Uncommon Enemy

by Alan Judd

  Heady days, he had thought as he leafed through the file, years later. But not only for that reason.

  10

  He cut through to the King’s Road on his way to Pimlico that night. The pubs and food shops were thronged, traffic was at a standstill and there was a fine drizzle, just enough to wet the pavements. He imagined his Scottish house; dusk would be more advanced there, with a leaden sea silvered by a strip of light on the horizon and wavelets lapping the rocks. That would be all. There was a time when, in the midst of city life, he longed to be there. Now he was not so sure. The early evening bustle was cheering, he was rediscovering his liking for crowds and he was stepping out to see someone. You could do that in a city. He imagined Sarah at that moment, putting on her coat, hurrying from the office, dashing back to check something, hurrying away again. He slowed his pace. He was in good time for Pimlico, time to take another deep breath and submerge himself in the past.

  Whenever he recalled that bright morning when he had made the discovery, he was struck by the limited part played by facts in the sense of an individual past. Facts were like longitude on a map, measurements of temporal relativity, evoking but not containing the myriad associations, tones, colours, remarks, incidents, feelings that formed the patchwork brocade of a life. It was they that drenched and infused the memory that was the person. Also, there were always gaps among facts, missing longitudinal lines whose absence was invisible to the reader, crucial to the participant.

  That morning, the blinds in his eleventh-floor office in Century House, the old MI6 head office in Lambeth, were lowered against the sun. He shared the office with two others, one of whom was ringing his girlfriend while the other was trying to persuade Alison, their Scottish secretary, to bring him coffee from the secretaries’ room.

  ‘What’s it worth?’ she kept asking in joshing Glaswegian. She had untidy dark hair and laughing eyes. ‘Come on, Paul, cough up, put your money where your mouth is.’

  Negotiations continued, but Charles was no longer listening. Among the sheaf of papers Alison had just dumped in his in-tray was a copy of Martin Worth’s birth certificate. Attached to it was a note from Vetting explaining that tracing had been delayed because the subject had been adopted and his current name was not his birth name. Charles was asked to send the certificate on to Registry for filing.

  He remembered holding it and noticing that it was quite still in his hand. He stared at the name, James Bourne, at the name of the mother, Sarah Bourne, at the line struck through where the father’s name should have been. The blinds rattled in the breeze, Alison told Paul to come off it, somebody laughed in the corridor, and Charles went on staring. The coincidence was too great, almost too great to be credible; yet there it was, a sliver of bureaucracy, a pink form completed in black ink in a clear round hand.

  His first, self-centred, reaction was a quiver of resentment at his exclusion. Perhaps she had meant to protect his identity, though he would not have minded about that; he was not ashamed. More likely she had wanted to deny him.

  He remembered the blinds dappling sun and shade across the back of Paul’s white shirt, the triumphant twirl of Alison’s skirt as she left the room with a promise of cakes. He tried to think what might be the consequences for the case, whether to tell the office, how it would react, whether to tell Sarah, whether to tell Martin, how he would feel meeting him again. Was it possible that Martin already knew about Sarah? He had every right to see his own birth certificate. But he wouldn’t have known his mother’s married name without further enquiry, and if he had discovered it he would surely have said something by now.

  Footsteps and voices in the corridor heralded the weekly section meeting. Charles’s phone rang and he ignored it, knowing that by convention the caller would ring off after three rings. He remembered thinking, as the others left for the meeting, how busy people were with things of temporary consequence and ultimate futility, how there would come a time when nothing of what this piece of paper said would matter to anyone. And how if this didn’t matter, nothing mattered. That was worse. His thoughts returned to Sarah, to whether he would tell her. It was she, more than Martin, he thought of then.

  They saw a little of each other during his Dublin visits, but only enough – apart from one occasion – to be useful as cover activity and as a check on Martin. Each time they parted she said he must come to dinner again in London. He realised she did not share his attitude to the past. For her it was water under the bridge, something of no contemporary consequence, not something to be siphoned and examined. A supremely practical attitude, he conceded, but one he was incapable of achieving. For him the past informed and enabled the present, it was the only way it could be understood. He remembered his relief at finding, as he began to see more of her in Dublin, that what he had liked in her in the past, he liked still. It had not all been wasted.

  In fact, it was a period in which he saw more of Nigel than of her. They both attended Current Intelligence Group meetings in the Cabinet Office. Charles’s interests did not overlap with Nigel’s European Commission work, but there were occasions when they coincided.

  One CIG was held in the Treasury Board Room, a domed, ornate eighteenth century masterpiece with a throne last used by George III and a large circular oak table within a table. Nigel came over to Charles as soon as he entered.

  ‘Hoped you’d be here. Something I want to ask you.’

  ‘You’ve got a bit of custard cream on your lower lip.’

  ‘Thanks. Always trust you for a correction, Thorough-good.’ He wiped his mouth with a red handkerchief that matched his braces and socks. ‘Completely over the top, this room, isn’t it? Perpetuates delusions of imperial grandeur.’

  ‘Probably why I like it.’

  ‘You don’t change, do you? Still driving around in ancient British cars in honour of the ancient British motor industry? Just as it’s all going down the tube, whatever our leaders like to think.’ He rested his elbow on one of the Georgian chairs and drew closer, lowering his voice. ‘No, but what I wanted to ask you about is this business of spying on friends. The principle of it, whether we should be doing it at all.’

  Charles hesitated. ‘All the people I’ve spied on have been enemies.’

  ‘Of course, on the Russian or terrorist side it’s straightforward. But even there it’s not entirely straightforward, is it? I guess – well, I know from Sarah – that one at least of your operations is in the Republic of Ireland, a European Community partner. I know you’re spying on the IRA, not the Irish government, but our Irish partners wouldn’t be too pleased if they caught you at it, would they? Trespassing on their patch, fishing in their waters. Lot of embarrassment potential.’

  ‘They wouldn’t, no.’

  ‘What I wanted to ask was, do we spy on other EC partners? France, for example. I’m talking to the French at the moment, you see, about these amendments to the Maastricht Treaty. They’re being straight with us. What worries me is, are we doing the same? I mean, if knowledge of what you’re doing in Ireland came out they’d assume we might do it in France too, mightn’t they? Maybe even doing it to them, against them, whether we are or not. D’you follow me? Of course, we’d brazen it out in the usual way but we’d have to choose our words very carefully, if we were doing it. D’you follow me?’

  Charles followed him in one sense, while physically trying to back away. Nigel lacked any understanding of the distance people normally keep from one another, and must never have noticed that his interlocutors were forever in retreat. Charles wondered whether Sarah had told him about it. ‘I don’t know what the European controllerate gets up to,’ he said. ‘I’ve never worked in it. So far as I know, it’s only liaison.’

  ‘No operations at all?’

  ‘Doubt it. Though they may do joint operations with European partners against third parties. But I don’t know. It’s not my area.’

  Nigel drew closer, forcing Charles back against the long-case clock. The room was not warm, but there wer
e tiny beads of perspiration on his upper lip. ‘Could you find out? I mean, it’s a clear case of need-to-know. The negotiating team needs to know if there’s a potential Pooh-trap ahead of us, come the day when we’re caught spying on one of our closest allies.’

  ‘Ask your head of department. He’d know, because he’d see the product if there were any.’

  Nigel’s bulbous dark eyes were fixed on his. ‘You mean there could be intelligence product that we in the third room don’t see?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. But it can happen with need-to-know stuff. Sometimes not even the head of department sees it.’

  Charles was spared further interrogation by the start of the meeting. He did not think much about the episode afterwards, putting it down to Nigel’s ambition to be in on everything.

  When Charles discovered Martin’s paternity he said nothing to anyone at first. Instead of sending it off for filing, he kept the birth certificate in his in-tray. He was waiting to feel. Each day he looked again at the certificate, buried beneath other papers, each day waiting for some lurch of feeling, some revelation, something. But each day passed and work went on, just as before he had known about it. Normality was like gravity, forever pulling everything back into itself, so pervasive as to be imperceptible. Martin must know he was adopted – it was a condition of adoption – and his having never mentioned it perhaps meant that it was not an issue. He referred to his parents only occasionally but always quite naturally, like anyone else. Unless he didn’t talk about it because it was too big an issue, too personal or even shameful.

  With regard to Sarah, Charles was clearer: unless she indicated otherwise, he would not trouble her by bringing back into her life something she had successfully put behind her.

  His new knowledge sharpened his eagerness for the next meeting with Martin. It should be routine, business as usual, though he knew he would study Martin’s physiognomy and demeanour, searching for signs, marks, mannerisms, would perhaps tangentially probe his family background. In the event there was no time.

  Martin entered the hotel room with a broad smile but no words. He helped himself to a can of beer, flopped into an armchair and put his feet on the coffee-table. He was wearing new trainers. Charles raised his eyebrows, surreptitiously searching for likenesses. Martin had Sarah’s eyes, he could see that now. Maybe his hair was a thicker version of Charles’s when he was younger. Martin emptied most of the can.

  ‘You should be proud of me. I’ve been a good student, done just what teacher wanted. You’ll never guess.’

  Charles helped himself to a beer.

  ‘You know you’re always telling me to watch to see if I’m being followed, all that James Bond anti-surveillance stuff? Except that Bond would never do it on buses. It may surprise you that sometimes I do.’

  Charles felt his stomach contract even as he smiled. He guessed what was coming.

  ‘I did today, and definitely I was being followed. There was a couple, a man and a woman, at the end of my road when I came out, just hanging about, you know, not obviously doing anything. They’d been dropped off by a car round the corner – I have the attic bedroom with a view into the next street and was looking out to see if it was going to rain. I saw them get out of it. Some sort of Ford, blue. Later, when I was out and walking towards them for the bus, they turned and walked ahead of me, crossing the road before I got to them. I stopped at the bus-stop and they carried on walking. Then they crossed back again, both looking round, and carried on walking out of sight round the bend. I got the bus and they got on at the next stop. I was tempted to go and ask for their tickets. They got off where I did, at the bottom of O’Connell Street, so then I did what you’ve been saying – you know, open spaces, crowded places, open spaces, crowded places, to see if they kept hurrying forward and dropping back. They did, both of them. They must be Garda Special Branch. So guess how I lost them.’

  ‘You’re sure you did?’

  ‘Sure as sure. Chuck another beer and I’ll tell you.’

  Charles threw a can across the bed, silently planning what to say if the Garda burst through the door. Any cover would be thin to the point of transparency, but any cover was better than none. So long as you stuck to it. ‘Why are you so sure they’re Garda? Why should they be following you?’

  ‘For the company I keep. They’re hotter on the Provos down here now, I keep telling you. And the heavies I keep company with – on your behalf – some get followed, some get lifted. Maybe they wanted to see if I was meeting someone interesting today, someone they’re looking for.’

  It was possible that Martin was imagining it, but he wasn’t usually fanciful or fearful. In which case either it was coincidence that he had been on the Garda surveillance list that day or they must have been tapping his phone and knew he was going to meet someone. They wouldn’t know who or where, because the place had been agreed at the last meeting and neither Martin nor Charles used names on the phone. So surveillance was the only way to find out.

  ‘How did you lose them?’ Charles asked.

  Martin grinned again. ‘I walked straight into the Garda headquarters with a fake query and then left by another door, but not before I’d seen them being asked for their passes. Embarrassing, having to search their own headquarters for their quarry. My heart bleeds.’

  There were voices and footsteps in the corridor. Charles was about to speak but stopped, waiting for the knock. ‘If they burst in here now and lift us both,’ he said as the voices faded, ‘we stick to the cover we agreed. The family cover. Okay? You’ve broken no law, they can’t keep you. Nor me. Not for long, anyway. They might have all the suspicions in the world, but unless we confess to something there’s nothing that will stand up in court. We’ve done nothing that breaks Irish state law. Remember that.’

  ‘Getting lifted would be good for me. Masses of street cred.’

  ‘Not if the Garda let it be known to your Provo friends that you were with me, it wouldn’t.’

  They got on with the business, but this time Charles took no notes, in case he was arrested afterwards. Waiting for room service, he made Martin repeat the episode in detail. Plenty of people imagined they were being followed; not only agents who had been warned they might be, but the innocently anxious, the egotistical and the credulous. Once you thought surveillance possible you began to see it everywhere. But Martin’s account was persuasive.

  Before they parted Charles arranged time and place of the next meeting, so there would be no need for contact. But he wasn’t sure there would be one. It would depend on the A desk.

  Later, in his room in the Chesham, Charles had leisure to probe once more his feelings about his own flesh and blood, and again found little to probe. The only connection between the man before him and the baby on whom he had once laid his finger was an intellectual construct: the knowledge that the one had become the other. The thought that this man was flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone, was simply that: a thought. It could lead to wonder, to incredulity, to curiosity, but carried with it no particular emotion. They might have passed their lives in daily contact and never guessed. It was knowing that made the difference, though it was still not clear what the difference might be.

  After he returned to London the A desk forbade any more meetings until Martin could travel to the UK. Charles argued that their next meeting should be safe, since no further contacts were needed to arrange it; and anyway, it was necessary to agree future, changed, contacts. The file showed him winning the argument, until Special Branch had got in touch to say they had been asked by the Garda SB to help trace an Englishman who had some sort of clandestine relationship with a target of theirs, Martin Worth. The Garda were interested in Worth because he was close to leading Provisionals, and they suspected this unknown Englishman might have some undisclosed role. They had tried to follow Worth to a meeting recently but he had given them the slip. Could the Met help identify this visitor? Special Branch had come to MI6 in case it was one of theirs.

  That clinche
d it for the A desk: absolutely no more meetings in Dublin. Charles fought on without much hope, adding that police interest in Martin would enhance his standing with his IRA friends, but the A desk insisted that Martin’s days as an agent were over. On the Irish terrorist target, anyway.

  The case was referred to Matthew Abrahams, now director of operations worldwide. The contesting parties met in Matthew’s spacious tenth floor office. Serious, pin-striped, bespectacled, Matthew was Charles’s idea of a judge in chambers, as he sat with his elbows on his invariably clear desk, his long hands poised fingertip to fingertip. He listened to the arguments and when they were finished spoke with quiet precision, as if from a script he had learned by heart.

  ‘The Garda have small surveillance resources. They will not have Gladiator under round-the-clock coverage, and may not cover him at all while waiting to hear back from the Met. If Charles does not appear on any flight manifests, but simply travels to Belfast and takes the train to Dublin, they won’t know anything about it. This last meeting may therefore go ahead.’

  Charles suppressed any sign of gratification. It was shortlived anyway.

  ‘At that meeting, Gladiator should be told that we shall either discontinue the case or continue but declare it to the Garda, sharing the product with them.’ Matthew paused to watch the effect of his words. Everyone, including Charles, was too surprised to react. ‘Given what he fears about PIRA penetration of some parts of the Garda, he probably won’t want to continue. Since his Legal Practice course finishes at the end of the term, Charles should give him the money to fly to London to discuss his future in more relaxed circumstances. We may have other work for him if he wants it.