A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [93]
Take Ames. He needed to live with the constant, incontrovertible knowledge that his actions were cherished at a higher level; they had to be world-shifting, deeply consequential. To be merely run-of-the-mill was intolerable to him. Up to a point, Ames was disenchanted with the CIA, sick of going out in the name of American imperialism and risking his life to obtain intelligence that was then overlooked by the Agency’s masters on Capitol Hill for reasons of political expediency. But the satisfaction of his vanity was crucial, and money provided that. Rick later explained that he wanted money for ‘what it could guarantee’: a sports car, an apartment in Europe, a fur coat for his foxy Colombian wife. But the trappings of wealth also provided him with the material proof of his importance to the other side.
And it was the money that was to prove his undoing. Conspicuous and inexplicably vast reserves of cash and possessions led the molehunt, after months of blind alleys and false leads, directly to Ames’s door. He was arrested at his home in Virginia and bundled into the back of an FBI Pontiac by a huddle of G-men wearing flak-jackets and mirrored shades.
‘Think,’ he was heard repeating to himself, over and over again. ‘Think.’
A few days after the meeting in Colville Gardens, Fortner and Katharine call me at Abnex to arrange a rendezvous at the swimming-pool in Dolphin Square, a vast, brown-brick residential cube on the north bank of the Thames.
The reception area, off Chichester Street in Pimlico, is a hotel lobby. Fortner and Katharine are sitting on a small two-seater sofa just inside the main doors, both looking out-of-place and friendless; they seem quite unable to shed that unassimilated quality which marks them out as Americans. Katharine is wearing a white tennis dress and clean plimsolls over pale yellow socks. Fortner has on a blue tracksuit with expensive Reebok pumps and two sweatbands secured tight around his wrists. They seem too healthy, too big-boned, to be British, like tourists off the red-eye whom I have been asked to show around.
As we greet one another it is immediately plain that a shift in the emphasis of our relationship has already taken place. When I kiss Katharine’s cheek it seems to toughen, and my handshake with Fortner is rigid with meaning: he holds the eye contact a beat too long. We are bound up in one another now, each of us capable of ruining the other. That knowledge acts as a background to our exchange of pleasantries, and during the short walk from the lobby to the pool there’s something forced about the level of civility between us.
Fortner is carrying a heavy sports bag, bulging with towels and clothing. We walk downstairs to the sports complex and he places it on the ground at the ticket desk, paying for the three of us to swim.
‘That’s kind of you, Fort,’ I tell him as he puts his wallet in a side pocket of the holdall.
‘Least I can do, Milius.’
‘So I’ll see you guys in there?’ Katharine calls out as she walks off in the direction of the ladies’ changing-rooms. ‘Got your ten pence for the lockers?’
‘Don’t you worry ‘bout that, honey,’ Fortner shouts after her - too loudly, I think, for such a small public space. ‘We got plenny.’
The changing-room is hot with steam: men are drifting in and out of showers and there is a stench of mingled deodorants. Walking in, I am confronted by the tuberous cock and balls of a man of Fortner’s generation, vigorously drawing a towel across his back like someone waving a scarf at a football match. I look away and find a small area of bench at which to undress. Fortner slots in beside me, cramping up the space.
‘All right if I slide in here, buddy?’ he says.
I don’t want to do the nude thing with him; not at all.
‘Sure,’ I reply.
Gradually he unpacks his affairs: