I’m losing control, she thought. Not of him, I never had it. Of me. More alarming still to the daughter of a terminally pompous Law Lord and the former partner of the immaculate Edgar, she was discovering a distinct appetite for the disreputable.
12
Osnard parked his diplomatic car outside the shopping complex at the foot of the tall building, greeted the security guards on duty, and rose to the fourth floor. Under sickly strip lighting the lion and unicorn boxed eternally. He typed a combination, entered the embassy’s reception lobby, unlocked an armoured glass door, climbed a staircase, entered a corridor, unlocked a grille and stepped into his own kingdom. A last door remained closed to him and it was made of steel. Selecting a long brass pipestem key from a bunch in his pocket, he inserted it the wrong way up, said “Fuck,” removed it, and inserted it the right way up. Alone, he moved a little differently to when he was observed. There was more rashness to him, something headlong. His jaw slumped, his shoulders hunched, his eyes looked out from under lowered brows, he seemed to be lunging at some unseen enemy.
The strong room comprised the last two yards of corridor converted to a kind of larder. To Osnard’s right lay pigeonholes. To his left, amid a variety of incongruous articles such as fly spray and toilet paper, a green wall safe. Ahead of him, an oversized red telephone reposed on a stack of electrical boxes. It was known in the vernacular as his digital link with God. A sign on the base said: “Speech on this instrument costs £50.00 per minute.” Osnard had written beneath it the one word “Enjoy.” It was in this spirit that he now lifted the receiver and, ignoring the automatic voice commanding him to press buttons and observe procedures, dialled his London bookmaker, with whom he placed a couple of bets to the tune of five hundred pounds each on greyhounds whose names and appointments he seemed to know as well as he knew the bookmaker.
“No, you stupid tart, to win,” he said. When had Osnard ever backed a dog each way?
After this he resigned himself to the rigours of his trade. Extracting a plain folder from a pigeonhole marked TOP SECRET BUCHAN, he bore it to his office, switched on the lights, sat himself at his desk, belched and, head in hands, began to read again the four pages of instructions he had received that afternoon from his regional director, Luxmore, in London and at considerable cost to his patience deciphered with his own hand. In a passable imitation of Luxmore’s Scottish brogue, Osnard mouthed the text aloud:
“ ‘You will commit the following orders to memory’ ”—suck of the teeth—“ ‘this signal is not repeat not for station files and will be destroyed within seventy-two hours of receipt, young Mr. Osnard. . . . You will advise BUCHAN forthwith of the following’ ”—suck of the teeth—“ ‘you may give BUCHAN the following undertakings only. . . . You will administer the following dire warning. . . .’ Oh yes!”
With a grunt of exasperation, he refolded the telegram, selected a plain white envelope from a drawer of his desk, put the telegram inside it and fed the envelope into the right-hand hip pocket of the Pendel & Braithwaite trousers that he had charged to London as a necessary operational expense. Returning to the strong room he picked up a shabby leather briefcase that was by intent the very opposite of official, set it on the shelf and with yet another key from his ring opened the green wall safe, which contained a stiff-backed ledger and thick bundles of fifty-dollar bills—hundreds being by his own edict to London too suspect to negotiate without making yourself conspicuous.
By the bulkhead light in the ceiling above him he turned up the current page of the ledger. It was divided into three columns of handwritten figures. The left-hand column was headed H for Harry, the right-hand column A for Andy. The centre column, which contained the largest sums, was headed Income. Neat bubbles and lines of the kind beloved of sexologists directed its resources to left and right. Having studied all three columns in aggrieved silence, Osnard took a pencil from his pocket and reluctantly wrote a 7 in the centre column, drew a bubble round it and added a line to the left of its circumference, awarding it to column H for Harry. Then he wrote a 3 and, in happier vein, directed it to column A for Andy. Humming to himself, he counted seven thousand dollars from the safe into the floppy bag. After it he tossed in the fly spray and other bits and pieces from the shelf. Disdainfully. As if he despised them, which indeed he did. He closed the bag, locked the safe, then the strong room and finally the front door.
A full moon smiled on him as he stepped into the street. A starry sky arched over the bay and was mirrored by the lights of waiting ships strung across the black horizon. He hailed a clapped-out Pontiac cab, gave an address. Soon he was rattling along the airport road, watching anxiously for a mauve neon Cupid firing its penile arrow towards the bungalows of love it advertised. His features, discovered by the beam of an opposing car, had hardened. His small dark eyes, as they maintained their wary watch on the driver’s mirrors, caught fire with every passing light. Chance favours only the prepared mind, he recited to himself. It was the favourite dictum of a science master at his prep school, who, having flogged him black and blue, suggested they make up their differences by taking off their clothes.
Somewhere near Watford, just north of London, there is an Osnard Hall. To reach it you negotiate a hectic bypass, then swing sharply through a run-down housing estate called Elm Glade, because that was where the ancient elms once stood. The hall has had more lives in its last fifty years than in its previous four centuries: now an old people’s home, now an institute for young offenders, now a stable for racing greyhounds, and most recently, under the stewardship of Osnard’s gloomy elder brother Lindsay, a sanctuary of meditation for followers of an Eastern sect.
For a while, through each of these transformations, Osnards as far away as India and Argentina divided up the rent, argued over the upkeep and whether a surviving nanny should receive her pension. But gradually, like the house that had spawned them, they fell into disrepair or simply gave up the struggle to survive. An Osnard uncle took his bit to Kenya and lost it. An Osnard cousin thought he could lord it over the Australians, bought an ostrich farm and paid the price. An Osnard lawyer raided the family trust, stole what he had not already dissipated through incompetent investment, then put a bullet through his head. Osnards who had not gone down with the Titanic went down with Lloyd’s. Gloomy Lindsay, never one for half-measures, put on the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk and hanged himself from the one sound cherry tree that remained in the walled garden.
Only Osnard’s parents, self-impoverished, remained infuriatingly alive, his father on a mortgaged family estate in Spain, eking out the dregs of his fortune and sponging off his Spanish relatives; his mother in Brighton, where she shared genteel squalor with a Chihuahua and a bottle of gin.
Others, given such a cosmopolitan perspective upon life, might have headed for new pastures or at least the Spanish sun. But young Andrew had determined from an early age that he was for England and, more specifically, England was for him. A childhood of deprival and the odious boarding schools that had seared their imprint on him for all time had left him feeling at the age of twenty that he had paid more dues to England than any reasonable country was entitled to exact from him and that from now on he would cease paying and collect.
The question was how. He had no craft or qualification, no proven skills outside the golf course and the bedroom. What he understood best was English rot, and what he needed was a decaying English institution that would restore to him what other decaying institutions had taken away. His first thought was Fleet Street. He was semi-literate and unfettered by principle. He had scores to settle. On the face of it he was perfectly cut out to join the new rich media class. But after two promising years as a cub reporter with the Loughborough Evening Messenger, his career ended with a snap when a steamy article entitled “Sex Antics of Our City Elders” turned out to be based on the pillow talk of the managing editor’s wife.
A great animal charity had him and for a while he believed he had found his true vocation. In splendid p
remises handy for theatres and restaurants the needs of Britain’s animals were thrashed out with passionate commitment. No gala premiere, white-tie banquet or foreign journey to observe the animals of other nations was too onerous for the charity’s highly paid officers to undertake. And everything might have come to fruition. The Instant Response Donkey Fund (organiser: A. Osnard), the Veteran Greyhound Country Holiday Scheme (finance officer: A. Osnard), had been widely applauded when two of his superiors were invited to account for themselves to the Serious Fraud Office.
After that, for a giddy week he contemplated the Anglican Church, which traditionally offered swift promotion to glib, sexually active agnostics on the make. His piety evaporated when his researches revealed to him that catastrophic investment had reduced the Church to unwelcome Christian poverty. Desperate, he embarked on a succession of ill-planned adventures in life’s fast lane. Each was short-lived, each ended in failure. More than ever, he needed a profession.
“How about the BBC?” he asked the secretary, back at his university appointments board for the fifth or fifteenth occasion.
The secretary, who was grey-haired and old before his time, flinched.
“That one’s over,” he said.
Osnard proposed the National Trust.
“Do you like old buildings?” the secretary asked, as if he feared that Osnard might blow them up.
“Adore them. Total addict.”
“Quite so.”
With trembling fingertips, the secretary lifted a corner of a file and peered inside.
“I suppose they might just take you. You’re disreputable. Charm of a sort. Bilingual, if they like Spanish. Nothing lost by giving them a try, I dare say.”
“The National Trust?”
“No, no. The spies. Here. Take this to a dark corner and fill it in with invisible ink.”
Osnard had found his Grail. Here at last was his true Church of England, his rotten borough with a handsome budget. Here were the nation’s most private prayers, preserved as if in a museum. Here were sceptics, dreamers, zealots and mad abbots. And the cash to make them real.
Not that his enlistment was a foregone conclusion. This was the new slimline Service, free of the shackles of the past, classless in the great Tory tradition, with men and women democratically hand-picked from all walks of the white, privately educated, suburban classes. And Osnard was as hand-picked as the rest of them:
“This sad thing with your brother Lindsay—taking his own life—how do you think it affected you?” a hollow-eyed espiocrat asked him with a frightful writhe from across the polished table.
Osnard had always detested Lindsay. He pulled a brave face.
“It hurt a hell of a lot,” he said.
“In what way?” Another writhe.
“Makes you ask yourself what’s valuable. What you care about. What you’re put on earth to get on with.”
“And that—suppose you had your way—would be this Service?”
“No question.”
“And you don’t feel—having skipped around the globe so much—family here, there, and everywhere; dual passports—that you’re as it were too un-English for this kind of service? Too much a citizen of the world, rather than one of us?”
Patriotism was a thorny subject. How would Osnard handle it? Would he react defensively? Would he be rude? Or worst of all, emotional? They need not have feared. All he asked of them was a place to invest his amorality.
“England’s where I keep my toothbrush,” he replied to relieved laughter.
He was beginning to understand the game. It wasn’t what he said that mattered, but how he said it. Can the boy think on his feet? Does he ruffle easily? Does he finesse, is he scared, does he persuade? Can he think the lie and speak the truth? Can he think the lie and speak it?
“We have been perusing your list of significant others over the last five years, young Mr. Osnard,” said a bearded Scot, wrinkling his eyes for greater shrewdness. “It’s, eh, somewhat of a long list”— suck of the teeth—“for a relatively short life.”
Laughter in which Osnard joined, but not too heartily.
“I guess the best way to judge a love affair is how it ends,” he replied with sweet modesty. “Most of mine seem to have ended pretty well.”
“And the others?”
“Well, I mean, Christ, we’ve all woken up in the wrong bed a few times, haven’t we?”
And since this was patently unlikely of any of the six faces round the table and of his bearded questioner particularly, Osnard won another cautious laugh.
“And you’re family, did you know that?” said Personnel, bestowing a knobbly handshake on him by way of congratulation.
“Well, I suppose I am now,” said Osnard.
“No, no, old family. One aunt, one cousin. Or did you really not know?”
To the huge gratification of Personnel, he didn’t. And when he heard who they were, a riotous belly laugh welled up inside him, which he converted only at the last moment to an endearing smirk of amazement.
“My name’s Luxmore,” said the bearded Scot, with a handshake strangely similar to Personnel’s. “I run Iberia and South America and a couple of other places along the way. You may also hear me spoken of in connection with a certain little matter in the Falklands. I shall be looking out for you as soon as you have profited from your basic training, young Mr. Osnard.”
“Can’t wait, sir,” said Osnard keenly.
Nor could he. The spies of the post–Cold War era, he had observed, were enjoying the best of times and the worst of times. The Service had money to burn, but where on earth was the fire? Stuck in the so-called Spanish Cellar, which could have doubled as the editorial offices of the Madrid telephone directory, cheek by jowl with chain-smoking, middle-aged debutantes in Alice bands, the young probationer jotted down an acerbic appraisal of his employers’ standing in the Whitehall marketplace:
Ireland Preferred: Regular earner, excellent long-term prospects, but slim pickings when divided between rival agencies.
Islam Militant: Occasional flurries, basically underperforming. As a substitute for Red Terror, total flop.
Arms for Drugs, PLC: A washout. Service doesn’t know whether to play gamekeeper or poacher.
As to that vaunted commodity of the modern age industrial espionage, he reckoned when you had broken a few Taiwanese codes and suborned a few Korean typists, there was really little more you could do for British industry than commiserate. Or so he had convinced himself until Scottie Luxmore beckoned him to his side.
“Panama, young Mr. Osnard”—striding up and down his fitted blue carpet, snapping fingers, thrusting elbows, nothing still—“that’s the place for a young officer of your talents. It’s the place for all of us, if the fools in Treasury could only see beyond their noses. We’d the same problem with the Falklands difficulty, I don’t mind telling you. Deaf ears until the stroke of midnight.”
Luxmore’s room is large and close to heaven. Through its tinted armoured-glass windows the Palace of Westminster stands brave across the Thames. Luxmore himself is small. A sharp beard and brisk stride fail to bring him up to size. He is an old man in a young man’s world, and if he doesn’t run he’s likely to fall down. Or so thinks Osnard. Luxmore gives a quick suck of the Scottish front teeth as if he has a boiled sweet permanently on the go.
“But we’re making headway. We’ve the Board of Trade and the Bank of England beating down the doors. The Foreign Office, though not given to hysteria, has expressed cautious concern. I remember they expressed much the same emotion when I had the pleasure of advising them of General Galtieri’s intentions regarding the misnomered Malvinas.”
Osnard’s heart sinks. “But, sir—” he objects in the carefully tuned voice of breathless neophyte that he has adopted.
“Yes, Andrew?”
“What’s the British interest in Panama? Or am I being stupid?”
Luxmore is gratified by the boy’s innocence. Moulding the young for service at th
e sharp end has ever been one of his keenest pleasures.
“There is none, Andrew. In Panama as a nation, zero British interest in any shape or form,” he replies with an arch smile. “A few stranded mariners, a few hundred millions of British investment, a dwindling bunch of assimilated ancient Britons, a couple of moribund consultative committees and our interest in the Republic of Panama is served.”
“Then what—”
With a wave Luxmore commands Osnard’s silence. He is addressing his own reflection in the armoured glass.
“Phrase your question somewhat differently, however, young Mr. Osnard, and you would receive a vastly different answer. Oh yes.”
“How, sir?”
“What is our geopolitical interest in Panama? Ask yourself that, if you will.” He was away. “What is our vital interest? Where is the lifeblood of our great trading nation most at risk? Where, when we train our long lens upon the future well-being of these islands, do we recognise the darkest storm clouds gathering, young Mr. Osnard?” He was flying. “Where in the entire globe do we perceive the next Hong Kong living on borrowed time, the next disaster waiting to happen?” Across the river apparently, where his visionary gaze was fixed. “The barbarians are at the gate, young Mr. Osnard. Predators from every corner of the globe are descending upon little Panama. That great clock out there is ticking away the minutes to Armageddon. Does our Treasury heed it? No. They are hiding their ears in their hands yet again. Who will win the greatest Prize Possession of the new millennium? Will it be the Arabs? Are the Japanese sharpening their katanas? Of course they are! Will it be the Chinese, the Tigers, or a Pan-Latin consortium underpinned with billions of drug dollars? Will it be Europe without us? Those Germans again, those wily French? It won’t be the British, Andrew. That’s a racing certainty. No, no. Not our hemisphere. Not our canal. We have no interest in Panama. Panama is a backwater, young Mr. Osnard. Panama is two men and a dog and let’s all go out and have a good lunch!”