A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [96]
I stare down at the clear blue pool and try to think of something else to say, something that will further convey both my lack of expertise and a sense of my enthusiasm about JUSTIFY. But my mind is a blank. Katharine lifts up a small handful of water and lets it fall.
‘You’re lookin’ a little raggedy there,’ Fortner says. ‘You OK?’
Our lack of movement in the water has stilled my muscles and I am starting to shiver with cold.
‘Sure. I’m fine. I’m going to swim for a bit,’ I tell them. ‘Let’s have another talk in a while.’
Ten minutes later, resting in the shallow end after six brisk lengths, my eyes are stinging with chlorine and my head aches with the effort of concentration. The pool has become almost deserted. The child and her mother have gone, as has the old man. Only the man in navy trunks remains, ploughing up and down the lanes with his vigorous front crawl.
Fortner’s black-capped head is bobbing up and down in the water, the goggles coming slowly towards me like lizard’s eyes. Katharine is two metres to his left, long arms describing elegant arcs of backstroke. They both touch the shallow-end wall simultaneously and move across to talk to me. Fortner rubs his eyes and makes a low noise which is only halfway to civility. He wants to get down to business.
‘We need to talk about your first drop,’ he says, chest hairs knotted by water. ‘You wanna do that now?’
‘Sure.’
‘What do you think you can get us?’ Katharine asks.
My answer comes out swift and easy. This is what I had planned to say today.
‘Abnex have just done some commercial price sets which include our assumptions about how the global economy is going to pan out over the next few years. They’d give Andromeda some idea of our short-term plans, where we think the price of oil is going, that kind of thing.’
‘Sounds good,’ she says, though a little forcedly. They expected more.
‘It’s available in e-mail format, but I suppose that’ll be traceable if I send it to you.’
‘That’s the right way to be thinking,’ Fortner says, keeping his voice low. ‘Safety first. You could direct your messages via a re-mailing service that will strip them of their identifying features, but that’s probably too risky as a first venture. We can’t simply encrypt them. We’ll have to think of another method. Maybe on floppy or a straight print-out.’
‘That wouldn’t be a problem,’ I tell him, trying to appear amenable and co-operative. Katharine comes in with a suggestion.
‘If you just ran it off the printer at the Abnex office under the pretext that you wanted to do some work at home, would that be OK? I’m sure everyone does that as a means of staying on top of their workload.’
Fortner nods in agreement, as though there were nothing more to be said on the subject, but something about this worries me. Just standing here watching the two of them discuss these vital first stages with such apparent calm makes me feel edgy and rushed. Katharine drops her hair back into the pool and a thin film of water on her neck glistens in the light. When she brings her head back up she looks directly at me in anticipation of some sort of response.
‘Yes,’ I tell her. ‘We do it all the time. It won’t be a problem.’
But it might be. How can I get the information on to the printer and out of the office without running the risk of somebody at Abnex noticing? There is constant movement in the office, constant observation, but I cannot be certain that someone won’t start asking questions. In an attempt to avoid looking nervous, I try to convince myself that it is best to let the Americans dictate things at this early stage. All of us are keen for the first handover to be completed and out of the way, and their experience here is greater than mine. But I do not like letting others make decisions on my behalf: there is already the danger that my best interests could be undermined by forces beyond my control. With this development it feels almost as if the Americans are laying traps for me, and yet I know that this can surely not be the case.
‘The actual process of handing over