by R. J. Dillon
‘How bad is it?’
‘An answer Angie, I need an answer. Yes or No?’
She slammed her hand on the banister. ‘No,’ she said, determined not to be treated as a child, not to be forever answering to Nick. Even though she hadn’t allowed the woman claiming to represent a film location company into the house, she was damned if she’d tell him.
He broke a rule and moved up a stair. Instinctively Angie retreated, surrendering one for safety or insurance. She had a great thing about distance, physical and mental, she would never give, never actually come out of herself and reveal a weakness, an emotion. The lager was still in his hand, he wanted to take a drink, but that would give her another reason to despise him.
‘If anyone does call you’re not familiar with, you ring the police and our emergency number, got that?’
When she laughed, Nick’s pulse trebled.
‘Do you understand?’
‘Of course. Am I not permitted to make any decisions without the master of the house being present?’
Her righteousness annoyed him. ‘Start packing.’ He advanced and brushed past without looking at her.
‘Did you hear me?’ he called over his shoulder going into the bathroom, putting down the can, running the shower.
‘Not until you tell me what’s going on?’
‘Nothing’s going on, it’s just a precaution,’ he shouted from inside the cubicle.
When he emerged draped in a towel Angie hadn’t budged, waiting to resume, her fury yet to reach its peak.
‘I’ve lost two officers and I haven’t time to argue,’ he warned her.
He made for the bedroom and she followed cautiously behind.
‘Lost how? Unaccounted for? Missing?’ She asked outside the door.
‘Lost as in dead,’ said Nick, dressed in dark cords, blue shirt and v-neck sweater.
‘Christ, what have you done?’
‘Me?’ Nick lifted his head from lacing his Oxford shoes to check if she was talking to him. ‘I haven’t done anything.’
The daylight had gone and the upstairs corridor was filled with deep shadow. Down the walls, her unframed oils depicted abstract women with faces of purple and red. After she’d hung them he’d asked for a clue, a preferred reading. She’d replied with a laugh that she was painting out her angst, her animus; and she’d done such a complete job that Tom would never pass them alone in the evening.
‘Don’t tell your folks there’s a scare on, just say you need a break from me, that’s always got you sympathy and a place to stay before. If you go to a hotel, pick one you know,’ he explained, passing her on the way to the stairs. ‘Don’t be on your own if you can help it.’
‘If I say no?’
‘I can’t guarantee your safety, I’m more or less suspended.’
‘You’re pathetic, know that?’ she said, following him down the stairs.
‘Course I am, that’s what attracted you in the first place,’ he called, deliberately banging about in the kitchen. Hung behind the dining table receiving natural light from the French doors, was the latest in a series of Angie’s large-scale oils. This one he hadn’t seen before, a colossal canvas of a naked, bleeding woman giving birth to a malformed infant. Must be denoting her latest layer of individuality decided Nick, collecting the keys to his car.
‘Tell Gus you’re going to have put back your exhibition,’ Nick suggested, facing her.
‘It’s Guy and you’re not in a position to tell me what to do.’
‘I don’t want anything to happen to you,’ he said, in memory of something they once had, possibly shared.
She glanced at her watch then straightened her head, sighing. ‘Really, that’s very considerate of you Nick. Twenty years too late, but nice.’
She didn’t even rate him enough to hate him any more; that special loathing and resentment they had so carefully nurtured the last few years had matured, acting as an invisible sibling that had managed to outlive Tom.
‘I have warned you,’ he said, slipping the Nokia into his pocket.
‘Couldn’t you have asked?’
‘About what?’
‘Taking my old phone,’ she said, scooping up the odds and ends, returning them to the base of the wicker hen.
‘Do you mind?’
‘You paid for it, a present to make up for one of your overdue trips if I remember. Have it.’
Accepting the offer, Nick thought it pointless trying to find anything else to say, nothing would justify his being there, his concern, so he left using his own phone to make two calls on the way out.
• • •
The budget hotel was in Earls Court, a peeling scar in a Regency terrace of run-down bedsits around the corner from Philbeach Gardens. A hotel masquerading as an economy bed and breakfast, a sign in a window warned potential guests that it regrettably did not cater for families or pets. Drizzle soaked into its grey facade, spreading thin damp fingers over the grubby windows and large pools of rain gathered on its worn steps before running off onto the pavement.
The receptionist, a harsh woman with round sad eyes, dragged her gaze reluctantly from a magazine devoted to puzzles.
‘What will it be dear?’ she asked with an ironed smile as Nick entered.
Calling from a side office a heavy male voice intercepted her question, taking it upon himself the trouble of answering. ‘Mr. Arrowsmith’s expected, Glenda,’ announced Freddy Easton.
Nick glimpsed him along with the hotel’s archaic switchboard in a cluttered office behind Glenda. Easton wore a determined fixer’s face and a blazer perpetually smeared by pipe ash. In his sixties, he limped from a shrapnel wound he boasted about when drunk. Nick could smell the tobacco on Easton’s clothes from where he stood, as individual as a fingerprint; aromatic, a special blend of herbs mixed by a Bengali on Brick Lane.
‘I’ll walk you up, sir,’ he offered gallantly.
‘There’s no need, Freddy, I’ll find my own way.’
‘He hasn’t moved an inch. No one’s been in either.’
Straightening his blazer as if to go on parade, Easton’s watery eyes followed Nick as he turned the corner. Ireland? The Falklands? The first Gulf War? A trouble spot before that? Nick had forgotten where Easton had picked up his limp, pension and devotion to all matters of intelligence, allowing CO8 to use his hotel for meetings of an arm’s length nature.
The narrow stairway took Nick into a different world its carpet as thin as paper, a fire extinguisher holding it in place at the landing’s curve. Badly framed prints of Thames sailing barges were moored along the corridor and given half a chance they’d have upped anchor and never returned. Nick strode up four steps into an annex where Fleur-de-lis wallpaper covered the bumps in a tight passage. The room was the sixth in a dull line of seven. Nick knocked once and walked right in.
‘You Bensham?’ asked Nick.
Lubov’s handler, a young SIS officer barely out of training nodded. Two chairs were pulled to attention before an electric fire, its one bar burning an inconsistent orange. Nick sidestepped the chairs, going instead to the window.
‘Have a seat,’ said Nick, but Bensham refused to move, standing to attention with a square flex-less stance. For a terrible moment Nick feared Bensham was about to make a run for it, only for Bensham to sweep past him across the room to lay claim to a space of his own, the ends of his check scarf sucked outwards by the draft.
‘I’m fine standing,’ said Bensham.
‘We haven’t much time, so we’ll keep it brief,’ Nick decreed, wondering why they’d pawned Lubov out to this twenty-something novice? With a solid build, Nick even thought of him as burly, Bensham’s fair hair had been cut fashionably short and his entire demeanour was set for self-defence. His square angular face carried what Nick had already come to recognise in many new recruits as a cock-sure belief in their own ability; an arrogance that Nick could pick out now in Bensham’s eyes, the way his small mouth was twisted in a slight sneer.
‘Is this off the recor
d?’ Bensham demanded, his eyes narrowing in self-protection. ‘I only agreed because Rossan said it would be.’
‘No cameras, no recorders,’ Nick told him. ‘And it’s Mr. Rossan to you.’
Completely unfazed, Bensham dug his hands deep into the pockets of his tailored overcoat. ‘Lubov was a complete nightmare,’ he stated boldly, ‘and there’s no way I’m taking responsibility for the trouble you had,’ Bensham concluded, his eyes waiting for agreement.
‘You have no idea of the trouble I had, hear me? You don’t. Foula and your agent died when I tried to get them out. I had a stint and beatings in Moscow you won’t even comprehend, so behave,’ Nick warned him, ‘otherwise Mr. Rossan will have you transferred to the Mad House. Lubov and you, tell me all about it. Sit down and don’t leave a thing out.’
Opting for a corner of the bed rather than a chair, Bensham pushed back his coat and let out an expansive sigh. ‘After I’d got a Box 1 on completion of my training, I was assigned to RUS/OPS,’ he began as though rehearsing for an interview. ‘I did ten months in London getting the hang of things, then I got a Moscow slot with Lubov attached.’
‘You and him hit it off straight away, did you?’ It was taking Nick all his reserve not to knock Bensham clean off the bed.
‘Hardly,’ he answered with a sarcastic smile. ‘Lubov was a hangover from the old days and when I inherited him, he’d already had a string of handlers. Lubov was pretty miffed when I turned up to take over the reins, but I’d been warned that Lubov was a high-maintenance, low-grade producer of the unremarkable kind, so that’s what I expected.’
‘Rumour or fact?’
‘Someone in RUS/OPS mentioned it, I can’t remember who.’ Nor did he care, if his shrug was anything to go by.
When Nick failed to press him, Bensham took up his discourse once more. ‘If Lubov didn’t get paid on time, he’d have a tantrum, threaten to shop me to his superiors, or even turn himself in. So I knew he was kind of unstable, a volatile loner who hated his wife, his work, even himself, which meant it wouldn’t take a lot to push him over the edge.’ In Bensham’s considered opinion, after he’d assessed Lubov fully for all of three months, he categorised him as nothing more than a dreamer. ‘I even went as far as proposing to RUS/OPS that it might be an idea to cut Lubov loose. After all, he’d never brought anything of any value to the table for me, so I thought it might be expedient to make a clean break with the past.’
‘That was very astute of you. How did RUS/OPS respond?’
‘More or less agreed that we weren’t in the business of providing monthly pensions for washed-up agents, but I shouldn’t cut the strings immediately. I had to bring him on message first, so to speak.’
‘Christ, with all your considerable experience of agent handling, he should have been thankful you were looking after his interests.’
Rebuked and stung, Bensham glared hard at Nick. ‘He shouldn’t have strung me along, should he,’ he whined, forever the victim.
‘Strung along how?’
Defiantly smiling, Bensham reflected for a moment before introducing the key evidence on his own behalf. ‘He demanded a deal didn’t he, pure fantasy. Lubov wanted an ex-senior officer to meet him in Moscow, nothing or no one else would do except our most recent ex-Chief. He kept blathering on that I shouldn’t trust a soul except this respected high-ranking ex-officer.’
‘But you didn’t take him seriously,’ Nick reminded him cruelly. ‘What did Lubov do?’
‘He wasn’t best pleased,’ Bensham sourly admitted. ‘Blew a gasket, his top, blew nearly everything. Told me I didn’t understand the big picture, I was going to jeopardise and wreck years of work. We had a bit of a ding-dong, I told him this was his last chance to impress me, he’d better put up or shut up.’
‘That must have reassured him. And Lubov finally brought a sample to the table did he?’ From Bensham’s reluctance to answer, Nick guessed he must have done a lot more than that.
‘I didn’t realise he was so serious.’ Setting off down the room, Bensham needed someone or something to blame.
‘Deadly serious,’ Nick retorted, avoiding Bensham’s difficulty. ‘What did he bring as a sample?’
Bensham’s bravado deserted him and Nick told him to take his time. By Nick’s side, a lace curtain was strung across the window. Yellow with age it smelt of stale dust, a dead moth trapped in the tapestry had shed its wings like petals. A mobile advertising truck crawled by promoting a new brand of room freshener, a distorted Greensleeves belting from its speakers into the miserable day. Turning from the window Nick heard the tune still ringing on, hollow notes with nowhere to go.
‘He told me that after the years of chasing the trail he’d struck gold, but I was making him deliver too early, there was still work to do,’ Bensham admitted at last. Expecting some form of praise, he turned sulkily away as Nick merely nodded as though the point wasn’t that important after all.
‘Did he explain what trail?’
‘He went on about it or them in London and I thought he’s lost it, he’s having a laugh.’
‘What did he mean by that?’ asked Nick, his temper rising.
‘I thought he was pumping up the value of his pitch,’ said Bensham, tugging his scarf this way and that along his bullish neck, aiming for a point of equilibrium.
‘What did he bring you?’ Nick’s voice had become so low, so compressed, that to those who knew him they’d consider it dangerous.
‘He said he had run the London end of the Oktober Projekt down,’ Bensham said, jamming himself into a corner of the room. ‘He was manic, tell the senior ex-officer I have discovered three of them, tell him three. Look, I should have paid attention but I didn’t, I had a lot on my plate, okay.’
‘No it’s not okay,’ fumed Nick, ‘it never will be okay when super-inflated egos such as yours are cleared for operational duties. I’m sick of your bullshit, your lame excuses and inflated opinion of yourself,’ Nick began, blocking Bensham’s escape from the corner. ‘You’re nothing to me, mean nothing to me, got that,’ insisted Nick stepping closer. ‘I haven’t decided if you leave here walking or crawling, but you will tell me the truth.’
Perhaps resenting Nick’s accurate assessment, the youthful tucks around Bensham’s mouth darkened, and his assurance deserted him, a dire spoiled face claiming its place. Finally, the novice intelligence officer reviewed his options with the sort of cold logic that they had drummed into him at Aspley during his initial training. ‘I told Lubov that a file name wasn’t going to be good enough for me to risk my career by approaching this senior ex-officer. I asked him for more, something sexy to sell,’ he confessed, visibly relaxing as Nick stepped away. ‘Lubov wasn’t for sharing, but he realised it was me or early retirement,’ he explained, his voice featureless. ‘And that’s when he gave me this crazy sales pitch. The Oktober Projekt is more than a mole, Lubov told me, it’s more than a dozen agents in place. These are elements he said, but they are just the means to the end. According to Lubov, Moscow have not recruited agents to pass on secrets, they have recruited agents that plant secrets, that is the symmetry of the Oktober Projekt, and it is ready to enter a new phase.’
‘And you passed all this on to RUS/OPS?’
‘No, I still thought Lubov was winding me up, so I watered everything down, kept it vague, sold it to RUS/OPS as the Oktober Projekt and nothing more.’
The scale of Bensham’s disclosure sent him pacing around the room once more. Catching his reflection in a cracked Tower of London souvenir mirror, Bensham scowled at the memory of being responsible for Lubov’s treasure.
‘What was RUS/OPS response?’
‘More or less ignored me,’ Bensham admitted. ‘I was told to back off, told it was way above my pay scale and they would handle it. I guess that’s why they sent you and Mr. Foula.’
That’s why they sent me and Alistair thought Nick; realising that Lubov was already a marked man before they even reached Moscow because Bensham had condemned
him to death. Lubov must have suspected as much when Bensham cut him free reasoned Nick, so he did what anybody would do; he tried to save himself, he made sure that his treasure went on ahead of him, sent in advance for his arrival in London.
‘Does that make any sense?’ Bensham asked, moodily attempting a reprieve.
At that precise moment Nick didn’t know what made sense. ‘Not now, but it may do,’ he said.
Unconvinced by Nick’s assurance, Bensham shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled, fastening the buttons on his coat.
‘You should be,’ Nick answered as Bensham sloped off through the door.
Turning off the electric fire, Nick made his way down to reception, avoiding Easton’s attempts at anything close to a conversation.
At the newsagents across the street a customer was accusing the assistant of short changing him, their bitter feud hanging in the musty air. Nick bought a bar of chocolate between accusations; lingering in the doorway, spinning a wire rack of postcards crisp and brown from a forgotten sun, he watched a Service car drop off a team of two from internal security.
A check along both sides of the street from the hotel steps and the internal security team swept inside. Bensham has tried to cut a deal and save his own neck by giving them mine he thought; or Hawick has had me listed as wanted, a handsome bounty to be claimed, and even Freddy had to make ends meet. This is still their territory Nick reasoned. Their lies, their denials; these are the contours on the map. Striding smartly away from the newsagents Nick took a call on his phone.
Four
Someone to Trust
London, November
Nick came out of the Tube at London Bridge station, and by Battle Bridge Lane he already had a scent of the river. The Thames was ebbing and its mud reeked of salt and diesel. Around him he saw a river robbed of its soul, its warehouses gentrified, squeezed between utilitarian office blocks and apartments. The warehouses had been built to store exotic goods and had somehow survived the best intentions of the Luftwaffe during the Blitz, but they had succumbed to the developers and now stored people instead. Calling it Docklands was the supreme irony, he decided pressing on. And for once he played the good tourist, queuing to pay his entry fee to board H.M.S. Belfast on a grey freezing afternoon, complete with a small blue rucksack on his back bought from a branch of Blacks in Kensington. Ambling round the upper deck, Nick selected a position on the starboard rail by the bow turrets. A few tourists in two and threes strolled by venturing up to the bow. Towards the stern, a school party loud and boisterous intent on mutiny, and Nick prayed they weren’t heading his way. Turning his back on the river, Nick watched Rossan pelt up the gangway as though the ship was about to sail without him.