His smile turned briefly back to a frown, and Jasminder wondered if she’d offended him again. She usually felt so relaxed with Laurenz; she didn’t like this sudden feeling of walking on eggshells. Then he smiled again, and she was pleased until she realised how her own mood was becoming dependent on his. I must be really falling for him, she thought, if I’m acting like such an impressionable schoolgirl.
‘I’d love to meet Emma,’ he said, and Jasminder was about to suggest some dates when she saw his hand was held up, like a traffic policeman stopping a lorry. ‘But not just yet. Let me get this wretched divorce out of the way, and then you and I can go public. I can meet your friends, and you can meet mine, and perhaps some of my clients too. That is,’ and he said this shyly, endearingly, ‘if you’d like to do that?’
‘That would be wonderful,’ said Jasminder, her doubts melting away.
‘But I almost forgot,’ he said, getting up from the sofa. ‘I bought you a present. To celebrate your new job.’
‘Oh,’ said Jasminder, surprised and delighted. ‘That’s really kind of you.’
As she was speaking he got up from the sofa and went to open a drawer in the kitchen. He took out a box.
‘Here you are,’ he said, handing it to her. ‘It’s a new phone – the latest iPhone. I hope you like the colour.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, taking the phone out of the box. ‘But that’s a terribly expensive present.’
‘I wanted to be sure you kept in touch. You can keep it on your desk in the office and I’ll know I can always get through to you.’
‘Oh, dear. I’m afraid that won’t work,’ she laughed. ‘We’re not allowed to take private mobiles into the office. We have to keep them at the door and collect them when we leave the building. But you can always leave messages on it and I’ll pick them up as soon as I go out.’
He looked disappointed. ‘Put it in your pocket. They’ll never know.’
‘I think they might,’ she replied, smiling. ‘And you shouldn’t be encouraging me to break the rules. You’ll get me sacked.’
‘Well, okay then. Leave it at the door.’ He paused and looked at her, grave-faced. ‘I certainly wouldn’t want you to get the sack.’
23
The fog was just lifting at Heathrow airport, allowing the early-morning long-distance flights that had been stacked overhead to land, filling the Immigration Hall with weary arrivals. In the Departure Hall Miles Brookhaven, along with thousands of other frustrated travellers, was scanning the departure boards for information about when his flight to Washington was likely to take off.
He hadn’t wanted to make this journey. He didn’t think it was necessary and, if it hadn’t been for Andy Bokus’s insistence on a face-to-face meeting, was sure it could all have been sorted out in a video conference. Andy Bokus, Miles’s predecessor as CIA Head of Station in London, had left Britain under a bit of a cloud. A gruff, son-of-the-soil sort of man, he had never liked the place. He hated the weather, he didn’t like London, and above all he didn’t like the Brits, particularly Geoffrey Fane of MI6, who he thought, rightly, patronised him.
Andy was nonetheless rather good at his job, and the London Station had done well under him. Yet after he’d spent years asking for a new posting, Bokus had finally got his wish – though only after he had made a misjudgement and lost a potentially useful counter-terrorism source to Russia. Now, after six months’ rest and recuperation leave, he was back in Langley as Head of Counter-Intelligence Operations in Northern Europe, which meant that he was still involved in some of the London Station’s activities.
What had triggered Miles’s flying visit to Langley was a message that had come in the day before from the Kiev Station. Mischa, the Russian military source Miles had met, had resurfaced. Shortly after that he had left Ukraine but no one knew where he’d gone and nothing had been heard from him. The Kiev Station was under instructions not to try and contact him as he was seen as a potentially valuable long-term source; nothing was to be done that might put him at risk. But a message had come from him. He was in Estonia for a month and wanted to see the ‘British expert’ again; he had more information. He would provide contact arrangements when a meeting was confirmed, the message had said.
The communication, which Kiev had sent to London and Langley simultaneously, had triggered a rapid response from Bokus. No one was to contact Mischa in Estonia, and Miles was to come to Langley for a meeting. So here he was, hanging around at Heathrow, expecting to spend more time in the air in the next twenty-four hours than he would on the ground – that is, if he ever got off the ground at all.
Heathrow eventually got itself back to something approaching normal and Miles’s plane landed at Dulles airport in the early evening, several hours late. He stayed the night at the guest house near the HQ building at Langley and turned up early and grumpy for the eight-thirty meeting. Rather to his surprise he found that it had been moved from Andy Bokus’s office to the grander suite of the Director of Counter-Intelligence.
This post was now held by someone Miles had not met, a new man called Sandy Gunderson. His predecessor, the legendary Tyrus Oakes, known as ‘The Bird’, was a small thoughtful man with outlandishly big ears and an obsessive habit of taking voluminous notes by hand on yellow legal pads, even in the most sensitive meetings. People speculated about what happened to the notes afterwards. Some said it was just a nervous habit and that they were immediately destroyed, others thought that he was saving them up for his memoirs, but only his secretary knew for sure. And she wasn’t saying.
Gunderson, Oakes’s successor, was too new to have acquired a nickname, and from the look of his office was almost fetishistically tidy – his desk and the table in the windowless conference room attached to it were bare. The walls held only framed photographs of the Agency headquarters, and the chrome-and-leather chairs looked more functional than comfortable. There was not a legal pad in sight or any person except Gunderson’s secretary. Miles was early.
‘Mr Gunderson will be along in a moment,’ she said, placing a plate of pastries and a jug of coffee on the table. ‘Help yourself.’
Ten minutes later the meeting that Miles had come so far to attend got under way. Round the table were Andy Bokus, looking slimmer and fitter than when Miles had last seen him, and a tall, square-jawed man in a dark blue suit and gleaming black shoes, who was introduced as Bud McCarthy from the FBI.
At the head of the table sat Gunderson: early fifties, thin-faced, rimless glasses, intense pale blue eyes. Reminds me of photographs of Himmler, thought Miles, who had studied the Second World War at college. But Gunderson began in friendly enough style.
‘I’ve called this meeting to discuss our response to the message from your friend Mischa asking for a meeting in Estonia, Miles. And thank you for coming over at such short notice, and to you too, Bud, for coming across. We have no one here from our Kiev Station, but Miles, you’ve met their source so maybe you’d begin by reminding us of the background and the intelligence he provided.’
Miles outlined the circumstances of his meeting in Ukraine and reminded them of Mischa’s information about Illegals and Russian efforts at subversion and disruption in the West. ‘His information came from his brother who is an FSB officer working on the programme,’ he added. ‘He specifically mentioned the US and France – and Britain, where he said the Illegal was having success. I was described to him as a British expert, so as he’s asked to see me again, I assume he has more information about the British operation.’
‘Thanks. That’s useful background. Now, Andy, you have concerns about a meeting in Estonia, so would you tell us your angle?’