Harry put the phone down, and hurried out into the cold and the long walk back up the Falls. He was concerned that they should get the girl out of the quagmire, and fast, before her involvement became too great for her to extricate herself… before she followed the other girl he’d brought into the game.
But things did move fast that Sunday.
Twenty minutes after Harry had rung off Davidson called the Permanent Under-Secretary. He caught the civil servant on the point of going to early morning service. The bad news first. Always play it that way, Davidson liked to say. Kick them a bit, then produce the magic sponge. They like it better. The agent was still declining to name a contact point. Not refusing, but declining. Don’t want to make an order of it. Told him it’s stupid, but can’t do more than that. As he says, it’s his neck. Our scandal if he catches it, mind, but his neck for all that. Now the bonus. Good information out of our chap. He’ll like that.
‘Keep that for a moment,’ snapped the civil servant. ‘I’ve had calls in the night. GOC has been on, and that man of his, Frost of intelligence. Bloody misnomer that. They want our fellow out, and kicking up a hell of a scene. They think he’s blown.’
Davidson bit his tongue. He heard at the end of the line the call for the rest of the family to go on.
‘There’s been some sort of leak. Like a sieve, that place. The papers have got a story from the opposition that they know a big man has been put in. There’s panic stations over there. Anyway the order is get the chap out or the General says he’ll go to the PM. Consolation is that the men over there say they don’t think the IRA have a name. But that’ll come soon enough. And you haven’t an idea where we could go and just take hold of him?’
‘All I have is that he works in a scrap merchant’s in Andersonstown. Nothing more.’
‘That won’t do us much good till Monday morning.’
‘He’s done well again, our chap. The man we want was actually at the dance where Harry was the other night. The military had him, and must have let him go, or are holding him on something else…’
‘Look, for God’s sake, Davidson, I’m at home. I’m going to church. There’s no point feeding me that sort of material over the phone. Talk to Frost direct. He’ll be in his office, prancing about. He’s having a field day. But if this Harry man should call again, get him out. That now is an instruction.’
Davidson had always had to admit that he enjoyed the complicated paraphernalia of introducing the agent into the operations theatre. He could reflect on it now, with the phone quiet, and his superior racing down the country lanes late for his communion. Davidson had been on the old Albania team. There had been the months with the undercover Greeks and Turks in Cyprus. Three years’ secondment to the Singapore government to train bright-faced little policemen in the techniques of urban infiltration and maintaining men in a hostile environment. There was a gap in his wide experience. He recognized it. The men he sent into the field or discussed sending were all, as Davidson saw them, foreigners. The involvement with the men who listened to his lectures or acted under his orders was loose, and in no way binding.
With Harry it had become quite different. The danger that he now knew his agent to be facing numbed Davidson to a degree that almost shamed him. He had long seen himself as a tough, near-ruthless figure, the man in charge who put his agents onto the ground without sentiment or personal feeling. His defensive walls were being breached, he realized, as he thought of his man across the water, with the enemy closing on him.
And Harry didn’t just not know of it: he’d just been told that all was well and looked good. That made him vulnerable.
Davidson had a growing feeling of nausea when he remembered how Harry had been brought to Dorking. Damn-all chance he’d had of backing out of the operation. The Prime Minister personally authorized the setting up of the team, and we’ve chosen you as the most suitable man. What chance did he have of sidestepping that little lot? He’d been belted off on the plane on a wild-goose chase. If he’s not out of there soon he’ll be number one thousand and bloody something pushing up daisies.
He picked up his phone and called Frost direct, in his office where he’d been told he’d be. At the other end of the line the serving colonel in intelligence left the London-based civilian with no illusions as to what he thought of armchair administrators organizing undercover work without consultation or know-how. Davidson resigned himself to it, letting it blaze over him. Between the interruptions he read over the transcript of Harry’s message. He ended on a high note.
‘He did pretty well with the first lot of stuff we gave you. We were disappointed in our team it didn’t come to much. You should have it sewn up this time, don’t you think, old boy?’
Frost didn’t rise. It was a juicy and wriggling bait, but the office was crowded, and it was not the day for telephone brawling. That would come after this merry little show was wrapped up and in mothballs — what was left of it. He called the Springfield Road police to request the locating and picking up of the girl Josephine Laverty of Clonard, and then turned his attention to the matter of the man having been in and presumably out of military hands on Saturday night two weeks back. Cool bastard he must be, appraised the colonel. In between the calls he cancelled his Sunday-morning nine holes with G2 Ops.
Other operations had gone wrong before, Davidson recalled. There were those endless nights when they parachuted Albanians into the marshlands between the sea and Tirana and waited in vain with their CIA colleagues for the chatter of radio signals that would let them know all was well. When the Cypriot agents he had controlled had disappeared there had been days of nagging uncertainty until the bodies showed up — generally tortured, and always shot through the back of the head. But they were only aliens, so that the recriminations were short-lived, the reprisals muted. But if they lost Harry then the ramifications would be huge, and public. The round-up of scapegoats would be spectacular, Davidson had no doubt of that. The Permanent Under-Secretary would have faded from the picture by then, would have fetched his sliding carpet out. The old hack would be left holding the baby.
He called his assistant in from the outer office where, thank God, the man spent most of his time, and told him to watch the phones. He was to tape all calls, regardless, on the cassette recorder, whichever phone they came through on. He slipped out of the building. Sunday morning in Covent Garden. Some sunlight about on the upper reaches of the big buildings. Piles of fruit and vegetable boxes. No people. Davidson walked to the small grocer that he knew would be open to serve the flats, big and grey-smeared, to the north of the market square. He bought bread, and cartons of milk, coffee and biscuits, some butter, and lemon curd. He’d liked that ever since boarding school thirty-five years ago. The total was about all his cooking facilities would cope with.
There had been no calls when he returned. He phoned his wife, told her he would be in town for a day or so, and not to worry. She didn’t sound as if she was. There was an army-issue camp bed kept in the wardrobe behind his desk, excruciatingly uncomfortable but better than nothing. It would be a long wait, and no-one to spend it with but the boring young man they’d sent along to give him a hand. Davidson had realized soon that they had not fully briefed his assistant on what was happening. He had no intention himself of enlightening him. They were on stand-by now, operational twenty-four hours.
The boys ran intricately between the towering regimented lines of the pine trunks, hurtling their way over the bending carpet of needles and cones in perpetual games of chase and hide and seek. Their voices were shrill, loud as if to fight off the cold attacking wind that heralded the real winter of the great plain east of Hanover. This was where Harry liked to bring them, to search for trout in the streams in high summer and spend weekends in a wooden chalet, to run round to keep warm in the early winter, and then, when the snow came, to bring their toboggans. Sometimes they would set up a fox that had hidden in the sparse, stunted undergrowth under the pine umbrella hoping to avoid detection, then when its nerve went and it bounded clear there would be the noisy, clumsy chase, the ground giving under their boots before the quarry made its escape. It would take them deep into the forest, and when the brown flash was well lost they would stop and ponder and think of the direction of the fire-break path where they had left their mother, Mary Brown.