They have a confidence. Yes, you would trust the eyes.
The nose is prominent, straight and without blemishes. It is not the nose of a fighting man, has not been broken, fractured or lost alignment. I discard the moustache and the beard. They are from the passports used for the first stage of his journey, not from the second stage. If they have been shaven off, he cannot have regrown that degree of facial hair. The mouth, with or without a beard and moustache, is distinctive
– distinctive because it is unique to him. Two aspects – his smile, we'll start with that. Few men smile for a passport picture. He does in each case. It is a good smile, one of honesty. I like his smile and I warm to him, open and frank, showing no deviousness. The second aspect is the teeth. The teeth are dreadful, but clean. The upper bite comes down over the lower teeth and is overfilled and prominent. Big incisors that are packed too close, so they bulge. I venture, he never met an orthodontist – sorry, Mr Gaunt. His ears are not flappers but are close back against his hair, those of my dog when it is listening, keen and alert. He is not big-boned, and from the set of him I would hazard that he is slightly built… If I had to pick on one point, I'd say that most of our guests, given wall space, have a deep-rooted suspicion of the camera, but this man is not frightened of it… Put another way, there's nothing in the face that demonstrates the stresses of anxiety.' He had heard Gloria out, then had buttoned his waistcoat, lifted his tie, shrugged into his jacket and taken the elevator up to where the Gods rested.
'You promised me the moon last time. All bottled up in Prague.'
'And did not deliver because of Czech in competence.'
'Hamburg would be different enough to override Fen wick's irritation?'
'I think so.'
'Think? Is that all you have for me to bite on?'
'I believe so. That we are this far forward is due to Polly Wilkins's efforts. She deserves the chance…'
He stopped, gazed without mercy into the assistant deputy director's face, then resumed pacing. 'After what was done to her she most emphatically deserves the chance.'
'Sanctioned.'
'A good decision.'
Not a time to hang about. Gaunt had what he had come for. He was heading for the door, anxious to be away before riders were attached. He heard the bleat at his back.
'He's dangerous, isn't he? Our man who's on the run – dangerous, yes?'
'Exceptionally so.'
'Murderous little bastard.'
The mischief caught him as he went into the outer office. Gaunt said, 'Perhaps, but rather a nice face, don't you know?'
She packed.
'Don't I get told where you're going?'
Ronnie was watching from the door. It was her apartment and Polly was the guest imposed on the girl from the visa section. Polly would not have said that she was going to Hamburg, but could have said she was going to Germany and left it vague. She did not answer but went on folding blouses and skirts, laying them over the shoes at the bottom and her smalls – didn't really have an idea of what she needed, whether the spring came warm up there or whether it would be perishing cold. The sharing arrangement had been intended as temporary, while a one-bedroom apartment for herself was redecorated, but then a refurbishment budget had gone dry and time had slipped on. It wasn't satisfactory for an officer in the Service, however junior, to share but having her own room was good enough and she'd given up nagging the man at the embassy who allocated premises. She was precious little use to Ronnie, a lonely woman. Too early at work and too late back to offer company.
'Well, how long are you going to be away?'
She didn't know how long she would be away, and didn't answer, just went on filling the case. She could share the apartment but not her life.
The bridling voice whipped her. 'Don't mind me.
I'm not important. I'm not need-to-know. You have a good time, wherever. I'll say this, you look like the cat that found the cream. You just come back when it's finished, whenever.'
A last pair of jeans and a sweater went in. No photographs in leather frames, nothing personal. 'The cat that found the cream'? Probably. Not very fair to show it because there was little enough cream in Ronnie's existence in the visa section. While she was packing the bag Polly had thought she walked tall for the first time since the collapse of the unit in London.
Two years' work there, hard and slogging study.
Satellite photos of every corner of Iraq's deserts pored over. Defectors' statements gutted, analysed, each word weighed. Businessmen from every corner of that wretched region who travelled to Baghdad had been met in hotel bars, had money shoved at them, and been pestered for descriptions of factories and chemical plants. Phone calls and emails intercepted and transcribed. All to answer the great question: were there, in Iraq, programmes for the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction? Papers written. In Service tradition it was taught: Capability + Intent =
Threat. Had Iraq the capability or the intent to justify the wolf cry of realistic threat? Caution expressed, caveats and hesitations. Papers returned with red-ink scratchings obliterating the cautions that were embedded in the Service's work practices. Papers resubmitted with honesty seeping out from them.
Caveats and hesitations removed. What they wrote, by Service tradition, was supposed to exude
'provenance'. But provenance had died, and the team
– scattered to the winds – she assumed cursed themselves now for bending at the knee, for allowing valued practices – C+I=T – to be steamrollered and crushed.
She could remember the day when politicians, jutting their chins, had spoken of 'irrefutable proof' of the WMD programmes as justification for the tanks rolling in the sands: she had stood behind Frederick Gaunt's shoulder, had watched the television and heard his silence, and had known it would burst. So quiet when it had done, but a violence in his words she had never heard before. 'They wanted the fucking war. We gave them the fucking war – and our reward will be to be fucked by them.' The inquest, then the cull of the casualties of failure to find the weapons.
Polly Wilkins had been categorized as NBA by the investigators – No Blame Attached – and sent to Prague, but the message had been clear to her: all of the unit was contaminated by that failure. She was scarred by the inquest, poisoned by the failure. She checked her bag for her passport, ticket and euros.
She heaved it off the bed, grimaced, and went to call a taxi for the airport. Because she was the chosen one, elation gripped her.
In the city of Dresden, on their first visit to Germany, an elderly American couple waited for one of a line of public telephones in the square to come free.
That afternoon they had toured the opera house and the Kreuzkirche, then crossed the Augustus-brucke to trawl the galleries of old masters' works in the Zwinger houses. Next they would visit the Hofkirche in the Theaterplatz. They needed a telephone to ring their hotel to confirm a booking for the morning, car and driver, to travel out of the city to the Pillnitz Palace and take them later to Meissen where they would buy porcelain for shipment to Chicago.
They stood, Dwight and Janet, behind a young man. He had dialled, and now he waited for an answer. Always the difficulty at such a time, which phone to target. Which caller would take the least time? They had chosen to stand behind this young man, slight and with bowed shoulders. He spoke.