A Spy by Nature (2001)

by Charles Cumming

  ‘But with America?’ she says. ‘They’re our allies. Why did you have to get involved with them? Why didn’t Abnex just prosecute the two people from the CIA?’

  ‘Because it would be politically explosive. And because intelligence people love the thrill of the chase, the satisfaction of knowing that they’re getting one over on the other guy. It’s all tit-for-tat.’

  ‘Childish, if you ask me,’ she says, glancing out of the window. ‘What are these Americans called? What are their names?’

  ‘Katharine Lanchester and Fortner Grice. A married couple. He’s much older.’

  Kate clearly has a growing interest in this now, a look of privileged access, though as yet no discernible admiration of my role in it.

  ‘And how did you know that they’d come to you? How did you…? I don’t understand how it all works.’

  I put out the cigarette. It tasted suddenly sour.

  ‘We were going to set up a meeting with the two of them at Abnex to discuss a possible joint venture with Andromeda. There’s a lot of that going on in the Caspian Basin, a lot of co-operation. Companies get together and share the cost of exploration, drilling, whatever. That’s how I wanted it to go, but Hawkes and my controller at Five thought that that approach would be too obvious.’

  The sensation of finally being able to break my silence has momentarily suppressed any immediate concern for Cohen. Two years of backed-up secrets, all pouring out in a scrambled rush. I feel loose and relieved to be free of them.

  ‘So we came up with another plan. MI5 put someone inside Andromeda, a guy called Matthew Frears who was on my recruitment programme. He fed us background on their movements, leaked documents and so on. I then invited Saul to an oil industry party and Matthew manufactured an introduction to the Americans, using Saul as cover. He didn’t know anything about it. Everything that happened after that was carefully planned. It took a lot of organization, a lot of hard work. I saw them regularly, made out that I didn’t have very much money. I even had speeches prepared, tracts of dialogue committed to memory.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Kate asks. ‘Give me an example.’ It is not difficult recalling the bones of one of the monologues. I lean forward in the chair and it is like being back in their apartment, weaving a tale for the CIA.

  ‘I was predicted straight-A grades, but I got ill and took a string of Bs and Cs so I didn’t get my chance to go to Oxbridge. That would have changed everything. I meet Oxbridge graduates and none of them has qualities I don’t possess. And yet somehow they’ve found themselves in positions of influence. What do they have that I haven’t? Am I lazy? I didn’t waste my time at university. I’m not the sort of person who gets depressed. If I start feeling low I tell myself it’s just irrational and I pull myself out of it. I feel as if I have had such bad luck.’

  Kate has a peculiar grin on her face as I continue. I am talking quickly now, giving the words no inflection.

  ‘I want to be recognized as someone who stands apart. But even at school I was always following on the heels of one or two students who were more able than I was. Smarter, more quick-witted, faster on the football pitch. They had an effortlessness about them which I never had. I always coveted that. I feel as though I have lived my life suspended between brilliance and mediocrity. Not ordinary, not exceptional. Do you ever feel like that?’

  Kate interrupts me.

  ‘That’s not a prepared speech,’ she says. ‘That is you.’

  I stare back at her, smarted.

  ‘No it’s not.’

  She gives a sputtering, patronizing laugh which effectively kills off any chance of arguing this out.

  ‘Whatever,’ I say, unconvincingly. ‘It doesn’t matter. Think what you like. The basic idea was that I showed them how unsettled I was, how depressed I had become after breaking up with you…’

  At this Kate baulks.

  ‘You brought me into this?’

  I stall. I had not intended to mention her role at all. Her voice quickens into anger.

  ‘Fuck, Alec…’

  ‘Relax. It was just cover. In all this time I must have mentioned your name once to them. Nobody at SIS or Five knows anything about you. You didn’t even come up in the interviews.’

  She appears to believe this, looking visibly calmer almost immediately. I keep on talking, to take her mind off the possibility that she was more acutely involved.

  ‘It was just a way of getting the Americans to sympathize with me.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘That’s how I was taught to approach things. Show them something you’ve lost. That’s the first rule. A girlfriend, a job, a close relative. It doesn’t matter. Then you confide in them, you show them your weaknesses. Ultimately I gave Katharine and Fortner the impression that they understood me. The relationship between us became almost familial.’

  ‘And all the time it was just a pretence…’

  Kate has that look she gets when learning lines for a play: an intense concentration, close to bewilderment, furrowing up her brow. It makes her look older.

  ‘They were not the innocent party, Kate. They knew Abnex had a small team that was exploring a sector of the North Basin that nobody else had access to. They wanted to get their hands on data from that project. And they cultivated the friendship with me to that end. That’s how it works. It’s grim and it’s cynical but it’s the way of things.’

  She does not answer. Her half-eaten apple has turned brown.

  ‘So, to cut a long story short, they offered me the chance to spy for them. They made me feel that it would be in everyone’s interest in the long run…’

  ‘I just don’t know how you could do this.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Pretend to be something that you’re not to people you care about.’

  ‘Who said I cared about them?’

  ‘Of course you do. You’re not capable of being that cold.’

  She wants to believe that about me. She has always wanted to believe that people are essentially decent, that they adhere to certain standards of behaviour.

  ‘Kate, you’re an actress. When you go on stage or in front of a camera what are you doing but pretending to be somebody else? It’s the same thing.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ she says, lifting her face up suddenly. ‘Don’t even attempt to make that comparison. I’m not fucking with people’s heads. I’m not living a twenty-four-hour lie. When I come home at night I’m Kate Allardyce, not Lady Macbeth.’

  ‘I dunno, there were some nights we were together…’

  ‘Alec, please. No jokes.’

  I try a smile. Nothing from her. I had not expected a reaction like this. I did not prepare myself in any way for being criticized by her.

  ‘I’m simply making the point that it’s an act. I had to become someone that I was not. I was paid to put up a pretence. Every time I go to their apartment, I have a particular strategy in mind, something I have to say or do to facilitate the operation.’

  ‘Every time you go? Present tense? You’re still doing this? But I thought…’

  The telephone rings out loud and hard on the counter nearest the sink. Both Kate and I start in our seats, eyes briefly meeting, but she is up quickly, answering it.

  ‘Hello.’

  When the person on the other end of the line speaks, she turns away from me so that I cannot see her face. It is a man. I can hear the low bass of his voice coming through the receiver.

  ‘Hi. Listen, can I call you back?’ she says, suddenly nervous and unsettled. ‘I’m just in the middle of something. No, I’m fine. I’ll ring you in an hour or so. Where will you be?’

  He tells her. I look at Kate, standing there lithe and cool, and it’s hard to believe that we fucked one another what must have been a thousand times.

  ‘Fine. Lots of love,’ she tells him.

  That’s what she used to say to me.

  She hangs up.

  ‘You should have taken the call.’

  ‘Forget it
,’ she says, scratching the back of her neck.

  Why didn’t she tell him I was here?

  ‘Who was that?’

  She hesitates, ignores the question.

  ‘I’m still trying to get my head round all this. You said when you got here that someone’s been hurt. Who? One of the Americans? Is that it? Who is this person you work with who’s in trouble? You say he’s on your team. Which team?’

  ‘Somebody at Abnex. He cottoned on to what I was doing.’ After a brief pause, I add: ‘At least, I thought he did.’

  I light another cigarette, though the stale tar funk of the last one, lying crumpled in the ashtray, still hangs over the table, a rank odour which Kate detests.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Harry Cohen. He’s been at Abnex three years longer than I have.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Twenty-eight.’

  ‘And how did he find out?’

  ‘He was jealous of me for some reason. Or wary, one or the other. We didn’t ever see eye to eye. And he seemed to track me. He always seemed to be on my back.’

  ‘Maybe you rubbed him up the wrong way,’ she says, as if looking to start an argument.

  ‘Maybe,’ I reply, unwilling to pursue this.

  ‘Maybe,’ she says again, archly.

  It is almost as if she is mocking me. I stop and look at her with a half-scowl which has the effect of making her turn away.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, flatly. ‘I didn’t mean to…’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I tell her.

  ‘Go on,’ she says.

  So I keep going, trying to explain Cohen as much to myself as to Kate.

  ‘A couple of weeks ago he followed me home from a drop. I’d left some information for Fortner and Katharine with a lawyer on Cheyne Walk. Harry says he was having dinner on a houseboat down there and just happened to see what was going on. He just knitted things together, like he was looking for a way to bring me down. And when I got back that night he confronted me. Threatened that if I didn’t explain to senior people at Abnex what was going on, he’d do it for me.’

  Kate again moves hair out of her face, tucking it quickly behind her ear.

  ‘I had no choice but to report all this to my controller. I told him what Harry had done and he said he would take care of it.’ I pause, looking over at Kate, whose face has hardened further into censure. She knows what I’m about to tell her. There’s a grim logic to it.

  ‘After we talked, Cohen flew out to Azerbaijan, one of the old Soviet Republ -‘

  ‘I know what it is.’

  This is short and abrasive, spat out of a hardening in her attitude. There is no sympathy in Kate’s eyes, no understanding of motive. Everything I am telling her has merely confirmed what she always suspected about me: that I am deceitful, weak and cold. When I tell her what has happened to Cohen she will blame me. And yet I cannot stop now; it has to come out. I have maintained a sense throughout this last half-hour of hearing these things for the first time. At last they have been made plain to me, simply by the act of hearing the secrets spoken aloud in a room. But there is no ignoring the plain fact of all the lies. If Kate is still the person she once was, the girl I fell in love with, she will despise me for what I have done.

  ‘I’ve just learned that Harry was in a fight in Baku. Near his hotel. He’s been very badly hurt. He might even have brain damage. They’ve flown him to a hospital in Switzerland.’

  Kate brings her elbows up on to the table, making a church with her fingers. She still wears that Russian wedding ring her mother gave her. I used to feel for it when we held hands, rolling the cold metal loops up to the knuckle and down. She would take it off when she had a bath.

  ‘And it was your people that did this?’ she says. ‘Because he found out what was going on? Because he knew the truth?’

  ‘Almost certainly. It’s too much of a coincidence.’

  She is silent for a long time and the sense of my shame is sickening.

  ‘God, how you hurt people, Alec.’ She is shaking her head. ‘Is he going to be all right? Will he be OK?’

  ‘They think so. Yes.’

  She looks up at me and that’s when I see pity. Such disappointment that it starts to anger me. I need understanding now, not contempt.

  ‘Kate, if I’d known, do you think…?’

  She stands up and walks across to the far side of the room, getting herself away from me.

  ‘He’s going to be all right.’ My voice is slightly raised. ‘They haven’t killed the guy. It was just too dangerous to allow him…’

  She puts out her hand to silence me, a weak floating limb which she retracts almost immediately.

  ‘Let’s just not talk about it for a bit. Is that OK? I’m sorry. I know you came here today because you needed someone to talk to, because all this has obviously had a bad effect on you. I can see that and I’m sorry, I really am. But I’m just so amazed, you know? I haven’t seen you in two years, my life has moved on in so many ways, and then this - that you could get involved in something like this. All the things you could have done and you end up…’

  Her words tail off but I am too tired to argue, to try to make her see sense. I cannot force Kate to act against her will, to console me with words she does not believe. It was inevitable that she would react in the way that she has: I had allowed myself to forget her true nature. She always speaks her mind, judgemental to the point of being conceited. She sets such high standards for herself and for others that it is almost impossible to move within the narrow confines of her expectations. Kate is incapable of compromise, of seeing another point of view. She demands so much of people that she will only ever be disappointed by them.

  Needing to be away from her as much as she needs to be away from me, I stand up and edge my way along the table back out into the room. I stand facing her, Kate staring beyond me at an opposite wall.

  ‘I need to splash some water on my face.’

  No reply.

  So I turn and leave the kitchen, walk upstairs to the bathroom and lock the door.

  I see things that are not hers immediately. A can of shaving foam at the edge of the bath. Contact-lens cleaners and a small plastic case beside the sink. Two toothbrushes in the mug beside them. After everything that has happened, now this.

  I sit down on the edge of the bath, head bowed. On the floor, a pair of white boxer shorts. Why didn’t she hide them?

  There is a window open and a cold wind buffets against the glass, knocking the wooden frame against a brick wall outside. I tell myself that Kate is a pretty girl and that pretty girls have boyfriends and that this is all inevitable. But somehow it doesn’t help. Why didn’t she hide his things?

  I drive myself crazy with images. Don’t. It’s too late for that. This is payback for Anna, for all of them. One man, two years later, his saline and his toothbrush laid out in the bathroom. You have to get used to that.

  It was him on the phone.

  I run cold water over my face at the sink but cannot stop the questions, the doubts. That he is good in bed, funny, capable of bringing out qualities in Kate that I suppressed. I cannot stop thinking that he makes her happier than I did.

  Did Saul know about this? Did he meet him at that party?

  Don’t. Don’t wonder what he looks like, what he does for a living, how much money he has or what stories he tells.

  She will have met his friends.

  They would have been to Paris, to movies, cooked for each other and fucked all night. Don’t. Don’t picture them in bed together because that has nothing to do with your feelings for Kate and everything to do with your vanity. I just don’t want him to be better than I was.

  Just let it go. Think about Cohen and let it go.

  God, the speed with which she has recovered.

  When I come back downstairs Kate has moved into the sitting-room, bunched up on the sofa with a fresh cup of tea and a face like stone. She looks different now, now that I know s
he has a boyfriend, a man living here under the same roof. The one I feared all those nights.

  ‘Not much has changed up there,’ I say.

  She cannot even look at me. My temper snaps.

  ‘Kate, if you want me to go, I’ll go. But please, don’t sit there with this air of disappointment, this condescension, because I didn’t come here for that. I genuinely believe that I would never have done this if we were still together.’

  ‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare blame this on me.’

  ‘You’re right. I shouldn’t blame you. It’s not your fault. I would have done it anyway. Just like I slept with someone behind your back. It’s in my genes, you say. And for the last time, I’m sorry that I took you for granted. I’m sorry I wasn’t the person you thought you deserved. You had dreams for me that I couldn’t fulfil and fucked up. And now I’ve got involved in a murky business that you find reprehensible. I don’t blame you.’

  She looks up at me, twitching with moral authority. Nothing that I say will ever satisfy her. Let’s have this out.

  ‘If I thought this would happen, do you think I would have done it? Do you? Do you think that if I knew it would come to something like this that I wouldn’t have put a stop to it? It was straightforward in the planning, that’s all I can tell you. I was doing a job that I thought was useful and loyal and significant.’

  ‘Straightforward in the planning?‘ Her laugh here is contemptuous, the slender jaw gaped with sarcasm. ‘Jesus. Straightforward in the planning?’

  ‘Let’s not do that thing where we pick each other’s sentences apart, OK? It’s demeaning.’

  ‘You never think, Alec. That’s just it with you. That’s just exactly the problem. It’s what happened with us, it’s what’s happening now. You take things on with no thought to the consequences, with nothing in your mind but how it can make you feel better about yourself. It doesn’t matter if it’s an affair with a girl at your fucking office or some needless industrial espionage that leads to an innocent guy getting the shit kicked out of him. It’s always the same thing. You can’t live life without turning it into a lie.’

  ‘That isn’t the case. It’s not that bad.’

  ‘Not that bad?’ she says. ‘You never stopped lying to me. For the last six months we were together, do you remember, we barely slept together?’