A Spy by Nature

11 Caspian

The offices of Abnex Oil occupy five central storeys in an eyesore Broadgate high-rise about six minutes’ walk from Liverpool Street station.

The company was founded in 1989 by a City financier named Clive Hargreaves, who was just thirty-five years old at the time. Hargreaves had no A-levels and no formal higher education, just a keen business sense and an instinctive, immediate grasp of the market opportunities presented by the gradual collapse of communism in the Eastern Bloc and, later, the former Soviet Union. With private investment attached to a chunk of money he’d made in the City during the Thatcher-Lawson boom, Hargreaves expanded Abnex from a small outfit employing fewer than one hundred people into what is now the third largest oil exploration company in the UK. At the start of the decade Abnex had minor contracts in Brazil, the North Sea, Sakhalin and the Gulf, but Hargreaves’ masterstroke was to realize the potential of the Caspian Sea before many of his competitors had done so. Between 1992 and early 1994, he negotiated Well Workover Agreements with the nascent governments of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, and sent down teams of geologists, contractors and lawyers to Baku with a view to identifying the most promising well-sites in the region. The Caspian is now awash with international oil companies, many of them acting as joint ventures, and all competing for their chunk of what are proven oil reserves. But Abnex is better placed than many of them to reap the benefits when the region goes online.

On New Year’s Day 1995, Hargreaves was killed riding pillion on a motorcycle in northern Thailand. The driver, his best friend, wasn’t drunk or high; he was just going too fast and missed a bend in the road. Hargreaves, who was single, left the bulk of his estate to his sister, who immediately sold her controlling stake in Abnex to a former Cabinet Minister in the Thatcher government. This is where Hawkes came in. A new chairman, David Caccia, had been appointed by the board of directors. Caccia was also ex-Foreign Office, though not SIS: the two men had been posted to the British Embassy in Moscow in the 1970s and become close friends. Caccia, knowing that Hawkes was approaching retirement, offered him a job.

I work as a business development analyst in a seven-man team specializing in emerging markets, specifically the Caspian Sea. On my first day, just four or five hours in, the personnel manager asked me to sign this:

All of the guys on my team are university graduates in their mid-to-late twenties who came here within six months of leaving university. With one exception, they are earning upwards of thirty-five thousand pounds a year. The exception, owing to the circumstances in which I took the job, is myself. I am over halfway through the trial period imposed by the senior management. If, at the end of it, I am considered to have performed well, my salary will be bumped up from its present level — which is sub-twelve thousand after tax — to something nearer thirty, and I will be offered a long-term contract, health cover and a company car. But if Alan Murray, my immediate boss, feels that I have not contributed effectively to the team, I’m out the door.

This probationary period, which ends on 1 December, was a condition of my accepting the job imposed by Murray. Hawkes and Caccia knew that they had brought me in over the heads of several other more highly qualified candidates — one of whom had been shadowing the team, unpaid, for over three months — and they were happy to oblige. From my point of view it’s a small price to pay. Like most employers nowadays, Abnex know that they can get away with asking young people to work excessively long hours, six or seven days a week, without any form of contractual security or equivalent remuneration. At any one time there might be fifteen or twenty graduates in the building doing unpaid work experience, all of them holding out for a position that in all likelihood does not exist.

So, no complaints. Things have swung around for me since last year and I have Hawkes to thank for that. The downside is that I now work harder, and for longer hours, than I have ever worked in my life. I am up every morning at six, sometimes quarter past, and take a cramped tube to Liverpool Street just after seven. There’s no time for a slow, contemplative breakfast, those gradual awakenings of my early twenties: the team are expected to be at their desks by eight o’clock. There is a small, aggressively managed coffee bar near the Abnex building where I sometimes buy an espresso and a sandwich at around nine a.m. But often there is so much work to do that there isn’t even time to leave the office.

The pressure comes mainly from the senior management, beginning with Murray and working its way steadily upwards towards Caccia. They make constant demands on the team for reliable and accurate information about geological surveys, environmental research, pipeline and refining deals, currency fluctuations and — perhaps most important of all — any anticipated political developments in the region which may have long- or short-term consequences for Abnex. A change of government personnel, for example, can dramatically affect existing and apparently legally binding exploration agreements signed with the previous incumbent. Corruption is at an epidemic level in the Caspian region and the danger of being outmanoeuvred, either by a competitor or by venal officials, is constant.

A typical day will be taken up speaking on the telephone to clients, administrators and other officials in London, Moscow, Kiev and Baku, often in Russian or, worse, with someone who has too much belief in their ability to speak English. In that respect, little has changed since CEBDO. But in every other way my life has taken on a dimension of intellectual effort that was entirely absent when working for Nik. I look back on my first six months at Abnex as a blur of learning: files, textbooks, seminars and exams on every conceivable aspect of the oil business, coupled with extensive weekend and night classes about Andromeda, usually chaired by Hawkes.

In late September, he and I flew out to the Caspian with Murray and Raymond Mackenzie, a senior employee at the firm. In under eight days we took in Almaty, Tashkent, Ashgabat, Baku and Tbilisi. It was the first time that Hawkes or myself had visited the region. We were introduced to Abnex employees, to representatives from Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell and BP, and to high-ranking government officials in each of the major states. Most of these had had ties with the former Soviet administration; three, Hawkes knew for certain, were former KGB.

It is not that I have minded the intensity of the work, nor the long hours: in fact, I draw a certain amount of satisfaction from possessing what is now a high level of expertise in a specialist field. But my social life has been obliterated. I have not visited Mum since Christmas, and I can’t remember the last time I had the chance to savour a decent meal, or to do something as mundane as going to the cinema. Furthermore, my friendship with Saul is now something that has to be timetabled and squeezed in, like sex in a bad marriage. Tonight — he is coming to an oil industry party at the In and Out Club on Piccadilly — will be only the third time that I have had the opportunity to see him since New Year. He resents this, I think. In days gone by it was Saul who called the shots. He had the glamorous job and the jet-set lifestyle: at the last minute he might be called off to a shoot in France or Spain, and any arrangements we might have made would have to be cancelled.

Now the tables have turned. Freelancing has not been as easy as Saul anticipated: the work hasn’t been coming in and he is struggling to finish a screenplay which he hoped to have financed by the end of last year. It may even be that he is jealous of my new position: there has been something distrustful in his attitude towards me since I joined Abnex. Almost as if he blames me for getting my life in order.

It’s a Thursday evening in mid-May, just gone five o’clock. People are starting to leave the office, drifting in slow pairs towards the lifts. Some are heading for the pub, where they will drink a pint or two before the party; others, like myself, are going straight home to change. If everything goes according to plan, tonight should mark a significant development in my relationship with Andromeda, and I want to feel absolutely prepared.

Back at the flat I put on a fresh scrape of deodorant and a new shirt. Time is limited and at around seven o’clock I order a taxi to take me to Piccadilly. This early part of the evening is not as awkward as I had anticipated: I am clear-headed and looking forward finally to making progress with the Americans.

There are flames leaping from tall Roman candles in a crescent forecourt visible from the cab as it shunts down a bottlenecked Hyde Park towards the In and Out Club. I pay the driver, check my reflection in the window of a parked car and then make my way inside.

An immaculate silver-haired geriatric wearing a gold-buttoned red blazer and sharp white tie is greeting guests on the door. He checks my invitation.

‘Mr Milius. From Abnex. Yes sir. Just go straight through.’

Other guests in front of me have been ushered into a high-ceilinged entrance hall where they are talking animatedly. Most of them are, at a guess, over thirty-five, though a hand-in-hand, good-looking couple of about my age are gliding around in a circular room immediately beyond this one. The boyfriend is guiding an elaborate blonde anti-clockwise around a large oak table, pretending to admire some cornice work on the oval ceiling. He points at it intelligently and the girlfriend nods openmouthed.

I walk past them and turn right down a darkened corridor leading into a spacious, paved garden where the party is taking place. The noise of it grows sharper with every pace, the rising clamour of a gathered crowd. I walk out on to a terraced balcony overlooking the garden from the club side and take a glass of champagne from a teenage waiter who breezes past me, tray held at head height. The party is in full swing: polite laughter lifts up from the multitudes in their suits and cocktail dresses, oil people in dappled light amid the ooze of small talk.

Piers, Ben and JT, three members of my team, are standing in the far right-hand corner of the garden, thirty or forty feet away, sucking back champagne. As usual, Ben is doing most of the talking, making the others laugh. Harry Cohen, at twenty-eight the oldest and most senior member of the team after Murray, is just behind them, schmoozing some mutton-dressed-as-lamb in a little black dress. No sign of Saul, though. He must have been held up.

Just below me, to my left, I can see the Hobbit talking to his new girlfriend. It is still extraordinary to witness the change that has come over him. Gone are the spots and greasy skin, and his once-raggedy hair has now been cropped short and combed forward to shield a gathering baldness. There are things that he still gets wrong: on his lapel he is wearing a bright orange badge imprinted with the name MATTHEW FREARS above the logo of his company, Andromeda. And his glance up at me is nervous, almost intimidated. But he is reliable, and honest to the point of candour. We make eye contact, nothing more. He’ll be as fired up as me.

I walk down a short flight of stone steps and make my way through the crowd to the Abnex team. JT is the first to spot me.

‘Alec. You’re late.’

‘Not networking?’ I say to them.

‘Pointless at parties,’ Piers replies.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Everyone’s up to the same game. You’re never going to make an impression. Might as well neck the free booze and fuck off home.’

‘It’s your optimism I admire,’ says Ben. ‘Life affirmin’.’

‘Murray arrived?’

‘Coming later,’ he says, as if it were inside knowledge.

‘Why’d you go home?’ Piers asks me.

‘Change of shirt.’

‘Sweaty boy,’ says Ben. ‘Sweaty boy.’

‘You haven’t met someone called Saul, have you?’

He is a vital component in tonight’s plan, and I need him to get here.

Ben says:

‘What kind of a name is that?’

‘He’s a friend of mine. I’m supposed to be meeting him here. He’s late.’

‘Haven’t seen him,’ he says quickly, taking a sip from his drink.

Cohen separates himself off from the middle-aged woman with the facelift and turns towards us. His coming into our small group has the effect of tightening it up.

‘Hello, Alec.’

‘Harry.’

The woman gives him a final smile before disappearing off into the crowd.

‘Mum come with you?’ Ben says to him, trying on a joke. Cohen does not react.

‘Who was she?’ JT asks.

‘A friend of mine who works for Petrobras.’

‘Sleeping with the enemy, eh?’ Ben mutters under his breath, but Cohen ignores him.

‘She’s involved with exploration on the Marlin field,’ he says, turning to me. ‘Where’s that, Alec?’

‘You giving me a test, Harry? At a fucking party?’

‘Don’t you know? Don’t you know where the Marlin field is?’

‘It’s in Brazil. Marlin is in Brazil. Offshore.’

‘Very good,’ he says with raw condescension. JT looks at me and rolls his eyes. An ally of mine.

‘Glad I could be of some assistance,’ I tell him.

‘Now, now boys. Let’s all try and enjoy ourselves,’ Ben says, grinning. He must have been drinking for some time: his round face has taken on a rosy, alcoholic flush. ‘Plenty of skirt here.’

JT nods.

‘You still seeing that journalist, Harry?’ Ben asks.

Cohen looks at him, irked by the intrusion into his private life.

‘We’re engaged. Didn’t you know?’

‘Matter of fact I think I did know that,’ he says. ‘Set a date?’

‘Not as such.’

None of us will be invited.

‘Who’s that young bloke next to Henderson, the one with the dark hair?’

Cohen is half-pointing at a lean, jaded-looking man in a crushed linen suit standing to the right of our group.

‘Hack from the FT,’ says Piers, taking a satay stick from one of the waiters. ‘Joined from the Telegraph about three months ago. Going places.’

‘Thought I recognized him. What’s his name?’

‘Peppiatt,’ Piers tells him. ‘Mike Peppiatt.’

This is registered by Cohen, the name stored away. Before the evening is out he will have spoken to the journalist, made contact, chatted him up. Here’s my card. Call me anytime you have a query. Cohen has the patience to forge contacts with the financial press, to feed them their little titbits and scoops. It gives him a sense of power. And Peppiatt, of course, will return the favour, putting another useful name in his little black book. This is how the world goes round.

I spot Saul now, sloping into the party on the far side of the garden, and feel relieved. There is a look of wariness on his face, as if he were here to meet a stranger. He looks up, sees me immediately through the dense, shifting crowd, and half-smiles.

‘There he is.’

‘Your mate?’ says Ben.

‘That’s right. Saul.’

‘Saul,’ Ben repeats under his breath, getting used to the name.

The five of us turn to greet him, standing in an uneven semi-circle. Saul, nodding shyly, shakes my hand.

‘All right, man?’ he says.

‘Yeah. How was your shoot?’

‘Shampoo ad. Canary Wharf. Usual thing.’

Both of us, simultaneously, take out a cigarette.

‘These are the people I work with. Some of them, anyway’

I introduce Saul to the team. This is JT, this is Piers, this is Ben. Harry, meet an old friend of mine. Saul Ricken. There are handshakes and eye contacts, Saul’s memory lodging names while his manner does an imitation of cool.

‘So how are things?’ I ask, pivoting away from them, taking us out of range.

‘Not bad. Sorry I was late getting here. Had to go home and change.’

‘Don’t worry. It was good of you to come.’

‘I don’t get much of a chance to see you these days.’

‘No. Need a drink?’

‘Whenever someone comes round,’ he says, flatly.

Both of us scan the garden for a waiter. I light Saul’s cigarette, my hand shaking.

‘Nervous about something?’ he asks.

‘No. Should I be?’

No reply.

‘So what sort of shampoo was it?’

‘You really care?’ he says, exhaling.

‘Not really, no.’

This is how things will start out: like our last meeting in March, the first few minutes will be full of strange, awkward silences and empty remarks that go nowhere. The broken rhythm of strangers. I can only hope that after two or three drinks Saul will start to loosen up.

‘So it’s good to finally meet the guys you work with,’ he says eventually. ‘They seem OK.’

‘Yeah. Harry’s a bit of a cunt, but the rest are all right.’

Saul puffs out his lips and stares at the ground. There is a waitress about ten feet away moving gradually towards us, slim and nineteen. I try to catch her eye. A student, most probably, making her rent. She sees me, nods, and comes over.

‘Glass of champagne, gentlemen?’

We both take a glass. Clear marble skin and a neat black bob, breasts visible as no more than faint shapes beneath the thin white silk of her shirt. She has that air of undergraduate self-confidence which gradually ebbs away with age.

‘Thanks,’ says Saul, the side of his mouth curling up into a flirty smile. It is the most animated gesture he has made since he arrived. The girl moves off.

We have been talking for only ten or fifteen minutes when Cohen sidles up behind Saul with a look of intent in his eye. I take a long draw on my champagne and feel the chill and fizz on my throat.

‘So you’re Saul,’ he says, squeezing in beside him. ‘Alec’s often spoken about you.’

Not so.

‘He has?’

‘Yes.’

Cohen reaches across and touches my shoulder, acting like we’re best buddies.

‘It’s Harry, isn’t it?’ Saul asks him.

‘That’s right. Sorry to interrupt but I wanted to introduce Alec to a journalist from the Financial Times. Won’t you come with us?’

‘Fine,’ I say, and we have no choice but to go.

Peppiatt is tall, almost spindly, with psoriatic flakes of chalky skin grouped around his nose.

‘Mike Peppiatt,’ he says, extending an arm, but the grip goes dead in my hand. ‘I understand you’re the new kid on the block.’

‘Makes him sound like he’s in a fucking boy band,’ Saul says, coming immediately to my defence. I don’t need him to do that. Not tonight.

‘That’s right. I joined Abnex about nine months ago. August-September.’

‘Mike’s interested in writing a piece about the Caspian,’ Cohen tells me.

‘What’s the angle?’

‘I thought you might have some ideas.’ Peppiatt’s voice is plummy, precise.

‘Harry run out of them, has he?’

Cohen clears his throat.

‘Not at all. He’s been very helpful. I’d just welcome a second opinion.’

‘Well what interests you about the region?’ I ask, turning the question back on him. Something about his self-assuredness is irritating. ‘What do your readers want to know? Is it going to be an article on a specific aspect of oil and gas exploration, or a more general introduction to the area?’

Saul folds his arms.

‘Let me tell you what interests me,’ Peppiatt says, lighting a cigarette. He doesn’t offer the pack around. Journalists never do. ‘I want to write an article comparing what’s going on in the Caspian with the Chicago of the 1920s.’

No one responds to this. We just let him keep talking.

‘It’s a question of endless possibilities,’ he says, launching a slim wrist into the air. ‘Here you have a region that’s rich in natural resources, twenty-eight billion barrels of oil, two hundred and fifty trillion cubic feet of gas. Now there’s a possibility that an awful lot of people are going to become very rich in a very short space of time because of that.’

‘So how is that like Chicago in the twenties?’ Saul asks, just before I do.

‘Because of corruption,’ Peppiatt replies, his head tilting to one side. ‘Because of man’s lust for power. Because of the egomania of elected politicians. Because somebody somewhere, an Al Capone if you like, will want to control it all.’

‘The oligarchs?’ I suggest.

‘Maybe. Maybe a Russian, yes. But what fascinates me is that no country at the present time has a clear advantage over another. No one knows who owns all that oil. That hasn’t been decided yet. Not even how to divide it up. It’s the same with the gas. Who does it belong to? With that in mind, we’re talking about a place of extraordinary potential. Potential for wealth, potential for corruption, potential for terrible conflict. And all of that concentrated into what is a comparatively small geographical area. Chicago, if you like.’

‘OK…’

I had tried interrupting, but Peppiatt has not finished.

‘…But that’s just one angle on it. The former Soviet states — Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan — are just pawns in a much bigger geographical game. Look at a map of the region and you see the collision of all the great powers. China on the eastern flank of the Caspian Sea, Russia on its doorstep, the EU just a few hundred miles away to the west of Turkey. Then you have Afghanistan in the south-east and a fundamentalist Islamic republic right next door to that.’

‘Which one?’ Saul asks.

‘Iran,’ Cohen says, without looking at him.

‘So you can see why the Yanks are in there,’ Peppiatt says, as if none of us was aware of an American presence in the Caspian. ‘They’re trying to get a piece of the action. And their best way of doing that is to toady up to the Turks. And why not? We Europeans treat the government in Ankara as though they were a bunch of good-for-nothing towel heads.’

Saul snorts out a laugh here and I look around, just in case anyone has heard. But Peppiatt is on a roll: this guy loves the sound of his own voice.

‘In my view it’s an outrage that Turkey hasn’t been offered membership of the EU. That will come back to haunt us. Turkey will be Europe’s gateway to the Caspian, and we’re allowing the Americans to get in there first.’

‘That’s a little melodramatic,’ I tell him, but Cohen immediately looks displeased. He doesn’t want me offending anyone from the FT.

‘How so?’ Peppiatt asks.

‘Well, if you include Turkey in the EU, your taxes will go up and there’ll be a flood of immigrants all over western Europe.’

‘Not my concern,’ he says, unconvincingly. ‘All I know is that the Americans are being very clever. They’ll have a foot in the door when the Caspian comes online. There’s going to be a marked shift in global economic power and America is going to be there when it happens.’

‘That’s true,’ I say, my head doing an easy bob back and forth. Saul smiles.

‘Only to an extent,’ Cohen says, quick to contradict me. ‘A lot of British and European oil companies are in joint ventures with the Americans to minimize risk. Take Abnex, for example.’ Here comes the PR line. ‘We got in at about the same time as Chevron in 1993.’

‘Did you?’ says Peppiatt. ‘I didn’t realize that.’

Cohen nods proudly.

‘It’s true,’ he says.

There is a brief lull while Peppiatt gathers his thoughts.

‘Well, you see that in itself will be interesting for my readers. I mean are all these joint ventures between the multinational oil conglomerates going to make millions for their shareholders in five or ten years’ time, or are they all on a hiding to nothing?’

‘Let’s hope not,’ says Cohen, giving Peppiatt a chummy smile. It’s sickening how much he wants to impress him.

‘You know what I think you should write about?’ I say to him.

‘What’s that?’ he replies briskly.

‘Leadership. The absence of decent men.’

‘In what respect?’

‘In respect of the increasing gap between rich and poor. If there aren’t the right kind of politicians operating down there, men who care more about the future of their country than they do about their own comfort and prestige, nothing will happen. Look what happened to Venezuela, Ecuador, Nigeria.’

‘And what happened to them?’ Peppiatt asks, his brow furrowing. I’ve found a gap in his knowledge and he doesn’t like that.

‘Their economies were crippled by oil booms in the 1970s. Agriculture, manufacturing and investments were all unbalanced by the vast amounts of money being generated by oil revenues in a single sector of the economy. Other industries couldn’t keep up. There was no one in power who foresaw that. The governments in the Caspian are going to have to watch out. Otherwise, for every oil tycoon fucking a call-girl in the back of his chauffeur-driven Mercedes, there’ll be a hundred Armenian farmers struggling to make enough money to buy a loaf of bread. And that’s how wars start.’

‘I think that’s a bit melodramatic, Alec,’ Cohen says, again smiling at Peppiatt, again trying to put a positive spin on things. ‘There’s not going to be a war in the Caspian. There’s going to be an oil boom for sure, but no one is going to get killed in the process.’

‘Can I quote you on that?’ Peppiatt asks.

Cohen’s eyes withdraw into calculation. That is what he wants most of all. His name in the papers, a little mention in Lex.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Of course you can quote me. But let me tell you a little bit about what our company is doing down there.’

Saul catches my eye, but I can’t tell whether or not he’s bored.

‘Fine,’ says Peppiatt.

Cohen takes a step back.

‘Tell you what,’ he says, suddenly looking at me. ‘Why don’t you tell him, Alec? You could explain things just as effectively as me.’

‘All right,’ I reply, slightly off balance. ‘But it’s quite straightforward. Abnex is currently conducting two-dimensional seismic surveys in several of Kazakhstan’s one hundred and fifty unexplored offshore blocks. It’s one of our biggest projects. Some of this is being done in conjunction with our so-called competitors, as a joint venture, and some of it is being done independently, without any external assistance. I can have details faxed to you tomorrow morning, if you like. What we want to do is start drilling exploration wells in two to three years’ time if evidence of oil is found. We have sole exploration rights to six fields, thanks to the Well Workover Agreements negotiated by Clive Hargreaves, and we’re very hopeful of finding something down there.’

‘I see.’ This may be too technical for Peppiatt. ‘That’s a long and expensive business, I take it?’

‘Sure. Particularly when you don’t know what you’re going to find at the end of the rainbow.’

‘That’s just it, isn’t it?’ says Peppiatt, with something approaching glee. ‘The truth is you boys don’t know what you’ve got down there. Nobody does.’

And Saul says:

‘Print that.’

12 My Fellow Americans

This is when I see her for the first time, standing just a few metres away through a narrow break in the crowd. A sudden glimpse of the future.

She is wearing a backless cotton dress. For now, all that is visible is the delicate heave of her pale shoulder blades and the faultless valley of skin which lies between them. It is not yet possible to see her face. Her husband, twenty years older, is standing opposite her, bored as a museum guard. His lower back is slumped down and his thick greying hair has been blown about by a wind that is whipping around the garden. You can tell right away that he is an American: it’s in the confident breadth of his face, the particular blue of his shirt. He seems somehow larger than the people around him.

There is an older man standing with them, thinned out by age, his cheeks like little sacks. This is Doug Bishop, former CEO of Andromeda, moved upstairs in 1994 but with one hand still on the tiller. The fourth member of the group is a monstrous suburban matron wearing pearls and Laura Ashley, her hair piled up in a beehive like an astronaut’s wife. The pitch and yaw of her voice whinnies across the garden. These words are actually coming out of her mouth:

‘And this is why I told my friend Lauren that feng shui is an absolute scandal. And Douglas agrees with me. Don’t you Doug?’

‘Yes, dear,’ says Bishop in a voice of great fatigue.

‘And yet not only ordinary members of the public but actual corporations are prepared to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to these Oriental tricksters just so’s they can rearrange the alignment of their plant pots.’

Listening to this, Katharine takes a sip of her drink and smiles weakly. Then she turns, so that her face is more clearly visible. Male heads in the immediate vicinity spring to catch a glimpse of her, alert as dogs.

‘When were you thinking of writing the piece?’ Cohen is asking Peppiatt. ‘In the near future, or is this an ongoing project?’

‘The latter, most definitely,’ Peppiatt replies, accepting a champagne refill from a passing waiter. ‘I want to talk to the tobacco industry, to car manufacturers, to all of these huge corporations who are making big moves into Central Asia.’

The Hobbit comes up behind me.

‘Can I have a word, Alec?’

I nod at the others and say: ‘Excuse me a moment. Back in a second.’

‘Sure,’ says Cohen.

When the Hobbit and I are a few paces away, moving towards a corner of the garden, he turns and says:

‘That’s them. That’s Katharine and Fortner.’

‘I know,’ I tell him, smiling, and he grins sheepishly, realizing that he has stated the obvious. He wouldn’t have wanted to let on how nervous he is.

‘We should do it now,’ he says. ‘While Bishop is with them. I know him and I can introduce you.’

‘Good. Yes,’ I reply, feeling a slight lift in my stomach. ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’

‘Yeah,’ the Hobbit says wearily. ‘The whole fucking office fancies her.’

And in that instant, Katharine seems to sense that we are talking about her. She turns her head and looks directly at me through the crowd, smiling in a single movement. It is as if the shape of her glance, the timing of it, had been minutely planned. My face freezes and I cannot summon a smile. I merely stare back and then almost immediately look away. But the Hobbit acts smartly, quick on his feet. He has smiled back at her, a colleague’s acknowledgement, using the eye contact to legitimize our approach.

‘Here we go,’ he says, moving towards her. ‘Bring Saul.’

So, as we pass Cohen and Peppiatt, I extract him from their conversation.

‘Come with me, will you mate?’ I say to him. ‘You remember Matt, don’t you?’ (They met at my flat a few months ago, to ease this evening’s events.) ‘He wants to introduce us to some people he works with.’

‘Sure,’ Saul replies, acknowledging the Hobbit with a nod. ‘You don’t mind, do you guys?’

‘No,’ they say in unison.

And we are on our way, the three of us moving through the crowd towards the Americans. My sense of nervousness is suddenly overwhelming.

‘Mr Bishop,’ the Hobbit says as we arrive, playing the ingratiating underling to great effect. ‘Could I just introduce you to an old friend of mine? Alec Milius. And Saul…’

‘Ricken,’ says Saul.

‘Of course.’

Bishop transfers a glass of champagne to his left hand so that he can effect the handshakes.

‘Good to make your acquaintance,’ he says. ‘How do you know Matthew here?’

‘Long story,’ I tell him. ‘We met travelling in 1990 and just bumped into each other at a social occasion a few months ago.’

This is also the story I told Saul.

‘I see. Well, allow me to introduce my wife, Audrey.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ she says, scanning the two of us up and down.

‘And this is Katharine Lanchester and her husband, Fortner Grice.’

Katharine looks at me. There is now no flirtatiousness in her manner, not with Fortner so close.

‘How do you do?’

‘Very well, thank you,’ she says. Her hand is cool and soft.

Then it’s Fortner’s turn. He pumps my arm, doing a little side-jerk with his head. His forehead is dark and creased by frown lines, as if he has spent a lifetime squinting up at a bright sun.

‘Good to meet you guys,’ he says, very unruffled, very cool. ‘You in oil, like everybody else here?’

‘With Abnex, yes. Caspian development.’

‘Oh right. Kathy and I work as consultants for Andromeda. Exploration. Geological surveying and so on.’

‘You spend much of your time down there?’

Fortner hesitates, clearing his throat with a stagey cough.

‘Not for a while. They like to keep us in London. Yourself?’

‘Ditto.’

The conversation misses a beat here, to the point of becoming awkward, and Doug takes a half-step forward.

‘We were just talking about politics back home,’ he says, taking a mouthful of champagne.

‘We were,’ Beehive adds animatedly. ‘And I was asking why that grotesque man from Little Rock is living in the White House.’

Bishop rolls his eyes as Fortner cuts in. He must weigh fifteen or sixteen stone, and not much of it is fat.

‘Now hold on there, Audrey. Clinton’s been doin’ a lot of good. We’ve all just been away from home too long.’

‘You think so, honey?’ Katharine asks, disappointed that he should hold such an opinion. She’s from Republican stock, New England money.

‘Damn right I do,’ he replies forcefully, and the Hobbit laughs politely. Things are awkward again.

‘Is anybody else hot?’ Bishop asks.

‘I’m OK, actually,’ Saul tells him.

‘Me too,’ says Fortner. ‘Maybe you should be wearing a cocktail dress, Doug. You’d feel more comfortable.’

I smile at this and Saul lights another cigarette.

‘Can we go back to Clinton, for a moment?’ Audrey is saying. Somebody on the far side of the garden drops a glass and there is a momentary hush. ‘What I mean to say is…’ She loses herself, struggling to find the words. ‘Is it your interpretation that Clinton will be re-elected this year?’

‘What do you guys think? You reckon our President will be re-elected in November?’

Katharine looked at Saul rather than me as she asked this, but it is the Hobbit who answers:

‘I think he’ll be re-elected, if only because Dole is too old.’

‘Mind what you’re saying there, son,’ Douglas says to him, his voice low and sly. ‘Old Dole’s only got a few years on me.’

‘I didn’t mean…’

‘No apology necessary.’

‘So do the Brits like him, then?’

This comes from Audrey. She must have used up a can of hairspray tonight: her beehive hasn’t budged an inch in the wind.

‘I think he has the most impressive grasp of insincerity that I’ve ever seen,’ I tell her, though that isn’t the first time that I’ve used that phrase. It just sounds good coming out now. ‘I think the British people like him. We tend to admire your politicians more than our own. But it’s a hypocritical approval. We wouldn’t want any of them running our country.’

‘Why in hell not?’ Fortner asks, and for a moment I am concerned that I may have annoyed him. Saul drops his half-finished cigarette on the ground and steps on the butt. He may be bored.

‘Your political system is seen as being more corrupt than ours,’ I reply. ‘Unfairly, I think.’

‘Too right unfairly,’ he says. ‘What about Matrix-Churchill? What about Westland? What about arms to Iraq?’

The way he says ‘Iraq’ it rhymes with ‘I smack’.

‘The Scott Inquiry will clear everyone,’ Saul announces solemnly. ‘The old boy network will see to that.’

‘Oh, yes,’ says Douglas wistfully. ‘The old boy network.’

‘You wish you were a part of that, Doug?’ Fortner says, nudging him. ‘An old Etonian? An Oxford man?’

‘Princeton’ll do me fine.’

‘So how long have you been with Abnex?’ Katharine asks, changing the subject.

‘About nine months.’

‘You enjoying it?’

‘Yes and no. I’ve had to learn a lot in a short space of time. It’s been a real eye-opener.’

‘An eye-opener,’ she says, as if she has enjoyed this expression. ‘So your background was in…?’

‘Russian and business studies.’

‘You just out of college?’

‘No. I worked in marketing for a bit.’

‘Right.’

Saul asks:

‘How long have you and your husband been living here?’

‘Oh a long time now. Four years.’

The Hobbit has cleverly started up a separate conversation with Bishop and Audrey, one that I cannot hear.

‘And you enjoy it?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Fortner says, and the heavy, interjectory way that he comes forward, answering the question on Katharine’s behalf, seems to reveal something about the dynamic of their relationship. ‘We love it here. Spending time with the allies. What do you do for a living, Saul?’

‘I’m in advertising. Commercials. I’m an assistant director.’

‘And, what? That will lead into television, into movies?’

‘Something like that,’ he replies. ‘I’m working on a script at the moment, trying to get some development money.’

‘What’s it about?’ Katharine asks.

‘It’s a kind of spoof thriller. A comedy about a serial killer.’

‘No shit,’ Fortner says, laughing. ‘A comedy about a serial killer?’ He clearly thinks the idea is ludicrous. ‘I gotta say I prefer different kinds of movies myself. Old Bogarts and Cagneys. Westerns mainly.’

‘Really?’ Saul replies enthusiastically. He is, albeit unwittingly, playing his role to perfection. ‘You like westerns? Because the National Film Theatre is doing a John Wayne season at the moment.’

‘Is that right?’ Fortner looks genuinely interested. ‘I didn’t know that. I’d love to catch one or two. The Searchers, Liberty Valance…’

‘Me too.’ I sensed immediately that I can use this as a way of establishing a bond between us. ‘I love westerns. I think John Wayne is great.’

‘You do?’ Saul asks, screwing his face up in surprise.

I have to be careful that he doesn’t undermine me.

‘Yeah. It’s a little fetish of mine. I used to watch them with Dad when I was growing up. Henry Fonda. Jimmy Stewart. But especially John Wayne.’

Katharine clears her throat.

‘So you like him too, Saul?’ she asks, as if it were a test of character.

‘Not as much as Clint,’ he replies. ‘But Wayne’s great. One of the best.’

‘The best,’ says Fortner with emphasis. ‘Eastwood’s just a pretty boy.’

‘Maybe it’s a generational thing, honey,’ Katharine suggests. ‘Sorry, guys. My husband has a weakness for draft dodgers.’

I don’t know what she’s referring to and Fortner says:

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘John Wayne didn’t fight in World War Two,’ Saul informs him. ‘He did everything he could to avoid conscription.’

‘Right,’ says Katharine triumphantly.

‘So what?’ Fortner replies. Although his tone is aggressive, he may be enjoying the argument. ‘Wayne did more for the war effort as an actor than he ever coulda done getting shot at on Omaha Beach. He was a patriot, an anti-Communist…’

‘… Who hated riding horses, hated wearing his cowboy outfits, and actively encouraged American participation in the Vietnam War,’ Katharine says, interrupting him in full flow. She has a brazen, mischievous intelligence, a self-confidence not dissimilar to Kate’s.

‘But he made some great films,’ Saul says, perhaps as a way of defusing what he thinks is tension.

And then the idea comes to me. As simple as it is shrewd. A way of guaranteeing a second encounter.

‘I have an idea,’ I suggest. ‘We should solve this by going to see one of these films at the NFT. I was going anyway. Why don’t you join me?’

And without any hesitation, Fortner says:

‘Great,’ shrugging his shoulders. ‘You wanna go too, Saul?’

‘Sure,’ he replies.

Katharine looks less enthused, a reaction which may be more instinctive than premeditated.

‘Count me out,’ she says. ‘I can’t stand westerns. You fellas go right ahead and I’ll stay home with Tom Hanks.’

The Hobbit, Bishop and Audrey have by now been pulled away into a larger group of six or seven people, two of whom are employees of Abnex. And, across the garden, David Caccia is coming down a short flight of stone steps, joining the party late. He catches my eye, but when he sees that I am with the Americans a mild look of concern passes across his face. In his right hand he is balancing a little pastry parcel oozing feta cheese.

‘Is that David Caccia?’ Fortner asks. ‘That guy looking at ya?’

‘That’s right.’

‘He and I had a couple of meetings back in the New Year. Tough negotiator. We were discussing the joint venture. You know about that?’

‘A little. Fell through, I hear.’

‘That’s right,’ he replies, breathing out with heavy exasperation. ‘Not a smart move if you ask me.’

‘I have to say — off the record — agree with you.’

My voice is quiet here, collaborative.

‘You do?’ Katharine asks. She seems surprised by my candour. This may be a good time to leave.

‘Look, I have to have a word with him about something. Will you excuse us?’

Saul takes an instinctive step backwards and Fortner says:

‘Sure, no problem. It sure was nice to meet you fellas.’

He takes my hand and the shake is firmer than it was before. But I am worried that the plan to visit the NFT will be forgotten as a casual passing remark: I cannot mention it again at the risk of appearing pushy. The invitation will have to come from them.

Fortner now turns to Saul and Katharine takes me to one side.

‘Do you have a card?’ she asks, holding a slim piece of embossed white plastic in her hand. ‘So Fort can get in touch about the movie.’

Luck is on my side.

‘Of course.’

We exchange cards. Katharine studies mine carefully.

‘Milius, huh? Like the name.’

‘Me too,’ says Fortner, breaking in from behind and slapping me hard on the back. ‘So we’re set for John Wayne? Leave the womenfolk at home?’

Katharine adopts an expression of good-humoured exasperation.

‘Looking forward to it,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll give you a call.’ An hour later the Hobbit weaves towards me carrying a glass of sparkling mineral water. Saul is inside the club, talking to the waitress.

‘Hi, Matt.’

He looks slightly sheepish.

‘How did you get on?’

‘Very well. I think we’re going to see each other again. I just bumped into them as they were leaving and we chatted for another ten minutes.’

‘Good,’ he says, picking a piece of lemon out of his drink and dropping it on to the ground.

‘Manners, Matthew.’

‘Nobody saw,’ he says, looking quickly left and right. ‘Nobody saw.’

13 The Searchers

‘So how did it go?’

Hawkes is leaning back in a moulded plastic chair on the second floor of the Abnex building. The blinds are drawn in the small grey conference room, the door closed. His feet are up on the table, hands clasped behind his neck.

‘Fine. Really well.’

He arches his eyebrows, pressing me.

‘And? Anything else? What happened?’

I lean forward, putting my arms on the table.

‘I met Saul at seven for a drink in the bar. You know, where they have all those bookstalls under Waterloo Bridge.’

Hawkes nods. The soles of his shoes are scuffed to the colour of slate.

‘Fortner was on time. Seven fifteen. We had another round of drinks, bought our tickets and went in.’

‘Who paid?’

‘For the drinks or the tickets?’

‘Both.’

‘Everybody went Dutch. Don’t worry. There was no largesse.’

Somebody walks past outside at a fast clip.

‘Go on,’ he says.

As it always is when we are talking business, Hawkes’s manner is abrupt to the point of being rude. Increasingly he has become a withdrawn figure, an enigma at the back of the room.

‘Saul sat between us. There was no planning to it. It just worked out that way. We saw The Searchers and afterwards I told him we had to go to a party. Which we did.’

‘Did you invite him along?’

‘I thought that would be pushing things.’

‘Yes,’ he says after a moment’s contemplation. ‘But in your view Grice wasn’t offended by that?’

I light a cigarette.

‘Not at all. Look, I’ve obviously been thinking about what I was going to tell you this afternoon. And it’s a measure of how well things went that I feel as if I have nothing of any significance to reveal. It was all very straightforward, very normal. It went exceptionally well. Fortner has a youthful side to his personality, like someone much younger. Just as you said he did. He fitted in, and if I’d invited him to the party, he would have fitted in there, too. He was making an effort, of course, but he’s one of those middle-aged men who are hanging on to something youthful in their nature.’

Hawkes folds his arms.

‘So it wasn’t at all awkward,’ I tell him. ‘When we were having the drink beforehand, we talked like we were old friends. It was a boys’ night out.’

‘And how do you want to play it now?’

‘My instinct is that they’ll call.’

‘Why do you think that?’

‘Because he likes me. Isn’t that what you wanted?’

No reaction. Hawkes is assessing whether or not I have read the situation correctly.

I continue:

‘He left saying that Katharine wanted to have dinner sometime. He also wants to introduce Saul to a friend of his in advertising who used to be an actor. He’s interested, believe me.’

‘But in Saul or in you?’

‘What do you think?’

‘That’s what I’m asking,’ he says, not impatiently.

‘Look. Saul has a lot of friends. Far more than I do. He likes Fortner, they laugh at each other’s jokes. But there’s no connection between them. Saul will fall by the wayside and resume his day-to-day life without even realizing he has brought the Americans to me. And then it’ll just be the three of us.’

14 The Call

Exactly two weeks later, at around three o’clock in the afternoon, JT walks over to my desk and presses a single sheet of Abnex-headed paper into my hand.

‘You seen this?’ he says.

‘What is it?’

I save the file on my computer and turn to him.

‘New staff memo. Unbelievable.’

I begin to read.

While Abnex Oil fully respects the privacy of employees’ personal affairs it expects them to discharge fully their obligations of service to the company. It also requires them to be law-abiding, both inside and outside working hours. Remember that any indiscreet and/or anti-social behaviour could not only affect an employee’s performance and position, but also reflect badly on Abnex Oil.

‘Jesus,’ I mutter.

‘Too right, Jesus. Fucking nanny state.’

‘Next they’ll be telling us what to eat.’

Cohen’s desk faces mine: we work staring into one another’s eyes. He looks up from his computer terminal and says:

‘What is that?’

‘New memo. Just came up from personnel,’ JT tells him. ‘Call it up on your e-mail. They’ve labelled it urgent. Some big-brother piece of shit instructing employees on how to conduct their private lives. Fucking disgrace.’

‘Did you manage to get those figures I asked you for at lunch?’ Cohen asks him, ignoring the complaint entirely. He will not tolerate any hint of dissent on the team.

‘No. I can’t seem to get hold of the guy in Ankara.’

‘Well will you keep trying, please? They’ll be closing up and going home now.’

‘Sure.’

JT, suitably rebuked and sheepish, slopes back to his desk and picks up the phone. He leaves the memo beside my computer and I slide it into a drawer.

All seven members of the team, including Murray and Cohen, share a secretary. Tanya is an anglophone Canadian from Montreal with strong views on Quebec separatism and a boyfriend called Dan. She is big-boned, thick-set and straightforward, and has been with the company since it started. Tanya wears a lot of make-up and piles her hair up high in a thick ebony bunch which she never lets down.

‘Only Dan gets to see my hair,’ she says.

No one has ever met Dan.

At half past three the telephone rings on my desk.

‘Who is it, Tanya?’ I call out.

‘Someone from Andromeda.’

I think that it may be the Hobbit, but then she says:

‘Name’s Katharine Lanchester. You want me to take a message?’

Cohen looks up, just a half-glance, registering the name.

‘No. I’ll take it.’

I was a day away, no more, from calling them myself.

From his desk near by, Ben mutters: ‘Play hard to get, Alec. Birds love that.’

‘I’m putting her through.’

‘OK.’

Adrenalin now, my hand in my hair, pushing it out of my face.

‘Alec Milius.’

‘Hello, Alec? It’s Katharine Lanchester at Andromeda. Fortner’s wife.’

‘Oh, hello. What can I do for you?’

‘How are you?’

‘Fine, thanks. It’s good to hear from you.’

‘Well, Fort so enjoyed going to the movies with you. Said he had a great time.’

Her voice is quick and enthused.

‘Yes. You missed a good film.’

‘Oh, I can’t stand westerns. Guys in leather standing in the middle of the street twirling six-shooters and seeing who blinks first. I prefer something more contemporary.’

‘Sure.’

‘Still, I had a nice dinner with Fortner afterwards and he told me all about it. Matter of fact, that’s why I was calling. I was wondering if you and maybe Saul would like to have dinner sometime?’

‘Sure, I — ‘

‘I mean I don’t know if you’re free, but…’

‘No, no, not at all, I’d like that very much. I’ll ask him and I’m sure he’d like to.’

‘Good. Shall we set a date?’

‘OK.’

‘When are you not taken up?’

‘Uh, anytime next week except — just let me check my diary.’

I know that I’m free every night. I just don’t want it to appear that way.

‘How about Wednesday?’

‘Terrific. Wednesday it is. So long as Saul can make it.’

‘I’m sure he’ll be able to.’

Cohen’s eyes are fixed on the far wall. He is listening in.

‘How is Fortner?’

‘Oh, he’s good. He’s in Washington right now. I’m just hoping that he’ll be back in time. He’s got a lot of work to get through out there.’

‘So where shall we meet?’

‘Why don’t we just say the In and Out again? Just at the gate there, eight o’clock?’

She had that planned.

‘Fine.’

‘See you there, then.’

‘I’ll look forward to it.’

I hang up and there is a rush of blood in my head.

‘What was all that?’ Cohen asks, chewing the end of a pencil.

‘Personal call.’

15 Tiramisu

The only spy who can provide a decent case for ideology is George Blake. Young, idealistic, impressionable, he was posted by SIS to Korea and kidnapped by the Communists shortly after the 1950 invasion. Given Das Kapital to read in his prison cell, Blake became a disciple of Marxism, and the KGB turned him after he offered to betray SIS. ‘I’d come to the conclusion that I was no longer fighting on the right side,’ he later explained.

Upon his release in 1953, Blake returned to England a hero: he had suffered terribly in captivity and was seen to have survived the worst that communism could throw at him. There is television footage of Blake at Heathrow airport, modest before the world’s press, a bearded man hiding a terrible secret. For the next eight years, working as an agent of the KGB, he betrayed every secret that passed across his desk, including Anglo-American co-operation on the construction of the Berlin Tunnel. His treachery is considered to have been more damaging even than Philby’s.

Blake was caught more by a process of elimination than by distinguished detective work, and summoned to Broadway Buildings. SIS needed to extract a confession from him: without it, the traitor would walk free. After three days of fruitless interrogation in which Blake denied any involvement with the Soviets, the SIS officer in charge of the case played what he knew was his final card.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘We know you’re working for the Russians and we understand why. You were a prisoner of the Communists, they tortured you. They blackmailed you into betraying SIS. You had no choice.’

This was too much for George.

‘No!’ he shouted, rising from his chair. ‘Nobody tortured me! Nobody blackmailed me! I acted out of a belief in communism.’

There was no financial incentive, he told them, no pressure to approach the KGB.

‘It was quite mechanical,’ he said. ‘It was as if I had ceased to exist.’

The platforms and escalators of Green Park underground station are thick with trapped summer heat. The humidity follows me as I clunk through the ticket barriers and take a flight of stairs up to street level. Here, passing traffic creates little cooling winds, and the tightly packed crowds gradually thin out as I move downhill towards the In and Out Club.

I am casually dressed, in the American style: camel-coloured chinos, a blue button-down shirt, old suede loafers. Some thought has gone into this, some notion of what Katharine would like me to be. I want to give an impression of straightforwardness. I want to remind her of home.

But it’s Fortner I see first, about fifty metres further down the street. He is dressed in an old, baggy linen suit, wearing a white shirt, blue deckshoes and no tie. At first I am disappointed to see him: there was a possibility that he might have been in Washington and I had hoped that Katharine would be waiting for me alone. But it was inevitable that Fortner would make it: there’s simply too much at stake for him to stay away.

Katharine is beside him, more tanned than I remember, making gentle bobbing turns on her toes and heels with her hands gently clasped behind her back. She is wearing a plain white T-shirt with loose charcoal trousers and light canvas shoes. The pair of them look as if they have just stepped off a ketch in St Lucia. They see me now and Katharine waves enthusiastically, starting to walk in my direction. Fortner lumbers just behind her, his creased pale suit stirring in the breeze.

‘Sorry. Am I late?’

‘Not at all,’ she says. ‘We only just got here ourselves.’

She kisses me. Moisturizer.

‘Good to see ya, Milius,’ says Fortner, giving me a butch, pumping handshake and a wry old smile. But he looks tired underneath the joviality, far-off and jet-lagged. Perhaps he came here direct from Heathrow.

‘I like your suit,’ I tell him, though I don’t.

‘Had it for years. Made in Hong Kong by a guy named Fat.’

‘Did you come from work?’ Katharine asks.

‘Yeah. It doesn’t take long to get here by Tube.’

‘You came on the subway?’

‘Yeah.’

We start walking towards the Ritz.

‘So it was great that you could make it tonight.’

‘I was glad you rang.’

‘Saul not with you?’

‘He couldn’t come in the end. Sends his apologies. Had to go off at the last minute to shoot an advert.’

I never asked Saul to come along. I don’t know where he is, or what he’s up to.

‘That’s too bad. Maybe next time.’

Katharine moves some loose hairs out of her face.

‘I forget, honey,’ she says. ‘What’s this neighbourhood called? How do you pronounce it?’

‘Piccally Diccally,’ Fortner replies, giving me a discreet wink.

‘Come on. No it’s not. It’s Piccali… Oh, I can never pronounce it. What is it Alec?’

‘Piccadilly.’

‘That’s it.’

‘Do you know why it’s called that?’ I ask, tempering my voice so as not to sound like too much of a smart arse.

‘No, why?’

‘A “dilly” in old-fashioned English was a prostitute. A hooker.’

‘Really?’

‘And so you came here to literally “pick a dilly”.’

‘No way!’

Katharine sounds genuinely amazed by this.

‘That’s pretty interestin’,’ Fortner adds, though there is nothing in his reaction to suggest that he thinks it is. ‘Too bad Saul couldn’t come. Hope you won’t be bored.’

‘Not at all. I’m happy it being just the three of us.’

‘You gotta girlfriend, Milius?’

I don’t mind it too much that Fortner has decided to call me that. It suggests a kind of intimacy, a preparedness for risk.

‘Not at the moment. Too busy. I used to have one but we broke up.’

This is quietly registered by both of them, another fact about me. We continue along the street, the silence lengthening.

‘So where are we heading?’ I ask, trying to break it, trying to stop any sense that we might have nothing to say to one another. I must keep talking to them. I must earn their trust.

‘Yes,’ says Fortner, loudly clapping his hands. It is as if I have woken him up from a nap. ‘Good question. Kathy and I have been going to this place for years. We thought we’d show it to you. It’s a small Italian restaurant that’s been owned by the same Florentine family for decades. Maitre d’ goes by the name of Tucci.’

‘Sounds great.’

Katharine’s attention has been distracted. There are hampers, golf bags and elegant skirts on display in the windows of Fortnum & Mason and she has stopped to look at them. I am watching her when Fortner puts his hand on my shoulder and says:

‘I like this part of town.’ He’s decided to play the avuncular card right away. ‘It’s so… anachronistic, so Merchant Ivory, you know? Round here an English gentleman can still get his toast done on one side, have an ivory handle attached to his favourite shooting stick, get a barber to file his nails down and rub his neck with eau de Cologne. You got your bespoke shirts, your customized suits. Look at all this stuff.’

‘You like that, honey?’ Katharine asks, pointing at a smart two-piece ladies’ outfit in a window.

‘Not a whole lot,’ Fortner replies, his mood abruptly fractious. ‘Why, you wanna get it?’

‘No. Just askin’.’

‘Well I’m hungry,’ he says. ‘Let’s go eat.’

The restaurant has an outside staircase flaked with dried moss leading down to a basement. Fortner, walking ahead of us, clumps down the steps and through the heavy entrance door. He doesn’t bother holding it open for Katharine: he just wants to get inside and start eating. Katharine and I are left on the threshold and I hold the door open for her, letting her glide past me with a whisper of thanks which is almost conspiratorial.

The restaurant is only half-full. There’s a small clearing immediately inside the entrance where we are met by a paunchy, hair-oiled Italian in late middle-age. Fortner already has his arm wrapped around his white-shirted belly with a big, fulfilled smile all over his face.

‘Here they come now,’ he is saying as we come through the door, his voice hearty and full of good cheer. ‘Tucci, let me introduce you to a young friend of ours, Mr Alec Milius. Very smart guy in the oil business.’

‘Nice to meet you, sir,’ says Tucci, shaking my hand, but he hasn’t even looked at me. His eyes have been fixed on Katharine since we walked in.

‘And your beautiful wife, Mrs Grice,’ he says. ‘How are you, my dear?’

Katharine bends to meet Tucci’s puckered kiss, offering him a smooth, pale cheek. She doesn’t bother explaining that Grice isn’t her surname.

‘You look as beautiful as ever, madam.’

‘Oh you’re incorrigible, Tucci. So charming.’

The slimy old bastard leads us downstairs into a dark basement where we are shown to a small table covered in a red cloth and faded cutlery. The decor is very seventies, but it isn’t consciously retro. Cheap wood carvings line the walls and there are candles in old wicker flasks on shelves. Hardened wax clings to their sides like jewellery.

Fortner shuffles on to a sofa attached to the wall and Tucci pins the table up against his legs. I take the chair to Fortner’s right and Katharine sits down opposite me. Three of us in a booth. Rather than have one of his dumb-looking Sicilian studs do it, Tucci then goes back upstairs and brings down three menus and a wine list, thereby giving himself as much time as possible with Katharine. All of his pre-meal small talk is addressed towards her. That’s a lovely dress, Mrs Grice. Have you been on holiday? You look so well. By contrast, Former and I are treated with something approaching contempt. Eventually, Fortner loses his cool and tells Tucci to bring us some drinks.

‘Right away, Mr Fortner. Right away. I have a nice bottle of Chianti you try. And some Pellegrino, perhaps?’

‘Whatever. That’d be great.’

Fortner takes off his jacket to eat, tossing it in a crumpled heap on to the sofa beside him. Then he undoes the top three buttons of his shirt and inserts a napkin, mafia-style, below the nape of his neck. His chest hair is clearly visible, tight black curls like cigarette burns.

In the early part of the meal we do not talk about any aspect of the oil business. I am not tapped for information, for tips and gossip, nor do Katharine and Fortner discuss ongoing projects at Andromeda. I have ordered veal but it is tough and bland, a stubborn slice of calf with no flavour. The Americans are both having the same thing — plump breasts of chicken in what appears to be a mushroom cream sauce — but it looks a lot better then mine. We share out french beans and potato croquettes and get through the first bottle of red wine within half an hour.

We get along fine, better even than I had expected: everything is easy and enjoyable. The generation gap between us, as was proven by the trip to the NFT, is no hindrance at all. And although Fortner’s age is in some ways accentuated by the vigour of his younger bride, he has that certain playfulness about him which largely offsets this.

Still, I cannot work out why Katharine would ever have chosen to marry him. Fortner is handsome, yes, with a certain gruff charm and a full head of hair. But close up, sitting near her in the dim light of the restaurant, the virility dissipates: he suffers by comparison, looking blotchy and liquor-sick, just another man on the wrong side of fifty. With a few drinks inside him, Fortner has a nice, sly sarcastic manner which he can get away with on account of his age — in a younger man, it would look like arrogance — yet there is a quality of solipsism about him which overshadows any occasional glints of mischief. As I felt when I first met him, Fortner looks to have experienced a great deal, yet he appears to have learned very little from those experiences. There is even an element of stupidity in him: he can at times appear almost a fool.

Yet his attitude towards Katharine is not one of deference and admiration. He is often short with her, critical and dismissive. At one point, just as I am finishing off my veal, she embarks on a story about her college days at Amherst. But before she has really begun, Fortner is interrupting her, telling her not to bore Alec with stories from her youth. Then he simply takes the conversation off on a separate tangent with which he is more at ease. This is done consciously, as a premeditated recrimination, but Katharine barely seems to mind. It is as if she has accepted the subjugatory role of pupil, like a student who has moved in with her tutor and finds herself living in his shadow. This is not how things should be: Katharine is smarter, quicker-witted and more subtle, both in her views and manner, than Fortner. He is gauche by comparison.

Just once or twice there is a slight register of impatience on her face when Fortner goes too far, though I sense that this may be largely for my benefit, another tactic she employs in flirtation. Nevertheless, it is all the more pointed for being concealed from him, and by the time the pudding menus arrive I am convinced that she is starved of simple affections and would cherish a little attention.

Tucci recommends the tiramisu and flatters Katharine by telling her that she is the last person on earth who should worry about putting on weight. But she will not be persuaded, ordering fruit instead. Fortner asks if the restaurant still serves ice cream, and Tucci gives him a slightly withering look before saying yes. Fortner then orders a large bowl of mint choc chip. I ask for the tiramisu and Tucci disappears upstairs with our order.

This is when they finally ask me a question about Abnex.

‘How long have you been there?’ Katharine enquires, rearranging her napkin so that it forms a neat square on her lap.

‘About nine months.’

‘You like it?’

She has asked me this before. At the party.

‘Yes. I find the work interesting. I’m underpaid and the hours are anti-social, but I have prospects.’

‘Boy, you really know how to sell it,’ Fortner mutters.

‘You’ve just got me on a bad day. I had an argument with my boss earlier. He comes down hard when things don’t go his way.’

‘What did you do wrong?’ Katharine asks.

‘That’s just it. I didn’t.’

‘OK then,’ she says patiently. ‘What does he think you did wrong?’

I get all the components of the story straight in my mind, then kick off.

‘He told me to set up a meeting with an associate of his who I think is unreliable. Name of Warner. This guy is an old friend of Alan’s, so he feels a residual loyalty towards him. In other words, he’s prepared to overlook the fact that Warner’s a loser. Alan knows I think this, and it’s almost like he enjoys giving me as much contact with him as possible.’

Fortner’s head drops slightly, his eyes moving slowly across the table.

‘Anyway, Warner didn’t return any of my calls for a week and I must have been ringing him five times a day. I needed some figures. Eventually I gave up and just got them from someone else. Alan went spastic, said I’d gone over his head and questioned his authority. And I’m at Abnex on a trial basis, so it doesn’t bode well.’

‘A trial basis?’ says Fortner, looking up immediately. He hadn’t stopped listening to me. ‘You mean you’re not a full-time employee?’

‘I’m halfway through a trial period. I have to attain a consistently high standard of work or they’ll kick me out.’

‘Jesus,’ says Katharine, swallowing a mouthful of Chianti. ‘That’s a lot of pressure to work under.’

‘Yeah,’ adds Fortner. ‘You’re a human being, not a high-performance saloon.’

I laugh at this, making a snorting noise which is loud enough to cause someone on a neighbouring table to look up and stare at me. I bring my napkin up to my face and dab away an imaginary speck. Keep going.

‘The trouble is that they don’t give me any indication of how well I’m doing. There’s very little in the way of compliments or praise.’

‘I think people need that, the encouragement,’ Katharine says.

‘That’s right,’ says Former, his voice going deep and meaningful. ‘So is that usual for young guys like yourself to get hired by a company and then, you know, just see how it pans out?’

‘I guess so. I have friends in a similar kind of position. And there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it. It’s work, you know?’

The pair of them nod sympathetically and, sensing that this is the best opportunity, I decide to tell them now about my interviews with SIS last year. It is a great risk, but Hawkes and I have decided that to tell the Americans about SIS may actually draw me further into their confidence. To conceal the information might arouse suspicion.

‘It’s funny,’ I say, taking a sip of wine. ‘I nearly became a spy.’

Katharine looks up first, vaguely startled.

‘What?’ she says.

‘It’s true,’ I say, very relaxed and cool. ‘I probably shouldn’t be telling you, Official Secrets Act and all that, but I got approached by MI6 a few months before I got the job at Abnex.’

Not missing a beat Katharine says:

‘What is MI6? Like your version of the CIA?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jesus. That’s so… so James Bond. So… are you… I mean, are…?’

‘Of course he’s not, honey. He’s not gonna be sitting here telling us all about it if he’s in MI6.’

‘I’m not a spy, Katharine. I didn’t pass the exams.’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why? Why are you sorry?’

‘Well, weren’t you disappointed?’

‘Not at all. If they didn’t think I was good enough for the job, then fuck ‘em.’

‘That’s a great attitude,’ Fortner exclaims. ‘A great attitude.’

‘How else am I supposed to react? I went through three months of vetting and interviewing and IQ tests and examinations and at the end of it all, after they’d more or less told me I was certain to get in, they turned around and shut me out. With a phone call. Not a letter or a meeting. A phone call. No explanation, no reason why.’

My sense of disappointment should be clear to them.

‘You must have been devastated.’

But I don’t want to overplay the anger.

‘At the time, I was. Now I’m not so sure. I had a pretty idealistic view of the Foreign Office, but from what I can gather it’s not like that at all. I had images of exotic travel, of dead drops and seven-course dinners in the Russian Embassy. But nowadays it’s all pen-pushing and equal opportunities. Right across the board, the Civil Service is being filled up with bureaucrats and suits, people who have no problem toeing the party line. Anybody with a wild streak, anyone with a flash of the unpredictable, is ruled out. There are no rough edges any more. The oil business has more room for adventure, don’t you think?’

They both nod. It looks as though the gamble has paid off.

‘Sorry. I don’t mean to rant.’

‘No, no, not at all,’ says Katharine, laying her hand on my sleeve. A good sign. ‘It’s good to hear you talk about it. And I have two things I wanna say.’ She fills my glass, draining the bottle in the process. ‘One, I can’t believe that a guy as smart and together as you didn’t make it. And two, if your government doesn’t have sense enough to know a good thing when it sees one, well then that’s their loss.’

And with that she raises her glass and we do a three-way chink over the table.

‘Here’s to you, Alec,’ says Fortner. ‘And screw MI6.’

While we are eating pudding something odd happens between Fortner and Katharine, something I had not expected to see.

I have been given a large bowl of tiramisu and Katharine is insisting on tasting it. Fortner tells her to leave me alone, but she ignores him, sliding her spoon into the ooze of my plate and retrieving it with her hand held underneath, catching stray droplets of cream.

‘It’s good,’ she says, swallowing, and turns to Fortner.

‘Can I try yours, sweetie?’

But he rears back, shielding his bowl with his hand.

‘No way,’ he says indignantly. ‘I don’t want your germs.’

There is a startled pause before she says:

‘I’m your wife, for Chrissakes.’

‘Makes no difference to me. I don’t want any foreign saliva on my mint choc chip.’

Katharine is embarrassed, as am I, and she stands up just a few seconds later to go to the ladies.

‘Sorry, Milius,’ Fortner grunts, now shamed into regret. ‘I get real touchy about that kinda thing.’

‘I understand,’ I tell him. ‘Don’t worry.’

To smooth things over, he starts telling me a story about how the two of them met (Paris, conference), but the ease has gone out of the evening: Fortner knows that he has slipped up, that he has showed me a side of himself he had intended to remain concealed.

‘You want coffee, honey?’ he asks timidly when Katharine comes back. I can tell straight away that she has forgiven him, gathered herself together in the ladies and taken a deep breath. There is no hint of admonishment or frustration on her face.

‘Yeah. That’ll be nice,’ she says, — grinning. She has put on a new coat of lipstick. ‘You boys having one?’

‘We are.’

‘Good. Then I’ll have an espresso.’

And the incident passes.

Half an hour later we emerge into the darkness of Wi. Fortner, who has picked up the bill, puts his arm around Katharine and walks east, looking around for a cab. The weight of his arm seems to be pulling her down on one side.

‘We gotta do this again some time,’ she says. ‘Right, honey?’

‘Oh, yeah.’

High up to the left, Katharine gazes at the postcard lights of Piccadilly Circus and says how she never grows tired of looking at them. We walk down the hill towards Waterloo Place and pass the statue commemorating the Crimea.

There are no cabs in sight, but a red Vauxhall Cavalier kerb-crawls us on the corner of Pall Mall. An unlicensed taxi. Fortner looks over nervously as the driver lowers the window on the passenger side and mutters ‘Cab?’ under his breath. I lean down and tell him no thanks. He pulls away.

‘That’s so sweet,’ says Katharine. ‘In New York guys like that come past you whispering “crack, crack”. Here all they wanna do is get to drive you home.’

‘Did you want to go with him?’ I ask.

‘No, we’ll get a black,’ says Fortner firmly.

And no sooner has he said this than one shows up.

‘You sure you don’t want it?’ Katharine says, kissing me on both cheeks.

‘No,’ I tell her. ‘I’m going to catch a train from Charing Cross.’

‘Sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Well, it was lovely seeing you.’

‘Give me a ring,’ I say as she climbs in behind Fortner. I can see the slim outline of her arse and a long slender thigh taut against the cloth of her charcoal trousers.

‘We will,’ he shouts out and the cab pulls away.

It went well.

16 Hawkes

Hawkes leaves the country for the next four and a half months, ostensibly on Abnex business, although I am increasingly of the view that he is involved in other projects with at least one other company. In his absence my encrypted reports are sent to John Lithiby, who has not contacted me directly since the beginning of the year. I have taken this as a sign of his approbation.

There is a rumour in the office — no more than that — that Hawkes has a girlfriend in Venice, and when we meet in the grey conference room on the second floor for our first debriefing of the summer, he has just returned from a ten-day break ‘in northern Italy’.

‘Is it nice this time of year?’ I ask him.

‘Crowded,’ he says.

Lithiby will have informed Hawkes of the progress of my relationship with Katharine and Fortner: the Sunday lunch I cooked for them at my flat in May, with the Hobbit, his girlfriend, Saul and JT in attendance; the night we watched England lose on penalties to Germany in a pub on Westbourne Grove; the Saturday afternoon when Fortner got sick, and Katharine and I ended up going to the cinema together. It is the record of a gradually improving acquaintance, all of it planned and analysed to the last detail.

‘John said something about a drive you took with Fortner the week before last. Could you tell me more about that?’

I have been fiddling with my mobile phone, which I now place on the table in front of me.

‘He wanted to see Brighton, said he’d never been there.’

‘Where was Katharine?’

‘Visiting a friend who was pregnant.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘It’s in the report, Michael.’

‘I want to hear it from you.’

I have difficulty casting my mind back to that afternoon. There is an important call coming through from an Abnex client in Russia this evening, and I am anxious to get back to my desk to prepare for it.

‘It was normal. I told him about my problems at Abnex.’

‘What kind of problems?’

‘Made-up stuff. Not getting enough money, that kind of thing.’

‘Don’t overplay that,’ he says, one of the few times that Hawkes has hinted at any concern over the way I am handling things.

‘I won’t,’ I tell him, lighting a cigarette. ‘Fort likes to give me advice about the business, tells me how to handle Alan and Harry. He gets a kick out of it.’

‘Playing the father figure?’

I hesitate here, uncomfortable with the analogy.

‘If you want to call it that, yes. He likes to think of himself as someone who helps out the younger generation. He tried to set Saul up with a contact he had in advertising.’

‘Did anything come of that?’

‘Don’t think so. Anyway, we chatted, drove around, had some coffee. I managed to bring up that conversation you suggested.’

‘Which one?’

‘You wanted me to complain to them about our government doing anything the Americans tell it to.’

‘I do recall that, yes.’

‘As a matter of fact, I think I used your phrase: “We’ve been hanging on to the shirt-tails of every Presidential administration since Franklin Roosevelt.” ‘

‘And how did Fortner respond?’

‘Coolly, I would say. That’s the word I used in my report. I told him I felt Britain had become the fifty-first American state. Ask nicely and we’ll bomb Baghdad. Just say the word and you can use our runways. You know the kind of argument. Cut us a deal and you can borrow our aircraft carriers, our military installations. Even our soldiers, for Christ’s sake.’

‘You’re not trying to defect, Alec,’ he says suddenly, cackling at his own joke. ‘I trust you didn’t go too far?’

‘Relax,’ I tell him. ‘Fortner agreed with everything I said.’

‘And Katharine. How is she?’

‘Very flirtatious. That’s still the predominant tactic. Little arguments every now and again with Fortner, then a little glance at me for sympathy. She’s very touchy-feely. But that may be just a Yank thing.’

Hawkes straightens up in his chair.

‘Keep using the sexual element,’ he says, with the detachment of a doctor discussing a prescription. ‘Don’t go too far, but don’t shut her out.’

‘I won’t.’

‘When are you next seeing them?’

‘This weekend. Fortner’s gone to Kiev for the pipeline conference. Katharine called me almost as soon as he left for the airport.’

‘She did?’

‘Yeah. Asked if I wanted to spend Saturday with her. Go for a walk in Battersea Park.’

‘Let me know how it goes,’ he says.

Feeling oddly confident, I decide to press him on something.

‘Any news on the job? Has Lithiby said anything about taking me on full time?’

Hawkes withdraws slightly, as if offended by the question. As far as he is concerned, this matter has already been dealt with.

‘Things remain as they were,’ he says. ‘If the operation is a success, the Security Service will consolidate its relationship with you. Your position will become permanent.’

‘That was always the precondition,’ I say, speaking for him. And in a tired echo, Hawkes says:

‘Yes. That was always the precondition.’

17 The Special Relationship

Standing easy against the fridge in the kitchen at Colville Gardens, Katharine sweeps hair out of her face and says:

‘Alec, I’m gonna take a shower, is that all right? I’m kinda hot after our walk. If the phone rings, the machine’ll pick it up. You be OK for a bit; watch TV or something?’

‘Sure.’

Her cheeks have rouged to a healthy flush after being outside in the fresh air of Battersea Park.

‘Why don’t you fix us a drink while I’m gone?’ she says.

I know what she likes: a fifty-fifty vodka tonic in a tall glass with a lot of ice and lemon.

‘You want a vodka and tonic?’

She smiles, pleased by this.

‘That’d be great. I got some olives in the refrigerator.’

‘Not for me.’

‘OK. Leave ‘em. They’re really for Fort. He eats them like candy.’

The kitchen is open-plan, chrome, gadget-filled. Their entire apartment is like this: expensively decked out, but clearly rented, with no evidence of personal taste. Just a few photographs, some CDs and an old clock on the wall.

‘You like a lot of lemon, don’t you?’ I ask as Katharine crosses to a cupboard above the sink. She takes down two highball glasses and a bottle of Smirnoff Blue and sets them down on the counter. She is tall enough to reach up without standing on tip-toe.

‘Yeah. A lot of lemon. Squeeze it in.’

I move towards the fridge and open the freezer door.

‘That’ll be the best ice you ever had,’ she says from behind me.

‘The best ice? How come?’

‘Fort’s started putting Volvic in the tray. Says he read somewhere it’s the only way to avoid getting too much lead or something.’

I half-laugh and retrieve the tray. By the time I turn round, Katharine has left the room. I break out two cubes and throw them gently into a glass. Then I pour myself a double vodka and sink it in a single gulp.

Gladiators is on ITV.

I look around the other three channels but there’s nothing on so I mute the sound and flick through a copy of Time Out. There’s a swamp of plays and films on in London that I will never get to see because of work. All that entertainment, all those ideas and stories just passing me by.

After about ten minutes I hear a ruste at the sitting-room door and look up to see Katharine coming in. She is wearing a dark blue dressing gown over white silk pyjamas, her hair still wet from the shower, combed back in long straight even strands. She looks up at me and smiles with softened wide eyes.

‘Good shower?’ I ask, just to disguise my surprise.

‘Great, thanks. Oh, are you watchin’ Gladiators?’ She sounds excited, picking up the remote control and putting the sound back on. The thin silk of her dressing gown flutters as she sits down beside me, releasing an exquisite mist of warm lathered soap. ‘The British version of this show is much better than ours.’

‘You actually watch this?’

‘I find it intriguingly barbaric. She’s pretty, huh, the blonde one?’

The dour Scots referee says: ‘Monica, you will go on my first whistle. Clare, you will go on my second whistle,’ and before long two tracksuited PE teachers are chasing each other around the Birmingham NEC.

‘So, you hungry?’ Katharine asks, turning away from the screen to face me. ‘I’m gonna make us some supper.’

‘That’d be great.’

I am still getting over the pyjamas.

‘You wanna stay here or help me out?’ she says, as if there were no choice involved.

‘I’ll come with you.’

In the kitchen, Katharine goes to the fridge and takes out a tray of freshly made ravioli which I make all the right noises about. Did you make them yourself? That’s amazing. So much better than the packet stuff. The delicate shells are coated in a thin dusting of flour and she sets them down beside the fridge. I help by putting a large pan of salted water on the stove, placing a lid on top and turning the gas up high. The speed of the ignition makes me jerk my head back and Katharine asks if I’m OK. Oh, yes, I say, as the blue flames glow and roar. Then I sit down on a tall wooden stool on the far side of the kitchen counter and watch as she prepares a salad.

‘I’ll teach you a trick,’ she says, crunching down on a stick of celery like a toothpaste ad. ‘If you’ve got yourself a tired lettuce like this one, just stick it in a bowl of cold water for a while and it’ll freshen right up.’

‘Handy.’

I can think of nothing worthwhile to say.

‘You never had your drink,’ I tell her, looking over at the sink where the ice in her vodka tonic has melted into a tiny ball.

‘Oh that’s right,’ she exclaims. ‘I knew there was something missing. Will you fix me a fresh one?’

‘Of course.’

The bottle of Smirnoff is still sitting out and I mix two fresh vodka and tonics as she washes a colander up at the sink. This will be my third drink of the evening.

‘There you go,’ I say, handing it to her. Our fingers do not touch. She takes a sip and lets out a deep sigh.

‘God, you make these so good. How’d you know how to do that?’

‘My father taught me.’

She sets the glass down on the counter and starts slicing up some tomatoes, a cucumber and the sticks of celery on a wooden chopping board, throwing them gently into a large teak bowl. Steam has started to rise in thick clouds from the pan on the stove, rattling the lid, but rather than do anything about it I say:

‘Water’s boiling, Kathy.’

‘You wanna get it, honey? I’m kinda busy.’

‘Sure.’

I remove the lid, twist the dial to low and watch the water subside into little ripples.

Honey. She called me honey.

Katharine stops chopping and comes to stand beside me. She has a wooden spoon in her hand and says: ‘Let’s put the pasta on, shall we?’

And now very carefully, one by one, she lowers the ravioli pillows down into the water on the wooden spoon, intoning ‘This is the tricky bit, this is the tricky bit’ in a low voice that is almost a whisper. I am beside her, watching, doing nothing, my shoulder inches from hers. When she is done I walk away from the stove and sit back down on the stool. Katharine brings out a large white plate, a flagon of olive oil, some balsamic vinegar and a basket of sliced ciabatta. These she places on the counter in front of me. Still clutching the basket, she turns around to face the stove and the silk of her dressing gown rides up to the elbow. Her bared arm is slender and brown, the long fingers of her flushed pink hands crowned by filed white nails.

‘The trick is not to let the water boil too fast,’ she says, talking to the opposite wall. ‘That way the ravioli doesn’t break up.’

She turns back to face me and the sleeve of her gown slips back down her arm. Even with all the flavours and steam around us, the smell of her is lifting from her hair and shower-warmed skin.

‘You’ll love this,’ she says, looking down at the counter. She picks up the flagon of oil and pours it on to the plate in a thin, controlled line which creates a perfect olive circle. Then she allows tiny droplets of balsamic vinegar to fall into the green centre of the plate, forming neat black orbs which float loose in the viscous liquid.

‘Dip the bread in,’ she says, showing me how with a crusty slice of her own. ‘It tastes so good.’

I take a smaller chunk of bread from the basket and run it through the oil.

‘Try to get a little more of the oil than the vinegar,’ she says.

I swirl the bread around and leave cloudy crumbs amid the black and green spirals.

‘Sorry. Messy.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she says, licking her lips. I take my first mouthful, sweet and rich. ‘Tastes good, huh?’

We eat the ravioli sitting at the kitchen table, and consume the better part of a bottle of Chablis by quarter past nine. As Katharine is taking the plates over to the sink, the telephone rings and she goes next door to answer it, padding there softly in bare feet. From the tone of the conversation I presume that it’s Fortner: there’s no forced politeness in Katharine’s voice, just the easy familiarity of long-term couples. At no point does she mention that I am next door, though there’s a section of the conversation that I can’t hear owing to a car alarm triggering in Colville Gardens. When it is finally shut off, I overhear Katharine say, ‘You could say that, yes,’ and ‘Absolutely’ with a guardedness which leads me to assume they are talking about me. It will be past midnight in Kiev.

‘That was Fort,’ she says, breezing back into the kitchen a few moments later. ‘He says hi. Jesus, those fucking vehicle alarms.’

She wouldn’t ordinarily say ‘fucking’ unless she’d had a few drinks.

‘I know, I heard it.’

‘What’s the point of them, anyway? Nobody pays any attention when they go off. They don’t prevent car crime. Everybody just ignores them. You wanna coffee or something? I’m making myself one.’

‘Instant?’

”Fraid so.’

‘No, thanks.’

‘You’re such a snob about coffee, Alec.’

‘Nescafe is just an interestingly flavoured milk drink. You shouldn’t tolerate it. I’m going for a pee, OK?’

‘You do what you have to, sweetie.’

The bathroom is at the far end of the apartment, through the sitting-room and down a long passage which passes the entrance to the flat. The bathroom door is made of light wood with an unoiled hinge which squeaks like a laughing clown when I open it. I walk in and slide the lock. There is a mirror hung above the sink and I check my reflection, seeing tiny pimples dotted along my forehead which can’t look good in the stark white light of the kitchen. The rest of my face is blanched, and I push out my lips and cheeks to bring some colour back into them. Once a little red flush has appeared I go back outside.

Walking towards the sitting-room I steal a look through the door of their bedroom, which Katharine has left open after her shower. This is the most basic sort of invasion, but it is something I have to do. There are clothes, shoes and several issues of the New Yorker strewn on the floor. I walk further inside, my eyes shuttling around the room, taking in every detail. There is a fine charcoal sketch of a naked dancer on the wall above the bed, and a discarded bottle of mineral water by the window.

I go back out into the corridor and hear the distant running of water at the kitchen sink. Katharine is washing up. There is another bedroom further down on the right-hand side of the passage, again with its door open. Again I look through it as I am passing, prying behind her back. An unmade bed is clearly visible on the far side, with one of Fortner’s trademark blue shirts lying crumpled on the sheets. An American paperback edition of Presumed Innocent has been balanced on the window sill and there are bottles of cologne on a dresser near the door. Is it possible that they are no longer sharing a room? There are too many of Fortner’s possessions in here for him simply to have taken an afternoon nap.

I go back outside and walk quietly back to the first bedroom. This time I notice that the bed has only been slept in on one side. Katharine’s creams and lotions are all here, with skirts and suits on hangers by the door. But there are no male belongings, no ties or shoes. A photograph in a gilt frame by the window shows a middle-aged man on a beach with a face like an old sweater. But there are no pictures of Fortner, no snaps of him arm-in-arm with his wife. Not even a picture from their wedding.

On a side table I spot a heavy, leather-bound address book and pick it up. No noise in the corridor. The alphabetized guides are curled and darkened with use, each letter covered in a thin film of dirt. I check the As, scanning the names quickly.

No Allardyce. That’s a good sign.

To B, on to the Cs, then a flick through to R. Sure enough, at the bottom of the third page:

with his full address and telephone number. I have to get back to the kitchen. But there is just time for M.

Suddenly I hear footsteps near by, growing louder. I shut the book and place it back on the table. I am turning to leave when Katharine comes in behind me. We almost collide and her face sparks into rage.

‘What are you doin’ in here, Alec?’

‘I was just…’

‘What? What are you doing?’

I can think of nothing to say and wait for the wave of anger in her eyes to break over me. In the space of a few seconds, the evening has been ruined.

But something happens now, something entirely artificial and against the apparent nature of Katharine’s mood. It is as if she applies brakes to herself. Had I been anyone else there would have been an argument, a venting of spleen, but the fury in her quickly subsides.

‘You get lost?’ she asks, though she knows that this is unrealistic: I have been to the bathroom in their flat countless times.

‘No. I was snooping. I’m sorry. It was an intrusion.’

‘It’s all right,’ she replies, moving past me. ‘I just came to get something to wear. I’m kinda cold.’

I leave immediately, saying nothing, and return to the sitting-room. When Katharine comes back — some time later — she is wearing thick Highland socks and a blue Gap sweatshirt beneath her dressing gown, as if to suppress anything which I may earlier have construed as erotic. She sits down on the sofa opposite me, her back to the darkening sky, and fills the silence by reaching for the CD player. Her index finger prods through the first few songs on Innervisions and Stevie comes on, the volume set low.

‘Oh, that’s right,’ she says, as if ‘Jesus Children of America’ had prompted her. ‘I was going to fix some coffee.’

‘I’m not having any,’ I tell her as she leaves the room, and even that sounds rude. She does not reply.

I should knock this on the head, do it now. I follow her into the kitchen.

‘Listen, Kathy, I’m sorry. I had no right to be in your bedroom. If I caught you looking around my things, I’d go spastic.’

‘Forget about it. I told you it was OK. I have no secrets.’

She tries to smile now, but there is no hiding her annoyance. She is clearly upset; not, perhaps, by the fact that I was in her room, but because I have discovered something intimate and concealed about her relationship with Fortner which may shame her. I do not think she saw me with the address book. Leaning heavily on the counter, she spoons a single mound of Nescafe into a blue mug and fills it with hot water from the kettle. She has not looked directly at me since it happened.

‘I need you to know that it doesn’t matter to me, what I saw.’

‘What?’

Katharine stares at me, her head at an angle, tetchy.

‘I think every married couple goes through a stage where they don’t share a room.’

‘What the hell makes you think you can talk to me about this?’ she says, straightening up from the counter with a look of real disappointment in her eyes.

‘Forget it. I’m sorry.’

‘No, Alec, I can’t forget it. How is that any of your business?’

‘It’s not. I just didn’t want to leave without saying something. I don’t want you thinking that I know something about you and Fort and that I’m jumping to conclusions about it.’

‘Why would I think that? Jesus, Alec, I can’t believe you’re being like this.’

We have never before raised our voices at one another, never had a cross word.

‘I shouldn’t have said anything.’

‘No, you’re right. You shouldn’t have. If I asked you personal stuff about Kate you wouldn’t like it too much, would you?’

‘That was a long time ago.’

‘Was it? Does it feel that way? No. No it doesn’t. These things are our most private…’

I put my hands in the air defensively, moving them up and down in a gesture of contrition.

‘I know, I know.’

‘Jesus,’ she says, a rasp in her voice. ‘I don’t wanna argue with you like this.’

‘Neither do I. I’m sorry.’

Silence now, and the edge suddenly goes out of our rush of talk. We are left facing one another, quiet and spent.

‘Let’s just sit next door,’ she says, turning to pick up her coffee. ‘Let’s just forget all about it.’

We go into the sitting-room, the breath of the fight still around us. Stevie is singing — ridiculously — ‘Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing’. Katharine flops down into one of the sofas and clutches her mug in both palms. She has the most beautiful hands. Eventually she says:

‘I hate fighting with you,’ as if we have done it many times before.

‘Me too.’

I sit down on the sofa opposite hers.

‘Can we talk about it?’

She emphasizes the word ‘can’ here as if it were a test of character. I do not know how to respond except with the obvious:

‘About what?’

‘About Fortner.’

His name balloons out of her as if he were sick.

‘Of course we can. If you want to.’

Her voice is very quiet and steady. It is almost as if she has prepared something to say.

‘We — Fortner and I — haven’t shared a bed for more than a year. For longer than you’ve known us.’

My pulse skips.

‘I’m sorry. I had no idea.’

I regret saying this immediately.

‘We’ll work it out,’ she says hopefully. ‘I just can’t be beside him in a bed right now. It’s not anyone’s fault.’

‘No.’

‘We’re just kind of going through this thing where we’re not attracted to one another.’

‘Or where you’re not attracted to him?’

She looks up at me, acknowledging with a softened expression that this is closer to the truth.

‘Have you talked about it? Does he know how you feel?’

‘No. He thinks he’s moved into the spare room because I can’t stand his snoring. He has no idea it’s because I don’t want to sleep with him.’

A brief quiet falls on the room, the lull after a sudden revelation. Katharine drinks her coffee and plays with a loose thread on her dressing gown.

‘There’s some history to it,’ she says softly, still staring into her lap. ‘When I met Fort I was very vulnerable. I’d just come out of a long-term relationship with a guy I’d met in college. It had ended badly and Fort offered me the kind of support that I needed.’

‘Was he a rebound?’

Katharine doesn’t want to admit this either to herself or to me, but she says:

‘I guess so. Yes.’

She looks up at me and I can only hope that my face looks receptive to what she wants to say.

‘Before I’d even really thought about it we’d gotten married. Fort had been hitched before — kids, divorce, the usual pattern — and he really wanted to make it work this time. He hasn’t had access to his children for more than ten years. But I was still kind of hung up on this guy and Fortner knew that. He’s always known it.’

She takes a deep, almost stagey breath.

‘I wanted to have kids, to make a family like I’d known it growing up, but he was reluctant to start again. Fort’s daughters are your age, you know, and he doesn’t think it’s fair on children to become a parent when you’re close to fifty. But I didn’t agree with him. I thought he didn’t want to have kids because he didn’t really love me. That was the state my mind was in. And after my father died, I thought there was something almost reverent about being a parent, like if you had the chance to be one you shouldn’t throw that away. Maybe you felt that too after your Dad passed away. But I was… I was…’

She is suddenly tripping over her thoughts, too scared to hear them come out.

‘Tell me.’

‘Alec, you can’t ever tell him that I told you this. OK? There’s only a handful of people in the world that know about it.’

‘You can trust me.’

‘It’s just I wanted children so badly. So I did a terrible thing. I tricked Fort into getting us pregnant. I stopped using my contraception and then when I got pregnant I told him.’

‘How did he react?’

‘He went crazy. We were living in New York. But Fort, you know, he’s totally against termination so he agreed that I could keep her.’

There’s only one possible outcome to this story, the worst outcome of all.

‘But I lost her. Three months in, there was a miscarriage and…’

‘I’m so sorry.’

Katharine’s face is an awful picture of despair. In an attempt to appear resilient, she is struggling to bury tears.

‘Well what can you do, huh?’ she says, with a shrug of her shoulders. ‘It was just one of those things. I was paying the penalty for deceiving him.’

‘Is that how you see it? Divine retribution?’

‘It gives me a sort of comfort to see it that way. Maybe it isn’t true. I don’t know. Anyway, pretty soon after that, work brought us here to London; but it’s never been the same between us. Never. We just have the friendship.’

‘He’s Misstra Know-It-All’ comes on the stereo system, a song I like, and it distracts me. What I should properly be feeling now is a sense of honour at being made privy to the secrets of their marriage, but even as Katharine is relating the most intimate history of her relationship with Fortner, my mind is caught between the loyalty demanded of friendship and a growing desire to take advantage of her vulnerability. When she is speaking I have tried to look solely at her eyes, at the bridge of her nose, but every time she has looked away I have stolen glimpses of her calves, her wrists, the nape of her neck.

‘You’ve repaired that?’

‘It’s a slow process. I’d been very honest with Fortner about how I’d gotten pregnant. I’d told him that it was a deliberate act on my part. That was a mistake: it would have been better to lie, to blame the Pill or something. It would have been better to say it was an accident. But somehow I wanted him to know, like an act of defiance.’

‘Sure, I can see that.’

‘It’s so good having someone who understands,’ she says. ‘I mean, you’ve had your heart broken, you’ve been through some tough times. You know how all this feels.’

‘Perhaps,’ I say, nodding. ‘But not to the extent that you’ve been through it.’

‘It’s not so bad,’ she says. She is attempting to come out of her contemplative mood into something more positive. ‘In a lot of ways, I’m lucky. Fort’s great, you know? He’s so smart and funny and laid-back and wise.’

‘Oh yeah, he’s great.’

‘Hey,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘Thanks for listening. Thanks for being there for me when I needed you.’

‘That’s all right. Don’t mention it.’

In a single fluid movement she stands up and crosses the room to where I am sitting, crouching down low on her thick Highland socks. And before I have had time to say anything she has wrapped her arms around my neck, whispering ‘Thank you, you’re sweet’ into my hair. The weight of her is so perfect. I put my hand lightly on her back.

She stops hugging first and withdraws. Now we are looking at one another. Still on her haunches, Katharine smiles and, very softly, touches the side of my face with her hand, drawing her fingers down to the line of my jaw. She lets them linger there and then slowly takes her hand away, bringing it to rest in her lap. There is a look in her eyes which promises the impossible, but something prevents me from acting on it. This is the moment, this is the time to do it, but after all the thought-dreams and the longings and the signals coding back and forth between us, I do not respond. And before I have even properly thought about it, I am saying:

‘I should get a cab.’

It was pure instinct, something defensive, an exact intimation of the correct thing to do. I could not spend the night with her without jeopardizing everything.

‘What, now?’ she says, leaning backwards with a relaxed smile which disguises well any disappointment she may be feeling. ‘It isn’t even eleven o’clock.’

‘But it’s late. You’ll want to — ‘

‘No, it’s not.’

I don’t want to offend her, so I say:

‘You want me to stick around?’

‘Sure. Relax. I’ll fix us a whisky.’

She gives my knee a squeeze and I simply can’t believe that I have just let that happen. Just kiss her. Just give in to what is inevitable.

‘OK, then, maybe just a quick one.’

She stands slowly, as if expecting me at any moment to pull her down towards me on the sofa. Just the action of her moving releases that exquisite scent as she turns and walks into the kitchen. I hear Fortner’s frozen Volvic falling into glass tumblers, then the slow glug-glug of whisky being poured on to ice. The noise of her moving quietly around on the polished wooden floor fills me with regret.

‘You have water in it, don’t you?’ she asks, coming back in with the drinks.

‘Yes.’

She hands me a glass and sits down beside me on the sofa.

‘Can I ask you something?’ she says, taking a sip of her whisky straight away. It is as if she has plucked up the courage for a big subject while she was next door.

‘Of course.’

Tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, she tries to make the question sound as easygoing as possible.

‘Are you happy, Alec? I mean really happy?’

The question takes me by surprise. I have to be very careful what I say here.

‘Yes and no. Why?’

‘I just worry about you sometimes. You seem a little unsettled.’

‘It’s just nerves.’

‘What d’you mean nerves? What about?’

It was a mistake to say that, to speak of nervousness. I’ll have to shift the subject, work from memory.

‘I was joking. It’s not nervousness exactly. I’m just in a constantly fraught state because of Abnex.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of the pressure to do the best job that I can. Because of the feeling of being watched and listened in on all the time. Because of the demands Alan and Harry put on me. All that stuff. I’m so tired. It’s so easy to get locked into a particular lifestyle in London, a particular way of thinking. And right now all I seem to worry about is work. There’s nothing else.’

Katharine has tilted her head to one side, eyes welled up with concern.

‘You’ll get the job, won’t you?’

‘Probably, yes. They wouldn’t spend all that money training someone just to chuck them out after a year. But it still hangs over me.’ I take a sip from the whisky tumbler and a slipped ice-cube chills my top lip. ‘The truth is I have this deep-seated fear of failure. I seem to have lived with it all my life. Not a fear of personal failure, exactly. I’ve always been very sure and certain of my own abilities. But a fear of others thinking that I’m a failure. Maybe they’re the same thing.’

Katharine smiles crookedly, as if she is finding it difficult to concentrate.

‘It’s like this, Kathy. I want to be recognized as someone who stands apart. But even at school I was always following on the heels of students — just one or two, that’s all — who were more able than I was. Smarter in the classroom, quicker-witted in the playground, faster on the football pitch. They had a sort of effortlessness about them which I have never had. And I always coveted that. I feel as though I have lived my life suspended between brilliance and mediocrity, you know? Neither ordinary nor exceptional. Do you ever feel like that?’

I look at her hopefully.

‘I think we all do, all the time,’ she replies, lightly shrugging her shoulders. ‘We try to kid ourselves that we’re in some way distinct from everyone else. More valuable, more interesting. We create this illusion of personal superiority. Actually, I think men in particular do that. A whole lot more than women, as a matter of fact.’

‘I think you’re right.’

I have a longing for a cigarette.

‘Still,’ she says. ‘I gotta say that you don’t seem that way to us.’

‘Who’s us?’

‘Fort and I.’

‘Don’t seem vain?’

‘No.’

It’s good that they think that.

‘But are you disappointed to hear me say these things?’

She jumps at this.

‘No! Hell no. Talk, Alec, it’s fine. We’re friends. This is how it’s supposed to be.’

‘I’m just telling you what I feel.’

‘Yes.’

‘Like for a long time now I’ve thought that things are down to luck. Success has nothing to do with talent, don’t you think? It’s just good fortune. Some people are lucky, some aren’t. It’s that simple.’

Katharine tucks her feet under her thighs, crouching up tight on the sofa, and she breathes out through a narrow channel formed between pursed lips. I can feel the wine now, the dissembling brew of vodka and whisky.

‘For example, I was predicted straight-A grades for university, but I got sick and took a string of Bs and Cs so I didn’t get my chance to go to Oxbridge. That would have changed everything. Oxford and Cambridge are the only truly optimistic places in England. Graduates come out feeling that they can do anything, that they can be anybody, because that’s the environment they’ve been educated in. And what’s to stop them? It’s almost American in that sense. But I meet Oxbridge graduates and there’s not one of them who has something I don’t, some quality I don’t possess. And yet somehow they’ve found themselves in positions of influence or of great wealth, they’ve got ahead. Now what is that about if it isn’t just luck? I mean, what do they have that I haven’t? Am I lazy? I don’t think so. I didn’t sit on my arse at university screwing girls and smoking grass and raving it up. I just didn’t get a break. And I’m not the sort of person who gets depressed. If I start feeling low I tell myself it’s just irrational, a chemical imbalance, and I pull myself out of it. I feel as if I have had such bad luck, you know?’

Katharine brings her eyes down from the ceiling and exclaims:

‘But you’re doing such good work now, such important work. The Caspian is potentially one of the most vibrant economic and political areas in the world. You’re playing a part in that. I had no idea you harboured these frustrations, Alec.’

I shouldn’t go too far with this.

‘They’re not constant. I don’t feel like that all the time. And you’re right — the Caspian is exciting. But look at how I’m treated, Kathy. Twelve and a half thousand pounds a year and no future to bank on. There’s so little respect for low-level employees at Abnex it’s staggering. I can’t believe what a shitty company it is.’

‘How are they shitty?’ This has caught her interest, but I don’t want to overplay my hand. ‘Tell me,’ she says.

‘Well…’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve only just started admitting this to myself, but after what happened with MI6, Abnex was a bit of a rebound.’

‘MI6?’ she says, as if she’d never heard of it. ‘Oh yes, of course. Your interviews. How do you mean a rebound?’

‘Well that was my dream job. To do that.’

‘Yes,’ she says slowly. ‘I recall you saying.’

I watch her face for a trace of deceit, but there is nothing.

‘Not for Queen and Country — that’s all shit — but to be involved in something where success or failure depended entirely on me and me alone. Working in oil is OK, but it doesn’t compare to what I would have experienced if I’d been involved in intelligence work. And I’m not sure that I’m cut out for the corporate life.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Let me put it like this. Sometimes I wake up and I think: is this it? Is this what I really want to do with my life? Is this the sum total of my efforts so far? I so much wanted to be a success at something. To be significant. And I still resent the Foreign Office for denying me that. It’s childish, but that’s how I feel.’

‘But you are a success, Alec,’ she says, and it sounds as if she really means it.

‘No, I mean a successful individual. I wanted to make my own mark on the world. MI6 would have given me that. Is that too idealistic?’

‘No,’ she says quietly, shaking her head from side to side in slow agreement. ‘It’s not too idealistic. You know, it’s funny. I look at you and I think you have everything a guy your age could possibly want.’

‘It’s not enough.’

‘Why not?’

‘I want acclaim. I want to be acknowledged.’

‘That’s understandable. A lot of young, ambitious guys are just like you. But do you mind if I give you a piece of advice?’

‘Go ahead.’

After a brief pause, she says:

‘I think you should relax a little bit, try to enjoy being young. What do you say?’

Katharine edges towards me, lending a bending emphasis to the question, and for the first time since she returned from the kitchen we find ourselves looking one another directly in the eye. We hold the contact, drawing out a candid silence, and I tell myself: this is happening again. She is giving it another try. She is guiding us gradually towards the bliss of an infidelity. And I think of Fortner, asleep in Kiev, and feel no loyalty to him whatsoever.

‘Relax a little bit?’ I repeat, moving towards her.

‘Yes.’

‘And how do you suggest I do that?’

‘I dunno,’ she says, leaning back. ‘Get out a bit more. Try not to care so much about what other people think about you.’

In this split instant I fear that I have read the situation wrongly. Her manner became suddenly curt, even distant, as if by flirting with her I broke the spell between us, made it explicit.

‘Easier said than done.’

‘Why?’ she asks. ‘Why is that easier said than done?’

‘I find it so hard, Kathy. To relax.’

‘Oh, come on,’ she says, tossing her face up to the ceiling. She finds my cautiousness disappointing.

‘You’re right…’

‘You know I am. I know what’s best for you. What about Saul? Why don’t you go out with him more?’

‘With Saul? He’s always busy. Always got a new girlfriend on the go.’

‘Yes,’ she says quietly, standing and picking up the two empty glasses from the table.

‘Let me give you a hand with those.’

‘No no, that’s OK.’ As she moves towards the kitchen she is shaking her head. ‘You’re so serious, Alec. So serious. Always have been.’

I don’t reply. It is as if she is angry with me.

‘You want another drink?’ she calls out.

‘No thanks. I’ve had one too many.’

‘Me too,’ she says, coming back in. ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’

‘Fine.’

‘Be here when I get back?’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

I had expected it: when she returns from the bathroom, Katharine is yawning, the elegant sinew and muscle on her neck stretched out in fine strands. She slumps down on the sofa and says: ‘Excuse me. Oh, I’m sorry. Must be tired.’

I take the cue. The hint is broad enough.

‘I should be going, Kathy. It’s late.’

‘No, don’t,’ she says, jerking up out of her seat with a suddenness which gives me new hope. ‘It’s so nice having you here. I’m just a little sleepy, that’s all.’

She rests her hand lightly on my leg. Why is she blowing so hot and cold?

‘That’s why I should be going. If you’re sleepy.’

‘Why don’t you stay the night? It’s Sunday tomorrow.’

‘No. You’ll want to be on your own.’

‘Not at all. I hate being alone. Strange noises. It would be nice if you slept over.’

‘You sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure.’

‘Because that would be great if I could. I’d save the money on a taxi.’

‘Well there you go, then. It’s settled.’ She beams, lots of teeth. ‘It’ll be just me and you. You can look out for me. Be my protector.’

‘Well if I’m going to do that I should sleep on the sofa. See the burglars coming in.’

‘You won’t be all that comfortable.’

‘Well, where do you suggest I sleep?’

I put as much ambiguity into this as it is comfortable to risk, but Katharine doesn’t pick it up.

‘Well, there’s always Fortner’s room,’ she says. ‘I can change the sheets.’

Not what I wanted her to say.

‘That’s a chore. You don’t want to be doing that at this time of night.’

‘No really. It’s no problem.’

I scratch my temple.

‘Look, maybe I should just get a taxi. Maybe you’d prefer it if I went.’

‘No. Stay. I’ll fetch you a blanket.’

‘You have one spare?’

‘Yeah. I got plenty.’

She twists up from the sofa, her left sock hanging loose off the toes, and walks back down the corridor.

‘There you go,’ she says, returning with a green chequered rug draped over her arm. She lays it on the sofa beside me. ‘Need a pillow?’

She yawns again.

‘No, the cushions will be fine.’

‘OK, then. Well I’m gonna get some sleep. Shout if you need anything.’

‘I will.’

And she leaves the room.

I am not sure that there was anything else I could have done. For a moment, sex was hovering in the background like a secret promise, but it was too much of a risk to make a move. I could not have been certain of her response. But now I am alone, still clothed, still wide awake, feeling cramped and uncomfortable on a Habitat sofa. I regret talking her into letting me stay the night: I only did it in the hope of being asked to join her in bed. I’d like to be on my way home, working back through the night’s conversations, thinking them through and noting them down. But now I am stuck here for what will be at least six or seven hours.

Katharine goes into her room after snuffing out the light in the passage, and I hear the firm closing thunk of her bedroom door.

At around two o’clock, perhaps a little later, I hear the noise of footsteps in the corridor. A quiet tip-toe in the dark. I turn on the sofa to face out into the darkened room, eyes squinting as a light comes on in the passage.

I make out Katharine’s silhouette in the door. She pauses there, and the room is so quiet that I can hear her breathing. She is coming towards me, edging forward.

‘Kathy?’

‘Sorry.’ She is whispering; as if someone might hear. ‘Did I wake you?’

‘No. I can’t sleep.’

‘I was just gonna fetch a glass of water,’ she says. ‘Sorry to wake you. You want one?’

‘No, thanks.’

If I’d said yes it would have brought her over here. That was stupid.

‘Actually maybe I will have one.’

‘OK.’

She turns on a side light in the kitchen and the low hum of the fridge compressor cuts out as she opens the door. A narrow path of bright light floods the floor. She pours two glasses of water, closes the fridge, and comes back into the sitting-room.

‘There you go,’ she says. I sit up, trying to catch her eye as she comes towards me. Her legs look tanned in the darkness.

‘Thanks, Kathy.’

‘Sorry to disturb you.’

She is not stopping. She turns, saying nothing more, moving back in the direction of her room.

‘Can’t you sleep?’ I ask, desperate now to keep her here. My voice is loud in the room, foolish.

‘No,’ she whispers. ‘I’ll be fine after this. Move into Fortner’s bed if you want. I’ll see you in the morning.’

18 Sharp Practice

‘So how was Kiev?’

‘Kiev?’ says Fortner, as if he had never heard of the place.

‘Yeah. Kiev.’

We walk another two or three paces down Ladbroke Grove before he replies:

‘Oh yeah. Christ. Kiev. Not bad. Not bad.’

I know he didn’t go to Ukraine. The Hobbit told me yesterday on the phone.

‘Were you working the whole time?’

‘Flat out. Twenty-four seven. A lotta talk.’

‘Nice weather?’ I ask, with a grin that he doesn’t see.

‘Oh yeah. Real nice. They sure don’t know how to dress for it, though. Girls wearing nylon tights in the sunshine and all the guys with these thick moustaches. What is that, a macho thing?’

‘What, wearing nylon tights?’

‘You’re sharp tonight, Milius,’ he says, putting his arm across my shoulders. He does that quite frequently nowadays. ‘I like it when you’re quick on your feet. Keeps us old guys on our toes.’

Fortner and I are going for a drink together: it’s something we’ve done three times before, just the two of us. Katharine cooks dinner, makes herself scarce, and leaves us to it. You go enjoy yourself, honey, she says, helping him on with his jacket. Bring him back in one piece, y’hear? And we walk the few blocks from their flat in Colville Gardens down to Ladbroke Grove, ready to drink through to last orders.

The setting is a spacious, brown, old-style pub which will be a themed bar-and-restaurant within twelve months, guaranteed. I hold the door open for him and we go inside, finding a pair of stools at the bar. Fortner hangs his elbow-patched tweed jacket on a nearby hook, retrieving his wallet from the inside pocket. Then he sits down beside me and rests his forearms on the wooden bar, breathing out heavily in anticipation of the long night ahead. To his left there’s a vast, Sun-reading builder, all bicep and sinew, muscles packed tight into a lumberjack shirt. His neck has been shaved to stubble and dropping from a scarred right earlobe is a single silver stud which seems to contain his entire personality. The man does not look up as we sit down. He just keeps on reading his paper.

‘I’ll get the first round,’ I say and reach into my hip pocket for a handful of change. ‘You want a pint or something, Fortner?’

‘A pint,’ he says slowly, as if still coming to terms with this strange Limey word. ‘Yes. That is a good idea, young man. A pint.’

‘Guinness? I’m having one.’

‘A drop of the old Irish,’ he glints. ‘Stout.’

The barman hears this and brings down two tall glasses, starting to pour the Guinness before I have even asked for them. He allows the pints to settle for a while, using the time to take my money and cash it in at the till.

‘Nuts? Do you want any nuts?’

‘Not for me,’ Fortner says. ‘Been tryin’ to get back to my ideal weight. Two hundred fifty pounds.’

‘There you go, guys,’ says the barman, setting the glasses down in front of us. He has the slightly sweeter, higher semitone voice which distinguishes Kiwis from Australians.

‘How was your flight?’

‘From Ukraine? Lousy.’

Imperceptibly, Fortner gathers together the lies.

‘There’s no chance of jet-lag on account of the time difference, but they do their best to exhaust you anyway. Aeroplane sat on the tarmac for three straight hours. Fuckin’ stewards gave us one complimentary drink and then played cards until take-off. Then the flight was diverted through Munich and I had to spend the night in a goddam Holiday Inn. Took a day to get home.’

This is utterly convincing. Perhaps the Hobbit got it wrong. Fortner does look older tonight, aged by long-haul flights and the trickeries of Kiev. Here is a man propping up a bar, a man in shirt-sleeves and slacks, with ovals of sweat under his arms and stubble cast across his face like a rash. There will be questions he means to ask of me, but his eyes look drained of will. He has no energy.

‘You look tired,’ I tell him.

‘Oh, I’m all right. This’ll start me up.’

He takes a long creamy swig of his Guinness and sets it back down on the bar with a thud.

‘So what’d you and Kathy get up to while I was away?’ he asks, licking his upper lip. We’ve already been over this at dinner, but it makes me do the talking.

‘Like she told you at supper. We went walking in Battersea Park. Had dinner at your place afterwards.’

‘Oh, yeah. She mentioned that.’

‘Why d’you ask, then?’

‘I just wanted details. Kinda missed her while I was away. I like hearing stories about her, things she did and said.’

The truth here would prove interesting. Well, frankly, Fort, there’s a lot of sexual tension between your wife and me and we nearly had sex on Saturday night.

‘She talked about you a lot,’ I tell him.

‘Is that right?’

‘Then I talked about me a lot…’

‘No change there, then.’

‘And finally we went to bed. I slept on the sofa.’

‘You stayed the night on the couch? Kathy never said.’

Interesting.

‘Didn’t she?’

‘No.’

An awkward pause hovers over us. The builder turns the page of his newspaper and it crackles in the silence.

‘Why do we always drink here?’ I ask Fortner, turning back to face him and lighting a cigarette from my packet on the counter. ‘Why do you like it?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No, it’s great. It’s just that we haven’t varied the venue.’

‘Consistency is a much undervalued asset in modern times, my friend. Best to get to know a place. And besides, there’s good-lookin’ women later on.’

The builder vibrates slightly on his stool. Something about this unnerves him.

Fortner takes another long draw of Guinness. ‘So how are things?’ he asks. ‘Everything OK at Abnex?’

‘Good, actually. Alan’s on holiday this week so we can get things done without him breathing down our necks.’

‘That’s always good, when the big chief takes off. You gotta hope they never come back.’

‘But I’m skint. I got hit for a parking ticket and a council tax bill first thing on Monday morning. That really pissed me off.’

‘You forget to feed the meter?’

‘No. Parked it on a double yellow near Hammersmith. Got towed.’

‘Shit. They swoop those guys, like a fucking SWAT team. You gotta be careful.’

‘The council tax is worse. I live in a shithole but I’m paying a fortune.’

‘Back taxes?’

‘Yeah, it’s been building up over the last year. I couldn’t afford to pay so I just let it drift.’

‘Foolish, my friend. Foolish. You should have come to me. I’d have helped you out.’

Fortner gives me a paternal pat on the back and I thank him, saying in the nicest possible way that I have no intention of borrowing money off him.

‘The council tax,’ he says, ruminatively. ‘What is that, like the poll tax only with a different name?’

‘Exactly. It’s like when they change a chocolate bar. Snickers — the new name for Marathon; council tax — the new name for exactly the same tax that caused riots in Trafalgar Square and the downfall of Margaret Thatcher. It’s just had a PR makeover and now suddenly everyone is prepared to put up with it. And it’s just stripped me of two weeks’ wages in one shot.’

Fortner drains his pint with a long, satisfied gulp and says it’s his round. Mine is still only half-empty. It takes him some time to get the attention of the barmaid, a local girl who has served us before.

‘How are you, gents?’ she asks. She has a crisp East End accent. ‘Same again is it?’

‘That’s right,’ says Fortner, taking a twenty-pound note from his wallet and snapping it between his fingers. He’s started to pick up in the last few minutes: one more pint and things will be rolling.

‘You mind if I make a slight criticism of you, Milius?’ he says, still looking at the girl. ‘Would that be OK?’

It is as if the fact that he is buying me a drink has suddenly given him the confidence to ask a serious question.

‘Sure.’

‘It’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about for a while now and I thought tonight would give us a good opportunity.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘It’s just that in the time that we’ve known one another — what is it, about six or seven months — you’ve shown a lot of hostility to the way things work over here. Does that sound unfair? I mean, stop me if I’m outta line.’

He wants to sound me out.

‘No, that’s OK.’

‘So you know what I’m talkin’ about?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

Encouraged by this, Former expands on his theme.

‘There’s just certain things you say, certain observations you make, like what you just said about the council tax there. For a guy your age you have a very jaded perspective on things. Maybe it’s normal for your generation. I hope you don’t mind me sayin’ this.’

I don’t mind at all. The barmaid puts two more pints down in front of us and gives Fortner his change.

‘Example. Do you really think that the concept of Queen and Country is just a lot of shit?’

‘Why did you use that phrase? Queen and Country?’

‘Because you did. With Kathy on Saturday night. She told me you’d said you didn’t want to go into the foreign service for patriotic reasons because you thought that kind of stuff was a waste of time. Why d’you feel that way?’

‘Maybe it’s difficult for an American to understand,’ I say, trying to find a way of balancing expediency with opinions that I genuinely hold. ‘Although your country is divided in a lot of ways — down racial lines, in the gap between the very rich and the very poor — you’re still bound together by flag-waving patriotism. It’s drummed into you from childhood. God bless America and put a star-spangled banner outside every home. You’re taught to love your country. We don’t have that here, we don’t do things the same way. Loving the country is something blue-rinse Tories do at the party conference in Blackpool. It’s seen as naive: it lacks the requisite degree of cynicism. We’re a divided nation, like yours, but we seem to relish that divisiveness. We have no reason historically to love our country.’

‘That’s a crock. Look at the camaraderie you generated during World War Two.’

‘Right. And we’ve been living off that for fifty years. Let me tell you: four in ten people in England celebrate St Patrick’s Day every year. How many do you think do something to celebrate St George’s Day?’

‘No idea.’

‘Four in every hundred. English pubs can get a special late licence to serve on St Patrick’s Day. They can’t if they want to do that on St George’s.’

‘That’s pretty sad.’

‘Too right it’s pretty sad. It’s pretty fucking embarrassing, too. But that isn’t the reason why I’m jaded, necessarily.’

‘Why, then?’

The builder suddenly scrapes back his stool, bundles up his copy of the Sun, and leaves. He’s heard enough of this.

‘I think we’re living in an age of social disintegration,’ I tell Fortner, trying not to sound too apocalyptic.

‘You do?’ he replies, nonplussed, as if everyone he has had a conversation with in the last few days has said exactly the same thing.

‘Absolutely. Health and education in this country, the two bedrocks of any civilized society, are a disgrace.’

I almost used the word ‘timebomb’ there, but I can hear Hawkes’s voice in my head: ‘You’re not trying to defect, Alec.’ Then his brisk, cackled laugh.

I continue:

‘For nearly twenty years the government has been more interested in installing pen-pushing bureaucrats into hospitals than it has been in making sure there are enough beds to tend for the sick. And why? Because in these days of enlightened capitalism and free markets, a hospital, just like everything else, has to turn a profit.’

‘Come on, Milius. You believe in free markets just as much as the next guy…’

True. But I don’t admit this.

‘Just a second. So in order to make their money they’ve created a culture of fear overseen by big-brother management consultants — no offence to you and Kathy — whose only concern is to get their annual bonus. The last thing it has anything to do with is curing people.’

Former makes to interrupt me again but I keep on going.

‘Education is worse: nobody wants to become a teacher any more because in the mind of the public, being a teacher is just a notch above cleaning toilets for a living. Just like doctors, they’ve been treated with utter contempt, subjected to endless form-filling, changes in the curriculum, low salaries, you name it. And all because the Tories don’t have the guts to say that the real problem isn’t the teachers, it’s bad parenting. And you know why they don’t say that? Because parents vote.’

‘You think that’ll change if Labour win?’

I give a spluttering laugh, more contemptuous than I had intended.

‘No. No way. Maybe they’ll try and make a difference in schools, but until the accumulation of knowledge stops being unfashionable, until kids are encouraged to stay at school past sixteen, and until they find parents who actually take responsibility for their kids when they go home in the evening, nothing will change. Nothing.’

‘It’s no different in the States,’ Fortner says, curling his mouth downward and shaking his head. ‘In some cities we have kids checking in assault rifles before assembly. You go to a high school in Watts it’s like passing through security at Tel Aviv airport.’

‘Sure. But your system isn’t a toss-up between private and public education. Only a very few people actually pay to go to high school in the States, right?’

‘Right.’

‘That’s not the case in this country. Here, you can buy your way out of the mess. And the worst of it is that the more state education goes into decline, the more parents are going to send their children to fee-paying schools, and the more teachers are going to want jobs outside the state sector because they don’t need the grief of working in an inner-city comprehensive. So the gap between rich and poor will widen. It’s exactly the same pattern with medical care. The only way not to have to wait three years for an operation is to pay for it. But you want to know what really sickens me?’

‘I feel sure you’re gonna tell me.’

‘Our fee-paying schools. They have unbelievable facilities, superb teaching resources, and they cost a fortune. But they’re wasted on the people who can afford to go there.’

‘Why d’you say that?’

‘Look at what the students do after ten years of being privately educated. Most of them go and work in the City with the sole objective of making money. Nobody ever puts anything back in. Nobody is taught to feel a responsibility towards their society. It’s women and children first with those guys, but only if Tarquin isn’t worried about losing the twelve per cent bonus on his offshore investment portfolio. That’s the extent of his imagination.’

‘But these are bright guys, Milius. And maybe after working in the City they go into the law or politics, or they start their own small business and create jobs for other people.’

‘Bullshit. Excuse me, Fort, but that’s bullshit. They’ll just make sure they have enough money to send their son to Winchester and then the whole cycle will begin all over again. Another generation of inbred fuckwits who are spoon-fed just enough of the right information by gifted teachers that they can scrape through their A-levels, go to university and waste some more of the taxpayer’s money. You know what? We should have to pay to go to university like you do in the States: at least then we’d appreciate it more.’

Fortner smirks and mutters ‘Yeah’ under his breath. A vapour of sweat has appeared on his forehead and he has a thin line of Guinness threaded across his upper lip.

I try a different tack.

‘Reminds me of a story my father told once.’

‘Your late father?’

‘Yes.’

Why did he need to stress that? Late father. Does it make him feel somehow closer to me?

‘He said that whenever a Cadillac goes by in America, the man on the street will say, “When I make my fortune, I’m gonna buy one of those.” But when a Rolls-Royce drives past in England, people look at it and say, “Check out the wanker driving the Rolls. How come he’s got one and I haven’t?”’

This is actually a story Hawkes told me, which I thought would go down well with Fortner.

‘That’s what we’re faced with here,’ I tell him. ‘A profound suspicion of anything that smacks of success. It’s got so bad now in public life that I wouldn’t be surprised if no one in my generation wants to go into politics. Who needs the grief?’

‘There’ll always be folks lookin’ for power, Milius, whatever the cost to their personal lives. Those guys know how high the stakes are: that’s why they get involved in the first place. Anyway, a minute ago you were attacking politicians. Now you feel sorry for them?’

I have to be careful not to build in too many contradictions, not to sound too rash. The trick, Hawkes told me, is not to play your hand too early. Sound them out, try to discover what it is that they want to hear, and then deliver it. You must become practised at the art of the second guess. I cannot afford to be cack-handed, to overemphasize like this. Rest assured, he said, that everything you tell them will be infinitely examined for flaws.

Fortner leans towards me.

‘I’ll tell you, I think some of the worst offenders in this are CNN. That station has done more to decimate the art of television news than any other organization on the planet. For a start, it’s just a mouthpiece for whoever happens to be in the White House. It’s an instrument of American imperialism. And secondly, because of the pressure to do reports on the hour, every hour, the reporters never actually go anywhere. They sit in their hotels in Sarajevo or Mogadishu doing their hair and make-up, waiting for a live satellite link-up with the Chicago studio based on information they gleaned from the guy who brought them room service.’

It’s surprising to hear these kinds of arguments from Fortner. They are the first anti-American sentiments he has ever revealed.

‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘But at least you have CNN. At least you had the vision and the balls to set the thing up. Why couldn’t the BBC do that? They have the resources, the staff, the years of experience. And they would have done it a lot better than Ted Turner. Why did it take an American company to create a global news network? I’ll tell you. Because you have the vision and we don’t. It’s just too daunting for us.’

‘You got a point,’ he says, tapping his glass. ‘You got a point.’

My round again.

It’s past nine thirty and this is as crowded as the pub usually gets. Every so often, Fortner and I are jostled by customers hollering orders from behind our stools. Standing between us, a twig-thin trust-fund hippy waits for the barman to finish pouring the last of the half-dozen pints he paid for with a Coutts & Co. cheque. His jacket smells, and he has no qualms about pushing his thigh up tight against mine. I move to the right to make more room, but he just keeps coming at me, getting closer to the bar, squeezing me up.

‘This is intolerable,’ Fortner says. ‘Let’s get outta here.’

A small group of people are in the process of vacating one of the small tables up a short flight of steps to our right.

‘I’ll grab that table,’ I tell him. ‘Bring your stuff.’

I step down off the stool and make my way over, loitering near by as the students drain their drinks and make for the exit. When enough of them have gone, and before any of the other customers has had time to react, I slide on to one of the vacant chairs, its wood still warm. One girl remains, an expensive-looking Jewish princess with sharp features and highlights in her hair. She is checking her make-up in the mirror of a powder compact. Her black-lined eyes flick up at me momentarily, a fan of lash registering distaste.

Fortner comes up behind me as the girl moves off.

‘I never bought that round,’ I tell him.

‘What?’

‘Of drinks.’

‘Oh sure, yeah,’ he says, looking down at the table. ‘Get me a Bloody Mary this time, will ya, Milius? I can feel my insides turnin’ black with all this Guinness.’

I stand up to go back to the bar as one of the members of staff comes past me with a tall column of pint glasses stacked high in his arms. He collects the empties from our table and goes on his way, leaving the ashtray full of butts and gum.

‘Pint of lager and a Bloody Mary,’ I tell the Kiwi barman. The boy to girl ratio around me is Alaskan: for every reasonably attractive woman, there are now six or seven men crowding up the pub.

‘Tabasco, Worcester sauce in the Bloody Mary?’

‘Yeah.’

The Kiwi pours the pint and sets it down on a cloth mat in front of me, turning to fill a tumbler with ice. He places that alongside the lager and lifts a half-empty bottle of Smirnoff from a rack below his waist. Rather than simply pour the vodka into the glass, he gives the bottle a 360-degree spin in the flat of his hand and upends it so that a good splash of liquid bounces out of the glass on to the mat. Then, when he has finished pouring a contemptible measure of spirits, he whips the neck of the bottle out of the glass in a fast twist, and the same thing happens again: large drops of vodka land on the mat outside the tumbler, leaving no more than an inch in the glass itself.

‘I would have preferred that in the drink,’ I tell him.

‘Sorry, mate,’ he says, a fake smile frozen on to his face like a gameshow host’s. He drop-slides the bottle back into its rack, fills the glass with Bloody Mary mix and says, ‘Four-twenny.’

I don’t make a scene. How can you argue with a guy who, ten years after Cocktail, still thinks it’s cool to act like Tom Cruise? He gives me my change and I head back to the table.

‘So I’ve been thinking about what you were sayin’ earlier,’ Fortner announces, as if I hadn’t been away. I am still squeezing into my seat when he says: ‘About the difference between here and back home. You may have a point.’

‘I definitely have a point. And I haven’t even started yet. You know the thing that frustrates me?’ The music is turned up on a speaker above our heads so I lean in a little closer. ‘It goes back to what we were saying about CNN. How come the world is crawling with mediocre American hamburger and ice cream outlets? Why does no one here get a piece of that?’

‘Same reason you were sayin’. You guys just don’t have the vision. You don’t think globally. You tellin’ me the ice cream in Penzance isn’t better than Ben ‘n’ fuckin’ Jerry’s? No way. But those guys were smart for two hippies. They saw the opportunity and they weren’t afraid to hang their balls out a little bit. But your man in Cornwall with his two scoops and a chocolate flake, he doesn’t think like that. That’s why he doesn’t have any outlets in Wisconsin and Ben and Jerry have a store on every street corner in western Europe. And Haagen-Dazs for that matter.’

Fortner leans back in his chair. His eyes sweep briefly, suspiciously, around the room, and his mouth stretches out.

‘You know Haagen-Dazs is a made-up name?’

‘No kidding?’ he says.

‘I’m telling you. The guy wanted something that sounded aristocratic, something classy, so he played around with a few Scandinavian-sounding words and came up with that. Then he had his family change their surname by deed poll to Haagen-Dazs and now they have their picture taken for Hello! magazine.’

‘Shit,’ says Fortner. ‘I always thought they were descended from the Hapsburgs.’

‘No. They’re descended from a thesaurus.’

Fortner is an intriguing drunk. In the early stages, say after two or three beers or a half-bottle of wine, all the better elements of his personality — the quick, sly humour, the anecdotes, the cynicism — fuse together and he operates with a sharpness which I have seen captivate Katharine. But this doesn’t last. If he keeps knocking back the drink, his questions become more blunt, his answers long-winded and tinged with a regret that can morph into self-pity. Right now, we are in the limbo between these two points: it could go either way.

Largely as a way of tapping me for industry rumour before his condition gets out of hand, Fortner starts talking shop for the next fifteen minutes. He tells me what he and Katharine have been up to, and about Andromeda’s plans for the short-term future. In return, Fortner expects information, much of which he knows I should not be telling him. What are Abnex planning to do about X? What’s the company line on Y? Is there any truth in the rumours about a merger with Z? My answers are carefully evasive.

‘That was damn good,’ he says, tipping his head back and letting the last half-mouthful of his Bloody Mary seep through a mess of ice and lemon. ‘I like ‘em spicy. You like ‘em like that, Milius?’

‘Kate did.’

This just comes out. I hadn’t planned to say it.

‘You never talk about her much,’ he says, after a brief silence in which sincerity has suddenly swamped his mood.

‘No. I don’t.’

‘You feel like talkin’ about her now?’

And the curious thing is that I do. To talk about Kate to this weathered Yank in a pub swirling with noise and bluster.

‘How long has it been now since you broke up?’

‘Over a year. More.’

‘D’you think you’re over her?’

‘There’s always this pilot light of grief.’

‘Nice way of putting it,’ Fortner says. He is doing a good job of suppressing any instinct for flippancy.

‘You were together what, six or seven years?’

‘From school, yes.’

‘Long time. You ever see her?’

‘Now and again,’ I tell him, just to see what happens. ‘You know how it is with couples who’ve been together a long time. They can’t ever really break up. So we meet once in a while and spend these incredible nights together. But we can never seem to get it going again.’

I like the idea of Fortner thinking she still can’t get over me.

‘How often?’

‘Every five or six weeks. I still confide in her. She’s still the best friend I have.’

‘Really?’ Fortner looks suitably intrigued, admiring even. ‘She got another boyfriend?’

‘Don’t know. She’s never said anything to me.’

‘So how come you broke up? What happened?’

‘Same thing that happens to a lot of couples after university. Suddenly they find they have to go out and work for a living and things aren’t as much fun any more. Priorities change, you have more responsibilities. You have to grow up so fast, and unless you can find a way of doing that together, the cracks are bound to show.’

‘And that’s what happened with you and Kate?’

‘That’s what happened with me and Kate. We were living together, but for some reason that made things worse. We were trying to be our parents before our time.’

This last remark doesn’t appear to have made any sense to Fortner. He says:

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Playing host and hostess to our friends. Dinner parties. Going to the Prado during the Easter holidays and renting villas in Tuscany. All of a sudden we were dressing smarter, choosing furniture, buying fucking cookbooks. And we were barely twenty-one, twenty-two. We took everything so fucking seriously.’

‘That’s not like you,’ he says, arching his eyebrows and grinning.

‘Funny,’ I reply.

‘And Kate was getting a lot of work? She was finding success as an actress and you weren’t?’

‘Partly. I was fucked up after college. I didn’t want to commit myself to any one thing in case something better came along. I was afraid of hard work, afraid that my youth was prematurely over. And I was jealous of her success, yes. It was pretty pathetic.’

‘And she didn’t help?’

‘No, Christ, she was wonderful. She was sympathetic and understanding, but I pushed her away. She got tired of me. Simple as that.’

‘You think she was in love with you?’

I feel as though everyone sitting around us in the pub is listening in to our conversation, waiting for my response to this question. I falter, looking down at the worn brown carpet, then say: ‘I’ll tell you a story.’

‘OK,’ he says. ‘But first let me buy us a drink.’

When Fortner returns he is clutching two whiskies, mine a Scotch and dry, his a double on the rocks. The bell sounds for last orders.

‘Lucky I got there on time,’ he says. ‘Now, you were gonna tell me somethin’.’

‘You asked if Kate was ever in love with me.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘This is what I know. During one of the summer breaks from college I went on holiday with Mum to Costa Rica. Without Kate.’

‘How come?’

‘I didn’t invite her.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I saw it as a good opportunity to have some time away from her. We lived in each other’s pockets and round about then Kate was very unsettled. And Mum wanted it to be just the two of us. She never really got on with Kate.’

Fortner just nods, takes a sip of his drink.

‘My mother and I had rooms quite far apart in the hotel, so that if I came back late at night I wouldn’t disturb her. One night I went clubbing with some people who were also staying in the hotel. We drank a lot, danced, the usual stuff. There was a girl with us that I liked a lot. A Canadian. Don’t remember her name. She’d been hanging around the pool and we’d talked every now and again. She was beautiful, really sexy, and I fancied my chances, y’know? But I’d been with Kate so long that I’d forgotten how to seduce someone.’

‘Sure,’ says Fortner, listening hard. My glass of whisky has a taste of aniseed on its rim. I want to take it back and complain.

‘So I bought her a few drinks, tried to make her laugh, tried to act cool, tried to dance without making a fool of myself. But nothing seemed to work. All night she seemed to be getting further and further away from me and I had no idea why. Anyway, after the club closed we found ourselves in the hotel lift together, going back to our rooms, and I tried to kiss her. I lunged in and waited for a response, even though deep down I knew it wasn’t coming. I knew she didn’t like me, and sure enough she veered away. Then the doors of the lift opened on to her floor and she said goodnight — I couldn’t tell if she was giggling or offended — got out of the lift and went off down the corridor to her room.’

‘What happened then?’ says Fortner.

‘I went back to my room. Shame, guilt, embarrassment, you name it.’

‘You only tried kissin’ her, for Christ’s sake.’

‘You don’t know Kate.’

Fortner frowns.

‘It was five in the morning and I was drunk and melancholy. The time difference with London was four or five hours so I decided to ring Kate, to hear her voice, just to make myself feel better so that I could get some sleep. So I picked up the phone and dialled her number. She answered almost straight away.’

‘What’d she say?’

‘She was crying.’

‘Crying?’

‘Yeah. I said “What’s wrong?” and without a second’s hesitation she said “I just miss you. I woke up and you weren’t beside me and I was all alone and I miss you.” That’s how much she loved me.’

Fortner absorbs the story, but his blank expression indicates that it’s nothing he hasn’t heard before: once you’ve seen one broken heart, you’ve seen them all. He waits for a few seconds, just out of politeness, and then asks:

‘Was Kate always emotional? Cryin’ all the time?’

It irritates me that he’ll think of her now as meek and timid, a little lamb of insecurity unable to sustain herself without me. She wasn’t like that at all.

‘No. She’s very strong. She’s one of those people who are old before their time, who know exactly what they want and don’t waste any time getting it. Kate’s very low-bullshit. She has no ego.’

‘Bet you’re wrong about that,’ he says, swallowing a mouthful of whisky. ‘Everyone has an ego, Milius. Some are just better at hidin’ it than others.’

‘You think Katharine has an ego?’

‘Hell, yeah. Why, you don’t think she does?’

I don’t want to give Fortner the impression that I’ve given too much time to thinking about his wife.

‘I dunno. But it’s interesting. Kate seemed so perfect to me that by the end I just worshipped her. That had a lot to do with the fact that she was so kind. It didn’t seem proper, or possible, that someone could be as good and as pure as she was. I was in awe of her beauty. It got to such a point that I felt I could no longer touch her. She actually made me feel unworthy of her. Perverted even. She was too good for me.’

‘But you still see her?’ he asks quickly, aware of an emerging contradiction. I’d forgotten that I’d lied about that.

‘Yeah. But it’s just sex now. Sex and the occasional chat. Nostalgia.’

‘If you could take her back, would you?’ he asks. ‘Go back to having a full relationship, living together and all that?’

‘Straight away.’

‘Why?’

It feels so good to be telling him even a semblance of truth. I wouldn’t be surprised if he suddenly took out a notebook and began taking shorthand.

‘This is what I truly believe,’ I tell him, and this will be my last word on the subject. ‘I believe that people spend years looking for the right person to be with. They try on different personalities, different bodies, different neuroses, until they find one that fits. I just happened to find the right girl when I was nineteen years old.’

‘That the only time you cheated on her, in Costa Rica?’

‘Yes.’

No one knows about Anna. Only Kate and Saul, and the people at CEBDO.

‘Truth?’

‘Course it’s the truth. Why? Do you ever contemplate screwing around on Katharine?’

‘Do I ever contemplate it?’ he says, examining the word for its various meanings, like a lawyer checking smallprint. Then he says ‘No’ with tremendous firmness.

‘But you think about it?’

‘Oh, sure, I think about it. Does Rose Kennedy have a black dress? Sure, I think about it. I’d been messin’ around for years before I met Kathy and it’s been hard givin’ all that up. But you know what I finally realized?’

‘No. What?’

‘I realized that there’s a lot of attractive women out there, but you can’t fuck ‘em all. It just ain’t possible. The problem with screwing around is you get yourself a taste for it. You fuck one woman, you start developing this lucky feelin’, start thinking you can fuck the next one that comes along, and the next one after that. What you have to learn is how to prefer looking at women but not touching them. You see what I’m saying? It’s like giving up cigarettes. You might love to have a smoke, the smell of the tobacco on the air, but you know it’ll kill you if you do. You can never let that filter touch your lips again. Same with women. You gotta let ‘em go.’

He takes another slug of Scotch, as if anticipating applause, and lets the alcohol sloosh and sting around his mouth.

‘It’s like gettin’ older.’ Fortner’s hand ducks down below the level of the table and he gives his balls a good, ill-disguised scratching. ‘When you’re a young kid, you think you can change the world, right? You see a problem and you can articulate it to your college friends and suddenly the world’s a much better fuckin’ place to live. But then you start gettin’ older, and you get yourself a whole new bunch of experiences. You’re aware of a lot more points of view. So now it’s not so easy sounding convinced about what you’re thinkin’ about, ‘cos you know too many of the angles. You followin’ me?’

I have been distracted by the gradual exodus of people in the pub, the clatter and wipe of closing. But I know I can drift out of the conversation and still come back in to follow Fortner’s train of thought.

‘Oh, yeah,’ I tell him. ‘That makes a lot of sense.’

‘Jeez, I’m hammered,’ he says suddenly, wiping his brow with his forearm. He had noticed that my attention was wandering. ‘We oughta be going, I guess. Hope my jacket’s still here.’

‘It should be,’ I tell him.

Both of us finish our drinks and stand up. I take my packet of cigarettes off the table and check that the lighter is still in my trousers. As we head for the exit, Fortner pulls his jacket off the hook by the bar — it’s the last one there — and flips it over his shoulder. He barks a friendly farewell to the Kiwi, who is busy emptying ashtrays into a blue plastic bucket. He looks up at us and says ‘Night guys, see y’again’ and then goes back to work.

Out on the street, a few paces up the road, Fortner turns to me.

‘Well, young man,’ he says, slapping me on the back. ‘It’s been a pleasure as always. Stay in touch. I’m gonna go home, wake up Kathy, take a fistful of aspirin and try to get some sleep. You gonna be OK gettin’ back to your apartment? You wanna come up for a beer, a coffee or somethin’?’

‘No. I’d better be off. Got work tomorrow.’

‘Sure. OK, I’ll see ya. Gimme a call in the next few days.’

‘Will do.’

And he ambles up the street, a lost, faintly dishevelled figure gradually moving out of focus. I have this sense that the evening ended oddly, too quickly, but it’s a barely registered concern.

I head up the hill as far as Holland Park Avenue, but there isn’t a taxi in sight. Passing the underground station, my mobile phone goes off and I take it out of my jacket.

‘Alec?’

‘Yes.’

It’s Cohen.

‘Harry. Hi. How are you?’

‘I’m at the office.’

I look at my watch.

‘But it’s past eleven.’

‘Do you think I’m not aware of that?’

‘No, I simply — ‘

He interrupts me, his voice bullish and proud.

‘Look. When did you speak to Raymond Mackenzie?’

‘Off the top of my head I can’t remember. Can’t this wait until tomorrow?’

‘Given that he’s leaving for Turkmenistan in seven hours, no it can’t.’

‘I think I spoke to him yesterday. In the afternoon. I had everything he needs faxed over to him. He’s not going there with his trousers down.’

The connection falters here, dead noise and then broken words.

‘Harry, I can’t hear you.’

Cohen is raising his voice, but it’s impossible to make out what he is saying.

‘I can’t hear you. Harry? My battery’s dead. Listen, I’ll call you from a landline…’

He is cut off.

There is a phone booth near by, decorated with a patchwork quilt of whore cards. A man is standing inside, a worn-out husband wearing a raincoat and trainers. I look straight at him and our eyes briefly meet, but with no regard for this he just rocks back on his heels and has a good look at what’s on offer. He pans left and right, studying the cards, taking his time. Traffic sweeps by and I feel suddenly cold.

After a minute or so he makes up his mind, scribbling a number down on a pad which is resting on the thin metal shelf to the right of the phone. Then he drops a ten-pence piece into the slot.

I don’t want to be doing this. I don’t want to be waiting to make a phone call to Cohen at half past eleven at night. I tap on the glass, fast with the hard edge of my knuckle, but the man just ignores me, turning his back.

A cab drives past and I flag it down, riding back to Uxbridge Road. But when I try Cohen’s number from home, there is no reply. Just the smug disdain of his voicemail and a low-pitched beep.

I hang up.

19 Seize the Day

The keypad on my telephone at home has four preprogrammed numbers: 1 is Mum; 2 is Saul; 3 is Katharine and Fortner; 0 is Abnex. The rest are blank.

I push Memory 3 and listen to the tone-dial symphony of their number ringing out.

She answers.

Here we go.

‘Hello. Katharine Lanchester.’

‘I don’t fucking believe it.’

‘Alec. Is that you?’

‘I don’t fucking believe it.’

‘Alec, what is it?’

‘Abnex have told me they’re not satisfied with what I’m doing. With my work. They’re not convinced I’m doing the best I can.’

‘Slow down, honey. Slow down.’

‘I don’t fucking believe it.’

‘What did they say?’

‘That if I don’t start pulling my weight they won’t give me a contract when my trial period is over.’

‘When did they say this?’

She whispers ‘It’s Alec’ to Fortner. He’s there in the room with her.

‘Today. Murray called me into his office and we both went upstairs and I was given a dressing down by David Caccia, the fucking guy who hired me in the first place. Obviously Murray’s been on to him about me. It was totally humiliating.’

‘Just you? Was anyone else criticized?’

I have to think about this before answering. It’s all lies.

‘Only Piers. But his job is safe, he’s on contract. He’s not in the same position as I am.’

‘It’s possible they’re just giving everybody a scare. Management likes to do that from time to time.’

‘Well then fuck them for doing that, Kathy. I’ve worked my arse off for that company, learning my trade, doing overtime, making up for the fact that I came in through the back door. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do to…’

‘To what?’

‘I just can’t believe I’m being treated like this. And they have the nerve to pay me twelve thousand a year and still talk to me like that.’

‘It is kind of odd. I mean you’re there every night until eight or nine, right? Later sometimes.’

She’s finding it difficult to know what to say: my voice is shaking and I have taken her by surprise.

‘Wait a minute, Alec.’ There is a muffled noise on the line, like a piece of cloth being dragged across the receiver. ‘Fort’s trying to say something. What, honey? Yeah, that’s a good idea. Why don’t you come over here, for dinner, huh? We can talk about it. We haven’t eaten yet and besides, we haven’t seen you in almost two weeks.’

I wasn’t expecting this. It could all happen quicker than I anticipated.

‘Now? Are you sure it’s not too late? Because that would be great.’

‘Sure it’s not too late. Come on over. I got a chicken here needs roasting. There’s easily gonna be enough for three. Get a cab and you’ll be here in a half-hour.’

They both come to the door. Katharine’s face is a haven of sympathy; her hair is brushed out and she’s wearing a long black dress with red roses imprinted on the cotton. Fortner looks unsettled, nervous even. He is wearing flannel trousers and a white shirt, with an old, canary yellow tie knotted tight against his larynx.

‘Come on in,’ says Katharine, putting her arm across my shoulders. They’ve obviously decided that she’ll play the mother figure. ‘You’ve had a shitty day.’

‘I’m really sorry to bother you like this.’

‘No. God, no. We’re your friends. We’re here for you. Right, Fort?’

Fortner nods and says ‘Of course’ like he has something else on his mind.

‘You wanna fix Alec a drink, honey? What do you feel like?’

‘Do you have any vodka?’

‘I think we have some left over from the last time you went at it,’ Fortner says, going into the kitchen ahead of me. ‘You have it straight, Alec, or with tonic?’

‘Tonic and ice,’ Katharine calls after him, smiling at me broadly.

I am invited to come in and sit down, which I do, on the large window-facing sofa with the coffee table in front of it. All the lamps are on to make the room feel warm and cosy; there’s even jazz drifting out of the CD player. It’s John Coltrane or Miles Davis, one or the other. I light a cigarette and look over at Katharine who has sat down on the sofa facing mine. I allow myself a little courageous smile, a gesture to suggest that things aren’t as bad as I might have made out on the phone. I want to appear gutsy, while at the same time eliciting their sympathies.

Fortner emerges with my drink in a large tumbler. As far as I can make out they aren’t having anything themselves. There’s an ice-melted glass on the mantelpiece above the fire, but it’s a leftover from early evening.

As Fortner hands me my drink, I smell shaving foam or aftershave on him, and indeed his face does look unduly smooth for this time of night. Is it possible that he has preened himself for me, as if I were the vicar coming for tea? He walks around the coffee table and falls heavily into his favourite armchair, the collapse of a man whose evening rhythm has been disturbed. There’s a smile on his face which his eyes aren’t backing up. My visit has thrown him: he’d like to have gone to bed with a Grisham and seen the day off. Now he has to re-engage his mind and give this situation his full attention.

‘So come on. Spit it out,’ he says, not unkindly. ‘What’d they say to you?’

‘Just what I said on the phone,’ I tell him, taking a sip of the vodka. He’s made it strong, at least a double, and I am wary of this. Have to keep my wits about me.

‘Go through it again for Fort, sweetie. He didn’t hear our conversation.’

So, for the old man’s benefit, I retread the shape of the threat from Abnex.

‘You know, at least I’ve always told you, that I don’t really get on with the two senior guys on my team.’

‘What are their names?’ he asks. ‘Cohen, is that it, and Alan Murray?’

‘Harry Cohen, yes. They’re very tight, very good friends.’

‘And you feel that they…?’

Katharine says:

‘Let him finish, honey.’

‘Right from day one they’ve treated me disrespectfully. I get given more work to do than any other member of the team. I have to work longer hours, I have to take more shit. If there’s a letter that needs writing, a phone call that has to be made, if a client needs to talk with one of us or if Abnex needs somebody to stay in the office over the weekend, it’s always me that has to do it. Alan swans up and says: “Alec, do this, Alec do that,” or if he’s not around, Harry does the same thing. Never a please or a thank you. Just this expectation that I will fall into line. Don’t get me wrong. I know I’m the junior partner. In a sense I deserve to get given the menial tasks. But I am not appreciated. I am not afforded any respect. If I do a good job, it goes unnoticed. Either that or Harry will take the credit. But if I fuck something up, it sure as shit isn’t forgotten.’

Fortner’s mouth has dropped into a deep scowl, like a horseshoe spilling its luck.

‘And I’ve never been sure whether they treat me like this because they genuinely dislike me, or because of jealousy…’

‘The latter, most likely,’ he mutters.

‘Or it could be because they feel threatened by me. I really can’t believe that they think I’m no good at my job. That’s just impossible. If you could just see the fuck-ups JT makes. Lost business, bad planning, basic fucking mistakes. But today it’s me they chose to round on.’

‘What did they say?’ Katharine asks. ‘Tell Fort.’

‘They say I screwed up with this guy called Raymond Mackenzie. He went to the Caspian for us, he’s one of our top oil traders. I was supposed to do background for him, get logistical information about pipelines out there, how their refineries are set up, that kind of stuff.’

‘Yes,’ says Fortner slowly.

‘I got hold of maps, spoke to a bunch of geologists, it was a normal job. And I did it well, you know?’

‘Sure,’ he says.

‘There are so many things that I could have slipped up on but didn’t. I got the size of the export jetties — that took three days to discover — I got watertight information about pipelines that he was able to work with. But Mackenzie gets out there and he’s ready to finalize a deal with the Turkmen Bashi refinery when it turns out that the oil is going to be too sulphurous for them to handle. So it’s looking like we’re going to have to recommend spending a hundred and fifty million dollars on a brand-new distillate hydro treating unit to strip out the sulphur at the refinery.’

‘Surely that’s not your responsibility,’ says Katharine. ‘Surely they would have found something like that out long ago?’

‘Well they didn’t,’ I snap, though she does not look offended. ‘I was supposed to check it out. But it never crossed my mind. And now we have all this oil, an expectant market, and no way to fucking refine it and get it out to them.’

‘There’s gotta be another refinery.’

‘That’s what I’ve been working on. I’m trying the one in Baku. But the shit still hit the fan. Murray went fucking crazy.’

‘Guy’s a chump,’ says Fortner. ‘Class-A dickhead.’

Katharine looks upset.

‘I can’t believe this,’ she says. ‘After all you’ve done for them I think it’s despicable the way you’re being treated.’

To which Fortner adds:

‘You must be mad as hell,’ getting up from his chair to put some classical music on. The volume is louder than it needs to be. ‘Alan Murray is lucky to have a guy like you on board. Period.’

‘Well I must be doing something wrong…’

‘No,’ Katharine says sharply. ‘I don’t think so at all. In fact, quite the contrary. This is about personalities, it’s not about the job. Obviously there are people within your organization who feel threatened by you.’

Obviously.

‘I’ve seen it a thousand times,’ says Fortner, now moving to the window and closing the curtains. ‘A thousand times.’

‘What do you think I should do?’

For once, the immediacy of their answers stalls. Fortner glances over at his wife and, only when a few seconds have passed, says: ‘We’ll come to that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We’ve been thinking and we have a few ideas as to how we might help you.’

‘I don’t understand.’

My pulse starts to thump. It’s coming.

‘Before we get to that, there’s something I’d like to say.’

‘Sure. What is it?’

Fortner moves away from the window, pacing towards the kitchen door and then back to the drawn curtains. At times he is talking from behind my back. The anxiety he was showing when I first arrived has receded completely.

‘There’s a pattern of behaviour here, Alec. Do you see it?’

Katharine is nodding confidently, as if she already knows what he’s going to say.

‘What pattern? Does this have something to do with what you were saying about ideas to help me?’

Don’t rush them.

‘You remember that conversation we had a while back about your interviews with MI6? Do you remember that?’

He’s behind me now. Only Katharine can see the distinct characteristics of his face.

‘Of course, yes.’

‘Well it was my view then, and it still is, that if the British government could afford to throw away someone of your potential then it’s either in much better shape than anyone thinks, or it’s just plain dumb. Now…’

He moves back towards the bay window, turning to face me.

‘Abnex appear to be doing the same thing. I get a sense that both of these organizations are overawed by you. You may think of that as an overstatement, but let me explain.’ He touches his tie, loosening it still further. ‘It seems to us that Abnex don’t really know how to get the best out of you. It’s almost as if they can’t deal with an employee who shows a little flair or versatility. Now I’m not blind, Alec. We both know that you can step out of line occasionally. But only — and this is crucial — only ever in the interests of the company.’

‘I’m just sick of being underestimated,’ I tell him, skirting around the compliment. ‘I’m sick of being ignored and treated as a second-class citizen. I’m sick of knockbacks and failure.’

‘You haven’t failed,’ says Katharine, interjecting. ‘Not at all. You’re just in a very unfortunate situation.’

As she says this, Fortner walks back behind his armchair with the deliberation of an actor hitting a mark. Katharine says:

‘Alec, this isn’t the first time that you’ve been upset, is it?’

‘About Abnex? No, it isn’t.’

‘And your financial situation hasn’t improved since you started there?’

I glance over at Fortner and there is a look of rock-like concentration on his face. His eyes are fixed on mine. To all intents and purposes the rest of the room has become invisible to me: it’s just the three of us, closing in on something unimaginable.

‘No. Why?’

But Katharine does not answer. There is no knowing why she asked that question, other than to remind me that I am being badly paid. A little subconscious hook.

‘You want another drink?’

I almost jump when Fortner says this, and he smiles warmly, taking my glass from the table. From my position low down on the sofa, he looks suddenly vast and strong.

‘Sure, that would be great. You having something?’

‘Yeah, I’m gonna open a bottle of wine.’

‘That’d be nice, honey,’ says Katharine, very mellow. It’s as if they have both gone into a trance.

With Fortner out of the room, Katharine asks:

‘Do you still believe that Abnex is unprincipled in some of its activities?’

‘When did I say I believed that?’

‘So you don’t?’

There’s no noise at all coming from the kitchen. Fortner is listening.

‘No, as a matter of fact I still do. Yes.’

‘How do you feel about that? About unprincipled behaviour?’

‘What, generally?’

‘Yes.’

‘Kathy, it completely depends…’

‘Of course…’

A cork pops next door.

‘On the circumstances.’

‘Right.’

‘But I do think that a lot of the stuff that we’re getting involved in now will be detrimental to the company, not necessarily in the short term, but in ten to fifteen years’ time. That’s why I have a problem with it. It’s not the dishonesty which annoys me, so much as the stupidity of it.’

‘What are they paying you, exactly?’ Fortner asks, coming back into the sitting-room with a bottle of good red wine and three upside-down glasses threaded through the fingers of his right hand.

‘Twelve.’

‘What’s that, around eighteen thousand dollars a year?’ he says, setting the glasses down on the surface of the coffee table. ‘In America, for the job you’re doing, that salary would be unsatisfactory. And we have lower taxes, medical plans built in, all that.’

It’s time to get it out of them.

‘What are you saying?’

‘What we’re saying, Alec, is that we’d like to give you the opportunity to do something about your situation.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You won’t, immediately,’ he says, his eyes fixed on the table.

I shift uncomfortably in my seat as he says this, and look over at Katharine for some indication of what is going on. But her face is entirely inscrutable. There is an atmosphere of very carefully chosen words. I hear the first swallowing glugs of wine as Fortner starts to fill the glasses. He twists the bottle to catch any drips, his hand as steady as a flat sea. There’s just the rustle of clothing and distant traffic sounds as Fortner sits down, little else. Each of us takes a glass from the table, sipping, registering the taste. Fortner breathes in the bouquet and says:

‘We have something, we both have something we want to discuss with you.’

I do not answer. The rush of expectation in me is so great that I don’t want to risk anything on a few ill-chosen remarks. Better to react precisely to what he has to say, to let them make all the running.

‘How would you feel about coming over to our side?’

There’s no liveliness in his face as Fortner asks this, no widening of the eyes. He merely lets the question drift out of him with an uninflected stillness.

‘What, you mean work for Andromeda?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

I don’t have to look over at Katharine to know that she is watching me.

‘How, then?’

‘We want you to help us.’

His words are being phrased with care to ensure an ambiguity.

‘To help you?’

‘Yes.’

I hold the pause longer than is necessary. What Fortner is asking is very plain to anyone who works in our business, but he has couched it in such a way that if I object, neither of them will be culpable. As if to confirm this, Fortner takes a very relaxed draw on his glass of wine as he waits for my response, pausing to look at me only briefly. He’s been here before.

I look across at Katharine, more out of nervousness than anything else, and I am surprised to see that she looks almost ashamed at what Fortner has suggested. She is blinking constantly, massaging the back of her neck with her hand.

‘I don’t understand,’ is all I can think to say. There’s been a delay in the room like the disappearing echo of a long-distance phone call.

‘It’s quite simple. Would you like to help us?’

‘You mean hand over information about what Abnex is doing? For money?’

He has made me say it, just as they said he would. I was the one who put it in concrete terms.

‘That is correct.’

‘Kathy, do you know about this?’

‘Of course. It occurred to us that you would be amenable.’

At this, Fortner looks over at her quickly. It wasn’t the right thing to say. She changes tack.

‘And that it would suit you. And us.’

I take a sip of wine. My hand is shaking so violently that I can barely hold the glass.

‘You’ll obviously need some time to think it over,’ Fortner says, like a doctor who has just diagnosed a cancer. He is funnelling any anxiety into the red plastic top of the wine bottle, turning it this way and that in his thick fingers. He has gradually moulded the plastic cone into the shape of a toadstool, twirling the stem between the thumb and index finger of his left hand.

I know that at first I must appear to be offended.

‘So our whole friendship has been based on the possibility that this might happen?’

‘Alec, don’t…’ says Katharine, but I interrupt her.

‘You’ve pretended to be something that you’re not.’

‘You’re bound to be a little shocked at first,’ Fortner says very flatly. He’s absolutely certain that I’ll come over: it’s just a matter of time.

‘How long have you been planning to ask me?’

‘For some time now,’ Katharine replies, running her hands down her thighs so that the material of her dress stretches out.

‘How long?’

‘Four or five months,’ she says.

‘Four or five months! That’s practically when we met.’

‘Come on, Alec. We were first introduced before that.’

‘Yes. And you cultivated the friendship because you knew that this might happen.’

‘Now hold on there,’ says Fortner. ‘We just want a little help, that’s all, and we’d be prepared to pay you handsomely for that.’

This is smart: bring it back to the money. It’s fascinating to see how Fortner operates. He wants to take my mind away from ethical considerations and just let me visualize the cash.

‘How much?’

‘We’ll come to that in good time. There’s a lot we need to discuss first.’

‘I’m not even sure about this. I’ll need time to think it over.’

‘Of course.’

And now it’s my turn to pace. I am up on my feet, walking in random circles around the room, running my hand through my hair, lighting a cigarette.

‘I need some air.’

‘What?’

Katharine looks up at me, a dying fall of panic in her voice.

‘He says he needs some air. Alec, you mustn’t talk to anyone about this. That could get us all in a lot of trouble. Now you understand that, don’t you?’

‘I’m not stupid, Fort. I just need to walk around, clear my head.’

‘So you’ll be back?’ she asks.

‘Maybe,’ I reply, backing away towards the front door. ‘Maybe.’

20 Creating JUSTIFY

An hour later I climb the stairs to their apartment, not two at a time, but singly, contemplatively, slowly making my way to the third-floor landing. Fortner is standing in the half-opened door, his tie gone, a glass of whisky in his hand. Our eyes meet for a good long time as I come towards him, my shoulders hung deliberately heavy, hair dishevelled by the wind.

‘Where d’you get to?’ he says quietly, ushering me back inside.

‘To Portobello Road. Around.’

Katharine is sitting on the sofa, upright and very still. She looks to have been scolded. Her eyes are heavy, perhaps even with tears. It is as if a mask has been wrenched from her face and all that is left is a frightened revelation of self. She looks up at me and gives a weak smile. Everything feels drained now.

‘You wanna drink?’

‘No thanks, Fortner. I want to be very clear.’

He sits down beside his wife and I settle opposite them on the second sofa, our positions exactly reversed from before.

‘We didn’t think you’d come back,’ says Katharine. ‘We’re really very sorry about what happened.’

‘I was walking. Thinking things through.’

‘Of course,’ she says.

‘I…’

Fortner interrupts me as I make to say something.

‘Alec, it was a bad idea asking you. We could get you in a lot of trouble if — ‘

‘I’ll do it.’

Katharine’s head jerks up and her bruised eyes flare open.

‘You will?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that’s good news,’ says Fortner, less enthused than I had expected. He’s known that I would bite all along.

I tell them that we need to clarify a lot of things, and Fortner says, ‘Indeed.’

‘And I’m sorry I got upset with you,’ I say, lighting another cigarette. The packet is getting low. ‘I was just very surprised.’

‘Of course you were.’ Fortner says this with no feeling in his voice. Katharine stirs, looking at me fondly. Relief has energized her.

‘Alec, I really just wanna make one thing absolutely clear, OK?’

‘Sure.’

‘I just wanna say that our friendship wasn’t predicated on this happening. It was interdependent… uh… more of a product of our becoming friends.’

Fortner seconds this, saying, ‘Absolutely, it’s very important to make that clear,’ but it’s a lie because his eyes sink to the floor as he says it. He and Katharine are strangely out of synch, as if every development is new to them, untested.

‘So what is it exactly that you want me to do?’

Katharine suddenly laughs with nerve-relief.

‘Golly,’ she says breathlessly. ‘Where do we start?’

‘Golly’ isn’t a word that I’ve heard her use before. This is all getting to her in a way that Fortner cannot have anticipated.

‘We’re not gonna get anything resolved this evening in any detail,’ he says, with a steadiness which suggests that from now on he will be taking charge. ‘The most important thing to stress to you is that what we’re about to embark on must be undertaken with a view to total secrecy. You can tell no one, Alec. Not a girlfriend, not your mother, not Saul, not some stranger you meet in a bar you’re never gonna see again. No one.’

‘Of course.’

‘Believe me, that will be the most difficult part. But you’ll quickly come to understand the kinds of sacrifices involved and I don’t foresee that for someone of your integrity it would be a problem.’

How deft are his little flatteries.

‘Integrity? This doesn’t feel all that principled.’

‘You’ll be substantially remunerated for any and all information that you can give us.’

‘I want that to start tonight,’ I tell him, exhaling smoke in a tight cylinder which may look self-conscious. ‘I want some sort of initial down payment this evening.’

There’s a fractional skip as Fortner weighs this up before saying: ‘Of course.’ As he should, he thinks I’m greedy, but it’s more important to him to keep me sweet.

‘We’ll deposit ten thousand dollars in a US bank account straight up. You start getting irregular activity on your high-street bank account and those guys are obliged to tell their money laundering people, who’ll go straight to the cops.’

This is intended to worry me, but I say nothing in response. I’m waiting for Fortner to do what’s right.

‘What we can do for you is give you a small amount of cash as an initial gesture of good faith. Say a thousand sterling. That suit ya?’

‘Pocket money. But it’ll be OK to be getting on with.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Alec, all right? We’ll see to it that the financial side of things is very satisfactory for you. You’re not gonna have any complaints. We’re also in a position to offer you employment at Andromeda if Abnex don’t pick up your option at year end. And if they do, and if you’re still happy with our arrangement, we can keep things just as they are. But that’s all in the future.’

‘I’ll need this in writing.’

‘No,’ he says firmly, his voice raised for the first time. ‘That’s imperative. Write nothing down. You let us do all the paperwork.’

‘Why? Isn’t it better to cloak everything in some sort of code? Isn’t that how this is done? I don’t want it coming back to me.’

Fortner slowly shakes his head, trying his best to be patient with my apparent lack of expertise.

‘It won’t come back to you. Not if there’s nothing to come back in the first place. And there won’t be if you don’t write any of it down. That’s the first rule you gotta learn.’

This is what it’s all about for Fortner: the lure, the approach, the sting. He’s relishing this situation for all the demands it is going to make on his tradecraft. He has lifted right out of himself and all the old tingles are coming back. This is the way things used to be, in the old days. This is the way he likes it.

‘You have any other questions at this time?’

‘What about getting the information to you? How do I do that?’

Katharine leans forward in her chair: she’s prepared to field this one.

‘We have an entire set-up which will assist you with that.’

‘What do you mean an entire set-up? At Andromeda?’

She looks across at Fortner, who is slowly lolling his neck from side to side, loosening tightened muscles. He stands up and slides his hands into his pockets, beginning to pace the room once again.

‘You explain, honey,’ Katharine says to him, in a quiet, almost respectful voice. Fortner steadies himself, turns around and smiles at me. A man preparing to reveal his hand.

‘Alec,’ he says, ‘let me put it to you this way.’ He takes another couple of paces and briefly glances at the mantelpiece. ‘The end of the Cold War has meant an increasingly blurred line between state-sponsored intelligence gathering and private-sector espionage. Do you follow me?’

‘I think so. Yes.’

‘I made the crossover.’

He coughs, a throat-clearer.

‘You mean you used to work for the CIA?’

Asking him this feels very ordinary, very straightforward, like enquiring after his star sign.

‘Yes,’ he says.

I look towards Katharine, whose head is very slightly bowed.

‘And you?’

She looks up at her husband, waiting for him to give her clearance.

‘Katharine is still with the Agency,’ he says. ‘She has a formal relationship with Andromeda, but the federal government pays her salary.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I can understand your sense of shock.’

‘It’s not… No…’ I begin to mumble incoherently. ‘I always thought… Jesus.’

‘Please, if I could just say at this stage that anything you might have heard or read or understood about the Agency — put that immediately to one side. The CIA is not a sinister operation…’

‘I didn’t say it was…’

‘It’s just the American equivalent of your Secret Intelligence Service. With a bigger budget.’

‘Well, everything’s bigger in America.’

This is clever. It breaks the ice and both of them laugh aloud. Katharine looks up and gives me a broad, flirty smile.

‘Would you like to know something about what we do?’ she says. ‘Would that make it easier for you? Get it down to a more realistic level?’

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘But I’m sitting here wondering why you need me. Why don’t you just bug the Abnex phones and get the information you need from a satellite somewhere?’

That was always going to be a naive question, but Fortner gives it a patient, considered response.

‘Only about ten per cent of our intelligence is scooped by birds: we still need guys like you on the ground. The Agency has a budget of twenty-eight billion dollars a year. Only six of that goes on satellites. Agents like Katharine and myself still provide the backbone of the intelligence operation, and guys like you are our life-blood.’

‘So this is what you do all the time? Jesus, it’s overwhelming.’

Fortner smiles, like he’s glad to have everything out in the open.

‘This is it.’

They are looking at one another, an undisguised relief shuttling between them.

‘So what kind of stuff do you get up to? I can’t believe this, it’s so…’

‘Primarily nowadays the Agency is involved in reducing the influence of Russian organized crime,’ Katharine says, with the confidence of someone moving into an area of expertise. ‘Last June, for example, we arrested three guys who were trying to sell nuclear-grade zirconium to some of our federal agents posing as Iraqis in New York. That’s just an example.’

‘FBI agents. Not the CIA?’

‘That’s right,’ she replies. I am amazed at her candour.

‘More and more since Ames we’ve been working with the FBI,’ says Fortner.

I should ask who Ames is.

‘Who’s Ames?’

‘You know. The trait — ‘ Katharine stops herself short and adjusts swiftly. ‘The CIA agent who was spying for the KGB. He was our head of counter-intelligence in Washington.’

‘Oh yeah. I think I read about him.’

Fortner sits down on the sofa beside Katharine and juts his chin towards the floor. Bad memories.

‘And how long have you guys been doing this?’

He looks up.

‘Let’s not talk too much about it now, OK? We can fill you in on everything you need to know some other time.’

‘Sure. Fine. Whatever.’

Almost to himself, he says:

‘Shit, it’s not like you’ll be doing anything in the same sphere as Rick Ames. What we’re asking you to do isn’t anything like that. What you’ll be doing for Andromeda isn’t gonna get people killed.’

‘I understand that. I wouldn’t do it if it did.’

‘Good,’ he says, looking across at Katharine. ‘That’s good to know. I think it’s important to have standards and I respect you for that, Alec, I really do. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t even compare the two. So let’s not get sidetracked. What remains to be said right now — the most important thing as far as you’re concerned — is that there’s a common misconception about how all this works.’

Katharine, who has been listening quietly, stands up and offers us coffee. We both accept.

‘All you gotta do is bring us as much information as you can without arousing suspicion with any of your colleagues or with Abnex security. Those offices are under twenty-four-hour camera surveillance; ditto the Xerox room.’

‘So you want me to photocopy stuff?’

‘We’ll go over it. I’m just giving you some basic ground rules. Everything you do on your computer terminal will be logged.’ He starts to chop the air with his hand, marking out each point. ‘Presume that your telephone is tapped. Never communicate with us using e-mail or cellular phone. These are just basic precautions.’

‘I see.’

In the kitchen I hear Katharine take down mugs from a cupboard.

‘There’s also a problem which is unique to your situation. We share a lot of intelligence with your government and a lot of the codes and ciphers we use are identical to those employed by Five and SIS. We start using them and they’d be on to us right away. So we can’t encrypt text or scramble conversations. I wouldn’t wanna scare you. You just have to be smart. We can go over all this in much finer detail when we’re a lot less pumped up. For now, all I would emphasize to you is this: keep it simple. Go home with that thought. Don’t ever try to do too much, especially at first. Just make everything look as natural as possible.’

‘That’s it?’

Fortner laughs.

‘That’s it. If you don’t make a big deal about it, no one else will. Years gone by we might have asked you to take a couple of weeks’ vacation so that we could get you off to a safe house back home and give you some basic training in equipment and communications. But in your case none of that will be necessary. This is just a small operation. Like I said, we’re just gonna keep things real simple. That’s the mistake a lot of people make. They try to make things too complicated for themselves, start feeling like the whole world is watching them when in fact the whole world doesn’t have a goddam clue what’s going on. You’re just plain old Alec Milius to Abnex and it’ll stay that way so long as you don’t do anything that’s gonna arouse anyone’s suspicion. Don’t go looking for extra information that wouldn’t ordinarily cross your desk. Keep it real simple. We’ll get into isolated dead-drops, surveillance exercises and audio penetrations only when it’s absolutely necessary. Otherwise, it doesn’t need to get complicated.’

‘What sort of information do you want? Memos, financial reports, business plans…?’

‘That kinda thing, yes,’ he says, though his expression hints at greater prizes. ‘Get us everything you safely can. Even information about your operation which you might consider to be of no interest to us. Don’t make any judgement on the validity of documentation on our behalf. Are we clear?’

‘Sure.’

Katharine comes back in with the tray of coffee. She distributes the mugs quietly, settles back down on the sofa and says:

‘Did you say anything about Caspian exploration, Fort? Did you mention 5F371?’

Fortner does very well here. She has made a bad mistake but he betrays no sign of it.

‘How do you know about that?’ I ask. ‘How do you know about 5F371?’

And he says, very coolly:

‘It’s common knowledge, right? Look, we’ll get to that some other time. Later. No need to talk about specifics at the present time.’

‘All we need for you now is a codename,’ Katharine says, also recovering well.

‘A what?’

‘A codename?’

‘Yes,’ says Fortner, sipping his coffee and putting the mug down on the table. ‘Kathy came up with JUSTIFY. How do you feel about that?’

I like it.

‘JUSTIFY?’

‘Yes.’

‘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 underway?’

‘Oh yes,’ I reply. ‘I’m clear. Absolutely.’

This thing is definitely underway.

21 Being Rick

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 singularly by greed. He walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington on a sunlit mid-eighties 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 fulfilment 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; they had to be 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. Rick 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. But the trappings of wealth also provided him with the material proof of his importance to the other side.

And 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 which 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 tight 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 to toughen, 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, and 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 ribcage 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, with no wish to scope his cock.

‘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 next door 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 next door. 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 of it against my stomach is painful and stinging. I swim briefly underwater, long enough for any embarrassment to subside, and surface in the centre of the pool. Fortner and Katharine are standing in the shallow end talking to one another, but they stop when they see me coming towards 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 clamour.’

‘Is that the idea?’

It’s a well-known technique.

‘That’s the idea.’

Fortner splashes water on to 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 one another, both of us breast-stroking, 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 hair has glossed to jet black in the wet, thick as seaweed.

An elderly man passes us, swimming in the opposite direction. He moves with a painful slowness, as though he were here under duress. Thin grey hairs are glued across his pock-marked 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 OK?’

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?’

‘Agree to help us?’

‘Yes.’

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 fitted 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 as Fortner says:

‘Yes. That’s true. Things like that are not irrelevant.’

The old man passes us again, slow weightless kicks towards 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 mid-thirties wearing navy blue 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 child and its mother 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 naive 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. And 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. Think she’s soft on republicanism on account of her Irish roots. It’s all bullshit of course, but the Security Service are understandably upset. So 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 during the war in Bosnia. At the time I recall thinking that Lithiby’s antagonism towards 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 both my lack of expertise and a sense of my enthusiasm about JUSTIFY. But my mind is a blank. Katharine lifts up a small handful of water and lets it fall.

‘You’re lookin’ a little raggedy there,’ Fortner says. ‘You OK?’

Our lack of movement in the water has stilled my muscles and I am starting to shiver with cold.

‘Sure. I’m fine. I’m 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 has become almost deserted. The child and her mother have gone, as has the old man. Only the man in navy trunks remains, ploughing 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 towards me like lizard’s eyes. Katharine is two metres to his left, long arms describing elegant arcs of backstroke. They both touch the shallow-end wall simultaneously and move across to talk to me. Fortner rubs his eyes and makes a low noise which is only halfway to civility. He wants to get down to business.

‘We need to talk about your first drop,’ he says, chest hairs knotted by water. ‘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.

‘Abnex have just done some commercial price sets which include our assumptions about how the global economy is going to pan out over the next few years. They’d give Andromeda some idea of our short-term plans, where we think the price of oil is going, that kind of thing.’

‘Sounds good,’ she says, though a little forcedly. They expected more.

‘It’s available in e-mail format, but I suppose that’ll be traceable if I send it to you.’

‘That’s the right way to be thinking,’ Fortner says, keeping his voice low. ‘Safety first. You could direct your messages via a re-mailing service that will strip them of their identifying features, but that’s probably too risky as a first venture. We can’t simply encrypt them. We’ll have to think of another method. Maybe on floppy or a straight print-out.’

‘That wouldn’t be a problem,’ I tell him, trying to appear amenable and co-operative. Katharine comes in with a suggestion.

‘If you just ran it off the printer at the Abnex office under the pretext that you wanted to do some work at home, would that be OK? I’m sure everyone does that as a means of staying on top of their workload.’

Fortner nods in agreement, as though there were nothing more to be said on the subject, but something about this worries me. Just standing here watching the two of them discuss these vital first stages with such apparent calm makes me feel edgy and rushed. Katharine drops her hair back into the pool and a thin film of water on her neck glistens in the light. When she brings her head back up she looks directly at me in anticipation of some sort of response.

‘Yes,’ I tell her. ‘We do it all the time. It won’t be a problem.’

But it might be. How can I get the information on to the printer and out of the office without running the risk of somebody at Abnex noticing? There is constant movement in the office, constant observation, but I cannot be certain that someone won’t start asking questions. In an attempt to avoid looking nervous, I try to convince myself that it is best to let the Americans dictate things at this early stage. All of us are keen for the first handover to be completed and out of the way, and their experience here is greater than mine. But I do not like letting others make decisions on my behalf: there is already the danger that my best interests could be undermined by forces beyond my control. With this development it feels almost as if the Americans are laying traps for me, and yet I know that this can surely not be the case.

‘The actual process of handing over any information should be simple and straightforward,’ says Fortner, who halts momentarily as the swimmer approaches us, does a brisk turn, and moves away. He continues:

‘There’s an absence of risk if you just keep to the basics. Let me give you a few examples of how we can work all this to our mutual advantage.’

Hot chemical air is rising off the water and continuing to sting my eyes, but I manage a nod which should look alert and concentrated.

‘To start out, you can make duplicates of disks on the laptop at your apartment and photocopy any sensitive documentation at a newsagent in your neighbourhood without arousing undue suspicion. Who’s in those places, after all? Old ladies buying scratchcards and teenage kids sifting through porno magazines. Nobody’s gonna notice. Better to do it there than under the cameras at Abnex, right?’

‘What about getting the documents to you?’ I ask.

‘Just get a cab or subway over to our apartment like you would any other time. Or you can meet me in a restroom or cinema to effect the handover in a crowded public area where any exchange will go unnoticed. Or we can do it at your apartment in Shepherd’s Bush. The key is variety, to avoid anything that may look like a routine to a possible tail.’

I bob my head without responding. That was the first time they have mentioned anything about my being followed. Katharine says:

‘The only thing I would add…’

The man is already back again, swimming fast and hard to burn himself out. The three of us stare wanly out at the pool as he touches down, somersaults, and swims away. When he is safely out of earshot Katharine continues.

‘The only thing I would add is that it’s better to say as little as possible about JUSTIFY when you’re visiting Colville Gardens, or if we’re meeting at your apartment. Just in case there’s any audio surveillance. We’ll put some background music on whenever you show up, and you should do the same when we come to Shepherd’s Bush. And don’t just do it when it’s us that’s visiting. Make a habit of putting on a CD whenever somebody comes round. That way it won’t stand out as unusual if anyone happens to be listening in. Now, is there anywhere in particular that you would like to use as a location for the first drop?’

Her voice is full of patience and without thinking I reply:

‘What about Saul’s flat on Saturday night? We’re all going for dinner anyway, so it might just as well be there.’

Fortner’s response is tentative.

‘You cannot be seen handing any information to us. That’s critical, Alec.’

‘Yeah. Maybe it’s not such a good idea.’

He narrows his eyes, working things through in his mind.

‘Not necessarily,’ he says, as two young girls come out of the changing-room and make their way gingerly down the steps into the pool. ‘There is a way we could work it.’

‘How?’

He waits for the girls to swim away.

‘What’s the combination on your briefcase, the one you take to work?’

‘162.’

‘On both sides?’

I nod.

‘All right, then.’ He shifts his legs underneath the water, moving his left hand in the shallows. ‘Just bring the information to Saul’s apartment at, say, seven-thirty, and at some point during the evening either Kathy or myself will get to the case, open it up and take out whatever’s there.’

‘That’s not making things too complicated?’

‘Piece a cake,’ he replies confidently. ‘Once that’s done and we’ve had a chance to examine the price sets, we’ll arrange for ten thousand dollars to be deposited in the account that our operation is setting up for you in Philadelphia.’

‘Pounds.’

‘What?’

‘I said pounds. I want it in pounds.’

‘That wasn’t a part of our initial agreement.’

Katharine nervously passes her hand over her hair, flattening it down.

‘I’m making it one now,’ I tell him, my voice still light and friendly. ‘I understood that payment would be in sterling.’

‘Alec, this is highly irregular.’

‘I don’t think so. And don’t tell me the Agency can’t afford it.’

‘That’s not the point. There’s a principle involved.’

I say nothing: Fortner’s hands are tied and he will have to consent.

‘We’ll see what we can do,’ he says quietly.

Katharine looks away.

‘Thank you.’

I feel bad now, like I’ve gone too far. The chill of the water is again starting to take hold.

‘What if there’s no opportunity to get to the case during dinner?’

‘Most probably there will be, Alec, if you put it somewhere smart,’ Fortner says, with a hint of irritation. ‘If we can’t do it safely, we won’t do it at all. And if that happens, just take the case home and bring it to us some other time. But just remember one thing…’ He brings his hand out of the water to make his point firmly and with great care. ‘Nobody is expecting you to do what you’re doing. That’s the beauty of it. Nobody’s watching us any more. That should help to calm any nerves you might have.’

I do not answer this, merely nod my head.

‘That’s settled then,’ he says, crouching down until the water is up to his neck. Katharine does the same. ‘Just leave the case in the hall of Saul’s apartment. We’ll take care of the rest. It’s gonna be real easy. Now let’s do some laps.’

It has started to rain as we make our way through the lobby doors and out on to Chichester Street. A strong wind is blowing along the face of the building and it catches on the trapped globs of water inside my ears. I shiver with sudden cold and Katharine comments on how quickly the summer has passed. Fortner tells us to stay indoors while he fetches the car, so we head back inside and sit down.

Katharine immediately leans forward and adopts the manner of a concerned friend. She wants to get back that closeness we had, that shared understanding with which I was first ensnared.

‘Alec, it’s difficult for you, I know,’ she says. ‘You wanna do everything right by Fortner, you don’t want to let him down. But all this must be quite a shock for you. You sure you don’t have any concerns?’

‘Of course,’ I tell her with a confident smile. ‘I’m completely OK about it.’

‘You sure?’ she says, ‘Because back there in the pool you seemed a little spaced out, a little tense.’

It’s bad that she thought this.

‘Not at all, no. I was just a bit apprehensive about using Saul’s flat. You know, the friend thing.’

‘We can change that if you want.’

‘It’s fine. It makes sense. I’ve thought about it now. Don’t worry.’

‘You sure? Because you know you can always come to me if there’s a problem.’

And with this she reaches across to touch my sleeve, her fingers pushing against my wrist.

‘I’m sure,’ I tell her, looking away.

Clearly this is how they will proceed from now on: the pattern has been set. Fortner will handle the business end of things while Katharine takes care of the emotional side, coddling me whenever I am beset by doubt. It’s pointless, of course, to confide in her, for my every word will be reported back to him for careful analysis. All of my conversations, no matter who they are with, have this quality of evasion about them. They are significant not for what is said in the everyday to and fro of mutual trickery, but rather for what is left unspoken. It’s all about hidden meanings, reading between the lines, teasing out the subtext. This is where the skill resides.

The first handover, for example, is not about the leaking of sensitive information: its true purpose is subtler than that. Katharine and Fortner set it up with such ease in the pool because they know that a duplicate of our commercial price sets is of no more use to them than a copy of The Economist. The true value of the exchange at Saul’s flat lies in giving JUSTIFY a dummy run. Katharine and Fortner want to see how effectively I can operate within our new arrangement: whether, in the heat of the action, I become sloppy, forgetful, thrown by nerves. More crucially, it is essential from their point of view that I commit an act of industrial espionage — however slight — as soon as possible. That will bind me into the treachery and give them leverage with which to threaten me should I, at a later date, develop cold feet.

Fortner pulls up in the car outside and Katharine moves towards the door. Then, just as I am standing up to leave, Cohen’s girlfriend walks into the lobby. I recognize her from the Christmas party: tall and self-confident, with an older face which she will grow into. We catch one another’s eye and stare lingeringly without words: in different circumstances, the moment might even be construed as flirtatious. We both consider, momentarily, the prospect of a brief embarrassed greeting where neither of us knows the other’s name, but she soon looks the other way and walks off towards the reception desk.

There is no doubt in my mind that she recognized me, at least as an Abnex employee or, more exactly, as a member of Murray’s team. She will tell Cohen of this encounter when she sees him tonight, perhaps giving him a description in the hope of discovering my name. He will piece it together from there.

‘Was he with anyone?’

‘Yes,’ she will reply.

‘Really?’ Cohen will say. ‘A woman in her thirties, tall, good-looking? An older man too?’

‘Yes,’ she’ll say. ‘As a matter of fact he was.’

22 Plausible Deniability

Tanya walks past and floats a single sheet of paper into my in-tray. It’s a circular about restricting noncommercial use of the Internet within the office. There is a satsuma on my desk and I tear open its skin. The smell of Christmas billows up out of the fruit.

I hit Reply.To: Saul RickenAddress: sricken@compuserve.comSubject: Re: Dinner SatMeeting F + K at your place — seven-thirty OK with you? I have to work, so coming direct from here.Can’t believe you’ve never heard the egg joke before.See you tomorrow night.Alec

I have a long meeting on Saturday morning between nine o’clock and twelve thirty with Murray and Cohen in one of the small conference rooms on the sixth floor. With the exception of George on security duty downstairs, the office is completely deserted. Even the canteen is closed.

I am the last to arrive and the only one of us not wearing a suit. Cohen remarks on this immediately and Murray reminds me about ‘company policy’ as we sit down at the start of the meeting. Another black mark against my name. Cohen, of course, looks trim and showered, elegantly attired in a bespoke navy herringbone: you could take him anywhere, the little fucker.

His attitude towards me throughout the meeting is spiteful and manipulative. At one point he presses me for details about a research project which he knows I have yet to begin working on. When I can’t give a full answer, a shadow of irritation falls across Murray’s face and he coughs lightly, writing something down. They are both sitting opposite me at the conference table so that the relationship between us takes on the characteristics of an interrogation. My mind is slipped and weak: I woke up late and missed breakfast, and I have a gathering nervousness about the handover tonight which parries clear thinking. Cohen, by contrast, is sharp as a pin: he listens with faked over-attentiveness to Murray’s every word, nodding vigorously in agreement and taking detailed minutes on his laptop with neat little punches of the keyboard. If Murray cracks a joke, Cohen laughs. If Murray wants a cup of coffee, Cohen fetches it for him. The whole affair is sickening. By lunchtime my gut feels hollow and my mood is one of blank anger.

I eat alone in a pub on Hewett Street, haddock and chips with plastic sachets of tartare sauce. There’s a man next door to my table reading FHM, one of those glossy magazines for men who don’t have the guts to buy porn. A bikini-clad actress beams out from the cover, all cleavage and flat tummy. There’ll be a suggestive interview inside about what she looks for in a guy, next to a Q&A health page answering readers’ queries on penis size and bad breath.

Cohen has had a sandwich (prepared at home) at his desk, washed down with a carton of low-sugar Ribena. ‘I had some e-mailing to catch up on,’ he tells me as I come back into the office, ‘a query from a law firm in Ashgabat.’ I sit down at Piers’s desk and flick through a copy of the Wall Street Journal.

‘Where’s Murray?’

‘He’s had to go home. Family crisis. Jemma’s fallen off a swing.’

‘Who’s Jemma?’

‘His youngest daughter.’

This could make it more difficult to print the price sets from my computer.

‘So what are we supposed to do?’ I ask him.

‘You can go, if you like.’

This is exactly Cohen’s style: probing, arch, ambiguous. The remark is designed to test me. Will I work through the afternoon, or take the opportunity presented by Murray’s sudden departure to clock off early? Cohen won’t make a move until he knows what I intend to do. If I stay in the office, he’ll stay too. If I leave, he will remain another half-hour and then pack up. He can never be anything other than the last man to go home at night.

My best option is to leave now, have a cup of coffee, and return to the office in two hours. By then Cohen will almost certainly have gone. He’s clinical and industrious, but he likes his weekends as much as the next man. I can then pretend to do an hour’s work at my desk — for the benefit of the security cameras — during which I can print out the price sets on the laserjet. That way I’ll still be on time for the seven-thirty handover.

‘I might go,’ I tell him firmly.

‘Really?’ he says, disappointment in his voice.

‘Lots to do. I want to go shopping in the West End, get myself some new clothes.’

‘Fine.’

He isn’t interested in any excuses.

‘So I’ll see you on Monday.’

‘Monday.’

Three blocks away I order a macchiato and a chocolate wafer in a decent Italian cafe where there’s a pretty waitress and a fuzzy TV bolted to the wall. I haven’t been in here before; my usual place was closed. The BBC are replaying highlights from Euro 96 — a Czech player saluting the crowd after chipping Peter Schmeichel, Alan Shearer reeling away from the goal with his right hand raised in triumph. Simpler pleasures. My neck starts to hurt from craning up at the screen, so I turn to the copy of The Times that I brought with me to pass the time until four o’clock. I read it almost cover to cover: op-eds, news, arts, sports, even the columns I usually hate where an overpaid hack tells you about their children going off to nursery school, or what brand of olive oil they’re using this week. I drink two more coffees, lattes this time, and then make my way back to the office.

George is still on security duty as I come in through the revolving doors.

‘Forget something, did we?’

George has just come back from holiday. He looks sunburned and overfed.

‘You won’t believe this,’ I tell him, all casual and relaxed. ‘I got all the way home, made myself a nice cup of tea and was just settling down to watch Grandstand when I remembered I had some letters to finish by Monday morning. I’d forgotten all about them, and my notes are here in the office. So I had to get on the Tube and come all the way back.’

‘That’s too bad,’ says George, rearranging a bunch of keys on his desk. ‘And on a weekend an’ all.’

I walk past him towards the lifts, clutching my security pass in the sweat of my palm. I have to wait for some time for a lift to arrive, pacing up and down on the cold marble floor. George ignores me: he is reading today’s Mirror next to the flickering monochrome of five closed-circuit televisions. The crackle of his newspaper provides the only noise in the reception area. Then a lift chimes open and I ride it to the fifth floor.

The coffees have started to kick in: I am fidgety without being any more alert. If I can see that Cohen is still working at his desk, through the glass which separates our section from the lift area, I will leave the building for another hour. If Cohen has gone home, as I expect he has, I can proceed. Pan-piped music issues from a speaker above my head.

I emerge slowly from the lift as the doors glide open, immediately looking through the window partition in the direction of Cohen’s desk. My view is partially obscured by a rubber plant. I carry on towards the door of the office, still looking around for any sign of him.

Keep moving. The cameras are watching. Don’t loiter.

The team area appears to be clear. No sign of Cohen. His briefcase has gone and his desk has been tidied the way he leaves it night after night: neat piles, immaculate in-trays, a squared-up keyboard with the mouse flush along one side. It’s all about control with Cohen, never letting anything slip. Even his Post-It notes are stuck down in exacting straight lines.

I sit down at my desk and disturb the screen saver with a single touch on the space bar. Why is this suddenly so hard? I had not expected it to be as difficult as this. There is no risk, no chance of trouble, and yet I feel somehow incapable, lost in an immense space surveyed by invisible eyes. Even the simple process of keying in my password feels unlawful. I should have done this yesterday, not now, should have let the print-out get lost in the constant traffic and buzz of office life. To do this alone on a Saturday afternoon looks all wrong.

So I wait. As a smokescreen I type e-mails that I don’t need to send and fetch reference books which I flick through ostentatiously at my desk. I go to the gents, fetch coffee from the machine, drink water at the fountain, overdoing every aspect of normal everyday behaviour for the benefit of anyone who might be watching. I do this for the best part of an hour. It is unthinkable that George is watching with any great attentiveness, and yet I go through with the absurd routine. I am held back not by cowardice, or by a change of heart, but by the simple panic of being caught.

Finally, at around five o’clock, I resolve to do what I came here to do. I sit at the computer and load the file. Three clicks of the mouse and the document opens up on the screen.

There are four A4 pages constituting about thirty seconds of normal printing time. The Print dialogue box prompts me — Best, Normal or Draft? Greyscale or Black & White? Number of copies? I go for the default setting and press Return.

The file spools over to the printer, but it takes longer than usual to emerge from the laserjet. I busy myself with other tasks, trying not to look distracted by the yawning gap of time. I pour myself a plastic cup of water at the fountain, but my nervousness is all-consuming: when the fax machine on the facing wall beeps with an incoming message, the shock of it spills a small amount of the water as I am bringing it up to my mouth.

Why was I not more prepared for this? They’ve trained you. It’s nothing. Be logical.

I look down at the printer, willing it to work, and, finally, the first page discharges, smooth and easy. Then the second. I look closely at the two sheets of paper and the printing quality is good: no smudges or run-overs. The third page follows. I try to read some of the words as it comes out upside-down, neck twisted round, but I am too disoriented to make any sense of it. Then I stand over the printer, waiting for the fourth and final sheet.

It isn’t coming out.

I wait, but there’s no sign of it. The printer must have run out of paper.

The drawer is stuck and I have to give it a sharp tug before it opens, but there is still a half-inch of A4 paper lying inside the machine. I slam it shut, but this has no effect: it is as if every piece of hardware in the building has suddenly shut down.

There must be a bad connection somewhere, or a fault with the main computer.

And I am on the point of crouching down, ready to trace leads and check power cables, when I hear his voice.

‘What’s this?’

Cohen is absolutely beside me, shoulder to shoulder. Not looking at me, but down at the printer. I breathe in hard and cannot disguise the sound of it, a startled gasp of air as my face flushes red. His breath smells of menthol.

Cohen has picked up the three sheets from the printer tray and started reading them.

‘What do you want these for?’

If you ever get caught, they told me, don’t answer the question. Deflect and deny until you know that you can get clear.

Think. Think.

‘You gave me a shock,’ I tell him, mustering a half-laugh, in the hope that this will explain my blushing. ‘I thought you’d gone home.’

‘I was on the sixth floor,’ Cohen says coolly. ‘Library.’

I didn’t hear the lift. He must have used the staircase. I look down at his shoes, silent suede loafers.

‘What do you want this for?’

‘The commercial price sets?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘The price sets.’ He holds up the first page and flaps it in my face.

‘I needed a copy at home.’

‘Why?’

‘Why not? So I can get on top of my work. So I can see the long-term picture.’

Don’t go on too long. The bad liar always embellishes.

Cohen nods and mutters ‘Oh.’

I look back at the printer, trying to avoid his eyes.

‘So what happened to shopping in the West End? Got to get myself some new clothes, you said.’

‘I had some letters to finish by Monday. Forgot.’

‘And this, of course,’ he says archly, passing me the sheets of paper.

Cohen knows that something is not right here.

The fourth and final page has emerged into the printer tray without my realizing it. I bend over to scoop it out and tap the pages into a neat pile, stapling them in the top left-hand corner. Cohen walks back to his desk and takes a pen out of a drawer.

‘I’m going now,’ he says.

‘Me too. I’m all done.’

‘Better switch off your computer, then,’ he says, housing the pen in his jacket pocket.

‘Yes.’

I move around to my desk and sleep the system. It folds into a slow screen saver, coloured shapes in space disappearing into a vast black hole. He is already halfway to the exit when he says:

‘Couldn’t you have written your letters at home?’

‘What?’

Pretending not to have heard him buys me the time to think of a reason.

‘I said couldn’t you have done the letters at home?’

‘No. I had all my notes here.’

‘I see. Bye then.’

‘See you, Harry.’

He turns the corner and disappears, taking the stairs all the way to the ground floor. I continue to sit at my desk, wanting to clutch my head in my hands and sink to the floor. After all the planning and the preparation it seems extraordinary to me that something should have gone wrong so quickly.

I put the documents into my briefcase, place the letters beside the franking machine, shut off the lights in the office and take the lift to the foyer. The blur of aftermath makes it impossible to think at all clearly. I leave the Abnex building without speaking to George and disappear out on to Broadgate. It’s five-thirty.

Some things become clear as I walk around.

I may have over-reacted. What did Cohen really see? He saw Milius, the new boy, doing some printing. No more, no less. He saw letters on my desk, cold cups of coffee, the outward signs of an afternoon’s work. Nothing untoward about that. Nothing to make him suspect sharp practice.

What do I know about Cohen? That he is guileful and malevolent. That he is the sort of person to sneak up on a colleague in a deserted office on a weekend afternoon and get a kick out of giving him a fright. Cohen feels simultaneously threatened by what I am capable of and contemptuous of what I represent. He’s just another Nik, snuffing out his insecurity by making others feel uneasy.

But he will be watching me that much more closely from now on. It was my first mistake, the only thing to have gone wrong so far.

Why didn’t I see him coming?

23 The Case

Just after six, still feeling restless and shaken, I take a slow, half-empty Tube to West Kensington. I have rationalized what happened and yet it continues to play on my nerves. There should have been a clean through-line of action in the last six hours, right up to the handover this evening. But it has been disrupted by Cohen, by my own stupidity.

Emerging from the underground station into a humid September evening, I walk slowly, always clutching the briefcase tight in my right hand. Sweat has warmed on the handle, making it clammy to the touch. The contents feel almost radioactive, as if they will somehow burn through the leather casing: this thought in itself strikes me as absurd, and yet I cannot shake it off. I want to stop and open the briefcase to check that the documents are still inside. Dog-walkers and lone queers pass me as I walk through Hammersmith Cemetery, and each one appears to steal a glance at the case, as if aware of its contents. Their faces seem full of bored, suspicious loathing, and this only deepens my sense of isolation. I was warned that the first drop would be like this, but the chaos of it has completely bewildered me.

Approaching the door of Saul’s apartment building at seven fifteen, I turn around in the street to check for evidence of a tail. There is an old lady loitering near a fenced-off expanse of grass, but otherwise the road is completely deserted. I look closely at the cars parked up and down the length of Queen’s Club Gardens, but all of them appear to be unoccupied. Now there is not solely the probability of American and British surveillance, which I had anticipated, but the added problem of Cohen. It is as if I am expecting him to appear around the next corner at any given moment.

Saul buzzes me in without saying hello and I climb the four flights of stairs to his flat. This is a slow business: my mind has been scrambled by the afternoon’s events and my body feels tired and cumbersome. Yet the hopefulness and optimism contained in his smile as he opens the front door momentarily lifts me: I had forgotten just how much I rely on him for a sense of being liked. He plants his arm across my back and gives it a slap.

Katharine and Fortner have come up behind me on the stairs. They are so close by that Saul asks if we have come together. How could I not have seen them after staring so long down Queen’s Club Gardens? They must have been parked a long way from the building, watched from a distance as I entered, and then followed me up. As soon as I see them, my stomach tightens with nerves.

‘Hi, sweetie,’ Katharine says, kissing me on the cheek. She has put on weight, just in the space of a few days. Her face looks puffy up close, suddenly middle-aged. ‘You OK?’

‘Fine thanks,’ I say. ‘Fine.’

Both of them look unnervingly focused. Fortner’s complexion is almost grey against the faded white of his shirt, but there is a look of intense concentration in his fixed, still eyes. In his left hand he is holding a single bottle of wine wrapped in thin crepe paper, and in his right he has a tanned leather briefcase which I have not seen before. He will be using this to carry my documents away.

Katharine surges forward to plant a kiss on Saul’s cheek and she compliments him on his clothes. He is wearing a cream shirt and a trim pair of dark moleskins, with what looks to be a new pair of trainers. Saul has always had the money to buy decent clothes. He and Fortner shake hands as we shuffle around, dispensing our jackets and coats in the hall.

With Saul’s back turned I set my briefcase down next to an old umbrella stand and look to Fortner for approval. He nods quickly, letting me know that he has registered where it is. I look back at Saul to check that he has not seen this exchange taking place between us, but he is still speaking to Katharine, unaware. It occurs to me that I have not properly considered the implications of allowing a handover to take place here. The consequences, should Saul ever find out, would be enough to end our friendship, and yet I barely feel a jolt of betrayal. I have to concentrate so hard nowadays on every aspect of my relationship with Andromeda that there’s no time to consider anything as mundane as friendship.

‘Everything all right?’ Fortner says to me, not bothering to lower the pitch of his voice.

‘Absolutely.’

‘Did you find that stuff we needed?’

Across the hall, Saul is still talking to Katharine, though she must have one ear listening in on what we are saying.

‘Yeah. I got it. It’s there.’

I nod in the direction of the briefcase. Fortner sets his own down beside it.

‘Nice goin’.’

‘Come through and I’ll introduce you,’ Saul is saying, and he guides the three of us into the sitting-room.

I just float through the next half-hour, oblivious of the others, unable to concentrate on anything beyond the possibility of discovery by Saul. We are introduced to Dave, Saul’s friend from Spain, and Susannah, his girlfriend. They are the only other guests, which concerns me. Fortner’s absence, when it comes, would not be so noticeable in a larger crowd of people.

Dave is a squat thirtysomething, bald before his time, with a generous smile stitched below weak eyes. Susannah is also short, but pale and thin, with vanished tits and an Oxfam wardrobe. I distrust her immediately, and think of him as ineffectual. He has a slightly desperate way of looking at me, a craving to be friendly and affable. Saul pours us all a drink and a conversation develops between the five of them to which I make no contribution. The utter pointlessness of getting to know new people, given my present situation, is palpable. Smells of garlic and wine drift in from the kitchen, where Saul goes from time to time to check up on the food.

Towards eight o’clock, as we are standing up to go next door for dinner, Dave asks me how I know Saul.

‘Old school friends,’ I tell him. ‘From way back.’

‘Listen to him,’ Saul interjects loudly from across the room. ‘From way back. You never used to say that, Alec.’ He looks over at Katharine. ‘You two are turning him into an American. The other day on the phone he told me to have a nice day.’

‘Bullshit,’ I say, but the way this comes out it sounds angry and petulant. There’s a sudden embarrassed silence among us and Saul grimaces, a joke gone wrong.

‘All right, all right,’ he says, and his face fills with disappointment. He has been growing gradually more impatient with me in the last few months, knowing that something in our friendship has changed, but without any real knowledge as to why. I don’t telephone Saul as much as I used to; don’t, for example, have the time to send him jokes via e-mail. We haven’t been out for a drink, just the two of us, since Christmas of last year, and I have entirely lost track of his career, his girlfriends, his worries and concerns. This is how I imagined things would pan out, but now that something has gone wrong, the burden of secrecy feels suddenly overwhelming. With Kate gone, Saul is the one person I might trust to talk to about what happened this afternoon. I want to tell him the truth, I want to tell him exactly what is going on. This constant entanglement with bluff, double-bluff, second-guess and guile, is wearing. Any notion of trust or honour that I ever had has vanished: my life has become a wall of lies shored up against the possibility of capture. I cannot recall what it felt like just to sit around this flat in the old days, watching videos with Saul and pissing away our teens and twenties.

‘Telecommunications,’ Dave is saying, to no one else but me. We are sitting beside one another at the dining-room table, Katharine and Fortner at either end with Saul and Susannah on the opposite side.

‘What about them specifically?’

‘You know how they’re paying for the Internet and all the fibre optic networks?’

Has he been talking to me about this before now? Have I missed something? Have I just been nodding and mumbling at him, my mind drifted off elsewhere?

‘No. How?’

‘Answering machines.’

‘What do you mean, “answering machines”?’

Dave leans forward, plucks a napkin from his side plate and places it on his lap.

‘Before answer phones came along you just dialled a number and let it ring out, right? If somebody wasn’t in, you hung up and there was no charge for making the call. But all that’s changed now that everybody has an answering machine. Whenever you make a call it kicks in after two or three rings. So a connection’s been made, right? And if a connection’s been made then you’ve added to your phone bill. They have a minimum charge of four pence so it adds up. How many answering machines do you think there are in the UK?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Maybe fifteen million, conservative estimate. So every time somebody rings those machines, British Telecom is making sixty million pence which is… which is…’

The night is still while Dave makes his calculation. I do it for him.

‘Six hundred thousand pounds.’

‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’

Susannah is reacting to something Saul has said. She has a laugh like a broken fanbelt. There’s some kind of mousse starter in front of me and I am already halfway through it.

‘But of course the really smart thing about answering machines is that you have to call back if someone leaves you a message. So that’s another guaranteed call for BT, another four pence minimum. It’s no wonder they make the profits they do. What is it? About seven hundred and fifty pounds a minute?’

‘Is that how much they make?’ Katharine asks. Suddenly the entire table is listening to Dave’s monologue.

‘Apparently. And it doesn’t just stop with answering machines. There’s call waiting now, too. That’s the most craven one of all. You ring up a friend and even if they’re on the line talking to someone else you’re made to wait. Beep. Beep. Please hold the line while we try to connect you. The other person knows you are waiting. And it goes on and on. Fucking woman sounds like Margaret Thatcher. So you’re there, you’re holding the line, but they’re not trying to connect you. Like fuck they are. They’re just happy to let you run up your bill. And the other person may know you’re there, but even if they want to talk to you, nobody actually knows how to work call waiting. No one. What d’you do? Press Recall or something? Nobody knows.’

‘That’s right,’ says Fortner. ‘They don’t.’

He looks relaxed and composed, a drink inside him, safe in the knowledge that the Abnex documents are next door.

‘And let’s say they do.’ Dave is speaking faster and faster, gesturing wildly, cutlery in hand. I look across at Susannah, but she has nothing but pride in her eyes as Dave swallows a mouthful of mousse and continues with his discourse. Little bits of spittle spray out across the table as he says: ‘Then the first person they were talking to has to run up their phone bill waiting for the other person to talk to the person who’s waiting. That can go on for hours. And even then one of them will have to call the other back, which is another guaranteed call for BT. And then — and then — there are itemized phone bills. If you’re sharing a flat with somebody and they deny making that five-pound call to the number listed on the bill you then have to ring that number up and embarrass yourself by asking who the fuck they are, just so that you can work out if it’s your bill or his. You ever done that, Alec?’

‘I live alone.’

Again, silence settles around the table in the wake of my speaking. Saul frowns and then turns his head to face Katharine, his lips drawn together in a tight, disappointed line. Dave, looking pale and embarrassed, finishes eating, and for a while the only noise in the room is the tinkling of a fork against his china plate, the quick munch of his jaw as he chews and swallows. Saul is already up and collecting the plates before he has finished, stacking them noisily and making for the kitchen.

‘Can I give you a hand?’ I ask and, without looking at me, he says: ‘Sure.’

‘I’ll come too,’ Katharine offers, but Saul gestures at her to sit down.

‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I only need Alec.’

Once we are in the kitchen, he turns on me.

‘What’s the matter with you these days?’

What surprises me about my reaction to this is that I am grateful to him for asking. For a brief moment I consider not bothering to deny any unhappiness. I want the opportunity to unburden myself. But it’s untenable. I have to keep up the masquerade.

‘I’m fine. Fine,’ I tell him, managing a smile, but there can be nothing in either my voice or my attitude to convince him of this.

‘You’re not fine, Alec,’ he says, the weight of his body shifting forward, coming at me. ‘You’re hardly here. Most of the time I don’t even recognize you any more.’

He is keeping his voice low, tinkering with a pan on the stove which has pasta boiling hard inside it. I am worried that Fortner, who is only across the corridor in the chair nearest the kitchen, will hear us, so I move away from the sink and close the door until it is ajar.

‘Come on, Saul. Who has the will to listen to a guy they’ve never met before doing his party piece about answering machines and phone bills? I have a lot on my mind.’

‘We all work hard, for fuck’s sake,’ he says, but before I have time to reply he has carried a bowl of salad into the dining-room and left me alone in the kitchen. I turn to the sink and begin rinsing the plates in a coughing stream of lukewarm water. One by one, I slot them into the dishwasher.

‘Is the pasta ready?’ he says, coming back in.

‘I don’t know. Listen, why don’t I stay tonight? We can talk then, have a smoke, watch some TV.’

‘OK,’ he says, forking a strand of tagliatelle out of the water. Then, more quietly: ‘Whatever.’

At half past ten, with the main course out of the way, Fortner makes his move.

Saul, Dave and Susannah are having a conversation about the latest cinema releases, which to me is always the sign of a bad dinner party. Fortner interjects to ask if anyone has seen Mission Impossible, and Susannah says yes she has and tells a boring story which reveals only that she has misunderstood the plot. More summer blockbusters are discussed — Independence Day, Die Hard With a Vengeance, one with Schwarzenegger I haven’t heard of called Eraser — and everybody gets to share their views about whether or not Arnie is past his prime. Dave plays the arthouse card by revealing that he has seen ‘the new Bertolucci’. As far as I can tell, it’s just a story about a bunch of seedy British ex-pats sleeping around in Tuscany. In the middle of all this, Katharine says simply:

‘Honey, have you taken your medication?’

Which is Fortner’s cue.

‘Dunno why I bother,’ he says, getting up from the table with the slowness of a geriatric. His voice is a low grunt. ‘Goddam pills never do any good.’

And with that he lumbers towards the entrance hall. He makes this look so natural that the others would never suspect a thing. Dave carries on.

‘I often think, would Bernardo Bertolucci have half the reputation he has if his name was Bernard Bell or… or Bob Bower or something?’

From the hall I can hear the slap of my briefcase falling on to the carpet, and the successive snaps of the brass catches flying open.

‘I mean don’t you think that the success he’s enjoyed has something to do with the allure of the name “Bernardo Bertolucci”? He already sounds like a great movie director before he’s even shot a frame of film.’

There’s a rustle of papers in the hall, clearly audible to all of us and not at all like the sound of a pill bottle or a foil pack of antibiotics. Then the briefcase is closed. Almost immediately another case, clearly Fortner’s, is opened. The sound of this is much fainter; only someone who was deliberately listening out would hear it. Fortner must have held the catches with his fingers, drawing them up slowly to smother any sound. I look at Saul and Susannah, but they have been sidetracked by Dave, who has segued into Last Tango in Paris. I listen for further noises, but Dave’s voice smothers everything. Katharine catches my eye but the expression on her face does not change. Then, at a convenient break in the conversation, Saul says:

‘I’ll get pudding. Will Fortner want any, Kathy?’

This could be dangerous: if he heads out into the hall, he may see Fortner. I try to think of a way to delay him, but Katharine reacts quicker.

‘Hey,’ she says, thinking on her feet. ‘Before you do that, just tell me about something. It’s been bugging me all night. You see that book there?’

‘Which one?’

Saul is wavering near the door, looking back at her.

‘On the second shelf.’

‘Here?’

Saul points to a book with an orange spine, coming back into the room.

‘No, just a little further along. To the right.’

‘The one by James Michener?’

‘That’s it, yes.’

By now we are all swivelled and looking at the book in question.

‘That’s right. Now was he British?’

‘Michener?’

‘Yes,’ Katharine says.

‘I don’t know,’ Saul admits. ‘Why?’

‘Because I have an ongoing argument with my father that he’s from Connecticut.’

Saul doesn’t know that Katharine’s father is dead.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Dave says. ‘I’m fairly sure he’s British.’

Fortner comes back into the dining-room.

‘No idea about what?’ he says confidently, a spring in his step. Everything must have gone smoothly.

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ Katharine tells him, settling back into her chair with a faint grin. ‘D’you want any dessert, honey?’

There is pudding, there is cheese, there is coffee.

My sense of relief at the success of the handover has made adrenalin gradually dissipate from me like a deep, muscle-softening massage. For the first time in hours I begin to relax. But out of this comes a tiredness which flattens me towards eleven o’clock like jet-lag. Katharine notices this and offers me more coffee. I drink it and pick at the pudding, a chocolate goo which goes some way to restoring my energy. But it’s difficult to involve myself in the party. I am always outside it, looking in.

At midnight, Katharine herself begins to fade and she is soon making excuses to leave which Fortner is only too keen to pick up on. He came here for the briefcase, after all, not the conversation. Having stood up, he walks over and kisses Susannah twice on the cheek and shakes Dave’s hand, telling them what a pleasure it’s been to make their acquaintance.

‘Goodbye young man,’ he says to me, placing his arm on my shoulder. ‘We’ll be seeing you soon, I hope.’

‘I asked him for supper next week,’ Katharine says, disengaging from her farewell to Dave.

‘Terrific. See you then.’

Saul then walks them to the front door — I remain where I am, listening to Dave talk about his job — and he sees them out. When Saul comes back he smokes a joint with Dave in the sitting-room while Susannah makes a vague attempt at clearing up. By one o’clock the two of them have gone, out into the hall arm-in-arm with warm smiles and promises of meeting again that I do not deserve and do not believe.

Saul now goes for a pee and I sit on the sofa. But it’s late and he’s stoned and when he comes back he doesn’t want to talk. I was expecting a long, involved chat into the small hours, but he just wants to sit in front of the television watching a recording of Match of the Day. As the cassette is rewinding he asks me what I thought of Susannah, and I say how nice she seemed, how funny and smart and easy, and that seems to satisfy him.

On the sofa, beer in hand, Saul follows the match between Chelsea and Manchester United with the attentiveness of the lifelong fan. I half-watch it, my mind wandering back through the events of the day. Fortner will be home by now, going through the contents of the file, preparing the information before handing it over to his case officer in the morning. Will Katharine help him with this, or leave him to it? A car horn sounds long and hard in Queen’s Club Gardens as a Manchester United player is tracked closely down the wing by a defender stooped low like a piano player.

‘Andy fucking Cole,’ Saul mutters. ‘I know battery hens who are more creative in the box.’

Ten minutes later, as I am getting up to go to bed, Saul mutes the sound of the television and looks up at me.

‘Alec?’ he says.

‘Yeah?’

‘Sorry I had a go at you before. About Abnex. I think it’s great you’re doing so well there, doing something you believe in. A lot of people would give their arse to be in your position.’

‘Don’t bother…’

‘No, hear me out,’ he says, raising his hand. He’s more drunk than I had realized. ‘I don’t have any right to criticize you for working hard, for spending time with people in the business. And I like Fort and Kathy, they’re not the issue. I’m just reacting to how little time all of us have now, away from our careers. It’s taken me a while to adjust to the fact that we can’t always be fucking about like we used to. I don’t really know when the fun stopped, you know? We’ve all had to get a lot more serious.’

I nod.

‘Truth is, I admire you,’ he says. ‘You were in a bad place after not getting into the Foreign Office and you sorted yourself out.’

Now is when it is most difficult. Now is when none of it seems worthwhile at all.

‘Thanks,’ is all I can say. ‘That means a lot to me.’

He leans back and I decide to call it a night.

‘I’m bushed,’ I tell him. ‘Going to get some sleep.’

‘Sure,’ he replies. ‘See you in the morning.’

And he turns back to the TV.

I sleep in the room where I always stay, a study with a futon in it, the walls lined with paperbacks and hefty academic tomes left over from Saul’s days at LSE. I take down a paperback copy of Out of Africa and climb into bed, wearing boxer shorts and an old white T-shirt. From down the hall I can hear the roar of a goal-celebrating crowd and Saul quietly shouting ‘Yes!’ to himself as someone scores. I lie there for a while, trying to read, but my eyes grow tired after a single page and I put out the bedside light.

Then, of course, I cannot sleep.

Every night now for more than a year the pattern has been the same: an urgent need to rest ignored by my wandering mind, raking over every imaginable thought and anxiety, solving nothing. To sleep so little, so agitatedly, has become commonplace, yet somehow my body has adjusted to being starved of rest. On a daily basis I still manage to work, think, exercise, lie; but at some basic level I have forgotten how to feel. The jadedness is gradually erasing my better instincts, any capacity I once possessed to evaluate consequence and implication. It is as if every time I am woken up at three in the morning by that awful, gradual, caving sense of worry creeping around my subconscious, some better part of me begins to fail. Even a few straight hours of unbroken sleep will always be ended before dawn by mind-racings, concerns somehow magnified by the quiet and black of the night.

So, as ever, I turn to sex to try to shut it all out, lying there in the dark with the noise of the TV in the distance and some girl fucking me to sleep. She’s never anyone I care about, never Kate. Only the ones I tried to have, but couldn’t, even some woman I saw at a bus-stop who gave me the eye. Every now and again I relive an actual sexual encounter and try to make it better than it was: screwing someone from years back, or Anna again. Tonight it’s her, with her showered skin and tits bouncing uselessly above me, that look of sated lust in her eyes which I failed to recognize as malice. Nothing works, though. I hear Saul shut off the TV at around two o’clock and follow the noise of his footsteps going up and down the passage. He visits the bathroom, washes, then turns out all the lights. The flat is quiet.

I find myself thinking back to when I broke up with Kate. Saul and I would spend long hours in a Brazilian bar in Earls Court trying to dream up ways for me to win her back. These talks were, for the most part, serious and full of regret, as the realization that I had thrown away my one pure chance of a kind of happiness gradually dawned on me. But they were also good conversations, punctuated with laughter and optimism. This was all down to Saul — I was a mess. Quietly and selflessly over the years, he had watched and understood Kate and me to a point where he knew us both intimately. And now that understanding was paying off: he could explain her apparent cruelty, he could see when I was allowing a particular line of thought to become warped or exaggerated. It was uplifting in itself just to talk to somebody who also knew and loved Kate. And he never once tried to make me get over her; in his heart he knew that we should be together, and he wasn’t about to conceal that from me. I respected him for that.

Three months later, with ridiculous symmetry, Saul’s long-term girlfriend turned round and told him that she was seeing another man. And so we went back to that same bar, only now it was my turn to be the good friend, to be as wise and understanding as Saul had been to me. We sat down with our bottles of beer, late-night traffic sliding by outside, and tried to make sense of what had happened. From his coat pocket Saul took out a letter she had written to him, parts of which he allowed me to read. ‘How sad that two people who once cared for each other so much can end up like this,’ it said, ‘Take care of yourself’ and ‘I will always love you.’ The awful platitudes of separation.

More than anything else, I think, Saul was astonished by the speed with which it had finished. They had been together, on and off, since school. To my knowledge she was the first girl he had ever slept with.

What he needed then was for me to keep my mouth shut and just drink a beer with him. But I felt some sort of obligation to cure and began bombarding him with half-baked advice and banalities. I tried to tell him that all of his fears and insecurities were not worth worrying over, that he should try to ignore and shut out all the mental pictures of her infidelity. I told him that the anguish we feel in the immediate aftermath of heartbreak only dissipates in time into prejudice and misinformation. Best to ignore it. None of this seemed to make any impression on him; he looked at me almost with pity. I wanted, absurdly, a transcript of the advice he had given me to read out to him.

The truth of that situation was that he had already made up his mind what to do. He had stopped loving her the moment she had told him about her affair: very quickly she had become reprehensible to him. Saul’s numbness gave way to a strange kind of relief in a matter of days, as if he was pleased to be rid of someone who was so devoid of basic decency. This strength astonished me. I had thought it would be years, literally, before he got over her, that the break-up would be something from which he would never properly recover. But I was wrong.

This memory is in my head for the best part of an hour, all the sides of it, the implications. Then I review the night’s events once again, unable to shut them out, unable just to put it all to one side.

I do not once look at my watch — I learned that long ago — but it must be after four when I finally manage a few hours’ sleep.

Early next morning I call Hawkes at his house in the country from a telephone box in Barons Court.

‘Could I speak to Paul Watson, please?’

‘You have the wrong number,’ he says, following procedure. Then he calls back immediately, using a secure line.

‘Alec. What is it?’

He sounds remote, detached.

‘I needed to ask you something.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you ever get caught up in the drama of it?’

‘What do you mean?’ he says, as if the question were ridiculous.

‘Did you ever do things in the course of your work that you didn’t really need to do? Did you make things more difficult for yourself because you were deceived by the glamour of espionage?’

‘I’m sorry, I’m not following.’

‘Let me give you an example. Last night, I made the first drop…’

‘Yes,’ he says nervously. He has always been wary of who may be listening in. His has been a lifetime of paring words back, of bending them into ambiguities and codes.

‘I was only following instructions, but the Americans seemed to have made things more complicated, more risky than was necessary. Maybe it was a test. I brought a briefcase to Saul’s flat…’

‘Alec, we can’t talk about this.’

‘What do you mean?’ I ask, and my voice must sound petulant and spoiled. Like the game is over.

‘It is not advisable for us to speak any more.’

‘Since when?’

‘I’m going to be out of contact for some time. You’ll be all right. Just retain anonymity. You’ve been told what to do in an emergency: go to Lithiby. Do not contact me again. You’re doing fine, Alec. You must learn how to do this thing on your own.’

24 Final Analysis

The year draws to an end.

There are four more drops, one roughly every month, for each of which I am paid ten thousand pounds sterling, deposited in an escrow account in Philadelphia. I will have access to the money when the Americans have the data from 5F371.

The first handover takes place at a West End theatre, a simple exchange almost as soon as the house lights have gone down. The next two occur at my flat in Shepherd’s Bush, and the fourth inside Fortner’s car on the way to the Andromeda Christmas party. That was last week.

Were they straightforward? Yes and no. The actual transactions with the Americans are always fairly simple: well planned-out, isolated, unobserved by third parties. There is the small problem of obtaining suitable information, or of getting freely available documents home to a secure place where I can make copies. There are security systems to be circumvented at Abnex, random checks on packages leaving and coming into the building.

So JUSTIFY has become routine, just as it was supposed to, just as we had planned it all along. Yet something in me will not rest. When they asked me to do this, to give over the next two, possibly three years of my life, I agreed to it with the private acknowledgement that things would be difficult at times, occasionally even intolerable. But the long-term gain, the promise of a settled and fulfilling future, outweighed any immediate reservations I had about conceding to a constant duplicity. The hard fact of being caught between two sides was presented to me as a relatively simple arrangement: it was just a question of maintaining balance.

That is easier than it sounds. A third party was never foreseen. We reckoned without Cohen; we did not factor him in. I was ready to feel on edge, watchful and suspicious, but I expected that to be attended by feelings of elation and personal fulfilment. Instead, because of his constant, nagging presence at Abnex, I feel isolated and consumed by an apprehensive solitude which I am increasingly unable to control.

To give an example. In mid-October I began to notice that black rubbish bags were being taken from the outside of my building as often as three or four times a week. No other garbage is removed from the road with the same frequency: the council truck is scheduled to come only on a Thursday morning. I could not mention the problem to anyone, for fear of worrying them about the security of JUSTIFY. It was conceivable furthermore that it was American agents who were going through my bins as a way of checking up on the validity of their agent. This is common practice.

But that was not all. At around the same time in October I made a telephone call to BT requesting a second copy of my itemized phone bill; the first had been mislaid and I was late paying the balance.

‘Haven’t we already sent you one?’ the operator asked. ‘Didn’t you request an itemized bill last week? I’ve got a note here on my screen.’

No, I told her, I did not. So who requested it? The CIA already has a tap on my phone. Was it Abnex? Cohen himself? Or had the operator simply made a mistake?

Thirdly, the post has started arriving later than it did, as if it is being intercepted en route to my flat, then checked, resealed and sent on. First-class letters take two days instead of one; second-class up to a week. Parcels have often been tampered with, seals broken and so on.

I expected taps and tails, but everything else is outside normal US and British procedures. It is possible that because of Cohen, Abnex have placed me under twenty-four-hour surveillance. There is at all times a feeling of being watched, listened to, sifted, followed, pressures exerted on me from all sides. I live constantly with the prospect of abandonment, constantly with the prospect of arrest. Things have been like this for so long now that I cannot recall what life was like before they started. The sensation is not dissimilar to the experience of being ill, as the world outside goes about its business and you cannot even remember what it felt like to be healthy and well.

Thus, walking to Colville Gardens tonight to make JUSTIFY’s sixth drop on a cold December evening, I feel tight and self-contained, certain in the knowledge that I am being tailed — by Cohen, by the Americans, even by our side. ‘Do They Know it’s Christmas?’ is playing out of the open window of a house on Pembridge Crescent. But there are no visible signs that it is Christmas. The streets have not been decked out with lights, there are no glowing trees in the bay windows of sitting-rooms and no carol-singing children scurrying from flat to flat in the cold.

In the inside pocket of my long overcoat, zipped up against thieves and spooks, there is a single high density IBM 1.44 MB floppy disk inside a small manila envelope containing crude oil assay data from a well-head sample in Tengiz. My adrenalin, as always, is up, my heart beating rapidly with a rush like caffeine pushing me quickly down the street. I tilt my head downward for warmth and watch my breath as it disappears into the folds of the coat.

For perhaps the tenth time today, my mind casts back to a confrontation I had with Cohen last week. I cannot ignore what happened, because it convinced me that he is assured of my guilt. This, at least for once, is not paranoia, not just some by-product of my persistent agitation. There are hard facts to consider.

We were standing beside the printer, the same one where three months before he had discovered me spooling out the commercial price sets on a quiet Saturday afternoon.

‘Those Americans you’ve been spending so much time with,’ he said, adjusting his tie.

‘What about them?’ I replied, a void immediately opening up inside me.

‘Alan has found out about it.’

‘What do you mean he’s found out about it? You two been keeping tabs on me?’

This was my first mistake. I was too aggressive too early. There had been nothing in what Cohen had said to cause me any alarm: simply a sly tone of voice, an implied rebuke in his manner.

‘We like to keep an eye on new people.’

‘What do you mean, “new people”? I’ve been with the company over a year.’

‘Did you know they work for Andromeda?’

‘No kidding, Harry. I thought they were guides at the British Museum. Of course I know they work at Andromeda.’

‘And do you think it’s wise to be spending so much of your time with a competitor?’

‘Implying what?’

‘Implying nothing.’

‘Why ask the question, then?’

‘You’re getting very ruffled, Alec.’

‘Listen, Detective Inspector. If I’m ruffled it’s because I don’t like the undercurrent of what you’re saying.’

‘There’s no undercurrent,’ he said, calm as quicksand. ‘I merely asked if it was a good idea.’

‘I know what you asked. And the answer is that it’s my private affair. I don’t keep tabs on what you do behind closed doors.’

‘So you do things behind closed doors?’

‘Fuck off, Harry. OK? Just fuck off.’

At this both Piers and Ben looked up from their desks and stared at us. Cohen knew he had me cornered so he kept on probing. Typically, he phrased his next remark as a statement, not a question.

‘I was simply going to say that they don’t ring as often as they used to.’

I responded to this without thinking through my reply.

‘No, they don’t,’ I told him. ‘I wonder why that is.’

That was my second mistake. I should have reacted to the strangeness of Cohen’s observation.

‘Look,’ he said, sympathy suddenly in his voice. ‘I’m just telling you this because you might need to be prepared for some questions.’

‘Questions? What about?’

‘Anybody who spends an unusual amount of time socializing with employees of a rival firm is bound to come under suspicion. At some point.’

I had to presume that this was a lie designed to flush me out. He paused, leaving a silence that I was supposed to fill. My body was wretched with heat, exacerbated by the warmth of the office. I managed to say:

‘Suspicion of what?’

‘We both know what I’m talking about, Alec.’

‘This conversation is finished.’

‘That’s something of an over-reaction, don’t you think?’

‘Fortner and Katharine are my friends. They are not work associates. Try to make that distinction. Your life may begin and end with Abnex, and that’s admirable, Harry, it really is. We all admire you for your dedication. But the rest of us try to have a life away from the office as well. You’ll find as you get older that this is perfectly normal.’

Smirks from Piers and Ben.

‘I’ll take that into consideration,’ he said, and walked back to his desk.

I ring the street bell of Katharine and Fortner’s building and the door buzzes almost instantaneously. They have been waiting for me.

When I get to their apartment, Fortner opens the door slowly and offers to take my coat. I pass him a bottle of wine which I bought in Shepherd’s Bush and extract the manila envelope from my inside pocket. He takes it quickly, with a magician’s sleight of hand. Simultaneously he is talking, asking about the weather, hanging up my coat, pointing out a scratch on the door.

‘Never noticed that before,’ he says, rubbing his thumb against it. ‘Do you want a drink?’

‘Glass of wine?’

‘You got it.’

Katharine is in the kitchen, washing up after dinner. She has had her hair done and it makes her look older. The clock on the wall says ten to nine.

‘Hi, Alec. How you doin’, sweetie?’

‘Fine. Tired.’

‘Everybody is,’ she says. ‘I think it’s the change in temperature. Isn’t it cold suddenly?’

She comes over to kiss me, a warm dry lingering on my right cheek. Next door, Fortner starts up some classical music on the CD player, piping it through to the kitchen with a switch on the hi-fi. The orchestration is loud, talk-smothering.

‘Oh that’s nice, honey,’ Katharine says as Fortner comes into the kitchen.

‘Chopin,’ he says, with no attempt at an accent. ‘Let me get you that glass of wine.’

We have a signal, one of only four, that I use to enquire whether it is safe to talk. I simply put a straightened index finger to my lips, look at either one of them and wait for a nod. Katharine glances at Fortner and does so. It is safe.

‘I had a conversation with Harry Cohen at the office last week that I think you should know about.’

‘Cohen?’ Fortner says. ‘The one who’s always on your back?’

He knows exactly who he is.

‘That’s him.’

‘What did he say?’ Katharine asks, touching her neck gently with her hand.

‘He’s noticed that you’ve stopped calling me at the office. Brought it up out of nowhere.’

‘OK, so we’ll call a little more. I don’t think you should be unduly concerned. Did he say anything else?’

Fortner takes a sip from one of two glasses of wine he has poured near the stove. He hands me the other.

‘No, there was nothing else in particular. I just found it odd that he should have brought it up.’

‘Listen, Alec,’ he says quickly. ‘Far as I can make out this guy has been all over your job since you started. He feels threatened by you, just like they all do. Askin’ you questions about a couple of Americans who happen to be working for Andromeda is just his way of puttin’ the shit up you. You gotta ignore it. You’re doin’ a great job and nobody suspects a thing.’

I want to leave it at that, but Katharine comes a step closer towards me. She is half-biting her lip.

‘You all right?’ she asks. ‘You look almost feverish.’

I sit down on one of the kitchen chairs and light a cigarette. My hand is shaking.

‘No. I’m well. I’m just… I get nervous. I worry about being followed, you know?’

‘Natural reaction,’ says Fortner, still very matter-of-fact. ‘Be strange if you didn’t.’

They have bought a new picture, a Degas print in a wooden frame hanging to the right of the fridge. The one of the girl at ballet school, bending down to tie her shoes. Now, just briefly, I let things slip. My intense desire to talk to someone momentarily outweighs the wisdom of doing so with Fortner and Katharine.

‘It’s funny,’ I tell them, trying hard to sound as solid and as capable as I can. ‘I’m living with this constant fear that some journalist on the Sunday Times is going to call me up out of the blue and start asking questions. “Mr Milius?” he’ll say. “We’re running a story in tomorrow’s edition that names you as an industrial spy working for the Andromeda Corporation. Would you care to make a comment?”’

‘Alec, for Christ’s sake,’ Fortner says, putting his glass down on the counter so hard that I fear it might break. I cannot tell if he is angry with me for being afraid, or for making a direct reference to JUSTIFY. Even in the security of their apartment it was unwise to mention it. ‘What are you getting so bothered about all of a sudden? There isn’t some Bob Woodward out there trackin’ every move you make. Not unless you’re being dumb.’

There is a brief silence.

‘Are you being dumb?’

‘No.’

‘Well, there you go. Now just relax. Where is all this coming from?’

He doesn’t give me time to answer.

‘If you’re worried about being tailed we can have one of our own people follow you. They’ll know in thirty seconds if you’ve got a surveillance problem.’

The nerve of this. They’re already tracking me.

‘Great. So now I won’t know if I’m being tailed by the CIA or Scotland Yard or a private security firm hired by Abnex.’

Fortner doesn’t like this now, not at all.

‘Now look, Alec. You’d better start being cool about this or you’re gonna slip up. When they caught spies during the Cold War they were sent to Moscow and made into heroes. If they catch you, you’ll be sent to jail and get your butt fucked. And if you get caught, we get caught. So let’s all just calm down, right? Let’s not get too excited.’

He sits down on the chair nearest mine and for a moment I think he is going to try to reach out and touch me. But his hands remain folded on the surface of the table.

‘Look,’ he says, taking a deep breath. ‘Bottom line. If things get too hot we have a safe house for you here in London. In fact we have safe houses, plural. We can get you in a Witness Protection Program back home, whatever you want.’

I almost let out a laugh here, but luckily some latent good sense in me smothers it.

Katharine says:

‘The important thing is that we are all deniable to one another.’ Her voice is a welcome balm. ‘Now are we deniable, Alec? What is the nature of our relationship should you get caught?’

‘I’m not going to get caught.’

‘If you do,’ she says, trying to be patient with me.

‘Friendship. We had dinners and drinks. That’s it. No one has ever seen me handing anything to you. Not even in the theatre. That’s how you wanted it.’

‘Good.’

‘And me?’ I ask. ‘Am I deniable to you?’

‘Of course,’ they say in practised unison. ‘Absolutely.’

Now we sit quietly for a moment, no one saying anything, just coming down off the tension. Katharine gets up and pours herself a glass of wine and I light a cigarette, searching around for an ashtray. The Chopin has slowed to an aching lament, single notes collapsing into each other.

‘I don’t mean to get tough on you,’ Fortner says finally, moving his hand closer towards mine on the table.

‘Look,’ Katharine says, joining in. ‘We’re here for you. What you’re doing must be messing with your nerves.’

This is standard procedure: officers must combine a firmness of intent with enough flattery and conciliation to keep an agent onside.

‘Is there anything else you need to talk about?’ she adds.

‘No,’ I reply. ‘I’d just like to talk business briefly, if that’s all right?’

Fortner jerks his head up.

‘Sure,’ he says, looking pleased.

‘It’s just that I have some interesting news.’

‘Go on,’ he says, nodding slowly. He needs to shave.

‘You know of course that Abnex has been exploring 5F371 in the North Basin?’

‘Sure.’

I take a long draw on the cigarette. This is what the Americans have been waiting for.

‘The exploration work finished as of last week. My team is expecting a geological report containing sufficient 3D seismic data to depict the extent and location of the hydrocarbon deposits within the field. That could happen at any time in the next two months. If I can get hold of a copy, it should tell you how much Abnex is prepared to pay to get access rights to the oil.’

‘Good,’ Fortner murmurs.

‘As far as I know, bids are being tabled in early summer of next year. That should allow Andromeda time to outflank us. I can also get you documentation outlining how we plan to export the oil once our bid has been accepted. There will also be maps and information regarding pipelines, terminals and shipping routes, all of which should be useful to you in making your bid more attractive. And I can get you access telephone numbers and addresses for all the key personnel at each of the transport nodes. There’s also a lot of detail on loopholes and flaws in Kazakh law.’

‘That would be dynamite,’ Fortner says, leaning towards me. He glances over at Katharine and beams.

I go on:

‘Abnex has done all the hard work, spent all the money. All you’ve got to do is outbid us and the field is yours. But it’s going to cost you. I want two hundred thousand dollars for the information or I’m out.’

‘Two hundred thousand?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Haven’t we been here before?’ he says, but the glow in his face betrays an excitement. The geological data is too important to Andromeda for Fortner to risk alienating me.

‘I’m aware of that. But this is the Crown jewels, Fort, and it’s worth a lot more than ten grand. If Andromeda’s bid is successful I’ll have made the shareholders millions of dollars. That’s got to be worth something. I think two hundred thousand is cheap.’

‘All right,’ he says, buying time. ‘I’m not authorized to green light that kind of money. Let me talk to our people and we’ll get you an answer within seventy-two hours. My instinct says it may be a problem, but I’ll try to talk them round.’

‘You do what you have to,’ I tell him.

It is nearly midnight by the time Fortner shows me to the door.

There are no services running on the Hammersmith and City Line, so fifteen minutes later I board what must be the night’s last train at Notting Hill station. Empty hamburger cartons have been discarded on the floor and men in suits are falling asleep against greasy glass partitions. I am tired and find it difficult to focus on a single object for any length of time: an advertisement above the windows, a passenger’s shoes, the colour of someone’s scarf. I look through into the next carriage half-expecting to see Cohen in there, staring right back. My eyes sting and the skin on my face feels tight and dry.

I find it impossible to shut down: I am always thinking, evaluating, calculating the next move. I actually dread the thought of going home for another night of sleeplessness, just lying there in the dark analysing the day’s events, speculating on how much, or how little, Cohen knows. Then I picture Kate asleep in bed, her slim arm draped across the shoulders of another man. Night crap.

Last night, at three in the morning, I got up, put on a pair of jeans and a sweater, and wandered around the dead streets of Shepherd’s Bush for over an hour in an attempt to tire myself out with walking. There seemed to be no alternative beyond taking a handful of sleeping pills or sinking a half-bottle of Scotch, which I cannot do because of the need to stay sharp and clear-headed for Abnex. When I got back to the flat at around four, sleep came easily. But then there were the customary dreams, packed with sicknesses and capture, isolation and pursuit. It’s all so predictable, regular as clockwork, and tonight I will have to go through it all again.

I stare into the concave windows of the Central Line train and they warp my reflection like a hall of mirrors. I am split in half by the steep curvature of the glass, a pair of broad shoulders and a tiny, mutated head melting into an inverted reflection of itself.

Two of me.