The present day – Wednesday
Old Admiralty Building, Spring Gardens, London
‘Look,’ Paul Richter said, exasperation showing in his voice, ‘I don’t even know why I’m here.’
‘Yes, you do,’ Baldwin replied. ‘You’re here because you need a job.’
Gerald Baldwin was tall and spare, with a hooked nose and deep-set eyes, and he looked like a senior naval officer in mufti. Despite this, he was actually a colonel in a tank regiment, and Richter still didn’t really know why he was sitting in front of him.
In the afternoon sunshine, the room was oppressively hot, for all the windows were tightly closed. Baldwin didn’t seem to notice but, if you’ve spent most of your working life jammed into a tiny unventilated armoured steel box that you share with two or three other men and a twelve-cylinder internal combustion engine, the discomfort of a warm day in London is going to be barely noticeable.
‘Not a particularly impressive record, Mr Richter,’ Baldwin remarked, glancing down at the file lying open on the desk in front of him. ‘Just over twenty years in the Navy, and you leave as only a middle-seniority lieutenant commander. An early promotion to lieutenant, but after that the drive seemed to go, and you didn’t even make it to two and a half until your fourth selection board.’
‘I had some personality clashes,’ Richter said.
Baldwin favoured him with a brief smile. ‘The word used here in your file,’ he said, ‘is insubordination.’
Richter shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter much what you call it,’ he said. ‘I was working for an illiterate idiot. I knew it and everyone else knew it. What I shouldn’t have done was call him an illiterate idiot to his face.’
‘No,’ Baldwin agreed, ‘and especially not in the middle of the Yeovilton Wardroom bar on a Friday lunchtime, with half the senior officers from Flag Officer Naval Aviation standing there watching.’
‘That shouldn’t be on file,’ Richter said.
‘It isn’t,’ Baldwin replied, another smile slowly forming, ‘but word gets around.’
‘So,’ Richter said, ‘good timing was never one of my virtues.’
Baldwin went back to the file. ‘Seems you’ve got no real qualifications,’ he observed.
‘Are you trying to cheer me up, or what? Most of the skills anyone learns in the services are completely useless on the outside.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Baldwin said. ‘You still have some abilities that could be in demand.’
‘Like what?’ Richter asked.
Baldwin shook his head. ‘I’ll come to that later, if I may.’
‘I’d rather you came to it now.’ Richter was looking at his watch. ‘It’s nearly three o’clock, and I was hoping to get back home tonight.’
‘Ah, yes. You live in Cornwall, don’t you?’
As Baldwin had already signed the chitty for his rail fare from Falmouth, Richter assumed that this was a rhetorical question and ignored it.
A colleague had once, rather unfairly, described Richter’s cottage on the east side of the Lizard peninsula as ‘a shithouse with an adjoining ruin’. It was better than that, of course, but not by much. Richter had bought it when it looked as if he would be spending about every third tour of duty at the Air Station at Culdrose, just a ten-minute drive away. After he had exchanged contracts, the Royal Navy had, probably deliberately, then posted him only to the Air Stations at Portland and Yeovilton, or to carrier-based squadrons and staff jobs in the London area.
Baldwin continued turning over the pages of the file, perusing them in a somewhat disapproving fashion. Finally he closed it, tapped the cover in a fatherly manner, and looked over at the stocky and slightly untidy man sitting in a chair on the other side of his desk.
Richter was one of those people who could look scruffy, even in a morning suit. His fair hair had obviously been combed at some point that day, but still looked badly cut and untidy. His suit was clean, but needed pressing, and his shoes definitely lacked the mirror-like polish that a batman laboured to achieve every morning on Baldwin’s footwear.
But the most arresting thing about Richter, Baldwin realized, was his presence. He didn’t seem to blink quite as often as he should, and his blue-green eyes held the gaze of anyone he was looking at perhaps a shade too intently. He seemed to exude an air of stillness and tension that was almost menacing, and the colonel could see why he had sometimes not meshed well with his superiors in the Navy.
‘You’ve had no success yet with finding a job outside?’ Baldwin asked.
Richter shook his head. He had almost lost count of the applications he had sent out, and all of them – apart from eliciting three cautious interviews with insurance companies looking for an employee who could legitimately put the rank ‘Commander’ on his business cards – had been firmly rejected. It had been a very frustrating three months, and Richter didn’t like being reminded of this.
‘If I’d found myself a job outside,’ he replied, starting to get irritated, ‘I wouldn’t be sitting here now in this greenhouse, listening to you pontificating.’
Baldwin gave him an unfriendly stare. ‘Careful, Mr Richter,’ he said, tapping the file again. ‘Insubordination is no more welcome outside the services than within them.’
‘Neither is procrastination. If you’ve got a job for me, why don’t you just tell me about it so I can either take it or leave it, and then get the hell out of here?’
Baldwin eyed him for some moments further, then opened the file again. He leaned across the desk to take a pencil from a small grey plastic tray, minutely inspected the point – presumably to ensure that it had been correctly sharpened, in the proper military fashion – and then wrote a short note on the minute sheet inside the file. Like most Old Admiralty Building staff, he regarded the introduction of the fountain pen as dangerously reactionary, and much preferred pencils.
‘One of your other reporting officers commented that you lacked patience and didn’t suffer fools gladly, Mr Richter. I hope your present attitude is not an indication of the way you might conduct yourself if we did offer you employment.’
‘That rather depends,’ Richter said, ‘on the fools I would be working for.’
Baldwin looked up sharply. ‘I’m not sure I like the tone of that remark,’ he said. ‘Are you trying to suggest that I’m a fool?’
‘I don’t know,’ Richter replied evenly. ‘I don’t know you well enough yet.’
Baldwin stared at Richter for a few moments, then made another note on the minute sheet, and underlined it twice. Richter was beginning to feel like a schoolboy in front of the headmaster.
Unfortunately, the only halfway interesting offer of possible employment Richter had received, since departing from the service of the Queen, had been a slip of paper bearing Baldwin’s signature, which had fallen out of a buff envelope on the previous Thursday morning. What he really couldn’t afford to do was annoy this man too much.
‘Look,’ Richter said, ‘I’ve travelled halfway across England to get here – a very long, irritating and uncomfortable journey thanks to our new cattle-class service – and I face the prospect of doing the same trip in reverse, as soon as I get out of here. The only difference, going back, is that I’ll probably have to stand up for most of the way.’ He paused. ‘As you’ve already said, I do need a job, but I don’t have any readily saleable skills unless, for some bizarre reason, you’re looking for a Harrier pilot. If you think you can employ me, I’d very much like to hear about it, but I really would appreciate it if you’d get to the point.’
Baldwin nodded slowly. ‘What sort of a job do you think we have on offer?’ he asked.
‘How should I know?’ Richter replied. ‘Your letter inviting me to an interview only mentioned – and I quote – “possible employment as a retired officer in a post offering challenging and wide-ranging duties”. It also hinted at travel, foreign travel, but it didn’t say anything about the nature of the work, nor about the salary. Both of those topics happen to be of considerable interest to me.’
Baldwin appeared to come to a decision. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘let’s look at specifics. First, the salary. This job is based on the normal retired officer scaling, and attracts an initial salary of twenty-eight thousand pounds a year, plus expenses.’
‘That amount might attract some people,’ Richter said, ‘but it certainly doesn’t attract me. Why is it so low?’
‘I take it you’re unfamiliar with the retired officer system,’ Baldwin replied. ‘All retired officer posts are subject to abated salaries because they take into account the pension that each appointee has already earned from his previous service career.’
Richter looked at him. ‘I didn’t know that,’ he said, ‘but it doesn’t surprise me. I suppose that’s another rule dreamed up by some civil servant at the Treasury.’ Baldwin nodded. ‘And I suppose,’ Richter continued, ‘that it was another Treasury civil servant who decreed that most officers should be forced to leave the services between January and the end of March, so as to ensure that they are denied the higher pensions and gratuities they would be entitled to if they continued serving after the first day of April?’
‘Probably, yes.’ Baldwin looked as if another smile was dangerously close.
‘While at the same time,’ Richter concluded, ‘ensuring that their own substantial and fully index-linked salaries, and eventual index-linked pensions, are completely protected?’
The smile finally appeared. ‘Who’s pontificating now, Mr Richter? You’re perfectly correct, though. But, as they say, there’s no point in having power if you can’t abuse it.’
Baldwin selected another slim file from the desktop and opened it. ‘You’re a bachelor, aren’t you?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Richter replied.
‘Would you have any objection to being positively vetted?’
Positive vetting, and an even more rigorous process known as enhanced positive vetting, are the most stringent security checks that are normally applied to anyone working for the British government.
‘Two things,’ Richter said. ‘First, just because I’m thirty-nine years old and not married doesn’t necessarily mean that I spend all my spare time interfering with small boys or cruising gay bars.’
‘I never implied that—’
‘Yes, you did,’ Richter snapped. ‘Secondly, I’ve already been PV’d for the last staff job I did in London, at Military Air Traffic Operations Headquarters. That should be somewhere in my file.’
Baldwin looked somewhat embarrassed; not, Richter suspected, about making a veiled implication of his sexual orientation, but more because he himself had missed the PV clearance.
‘Ah, yes,’ he said quickly. He flicked on through the file until he found the relevant papers and studied them. Then he closed the file again. ‘Now, the job itself,’ he continued. ‘In simple terms, you’d be a courier.’
‘Do you mean a Queen’s Messenger?’
‘Certainly not.’ Baldwin looked slightly shocked. ‘Queen’s Messengers are very carefully chosen, normally from among senior ex-Army officers.’
‘And insubordinate ex-naval officers don’t fit the bill, is that it?’
‘You said it, Mr Richter, not me.’
Richter nodded. ‘So what sort of a courier, then?’ He added, ‘I hope you’re not proposing I join those ranks of pensioners who plod about the Ministry of Defence, pushing trolleys loaded with files.’
Baldwin shook his head in slight irritation. ‘Of course I’m not. We’d hardly be headhunting someone for a job like that.’
Now, that was an illuminating remark, Richter thought. He had assumed that the invitation to swell the ranks of retired officers, doing jobs that regular service officers wouldn’t usually touch with a ten-foot bargepole, was simply a normal Ministry of Defence ruse to save on the cost of advertising. If Baldwin was right, it looked as if – despite his service record – someone, for some reason, had actually decided they wanted him to work for them.
Baldwin looked down yet again at the file. ‘We have,’ he said, ‘a need for classified documents and other materials to be transported by hand from place to place, nationally and internationally. That is the job for which we believe you are well suited.’
Baldwin’s pedantic speech was beginning to get on Richter’s nerves. ‘Why and why?’ he asked.
‘Why and why what?’
‘Why don’t you send these documents and other bits and pieces by secure mail or by Queen’s Messenger, if they’re that important? And why do you think I would be any good at acting as a postman?’
‘First,’ Baldwin said, ‘some of these materials are far too sensitive to entrust to the Post Office, under any circumstances. Second, the Queen’s Messengers normally travel by regular routes, and their schedule is generally so busy that they cannot be pulled out to do special trips for us.’
‘OK,’ Richter said. ‘So why me?’
Baldwin opened the file again. ‘The one thing that all your reporting officers have consistently said about you,’ he began, ‘with the sole exception of that officer you abused in the Yeovilton Wardroom bar, is that you are totally loyal. Most have also commented on your competence, resourcefulness and stubborn attitude. The man we are looking for will need all those qualities.’
Richter thought about that for a few moments. ‘You mentioned a starting salary of twenty-eight thousand pounds a year,’ he said. ‘What about the annual increments?’
Baldwin smiled slightly. According to the pre-release Resettlement Briefings that Richter had attended, in most recruitment interviews the moment the interviewee starts asking about money, he or she is already mentally committed to taking the job. Richter wasn’t actually committed yet, but he was certainly interested.
‘Increments will amount to three thousand pounds a year annually for the first six years, then five thousand pounds per year after that. In addition, the basic salary and increments will be index-linked, one year in arrears.’
Richter was surprised. ‘That doesn’t sound like the niggardly rate one would expect as a retired officer,’ he said.
‘It isn’t,’ Baldwin replied. ‘I said the initial salary was based on the normal retired officer scales, but the annual increases are not. There is an ulterior motive,’ he continued. ‘If you accept this offer, we would like to keep you. And the annual increments and index-linking are intended to offer a reasonable incentive for you to stay in the job.’ He paused a moment. ‘Additionally, you will be allowed a generous expense account, and provided with an unlimited credit card. The only stipulation is that all expenses must necessarily be incurred as part of your duties, and should be reasonable and justified. If you need to hire a car, for example, we would expect you to choose a Ford, not a Porsche.’
‘What if I needed to get somewhere very quickly?’
‘Then choose a fast Ford.’
‘I think that’s an oxymoron, like military intelligence,’ Richter said, and Baldwin looked at him sharply. ‘There’s no such thing as a fast Ford,’ he continued. ‘What about a slow Porsche?’
‘You just find yourself a fast Ford,’ Baldwin said, with a faint smile now. ‘And there’s definitely no such thing as a slow Porsche.’
‘Where will I be based . . . when I’m not playing postman to some far-flung country, I mean?’ Richter asked.
‘Here in London. In fact, you will share an office in this building.’
‘What about accommodation here in London? I presume you wouldn’t expect me to commute every day from Cornwall?’
Baldwin allowed him another brief smile. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we will provide you with service accommodation within a reasonable travelling distance of central London. You will have a senior officer’s room at RAF Uxbridge.’
‘Handy for the airport?’
‘Exactly. In fact, both Heathrow and RAF Northolt are only a few minutes away by car, and Uxbridge also has a large pool of MT vehicles which can be used for deliveries within mainland Britain.’
Richter only had two last questions. ‘Who will I be working for?’ he asked. ‘Who will be my direct superior?’
‘Either me or my deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Reese-Jones.’
Richter nodded. ‘How many other couriers work in the department?’
Baldwin looked slightly surprised. ‘I thought I’d made that clear,’ he said. ‘This is a brand-new post – in fact, it’s something of an experiment. There are no other couriers, or at least, not at present. You, Mr Richter, will be the only one.’
Hammersmith, London
The anonymous seven-storey building was located a little way north of the Hammersmith flyover, amid a tangle of backstreets and parking meters. The faded sign above the entrance door announced it was the premises of Hammersmith Commercial Packers and, in an untidy office suite on the ground floor, a small and very disorganized staff attempted to conduct the business as advertised, usually unsuccessfully.
In fact, the building itself extended for three floors below street level, in addition to the more visible seven above. It also housed the Foreign Operations Executive. The FOE’s address and telephone numbers appeared in no directory, classified or otherwise, and no references to it, or its staff, or its considerable budget, were ever to be found in any official publication. There were three good reasons for this.
Firstly, as the FOE was a covert executive arm subordinate to the Secret Intelligence Service, even admitting to the existence of FOE would be tantamount to admitting that SIS itself existed, something that the British government had only ever done with the greatest possible reluctance. This curious failure to acknowledge something that was common knowledge to almost everyone – even London taxi drivers had routinely referred to Century House, the old headquarters building of the SIS, as ‘Spook House’ – has never been satisfactorily explained, and it led indirectly to the ‘Spycatcher’ humiliation.
Secondly, all FOE operations were both covert and deniable, which meant that FOE had to be the same.
Thirdly, the FOE’s Director, Richard Simpson, was almost chronically paranoid about security, and invariably applied the ‘need-to-know’ principle as ruthlessly as possible. As far as he was concerned, nobody – apart from the Prime Minister and the Head and Deputy Head of SIS, to whom Simpson was operationally and functionally responsible – needed to know anything at all about FOE.
Even the members of the Joint Intelligence Committee, of which he was a non-speaking member, believed Simpson was simply an assistant to Sir Malcolm Holbeche, the Head of SIS. At an operational level, of course, things had to be somewhat different, as SIS officers frequently had to brief or debrief their FOE counterparts, but Simpson ensured that even these essential meetings were always conducted well away from Hammersmith and, where possible, in safe houses or on neutral ground.
The incoming call from Old Admiralty Building was made just after four in the afternoon. Simpson had been expecting it, and picked up the telephone immediately. ‘Yes?’
‘Switchboard, sir, with a call from the OAB.’
‘Right, put it through,’ Simpson said.
There was a click, a pause, and then the slightly nasal voice of Colonel Baldwin could be heard. ‘Mr Simpson?’
‘Yes. Any problems?’
‘No,’ Baldwin replied, with a slight hesitation. ‘He is somewhat insubordinate, as his reports suggested – he even inferred, somewhat obliquely, that I was a fool – but I think he has the qualities that you need.’
Simpson grunted. ‘Did he take the job?’
‘No,’ Baldwin said, ‘but I’m quite certain that he will. I’m sure he needs the money, for one thing, but I think the idea of the work itself attracted him.’
Simpson, who had ordered a check on Richter’s bank account through SIS, and knew exactly how much he needed the money, nodded in silent agreement. ‘What’s the earliest he could become available?’
‘On Monday immediately after he accepts the job,’ Baldwin replied.
‘So that could be as soon as next week?’ Simpson asked.
‘Yes, as long as he calls me either tomorrow or Friday,’ Baldwin said. He asked, after a brief pause, ‘Is there some urgency about this, Mr Simpson?’
‘Yes,’ Simpson said flatly, and without any elaboration. ‘Keep me informed,’ he added, and put down the telephone.
Simpson sat in silence for a few moments, then stood up and walked over to the south-facing window. His office was on the building’s seventh floor, and he gazed without interest at an uninspiring view across the adjacent rooftops towards the Hammersmith flyover. Simpson was small and pinkish, and as fastidious in matters of dress and appearance as he was professional in his work. His dark grey suit was immaculate, and even the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket looked perfectly pressed.
He walked back to his desk, sat down again, and opened the temporary file bearing the single word ‘RICHTER’ on the cover. He looked briefly at the photograph attached on the left-hand side, and then scanned the personal details revealed on the printed sheets opposite.
‘You’ll do,’ he muttered. ‘You’ll have to do.’ Then he closed the file, put it to one side of his desk and turned his attention to the pink file he had been studying for most of the afternoon. Its title was ‘EGRET SEVEN’.
Southern England
The train journey home was better than Richter had expected, mainly because he had managed to fight his way to a seat immediately. Having picked up a paperback at the station bookstall, he tried to read it as the train headed west, but his mind kept wandering away from the printed word.
Three things bothered him. First, at no time during his career in the service had Richter ever been aware of any requirement for a dedicated courier of the type proposed by Colonel Baldwin. Second, although the salary starting point was about what you might expect for courier duties, the annual increments were far too large. Third, coincidence apart, it seemed more than just providential that this job should have been created at exactly the time when Richter most needed to find employment. It was almost as if this job had been picked for him, rather than the other way around.
The next morning, Richter rang Baldwin and told him he’d take it.