Agent Running in the Field (13 page)

I am at the door when he calls
me back. I turn my head but stay at the door.

‘Nat?’

‘Yes?’

‘What do you think you’re going to get out of him, anyway?’

‘With luck, nothing I don’t already know.’

‘Then why go?’

‘Because nobody calls out Operations Directorate on the strength of a hunch, Dom. Ops Directorate like actionable intelligence, cooked two ways and preferably three. It’s called
evidence-based
in case the term is
new to you. Which means they are not overly impressed by the self-serving ramblings of a grounded field man stuck in the boondocks of Camden,
or
his somewhat untested head of London General.’

‘You’re mad,’ Dom says again, as he retreats behind his files.

*

I am back at the Haven. Turning the key on the long faces of my team, I go to work drafting a letter to my former agent Woodpecker, alias
Arkady. I write in my notional capacity as Secretary of a badminton club in Brighton. I invite him to bring a team of mixed players to our beautiful seaside town. I propose dates and times of play and offer free accommodation. The uses of open word-code are older than the Bible and rest on mutual understandings between writer and recipient. The understanding between Arkady and myself owed nothing
to any codebook and everything to the concept that every premise contains its
opposite. Thus I was not inviting him, but seeking an invitation from him. The dates on which the notional club was prepared to welcome its guests were the dates on which I hoped to be received by Arkady. My offers of hospitality were a deferential enquiry about whether he would receive me, and where we might meet. The
times of play indicated that any time was fine by me.

In a paragraph that came as near to reality as cover allowed, I reminded him of the amicable relations that had long existed between our two clubs in defiance of ever-changing tensions in the larger world, and signed myself Nicola Halliday (Mrs) because Arkady over the five years of our collaboration had known me as Nick, despite the fact
that my real name was blazoned on Trieste’s official list of consular representatives. Mrs Halliday did not provide her home address. Arkady knew plenty of places to write to if he chose to do so.

Then I sat back and resigned myself to the long wait, because Arkady never took his big decisions in haste.

*

If I was apprehensive about what I had let myself in for with Arkady, my badminton battles
with Ed and our political
tours d’horizon
at the
Stammtisch
were becoming ever more precious to me – and this despite the fact that Ed, to my grudging admiration, was beating me hands down.

It seemed to happen overnight. Suddenly he was playing a faster, freer, happier game, and the age gap between us was yawning at me. It took a session or two before I was able to relish his improvement objectively,
and as best I could congratulate myself for my part in it. In other circumstances I might have cast round for a younger player to take him on, but when I proposed this to him he was so offended that I backed off.

The larger issues of my life were less easily resolved. Each morning I checked the Office’s cover addresses for Arkady’s response. Nothing. And if Arkady wasn’t my problem, Florence
was. She had been friendly with Ilya and Denise but, press them as I might, they knew no more of her whereabouts or doings than any other member of the team. If Moira knew where to get hold of her, I was the last person she was telling. Every time I tried to imagine how Florence, of all people, could have walked out on her beloved agents, I failed. Every time I attempted to reconstruct her seminal
encounter with Dom Trench, I failed again.

After much soul searching, I tried my luck with Ed. It was a long shot and I knew it. My makeshift cover story allowed Florence and myself to know nothing of each other beyond the one notional encounter in my notional friend’s office and one badminton session with Laura. All I had going for me otherwise was a growing hunch that the two had been mutually
attracted on sight, but since I was now aware of Florence’s state of mind by the time she showed up at the Athleticus, it was hard to imagine she was in a mood to be attracted to anyone.

We’re sitting at the
Stammtisch
. We’ve finished our first pints and Ed has fetched us a second. He has just trounced me four–one to his understandable satisfaction if not to mine.

‘So how was the Chinese?’ I
ask him, picking my moment.

‘Chinese who?’ – Ed as usual absorbed elsewhere.

‘The Golden Moon restaurant up the road, for God’s sake. Where we were all going to have dinner together until I had to rush off to rescue a business deal, remember?’

‘Oh yeah, right. Great. She loved the duck. Laura did. Her best thing ever. Waiters spoiled her rotten.’

‘And the girl? Whatever her name was? Florence?
Was she good value?’

‘Oh yeah, well. Florence. She was great too.’

Is he clamming up on me or just being his usual churlish self? I keep trying anyway:

‘You don’t happen to have a number for her, by any chance? My chum called me up, the one she was temping for. Said she’d been terrific and he had a mind to offer her a full-time job but the agency’s not playing ball.’

Ed ponders this for a
while. Frowns about it. Searches his mind or makes a show of doing so.

‘No, well, they wouldn’t, would they?’ he agrees. ‘Those agency sods would keep her on a string for the rest of her life if they could. Yeah. Can’t help you there, I’m afraid. No’ – followed by a diatribe against our reigning foreign secretary, ‘that fucking Etonian narcissistic elitist without a decent conviction in his body
bar his own advancement’ et cetera.

*

If there is any consolation to be had from this interminable waiting period, apart from our Monday-evening badminton sessions, it is Sergei, aka Pitchfork. Overnight he has become the Haven’s prize agent. From the day his university term ended, Markus Schweizer, Swiss freelance journalist, has taken up residence in the first of his three North London districts.
His aim, readily approved by Moscow, is to sample each district in turn and report on it. With no Florence to offer him, I have appointed Denise, state-educated, obsessed from childhood by all things Russian, as his keeper. Sergei has taken to her as if she were his lost sister. To lighten her load, I approve the support of other members of the Haven team. Their cover is not a problem. They
can call themselves aspiring reporters, out-of-work actors or nothing at all. If Moscow’s London
rezidentura
were to turn out its entire counter-surveillance cavalry, it would come away
empty-handed. Moscow’s incessant demands for locational details would tax the most diligent sleeper agent, but Sergei is equal to them, and Denise and Ilya are on hand to lend their assistance. The required photographs
are taken with Sergei’s mobile phone only. No topographical detail is too slight for Anette aka Anastasia. Whenever a fresh set of requirements comes in from Moscow Centre, Sergei drafts his replies in English and I approve them. He translates them into Russian, and covertly I approve the Russian before it is encoded by Sergei using a one-time pad from his collection. By this means Sergei
is made notionally answerable for his own errors, and the tetchy correspondence with Centre that follows has the ring of authenticity. Forgery department has made a fine job of the invitation from Harvard University’s physics faculty. Sergei’s friend Barry is suitably awed. Thanks to Bryn Jordan’s ministrations in Washington, a Harvard physics professor will field any stray questions that come in
from Barry or anywhere else. I send Bryn a personal note thanking him for his efforts and receive no reply.

Then the waiting again.

Waiting for Moscow Centre to stop dithering and settle for a single location in North London. Waiting for Florence to lift her head above the parapet and tell me what made her walk out on her agents and her career. Waiting for Arkady to come off the fence. Or not.

Then, as things will, everything started happening at once. Arkady has replied; not what you might call enthusiastically but a reply nonetheless. And not to London but to his preferred cover address in Bern: one plain envelope addressed to N. Halliday, Czech stamp, electronic type, and inside it one picture postcard of the Czech spa resort of Karlovy Vary and a brochure in Russian for a hotel
ten kilometres outside the same town. And folded inside the hotel brochure a booking form
with boxes to tick: dates required, accommodation, estimated time of arrival, allergies. Typed crosses in the boxes inform me that I am expected to check in at ten o’clock this coming Monday night. Given the warmth of our former relationship, it would be hard to imagine a more grudging response, but at least
it says ‘come’.

Using my uncancelled passport in the alias of Nicholas George Halliday – I was supposed to surrender it on my return to England but nobody asked me for it – I book myself a flight to Prague for the Monday morning and pay for it with my personal credit card. I email Ed regretfully cancelling our badminton fixture. He comes back with ‘Chicken’.

On the Friday afternoon I receive
a text from Florence on my family mobile. It tells me we can ‘talk if you want’ and offers me a number that is not the one she is texting from. I ring it from a pay-as-you-go mobile, get the answering service and discover I am relieved not to be talking to her directly. I leave a message saying I will try again in a few days, and come away thinking I sound like somebody I don’t know.

At six the
same evening I send an ‘all eyes’ to the Haven, copy to Human Resources, informing them that I am taking a week’s leave of absence for family reasons from 25 June to 2 July. If I am wondering what family reasons I am attending to, I need look no further than Steff who, after weeks of radio silence, has announced that she will be descending on us for Sunday lunch with ‘a vegetarian friend’. There
are moments that are made for cautious reconciliation. As far as I am concerned, this is not one of them but I know my duty when I see it.

*

I am in our bedroom, packing for Karlovy Vary, sorting through my clothes for laundry marks and anything that shouldn’t belong
to Nick Halliday. Prue, having conducted a long telephone conversation with Steff, has come upstairs to help me pack and tell
me all about it. Her opening question is not designed for harmony.

‘Do you
really
need to take badminton gear all the way to Prague?’

‘Czech spies play it all the time,’ I reply. ‘Vegetarian
boy
or vegetarian
girl
?’

‘Boy.’

‘One we know, or one we have yet to know?’

There have been precisely two of Steff’s many boyfriends that I managed to engage with. Both turned out to be gay.

‘This one
is
Juno
, if you remember the name, and they’re on their way to Panama together. Juno being short for Junaid, she tells me, which means
fighter
, apparently. I don’t know whether that makes him any more appealing to you?’

‘It might.’

‘From Luton. At three in the morning. So they won’t be staying the night with us, you’ll be relieved to hear.’

She is right. A new boyfriend in Steff’s bedroom and
pot smoke coming out from under the door do not accord with my vision of family bliss, least of all when I am packing for Karlovy Vary.

‘Who the hell goes to Panama anyway?’ I demand just as irritably.

‘Well, I think Steff does. In rather a big way.’

Mistaking her tone, I turn sharply to look at her.

‘What d’you mean? She’s going there and not coming back?’ – only to discover she is smiling.

‘Do you know what she said to me?’

‘Not yet.’

‘We could make a
quiche
together. Steff and me. Between us. Make a quiche for lunch. Juno loves asparagus and we
mustn’t talk about Islam because he’s a Muslim and doesn’t drink.’

‘Sounds ideal.’

‘It must be five years since Steff and I cooked
anything
together. She thought you men should be in the kitchen, remember? And we shouldn’t.’

Entering
the spirit of the occasion as best I can, I take myself to the supermarket, buy unsalted butter and soda bread, the two staples of Steff’s gastronomic regime, and to atone for my boorishness a bottle of ice-cold champagne even if Juno isn’t allowed any. And if Juno isn’t allowed, then my guess is that Steff won’t be either, because by now she is probably well on her way to converting to Islam.

I return from shopping to find the pair of them standing in the hall. Two things then happen at once. A courteous, well-dressed young Indian man steps forward and takes my shopping bag from me. Steff throws her arms round me, tucks her head into the crook of my shoulder and leaves it there, then pulls back and says, ‘Dad!
Look
, Juno, isn’t he
great
?’ The courteous Indian man steps forward again,
this time to be formally introduced. By now I have spotted a serious-looking ring on Steff’s wedding finger, but I have learned that with Steff it’s better to wait till I’m told.

The women go to the kitchen to make quiche. I open the champagne and present each of them with a glass, then walk back to the drawing room and offer Juno one too because I don’t always take Steff’s guidance about her
men literally. He accepts without demur and waits for me to invite him to sit down. This is new territory for me. He says he fears this has all come as a surprise to us. I assure him that with Steff nothing surprises us, and he seems relieved. I ask him, why Panama? He explains that he is a graduate zoologist and the Smithsonian has invited him to conduct a field study of large flying bats on the
island of
Barro Colorado on the Panama Canal and Steff is going along for the ride.

‘But only if I’m bug-free, Dad,’ Steff chimes in, poking her head round the door in her apron. ‘I’ve got to be fumigated and I can’t breathe on anything and I can’t even wear my new fuck-me shoes, can I, Juno?’

‘She can wear her own shoes, but she’s got to wear covers over them,’ Juno explains to me, ‘and nobody
gets fumigated. That’s pure decoration, Steff.’