He was shown down peeling corridors to a back room with cream paint and dusty venetian blinds, guarded by an old soldier at a desk in the ante-room. It made a disconcerting contrast to the modern smart-card protected electronic monitoring of Thames House. There were three of them already there, sitting in silence at the table, staring as he walked through the door. His director, the legal man and, as if to confirm that this was as bad as it could get, the Deputy DG Operations.
‘Sit down, Kay,’ said the Deputy DG, ‘we’ve got a lot of damage to deal with, so no bullshit, right?’
‘No. Of course not. What about the other two?’
His director looked harassed and cross. ‘They got clear,’ she said, ‘McDonald was able to drive off when the police ran after you, though he had to do a bit of pushing and shoving past their van. Tarling had the sense to keep his eyes open and go the other way when he saw them. What we want to know from you is how we wound up with a dead American on our hands. Maybe you would be kind enough just to run over the facts.’
Johnny took a deep breath. ‘It should have been completely routine. We knew this man Clymer had made an approach to a Marconi development engineer. We knew from monitoring the cash transfers that he must have several more people on his shopping list. We got proper authorization to have a look when information from Monitoring told us he and his wife would be at Glyndebourne.’ He saw his director flinch slightly at proper.
‘Not him and his wife,’ she said quickly, ‘his wife and her sister. If you’d been a bit more thorough you would have known he was having an affair and you might just have guessed he’d use every excuse he could to get a few hours for his own ends. You might also have followed proper procedure and made sure your surveillance car was parked in a position where it wouldn’t attract the attention of the police, instead of right outside the house of a rather important Saudi.’
Thanks a lot, Mac, thought Johnny bitterly. So much for delegation. Everybody did it, but he knew where the buck stopped officially and there was no way out of that one.
The Deputy DG was scribbling on his pad. He stopped and stared at Johnny from under lowered brows. ‘A complete foul-up, I’d say,’ he said with terrifying calmness. ‘Leaving us with six policemen to sort out – for whom we’ll have to concoct a rather unconvincing story – plus some unpleasantly hot phone calls already coming in from Grosvenor Square.’
Johnny wondered whether to say it and decided he had nothing to lose. ‘I would like to stress it was an accident, sir. It was unfortunate that Clicker Tarling happened to collide—’
The Deputy DG stopped him in his tracks, ‘Well planned operations don’t have accidents, Kay, and field officers in charge of operations do not try to shift the blame to others on their team.’
Johnny left, to be driven home under suspension, followed by the legal man with a long list of urgent actions to set in motion. The Deputy DG turned his attention to the Director. ‘You should have been looking over his shoulder. I know he came out of the Wineglass incident well enough in the end but this rather points up the old theory that Wineglass was more luck than judgement.’
‘Look, George,’ said the Director, chancing the familiarity to try to get back to firm ground, ‘you know we wouldn’t have the little sod if it wasn’t for his mother. I think it’s time for a radical change.’
Lady Viola Kay was a legend in the office, on the hunting field, in the corridors of government and wherever else she impacted on her less forceful fellows. A brief marriage to a career diplomat had ended when passion was chased away by irreconcilable views of the world. ‘The man turned into a bloody Communist’ was her habitual way of describing her first husband’s sympathetic approach to the final dismantling of Empire. The marriage left her with a son, John, an increasingly violent disregard of weak compromise and an entrée to the realms of the Secret State. The Cold War had been her private seventh heaven. Margaret Thatcher had been her ideal prime minister. The only politics were conviction politics. The protection of the State from external and internal dangers was the avowed purpose of the Security Service and she rose through its ranks propelled by a willingness to see those dangers where others might pause to wonder.
Her second husband, Sir Greville Kay, was as near a soul mate as she was likely to get while firmly maintaining the upper hand. He was the founder of a rapidly expanding chemicals empire, a man who (like his wife) was quite sure he knew what was best for others. She saw all kinds of benefits from a husband-and-wife team that straddled the border between the overt and covert means of government. Encouraged by her, he’d gone into politics, calling in his major gifts to successive election campaigns to be granted one of the safest seats in the Tory heartland. The two of them had watched the political assassination of Margaret Thatcher with outraged horror and hitched their wagon firmly to the New Right movement that expanded into her vacuum.
Lady Viola had eventually left the Service as part of her contribution to her husband’s political career, to start off instead a small think-tank which provided him and his political circle with well-sourced information – and well-sourced it certainly was, because her contacts inside remained excellent. Hers was one of a number of organizations to profit from the general fear of redundancy which afflicted both the MIs, 5 and 6, in the first flush of post-Cold War relaxation. Jobs awaited those who were ‘one of us’ and they’d do well to remember that long before they switched employer.
It took very little time for her to learn exactly what had happened to her only child and Johnny was woken by loud knocking on his door just after seven thirty the next morning. He immediately knew who it was. The porter down in the lobby was meant to ring before he let anyone up the stairs to the flats. Johnny paid a large service charge for that privilege, but his mother had sorted the porters out to her satisfaction in the first week after he’d moved in and none of them dared stop her. He put on a dressing gown and let her in.
‘You silly little shit.’
‘Good morning, Mother.’
‘Put the bloody kettle on. This is no time to be sulking in bed.’
She made him feel, as she always did, about thirteen years old. He looked at her and realized age was at last starting to catch up with her, too much make-up and exposure to expensive foreign sunshine. For all that, she could have passed for no more than fifty – tall, thin to the point of boniness, any extra flesh burnt off by the constant restless furies she directed against the threats she perceived to her England.
She turned a kitchen chair round and sat astride it like a horse. ‘You’ve had it, Johnno, you do know that?’
‘I’m suspended, Mother. They’ll investigate it then we’ll see.’
She raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘God Almighty. You’re so bloody naïve. They’ve already decided. It’s Support Services for you. Bloody paper-clips job. Early retirement if you make it that far without taking to the bottle.’
He felt sick. If she said it, then that was the way it was. He could just imagine the phone call. She always knew far more about what was going on in the office than he did. He sat down heavily at the table.
‘You could get out,’ she said.