Uncommon Enemy (6 page)

The baby – the boy she had expected, whom she named James – was born on a spring morning of sun and showers. He was duly fostered and adopted, despite her parents’ offer to
bring him up. Sarah permitted Charles to pay the foster fees, a fairly small sum that was nonetheless gratifyingly hard to find. To his parents’ growing worry, he did nothing about a career
but spent the year following Oxford in a series of labouring jobs, as if physical work might somehow assuage his guilt. It did not, but he still felt that a sentence of nine months’ hard
labour might have been about right.

After that he had joined the army and Sarah went to law school, equipped with a better degree than she had predicted. Their letters became fewer and shorter. Nigel had already joined the Foreign
Office. Three years later, on the very day he had started with MI6, came the letter from Sarah telling him that she and Nigel were to marry. He sent a reply which it still shamed him to recall
– to the effect that he hoped they would both be as happy as they deserved – and went off to MI6 feeling that his old life had dropped away entirely.

All this, and much more, was known to his former mentor, Matthew Abrahams. It was known, too, to Sonia, Matthew’s sometime secretary and later Charles’s confidente; but to no-one
else still serving apart – now – from Nigel himself. When Matthew had rung Charles in Scotland the day before Jeremy Wheeler’s call, he had come characteristically to the point,
with no preliminaries.

‘This is to warn you, Charles, that you’ll get a call from Jeremy Wheeler asking you to come back for a while to help out with an old case. The case is Gladiator, who has
disappeared. In seeking your help, they won’t know what they’re asking. That is, they don’t know the full story. They know only that you were his first and most influential case
officer. They do not know the real reason I have instructed them to ask you. I’ll explain when we meet. If we meet.’

The voice was lighter than Charles remembered, but it was still the same precise, slightly daunting, slightly playful Matthew Abrahams he had revered and loved. Tall and stooping, with mordant
humour and ruthless integrity, he had more than once been Charles’s boss and latterly, his protector, as Charles had chosen an increasingly eccentric career. Liked and respected by those who
worked for him, but treated warily by peers and superiors, he was the most complete intelligence officer Charles had known. He treated Charles with an assumption of equality that Charles never
believed he merited.

‘I’m warning you to give you time to think before Jeremy rings,’ Matthew had said. ‘You may not wish to reopen that particular can of worms. I hope you will, of course
– not least because I have my own agenda, as ever.’ His chuckle had become a cough. ‘But if you do come back you’ll find the office much changed and you’ll hate it.
Not only because of the merger. The old office you and I knew has succumbed to management blight: meetings, mission statements, jargon, targets, obsession with process, the mania for measurement.
Everything that can be counted, is; which, almost by definition, is what doesn’t matter. Nothing of value can be measured, so it’s not valued.’

‘But you’re still there. You’re running it, aren’t you?’

‘I’m here, just. I’m still in charge, I’m responsible for the SIA but I don’t run it. Nobody runs it. It’s become a self-regarding, self-perpetuating
bureaucracy, like all the others. If I insist on something – such as asking you back – it happens. Everything else is being delayed pending my imminent departure, for which they can
barely wait.’

‘So the amalgamations haven’t worked?’

‘They have. That was their point, to make it as it is.’

‘Why did you stay on?’

‘Because I could see the awfulness coming and hoped to ameliorate it. I failed. Now it’s too late. We’ll discuss that when you come. If you come.’

‘Meanwhile I read that Nigel Measures has forsaken Europe to return to the bureaucracy and take over from you?’

‘That is why you are needed, Charles,’ Matthew had said.

The door-banger was banging less frequently now. Presumably it hurt your hands after a while. And, presumably, if you did too much of it in prison you would be silenced by the
other prisoners. It was the prospect of living with them that worried Charles more than the law, or the system, or even the plot that had put him where he was.

He continued trying to reconstruct all that had happened in the few weeks since his return. When he reported to the new Head Office on Victoria Street he found a renovated 1960s building guarded
by two armed policemen, who were drinking tea from plastic mugs and did not see him enter. In Visitor Reception there were red plastic seats and notices forbidding smoking or proclaiming the SIA an
equal opportunities employer. Half a dozen people were waiting, four men and two women, all, like Charles, in suits. A man and a woman were negotiating with another woman behind a plate glass
window, repeating their names and business into a microphone. Eventually Charles was summoned. The woman behind the glass had a round face and listened open-mouthed as he gave her his and Jeremy
Wheeler’s names.

‘Photo ID, driving licence, passport, other government office pass or similar,’ she said.

‘Sorry, I didn’t know.’

‘You should’ve been told.’

‘Perhaps you could ring Jeremy Wheeler and tell him I’m here.’ If she would only close her mouth now and again, he thought, she could look like a goldfish.

‘Extension?’

‘Sorry.’

She sighed and turned to her screen. ‘Name?’ she asked again, then turned off the microphone and picked up the phone. When she’d finished she turned back and said something
inaudible. He pointed at his ears and she switched on the microphone. ‘Take a seat.’

After a few minutes he was summoned back to the window to see an overweight, balding, florid man wearing jeans, a wide brown belt with a silver buckle and a pink shirt. He realised, rather than
recognised, that it was Jeremy. Jeremy nodded to the woman and turned away, looking cross.

Charles was directed into a corridor, where his jacket and the book he was carrying were put through a machine by two men in white shirts and black ties. They put his mobile phone in a cage on
the wall and gave him a ticket for it.

Jeremy’s handshake was limp, which seemed out of keeping with his manner. They probably had not shaken hands since the day they had reported for their training course, decades before.
Jeremy led the way to the lifts. ‘We’ll have to get you a pass and all that, assuming you feel up to the job.’

They waited with two unshaven men in T-shirts and trainers and a similarly dressed but cleaner-looking woman escorting one of the other suited visitors. ‘Dress down Friday,’ Jeremy
murmured.

‘Compulsory?’

‘Of course not, but everyone does, except for a few fuddy-duddies.’

In the lift were notices about a talk on emerging terrorist technologies and a lunchtime meeting of the gay and disability rights group.

‘It’s not just Fridays, as you’ll see,’ said Jeremy when the others had left the lift. ‘We’re much less formal than the old office. Quite rightly, have to
move with the times, be more egalitarian. No time now for all that stuffiness and poncing about of your day.’

Jeremy’s talent for gratuitous offence had evidently not been discarded with his pin-stripes. It hadn’t mattered with his peers, who had never taken him seriously, but it might have
with inferiors, Charles thought; and would have with agents, if he had ever run any.

‘We’ve changed operationally, too,’ Jeremy continued. ‘Much more coal-face work, direct approaches, take-it-or-leave-it. We get our hands and knees dirty now. All that
faffing about pretending to be diplomats chatting up other diplomats, all those endless cultivations and natural cover operations leading nowhere – sort of thing you used to get involved in
– all that’s gone. We just get on with the job now.’

They headed along a corridor decorated with child-like paintings of bushy-topped trees and crooked houses until they came to a large open-plan office crowded with desks, screens and printers.
Televisions lined the walls, mostly showing football repeats with the sound turned down. It was busy and noisy and everyone was young.

Jeremy waved his arm. ‘The heart of Prevail. Our counter-terrorist – CT – strategy. Valerie’s very keen on CT.’

‘Valerie?’

‘Valerie Hubbard, our new security minister. We have our own now instead of messing about with the foreign secretary and home secretary. You must have read about her. Nigel – Nigel
Measures – is very close to her. They go back a long way, politically. How he got the top job, I s’pose. Useful to have a CEO who’s politically well plugged-in.’

There was another corridor, then another open-plan office. Jeremy waved his arm again. ‘My empire. HR.’

‘Don’t you find it distracting, working like this?’

‘Encourages activity and communication.’

‘Need to know? Supposing you have to discuss something sensitive?’

Jeremy pointed to a round table and chairs in a corner. ‘Break-out area. You talk there. But all that need-to-know stuff you and I were brought up on just got in the way, really. As I
said, we get on with the job now.’ He led Charles into a private office at the end of the room and closed the door.

‘You still have your own, then?’

‘Have to. Everything I do is confidential. I only deal with what’s important. If it’s not important it doesn’t reach me. Personally, I’d sooner be out there on the
factory floor, but there we are. Can’t be forever discussing people’s futures in front of other people. Or telling them they haven’t got one, which happens more often now. Much
better at getting rid of dead wood than we used to be.’ He chuckled. ‘Coffee? We make our own. No more secretaries waiting on us hand and foot like you’re used to. We’ll get
it in a minute.’ He sat, his plump features briefly clouded by reflection. ‘Used to have some nice secretaries in the old SIS, though, didn’t we? Smart girls, capable, bright,
attractive.’

‘We did.’

‘Many with naval connections. Or Scots. Very good people here now, though.’

‘I’m sure.’

Jeremy was lost in reflection for a few more seconds, then abruptly resumed, as if having to bring Charles back to the business in hand. ‘No, but the point is, this job. Reason
you’re here. Gladiator. Why you? You may well ask. Recruited him, didn’t you? You were his first case officer, back when he used to report on the IRA? Then Afghanistan and the Taliban
and all that. Well, he’s still in business, reporting on international terrorism. Or was.’

‘Which international terrorists?’

‘Islamists. We’re not supposed to call them that – religious stigmatisation. Anyway, he’s gone missing and they want you to go back through the file – it’s
such an old case, there’s still a paper one – to see if it offers any clues as to motive or contacts. Not my idea, frankly. Came from the chief himself, the old chief, about to be
ex-chief. Apparently he knows the case – you were working for him when it started, something like that. Not often he intervenes now.’ He paused and became solemn. ‘You know
he’s very ill?’

‘You mentioned it when you rang.’

‘Hardly comes to the office now. Not that he’d have lasted much longer, anyway. Can’t cope with change. Frankly, the sooner Nigel’s formally in the chair, the better.
He’s effectively CEO as it is. CEO Dep is his title. As I said on the phone, no more of this old chief or C or CSS nonsense that you’re accustomed to. Time for a new broom. He wants to
see you, though.’

‘Who?’

‘Both of them, actually.’ Jeremy’s solemnity, which Charles now remembered came over him whenever there was any mention of illness, had been replaced by irritation. ‘You
might know why. I don’t. But then I’m only HR. We’ll go to Nigel’s office first. Matthew Abrahams wants to see you in his flat this afternoon.’

Nigel Measures’s office was on the top floor, with a view of Parliament Square and the roofscape of Westminster Abbey and school. It was quieter than the other floors; the carpets newer,
the staff better dressed, the men shaved. From the outer office, marked CEO, they could see Nigel though the open door of his inner sanctum, talking on the phone. He was suited but tie-less,
another new convention. Watching the still sharp and energetic figure as he spoke rapidly into the phone, gesticulating with his free hand, Charles recalled their last meeting. Nigel would do the
same, he was sure. Unsatisfactory from both points of view, it had been a meeting that could have no successor; unless they both pretended to forget it, as they doubtless would now.

It had not been a dramatic meeting, they had had no great falling out, but its context had given it venom. They had seen nothing of each other following Oxford until after Charles had joined
MI6. In his first post there he had had occasional dealings with Nigel’s Foreign Office department. There was no outward awkwardness; they simply resumed at the point they had left off as if
nothing – including Nigel’s marriage to Sarah – had happened in the interval. Nigel had a slightly patronising attitude towards the Friends, as MI6 was known in the Foreign
Office, but was on the whole more inclined to be helpful than not. During the next few years they lunched a few times in Westminster pubs, compared experiences, gossiped about mutual acquaintances,
speculated about their respective futures. They were both, Charles concluded later, natural compartmentalisers, capable of sustaining a relationship in which everything important was sidelined.
Although he was doing well in the Foreign Office, Nigel was still considering a political career.

‘One disadvantage of your service – which I briefly considered joining – is that it’s a very narrow pyramid,’ he said during one of their early lunches. ‘Very
few top jobs compared with the Foreign Office. Fun for the first few years, no doubt, but thereafter narrow in scope, limited horizons and, frankly, rather a limited contribution to policy. If you
want to influence things, particularly if you want to change them, you’re much better off where I am. Better off still in politics, of course. Especially if you’re in
government.’