A Spy by Nature

25 The Lure

The New Year brings with it familiar cliches of renewal: private promises to take more exercise, to be a better friend to Saul, to get over Kate and to find a new girlfriend. I want to exert a greater control over my life, to try to get things into some kind of perspective. But by the second week of January all resolutions have been set aside, rendered meaningless by the simultaneous demands of Abnex and JUSTIFY. My lifestyle simply doesn’t allow any opportunity for change.

Everything now is about 5F371. Whenever I am not involved in normal day-to-day activities at work, all of my efforts are concentrated on obtaining the doctored North Basin data from Caccia. Andromeda want the information as soon as it becomes available: the Americans now make that clear in almost every conversation I have with them.

Even over the Christmas break, while Katharine and Fortner were staying at her family home in Connecticut, they phoned me to check up on developments.

Mum picked up the phone.

‘Alec!’ she shouted, with that strained, impatient bark which got me out of bed on so many mornings as a teenager.

I was upstairs, reading.

‘Yes?’ I said, coming to the landing.

‘There’s an American on the phone for you.’

I picked up the receiver in Mum’s bedroom, having closed the door for privacy. She hung up in the kitchen as I did so.

‘Alec?’

‘Katharine, hello.’

‘Hi! We just wanted to call and wish you a happy Christmas!’

Her voice was pitched high and enthusiastic, overcooking the friendship for the benefit of anyone who might be listening in.

‘That’s very kind of you. Where are you?’

‘Back home with my mother. Fort’s here. You want to talk to him?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well just a minute. Tell me what you’ve been up to.’

I told her.

‘Great. And is your mom good?’

‘Very well. She hates Christmas, but she’s well.’

‘Super. Look, Fort really wants to talk to you so I’ll pass him over.’

‘Fine. See you when you get back in January.’

I was wondering why she had bothered ringing. The conversation felt rushed; she had made the call out of a sense of professional duty but had neglected to think of anything to say.

‘Hey, Milius. How ya doin’?’

Fortner sounded humdrum and tired. It was ten in the morning on the East Coast.

‘Fine. Fine. You?’

‘Same old same old. Been seein some friends. Egg nog and old movies. Fuckin’ smoke police at every party we got to. Tell you this, pal. Nowadays it’s easier takin’ a gun out of your pocket in America than it is smokin’ a cigarette.’

‘It’s nice of you to ring.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ he replied. ‘Get any gifts?’

‘Some. A shirt. A couple of videos.’

This was all starting to feel easier. The pressure, for once, was off.

‘What d’you give your mom?’

‘Stuff from Crabtree and Evelyn. Bath salts.’

‘Oh,’ he said, his voice lifted. ‘Crabtree and Evelyn.’ He pronounced Evelyn like Devlin. ‘We have that over here. Makes Kathy smell like a rose bush.’

‘Good.’

‘What about that CD you wanted? You get that?’

And straightaway I was back in the fog of duplicity, no break from it. The CD was code we used for the geological data from 5F371.

‘No,’ I said, stumbling for words. Three days away from London and I had forgotten how to lie. ‘Mum couldn’t find it in the shops. But I’ve got a record token for it. It should be out in the New Year.’

‘Great. So I guess we’ll see you when we get back.’

That was all they wanted to know: as soon as Former had established that the data was not yet available, the festive niceties could be dispensed with. It was not a social call.

‘How ‘bout you come over for supper sometime in January, once we get back?’ he said. ‘Say Wednesday the twenty-ninth?’

Why was he so specific that it should be that date?

‘Sounds great.’

‘I’ll get Kathy to fix it up. She’s sayin’ goodbye. Give our best to your folks.’

Folks, he said, plural. A slip-up.

‘I will,’ I said, and I was halfway through saying goodbye when the line went dead.

We speak transatlantic on two occasions in January. Both are calls made to the Abnex offices, which I think of as risky and unnecessary. The first is from Katharine in New York, ‘just calling to touch base’. In a ten-minute conversation that can be clearly overheard by Cohen, she makes no reference to 5F371. The second is from Fortner, now in Washington, just two days before they are due to fly back to London. He asks almost immediately about the CD, and I am able to tell him that I have ordered it, expecting delivery within eight to ten days. This is what Caccia has indicated and he is usually reliable. Fortner sounds pleased, reiterates the invitation to dinner on the 29th, and is quickly curtailing the conversation. This angers me: my work phone is presumably tapped, and if an Abnex official happened to be listening in on the conversation, they would surely find the exchange between us odd.

The night that they get back, Katharine e-mails me to confirm the dinner date for the third time. Clearly they have something specific planned. I enter a lie about it in my desk diary: on Wednesday 29th, instead of ‘Dinner F + K’, the entry reads: ‘Cinema. Saul. Maybe Some Mother’s Son?’, a film about Northern Ireland which has just opened in London.

Then it’s just a question of waiting.

26 The Approach

The night of the dinner, Wednesday January 29th, is glacial, as cold as it has been all winter, with a freeze-chill in the air that might precede snow. Walking to Colville Gardens I am characteristically apprehensive, and yet there is also a more unfamiliar edge to my mood. Although no handover is taking place tonight, the meeting has been arranged a month in advance, which is more than enough time for the Americans to have planned something unexpected. It is too much to suggest that I am being lured into a trap, and yet something is not quite right. Is it only that I am coming empty-handed, without a disk, a file, even a photograph? To meet them purely on the basis of our friendship is both so unnecessary now and so utterly false that it feels almost sinister.

I take a pair of gloves out of my briefcase and put them on. The people around me are moving quickly, hurrying, just wanting to be indoors and out of the cold. I have started to notice a gradually increasing dampness in my left shoe, as if rainwater has seeped through the leather, wetting the sock, but when I stop to check it there is only pavement dreck and muck on the sole, with no sign of a hole or tear. I light a cigarette and continue walking.

Turning right into Colville Terrace from Kensington Park Road, a pair of car headlights flash twice in quick succession on the opposite corner of the street. Two people are sitting inside a gleaming green Ford Mondeo, one in the driver’s seat, one in the back. The headlights flash again, briefly flooding the street with light. I stop and peer at the car more closely.

Fortner and Katharine are sitting inside. I cross the street and move towards the passenger door. Fortner reaches across to open it.

‘What are you two doing here?’ I ask, trying to sound nerveless and calm as I climb inside. ‘I thought we were going to meet in your apartment.’

After a last drag on the cigarette I toss it into the gutter, twisting around in my seat to give Katharine a smile. She looks gaunt.

‘Close the door, Alec,’ Fortner says with heavy seriousness.

I clunk it shut. The interior smells like a rental car.

‘When did you pick this up?’ I ask, tapping the dashboard lightly. My heart is racing furiously.

‘This morning,’ Fortner says, activating the central locking before turning the key in the ignition. The engine roars briefly and then settles back to a low hum.

‘What happened to the old one?’

‘Garage,’ says Katharine, deadpan.

Fortner pulls out into the street. We are heading back up Kensington Park Road.

‘What’s going on? Where are we going?’

‘We’re real concerned about something, Alec,’ he says, turning to look directly at me. ‘We believe that our apartment may have been penetrated. It may be under audio surveillance. The vehicle also. That’s why we picked up a fresh one. The Mondeo is clean.’

There was an agreement not to tamper with their flat or with any vehicles. If Fortner is telling the truth, the surveillance must have come from Abnex.

Fortner grips his hands firmly around the steering wheel, turning back to look at the road. My reaction here will be crucial: I have to get it exactly right.

‘Your apartment is bugged?’ I say, with what may be too much emphasis. ‘Why would you think that?’

‘We picked something up on a routine sweep,’ Katharine says. She has positioned herself directly between the two front seats, leaning forward between us.

‘A routine sweep? So it’s something you do all the time?’

‘All the time,’ she says.

Fortner makes a turn into Ladbroke Square. I cannot think what to say to them. If their apartment has been bugged, it may be because of mistakes I have made at Abnex, and that will not have escaped their notice.

‘Don’t worry unnecessarily,’ Katharine says, resting her hand gently on my shoulder. ‘This may have nothing to do with JUSTIFY. It may be completely unrelated. But we’re gonna have to make some changes. When are the geological plans due? Any day now, right?’

Suddenly everything is clear. This is all just a bluff. They are trying to move me along, trying to scare me into thinking that we are running out of time.

‘Yes. Like I told Fortner, I’m expecting them within a week. But there have been rumours of a delay. I’m so low down the food chain I don’t get to find out…’

‘Well, let’s hope it’s soon. Now listen,’ she says. ‘Due to what’s happened, and due to the sensitivity of the 5F371 documentation, we’re gonna have to ask you to change the strategy of your handovers.’

I say nothing, but this is highly unorthodox.

‘It’s nothing too serious, nothing that you won’t be able to handle.’ After a brief pause, no more than a deep inhalation, she adds: ‘We’re going to introduce a third party.’

I glance out into the road, trying to calculate implication. A third party is outside of our arrangement, an unnecessary complication that I have been advised against.

I turn to look back at Katharine.

‘The understanding we have is that I am to deal with you and you only. Introducing a third party would be reckless.’

‘I know that, Alec,’ she says. ‘But we can’t risk any foul-ups.’

Fortner is staying well out of this, just driving the car, his lined face swept by the shifting lights outside. Katharine’s voice is close and loud in my right ear and I cannot twist around to look at her for any length of time without causing pain in the small of my back.

‘Who is the third party?’ I ask, turning back to face the dashboard. ‘Is he CIA?’

‘His name is Don Atwater,’ she says. ‘He’s an American corporate lawyer who works out of London.’

‘That’s his cover?’

‘He helps us out from time to time. That’s all you need to know.’

‘On the contrary. I need to know everything.’

‘No, you don’t,’ says Fortner, interjecting. There is a light trace of malice in his mood tonight, as if he is disappointed in me. Perhaps they are telling the truth about the surveillance and blame me for what has happened. That thought is enough to make me back down.

‘How would we work it, if I agree to go ahead?’

Katharine breathes in hard once again. She will have prepped herself for this part of the briefing.

‘As soon as you have obtained a copy of the 5F371 data, you are to call this number.’

She reaches forward and hands me a piece of white paper, no bigger than a credit card. It has a seven-digit number written on it in neat black ink.

‘When they answer, you are to give your name and ask if your dry-cleaning is ready.’

‘My dry-cleaning?’ I ask, stifling a surge of incredulous laughter.

‘Yes,’ she replies soberly. ‘They will say that it is ready and then hang up. That is your signal to us that we are ready to go.’

‘I just ask if it’s ready? Nothing else?’

‘Nothing.’

A car cuts us up at some lights and Katharine says ‘shit’ through her teeth as she is rocked by the sudden braking. I have lost track of where we are: the West End? Kilburn? Further north than that?

‘That night,’ she says, ‘make your way to Atwater’s London offices in your car.’

‘Where does he work?’

‘Cheyne Walk. Chelsea. SW3.’

‘I know where it is. Which end?’

‘Close to Battersea Bridge.’

‘What if I’m working late?’

‘You won’t be. He’s not expecting you before midnight.’

Again Fortner comes in:

‘And you should not arrive there before that time.’

‘Midnight?’

‘Midnight,’ Katharine confirms. The switch between them is disorienting, like a tussle for power. ‘Now the most important thing for you to be doing en route is to watch your tail.’

‘Tell him about the bike.’

‘I was going to,’ Katharine says impatiently. ‘If you want, we can put a motorcycle outrider with you throughout the journey. He’ll keep an eye on things.’

At this I lose some cool.

‘Fuck, Kathy. How serious is this? If they’re on to me, it’s too risky. If there’s a chance of being followed, I shouldn’t do it. We should close it all down for a while.’

‘Not necessary,’ Fortner says, making a slow right-hand turn. ‘An outrider is routine with something this important.’

‘Well, you can forget it. I’ll go alone.’

‘Your choice,’ he says calmly. ‘Your choice.’

We have stopped at another set of traffic lights. A small group of teenage girls wearing too much make-up pass in front of the Mondeo, laughing in a squawking pack. They are dressed in mini-skirts, in spite of the cold. When we have pulled away, Katharine continues talking.

‘Once you have left your apartment make sure that you drive directly towards the roundabout at Shepherd’s Bush. As if you were heading to our place.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m coming to that,’ she says, not wanting to be rushed. ‘Go right around it and come back on yourself down towards Hammersmith.’

I know why she has recommended this, but still I have to say:

‘Go right round the roundabout? Why?’

‘Best way of shaking a tail,’ says Fortner, who can’t help himself butting in. His voice is low and dismissive. ‘Take the Shepherd’s Bush Road down to Hammersmith, then make your way to Chelsea Harbour.’

‘Why there?’ I ask. ‘Why not go directly to Atwater’s office?’

‘There’s something you’ve gotta do before proceeding to Cheyne Walk.’

The information is starting to pile up now and after a tough day at work I am finding it hard to work through all the ramifications of what they are telling me. If their surveillance concerns are a bluff, both Atwater and the briefing are needless, a waste of time. But if there is a genuine threat of penetration by Abnex, I am at great risk.

‘This is getting very complicated.’

‘We’ll go over it all again before we get you home,’ Fortner tells me, dropping down into first gear in a crawl of traffic.

‘What happens at Chelsea Harbour?’

Katharine gathers herself.

‘There’s only one entrance there and one exit. If you still have a tail, this is where you will lose him. Wait inside the complex. It’s a left-hand turn if you’re coming off Lots Road. Anyone following you will be forced to pass your vehicle once they are inside. When you’re sure it’s safe to drive on, proceed to Cheyne Walk. Not before. Go back on to Lots Road and drive east towards the river. Don Atwater’s offices are at number 77. Park your car — it shouldn’t be difficult at that time of night — and, when you’re inside, hand the documentation to him. Make sure that it is Atwater and no one else. Not his secretary, not the doorman. Are we clear?’

‘We would be if I knew what he looked like.’

Marble Arch looms up on the right.

‘Overweight. Puffed out cheeks. Glasses. He will make himself known to you.’

‘And what about the money? What about the two hundred thousand?’

‘As soon as Atwater has the 5F371 data in his possession he will notify us and that will trigger the financial transaction in escrow. It will be the sum that you requested. That’s been cleared.’

As I had expected it would be.

‘Can I smoke?’ I ask, taking out my packet of cigarettes.

‘Be my guest,’ Fortner says, with a little more relaxation in his manner. ‘The sooner this upholstery smells of stale tobacco, the better.’

I light the cigarette, offering one to Fortner, who declines. Then I request that we go over the instructions one more time for clarity. So he drives for another twenty minutes while Katharine runs them past me once more.

We are almost home when their car phone rings out loud and shrill. The interior of the Mondeo is miked up and Fortner is able to answer the call without lifting the receiver from its cradle.

‘Yup,’ he says.

‘Fort?’

The caller, an American, is trying to shout above the roar of the road. His voice sounds distant and warped, as if lost under a great, vaulted ceiling.

‘Hi, Mike.’

‘Hey, buddy. Can you call Strickland ASAP?’

I instinctively flinch away from Fortner when I hear his name, an uncontrolled movement to disguise my surprise. Strickland. The agent Lithiby used to leak my SIS file to the CIA. Is this just coincidence, or is there another level to this, a conspiracy that I’m not seeing?

‘Sure,’ says Fortner quickly, too casually, as if he wants the conversation to end before Mike says anything else. ‘Usual number?’

Everything that has happened tonight has been curiously unnatural, almost like the rehearsal of real events. Katharine’s insistence that I follow an exact procedure, their lies about surveillance.

‘Yeah, usual number. See you Saturday.’

Fortner presses the red button on the telephone handset and Mike’s voice disappears.

What would they want with Strickland? What would he want with them?

Katharine asks the very same question, but it may be just a bluff.

‘Why’s he calling?’

‘Not sure,’ Fortner replies, and is it my imagination or does his gaze slip towards me, a concealed warning to Katharine to stay away from the subject. Certainly he does not call Strickland while I am still in the car. Instead, I am driven back to Uxbridge Road, and let out a block short of my flat.

27 The Sting

I have waited so long for Caccia’s people to prepare the data from 5F371 that when it finally arrives there is a hurried sense of expectation which catches me off guard.

It is a grey March day at work and the morning has adhered to its usual routines: phone calls, reports to be written, a meeting with some clients in Conference Room C on the sixth floor. I have a late lunch — steak sandwich, Sprite — in a cafe down the street, doing my best to avoid making eye-contact with two Abnex employees eating spaghetti at a Formica-topped table on the far side of the room. Then, just before three o’clock, I make my way back to the office.

Cohen, who is working studiously at his desk, looks across at me as I come in, putting down his pen.

‘Since when did you start getting packages from the boss?’ he asks, an uncharacteristic suggestion of defeat in his voice. ‘Barbara Foster, the chairman’s PA…’

‘I know who she is.’

‘Well, she left that package for you while you were out getting lunch.’

He is pointing at a white padded envelope in my in-tray. I know immediately what it is and experience a surge of grateful satisfaction which proves critical.

‘She did?’

‘Yeah. Told me to let you know it was there.’

I make no gesture to pick it up.

‘So what is it?’ he asks.

‘Probably his remarks on a report I did for the board three weeks ago. The one about Turkmenistan and Niyazov.’

‘I didn’t know you’d done a report for the chairman,’ he says, a flicker of envy about him as he looks away. His ego has been wounded by a lie. ‘Can I look at it?’

‘Sure. But I’m taking it home tonight. Want to read over what he’s said.’

Cohen nods unconvincingly and returns to his work. I open my briefcase, drop Caccia’s envelope inside it and, without even pausing to think, retrieve the small card on which Katharine wrote down the contact number for Don Atwater. The card is frayed at the edges now, worn by the constant movement of pens, coins and files in my case. So keen am I to alert the Americans that I dial the number right away, with no thought of Cohen’s proximity, the receiver clamped between my neck and chin. It starts to ring out as soon as I have punched in the last digit.

There is no immediate answer, but I wait. Still no one picks up, even after a dozen rings. I am on the point of replacing the receiver, thinking that I have dialled the number incorrectly, when a voice responds at the other end.

‘Hello?’

It’s a woman, Irish accent. For some reason I had been expecting an American male.

‘Hello. This is Mr Milius calling. Is my dry-cleaning ready? I brought it in last week.’ As an afterthought, as if to take the edge off the absurdity of what I am saying, I add: ‘A jacket.’

Cohen is tapping something into his Psion Organizer. There is a brief pause on the phone line backgrounded by a rustling of papers. The woman seems vague and disorganized and this worries me.

‘Yes, Alec Milius. Hello,’ she says eventually. There is relief in her voice, an enthused lilt. ‘That’s fine. You can come and get it.’

‘I can?’ I say, with enthusiasm. ‘Great.’ These simple words feel unnatural and self-conscious. ‘See you then.’

‘All right,’ she says, abruptly hanging up.

As I replace the receiver my left thigh is shaking involuntarily beneath the desk. I need to walk around, need to splash some cold water on my face to throw me clear of worry. In the gents I run the cold tap for a few seconds, eventually filling a sink. Then I scoop handfuls of icy water on to my face, letting it wash out my eyes and cool my temples. Having lifted the lever to release the plug, I stare open-eyed into the mirror. Bloodshot whites, tired and weary, with a spot coming up on my nose. I run through Katharine’s instructions one more time.

It’s watertight. Relax. Just do what you’re being paid to do.

Crossing the room towards the hand dryers, I stick my face in a rush of warm air, eyes squeezed tight against the heat. Behind me a cubicle lock snaps open, making me jump. Duncan from accounts emerges from one of the booths looking dishevelled. I glance at him briefly, and leave.

Towards six o’clock Piers invites me to join him for a drink with Ben, but I explain that I already have a dinner engagement and make my excuses. I need time in which to settle myself before the handover tonight, time in which to gather my strength.

At half past I join the early evening rush-hour and for once am glad of the people crowding up the Tube, glad that we stop between stations and wait in the darkness for the train to jerk just a few yards down a tunnel. It takes three times as long for the sheer volume of passengers to get on and off at each station, and every passing moment shrinks my waiting time before meeting Atwater. I dread the inevitable slowness which precedes a handover, the dead period in which I can only anticipate capture. Every enforced delay is welcome.

It is already a quarter to eight by the time I get home. A weak drizzle has begun falling outside, a wetness which clings to the roads and buildings, glistening under the street lights. My hair is damp when I get inside and I dry it off with a towel, boiling the kettle for tea. Then I sit for more than an hour just watching television, my mind working slowly over the details of the plan for the last time: the circuit of the roundabout, the route to Chelsea Harbour, the tenor of the meeting with Atwater. I stay off the booze and occasionally pick at a microwaved potato, but deep concentration has left me with no appetite.

Just after nine o’clock I go through the contents of Caccia’s package. The envelope is padded with bubble wrap and contains a light blue plastic folder labelled CONFIDENTIAL in bold black ink. Inside it there is a twelve-page document with a handwritten covering note attached by a paper-clip. It says: 5F371 as requested. Good luck. DRC. These are Caccia’s initials. I burn the note in the sink. On the inside back page of the folder, housed within a clear plastic flap, is a CD-ROM marked with the Abnex logo. When I open the disk on my laptop, bitmap 3D seismic imagings of 5F371 form on-screen, with magnetic surveys and information on rock samples available in separate files. It all looks realistic. The printed document contains everything from assay data to sources of capital, with details about loans Abnex has taken out to finance drilling operations in the North Basin. There is more here even than I promised them. I go into my bedroom and take a new A4 manila envelope from my desk in which to place the contents. Once I have put the disk and the documentation inside, I seal it up with a lick. The gum on the flap tastes like curry powder.

The minutes then drag out until ten. I stare at the envelope on the kitchen table, smoking dumbly, drinking cups of strong percolated coffee which only make me feel more shaky and tense. Finally, unwilling to sit things out, I place the envelope inside a folded copy of the Sunday Times and leave the flat.

My car is halfway down the right-hand side of Godolphin Road, about a thirty-second walk from the front door. There has been an ice cream van parked in the same space next to it for weeks, painted with cartoon characters and pictures of Cadbury’s Flakes. When Kate was a small child her mother used to lie to her, would tell her that the jingle of the van, the ripple of bells in the street, meant that the vendor had actually run out of ice cream. Kate told me that story on the first night we met: it was one of the first things she said. Why do I think of that now?

Inside the car, buckling up, I realize there are things I have forgotten to do. I should have filled up with petrol, checked the tyres and oil, and turned the engine over at least once in the last few days to free it of winter cold. When I put the key in the ignition the starter motor turns over asthmatically, sounding disconnected and worn, and I switch off for fear of flooding the engine. At the second attempt, there appears to be less seizure within the system: the starter moans briefly, flicks over twice, but then catches and the engine fires. I whisper a grateful ‘shit’ to myself, switch on the headlights and pull away from the kerb.

There are still plenty of vehicles on the roads: lorry drivers making up time before stopping for a night’s rest, cabs shipping people across the city. I drive down Uxbridge Road, join the one-way system at Shepherd’s Bush Green and glide in the wet under the mocked-up Inter City walkway. Cars are waiting in queues of five or six, preparing to go on to the roundabout; faced with the sheer volume of traffic, making a full circuit with surveillance check may prove difficult. I sit in the outside lane with my indicator out and wait for the lights to go green.

As I go round, I check my mirror every half-second for any sign of sudden movement behind me — a last-minute indication, a swerve-out or burst of acceleration. After passing the second exit a cab-driver blasts his horn at me when I cut across his lane, and another beeps as I pass through the traffic lights leading back towards the Green. All the time I am watching as vehicles build up behind me, trying to gauge where they have come from. As far as I can tell, all appear to have entered the roundabout from either Holland Park Avenue, Holland Road or the Westway. It looks as if no one followed me completely around.

So I head for Chelsea Harbour. Katharine suggested going via Fulham Palace Road, but I take a different route with which I am more familiar — via Brook Green, Talgarth Road and Fulham Broadway. The journey takes no time at all: only once — my eyes distracted by a girl on the North End Road — do I brake fractionally late and almost rear-end a designer Jeep with a skiing rhino painted on its spare tyre. Otherwise, the drive is incident free: no tail, no motorcycle outrider, nothing to report at all.

By half past eleven I have arrived, a full thirty minutes before the scheduled meeting. I look up at the Wharf tower, London’s puny skyscraper, and consider my options. There is no need to go into the harbour complex to flush out a tail because I have experienced no surveillance problems en route. And my presence there will only serve to alert the Americans to my whereabouts. There can also be no reason why I cannot meet Atwater before the pre-arranged time: if he’s not there, I will simply wait outside on the street until he arrives. There is no advantage in following Katharine’s instructions to the letter. Better to put myself in a position of control, rather than play into their hands and be dictated to by others.

So I do not turn into Lots Road. Instead I continue down King’s Road until I come to Edith Grove, driving with the one-way system as far as Cheyne Walk. After a brief block in traffic I cross the Battersea Bridge lights and park in the first available space on the left, just a few feet away from the statue of Sir Thomas More. From here it’s just a short walk to Atwater’s office.

There are three white stone steps rising to number 77. I climb them, the file and Sunday Times clutched in my right hand, and press a small plastic buzzer marked ‘Donald G. Atwater, Corporate Attorney’. A wild wind is gusting off the Thames; it whips across my face as I stand in the porch. The lock buzzes softly and I push the door.

The foyer is an enclosed hall with high white walls and a chequered marble floor. There is a mirror to one side with a wooden umbrella stand directly below it. Opposite that, above an empty cream mantelpiece, hangs a large watercolour depicting thin children at the seaside, paddling in the shallows. I stop and wait, hearing heavy footsteps coming down a staircase. There is a deep male cough, what sounds like the rustling of small change in a pocket, and then a man comes into the hall through a door in front of me.

Donald G. Atwater is a large, humourless American, full of expensive lunches. He moves towards me more quickly than his short stumpy legs would otherwise suggest.

‘Alec Milius?’ he enquires in a slurred Virginian drawl. He is holding a small white envelope in his left hand.

‘That’s right.’

‘Privilege to meet you, sir.’

‘Sir’ sounds absurd coming from a man of such size, a man who must be twice my age, but I am well used by now to empty American flatteries. I look at the heavy pods of fat on his face as he extends a hand which I briefly shake. His palm is dry and hard.

‘You got the package?’ he asks.

Down to business right away. No pleasantries.

‘Yes. But first I have to ask who you are.’

He seems surprised by this and gives me a strange sideways glance.

‘I’m Don Atwater.’

‘Do you have some sort of identification?’

He fishes around in his pockets for a business card, die-stamped with his name.

‘Thank you. I just had to be sure.’

Atwater cranes his neck back and looks down his nose into my eyes. There is an unsettling quality about this man, a suggestion of lazy ruthlessness.

‘You wanna come in or are you happy doing this out here?’ he says, glancing carelessly around. Somehow we have got off on the wrong foot.

‘Why don’t we just do it here?’

‘Fine,’ he says, curtly.

I take the envelope out of the folded-up newspaper. Atwater reaches out and takes it with a thin smile, his eyes staying focused on the pale manila. He tucks the file firmly under his left arm and coughs at a higher pitch than before. Neither of us says anything, as if in deference to the moment. Then, as this awkward silence draws out, I ask:

‘Why was it necessary for me to give this to you?’

‘Excuse me?’ he says. He has a way of talking which implies that I am wasting his time.

‘This isn’t the way we normally proceed.’

‘I’m just acting on behalf of my client,’ he says, down-curling his lip. Interesting that he used the word ‘client’ there, singular. He may be working on behalf of an Agency case officer higher up the food chain. But I might be jumping the gun: Atwater may have no knowledge of the contents of the file and consequently no idea of the real importance of JUSTIFY. He may be just what the Americans said he is: a lawyer, acting as a middle-man.

‘Then is there any reason why your client was so adamant that we meet this late on a weekday night?’

‘Mr Milius,’ he says, making no attempt to disguise an impatience with my questions. ‘As I understand it, the fewer people who know about this the better. Am I right?’

‘Right.’

‘Hence the midnight exchange.’

‘I’m sorry I asked.’

‘Not a problem,’ he says. Atwater reaches out sideways with his right arm and leans against the wall, propping up his vast bulk with a splayed-out hand.

‘I have instructions to authorize the release of funds to you in escrow.’

‘Yes.’

He pauses briefly before saying:

‘The money is being held at the Chase Manhattan Bank in Philadelphia. Inside this envelope you will find the account details.’

He passes me the small white envelope, lick-sealed with no writing on it. I place it in the back pocket of my trousers.

‘Thank you.’

Atwater lifts himself away from the wall and makes a move towards his jacket pocket.

‘I also have something that my client wanted me to give to you.’

‘What is it?’

‘A gift. A gesture of thanks.’

I was waiting for this to happen. One day.

‘My client said that you would understand their not giving it to you in person,’ he says, finding it difficult to extract the gift from his pocket. It is a rigid blue box, something heavy. He eventually frees it and passes the box to me.

‘Go ahead. Open it up.’

I flip the catch and lift the lid to reveal a silver Rolex watch draped over a hand-stitched baseball. I do not know what is more absurd: that they should have baulked at paying me $200,000 for the data and then splashed out on a five-figure Swiss watch, or that they thought it was appropriate to throw in a baseball as well.

‘Wow,’ I say. ‘How generous of them.’

‘What is it?’ Atwater asks.

‘It’s a Rolex,’ I say, swivelling the box so that he can take a look. He must have known this already. ‘And a baseball.’

‘That’s a beauty,’ he says. ‘Put it on.’

I take out the watch, house the baseball in my coat pocket, and thread the broad silver links of the strap on to my wrist.

‘Will you thank them on my behalf? Tell them I won’t be declaring it as a corporate gift.’

Atwater manages a meagre laugh here and takes a firmer hold on the file as it slips under his arm. He says: ‘Of course’ as I rattle the watch: it weighs heavy on my wrist.

‘I really wasn’t expecting anything so generous,’ I add, privately wondering if the watch contains a bug, a tracking device, a small plastic explosive. This is the ludicrous state of my mind: movie-fuelled.

‘Yes, it is a fine gift,’ Atwater replies, suddenly sounding bored. His job is done and I have a feeling that he is keen to get rid of me.

‘Is there anything else?’ he says, confirming this.

‘No. Not really. Just to thank them.’

Atwater says nothing. We find ourselves swaying in the wind of another lengthy pause. The baseball knocks lightly against my hip bone as I rock from foot to foot.

‘Alec,’ he says finally. ‘I have things I need to be getting on with. So if there’s nothing else…’

I have a bizarre desire to keep him here, to ruin his night with a needless hour of talk. This man does not approve of me and I would like him to suffer for that. But instead I say:

‘Yes, I should be leaving.’

And he quickly replies: ‘Whatever you like,’ with a quick leftways jerk of his chin.

‘Maybe see you again,’ I say, turning to go. The watch slips on my wrist with the movement of my arm. I’ll need to have it adjusted for size. Take a couple of links out.

‘Yes.’

Everything feels rushed in these final seconds. I shake Atwater by the hand, but his skin is damper than before, a nervous heat spread out across the palm. Then I turn round and pull the handle on the front door. It does not budge. I look back at Atwater who says ‘Wait just a minute’ as he hits a small black button to his left. This buzzes the lock electronically and I open the door, passing outside on to the unlighted porch. I am still holding the copy of the Sunday Times in case anyone is watching from the street. The door swings shut behind me. Deep inside the hall I hear Atwater say ‘Goodbye now’, but I am given no opportunity to reply.

I walk back to the car and unlock it just as a little girl in a Don’t Look Now raincoat is crossing the road from the river, tightly clutching her mother’s hand. She looks wise and canny, too old for her age, staring at me for that too-long length of time known only to kids. What’s she doing up this late?

When the two of them, mother and daughter, are out of sight, I drive away with an odd sentimental feeling that nothing will ever be the same again with Katharine and Fortner. Why I think this now, so suddenly, I cannot be sure, yet the gift of the Rolex has already acted like a seal on our arrangement: they have what they think of as the main prize, and my usefulness to them may well have ended. Often the immediate aftermath of a handover is like this: there are a lot of questions in my mind, many doubts and queries, but the predominant sensation is one of anti-climax, as the adrenalin seeps away and all that remains is exhaustion. For some inexplicable reason I start to miss the thrill of the drop, the risk of capture; everything that follows is dull by comparison. And this feeling soon bleeds into solitude, into self-doubt.

The streets are drenched with the early evening drizzle that turned to rain at midnight. I like the noise of tyres on soaked roads, the quick wet whip of water thrown up by speed. In my tiredness I listen to this sound above the quiet noise of the engine, driving more or less on instinct, barely paying attention to what is happening on the roads. For once I feel capable of sleep; I can drive home now and get seven straight hours with no need of booze or pills or useless, lust-filled walks around the streets of Shepherd’s Bush. An odd, edgy meeting has left me with a rare feeling of calm: perhaps I know now that the worst is over.

28 Cohen

I see the black Volkswagen in my rearview mirror three times on the way home: once at the lights coming on to King’s Road; again on Holland Road, which is where I start to get suspicious; and finally on Goldhawk, when it sweeps behind me as I make a right turn on to Godolphin Road on my way back to the flat. I can’t, of course, be sure that it was the same car every time; my mind has been wandering, and the second sighting was obscured by a night bus heading east along Kensington High Street. But it would be wrong to write off the reappearance of the same car — same colour, same lines — to mere coincidence. Someone might have been tailing me from Cheyne Walk.

So I don’t take any chances. I park about a hundred and fifty metres short of my front door, which is on the corner of Uxbridge and Godolphin Roads. This is further away than I need to be — there are several spaces nearer to the flat — but I want a good clear sighting of the street. Now I wait, inside the car, staring out through the windscreen, waiting for the Volkswagen to reappear. The rain starts up again and an old man appears at a bedroom window high up to my right, closing curtains in a dirty white vest.

Nothing happens. No cars, no pedestrians, no cyclists. After ten minutes I get out and lock up, convinced that there’s nothing more to worry about: it’s just the play of my paranoid mind, the cautious proddings of self-preservation. So I begin walking towards the flat, relaxed and ready for bed. An animal — but not a cat or a dog — darts across the road in front of me, sleek and wet. Just as it vanishes behind some broken fencing a car turns into the north end of the street directly ahead of me. I halt beside a wall. The headlights are so bright that I can make out neither the type of vehicle nor its colour: it might be the black VW, it might not. The car stops directly opposite my front door, one hundred metres ahead, engine still running.

The driver remains there for several seconds and then moves off, coming towards me now, creeping malignly down the street. Slowly I move forward, edging away from the wall, walking through the pools of orange light thrown on to the road by street lamps. I halt again almost immediately, pausing under the shadow of an overhanging bush. The car stops, fifty metres away, and I hear the gearbox shift into reverse. The driver is backing up into a parking space.

I can see the make now. It’s a Vauxhall, like mine: a bottle-green, four-door B reg with chafed hub caps and a sprig of heather threaded through the radiator. I move out of the cover provided by the bush.

Driver and passenger get out just as I am walking past. They catch me looking at them in a split, nervous instant, and I recognize their faces: I’ve seen them buying newspapers in the neighbourhood, watched them walking to the Tube. They live in the next street — Hetley Road — a young couple with a kid. They look startled, wary with mugging nerves, and we do not greet one another.

I walk on, relieved, reaching into my trousers for keys, now just a few paces short of the front door. There is loose change in my pocket, tiny balls of laundry fluff and an old packet of gum. I look up, tugging the cold keys in my fingers, pulling them free.

He comes directly at me, moving quickly with a flat, focused walk. He’s wearing a heavy brown corduroy jacket, gloves and a black scarf.

Cohen.

He stops, feet scuffing on the pavement as he comes to a halt.

‘Hello, Alec.’

Cohen’s new company car is a Volkswagen. He was taking delivery of it last week.

‘Harry. What are you doing here? Been out to dinner?’

‘Where have you been?’

‘I’ve been out.’

‘Where?’

He is breathing quickly: vapour clouds out into the narrow space between us.

‘Are you pissed?’ I ask him.

‘No,’ he says with a quiet authority which cancels out any trace of affability. He has been rushed to get here, but has quickly regained his composure. ‘I’ve just come from Cheyne Walk.’

I try to work through the consequences of this. He must know something. He must be on to me. Think.

‘Where have you been, Alec?’

‘I’ve been on Cheyne Walk as well. But something tells me you already knew that. What’s all this about? What are you doing here?’

‘Who were you with tonight?’

‘Is that your business?’

‘Why don’t I tell you who you’ve been with?’

‘Why not?’

He inches forward on the pavement.

‘You were with your contacts from Andromeda. The Lanchesters.’

I am briefly relieved. He has made a baseless assumption.

‘What is it with you and those two, Harry?’ I ask him, letting out a little sputtering laugh.

‘Are you saying you weren’t with them, or not?’

The manner in which he asks this worries me: it is as if he already knows the answer to his own question. Perhaps Cohen saw Katharine and Fortner going into Atwater’s building before I arrived. There would be no logic in that, but it is possible. They may have been there throughout the meeting. I feel suddenly rushed and get lost in the double negative of Cohen’s question. Taking a chance without thinking things through, I tell him, ‘No.’

And immediately I sense from his reaction that he has trapped me.

‘No? You’re saying no?’ His tone is one of grim sarcasm. ‘Then why did I see them enter the building you’ve just come back from half an hour before you got there?’

Why would the Americans have kept that from me? Momentarily this question outweighs the grave fact of Cohen’s accusations. I try to stay on the offensive.

‘What the fuck were you doing wasting your time following those two around?’

‘I wasn’t following them,’ he says unconvincingly. ‘I was having dinner on a houseboat and I saw them going into the building as I was leaving.’

‘And you decided to spy on them?’

‘An appropriate word, wouldn’t you say?’

I take out a cigarette and light it as a means of shutting out the inference.

‘Am I not allowed to see the employees of other oil firms after a nine o’clock curfew? Is that it? Is that a clause in my Abnex contract?’

‘That’s not the issue.’

‘Well, then, I don’t know what is. You’re wasting your time. I’m very tired. I want to go inside and get some sleep. Maybe we can have a word about your problem in the morning.’

This is weak, a thin attempt at escape. And of course it does nothing to deflect him.

‘You made a telephone call this afternoon,’ he says.

‘I did?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I made a lot of phone calls today. That’s part of what we do, Harry.’

‘Ostensibly to a dry-cleaner.’

I try to disguise my reaction to this, but some of the shock must seep through.

‘That’s correct,’ I reply, not bothering to deny or deflect. Better to find out how much Cohen knows, to listen to the evidence he has compiled.

‘You went to the toilet afterwards.’

‘Yes.’

‘After you got up from your desk I pressed the redial button on your telephone.’

It is as if something collapses inside me.

‘Why did you do that?’

I do not expect him to answer this. Cohen knows he has the upper hand: he came here with enough evidence to flush me out and he is interested only in confession. He has acted with a greater swiftness than I would ever have anticipated.

‘A woman answered,’ he says, moving a few inches closer to me so that his face is suddenly bathed in the grim orange glow of a street light. He is almost whispering now, as if out of courtesy for my sleeping neighbours. ‘Do you want to know what she said?’

‘You had no right to do that, Harry,’ I tell him, but my anger makes no impression on him.

‘She said: “Mr Milius? Alec, is that you?” Now, does it strike you as odd that she should say that?’

‘This is ridiculous.’

‘You must be very friendly with your dry-cleaner to be on first name terms with her.’

‘I’ve spent a lot of money there. We know each other by name. It’s not that uncommon, Harry. Did you come here just to tell me this?’

In my stupidity I think that this remark may be enough to deter his questioning, but it is not. What comes next is the worst of it.

‘Does the word “justify” mean anything to you?’

His eyes scour mine and I look away down the street, my body suddenly limp with fear. I inhale deeply on the cigarette and try to think of a response. But any reply will be futile. This is over.

‘Excuse me?’

‘“Justify”?’ says Cohen, as if the effort of repeating it has annoyed him. ‘Does that word mean anything to you?’

‘No. Why?’

‘The woman on the phone. She had an Irish accent. She used that word as if it were some sort of code. Is that what it is, Alec? Just tell me and let’s get this out of the way.’

I do not know if he sees my face in the darkness with its flush of humiliation. Perhaps the fall of a shadow saves me, a simple lack of colour in the night. I can say only this:

‘Go home, Harry. I don’t know if you’re drunk or paranoid or whatever, but just go home. The word “justify” means nothing to me. Absolutely nothing at all.’

‘Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on?’

‘I’m very tired. You’re getting a big kick out of playing private detective and I’m very tired.’

‘Just tell me. I’ll understand, I promise,’ he says. Then, after a calculated pause: ‘How much are you being paid?’

‘You want to be careful what you say.’

‘How much are they paying you, Alec?’

Our eyes lock in a tableau of male bravura, a standoff on a street corner. I have to deny this; I cannot betray the truth to him. I must, from somewhere, summon the energy to counter-attack. Yet I feel — as I have felt for so long now — completely worn down by him. Cohen has always second-guessed me; he has always been there, right from the beginning, hounding my every move. How did he know? What clue did I give him to allow his slight suspicion of me to develop into something altogether more serious? What was my mistake?

Again I say:

‘Go home, Harry. Get in your car and go home.’

But he says:

‘This is not going to go away.’

And now it is all I can do to stretch my panic into self-preservation. At least I can find out who else knows.

‘Who the hell else have you been spreading these rumours to?’

To ask this is an innate piece of common sense that I am lucky to have struck on. His answer will prove crucial.

‘As of this moment, nobody else knows.’

This is my only glimpse of hope and I use it to turn on him, this time with more force.

‘What do you mean, “Nobody else knows”? There’s nothing to know.’

‘We both know that’s a lie. Tonight has proved that.’

‘Tonight has proved nothing.’

I turn in the direction of my front door.

‘I’m on the Baku flight first thing tomorrow morning,’ he says, barely raising his voice. ‘By the time I get back I expect you to have spoken to David, to have put your side of the story. I’m not a rat, Alec. I will not be the one to turn you in. I have always worked on the principle that I would give you the chance to give yourself up. But if you haven’t cleared things by the time I get home, I will see to it that you go down.’

He turns to leave, without waiting for a reply, heading back in the direction from which he came.

‘This is all shit,’ I call after him, struggling to conceal my desperation. He is already turning the corner on to Uxbridge Road when I say: ‘Wait. Harry.’

He stops, making to come back.

‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow,’ I tell him. ‘Call me from the airport when you’re more clear-headed.’

He does not reply.

‘There are things you should know.’

He takes a step forward, intrigued.

‘Meaning?’

I have to do this, have to tell him at least something of the truth.

‘I know why it is that you have these suspicions. But believe me, things are not as they appear to be. You think you’re on to something, but the only person you’re going to end up hurting is yourself. In your mind it all adds up, but you have to try and see the bigger picture.’

He looks at me with contempt and then he is gone. I am left staring at a section of empty street with no clue as to how to proceed. I tried to make him privy to the complete truth of this. I was prepared to break the central binding law, but he withdrew from it.

A car goes past with the radio on, a song playing loud that I do not recognize. I feel cold, hungry and beaten. How quickly failure settles on me. Cohen has won: in this, as in all things, he has proved the better man.

29 Truth-Telling

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

Only make contact in the event of an emergency.

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

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

This is the number.

I ring from a telephone box outside the Shepherd’s Bush Theatre. With Hawkes out of contact, I have no other choice. The woman who answers says:

‘Two-seven-eight-five.’

‘John Lithiby, please.’

‘One moment.’

Lithiby picks up.

‘Yes?’

‘John. It’s Alec.’

‘Yes?’

‘We need to have a meeting.’

‘I see.’

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

‘Where are you?’ he asks.

‘Near my home.’

‘Can you get to the restaurant for midday?’

‘I’ve taken the morning off.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘You’re lookin’ a bit ropey, Alec.’

His accent suggests a desire to shake off London vowels.

‘I’m not too bad.’

We sit down. The waiter, new to the place, comes back with a bottle of Hildon, two menus in his other hand. He pours each of us a glass of water and begins reciting the specials in halting English. Sinclair lets him get to the third dish before he says:

‘That’s all right, mate. We’re not staying.’

The waiter looks confused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Alec.’

‘Hello, John.’

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

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

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

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

‘Last night I dropped off the North Basin report that David prepared.’

‘We were there. We saw you go in.’

‘Did your people spot Harry Cohen?’

‘Who?’

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

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

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

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

‘He suspects that I may be handing secrets to Andromeda.’

‘Why would he think that?’ Lithiby asks, a rising note of surprise in his measured voice.

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

‘This man has been following you?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I admit: ‘It’s not that simple.’

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

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

‘Maybe it would help if I told you exactly what happened yesterday.’

‘From that we could certainly put together a more complete overall picture.’

I steady myself, begin.

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

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

‘From the office.’

‘Why didn’t you use a secure line?’

Another mistake.

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

Saying ‘dry-cleaner’ like this sounds ridiculous. Lithiby breathes contemptuously through his nose.

‘But he did recognize it. He suspected that something was up.’

‘Apparently. Yes.’

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

‘He’s been acting strangely towards me for some time.’

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

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

‘Cohen was suspicious of my friendship with Katharine and Fortner.’

‘Suspicious?’

He is still looking at the lamp, gazing.

‘He felt it was professionally inappropriate.’

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

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

‘I didn’t think it was important.’

‘You didn’t think it was important.’

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

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

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

‘How did he react when you were setting up the Atwater meeting?’

‘What do you mean?’ I ask, buying time. Lithiby’s reply is quick and impatient, a rapid list of questions he considers obvious to the overall design.

‘Was he listening? Was he alone? Did he look up? How did he react?’

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

Something knocks against the wall to Lithiby’s left, a hard, heavy falling, but neither of us moves. I add, implausibly:

‘I can only conclude that it wasn’t the code that alerted him. It must have been something else.’

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

‘And you have no idea what that something else could be?’ he says.

‘None at all,’ I reply.

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

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

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

‘Ten thirty. Around then.’

‘And what did you do? How did you get to Cheyne Walk?’

‘I drove down Uxbridge Road, got on to Shepherd’s Bush Green, did a complete circuit of the roundabout to shake off anyone who might be following…’

He interrupts me. His expression has taken on the sudden alertness of the interrogator who has discovered a flaw.

‘Why did you feel it necessary to do that if you weren’t worried about Cohen following you?’

He has led me into a trap. He wants me to admit that I have been fearful about Cohen for some time.

‘I’m not sure I follow you.’

‘It’s perfectly simple, Alec. You can’t have been trying to shake off a CIA tail because you were going to an American drop. That would have been pointless. You must have been worried about surveillance coming from another source.’

‘Not at all. I just did it because I’d been told to by Fortner.’

‘You weren’t worried that someone from Abnex, possibly Cohen, might be following you?’

‘No.’

Lithiby breathes in hard, as though growing tired of my lies. I think back to Stevenson at Sisby, catching me out over Kate. You get so far into a deceit that it’s just too late to get out.

‘Let me tell you what I think has been going on here. I think your friend Harry has had his doubts about you for some time. He has followed you around now and again, noted how often you see our American friends, perhaps even sneaked a look in your diary or staked out your flat of an evening. Last night he followed the Lanchesters to an address in Cheyne Walk. He sees them go inside and then, lo and behold, who should turn up twenty minutes later but Alec Milius. You come out after fifteen minutes, he follows you home, confronts you on your doorstep and tries to extract a confession.’

‘That’s your theory,’ I say. ‘I can see why you might think that.’

He was always the smartest of them: it was stupid of me ever to think that I could deceive him. I pick out the hum of air-conditioning in the room, the lunchtime traffic far below, horns and the din of people.

‘Why didn’t you go to David with this?’ he asks, the obvious question to which I have no sensible answer.

‘I thought about it, but what could he have done? I didn’t want to panic him into shutting things down.’

Lithiby appears to accept this, but he asks:

‘Didn’t you ever worry that Cohen might have gone to security at Abnex, that he might have asked them to keep an eye on you?’

I have to give him something. Lithiby won’t let this go until I tell him at least some of what he wants to hear.

‘I did, yes. I admit it. But I didn’t put that in any of my reports because I thought you’d write it off as paranoia. I’m under constant CIA surveillance. You would have said it was just American interference.’

‘That was a considerable supposition, Alec. We could have looked into things for you. A simple phone call to David.’

I try to defend myself, try to erase the slim look of betrayal that has appeared on his face.

‘It was too risky. It wasn’t worth it. And they only took my rubbish away a few times. It could have been the CIA doing that. In fact, looking back over what Cohen said last night, it probably was.’

This does not console him. It appears only to make things worse.

‘They took your rubbish away? When?’

‘Three or four times. It would just vanish.’

‘And you thought it might have been Abnex doing this and you said nothing?’

‘Because I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem important enough.’

‘Does it seem important enough now?’

I am tired suddenly of his persistent scolding, the claustrophobia of Lithiby’s disappointment.

‘John, I don’t want to sit here and be reprimanded by you. I have been out there twenty-four hours a day for the last eighteen months trying to do a job, not knowing where surveillance is coming from, not knowing who I can trust, not knowing what I can or cannot say. Sometimes little things get away from me. I make judgements, good and bad. In this instance, yes, I fucked up. And because of that Harry Cohen has threatened to turn me in.’

‘Threatened?‘ Lithiby says, seizing gratefully on semantics. ‘You mean he has done nothing so far?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. I can hear myself in the room, the exasperation in my voice. But it is beyond me now to try to be calm. I resent Lithiby for extracting so much of the truth from me. ‘I don’t know what he’s done. But I’m worried. Cohen’s fiancee works at The Times. If he leaks the story to her I’ll end up on the front cover of every fucking newspaper in the western…’

‘Oh, let’s not be drawn into melodrama, Alec.’

My visible sense of panic has seen him slide once more into condescension. This irritates me.

‘It’s not melodrama, John. This is a very real situation. I am not keen to become my generation’s Kim Philby.’

At the mention of his name Lithiby’s face folds up. I am over-reacting and he knows it.

‘It won’t come to that. You’ll be protected,’ he says. His voice has slowed to a stall: it is almost as if he is ridiculing me. I stand up from the bed, my back stiff from inactivity. The hotel room feels dark and musty and I walk to the door to flick on an overhead light. Lithiby squints.

‘Is that necessary?’

I do not answer, but switch the light off.

‘This is the situation, John.’ I start to move around the room, pacing the narrow corridor that leads from the door to the bedroom, gesticulating, sweating. ‘Harry flew to Baku this morning on a three-week working trip. When he comes home he expects me to have discussed things with somebody, to have cleared my name.’

‘So you think no one else at Abnex knows what he knows?’

Lithiby has latched on to this as though it were a sign of hope, and I have no intention of deflating that.

‘I’m convinced of it. I wasn’t until last night, but I am now. Cohen was very specific about it.’

‘And you believed him?’

‘What reason would he have to lie?’

Lithiby looks at me and smiles with appropriate disdain.

‘What reason would he have to tell the truth?’

‘He’s basically a decent guy, John. He snoops around because he’s a company man. He does it out of loyalty to the firm. But I trust him to stick to his word. We made an agreement. Now I have three weeks in which to come up with a way of convincing him that I am not an industrial spy and I need your help in that.’

‘And what do you suggest we do?’

Lithiby asks this in a tone that suggests he is prepared to do very little. All solidarity between us appears to have vanished in the last half-hour.

‘Can you talk to Harry?’

‘Out of the question. The only people within Abnex who know the truth about you are David Caccia and Michael Hawkes, and that’s how things are going to stay. We cannot jeopardize the operation because of one man. The North Basin data is being examined by the Americans as we speak. In a matter of days they will start to act on the information contained within it. To get to that point has always been the purpose of this operation.’

‘And it doesn’t bother you that Cohen may go to the press and mess everything up before that happens?’

‘Of course it bothers me. Do you know what a scandal it would cause if we were found to be selling fake secrets to the Americans?’

‘No more of a scandal than that the Americans were buying them in the first place.’

Lithiby likes it that I’ve said this: it’s the argument that legitimizes his operation. He pushes out his lips to smother a grin that steals up on him. Then he crosses his legs and says with absolute conviction:

‘Cohen isn’t going to go to the press.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I speak to David Caccia regularly. He has never mentioned anything about a security alert at the company. Cohen must have kept his mouth shut. And there’s no way an employee of the firm would go to The Times — girlfriend or no girlfriend — without making certain of his story beforehand. He would need to instigate a thorough internal investigation of your activities before he went to the press. If he was wrong, he would lose his job.’

This reading of Cohen’s behaviour makes perfect sense. And with the slow absorption of his logic I experience a first buzz of relief.

‘That is not to say he isn’t a fly in the ointment,’ Lithiby adds. ‘But Cohen is easily dealt with.’

‘How?’

He pauses for a moment, as if weighing up a raft of options. Then he leans back in his chair and puts his hands behind his head.

‘What would you say were his weaknesses?’

There’s relish in the asking. Lithiby has allowed his grin to burn through, not bothering any more to hide it. This is the part of the job that he most enjoys, slicing imperceptibly through an opponent’s Achilles’ heel.

‘Don’t you think it’s gone beyond that? Beyond playing psychological games?’

‘That’s what we’re about, Alec. Now what would you say are his weaknesses?’

‘He’s competitive. Ambitious.’

‘You see those as flaws?’

‘If you can exploit his vanity, yes.’

‘What else?’ He is unsatisfied by this avenue of thought. ‘What about his fiancee. What’s her name, this journalist?’

‘Sarah Holt.’

‘How long have they been together?’

I don’t feel like having this conversation and I am curt with Lithiby, almost rude.

‘Long enough to get engaged.’

‘Is Cohen faithful to her?’

‘John, I don’t know,’ I reply, thinking immediately of Kate. ‘I assume so. He’s that sort of person.’

‘What hotel is he staying at in Baku?’

‘If it’s the one we normally use, the Hyatt Regency.’

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘We’ll take care of him.’ Then his face seems to shut down and his appearance takes on the calm detachment of one who has access to terrible power.

‘What do you mean, you’ll take care of him?’

‘I mean just that. We will see to it that Harry Cohen no longer poses a threat to the operation.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘That will require consultation.’

‘With whom?’

I am suddenly fearful for Cohen’s safety, the first time that I have ever experienced any measure of sympathy for him.

‘It’s not your problem, Alec. You can relax. Don’t let your imagination run away with you.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Good,’ he says, in a tone close to reprimand. ‘We’re on your side. Don’t lose sight of that.’

‘You don’t need to worry about me,’ I tell him, summoning a sort of strength.

Lithiby smiles unconvincingly and takes off his glasses, polishing them on a lint cloth which he produces from the breast pocket of his shirt. Here sits a man who exists outside the usual parameters of right and wrong. I will one day be like him if they decide to keep me on. He replaces the cloth and moulds the thin, wire-rimmed glasses back on to his face.

‘There are positive elements to be drawn from this,’ he says, standing up. He wants to stretch himself out with a little theorizing.

‘And what are those?’ I ask.

‘The Americans know nothing about this. Everything in that respect is going very well and that’s in large part down to your efforts. I’m very pleased, on the whole, with the way things have gone.’

On the whole.

‘Good,’ I say. ‘I’m glad.’

We are facing one another now, both on our feet, the conversation coming to its natural end. I have a deep need to be away from this place.

‘I should be getting back to work.’

‘Of course,’ he says, clapping his hands against thin hips. ‘No point in upsetting the firm.’

I turn towards the door and as I do so, Lithiby puts his arm around my waist to guide me out. The physical contact is sickening. A card hooked on the door handle reads: Please Do Not Disturb. Just as I am reaching for it, he says:

‘Haven’t you forgotten something, Alec?’

We are a pace away from being outside, yet it feels as if I will never leave. There must be something that Lithiby knows, something that I have omitted to tell him. But I cannot think what that might be.

‘I’m not following you,’ I say.

He withdraws his hand from my waist and rests it on the bone of my left wrist. It becomes clear.

‘Oh, you mean the watch? The Rolex?’ I hold it up and give it a slow shake. ‘How did you know about that?’

‘Katharine was seen buying a Rolex in Bond Street by one of our people. I noticed today that you are wearing a Rolex. I merely put two and two together.’

‘They gave it to me as a gesture of goodwill. Of thanks. For the North Basin data.’

‘Did they?’ he says, opening the door with a dry smile. ‘Well done, Alec. That’s a good sign. Well done.’

Sinclair, I see, is already waiting outside in the corridor. He nods complacently at me as we come out. He’s heard everything.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ I tell Lithiby.

‘Yes,’ he says, already turning to go back inside. It is as if the vivid glare of indoor light in the passage has startled him.

‘Chris,’ he says, just as an acknowledgement of Sinclair, nothing more.

The single syllable trails off as the door closes and there is silence now, not a sound from anywhere. Just Sinclair and I standing alone together in the corridor.

Eventually he says:

‘All set?’

30 Limbo

And what now?

It appears that I am expected to go about my business as normal, to conduct my everyday life with the same blank regard for routine that I have shown for the past eighteen months. I receive no instruction from Lithiby, no hint or tip about Cohen. I can measure his disappointment in the silence that follows our meeting.

Six days go by. I wait by the phone, sleep only with the help of pills, drink from twilight till two a.m. Self-discipline erodes. At work I am somnambulant, incapable of clear and sustained thought. Tanya enquires if I am ill — you look tired, she says, you look sick, Alec — and I leave every afternoon at four, eager for the simple shelter of home.

What has happened is this: I have grown bored of secrecy. I have developed a compelling urge to confess. I want now to be rid of all half-truths and deceptions, of all the necessary lies of my life. I have been doing this for so long now that I cannot recall when the deceiving began; when it became necessary, in the name of a higher cause, to be something other than the person I once was.

Did I let this happen willingly, or was I lured into a trap set by Hawkes? I have never been able properly to answer that question. Late ‘95 and ‘96 is a blur of heartbreak and bruised ego. SIS rejected me — but in the next instant, just a day later, I was presented by Hawkes with a plan. At the time it seemed a lifeline thrown by kinder fates, a glimpse at last of something promising. And I grasped at it with no thought to consequence, no concept of its dependence on total secrecy, and with nothing but a young man’s blind greed for acclaim.

That, of course, is how they operate: they appeal to your innocence, to your secret and grandiose dreams. Any large corporation is the same: get them when they’re young, prelapsarian, before they’ve had a chance to get too disappointed with what life throws at them. When being faced with a choice does not constrain but rather liberate; when the thought of the clandestine life is thrilling, not abhorrent.

I no longer recognize the person that made those choices, and yet he was surely a better person than I am now. The one that Kate knew. If I could only get back to that.

On the weekend of 4 April I set myself to do some clear thinking, but it’s vague and contradictory. For a while I convince myself that there was a part of me that was waiting for Cohen, a desire actually to get caught. Something about his persistence was comforting: it offered me a way out. And just below the constant fright of imminent capture I am experiencing a curious sense of relief, an intimation of rebirth, a feeling of beginning again in the past. To be free of Lithiby, of Caccia and Hawkes, to start afresh, seems possible now.

But to believe this is fatuous. If Cohen bleats, SIS and Five will deny all knowledge of me and I will be left to fend for myself, as a traitor against the state. And if the truth comes out — that the Americans have been victims of an elaborate hoax — it will be denied at official levels in the interests of the special relationship. What was Hawkes’s line? ‘We’ve been hanging on to the shirt-tails of every US administration since Roosevelt.’ That isn’t about to change just so that Alec Milius can sleep soundly in his bed at night. I will then be a marked man, the target of an expansive American grudge. Either way, my options are hopelessly limited.

Why did I not see all of this coming? Why did I not recognize immediately the grim paradox of the trade: that we are all of us foolishly reliant on the goodwill of corrupt men for our safety and peace of mind. Their loyalty can — and will — vanish in an instant, because everyone must be ultimately deniable. That’s what breaks the chain. You came here lonely and you will leave alone.

Saturday night. There’s nothing on TV but talking heads and Noel’s House Party in ‘A New York Special’. Edmonds has taken the show to a television studio in Manhattan where William Shatner and David Hasselhoff have been invited on as his special guests. Next to these tanned, protein-rich megastars, Noel looks like a very small man awed by America. I switch the programme off and the room lapses into silence, the thin electric whine of the TV fading out, just on the edge of sound.

There is a buzz on the doorbell, a sharp sudden punch which kicks me out of the reliable calm of home. What if it’s a journalist, a scoop-hungry hack with a TV camera bolted to his shoulder? I have lived this last week in persistent dread of the journalist on the phone, of the item on the six o’clock news. More wild hallucinations. Who is at the door?

It’s just a pizza delivery boy, clear-skinned and accentless, called to the wrong address. I show him where he wants to go — 111B, next door — and he thanks me with a grunt. Going back upstairs, passing all the flyers and pamphlets littering the hall, I allow myself a little knowing smile: perhaps, at the end of the day, all of this is merely appealing to my sense of dramatic effect. Perhaps everything will be fine. Perhaps the Americans will use the data, oblivious of its defects, Cohen will be taken to one side and told to act in the best interests of Queen and Country, and JUSTIFY will prosper. And maybe I should stick to the plan that has existed all along: to leave Abnex in three or four years and accept Lithiby’s offer of employment with Five. In the final analysis — Cohen’s intrusions apart — I am good at my job. I have a talent for it.

I had thought about a confession to Saul. It came from a deep-seated desire to be unburdened of the facts, a simple need, in the wake of Lithiby, to explain to someone exactly what has been going on. No evasions, no half-truths. The total picture. I would sit him down, apologize for being such a lousy friend and explain that I used his flat for a dead drop. But what could I expect in return? Forgiveness and understanding? Why burden him with something so beyond his experience? There is nothing Saul could usefully do for me but bob his head sympathetically and pour me another drink.

The general election campaign is gathering pace. Martin Bell, a former war correspondent, has left BBC News, bought himself a raggedy white suit and been manipulated by Labour spin-doctors into making a Conservative MP called Neil Hamilton look bad. It isn’t exactly clear what Hamilton has done wrong. He has not been tried by a jury, nor confessed to any crime. But we are encouraged to see him as a liar, a stuffer of envelopes cloaked in sleaze. An unfortunate-looking man with weak eyes, Hamilton’s position is made worse by a handbag wife called Christine who is constantly at his side, straining her indignation like a pug on a leash. They are victims of image, laid low by media men who have glimpsed their meagre secrets and inflated them into crimes against the state. Bell, by sharp white contrast, is offered to us as a symbol of stainless rectitude.

The two of them meet on a windy heath, a green square of moral high ground in Tatton. It’s like a duel in Pushkin. Bell, for once, is on the other side of the microphone, and he looks edgy. He knows it’s his duty to take his opponent to task — to unleash the simple sword of truth — but something holds him back. He is unused to adopting a tone of baseless aggression for the sake of a soundbite; he is frightened by the idea that his words could ruin a man. As a journalist, Bell has spent his life tracking some of the century’s more despicable individuals; when he looks at Hamilton he sees only that he is just like the rest of us. Just like Martin Bell, probably. An opportunist when backs are turned, an ambitious man with a fool’s face. Not a criminal. Not a Philby.

So Bell looks at the circus gathered around him, at the crowd baying for blood, and he tries to act honourably. When Hamilton asks him if he believes that a man is innocent until proven guilty, Bell agrees enthusiastically, speaking hopefully of letting the facts come out, of a period of quiet contemplation before the passing of judgement. But common sense goes unheard. It’s good cop, bad cop, because that’s how the media want it. And there’s nothing either one of them can do about it.

I sit there watching all this as it develops on TV. What is clear — what would seem most plausible — is that Hamilton has lied, but with no great vigour or aplomb. I think this not because of any weight of evidence, but because he looks haunted and guilty, and because his wife reminds me of Mrs Thatcher. There’s no logic to my conclusion: it’s based solely on his lack of personal appeal.

And I start actively to dislike Neil Hamilton for the simple reason that he has lied badly, without wit. He has made Nixon’s mistake: once he was caught, he should have admitted to it right away. The liar must not cling on, piling little lie on little lie in the hope that it will all go away. That is to build a house of cards. Instead: confess, seek pardon, and move on. It is the simplest trick in the book, but the pride of the powerful man, the play of his complex egotisms, will not allow him to do such a thing.

31 Baku

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

‘You OK?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘I dunno. You sound kinda odd. Sad.’

I almost believe she cares.

‘I’m fine.’

‘Sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

We talk about the election (everyone is talking about the election). Katharine says that if she had British citizenship she would vote for Blair, because he has the requisite ‘dynamism’ that’s lacking in Mr Top Lip. Fortner, on the other hand, feels sympathetic to Major, seeing him as an essentially decent man laid low by the vanities of his grudge-filled colleagues. But he would put a tick in the box marked Ashdown ‘because of the military background’. We both laugh at this.

‘By the way,’ she says, shifting ground suddenly. ‘That gift you gave us, the CD. It’s great. Terrific. Just exactly what we were hoping for.’

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

‘I’m glad,’ I say, but nothing else.

‘It took a long time for you to find it but it was worth the wait.’

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

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

‘That would be nice.’

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

‘You sure you’re OK, Alec?’

‘Just a bit tired, that’s all.’

‘Maybe you should take a vacation. They work you too hard.’

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

‘Alec?’

‘Sorry, Kathy. Look can I ring you back?’

‘Sure. Get some rest, will ya?’

‘I will.’

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

‘Can I have a word?’

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

‘You all right?’ I say to Tanya.

‘You’d better go in,’ she says.

‘Shut the door, will you?’

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

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

‘What’s going on?’ I ask.

‘It’s about Harry.’

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

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

We’ll take care of him.

‘He’s alive?’

‘Intensive care.’

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

‘Where?’

‘He’s in a hospital in Geneva.’

‘What’s the extent of his injuries?’

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

‘Does his girlfriend know?’

‘Already in Switzerland. Mum and dad as well.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

At this Murray appears to shiver.

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

‘It’s just a figure of speech.’

Nodding. ‘A figure of speech.’

He turns back to the window.

‘He’s not going to die.’

The way I say this makes it sound like a statement of fact, not a question.

‘No. Chances are.’

‘That’s good, at least. I’d better see if Tanya’s OK.’

‘Yeah. Take her out for a coffee or something.’

‘Sure.’

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

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

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

I can see them close in, the dull glint of a muddied blade, the suddenness of it. They are upon him so quickly. A kick burying into his kidneys, bleeding. The complete lack of any sound. Just the thud of a boot, a punch landing awkwardly across his shoulders, another following instantly, smashing bone. He feels warm suddenly with the blood in his clothes but the pain in his ribs is wrenching. He cannot any longer see. There is a taste of vomit growing in the throat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It takes me a beat to respond.

‘Kate. It’s Alec.’

32 End of the Affair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I like your hair.’

‘Thanks,’ she says, dismissively. ‘Had it done a while ago.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘You got a dishwasher.’

‘Yes.’

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

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

‘You sounded awful on the phone,’ she says.

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

‘No one’s hurt, are they?’

‘No. Nothing like that. No one that you know, anyway.’

She looks perplexed.

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

‘I wasn’t.’

Think of something to say. Fill the silence.

‘Are we alone?’ I ask.

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

‘Good. Just had to be sure.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s really all right.’

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

‘You look tired,’ she says.

‘I haven’t been sleeping all that well.’

‘You sure you won’t have tea?’

‘Sure.’

‘Nothing else? Sprite or Coke? Something to eat?’

‘Nothing, thanks. You’re kind to offer.’

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

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

‘Alec?’

I had wandered off.

‘Sorry. Why am I not sleeping? Stress, I suppose. Just worry.’

‘About what?’

‘All kinds of stuff.’

‘What kind of things? Why have you come here?’

‘I think I may have been responsible for something terrible. For someone getting hurt.’

She doesn’t visibly react to this. She will just want me to go on talking.

‘He’s someone at work. I’m in the oil business now. He’s on my team.’ I am starting to speak at a quicker speed, feeling the rush of the impending confession. ‘What I’m going to say to you, Kate, you have to swear to tell no one. You can’t speak to your dad about this, or to Hesther, or anyone…’

‘Alec, I won’t. I promise.’

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

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

‘About two years ago I was approached by someone to be recruited for MI6.’

‘What’s that, like MI5?’

‘MI5 is domestic. Six is foreign intelligence. Its proper name is SIS. The Secret Intelligence Service.’

Kate nods.

‘I did a lot of interviews and exams. The whole process took about three months. At the end of it they told me I had failed to get in. The man who approached me was called Michael Hawkes. He knew my father when they were students.’

‘Did I ever meet him?’ she asks, a question which strikes me as odd.

‘No. At least I don’t think so. Why?’

‘Go on,’ she says.

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

‘Never heard of it.’

‘No. It’s small.’

Kate sips her tea.

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

‘Jesus.’

‘I know.’ I attempt a smile. ‘Who would have thought it?’

‘And you did it?’ she asks, deadpan. ‘You went ahead with this?’

‘I was flattered. I was at a loose end. Yes, I went ahead with it.’

She pushes out her lower lip and I feel a need to say:

‘What young man of twenty-five wouldn’t go ahead with it?’

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

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

‘I see,’ she says.

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

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

‘Amazing,’ she says under her breath.

‘What is?’ I ask.

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

‘Who told you that?’

She hesitates.

‘I saw Saul at a party a year ago and that’s what he said.’

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

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

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

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

‘Absolutely,’ she says, interrupting me. ‘I can understand that.’

We look at one another briefly, the first vaguely intimate moment to pass between us. Her skin is so close now, the vivid green of her eyes, but the instant passes very quickly. Kate seems to check it: she will not smile at me, nor show any real warmth beyond a certain businesslike efficiency.

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

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

‘How?’

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

‘So you’re a spy? You work for MI5?’

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

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

I had expected her to be impressed by this, but nothing registers. She says:

‘Do they pay you?’

‘Yes.’

But she does not ask how much.

‘And what? These two Americans think that you’re loyal to them and you’re not?’

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

‘And the CIA pay you as well?’

I nod.

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

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

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

‘So it’s a widespread thing?’

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

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

‘It makes you sick.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I put out the cigarette. It tasted suddenly sour.

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

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

‘So we came up with another plan. MI5 put someone inside Andromeda, a guy called Matthew Frears who was on my recruitment programme. He fed us background on their movements, leaked documents and so on. I then invited Saul to an oil industry party and Matthew manufactured an introduction to the Americans, using Saul as cover. He didn’t know anything about it. Everything that happened after that was carefully planned. It took a lot of organization, a lot of hard work. I saw them regularly, made out that I didn’t have very much money. I even had speeches prepared, tracts of dialogue committed to memory.’

‘How do you mean?’ Kate asks. ‘Give me an example.’ It is not difficult recalling the bones of one of the monologues. I lean forward in the chair and it is like being back in their apartment, weaving a tale for the CIA.

‘I was predicted straight-A grades, but I got ill and took a string of Bs and Cs so I didn’t get my chance to go to Oxbridge. That would have changed everything. I meet Oxbridge graduates and none of them has qualities I don’t possess. And yet somehow they’ve found themselves in positions of influence. What do they have that I haven’t? Am I lazy? I didn’t waste my time at university. I’m not the sort of person who gets depressed. If I start feeling low I tell myself it’s just irrational and I pull myself out of it. I feel as if I have had such bad luck.’

Kate has a peculiar grin on her face as I continue. I am talking quickly now, giving the words no inflection.

‘I want to be recognized as someone who stands apart. But even at school I was always following on the heels of one or two students who were more able than I was. Smarter, more quick-witted, faster on the football pitch. They had an effortlessness about them which I never had. I always coveted that. I feel as though I have lived my life suspended between brilliance and mediocrity. Not ordinary, not exceptional. Do you ever feel like that?’

Kate interrupts me.

‘That’s not a prepared speech,’ she says. ‘That is you.’

I stare back at her, smarted.

‘No it’s not.’

She gives a sputtering, patronizing laugh which effectively kills off any chance of arguing this out.

‘Whatever,’ I say, unconvincingly. ‘It doesn’t matter. Think what you like. The basic idea was that I showed them how unsettled I was, how depressed I had become after breaking up with you…’

At this Kate baulks.

‘You brought me into this?’

I stall. I had not intended to mention her role at all. Her voice quickens into anger.

‘Fuck, Alec…’

‘Relax. It was just cover. In all this time I must have mentioned your name once to them. Nobody at SIS or Five knows anything about you. You didn’t even come up in the interviews.’

She appears to believe this, looking visibly calmer almost immediately. I keep on talking, to take her mind off the possibility that she was more acutely involved.

‘It was just a way of getting the Americans to sympathize with me.’

‘OK.’

‘That’s how I was taught to approach things. Show them something you’ve lost. That’s the first rule. A girlfriend, a job, a close relative. It doesn’t matter. Then you confide in them, you show them your weaknesses. Ultimately I gave Katharine and Fortner the impression that they understood me. The relationship between us became almost familial.’

‘And all the time it was just a pretence…’

Kate has that look she gets when learning lines for a play: an intense concentration, close to bewilderment, furrowing up her brow. It makes her look older.

‘They were not the innocent party, Kate. They knew Abnex had a small team that was exploring a sector of the North Basin that nobody else had access to. They wanted to get their hands on data from that project. And they cultivated the friendship with me to that end. That’s how it works. It’s grim and it’s cynical but it’s the way of things.’

She does not answer. Her half-eaten apple has turned brown.

‘So, to cut a long story short, they offered me the chance to spy for them. They made me feel that it would be in everyone’s interest in the long run…’

‘I just don’t know how you could do this.’

‘Do what?’

‘Pretend to be something that you’re not to people you care about.’

‘Who said I cared about them?’

‘Of course you do. You’re not capable of being that cold.’

She wants to believe that about me. She has always wanted to believe that people are essentially decent, that they adhere to certain standards of behaviour.

‘Kate, you’re an actress. When you go on stage or in front of a camera what are you doing but pretending to be somebody else? It’s the same thing.’

‘Oh, please,’ she says, lifting her face up suddenly. ‘Don’t even attempt to make that comparison. I’m not fucking with people’s heads. I’m not living a twenty-four-hour lie. When I come home at night I’m Kate Allardyce, not Lady Macbeth.’

‘I dunno, there were some nights we were together…’

‘Alec, please. No jokes.’

I try a smile. Nothing from her. I had not expected a reaction like this. I did not prepare myself in any way for being criticized by her.

‘I’m simply making the point that it’s an act. I had to become someone that I was not. I was paid to put up a pretence. Every time I go to their apartment, I have a particular strategy in mind, something I have to say or do to facilitate the operation.’

‘Every time you go? Present tense? You’re still doing this? But I thought…’

The telephone rings out loud and hard on the counter nearest the sink. Both Kate and I start in our seats, eyes briefly meeting, but she is up quickly, answering it.

‘Hello.’

When the person on the other end of the line speaks, she turns away from me so that I cannot see her face. It is a man. I can hear the low bass of his voice coming through the receiver.

‘Hi. Listen, can I call you back?’ she says, suddenly nervous and unsettled. ‘I’m just in the middle of something. No, I’m fine. I’ll ring you in an hour or so. Where will you be?’

He tells her. I look at Kate, standing there lithe and cool, and it’s hard to believe that we fucked one another what must have been a thousand times.

‘Fine. Lots of love,’ she tells him.

That’s what she used to say to me.

She hangs up.

‘You should have taken the call.’

‘Forget it,’ she says, scratching the back of her neck.

Why didn’t she tell him I was here?

‘Who was that?’

She hesitates, ignores the question.

‘I’m still trying to get my head round all this. You said when you got here that someone’s been hurt. Who? One of the Americans? Is that it? Who is this person you work with who’s in trouble? You say he’s on your team. Which team?’

‘Somebody at Abnex. He cottoned on to what I was doing.’ After a brief pause, I add: ‘At least, I thought he did.’

I light another cigarette, though the stale tar funk of the last one, lying crumpled in the ashtray, still hangs over the table, a rank odour which Kate detests.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Harry Cohen. He’s been at Abnex three years longer than I have.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Twenty-eight.’

‘And how did he find out?’

‘He was jealous of me for some reason. Or wary, one or the other. We didn’t ever see eye to eye. And he seemed to track me. He always seemed to be on my back.’

‘Maybe you rubbed him up the wrong way,’ she says, as if looking to start an argument.

‘Maybe,’ I reply, unwilling to pursue this.

‘Maybe,’ she says again, archly.

It is almost as if she is mocking me. I stop and look at her with a half-scowl which has the effect of making her turn away.

‘Sorry,’ she says, flatly. ‘I didn’t mean to…’

‘It’s all right,’ I tell her.

‘Go on,’ she says.

So I keep going, trying to explain Cohen as much to myself as to Kate.

‘A couple of weeks ago he followed me home from a drop. I’d left some information for Fortner and Katharine with a lawyer on Cheyne Walk. Harry says he was having dinner on a houseboat down there and just happened to see what was going on. He just knitted things together, like he was looking for a way to bring me down. And when I got back that night he confronted me. Threatened that if I didn’t explain to senior people at Abnex what was going on, he’d do it for me.’

Kate again moves hair out of her face, tucking it quickly behind her ear.

‘I had no choice but to report all this to my controller. I told him what Harry had done and he said he would take care of it.’ I pause, looking over at Kate, whose face has hardened further into censure. She knows what I’m about to tell her. There’s a grim logic to it.

‘After we talked, Cohen flew out to Azerbaijan, one of the old Soviet Republ — ‘

‘I know what it is.’

This is short and abrasive, spat out of a hardening in her attitude. There is no sympathy in Kate’s eyes, no understanding of motive. Everything I am telling her has merely confirmed what she always suspected about me: that I am deceitful, weak and cold. When I tell her what has happened to Cohen she will blame me. And yet I cannot stop now; it has to come out. I have maintained a sense throughout this last half-hour of hearing these things for the first time. At last they have been made plain to me, simply by the act of hearing the secrets spoken aloud in a room. But there is no ignoring the plain fact of all the lies. If Kate is still the person she once was, the girl I fell in love with, she will despise me for what I have done.

‘I’ve just learned that Harry was in a fight in Baku. Near his hotel. He’s been very badly hurt. He might even have brain damage. They’ve flown him to a hospital in Switzerland.’

Kate brings her elbows up on to the table, making a church with her fingers. She still wears that Russian wedding ring her mother gave her. I used to feel for it when we held hands, rolling the cold metal loops up to the knuckle and down. She would take it off when she had a bath.

‘And it was your people that did this?’ she says. ‘Because he found out what was going on? Because he knew the truth?’

‘Almost certainly. It’s too much of a coincidence.’

She is silent for a long time and the sense of my shame is sickening.

‘God, how you hurt people, Alec.’ She is shaking her head. ‘Is he going to be all right? Will he be OK?’

‘They think so. Yes.’

She looks up at me and that’s when I see pity. Such disappointment that it starts to anger me. I need understanding now, not contempt.

‘Kate, if I’d known, do you think…?’

She stands up and walks across to the far side of the room, getting herself away from me.

‘He’s going to be all right.’ My voice is slightly raised. ‘They haven’t killed the guy. It was just too dangerous to allow him…’

She puts out her hand to silence me, a weak floating limb which she retracts almost immediately.

‘Let’s just not talk about it for a bit. Is that OK? I’m sorry. I know you came here today because you needed someone to talk to, because all this has obviously had a bad effect on you. I can see that and I’m sorry, I really am. But I’m just so amazed, you know? I haven’t seen you in two years, my life has moved on in so many ways, and then this — that you could get involved in something like this. All the things you could have done and you end up…’

Her words tail off but I am too tired to argue, to try to make her see sense. I cannot force Kate to act against her will, to console me with words she does not believe. It was inevitable that she would react in the way that she has: I had allowed myself to forget her true nature. She always speaks her mind, judgemental to the point of being conceited. She sets such high standards for herself and for others that it is almost impossible to move within the narrow confines of her expectations. Kate is incapable of compromise, of seeing another point of view. She demands so much of people that she will only ever be disappointed by them.

Needing to be away from her as much as she needs to be away from me, I stand up and edge my way along the table back out into the room. I stand facing her, Kate staring beyond me at an opposite wall.

‘I need to splash some water on my face.’

No reply.

So I turn and leave the kitchen, walk upstairs to the bathroom and lock the door.

I see things that are not hers immediately. A can of shaving foam at the edge of the bath. Contact-lens cleaners and a small plastic case beside the sink. Two toothbrushes in the mug beside them. After everything that has happened, now this.

I sit down on the edge of the bath, head bowed. On the floor, a pair of white boxer shorts. Why didn’t she hide them?

There is a window open and a cold wind buffets against the glass, knocking the wooden frame against a brick wall outside. I tell myself that Kate is a pretty girl and that pretty girls have boyfriends and that this is all inevitable. But somehow it doesn’t help. Why didn’t she hide his things?

I drive myself crazy with images. Don’t. It’s too late for that. This is payback for Anna, for all of them. One man, two years later, his saline and his toothbrush laid out in the bathroom. You have to get used to that.

It was him on the phone.

I run cold water over my face at the sink but cannot stop the questions, the doubts. That he is good in bed, funny, capable of bringing out qualities in Kate that I suppressed. I cannot stop thinking that he makes her happier than I did.

Did Saul know about this? Did he meet him at that party?

Don’t. Don’t wonder what he looks like, what he does for a living, how much money he has or what stories he tells.

She will have met his friends.

They would have been to Paris, to movies, cooked for each other and fucked all night. Don’t. Don’t picture them in bed together because that has nothing to do with your feelings for Kate and everything to do with your vanity. I just don’t want him to be better than I was.

Just let it go. Think about Cohen and let it go.

God, the speed with which she has recovered.

When I come back downstairs Kate has moved into the sitting-room, bunched up on the sofa with a fresh cup of tea and a face like stone. She looks different now, now that I know she has a boyfriend, a man living here under the same roof. The one I feared all those nights.

‘Not much has changed up there,’ I say.

She cannot even look at me. My temper snaps.

‘Kate, if you want me to go, I’ll go. But please, don’t sit there with this air of disappointment, this condescension, because I didn’t come here for that. I genuinely believe that I would never have done this if we were still together.’

‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare blame this on me.’

‘You’re right. I shouldn’t blame you. It’s not your fault. I would have done it anyway. Just like I slept with someone behind your back. It’s in my genes, you say. And for the last time, I’m sorry that I took you for granted. I’m sorry I wasn’t the person you thought you deserved. You had dreams for me that I couldn’t fulfil and fucked up. And now I’ve got involved in a murky business that you find reprehensible. I don’t blame you.’

She looks up at me, twitching with moral authority. Nothing that I say will ever satisfy her. Let’s have this out.

‘If I thought this would happen, do you think I would have done it? Do you? Do you think that if I knew it would come to something like this that I wouldn’t have put a stop to it? It was straightforward in the planning, that’s all I can tell you. I was doing a job that I thought was useful and loyal and significant.’

‘Straightforward in the planning?‘ Her laugh here is contemptuous, the slender jaw gaped with sarcasm. ‘Jesus. Straightforward in the planning?’

‘Let’s not do that thing where we pick each other’s sentences apart, OK? It’s demeaning.’

‘You never think, Alec. That’s just it with you. That’s just exactly the problem. It’s what happened with us, it’s what’s happening now. You take things on with no thought to the consequences, with nothing in your mind but how it can make you feel better about yourself. It doesn’t matter if it’s an affair with a girl at your fucking office or some needless industrial espionage that leads to an innocent guy getting the shit kicked out of him. It’s always the same thing. You can’t live life without turning it into a lie.’

‘That isn’t the case. It’s not that bad.’

‘Not that bad?’ she says. ‘You never stopped lying to me. For the last six months we were together, do you remember, we barely slept together?’

Here we go. Actress time.

‘Get over it, Kate. It’s history.’

‘And when we did, those few times, I had to shut my eyes, I had to hold off the scream in my head. But I did it for you. I let you fuck me because somewhere I still felt love for you, all the time knowing that that love had been corrupted, bit by bit, until all I felt was pity. Towards the end I could barely look at you. I couldn’t touch you. And I’m not sure you even noticed that. I would lie beside you in bed and actually dread your weight, your smell. And do you know why? Because you were soaked in lies. Deceit was all over you. I should have been the first person, the only person, that you might have been open with. But instead, I was the one person that you lied to more or less the whole time.’

I have heard all this before. The words have changed, but the well-worn message remains exactly the same. It is her standard tactic, a withering assault on my masculinity, disowning our sex life to wound me. My regrets about JUSTIFY, my fears for Cohen, are of no consequence to her. She does not see herself as my friend: there is still too much that she feels enraged by. Nothing has changed, nothing at all. It is still impossible to talk to Kate without her twisting a subject until it becomes a conversation about her. This is the selfishness in her that I had forgotten.

She is still not finished. She puts her tea down on the small table beside the sofa and shakes her head with disappointment.

‘In the beginning, when we first met, I saw you like someone might see a jigsaw. Just starting off. You were seventeen and I didn’t know how you would work out, the shape of you. And then, as I got to know you, as the jigsaw came together, I saw that you were just made up of lies. Not big lies, not all the infidelities or womanizing or cheating or anything really dangerous, but weak, cowardly, fearful lies. And you lied because you were afraid of me. You were afraid of everybody. To console me you would open your mouth and something sweet and caring would come out, but I couldn’t know if it was deeply felt. I couldn’t know if you really meant it or if you just liked the sound of those words in the room, the way the sentences altered my face. I felt that you were never with me. You couldn’t let me near you, you couldn’t let anyone near you. Your whole life is just a process of holding people off in case they have an effect on you.’

I do not deserve this. She has never found it in herself to forgive me; the damage to her self-esteem was just too great. I came here today on an impulse, to tell her things as a friend that I had never told to anyone else. And yet she wants to use my confession as an excuse to criticize me for things that happened between us more than two years ago. The only thing that is of any interest to Kate is Kate. I had forgotten that.

‘I’m going to go,’ I tell her very firmly, with no doubt in my mind that this is the right thing to do. ‘I don’t have time to be talking about this. I need to find out about Harry and then get home. I’m sorry you weren’t able to see the bigger picture, I really am. But I’m trusting you not to speak to anybody about what I’ve told you. You’ve given me your word and I trust you. Because if you do it would certainly mean the end of my career. I could even be killed.’

She smirks at this. She does not want to believe any of it.

‘I’m serious,’ I tell her. ‘So that’s it. You’ve got it?’

‘Yes,’ she says, exasperated.

‘Good. Because I’m trusting you.’

I travel home numbed by all the bad decisions I have made, each falling on the heels of the other. Young and blind to consequence, I have done and said things which have led me to the point at which I now find myself. This afternoon was just another example, a pointless tracking back into the past.

When Kate and I were together, there was such arrogance in me, an inability to see things for what they were. I just threw everything we had away on a whim and never properly fought to get her back. And then with Hawkes, what was it? Vanity? Is that all it was, a craving for recognition? What do Saul and Kate know that I do not, that they can make the right decisions, that they can appear to live life in the way that it is meant to be lived?

More waiting now. Nothing to be done. Always the ball in someone else’s court. So I open a bottle of wine and read for five hours straight about Philby.

I cannot conceive of the scale of his deceit: the entire span of a life lived as a vast deception — to friends, to family, perhaps even to wives. I have done it for less than two years and the relentless demands of total secrecy have been overwhelming. What must have been going through his mind as he contemplated all of that coming to an end?

Earlier in his career, British intelligence had been convinced that Philby was the Third Man, even to the point of asking for his resignation. Yet they held off, because the consequences of publicly revealing an enemy within outweighed the practical necessity of unmasking him: the shame would have been too much for the Establishment to endure. Philby, Burgess and Maclean all survived undetected for so long precisely for this reason, precisely because of their gentlemanly polish, their wit and erudition. In short, no one believed it possible that such men would betray their country. They induced a sort of class blindness in the intelligence community.

In spite of their suspicions, SIS allowed Philby to operate in Lebanon for some time, using journalism as cover. While still on the SIS payroll he filed for the Observer, in between feeding cocktail party gossip to low-level KGB agents in Beirut. Throughout all of this, SIS acted as if Philby was a problem that would eventually disappear. Which in the end, of course, is exactly what he did.

When they were sure, when they knew that they had their man, they sent Philby’s best friend — his Saul — to Beirut to flush him out. Nicholas Elliott was also SIS, under instruction to offer him immunity from prosecution in return for a full confession. He was given twenty-four hours to reveal the full extent of his activities, but over that period was left to his own devices. What is astonishing to me is that on the night of Elliott’s visit Philby attended a dinner party at the residence of the First Secretary to the British Embassy, and then drank himself into a coma on cheap Lebanese whisky. When he woke up he made the decision to defect. He contacted his KGB controller, was given false papers as a Russian sailor and spirited back to Moscow on a freight ship before anyone had time to notice.

33 Caccia

The days after seeing Kate continue to feel awkward and unsettled, like the guilt that follows an infidelity. The morning after I first slept with Anna there was this sense that I had succumbed to a needless temptation with no net gain which threatened to destroy everything. The pursuit was all: actually to wake up beside her, to adjust to her routines and smells, was the least enjoyable part of it. And yet I went back to her, time and again, for no better reason than that she provided me with a sense of excitement, a pitiful rush of adrenalin.

Telling Kate about JUSTIFY, having not seen her for more than two years, feels oddly similar, for she is a stranger to me now, someone whom I no longer know. The confession was pointless: none of my anxiety has subsided and, if anything, telling her has actually compounded the problem. I feel no less guilty about Cohen — whose condition in Switzerland is deteriorating — and I have broken the explicit pledge made to Lithiby, Caccia and Hawkes to maintain absolute secrecy.

But perhaps the most damaging consequence of contacting Kate is that there is now someone out there who knows the truth about me. This endangers both her and the security of the operation. Although I can trust Kate to keep her mouth shut in the short term, it may not be too long before she feels the need to open up to someone. There is a sell-by date on secrets.

Nevertheless, it is astonishing how quickly things begin to slip out of control.

On the afternoon of Thursday, 1 May, election day, I get a call at my desk direct from Caccia. He would never normally phone me in person. Barbara would do it, or he would send an encrypted message to Uxbridge Road.

When I pick up, he says:

‘Alec. It’s David.’

I do not disguise my surprise with any skill.

‘We need to have a talk,’ he says. ‘Right away. Can you come up?’

‘Of course.’

Instinctively, I look up to check for Cohen’s whereabouts, to ensure that he has not overheard the conversation, and it is only after a couple of seconds that I realize my mistake. Tanya is eating a yoghurt at her desk and I smile at her as I leave the office, riding the lift to the executive floor.

Caccia is waiting for me on the other side of the elevator doors, alone and trim in a grey suit. It is not his style to look worried, though there is an undertow of concern as we shake hands. He would not have contacted me unless it was absolutely necessary to do so.

‘Come into my office,’ he says, telling Barbara that we are not to be disturbed. She looks up at me warmly, as if I am somebody whom she has been instructed to impress. I smile back as Caccia ushers me inside, closing the door behind him.

‘Drink?’

‘Not for me, thanks.’

‘Mind if I have one?’

He turns towards a bookcase in the corner of his office, pouring a large whisky from a duty-free bottle of J&B concealed inside a cupboard. I have only been in Caccia’s office on three occasions, twice with Hawkes in the very earliest days, by way of preparation for JUSTIFY, and then several months later with Murray, JT and Cohen to discuss a project in Kazakhstan.

‘Terrible about Harry,’ he says.

I do not reply.

‘I said, it’s terrible about Harry.’

Caccia is facing me, a tumbler in his right hand, waiting to see how I respond.

‘Yes,’ I say, slowly. ‘A terrible shock. Who would have thought a thing like that could happen?’

He murmurs something and his head drops as if suddenly weighed down by thought. If Caccia is privy to what has gone on behind the scenes, if he has knowledge that the assault on Cohen was authorized by Lithiby, he does not reveal it. Nothing in his demeanour suggests a willingness to conceal the facts from me: he would appear to be legitimately upset. And, of course, it is entirely possible that Lithiby has left him out of the loop: Caccia may have no idea just how close Cohen had come to the truth. On the other hand, Lithiby may have told him everything. At all times I have to remember that these guys are in a different league when it comes to deception: whatever they say, they say nothing.

‘They haven’t caught the bastards who did it,’ he says. I always forget how well-spoken he is, the certainty of his place in the world revealed through polished vowels.

‘No. Not yet.’

Caccia clears his throat.

‘One of our best people, too,’ he says, a remark which irritates me. He sits down in the high-backed black leather chair behind his desk. ‘Normally I would ask how things are proceeding. My impression was that things had been going rather well. Do have a seat.’

I sit down in a nearby armchair, troubled by his use of the past tense.

‘It would appear that we have a problem.’

I was expecting this, but at first I say nothing. Then: ‘Really? What kind of problem?’

‘We’ve been keeping an eye on Andromeda, seeing how things proceed with the data you passed to the Americans. At first they acted exactly as we supposed they would. Two of their employees flew down to Baku to begin negotiating the well workovers for 5F371. They set up meetings with government officials, crossed a few palms, usual sort of thing. The validity of rights was meaningless with the recent change of government personnel, and that was their cue to act. Again, exactly as we thought it would be.’

‘Yes?’

‘Then nothing. This is the point. In the last forty-eight hours everything appears to have ground to a halt.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We were expecting them to move quickly, to start looking into the possibility of drilling an exploration well before the end of this year. But now we hear that the Andromeda people are back in London. Cut short their visit. Never completed negotiations for the workover agreements and missed a series of crucial meetings.’ He takes a sip of his whisky. ‘I don’t need to tell you that this is strictly entre nous.’

‘Of course.’

It always is. Why did he bother saying that?

‘You think they smell a rat?’ I ask.

‘I rather hoped you would be able to tell me that.’

‘Surely it’s too early to say. Just because they come home doesn’t mean Andromeda have realized there’s nothing in 5F371.’

‘True. True,’ says Caccia, nodding. ‘But we have another unanswered question. Again, something unusual, against the normal run of things.’

I move forward in my seat.

‘Fortner was seen in Colville Gardens last night packing up his car. Chris Sinclair tailed him to Heathrow. He was alone. We saw him check on to an American Airlines flight to Dallas, connecting on to Norfolk Beach. The long route to Virginia, in other words. He usually flies United to Richmond via Washington. So it was unscheduled. According to Frears, Fortner hadn’t planned to be going away at such short notice. Chris says he had four large suitcases with him, as well as a holdall for the cabin. Paid over two hundred pounds in excess baggage. You know anything about that?’

‘Nothing. He and I haven’t spoken in over a week.’

‘And Katharine?’

‘Ditto.’

‘Sounds like a hasty exit to me.’

And to me, too, but I reply: ‘Not necessarily. He may just have had to make an unscheduled visit to Langley.’

‘Let’s hope so.’

Caccia takes another long sip of his drink, setting it down on a copy of the Spectator.

‘We think it would be a good idea for you to telephone Katharine as soon as possible. Try to find out what’s going on.’

‘I can’t mention 5F371. That would be too obvious.’

‘Of course.’

‘But I can ask her about Fortner. See what he’s up to.’

‘Good.’

This appears to satisfy him. Caccia nods, clears his throat, and stares at a painting on the wall. There appears to be nothing left to say. In the silence, I feel suddenly awkward and oddly embarrassed, as if I should somehow elaborate on my plan. Then, out of nowhere, Caccia asks if I have voted in the election.

The question takes me by surprise.

‘Er, I don’t intend to,’ I tell him. ‘I take Billy Connolly’s advice.’

‘Oh? And what’s that?’ he asks with an amused grin.

‘Don’t vote. It just encourages them.’

Caccia grunts out a laugh.

‘Think Blair’s got it sewn up, anyway,’ he says, standing up. I take this as my cue to leave. ‘Find out what you can, eh?’

‘I’m sure it’s nothing, David. Just a coincidence.’

‘Well, let’s hope so,’ he says. ‘Let’s hope so.’

And the meeting is over.

34 Think

Of course, a day has not gone by when I did not fear that all of this would come to an end. And contained in Caccia’s warning is an intimation that the game is up, that somehow the Americans have discovered my true intentions and pulled the plug on JUSTIFY. Every instinct tells me that this is the case, yet some grudging stubbornness in me will not accept the situation. It could still be a wild coincidence that Andromeda’s people pulled out of Baku just hours before Fortner left for the States with his London life packed into four large suitcases and a cabin bag. There is still that tiny possibility.

There is a message on my answering machine when I get home:

Hi man, it’s Saul. Listen, hope you’re OK. I just got your message from last week. I was in Scotland. Ring me if you still need to talk about whatever it was… Ring me anyway, will you? Do you fancy going down to Cornwall this weekend? I need to talk to you about that. I want to bring someone, try and maybe leave tomorrow night. So… give me a ring.

I call him back on his mobile.

‘Alec. How you doing? Everything all right?’

He sounds concerned.

‘Everything’s fine.’

‘I was worried. You sounded in bad shape. What happened?’

‘It was just a scare. Nothing.’

‘What kind of scare?’

Let’s try this.

‘Just Mum. We thought she might have a skin cancer, but it turned out to be benign.’

‘Shit. I’m glad. Send her my best.’

‘What’s this about Cornwall?’

He stalls momentarily.

‘I’ve met someone.’

‘And?’

‘And I wanted to invite her down to Padstow this weekend.’

‘Why are you asking me? You want my permission?’

He does not laugh.

‘No. It’s not that. I wanted you to come with us.’

‘Sounds very gooseberry.’

‘It won’t be. She has friends down there already. We’re going to hook up.’

In all probability events at Abnex will prevent me from going.

‘Can I let you know at the last minute?’

‘Sure,’ he says. ‘No problem. Look, I’ve got another call coming through. We’ll speak first thing tomorrow.’

I take a lasagne out of the freezer and microwave it for dinner, finishing off a bottle of red wine that I opened last night. I have to prepare now for Katharine; it needs to be just right. There are two crucial things to find out. Why did Fortner go to the United States at such short notice, and what happened down in Baku? It should be easy getting an answer to the first question: Katharine will most probably volunteer all the information we need. Whether she reveals that Fortner has gone to America will be a first signal: if she lies about that, we may have a problem. But finding out about Baku will be more difficult: she would never bring up 5F371 on an open land line, though it may be possible to ask a more general question about Andromeda which could lead to her revealing something about the present situation.

I also need to recapture something of my customary mood. The Alec they knew before the attack on Cohen was chirpy and biddable, untroubled by matters of conscience. It will be essential not to sound nervous or distant: nothing can seem out of the ordinary. This has to be just another phone call, just the two of us touching base after a break of six or seven days. There’s no hidden agenda. We’ll just be two old friends talking on the phone.

I wash up my plate, put it on the rack to dry, light a cigarette and go out into the hall to make the call.

Their number rings out, long enough for me to suspect that Katharine is not in. She usually picks up promptly and sure enough the answering machine kicks in after several seconds. This is frustrating: my mood was exactly right to handle the conversation. Not too tired, not too tense. Oddly calm, in fact.

The beep sounds.

‘Katharine, hi, it’s Alec. Just calling to — ‘

There is a loud scraping crash on the line, as if the phone has been dropped on a hard wooden floor. Then a thud and a tap as Katharine picks up the receiver, her voice coming through.

‘Yes?’

‘You’re there.’

‘I’m here.’

‘Screening your calls?’

‘No. Just got in.’

‘From work?’

‘From work.’

She sounds immediately detached. I feel a rushing heat across my forehead and extinguish the cigarette.

‘Everything OK?’ I ask, trying to sound as easygoing as possible.

‘Oh, everything’s just fine,’ she says, a little archly.

She waits for me to respond and, when I do not, says:

‘So, what are you calling about?’

In any normal conversation between us there would be friendly enquiries after my mood, about Saul or Mum, my work at Abnex. Perhaps even a joke or a story. But nothing tonight, merely this odd reticence.

‘Just to see how you were. How things are going.’

I wish I could see her face.

‘I’m fine, thank you.’

‘And Fort?’

A fractional pause.

‘Oh, he’s fine, too.’

This is said with no feeling.

‘Katharine, are you OK?’

‘Sure,’ she says, lifting herself. ‘Why?’

‘You sound odd. Are you tired?’

‘That must be it.’

I should end the conversation here. She knows something, she must do. But is that simply paranoia? How could the Americans have any idea of the truth?

‘You should get an early night,’ I tell her.

‘I have to go out.’

‘For dinner?’

With a low hum she confirms this.

‘Who with?’

‘Just some friends.’

Where is the detail, the shading-in? She is being stubbornly, deliberately obtuse.

‘Anyone I know?’ I ask.

‘No.’

A longer pause now, so much so that I think she may be about to end the conversation. But finally she asks a question.

‘So what’ve you been up to these last few days?’

‘Not much,’ I reply.

‘Oh.’

Then I recall lying to Saul about Mum before dinner, a conversation which the Americans may have tapped and alerted her to.

‘There was one slight scare, but otherwise everything’s been fine.’

‘A scare? What kind of scare?’

For the first time she sounds interested by something I have said.

‘Mum thought she might have a skin cancer. But it turned out to be benign.’

‘That’s a relief,’ she says. ‘And how’s Kate?’

Nothing prepares me for the shock of this, a carefully weighted jab exactly timed for maximum impact.

I manage to say:

‘What are you talking about?’ although my voice cracks like an adolescent on the word ‘talking’.

‘I asked after Kate.’

They have got to her. Kate has been burned.

‘But you know I don’t see her any more. I haven’t seen her in over two years.’

‘That’s not what I heard.’

‘What did you hear?’

‘Fort says you two still sleep together, for old times’ sake.’

‘Why would he have said that?’

‘You mentioned it to him one night when the two of you were out drinking. Or don’t you remember?’

That was months ago, a slight lie in a pub just to fill the silence. Instinct tells me to deny all of this.

‘I don’t remember ever mentioning that to him.’

‘Were you bragging, Alec?’

What does she want to hear? I do not know what Kate has told them. Then — a chink of light — it occurs to me that someone from their side simply saw me going into Kate’s house last week. They know no more than that.

‘Was it male bravado?’ Katharine is asking. ‘Was that what made you say it?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘So you two still hook up from time to time? How come you never said anything to me?’

Her voice becomes significantly warmer with this question, more friendly and engaging. Is it possible that she is simply jealous?

‘It was private. Kate wanted me to keep it a secret. She has a boyfriend. I’m sorry I told Fort and not you.’

‘That’s OK,’ she says calmly.

‘You can understand why I didn’t say anything. Not even Saul knows that I still see her.’

‘Of course,’ she says, creating a brief lapse in which an instinct to get away from any talk of Kate fatally overrides my common sense. I ask:

‘How come Fortner is in the States?’

And there is silence. And nothing I can do to retract the question.

‘Why do you ask that, Alec?’

I can say only:

‘What?’

‘Why would you think Fortner is in the States?’

‘Isn’t he? I just assumed he wasn’t home.’

‘Why didn’t you ask if he was here?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m not following you.’

‘It’s very simple, Alec. How did you know my husband had gone to America?’

I am trapped now, with no way out of this but ineffectual bluffs.

‘I just assumed. It sounded like he wasn’t around. Usually I would have talked to him by now.’

She’ll never buy that.

‘You just assumed.’

I go on to the offensive. It may be the only way to distract her.

‘Kathy, what are you getting at? You’re being really odd tonight.’

Then it is as if every sound around me is suddenly ended, a tunnel of silence into which Katharine whispers:

‘My God, it is true. I could not believe it until I heard it from you directly. I would not believe them.’

‘Believe who?’

Very slowly, she says:

‘You’re so dumb, Alec. How did you know Fortner was in the States, huh? Isn’t that revealing a little too much of what you know?’

‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at…’

‘You want me to tell you why he’s there?’

‘Maybe we should talk another time, Kathy. I don’t know what’s got into you, but…’

‘He’s there because of your fucking girlfriend.’

I have a sensation now of cold fear, like falling through space in a dream and the black ground rushing up to meet me.

‘Kate’s apartment is bugged. It has been ever since you told Fortner you were still seeing her. Just like your home is bugged, your car, your telephones, Saul, your mother’s place. Everyone is being listened to.’

My body goes stiff with panic. It was nobody’s fault but my own. They heard everything I said to Kate.

‘And you know what the irony is?’ she says contemptuously. ‘We almost shut it down. You never visited Kate and we figured you weren’t about to in the future. It was a sleeper, but Fort insisted we keep it on. He had some hunch you might go there some day, said he knew how you felt about her. I gotta hand it to your people: 5F371 was a smart plan. You guys worked us over. Nice little Alec hands over 3D seismic imaging showing the strong possibility of oil in a field where none exists. Caccia has known all along that the crude was beaten out of it by the Soviets in the sixties and seventies, but Andromeda buy out Abnex’s validity of rights, drill an exploration well, spend — what? — about three hundred million dollars, and find nothing when we get there. Meantime, the Azerbaijani government lose confidence in Andromeda and, next time round, are more open to the idea of joint ventures with Abnex. Only you messed up, Alec. You couldn’t keep your fucking mouth shut. You went soft on them.’

To hear her anger spat back, the triumph of it, sickens me almost to the point of retaliation.

‘You gonna say something, Alec? You got anything you want to say to me?’

Only Hawkes’s voice in my head like an invocation prevents me from tripping into confession. When caught, he said, deny everything, if only for the sake of legal process. Never admit charges, never verify their accusations, however much information they may appear to have against you. The other side will always know less than you think they do. Resort to lies.

‘I have nothing to say to you, Kathy. And frankly I’m disgusted that you think this about me…’

‘Oh, get off it, Alec.’ She is shouting now, making no attempt to control the flow of her rage. ‘Have you no self-respect? Is your vanity so great that you crave this kind of recognition, from men like David Caccia, from men like Michael Hawkes? It’s pitiful, truly it is. I’m flying to Washington tonight. Do you understand that? My career is most probably over. How does that make you feel?’

‘It has nothing to do with me,’ I tell her.

‘Oh? And how do you spin that one?’

‘I’m not spinning anything.’

‘Why don’t you just have the guts to come out and admit what’s going on here? It’s over, Alec. You’re beaten.’

I know that she is right: the situation is out of control. Whatever happens now, this is over.

‘I am not beaten, Kathy. No one is beaten. This is all…’

‘Why are you bothering to deny this? Is that what they taught you, huh? Is that it?’

And suddenly I snap. I just let it go.

‘Listen. This is the game we’re in. It’s that simple.’

There is a momentary silence as she acknowledges that I have broken cover for the first time. But her anger soon returns.

‘The game? Doing undercover work for a snake like John Lithiby? You have any idea of that guy’s record, Alec?’

‘And what about you? You work for an operation that helped to arrest Mandela, that relocated Nazi war criminals…’

She emits a dry and contemptuous laugh.

‘That’s ancient history. We both know that. It’s a freshman conspiracy theory.’

‘You want something recent? OK. I’ll give you something recent. We’ve just caught American intelligence agents hacking into the computers of the European Parliament. CIA people trying to steal economic and political secrets, just like you, just like Fort. Just doing their job, in other words. That computer linked up to 5,000 MEPs, researchers and EU officials with their confidential medical and financial records, all of which the CIA would have had no hesitation in using if it gave them some leverage. So don’t lecture me about ethics.’

‘So that’s all this is? Tit for tat?’

‘If you want to see it that way, sure.’

‘What are you saying, Alec? That SIS isn’t doing exactly the same thing with its own European allies? Are you so blinkered that you think the good old Brits aren’t up to that? You really suppose your government is too clean to spy on its EU partners?’

‘Not at all. But that’s how all of this works. You spy on me, I spy on you. And every government in the civilized world spend millions of dollars going round and round in circles.’

‘There are too many people who know about this, Alec.’

‘Meaning?’

‘You work it out.’

‘Are you referring to Kate?’

She says nothing.

‘I said are you talking about Kate, because if you — ‘

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

‘You leave me alone. You leave her alone.’

But Katharine’s voice suddenly slows into intimidation.

‘You haven’t heard the last of it.’

My rushed temper still flared and obstinate, I say:

‘Is that a threat?’

And her reply is a sinister foreboding of revenge.

‘You know what it is.’

35 Fast Release

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

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

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

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

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

Sorting through the debris of what Katharine has said occupies my mind for the whole journey. There is no order to this. I experience an acute sense of self-hatred and embarrassment, but also an immense anger. I thought that I had experienced the last of failure, seen it off for good, but to have messed up like this is catastrophic; it is a personal defeat of a different order to anything that has happened to me in the past. There is also concern: for Mum’s safety, for Saul’s, and for Kate’s. She knows everything about JUSTIFY, but I cannot think that Katharine’s words were anything more than scaremongering. Kate poses no threat to them: why should they harm her? And I feel a curious sense of annoyance with her, too. Though none of this is Kate’s fault, she was the source of my failure: were it not for the hold that she exerted over me, I would never have gone to see her, far less lied to Fortner about the two of us still being lovers. And there is consternation that he even bothered to install a microphone in her house in the first place. Fortner actually believed me when I told him we were still sleeping together: he saw that as a genuine possibility. And I realize that the Americans never really knew me at all.

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

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

But he stops me short.

‘Listen, Alec. I’ve been instructed to keep my mouth shut. So unless you wanna talk about New Labour or somethin’, we’d better just wait ‘til we get there.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Black please,’ I reply. ‘Two sugars.’

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

‘This is OK, isn’t it?’ I ask him, holding up my lighter. I want to hear Caccia speak.

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

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

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

‘Of course,’ Caccia says quickly. ‘Forgetting my manners. Alec, this is Peter Elworthy.’

A cover name.

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

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

‘How do you do?’

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

‘Do you know what the Russians are up to these days?’ Elworthy asks. The question appears to have been directed towards Lithiby, who is standing beside him.

‘No,’ he replies, as if he has learned his lines.

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

‘Is that right?’ says Lithiby blandly.

This is all a part of their game.

Elworthy continues:

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

‘Mossad has the same problem,’ Lithiby replies. ‘We all have.’

Caccia looks down at the table as Elworthy moves further towards me.

‘My feeling is — ‘

I interrupt him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where are you going?’ Lithiby asks.

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

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

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

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

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

Behind me, Lithiby says:

‘It would be helpful, none the less, if we could get a handle on things from your point of view.’

‘What, so that Barbara can get it all down for the record?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What happened when you got home?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elworthy ignores this.

‘In your first meeting with the Friends,’ he says flatly, ‘you led the interviewer to believe that you were still involved with her.’

‘What does that have to do with anything?’

‘There’s a pattern of deceit, Alec, don’t you see?’ Elworthy is now to my left, no more than a foot away, with Lithiby closing in on the right. It is like a pincer movement as Lithiby says:

‘You’ve tried to pull the wool over our eyes about her before. We’d like to know what role she has in this. How does Kate Allardyce fit in?’

What is this assumption they have made about Kate? Where is it coming from? Have they got to her, too? I cannot think how to reply.

‘Alec?’ Caccia says, trying to prompt me into saying something.

‘She doesn’t have any role in this,’ I tell them. ‘This is a blind alley. That was the first time I’d seen her in over two years.’

‘When?’ Elworthy asks very quickly. He is convinced that there is more to this.

‘Last week. When I went to her house. When I told her about what happened to Harry in Baku. About JUSTIFY. About all of this.’

‘And she knew nothing of it before?’

‘No. Of course not.’

They appear to have had doubts about her for some time. Trained to see trickery in even the most blameless situations.

‘So how is it that the Americans discovered what was going on?’

This comes from Caccia, and I hand him a look of derision.

‘Are you not getting this, David? Can you guys stop asking all these fucking obvious questions? You know how the Americans found out. They had her fucking house tapped.’

‘But why?’ says Elworthy, and the malice returns now to his voice. He doesn’t like the fact that I have been disrespectful to Caccia.

‘Because I lied to Fortner about her. Told him we were still seeing one another. This is all on your tape. You heard the fucking conversation with Katharine. They put a bug in Kate’s house.’

‘Just because of that?’

They think I’m lying.

‘What other reason would they need?’ I ask, exasperated by this.

‘The fact that you were still sleeping together hardly justifies a wire-tap.’

‘On the contrary,’ I reply. ‘If tonight has proved anything, it’s that Fortner was entirely justified in making that decision. After all, that’s what caught us out.’

‘That’s what caught you out,’ says Elworthy, emphasizing my guilt with contemptuous precision.

I look at him, itching to retaliate, knowing that what he has said is entirely justified. Now he begins to pick over his words, choosing them with great care, like a politician wary of being caught out by semantics.

‘You asked who I am,’ he says. ‘I will tell you. There are people in this room who are answerable to me. That is all that I am prepared to say. What I have come here tonight to tell you is this. In view of what has happened today we are terminating our arrangement with you. I imagine that you might have expected as much.’

I nod.

‘You will be only too aware that we are under no obligation to keep you on as a support agent. Your contract is with Abnex Oil. Whether or not David decides to renew it is a matter to be settled entirely between the two of you, with the possible input of Alan Murray. The position of the Security Service is straightforward. We are letting you go.’

Only Sinclair has the guts to look at me: both Lithiby and Caccia stare down at the floor, briefly ashamed by what Elworthy has said. The room is suddenly very silent, as if even the walls are absorbing the news. Then Caccia speaks.

‘Abnex are in a similar bind, I’m afraid. After what has happened in the last few days, we feel it would be ill-advised for you to continue as an employee. There may be risks involved. I’m thinking, for example, about Harry coming back to work in due course. How will he feel if you’re still on the team?’

I am enraged by this.

‘I am not the one responsible for what happened to Harry…’

‘That’s not the point I’m making,’ says Caccia. ‘As far as he is concerned, you are a liability, an industrial spy for God’s sake. The last thing we need is for him to start digging all of this up once it’s been put to bed.’

‘Whether I’m there or not won’t stop him doing that.’

‘Oh, I think it will,’ says Lithiby, and I see that they have agreed to present a united front against me. Tonight is not about argument or debate: tonight is about eradicating Milius.

‘So I’ve outlived my usefulness. Is that it? You just wash your hands of me, after everything I’ve done?’

‘You will receive a generous pay-off from Abnex Oil,’ says Caccia, blinking rapidly.

Lithiby again interrupts.

‘We suggest that you get out of London for the time being. Take a holiday or something. Let the dust settle.’

I actually laugh at this, at the effrontery of it.

‘Take a holiday? That’s it? That’s your advice?’ Even Elworthy, for the first time, looks uneasy. ‘And where do you think I should go? Where’s nice this time of year? Do I check the brakes on my car? Spend the next thirty years looking over my shoulder?’

‘That is an over-reaction,’ he says, though with the knowledge of what happened to Cohen, it is the least authoritative thing Lithiby has said all night.

‘I’ll tell you what I want,’ I say to them, and for a moment it is as if I have a measure of control. Having expected to be sacked, and having no great wish to remain at Abnex, the single thing I care about now is my own safety. I look Lithiby directly in the eye. ‘Before I leave here tonight I need concrete assurance that you will negotiate with the Americans on my behalf to guarantee that I go unharmed.’

It is some time before any of them respond.

‘We’ll see what we can do,’ says Elworthy.

‘That isn’t good enough,’ I tell him, pacing towards the door.

‘Well, it’s unfortunate that you should think that,’ he replies. ‘I would remind you that there are more important things at stake here than misguided concerns about your safety.’

‘Such as?’

‘We must protect the institution of secrecy, first and foremost. We told you that you had to be completely deniable. You failed in that respect.’

‘The institution of secrecy?’ I am almost shouting. ‘That is meaningless. What the fuck is that above a man’s life? I could be killed when I leave here. Had that thought even occurred to you? Or is it simply that you don’t care?’

‘You are being relieved of your responsibilities. That is our position. By speaking to Miss Allardyce you broke the very code on which this organization depends for its security and well-being.’

I look away from Elworthy at Lithiby, a flash glance of anger.

‘And did John think about Harry Cohen’s security and well-being when he ordered a gang of Azerbaijani thugs to beat the crap out of him?’

‘Excuse me?’

Lithiby has taken a step forward.

‘You know what I’m talking about.’

‘I suggest that you withdraw that remark, young man,’ Elworthy warns.

I do not do so.

‘John had nothing whatsoever to do with what happened to Harry. That was simply an unfortunate accident.’

‘Is that right? And how would you know?’

Lithiby’s face has darkened to a scowl.

‘You’re out of your depth, Alec. I suggest that you do not make enemies of us.’

‘I’m not interested in your suggestions,’ I reply, and before I have properly thought it through, I issue them with a clear-cut blackmail. ‘You have given me an ultimatum. Now let me give you one. If I do not receive clear indication that you have negotiated with the Americans to ensure my safety, I will send full details of JUSTIFY to a national newspaper.’

This threat, which I had only briefly contemplated on the journey from Shepherd’s Bush, does not appear to worry them. They would have expected it.

‘You’d be wasting your time,’ says Elworthy. ‘We will simply D-Notice the material.’

‘Then I’ll publish overseas. In France. In Australia. Fancy another Spycatcher? Don’t you think Pravda or the New York Times would be interested in a story like that? It’s news that’s fit to print, wouldn’t you say? And I’ll put everything about JUSTIFY on the Internet. Everything. You have no jurisdiction there.’

‘Two things will happen if you do that,’ he says, very calmly. ‘Firstly, no one will believe you. Secondly, you will be prosecuted under the terms of the Official Secrets Act.’

‘Then it’s simple,’ I tell him. ‘You keep your end of the bargain and nothing will happen.’

‘Why?’ asks Caccia, whose voice seems to hide a measure of concern. ‘Why should we keep our end of the bargain when you have failed so completely to keep yours?’

‘That’s just the way it’s got to be. And if either myself or Kate or anybody is so much as winked at by you or the CIA, I will make arrangements to have every detail of this operation made public.’

‘We will have to talk to her,’ Lithiby suggests.

‘No. You will not. She has nothing to do with this. And if I hear that Kate has been approached by any of you, that will be enough to set things off.’

There is a knock at the door. It can only be Barbara.

‘Come in,’ Caccia says.

‘Telephone call for you, sir,’ she says to Elworthy. I didn’t hear a phone ring.

‘Thank you.’ He turns to Lithiby. ‘Will you excuse me?’

Lithiby nods and Elworthy shuffles next door. Barbara, looking at four washed-out faces, says:

‘It looks like a Labour landslide.’

‘Really,’ Lithiby murmurs. None of it makes any difference to him.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Lost every seat in Scotland by the looks of things.’

‘Every seat?’ Sinclair exclaims, his first input since we arrived. ‘Christ.’

A car sounds its horn in the street outside.

‘There was one other thing.’

Lithiby is talking to me.

‘Yes?’

Very calmly he says:

‘They weren’t married.’

‘Who?’

‘Our American friends. Not even a couple. Thought you’d like to know.’

‘What do you mean they weren’t married? How long have you known this?’

Of course. Separate bedrooms. The age difference. The lie Katharine told me about her miscarriage. All just cover.

‘Not long. Two, three weeks. I was surprised you didn’t have any suspicions.’

‘I did.’

‘They weren’t in your reports.’

To have been lied to for so long about a thing so obvious. I am momentarily blunted, consternation draining away any control I may have had over the meeting. That was Lithiby’s deliberate intention: to throw me off guard.

‘Alec?’

‘Yes?’

‘I said it wasn’t in any of your reports.’

From somewhere I summon the energy to challenge him.

‘What does that matter?’

Lithiby does not reply. He glances across at Sinclair and I could swear that he was smiling.

‘How did you find out about this?’ I ask.

‘Deep background,’ Lithiby says, as if that explains everything.

‘Why would they bother to pretend?’

He is interrupted by Elworthy coming back into the kitchen.

‘Labour landslide,’ Caccia says to him. ‘The Tories are out.’

‘Is that right?’ he says, his reaction muted. ‘Well, here’s to the tedious and predictable triumph of moderate politics.’

Caccia grins smugly.

‘I have had a chance to think,’ Elworthy says, turning his attention to me. ‘I suspect that we are all rather tired of threats and innuendo. It’s late and I suggest we call it a day. Alec, you will hear from us in due course about the matters discussed here this evening. It only remains for me to remind you that you are still bound by the terms of the Official Secrets Act.’

‘And it only remains for me to remind you that you have an obligation to protect me. Set up a meeting with the Americans or I will make good my promise to go public with the story.’

Elworthy merely nods his head, knowing that his hands are tied.

‘Chris will drive you back,’ says Lithiby.

‘Fine.’ I look down at Caccia, still seated at the kitchen table, and say goodbye. He does not answer. Lithiby manages a contemptuous nod, but both Barbara and Elworthy remain silent.

Nothing else is said.

We pull up outside the flat at around three a.m. and Sinclair surprises me by switching off the engine.

‘Where will you go?’ he asks.

It is some time before I answer, dazed:

‘To Scotland, I think.’ The lie is pointless: they will find me wherever I go, but I do it out of spite. ‘A friend of mine has a place in Perthshire. He invited me up this weekend. I’ll probably stay there for a while.’

Sinclair looks ahead at the street and appears to be summoning up the courage to say something.

‘I admire what you did tonight,’ he says, very softly. ‘The way you handled yourself.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Didn’t let them push you around.’

‘I appreciate you saying that. I really do.’

‘It’s funny,’ he says, laughing gently, though it appears that he has been overtaken by reflection. ‘I never liked you much before. Jealousy or something. And now that’s it, you’re out of it, just when things were starting to look OK. Most probably you and I will never see each other again.’

‘Most probably.’

‘You’re all right, Alec,’ he says, and he takes his arm off the steering wheel to shake my hand. ‘You’re gonna be all right.’

Inside the flat I switch on the television to catch the tail-end of the election coverage. Just as Barbara said, the Tories have been obliterated. The nation sheds an entire generation of public servants: Forsyth, Lang, Rifkind, to replace them with — what? Perhaps it is just my solemn mood of regret, but it is hard not to detect in the government’s downfall a spitefulness on behalf of the electorate. Good and able men are being made to suffer for the failures of a very few. I even feel sorry for Portillo, who is beaten out by an ineffectual Blairite clone with a weak mouth and puppy eyes.

But what I will not allow to happen is a slide into self-pity. There is no time for that. The utter disappointment of the last several hours actually motivates me to move against them, to make good the threat against Five. If I do not act now, they will regain the upper hand.

So in front of the TV, with the sound muted, I compose letters.

To Lithiby I restate my intention to release a complete account of JUSTIFY on the Internet and to sell the story to foreign publications unless he receives a valid guarantee of my safety from the Americans. I write: ‘There will be an anonymous third party in a position to release all information when and if he is instructed to do so.’

That person will be Saul.

To Caccia I write a brief letter of resignation from Abnex. This is pointless, given that tonight he effectively fired me, but a vague and petty stubbornness in me will not allow him the pleasure of formally handing me my notice.

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

Only my mother knows about that. A family secret.

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

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

36 West

Eight twenty p.m. Ten minutes until we are scheduled to leave. On the far side of the neat gravel path a man is standing, back straight, head level, eyes closed. He wears purple shorts and a plain white T-shirt bearing the inscription ‘moon’ in narrow black letters. A canvas bag lies at his shoeless feet. Slowly, he moves his legs apart. Then the man lifts his arms in a wide arc above his shoulders, palms face upwards to the sky, until his body forms a composed, tranquil cross.

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

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

The first thing he says is:

‘She can’t come. Says she’s going to drive down first thing in the morning. You all right? You look knackered.’

I ignore this.

‘Can we just head off?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am so tired of lying to him.

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

‘I’ll try and fix something up.’

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

‘I may have to go away, too.’

‘Really?’ he says into the ground.

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

He stands up.

‘When did this happen?’

‘Just last week.’

‘You’re not going straight away?’

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

‘No. Most probably not.’

‘Good,’ he says, relaxing immediately. Then he looks across at the gate.

‘Here she comes now.’

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

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

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

She is American.

‘You’re from the States?’ I ask.

She looks irritated.

‘Canada. From Vancouver.’

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

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

‘You OK?’ I asked, calling up at her.

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

‘Yes,’ she said, and there was a certain stubbornness in her voice which I noticed, and liked, right away. ‘I’m OK.’

And she kept on climbing.

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

‘See you at the weekend,’ she calls back to me.

‘Yeah. Looking forward to it.’

And five minutes later we are on our way.

Saul is driving his wideboy Capri, a dark blue V-reg with 70,000 miles on the clock and a bonnet the size of a ping-pong table. Gradually we shunt our way through the pre-weekend traffic which has clogged up the M3 from Sunbury right out to Basingstoke. The Capri feels low and heavy against the road; when I lean right back in the passenger seat, the darkening sky entirely fills the windscreen.

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

‘You want to get something to eat?’ Saul asks, as he is overtaking a caravan. ‘I was going to stop at the next place we see.’

‘Sure.’

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

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

‘Whatever.’

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

Three vehicles follow us up the exit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where are we?’

‘Hammersmith.’

‘Seriously.’

‘Nearly there. I need you to show me the way.’

‘Fucking rain,’ he says.

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

‘Take the second left after this village. Sign saying Trevose.’

‘Then what?’

He starts imitating Katharine’s voice.

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

I wheeze a fake laugh.

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

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

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

Saul comes back into the kitchen.

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

‘Me neither.’

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

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

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

Saul is preoccupied by his work, thinking of chucking his job in and going into finance. He says:

‘After university, we all went into television for the glamour. I thought TV would provide some outlet for self-expression, but a lot of the time it’s just tedious and vain, full of guys with goatee beards wearing Armani suits. I need to make some money.’

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

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

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

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

But it is not her.

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

He says that he is so sorry.

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

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

And the boyfriend. He got caught up in it and they took him as well. His life meant nothing to them.

‘Who was driving?’ I say, and at first Saul does not hear me. I have to repeat the question, my voice louder.

‘Who was driving?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replies, and he uses this as an opportunity to come towards me, out on to the drive. ‘It was Hesther who telephoned. She had to tell her parents. That’s where she was calling from. Said they were at a party or something. Coming back. That’s all she said.’

‘No other cars? No drunk driver or…’

‘Alec, I don’t know. She didn’t say. Do you want to go back to London? What do you want to do?’

When you are with somebody, when you love them, you think about their loss, what it would mean to suffer their dying. I thought of this always with Kate: illness, accident — even a car crash. Her going off on a journey and simply never coming home. And I was aware that these fears contained an element of expectation, perhaps even of hope that something might happen to her. Why? Because that would make people sympathetic towards me; it would give my life a certain drama. To lose your first love. It had the character of tragedy.

There is nothing of that now. Only the hideous noise of impact, an inhuman sound. And Kate’s eyes at this moment. I see Kate’s eyes.

How did they do it? Brakes? Tyres? Were they forced off the road? What person has it in them to order the deaths of two young people?

‘What happened?’ I ask Saul. ‘How did it happen?’

‘I really don’t know. You can imagine, Hesther was…’

‘Yes.’

‘We should go back,’ he says. ‘Maybe sleep and then go back to London.’

I agree with him instinctively, without thinking it through, looking directly at him for the first time. We just stand there, saying nothing, and Kate is dead and Saul does not know why.

And now the first doubts come, the first ugly glimpses of self-interest.

I realize that I am not safe — that Saul is not safe — not here or in London, not anywhere now that this has happened. They will find us and, without hesitation, move again.

He is offering me a cigarette, already lit, and I take it.

‘Let’s get in,’ he says.

‘Yes.’

In the house, things move slowly. Saul is quiet and still, sitting at the kitchen table, knowing that there is nothing he can say. I move about the room, boiling a kettle, making tea; I find that it helps me not to stay in one place. Occasionally he will speak — a question, some expression of his concern — but I barely respond. I can say nothing of what I am really feeling, for the simple reason that it is inexpressible without resorting to the truth.

With the clock at five thirty I suggest to Saul that he go upstairs and get some sleep. He agrees and turns at the door and asks me twice if I will be all right. I nod, manage a smile even, and say that I will wake him in a few hours.

‘I probably won’t sleep,’ he says.

As soon as he has gone upstairs I go out on to the gravel drive and walk along the main road, heading downhill in the direction of the sea. The colour of night has shifted to a deep blue, which makes it easier to spot the telephone box on the first corner leading into Padstow.

The door to the booth opens heavily. I struggle with it, weakened by the hopeless knowledge that this is all that I have left. Three phone calls.

I put a pound coin in the slot and dial Katharine’s number.

It connects immediately, but there is only a rising three-note message where her voice used to be.

The number you have dialled has not been recognized. Please check and try again.

I press redial, forcibly with the point of my thumb.

The number you have dialled has not been recognized. Please check and try again.

She has gone, on a plane to join Fortner in the States. The man who is not even her husband. Their work is done.

I try Hawkes.

Nothing. An engaged tone both at his house in the country and at the flat in London. Both lines busy at a quarter to six on a Saturday morning. If he is here, he knows about Kate. He knows that I want to talk to him. They are all of them cowards.

I have one final chance. The number rings out and I hold on, for twenty or thirty seconds, waiting. Then, finally, a woman’s voice, tired and suspicious:

‘Two-seven-eight-five.’

‘I want to speak to John Lithiby. This is Alec Milius.’

She buys time.

‘Who?’

‘This is Alec Milius. Put me through to John Lithiby.’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible, sir. Mr Lithiby will not be available until Monday morning.’

‘Then give me his home number.’

‘You can understand that — ‘

‘I don’t give a fuck about what I can understand or what kind of policy you’ve been told to follow. Just tell him that Kate is dead. Tell him that Kate Allardyce is dead. They killed her and they will kill me unless — ‘

‘Dead?’ she says, as if she has heard of Kate, as if she knows who Kate is.

‘That’s right. In a car crash. Tell him this. Get him to ring me. Tell him that if he doesn’t contact me I will put everything on the Net. Do you understand? Everything. There is someone else who knows. Tell him to speak to the Americans, let them know that. Someone else. Get Elworthy if you have to…’

There is a brief silence and then I can hardly believe what happens.

The woman says:

‘I will be sure to give Mr Lithiby that message on Monday morning.’

And she replaces the handset.

I stand in the phone booth holding the receiver and there is nothing left to do. I press redial, but the line has become busy. I try Hawkes again at both numbers but it is pointless: he is still engaged, town and country. Caccia will be the same, Sinclair also. I do not know how to reach Elworthy. I push open the door of the phone booth and go outside.

They had no intention of striking a deal with the Americans. They do not even know that I have threatened to expose them. The Americans have no idea what is at stake.

This is what they have decided on: to ignore Milius, to exclude him until he is taken out of the equation. They are counting on the Americans. Counting on a shared understanding. A special relationship.

Saul must be told what has happened. They have to realize that there is someone else who knows. That is the only way. And yet to tell him is to place him in danger. To tell him is to make him into another Kate.

Walking back up the hill I can see a light on in his house. Saul’s bedroom. He may still be awake.

But when I get upstairs he is slumped in an armchair, still fully dressed, but asleep.

I close the door and walk back downstairs to the kitchen. My laptop computer is on the back seat of the car in a plastic bag. I find Saul’s keys, go outside and take it out.

Then, at the kitchen table, I begin to write everything down.

At nine Saul comes downstairs, saying that he has managed a few hours of sleep. I am standing by the sink.

‘How about you?’ he asks, glancing at the computer and frowning. He is wearing a different shirt.

‘I’ve just been thinking about things. I can’t seem to remember anything about Kate. I’m trying to summon up memories but they’re just not there.’

He nods, still unsure of how to look at me.

‘Maybe it’s too early,’ he says.

‘I can’t seem to picture or recall anything we did together. All I keep thinking about is her mum and dad, and William’s parents. Did you ever meet him?’

‘A couple of times.’

‘It just seems so long ago now. Two years since we split. She had a whole life that I knew nothing about. It’s as if I was a different person back then.’

He does not answer.

I had boiled the kettle shortly before he woke up, and he makes himself a coffee, going out on to the drive with the mug.

This is probably the best time. When he’s outside. Still early in the day.

Always where Saul is concerned there has been this conflict in me between doing what is necessary and expedient, and what I feel is right. Always I have been trying to suppress my more calculating instincts in order to behave as would a good and loyal friend.

But it is hopeless. I am so inured to moral consequence that I do not even consider whether or not he will forgive me. I simply walk outside into the gathering light and open the driver’s door on the car. Reaching inside I switch on the radio, tuning it to the nearest station.

‘What are you doing?’ he asks gently.

‘It’s necessary,’ I reply, and Saul looks bewildered. A song is playing and I turn up the volume, leaving the door of the car open.

‘What do you mean, “it’s necessary”?’

I have to keep him out of the house, in case they have had it wired.

‘Don’t go back inside for a bit, OK? And don’t get too close to the car.’

‘Alec, turn it down, what are you…?’

‘I know what happened to Kate. I know why they were killed last night.’

‘But we both…’

He starts to reply but then stops, putting the mug of coffee down. Saul looks up at me, his face suddenly altered by fear.

I come a step closer to him. I want to lay a hand on his shoulder, to assure my friend that everything is going to be all right. And then I say:

‘There are things that I have to tell you.’