A Spy by Nature (2001)

by Charles Cumming

  Lithiby nods and Elworthy shuffles next door. Barbara, looking at four washed-out faces, says:

  ‘It looks like a Labour landslide.’

  ‘Really,’ Lithiby murmurs. None of it makes any difference to him.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Lost every seat in Scotland by the looks of things.’

  ‘Every seat?’ Sinclair exclaims, his first input since we arrived. ‘Christ.’

  A car sounds its horn in the street outside.

  ‘There was one other thing.’

  Lithiby is talking to me.

  ‘Yes?’

  Very calmly he says:

  ‘They weren’t married.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Our American friends. Not even a couple. Thought you’d like to know.’

  ‘What do you mean they weren’t married? How long have you known this?’

  Of course. Separate bedrooms. The age difference. The lie Katharine told me about her miscarriage. All just cover.

  ‘Not long. Two, three weeks. I was surprised you didn’t have any suspicions.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘They weren’t in your reports.’

  To have been lied to for so long about a thing so obvious. I am momentarily blunted, consternation draining away any control I may have had over the meeting. That was Lithiby’s deliberate intention: to throw me off guard.

  ‘Alec?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I said it wasn’t in any of your reports.’

  From somewhere I summon the energy to challenge him.

  ‘What does that matter?’

  Lithiby does not reply. He glances across at Sinclair and I could swear that he was smiling.

  ‘How did you find out about this?’ I ask.

  ‘Deep background,’ Lithiby says, as if that explains everything.

  ‘Why would they bother to pretend?’

  He is interrupted by Elworthy coming back into the kitchen.

  ‘Labour landslide,’ Caccia says to him. ‘The Tories are out.’

  ‘Is that right?’ he says, his reaction muted. ‘Well, here’s to the tedious and predictable triumph of moderate politics.’

  Caccia grins smugly.

  ‘I have had a chance to think,’ Elworthy says, turning his attention to me. ‘I suspect that we are all rather tired of threats and innuendo. It’s late and I suggest we call it a day. Alec, you will hear from us in due course about the matters discussed here this evening. It only remains for me to remind you that you are still bound by the terms of the Official Secrets Act.’

  ‘And it only remains for me to remind you that you have an obligation to protect me. Set up a meeting with the Americans or I will make good my promise to go public with the story.’

  Elworthy merely nods his head, knowing that his hands are tied.

  ‘Chris will drive you back,’ says Lithiby.

  ‘Fine.’ I look down at Caccia, still seated at the kitchen table, and say goodbye. He does not answer. Lithiby manages a contemptuous nod, but both Barbara and Elworthy remain silent.

  Nothing else is said.

  We pull up outside the flat at around three a.m. and Sinclair surprises me by switching off the engine.

  ‘Where will you go?’ he asks.

  It is some time before I answer, dazed:

  ‘To Scotland, I think.’ The lie is pointless: they will find me wherever I go, but I do it out of spite. ‘A friend of mine has a place in Perthshire. He invited me up this weekend. I’ll probably stay there for a while.’

  Sinclair looks ahead at the street and appears to be summoning up the courage to say something.

  ‘I admire what you did tonight,’ he says, very softly. ‘The way you handled yourself.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Didn’t let them push you around.’

  ‘I appreciate you saying that. I really do.’

  ‘It’s funny,’ he says, laughing gently, though it appears that he has been overtaken by reflection. ‘I never liked you much before. Jealousy or something. And now that’s it, you’re out of it, just when things were starting to look OK. Most probably you and I will never see each other again.’

  ‘Most probably.’

  ‘You’re all right, Alec,’ he says, and he takes his arm off the steering wheel to shake my hand. ‘You’re gonna be all right.’

  Inside the flat I switch on the television to catch the tail-end of the election coverage. Just as Barbara said, the Tories have been obliterated. The nation sheds an entire generation of public servants: Forsyth, Lang, Rifkind, to replace them with - what? Perhaps it is just my solemn mood of regret, but it is hard not to detect in the government’s downfall a spitefulness on behalf of the electorate. Good and able men are being made to suffer for the failures of a very few. I even feel sorry for Portillo, who is beaten out by an ineffectual Blairite clone with a weak mouth and puppy eyes.

  But what I will not allow to happen is a slide into self-pity. There is no time for that. The utter disappointment of the last several hours actually motivates me to move against them, to make good the threat against Five. If I do not act now, they will regain the upper hand.

  So in front of the TV, with the sound muted, I compose letters.

  To Lithiby I restate my intention to release a complete account of JUSTIFY on the Internet and to sell the story to foreign publications unless he receives a valid guarantee of my safety from the Americans. I write: ‘There will be an anonymous third party in a position to release all information when and if he is instructed to do so.’

  That person will be Saul.

  To Caccia I write a brief letter of resignation from Abnex. This is pointless, given that tonight he effectively fired me, but a vague and petty stubbornness in me will not allow him the pleasure of formally handing me my notice.

  And to the Chase Manhattan Bank at 1603E, Wadsworth Avenue, Philadelphia, I fax instructions to transfer funds from escrow to a dormant account in Paris set up by my father over fifteen years ago and left to me in his will.

  Only my mother knows about that. A family secret.

  I stay awake until dawn as the BBC re-run pictures of Blair standing outside his constituency office, acknowledging the extent of Labour’s victory. But in his moment of triumph, after a carefully stage-managed campaign in which he has been presented as a mature and thoughtful politician undaunted by the prospect of high office, the new Prime Minister appears suddenly adolescent, almost on the verge of tears. Suddenly the prize for which he has worked so tirelessly, the culmination of his consuming ambition, stands before him. And as he comes to terms with the weight of the responsibility which has been placed on his shoulders by millions of people, right there in front of the cameras it is possible to see Blair experience a dawning realization: that there is a price to be paid for success. He actually looks panicked by what he has achieved.

  This is something that I have come to realize far too late. That we allow ambition, the hunger for recognition, to blind us to wider consequences. We are encouraged to pursue goals, to make the best of ourselves, to search for meaning. But what does a person do when those dreams come true? What is the next step?

  36

  West

  Eight twenty p.m. Ten minutes until we are scheduled to leave. On the far side of the neat gravel path a man is standing, back straight, head level, eyes closed. He wears purple shorts and a plain white T-shirt bearing the inscription ‘moon’ in narrow black letters. A canvas bag lies at his shoeless feet. Slowly, he moves his legs apart. Then the man lifts his arms in a wide arc above his shoulders, palms face upwards to the sky, until his body forms a composed, tranquil cross.

  Fifteen feet to his left, two women, both in jeans, stand up from their bench and drop two empty Diet Coke cans into a wire-mesh bin. They move away.

  The man’s mouth opens, emitting a just-audible noise, a sustained meditative yawp out into the trees. For a moment, the stillness of it erases all the white noise of London. Then a creak of the metal gate at the
entrance to Queen’s Club Gardens and Saul appears, shouldering an overnight bag.

  The first thing he says is:

  ‘She can’t come. Says she’s going to drive down first thing in the morning. You all right? You look knackered.’

  I ignore this.

  ‘Can we just head off?’

  I am anxious to leave, keen to be out of London. Whatever self-confidence I had is gradually draining away to a constant fear that what has happened to Cohen will happen to me.

  ‘In a minute. I told her to come over so I can give her instructions about how to get there.’

  I look back at the man. From the canvas bag he extracts a sandwich and begins eating it in a pool of fading sunlight. Behind him, an elderly couple are playing tennis on a hard court, the slow thock of balls like a clock.

  There is no one else in the gardens. No one who could be watching me.

  ‘Seen much of Fort and Katharine?’ Saul asks, and the question catches me off guard.

  ‘A little. Their contract at Andromeda hasn’t been renewed. They’re thinking of moving back to the States. In fact, I think it’s definite. They may be gone by the end of the month.’

  I am so tired of lying to him.

  ‘That’s a pity,’ he says, gazing up at the sky. ‘It’d be good to see them before they go.’ There’s a tick-shaped cloud above his head like the Nike logo.

  ‘I’ll try and fix something up.’

  Saul bends over now to tie his shoelaces and I say what I have to say while I don’t have to look into his eyes.

  ‘I may have to go away, too.’

  ‘Really?’ he says into the ground.

  ‘Yeah. Abnex have a posting overseas. Something came up. In Turkmenistan. It would just be for a year or so. I think it would be a great opportunity.’

  He stands up.

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Just last week.’

  ‘You’re not going straight away?’

  First thing this morning I booked a cross-Channel ticket to Cherbourg, leaving late on Monday afternoon.

  ‘No. Most probably not.’

  ‘Good,’ he says, relaxing immediately. Then he looks across at the gate.

  ‘Here she comes now.’

  Saul’s new girlfriend is tall and slim and attractive - they always are - with dark hair cut short to the nape of the neck. A little like Kate’s new bob.

  ‘Hi,’ he shouts out enthusiastically, though she is still some distance away. The girl gives a stiff wristy wave and then looks beyond us, apparently at the tennis court. When she arrives she says nothing at first, just glances at me and then wraps Saul in a hug and a kiss. I am briefly envious. She has a slim, supple waist and a lightness about her.

  ‘And you must be Alec,’ she says, breaking away from him to shake my hand. ‘I’m Mia. Pleased to meet you.’

  She is American.

  ‘You’re from the States?’ I ask.

  She looks irritated.

  ‘Canada. From Vancouver.’

  Just seeing them together casts my mind back to Kate and me meeting for the first time. We were seventeen, what now seems an absurdly young age to be about to embark upon the relationship we had. Barely old enough to express ourselves. It was at a party in the school holidays. I remember a lot of weak beer and girls in mini-skirts. Kate came right up to me, just seemed to know it was the right thing to do. We were standing over a bale of straw, surrounded by people dancing to Dexy’s Midnight Runners, and within minutes were hidden in some dark quarter of a vast garden, kissing. Everything was new back then; all we did was react to things.

  For some reason, we started climbing a tree, Kate first, me right behind her, just the rustle and scrape of the two of us against the branches and amongst the leaves. Quite quickly she lost her footing. Flecks of sooty bark puffed into my eyes. I lifted up my hand to catch her in case she was about to fall.

  ‘You OK?’ I asked, calling up at her.

  Even then, within moments of our meeting, I wanted Kate to feel safe. It happened immediately.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and there was a certain stubbornness in her voice which I noticed, and liked, right away. ‘I’m OK.’

  And she kept on climbing.

  Saul is talking Mia through the route to Cornwall. When they’re done, I shake her hand, she wishes me well, and he walks her back to the street.

  ‘See you at the weekend,’ she calls back to me.

  ‘Yeah. Looking forward to it.’

  And five minutes later we are on our way.

  Saul is driving his wideboy Capri, a dark blue V-reg with 70,000 miles on the clock and a bonnet the size of a ping-pong table. Gradually we shunt our way through the pre-weekend traffic which has clogged up the M3 from Sunbury right out to Basingstoke. The Capri feels low and heavy against the road; when I lean right back in the passenger seat, the darkening sky entirely fills the windscreen.

  After an hour the traffic starts to free up and we can move at a steady seventy-five. I put on a tape - Radiohead’s The Bends - and watch the flat suburban heartlands flick by.

  ‘You want to get something to eat?’ Saul asks, as he is overtaking a caravan. ‘I was going to stop at the next place we see.’

  ‘Sure.’

  It is the first time I have felt like eating in twenty-four hours.

  ‘There’s a McDonald’s at Fleet services,’ he says, winding down his window and letting a half-smoked cigarette firework on to the road. ‘You feel like McDonald’s?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Two miles later I spot a glowing yellow M hanging low over a slip-road encased in black trees. Saul comes off the motorway. The passenger-side wing mirror is not aligned, so I turn around sharply in my seat and look out through the back windscreen.

  Three vehicles follow us up the exit.

  In the car park Saul swings into a space alongside a grey BMW. The Capri gives a growling cough as he shuts off the engine. Two of the vehicles behind us went straight on to get petrol. The third, a hatchback Volkswagen, has parked fifty metres away, disgorging young children who run gleefully into the building. An Indian woman wearing a sari is stretching near by, rolling her neck in a slow clockwise loop.

  The restaurant is as bright and sterile as the Abnex offices. There are no shadows. People drift about in the white light, fetching straws and napkins. They queue up four deep at the tills, munch Big Macs at clean-wiped tables. Kids are greedy for plastic figurines and pots of ice cream threaded with furls of chocolate sauce. There’s a constant noise of demand.

  A middle-aged man standing near me is looking about the place with a flinching bewilderment, as if he has been deposited here by accident from another era. The queue moves quickly. We are flanked by young couples and boys in shell suits, overweight salesmen and girls in bright pink, too young to be wearing make-up.

  At the counter, an acne-soaked teenager in a purple hat takes our order for food. I pass Saul a five-pound note, but he wants to pick up the tab.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ he says, pushing my hand away.

  Twenty minutes later and we are back inside the car, my mood flatly resigned to a long, dark journey with no end until well after midnight. Saul has a polystyrene cup of Coke wedged between his thighs and a post-burger cigarette hanging from his mouth. It’s my turn to drive. The Capri feels heavy as I reverse out, as if it too has eaten too much, too quickly. Saul clicks in The Bends again and sits back in the passenger seat with a deep sigh. Within ten minutes he is asleep and I just listen to the songs.

  And if I could be who you wanted,

  If I could be who you wanted

  All the time.

  The rain starts coming down at around eleven fifteen and it doesn’t stop all night. I worry that the heavy car will skid on the road surface and it’s a job to keep my concentration. The motor driving the windscreen wipers is sluggish, and as a consequence my vision is constantly blurred by the glare of oncoming headlights refracting through the water-covered glass. Saul naps
through all of this with heavy catarrh snores and an occasional groan.

  The traffic gradually evaporates the closer we come to Bodmin. Now and then a vast, speeding lorry will roar past in the wet, throwing up spray and mud, but otherwise I have the road to myself. There’s just a feeling now of wanting to get there, of the quest for sleep. For fifteen minutes on the Dorchester road I was tailed by a black Rover, the same make of car that Sinclair was driving when I first met Lithiby. But I am past caring. Let them waste their time. They know where I’m going. They know where to find me.

  I wake Saul when we enter Little Petherick, the last village before the turn-off to Padstow. He makes a show of being disturbed, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles like a sleepy child.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Hammersmith.’

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘Nearly there. I need you to show me the way.’

  ‘Fucking rain,’ he says.

  I have pulled the Capri over to the side of the road, the wipers flapping irregularly, left-to-right, right-to-left. The tired old engine turns over. Across the street there is a man loitering alone in a bus stop, trapped by the weather. He stares at us from under the peak of his baseball cap, colourless eyes in the wet gloom.

  ‘Take the second left after this village. Sign saying Trevose.’

  ‘Then what?’

  He starts imitating Katharine’s voice.

  ‘Road forks so go real slow,’ he says. ‘Flirt with me awhile, turn right at the traffic lights, and then I’ll leave my husband and elope with you.’

  I wheeze a fake laugh.

  ‘It’s easy from here,’ he says. ‘Just head down to the sea. I’ll show you.’

  Saul makes coffee when we arrive and I smoke a cigarette in the kitchen as he busies himself finding blankets and towels. The house feels damp. In the distance I can hear steel halyards pinging in the wind against masts. Otherwise it is utterly quiet.

  I like it down here. London makes you forget the simpler pleasures of being away from a city. The loose give of the warming sand after weeks of walking on pavements and hard floors. And in the summer that brilliant clean light, and the feeling of salt drying against the skin. Then evening sunsets blinking off the surface of the water, like flashbulbs in a floodlit stadium.