Authors: Charles Cumming
I like it.
“Sounds fine to me. Why do I need one?”
“In the unlikely event that there’s any kind of an emergency, that’s the name you would use to contact us. We call it a cryptonym. It’s also how you’ll be known to our case officer at the Agency.”
“I see.”
“So are we clear?” he asks, rubbing his hands together with a broad smile. “Is this thing under way?”
“Oh yes,” I reply. “I’m clear. Absolutely.”
This thing is definitely under way.
When Aldrich Ames made the decision to become an agent for the KGB, he did it swiftly and without moral compunction. His treachery was motivated solely by greed. He walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington on a sunlit mideighties afternoon, presented himself to the nearest intelligence operative, and offered up his services in exchange for large sums of money. The Russians couldn’t believe their luck.
Treason is rarely explained by ideology. Nobody really knows why Blunt crossed over. He only got into Marxism as a way of understanding paintings. The others—Burgess, Maclean, Philby—were twisted in on themselves, corrupt from the soul up. Marxism was only theoretically attractive to them; their attachment to it was not deeply felt. What mattered more was the secret thrill of betrayal, the proper fulfillment of their vast egotism. All the traitor ever craves is respect.
Take Ames. He needed to live with the constant, incontrovertible knowledge that his actions were cherished at a higher level, that what he was doing was world shifting, deeply consequential. To be merely run-of-the-mill was intolerable to him. Up to a point, Ames was disenchanted with the CIA, sick of going out in the name of American imperialism and risking his life to obtain intelligence that was then overlooked by the Agency’s masters on Capitol Hill for reasons of political expediency. But the satisfaction of his vanity was crucial, and money provided that. Ames later explained that he wanted money for “what it could guarantee”: a sports car, an apartment in Europe, a fur coat for his foxy Colombian wife. The trappings of wealth also provided him with the material proof of his importance to the other side.
It was the money that was to prove his undoing. Conspicuous and inexplicably vast reserves of cash and possessions led the molehunt, after months of blind alleys and false leads, directly to Ames’s door. He was arrested at his home in Virginia and bundled into the back of an FBI Pontiac by a huddle of G-men wearing flak jackets and mirrored shades.
“Think,” he was heard repeating to himself, over and over again. “Think.”
A few days after the meeting in Colville Gardens, Fortner and Katharine call me at Abnex to arrange a rendezvous at the swimming pool in Dolphin Square, a vast, brown-brick residential cube on the north bank of the Thames.
The reception area, off Chichester Street in Pimlico, is a hotel lobby. Fortner and Katharine are sitting on a small two-seater sofa just inside the main doors, both looking out of place and friendless. They seem quite unable to shed that unassimilated quality that marks them out as Americans. Katharine is wearing a white tennis dress and clean plimsolls over pale yellow socks. Fortner has on a blue tracksuit with expensive Reebok pumps and two sweatbands secured tightly around his wrists. They seem too healthy, too big boned, to be British, like tourists off the red-eye whom I have been asked to show around.
As we greet one another, it is immediately plain that a shift in the emphasis of our relationship has already taken place. When I kiss Katharine’s cheek, it seems colder, and my handshake with Fortner is rigid with meaning. He holds the eye contact a beat too long. We are bound up in one another now, each of us capable of ruining the other. That knowledge acts as a background to our exchange of pleasantries. During the short walk from the lobby to the pool, there’s something forced about the level of civility between us.
Fortner is carrying a heavy sports bag bulging with towels and clothing. We walk downstairs to the sports complex and he places it on the ground at the ticket desk, paying for the three of us to swim.
“That’s kind of you, Fort,” I tell him as he puts his wallet in a side pocket of the holdall.
“Least I can do, Milius.”
“So I’ll see you guys in there?” Katharine calls out as she walks off in the direction of the ladies’ changing rooms. “Got your ten pence for the lockers?”
“Don’t you worry ’bout that, honey,” Fortner shouts after her—too loudly, I think, for such a small public space. “We got plenny.”
The changing room is hot with steam. Men are drifting in and out of showers and there is a stench of mingled deodorants. Walking in, I am confronted by the tuberous cock and balls of a man of Fortner’s generation, vigorously drawing a towel across his back like someone waving a scarf at a football match. I look away and find a small area of bench at which to undress. Fortner slots in beside me, cramping up the space.
“All right if I slide in here, buddy?” he says.
I don’t want to do the nude thing with him. Not at all.
“Sure,” I reply.
Gradually he unpacks his affairs: a too-small pair of Speedo trunks, a set of sky-blue goggles, and, to my surprise, a large black bathing cap. Quite quickly he is undressed, Adam-naked for the world to see. Fortner’s skin is white and, with the exception of the upper part of his chest, comparatively hairless. But the shoulders are broad and strong, and his rib cage juts out proudly, as though packed with voluminous lungs. He looks tougher with his clothes off. I glance away as he puts on the Speedos.
“You not gettin’ changed there, Alec?”
This is said brazenly, and two men sitting nearest us on the bench glance over suspiciously. We must look like a couple of queers: rent boy and papa.
“I was just wondering if I had a ten pee.”
“I got one,” he says, reaching into his trouser pocket on the clothes hook, withdrawing a fistful of loose change and handing me a shiny ten-pence piece. “That do ya?”
I thank him and clasp the coin in my hand. Then I wrap a towel around my waist before sliding on my Bermudas. In the meantime, Fortner shoulders his bag and walks to the locker rooms. He has thick stubby legs dotted with freckles, and a faded pink scar running down the back of his right thigh. I hear the metal clatter of a locker opening, then the slide of his bag being stowed within.
“Flashy shorts,” he says as he comes back in, and the two men again look over at me. I drop my head, gathering my clothing into a tight round ball, which I place in a locker in the next room. There’s nothing worth stealing, but it would be irritating to be robbed: I have a wallet with a picture of Kate inside and a decent pair of shoes that cost me seventy quid.
By the time I have returned to the changing room, Fortner has already showered off and entered the pool. There are two men dressed in suits, preparing to leave, hair wet and faces flushed with exercise. I switch on the taps in an open shower cubicle and soap away the sweat and surface grime of an average London day, trying to clear my head for what is about to follow. I must remain alert to everything they say or imply. We have not spoken about JUSTIFY for seventy-two hours and there will be details that they will want to clarify.
My dive into the pool goes badly wrong. I haven’t been swimming in a long time, and I land too flat on the surface of the water with a loud, clapping belly flop. The hard slap against my stomach is painful and stinging. I swim briefly underwater, long enough for any embarrassment to subside, and surface in the center of the pool. Fortner and Katharine are standing in the shallow end, talking to each other, but they stop when they see me coming toward them.
Being tall, Katharine is only up to her waist in the water. She is wearing a blue bikini and her stomach looks flat and supple to the touch. I dare not look directly at her breasts in case Fortner notices. He looks absurd in the black bathing cap. It is wrapped so tightly around his head that all the blood has vanished from the upper part of his face, leaving his forehead looking white and ill. The goggles, too, are sucking down hard on his eyeballs, bulging out the surrounding skin.
“Nice temperature, don’tcha think?” he says.
“Ideal.”
“You been here before, Milius?”
“Never. You picked a good spot for the meeting.”
“That’s right,” he tells me. “Everything we say gets lost in the clamor.”
“Is that the idea?”
It’s a well-known technique.
“That’s the idea.”
Fortner splashes water onto his face and says, “You wanna go about halfway down and talk there?”
I nod and he pushes off, leading the way with a gentle crawl. Katharine follows in the slipstream and I swim with her, still adjusting to the sting and warmth of the pool. We swim directly beside each other, both of us breaststroking, and at one point our hands touch very briefly near the surface of the water. Katharine laughs instinctively as they slip apart, looking across at me with a smile. Her wet hair has glossed to jet black, thick as seaweed.
An elderly man passes us, swimming in the opposite direction. He moves with a painful slowness, as though he is here under duress. Thin gray hairs are glued across his forehead, and his face is strained from effort. His thin legs barely kick at all. Ahead of us, Fortner reaches the edge of the pool, touches down, and waits for us to join him.
“So how you doin’?” he says to me when we get there. “Everything feel okay?”
He removes the goggles, and his eyes are bloodshot and sore.
“Fine,” I reply, with no inflection. “Better than I thought it would.”
“No nerves? Second thoughts?”
“None.”
“Good. We couldn’t explain on the phone, but Kathy and I felt we should meet here today to give you the opportunity to ask any questions you may have.”
A child’s high-pitched shriek bounces off the water, piercing the space around us. I turn and see a mother coming out of the ladies’ changing room, holding a wriggling toddler by the hand.
“There is one thing,” I say, trying to keep things light and easy.
“What’s that?” Katharine asks.
“How did you know I’d do it?”
Fortner’s face retracts very slightly. This is not the question he was expecting.
“Do what?” he asks.
“How did you know I would agree?”
Fortner considers his answer for some time. Katharine, who is holding on to the ceramic edge of the pool, watches his face for clues. Finally she makes to speak, but Fortner interrupts her.
“I felt—we both felt—that you fit a certain personality type. You’re a very sensitive person, Alec. You enjoy your solitude. You expressed to us on a number of occasions a certain understandable dissatisfaction with your job….”
“And I’m short of money.”
This prompts a smile in both of them, and Fortner says, “Yes. That’s true. Things like that are not irrelevant.”
The old man passes us again, slow weightless kicks toward the deep end.
“So there is such a thing as a psychological profile?” I ask. “There’s a certain type of person who is more willing to commit an act of betrayal than another?”
“I don’t put all that much faith in them myself,” Katharine says. “I tend to go on instinct. And we always had a great feeling about you, Alec. Like you would want to do the right thing.”
“Yes,” I reply quietly.
A fit-looking man in his midthirties, wearing navy trunks and dark goggles, dives neatly into the pool and starts doing fast lengths. The blue water, which is covering me up to my shoulders, is suddenly warmer than the surrounding air. The mother and child are in the shallow end. She is teaching him how to swim.
“You have anything else you wanna ask?” Fortner says.
I must stress to them my ignorance of the intelligence world, ask something naïve about espionage.
“Yes. You said something about your organization sharing a lot of codes and stuff with MI5 and MI6. How much intelligence do we share with the Americans?”
“It’s a good question,” Katharine says, holding on to the side with outstretched arms and beginning to kick very gently underwater. “And, like Fort said, it’s relevant to your situation. Usually, we share a great deal. The Agency sits in on weekly meetings of the Joint Intelligence Committee, for example. Some time ago, the British government paid our National Security Agency about eight hundred million dollars to share satellite-signals intelligence. But there’s a problem right now with MI5. They feel that sensitive information about terrorist activities in Northern Ireland is finding its way back to the IRA via the Clinton White House. They’re blaming Kennedy Smith, our ambassador in Dublin, who they think is soft on republicanism on account of her Irish roots. It’s all bullshit of course, but the Security Service is understandably upset. They’re being a little more economical with what they hand over.”
This is certainly true. I recall Lithiby talking about it in one of our first meetings. It was just the latest in a long line of disputes with the Americans. He was also incensed that they had eavesdropped on British troops in Bosnia. At the time, I recall thinking that Lithiby’s antagonism toward the CIA may have justified the entire Abnex/Andromeda project in his eyes.
I stare down at the clear blue pool and try to think of something else to say, something that will further convey my lack of expertise and a sense of my enthusiasm about JUSTIFY. But my mind is a blank. Katharine lifts a small handful of water and lets it fall.
“You’re lookin’ a little raggedy there,” Fortner says. “You okay?”
Our lack of movement in the water has stilled my muscles. I am starting to shiver with cold.
“Sure. I’m fine. I’m just going to swim for a bit,” I tell them. “Let’s have another talk in a while.”
Ten minutes later, resting in the shallow end after six brisk lengths, my eyes are stinging with chlorine and my head aches with the effort of concentration. The pool is almost deserted. The child and her mother have gone, as has the old man. Only the man in navy trunks remains, plowing up and down the lanes with his vigorous front crawl.
Fortner’s black-capped head is bobbing up and down in the water, the goggles coming slowly toward me like lizard’s eyes. Katharine is about seven feet to his left, arms describing elegant arcs of backstroke. They touch the shallow-end wall simultaneously and move across to talk to me. Fortner rubs his eyes and makes a low noise that is only halfway to civility. He wants to get down to business.
“We need to talk about your first drop,” he says. “You wanna do that now?”
“Sure.”
“What do you think you can get us?” Katharine asks.
My answer comes out swift and easy. This is what I had planned to say today.