The Envoy (10 page)

As he returned Jennifer’s underwear to the drawer, Kit noticed some other things lurking at the back – half hidden. They were not ‘normal’ or even conventionally ‘sexy’ articles of underclothing. The strange apparel and other objects belonged to a completely different order of things. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘my God. Who would have thought this?’ At first, Kit was shocked to his core. Then he was oddly excited by the discovery – and then ashamed that it did excite him. He closed the drawer: it was like closing the first half of his life.

When Kit got back to London, he found it difficult to get Jennifer out of his mind. Her face kept materialising like an apparition on official documents and memos. It was a long day that had ended with a late-night clandestine meeting with the cabinet minister he had compromised in a honey trap. The woman in question was stunningly beautiful, but needed elocution lessons. She had also begun ‘dating’ someone on the other side – bad news.

Once again, it was past midnight when Kit got back to his flat. He’d had to stay late for a top secret briefing about the results of the most recent hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific. The
briefing
had been given by Sterling Cole, Chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy. Cole’s message was chilling. The H-bomb test on Bikini had been three times more powerful than the scientists had predicted. The crew of a Japanese fishing boat – ‘eighty-five miles outside the declared danger zone’ – had been afflicted with serious radiation sickness. After Cole finished, the press attaché gave a talk about how important it was to stop ‘H-bomb panic’ from spreading through the British press and to the public at large.

Kit lit the gas fire that had been installed in the old Victorian hearth. It hissed and spat under the mantlepiece before it settled down. There were still London homes with coal fires – and the fumes still killed. The Great Smog of 1952 killed over four
thousand
Londoners in ten days; there were even cattle asphyxiated at Smithfield Market. But the Clean Air Act was on its way – those coal fires were going to be history. Pity in a way, thought Kit. He liked to think of Falstaff fondling a wench at the Boar’s Head warmed by a ‘sea coal’ fire. Four thousand Londoners killed by coal smoke. How many would an air burst over St Paul’s finish off?

An H-bomb over St Paul’s wouldn’t just melt Wren’s great bronze dome: it would vaporise it. In one second the temperature of the blast would reach a hundred million degrees Celsius. A fireball, a mile in diameter, would unleash a wall of wind
sweeping
all before it at seven hundred and fifty miles per hour. Cars, trucks and buses would be tossed into the air like autumn leaves – tyres alight and petrol tanks exploding. Gulls in flight over the Thames estuary would drop from the sky in flames. Ten seconds later, the suction from the blast would reverse the wind
direction
and create a vast mushroom cloud. A super-heated
three-hundred-mile
per hour hurricane would boil the Thames into a cauldron of steam. At three miles distance clothing would burst into flames or melt. No living thing would survive within
sixty-five
square miles. That was one H-bomb – and yet Kit knew that London was targeted with eight.

And London was, in megaton-speak, ‘lucky’. Kit remembered a Pentagon briefing that had started as surreal, then quickly took off into the absolute
un
real. It began turning funny when General Curtis LeMay pointed to a map of Moscow pinpointed with four hundred H-bomb targets.
Four-fucking-hundred
!
A junior White House staffer had the temerity to ask why. Kit remembered how LeMay puffed his cigar and smiled. ‘The Russian bear’s a big beast. We need,’ said the general, ‘to take his leg off right up to his testicles. On second thought, let’s take off his testicles too.’ Kit remembered how fond his father was of quoting St Thomas Aquinas. It wasn’t only a matter of
Jus ad Bellum
, but of
fighting
a ‘Just War’ with ‘Just Means’. If, thought Kit,
twelfth-century
ignoramuses were able to work that one out, what does that say about us? When did our own savagery begin? Sherman marching through Georgia? Hamburg and Dresden? Hiroshima and Nagasaki? When did deliberately killing civilians become an acceptable means to achieve military and political goals? Collective punishment. You can’t get the top brass, so you kill little kids instead. Why is it OK for us to do it, but not the other guys?

Kit poured himself another glass of brandy. None of those qualms mattered. He was a servant of the State and had a job to do. He remembered how the DCI had faulted him for not
having
recruited any journalists to spout the American line. It was a subtle game. The strategy was to target progressive and centre-left publications. No sense in preaching to the converted. An
anti-American
paper changing its tune was the more effective form of propaganda. And you shouldn’t ignore book reviewers and publishers either – they were often strapped for cash and
vulnerable
. Good reviews for ‘good’ writers and vice versa. Sometimes it verged on the ridiculous. His predecessor had ‘subsidised’ a London house to publish a Swahili translation of the complete poetry of T.S. Eliot. If that doesn’t stop Africa from going
communist
, nothing will.

Kit went to the bedroom to undress. The walls were bare, except for a statue on a plaque of the Virgin Mary. Pepita, the Indian woman who looked after Kit when the family had been stationed in Managua, had given him the statue. She was his favourite of several nannies. The statue was pure Latino tat. The Virgin was painted with luminous white so that her image glowed in the dark. A symbol of purity. Pepita would always say, ‘Remember, Kit, she is always looking at you.’ A few years later, Kit realised that Pepita’s words were a veiled warning about masturbation. The warning worked. Puberty arrived as a horny storm, but Kit was always dissuaded from self-love by the glowing nocturnal image of Pepita’s Virgin.
She’s watching
. Then somehow, the Virgin became an object of desire and that desire became
manifest
in the person of his cousin, Jennifer. Jennifier – body, mind, soul, voice – became Kit’s Holy Virgin. And then Jennifer went with another man – and did strange things. Kit poured another brandy, a final one he hoped. It was all complicated in a way that he could never explain to anyone, could never explain to himself.

Kit stared into the mirror above the chest of drawers. His eyes were bloodshot and his face had the drawn look of a monk in an ascetic order. Maybe that was his role: a modern Knight Templar serving the Holy State. But he wasn’t any good. He hadn’t recruited a single journalist or publisher. And worse, he hadn’t spotted Burgess and Maclean. He’d worked closely with both of them when they were stationed in Washington, but hadn’t detected a whiff of treachery. Sure, Guy was a queer and a drunk, but that isn’t particularly unusual in the trade. And Maclean, a devoted family man, seemed an even less likely
traitor
. Kit still blamed himself. He had been briefed about them, but he trusted his intuition and his intuition was shit. A year after he defected, Donald Maclean made a statement to the press. Kit kept a copy of it taped to the corner of the mirror:
I am haunted and burdened by what I know of official secrets, especially by the
content of high-level Anglo-American conversations. The British Government, whom I have served, have betrayed the realm to Americans. I wish to enable my beloved country to escape from the snare which faithless politicians have set. I have decided that I can discharge my duty to my country only through prompt
disclosure
of this material.

As Kit sat over his morning tea and toast, he opened his
first-edition
copy of
The Portrait of a Lady
to the appropriate page. He found a piece of lined paper and wrote out the message in
standard
four-letter groups for encoding. IWAN TTOB UYAS MALL BOAT TWEN TYTO TWEN TYFI VEFE ET. He then copied out the encryption key for the day from the novel: ONES COUS INAL WAYS PRET ENDE DTOH ATEO NESH USBA ND. Kit encoded quickly. He didn’t need to add up; he knew the seven hundred and thirty-six combinations of the tri-graph by heart. He then wrote the encoded message, WJEF VHIT … on a blank sheet of paper and popped it in an envelope. It was risky sending it that way. If Brian opened the envelope he would never be able to break the code, but he would know that someone was
communicating
in code. Next time he met Jennifer, Kit would show her how to hide encoding within a seemingly innocent letter. For example, lay out the letter so the left-hand margin contains the encoded message.

Kit put on his best lounge suit, white shirt and grey silk tie. It was St Patrick’s day and there was a reception at the Irish Embassy. He wondered if he should wear a green tie or green socks or a green jockstrap. It was all so stupid. He supposed they’d all have to wear cardboard shamrocks in their lapels or something similar. It was one of the most drunken occasions of the diplomatic year. Everyone enjoyed watching the Brits trying to interact with their hosts as if the Easter uprising and partition had never happened. That bit was always great fun and almost made it worth going. The Russians were fun too – and really did get drunk, no olive-oil prophylaxis beforehand. Irish whisky was too good to waste.

There was a lot of traditional Irish food to soak up the booze: so most people stuck to the booze. Vasili, Kit’s counterpart in the Soviet Embassy, raised a Waterford crystal tumbler of single malt to greet the American. Kit had known Vasili for ten years. The Russian was now KGB Chief of Residency, the Soviet
equivalent
of CIA Chief of Station. At the top level, there was no
coyness
or pretend secrecy about one another’s job or identity. They were all members of the same club, even though they went out on the court to thrash each other. And, like gentleman players, they were polite to each other in the clubhouse afterwards. And, like aspiring professionals in any sport, they charted each other’s progress through the rankings. Vasili had done much better since the death of Stalin and the execution of Beria; likewise, Kit had profited from the replacement of Dean Acheson – a pompous ass largely responsible for teeing up the Cold War – by Foster Dulles, who was an even worse ass but less hostile to Kit’s career.

Vasili winked and gestured for Kit to come over. Kit flashed him a middle finger, then looked up to see the Irish Ambassador frowning directly at him. Kit nodded and smiled blandly, then made his way to the drinks table and served himself. He then
circulated
past the Uruguayan chargé d’affaires, who was speaking in German to the Papal Nuncio, and found himself next to Vasili. The Russian, by way of small talk, began by asking, ‘How are the British getting on with their hydrogen bomb?’

Kit laughed and gestured with his thumb towards a British cabinet minister, then whispered, ‘Why don’t you fucking ask him?’ It was the same minister that Kit had compromised in a honey trap.

Vasili glanced at the minister and said deadpan, ‘I don’t think he would tell me.’

‘But his girlfriend might.’ Kit not only knew that the Russians knew, but he knew that the Russians knew that he knew. In other words, his comment revealed nothing that wasn’t already known. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have said a word. Kit wasn’t sure how the Russians knew about his honey trap and it worried him. There were rumours that a Sov attaché had got involved too. The rumours complicated things and Kit longed to know if they were true. He gave Vasili a playful nudge with his elbow. ‘She’s a good looker, isn’t she?’