A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [110]
The first handover takes place at a West End theatre, a simple exchange almost as soon as the house lights have gone down. The next two occur at my flat in Shepherd’s Bush, and the fourth inside Fortner’s car on the way to the Andromeda Christmas party. That was last week.
Were they straightforward? Yes and no. The actual transactions with the Americans are always fairly simple: well planned-out, isolated, unobserved by third parties. There is the small problem of obtaining suitable information, or of getting freely available documents home to a secure place where I can make copies. There are security systems to be circumvented at Abnex, random checks on packages leaving and coming into the building.
So JUSTIFY has become routine, just as it was supposed to, just as we had planned it all along. Yet something in me will not rest. When they asked me to do this, to give over the next two, possibly three years of my life, I agreed to it with the private acknowledgement that things would be difficult at times, occasionally even intolerable. But the long-term gain, the promise of a settled and fulfilling future, outweighed any immediate reservations I had about conceding to a constant duplicity. The hard fact of being caught between two sides was presented to me as a relatively simple arrangement: it was just a question of maintaining balance.
That is easier than it sounds. A third party was never foreseen. We reckoned without Cohen; we did not factor him in. I was ready to feel on edge, watchful and suspicious, but I expected that to be attended by feelings of elation and personal fulfilment. Instead, because of his constant, nagging presence at Abnex, I feel isolated and consumed by an apprehensive solitude which I am increasingly unable to control.
To give an example. In mid-October I began to notice that black rubbish bags were being taken from the outside of my building as often as three or four times a week. No other garbage is removed from the road with the same frequency: the council truck is scheduled to come only on a Thursday morning. I could not mention the problem to anyone, for fear of worrying them about the security of JUSTIFY. It was conceivable furthermore that it was American agents who were going through my bins as a way of checking up on the validity of their agent. This is common practice.
But that was not all. At around the same time in October I made a telephone call to BT requesting a second copy of my itemized phone bill; the first had been mislaid and I was late paying the balance.
‘Haven’t we already sent you one?’ the operator asked. ‘Didn’t you request an itemized bill last week? I’ve got a note here on my screen.’
No, I told her, I did not. So who requested it? The CIA already has a tap on my phone. Was it Abnex? Cohen himself? Or had the operator simply made a mistake?
Thirdly, the post has started arriving later than it did, as if it is being intercepted en route to my flat, then checked, resealed and sent on. First-class letters take two days instead of one; second-class up to a week. Parcels have often been tampered with, seals broken and so on.
I expected taps and tails, but everything else is outside normal US and British procedures. It is possible that because of Cohen, Abnex have placed me under twenty-four-hour surveillance. There is at all times a feeling of being watched, listened to, sifted, followed, pressures exerted on me from all sides. I live constantly with the prospect of abandonment, constantly with the prospect of arrest. Things have been like this for so long now that I cannot recall what life was like before they started. The sensation is not dissimilar to the experience of being ill, as the world outside goes about its business and you cannot even remember what it felt like to be healthy and well.
Thus, walking to Colville Gardens tonight to make JUSTIFY’s sixth drop on a cold December evening, I feel tight and self-contained, certain in the knowledge