A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [59]
From his desk near by, Ben mutters: ‘Play hard to get, Alec. Birds love that.’
‘I’m putting her through.’
‘OK.’
Adrenalin now, my hand in my hair, pushing it out of my face.
‘Alec Milius.’
‘Hello, Alec? It’s Katharine Lanchester at Andromeda. Fortner’s wife.’
‘Oh, hello. What can I do for you?’
‘How are you?’
‘Fine, thanks. It’s good to hear from you.’
‘Well, Fort so enjoyed going to the movies with you. Said he had a great time.’
Her voice is quick and enthused.
‘Yes. You missed a good film.’
‘Oh, I can’t stand westerns. Guys in leather standing in the middle of the street twirling six-shooters and seeing who blinks first. I prefer something more contemporary.’
‘Sure.’
‘Still, I had a nice dinner with Fortner afterwards and he told me all about it. Matter of fact, that’s why I was calling. I was wondering if you and maybe Saul would like to have dinner sometime?’
‘Sure, I -‘
‘I mean I don’t know if you’re free, but…’
‘No, no, not at all, I’d like that very much. I’ll ask him and I’m sure he’d like to.’
‘Good. Shall we set a date?’
‘OK.’
‘When are you not taken up?’
‘Uh, anytime next week except - just let me check my diary.’
I know that I’m free every night. I just don’t want it to appear that way.
‘How about Wednesday?’
‘Terrific. Wednesday it is. So long as Saul can make it.’
‘I’m sure he’ll be able to.’
Cohen’s eyes are fixed on the far wall. He is listening in.
‘How is Fortner?’
‘Oh, he’s good. He’s in Washington right now. I’m just hoping that he’ll be back in time. He’s got a lot of work to get through out there.’
‘So where shall we meet?’
‘Why don’t we just say the In and Out again? Just at the gate there, eight o’clock?’
She had that planned.
‘Fine.’
‘See you there, then.’
‘I’ll look forward to it.’
I hang up and there is a rush of blood in my head.
‘What was all that?’ Cohen asks, chewing the end of a pencil.
‘Personal call.’
15
Tiramisu
The only spy who can provide a decent case for ideology is George Blake. Young, idealistic, impressionable, he was posted by SIS to Korea and kidnapped by the Communists shortly after the 1950 invasion. Given Das Kapital to read in his prison cell, Blake became a disciple of Marxism, and the KGB turned him after he offered to betray SIS. ‘I’d come to the conclusion that I was no longer fighting on the right side,’ he later explained.
Upon his release in 1953, Blake returned to England a hero: he had suffered terribly in captivity and was seen to have survived the worst that communism could throw at him. There is television footage of Blake at Heathrow airport, modest before the world’s press, a bearded man hiding a terrible secret. For the next eight years, working as an agent of the KGB, he betrayed every secret that passed across his desk, including Anglo-American co-operation on the construction of the Berlin Tunnel. His treachery is considered to have been more damaging even than Philby’s.
Blake was caught more by a process of elimination than by distinguished detective work, and summoned to Broadway Buildings. SIS needed to extract a confession from him: without it, the traitor would walk free. After three days of fruitless interrogation in which Blake denied any involvement with the Soviets, the SIS officer in charge of the case played what he knew was his final card.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘We know you’re working for the Russians and we understand why. You were a prisoner of the Communists, they tortured you. They blackmailed you into betraying SIS. You had no choice.’
This was too much for George.
‘No!’ he shouted, rising from his chair. ‘Nobody tortured me! Nobody blackmailed me! I acted out of a belief in communism.’
There was no financial incentive, he told them, no pressure to approach the KGB.
‘It was quite mechanical,’ he said. ‘It was as if I had ceased to exist.’
The platforms and escalators of Green Park underground station are thick with trapped summer heat. The humidity follows me as I clunk through the ticket barriers and take a flight of stairs up to street level. Here, passing traffic creates little cooling