A Perfect Spy

CHAPTER 9

Brotherhood had bathed and shaved and cut himself and put on a suit. He had listened to the news on the BBC and afterwards tuned to the Deutsche Welle because sometimes the foreign press got hold of stories while Fleet Street was still obediently suppressing them. But he had heard no lighthearted mention of a senior officer of the British Secret Service going walkabout or turning up in Moscow. He had eaten a piece of toast and marmalade, he had made a few phone calls but six till eight of an English morning were the dead hours when nobody except himself was about. On a normal day he would have walked across the park to Head Office and given himself a couple of hours at his desk reading the night’s crop of Station reports and preparing himself for the ten-o’clock prayer session in Bo’s sanctum. “So how’s our Eastern Front this rainy morning, Jack?” Bo would say in a tone of jokey veneration, when Brotherhood’s turn came round. And a respectful quiet would follow while the great Jack Brotherhood gave his chief the score. “Some quite nice stuff from Conger on the Comecon trading figures for last year, Bo. We’ve sent it up to Treasury by special bag. Otherwise it’s the silly season. Joes are on holiday, so’s the opposition.”

But this was not a normal day and Brotherhood was no longer the grand old man of covert operations that Bo cracked him up to be when he introduced him to visiting firemen from Western liaison services. He was the latest unperson in the latest looming scandal and, as he stepped into the street below his flat, his quick gaze was more than usually vigilant. It was eight-thirty. First he headed south across Green Park, walking as fast as ever and perhaps a little faster, so that Nigel’s watchers, if they were on him, would either have to gallop or radio for somebody to get ahead of him. The night’s rain had stopped. Warm, unhealthy mist hung over the ponds and willows. Reaching the Mall he hailed a cab and told the driver Tottenham Court Road. He walked again and took a second cab to Kentish Town. His destination was a grey hillside of Victorian villas. The lower reaches were still run down, their windows plugged with corrugated iron against squatters. But higher up Volvo estate cars and teak-framed dormer windows testified to the safe arrival of the middle classes, and the long gardens boasted coloured climbing frames and half-made dinghies. Here Brotherhood was no longer in a hurry. He trudged up the hill slowly, noting everything at his leisure: this is the pace I have earned in life, this is the smile. A pretty girl passed him on her way to work and he greeted her indulgently. She winked pertly back at him, proving for all time that she was not a watcher. At number 18 he paused and in the manner of a prospective purchaser stood back and surveyed the house. Bach and a smell of breakfast issued from the ground-floor kitchen. A wooden arrow marked “18A” pointed down the basement steps. A man’s bicycle was chained against the railings, a poster for the Social Democratic Party hung in the bay window. He pressed the bell. A girl in a blazer opened the door to him. At thirteen she already wore an air of superiority.

“I’ll get Mummy,” she said before he could speak, and turned sharply so that he could watch her skirt swing. “Mummy. It’s a man. For you,” she said and, sweeping past him down the steps, set off for her decent school.

“Hullo, Belinda,” Brotherhood said. “It’s me.”

Coming out of the kitchen, Belinda paused at the foot of the stairs, drew a breath and yelled up them at a closed door. “Paul! Come down at once, please. Jack Brotherhood is here. I assume he wants something.”

Which more or less was what he knew she’d shout — though not quite so loud — because Belinda had always reacted badly first and put it right rather sweetly later.

* * *

They sat in a pine drawing-room on low basketwork chairs that creaked like swings when you moved. A gigantic lampshade of white paper rocked crookedly above them. Belinda had made coffee in hand-thrown mugs and sweetened it with natural sugar. Her Bach still played defiantly in the kitchen. She was dark-eyed and angry about something in her childhood — at fifty her face was still set ready for another quarrel with her mother. She had greying hair bound in a sensible bun and wore a necklace of what looked like nutmeg. When she walked, she waded through her kaftan as if she hated it. When she sat, she spread her knees and scraped at the knuckles of one hand. Yet her beauty clung to her like an identity she was trying to deny and her plainness kept slipping like a bad disguise.

“They’ve already been here in case you don’t know, Jack,” she said. “At ten at night as a matter of fact. They were waiting for us on the doorstep when we got back from the cottage.”

“Who’s they?”

“Nigel. Lorimer. Two more I didn’t know. All men, of course.”

“What did they say they were here for?” Brotherhood asked, but Paul stopped him.

You could never be angry with Paul. He smiled so wisely through his pipe smoke even when he was being rude. “What is this actually, Jack?” he said, taking his pipe from his mouth and lowering it until it became a hand microphone. “Interrogations about interrogations? You people have no constitutional position, you know, Jack. You’re only a chartered body even under this government, I’m afraid.”

“You probably don’t know it, but Paul has written extensively on the rise and rise of the para-military services under the Tories,” Belinda said in a voice that struggled to be harsh. “You’d know if you’d bother to read The Guardian, but you don’t. They gave him a whole page for the last one.”

“So screw you actually, Jack,” said Paul just as pleasantly.

Brotherhood smiled. Paul smiled. An old English sheepdog wandered in and settled at Brotherhood’s feet.

“Do you want to smoke, by the way?” said Paul, ever sensitive to people’s needs. “I’m afraid Belinda draws the line at fags but I can offer you a nifty little brown one if you’re pushed.”

Brotherhood pulled out a packet of his foul cigarettes and lit one. “Screw you too, Paul,” he said equably.

Paul had peaked early in life. Twenty years ago he had written promising plays for fringe theatres. He wrote them still. He was tall but reassuringly unathletic. Twice, to Brotherhood’s knowledge, he had applied to join the Firm. Each time he had been turned down flat, even without Brotherhood’s intervention.

“They came here because they were vetting Magnus for a top appointment, if you want to know,” Belinda said all in one breath. “They were in a hurry because they wanted to promote him immediately so that he could get on with the job.”

“Nigel?” Brotherhood echoed with an incredulous laugh. “Nigel and Lorimer plus two other men? Doing their own vetting at ten o’clock at night? You’ve got half the brass of secret Whitehall on your doorstep there, Bel. Not a vetting team of old crocks on half pay.”

“It’s a senior appointment so he has to be vetted by senior people,” Belinda retorted, blushing scarlet.

“Did Nigel tell you that?”

“Yes, he did!” said Belinda.

“Did you believe it?”

But Paul had decided it was time to show his mettle. “Actually, fuck off will you, Jack?” he said. “Get out of the house. Now. Darling, don’t answer him. It’s all too theatrical and stupid for words. Come on, Jack. Out. You’re welcome for a drink any time, as long as you phone first. But not for this nonsense. Sorry. Out.”

He had opened the door and was flapping his big soft hand as if scooping water but neither Brotherhood nor the sheepdog stirred.

“Magnus has jumped ship,” Brotherhood explained to Belinda, while Paul put on his I-can-be-violent glower. “Nigel and Lorimer sold you a load of cock. Magnus has bolted and gone into hiding while they cook up a case against him as the big traitor of the Western world. I’m his boss so I’m not quite as enthusiastic as they are. I think he’s strayed but not lost and I’d like to get to him first and talk to him.” Addressing Paul, he didn’t even bother to turn his head. He just lifted it far enough to make the difference. “They’ve put a muzzle on your editor for the time being, same as everybody else, Paul. But if Nigel has his way, in a few days’ time your colleagues will be plastering Belinda’s previous marriage all over their nasty little columns and taking your picture every time you go to the launderette. So you’d better start thinking about how to get your act together. In the meantime, fetch us some more coffee and leave us in peace for an hour.”

* * *

Alone, Belinda was much stronger than when protected by her mate. Her face, though dazed, had relaxed. Her gaze had fixed itself steadfastly on a spot a few feet from her eyes, as if to suggest that although she might not see as far as others, her faith in what she saw burned twice as bright. They sat at a round table in the window bay and the Venetian blind sliced the Social Democratic Party into strips.

“His father’s dead,” Brotherhood said.

“I know. I read. Nigel told me. He asked me how it might have affected Magnus. I suppose that was a trick.”

Brotherhood took a moment to answer this. “Not entirely,” he said. “No. Not a complete trick, Belinda. I think they’re reasoning that it could have turned his head a little.”

“Magnus always wanted me to save him from Rick. I did my best. I tried to explain that to Nigel.”

“How save him, Belinda?”

“Hide him. Answer the phone for him. Say he was abroad when he wasn’t. I sometimes think that’s why Magnus joined the Firm. As a hiding place. Just as he married me because he was scared to risk it with Jemima.”

“Who’s Jemima?” said Brotherhood, playing ignorant.

“She was a close friend of mine at school.” She scowled. “Too close.” The scowl softened and became melancholy. “Poor Rick. I only ever saw him once. That was at our wedding. He turned up uninvited in the middle of the reception. I never saw Magnus look happier. Otherwise he was just a voice on the telephone. He had a nice voice.”

“Magnus have any other hiding places in those days?”

“You mean women, don’t you? You can say it if you want. I don’t mind any more.”

“Just somewhere he might have hidden. That’s all. Little cottage somewhere. An old buddy. Where would he go, Belinda? Who’d have him?”

Her hands, now that she had unlocked them, were elegant and expressive. “He’d have gone anywhere. He was a new man every day. He’d come home one person, I’d try to match him. In the morning he’d be someone else. Do you think he did it, Jack?”

“Do you?”

“You always answer one question with another. I’d forgotten. Magnus had the same trick.” He waited. “You could try Sef,” she said. “Sef was always loyal.”

“Sef?”

“Kenneth Sefton Boyd. Jemima’s brother. ‘Sef’s too rich for my blood,’ Magnus used to say. That meant they were equals.”

“Could Magnus have gone to him?”

“If it was bad enough.”

“Could he have gone to Jemima?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“I understand she’s gone off men these days,” she said and blushed again. “She’s not predictable. She never was.”

“Ever heard of anyone called Wentworth?”

She shook her head, still thinking of something different. “Since my time,” she said.

“Poppy?”

“My time ended with Mary. If there’s a Poppy, that’s Mary’s bad luck.”

“When did you last hear from him, Belinda?”

“That’s what Nigel asked me.”

“What did you say to Nigel?”

“I said there was no reason to hear from him after we divorced. We’d been married six years. There were no children. It was a mistake. Why relive it?”

“Was that the truth?”

“No. I lied.”

“What were you concealing?”

“He rang. Magnus did.”

“When?”

“Monday night. Paul was out, thank God.” She paused, listening for the sound of Paul’s typewriter, which was tapping reassuringly from upstairs. “He sounded strange. I thought he was drunk. It was late.”

“What time?”

“It must have been around eleven. Lucy was still doing her homework. I won’t let her work after eleven as a rule but she was doing a French mock O-level. He was in a phone box.”

“Cash?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“He didn’t say. He just said, ‘Rick’s dead. I wish we’d had a child.’”

“That all?”

“He said he’d always hated himself for marrying me. Now he was reconciled. He understood himself. And he loved me for trying so hard. Thanks.”

“That all?”

“‘ Thanks. Thanks for everything. And please forgive the bad parts.’ Then he rang off.”

“Did you tell Nigel this?”

“Why do you keep asking me that? I didn’t think it was Nigel’s business. I didn’t want to say he was being drunk and sentimental on the phone late at night just at the time when they were considering him for promotion. Serves him right for deceiving me.”

“What else did Nigel ask you?”

“Just character stuff. Had I ever had any reason to suppose Magnus might have had Communist sympathies. I said Oxford. Nigel said they knew about that. I said I didn’t think university politics meant much anyway. Nigel agreed. Had he ever been erratic in any way? Unstable — alcoholic — depressive? I said no again. I didn’t reckon one drunken phone call constituted drunkenness, but if it did I wasn’t going to tell four of Magnus’s colleagues about it. I felt protective of him.”

“They ought to have known you better, Belinda,” said Brotherhood. “Would you have given him the job yourself, by the way?”

“What job? You said there wasn’t one.” She was being sharp with him, belatedly suspecting him too of duplicity.

“I meant suppose there had been a job. A high-level, responsible job. Would you give it to him?”

She smiled. Very prettily. “I did, didn’t I? I married him.”

“You’re wiser now. Would you give it to him today?”

She was biting her forefinger, frowning angrily. She could change moods in moments. Brotherhood waited but nothing came so he asked her another question: “Did they ask you about his time in Graz, by any chance?”

“Graz? You mean his army time? Good heavens, they didn’t go back that far.”

Brotherhood shook his head as if to say he would never be equal to the wicked ways of the world. “Graz is where they’re trying to say it all started,” he said. “They’ve got some grand theory he fell among thieves while he was doing his National Service there. What do you make of that?”

“They’re absurd,” she said.

“Why are you so sure?”

“He was happy there. When he came back to England he was a new man. ‘I’m complete,’ he kept saying. ‘I’ve done it, Bel. I’ve got my other half together.’ He was proud he’d done such good work.”

“Did he describe the work?”

“He couldn’t. It was too secret and too dangerous. He just said I would be proud of him if I knew.”

“Did he tell you the name of any of the operations he was mixed up in?”

“No.”

“Did he tell you the names of any of his Joes?”

“Don’t be absurd. He wouldn’t do that.”

“Did he mention his C.O.?”

“He said he was brilliant. Everyone was brilliant for Magnus when they were new.”

“If I said ‘Greensleeves’ to you in a loud voice, would that ring any bells?”

“It would mean English traditional music.”

“Ever hear of a girl called Sabina?”

She shook her head. “He told me I was his first,” she said.

“Did you believe him?”

“It’s hard to tell when it’s the first for you too.”

With Belinda, he remembered, the quiet was always good. If her charges into the lists had something comic about them, there was always dignity to the calm between.

“So Nigel and his friends went away happy,” he suggested. “Did you?”

Her face against the window was in silhouette. He waited for it to lift or turn to him, but it didn’t.

“Where would you look for him?” he said. “If you were me?”

Still she did not move or speak.

“Some place by the sea somewhere? He had these fantasies, you know. He chopped them up and gave a bit to each person. Did he ever give a version to you? Scotland? Canada? The migration of the reindeer? Some kind lady who’d take him in? I need to know, Belinda. I really do.”

“I won’t talk to you any more, Jack. Paul’s right. I don’t have to.”

“Not whatever he’s done? Not to save him perhaps?”

“I don’t trust you. Specially when you’re being nice. You invented him, Jack. He’d have done whatever you told him. Who to be. Who to marry. Who to divorce. If he’s done wrong it’s as much your fault as his. It was easy to get rid of me — he just gave me the latch key and went to a lawyer. How was he supposed to get rid of you?”

Brotherhood moved towards the door.

“If you find him, tell him not to ring again. And Jack?” Brotherhood paused. Her face was soft again, and hopeful. “Did he write that book he was always on about?”

“Which book was that?”

“The great autobiographical novel that was going to change the world.”

“Should he have done?”

“‘ One day I’m going to lock myself away and tell the truth.’ ‘Why do you have to lock yourself away? Tell it now,’ I said. He didn’t seem to think he could. I’m not going to let Lucy marry early. Nor’s Paul. We’re going to put her on the pill and let her have affairs.”

“Lock himself away where, Belinda?”

The light once more faded from her face. “You brought it on yourselves, Jack. All of you. He’d have been all right if he’d never met people like you.”

* * *

Wait, Grant Lederer told himself. They all hate you. You hate most of them. Be a clever boy and wait your turn. Ten men sat in a room inside a room. In the false walls, false windows looked onto plastic flowers. From places like this, thought Lederer, America lost her wars against the little brown men in black pyjamas. From places like this, he thought — from smoked-glass rooms, cut off from humankind — America will lose all her wars except the last. A few yards beyond the walls lay the placid diplomatic backwaters of St. John’s Wood. But here inside they could have been in Langley or Saigon.

“Harry, with the greatest possible respect,” Mountjoy of the Cabinet Office piped with very little respect at all. “These early indicators of yours could perfectly easily have been dumped on us by an unscrupulous opposition, as some of us have been saying all along. Is it really fair to trot them out yet again? I thought we put all this stuff to bed back in August.”

Wexler stared at the spectacles he was holding in both hands. They are too heavy for him, thought Lederer. He sees too clearly through them. Wexler lowered them to the table and scratched his veteran’s crew cut with his stubby fingertips. What’s holding you up? Lederer demanded of him silently. Are you translating English into English? Are you paralysed by jet-lag after flying Concorde all the way from Washington? Or are you in awe of these English gentlemen who never tire of telling us how they set up our service in the first place and generously invited us to sup at their high table? You’re a top man of the best intelligence agency in the world, for Christ’s sake. You’re my boss. Why don’t you stand up and be counted? As if in response to Lederer’s silent pleading, Wexler’s voice started functioning again with all the animation of a machine that speaks your weight.

“Gentlemen,” Wexler resumed — except that he said “junnlemen.” Reload, aim again, take your time, thought Lederer. “Our position, Sir Eric,” Wexler resumed, with something unpleasantly close to a bow in the direction of Mountjoy’s knighthood, “that is — the ah Agency position overall on this thing — at this important meeting, and at this moment in time — is that we have here an accumulation of indicators from a wide range of sources on the one hand, and new data on the other which we consider pretty much conclusive in respect of our unease.” He moistened his lips. So would I, thought Lederer. If I’d spoken that mouthful, I’d spit at least. “It looks to us therefore that the ah logistics here require us to go back over the ah course a little distance and — when we’ve done that — to ah slot the new stuff in where we can all take a good look at it in light of what has — ah latterly gone before.” He turned to Brammel and his lined but innocent face broke into an apologetic smile. “You want to do it different in any way, Bo, why don’t you just say so and see if we can accommodate you?”

“My dear chap, you must do exactly whatever makes you feel most comfortable,” said Brammel hospitably, which was what he had been saying to everybody all his life. So Wexler went back to his brief, first centering the folder before him on the table then tilting it cautiously to the right, as if landing it on one wingtip. And Grant Lederer III, who has the impression that the inside surfaces of his skin have been afflicted by an itchy rash, tries to lower his pulse rate and his blood heat and believe in the high level of this conference. Somewhere, he argues to himself, there is worth and secrecy and an all-knowing intelligence service. The only trouble is, it’s in Heaven.

* * *

The British had fielded their usual intractable, over-fluent team. Hobsbawn, seconded from the Security Service, Mountjoy from the Cabinet Office and Dorney from the Foreign Office all lolled in varying positions of disbelief or outright contempt. Only the placement had changed, Lederer noticed: whereas Jack Brotherhood had hitherto been placed symbolically at Brammel’s side, today that position had gone to Brammel’s bagman, Nigel, and Brotherhood had been promoted to head of the table, where he presided like an old grey bird glowering down on his prey. On the American side of the table they were a mere four. How typical that in our Special Relationship the Brits should outnumber the Americans, thought Lederer. In the field the Agency outguns these bastards by about ninety to one. In here we’re a persecuted minority. To Lederer’s right, Harry Wexler, having cleared his throat not before time, had at last begun wrestling with the intricacies of what he insisted on calling the ongoing ah situation. To Lederer’s left lounged Mick Carver, Head of the London Station, a spoilt Bostonian millionaire considered brilliant on no evidence Lederer was aware of. Below him the egregious Artelli, a distraught mathematician from Signals Intelligence, looked as though he had been hauled from Langley by his hair. And, between them, here sit I, Grant Lederer III, unlovable even to myself, the pushy law boy from South Bend, Indiana, whose tireless efforts in the interest of his own promotion have dragged everyone together this one more time to prove what could have been proved six months ago: namely, that computers do not fabricate intelligence, do not sidle over to the opposition in return for favours, do not voluntarily compose slanders against men in high standing in the British service. They tell the disgraceful truth without regard to charm, race or tradition and they tell it to Grant Lederer III, who is busy making himself as unpopular as possible.

As Lederer listened impotently to Wexler’s floundering, he decided that it was himself not Wexler who was the alien. Here is the great Harry E. Wexler, he reasoned, who in Langley sits at the right hand of God. Who has been featured in Time as America’s Legendary Adventurer. Who played a star part in the Bay of Pigs and fathered some of the finest intelligence fuck-ups of the Vietnam War. Who has destabilised more bankrupt economies in Central America than are dreamed of, and conspired with the greatest in the land from the heads of the Mafia downwards. And here is me, an ambitious jerk. And what am I thinking? I am thinking that a man who cannot speak clearly cannot think clearly. I am thinking that selfexpression is the companion to logic and that Harry E. Wexler is by this criterion circumcised from the neck up, even if he does hold my precious future in his hands.

To Lederer’s relief, Wexler’s voice suddenly acquired new confidence. This was because he was reading directly from Lederer’s brief. “In March ’81 a reliably assessed defector reported that. .” Cover name Dumbo, Lederer remembered automatically, himself becoming the computer: resettled Paris with a hooker supplied by Resources Section. A year later, it was the hooker who defected. “In May ’81 Signals Intelligence reported that. .” Lederer glanced at Artelli, hoping to catch his eye, but Artelli was hearing signals of his own. “In March again of ’82 a source inside Polish Intelligence while on a liaison visit to Moscow was advised that. .” Cover name Mustapha, Lederer recalled with a fastidious shiver: died of over-enthusiasm while assisting Polish security in its enquiries. With a fumble and a near fall the great Wexler delivered his first punchline of the morning and managed not to fluff it. “And the burden of these indicators, junnlemen, is in every case the same,” he announced, “namely that the entire Balkan effort of an unnamed Western intelligence service is being orchestrated by Czech Intelligence in Prague, and that the leak is occurring under the noses of the Anglo-American intelligence fraternity in Washington.” Nobody leaps in the air however. Colonel Carruthers does not remove his monocle to exclaim “By God, the fiendish cunning!” The sensational force of Wexler’s revelation is six months old. The sedge is withered from the case and no spooks sing.

Lederer decided to listen instead to what Wexler does not say. Nothing about my interrupted tennis training, for example. Nothing about my imperilled marriage, my truncated sex-life, my total noncontribution as a father, starting the morning they hauled me off all other duties and assigned me to the great Wexler as his superslave for twenty-five hours a day. “You have a lawyer’s training, you have Czech language and Czech expertise,” Personnel had told him in as many words. “More appropriately you have a thoroughly sleazy mind. Apply it, Lederer. We expect terrible things of you.” Nothing about the night hours in front of my computer while I typed my damned fingers off, feeding in acres of disconnected data. Why did I do it? What got into me? Mom, I just felt my talent striding out inside of me, so I got on its back and rode away to my destiny. Names and records of all Western intelligence officers past or present in Washington with access to the Czech target, whether central or peripheral consumers: Lederer cans the whole ridiculous assembly in four days cold. Names of all their contacts, details of their travel movements, behaviour patterns, sexual and recreational appetites: Lederer nets them all in a manic Friday-to-Monday while Bee does the praying for both of us. Names of all Czech couriers, officials, legal and illegal travellers passing in and out of the United States, plus separately entered personal descriptions to counteract false passports. Dates and ostensible purpose of such journeys, frequency and duration of stay. Lederer delivers them bound and gagged in three short days and nights while Bee convinces herself he is making it with Maisie Morse from Collation, who has pot smoke coming out of her ears.

Still disdaining these and the many other noble sacrifices of his subordinate, Wexler has embarked on a disastrous paragraph about “incorporating our general awareness of the Czechoslovak methodology in regard to the servicing of and the ah communication with their agents in the field.” An impressed silence follows while the meeting mentally paraphrases.

“Ah, you mean tradecraft, Harry,” says Bo Brammel, who never could resist a quip if he thought it would adorn his reputation, and little Nigel next to him restrains his laughter by patting down his hair.

“Well, yes, sir, I guess that is what I do mean,” Wexler confesses, and Lederer to his surprise feels a yawn of nervous excitement pass over him as the tousled Artelli takes the stage.

* * *

Artelli uses no notes and has a mathematician’s frugality with words. Despite his name, he speaks with a slight French accent that he disguises beneath a Bronx drawl. “As the indicators continued to multiply,” he says, “my section was ordered to make a reappraisal of clandestine radio transmissions beamed from the roof of the Czech Embassy in Washington as well as from certain other identified Czech facilities in the United States, throughout the years ’81 and ’82, notably their consulate in San Francisco. Our people reconsidered skip distances, frequency variations and probable reception zones. They backtracked over all intercepts of that period though we had not been able to break them at the time of their original transmission. They prepared a schedule of such transmissions so that they could be matched against the movements of eligible suspects.”

“Hold on a minute, will you?”

Little Nigel’s head snaps round like a weathervane in a gale. Even Brammel shows distinct signs of human interest. From his exile at the end of the table, Jack Brotherhood is pointing a.45-calibre forefinger straight at Artelli’s navel. And it is symptomatic of the many paradoxes of Lederer’s life that of all the people in the room, Brotherhood is the one whom he would most wish to serve, if ever he had the opportunity, even though — or perhaps because — his occasional efforts to ingratiate himself with his adopted hero have met with iron rebuff.

“Look here, Artelli,” Brotherhood says. “You people have made rather a lot out of the point that every time Pym left the precincts of Washington, whether on leave or in order to visit another town, a particular series of coded transmissions from the Czech Embassy was discontinued. I suspect you are going to make that point again now.”

“With embellishments, yes, I am,” says Artelli pleasantly enough.

Brotherhood’s forefinger remains trained on its mark. Artelli keeps his hands on the table. “The assumption being that if Pym was out of range of their Washington transmitter, the Czechs wouldn’t bother to talk to him?” Brotherhood suggests.

“This is correct.”

“Then every time he came back to the capital they’d pop up again. ‘Hullo it’s you and welcome home.’ Correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well turn it round for a moment, will you? If you were framing a man, isn’t that precisely what you would do too?”

“Not today,” he says equably. “And not in 1981 or ’82. Ten years ago, maybe. Not in the eighties.”

“Why not?”

“I wouldn’t be that dumb. We all know it’s standard intelligence practice to continue transmitting whether or not the party is listening at the other end. It’s my hunch they—” He stops. “Maybe I should leave this one to Mr. Lederer,” he says.

“No you don’t — you tell it to them yourself,” Wexler orders without looking up.

Wexler’s terseness is not unexpected. It is a feature of these meetings, known to everybody present, that a curse, if not an outright embargo, hangs over the use of Lederer’s name. Lederer is their Cassandra. Nobody ever asked Cassandra to preside over a meeting on damage limitation.

Artelli is a chess-player and takes his time. “The communication techniques we were required to observe here were out of fashion even at the time of their use. You get a feel. A smell. A smell of age. A sense of long habituation, one human being to another. Years of it maybe.”

“Well now that’s very special pleading,” Nigel exclaims, quite angry, and continues to sit bolt upright before keeling towards his master, who appears to be trying to shake his head and nod at the same time. Mountjoy says “Hear, hear.” A couple of Brammel’s supporters’ club are making similar farmyard noises. There is hostility in the air, and it is forming on national lines. Brotherhood says nothing but has coloured. Whether anyone apart from himself has noticed this, Lederer does not know. He has coloured, he has lowered his fist, and for a second he appears to have dropped his guard entirely. Lederer hears him growl, “Fanciful twaddle,” but misses the rest because Artelli has decided to continue.

“Our more important discovery relates however to the types of code in these transmissions. As soon as we had the notion of an older type of system, we subjected the transmissions to different analytical methods. Like you don’t immediately look for a steam engine inside the hood of a Cadillac. We decided to read the messages on the assumption they were being received by a man or woman in the field who is of a certain generation of training, and who cannot or dare not store modern coding materials. We looked for more elementary keys. We looked in particular for evidence of non-random texts that would serve as base keys for transposition.”

If anybody here understands what he’s saying, they are not showing it, thinks Lederer.

“When we did this, we at once began to detect a progression in the structure. Right now it’s still algebra. But it’s there. It’s a logical linguistic progression. Maybe it’s a piece of Shakespeare. Maybe it’s a Hottentot nursery rhyme. But there is a pattern emerging that is based upon the continuous text of some such analogue. And that analogue is in effect the codebook for those transmissions. And we feel — maybe it’s a little mystical — that the analogue is — well, like a bond between the field and base. We see it as having almost a human identity. All we need is one word. Preferably but not necessarily the first. After that it’s only a question of time before we identify the rest of the text. Then we’ll break those messages wide open.”

“So when will that be?” says Mountjoy. “About 1990, I suppose.”

“Could be. Could be tonight.”

Suddenly it becomes apparent that Artelli means more than he is saying. The hypothetical has become the specific. Brotherhood is the first to take him up on his innuendo.

“So why tonight?” he says. “Why not 1990?”

“There’s something very peculiar going on with the Czech transmissions overall,” Artelli confesses with a smile. “They’re throwing stuff out at random everywhere. Last night Prague Radio put out a world-wide spook call using some phoney professor who doesn’t exist. Like a cry for help to somebody who’s only in a position to receive spoken word. Then all around the clock we get Mayday calls — for example a high-speed transmission from your Czech Embassy here in London. For four days now, they’ve been bumping high-speed signals into your mainline BBC transmissions. It’s as if the Czechs had lost a kid in the forest and were shouting out any messages that might conceivably get through to him.”

Even before Artelli’s echoless voice has died, Brotherhood is speaking. “Of course there’s a London transmission,” he declares vehemently, laying his fist on the table like a challenge. “Of course the Czechs are stirring it. My goodness, how many times do we have to put this to you? For two damned years, there have been Czech transmissions in any part of the globe where Pym sets foot and they do, naturally, coincide with his movements. It’s a radio game. That’s how you play the radio game when you’re framing a man. You persist and you repeat and you wait till the other fellow’s nerve cracks. The Czechs are not fools. Sometimes I think we are.”

Unbothered, Artelli turns his twisted smile to Lederer as if to say, “See if you can impress them.” At which Grant Lederer allows himself an irrelevant memory of his wife Bee splayed above him in her naked glory, making love to him like all the angels in Heaven.

“Sir Michael, I have to start at the other end,” Lederer says brightly in a prepared opening, straight at Brammel. “I have to pick up in Vienna just ten days ago, if you don’t mind, sir, and track back from there to Washington.”

Nobody is looking at him. Start wherever you must, they were saying, and get it over with.

* * *

A different Lederer has broken loose inside him and he greets this version of himself with pleasure. I am the bounty hunter, shuttling between London, Washington and Vienna with Pym perpetually in my sights. I am the Lederer who, as Bee vociferously complained when we were safe from microphones, took Pym into bed with us every night, woke sweating with self-doubt in the fitful hours, woke again in the morning with Pym once more firmly between us: “I’ll get you, boy. I’ll nail you.” The Lederer who for the last twelve months — ever since Pym’s name began to wink at me from the computer screen — has tracked him first as an abstraction, then as a fellow screwball. Has posed with him on spurious committees as his earnest and admiring colleague. Shared jolly drunken picnics with family Pym in the Vienna woods, then rushed back to my desk and set to work with fresh vigour to rip apart what I have just enjoyed. I am the Lederer who too easily attaches himself, then punishes whatever holds him tight; the Lederer who is grateful for every wiry smile and casual pat of encouragement from the great Wexler, my master, only to round on him minutes later, lampooning him, degrading him in my overheated mind, punishing him for being yet another disappointment to me.

Never mind that I am twenty years Pym’s junior. What I recognise in Pym is what I recognise in myself: a spirit so wayward that, even while I am playing a game of Scrabble with my kids it can swing between the options of suicide, rape and assassination. “He’s one of us, for Christ’s sake!” Lederer wants to scream at the sleeping potentates around him. “Not one of you. One of me. We’re howling psychopaths, the both of us.” But of course Lederer doesn’t scream that or anything else. He talks sanely and wisely about his computer. And about a man named Petz, also known as Hampel and Zaworski, who travels almost as much as Lederer and exactly as much as Pym, but takes more trouble than either of us to conceal his tracks.

But first, in the same perfectly balanced and dispassionate voice, Lederer describes the situation as it had stood in August, when it was agreed on both sides — Lederer casts a respectful glance towards his hero Brotherhood — that the Pym case should be abandoned and the committee of investigation dissolved.

“But it wasn’t abandoned, was it?” Brotherhood says, not bothering this time to give warning of his interruption. “You kept a watch going on his house and I don’t mind betting you left a few other meters ticking too.”

Lederer glances at Wexler. Wexler scowls into his hands to say keep me ah out of this. But Lederer has no intention of fielding that ball, and waits boorishly for Wexler to do it for him.

“The determination on our side, Jack, was that we should capitalise the ah existing appropriation of resources,” Wexler says reluctantly. “We opted here for a gradual reduction of a — ah phased and undramatic running down.”

In the silence Brammel gives a sporting smile. “So you mean you did keep the surveillance going? Is that what you’re saying?”

“On a limited basis only, very low key, very minimal at all levels, Bo.”

“I rather thought we said we’d all call off our dogs at once, Harry. We certainly kept our half of the bargain, I know.”

“The ah Agency decided here to honour that agreement in spirit, Bo, but also in light of what was deemed operationally expedient having regard to ah all the known facts and indicators.”

“Thanks,” says Mountjoy and tosses down his pencil like a man refusing food.

But this time Wexler bites back and Wexler can do that: “I think you may find your gratitude is well placed, sir,” he snaps, and pushes his knuckles combatively across the tip of his nose.

The case of Hans Albrecht Petz, Lederer continues, surfaced six months ago in a context that at first sight had nothing whatever to do with the case against Pym. Petz was simply another Czech journalist who had appeared at an East-West conference in Salzburg and been talent-spotted as a new face. An older man, withdrawn but intelligent, passport details supplied. Lederer put his name on watch and signalled Langley for a routine background check. Langley signalled “nothing recorded against” but warned that it was irregular that a man of Petz’s age and profession should not have come to notice. A month later Petz surfaced again in Linz, purportedly to cover an agricultural fair. He didn’t hobnob with other journalists, didn’t try to ingratiate himself, was seen seldom at the tents and contributed nothing. When Lederer had his press readers comb the Czech press for contributions by Petz, the most they came up with was two paragraphs in the Socialist Farmer, signed “H.A.P.,” on the limitations of Western heavy tractors. Then, just when Lederer was disposed to forget about him, Langley came back with a positive identification. Hans Albrecht Petz was identical with one Alexander Hampel, a Czech intelligence officer, who had recently attended a conference of non-aligned journalists in Athens. Do not approach Petz-Hampel without an authorisation. Stand by for more information.

Hearing himself say “Athens,” Lederer has a feeling that the air pressure has dropped inside the safe room.

“Athens when?” Brotherhood growls irritably. “How can we follow this stuff without dates?”

Nigel’s hair has become a sudden and intense worry to him. He is shaping the greying horns above one ear again and again with his immaculate fingertips while he frowns in pain.

Wexler once more cuts in, and to Lederer’s pleasure he is beginning to shed his shyness and respect. “Athens conference was July 15 to 18, Jack. Hampel was sighted on the first day only. He kept his hotel room the three nights but didn’t sleep in it once. Paid cash. According to Greek records he arrived Athens on July 14 and never left the country. Most likely he went out on a different passport. Looks like he flew to Corfu. Greek flight lists are the usual pig’s breakfast, but looks like he flew to Corfu,” he repeats. “By this time we’re getting very interested in this man.”

“Aren’t we running ahead?” says Brammel, whose sense of the proprieties is never sharper than in moments of crisis. “I mean damn it, Harry, it’s the same old game. It’s guilt by coincidence. It’s no different to the radio stuff. If we were looking to frame a man, we’d play the same game on them. We’d get some old member of the Firm, a bit tarnished but nothing discreditable, and we’d run him parallel to some poor chap’s movements and wait for the opposition to say ‘W hoo-hoo, our man’s a spy.’ Get them to shoot themselves in the foot. Dead easy. All right. Hampel is trailing Pym around. But what’s to show that Pym’s an active partner?”

“At that point in time nothing, sir,” Lederer confesses with false humility, stepping in on Wexler’s behalf. “However we had by then established a retrospective link between Pym and Hans Albrecht Petz. At the time of the Salzburg conference, Pym and his wife were attending a music festival there. Petz was staying about two hundred yards from the Pyms’ hotel.”

“Same story over again,” says Brammel doggedly. “It’s a set-up. Sticks out a mile. Right, Nigel?”

“It’s awfully tenuous actually,” Nigel says.

The air pressure again. Maybe the machines kill the oxygen as well as the sound, thinks Lederer. “Do you mind telling us the date when that Athens trace came through?” asks Brotherhood, still on the matter of the timing.

“Ten days ago, sir,” says Lederer.

“Bloody slow about advising us, weren’t you?”

In anger Wexler finds his words faster: “Well now, Jack, we were pretty damn reluctant to present you people prematurely with yet another series of computerised coincidences.” And to Lederer, his whipping boy: “What the hell are you waiting for?”

It is ten days ago. Lederer is crouched in the communications room in the Station in Vienna. It is night and he has bowed out of two cocktail invitations and one dinner by pretending a light flu. He has phoned Bee and let her hear the excitement in his voice and he has half a mind to rush back and tell her then and there, because he has always told her everything anyway — and sometimes when trade was poor a little more than everything in order to keep the image going. But he holds on to himself. And though his fingers are frozen in the joints from the sheer tension of it, he keeps on typing. First he calls up the most recent schedules of Pym’s known movements in and out of Vienna and establishes, almost as a matter of course, that he visited both Salzburg and Linz on precisely the same dates as Petz alias Hampel.

“Linz too?” Brotherhood interrupts sharply.

“Yes, sir!”

“You followed him there, I suppose — contrary to our agreement?”

“No, sir, we did not follow Magnus to Linz. I had my wife Bee call Mary Pym. Bee elicited the information in the course of an innocent conversation, woman to woman, on another matter, Mr. Brotherhood.”

“He might still not have gone to Linz. Could have told his wife a cover story.”

Lederer is at pains to concede that this is possible but gently suggests that it hardly matters, sir, in view of Langley’s signal of that same night, which signal he now reads aloud to his assembled Anglo-American lords of intelligence. “It arrived on my desk five minutes after we had the Linz connection, sir. I quote: ‘Petz-Hampel also identical with Jerzy Zaworski, born Carlsbad 1925, West German journalist of Czech origin who made nine legal journeys to United States in 1981, ’82.’”

“Perfect,” says Brammel under his breath.

“Birthdates are of course approximations in these cases,” Lederer continues undaunted. “It is our experience that alias passports have the tendency to give the bearer a year or two.”

The signal is hardly on Lederer’s desk, he says, before he is typing in the dates and destinations of Herr Zaworski’s visits to America. And then it was — says Lederer, though not in as many words — that with one touch of the button everything came together, continents merged, three journalists in their late fifties became a single Czech spy of uncertain age, and Grant Lederer III, thanks to the flawless insulation of the signals room, was able to scream “Hallelujah!” and “Bee, I love you!” to the padded walls.

“Every American city visited by Petz-Hampel-Zaworski in 1981 and 1982 was visited by Pym on the same dates,” Lederer intones. “During those dates the relevant clandestine transmissions from the Czech Embassy roof were discontinued, the reason in our estimation being that a personal encounter was occurring between the agent in the field and his visiting controller. Radio transmissions were accordingly superfluous.”

“It’s beautiful,” says Brammel. “I’d like to find the Czech intelligence officer who thought this one up and give him my private Oscar immediately.”

With a pained discretion Mick Carver lifts a briefcase gently to the table and extracts a bunch of folders.

“This is Langley’s profile as of now on Petz-Hampel-Zaworski, Pym’s presumed controller,” he explains in the patient manner of a salesman bent on showing off a new technology, despite the obstruction of the older element. “We expect a couple more updates in the next immediate while, maybe even tonight. Bo, when does Magnus return to Vienna, do you mind telling us, please?”

Brammel like all the rest of them is peering into his folder, so it is natural he should not reply at once. “When we tell him to, I suppose,” he says carelessly, turning a page. “Not before, that’s for certain. As you say, his father’s death was rather providential. Old man left quite a mess, I gather. Magnus has a lot to sort out.”

“Where is he now?” says Wexler.

Brammel looks at his watch. “Having dinner, I should imagine. Nearly time, isn’t it?”

“Where’s he staying?” Wexler insists.

Brammel smiles. “Now Harry, I don’t think I’m going to tell you that. We do have some rights in our own country, you know, and your chaps have been a bit overeager on the surveillance stakes.”

Wexler is nothing if not stubborn. “Last we heard of him, he was at London Airport checking in to his flight to Vienna. Our information is he’d wrapped up his affairs over here and was heading back to his post. What the hell happened?”

Nigel has clasped his hands together. He sets them, still clasped, on the table to indicate that, small or not, he is speaking. “You haven’t been following him over here too, have you? That really would be going it.”

Wexler rubs his chin. His expression is rueful but undefeated. He turns again to Brammel. “Bo, we need a piece of this. If this is a Czech deception operation it’s the damnedest, most ingenious case I ever heard of.”

“Pym is a most ingenious officer,” Brammel countered. “He’s been a thorn in the Czechs’ side for thirty years. He’s worth a lot of trouble on their part.”

“Bo, you’ve got to pull Pym in and you’ve got to interrogate the living shit out of him. If you don’t, we’re going to go around and around this thing till we’ve all got grey hairs and some of us are in our graves. Those are our secrets he’s been fooling with as well as yours. We have some very heavy questions to put to him and some fine people trained to put them.”

“Harry, you have my word that when the moment is ripe, you and your people shall have as much of him as you want.”

“Maybe the moment’s right now,” Wexler says, sticking out his jaw. “Maybe we should be there from when he starts to sing. Hit him while he’s soft.”

“And maybe you should trust sufficiently in our judgment to bide your time,” Nigel purrs sleekly in reply, and casts Wexler a very reassuring glance over the top of his reading spectacles.

A most strange impulse, meanwhile, is taking hold of Lederer. He feels it rising in him and can no more check himself than if it were an urge to vomit. In this self-renewing cycle of compromise and double-think he needs to externalise the secret affinity between himself and Magnus. To assert his monopoly of understanding of the man and underline the personal nature of his triumph. To be at the centre still, and not shoved out to the bleachers where he came from.

“Sir, you mentioned Pym’s father,” he bursts out, talking straight at Brammel. “Sir, I know about that father. I have a father who is not in certain ways dissimilar, only in degree. Mine’s a small-time iffy lawyer and honesty is not his strong suit. No, sir. But that father of Pym’s was a total crook. A con artist. Our psychiatrists have assembled a really disturbing profile of that man. Do you know that when Richard T. Pym was in New York he faked a whole empire of bogus companies? Borrowed money from the most unlikely people, really some important people? I mean listed. There’s a serious strain of controlled instability here. We have a paper on this.” He was overrunning himself but couldn’t stop. “I mean Jesus, do you know Magnus made the most wild pass at my own wife? I don’t grudge him that. She’s an attractive woman. What I mean is the guy’s everywhere. He’s all over the place. That English cool of his is just veneer.”

Not for the first time Lederer has just committed suicide. Nobody hears him, nobody shouts “Wow, you don’t say!” And when Brammel speaks, his voice is as cold as charity and as late in arriving.

“Yes, well, I always assume that businessmen are crooks, don’t you, Harry? I’m sure we all do.” He glances round the table at everyone but Lederer and comes back to Wexler. “Harry, why don’t you and I get our heads together for an hour, shall we? If there’s to be a hostile interrogation at some stage, I’m sure we should agree on some guidelines in advance. Nigel, why don’t you come along to see fair play? The rest of us—” His gaze falls on Brotherhood and he awards him a particularly confiding smile. “Well, we’ll simply say see you all later. You will leave in pairs, won’t you, when you’ve done your reading? Not all at once, it scares the local peasants. Thank you.”

Brammel leaves, Wexler waddles boldly after him, a man who has made his point and doesn’t care who knows it. Nigel waits till they have all left, then like a busy undertaker hastens round the table and takes Brotherhood’s arm in a fraternal gesture.

“Jack,” he whispers. “Well put, well played. We absolutely stymied them. A word in your ear away from the microphones, yes?”

* * *

It was early afternoon. The safe house where they had met was a pseudo-Regency villa with jewellers’ screens across the windows. A warm fog hung over the gravel drive and Lederer loitered in it like a murderer waiting for Brotherhood’s hulk to fill the lighted porch. Mountjoy and Dorney passed by him without a word. Carver, accompanied by Artelli and his briefcase, was more explicit. “I have to live here, Lederer. I just hope that this time either you make it stick or they post the hell out of you.”

Bastard, thought Lederer.

At last Jack Brotherhood emerged, speaking cryptically to Nigel. Lederer watched them jealously. Nigel turned and went back inside. Brotherhood walked forward.

“Mr. Brotherhood, sir? Jack? It’s me. Lederer.”

Brotherhood came slowly to a halt. He was wearing his usual grimy raincoat and a muffler, and he had lit one of his yellow cigarettes.

“What do you want?”

“Jack. I want to tell you that whatever happens, and whatever he’s done or not done, I’m sorry it’s him and I’m sorry it’s you.”

“Probably hasn’t done anything at all. Probably recruited one of the other side and hasn’t told us, knowing him. My guess is you’ve got the story inside out.”

“Would he do that, Magnus? Play a lone hand with the enemy and not tell anybody? Jesus, that’s dynamite! If I ever tried that, Langley would skin me.”

Unbidden, he fell in beside Brotherhood. A policeman stood at the gate. They passed the Royal Horse Artillery Barracks. The sound of hoofs clattered at them from the parade ground but the horses were hidden in the fog. Brotherhood was striding fast. Lederer had difficulty keeping up.

“I feel really bad, Jack,” Lederer confessed. “Nobody seems to understand what it’s been like for me to have to do this to a friend. It’s not just Magnus. It’s Bee and Mary and the kids and everybody. Becky and Tom are real sweethearts. It kind of made all of us consider ourselves in many ways. There’s a pub right here. Can I buy you a drink?”

“Got to see a man about a dog, I’m afraid.”

“Can I drop you somewhere? I have a car and driver right here around the corner.”

“Prefer to walk if you don’t mind.”

“Magnus told me a lot about you, Jack. I guess he broke some of the rules but that’s how we were. We really shared. It was a great liaison. That’s the crazy thing. We really were the Special Relationship. And I believe in that. I believe in the Anglo-Saxon alliance, the Atlantic Pact, the whole bit. You remember that burglary you and Magnus did together in Warsaw?”

“Don’t think I do, I’m afraid.”

“Oh come on, Jack. How you lowered him through a skylight? Like in the Bible? And you had these fake Polish cops downstairs on the doorstep in case the quarry came home unexpectedly? He said you were like a father to him. You know how he referred to you once? ‘Grant,’ he said to me. ‘Jack is the true champion of the great game.’ You know what I feel? I think if Magnus’s writing had ever worked for him, he’d have been okay. There’s just too much inside him. He has to put it somewhere.” He was breathing a little hastily between his words, but he insisted on keeping up; he had to get it right with Brotherhood. “You see, sir, I’ve read a great deal recently about the creativity of the criminal mind.”

“Oh he’s a criminal now, is he?”

“Please. Let me quote you something I read.” They had reached a crossing and were waiting for the lights. “‘ What is the difference, in morality, between the totally anarchic criminality of the artist, which is endemic in all fine creative minds, and the artistry of the criminal?’”

“Can’t do it, I’m afraid. Too many long words. Sorry about that.”

“Hell, Jack, we’re licensed crooks, that’s all I’m saying. What’s our racket? Know what our racket is? It is to place our larcenous natures at the service of the state. So I mean why should I feel different about Magnus just because maybe he got the mix a little wrong? I can’t. Magnus is still exactly the same man I spent these great times with! And I’m still the same man who had these times with Magnus. Nothing’s changed except we’ve landed on different sides of the net. You know we talked about defection once? Where we would go if we ever cut and run? Left our wives and kids and work, and just stepped into the blue? We were that close, Jack. We literally thought the unthinkable. We really did. We were amazing.”

They had entered St. John’s Wood High Street, and were heading towards Regent’s Park. Brotherhood’s pace had increased.

“Where did he say he’d go, then?” Brotherhood snapped. “Back to Washington? Moscow?”

“Home. He said there was only ever one place. Home. I mean this shows you. The man loves his country, Mr. Brotherhood. Magnus is no renegade.”

“Didn’t know he had a home,” said Brotherhood. “Vagrant childhood, he always told me.”

“Home is a little seaside town in Wales. It has a very ugly Victorian church. It has a very strict landlady who shuts him in at 10 p.m. And one of these days Magnus is going to lock himself in that upstairs room and write his ass off till he comes out with all twelve volumes of Pym’s answer to Proust.”

Brotherhood might not have heard. He strode faster.

“Home is childhood re-created, Mr. Brotherhood. If defection is a self-renewal, it requires also a rebirth.”

“That his stupid phrase or yours?”

“Mine and his equally. We discussed all this and we discussed much, much more. Know why so many defectors redefect? We had that one straight too. It’s in and out of the womb all the time. Have you ever noticed that about defectors — the one common factor in all that crazy band? They’re immature. Forgive me, they are literally motherfuckers.”

“Have a name, this place?”

“Pardon?”

“This Welsh paradise of his. What’s it called?”

“He never said a name. All he said was it was near the castle where he grew up with his mother, in an area with great houses, where he and his mother used to go to the hunts, dance at the Christmas balls and mix quite democratically with the servants.”

“Have you ever come across Czechs using back numbers of newspapers?” Brotherhood asked.

Momentarily thrown by the change of tack, Lederer was obliged to pause and consider.

“It’s a case a colleague of mine is running,” Brotherhood said. “He asked me. Czech agent always grubbing around for last week’s newspapers before he takes a walk up the road. Why would he do that?”

“I’ll tell you why. It’s a standard thing,” said Lederer, recovering. “Old hat, but standard. We had a Joe like that, a double. The Czechs trained him for days, just in how to roll exposed film into newspaper. Took him out into the streets at night, made him find a dark area. Poor bastard nearly froze his fingers off. It was twenty below.”

“I said back numbers,” Brotherhood said.

“Sure. There’s two ways. One way they use the day of the month, the other way they use the day of the week. Day of the month is a nightmare: thirty-one standard messages to be learned by heart. It’s the eighteenth of the month so it’s ‘Meet me behind the gentleman’s convenience in Brno at nine-thirty and don’t be late.’ It’s the sixth so ‘W here the hell’s my monthly pay cheque?’” He giggled breathlessly but Brotherhood did not reciprocate. “The days of the week, that’s a shortened version of the same thing.”

“Thanks, I’ll pass it on,” said Brotherhood, drawing to a halt at last.

“Sir, I can imagine no greater honour than taking you out to dinner tonight,” Lederer said, now quite desperate for Brotherhood’s absolution. “I cast aspersions on one of your men, that’s duty. But if I were ever able to separate the personal and the official sides, I’d be a happy man, sir. Jack?”

The taxi was already drawing up.

“What is it?”

“Do you think you could give Magnus a message for me — a friendly one?”

“What is it?”

“Tell him any time — when it’s over — any place. I’ll be there as his friend.”

With a nod Brotherhood climbed into the taxi and rode away before Lederer could hear his destination.

What Lederer did next should go into history, if not into the larger history of the Pym affair then at least into his own exasperating personal chronicle of seeing everything with perfect vision and being repeatedly dismissed as an unwelcome prophet. Lederer struggled into a phone box intending to call Carver, only to discover he had no English coins. He dived into the Mulberry Arms, fought his way to the bar and bought a beer he did not want in order to have change. He returned to the phone box to find it didn’t work, so he pelted back down the road in search of his driver, who, having watched Lederer march by with Brotherhood, had assumed he was no longer required and had driven home to Battersea where he had a friend. At nine o’clock, Lederer burst in upon Carver at the U.S. Embassy, where Carver was drafting a signal on the day’s events.

“They’re lying!” Lederer shouted.

“Who are?”

“The fucking Brits! Pym’s flown the coop. They don’t know where he is from the man in the fucking moon. I asked Brotherhood to pass him this totally subversive message and he sweet-mouthed me to keep me off the track. Pym jumped ship at London Airport and they’re looking for him the same way we are. Those Czech radio transmissions are kosher. The Brits are looking for him, we’re looking for him. And the fucking Czechs are looking for him all over. Listen to me!”

Carver had listened. Carver continued to listen. He took Lederer through his conversation with Brotherhood and concluded it should not have taken place and that Lederer had exceeded his competence. He did not say this to Lederer but he made a note of it, and later that night in a separate telegram to the Agency’s personnel people he took care that this note was added to Lederer’s file. At the same time he accepted that Lederer might well have stumbled upon the truth, even if by the wrong route, and said this also. Thus Carver covered his back all ways, while at the same time knifing an unpleasing interloper. Never bad.

“The British are not playing this straight,” he confided to people he knew at the top. “I am going to have to watch this very carefully.”

* * *

The Headmaster’s study smelt of killing bottles. Mr. Caird, though he hated violence, was a passionate lepidopterist. A grim portrait of our founder G. F. Grimble glowered down on cracked leather chairs. In one of them sat Tom. Brotherhood sat opposite him. Tom was looking at the photograph from the Langley folder on Petz-Hampel-Zaworski. Brotherhood was looking at Tom. Mr. Caird had shaken Brotherhood’s hand and left them to it.

“That the one who walked your dad round the cricket ground in Corfu?” said Brotherhood, watching Tom.

“Yes, sir.”

“You weren’t far wrong with your description then, were you?”

“No, sir.”

“I thought you’d be amused.”

“I am.”

“He doesn’t limp in the photograph, so he doesn’t look so hobbly. Had any more letters from your dad? Phone calls?”

“No, sir.”

“Written to him?”

“Don’t know where to send it, sir.”

“Why don’t you give it to me?”

Tom delved inside his grey pullover and unearthed a sealed envelope with no name or address on it. Brotherhood took it from him, and took back the photograph too.

“That inspector fellow hasn’t been back to trouble you, has he?”

“No, sir.”

“Anyone else been?”

“Not really, sir.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s just so odd you coming tonight.”

“Why?”

“It’s maths prep,” said Tom. “It’s my worst thing.”

“I expect you’d like to get back to it then.” He took Pym’s crushed letter from his pocket and handed it across the gap. “Thought you might like this back, too. It’s a fine letter. You should be proud.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Your dad talks there about an Uncle Syd. Who’s that? ‘If you’re ever down on your luck,’ he says, ‘or if you need a warm meal and a laugh or a bed for the night, don’t forget your Uncle Syd.’ Who’s Uncle Syd, when he’s at home?”

“Syd Lemon, sir.”

“Where does he live?”

“Surbiton, sir. By a railway.”

“Old man, is he? Youngish?”

“He looked after Dad when he was small. He was a friend of Granddad’s. He’s got a wife called Meg but she’s dead.”

They both stood up.

“Dad’s still all right, isn’t he, sir?” said Tom.

Brotherhood’s shoulders stiffened. “You’re to go to your mother, d’you hear? Your mother or me. No one else. That’s if things get tough.” He pulled an old leatherbound box from his jacket pocket. “This is for you.”

Tom opened it. A medal lay inside with a piece of ribbon attached to it — crimson with narrow dark blue stripes on either side.

“What did you get it for?” said Tom.

“Sticking out dark nights alone.” A bell was ringing. “Now run along and do your job,” said Brotherhood.

* * *

The night was foul. Gusts of rain tore across the windscreen as Brotherhood negotiated the narrow lane. The car was a souped-up Ford from the Firm’s pool and he had only to stroke the accelerator for it to lunge towards the hedge. Magnus Pym, he thought: traitor and Czech spy. If I know, why don’t they? How many times, in how many ways, do they need the proof before they act on it? A pub loomed suddenly out of the rain. He pulled into the forecourt and drank a scotch before going to the phone. Call me on my private line, old boy, Nigel had said expansively.

“The man in the picture is our friend from Corfu. No question about it,” Brotherhood reported.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. The boy’s sure. I’m sure he’s sure. When are you going to give the order to evacuate?”

A muffled crackle while Nigel put his fist over the mouthpiece the other end. But not, presumably, the earpiece.

“I want those Joes out, Nigel. Get them out. Tell Bo to get his head out of the sand and give the order.”

Long silence.

“We’re tuning in at 0500 tomorrow,” said Nigel. “Come back to London and get some sleep.” He rang off.

London was east. Brotherhood headed south, following the signs to Reading. In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job.

The letter to Tom was postmarked Reading, he rehearsed. Posted Monday night or first thing Tuesday morning.

He rang me on Monday evening, Kate had said.

He rang me on Monday evening, Belinda had said.

Reading station resembled a low redbrick stable set at one end of a tawdry square. A poster in the concourse gave the times of coaches to and from Heathrow. That’s what you did, he thought. That’s what I’d do. At Heathrow you put up your smokescreen about planes to Scotland, then you hopped a coach to Reading to keep things nice and private. He considered the coach stop, then cast a long slow look around the square until his eye fell at last on the ticket kiosk. He wandered over to it. The clerk wore a small metal wheel in the buttonhole of his jacket. Brotherhood put five pounds in the tray.

“I’d like some change, please, to telephone.”

“Sorry, mate. Can’t do,” the clerk said, and went on with his newspaper.

“You could do it last Monday night though, couldn’t you?” The clerk’s head came up fast.

Brotherhood’s office pass was green with a red diagonal line drawn in transparent ink across his photograph. A notice on the back said that if found it should be returned to the Ministry of Defence. The clerk looked at both sides of it and gave it back.

“I haven’t seen one like that before,” he said.

“Tall fellow,” Brotherhood said. “Carried a black briefcase. Probably wore a black tie as well. Well spoken, nice manner. Had a lot of calls to make. Remember?”

The clerk vanished, to be replaced a minute later by a tubby Indian with exhausted, visionary eyes.

“Were you on duty here Monday evening?” Brotherhood said.

“Sir, I was the man who was on duty on Monday evening,” he replied warily, as if he might not be that man any more.

“A pleasant gentleman in a black tie.”

“I know, I know. My colleague has acquainted me with all the details.”

“How much change did you give him?”

“Good heavens above, what does that matter? If I elect to give a man change, that is my personal preference, a matter for my pocket and my conscience that has nothing to do with anybody.”

“How much change did you give him?”

“Five pounds exactly. Five he wanted, five he got.”

“What in?”

“Fifty p’s exclusively. He wished to make no local calls at all. I questioned him about this and he was entirely consistent in his answers. I mean where is the hardship in this? Where is the sinister element?”

“What did he pay you with?”

“To my recollection, he gave me a ten-pound note. I cannot be completely certain but that is my imperfect recollection: that he gave me a ten-pound note from his wallet, accompanied by the words ‘Here you are.’”

“Did the ten pounds cover his rail ticket too?”

“This was totally unproblematical. The price of a second-class single fare to London is four pounds and thirty pence exactly. I gave him ten fifties and the balance in small change. Now have you further questions? I seriously hope not. Police, police, you know. If it’s one enquiry a day, it’s half a dozen.”

“Is this the man?” said Brotherhood. He was holding a photograph showing Pym and Mary at their wedding.

“But that is you, sir. In the background. I think you are giving the bride away. Are you sure you are engaged in an official enquiry? This is a most irregular photograph.”

“Is this the man?”

“Well I’m not saying it is not, put it that way.”

Pym would take him off perfectly, thought Brotherhood. Pym would catch that accent to a tee. He stood at the barrier studying the timetable of trains leaving Reading station after eleven o’clock on a weekday night. You went anywhere except to London because London is where you bought your ticket to. You had time. Time to make your maudlin telephone calls. Time to write your maudlin letter to Tom. Your plane left Heathrow at eight-forty without you. By eight o’clock latest you had done your turnaround. By eight-fifteen, according to the testimony of the airport travel clerk, you had put up your little smokescreen about planes to Scotland. After that you hightailed it to the Reading-bound coach, pulled down the brim of your hat and said goodbye to the airport as quickly and quietly as you knew how.

Brotherhood walked back to the coach timetable. Time to kill, he repeated to himself. Say you caught the eight-thirty from Heathrow. Between nine- and ten-thirty there were half a dozen trains in both directions out of Reading but you caught none of them. You wrote to Tom instead. Where from? He went back to the square. In the neon-lit pub there. In the fish-and-chip shop. In the all-night café where the tarts sit. Somewhere in this dowdy square you sat down and told Tom what to do when the world ended.

The telephone box stood at the station entrance, under a bright light that was supposed to deter vandals. Smashed glass and paper cups cluttered the floor. Graffiti and promises of love defaced the awful grey paint. But it was a good telephone, for all that. You could watch the whole square from it while you said your goodbyes. A mail box was let into the wall close by. And that’s where you posted it, saying whatever happens, remember that I love you. After which you went to Wales. Or to Scotland. Or you popped over to Norway to watch the migration of the reindeer. Or you hightailed it to Canada and prepared to eat out of tins. Or you did something that was all these things and none of them, in an upstairs room with a view of the church and the sea.

Reaching his flat in Shepherd Market, Brotherhood was still not quite done. The Firm’s official police contact was a Detective Superintendent Bellows at Scotland Yard. Brotherhood rang his home number.

“What have you got for me on that ennobled gentleman I mentioned to you this morning?” he asked, and to his relief detected no note of reservation in Bellows’s voice as he read him out the details. Brotherhood wrote them down.

“Can you do me another one for tomorrow?”

“It’ll be a pleasure.”

“Lemon, believe it or not. First name Syd or Sydney. Old chap, widowed, lives in Surbiton, close to a railway.”

Reluctantly Brotherhood phoned Head Office and asked for Nigel of Secretariat. Belatedly, and in the teeth of more larcenous instincts, he knew he must conform. Just as he had conformed this afternoon when he poured scorn on the Americans. Just as in the end he had always conformed, not out of slavishness but because he believed in the fight and, despite everything, the team. A lot of atmospherics followed while Nigel was located. They went over to scramble.

“What’s the matter?” said Nigel rudely.

“The book Artelli was talking about. The analogue, he called it.”

“I thought he was perfectly ridiculous. Bo is going to take it to the highest level.”

“Tell them to try Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus. On a hunch. Tell them to be sure to use an early text.”

A long silence. More atmospherics. He’s in the bath, thought Brotherhood. He’s in bed with a woman, or whatever he likes.

“Now how are you spelling that?” said Nigel warily.