Sleeping Dogs by Thomas Perry Page A

like a present. “I’m going to tell you something that’s absolutely secret. Very few people even inside the Western intelligence community have heard it, and I’m not cleared by your government to be one of them. There’s a special room inside a building near Whitehall. It’s a big room in a basement, and outside the door there are always two sergeants of the Royal Marines, fully armed and at attention on two-hour shifts. Inside the room are hundreds of identical black-velvet boxes, with little gold plates on them engraved with the names of the heroes of the secret wars. When a member of England’s intelligence services does something spectacular, there’s a quiet ceremony where he’s given a medal. Because who he is and what he did must be kept secret, the medal is put inside the little velvet box and kept in trust by the government. But years later, when the man dies and the secret is no longer crucial to national security, the Queen invites his family to the Palace for an audience and gives them the box. But it’s not just for professionals. A lot of the boxes in that room are set aside for people like your friends, just regular citizens who maybe got involved by accident, or performed some service when the need arose. For the moment their families and friends are going to think that Jimmy and Peter were killed by robbers or something—whatever story the government puts out for the press. But someday they’ll get a little printed invitation to come visit the Queen, and then they’ll know.”
    Margaret stared at him, and in her eyes he could see that she wanted to be able to tell the story, to go to Peter’s sister or Jimmy’s mother in some private room of the gigantic old country houses they lived in and whisper the lie he had offered her. Then there was no telling where it would go, and he knew it wouldn’t hold up. “You’ve got to keep that to yourself,” he said. “If it ever got out, the Russians would do anything to get into that room and read the citations—the ones for the last fifty years, anyway.”
    “But you know, and now I know,” she said. “Michael, if I could tell just one or two people … and after all, it’s their secret, theirs and mine, not yours.”
    He wavered as he thought about her. If she told it, she would probably make up lots of details that would make it sound more authentic, but he couldn’t chance it. “It’s a deep secret. None of them would ever have told an American, even one who’s been here for years trying to protect their country.”
    “Then, how do you know?”
    He sighed, as though he were giving in against his better judgment. “A few years ago, a man from MI6 managed to get inside a Soviet communications post in Afghanistan. How that happened, and how he got out, I can’t go into. But he ended up with me. He’d seen some things: the specification plates on the equipment, written texts on the computer screens and so on. The problem was, he didn’t speak Russian. He’d looked at them, but there was no way he could remember them because they meant nothing to him; just gibberish. His own people tried hypnotism, locking him in a sensory-deprivation chamber, everything. But they knew that we’d experimented with certain drugs. I can’t name them, but chemically they’re several generations beyond truth serums.
    “This Englishman came to my house and met a doctor we’d flown in from Langley. The doctor shot him up, and he started to draw. He drew for days. He drew the Russian letters he’d seen on the computer screens, and made diagrams and maps. He saw everything all over again, and traced it on paper. But he also started to talk. It was endless, compulsive talk about all kinds of things that he’d kept secret. He told me about sexual experiences, childhood lies and things his parents hadn’t caught him at, secret fears and worries that he’d never resolved. It turned out he was from an old family that had been involved in British secrets