal message I have just delivered, she launches a full-frontal assault on its messenger: me.

I think that just because I’m a spy I’m one of God’s anointed, the navel of the fucking universe, whereas all I am is another over-controlled public-school wanker. I am a
badminton trawler
. Badminton is how I pull pretty
boys. I got the hots for Ed and now I’ve set him up as a Russian spy because he refused my advances.

Tearing blindly into me like this, she is a wounded animal, a feral protector of her man and her unborn child. If she had
spent the whole night dredging up every dark thought she ever had about me, she couldn’t have done a better job.

After a needless intervention by the maître d’ who insists
on knowing that everything is satisfactory, she returns to the charge. Taking a lead straight out of the trainers’ manual, she gives me her first tactical fallback:

All right, let’s just
suppose
– for argument’s sake – that Ed
has
got his loyalties in a twist. Let’s suppose he went binge drinking one night and the Russians did a
kompromat
job on him. And that Ed went along with it, which he never
would in a thousand years, but let’s suppose all the same. Do I then
really
imagine that
on no terms at all
he’s going to sign up as a
fucking double agent
in the full knowledge that he will be dropped down a hole any time we feel like it? So in a nutshell, kindly tell her, if I can, what sort of
guarantees
is
my Office
going to offer a double agent without a prayer to his name who’s about to
put his head in the fucking lion’s mouth?

And when I reply that Ed is in no sort of position to bargain and he must either take us on trust or accept the consequences, I am only spared another onslaught by the arrival of the turbot, which she attacks in short, indignant stabs while calculating her second tactical fallback:

‘Suppose he
does
work for you,’ she concedes in an only slightly more
emollient tone. ‘Just suppose. Say I talk him into it, which I’d have to. And he screws up, or the Russians rumble him, whichever comes first.
Then
what? He’s blown, he’s used goods, fuck him, he’s on the rubbish heap. Why should he go through all that shit? Why bother? Why not tell you all to take a running jump and just go to jail? Which is worse, finally? Being played by both sides like a fucking
marionette and ending up dead in a back street, or paying his debt to society and coming out in one piece?’

Which I take as my cue to bring matters to a head:

‘You’re deliberately ignoring the scale of his crime and the mountain of hard evidence stacked against him,’ I say in my most persuasive and finite tone. ‘The rest is sheer speculation. Your husband-to-be is up to his neck in trouble,
and we’re offering you a chance to dig him out. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it, I’m afraid.’

But this only sparks yet another scathing response:

‘So you’re judge and jury now, are you? Fuck the law courts! Fuck fair trials! Fuck
human rights
and whatever your civil society wife thinks she stands for!’

Only after prolonged thinking time on her part do I secure the grudging breakthrough that she’s
made me work so hard for. Yet even now she manages to preserve a semblance of dignity:

‘I’m not conceding anything, right? Not a bloody thing.’

‘Go on.’

‘
If
, and only if, Ed says: all right, I got it wrong, I love my country, I’ll collaborate, I’ll be a double, I’ll take the risk. I said
if
. Does he get his amnesty or not?’

I play it long. Promise nothing you can’t take back. A Bryn aphorism.

‘If he’s earned it, and we
decide
he’s earned it, and if the Home Secretary signs off on it: yes, in all probability he gets his amnesty.’

‘
Then
what? Does he risk his neck for free? Do I? How about a bit of risk money?’

We’ve done enough. She’s spent, I’m spent. Time to call down the curtain.

‘Florence, we’ve come a long way to meet you. We want unconditional compliance. Yours and Ed’s. In
return we offer expert handling and full support. Bryn needs a clear answer.
Now
. Not tomorrow. It’s either a yes, Bryn, I will. Or it’s no, Bryn, and accept the consequences. Which is it to be?’

‘I need to marry Ed first,’ she says, without lifting her head. ‘Nothing before.’

‘Before you tell him what we’ve just agreed?’

‘Yes.’

‘When will you tell him?’

‘After Torquay.’

‘
Torquay?
’

‘Where
we’re going for our forty-eight-hour fucking honeymoon,’ she snaps in an inspired resurgence of anger.

A shared silence, mutually orchestrated.

‘Are we friends, Florence?’ I ask. ‘I think we are.’

I am holding out my hand to her. Still without raising her head she takes it, first hesitantly then clutches it for real as I secretly congratulate her on the performance of a lifetime.