Contents
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY GUY ADAMS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
BACKGROUND DOCUMENT
PART ONE: BLIND
CHAPTER ONE: LUDWIG
CHAPTER TWO: NUMBERS
CHAPTER THREE: NOSTALGIA
CHAPTER FOUR: CONVERSATION
CHAPTER FIVE: ARCHEOLOGY
CHAPTER SIX: NOSTALGIA (2)
CHAPTER SEVEN: TIME
SUPPLEMENTARY FILE: ST. MATHEW’S CHURCH, ALDGATE
PART TWO: BLACK EARTH
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE FEAR
SUPPLEMENTARY FILE: UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
CHAPTER NINE: RECOGNITION
CHAPTER TEN: ARCHIVE
CHAPTER ELEVEN: NOSTALGIA (3)
CHAPTER TWELVE: GHOSTS
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: TRUTH
SUPPLEMENTARY FILE: UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: TRAVEL PLANS
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: GONE
SUPPLEMENTARY FILE: BERLIN, 1961
PART THREE: HIGHER
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: DISLOCATED
SUPPLEMENTARY FILE: TAMAR
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: INSUBSTANTIAL
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: REVIVAL
CHAPTER NINETEEN: THE FEAR
CHAPTER TWENTY: POSSIBILITIES
SUPPLEMENTARY FILE: SHAD THAMES, 1963
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: POTENTIAL
APPENDICES
ADDITIONAL FILE: THE MANY FACES OF OLAG KRISHNIN
ADDITIONAL DOCUMENT: AUGUST SHINING, PRIVATE NOTES, [DATE REDACTED]
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IN CONVERSATION WITH GUY ADAMS
COPYRIGHT
Toby Greene has been reassigned.
The Department: Section 37 Station Office, Wood Green.
The Boss: August Shining, an ex-Cambridge, Cold War-era spy.
The Mission: charged with protecting Great Britain and its interests from paranormal terrorism.
The Threat: an old enemy has returned, and with him Operation Black Earth, a Soviet plan to create the ultimate insurgents by re-animating the dead.
Guy Adams lives in Spain, surrounded by rescue animals. Some of them are his family. He isn’t a spy, but he is a boy, so naturally he’s always dreamed of being one.
Having spent over ten years working as a professional actor and comedian, eventually he decided he’d quite like to eat regularly, so switched careers and became a full-time writer. Nobody said he was clever.
Against all odds he managed to stay busy and since then he has written over twenty books.
Torchwood: The House That Jack Built
Torchwood: The Men Who Sold The World
Kronos
Hands of the Ripper
Sherlock: The Casebook
Countess Dracula
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First published in the UK in 2013 by Del Rey, an imprint of Ebury Publishing A Random House Group Company
Copyright © 2013 by Guy Adams
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This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
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To Agents “Loobrins” and “Durdles”, for their consistent support in the field. Mission accomplished.
The man splayed by the side of the pool was dead.
Seated on the lawn, Olag Krishnin smoked a cigarette and watched as a pair of flies circled the wet head of the corpse. The insects danced in the light of the winter sun, a pale yellow fire that added glints to the thin, tousled strands of the dead man’s hair.
The grass of the lawn had been cut ruthlessly short. A fraction further and it would have revealed earth. It reminded Krishnin of the crew cut he had worn in the army. That fine stubble that tingled against the palm like furry static. It didn’t surprise Krishnin that a man like Andrei Bortnik would have taken such fastidious care over his grass (or rather ensured his staff did so). Bortnik had been a man who obsessed on detail. Not the sort of man to tolerate weeds within his garden, literally or metaphorically. That was, after all, why Olag had been forced to kill him.
‘You’ve gone too far,’ Bortnik had said in that wheezy, fat-choked voice of his. ‘I can’t cover for you any longer – even I have my orders.’
Krishnin had known this moment was coming. It had been inevitable as soon as he had joined the committee. Bortnik might be someone who could spend his whole life following orders. Krishnin was not. He had toed the line, given good service – as long as it had benefited him to do so. Now, in anticipation of being plucked from his position of authority, a weed in Bortnik’s flowerbed, Krishnin had reached up and choked the man, stilling the hand that had sought to remove him. It was survival, of course, but also an act of principle. The moment his superiors lost heart they relinquished their right to be his superiors.
‘We cannot do this,’ Bortnik had insisted, his voice suddenly fearful as he realised the danger he was in. ‘There is no honour in a victory like this – we cannot become monsters.’
‘Not monsters,’ Krishnin had replied, gripping the man’s neck, ‘masters of monsters.’
Bortnik had been surprisingly difficult to kill. Krishnin had expected it to be quick but all men, even weak old men like Bortnik, fought for life when they recognised how close they were to losing it.
He had pushed Bortnik’s head down into the pool, his knee pressed hard between the man’s shoulder blades. The water had bubbled and frothed with Bortnik’s last frantic attempts to breathe. Krishnin had held him there longer than necessary, hypnotised by the slow circling of a leaf that was working its way across the surface of the pool. A thing at the mercy of wind and current. He saw something of himself in that leaf. It felt good to finally be free.
He finished his cigarette, stubbing it out in the grass – savouring this small act of vandalism – got to his feet, and began to walk towards the driveway.
Looking out of one of the upstairs windows of Bortnik’s house, Valentina Denisov, his general maid, thought she saw a man walking across the lawn. She had been startled at the time, knowing that her master had insisted he wasn’t to be disturbed all morning. She would have been even more startled had the angle from the window not prevented her from seeing her master’s corpse. It would be another two hours before the body was discovered. Moving closer to the window, perversely hopeful of a stranger on the property and the panic and anger that would cause, she was disappointed to see there was nobody there. She returned to the boredom of her cleaning.
Later, when the questioning began in earnest, Valentina decided not to mention thinking she had glimpsed someone. After all, it would only cause her trouble. Besides, it must have been a trick of the light: a man cannot just vanish.
The journey between Ukraine and Austria had been leisurely. Krishnin knew that the murder of Bortnik would have set off a panic within the upper echelons of the KGB, but he wasn’t worried that the trail would lead to him. He had certain advantages, not least of which being that the majority of the committee were unaware he even existed. Bortnik would have kept the circle of those who knew of Krishnin tight, and those few privy to the knowledge would now be doing their best to cover up the fact. They would also be worried for their own lives, scuttling to their holiday homes, hiding behind locked doors. Much good it would have done them. If Krishnin wanted them dead, they would be.
But Krishnin had other plans and they took precedence.
He made his way down Schönlaterngasse, stopping not to look at the ornate street lantern that gave it its name but rather at the building opposite. An ancient myth held that in 1212 a baker’s servant had fought a basilisk there. The mythical serpent, said to be hatched by a cockerel from a snake’s egg, was believed so poisonous it would kill with no more than a glance. The servant had held a mirror up to the basilisk, turning its own poisonous gaze back on itself. Krishnin approved. Perhaps there was a metaphor there, he mused. After all, was he not about to turn his enemies on themselves?
He took a seat at a small coffee shop nearby and waited for his contact.
The man was a smuggler, American, but so totally corrupt that his politics had become meaningless. Krishnin disliked the man but was pragmatic enough to take what he needed from wherever he could find it.
‘It’s all there,’ the man said as he dropped a newspaper on the table between them, a buff envelope poking out from between its fold. ‘And my work speaks for itself. I can assure you nobody will bat an eye at any of it. I’m a professional.’
A professional. The use of the word rankled with Krishnin. Nonetheless he picked up the paper and unfolded it so that the ‘secreted’ envelope fell into his lap.
‘I don’t need reassurance,’ he said, pulling from the inside pocket of his coat a similarly-sized envelope of cash and folding it inside the newspaper. ‘If I didn’t consider you reliable, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’
He handed the paper back, a false smile on his face, two men sharing a news story in an outdoor cafe.
‘I have a reputation,’ the American admitted, his smile genuine and somewhat arrogant.
‘Indeed,’ Krishnin agreed, finishing his coffee. ‘I hope that one day it gets you shot.’
Krishnin couldn’t think how they had found him and it was that lack of knowledge that angered him most. He had grown so used to being in a dominant position that the sudden loss of authority seemed a savage insult. He wasn’t overly worried that they would catch him, but a little surprised they were even trying … One of Bortnik’s colleagues must have had more resolve than he had credited. Good for him. If Krishnin ever found out the name he would eliminate the problem in his usual way.
There were two officers waiting by the departure gate and three more milling around hoping to catch him before he got there. Krishnin followed one of them into the toilet, partly to gather intelligence, partly just to vent his anger.
Having slowly garrotted the man with the cistern chain, his legs wrapped around the man like a lover to stop his thrashing feet from making too much noise, Krishnin knew no more than he had five minutes earlier. No matter. Let them send whoever they liked – he would kill them all if need be.
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.
‘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.
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.’
‘He got the jump on me,’ Toby managed to blurt out. ‘It could have happened to anyone.’
The Section Chief reached towards the horse ornament again. ‘Don’t make me do it,’ he said. ‘One solid blow, that’s all it will take. Your medical report assures me that Yoosuf has weakened your cranium considerably.’
Toby sighed and lowered his head. A beaten dog accepting the flexed belt of his master.
‘It was a simple assignment, Greene,’ his Chief continued, ‘pathetically so. You just had to babysit him. A man whose hobbies include collecting sheet music and playing the bassoon. A man I would have previously considered one of the most delicate in espionage. Before he brained you, that is. At which point you became the most fragile flower on the books. A fragile flower that I now have to replant.’
His chief sat back in his chair and looked out of the window. ‘Somewhere shady, I think. Somewhere the bad weeds won’t immediately throttle you.’
The ensuing silence seemed to swell like a tick feeding on awkwardness. Toby wondered if it might eventually crush them both beneath its terrible weight.
‘Of course,’ said his Chief finally, ‘there was that fuss in Basra wasn’t there?’ He clicked away at his computer, making a show of searching for information that Toby knew well enough he already had. ‘A possible PTSD diagnosis?’
Toby didn’t know if he was really expected to answer. He chose to assume not.
‘A diagnosis you fiercely denied at the time. Is that the root of the problem?’ his superior continued. ‘Was that the chink of vulnerability that brought the whole lot crumbling down?’
He looked at Toby. ‘Was that when I should have realised you weren’t cut out for our line of work? That you didn’t have the …’ he looked up at the office roof, as if hoping to find the word he was thinking of scribbled on one of the ceiling tiles, ‘fortitude?’
He brought his gaze back down to the computer. ‘I always said there was a problem with sending non-military personnel into hot zones. I should have seen that you weren’t ready for it.’
Toby thought back to those few months, and one night in particular, when the sky had filled with harsh light and noise and the whole city had trembled. Who could have been ready?
‘In the old days it was so much easier,’ his Section Chief mused, ‘you threw a man into hell and he managed. These days I’m surrounded by analysts and doctors telling me to mind my poor, genteel boys.’ The man gazed into space, remembering the glory days when he hadn’t been expected to mind his operatives’ feelings.
‘The problem,’ he said, ‘has always been that you’re a dreamer. You joined up wanting to be James Bond, grown fat on a diet of TV shows and spy novels.’
Toby remained silent.
‘You expected to be working for George Smiley, no doubt,’ his chief continued, ‘a genteel old chap with a penchant for cardigans held together with pipe smoke. Instead you got me.’
He sighed and swiped his mouse on the surface of the desk. ‘Well, if this is the Circus,’ he said, referencing the slang term for the Secret Service, ‘then Section 37 is where we keep the clowns. And frankly, they’re welcome to you.’
He scribbled on a piece of paper and pushed it across the desk. ‘Report there on Monday and never trouble me again.’
Toby stared at the piece of paper and opened his mouth to speak.
The Section Chief snarled, grabbed the horse statuette off his desk and threw it at him.
Toby uncoiled the bandage from his head, then leaned back with a handheld vanity mirror so that he could see his wound in the reflection. A crop circle with puckered flesh at the centre of it. He wondered if combing carefully might cover it up. A couple of minutes’ effort resulted only in an even sorer head and a piling of hair whose position was obviously contrived. Blatant as dust swept into the corner of an ugly room.
Throwing the comb at the sink, Toby went into the kitchen to find something to drink.
His doctor had been unequivocal with regards to mixing alcohol with his medication. It was something that Should Not Be Done. Finding he couldn’t care less, he opened a bottle of wine.
After draining half a glass while standing at the worktop, he refilled it and tried to decide what to do next. Naturally, given his self-destructive streak, he called his father.
‘Who is it?’
‘Toby.’
There was a lengthy pause at the end of the line. Then, ‘Is there something wrong?’
‘No, just calling to see how you are.’
‘Oh.’ There was another pause; his father couldn’t have made his disinterest clearer had he hung up.
‘So, how are you?’
‘Fine. Busy.’
‘Busy doing what? You haven’t broken a sweat in four years.’ Toby had meant the comment to sound light-hearted. It was out of his mouth before it occurred to him that it might come across as a criticism. His father certainly took it as such.
‘Retired doesn’t mean lazy,’ he said. ‘I can still be busy.’
‘I know. I was joking.’
Toby’s father made a noise that could have been dismissal or phlegm. Then was silent again.
‘I’ll ring back another time, shall I?’
‘No,’ his father replied, ‘chat away.’
‘Right, well it was more to find out how you were really.’
‘Busy, like I said.’
‘Yes.’ There was a pause, then Toby added, ‘With what?’
‘Stuff, you know, just … stuff.’ His father seemed to suddenly remember how conversations worked. ‘You?’
‘Oh, some fuss at work, nothing major. I could do without it, though.’
‘I bet. You’re lucky to have a job in this recession. So, what have you done now?’
‘Done?’
‘You say there’s been trouble. What have you done?’
The fact that his father was right hardly helped Toby forgive him the assumption. ‘Why would I have done anything?’ he countered. ‘All I said was that there was trouble at work. Why do you automatically think that means I’ve fucked up somehow?’
‘Experience,’ his father laughed. Toby was familiar with that laugh. It was a common shield, his jolly weapon to be re-employed should Toby argue over the comment. ‘Don’t be so sensitive,’ his father would say. ‘Couldn’t you tell I was joking?’
Toby refused to give his father any satisfaction. He took another mouthful of wine. ‘I’m being transferred, actually – moved to a better department.’
‘Better, eh? Says who?’
‘Says me. But I would rather have had a bit more notice; it leaves a lot of unfinished business on my desk.’
‘You always flitted about, never could settle.’
‘Not my choice,’ Toby replied, feeling his anger build, a roaring tension that made him stiffen from neck to toe, becoming one clenched muscle. ‘They need me elsewhere.’
‘God help them!’ – that laugh again. Toby felt the stem of his wine glass snap in his hand and the bowl tumbled to the floor to spill wine across the carpet. ‘What’s wrong now?’ his father asked, responding to Toby’s short, startled cry.
‘Nothing,’ Toby insisted, refusing to admit anything that might be seen as idiocy in the eyes of his father. God, how tiring it was trying to be perfect. He threw the stem onto the sofa and squatted down to pick up the bowl of the glass.
‘You made a noise,’ his father said, utterly attentive for the first time in the phone call.
Toby went to the kitchen, meaning to tug some kitchen roll off the holder but it was empty. He always forgot to replace the roll. Stupid.
‘No,’ he said into the phone as he rummaged in the cupboard under the sink, turfing out a mess of carrier bags and the sort of kitchen junk that was never used but never thrown away. ‘Must have been the line.’
He found a kitchen roll and tried to tug it free from the shrink-wrapped plastic packaging. It fought him and, as the anger continued to build, he wished he could tear it to fucking shreds.
‘Anyway,’ Toby declared, determined to keep his voice even despite his jaw beginning to tighten as much as the rest of him, ‘I start next Monday – so at least I can have a few days to chill out a bit. The doctor says I should avoid doing much. Concussion can sneak up on you, apparently.’
‘Only you could manage to brain yourself working in HR,’ his father said. ‘Who knew filing cabinets had such fight in them?’
Of course he had had to lie about the cause of his accident, his father not having been cleared to know the nature of his son’s job. But it irritated Toby. It was bad enough that his father always seemed to consider him a failure without him having to bolster that opinion.
‘Yeah,’ he laughed, deciding it was better to brush the comment off than dwell on it. ‘Stationery has teeth in the Civil Service.’
‘I imagine it’s the only thing that has. So what’s this new job of yours then?’
‘More of the same, really,’ Toby replied as noncommittally as he could – it was always easier to maintain a lie that was barely uttered in the first place. ‘Just a different department.’
‘And this is what I spend my taxes on. Christ! I’m still paying your pocket money, aren’t I?’
‘I’m sure it’s money well spent.’ Of course, Toby’s Section Chief hadn’t thought so and he was quite sure his father wouldn’t have either. All the more reason to keep his secrets. He tried to change the subject. ‘When are you coming up to London next?’
‘There’s a sale on the 23rd that’s probably worth the train ride.’
Like seeing your son isn’t? thought Toby. ‘Maybe we could have lunch while you’re here.’
‘Look at you trying to take extra time off so soon into your new job.’
‘Just lunch, the department’s flexible on lunch.’
‘Well, it shouldn’t be,’ said his father, ‘it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money.’
‘Forget it then.’ Toby wasn’t going to fight for it; he was only too happy to not see him. ‘Listen, I’d better go.’
‘Got something more important to do, have you?’ And, again, the laugh, just to make it quite clear that his father wasn’t really bothered. ‘I’m sure I’ll be talking to you again soon.’
The phone went dead and Toby spent a few minutes contemplating the red wine-stain on the rug.
Monday morning crept slowly across the city as Toby headed to the Piccadilly line like a man going to his death.
The raucous clatter of the Tube didn’t intrude upon him as he sat staring at his own reflection in the darkened glass of the window. He seemed to see someone he didn’t know anymore. Even his clothes looked uncomfortable. The suit that never quite fitted the way he hoped it would, the shirt collar that would never sit still. The man in his head never appeared in the mirror; it was always this fragile idiot.
He got off at Wood Green and ascended the stairway into a riot of traffic and pedestrians. The noise wrong-footed him as it occasionally had since his injury. It was all engines, shouting and the roar of life. A feeling of claustrophobia swelled up inside him and he dashed across the road looking for somewhere to catch his breath. Misjudging the lights, he narrowly missed being hit by a bus, a solid red wall of metal and glass that swung towards him as if out of nowhere.
The pavement hardly seemed safer. Having lost his rhythm he felt as if he were in everyone’s way, constantly swinging to one side or another as people converged on him. He had to fight an urge to shout as he turned off the main road to find a place of relative silence.
Resting against a street sign Toby caught his breath, trying to tug the collar of his shirt away from his sweating throat. Was this it now? A promising career finished because of a series of mistakes and panic attacks? Had he fallen so far? The last few years had certainly rained punches on him: the shooting in Israel, the bomb attack in Basra, now Yoosuf … Everyone had their fair share of bad luck in this business, but his seemed particularly sour. It weighed on him. It made him feel spent.
The temptation simply to quit had surfaced repeatedly. A constant argument with himself that he could never quite resolve. Was he really cut out for this work? The way he was feeling now suggested not, mentally battered from one conflict after another, and yet … the more he suffered the more he was determined to push through it, to regain the strength he was sure he had once had. The act of giving up seemed a failure too far. The more it tempted him, the more he became determined to continue. He could be better than this – had to be better than this.
Checking the map on his phone to make sure he knew where he was going, with a deep breath, Toby pushed on. He moved back to the bustling street, like a deep-sea diver leaving the air-filled surface far behind him.
Past the mobile-phone shops and fast-food restaurants, the shopping precinct and the market, Toby worked his way along the main road. He grew more accustomed to the noise as he walked and was almost his old self by the time he reached the nondescript door that led to the offices of Section 37. It stood to the left of a cluttered window offering cheap international call minutes, phone-unlocking and cheque-cashing.
‘Lovely,’ he muttered, trying to decide between the two buttons mounted next to the flaking, purple-painted door. Neither was marked. He jabbed the upper one.
Inside the shop an angry Turkish man began hurling abuse at children loitering by the racks of cheap mobile-phone covers. If nothing else, Toby thought, his career had taught him to understand curses in most languages.
The door was opened by a jaded young woman in a silk dressing gown. It had been slung on in a casual manner, like a serviette draped over a nice slice of cake to dissuade flies.
‘What?’ she asked. ‘You woke me up.’ Most people would have registered a Russian accent, but Toby could be more precise. It was Armenian.
‘Oh,’ Toby said, ‘I’m sorry, I was after Mr Shining.’
Her shoulders sagged but she gave a soft, sleepy smile. ‘Wrong bell,’ she said, pointing at where he had pressed the upper, rather than lower button.
‘So sorry,’ Toby said, ‘do you think I might come in anyway?’
At that, the smile vanished and she held her hand out in flat-palmed denial. ‘Nobody visits August unless they are approved,’ she said. For a moment he thought her English was off and had been about to insist that it was actually May. Then he realised that his new boss must be called August. August Shining. It was not the most inconspicuous name a spy could wish for.
‘I’m expected,’ he assured her.
She settled a suspicious look on him and pressed the correct button. The buzzer could be heard going off up the stairs behind her.
‘Yes?’ asked a voice.
‘August,’ said the girl, ‘I have a man here who says you expect him.’
‘Well,’ said the man who sounded much older than Toby had envisaged, ‘what’s he like?’
Toby sighed as he was given a thorough once-over by the Armenian girl.
He looked over her shoulder at the dingy hall and the stairs that climbed towards the pale light of a window shrouded in yellowing dust and cobwebs. It certainly didn’t look worth the effort it was taking to gain access.
‘He’s late in his twenties,’ the girl said, ‘probably eleven and a half stone, maybe twelve. Spent a lot of time abroad, his skin shows too much tan for the weather here these last months.’
‘Sunbed?’ asked the voice.
‘Not the type,’ she replied. ‘He is alone and has been for long time, I think. He wears his clothes and hair like they are habits. He deals with them because he has to, not because he wants to be handsome.’
‘He sounds charming.’
‘And he’s stood right here,’ Toby reminded them both.
‘Oh, let him in,’ said Shining. ‘If he wants to kill me you can soon come to my rescue.’
‘Is damn right,’ she said, stepping back to let Toby pass. ‘I break his neck if he hurt my August.’
There was the sound of a door opening from above and Toby climbed around a corner in the stairway to come face to face with August Shining.
The man looked even older than his voice had suggested, with thin hair combed perfectly over a liver-spotted scalp. A white beard helped to hide some of the wrinkles, but his eyes were sharp – watching Toby from behind thin, designer wire-framed glasses. Wearing a fawn three-piece suit with a thick, dark-green checked shirt, Shining looked something between an old-fashioned country gentlemen and a fold-out fashion spread from GQ.
‘I don’t think he’s here to kill me, Tamar,’ Shining commented. ‘You can try to get some more sleep.’
‘I will keep the ears open,’ the girl replied, ‘and if he turns out bad you can shout.’
‘I certainly will.’
Shining stepped back and gestured for Toby to make his way through the door ajar behind him.
The office for Section 37 was a nest of filing cabinets and comfortable soft furnishings. Bookshelves lined one wall, framed black and white photographs another. A pair of leather sofas formed an avenue for the window to pour in North London light; it spilled out onto a carpet that was manila-envelope brown.
‘Sit down,’ said Shining, pointing to one of the sofas, ‘I’ll just get some coffee on the go.’
He stepped out of the room and there came the distant sound of running taps and coffee filters being banged against the plastic of a swing bin.
Toby walked over to look at the book shelf. It was a combination of geographical texts, political manuals, occult books and trashy horror novels. He pulled out a book and looked briefly at the blood-stained woman on the cover. Apparently it was a ‘thrill-storm of gore’ and ‘a meaty must-read’. He returned the book and moved on to the photographs. They were of locations all over the world, from obvious tourist spots like the Eiffel Tower or the Sphinx to other, more obscure locations: a West German alleyway; a rain-soaked street in Portugal; an icy bandstand freezing its wooden bones in an indeterminate landscape. Obviously they must mean something to Shining, but Toby couldn’t guess what. Places he’d worked possibly. If he’d been a member of the Service for as long as his age allowed, he must have seen his fair share of the world.
‘Do you take milk or sugar?’ came a voice from the kitchen.
‘No, thank you,’ Toby replied, having taken to drinking his coffee black as he kept running out of milk.
‘Then you’re easy to please,’ said Shining, coming back into the room with a pair of coffee cups, one of which he handed to his visitor.
Toby took it and stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, feeling stranded – in foreign territory.
‘My wailing wall,’ said Shining, nodding to the photographs before sitting down on one of the sofas and looking out of the window.
Toby found the conviviality disturbing. First he had been made a drink; now he was standing while his superior relaxed by the window.
‘It’s a good spot,’ said Shining, nodding at the view outside, ‘though I have no doubt my paymasters would begrudge my saying so.’ He looked to Toby and smiled. ‘The only reason people get sent here is when they’ve made someone stupid but important hate them.’ He gestured once again to the opposite sofa. Toby sat. ‘Was that how it was for you?’
Toby thought for a moment. Unsure whether to tell the truth or not. Eventually he decided it could hardly matter. ‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘I let someone get away from me on a mission.’
‘We’ve all done that. Why was this a particular problem?’
‘I was cocky. I let him get away because I didn’t pay attention. I underestimated him.’
‘And he surprised you?’
‘Yes. He hit me over the head and ran.’
‘Hit you with what?’
‘Does it matter? A bust of Beethoven.’
‘It matters. It would hardly be funny were it a crowbar instead of a porcelain ornament of a dead composer.’
‘I don’t find it particularly funny anyway.’
‘No, but I bet your colleagues did.’
Toby shrugged. ‘Probably.’
‘What do they call you?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘After it happened, they must have given you a nickname – what was it?’
Toby didn’t really see it was any of Shining’s business. He had hoped to leave the name behind with the transfer. ‘They called me Ludwig.’
‘Really? I would have guessed at Rollover.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m old enough to know who Chuck Berry was. Doesn’t matter.’ He took a sip of his coffee and fixed Toby with a penetrating stare. ‘Are you washed-up?’ he asked. ‘Do you deserve to be hidden away out here?’
Toby didn’t feel annoyed by the question, something that would surprise him when he thought back on it. ‘Depends where “here” is,’ he replied, ‘and what I’m expected to do.’
‘A sensible, if evasive answer. Section 37 is an anomaly within the Service. A borderless agency that nobody can quite decide who runs. Are we part of the SIS or the Security Service? Neither, even if pressed, will admit to us. The ugly date brought home after a drunken night out. For all that, you’re expected to fight and, if necessary, die protecting your country. Does that sound unreasonable?’
‘Yes, but I’d probably do it if I had to.’
Shining smiled. ‘Good lad! Maybe we’ll be able to show them there’s life in Ludwig yet, eh?’
‘Do you have to call me that?’
‘No,’ Shining smiled, ‘but I probably will anyway. Never run away from the labels they give you. Wear them with pride and rob them of their sting.’
‘You’d need that philosophy,’ said Toby without thinking, ‘being called August Shining.’
Instead of being angered his new Section Chief laughed and nodded. ‘It’s not as florid as it sounds. I was born in August, and my parents were too busy to think of something better.’
‘Sounds familiar,’ Toby admitted, then immediately changed the subject for fear of getting onto the subject of his father. ‘So what exactly is it we do here?’
‘They didn’t tell you?’ Shining finished his coffee. ‘No. I imagine they wouldn’t. We’re the smallest department in the Secret Service, and exist purely by force of determination and my pig-headedness. We are charged with protecting the country or its interests from preternatural terrorism.’
Toby had to think about that. The words simply hadn’t made sense so he assumed he had heard them incorrectly. He repeated them out loud. ‘Preternatural terrorism?’
‘Absolutely. You’ve got a lot to learn.’
The sound in Toby’s head returned, that white noise of confusion that had assailed him when he was out on the street. It was the sound of a mind folding under the weight of things it simply didn’t want to process.
‘Do you believe in the paranormal?’ Shining asked. Toby simply stared at him, desperately wishing he had misunderstood the question, the word, the concept.
‘No,’ he responded, aware that the tone of his voice suggested he thought the answer obvious.
He needn’t have worried about giving offence. Shining merely smiled. It was a soft, indulgent smile, the sort you’d offer to a child who has just expressed disbelief that men ever walked on the moon. ‘You will,’ he said, ‘unless you’re foolhardy.’ He winked. ‘And I don’t think you are.’
There was the beep of a phone and Shining ferreted in his pocket. Swiping at the screen of his phone he peered through his glasses at the text message and gave a quiet chuckle. ‘And maybe this will help us decide one way or the other,’ he said.
He wandered out of the room only to reappear shrugging on a long overcoat. ‘Come on then,’ he said, ‘let’s begin your education.’
They were underneath the city and Shining was still saying things Toby wasn’t sure he wanted to hear.
‘Of course,’ he said. His lips were close to Toby’s ear so he could be heard over the noisy line, like a devil perched on his shoulder whispering confidences. ‘In the ’60s everybody had a section like ours. Those were the days! Budgets as over-inflated as the nation’s paranoia. There was nothing in which we couldn’t believe.
‘I was brought on straight out of Cambridge,’ Shining continued, ‘selected because of a frankly awful thesis about the philosophical implications of time travel.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘You could write about any old twaddle then and some fool would give you a doctorate.’
The train drew to a halt at Turnpike Lane and a large man clambered aboard, balancing himself against a tatty shopping trolley. He took one look at Toby and Shining and waddled to the far end of the carriage, ignoring the empty seats next to them.
‘It obviously impressed somebody,’ Shining continued, ‘because I was running a whole section within twelve months. Organising a network of forty or so agents, funnelling cash into research on everything from remote viewing to the living dead.’
‘The living dead,’ Toby repeated, dreamily and involuntarily, like a hypnotised man minutes away from swaggering around the stage in the belief he had transformed into a chicken.
‘I know, ridiculous, though intelligence suggested the Russians cracked it.’ Shining tugged at the crease in his trousers, ever the dandy. ‘They always were so much better funded, even back then.’
Toby slowly became aware that the other passengers were all moving further down the carriage, leaving the half that he and Shining were sitting in completely empty.
‘Then the ’70s came,’ said Shining, ‘and everything was budget cuts and a new broom. If you didn’t fit the new, leaner Service, then your section was closed and you were folded in somewhere else. If I hadn’t saved Harold Wilson’s neck – literally – from that bastard Romanian and his perverse clan, I would have suffered the fate of everyone else. As it is I operate under a special sanction. Section 37 will continue to operate while its Section Chief, that would be me, continues to draw breath.’
‘Better look after yourself then,’ Toby said, staring at the other passengers. However brazen his stare, they didn’t seem to be aware of it. Or aware of him at all.
‘Well, that was rather the problem,’ Shining agreed, ‘they might not have been able to close me down but they could make it as hard as possible for me to function. One old man in an office kept right on the periphery of the city, struggling to run a network and still manage to file a report or three. I must admit I was surprised to receive your transfer order.’
‘You and me both.’