‘Sometimes people of her age don’t want to be helped. But it’s very frustrating when it’s your own child.’ A sigh came over the line, and Liz knew he was thinking of his own daughter. ‘After my divorce Danielle got very upset – but she wouldn’t talk about it. Not to me anyway.’
Liz knew things had got better since Danielle had gone to the Sorbonne and stopped living with her mother. Martin tried to see her regularly, at least once a month, and recently when she’d changed her digs, she had actually asked him to help.
‘I am going to give Isobel Florian at the DCRI a call,’ Martin had said. ‘She’s taken on the job of monitoring violent groups, so she may know something about this lot. I’ll let you know what she says.’
A man came through the gates of the park from Quai Gustave Ador and Liz’s mind snapped into the present. It was Sorsky all right. In the distance the city’s famous fountain, the jet d’eau, was shooting water high into the air where the lake met its inland river.
Watching Sorsky coming towards her, hunching his shoulders as he walked, she remembered how he’d looked all those years before. Funny how it came back to her, even though she’d barely known the man. He took the gravel path that would bring him past the bench she was sitting on; he was walking slowly, not looking in her direction. While she waited for him to reach her, Liz scanned the park yet again. Across a broad stretch of lawn two women were sitting chatting together, keeping a casual eye on a couple of toddlers. Near them a gardener was scarifying a patch of grass with a metal rake, its tines flashing whenever they caught the rays of the lowering sun. Late for a gardener to be working, she thought. Further back from the gates, a young couple canoodled on a picnic blanket spread under a large plane tree. It all looked innocuous enough though she knew that any or all of it could be surveillance.
Sorsky did not seem particularly concerned; he kept walking along the path towards her, but when he arrived at the bench and sat down he was breathing noisily. For a minute or so he said nothing as his breathing gradually slowed. Then, ‘So we meet again, after rather less time than before.’
He looked weary as he went on, ‘I’m disappointed that I haven’t found out as much as I would have liked.’
‘That’s okay,’ said Liz. She waited for him to say something else. The daylight would soon be gone, and she was afraid the park might close, so trying to push things on she said, ‘When we met last week you said your Station had been asked to try and infiltrate Clarity. But then you were told this had already been done by another country. How did your people find that out?’
‘I don’t know.’ Sorsky seemed troubled – not as nervous now as he’d been at their first meeting, but somehow weighed down, burdened. He pursed his lips for a moment. Then he shrugged and sighed deeply, as if to say, to hell with it. ‘We were briefed about Clarity two months ago – one of the high-ups flew in from Moscow. But that is not how I learned about this other country.’
He paused and Liz resisted the urge to press him, since he seemed so fragile. Eventually he started to speak. ‘One night about six weeks ago,’ he began, ‘my section all went out for a night on the town.’
It was an annual outing, he explained, and they liked to splash out. That night was no exception: Sorsky and four others dined in a fine French restaurant in the old town where they had nothing but the best – foie gras, Chateaubriand, a perfect Camembert, and finally Crêpes Suzette. There was champagne before dinner, bottles of Château Margaux during the meal, and a fine Sauternes with the dessert.
It was a real blow-out, and by the time the meal ended Sorsky was more than ready to go home, but one of them – ‘I’ll call him Boris,’ said Sorsky, ‘but that is not his real name’ – wanted to go on to a club.
‘What sort of a club?’ asked Liz at this point.
‘A nightclub. Not a good one.’
It was called the PussKat Club. You went down some steps, tipped the doorman, signed any name you liked in a book, then went into a cavernous, smoke-filled room, with disco music blaring from speakers in the ceiling.
The place was full of international businessmen, sitting in little groups on vinyl banquettes, drinking exorbitantly expensive champagne or – in the case of the Russians – bottles of Stolichnaya. From time to time, semi-clad ‘hostesses’ approached the tables, offering lap dances and the possibility of a whole lot more.
It wasn’t Sorsky’s scene at all and he wasn’t surprised when the others swallowed down their vodka and peeled off home – they were all family men. Sorsky was about to go home too, but Boris refused to leave – he had his eye on one of the women. Sorsky didn’t want to abandon him. Boris had had a lot to drink and was beginning to get aggressive, and Sorsky was afraid that if he stayed there by himself he’d end up either getting fleeced or beaten up by the bouncers, or both.
Fortunately, after another drink, Boris was starting to flag and when Sorsky said firmly that they should leave, he didn’t argue. Once outside, it was obvious Boris could hardly stand and that Sorsky would have to take him home. Twenty Swiss francs were enough to persuade the doorman to leave his post and flag down a cab at the corner, while Sorsky propped his colleague up against the wall.
The man lived alone in a new high-rise block on the edge of the financial district and it took only a few minutes to get there, heave Boris out of the cab and into the lift, and then open the front door. Once he’d dumped him on a sofa, Sorsky was ready to go home, but Boris, slightly sobered from the ride, insisted he stay for a drink, and fetched yet another bottle of vodka from the fridge. Sorsky reluctantly joined him, thinking he’d have just one small nightcap and then get out of there. But Boris had found his second wind. Putting on some loud rock music, he suggested, to Sorsky’s alarm, that they phone an agency and get some girls to come over. Sorsky was no prude, but when he found out that the girls Boris had in mind were fifteen years old, all he wanted to do was get out of the flat and go home.
To distract him from this new idea, Sorsky began talking about work, asking about other postings Boris had had and how they compared to Geneva; telling a few stories of his own about some escapades he’d had when he’d been stationed in the Ukraine in the year the Soviet Union had broken up. Then, with no particular intention but probably because it was at the front of his mind, he found himself mentioning the recent briefing they’d had on Operation Clarity from the Moscow bigwig who’d flown in. He said to Boris that it was all very well being asked to find out more about the British–American defence programme, but the chances of infiltrating it seemed virtually nil. How could they be expected to put an agent in there? Or, even more unlikely, to turn someone who was already working inside?
Pausing for a moment then, Sorsky turned and looked at Liz. ‘You know the history. In the thirties the threat of fascism was enough to make Communists out of a whole generation of young Englishmen – including many who were working in the very heart of the Establishment. But now the only lever we’ve got is money – blackmail or just pure cash. And first you’ve got to find the person with the right access. The security for a programme like Clarity would be buttoned up tight.’
He’d said as much to Boris, but his colleague had shaken his head, saying that British security wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. When Sorsky started to argue, Boris cut him off, and it was then that he said something startling – he said that another country had already managed to plant an agent in the British Ministry of Defence. Not in the Clarity programme itself, but close enough. Sorsky remembered the exact words – close enough, Boris had said.