"Mo…"

But Magill was already grinning to himself. "Okay -but did you ever reread Hamlet as power politics, déstabilisation, covert operations?"

"And assassination."

"Plenty of it. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would be working for The Mob, these days. And did you wonder how an Elizabethan audience would take allofthat? I'd say they loved it-and they understood it. If that was what you did to keep control, that was what was needed. "

"So Tatham became a top field man by reading Shakespeare. And was he running Track Two?"

"He set it up, I just ran interference for him, trying to keep your people looking the wrong way with talk about opening up Winter Garden again. I guess it worked, too -until you figured it out." Agnes noted the sly flattery and smiled. "But if you're going to ask me did I know who he recruited, no I didn't. I never wanted to."

Agnes absorbed that and found that she believed it: Mo had been thirty years in intelligence work, which trains up a determination not to know some things quite as strong as the desire to know others. "And Tatham got himself killed in Italy-what? four, five years ago?"

"Right. He retired over there: his marriage had gone, and so had his daughter's"-and so had Magill's first marriage, she knew: marriages in the secret world had a high casualty rate-"and she went over to keep house for him. " He took her glass and freshened their drinks. "Then some asshole of a journalist printed a story that he was still working for the Company and a couple of weeks later the Red Brigade snatched both of them. It was the usual stuff: demands for money and release of terrorist prisoners… I don't know how much pressure we put on for the police to get off their butts and do something. I wasn't with the Company any more, and Arniedidn't have much in the way of friends left in DC, so… Anyhow, they killedhim. In front of his daughter; they made her take pictures of his body… Then the cops did do something, but I don't know if it was a tip-off or dumb luck: they raided some farmhouse up in Tuscany and found her still alive. They charged some people with the murder, a year later. It was that big show trial, everybody charged with everything, the Bologna train station bombing, Moro's murder, you remember it… I don't recall if they got a conviction for Arnie. What did it matter?"

Agnes sipped her drink, assuming that Magill was watching her face for signs of disappointment. "That sounds like the end of the story, then."

"That's the end of it, sure. What I haven't told you yet is the beginning. When the war ended, the OSS was busted up: they hung on to a few units-there was a whole alphabet soup of SI, SSU, X-2, CIG, for a rime-but most of us just went home to build a brave new world with law books and Shakespeare. We figured the United Nations could handle the rest.

"So then it started over." He stood up, ticking off the events with his glass against the fingers of his left hand. "The Soviet takeovers in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland. The Berlin blockade. First Soviet nuclear test. Mao in China. The Korean war. And when we could see some of these coming, we didn't have the resources, the agencies, to head it off. That's when Central Intelligence really got started. "

"A new crusade?" Agnes said quietly.

"I guess we saw it that way: I did, for sure. That's why I came back when they called. But I'd say a crusade was something you came home from, for Arnieit was a way of life. He was a believer. Not a preacher, just a quiet believer. You know one of the things he believed in? He believed in England-well, Episcopalian is your Church of England, and I think his grandfather was an immigrant back around the end of the century.

"Now when I say he believed in England, I don't mean your thatched cottages and warm beer, he didn't think the place wascute, not just his grandfather's birthplace. I wonder if Arnieeven bothered to go there. No, he thought of England as Magna Cartaand Shakespeare and Churchilland Milton and the rule of law-a lot of great ideas and ideals that maybe you were going to just crumple and throw away." He had been pacing the room with slow, majestic energy, ending by peering down through the Venetian blind at Madison below. "That's what made him a natural for Crocus."

"Crocus?"

After a moment, Magill said: "Yes. We called it that, so if it leaked out it would get mixed up with the old Winter Garden names." He sounded annoyed at himself for letting that slip, and Agnes wondered how much was genuine: the codename, the slip, the annoyance. You had to think like that with Magill. Tatham might have been a natural, but Magill had been the achiever in the secret world.

He went on flatly: "So I fixed things for him-he was posted to Germany; we didn't want him in London having to ride the cocktail circuit." That was standard practice: where possible, you ran a group in one country from a nearby one. Most Soviet espionage in the USA was directed from Canada and Mexico. "But he came through London when… when he needed to."

"And you never saw the Crocus List?"

"Like I say."

"But somebody at Langley saw it. If the time came, they'd be directing operations from there and they'd want to know just who they were directing, where they were placed in British society-everything. And somebody must have taken over when Tatham resigned."

Magill shook his head slowly. "No… I didn't tell you how he left, yet. It was just after Nixon fired Dick Helms and was dumping all over the Company to get us to take the rap for Watergate, and Congress was hearing words like assassination and setting up committees and… like everybody was pissing into our bathtub and hoping to stir up a U-boat. At one time it looked like everything we'd done in twenty years was going to be spread out on the table-and that included setting up a group to destabilise our closest ally, if it got needed. Now, do you think anybody who wasn't already tied in to that wanted to get tied in, at that time?"

Shaking his big head slowly, he lowered himself on to the chaise-longue and sat back carefully. "I said, I said it to Arnie, we had two choices: that file on the committee table, or Crocus had never happened and surely wasn't happening now. If we tried to keep it alive, we had an open flank: some guy trying to save his own ass by telling them: 'Jeez, if you think I did bad things, just look at what Maguíand Tatham were doing in London.'Arniewas ready to take that risk, but I wasn't: I'd been the one at London station. I told him, either that file went up the Hill, maybe with the list he'd recruited, or it all went in the shredder."

"Not much of a choice," Agnes said.

"No, I had him by the balls. It wasn't the only operation that went into the shredder at that time-you could figure that for yourself. So, Arniewent to London and closed it off, wiped our prints off everything, and I shut down the Langley end. And from then on, it had never happened. Only, he never spoke to me again. He'd been all set to save England and I'd stopped him. He put in his resignation, took out his pension contributions and walked."

"But with the Crocus List in his head."

Magill turned the heavy glass in his hand, studying the reflections on his drink. "I'd assume he couldn't forget it if he wanted to. It would only be ten names, maybe. Arniedidn't think that big was beautiful, he believed small was secure-and Crocus had to be secure; the blowback potential was massive. Natch, if the operation had gotten the go-code, that List would only have been part of it. The big push would be diplomatic propaganda, screwing the pound sterling on the money markets… mugging the Mother of Parliaments would've been quite a job." He smiled lopsidedly.

"Only now, your Crocus List is trying it all on its ownsome."

"Not mine, sweetie, nor the Company's neither. I told you: it never happened."