Adam Hall: Northlight

I owed the man nothing. He was chief of Main Control, the administrator, coordinator and organizer of any given number of shadow operations that might be going on at the same time. He was good at this. Before him, Strickland hadn't been: he was too wild, too ready to commit an executive to uncalculated risks, too inclined to influence the control who was actually running the mission. With Croder you felt safer; he saw us as chessmen, yes, to be pushed around; but he didn't push us blindly over the edge of the board, as Strickland had.

With Croder you could hope to live longer.

I glanced at the digital clock on the facia.

'Look,' I said, 'I'm running it close tonight. You'd have to get a police car to pick someone up at Heathrow for me and take him down to Streatham.'

'That can be arranged.'

'All right. His name is Yamada and he's coming through from Tokyo via Karachi on JAL Flight 287, ETA 9:15 at Heathrow, our time.' I didn't repeat anything because ingoing calls were automatically taped. 'I want him brought off the plane through the VIP lounge and cleared through customs and immigration without formalities. Take him to the Shotokan Karate Dojo in Gracefield Gardens, Streatham.'

If he said no, then he could send someone else along to No. 10.

'That too can be arranged.'

'You'll see to it personally?'

'Of course.'

'All right.'

I got out and walked back to the police car. 'I've got to get to Downing Street rather fast. Will you help me cut the corners?'

'Okay, sir.' The call to pick me up had come from the Yard and they must have given him my operational status. When it has to, the Bureau can request assistance from public services and get it so fast that you'll miss it if you blink. 'We'll proceed ahead of you,' he said.

By the time I got back behind the wheel and switched the engine on the police car had swung out and slowed in front of me with its lights still flashing and the siren starting up. I got into gear and we did a tight U-turn across Knightsbridge and went east with the rear end of the Interceptor waltzing a fraction as the tyres lost their grip on the wet surface and then found it again through the gears. They'd been using their radio, and before we reached Hyde Park Corner another police car had fallen in behind and was keeping station as the evening traffic slowed and pulled over to let us through.

We touched sixty in places and my nerves were settling down again. It's always like this when you catch the scent of a new mission; it's like the smell of smoke to an animal. But we don't have to go out again. We have to report to operations four weeks after debriefing from the last time out, but that's all: we're simply on standby again, available but not committed. And when they offer us something we can tell them we need another week or two, even another month or two, before we're ready to take on whatever they've got for us — and even then we can refuse if we don't like the look of it. It wouldn't work in any other way: it's our life on the line and we're not in the army, we're on our own once we're into the field and too far for our local control to help us.

This is the waiting time, between missions, when we've got a chance to look back and think about what we were doing the last time around, how close we came, how lucky we were to get back at all, whether or not we had the product they'd sent us to get: documents, tapes, maps or plans or diagrams or sometimes a defector for debriefing if we can bring him across alive, whatever it is that's going to give us an edge over the potential enemy when it comes to the push. And when we look back, we don't like it. We know we came too close to mucking it up and digging ourselves an idiot's grave in the rubble of some alien city with a bullet in the back or the wreckage of a car for a tombstone or the glass splinters of the capsule still in our mouth if we had a chance to use it.

So this is when the nerves start working on us, and they know that, the people in operations. They know that if they don't handle us with kid gloves they're going to lose an agent, not out there in the field but safe at home here in London, ready at any second to take offence, to read double meanings in whatever they say to us, to flare up at the slightest thing, at a tone of voice, like tonight when that bastard Trench tried to throw his weight around, I'd rather not have to ask Mr Croder to come on the line, as if he'd been talking to a bloody trainee down from Norfolk on his first bloody mission, as if. Slow down. This is just the waiting time, the worst time. I'd seen Bradley coming out of Clearance last week — he hadn't even got that far — with his face white and his hands flying all over the place for something to hang onto, some sort of spiritual lifeline, while he'd gone on shouting at them — You'll have to get someone else for this one, God damn your eyes, you'll have to get someone else. He'd been back only ten days from the Beirut thing and his nerves were still like a disco hall after what they'd done to him in the interrogation cell.

When you're that far gone, it's finis. They'll write you off the books and send you home with a final handshake, their eyes not quite meeting yours, and you'll end up pruning the roses and washing the Mini to pass the time before you can go along and pick up your pension cheque. Mother of God, don't let it ever happen to me: let them find me out there somewhere with my arms spreadeagled on a minefield and the earth still coming down and the stink of cordite on the air, not with a whimper, gentlemen, with a bang when it's got to come.

Slow. Slow down. This is the waiting time, that's all.

Take it easy. Go and see what's happening at No. 10. Then ask Croder what he's got lined up for you, because you've got to go out again some time, you know that.

We swung into Whitehall with the sirens still going, then slowed for the right hand turn into Downing Street, and when I pulled up at the curb I cut the ignition and looked at my spread fingers and saw they were steady, because the waiting was nearly over.

'I regard this as a deliberate act of war.'

Spode everywhere, on the marble mantlepiece and in glass cabinets in the corners of the room and along the windowsills. Spode, Turners and Chippendale, and an atmosphere of controlled shock.

'Unless the ambassador believes that in fact the submarine was actually within the twelve-mile limit.'

This was Lord Cranley, Foreign Secretary. I'd recognized him when Frome had brought me in, but only from photographs I'd seen of him. I'd never been here before, but I'd seen most of their pictures: the prime minister, US ambassador, foreign secretary, three or four members of the cabinet and the leader of the opposition. The others were aides and assistants. Frome had been here before I'd arrived: the Bureau had obviously sent him ahead on the assumption that they'd somehow get me here. He'd met me at the front door when the constable on guard had knocked, and led me to this room.

'The meeting's already begun, but in any case you won't be introduced. You're just here to listen.'

Frome was in a dark suit, his grey hair smoothed back on his narrow head, his eyes watchful, his skin dead-looking and with a sanatorium pallor; they said he'd got cancer. He hadn't spoken since he'd shown me where I was to sit; no one had spoken to him, nor even looked at him, or me.

'If the submarine was in Soviet waters,' Ambassador Morris said deliberately, 'it was there by navigational error, or some mechanical breakdown with the steering gear or something like that.' He was a heavy man, sitting with his hands along the arms of his small fragile chair, his head lowered as if prepared to charge. It had said in one of the news reports I'd seen that he'd had a nephew on board the submarine, but that in any case his personal feeling was that if the entire Soviet fleet were to be blasted out of the oceans it would express the attitude of the United States with accuracy. 'If it was there within the twelve-mile limit, the Soviets should have warned the crew in the normal way, by dropping depth charges and sonar buoys. It could have been done, it should have been done, and it was not done.'