Agent Running in the Field Read Online Free PDF

disadvantaged kids in Birmingham and swore he’d never been so happy in his life. Hadn’t I once talked of doing just that?

4
    For the rest of the week leading up to our crack-of-dawn departure from Stansted I affected for reasons of family harmony to be mulling over whether to accept the
pretty drearyjob
I had been offered by the Office, or make the clean break Prue had long advocated. She was content to wait. Steff professed herself unbothered either way. As far as she was concerned I was just a middle-order bureaucrat who was never going to make the grade whatever he did. She loved me, but from a height.
    ‘Let’s face it, sport, they’re not going to appoint us ambassador to Beijing or giveus a knighthood, are they?’ she reminded me cheerfully when the question came up over dinner. As usual, I took it on the chin. For as long as I was a diplomat abroad, I at least had status. Back in the mother country, I was part of the grey mass.
    It was not till our second evening in the mountains, while Steff was out gallivanting with a bunch of Italian kids who were staying in our hotel, andPrue and I were enjoying a quiet cheese fondue and a couple of glasses of kirsch at Marcel’s, that I was seized with the urge to come clean to Prue about my job offer at the Office – really clean – not tiptoe around as I had been planning, not another cover story, but tell it to her from the heart, which was the least she deserved after all I’d put her through over the years. Her air of quiet resignationtold me shehad already sensed that I was a long way from opening that outward-bound club for disadvantaged kids.
    ‘It’s one of those run-down London substations that’s been resting on its laurels since the glory days of the Cold War and not producing anything worth a damn,’ I say grimly. ‘It’s a Mickey Mouse outfit, light miles from the mainstream, and my job will be either to get it on its feetor speed it on its way to the graveyard.’
    With Prue, on the rare occasions we get to talk in relaxed terms about the Office, I never know whether I’m swimming against the tide or with it, so I tend to do a bit of both.
    ‘I thought you always said you didn’t want a command post,’ she objects lightly. ‘You preferred to be second man, not bean-counting and bossing other people around.’
    ‘Well, thisisn’t really a
command
post, Prue,’ I assure her warily. ‘I’ll still be second man.’
    ‘Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?’ she says, brightening. ‘You’ll have Bryn to keep you on the rails. You always admired Bryn. We both did’ – gallantly setting aside her own scruples.
    We exchange nostalgic smiles as we recall our short-lived honeymoon as Moscow spies, with Station head Bryn our ever-watchfulguide and mentor.
    ‘Well, I won’t be under Bryn
directly
, Prue. Bryn’s Czar of All the Russias these days. A sideshow like the Haven’s a bit below his pay grade.’
    ‘So who’s the lucky person who’s going to be in charge of you?’ she enquires.
    This is no longer the kind of full disclosure I had in mind. Dom is anathema to Prue. She met him when she came out to visit me in Budapest with Steff, tookone look at Dom’s distraught wife and children and read the signs.
    ‘Well, officially I’ll be under what’s called
London General
,’ I explain. ‘But of course in reality, if it’s anything
really
major,it trickles up the pyramid to Bryn. It’s just for as long as they need me, Prue. Not a day longer,’ I add by way of consolation, though which of us I’m consoling is not clear to either of us.
    Shetakes a forkful of fondue, a sip of wine, a sip of kirsch and, thus fortified, reaches both her hands across the table and grasps mine. Does she
guess
Dom? Does she
intuit
him? Prue’s near-psychic insights can verge on the disturbing.
    ‘Well, I’ll tell you what, Nat,’ she says after due reflection. ‘I think it’s your good right to do exactly what you want to do, for as long