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 that 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 redialing the Irish woman and hearing the word justify said 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 onto 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 Dr. Stevenson at Sisby, a shrink 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 judgments, 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 can hear myself in the room, the exasperation in my voice. 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.”
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 overreacting and he knows it.
