The Private Sector

1

Williams was talking to Marcus, his deputy and head of the new security bureau within the section. Marcus, though only six months started on his career as ferret in Mid-East Intelligence, already had a nickname throughout the department — “The Grip”, the one who didn’t let go. They were in Williams’s small office at the back of the tall building in Holborn, which he preferred to his quarters at the front, looking over the courtyard and the huge Hepworth abstract which he couldn’t abide. Contemporary sculpture sent him into a fury, ever since he’d first gazed at Reg Butler’s “Unknown Political Prisoner” in the Tate.

“Our only problem is that we don’t know — do we? — if Edwards and Marlow know. We don’t know the real nature of our “agreement” with them. Still, it won’t much matter. That’s the beauty of the plan.

Williams took up the file which lay in front of him and ran his fingers gently over the red cardboard folder as if there’d been dust on it — the file marked “MOUSE”.

Williams had never been one for code names; it had been Marcus’s idea. He was new to the business. If he wanted it that way — why not?

Williams put the file away in his safe, got up and walked over to the hatstand where he fingered his hat and coat absent-mindedly for a moment, looking out of the window towards the glimpse of St. Paul’s between the tall white buildings which threw back the early May sunset in a blaze of light. He turned away from the vision with bored resignation.

“I suppose I shall have to put in an appearance at the liaison meeting downstairs. The Americans would take it badly if I didn’t. The usual lot this time, are they? Dutton and Elder — the ‘callous gentlemen’. They’re so keen on protocol. Like we used to be. Care to drop by with me, Marcus?”

The two men left the eighth-floor office. The lifts were busy so they walked down the stairs to the liaison annexe three floors below.

“I never asked you, Marcus — why ‘Mouse’? Why that for the code name? The usual connotations — ‘cat and mouse’?”

“Partly. It’s the poem by Burns.” And Marcus recited a verse as they moved through the dusty shafts of sunlight from the stair windows between the floors, his dull, classless accent massacring the original lines:

“Wee, sleekit, cowrin, timirous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie,

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

Wi’ bickering brattle!..”

The tread of their feet echoed down the vault of the stairwell, the slow irregular smack of leather on concrete, like a horse dragging along a road at the end of the day.

“Yes, I know. I’m not quite sure I see the point, though.”

“Edwards is the mouse, isn’t he? It’s obvious, isn’t it? When you come to look at the plan. Because he doesn’t see it. He can’t.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. I wouldn’t have thought if it. The title, I mean.”

Williams suddenly remembered the Russia doll his mother had given him to play with as a child — the brightly coloured barrel-like figures all with the same frozen expression, one inside the other, and another inside that, getting smaller and smaller. And he remembered the feeling of despair that had come over him whenever he played with the toy, the fearful idea that real children, too, went on for ever, one inside the other, in the body of their mother, for he had been an only child at the time: the knowledge, which must have been born in him then, of the endless ramifications of deceit, the tricks which lay up every sleeve; the voices beyond the nursery at the end of the landing, the doctor’s voice, the nurse’s, someone else’s — his mother perhaps, a shout of pain, and the screaming infant; the feeling that you could never be sure of anything, returned to him now for an instant before he heard the bland accommodating drawl of Dutton speaking to McCoy at the entrance to the liaison annexe. And his cold memories of the past were washed away in a tide of even stronger resentment.

2

The United Arab Airlines Comet had stopped at Munich on its way to Cairo and for the first time in years Edwards felt near panic when he was in a position to reflect it.

He didn’t mind that Williams might now know that he was a double — or that perhaps he had known for a long time; that could have been so and he would have survived, as long as his account had shown a profit and he’d seen to that, he knew it had. What worried him now — as it had since he’d first been asked to go on this mission by Williams a week earlier — was his complete uncertainty about the purpose of the plan; it didn’t add up. It might make sense to someone who’d never been to the Middle East, but that person wasn’t Williams; he knew the situation there backwards. The man in Cairo would never look at the plan, Edwards knew his background and his real inclinations fairly well — Mohammed Yunis, mildly “left-wing” and secretary of the only legal party in Egypt, the Arab Socialist Union, “political rival to the President” as Williams had naïvely described him at one of their meetings over the plan together. That didn’t mean much in Egypt these days; every putative Marxist there, both in or out of jail, saw himself as a potential rival to Nasser — just as most of the leaders of the right-wing Moslem Brotherhood did, not to mention some of the younger army officers. Nasser himself stood firmly in the middle of these warring idealogies, supported fervently by the great public who cared little for alternatives; they never had — the army of bureaucrats and farmers, ninety-five per cent of the population, who saw nothing beyond their next pay chit or weevils in the cotton crop. Political rivals, in these circumstances, were a drug on the market in Egypt. They didn’t have a chance and the idea that Yunis, helped by Britain and America, might stir the country to a new revolution and overthrow the President seemed impossible in the first place and in no sense an advantage to the West, if it happened, in the second. And anyway, he thought, Yunis was so much the last man in Egypt to get himself involved in this sort of thing: Yunis had once harboured vaguely Marxist ideas it was true, but he was a very conservative socialist now. He had come to an age and position in life where he could personally reap the benefits of the first Egyptian revolution and the idea of creating a second, Edwards thought, couldn’t have been further from his mind.

The plan was so palpably unrealistic that Edwards not only saw a trick in it but saw as well that he was meant to see this in it, which was something quite different, quite new in the history of his relations with Williams who until now had always given him definite, realizable aims — operations where success or failure could be accounted for as meticulously as figures in a ledger.

If only he could have approached Williams as the others in his section did, the ones who genuinely worked for him, he thought, how easy it would have been to say to him, look, this won’t work and this is why … And he longed for that sort of trust, knowing it was the one step he could never take, the step which broke the gentlemen’s agreement he had with Williams — broke the rules which governed the game and which for so long had ensured his survival as a player on both sides of it. In his position he could never query William’s directions, alternative suggestions from him could only be taken as evidence of bad faith, of the wrong kind of double dealing, favouring one side more than the other; one had to go through with the instructions, to the letter, and he always had.

But now, with this plan — here was an operation that could never show a profit or a loss — to anyone — for it could never succeed. And the logic then was inescapable: he was being dropped. He was a tight-rope walker who went to and fro between the poles, and there was trust at either end as long as he managed the feat, as he always had. And now, here was Williams at one end shaking the wire vigorously, knowing that he could do nothing but try and weather the storm, that he couldn’t move to safety in one direction or the other. And that was the only logic of it all — that he had to fall.

But why?

He decided to stay on the plane during the half-hour stop at Munich, noticing the sharp east wind which blew the mechanics’ overalls into vicious flapping shapes about their legs. He knew the airport anyway; there was nothing to be got out of stretching one’s legs, or even a café-crême and a cognac with the weary commercial travellers at the horseshoe bar. He’d done it so many times before. Until he thought suddenly, ashamed at his fear, that it wasn’t the cold wind that kept him in his seat, but the idea of something lurking for him outside: someone behind the swinging glass doors of the terminal building, a car waiting for him on the tarmac, a marked transit ticket. All the traditional fictions of his profession surged into his mind and he realized he was a complete stranger to them, that they had never impinged on his professional life, and they were as unreal and frightening to him now as they might have been to an outsider, a happy man in the back row of the stalls.

He was quite unprepared for this sense of mystery; the idea that these fictions might suddenly become facts had never occurred to him. Until now he’d played the tune, from the middle as he’d seen it, and all three sides — Moscow, Cairo and London — had been happy. He’d always known what was happening and had been quite prepared to see himself as a huckster who gave full value for money; and he’d justified his behaviour in terms of maintaining what he thought of as his “primary interest”; his Russian connections, his belief, for it was still just that. But if he went, if Williams were getting rid of him, he knew his other interests would vanish as well. It was a cat’s cradle; one tiny movement of a string and the whole intricate pattern of trust would collapse. And Williams had made that move by involving him in this hare-brained scheme.

Why?

He thought carefully over the events of the last month — the last year perhaps? Blake’s escape? Blake had worked out of Williams’s Middle East section and there had been some uneasy times after his arrest and during his imprisonment. But Blake didn’t know of his involvement with Moscow — as he hadn’t known of Blake’s. They were careful of that sort of thing in Moscow these days. No KGB double knew the identity of any other in the same position — not after the disasters of the past. Unless Moscow had arranged to shop him? The permutations, non-existent a month ago, were endless now.

Edwards tried to isolate and catalogue them for the hundredth time, yet in the end only one thing was really clear: London wanted him to do something which they knew would result in his immediate obliteration if he attempted it — so they must have known too that he would never attempt it. At the same time they’d surely not gone through all this elaborate charade for nothing; they had something else in mind, something which he hadn’t seen, which he couldn’t see. It almost began to amuse him, the clues were so obvious, like the values for a simple equation … yet he couldn’t work it out. And he’d been good at that sort of thing in school.

3

The passengers came back from the transit lounge. Edwards could see them through the cabin window, forcing themselves into the wind, whipping the puddles into blisters on the concrete apron, clutching their hats, their faces wrinkling painfully, and he was glad he’d not gone with them. He stretched his legs down beneath the seat, yawned, closed his eyes. He gave himself over to the feeling of warmth and safety which the cabin induced in him. A weakness, he thought, but this was a place, probably the last place, where he could safely indulge it.

There were a dozen or so new arrivals, half of them Egyptians, too sharply dressed in Italian-cut suits that hadn’t been made with quite enough cloth; returning from some trade or government mission, Edwards thought, when he opened his eyes cautiously and looked at them flapping about the aisle, pushing for seats, making a nuisance of themselves like men who don’t travel often and are determined to make the most of it.

He had taken a place at the very back of the plane, where he always sat, next to the cabin staff, hoping that none of the new arrivals would get that far. To discourage the possibility he put his briefcase and a pile of newspapers on the two vacant seats to his left and looked determinedly out of the window like a stuffy woman travelling below her class.

He’d always had an obsession about sitting by himself on journeys; he couldn’t bear enforced company, being with anyone, in fact, whose presence he hadn’t actively encouraged. As a child — it had begun then, at the end of term: the vicious, howling cabal of schoolboys savaging each other with their peaked caps and bunching in the corridors on the train away from Capetown — the sense of release he’d craved then, as he did now, and had only found when he’d changed at the junction and was sitting alone in the rackety wooden carriage which took him along the branch line to his uncle’s home up country.

“May I?”

Edwards nodded distantly, barely turning his head, as the small, perky, almost balk figure in a glistening Dacron suit moved the papers diffidently and sat down on the far seat from him. Nodded, and closed his eyes again. But he couldn’t avoid hearing the storm of Arabic which followed from the man — the brusque, admonitory phrases of someone too long accustomed to giving orders, as he shouted for the steward. Apart from the rough country accent — from Upper Egypt, probably Aswan — the voice might have belonged to some petty court functionary from Farouk’s time and not Nasser’s. But then Nasser had been in power now for as long as Farouk had, Edwards thought, and one regime is much like another as far as the functionaries are concerned. When they get into their stride you couldn’t tell them apart: obsequiousness by the well-heeled, with the well-heeled, and stuff the people; the secret society of boot strappers: the new rich, and the “government class”; and between them the shared nightmare memory of a mud village lost in the delta two decades before, when the night came down in black frustration and you were the only person in the café with trousers, talking revolution over the sizzling pressure lamp.

And the revolution had come; others had brought it, sought death for it, denned it — you were buying stamps in the General Post Office at the time. Never mind. It was just what you’d always talked about in the village café, it had come to pass exactly as you had said — it was yours, your number had come up at last. You were out in the streets for the rest of the week, you yelled more than anybody and looted a little. And later you bought a jacket to go with the trousers and had a word in someone’s ear — a friend of your uncle’s who had actually been seen with a stick in his hand on the first day.

Now the ranks had closed again after the whirlwind, you met the fixers again, the ones you’d rallied against in the village, only they wore suits now — you met them again, came together like long-estranged and passionate lovers: the ten per cent man; the kick-back, as violent and profitable as American football; government by baksheesh: the call from the hotel lobby before the tender is put out, the piece of marshy land beyond Ismailia bought from a small family for £200, already surveying it in the mind’s eye, seeing the graceful curve of the new road, the tall chimneys of the chemical factory …

The trouble was he’d gone on thinking there was a difference, between one sort of government and another, for too long. The man’s arrogant, peremptory attitude came to him as a shock, he realized — as another indisputable sign of something he’d long wanted to avoid recognizing: that the things some people fought for didn’t make the rest any better, that if there were improvements in their life they took them as being no more than their due; that was the accepted order of things — personal advantage, material gain — these were the things that came first whichever side you were on, whatever you had fought for. Edwards wished that he could start now like everyone else, dreaming of a colour television set and a second car, that he’d never come to believe in sides.

The man was loudly demanding the basket of sweets before take-off, like a fractious child, and when the steward came he grabbed a whole fistful, and then another, and stuffed them in his pocket, some of them dropping down between the seats.

“Please, Your Excellency,” the steward fawned in Arabic, “I can arrange for you to take a bag of them with you before we get to Cairo.”

His conciliatory, false voice — how quickly the steward had changed from privileged official to grovelling servant. It reminded Edwards of his father’s basement office next to the cellars in the old Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo and the monthly agony of paying, and docking, the servants’ wages. Edwards had worked there for a few months when he’d left school at a time when his parents still hoped he’d follow them in the hotel business. “Please, Effendi — Please, Mr. Edwards — ” when some floor waiter had broken something or had had a complaint laid against him. And he remembered the repeated pleas of one particular servant who had smashed a decanter, an elderly Nubian who spoke like a child as his father calculated the three-month deduction from his salary: “Please, Effendi, I’ll never do it again, I’ll never do it again.”

He’d wanted a world then, really ever since he could remember, where saying things like that would never again be possible. That was when the vehemence had begun, the anger that had lit all his life, and which seemed to be dying in him now.

Sweets, he thought — that’s what it all comes to. That’s all they want. That’s all the anger has really been about.

“Sweets,” the man in the seat next to him said affably, sucking and chomping on one loudly. “You can’t get them like this in Cairo these days, I’m afraid. My grandchildren love them. What can one do?”

Edwards had to turn now and was about to nod his head again in vague assent when he saw that it was Mohammed Yunis who had spoken. His Excellency Mohammed Yunis, Secretary General of the Arab Socialist Union.

For a moment Edwards thought he saw the answer to London’s riddle: that Williams had organized some kind of incredibly subtle end for him, whose instrument was to be Yunis. The first stages were already under way.

Or perhaps the plan was that he and Yunis were to go down together, literally, on the flight to Cairo. But it couldn’t have been planned like that, nothing could have been organized so that he should meet Yunis in this way: he’d changed his flight himself at London Airport, as he often did, from a BOAC one to another an hour later on United Arab Airlines. Still, there was an advantage in seeing Yunis — it confirmed his only course of action. Yunis, he saw now so clearly, was nothing more than the largest cog in what they were pleased to call the “elected government” of Egypt — the Arab Socialist Union which was simply a rubber stamp for the President’s intentions. He might have been somewhat to the left of Nasser but not nearly enough, and quite without sufficient support in the country, for anyone in the West ever to think of approaching him with ideas of a counter-revolution. Yunis was just a dapper, greedy old socialist, anxious for trips to Berlin and London, for good English sweets, properly boiled, and long-playing records of Jewish musicals. Edwards thought: anyone who could see him, as Williams apparently did, in battledress, master-minding a coup, didn’t have Nasser’s end in mind but his own. Yunis would have him in the hands of the police the moment he suggested such a scheme.

It was a fortunate coincidence in fact, Edwards thought again, this meeting with Yunis. It had come as a last warning, a clear sign pointing to sanity and survival: he would have to disappear; into Egypt or further south, from where he’d come. Williams had burnt his boats on one side and he couldn’t see Moscow taking him back.

The currency he’d worked with for so many years would be discredited at once, he realized — the moment he tried to work outside the peculiar circumstances which alone gave it a value. No single organization could trust him now, not with his long history of work with that organization’s enemies. Each side had trusted him so long as he remained in the middle, like a reliable news agency, giving them all the news. But for one side to give him sanctuary would not only be valueless to them, it would be dangerous too. For how could they be sure it wasn’t a trick, that he wasn’t a Trojan hen come home to roost? Williams had put him quite beyond trust and he cursed him for it. His deceits in the past seemed like honesty now — by comparison with the future, which he’d thought of as the beginning of that state at last. The dacha in the Moscow suburbs wasn’t really on, he saw. Or the hot toddy.

4

Williams’s dinner with his mother had gone off rather well in his house in Flood Street: they’d reached the coffee before she’d embarked on the condition and position of her daughter-in-law.

“How is she — where is she, Charles? I never hear of her. Why all this mystery?”

“Alice is in Devon. You know that perfectly well. There’s no mystery. She’s been there since Christmas.”

And just then the telephone had thankfully gone. It was Marcus. “Just to confirm his movements, I’ve had word from Heathrow: he’s on his way.”

“Good, Marcus. We’re under way then, too. Now there’s only Marlow to send packing.”

“We’re seeing him tomorrow afternoon. It shouldn’t be too difficult. They were close friends after all.”

Williams put down the receiver and blew his nose. A minute sliver of the chicken fricassee they’d had for dinner had lodged somewhere in the back of his throat and he felt the need to clean his teeth.

He’d like to have left his mother at once and gone back to the office. There was so much to do. There was no denying it — his plan was shaping well.

5

Edwards assumed there’d be one of his section officers checking on his arrival at Cairo. There usually was, though he never knew who, and certainly Williams would want to know in this case, so he left the aircraft with Yunis, ending a conversation with him about Egypt’s balance of payments problem as they walked down the steps to the apron, before Yunis was swallowed up in a crowd of party hacks and photographers who had come to meet him. The thing was to keep London happy for as long as possible, let them think he was going through with their plan, whatever it was, until he could get his bearings in Egypt, decide what to do and then dump the whole thing.

And surely Bridget would have some ideas, he thought.

Things, in fact, worked out rather better than he’d expected. He must have made more of an impression on Yunis than he’d realized, with his talk of World Bank loans (he’d said he was going to Egypt to do some articles on their hard currency crisis) for from the middle of the crush of well-wishers Yunis turned back towards him and offered him a lift back into the city — turned round like a friend recognizing him in a crowded street and suggesting lunch. How easy it was, Edwards thought, to lead an ordinary life, to make up one’s day with meetings and activities that one enjoyed. He thought of Yunis’s sweets and found he didn’t resent his greed any longer. The two men pushed their way through the crush to the passenger exit. A big government Mercedes was humming by the kerb. They got into it like minor royalty and drove off towards the city.

6

The rather distinguished-looking Egyptian eased the collar of his old-fashioned linen summer suit in the moist air of the airport’s main lobby. The lapels were far too wide. He knew that. The air-conditioning plant had long since broken down and he had spent some uncomfortable minutes pretending to make a phone call from a booth which looked out over the main passenger entrance before coming out on to the concourse, mopping his brow, breathless and perturbed. He nodded absent-mindedly towards a man in a suit of grubby blue cloth on the other side of the hall who at once left the building and disappeared after Yunis’s cavalcade in a small Hillman. An angry squabble of passengers were shouting and waving their arms on the baking pavement outside. The airport coach either wouldn’t start or, by arrangement, wasn’t leaving then, and they’d been left to the mercies of the rapacious taxi drivers who had started to move in among them, hawking their broken down American cars for a trip to the city. An American woman it was who had supposedly been raped in one of these taxis several months before, the man in the summer suit remembered, at night on the old road back into Cairo past the City of the Dead; appropriate. The incident had come up to him in Military Intelligence: someone in the city police, as a way of avoiding responsibility for the investigation, had suggested that the woman was an imperialist spy and the taxi driver had only really been doing no more than his patriotic duty.

The man in the summer suit dealt with spies, as head of Egyptian Counter-intelligence. He finished tidying himself up, tucking away a large spotted handkerchief in his breast pocket. It was frayed at the edge, but you’d have to be close to notice it. Too much laundering, for too long. That’s the only thing they’re really good at. Nothing else works here, he thought, with unusual impatience. Everyone is a liar, all of them — absolute rogues. But then that was exactly what he had always liked about the country, he remembered, trying to calm himself: he’d never cared for efficiency or skill in those he worked with; it cramped his own effectiveness in that sphere. He could pretend, as he had for a long time, that he was slipshod and vain like the others, knowing that he wasn’t. That was his pleasure, which Egypt gave him every day of his life: the confirmation of another secret, inside the secret of his work.

But now someone from outside had come up with a mystery, something he wasn’t in on, and it had thrown him completely. Until then he’d known about everything, everybody else — he had been in the middle of the web — but what was Henry Edwards doing with Mohammed Yunis? Nothing, nobody, had prepared him for that.

Colonel Hassan Hamdy thought about it all over a cup of sweet coffee with the airport’s Chief Security Officer in the stuffy little room on the second floor of the passenger building. He hadn’t in the least wanted to see Selim but it might have looked odd if he’d not put in an appearance. Home Security expected that sort of condescension from the senior military branch of the service and the Colonel had never failed to supply it — to play the arrogant role whenever necessary, as it so frequently was — in his twenty-three years with Egyptian Intelligence.

Selim was both annoyed and pleased to see the Colonel — unable to decide whether the honour of seeing him at the airport outweighed the implications of his having felt it necessary to come there in the first place. Had not His Excellency’s arrivals always gone off exactly to plan? — without interference from the military branch? Unfortunately, though Selim continually thought about such real or imagined slights, he knew he could never voice them, so he proceeded instead to welcome the Colonel with an effusive, elaborate courtesy.

“Salaam alaikum … ’am di’illah, Colonel …”

The Colonel listened to the usual succession of God-be-with-yous and other invocations to the deities while carefully adjusting the small fan on Selim’s desk so that it favoured him rather than Selim. They expected that sort of thing too, he reminded himself, they really enjoyed being cast down, and now of all times it was important to behave just as usual. Was he behaving a little nervously? Selim’s next words made him think he might be.

“I hope His Excellency the Secretary General had a successful mission. I believe our security arrangements for his arrival were satisfactory?” Selim made his inquiry with just a hint of directness and dissatisfaction, as though he’d suddenly become aware of a certain unusual vulnerability in the Colonel.

“Yes, Selim, they were all right” the Colonel retaliated, emphasising the words so that they suggested a doubt rather than a recommendation. “I think the car should have met His Excellency on the apron and not at the passenger exit. There’s a risk — in his walking between the two, through the corridor, other passengers and so on. The press and film people in the main lobby, like chickens round a corn sack. Anything could have happened.”

“But His Excellency insists on meeting them. And the film people told me they don’t have enough cable to reach the apron for their cameras — the power connections — ”

“Don’t they have batteries?”

“Ah, not these days I’m afraid, Colonel. As you know yourself we can get very little imported material now. And our own batteries, I’m afraid …” Selim shrugged his shoulders, raised both hands briefly, policing the air, and began to chatter again about the Will of God and about the lack of even the smallest comforts in Egypt today, and the Colonel nodded in agreement, thinking what a liar Selim was, knowing that he and all his more cherished friends got everything they wanted from the tax-free airport shop downstairs. When would they stop lying? the Colonel thought again. When? But then he remembered his own life-long deception and tried to think of something else. He couldn’t.

How and why had Edwards met up with Yunis? This meeting was just one more query in a succession of inexplicable events which had plagued the Colonel for the past twenty-four hours, another part of the mystery, which was something he had always rigorously avoided in his work. When he sensed it he was like an animal downwind of the gun and he had to fight the panic that came over him, the need he felt to run.

Someone, for once, knew more about what was going on than he did — was arranging things behind his back, manipulating people, had him in his sights perhaps as well. He had to force himself to stay where he was, do nothing, behave normally. And Selim’s grubby, anonymous little office was the ideal cover for his mood. He could bury himself in the idle bureaucratic chatter, use it as a camouflage. Selim’s venal pursuits, which he had despised before, were part of a safe world he wanted to belong to now.

“They’ve recently had a very fine consignment of Japanese transistors downstairs. I’ve put in for one on our allowance. You might like to look at them … My wife wants to go to Ras el Bar for the summer … Hate the place myself — the girls, you know, they put the price up … It’s impossible. Yes, I’d like to see him get promotion but his father’s a complete farmer …”

The Colonel nodded his head and said “Yes” and “No” and “Of course” and sipped his coffee. And he thought about Edwards.

Where was the trick? There must be one. What was it? The first part of the problem made sense, or might do: the message which he had received the day before from his Control in Tel Aviv: that Edwards, a British SIS man in their Mid-East section, was a KGB double and was on his way back to Moscow via Cairo, with the names of a group of Israeli intelligence men in Egypt. And the message had been crystal clear: stop him immediately, at the airport if possible — kill him with the utmost dispatch; the security of the entire Tel Aviv circle in Egypt depended on it.

There was a slight problem in this, of course, which Tel Aviv didn’t know about: Edwards was one of his own men, an Egyptian agent, doubling in Holborn — had been for seventeen years. It was an essential part of the Colonel’s cover with Egyptian Intelligence that he form his own quite separate network of people working genuinely for Cairo and that these people should never be known to Tel Aviv. It was a problem he could rise above, the Colonel thought. It was easier after all to kill someone face to face, rather than at a distance, with pills or silencers: the close approach — sighing in the man’s ear, turning the knife delicately between the ribs — that was far easier. But Mohammed Yunis had got in the way of all that.

How — and why — had Edwards met up with him? the Colonel wondered again. What purpose could they have had other than that of swapping notes? The puzzle began to fit then: Moscow would give Yunis the names of the Israeli circle in Egypt in return for his co-operation in toppling the President. With those names Yunis would be in a nearly unassailable position of power: he would be able to expose the President and his intelligence services as bumbling fools, save Egypt from dishonour and emerge as the natural successor and hero — and Soviet puppet.

It was for just such reasons that Yunis, at this moment, on instructions from the President, was on his way to an unexpected appointment in Heliopolis: he had been chattering too much in Moscow already. And it was no more possible to stop him talking now than it had been to do away with the messenger who had accompanied him. The two men had taken the precaution of sticking together all the way, one protecting the other, on the plane and through the airport welcome. The only way of separating them was to risk going to Heliopolis himself, hoping that neither of them had talked yet. Edwards, after all, was his own man — with Military Intelligence, not Home Security. There was just a chance he hadn’t opened his mouth about the Tel Aviv circle in Egypt. If he could get him away, he would ensure that he never did.

“Tell me, Colonel, would you like to take a look at one of these transistors? They fit in your pocket …”

Selim interrupted the Colonel’s calculations so that he looked up and said “Yes” before he knew what he was doing.

7

Edwards began to enjoy being with Yunis, not so much for his chatter about Egypt’s economy — he couldn’t in fact, understand why, after so many visits to the country in the guise of journalist and the fruitless attempts to see people like Yunis for his articles, the man should suddenly now have taken an interest in him — but because he knew that as long as he stayed with him he was safe. No one was going to pick him up — or off — in the big Black Mercedes with its electric windows, glass partitions and bullet-proofing.

It was a pity though, he thought, with the windows shut, in the false air — there was not that real sense of his coming back to the country which he always looked forward to, the sudden overwhelming indication that he had really come home: the dry chalky smell of baking concrete and lime dust, the sharp breath of paraffin and rotting newspapers swirling up from the rissole carts in the back-streets of Heliopolis which they were passing through. Before, on every other journey, this had been the unmistakable evidence that he’d come back into his own world — that, and seeing Bridget again. The two had so often gone together in the past, when she’d met him at the airport and they’d driven back, taking the old road into the city past the City of the Dead, to the warm cedar smell of the house in Maadi where she lived alone.

This time she hadn’t come; he hadn’t told her. He was supposed to be defecting. If only it had been as simple as that.

Yunis had been talking all the time — about Egypt’s economic problems and the price of rice and what the Arab Socialist Union was going to do about it all if they could manage another loan from the World Bank — and Edwards had barely heard him.

“… I’m afraid the economic outlook is not bright — a hard currency crisis … I feel our real hope lies with Moscow. Unfortunately they are not prepared to consider any more barter deals. They want something better than that, nearly all our cotton, which of course would give them a financial stranglehold, something which the President naturally is not prepared to consider. The canal and tourist currency …? No one knows where it goes to — to the Army in some shape or form, for sure. They get everything in Egypt nowadays. We are in trouble …”

Edwards nodded his head sagely, still thinking about other times, as if he were chatting with some knowledgeable but boring economist from the Financial Times in El Vino: until he realized that no Egyptian, least of all someone in Yunis’s position, had ever talked to him with such bluntness, and would never do so, except for the most appalling reason.

He looked round at Yunis sharply, sensing in his words, not the scoop that would have otherwise occurred to him, but something dangerously candid, a frantic upset in the whole temper of Egyptian official life, in the rigidly secretive attitudes of Cairo officialdom with which he was so familiar.

Yunis looked at Edwards quizzically, as though he’d failed to understand something very simple, something obvious, behind his words.

“What do you mean — ‘We’re in trouble’?”

Edwards was calm, but only through an effort born of long practice; the empty, windless feeling in his stomach and the sudden consciousness of sweat rising up the back of his neck giving him sure warning before his mind had told him anything.

“Just what I said. The doors are locked. I’m sure they are. They do it from the outside.”

The questions in Yunis’s face disappeared in crinkly lines which spread up his cheek and over his eyes, just the beginnings of a wan smile, as though he were congratulating himself on having at last made himself clear to Edwards.

When thought flooded back a moment later it was about Williams. Why had he arranged for Yunis to pick him up? And he saw Yunis in a policeman’s uniform for a second, as a London bobby in a tall black helmet: it wasn’t possible. And then as the car drew in past the main gates of the Armour depot and barracks in Heliopolis and Yunis was frog-marched in front of him towards a group of old Nissen huts, he realized that Yunis was the victim, not he, that he’d just been taken along for the ride.

Certainly Edwards was more than an embarrassment to the Major who met them at the entrance of the building, which must have been exactly Yunis’s intention, the partitions in the hut were far too thin to allow any immediate rough stuff to go undetected.

“Who is he?” the Major spoke abruptly in Arabic to one of a group of men in civilian clothes who had drawn up behind them in a car a few minutes afterwards. Edwards had noticed the man among the crowd of journalists who’d flocked around Yunis’s car at the airport — a particularly compact, tough little man with an acid expression and tooth-brush moustache: an upright swagger — one of the President’s personal security men, Edwards thought, an élite corps of some fifty or so people, most of them junior colleagues of the President during his Army days, and now his Praetorian guard.

“Well? Who is it?”

“A British journalist. We’ve got his papers.”

“What’s his connection — with — ” the Major paused, but admitted — “His Excellency?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who does he work for?”

“There’s no mention of any paper. Visa through the Press section of the London Embassy. He’s been here often before. Arab affairs. Middle East expert …”

The officer looked across at Edwards with a completely blank expression, as if attempting some complex mental arithmetic which would connect Edwards with Yunis, and failing to add up the figures he became angry.

“A journalist? Middle East expert — but how? Why here at this moment? Explain.”

“Yunis joined him on the flight. After Munich. Wanted him along for protection. He must have known we were going to pick him up. It’s obvious.”

The swagger man licked his moustache and pursed his lips aggressively, pulling his rank in Nasser’s secret army; he wasn’t going to be browbeaten by any mere officer in uniform.

“There was nothing to do about it. Yunis offered him a lift back to the city. We had to let him go along with him. There would have been trouble — passengers, the press — he was surrounded; we couldn’t have pulled him at the airport. You knew that. And it doesn’t matter. Just a freelance. They won’t be looking for him in London. We can keep him. We’ll have to.”

Edwards looked across to where Yunis was standing by the opposite wall, between two officers, his neat black briefcase by his feet, mopping his face, still holding a copy of the Economist under his arm like any weary stockbroker waiting for the 5:25 at Waterloo. A weary but somehow contented man as he returned Edwards’s look with another of his brief miniature smiles.

Behind him was a window and through it Edwards could see a group of soldiers in singlets and black underpants playing soccer in the first coolness of the day and some others hanging up their laundry and boxing each other good-naturedly about the ears. It was evening and in another half hour it would be quite dark with stars, and Edwards longed with sharpness for the bath and the terraced room smelling of hot plaster looking out over the river in the Semiramis, and the meal on the roof restaurant later on, at one of the small tables with their Edwardian lamps next to the parapet: the first taste again, which he missed even after a few weeks, of the spongy flat bread, the moist tartness of the local cheese which he ordered specially, and the purple Omar Khayyam from Gianaclis’s vineyards outside Alexandria — wanted it sharply, for he knew it wasn’t going to happen that night and, like sex, he wanted it then, right away.

He thought how he’d tailored his pleasures in life to the few he knew without question he could always have, to unadventurous things he could rely on: not happiness or girls in night clubs or the long-awaited letter. He’d accepted long ago that these things didn’t work: the letter never came, the girl had someone else. And it was happiness enough just to know that these things were so, to be sure of them.

The intense flavour of certain tastes and places — and the feeling of ease in a strange land, these were the diversions he’d come to take for granted, which depended on him alone, which were really his life, and he cursed again the profession which had encouraged such dilettante pursuits in him over the years and had now, just as haphazardly, withdrawn them.

His mouth was dry and salty and he felt dizzy as if he’d swum a long way without pleasure. He began to wonder what role he should play now and the thought made him feel sick. But when he spoke it was with bruised conviction, an actor coming midway into the lines of an old and well-remembered character.

“Do you think I might have a drink of water?” His tone was pompous and old-fashioned and very English, jumping a class into the outraged accents of someone who believed wogs began at Dover and had never known another tongue. It was as well to preserve that fiction as long as possible. The Major turned from the doorway and gestured to the man next to Yunis.

“Take him.” Yunis was led away down a corridor.

“I’m sorry. There has been a mistake. Come.” The Major pointed to a seat in his own room, without ceremony or abruptness, but mystified, thinking.

“A mistake …” He pushed a bell on his desk.

“That’s what I was going to say. You’ve taken the words out of my mouth.”

“I don’t understand …?”

And he didn’t, Edwards thought. He was dealing with a senior man. He’d used the colloquialism intentionally, to see where he stood, to gauge the officer’s importance in Egyptian military security. One could place a man in this hierarchy almost exactly by his knowledge of English. Knowing too much of that or any foreign language had always been regarded with the greatest misgivings in their service. It dated from the time of Nasser’s orginal coup de palais against Farouk when almost everyone concerned had been junior officers who had never had the oportunity of learning a second language, and in the security divisions at least this linguistic frailty had since been encouraged; it was thought to be a guarantee against outside infiltration or influence while at the same time it had made Cairo a haven for every sort of pentration. Egyptian security there — eavesdropping or interrogating — often didn’t really understand what their target was saying.

“Would you like a Coke or some coffee?”

“I’d like to know what I’m doing here.”

“I’m sorry. You ask for something to drink. That will come now. But no questions. You must wait for some — for another man before you ask questions. There has been a mistake.”

He repeated the phrase as if his future safety depended on the words being fully understood.

They left him alone in the office with a warm Coca-Cola. Edwards swallowed a mouthful and then rubbed the lip of the bottle carefully with his cuff.

Colonel Hamdy, out of his linen suit and in uniform now, came into the room an hour later. He smiled at Edwards and glanced at the three empty Coke bottles on the desk.

“You’re drinking too much, Henry. Relax.”

8

“Marlow’s coming at three. You’ve seen his preliminary report? Rather cagey, I thought How close was he with Edwards?”

Williams sat down and looked at Marcus through his “In” tray. There was nothing there; it was just after nine o’clock and none of the secretaries had arrived. He and Marcus had come from breakfast at Carlton Gardens.

“They were close — very close as far as I can gather. It was when Crowther was Principal Officer in the Cairo Circle, so one can’t be too sure about anything. The files are very skimpy over that period. But they were close, certainly. That’s one of the essential factors in the operation after all.”

“Homosexual?” Williams inquired brightly.

“No. Marlow was married at our Consulate in 1958. Apparently it was part of some deal we arranged — to get him to work for us. It gave us a lever. His wife was with us too at the time as a stringer. She’d been Edwards’s mistress — and that was part of the deal we had with him. Edwards said she was necessary cover for him — he was a real whoremaster then. As well as everything else. But the woman did a good job, as far as one can tell from the files. The marriage broke up, dissolved some years later, and Marlow was put on the strength in London. Recommendation from the Cairo Resident. Marlow seems a decent enough fellow, quiet, fall guy material I suppose, though even so there’s a chance he may not go along with all this.”

Williams looked at Marcus walking in and out of the morning light that flooded through the bright shaft from the half-drawn curtains.

“He’ll agree. He’s agreed to everything here in the past eight years, as long as I’ve known him. Civil servant material — the same as ‘fall guy’ material, as you put it. A good fellow, certainly — and very good on those Arabic rags too. I’ll be sorry if I have to lose him. But he’ll agree all right. It will be a matter of honour for him. He’ll want to prove something — either my stupidity or his friendship for Edwards. Or both. He’s a reliable fellow.”

Marcus nodded, privately unconvinced, and walked across to the window which looked over the car park at the back of the building. Cars were popping in through the control gate, one after the other, stopping and starting at the barrier with hideous regularity, as though automated and not driven. On-the-dot, conscientious people in little Heralds and Minis, twenty-nine miles an hour all the way in from Croydon and Barnet with their mild tweed jackets and a copy of last week’s Sunday Express in the rear window. Yet in half an hour they would be sorting cables in the cypher room, decoding reports from the field, culling through the Beirut and Cairo pouches, handling people’s lives — and Marcus’s reputation.

They looked so very safe and dedicated and English, Marcus thought. And stupid. But one such person had been Philby, a second Blake, another Edwards. And perhaps Marlow? Williams was too beguiled by him, too soft. Marlow was so ordinary it worried Marcus. And it crossed his mind if, in these stringent days, a certain degree of flamboyance in a spy might not be a better guarantee of security and trust — rather than the anonymous characteristics of these people who locked their cars in a top security area and streamed in through the back of the building with such an air of probity and dedication. You couldn’t tell a thing from their faces. It made Marcus uneasy.

Still, with Edwards, there would be an object lesson for them all at last. He would never again have to doubt those inscrutable morning faces. Edwards’s total demise would put an end to it all, make up for it all: there would be no dacha in Moscow or forty-two years in the Scrubs for him; the deceits and betrayals of the past, the good men in so many sectors who had simply disappeared and the rest who were nursing ruined careers on cut pensions in small houses in Sussex.

Marcus thought about their various fates with an overwhelming righteousness, as though in multiplying the pity he brought to bear on their individual misfortunes he could justify his own insensate vehemence in the matter of defectors and double agents.

He knew Williams didn’t share his vindictiveness, indeed that he was far more concerned with his own rider to the plan of disposing of Edwards. He wanted to use Edwards before he “disappeared” whereas Marcus just wanted to see him dead — something which he could no longer arrange for him through any British court. And he saw just a chance that in being tied in with Williams’s scheme Edwards might get away. That was the flaw in the plan — simply that there were two plans. Edwards was being given an alternative, albeit an impossibly dangerous one, which Marcus would never have allowed him: a narrow exit which, if he were foolish enough to take it, could get him clear of them.

Marcus’s plan for him had been straightforward enough: Edwards had gone to Cairo and his own department had already blown him to Israeli Intelligence in Tel Aviv as the Russian agent he was. They had said he was on his way there with the names of a group of Israeli Intelligence men stationed in Egypt — names that he had picked up in the course of his work for Holborn — and that he was about to pass this information on to Egyptian Security before beating it back to Moscow. On this impeccable advice Tel Aviv’s men in Cairo would pick Edwards up at the airport — or the moment he got to his hotel — and kill him. The Israelis were tough about that sort of thing. Necessarily tough. Unlike Williams.

The operation had every chance of success — until Williams had imposed what seemed to Marcus a quite unnecessary handicap to the scheme: the ostensible purpose which Edwards had been given for going to Egypt was to contact Mohammed Yunis and stir revolution within the Arab Socialist Union. Williams had justified this as a “necessary reason” for sending him to Cairo, without which he would immediately suspect something. Marcus, on the other hand, had argued that Edwards went to Cairo every few months in any case, as a matter of routine — and wasn’t that sufficient reason in this case? But he had been unable to dissuade Williams.

Why had Williams wanted to jeopardise the plan? For that’s what it amounted to, Marcus decided. Was he getting too old for the job, too cautious, past making an unequivocal decision, intent always on creating innumerable “standbys” and “provisos”? Was that it? And if not was it possible that somehow, for some reason, Williams wanted Edwards to have a get out, wanted to warn him that the whole affair was a trap by offering him the clearly impractical idea of subverting Yunis? And who would want to let Edwards off the hook? Unless, like Edwards, he worked for Moscow?

It was a quarter past nine. Someone opened the door in the next room and the two men looked up, almost apprehensively, and then continued talking, but in lower, more careful tones, like conspirators. But were they both involved in the same conspiracy? Marcus wondered.

“Edwards may break,” Marcus said. “I mean not after the Israelis get him — but before. I can’t believe that anyone with his experience of the area would fall for that plan about contacting Yunis. And if Edwards has any suspicions don’t you think he’ll run the moment he hits Cairo? Or before — on the way. He’ll know we’ve cooked something up for him. A trap.”

Williams knew that this was perfectly true, just as he’d known long before anyone else that Edwards was a double, working with Moscow. He’d realized it finally when, out of the forty or so British agents in the Middle East whom Blake had shopped, only Edwards and half a dozen other minor figures had remained with their cover intact.

All had been well until Marcus had been moved from the Scottish Office and appointed as an internal watchdog by the new Minister to look into the whole question of security in the Middle East section — from then on the sands had begun to shift awkwardly.

Marcus had got to the point about Edwards with uncomfortable rapidity. He’d hit on the fact that Edwards’s cover had been left intact after Blake had shopped everyone else, he’d combed his files, turned his life inside out, grilled Crowther in retirement He just couldn’t accept that Blake could have overlooked one of their key men in the Middle East section — and he’d been right.

Petnicki, the defector the Americans had got hold of a month before, had confirmed it all. And Williams had been unable to do anything about it — except ensure that Marcus’s investigations didn’t percolate up to him, and try to get Edwards out of the way, which he couldn’t do directly, or through Moscow, since he’d cut every contact with them once Marcus had begun his ferreting. As far as Moscow was concerned Williams was “buried” for the time being, which meant he didn’t exist for them, was not to aproach them in any way, warn them, or tell them anything. That was the arrangement. It was his only chance of keeping his cover intact. After Philby and his two friends, whom he’d recruited in the early ’thirties — and then Blake and now Edwards — he was the last, the most important man left in the Citadel. It wasn’t a question now of being caught without a chair when the music stopped; he couldn’t afford to play the game any more at all. It was a matter of sitting tight and never taking one’s eyes off the orchestra.

He looked at Marcus firmly. “Edwards may run. But if he does they’ll be with him. The Israelis were going to have a man at the airport.”

“But the whole idea of his contacting Yunis — it seems to me an excellent way of warning him — no? If he has any sense, and he has, he won’t go near Yunis and hell know something’s up. We should have had him in the Scrubs by now, with another forty-two years, and not given him the chance, however slight, of getting back to Moscow.”

Williams smiled slightly and created a sigh. “Forty-two years doesn’t seem to do much good. They don’t seem to last the pace these days. And the hanging judges have all gone. This is the way to do it. Edwards won’t be many days on the Nile — and he’ll never see Moscow. The Yunis alternative is perfectly sound — perfectly in order.”

Williams lied comfortably, a slow pensive authority in his voice — the voice and the authority born of many years dealing with over-conscientious, pushy subordinates — underlining his real knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs which he knew Marcus, for all his other skills, didn’t possess. He’d been involved with the Scottish Office for too long and in negotiating that devious terrain he had found little time for any wider geography.

“We’ve gone over it all. Goodness me. And Edwards is already there. We’ve talked it out together, you should have voiced your doubts at the time.”

“I suppose so. I wasn’t so familiar with UAR affairs then. But it’s clear enough now to me. We’re warning Edwards …”

Marcus looked directly at Williams for the first time that morning: a sad look, the small blue eyes admitting failure for a moment, Williams thought. Or were they questioning him, connecting him directly with this idea that Edwards had been warned?

For that had been exactly his intention — to alert Edwards. He hoped what he’d done would be sufficient, that Edwards would get himself safely to Moscow. He would leave the Cairo flight somewhere along the line, at Rome, or more likely at Munich where he could slip into Berlin, contact the Resident there, cross over into the East city and on to Moscow. And that would be the end of it all; Edwards would go home; he would never get near the Israelis at Cairo Airport, let alone Mohammed Yunis. Without any direct contact, Williams would get him out of the way under Marcus’s nose. The message and the warning would be implicit in his directions to contact Yunis and infiltrate his Union — for nothing could be more obviously suicidal: he was waving red flags all down the line at Edwards. He couldn’t fail to notice them.

After all, thought Williams, if he put himself in Edwards’s position, as he’d often done recently … it was surprisingly easy, professionally they were the same sort of men. And Williams reminded himself once again of how many professional characteristics they must share: the development to a fine pitch of all those senses beyond the fifth — those which created confidence and attracted luck in the worst corners, the others which warned or encouraged, pushed or stalled one, at just the right moment, so that even in the most hazy circumstances where logic was useless, one felt impelled towards the right decision. Thus equipped it was possible to survive indefinitely in two worlds, for these added dimensions of the deeply committed liar, like any gift of genius, had the effect of creating a patina of trust around one which the merely honest rarely possessed.

In these circumstances one paid court to the dissembler and mistrusted steady virtue. A licence for deceit was like cut garlic in one’s pocket: one stank of belief.

And Edwards must still have all these gifts, Williams thought. He would not have lost them — the confidence and the skills and the early warning systems born of a lifetime’s necessary disloyalty would now be more acute than ever: Edwards would run for his life. There was little to worry about there.

But there was Marlow to think about; the other half of the plan called MOUSE: the official Holborn plan which would now have to be put into operation when they met Marlow that afternoon. He was an important lever in the machine: if Israeli Intelligence in Cairo, once they got hold of Edwards, were to believe that he was a genuine Soviet defector and not just a plant, London would have to appear much more concerned at his loss; someone from the Holborn section would have to be sent chasing him, to try and stop him before he got over to the other side: a bona fide spy-catcher, a warranty of the goods being supplied; Marlow was to be that man.

Of course, it would never come to that, Williams realized; since Edwards would surely never get to Cairo Marlow would never be needed to guarantee him in this way as a defector: certainly not; Marlow’s visit to Cairo would be for another purpose altogether, something which Williams had planned and arranged long before with Moscow.

Suez had given him the idea; Eden’s muddled ‘collusion’—they would do it properly this time: a scheme for Moscow which would once and for all bring about a complete Soviet grip on the Middle East: the subversion of the Nasser regime by creating a war for them against Israel, which they would necessarily lose and which would subsequently allow for a massive Soviet military and political build-up in Egypt, which in turn would lead to their virtual control of the country and the other Arab satellites — a position Moscow would never achieve as long as Nasser remained in power.

The steady, honest, loyal Marlow was to be the man who took the fall here, the ‘plant’ who carried the virus, the British agent dealing with Israel, to be unmasked by Egyptian security in Cairo with a secret memorandum, a forged copy of an Israeli Ministry of Defence document from the Chief of Staff General Rabin to General Elazar, Commander Northern Front, outlining details for an advance on the Syrian border — troop dispositions, attack schedules, primary targets — orders, in fact, for an Israeli preemptive strike against Syria.

With a message of this sort, found on a genuine British agent, Nasser would have his MiG’s and Sochi bombers over Tel Aviv within forty-eight hours, and Israel would have shot them out of the sky and been on the canal by the end of the week.

The Moscow Resident’s department in London had had Marlow under surveillance for some time and as soon as he packed his bags for Cairo their plan with him would come into operation: the hidden document which Egyptian Security would “find”—on a tip-off from Moscow.

Williams had chosen Marlow as the carrier of this virus because he had initially agreed to his recruitment into the service, years before, for just such an eventuality as this. Every Intelligence Department needed people like Marlow on hand — men in whom nothing had been invested and whose account could only show a profit when it was closed. And that, after all, was the proper use — the only positive justification — for an intelligence service, Williams thought: to make war for a country that didn’t want one, and couldn’t win it, in order to bring on better times …

Marcus turned away from the window, sat down and stretched himself amiably, easing his muscles, tilting his head back, in a happy cruciform.

“You’re right. There’s no real warning for Edwards in the Yunis plan. It’s reasonable — or as reasonable as some of the other schemes I’ve come across in the files here. It takes time to accustom oneself, that’s all — from the Highland Development Authority to Cairo back alleys — it’s a different sort of intrigue. It was just a thought about Yunis.”

Williams suspected the intrigue was probably identical.

“We’ve all had too many second thoughts. The ones we started with are all right. You can depend on it. Let’s get some coffee. The trolley must be about by now.”

Williams got up, looked into the still empty room next door, and went now to the window, pulling the last bit of curtain back firmly to the edge of the casement. The secretaries were flocking in through the back entrance — Navy Recruitment used the front one — and he looked at the bobbing scarves and heard the click-clack of small feet beating on the concrete like a football rattle and found that he could no longer interpret what his senses told him about the view in any meaningful way. Abruptly, there was no name which he could give to what he saw; the idea that the “things” crossing the car park could be described as “women” or “secretaries” or by any other word was ludicrous. It was like looking at a fork for so long that it lost its identity, its forkiness. It sometimes happened to him, this: it was a rapid sensation, hardly more than seconds, like brief concussion, during which everything lay suspended.

But as soon as he managed to put words back to his vision — “those are the secretaries in scarves and stilettoes arriving for work”—he knew that Marcus was lying. That querulous Scottish logic of his that had eased up so many stones in his department, smashing the insects, had now suddenly disappeared. He had not climbed down in the face of Williams’s explanations about Yunis, he had argued all the way and had then suddenly fallen headlong backwards. He had accepted everything, given up the questions.

“Of course there’s no warning implicit in Edwards’s directions to contact Yunis. Of course not. It was sound thinking, so that he won’t suspect his trip has any other motive …” Marcus might as well have said the words there and then, Williams thought, sitting back, arms triangled behind his head, like someone who has at last seen the light in an argument and taken pleasure in the admission. Williams had been prepared to argue the case for subverting Yunis — as he had done, convincingly, in the face of persistent arguments against the plan for Marcus. He was not now prepared to accept the man’s capitulation. There was something completely out of character in it.

And that was what disturbed Williams: the break in the logic, in the slow precise meanderings which had always before got Marcus out of the maze and into the truth; Marcus had broken off too soon. Now there was a real threat to his own long sense of security in his cover in Holborn; he could feel it, like a proffered knife. He had come to depend so much for his safety on intuition, on the sense which he had developed which monitored every detail of his work and office routine: the low-grade memos and files he was passed and the others he received on a strictly limited circulation: a new secretary in the next office but one, a different messenger in the corridor, a click at the wrong time on an outside call: he had come to assess all the minute paraphernalia of his work as a single picture, which he glanced at every hour of the day, and which, if it changed even in the smallest detail, like a degree on a barometer, alerted him like a gun blast. He had been safe for so long; the picture had remained exactly the same for thirty-five years. And now Marcus had turned it upside down, in seconds, while his back was turned.

He knew now that Marcus had finally agreed with him because in some way he had seen the light; he had seen exactly what was going to happen: Edwards was going to give them the slip. He would never get near Cairo — or make contact with Mohammed Yunis; that ridiculous rider to the plan would warn him and he’d run for Moscow long beforehand: Marcus had seen all that. And the next thing Marcus would see, or confirm — how long had he? — days or hours? — was that the man who had carefully rigged this red light for Edwards was himself.

Williams looked out at the last of the girls, a few tall stragglers in silk scarves and twin sets, crossing the rear car park; the “better class” of girl who still lived with Mummy and Daddy in Tunbridge Wells and never made it on time. Marcus was on to him — or dead set in the right direction for him at least; there was no doubt about that. His ordinary senses had failed a minute before, like that passage of time on a train ferry when the carriages pass from one guage to another, but he had come now into full possession of those other senses, every one beyond the fifth — the ones which warned one, at just the right moment, so that even in the most hazy circumstances where logic was useless, one felt impelled towards the right decision …

A woman knocked and came into the room.

“Morning, Rosalie. Two coffees, please. Both with. And sugar.”

He would have to break cover, contact Moscow. There was nothing else for it. It was not Marlow now who had to be dispensed with, it was Marcus. And there weren’t many ways to do that, without inviting more suspicion upon himself. It wasn’t going to be easy. Yet in thinking of Marlow he had the clue already, saw a way out.

Marcus — the lawyer, the interrogator, the counter-intelligence expert; the wily Scotsman who missed nothing, the Russian speaker who’d been the terror of every Soviet trawler skipper in the North Sea when he’d been in the Scottish Office: very well then; he would secure for him a quarry worthy of his talents, somebody possibly even more important than himself: an investigation that would result in his going under for a long time.

Williams left the office at exactly his usual time that evening. His two meetings earlier with Marlow had passed satisfactorily. The man had voiced a number of perfectly reasonable doubts about the scheme to “look for” Edwards, and he had seemed to think that Edwards was in Cairo already, without actually being told that this was so, but otherwise there had been a few bad moments. Marlow was a loyal fellow. If only it went as sweetly with Marcus, Williams thought.

He had always walked some distance from the office before catching a bus or tube to the King’s Road — always had a drink at any one of a number of different pubs on the way and gone on to buy an evening paper from an equal variety of news stands. It was a haphazard wandering which he had built into his routine years before — a proviso for just such an occasion as this, when he had to make contact: if he was already under surveillance he would be doing no more than he did every night, going in and out of various pubs, crossing from the saloon to the public. But tonight he would do much more — getting on to the Waterloo tube at the last possible moment, getting off and coming back to where he started, on to the street again, walking, then the same process on the Central line to Oxford Circus, engrossed in his paper, jumping off just as the doors were closing, waiting on the stairway for any footsteps behind him.

He was tired an hour later, his back against the sweaty phone box in the ticket concourse upstairs, the last of the rush hour crowds swarming past him.

“Mills here. Who’s speaking?”

Williams had almost forgotten the Cockney-Jewish Whitechapel Road voice. It wasn’t the sort of mixture one heard often nowadays, with its echoes of a Russian émigré past in the East End, so that the “Mills”, in the way he pronounced his name, became “Meals”—which wasn’t, of course, his name at all.

Williams gave his code phrase by way of reply and asked for an urgent meeting. They wasted no words on the phone.

“Come to the office then; the usual routine.”

Williams had a whisky in the bar on the Grosvenor House Hotel, left a second one unfinished, went to the gents and from there to the penthouse elevators at the rear of the hotel. He turned his back to them, pretending to look for someone, waiting for an empty car. He got off a floor below and walked up.

Mills opened the door. He was in his sixties and had the rouged and toupéed features of a man who had tried and failed to escape from the mould which nature had cast him in: that of a caricature Jew — a large nose, bulbous and hooked, wide forehead and narrowing chin, hooded eyes close together: a Disraeli from a nineteenth-century cartoon who had done his best to iron out the trademarks of his ancestry. He looked now slightly rubbery and false, like a half finished wax-work or an idea in the make-up department for a horror film. He has survived, Williams thought, because he looks so obviously devious.

But there was nothing the least shifty in his manner. He had a busy, straightforward, almost overbearing attitude, like a man who had little time to spare and took salad and a glass of milk for his lunch.

Mills ran a small film company from the office — (“Marlborough Films — a ring of confidence, don’t you think?”) — and there was recommendation from the Cork Film Festival on the wall behind his desk — “Carrot and Donkey” it had been called, a documentary about a red-headed child in Connemara. Williams had seen it once in the King’s Road Odeon. It had been better than the feature.

They sat together on a sofa under Cocteau’s poster for the Edinburgh Festival.

“There’s some soda water in the fridge?”

“Without for me.”

They drank their whisky in large Waterford glass tumblers (another award from Cork) and Mills listened to Williams’s story of his meeting with Marcus that morning.

“Well, what do you suggest then?” Mills looked upset, as though he were being put upon unnecessarily. “A fast car going down his street? We can’t risk that sort of ‘incident’—doing in your deputy. It would certainly find its way back to us, and you. And kidnapping, you surely don’t — ”

“No, of course not — ”

“We can’t really do anything to him here without risking more suspicion falling on you. He’ll almost certainly start voicing his theories about you — ”

“That’s the whole point. I want to arrange for someone else altogether to settle him — before he makes his mind up about me. I want you to bait him. Listen: he’s a lawyer, his reputation is as an interrogator; counter-intelligence — that’s his métier in our section: quizzing possible doubles, defectors: ferreting. That’s what he was brought in for. Now I want you to get Moscow to lay on a defector for him — in Cairo. Urgently. And someone important, not some station slogger. Someone he’ll want to go for. Get the man to ask for asylum at the British Consulate in Garden City. They’ll contact the Chief of Service here and he’ll ask for Marcus to go to Cairo to check the man out. That’s his job. Our Mid-East section would have to deal with that sort of thing in any case. I won’t appear to have had anything to do with it.”

“And how will that silence him?” Mills sniffed and pulled his nose, quickly and vigorously between thumb and forefinger, as though intent on plucking it away from his face without his or anyone else’s noticing.

“Marcus won’t ever get to the Consulate. He’ll be carrying the goods we’ve arranged for Marlow. We just change the two of them around: the word from Moscow to Egyptian Intelligence will be Marcus, not Marlow. Marcus will be carrying the memorandum instead; I’ll see to that. I expect he’ll get fifteen years for his trouble. Marlow we just leave to look around Cairo for Edwards, as planned; we don’t break him to the Egyptians. As for Edwards, he should have come home by now. Has there been any word?”

“No. But I wouldn’t have heard yet in any case.”

“Well, get over to the Embassy straight away. Line up your defector in Cairo, have him approach the Consulate at once, and wait till I call you to say Marcus is on the way. Then bounce him to Egyptian security there. That should be in two — three days at most, if you work fast.”

Mills was worried. He didn’t like Williams and he cared less for his plan. But there was nothing he could do about it. Williams outranked him; he was the man at the top of the pile in London, the one they could never afford to lose; and certainly he didn’t want to be the man responsible for that: all the others who’d been lost to them over the years had been pawns by comparison to this queen.

“Right then. I’ve been here too long already.”

“I’ll have to clear this with the Colonel here. Vorishil — ”

“Clear it with the Politburo — if you think you’ve got that sort of time. But do it; otherwise I’ll have to break — now. Moscow won’t like that. And there’s no reason for it: Marcus suspects at the moment, he may have me under surveillance, that’s all. He’ll be working on it — and me — for the next few days. He’ll want to be sure, absolutely sure, before he comes out and says anything, before there’s any serious investigation. So we have that time, we have forty-eight hours start on him, at least. Make the bait ripe enough — and he’ll go for it. I can guarantee it. Take his mind off me: give him a real peach to get his teeth into. And by the way, don’t swamp the air waves on the Moscow circuit up at the Embassy — that’s how they first got on to Philby. No arguments, no long correspondence with mother — just one message — help you to make it all the sharper.”

Williams avoided the lifts, walked down the stairs and back into the gents on the ground floor next to the bar. He tidied himself a little and then returned to finish his whisky. He’d been gone more than five minutes. Too long, but he was sure no one had got near to following him, even if they had already started to tail him. It would have been almost impossible to pick him up in the crowded bar and lobby in any case — if they’d ever got that far: the place was full of stuffed shirts for some ball, in scarlet cummerbunds, lowering quick brandies while their women prepared themselves in the ladies’ cloaks.

Williams envied their vulgar ease, their next few irresponsible hours, before he decided he might as well match it. He ordered himself a third whisky, an expensive Malt which he took neat. He didn’t want to go back to Flood Street. Not yet. For the moment, like a child playing truant, he felt safety lay in luxury, anonymity, distance — being far from school, leaning over the rim of a Knickerbocker Glory.

Then he went home, walking briskly across the evening park, glancing at the pickups — an exaggerated blonde on a bench — an exotic flower in the night; the commoner strolling troopers looking for beer money and a bed till reveille — inspected them professionally with perfectly concealed interest Yes, but not now. Not yet.

He poured a small glass of sherry for his mother. He couldn’t bear the stuff, even the smell of it; yet he’d liked it long ago. Something to do with his father? Another way of getting at him? The locked tantalus in the Thames Valley library; the butler had a second key and they’d taken gulps, at it together; another conspiracy, not long after the Russian doll. Or was it just that, with age, one required the ultimate refinement of the grape: fine, mellowed brandy? Williams amused himself with these sybaritic reflections on long-ago tastes and present passions — fiddling with memory, the panorama of his life, to no purpose — like an idle man on a pinball machine: dabbing in the shallows of thought.

He’d done his thinking for that day, he decided, come clear of the dangerous passages. Now it was time to merge into the background again. You had to know when to switch off. He’d have a drink round the corner in the Wellington: there was a new Guards battalion in town and rumour of two Swedish frigates on a courtesy visit just berthed below Tower Bridge …

The great thing to remember, he thought, if they were on to you, was to keep the pattern — exactly; no panic, do the things you’d always done, stick to type. That was what saved you. When the others lost their heads, broke faith and started running for the night ferry — you just carried on as you’d always done, doing the obvious thing. And then, if they were looking for you, they looked right through you. They never saw you at all.

9

Colonel Hamdy shook hands with Edwards and then took a seat next to him on one side of the desk. Major Amin, who had first questioned Edwards, joined them.

“I am sorry, Mr. Edwards. An unfortunate mistake.” The Major spoke in Arabic. Edwards sighed, ruffling back his hair. Fine. He’d have to have the ritual cup of coffee with them and then he’d be on his way.

“I’d no idea you were with us,” the Major continued, “until Colonel Hamdy told me. I’m with Home Security as you’ve probably realized. We don’t always know what our Foreign section are up to. My apologies.”

Colonel Hamdy nodded a happy confirmation of this, eased himself in his chair.

“How are you, Henry? I didn’t expect you back so soon. What have they sent you on?”

Edwards looked at the other officer.

“Go ahead. You can speak quite freely.”

“Well, I don’t know what’s going on with Mohammed Yunis. The thing is that I was sent out to make contact with him. We met on the plane quite by chance …’

The two men seemed to look at him more closely than they listened, as though his face might give them more of a clue to what had been going on than his words, which already sounded hollow and unconvincing.

“I was to approach Yunis, sound him out on his real views about the President and the possibility of my section infiltrating his Union — the idea was to form a fifth column around Marxist dissidents in the UAR — ”

“With the idea of overthrowing the President?”

“Yes. Though of course it hadn’t got beyond the early stages — of finding out what way Yunis might go. That was my job. A wild idea, I thought. But I had to pretend to go along with it. I’d no intention of contacting Yunis. As I said, it was quite by chance. He got on at Munich and took a seat next to me. What have you picked him up for?”

“He’s been chattering, talking with Moscow, making ‘unauthorized arrangements’.” The Colonel looked at Edwards closely. “After what you’ve said about being told to contact him, you don’t really expect me to believe you met him quite by chance on that plane, do you? The two of you seem to have been involved in exactly the same scheme — an ASU takeover here, a Moscow puppet government.”

“How could Holborn be involved with Moscow in a plan like that?”

“Because they see things the same way over this. East and West — they’d both like to see Nasser fall. Their interests are identical there. Another bit of collusion, I’d say. You’d better think up a stronger reason than coincidence, Henry. What were you really doing on that plane with Yunis? Oughtn’t we to talk about it?”

He glared at Henry, and then at the Major. Getting Edwards away from him was like taking sweets off a child.

They drove to the new Military Hospital outside Cairo on the Nile road that led to Maadi. Colonel Hamdy sat in front, half turned towards Edwards, his arm stretched behind the driver’s back.

“Why the hospital, Hamdy? What’s the point? Truth drugs or something? I’ve told you the truth already.”

The Colonel looked out into the darkness, at the yellow light flickering here and there on the water from small fires built in the sterns of feluccas going southwards, their huge lateen sails just visible against the sky as they moved with infinite slowness upstream.

“This isn’t a matter for the ordinary police, or Home Security. It’s just between us for the moment.”

They pulled round to the back of the main hospital building and walked away from it to a group of smaller, half-finished buildings which ran down in two lines to one of the many irrigation canals which drained the area: a flat landscape of berseem fields and market vegetables, as far as Edwards could make out, a mile or two before Maadi, laid out beneath the white pile of the Mokattam Hills just visible with the lights of the Casino high up in the far background. Edwards knew exactly where he was; the canal almost certainly was the one that followed the Bab el LukHelwan railway, which went past the station at Maadi, bordered the playing fields at Albert College and dipped round half a mile to the west of Bridget’s house.

Edwards and the Colonel went inside one of the new buildings, with light flexes hanging out of the plaster and a smell of limewash everywhere. Two expensively dressed men in the hallway stood up, led them to a room more finished than the others (they’d already managed a photograph of the President on one wall) and coffees were ordered.

“Well, you’re out of Major Amin’s tender care. Now, tell me, what did Williams send you here for?”

“To see if Yunis would jump. I’ve told you, for God’s sake. A mad idea. I knew Williams was on to me — ”

“But if he was on to you, he’d hardly have let you go like that, straight back to your friends. Unless he wanted to be rid of you — I mean, dispose of you, kill you — if, as you say, he’d found out you were really working for us. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Perhaps he expected somebody else to get rid of me. The Israelis perhaps. He could have blown me to the Israelis — they have their men in Cairo after all. They’d have willingly done the job for him — if he’d told them I had their names here or something.”

“So, what happened?”

“I met Yunis, of course — or rather, he met me, latched on to me as a kind of hostage, arranged to stick with me all the way: on the plane, at the airport, then the bullet-proof car to Heliopolis. They haven’t had a chance to get me yet.”

The Colonel nodded his head, thinking how exactly that had been the plan. Edwards had been the target all right; the Holborn defector with the names of his circle in Egypt, the tip-off he’d had from Tel Aviv. And he was playing it well now, suggesting the truth in the most off-hand way imaginable so that it would appear entirely unlikely. He still had those names and even if his involvement with Yunis had been pure coincidence, it meant simply that the names were for someone else.

Perhaps Edwards, staring with such a bewildered look across the table at him now, had his own name, trembling for utterance on his lips. And then again, the Colonel thought, perhaps he’s given Yunis my name already. One should always assume the worst in this business. And the immediate corollary was that he should get clear at all costs, this instant, run for his life out of Egypt.

And then he knew what had been in the back of his mind all the time, what he hadn’t been facing: he didn’t want to leave Egypt, and the logic of that followed equally quickly: he was a bad double. Tel Aviv wasn’t getting value any more, the goods they’d agreed on years before were shoddy now, not the same quality. He hadn’t changed sides; he hadn’t betrayed Israel, he just wasn’t really interested in it any more and he felt he’d only managed to betray himself with any real skill over the years.

It simply hadn’t been worth it, he thought. In his sort of work you had to have an anvil of belief — in a people better than others, in one country above another, in a first idea against a second. But one could lose faith in a country like a dripping tap and find the tank quite empty one morning. Whatever was fine in it hadn’t helped you — as an exile, living outside its borders, its spirit hadn’t come across to make one day better than another; the days had got worse and you knew the land you worked for wasn’t in your bones.

He’d worked for the British, as an intelligence officer attached to the Eighth Army. He was Jewish, he’d been born in Egypt and after the war he had worked for the Israelis. But he’d spent his life in Egypt and had never ceased to enjoy the place: the people and the river, the remains of so many empires, so much crumbling thought. He’d liked it better, far better, than the few glimpses he’d had of his own adopted country — which he remembered mostly as a new and raw place, full of emptiness and ambition. The land had reeked of fresh concrete: the fine grey powder blew everywhere around the new buildings. It grated against one’s hands when one washed them and left a tide mark round everything. It was uncomfortable and disconcerting, like a pair of spectacles worn for the first time.

He believed in his own people all right, in their belief and their suffering, but he enjoyed the other things, in Egypt; he loved them, he realized — why pretend otherwise?

The whole business was a bad book about history. Belief required something better than an ideal, or a story they made up about you after you were dead. It was the drink before lunch with friends — something in that direction at least. It was a selfish, deprecating thing — not this crushing self-importance which was the only return he had got from the necessarily secret nature of his work — work which he knew now was simply a foil against loneliness. It was better not to be lonely, if it was at all possible to do anything about it, he thought.

“How did you leave things with London — what about the others in your section? They’ll be wondering about you. Marcus for example, the new man you told me about. No one else knew of course — that you were coming here — besides Williams?”

“No. Not as far as I know. I only dealt with Williams.”

“No friends …? The grocer — the milkman? You still have your milk delivered in England, don’t you?”

“I buy it from the corner shop — and cream, for horseradish sauce. You know all about that too, I suppose …”

“Nobody? You were just going to leave London forever — and you told nobody?”

“What are you getting at? You mean I’d have risked telling someone in the face of an ‘overwhelming temptation’—wanting to leave some memorial behind me?”

“That sort of temptation goes with a bad conscience, after all. Let’s get back to the beginning — you may have run too soon. That’s what I’m getting at It’s possible Williams wasn’t on to you at all.”

“Of course he was. You know the Yunis plan would never have worked. It was a trap.”

“So you were going to ‘retire’—come home to Mama? You were running surely? Isn’t that all?”

“Not running away. I was running towards something.”

“Here — in Egypt?”

“Yes.”

“Your friends are all here, you mean — and there’s nobody in London that would miss you. You reckoned on just walking out of that life as if it had never existed?”

“People tire of their jobs, you know. Others in the London section talked about it. About getting out. It’s a fiction — that bit about never being able to leave work like this. I talked with Marlow about it the other day, said he ought to get out, that the whole thing was a toytown.”

“You what?”

“A toytown — a pretence — for children.”

“No, you talked to someone. Who did you say — ?”

“Marlow — you remember Marlow. He’s in the Library. You approached him once, to work for you. He was worried about it.”

The Colonel remembered Marlow. Or rather he remembered him through Bridget. She had loved him and left him, like cheap fiction; they had even got married. He had never understood how she had become involved with him in the first place, what she had seen in him. And here he was again, waving his arms about inexplicably in the firing line; the Jester or thirteenth guest, fate’s toy who upset every calculation. You could never make sufficient allowance for people like Marlow; their innocence was the most dangerous of all imponderables. It gave them a talismanic gift: no matter how distant, they could ruin your own careful dispositions, as polar storms affect tropic weather.

With Edwards, for example: Edwards had told Marlow he was getting out of Holborn, or as good as told him, the Colonel was sure of it. Thus, among all the others and against all the laws of probability, Marlow would be the one chosen to look for him, to stop him before he got to Moscow. And with Bridget; Marlow’s relationship with her was not necessarily dead, but sleeping. The Colonel resented Marlow ten years before; a case of sheer envy at his marriage to Bridget — even though it hadn’t lasted, and their own affair had begun again soon afterwards. He had as well, he remembered, tried to break up their relationship by implicating Marlow with Egyptian intelligence, and having him packed off home as a result.

And later, when it was all over, and Marlow had gone home in any case, he had resented still more Bridget’s compassion for him, the responsibility she felt for the disaster, which had worked itself to the surface long after she had ceased to have anything to do with him, which had soured some of their own days together. It was the quality in Bridget which he most feared — these obsessive residuals, which could flare again. If Marlow ever did come back to Egypt, he thought … The nostalgic temperament which he recognized so well in her, could fall in love with remembered passion just as easily as falling off a log.

Marlow would be the least expected person in Cairo, yet it was exactly his nature to come untimely. And so, the Colonel argued, with that certainty of intuition that comes of loving, fearing loss, Marlow would return — just as surely as if he had bought the ticket for him in London himself.

He feared Marlow. He was another of the signs of the last twenty-four hours; they were not messages of logic but a kind of magic which until now had preserved him in his profession and protected his passion — signs, there was no other way of putting it, given in tents, heard on the wind, written on sand. But he could no longer interpret them. He feared his luck had just started to run out.

The Colonel thought of his long affair with Bridget Girgis as if it were already finished. It had begun when she was hardly twenty, and he nearly twenty years older, just after the war. It had started so easily in those fluent days of parties and dances before the British had left; it had been an affair of light carried forward effortlessly on a tide of dazzling linen tablecloths, sheets, glazed martini glasses, picnic hampers. She had taken to him without a murmur, had become a perfect part of his conspiracy.

Perhaps she had found out that he had once been with British intelligence in Egypt from her father, with whom he’d had professional contacts during the war. And the rest had followed without any strain: Bridget had gone on assuming he was with the British, working now as one of their men in Egyptian security. It had been a joke between them on the few occasions when the subject had come up; he had warned her never to talk about it — and they had both subsequently contrived to forget their knowledge of each other’s work, when they were apart — or together. It had been a matter of no importance, a detail which, though acknowledged, had nothing to do with their real focus of intent, their ambition as lovers.

And yet she had gone on seeing Edwards whenever he came to Cairo — in the same generous, impossible way that she had taken up with Marlow. He knew that; he’d had Edwards followed, though he’d never mentioned it to her. That had been the one proviso in their love — never to question trust. And she had been trustworthy, certainly: to him, to Edwards, even to Marlow. She had been more than kind to everyone. While he and Edwards, and no doubt Marlow, nursed uneasy consciences, she seemed to ride high above doubt, living with suspicion and dissension as happily as she did with the men who brought these things to her.

But Edwards had more than a bad conscience now; he had come to the last peg as an agent: Edwards was beyond trust, therefore he was as good as dead. And in any case one never picked women up on the way down, on the run, even if they were old friends. A passion to save yourself — your neck or your conscience — stopped the kissing like bad breath. Henry was finished with loving too.

The Colonel thought of Bridget again with sudden hope, as something vital still within his grasp; for her sake alone, perhaps, he had not yet tired of conspiracy; because of her he still had armour, could bring foresight and professional skill against disruption or whatever the signs held for him. He would hold her as long as he never came to pity himself — that was the way to look at it.

Edwards had been chattering away about “devious plots”. The Colonel was bored out of his mind by his theories. He knew the facts now: Edwards was going to double-cross him, expose him and the other Tel Aviv men in Egypt. He would kill him in the morning: not now, but tomorrow. He was late already now.

The ceaseless questions which had raged through the Colonel’s mind for the past twenty-four hours drifted away as he remembered his appointment with Bridget that night. He was due to pick her up later at Maadi. They were going on to dinner afterwards on the Semiramis terrace.

The Colonel turned to Edwards. “Look, you’ll have to stay on here for the moment. I can’t immediately countermand Major Amin’s orders. It’s his show — this business with Yunis, and you’re involved with it one way or another. I believe what you say; there’s been a mix-up, we’ll get it straightened out. I’ll see Amin tomorrow and we’ll talk about it then. The quarters are comfortable enough here. I’ll have them send you some food.”

“Yes. Certainly.”

Edwards spoke with the good nature of someone trying to ingratiate himself, having decided some time before that he would get himself out of the hospital at the first opportunity and make his way — by whatever means, the canal seemed promising — to Bridget’s house in Maadi.

Edwards was quite determined to escape for he was certain now that he was involved, not just in a trap, but in a trap set to kill him in the morning. He couldn’t understand why the Colonel hadn’t got under way with it that night. Perhaps he was in a hurry, was late already for an appointment with a woman or something.

10

After the Colonel had left, Edwards sat in the office and listened. Now, twenty minutes later, he was in complete darkness. All the lights had gone out just after they’d brought him some food — a plateful of mushy courgettes and some stringy meat fried in breadcrumbs. It was the last he’d see of it, thankfully.

They hadn’t locked the door. They had brought blankets and shown him to a bed in the next inter-connecting office. But the entrance to the low building would still obviously be guarded on the outside. Before the lights went out there had been a noise too, Edwards remembered now that it had stopped: a generator or a boiler, an insistent powerful humming noise. What was it? And now the room was getting warmer, the whole atmosphere of the building becoming slightly muggy and velvet, like any other Egyptian night, while before there had been a slight crispness.

Minute beads of sweat began to form around his hairline before Edwards understood: the Colonel’s office was next to the hospital’s refrigeration plant — the cold rooms where they kept drugs, food and obviously the bodies as well. Presumably the humming would start again the moment power returned, or the emergency generator was activated.

The lights came on. The soft purr from behind the walls returned. A power failure; as regular and certain an occurrence in Cairo as the weather. But there had been several minutes during which the whole building must have been in complete darkness. Which meant that the emergency generator didn’t cut in automatically.

Edwards looked around the office and noticed two strands of exposed cable above the Colonel’s desk, the beginning of a light fitting which hadn’t yet been installed. Both ends of the flex had been bound up with tape, something they’d have hardly bothered to do, he thought, if the wires had been dead.

He got a chair, stood up and wound the tape off each strand of wire. He took a coin out of his pocket, an old copper piastre with Fuad’s head almost rubbed away, and pushed it into the plastic clip of his pen …

In the first moment of blackness Edwards ran as fast as he could down the corridor towards the entrance, shouting in Arabic:

“Quick, quick! The foreigner — he’s broken through the window. Out the door — quick!”

He avoided the approaching beams of torchlight, which now swung away from the corridor towards the main door of the building. He actually opened the door himself, cursing and shouting at the other two figures by his side, and the three of them raced out into the night, two to the left of the building where his window was, and the third to the right, making eastwards towards the white spurs of the Mokattam Hills which showed in the faint light.

Edwards crashed straight into the fence in the darkness and wondered how he’d got to the far side when he picked himself up, gasping for breath, his face covered in soil, spitting grit and something that tasted like spinach. He must have caught the top wire, chest high, and somersaulted on to the other side.

He had, he calculated, at least fifteen seconds start on them, and double that time before the lights came on again in the compound: about two hundred yards start, but across completely flat, open countryside.

For the moment there was no sound of a chase behind him and by the time he had got to the canal, and the lights had come on again, he saw why. The two smart men had stopped by the fence. They stood next to one another now, as though holding each other up in shaky indecision, before one of the men turned and ran back towards the hospital. The other fell to the ground, perhaps with a rifle, his body flat out in a line facing the canal.

Edwards ducked beneath the shallow bank and was twenty yards down the water before he realized that one of his pursuers had been electrocuted.

His feet sank deep into the mud each time he moved, the water rising and falling over his mouth, soft and tasteless as rainwater, and it was a sudden old-fashioned fear of bilharzia or a monstrous go of Gyppy tummy — more than drowning, or cut glass or his slow progress — that made him scramble up on the bank a few minutes later. Fifty yards to his left, between the feeder canal and the Mokattam Hills, there was an embankment and on top of it the double railway line which ran from Bab el Luk to Helwan. When he got to it he saw the lights of Maadi station winking through clumps of palm half a mile away to the south. And beyond the station he could just make out the glare from the croquet floodlights at Maadi Sporting Club. That strange Egyptian passion for the game, which they played late into the night, meant that the locker rooms would still be open.

He came in over the sagging chicken wire beyond the last tennis court, walked past the deserted pool, into the gents, across the showers and from there to the locker room beyond. He knew this moist geography of the Club almost as well as he knew his own bathroom in Kentish Town.

Abdul Khaki, under the letter K, was his benefactor. He had known him ever since he’d first come to teach at Albert College — a witty, careless, overweight man who had once, in slimmer days, played squash for Egypt before making a fortune in real estate — and he had left his locker open. There were a reasonable pair of plimsolls, Slazenger shirt and pants, an old blue blazer and an even older squash racket: Abdul’s second division equipment. Edwards transferred his money, his damp cheque-book, passport, and a book of English stamps and threw his own clothes into the laundry bin. He would get them back in twenty-four hours, beautifully done, if he wanted.

They were playing bridge behind the glass windows of the terrace — beaky, white-haired ladies and crop-headed old men in Rex Harrison cardigans, utterly absorbed. And he could hear the furious clonk of wood on wood as other older and even more vehement members dispatched each other to the nether ends of the croquet court on the far side of the building.

The minute porter in the ragged corduroy jacket who had once looked after King Fuad’s stables at Abdin Palace saluted Edwards carefully as he passed the little sentry box by the main gate of the club.

“Good night, Mr. Edwards, sir. Taxi?”

They never forgot you here, Edwards thought, and he put his hand down the vest pocket of Khaki’s blazer and found a few coins there — the little essential baksheesh that every good club member kept in store for such contingencies. He gave the old fellow a five-piastre piece.

“Thank you, Ahmed.”

A taxi pulled out from the station rank, swung round the sandy circle in leaps and bounds, carburettor stomping and spitting vigorously, and pulled up at the entrance.

“Thank you, sir, thank you,” Ahmed said, opening the door. “Your bat, sir! Don’t forget your bat!” And he pushed the mysterious instrument through the cab window.

He left the taxi at the end of the dusty street, the arch of evergreens stooping overhead all along its length, and came to the house by its back entrance which led to the garden — past the suffragi’s quarters in a thicket of bramble and flowering laurel, through the wilderness of papyrus on the damp margin of the lawn and over the willow pattern bridge.

The lights were on downstairs and on the terrace but all he could see was Bridget’s feet stretched out on a sun chair behind the parapet and its tumble of orange flowered creeper. She was reading probably, as she often did late at night, and Edwards wondered what it was: a travel book from the Council library, a new biography perhaps. He had often brought her out the latest success in that line when he came from London. A surprise … And he wished now that he didn’t have to surprise her, that she’d known he was coming, as he walked up the terrace steps, broken racket in hand, in his billowing shorts. That was surprise enough. A joke as well. Perhaps that was the way to handle it. Anyone for tennis?

Bridget wasn’t reading. There had simply been a silence between them, the empty stillness after a row — as though she and Colonel Hamdy had just had a flaming row: that was it, Edwards was sure of it.

The telephone, taken out on a long extension from the drawing room, was on a table between them. The three of them glanced at it, like a gun, before it started a long, stumbling, jittery ring.

“Aiowa,” the Colonel said. “Aiowa,” between pauses, impatiently, as though confirming a grocery order with a tiresome merchant.

“Well, the man isn’t dead.” The Colonel put the phone down. “Just burnt. The trouble is they think you’re going to blow the Yunis business to the press, that you really are a journalist. That’s the problem. We’ll have to get you out of here.”

Edwards put the racket on the parapet and took a cigarette from a pack on the table. Bridget leant forward, handing him a lighter, taking one herself. He realized he was shaking now, the cigarette bouncing around in his hand. Not from the cold, the terrace was warm from years of continual sunlight. Bridget had never looked like speaking. There was surprise, certainly; the incredulous lines on someone’s face before one laughs.

“Before I came,” Edwards said, looking at her intently, as if searching for a vital response, “what were you fighting about?”

“We weren’t fighting. Hamdy just told me you were here. That you’d been arrested at the airport, being held by security. We were thinking.” She looked at the Colonel. “Now that you’re here you might as well know,” he said. “Why not?” And Bridget went on quickly, as if making up for something, making up for years of necessary lies: “I’m sorry you didn’t know about Hamdy before. I couldn’t tell you.”

“What?”

“That he’s with us. That he’s always been.”

“With Holborn?”

“Yes.” Bridget got up and went to organize a drinks tray in the room behind.

“How the hell is it you’re the only one to know about it then?” Edwards shouted after her. “That’s a likely story.” He was trying to be angry. “How come I’ve never heard of it? With twenty years in the same section.” He was about to add “With twenty years working for the same man” but stopped himself in time.

“Don’t be stupid.” The Colonel came over towards him. “Of course you never heard about it, could never hear of it. Do you think my position with Egyptian intelligence here would have been secure if I’d ever been an official part of the Holborn circle in Cairo? No one knew. Except central office.”

“And Bridget”

“Yes.”

“But she was just sustenance. Lemons at half time. To keep you going. I know. But what about me?” He lowered his voice. “I’ve been working for you for twenty years, for your Egyptian office. Why did you never tell them that in London?”

“Because it didn’t matter. Nothing I got from you ever went beyond me. I needed you for my own cover with the Egyptians. Don’t you see? I had to be able to show them that I had control of at least one man in Holborn, that I’d turned him. It was a crucial point. That way they were never likely to suspect that I worked for Holborn too. But I shouldn’t talk about it. She doesn’t know.”

Bridget came back with a tray and some whisky. Edwards sighed. It made sense. like so many things did which you’d least suspected: it was the longest shot in the world, that the Colonel worked for London. But that was what the whole business was about; seeing who could be the cleverest.

And he realized how it explained Bridget’s ease, even her light-headedness, over his arrival: it wasn’t the danger of the situation which had occurred to her, it was the fact that the three of them were now being “true” to each other at last, in really knowing about each other. And just as she’d welcomed Marlow into the “British camp” ten years before — with a sudden overwhelming joy because the pretence of their threefold relationship was over, so now she was inviting Edwards to join the celebration of a similar “truth” which she had obviously enjoyed for a long time with the Colonel. This time Edwards was the guest — at a reception of a marriage that must have occurred years before.

She handed Edwards his whisky almost formally, smiling hugely, as though he was the first man in a receiving line at a lucky late wedding, the Colonel behind her, flapping about the place like an embarrassed groom.

For Bridget the grubby, deceitful days were over and she was celebrating.

Celebrating what? That the Colonel had been a loyal British agent all along and that he’d just been used to give him cover, while really believing Hamdy was working for the Egyptians. That was worth a drink. And perhaps if one day the three of them really got to know each other, Edwards thought, he’d tell them he actually worked for Moscow.

The telephone rang again. Bridget picked it up.

“‘A message from Hassenein,’” she repeated the words at the other end. “‘Would I tell my friend he can pick up his car now. The brakes have been fixed.’ Right, I’ll do that.” She put the receiver back. “Someone from the Semiramis. Who’s ‘my friend’? Is that your car, Hamdy — is that you?”

So Henry had done for him after all, long before, on the plane, with Yunis. The Colonel wondered why he didn’t go for him there and then, kill him, wipe him out — wondered why he just stood there patting his pockets absentmindedly. Because of his togs, he thought — the ridiculously billowy shorts and blazer, the Chaplin plimsolls, the rakish clotted hair and mended spectacles: one didn’t go for a man so obviously down. There wasn’t the air of a traitor about Henry, it was useless. He looked, he had been behaving, like the second lead in a marital farce, the cuckolded husband, bursting through the French windows, intent on hopeless revenge; so it was that the Colonel couldn’t contemplate a similar role. He thought of the message from the Semiramis instead.

The suffix “now” meant just what it said. “The brakes have been fixed” stood for “get clear at all costs” and “Hassenein” was the code name for a man he’d never met: one of the other men — he’d no idea how many there were — who, like him, worked for Tel Aviv in Egyptian intelligence. He had never been given any method of contacting these people; they were pilot fish, infiltrated into various sections of the Cairo apparat over the years — as cypher clerks, secretaries, telephonists, messengers — almost solely for the purpose of warning him of impending disaster. They contacted the telephonist at the Semiramis who had his home number, and Bridget’s, and she had passed the message on.

The form of the message had been agreed many years before, the Colonel remembered, just after the war when the British Army had still been in the Kasr el Nil barracks and he’d managed to buy a pre-war Morris 8 with perfect brakes from a major of a returning regiment The major, a Jew, had been his initial contact with the Israeli underground. Subsequently he had left the army and gone to Palestine. The Colonel had worked for him ever since. They’d drunk themselves silly together in Shepheard’s all afternoon before he got the train to Port Said to join his men and the ship home. Gin and limes. Gin and everything. “Let’s hope your brakes never fail,” the major had said, and he’d stumbled into a gharry, the harness bells tinkling away into the flare-lit alleys beyond Opera Square.

Well, the brakes had gone now, and with them twenty years, many more than a thousand and one nights. He’d betrayed a country and he’d come to love it — to love it greatly in exact proportion to his treachery. He was bored by the grip this cliché had had on him, appalled now that it had held him in Egypt so blindly, for so long. He ought to have seen from the beginning that he would one day have to accept an equally banal ending: that he wouldn’t get away with it for ever. If he’d come to hate Egypt he would almost certainly have survived, he thought. Hate protected you from clichés.

“It’s a ‘get clear’ message, Hamdy, isn’t it?” Edwards said. “No one’s really phoning you about your brakes. And you can’t have much time if they’re prepared to use an open line to you.”

Bridget didn’t wait for him to answer.

“What is it, Hamdy? What’s happened?”

The Colonel had only moments to make up his mind. He could agree that it was a code message, but simply from his own section in Cairo — leave them, and try and get clear. Or he could take them with him. The first choice was the obvious one. Yet he prevaricated with himself for a second, found himself arguing the toss against his will. And the moment he began that he knew he was finished. He might get clear of Egypt with luck, as an ordinary man; he would never again survive as a professional. He didn’t mind. He argued; he delayed; he thought of Bridget. It was impossible to get clear of Egypt without going through a number of elaborate pre-arrangements, he reminded himself — which needed time to organize and a place to do that from. He had the place, the top floor apartment in Gezira. It was where he took Bridget when they were in town together, when they “had a moment” …

It was really only a matter of whether he brought Edwards with him too, he thought, since he’d now established that he wasn’t going to leave Bridget behind. And then he realized that he had no alternative but to take Henry — if he wanted Bridget. From her point of view, after all, they were now three British agents on the run: like an old British film.

“Henry’s right, isn’t he?” Bridget said. “Intelligence here has found out you’re with London. Someone from the Consulate — or that man at the airport — they’ve warned you?”

The Colonel nodded. “Come on. Don’t pack. But get Henry one of your father’s coats or something. And a pair of trousers. It’s not the moment for squash.”

The house was a dry oven smelling of orange blossom and cedar when they left. The clock which had been made in Bath chimed the first quarter after eleven slowly, four bell-like notes in a scale, the bull of Taurus moving round a semi-circle at the bottom, and a large Humpty-Dumpty moon bouncing over the blue-starred horizon above. Bridget took a couple of copies of Country Life with her as she went.

Was that what had kept her going in Cairo all these years, Edwards wondered: the idea of returning eventually to England once with him, once with Marlow, and now with the Colonel? When the story finally broke, and all their cover gone, she might, if they were very lucky, achieve a lifetime’s ambition; come into her due reward: something small and half-timbered in Sussex, a paddock and a fast midday train to the London shops, with Hamdy sipping gassy bitter in the Wheatsheaf at weekends. “Tea planting, don’t you know. Back from a little trouble in Ceylon.”

Was that the dull reason for her attachment to the Colonel? In his twenty years as a double in Egypt he must have outranked everyone except Williams in the Holborn section. Perhaps, she may even have reckoned, Hamdy might be in line for a manor in the Cotswolds — if they ever made it home.

Intrigue, Edwards thought, what a lot of bloody intrigue. He took the bottle of whisky with him. He would have to look to his own intrigues from now on. Moscow perhaps. He too needed time to make preparations; the only sort of house he wanted at the moment was a safe one.

They turned left at the T junction from Maadi on to the Helwan road, swung the old Chrysler round facing Cairo three hundred yards away under some trees by the river, and waited. There was only one road back to the city on the narrow stretch of land between the Mokattam Hills and the Nile, the road they’d have to use if they were coming after the Colonel.

Fifteen minutes later they came, not fast and not all together: a Mercedes and then two jeeps, recent Russian models, without markings. They turned off into the clumpy velvet evergreens of the estate, one jeep stopping to block the road out, and the other two vehicles turning round the circle by the Club and going on towards Bridget’s house.

Edwards and the Colonel crouched down in the back seat and Bridget, waiting another minute for some other cars to pass, drove quietly after them towards the city.