Our kind of traitor

'It was insects mainly.'

'Leeches?'

'Those too.'

'Don't hover. Take a pew.'

Luke obediently sat down. But Hector remained standing, hands thrust deep in his pockets, shoulders stooped, glowering into the unlit fireplace with its ancient brass tongs and pokers and cracked leather surrounds. And it occurred to Luke that the atmosphere inside the library had become oppressive, if not threatening. And perhaps Hector felt it too, because his flippancy deserted him, and his hollowed, sickly face turned as grim as an undertaker's.

'Want to ask you something,' he announced abruptly, more to the fireplace than to Luke.

'Ask away.'

'What's the most dire, fucking awful thing you've ever seen in your life? Anywhere? Apart from the business-end of a drug lord's Uzi staring you in the face. Pot-bellied starving kids in the Congo with their hands chopped off, barking mad with hunger, too tired to cry? Fathers castrated, cocks stuffed in their mouths, eyeholes full of flies? Women with bayonets stuck up their fannies?'

Luke had never served in the Congo, so he had to assume Hector was describing an experience of his own.

'We did have our equivalents,' he said.

'Such as what? Name a couple.'

'Colombian government having a field day. With American assistance, naturally. Villages torched. Inhabitants gang-raped, tortured, hacked to bits. Everybody dead except the one survivor left to tell the tale.'

'Yes. Well. We've both seen a bit of the world then,' Hector conceded. 'Not wanking around.'

'No.'

'And the dirty money sloshing about, the profits of pain, we've seen that too. In Colombia alone, billions. You've seen that. Christ knows what your man was worth.' He didn't wait for the answer. 'In the Congo, billions. In Afghanistan, billions. An eighth of the world's fucking economy: black as your hat. We know about it.'

'Yes. We do.'

'Blood money. That's all it is.'

'Yes.'

'Doesn't matter where. It can be in a box under a warlord's bed in Somalia or in a City of London bank next to the vintage port. It doesn't change colour. It's still blood money.'

'I suppose it is.'

'No glamour, no pretty excuses. The profits of extortion, drug dealing, murder, intimidation, mass rape, slavery. Blood money. Tell me if I'm overstating my case.'

'I'm sure you're not.'

'Only four ways to stop it. One: you go for the chaps who are doing it. Capture 'em, kill 'em or bang 'em up. If you can. Two: you go for the product. Intercept it before it reaches the street or the marketplace. If you can. Three: collar the profits, put the bastards out of business.'

A worrying pause while Hector seemed to reflect on matters far above Luke's pay grade. Was he thinking of the heroin dealers who had turned his son into a gaolbird and addict? Or the vulture capitalists who had tried to put his family firm out of business, and sixty-five of the best men and women in England on the rubbish heap?

'Then there's the fourth way,' Hector was saying. 'The really bad way. The best tried, easiest, the most convenient, the most common, and the least fuss. Bugger the people who've been starved, raped, tortured, died of addiction. To hell with the human cost. Money's got no smell as long as there's enough of it and it's ours. Above all, think big. Catch the minnows, but leave the sharks in the water. A chap's laundering a couple of million? He's a bloody crook. Call in the regulators, put him in irons. But a few billion? Now you're talking. Billions are a statistic.' Closing his eyes while he lapsed into his own thoughts, Hector resembled for a moment his own death mask: or so it seemed to Luke. 'You don't have to agree with any of this, Lukie,' he said kindly, waking from his reverie. 'Door's wide open. Given my reputation, a lot of chaps would be through it by now.'

It occurred to Luke that this was a fairly ironic choice of metaphor, since Hector had the key in his pocket, but he kept the thought to himself.

'You can go back to the office after lunch, tell the Human Queen, thanks awfully but you're happier serving out your time on the ground floor. Draw your pension, keep away from drug lords and colleagues' wives, lie on your back and spit at the ceiling for the rest of your life. No bones broken.'

Luke managed a smile. 'My problem is, I'm not very good at spitting at the ceiling,' he said.

But nothing was going to stop Hector's hard selclass="underline" 'I'm offering you a one-way street to nowhere,' he insisted. 'If you sign up to this thing, you're fucked all ways up. If we lose, we were two failed whistleblowers who tried to foul the nest. If we win, we'll be the lepers of the Whitehall-Westminster jungle and all stations between. Not to mention the Service we do our best to love, honour and obey.'

'This is all the information I get?'

'For your own preservation and mine, yes. No nookie unless you come to the altar first.'

They were at the door. Hector had produced the key and was about to turn the lock.

'And about Billy Boy,' he said.

'What about him?'

'He's going to put the arm on you. Bound to. Stick-and-carrot stuff. "What's that mad bugger Meredith been telling you? What's he up to, where, who's he hiring?" If that happens, talk to me first, then talk to me again afterwards. Nobody's kosher in this thing. Everyone's guilty till proven innocent. Deal?'

'I've managed pretty well on the counter-interrogation stakes this far,' Luke replied, feeling it was about time he asserted himself.

'All the same,' said Hector, still waiting for his answer.

'Is it Russian, by any chance?' Luke asked hopefully, in what he afterwards regarded as an inspired moment. He was a Russophile, and had always resented being taken off the circuit on the grounds of supposed over-affection for the target.

'Could be Russian. Could be any fucking thing,' Hector retorted, as his big grey eyes lit up again with his believer's fire.

*

Did Luke ever really say yes to the job? Did he ever, now that he looked back, say, 'Yes, Hector, I will come aboard, blindfolded with my hands tied, just the way I was that night in Colombia, and I will join your mystery crusade' – or words to that effect?

No, he did not.

Even as they sat down to what Hector happily described as the second-worst lunch in the world, first prize yet to be awarded, Luke was still, if he was true to himself, entertaining lingering doubts about whether he was being invited to join the sort of private war that the Service was from time to time led into against its better judgement, with disastrous results.

Hector's opening shots at affable small talk did nothing to put these anxieties to rest. Seated in the outer regions of his club's sepulchral dining room, at the table closest to the clatter of the kitchen, he treated Luke to a masterclass in the uses of indirect conversation in public places.

Over the smoked eel, he confined himself to inquiring after Luke's family, incidentally getting the names of his wife and son right, a further sign to Luke that he had been reading his personal file. When the shepherd's pie and school cabbage arrived, on a clanking silver trolley ferried by an angry old black man in a red hunting jacket, Hector passed to the more intimate but equally harmless topic of Jenny's marriage plans – Jenny, it turned out, being his beloved daughter – which she had recently abandoned since, according to Hector, the chap she was involved with had turned out to be the most unmitigated shit:

'Wasn't love on Jenny's part, it was addiction – same as Adrian except, thank God, it wasn't drugs. Chap's a sadist, she's an old softie. Willing seller, docile buyer, we thought. We didn't say anything, you can't. Hopeless. Bought 'em a sweet little house in Bloomsbury, all fitted out. Vulgar bugger needed three-inch-deep wall-to-wall carpets, so Jenny needed 'em too. Hate 'em personally, but what else can you do? Couple of minutes' walk from the British Museum, and just right for Trotsky and her D.Phil. But old Jenny rumbled the little turd, thank God, full marks to her. Good recession price, the landlord was broke, I shan't lose money. Nice garden, not too big.'