by Tom Bradby
‘Without my knowledge?’
‘The foreign secretary was fully informed.’
His eyes bored into her. ‘In all honesty, that is not the kind of mealy-mouthed crap I expected of you.’
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Prime Minister.’
‘And neither is that! For God’s sake, Kate. I thought you were a good egg. Is this your friend Imogen Conrad’s doing?’
‘She’s not my friend.’
‘You could have fooled me.’
‘You may recall she had an affair with my husband.’
He shrugged. ‘Fair enough.’ He got up and paced behind his desk. He picked up a squidgy stress ball and pumped it hard in his fingers.
His special adviser had curled herself up again. ‘No one will believe it,’ she purred soothingly. ‘You’ve wanted to get rid of Meg for an age.’
‘She’s never coming back. Never! Bloody bitch.’
Kate’s experience of government at the highest level had been of such exaggerated formality that the Prime Minister’s relentless foul mouth was a shock, if not necessarily a surprise. It made her reflect on just how well he hid his true nature behind that easy-going affable exterior. ‘You know what the worst of it is?’ He was looking at Kate, waiting for an answer.
‘There are quite a few aspects of this that would qualify as “the worst of it”, Prime Minister.’
‘All right, drop the “Prime Minister” crap. It’s not very authentic.’ He leant back against his desk, tossing the stress ball into the air and catching it. ‘The worst of it is that I sense you believed it. You thought it was true.’ He picked up two more balls from his desk and started to juggle. He was rather good at it.
‘Believing what you see is a basic human instinct. But I’d like to think I’m smarter than that. It wasn’t my job to form a view either way on the video.’ Kate reflected as she spoke that she had, which had perhaps been a mistake. ‘In the end, for us, it was simple: we couldn’t turn down this kind of offer. Everything else is incidental.’
‘Not for me it isn’t.’
‘Look, I’m extremely sorry about this leak. I don’t know what happened. It occurred within an hour of our meeting with the foreign secretary this morning and the fact that it happened is absolutely inexplicable to me.’
‘I doubt that. And, if so, you don’t spend enough time around politicians.’
‘I don’t see how Meg Simpson benefits—’
‘A safe pair of hands if I fall.’ He put down the stress balls. ‘Surely even you can see that.’
‘I don’t think Meg Simpson leaked this.’
‘Really? She’s not as cosy as she looks.’
He came to sit opposite her again, landing with a thump. ‘All right, Mrs Henderson, let me tell you this. We’re going ahead with your operation. We’ll accept Igor Whatever-His-Bloody-Name-Is into this country with open arms. And we’ll expose exactly what our friends in the Kremlin have been up to.’
Kate stared at him. If he had a reputation for being unpredictable, she sure as hell had not expected that.
‘You look shocked,’ he said.
‘It wasn’t entirely the outcome I expected.’
‘Exactly. Because your world view is unfortunately limited enough to conflate those men who enjoy the company of women too much with those who seek to abuse them.’
Kate could feel her cheeks reddening. In his case, that was indeed exactly what she had done.
‘I hereby authorize you to do whatever you see fit to expedite this defection. But do it quickly. I intend to brief the press in full as soon as this man is in the country and we have established to your satisfaction that what he has to offer is as fake as the Hitler diaries.’ He returned to his desk and took a seat beyond it. ‘You are dismissed!’
Kate got up and walked out. The special adviser led her down the long corridor beside the Commons chamber. ‘You didn’t expect that, did you?’ she said. ‘You people aren’t nearly as smart as you think. I love the way he out-manoeuvres you.’
It was all Kate could do to refrain from punching her. ‘I can find my way from here,’ she said icily.
‘I need to see you out.’
‘I can manage, thank you.’
The woman turned away in irritation and Kate marched on towards Central Lobby. But there was one more surprise in store for her on a day that had already held too many. Imogen Conrad stood waiting. ‘They said you were here,’ she said, without any other form of greeting.
Kate didn’t break her stride and Imogen fell into step with her as she swung right towards the entrance.
‘I’ve just had a text from the PM, asking me in. What the hell is going on?’
‘I really can’t talk about it.’
‘Come on, Kate, for God’s sake . . .’
‘If he’s texted you, perhaps it would be an idea to go and see him.’
Imogen took Kate’s arm and brought her up abruptly. They were close together. And, not for the first time, Imogen’s olive skin, full lips and wide eyes annoyed her: she was too damned pretty for her own – or anyone else’s – good. ‘Is he going to offer me the job?’
‘How on earth would I know?’
‘Did he talk about it?’
‘No.’
‘But you were in seeing him, right?’
‘I can’t talk about it.’
‘Well, if I’m about to become your boss, I can instruct you to do so.’
‘Once you do become my boss, you can call the chief, or one of his deputies, and request a formal briefing on any subject you like. But in the meantime the answer is no comment.’ Kate started to walk away.
‘You are absolutely infuriating,’ Imogen threw after her, but without much conviction, and it occurred to Kate that one of her friend’s – if you could call her that – more redeeming features was her utter imperviousness to all criticism or insult.
She burst out of the House of Commons, wove through the tourists outside and marched away down Millbank with grim purpose. She had no idea what to think. The operation had been green-lit and Imogen was about to be made her direct boss. You simply couldn’t make it up. She took out her phone and glanced at a news alert. Below the item about the ‘so-called sex video’ and of the foreign secretary’s departure there was a report that the US president had cancelled a state visit to Denmark because it wouldn’t sell him Greenland.
The world was laughing at her.
Imogen Conrad had been formally appointed foreign secretary by the time Kate returned to the office and she had already given up being shocked: one politician mired in scandal over a sex video appointing another formerly mired in scandal over a sex video. Perhaps they would make one together.
Kate gathered together Julie and Suzy. She called Ian, who practically ran down the corridor. ‘What is going on?’ he said, as he burst in, which more or less confirmed her – or, at least, Julie’s – suspicion that he must have been the cause of the leak.
‘I’ve just been summoned to see the prime minister.’
Ian looked put out. ‘Kate, it really isn’t your place to—’
‘He wasn’t handing out gold stars, Ian.’ Kate was enjoying the sense of being at the end of her tether and felt better than she had for a long time. At some point on the walk back, she realized, she had taken the decision to resign from the Service in search of a quieter life once this was over. The relief made her feel light-headed. ‘He has authorized the operation.’
There was a stunned silence. ‘He did what?’ Julie asked.
‘He said the sex video is a fake and he now has to prove it.’
Ian was ahead of the others. He had a superhuman ability to sniff out the political ramifications in all things. ‘He’ll say it’s fake anyway.’
‘What do you mean?’ Suzy asked.
‘If we bring Igor in, the PM will insist the video is examined by experts he appoints and they will conclude it’s a fake. He’ll come out looking like the victim of a wicked plot, not the w
retched traitor he may very well be.’
This was injudicious, for Ian, and Kate saw the surprise in Julie’s eyes in particular.
‘It’s a trap,’ Suzy said.
‘Of course it is,’ Ian said. ‘But we still have all the cards. We’ll have Igor. We’ll have the video and evidence of the payments he’s been receiving. If Downing Street wants to play games with this, they’ve chosen the wrong people. Game on.’ He nodded at them with schoolboy enthusiasm and strode away down the corridor. Suzy went after him. Julie and Kate watched them go.
‘What’s got into him?’ Julie asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Kate said. And it was true. Ian’s conversion to their cause was perhaps the most worrying turn of all.
27
THE AIR FRANCE flight banked smoothly and straightened as it followed the course of the Mtkvari River on its way into Tbilisi, the ancient Georgian capital that had served for so many centuries as the crossroads between East and West and gateway to the Caucasus and Central Asia.
By the time they disembarked, the sky was a rich dark red beyond an old Russian Tupolev plane silhouetted on the far side of the runway. There was a newer Boeing 747, too, painted white, with ‘Cargo’ emblazoned in bright orange on its side. It looked like some kind of rendition flight. Perhaps, Kate thought, that was appropriate under the circumstances, though the Service certainly didn’t run to hiring a Boeing to fly out a defector.
The old Soviet terminal was banished behind a barbed-wire fence across the apron, so they were bussed to the shiny new gateway to Georgia, which looked like a couple of stacked pancakes. There was nothing but gambling ads for casinos in the baggage waiting area, but immigration was painless – a country that actually welcomes visitors, Kate reflected – and their bags arrived swiftly enough to have them in the car Suzy had organized from the hotel within minutes.
Their driver was a big, burly man, probably younger than he looked. Ian immediately engaged him in fluent Georgian, which he insisted on answering in English, to Ian’s visible irritation. He launched into an unstoppable tirade on the greatness of his nation, its friendly people, its varied landscape – ‘Visitors say Georgia has everything, why would you ever leave?’ – and its courage: ‘We are very, very old country,’ he said. ‘We protect our lands against Turkish people, Iranian people. Many times. Many times.’
They were packed into a new minivan, but he insisted on trying to drive it like a Ferrari, so Kate attempted to distract him by asking where he was from. ‘Kakheti,’ he said. ‘Georgia best wine-growing region.’ It turned out he had been brought up and schooled in the dying days of the old Soviet Union and, like many men and women of his generation, he had mixed feelings about their former Russian overlords. On one level, he was irritated by their continued interference in Georgian affairs, but on another he recognized the value of Russian tourists and was fighting a losing battle to persuade his children to learn the language. ‘French, German, Spanish, English, of course. They would rather learn anything but Russian.’
After that, he couldn’t be stopped. He talked about his love of rugby, but mostly seemed to want to curse his government – all governments, in fact – as well as Turks and Iranians. As they roared towards the centre of town, he had to swerve to avoid a couple crossing the road. The woman was wearing the niqab, which elicited another muttered insult. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just don’t like them.’
They were speeding past Tbilisi old town and Kate looked out at the brightly painted houses with their striking exterior balconies, many of which appeared to hang in mid-air. This gave Ian a chance to play the role he’d adopted as Suzy’s caring and thoughtful tour guide, holding her hand through ‘her first major foreign assignment’, as he put it, though it wasn’t and she didn’t need her hand held. Berlin had proved that. ‘They really are quite something,’ he said, pointing out a particularly spectacular example of the local architecture. ‘I had a house just up here with the most incredible courtyard.’
As a transparent and not especially subtle attempt to make Julie jealous, this flirtation was surely doomed to failure – ‘He’s a moron,’ she’d whispered to Kate on the flight from Paris. ‘I can’t imagine what I saw in him’ – but Suzy appeared to be lapping it up.
‘Tbilisi was destroyed by the Persians in 1795,’ Ian told her, ‘so it turned to Imperial Russia for protection. They reneged on everything they’d agreed, but made it a place to be reckoned with, a true crossroads between East and West. Most of the old houses you see are essentially a mixture of cultures and styles.’ He was warming to this theme. ‘You get these amazing exterior staircases that literally cascade down the hill, following the natural contours of the slope.’
‘Tbilisi very old, very beautiful,’ the driver chimed in, not to be displaced as tour guide. They were racing away from Freedom Square down Rustaveli Avenue. ‘Here is Parliament building. Heroes butchered in 1989.’
‘So was Georgia always part of the Russian Empire?’ Suzy asked Ian. Perhaps it was her imagination, but Kate had the sense she already knew the answer to this perfectly well. If she was playing him, he took the bait.
‘No, it declared independence at the end of the First World War, after the Tsar had stood down. But it only lasted about a year before Lenin ordered the troops in to take it back. It was why it was one of the first Soviet republics to declare independence when glasnost got going.’
‘I thought the Georgians had a pretty good run of the Soviet Empire?’
‘They did, if you can ignore the deportations, mass shootings and trips to the gulag. Stalin was their man, too, of course, so they have rather mixed feelings about him now. They maintained a pretty strong sense of national identity throughout, so maybe it was no surprise they were among the first to want out.’
They arrived at the hotel. Suzy had booked it through the Travel Department and Kate thought she must spend much of her life on the Mr & Mrs Smith website, since Rooms Hotel Tbilisi bore a striking resemblance to Das Stue in Berlin, and was another study in low-key luxury. The central lobby had floor-to-ceiling bookcases on both sides, though all of the books appeared to be in English – a sign of the direction the hotel, and perhaps the country, was facing. They walked over polished red and cream tiles, past a curved green velvet and wood sofa and renaissance chandeliers until a bellboy in red hat and jacket, with a gold tassel on the shoulder, leapt at Kate’s small shoulder bag and insisted on escorting her to her room.
She rummaged in her pocket and produced a twenty-lari tip.
It was a big room with a free-standing iron-clawed bath, sumptuous green velvet curtains and bold black and tangerine wallpaper. The lighting was low, the atmosphere moody. It was comfortable, luxurious even, and so clearly designed for couples in the first flush of lust as to be the last place on earth Kate felt like being. She thought painfully of the night on the train with Sergei and found it hard to push the image of his distorted face from her mind.
She washed her face and went downstairs to wait for Julie in the bar. She ordered some kind of lavender cocktail – made with gin and coconut – and sat beneath a giant painting of a woman seated backwards on a zebra. It was that kind of hotel.
Kate’s cocktail arrived, shortly followed by Julie. ‘What is that?’ she asked.
Kate sipped it. ‘Too sweet for you.’
Julie waved at the waiter. ‘Gin and tonic, please. Hendrick’s, if there’s a choice.’ As he disappeared again, Julie took in their surroundings. ‘A stoner’s paradise,’ she said. ‘Have you spoken to Mikhail?’
Kate took out her phone, checked the Wi-Fi hadn’t hooked up to the hotel’s system, then sent him a Signal message. We’re here.
She got a reply straight away. Good. Will let you know where to meet tomorrow 10 a.m. Be ready.
Kate answered: Would rather we set venue.
But Mikhail was obdurate: No, this is our backyard. Do as we ask.
‘I bet you a hundred quid he shags her on this trip,’ Julie said.
/>
‘He’s just trying to make you jealous.’
‘That may have been his original intention, but he’s loving the attention. He won’t be able to resist. You know what it’s like, the excitement of your first big foreign gig. She’ll be all over him like a rash.’
‘He’s not that stupid.’
‘He absolutely is and you of all people know it.’
Kate thought about having a word with Suzy and warning her off. But she actually felt a little sorry for both of them. Their loneliness was so transparent. ‘Would you be upset?’ she asked Julie.
‘Not in the slightest.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘One hundred per cent certain. Every time I look at him, I feel a bit sick at what happened between us. I can’t imagine what I was thinking.’ She could see the scepticism in her friend’s face. ‘Genuinely, honestly.’
Kate was struck by her colleague’s ability to cleave off a set of unwanted emotions. No wonder Ian was so shaken by it.
Ian and Suzy arrived together. Perhaps he’d continued his tour of Georgian history all the way to her room. Suzy had booked a restaurant a short walk from the hotel, and since it was still a balmy evening, they took a table just beyond the rose-covered pergola on the terrace. Ian demanded a menu in Georgian, rather than English, and ordered for all of them. The food – tender green beans with soft walnut paste, beetroot quenelle and lightly fried corn bread, a Georgian speciality – was better than the conversation. Ian marched on with his history lesson, gesturing wildly at the twinkling lights of the city beneath them. He’d arrived in 1990, the Service’s first man in – ‘an incredible opportunity for an ambitious young officer’ – and he gave Suzy a blow-by-blow account of that era, from Gamsakhurdia’s departure for Armenia and Chechnya to the long rule of Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s foreign minister, of whom Ian was an unreconstructed fan.