A Spy By Nature (29 page)

This is what they told me, a long time ago.

Only make contact in the event of an emergency.

Only telephone if you believe that your position has been fatally compromised.

Under no circumstances are you to approach us unless it is absolutely necessary in order to preserve the security of the operation.

This is the number.

I ring from a telephone box outside the Shepherd’s Bush Theatre. With Hawkes out of contact, I have no other choice. The woman who answers says, “Two-seven-eight-five.”

“John Lithiby, please.”

“One moment.”

Lithiby picks up.

“Yes?”

“John. It’s Alec.”

“Yes?”

“We need to have a meeting.”

“I see.”

It sounds as if the breath has gone out of him. I never wanted to be a disappointment to them.

“Where are you?” he asks.

“Near my home.”

“Can you get to the restaurant for midday?”

“I’ve taken the morning off.”

“Good. I’ll send Sinclair to meet you. He will escort you to a place where we can speak freely.”

At the restaurant off Notting Hill Gate, downstairs out of sight of the street-facing window, I order a bottle of mineral water and wait for Lithiby’s stooge.

The only consolation in all this is that I am doing the right thing. It is better to act now, when I can take preventive measures against Cohen, than to let matters get beyond my control.

I never thought it would come to this. I never thought it would be necessary to tell the truth.

Sinclair is on time. He comes down the stairs at a fast clip wearing brown suede loafers and a corduroy suit. There is, as always, too much gel in his hair. He scans the room, sees me, but makes no discernible greeting. His height—six three—is immediately striking. It marks him out. He walks over to my table and I stand to greet him, to shake his firm hand. He looms four or five inches above me, looking down like a prefect. I hate the unearned psychological advantage of the tall, the payoff from an accident of birth.

“You’re lookin’ a bit ropy, Alec.”

His accent suggests a desire to shake off London vowels.

“I’m not too bad.”

We sit down. The waiter, new to the place, comes back with a bottle of Hildon and two menus in his other hand. He pours each of us a glass of water and begins reciting the specials in halting English.

Sinclair lets him get to the third dish before he says, “That’s all right, mate. We’re not staying.”

The waiter looks confused.

“It’s not that we don’t like it here. It’s just we have to be somewhere else.”

“I don’t understand,” he says, a Russian accent. “You don’t want eat?”

“That’s right,” I tell him. “I’ll leave money for the water. Just let me know how much it is.”

“What you like,” the waiter says with a shrug. He walks away from the table briskly, as if we have hurt his feelings.

“Just leave five pounds,” Sinclair tells me firmly. “No need to wait for the bill.”

I don’t like it when Sinclair tells me what to do. There’s only a five-year gap in age between us, but he likes playing the slick old hand, the unruffable pro. To irritate him, to make him look cheap, I take a ten-pound note from my wallet and wedge it between the pink tablecloth and a worn glass ashtray. Sinclair looks at it and then stands to leave. I want to let him know that I have access to money.

We cross the room. A Japanese businessman passes us on the stairs with a young Slavic blonde draped on his arm, probably a hooker. She looks drugged out and shamed. Then we go outside onto the street.

Sinclair and I do not speak in the taxi, not out of concern for what the driver might overhear but because there is so little to be said between us. He gives the address of a hotel at the west end of Kensington High Street and spends the rest of the journey looking for signs of a tail out the back window. Aftershave lifts off his clothes, a brutish smell of lavender. I start to dread Lithiby.

The journey takes less than ten minutes. Sinclair pays, makes a big deal of leaving a generous tip, and taps the roof of the cab as it pulls away. We walk up a ramp at the side of the hotel entrance and move haltingly through stiff revolving doors.

The decor is international marble, light and gleaming. A reception desk widens out ahead of us, manned by a slim, mustachioed man and a brunette with galaxies of dandruff stuck to the shoulders of her corporate blazer. I scan the lobby for surveillance. Two tourists—undoubtedly Americans—are sitting on a sofa behind us. There are four Japanese, all men, loitering near a window, a cleaning woman stooped and dusting, a Royal Mail deliveryman with a clipboard making his way across the marble floor, and two young girls giggling near the entrance to a buffetstyle restaurant. We have not been followed inside.

Sinclair and I walk to a bank of lifts. There is one already waiting; its doors slide open, and we ride it, just the two of us, to the tenth floor. There is a large mirror inside the elevator car that makes the narrow space feel less claustrophobic. Sinclair brings a mobile phone out of his hip pocket like a revolver and twists it lovingly in his hand. He turns to me.

“We have people on either side of 1011. It’s on the top floor, directly above a conference suite, so there’s no listening threat from above or below.”

We step out of the lift and make our way to the room along a cream-walled corridor, the floor a marie-rose carpet flecked with ticks of blue. Sinclair walks a pace ahead of me, brisk and purposeful. My mind is simply not prepared for the rigors of a debriefing. As we pass room 1010 I can hear voices, relaxed cockney laughter. There are men inside setting up recording equipment, ready to take down everything I say.

Room 1011 is standard-issue. A hard-mattressed double bed with a smooth cream cover lying taut across it. A dressing table with a strip-lighted mirror, a freestanding lamp next to velvet curtains shut heavy against the daylight. There’s a smell of cleaning fluids, a sense of the recently hoovered, as if the memories of all former guests have been quickly and efficiently erased.

John Lithiby is sitting in a narrow, high-backed chair in front of the closed curtains. There is a briefcase at his feet, but he has left no trace of himself elsewhere in the room. Sinclair shows me in, nods deferentially at Lithiby, and leaves. I hear the door to 1010 open and close as he enters the next room.

“Alec.”

“Hello, John.”

He appears to be in a stark, blunt mood. I stand in the narrow space between bed and wall, getting my bearings. I back up and scope the bathroom. Neat soaps in packets, a shower above the bath partly obscured by a blue plastic curtain. Everything so clean.

“Why don’t you come in and sit down?” he says. “We can start whenever you’re ready.”

Nothing about Lithiby ever changes. His shirt is blue with a stiff white collar, the graying hair barbered in an exacting straight line that stretches from the back of his semibald cranium to the upper perimeters of his forehead. The bespectacled, bony face looks drawn out by intense concentration. It is hard to imagine such a man having a private life. I perch on the bed, at the corner farthest from his chair.

“Now, what is the precise nature of the problem?” he says, interlocking long fingers in his lap. “Why have you come in?”

“Last night I dropped off the North Basin report that David prepared.”

“We were there. We saw you go in.”

“Did your people spot Harry Cohen?”

“Who?”

I have never mentioned Cohen’s name in any of my reports to Lithiby. That fact alone will make the next hour extremely awkward.

“Harry Cohen. He works on my team at Abnex. Michael and David know him. Where
is
Michael, by the way?”

Lithiby moves forward and back within the narrow confines of his chair. He looks to have been suddenly constricted by my question.

“I don’t know if they did,” he says, referring back to Cohen. “I’d have to check the report.”

“He suspects that I may be handing secrets to Andromeda.”

“Why would he think that?” There is a rising note of surprise in his measured voice.

“He came to my house last night, close to one o’clock. I was back from Cheyne Walk after dropping off the file. He said he’d seen me going into Atwater’s building.”

“This man has been following you?”

“No,” I say, confidently. The lie just slips out because it has to. “But he may have been following the Americans. They’ve complained of an increase in surveillance.”

“Yes,” Lithiby says, dismissively. “I would ignore that if I were you. We looked into it. The Americans let you believe their flat was bugged to hurry you along. They wanted the survey of 5F371, and they wanted it quickly. That also explains why they were at Atwater’s office last night. We saw them leave ten minutes after you, presumably having taken possession of the file.”

“So you don’t think Cohen has been following them?”

“We’ve certainly never seen him.” He coughs, once and hard, his lungs sounding old. “Which begs the question, what was he doing there?”

And that is the question I do not want to answer, because it will reveal that I have kept things from them. I try to work around it.

“Cohen said it was just coincidence. He’d been to a dinner party on a houseboat and just happened to be passing Atwater’s building.”

Lithiby shuffles, pinching the fabric of his suit trousers to loosen them away from his thigh.

“So he comes out of his dinner party, sees you going into a building occupied by two employees of an American oil firm, and from that deduces that you are an industrial spy?”

I admit, “It’s not that simple.”

“I didn’t think it was. I imagine you have a little bit more to tell me.”

Lithiby’s attitude has already started to bend into a characteristic sarcasm.

I say, “Maybe it would help if I told you exactly what happened yesterday.”

“From that we could certainly put together a more complete overall picture.”

I steady myself, begin.

“Caccia’s report landed on my desk at about three o’clock yesterday afternoon. I immediately telephoned the Americans to set up the meeting with Atwater.”

“As you were instructed to do by Katharine,” Lithiby says. The smug self-assurance of his voice has started to unnerve me. “Where did you telephone from?”

“From the office.”

“Why didn’t you use a secure line?”

Another mistake.

“I didn’t think Cohen would recognize the dry-cleaner as code.”

Saying “dry-cleaner” like this sounds ridiculous. Lithiby breathes contemptuously through his nose.

“But he did recognize it. He suspected that something was up.”

“Apparently. Yes.”

“Had he been given any reason in the past to suspect that you were involved in something covert?”

“He’s been acting strangely toward me for some time.”

I do not like admitting this. I did not mention it in any of my monthly reports. Lithiby, who would be justified in becoming angry, looks away and appears to stare at a bedside lamp. He is weighing things up.

“In what way ‘strangely’?” he asks. Often he will latch on to individual words, inspecting them for hidden meanings, for ambiguity.

“Cohen was suspicious of my friendship with Katharine and Fortner.”

“Suspicious?”

He is still looking at the lamp, gazing.

“He felt it was professionally inappropriate.”

“I see,” he says, his voice tightening slightly. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”

Lithiby closes off the question by turning back to look at me.

“I didn’t think it was important.”

“You didn’t think it was important.”

This drifts, an echo that makes me feel scolded and useless. His eyes are gradually narrowing with irritation.

“And although you knew that Cohen was suspicious of your relationship with the Americans, you told us nothing about it and still made the call in his presence?”

I do not reply. There seems no point in doing so.

“How did he react when you were setting up the Atwater meeting?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, buying time.

Lithiby’s reply is quick and impatient, a rapid list of questions he considers obvious to the overall design: “Was he listening? Was he alone? Did he look up? How did he react?”

“He did nothing,” I say, equally quickly, to match him. “He was working quietly at his desk.”

Something knocks against the wall to Lithiby’s left, a hard, heavy falling, but neither of us moves. I add, implausibly, “I can only conclude that it wasn’t the code that alerted him. It must have been something else.”

Lithiby stares hard. My last remark has triggered something. It occurs to me, only now, that because my work phone is tapped by GCHQ, he may already know about Cohen redialing the Irish woman and hearing the word
justify
said freely on the line. If that is the case, he may think of this conversation solely as a test of my integrity. But I cannot tell Lithiby what motivated Cohen to confront me. That information might be enough to persuade him to shut everything down.

“And you have no idea what that something else could be?” he says.

“None at all,” I reply.

“And yet from somewhere this Harry Cohen has got hold of the idea that you are handing information to Andromeda?”

“Yes.”

Clearly, he thinks I am keeping something from him. There’s an increasingly curt, disapproving tone to Lithiby’s questions, an impatience with my failure to provide him with satisfactory answers.

“You said earlier that you were certain Cohen hasn’t been following you. How can you be so sure?”

“I just know he hasn’t been. You get a feel for these things.”

“Yes, you do,” Lithiby says, in apparent agreement. “Tell me what happened last night. What time did you leave your flat?”

“Ten thirty. Around then.”

“And what did you do? How did you get to Cheyne Walk?”

“I drove down Uxbridge Road, got onto Shepherd’s Bush Green, did a complete circuit of the roundabout to shake off anyone who might be following—”