'President Putin takes tea from Her Majesty's best crockery at Buckingham Palace, dines with Chirac and Schroeder, and is a barbecue guest of Bush, but that does not mean friendship. Under the ageing and boozed-up Boris Yeltsin, the Russian intelligence gathering agencies were in free fall. No longer. Putin came to power on the back of a promise to resurrect Russia's status as a world power. He is a man of those agencies and dedicated to giving them a degree of authority in modern Russia, today, that might be greater than they have ever known — even in the horrendous days of the Purges. Nuclear missiles are deployed again in oblasts from which they had been withdrawn — the testing of those missiles, which are designed to carry warheads of mass destruction, has been resumed.
'The President has spoken publicly of the need to boost Russia's nuclear potential. Physical and verbal freedom for the mass of citizens is diminishing, as more and more positions of influence at the heart of power are doled out to his old chums in the FSB, the Federal Security Bureau, that is the successor to the Second Directorate of the KGB — different name, same mindset. Our own Security Service employs some two thousand personnel — the FSB has seventy-six thousand, and that excludes security and support staff. Our Secret Intelligence Service runs to some two thousand two hundred men and women — their SVR is twelve thousand strong. The FAPSI, electronic espionage and security, has a staff of fifty-four thousand, while our GCHQ has fewer than a tenth of that number. How many are thought necessary to guard the leaders of Putin's regime and strategic facilities? Another twenty-three thousand. Add to that the twelve thousand responsible for military intelligence, the GRU, and you are nudging close to two hundred thousand persons charged with the responsibility of protecting the Russian motherland…I ask, where do they think the threat will emanate from? From here? From you? From me? They seek to control — and Putin demands this of them — those free spirits that we regard as having an integral place in our society. Do not, in Russia today, seek to be an environmentalist, or an investigative journalist, or a powerful but independent-thinking industrialist, or a local-government officer with his own mind. In Putin's new fiefdom a man challenges the status quo at his peril.'
He paused and drank again, and when he had set down his glass he used his palm to sweep back his silver hair.
'Do we care? Is it our business how Russia is governed? If the brave and the few who have the courage to stand up to be counted go off to a new generation of camps, have their careers wrecked and their lives destroyed, who are we to shout? We can be Pharisees…But, but, there is, and it cannot be ignored, a kleptomaniac psychology about the new Russian government. They steal. They cannot keep their hands in their pockets. If we have it, they want it. They don't steal the know-how and blueprints in order to put more fridges and dishwashers in their people's ghastly, inadequate housing, or more cars on the road. They thieve so that they can make their submarines faster and more silent, their attack aircraft more efficient, their tanks more resilient to counter-measures. They are the jackdaws of espionage. Remember the names of Walker, Ames, Hanssen — all Americans, and I thank God for it — recruited to feed an insatiable appetite for military knowledge. You would be foolish if you believed that the handshakes and deals between our governments and the Russians over this current Afghanistan adventure were anything more than window-dressing. Everything in Putin's Russia is subservient to military power, before the World Trade Center and after it…
'Gentlemen, and ladies, thank you for offering your time to this old fart. May I leave you with this thought? If we were to drop our shield, our guard, then we will suffer.'
As he stepped back from the lectern there was a small, underwhelming stutter of applause, soon drowned by the scrape of the chairs. The spotlight beamed on him and he smiled…It was twenty eight weeks, half a year and a finger-count of days, since he had left the Service and, God, he missed it. The reason he smiled was that the good, faithful, loyal George would be on the final approach to Heathrow at this moment with a briefcase chained to his wrist, and there would be a package in it. The dead-drop collection was made on that day of each second month and that calendar pattern was always with him.
Ferret was his man, the crowning pride of Rupert Mowbray's life.
It had not been good.
Not good, not even indifferent: it had been lousy sex.
Locke lay on his back on his bed. He stared at the ceiling. They had had the ceiling light on above them. It was the baby oil that had made it lousy. The baby oil, for both of them, was as regular as having the light on. She'd had her shower when he was doing his duty and pressing the flesh at the ambassador's residence, then anointed herself with it, and he'd come in, rushed, stripped down and lain on the bed, and she'd crouched over him, shaken the bottle and he had been ready for a little rivulet of the oil to run on to his stomach, which she would have massaged into his skin. The oil had come in a gush, had splurged on to him and on to the bedspread, which was ruined. He'd cursed. In the middle of it, her on top of him and slithering over him, their bodies glistening under the ceiling light, he had actually asked her if she knew of a good laundry in the city, close and convenient, where he could take the bedspread. She'd tried, at first, to make it work, then gone into automatic mode with a few grunts that he'd known were pretence. Then she'd rolled off him, lain on her belly and turned her head away from him. It was another of their habits that the curtains of his bedroom were never drawn when they had sex, and usually that seemed to add keen tension to their loving. He'd looked at other windows across the street, seen people moving in them and the flickers of their televisions, the big tower blocks on the far side of the river, and he'd said sharply to her that if she didn't know of a laundry then could she, please, ring round in the morning and locate one. But she hadn't turned and hadn't spoken.
'Can you move, please? If you hadn't noticed, it's all over the sheets now.' Couldn't help himself, he was petulant and annoyed.
He had met Danuta in Warsaw two months earlier. Their first dates had taken place where they had met, in an Internet café, before they graduated to his bed or hers. Her English was fluent and his Polish was passable. She was from outside the cocoon of embassy life, and she had travelled. Her parents had emigrated from Poland to Australia nineteen years ago and she spoke with the accent of a town up the coast from Perth. She was one of the new generation of young Poles who had come home, and he'd found her warm, vibrant and fun, a blessed relief from the tedium of being the junior in an isolated corner of the embassy's second floor.
He knew he'd destroyed the relationship, and he knew that when she left that evening she would not return, but the anger in him made for his persistence. She rolled off the bed, didn't seem to care that the curtains weren't drawn, and moved slowly in front of him, bending from place to place to pick up her clothes. Then she stood, framed by the window, and began very slowly to dress.
Danuta was Locke's first girlfriend in the last thirty months. There had been no woman in his life while he was stationed in Zagreb, and none before Danuta after he had been abruptly transferred to Warsaw. There had been a girl from Library at Vauxhall Bridge Cross after he'd passed his probationer period, but she'd been looking for a ring and had wanted him to visit her parents. Before that there had been a girl from the physics department at Lancaster, but she'd slipped away from him at an end-of-term booze binge, and he'd found her on the floor with the hero of the university's lacrosse team. Everybody said he was good-looking and a catch, so the ambassador's wife had told him and Libby Weedon, but whatever it was he searched for had eluded him.