Our Kind of Traitor (18 page)

‘And you’re not in need of post-traumatic counselling or one of
those
things?’ she asked solicitously, as he was leaving.

Not from you, thank you, thought Luke. And my private life isn’t settled.

*

The Administration Section had its dismal being on the ground floor, and Luke’s desk was as near to the street as you could get without actually being thrown into it. After three years in the kidnap capital of the world, he did not take easily to such matters as mileage allowance for home-based junior staff, but tried his best. His surprise had been all the greater therefore when a month into his sentence he lifted the phone that hardly ever rang to hear himself being summoned by Hector Meredith to lunch with him forthwith at his famously dowdy London club.

‘
Today
, Hector? Christ.’

‘Come early and don’t tell a fucking soul. Say it’s the time of the month or something.’

‘What’s early?’

‘Eleven.’

‘Eleven?
Lunch?
’

‘Aren’t you hungry?’

The choice of time and place turned out to be not quite as outlandish as might have appeared. At eleven on a weekday morning a decaying Pall Mall club resounds to the honk of vacuum cleaners, the singsong chatter of underpaid migrant labourers laying up for lunch, and little else. The pillared lobby was empty save for a decrepit doorman in his box and a black woman mopping the marble floor. Hector, roosting on an old carved throne with his long legs crossed, was reading the
Financial Times
.

*

In a Service of nomads pledged to keep their secrets to themselves, hard information about any colleague was always difficult to come by. But even by these low standards, the sometime Deputy Director Western Europe, then Deputy Director Russia, then Deputy Director Africa & South East Asia and now, mysteriously, Director Special Projects, was a walking conundrum or, as some of his colleagues would have it, maverick.

Fifteen years back, Luke and Hector had shared a three-month Russian-language immersion course conducted by an elderly princess in her ivy-covered mansion in old Hampstead, not ten minutes from where Luke now lived. Come evening, they would share a cathartic walk on the Heath. Hector was a fast mover in those days, physically and professionally. Striding out with his gangly legs, he was a hard fellow for little Luke to keep up with. His conversation, which often went over Luke’s head in both senses and was peppered with expletives, ranged from the ‘two greatest conmen in history’ – Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud – to the crying need for a brand of British patriotism that was consistent with the contemporary conscience – usually followed by a typically Hector U-turn, in which he demanded to know what
conscience
meant anyway.

Only rarely since then had their paths crossed. While Luke’s field career followed its predictable course – Moscow, Prague, Amman, Moscow again, with spells of Head Office in between, and finally Bogotá – Hector’s rapid ascent to the fourth floor seemed divinely foretold and his remoteness, so far as Luke was concerned, complete.

But as time passed, the turbulent contrarian in Hector showed signs of raising its head. A new wave of Service power-brokers was pressing for a louder voice in the Westminster village. Hector, in a closed address to Senior Officers that turned out to be not quite as closed as it might have been, castigated the Wise Fools of the fourth floor who were ‘willing to sacrifice the Service’s sacred obligation to speak truth to power’.

The dust had barely settled when, presiding over a stormy post-mortem into an operational cock-up, Hector defended the perpetrators against the Joint Services’ planners, whose vision, he claimed, had been ‘unnaturally restricted by having their heads stuck up the American arse’.

Then sometime in 2003, not surprisingly, he vanished. No farewell parties, no obituary in the monthly newsletter, no obscure medal, no forwarding address. First his encoded signature disappeared from operational orders. Then it disappeared from distribution lists. Then it disappeared from the closed-circuit email address book, and finally from the encrypted phone book, which was tantamount to a death notice.

And in place of the man himself, the inevitable rumour mill:

He had led a top-floor revolt over Iraq and been sacked for his pains. Wrong, said others. It was the bombing of Afghanistan, and he wasn’t sacked, he resigned.

In a stand-up argument, he had called the Secretary to the Cabinet a ‘mendacious bastard’ to his face. Wrong again, said a different camp. It was the Attorney-General and ‘spineless toady’.

Others with rather more hard evidence to go on pointed at the personal tragedy that had befallen Hector shortly before his departure from the Service when his wayward only son Adrian, not for the first time, had crashed a stolen car at high speed while under the influence of class-A drugs. Miraculously, the only victim had been Adrian himself, who suffered chest and facial injuries. But a young mother and her baby had escaped by inches and CIVIL SERVANT’S RUNAWAY SON IN HIGH STREET HORROR made ugly reading. A string of other offences was taken into account. Broken by the
affair, said the rumour mill, Hector had withdrawn from the secret world in order to support his son while he was in gaol.

But while there might have been some merit in this version – it had at least a few hard facts in its favour – it could not have been the whole story, because a few months after his disappearance, it was Hector’s own face staring out of the tabloids, not as the distraught father of Adrian but as the doughty lone warrior fighting to save an old-established family firm from the clutches of those he dubbed VULTURE CAPITALISTS, thereby securing himself a sensational headline.

For weeks, Hector-watchers were regaled with stirring tales of this old-established, decently prosperous docklands firm of grain importers with sixty-five long-serving employees, all shareholders, whose ‘life-support system has been switched off overnight’, according to Hector who also overnight had discovered a gift for public relations: ‘The asset-strippers and carpet-baggers are at our gates, and sixty-five of the best men and women in England are about to be tossed on to the rubbish heap,’ he informed the press. And sure enough, within a month, the headlines shouted: MEREDITH FIGHTS OFF VULTURE CAPITALISTS – FAMILY FIRM IN TAKEOVER TRIUMPH.

And a year later, Hector was sitting in his old room on the fourth floor, raising a little hell, as he liked to call it.

*

How Hector had talked his way back in, or whether the Service had gone to him on bended knee, and what anyway were the functions of a so-called Director of Special Projects were mysteries Luke could not but ponder as he followed him at a snail’s pace up the splendiferous staircase of his club, past the crumbling portraits of its imperial heroes, and into the musty library of books that nobody read. And he continued to ponder it as Hector pulled shut the great mahogany door, turned the key, dropped it into his pocket, unfastened the buckles of an old brown briefcase and, shoving a sealed Service envelope at Luke with no stamp on it, ambled to the
ceiling-high sash window that looked out on to St James’s Park.

‘Thought it might suit you a bit better than pissing around in Admin,’ he remarked carelessly, his craggy body silhouetted against the grimy net curtains.

The letter inside the Service envelope was a printout from the same Queen of Human Resources who only two months ago had passed sentence on Luke. In lifeless prose it transferred him with immediate effect and no explanation to the post of Coordinator of an embryonic body to be known as the Counterclaim Focus Group, answerable to the Director of Special Projects. Its remit would be to ‘consider proactively what operational costs may be recovered from customer departments who have significantly benefited from the product of Service operations’. The appointment carried an eighteen-month extension to his contract, to be credited to his length of service for the purpose of pension rights. Any questions, email this address.

‘Make sense to you at all?’ Hector inquired, from his place at the long sash window.

Mystified, Luke said something about it helping with the mortgage.

‘You like
proactive
? Proactive grab you?’

‘Not much,’ said Luke, with a baffled laugh.

‘The Human Queen
adores
proactive,’ Hector retorted. ‘Gets her horny as a cat. Shove in
focus
, you’re home and dry.’

Should Luke humour the man? What on earth was he up to, hauling him off to his awful club at eleven in the morning, giving him a letter that wasn’t even his to give, and making pedantic cracks about the Human Queen’s English?

‘Heard you had a bad time in Bogotá,’ Hector said.

‘Well, up and down, you know,’ Luke replied defensively.

‘Bonking your number two’s wife, you mean? That sort of up and down?’

Staring at the letter in his hand, Luke saw it start to tremble but by an act of self-control managed to say nothing.

‘Or the sort of up and down that comes of being hijacked at
machinegun-point by some shit of a drug baron you thought was your joe,’ Hector pursued. ‘
That
sort of up and down?’

‘Very probably both,’ Luke replied stiffly.

‘Mind telling which came first – the hijack or the bonk?’

‘The bonk, unfortunately.’

‘
Unfortunately
because, while you were being detained at your drug baron’s leisure in his jungle
redoute
, your poor dear wife back in Bogotá got to hear you’d been bonking the girl next door?’

‘Yes. That’s right. She did.’

‘With the result that when you escaped from your drug baron’s hospitality, and found your way home after a few days of rubbing shoulders with nature in the raw, you didn’t get the hero’s welcome you were expecting?’

‘No. I didn’t.’

‘Did you tell all?’

‘To the drug baron?’

‘To Eloise.’

‘Well, not
all
,’ said Luke, not entirely sure why he was going along with this.

‘You confessed to whatever she already knew, or was certain to find out,’ Hector suggested approvingly. ‘The partial hang-out posing as the full and frank confession. Fair reading?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Not prying, Luke, old boy. Not judgemental. Just getting it straight. We stole some good horses together back in better days. In my book you’re a bloody good officer and that’s why you’re here. What d’you think of it? Overall. The letter you’re holding in your hand. Otherwise?’

‘Otherwise? Well, I suppose I’m a bit puzzled by it.’

‘Puzzled by
what
exactly?’

‘Well why this urgency, for a start? All right, it’s with immediate effect. But the job doesn’t exist.’

‘Doesn’t have to. Narrative’s perfectly clear. Cupboard’s bare, so the Chief goes to the Treasury with his begging bowl and asks ’em for more cash. Treasury digs its toes in. “Can’t help you. We’re all
broke. Claw it back from all the buggers who’ve been getting a free ride off you.” I thought it played rather well, given the times.’

‘I’m sure it’s a good idea,’ said Luke earnestly, by now more lost than he had been ever since his untriumphant return to England.

‘Well, if it
doesn’t
play, now’s your time to speak up, for Christ’s sake. No second chances in this situation, believe you me.’

‘It plays, I’m sure. And I’m very grateful, Hector. Thanks for thinking of me. Thanks for the leg-up.’

‘The Human Queen’s plan is to give you your own desk, God bless her. A few doors along from Finance. Well I can’t mess with that. Be ungracious to. But my advice would be to give Finance a wide berth. They don’t want you counting
their
beans, and we don’t want ’em counting
ours
. Well, do we?’

‘I don’t expect we do.’

‘Anyway, you won’t be in the shop that much. You’ll be out and about, trawling Whitehall, making a bloody nuisance of yourself with the fat-cat ministries. Check in a couple of times a week, report to me on progress, fiddle your expenses, that’ll be your lot. You still buying it?’

‘Not really.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, why
here
, for a start? Why not email me on the ground floor, or call me up on the internal line?’

Hector had never taken easily to criticism, Luke remembered, and he didn’t now. ‘All right, dammit. Suppose I
did
email you first. Or called you, what the fuck? Would you buy it
then
? The Human Queen’s offer as it stands, for Christ’s sake?’

Too late in the day, a different and more heartening scenario was forming in Luke’s mind.

‘If you’re asking me whether I would accept the Human Queen’s offer as it has been presented to me in the letter – asking me notionally – my answer is yes. If you’re asking me – notionally, again – whether I’d smell a rat if I found the letter lying on my desk in the office, or on my screen, my answer is no, I wouldn’t.’

‘Scout’s honour?’

‘Scout’s honour.’

They were interrupted by a ferocious rattle of the door handle, followed by a burst of angry knocks. With a weary ‘oh
fuck
’em’, Hector gestured to Luke to get himself out of sight among the bookshelves, unlocked the door, and shoved his head round it.

‘Sorry, old boy, not today, I’m afraid,’ Luke heard him say. ‘Unofficial stock-taking in progress. Usual fuck-up. Members taking out books and not signing for ’em. Hope you’re not one of them. Try Friday. About the first time in my life I’ve been grateful to be Honorary fucking Librarian,’ he continued, not much bothering to lower his voice as he closed the door and relocked it. ‘You can come out now. And in case you think I’m the ringleader of a Septembrist plot, you’d better read this letter as well, then shove it back at me and I’ll swallow it.’

This envelope was pale blue, and conspicuously opaque. A blue lion and unicorn rampant were finely embossed on the flap. And inside, one matching blue sheet of writing paper, the smallest size, with the portentous printed heading: From the Office of the Secretariat.