‘What do you want, Richard?’
‘I want to talk.’
‘Shouldn’t you be somewhere else?’
‘It’s not my shift. Besides, it looks like another dead end, surprise surprise.’
‘So what is it you want to talk about?’
‘The CIA, of course.’
Miles looked for a smile, for some acknowledgment that a joke was being made. None came.
‘OK,’ said Miles as a trumpet strained its way toward climax behind him, ‘let’s talk.’
‘Great. There’s a coffee shop across the road. Advertising execs mostly. That do you?’
‘Fine.’
And Mowbray led him across the street and into a sweet-smelling café where Jeff Phillips was already waiting for them.
‘What is this?’ said Miles.
‘Milk and sugar?’ asked Mowbray, pouring the coffee.
‘No thanks. I think I’ll take it black and bitter.’
‘Suit yourself. Jeff?’
‘White, no sugar, thank you.’
Miles checked his watch. He was tired of these games of protocol. It seemed that business could not be discussed without a preamble of sham courtesies and responses. Phillips sipped his coffee just a little too appreciatively: this, too, was part of the game. Miles felt his patience ebb, leaving only wrack and salt.
‘You mentioned the CIA, Richard.’
‘Yes, I did. I’ve got a little theory about our cousins. I’d like to hear your reaction to it. You see, it struck me a while back that the cousins are every bit as interested in our activities as are the Russians. Agreed?’
Miles nodded.
‘So,’ continued Mowbray, ‘why does it never occur to us that there may be CIA moles inside the firm, eh? Or Israeli moles, or Australian?’
‘In fact,’ interrupted Phillips, ‘any country you care to mention.’
‘Madagascar?’ countered Miles, remembering some textbook geography. ‘Mali? Mauritania? Mongolia?’
Richard Mowbray held open his arms, a smile just evident on his face.
‘Why the hell not?’ he said.
Yes, thought Miles, everything but British moles. He had dropped a teaspoon on the floor at the beginning of this conversation, and picking it up, had checked beneath the table for bugs.
‘What do you think, Miles?’ asked Phillips now.
‘I think it’s banal.’
‘Do you?’ This from Mowbray, leaning forward in his chair now, taking on the pose of the thinker. ‘Then maybe I shouldn’t tell you the rest.’
‘The rest of what?’
‘What about if I told you that the U.S. embassy in Moscow has all the parts for a small nuclear device located in different sections of the building? The wolf already in the fold: what would you say?’
‘I’d say you were mad.’
‘Maybe he’s not as ready as we suspected,’ Phillips said to Mowbray.
‘Look, Richard, what is all this about?’ Miles was concerning himself with Mowbray. Phillips was wet behind the ears, hardly out of nappies. He’d go along with anything that might mean a commendation or the chance to make a fast reputation. But Mowbray was different: Miles had no doubt that it was Mowbray’s baby in the pram, for it was Mowbray who had looked disconsolate when Miles said what an ugly child it was.
If possible, Mowbray leaned forward even farther.
‘I’m compiling a sort of list, Miles, a dossier of, well, let’s just say the slightly odd, the irregular. You know, those hiccups in certain operations, the occasional slip-ups which appear to occur for no good reason. I’d like, quite unofficially, to have your version of last night’s events on paper. If there are moles in this department, then we — and I would have thought you’d be included, Miles — want to gas them once and for all.’
Miles looked to Phillips.
‘Jeff is part of my little team. There are others, too. What do you say, Miles?’
‘I say you’re off your trolley, Richard. Sorry, but there it is. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’ He had already risen to his feet, coffee untouched, and now waved back as he went, went back out into the sanity of the unchanged street.
He breathed deeply as he walked. There was madness everywhere. The bottom fell out of a woman’s carrier bag and tins of food went rolling across the road. Miles dodged them and kept on walking. He noticed that passers-by were wary of parked cars, and rightly so. Any one of them might contain another bomb. People glanced in windows, searching for anonymous packages, or steered well clear of any driverless cars by the roadside. Well, on a day like this, thought Miles, I may as well cut through Oxford Street. Having encountered so much madness, a little more could do no harm. What was Richard Mowbray’s game?
The pavements were packed with lunchtime shoppers, seeking those items without which they would not last the afternoon. Insect life. Miles was about to shake his head slowly when in front of him a large window exploded silently into the street, followed a split second later by earth-rending thunder. Silence reigned as shards of glass poured down like silver, and then there were the first screams, and Miles checked himself for cuts. No, he was all right. He was all right. But only yards ahead of him was chaos.
Later, he would wonder why it was that he veered away from it all and back into Soho, not wanting to get involved. A ten-pound bomb it had been, easy, planted inside one of the garish shops while the pedestrians had been checking out the cars only. Later, he would wonder, too, why he found the go-go bar and paid his money and watched the show for ten minutes, why he went to the peep show and crouched in a rank cubicle, where he could watch from a slit not much bigger than the mouth of a postbox. The peep show was of circular design, and instead of watching the parody of lust, he had concentrated on the pairs of eyes he could see past the two girls. Dear God, they looked sad. He thought that he might even recognize one pair of eyes, but, too late, the slat came down like a judgment upon him, and only the reality of the cubicle remained, replacing for a time that much greater and much more incomprehensible reality: Oxford Street had been bombed.
A young boy, running past, screaming with joy, brought Miles awake. He was in Hyde Park, seated on a damp bench beside an old woman surrounded by black plastic bags. The bags were tied with thick string and were arranged about her like a protective wall. She was staring at Miles, and he smiled toward her.
Slowly it came back to him: the car accident, meeting Mowbray and Phillips, and the bomb, dear God, the bomb. It was half past five, and his lunchtime had turned into another afternoon off. A sort of panic had overtaken him this afternoon, so that he had felt less in charge of his life than usual. Yes, he remembered a similar sensation from his student days: those weekend blackouts, the anger and frustration, the fights... But in those days he would not have walked away from an explosion, would he? He would have stayed to help the injured, the survivors. But not now, not now that he was a watchman.
The old woman rose slowly from the bench and began to gather together her bags. Somehow she managed to heave them onto her back, and Miles felt a sudden impulse to help her.
‘I can bleedin’ manage!’ she growled at him. Then, moving away through the park, ‘Watch out for yourself, dearie, just you watch out.’
Yes, that reminded him, there was a puzzle he had to solve. He hadn’t got very far, had he? Well, he knew just the cure for that now: send in a mole to catch a mole.
Everybody who knew him thought that Pete Saville had just a little too much love for his computer. He seemed to be at his desk before everyone else in the mornings, and he was always — always — the last to leave. Didn’t he have any social life? A girlfriend? But Pete just shrugged his shoulders and told them that they should know better than to interfere with a man who loved his work. So no one paid him much attention nowadays, and no one asked him to the pub or out to a party, which was just fine by Pete Saville.