A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [134]
I no longer recognize the person that made those choices, and yet he was surely a better person than I am now. The one that Kate knew. If I could only get back to that.
On the weekend of 4 April I set myself to do some clear thinking, but it’s vague and contradictory. For a while I convince myself that there was a part of me that was waiting for Cohen, a desire actually to get caught. Something about his persistence was comforting: it offered me a way out. And just below the constant fright of imminent capture I am experiencing a curious sense of relief, an intimation of rebirth, a feeling of beginning again in the past. To be free of Lithiby, of Caccia and Hawkes, to start afresh, seems possible now.
But to believe this is fatuous. If Cohen bleats, SIS and Five will deny all knowledge of me and I will be left to fend for myself, as a traitor against the state. And if the truth comes out - that the Americans have been victims of an elaborate hoax - it will be denied at official levels in the interests of the special relationship. What was Hawkes’s line? ‘We’ve been hanging on to the shirt-tails of every US administration since Roosevelt.’ That isn’t about to change just so that Alec Milius can sleep soundly in his bed at night. I will then be a marked man, the target of an expansive American grudge. Either way, my options are hopelessly limited.
Why did I not see all of this coming? Why did I not recognize immediately the grim paradox of the trade: that we are all of us foolishly reliant on the goodwill of corrupt men for our safety and peace of mind. Their loyalty can - and will - vanish in an instant, because everyone must be ultimately deniable. That’s what breaks the chain. You came here lonely and you will leave alone.
Saturday night. There’s nothing on TV but talking heads and Noel’s House Party in ‘A New York Special’. Edmonds has taken the show to a television studio in Manhattan where William Shatner and David Hasselhoff have been invited on as his special guests. Next to these tanned, protein-rich megastars, Noel looks like a very small man awed by America. I switch the programme off and the room lapses into silence, the thin electric whine of the TV fading out, just on the edge of sound.
There is a buzz on the doorbell, a sharp sudden punch which kicks me out of the reliable calm of home. What if it’s a journalist, a scoop-hungry hack with a TV camera bolted to his shoulder? I have lived this last week in persistent dread of the journalist on the phone, of the item on the six o’clock news. More wild hallucinations. Who is at the door?
It’s just a pizza delivery boy, clear-skinned and accentless, called to the wrong address. I show him where he wants to go - 111B, next door - and he thanks me with a grunt. Going back upstairs, passing all the flyers and pamphlets littering the hall, I allow myself a little knowing smile: perhaps, at the end of the day, all of this is merely appealing to my sense of dramatic effect. Perhaps everything will be fine. Perhaps the Americans will use the data, oblivious of its defects, Cohen will be taken to one side and told to act in the best interests of Queen and Country, and JUSTIFY will prosper. And maybe I should stick to the plan that has existed all along: to leave Abnex in three or four years and accept Lithiby’s offer of employment with Five. In the final analysis - Cohen’s intrusions apart - I am good at my job. I have a talent for it.
I had thought about a confession to Saul. It came from a deep-seated desire to be unburdened of the facts, a simple need, in the wake of Lithiby, to explain to someone exactly what has been going on. No evasions, no half-truths. The total picture. I would sit him down, apologize for being such a lousy friend and explain that I used