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.”
“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? Okay. I’ll give you something recent. We’ve just caught American intelligence agents hacking in to 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 five thousand 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 blind 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 spends 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.”
And the line goes dead.
35
GCHQ picks it all up and within ninety minutes Sinclair has been dispatched 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 each other 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 from 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.
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 vapor of alcohol on his breath.
“It’s funny, you know,” I say, turning toward him as he comes off the Westway, heading north toward 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 till 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 side of the road, scraping the hubcaps against the curb as he attempts to park. “Shit,” he mutters under his breath, and I unbuckle my seat belt.
A man is walking a dog on the opposite side of the street. 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 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 that 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 that 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 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. He has an air of long
