A Spy By Nature (31 page)

At work on Tuesday afternoon, three days before Cohen is due back from Baku, I get a call from Katharine. I am unprepared for the conversation and struggle to summon up the necessary zip. My mind is so slack that I speak only briefly in abrupt phrases that trail off, going nowhere. Katharine, who is evidently cheery and content, picks up on this and after a couple of minutes asks, “You okay?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I dunno. You sound kinda odd. Sad.”

I almost believe she cares.

“I’m fine.”

“Sure?”

“Absolutely.”

We talk about the election. Katharine says that if she had British citizenship she would vote for Blair, because he has the requisite “dynamism” that’s lacking in John Major. Fortner, on the other hand, feels sympathetic to the prime minister, seeing him as an essentially decent man laid low by the vanities of his grudge-filled colleagues.

“By the way,” she says, changing the subject. “That gift you gave us, the CD. It’s great. Terrific. Just exactly what we were hoping for.”

I absorb this, the first piece of good news in days.

“I’m glad,” I say, but nothing else.

“It took a long time for you to find it, but it was worth the wait.”

There’s the sound of a tap running in the room where she is talking. She must be using the phone in the kitchen. Fridge magnets, a wooden rack of wines. My concentration wanders. I can think of nothing to say.

“So maybe we’ll see you before too long, huh?”

“That would be nice.”

I cannot lift myself out of this sapped funk. The intensity I need for JUSTIFY has somehow vanished. I cannot even lie with my voice on a phone.

“You sure you’re okay, Alec?”

“Just a bit tired, that’s all.”

“Maybe you should take a vacation. They work you too hard.”

This is when I see Tanya coming out of Murray’s office, her eyes flooded with tears. I think at first that she has been fired, but this is sadness for another person; it isn’t the grief of self-pity. Her cheeks, the stretch of her face, have flushed to raw pink, like someone with a bad cold. She has a handkerchief balled tightly in her right hand, which she is pressing weakly against her nose. I am the only other person in the office.

“Alec?”

“Sorry, Kathy. Look, can I ring you back?”

“Sure. Get some rest, will ya?”

I replace the receiver slowly, without saying good-bye. Tanya is slumped now at her desk and I start walking over to console her. Murray appears in the doorway, arms propped on both sides at head height.

“Can I have a word?”

He does not wait for me to answer, turning back in the direction of his office on the opposite side of the corridor.

“You all right?” I say to Tanya.

“You’d better go in,” she says.

“Shut the door, will you?”

Murray is standing in the bright spring light of his window, which overlooks a merchant bank and a small block of flats. He has his back to me, staring out over the City. He is very still. A man who has found a calm within himself so that he may deliver bad news.

I close the door. Someone walks past outside and I hear a woman’s voice, in concerned tones, asking Tanya a question.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“It’s about Harry.”

Murray turns, and I find that my head lolls down, shamed into staring at the carpet.

“He’s been badly injured in a fight in Baku. A robbery. Three, they think, maybe four local boys attacked him. Knives. He’s in bad shape.”

We’ll take care of him.

“He’s alive?”

“Intensive care.”

We will see to it that Harry Cohen no longer poses a threat to the operation.

“Where?”

“He’s in a hospital in Geneva.”

“What’s the extent of his injuries?”

“Three broken ribs. Internal bleeding. Broken arm, hairline fracture to the skull. They don’t think there’s been damage to the brain, but it’s too early to say. He’s not been conscious.”

“Does his girlfriend know?”

“Already in Switzerland. Mum and dad as well.”

“I’m so sorry.”

At this, Murray appears to shiver.

“What are you sorry for?” he says, like a clue to something he has doubted about me. “What does it have to do with you?”

“It’s just a figure of speech.”

He turns back to the window.

“He’s not going to die.” The way I say this makes it sound like a statement of fact, not a question.

“No. Chances are.”

“That’s good, at least. I’d better see if Tanya’s okay.”

“Yeah. Take her out for a coffee or something.”

“Sure.”

I leave Murray’s office, closing the door behind me. Tanya, still seated at her desk, is being comforted by one of the girls from personnel, who is sitting on her haunches, her arm half around Tanya’s back. They both look up, as if expecting me to speak, and I say, “It’s unbelievable,” but the words may come out too softly to be heard. Neither of them replies. I cross the room, take my coat off the rack, pick up my briefcase, and walk to the door.

“I need some air,” I tell them. “I’m going for a walk.”

Tanya gives a desperate short nod of assent, her face still blotched with tears, and I make my way to the lift.

I can see them close in, the dull glint of a muddied blade, the suddenness of it. They are upon him so quickly. A kick burying into his kidneys, bleeding. The complete lack of any sound. Just the thud of a boot, a punch landing awkwardly across his shoulders, another following instantly, smashing bone. He feels warm suddenly with the blood in his clothes, but the pain in his ribs is wrenching. He can no longer see. There is a taste of vomit growing in his throat.

The stark truth of cause and effect appears now with a clarity that I have never before allowed myself to acknowledge. There is no longer anything theoretical about what I have been doing. My actions have had a direct and appalling consequence. The guilt is overpowering. I have a lurching need to talk to somebody, to confess and to explain. And there is only Saul.

In a telephone box a block away from the office, I dial his number, but it just rings and rings. No one home. I try the mobile, but he has left it on message. He could be out of town on a shoot, or screening his calls. I do not know where Saul is.

“It’s Alec. Please, if you get this, can you ring me? At home. I’m going home. It’s urgent. I need…I really need someone to talk to about something.”

A woman has appeared outside the booth, waiting to use the phone. I hang up, and a coin falls with a clatter behind the small metal flap. I retrieve the ten-pence piece from the slot. The woman comes around to my left, but she does not look directly through the glass. She just wants to let me know that she’s there. Where is Saul?

Then, like a temptation, I feed the coin back into the telephone and dial her number from memory.

She answers after just a half ring. There’s even a little performance in the cadence of her “hello.” A need to be liked.

It takes me a beat to respond.

“Kate. It’s Alec.”

I travel to her house in a kind of trance, blank of thought and purpose. The taxi ride becomes a stark fact: within twenty minutes I will be in a room with Kate for the first time in over two years. She didn’t sound surprised to hear from me. There was no gulp or awkward silence on the phone, no apparent sense of shock. Just a note of happy surprise, almost as if she had been expecting me to call.

Yes, it’s a good time. Come straight round. I understand. Anything.

I pay the driver and walk the short distance to the front door of her house. It’s still deep blue, the glass mottled, the base flecked with the scratches of a dog’s paw. I glance up at the sitting-room window, looking for a twitch of curtain, some sign of her, but there isn’t even a light on inside. So many times I walked up these steps and just the sight of her face would lift me, an inexplicable joy. Will that still happen? Can I still feel things in that way?

So I ring the bell. I don’t hesitate. I just press it right away.

Odd not to have keys. Odd to have to wait.

A light comes on in the hall and then the tall outline of her, blurred by the glass. Now comes the first true nervousness, a swallowing void in my stomach. This was a sudden decision. I have not thought it through. Her hand is on the latch of the door.

New haircut. Bobbed. It suits her. In the first instant that I see her I know that it will be possible to tell her everything and to depend on her silence. Kate says my name very softly with a nice ironic smile that does something to diffuse the forced theater of reunion. Then we hug—it seems the right thing to do—but that goes wrong. I lean too far in, across the threshold, and our shoulders collide. We do not kiss.

“I like your hair.”

“Thanks,” she says, dismissively. “Had it done a while ago.”

Her mood is cool, patient but without much warmth. Perhaps that will change. To begin with, she will want to show me that she has moved on. Perhaps for this reason there has been no attempt to look pretty for me. Her face is without makeup and she is wearing her old Nicole Farhi sweater, stretched and holed at the elbow, with a pair of torn blue Levi’s. No perfume, either.

She turns and walks back into the hall and I see that she has put on weight, perhaps as much as fifteen pounds. Her hips have widened out. All of us getting older.

“Let’s go to the kitchen,” she says. “I made tea.”

That’s her mug on the table, the one with the teaspoon in it. She always liked her coffee that way. She’d lie in bed in the morning with her index finger wrapped around the handle of the spoon, supping with sleepy eyes.

Not much has changed in here. Everything still smells and looks the same. The Hermitage poster from the time Kate went to St. Petersburg is still hanging on the wall, and there’s a pile of yellowed newspapers on a wicker chair by the door. Just like the old days. We never got around to recycling. A dishwasher, though, over by the sink. That’s new.

“You got a dishwasher.”

“Yes.”

“They’re great. Wish I had one. Saves so much time.”

She smooths down her hair, edgy and flushed now. This isn’t easy for her. Memories coming back all the time.

“You sounded awful on the phone,” she says.

“It’s just been a terrible few weeks. I had some bad news.”

“No one’s hurt, are they?”

“No. Nothing like that. No one that you know, anyway.”

She looks perplexed.

“I’m sorry to ring you out of the blue. You were probably busy.”

“I wasn’t.”

Think of something to say. Fill the silence.

“Are we alone?” I ask.

Kate hesitates, gives a look that I interpret as guilt, then says, “Yes,” as she touches her chin.

“Good. Just had to be sure.”

I sit at the seat nearest the window, weak sunlight on my back. There’s a small yellow jug on the table with daffodils in it. Kate goes toward the sink and offers me tea, tapping a steaming pot on the counter. I say no. If I could only tell what she is thinking. Is she still angry with me, or is this slight detachment only nerves? She walks back to her chair, an apple in hand, and sits.

“So what is it?” she asks. She has a genuine look of concern about her, the patience of a true friend, but this may be entirely artificial. She is capable of that, of putting on a show. It’s quite possible that she feels nothing but hatred for me.

“I’m involved in something,” I tell her, starting out sooner than I had anticipated. “I just needed to talk to someone. Saul wasn’t around.”

She doesn’t react to the mention of Saul’s name. He is just someone from her past now.

“So I rang you. That’s why I rang you. Because of that. I’m sorry to bother you like this. It just seemed to make sense.”

“It’s really all right.”

She must think it’s weak of me to have come here: how could she not? I should have a new life by now, a new girlfriend, somebody else to lean on. To rely on the past like this is pitiful. I’ve known too many couples who meet up after an absence of a couple of years, and one of them always wonders why they wasted so much time on the other.

“You look tired,” she says.

“I haven’t been sleeping all that well.”

“You sure you won’t have tea?”

“Sure.”

“Nothing else? Sprite or Coke? Something to eat?”

“Nothing, thanks. You’re kind to offer.”

“So how come you haven’t been sleeping?” she asks.

I take out a cigarette and light it, not bothering to ask if that’s okay. I couldn’t bear too much politeness between us. My eyes fix on an unpaid bill lying on the kitchen table, £124 to BT. At least they have Cohen in a Geneva hospital with Swiss doctors who’ll give him the best treatment they can.

“Alec?”

I had wandered off.

“Sorry. Why am I not sleeping? Stress, I suppose. Just worry.”

“About what?”

“All kinds of stuff…”

“What kind of things? Why have you come here?”

“I think I may have been responsible for something terrible. For someone getting hurt.”

She doesn’t visibly react to this. She will just want me to go on talking. “He’s someone at work. I’m in the oil business now. He’s on my team.” I am starting to speak more quickly now, feeling the rush of the impending confession. “What I’m going to say to you, Kate, you have to swear to tell no one. You can’t speak to your dad about this, or to Hesther, or anyone….”

“Alec, I won’t. I promise.”

“Because no one knows. There’s just me and three other men, that’s all.”

She doesn’t bother to reassure me again of her intent to keep her word. She has promised it once, and that, in her view, is enough.

“About two years ago I was approached by someone to be recruited for MI6.”

“What’s that, like MI5?”

“MI5 is domestic. Six is foreign intelligence. Its proper name is SIS. The Secret Intelligence Service.”

Kate nods.

“I did a lot of interviews and exams. The whole process took about three months. The man who approached me was called Michael Hawkes. He knew my father when they were students.”

“Did I ever meet him?” she asks, a question that strikes me as odd.

“No. At least I don’t think so. Why?”

“Go on,” she says.

“He was taking up a seat on the board of directors at a British oil company called Abnex.”

“Never heard of it.”

“No. It’s small.”

Kate sips her tea.

“He told me that Abnex was having a problem with industrial espionage, people trying to extract information from employees of the firm to benefit rival organizations. In particular there were two known CIA agents working out of an American oil company called Andromeda, using marketing consultancy as a cover. Since we share so much intelligence with the Americans, and they know our personnel, MI5 couldn’t use any of their own people. So Michael asked me if I would pose as a target for them, if I would present myself as somebody who would be willing to hand over sensitive documents in exchange for money.”

“Jesus.”

“I know.” I attempt a smile. “Who would have thought it?”

“And you did it?” she asks, deadpan. “You went ahead with this?”

“I was flattered. I was at a loose end. Yes, I went ahead with it.”

She pushes out her lower lip and I feel a need to say, “What young man of twenty-five
wouldn’t
go ahead with it?”

Kate responds to this with a twitch of her mouth, which suggests that she can think of several who wouldn’t. Steady, able fellows with a puritan streak.

“So that’s how I got the job in the oil business. It was put together by Michael Hawkes.”

“I see,” she says.

“And by David Caccia, the chairman of Abnex, who’s ex-Foreign Office, working alongside another man, someone they both know at MI5.”

Some dying trace of professional responsibility prevents me from mentioning Lithiby by name.

“Amazing,” she says under her breath.

“What is?” I ask.

“I heard that you’d got that job on merit. Because of your languages.”

“Who told you that?”

She hesitates.

“I saw Saul at a party a year ago. That’s what he said.”

Saul never told me anything about seeing Kate at a party.

“That’s what people are supposed to think. That’s what Saul thinks. He doesn’t know about any of this. Neither does Mum. I haven’t been able to tell anybody. That’s why I made you promise not to discuss it with anyone. I know it’s a lot to ask, but…”

She says my name softly, to herself, a whispered consternation.

“I’ve had to maintain complete secrecy. It’s driven me crazy. Can you imagine not being able to tell your friends or your family—”

“Absolutely,” she says, interrupting me. “I can understand that.”

We look at each other briefly, the first vaguely intimate moment to pass between us. Her skin is so close now, the vivid green of her eyes, but the instant passes very quickly. Kate seems to check it. She will not smile at me or show any real warmth, beyond a certain businesslike efficiency.

“But how did they set all this up?” she asks, pushing hair out of her face. “I don’t get it. Michael Hawkes and these other people you work for. How did they set you up with the Americans?”

“They leaked my SIS recruitment report to the CIA, having taken out any reference to Michael Hawkes and doctored the psychological profile to make it look like I’d be more susceptible to treason.”

“How?”

“Gave me low self-esteem, delusions of grandeur, no money. The classic traitor profile. It was all shit.”

“So you’re a spy? You work for MI5?”

There’s no concealed pride in the way she asks this, only worry in her voice, perhaps even contempt.

“At the moment, I’m what they call a support agent, someone who’s not an official employee but who assists the intelligence services in some other capacity. They may grant access to a private bank account for money laundering, or provide safe houses in London, that kind of thing. MI5 have offered me a full-time job if I want it.”

I had expected her to be impressed by this, but nothing registers. She says, “Do they pay you?”

“Yes.”

But she does not ask how much. “And what? These two Americans think that you’re loyal to them and you’re not?”

“Yes. Some of the information I’ve given them is legitimate, but most of it has been doctored. That was the purpose of the initiative.”

“And the CIA pay you as well?”

I nod.

She sucks all this in, biting down on the apple for the first time.

“I can’t believe this stuff goes on. And I can’t believe you’re involved in it, Alec.”

“It’s happening all the time,” I tell her, again feeling some need to justify myself. “Everyone’s doing it. European countries spy on other European countries. The Yanks spy on us, we spy on them. There are SIS officers operating under diplomatic cover in almost every one of our embassies overseas.”

“So it’s a widespread thing?”

The experience of seeing her come to terms with this is bewildering. I had just blandly assumed that everybody knew about it.

“Of course. Let me give you an example. Just the other day, we found out that French intelligence had people listening in on secret negotiations between Siemens, a German technology company, and the South Korean government over a contract to build high-speed trains. Using that information, a French company was in a position to offer the Koreans a better deal and they won the contract.”

“It makes you sick.”

“I know. Those guys even bug business-class seats on Air France flights out of Paris. We’re all supposed to be in this fucking European community to make trading easier between member states, but this is how the real business gets done.”

“But with America?” she says. “They’re our allies. Why did you have to get involved with them? Why didn’t Abnex just prosecute the two people from the CIA?”

“Because it would be politically explosive. And because intelligence people love the thrill of the chase, the satisfaction of knowing that they’re getting one over on the other guy. It’s all tit for tat.”

“Childish, if you ask me,” she says, glancing out the window. “What are these Americans called? What are their names?”

“Katharine Lanchester and Fortner Grice. A married couple. He’s much older.”

Kate clearly has a growing interest in this now, a look of privileged access, though as yet no discernible admiration of my role in it.

“And how did you know that they’d come to you? How did you…? I don’t understand how it all works.”

I put out the cigarette. It tasted suddenly sour.

“We were going to set up a meeting with the two of them at Abnex to discuss a possible joint venture with Andromeda. There’s a lot of that going on in the Caspian Basin, a lot of cooperation. Companies get together and share the cost of exploration, drilling, whatever. That’s how I wanted it to go, but Hawkes and my controller at Five thought that that approach would be too obvious.”

The sensation of finally being able to break my silence has momentarily suppressed any immediate concern for Cohen. Two years of backed-up secrets, all pouring out in a scrambled rush. I feel loose and relieved to be free of them.