a sharp-eyed Russian-speaking Anglo-Finnish boy I had recruited as a double agent in Helsinki five years ago. He had gone on to work for my successor on the promise of resettlement in the UK. At first Head Office wouldn’t go near him. It was only after my repeated representations to Bryn Jordan that they agreed to take him on as a member of the lowest form of secret life: junior clerical assistant cleared to Grade C. With cries of Finnish joy, he seizes me in a Russian-style embrace.
And on a top floor condemned to eternal darkness, my ragtag support staff of clerical assistants with bicultural backgrounds and elementary operational training.
Only after we have seemingly completed our grand tour and I am beginning to wonder whether my promised number two exists at all does Giles rap ceremoniously on a stippled-glass door that leads from his own musty office, and there in what I suspect was once a maid’s room I have my first sight of the youthful, bold-faced, stately figure of Florence, fluent Russian-speaker, second-year probationer, latest addition to substation Haven and, according to Dom, its white hope.
‘Then why hasn’t she gone straight to Russia department?’ I had asked him.
‘Because we deemed her a trifle callow, Nat,’ Dom had replied loftily in his borrowed speak, implying that he had been at the centre of the decision. ‘Talented yes, but we thought we should give her another year to settle.’
Talented but needs to settle. I had asked Moira for a sight of her personal file. True to form, Dom had filched the best line.
*
Suddenly everything the Haven undertakes is Florence-driven. Or so it is in my memory. There may have been other deserving projects, but from the moment my eye lighted on draft Operation Rosebud it was the only show in our very small town, and Florence was its only star.
On her own initiative she had recruited the disaffected mistress of a London-based Ukrainian oligarch codenamed Orson who had well-documented links to both Moscow Centre and pro-Putin elements in the Ukrainian Government.
Her ambitious plan, luridly overstated, called for a Head Office stealth team to break into Orson’s £75 million Park Lane duplex, bug it to the rafters and make constructive adjustments to a bank of computers installed behind a steel door halfway up the marble staircase leading to the panoramic lounge.
As currently presented, Rosebud’s chances of getting the green light from Operations Directorate were in my judgement zero. Illegal break-ins were a highly competitive field. Stealth teams were gold dust. Rosebud in its present state would be just one more unheard voice in a noisy marketplace. Yet the further I delved into Florence’s presentation, the more convinced I became that, with ruthless editing and smart timing, Rosebud could deliver actionable high-grade intelligence. And in Florence, as Giles was at pains to inform me over a nocturnal bottle of Talisker whisky in the back kitchen of the Haven, Rosebud had found an implacable if obsessive champion:
‘Girl’s done all her own shoe-leather work, all her own paperwork. From the day she dug Orson out of the files she’s been living and dreaming the bugger. I said to her: you got a vendetta against this fellow? Didn’t even laugh. Said he was a blight on humanity and needed flushing out.’
Long pull of whisky.
‘Girl doesn’t just cosy up to Astra and make her a friend for life’ – Astra being the codename of Orson’s disenchanted mistress – ‘she stitches up the night porter of the target building into the bargain. Spins the fellow this yarn that she’s working undercover for the Daily Mail doing a feature on the lifestyle of London’s oligarchs. Night porter falls in love with her, believes every word she says. Any time she wants to take a look inside the lion’s cage, five thousand quid out of the Daily Mail’s reptile fund and it’s hers for the asking. Immature, my arse. Balls like an elephant’s.’
*
I organize a quiet lunch with Percy Price, all-powerful head of Surveillance, an empire to itself. Protocol requires that I invite Dom along. It is quickly evident that Percy and Dom are not made for each other, but Percy and I go back a long way. He is a gaunt and taciturn ex-policeman in his fifties. Ten years ago, with the assistance of one of his stealth teams and an agent I was running, we stole a prototype missile from the Russian exhibition stand at an international arms fair.
‘My boys and girls keep bumping into this Orson fellow,’