A Spy By Nature (37 page)

And to the Chase Manhattan Bank at 1603 E. Wadsworth Avenue, Philadelphia, I fax instructions to transfer funds from escrow to a dormant account in Paris set up by my father more than fifteen years ago and left to me in his will.

Only my mother knows about that. A family secret.

I stay awake until dawn as the BBC reruns pictures of Blair standing outside his constituency office, acknowledging the extent of Labour’s victory. In his moment of triumph, after a carefully stage-managed campaign in which he has been presented as a mature and thoughtful politician undaunted by the prospect of high office, the new prime minister appears suddenly adolescent, almost on the verge of tears. Suddenly the prize for which he has worked so tirelessly, the culmination of his consuming ambition, stands before him. And as he comes to terms with the weight of the responsibility that has been placed on his shoulders by millions of people, right there in front of the cameras it is possible to see Blair experience a dawning realization: there is a price to be paid for success. He actually looks panicked by what he has achieved.

This is something that I have come to realize far too late. That we allow ambition, the hunger for recognition, to blind us to wider consequences. We are encouraged to pursue goals, to make the best of ourselves, to search for meaning. But what does a person do when those dreams come true? What is the next step?

Eight twenty
P.M.
Ten minutes until we are scheduled to leave. On the far side of the neat gravel path a man is standing, back straight, head level, eyes closed. He wears purple shorts and a plain white T-shirt bearing the inscription
MOON
in narrow black letters. A canvas bag lies at his shoeless feet. Slowly, he moves his legs apart. Then the man lifts his arms in a wide arc above his shoulders, palms up toward the sky, until his body forms a composed, tranquil cross.

Fifteen feet to his left, two women, both in jeans, stand up from their bench and drop two empty Diet Coke cans into a wire-mesh bin. They move away.

The man’s mouth opens, emitting a just-audible noise, a sustained meditative
yawp
out into the trees. For a moment, the stillness of it erases all the white noise of London. Then a creak of the metal gate at the entrance to Queen’s Club Gardens, and Saul appears, shouldering an overnight bag.

The first thing he says is, “She can’t come. Says she’s going to drive down first thing in the morning. You all right? You look knackered.”

I ignore this.

“Can we just head off?”

I am anxious to leave, keen to be out of London. Whatever self-confidence I had is gradually draining away to a constant fear that what happened to Cohen will happen to me.

“In a minute. I told her to come over so I can give her instructions about how to get there.”

I look back at the man. From the canvas bag he extracts a sandwich and begins eating it in a pool of fading sunlight. Behind him, an elderly couple are playing tennis on a hard court, the slow thock of balls like a clock.

There is no one else in the gardens. No one who could be watching me.

“Seen much of Fort and Katharine?” Saul asks, and the question catches me off guard.

“A little. Their contract at Andromeda hasn’t been renewed. They’re thinking of moving back to the States. In fact, I think it’s definite. They may be gone by the end of the month.”

I am so tired of lying to him.

“That’s a pity,” he says, gazing at the sky. “It’d be good to see them before they go.” There’s a check-shaped cloud above his head like the Nike logo.

“I’ll try to fix something up.”

Saul bends over now to tie his shoelaces, and I say what I have to say while I don’t have to look into his eyes.

“I may have to go away, too.”

“Really?” he says into the ground.

“Yeah. Abnex has a posting overseas. Something came up. In Turkmenistan. It would just be for a year or so. I think it would be a great opportunity.”

He stands up.

“When did this happen?”

“Just last week.”

“You’re not going straightaway?”

First thing this morning I booked a cross-Channel ticket to Cherbourg, leaving late on Monday afternoon.

“No. Most probably not.”

“Good,” he says, relaxing immediately. Then he looks across at the gate.

“Here she comes now.”

Saul’s new girlfriend is tall and slim and attractive—they always are—with dark hair cut short to the nape of the neck. A little like Kate’s new bob.

“Hi,” he shouts out enthusiastically, though she is still some distance away. The girl gives a stiff wristy wave and then looks beyond us, apparently at the tennis court. When she arrives, she says nothing at first, just glances at me, and then wraps Saul in a hug and a kiss. I am briefly envious. She has a slim, supple waist and a lightness about her.

“And you must be Alec,” she says, breaking away from him to shake my hand. “I’m Mia. Pleased to meet you.”

She is American.

“You’re from the States?” I ask.

She looks irritated.

“Canada. From Vancouver.”

Just seeing them together casts my mind back to when Kate and I met for the first time. We were seventeen, what now seems an absurdly young age to be about to embark upon the relationship we had. Barely old enough to express ourselves. It was at a party in the school holidays. I remember a lot of weak beer and girls in miniskirts. Kate came right up to me, just seemed to know it was the right thing to do. We were standing over a bale of straw, surrounded by people dancing to Dexy’s Midnight Runners, and within minutes were hidden in some dark quarter of a vast garden, kissing. Everything was new back then; all we did was react to things.

For some reason, we started climbing a tree, Kate first, me right behind her, just the rustle and scrape of the two of us against the branches and among the leaves. She lost her footing. Flecks of sooty bark puffed into my eyes. I lifted my hand to catch her in case she was about to fall.

“You okay?” I asked, calling up at her.

Even then, within moments of our meeting, I wanted Kate to feel safe. It happened immediately.

“Yes,” she said, and there was a certain stubbornness in her voice that I noticed, and liked, right away. “I’m okay.”

And she kept on climbing.

Saul is talking Mia through the route to Cornwall. When they’re done, I shake her hand, she wishes me well, and he walks her back to the street.

“See you at the weekend,” she calls back to me.

“Yeah. Looking forward to it.”

And five minutes later, we are on our way.

Saul is driving his wideboy Capri, a dark blue V-reg with seventy thousand miles on the clock and a bonnet the size of a Ping-Pong table. Gradually we shunt our way through the preweekend traffic, which has clogged up the M3 from Sunbury right out to Basingstoke. The Capri feels low and heavy against the road. When I lean back in the passenger seat, the darkening sky entirely fills the windshield.

After an hour, the traffic starts to free up and we move at a steady seventy-five. I put on a tape—Radiohead’s
The Bends
—and watch the flat suburban heartlands flick by.

“You want to get something to eat?” Saul asks, overtaking a caravan. “I was going to stop at the next place we see.”

“Sure.”

It is the first time I have felt like eating in twenty-four hours.

“There’s a McDonald’s at Fleet services,” he says, winding down his window and letting a half-smoked cigarette firework on to the road. “You feel like McDonald’s?”

“Whatever.”

Two miles later, I spot a glowing yellow M hanging low over an off-ramp encased in black trees. Saul comes off the motorway. The passenger-side mirror is not aligned, so I turn around sharply in my seat and look out through the back windshield.

Three vehicles follow us up the exit.

In the car park, Saul swings into a space alongside a gray BMW. The Capri gives a growling cough as he shuts off the engine. Two of the vehicles behind us went straight on to get petrol. The third, a hatchback Volkswagen, has parked seventy feet away, disgorging young children who run gleefully into the building. An Indian woman wearing a sari is stretching nearby, rolling her neck in a slow clockwise loop.

The restaurant is as bright and sterile as the Abnex offices. There are no shadows. People drift about in the white light, fetching straws and napkins. They queue up four deep at the tills, munch Big Macs at clean-wiped tables. Kids are greedy for plastic figurines and pots of ice cream threaded with furls of chocolate sauce. There’s a constant noise of demand.

A middle-aged man standing near me is looking around the place with a flinching bewilderment, as if he has been deposited here by accident from another era. The queue moves quickly. We are flanked by young couples and boys in shell suits, overweight salesmen, and girls in bright pink, too young to be wearing makeup.

At the counter, an acne-soaked teenager in a purple hat takes our order for food. I pass Saul a five-pound note, but he wants to pick up the tab.

“I’ll get it,” he says, pushing my hand away.

Twenty minutes later we are back inside the car, my mood flatly resigned to a long, dark journey with no end until well after midnight. Saul has a polystyrene cup of Coke wedged between his thighs and a postburger cigarette hanging from his mouth. It’s my turn to drive. The Capri feels heavy as I reverse out, as if it, too, has eaten too much, too quickly. Saul clicks in
The Bends
again and sits back in the passenger seat with a deep sigh. Within ten minutes he is asleep and I just listen to the songs.

The rain starts coming down at around eleven fifteen and doesn’t stop all night. I worry that the heavy car will skid on the road surface and it’s a job to keep my concentration. The motor driving the windshield wipers is sluggish, and as a consequence my vision is constantly blurred by the glare of oncoming headlights refracting through the water-covered glass. Saul naps through all this with heavy catarrh snores and an occasional groan.

The traffic gradually evaporates the closer we come to Bodmin. Now and then a vast, speeding lorry will roar past in the wet, throwing up spray and mud, but otherwise I have the road to myself. There’s just a feeling now of wanting to get there, of the quest for sleep. For fifteen minutes on the Dorchester road, I was tailed by a black Rover, the same make of car that Sinclair was driving when I first met Lithiby. But I am past caring. Let them waste their time. They know where I’m going. They know where to find me.

I wake Saul when we enter Little Petherick, the last village before the turnoff to Padstow. He makes a show of being disturbed, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles like a sleepy child.

“Where are we?”

“London.”

“Seriously.”

“Nearly there. I need you to show me the way.”

“Fucking rain,” he says.

I have pulled the Capri over to the side of the road, the wipers flapping irregularly, left to right, right to left. The tired old engine turns over. Across the street there is a man loitering alone in a bus stop, trapped by the weather. He stares at us from under the peak of his baseball cap, colorless eyes in the wet gloom.

“Take the second left after this village. Sign saying Trevose.”

“Then what?”

He starts imitating Katharine’s voice.

“Road forks, so go real slow,” he says. “Flirt with me awhile, turn right at the traffic lights, and then I’ll leave my husband and elope with you.”

I wheeze a fake laugh.

“It’s easy from here,” he says. “Just head down to the sea. I’ll show you.”

Saul makes coffee when we arrive and I smoke a cigarette in the kitchen as he busies himself finding blankets and towels. The house feels damp. In the distance I can hear steel halyards pinging in the wind against masts. Otherwise, it is utterly quiet.

I like it down here. London makes you forget the simpler pleasures of being away from a city. The loose give of the warming sand after weeks of walking on pavements and hard floors. In the summer that brilliant clean light, and the feeling of salt drying against the skin. Then evening sunsets blink off the surface of the water, like flashbulbs in a floodlit stadium.

Saul comes back into the kitchen.

“I’m not actually all that tired,” he says.

“Me neither.”

“You want a drink? I think there’s a bottle of wine here somewhere.”

He finds it and sits down with two tumblers, a radio on in the background playing country music. I pour the wine and we toast the weekend, glasses clinking over the table. A car drives past outside, close to the house at a crawl, and I think that it might be about to stop on the drive when it suddenly moves away.

We talk for perhaps an hour, and it surprises me how easily I disguise my apprehension from him. I am thinking always of the consequences of telling Saul about JUSTIFY, of asking him to release details to the press and on the Internet should anything happen to me. But I can stay focused on what he is saying. Any thoughts I might have about the timing of a confession exist only as an undercurrent to the conversation.

Saul is preoccupied by his work, thinking of chucking his job and going into finance. He says, “After university, we all went into television for the glamour. I thought TV would provide some outlet for self-expression, but a lot of the time it’s just tedious and vain, full of guys with goatee beards wearing Armani suits. I need to make some
money.
”

I don’t try to sway him one way or the other. I simply hear him out. It is the longest and most fulfilling conversation we have had in over eighteen months, just the two of us talking into the night. All the time I am conscious of a thawing in Saul’s attitude toward me, the gradual reconciliation of a ten-year friendship that had been allowed to fester and grow stale. The old-established ties were always there: they simply needed to be rekindled.

When both of us are slightly drunk and, although not tired, starting to think about going to bed, Saul’s mobile phone goes off. It is still packed inside his overnight bag on the kitchen floor, the ring muffled by clothes.

“Who the fuck’s that?” I ask, looking at the clock on the wall. It is half past three in the morning.

“Probably Mia,” he says, getting up out of his chair and struggling to retrieve the phone. “She always calls late. Doesn’t sleep.”

But it is not Mia.

The signal is bad, and Saul has to go outside to take the call. When he comes back into the kitchen, he tells me that Kate and her boyfriend have been killed in a car accident. He tells me quickly and without inflection, the news of her death first, then the place where the crash took place, and the name of the boyfriend. William.

He says that he is so sorry.

I cannot stay in the room with him. I do not even ask a question. I am outside, through the open door, and stumbling on gravel, his voice behind me just a single word: “Alec.”

There is no feeling in me but rage. No sadness or pain, just a sense of powerless anger, like punching air. I turn and am conscious of Saul, standing in the doorway, his head absolutely dropped, not knowing what to do or say. She was his friend, too.