He seemed to lose his for a moment, but it turned out he was rustling about in a carrier bag under his desk. When he reappeared he was holding a bottle. There were two smeary glasses on his desk, the only items there which hadn’t lately been used as an ashtray. He poured two fingers into one glass, four into the other, and pushed the former in Chapman’s direction. To Catherine he said, “If you want to nip straight from the bottle, be my guest.” To Coe, “But you can buy your own.”
Coe didn’t respond. He had spoken more in the past ten minutes than in the last six months. His head was pounding. There was a line of verse stuck in his mind,
“Was there anything else?” he said.
“Are we keeping you up?”
“I just—”
“Yeah, well just don’t.” Lamb half-emptied his glass into his mouth, and didn’t seem worried about savouring the taste. “So that was what the Reds got up to. Doubtless the Yanks had their own version. But what about us? Or wasn’t that on the syllabus?”
Coe said, “Not on the syllabus, no,” and Lamb’s ears twitched.
“His name was Frank. Frank Harkness. American chap, ex-Agency, though I didn’t find that out until later. That he was ex-, I mean. Assumed at the time he was on the books. Well, you do, don’t you? Assume the worst.”
Which was meant in jest but had a sour edge, spoken aloud. Never mind.
“Back then I was gunning for First Desk. Never admitted that before. But it’s true, I took it for granted it was mine for the asking. Simply a matter of waiting out the incumbent, and keeping my copybook clean. Didn’t seem too much to ask. Been doing it for years.”
Though there had been moments when his copybook hadn’t been all that clean. When his conscience hadn’t been spotless, come to that. But again: no time for nitpicking. The details. He had a daughter.
“Her name was Isobel.”
He wondered if he had skipped ahead here. But it didn’t matter; the tape would be running. Spill it all out, let them join the dots for themselves.
“Lovely child.”
She had been, too. It was later that it had all gone wrong. But then, it was later that he was supposed to be talking about, wasn’t it? Project Cuckoo.
“It wasn’t Frank’s idea, exactly,” he said. “The notion had been around for a while. The Agency had tested it, and the Sovs had their version, of course. The Chinese. But not us. Nothing to do with morality or ethics—sheer pragmatism. There’d be big investment required, and the time we’re talking about, well . . . Lines were being redrawn. Gorbachev was beating rugs in the Kremlin, throwing up dust clouds. Nobody knew what the world would look like once they cleared. So not much point in setting up a long-term project to confound our enemies when nobody knew who those enemies would be two Christmases down the line. We’d have ended up looking foolish. And the main objective of an Intelligence Service is not to look foolish if it can be avoided.”
The words were finding him now. He had always known they would, sooner or later. The Franks of this world were born damage-doers; in their one-eyed crusade to protect their innocent, they’d rain down fire on everyone in sight. And David Cartwright, God help him, had given this particular Frank a brand-new box of matches. So yes, he’d always known there’d be an accounting.
“But he had a different angle, did Frank. And you have to hand it to him, there were some things he saw more clearly than most. One thing had come to an end, so we had to be ready for the next. That’s what he said.”
The old man’s eyes crinkled with the effort of memory. When this was done, he thought, he’d head back home to Rose. Cup of tea, or something stronger. Tell her about his day. Though maybe not this part, no. This story wasn’t one he’d want her to judge him by.
His hands were trembling. Now there was a funny thing.
The woman said, “Are you all right? Would you like another cup of tea?”
This was clever, he conceded. The art of a good debriefing: always allow for the possibility that you can have a rest, that it would soon be over.
You could never have a rest.
It wouldn’t soon be over.
“Extremism, Frank said. That was what was taking hold in the Middle East. All very true, we told him, but it’s not like they’re exporting the stuff, is it? And if they want to chop the hands off thieves, well, it probably keeps shoplifting to manageable levels in downtown Baghdad. Because we’d just won a war, you see? We didn’t want to hear about the next one, not yet.”
“I’m not sure you should be getting yourself into this state.”
