Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  Angel listened to his old boss and mentor, his friend Nick Roux.

  *

  The new director general came from King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape, and in the DG’s palatial office Angel spoke Xhosa.

  “I need some time off, sir.”

  The director didn’t answer him.

  “Brief me on Asher Karni.”

  “He’s a dual national, South African and Israeli. ‘Businessman’. We’re sure he’s been supplying nuclear technology to Pakistan. We need to raid his home near Cape Town. Sea Point, I believe.”

  “No time off, Angel,” the DG said. “There’s this Pakistan connection and an al-Qaeda threat. You are my Arabist. I’m under pressure from above. She who must be obeyed.”

  The director reported to the Minister of Intelligence Services, her parents ANC activist friends of the President from the time of exile in Lusaka. It put additional pressure on the DG.

  “Now is not the time.”

  Angel had expected his response.

  “There’s a funeral in Johannesburg. And I need to go to England.”

  “Where in England?”

  “London, then possibly somewhere called Eli or Elee. I don’t know how to say it.”

  “Is your English still all right, Angel?” the DG asked him.

  “Sir. If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart. Mandela.”

  The director paused and looked at him.

  “Yes, Angel. I remember.”

  Angel stood at the door when the DG called to him.

  “Oh, Angel.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The minister wants to give your old mentor an award.”

  “Nick Roux?”

  “She’s recommending that Mr Roux should get an Intelligence Lifetime Award from the President himself.”

  “He deserves it,” said Angel.

  *

  In Arcadia, Angel picked up the phone.

  “Hello, Jumbo.”

  “Angel, my dear fellow. Unjani?”

  “Ngikhona, Jumbo.”

  Twenty-eight

  Angel found the door by the sound that certain Englishmen make, a sort of shy whinny. Other than that the London Ship Club would have been impossible to find. A very small sign by the entry bell gave it away, but only to those that knew the club burgee.

  Joshua ‘Jumbo’ Cameron had been vague with directions when he’d called Angel at his office in Pretoria.

  “The LSC. It’s a sailing club. In the City, by the river. Cruisers for the most part. We tried some racing but there were too many arguments. Upset the bar staff.”

  He had insisted they met on a Tuesday, club night, full of bores like him and noisy so that no one would hear them talk. They’d been friends since boarding school, had shared pointless early morning runs through foggy cold town streets, elm leaves rustling under their feet. It came as a surprise to both that they’d ended up as opposite numbers in similar organisations, although through very different ways.

  Jumbo lowered himself carefully into a deep leather chair, his drooping jowls rattling like halyards against a mast, and ordered a beer.

  “Difficult to get a decent pint anywhere in London,” he moaned.

  “Not even The Northumberland Arms?” Angel asked him.

  “I wish.”

  Jumbo’s department had moved office nine years previously to the old Imperial Chemical Industries headquarters at Thames House. He missed Bloomsbury.

  “The old Northumberland Arms on Gower Street used to pull such a good pint at lunchtime. Not that anyone drinks at lunchtime anymore.”

  Jumbo missed that too.

  “The new place is handy for the club though.”

  “And convenient for the south side of the river,” Angel said.

  Jumbo’s ‘business partners’ had moved at the same time from Century House in Lambeth, to be closer to the river near Vauxhall Bridge.

  “Yes, that too,” agreed Jumbo. “By the way, how is Nick Roux?”

  “Bored.”

  “A very clever man. Send him my sincere best wishes for a peaceful retirement.”

  It surprised Angel that Jumbo thought so highly of his old boss. Angel and Jumbo were the same age but Jumbo had been in the Security Service for thirty years. Angel wondered if he had thoughts of his own retirement.

  Jumbo had been a member of the London Ship Club for just as long and had seated Angel for dinner in between an old woman who smelt of cats on his left and a tall man in an inky dark suit on his right; Angel wondered if he worked as an undertaker.

  Jumbo spoke of the people either side of Angel as though they weren’t there. He didn’t introduce them.

  “These two? There are just two types of people in the world, Angel. Those you’d want to be in a life raft with and those you wouldn’t.”

  Jumbo didn’t clarify to which group they belonged.

  The wine waiter came around and Angel said, “Obrigado.”

  “So, Angel, lots of languages still? I speak some French. Not very well. Seems to depend on whether I’m buying or selling. If I’m buying they understand me perfectly. If selling they haven’t got a clue. Odd.”

  The waiter from Evora poured.

  “Ah. A Côtes du Rhône. Not sure which côte.”

  Jumbo drank deeply and thoughtfully. Angel imagined he needed to think about the wine.

  “You need a lawyer, Angel. Club’s full of them. You’re sitting next to one. Known him for years. Wouldn’t trust him with toffees.” He leant forward. “He’s the sort of man who would try and trick a new boy with the port.” Jumbo reminded himself of the wine. “Lovely to see you, dear boy. Can you tell me why you are here? Woman problems? Women?”

  Angel looked at the two people beside him: the tall thin pallid lawyer and the malodorous old woman. He assumed they were both members of the sailing club but couldn’t imagine either of them being tossed around on a small yacht.

  “Don’t worry, Angel. All safe here. He’s deaf and she’s stupid. They both think I’m with MI5.”

  Jumbo laughed.

  “You know why we still call it that, Angel?”

  Angel shook his head.

  “Because if we were known by our real name people would have to call us the SS.” Jumbo curled himself into a round ball with laughter, unable to speak. “Can you imagine? The UK’s internal spying organisation. The SS. I ask you, who thought that up? Not that I work for them.”

  Angel couldn’t hide his surprise.

  “You work for SIS now?”

  “No, not really. Sort of in between the two.”

  He’s a hybrid, thought Angel, probably always has been; running a department with no name.

  “Intelligence-gathering is not that clear-cut, as you well know, Angel.”

  Angel did know – from years of service in departments with ever-changing acronyms. He knew that the Security Service in the UK concentrated on domestic threats and the Secret Intelligence Service provided foreign intelligence. He knew the problem here, as at home in South Africa, was that many domestic threats originated overseas and demanded foreign intelligence.

  “The lines get blurred, you see,” said Jumbo.

  “And WMD?” Angel asked.

  “A good example, Angel. In fact, for a long while that was my particular pigeon. It’s the responsibility of the Security Service to control the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, most of which is by rogue foreign states and outside of the UK. Blurred lines again.”

  “Rogue foreign states like South Africa?”

  “We thought so at one time.”

  Angel passed him a blue file.

  “Ah, lovely,” said Jumbo. “You’re going to give me a blow job
.”

  Angel knew the joke. In the old Service between the wars decoded messages had been circulated in blue-jacketed files known as Blue Jobs or BJs. They hadn’t anticipated today’s more physically intimate interpretation.

  Not for the first time Angel wondered about the British. He had been born in London, sent to school in Dorset and could have easily followed a path like Jumbo’s. He respected them but he’d never understood them. They had a way of being flippant with serious matters and yet intensely serious about trivia.

  Jumbo glanced inside the blue jacket.

  “Ah yes. Mr Phillips. I wondered when he’d crop up.”

  Jumbo drank some wine and turned to look at the bar.

  “Zac’s over there, look. Say hello.”

  Angel nodded to a large and bald man who raised a dimpled mug in salute.

  “He tells everyone he’s a management consultant. Brilliant. People don’t have any idea what he does but no one ever asks.” Jumbo concentrated on his wine glass. “An accidental encounter started it all,” he said. “I think it may have been January ’82, the year some idiot vice-commodore organised a freezing cold winter rally to Yarmouth that nearly killed off half the members.”

  Angel had always assumed that Jumbo had sent Zac to South Africa in a mad rush, not a thought about his cover, to tickle things up a bit and see if anything crawled out of the woodwork. He probably shouldn’t have sent him but there had been, as Angel knew, an interesting development.

  “Zac had drawn a big blank until luckily bumping into a teenage English backpacker, Ralph Phillips. Together they got as high as kites on a beach and out came a tale of where Ralph had been and what he’d seen,” Jumbo explained. “Zac couldn’t believe his luck. Until then he’d thought he would be coming home empty-handed, tail between his legs.”

  Jumbo waved an empty bottle in the direction of the waiter.

  “In December 1981 Ralph flew to Johannesburg, nearly twenty-two years ago. Would you like me to tell all?” Jumbo asked. “I felt like the son of Nun.”

  *

  Jumbo Cameron beamed cordially at other diners around the restaurant of the London Ship Club but Angel knew he wasn’t acknowledging old sailors, only anxious of the whereabouts of his new Portuguese friend, the wine waiter from Evora.

  “Zac and I met Ralph on a train to Dorset,” said Jumbo, relieved when bottles appeared at their end of the table. “His name went on a report, no further action, and Ralph gets on with his life. Less than a year later the name flagged up. For some reason that I never understood he wanted to be a soldier and he’d gotten into trouble.”

  Ralph had joined the British Army. Other boys from his school forged ahead with service careers but Ralph stumbled. He found this difficult to reconcile because he loved it. He loved the daily physicality, absorbing new skills like a military sponge, the variety of training challenges. The problem turned out to be most of the other soldiers. He found them often inflexible and became frustrated by their sometimes lethargic thought processes and sluggish responses to situational changes. It wasn’t a one-way street. Other soldiers had a problem with him. Ralph would read instead of drink with them at a club in town on a Saturday night and then go alone to a village pub on a Sunday morning with the newspapers. In a hundred tiny ways there were unassailable breaches between them. They would turn to him to answer questions on navigation or radio procedure but exclude him from a quick kick-around on the football pitch and then not invite him to that boozer with girls known to be easy pickups. Ralph blamed himself. He had recoiled like his self-loading rifle from the chummy group camaraderie essential in army life.

  “That was a big mistake,” said Angel.

  Jumbo scratched his head.

  “When? Oh, yes. February ’83. A frosty night navigation exercise.”

  It had come to a head at Sennybridge, a thirty-seven-thousand-acre Ministry of Defence training area with a straight access road called Church Hill to the top of the Brecon Beacons, cut like a staircase in the Welsh hillside by an ambitious Royal Engineer.

  “He left his squad and found his own way home because an officer wouldn’t listen to him and continued leading them all, cold and tired, the wrong way. The Army was very impressed from what I remember. He broke some sort of record. Got back six hours before the rest of them. But not very ‘Army’, if you know what I mean. You have to sympathise with them. They can’t have soldiers just doing their own thing and leaving their platoon to muddle through in the dark.”

  To Ralph, as tired as the rest of them, the way home had seemed obvious. Even in the blackness the dogleg shape that looked even blacker could only be the forestry plantation that led to a valley and a track by a meandering stream to the waiting Bedfords. The officer preferred his soldiers to follow, quietly. Ralph had slipped away, alone.

  “So, he left. Services No Longer Required. Conduct Exemplary. He told them to take the eight-figure number starting two four six five that they’d given him and put it somewhere alimentary. Never been a great team player though, has he? That didn’t matter to me. I collared him just as he handed in his kit, minus one kitbag canvas green and one beret size seven with cap badge, and suggested he might like to see a mate of mine in London. My ‘mate’ sent him to a security firm, guards for art galleries and night watchmen for City offices, that sort of thing. Where was it? Diamond Street?”

  Jumbo scrutinised his glass to remember. Of course, Emerald Street. They had an unmarked glass door opposite the Emerald Street nick. You got buzzed in, then went upstairs for the regular office, with a pretty girl on reception, people pushing bits of paper around and a tall rangy Rupert, ex ‘vulgar-fraction’ Lancer, always on the phone haughtily selling static guards for exhibitions at the Tate Modern and the Royal Academy. And Ralph could tell Ian and Innes, the old grammar school mates he lodged with in Lewisham, that he worked ‘In security, in the control room’. Working long shifts to explain his absences from the pub. Working days and nights to explain his nocturnal movements. But he wasn’t a security guard controller. He didn’t go upstairs and chat with ‘the Sandra’ or ‘the Dawn’ when she wasn’t answering the phone. He went downstairs through an airlock, with heavy doors and a monitor in the middle, to where the real action took place, to the Trainer.

  “The renowned Trainer. Didn’t he have a surname like a Christian name? Allen? Tom?” Jumbo asked the old woman, who beamed with pleasure at his attention.

  “Peter. John Peter. That’s right, the retired six foot seven Welsh Guards warrant officer, with a scary scarred face cratered from some childhood pox, a Queen’s Gallantry Medal, and a dapper line in brown shoes and brown hats to go with his pinstripe in town.”

  Jumbo started eating.

  “I remember the Trainer particularly liked it when he came back with the complete airline meal on the little tray it’s served on.”

  It had been one of those silly tasks like getting a footballer’s signature or your photo with a topless model, tasks that can reveal so much. Of special note to the Trainer was how well he’d taught him to lie. Ralph convincingly told him that he’d gently persuaded a plump and understanding stewardess to give him the meal tray and that he’d then ravenously eaten it all on the Tube home. The Trainer remembered being very impressed by how well Ralph did it. He wanted to believe him. Alas it became clear to him that Ralph had helped himself to a used one from a rubbish skip at the airport. The coffee stains in the little plastic cup had given him away. It ended up as a small black mark to an otherwise faultless performance.

  “You did use untrained people,” said Angel.

  Jumbo just smiled. It had been a project developed initially by some free-thinking high flyers at the Home Office for cheap but valuable domestic surveillance. Sometimes the recruits were military, but from any rank and with diverse periods of service and from any branch. Equally they could come from the Civil Service, or from one of the professions. Th
e Church had provided notable recruits, including a young vicar from Tyne and Wear, a keen amateur boxer, who had beaten up two youths he’d found trying to steal the church silver. Fleet Street had provided an investigative journalist sacked by his paper before he discovered too much about his editor’s dodgy business dealings and cocaine-fuelled wife-swapping parties with a Chief of Police. Occasionally they came from people destined for nationally important British companies, or strategically important British industries. The recruits were given some one-to-one basic tradecraft, which it had never been expected they would need, but it gave an opportunity to evaluate if they were interested and whether they were interesting. The Service called them ‘meerkats’.

  “You had a network of eyes and ears,” said Angel. “Like the SS,” he joked.

  “Very funny, Angel. Our meerkats were nothing sinister, not a secret society or ‘messengers of terror’. All we asked was that they occasionally stuck their head up, had a look around and warned us if there was anything nasty.”

  *

  Jumbo ate until he’d cleared his plate. Angel picked aside soft cabbage from hard chicken, the food reminding him of school.

  “Fast-forward three or four years and Ralph is at an agricultural school in Shropshire.”

  “Harper Adams,” Angel interrupted.

  Jumbo couldn’t disguise his surprise.

  “You heard?”

  Angel drank some wine, quietly.

  “Did that information come from Rietvlei?” Jumbo asked. “I’d like to talk about that sometime.”

  Angel wished he hadn’t said anything. He felt sure Jumbo would want him to trade some information in return for the help being provided.

  “We had some interests around Shropshire at that time,” Jumbo said. “Threats to RAF training bases at Shawbury and Cosford, Army barracks at Tern Hill and Copthorne, and a concern that Harper Adams might be hiding a nest of student vipers. I sent Zac to ask for Ralph’s help.”