So Hector did hear, thought Luke with satisfaction: Billy Boy hit you with Adrian, and you've made him pay the price.
Matlock's outrage was mingled with frank disbelief. 'Without the Chief's word even? Without fourth-floor approval, at all? Hector Meredith flying solo all over again? Taking information from unsymbolized sources on your own initiative for your own ends? You're not in the real world, Hector. You never were. Don't look at what your man's offering. Look at what he's asking! Resettlement for his whole tribe, new identities, passports, safe houses, amnesties, guarantees, I don't know what he isn't asking! You'd have to have the entire Empowerment Committee behind you, in writing, before you'd get me signing up to that. I don't trust you. Never did. Nothing's enough for you. Never was.'
'The entire Empowerment Committee?' Hector inquired.
'As constituted under Treasury rules. The full Committee of Empowerment, in plenary session, no subcommittees.'
'So a clutch of government lawyers, an all-star cast of Foreign Office mandarins, Cabinet Office, the Treasury, not to mention our own fourth floor. You think you can contain that, do you, Billy? In this context? How about the Parliamentary Oversight lot? They're worth a laugh. Both houses of Parliament, cross-Party, Aubrey Longrigg to the fore, and de Salis's fully paid-up choir of parliamentary mercenaries, all singing from the same hymn-sheet?'
'The size and constitution of the Empowerment Committee is flexible and adjustable, Hector, as you very well know. Not all elements have to be present at all times.'
'And this is what you propose before I've even spoken to Dima? You want a scandal before the scandal's broken? Is that what you're pushing for? Go wide, blow the source before you've let him show you what he's got to sell, and sod the consequences? Is that seriously what you're suggesting? You'll let the shit hit the fan before it's even turning, all to save your back? And you talk about the good of the Service.'
Luke had to hand it to Matlock. Even now, he did not relax his aggression.
'So it's the interests of the Service we're protecting at last! Well, well. I'm glad to hear it, late as it may be. What are you suggesting?'
'Hold off your committee meeting until after Paris.'
'And in the meantime?'
'Against your better judgement and all you hold dear, such as your own arse, you give me a temporary operational licence, thereby entrusting the whole affair to the hands of a maverick officer who can be disowned the moment the operation goes belly up: me. Hector Meredith has his virtues, but he's an identified loose cannon and he's exceeded his brief. Media please copy.'
'And if the operation doesn't go belly up?'
'You assemble the smallest version of the Empowerment Committee that you can get away with.'
'And you'll address it.'
'And you'll be on sick leave.'
'That's not fair, Hector.'
'It wasn't intended to be, Billy.'
*
Luke never knew what piece of paper it was that Matlock was drawing from the recesses of his jacket, what it said and didn't say, whether both signed it or only one, whether there was a copy and if so who kept it and where, because Hector reminded him, not for the first time, that he had an engagement, and he had left the room to keep it by the time Matlock was spreading out his wares on the table.
But he would remember all his life the walk back to Hampstead through the last of the evening sunshine, and wondering whether he might just stop by on Perry and Gail at their flat in Primrose Hill on his way, and urge them to run for their lives while there was time.
And from there his thoughts as so often strayed, with no prompting from him, to the booze-sodden sixty-year-old Colombian drug lord who, for reasons neither he nor Luke would ever understand, decided that instead of providing Luke with Intelligence, which he had done for the last two years, he would lock him up in a stinking jungle stockade for a month and leave him to the tender mercies of his lieutenants, then bring him a set of clean clothes and a bottle of tequila and invite him to find his own way back to Eloise.
11
Of the many emotions that Gail had expected to feel as she boarded the 12.29 Eurostar from St Pancras Station bound for Paris on a cloudy Saturday afternoon in June, relief was about the last of them. Yet relief, albeit hedged around with every sort of caveat and reservation, was what she felt, and if Perry's face opposite her was anything to go by, so did he. If relief meant clarity, if it meant harmony between them restored, and getting back on track with Natasha and the girls and mopping Perry's brow when he was doing his Land and Liberty number, then Gail was relieved; which didn't mean she'd tossed her critical faculties out of the window, or was one half as enchanted as Perry patently was by his role as master-spy.
Perry's conversion to the cause had come as no big surprise to her, though you had to be a Perry-watcher to know just how far he had moved: from high-minded rejection to outright commitment to what Hector referred to as The Job. Sometimes, it was true, Perry would express residual moral or ethical reservations, even doubts – is this really the only way to handle this? Isn't there a simpler route to the same end? – but he was capable of asking himself the same question halfway up a thousand-foot overhang.
The original seeds of his conversion, she now realized, had been planted not by Hector but by Dima, who since Antigua had acquired the dimensions of a Rousseau-esque noble savage in the Perry lexicon:
'Just imagine who we'd have been if we'd been born into his life, Gail. You can't get away from the fact: it's practically a badge of honour to be selected by him. And I mean, think of those children!'
Oh, she thought of the children all right. She thought of them day and night, and most particularly she thought about Natasha, which was one reason why she had refrained from suggesting to Perry that, stuck out on a headland in Antigua with the fear of God in him, Dima mightn't exactly have been spoiled for choice when it came to selecting a messenger, confessor, or prisoner's friend, or whatever it was that Perry had been appointed, or had appointed himself. She'd always known there was a slumbering romantic in him waiting to be woken when selfless dedication was on offer, and if there was a whiff of danger in the air, so much the better.
The only missing character had been a fellow zealot to sound the bugle: until enter on cue Hector, the charming, witty, falsely relaxed, eternal litigant, as she saw him; the archetypal justice-obsessed client who had spent his life proving he owned the land that Westminster Abbey was built on. And probably if her Chambers spent a hundred years on his case he would be proved right and the courts would find for him. But in the meantime the Abbey would remain pretty much where it was, and life would go on as before.
And Luke? Well, Luke was Luke, as far as Perry was concerned, a safe pair of hands, no argument: a good pro, conscientious, savvy. All the same, it had been a comfort to Perry, he had to admit, to learn that Luke was not, as they had at first assumed, the team leader, but Hector's lieutenant. And since Hector could do no wrong in Perry's eyes, this was obviously the right thing for Luke to be.
Gail was not so sure. The more she had seen of Luke over their two weeks of 'familiarization', the more inclined she was to regard him – despite his twitchiness and exaggerated courtesy and the worry-ripples that flitted across his face when he thought nobody was looking – as the safer pair of hands; and Hector, with his bold assurances and ribald wit and overwhelming powers of persuasion, as the loose cannon.