Cloudy as the present was, though, some things you didn’t forget.
He said, “Project Cuckoo. Right you are, then. You taking this down?”
And his voice sounded stronger now, because he knew which side of the door he needed to be on.
All he had to do was step through it, and close it behind him.
Cuckoo.
JK Coe said, “There was a Soviet village, or there were rumours, anyway. It might have been a legend. There were a lot of them about.”
In the gloomy light of Lamb’s room Coe might have been Marley’s ghost, draped in invisible chains. There was nowhere to sit, so he leaned against the door. Hanging on a hook was a raincoat—it could only be Lamb’s—from which ancient odours crept, released by Coe’s pressure; a mummy’s tomb of long-dead fragrances: cigarettes and whisky, and bus station waiting rooms, and damp desperate mornings, and death. Coe wondered if it was just him, or whether the others could smell it too: Lamb himself, and Catherine Standish, and the man called Chapman.
“Any time you feel like drifting off into dreamland,” Lamb suggested, “feel free to use my arse as a pillow.”
“Give him a chance, Jackson,” said the woman in the dark.
“I say Soviet, but the point was, it was anything but. What they did was create an American town, picket fence, Main Street and all, way out in Georgia, or wherever. Just like there’s an Afghan village on the Northumberland moors, in the military zone, except that’s for strategic purposes. But this was for people to live in. Be born in and live in. Learning American English, and watching American TV. Spending American dollars. A sort of finishing school. That was Project Cuckoo, USSR-style. They’d have a different name for it. But it was a means of breeding a perfect simulacrum of the enemy, so you could learn the way he thought, the way he dreamed, the way . . . well, everything.”
Coe had been Psych Eval, in what felt like a different life. One of the modules had been in Black Ops. That was a favourite with everyone, because you got to hear about the spooky shit. As in, this was the kind of shit spooks got up to once. But also as in, there was some seriously spooky shit out there.
“The theory was, if you wanted to plant a sleeper, that was the right kind of nursery to grow them in.”
Lamb growled, but it wasn’t clear if this was an objection, an agreement, or a digestive necessity.
“And do you think it ever really happened?” Catherine asked.
“There was another story,” Coe said, “that somewhere near the Red Sea, back in the sixties, there was a perfect replica of the White House. And the Sovs had someone living there for years, with a full staff, all English-speaking, and the point of him was, they’d initiate crises, and monitor his responses, and this would give them an insight into how the actual President might react to a given situation.”
“And do you think,” and it was Chapman this time, “that that ever really happened?”
“No,” said Coe. “You’d have to be insane to base strategic policy on how a puppet reacted to a fake crisis.”
“Yeah, that was the thing about the Cold War,” said Lamb. “Everyone kept their heads.”
He seemed to lose his for a moment, but it turned out he was rustling about in a carrier bag under his desk. When he reappeared he was holding a bottle. There were two smeary glasses on his desk, the only items there which hadn’t lately been used as an ashtray. He poured two fingers into one glass, four into the other, and pushed the former in Chapman’s direction. To Catherine he said, “If you want to nip straight from the bottle, be my guest.” To Coe, “But you can buy your own.”
Coe didn’t respond. He had spoken more in the past ten minutes than in the last six months. His head was pounding. There was a line of verse stuck in his mind, a bright rain will wash your wounds, and it kept circling round without going anywhere. He wanted his music back. If he had to be in Slough House, and he might as well be here as anywhere else, he’d rather be at his desk, earbuds planted, listening to Jarrett carving music out of the air: November 12, 1976. Nagoya. That would wash his wounds, he thought.
“Was there anything else?” he said.
“Are we keeping you up?”
“I just—”
“Yeah, well just don’t.” Lamb half-emptied his glass into his mouth, and didn’t seem worried about savouring the taste. “So that was what the Reds got up to. Doubtless the Yanks had their own version. But what about us? Or wasn’t that on the syllabus?”
Coe said, “Not on the syllabus, no,” and Lamb’s ears twitched.
“His name was Frank. Frank Harkness. American chap, ex-Agency, though I didn’t find that out until later. That he was ex-, I mean. Assumed at the time he was on the books. Well, you do, don’t you? Assume the worst.”
Which was meant in jest but had a sour edge, spoken aloud. Never mind.
“Back then I was gunning for First Desk. Never admitted that before. But it’s true, I took it for granted it was mine for the asking. Simply a matter of waiting out the incumbent, and keeping my copybook clean. Didn’t seem too much to ask. Been doing it for years.”
Though there had been moments when his copybook hadn’t been all that clean. When his conscience hadn’t been spotless, come to that. But again: no time for nitpicking. The details. He had a daughter.
“Her name was Isobel.”
He wondered if he had skipped ahead here. But it didn’t matter; the tape would be running. Spill it all out, let them join the dots for themselves.
“Lovely child.”
She had been, too. It was later that it had all gone wrong. But then, it was later that he was supposed to be talking about, wasn’t it? Project Cuckoo.
“It wasn’t Frank’s idea, exactly,” he said. “The notion had been around for a while. The Agency had tested it, and the Sovs had their version, of course. The Chinese. But not us. Nothing to do with morality or ethics—sheer pragmatism. There’d be big investment required, and the time we’re talking about, well . . . Lines were being redrawn. Gorbachev was beating rugs in the Kremlin, throwing up dust clouds. Nobody knew what the world would look like once they cleared. So not much point in setting up a long-term project to confound our enemies when nobody knew who those enemies would be two Christmases down the line. We’d have ended up looking foolish. And the main objective of an Intelligence Service is not to look foolish if it can be avoided.”
The words were finding him now. He had always known they would, sooner or later. The Franks of this world were born damage-doers; in their one-eyed crusade to protect their innocent, they’d rain down fire on everyone in sight. And David Cartwright, God help him, had given this particular Frank a brand-new box of matches. So yes, he’d always known there’d be an accounting.
“But he had a different angle, did Frank. And you have to hand it to him, there were some things he saw more clearly than most. One thing had come to an end, so we had to be ready for the next. That’s what he said.”
The old man’s eyes crinkled with the effort of memory. When this was done, he thought, he’d head back home to Rose. Cup of tea, or something stronger. Tell her about his day. Though maybe not this part, no. This story wasn’t one he’d want her to judge him by.
His hands were trembling. Now there was a funny thing.
The woman said, “Are you all right? Would you like another cup of tea?”
This was clever, he conceded. The art of a good debriefing: always allow for the possibility that you can have a rest, that it would soon be over.
You could never have a rest.