“What are you going to do?” Pope asked.
“Let them get a smell of the fox. See what they do.”
“That’s all?” Pope asked with a raised eyebrow.
“For now.”
“I have your word?”
Quayle nodded in the dark. Then it was Pope’s turn to stare out at the dark sea. He tried to imagine what it would be like bent over the railway line every day, nothing to look forward to but a walk up to the tobacconist for a paper, and his sister’s incessant complaints about the bus service and why didn’t he want to come to the bingo. After a lifetime of living on his nerves and his reflexes, a lifetime of discipline and craftsmanship and the eye of the hunter, he knew he could not go back, not yet. To go back would mean to die grey and withered in the attic. He looked round at Holly, sitting with her knees up to her chest on the bench, her hair blowing in the wind. She had said very little since the incident on Serifos, but he knew Quayle was right. She was a civilian and a frightened one at that. It was simple. Her life was in danger and he was a close protection specialist. So be it.
He turned back to Quayle, pulled his hat down firmly on his head, and pushed his rimless spectacles up with his forefinger.
“Agreed,” he said
The acting deputy department head of the Fairies at Milburn sat back and read the contact log with some concern, his bushy eyebrows creasing. He didn’t like the ‘no contact’ tag against the three men on the Serifos job. The leader wasn’t too bad, but the younger two had a lot to learn, so it wasn’t the most experienced team he had seen fielded. Even reporting direct as they were to John Burmeister, the drills demanded they called in on a regular schedule. The schedule was sacred, and the second fall-back contact could and would take priority in Embassy coded transmissions back to GCHQ at Cheltenham.
The three had been due to report in at 6pm that evening, but so far there had been nothing. The second contact would be scheduled for exactly twelve hours later. He didn’t like the hot seat. This was the second time he’d stood in while Jonno Smith went on leave, and the last time had been a real bastard because the wheels had come off the Helsinki job, and Oberon had come in at three in the morning and more men had gone into the field and, by the Monday afternoon, there were two dead Russians in a snow drift near the airport. Dead kilos meant everyone watching their backs in case the KGB retaliated, even though the dead men on this occasion were rogue. Selling secrets and then double crossing the buyer was always risky.
He looked up at the clock. Nine hours until the next deadline.
He moved the status on the board from green to amber alert.
Three floors up, John Burmeister had noticed that his team hadn’t called in since midday – but, with other things on his plate, he hadn’t given it much thought. The Greek telephone service was infamous and, without being within easy distance of the embassy, other communications were difficult. Besides, it was a routine task and, if anything, Oberon had overdone the manpower allocation with three men. He saw no reason to be concerned and pushed on with other active files, all generated by Adrian Black’s list of Teddy Morton’s associates and friends.
Within seconds of the team missing the second fall-back contact, the acting deputy department head took a deep breath, calmed himself, and phoned Oberon at home. By 6.40pm, after a quick call to Burmeister and a more lengthy conversation with the Station Chief in Athens, Oberon moved the team from an amber status to a ‘red two’: Situation Unknown but deemed Critical. The only other stage left was a ‘red one’: Personnel Dead or Interned, Mission Failed.
At this time, the mainstream Service at Century house became involved, because whatever had happened to the three Acton Fairies could be part of a larger effort or have wider implications, and that notification was in the overnight report on the desk of the Director General, Sir Gordon Tansey-Williams. It was the talk of the building that morning – after all, as one administrator pointed out with morbid glee, the Service hadn’t lost three men on one job since 1957 and they were killed when a car crashed in Germany.
For the service, with its strictly defined areas of responsibility, the situation was now becoming confused. The job was still technically under the control of the Counter Espionage department head, but he was still in hospital and it was uncertain when, if ever, he would be out to resume his responsibilities. He had a small, very talented department – but no one individual was capable of assuming control. Burmeister, as the only other fully briefed senior man, had filled the breach temporarily – but now, with a red two code on the board, there was every chance that Milburn would lose the matter to Century.
Sir Martin Callows eased his bulk from his seat and walked ponderously to the fireplace. The whole scenario was ugly. Seven dead and one maimed for life – and now a possible three additional bodies on the tally. All his people and, so far, for nothing. Still no real smell of the quarry. All he had was Black’s feel for it. Black had said he thought Henry Arnold was correct in his belief that Meredith Mortimer was an aside to the main issue. Yes she was a spy, yes she had been pillow talking with the Soviet, but that was all. She was simply the method by which Moscow Centre knew that the Service was onto something erased and hidden, something concealed with great care and valuable enough to kill for. Something called Long Knives by the Kilos, and known about by our dead investigator whose main
