The Network (6 page)

I’m a few minutes from home after this little detour when an unfamiliar sight catches my eye. A bright-red late-model Alfa Romeo is parked on the grassy verge with its hazard lights flashing. It’s an odd place to leave a car. There’s nothing to stop for nearby except empty fields. I slow up alongside and can see that the front wheels have spun themselves into the soft ground. I can see heat rising off the bonnet. Someone has got stuck and needs to be towed out.

I drive on and a hundred yards later see a figure up ahead. It must be the driver: a dark-haired woman, walking on the verge with her back to me. As I draw closer I can’t help noticing how well proportioned she is. She’s wearing a short wine-coloured jacket embroidered with what look like flowers and beads, dark close-fitting trousers and knee-high boots in cream and brown leather. They’re expensive, city clothes and look out of place on a country lane in Wiltshire. She turns her head as she hears Gerhardt’s engine and turns back again without changing pace, and I catch a glimpse of a shapely, Far Eastern-looking face.

She makes no effort to stop me as I pass, so I pull over just ahead of her. Leaning over to lower the passenger window I see the striking features of a thirty-year-old woman with long jet-black hair and high cheekbones. Her eyes are dark, narrow and intense, and their opposing curves resemble a pair of leaping dolphins. She brushes a strand of hair from her forehead, and comes to the window with an anxious smile. She looks Japanese, and is very beautiful.

‘Nice parking,’ I say. A soft leather handbag is slung over her left shoulder. In her right hand is a mobile phone, which she waves in a gesture of embarrassment.

‘Can you help me?’ she asks. ‘No signal!’ She sounds Russian, which is unexpected. ‘I have to make a phone call. Do you know where there’s a telephone?’

‘There’s no reception here,’ I say. ‘I have the same problem.’ I’m feeling in my pocket for my phone, then realise I’ve left it at home. ‘Maybe I can help,’ I suggest, because it’s not every day you get to come to the aid of an Oriental damsel in distress. ‘I have a rope,’ I tell her, wondering how I’ll extricate it from under half a ton of logs. ‘We can drive back to your car and try to pull it out.’

I open the passenger door for her, and apologise for the logs that have fallen into the front of the car. She looks hesitantly for a moment at the debris of bark on the seat.

‘You are
farmer
?’

I can’t explain I’ve been stealing wood, so the simplest thing is to agree.

‘I live here,’ I say, brushing off the seat and throwing a few logs into the back. Her accent is definitely Russian, though by her looks she’s from central Asia. She smiles, gives a girlish shrug of assent, and climbs aboard.

‘My name is Anthony,’ I say, feeling unexpectedly nervous to have such a beautiful stranger by my side. I turn the car around.

‘Anthony,’ she repeats. ‘I can call you Tony?’

‘Absolutely not. My friends call me Ant. Like the animal.’ I make a crawling motion on the dashboard. She laughs, and the slender gold circles of her earrings dangle with the motion of her head.

‘My name is Ziyba,’ she says.

‘The word for beautiful.’

‘My God!’ she squeals. ‘You speak Uzbek! How is it possible?’

‘A farmer knows many things,’ I say. I don’t actually speak a word of Uzbek, but the word has the same meaning in Persian, which I know well enough.

‘I am lucky to find such a farmer,’ she says with irony. But I’m the one who can’t believe my luck. Her jacket has fallen open and my eye has been caught by the contours of her sweater and the medallion-like buckle of her belt, which is made from concentric circles of pink coral beads. I’ve almost driven past her stranded car when I hear her point it out, and pull over. I retrieve the tow rope from under the seat, and make a show of effort hooking up the U-bolts to the towing brackets of both cars.

‘Start the engine and drive forward gently, and let’s see what happens.’

I drive ahead of her, take up the slack very slowly and in the mirror watch as the Alfa rolls onto the road. Then we both get out to admire our success.

‘It worked!’ She’s beaming. ‘Thank you,’ she says. There’s an awkward pause. I live half a mile away and haven’t the courage to ask her back for a coffee. I roll up the tow rope and throw it back into the car, but I can’t bear to see her go. She’s like a bird of paradise that’s landed in my lap, and I’m racking my brains for an idea that will stop her from disappearing.

‘If you need to make a phone call, you can follow me to a pub. It’s just two minutes away.’

She shrugs again after a moment’s thought, and agrees to drive behind me.

It’s my local, but I’m not there very often. A couple of scruffy-looking local cars are parked outside, as well as a powerful grey BMW, looking very out of place. We walk in together through the back door, where I point out the payphone in the corridor. I check if she has change for the phone, and ask if I can buy her a drink.

‘Just a mineral water,’ she says, smiling.

I push open the door to the bar and smell the smoke and beer. A few locals are sitting at tables with their drinks. Standing at the bar itself is a solitary man with his back to me, wearing a Barbour that has lost its shine. I order a mineral water and a pint of local beer, and glance at the man a few feet from me, who’s peering thoughtfully into his glass. The drinks appear. I take a few sips of beer as I wait and glance back at the door, but as the minutes pass I lose patience and walk back to see if I can help Ziyba. The corridor’s empty.

Outside, Gerhardt is where I’ve left him, but the Alfa has gone. I feel a pang of disappointment, and walk back to the bar, feeling desolate and stupid. Then, as I raise my glass to my lips, I hear a distinctly upper-class English voice say, ‘You look like someone who’s just been stood up.’

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.’