Alec Milius Spy Series Books 1 and 2: A Spy By Nature, The Spanish Game. Charles Cumming
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school or university who spend a lot of their time just sitting around or wasting away in dead-end jobs.’
I sure do. I’m one of them.
‘I don’t have that many friends,’ I tell him. ‘But yes, there are a lot of people who come out of higher education and feel that their choices are limited. People with good degrees with nowhere to go.’
Hawkes coughs, as if he hasn’t been listening. ‘And this job you’re doing at the moment. I suspect it’s a waste of your time, yes?’
The remark catches me off guard, but I have to admire his nerve.
‘Fair enough.’ I smile. ‘But it’s not a waste of time anymore. I quit over the weekend.’
‘Did you now?’ His reply does not disguise a degree of surprise, perhaps even of pleasure. Is it possible that Hawkes really does have some plan for me, some opportunity? Or am I simply clinging to the impossible hope that Liddiard and his colleagues have made an embarrassing mistake?
‘So what are you going to do?’ he asks.
‘Well, right now it looks as though I’m going to become one of those people who spend a lot of their time just sitting around.’
He laughs at this, breaking into a rare smile that stretches his face like a clown. Then he looks me in the eye, that old paternal thing, and says, ‘Why don’t you come and work for me?’
The offer does not surprise me. Somehow I had expected it. A halfway house between CEBDO and the coveted world of espionage. A compromise. A job in the oil business.
‘At your company? At Abnex?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m very flattered.’
‘You have Russian, don’t you? And a grounding in business?’
‘Yes,’ I reply confidently.
‘Well then, I would urge you to think about it.’
We have stopped walking. I look down at the ground, drawing my right foot up and down on the grass. Perhaps I should say more about how grateful I am.
‘This is extraordinary,’ I tell him. ‘I’m amazed by how–‘
‘There is something I would need to ask in return,’ he says, before I become too gushy.
I look at him, trying to gauge what he means, but his face is unreadable. I simply nod as he says, ‘If you decided that you wanted to take up a position…’ Then he stalls. ‘What are your feelings, instinctively? Is oil something you’d like to become involved in?’
In my confused state, it is almost impossible to decide, but I am intrigued by Hawkes’s caveat. What would he ask for in return?
‘I would need to get my head together a little bit, to think things through,’ I tell him, but no sooner have the words come out than I am thinking back to what he said about my father. His ambition. His need to improve himself, and I add quickly, ‘But I can’t think of any reason why I would want to throw away an opportunity like that.’
‘Good. Good,’ he says.
‘Why? What would you need me to do?’
The question sets us moving again, walking slowly down a path toward Park Lane.
‘It’s nothing that would be beyond you.’
He smiles at this, but the implication is clandestine. There is something unlawful here that Hawkes is concealing.
‘Sorry, Michael. I’m not understanding.’
He turns and looks behind us, almost as if he feels we are being followed. A reflex ingrained into his behaviour. But it’s just a group of four or five schoolchildren kicking a football fifty metres away.
‘Abnex has a rival,’ he says, turning back to face me. ‘An American oil company by the name of Andromeda. We would need you to befriend two of their employees.’
‘Befriend?’
He nods.
‘Who is “we”?’ I ask.
‘Let’s just say a number of interested parties, both from the government side and private industry. All I can tell you firmly at this stage is that you would need to maintain absolute secrecy, in exactly the same way as was described to you during your selection procedure for SIS.’
‘So this has something to do with them?’
He does not respond.
‘Or MI5? Are they the “alternative” you were talking about on the phone yesterday?’
Hawkes breathes deeply and looks to the sky, but a satisfied expression on his face seems to confirm the truth of this. Then he continues walking. ‘Five might be interested in using you as a support agent,’ he says. ‘On a trial basis.’
I am astonished by this. ‘Already?’
‘It’s something that just popped up in the last couple of weeks. A rather discreet operation, in actual fact. Off the books.’ A dog runs across our path and vanishes into some long grass. ‘My contact there, John Lithiby, can’t use his regular employees and needs some fresh fruit off the tree. So I suggested your name…’
‘I can’t believe this.’
‘There’d be a job for you at the other end,’ he says, ‘if the operation is a success.’
I feel flattered, stunned. ‘You’re talking about a job with MI5?’ I am shaking my head, almost laughing. ‘Just for befriending some Americans?’
Hawkes turns and looks back down the path, as if searching for the dog, then faces me and smiles. He appears oddly proud, as if he has fulfilled a longstanding pledge to my father. ‘Questions, questions,’ he mutters. Then he puts his arm across my back, the right hand squeezing my shoulder, and says, ‘Later, Alec. Later.’
PART TWO
1996
Making millions on sheer gall. American Dream.
—John Updike, Rabbit Redux
ELEVEN
Caspian
The offices of Abnex Oil occupy five central storeys in an eyesore Broadgate high-rise about six minutes’ walk from Liverpool Street station.
The company was founded in 1989 by a City financier named Clive Hargreaves, who was just thirty-five years old at the time. Hargreaves had no A levels and no formal higher education, just a keen business sense and an instinctive, immediate grasp of the market opportunities presented by the gradual collapse of communism in the Eastern bloc and, later, the former Soviet Union. With private investment attached to a chunk of money he’d made in the City during the Thatcher–Lawson boom, Hargreaves expanded Abnex from a small outfit employing fewer than one hundred people into what is now the third largest oil-exploration company in the UK. At the start of the decade, Abnex had minor contracts in Brazil, the North Sea, Sakhalin, and the Gulf, but Hargreaves’s masterstroke was to realize the potential of the Caspian Sea before many of his competitors had done so. Between 1992 and early 1994, he negotiated well-workover agreements with the nascent governments of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan, and sent down teams of geologists, contractors, and lawyers to Baku with a view to identifying the most promising well sites in the region. The Caspian is now awash with international oil companies, many of them acting as joint ventures and all competing for their chunk of what are proven oil reserves. Abnex is better placed than many of them to reap the benefits when the region goes online.
On New Year’s Day 1995, Hargreaves was killed riding pillion on a motorcycle in northern Thailand. The driver, his best friend, wasn’t drunk or high; he