‘What you like,’ the waiter says with a shrug of his shoulders. He walks away from the table briskly, as if we have hurt his feelings.
‘Just leave five pounds,’ Sinclair tells me firmly. ‘No need to wait for the bill.’
I don’t like it when Sinclair tells me what to do: there’s only a five-year gap in age between us, but he likes playing the slick old hand, the unruffable pro. To irritate him, to make him look cheap, I take a ten-pound note from my wallet and wedge it between the pink tablecloth and a worn glass ashtray. Sinclair looks at it, impressed, and then stands to leave. I want to let him know that I have access to money.
We cross the room. A Japanese businessman passes us on the stairs with a young Slavic blonde draped on his arm, probably a hooker; she looks drugged out and shamed. Then we go outside on to the street.
*
Sinclair and I do not speak in the taxi, not out of concern for what the driver might overhear, but because there is so little to be said between us. He gives the address of a hotel at the west end of Kensington High Street and spends the rest of the journey looking for signs of a tail out of the back window. Aftershave lifts off his clothes, a brutish smell of lavender. I start to dread Lithiby.
The journey takes less than ten minutes. Sinclair pays, makes a big deal of leaving a generous tip, and taps the roof of the cab as it pulls away. We walk up a ramp at the side of the hotel entrance and move haltingly through stiff revolving doors.
The decor is international marble, light and gleaming. A reception desk widens out ahead of us, manned by a slim, moustachioed man and a brunette with galaxies of dandruff stuck to the shoulders of her corporate blazer. I scan the lobby for surveillance. Two tourists - undoubtedly Americans - are sitting on a sofa behind us. There are four Japanese, all men, loitering near a window, a cleaning woman stooped and dusting, a Royal Mail delivery man with a clipboard making his way across the marble floor, and two young girls giggling near the entrance to a buffet-style restaurant. We have not been followed inside.
Sinclair and I walk to a bank of lifts. There is one already waiting, its doors slid open, and we ride it, just the two of us, to the tenth floor. There is a large mirror inside the elevator car which makes the narrow space feel less claustrophobic. Sinclair brings a mobile phone out of his hip pocket like a revolver and twists it lovingly in his hand. He turns to me.
‘We have people on either side of 1011. It’s on the top floor, directly above a conference suite, so there’s no listening threat from above or below.’
When the lift arrives we make our way to the room along a cream-walled corridor, the floor a marie-rose carpet flecked with ticks of blue. Sinclair walks a pace ahead of me, brisk and purposeful. My mind is simply not prepared for the rigours of a debriefing. Passing ioio I can hear voices, relaxed cockney laughter. There are men inside setting up recording equipment, ready to take down everything I say.
Room 1011 is standard-issue. A hard-mattressed double bed with a smooth cream cover lying taut across it. A dressing-table with a strip-lit mirror, a free-standing lamp next to velvet curtains shut heavy against the daylight. There’s a smell of cleaning fluids, a sense of the recently hoovered, as if the memories of all former guests have been quickly and efficiently erased.
John Lithiby is sitting in a narrow, high-backed chair in front of the closed curtains. There is a briefcase at his feet but he has left no trace of himself elsewhere in the room. Sinclair shows me in, nods deferentially at Lithiby, and leaves. I hear the door to 1010 open and close as he enters next door.
‘Alec.’
‘Hello, John.’
He appears to be in a stark, blunt mood. I stand in the narrow space between bed and wall, getting my bearings. I back up and scope the bathroom. Neat soaps in packets, a shower above the bath partly obscured by a blue plastic curtain. Everything so clean.
‘Why don’t you come in and sit down?’ he says. ‘We can start whenever you’re ready.’
Nothing about Lithiby ever changes. His shirt is blue with stiff white collars, the greying hair barbered in an exacting straight line which stretches from the back of his semi-bald cranium to the upper perimeters of his forehead. The bespectacled, bony face looks drawn out by intense concentration. It is hard to imagine such a man having a private life. I perch on the bed, at the corner furthest from his chair.
‘Now, what is the precise nature of the problem?’ he says, interlocking long fingers in his lap. ‘Why have you come in?’
‘Last night I dropped off the North Basin report that David prepared.’
‘We were there. We saw you go in.’
‘Did your people spot Harry Cohen?’
‘Who?’
I have never mentioned Cohen’s name in any of my reports to Lithiby. That fact alone will make the next hour extremely awkward.
‘Harry Cohen. He works on my team at Abnex. Michael and David know him. Where is Michael, by the way?’
Lithiby moves forward and back within the narrow confines of his chair. He looks to have been suddenly constricted by my question.
‘I don’t know if they did,’ he says, referring back to Cohen. ‘I’d have to check the report.’
‘He suspects that I may be handing secrets to Andromeda.’
‘Why would he think that?’ Lithiby asks, a rising note of surprise in his measured voice.
‘He came to my house last night, close to one o’clock. I was back from Cheyne Walk after dropping off the file. He said he’d seen me going into Atwater’s building.’
‘This man has been following you?’
‘No,’ I say, confidently. The lie just slips out because it has to. ‘But he may have been following the Americans. They’ve complained of an increase in surveillance.’
‘Yes,’ Lithiby says, dismissively. ‘I would ignore that if I were you. We looked into it. The Americans let you believe their flat was bugged to hurry you along. They wanted the survey of 5F371 and they wanted it quickly. That also explains why they were at Atwater’s office last night. We saw them leave ten minutes after you, presumably having taken possession of the file.’
‘So you don’t think Cohen has been following them?’
‘We’ve certainly never seen him.’ He coughs, once and hard, his lungs sounding old. ‘Which begs the question, what was he doing there?’
And that is the question I do not want to answer because it will reveal that I have kept things from them. I try to work around it.
‘Cohen said it was just coincidence. He’d been to a dinner party on a houseboat and just happened to be passing Atwater’s building.’
Lithiby shuffles, pinching the fabric of his suit trousers to loosen them away from his thigh.
‘So he comes out of his dinner party, sees you going into a building occupied by two employees of an American oil firm and from that deduces that you are an industrial spy?’
I admit: ‘It’s not that simple.’
‘I didn’t think it was. I imagine you have a little bit more to tell me.’
Lithiby’s attitude has already started to bend into a characteristic sarcasm. I say:
‘Maybe it would help if I told you exactly what happened yesterday.’
‘From that we could certainly put together a more complete overall picture.’
I steady myself, begin.
‘Caccia’s report landed on my desk at about three o’clock yesterday afternoon. I immediately telephoned the Americans to set up the meeting with Atwater.’
‘As you were instructed to do by Katharine,’ Lithiby says. The smug self-assurance of his voice has started to unnerve me. ‘Where did you telephone from?’
‘From the office.’
‘Why didn’t you use a secure line?’
Another mistake.
‘I didn’t think Cohen would recognize the dry-cleaner as code.’
Saying ‘dry-cleaner’ like this sounds ridiculous. Lithiby breathes contemptuously through his nose.
‘But he did recognize
it. He suspected that something was up.’
‘Apparently. Yes.’
‘Had he been given any reason in the past to suspect that you were involved in something covert?’
‘He’s been acting strangely towards me for some time.’
I do not like admitting this: it was not mentioned in any of my monthly reports. Lithiby, who would be justified in becoming angry, looks away and appears to stare at a bedside lamp. He is weighing things up.
‘In what way “strangely”?’ he asks. Often he will latch on to individual words, inspecting them for hidden meanings, for ambiguity.
‘Cohen was suspicious of my friendship with Katharine and Fortner.’
‘Suspicious?’
He is still looking at the lamp, gazing.
‘He felt it was professionally inappropriate.’
‘I see,’ he says, his voice tightening slightly. ‘Why didn’t you mention this before?’
Lithiby closes off the question by turning back to look at me.
‘I didn’t think it was important.’
‘You didn’t think it was important.’
This drifts, an echo which makes me feel scolded and useless. His eyes are gradually narrowing with irritation.
‘And although you knew that Cohen was suspicious of your relationship with the Americans, you told us nothing about it and still made the call in his presence?’
I do not reply. There seems no point in doing so.
‘How did he react when you were setting up the Atwater meeting?’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask, buying time. Lithiby’s reply is quick and impatient, a rapid list of questions he considers obvious to the overall design.
‘Was he listening? Was he alone? Did he look up? How did he react?’
‘He did nothing,’ I say, equally quickly to match him. ‘He was working quietly at his desk.’
Something knocks against the wall to Lithiby’s left, a hard, heavy falling, but neither of us moves. I add, implausibly:
‘I can only conclude that it wasn’t the code that alerted him. It must have been something else.’
Lithiby stares hard: my last remark has triggered something. It occurs to me, only now, that because my work phone is tapped by GCHQ, he may already know about Cohen redialling the Irish woman and hearing the name JUSTIFY spoken freely on the line. If that is the case, he may think of this conversation solely as a test of my integrity. But I cannot tell Lithiby what motivated Cohen to confront me: that information might be enough to persuade him to shut everything down.
‘And you have no idea what that something else could be?’ he says.
‘None at all,’ I reply.
‘And yet from somewhere this Harry Cohen has got hold of the idea that you are handing information to Andromeda?’
‘Yes.’
Clearly, he thinks I am keeping something from him. There’s an increasingly curt, disapproving tone to Lithiby’s questions, an impatience with my failure to provide him with satisfactory answers.
‘You said earlier that you were certain Cohen hasn’t been following you. How can you be so sure?’
‘I just know he hasn’t been. You get a feel for these things.’
‘Yes, you do,’ Lithiby says, in apparent agreement. ‘Tell me what happened last night. What time did you leave your flat?’
‘Ten thirty. Around then.’
‘And what did you do? How did you get to Cheyne Walk?’
‘I drove down Uxbridge Road, got on to Shepherd’s Bush Green, did a complete circuit of the roundabout to shake off anyone who might be following…’
He interrupts me. His expression has taken on the sudden alertness of the interrogator who has discovered a flaw.
‘Why did you feel it necessary to do that if you weren’t worried about Cohen following you?’
He has led me into a trap. He wants me to admit that I have been fearful about Cohen for some time.
‘I’m not sure I follow you.’
‘It’s perfectly simple, Alec. You can’t have been trying to shake off a CIA tail because you were going to an American drop. That would have been pointless. You must have been worried about surveillance coming from another source.’
‘Not at all. I just did it because I’d been told to by Fortner.’
‘You weren’t worried that someone from Abnex, possibly Cohen, might be following you?’
‘No.’
Lithiby breathes in hard, as though growing tired of my lies. I think back to Stevenson at Sisby, catching me out over Kate. You get so far into a deceit that it’s just too late to get out.
‘Let me tell you what I think has been going on here. I think your friend Harry has had his doubts about you for some time. He has followed you around now and again, noted how often you see our American friends, perhaps even sneaked a look in your diary or staked out your flat of an evening. Last night he followed the Lanchesters to an address in Cheyne Walk. He sees them go inside and then, lo and behold, who should turn up twenty minutes later but Alec Milius. You come out after fifteen minutes, he follows you home, confronts you on your doorstep and tries to extract a confession.’
‘That’s your theory,’ I say. ‘I can see why you might think that.’
He was always the smartest of them: it was stupid of me ever to think that I could deceive him. I pick out the hum of air-conditioning in the room, the lunchtime traffic far below, horns and the din of people.
‘Why didn’t you go to David with this?’ he asks, the obvious question to which I have no sensible answer.
‘I thought about it, but what could he have done? I didn’t want to panic him into shutting things down.’
Lithiby appears to accept this, but he asks:
‘Didn’t you ever worry that Cohen might have gone to security at Abnex, that he might have asked them to keep an eye on you?’
I have to give him something. Lithiby won’t let this go until I tell him at least some of what he wants to hear.
‘I did, yes. I admit it. But I didn’t put that in any of my reports because I thought you’d write it off as paranoia. I’m under constant CIA surveillance. You would have said it was just American interference.’
‘That was a considerable supposition, Alec. We could have looked into things for you. A simple phone call to David.’
I try to defend myself, try to erase the slim look of betrayal that has appeared on his face.
‘It was too risky. It wasn’t worth it. And they only took my rubbish away a few times. It could have been the CIA doing that. In fact, looking back over what Cohen said last night, it probably was.’
This does not console him. It appears only to make things worse.
‘They took your rubbish away? When?’
‘Three or four times. It would just vanish.’
‘And you thought it might have been Abnex doing this and you said nothing?’
‘Because I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem important enough.’
‘Does it seem important enough now?’
I am tired suddenly of his persistent scolding, the claustrophobia of Lithiby’s disappointment.
‘John, I don’t want to sit here and be reprimanded by you. I have been out there twenty-four hours a day for the last eighteen months trying to do a job, not knowing where surveillance is coming from, not knowing who I can trust, not knowing what I can or cannot say. Sometimes little things get away from me. I make judgements, good and bad. In this instance, yes, I fucked up. And because of that Harry Cohen has threatened to turn me in.’
‘Threatened?‘ Lithiby says, seizing gratefully on semantics. ‘You mean he has done nothing so far?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. I can hear myself in the room, the exasperation in my voice. But it is beyond me now to try to be calm. I resent Lithiby for extracting so much of the truth from me. ‘I don’t know what he’s done. But I’m worried. Cohen’s fiancee works at The Times. If he leaks the story to her I’ll end up on the front cover of every fucking
newspaper in the western…’
‘Oh, let’s not be drawn into melodrama, Alec.’
My visible sense of panic has seen him slide once more into condescension. This irritates me.
‘It’s not melodrama, John. This is a very real situation. I am not keen to become my generation’s Kim Philby.’
At the mention of his name Lithiby’s face folds up. I am over-reacting and he knows it.
‘It won’t come to that. You’ll be protected,’ he says. His voice has slowed to a stall: it is almost as if he is ridiculing me. I stand up from the bed, my back stiff from inactivity. The hotel room feels dark and musty and I walk to the door to flick on an overhead light. Lithiby squints.
‘Is that necessary?’
I do not answer, but switch the light off.
‘This is the situation, John.’ I start to move around the room, pacing the narrow corridor that leads from the door to the bedroom, gesticulating, sweating. ‘Harry flew to Baku this morning on a three-week working trip. When he comes home he expects me to have discussed things with somebody, to have cleared my name.’
‘So you think no one else at Abnex knows what he knows?’
Lithiby has latched on to this as though it were a sign of hope, and I have no intention of deflating that.
‘I’m convinced of it. I wasn’t until last night, but I am now. Cohen was very specific about it.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘What reason would he have to lie?’
Lithiby looks at me and smiles with appropriate disdain.
‘What reason would he have to tell the truth?’
‘He’s basically a decent guy, John. He snoops around because he’s a company man. He does it out of loyalty to the firm. But I trust him to stick to his word. We made an agreement. Now I have three weeks in which to come up with a way of convincing him that I am not an industrial spy and I need your help in that.’
‘And what do you suggest we do?’
Lithiby asks this in a tone that suggests he is prepared to do very little. All solidarity between us appears to have vanished in the last half-hour.
‘Can you talk to Harry?’
‘Out of the question. The only people within Abnex who know the truth about you are David Caccia and Michael Hawkes, and that’s how things are going to stay. We cannot jeopardize the operation because of one man. The North Basin data is being examined by the Americans as we speak. In a matter of days they will start to act on the information contained within it. To get to that point has always been the purpose of this operation.’
A Spy by Nature (2001) Page 31