Our Kind of Traitor

‘That’s diplomats. We’re not gentlemen.’

‘So you lie to save your hides.’

‘That’s politicians. Different game entirely.’

8

At midday of a sunny Sunday, ten hours after Perry Makepiece returned to Primrose Hill to make his peace with Gail, Luke Weaver renounced his place at the family lunch table – his wife Eloise having cooked a plump free- range chicken and bread sauce specially, his son Ben having invited an Israeli school friend – and with his apologies ringing in his ears, abandoned the red-bricked terrace house on Parliament Hill that he could ill afford, and set off for what he believed was the decisive meeting of his chequered Intelligence career.

His destination, as far as Eloise and Ben were allowed to know, was his Service’s hideous riverside headquarters in Lambeth, dubbed by Eloise, who was of aristocratic French extraction, la Lubianka- sur-Tamise. In reality it was Bloomsbury, as it had been for the last three months. His chosen mode of transport, either in spite of the tension brewing in him or because of it, was neither tube nor bus, but shanks’s pony, a habit he had acquired during his stints in Moscow where three hours of pavement-bashing in all weathers were standard fare if you were looking to clear a dead letter box or sidestep into an open doorway for a thirty- second breathless handover of cash and materials.

To reach Bloomsbury from Parliament Hill on foot, a walk for which Luke customarily allowed himself a good hour, it was his practice, so far as possible, to take a different route each day, the purpose being not to shake off notional pursuers, though the thought was seldom far from his head, but to savour the byways of a city he was keen to get to know again after years of service overseas.

And today, what with the sunshine and the need to clear his head for action, he had decided on a stroll through Regent’s Park before swinging eastwards across town; and to that end had added an extra half-hour to his journey. His mood, shot through with anticipation and excitement, was also one of dread. He had slept little if at all. He needed to steady the kaleidoscope. He needed ordinary, unsecret folk to look at, flowers, and the world outside.

‘A wholehearted yes from him, and a wholehearted yes, damn you from her,’ Hector had enthused over the encrypted phone. ‘Billy Boy will hear us out at two this afternoon and the Lord is in His Heaven.’

* * *

Six months ago, when Luke was back on home leave after three years in Bogota, the Queen of Human Resources, disrespectfully known throughout the Service as the Human Queen, had informed him that he was headed for the shelf. He had expected no less. All the same, her message took him a few painful seconds to decode:

‘The Service is surviving the recession with its usual proverbial resilience, Luke,’ she assured him, in a tone so blithely optimistic that he could have been forgiven for thinking that, far from being thrown out on his ear, he was about to be offered a Regional Directorship. ‘Our stock in Whitehall has frankly never been higher, I’m pleased to say, nor our job of recruitment easier. Eighty per cent of our latest intake of young hopefuls have got First Class Honours degrees from decent universities and nobody talks about Iraq any more. Some of them Double Firsts. Would you believe it?’

Luke would believe it, but forbore from saying that he had acquitted himself pretty decently for twenty years on the strength of a modest Second.

The only real problem these days, she explained, in the same determinedly upbeat tone, was that men of Luke’s calibre and pay grade who had reached their natural watershed were becoming harder and harder to place. And some just couldn’t be placed at all, she lamented. But what was she to do – tell her – with a young Chief who liked his staff to have no Cold War baggage attached to them? It was just too sad.

So the very best she could manage, she was afraid, Luke, superb as he’d been in Bogota, and terribly brave – and incidentally the way he conducted his private life was nothing whatever to do with her, provided it didn’t affect his work, which patently it hadn’t – all spoken in a gabble between brackets – would be a temporary vacancy in Administration until the present incumbent returned from her maternity leave.

Meanwhile, it might be a good idea for him to have a chat with the Service’s Resettlement people to see what they had to offer in the big world: which, contrary to all the nonsense he might have read in his newspaper, wasn’t all doom and gloom by any means. The terror thing, and the threat of civil unrest, were doing wonders for the private-security sector. Some of her very best ex-officers were earning twice as much as they’d earned in the Service, and loving it. With a field record like his – and his private life settled, which by all accounts it was, although it was nothing to do with her – she had no doubt at all that Luke would be a hugely desirable asset to his next employer.

‘And you’re not in need of post-traumatic counselling or one of those things?’ she asked solicitously, as he was leaving.

Not from you, thank you, thought Luke. And my private life isn’t settled.

* * *

The Administration Section had its dismal being on the ground floor, and Luke’s desk was as near to the street as you could get without actually being thrown into it. After three years in the kidnap capital of the world, he did not take easily to such matters as mileage allowance for home-based junior staff, but tried his best. His surprise had been all the greater therefore when a month into his sentence he lifted the phone that hardly ever rang to hear himself being summoned by Hector Meredith to lunch with him forthwith at his famously dowdy London club.

‘Today, Hector? Christ.’

‘Come early and don’t tell a fucking soul. Say it’s the time of the month or something.’

‘What’s early?’

‘Eleven.’

‘Eleven? Lunch?’

‘Aren’t you hungry?’

The choice of time and place turned out to be not quite as outlandish as might have appeared. At eleven on a weekday morning a decaying Pall Mall club resounds to the honk of vacuum cleaners, the singsong chatter of underpaid migrant labourers laying up for lunch, and little else. The pillared lobby was empty save for a decrepit doorman in his box and a black woman mopping the marble floor. Hector, roosting on an old carved throne with his long legs crossed, was reading the Financial Times.

* * *

In a Service of nomads pledged to keep their secrets to themselves, hard information about any colleague was always difficult to come by. But even by these low standards, the sometime Deputy Director Western Europe, then Deputy Director Russia, then Deputy Director Africa & South East Asia and now, mysteriously, Director Special Projects, was a walking conundrum or, as some of his colleagues would have it, maverick.

Fifteen years back, Luke and Hector had shared a three-month Russian-language immersion course conducted by an elderly princess in her ivy-covered mansion in old Hampstead, not ten minutes from where Luke now lived. Come evening, they would share a cathartic walk on the Heath. Hector was a fast mover in those days, physically and professionally. Striding out with his gangly legs, he was a hard fellow for little Luke to keep up with. His conversation, which often went over Luke’s head in both senses and was peppered with expletives, ranged from the ‘two greatest conmen in history’ – Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud – to the crying need for a brand of British patriotism that was consistent with the contemporary conscience – usually followed by a typically Hector U-turn, in which he demanded to know what conscience meant anyway.

Only rarely since then had their paths crossed. While Luke’s field career followed its predictable course – Moscow, Prague, Amman, Moscow again, with spells of Head Office in between, and finally Bogota – Hector’s rapid ascent to the fourth floor seemed divinely foretold and his remoteness, so far as Luke was concerned, complete.