A Spy by Nature. Charles Cumming

two days.

      ‘As I was saying, my name is Keith Heywood.’

      Keith’s sparse hair is grease combed and badger grey. He has skin the colour of chalk and puffy hairless arms. He looks sixty-five but is probably twenty years younger. Most of his working life has been spent in this building. He wears a light blue short-sleeved shirt and black flannel trousers with meandering creases. His shoes, also black, are at least five years old: no amount of polishing could save them now. He looks, to all intents and purposes, like a janitor.

      ‘I’m your intake manager,’ he says. ‘If you have any questions about anything at all over the course of the next two days, you come to me.’

      Everyone nods.

      ‘I’ll also be monitoring the cognitive tests. You won’t, of course, be permitted to talk to me during those.’

      This is obviously Keith’s big opening-speech gag. Ogilvy is polite enough to laugh at it. As he smiles and sniggers, he looks across and catches my eye. Rivalry.

      ‘Now,’ Keith says, clapping his hands. ‘Do you have any questions about your timetables?’

      I look down at the sheet of paper. It is headed AFS NON-QT CANDIDATES, a phrase that I do not understand. I am known only as Candidate 4.

      ‘No. No questions,’ says Ann, answering for us all.

      ‘Right,’ says Keith. ‘Let’s get started.’

      Keith lumbers down the corridor to a small classroom filled with desks in rows and orange plastic chairs. We follow close behind him like children in a museum. Once inside, he stands patiently at one end of the room beside a large wooden examiner’s table while each of us chooses a desk.

      Ann sits immediately in front of Keith. Matt settles in behind her. He places a red pencil case on the desk in front of him, which he unzips, retrieving a chewed blue Bic and a fresh pencil. Ogilvy heads for the back of the room, separating himself from the rest of us. Elaine, who is older than me, sits underneath a single-pane window overlooking the trees of St. James’s Park. She looks bored. I position myself at the desk nearest the door.

      ‘I have in my hand a piece of paper,’ says Keith, surprisingly. ‘It’s a questionnaire that I am obliged to ask you to complete.’

      He begins dishing them out. Ann, helpfully, takes two from his pile, swivelling to hand one back to Matt. She moves stiffly, from the waist and hips, as if her neck were clamped in an invisible brace.

      ‘It’s just for our own records,’ says Keith, moving between the desks. ‘None of your answers will have any bearing on the results of the Selection Board.’

      The first page of the questionnaire is straightforward: name, address, date of birth. It then becomes more complicated.

      1 What do you think are your best qualities?

      2 And weaknesses?

      3 What recent achievement are you most proud of?

      These are big subjects for nine o’clock in the morning. I ponder evasive answers, wild fictions, blatant untruths, struggling to get my brain up to speed.

      ‘Of course,’ says Keith, as we begin filling out the forms, ‘you’re not obliged to answer all of the questions. You may leave any section blank.’

      This suits me. I complete the first page and ignore all three questions, sitting quietly until the time elapses. The others, with the exception of Elaine, begin scribbling furiously. Within ten minutes, Ann is on her third page, unravelling herself with a frightening candour. Matt treats the exercise with a similar seriousness, letting it all out, telling them how he really feels. I turn to look at Ogilvy, but he catches my glance and half smiles at me. I turn away. I can’t see how much, if anything, he has written. Surely he’d be smart enough not to give anything away unless he had to?

      It’s over after twenty minutes. Keith collects the questionnaires and returns to his desk. I turn around to see Ogilvy leaning back in his chair, staring at the ceiling like a matinee idol.

      Keith coughs.

      ‘In just over ten minutes you’ll begin the group exercise,’ he says, leaning to pick up a small pile of papers from the top right corner of his desk. ‘This involves a thirty-minute discussion among the five of you on a specific problem described in detail in this document.’

      He flaps one of the sheets of paper beside his ear and then begins distributing them, one to each of us.

      ‘You have ten minutes to read the document. Try to absorb as much of it as possible. The board will explain how the assessment works once you have gone into the second examination area. Any questions?’

      Nobody says a word.

      ‘Right, then. Can I suggest that you begin?’

      This is what it says:

      A nuclear reprocessing plant on the Normandy coast, built jointly in 1978 by Britain, Holland, and France, is allegedly leaking minute amounts of radiation into a stretch of the English Channel used by both French and British fishermen. American importers of shellfish from the region have run tests revealing the presence of significant levels of radiation in their consignments of oysters, mussels, and prawns. The Americans have therefore announced their intention to stop importing fish and shellfish from all European waters, effective immediately.

      The document–which has been written from the British perspective by a fictional civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food–suggests that the American claims are nebulous. Their own tests, carried out in conjunction with the French authorities, have shown only trace levels of radiation in that section of the English Channel, and nothing in the shellfish from the area that might be construed as dangerous. The civil servant suspects an ulterior motive on the part of the Americans, who have objected in the past to what they perceive as unfair fishing quotas in European waters. They have asked for improved access to European fishing grounds, and for the French plant to be shut down until a full safety check has been carried out.

      The document suggests that the British and French ministries should present a united, pan-European resistance to face off the American demands. But there are problems. An American car company is one step away from signing a contract with the German government to build a factory near Berlin that would bring over three thousand jobs to an economically deprived area. The Germans are unlikely to do anything at this stage to upset this agreement. Ditto the Danes, who have an ongoing row with the French over a recent trade agreement. The Spanish, who would suffer more than anyone under any prolonged American export ban, will side firmly with the British and French, though their position is weakened by the fact that the peseta is being propped up by the U.S. dollar.

      It’s a fanciful scenario, but this is what we are required to talk about.

      Keith has given each of us a sheet of blank paper on which to scribble notes, but I write as little as possible. Eye contact will be important in front of the examiners: I must appear confident and sure of my brief. To be constantly buried in pages of notes will look inefficient.

      Ten minutes pass quickly. Keith asks us to gather up our things and accompany him to another section of the building. It takes about four minutes to get there.

      Two men and an elderly lady are lined up behind a long rectangular desk, like judges in a bad production of The Crucible. They have files, notepads, full glasses of water, and a large chrome stopwatch in front of them. The classroom is small and cheaply furnished, with just the one window. Somehow I expected a grander setup: varnished floors, an antique table, old men in suits peering at us over half-moon spectacles. A stranger might walk in here and be offered no hint that the three people inside are part of the most secret government department of them all. And that, of course, is as it should be. The last thing we are supposed to do is draw attention to ourselves.

      ‘Good morning,’ says the older of the two men. ‘If you’d all like to take a seat, we’ll make a start.’

      From his accent,