deal, remember?’
‘Oh yeah, right. Great. She loved the duck. Laura did. Her best thing ever. Waiters spoiled her rotten.’
‘And the girl? Whatever her name was? Florence? Was she good value?’
‘Oh yeah, well. Florence. She was great too.’
Is he clamming up on me or just being his usual churlish self? I keep trying anyway:
‘You don’t happen to have a number for her, by any chance? My chum called me up, the one she was temping for. Said she’d been terrific and he had a mind to offer her a full-time job but the agency’s not playing ball.’
Ed ponders this for a while. Frowns about it. Searches his mind or makes a show of doing so.
‘No, well, they wouldn’t, would they?’ he agrees. ‘Those agency sods would keep her on a string for the rest of her life if they could. Yeah. Can’t help you there, I’m afraid. No’ – followed by a diatribe against our reigning foreign secretary, ‘that fucking Etonian narcissistic elitist without a decent conviction in his body bar his own advancement’ et cetera.
*
If there is any consolation to be had from this interminable waiting period, apart from our Monday-evening badminton sessions, it is Sergei, aka Pitchfork. Overnight he has become the Haven’s prize agent. From the day his university term ended, Markus Schweizer, Swiss freelance journalist, has taken up residence in the first of his three North London districts. His aim, readily approved by Moscow, is to sample each district in turn and report on it. With no Florence to offer him, I have appointed Denise, state-educated, obsessed from childhood by all things Russian, as his keeper. Sergei has taken to her as if she were his lost sister. To lighten her load, I approve the support of other members of the Haven team. Their cover is not a problem. They can call themselves aspiring reporters, out-of-work actors or nothing at all. If Moscow’s London rezidentura were to turn out its entire counter-surveillance cavalry, it would come away empty-handed. Moscow’s incessant demands for locational details would tax the most diligent sleeper agent, but Sergei is equal to them, and Denise and Ilya are on hand to lend their assistance. The required photographs are taken with Sergei’s mobile phone only. No topographical detail is too slight for Anette aka Anastasia. Whenever a fresh set of requirements comes in from Moscow Centre, Sergei drafts his replies in English and I approve them. He translates them into Russian, and covertly I approve the Russian before it is encoded by Sergei using a one-time pad from his collection. By this means Sergei is made notionally answerable for his own errors, and the tetchy correspondence with Centre that follows has the ring of authenticity. Forgery department has made a fine job of the invitation from Harvard University’s physics faculty. Sergei’s friend Barry is suitably awed. Thanks to Bryn Jordan’s ministrations in Washington, a Harvard physics professor will field any stray questions that come in from Barry or anywhere else. I send Bryn a personal note thanking him for his efforts and receive no reply.
Then the waiting again.
Waiting for Moscow Centre to stop dithering and settle for a single location in North London. Waiting for Florence to lift her head above the parapet and tell me what made her walk out on her agents and her career. Waiting for Arkady to come off the fence. Or not.
Then, as things will, everything started happening at once. Arkady has replied; not what you might call enthusiastically but a reply nonetheless. And not to London but to his preferred cover address in Bern: one plain envelope addressed to N. Halliday, Czech stamp, electronic type, and inside it one picture postcard of the Czech spa resort of Karlovy Vary and a brochure in Russian for a hotel ten kilometres outside the same town. And folded inside the hotel brochure a booking form with boxes to tick: dates required, accommodation, estimated time of arrival, allergies. Typed crosses in the boxes inform me that I am expected to check in at ten o’clock this coming Monday night. Given the warmth of our former relationship, it would be hard to imagine a more grudging response, but at least it says ‘come’.
Using my uncancelled passport in the alias of Nicholas George Halliday – I was supposed to surrender it on my return to England but nobody asked me for it – I book myself a flight to Prague for the Monday morning and pay for it with my personal credit card. I