would say. Sometimes we’re bastards, sometimes we’re Samaritans and sometimes we get it plain wrong. But fail an agent in his hour of need and you fail him for ever, as my mentor Bryn Jordan liked to say. Ed is still sitting on the slatted bench, head slumped forward. He has his knees spread and is staring downwards between them while I’m checking railway timetables on my mobile. Last train for York leaves King’s Cross in fifty-eight minutes.
‘Got to love you and leave you, I’m afraid, Ed,’ I say. ‘No Chinese for me after all. Bit of business to attend to before it goes sour on me.’
‘Tough,’ Ed remarks, without lifting his head.
I make for the door.
‘Hey, Nat.’
‘What is it?’
‘Thanks, okay? Very nice of you, that was. Florence too. I told her. Made Laura’s day. Just sorry you can’t do the Chinese.’
‘Me too. Go for the Peking Duck. It comes with pancakes and jam. What the hell’s the matter with you?’
Ed has opened his hands in theatrical display, and is rolling his head around as if in despair.
‘Want to know something?’
‘If it’s quick.’
‘Either Europe’s fucked or somebody with balls has to find an antidote to Trump.’
‘And who might that be?’ I enquire.
No answer. He has slumped back into his thoughts, and I am on my way to York.
9
I am doing the decent thing. I am answering the cry that every agent-runner the world over takes to his grave. The tunes vary, the lines vary, but in the end it’s the same song every time: I can’t live with myself, Peter, the stress is killing me, Peter, the burden of my treachery is too great for me, my mistress has left me, my wife is deceiving me, my neighbours suspect me, my dog’s been run over and you my trusted handler are the one person in the world who can persuade me not to cut my wrists.
Why do we agent-runners come running every time? Because we owe.
But I don’t feel I owe much to the notably quiescent agent Pitchfork, neither is he my first concern as I take my seat on a delayed train to York in a carriage crammed with screaming kids returning from a London outing. I am thinking about Florence’s refusal to join me in a cover story that is as natural to our secret lives as brushing our teeth. I am thinking about the go-ahead for Operation Rosebud that still refuses to materialize. I am thinking of Prue’s reply when I called her to tell her I wouldn’t be home tonight and asked her whether she has news of Steff:
‘Only that she’s moved into posh new digs in Clifton and doesn’t say who with.’
‘Clifton. Whatever’s the rent?’
‘Not ours to ask, I’m afraid. An email. One-way traffic only’ – unable for once to hide the note of desperation in her voice.
And when Prue’s sad voice isn’t sounding in my ear, I have Florence’s to regale me: I don’t feel like fucking lying any more. Not to him or anybody else. Got that? Which in turn leads me back to a question that has been gnawing at me ever since Dom’s unctuous phone call with his offer of the chauffeur-driven car, because Dom never does anything without a reason, however twisted. I try Florence on her Office mobile a couple more times, get the same electronic howl. But my mind is still on Dom: why did you want me out of your way today? And are you by any chance the reason why Florence has decided not to lie for her country, which is a pretty massive decision if lying for your country is your chosen profession?
So it’s not until Peterborough that, sheltered by a giveaway copy of the Evening Standard, I touch in an endless string of digits and apply myself to agent Pitchfork’s unsatisfactory case history.
*
His name is Sergei Borisovich Kusnetsev, and henceforth against all known rules of my trade I will call him plain Sergei. He is the Petersburg-born son and grandson of Chekists, his grandfather an honoured general of the NKVD buried in the Kremlin walls, his father an ex-KGB colonel who died of multiple wounds sustained in Chechnya. So far so good. But whether Sergei is the true heir to this noble lineage remains uncertain.
The known facts argue in his favour. But there are a lot of them, some would say too many. At sixteen he was sent to a special school near Perm, which in addition to physics taught ‘political strategy’, a euphemism