Authors: Charles Cumming
I am woken at nine forty-five by the noise of the telephone, the sound of it moving toward me out of a deep sleep, growing louder, more substantial, incessant. At first I turn over in bed, determined to let it ring out, but the answering machine is switched off and the caller won’t relent. I throw back the duvet and stand up.
It is as if one part of my brain lurches from the right side of my head to the left. I almost fall to the floor with the pain of it. And the phone keeps on ringing. Naked, stumbling across the hall, I reach the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Alec?”
It’s Hawkes. With the sound of his voice I immediately reexperience the stab of my failure at SIS, the numb regret and the shame.
“Michael. Yes.”
“Did I wake you?”
“No. I was just listening to the radio. Didn’t hear it ring.”
“My apologies.”
“It’s fine.”
“Can you meet me for lunch?”
The thought of gathering myself together sufficiently to spend two or three hours with Hawkes feels impossible with such a hangover. But there is a temptation here, a sense of unfinished business. I spot his telephone number scribbled on the pad beside the phone.
We haven’t exhausted every avenue. There are alternatives.
“Sure. Where would you like to meet?”
He gives me an address in Kensington and hangs up.
There had better be something in this. I don’t want to waste my time listening to Hawkes tell me where I went wrong, saying over and over again how sorry he is. I’d rather he just left me alone.
He cooks lunch for the two of us in the kitchen of a small flat on Kensington Court Place, beef Stroganoff and rice that is still crunchy, with a few tired beans on the side. Never been married, and he still can’t cook. There is an open bottle of Chianti, but I stick to mineral water as the last of my hangover fades.
We barely discuss either SIS or Sisby. His exact words are, “Let’s put that behind us. Think of it as history,” and instead the subjects are wide-ranging and unconnected, with Hawkes doing most of the talking. I have to remind myself continually that this is only the second occasion on which we have met. It is strange once again to encounter the man who has shaped the course of my life these last few months. There is something capricious about his face. I had forgotten how thin it is, drawn out like an addict’s. He is still wearing a frayed shirt and a haphazard cravat, still the same pair of velvet loafers embroidered on the toe with a coat of arms. How odd that a person who has given his life to secrecy and concealment should be so willing to stand out from the crowd.
Afterward, scraping creamy leftovers of rice into a garbage bin, he says, “I often like to go for a walk after lunch. Do you have time?”
And largely because there has not yet been any talk of improving my situation, I agree to go.
Hyde Park is buzzing with rollerbladers and a warm wind is blowing north to south across the grass. I have a desire for good, strong coffee, a double espresso to give me a lift after lunch. My energy feels sapped by the exercise.
We have been talking about Mum when Hawkes says, “You remind me very much of your father. Not just in the way you look—he always seemed about twenty-one, never appeared to age—but in manner. In approach.”
“You’d lost touch? You said when we met…”
“Yes. Work took me away. It’s what happens in the Office, I’m afraid.”
I don’t feel like asking a lot of questions about Dad. I’d rather Hawkes brought up another subject. As we are passing the Albert Memorial he says, “I admired his tenacity tremendously. He was entrepreneurial almost before the word had been invented. Always working on a plan, a scheme for making money. Not a fast buck. Not to cheat anyone. But he loved working, he was ambitious. He wanted to make the best of himself.”
And this intrigues me. I remember Dad more as an absence, always away on business, and never wanting to talk about work when he came home. Mum has certainly never spoken about him in such a way.
“How do you mean?”
“Let me give you an example,” he says. “I imagine that you have friends from school or university who spend a lot of their time just sitting around or wasting away in dead-end jobs.”
I sure do. I’m one of them.
“I don’t have that many friends,” I tell him. “But yes, there are a lot of people who come out of higher education and feel that their choices are limited. People with good degrees with nowhere to go.”
Hawkes coughs, as if he hasn’t been listening. “And this job you’re doing at the moment. I suspect it’s a waste of your time, yes?”
The remark catches me off guard, but I have to admire his nerve.
“Fair enough.” I smile. “But it’s not a waste of time anymore. I quit over the weekend.”
“Did you now?” His reply does not disguise a degree of surprise, perhaps even of pleasure. Is it possible that Hawkes really does have some plan for me, some opportunity? Or am I simply clinging to the impossible hope that Liddiard and his colleagues have made an embarrassing mistake?
“So what are you going to do?” he asks.
“Well, right now it looks as though I’m going to become one of those people who spend a lot of their time just sitting around.”
He laughs at this, breaking into a rare smile that stretches his face like a clown. Then he looks me in the eye, that old paternal thing, and says, “Why don’t you come and work for me?”
The offer does not surprise me. Somehow I had expected it. A halfway house between CEBDO and the coveted world of espionage. A compromise. A job in the oil business.
“At your company? At Abnex?”
“Yes.”
“I’m very flattered.”
“You have Russian, don’t you? And a grounding in business?”
“Yes,” I reply confidently.
“Well then, I would urge you to think about it.”
We have stopped walking. I look down at the ground, drawing my right foot up and down on the grass. Perhaps I should say more about how grateful I am.
“This is extraordinary,” I tell him. “I’m amazed by how—”
“There is something I would need to ask in return,” he says, before I become too gushy.
I look at him, trying to gauge what he means, but his face is unreadable. I simply nod as he says, “If you decided that you wanted to take up a position…” Then he stalls. “What are your feelings, instinctively? Is oil something you’d like to become involved in?”
In my confused state, it is almost impossible to decide, but I am intrigued by Hawkes’s caveat. What would he ask for in return?
“I would need to get my head together a little bit, to think things through,” I tell him, but no sooner have the words come out than I am thinking back to what he said about my father. His ambition. His need to improve himself, and I add quickly, “But I can’t think of any reason why I would want to throw away an opportunity like that.”
“Good. Good,” he says.
“Why? What would you need me to do?”
The question sets us moving again, walking slowly down a path toward Park Lane.
“It’s nothing that would be beyond you.”
He smiles at this, but the implication is clandestine. There is something unlawful here that Hawkes is concealing.
“Sorry, Michael. I’m not understanding.”
He turns and looks behind us, almost as if he feels we are being followed. A reflex ingrained into his behavior. But it’s just a group of four or five schoolchildren kicking a football fifty meters away.
“Abnex has a rival,” he says, turning back to face me. “An American oil company by the name of Andromeda. We would need you to befriend two of their employees.”
“Befriend?”
He nods.
“Who is ‘we’?” I ask.
“Let’s just say a number of interested parties, both from the government side and private industry. All I can tell you firmly at this stage is that you would need to maintain absolute secrecy, in exactly the same way as was described to you during your selection procedure for SIS.”
“So this has something to do with them?”
He does not respond.
“Or MI5? Are they the ‘alternative’ you were talking about on the phone yesterday?”
Hawkes breathes deeply and looks to the sky, but a satisfied expression on his face seems to confirm the truth of this. Then he continues walking. “Five might be interested in using you as a support agent,” he says. “On a trial basis.”
I am astonished by this. “Already?”
“It’s something that just popped up in the last couple of weeks. A rather discreet operation, in actual fact. Off the books.” A dog runs across our path and vanishes into some long grass. “My contact there, John Lithiby, can’t use his regular employees and needs some fresh fruit off the tree. So I suggested your name….”
“I can’t believe this.”
“There’d be a job for you at the other end,” he says, “if the operation is a success.”
I feel flattered, stunned. “You’re talking about a job with MI5?” I am shaking my head, almost laughing. “Just for befriending some Americans?”
Hawkes turns and looks back down the path, as if searching for the dog, then faces me and smiles. He appears oddly proud, as if he has fulfilled a longstanding pledge to my father. “Questions, questions,” he mutters. Then he puts his arm across my back, the right hand squeezing my shoulder, and says, “Later, Alec. Later.”
Making millions on sheer gall. American Dream.
—JOHN UPDIKE,
Rabbit Redux
The offices of Abnex Oil occupy five central stories in an eyesore Broadgate high-rise about six minutes’ walk from Liverpool Street station.
The company was founded in 1989 by a City financier named Clive Hargreaves, who was just thirty-five years old at the time. Hargreaves had no A levels and no formal higher education, just a keen business sense and an instinctive, immediate grasp of the market opportunities presented by the gradual collapse of communism in the Eastern bloc and, later, the former Soviet Union. With private investment attached to a chunk of money he’d made in the City during the Thatcher–Lawson boom, Hargreaves expanded Abnex from a small outfit employing fewer than one hundred people into what is now the third largest oil-exploration company in the UK. At the start of the decade, Abnex had minor contracts in Brazil, the North Sea, Sakhalin, and the Gulf, but Hargreaves’s masterstroke was to realize the potential of the Caspian Sea before many of his competitors had done so. Between 1992 and early 1994, he negotiated well-workover agreements with the nascent governments of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan, and sent down teams of geologists, contractors, and lawyers to Baku with a view to identifying the most promising well sites in the region. The Caspian is now awash with international oil companies, many of them acting as joint ventures and all competing for their chunk of what are proven oil reserves. Abnex is better placed than many of them to reap the benefits when the region goes online.
On New Year’s Day 1995, Hargreaves was killed riding pillion on a motorcycle in northern Thailand. The driver, his best friend, wasn’t drunk or high; he was just going too fast and missed a bend in the road. Hargreaves, who was single, left the bulk of his estate to his sister, who immediately sold her controlling stake in Abnex to a former cabinet minister in the Thatcher government. This is where Hawkes came in. A new chairman, David Caccia, had been appointed by the board of directors. Caccia was also ex-Foreign Office, though not SIS. The two men had been posted to the British embassy in Moscow in the 1970s and become close friends. Caccia, knowing that Hawkes was approaching retirement, offered him a job.
I work undercover for MI5 as a business development analyst in a seven-man team specializing in emerging markets, specifically the Caspian Sea. On my first day, just four or five hours in, the personnel manager asked me to sign this agreement:
CODE OF CONDUCT
To be complied with at all times by employees and associates of Abnex Oil.
August 1995
All the guys on my team are university graduates in their mid-to-late twenties who came here within six months of leaving university. With one exception, they are earning upward of thirty-five thousand pounds a year. The exception, owing to the circumstances in which I took the job, is myself. I am over halfway through the trial period imposed by the senior management. If, at the end of it, I am considered to have performed well, my salary will be bumped up from its present level—which is below twelve thousand after tax—to something nearer thirty, and I will be offered a long-term contract, health coverage, and a company car. If Alan Murray, my immediate boss, feels that I have not contributed effectively to the team, I’m out the door.
This probationary period, which ends on 1 December, was a condition of my accepting the job imposed by Murray. Hawkes and Caccia knew that they had brought me in over the heads of several more highly qualified candidates—one of whom had been shadowing the team, unpaid, for more than three months—and they were happy to oblige. From my point of view it’s a small price to pay. Like most employers nowadays, Abnex knows that they can get away with asking young people to work excessively long hours, six or seven days a week, without any form of contractual security or equivalent remuneration. At any one time there might be fifteen or twenty graduates in the building doing unpaid work experience, all of them holding out for a position that in all likelihood does not exist.
So, no complaints. Things have swung around for me since last year and I have Hawkes to thank for that. The downside is that I now work harder, and for longer hours, than I have ever worked in my life. I am up every morning at six, sometimes quarter past, and take a cramped tube to Liverpool Street just after seven. There’s no time for a slow, contemplative breakfast, those gradual awakenings of my early twenties. The team is expected to be at our desks by eight o’clock. There is a small, aggressively managed coffee bar near the Abnex building where I sometimes buy an espresso and a sandwich at around nine
A.M.
But often there is so much work to do that there isn’t time to leave the office.
The pressure comes mainly from the senior management, beginning with Murray and working its way steadily up to Caccia. They make constant demands on the team for reliable and accurate information about geological surveys, environmental research, pipeline and refining deals, currency fluctuations, and—perhaps most important of all—any anticipated political developments in the region that may have long-or short-term consequences for Abnex. A change of government personnel, for example, can dramatically affect existing and apparently legally binding exploration agreements signed with the previous incumbent. Corruption is at an epidemic level in the Caspian region, and the danger of being outmaneuvered, either by a competitor or by venal officials, is constant.
A typical day will be taken up speaking on the telephone to clients, administrators, and other officials in London, Moscow, Kiev, and Baku, often in Russian or, worse, with someone who has too much belief in his ability to speak English. In that respect, little has changed since CEBDO. In every other way, my life has taken on a dimension of intellectual effort that was entirely absent when I was working for Nik. I look back on my first six months at Abnex as a blur of learning: files, textbooks, seminars, and exams on every conceivable aspect of the oil business, coupled with extensive MI5/SIS weekend and night classes, usually overseen by Hawkes.
In late September, he and I flew out to the Caspian with Murray and Raymond Mackenzie, a senior employee at the firm. In under eight days we took in Almaty, Tashkent, Ashgabat, Baku, and Tbilisi. It was the first time that Hawkes or I had visited the region. We were introduced to Abnex employees, to representatives from Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, and BP, and to high-ranking government officials in each of the major states. Most of these had had ties with the former Soviet administration; three, Hawkes knew for certain, were former KGB.
It is not that I have minded the intensity of the work or the long hours. In fact, I draw a certain amount of satisfaction from possessing what is now a high level of expertise in a specialist field. But my social life has been obliterated. I have not visited Mum since Christmas, and I can’t remember the last time I had the chance to savor a decent meal, or to do something as mundane as going to the cinema. My friendship with Saul is now something that has to be timetabled and squeezed in, like sex in a bad marriage. Tonight—he is coming to an oil industry party at the In and Out Club on Piccadilly—will be only the third time that I have had the opportunity to see him since New Year’s. He resents this, I think. In days gone by, it was Saul who called the shots. He had the glamorous job and the jet-set lifestyle. At the last minute, he might be called off to a shoot in France or Spain, and any arrangements we might have made to go to a movie or meet for a drink would have to be canceled.
Now the tables have turned. Freelancing has not been as easy as Saul anticipated. The work hasn’t been coming in, and he is struggling to finish a screenplay that he had hoped to have financed by the end of last year. It may even be that he is jealous of my new position. There has been something distrustful in his attitude toward me since I joined Abnex, almost as if he blames me for getting my life in order.
It’s a Thursday evening in mid-May, just past five o’clock. People are starting to leave the office, drifting in slow pairs toward the lifts. Some are heading for the pub, where they will drink a pint or two before the party; others, like me, are going straight home to change. If everything goes according to plan, tonight should mark a significant development in my relationship with Andromeda, and I want to feel absolutely prepared.
Back at the flat, I put on a fresh scrape of deodorant and a new shirt. At around seven o’clock I order a taxi to take me to Piccadilly. This early part of the evening is not as awkward as I had anticipated. I am clearheaded and looking forward finally to making progress with the Americans.
There are flames leaping from tall Roman candles in a crescent fore-court visible from the cab as it shunts down a bottlenecked Hyde Park toward the In and Out Club. I pay the driver, check my reflection in the window of a parked car, and then make my way inside.
An immaculate silver-haired geriatric, wearing a gold-buttoned red blazer and sharp white tie, is greeting guests at the door. He checks my invitation.
“Mr. Milius. From Abnex. Yes, sir. Just go straight through.”
Other guests in front of me have been ushered into a high-ceilinged entrance hall. Most of them are, at a guess, over thirty-five, though a hand-in-hand, good-looking couple of about my age are gliding around in a circular room immediately beyond this one. The boyfriend is guiding an elaborate blonde counterclockwise around a large oak table, pretending to admire some cornice work on the oval ceiling. He points at it intelligently, and the girlfriend nods, openmouthed.
I walk past them and turn right down a darkened corridor leading into a spacious, paved garden where the party is taking place. The noise of it grows sharper with every pace, the rising clamor of a gathered crowd. I walk out onto a terraced balcony overlooking the garden from the club side and take a glass of champagne from a teenage waiter who breezes past me, tray held at head height. The party is in full swing. Polite laughter lifts up from the multitudes in their suits and cocktail dresses, oil people in dappled light amid the ooze of small talk.
Piers, Ben, and J.T., three members of my team, are standing in the far right corner of the garden, thirty or forty feet away, sucking back champagne. As usual, Ben is doing most of the talking, making the others laugh. Harry Cohen, at twenty-eight the oldest and most senior member of the team after Murray, is just behind them, schmoozing some mutton-dressed-as-lamb in a little black dress. No sign of Saul, though. He must have been held up.
Just below me, to my left, I see the Hobbit talking to his new girlfriend. It is still extraordinary to witness the change that has come over him. Gone are the spots and greasy skin, and his once-raggedy hair has now been cropped short and combed forward to shield a gathering baldness. There are things that he still gets wrong. On his lapel he is wearing a bright orange badge imprinted with the name
MATTHEW FREARS
above the logo of his company, Andromeda. And his glance up at me is nervous, almost intimidated. Yet he is reliable, and honest to the point of candor. We make eye contact, nothing more. He’ll be as fired up as me.
I walk down a short flight of stone steps and make my way through the crowd to the Abnex team. J.T. is the first to spot me.
“Alec. You’re late.”
“Not networking?” I say to them.
“Pointless at parties,” Piers replies.
“Why’s that?”
“Everyone’s up to the same game. You’re never going to make an impression. Might as well neck the free booze and fuck off home.”
“It’s your optimism I admire,” says Ben. “Life-affirmin’.”
“Murray arrived?”
“Coming later,” he says, as if it were inside knowledge.
“Why’d you go home?” Piers asks me.
“Change of shirt.”
“Sweaty boy,” says Ben. “Sweaty boy.”
“You haven’t met someone called Saul, have you?”
He is a vital component in tonight’s plan, and I need him to get here.
Ben says, “What kind of a name is Saul?”
“He’s a friend of mine. I’m supposed to be meeting him here. He’s late.”
“Haven’t seen him,” he says, taking a sip from his drink.
Cohen separates himself from the middle-aged woman with the facelift and turns toward us. His coming into our small group has the effect of tightening it up.
“Hello, Alec.”
“Harry.”
The woman gives him a final smile before disappearing into the crowd.
“Mum come with you?” Ben says to him, trying on a joke. Cohen does not react.
“Who was she?” J.T. asks.
“A friend of mine who works for Petrobras.”