It was a good restaurant, as good as any in that south-coastal town. The season was over and the visitors remaining were eking out their pensions and would not have patronized the one he had chosen. With the summer gone, the town's traders and this restaurant's owner were able to evaluate their successes and failings of the last five months, and they had not been well treated by the weather. For that reason, each time Hamilton Protheroe raised his hand he was given immediate and undivided attention. Champagne had been drunk while they sat on stools at the bar and chose the Italian-style dishes, and a Chianti bottle was now nearly empty on the table. He was a con-man. He deceived older ladies, widows and divorced. He made them laugh and smile, and sometimes bedded them after lunch, and when he had had use of their credit cards and their cheque books, he slid away and out of their lives, and moved on to the next town with a new name but the same flattering, winning ways. He would lock away his wheelbarrow and tools, switch on the headlight of his bicycle, then pedal away down the road to the farmhouse and his room. He did not need company; he was content.
He wheeled the trolley back down the corridor along which, a few minutes earlier, it had been stampeded when en route from the ambulance reception bay to A&E. The hospital was less than a dozen miles from the M6 motorway and received more than its share of road accident victims. The casualty who had been on the trolley Colin Wicks now pushed — a young man in a good suit, what was left of it, and a white shirt made revolting with his blood — had looked, as he was wheeled in by the shouting, running team, to have little future. Wicks pushed the trolley down the corridor and out through swing doors into the dropping gloom, unravelled the hose, turned on the tap and drove the gore from the trolley's cradle. It was always him who did it, hosed down the trolleys, because the others on the shift were too squeamish for that work. It upset them, but not him. When the cradle was cleaned he would take disinfectant and a stiff brush and would scour its canvas surface; he would let it dry in the evening air, then wheel it back to the ambulance bay, and it would be there for the next victim who had been impatient or tired or had drunk too much or had simply been unlucky. The last of the water cascaded off the trolley and down to the drain at his feet. As he bent to turn off the tap, he saw the flash in the water and knelt to retrieve it, a cufflink. It would have been given to the casualty by a grandfather, a father, or a lover. He used his own handkerchief to dry it, and examined it to make certain that no blood was left staining it. He would take it back to A&E and give it to a nurse. He didn't feel good about finding it, or bad about the condition of the young man who had worn it in his cuff. In his life, he was long past feeling emotions.
None of them — Billy, Ham, Lofty or Wickso — knew of the consequences that would follow from the empty space under a faraway castle's bench.
Locke pressed the key. Electronically, the signal was sent — ferret: no show. His finger hovered, and in that macrosecond the signal, in cypher, travelled from the Service's suite of rooms in the embassy on Warsaw's Al Roz street, near to the Park Ujazdowski, and hurtled across the air space of western Europe until it was sucked down by the dishes and antennae on the roof of Vauxhall Bridge Cross overlooking the Thames.
He went through the procedure of shutting down the secure computer. A few years back, in the days before Gabriel Locke had been accepted into the Secret Intelligence Service, there would have been a technician to handle the transmission. In those days, those years, the officers of the Service would not have been trusted to write, encode, and transmit their messages from the field. He understood the way the computers worked and what they could do for him. He had even written a paper, passed on by his Station Chief for consideration by Administration, on how the computers could be upgraded at a minimal cost. To Locke it was pitiful that older inadequate men could not master the new technology.
The signal was sent. He closed the door to the cypher room behind him, checked the double lock was engaged, and went through to the outer room where the two girls, Amanda and Christine, had their desks.
Libby Weedon's door was open. He was sidling past it, hoping not to be noticed, but her voice, deep and with the clarity of a broadcaster, snatched at him. He was summoned inside. He was told he looked 'pissed off, and then she smiled in her prim, severe way and told him it was not his fault that Ferret hadn't travelled…of course it was not his fault…and she reminded him not to forget George, who would be waiting out in the second-floor lobby…of course he wouldn't…and she pointedly mentioned the ambassador's reception later that evening. She glanced up at him from her screen and a little of the severity was replaced by a tinge of coyness. He knew Libby Weedon was in her forty-third year, and that there was no sign of any romantic entanglement in her life. Well, she fancied him. Drunk, or across lit candles at dinner, or sweating after a workout in the embassy's basement gymnasium, he thought she might have pushed the 'fancying' further. He repeated that he wouldn't forget George, and had not forgotten that there was a three-line whip on the ambassador's drinks party. She was heavy in the hips and the chest, but she had good skin and her throat wasn't lined — she was as old as his aunts, who lived marooned lives on the west Wales coast. He thought she was lonely and had only her work for comfort. Outside, in the open-plan area, he grinned, winked, and gave a little wave to Amanda and Christine. He took his heavy coat and slipped out. In the corridor he pressed the code into the console on the wall and pushed open the door of inch-thick steel bars that separated the Service's quarters from the rest of the embassy offices, and with his heel slammed it shut after him.
Across the lobby, on a thinly-upholstered bench, George waited. A heavy-set man, balding and with the jowl to go with his fifty-nine years, George was the punctual one: a wristwatch could have been set by his movements. Long ago, and he'd told Locke most of his life story on the two previous occasions they'd met, he'd been a detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, but on retirement eleven years earlier he had decided to augment his pension with paid travel. He was a courier for the Service. Not a week went by when he wasn't in the air. Long-haul or short, it barely mattered to him. On the flights of the national carrier, George went business class; the front row of the section and the seat beside him were always unfilled, even if it meant turning away paying passengers. Libby Weedon had said that a hostile counterintelligence service would know from George's arrival and departure from their capital city that the Service were running an operation on their territory. For all his weight the courier would have been hard to spot in a crowd and he dressed down in street-market jeans, a well-used shirt with a quiet tie poking up above his pullover, and a faded green anorak. To Locke, he was another example of the old world still inhabited by a part of the Service. On his knee was a battered briefcase, scratched and well-used, like any businessman's, except that its fastening lock was reinforced with a discreet padlock and a fine chain hung between the handle and George's wrist, where it disappeared under the cuff of his anorak. At the sight of him, George flipped open the briefcase, making ready to receive the package, then withdrew a little pad of docket sheets from the inside pocket of the anorak.