The Night Manager

FOUR

The recruitment of Jonathan Pine, former undercover soldier, by Leonard Burr, former intelligence officer, was conceived by Burr immediately after Jonathan presented himself to Wing Commander Quayle but only accomplished after tense weeks of Whitehall infighting, despite the mounting clamour from Washington and Whitehall's perpetual urge to earn merit in the fickle corridors of Capitol Hill.

The title of Jonathan's part of the project was first Trojan, then hastily changed to Limpet ― the reason being that while some members of the joint team might not know much about Homer's wooden horse, they all knew that Trojan was the brand name of one of America's most popular condoms. But Limpet was fine. A limpet attaches itself through thick and thin.

Jonathan was a godsend, and nobody knew this better than Burr, who from the moment the first reports from Miami started landing on his desk had been beating his brains for some way, any way, into the Roper camp. But how? Even Burr's mandate to operate hung by a thread, as he discovered when he took his first soundings about the feasibility of his plan.

"My master is a bit chary, frankly, Leonard," a mandarin called Goodhew confided skittishly to Burr over the secure telephone. "Yesterday it was all about the cost, today he's not keen on aggravating an uneasy situation in a former colony."

The Sunday papers had once described Rex Goodhew as Whitehall's Talleyrand without the limp. But as usual they had it wrong, for Goodhew was nothing that he seemed. If there was a separateness about him, it came of virtue, not intrigue.

His mangy smile, flat cap and bicycle concealed nothing more sinister than a high-minded Anglican of reforming zeal. And if you were ever lucky enough to penetrate his private life, you found, instead of mystery, a pretty wife and clever children who adored him.

"Uneasy, my Aunt Fanny, Rex!" Burr exploded. "The Bahamas is the easiest country in the hemisphere. There's hardly a bigwig in Nassau isn't up to his ears in cocaine. There's more bent politicians and shady arms dealers on that one island ― "

"Steady down, Leonard," Rooke warned him. from across the room. Rob Rooke was Burr's restraining hand, a retired soldier of fifty with grizzled hair and a rugged, weather-beaten jaw. But Burr was in no mood to heed him.

"As to the rest of your premise, Leonard," Goodhew resumed, undaunted, "which personally I thought you presented with tremendous brio, even if you were a trifle long on adjectives, my master called that 'reading tea leaves with a dash of special pleading for good measure.' "

Goodhew was referring to his minister, a silky politician not yet turned forty.

"Tea leaves?" Burr echoed in furious bewilderment. "What's he bleating about tea leaves for? That's a five-star, chapter-and-verse, verifiable report from a highly placed informant of American Enforcement. It's a miracle Strelski ever showed it to us! What's tea leaves about that?"

Once more Goodhew waited for Burr to finish his tirade.

"Now for the next question ― my master's again, Leonard, not mine, so don't shoot the messenger! When do you propose to advise our friends across the river?"

He was referring this time to Burr's former service and present rival, which traded in Pure Intelligence from a grim tower block on the South Bank.

"Never," Burr retorted belligerently.

"Well, I think you should."

"Why?"

"My master regards your old colleagues as realists. Far too easy, in a small, very new and, dare he say it, idealistic new agency such as yours, not to see beyond one's fence. He'd feel more comfortable if you had the River boys aboard."

The last of Burr's self-restraint gave way. "You mean your master would like to see someone else bludgeoned to death in a Cairo flat, is that it?"

Rooke had risen to his feet and was standing like a traffic policeman, his right hand raised for "halt." On the telephone, Goodhew's flippancy gave way to something harder.

"What are you suggesting, Leonard? Perhaps you'd better not explain."

"I'm suggesting nothing. I'm telling you. I've worked with your master's realists, Rex. I've lived with them. Lied with them. I know them. I know Geoffrey Darker. And I know his Procurement Studies Group. I know their houses in Marbella, and their second Porsches in the garage, and their unstinted devotion to the free market economy, provided it's their freedom and somebody else's economy. Because I've been there!"

"Leonard, I will not hear you, and you know I won't."

"And I know there's more crockery in that shop, more bad promises to keep, more lunching with the enemy, and gamekeepers turned poachers, than is healthy for my operation, or my agency!"

"Just stop," Rooke advised quietly.

As Burr slammed down the telephone, a sash window slipped its ancient fastening and toppled like a guillotine. Patiently, Rooke folded a used brown envelope, raised the sash and wedged it in place.

Burr was still sitting with his hands buried in his face, speaking through his splayed fingers. "What the hell does he want, Rob? One minute I'm to frustrate Geoffrey Darker and all his wicked works, the next he's ordering me to collaborate with Darker. What the bloody hell does he want?"

"He wants you to ring him back," said Rooke patiently.

"Darker is wicked. You know that, I know that. On a clear day, so does Rex Goodhew. So why do we have to ponce around pretending Darker's a realist?"

Burr rang Goodhew back nonetheless, which was only proper because, as Rooke constantly reminded him, Goodhew was the best and only champion he had.

In appearance Rooke and Burr could scarcely have been more different: Rooke the military parade horse in his nearly good suits, Burr as slovenly in his manner as his speech. There was a Celt in Burr somewhere, an artist and a rebel ― Goodhew said a gypsy. When he troubled to dress himself for an occasion, he only contrived to look more disreputable than when he wasn't bothering. Burr, as he would tell you himself, was the other kind of Yorkshireman. His forebears were not miners but handloom weavers, which meant they had owned their lives instead of being vassals in a corporate endeavour. The blackened sandstone village where Burr had grown to manhood was built onto a south-facing hillside, with each house looking at the sun and each attic window stretched to catch the most of it. In their solitary lofts, Burr's forefathers had woven all alone and all day long, while the womenfolk downstairs chattered and did the spinning. The men led lives of monotony in communion with the sky. And while their hands mechanically performed the daily drudgery, their minds took off in all sorts of startling directions. In that one small town, there are tales to fill a book about the poets, chess players and mathematicians whose brains grew to fruition in the long daylight of their attic eyries. And Burr, all the way to Oxford and beyond, was the inheritor of their collective thrift, their virtue and their mysticism.

So that it was somehow written in the stars, from the day Goodhew plucked Burr from the River House and gave him his own underfinanced, underwanted agency, that Burr should appoint Richard Onslow Roper as his personal Antichrist.

* * *

Oh, there had been others before Roper. In the dying years of the Cold War, before the new agency was a twinkle in Goodhew's eye, when Burr was already dreaming of the post-Thatcher Jerusalem and even his most honourable colleagues in Pure Intelligence were casting about for other people's enemies and jobs, there were few insiders who did not remember Burr's vendettas against such renowned illegals of the eighties as the grey-suited billionaire "scrap-metal dealer" Tyler, who flew standby, or the monosyllabic "accountant" Lorimer, who made all his calls from public pay phones, or the odious Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, gentleman and occasional satrap of Darker's so-called Procurement Studies Group, who ran a vast estate on the fringes of Newbury and rode to hounds with his butler mounted at his side, equipped with stirrup cup and foie gras sandwiches.

But Richard Onslow Roper, said the Burr-watchers, was the adversary Leonard had always dreamed of. Everything Leonard was looking for to appease his Fabian conscience, Dicky Roper possessed in trumps. In Roper's past there was neither striving nor disadvantage. Class, privilege, everything Burr loathed, had been handed to Roper on a salver. Burr even had a special voice for talking about him: "our Dicky," he would call him, with a shove of his Yorkshire accent; or, for variety, "the Roper."

"He's tempting God, is our Dicky. Everything God's got, the Roper's got to have two of, and it'll be the undoing of him."

Such obsession did not always make for balance. Embattled in his shoestring agency, Burr had a tendency to see conspiracy everywhere. A file had only to go missing, a permission be delayed, for him to scent the long arm of Darker's people.

"I tell you, Rob, if the Roper committed daylight armed robbery in full view of the Lord Chief Justice of England ― "

"The Chief Justice would lend him his jemmy," Rooke suggested.

"And Darker would have bought it for him. Come on. Lunch."

In their dingy offices in Victoria Street, the two men would prowl and brood till late into the evenings. The Roper's file ran to eleven volumes and half a dozen secret annexes, flagged and cross-referred. Put together, it documented his steady glide from the grey or semi-tolerated arms deal all the way to what Burr called dark black.

But the Roper had other files: at Defence, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Bank of England, the Treasury, Overseas Development, the Inland Revenue. To obtain them without arousing curiosity in the circles where Darker might have allies required stealth and luck, and occasionally Rex Goodhew's devious connivance. Pretexts had to be invented, unwanted papers requested, in order to confuse the scent.

Gradually, nevertheless, an archive was assembled. First thing in the morning a policeman's daughter called Pearl would trundle in a metal trolley with the purloined records patched and bandaged like casualties of war, and Burr's little team of dedicated assistants would resume its work. Last thing at night she trundled them back to their cell. The trolley had a wonky wheel, and you could hear it whistling down the linoleum corridor. They called it Roper's tumbril.

* * *

But even in the midst of these exertions, Burr never took his mind's eye off Jonathan. "Don't let him risk his hand now, Reggie," he urged Quayle over the secure telephone while he champed and waited for what Goodhew sarcastically referred to as his master's official, final maybe. "He's not to go stealing any more faxes or listening at keyholes, Reggie. He's to tread water and act natural. Is he still angry with us over Cairo? I'll not flirt with him till I know I can have him. I've been that road before." And to Rooke, "I'm telling no one, Rob. He's Mr. Brown for the lot of them. Darker and his friend Ogilvey have taught me a lesson I'll not ignore."

As a further desperate precaution, Burr opened a decoy file for Jonathan, gave it a fictitious name, fronted it with the particulars of a fictitious agent, and surrounded it with a conspicuous secrecy, which he hoped would draw the eye of any predator. Paranoia? Rooke suggested. Burr swore it was no more than a sensible precaution. He knew too well the lengths that Darker would go to in order to do down a rival ― even one as humble as Burr's tin-pot outfit.

Meanwhile in his neat script Burr added note after note to Jonathan's fast-expanding dossier, which he kept in an unfiled folder in the dreariest corner of the registry. Through intermediaries, Rooke drew the army papers on Jonathan's father. The son was barely six years old when Sergeant Peter Pine won his posthumous Military Medal in Aden for "outstanding courage in the face of the enemy." A press cutting showed a ghostly child displaying it on the breast of his blue mackintosh outside the palace gates. A weeping aunt escorted him. His mother was not well enough to attend. A year later she too was dead.

"Those are usually the chaps who love the army best," Rooke commented in his simple way. "Can't think why he gave it up."

By the age of thirty-three, Peter Pine had fought the Mau Mau in Kenya, chased Grivas across Cyprus and battled with guerrillas in Malaya and northern Greece. Nobody had a bad word to say of him.

"A sergeant and a gentleman," Burr the anti-colonialist told Goodhew wryly.

Returning to the son, Burr pored over reports of Jonathan's progress through army foster homes, civilian orphanages and the Duke of York's Military School in Dover. Their inconsistency quickly incensed him. Timid, ran one; plucky, another; a solitary, a grand mixer, an inward boy, an outgoing one, a natural leader, lacks charisma, back and forth like a pendulum.

And once, very involved with foreign languages, as if this were a morbid symptom of something better left alone. But it was the word unreconciled that got Burr's goat.

"Who the hell ever decreed," he demanded indignantly, "that a sixteen-year-old boy of no fixed abode, who's never had a chance to know parental love, should be reconciled?"

Rooke took his pipe from his mouth and frowned, which was about as near as he came to indulging in an abstract argument.

"What does cabby mean?" Burr demanded from deep in his reading.

"Streetwise, among other things. Pushy."

Burr was at once offended. "Jonathan's not streetwise. He's not wise at all. He's putty. What's a roulement?"

"A five-month tour," Rooke replied patiently.

Burr had come upon Jonathan's record in Ireland, where, after a succession of special training courses, for which he had volunteered, he had been assigned to close observation duties in the bandit country of South Armagh.

"What was Operation Night Owl?"

"I haven't the foggiest idea."

"Come on, Rob. You're the soldier in the family."

Rooke rang the Ministry of Defence, to be told the Night Owl papers were too highly classified to be released to an unchartered agency.

"Unchartered?" Rooke exploded, blushing darker than his moustache. "What the devil do they think we are? Some Whitehall bucket shop? Good Lord!"

But Burr was too preoccupied to relish Rooke's rare outburst.

He had fixed upon the image of the pale boy wearing his father's medal for the convenience of photographers. Burr was by now moulding Jonathan in his mind. Jonathan was their man, he was sure of it. No cautious words from Rooke could soften his conviction.

"When God finished putting together Dicky Roper," he told Rooke earnestly over a Friday evening curry, "He took a deep breath and shuddered a bit, then He ran up our Jonathan to restore the ecological balance."

* * *

The news Burr had been praying for came exactly a week later. They had stayed in to wait for it. Goodhew had told them to.

"Leonard?"

"Yes, Rex."

"May we agree that this conversation is not taking place? Or not until after Monday's meeting of the Joint Steering Committee?"

"If you like."

"Here's the bottom line. We've had to toss them a few trinkets, or they'd have sulked. You know how the Treasury is." Burr didn't. "Number one. It's an Enforcement case, one hundred percent. Planning and execution to be yours exclusively, the River House to provide support in aid, theirs not to reason why. Do I hear shouts of hooray? I don't think I do."

"How exclusive is exclusively?" said Burr the wary Yorkshireman.

"Where you have to use outside resources, you obviously take potluck. One can't, for instance, expect the River boys to run a telephone check for one and not take a peek at the product before they lick the envelope. Can one?"

"I'll say one can't. What about our gallant American Cousins?"

"Langley, Virginia, like their counterparts across the Thames, will remain outside the charmed circle. It's like to like. The Lex Goodhew. If Pure Intelligence is to be held at bay in London, then it stands to reason that their opposite numbers in Langley must also be held at bay. Thus have I argued, and thus has my master heard me. Leonard...? Leonard, are you sleeping there below?"

"Goodhew, you're a bloody genius."

"Number three ― or is it D? My master in his capacity as minister responsible will nominally hold your tiny hand, but only with the thickest possible gloves, because his latest phobia is scandal." The flightiness disappeared from Goodhew's voice, and the proconsul came through. "So nothing direct from you to him at all, thank you, Leonard. There's one route only to my master, and that's me. If I'm putting my reputation at risk, I don't want you muddling. Agreed?"

"How about my financial estimates?"

"What do you mean, how about them?"

"Have they been approved?"

The English damn fool returned: "Oh my goodness no, you silly boy! They have not been approved. They have been endured through gritted teeth. I've had to carve them up between three ministries and cadge some extra from my aunt. And since I personally shall be cooking the books, will you please account to me for your money as well as for your sins?"

Burr was too excited to bother with any more fine print. "So it's the green light," he said, as much for Rooke as for himself.

"With more than a dash of amber, thank you," Goodhew retorted.

"No more snide digs at the Darker Procurement octopus, or silly talk about secret servants feathering their own nests. You're to be all honey with your American Enforcement buddies, but you will be, anyway, and you're not to lose my master his safe seat or his shiny car. How would you like to report? Hourly? Three times a day before meals? Just remember we didn't have this conversation until after Monday's agonised deliberations, which on this occasion are a formality."

* * *

Yet it was not till the U. S. Enforcement team actually set foot in London that Burr allowed himself to believe he had won the day. The American policemen brought a whiff of action with them that washed away the taste of interdepartmental haggling. Burr liked them at first sight, and they liked him, better than they liked the less winnable Rooke, whose army back stiffened as soon as he sat down with them. They warmed to Burr's blunt language and his short way with bureaucracy. They liked him better still when it became clear that he had forsaken the unsavoury preserves of Pure Intelligence for the hard tack of defeating the enemy. Pure Intelligence for them meant all things bad, whether it resided in Langley or the River House. It meant turning a blind eye to some of the biggest crooks in the hemisphere for the sake of nebulous advantages elsewhere. It meant operations inexplicably abandoned in midstream and orders countermanded from on high. It meant callow Yale fantasists in button-down shirts who believed they could outwit the worst cutthroats in Latin America and always had six unbeatable arguments for doing the wrong thing.

First of the enforcers to arrive was the celebrated Joseph Strelski from Miami, a tight-jawed American-born Slav in training shoes and a leather jacket. When Burr had first heard his name five years before, Strelski had been leading Washington's uncertain campaign against the illegal arms traffickers who were Burr's declared foe. In his fight against them, he had crashed head-on with the very people who should have been his allies. Hastily transferred to other duties, Strelski had enlisted himself in the war against the South American cocaine cartels and their appendages in the States: the crooked percentage lawyers and silk-shirt wholesalers, the arm's-length transportation syndicates and money launderers, and what he called the no-see-'em politicians and administrators who cleared the path and took their cut.

The dope cartels were now Strelski's obsession. America spends more money on dope than food, Leonard! he would protest, in a taxi, in a corridor, across a glass of 7-Up. We're talking the cost of the entire Vietnam war, Rob, every year, untaxed! ― After which he would rattle off the prevailing dope prices with the same enthusiasm with which other addicts quote the Dow-Jones index, starting with raw coca leaves at a dollar a kilo in Bolivia, rising to two thousand for a kilo of base in Colombia, to twenty thousand a wholesale kilo in Miami, to two hundred thousand a kilo at street. Then, as if he had caught himself being a bore again, he would pull a hard grin and say he was damned if he knew how anyone could pass up a profit of a hundred dollars to a dollar. But the grin did nothing to quench the cold fire in his eyes.

This permanent anger seemed to make Strelski almost physically unbearable to himself. Each morning early and each evening, whatever the weather, he went jogging in the royal parks, to Burr's simulated horror.

"Joe, for God's sake, have a big slice of plum pudding and sit still," Burr urged him, with mock severity. "You're giving us all heart attacks, just thinking about you."

Everyone laughed. Among the enforcers it was that kind of locker-room atmosphere. Only Amato, who was Strelski's Venezuelan-American sidekick, refused to smile. At their conferences, he sat with his mouth clamped into a grimace and his wine-black eyes staring into the horizon. Then suddenly on the Thursday he was beaming like an idiot. His wife had had a little girl.

Strelski's unlikely other arm was an overweight, meat-faced Irishman named Pat Flynn from U. S. Customs: the kind of policeman, Burr told Goodhew with relish, who typed his reports with his hat on. Legend attached to Flynn, and with reason. It was Pat Flynn, said the word, who had invented the first pinhole-lens camera, known as a pole camera and disguised as a junction box, that could be fixed to any stray telegraph post or pylon in a matter of seconds. It was Pat Flynn who had pioneered the art of bugging small boats from under water. And Pat Flynn had other skills, Strelski confided to Burr while the two men strolled together one early evening in St. James's Park, Strelski in his jogging gear and Burr in his crumpled suit.

"Pat was the one who knew the one who knew the one," said Strelski. "Without Pat, we'd never have gotten to Brother Michael."

Strelski was talking about his most sacred and delicate source, and this was holy ground. Burr never ventured onto it except at Strelski's invitation.

* * *

If the Enforcers bonded closer every day, the espiocrats from Pure Intelligence did not take lightly to their role as second-class citizens. The first exchange of gunfire occurred when Strelski let slip his agency's intention of putting Roper behind bars. Knew the very prison he had in mind for him, he cheerfully informed the company. "Sure do, sir. Little place called Marion, Illinois. Twenty-three and a half hours a day in solitary lock-down, no association, exercise in cuffs, food off a tray they shove at you through a slit in the cell. Ground floor's toughest, no views. Top floor's better, but the smell's worse."

Icy silence greeted this revelation, broken by an acid-voiced solicitor from the Cabinet Office.

"Are you sure this is the sort of thing we should be discussing, Mr. Strelski?" he asked with courtroom arrogance. "I had rather understood that an identified rogue was of more use to society when he was left at large. For as long as he's out and about, you can do what you want with him: identify his conspirators, identify their conspirators, listen, watch. Once you lock him up, you have to start the same game all over again with someone new. Unless you think you can stamp out this sort of thing altogether. Nobody here thinks that, do they? Not in this room?"

"Sir, in my submission there's basically two ways you can go," Strelski replied, with the respectful smile of an attentive pupil. "You can be exploitative, or you can enforce. Be exploitative, that's a never-ending story: that's recruiting the enemy so that you catch the next enemy. Then recruit the next enemy so that you catch the next one, ad infinitum. Enforce, that's what we have in mind for Mr. Roper. A fugitive from justice, in my book you apprehend him, you charge him under the International Trafficking in Arms regulations, and you lock him up. Exploitation, in the end you get to ask yourself who's being exploited: the fugitive, or the public, or justice."

"Strelski is a maverick," Goodhew confided to Burr with undisguised pleasure as they stood on the pavement under umbrellas.

"You're two of a kind. No wonder the legal people have misgivings."

"Me, I've got misgivings about legal people."

Goodhew glanced up and down the rain-swept street. He was in sparkling mood. The previous day, his daughter had won a scholarship to South Hampstead, and his son, Julian, had been accepted by Clare College, Cambridge. "My master is having a severe case of the croup, Leonard. He has been talking to people again. Worse than scandal, he now fears he will look a bully. He is offended by the notion that he is instigating a wide-flung plot, mounted by two powerful governments against a lone British trader locked in battle against the recession. His sense of fair play tells him you are being disproportionate."

"Bully," Burr echoed softly, remembering Roper's eleven volumes of file, the tons of sophisticated weaponry lavished upon unsophisticated people. "Who's the bully? Jesus."

"Leave Jesus out of it, thank you. I need a counterblast. For Monday at first light. Brief enough to go on a postcard, no adjectives. And tell your nice man Strelski I adored his aria. Ah. We're saved. A bus."

* * *

Whitehall is a jungle, but like other jungles, it has a few watering holes where creatures who at any other hour of the day would rip each other to pieces may assemble at sunset and drink their fill in precarious companionship. Such a place was the Fiddler's Club, situated in an upper room on the Thames Embankment and named after a pub called the Fiddler's Elbow, which used to stand next door.

"I think Rex is in the pay of a foreign power, don't you, Geoffrey?" said the solicitor from the Cabinet Office to Darker, while together they drew themselves a pint from the keg in the corner and signed a chit. "Don't you? I think he's taking Frog gold to undermine the effectiveness of British government. Cheers."

Darker was a small man, as men of power often are, with hollowed cheeks and sunken, steady eyes. He dressed in sharp blue suits and lots of cuff, and this evening he wore brown suede shoes as well, which gave a hint of Ascot to his gallows smile.

"Oh, Roger, however did you guess?" Goodhew replied with willed cheerfulness, determined to take the sally in good part. "I've been on the take for years, haven't I, Harry?" ― passing the question down the line to Harry Palfrey. "How else could I afford my shiny new bicycle?"

Darker continued smiling. And since he had no sense of humour, his smile was a little sinister, even mad. Eight men and Goodhew sat at the long refectory table: a Foreign Office mandarin, a baron from Treasury, the Cabinet Office solicitor, two squat-suited earthlings from the Tory middle benches, and three espiocrats, of whom Darker was the grandest and poor Harry Palfrey the most derelict. The room was fuggy and smoke-stained. Nothing commended it other than its handiness to Whitehall, to the House of Commons and to Darker's concrete kingdom across the river.

"Rex is dividing and ruling, if you ask me, Roger," said a Tory earthling who spent so much of his time sitting on secret committees that he was often mistaken for a civil servant.

"Power mania got up as constitutional cant. He's deliberately eroding the citadel from within, aren't you, Rex? Admit it."

"Sheer balderdash, thank you," Goodhew replied lightly.

"My master is merely concerned to drag the intelligence services into the new era and help them to set down their old burdens. You should be grateful to him."

"I don't think Rex has got a master," the mandarin from the Foreign Office objected, to laughter. "Has anyone ever seen the wretched fellow? I think Rex makes him up."

"Why are we so squeamish about drugs, anyway?" a Treasury man complained, his thin fingertips propped together like a bamboo bridge. "Service industry. Willing buyer, willing seller. Vast profits to the Third World, some of it's going to the right places, must be. We accept tobacco, booze, pollution, pox. Why are we such prudes about drugs? I wouldn't mind an order for a couple of billion quids' worth of arms, even if there was a bit of cocaine on the bank notes; I'll tell you that for nothing!"

A drenched voice cut through their merriment. It came from Harry Palfrey, a River House lawyer now on permanent loan to Darker's Procurement Studies Group. "Burr's real," he warned huskily, with no particular prompting from anybody. He was drinking a large Scotch, not his first. "Burr does what he says."

"Oh my God," cried the Foreign Office in horror. "Then we're all for the high jump! Right, Geoffrey? Right?"

But Geoffrey Darker just listened with his eyes and smiled his mirthless smile.

* * *

Yet of all those present at the Fiddler's Club that night, only the leftover lawyer Harry Palfrey had any notion of the scope of Rex Goodhew's crusade. Palfrey was a degenerate. In every British organisation there is always one man who makes an art form of going to the devil, and in this one respect Hairy Palfrey was the River House's prize exhibit. Whatever he had done well in the first half of his life, Palfrey had systematically undone in the second ― whether it was his law practice, his marriage or the preservation of his pride, of which the last shameful tatters lingered in his apologetic grin. Why Darker kept him on, why anybody did, was no mystery at all: Palfrey was the failure who made everyone look successful by comparison.

Nothing was too humble for him, nothing too demeaning. If there was scandal, Palfrey was ever willing to be slaughtered. If murder was to be done, Palfrey was on hand with a bucket and cloth to mop up the blood and find you three eyewitnesses to say you were never there. And Palfrey, with the wisdom of the corrupt, knew Rex Goodhew's story as if it were his own ― which in a sense it was, since he had long ago made the same perceptions as Goodhew, even if he had never had the courage to draw the same conclusions.

The story was that after twenty-five years before the Whitehall mast, something inside Goodhew had discreetly snapped.

Perhaps it was the ending of the Cold War that had caused it.

Goodhew had the modesty not to know.

The story was that one Monday morning Goodhew woke as usual and decided with no premeditation that for far too long, in the misused name of freedom, he had been sacrificing scruple and principle to the great god expediency, and that the excuse for doing so was dead.

And that he was suffering from all the bad habits of the Cold War without their justification. He must mend his ways or perish in his soul. Because the threat outside the gates had gone. Decamped. Vanished.

But where to begin? A perilous bicycle ride supplied him with his answer. On the same rainy February morning, the eighteenth ― Rex Goodhew never forgot a date ― he was cycling from his home in Kentish Town to Whitehall as usual, weaving between the choked columns of commuter cars, when he experienced a silent epiphany. He would crop the secret octopus.

He would give away its powers to separate, smaller agencies and make each of them separately accountable. He would deconstruct, decentralise, humanise. And he would begin with the most corrupting influence of all: the unholy marriage between Pure Intelligence, Westminster and the covert weapons trade, presided over by Geoffrey Darker of the River House.

* * *

How did Harry Palfrey know all this? Goodhew had told him. Goodhew, out of his Christian decency, had invited Palfrey to Kentish Town at summer weekends to drink Pimm's in the garden and play silly cricket with the kids, well aware that, in his shabby, grinning way, Palfrey was near the dangerous edge. And after dinner, Goodhew had left Palfrey at the table with his wife so that he could pour out his soul to her, because there is nothing that dissolute men like better than confessing themselves to virtuous women.

And it was in the afterglow of one such luxurious unbaring that Harry Palfrey, with pathetic alacrity, volunteered to become Goodhew's informant on the backstairs machinations of certain wayward barons at the River House.