A Spy By Nature (35 page)

“You work it out.”

“Are you referring to Kate?”

She says nothing.

“I said, are you talking about Kate, because if you—”

“All I’m saying is that there are people who are going to want payback for this.”

“You leave me alone. You leave her alone.”

But Katharine’s voice suddenly slows into intimidation.

“You haven’t heard the last of it.”

And the line goes dead.

GCHQ picks it all up and within ninety minutes Sinclair has been dispatched to bring me in. He rings the buzzer downstairs impatiently in hard electric bursts lasting four or five seconds. It is just past ten o’clock.

“You’d better come with me,” he says, when I open the front door. “No need to pack.”

His expression is one of worn distaste. Most probably Lithiby summoned him from home just as he was preparing to go to bed. He betrays no sign of pleasure at my failure; there is just a weary contempt on his neat, tanned face. He never liked me. He never thought I was up to the job. They should have given it to him and then none of this would have happened.

I go back upstairs and put on my jacket like a condemned man. I have a few cigarettes in the inside pocket, also my wallet and an old pack of chewing gum to see me through the night. Then I lock up and go outside to the car.

We say very little to each other on the journey. Sinclair will not reveal where we are going, though I suspect that it will be a safe house and not Vauxhall Cross or Five. I cannot tell how much or how little he knows about the conversation with Katharine. Lithiby would have given him only a sketchy outline on the phone, just enough to make him realize that JUSTIFY is blown.

Sorting through the debris of what Katharine has said occupies my mind for the whole journey. There is no order to this. I experience an acute sense of self-hatred and embarrassment, but also an immense anger. I thought that I had experienced the last of failure, seen it off for good, but to have messed up like this is catastrophic. It is a personal defeat of a different order from anything that has happened to me in the past. There is also concern for Mum’s safety, for Saul’s, and for Kate’s. She knows everything about JUSTIFY, but I cannot think that Katharine’s words were anything more than scaremongering. Kate poses no threat to them. Why should they harm her? And I feel a curious sense of annoyance with her, too. Though none of this is Kate’s fault, she was the source of my failure. Were it not for the hold that she exerted over me, I would never have gone to see her, far less lied to Fortner about the two of us still being lovers.

On just one occasion, about five minutes into the journey, I attempt to make conversation with Sinclair. A cool night wind is drumming into the car through an open window, and I think I detect the sour vapor of alcohol on his breath.

“It’s funny, you know,” I say, turning toward him as he comes off the Westway, heading north toward Willesden. “After everything that’s happened in the last few—”

But he stops me short. “Listen, Alec. I’ve been instructed to keep my mouth shut. So unless you wanna talk about New Labour or somethin’, we’d better just wait till we get there.”

The street is narrow, poorly lit, suburban. Of the dozen or so houses lining both sides of the road, only two or three have lights on downstairs. It’s late, and most people have gone to bed. Sinclair pulls the car over to the right side of the road, scraping the hubcaps against the curb as he attempts to park. “Shit,” he mutters under his breath, and I unbuckle my seat belt.

A man is walking a dog on the opposite side of the street. Sinclair tells me to stay where I am until he is out of sight. Then we both get out of the car and make our way up a short driveway to the front door of a detached house with curtains drawn in all the front windows. He taps once on the foggy glass of the door, and I am surprised to see that it is Barbara who opens it from the other side. She greets Sinclair with a tired smile but shoots me a sour look that breaks from her face like a snake. No more pleasantries. That is not required of her now.

The hall is covered in a dirty brown carpet that continues upstairs to the first floor. There are two umbrellas and a walking stick in a stand beside the door, and a bright oil painting of a mountain hanging to our right as we come in. Magnolia paint covers all the walls and ceilings. It is as if we are encased in the mundane. The safe house smells stale with lack of use, yet it hides interrogations, solitudes, enforced captures. People have not been happy in this place.

Barbara ushers us slowly into the kitchen, which is where I see the three men for the first time. I was expecting Hawkes to be here, but he is not among them. Standing left to right in front of a bank of bottle-green kitchen cabinets are John Lithiby, David Caccia, and an older, bespectacled man in his late sixties. I have never seen him before, this portly, stooped Englishman with a lonely, cuckolded look in his eyes. He has an air of long experience, and the others appear quietly deferential toward him.

All three are probably wearing the clothes in which they went to work this morning: Lithiby in his customary blue shirt with its white collar, Caccia still in his gray flannel suit, the third man in cords and a tweed jacket. Dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, I feel untidy and slack beside them, yet their formal clothes are incongruous in this kitchen with its cheap fixtures and fittings, its linoleum floor patterned with worn beige checks. They are visitors here, too.

There are three mugs of tea resting on a Formica-topped table in the center of the room, brown milky fluid gradually souring in dregs at the base of each.

I try to gather myself into courage by speaking first, looking at each of them in turn.

“Good evening, David. John.” I look directly into the glasses of the older man. “Sir.”

“Good evening to you,” he says. He has no accent, but there is a gravelly resonance in his voice like that of a well-trained actor. I notice that his shoes are brown suede, one of them stained.

“Have a seat, Alec,” says Lithiby, failing to introduce me to the older man. I would have preferred to remain standing—and he knows that about me—but this is typical of the way Lithiby operates. He is a student of control, of bending others to his will.

I sit with my back to the door. Barbara makes herself scarce, most probably to the sitting room nearby, where she will record and minute the conversation that follows. Sinclair loiters near the sink and Lithiby tells him to make four cups of instant coffee, an order he obeys like a butler.

“You take milk, don’t you, Alec?” Sinclair asks.

Never accept tea or coffee at an interview. They’ll see your hand shaking when you drink it.

“Black, please,” I reply. “Two sugars.”

Caccia now sits on my left. I take out a cigarette.

“This is okay, isn’t it?” I ask him, holding it up. I want to hear Caccia speak.

“Of course, of course,” he says breathlessly. “This isn’t going to be anything sinister, Alec. We just want to have a little chat.”

I light the cigarette. Sinclair puts a small white plate in front of me to use as an ashtray. They’ve got him well trained.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me, David?” I say, nodding toward the old man. I wouldn’t have had the nerve to say that to Lithiby.

“Of course,” Caccia says quickly. “Forgetting my manners. Alec, this is Peter Elworthy.”

A cover name.

“How do you do?” I say, trying to stand up to shake the old man’s hand. My legs get trapped under the table as I say, “Alec.”

His look here is revealing: Elworthy knows exactly who I am—of course he does—and gives a passing glance of annoyance. He lacks entirely Caccia’s easily peddled charm and, unlike Lithiby, is too old for me to make any sort of a connection with him.

“How do you do?”

His suit is a very dark tweed with a waistcoat underneath. Men of his age often don’t seem to mind being too warm in the summer months. And although it is late now, he looks sharp and alert, more so than Caccia, who looks significantly more tired than he did this afternoon.

“Do you know what the Russians are up to these days?” Elworthy appears to have directed the question to Lithiby, who is standing beside him.

“No,” he replies, as if he has learned his lines.

“Rather than track down all their traitors, the KGB—or whatever those fellows are calling themselves these days—are trying to turn them into double agents, to play them back against our side. They even have a number that the Russian agents can telephone if they’re having second thoughts and want to turn themselves in. The Yeltsin government then offer them money to feed us disinformation.”

“Is that right?” says Lithiby blandly.

Elworthy continues, “The Americans are finding it difficult to recruit new officers as well. You need fluency in two or three languages coupled with a high level of computer literacy. And if one has those as a graduate, why opt for a CIA starting salary of thirty thousand dollars when Microsoft will pay three times that amount?”

“Mossad has the same problem,” Lithiby replies. “We all have.”

Caccia looks down at the table as Elworthy moves farther toward me.

“My feeling is—”

I interrupt him.

“Can we cut the shit? Is that possible? We all know why I’m here, so let’s talk this thing out. Stop fucking around.”

Elworthy looks taken aback: I would almost say that he is impressed. I do not know where this courage has come from, but I am grateful for it. Nothing is said for a few moments. Sinclair takes the opportunity to place two mugs of coffee on the table. He passes one to Lithiby, but Elworthy raises his hand.

“Listen to me, young man.” He leans on the table, palms down, fingers spread out like a web. “I will do this in my own time.”

His voice is a dark hiss. It has shifted from nonchalance to malice in a matter of seconds. Only now do I realize the extent of their anger. All of them.

“I apologize. I’m just a little edgy. You bring me out here in the middle of the night…”

Elworthy stands again, leaving sweat prints on the red plastic surface of the table as he rises to his feet.

“We understand,” Caccia says, interjecting gently. He has obviously been designated to soften me up. “This must be as difficult for you as it is for us.”

“What does that mean?” I say, turning to him. I had not intended to lose my temper so quickly. “How can this in any way be as difficult for you as it is for me? Is
your
life in danger? Is it? Are your friends and family safe? Have you just fucked something up on this scale?”

“Let’s calm it, Alec, shall we?” Lithiby says, walking across the room toward the door. He is soon directly behind me, and his presence is enough to make me want to move. I pick up my cigarette, push back the chair, and stand up. Sinclair looks briefly startled. The cigarette has left a tiny nicotine smear on the plate.

“Where are you going?” Lithiby asks.

“Just let me walk around, will you? I think more clearly that way.”

At some point I have accepted that this will be my last encounter with any of them. They are preparing to cut me loose. It is pointless to hold out any hope of a reprieve. After this, there is no chance that MI5 will keep to their promise of a permanent job. That was conditional solely on the success of the operation.

“Why don’t you tell us what happened tonight,” Elworthy announces, his voice back to its characteristic level of flat understatement.

I inhale very deeply on the cigarette and almost choke on the smoke.

“You know what happened,” I tell him. “You heard it all. There’s nothing for me to add.”

Behind me, Lithiby says, “It would be helpful, nonetheless, if we could get a handle on things from your point of view.”

“What, so that Barbara can get it all down for the record?”

“You’re being very aggressive, Alec,” he says. “There’s really no need.”

Perhaps I am, and this checks my rising anger. Perhaps I have read the situation incorrectly and have not been summoned here simply to be mocked and fired. There may be a chance that they are prepared to notch this up to experience.

“I don’t mean to be that way,” I reply. “You can understand that it’s been a bad day.”

Caccia smiles. He is still sitting at the table, fingers playing idly with the handle of his mug. He has always looked too well preserved, too decent and respectable, to be involved in something like this. A diplomat out of his depth, a dull foil for Hawkes. Caccia was never SIS, merely window dressing.

“Of course,” says Lithiby, empathetically. “Why don’t you sit down and tell us what happened?”

His trickery has the effect of putting me once again on my guard.

“I’ve told you, John, I prefer to stand. All that happened was this. I had a meeting with David at Abnex this afternoon. He told me that our people had seen Fortner skip the country, and that Andromeda had pulled out of Baku. That was it. I feared the worst, though David didn’t seem too upset. Looking back on it now, that was disingenuous.” I glance down at Caccia. “You must have known that I was blown, but you wanted me to be the one who found out why. You wanted me to be the fall guy.”

“There’s no truth in that whatsoever,” Caccia says, maintaining his cool. “There is only one person responsible for this cock-up, and that is you.”

“But you weren’t to know that, were you? At that stage you had no idea why these things were happening.”

“What happened when you got home?”

Lithiby has interrupted, trying to prevent things from escalating into a full-scale argument. I am still surprised by how quickly I have allowed the civility of the meeting to break apart.

“I made the phone call. You heard it all for yourselves. Surely I don’t need to go over all that?”

Elworthy coughs, an old man’s way of saying that he wants to be heard.

“That won’t be necessary,” he says. “But we need to know about this girl. Kate Allardyce. We’ve had a problem with her before, haven’t we?”

Elworthy looks across at Lithiby and I instinctively follow his lead. He nods just once.

“A problem with Kate?” I reply. “What do you mean? Who
are
you, anyway? Nobody has even told me how you fit into things.”

Elworthy ignores this.

“In your first meeting with the friends,” he says flatly, “you led the interviewer to believe that you were still involved with her.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“There’s a pattern of deceit, Alec, don’t you see?” Elworthy is now to my left, no more than a foot away, with Lithiby closing in on the right. It is like a pincer movement as Lithiby says, “You’ve tried to pull the wool over our eyes about her before. We’d like to know what role she has in this. How does Kate Allardyce fit in?”