A Spy By Nature (5 page)

“Nice going,” he says, offering me a sweaty palm.

We always shake hands afterward.

At 1:00
A.M.
, drunk and tired, I sit slumped on the backseat of an unlicensed minicab, going home to Shepherd’s Bush.

There is a plain white envelope on my doormat, second post, marked
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL.

The second interview passes like a foregone conclusion.

This time around I am treated with deference and respect by the cop on the door, and Ruth greets me at the bottom of the staircase with the cheery familiarity of an old friend.

“Good to see you again, Mr. Milius. You can go straight up.”

Throughout the morning there is a pervading sense of acceptance, a feeling of gradual admission to an exclusive club. My first encounter with Lucas was clearly a success. Everything about my performance that day has impressed them.

In the secretarial enclave, Ruth introduces me to Patrick Liddiard, who exudes the clean charm and military dignity of the typical Foreign Office man. This is the face that built the empire: slim, alert, colonizing. He is impeccably turned out in gleaming brogues and a wife-ironed shirt that is tailored and crisp. His suit, too, is evidently custom-made, a rich gray flannel cut lean against his slender frame. He looks tremendously pleased to see me, pumping my hand with vigor, cementing an immediate connection between us.

“Very nice to meet you,” he says. “Very nice indeed.”

His voice is gentle, refined, faintly plummy, exactly as his appearance suggested it would be. Not a wrong note. There is a warmth suddenly about all this, a clubbable ease entirely absent on my previous visit.

The interview itself does nothing to dispel this impression. Liddiard appears to treat it as a mere formality, something to be gone through before the rigors of Sisby. That, he tells me, will be a test of mettle, a tough two-day candidate analysis comprising IQ tests, essays, interviews, and group discussions. He makes it clear to me that he has every confidence in my ability to succeed at Sisby and to go on to become a successful SIS officer.

There is only one conversational exchange between us that I consider especially significant. It comes just as the first hour of the interview is drawing to a close.

We have finished discussing the European monetary union—issues of sovereignty and so on—when Liddiard makes a minute adjustment to his tie, glances down at the clipboard in his lap, and asks me, very straightforwardly, how I would feel about manipulating people for a living.

Initially I am surprised that such a question could emerge from the apparently decent, old-fashioned gent sitting opposite me. Liddiard has been so courteous, so civilized up to this point, that to hear talk of deception from him is jarring. As a result, our conversation turns suddenly watchful, and I have to check myself out of complacency. We have arrived at what feels like the nub of the thing, the rich center of the clandestine life.

I repeat the question, buying myself some time.

“How would I feel about manipulating people?”

“Yes,” he says, with more care in his voice than he has allowed so far.

I must, in my answer, strike a delicate balance between the appearance of moral rectitude and the implied suggestion that I am capable of pernicious deceits. It is no good telling him outright of my preparedness to lie, although that is the business he is in. On the contrary, Liddiard will want to know that my will to do so is born of a deeper dedication, a profound belief in the ethical legitimacy of SIS. He is clearly a man possessed of values and moral probity: like Lucas, he sees the work of the Secret Intelligence Service as a force for good. Any suggestion that the intelligence services are involved in something fundamentally corrupt would appall him.

So I pick my words with care.

“If you are searching for someone who is genetically manipulative, then you’ve got the wrong man. Deceit does not come easily to me. But if you are looking for somebody who would be prepared to lie when and if the circumstances demanded it, then that would be something I would be capable of doing.”

Liddiard allows an unquiet silence to linger in the room. And then he suddenly smiles, warmly, so that his teeth catch a splash of light. I have said the right thing.

“Good,” he says, nodding. “Good. And what about being unable to tell your friends about what you do? Have you had any concerns about that? We obviously prefer it that you keep the number of people who know about your activities to an absolute minimum. Some candidates have a problem with that.”

“Not me. Mr. Lucas told me in my previous interview that officers are allowed to tell their parents.”

“Yes.”

“But as far as friends are concerned…”

“Of course not.”

“That’s what I’d come to understand.”

Both of us nod simultaneously. Suddenly, however, for no better reason than that I want to appear solid and reliable, I do something quite unexpected. It is unplanned and dumb. A needless lie to Liddiard that could prove costly.

“It’s just that I have a girlfriend.”

“I see. And have you told her about us?”

“No. She knows that I’m here today, but she thinks I’m applying for the Diplomatic Service.”

“Is this a serious relationship?”

“Yes. We’ve been together for almost five years. It’s very probable that we’ll get married. So she should know about this, to see if she’s comfortable with it.”

Liddiard touches his tie again.

“Of course,” he says. “What is the girl’s name?”

“Kate. Kate Allardyce.”

Liddiard writes down Kate’s name in his notes. Why am I doing this? They won’t care that I am about to get married. They won’t think any more of me for being able to sustain a long-term relationship. If anything, they would prefer me to be alone.

He asks when she was born.

“December twenty-eighth, 1971.”

“Where?”

“Argentina.”

A tiny crease saunters across his forehead.

“And what is her current address?”

I had no idea that he would ask so much about her. I give the address where we used to live together.

“Will you want to interview her? Is that why you want all this information?”

“No, no,” he says quickly. “It’s purely for vetting purposes. There shouldn’t be a problem. But I must ask you to refrain from discussing your candidature with her until after the Sisby examinations.”

“Of course.”

Then, as a savored afterthought, he adds, “Sometimes wives can make a substantial contribution to the work of an SIS officer.”

It’s 6:00
A.M.
on Wednesday, August 9. There are two and a half hours until Sisby.

I have laid out a gray flannel suit on my bed and checked it for stains. Inside the jacket there’s a powder-blue shirt at which I throw ties, hoping for a match. Yellow with faint white dots. Pistachio green shot through with blue. A busy paisley, a sober navy one-tone. Christ, I have awful ties. Outside, the weather is overcast and bloodless. A good day to be indoors.

After a bath and a stinging shave I settle down in the sitting room with a cup of coffee and some back issues of
The Economist,
absorbing its opinions, making them mine. According to the Sisby literature given to me by Liddiard at the end of our interview in July, “all SIS candidates will be expected to demonstrate an interest in current affairs and a level of expertise in at least three or four specialist subjects.” That’s all I can prepare for.

I am halfway through a profile of Gerry Adams when the faint moans of my neighbors’ early-morning lovemaking start to seep through the floor. In time there is a faint groan, what sounds like a cough, then the thud of wood on wall. I have never been able to decide whether she is faking it. Saul was over here once when they started up and I asked his opinion. He listened for a while, ear close to the floor, and made the solid point that you can only hear her and not him, an imbalance that suggests female overcompensation. “I think she wants to enjoy it,” he said, thoughtfully, “but something is preventing that.”

I put the dishwasher on to smother the noise, but even above the throb and rumble I can still hear her tight, sobbing emissions of lust. Gradually, too rhythmically, she builds to a moan-filled climax. Then I am left in the silence with my mounting anxiety.

Time is passing. It frustrates me that I can do so little to prepare for the next two days. The Sisby program is a test of wits, of quick thinking and mental panache. You can’t prepare for it, like an exam. It’s survival of the fittest.

Grab your jacket and go.

The Sisby examination center is at the north end of Whitehall. This is the part of town they put in movies as an establishing shot to let audiences in South Dakota know that the action has moved to London: a wide-angle view of Nelson’s Column, with a couple of double-decker buses and taxis queuing up outside the broad, serious flank of the National Gallery. Then cut to Harrison Ford in his suite at The Grosvenor.

The building is a great slab of nineteenth-century brown brick. People are already starting to go inside. There is a balding man in a gray uniform behind a reception desk enjoying a brief flirtation with power. He looks shopworn, overweight, and inexplicably pleased with himself. One by one, Sisby candidates shuffle past him, their names ticked off on a list. He looks nobody in the eye.

“Yes?” he says to me impatiently, as if I were trying to gate-crash a party.

“I’m here for the Selection Board.”

“Name?”

“Alec Milius.”

He consults the list, ticks me off, gives me a flat plastic security tag.

“Third floor.”

Ahead of me, loitering in front of a lift, are five other candidates. Very few of them will be SIS. These are the prospective future employees of the Ministry of Agriculture, Social Security, Trade and Industry, Health. The men and women who will be responsible for policy decisions in the governments of the new millennium. They all look impossibly young.

To their left a staircase twists away in a steep spiral and I begin climbing it, unwilling to wait for the lift. The stairwell, like the rest of the building, is drab and unremarkable, with a provincial university aesthetic that would have been considered modern in the mid-1960s. The third-floor landing is covered in brown linoleum. Nicotine-yellow paint clings to the walls. My name, and those of four others, have been typed on a sheet of paper that is stuck up on a pockmarked notice board.

COMMON ROOM B3: CSSB (SPECIAL)

ANN BUTLER

MATTHEW FREARS

ELAINE HAYES

ALEC MILIUS

SAM OGILVY

A woman—a girl—who can’t be much older than twenty is standing in front of the notice board, taking in what it has to say. She appears to be reading an advertisement requesting blood donors. She doesn’t turn to look at me; she just keeps on reading. She has pretty hair, thick black curls tied halfway down with a dark blue velvet band. Strands of it have broken free and are holding on to the fabric of her tartan jacket. She is tall with thin spindly legs under a knee-length skirt. Wearing tights. A pair of thick National Health glasses obliterates the shape and character of her face.

A middle-aged man comes around the corner and passes her at the top of the stairs. She turns to him and says, “Hello. By any chance you wouldn’t know where Common Room B3 is, would you?”

She has a Northern Ireland accent, full of light and cunning. That was brave of them to take her on. Imagine the vetting.

The man, probably a Sisby examiner, is more helpful than I expect him to be. He says yes of course and points to a room no more than ten feet away on the far side of the landing with
B3
clearly written on the door. The girl looks embarrassed not to have noticed this but he makes nothing of it and heads off down the stairs.

“Good start, Ann,” she says under her breath, but the remark is directed at me. “Hello.”

“Hi. I’m Alec.”

“This Alec?” She is tapping
ALEC MILIUS
on the notice board.

“The same.”

Her skin is very pale and lightly freckled. She has a slightly witchy way about her, a creepy innocence.

“I’m so nervous,” she says. “Are you? Did you find it okay?”

“Yes, I did. Where are you from?”

“Northern Ireland.”

We are walking into B3. Cheap brown sofas, dirty windowpanes, a low MFI table covered in newspapers.

“Oh. Which town?”

“Do you know Enniskillen?”

“I’ve heard of it, yes.”

Old men with medals pinned to their chests, severed in two by the IRA. Maybe an uncle of hers, a grandpa.

“And you?”

“I’m English.”

“Aye. I could tell by your accent.”

“I live here. In London.”

The small talk here is meaningless, just words in a room, but the beats and gaps in the conversation are significant. I note Ann’s sly glances at my suit and shoes, the quick suspicion in her wide brown eyes.

“Which part of London?”

“Shepherd’s Bush.”

“I don’t know that.”

No talk for a moment while we survey the room, our home for the next forty-eight hours. The carpet is a deep, worn brown.

“Do you want a drink?” she asks, but her smile is too full of effort. There is a machine in the corner surrounded by polystyrene cups, threatening appalling coffee.

“I’m all right, thanks.”

A gnomic man appears now in the doorway of the common room, carrying a brown leather satchel. He looks tired and bewildered, encumbered by the social ineptitude of the fabulously intelligent.

“Is this B3?” he asks. His hair is unbrushed.

“Yes,” Ann says, keenly.

He nods, clearly heavy with nerves. A hobbit of a man. He shuffles into the room and sits across from me in an armchair that has sponge pouring out of its upholstery. Ann seems to have decided against coffee, moving back toward the window at the back of the room.

“So you’re either Sam or Matthew,” she asks him. “Which one?”

“Matt.”

“I’m Alec,” I tell him. We are near each other and I shake his hand. The palm is damp with lukewarm sweat.

“Nice to meet you.”

Ann has swooped in, bending over to introduce herself. The Hobbit is nervous around women. When she shakes his hand, his eyes duck to the carpet. She fakes out a smile and retreats below a white clock with big black hands that says half past eight.

Not long now.

I pick up a copy of
The Times
from the low table and begin reading it, trying to remember interesting things to say about Gerry Adams. Matt takes a cereal bar out of his jacket pocket and begins tucking into it, oblivious of us, dropping little brown crumbs and shards of raisin on his Marks & Spencer blazer. It has occurred to me that in the eyes of Liddiard and Lucas, Matt and I have something in common, some shared quality or flaw that is the common denominator among spies. What could that possibly be?

Ann looks at him.

“So what do you do, Matt?”

He almost drops the cereal bar in his lap.

“I’m studying for a master’s degree at Warwick.”

“What in?”

“Computer science and European affairs.”

He says this quietly, as though he is ashamed. His skin is fighting a constant, losing battle with acne.

“So you just came down from Warwick last night? You’re staying in a hotel?”

She’s nosy, this one. Wants to know what she’s up against.

“Yeah,” he says. “Not far from here.”

I like it that he does not ask the same question of her.

A young man appears in the doorway. This must be Sam Ogilvy, the third male candidate. He has an immediate, palpable influence on the room that is controlling. He makes it his. Ogilvy has a healthy, vitamin-rich complexion, vacuous turquoise eyes, and a dark, strong jawline. He’ll be good at games, for sure, probably plays golf off eight or nine; bats solidly in the middle order and pounds fast, flat serves at you that kick up off the court. So he’s handsome, undoubtedly, a big hit with the ladies, but a drink with the lads will come first. His face, in final analysis, lacks character, is easily forgettable. I would put money on the fact that he attended a minor public school. My guess is that he works in oil, textiles, or finance, reads Grisham on holiday, and is chummy with all the secretaries at work, most of whom harbor secret dreams of marrying him. That’s about all there is to go on.

“Good morning,” he says, as if we have all been waiting for him and can now get started. He has broad athletic shoulders that manage to make his off-the-peg suit look stylish. “Sam Ogilvy.”

And, one by one, he makes his way around the room, shaking hands, moving with the easy confidence of an £80,000 per annum salesman used to getting what he wants—a closed deal, a wage increase, a classy broad.

Ann goes first. She is reserved but warm. It’s a certainty that she’ll find him attractive. Their handshake is pleasant and formal; it says we can do business together.

The Hobbit is next, standing up from the armchair to his full height, which still leaves him a good five or six inches short. Ogilvy looks to get the measure of him pretty quickly: a bright shining nerd, a number cruncher. The Hobbit looks suitably deferential.

And now it’s my turn. Ogilvy’s eyes swivel left and scope my face. He knew as soon as he came in that I’d be the one he’s up against, the biggest threat to his candidacy. I knew it, too. Ann and Matt won’t cut it.

“How do you do? Sam.”

He has a strong, captain-of-the-school grip on him.

“Alec.”

“Have you been here long?” he asks, touching the tip of his tanned nose.

“About ten minutes,” Ann replies behind him.

“Feeling nervous?”

This goes out to anyone who feels like answering. Not me. Matt murmurs “mmmm,” which I find oddly touching.

“Yeah, me too,” says Sam, just so we know he’s like the rest of us, even if he does look like Pierce Brosnan. “You ever done anything like this before?”

“No,” says Matt, sitting down with a deep, involuntary sigh. “Just interviews for university.”

Matt picks up a Sisby booklet from the table and starts flicking through it like a man shuffling cards. For a moment, Ann is stranded in the middle of the room, as if she was on the point of saying something but decided at the last minute to remain silent on the grounds that it would have been of no consequence. Sam smiles a friendly smile at me. He wants me to like him but to let him lead. I stand up, a sudden attack of nerves.

“Where are you off to?” Ann asks, quick and awkward. “If you’re looking for the toilet it’s down the hall to the right. Just keep on going and you’ll come to it.”

She stretches out a pale arm and indicates the direction to me by swatting it from left to right. A ring on her middle finger bounces a spot of reflected sunlight around the common room.

The loo is a clean, white-painted cuboid room with smoked-glass windows, three urinals, a row of push-tap basins, and two cubicles. Half-a-dozen other candidates are crowded inside. I squeeze past them and go into one of the cubicles. It is 8:40
A.M.
Outside, one of the candidates says, “Good luck,” to which another replies, “Yeah.” Then the door leading out into the corridor swishes open and clunks shut. Somebody at the sink nearest my cubicle splashes cold water onto his face and emits a shocked, cleansing gasp.

I remain seated and motionless, feeling only apprehension. I just want to focus, to be alone with my thoughts, and this is the only place in which to do so. The atmosphere in the building is so at odds with the princely splendor of Lucas’s and Liddiard’s offices as to be almost comic. I put my head between my knees and close my eyes, breathing slowly and deliberately. Just pace yourself. You want this. Go out and get it. I can feel something inside my jacket weighing against the top of my thigh. A banana. I sit up, take it out, peel away the skin, and eat it in five gulped bites. Slow-burn carbohydrates. Then I lean back against the tank and feel the flush handle dig hard into my back.

The water has stopped running out of the taps on the other side of the cubicle door. I check my watch. The time has drifted on to 8:50
A.M.
without my keeping track of it. I slam back the lock on the door and bolt out of the cubicle. The room is empty. The corridors, too. Just get there, move it, don’t run. My black shoes clap on the linoleum floors, funneling down the corridor back to B3. I reenter, trying to look nonchalant.