Authors: Alan Judd
His eyes rested on her still profile. If he insisted, pleaded that he couldn’t live without her, urged her to leave Nigel before it was too late, to re-start with him the life they should
have had, if he importuned enough, begged enough, she might just be persuadable.
But he didn’t want her by conquest or theft. Nor did he want only half of her, an affair burdened by deceit. His role in her life had been destructive enough already. He wanted her to give
herself freely, or not at all. Besides, it wouldn’t be true to swear he couldn’t live without her; he could, he had, people did despite what they said, as she had without him.
Yet something, anything, was better than nothing. He got up and went over to her, kneeling by the chair, his hand on her thigh.
She turned her head away. ‘Don’t,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t say anything, don’t touch me. Please.’
It was years before he made up his mind whether obeying her was the best or worst thing he could have done.
There was no hint of any of this in the file, which simply recorded Martin’s transfer to London as an agent and his subsequent reassignment. ‘He should become a Z
agent,’ Matthew Abrahams had minuted, ‘if he’s willing and has the talent for it. And the time. It will be useful money while he’s doing his legal training. His current case
officer should remain in touch for the time being. We should not forget that he will still have some residual PIRA contacts, even though he’s no longer in Dublin. If the current peace talks
break down we should be prepared for him to use them, but with care.’
The Z Organisation was a section named after a 1930s predecessor, in those days a part of MI6 that was supposed to be run under business rather than official cover. The section comprised a group
of agents with useful jobs in the outside world, who were trained in clandestine skills and could be deployed in operational support.
Martin was keen to do it but worried about combining it with being a trainee solicitor with a large City firm. ‘It sounds like 24/7 there,’ he said. ‘No more student hours. Plus I have to go back to Dublin now and again until my mum moves back over here. Presumably I could do a spot more spying there. Not all my Provisional friends will accept a
ceasefire.’
‘Not in Dublin, not any more. You must be as clean as whistle over there. By all means keep in touch with any of their contacts here, but not there. How is your mum?’
Martin did not often mention his adoptive parents and when he did, it was usually his late father. ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘Can’t make up her mind what she wants to
do with her life or where she wants to live, but that’s normal with her. Right now she wants to be back in Newcastle near her old friends. Give that a few years and she’ll want to be in
Dublin near my aunts.’
He never showed any sign of being unhappy with his parents, and never remarked on his background. Presumably a successful adoption, Charles concluded; all the more reason for not
interfering.
The Z training ate into Martin’s spare time, devouring what would have been his social life. However, it paid well enough for him to rent a flat in Marylebone and run a car. Mostly he was
in the hands of his trainers, but Charles kept in touch and helped out with exercises.
He joined the end of one to pick Martin up in an SAS Land Rover in a remote Shropshire lane. Martin had spent three days and nights of precious leave alone in a hide, reporting all movement in
and around a barn that was supposedly an arms cache. Exfiltration took place at night at a point where the lane narrowed to a rising double bend, densely hedged, forcing any vehicle to slow right
down. The Land Rover never quite stopped but as it slowed, Charles, sitting in the back, lowered the tailgate with a rope. At the mid-point of the bend the hunched figure, encumbered with weapon,
radio and rucksack, struggled free of the hawthorn and threw himself aboard, beneath the rear canvas. Charles pulled up the tailgate before they emerged from the bend. Martin lay unmoving on the
floor amidst his kit.
‘You okay?’ asked Charles.
‘Do I stink?’
‘You do.’
‘Did I do all right?’
‘Spot on. You clocked everything and you weren’t seen. All you missed was the two girls sunbathing.’
Martin hauled himself up onto the bench seat. ‘Girls my arse. There wasn’t a trace of bloody sun either. Not once. How d’you know I clocked everything, anyway? Don’t tell
me there was someone else there, watching alongside me?’
‘There was. It’s called a camera.’
‘Jesus.’
As time went on their relationship relaxed and deepened. They developed an understanding, expressed largely through ironic reference and understatement, interspersed with discussions of the
ethics of espionage, loyalty, patriotism and the moral and psychological consequences of living a double life. Once, Martin asked, ‘Could I join MI6 proper? I mean, be a case officer like
you?’
‘Provided you got through selection, like everyone else.’
‘Would I?’
‘I don’t see why not. I’ll put you up for it if you like. But you’d have to become a bureaucrat. The fun bits, the operational stuff which you do all the time, are only
part of it. The rest is officialdom.’
‘You mean poncing about pretending to be an embassy diplomat? Or sitting behind a desk in London like you? Not sure I could put up with that.’
‘And you want to be a lawyer? But at least that’s a meal-ticket for life, unlike spying.’
‘Trying to put me off?’
‘Just being a good uncle.’
Charles would have put him forward, as he had offered, but was relieved not to be asked. He felt a strong but inchoate desire to protect Martin from something; disillusionment, perhaps. Maybe he
had a touch of the paternal after all. Although he never for a moment forgot that Martin was his son, he still could not fully realise it. He watched constantly for mannerisms or reminders, not so
much of himself – he was invisible to himself – but more of Sarah. A fleeting expression, a movement of the hand, an intonation, an angle of the head sometimes cut him with a stab of
recognition. But still he said nothing, except once, over a pizza in Covent Garden, when Martin himself raised the subject.
‘My sisters are just like my mother,’ he said, ‘despite us all being adopted. You know all about that, I guess? On my file, is it?’
Charles nodded.
‘They’re all three of them busy, constructive, practical people. Salt of the earth, you know. The world functions because of people like them. But I’m more like my father, bit
of a dreamer, bit restless. And a lawyer. He was a successful barrister on the northern circuit. Never left the law, but he was always about to, always wanting to move house, always buying a new
car whenever he felt rich, always talking about moving to Colorado or New Zealand or the bloody book he was forever going to write. Christ knows what it would have been about. It would’ve
been another
Tristram Shandy.
He had that sort of mind.’
‘Have you ever been tempted to find your natural parents?’ Charles hoped he sounded casual.
Martin shook his head, his mouth full of pizza. ‘Maybe one day.’ He swallowed. ‘Doesn’t seem much point. The formative influences on my life were the people who brought
me up. The rest is just biology.’
Charles nodded.
The main Gladiator file gave an unnecessarily full account of the Herefordshire exercise and of others that followed, along with occasional progress reports. It was thorough and boring,
constructed deliberately, as Charles well knew, in order to conceal a gap. More than a gap, a chasm: one that would be visible now to Nigel Measures.
Part of the concealment was a lengthy account of an operational trip Charles made with Martin to Paris. It was prompted by intelligence that two of Martin’s former Provisional contacts,
who had joined a splinter group of dissident republicans opposed to the peace process, were to visit Paris in connection with an arms deal. The information had come from the Garda in response to
the gift of Martin’s intelligence. The A desk proposed that Martin should make contact with the couple. He would fly over for the weekend with his latest girlfriend, a trainee in another
firm. She would of course be unaware of –
unconscious to
was the term used – what was going on, and would assume she was being treated to a weekend in Paris. During this idyll,
with the discreet help of French surveillance, Martin would bump into his old contacts and try to find out what they were doing. Charles would go as his case officer and act as liaison between him
and the French.
The file told the story of an operation organised in haste and crowned with success. The MI6 Paris station made good use of its liaison contacts, the French cooperated enthusiastically and
Martin’s girlfriend – Martha in Charles’s memory, but Mary according to the file – had a wonderful, unsuspecting time. Martin, track-suited and notionally out for a solo run
in the Bois de Boulogne, left her to luxuriate in the Hotel St James. He was dropped by a French surveillance car just off the Champs Elysees where the Irish couple had taken a table at a pavement
bar. For once, everything had worked as planned. Martin jogged past, they saw and hailed him and he joined them at the table. They drank and talked and arranged dinner as a foursome that night.
Charles sat in a side-street with Michel from the DST, the French security service, in a blue Citroën surveillance car, where they were kept informed by the foot surveillants’ radio
reports. When Martin ran back towards the Bois de Boulogne they picked him up just off the Avenue Foch.
‘They say they’re here on holiday,’ he said. ‘Crap. They can’t afford a pint in Dublin. Jimmy’ll talk later if I get him on his own. Bound to, he can’t
help it. Always boasting.’
The two couples met that night. It was impossible for Martin to get away for a debrief afterwards, so late on the Sunday morning Charles waited for him in a corner café off the rue
d’Astorg. Martin had left Mary in bed while he went for another run. Charles had taken a table deep in the dark interior, well back from the windows but with a good view of the cobbled
junction. It was quiet, apart from a few cars splashing through the puddles and the occasional pedestrian hunched against the rain and trying not to slip on the cobbles. Charles lingered over his
coffee, attempting to recover a little more of his French with an old
Le Monde.
Martin was wet, breathless and exhilarated. He really had run in the Bois de Boulogne, buoyed up by success from the night before. ‘Getting me fit, this job,’ he said. Then, adopting
a stage Irish accent, ‘Jenny’s not a bad wee girl, I’ll say that for Jimmy. We got on fine.’
‘Don’t go getting ideas. You don’t need complications.’
‘She’s got enough of her own. She’s got a boyfriend back in Dublin. Very convenient, this little awayday with Jimmy. Suits them very well. And she’s got a weak bladder,
which is also very convenient. Went to the loo twice, second time with Mary, so Jimmy and I had a little chat.’ He grinned. ‘He wanted my advice, bless his dissident soul.’
Charles’s telegram, written later that day in the MI6 station, gave the meat of it. Jimmy and his operational girlfriend had what Jimmy called a ‘big job’ involving the
transfer of ‘useful tools’ for the cause back home. He had to visit a particular site in the woods at Chantilly and could Martin tell him if that part of the woods was within walking
distance of the station?
‘Never been near the place in my life,’ said Martin. ‘But I pretended I had, though my memory was a bit hazy, so he gave me a more precise location, based on what he’d
been told, and I gave him even more precise and completely imaginary directions. Christ knows where they’ll end up if he remembers what I said. But he won’t. We had another bottle after
that and then some, and he was well away by the time we left.’
It wasn’t clear whether they were reconnoitring a new weapons hide or confirming the accessibility of an existing one. Either way, their visit and the site would now be monitored and one
day, weeks, months or years hence, the French would make arrests. But that was for others to follow up.
Martin was in no hurry to leave the café, which was beginning to fill with early lunchers, stamping their feet in the doorway and shaking the rain off their umbrellas. Mary would sleep
till doomsday, he said, or at least until he’d had his breakfast. They ordered more coffee and croissants, again went over what had been said and watched the downpour spattering like bullets
on the cobbles. An elderly couple got up to leave but the woman refused to step outside when she reached the open door, which annoyed the man who had spent some time laboriously putting on his coat
and adjusting his cap. It was as they stood bickering in the doorway that Martin, who had been looking past them into the street, said quietly, ‘Well, look who it isn’t. Your rival in
love.’
The first thing Charles noticed was the DST car, the blue Citroën. It had just drawn up across the road, its wipers still going and rain machine-gunning its bonnet and roof. He knew it not
only by its number plates but by the discreet additional aerial. There were two men in it, neither of them Michel. So far, so normal; it was probably a DST fleet car used night and day for a
variety of jobs, changing numbers and colour every so often. But what Martin had seen was not normal.
Sheltering in the doorway of a tobacconist and struggling to close his umbrella, was Nigel Measures. He was wearing a Loden coat and had a small brown suitcase at his feet. As they watched, the
rear passenger door of the Citroën opened and Nigel, having mastered his umbrella, picked up his suitcase and ran across the pavement into the waiting car. The Citroën drove rapidly
away.
‘Not my rival,’ said Charles as they watched the car disappear, conscious that Martin said it only because it always provoked a response. ‘I didn’t know you knew
him.’
‘Sarah invited me to dinner a few months ago. I thought I told you. Not my cup of tea, Mr Measures. I can see why he isn’t yours, either.’
Charles let that go. They were both still looking at where the car had been.