Keep it simple, would be my advice, and dress your age. Harrods is still open for a couple of hours. See you." She didn't even leave at speed, just drew gently away from the kerb.
He watched after her for a moment, shaking his head with intense dislike. The reference to Sophie had had its intended effect: to let him know that Dawn Harding and her organisation could jerk his chain any bloody time they felt like it.
"Not if I see you first," he murmured, but knew that his words had no meaning.
He and Dawn Harding were locked together for the duration, like it or loathe it. He punched the recall button on his Nokia.
Five minutes later a silver Audi TT convertible pulled to a swerving halt at the kerb.
"Hey, sexy!
Looking for business?"
For the first time that day Alex smiled. Sophie was wearing a screamingly loud Italian print shirt and, despite the lateness of the day, sunglasses. The sight of her made his heart dance.
"Jump in," she ordered.
From that moment, things picked up. Alex explained his clothing predicament, Sophie made a rapid series of phone calls and five minutes later a willowy young man in leather trousers was unlocking a warehouse in Chelsea Harbour. Lights flickered on to reveal at least a dozen rails of men's clothes and several shoulder high pyramids of shoeboxes.
"Help yourself to anything you want," the young man told Sophie and Alex.
"I'll find you some bags."
"What is all this stuff?" Alex asked.
"Mostly bits and pieces from shows and magazine fashion shoots," Sophie replied.
"A lot of it hasn't even been worn.
They eventually settled on a selection of items that Alex thought slightly over-fashionable and Sophie disappointedly described as 'somewhere between dreary and invisible'.
"In my world," Alex explained, 'the grey man is king. How much do we owe this guy?"
"Oh, give him a couple of hundred."
"Are you sure?"
"Don't worry. It'll get written off as damaged."
"You lot are worse than army quartermasters."
Sophie swung the keys of the Audi from a slender forefinger.
"My place?"
In the flat overlooking Sloane Street they heated up a Sainsbury's Prawn Vindaloo, drank Kronenbourg beer from bottles and watched Goodness Gracious Me.
For Alex, after weeks of rations consumed in exclusively male company, the evening was heaven.
When she saw that he had unwound a few notches, Sophie settled herself against him on the sofa.
"Is it good news that you're back?" she asked him tentatively.
"Does it mean that you've got some time off?"
"Yes and no," he said.
"I'm here to .. . chase something up.
"Anything you can tell me about?"
He shook his head.
"I'm sorry.
"Dangerous?"
He shrugged.
"Doubt it. I've got to find someone, that's all. Brain work, not bullets. So I'm going to be around, yeah, but I'm also going to be coming and going."
She nodded.
"Is it always going to be like this?" she asked.
"Me asking, you not telling?"
"For as long as I'm in, yes," he said.
"You mustn't take it personally."
"I don't take it personally," she said, with a flash of irritation, quickly suppressed.
"It's just that we've been together for a year now, on and off, and I'd like to feel that I had some.." access to your life."
"You have full access to my life," he told her gently.
"It's just my work that's off limits. And I promise you, you're not missing anything there."
"But your life is your work," she protested.
"I can see that in your face. All those missions in Northern Ireland and Bosnia, all those dead men.. . I can see them there behind your eyes.
He shrugged. It was not something he'd ever talked about in much detail. The demons, it was generally accepted, came with the job.
"I want all of you, Alex. Not just the burnt-out remains. He frowned at his Kronenbourg bottle. At the edge of his vision an RUF soldier crouched in blood sodden shock, his lower jaw shot away. Behind him staggered the blackened figure of Don Hammond.
There was a full company of such men quartered in Alex's head now.
Blinking them away, locking on to Sophie's grey green eyes, he smiled.
"I'm all here. And I'm all yours.
EIGHT.
Alex presented himself at the front desk of Thames House at a couple of minutes to nine. Dawn Harding was waiting for him there, briefcase in hand, and signed him in.
"We're wearing Italian today, are we?"
she said, noting his Gucci loafers and running an appraising glance up and down his grey Cerrutti suit.
"I thought you Hereford boys were more comfortable in Mr. Byrite."
"I know the importance you civil service types attach to appearances," Alex said equably, fixing his visitor's badge to his lapel.
"You wouldn't want me to let the side down, now would you?"
He followed her into the lift, where she pressed the button for the fourth floor.
"And you found somewhere to stay all right?"
"I managed to get my head down."
"I'm sure you did." She stared without expression at the brushed-aluminium wall of the lift. As previously, she was dressed entirely in black and wearing no make-up, perfume or jewellery. Her only accessories were the briefcase large, black and plain and a military issue pilot's chronograph watch. This spareness did not, however, disguise her femininity. In some cuno us way, Alex mused, allowing his gaze to linger around the nape of her neck, it highlighted it.
Or at least it made you wonder.
The lift shuddered to a halt.
"A word of advice," she said flatly, checking her watch as she marched out into a grey-carpeted corridor flanked by offices.
"The correct form of address for the , ,
deputy director is ma am.
Alex smiled.
"So who are you, then? Matron?"
She gave him a withering glance.
"Dawn will be just fine."
The deputy director's office was at the far end of the corridor. Dawn left Alex in an ante-room containing a leather-covered sofa and a portrait of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, and disappeared through an unmarked door.
She reappeared five minutes later. Alex was still standing the leather sofa was so slippery he could hardly sit on it and she led him into an office which would have been sunlit had not the blinds been partially lowered. This, Alex guessed, was to prevent glare rendering the computer monitors illegible. There were three of these on a broad, purpose-built desk, along with a telefax console and a tray piled high with what looked like newspaper cuttings. Maps, books and a large flat-screen monitor covered most of the walls, but a painted portrait of Florence Nightingale and a signed photograph of Peter Mandelson romping with a dog went some way towards softening the room's essentially utilitarian lines. At the near end half a dozen leather-and-steel chairs surrounded a low table bearing a tray with a steaming cafeti~re and four civil service-issue cups and saucers.
Behind the desk, silhouetted against the half-closed blinds, sat the deputy director and once again Alex was struck by her handsome, clear-cut features and elegant appearance. Today she was wearing a charcoal suit, which perfectly complemented her shrewd blue eyes and the expensively coiffed gunmetal of her hair.
To one side of her, both hands thrust deep into the pockets of a suit which had probably once fitted him better, stood George Widdowes. To Alex, the studied informality of the posture looked like an attempt to play down his subordinate status.
The deputy director rounded the desk and held out her hand.