A Spy's Life

by Henry Porter

  Tomas composed new short bursts of information. That was his side of things. All the infiltration channels had been dreamed up by him. He started by using the phone-in programmes that are the standard fillers of airtime in radio stations the world over and during the calls played a tape of the condensed, coded message. He finessed his procedure by attacking the broadcasting computer systems with a benign virus – a vehicle which carried the messages. It was surprisingly easy – like a mosquito biting a sedated elephant. The stations, about thirty in all, were never aware of what was going on, but Mortz and he were certain that the messages were reaching their targets, causing acute discomfort and alarm in various intelligence services.

  Mortz’s idea was to reveal how the agencies of five or six Western powers, which were notionally on good terms, were using their resources to spy on each other. It was, he said in one of his oblique missives, a very wasteful hypocrisy. That was the nearest he came to articulating any motive.

  Tomas had to admit that he had been caught up by his own ingenuity almost as much as he relished the revenge. The information which arrived in the package – the very last means of communication that anyone would suspect – gave him a great deal more to play with. It was like an archive of their operation but there was also much that was new in the package, much that concerned him personally.

  It arrived one day back in September. Mortz had told him to expect something addressed to Mr J. Fengel. There was no flat number on the parcel so it had been delivered to the house and just left on the table in the hallway. Tomas reckoned that the only way anyone would know to go to that house was if Mortz had kept a record of the address. And that meant one thing: Mortz had been tumbled and somebody had gone through his things and found it. He reckoned this must have happened within the last ten days because he’d received a couple of messages from Mortz on the Sunday before he left London for New York. Yet since then two e-mails had gone unanswered. The question was, how had they found Mortz? How had they located a man whose whereabouts Tomas didn’t even know?

  Both of them had always understood there were risks, especially for Tomas because his role involved using the phone system. In fact, there had been a problem nine months before when an Internet café he’d used in Stockholm just once was inexplicably raided. That was when he decided to leave for Britain and lie low for a while. Then quite by chance he’d come across the perfect way of using the phones without being detected, and Mortz and he had started up again. He’d encoded the photograph he’d kept all these years with a new algorithm and let the virus vehicle loose on a small radio station in Germany.

  Tomas imagined the picture being passed up an intelligence hierarchy and landing in someone’s in-tray and their having to work out who were the people in the picture and why the photograph had been published in this unconventional manner. They would take it seriously because they appreciated what else had come to them in this way. There was a hint of this in the feedback Mortz got from his sources. Some of the agencies would be baffled by the photograph; others, like the British and Americans, would have no difficulty in identifying the man in the foreground. They wouldn’t, of course, recognise Tomas who stood to the side of the main subject, but he hadn’t censored the image as a matter of honour – as a matter of admission, he told himself. Not long after Mortz had said he had used the photograph again. He exchanged it for more valuable information with a former CIA agent – new material on the practices of the CIA and National Security Agency. Tomas had sent a second photograph to Mortz in coded form which they were planning to use at some stage, although Mortz had already exchanged this for information too.

  He worked through most of the night, his mind dodging between incidents in his past, to Flick and to Robert Harland. He was almost feverish with thought and yet he was aware of a manic clarity of purpose. He had little time. He knew they must be very close to finding him. They’d tracked him down to Flick’s place, forced her to give them the name he was using and almost certainly learned that he had left for the States. Perhaps that’s why they weren’t watching the house when he returned? Or was it because Flick’s body lay inside? Maybe they assumed he’d fled for good and were now looking for him in the States.

  He thought of the bar in Brooklyn where he’d talked to Harland. Jesus, what a terrible misjudgement that had been! How could he expect Harland to believe his story? Harland was a suspicious, unyielding person, not at all how his mother had described him. But it was seeing that other man in the reflection of the mirror which he thought of now. The same character who’d got out of the car at the end of Harland’s street and shown such interest in the building had walked straight into the bar. It couldn’t have been a coincidence. That’s why he’d left immediately, even though he knew it would only confirm Harland’s suspicions about him. He had caught something in Harland’s voice when he spoke to him on the phone that night. He barely reacted to what he was saying. He had just given his sister’s address and told him that he would be there. That was not what he needed now. He would go tomorrow and tell Harland how he had found Flick and force him to understand that he wasn’t making any of this up.

  At about five in the morning Tomas completed his work and ran through a few procedures to make sure the two small computers were working properly. Then he left the hotel, telling the night porter that he couldn’t sleep and needed a walk. He knew very little about this part of London but he was certain of finding what he wanted and within a few minutes he noticed the familiar oblong shape by a wall at the end of the street. He decided it was in too prominent a position so moved on and came to a quiet road of large, private houses where he found another slightly bigger cabinet.

  People pass these waist-high boxes every day in London without knowing what they contain. Indeed Tomas hadn’t noticed them until he saw a telephone engineer open one up near Flick’s flat. The man explained they were officially known as Primary Connection Points – the first stop on the way to the exchange for an area’s telephones. Tomas instantly realised that it would be possible to utilise the lines inside if he could open the cabinet. While talking to the engineer, he had discreetly jerked out the universal key that was lodged in the door and put it in his pocket. Thereafter he had used the boxes whenever he wanted, connecting his computer at random to one of the lines for a few minutes. It meant he could send the coded messages virtually undetected.

  Now he worked fast. He opened the box, placed the computer on top of the panels of wiring, so that it was pretty much hidden, and connected it to several different telephone lines. That way the computer would use a different phone line each time it automatically dialled out. He knew that by the time anyone happened upon the irregular wiring, the messages would be sent, the battery spent and the information on the drive wiped.

  He repeated the procedure a few streets away with the second computer and then returned to the hotel, feeling exhausted and cold.

  Harland slept until eleven o’clock, then rose and checked the messages on his cellphone. There was still no word from Tomas, but when he got downstairs Harriet showed him a report in the Daily Telegraph on the murder of a thirty-five-year-old flower shop owner from Hampstead named Felicity MacKinlay. She had been discovered in her flat by the manager of her shop. She had been bound, gagged and tortured before being shot through the head at close range, said the police. The officer leading the investigation believed there might have been some sexual implication for the murder but he did not rule out other motives.

  He was anxious to interview a man named Lars Edberg, a Swede in his mid-twenties who had returned to Britain at about the time of her death. A surprisingly sketchy description of Edberg was given and the manager was quoted as saying that he knew very little about Edberg and only saw him when he sometimes dropped flowers off in the morning. The Swedish authorities revealed that Edberg must have been travelling on forged documents. No passport had been issued to a Lars Edberg in the last five years, not to a man in this age bracket at any rate.

  H
arland put the paper down without saying anything.

  ‘Do you think he did it?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘No,’ said Harland. ‘I told you he called me last night. I don’t think he would’ve done that if he was guilty.’

  ‘Unless he wanted help and somewhere to hide.’

  ‘Could be, but I don’t think this lad is capable of it. You can make your own mind up if he comes here.’

  ‘Well, it will certainly make a change to have a fugitive from justice for Christmas lunch.’

  The noise of Harriet’s three children reminded Harland that he needed to buy Christmas presents and he ordered a cab to go to Regent Street. As he crossed the driveway, Harriet flung open the kitchen window.

  ‘Call your friends in the States – you know, Griswald’s widow – and tell her not to use your e-mail address. Vigo’s people must have copied everything on your computer last night. You can set up another address from here.’

  Harland phoned immediately he caught a cab. Sally recognised his voice and said that her son would send the material – she used that neutral word rather deliberately, he thought – when Harland got in touch with a new address. She told him that Griswald would be buried in a few days’ time and that there would be a memorial service early in the spring. She hoped he would come.

  After he’d hung up he ran through the conversation and realised that she had not used his name. There was also something constrained in her manner. He supposed that she might simply be depressed at the prospect of facing Christmas without Al. But it was possible that there was another reason. Perhaps someone had been in contact with her, someone who wanted to know the precise nature of Alan Griswald’s last investigation, and, being no slouch in these matters, Sally had suspected that her phone was no longer entirely secure.

  In Regent Street Christmas crowds had already thinned, leaving a rump of male shoppers desperate to buy presents in the few hours that remained. He quickly acquired a cashmere sweater for Harriet in the Burlington Arcade, then bought a couple of biographies of entrepreneurs for his brother-in-law at Hatchards. It was outside the bookshop that he noticed two men hanging back in the street – a fellow in his thirties hovering near a phone box and a man in a parka who was looking in the window of an airline outlet on the other side of Piccadilly. What was interesting about both, apart from a marked lack of urgency, was that neither of them carried shopping bags. By the time Harland had reached Regent Street, he was certain he was being followed by a surveillance team.

  Quite suddenly, as if he had just remembered something, he plunged into a clothes store named Cavet and Bristol, which was still quite crowded, and took the stairs to the outfitting department on the first floor. Then he immediately turned right into the lift and descended to ground level where, as he expected, he found the parka hood hesitating at the bottom of the stairs. Showing no concern, Harland strolled to a table where some ties were displayed and selected a couple. He took them over to the counter and proffered them to an Indian woman who was bent over a stocktaking form.

  Without changing his expression, he informed her that he’d just seen the man with the parka place two lightweight pullovers under his jacket. For good measure, he added that he suspected the woman thumbing her way along a rail of men’s casual wear was working with him. Harland had spotted her when he entered the shop and just now, as he’d turned from the tie counter, he had asked himself what woman shops for her man with only a few hours to go to Christmas?

  The assistant picked up the phone and in a very short time the man and woman were being accompanied by security guards to a back office. The man protested, wrenching his arms free of the security guards. But they caught hold of them more firmly and led him away. Harland nodded a smile of seasonal goodwill to the assistant and slipped away, somehow failing to hear her plea that he should stay and make a statement about what he had seen.

  He soon completed the rest of his purchases and caught a cab back to St John’s Wood. A palpable stillness was settling over the city as the first carols from the service at King’s College, Cambridge came from the cab driver’s radio. Harland thought of his father and a Christmas Eve twenty years ago when they went together to midnight mass in a big echoing church that rose above the Fens, half a mile from the family home. He could just hear the carol he particularly remembered from that service above the noise of the cab’s diesel engine. He looked out on the emptying streets and wondered where Tomas was.

  He arrived back to find his brother-in-law supervising the placing of presents beneath a perfectly decorated Christmas tree. He was dressed in a long collarless black tunic and slippers embroidered with his initials. He greeted Harland with a handshake that involved a brief semi-hug. Harland remembered that Robin had taken to bestowing this on practically anyone who came within range, as a declaration of his openness and modernity. Robin made the children sit down and listen to what was a condensed version of the crash. When Harland finished, he jumped up and gave him another brief hug.

  ‘It’s good to have you with us,’ he said, silencing Harland’s youngest nephew, Conrad, who wanted to know how many dead bodies he’d seen.

  The news that Harriet had forgotten to tell him was that fifty people – locals, as Robin put it – would descend on the house at six-thirty for Robin’s traditional Christmas Eve drinks party. Harland went off and set up a new e-mail address in Harriet’s little office, sent it to Sally Griswald’s address, then made himself useful, setting out glasses and lugging cases of drink into the kitchen.

  At the appointed hour several couples arrived at once, one or two of them having been dropped off by chauffeurs. The party very soon reached critical mass and for a time Harland avoided making conversation by handing drinks round, although this was unnecessary since a couple of waiters had appeared from nowhere and the children were already scurrying between guests with opened bottles of champagne. Eventually he was snared by Robin who introduced him to a couple named Lambton.

  ‘He’s the celebrity of the evening – the only survivor of the La Guardia crash. You’ll have seen his photograph in the papers last week. We’re very lucky and pleased to have him with us.’

  The woman, a psychologist of some sort, goggled at him and, after listening to an even shorter account of the crash, urged Harland to find some counselling. The man looked on indulgently while his wife got closer and closer to Harland. When she drew breath, Lambton told him that he was in property and often visited New York. Could Harland advise him where to stay? He was tired of The Pierre and wanted somewhere younger and fresher.

  ‘To take his girlfriends to,’ chipped in his wife, with a high nervous laugh.

  Harland’s eyes drifted across the room to a pretty woman in her early forties who was talking to Harriet. At that moment Harriet revolved and beckoned furiously, which allowed Harland to excuse himself from the Lambtons.

  ‘This is Anne White,’ she said when he reached them, ‘now divorced from one of Robin’s partners. Anne has been telling me that she’s going to dinner with Luke Hammick and his wife, around the corner, but that they are coming here first. Guess who else they’re having to dinner this evening?’

  Harland shrugged good-naturedly.

  ‘Davina and Walter Vigo. And even better news is that the Hammicks are proposing to bring the Vigos here beforehand for a quick drink. You and Walter will be able to catch up on old times.’

  Anne White looked on with interest, trying to fathom the underlined nature of Harriet’s delivery.

  Harland muttered, ‘Don’t worry, Hal, he can’t come.’

  ‘Oh, but you’re quite wrong,’ she said brightly. ‘In fact, they’re here now.’ She left with a whispered, ‘Bloody brass neck.’

  Harland turned and saw a couple in the doorway being greeted by Robin who was bobbing furiously. Beyond them he could see Walter Vigo in the hall talking to one of the children. The sight struck him as bizarre. Children weren’t part of Vigo’s universe. Indeed, Walter Vigo at a Christmas party seemed an
odd idea. Vigo looked up and caught sight of Harland and, without changing his expression, nodded imperceptibly. Harland turned back to Anne White.

  ‘So you’re a spy,’ she said with a challenging smile.

  Harland shook his head.

  ‘You must be if you work with Walter Vigo. Everyone knows he’s something important in the Foreign Office, which means spook in any language.’

  ‘I don’t work with Walter Vigo,’ he said. ‘I look at water pipes for a living.’

  She continued with one or two more flirtatious sallies. Harland smiled down at her and parried a little.

  Soon the children were lined up in front of the Christmas tree with two friends and required to sing a carol. Robin stood, hands clasped in front of him in frozen applause. When they had finished he turned to his guests with a wide grin, which Harland guessed had concluded many advertising presentations, and wished everyone a happy Christmas. He coughed once and added, ‘We are also much relieved this year to have Bobby, Harriet’s peripatetic brother, staying with us. As some of you may know, Bobby only last week escaped a terrible air crash in New York. He was the sole survivor and, as you can see, has managed to make the journey here to be with his family for Christmas. Bobby, we thank providence for your survival.’