He was pacing now, quartering the carpet. She watched and stayed silent. He seemed not to be talking to her but to the walls, the door and the window. With Mr Lawson away, Lucy had been busying herself with his paperwork and had tidied recent papers into the filing systems — he still used documents and the computer memory was for back-up — and the director general couldn’t be accused of keeping her from something that was necessity. She thought him troubled.
‘He’s a difficult man to read, Christopher is. Anyway, I’m giving him the offer of cavalry support. We could get to him, within a couple of hours, the best of the Polish agencies, a unit of their military, perhaps American Special Forces based in-country. Certainly the whole team from our Warsaw station could be there mob-handed. If he’s right, if his assessment of danger is correct, then — and I told him — “Failure is not acceptable.” Did he want the cavalry? A rather brusque answer: “Nice offer — no, thank you.” I ask myself, why is Christopher not prepared to share the load of responsibility?’
He finished the coffee, put the empty mug down on her desk.
‘It was a blunt refusal. Why would he have declined help and the chance of boosting his role as an interceptor? My difficulty is that I can see only one reason … I’m going back a few days to when he came to see me. He told me of his suspicions, hunches, and laid it out. More circumstantial than evidence. Very frankly, if it hadn’t been Christopher, I would have rejected the propositions I agreed to. That one reason, refusal of the cavalry, has a simplistic answer that is increasingly nagging at me, irritating me. Does he believe it himself, this threat? Does he believe wholeheartedly in this conspiracy?’
Her chin dropped, her mouth gaped. She found control. ‘I really wouldn’t know, Director.’
‘Is it just a figment of his imagination? Did I not examine it with due rigour? Does he not want support because the arrival of fresh teams would lead to a lorryload of witnesses to his fantasies? Well, I suppose we’ll know soon enough. He’ll be a laughing stock if he’s failed, if it were never about to happen, and I doubt that a seasoned friendship would be sufficient cause to save him. So kind of you, Lucy, to make me coffee. I have to say that where I’m going is towards blaming myself for indulging him.’
He was gone. The door closed after him.
Herself, she had never doubted Christopher Lawson. She pushed herself up in her chair, gained a few extra inches of height and could see over the window-ledge to the river. It flowed dark, brown and steady, and she wondered what the river Bug was like, whether it was fiercer or calmer. It had been Lucy’s intention to ignore a message that had reached her that morning, offering a chance to meet at a particular place and time. Now she checked it again. She would be late, at least a quarter of an hour. She stood, tidied her desk, looked through the glass door at the gloom of Mr Lawson’s empty inner office, and her jaw was set in defiance. She locked the outer door after her, went down the corridor and past the open-plan area of Non-Proliferation towards the lift. She passed staffers but none acknowledged her. She had no friends at VBX, could not have done. She worked for Christopher Lawson.
Alison, the liaison officer, said why she had asked for the meeting, and thanked the older woman for coming. She had been about to leave the café, had finished two espressos, had gutted her newspaper, front to back.
The woman grimaced. ‘You’ll get no tales out of school from me, or anything classified. I came because I admire and respect Christopher Lawson and have felt privileged to work for him for more than two decades. I came because he spoke well of you, because he is about to be ridiculed and his superiors have lost faith in him.’
She hadn’t intended it, but a wan smile crossed Alison’s face. She thought she recognized that degree of loyalty, the same as that of the small dog her parents kept.
‘You identified an undercover whom Mr Lawson took over. The undercover is leading him, and Mr Lawson is following in his wake with his team, and you had doubts: if you had kept your mouth shut, we might not have identified the undercover, so you may have put that man — and he’s only a face in a file to you — into circumstances of extreme danger. You are agonizing … Should you have involved him? Is Mr Lawson a fit individual to run the undercover?’
She nodded, couldn’t disagree with the précis of her concerns. It was a Greek-owned café. At other tables there were mechanics, bus drivers and some mail people just off duty. It wasn’t a place where VBX officers and support workers came, and she reckoned that the location gave her credibility, that the personal assistant would talk here, not spend the minutes looking over her shoulder.
‘He is obstinate, aloof, dismissive, sometimes cruel, and he is the most effective intelligence officer in that wretched building. That is who the undercover is working for. He is honourable, he has honour, and that is not a word often echoing through the corridors of our building. I don’t know why I came …’
There were, she thought, tears welling in the woman’s eyes, little glistening marks of wet, and redness. Alison reached her hand out and laid it on the other’s.
‘I came, I suppose, to stand in his corner. Easier to speak to a stranger. The high and the mighty, the brightest and the best have concluded that the mission is flawed. Wishful thinking on Mr Lawson’s part. He’s unwilling to call for more back-up and their conclusion is, therefore, that his confidence in his judgement has gone, and further back-up would merely expose it. He was never more certain, when he left here, of the shipment coming through — never more sure of the critical importance of the agent. For him, it’s all about trust. He would not have trusted the integrity of the back-up offered. It’s his courage that makes him take responsibility — that is, responsibility for the undercover you gave him.’
Alison offered, now, to go to the counter, get a coffee and a cake or a roll. It was declined. Instead, she learned about Christopher Lawson’s refusal to take a post with one of the new beefed stations in the Middle East, or a position on one of the augmented desks tracking the Islamists and their martyr teams through Europe. She learned about a bomb, and unbridled havoc.
‘It didn’t happen, did it? I wasn’t here.’
‘Thank you for coming, Lucy. Neither of us was.’
Alison stood, picked up her handbag from the adjacent chair. A man beside her ate a cholesterol mountain of breakfast and it was late in the afternoon. She eased back the table and nudged the pram a young mother guarded as she smoked and talked with her friend.
She said, ‘Please, one more question. Is it real, the threat they’ve gone after?’
The answer was given her when they were out on the pavement and the dusk thickened round them. ‘Others may not, but I believe it’s real. If it wasn’t, Mr Lawson wouldn’t have gone there and wouldn’t have recruited that undercover.’
They split, went their separate ways. Everything the liaison officer, Alison, had done was in the name of a young man she had never met, but into whose life she had inserted.
A kingfisher had gone downriver, but had not returned. For a long time, Carrick had looked for it. Storks had flown up the river, but not the kingfisher. There was nothing else to distract him, and he thought of what he wanted to do.
It played repeatedly in his mind. It was as if, he believed, he required a target on which to vent the pent-up pressure-cooker grievances. It was what he wanted to do to Mikhail. He saw it in images: walking up to the man and having no fear of him, calling him forward, seeing his surprise at the curtness of the command and seeing him obey, lunging at him, taking on a street-fighter with the tactics of his own gutter.