by Jason Elliot
I turn my head in surprise and look at the face of the man who’s been standing near me, which is now fixed on me in a broad and knowing grin.
‘Hello, Ant,’ he says quietly. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’
It’s an extraordinary coincidence. I haven’t seen the face for six or seven years. It’s broad and squarish, with a large and prominent brow framed with neat sandy-coloured hair. It has the same thin lips and prominent chin as I remember, the same mischievous eyes, and bears an uncanny resemblance to Frans Hals’ Laughing Cavalier. My most vivid memory of it is from ten years earlier, hanging upside down from the seat belt of an army Land Rover which the two of us have managed to roll over on Salisbury Plain. But it’s lost much of its boyish charm since then.
‘Captain Seethrough, I presume,’ I say with genuine astonishment. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Pronouncing his name out loud makes me want to laugh. His real name is Carlton-Cooper, or something very like it, which in an environment such as the army is as problematic as being called Hyper-Ventilate or Slashed-Peak. When he first made captain, and became Captain Carlton-Cooper, someone had the idea of calling him C3. Not long afterwards a fellow officer in a waggish mood tweaked the name to Seethrough, and for its ragging value and suggestion of lewdness, it stuck firmly. He never liked it much.
‘Well may you ask, Ant, well may you ask,’ he says, rather as if he knows something I don’t. He has the same manner of talking through his teeth in clipped tones that lends a quality of determination to everything he says, and the same playful habit of flexing his eyebrows as if a conspiracy were afoot. ‘I’d say the question is what are you doing here?’ He smiles charmingly. It’s a strange way to greet an old friend after such a long time, and I wonder for a moment whether there isn’t an hereditary streak of madness in his very distinguished family.
‘I’m here,’ I explain tolerantly, ‘because a tractor was blocking the road on my way home.’ I can’t decide whether to tell him about my unexpected encounter with the Uzbek girl, so I add, ‘I was just dropping a friend off.’
He looks at me with a smile that borders on smugness.
‘Naughty boy,’ he says as if to admonish a child. ‘Telling porkies again.’ His tone of voice suggests I’m a complete fool. I feel a mixture of resentment and curiosity towards him, which grows as he says, ‘Nice girl, though. Can’t blame you for liking her. Knew you would.’ He takes a sip from his glass and sighs with exaggerated relish. ‘God, you’ve really got proper beer in the country, haven’t you? Here.’ He passes me the untouched glass of mineral water. ‘Shall we sit?’
We move to a table in a corner of the room, facing the front door. I’m too baffled to speak.
‘Father was actually a KGB colonel, would you believe it?’ he goes on. ‘Unthinkable a few years ago. Now she works for us. Didn’t even have to twist her arm.’
‘Do you mind if I ask what you’re on about?’ I interrupt him. ‘I met that woman ten minutes ago by chance.’
‘Powerful illusion, isn’t it, chance?’ He takes a slow sip from his glass. ‘You met her because you stopped for her. You stopped for her because she was beautiful and driving a sports car. You saw her sports car because you took the long way home. You took the long way home because the road you were on was blocked by a tractor.’
‘And I suppose you’re going to tell me you put the tractor there.’ It’s too far-fetched. He’s bluffing wildly, but my mind’s racing through the possibilities. I can’t figure out how he knows I turned off the road, because I haven’t told him.
‘Actually, yes, we did. A little cash for an obliging farmer.’
‘What if I hadn’t turned off where I did?’
‘I admit we had to choose the right spot in advance. But you don’t like to be thwarted, and you do like going off-road. We knew you’d take the dirt track.’
‘I didn’t have to bring her here,’ I counter, wondering who ‘we’ are.
‘She needed to make a phone call. This is the nearest place where there’s a phone.’
‘I could have let her call from my mobile.’
‘You haven’t got your mobile with you, Ant. We know you left it at home from the last time it talked to the network. It’s called a handshake, and the transmitter density gives us a pretty good idea of the location it came from. Pretty soon all mobiles will be GPS-enabled and we’ll be able to know which pocket they’re in.’ He grins smugly and takes another sip of beer.
‘I could have taken her home,’ I say.
‘Oh, come on,’ he scoffs dismissively. ‘You’re much too old-fashioned for that.’
‘I might not have come to the bar. I could have left her in the car park.’
‘You like a drink, Ant. We both know that.’
He’s got me there. I feel strangely violated. He’s predicted my every step.
‘Why go to all the fuss?’ I asked. ‘If you wanted to meet why couldn’t you just call me like a normal person?’
He takes another sip of beer and his eyes scan the room from left to right as the glass is raised. His voice grows a little quieter.
‘This isn’t just a joke, Ant. People watch. This way, there’s nothing to show we didn’t meet by accident. No record, no phone calls, no prior meeting.’
‘Please. Who cares?’
‘The people you once nearly worked for care,’ he says, and turns to me in the manner of a parent admonishing a guilty child.
I feel the hair go up at the back of my neck. No one knows that. I’ve never told anyone. From wondering whether my old friend has lost his mind, I now have to ask myself how, unless he’s seen my personnel file at the Firm, he can possibly know about this secret chapter of my life which I buried a long time ago. My mind is scanning over the little history I really know about Seethrough.
We meet for the first time at Sandhurst, where he’s lecturing in Faraday Hall while I’m a still an officer cadet, and once again on exercise near Warminster, where we manage to topple the Land Rover. As a young lieutenant in a Guards regiment he’s rebadged during the Gulf War to operate with a branch of the SAS called the Force Projection Cell, based in Riyadh, where we meet again by chance at the end of hostilities. We see each other a few times in London after the Gulf but eventually lose touch. He’s always travelling, and the few times we speak by telephone, when I ask him what he’s doing he says he can’t talk about it. I regret the loss of contact. He’s a brave and principled soldier, gifted with charm, energy and a wide circle of distinguished friends, but I move, by choice and temperament, in less exalted circles. It occurs to me now that I’ve envied his enormous self-confidence, his freedom from introspection and his use of old-fashioned expressions that remind me of my father. But it makes sense now. My old friend Captain Seethrough has become a spy.
‘Why the approach?’ I ask casually, hoping to disguise my astonishment. ‘Am I a target? There’s not very much that’s secret about the landscaping business. I know some frogs and newts you could recruit.’
‘Don’t be facetious, Ant,’ he says, taking another sip from his glass. ‘We thought you might want to go back to Afghanistan. Courtesy of the Firm this time.’ He studies my reaction. I try not to have one. ‘There’s an op there if you want it. The Chief’s been looking for someone and I’ve managed to convince him that this one’s got your name on it. Think you might want to give it a try? Nobody’s poked around the place as much as you have, or speaks the languages.’ He pauses while the proposition sinks in. ‘You failed the first time and I’m giving you a second chance.’
‘I didn’t fail,’ I say, ‘I opted out.’
‘That’s not quite what your file says, Ant,’ he says with a sceptical tilt of his head. So he’s seen my PF after all. Then his manner changes completely and he looks around the room as if he’s just arrived.
‘Do they do food here?’ he asks loudly.
‘I haven’t got much of an appetite,’ I say.
Seethrough goes to the bar and orders two more beer
s, and I watch as he engages the barman in conversation, laughing with him as though the two of them are old friends. He has the gift of immense and apparently spontaneous charm. He can convince a complete stranger of nearly anything with what looks like untainted sincerity, and adapt his conversation to whatever subject comes up, even if he knows nothing about it. I can see he’s deliberately misleading the barman with an invented story about his reasons for being in the area, something about buying a yurt for his kids to play in. At the end of this contrived encounter, he reaches into his wallet for a note and hands it over with a theatrical flourish.
As I watch him, my thoughts are shunting back to the chapter I’ve allowed myself to forget. I didn’t fail. I wanted to join the Firm because I’d seen the effects of war first hand and believed that the weaknesses in intelligence that led to conflict could only be shored up by the more diligent use of human assets. I’d gone through the conventional channels, cleared the vetting and selection hurdles, signed Section 5 over tea in a room overlooking the Mall, and sat my qualifying tests in a gloomy office near Admiralty Arch. But the events of my personal life sent me spinning in a different direction. I was in the midst of my divorce at the time and my wife had told me I’d never see my children again if I was posted overseas. I had two young daughters and the prospect of not seeing them was too much. Then my wife had moved back to America with the girls, and my life felt as though it had been cut into small pieces.
When the trap came, I decided to walk into it rather than admit to the ongoing humiliations of my private life. A month after my QTs, while I was still under review, an old friend had contacted me out of the blue. He worked in the City and enjoyed the lifestyle that went with it. He’d introduced me to a new and distracting world, given me flying lessons in his private plane, lent me money and generally raised my spirits. Then came the offer of dinner with a married couple who liked, as he’d put it, to swing.
I’d known it was a set-up, and was deeply disappointed that my prospective employers had managed to persuade a friend to deceive me. The woman propositioned me the same evening, and I’d taken her up on the offer knowing that it would destroy my chances of a career in the Service. She looked a bit like Madonna, I now remember. But an aspiring Intelligence Branch officer can’t afford to be susceptible to sexual entrapment. He might one day be drugged while his computer is searched, or seduced into giving away secrets. The risk is too high. Shortly afterwards a curt letter had informed me that I had no future in the Service. As I’d expected.
‘Sorry,’ says Seethrough, after I briefly explain my motives for sabotaging my own career. ‘I don’t buy it. They assessed you in the old-fashioned way, and you fell for it. Don’t tell me you saw it coming. Nobody outwits the Firm.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ I say. ‘People have been known to run imaginary sources and been paid handsomely for it.’
‘Only if it suits us, Ant. Look. Someone wants you on board and I’m willing to approve it. If you don’t want the op you can forget we ever met and go back to building ponds.’
‘Landscaping,’ I correct him. ‘Ponds are only a part of what I do, but they’re arguably the most fascinating aspect.’
‘Don’t fuck about, Ant. This affects you.’
I enjoy our sparring, but he sounds serious.
‘So where do we go from here?’ I ask.
‘Talk about it outside,’ he says. As he glances at his watch he sees that his shirt cuff is wet with beer, and curses quietly.
‘There’s a sale on at Turnbull and Asser,’ I tell him.
‘Ended last week,’ he corrects me. ‘How would you know, anyway? Can you afford to buy shirts in Jermyn Street? Building homes for newts?’
‘Actually I have them made by my tailor in Rome.’ It isn’t entirely true. I only had the one shirt made because it cost so much.
‘You haven’t changed, Ant,’ he says thoughtfully as we stand up, and for a moment the mask drops and I’m reminded of the young soldier I had so much fun with. ‘But it’s nice to see you.’
We walk through the corridor to the car park, where I unlock Gerhardt. Seethrough climbs into the passenger seat and looks disapprovingly over the dashboard, then tugs absent-mindedly on one of the differential lock levers.
‘What’s wrong with an English car?’ he asks. ‘Why can’t you just have a Land Rover like a normal person?’
I ignore the question, although it’s true I occasionally long for a different car. A later-model version of Gerhardt, with full-time four-wheel drive and electronic centre-diff control.
‘Are you going to tell me about the op or not?’ I ask.
He sighs to himself, as if making way again for the serious side of his personality. He looks at me, and then out of the windscreen towards some far-off place.
‘Not right now. You’re going to go home and carry on as normal, building ponds or doing whatever it is you do. You don’t call anyone, you don’t tell anyone, you don’t write anything down. A week today, you come to Legoland at midday.’
‘Is that what they call it? Legoland?’ A picture of the Secret Intelligence Service headquarters, perched on the lip of the Thames beneath the southern end of Vauxhall Bridge, flashes into my head. It does look a bit like a giant Lego construction.
‘You go to the main entrance,’ says Seethrough, ignoring my interruption, ‘and ask for Macavity at reception. Introduce yourself as Plato, and someone will come for you.’
‘Macavity? Plato? They’re T. S. Eliot’s cats, aren’t they? That’s very original.’
‘Quite,’ he replies, ruffled.
He opens the door and turns to me just before stepping out.
‘And for God’s sake, Ant, just don’t blab about it in the meantime. Otherwise,’ he adds with a schoolteacherish look, ‘Macavity won’t be there.’
He’s alluding to the poem, a fragment of which now returns to me.
You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in a square
But when a crime’s discovered, Macavity’s not there!
The door bangs shut, and his manner changes again as he gives an uncharacteristically cheerful wave as if seeing off an old friend. For the benefit, I suppose, of whoever he thinks might be watching. Perhaps it’s his habitual tradecraft kicking in. The grey BMW slides quietly and swiftly away like a shark into deep water, and I’m alone again.
It’s only lunchtime, but already the day seems long. I head home, briefly entertaining the fantasy that as I turn into my drive I’ll see a red Alfa Romeo parked there, and the beautiful Ziyba will be waiting for me nearby.
I don’t, and she isn’t.
4
In the course of the following week I make two journeys. The first needs an accomplice. An old friend in London is happy to oblige. We’ve long ago agreed on an innocuous code word signifying alarm that can be slipped into a telephone conversation, so his suggestion that we have dinner together in London that evening sounds spontaneous enough to anyone who might be listening. It also allows me to name the restaurant, the location of which means I can walk credibly past a certain street corner in Maida Vale and, in the act of posting a letter, leave a chalk mark for an elderly lady to see on her daily walk the following morning. It’s old-fashioned, but it works, and allows me to avoid making a phone call which Seethrough’s minions are no doubt already authorised to intercept.
Halfway along Pall Mall, and sandwiched between what its occupants consider to be lesser places, stands a stone building said to be inspired by Michelangelo’s Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Nine steps lead up to dark heavy doors. It’s late morning. I check the time and walk up into the imposing entrance, where the porter, as porters are wont to do in such establishments, looks me up and down with a dour expression of enquiry.
‘Baroness K—— is expecting me in the library,’ I say.
He glances down at the papers on the kiosk counter and looks up again with a marginally more friendly expression.
‘Very good, sir.’
> I walk up the second set of steps into the flamboyant atrium. Glancing overhead I can see the graceful arcs of lead-crystal lozenges in the roof and the dark and slender Ionic columns of the upper gallery. I turn left towards the stairs, passing beneath the grand oil paintings on the walls and the marble facings in deep red and green, until I reach the cavernous opulence of the library. After the rush of traffic on the street below, the long room seems magically quiet. A few members glance discreetly up through the ritual dimness at the entry of a stranger, then return to their subdued conversations.
At the eastern end of the room stands the woman I’ve come to see, studying the spines of a row of leather-bound volumes beside the bay of a tall window. She turns and peers over her glasses just as I enter, and steps forward to meet me.
‘My dear boy,’ she says as we embrace. ‘You look more like your father every time I see you.’ And you, I think to myself, look older. It’s only been a month since our last meeting, but the radiotherapy has taken its toll on her body. She’s grown noticeably thinner, and there’s a visible space between the collar of her black cashmere sweater and the sinews of her neck. There’s a growing stoop to her bird-like frame, the bones of which seem too narrow and fragile to contain the sum of her life’s experience. Yet her movements are nimble and precise, and her voice is still charged with the quiet authority and confidence of an adviser to ministers and confidante to heads of state, and of her lifetime calling of scholar and spy. She ushers me to a marble fireplace and her voice lowers as we settle into a pair of red leather armchairs beneath a worn and austere-looking marble bust of Milton.
‘Your signal was awfully faint; I wasn’t sure if it was you. Or perhaps it’s my glasses. I lose them so often nowadays.’
‘They don’t make chalk like they used to,’ I suggest.
She presses a discreet button by the fireplace. A waiter appears a few moments later and she orders her usual, a whisky and soda with no ice. I ask for the same.
‘You’re well,’ I say.
