Len Deighton - XPD

‘You don’t know what the caller told him; you said you couldn’t hear.’

‘He had a phone call,’ said Stuart slowly, carefully and with mounting anger. ‘There were a lot of yeses, and a few minutes after that the house was blown up by someone close enough to detonate a radio fuse.’

‘How can you possibly know it was a radio fuse detonated within sight of the house?’

‘Because I know the department, Kitty. I know how these things are done. And when I said Wever worked for us the DG didn’t bat an eyelid.’

‘MI5, you said.’

‘So the DG admits that “Five” is running Wever. We all know that the DG can make them leap through flaming hoops if he feels like it; and this job has all the clout of the PM behind him.’

Kitty King ran a hand through her hair. She was wide awake now, ‘But what for, Boyd. Tell me what for?’

‘Except for a minor miscalculation by the ordnance technicians, Wever would have disappeared, I would have disappeared and all that evidence you receipted tonight and put in the red safe would have disappeared too.’

‘Boyd!’

‘And just by some remote lucky chance, the department happens to have someone in Thetford this afternoon. Someone they can contact at a moment’s notice. Someone the DG can trust with the delicate task of putting a roll of pound notes into Mrs Wever’s mouth.’

‘Conjecture,’ said Kitty. ‘That’s largely conjecture.’ She sat up in bed.

‘Don’t switch on the light,’ said Stuart, speaking quietly and holding the curtain open so that he could see down into the street below.

Kitty forced a little nervous laugh. ‘Are you trying to tell me that your father-in-law arranged to have you killed? XPD, expedient demise; is that what you are saying?’

‘There’s no getting round the facts, Kitty.’

She leaned forward towards him but he didn’t turn to look at her. ‘The DG has no contact with any XPD orders, Boyd. You know the system; XPD orders come only on the personal authority of each individual Regional Ops. Chief, and are then countersigned by the DG’s deputy. It’s always been done that way. The DG has no say in it.’

Stuart let the curtain move slowly back into position, then he turned to look at her. ‘Yes, it’s always been done that way, Kitty, so that any DG can go before secret parliamentary committees and truthfully swear that he has no knowledge of expedient demise or any other authorized killings. I know how it’s all done, Kitty. Believe me I do.’

‘No one knows about it,’ said Kitty, ‘Not even my boss knows how they assign the XPDs or even which of our agents handle them. But I’ll tell you one thing, Boyd. There’s no way that Sir Sydney could arrange it without the collusion of others, and I’ve worked there long enough to know that he wouldn’t get it.’

‘Are you seriously telling me that in the time you’ve worked in Operations, you’ve never seen an order for expedient demise?’

‘For defectors, Boyd. For traitors. For people with heads filled with secrets like the whereabouts of field agents. Then only after the department is certain that they are on the point of betraying everything to Moscow. They never XPD field people like you, pursuing an operational task to the best of your ability.’

‘Do you mind if I take notes,’ said Stuart sarcastically. ‘You’re talking just like a field manual.’

‘Thanks a lot! And now I’ve had enough of your bad temper I’m going home!’

‘Oh, stop it, Kitty. You know I didn’t mean to say that.’

‘Do you know what it’s like for me, being in this bloody flat with you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that everywhere I look there are bits and pieces belonging to your other women.’

‘ Woman , not women,’ said Boyd Stuart. ‘Jennifer’s things, you mean?’

Kitty’s lips tightened. Even hearing the name of the woman with whom Boyd Stuart had shared his life was enough to make her feel the pangs of jealousy, and feeling the pangs of jealousy made her angry. ‘Yes, your bloody Jennifer. That’s right. How did she talk? Not like a field manual… How then? Like a sex manual…?’ She found a handkerchief.

‘Oh, my God, Kitty, don’t start crying, I can’t stand it.’

‘That’s it!’ she yelled. ‘Of course! Not “Don’t cry, Kitty, because I hate to see you unhappy”-not “Don’t cry, Kitty, what can I do for you?” It’s “Don’t cry, little Kitty, because your man can’t stand it.” ’ She was very angry now. She threw the bedclothes aside and jumped out of bed. She was still sniffing as she pulled on her tights and looked under the bed for her shoes.

‘Your car is miles away,’ Stuart reminded her.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said tartly. ‘I’m not frightened of little green men in flying saucers.’

‘Oh, go to hell,’ said Stuart and meant it. After he heard the front door close he went down, wondering if she would be waiting there for him, but she had gone home. He undressed and went to bed but it was not easy to go to sleep. Awake in the darkness, he listened to the sound of the traffic going along Millbank. The road alongside the river was never quiet; it was one of the penalties of living here. Would Kitty King report the conversation they had just had, he wondered. How would that affect his career prospects? He chuckled to himself: what kind of career prospects does a man have when he suspects that his employer is trying to kill him? And if his employer is also his father-in-law? It was a problem still unresolved by the tune he drifted into a deep sleep. When he awoke, very late the next morning, the sun was shining and the green car outside the butcher’s shop and the men inside it had gone as if they had never existed.

So that, by Monday morning when he started work, the idea that someone from his own department would plot to have him killed was almost gone from his mind.

At that same time-10.30 on the morning of Monday, July 2, 1979-Sir Sydney Ryden was attending the regular weekly intelligence meeting. It is held in a small conference room on the first floor of 12 Downing Street. The room contained a long polished table, with eight chairs, four coloured telephones, some red leather armchairs, a fireplace with highly polished fire irons, and a small oil painting by Winston Churchill placed above the hearth. The only incongruously modern item was a machine with two ‘letter boxes’ in its top: a paper shredder.

Those present for the final part of the meeting were a deputy secretary of the Cabinet Office representing the Prime Minister, the coordinator of intelligence, Sir Sydney Ryden, and his opposite number, the DG of MI5.

The only important such person missing was the chief of GC HQ, the head of the department which obtains intelligence from orbiting satellites and radio monitoring. The reason for his absence was that nearly all his best hardware had been financed by the American government, an investment secured by the presence of American National Security Agency employees in the most sensitive posts in his department. The chief of GC HQ had departed early. He always did when the agenda included as a last item ‘non-electronic systems’. It was a polite way of asking him to leave the room. It was better that he did not know what was discussed, rather than have to feign ignorance to his American colleagues.

‘In the absence of any hard and fast evidence we have to assume certain things,’ said Sir Sydney Ryden as soon as the GC HQ chief had departed. ‘We must assume that a large body of documentary evidence has fallen into private hands. We have to assume that this material has not been noted, indexed, inventoried, photocopied or seen by the US State Department… ’