Legacy (3 page)

‘And so please tell him that Leonid thinks he will be able to meet next month as usual but two days before the usual date and that the currency for the last month had not reached his
24029609 account before he left so can Eric please ensure that it does this time.’ She paused. ‘Okay?’

‘24029609?’

‘That is correct.’

There was another pause. The pianist had returned alone while they had been talking and, seated at the piano, began to play a single note, repeatedly, in slow time. Charles had been vestigially
aware but had not heeded it until now, when he saw that she, too, was listening. It was slowly, softly done, the single insistent note becoming insidiously, then openly and finally triumphantly
dominant as the tea-room chatter gradually fell silent before it. Cups were returned to saucers or held suspended. People looked at each other, then at the expressionless pianist sitting very
upright, one hand in his lap. Tension increased as other sounds fell away. Waiters stopped, trays in hand. The pianist began slowly to vary his note. Incrementally, caressingly, he built up into a
lingering, aching rendition of
Lili Marlene
that flowed and swelled to its fullest and then, at its height, declined as slowly and hauntingly as it had begun into the single note that
started it.

When it ceased there was applause and cheering. The pianist bowed several times, grinning, the waiters started and the room was filled again with voices and movement. Charles caught her eye once
more. She held his gaze, as if they had shared a private joke in company, then she stood and put out her hand. ‘It has been very nice to meet you again. Please give my regards to David and
Avril when you see them.’

He let the women leave before he paid, then spent some time in the Gents’ so that he left a good twenty minutes after them, forgetting about his proposed recce of the Upstairs restaurant.
From the state of the Strand, it was clear it had been raining hard. There were puddles on the broken and uneven pavements, the gutters ran with water and the rush-hour traffic was worse than
usual. He walked briskly along to Charing Cross, where he bought shaving soap and a toothbrush, then headed across the concourse to join the crowd moving onto platform one, but slipped away before
the barrier, down the steps and into Villiers Street. From there he made for the Embankment Underground station, where he waited on the east-bound platform for a Circle line train, hesitated as if
opting for the District line then, with an obvious last-second check of the destination display, boarded as the doors closed. He got off one stop later, at Westminster, and walked over Westminster
Bridge to the south side of the Thames. A breeze rippled the brown water and an unexpected burst of afternoon sun glinted on the wet road and flashed in the windows of St Thomas’
hospital.

Charles maintained his brisk pace. He made no notes but mentally rehearsed the salient details, confident that he had the account number because he had trained himself over the past few months
to remember telephone numbers after repeating them aloud to himself, once. The secret was to give them mental rhythms. A bus had broken down on the far side of the bridge, in the middle of some
roadworks on the roundabout, halting traffic in all directions. As he picked his way between the clogged vehicles, he remembered Gerry telling them that a Russian spy had been discovered in the
round building in the middle, which housed London’s driving licence centre. The agent had used the records to help the Russians identify people they were interested in, and to help build up
legends for Russian agents working under cover. There had been nothing of it in the papers, which heightened Charles’s pleasure in knowing it.

He continued under the Waterloo railway bridge towards Century House, which towered above Lambeth North tube, but before reaching it he turned left into Lower Marsh where the street traders were
packing up for the day and a lorry was spraying the narrow wet road with yet more water. It was a thriving street in a poor area, cheap and dilapidated but always busy. You could get anything
there, they said – anything – minus the wrapping. A little over half way along was a door near a cut-price clothes shop with a polished brass plate announcing Rasen, Falcon & Co.,
Shippers and Exporters. Charles pressed the bell and turned to face the pane of darkened glass let into the wall at the side. When the door opened he stepped through into a short hallway with
another door and a uniformed guard sitting behind a raised ledge to the side. He showed his green pass.

The guard nodded. ‘Last one back, sir.’ He pressed a button to open the second door.

Charles went upstairs to a lecture room at the back of the building. All the windows had blinds down and the dozen desks were mostly occupied by his fellow students bent over papers or slowly
tapping the keyboards of heavy grey Olympia typewriters. They were writing up the results of the exercise. The only one to look up when Charles entered was Gerry, their instructor, slumped over the
podium in his shirtsleeves and making pencil notes which he kept crossing out. The film screen was unrolled and blank behind him.

‘Welcome, Carlos. Late lunch?’ Gerry altered or invented names for everyone.

‘Late agent.’

‘Agents are never late in Exercise Tabby Cat. Never accidentally, anyway.’ Gerry grinned and pushed his oversize glasses up his nose. Approaching forty, he had unruly fair hair, an
expressive, good-natured, prematurely lined face and a generally dishevelled appearance. ‘Better crack on with your write-up. We’ve got the moving pictures soon. Big treat. You’ve
missed tea.’

Charles went to his desk. The worst part of exercises was the write-up. It was supposed to be concise and properly divided between factual account, intelligence product – if any –
and opinion and recommendation. It was supposed to contain everything important and nothing unimportant, with the proviso that some unimportant things might later turn out to have been
important.

‘Never weary the busy A officer reader,’ Gerry often told them. ‘Action officers are dealing with at least twenty other cases apart from yours and they don’t want to read
about sunsets in deathless prose. At the same time, when your case goes bottom up and the proverbial hits the fan, as is not unknown’ – he would grin and push his glasses again –
‘you will be the first to be blamed for not having told the A officer something which at the time he did not want to know.’

When Rebecca, the training course secretary, entered the students – all men between their early twenties and early thirties – looked up. ‘Message for Charles,’ she said,
smiling more confidently now than in the early days when she used to blush through her suntan as they all looked at her. ‘C/Sov wants to see you a.s.a.p.’

Controller/Soviet Bloc was in charge of all Soviet and Eastern European operations.

‘Found you out already,’ called Roger, from the far side of the room.

‘Wants more sugar in his tea,’ said Christopher Westfield, a plump former merchant banker who was said to have taken a salary cut of three-quarters when he joined.

‘Probably disgusted by your anti-surveillance precautions,’ said Gerry. ‘Becky, please politely convey to C/Sov that Carlos will sprint over to Head Office as soon as he has
finished here, which will be some time after six. Meanwhile, let’s be having your write-ups soon, gentle men.’ He rubbed his hands as he separated both words. ‘I’ll be
having some more tea.’ He and Rebecca left the room.

Charles looked across at Roger. ‘Is that mine?’

Yawning, Roger held up the bottom of his tie and considered it. ‘Possibly. Probably. Shirt, too, maybe. All my own teeth, though.’

Desmond Kimmeridge, a former cavalry officer known, thanks to Gerry, as Debonair, glanced at the tie. ‘I should let him keep it if I were you.’

Gerry returned rubbing his hands. ‘Right, that’s it. Finish your write-ups later, in your own time. Meanwhile,
mes enfants
, we have a film show. Windows and blinds fully
closed, please, for the Secret Intelligence Service’s very own Keystone Cops. Probably all of you thought you were under surveillance at some point during this morning’s exercise, and
you should’ve specified times and places in your write-ups, with descriptions of surveillants. Perceived surveillants. Imaginary surveillants. None of you was, you see, except one. Cheaper
that way. Let it roll, Becky.’

After a couple of false starts and the usual teasing, Rebecca coaxed the cumbersome apparatus at the back of the room into action. Charles watched himself enter the Savoy, briefly looking
straight at the camera concealed in the window of the Upstairs restaurant. Next he was seen reading his paper and drinking tea, replacing his cup without looking and, to guffaws from the audience,
spilling some. Then he was seen talking to the blonde foreign woman, his exercise ‘agent’, which provoked ribaldry. Finally he was shown walking briskly away from the Savoy.

‘The team was with you all the way back here,’ said Gerry, ‘and for a while before you reached the hotel. They picked you up in the Strand.’

‘Rather they’d picked up the girl,’ said Christopher.

Charles tried to recover a little of his pride. ‘But I spotted the chap in brown shoes in Beaconsfield. And the Russian Embassy car at the station before.’

‘Nothing to do with us. You were on your own in Beaconsfield. Coincidence, chance, like most of life. Make sure you report the Russian car, though.’

‘The man was behaving oddly. He followed me most of the way.’

‘No accounting for taste,’ said Roger.

Gerry shook his head. ‘Look around you and the world is full of people doing odd things. Cross my heart, cut my throat and hope to die, Charles, there was no surveillance on you until you
reached the Strand. Then you had the full works until you got back here. The team reckoned your approach to the meeting looked reasonably natural except that your walk was a touch too deliberate,
too slow. Let’s watch you arrive again – Becky, thanks. Here, see. Most people are walking as if they’re trying to get somewhere. You’re not. We’ll spare you the hotel
shots again but they reckon your body language and so on was okay except that you obviously relaxed after about half an hour, as if you were no longer looking, no longer alert, no longer seriously
expecting anything. The surprise encounter with your agent was handled well, they said. Looked very natural. Probably because it was a surprise. But afterwards you shot off from the hotel like
Buster Keaton speeded up – there, you see, completely different walk. Much brisker, much more purposeful, eager to get back before you forget it all. Looking forward to doing your write-up, I
daresay. And clearly no longer looking. Not surveillance aware.’ Gerry emphasised the words with his fist on the podium. ‘Serious point, this, for all of you. SV teams reckon they can
always tell the difference between – say – a KGB officer approaching a meeting, brush contact, emptying or filling a DLB – dead letter box – or whatever – and one
who’s just done it, because afterwards he’s relieved and his pace quickens. Remember that, gentle men. Do not let it happen. Whenever you’re doing any operation you should walk at
your normal pace throughout. You probably don’t know what that is. Well, get to know it. Measure it. And always, always, give anyone watching an obvious reason for your being wherever you
are. One day the lives of your agents may depend on it. And the rest of you remember that Carlos got clobbered this time, so it may be you next. Or Carlos again, who knows. But in case you think
you’ve got clean away with it, we’ve a further surprise for you. Okay, Rebecca?’

Rebecca went out into the corridor and returned leading a line of ten men and women, several sheepishly grinning. ‘Gentlemen, your agents,’ Gerry announced with a flourish.
‘Come to tell each of you how you performed from the agent’s point of view, no holds barred. Nothing they say will be used in evidence against you’ – he opened his arms and
grinned – ‘yet.’

Charles grabbed an extra chair and pulled it to his desk as the blonde woman approached. She carried an expensive-looking brown leather jacket. Her smile was very slightly crooked, he now
noticed. ‘I’m so sorry to have kept you lingering over your tea for so long,’ she said. ‘I was told to give them plenty of time to try out their fancy new cameras.
Apparently the one that gave the best results was the old-fashioned briefcase sort used by the man at the table on the far side, opposite you.’

Charles hadn’t spotted him. She spoke quietly and, against the general hubbub, he had to concentrate on what she was saying. Twice, even before she was seated, she had pushed back her
hair. Her accent was educated southern English. ‘You’ve lost your accent,’ he said. ‘And your little girls.’

‘My borrowed accent. My husband is A/1, desk officer for London operations. We were in Prague. The children were not borrowed, though. But office wives are, for this sort of
thing.’

‘It was very convincing.’

‘Not to anyone who knows.’

‘Do you speak Czech?’

‘Shopping Czech – queuing Czech, I should say. Menu Czech.’

There was a pause, filled by the noise and laughter of the others. The loudest laugh was Gerry’s, as he went from desk to desk. They looked at each other for a moment before speaking.
‘That pianist,’ Charles said.

‘I know. It was wonderful. So simple. And so dramatic.’

Charles knew he should resist staring so directly. She crossed her legs and glanced down at the square toe of her polished brown boot. The leather jacket on her lap creaked softly.
‘I’m Anna,’ she said.

‘I wasn’t sure whether I was allowed to know you as anything other than Mrs A/1. I’m Charles Thoroughgood.’

‘I know, Gerry briefed us all. I’m supposed to tell you how you did. So embarrassing.’ She smiled again.

‘Was I that bad?’

‘No, no, you were fine. Very good, very natural. There’s nothing else to say, really. There’d be more if you were bad. No, it’s just – you know – the
necessary pretence of these necessary games.’

‘Fun, though,’ Charles said, hopefully.

‘Oh yes, fun, of course.’