So much for midwifery, he thought as he parked. You couldn’t always choose what you delivered.

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‘Deep Blue’ Teaser

Keep reading for a preview of

Deep Blue

by

Alan Judd

Chapter One

The Present

Agent files – paper files, anyway – told stories. It was never quite the whole story – nothing was ever that – and they could be misleading, repetitive and elliptical, but as you opened the buff covers and fingered the flimsy pages of carbon-copied letters and contact notes, and the thicker pages of Head Office minutes or telegrams from MI6 stations, a skeleton became a body and eventually a person. It was the story of a relationship; sometimes, almost, of a life. And sometimes, as with the file that Charles Thoroughgood sat hunched over that evening, it bore the ghostly impress of another story, an expurgated presence that had shaped the present one without ever being mentioned.

Files rarely lied in terms of content; their lies were usually by omission, nearly always on security grounds. In this case Charles knew those grounds well, having written much of what was in the file, and nearly all of what wasn’t, many years before.

Pellets of rain splattered against his office window, invisible behind the blinds he had insisted upon despite assurances that the security glass could not be seen through. Having spent much of his operational career penetrating the allegedly impenetrable, he was reluctant to accept blanket security assurances. The more confident the assertion, the less he trusted it, and now, as Chief of MI6, he was better able to assert his prejudices than at any point in his eccentric and unpredictable ascent to the top. But not as much as he would have liked; Head Office was still in Croydon and the government seemed in no hurry to fulfil its promise of a return to Whitehall.

He was on volume three of the file, the final volume, reading more slowly as he neared the point where he had joined the case as a young officer on the Paris station during the Cold War. He was alone in the Office but for the guards and a few late-stayers, having sent his private secretary home. Sarah, his wife, was also working late, the common fate of City lawyers. The file was a relief from his screen with its unending emails and spreadsheets; also an escape into a world which, because it was past, seemed now so much simpler and clearer than the present. But it had seemed neither simple nor clear then.