tripped Ed’s switch, and Jericho that drove him into the arms of Maria, then Gamma. Yet we’re all still sitting here, even now, pretending nobody spoke the bloody word!’
They know, I’m thinking. Everyone in the room is Jericho-indoctrinated except me. Forget it. They’re as ignorant as I am and they’re in shock because I’ve mentioned the unmentionable.
Brammel is the first to recover the power of speech.
‘We need to hear it from you one more time, Nat,’ he announces.
‘Hear what?’ I demand.
‘Shannon’s world view. A précis of his motivation. All the shit he spouted at you about Trump, Europe and the universe, which you appear to have swallowed wholesale.’
*
I am hearing myself at a distance, the way I seem to be hearing everything. I am being careful to say Shannon, not Ed, although now and then I slip up. I am doing Ed on Brexit. I am doing Ed on Trump and not sure any more how I got from one to the other. Out of prudence, I heap everything on to Ed’s shoulders. It’s his world view they want after all, not mine.
‘As far as Shannon is concerned, Trump is devil’s advocate for every tinpot demagogue and kleptocrat across the globe,’ I declare in my best offhand voice. ‘Trump the man is a total nothing in Shannon’s view. A mob orator. But as a symptom of what’s out there in the world’s undergrowth, waiting to be stirred up, he’s the devil incarnate. A simplistic view, you may say, not everyone’s by any means. But deeply felt all the same. Particularly if you’re by way of being an obsessive pro-European. Which Shannon is,’ I add firmly, lest I have not made the distinction between us sufficiently clear.
I give a reminiscent laugh that chimes quaintly in the silence of the room. I choose Ghita. She’s the safest.
‘You’ll never believe this, Ghita, but Shannon actually said to me one evening that it was a crying shame that all American assassins seem to come from the far right. High time the left got itself a shooter!’
Can the silence get any deeper? This one can.
‘And you went along with that?’ Ghita enquires for all the room.
‘Humorously, casually, over a beer, in the sense that I didn’t contradict him, inferentially, as one does, I agreed that the world would be a damned sight better off if Trump wasn’t in it. I’m not even sure he said assassinated. Maybe topped or offed.’
I hadn’t noticed the bottled water beside me. Now I do. The Office does tap water as a matter of principle. If it’s bottled it has come down from the top floor. I pour myself a glass, take a good swallow, and appeal to Guy Brammel as the last reasonable man standing.
‘Guy, for fuck’s sake.’
He doesn’t hear me. He is deep in his iPad. At last he raises his head:
‘All right, everybody. Orders from on high. Nat, you go home to Battersea now and stay there. Expect a call six p.m. this evening as ever is. Until then, you’re gated. Ghita, you take over the Haven with immediate effect: agents, ops, the team, the whole mess. The Haven as of now no longer in the maw of London General but assimilated on a pro tem basis into Russia department. Signed Bryn Jordan, head down in Washington, poor bastard. Anyone got anything else on their minds – nobody? Then let’s get back to work.’
They troop out. Last to leave is Percy Price, who hasn’t breathed one word in four hours.
‘Funny friends you’ve got then,’ he remarks without a glance.
*
There’s a greasy spoon café just up the road from our house. It serves breakfast from five in the morning. And I can’t tell you today, any more than I could have told you at the time, what thoughts were washing through my head as I sat drinking coffee after coffee and listening mindlessly to the workmen’s chatter which, being in Hungarian, was as incomprehensible to me as my own feelings. It was gone six a.m. when I paid my bill and stole into the house by the back door, then up the stairs, and into bed beside the sleeping Prue.
17
I ask myself from time to time how that Saturday would have unfolded if Prue and I hadn’t had a longstanding lunch date with Larry and Amy in Great Missenden. Prue and Amy had been at school together and friends ever since. Larry was a worthy family lawyer a bit older than me, loved his golf and his dog.