Agent Running in the Field Read Online Free PDF Page A

when?’
    ‘She’s in her second semester.’
    ‘I am asking when you leave on your holiday.’
    ‘At five a.m. from Stansted on Saturday, if you’re thinking of joining us.’
    ‘Assuming you and Prue have talked things over bythen and come to a satisfactory conclusion, I suppose I can have Giles hold the fort at the Haven till Monday week, if he hasn’t rolled off his perch by then. Would you be happy with that, or miserable?’
    Good question. Would I be happy? I’ll be in the Office, I’ll beworking on the Russia target, even if I’m living off scraps from Dom’s table.
    But will Prue be happy?
    *
    The Prue of today isnot the dedicated Office spouse of more than twenty years ago. As selfless, yes, and upright. And as much fun when she lets her hair down. And as determined as ever to be of service to the world at large, just never again in a secret capacity. The impressive junior lawyer who had taken courses in counter-surveillance, safety signals and the filling and clearing of dead letter boxes had indeed accompaniedme to Moscow. For fourteen exacting months we had shared the perpetual stress of knowing that our most intimate exchanges were listened to, watched over and analysed for any hint of human weakness or lapse in security. Under the impressive guidance of our head of Station – the same Bryn Jordan who today was huddled in anxious conclave with our intelligence partners in Washington – she hadplayed the starring role in husband-and-wife setpiece charades scripted to deceive the opposition’s eavesdroppers.
    But it was during our second back-to-back stint in Moscow that Prue discovered she was pregnant, and with pregnancy came an abrupt disenchantment with the Office and its works. A lifetime of deception no longer appealed to her, if it ever had. Neither did a foreign birthplace forour child. We returned to England. Perhaps when the baby is born, she’ll think differently, I told myself. But that was not to know Prue. On the day Stephanie was born, Prue’s father dropped dead of a heart attack. On the strength of his bequest, she paid cash down for a Victorian house in Battersea with a large garden and an apple tree. If she had stuck a flag in the ground and said ‘Here I stay’,she couldnot have made her intentions more clear. Our daughter Steff, as we were soon calling her, would never become the kind of diplomatic brat we had seen too many of, over-nannied and shuffled from country to country and school to school in the wake of their mothers and fathers. She would occupy her natural place in society, attend state schools, never private or boarding schools.
    And whatwould Prue herself do with the rest of her life? She would take it up where she had left it. She would become a human rights lawyer, a legal champion of the oppressed. But her decision implied no sudden separation. She understood my love of Queen, country and the Service. I understood her love of law and human justice. She had given the Service her all, she could give no more. From the earliestdays of our marriage she had never been the sort of wife who can’t wait for the Chief’s Christmas party or the funerals of revered members or At Homes for junior staff and their dependants. And I for my part had never been a natural for get-togethers with Prue’s radically minded legal colleagues.
    But neither of us could have foreseen that as post-Communist Russia, against all hope and expectation,emerged as a clear and present threat to liberal democracy across the globe, one foreign posting would follow on the heels of the last and I would become a de facto absentee husband and father.
    Well, now I was home from the sea, as Dom had kindly said. It hadn’t been easy for either of us, Prue particularly, and she had every reason to hope that I was back on dry land for good and looking fora new life in what she referred to, a little too often, as the real world. A former colleague of mine had opened up an outward-bound club for