A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [46]
‘I admired his tenacity tremendously. He was entrepreneurial almost before the word had been invented. Always working on a plan, a scheme for making money. Not a fast buck. Not to cheat anyone. But he loved working, he was ambitious. He wanted to make the best of himself.’
And this intrigues me. I remember Dad more as an absence, always away on business, and never wanting to talk about work when he came home. Mum has certainly never spoken about him in such a way.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Let me give you an example,’ he says. ‘I imagine that you have friends from school or university who spend a lot of their time just sitting around, or wasting away in dead-end jobs.’
I sure do. I’m one of them.
‘I don’t have that many friends,’ I tell him. ‘But yes, there are a lot of people who come out of higher education and feel that their choices are limited. People with good degrees with nowhere to go.’
Hawkes coughs, as if he wasn’t listening. ‘And this job you’re doing at the moment. I suspect it’s a waste of your time, yes?’
The remark catches me off guard, but I have to admire his nerve.
‘Fair enough,’ I smile. ‘But it’s not a waste of time any more. I quit over the weekend.’
‘Did you now?’ he says, not disguising a degree of surprise, perhaps even of pleasure. Is it possible that Hawkes really does have some plan for me, some opportunity? Or am I simply clinging to the impossible hope that Liddiard and his colleagues have made an embarrassing mistake?
‘So what are you going to do?’ he asks.
‘Well, right now it looks as though I’m going to become one of those people who spend a lot of their time just sitting around.’
He laughs aloud at this, breaking into a rare smile, which stretches his face like a clown. Then he looks me in the eye, that old paternal thing, and says:
‘Why don’t you come and work for me?’
And the offer does not surprise me: somehow I had expected it. A halfway house between CEBDO and the coveted world of espionage. A compromise. A job in the oil business.
‘At your company? At Abnex?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m very flattered.’
‘You have Russian, don’t you? And a grounding in business?’
‘Yes,’ I reply confidently.
‘Well then, I would urge you to think about it.’
We have stopped walking and I look down at the ground, drawing my right foot up and down on the grass. Perhaps I should say more about how grateful I am.
‘This is extraordinary,’ I tell him. ‘I’m amazed by how -‘
‘There is something I would need to ask in return,’ he says, before I become too gushy.
I look at him, trying to gauge what he means, but his face is unreadable. I simply nod as he says:
‘If you decided that you wanted to take up a position…’ Then he stalls. ‘What are your feelings, instinctively? Is oil something you’d like to become involved in?’
In my confused state it is almost impossible to decide, but I am intrigued by Hawkes’s caveat. What would he ask for in return?
‘I would need to get my head together a little bit, to think things through,’ I tell him, but no sooner have the words come out than I am thinking back to what he said about my father. His ambition. His need to improve himself, and I add quickly:
‘But I can’t think of any reason why I would want to throw away an opportunity like that.’
‘Good. Good,’ he says.
‘Why? What would you need me to do?’
The question sets us moving again, walking slowly down a path towards Park Lane.
‘It’s nothing that would be beyond you.’
He smiles at this, but the inference is clandestine. There is something unlawful here that Hawkes is concealing.
‘Sorry, Michael. I’m not understanding.’
He turns and looks behind us, almost as if he feels we are being followed. A reflex ingrained into his behaviour. But it’s just a group of four or five schoolchildren kicking a football fifty metres away.
‘Abnex has a rival,’ he says, turning back to face me. ‘An American oil company by the name of Andromeda. We would need you to befriend two of their employees.’
‘Befriend?’
He nods.
‘Who is “we”?’ I ask.
‘All that I can tell you is that you would need to maintain absolute secrecy, in