Ed Barnes is a British diplomat.
He is a pretty high ranking member of the Diplomacy Corps, reaching the position of Ambassador to France before we meet him in the first recorded adventure. In the first couple pages we learn a great deal about the man without yet encountering him. On a night when the Embassy was hosting a major gala, his wife, Lady Emma Barnes, was taking a walk on the other side of the Seine aware that if she turned left, she could just barely make it back in time for the welcoming ceremony; she turned right. Meanwhile, at the Embassy Foreign Secretary Redwood was putting her jewelry knowing she would soon become of of the honored guests at the festivities but making sure she stay as far from Ed Barnes and "his exhausting enthusiasm" as possible, wondering if "he too had suffered from achieving his ambition". We will learn he has.
This might paint a negative image of the man which we will find to be quite unfair but it does show that for all the interesting and dangerous and good things that he will be involved in as we follow him, he is still a man with traits that some will not find becoming - but don't we all. One trait that Barnes has that will definitely make him shine is he has a passion for doing what is right. And throw in an impressive B.S. detector, honed through a couple of decades of having to deal with it from both his own country and others. Furthermore, as we will discover soon, that Foreign Secretary was not someone to put on any pedestal herself.
People in Barnes' status, being in the upper echelons of diplomatic management and not in the trenches, do not get involved in the sort of things that we will find Barnes operating. Most diplomats consider themselves above such distasteful shenanigans; they do not "go rogue ... leaving a trail of destruction". In the pages of these adventures - and that is how many in the Home Office refer to the things that Barnes gets involved in, and they do not mean that favorably - we will watch with rapt fascination his stepping from his upper level office into the dangerous shadows. Most ambassadors in tales of espionage conducted in foreign lands, especially when done so out of an embassy, have a loathing for operatives as they tend to rock the boat. Barnes understands this as well but he is also willing to stir things up himself and when he does it, we sort of see things from both perspectives.
Good Lines:
- Thought of Ed Barnes by his boss, the Foreign Secretary. "[he was] the man who once taught her, inadvertently, to assume the worst".
- Thought by Ambassador Ed Barnes of his American counterpart, "Gandhi has said, 'I know no diplomacy, save that of the truth'. He was wrong".
- Said admiringly of his wife, Barnes noted, "I admired her most when she was at her simplest and most unspun. Too much of my life was spun".
- Terrific tag line for the second adventure: "From behind the trigger, there are only targets".
- "Her Majesty's High Commissioner to Kenya hated reading before breakfast about who might kill him after it."