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There was another wet embrace and the insistence they keep in touch from Billy Baker and a shrill giggle from the Chinese girl and a lot of damp handshakes as he made his way out of the room and down the tilting stairs into Westminster Bridge Road. The death of the dinosaurs, he thought, breathing deeply in the darkness: or rather, their funeral. He looked sideways towards the old headquarters building, expecting it to be in darkness, but it wasn’t. It was bright with the permanent office lights of whatever ministerial department had taken it over. Gerald Williams would shit himself at the thought of the electricity bill, thought Charlie.

‘Seems you’ve covered all that’s necessary,’ encouraged the Director-General.

‘There’s a scientific and military mission in Moscow at the moment. I’ve asked them to give him the technical briefing before they leave.’

‘That’s a good idea.’

‘Williams is complaining we’ve made too many financial concessions.’

‘He’s memoed me direct, covering his back against any Treasury enquiry.’ Dean was unaccustomed to bureaucratic politics. He’d started out finding it amusing, but not any more. If half his students had behaved in the back-biting, self-serving way of virtually all the people he worked with now, he’d have suspended them from their courses until they grew up. He wished he felt more comfortable with Johnson.

The deputy Director smiled. ‘Muffin’s certainly pushed it to the very edge.’

Dean made a vague gesture over his desk, somewhere in the disorder of which Johnson presumed Charlie Muffin’s file was buried. ‘He’s always pushed everything to the edge.’

‘I can monitor that closely enough.’

‘It seems to have been difficult in the past.’

‘I wasn’t the person controlling him in the past.’

‘Are you now? I thought the committee had been established to do that?’ The other man’s arrogance was irritating.

Johnson bristled. ‘I meant on a day-to-day basis.’

‘There’s been a Director to Director note, from Fenby: he’s making a personal visit to London to meet me,’ disclosed Dean.

‘You’ll like him,’ predicted Johnson, who already knew of the visit but wanted to remind the other man of his longer experience of the department. ‘He sees the grand picture: the sort of man who knows that politics is the art of the possible.’

At the beginning of their relationship Dean had suspected Johnson’s frequent invocation of Bismarck aphorisms to be a mockery of his previous academic career but he’d learned since that the German genuinely was Johnson’s hero, which was perhaps understandable in view of Johnson’s Foreign Office association. Dean twirled his spectacles prayer-bead fashion and said, ‘I hope Muffin really understands just how much politics is involved.’

‘I can monitor that, too,’ insisted Johnson.

John Fenby thought being the Director of FBI was like being the maker of the best Swiss clock whose wheels and cogs meshed together without ever going wrong by a single second. It seemed to Fenby that virtually every FBI Director since Hoover quit or retired complaining at the impossibility of working with the President or the Congress or the Attorney General or of being the victim of staff incompetence, their only ambition from their moment of appointment to get away from Pennsylvania Avenue as fast as possible.

John Fenby didn’t want to get away from Pennsylvania Avenue. If he had his way – which he was determined always to do – Fenby was going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming from Hoover’s original seventh-floor suite from which, under two successive Presidents, he had moulded the Bureau into a personal fiefdom unmatched since the Bureau’s creator.

Fenby, who was a small, rotund man not unlike Hoover in both looks and stature, coveted the Director’s role for exactly the same reasons as its founder. He adored the Bureau jet. And the chauffeured stretch limousine. And being part of an inner circle at the White House and up on the Hill. And of personally controlling an empire of thousands spread around the globe, anxious to respond to every command he uttered. Had Fenby not been, primarily for public awareness rather than religious conviction, a twice-on-Sunday churchgoer he would have believed himself God. He contented himself with Boss, which was a Hoover word. It was, in fact, a secret regret that he couldn’t go out on arrests and be photographed with a Tommy Gun cradled in his arms, like Hoover had been. But that had been in another age. He couldn’t have everything. What he had was good enough. And what he had most of all was an awareness of how things operated in the capital of the world.

Like today.

The corner table at the Four Seasons was reserved permanently for him, whether he used it or not, the other tables moved out of hearing. Although he was the favour-purveyor, Fenby was also today’s host and therefore solicitously early, already seated when the Speaker arrived. Fenby enjoyed being included in the frisson of recognition that went through the restaurant as Milton Fitzjohn strode across the room, the political glad-hand outstretched. The required my-you’re-looking-fine-and-so-are-you recital concluded with Fitzjohn ordering bourbon. The abstemious Fenby, who never risked alcohol during working hours, already had his mineral water.

‘So how’s my boy doing, sir?’ Fitzjohn, whose iron-fist control and manipulation of Congress exceeded even that of Lyndon Johnson, occupied an original colonial mansion in South Carolina and assiduously cultivated a Southern gentleman mien to go with it. He didn’t consider anyone, certainly not any White House incumbent from whom he was only two heart beats away, his superior, but ‘sir’ was one of several insincere courtesies.

‘A rising star,’ assured the FBI Director. ‘Someone of whom you can be rightfully proud.’

‘I am, sir, I am. Mrs Fitzjohn will be particularly gratified to hear it.’ Referring to his wife in the third person and never in public by her christian name was another affectation. ‘Natural that she should be worried, though.’

‘Quite natural,’ agreed Fenby. He’d had reservations posting Kestler to somewhere like Moscow and certainly with the specific nuclear brief, but Fitzjohn had insisted his wife’s nephew get a high-profile assignment.

Fitzjohn demanded a T-bone bleeding from exposure. Fenby ordered his customary salad and a second bottle of water.

‘Mrs Fitzjohn is a little worried, I have to say, about some of the things she’s hearing about Moscow. Lot of crime there: people getting killed.’

Only someone with Fenby’s committed dedication to remaining in power could have greeted that statement with a straight face. ‘I think you can tell Mrs Fitzjohn that I am taking every precaution to ensure James’s safety. Not only that: to ensure his career in the Bureau, too.’ The British approach had been very fortuitous, although Fenby knew very few directors, perhaps only Hoover himself, would have realized every advantage as quickly as he had.

‘I’m extremely grateful to hear that, sir. Extremely grateful.’

Which is what Fenby wanted everyone in positions of power or influence in Washington to be, extremely grateful to him. Like the CIA would be grateful to him if he had to sacrifice the Englishman who had caused them so much embarrassment, all those years ago.

That afternoon he memoed the Bureau’s Scientific Division at Quantico to ensure they had a sufficiently qualified nuclear physicist, if the need for one arose. He didn’t expect there to be, but John Fenby left nothing to chance. Which was why he called Peter Johnson, in London, too.

‘How were lessons?’

‘All right.’

‘What did you learn?’

‘Numbers.’

‘How many?’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘You’re supposed to remember.’

‘Why?’

‘You go to school to make you clever.’

‘Are you clever?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Why not all the time?’

‘People make mistakes.’

‘Do you make mistakes?’

‘I try not to.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s important not to make mistakes.’

‘Do people get angry?’

‘If I make bad mistakes, yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it upsets them.’

‘Do you get angry if people make mistakes?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘I’ll try not to make mistakes.’

‘So will I,’ said Natalia, a promise to herself as much as to Sasha.