by Carl Neville
Well, he says, it seems to me that this is an internal matter. This is something that will have to be raised after this stage of the investigation has been properly concluded.
What if we can’t properly conclude it without all the relevant information, what if we are pursuing the wrong objectives? My question is how did Burridge get the XV2? The ROD will show his movements, will either exonerate him or make it clear that he is responsible. Why isn’t it available? Why has it been requisitioned by SSF1?
Abhi remains silent.
Can we pick up his movements through the airport sensors?
I am officially on a mandated leave.
I would regard it as a personal favour, Barrow says, swivels his Passocon round on the desk to face Abhishek.
Results? Barrow asks. He’s impatient, watching the time tick closer to his meeting with Waterston, wants something actionable, some ammunition.
Anomalous, Abhishek responds.
Meaning? Barrow says, then moderates his tone. Please…
The bio-sensors note XV2’s presence as an absence, if that makes sense. We still haven’t got hold of it in sufficient, non-contaminated quantities to be able to feed it into the system, so at the moment we have a significant loophole there and of course XV2 is just one of the substances that we know we can’t identify, so the sensors at best identify a gap in the scan and that should alert us to pay closer attention.
He senses Barrow’s impatience. Anyway. This is what we think is the trace. He gestures to a particular star-shaped gap in the molecular reading pattern. If so, then it’s pretty clear that it comes in and is picked up by the exit sensors at stand 26.
Location of that is… the stop closest to Bewes’s domicile, correct?
Yes, and cross checking, the XV2 comes through at the same time as Burridge’s ROD is logged, so he brought it through.
A shadow of something, perhaps it’s disappointment, crosses Barrow’s face.
Would SSF1 RODs also be recorded coming through the scanners at the same time?
They could mute that. We can’t get access to SSF1 RODs, he says. Of course.
And the anomaly?
On the outward leg of that journey PRB 20037001 didn’t go out to the airport, just a couple of stops further along the line.
Barrow tries to reconnect the chain of events. The girl he went to see?
Yes. Like it or not, Abhi, is becoming interested.
We know the girl was connected to the groups who pulled the stunt at the stadium.
Yes.
We need to bring her in.
That will logistically be very difficult.
How else can we eliminate her from our enquiries?
Is this an official strand of the enquiry now? We would need a warrant of some kind to scan her. We could apply, the process can be slow though.
I have a sense of urgency.
Abhi smiles. I understand. You know, it should be a relatively simple procedure to scan the room they met in, we can look at the booking, take a scanner down to see if there is a trace, if there is that may work as a substantive basis to interview or eliminate her.
You are on leave, I don’t want to impose on you further.
Abhishek is already nodding. It’s fine, he says. A trip to Birmingham might be a nice way to spend my day off anyway.
Barrow
Barrow has heard enough on the gunman, they will try to track him down, but this is not Barrow’s main concern, and he suspects it is a further diversion. Even if the UAV intervention at the Games has proven to be a misdirection, he knows this is where the core of the interest lies, he has taken the wrong path perhaps and needs to re-trace his steps, but this question of the XV2 is central. He wonders how closely he is being monitored, to what extent certain agencies may have been directing his thoughts, used his underlying attachments and associations to push him in a particular direction. Lock Crane’s file, know of his associations to him through Rose, set him off in a chain of speculation designed to keep him away from the real heart of the matter, if they are going to call him in only to use him as a decoy, to impugn his abilities, to say he has created this farcical interruption in the Games, he will equally let them know that he can see the gaps and inconsistencies, the sleights of hand, the thin patches in whatever game they are playing and will pursue the matter anywhere it leads, wherever it may take him, and that he will overcome any obstructions put in his way.
The lift smells of gin, which means Squires is ahead of him going up to Waterston’s office. He takes a few deep breaths, tries to get his pulse rate down. What has happened to his legendary composure?
All of this when he could have sat in the spring sunlight sipping tea with Rose trying to love the art and music she surrounded him with. But still, he’s in now, neck-deep and still wading forward.
There is only person he knows he can trust. The Guarantor. Waterston.
PRB 2003701 ROD: Private Cache/Block-Block Activated
A Conversation around the Dinner Table, Part 3/4
Squires: It is a pressing matter, Bewes, you need to come down on one side or another and soon. Internal investigations suggest….
Solchenko: Allow me, no, no, my pleasure, this is one of our better vodkas. Not available outside the Co-Sphere, I believe.
Bewes (D): Internal investigations can sometimes lead us, for example, this long search for a mole, this idea that there is a single figure rather than that it is a broadly-based phenomenon. Information leaks, cross-partition information flows spring up as a consequence of any number of actors, it’s the quest for a single figure within SSF that I think is misplaced.
Squires: Well, respectfully that’s not what our research would suggest.
Solchenko: Nor, independently, ours. We have seen substantial overlap in our conclusions. As the report will explain. We believe conclusion is inescapable.
Squires: And we would much rather, how do you say it, we would much rather hold back on issuing this report, or allow it to only circulate to relevant parties in the hope of striking something of a quid-pro-quo over this whole democratising of SSF1, to which you know Evans and I believe all common sense is opposed. As I believe you must too, Dominic.
Bewes (D): Well in common with Jennifer I shouldn’t like to be drawn into anything so likely to disrupt the harmony of our evening, especially at this late hour. Excuse me. A call of nature.
Solchenko: (laughs) A very wise young man your grandson.
Squires: The report. It is interesting, Alan, that you have not requested it yet, I would have thought it a matter of some urgency. We suspect you suspect what we no longer suspect but know.
5
Waterston 07/04/2018
One of the youngsters brings him the scotch with water he has requested. He’ll sip it as much for the taste as anything. Evans, further along the table, receives his, conspicuously less diluted than Waterston’s own, Squires at the far end, an ice bucket and a bottle of what looks like vodka jutting from it. Will Bewes be here today? There are things they need to discuss discreetly in one of the side rooms. Not least what pressure Squires might have been putting on him, what conclusions he understands internal investigations may have reached.
Waterston is perturbed still by the meeting they have had with Solchenko, Dusjevic, the other heads of the pan–Co-Sphere agencies. There were the usual reprimands for PRB “exceptionalism”, of course, but it’s more than that, more the talk of frontiers crossed, new paradigms and problems that has disturbed him. And then all this talk of an endless life, of restored youth, the possibility of an eternal return, the untaken roads, the ungrasped moments, the unspoken words, reclaimed, redeemed. He smiles into his drink.
He always comes to these Saturday get-togethers now, especially since Margaret passed away, and today their numbers have been considerably swelled by all the regional departments who have come down to London in advance of the Games: many old comrades he has known but not seen for years, many newer ones he ought, he supposes, to mak
e an effort to know better, some absences due to illness or decline. The atmosphere is almost raucous and though he is one of them, he has always had little appetite for the triumphalism of the Beer and Sandwiches Brigade. Few of them now had been leaders in the really big unions of the Sixties and Seventies when they still had a government to infiltrate, influence and threaten or a parliament to win control of, few had been party men in the way he had.
Party, dead word now in that sense, political party. No real need for them for the best part of twenty years, a quarter of his lifetime. He scans the table, men half his age, a few closer to it, they are forgetting the struggle perhaps in a way that, well, say what you will about them, Solchenko and the Central Committee have not. For his fellow attendees there is nothing now but the inexorable inching forward of World Socialism, a little volatility along the way no doubt in the decomposition and recomposition of the balance of forces, history going busily about its smooth unfolding, the great terrors and the ruptures behind them.
A plate descends onto the table. Fish paste on white bread cut into triangles. Autarchy chic, one of the younger ones, a grandchild, says, takes one from the table and has a bite, raises his eyebrows.
Try the beef paste, another says, gesturing to one of the glass pots in the centre of the table, with a slightly panicked expression, quite remarkable!
Eh, an elder says, less of your cheek. That’s what got us through times the likes of which you lot will never see.
Won’t they? Well there it is; the complacency. He is disturbed by their heartiness and humour, their untroubled sleep, every new event and upset a mere hiccough in the onward flow, whereas he views everything as a crisis, a juncture, a crossroads. They dismiss him as Waterston the old worrier, the old worryguts: dead word. Perhaps they are right to, but sometimes he would like to show them, as they fold their legs under the seats and reach, pot-bellied, red-cheeked, contented, for another of the sandwiches, another pint in their truculent good humour, some of the plots and strategies SSF have averted, the footage from the recent atrocity in Stockholm for instance, and see the colour drain from those rosy complexions, the bolus of food unswallowable, their dry mouths hanging open.
Ah! He should be careful still, the most difficult thing of all for SSF is to guard against contempt, guard against resentment, against the desire to punish others for the ease and satisfaction they enjoy, their complacent self-regard: that is the true test of character.
Here is Dominic Bewes, perhaps with his grandfather in tow, but there is something about the cast to his face that means Waterston knows instantly what he is about to say, at this age one is never taken by surprise by a death. Dominic stands at the edge of the table for a moment, composes himself, then in a voice he struggles to keep neutral says quietly, then a little louder:
Comrades. Brothers and sisters!
A pause as scattered attention draws in around him.
Sad news, I am afraid.
The Meeting 04/04/2018
They are seated at the great round table in the main meeting room in Nyerere House, Solchenko with his back to the window, the blinds half down. Is this to be in Russian or…?
Comrades, he begins.
Ah, English.
You have rightly requested that I account for my presence here in your green and pleasant land. What can I say to you? You, my dear friends, Waterston, Evans, Squires, Bewes, know very well of my deep love for the comrades here and their struggle, our involvement, deep involvement, in struggle here over many years.
We appreciate everything you have done, but we have the right to ask. Are you here on official or unofficial business?
Official, unofficial, Solchenko says. I am here to solve problem that maybe even here in PRB you do not know you have.
Can we be a little more direct?
Of course, comrades. Let me give you general picture of situation as we see it. First, we worry that your system here is, how do you say… it leaks. He holds up his glass of water. Too many different systems that do not fit together and have many holes. We analyse data loss, bridge sites, information flows back and forth across the Partition. 80 percent, comrades, is through the PRB. 80 percent! What does this mean? You are vulnerable to attack, so we are all vulnerable to attack, you are the weak point in the chain. And you are going in the wrong direction, we believe.
We couldn’t impose a centralized system here.
Comrades, he says, imagine, you are about to give everybody in Co-Sphere access to SSF1 records. You, the part of Co-Sphere with lowest ability to retain data. With the highest number of subversives, subversive organizations, American funded groups and so on.
We are committed to our democratic structures.
Very well, says Solchenko and his voice rises, but we are not! Then softens again. And why your principle should put whole Co-Sphere in danger? We imagined you would not get so far with this; we imagined our wise friends in the People’s Republic would understand this was American plot to exert pressure at weakest point. It is our own fault, perhaps, we thought our reports would be enough, but it seems that they have been ignored.
Not ignored, Waterston says, but we are under-resourced for the scale of what you want to us to do.
Comrades, comrades, he says. We have staff, he spreads his arms. We wonder why you have not called on us. We wonder if you perhaps do not want so many Russian speakers here in your green and pleasant land. And we worry about perhaps suspicion, ingratitude, toward us, we think perhaps there is a sympathy with the Americans, after all. If not, his voice rises again, we ask ourselves, why have they done nothing to stop this?
Waterston speaks. This would all be simpler, less opaque, if we could get some clear answers on interdepartmental matters here in the PRB itself. He turns to address Squires, if your department was more forthcoming. Have you found your mole?
Well, yes.
Any more detail?
Not at this stage.
But the PCSDF know?
At the highest level, yes.
Then if the information is not being fully shared with SSF1 there is only one conclusion to draw.
Squires takes a sip from the tumbler that is permanently in his hand. Oh, I’m not sure there is ever only one conclusion, he says.
Waterston
Bewes gone now, too. He was unwell, certainly, and at that age, this age. Perhaps he should have retired. Seen more of Jennifer, enjoyed the garden. Just as he, Waterston, should have seen more of Margaret no doubt.
He was extraordinarily quiet at the meeting last week, unusually so. Perhaps the onset of whatever has carried him away. Whereas Evans. Different facets of a different decline, people harden as they grow old, or rather what’s emollient in them evaporates and only the dry nub of the temperament remains.
No doubt this has happened to him too. Perhaps he has become pure suspicion. On a bad day he would say: pure doubt.
He sits back in his chair as he waits for Barrow to arrive. Squires is already pressuring him to appoint a Pan-Co-Sphere team organised by his own department to look into the break-in and Waterston has responded by requisitioning one of his better team members, Abhishek, to head up the informatics. Squires has insisted on evaluating and monitoring Barrow, should he accept the role, just as he is evaluating and monitoring everyone, with only Waterston and Evans as institutional checks now Bewes has gone.
He has flagged up the break-in as high priority, suspicious about the timing, the morning after Bewes passed away. A coincidence perhaps, a Saturday when the offices would in principle be empty anyway, but with Bewes’s work ethic and this close to the Games? And if the break-in was consequent on Bewes’s death, opportunistic, how did they know? The news of Bewes’s passing away was received in person, almost simultaneous with the break-in. Who was there? Most of SSF1 ex and current. Certainly, Squires was out of the room for a few minutes after receiving the news. He was at Bewes’s house last night, along with Solchenko. An impromptu visit. And then.
Is it possible,
comprehensible, that Squires would engineer this in order to quash the Vote? Eliminate Bewes even when he was due to step down anyway in order to tilt the numbers of SSF1 against the democratization in his favour?
A knock at the door exactly on two: that will be Barrow. Come, come, he shouts, pushes other speculations from his mind for the moment and returns to Barrow’s file. He has been out on leave, retirement he has called it, for nine months, too long. They need as much manpower as they can get, need people who have demonstrated, as Barrow has, a lifelong commitment. True, he wouldn’t have been his first choice, but everyone is else is tied up in preparations for the Games or the diplomatic exchange with the Americans, numerous other issues relating to the Korean peninsula and the Asia pivot, the implications for the region, the world. And if it is Barrow or turning over jurisdiction to the PCSDF, well. Needs must, as the devil drives.
Barrow fills in the necessary paperwork, agrees to be patched and comply with the new sets of regulations that have come into place since he was last active with the department. Waterston’s mind drifts. Bewes, will he even have time to mourn him?
Perhaps he is secretly disappointed that his own medical has revealed nothing: how convenient to have been in the last stage of something, or frail at least. One night awakening to find her there beside the bed, beloved Margaret, cool hand resting on his brow, her sad and sympathetic smile. All done now. Time.
Barrow asks him suddenly if he has no plans for retirement himself and he is surprised to find the sudden surge of fear that brings the words up out of him.
I shall die at this desk, he says, and it sounds to his own ears less like a statement than a pledge.
The journey to Birmingham should take a little over an hour but Waterston has been lenient on himself, told the driver to go slowly. He has brought a Passocon and it sits, unused, on the walnut and mahogany table that folds down from the partition between the front and rear seats. A diplomatic car, for years they couldn’t use them until the printers became widespread and then all the missing parts could be fabricated again. Any that hadn’t been junked or left to rust were put back on the road.