The wind buffeted him as he steered the mower, and the storm edged closer. Too many memories and each time he was less able to run from them.
“Morning, Knacker.”
“And morning to you too, Boot. Keeping well?”
“Not too bad, thank you.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Knacker gave his coat to the long-retired company sergeant major of the Coldstreams who did duty at the door of this upper-floor dining-room where intelligence officers, past and present, gathered to swap tales. He handed over his phone and accepted the receipt for it, and registered the respect in which the NCO held him, and then had turned to face old Boot, a long-time colleague and now said to be in poor health. He gazed inside the room, started to nod greetings and let go of Boot’s limp hand. Gerard Coe – rather good in the Gulf, once – was at the bar and had lost too much weight and too quickly – and saw others that he’d want to talk to. Just in time, not late because that would have been an act of disrespect, and he was rewarded with eye contact from Arthur Jennings, low down and bowed in his wheelchair but who maintained an unimpaired mind. It was the first Tuesday of the month, a locked-down date, when the Round Table met.
Knacker eased away from Boot but gave him a soft smile as a parting gift. He thought, Boot was on borrowed time and might not be long with them, but his reputation was well burnished, as bright as Coe’s, as were the credentials of all of them, veterans of espionage, who came – by invitation only and access jealously guarded – to the upstairs room in the Victorian building on the Kennington Road. They were part of the Secret Intelligence Service, with good links but still regarded with well-founded suspicion, kept at arm’s length, funded by proxy, rarely seen in the building at the top of the road and overlooking the Thames. He reached Arthur Jennings whose parchment-textured skin seemed to crack in pleasure, his eyes rheumy in delight. Knacker crouched beside the wheelchair and allowed the talons of Jennings’ hand to grip his shoulder.
They were there, at least a dozen of them that day, because of Jennings. He was their founding father: had made his name (to the select few who knew anything of him) while working out of Beirut. He had become a legend of manipulation and success and extraordinary bravado melded with a ruthlessness that would have seemed brutal to anyone of a squeamish nature – and was a deity in the life of Knacker. There would have been no Round Table but for an evening of binge drinking led by Jennings – an endless supply of brandy sours. The refrain was that their Service had lost its edge, was no longer a risk taker, had ditched the role of playing the desperado. The Service, they said, was ‘withering on the vine’, and something must be done to rectify the weakness. An association of like-minded men, and a few women, was built around an image of a table, round, and on that table – sketched by an old China hand – was a ‘bloody great sword, sharp blade, unsheathed’. Arthur Jennings, in good voice in those days and with no audible alcohol impediment, had quoted from Alfred, Lord Tennyson. For many a petty king ere Arthur came Ruled in this aisle, and ever waging war Each upon other, wasted all the land: And still from time to time the heathen host Swarmed overseas, and harried what was left.
The upstairs room with its nicotine-stained prints and panelling, and tackily painted woodwork at the windows was not Camelot, but did the job for them and would have been well swept for recording devices by the Coldstreamer and his people. At face, their coming together was of little more significance than a Rotary or Probus group in a small market town, but such a view would have sold short the expertise of those who would take their place at the table where the sword – bought on the cheap from a theatrical costumier in Greek Street – dominated the centre. They believed in the Service’s ‘loss of clout’, believed that the fresh-faced graduates now dominating the headquarters building were unwilling to travel the ‘extra mile’, were wedded to the strictures of analysis. ‘The slide has to be halted in its tracks,’ Arthur Jennings had said. Tennyson had written And so there grew great tracts of wilderness, Wherein the beast was ever more and more, But man was less and less, till Arthur came. Arthur Jennings – now frail but not feeble – had summoned an image of a glorious and triumphant new world of espionage, compromise, deceit, and above all of success. They cost little, they were discreet, useful. They worked, as Arthur Jennings had said, ‘ahead of the sharp end’ – some of the claims were at the edge of justification but much was truthful. All of their membership, with their cover names of Tennyson’s knights, would have seemed to an outsider to behave like schoolboys, but a point would have been missed. Or several points.
And were deniable. They brought in defectors from across cultural and military frontiers. Agents were run on tight leashes, were seldom allowed to walk away from treachery. A glass was raised to his memory when an asset was captured, tortured, eventually executed or died under the rigours of interrogation, and when the glass was emptied the file was forgotten and the casualty became a fast-fading memory. It was as it had been before.
Over a buffet lunch, Knacker would hear the gossip of colleagues – not indiscreet, but valuable, and nuggets of recently learned tradecraft would be exchanged, and enemies’ weaknesses and strengths evaluated. In the centre of their round table was a narrow slot and when they were called upon to eat, the theatrical sword would be lowered into it. Grace would be said – not of a religious nature, but an Orwell quote: People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those that would harm us. It was the anthem of the group along with the historic poetry, and seemed to provide ample justification for the bending, fracturing, of official Rules of Engagement. Then, Arthur Jennings would be helped to lean across the table, and he’d puff and pant, and draw the sword clear of the slot – an Excalibur re-enactment, and then the business would begin and the swapping of confidences.
Arthur Jennings, mouth close to Knacker’s ear, voice a guttering growl, asked, “Busy? What do you have? Up to speed?”
“Not as of this moment, Arthur. Sort of parked up in a lay-by.”
“It’ll come…”
“What I always say, Arthur… Get up in the morning and don’t know what a new day will bring – out of a clear blue sky, that sort of stuff.”
“Good boy.”
They were called to order by Hilary, decent-looking woman whose last agent had been a Chinese air force pilot in an interceptor wing, dead now but valuable while he had lasted. Would have been roughed around before his trial, then taken out into a gaol yard, kicked into a kneeling position and then shot in the back of the head with a .38 calibre. He had done a good job for her, and earned her plaudits. Clapping broke out in the room and Knacker stood and carefully removed Arthur Jennings’ hand from his shoulder… It was the way things happened, least expected and out of that ‘clear blue sky’, and then a dawdle would become a sprint.
Knacker’s special talent was to squeeze the usefulness of an asset till the poor bugger was dried out, finished and condemned, and done without clemency.
In a first-floor office in the Lubyanka, Lavrenti was briefed on his new job. He was wearing the fatigue uniform, combat medal ribbons on his chest, and had flown down from the north the previous day.
To his mother, Lavrenti was a hero and she would hiss with sympathy each time he raised his hand to the grooved line in his cheek which he had told her was the result of crawling under fire through barbed-wire entanglements. Now a major, he was to his immediate superiors a coming figure to be humoured and treated with respect. He was regarded by his peers in those sections of FSB where he was known, as an officer of influence and prospect, not one to be crossed, and no offence should be given him. To his father, nominally retired and with the rank of brigadier general, he was the meal ticket to a dynasty of financial advantage and an opportunity to advance good links with the present apex of the regime.