hurt. ‘What?’
‘You shot me.’
‘Not you. Just your picture.’
They were taught elementary two-handed instinctive shooting with standard Browning 9mm pistols by Little Tom, the towering ex-Marine.
‘Makes a break from sitting on your bums and listening,’ Gerry said.
The morning of Charles’s return Little Tom had inserted a full-faced picture of a smiling Rebecca amongst the films and stills of armed men they had to hit. Everyone had withheld fire
except Charles, who had shot her in the mouth and left eye.
‘I thought I was meant to.’
‘No one else did.’
‘It was a manifestation of secret desire.’
‘Not a very nice way of showing it.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Little Tom says you’ve used a Browning before so I suppose you’re allowed to show off.’
‘Well, that was in Belfast. A place apart. Seems a long time ago.’
After dinner there was a case history concerning a senior Soviet bloc official who had survived undetected for thirty years as an agent and whose career was crowned by his secret exfiltration
and retirement, along with the latest diplomatic ciphers. Charles sat near the back with his pipe – a habit he had recently affected partly because of a sense that he lacked habits –
unlit. It reminded him of Hookey’s unlit pipe during their discussion. Perhaps the lighting of pipes whilst working was a sign of boredom and disengagement, something you didn’t do if
you were stimulated. Roger, he noticed, notoriously prone to postprandial drowsiness, had left his cigarettes open but untouched.
The story was told by the last of the agent’s many case officers, a tall, saturnine, good-looking man, now in Personnel. At the end he read extracts from the agent’s comments on his
handling over thirty years. The most serious criticism was of the frequency of changes of case officer, mostly dictated by the bureaucracy of postings and careers rather than by the demands of the
case itself, which was undeniably important.
‘On the one hand,’ concluded the case officer, ‘there’s some truth in the service’s dictum that no agent should be considered properly recruited unless he or she
accepts handover to a new case officer, demonstrating that the relationship is by then with the service rather than the individual. Nor should any agent dictate someone’s career. On the
other, an intelligence service which gives greater priority to its own administrative tidiness than to its casework is arguably not fully serious.’
Fully serious or not, secret service was turning out, Charles reflected, to be a pretty good choice. He enjoyed the course and liked the people, while the work so far had given him no cause for
the excited unease he’d felt before his first interview. People he knew who’d gone into business or other professions seemed more routinely exploitative and unscrupulous than this. It
answered, in fact, with everything he’d liked about the army – patriotic endeavour in a cause in which he could believe, a sense of belonging, the subtle satisfactions of service
– but without the detailed domination and invasiveness of military life. Now, in the intelligence world, he felt he was at the heart of the Cold War. He did not think of himself as extreme or
aggressive but he’d always had a desire to seek out the front line, wherever it was; a desire to be there, and to be able to feel later that he had been there. He sensed the same in some of
those around him.
They were let off soon after lunch on Friday. Charles was to spend the weekend at his mother’s house in Buckinghamshire and he looked forward to the leisurely drive in the Rover he had
inherited from his father. It was the big P5, the ministerial Rover with the thirsty V8 engine and enough wood and leather inside to furnish a London club. ‘The drawing room on wheels,’
his father had approvingly dubbed it. Charles kept meaning to exchange it for something more suited to his age, pocket and unaccompanied
‘You shot me.’
‘Not you. Just your picture.’
They were taught elementary two-handed instinctive shooting with standard Browning 9mm pistols by Little Tom, the towering ex-Marine.
‘Makes a break from sitting on your bums and listening,’ Gerry said.
The morning of Charles’s return Little Tom had inserted a full-faced picture of a smiling Rebecca amongst the films and stills of armed men they had to hit. Everyone had withheld fire
except Charles, who had shot her in the mouth and left eye.
‘I thought I was meant to.’
‘No one else did.’
‘It was a manifestation of secret desire.’
‘Not a very nice way of showing it.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Little Tom says you’ve used a Browning before so I suppose you’re allowed to show off.’
‘Well, that was in Belfast. A place apart. Seems a long time ago.’
After dinner there was a case history concerning a senior Soviet bloc official who had survived undetected for thirty years as an agent and whose career was crowned by his secret exfiltration
and retirement, along with the latest diplomatic ciphers. Charles sat near the back with his pipe – a habit he had recently affected partly because of a sense that he lacked habits –
unlit. It reminded him of Hookey’s unlit pipe during their discussion. Perhaps the lighting of pipes whilst working was a sign of boredom and disengagement, something you didn’t do if
you were stimulated. Roger, he noticed, notoriously prone to postprandial drowsiness, had left his cigarettes open but untouched.
The story was told by the last of the agent’s many case officers, a tall, saturnine, good-looking man, now in Personnel. At the end he read extracts from the agent’s comments on his
handling over thirty years. The most serious criticism was of the frequency of changes of case officer, mostly dictated by the bureaucracy of postings and careers rather than by the demands of the
case itself, which was undeniably important.
‘On the one hand,’ concluded the case officer, ‘there’s some truth in the service’s dictum that no agent should be considered properly recruited unless he or she
accepts handover to a new case officer, demonstrating that the relationship is by then with the service rather than the individual. Nor should any agent dictate someone’s career. On the
other, an intelligence service which gives greater priority to its own administrative tidiness than to its casework is arguably not fully serious.’
Fully serious or not, secret service was turning out, Charles reflected, to be a pretty good choice. He enjoyed the course and liked the people, while the work so far had given him no cause for
the excited unease he’d felt before his first interview. People he knew who’d gone into business or other professions seemed more routinely exploitative and unscrupulous than this. It
answered, in fact, with everything he’d liked about the army – patriotic endeavour in a cause in which he could believe, a sense of belonging, the subtle satisfactions of service
– but without the detailed domination and invasiveness of military life. Now, in the intelligence world, he felt he was at the heart of the Cold War. He did not think of himself as extreme or
aggressive but he’d always had a desire to seek out the front line, wherever it was; a desire to be there, and to be able to feel later that he had been there. He sensed the same in some of
those around him.
They were let off soon after lunch on Friday. Charles was to spend the weekend at his mother’s house in Buckinghamshire and he looked forward to the leisurely drive in the Rover he had
inherited from his father. It was the big P5, the ministerial Rover with the thirsty V8 engine and enough wood and leather inside to furnish a London club. ‘The drawing room on wheels,’
his father had approvingly dubbed it. Charles kept meaning to exchange it for something more suited to his age, pocket and unaccompanied
Similar Books
