Our Kind of Traitor

source for all this? Why am I being fed snippets all the time, no hard data? Why haven’t you cleared him with us – or her? I don’t remember anything about a professor crossing my desk.’

‘Want to run him, Billy?’

Matlock gives Hector a long, silent stare.

‘Be my guest, Billy,’ Hector urges. ‘Take him over, whoever he or she is. Take over the whole case, Aubrey Longrigg and all. Hand it to the organized crime people, if you prefer. Call in the Met, the security services and the guards armoured while you’re about it. The Chief may not thank you, but others will.’

Matlock is never defeated. Nevertheless, his truculent question has the unmistakable ring of concession:

‘All right. Let’s do some plain talking for a change. What d’you want? How long for, and how much? Let’s have your full bag. Then let’s empty it out a bit.’

‘I want this, Billy. I want to meet Dima face to face when he comes to Paris in three weeks’ time. I want to get trade samples out of him exactly as we would from any high-priced defector: names from his list, account numbers, and a sight of his map – sorry, link chart. I want written approval – yours – to take him to first base on the understanding that if he can provide what he says he can provide, we buy him on the nail, at full market price, and don’t piss around while he tries to flog himself to the French, the Germans, the Swiss – or, God help us, the Americans, who will need one quick look at his material to confirm their current dismal view of this Service, this government and this country.’ A bony forefinger shoots into the air and stays there as the fervent light once more rises to his wide grey eyes. ‘And I want to go barefoot. You follow me? That means no tipping off the Paris Station that I’m there, and no operational, financial or logistical support from you or the Service at any level until I ask for it. Got it? Ditto with Berne. I want the case kept watertight and the indoctrination list closed and locked. No more signatories, no whispering in the corridor to best chums. I’ll handle the case on my own, in my own way, using Luke here and whatever other resources I choose. All right, go on, now have your fit.’

So Hector did hear, thought Luke with satisfaction: Billy Boy hit you with Adrian, and you’ve made him pay the price.

Matlock’s outrage was mingled with frank disbelief. ‘Without the Chief’s word even? Without fourth-floor approval, at all? Hector Meredith flying solo all over again? Taking information from unsymbolized sources on your own initiative for your own ends? You’re not in the real world, Hector. You never were. Don’t look at what your man’s offering. Look at what he’s asking! Resettlement for his whole tribe, new identities, passports, safe houses, amnesties, guarantees, I don’t know what he isn’t asking! You’d have to have the entire Empowerment Committee behind you, in writing, before you’d get me signing up to that. I don’t trust you. Never did. Nothing’s enough for you. Never was.’

‘The entire Empowerment Committee?’ Hector inquired.

‘As constituted under Treasury rules. The full Committee of Empowerment, in plenary session, no subcommittees.’

‘So a clutch of government lawyers, an all-star cast of Foreign Office mandarins, Cabinet Office, the Treasury, not to mention our own fourth floor. You think you can contain that, do you, Billy? In this context? How about the Parliamentary Oversight lot? They’re worth a laugh. Both houses of Parliament, cross-Party, Aubrey Longrigg to the fore, and de Salis’s fully paid-up choir of parliamentary mercenaries, all singing from the same hymn-sheet?’

‘The size and constitution of the Empowerment Committee is flexible and adjustable, Hector, as you very well know. Not all elements have to be present at all times.’

‘And this is what you propose before I’ve even spoken to Dima? You want a scandal before the scandal’s broken? Is that what you’re pushing for? Go wide, blow the source before you’ve let him show you what he’s got to sell, and sod the consequences? Is that seriously what you’re suggesting? You’ll let the shit hit the fan before it’s even turning, all to save your back? And you talk about the good of the Service.’

Luke had to hand it to Matlock. Even now, he did not relax his aggression.

‘So it’s the interests of the Service we’re protecting at last! Well, well. I’m glad to hear it, late as it may be. What are you suggesting?’

‘Hold off your committee meeting until after Paris.’

‘And in the meantime?’

‘Against your better judgement and all you hold dear, such as your own arse, you give me a temporary operational licence, thereby entrusting the whole affair to the hands of a maverick officer who can be disowned the moment the operation goes belly up: me. Hector Meredith has his virtues, but he’s an identified loose cannon and he’s exceeded his brief. Media please copy.’

‘And if the operation doesn’t go belly up?’

‘You assemble the smallest version of the Empowerment Committee that you can get away with.’

‘And you’ll address it.’

‘And you’ll be on sick leave.’

‘That’s not fair, Hector.’

‘It wasn’t intended to be, Billy.’

* * *

Luke never knew what piece of paper it was that Matlock was drawing from the recesses of his jacket, what it said and didn’t say, whether both signed it or only one, whether there was a copy and if so who kept it and where, because Hector reminded him, not for the first time, that he had an engagement, and he had left the room to keep it by the time Matlock was spreading out his wares on the table.

But he would remember all his life the walk back to Hampstead through the last of the evening sunshine, and wondering whether he might just stop by on Perry and Gail at their flat in Primrose Hill on his way, and urge them to run for their lives while there was time.

And from there his thoughts as so often strayed, with no prompting from him, to the booze-sodden sixty- year-old Colombian drug lord who, for reasons neither he nor Luke would ever understand, decided that instead of providing Luke with Intelligence, which he had done for the last two years, he would lock him up in a stinking jungle stockade for a month and leave him to the tender mercies of his lieutenants, then bring him a set of clean clothes and a bottle of tequila and invite him to find his own way back to Eloise.

11

Of the many emotions that Gail had expected to feel as she boarded the 12.29 Eurostar from St Pancras Station bound for Paris on a cloudy Saturday afternoon in June, relief was about the last of them. Yet relief, albeit hedged around with every sort of caveat and reservation, was what she felt, and if Perry’s face opposite her was anything to go by, so did he. If relief meant clarity, if it meant harmony between them restored, and getting back on track with Natasha and the girls and mopping Perry’s brow when he was doing his Land and Liberty number, then Gail was relieved; which didn’t mean she’d tossed her critical faculties out of the window, or was one half as enchanted as Perry patently was by his role as master-spy.

Perry’s conversion to the cause had come as no big surprise to her, though you had to be a Perry-watcher to know just how far he had moved: from high-minded rejection to outright commitment to what Hector referred to as The Job. Sometimes, it was true, Perry would express residual moral or ethical reservations, even doubts – is this really the only way to handle this? Isn’t there a simpler route to the same end? – but he was capable of asking himself the same question halfway up a thousand-foot overhang.

The original seeds of his conversion, she now realized, had been planted not by Hector but by Dima, who since Antigua had acquired the dimensions of a Rousseau-esque noble savage in the Perry lexicon:

‘Just imagine who we’d have been if we’d been born into his life, Gail. You can’t get away from the fact: it’s practically a badge of honour to be selected by him. And I mean, think of those children!’

Oh, she thought of the children all right. She thought of them day and night, and most particularly she thought about Natasha, which was one reason why she had refrained from suggesting to Perry that, stuck out on a