"A spy by nature" by Charles Cumming

An audio book.

Alec is 24, doing a useless job. He has a friend Saul from his LSE days. He applies for a Foreign Office job and gets put onto a spy-suitability exercise for 2 days. He's one of 5. He asks about the role of spouses, and though he broke up with Kate, an actress, 6 months before, tells some people they're still together. He tells them her address. He's not accepted.

In part 2 he's working for Abnex - an oil company with interests in the Caspian Sea. His boss is Hawkes. He befriends Caroline and her 20 years old husband Ford, both american, who work for a rival oil company. When, after 6 months, he complains to them about his work, they offer him money for information. He asks if that's why they befriended him. They half admit it. But all along we know that this is what Alec wanted. He's been assessing their performance - and his own.

Ford deals with the business/admin issues, Cathy with the emotional side. Maybe she really likes him? He gets £10k per drop. At work his boss Cohen begins to suspect him. The double deception tires Alec. He wants to open up to Saul, who's friends with the couple. He asks for £200k in return for some especially important info. He passes it over to them (it's fake), but Cohen from work catches him out. Cohen tells him that he's off on a 3 week business trip and expects Alec to have sorted things out by then. 2 people in Abnex know what Alec is doing (the job is just a cover to investigate the 2 CIA spies), but all the same, Cohen complicates matters. Alec contacts his spy boss and is alarmed when a few days later he hears that Cohen has been badly assaulted. He has nobody to talk to - Saul's away - so he contacts Kate for the first time in 2 years. In her flat (where there's evidence of a sleep-over boyfriend) he tells her everything (filling in for us some of the plot between parts 1 and 2). He says he played a role which made him look vulnerable to corruption. He doesn't perhaps realise that his personality is similar to that role. When she probes for details he provides them!

He phones Cathy because his spy boss has said that the couple's activity has been strange since the info transfer - Ford has dashed to the States. She knows he's seen Kate, but gives nothing else away.

He reads about Philby - how his deception was uncovered and what happened.

He phones Cathy again. She knows about him - they'd bugged Kate's place because he'd lied that they still slept together. He's taken for questioning by his bosses. They politely ask how it went wrong - 100s of millions of dollars were at stake. He threatens to tell the press about it all unless they promise to protect his mother and friends. That night Blair wins the election - a young man who's achieved his ambitions while many others face defeat. He transfers money to a private account.

He and Saul drive to Devon for a holiday. He suspects they're being followed. They get a phonecall - Kate's died in a car crash. He phones Cathy, his spy boss, his boss's boss. They're all out. He guesses that the UK secret service are hoping that they'll eliminate him too - part of the special arrangement. He decides to tell Saul about the case, making sure they're not being bugged.

I was wondering if he already knew.

Part 1 seems expendable to me.

Other reviews

• Leo Benedictus (a readable, if slightly contrived, yarn, let down badly by flat characters, stale prose and a charmless hero. Alec Milius's simplistic pronouncements on the real motives behind human behaviour may be typical of an arrogant and solitary young man, but that does not make them any less irritating.)
• speeshreads (Both sides are playing at something they aren’t and I think both sides know it. It’s just that it goes on and on and on and on in the central part of the novel. ... I really expected a lot more from A Spy By Nature. But I got a lot less. Less plot, less suspense and tension and less of a story. ... I think this is essentially a short story padded out to 500-odd pages. A back of an envelope plot stretched to breaking point. And beyond. And then some.)