male lawyers in dark suits despite the sweltering heat. Brammel himself reads out Sergei’s latest instructions from Centre. They are to provide field support for a covert encounter between an important Moscow emissary, gender not provided, and a high-value British collaborator, no other details supplied. My own role in Stardust is formally agreed, and simultaneously restricted. Do I detect Bryn Jordan’s hand, or am I being more than usually paranoid? As head of substation Haven, I will be ‘responsible for the welfare and management of PITCHFORK and his handlers’; all covert communications to and from Moscow Centre will pass through me. But Guy Brammel, as acting head of Russia department, will sign off on all the Haven’s communications before they are given circulation.
And there with a jolt my duties officially end: except that they don’t because that’s not who I am, as the distant Bryn should know better than anyone. Yes, I’ll be hunkered down for wearisome sessions with Sergei and his minder Denise in the Haven’s decrepit safe flat next door to Camden Town tube station. Yes, I shall be composing Sergei’s under-texts and playing chess with him late into the night while we wait for the next obscure East European commercial radio station to confirm by prearranged word-code that our latest love letter to Copenhagen is being processed.
But I’m a field man, not a desk jockey, not a social carer. Haven outcast though I may be, but I am also the natural author of Operation Stardust. Who crucially debriefed Sergei, and scented blood? Who brought him down to London, made the forbidden pilgrimage to Arkady and thus delivered the conclusive evidence that this was not some run-of-the-mill game of Russian musical chairs but a high-end intelligence operation built around a potential or active British source of high value and run personally by Moscow Centre’s queen of illegals?
In our time Percy Price and I have stolen a good few horses together, as the saying goes, and not just that prototype Russian ground-to-air missile in Poznań. So it should have come as no great surprise to anyone on the top floor that, within days of the first Stardust war party, Percy and I are crouching in the back of a laundry van fitted out with the latest wonders of modern surveillance, touring the first, then the second, and now the last of the three North London districts Sergei has been instructed to reconnoitre. Percy has christened it Ground Beta and I don’t question his choice.
On our tours together, we reminisce about old cases we have shared, old agents, old colleagues, and talk like old men. Thanks to Percy I am also discreetly introduced to his Grande Armée of watchers, a privilege that Head Office emphatically does not encourage: after all, one day they may be watching you. The venue for this event is a red-brick desanctified tabernacle awaiting demolition on the outskirts of Ground Beta. Our cover is a memorial gathering of souls. Percy has rallied a cool hundred of them.
‘Any little boost you can give my boys and girls will be highly welcome and appreciated, Nat,’ he tells me in his homely cockney. ‘They are committed, but the work can be on the tedious side, especially with the heat we’ve got. You look a mite worried, if I may say so. Please remember that my boys and girls like a good face. Only they’re watchers, see, so it’s natural.’
For love of Percy I press the flesh and pat shoulders, and when he invites me to address a few rallying words of encouragement to his faithful I do not disappoint.
‘So what we all hope to be watching this coming Friday evening’, as I hear my voice ring out pleasingly amid the pitch-pine rafters, ‘– this 20 July, to be precise – is a highly orchestrated covert encounter between two people who’ve never met each other. One, codename Gamma, will be a tried-and-tested operative with all the tricks of the trade up his or her sleeve. The other, codename Delta, will be a person of unknown age, profession and gender,’ I warn them, protective as ever of my source. ‘His or her motives are as much of a mystery to us as I’m sure they will be to you. But what I can tell you is this: if the stack of hard intelligence we are receiving even as I speak means anything at all, the great British public is about to owe you a very considerable debt of thanks, even if