‘I’m sure they do, sir,’ Johnson said.
‘Men of the world do not suffer from the professional deformities which beset the more inward-looking officers of this Service, Johnny. They are not bunker-minded, bogged down in detail and superfluous information. They see the forest, not the trees. And what they see here is an East-South cabal of perilous dimensions.’
‘Sally doesn’t,’ Johnson objected doggedly, deciding that he might as well be hanged for a pound as a penny. ‘Nor does Moo.’
‘Who is Moo?’
‘Her assistant.’
Luxmore’s smile remained tolerant and kindly. He too, it said, saw forests and not trees.
‘Turn your own question inside out, Johnny, and I think you will have your answer. Why is there an underground Panamanian opposition if there is nothing in Panama to oppose? Why do clandestine dissident groups – not riff-raff, Johnny, but drawn from the concerned and affluent classes – wait in the wings, unless they know what there is to wait for? Why are the fishermen restive? – canny men, Johnny, never underrate your man of the sea. Why does the Panamanian President’s man on the Canal Commission profess one policy in public while his private engagement book professes another? Why does he live one life on the surface and another below the waterline, hiding his tracks, conferring at unsociable hours with spurious Japanese harbourmasters? Why are the students restless? What is it they are sniffing in the air? Who has been whispering to them in their cafes and their discotheques? Why is the word sell-out passed from mouth to mouth?’
‘I didn’t know it was,’ said Johnson, who of late had become increasingly puzzled to observe how raw intelligence out of Panama enhanced itself in transit across his master’s desk.
But then Johnson wasn’t cleared for everything – and least of all for Luxmore’s sources of inspiration. When Luxmore was preparing his famous one-page summaries for submission to his mysterious planners and appliers, he first ordered up a heap of files from the Most Restricted archive, then locked the door on himself until the document was done – although the files, when Johnson ingeniously contrived to take a look at them, related to past events such as the Suez conflict of 1956 rather than to anything that was supposed to be happening now or in the future.
Luxmore was using Johnson as a sounding board. Some men, Johnson was learning, cannot think without an audience.
‘It’s the hardest thing for a Service like ours to put its finger on, Johnny: the human groundswell before it has stirred, the vox populi before it has spoken. Look at Iran and the Ayatollah. Look at Egypt in the run-up to Suez. Look at the perestroika and the collapse of the evil empire. Look at Saddam, one of our best customers. Who saw them coming, Johnny? Who saw them forming like black clouds upon the horizon? Not us. Look at Galtieri and the conflagration in the Falklands, my God. Again and again, our vast intelligence hammer is able to crack every nut except the one that matters: the human enigma.’ He was pacing at his old speed, matching his footsteps to his bombast. ‘But that’s what we’re cracking now. This time we can pre-empt. We have the bazaars wired. We know the mood of the mob, its subconscious agenda, its hidden flashpoints. We can forestall. We can outwit history. Ambush her -‘
He grabbed his telephone so fast it scarcely had time to ring. But it was only his wife, asking whether he had yet again put the keys to her car in his pocket before he left for work. Luxmore tersely acknowledged his crime, rang off, tugged at the skirts of his jacket and resumed his pacing.
They chose Geoff’s place because Ben Hatry said use it, and after all Geoff Cavendish was Ben Hatry’s creature, though both men felt it prudent to keep this quiet. And there was rightness in it being Geoff’s place because in a way the idea had been Geoff’s from the beginning, in the sense that it was Geoff Cavendish who had produced the first game plan, and Ben Hatry had said fucking do it, which was how Ben Hatry chose to speak: as a great British media baron.and employer of numberless terrified journalists he had a natural loathing for his mother tongue.