CHAPTER EIGHT

By the time I got back to the safe house, the fear I hadn't dared to allow myself to feel in Alexis Meynell's hotel room had combined with physical revulsion and self-disgust so strong that I felt sick. I had opened the taxi window as wide as I could despite the chill, but I could still smell and taste the bastard on my skin, in my hair and on my dress, which was now crumpled and stained. Every time I thought of him my stomach heaved, and even worse – and hideously more visible – my eyes were burning too. I kept trying to dab them with the ends of my stole, but eventually the driver's concern outweighed his natural British mind-your-own-business reticence.

"You all right, love?"

"Yeah. Yeah, thanks." I forced a smile. "Few too many and a row with the boyfriend. You know how it is."

I all but ran to the flat, desperate not to cause a scene in the street and attract the public attention that was every MI-5 officer's nightmare. I made it inside, but the bedroom was my undoing. I heard a strangled wail that didn't even sound like me as I flung my wrap and bag onto the bed, bolted for the bathroom and wrenched the taps on. As the water gushed into the bath I savagely tore the dress off, ripping the material in the process, and hurled it as far from me as I could. Then I kicked my shoes after it, removed my underclothes and scrambled into the steaming water.

You will not cry, Myers. I snatched up the soap and a sponge and started to scour myself. You will not.This operation was still live, and only I could make sure we ended it by bringing down Alexis Meynell. He could smell weakness the way a trained dog can sniff out explosives, and if he were to detect any in me the following day, we'd be finished. The gloves were off now. He knew who and what I was, and the only weapon I had left was my ability to deceive. If it proved to be insufficient, the operation would be dead in the water.

Yeah, and so might you be, I thought, recalling the fate of our previous agent. I scrubbed harder, as much to erase that from my mind as the traces of Meynell's hands and lips from my skin. I'd have back-up. Ben would be there, and I knew that Lucas would rather O.D on caffeine than move from the coffee stand downstairs tomorrow. I almost smiled at the thought of how protective he'd suddenly become. Somewhere under the urbane charm, there was a streak of caveman hidden in Lucas North. Normally, I would have been riled by it, but this time I couldn't help being touched. It steadied my nerves, too; I hated to admit it even to myself, but Meynell scared the shit out of me. I shuddered involuntarily, ran in some fresh hot water and slithered deeper into it. It wasn't just the raw, violent rage that I'd seen in him when Darlak had called. That was frightening – I'd seen it cow a room full of cocksure financial traders, after all - but it was manageable. It was the man's perspicacity that really alarmed me; long before that call he'd already begun to detect and read the signs of deception. There's a look that you have … someone who's part of a system but doesn't really belong to it. That might have applied to Jenny Hunter; it certainly applied to Ros Myers. I was using it to trick him into believing that I really was on his side, and so far it seemed to be working. But if he should see through that too …

He won't. I had spoken out loud. I washed my hair under the shower and rinsed myself off thoroughly. My skin was red, stinging and sore from the vicious scouring I'd given myself, but at least the heavy aroma of eucalyptus-scented soap oozing from my pores had finally defeated the odour of Meynell. Now I needed to get him out of my mind, too – at least long enough to catch a few hours sleep. I took the duvet and a pillow into the sitting room. I wasn't going to do a Lucas and spend the night on the floor, but I knew that if I got into that bed, Meynell would be in it with me. So I curled up on the sofa instead and set the alarm on my phone for seven. Then I turned my back on it and resisted the urge to ring Harry and check that everything would be in place for tomorrow. Stop being such a cowardly hypocrite, Myers. Since when do you need to backstop Harry Pearce? The only need I had was my own – to talk to him and draw on his strength and support before I had to face Meynell down again in the morning. Solitude had never bothered me – usually my own company was the only kind I felt truly at ease in – but right now it was a burden. Even Lucas's bloody fussing would have been a welcome companion.

Tomorrow. If – when – we've got the bastard. When I've had the unmitigated pleasure of bringing him as low as he's just done me. I could feel a slow tide of sleep lapping at the aches of tension in my body. I turned my face into the sofa cushions and let it have its way.

oOoOoOo

When I arrived at the office the following day Meynell's attitude to me seemed unchanged – part suspicious, part intrigued. His surly little sidekick clearly wasn't happy with my presence and said so, but Meynell waved him to silence. For the first few moments it looked as if the plan was going to succeed.

I've had enough of this. It was only when the little runt said that and pulled out a pistol that I realised my error. Throughout the operation I had been so focused on manipulating Meynell that I had overlooked him. Darlak had seemed to me mildly ridiculous with his theatrical glares and over-precise English. If I'd considered him at all, I thought of him as Meynell's pawn, an obedient little puppy eagerly fetching and carrying in expectation of an occasional approving pat on the head. Only now was his real clout apparent. I kept my gaze on Meynell and my breathing steady as he put the gun to my head.

Do as he says. Meynell's voice was flat, dead almost. Call them.

I only had time to tell Harry where I was and with whom before Darlak interrupted with his sixty-second ultimatum. I could guess at the frantic activity that his words would have triggered on the Grid, and I could only pray that it included getting Ben and Lucas here fast.

You have thirty seconds to withdraw the announcement and pay out. My heart was racing, but I kept my eyes riveted on Meynell, who stared back at me with a languid curiosity; he might have been watching an insect struggling to release itself from a piece of flypaper.

You have fifteen seconds.

His face swam in the film of tears that had welled into my eyes and were slowly beginning to spill over. My skin felt clammy from cold sweat, and my throat was constricted with terror. I don't think I could have spoken at all had not Harry's voice, roughened by his anxiety, rasped from the loudspeaker. Ros! Ros, are you all right?

"Harry, there is no gun." My voice was at breaking point, but just for the second I needed, pure hatred of the two men with me gave me strength. "Release the statement, because there is no gun."

I heard Darlak's shriek of fury as he grabbed my hair and slammed my head down onto a table, but louder still was Meynell's roar of 'No!' as he launched himself at his hatchet-man and snatched the gun from his hand. That was all I needed. All my fear and fury exploded. I sprang up, knocking Darlak off-balance, and wrenched the gun from Meynell's grasp.

A series of thuds and a clanging crash came from behind me as I pointed the gun straight at Asa Darlak. I kept it trained on him as I risked a glance towards Lucas and Ben. Ben looked shocked and bewildered; the look Lucas threw towards the Russian mafioso was murderous.

"You all right?" he asked me.

"Fine." I turned the gun on Meynell.

Ros! Ros, are you there? ROS! I had never heard panic in Harry's voice before. Still, I didn't take my eyes off Alexis Meynell.

"I'm fine, Harry." On Meynell's desk, a tinny voice was reporting a steady rise in the Highland Life share price.

"The system is rotten. You know it has to change." There was something almost petulant in Meynell's voice. Pleading, too, as if, even now, he still truly believed that I would go round to his side of the bloody desk and make common cause with him.

I could see the barrel of the gun beginning to quiver as the energy drained from me. My legs felt weak, and spots were starting to obscure my vision. If I was going to faint, I'd be damned if I'd do it in front of a robber baron with a good sob story and a short-arsed thug from the gutters of Moscow.

"I have a duty to the British state." I turned, handed the gun to Ben, and strode to the door, Lucas on my heels. I glared at both of them.

"You two should work out more." I don't think it was my most convincing put-down; I was shaking, and could barely get the words out. I shoved the door open, but when Lucas followed me through I stopped.

"No. You stay here, wait for the police, and see them arrested."

He put a hand gently on my arm. "Ros, you need to rest."

I shook it off. "I've done my part. It's your responsibility now. Go back in there. That's an order, Lucas. "

With obvious reluctance, he obeyed. The corridor was out of focus, but I saw the sign I needed - a toilet for the disabled. I was vaguely aware of suits emerging from their offices, but I couldn't hear what any of them were saying. I turned into the toilet, sank rubber-legged to the floor and passed out.

oOoOoOo

I sneaked out under cover of the noisy chaos when the police arrived, phoned Harry and drove straight to the Grid. In the car park, I found him waiting for me by the lift. He beamed at me.

"Well done, Rosalind. Outstanding work." Then his voice softened. "Are you all right?"

"Of course I am," I answered, but my voice caught.

"Of course you are," Harry echoed. He put his arm round my shoulders until I mumbled "OK," and then gave me a gentle shake. "I suggest you go and shower, change, and then come and brief me." His eyes twinkled. "Mr Johnnie Walker and Mr Smirnoff will be joining us."

I did as he suggested, deliberately changing into jeans and a shirt that 'Jenny Hunter' would never have worn. Lucas, I saw, had jettisoned 'Pete' in the same way, and was back in jeans and a sweater.

"Well done," he said, when I came in. "Going to Meynell's hotel room alone?" His eyes were admiring. "Don't think many people could have done that."

His words reminded me of something. Harry was approaching, but there was no sign anywhere of Jo Portman.

"Has anyone spoken to Jo?" I asked.

"I was just about to." Harry looked thoroughly uncomfortable at the prospect, and when I offered to do it instead, he accepted with obvious relief.

I took the photographs of Boscard's body up to the roof. I'd been derelict in my duty towards Jo Portman. I'd shrunk from venturing into the minefield of her trauma for fear of the kind of tearful gush of emotions that froze me into wordless embarrassment. But I had to try now. We were as different as two women could be, and I had offered of my own volition what had been brutally taken from her. But for all their admiration and sympathy, Lucas and Harry could never really understand how we both felt now. Perhaps we could console each other.

I tried to convey that to Jo and offer her the chance to talk if she wanted to. I suppose I only had myself to blame for the fact that she didn't. I'd never been the sort of person anyone willingly confided in - never tried to be. So ironically, now that, for once, I longed to confide in someone, I was reaping the harvest of the seeds of unsociability I'd been sowing all my life. Jo thanked me, politely but distantly, for what I'd told her, and then turned back to the view over the city.

"How is she?" Harry asked when I returned downstairs.

"Give her time. She'll be all right," I said tiredly.

He looked keenly at me. "You're worn out, Ros. Go home now. Lucas and I will tie up the loose ends."

I didn't argue. My awkward, blundering failure to empathise with Jo had added a familiar feeling of alienation to my exhaustion, and a weary inability to continue being strong and brave and in command … for the moment. So I left the muted triumph in the Grid, and exchanged Thames House for the more manageable solitude of my flat.

oOoOoOo

I knew I was still too wound-up to sleep, so I didn't try. Instead, I put on an old Oxford University sweatshirt and tracksuit pants, dimmed the lights and lay on the sofa listening to Faure's Requiem. When my mobile interrupted the haunting beauty of the In Paradisum with a noisy buzzing, I snatched it up furiously.

"Ros?" Lucas sounded slightly breathless. "Have you eaten?"

I hadn't; even though I was hungry, I hadn't had the energy to contemplate cooking, and I couldn't summon up the enthusiasm to order a takeaway either.

"No, Lucas," I said irritably. "I'm not really in the mood for a gourmet restaurant tonight."

"You don't have to be," he answered. "I dropped in at one and bought some takeaway."

I frowned. "Where are you?"

I heard a rustling noise and a muttered Russian curse. "Downstairs outside your block." Now there was a clatter. "Failing to balance two Thai meals, the phone and an umbrella. Ros," now his voice became cajoling, "it's raining out here. Please?"

Thai food was my favourite. How the hell did he know that?

"Hang on." I went into the hall, buzzed him in and opened the door. A few seconds later he bounced up the stairs, a precarious pile of white plastic boxes in his arms and the umbrella held in his teeth.

"Curry's leaking," he mumbled through a mouthful of wet plastic.

"So are you!" I shot back as he dropped the dripping umbrella into my hands, spattering me with water. He grinned, and went past me in a wafting scent of green curry that made my mouth water. I locked the door and followed him into the kitchen.

"I thought we could celebrate saving the British economy," he said. "Got some plates? I think it's still hot, and I'm starving."

"Did I actually invite you round?" I asked. I wasn't going to tell him how idiotically glad I was to see him.

He started opening the boxes. "You know the Service encourages us to show initiative, Ros." He put his head on one side like a sparrow eyeing a picnic sandwich. "Besides, I might have succumbed to malnutrition before you did."

For form's sake, I muttered something about that not being likely while there were still doughnuts in the world, and got out plates and cutlery.

"I've only got red wine," I said ungraciously. "If you'd told me - "

"Ta-da!" He pulled two large bottles of Tsingtao beer from his pockets with a flourish and a smug smile.

"Cold?" I enquired waspishly.

"Well, wet, anyway." I laughed too; I couldn't help it.

"Here," I said. "I'll open them. Take it into the sitting room."

I followed him with the beer and a tray, and did a double take at the array of dishes he had spread on the coffee table. "Did the JIC declare a famine emergency since lunchtime or something?"

"No, but the FO's been trying to boost trade with Asia." He pulled a face. "Does it count if the shop's in Wimbledon?"

I tutted mockingly, handed him a bottle and waved him to the sofa. "Make yourself comfortable."

He sat down, and, with a yelp, pulled something out from underneath himself. "Oh shit, sorry. I hope it - " he stared, and I felt myself turn scarlet. "What's this?"

"A scale model of the prototype for Concorde," I snapped. We started helping ourselves as he set the furry toy owl to one side. I kept my eyes on the food. "Present from Adam. I used to collect them once. He knew."

I was afraid he would laugh at me, but he merely looked intrigued. "Owls? Are you interested in birds, then?"

"Not that way." I explained: that as a child owls had frightened me. "My nurse, she was an Aymara Indian. She gave me a woven one, filled with beans, to help take away the fear. I suppose it started a trend. My father had a local artisan carve one, then he started bringing them home whenever he went on a trip or was moved to a new post. I had quite a collection in the end, glass, carved, toy ones, jewellery. It did the trick, I got quite fond of owls."

"Aymara? " Lucas helped himself to noodles. "Was that when your dad was in Lima?"

I carefully took a long swallow at my beer. "You looked him up then?" When he looked uneasy, I managed a smile. "It's all right, Lucas. I'd have done exactly the same in your place."

"Yeah." He toyed with his food for a moment. "I ... we work together and … well, I just wanted to know a bit more about you." He hesitated. "Sorry. It must be hell. If I'd known, I wouldn't have - "

"You didn't." I cut him off quickly. The last thing I wanted from him on this particular matter was sympathy. "It's not important. We all lose our fathers, sooner or later. I just lost mine sooner. Pass the rice, please." As he leaned across to do so I spotted fresh cuts and grazes on his knuckles, and gratefully jumped at the chance to change the subject. "What happened, did you mug someone for their noodles?"

He grimaced. "No, I decked Asa Darlak." My jaw dropped. "He tried to make a run for it. Ben grabbed him and I hit him. Svoloch."

"That's not exactly by the book," I pointed out.

He coloured. "Yeah, well maybe Darlak reads different books from us. Anyway, it was my fault; it was me he recognised, and that was what blew your cover."

I shook my head. "I think Meynell suspected long before. Darlak just confirmed it." I told him what Meynell had said about my not belonging to the system I worked in.

Lucas shrugged. "Random probing."

"No." I chewed slowly on a mouthful of curry. "He's intelligent, Lucas. Sensitive with it. He's not just one more pig with his snout in the trough."

Lucas looked at me curiously. "You sound as if you almost sympathise with him."

"With his views. I think I did, sometimes."

His expression combined disgust with bewilderment. "But Ros … after what he did - "

"I know. I know." I told him what Meynell had told me; about his childhood in Prague, his father's reaction to the post-revolution changes, his own loathing of the rampant capitalism that had brought them about. "He has a point."

Lucas snorted. "Lots of people have a point." He told me about Malcolm, and his fear of losing his life savings in the Highland Life Bank. "There would have been millions like him if Meynell had had his way."

I finished what was on my plate and sighed. "Yeah, I know. Maybe he was right … about me not really belonging. I've never been very good at toeing the party line. Fitting in." My own words surprised me. Had I not known from living in Bangkok that Tsingtao was one of the weakest beers available, I would have blamed it for making me so loquacious. There was something about Lucas that seemed to untie the knots in my tongue that had made me so hopeless with Jo. It was unnerving, and at the same time strangely comforting. I must be going soft.

"Listen." Lucas reached across the debris of boxes and chopsticks strewn over the table and slid both hands round mine. I almost recoiled, but then made myself look at him and saw warm, smiling blue eyes rather than the cold, obsidian stare of Meynell's. "Bugger Comrade Meynell and the Dalek. Have you got any green tea?" I nodded. "Then why don't you make some, I'll find a good DVD, and we'll just be a pair of idle slobs for the rest of the evening?"

It sounded like the paradise King's College Choir had been singing about. I hadn't realised just how much I didn't want to be alone. "Like you are during the day, you mean?" I got up to make the tea.

We spent the next few hours side by side on the sofa watching old episodes of Yes Minister. I hadn't seen them in years; my TV diet these days was largely made up of news broadcasts. Lucas remembered the series from the years before his arrest in Russia, and he laughed at it so uproariously that his mirth infected me too. When MI-5 was called in to deal with the Foreign Minister's dalliance with the 'shady lady from Argentina', we both collapsed in paroxysms of helpless giggles.

"God," I said, when the episode ended with one of Sir Humphrey's Machiavellian 'solutions' to the Minister's problems, "just imagine Harry's face if that happened to us."

Lucas smiled, but rather absent-mindedly. I frowned. "What?"

"Harry," he said, then uncertainly: "You know how you said you thought he was hiding something?" I nodded, but still he hesitated.

"Spit it out, Lucas," I prompted.

It was a question of dribble rather than spit, but at last he told me – about the mysterious 'Sugarhorse', his own recollection of the code-name 'palomnik,' and Harry's reaction when Lucas had found, and given him, the Palomnik file. I was stunned, all the more so since Harry hadn't once mentioned any 'Sugarhorse' to me.

"Did Harry ask you to tell me all this?" I asked. He shook his head. "Then why did you?"

He licked his lips nervously. "Because I think he's in serious trouble, and the Russians are involved somehow." He looked at the floor for a moment. "I – I know what I've said about him, but … knowing how they work …" He trailed off and looked at me. "And because Harry trusts you, more than any of us. So do I."

That's one hell of a change of heart. I looked for mockery in his expression and found none. Lucas obviously felt I needed more convincing.

"Ros, you once told me Harry would rather die than let anything happen to me. Well, I feel the same way about him."

There was no denying the intensity with which he spoke. I hadn't been in the Service for fifteen-odd years without learning how to distinguish sincerity from a bloody good act. Suddenly, I remembered the tirade to which I had subjected Harry when he'd been unable to get my father's prison sentence reduced after the coup attempt. He'd been understanding about that, forgiven me for Yalta … the only news I ever received about my father came through Harry, from the Governor of Wormwood Scrubs, with whom he'd served in the Army. No-one could ever replace my father, but Harry Pearce had come close. It would take me a lifetime – minimum – to repay my debt to him.

I met Lucas's eyes and remembered how I had wondered if we could become friends. He'd risked a stinging rebuff in coming here tonight and offering me the companionship he'd sensed I needed but would never be able to ask for. And I knew it was for me, not to prevent him escaping, that he'd flattened Asa Darlak.

"Did you read the Palomnik file?" I asked.

He nodded. "Skimmed it."

"And you remember?"

A slight smile brushed his lips. I smiled back and poured half the beer remaining in my bottle into his.

"Tell me what it said."

oOoOoOo

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