by Tom Bradby
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘O-kay.’ She pulled a face. ‘Glad I asked. Your aunt Rose called.’
‘What did she want?’
‘There’s a problem with your expenses.’
‘What?’
‘All right, bad joke. She said she’d spoken to Fiona and would pick her and Gus up at four. She’s sorted your mother with the nursing home. She’ll pick her up just afterwards and they’ll all head down to Cornwall together. You’re welcome to join them at any point if you can get away.’
‘Did she hear back from Belgrade?’
‘Not so far as I know.’
‘Will you check?’
‘Of course.’
Maddy didn’t retreat. There was clearly more. ‘And?’ Kate asked.
‘She said I was to make sure you kept your appointment with Dr Wiseman – and walk you there myself if necessary.’
‘All right, thank you.’
‘What time is your appointment?’
‘Two.’
‘Are you going?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Maddy . . .’ Kate faced her assistant, whose concern for her welfare sometimes felt intrusive.
‘You have to go, Kate.’
‘Last time I looked I was a grown woman. So I don’t have to do anything.’
‘You’re not well.’
Kate frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘We all know what you’ve been through and you’re not yourself. Surely you can see that.’
Having dropped her bombshell, Maddy withdrew. Kate was caught between irritation and despair. Was it that obvious? She’d barely had time to fashion an answer when Julie came in with questions of her own. ‘What was their answer on Mikhail’s offer?’ she asked, as she sat on the desk beside Kate.
‘The foreign secretary wants the weekend to think about it.’
‘Lucky there are no time pressures, then. Do you think she’ll go for it?’
‘Sir Alan didn’t leave her much choice. He was there buying top cover and she was smart enough to grasp that. She seems pretty thorough. I didn’t realize he’d basically kept the original file from her, so I think she just wanted the time to go through it carefully. Ian had been there before us.’
‘What do you make of the Night Wolves pulling out?’
‘It’s confusing.’
‘Convenient, though. I mean, a quick win for us. It makes Mikhail look good.’
Kate was staring out of the window as she sifted the various different explanations for what had just happened in Estonia. None entirely made sense.
Julie stood and went to the glass wall overlooking the rest of the office. ‘I guess you know that Ian’s wife has booted him out,’ she said.
‘I do. I was a bit surprised, to be honest.’
‘Not half as bloody surprised as I was.’
‘What’s your reaction?’
‘I’m horrified. It was just casual sex, and now he’s suddenly saying he wants to marry me.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I’ll have to break it off.’ Julie’s voice betrayed no hint of emotion. She could sometimes, Kate thought, be a cold fish. Her hair was greasy, her T-shirt stained with a coffee spillage, but it did nothing to diminish a radiant, vibrant beauty. ‘I see you gave Suzy the Sigma file,’ Julie said. She was staring at their colleague, who was hunched over it on her desk.
‘I didn’t feel I had a choice. She’d have gone running back to her friends the other side of the river and they’d have made trouble.’
‘Who do you think she’s really working for?’
‘The correct answer is that we’re all on the same team. Isn’t it?’
Julie rolled her eyes and walked out. Kate watched Suzy for a moment. So what if MI5 ended up knowing everything? Perhaps it didn’t matter.
Kate picked up her bag. The foreign secretary’s desire to have the weekend to think about it left open the possibility she could join her children and aunt in Cornwall and she couldn’t think of a good reason to stay behind. But Rose would kill her if she missed her appointment with Dr Wiseman.
Before she went, Kate took the number Mikhail had given her from her pocket and sent him a WhatsApp message. The foreign secretary has asked for the weekend, but I anticipate a positive response. Will keep you posted. K.
Kate thought the mention of the foreign secretary would probably be enough to convince Mikhail they were taking his offer seriously and prevent him from approaching anyone else with his secrets, at least for a couple of days. The idea of the CIA, or indeed any other foreign intelligence service, having cast-iron proof of the prime minister’s treachery – with all the leverage, complication and even humi liation that that would involve – didn’t really bear thinking about, especially as it would come with the knowledge the British had deliberately chosen not to take up the offer.
He replied in a couple of seconds. I am in Berlin. See you at 10 a.m. on Monday. Head for Alexanderplatz. Do not be late.
Kate sent back: Monday too soon. I can’t make the wheels turn faster. Let’s say Tuesday at 10 a.m.
It was a long wait before she finally received a reply: All right. No later, or the deal is off. And you’re welcome, re Estonia.
Maddy was at the door of her office again. ‘The PM’s just about to make a statement.’ Kate joined the rest of her team in front of the big TV screen in the centre of the office, which was switched to Sky News. The prime minister swept up to a makeshift podium in Downing Street. ‘I will make a full statement on the events in Estonia to the House this afternoon . . . but it is our understanding that if the Russians did intend to provoke unrest on the border, as some have alleged, then that threat is now receding. The protests have petered out and we do not believe there is a meaningful threat to Estonia’s integrity and security. I have spoken to the Russian president directly this morning and he assured me that this is indeed the case, though he did ask that the Russian minority in Narva and in eastern Estonia be adequately protected, which is a perfectly reasonable request.’ There was a pause as he looked up from his script and directly into the camera. ‘I take this as further evidence of the advantage of a cautious, nuanced and balanced attitude to international relations. Nobody wants to rush into a war over a country few have heard of. That’s the rub of it, like it or not. Thank you. Good day to you!’
He turned and walked back in through the door of Number Ten. ‘That’s going to make the Estonians feel good,’ Julie said. ‘He’s a lot more bloody Neville Chamberlain than Winston Churchill.’
Kate didn’t reply. She picked up her bag and went to the lifts, trying to shake the sense that she had just been manipulated in a way she couldn’t yet quite articulate.
7
DR WISEMAN WAS a man of angular leanness, with a pair of square reading glasses that he took on and off as he alternated between asking questions and writing down her answers long-hand in a huge exercise book in the centre of his wood and chrome desk. He had a wide forehead, curly dark hair and a steady, level gaze. He reminded Kate of her first tutor at Cambridge, and her faltering attempts to explain herself were an uncomfortable echo of those encounters.
‘It’s really hard to describe,’ she said. ‘I usually feel all right when I first get up in the morning. I think. When I’ve slept. But then, as I said, I’m not sleeping well, and sometimes barely at all. In any event, once I get into the flow of the day, it’s as if someone has crept up and injected some kind of diabolical chemical into my bloodstream, adrenalin or cortisol – or whatever. And then I just feel . . . awful.’
‘In what way?’
‘Just this nameless sense of dread, of being permanently on guard and anxious, as if someone is about to come around the corner and shoot me at any moment or, worse, the children.’
‘And you say you felt like this before the events of six months ago, your husband’s betrayal and the deaths of the young woman you recruited as an agent, then your deputy, R
avindra?’
Kate hesitated. Unburdening herself was painful. She felt as if she was standing on the edge of a precipice and all she could see was how far there was to fall. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘When would you say it started?’ He was looking at her over his glasses.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you feel anxious as a child?’
‘No. I was pretty confident.’
‘One can be confident and anxious.’
There was a long silence. Kate stared at the floor as she racked her brains. And suddenly it was as if a window opened to allow a chink of light into the darkness. ‘I guess I was, yes. Anxious, I mean.’
‘About what?’
‘Not the usual things, like exams. I was pretty cool about all that. I didn’t mind very much what other people thought of me, either. I wasn’t anxious about friendships, or whether anyone did or didn’t like me or approve of what I was doing. But . . . I suppose loss . . . death.’
‘Loss of what? Or whom?’
Kate thought hard about that, too. It was bloody difficult casting her mind back across the years and trying to unravel the complex weave of thought and emotion. ‘Death, generally. The loss of someone or some people I loved, or of letting them down in some way. My own death, too, I suppose. Just the vagaries and impermanence of human existence. There were times when that uncertainty, the unpredictability of life, was paralysing.’
‘Did you fear you would lose your mother?’
‘No. I never had a relationship with her. I wasn’t close to her as a young child, and after I learnt of her infidelity – she had a long-running affair with my best friend’s father, a guy called David – I would say I came actively to hate her. I was brought up by my father. I understood from an early age that my mother was unreliable and often quite undermining, even poisonous.’
‘Did your father challenge that?’
‘No. That was the only issue I ever really had with him. I could never understand how he could love my mother. And, particularly, how he could go on loving her after she had treated him so badly. But he just quietly took me out of her orbit, which wasn’t difficult because she is the most self-absorbed and, indeed, selfish woman I have ever met.’
‘You were worried about losing your father, then?’
Kate had never thought about it like that. ‘Yes, I suppose I was.’ She stared at her hands. ‘I definitely was. I had no siblings, so I guess my father was all I had. I was petrified something would happen to him.’
‘Or that he would leave, that your mother would drive him away? Is that what lay beneath your resentment of her?’
‘I knew he would never leave me.’
‘Do you think you were the reason he stayed?’
Kate had never thought about it like that, either. It was an uncomfortable idea. ‘I suppose so.’
Dr Wiseman continued writing. Kate glanced at the clock on the wall beside her. They had only ten minutes left and she was starting to panic it would not be long enough. Reluctant as she had been to start this process, now that it had begun she didn’t want it to end. When was she going to get an answer? ‘Was your father anxious?’ he asked.
‘About what?’
‘Anything. You, your mother, life in general.’
‘No.’ She looked through the blind at the blurred figures hurrying by in the rain outside. ‘Actually . . . yes, perhaps he was. I . . .’ She sat up straight. Memories were crowding in on her. ‘When I was about eight, or maybe nine, a friend of mine at school died very suddenly of meningitis. She sat at the desk next to me and she said she had a headache. I told her to go and see the nurse. The following day, the teacher came into the class to say that Jane had died in the night. I didn’t know what to think or how to react. It was incredibly sad, but I didn’t know what death meant. And in an awful way, life went on as normal.’
‘But not for your father.’
‘Exactly. Not for him. You see, Jane was also an only child. I think I understood then that my father was terrified of losing me. I remember him being quite strange around me for a while. I’d always been a bit of a tomboy, into climbing trees and fighting with the boys, and he had been very relaxed about that. But after Jane died, he was much more tense around me for a long time.’
‘In what way?’
‘Every way, I suppose. If I was going out into the garden, he wouldn’t forbid me to climb the trees, but he’d come out and watch me, just to check I came to no harm.’
‘How long did that last?’
‘I don’t know. A year, maybe.’ Kate thought about it. ‘But I suppose, in another way, a lifetime. I mean, he really worried about me a lot. I knew that. If I came home for the weekend, he would always say, “Drive carefully,” at the gate when I was leaving.’
‘Doesn’t every parent say that?’
‘I suppose so. But there was an intensity to it that I haven’t really thought about until now.’
Dr Wiseman nodded. ‘Given everything you’ve said, what do you make of the profession you’ve chosen?’
Kate took a long time to answer. It was a good question. ‘I suppose there is a disconnect, as with many people, I should imagine, between what drives my intellectual curiosity and what ideally suits my psychological temperament.’
‘Except that cannot be true. I imagine your job requires high degrees of natural empathy. How else would you have persuaded the girl you lost to work for you?’
Blackmail, Kate thought. Bullying. But she decided not to share that. ‘I think I feel more in control the closer I am to the things I fear. I always worried about someone hurting someone I love, but this way I can seek out threats and defend myself and those I care for against them.’
‘In order to keep your home life pure?’
‘In what way?’
‘To avoid the hurt your mother’s betrayal caused?’
‘I . . . don’t know. Perhaps. But there is no perfect spy. We’re as flawed as everyone else.’
Dr Wiseman glanced at the clock. He shuffled his notes. ‘All right, I suggest we continue in a week or two. Please call Sarah to make another appointment.’
‘How do we proceed? I mean, what’s happening to me?’
He stapled his notes together. ‘I’m going to refer you to Cognitive Analysis. That should take around twenty sessions—’
‘Twenty?’
He didn’t blink. ‘We’ll explore issues relating to your work, your past and your family of origin. I’ll continue to see you at the same time. We’ll need to consider pharmacology—’
‘I really don’t want to take drugs.’
He looked up at her sharply. ‘Medicines,’ he said. ‘We call them medicines.’ He smiled. ‘And how interesting. You would take penicillin without a moment’s hesitation, I have no doubt, so why would you not take a medicine that might help you recover from the highly anxious state you find yourself in?’
Kate felt pretty stupid. She didn’t argue. ‘What is wrong with me?’ she asked.
Dr Wiseman closed the file. He took off his glasses, placed them carefully in the centre of the folder and looked up at her. ‘I suspect that some genetics is involved and some imprinting. You may have a natural predisposition to anxiety, as it seems your father had, and in turn his behaviour, his fears over your safety, may have helped further imprint that natural tendency into you.’ He wiped his forehead and began to clean his glasses. ‘You spoke earlier of the impact of your father’s death. Up until that point, you had looked to him to soothe your fears. After his departure, there was no one left to do that for you, save your husband, whom, as you also said, you clung to with too great a force.’
‘But what can I do about it?’
‘You will need to learn to self-soothe. To care for yourself, rather than rely on others to provide comfort. In short you must leave the anxious child behind you and learn to be comfortable in the adult and capable Kate, who is a mother to two children and a senior executive officer in one of our nation’s
most demanding professions.’ He put his glasses back on the folder. ‘It would help, I think, to begin that conversation quite consciously.’
‘Between?’
‘Your adult self and the frightened child within. The adult Kate Henderson is an incredibly accomplished and confident woman, making decisions of enormous importance for the nation at large. She is surely the person you need to soothe the scared child. If you can open up that conversation within you, it would help.’
That made a lot of sense. She stood. ‘Thank you . . . thank you, Dr Wiseman.’
She left his consulting room and hurried out into the light drizzle. She turned her face to the sky and let the cool drops fall upon her cheeks, then roll over her chin and down her neck. The relief was immense. Someone understood.
Dr Wiseman’s room was in Ealing Broadway, so she caught a cab all the way back to Vauxhall Cross and returned to her office with a spring in her step. She had barely got back to her desk before her new deputy was slipping through the door behind her. ‘Kate . . .’
‘Hi.’
Suzy closed the door. ‘I read the file. Operation Sigma.’
‘Good.’ Kate waited, but nothing further was forthcoming. ‘So now you’re up to date.’ She turned to her computer.
‘Are you sure your analysis on Viper was correct?’ Suzy asked. Kate turned back to her. ‘I’m not trying to be difficult,’ Suzy went on. ‘It’s just that, over at Five, I did quite a lot of mole hunts. You might even call it my speciality. And I’m not sure it makes sense that your husband was Viper.’
Kate tried to contain her irritation. This was about the last thing on the planet she wanted reopened. ‘My husband admitted his betrayal.’
‘I’m not disputing that, only the conclusion that he was actually Viper. We know how much effort the Russians have put into seducing and corrupting people across Whitehall. It makes sense that they have more than one – perhaps multiple – corrupted agent of influence. Stuart was expendable.’
‘Not to me.’
‘I’m sorry, bad choice of language.’