The Dark Chronicles (39 page)

That was even more worrying, if he’d
wanted
to do it: a Walter Mitty type. I didn’t like the sound of any of it.

‘You seem familiar with this man,’ said Haggard.

‘I ran him five years ago,’ I said, ‘but as an informant.’

Nobody said anything. I looked around the room and wondered
who would break the silence. Then I realized that they were all looking at me. They had to be joking.

‘It sounds as if he’s in very deep, and I don’t think sending in someone new at this stage would help. Besides, my face is too well known in Rome.’

‘Not by these people,’ said Haggard. ‘And it’s an advantage that you already know the city: you know how it works. We need to find out whatever it is Barchetti knows. What if John’s death is just the start of something much bigger?’

I didn’t give a stuff about Farraday, and if there had been a project to assassinate intelligence bureaucrats across the globe I’d have been all in favour of it. But I knew that there wasn’t, and that Farraday had been killed in my place. I didn’t want any of them to discover that fact, so I needed to stay here and manoeuvre myself into taking over the investigation. If I were in Italy, Christ knew what they might dig up.

‘Of course I care,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid I’m under doctor’s orders not to travel anywhere for the next two months. I only came out of isolation a few days ago.’

‘Yes,’ said Osborne, ‘Paul picked up some dreadful disease in Nigeria. Have they figured out which one yet?’ I shook my head. ‘He’s not fully recovered, and I agree it would be extremely dangerous to send him out in his current condition. We also need him here. We need to reorganize in the wake of this, and I’ll require his help.’

Haggard leaned back in his chair and cracked his knuckles together. ‘Well, I’m afraid
I’m
going to require much more than this to take to the PM,’ he said, gesturing at the dossier in front of him. ‘What we need is action. If these people are connected with John’s death, I suggest we do something that hits back at them.’

‘Were you thinking clandestine or covert, sir?’ said Osborne.

He squinted at him. ‘Remind me of the difference.’

Osborne smiled softly and spread his hands along the table. ‘Clandestine is when you don’t want anyone to know what you’re doing; covert is when you’re pretending to do something else.
Helping to instigate a coup is usually clandestine; sending an agent into a country and calling him an embassy official is covert.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Haggard, ‘as long as it can’t be traced back to us. Perhaps send in the agent under diplomatic cover, as you say, and then get him to work clandestinely – is that possible?’

Osborne inclined his head, thinking about it. ‘It depends on what you want done.’

‘I want whoever was responsible for this to be found and killed, as quickly as possible,’ he spat out. He nodded at the stenographer. ‘Leave that out, please. I will inform the Prime Minister myself later today. I’m happy to take the consequences. John was a dear friend of mine, and you have my unquestioned support to do whatever it takes to find those responsible and…
act
.’

I looked at him. Had he gone quite mad? The target was widening by the second. ‘Is that wise, minister?’ I said, and I could sense the others’ anger directed at me as I said it. ‘I’m all for justice, too, but if these people are planning further attacks, surely it’s best to find out as much as we can about their actions first, rather than go in with all guns blazing?’

‘Don’t give me that! Where are your balls? The head of your outfit has just been murdered in cold blood, in front of your very eyes, while you were
worshipping
. Are you going to take it lying down, or are you going to retaliate? You have a man infiltrated into the Italian division of this group, and even know the identities of some of its members. Let’s find out who the leaders are, send in a hit-man, and pay the bastards back.’

‘It’s not quite that simple, sir,’ said Osborne. ‘First of all, discovering the identities of the leaders is no easy task – it may take years before Barchetti is trusted with that information. Secondly, we don’t have “hit-men”, and haven’t for some time. There’s the SAS, of course, but I hardly think—’

‘What about Paul here?’ said Haggard, puffing out his waistcoat and looking me over as though I were a gladiator he was considering sending into the arena. ‘Can’t you do it? You chased down John’s killer,
ran this agent in Rome. And the report I read on the Nigerian affair said you single-handedly managed to stop this Red Army sniper getting the PM.’

I coughed into my hand. ‘Stopping a sniper and doing the sniping oneself are very different jobs,’ I said. ‘And I got rather lucky in Nigeria.’ But it was no use – I could see he thought I was being the modest English hero. I tried another tack: ‘I think it’s perhaps not a very good idea for us to risk too many senior officers at this juncture.’

‘Nonsense! They won’t see it coming, will they? Element of surprise and all that. Go out to Rome under diplomatic cover and the Russkies will sit back and relax: a fact-finding mission from the top brass. Little do they know, our top brass is rather lethal with a telescopic lens and – bang! – you give the little Eyetie who planned this whole thing a bullet to his brain. An eye for an eye. No messing. They’ll get the message then, all right.’

There was an uncomfortable pause.

‘If we could find the leaders,’ said Osborne finally, ‘it might well be an idea, sir.’

‘There’s no need to be like that,’ said Osborne once we were in the car heading back to the office. ‘Nobody seriously expects you to go out and
kill
anyone – he only put it in those terms because he was upset.’

‘Quite understandable,’ said Innes. ‘We all are.’

I didn’t reply. Haggard hadn’t been in the mood to be dissuaded, I knew, but Osborne’s intervention had really landed me in it. The meeting had ended with the decision that I would leave for Rome at once, subject to medical approval. I wasn’t sure which would be the worse result to get back: that I was still suffering from a potentially fatal and highly contagious tropical disease that nobody was sure how to treat yet, or that I was healthy enough to be sent on a wild-goose chase of a mission to slaughter an as-yet-unidentified terrorist leader in Italy.

I had wanted to be put in charge of the investigation, but this hadn’t been quite what I had in mind. Even ignoring the half-cocked assassination element, I didn’t like it. Parachuting an outsider into an operation was fine: that sort of thing happened occasionally, and could help speed things along. Someone with Italian experience made sense, too. But I had last been in Rome under diplomatic cover, meaning that there was no choice but for me to go in that way again or risk being easily blown. That meant that, despite Osborne leading Haggard on, the potential for clandestine activity was, in fact, extremely limited – I wouldn’t even be able to take a
weapon into the country, for instance. And even if there had been any opportunity for me to take part in that sort of thing, I didn’t believe there was anything I could do that couldn’t have been performed with greater ease and efficiency by the local Station.

There was no way around it, though. Haggard had handed down his ruling, and to refuse to go now would only raise suspicions about my motives. Perhaps the worst thing about the development was that it took me away from London at a crucial moment. Because the other conclusion of the meeting had been that Innes was now to investigate whether or not there were any links between the deaths of the two Chiefs and ‘the business in Nigeria’. That filled me with dread: given the run of Registry, and with me out of the country and unable to influence matters, there was no telling what he might dig up.

The office was in a state of turmoil, and Osborne and Innes both ran off to try to calm their respective troops, while I told my secretary to get onto Urquhart’s to set up an immediate appointment, giving her the emergency authorization phrase.

As I flipped off the desk intercom, there was a knock on the door of my office and Barnes poked his head around.

He was a quiet Londoner of indeterminate age, with greying close-cropped hair and a heavily lined face. After stints in Kenya and Malaya, he had become one of the Service’s bodyguards, most recently for Colin Templeton on weekends in the country. Templeton’s insistence that Barnes live in the neighbouring village rather than be installed in his home, as he had been urged when he had been appointed Chief, had given me a free hand on that crucial night five weeks ago. I would never have risked killing Templeton if Barnes had been in the house that evening, and as it had been the only action available to me to head off my imminent arrest, I had a lot to thank him for.

‘I’m your protection, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ll be accompanying you to Italy.’

‘Under what cover?’

‘Third secretary, sir. It’s already been arranged.’

My desk intercom buzzed: it was Mary, saying that Urquhart’s were expecting me. I told Barnes to get his coat.

*

I sat in the waiting room in a very expensive but uncomfortable leather and chrome chair, flicking through a copy of
Country Life
and wondering who still lived it. Barnes was engrossed in a cheap paperback biography of Churchill he’d brought with him: he had told me on the way over that he was a lover of military history. I’d refrained from mentioning that he had probably lived through most of it. He was more talkative than I’d expected, and had spent much of the journey trying to reassure me that Templeton’s death had been a once-in-a-lifetime lapse and that I was perfectly safe in his hands. It hadn’t cut a lot of ice, because he hadn’t seemed to notice the navy-blue Ford Anglia three cars behind us, driven by an intent, squat-faced man. I’d managed to lose him somewhere in Battersea, but that hadn’t done anything to calm my nerves. They knew I was alive now, and that meant they could try again.

The receptionist walked over and gave me her best Harley Street smile: ‘Doctor Urquhart will see you now.’ Barnes followed, and the receptionist nodded at him – presumably she was used to such nonsense. I wasn’t: it was like having a bloody dog.

Urquhart had been a medic with the Service during the war, and when he had set up his practice afterwards he had bagged the prestigious and, I suspected, rather well-paid job of looking after most of its senior staff. Some of his patients were bankers and barristers, but the Service was his bread and butter, and as a result there was a certain discreet level of security about the place – we had come through an unmarked entrance from a side street, and would leave by another one.

So far I’d been dealt with by his assistants, but today the man himself was there to look me over – I was definitely moving up in the world. I remembered him from previous check-ups as somewhat
wizened, but he was looking almost obscenely healthy, with a glowing tan under his white beard; he looked a little like Father Christmas. I asked him if he’d been on holiday, and he surprised me by saying that he’d been to Jamaica.

‘I go every other year,’ he smiled. ‘I love the vibrancy of the place – and the music.’ I tried not to imagine Urquhart in the nightclubs of Kingston, and mentally cursed myself again for not choosing an easier, more profitable profession. Jamaica in May. What a life.

He tested my reflexes and took some blood, then gave me a test tube and asked me to go behind a screen and fill it. Barnes made to stand up to follow me, but I gave him a look and he sat down again, somewhat sheepishly. Urquhart covered the awkwardness by asking Barnes when he’d last been out to Gosport, which was the Service’s training establishment. Barnes started gassing back immediately, and I peed in peace.

Urquhart took the tube from me and walked to an adjoining room. Barnes lapsed back into silence, and was no doubt hoping to get back to Churchill’s preparations for D-Day.

After a couple of minutes Urquhart came back in, smiling. ‘Good news,’ he said. ‘It looks like you’ve made good progress. You’re not entirely out of the woods, mind you. Have you had any muscle pain since you were last here, or sore eyes?’

‘Quite a lot of muscle pain,’ I said. ‘And my eyes sometimes throb.’

He nodded.

‘How about your hearing? Have you had any more bouts of deafness?’

‘No, but…’

‘Good, good. When any of the symptoms return, take one of these.’ He handed me a plastic tube containing several small blue capsules. ‘Don’t take more than two a day, though. And if you lose your hearing again, stop whatever you’re doing, get to a hospital and contact me through the Service switchboard. I’ll let them know what to give you.’ He picked up a clipboard from his desk and
peered at it. ‘I also see from your file that you’re a smoker – a thirty-a-day man.’

‘I’ve cut down,’ I said.

‘To… ?’

‘About twenty,’ I admitted.

He grimaced. ‘Better make it ten. And go easy on the booze as well, if you can. Otherwise, I think you’re basically in good shape.’

I stared at him. ‘Is that it? You’re clearing me for active duty?’

‘Yes. It’s a bit touch and go, admittedly, but I had a call from the Home Office earlier outlining just how important your work will be in Rome and I certainly don’t think you’re in
that
bad shape. In fact, I’m sure you’ll be fine.’

Of course – Haggard had fixed it. Urquhart gave me a couple of swift jabs with whatever medication they were trying this week, before ticking off all the necessary forms for the Italian embassy. Then I drove back to the office with Barnes to let them know I had the all-clear, stopping off at my flat for a few minutes to throw some clothes and a toothbrush into a hold-all. The office had quietened a little, and Mary booked the tickets and made all the necessary arrangements, with Smale supporting her by speeding up the red tape with Accounts and Personnel. It was all very efficient – lots of bowing and scraping. Partly the promotion, partly the order from the Cabinet, and partly, I supposed, a desire to avenge Farraday’s death, or at least get to the bottom of it. But somehow the likes of Smale kow-towing made me feel even more uncomfortable, and I realized that in an odd way I missed being under suspicion, because I deserved that and could concentrate on getting through it. Now that I was in the clear, the extent of my deception was getting much harder to take. Smale was almost looking up to me – and it was a little chilling.