Broken Teeth, a novel: prologue and chapter one

This is the opening of my unpublished espionage novel Broken Teeth. If you read it and like it let me know, I’d be happy to send you a copy. Otherwise, I am currently seeking representation. You can contact me via my X/Twitter @graveneywriting.

BROKEN TEETH BY SAM GRAVENEY

Prologue — November 2018

Freezing sleet slapped against James’s cheap plastic bike helmet, running through the ventilation holes and down his neck and numbing his body. He dodged brawny, expensive cars and miserable cats as he slithered through Geneva. Water dripped on the tip of his nose and when he breathed in it went up his nostrils and he coughed and cleared his throat at a red light. He ignored the police car next to him and the police car reciprocated, two fat Swiss cops steaming up their windows with hot chocolate and belches and ambivalence.

The light changed and the policemen left him in a muddy salty spray. Grit rattled on the bike frame and against the clear lenses of the thick glasses he wore as a nod to disguise, as if anyone would recognise him, as if anyone in this weather had their faces pointed anywhere but down, with collars pulled up to their ears.

The café Guêpe had booked was called the Siren, a marine name probably intended to trick potential customers into believing it had a Lake Geneva view. James locked his bike to a lamppost covered in stickers offering prostitutes and stand-up comedy and guitar lessons and kept his helmet on as he stepped into the fug of coffee and fish and the exhalations of bankers. He pretended to fiddle with the helmet’s buckle as he walked past pale men and tanned women who were daughters or wives or some equally expensive third thing, and he left a trail of rainwater on the fake marble floor. Guêpe was easy to identify, he was holding a red notebook vertically, the way no person holds a notebook when they are working at a table, and he was clicking a mechanical pencil so the graphite extruded. James watched a fraction longer, still fussing with the buckle, and Guêpe pressed the graphite to the white tablecloth and the length snapped off and he knocked it to the floor with a hairy-handed swipe. James followed its fall, noting the bulge in Guêpe’s waistband which cried ‘pistol’.

He sat opposite the pistol and ordered coffee from the nervous waiter who had followed him from the door and whose shoes were now wet, and struggled out of his cycling jacket which he balled up and tossed onto an empty chair. Guêpe demanded red wine from the waiter and laid his notebook flat. James could see illegible upside-down writing and a crude picture of an orca smashing a boat to pieces.

They spoke in French, by prior agreement. Everyone spoke English in Geneva anyway, but French stood out less. They did not, horror of horrors, want to be mistaken for Americans.

‘Settled in?’ asked Guêpe.

‘Money came through, the Swiss don’t care.’

‘How long will it last you?’

‘Six months, twelve if I’m lucky on the markets.’

‘Well we know you’re a lucky man. Second chances.’

Guêpe was ugly, James decided, but it was hard to tell. He was complicated to look at, a face of crag and crenelation and unstraight bone and bloodshot eyes.

‘Minsk was self-defence.’ It had become mantra-like by repetition. ‘I am grateful to be back in the field.’

‘I don’t care.’ Guêpe’s wine arrived, he took it from the waiter’s hand before it could be placed on the table. He waved him off. ‘Someone in the Service wants you working again.’

‘Excited to get back to it.’

Guêpe snorted in his wine glass, fogging it briefly, and James took his coffee. The waiter had taken the table’s temperature, and scuttled off immediately lest he endanger his tip.

‘You fucked up in Minsk and killed one of them and now they want to kill you. Law of the jungle. Lie low in Switzerland. Land of neutrality. Maybe Belarusian hitmen still find you, I don’t care, as long as you produce for me before that happens.’

Guêpe was not telling James anything new. He was just puffing his chest out. Old Service hands were like that, hated the young, but Guêpe had no excuse. He had not seen the Cold War either, no one under fifty had.

‘I’ll get to work, Guêpe. I know I’m just on a watch-and-botch. Probation period. But against who? The Chinese? Arabs?’

‘Russians. We’re after Russians.’

‘Which?’

Guêpe slid the red notebook to him. There were sheets of printed paper folded in it. ‘Start with these. Russians squatting in Swiss ski resorts with their cocks in the rivers of gold that flow through here. Using their ex-pat oligarchic cash for things the Service doesn’t want. Funding Yemeni militias or illegal Congolese mines. You don’t need to know what these people have done or what they’re doing beyond who’s a fag, who can’t get it up, who’s screwing their own kid or a neighbour’s dog. Get good, exploitable intelligence and hand it to me. There are the names of some tame journalists in there too, if you don’t want to dig through all the shit yourself, and a couple of academics at Zurich whose beer-money we provide if you need commercial intelligence. Otherwise, take that and fuck off.’ He slurped his wine and sat back, as if James had already gone.

James took the notebook, donned his jacket and buckled his helmet back on.

‘You said ski resorts. There are a lot in this country. Where should I start?’

Guêpe eyed him with feline boredom. ‘It’s all in there, James. But I’d start with Dents Cassées.’

To the French and the Swiss, it was just another place name, but James, operational, translated it as a matter of course.

‘Broken Teeth.’

Guêpe bared his own, red with wine, in a grin or a grimace, it didn’t matter.

Day 1 — Saturday 23 February 2019

I wake up early. One of those four A.M. starts that exist exclusively for going to the airport, that leave you and your bowels out of sorts for the rest of the day. The sort of start that makes you question the point of traveling, when bed is plainly superior. But this is my holiday of revenge.

I get to my feet, totter into the shower and blast myself with hot water. Every shower I’ve had for the last month I’ve looked at the pink potions left behind, and have resolved to throw them out, but I always forget by the time I’ve dried and dressed. They’d need recycling anyway.

I like to be smart for airports. They’re glamorous places, at least in theory. A place for businessmen and spies and the jet-set. I’m skiing, so a suit jacket is out. But I aim to look cool, in a low-key celebrity way. Black jeans, a black jumper, a black ski jacket. I drink coffee and lace up snow boots bought in a fit of manufactured free-spiritedness at a charity shop. They’re blue and grey, and clash with the rest of my outfit, but I’d feel stupid if I didn’t use them. It doesn’t snow in London, and they take up space in the flat. Then again, I have got twice as much space as I had a few weeks ago.

A quick breakfast, and I leave the toast crumbs for the future. One of many problems I’m leaving for when I return. I brush my teeth, piss and leave the toilet seat up, flag on field of victory, and then I am out our, my, the, flat. My snow boots are rubbing already. I close my front door, and wince at the memory of the shouting in the doorway, the storming-out, the slamming of the door, the crushing of my thumb. The bruise is still there, migrating to the tip of the nail, marking the time since she left. Eventually I’ll be able to cut it off, but I’m sure there will still be phantom pain.

Bus, tube, train, and I’m at Stansted Airport. Instead Airport, they should call it. The one you go to if you don’t get Heathrow. It’s full of ugly couples seeking winter sun, and gorgeous couples going skiing. School trips shoal around me as I wheel a suitcase to the luggage check. They look young, they’re probably nineteen. I, approaching the end of my early thirties at terminal velocity, feel elderly.

Airport security. I’ve been looking forward to this. It’s my favourite bit of travelling. I’m not one of those people who panics and thinks they’ve accidentally packed a machete. Toiletries in hold luggage, already checked. Phone and laptop tucked under arm. Watch slipped into jacket pocket. Belt removed at the last moment, so as not to cause commotion or excitement in the queue. And then I get to the plastic buckets. I take a moment to glance left and right at my frantic neighbours, tearing off bracelets, kicking off shoes, hands shaking as if security will gun them down if they pass through the metal detectors while wearing earrings. I take my time. I unlace my snow boots seductively. I tessellate my electronics pleasingly. I hope I’m holding the queue up with insouciance, and enjoy this mote of power, the type I like: derived from following the rules, and enforced by someone other than myself.

Through, and my boots slip on more easily. My watch is back on. My water bottle is refilled, the water on this side of security less of a risk to aviation than the stuff that comes from my own tap. I refuse perfume at duty-free, consider the Omegas and the Tudors, and, camel to water, head to the Wetherspoons. It is seven in the morning now, but thanks to the miracle of air travel, unquestionably acceptable for me to order a pint of Peroni with my full English breakfast. I set my watch to French time and read and eat.

I’m working through La Peste by Camus. The title is in French, the text English. I reason being mistaken for a Frenchman or a French-speaker would be a good thing. It’s not a cheery story in either language, but it’s engaging enough, as is the bacon. Tiff, the dear departed girlfriend, was more of a granola girl, and experimented with vegetarianism like my other friends did with weed: sporadically and irritatingly and making it my problem. I’m not sure when I last had a pint before midday. Probably the last time I went flying. I feel completely sober, well-fed. Replete, that would be the word. I rest my ski helmet on the table, like I’m a soldier at the canteen. I check my watch, my stomach lurches, I’ve missed it. Wait, I set it to French time. I’ve half an hour. I order a half-pint.

The final hurdle of flying, the queue at the gate when they look at your papers. They’ve confirmed you’re not a threat, now they want to make sure you’re a paying customer. I produce my burgundy passport. It expires soon, and I’ll end up with one of the promised renovated Brexit passports. I have a fondness for the older ones. Memories of holidays with family, being trusted with my own papers for brief and vital and grown-up interactions with uniformed officials before having them whisked away into dad’s capacious bum bag. No longer. My dark blue replacement will come, singing of buccaneering Britain, shiny and new, like next year’s iPhone. I, the civil servant, will bear it with rictus-grin pride.

I shuffle forwards, smiling unctuously, broadcasting to the white-bloused border official that I know what I’m doing, that I’m there to make her job easy. She barely looks at me. Boarding pass scanned, in the name of Rupert Williams. Passport offered, in the name of Rupert Williams.

Out onto the windy apron, up slippery corrugated steps, into the body of the plane. A steward takes my boarding pass, and I never know if this is to double check I’ve not somehow penetrated several layers of security all to avoid paying £160 for a flight to Geneva or if it’s just to direct me to my seat, as if you could get lost on a plane.

I am directed to my seat. I realise, too late as with all things, that I might as well have upgraded to a first-class ticket, or premium economy, or whatever they’re conning people with these days. It would be worth it as long as I could somehow leak this lavishness to Tiff. I’m currently tactically rich, though strategically impoverished, for the first time since leaving university a decade ago. Tiff and I were saving for a house, and since she left that’s not happening. I have cash, and no future to invest it for. A wiser man would have cancelled the disaster-relief couple’s ski trip we were booked on, but I am throwing good money after bad. I’m showing Tiff. I’m going skiing. My holiday of revenge. When I return I’ll worry about rent. When I return I’ll clean up the crumbs and a new sense of purpose will enter my life. I’m certain of it.

I throw everything into an overhead bin and squeeze in between my two neighbours for the duration of the flight. I ignore the safety briefing, ignore my fellow passengers, ignore England as it shrinks from me. I try to read, and my ears pop. A trolley wheels down the aisle and I buy a whiskey and coke. It’s an exorbitant price, but the ten richest pharaohs couldn’t have enjoyed a drink on a plane, so it’s worth 12 pounds. The woman in the window seat, a little older than me, looks like she’s travelling for business, gives me a look which I catch in my peripheral. Hey big spender. I turn and smile, and consider offering to buy her a drink. She smiles again, she’s very pretty, and she nods at my book, and says something indecipherable, that is, something French. I’m caught out, and clumsily turn the book inside out to show the English text within. I feel like a schoolboy with a dirty magazine hidden in his textbook. Her smile dims. She’s twigged she’s not sitting next to monsieur internationale, who drinks whiskey at 30,000 feet, but a mere Englishman.

It may be a holiday of revenge, but I’m not desperate enough to try to speak French, or to incur her pity by throwing myself upon whatever English she has.

‘Camus, bon auteur,’ I offer, a surrender and an end to the conversation.

‘I know.’ She returns to the window. The Alps are swelling on the horizon. They remind me of wisdom teeth coming in.

It’s eleven when the plane lands. Geneva Airport is one of those airports where you get on a bus to get to the terminal. Maybe in Switzerland, if you’re anyone, you get picked up by a BMW on the tarmac. I am no one. I am on a bus. The businesswoman shows no further interest in me, which is fine, the bitch. I’m not going to Geneva, for hotels and discussion of the CHF-GBP exchange rates and Nazi gold. I’m going to Chemin de la Neige to seek a baptism and a rebirth in the snow. And I’ll try to get laid.

Passport control, and I am irritated by how handsome the men in the security booths are. Tight blue military-style multi-pocketed shirts over biceps, Glocks or whatever strapped to narrow hips. Sharp haircuts. Frederick the Great had a bodyguard of the tallest Germans he could find, maybe the Swiss put their most beautiful at their gates for the same effect. I join the EU queue, which we second-class citizens of our own continent are still permitted in for now, and hand over my British passport. There’s no point looking apologetic. He’s Swiss, and therefore both dispassionate, and excited to undermine London’s financial sector.

‘Ruperre?’

‘Oui.’

I have now essentially exhausted my storehouse of French vocabulary. He examines the photo. I’ve not changed so much in the last few years, so it looks like me, but I still assume a neutral expression to ape my younger self. Blue eyes made muddy with hazel. A nose which points down at about 110 degrees, and a mouth which I can shape into a stern expression when I need to brief a team or make a customer service complaint. My dark red hair is cut short. It’s a rom-com cliche for the woman to cut her hair after the breakup, but I’m egalitarian. Hair cut short, and the beard which Tiff liked so much, it makes you look like Michael Fassbender, is gone. It is survived by its moustache, a big red World War One officer-type thing. I don’t wax it. I’m not a prick. But I quite enjoy wearing it around the Department, actually. It’s a bit like wearing a pink suit; nothing in the rule book says you can’t do it, which is about as much rebellion as is tolerated.

‘Merci.’

The handsome man stamps a page firmly, selected at random. I’d have thought a Swiss would stamp The First Blank Page according to their efficient laws, but no. Page seven. Why not. Who even cares. Not me. I am in Switzerland, on holiday. No one can catch me.

I have to collect my suitcase. I find it on its wheels. By some strange quirk of luggage-tossing, it is stationary on the carousel, rolling frantically against the running river of black rubber. It’s a strangely pathetic sight, and I’m embarrassed to claim it, as if it’s a misbehaving dog. A small boy, dazzled by the physics on display, sighs weightily as I spoil his fun.

Out into the Swiss February midday. It’s cool, and would be crisp except for the exhaust fumes a hundred planes are squirting out above my head. I cross to a minibus, and shake the hand of a sunburnt Welshman in wrap-around sunglasses who is responsible for transfers to the Chemin. Minibuses are minibuses, all exposed metal and rubber mats and strange bedfellows as I stoop in like a caveman clutching a Camus novel whose cover I now attempt to obscure.

I am the last, and the Welshman locks us in. I am sitting next to a handsome young man, of Indian or Pakistani or Sri Lankan extraction, but he’s holding a burgundy passport.

‘Hey man,’ he says, ‘going skiing?’

I laugh, ‘what else would I be doing?’

Offended, he replies, ‘snowboarding.’

‘Ah, no. Too cool for me, I’m afraid.’

It’s intended to be self-deprecating, but he shrugs and begins talking to his sister or his girlfriend in another language I don’t understand, but at least it’s not French. I look out the window instead.

Geneva is a dowdy city. Grey, and trams, and those little boxes you can buy newspapers from for a centime or whatever a Swiss Franc breaks down into. A Rappen? I don’t have any with me. We cruise past Lake Geneva, whose banks are patrolled by the wives of men making money in the city, and their offspring who are being fleeced at grubby fairground stands. I’ve been told the Red Cross museum is good, but I’m not sure what the overlap is of people who go to Geneva and people who are interested in the general betterment of mankind.

I try again with my neighbour.

‘Chemin de la Neige, yeah?’

‘That’s right. Out here for a few days, then we’re driving up the valley.’

‘Nice. And you’re a snowboarder?’

‘Yeah, I hate ski boots. Your shins, dude, they get shredded.’ He speaks like a surfer. ‘But you fall on your ass a lot when you board.’

‘Same with skiing, but then, I’m a bad skier.’ He acknowledges this with an offer of Swiss Haribo. ‘Cheers.’

I say cheers when I’m self-conscious. I have never said cheers to friend or family.

‘Are you meeting people out there or solo-skiing?’

I wonder if solo-skiing is a technical term, like Nordic skiing.

‘Solo-skiing,’ I reply, confidently. Fuck it, I’ll never see this guy again. ‘I had a bad breakup. Shit happens. She wasn’t a good skier, so we never really went.’ I realise I sound petty. She. The old ball-and-chain. I try to save the conversation. ‘I mean, we weren’t that compatible, and skiing’s pretty good-‘

‘-to work through stuff, yeah, I get it. We should all go boarding after funerals. Maybe that’s why the Danes are all so happy.’ I’m not sure the Danes ski more than anyone else, but I don’t correct him. ‘Oh shit, there’s the Red Cross museum.’ He nudges his sister or his girlfriend, and I am forgotten.

I get out my phone. It’s connected to the French network already, even though we’re still basically in Geneva, and I’m getting texts from every telecom provider reassuring me I don’t need to worry about roaming charges. I remember Tiff’s still attached to my phone plan; I don’t pay for her, just that somewhere on Vodafone’s systems Tiffany Jamison and Rupert Williams are still together. I file that away for later, a negotiating point. I can be really mature about it. Hey Tiff, I just remembered this thing, I’ll look into it, don’t worry about it, I’ll sort it. And she’ll wonder if I can cut off her phone at will. Maybe it’ll come to that.

I’ve got a WhatsApp, from Ben, a uni friend.

‘I think there’s some people from pembroke skiing atm. ill let you know.’ We all graduated well over a decade ago, but Pembroke people are always Pembroke people, as is Ben. He’s worried about me, unnecessarily. People you should worry about go on holidays of misery. I’m on a holiday of revenge.

‘Like who?’

‘Flo, I think, with home friends. and sexi lexi, but I think that’s work.’ Ben replies instantly.

It’s a Saturday, barely midday, in England, so he’s got nothing better to do. He’s probably still in bed and thinks I’m very touched that he’s checking in on me and I feel suddenly irrationally patronised by this kid glove treatment. Ben has been my shoulder to cry on, and I hate him for it. It’s like he’s seen me naked.

‘flo single?’ is the best I can come up with, because he would have seen I had started typing, though the message was fuck off.

‘lol’ is his gnomic reply.

He must have found something more interesting to do, and he ceases to be Online, and we pass into France without any sort of border control or noticeable change in the population or environment or material culture, and climb into the Alps like a snake on its way to rob a nest.

I’ve been on mountain walking holidays, but driving is always preferable. The higher we get, the more mountains are revealed, stretching away. It’s now two in the afternoon, and still Winter. The sun is beginning to sink, so every slight bulge and gouge and undulation is picked out in daylight running to orange, and I see my first patch of snow.

My ears pop, and my neighbour sees me working my jaw. ‘Have another, it’ll help,’ he says, offering a second gummy bear like I’m a swooning Victorian woman who needs smelling salts.

I am powerless to avoid replying, ‘cheers.’

‘Where are you staying?’ he asks, clearly bored of his crumpled copy of The Economist.

Is that a normal question? Maybe he’s hitting on me. Is he gay, holidaying with a sister? Do I look gay? Is it the moustache? Does it matter?

‘Le Crêt, in the town.’

‘Catered?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Nice. We’re in one of the hotels, not in the town, on the mountain. Srishti insisted.’ Srishti, the sister or girlfriend, hears her name and raises an eyebrow. ‘She says I get up too late, so she wants to be able to shove me out the door and right onto a slope.’

Srishti joins in. She’s got an exotic accent, which I guess makes her a girlfriend, not a sister. ‘I’ll stick snow in his pyjamas. Any further down the mountain, maybe no snow.’

I laugh. Somehow, this man, whose name I do not know, has assumed the role of the mutual acquaintance who everyone makes fun of as common activity. I go to his defence.

‘He’s on holiday. Let the man sleep!’

Conversation ceases naturally. I am feeling confident enough to get out La Peste and make myself sick trying to read on the hairpin bends.

A few hours later I am ejected at the bottom of Chemin de la Neige, while my fellow travellers are set to continue further up. I consider trying to get their details, but it seems too desperate. What would Tiff think? Without her for less than two months and already begging for friends like the new boy at school.

It is now four and the light is already fading, too late to ski. I drag my suitcase through slush to Le Crêt, which describes itself as a small catered chalet, and which means an anonymous hotel with a canteen. Regardless, everything’s wood-panelled and Alpine themed and pleasant enough. I check in, a copy is made of my passport, a credit card taken.

‘Dinner at eight, breakfast from seven, oh, and cakes and coffee from four. If you hurry, you can get in on that now.’ The woman at the desk is English. ‘Boot room down below. Do you have your own stuff? Own gear?’

‘Just a helmet. I’ve reserved skis and things at…’ I pause, what was the ski hire place called? ‘Gavroche’s.’

‘Oh yeah. Out here, left, right at the Christmas tree and you’ll see the sign.’

I swallow a cheers. ‘Thanks.’ I take my key. My room is, naturellement, wood-panelled. It’s a twin room, en suite, wooden desk, wooden chair, both IKEA, and a balcony in the technical sense but so shallow that when I test it my heels are still inside. I enjoy a view of a surprisingly perky Christmas tree, which has either overstayed by three months or sprung up early by nine, and anonymous French rooftops and the mighty Alps which I enjoy for about ten seconds before I continue my tour. A painting of a fat horse ridden by a thin man, a little kettle, a safe. I consider the safe, open the small door, read the instructions which are offered in English, French, Spanish and Korean. I throw in my passport, my flat keys, most of my Euros, my used boarding pass, as if someone would take it from the bin and use it to steal my identity. I use my birth year for a code, 1988, and lock it.

Back out on the street, I walk to Gavroche’s. Past the Christmas tree. I give it a sneer. Just because it’s snowing doesn’t mean you’re allowed to have a Christmas tree up in February. It’s cheating. Go without Christmas spirit, like the rest of us.

Gavroche’s is down some stairs, a lair of ski boots crushing socked feet and rows of plastic skis and arsenals of jagged poles. I don’t know if it’s Gavroche I’m speaking to, but his English is good and he’s polite enough. He’s pleased I know my shoe size in French (because it’s in the tongue of my snow boot), mand pleased that I’m not one of the six small children crying on long benches because they’re fussy after a day of travelling and their feet hurt. I leave with Neutron-brand skis, Polaris-brand poles and Heudl-brand boots. The “silver package”, though Gavroche tries to upswell me to gold. I resist. The holiday of revenge and dignified Protestant budgeting.

Le Crêt has a boot room. The walls bristle with gear. The floor is wet with melted snow, and metal prongs jut from a heater and I slide my Heudl boots onto them, though of course they’re still dry. It’s now five, and night is falling, but it’s a holiday of revenge, so I don’t go back to my room quite yet. The town is illuminated with sulphur lights, and I walk about quite aimlessly, peering into encouragingly and tragically affordable restaurants where people are enjoying yellow raclette melted by orange heat lamps, open-air après bars where packs of bald and middle-aged and embarrassing Englishmen drink endless pints of yellow lager to produce endless streams of yellow piss onto snowbanks, and a roller rink which, though completely empty, is pounding music and neon pink lasers out into the still air, completing the ambience. Ski shops are still open, preying on people still coming off the mountain, eager to augment their panoplies with more high-tech socks or gloves or hats or goggles for a fifty per cent markup to what you can get on Amazon, as if that will make them ski better. The town, after which the resort is named, is a standard French ski town. It’s all artificial, really, but it’s a wholesome, uncynical artifice. It’s a bit like Christianity: go to Church, and maybe you can trick Christ into letting you in even though you don’t believe. Go to Chemin de la Neige and you can feel like a healthy man of the Alps, yodelling and drinking milk and chopping down spruce, but really you’re just drinking Heineken in slightly cleaner air than, and at the same price as, London. We know what we are getting. If we wanted something else we would have paid more, and gone to Switzerland. If we were happier with something less, we’d have gone to Bulgaria and been honest with ourselves.

I can see the slopes. The lifts generally close at five, I read on the website, but some are illuminated, and I can see figures tearing down them, the last run of the day, and I feel a twinge of genuine excitement, the first in seven weeks. That’ll be me, tomorrow. Nothing to distract. No Tiff, complaining that she’s tired or insisting we do something cultural. No clamouring mates, who want to stop at two for endless après. No family, no young cousins who need me to wait at every bend lest they arrive at the bottom of the run with ice-rimed snot from crying, accusing me of abandoning them, and no uncles to tell me we don’t leave a man behind. Just me and the mountain, and the blue runs I’ll enjoy, and the red runs I’ll feel obliged to take on even though they just make my legs hurt, and black runs I’ll approach and then pretend I’ve taken the wrong route and avoid and WhatsApp Ben that I did anyway. I send a photo of the slope to my mum.

‘Lovely! Have fun (but be safe)!’

Le Crêt dinner is good. It’s quiet, but it’s a Saturday and seven P.M., and people will still be travelling to the resort. Pork and apple, potatoes, green beans, and red wine, and a compote for dessert. It all bodes well. By the time my plate is cleared, I’m exhausted. I’ve been on the move for 16 hours. I go to bed. I default to the left side, with room for Tiff, but then in protest starfish out, but it’s cold. I curl up. I sleep.

James’ hotel was not in Switzerland, although his work was. On the Service’s stipend he could only afford to live in France, close to the border. Guêpe knew this, but had shrugged when James had pointed out the risks: increased chance of border checks; likelihood of running into law enforcement; more cameras; heavier traffic slowing him down if, or when, the Belarusians locate him. But Guêpe, or Guêpe’s boss, had wanted to save money, and exiled James could not object. He knew he was lucky to get a second chance.

The Vache Marrant, however, was not a cheap hotel, even according to the high standards of the French who had to look at Switzerland every day. Cheap hotels are bad for spies. Any poor soul could pay a few Euros to sleep in a room, but a decent percentage of the clientele of any cheap hotel is not sleeping but waiting. Waiting for something: drugs, lovers, guns, money, whatever. And this waiting percentage had eyes, and waiting gave time for watching. James did not want to be watched, so the Vache Marrant was chosen for a premium Guêpe grudged him. Everyone staying there appeared like he did, a man who worked across the border. This meant large travelling suitcases, it meant serious-faced men using their phones rather than their eyes, it meant zero chaotic and intrusive and observant children.

The Vache was laid out like an American motel to facilitate commuting into grey Geneva, and allowing James to move his equipment directly to his room without passing through a lobby. He had arrived in the middle of the day, making himself an obvious and therefore valueless target to curtain-twitchers. He had paid with a credit card as the Vache did not take cash, being a respectable establishment. He handed over the passport in the name of James Masters, an honest Englishman, which had survived all scrutiny so far. They took a copy, not the passport, being a respectable establishment. And they looked hard at a sign which said, in French, This is a Respectable Establishment, and James acknowledged the sign with a nod.

He lay on his bed, completely naked, drinking tap water from the Vache’s mug. His expression was blank but pleasant, the expression of the field man the world over. It would not inspire hostility nor affection, as it seemed too vapid for anyone to believe they were its intended recipient even as the dull eyes roved over them. However, James’s ordered brain was working away. Three months since he had met Guêpe, and he had little to show for it. His legwoman Gebhardt was working, keeping him in the loop via messages on Signal, about an infidelity she had discovered via a social media site aimed at children. He had left her to pick away at it, the ‘watch’ before the ‘botch’. Until he knew precisely what infidelity had occurred, and what Gebhardt had, there was little point forecasting. Again, the nature of the field man: to think too far ahead was to lock oneself into patterns of behaviour which might be followed rote, something fatal in his line of work. It had proven fatal for that Minsker cop, gasping on a deserted subway platform before the rush of night train snatched his soul into the tunnels. James’ expression did not shift at recalling his worst mistake and the worst night of his life. He had his second chance.

Guêpe had kept in touch, genial Anglophone texts apparently from an uncle in the same currency trade as James, checking on his progress with a convincing sporadicness. It was a recent message from this uncle that had caused James’ introspection.

‘I spoke to your sister, she’s sick.’

Neither version of James, neither James Masters, nor James the intelligence officer, had a sister. Three months of James’s deployment with few impressive results, and Guêpe’s comment represented the bone-scrape of a knife being drawn. A brother was the mission. A sister was the officer’s wider career, which in James’ specific circumstances could easily mean his life. And James’ sister was sick. The second chance, so rarely granted, was deemed wasted on an agent whose nerve had leaked away onto the same tracks of the Nyamiha Station as the Minsker’s blood. The agent was costing the Service money and risking blowback every minute he lingered in France. The KGB, as the Belarusian security service was anachronistically called, knew the murder in the station had not been a random act of criminality, but had been one of the brief red flares that sometimes lit up their shared and secret world. James and the Service knew they were suspected, but only James knew why: there had been another man at Nyamiha Station, a witness and an agent of the KGB. James could picture him precisely: Ghostly pale save ears red with cold, with a full beard and black eyes which took in the platform, the train, the casualty, and James without blinking. James had seen him start forward, seen his hand go for a weapon, and James had turned and fled, knowing the bullet was coming. But it never did, and when he paused, gasping at the stairs which led to the bitter winter street, and had looked over his shoulder like his instructors had told him never to do, he saw the black-eyed man bent over the policeman, keeping pressure on the wound. James learnt from the papers that this ghost had failed to save or take a life that day. But the Belarusians, forever chafing under the Russian yoke and keen to be taken seriously even in the world of underground violence, neither forgot nor forgave. Their security service chiefs would not be discussing with civilian chiefs in government how best to proceed in minuted meetings but would, instead, privately, over lunch, make their case. Blood for blood. Nothing flashy, nothing loud, but revenge as national policy. And they would be on the hunt, and it did not matter who James worked for, ally or enemy, and it did not matter why James had killed, accident or no. And James’s own Service knew he was quarry. And with Guêpe’s threat to James’s sister, the knife was at his jugular. The Service could remove the inconvenient James at a convenient time. It would be the work of a moment for Guêpe, acting on orders from high up, to let the director of the KGB know where to find their man. It would be a gesture of professionalism, an apology of sorts, or a sacrifice to the gods of spycraft. While too much blood flooded the engine of international statecraft, a little could lubricate. Guêpe knew the Belarusians were not short of killers. At the School they studied Belarusian methods, as they did those of a dozen other nations. Guêpe would be expecting a bemuscled Spetsnaz trained in the Russian style, jingling with grenades, guns and hatchets, but James felt in his bones that if they located him, he would get the black-eyed ghost. And really, he could not hold it against them. James’ brows did not flicker, his jaw did not clench, as he pictured his violent death. How would he do it, if their positions were inverted? He would wait in an unheated and frosted car, and watch. When his target left the hotel, he would let him go, but would begin to warm his vehicle’s engine. Then he would place chewing gum or blue-tack in the swipe-card reader (which the Vache Marrant also had, being a respectable establishment), and wait to shoot his man as he struggled to enter. Four rounds, centre mass, to drop him, then two in the head (James pictured a revolver. Cheap, reliable, and six shots would be sufficient). Gloves, of course, and a speedy getaway. The French might never understand why honest Englishman James Masters was dead in the snow, and would be told by a Service contact posing as a grieving father to end the search after an appropriate period of time. But in the exclusive circles which revolved around the Minsk’s Presidential Palace, the cadaverous head of internal security might have a quiet word with the Minsk police chief. ‘Don’t ask who he worked for. It doesn’t matter,’ they would say. ‘He’s dead now, and they handed him over. They obeyed the rules. Good chaps, really. Play continues. Paris, London, Berlin, Moscow and Minsk, play continues.’

Or perhaps the mention of the sister was merely Guêpe keeping James grounded, keeping him from slipping into morbid fantasies. Reminding him that he was not in Paris or London or Berlin or Moscow or Minsk but was in Alpine France with a job to do. James had nothing, no family, no real brother or sister. All he had was his career. That’s how they liked them in the Service. Maladjusted enough for the life, but simultaneously capable of charm, wit, violence and laughter. And he could not imagine a life beside the one the Service offered. He would live or die along with his sister.

He rose from bed, dropped into fifty press ups with the prayerfulness of a flagellant. He was wheezing by the end, shaking in the altitude, but he knew he could have done another fifty. He drank more water. He checked the rubber wedge under his door which reinforced the do-not-disturb sign outside. He had told the head of housekeeping he moved(and slept) erratically to better follow the currencies he claimed to trade, and would let them know when he wanted his room turned down.

He checked his watch, a modest steel diver on a NATO strap. Anything cheaper would suggest he was not actually a trader, anything more expensive was beyond Guêpe’s budget and would have people assume he was a good trader, something he wanted to avoid. Good traders were memorable, and were asked tricky questions. Middling traders were ubiquitous near Geneva, like pilgrims at Lourdes, and often equally deluded.

Gebhardt should have been in touch.

A shadow moved along the curtained window which looked onto the orange-lit car park. James froze, watching it pass. It hesitated and so he moved to the safe, propped open with the Vache Marrant’s limited room service menu. Silently he opened the door wide enough to pull out a handgun. His heart was racing, from the press-ups, he explained to himself, as he pressed the hammer down, feeling it move by millimetres and holding it just shy of clicking home. The shadow moved on as if blown by the Winter wind and James relaxed his thumb and the gun was replaced with movements as smooth and efficient and natural as the slackening of a stretched rubber band. His thoughts moved back to Gebhardt. He didn’t know who else she was working for. It might be the opposition. Using journalists was a common method, and journalists working for multiple masters a common risk. James didn’t mind, as long as she was compartmentalising. If she wasn’t, if she was leaking, that was another matter. Not necessarily a death sentence, not without Guêpe’s permission, but certainly meriting punishment. He left the safe and stalked to his desk. One fat plastic laptop, fan snoring, and a couple of small plastic boxes with slots for sheets of paper, were neatly placed at pleasing right-angles, and he logged in. James Masters was a freelance trader, the computer therefore his life. He browsed the news, past the announcements of the Oscar winners, past the latest words from the disordered mind of the president, past grim news out of Syria, and Iraq, and the Horn. Movement in the breakaway parts of Ukraine, keeping the Russian Army on its toes just across the border.

Russia, of course, loomed large in his mind. His targets were those Russians who had left the country in three big waves: either recently, after the big pro-democracy protests of the 2010s, or during Putin’s bloody ascent in the 2000s, or scuttling out through the wrecked Berlin Wall in the early 1990s. This jetsam had bobbed up in the West and needed watching. Oligarchs, they were called. But that wasn’t really right. Oligarchy meant rule by the few. What did these itinerants, expats, refugees rule? The bars of Switzerland. They were the ash blown into Europe from the Russian inferno as the enormous country emerged from its Soviet tomb. They were rich, but so were lots of people. They had friends, but so did lots of people. And yet these were the targets Guêpe wanted him hunting. To what end? Perhaps their wealth, if seized, could be used against the Service’s enemies. Perhaps their friends could be enlisted as allies. Perhaps the bars and restaurants they owned would be good, and could be dangled in front of North Korean officers as a prize of desertion, or to Germany civil servants as the reward of long double-service.

He clicked onto the website of the magazine Gebhardt ostensibly worked for, Ragpot. If Guêpe could see him wallowing in tabloid muck he would have had him executed to spare them both embarrassment.

Natalia Turns 16. A spectral child emerged from the belly of a BMW, pressing her dress down between her legs. The photographer must have lain in the road for the shot, hoping for a flash of underwear.

Carnage At Carnessot. Photos of smashed champagne bottles and a woman in a bridal veil and an animalistic snarl lunged at the unseen observer, a cake slice in her hand.

Homeausexuel. Two men screwing in a bathhouse, a pair who had played father and son in some TV show he had never seen. He sighed at the punning headline and slammed his computer shut.