Our kind of traitor

8

At midday of a sunny Sunday, ten hours after Perry Makepiece returned to Primrose Hill to make his peace with Gail, Luke Weaver renounced his place at the family lunch table – his wife Eloise having cooked a plump free-range chicken and bread sauce specially, his son Ben having invited an Israeli school friend – and with his apologies ringing in his ears, abandoned the red-bricked terrace house on Parliament Hill that he could ill afford, and set off for what he believed was the decisive meeting of his chequered Intelligence career.

His destination, as far as Eloise and Ben were allowed to know, was his Service's hideous riverside headquarters in Lambeth, dubbed by Eloise, who was of aristocratic French extraction, la Lubianka-sur-Tamise. In reality it was Bloomsbury, as it had been for the last three months. His chosen mode of transport, either in spite of the tension brewing in him or because of it, was neither tube nor bus, but shanks's pony, a habit he had acquired during his stints in Moscow where three hours of pavement-bashing in all weathers were standard fare if you were looking to clear a dead letter box or sidestep into an open doorway for a thirty-second breathless handover of cash and materials.

To reach Bloomsbury from Parliament Hill on foot, a walk for which Luke customarily allowed himself a good hour, it was his practice, so far as possible, to take a different route each day, the purpose being not to shake off notional pursuers, though the thought was seldom far from his head, but to savour the byways of a city he was keen to get to know again after years of service overseas.

And today, what with the sunshine and the need to clear his head for action, he had decided on a stroll through Regent's Park before swinging eastwards across town; and to that end had added an extra half-hour to his journey. His mood, shot through with anticipation and excitement, was also one of dread. He had slept little if at all. He needed to steady the kaleidoscope. He needed ordinary, unsecret folk to look at, flowers, and the world outside.

'A wholehearted yes from him, and a wholehearted yes, damn you from her,' Hector had enthused over the encrypted phone. 'Billy Boy will hear us out at two this afternoon and the Lord is in His Heaven.'

*

Six months ago, when Luke was back on home leave after three years in Bogota, the Queen of Human Resources, disrespectfully known throughout the Service as the Human Queen, had informed him that he was headed for the shelf. He had expected no less. All the same, her message took him a few painful seconds to decode:

'The Service is surviving the recession with its usual proverbial resilience, Luke,' she assured him, in a tone so blithely optimistic that he could have been forgiven for thinking that, far from being thrown out on his ear, he was about to be offered a Regional Directorship. 'Our stock in Whitehall has frankly never been higher, I'm pleased to say, nor our job of recruitment easier. Eighty per cent of our latest intake of young hopefuls have got First Class Honours degrees from decent universities and nobody talks about Iraq any more. Some of them Double Firsts. Would you believe it?'

Luke would believe it, but forbore from saying that he had acquitted himself pretty decently for twenty years on the strength of a modest Second.

The only real problem these days, she explained, in the same determinedly upbeat tone, was that men of Luke's calibre and pay grade who had reached their natural watershed were becoming harder and harder to place. And some just couldn't be placed at all, she lamented. But what was she to do – tell her – with a young Chief who liked his staff to have no Cold War baggage attached to them? It was just too sad.

So the very best she could manage, she was afraid, Luke, superb as he'd been in Bogota, and terribly brave – and incidentally the way he conducted his private life was nothing whatever to do with her, provided it didn't affect his work, which patently it hadn't – all spoken in a gabble between brackets – would be a temporary vacancy in Administration until the present incumbent returned from her maternity leave.

Meanwhile, it might be a good idea for him to have a chat with the Service's Resettlement people to see what they had to offer in the big world: which, contrary to all the nonsense he might have read in his newspaper, wasn't all doom and gloom by any means. The terror thing, and the threat of civil unrest, were doing wonders for the private-security sector. Some of her very best ex-officers were earning twice as much as they'd earned in the Service, and loving it. With a field record like his – and his private life settled, which by all accounts it was, although it was nothing to do with her – she had no doubt at all that Luke would be a hugely desirable asset to his next employer.

'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 amp; 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 Bogota – 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 Bogota,' 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 Bogota 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. Dear Luke,

This is to assure you that the very private conversation you are conducting with our mutual colleague over lunch at his club today takes place with my unofficial approval.

Ever, – - then a very small signature which looked as if it had been extracted at gunpoint: William J. Matlock (Head of Secretariat), better known as Billy Boy Matlock – or plain Bully Boy if that was your preference, as it was for those who had fallen foul of him – the Service's longest-standing and most implacable troubleshooter and left-hand man to the Chief himself.

'Load of horseshit, as a matter of fact, but what else can the poor bugger do?' Hector was remarking, as he returned the letter to its envelope and stuffed the envelope into an inside pocket of his mangy sports coat. 'They know I'm right, don't want me to be, don't know what to do if I am. Don't want me pissing into the tent, don't want me pissing out of it. Lock me up and gag me's the only answer, but I don't take kindly to that, never did. Nor did you, by all accounts – why weren't you eaten by tigers or whatever they have out there?'

'It was insects mainly.'

'Leeches?'

'Those too.'

'Don't hover. Take a pew.'

Luke obediently sat down. But Hector remained standing, hands thrust deep in his pockets, shoulders stooped, glowering into the unlit fireplace with its ancient brass tongs and pokers and cracked leather surrounds. And it occurred to Luke that the atmosphere inside the library had become oppressive, if not threatening. And perhaps Hector felt it too, because his flippancy deserted him, and his hollowed, sickly face turned as grim as an undertaker's.

'Want to ask you something,' he announced abruptly, more to the fireplace than to Luke.

'Ask away.'

'What's the most dire, fucking awful thing you've ever seen in your life? Anywhere? Apart from the business-end of a drug lord's Uzi staring you in the face. Pot-bellied starving kids in the Congo with their hands chopped off, barking mad with hunger, too tired to cry? Fathers castrated, cocks stuffed in their mouths, eyeholes full of flies? Women with bayonets stuck up their fannies?'

Luke had never served in the Congo, so he had to assume Hector was describing an experience of his own.

'We did have our equivalents,' he said.

'Such as what? Name a couple.'

'Colombian government having a field day. With American assistance, naturally. Villages torched. Inhabitants gang-raped, tortured, hacked to bits. Everybody dead except the one survivor left to tell the tale.'

'Yes. Well. We've both seen a bit of the world then,' Hector conceded. 'Not wanking around.'

'No.'

'And the dirty money sloshing about, the profits of pain, we've seen that too. In Colombia alone, billions. You've seen that. Christ knows what your man was worth.' He didn't wait for the answer. 'In the Congo, billions. In Afghanistan, billions. An eighth of the world's fucking economy: black as your hat. We know about it.'

'Yes. We do.'

'Blood money. That's all it is.'

'Yes.'

'Doesn't matter where. It can be in a box under a warlord's bed in Somalia or in a City of London bank next to the vintage port. It doesn't change colour. It's still blood money.'

'I suppose it is.'

'No glamour, no pretty excuses. The profits of extortion, drug dealing, murder, intimidation, mass rape, slavery. Blood money. Tell me if I'm overstating my case.'

'I'm sure you're not.'

'Only four ways to stop it. One: you go for the chaps who are doing it. Capture 'em, kill 'em or bang 'em up. If you can. Two: you go for the product. Intercept it before it reaches the street or the marketplace. If you can. Three: collar the profits, put the bastards out of business.'

A worrying pause while Hector seemed to reflect on matters far above Luke's pay grade. Was he thinking of the heroin dealers who had turned his son into a gaolbird and addict? Or the vulture capitalists who had tried to put his family firm out of business, and sixty-five of the best men and women in England on the rubbish heap?

'Then there's the fourth way,' Hector was saying. 'The really bad way. The best tried, easiest, the most convenient, the most common, and the least fuss. Bugger the people who've been starved, raped, tortured, died of addiction. To hell with the human cost. Money's got no smell as long as there's enough of it and it's ours. Above all, think big. Catch the minnows, but leave the sharks in the water. A chap's laundering a couple of million? He's a bloody crook. Call in the regulators, put him in irons. But a few billion? Now you're talking. Billions are a statistic.' Closing his eyes while he lapsed into his own thoughts, Hector resembled for a moment his own death mask: or so it seemed to Luke. 'You don't have to agree with any of this, Lukie,' he said kindly, waking from his reverie. 'Door's wide open. Given my reputation, a lot of chaps would be through it by now.'

It occurred to Luke that this was a fairly ironic choice of metaphor, since Hector had the key in his pocket, but he kept the thought to himself.

'You can go back to the office after lunch, tell the Human Queen, thanks awfully but you're happier serving out your time on the ground floor. Draw your pension, keep away from drug lords and colleagues' wives, lie on your back and spit at the ceiling for the rest of your life. No bones broken.'

Luke managed a smile. 'My problem is, I'm not very good at spitting at the ceiling,' he said.

But nothing was going to stop Hector's hard sell: 'I'm offering you a one-way street to nowhere,' he insisted. 'If you sign up to this thing, you're fucked all ways up. If we lose, we were two failed whistleblowers who tried to foul the nest. If we win, we'll be the lepers of the Whitehall-Westminster jungle and all stations between. Not to mention the Service we do our best to love, honour and obey.'

'This is all the information I get?'

'For your own preservation and mine, yes. No nookie unless you come to the altar first.'

They were at the door. Hector had produced the key and was about to turn the lock.

'And about Billy Boy,' he said.

'What about him?'

'He's going to put the arm on you. Bound to. Stick-and-carrot stuff. "What's that mad bugger Meredith been telling you? What's he up to, where, who's he hiring?" If that happens, talk to me first, then talk to me again afterwards. Nobody's kosher in this thing. Everyone's guilty till proven innocent. Deal?'

'I've managed pretty well on the counter-interrogation stakes this far,' Luke replied, feeling it was about time he asserted himself.

'All the same,' said Hector, still waiting for his answer.

'Is it Russian, by any chance?' Luke asked hopefully, in what he afterwards regarded as an inspired moment. He was a Russophile, and had always resented being taken off the circuit on the grounds of supposed over-affection for the target.

'Could be Russian. Could be any fucking thing,' Hector retorted, as his big grey eyes lit up again with his believer's fire.

*

Did Luke ever really say yes to the job? Did he ever, now that he looked back, say, 'Yes, Hector, I will come aboard, blindfolded with my hands tied, just the way I was that night in Colombia, and I will join your mystery crusade' – or words to that effect?

No, he did not.

Even as they sat down to what Hector happily described as the second-worst lunch in the world, first prize yet to be awarded, Luke was still, if he was true to himself, entertaining lingering doubts about whether he was being invited to join the sort of private war that the Service was from time to time led into against its better judgement, with disastrous results.

Hector's opening shots at affable small talk did nothing to put these anxieties to rest. Seated in the outer regions of his club's sepulchral dining room, at the table closest to the clatter of the kitchen, he treated Luke to a masterclass in the uses of indirect conversation in public places.

Over the smoked eel, he confined himself to inquiring after Luke's family, incidentally getting the names of his wife and son right, a further sign to Luke that he had been reading his personal file. When the shepherd's pie and school cabbage arrived, on a clanking silver trolley ferried by an angry old black man in a red hunting jacket, Hector passed to the more intimate but equally harmless topic of Jenny's marriage plans – Jenny, it turned out, being his beloved daughter – which she had recently abandoned since, according to Hector, the chap she was involved with had turned out to be the most unmitigated shit:

'Wasn't love on Jenny's part, it was addiction – same as Adrian except, thank God, it wasn't drugs. Chap's a sadist, she's an old softie. Willing seller, docile buyer, we thought. We didn't say anything, you can't. Hopeless. Bought 'em a sweet little house in Bloomsbury, all fitted out. Vulgar bugger needed three-inch-deep wall-to-wall carpets, so Jenny needed 'em too. Hate 'em personally, but what else can you do? Couple of minutes' walk from the British Museum, and just right for Trotsky and her D.Phil. But old Jenny rumbled the little turd, thank God, full marks to her. Good recession price, the landlord was broke, I shan't lose money. Nice garden, not too big.'

The old waiter had reappeared with an incongruous jug of custard. Waved away by Hector, he muttered an imprecation and shuffled off to the next table twenty feet away.

'Got a decent basement too, which you don't often see these days. Pongs a bit. Not offensively. Used to be someone's wine cellar. No party walls. Decent amount of traffic going past outside. Only luck she didn't have a baby by the chap. They weren't taking precautions, knowing Jenny.'

'Sounds a blessing,' said Luke politely.

'Yes, well it could be, couldn't it?' Hector agreed, leaning forward in order to be sure of being heard beneath the din of the kitchen. By now Luke was half wondering whether Hector had a daughter at all. 'I thought you might care to take the place over rent-free for a bit. Jenny won't go near it, understandably, but it does rather need living in. I'll give you the key in a minute. Remember Ollie Devereux, by the way? Son of a White Russian travel agent in Geneva and a fish-and-chip lady in Harrow? Looks about sixteen going on forty-five? Helped you out of a scrape when you fucked up a probe-mike job in that St Petersburg hotel a while back?'

Luke remembered Ollie Devereux well.

'French, Russian, Swiss-German and Italian, if we need 'em, and the best back-door man in the business. You'll be paying him cash. I'll give you some of that too. You start at nine sharp tomorrow morning. Give you time to pack up your desk in Admin and take your pins and paper clips to the third floor. Oh yes, and you'll be shacked up with a nice woman called Yvonne, other names irrelevant: professional bloodhound, butter wouldn't melt, balls of steel.'

The silver trolley reappeared. Hector recommended the club's bread-and-butter pudding. Luke said it was his favourite. And custard would be great this time, thank you. The trolley left in a cloud of geriatric fury.

'And will you kindly consider yourself one of the chosen few, as of a couple of hours ago,' Hector said, dabbing at his mouth with a moth-eaten damask napkin. 'You'd be number seven on the list including Ollie, if there was a list. I don't want an eighth without my say-so. Deal?'

'Deal,' said Luke this time.

So perhaps he had said 'yes' after all.

*

That afternoon, under the stony gaze of his fellow detainees in Administration, and reeling from the effect of vile club claret, Luke gathered together what Hector had called his pins and paper clips and transferred them to the seclusion of the third floor, where a dingy but acceptable room with a door labelled COUNTERCLAIM FOCUS did indeed await its theoretical occupant. He was carrying an old cardigan, and something moved him to hang it over the back of the chair, where it remained to this day, like the ghost of his other self whenever he dropped by of a Friday afternoon to say a cheery something to whomever he happened to bump into in the corridor, or put in his week's fictitious expenses which he later religiously paid back into the Bloomsbury housekeeping account.

And the very next morning – he was just starting to sleep again in those days – he embarked on his first walk to Bloomsbury, exactly as he was walking there now, except that on the day of his maiden voyage, sheets of blinding rain were sweeping across London, obliging him to wear his neck-to-toe waterproofs and a hat.

*

First he had checked out the street – hardly a problem in the deluge, but there are some operational habits you can't change, however much sleep you get and hard walking you do – one pass north to south, another from a side street feeding into the road bang opposite the target house, which was number 9.

And the house itself as pretty as Hector had promised, even in the downpour: a late-eighteenth-century flat-fronted terrace house of London stock brick on three floors with freshly painted white steps leading up to a newly painted door of royal blue with a fan window above it, a sash window either side of it, and basement windows to each side of the front steps.

But no separate outside basement staircase, Luke duly noted as he climbed the steps, turned the key and went inside, then stood on the doormat, first listening, then hauling off his drenched overclothes and extracting a pair of dry slip-ons from their carry-bag under his waterproof.

The hall richly carpeted in screaming deep-pile vermilion: legacy of the little turd that Jenny had rumbled just in time. An antique porter's chair in strident new green hide. A period mirror, lavishly regilded. Hector had meant to do well by his beloved Jenny, and after his successful foray against the Vulture Capitalists, he could presumably afford to. Two staircases above him, also deep-carpeted. He called out 'anyone here?' – and heard nothing. He pushed open a door to the drawing room. Original fireplace. Roberts prints, sofa and armchairs in upmarket close covers. In the kitchen, high-end equipment, distressed pine table. He pushed open the basement door and called down the stone steps: 'Hello there – excuse me' – no reply.

He climbed to the first floor without hearing his own footsteps. At the half-landing, there were two doors, the one on his left reinforced with a steel plate and brass locks either side at shoulder height. The door on his right was just a door. Twin beds not made up, small bathroom off.

A second key was attached to the house key Hector had given him. Addressing the door on his left, he turned the locks and stepped into a pitch-dark room that smelled of woman's deodorant, the one Eloise used to like. He groped for the light switch. Heavy red velvet curtains, barely hung out, tightly drawn and held together with oversized safety pins that haphazardly recalled for him his weeks of recuperation in the American Hospital in Bogota. No bed. At the centre of the room, a bare trestle table with rotating chair, computer and reading light. On the wall ahead of him, fixed into the angle of the ceiling, four black blinds of waxy cloth reaching to the floor.

Returning to the half-landing, he leaned over the bannisters and yet again called 'anyone there?' and yet again received no answer. Back in the bedroom he released the black blinds one by one, nursing them into their housings on the ceiling. At first he thought he was looking at an architect's plan, wall wide. But a plan of what? Then he thought it must be a huge piece of calculus. But calculating what?

He studied the coloured lines and read the careful italic handwriting denoting what he at first took to be towns. But how could they be towns with names like Pastor, Bishop, Priest and Curate? Dotted lines beside solid ones. Black lines turning to grey, then vanishing. Lines in mauve and blue, converging on a hub somewhere south of centre, or did they emanate from it?

And all of them with such detours, so much backtracking, so many turns, doublings and switches of direction, up, down and sideways, and then up again, that if his son, Ben, in one of his unexplained rages, had holed up in this same room and seized a tin of coloured crayons and zigzagged his way across the wall, the effect wouldn't have been much different.

'Like it?' Hector inquired, standing behind him.

'Are you sure you've got it the right way up?' Luke replied, determined not to show surprise.

'She's calling it Money Anarchy. I reckon it's just about right for the Tate Modern.'

'She?'

'Yvonne. Our Iron Maiden. Does mainly afternoons. This is her room. Yours is upstairs.'

Together, they climbed to a converted attic with stripped beams and dormer windows. One trestle table of the same design as Yvonne's. Hector is no fan of desk drawers. One desktop computer, no terminal.

'We don't use landlines, encrypted or t'other,' Hector said, with the hushed vehemence that Luke was learning to expect of him. 'No fancy hotlines to Head Office, no email connection, encrypted, decrypted or fried. The only documents we deal with are on Ollie's little orange sticks.' He was holding one up: a common memory stick with a number 7 branded on its orange plastic shell. 'Each stick tracked in transit by each of us each end, got it? Signed in, signed out. Ollie runs the shuttle, keeps the log. Spend a couple of days with Yvonne and you'll get the hang of it. Other questions as they arise. Any problems?'

'I don't think so.'

'Nor do I. So lean back, think of England, don't maunder, and don't fuck up.'

And think too of Our Iron Maiden. Professional bloodhound, balls of steel and Eloise's expensive deodorant.

*

It was advice Luke had done his utmost to adhere to for the last three months, and he prayed devoutly that he would do so today. Twice, Billy Boy Matlock had summoned him to the presence, to blandish or threaten him, or both. Twice he had ducked and weaved and lied to Hector's instruction, and survived. It had not been easy.

'Yvonne does not exist either in Heaven or here on earth,' Hector had decreed from Day One. 'Does not, will not. Got it? That's your bottom line. And your top line too. And if Billy Boy straps you by your balls to the chandelier, she still doesn't exist.'

Does not exist? A demure young woman in a long dark raincoat and pointed hood standing on the doorstep on the very first evening of his very first day here, no make-up, clutching a baggy briefcase in both arms as if she had just rescued it from the flood, does not, will not exist?

'Hi. I'm Yvonne.'

'Luke. Come on in, for Heaven's sake!'

A dripping handshake as they bundle her into the entrance hall. Ollie, the best back-door man in the business, finds a hanger for her raincoat and hangs it in the loo to drip on to the tiled floor. A three-month-long working relationship that does not exist has begun. Hector's strictures about paper did not extend to Yvonne's bulky bag, Luke quickly learned later that same night. That was because whatever she brought in her bag left in it the same day. And the reason for this again was that Yvonne was no mere researcher, she was a clandestine source.

One day her bag might contain a bulky file from the Bank of England. Another, it would be from the Financial Services Authority, the Treasury, the Serious and Organized Crime Agency. And on one momentous Friday evening, never to be forgotten, it was a stack of six fat volumes and a score of audio cassettes, enough to fill the bag to bursting, from the hallowed archives of the Government Communications Headquarters itself. Ollie, Luke and Yvonne spent the whole weekend copying, photographing and replicating the material any way they could, so that Yvonne could return it to its rightful owners at crack of dawn on Monday morning.

Whether she came by her loot licitly or by stealth, whether she filched it or cajoled it out of her colleagues and accomplices, Luke to this day had no idea. He knew only that as soon as she arrived with her bag, Ollie would whisk it to his lair behind the kitchen, there to scan its contents, transfer them to a memory stick, and return the bag to Yvonne: and Yvonne, come end of day, to whichever Whitehall department officially owned her services.

For that too was a mystery, never once revealed in the long afternoons when Luke and Yvonne sat cloistered together comparing the illustrious names of Vulture Capitalists with billion-dollar cash transfers conducted at lightning speed across three continents in a day; or chatting in the kitchen over Ollie's lunchtime soup, tomato a speciality, French onion not bad either. And his crab chowder, which he brought part-cooked in a picnic Thermos and completed on the gas stove, a miracle by common consent. But as far as Billy Boy Matlock is concerned, Yvonne does not and will not ever exist. Weeks of training in the arts of resisting interrogation say so: so does a month of crouching handcuffed in a mad drug lord's jungle redoute while your wife discovers that you are a compulsive womanizer.

*

'So what are we looking at here for whistleblowers, Luke?' Matlock inquires of Luke over a nice cup of tea in the comfortable corner of his large office in la Lubianka-sur-Tamise, having invited him to drop by for a chat, and no need to tell Hector. 'You're a fellow who knows a thing or two about informants. I was thinking of you only the other day when the question of a new senior trainer in agent-running came up. A nice five-year contract for somebody just your age,' Matlock says in his homespun Midlands drawl.

'To be perfectly honest with you, Billy, your guess is as good as mine,' Luke replies, mindful that Yvonne does not, will not exist, even if Billy Boy straps him to the chandelier by his balls, which was about the one thing the drug lord's boys didn't think of doing to him. 'Hector just conjures up his information out of the fresh air, frankly. It's amazing,' he adds, with appropriate bewilderment.

Matlock seems not to hear this answer, or perhaps not to care for it, for the geniality disappears from his voice as if it had never been.

'Mind you, it's a double-edged sword, is a training appointment like that one. We'd be looking for the veteran officer whose career would serve as a role model to our idealistic young trainees. Male and female, I don't have to emphasize. The Board would need to be convinced there were no suggestions of impropriety that might be levelled against the successful candidate. And Secretariat would be tendering that advice, naturally enough. In your case, we might have to be looking at a little creative restructuring of your CV.'

'That would be generous, Billy.'

'It would indeed, Luke,' Matlock agreed. 'It would indeed. And somewhat conditional on your current behaviour too.'

*

Who was Yvonne? For the first of those three months, she had driven Luke – he could say it now, he could admit it – just a little bit wild. He loved her demureness and her privacy, which he longed to share. Her discreetly scented body, if she ever allowed it to be revealed, would border on the classic, he could imagine it exactly. Yet they could sit for hours on end, cheek by jowl in front of her computer screen, or poring over her Tate Modern mural, feeling each other's body-warmth, grazing hands by accident. They could share every twist and turn of the chase, every false trail, dead end and temporary triumph: all at a distance of a few inches from each other, in the upstairs bedroom of a secret house that for most of the day they shared alone.

And still nothing: until an evening when the two of them were sitting exhausted and alone at the kitchen table enjoying a cup of Ollie's soup and, at Luke's suggestion, a shot of Hector's Islay malt. Taking himself by surprise, he asked Yvonne point-blank what sort of a life she led apart from this, and whether she had anyone to share it with who could support her in her stressful labours – adding, with the old sad smile of which he was instantly ashamed, that after all it was only our answers that were dangerous, wasn't it, not the questions, if she saw what he meant?

For a long time her dangerous answer didn't materialize:

'I'm a government employee,' she said, in the robotic tone of somebody speaking into camera for a quiz competition. 'My name is not Yvonne. Where I am employed is none of your business. However, I don't think you're asking me that. I'm Hector's discovery, as I assume we both are. But I don't think you're asking me that either. You're asking me about my orientation. And whether, by extension, I wish to go to bed with you.'

'Yvonne, I was asking you nothing of the kind!' Luke protested, truthlessly.

'And for your information, I'm married to a man I'm in love with, we have a three-year-old daughter, and I don't fuck around even with people as nice as you. So let's get on with our soup, shall we?' she suggested – at which, amazingly, they both broke out in cathartic laughter and, with the tension broken, returned peacefully to their separate corners.

*

And Hector, who was he, after three months of him, albeit in sporadic bursts? – Hector of the feverish stare and the scatological tirades against the City crooks who were the source of all our evils? On the Service grapevine it was hinted that in successfully saving the life of his family firm, Hector had resorted to methods honed by half a lifetime in the black arts, and deemed, even by the City's abysmal standards, foul. So was the vendetta against the City's evildoers driven by revenge – or guilt? Ollie, not normally given to gossip, had no doubt: Hector's experience of the City's bad manners – and his own employment of them, said Ollie – had turned him overnight into an avenging angel. 'It's a little vow he's taken,' he confided to them in the kitchen, while they waited for Hector to put in one of his late appearances. 'He's going to save the world before he leaves it if it kills him.'

*

But then Luke had always been a worrier. From infancy he had worried indiscriminately, rather in the way he fell in love.

He could worry as much about whether his watch was ten seconds fast or slow, as about the direction of a marriage that was null and void in every room except the kitchen.

He worried whether there was more to his son Ben's tantrums than just growing pains, and whether Ben was under his mother's orders not to love his father.

He worried about the fact that he was at peace when he was working, and that when he wasn't, even now walking along, he was a mass of unjoined ends.

He worried whether he should have swallowed his pride and accepted the Human Queen's offer of a shrink.

He worried about Gail, and his desire for her, or for some girl like her: a girl with real light in her face instead of the glum cloud that followed Eloise around even when the sun was on her.

He worried about Perry and tried not to be envious of him. He worried about which half of Perry would come out on top in an operational emergency: would it be the intrepid mountaineer or the unworldly university moralist – and anyway, was there a difference?

He worried about the impending duel between Hector and Billy Boy Matlock, and which of them was going to lose his temper first – or pretend to.

*

Leaving the sanctuary of Regent's Park, he entered the throng of Sunday shoppers looking for a bargain. Ease down, he told himself. It'll be all right. Hector's in charge, not you.

He was counting off landmarks. Ever since Bogota, landmarks had been important to him. If they kidnap me, these are the last things I saw before they put the blindfold on me.

The Chinese restaurant.

The Big Archway nightclub.

The Gentle Readers' Bookshop.

This is the ground coffee I smelled while I was wrestling with my attackers.

Those are the snowy pine trees I saw in the window of the art shop before they sandbagged me.

This is number 9, the house where I was reborn, three steps to the front door and act like any normal householder.