Agent Running in the Field (27 page)

The two and a half days of waiting might as well be a hundred and I remember every hour of them. Florence’s taunts, however wide of the mark, had been drawn from life, and
on the rare occasions when I ceased pondering the operational contingencies that lay ahead of us, her searing performance came back to accuse me of sins I hadn’t committed, and quite a few that I had.

Not once since her declaration of solidarity had Prue given the smallest hint of relenting on her commitment. She expressed no pain about my tryst with Reni. She had long ago consigned matters of
that sort to the unrecoverable past. When I ventured to remind her of the perils to her legal career she replied a little tartly she was well aware of them, thank you. When I asked her whether a British judge would draw any distinction between passing secrets to the Germans as opposed to the Russians she replied with a grim laugh that in the eyes of many of our dear judges the Germans were worse.
And all the while the trained Office spouse in her that she continued to deny went about her covert duties with an efficiency I tactfully took for granted.

For her professional life she had retained her maiden name of Stoneway, and it was in this name that she instructed her assistant to book her a hire car. If the company required licence details, she would supply them when she collected the
car.

At my request she twice called Florence, the first time to ask in womanly confidence which hotel the honeymoon couple would be staying at in Torquay because she was dying to send flowers and Nat was equally determined to send Ed a bottle of champagne. Florence said the Imperial as Mr and Mrs Shannon and Prue reported that she sounded focused, and was putting on a good turn as nervous bride-to-be
for the benefit of Percy’s listeners. Prue sent her flowers. I sent my bottle, each of us ordering online, trusting to the vigilance of Percy’s team.

The second time Prue called Florence was to ask whether she could be of any help with organizing the knees-up at the pub after the wedding as her partnership’s chambers were just down the road. Florence said she’d booked a big private room, it was
okay but smelt of piss. Prue promised to take a look at it, although they agreed it was too late to change. Percy, are you listening there below?

Using Prue’s laptop and credit card in preference to my own, we examined flights to various European destinations and noted that in the high holiday season Club Class on regular airlines was still largely available. Shaded by the apple tree, we ran
through every last detail of our operational plan one more time. Had I neglected some vital move? Was it conceivable that after a lifetime devoted to stealth I was about to fall at the last fence? Prue said not. She had reviewed our dispositions and found no fault with them. So why don’t I, instead of fretting uselessly, give Ed a ring and see if he has time for lunch? And with no further encouragement
needed, that is what I do in my role of best man, just twenty-four hours before Ed is due to exchange vows with Florence.

I call Ed.

He is thrilled. What a great idea, Nat! Brilliant! He only gets an hour, but maybe he can stretch it. How about the Dog & Goat saloon bar, be there sharp at one?

The Dog & Goat it is, I say. See you there. Thirteen hundred hours sharp.

*

A dense cluster of civil
service suits is packed into the saloon bar of the Dog & Goat that day, not surprisingly since it lies five hundred imperial yards from Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the Treasury. And a good few of the suits are around Ed’s age, so it somehow doesn’t seem right to me, as he wades towards me through the scrum on the eve of his wedding day, that hardly a head turns to acknowledge him.

There is no
Stammtisch
available, but Ed uses his height and elbows to good effect and soon liberates a couple of bar stools from the mêlée. And somehow I fight my way to the front line and buy us a couple of pints of draught lager, not frosted but near enough, and a couple of ploughman’s lunches with Cheddar and pickled onions and crisp bread, handed along the bar in a fireman’s chain.

With these
essentials we succeed in improvising a watcher’s corner of sorts for ourselves, and bellow at each other above the din. I only hope that Percy’s people are managing to get an ear in, because everything Ed says is balm to my frayed nerves:

‘She’s gone completely and totally off the
wall
, Nat! Flo has! Invited all her posh mates to the pub afterwards! Kids and all!
And
booked us a bloody great
hotel
in Torquay with a
swimming pool and massage parlour
! Know what?’

‘What?’

‘We’re skint, Nat! Clean broke! It’s all gone on builders! Yeah! We’ll have to do the washing-up on the morning after our wedding night!’

Suddenly it’s time for him to go back to whatever dark Whitehall hole they’ve put him in. The bar empties as if on
command and we’re standing in the relative quiet of the pavement
with only Whitehall traffic thundering by.

‘I was going to have a bachelor night,’ Ed says awkwardly. ‘You and me kind of thing. Flo put the kibosh on it, says it’s all male bullshit.’

‘Florence is right.’

‘I took the ring off her,’ he says. ‘Told her I’d give it her back when she’s my wife.’

‘Good idea.’

‘I’m keeping it on me so I don’t forget.’

‘You don’t want me to look after it till
tomorrow?’

‘Not really. Great badminton, Nat. Best ever.’

‘And a whole lot more when you come back from Torquay.’

‘Be great. Yeah. See you tomorrow then.’

On Whitehall’s pavements you don’t embrace, though I suspect it’s in his mind. Instead he makes do with a double handshake, grabbing my right hand in both of his and pumping it up and down.

*

Somehow the hours have slipped by. It’s early
evening. Prue and I are back under the apple tree, she at her iPad, I with an ecological book Steff wants me to read about the forthcoming apocalypse. I have draped my jacket over the back of my chair and I must have entered some kind of reverie because it takes me a moment to realize that the squawk I’m hearing is coming from Bryn Jordan’s doctored smartphone. But for once I’m too slow. Prue has
fished it out of my jacket and put it to her ear:

‘No, Bryn. His wife,’ she says briskly. ‘A voice from the past. How are you? Good. And the family? Good. He’s in bed, I’m afraid, not feeling his brightest. The whole of Battersea is going down with it in droves. Can I help? Well, that will make
him feel
much
better, I’m sure. I’ll tell him the moment he wakes up. And to you, Bryn. No, not yet
but the post here is haywire. I’m sure we shall come if we possibly can. How very clever of her. I tried oils once but they weren’t a success. And goodnight to you, Bryn, wherever you are.’

She rings off.

‘He sends his congratulations,’ she says. ‘And an invitation to Ah Chan’s art exhibition in Cork Street. I somehow think we shan’t make it.’

*

It’s morning. It has been morning for a long
time: morning in the hill forests of Karlovy Vary, morning on a rain-drenched Yorkshire hilltop, on Ground Beta and the twin screens in the Operations room; morning on Primrose Hill, in the Haven, on court number one at the Athleticus. I have made the tea and squeezed the orange juice and come back to bed: our best time for taking the decisions we couldn’t take yesterday, or discovering what we’ll
do at the weekend or where we’ll go on holiday.

But today we’re talking solely about what we’ll be wearing for the great event, and what fun it will be, and what a stroke of genius on my part to suggest Torquay because the children seem
quite
incapable of taking
any
practical decisions of their
own
– children being our new shorthand for Ed and Florence, and our conversation being a precautionary
return to our Moscow days, because the one thing you know about Percy Price is, friendship comes second when there’s a telephone extension right beside your bed.

Until yesterday afternoon I had assumed that all weddings took place at ground level, but I was abruptly corrected on the point when, on my way back from the Dog & Goat, I undertook a discreet photographic reconnaissance of our target
area and
confirmed that the Register Office of Ed’s and Florence’s choice was on the fifth floor, and the only reason it had a slot at such short notice was that it boasted eight arduous flights of cold stone staircase before you reached the reception desk, and another half-flight before you entered a cavernous arched waiting room got up like a theatre with no stage, with soft music playing and
plush seats and a sea of uneasy people in groups, and a shiny black-lacquered door at the far end marked ‘Weddings Only’. There was one minuscule lift, with priority given to the disabled.

I also established in the course of the same reconnaissance that the third floor, which was leased in its entirety to a firm of chartered accountants, gave on to an overhead Venice-style footbridge leading
to a similar building across the street; and better still, to a lighthouse-style stairwell that descended all the way to an underground car park. From the insanitary depths of the car park, the staircase was accessible to anyone fool enough to want to climb up it. But to those wishing to descend it by way of the footbridge on the third floor, access was denied to all but certified residents of the
block, see the lurid ‘NO ENTRY TO PUBLIC’ sign plastered across a pair of solid, electronically controlled doors. The chartered accountant’s brass plate named six partners. The one at the top was a Mr M. Bailey.

The next morning, in near silence, Prue and I dressed.

*

I will report the events as I would any special operation. We arrive by design early, at 11.15 a.m. On our way up the stone
staircase we pause at the third floor, while Prue stands smiling in her flowered hat and I engage the woman receptionist of the firm of chartered accountants in casual conversation. No, she says in answer to my question, her employers do not close their doors early on a Friday. I inform her that I am an old client of
Mr Bailey. She says robotically that he is in meetings all morning. I say we
are old school friends, but not to disturb him, and I will make a formal appointment for next week some time. I hand her a printed name card left over from my last posting:
Commercial Counsellor, H.M. Embassy, Tallinn
, and wait till she consents to read it.

‘Where’s Tallinn?’ she asks pertly.

‘Estonia.’

‘Where’s Estonia?’ – giggle.

‘The Baltic,’ I tell her. ‘North of Latvia.’

She doesn’t
ask me where the Baltic is, but the giggle tells me I have made my mark. I have also blown my cover, but who’s counting? We ascend two more floors to the cavernous waiting room and take up a position close to the entrance. A large woman in a green uniform with a major general’s epaulettes is sorting wedding groups in line ahead. Jingle bells play over loudspeakers each time a wedding ends, upon which
the group nearest the shiny black door is ushered in. The door closes and the jingle bells resume fifteen minutes later.

At 11.51 Florence and Ed emerge arm in arm from the stairwell, looking like an advertisement for a building society: Ed in a new grey suit that fits him as poorly as his old one, and Florence in the same trouser suit that she had sported one sunny spring day a thousand years
ago when, as a promising young intelligence officer, she presented Rosebud to the wise elders of Operations Directorate. She is clutching a bunch of red roses. Ed must have bought them for her.

We kiss each other: Prue to Florence, Prue to Ed; after which, as best man, I plant my own kiss on Florence’s cheek, our first.

‘No pulling back now,’ I whisper loudly into her ear in my most jocular
tone.

We have barely disentangled ourselves before Ed’s long arms enfold me in a botched manly embrace – I doubt he’s ever tried
it before – and the next thing I know he has lifted me to his own height and is holding me chest to chest, half suffocating me in the process.

‘Prue,’ he announces. ‘This man plays bloody awful badminton, but he’s all right otherwise.’

He sets me down, panting and
laughing in his excitement while I scan the latest arrivals for a face, gesture or silhouette that will confirm to me what I already know: Prue will not by any means be the only witness to this wedding.

‘
Edward and Florence party
, please!
Edward and Florence party
, thank you. Over here, please. That’s the way.’

The major general in her green uniform is marshalling us, but the shiny black door
is still closed. Jingle bells rise to a crescendo and fade away.

‘Hey, Nat, I’ve gone and forgotten the ring,’ Ed murmurs to me with a smirk.

‘Then you’re an arsehole,’ I retort, as he pushes my shoulder to tell me he’s only teasing.

Has Florence looked inside Prue’s expensive Japanese lipstick that I planted in her handbag? Has she read the address it contains? Has she looked up the address
on Google Earth and identified the remote guesthouse high in the Transylvanian Alps owned by an elderly Catalan couple who were once my agents? No, she won’t have done, she’s too smart, she knows her counter-surveillance. But has she at least read my accompanying letter to them, written small on rolled-up typing paper in our best tradition?
Dear Pauli and Francesc, please do your best for these
good people, Adam
.