KSO—KISS Step One—was to turn right, not left, when I hit Curzon Street. Half Moon Street is a one-way street, with traffic running northwest. Curzon is also one way, with traffic running southwest. So, I turned north east, walking against the traffic flow. That took care of the taxi. KST (if you’re so dense you can’t figure that acronym out, then you have no business buying this kind of book in the first place) was just as easy. I crossed Curzon Street and marched 250 yards, turned left, walked ninety feet up Clarges Mews, then rapped on the heavy steel-plated door to Curzon Street House. I turned and smiled at the camera that was focused on the doorway. The electronic lock clicked open. I pushed the door inward, slid through, and closed it behind me. I extracted my building pass from my pocket, and showed it to Corporal Duke, the armed guard who was sitting in the biological/chemical warfare–resistant airtight security cubicle made of space-age material. The fucking thing could take a direct RPG hit and the man inside would be just fine.
He gave me an offhand salute and logged me in, his voice metallic tinny through the intercom. “Morning, Captain. Up early today I see.”
“No rest for the weary, Corporal Duke.” I passed through the inner air lock and marched along the corridor toward the stairs that led to DET Bravo’s area of the basement. But I didn’t go into the cramped warren of offices. Instead, I continued past them, slaloming my way around the unused desks, chairs, and fine cabinets stacked in the marble-floored hallway, to one of Curzon Street House’s three secret tunnel entrances.
You think I’m making this all up. But I’m not. I’ve already told you that Curzon Street House once served as the MI5 registry. But the six-story building with its bomb-proof glass, thick draperies, and concrete “awning” between the ground and first floors, has a long clandestine history. During the blitz in the early days of World War II, its basement sheltered the Royal Family. Later, Curzon Street House became the headquarters for MI5. Until, that is, the secret service outgrew the old building and moved, first to 140 Gower Street above the Euston Street tube station, and then to Thames House on Millbank, just south of Lambeth Bridge, where it still remains.
There is another element to Curzon Street House’s architecture that I haven’t told you about: its three secret tunnels. The first, which was built during the site’s original construction, leads to the basement of the Lansdowne Club, which sits on Fitzmaurice Place but shares a common wall with Curzon Street House. The second goes almost due east, under Stratton Street, and comes out in the basement of an art gallery on Berkeley Street that for years was an MI5 front. The third, and deepest, tunnel burrows under Clarges Mews and runs all the way to the intersection of Charles and Farm Streets, culminating in the basement of a four-story town house, next to whose black front door is a small brass plaque that reads: “London Antiquarian Book Society—Members Only.”27
Strangers with the temerity to ring the society’s doorbell despite the notice are greeted by a middle-aged, gray-haired lady watchdog who shoos them away. Indeed, the only “members” allowed inside are employees of MI5’s technical services division, who use the town house as their electronics laboratory. There they refine eavesdropping equipment to suit individual cases, and hone the black arts of surreptitious entry. I made my way to the Farm Street tunnel, passed through the manned security door, and headed down the long, damp, chilly concrete passageway.
The end of the tunnel was blocked by a checkpoint. I was vetted by a pair of armed security men, and then allowed to proceed through an air lock and into a small vestibule. I pushed the button to call the elevator and waited until the electric motor stopped whirring, slid the door open and then opened the inside grate, stepped inside, closed the outer door and the inner grate, and pushed the top button.
The fifty-year-old elevator car, which was about the size of a coffin, lurched upward, motor humming. Sixteen seconds later it stopped abruptly. I did the grate-and-door routine, and stepped out, to find myself in an ornate foyer. To my right was a beautiful staircase, arching gracefully up to the town house’s first floor. Straight ahead was the thick front door. To the right of it, out of the draft, was a small Regency desk, behind which sat the omnipresent, gray-haired watchdog-lady. Her eyes flicked toward the elevator as I disembarked. From her expression, it was obvious that I didn’t pass muster. She stared at me, taking in the French braid and the thick beard in contemptuous silence.
“G’morning,” I finally said.
“Good morning … sir,” she growled, spelling the greeting (and I use that term very loosely here) with a c and a u. “May I ’elp you?”
“Just passing through,” I said.
“That’ll be fine, then. Just step to the door, please.” She came around her small desk, glanced at the security camera picture to double-check that no malefactors were lurking outside, then unlatched a trio of dead bolts and cracked the door open to allow my rapid absquatulation. “Have a nice day… sir.”
The door closed behind me with an audible click, followed by the solid latching of the three dead bolts. Farm Street was deserted. I saw no one on Charles Street either. I stood quietly for some seconds, listening for footfalls, or car motors, but heard nothing but my own breathing. And so, having KISSed off the opposition, I turned left and walked thirty yards to Hay’s Mews, turned left again, and meandered down the center of the narrow roadway. On my right, I passed the boxy, two-story carriage house with a green rectangular, wooden front door where the late William Colby, the former Director of Central Intelligence, lived when he was a young OSS lieutenant during World War II. I recognized Gerry Kelley’s house—or to be more accurate, his two houses—as I approached the intersection of the Mews and Chesterfield Gardens. From what I’d read in Architectural Digest, the common wall between the two adjoining Victorian red brick structures had been demolished when Kelley’d done his renovations. But the outer shells remained unchanged, giving the structure an unbalanced look. I peeked around the corner. An eight-foot brick garden wall fronting on Chesterfield Gardens was topped by two strands of electrified wire, and a pair of security cameras on gimbals.
Yes, I was probably being provocative with this Roguish social call. That was the point. Like I said, we Warriors don’t usually meet our adversaries face-to-face. I will never get to bitch-slap Saddam Hussein (although I’d sure like to get the opportunity). And I will probably never get my hands around Usama Bin Laden’s scrawny neck—although I’d love to break it… slowly. I wouldn’t mind giving Muammar Qaddafi a swift boot in the balls, either (and once I almost got the opportunity). But that was the exception to the rule. And the rule is that villains like Saddam and Muammar and Usama are usually well insulated from folks at my operational level.
But let me be honest: I’ve been lucky. Over the past decade I’ve had the fortune to take down a number of cockbreaths who caused the deaths of innocent people—and do it up close and personal. And if Gerry Kelley turned out to have anything to do with the death of my shipmate Butch Wells, I’d deliver his death sentence face to face, too.
I retraced my steps and stopped in front of the arched, glossy black enamel front door adorned with a massive brass lion’s head door knocker. I lifted the heavy ring and brought it down hard on the striker knob three times. When I got no response, I repeated my action. After the ninth blow, I heard something above my head stir.
I looked upward, to see a security camera swivel on its gimbal and abruptly tilt down to peruse me. I waved and said, “Good morning,” just in case there was a microphone attached to the apparatus. There was a pause perhaps forty-five seconds in length. And then a single bolt was thrown on the inside of the door, I heard the ratcheting of a lock being turned, and the door itself swung inward.
Gerry Kelley, his thick red hair a mess, his long, angular body wrapped inside a thick, quilted silk robe done in subtle green, brown, burgundy, and burnished gold ancient madder, towered in the low, arched doorway and beckoned me inside. He was a good actor, as seemingly insouciant as if he’d been expect
ing me.
“Good morning to you, Captain Marcinko. Up betimes, I see.” He glanced skyward into the clear, cool London air. “And a lovely morning it is to be up betimes, if I don’t say so myself.”
He extended his hand. “Welcome, Captain. Please come in.” I took it. His grip was strong, and—much to my surprise—his hand was as rough as eighty grit sandpaper. This Gerry Kelley was someone who did manual labor. He exerted a considerable amount of pressure on my paw. I squeezed back, ounce for ounce, smiling as I did.
We played macho man for about ten seconds. I won—I could see it in his eyes. The young Irishman released his grip, extracted his hand, and shook it twice. “I like a man with a firm grip,” he said as he stepped aside to let me pass.
I crossed the threshold into the carriage house. Kelley eased the door shut until the latch clicked audibly. Next to the frame, a light nodule on the control panel for a sophisticated security system blinked green. Then Gerry Kelley turned, and led me forward. “This way, Captain.”
I had to admit his place was impressive. The entire space, all two and a half stories of it, had been gutted, so that I was greeted by a single, huge, high-ceilinged room, whose space was defined by a trio of six-panel, nineteenth-century coromandel screens, ten-foot-high walls of books, and huge, ornately framed antique mirrors. The cooking space was delineated by floating walls made of alternating stainless steel, copper, and brass panels.
The artwork was eclectic. A huge Andy Warhol portrait of Lenin dominated the foyer. To my left, I spotted a pair of early Lichtensteins and a large Mark Rothko oil, counterpointed by a trio of sixteenth-century, school of Botticelli, Virgin Marys. The floors were made of wide, antique heart-of-pine slab boards and covered with Persian carpets. Area-defining spotlights hung from the vaulted ceilings. It was all totally unexpected, and quite spectacular.
I stopped long enough to take it all in. Kelley watched me absorb the details. “What do you think?”
The Rogue’s First Rule of Conversation is, Don’t Give Anything Up. “Nice enough for a crash pad.”
The Irishman cracked a smile, and his knuckles. “Coffee, Captain?” he asked. “I just brewed a pot.”
I was here to take the man’s measure, not palaver over beverages. “No thank you.”
He nodded. “Fine, then,” he said. “It’ll be business, then. What brings you here this fine, clear autumn morning?”
I faced him. “Your ads,” I said. “The posters on the sides of the buses.”
His hands dropped to hip level. “You don’t like them.”
“That’s right.”
His eyes went hard. “Too bad,” he said. “You’ll have to live with them. Until, that is, the government does the right thing and you and your people leave.”
“It was British kids we saved.”
“Captain,” he said, “the British are fully capable of saving their own children. But that is beside the point.” His round face screwed into a concerned look. He reached into the pocket of his robe and extracted a small pager, looked at the readout, and then said, “Excuse me for just a moment, Captain, but I must deal with something.”
He turned and disappeared behind the Rothko. Three minutes later, he was back. “Pardon the interruption,” Gerry Kelley said. “One of the problems with running a business is that you can never, ever, be out of touch with your people.”
Now, my friends, let me stop things long enough to give you a little Roguish insight. The man who reappeared was not the same one who’d left to make a call. His entire demeanor had changed. His stance was a lot more hostile. His body language had shifted, ratcheting from “neutral” to “aggressive.” That piqued my curiosity. But I didn’t bring it up. I let him continue his monologue.
“The fact,” Kelley said, “is that you Americans seem to believe that you can insert yourselves into the middle of a problem, solve it with a few words or a piece of paper, then leave—and everything will turn out all right. But that is not the case. Not here, or anywhere else. In fact, you Americans leave the situation worse than it was when you insinuated yourselves into the crisis in the first place.”
I would never admit it to him, of course, but he had a valid point there. Look back over the past decade or so and think about the times we have used our armed forces to try to fix an internal problem in a sovereign nation. America’s record is not good. We failed in Somalia. We failed in Haiti. We failed in Bosnia. And we failed in Kosovo.
A few years ago, I would simply have reamed Gerry Kelley a new asshole, or given him the ol’ Roguish wake-up call, and be done with it. But this was a new century, a new millennium. And so, I spent the next hour in earnest conversation, giving myself an ample opportunity to take the measure of the man.
It isn’t necessary to re-create all the dialogue here and now. Suffice it to say that Gerry Kelley disagreed—vehemently—with the way the British government and ours was dealing with the Irish problem. He resented the American companies who were setting up shop on his turf and getting tax advantages that he—that is to say Globex—did not enjoy. He was passionately opposed to the military cooperation between us and the Brits. He believed that Echelon, the joint SIGINT project, was actually a cover for a huge domestic spying operation in Britain and Ireland (and I have to admit that he wasn’t far off the mark there, although I certainly didn’t confirm it for him). And most of all, he resented the way Her Majesty’s government had allowed the Americans to become an equal player in Northern Ireland. That was where things got interesting.
“It is my country to win or to lose, Captain—not yours.”
“You’d rather see it remain the way it is; rather see your people killing one another, than have us try to help create an environment that nurtures peace.”
“I believe that we Irish have to solve internal problems on our own,” he said obliquely.
“Do you believe Northern Ireland should be reunited with the Republic?”
“I believe,” Gerry Kelley said, “in one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” He gave me a grim smile. “Sound familiar, Captain?”
It did, and I told him so. “It’s a noble sentiment.”
“It is that,” he agreed. “But we Irish have to bring it about ourselves. Not because you Americans impose your values or your agreements on us, either through economic blackmail, or through force of arms.”
I am no politician, and I told Gerry Kelley that. “Politics aside,” I said, “what about the Americans who have been killed? I had a man who died recently, fighting for peace in Ireland. He came here with the best of intentions. There are other Americans, businessmen, who have been killed in the past months. Didn’t they deserve some protection?”
There was a pause. And then, Gerry Kelley said, “You Americans deserve whatever you get.”
“Including getting murdered.”
His eyes were now full of hate. “Including anything. You Americans are plagued by a national arrogance coupled with a naïveté of character that makes you inviting targets for every democratic and revolutionary liberation movement in the world.”
Democratic and revolutionary liberation movement? Where was this asshole coming from?
And then I realized precisely where he was coming from. Gerry Kelley was twenty-four. He’d been born in 1977. To him the British campaign to free the Falkland Islands in 1982 was something he’d read about in history books. Ditto Lady Margaret Thatcher, whose Tory government had brought Britain out of forty years of economic and social doldrums and made it into the vibrant, multicultural society it was today. To children like Gerry Kelley who came into their teens in the late 1990s, the Cold War is ancient history. To them, NATO, whose members include former Warsaw Pact nations like Poland and the Czech Republic, is a toothless bureaucracy. To them, the Euro is official currency. There had always been desktop and laptop computers equipped with modems, and they’d always had color screens. Pentium was a way of life. Televisions all came with remote control units, and there had alwa
ys been a Sky Channel on which you could watch CNN. To Gerry Kelley, the Vietnam War (if he’d ever read about it at all), was as distant as World War II, or the Hundred Years War.
What I’m saying here, is that Gerry Kelley, for all of his billions of pounds, or punts, or dollars, or Euros, was nothing more than a wet-behind-the-balls kid. A child. Worse, he was a spoiled child. A spoiled child of a new millennium who had no idea what REAL LIFE was all about. He’d grown up during the two greatest decades of economic growth in the history of mankind. He’d become a dot-com billionaire long before his twenty-fifth birthday. But like many generations of spoiled children who’d gone before him, he had, for whatever reasons, decided that instead of devoting his life to doing positive things, he’d go negative. And so he’d adopted the aggressive vocabulary of privileged, dilettante revolutionaries very similar to the bogus liberation pseudophilosophy disgorged by the mostly upper-middle-class members of 1970s and 1980s terrorist groups like the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, Italy’s Red Brigades, or America’s own United Freedom Front or Students for a Democratic Society.
My friends, this was nothing more than bullshit. This carrot-topped cockbreath was spewing the same specious bullshit I’ve heard for years, about us Americans deserving what we get; he was justifying Americans being killed because we were trying to impose values like democracy and freedom and equality like a ruthless bunch of imperialist, colonialist hegemonists. What a huge pile of horse manure. What a truckload of cow pies.
No: worse. Billionaire or not, computer genius or not, this numb nuts twentysomething had just crossed over the line I keep in my head. He didn’t mind that Butch Wells was dead fighting for peace in Ireland. Well, okay, I could maybe live with that without killing him, because Butch was a Warrior who knew the risks of what he did. But Gerry hadn’t stopped there. Now he was advocating the murder of innocent victims. He was promoting the sorts of cowardly acts I have spent my whole career fighting against. The sorts of acts we’d gone into the Brook Green School to prevent. “I can’t allow—”
Detachment Bravo Page 9