Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

'What was the tune? What was its name? I couldn't remember its bloody name,' Joey said flatly.

'It was Elvis, come on – or are you too young?

"Wooden Heart", recorded during his army service – weren't you born then? It was clear as a bell. Are you all right?'

'I was actually about to piss in my trousers. I suppose you're too important to put your own bugs in place. Give the job to the boy.'

'Who would have checked the gear, seen it was working? You?'

It was icily said; he hadn't thought of it. He subsided. She was in touch, just, with the second Mercedes. He was thinking dully of the fear he had felt, and he had not even seen the man. He had feared the whistling closeness, and did not know how to confront the fear.

He let the anger burst. 'You were bloody damn late on the warning. I could have been killed because you were late. I had fuck-all time to get the room back in place because of you. He kills people, do you know that? He hurts people before he kills them. This isn't some bloody game with diplomatic bloody immunity.

You said it yourself, "I bloody missed him." You couldn't have given me less warning if you'd bloody tried. Miss fucking Superior, who the fuck do you think you are?'

Maggie Bolton had a soul but precious few could find it. Her father hadn't. A Ministry of Defence quality-control engineer at the aerospace factory at Preston in Lancashire would admit to colleagues and relations that he could not reach close enough to touch the emotions of his daughter, christened Margaret Emily.

Eight years back he had gone to the crematorium, two months after being declared redundant, still not knowing her. Proud of her, yes, but not understanding. Her mother, too, was kept at arm's length, had been there through Maggie's childhood, young womanhood, and was there still as her daughter drifted into middle age, was phoned once a week if it was convenient, was sent postcards if Maggie was away and it did not breach security, but was not confided in. There had been no schoolfriends who had lasted into adult life. A bachelor uncle had taught at a minor public school in the West Country, and since the school was short of girl entrants had arranged a bursary for her. She had taken no interest in sport as the other girls had, and had devoted her time to the physics and electronics laboratories. She had won a place at Sussex University to study electronic engineering, the only female in that year's intake on the course. At the end of three years her exam results had disappointed her lecturers: she had taken only a lower-second degree. She had spent too much of her last academic year working on a programme of research and development hived out to her department by technicians from the Secret Intelligence Service – routinely such organizations looked to the universities to upgrade their equipment into state-of-the-art standards. Afterwards, regardless of her poor degree, the SIS managers had snapped her up. The secrecy of intelligence work suited her: it was a wall behind which she could live. She could even justify her lack of communication with her parents: they were not on the 'need-to-know' list.

As a new recruit, she was in the basement workshops of the building they called Ceau§escu Towers, below the waterline level of the Thames. In the evenings she spent hours with the master technicians of Imperial College's laboratories after the lecturers and students had gone home. No one in her life was allowed close to her. At parties, home or away, her prettiness, laughter, trim figure and ringless finger ensured that she was a central attraction, but although she flirted shamelessly in public, she was alone in bed.

Her fingernails were the giveaway to her skill, clipped back to the quick. The fingers were small and firmly boned, perfect for the precision of her work with microphones, infinity transmitters, tracking beacons, and fish-eye pinhead cameras. In the basement work shops and in the university's laboratories she was admired. A foreman at Imperial had once said, 'She could get a probe bug up a crocodile's bum and he wouldn't even know his sphincter was being tickled Her research was focused on two specific areas, both equally critical for SIS operations: the downsizing of equipment and the clarity of reception.

It was not on her file, but she had only loved two men in her forty-seven years.

In the summer of '88, she had gone to Warsaw, travelling on a diplomatic passport and with her gear in a diplomatic bag. The contact, introduced to her by the station officer, was a young male clerk working in the Polish Ministry of Defence, with access to the permanent secretary's office. She had provided the bug, he'd put it in place. She was then thirty-four and a virgin, and he was eleven years younger, frightened witless at what he had agreed to do. It had been a sort of love, more in the mind than in the muscle, furtive kisses and hands held briefly in the clandestine night meetings. The bug was the best she had ever made; its low transmission of power signals ensured it defeated the monthly scanning of the permanent secretary's office, and intelligence flowed to the antennae on the roof of the British embassy. Six months later, long after she had gone home, she was told that the clerk had been arrested, tried in camera, for treason, and hanged in the central prison. When she was told – she had been offered, and had accepted – a pink gin. Her composure had not flickered.

In '94, she had manufactured the tiny microphone bug to be fitted into the mobile phone of an Iraqi official of the Mukhabarat who travelled to meet fellow secret intelligence officers in Tripoli, Libya. The beauty of the device was that it could be activated to monitor both telephone transmissions and voice conversations that did not involve the phone. She had spent five days in Malta with the Libyan police bodyguard who had been turned and had the task of inserting the bug in the target's phone. It had worked, she was told, like 'a dream'. And she was told, also, two months later that the bodyguard – sweet, charming, courteous, vulnerable, and loving on evenings on the hotel veranda overlooking the sea – had been held, tortured and shot. Again the gin had been offered her, again her composure had held. If she cried, it was only in the silence of her tiny flat.

She was a part of the old world, a Cold War warrior.

She had protested viciously when her line-manager had assigned her to Sarajevo, told that her annual assessment interview would be postponed, given to understand that the latest rate of per diem expenses should not be exceeded unless she was prepared to stump up the excess herself. Yes, she had been to Sarajevo in the war, but with her own people, and in a time before the line-managers had taken control of Ceaucescu Towers, a time before assessments were de rigueur for experienced experts, when expenses were passed without quibble. There had been bugs in the President's office, and in the UN general's operations centre, and nearly – if there had been another week to work on it – in Ratko Mladic's headquarters. As far as she was concerned this assignment was vulgar plod work, a waste of her time.

She was damned if she would easily give a sight of her soul to Joey Cann.

'Forget it,' Maggie said. 'It's in the past.'

'Is that all you've got to say?'

'Too right, that's all you're getting.'

He'd subsided into silence and let her drive. She'd been on the courses run from Fort Monkton at Gosport. From the old strongpoint built to deter Napoleonic ideas of invasion, on the Hampshire coast overlooking the English Channel, she'd learned to drive surveillance cars through the close Portsmouth city streets, in country lanes, and up the motorway towards London. She knew what she was doing, but it was hard in the clogged traffic to hold the link with the Mercedes, and she didn't need his righteous scared anger.