scrambled out of the scrub beneath his feet, screaming its fury.
Once, he fell headlong over a broken catch-net and only the thicket saved him.
Then, just as suddenly, they were standing on the empty coast road, breathless but miraculously unharmed.
The wind had dropped, the rain had ceased. A second car was pulling up beside them. Two men in boots and tracksuits sprang out. With a nod for Kirsty and nothing for himself, they set off at a half-run towards the hillside.
‘I’ll need the goggles,’ she said.
He gave them to her.
‘Have you got any papers on you – maps, anything you kept from up there?’
He hadn’t.
‘It was a triumph. Right? No casualties. We did a great job. All of us. You, too. Right?’
Did he say ‘Right’ in return? It no longer mattered. Without another glance at him, she was heading off in the wake of the two men.
2
On a sunny Sunday early in that same spring, a thirty-one-year-old British foreign servant earmarked for great things sat alone at the pavement table of a humble Italian café in London’s Soho, steeling himself to perform an act of espionage so outrageous that, if detected, it would cost him his career and his freedom: namely, recovering a tape recording, illicitly made by himself, from the Private Office of a Minister of the Crown whom it was his duty to serve and advise to the best of his considerable ability.
His name was Toby Bell and he was entirely alone in his criminal contemplations. No evil genius controlled him, no paymaster, provocateur or sinister manipulator armed with an attaché case stuffed with hundred-dollar bills was waiting round the corner, no activist in a ski mask. He was in that sense the most feared creature of our contemporary world: a solitary decider. Of a forthcoming clandestine operation on the Crown Colony of Gibraltar he knew nothing: rather, it was this tantalizing ignorance that had brought him to his present pass.
Neither was he in appearance or by nature cut out to be a felon. Even now, premeditating his criminal design, he remained the decent, diligent, tousled, compulsively ambitious, intelligent-looking fellow that his colleagues and employers took him for. He was stocky in build, not particularly handsome, with a shock of unruly brown hair that went haywire as soon as it was brushed. That there was gravitas in him was undeniable. The gifted, state-educated only child of pious artisan parents from the south coast of England who knew no politics but Labour –the father an elder of his local tabernacle, the mother a chubby, happy woman who spoke constantly of Jesus – he had battled his way into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, first as a clerk, and thence by way of evening classes, language courses, internal examinations and two-day leadership tests, to his present, coveted position. As to the Toby , which might by the sound of it set him higher on the English social ladder than his provenance deserved, it derived from nothing more elevated than his father’s pride in the holy man Tobias, whose wondrous filial virtues are set down in the ancient scripts.
What had driven Toby’s ambition – what drove it still – was something he barely questioned. His schoolfriends had wished only to make money. Let them. Toby, though modesty forbade him to say so in so many words, wished to make a difference – or, as he had put it a little shamefacedly to his examiners, take part in his country’s discovery of its true identity in a post-imperial, post-Cold War world. Given his head, he would long ago have swept away Britain’s private education system, abolished all vestiges of entitlement and put the monarchy on a bicycle. Yet even while harbouring these seditious thoughts, the striver in him knew that his first aim must be to rise in the system he dreamed of liberating.
And in speech, though he was speaking at this moment to no one but himself? As a natural-born linguist with his father’s love of cadence and an almost
Once, he fell headlong over a broken catch-net and only the thicket saved him.
Then, just as suddenly, they were standing on the empty coast road, breathless but miraculously unharmed.
The wind had dropped, the rain had ceased. A second car was pulling up beside them. Two men in boots and tracksuits sprang out. With a nod for Kirsty and nothing for himself, they set off at a half-run towards the hillside.
‘I’ll need the goggles,’ she said.
He gave them to her.
‘Have you got any papers on you – maps, anything you kept from up there?’
He hadn’t.
‘It was a triumph. Right? No casualties. We did a great job. All of us. You, too. Right?’
Did he say ‘Right’ in return? It no longer mattered. Without another glance at him, she was heading off in the wake of the two men.
2
On a sunny Sunday early in that same spring, a thirty-one-year-old British foreign servant earmarked for great things sat alone at the pavement table of a humble Italian café in London’s Soho, steeling himself to perform an act of espionage so outrageous that, if detected, it would cost him his career and his freedom: namely, recovering a tape recording, illicitly made by himself, from the Private Office of a Minister of the Crown whom it was his duty to serve and advise to the best of his considerable ability.
His name was Toby Bell and he was entirely alone in his criminal contemplations. No evil genius controlled him, no paymaster, provocateur or sinister manipulator armed with an attaché case stuffed with hundred-dollar bills was waiting round the corner, no activist in a ski mask. He was in that sense the most feared creature of our contemporary world: a solitary decider. Of a forthcoming clandestine operation on the Crown Colony of Gibraltar he knew nothing: rather, it was this tantalizing ignorance that had brought him to his present pass.
Neither was he in appearance or by nature cut out to be a felon. Even now, premeditating his criminal design, he remained the decent, diligent, tousled, compulsively ambitious, intelligent-looking fellow that his colleagues and employers took him for. He was stocky in build, not particularly handsome, with a shock of unruly brown hair that went haywire as soon as it was brushed. That there was gravitas in him was undeniable. The gifted, state-educated only child of pious artisan parents from the south coast of England who knew no politics but Labour –the father an elder of his local tabernacle, the mother a chubby, happy woman who spoke constantly of Jesus – he had battled his way into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, first as a clerk, and thence by way of evening classes, language courses, internal examinations and two-day leadership tests, to his present, coveted position. As to the Toby , which might by the sound of it set him higher on the English social ladder than his provenance deserved, it derived from nothing more elevated than his father’s pride in the holy man Tobias, whose wondrous filial virtues are set down in the ancient scripts.
What had driven Toby’s ambition – what drove it still – was something he barely questioned. His schoolfriends had wished only to make money. Let them. Toby, though modesty forbade him to say so in so many words, wished to make a difference – or, as he had put it a little shamefacedly to his examiners, take part in his country’s discovery of its true identity in a post-imperial, post-Cold War world. Given his head, he would long ago have swept away Britain’s private education system, abolished all vestiges of entitlement and put the monarchy on a bicycle. Yet even while harbouring these seditious thoughts, the striver in him knew that his first aim must be to rise in the system he dreamed of liberating.
And in speech, though he was speaking at this moment to no one but himself? As a natural-born linguist with his father’s love of cadence and an almost
Similar Books
