“I don’t understand …?”
And he didn’t, Edwards thought. He was dealing with a senior man. He’d used the colloquialism intentionally, to see where he stood, to gauge the officer’s importance in Egyptian military security. One could place a man in this hierarchy almost exactly by his knowledge of English. Knowing too much of that or any foreign language had always been regarded with the greatest misgivings in their service. It dated from the time of Nasser’s orginal coup de palais against Farouk when almost everyone concerned had been junior officers who had never had the oportunity of learning a second language, and in the security divisions at least this linguistic frailty had since been encouraged; it was thought to be a guarantee against outside infiltration or influence while at the same time it had made Cairo a haven for every sort of pentration. Egyptian security there — eavesdropping or interrogating — often didn’t really understand what their target was saying.
“Would you like a Coke or some coffee?”
“I’d like to know what I’m doing here.”
“I’m sorry. You ask for something to drink. That will come now. But no questions. You must wait for some — for another man before you ask questions. There has been a mistake.”
He repeated the phrase as if his future safety depended on the words being fully understood.
They left him alone in the office with a warm Coca-Cola. Edwards swallowed a mouthful and then rubbed the lip of the bottle carefully with his cuff.
Colonel Hamdy, out of his linen suit and in uniform now, came into the room an hour later. He smiled at Edwards and glanced at the three empty Coke bottles on the desk.
“You’re drinking too much, Henry. Relax.”
8
“Marlow’s coming at three. You’ve seen his preliminary report? Rather cagey, I thought How close was he with Edwards?”
Williams sat down and looked at Marcus through his “In” tray. There was nothing there; it was just after nine o’clock and none of the secretaries had arrived. He and Marcus had come from breakfast at Carlton Gardens.
“They were close — very close as far as I can gather. It was when Crowther was Principal Officer in the Cairo Circle, so one can’t be too sure about anything. The files are very skimpy over that period. But they were close, certainly. That’s one of the essential factors in the operation after all.”
“Homosexual?” Williams inquired brightly.
“No. Marlow was married at our Consulate in 1958. Apparently it was part of some deal we arranged — to get him to work for us. It gave us a lever. His wife was with us too at the time as a stringer. She’d been Edwards’s mistress — and that was part of the deal we had with him. Edwards said she was necessary cover for him — he was a real whoremaster then. As well as everything else. But the woman did a good job, as far as one can tell from the files. The marriage broke up, dissolved some years later, and Marlow was put on the strength in London. Recommendation from the Cairo Resident. Marlow seems a decent enough fellow, quiet, fall guy material I suppose, though even so there’s a chance he may not go along with all this.”
Williams looked at Marcus walking in and out of the morning light that flooded through the bright shaft from the half-drawn curtains.
“He’ll agree. He’s agreed to everything here in the past eight years, as long as I’ve known him. Civil servant material — the same as ‘fall guy’ material, as you put it. A good fellow, certainly — and very good on those Arabic rags too. I’ll be sorry if I have to lose him. But he’ll agree all right. It will be a matter of honour for him. He’ll want to prove something — either my stupidity or his friendship for Edwards. Or both. He’s a reliable fellow.”
Marcus nodded, privately unconvinced, and walked across to the window which looked over the car park at the back of the building. Cars were popping in through the control gate, one after the other, stopping and starting at the barrier with hideous regularity, as though automated and not driven. On-the-dot, conscientious people in little Heralds and Minis, twenty-nine miles an hour all the way in from Croydon and Barnet with their mild tweed jackets and a copy of last week’s Sunday Express in the rear window. Yet in half an hour they would be sorting cables in the cypher room, decoding reports from the field, culling through the Beirut and Cairo pouches, handling people’s lives — and Marcus’s reputation.
They looked so very safe and dedicated and English, Marcus thought. And stupid. But one such person had been Philby, a second Blake, another Edwards. And perhaps Marlow? Williams was too beguiled by him, too soft. Marlow was so ordinary it worried Marcus. And it crossed his mind if, in these stringent days, a certain degree of flamboyance in a spy might not be a better guarantee of security and trust — rather than the anonymous characteristics of these people who locked their cars in a top security area and streamed in through the back of the building with such an air of probity and dedication. You couldn’t tell a thing from their faces. It made Marcus uneasy.
Still, with Edwards, there would be an object lesson for them all at last. He would never again have to doubt those inscrutable morning faces. Edwards’s total demise would put an end to it all, make up for it alclass="underline" there would be no dacha in Moscow or forty-two years in the Scrubs for him; the deceits and betrayals of the past, the good men in so many sectors who had simply disappeared and the rest who were nursing ruined careers on cut pensions in small houses in Sussex.
Marcus thought about their various fates with an overwhelming righteousness, as though in multiplying the pity he brought to bear on their individual misfortunes he could justify his own insensate vehemence in the matter of defectors and double agents.
He knew Williams didn’t share his vindictiveness, indeed that he was far more concerned with his own rider to the plan of disposing of Edwards. He wanted to use Edwards before he “disappeared” whereas Marcus just wanted to see him dead — something which he could no longer arrange for him through any British court. And he saw just a chance that in being tied in with Williams’s scheme Edwards might get away. That was the flaw in the plan — simply that there were two plans. Edwards was being given an alternative, albeit an impossibly dangerous one, which Marcus would never have allowed him: a narrow exit which, if he were foolish enough to take it, could get him clear of them.
Marcus’s plan for him had been straightforward enough: Edwards had gone to Cairo and his own department had already blown him to Israeli Intelligence in Tel Aviv as the Russian agent he was. They had said he was on his way there with the names of a group of Israeli Intelligence men stationed in Egypt — names that he had picked up in the course of his work for Holborn — and that he was about to pass this information on to Egyptian Security before beating it back to Moscow. On this impeccable advice Tel Aviv’s men in Cairo would pick Edwards up at the airport — or the moment he got to his hotel — and kill him. The Israelis were tough about that sort of thing. Necessarily tough. Unlike Williams.
The operation had every chance of success — until Williams had imposed what seemed to Marcus a quite unnecessary handicap to the scheme: the ostensible purpose which Edwards had been given for going to Egypt was to contact Mohammed Yunis and stir revolution within the Arab Socialist Union. Williams had justified this as a “necessary reason” for sending him to Cairo, without which he would immediately suspect something. Marcus, on the other hand, had argued that Edwards went to Cairo every few months in any case, as a matter of routine — and wasn’t that sufficient reason in this case? But he had been unable to dissuade Williams.