She arrived early at Westminster tube station that first morning at the FCO, taking exit five onto Parliament Street as per the instructions she’d been sent, letting her eyes take it all in as she looked back towards the Houses of Parliament – the tourists gathering for photographs in front of soldiers on horseback, men in suits bustling with their briefcases into the backs of taxis, their phones pressed to their ears. As she approached the stone arch at the foot of King Charles Street, a security guard directed her towards the open brown metal gates where another official passed her bag through a scanner before she was pointed towards a reception area and handed a lanyard with her name on it.
‘You’re here as an intern, yes? I’m Lauren,’ said the young woman who arrived to escort her across into the main building, not waiting for an answer before leading the way through the metal turnstiles which opened like a mouth, its teeth clamping shut behind them.
Gabriela thought of the night before, turning away from the mirror towards Tom, who was on the other side of the bedroom they had shared since making the decision that rather than sell her father’s house, they would move in together.
‘Stop worrying, you’re not going to mess it up.’ Tom’s face had been serious. ‘You’re brilliant, everyone knows you’re brilliant. You have a degree in languages, you work hard. I promise you, there is nothing to worry about.’
‘I just want it so badly,’ she said, noticing a tiny crack in the top corner of the mirror.
‘I know you do.’
‘But what if …’
‘Just enjoy it, for God’s sake. Why do you always have to catastrophise? Everything’s going to be fine.’
‘This way.’ Lauren turned sharply left, holding open the first door they came to and leading the way up a flight of stone steps, past a couple of offices and a tiny Costa concession, where the queue stretched out the door.
Inside, the offices were more old-fashioned than Gabriela had imagined, semi open-plan, little more than a bunch of desks, suit jackets discarded on the backs of chairs. Placing her bag on the desk Lauren had pointed her towards, she removed her camel-coloured cashmere coat, one of the few items of her mother’s clothing that she had kept.
A while later, a woman a couple of years older than her approached to give the grand tour, introducing herself as Madeleine.
‘Is it what you had imagined?’ she asked as they weaved back through the hallway. ‘My own theory is that this whole structure is built for people who know nothing other than quads. Went to public school (quad), Oxbridge (quads), and now the FCO – guess what? Architecture to comfort public schoolboys.’
Madeleine had grown up in the service, she explained as they walked. Her father, a diplomat in countries across the Middle East and Asia, had been tipped to become Permanent Under-Secretary before dropping dead in the shower on the morning of his fifty-second birthday. On paper, at least, it seemed to Gabriela that Madeleine was born for this world; the gilded corridors of King Charles Street seemed to widen a little for her as they passed through.
Outside, corridors snaked around the quad, with lettered entry points and numbered offices. Noticing Gabriela looking, Madeleine said, ‘The whole thing is apparently designed with the intention of confusing as many people as possible at once. In that respect, at least, it’s a highly effective system. You all right for lunch?’
‘I brought sandwiches with me.’
‘Good, and you know where the coffee is?’
Gabriela nodded again. ‘What do you do here?’
‘Me?’ Madeleine scoffed. ‘Oh, you know, make up numbers. Here’s a fun fact: did you know until the late Sixties a woman had to leave when she got married? I shit you not. We all move around rather a lot, often completely arbitrarily, which I can talk you through in a bit more detail once you’ve been through clearance. As for you, the thing with the FCO, as you will learn, is that it equates Young People – that’s you, and even me, would you believe – with “the internet”.’ She made fingers around the words. ‘So as far as what you will be expected to do, it will mainly be monitoring online forums for now. I’m afraid there is a risk that you will die of boredom before you manage to finish your placement …’
When they arrived at the foot of a gilded sweeping staircase, quite a way inside the building, Madeleine pointed upwards. ‘This is probably more what you were imagining, no?’
Gabriela took in the portraits that lined the walls with watchful eyes.
‘Perhaps we can take a proper look another day … That’s the Foreign Secretary’s office at the top of those stairs.’
Madeleine paused for a moment and then fixed her seriously with her gaze, as if considering something before deciding to go ahead, lowering her voice. ‘The only other thing you need to know at this stage is that the Director, Guy Emsworth …’ Her words drifted off. ‘Just, if you have any questions, any concerns, you come to me. OK?’
Gabriela felt a sudden chill run down her back and Madeleine, noticing her shiver, started to walk back into the bowels of the building.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Just you wait. It gets colder in here than you’d ever expect.’
She spent most of her first week, as per Madeleine’s prediction, scouring online message-boards for ‘suspicious activity’, whatever that was supposed to mean. It was a few days before Guy Emsworth appeared beside her chair. She wasn’t sure whether to stand up, but when he stooped over the corner of her desk, it was as if he was fixing her to her seat.
‘Guy Emsworth.’ He held out a hand, his palm clammy against hers. ‘You’re our new recruit, am I right?’
From the hours she’d spent poring over the FCO website in preparation for this moment, she knew Emsworth was a director of the Joint International Counter-Terrorism Unit, the department to which she was to be attached – singled out, according to the feedback from her application, as a result of speaking Arabic, French, Spanish and Russian.
She smiled. ‘Well, I’m here for the next month, hopefully longer – I’m Gabriela.’
He considered her for a moment, his eyes moving briskly over her body before he stood straight. ‘Gabriela … Very good. Well, you seem like the sort who could stick around.’
Three weeks later and she was one of the last in the office, finishing off the report she’d been compiling for Lauren, when she spotted Emsworth in his office with his back to the door. She was on a high, having noticed what she believed to be a series of potentially significant codewords being used on a forum linked to a magazine which sold itself as an aspirational lifestyle publication but was in fact funded by an Islamist terror cell that was part of a growing concern in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. She had been preparing to leave a print-out of her findings on Lauren’s desk for her to pass on to her boss the following day, but at the last minute she’d paused, deciding instead to hand the document to him herself in the morning. After all, it was her work: why risk someone else getting the credit?
As she walked past his office on her way back to her desk, she glanced through the semi-open door, hardly expecting him to still be there. Even with his back to her, she could sense there was something important about the conversation he was having on the phone, something in his stature giving it away.
He cut off the call a couple of seconds later and stepped out of the office, signalling across to her as she gathered her coat.
‘I didn’t know anyone was still here,’ he said and she was pleased he’d noticed her putting in the hours. ‘Listen, Gabriela. What are you doing now? A few of us were going to have a quick drink, if you fancied joining? They’ve gone ahead.’
She stood for a moment in the empty room, momentarily wondering why the head of the department would invite the intern along for after-work drinks, before smiling back at him, blotting out the warning voice in her head.
‘Oh bugger, it looks like the others have already left,’ he sighed, slipping his phone back into his pocket as they crossed Parliament Street towards the Red Lion, its colourful hanging baskets a counterpoint to the endless grey, and she felt another scratch of disbelief. But she could hardly turn back now.
Inside, the bar was heaving.
‘Grab us that seat, and I’ll come and join you.’
He didn’t ask what she wanted to drink, returning a few minutes later with two glasses of gin and tonic, the sweat from his palm leaving a handprint like a slap mark in the condensation. Settling beside her, too close, he said, ‘So, tell me, where did you go to university, Gabriela?’
She took a sip of her drink before answering, ‘UCL. I graduated last summer.’
‘Excellent,’ he replied, his eyes moving briefly to her chest. ‘And you live in London?’
She nodded. ‘At my father’s house.’
She didn’t mention Tom, whose idea it had been to give up his damp rented studio flat and pay to live at hers instead. For him, the new arrangement had meant the chance to live in a house that represented a slice of the modernist dream that defined so much of his degree, which would soon, finally, be coming to an end. For her, it was a practical solution that afforded her the option of holding onto the house. Besides, Tom was good company, he was a good man, and it was easier to go along with it than to push back in a way that was bound to have hurt him.
She would wonder later about the things she had and had not told Emsworth that night. The things that might have given him the wrong impression, that might have made what followed – at least this particular segment of events – partly her own fault.
She took a sip of her drink as Emsworth’s phone pinged. Reading the words on the screen, his face dropped. He cursed under his breath, placing the handset back in his pocket, the gold ring flashing on his third finger.
‘Gabriela, I’m so sorry, there’s been a bit of an emergency and I’m afraid I’m going to have to dash back to the office. You stay and finish off your drink and I’ll catch up with you tomorrow, all right?’
He leaned over and squeezed her knee and she had to curb a reflexive desire to kick him.
Watching through the window as he left the pub, rather than heading back to King Charles Street as he said he was going to, she saw him hail a taxi, moving into it, pulling out his phone and placing it to his ear. Glancing over his shoulder, he paused for a moment before talking into the receiver, his face suddenly unrecognisable from the one seated opposite her just moments before. As she necked the last of her drink, the bubbles caught in her throat, causing a tear to form in the corner of her eye.
Lauren was characteristically blasé as she made the offer the following day.
‘The guy who was supposed to be coming in for a month after you has cancelled. So if you wanted to stay on a bit longer …’
‘Wow, I’d love to,’ Gabriela replied.
She paused before emailing Emsworth, unsure of the protocol, then decided that since he would have had to have signed off her extended stay, it would be rude not to acknowledge it.
Opening a new message, she typed: Thank you for offering me an extended placement. I look forward to working with you and the team. Best wishes, Gabriela.
His reply was almost instantaneous. No need to thank me. Good to have you on board. GE.
It was another six months before she was taken on properly, in her first official role – fast-streamed – enabling her to do a year in two different departments, one policy-based, one most likely corporate, before taking her first foreign posting.
‘Bugger me, Gabs, you’re in the Foreign Office!’ Tom had enthused, lifting her off her feet when she got home that night, having rung on her way to share the news, too excited to wait.
‘I’d rather not, if you don’t mind,’ she pulled a face before continuing. ‘I mean, it’s not official yet. There’s some security clearance checks that have to be made first, which will take a couple of weeks. But if that’s all good, and bloody hell it should be, then …’
‘This deserves champagne,’ he said, popping open a bottle of Cava. ‘I mean obviously we don’t have any, but if we did …’ He handed her a glass. ‘Seriously, though, I’m so bloody proud of you. This is massive.’
‘I know,’ she said, taking a sip of her drink, ignoring the whispers telling her, even then, that it was too good to be true; voices that grew louder in her mind as she fell asleep that night, so that in her dreams they were shouting, begging her to run and not look back.
Her first year proper at King Charles Street was spent working under Emsworth in Counter-Terrorism, still mostly trawling the internet for signs of suspicious activity, which she would deliver to him along with an analysis of how she believed the information she’d found fitted in with what they already knew of existing organisations – analysis she was desperate for him to give more credence to than appeared to be the case. Nevertheless, she was there, and she was on course to making herself indispensable, of that much she was sure.
Emsworth had stationed her at a desk near his on the basis that he could delegate when necessary – really help lift her up through the organisation.
‘To give him a better vantage point from which to ogle your tits, more like.’ Madeleine kissed her teeth when she saw her friend there, and Gabriela was pissed off that she didn’t believe she’d earned his interest by virtue of her obvious talents.
She felt her cheeks pinken when Emsworth’s email came through the following day.
Let’s go for lunch, talk through any ideas you have for strategy? GE.
‘I know it’s a bit of a walk away,’ Emsworth said as they reached the Italian bistro on Crown Passage that he referred to as his unofficial office. ‘But wait until you try the lasagne – you’ll understand why it’s worth the stroll.’
The bistro was tucked at the end of the alleyway so that you could almost miss it if you didn’t know what you were looking for. Inside, it was furnished in the sort of deep reds and wood veneers that reminded Gabriela of the Italian cafés that were all over Camden when she was growing up. The kind of place her mother would offer to meet her on their weekends together as a teenager, as if the warmth of the pizza would make up for the coolness she couldn’t help but exude towards her only child.
‘What will you drink?’ Emsworth asked, once they were settled at a table.
‘Oh, I’ll just have a Coke.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said, without looking up from the wine menu. ‘You can’t leave me to drink alone. White or red?’
‘I don’t mind,’ she replied as the waitress came to take their order, greeting him in a way that confirmed he was a regular.
‘I was interested in what you mentioned in the briefing about, what was it, terrorism and branding? Very intriguing.’
She sat straighter in her chair. ‘Oh, OK. Well, I was just saying that from the data that’s beginning to be collected in other countries, it seems that terrorist groups are manipulating emerging social media platforms to create an identity which helps to propagate their own narrative, rather than that foisted on them by traditional media.’ She sounded like an automaton, churning out lines verbatim from what she had read, but he didn’t seem to notice.
‘The fear is that with the recent emergence of platforms like Myspace and Facebook, these groups will be able to access potential recruits in ways that we can’t see and therefore can’t monitor …’
As the waitress settled the bottle on the table, she felt Emsworth’s eyes on hers in a way that she found both thrilling and unnerving.
Pausing to take a sip of cold wine, he said, ‘Gosh, you really are more than a pretty face. Do carry on.’
As per another of the organisation’s peculiar, and frustrating, habits, just as she was catching her stride in Counter-Terrorism, she was pulled into Digital Diplomacy, an ‘emerging department’ pivoting around the sort of PR work that made a mockery of the whole place. Madeleine, meanwhile, was hoisted kicking and screaming, almost literally, into Communications.
‘I swear to God, they’re trying to kill us off.’ She gesticulated with her cigarette as they stood outside the Red Lion one evening after work, clots of traffic leaking out fumes on the street in front of them.
It was that autumn when Gabriela was offered her first foreign posting, in Russia, Emsworth delivering the news personally as she made her way back into the office from lunch.
‘What do you say? Two years in Moscow back working under me, from a distance. It’s a pretty good option for your first posting. Could do a hell of a lot worse. I’ve worked hard to wangle you this – don’t mess it up.’
He wagged his finger in her face as he uttered the final words, like a teacher doling out the star part in the school play. She felt her heartbeat rise, her chest seeming to vibrate with it. As if something inside her knew what was coming and was beating at her ribcage in order to escape.
Madeleine nearly dropped her sandwich when Gabriela told her the news about Moscow. They were sitting on a bench eating their lunch on the stretch of riverside overlooking the Thames.
‘What about you?’ she asked, knowing that Madeleine, too, had been offered another placement, and having already refused her first one would be expected to take it.
‘Fucking Dubai. Bastards,’ she hissed.
‘What’s wrong with Dubai?’ Gabriela asked, stifling a laugh, trying not to sound smug but unable to suppress her pride at being sent on the more serious posting. ‘Loads of people would kill for Dubai; you should hear Johnny banging on about the bottomless brunches in the compound …’
Madeleine gave Gabriela a look of hateful despair at the thought of it and Gabriela smiled back sympathetically, taking a drag. ‘Sorry …’
It wasn’t that she relished Madeleine’s self-perceived failing – on the contrary, she would have loved for her, too, to get the posting she craved, the one that she deserved. But did she feel guilty about her tenure, knowing as she did that Moscow was high on Madeleine’s list of preferred destinations? How could she? It was out of her hands. Besides, dog-loyal as she was, there was no way Madeleine would have spared her a moment’s guilt, had the tables been turned.
‘You’re not going to take it?’
‘Am I fuck,’ she said, grabbing her lighter from the bench and inhaling sharply. ‘I’m telling you now, it’s that bastard Emsworth, he’s had it in for me since the moment I arrived. I should have lied about my geographical preferences, there’s no way he is not doing this to spite me.’
‘He’s not even involved in Communications,’ Gabriela reasoned and Madeleine scoffed, taking another drag of her cigarette and kissing her teeth. ‘Not involved? Oh fucking please. Like he doesn’t have his hands in everything that is going on around here.’