A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [116]
The night that they get back, Katharine e-mails me to confirm the dinner date for the third time. Clearly they have something specific planned. I enter a lie about it in my desk diary: on Wednesday 29th, instead of ‘Dinner F + K’, the entry reads: ‘Cinema. Saul. Maybe Some Mother’s Son?’, a film about Northern Ireland which has just opened in London.
Then it’s just a question of waiting.
26
The Approach
The night of the dinner, Wednesday January 29th, is glacial, as cold as it has been all winter, with a freeze-chill in the air that might precede snow. Walking to Colville Gardens I am characteristically apprehensive, and yet there is also a more unfamiliar edge to my mood. Although no handover is taking place tonight, the meeting has been arranged a month in advance, which is more than enough time for the Americans to have planned something unexpected. It is too much to suggest that I am being lured into a trap, and yet something is not quite right. Is it only that I am coming empty-handed, without a disk, a file, even a photograph? To meet them purely on the basis of our friendship is both so unnecessary now and so utterly false that it feels almost sinister.
I take a pair of gloves out of my briefcase and put them on. The people around me are moving quickly, hurrying, just wanting to be indoors and out of the cold. I have started to notice a gradually increasing dampness in my left shoe, as if rainwater has seeped through the leather, wetting the sock, but when I stop to check it there is only pavement dreck and muck on the sole, with no sign of a hole or tear. I light a cigarette and continue walking.
Turning right into Colville Terrace from Kensington Park Road, a pair of car headlights flash twice in quick succession on the opposite corner of the street. Two people are sitting inside a gleaming green Ford Mondeo, one in the driver’s seat, one in the back. The headlights flash again, briefly flooding the street with light. I stop and peer at the car more closely.
Fortner and Katharine are sitting inside. I cross the street and move towards the passenger door. Fortner reaches across to open it.
‘What are you two doing here?’ I ask, trying to sound nerveless and calm as I climb inside. ‘I thought we were going to meet in your apartment.’
After a last drag on the cigarette I toss it into the gutter, twisting around in my seat to give Katharine a smile. She looks gaunt.
‘Close the door, Alec,’ Fortner says with heavy seriousness.
I clunk it shut. The interior smells like a rental car.
‘When did you pick this up?’ I ask, tapping the dashboard lightly. My heart is racing furiously.
‘This morning,’ Fortner says, activating the central locking before turning the key in the ignition. The engine roars briefly and then settles back to a low hum.
‘What happened to the old one?’
‘Garage,’ says Katharine, deadpan.
Fortner pulls out into the street. We are heading back up Kensington Park Road.
‘What’s going on? Where are we going?’
‘We’re real concerned about something, Alec,’ he says, turning to look directly at me. ‘We believe that our apartment may have been penetrated. It may be under audio surveillance. The vehicle also. That’s why we picked up a fresh one. The Mondeo is clean.’
There was an agreement not to tamper with their flat or with any vehicles. If Fortner is telling the truth, the surveillance must have come from Abnex.
Fortner grips his hands firmly around the steering wheel, turning back to look at the road. My reaction here will be crucial: I have to get it exactly right.
‘Your apartment is bugged?’ I say, with what may be too much emphasis. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘We picked something up on a routine sweep,’ Katharine says. She has positioned herself directly between the two front seats, leaning forward between us.
‘A routine sweep? So it’s something you do all the time?’
‘All the time,’ she says.
Fortner makes a turn into Ladbroke Square. I cannot