‘Mmm,’ said Liz noncommittally. ‘What’s he going to do about it?’
‘He wants to create a “Corporate Communications Director”. A ridiculous idea! Our job isn’t to “communicate” – we don’t tell secrets; we keep them.’
Actually, it wasn’t a bad idea, thought Liz, though she felt it politic to keep this to herself. As Liz saw it, there was a necessary amount of secrecy about the intelligence services and their operations and people – but there was also unnecessary secrecy, which could be positively harmful to effectiveness in the modern world. But Fane was of the old school – thinking that it was safer to keep quiet about everything, in case you unwittingly gave something important away. He also found change abhorrent, and Liz sometimes thought that he viewed the mere passage of time as a cause for lament – if you listened to him, it had been downhill all the way for British intelligence since the end of the Cold War.
‘I’m sorry you’re upset,’ she said mildly.
‘It gets worse,’ said Fane. He shook his head, and at last sat down. ‘Do you know, they’ve actually appointed some head-hunters to find this Communications person.’ He seemed to spit out the last two words. ‘You know what that means, don’t you?’
‘Tell me.’
‘It means they’re going to look outside. It’s not even necessarily going to be one of us – an insider, I mean. They’re intending to advertise the post.’ Fane’s outrage seemed entirely genuine. ‘It’s bad enough to create this position, but then to advertise it and possibly appoint someone who’s never set foot in Vauxhall Cross…’ He paused, to allow the idiocy of it to sink in. Liz contented herself with a raised eyebrow. Fane went on, ‘I tell you, I can see nothing but disaster looming.’
‘I suppose you’ll just have to ignore it,’ said Liz, wishing they could get down to business. They met occasionally to exchange information. It was rarely a long meeting, but it could be helpful – sometimes crucially so. ‘Maybe it won’t turn out to be such a bad idea. Perhaps he won’t find a suitable outsider and he’ll appoint an insider after all.’
But Fane wasn’t mollified. ‘How can I ignore it? Treadwell’s put me on the selection board. I told him to his face that the whole thing was ridiculous. He just smiled and said in that case my contribution would be especially useful.’
Liz tried not to laugh. This man Treadwell, the new C as he was by tradition called, after the first head of MI6, Captain Cumming, sounded rather interesting. Not that she would have dreamed of saying so to Fane.
3
An hour later, with a still-fuming Fane gone, Peggy Kinsolving came into Liz’s office. If Liz had been asked to name her most valuable member of staff, Peggy would have topped the list. She was in her early thirties now, having joined MI5 after first spending two years in MI6. Seconded to MI5 to assist Liz on a tricky case, she had found the work more suited to her skills, and her career prospects better, on the defensive side of the intelligence business. A former librarian, Peggy combined a researcher’s precision and love of detail with a growing aptitude in the field. She had become a brilliant interviewer, transforming her undergraduate interest in drama into a professional asset as an intelligence officer.
There was something different about her this morning, and it took Liz a moment to twig. ‘Where are your glasses?’ she said suddenly as Peggy sat down.
‘I’ve got contacts. What do you think?’
‘You look great,’ said Liz, a little taken aback by the transformation. The Peggy she’d first come to know had been an uncertain bookish girl with rather wispy hair. In those days Peggy had worn horn-rimmed spectacles, which never seemed quite to fit her face. Over the years Liz had come to recognise that during an investigation the sight of Peggy pushing her glasses firmly into place meant that she was on to something, and it had always lifted Liz’s heart. But as Peggy had become more confident her appearance had subtly changed. Now she often wore her hair up, held in place by some sort of clasp, and instead of dun-coloured jumpers and skirts, she went for blues and lilacs. The contact lenses seemed to complete a transformation that had been slowly taking place for years, and for the first time Liz saw that the eyes that had been hidden behind the spectacles were a rather remarkable blue.
‘What does Tim think?’ asked Liz.
‘Oh, Tim!’ said Peggy, sighing. ‘He hasn’t even noticed. If there’s a typo in the edition of Donne he’s reading, you can be sure he’ll catch it. But if I walked through the flat in biker’s leathers he’d just ask me when supper would be ready.’
Liz laughed, though she sensed that something in Peggy’s attitude had changed. Previously she had treated her partner Tim’s academic absent-mindedness as a joke and had laughed fondly at his eccentricities. But now she sounded irritated.
‘Give him time,’ Liz said soothingly, but Peggy just shrugged.
‘How is he otherwise?’ Liz persevered.
‘Oh, he’s all right,’ said Peggy, sounding resigned. ‘But he’s got seriously into civil liberties. He thinks it’s today’s big issue.’
‘Maybe it is,’ said Liz, who was essentially well disposed towards Tim. She found his attachment to vegetarianism and Ayurvedic medicine difficult to take and thought him rather wet in a donnish way – he was a lecturer in English at King’s College, London – but she knew he adored Peggy, and Liz thought he was good for her.
‘Possibly, but being Tim, he’s gone for it hook, line and sinker. He thinks Edward Snowden is a hero. Says Orwell didn’t imagine the half of it – soon we won’t be able to breathe without the state monitoring our exhalation rate.’
‘Oh, dear. That must be a bit difficult to live with. But I’m sure he’ll mellow a bit when he thinks about it. Can’t you reason with him? He must know that you’re no advocate of massive state surveillance. He’s lived with you long enough. You’re in a pretty good position to explain the balance between freedom and protection. He knows how hard we work and what we are trying to do. Tell him that if we had even a third of the power of surveillance that he’s imagining, our job of keeping people safe would be a lot easier.’
‘I’ve tried. But so far he’s not listening. He wants me to go to a lecture with him tonight at the university. It’s on civil liberties, naturally. It used to be poetry readings he dragged me off to, or lectures on diphthongs in medieval literature. But now it’s Snowden he’s obsessed with instead of the Metaphysical Poets. When the Guardian published all those revelations, Tim didn’t read anything else for days.’ She shook her head wearily. Then she asked, ‘Have you heard of Jasminder Kapoor?’
‘Sounds familiar.’ Liz racked her brains for a moment. ‘I know – she’s the civil liberties woman; I heard her the other morning, on the Today programme. She edits some magazine, doesn’t she?’
‘That’s right. It’s a monthly called Democratic Affairs. Tim brings it home. He gets it at the College. She lectures in the Law department there but I don’t think he’s ever met her.’
Liz nodded; she’d occasionally leafed through copies of it in bookshops. ‘There’s some pretty wild stuff in it, isn’t there?’
‘Well, Jasminder Kapoor’s own stuff is pretty balanced, I think. But some of the others who write for it seem a bit off the wall.’
‘I remember thinking she sounded rather sensible when I heard her on the radio.’ Jasminder had been on the programme with an American politician, talking about the remaining prisoners in Guantanamo. The American, a conservative Republican, had grown heated, suggesting that his interlocutor was either a naïve dupe or on the side of al Qaeda. Kapoor had made her points very calmly in the face of his blustering, suggesting that his caricature of an argument did as much damage to democracy as its extremist opponents.