Fortner splashes water onto his face and says, “You wanna go about halfway down and talk there?”
I nod and he pushes off, leading the way with a gentle crawl. Katharine follows in the slipstream and I swim with her, still adjusting to the sting and warmth of the pool. We swim directly beside each other, both of us breaststroking, and at one point our hands touch very briefly near the surface of the water. Katharine laughs instinctively as they slip apart, looking across at me with a smile. Her wet hair has glossed to jet black, thick as seaweed.
An elderly man passes us, swimming in the opposite direction. He moves with a painful slowness, as though he is here under duress. Thin gray hairs are glued across his forehead, and his face is strained from effort. His thin legs barely kick at all. Ahead of us, Fortner reaches the edge of the pool, touches down, and waits for us to join him.
“So how you doin’?” he says to me when we get there. “Everything feel okay?”
He removes the goggles, and his eyes are bloodshot and sore.
“Fine,” I reply, with no inflection. “Better than I thought it would.”
“No nerves? Second thoughts?”
“None.”
“Good. We couldn’t explain on the phone, but Kathy and I felt we should meet here today to give you the opportunity to ask any questions you may have.”
A child’s high-pitched shriek bounces off the water, piercing the space around us. I turn and see a mother coming out of the ladies’ changing room, holding a wriggling toddler by the hand.
“There is one thing,” I say, trying to keep things light and easy.
“What’s that?” Katharine asks.
“How did you know I’d do it?”
Fortner’s face retracts very slightly. This is not the question he was expecting.
“Do what?” he asks.
“How did you know I would agree?”
Fortner considers his answer for some time. Katharine, who is holding on to the ceramic edge of the pool, watches his face for clues. Finally she makes to speak, but Fortner interrupts her.
“I felt-we both felt-that you fit a certain personality type. You’re a very sensitive person, Alec. You enjoy your solitude. You expressed to us on a number of occasions a certain understandable dissatisfaction with your job…”
“And I’m short of money.”
This prompts a smile in both of them, and Fortner says, “Yes. That’s true. Things like that are not irrelevant.”
The old man passes us again, slow weightless kicks toward the deep end.
“So there is such a thing as a psychological profile?” I ask. “There’s a certain type of person who is more willing to commit an act of betrayal than another?”
“I don’t put all that much faith in them myself,” Katharine says. “I tend to go on instinct. And we always had a great feeling about you, Alec. Like you would want to do the right thing.”
“Yes,” I reply quietly.
A fit-looking man in his midthirties, wearing navy trunks and dark goggles, dives neatly into the pool and starts doing fast lengths. The blue water, which is covering me up to my shoulders, is suddenly warmer than the surrounding air. The mother and child are in the shallow end. She is teaching him how to swim.
“You have anything else you wanna ask?” Fortner says.
I must stress to them my ignorance of the intelligence world, ask something naive about espionage.
“Yes. You said something about your organization sharing a lot of codes and stuff with MI5 and MI6. How much intelligence do we share with the Americans?”
“It’s a good question,” Katharine says, holding on to the side with outstretched arms and beginning to kick very gently underwater. “And, like Fort said, it’s relevant to your situation. Usually, we share a great deal. The Agency sits in on weekly meetings of the Joint Intelligence Committee, for example. Some time ago, the British government paid our National Security Agency about eight hundred million dollars to share satellite-signals intelligence. But there’s a problem right now with MI5. They feel that sensitive information about terrorist activities in Northern Ireland is finding its way back to the IRA via the Clinton White House. They’re blaming Kennedy Smith, our ambassador in Dublin, who they think is soft on republicanism on account of her Irish roots. It’s all bullshit of course, but the Security Service is understandably upset. They’re being a little more economical with what they hand over.”
This is certainly true. I recall Lithiby talking about it in one of our first meetings. It was just the latest in a long line of disputes with the Americans. He was also incensed that they had eavesdropped on British troops in Bosnia. At the time, I recall thinking that Lithiby’s antagonism toward the CIA may have justified the entire Abnex/Andromeda project in his eyes.
I stare down at the clear blue pool and try to think of something else to say, something that will further convey my lack of expertise and a sense of my enthusiasm about JUSTIFY. But my mind is a blank. Katharine lifts a small handful of water and lets it fall.
“You’re lookin’ a little raggedy there,” Fortner says. “You okay?”
Our lack of movement in the water has stilled my muscles. I am starting to shiver with cold.
“Sure. I’m fine. I’m just going to swim for a bit,” I tell them. “Let’s have another talk in a while.”
Ten minutes later, resting in the shallow end after six brisk lengths, my eyes are stinging with chlorine and my head aches with the effort of concentration. The pool is almost deserted. The child and her mother have gone, as has the old man. Only the man in navy trunks remains, plowing up and down the lanes with his vigorous front crawl.
Fortner’s black-capped head is bobbing up and down in the water, the goggles coming slowly toward me like lizard’s eyes. Katharine is about seven feet to his left, arms describing elegant arcs of backstroke. They touch the shallow-end wall simultaneously and move across to talk to me. Fortner rubs his eyes and makes a low noise that is only halfway to civility. He wants to get down to business.
“We need to talk about your first drop,” he says. “You wanna do that now?”
“Sure.”
“What do you think you can get us?” Katharine asks.
My answer comes out swift and easy. This is what I had planned to say today.
“Abnex has just done some commercial price sets, which include our assumptions about how the global economy is going to pan out over the next few years. They’d give Andromeda some idea of our short-term plans, where we think the price of oil is going, that kind of thing.”
“Sounds good,” she says, flatly. They expected more.
“It’s available in e-mail format, but I suppose that’ll be traceable if I send it to you.”
“That’s the right way to be thinking,” Fortner says, keeping his voice low. “Safety first. You could direct your messages via a remailing service that will strip them of their identifying features, but that’s probably too risky as a first venture. We can’t simply encrypt them. We’ll have to think of another method. Maybe on floppy or a straight printout.”
“That wouldn’t be a problem,” I tell him, trying to appear amenable and cooperative.
Katharine comes in with a suggestion: “If you just ran it off the printer at the Abnex office under the pretext that you wanted to do some work at home, would that be okay? I’m sure everyone does that as a means of staying on top of his workload.”
Fortner nods in agreement, as though there were nothing more to be said on the subject, but something about this worries me. Just standing here watching the two of them discuss these vital first stages with such apparent calm makes me feel edgy and rushed. Katharine drops her hair back into the pool and a thin film of water on her neck glistens in the light. When she brings her head back up, she looks directly at me in anticipation of some sort of response.
“Yes,” I tell her. “We do it all the time. It won’t be a problem.”
But it might be. How can I get the information onto the printer and out of the office without running the risk of somebody at Abnex noticing? There is constant movement in the office, constant observation. I cannot be certain
