revelation of self. She looks up at me and gives a weak smile. Everything feels drained now.
“You wanna drink?”
“No, thanks, Fortner. I want to be very clear.”
He sits beside his wife and I settle opposite them on the second sofa, our positions exactly reversed from before.
“We didn’t think you’d come back,” says Katharine. “We’re really very sorry about what happened.”
“I was walking. Thinking things through.”
“Of course,” she says.
“I…”
Fortner interrupts me as I make to say something.
“Alec, it was a bad idea asking you. We could get you in a lot of trouble if-”
“I’ll do it.”
Katharine’s head jerks up and her bruised eyes flare open.
“You will?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s good news.” Fortner seems less enthused than I had expected. He’s known that I would bite all along. I tell them that we need to clarify a lot of things, and he says, “Indeed.”
“And I’m sorry I got upset with you,” I say, lighting another cigarette. “I was just very surprised.”
“Of course you were.” Fortner says this with no feeling in his voice. Katharine stirs, looking at me fondly. Relief has energized her.
“Alec, I really just wanna make one thing absolutely clear, okay?”
“Sure.”
“I just wanna say that our friendship wasn’t predicated on this happening. It was interdependent…uh…more of a product of our becoming friends.”
Fortner seconds this, saying, “Absolutely, it’s very important to make that clear,” but it’s a lie, because his eyes sink to the floor as he says it. He and Katharine are strangely out of sync, as if every development is new to them, untested.
“So what is it exactly that you want me to do?”
Katharine suddenly laughs with nervous relief.
“Golly,” she says breathlessly. “Where do we start?”
Golly isn’t a word that I’ve heard her use before. This is all getting to her in a way that Fortner cannot have anticipated.
“We’re not gonna get anything resolved this evening in any detail,” he says, with a steadiness suggesting that from now on he will take charge. “The most important thing to stress to you is that what we’re about to embark on must be undertaken with a view to total secrecy. You can tell no one, Alec. Not a girlfriend, not your mother, not Saul, not some stranger you meet in a bar you’re never gonna see again. No one.”
“Of course.”
“Believe me, that will be the most difficult part. But you’ll quickly come to understand the kinds of sacrifices involved, and I don’t foresee that for someone of your integrity it would be a problem.”
How deft are his little flatteries.
“Integrity? This doesn’t feel all that principled.”
“You’ll be substantially remunerated for any and all information that you can give us.”
“I want that to start tonight,” I tell him, exhaling smoke in a tight cylinder, which may look self-conscious. “I want some sort of initial down payment this evening.”
There’s a fractional skip as Fortner weighs this before saying, “Of course.” As he should, he thinks I’m greedy, but it’s more important to him to keep me sweet.
“We’ll deposit ten thousand dollars in a U.S. bank account right away. You start getting irregular activity on your High Street bank account, and those guys are obliged to tell their money-laundering people, who’ll go straight to the cops.”
This is intended to worry me, but I say nothing in response. I’m waiting for Fortner to do what’s right.
“What we can do for you is give you a small amount of cash as an initial gesture of good faith. Say a thousand sterling. That suit ya?”
“Pocket money. But it’ll be okay to be getting on with.”
“Don’t worry about it, Alec, all right? We’ll see to it that the financial side of things is very satisfactory for you. You’re not gonna have any complaints. We’re also in a position to offer you employment at Andromeda if Abnex doesn’t pick up your option at the end of the year. And if they do, and if you’re still happy with our arrangement, we can keep things just as they are. But that’s all in the future.”
“I’ll need this in writing.”
“No,” he says firmly, his voice raised for the first time. “That’s imperative. Write nothing down. You let us do all the paperwork.”
“Why? Isn’t it better to cloak everything in some sort of code? Isn’t that how this is done? I don’t want it coming back to me.”
Fortner slowly shakes his head, trying his best to be patient with my apparent lack of expertise.
“It won’t come back to you. Not if there’s nothing to come back in the first place. And there won’t be if you don’t write any of it down. That’s the first rule you gotta learn.”
This is what it’s all about for Fortner: the lure, the approach, the sting. He’s relishing this situation for all the demands it is going to make on his tradecraft. He has lifted right out of himself, and all the old tingles are coming back. This is the way things used to be in the old days. This is the way he likes it.
“You have any other questions?”
“What about getting the information to you? How do I do that?”
Katharine leans forward in her chair. She’s prepared to field this one.
“We have an entire setup that will assist you with that.”
“What do you mean, an entire setup? At Andromeda?”
She looks across at Fortner, who is slowly lolling his neck from side to side, loosening tightened muscles. He stands and slides his hands into his pockets, beginning to pace the room once again.
“You explain, honey,” Katharine says to him, in a quiet, almost respectful voice. Fortner steadies himself, turns around, and smiles at me. A man preparing to reveal his hand.
“Alec,” he says, “let me put it to you this way.” He takes another couple of paces and briefly glances at the mantelpiece. “The end of the Cold War has meant an increasingly blurred line between state-sponsored intelligence gathering and private-sector espionage. Do you follow me?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“I made the crossover.”
He coughs, a throat clearer.
“You mean you used to work for the CIA?”
Asking him this feels very ordinary, very straightforward, like inquiring after his star sign.
“Yes,” he says.
I look at Katharine, whose head is very slightly bowed.
“And you?”
She looks up at her husband, waiting for him to give her clearance.
“Katharine is still with the Agency,” he says. “She has a formal relationship with Andromeda, but the federal government pays her salary.”
“Jesus.”
“I can understand your sense of shock.”
“It’s not…No…” I begin to mumble incoherently. “I always thought…Jesus.”
“Please, if I could just say at this stage that anything you might have heard or read or understood about the Agency-put that immediately to one side. The CIA is not a sinister operation-”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“It’s just the American equivalent of your Secret Intelligence Service. With a bigger budget.”
“Well, everything’s bigger in America.”
