The Scarlet Papers: The Times Thriller of the Year 2023

‘A hot war’s better than a cold one. At least everyone knows the score.’

‘The sun has gone over the yardarm,’

According to the papers, he had unwittingly committed the cardinal sin of being pale, male and stale. None of the above seemed likely to change in the immediate future.

Death was funny like that. It lingered like an hourglass, grains of sand slipping through with unstoppable momentum. Pleasures must be seized, opportunities taken.

But counterfactuals were useless. History was just hindsight after the facts. What was that Alan Bennett line? History is just one bloody thing after another. It was often hard to disagree.

The first twenty years of life, he was starting to realize, were all external. Spots, grease, hormones – the bumpy ride to adulthood. The next twenty were all internal, far more difficult to catch.

It was always the first question a handler asked an asset, the practical realities of spying so much more mundane than the movie version. Assets didn’t usually get caught by grand, heroic gestures. It was the small things that undid them: unexplained absences from work, erratic behaviour at home, seemingly pointless travel or diversions.

The secret war, the scientific struggle, depended on that. Spying was a performance and the costume, the voice, the initial entrance were as vital as the lines themselves.

‘Just nothing. One whiff of my arrival to the DGSE or DGSI and you’ll be posted to outer Mongolia with drone attacks as mood music. Do we understand each other?’