Guy Adams: The Clown Service

d) BOAC Flight B127, Vienna to Heathrow, 1962

Analiese Bauer had been joking the night before that the most important skill for a stewardess was never to be surprised. Over a few drinks with an old school friend, she had recounted her favourite stories of shocking sights seen at twenty-thousand feet. The usual old chestnuts, though tired amongst her colleagues, were brand new to this audience: couples having sex in toilet cubicles, ludicrous propositions from businessmen flying home to their wives, a particularly notorious pilot frequently so drunk he had to be carried into the cabin. Her friend had listened and laughed in all the right places.

Now, Analiese seemed to have forgotten her own rule – she was very surprised indeed. The man in seat 23B was unremarkable in every way: plainly-dressed, quiet, gazing sleepily out of the window. What had so surprised her was that he hadn’t been sitting there when they had taken off. More than that – and it was the impossibility of the idea that really set her heart racing – she would have sworn blind that he hadn’t been on the plane at all. Even as she was thinking this, she tried to find excuses and explanations: he had been in one of the toilets (though she and her colleagues had checked them before take-off); he had been late embarking and she had somehow missed him (she hadn’t, she knew she hadn’t); her memory was simply mistaken (it never was – in this job you grew to remember faces, building a mental catalogue of who was onboard for any given flight, assessing the troublemakers or the tippers).

But he couldn’t have simply appeared inside the cabin once the plane was in the air…

‘Can I get you anything, sir?’ she asked. He looked at her, his tired eyes struggling to focus. For a moment she wondered if he was on something – he would hardly be the first passenger to dose himself up before hitting the air. Or maybe he didn’t speak German? She asked once more, this time in English.

‘I’m fine, thank you,’ he replied, ‘just tired.’

‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘I’ll leave you in peace.’

She did so, attending to the rest of her passengers. The man didn’t speak to her again, just fell asleep, jolting awake only once the wheels hit the tarmac at Heathrow.

Analiese did her best to persuade herself that she had been mistaken. The passenger must have been there when they had taken off – it had simply slipped her mind. Yet she remained unconvinced.

e) Office of [REDACTED], Lubyanka Building, Moscow, Russia, 1962

‘You let him go?’

‘Not by choice, but you know his skills.’

The man in authority gave a slight nod, rubbing his weary eyes with the tips of his fingers. It had been two days since the death of Bortnik and he had been struggling to sleep ever since.

‘And now he is out of our control,’ the other man ventured, hoping to prompt his superior into either letting him go or issuing new orders.

‘Not quite,’ came the reply. ‘I took the precaution of having our man whisper in a few ears over there. The British are expecting him.’

‘They can’t know what he’s capable of, surely?’

The other man stared at his subordinate who wilted slightly, aware that he had spoken out of turn.

‘Naturally not. But they will be watching him; we can only hope that will be enough.’

His subordinate couldn’t help but feel that it wouldn’t be, but knew better than to question a second time. Besides, did it matter? Krishnin was nothing less than a weapon, one capable of the most terrible destruction. The British would know him for what he was soon enough; by which time it would be far too late to do anything about it.

a) Secret Intelligence Services, SIS Building, Vauxhall Cross

The difference in the light unsettled Toby Greene during those first few days back home. In the Middle East the air was clear, everything had hard edges – looked almost sharp enough to cut. Here the landscape, beneath thin cloud, was insipid, pale and blurred. As if someone had poured skimmed milk over the city.

The concussion wasn’t helping. Toby was dizzy and nauseous. The world was a place he could imagine slipping from, falling through the thick, imaginary surface into something even worse. The sombre face of his Section Chief’s secretary seemed to suggest that was indeed about to happen. Perhaps he had started falling the minute Yoosuf had hit him. Perhaps he was finally going to hit the ground.

Toby looked at his reflection in the glass partition that separated them from the shop floor of open-plan desks and bored data analysts. He saw a man of compromise: not fat but fatter than he would like; not ugly but not attractive either; not stupid but sat waiting to be labelled as such. The bandage made his light-brown hair stick up, an extra piece of absurdity. He stared at his face and had an almost uncontrollable urge to punch it. We all aspire , he thought, we all dream. Why can I not be even half the man I want to be?

‘You can go in now,’ said the secretary.

His Section Chief didn’t stand as Toby entered, just watched him as if casually interested in the progress of a limping dog.

There was a moment of silence. His superior scratched at his grey beard. Toby found himself transfixed by the way the action made the older man’s jowls quiver. The fat beneath the skin had stretched his features out, turning his whole face into a mask. He couldn’t bear to think what might be underneath.

‘You’re a headache, Greene,’ his superior said eventually.

Toby thought for a moment, wondering if the man had asked him whether his head ached. It did. But he hadn’t.

‘I despair,’ his Chief said, plainly feeling it was necessary to make his displeasure clearer.

‘Oh,’ said Toby.

‘If you worked somewhere like McDonalds,’ his Chief leaned back in his chair, ‘and let me be clear that I am using that as an example not only because it popped readily to mind but also because I think it represents a level of employment that would suit one of your intellect –’ he stared at Toby, as if quite baffled by him ‘– if you worked there, you would simply be fired.’

‘Sir?’

‘For showing such consistent and inarguable ineptitude for the position in which you are employed.’

‘Oh.’

‘Fired.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But you don’t work at McDonalds, do you Greene?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Or indeed any brand of fast food restaurant.’

‘No, sir.’

‘You work in intelligence – a fact so weighted in irony that I would be tempted to laugh, were it not for the bubbling disgust I feel for you robbing me of my mirth.’

Toby opened his mouth to argue. After all, he could only take so much of a beating, as Yoosuf had recently proved.

‘Don’t say anything, Greene,’ his superior replied. ‘It would be safer. Because if you said something I might accidentally lose my professional grip and stave in your soft skull with this decorative monstrosity.’ He pointed at a silver horse that leaped perpetually skyward from the corner of his desk. ‘A present from my wife, and nothing would please me more than to break it on your idiotic head.’ He reached out and twisted the ornament slightly, as if judging the best edge to lead with when using it in an assault. ‘I could kill you with impunity. To hell with British law. We get rid of dead bodies every day.’

Toby felt the pain in his head intensifying.

‘It would be easy,’ his superior continued, ‘but I will resist. I will resist because I do not like to waste the taxpayer’s money. Your career thus far represents an investment of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Hundreds of thousands of pounds spent trying to beat the knowledge of spycraft into that thick, curdled brain of yours.’