it will never know it.’
The thunderous applause, wholly unexpected, touched me.
*
If Percy was uneasy about the effect of my facial expression on his flock, Prue has no such anxiety. We are eating early breakfast.
‘It’s just lovely to see you all eager for your day,’ she tells me, putting down her Guardian newspaper. ‘Whatever it is you’re up to. I’m so very pleased for you, after all the dire thoughts you had about coming home to England and what to do when you got here. I just hope it’s not too desperately illegal, whatever you’re doing. Is it?’
The question, if I read it correctly, marks a substantial advance in our careful journey back to one another. Ever since our Moscow days it has been understood between us that even if I were to bend Office rules and tell her all, her principled objections to the Deep State would not allow her to enjoy my confidences. In return I had made something of a point – perhaps too much of one – of not encroaching on her legal secrets, even when it came to such titanic battles as the one her partnership is currently waging against Big Pharma.
‘Well, funnily enough, Prue, just for once, it isn’t awful at all,’ I reply. ‘In fact I think you might even approve. All the signs are that we’re on the verge of exposing a high-level Russian spy’ – which isn’t just bending Office rules, but trampling on them.
‘And you’ll bring him or her to court when you’ve exposed them, whoever they are. Of course you will. Open court, I trust.’
‘That’ll be up to the powers-that-be,’ I reply cautiously, since about the last thing the Office would want to do when it has rumbled an enemy agent is turn him over to the forces of justice.
‘And have you played an absolutely key role in smoking him or her out?’
‘Since you ask, Prue, to be truthful, yes,’ I concede.
‘Like going to Prague and discussing it all with Czech liaison?’
‘There is a Czech element. Let me put it that way.’
‘Well, I think that’s just perfectly brilliant of you, Nat, and I’m very proud of you,’ she says, brushing aside years of pained forbearance.
Oh, and her partnership reckons they’ve got Big Pharma over a barrel. And Steff was very sweet on the phone last night.
*
So it’s a bright sunny morning with everything coming together in ways I hadn’t dared hope, and Operation Stardust is gathering unstoppable momentum. Sergei’s latest instructions from Moscow Centre require him to present himself at a brasserie off Leicester Square at eleven in the morning. He will select a seat in ‘the north-west area’ and order himself a chocolate latte, a hamburger and a side dish of tomato salad. Between eleven-fifteen and eleven-thirty, with these recognition signals set out before him, he will be approached by a person who will claim to be an old acquaintance, embrace him and depart saying he is late for an appointment. In the course of this embrace Sergei will become the richer by one ‘uncontaminated’ mobile phone – Moscow’s description – containing, in addition to a new SIM card, a slip of microfilm with further instructions.
Braving the same seething crowds and heat that are bedevilling Percy Price’s coverage of the encounter, Sergei positions himself in the brasserie as instructed, orders his meal and is delighted to see approaching him with outstretched arms none other than the ebullient and ever-youthful Felix Ivanov – or so his cover name at sleeper school – a fellow student in his same intake and same class.
The covert handover of the mobile phone passes off faultlessly, but acquires unexpected social dimensions. Ivanov is equally surprised and delighted to see his old friend Sergei in such good fettle. Far from pleading an urgent appointment, he sits down beside him and the two sleeper agents enjoy a head-to-head that would have been the despair of their trainers. Despite the clamour, Percy’s team has no difficulty hearing them, or for that matter capturing the encounter on camera. As soon as Ivanov – in the meantime randomly christened Tadzio by Russia department’s computer – takes his leave, Percy dispatches a team to house him, in Tadzio’s case to a students’ hostel in Golders Green. Unlike his literary namesake, Tadzio is heavily built, husky and cheerful, a little Russian bear much loved by his fellow students, notably the female element.
It also transpires, as Head Office’s checkers process the flood of incoming data, that Ivanov is not Ivanov any more, neither