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fight.’
    â€˜You never did.’ The reply came through in a mumble. ‘But you won’t win against the Mandarins. Nobody does.’
    She hadn’t heard the nickname for the power figures in the Establishment for a long time. It dated Harrington to the early postwar days.
    â€˜I can win,’ she said, ‘if I can show something that can’t be brushed aside.’
    He raised his head and narrowed his eyes to focus on her face. He was growing short-sighted and outlines weren’t clear any more. Clever bitch, he thought, giving me a heart attack first. My Christ, I’ve lost my touch, falling for that bad-news trick. There’s no official cover-up. She’s trying to force the pace, that’s all, get me to give something for nothing.
    â€˜You don’t have to believe me,’ Davina said. ‘It’s up to you. I can walk out of here, and that’ll be the end of it. And you’ll serve out your sentence. Not twenty-four years, because you’ll get remission. But long enough.’
    â€˜Blackmailing?’ he hissed at her.
    She shook her head. ‘No. I stand to lose as much as you, in a way. The Service even more so. I need you, Peter, or I wouldn’t be here. And you need me. That’s not blackmail, that’s fact.’
    â€˜Give me a cigarette,’ he said. ‘All right – now. Let me ask you a few questions first. Where did you get the tip-off?’
    Davina put the recorder on the desk, snapped the switch down and it began recording. ‘It came from outside. We had an operative with military training. He joined me on a mission last year. And he noticed some funny coincidences. He began compiling a report, noting things that didn’t add up, and which, frankly, none of us would have seen. It needed a fresh eye, Peter. At the end, what he’d done was put a lot of pieces of jigsaw together with one big missing piece. But it made a picture all the same.’
    â€˜Made up of coincidences, though,’ Harrington objected. ‘No hard facts.’
    â€˜No,’ Davina admitted. ‘But you know yourself that facts can be misleading. This was a sequence of events. Starting with Sasanov and you and me.’
    He sucked on the cigarette; he had regained his composure. The habit and training of his whole life reasserted itself and his mind started running ahead of Davina’s voice. Himself and her and Sasanov. The Russian Intelligence disaster of the decade. So nearly reversed and neutralized. Except for Davina Graham – that was the obvious reason. And yet there was a shading, a grey area that tantalized his instincts.
    â€˜I’d like to look at this report,’ he said. He could see by her expression that the suggestion was dismissed. ‘Listen to me, Davy,’ he said. ‘I’m not up to anything. I don’t give a fuck about who wins the Intelligence war. All I want is to get out of here; live out my life in some nice neutral place like Switzerland. I’m fifty-four, and I feel a fucking hundred. Let me see that report.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜Because all I know is the codename: Albatross.’ His voice rose. ‘If I knew who he was I’d tell you, in exchange for a pardon. Or a deal with Moscow, like Lonsdale. I wouldn’t hold out – I wouldn’t drag this on for week after week for my own sake. I’m starting to go mad in here, now that you’ve stirred things up!’
    She believed him. She believed the pitch of desperation in his voice, and the twitching hands fumbling with the packet of cigarettes. And he had lost weight since she had seen him a fortnight ago. He was telling the truth. He knew there was someone, but he didn’t know who it was. They would need his brain working in cooperation with hers if the missing piece of Colin’s jigsaw was to be found and fitted into place.
    â€˜I’ll get a copy of the report for you,’ she said.