A Spy by Nature (2001)

by Charles Cumming

  I wash up my plate, put it on the rack to dry, light a cigarette and go out into the hall to make the call.

  Their number rings out, long enough for me to suspect that Katharine is not in. She usually picks up promptly and sure enough the answering machine kicks in after several seconds. This is frustrating: my mood was exactly right to handle the conversation. Not too tired, not too tense. Oddly calm, in fact.

  The beep sounds.

  ‘Katharine, hi, it’s Alec. Just calling to -‘

  There is a loud scraping crash on the line, as if the phone has been dropped on a hard wooden floor. Then a thud and a tap as Katharine picks up the receiver, her voice coming through.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re there.’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Screening your calls?’

  ‘No. Just got in.’

  ‘From work?’

  ‘From work.’

  She sounds immediately detached. I feel a rushing heat across my forehead and extinguish the cigarette.

  ‘Everything OK?’ I ask, trying to sound as easygoing as possible.

  ‘Oh, everything’s just fine,’ she says, a little archly.

  She waits for me to respond and, when I do not, says:

  ‘So, what are you calling about?’

  In any normal conversation between us there would be friendly enquiries after my mood, about Saul or Mum, my work at Abnex. Perhaps even a joke or a story. But nothing tonight, merely this odd reticence.

  ‘Just to see how you were. How things are going.’

  I wish I could see her face.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you.’

  ‘And Fort?’

  A fractional pause.

  ‘Oh, he’s fine, too.’

  This is said with no feeling.

  ‘Katharine, are you OK?’

  ‘Sure,’ she says, lifting herself. ‘Why?’

  ‘You sound odd. Are you tired?’

  ‘That must be it.’

  I should end the conversation here. She knows something, she must do. But is that simply paranoia? How could the Americans have any idea of the truth?

  ‘You should get an early night,’ I tell her.

  ‘I have to go out.’

  ‘For dinner?’

  With a low hum she confirms this.

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘Just some friends.’

  Where is the detail, the shading-in? She is being stubbornly, deliberately obtuse.

  ‘Anyone I know?’ I ask.

  ‘No.’

  A longer pause now, so much so that I think she may be about to end the conversation. But finally she asks a question.

  ‘So what’ve you been up to these last few days?’

  ‘Not much,’ I reply.

  ‘Oh.’

  Then I recall lying to Saul about Mum before dinner, a conversation which the Americans may have tapped and alerted her to.

  ‘There was one slight scare, but otherwise everything’s been fine.’

  ‘A scare? What kind of scare?’

  For the first time she sounds interested by something I have said.

  ‘Mum thought she might have a skin cancer. But it turned out to be benign.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ she says. ‘And how’s Kate?’

  Nothing prepares me for the shock of this, a carefully weighted jab exactly timed for maximum impact.

  I manage to say:

  ‘What are you talking about?’ although my voice cracks like an adolescent on the word ‘talking’.

  ‘I asked after Kate.’

  They have got to her. Kate has been burned.

  ‘But you know I don’t see her any more. I haven’t seen her in over two years.’

  ‘That’s not what I heard.’

  ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘Fort says you two still sleep together, for old times’ sake.’

  ‘Why would he have said that?’

  ‘You mentioned it to him one night when the two of you were out drinking. Or don’t you remember?’

  That was months ago, a slight lie in a pub just to fill the silence. Instinct tells me to deny all of this.

  ‘I don’t remember ever mentioning that to him.’

  ‘Were you bragging, Alec?’

  What does she want to hear? I do not know what Kate has told them. Then - a chink of light - it occurs to me that someone from their side simply saw me going into Kate’s house last week. They know no more than that.

  ‘Was it male bravado?’ Katharine is asking. ‘Was that what made you say it?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘So you two still hook up from time to time? How come you never said anything to me?’

  Her voice becomes significantly warmer with this question, more friendly and engaging. Is it possible that she is simply jealous?

  ‘It was private. Kate wanted me to keep it a secret. She has a boyfriend. I’m sorry I told Fort and not you.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ she says calmly.

  ‘You can understand why I didn’t say anything. Not even Saul knows that I still see her.’

  ‘Of course,’ she says, creating a brief lapse in which an instinct to get away from any talk of Kate fatally overrides my common sense. I ask:

  ‘How come Fortner is in the States?’

  And there is silence. And nothing I can do to retract the question.

  ‘Why do you ask that, Alec?’

  I can say only:

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why would you think Fortner is in the States?’

  ‘Isn’t he? I just assumed he wasn’t home.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ask if he was here?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m not following you.’

  ‘It’s very simple, Alec. How did you know my husband had gone to America?’

  I am trapped now, with no way out of this but ineffectual bluffs.

  ‘I just assumed. It sounded like he wasn’t around. Usually I would have talked to him by now.’

  She’ll never buy that.

  ‘You just assumed.’

  I go on to the offensive. It may be the only way to distract her.

  ‘Kathy, what are you getting at? You’re being really odd tonight.’

  Then it is as if every sound around me is suddenly ended, a tunnel of silence into which Katharine whispers:

  ‘My God, it is true. I could not believe it until I heard it from you directly. I would not believe them.’

  ‘Believe who?’

  Very slowly, she says:

  ‘You’re so dumb, Alec. How did you know Fortner was in the States, huh? Isn’t that revealing a little too much of what you know?’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at…’

  ‘You want me to tell you why he’s there?’

  ‘Maybe we should talk another time, Kathy. I don’t know what’s got into you, but…’

  ‘He’s there because of your fucking girlfriend.’

  I have a sensation now of cold fear, like falling through space in a dream and the black ground rushing up to meet me.

  ‘Kate’s apartment is bugged. It has been ever since you told Fortner you were still seeing her. Just like your home is bugged, your car, your telephones, Saul, your mother’s place. Everyone is being listened to.’

  My body goes stiff with panic. It was nobody’s fault but my own. They heard everything I said to Kate.

  ‘And you know what the irony is?’ she says contemptuously. ‘We almost shut it down. You never visited Kate and we figured you weren’t about to in the future. It was a sleeper, but Fort insisted we keep it on. He had some hunch you might go there some day, said he knew how you felt about her. I gotta hand it to your people: 5F371 was a smart plan. You guys worked us over. Nice little Alec hands over 3D seismic imaging showing the strong possibility of oil in a field where none exists. Caccia has known all along that the crude was beaten out of it by the Soviets in the sixties and seventies, but Andromeda buy out Abnex’s val
idity of rights, drill an exploration well, spend - what? - about three hundred million dollars, and find nothing when we get there. Meantime, the Azerbaijani government lose confidence in Andromeda and, next time round, are more open to the idea of joint ventures with Abnex. Only you messed up, Alec. You couldn’t keep your fucking mouth shut. You went soft on them.’

  To hear her anger spat back, the triumph of it, sickens me almost to the point of retaliation.

  ‘You gonna say something, Alec? You got anything you want to say to me?’

  Only Hawkes’s voice in my head like an invocation prevents me from tripping into confession. When caught, he said, deny everything, if only for the sake of legal process. Never admit charges, never verify their accusations, however much information they may appear to have against you. The other side will always know less than you think they do. Resort to lies.

  ‘I have nothing to say to you, Kathy. And frankly I’m disgusted that you think this about me…’

  ‘Oh, get off it, Alec.’ She is shouting now, making no attempt to control the flow of her rage. ‘Have you no self-respect? Is your vanity so great that you crave this kind of recognition, from men like David Caccia, from men like Michael Hawkes? It’s pitiful, truly it is. I’m flying to Washington tonight. Do you understand that? My career is most probably over. How does that make you feel?’

  ‘It has nothing to do with me,’ I tell her.

  ‘Oh? And how do you spin that one?’

  ‘I’m not spinning anything.’

  ‘Why don’t you just have the guts to come out and admit what’s going on here? It’s over, Alec. You’re beaten.’

  I know that she is right: the situation is out of control. Whatever happens now, this is over.

  ‘I am not beaten, Kathy. No one is beaten. This is all…’

  ‘Why are you bothering to deny this? Is that what they taught you, huh? Is that it?’

  And suddenly I snap. I just let it go.

  ‘Listen. This is the game we’re in. It’s that simple.’

  There is a momentary silence as she acknowledges that I have broken cover for the first time. But her anger soon returns.

  ‘The game? Doing undercover work for a snake like John Lithiby? You have any idea of that guy’s record, Alec?’

  ‘And what about you? You work for an operation that helped to arrest Mandela, that relocated Nazi war criminals…’

  She emits a dry and contemptuous laugh.

  ‘That’s ancient history. We both know that. It’s a freshman conspiracy theory.’

  ‘You want something recent? OK. I’ll give you something recent. We’ve just caught American intelligence agents hacking into the computers of the European Parliament. CIA people trying to steal economic and political secrets, just like you, just like Fort. Just doing their job, in other words. That computer linked up to 5,000 MEPs, researchers and EU officials with their confidential medical and financial records, all of which the CIA would have had no hesitation in using if it gave them some leverage. So don’t lecture me about ethics.’

  ‘So that’s all this is? Tit for tat?’

  ‘If you want to see it that way, sure.’

  ‘What are you saying, Alec? That SIS isn’t doing exactly the same thing with its own European allies? Are you so blinkered that you think the good old Brits aren’t up to that? You really suppose your government is too clean to spy on its EU partners?’

  ‘Not at all. But that’s how all of this works. You spy on me, I spy on you. And every government in the civilized world spend millions of dollars going round and round in circles.’

  ‘There are too many people who know about this, Alec.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘You work it out.’

  ‘Are you referring to Kate?’

  She says nothing.

  ‘I said are you talking about Kate, because if you -‘

  ‘All I’m saying is that there are people who are going to want payback for this.’

  ‘You leave me alone. You leave her alone.’

  But Katharine’s voice suddenly slows into intimidation.

  ‘You haven’t heard the last of it.’

  My rushed temper still flared and obstinate, I say:

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  And her reply is a sinister foreboding of revenge.

  ‘You know what it is.’

  35

  Fast Release

  GCHQ pick it all up and within ninety minutes Sinclair has been despatched to bring me in. He rings the buzzer downstairs impatiently in hard electric bursts lasting four or five seconds. It is just past ten o’clock.

  ‘You’d better come with me,’ he says, when I open the front door. ‘No need to pack.’

  His expression is one of worn distaste: most probably Lithiby summoned him from home just as he was preparing to go to bed. He betrays no sign of pleasure at my failure; there is just a weary contempt on his neat, tanned face. He never liked me. He never thought I was up to the job. They should have given it to him and then none of this would have happened.

  I go back upstairs and put on my jacket like a condemned man. I have a few cigarettes in the inside pocket, also my wallet and an old pack of chewing-gum to see me through the night. Then I lock up and go outside to the car.

  We say very little to one another on the journey. Sinclair will not reveal where we are going, though I suspect that it will be a safe house and not Vauxhall Cross or Five. I cannot tell how much or how little he knows about the conversation with Katharine. Lithiby would have given him only a sketchy outline on the phone, just enough to make him realize that JUSTIFY is blown.

  Sorting through the debris of what Katharine has said occupies my mind for the whole journey. There is no order to this. I experience an acute sense of self-hatred and embarrassment, but also an immense anger. I thought that I had experienced the last of failure, seen it off for good, but to have messed up like this is catastrophic; it is a personal defeat of a different order to anything that has happened to me in the past. There is also concern: for Mum’s safety, for Saul’s, and for Kate’s. She knows everything about JUSTIFY, but I cannot think that Katharine’s words were anything more than scaremongering. Kate poses no threat to them: why should they harm her? And I feel a curious sense of annoyance with her, too. Though none of this is Kate’s fault, she was the source of my failure: were it not for the hold that she exerted over me, I would never have gone to see her, far less lied to Fortner about the two of us still being lovers. And there is consternation that he even bothered to install a microphone in her house in the first place. Fortner actually believed me when I told him we were still sleeping together: he saw that as a genuine possibility. And I realize that the Americans never really knew me at all.

  On just one occasion, about five minutes into the journey, I attempt to make conversation with Sinclair. A cool night wind is drumming into the car through an open window and I think I detect the sour vapour of alcohol on his breath.

  ‘It’s funny, you know,’ I say, turning towards him as he comes off the Westway, heading north towards Willesden. ‘After everything that’s happened in the last few -‘

  But he stops me short.

  ‘Listen, Alec. I’ve been instructed to keep my mouth shut. So unless you wanna talk about New Labour or somethin’, we’d better just wait ‘til we get there.’

  The street is narrow, poorly lit, suburban. Of the dozen or so houses lining both sides of the road only two or three have lights on downstairs. It’s late, and most people have gone to bed. Sinclair pulls the car over to the right-hand side of the road, scraping the hubcaps against the kerb as he attempts to park. ‘Shit,’ he mutters under his breath, and I unbuckle my seatbelt.

  A man is walking a dog on the opposite side of the street and Sinclair tells me to stay where I am until he is out of sight. Then we both get out of the car and make our way up a short driveway to the front door of a detached house with curtains drawn in all of the front windows. He taps once on th
e foggy glass of the door and I am surprised to see that it is Barbara who opens it from the other side. She greets Sinclair with a tired smile, but shoots me a sour look which breaks from her face like a snake. No more pleasantries. That is not required of her now.

  The hall is covered in a dirty brown carpet which continues upstairs to the first floor. There are two umbrellas and a walking stick in a stand beside the door, and a bright oil painting of a mountain hanging to our right as we come in. Magnolia paint covers all the walls and ceilings; it is as if we are encased in the mundane. The safe house smells stale with lack of use, yet it hides interrogations, solitudes, enforced captures. People have not been happy in this place.

  Barbara ushers us slowly through into the kitchen, which is where I see the three men for the first time. I was expecting Hawkes to be here, but he is not among them. Standing left to right in front of a bank of bottle-green kitchen cabinets are John Lithiby, David Caccia and an older, bespectacled man in his late sixties. I have never seen him before, this portly, stooped Englishman with a lonely, cuckolded look in his eyes. But he has an air of long experience, and the others appear quietly deferential towards him.

  All three are wearing the clothes in which they went to work this morning: Lithiby in his customary blue shirt with its white collars, Caccia still in his grey flannel suit. Dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, I feel untidy and slack beside them, yet their formal clothes are incongruous in this kitchen with its cheap fixtures and fittings, its linoleum floor patterned with worn beige checks. They are visitors here, too.

  There are three mugs of tea resting on a Formica-topped table in the centre of the room, brown milky fluid gradually souring in dregs at the base of each.

  I try to gather myself into courage by speaking first, looking at each of them in turn.

  ‘Good evening, David. John.’ I look directly into the glasses of the older man. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Good evening to you,’ he says. He has no accent, but a gravelly resonance in his voice like a well-trained actor. I notice that his shoes are brown suede, one of them stained.