And it was the money that was to prove his undoing. Conspicuous and inexplicably vast reserves of cash and possessions led the molehunt, after months of blind alleys and false leads, directly to Ames’s door. He was arrested at his home in Virginia and bundled into the back of an FBI Pontiac by a huddle of G-men wearing flak-jackets and mirrored shades.
‘Think,’ he was heard repeating to himself, over and over again. ‘Think.’
A few days after the meeting in Colville Gardens, Fortner and Katharine call me at Abnex to arrange a rendezvous at the swimming-pool in Dolphin Square, a vast, brown-brick residential cube on the north bank of the Thames.
The reception area, off Chichester Street in Pimlico, is a hotel lobby. Fortner and Katharine are sitting on a small two-seater sofa just inside the main doors, both looking out-of-place and friendless; they seem quite unable to shed that unassimilated quality which marks them out as Americans. Katharine is wearing a white tennis dress and clean plimsolls over pale yellow socks. Fortner has on a blue tracksuit with expensive Reebok pumps and two sweatbands secured tight around his wrists. They seem too healthy, too big-boned, to be British, like tourists off the red-eye whom I have been asked to show around.
As we greet one another it is immediately plain that a shift in the emphasis of our relationship has already taken place. When I kiss Katharine’s cheek it seems to toughen, and my handshake with Fortner is rigid with meaning: he holds the eye contact a beat too long. We are bound up in one another now, each of us capable of ruining the other. That knowledge acts as a background to our exchange of pleasantries, and during the short walk from the lobby to the pool there’s something forced about the level of civility between us.
Fortner is carrying a heavy sports bag, bulging with towels and clothing. We walk downstairs to the sports complex and he places it on the ground at the ticket desk, paying for the three of us to swim.
‘That’s kind of you, Fort,’ I tell him as he puts his wallet in a side pocket of the holdall.
‘Least I can do, Milius.’
‘So I’ll see you guys in there?’ Katharine calls out as she walks off in the direction of the ladies’ changing-rooms. ‘Got your ten pence for the lockers?’
‘Don’t you worry ‘bout that, honey,’ Fortner shouts after her - too loudly, I think, for such a small public space. ‘We got plenny.’
The changing-room is hot with steam: men are drifting in and out of showers and there is a stench of mingled deodorants. Walking in, I am confronted by the tuberous cock and balls of a man of Fortner’s generation, vigorously drawing a towel across his back like someone waving a scarf at a football match. I look away and find a small area of bench at which to undress. Fortner slots in beside me, cramping up the space.
‘All right if I slide in here, buddy?’ he says.
I don’t want to do the nude thing with him; not at all.
‘Sure,’ I reply.
Gradually he unpacks his affairs: a too-small pair of Speedo trunks, a set of sky-blue goggles and, to my surprise, a large black bathing cap. Quite quickly he is undressed, Adam-naked for the world to see. Fortner’s skin is white and, with the exception of the upper part of his chest, comparatively hairless. But the shoulders are broad and strong, and his ribcage juts out proudly, as though packed with voluminous lungs. He looks tougher with his clothes off. I glance away as he puts on the Speedos, with no wish to scope his cock.
‘You not gettin’ changed there, Alec?’
This is said brazenly, and two men sitting nearest us on the bench glance over suspiciously. We must look like a couple of queers: rent boy and papa.
‘I was just wondering if I had a ten pee.’
‘I got one,’ he says, reaching into his trouser pocket on the clothes hook, withdrawing a fistful of loose change and handing me a shiny ten-pence piece. ‘That do ya?’
I thank him and clasp the coin in my hand. Then I wrap a towel around my waist before sliding on my Bermudas. In the meantime, Fortner shoulders his bag and walks next door to the locker rooms. He has thick, stubby legs dotted with freckles, and a faded pink scar running down the back of his right thigh. I hear the metal clatter of a locker opening, then the slide of his bag being stowed within.
‘Flashy shorts,’ he says as he comes back in, and the two men again look over at me. I drop my head, gathering my clothing into a tight round ball which I place in a locker next door. There’s nothing worth stealing, but it would be irritating to be robbed: I have a wallet with a picture of Kate inside and a decent pair of shoes that cost me seventy quid.
By the time I have returned to the changing-room Fortner has already showered off and entered the pool. There are two men dressed in suits preparing to leave, hair wet and faces flushed with exercise. I switch on the taps in an open shower cubicle and soap away the sweat and surface grime of an average London day, trying to clear my head for what is about to follow. I must remain alert to everything they say or imply: we have not spoken about JUSTIFY for seventy-two hours and there will be details that they will want to clarify.
My dive into the pool goes badly wrong. I haven’t been swimming in a long time and I land too flat on the surface of the water with a loud, clapping belly-flop: the hard slap of it against my stomach is painful and stinging. I swim briefly underwater, long enough for any embarrassment to subside, and surface in the centre of the pool. Fortner and Katharine are standing in the shallow end talking to one another, but they stop when they see me coming towards them.
Being tall, Katharine is only up to her waist in the water. She is wearing a blue bikini and her stomach looks flat and supple to the touch. I dare not look directly at her breasts in case Fortner notices. He looks absurd in the black bathing cap: it is wrapped so tightly around his head that all the blood has vanished from the upper part of his face, leaving his forehead looking white and ill. The goggles, too, are sucking down hard on his eyeballs, bulging out the surrounding skin.
‘Nice temperature, don’tcha think?’ he says.
‘Ideal.’
‘You been here before, Milius?’
‘Never. You picked a good spot for the meeting.’
‘That’s right,’ he tells me. ‘Everything we say gets lost in the clamour.’
‘Is that the idea?’
It’s a well-known technique.
‘That’s the idea.’
Fortner splashes water on to his face and says:
‘You wanna go about halfway down and talk there?’
I nod and he pushes off, leading the way with a gentle crawl. Katharine follows in the slipstream and I swim with her, still adjusting to the sting and warmth of the pool. We swim directly beside one another, both of us breast-stroking, and at one point our hands touch very briefly near the surface of the water. Katharine laughs instinctively as they slip apart, looking across at me with a smile. Her hair has glossed to jet black in the wet, thick as seaweed.
An elderly man passes us, swimming in the opposite direction. He moves with a painful slowness, as though he were here under duress. Thin grey hairs are glued across his pock-marked forehead, and his face is strained from effort. His thin legs barely kick at all. Ahead of us, Fortner reaches the edge of the pool, touches down and waits for us to join him.
‘So how you doin’?’ he says to me when we get there. ‘Everything feel OK?’
He removes the goggles and his eyes are bloodshot and sore.
‘Fine,’ I reply, with no inflection. ‘Better than I thought it would.’
‘No nerves? Second thoughts?’
‘None.’
‘Good. We couldn’t explain on the phone, but Kathy and I felt we should meet here today to give you the opportunity to ask any questions you may have.’
A child’s high-pitched shriek bounces off the water, piercing the space around us. I turn and see a mother coming out of the ladies’ changing-room, holding a wriggling toddler by the hand.
‘There is one thing,’ I say, trying to keep things light and easy.
>
‘What’s that?’ Katharine asks.
‘How did you know I’d do it?’
Fortner’s face retracts very slightly. This is not the question he was expecting.
‘Do what?’ he asks.
‘How did you know I would agree?’
‘Agree to help us?’
‘Yes.’
Fortner considers his answer for some time. Katharine, who is holding on to the ceramic edge of the pool, watches his face for clues. Finally she makes to speak, but Fortner interrupts her.
‘I felt - we both felt - that you fitted a certain personality type. You’re a very sensitive person, Alec. You enjoy your solitude. You expressed to us on a number of occasions a certain understandable dissatisfaction with your job…’
‘And I’m short of money.’
This prompts a smile in both of them as Fortner says:
‘Yes. That’s true. Things like that are not irrelevant.’
The old man passes us again, slow weightless kicks towards the deep end.
‘So there is such a thing as a psychological profile?’ I ask. ‘There’s a certain type of person who is more willing to commit an act of betrayal than another?’
‘I don’t put all that much faith in them myself,’ Katharine says. ‘I tend to go on instinct. And we always had a great feeling about you, Alec. Like you would want to do the right thing.’
‘Yes,’ I reply quietly.
A fit-looking man in his mid-thirties wearing navy blue trunks and dark goggles dives neatly into the pool and starts doing fast lengths. The blue water, which is covering me up to my shoulders, is suddenly warmer than the surrounding air. The child and its mother are in the shallow end. She is teaching him how to swim.
‘You have anything else you wanna ask?’ Fortner says.
I must stress to them my ignorance of the intelligence world, ask something naive about espionage.
‘Yes. You said something about your organization sharing a lot of codes and stuff with MI5 and MI6. How much intelligence do we share with the Americans?’
‘It’s a good question,’ Katharine says, holding on to the side with outstretched arms and beginning to kick very gently underwater. ‘And, like Fort said, it’s relevant to your situation. Usually we share a great deal. The Agency sits in on weekly meetings of the Joint Intelligence Committee, for example. And some time ago the British government paid our National Security Agency about eight hundred million dollars to share satellite signals intelligence. But there’s a problem right now with MI5. They feel that sensitive information about terrorist activities in Northern Ireland is finding its way back to the IRA via the Clinton White House. They’re blaming Kennedy Smith, our ambassador in Dublin. Think she’s soft on republicanism on account of her Irish roots. It’s all bullshit of course, but the Security Service are understandably upset. So they’re being a little more economical with what they hand over.’
This is certainly true: I recall Lithiby talking about it in one of our first meetings. It was just the latest in a long line of disputes with the Americans: he was also incensed that they had eavesdropped on British troops during the war in Bosnia. At the time I recall thinking that Lithiby’s antagonism towards the CIA may have justified the entire Abnex/Andromeda project in his eyes.
I stare down at the clear blue pool and try to think of something else to say, something that will further convey both my lack of expertise and a sense of my enthusiasm about JUSTIFY. But my mind is a blank. Katharine lifts up a small handful of water and lets it fall.
‘You’re lookin’ a little raggedy there,’ Fortner says. ‘You OK?’
Our lack of movement in the water has stilled my muscles and I am starting to shiver with cold.
‘Sure. I’m fine. I’m going to swim for a bit,’ I tell them. ‘Let’s have another talk in a while.’
Ten minutes later, resting in the shallow end after six brisk lengths, my eyes are stinging with chlorine and my head aches with the effort of concentration. The pool has become almost deserted. The child and her mother have gone, as has the old man. Only the man in navy trunks remains, ploughing up and down the lanes with his vigorous front crawl.
Fortner’s black-capped head is bobbing up and down in the water, the goggles coming slowly towards me like lizard’s eyes. Katharine is two metres to his left, long arms describing elegant arcs of backstroke. They both touch the shallow-end wall simultaneously and move across to talk to me. Fortner rubs his eyes and makes a low noise which is only halfway to civility. He wants to get down to business.
‘We need to talk about your first drop,’ he says, chest hairs knotted by water. ‘You wanna do that now?’
‘Sure.’
‘What do you think you can get us?’ Katharine asks.
My answer comes out swift and easy. This is what I had planned to say today.
‘Abnex have just done some commercial price sets which include our assumptions about how the global economy is going to pan out over the next few years. They’d give Andromeda some idea of our short-term plans, where we think the price of oil is going, that kind of thing.’
‘Sounds good,’ she says, though a little forcedly. They expected more.
‘It’s available in e-mail format, but I suppose that’ll be traceable if I send it to you.’
‘That’s the right way to be thinking,’ Fortner says, keeping his voice low. ‘Safety first. You could direct your messages via a re-mailing service that will strip them of their identifying features, but that’s probably too risky as a first venture. We can’t simply encrypt them. We’ll have to think of another method. Maybe on floppy or a straight print-out.’
‘That wouldn’t be a problem,’ I tell him, trying to appear amenable and co-operative. Katharine comes in with a suggestion.
‘If you just ran it off the printer at the Abnex office under the pretext that you wanted to do some work at home, would that be OK? I’m sure everyone does that as a means of staying on top of their workload.’
Fortner nods in agreement, as though there were nothing more to be said on the subject, but something about this worries me. Just standing here watching the two of them discuss these vital first stages with such apparent calm makes me feel edgy and rushed. Katharine drops her hair back into the pool and a thin film of water on her neck glistens in the light. When she brings her head back up she looks directly at me in anticipation of some sort of response.
‘Yes,’ I tell her. ‘We do it all the time. It won’t be a problem.’
But it might be. How can I get the information on to the printer and out of the office without running the risk of somebody at Abnex noticing? There is constant movement in the office, constant observation, but I cannot be certain that someone won’t start asking questions. In an attempt to avoid looking nervous, I try to convince myself that it is best to let the Americans dictate things at this early stage. All of us are keen for the first handover to be completed and out of the way, and their experience here is greater than mine. But I do not like letting others make decisions on my behalf: there is already the danger that my best interests could be undermined by forces beyond my control. With this development it feels almost as if the Americans are laying traps for me, and yet I know that this can surely not be the case.
‘The actual process of handing over any information should be simple and straightforward,’ says Fortner, who halts momentarily as the swimmer approaches us, does a brisk turn, and moves away. He continues:
‘There’s an absence of risk if you just keep to the basics. Let me give you a few examples of how we can work all this to our mutual advantage.’
Hot chemical air is rising off the water and continuing to sting my eyes, but I manage a nod which should look alert and concentrated.
‘To start out, you can make duplicates of disks on the laptop at your apartment and photocopy any sensitive documentation at a newsagent in your neighbourhood without arousing undue suspicion. Who’s in those places, after all? Old ladies buying scratch
cards and teenage kids sifting through porno magazines. Nobody’s gonna notice. Better to do it there than under the cameras at Abnex, right?’
‘What about getting the documents to you?’ I ask.
‘Just get a cab or subway over to our apartment like you would any other time. Or you can meet me in a restroom or cinema to effect the handover in a crowded public area where any exchange will go unnoticed. Or we can do it at your apartment in Shepherd’s Bush. The key is variety, to avoid anything that may look like a routine to a possible tail.’
I bob my head without responding. That was the first time they have mentioned anything about my being followed. Katharine says:
‘The only thing I would add…’
The man is already back again, swimming fast and hard to burn himself out. The three of us stare wanly out at the pool as he touches down, somersaults, and swims away. When he is safely out of earshot Katharine continues.
‘The only thing I would add is that it’s better to say as little as possible about JUSTIFY when you’re visiting Colville Gardens, or if we’re meeting at your apartment. Just in case there’s any audio surveillance. We’ll put some background music on whenever you show up, and you should do the same when we come to Shepherd’s Bush. And don’t just do it when it’s us that’s visiting. Make a habit of putting on a CD whenever somebody comes round. That way it won’t stand out as unusual if anyone happens to be listening in. Now, is there anywhere in particular that you would like to use as a location for the first drop?’
A Spy by Nature (2001) Page 23