A Spy by Nature (2001) Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  A SPY BY NATURE

  ‘A wonderfully assured first novel. From the first page to the last it has the ring of absolute authenticity. Tautly written, cleverly plotted and with a real sense of moral anger at the cruelties and duplicities of modern espionage it reminded me strongly of the early books of John le Carre’ Robert Harris

  ‘A gripping debut novel, which shows there is still life in spy fiction despite the end of the Cold War… Cumming memorably captures the loneliness and constant anxiety of a man who has chosen to lie for a living… one finds oneself totally caught up in his story… The book is well researched and deftly plotted and though there is a clear debt to Deighton and le Carre, Cumming never seems like a mere imitator… In its exciting closing stages, it is a book one would be seriously annoyed to have to put down’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Eerily good (where did this brand-new writer develop such style, authority and muscle?)… plotting both plausible and persuasive, with horrors which mount stealthily behind a veneer of seemingly straightforward cloak-and-dagger games… Strong and serious entertainment; don’t miss’ Literary Review

  ‘Subtle, evocative and haunting. Cumming writes beautifully, equally at home with the broad brushstrokes of international geopolitics as he is with the finer dabs of nuance and subtlety. His plotting is assured, but where he really excels is with his characterization… Even the most fleeting of characters are given distinctive voices and identities - something that only Thomas Harris among modern thriller writers does better’ Boris Starling

  ‘A fine debut to what will doubtless be an impressive literary career… Accurate in every detail… Anyone wishing to join the Secret Intelligence Service should certainly buy this book… Tautly written… Cumming writes it like it is’ Andrew Roberts, Mail on Sunday

  ‘An intense study of the world of espionage… Cumming ventures calmly and collectedly into the spy’s psyche’ Daily Mirror

  ‘An extraordinary confident debut: an espionage thriller that has the classic touch of early le Carre’ Bookseller

  ‘Clever… Taut and well plotted, it’s a strong first novel that shows off Cumming’s abilities’ Punch

  ‘Mixes the tight, involved plot of a thriller with a literary feeling for language… Buy it’ Limb by Limb

  ‘The contemporary spy novel was said to have died with the Cold War but Charles Cumming has brought to life a story of modern spying… a good read and a good spy novel. It has been some time since a writer took on the MI5/SIS mantle with any tone of authenticity and this novel certainly succeeds in its descriptions of tradecraft and the like… a writer who will be well worth reading for some time to come’ Peter Miller

  ‘Don’t miss out on this brilliant, atmospheric thriller. Gripping and authentic, it shows Cumming is the real thing’ Chris Ryan

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Charles Cumming was born in Scotland in 1971. He is the author of the bestselling thrillers A Spy By Nature, The Hidden Man and The Spanish Game. He lives in London. Find out more at www.charlescumming.co.uk

  A Spy By Nature

  CHARLES CUMMING

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published by Michael Joseph 2001

  Published in Penguin Books 2002

  13

  Copyright (c) Charles Cumming, 2001

  All rights reserved

  Extract from The Sportswriter copyright (c) Richard Ford. Published in Great Britain by Harvill Press 1986

  Extract from The Uses of Enchantment copyright (c) Bruno Bettelheim. Published in Great Britain by Thames & Hudson 1976

  Extract from Rabbit Redux copyright (c) John Updike. Published in Great Britain by Andre Deutsch 1972

  ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, Words and Music by Thom Yorke, Edward O’Brien, Colin Greenwood, Jonathan Greenwood and Philip Selway (c) 1994 Warner/Chappell Music Ltd, London W6 8BS. Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192291-1

  for my wife Melissa

  Author’s Note

  Were the events of this story entirely true, they would inevitably breach clauses in the Official Secrets Act. Nevertheless, members of the intelligence community both in London and in the United States may find that they catch their reflection in the account which follows.

  ‘I remember, in fact, the Lebanese woman I knew at Berkshire College saying to me, after I told her how much I loved her: “I’ll always tell you the truth, unless of course I’m lying to you.”’

  Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

  PART ONE

  1995

  ‘If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives.’

  Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment

  1

  An Exploratory Conversation

  The door leading into the building is plain and unadorned, save for one highly polished handle. No sign outside saying FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE, no hint of top brass. There is a small ivory bell on the right-hand side and I push it. The door, thicker and heavier than it appears, is opened by a fit-looking man of retirement age, a uniformed policeman on his last assignment.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir.’

  ‘Good afternoon. I have an interview with Mr Lucas at two o’clock.’

  ‘The name, sir?’

  ‘Alec Milius.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  This almost condescending. I have to sign my name in a book and then he hands me a security dog-tag on a silver chain which I slip into the hip pocket of my suit trousers.

  ‘Just take a seat beyond the stairs. Someone will be down to see you in a moment.’

  The wide, high-ceilinged hall beyond the reception area exudes all the splendour of imperial England. A vast panelled mirror dominates the far side of the room, flanked by oil portraits of black-eyed, long-dead diplomats. Its soot-flecked glass reflects the bottom of a broad staircase, which drops down in right-angles from an unseen upper storey, splitting left and right at ground level. Arranged around a varnished table beneath the mirror are two burgundy leather sofas, one of which is more or less completely occupied by an overweight, lonely looking man in his late
twenties. Carefully, he reads and rereads the same page of the same section of The Times, crossing and uncrossing his legs as his bowels swim in caffeine and nerves. I sit down on the sofa opposite his.

  Five minutes pass.

  On the table the fat man has laid down a strip of passport photographs, little colour squares of himself in a suit, probably taken in a booth at Waterloo sometime early this morning. A copy of the Daily Telegraph lies folded and unread beside the photographs. Bland non-stories govern its front page: IRA hints at new ceasefire, rail sell-offwill go ahead, 56 per cent of British policemen want to keep their traditional bobbies’ helmets. I catch the fat man looking at me, a quick spotcheck glance between rivals. Then he looks away, shamed. His skin is drained of ultra-violet, a grey flannel face raised on nerd books and Panorama. Black oily Oxbridge hair.

  ‘Mr Milius?’

  A young woman has appeared on the staircase wearing a neat red suit. She is unflustered, professional, demure. As I stand up, Fat Man eyes me with wounded suspicion, like someone on their lunch break queue-barged at the bank.

  ‘If you’d like to come with me. Mr Lucas will see you now.’

  This is where it begins. Following three steps behind her, garbling platitudes, adrenalin surging, her smooth calves lead me up out of the hall. More oil paintings line the ornate staircase.

  Running a bit late today. Oh, that’s OK. Did you find us all right? Yes.

  ‘Mr Lucas is just in here.’

  Prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.

  A firm handshake. Late thirties. I had expected someone older. Christ, his eyes are blue: I’ve never seen a blue like that. Lucas is dense-boned and tanned, absurdly handsome in an old-fashioned way. He is in the process of growing a moustache which undercuts the residual menace in his face. There are wispy black puppy-fluff tufts sprouting on his upper lip, cut-price Errol Flynn.

  He offers me a drink, an invitation seconded by the woman in red who, when I refuse, seems almost offended.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she says, as if I have broken with sacred tradition. Never accept tea or coffee at an interview. They’ll see your hand shaking when you drink it.

  ‘Absolutely, yes.’

  She withdraws and Lucas and I go into a large, sparsely furnished room near by. He has not yet stopped looking at me, not out of laziness or rudeness, but purely because he is a man entirely at ease when it comes to staring at people. He’s very good at it.

  He says:

  ‘Thank you for coming today.’

  And I say:

  ‘It’s a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. It’s a great privilege to be here.’

  There are two armchairs in the room, upholstered in the same burgundy leather as the sofas downstairs. A large bay window looks out over the tree-lined Mall, feeding weak, broken sunlight into the room. Lucas has a broad oak desk covered in neat piles of paper and a framed black-and-white photograph of a woman whom I take to be his wife.

  ‘Have a seat.’

  I drop down low into the leather, my back to the window. There is a coffee table in front of me, an ashtray and a closed red file. Lucas occupies the chair opposite mine. As he sits down he reaches into the pocket of his jacket for a pen, retrieving a blue Mont Blanc. I watch him, freeing the trapped flaps of my jacket and bringing them back across my chest. The little physical tics that precede an interview.

  ‘Milius. It’s an unusual name.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your father, he was from the Eastern Bloc?’

  ‘His father. Not mine. Came over from Lithuania in 1938. My family have lived in Britain ever since.’

  Lucas writes something down on a brown clipboard braced between his thighs.

  ‘I see. Why don’t we begin by talking about your present job. The CEBDO. That’s not something I’ve heard much about.’

  *

  All job interviews are lies. They begin with the CV, a sheet of word-processed fictions. About halfway down mine, just below the name and address, Philip Lucas has read the following sentence:

  I have been employed as a Marketing Consultant at the Central European Business Development Organization (CEBDO) for the past eleven months.

  Elsewhere, lower down, are myriad falsehoods: periods of work experience on national newspapers (‘Could you do some photocopying please?’); a season as a waiter at a leading Genevan hotel; eight weeks at a London law firm; the inevitable charity work.

  The truth is that CEBDO is run out of a small, cramped garage in a mews off the Edgware Road. The kitchen doubles for a toilet; if somebody has a crap, no one can make a cup of tea for ten minutes. There are five of us: Nik (the boss), Henry, Russell, myself and Anna. It’s very simple. We sit on the phone all day talking to businessmen in central - and now eastern - Europe. I try to convince them to part with large sums of money, in return for which we promise to place an advertisement for their operation in a publication known as the Central European Business Review. This, I tell my clients, is a quarterly magazine which enjoys a global circulation of 400,000 copies, ‘distributed free around the world’. Working purely on commission I can make anything from two to three hundred pounds a week, sometimes more, peddling this story. Nik, I estimate, makes seven or eight times that amount. His only overheads (apart from telephone calls and electricity) are printing costs. These are paid to his brother-in-law who desktop publishes, on recycled matt paper, five hundred copies of the Central European Business Review four times a year. These he posts to a few selected embassies across Europe and to all of the clients who have placed advertisements in the magazine. Any spares, he throws in the bin.

  On paper, it’s legal.

  I look Lucas directly in the eye.

  ‘The CEBDO is a fledgling organization which advises new businesses in central - and now eastern - Europe about the perils and pitfalls of the free market.’

  He taps his jawline with the bulbous fountain pen.

  ‘And it’s entirely funded by private individuals? There’s no grant from the EC?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Who runs it?’

  ‘Nikolas Jarolmek. A Pole. His family have lived in Britain since the war.’

  ‘And how did you get the job?’

  ‘Through the Guardian. I responded to an advertisement.’

  ‘Against how many other candidates?’

  ‘I couldn’t say. I was told about a hundred and fifty.’

  ‘Could you describe an average day at the office?’

  ‘Broadly speaking I act in an advisory capacity, either by speaking to people on the telephone and answering any questions they may have about setting up in business in the UK, or by writing letters in response to written queries. I’m also responsible for editing our quarterly magazine, the Central European Business Review. That lists a number of crucial contact organizations that might prove useful to small businesses that are just starting out. It also gives details of tax arrangements in this country, language schools, that kind of thing.’

  ‘I see. It would be helpful if you could send me a copy.’

  ‘Of course.’

  To explain why I am here.

  The interview was set up on the recommendation of a man I barely know, a retired diplomat named Michael Hawkes. Six weeks ago I was staying at my mother’s house in Somerset for the weekend and he came to dinner. He was, she informed me, an old university friend of my father’s.

  Until that night I had never met Hawkes, had never heard my mother mention his name. She said that he had spent a lot of time with her and Dad when they were first married in the 1960s, but when the Foreign Office posted him to Moscow, the three of them had lost touch. All this was before I was born.

  Hawkes retired from the Diplomatic Service earlier this year to take up a directorship at a British oil company called Abnex. I don’t know how Mum tracked down his phone number, but he showed up for dinner alone, no wife, on the stroke of eight o’clock.

  There were other guests there that night,
bankers and insurance brokers in bulletproof tweeds, but Hawkes was a thing apart. He had a blue silk cravat slung around his neck like a noose, and a pair of velvet loafers embroidered on the toe with an elaborate coat-of-arms. There was nothing ostentatiously debonair about any of this, nothing vain: it just looked as if he hadn’t taken them off in twenty years. He was wearing a washed-out blue shirt with fraying collar and cuffs, and stained silver cufflinks that looked as though they had been in his family since the Opium Wars. In short, we got on. We sat next to each other at dinner and talked for close on three hours about everything from politics to infidelity. Three days after the party my mother told me that she had spotted Hawkes in Waitrose, stocking up on Stolichnaya and tomato juice. Almost immediately, like a task, he asked her if I had ever thought of ‘going in for the Foreign Office’. My mother said that she didn’t know.

  ‘Ask him to give me a ring if he’s interested.’

  So on the telephone that night, wind on the line from Somerset, my mother did what mothers are supposed to do.

  ‘You remember Michael, who came to dinner?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, stubbing out a cigarette.

  ‘He likes you. Thinks you should try out for the Foreign Office.’

  ‘He does?’

  ‘What an opportunity, Alec. To serve Queen and Country.’

  I nearly laughed at this, but checked it out of respect for her old-fashioned convictions. Instead, I said:

  ‘Mum, an ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country.’

  And she sounded impressed.

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Anyway, Michael says to give him a ring if you’re interested. I’ve got the number. Fetch a pen.’

  I had tried to stop her. I didn’t like the idea of her putting shape on my life. But she was insistent.