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“You mean what is called ‘unattractive employments,’ ” said the Chief. “Most will not take them.”
“Then they must go for early retirement,” said the diplomat smoothly. He leaned forward again. “Mark, my dear chap, this is not negotiable. I will have the Five Wise Men with me on this, be assured of it, seeing that I am one myself. We will agree to handsome compensation, but ...”
The Five Wise Men are the Permanent Under-Secretaries of the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Ministry of Defense, and the Treasury. Among them, these five wield enormous power in the corridors of government. Among other things they appoint (or recommend to the Prime Minister, almost the same thing) the Chief of the SIS and the Director General of the Security Service, MI-5.
Sir Mark was deeply unhappy, but he knew the realities of power well enough. He would have to concede. “Very well, but I will need guidance on procedures.”
What he meant was that, for his own position among his own staff, he wanted to be visibly overruled. Sir Robert Inglis was expansive; he could afford to be.
“Guidance will be forthcoming at once,” he said. “I will ask the other Wise Men for a hearing, and we will lay down new rules for a new set of circumstances. What I propose is that you instigate, under the new rules that will be handed down, what the lawyers call ‘a class action’ and thus establish specimen counts.”
“Class action? Specimen counts? What are you talking about?” asked Sir Mark.
“A precedent, my dear Mark. A single precedent that will then operate for the whole group.”
“A scapegoat?”
“An unpleasant word. Early retirement with generous pension rights can hardly be called victimization. You take one officer whose early departure could be envisaged without demur, hold a hearing, and thus set your precedent.”
“One officer? Had you anyone in mind?”
Sir Robert steepled his fingers and gazed at the ceiling.
“Well, there is always Sam McCready.”
Of course. The Deceiver. Ever since his latest display of vigorous if unauthorized initiative in the Caribbean three months earlier, Sir Mark had been aware that the Foreign Office regarded him as a sort of unleashed Genghis Khan. Odd, really. Such a ... crumpled fellow.
* * *
Sir Mark was driven back across the Thames to his headquarters, Century House, in a deeply introspective mood. He knew the senior civil servant in the Foreign Office had not merely “proposed” the departure of Sam McCready—he was insisting on it. From the Chief’s point of view, he could not have chosen a more difficult demand.
In 1983, when Sam McCready had been chosen to head up the new desk, Sir Mark had been a Deputy Controller, a contemporary of McCready and only one rank above him. He liked the quirky, irreverent agent whom Sir Arthur had appointed to the new post—but then, so did just about everybody.
Shortly afterward, Sir Mark had b
een sent to the Far East for three years (he was a fluent Mandarin-speaker) and had returned in 1986 to be promoted to Deputy Chief. Sir Arthur retired, and a new Chief sat in the hot seat. Sir Mark had succeeded him the previous January.
Before leaving for China, Sir Mark had, like others, speculated that Sam McCready would not last long. The Deceiver, or so ran the received wisdom, was too rough a diamond to cope easily with the in-house politics of Century House.
For one thing, he had thought at the time, none of the regional desks would take kindly to the new man trying to operate in their jealously guarded territories. There would be turf wars that could only be handled by a consummate diplomat, and whatever else his talents, McCready had never been seen as that. For another, the somewhat scruffy Sam would hardly fit into the world of smoothly tailored senior officers, most of whom were products of Britain’s exclusive public schools.
To his surprise Sir Mark, on his return, had found Sam McCready flourishing like the proverbial green bay tree. He seemed to be able to command an enviable and total loyalty from his own staff while not offending even the most die-hard territorial desk heads when asking for a favor.
He could talk the lingo with the other field agents when they came home for furlough or a briefing, and from them he seemed to amass an encyclopedia of information, much of which, no doubt, should never have been divulged on a need-to-know basis.
It was known he could share a beer with the technical cadres, the nuts-and-bolts men and women—a camaraderie not always available to senior officers—and from them occasionally obtain a phone tap, mail intercept, or false passport while other desk heads were still filling out forms.
All this—and other irritating foibles like bending the rules and disappearing at will—hardly caused the Establishment to become enamored of him. But what kept him in place was simple—he delivered the goods, he provided the product, he ran an operation that kept the KGB fully stocked with indigestion tablets. So he had stayed ... until now.
Sir Mark sighed, climbed out of his Jaguar in the underground car park of Century House, and took the lift to his top-floor office. For the moment he need do nothing. Sir Robert Inglis would confer with his colleagues and produce the “new set of rules,” the “guidance” that would enable the troubled Chief to say, truthfully but with a heavy heart, “I have no alternative.”
It was not until early June that the “guidance”—or in reality the edict—came down from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and enabled Sir Mark to summon his two Deputies to his office.
“That’s a bit bloody stiff,” said Basil Gray. “Can’t you fight it?”
“Not this time,” said the Chief. “Inglis has got the bit between his teeth, and as you see, he has the other four Wise Men with him.”
The paper he had given his two Deputies to study was a model of clarity and impeccable logic. It pointed out that by October 3, East Germany—once the toughest and most effective of Eastern European Communist states—would literally have ceased to exist. There would be no embassy in East Berlin, the Wall was already a farce, the formidable secret police, the SSD, or Stasi, were in full retreat, and the Soviet forces were pulling out. An area that had once demanded a large operation by the SIS in London would become a sideshow, if any show at all.