Authors: Charles Cumming
It’s time to get it out of them.
“What are you saying?”
“What we’re saying, Alec, is that we’d like to give you the opportunity to do something about your situation.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You won’t, immediately,” he says, his eyes fixed on the table.
I shift uncomfortably in my seat as he says this and look over at Katharine for some indication of what is going on. Her face is entirely inscrutable. There is an atmosphere of very carefully chosen words. I hear the first swallowing glugs of wine as Fortner starts to fill the glasses. He twists the bottle to catch any drips, his hand as steady as a flat sea. There’s just the rustle of clothing and distant traffic sounds as Fortner sits down. Each of us takes a glass from the table, sipping, registering the taste.
Fortner breathes in the bouquet and says, “We have something, we both have something we want to discuss with you.”
I do not answer. The rush of expectation in me is so great that I don’t want to risk anything on a few ill-chosen remarks. Better to react precisely to what he has to say, to let them do all the talking.
“How would you feel about coming over to our side?”
There’s no liveliness in Fortner’s face as he asks this, no widening of the eyes. He merely lets the question drift out of him with an uninflected stillness.
“What, you mean work for Andromeda?”
“Not exactly, no.”
I don’t have to look over at Katharine to know that she is watching me.
“How, then?”
“We want you to help us.”
His words are phrased with care to ensure an ambiguity.
“To help you?”
“Yes.”
I hold the pause longer than is necessary. What Fortner is asking is very plain to anyone who works in our business, but he has couched it in such a way that if I object, neither of them will be culpable. As if to confirm this, Fortner takes a very relaxed draw on his wine as he waits for my response, pausing to look at me only briefly. He’s been here before.
I look across at Katharine, more out of nervousness than anything else, and I am surprised to see that she looks almost ashamed at what Fortner has suggested. She is blinking constantly and massaging the back of her neck.
“I don’t understand,” is all I can think to say. There’s been a delay in the room like the disappearing echo of a long-distance phone call.
“It’s quite simple. Would you like to help us?”
“You mean hand over information about what Abnex is doing? For money?”
He has made me say it, just as they said he would. I was the one who put it in concrete terms.
“That is correct.”
“Kathy, do you know about this?”
“Of course. It occurred to us that you would be amenable.”
At this, Fortner looks over at her quickly. It wasn’t the right thing to say. She changes tack.
“That it would
suit
you. And us.”
I take a sip of wine. My hand is shaking so violently that I can barely hold the glass.
“You’ll obviously need some time to think it over,” Fortner says, like a doctor who has just diagnosed a cancer. He is funneling any anxiety into the red plastic top of the wine bottle, turning it this way and that in his thick fingers. He has gradually molded the plastic cone into the shape of a toadstool, twirling the stem between the thumb and index finger of his left hand.
I know that at first I must appear to be offended.
“So our whole friendship has been based on the possibility that this might happen?”
“Alec, don’t…” says Katharine, but I interrupt her.
“You’ve pretended to be something that you’re not.”
“You’re bound to be a little shocked at first,” Fortner says very flatly. He’s absolutely certain that I’ll come over. It’s just a matter of time.
“How long have you been planning to ask me?”
“For some time now,” Katharine replies, running her hands down her thighs so that the material of her dress stretches out.
“How long?”
“Four or five months,” she says.
“Four or five months! That’s practically when we met.”
“Come on, Alec. We were first introduced before that.”
“Yes. And you cultivated the friendship because you knew that this might happen.”
“Now hold on there,” says Fortner. “We just want a little help, that’s all, and we’re prepared to pay you handsomely for that.”
This is smart: bring it back to the money. It’s fascinating to see how Fortner operates. He wants to take my mind away from ethical considerations and just let me visualize the cash.
“How much?”
“We’ll come to that in good time. There’s a lot we need to discuss first.”
“I’m not even sure about this. I’ll need time to think it over.”
“Of course.”
And now it’s my turn to pace. I am up on my feet, walking in random circles around the room, running my hand through my hair, lighting a cigarette.
“I need some air.”
“What?”
Katharine looks up at me, a dying fall of panic in her voice.
“He says he needs some air. Alec, you mustn’t talk to anyone about this. That could get us all in a lot of trouble. Now you understand that, don’t you?”
“I’m not stupid, Fort. I just need to walk around, clear my head.”
“So you’ll be back?” she asks.
“Maybe,” I reply, backing away to the front door. “Maybe.”
An hour later, I climb the stairs to their apartment, not two at a time but singly, contemplatively, slowly making my way to the third-floor landing. Fortner is standing in the half-open door, his tie gone, a glass of whiskey in his hand. Our eyes meet for a good long time as I go toward him, my shoulders hung deliberately heavy, hair disheveled by the wind.
“Where d’you get to?” he says quietly, ushering me back inside.
“To Portobello Road. Around.”
Katharine is sitting on the sofa, upright and very still. She looks to have been scolded. Her eyes are heavy, perhaps even with tears. It is as if a mask has been wrenched from her face, and all that is left is a frightened revelation of self. She looks up at me and gives a weak smile. Everything feels drained now.
“You wanna drink?”
“No, thanks, Fortner. I want to be very clear.”
He sits beside his wife and I settle opposite them on the second sofa, our positions exactly reversed from before.
“We didn’t think you’d come back,” says Katharine. “We’re really very sorry about what happened.”
“I was walking. Thinking things through.”
“Of course,” she says.
“I…”
Fortner interrupts me as I make to say something.
“Alec, it was a bad idea asking you. We could get you in a lot of trouble if—”
“I’ll do it.”
Katharine’s head jerks up and her bruised eyes flare open.
“You will?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s good news.” Fortner seems less enthused than I had expected. He’s known that I would bite all along. I tell them that we need to clarify a lot of things, and he says, “Indeed.”
“And I’m sorry I got upset with you,” I say, lighting another cigarette. “I was just very surprised.”
“Of course you were.” Fortner says this with no feeling in his voice. Katharine stirs, looking at me fondly. Relief has energized her.
“Alec, I really just wanna make one thing absolutely clear, okay?”
“Sure.”
“I just wanna say that our friendship wasn’t predicated on this happening. It was interdependent…uh…more of a product of our becoming friends.”
Fortner seconds this, saying, “Absolutely, it’s very important to make that clear,” but it’s a lie, because his eyes sink to the floor as he says it. He and Katharine are strangely out of sync, as if every development is new to them, untested.
“So what is it exactly that you want me to do?”
Katharine suddenly laughs with nervous relief.
“Golly,” she says breathlessly. “Where do we start?”
Golly
isn’t a word that I’ve heard her use before. This is all getting to her in a way that Fortner cannot have anticipated.
“We’re not gonna get anything resolved this evening in any detail,” he says, with a steadiness suggesting that from now on he will take charge. “The most important thing to stress to you is that what we’re about to embark on must be undertaken with a view to total secrecy. You can tell no one, Alec. Not a girlfriend, not your mother, not Saul, not some stranger you meet in a bar you’re never gonna see again. No one.”
“Of course.”
“Believe me, that will be the most difficult part. But you’ll quickly come to understand the kinds of sacrifices involved, and I don’t foresee that for someone of your integrity it would be a problem.”
How deft are his little flatteries.
“Integrity? This doesn’t feel all that principled.”
“You’ll be substantially remunerated for any and all information that you can give us.”
“I want that to start tonight,” I tell him, exhaling smoke in a tight cylinder, which may look self-conscious. “I want some sort of initial down payment this evening.”
There’s a fractional skip as Fortner weighs this before saying, “Of course.” As he should, he thinks I’m greedy, but it’s more important to him to keep me sweet.
“We’ll deposit ten thousand dollars in a U.S. bank account right away. You start getting irregular activity on your High Street bank account, and those guys are obliged to tell their money-laundering people, who’ll go straight to the cops.”
This is intended to worry me, but I say nothing in response. I’m waiting for Fortner to do what’s right.
“What we can do for you is give you a small amount of cash as an initial gesture of good faith. Say a thousand sterling. That suit ya?”
“Pocket money. But it’ll be okay to be getting on with.”
“Don’t worry about it, Alec, all right? We’ll see to it that the financial side of things is very satisfactory for you. You’re not gonna have any complaints. We’re also in a position to offer you employment at Andromeda if Abnex doesn’t pick up your option at the end of the year. And if they do, and if you’re still happy with our arrangement, we can keep things just as they are. But that’s all in the future.”
“I’ll need this in writing.”
“No,” he says firmly, his voice raised for the first time. “That’s imperative. Write nothing down. You let us do all the paperwork.”
“Why? Isn’t it better to cloak everything in some sort of code? Isn’t that how this is done? I don’t want it coming back to me.”
Fortner slowly shakes his head, trying his best to be patient with my apparent lack of expertise.
“It won’t come back to you. Not if there’s nothing to come back in the first place. And there won’t be if you don’t write any of it down. That’s the first rule you gotta learn.”
This is what it’s all about for Fortner: the lure, the approach, the sting. He’s relishing this situation for all the demands it is going to make on his tradecraft. He has lifted right out of himself, and all the old tingles are coming back. This is the way things used to be in the old days. This is the way he likes it.
“You have any other questions?”
“What about getting the information to you? How do I do that?”
Katharine leans forward in her chair. She’s prepared to field this one.
“We have an entire setup that will assist you with that.”
“What do you mean, an entire setup? At Andromeda?”
She looks across at Fortner, who is slowly lolling his neck from side to side, loosening tightened muscles. He stands and slides his hands into his pockets, beginning to pace the room once again.
“You explain, honey,” Katharine says to him, in a quiet, almost respectful voice. Fortner steadies himself, turns around, and smiles at me. A man preparing to reveal his hand.
“Alec,” he says, “let me put it to you this way.” He takes another couple of paces and briefly glances at the mantelpiece. “The end of the Cold War has meant an increasingly blurred line between state-sponsored intelligence gathering and private-sector espionage. Do you follow me?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“I made the crossover.”
He coughs, a throat clearer.
“You mean you used to work for the CIA?”
Asking him this feels very ordinary, very straightforward, like inquiring after his star sign.
“Yes,” he says.
I look at Katharine, whose head is very slightly bowed.
“And you?”
She looks up at her husband, waiting for him to give her clearance.
“Katharine is still with the Agency,” he says. “She has a formal relationship with Andromeda, but the federal government pays her salary.”
“Jesus.”
“I can understand your sense of shock.”
“It’s not…No…” I begin to mumble incoherently. “I always thought…Jesus.”
“Please, if I could just say at this stage that anything you might have heard or read or understood about the Agency—put that immediately to one side. The CIA is not a sinister operation—”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“It’s just the American equivalent of your Secret Intelligence Service. With a bigger budget.”
“Well, everything’s bigger in America.”
This is clever. It breaks the ice and both of them laugh. Katharine looks up and gives me a broad, flirty smile.
“Would you like to know something about what we do?” she says. “Would that make it easier for you? Get it down to a more realistic level?”
“Sure,” I say. “But I’m sitting here wondering why you need me. Why don’t you just bug the Abnex phones and get the information you need from a satellite somewhere?”
That was always going to be a naïve question, but Fortner gives it a patient, considered response.
“Only about ten percent of our intelligence is scooped by birds. We still need guys like you on the ground. The Agency has a budget of twenty-eight billion dollars a year. Only six of that goes for satellites. Agents like Katharine and myself still provide the backbone of the intelligence operation, and guys like you are our lifeblood.”
“So this is what you do all the time? Jesus, it’s overwhelming.”
Fortner smiles, like he’s glad to have everything out in the open.
“This is it.”
They are looking at each other, an undisguised relief shuttling between them.
“So what kind of stuff do you get up to? I can’t believe this, it’s so…”
“Primarily nowadays the Agency is involved in reducing the influence of Russian organized crime,” Katharine says, with the confidence of someone moving into an area of expertise. “Last June, for example, we arrested three guys who were trying to sell nuclear-grade zirconium to some of our federal agents posing as Iraqis in New York. That’s just an example.”
“FBI agents. Not the CIA?”
“That’s right,” she replies. I am amazed at her candor.
“More and more since Ames we’ve been working with the FBI,” says Fortner.
I should ask who Ames is.
“Who’s Ames?”
“You know. The trait—” Katharine stops herself short and adjusts swiftly. “The CIA agent who was spying for the KGB. He was our head of counterintelligence in Washington.”
“Oh yeah. I think I read about him.”
Fortner sits on the sofa beside Katharine and juts his chin toward the floor. Bad memories.
“How long have you guys been doing this?”
He looks up.
“Let’s not talk too much about it now, okay? We can fill you in on everything you need to know some other time.”
“Sure. Fine. Whatever.”
Almost to himself, he says, “Shit, it’s not like you’ll be doing anything in the same sphere as Rick Ames. What we’re asking you to do isn’t anything like that. What you’ll be doing for Andromeda isn’t gonna get people killed.”
“I understand that. I wouldn’t do it if it did.”
“Good,” he says, looking at Katharine. “That’s good to know. I think it’s important to have standards, and I respect you for that, Alec, I really do. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t even compare the two. So let’s not get sidetracked. What remains to be said right now—the most important thing as far as you’re concerned—is that there’s a common misconception about how all this works.”
Katharine, who has been listening quietly, stands and offers us coffee. We both accept.
“All you gotta do is bring us as much information as you can without arousing suspicion with any of your colleagues or with Abnex security. Those offices are under twenty-four-hour camera surveillance, ditto the Xerox room.”
“So you want me to photocopy stuff?”
“We’ll go over it. I’m just giving you some basic ground rules. Everything you do on your computer terminal will be logged.” He starts to chop the air with his hand, marking out each point. “Presume that your telephone is tapped. Never communicate with us using e-mail or cell phone. These are just basic precautions.”
“I see.”
I hear Katharine in the kitchen taking down mugs from a cupboard.
“There’s also a problem that’s unique to your situation. We share a lot of intelligence with your government, and a lot of the codes and ciphers we use are identical to those employed by Five and SIS. We start using them, and they’d be on to us right away. So we can’t encrypt text or scramble conversations. I wouldn’t wanna scare you. You just have to be smart. We can go over all this in much finer detail when we’re a lot less pumped up. For now, all I would emphasize to you is to keep it simple. Go home with that thought. Don’t ever try to do too much, especially at first. Just make everything look as natural as possible.”
“That’s it?”
Fortner laughs.
“That’s it. If you don’t make a big deal about it, no one else will. Years gone by, we might have asked you to take a couple of weeks’ vacation so we could get you off to a safe house back home and give you some basic training in equipment and communications. In your case, none of that will be necessary. This is just a small operation. Like I said, we’re just gonna keep things real simple. That’s the mistake a lot of people make. They make things too complicated for themselves, start feeling like the whole world is watching them when in fact the whole world doesn’t have a goddamn clue what’s going on. You’re just plain old Alec Milius to Abnex, and it’ll stay that way as long as you don’t do anything that’s gonna arouse anyone’s suspicion. Don’t go looking for extra information that wouldn’t ordinarily cross your desk. Keep it real simple. We’ll get into isolated dead-drops, surveillance exercises, and audio penetrations only when it’s absolutely necessary. Otherwise, it doesn’t need to get complicated.”
“What sort of information do you want? Memos, financial reports, business plans…?”
“That kinda thing, yes,” he says, though his expression hints at greater prizes. “Get us everything you safely can. Even information about your operation that you might consider to be of no interest to us. Don’t make any judgment on the validity of documentation on our behalf. Are we clear?”
“Sure.”
Katharine comes back in with the tray of coffee. She distributes the mugs quietly, settles back down on the sofa, and says, “Did you say anything about Caspian exploration, Fort? Did you mention 5F371?”
Fortner does very well here. She has made a bad mistake, but he betrays no sign of it.
“How do you know about that?” I ask. “How do you know about 5F371?”
And he says, very coolly, “It’s common knowledge, right? Look, we’ll get to that some other time. Later. No need to talk about specifics at the moment.”
“All we need for you now is a code name,” Katharine says, also recovering well.
“Yes,” says Fortner, sipping his coffee, then putting the mug on the table. “Kathy came up with JUSTIFY. How do you feel about that?”