‘I made a balls of it, Charlie. You don’t know how sorry I am,’ said Johnson, after they’d talked through in every way possible what had happened. They’d worked together before, always well. Knowing it was Charlie’s operation – which he had not until now – worsened Johnson’s remorse.
‘These things happen, mate,’ said Charlie, sympathetically.
‘I wanted to go out covered in glory and instead I leave covered in shit.’
‘What you did get confirms a lot: I’m grateful,’ said Charlie, sincerely. ‘It could have happened to anyone.’
‘It happened to me,’ said Johnson.
‘There have been worse cock-ups already, believe me,’ said Charlie. He wondered how many more holes-in-one Witherspoon had managed.
‘Any idea who he is?’
‘Not a clue.’
‘Or what the job is?’
‘Nope.’ There’d been eight responses to his embassy requests and none of them had meant a thing. Gale had replied from Moscow, too.
‘Be careful, Charlie. He’s good, bloody good.’
‘That’s what frightens me,’ admitted Charlie.
‘I’m giving the retirement party at the Brace of Pheasants,’ said the Watcher. ‘Any chance of your getting along?’
‘Ever known me miss a piss-up?’ said Charlie.
‘I am sorry,’ said Johnson, again.
‘A pint of beer and we’re even,’ assured Charlie.
‘I’d like to think it was as easy as that,’ said Johnson.
As he spoke Vasili Zenin was entering Terminal Two at London airport with the driving licence and passport which identified him as Henry Smale – and which fortunately the dog had missed peeing over – snug in his inside pocket. His ticket, however, was in the name of Peter Smith: he’d been lucky with the Swissair reservation and had decided it was an omen. He saw the pregnant woman ahead stumble, just before she fainted, and managed easily to switch to another passport line, to avoid becoming involved. Lucky again, he thought.
Because she was a member of the secretariat and therefore part of the official delegation, Sulafeh Nabulsi had a place on the platform but at the rear. The backs of those who were going to Geneva for the conference were against her but beyond she could see the faces of the hundreds of Palestinians gathered to hear what the current speaker was describing as an historic breakthrough in their demands for an independent homeland. Fools, she sneered, mentally. Worse than fools. Cowards. There was no struggle any more; no fight. Just a lot of ageing men posturing in camouflage fatigues, playing at being freedom fighters and using words like the actors they were. Most of the council at whose backs she was staring in well-concealed loathing each had a million dollars discreetly hidden in numbered Swiss bank accounts and would find it difficult to identify the muzzle of a Kalashnikov from its butt. And most definitely didn’t give a damn about the trusting idiots here whom they were deceiving at the final Tripoli assembly of the PLO with talk of a conference and a political settlement. Any more than they gave a damn about the Palestinians forgotten and rotting in the refugee camps of the Lebanon, target practice for any Shi’ite or Jew who felt like expending a bullet. None of them had even lived in a refugee camp, not like she had. At the age of nine, in the last hours of the 1973 Six Day War, Sulafeh had seen her grandfather shot in one by the Israelis, as a spy for Syria, which he had been. Four years later her mother and older brother had been blown up – accidentally said the later contemptuous report – when the Jews destroyed their house in retribution for a grenade attack upon a passing Israeli patrol. And she’d been raped in one. It had happened when she was fifteen and still a virgin. Her attacker had been one of the smirking clowns in a tiger uniform, like those smirking clowns in the audience in front of her, applauding and cheering every lie being told them. She’d fought as hard as she could, gouging at his face with her nails, and he’d punched her almost senseless and so finally she pretended to be unconscious when he tore at her pants and then drove himself into her, splitting her. And while he grunted and pumped above her she’d taken his own knife from his belt, halfway down his thighs, and put her arms around him in what he’d thought to be belated passion to be better able to stab him to death, plunging the knife into his back again and again like he’d plunged into her.
Sulafeh had an orgasm, doing it. She’d never had one since: certainly never during the countless couplings that had been necessary for her to insinuate and manoeuvre herself into the favour of the senior hierarchy to achieve the role she now occupied. She wondered if she might know the sensation again, at the moment of what was going to happen in Geneva. It was an often longed-for feeling.
Chapter Seven
Four of Johnson’s exposures had been developable but the face of the jogger who picked up the drop was only shown on one of them and then indistinctly, as the man half-turned to run on from snatching up the package. Two others showed his back view, as he went towards Primrose Hill Road – in one the name was actually visible – and the fourth at the moment of his mounting the bicycle but again completely turned away.
‘Bungled!’ complained Harkness. ‘How the hell could it have happened!’
‘Easily,’ said Charlie at once, in defence of a friend. ‘It was a brilliantly carried-out collection.’
The Director was wedged as usual against the window-sill, with his back to the depressing view. The roses today were yellow-hearted Piccadilly, with pink edging, and Wilson wore one in the buttonhole of his jacket to match those arranged in the window vase. Charlie decided that the Director’s tweed suit was as bagged and shapeless as his. Funny how clothes collapsed like that.
‘Tell me why you think this is significant: the sort of thing you’ve been looking for,’ demanded the Director. ‘Why couldn’t whoever it is have been an English contact of the Russians that MI5 haven’t yet got on to?’
‘It was brilliant, like I said,’ insisted Charlie. ‘So the man is a complete professional. No amateur – and an Englishman would have been an amateur suborned by the Russians, not properly trained – would have done it like this.’
‘What’s so completely professional?’ persisted Harkness.
‘Becoming a jogger in the first place,’ set out Charlie. ‘The first essential is becoming invisible, which is exactly what he did. Johnson openly admits that he’d accepted the joggers in the park that afternoon: wasn’t really seeing them any more. But think of the other advantages it gave the man. He was entitled to run, because he was dressed for it. So having made the pick-up he did run, like hell Johnson says. But that would not have looked unusual to any passer-by because joggers do sprint. What it did mean is that the man could literally run away and any Watcher would have disclosed himself, setting out in open pursuit: so it was an abort-or-continue test as well. He was actually looking for us!’
‘I hardly consider using a bicycle professional,’ argued the deputy.
‘It was absolutely professional,’ refuted Charlie. ‘The distance from the drop to where the bicycle was parked is just over half a mile: Johnson later carried out a positive measurement. So he would have begun to flag, after sprinting so far. But on the bicycle he could carry on running – but remain invisible to anyone he passed because he was dressed exactly for riding as he was for jogging – and outpace anyone trying to follow on foot.’