Our Kind of Traitor

In operational planning, there are two opportunities only for flexibility – with me, Lukie?

With you, Hector.

One, when you draw up your plan. We’ve done that. Two, when the plan goes belly up. Until it does, stick like glue to what we’ve decided to do, or you’re fucked. Now shake my hand.

* * *

So here was the question in Luke’s mind as he sat staring at a lot of gobbledegook on the screen of his silver laptop and, with zero minutes to go, waited for Dima to emerge alone from the Salon d’Honneur: did the memory of Hector’s parting homily come to him before he saw the baby-faced Niki and the cadaverous philosopher taking up their positions in the two tall-backed chairs either side of the glass doors? Or was it instigated by the shock of seeing them there?

And who first called him the cadaverous philosopher anyway? Was it Perry or Hector? No, it was Gail. Trust Gail. Gail has all the best lines.

And why was it that, precisely at the moment when he spotted them, the burble in the Salon d’Honneur swelled into a babble, and the great doors opened – actually only one of them, he now saw – to disgorge Dima alone?

Luke’s confusion was not only one of time, but of place. While Dima was approaching from behind him, Niki and the cadaverous philosopher were rising to their feet in front of him, leaving Luke hunched at mid-point between them, not knowing which way to look.

A furious bark of Russian obscenities from over his right shoulder informed him that Dima had drawn to a halt beside him:

‘What the fuck d’you want with me, you shit-ants? You want to know what I’m doing, Niki? I’m taking a piss. You want to watch me piss? Get out of here. Go piss on your bitch Prince.’

Behind his desk, the concierge’s head discreetly lifted. The impossibly chic German receptionist, showing no such discretion, swung round to take a look. Determinedly deaf to all of it, Luke tapped meaninglessly at his silver laptop. Niki and the cadaverous philosopher remained standing. Neither had stirred. Perhaps they suspected Dima was about to make a straight dash for the glass doors and the street. Instead, with a subdued ‘fuck your mothers,’ he resumed his walk across the lobby and into the short corridor leading to the bar. He passed the lift and drew up at the top of the stone staircase that led to the basement lavatories. By then he was no longer alone. Niki and the philosopher were standing behind him, and a few feet behind Niki and the philosopher stood meek, unnoticed little Luke with his laptop under his arm and his blue raincoat over it, needing to go to the loo.

His heart is no longer beating vigorously, his feet and knees feel good and springy. He is hearing and thinking clearly. He is reminding himself that he knows the terrain and the bodyguards don’t, and that Dima knows it too, which gives extra incentive to the bodyguards, if they ever needed it, to be behind Dima rather than in front of him.

Luke is as astonished by their unscripted appearance as Dima patently is. It defeats him, as it does Dima, that they should be harassing a man who is of no further use to them, and will by his own reckoning and probably theirs shortly be dead. Just not here and now. Just not in broad daylight with the entire hotel looking on, and the Seven Clean Envoys, a distinguished British Member of Parliament, and other dignitaries, putting back the champagne and canapes twenty metres away. Besides which, as is well attested, the Prince is fastidious in his killing. He likes accidents, or random acts of terror by marauding Chechen bandits.

But that discussion is for another time. If the plan has gone belly up, in Hector’s words, then it is a time for Luke to exercise flexibility, a time not to finger it but to do it, to quote Hector again, a time to remember the stuff that has been dinned into him on successive unarmed combat courses over the years, but he has never been obliged to put into effect except the once in Bogota, when his performance had been fair to middling at best: a few wild blows, then darkness.

But on that occasion it had been the drug baron’s henchmen who’d had the advantage of surprise, and now Luke had it. He didn’t have the odd pair of paper scissors handy, or the pocketful of small change, or the knotted bootlaces, or any other of the fairly ridiculous bits of household killing equipment that the instructors were so enthusiastic about, but he did have a state-of-the-art silver-cased laptop and, thanks not least to Aubrey Longrigg, huge anger. It had come over him like a friend in need, and at that moment it was a better friend to him than courage.

* * *

Dima is reaching out to shove the door in the middle of the stone staircase.

Niki and the cadaverous philosopher stand close behind him, and Luke stands behind them, but not as close as they are to Dima.

Luke is shy. Descending to a lavatory is a man’s private business, and Luke is a private person. Nevertheless, he is having a life-moment of spiritual clarity. For once, the initiative is his, and no one else’s. For once, he is the rightful aggressor.

The door they are standing in front of is occasionally locked for security reasons, as Dima rightly pointed out in Paris, but today it isn’t. It’s guaranteed to open, and that’s because Luke has the key in his pocket.

Therefore the door opens, revealing the rather poorly lit staircase beneath. Dima is still leading the way but that situation changes abruptly when a truly massive blow from Luke with the laptop sends the cadaverous philosopher clattering without complaint past Dima down the staircase, unbalancing Niki and providing Dima with a chance to seize his hated blond turncoat of a bodyguard by the throat in the manner that, according to Perry, he had fantasized about when describing how he proposed to murder the husband of Natasha’s late mother.

With one hand still round his throat, Dima drives Niki’s astonished head left and right against the nearside wall until his useless, worked-out body collapses under him, and he lands speechless at Dima’s feet, prompting Dima to kick him repeatedly and very hard, first in the groin and then on the side of the head, with the toe of his inappropriate Italian right shoe.

All of this happening quite slowly and naturally for Luke, though somewhat out of sequence, but with a cathartic and mysteriously triumphant effect. To take a laptop in both hands, raise it above his head at full stretch, and bring it down like an executioner’s axe on the cadaverous bodyguard’s neck conveniently placed a couple of steps beneath him was to repay every slight that had been done to him over the last forty years, from his childhood in the shadow of a tyrannical soldier-father, through the catalogue of English private and public schools that he had detested, and the scores of women he had slept with and wished he hadn’t, to the Colombian forest that had imprisoned him, and the diplomatic ghetto in Bogota where he had performed the most idiotic and compulsive of his life-sins.

But in the end, it was undoubtedly the thought of rewarding Aubrey Longrigg for betraying the Service’s trust that, irrational though it might be, delivered the greatest impetus because Luke, like Hector, loved the Service. The Service was his mother and father and his bit of God as well, even if its ways were sometimes imponderable.

Which, come to think of it, was probably how Dima felt about his precious vory.

* * *

Someone should be screaming, but no one is. At the foot of the stairs, the two men slump across one another in seeming defiance of vory homophobic code. Dima is still kicking Niki, who is underneath, and the cadaverous philosopher is opening and closing his mouth like a beached fish. Turning on his heel, Luke treads cautiously back up the steps and relocks the swing-door, returns the key to his pocket, then joins the tranquil scene downstairs.

Grabbing Dima by the arm – who must have just one last kick before he goes – Luke leads him past the lavatories, up some steps and across an unused reception area until they arrive at the iron-clad delivery door marked EMERGENCY EXIT. This door requires no key but has instead a tin green box mounted on the wall, with a glass front and a red panic button inside for emergencies such as fire, flood or an act of terrorism.

Over the last eighteen hours Luke has devoted serious study to this green box with its panic button, and has also taken the trouble to discuss with Ollie its most likely properties. At Ollie’s suggestion, he has loosened in advance the brass screws attaching the glass panel to its metal surround, and snipped through a sinister-looking red-clad wire that leads back into the bowels of the hotel with the purpose of connecting the panic button with the hotel’s central alarm system. In Ollie’s speculative view, the effect of snipping the red wire should be to open the