‘I don’t know, Robert,’ he says with angry obstinacy that makes him sound shrill. ‘I don’t know what the Swedes know.’
‘You said you had the leak under control. That she had eliminated it.’
He spreads his arms out in an ironic, resigned gesture.
‘That was the information I had. I was presumably wrong.’
Robert is immediately pale. His head drops, his face bloated and aged.
A cold joy begins to grow within Jonathan. He can see they are thinking the same thing. If the Swedes have the documents, then it will harm Robert. The House is liable to come tumbling down on top of him, burying both him and his career.
‘You were supposed to take care of this,’ says Robert.
His own career must soon be over, but if that is the case, then it should be for Robert, too. Over the years Robert has always pushed forward, taken all the adulation, got everything. If it is possible to ruin it all for him, then he wants nothing more.
‘Bloody hell!’ Robert bellows.
Gone is the indolent, superior crown-prince-in-waiting of MI6. Instead there is a raging, hard-pressed man who knows that his carefully calculated career plan may crack like thin ice beneath his feet at any moment. Robert leans forward, close to him.
‘You are a disgrace to the service, Jon. This mess is your fault. Your poor judgement and useless management. If these documents get out, then Parliament will be competing to tear down our MI6.’
It is so unfair. He has always been loyal to MI6. He couldn’t have stopped that cursed analyst from leaking. He has tried to do everything right.
Robert is wandering around the room.
‘You will deal with this,’ he says, pointing a finger at him as if it were a pistol. ‘You will eliminate the documents immediately, otherwise I will blame you. You will take the blame alone. Believe you me, Jon. I will crush you.’
And he believes him.
Kate is standing in the doorway. She stares at him as he steps into the hallway as if she can’t believe her eyes. ‘Hello,’ she says in a low voice. Then she regains her senses and moves backwards from the door to let him in.
Everything is as before. It seems completely absurd and simultaneously completely natural to be home again.
Kate turns around without saying a word and disappears into the house. He puts down his bag and saunters after her. He finds her at the dining table with her computer, absorbed by its blue light, and when he comes into the room she looks up hastily, as if she is surprised to see him there.
From the headphones he can discern the faint sound of shouting and noise. He makes to move around the table to see what is happening on the screen, but notices that she would rather be alone so leaves her. He is exhausted from Syria and is still unable to muster interest.
His thoughts return anxiously to what has to happen now, in Brussels. He has to make contact with Heather. But he doesn’t know how; he has already tried calling her and her phone is off.
Kate, with her resolute seriousness, is encroaching upon the calm he needs. He had hoped she would be asleep when he came home. He can’t talk to her about any of what happened in London or Syria – not a word – yet that is all he can think about. He is alone in all of this, and having her around just makes him feel lonelier.
The kitchen is a mess. Plates with food crusted onto them, dirty glasses and cups are scattered on the kitchen counter. He gets out a clean wine glass, finds an open bottle of white wine in the fridge and pours a generous glass.
‘But is there someone who can give them a lift?’ he hears Kate say in the other room. ‘Okay, okay.’ She is standing in the dining room talking on the phone. Indecisive, he stands still in the kitchen, but then goes into the living room.
Kate is standing by the dining table with her back to him, her arms around her small body as if she is cold, mobile to her ear.
He has killed a man. Imagine if she knew. If she knew that, his career and the whole life they have together might soon be over. It is so overwhelming that he forlornly does what requires the very least of him: he flops onto the living-room sofa and turns on the TV. Three sports channels are showing the same football match, with different commentators and slightly different shifting angles in the simultaneous flow of games. Barely ten minutes of the first half have been played. He drinks wine and watches the match, all while he can hear Kate’s brief, low conversations from the dining room.
A Spanish team has possession. A rapid cross is followed by a forward on the offensive, the player bounding along the touchline. The battle is approaching. The players run about in their formations. An uncontrolled pass is intercepted by a defender for the French team and the attack is over just as quickly as it began. The rhythm of the game yields to a series of long, cautious passes. He looks up.
Kate is talking about the fact that they can’t just wait, it is a family with a three-year-old, then he can’t hear her over the chatter of the television. The French team go on the counteroffensive in a series of rapid passes. But he is no longer following the match, instead watching Kate as she paces back and forth on the other side of the sliding doors to the dining room.
As if she senses him watching her, she turns and looks angrily at him. She disappears into the kitchen.
He can’t deal with her, but he can’t get away – it is as if the whole house is enveloped in a dark gravitational field. He gets up to fetch more wine.
Her computer is standing on the dining table. A Facebook page is visible; he reads a few of the posts: a steady stream of appeals to provide clothing, medicines, questions about whether anyone can take in a family with a child. Kate has written a post. She is offering to give lifts, she has posted her phone number. It is careless – it might also lead to him.
Another page is open in another tab. A shaky video clip. Someone filming with a mobile phone. It is a district in central Aleppo. Despite the crumbling façades, he recognises the office block on the corner of Al-Mutanabbi Street. It should be taller – but the top floors have collapsed forming a piecemeal stack of destroyed offices. It is as if an angry giant has put its fist straight down through the building.
Kate is sitting in the kitchen crying.
‘Kate?’
‘Frances called.’
He is silent. He has always known that sooner or later his life would collapse under the weight of all the secrets.
‘She told me . . .’
He wants to say something extenuating, that it wasn’t serious, that he regrets it, but he doesn’t manage to before Kate says:
‘I can’t live like this.’
There have been nights of paralysing anxiety that she will find out what he is up to, but now, instead, it is a tremendous relief. Perhaps he has longed to hear those words from her. For a brief moment he can see her and himself, as if looking at them in a doll’s house, and then he thinks she is right – she is always right. They can’t live like this.
‘I’m sorry, Kate.’
The words feel awkward in his mouth, like sharp rocks. He isn’t even sure whether they are true any longer. It is sad, he wishes deep down that this had happened a long time ago. That she hadn’t sacrificed so much. Because he is a good person, he wasn’t with Frances to hurt Kate. He was just doing what he wanted to do, he thinks to himself. It had nothing to do with Kate. He is used to separating things, everything in his life is compartmentalised. It is as if one emotion could just as well be another. He has loved Kate and now she is completely unimportant to him, which is strange.
‘Who are you, Jonathan?’
‘You know who I am.’
He waits, trying to determine the right thing to say. Then he stops himself, realising how strange it is to think like that: as if this were an interrogation or contact with an enemy intelligence service.
‘You used to be open. You were considerate. I know you loved me. But
I haven’t felt that for a long time.’
He says nothing.
‘Sometimes I look at you and think you’re this person with me and someone completely different when I can’t see you. Like now. You’ve lied to me.’
‘Yes, and I’m very sorry . . .’
‘What sort of person are you?’
‘I’m a completely normal person.’
‘Where have you been?’
‘You know I can’t talk about my work.’
‘But you must be able to tell me something.’
She stares angrily at him until she realises that he really isn’t going to say anything.
She turns around and reaches for her phone. But the movement is more of a pretext to avoid showing her face.
If he tells her what he works on and what he has done . . . A relationship isn’t just based on what you say to each other, but also what you spare the other from having to hear.
‘What should I say?’
She looks at him sadly.
‘I don’t know, Jon. What about the truth?’
‘Okay. I love Frances. I have always loved her.’
She looks at him, her eyes wide open, her face hurt.
He knows he has crossed a line. A final line. But he wanted to shake Kate up and make her see that he isn’t the impassive man she believes him to be and that deep down he is afraid he has always been.
24
Bente crosses the neat park in the Square de Meeûs in which office workers are eating their lunch as a light shower passes by. Her hip still hurts. She has been at home for two days to avoid surveillance. It’s a relief not to have to see her staff.
A war is now raging. Sources in London say the British are turning all data from across the European continent inside out in their search for Heather.
Almost three hours after she silently left Fredrik and the boys at the breakfast table, she approaches the Section’s shiny glass façade. First, she drove to the airport, before heading for the city centre. At Porte de Namur she had rapidly handed the car to an operative from Stockholm and hurried down into the metro station, going as far as Trône and then emerging into the clear sunshine, slipping into the lunchtime hubbub. She still isn’t sure whether she is in the clear.
She crosses the bright lobby, but doesn’t take the lift up as she would on an ordinary day. Instead, she inserts a key and selects level minus two.
The culvert is a slit of grey concrete. She follows it to the end and enters her code. The white fire door swings open.
A man leans his head out vigilantly, but he recognises her and relaxes.
Gustav’s people are sitting at their screens in a small anteroom. They are working shifts around the clock to prepare material for the interrogation going on in the adjacent room, behind the next white fire door. Fears, hopes, dependencies, debts, every detail of Heather’s personal history and work forms the raw material used by the interrogator against her.
‘How’s it going?’
Gustav grimaces.
They have been holding Heather in there for over twenty-four hours. They are already working overtime, because with each hour that passes they approach the moment when they must let her disappear into the clear autumn weather.
They are taking a short break. Heather needs to relieve herself.
Gustav appears to be maintaining a strict regime: she is not permitted to leave her cell.
‘She admits that she works at the British Embassy and that she met Fredrik at a workshop, but nothing else. She knows she can wait us out.’
Stockholm has gone through her mobile, he explains. Everything points to her having worked alone. But they still don’t know exactly what she did. And they need to rule out the idea that there might be more people like her – agents infiltrating the Swedish system.
‘The Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is going to declare her as a persona non grata as soon as we can demonstrate that she is MI6,’ says Gustav. ‘They’ll throw her out immediately.’
‘Can I go in?’
Heather is slumped on a chair in the small cell. Behind her is a mattress and in the corner a basic toilet and handbasin. The air is stifling; they have turned down the ventilation on purpose.
Heather looks at her in alarm. Her face is pale and washed out, she is exhausted, dried up. Bente stands by the wall and observes the slight young woman. She would like to crawl inside her like a parasite and comprehend how she managed to make her husband fall for her so hard. How was she able to exert power like that? After all, this is no demon before her but a completely ordinary woman with straight dark hair that she occasionally tucks nervously behind her ear.
Gustav is right: she hasn’t cracked. Because when Heather meets her eyes she sees the stubbornness and the furtive expression. Heather knows that by keeping quiet she will win.
She wants to say that she doesn’t care that Heather has slept with her husband, but that is irrelevant now. She still has to make an effort not to look at her mouth and think about the fact that those lips have kissed him, taken him in her mouth. The thought stings like a burn.
She puts her hand in her pocket and retrieves the flash drive.
‘This is what you’re looking for, isn’t it?’
Heather can’t hide her reaction; she stares at the small black object.
‘You’ve used your own body to get at this information.’
Heather glowers silently at her.
‘I’ll show you.’
She puts the drive in the computer lying on the table by the door and quickly clicks through the documents. Then she sits down on a chair opposite with the computer on her lap. Heather can’t help looking at what she is showing on the screen. She doesn’t know, Bente thinks. She has no idea what the documents contain.
She pulls up a photo. The House. The courtyard. Then a beaten, swollen face. A string of the House’s clients.
‘Why do you think Jonathan wanted you to get your hands on this?’
She leans forward. Their eyes are level. Heather remains defiantly silent.
‘Look,’ she says, pointing at the screen. ‘These are lists of people that allied forces captured and that your colleagues subjected to hard interrogation.’
She points at Jonathan Green’s signature.
‘Why are you showing me this?’
Her tone is calm and scornful; she doesn’t understand what is happening. It is working; Heather thinks Bente is trying to shake her, frighten her with the documents.
Bente shows her the ten most important documents relating to the House and then to Hercules, calmly explaining how the operation is planned. Heather listens with a frown.
‘Do you understand?’
Heather shrugs her shoulders.
The camera on the wall is filming everything.
‘Are you listening? Do you understand what I am showing you?’
Heather nods. She drinks the poison without smelling a rat.
They sit there for more than an hour and when Bente closes the computer she knows that Heather will never escape her grip. The young agent doesn’t understand yet, but she now knows a secret way above her rank. Heather shouldn’t even be familiar with the code name Hercules, or the House, let alone what they conceal. The last unauthorised individual in MI6 who saw these documents was B54, who was found dead a few weeks earlier.
‘Do you see the camera there?’
Heather nods. And slowly, the penny begins to drop. Her face is taut with fear. She tries to resist and shrugs her shoulders, but she knows she is caught in the trap, she is just unwilling to accept it.
There are secrets that tear apart everything that comes close to them and Heather has just swallowed a big chunk of one.
She thinks she can see Heather changing. She looks confused, as if she had just awoken from a strange dream. They will re
lease her soon, but she will never be free because she knows too much. The knowledge she now possesses cannot be erased, it makes her a burden on those she thought would protect her.
‘Jonathan Green is returning to Brussels this evening,’ she says. ‘I’m going to make sure he gets the video. He’ll doubtless find it interesting.’
Fear turns Heather’s face to a stiff mask.
‘What sort of trick is this?’
‘You mean tricks like sleeping with my husband. Coming into my home.’
Heather’s face is covered in weariness. She looks furrowed and worn out, a woman caught in a system she will never escape. One of many women tricked into sacrificing themselves for a greater goal.
Heather dries her eyes.
‘What should I do?’ she says.
‘Tell us everything.’
25
As Jonathan wanders up the stairs of the embassy he is remarkably clear-headed.
He is early, the corridors are in a state of unusual and pleasant peacefulness. He has spent the night lying awake on the sofa as thoughts about how to resolve everything have bounced around in a confusing whirlwind. His thoughts destroyed all prospects of sleep and he got up early, before dawn, to get out of the house before Kate woke.
Heather has finally replied with a short message: I have been released. He hurries to the trade department and Heather’s office, but she isn’t there. She is still useful – overnight an idea has taken hold of how she might come in handy, and now he is worried she may already have left. He has to find her, find out exactly what happened before London gags her.
The door to the photocopying room is ajar. The machine is performing its lightning-fast sweeps back and forth. He pops his head in but she isn’t there.
Then he spots her sitting on the floor.
He likes observing people who aren’t aware he has seen them – something of an occupational hazard. The facial expressions of someone who thinks they are alone are often radically different from those of someone who knows they are being watched. Heather’s is grimly absorbed. Her career in MI6 will be brief.
‘Good morning,’ he says, leaning further through the door. She looks up with a haunted expression. She has been crying.
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