by the time I returned to reality, the digital clock at the foot of our screens had actually gone back by twenty-nine seconds, Percy Price having decided that this was the opportune moment to regale us with flashback images of our newfound quarry. Ed is standing in line in the interior of the café, brown briefcase in one hand, tin tray in the other. He shuffles past the sandwiches, cakes and pastries stall. He selects a cheddar-and-pickle baguette. He is at the drinks counter, ordering himself an English breakfast tea. The microphones render his voice in a metallic bellow:
‘Yeah, a large one would be great. Cheers.’
He is standing at the cash desk in a ham-fisted muddle, juggling his tea and baguette, beating his pockets for his wallet, briefcase wedged between his big feet. He is Ed codenamed Delta and he is loping over the threshold into the outdoors, tray in one hand, briefcase in the other, blinking around him as if he’s wearing the wrong spectacles. I am remembering something I read a hundred years ago in a Chekist handbook: a clandestine meeting appears more authentic if food is taken.
15
I remember taking a reading of my chers collègues at around this point, and ascertaining no common reaction beyond a shared fixation with the two flat screens. I remember discovering that my head was the only one looking the wrong way, and hastily readjusting it. I don’t recall Dom at all. I recall one or two fidgets round the room like symptoms of restlessness in a boring play, and a few crossings of legs and a clearing of throats here and there, chiefly from our top-floor mandarins, Guy Brammel for one. And the permanently aggrieved Marion from our sister Service: I saw her stalk from the room on tiptoe, which is a kind of anomaly, for how do you take long paces on tiptoe? But she managed it, long skirt and all, to be followed by her two spear-carrier lawyers in their black suits. Then a short-lived blaze of light as their three silhouettes sidle through the doorway before the guards close it in their wake. And I remember having a wish to swallow and not being able to, and a heave of the stomach like a low punch when you haven’t braced your muscles in readiness. And then bombarding myself with a scattershot of unanswerable questions that in retrospect are part of the process that any professional intelligence officer goes through when he wakes to the fact he’s been hoodwinked all ways up by his agent and is chasing round for excuses, and not finding any.
Surveillance doesn’t switch off because you do. The show goes on. My chers collègues went on. I went on. I watched the whole of the rest of the movie in real time, live on screen, without uttering a word or offering the smallest gesture that could in any way inhibit the enjoyment of my fellow members of the audience – even if thirty hours later, when I was standing under the shower, Prue did remark on the bloodied imprint made by my fingernails digging into my left wrist. She also refused to accept my story of a badminton injury, going so far as to suggest in a rare moment of accusation that the fingernails were not my own.
And I wasn’t just watching Ed as the rest of the show unfolded. I was sharing his every move with a familiarity unmatched by anyone’s in the room. I alone knew his body language from badminton court to Stammtisch. I knew how it could be skewed by some bit of internal anger he needed to get rid of, how words clogged up at the front of his mouth when he was trying to get them out all at once. And maybe that’s why I knew for a certainty, when Percy ran back the archive footage of him blundering out of the restaurant, that his tip of the head in recognition was directed not at Valentina, but at Tadzio.
It was only after Ed had spotted Tadzio that he approached Valentina. And the fact that by then Tadzio was already on his way out of the scene merely proves that, as ever in crisis, I continue to make reasoned operational judgements. Ed and Tadzio had previous form together. By introducing Ed to Valentina, Tadzio had completed his mission, hence his abrupt departure from the scene, leaving Ed and Valentina sitting at ease, talking casually to each other like two strangers