December. James Steel

Alex could see some sagging wooden goalposts in front of them with a high chain-link perimeter fence behind it, topped by razor wire.

      ‘OK, sir, this way.’ The drug-dealer opened the door. They both pulled their coat collars around their faces, huddled against the white fury whipped up by the rotors, and stumbled through the knee-deep snow. The snow got into Alex’s black Oxfords and melted into his insteps.

      Once he was able to stop squinting against the blizzard, he looked up and saw from the aircraft lights that the field was surrounded by dark trees on three sides but that they were heading towards a cluster of low buildings.

      The man pulled a large yellow torch from his coat pocket and shone it along the side of the building: brick single-storey offices of the cheapest possible construction. The windows were dark, the place looked completely deserted.

      He headed towards a door. Alex glanced at a plastic plaque screwed into the brick next to it: ‘MoD Training Centre RG—8894’.

      The man unlocked the door and shone the powerful beam inside, illuminating a corridor with cheap brown pine doors leading off it, each with a little Civil Service number plate. The musty smell of bureaucracy filled the place.

      ‘If you just go down the corridor to that door at the far end, sir…’ He pointed to a closed door about forty feet from them with a faint rim of light around the edge of it. He handed Alex the torch and turned to go back to the helicopter.

      ‘Well, who?’ Alex blurted at him urgently. The darkened building and mysterious behaviour was beginning to get to him.

      ‘I don’t know, sir. Need-to-know only.’ The man shrugged with indifference. ‘If you just go down there…’ he repeated more insistently, pointing.

      Alex bridled. He didn’t like taking orders. He glared at him, took the torch and stalked off down the corridor. The man shut the door. He was on his own.

       What the fuck is all this creeping around?

      He was now seriously alarmed. The operation had come from the top—the SAS and MoD connections seemed to bear that out—but the rushed nature of the contact, pulling him off the street and dumping him in this weird location, felt wrong.

      Why was the Establishment being so secretive, so rushed? They were supposed to be the ones in charge.

      He stood in the corridor for a moment, listening. Absolute silence. The building was stone cold, his breath smoked in the reflected light from the torch. He flashed it around to get some bearings: worn brown carpet and scuffed beige walls.

      He brushed the snow off his hair, stamped it from his feet, straightened his overcoat and walked down the corridor, the torch pushing a circle of light out in front of him. The anonymous-looking door at the end had a little blue plastic nameplate with ‘C-492’ on it. He paused, put his ear next to it and listened. Nothing.

      He knocked and then opened it.

      Inside was a windowless rectangular meeting room as bare and functional as the rest of the building, dimly lit by a battery-powered camping lantern on a brown veneer table. The lamp lit the table but the corners of the room were shadowy. A laptop lay open on the far side of it.

      A tall man in a smart coat, worn over a dark pinstriped suit, was pacing back and forth across the far end of the room with his hands clasped behind him, his white hair scraped into a severe short-back-and-sides.

      He flicked a tense look round as Alex came in.

      Alex recognised his large, red, leathery face instantly: General Sir Nigel Harrington was a well-known military figure. Alex had served under him when the Blues and Royals had been in 5 Airborne Brigade, based at Aldershot. A former paratrooper and ex-head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, he had retired three years ago. He was now in his late sixties but still kept his back ramrod straight and had a characteristic combative jut to his jaw.

      A tough, no-bullshit commander, he had been respected by his men but definitely not liked. All officers understood that command meant taking unpopular decisions, but Harrington had implemented them with an abrasive delight that bordered on the sadistic. ‘Wanker’ was his most frequent moniker amongst his HQ staff.

      Alex realised the fact that the general was in the room raised the significance of what was going on by another order of magnitude. The government didn’t drag major figures like him out of retirement for nothing. Alex involuntarily straightened his back.

      ‘Ah, Devereux, glad you could make it. Take a seat.’ The words were barked out as an instruction.

      ‘Thank you,’ Alex muttered, and sat down at the opposite end of the table. He managed to stop himself adding ‘sir’; he wasn’t in the army any more and neither was Harrington, at least officially.

      ‘Now obviously you’re wondering what the hell is going on.’ Harrington was never one for subtlety and launched straight in; he grinned as if this was all a big joke, but there was definitely a nervousness about him as well.

      ‘Well, first things first. This meeting is completely secret and deniable from Her Majesty’s Government’s point of view. The chaps who brought you don’t know I’m here and I am retired and in no way a serving member of HMG. So, before I go any further, you’re going to have to do your bit as well and sign the Official Secrets Act.’ He nodded at some papers and a pen laid out on Alex’s end of the table.

      Alex was fed up with being railroaded, but managed to ask calmly: ‘And what if I don’t want to?’

      ‘Don’t be an arse, Devereux!’ The bonhomie dropped away instantly. ‘After your last operational activities in Central African Republic, HMG has got enough dirt on you to prevent you ever working in the security industry again if it so chooses.’

      ‘I seem to think HMG had reason to be grateful at the time,’ Alex replied with heavy irony.

      ‘Grateful! What do you want—a bloody medal?’ Harrington glared at him. ‘Look, Devereux, you haven’t got any work at the moment and this could be very lucrative for you. But if you don’t sign the Act you’re never going to find out what it is all about, so just sign it and stop playing silly buggers!’

      Alex’s jaw tightened as he stared back at the other man with a calculating gaze.

      There was a pause before he slowly picked up the pen and carefully wrote ‘Bollocks’ on the bottom of the document.

      Harrington couldn’t see what he had written in the darkened room and breathed out in relief. He tried to get going again in a more positive tone.

      ‘Right. Now, so that we’re clear, I am representing HMG in an entirely unofficial capacity here—you have never discussed this issue with a serving member of the government—and this building is as near as you will come to any part of it. However, I have been authorised to communicate with you on their behalf, and obviously nothing we say goes outside these four walls or you will be in jug in no short order.’ He nodded menacingly at the documents in front of Alex.

      ‘Now, as you well know, the country is up shit creek at the moment with the Russian energy blockade. But what you don’t know is just how worried HMG is about Krymov—and this is crucial to the whole operation.’ He adopted a lecturing tone, jabbing his finger at Alex to emphasise points.

      ‘Firstly, he gets appointed as a bureaucratic nonentity who is supposed to calm the faction fight. However, as Churchill said,’ and here a note of deference crept into his voice at the mention of the master statesman, ‘“Trying to understand Kremlin factions is like watching bulldogs fight under a carpet.” He outmanoeuvres everyone in the faction fighting, kicks Medvedev out and then becomes increasingly paranoid and aggressive.’

      Harrington dropped the lecturing tone and became more candid. ‘Our analysis of him is basically that he is just not up to coping with the pressure of the job. He’s a working-class lad who made it to factory boss under the Soviets and then got promoted through the Party hierarchy mainly because he was so boring he wouldn’t ever rock the boat.’