A Perfect Spy

Closing his window Brotherhood stopped the car in a village where no one knew him. He was too early. He had needed to get out of London, out of touch, away from Kate’s brown stare. Give him one more hopeless damage-limitation conference, one more session on how to keep it from the Americans, one more glance of pity or reproach from Kate, or of plain hatred from Bo’s grey army of suburban mandarins, and possibly, just possibly, Jack Brotherhood might have said things that everyone, but most of all himself, would afterwards have regretted. So he had volunteered for this errand instead, and Bo with rare promptness had said what a good idea, who better? And he knew as soon as he cleared Bo’s doorway that they were as glad to see him go as he was to leave. Except for Kate.

“Just do keep phoning in if you don’t mind,” Bo called after him. “Three-hourly at most. Kate will know the score. Won’t you, Kate?”

Nigel followed him down the corridor. “When you phone in, I want you coming through Secretariat. You’re not to use his direct line and I shall need to speak to you first.”

“And that’s an order,” Brotherhood suggested.

“It’s a temporary licence and it can be withdrawn at any time.”

The church had a wooden porch, a footpath led beside a playing field. He passed a farmyard with brick barns and smelt warm milk on the autumn air.

“We evacuate them in echelons, Jack,” Frankel is saying in his hand-pressed Euro-English. “That’s if we evacuate them at all.”

“And on my say-so,” Nigel adds from the wings.

The room is low and windowless and overlit. A uniformed guard mans the peephole. Spaced along the wall sit Frankel’s greying female assistants at their trestle desks. They have brought thermos flasks and share each other’s cigarettes. They have done it all before, like a day at the races. Frankel is fat and ugly, a Latvian headwaiter. Brotherhood recruited him, Brotherhood promoted him. Now he was taking over Brotherhood’s mess. So it goes. It is three in the morning. It is today, six hours ago.

“Day one, Jack, we move only head agents,” says Frankel with a doctor’s false assurance. “Conger and Watchman in Prague, Voltaire in Budapest, Merryman in Gdansk.”

“When do we begin?” says Brotherhood.

“When Bo waves the flag, and not before,” says Nigel. “We’re still evaluating and we still regard Pym’s loyalties as quite possibly impeccable,” says Nigel, like somebody mastering a tongue-twister.

“We move them very quietly, Jack,” says Frankel. “No goodbyes, no flowers for the neighbours, no finding somewhere for the cat. Day two radio operators, day three the cut-outs, subagents. Day four whoever’s left.”

“How do we reach them?” Brotherhood asks.

“You don’t, we do,” says Nigel. “If and when the Fifth Floor says it’s necessary, which at the moment, I repeat, is pure hypothesis.”

Kate has followed them in. Kate is our widowed English spinster, pale and sculptural and beautiful, who at forty mourns the loves she never had. And Kate is still Kate, he can see it as clear as ever in her eyes.

“Maybe we pick them off the street when they go to work,” Frankel continues. “Maybe we bang on the door, tell a friend, leave a note somewhere. Just anything we think of, so long as it wasn’t done before.”

“That’s where you’ll be able to help if we get that far,” Nigel explains. “Telling us what’s been done before.”

Frankel has paused before a map of Eastern Europe. Brotherhood waits a step behind him. Head agents red, subagents blue. So much easier to kill a pushpin than a man. Still gazing at the map Brotherhood remembers an evening in Vienna. Pym is playing host, Brotherhood is Colonel Peter bringing London’s thanks for ten years’ service. He remembers Pym’s gracious speech in Czech, the champagne and medals, the handshakes, the assurances, the quiet waltzes to the gramophone. And this dumpy couple in brown, he a physicist, she a senior lady in the Czech Ministry of the Interior, lovers in betrayal, their faces glistening with excitement as they whirl round the drawing-room to the strains of Johann Strauss.

“So when do you start?” Brotherhood asks again.

“Jack, that is Bo’s judgment,” Nigel insists, dangerously patient.

“Jack, the Fifth Floor has ruled that the most important thing is to look busy, act natural, keep everything normal,” says Frankel, picking a sheaf of telegrams from his desk. “They use letter boxes? So clear the letter boxes like normal. They got radio? So send radio like normal, stick to all the normal schedules, hope the opposition are listening.”

“That’s the most important thing at the moment,” Nigel says, as if anything Frankel says is invalid until he says it too. “Total normality in all areas. One premature step would be fatal.”

“So would a late one,” Brotherhood says as his blue eyes start to catch fire.

“They’re waiting for you, Jack,” Kate says, meaning, come away, there’s nothing you can do.

Brotherhood does not move. “Do it now,” he tells Frankel. “Take them into the embassies. Broadcast a warning. Abort.”