He didn’t mind that Williams might now know that he was a double — or that perhaps he had known for a long time; that could have been so and he would have survived, as long as his account had shown a profit and he’d seen to that, he knew it had. What worried him now — as it had since he’d first been asked to go on this mission by Williams a week earlier — was his complete uncertainty about the purpose of the plan; it didn’t add up. It might make sense to someone who’d never been to the Middle East, but that person wasn’t Williams; he knew the situation there backwards. The man in Cairo would never look at the plan, Edwards knew his background and his real inclinations fairly well — Mohammed Yunis, mildly “left-wing” and secretary of the only legal party in Egypt, the Arab Socialist Union, “political rival to the President” as Williams had naïvely described him at one of their meetings over the plan together. That didn’t mean much in Egypt these days; every putative Marxist there, both in or out of jail, saw himself as a potential rival to Nasser — just as most of the leaders of the right-wing Moslem Brotherhood did, not to mention some of the younger army officers. Nasser himself stood firmly in the middle of these warring idealogies, supported fervently by the great public who cared little for alternatives; they never had — the army of bureaucrats and farmers, ninety-five per cent of the population, who saw nothing beyond their next pay chit or weevils in the cotton crop. Political rivals, in these circumstances, were a drug on the market in Egypt. They didn’t have a chance and the idea that Yunis, helped by Britain and America, might stir the country to a new revolution and overthrow the President seemed impossible in the first place and in no sense an advantage to the West, if it happened, in the second. And anyway, he thought, Yunis was so much the last man in Egypt to get himself involved in this sort of thing: Yunis had once harboured vaguely Marxist ideas it was true, but he was a very conservative socialist now. He had come to an age and position in life where he could personally reap the benefits of the first Egyptian revolution and the idea of creating a second, Edwards thought, couldn’t have been further from his mind.
The plan was so palpably unrealistic that Edwards not only saw a trick in it but saw as well that he was meant to see this in it, which was something quite different, quite new in the history of his relations with Williams who until now had always given him definite, realizable aims — operations where success or failure could be accounted for as meticulously as figures in a ledger.
If only he could have approached Williams as the others in his section did, the ones who genuinely worked for him, he thought, how easy it would have been to say to him, look, this won’t work and this is why … And he longed for that sort of trust, knowing it was the one step he could never take, the step which broke the gentlemen’s agreement he had with Williams — broke the rules which governed the game and which for so long had ensured his survival as a player on both sides of it. In his position he could never query William’s directions, alternative suggestions from him could only be taken as evidence of bad faith, of the wrong kind of double dealing, favouring one side more than the other; one had to go through with the instructions, to the letter, and he always had.
But now, with this plan — here was an operation that could never show a profit or a loss — to anyone — for it could never succeed. And the logic then was inescapable: he was being dropped. He was a tight-rope walker who went to and fro between the poles, and there was trust at either end as long as he managed the feat, as he always had. And now, here was Williams at one end shaking the wire vigorously, knowing that he could do nothing but try and weather the storm, that he couldn’t move to safety in one direction or the other. And that was the only logic of it all — that he had to fall.
But why?
He decided to stay on the plane during the half-hour stop at Munich, noticing the sharp east wind which blew the mechanics’ overalls into vicious flapping shapes about their legs. He knew the airport anyway; there was nothing to be got out of stretching one’s legs, or even a café-crême and a cognac with the weary commercial travellers at the horseshoe bar. He’d done it so many times before. Until he thought suddenly, ashamed at his fear, that it wasn’t the cold wind that kept him in his seat, but the idea of something lurking for him outside: someone behind the swinging glass doors of the terminal building, a car waiting for him on the tarmac, a marked transit ticket. All the traditional fictions of his profession surged into his mind and he realized he was a complete stranger to them, that they had never impinged on his professional life, and they were as unreal and frightening to him now as they might have been to an outsider, a happy man in the back row of the stalls.
He was quite unprepared for this sense of mystery; the idea that these fictions might suddenly become facts had never occurred to him. Until now he’d played the tune, from the middle as he’d seen it, and all three sides — Moscow, Cairo and London — had been happy. He’d always known what was happening and had been quite prepared to see himself as a huckster who gave full value for money; and he’d justified his behaviour in terms of maintaining what he thought of as his “primary interest”; his Russian connections, his belief, for it was still just that. But if he went, if Williams were getting rid of him, he knew his other interests would vanish as well. It was a cat’s cradle; one tiny movement of a string and the whole intricate pattern of trust would collapse. And Williams had made that move by involving him in this hare-brained scheme.
Why?
He thought carefully over the events of the last month — the last year perhaps? Blake’s escape? Blake had worked out of Williams’s Middle East section and there had been some uneasy times after his arrest and during his imprisonment. But Blake didn’t know of his involvement with Moscow — as he hadn’t known of Blake’s. They were careful of that sort of thing in Moscow these days. No KGB double knew the identity of any other in the same position — not after the disasters of the past. Unless Moscow had arranged to shop him? The permutations, non-existent a month ago, were endless now.
Edwards tried to isolate and catalogue them for the hundredth time, yet in the end only one thing was really clear: London wanted him to do something which they knew would result in his immediate obliteration if he attempted it — so they must have known too that he would never attempt it. At the same time they’d surely not gone through all this elaborate charade for nothing; they had something else in mind, something which he hadn’t seen, which he couldn’t see. It almost began to amuse him, the clues were so obvious, like the values for a simple equation … yet he couldn’t work it out. And he’d been good at that sort of thing in school.
3
The passengers came back from the transit lounge. Edwards could see them through the cabin window, forcing themselves into the wind, whipping the puddles into blisters on the concrete apron, clutching their hats, their faces wrinkling painfully, and he was glad he’d not gone with them. He stretched his legs down beneath the seat, yawned, closed his eyes. He gave himself over to the feeling of warmth and safety which the cabin induced in him. A weakness, he thought, but this was a place, probably the last place, where he could safely indulge it.
There were a dozen or so new arrivals, half of them Egyptians, too sharply dressed in Italian-cut suits that hadn’t been made with quite enough cloth; returning from some trade or government mission, Edwards thought, when he opened his eyes cautiously and looked at them flapping about the aisle, pushing for seats, making a nuisance of themselves like men who don’t travel often and are determined to make the most of it.