'Does it mean that you've got some time off?'
'Yes and no,' he said.
'I'm here to .. . chase something up.
'Anything you can tell me about?'
He shook his head.
'I'm sorry.
'Dangerous?'
He shrugged.
'Doubt it. I've got to find someone, that's all. Brain work, not bullets. So I'm going to be around, yeah, but I'm also going to be coming and going.'
She nodded.
'Is it always going to be like this?' she asked.
'Me asking, you not telling?'
'For as long as I'm in, yes,' he said.
'You mustn't take it personally.'
'I don't take it personally,' she said, with a flash of irritation, quickly suppressed.
'It's just that we've been together for a year now, on and off, and I'd like to feel that I had some..' access to your life.'
'You have full access to my life,' he told her gently.
'It's just my work that's off limits. And I promise you, you're not missing anything there.'
'But your life is your work,' she protested.
'I can see that in your face. All those missions in Northern Ireland and Bosnia, all those dead men.. . I can see them there behind your eyes.
He shrugged. It was not something he'd ever talked about in much detail. The demons, it was generally accepted, came with the job.
'I want all of you, Alex. Not just the burnt-out remains. He frowned at his Kronenbourg bottle. At the edge of his vision an RUF soldier crouched in blood sodden shock, his lower jaw shot away. Behind him staggered the blackened figure of Don Hammond.
There was a full company of such men quartered in Alex's head now.
Blinking them away, locking on to Sophie's grey green eyes, he smiled.
'I'm all here. And I'm all yours.
EIGHT.
Alex presented himself at the front desk of Thames House at a couple of minutes to nine. Dawn Harding was waiting for him there, briefcase in hand, and signed him in.
'We're wearing Italian today, are we?'
she said, noting his Gucci loafers and running an appraising glance up and down his grey Cerrutti suit.
'I thought you Hereford boys were more comfortable in Mr. Byrite.'
'I know the importance you civil service types attach to appearances,' Alex said equably, fixing his visitor's badge to his lapel.
'You wouldn't want me to let the side down, now would you?'
He followed her into the lift, where she pressed the button for the fourth floor.
'And you found somewhere to stay all right?'
'I managed to get my head down.'
'I'm sure you did.' She stared without expression at the brushed-aluminium wall of the lift. As previously, she was dressed entirely in black and wearing no make-up, perfume or jewellery. Her only accessories were the briefcase large, black and plain and a military issue pilot's chronograph watch. This spareness did not, however, disguise her femininity. In some cuno us way, Alex mused, allowing his gaze to linger around the nape of her neck, it highlighted it.
Or at least it made you wonder.
The lift shuddered to a halt.
'A word of advice,' she said flatly, checking her watch as she marched out into a grey-carpeted corridor flanked by offices.
'The correct form of address for the , ,
deputy director is ma am.
Alex smiled.
'So who are you, then? Matron?'
She gave him a withering glance.
'Dawn will be just fine.'
The deputy director's office was at the far end of the corridor. Dawn left Alex in an ante-room containing a leather-covered sofa and a portrait of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, and disappeared through an unmarked door.
She reappeared five minutes later. Alex was still standing the leather sofa was so slippery he could hardly sit on it and she led him into an office which would have been sunlit had not the blinds been partially lowered. This, Alex guessed, was to prevent glare rendering the computer monitors illegible. There were three of these on a broad, purpose-built desk, along with a telefax console and a tray piled high with what looked like newspaper cuttings. Maps, books and a large flat-screen monitor covered most of the walls, but a painted portrait of Florence Nightingale and a signed photograph of Peter Mandelson romping with a dog went some way towards softening the room's essentially utilitarian lines. At the near end half a dozen leather-and-steel chairs surrounded a low table bearing a tray with a steaming cafeti~re and four civil service-issue cups and saucers.
Behind the desk, silhouetted against the half-closed blinds, sat the deputy director and once again Alex was struck by her handsome, clear-cut features and elegant appearance. Today she was wearing a charcoal suit, which perfectly complemented her shrewd blue eyes and the expensively coiffed gunmetal of her hair.
To one side of her, both hands thrust deep into the pockets of a suit which had probably once fitted him better, stood George Widdowes. To Alex, the studied informality of the posture looked like an attempt to play down his subordinate status.
The deputy director rounded the desk and held out her hand.
'Since we're to be working together, Captain Temple,' she told him with a practised smile, 'I think we should at least know each other's real names. I'm Angela Fenwick, and my full title is Deputy Director of Operations. Dawn Harding and George Widdowes you know. Welcome to Thames House.'
As they arranged themselves in chairs around the table, Angela Fenwick leant forward and pressed down the plunger of the cafetiere.
'Boom!' whispered George Widdowes. No one smiled.
Angela Fenwick turned to Alex.
'I'd like you to know that nothing that is said in this office is recorded, unless you ask for it to be, and nothing you say here is in any way on the record. Basically, you can express yourself freely and I hope you will. The corollary is that you are not to make any mention of what I am about to tell you to anyone, in or outside this agency and that includes your Regimental colleagues, past and present -without my express say so. Do you have any problem with that?'
'No, I don't think so.'
'Good. Coffee, everybody? George, will you be mother?'
When Widdowes was done, Angela Fenwick leant back in her chair, cup in hand, and turned to Alex.
'Craig Gidley's murder,' she said.
'Did that remind you of anything?'
Alex glanced at the others. They were looking at him expectantly.
'You can speak openly in front of George and Dawn.'
Alex nodded.
'PIRA,' he said.
'Belfast Brigade took out those two FRU guys by hammering nails into their heads. Early 1996, it must have been, just after the Canary Wharf bomb. Left the bodies at a road junction outside Dungannon.'
