Ariel took her bookmark from where it rested beside her plate, set it between the pages, closed the book, and then looked at her parents. Her glasses, Crocker noticed, were smudged. Unlike Sabrina, Ariel went to great lengths not to care how she looked.
“Heard that, did you?” Jennie asked.
Ariel nodded. “I crashed my bicycle?”
“Tuesday,” Jennie said. “Yes, you narrowly avoided being hit by a car.”
“On Valentine’s Day?”
“You were distracted, obviously.”
Ariel made a face, disgusted by the thought of the kind of people who cared about things like boys and Valentine’s Day.
Crocker looked at Jennie. “Barclay called?”
“One of his assistants,” Jennie confirmed. “Last evening, before you got home.” She cast a glance to Ariel, then back to Crocker. “Little jugs have big ears.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this last night?”
“You did get home rather late, Paul. It slipped my mind.”
“Did he say why he was calling?”
“The assistant? He wanted to know if Ariel was all right. Said that Sir Frances was quite concerned.”
Ariel asked, “Who’s Sir Frances?”
“Daddy’s boss,” Jennie said.
“You lied to your boss? You told him I’d broken my leg?” Ariel asked Crocker.
“Yes.”
“Do I get a set of crutches, at least?”
Crocker didn’t respond, thinking. Jennie was looking at him, now mildly concerned.
Crocker rose from the table, finishing his tea, leaving his breakfast half eaten. “I’m going to have to go into the office.”
Jennie nodded, which was bearable, but Ariel’s look of disappointment was bitter, and not.
“I’m sorry,” he told his younger daughter.
“You promised we’d go to the show at the Old Town Hall,” Ariel said softly. Like her mother, when Ariel was upset, she wouldn’t raise her voice. Rather, she lowered it until it was almost impossible to hear. “You promised we’d see the puppets, the ones from Japan.”
“I know. I
“I’ll take you,” Jennie said. “We’ll have fun.”
“It’s not the same,” Ariel said, and then Crocker was out of the room, out of earshot.
The guilt dogged him all the way to London.
Ronald Hodgson was at Duty Ops when Crocker entered the Operations Room, supervising a skeletal staff, as appropriate for a weekend without a major operation in the offing. Crocker thought he did an admirable job of concealing his surprise.
“D-Ops on the floor,” Ron declared when he’d recovered, then added, to Crocker, “Didn’t expect you to be coming in today, sir.”
“No,” Crocker agreed, taking a position beside the Duty Ops Desk so he could survey the plasma wall. Lankford’s job in Morocco was posted on the map, with a callout designating the operation as “Bowfiddle,” and a notation reading, “Running—Joint.” Otherwise, there was nothing of immediate interest. Two other minor operations, one in Argentina, surveillance for the MOD, the other in Gibraltar.
Crocker stuck a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, called out to Alexis Ferguson at the MCO Desk. “Have we seen an exchange of signals with Tashkent Station in the last twenty-four hours? Anything at all?”
Alexis tapped her keyboard, quickly bringing up the log, scanning the entries. She was tall and quite thin, with a crown of short black hair, and she had to bend to peer at her monitor. “One exchange, sir, initiated nineteen- twenty-seven hours last night, London to Tashkent, with a reply logged as of oh-thirty-three, local.”
“Whose office initiated the communication?”
“The Deputy Chief, sir. Response by Station Number One, Craig Gillard.”
Crocker scowled, shook his head. Alison Gordon-Palmer had left the building before him the previous night. Unless she’d turned around and come back—which was entirely possible—the inquiry hadn’t been from her office. More to the point, if she was as deep into Sir Walter Seccombe’s pocket as Crocker was now beginning to suspect, she wouldn’t have risked tipping Chace’s run. Which meant that, while the communication appeared to have been initiated by the DC, it most likely hadn’t been.
Which left only two others who could make it look like the communication had come from the DC. Either D- Int, or C.
And Crocker couldn’t imagine why Simon Rayburn would want to hide any communication with a Station, let alone a communication to Tashkent, something he had both the authority and right to do whenever it suited him.
Which left C.
“We have a copy?” Crocker asked.
Alexis began tapping at her console again, then paused. After a moment, she resumed typing, faster, then paused again.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, slowly. “I can’t find a copy.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not here. It may have been purged to the server already.”
“William Teagle, sir. He’s forty-eight hours off, due back Monday morning.”
Crocker turned back to Ron. “Is C in the building?”
One of the phones in the bank at the Duty Ops Desk began ringing, and Ron moved to answer it, saying, “I believe so, sir, yes.”
Crocker grunted, tapping the edge of his cigarette into the ashtray at Ron’s desk, waiting for him to finish with the call. Ron listened, murmured an assent, then hung up.
“C most definitely
“Bloody hell,” was the only thing Crocker could think to say.
In almost every instance prior, Crocker had entered Barclay’s territory to find the other man firmly entrenched, either reigning from behind his desk or in the sitting area, where he would occupy the largest of the leather upholstered chairs arrayed around the coffee table. Barclay, like Crocker, like Seccombe, like Gordon-Palmer, like a thousand others throughout Whitehall, understood the power of the Desk, and the etiquette surrounding its use. Meet an underling while sitting behind it, you demonstrated your superiority in the chain of command; decline to stand upon receiving a guest, you indicated displeasure, or possibly even contempt; rise and move around it to greet, perhaps going so far as to offer a hand for the shaking, you declared anything from camaraderie to gratitude to friendship.
The etiquette of the desk, the ways it could be used, even abused, were legion. Crocker had sometimes thought, in his lighter moments, that the FCO and the Home Office could collaborate on a joint publication to be delivered to all senior civil servants.
In the imagined publication, Crocker always imagined Barclay writing the foreword.
Entering the office on this Saturday morning, though, Crocker wondered if a new chapter mightn’t be in order. Sir Frances Barclay wasn’t behind the desk. He was waiting in front of it.
“You wanted to see me, sir?” Crocker said.