He holidayed once a year in England—another example, in Adrian’s opinion, of an almost sackcloth approach to personal enjoyment.
Adrian considered him a perfectly behaved, grammar-school-educated civil servant who knew his place, and whose main fault was in not aspiring to be more than that. But for precisely this reason, Adrian often needed him. Teddy’s support was valuable in anything that might be considered by Downing Street to be too risqué.
Adrian, by contrast, had from the start brought a flamboyance to MI6, which had almost cost him the top job. It was only his own political adroitness, and this solely in the field of internal politics, that had beaten two other, more Parkinson-like candidates out of the running.
To some at the Service, this new style at the top was welcome. To others—in particular those whose feet Adrian had trampled over to reach the top—he was unsuitable, even dangerous. Teddy was a useful, a necessary ally for Adrian, therefore, when he needed something that required the imprimatur of a man with a reputation for safety first.
After lunch cooked by Teddy’s wife, Elizabeth, a self-described “English rose,” the two men decided to walk across the fields at the rear of the house and up to a small hill that looked towards the South Downs.
But Teddy knew that Adrian hadn’t come for the lunch. Despite Adrian’s scornful, snobbish opinion of him, he was well aware of Adrian’s need—and Adrian’s own faults that propelled that need. The two were not friends, and Teddy wasn’t fooled by any pretence that they were. They’d never socialised together outside work.
He assumed it was further information about Semyonovich Adrian wished to impart, in private, but in this at least he was to be surprised. The matter Adrian wished to discuss was nothing to do with the murdered Russian.
“The Semyonovich business has overshadowed another development over the weekend, Teddy,” Adrian began as they left the cultivated field at the rear of Parkinson’s house and walked uphill across a rough, sun-scorched meadow. “Grigory Bykov. Remember him? The Russians have finally declared that they won’t extradite him. It’s taken them six months from my meeting in Helsinki. This is a matter that concerns us much more than the assassination of Semyonovich. It’s one of my boys that got killed, our boys.”
“Oh, yes?” Teddy replied.
“Yes. You remember Finn?”
Parkinson let the name hang in the still afternoon air and continued to tramp up the field.
“He’d left the Secret Intelligence Service, hadn’t he, Adrian?” he said finally. “By the time he was killed, he hadn’t been with us for… how long? Five, six years? Still on first-name terms with someone who deserted the SIS?”
“He’s dead now, Teddy. And as you know, Finn was always my boy. When he was onside, he was one of the best officers I ever had.”
This was a new argument of Teddy’s, he saw, different from the one he’d used back in January. Parkinson was now distancing Finn from the protection of the SIS. The politicians were moving the target as usual. It was an argument Parkinson certainly hadn’t used over their lunch at the Special Forces Club. Then, it was all about making an effort at quiet extradition first. Adrian gritted his teeth.
“But he’d given the SIS the push,” Parkinson said. “Or we gave him the push. Both, perhaps. Either way, what do we owe him? Isn’t that the question?”
“He turned his back on us, yes. In a way,” Adrian agreed. “He became a liability, and we had to lose him. That was back in 2000. But…” He paused, for a rare moment uncertain how to continue.
They’d reached the top of the meadow, where a small copse was maintained for pheasant shooting in the winter. Wire netting and metal bird feeders were ready for the new young chicks to be reared. It was a beautifully clear day, and the view began to unfold as they breasted the hill.
Adrian didn’t like to say what he was going to say. He rarely, if ever, admitted he was culpable. However, in this case…
“It’s true, Teddy. Finn did leave us, in the sense that he rejected government policy back then. He suddenly got all hot about what was right and wrong, and so on. It became impossible for him to work any longer in the role he’d performed so brilliantly for many years in Moscow. But he left us for a reason, and that reason has come home to roost. The reason he left was that HM government was cosying up, as he saw it, to Vladimir Putin. He believed it was against the UK’s national interest. Finn’s view was out of whack back then, but now it’s become government policy. Now Putin is out in the cold with our government, as Finn always said he should be.”
“Policies change, Adrian. It’s not our job, let alone the job of our officers, to interpret political necessities.”
“Okay. Agreed. It wasn’t right for Finn to take matters into his own hands. The awkward fact, however, is that he was right.”
“So?”
“Finn was murdered by a KGB assassin for following up lines of enquiry we’d told him to drop. To drop for political reasons. Now, today, these are exactly the lines of enquiry we are pursuing. Again, for changing political reasons. He got murdered for it. And we were wrong,” he added, including Parkinson in the assessment. “In January you told me to meet with the Russians. Give them an opportunity to hand Bykov over without losing face. That’s all happened. I met Sergei Limov, as you know, seven months ago now. This weekend we learn the Russians aren’t going to hand Bykov over. That leaves us with only one option, according to SIS procedure. We take out anyone who assassinates one of ours.”
“One of ours, yes,” Parkinson said, with heavy emphasis on “ours.”
“To the Russians he always was one of ours. They never knew he’d left MI6. They murdered someone they believed to be a fully paid-up member of SIS. We can’t allow that.”
“Intelligence officers aren’t paid to have political opinions,” Teddy Parkinson said, returning to his earlier theme. He sounded hard-edged now, and ignored what Adrian perceived to have been his winning throw. He was better at dealing with Adrian than Adrian knew. “They’re paid to put into play whatever they’re told by HMG and by us.”
“Finn was disobedient. I agree with you entirely, Teddy. But although he was no longer officially on our books, he was one of us. And the Russians thought so, that’s the real point,” Adrian repeated.
He was uncomfortably conscious that he was being far more supportive of Finn now than he’d been in the last years of Finn’s life. Honour him in death.
“We don’t allow people to kill our officers and get away with it,” Adrian said. “It’s part of the highest ethics of the SIS.”
“So. You want to take action.”
“Now that the Russians have refused extradition, yes. That was your condition, Teddy, not mine. We’ve done everything the prime minister asked us to do. Foreign agents don’t murder our people with impunity. If we don’t make the point, they’ll just be encouraged, maybe to do a similar hit on another, acting SIS officer in the future.”
Parkinson looked across the rolling hills that stretched into the haze of distance. He’d picked up a stick, Adrian noticed, and was flicking it in the air, like a headmaster wielding a cane.
“I share your concern,” he said, without looking at Adrian.
“Thank you, Teddy. So I have your support?”
“So far as it goes,” Parkinson said.
Parkinson observed Adrian standing impatiently on the hill beside him. Carew looked very out of place in this ordinary, unkempt, though to him spectacular countryside, he thought. He imagined that Adrian’s country estate in Hampshire, with its tailored buildings and lawns, would accommodate Adrian rather better. The man’s face had a city pallor, which accentuated the red parts of his face, but it wasn’t the ruddiness of the open air. Maybe the pallor was also the smoking, Parkinson thought.