knack during Marchant’s teenage years of striding into the sitting room whenever he was watching a sex scene on television.
‘It’s OK, I looked away for the money shot,’ Prentice said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Fielding sends big love and kisses.’
Marchant wasn’t sure if he was pleased that London had sent Prentice. On balance, he thought he was. To look at, Prentice was smoothness personified, from the swept-back hair to the cut of his safari suit: old-school spy. Just the sort Marchant needed to help him out of the old-school fix he found himself in. Prentice had recently returned from a three-year tour of Poland, where he had helped Marchant escape from a black site, but he was too old for regular deskwork in Legoland, too much of a troublemaker for a management role. Human Resources had branded him a ‘negative sneezer’, spreading dissent rather than ’flu. Fielding had ignored the warning memos, as he usually did with anything sent from HR, and deployed him as a firefighter, ready to be dispatched to global trouble spots at the drop of a panama.
‘They want me to meet someone,’ Marchant said. ‘A friend of my father’s.’
‘That narrows it down,’ Prentice replied. ‘Your old man was a popular Chief. Any other clues?’
‘The meeting’s in London.’ He decided not to tell Prentice about the private view. In his current situation, it helped him to feel in control if he knew at least something that others around him didn’t. ‘I presume it’s with one of theirs, given the need to persuade me,’ Marchant continued, glancing at the television.
‘Moscow still rules. Christ, it’s a while since I’ve seen Eva Shirtov in action. Makes me feel almost nostalgic.’
‘I need to sort it.’ Marchant wasn’t in the mood for flippancy. He was embarrassed.
‘It’s already taken care of.’ Prentice walked over to the TV and ejected a disc from the player in the cabinet below it. ‘Master copy,’ he said, throwing it onto the bed next to the remote.
‘I thought you said it was being broadcast around the resort.’
‘That was their plan. I retrieved the disc while you were having lunch.’
Marchant felt a wave of relief, but he was also irritated. He hated being indebted to anyone.
‘Aren’t they going to notice?’ He knew it was a pointless question, that Prentice would have tied off any loose ends. He had more experience of the Russians than anyone in the Service. Marchant remembered listening to him at the Fort, which he visited every year to address the new IONEC recruits. They had sat in rapt silence as he spoke of brush passes in Berlin, dangles, and how, as a young officer, he had played Sibelius’s
Sure enough, Prentice didn’t reply to Marchant’s question, letting its foolishness grow in the silence. Instead, he went to the window and peered through the curtain at the Russians’ villa. Marchant joined him.
‘When the Russians cross the line, you have to respond with interest,’ Prentice said, watching as a suited man approached the villa with a posse of local Italian police behind him. ‘Remind them where the line is. Otherwise it moves. They’ll respect you more, too. They don’t like weak enemies.’
‘Who’s that with the police?’
‘Giuseppe Demuro, manager of the resort, old friend of the family. He received an anonymous tip-off half an hour ago that the occupants of villa 29 were trying to broadcast pornographic videos across the resort.’
‘But we’ve got the disc.’
‘I swapped it for a different one.’
Prentice turned and picked up the remote from the bed, then clicked onto the resort’s in-house channel. The footage was grainy, but it was possible to see an older man with a younger woman, lying on a bed. It was also possible to see that the man was the Prime Minister of Russia and the young woman wasn’t his wife.
‘The oligarch currently staying in the penthouse by the sea is a close friend of the Kremlin. He won’t be amused. Come, we must go.’
36
‘Nikolai Primakov was an unusual case,’ Cordingley said, stopping at a disused coastguard hut to take in the view of the bay. ‘Once in a lifetime.’ They were walking west along the cliffs towards Lamorna. Cordingley was too old to go far now, but he had insisted that they should talk in the open, away from his house. His former hostility had passed, but there was no warmth, no offer of tea. ‘The initial approach was made by Stephen,’ he continued. ‘Never forget that. He’d met Primakov a few times at cultural events in Delhi, liked him on a personal level, singled him out for company. He also sensed a deep unhappiness behind all the smiles.’ Cordingley paused. ‘Primakov wasn’t the dangle, we dangled Stephen Marchant.’
‘And you’re still sure of that?’ Fielding asked.
‘More so than ever. And I think back over it often. Once Stephen had recruited him, Primakov’s true value became apparent to us. Dynamite. K Branch, First Chief Directorate. You couldn’t get better than that. And he knew much more than his rank should have allowed, particularly about KGB operations in Britain. The problem was, he kept talking about defecting, which would have been no good to us at all. To keep him useful, he needed to be promoted, not exfiltrated, so Stephen and I devised a plan for him, something to impress his superiors in Moscow Centre.’
‘You let Stephen be recruited by Primakov.’
Another pause as they watched the seagulls circling below. ‘It was actually Stephen’s idea. Brilliant, even now. Moscow thought they’d turned a rising MI6 agent, giving Primakov an excuse to meet regularly with Stephen. There was just one problem: the intel we had to give Primakov to keep Stephen credible as a Soviet asset.’
They both knew what Cordingley meant by this, but neither wanted to speak about it. Not yet. The moment demanded a respectful pause, a lacuna. Instinctively, they looked around to see if anyone might be within earshot, then walked on. On one side the coast path was overshadowed by a steeply rising hillside of gorse, pricked with yellow flowers. On the other was the Atlantic, swelling over flat black rocks far beneath them. It would have been difficult for anyone to listen in on their conversation, except perhaps if they were on a well-equipped trawler, which both men knew was not beyond the realms of Russian tradecraft. But the last boat had now slipped past them towards Newlyn, and the bay was empty, the coast clear.
Cordingley spoke first. He had stopped again and was facing the Atlantic, his thin white hair teased by the sea breeze. ‘We couldn’t give Moscow chickenfeed. They would have been immediately suspicious. The decision to pass them high-grade American intel was never approved by anyone, never formally acknowledged. I assume it remained that way, even when the Yanks went after Stephen.’
‘Cs’ eyes only.’
Fielding thought back to his first week as Chief of MI6, the evening he had spent sifting through the files in the safe in his office. It contained the most classified documents in Legoland, unseen by anyone other than successive Chiefs. They were even more invisible than ‘no trace’ files, short, unaccountable documents that read like briefing notes from one head to the next, outlining the Service’s deniable operations, the ones that had never crossed Whitehall desks. It had reminded Fielding of the day he had become head of his house at school, more than forty years earlier. A book was passed on from one head to the next, never seen by anyone else. It identified the troublemakers and bullies, in between tips on how to deal with the housemaster’s drink problem.
‘There’s no doubt someone in Langley got enough of a sniff to distrust Stephen, but I’m confident that Primakov’s still known only to the British.’
‘So why have you come here today?’
‘He’s back.’
‘In London?’ It was the first time Cordingley had seemed surprised.
Fielding nodded. ‘Next week. I need to know if we can still trust him.’
‘Primakov only dealt with Stephen. Refused to be handled by anyone else. He must have been frightened when the Americans removed Stephen from office, and upset when he died. It’s whether he’s bitter that counts. For almost twenty years, we kept promising him a new life in the West.’
