Locke said curtly, 'Sorry, George, nothing for you.'
'Beg your pardon, Mr Locke?'
'As I said, George, I've nothing for you.'
That should have been simple enough, but a fog of puzzlement hazed the courier's forehead, and his eyes closed sharply, then opened again. 'Oh, I see, nothing — nothing for me.'
'That's right.'
George stood, and the frown gouged his brow deeper. 'Well, that's a turn-up…Every two months I've been coming, sixteen trips, and never gone away empty-handed.' His eyes screwed as if in suspicion. 'You absolutely sure, Mr Locke?'
The query annoyed Locke. Patronizingly, he rolled his eyes to the ceiling light. 'Yes, I am sure, George. I think I would know whether I had a package for you, or not. I have today driven halfway across this bloody country and back — so give me the credit for knowing whether or not I have anything for you.'
George murmured understated criticism, 'There was always something for me when Mr Mowbray was here.'
'Mr Mowbray is not here, and has not been here for many months,' Locke said evenly. 'I expect I'll see you in a week's time, but you'll have it confirmed.'
The handcuff was unlocked, taken off the wrist and, with the chain, was dropped into the briefcase. George scowled. 'Yes, maybe, in a week…if nothing's happened — or gone belly-up.'
'I'm sure it hasn't,' Locke said quickly.
He followed George down the flights of stairs, through the main doors, and waved desultorily to him as the courier climbed, still frowning, into the embassy car. He realized that he, too, was merely a courier. They were equally ignorant of Ferret. 'Gone belly-up'? What could have gone belly-up? Nothing ever went belly-up with Ferret.
Locke drove into the centre. Danuta would be waiting for him. Their favourite trysting place, at the end of his working day, was where they could get the best coffee in the city. The little bar had a daft long name, Sklep z Kawq Pozegnanie z Afrykq, but the coffee choice was unrivalled in the city, thirty different varieties, and better than any place he knew in London. With Danuta, sitting opposite her and holding her long and elegantly thin fingers, and sipping the caffè latte in the big bowl cups, he could lose the day's irritation. Danuta designed websites, was as in love with the new world as he was. They were together, a fact known only to Libby Weedon. They would drink coffee and discuss her day before he went to the chore of the ambassador's party. Then he would go back to his apartment where Danuta would be waiting for him — and the fact that an agent had not filled a dead drop would be erased from his mind.
She was tied up at the quayside. Heavy hawsers held her fast. Once she had offloaded her cargo of lemons, brought from Palermo on the Italian island of Sicily, she would sail again on the midnight tide from her costly moorings at the port of Bilbao. Out in the Bay of Biscay she would ride out the storms that were forecast and would wait for the agents to find her another cargo. She might wait, tossed and forgotten, for several days because she was a vessel with the mark of death on her, for whom the breaker's yard beckoned, as suitable work was hard to come by.
With her cargo taken off by the docks' cranes, and her holds empty, she was high in the water. The Princess Rose, call sign 9HAJ6, had been launched in 1983 from the Den Helder yard of the Netherlands, and in the nineteen years since she had slipped out from the Wadden See, through the Marsdiep channel, she had performed as an overladen but willing baggage mule for her Cyprus-based owners. She had flown the convenience flag of Malta as she had plied around the Mediterranean, the eastern Atlantic European coastline, the Bay of Biscay, the North Sea and the Baltic. She was now worth no more than a hundred thousand American dollars, and her future was uncertain.
With the lemons in lorries and heading for French fruit-juice and soft-drinks factories she towered in her rusting glory above the quay. No care, no tenderness, no love or respect had been wasted on her. She was doomed, a liability to her owners, and soon she would be gone, probably on the one great voyage of her life to the Indian Ocean beaches of Pakistan where the demolition teams would pick her apart and destroy the memory of her.
In the night or in the morning, tossed in the Biscay, or the following night or the following day, or in a week, the owners' orders would be given to the master and his crew by radio. None of them knew where those orders might take them, and none believed that the orders would lead to anything more than the dreary routine of sailing to a familiar port, loading a cargo, then sailing to another familiar port, then unloading. Such was the life of the Princess Rose in her dying days.
Rupert Mowbray had been born to take his place on a stage, to have a spotlight shining at his face, a microphone on the lectern his hands gripped, notes in front of him that he did not need to refer to because he was the master of his subject, and an audience hushed and hanging on his words.
'You may call me — should you wish to, and it will be your privilege — an old fart. I would not take offence. You might also call me — because this is a free country, and I value the liberty of speech and have spent my adult life attempting to ensure it — an unreconstructed warrior of the conflict between East and West, between dictatorship and democracy. I would be proud if you did. The Cold War lives. It is about us at all times, and should concern defence analysts, students such as yourselves of international relations, and the men and women tasked with protecting our society. Perhaps you do not believe me — then I quote for you the words of Colonel General Valery Mironov who, from his vantage-point as the Kremlin's deputy defence minister, remarked in a rare interview, "The Cold War still goes on. Only one definite period of it is over." Yes, cuts have been made, but I can assure you that the knife has only been taken to the flab of the body of the Russian military. Key armoured units, the most advanced squadrons of the airforce, and the fleet of nuclear-missile-carrying long-range submarines still have every devalued rouble thrown at them that the State can muster. Friendship, trust, cooperation do not exist. It would be folly to relax our guard.'
He sipped from his water glass. Rupert Mowbray, now professor of the newly formed Department of Strategic Studies, had returned in glory to University College, London, from which he had graduated thirty-six years before. A niche had been found him. The deputy provost had been lunched by the Service's director, and it had been arranged that a place be manufactured to support his retirement. He had a room, a secretary, a budget generous enough for research and travel, and a captive audience of postgraduate students. Behind his back, because rumour of his past employment had spread, his students called him by the unflattering name of Beria. They indeed regarded him as an old fart, but he flattered himself that they still found him amusing. There were seldom empty seats at his weekly lecture.