My Name Is Nobody

by Matthew Richardson

  He checked again that he hadn’t missed anything. Once he was sure he hadn’t, he turned to the final set of numbers. 15024. Page 150, Line 2, Word 4. His fingers tensed harder as he made his way to the right page. Already, he could feel his chest beginning to constrict further. The mild curiosity began to morph into something else. His breathing became heavier, more rapid. As he slowly flicked through to the right page, another thought struck. A line echoing back at him, the voice clear and distinct: An old man with a crazy theory about my husband and a black op from half a decade ago. The room seemed to grow smaller by the second, the silence pressing in on him until he was almost struggling to stay still. He tracked back through everything he had said, words rushed out in fear and confusion. Yet, deep down, he was almost positive – no, certain, in fact – that he had never mentioned the date of the MIDAS operation. A black op from half a decade ago. How could she possibly have known?

  He reached the page and counted down to the second line. Then he moved along until the pen rested on the fourth word. He looked at it for several seconds, but he had no need to check this time. The line was already ingrained in his memory, like a bullet ready to fire at the right moment. It was the line that had damned Gabriel Wilde and seemed now to be his vindication.

  My (1) name (2) is (3) Nobody (4) …

  Suddenly, the rest of the world began to dissolve, losing all coherence. Vine saw a lifetime of memories start to crumble as he read the line on the piece of paper beside him, wondering whether insanity had temporarily overwhelmed him, obliterating the last of his reason. Three words, he realized now, that Gabriel Wilde was speaking from beyond the grave.

  ROSE IS NOBODY.

  59

  He did nothing more for the first minute than stare down at the letters in front of him. He considered the chance of human error, one incorrect number leading to a wildly mistaken conclusion. But none of the possible excuses survived for long. Somehow, deep inside himself, the truth of it overwhelmed him.

  Without warning, Vine felt vomit start to fill his throat, surging up uncontrollably. He staggered towards the bathroom sink just in time, heaving up the little food he had left in his stomach. Once it was done, he rested his head on the cracked surface of the mirror, splashing cool water against his face. He grabbed at a hand towel and dabbed his face dry, staying there as the torrent of memories began to assault him.

  Cosmo Newton had been right after all. The answer to everything rested in the connection between the MIDAS file and the Nobody mole, the one explaining the other. Two details came to him now, both taking on a new, terrible clarity. The first was the line from the memos, the meaning deliberately silenced by the ponderous prose, bled of consequence: I am delighted to say that legal approval for the MIDAS operation has been received from the Attorney General’s Office. The second image was far more human, busy with life and hope. It was the photo he had found hidden in the drawer at Rose’s flat the day he proposed to her; the memento in her coat pocket at the safe house. The photo of the family she had lived with for a year after Harvard, adopting her as one of their own – ‘Pakistan 2005’ scrawled carelessly on the back. He saw the exuberance of her smile, remembered the dissonance of it, the gap between the past and the present. He couldn’t be sure – perhaps he would never be sure – but everything told him that somewhere among the rubble of the MIDAS missions would be the faces from that photograph, that family, one of the many caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, paying for such cosmic bad luck with their lives.

  The MIDAS operation – the operation responsible for the death of over 150 people, most of them innocent civilians – had only gone ahead thanks to a legal opinion drafted by the Attorney General’s Office. Each piece of the puzzle began to slot slowly, hideously, into place. Rose had been with the Attorney General’s Office in September 2011, their lead counsel on intelligence matters; she had been the one to draft that deadly vindication, using every ounce of her intellect and academic ingenuity to approve a massacre. It would only be later that she would make the connection, truly realize what she had done. In another age, another era, perhaps, she could have remained mercifully ignorant of her actions, continued with her life. But she had made the mistake of living in an era of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, of tweets and blogs and posts. A memo could be drafted in Whitehall, a trigger pressed in the depths of RAF Waddington, a wedding ceremony turned to ashes in Pakistan and a Facebook page fall fatally silent all within the space of days. If he was right, then Rose’s words had killed that family as sure as if she’d pulled out a gun.

  The smiling faces in the photograph refused to leave him now, the grandmother, parents, the eight sons and daughters, the sight of Rose in the middle wearing a smile unlike any he had seen before. He wondered how much pressure Cecil had put on her to sanction his plan. She would be bound in from all sides, discarded as soon as her job was done. Locked alone with her grief. The operation was classified as STRAP 4: one word and she would be put away for life under the Official Secrets Act. She couldn’t run to a paper, couldn’t confess the cause of her guilt to a priest or counsellor. Boxed in, she had been left with only one means of rationalizing what had happened, of continuing to function as a human being. Denied justice, she had instead, over time, settled on something far more deadly – revenge.

  He saw her slot in beside him now on the pew at St Martin’s. Every action, each phrase, had been tailored specifically for him. His only sin had been to work in counter-espionage, tasked with rooting out the moles, the doubles, the breaches. Once she had blinded him, she moved on to Gabriel Wilde, Cecil’s protégé, the confidant. To destroy Cecil, she had to destroy his greatest creation, silently subverting Wilde’s every move. Vine had been so sure that Gabriel Wilde was guilty, allowing theory to disfigure the facts. Yet he saw now how they had all been played – Wilde, Yousef, Cecil; all merely symptoms of an establishment that punished the innocent and protected the guilty.

  So much began to take on a sharper focus, the chaos of recent events revealing their own impossible logic. The set-up that day in Istanbul, Wilde’s sudden disappearance, the watchers at Oxford and Guy’s, the deaths of Newton and Yousef – she had gone so far that each further step must have felt like a necessary evil, prelude to a final act of absolution.

  And that final act? He heard her words again, spoken right in front of him: there’s a big UK–US commemoration service in Westminster this morning that Cecil roped me into a while back, lots of security grandees attending. Several loose thoughts started to coalesce near the front of his mind: the barriers being put up down Whitehall as he had made his way towards Portcullis House to meet Amory; the signs in Westminster Hall during his second interview with Olivia Cartier; and the words from the story in the paper this morning: sources suggest attendees will include key members of the Diplomatic Service, representatives from the White House, State Department and CIA as well as Britain’s senior spymasters, including the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Director-General of the Security Service (MI5). Everyone involved in the MIDAS operation would be sitting in that chapel. As Vine saw the past rewrite itself, the numbness began to fade. He looked at his face in the mirror again, surfacing from the shock, snapping back to himself. He turned towards the room and glimpsed the alarm clock near the bed: 08.32 a.m.

  Hurriedly, he began searching for his clothes. As he finished dressing, he heard the sound of vehicles parking outside, the oddly muffled shutting of car doors. He inched closer to the window and lifted the curtain, peering down to the top of Hugh Street below.

  There were two vehicles dancing with lights. She must have alerted them soon after she left, calling in his location.

  The police had arrived.

  60

  He looked round the scene again. Enough of his possessions were scattered throughout to establish beyond doubt that he had spent the night here. The receipt for a train ticket to Edinburgh was carelessly dropped underneath the bed: not showy enough to scream of tr
adecraft, but obvious enough that a team could locate it with a bit of hunting. It wouldn’t buy him long, but enough for what he needed to do. He closed the door and made his way down the hall.

  When conducting an initial assessment of the building, he had spent time memorizing the sole escape route. There was a fire exit near the kitchens that led straight out on to Belgrave Road. He reached the door to the back stairs now and went through it without pausing. The stairs down to the fire escape were thin and crumbling, starved of any functional lighting and existing in a permanent greyness. Vine could imagine the progression of the team behind him, a crab-like scuttle up the floors; nearing the top now, soon to swoop on his room.

  He reached the final flight of stairs, cars thrumming past on the road outside. The only question was whether the team would have people stationed around the immediate vicinity. Given resource pressures and in order not to alarm the public near a major transport terminal, Vine guessed it was a small team, not more than four. They would only be carrying standard-issue Glocks, rather than clearly visible weaponry. With two taking the immediate task of scouring the room and one patrolling the downstairs, that left just one other to guard the area outside the front door.

  He readied himself, swallowing down the emotions that were rising through him. He had to clear his mind and stay focused now. No matter how practised he was in the art of remaining hidden, he had always known that sheer numerical force would eventually overwhelm him. It was only a matter of time – each second diluting his chances.

  He rehearsed his route one final time and then inched open the rusty fire escape door and slipped on to Belgrave Road.

  As soon as he felt his feet touch the concrete, he told himself not to look round. He proceeded at a calculated speed in smooth, unhurried movements. From the initial glance, he had seen the back of a police officer talking into a radio by the passport office. He calculated that he had no more than ten seconds to escape her sightline before she turned and saw him. He quickened his pace now, using the jam of traffic to snake his way through to the pavement opposite and up on to Eccleston Bridge.

  As he reached the back entrance to Victoria station, he risked one split-second look backwards. The police officer was walking in the direction of the hotel, past the fire escape door. Her radio was holstered on her bullet-proof vest. There was no other sign of significant police activity that side of the building.

  Vine followed the crowd in the direction of Buckingham Palace Road. He silently clocked the cameras around the station and made sure to duck his way free of a direct shot, crossing to the other side.

  He increased his pace forwards, trying to silence the tangle of thoughts. He wished more than anything that time could be reversed, that knowledge could be unlearned. But he knew there would be no retreat into ignorance.

  He stopped for a moment, his mind still swimming, body raw and hurting. As he tried to collect himself, he saw a taxi heading his way, the light mercifully lit. He began searching for his wallet, pulling out the last remaining cash he had as he raised his arm and saw the cab slow up ahead.

  Vine sprinted towards it, yanked open the door and handed over a twenty-pound note.

  ‘Where to?’ asked the driver, scooping up the money and casting a cautious eye over his new passenger.

  ‘Westminster,’ he said. ‘Take me to the Palace of Westminster.’

  61

  Vine looked at his watch: 8.49.

  There were eleven minutes before the commemoration service in the Crypt Chapel began. The taxi was still at the back of Parliament Square, jammed in a haze of exhaust fumes and parping horns, barely nudging forwards.

  As another car sounded its horn, Vine broke out of his numbness. He pressed his phone into life and called Valentine Amory, getting an answer on the fourth ring.

  ‘Valentine, it’s Solomon Vine.’

  Amory’s voice sounded wary. ‘Do you have the answers you were looking for?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Everything finally makes sense.’ Vine rubbed a hand across his forehead. He tried to think what to do. One hundred guests. One hundred possible casualties. ‘There is going to be an attack on the Crypt Chapel. We only have a matter of minutes to act. The commemoration service. That’s the target.’

  ‘Why?’ said Amory. ‘What does the file mean?’

  ‘It means we’ve all been duped,’ snapped Vine, the last of his composure beginning to melt away. ‘Ahmed Yousef, Gabriel Wilde, the Prophets group at Oxford. It was none of them. Rose Spencer has been behind everything that has happened. She was used by Cecil when she was intelligence counsel at the Attorney General’s Office to sanction UK involvement in a top-secret drone operation codenamed MIDAS. The operation was eventually shut down. But not before scores of innocent civilians were killed.’

  ‘And the commemoration service?’

  ‘It’s the only option,’ said Vine. ‘The biggest UK–US event of its kind for years. Rose Spencer is planning to blow up every former spook and mandarin who participated in the mass slaughter of civilian populations … And we’ve just given her the chance to do it.’

  He thought back to Newton dead on the railway tracks and Yousef slumped over his desk; the words on Yousef’s phone planted to frame him. Then he thought of the meeting in the Pugin Room, Olivia Cartier pushing him towards believing Yousef was behind the attack, further disinformation culled from a nameless source within the intelligence world. All of it had been Rose.

  ‘She’s using her position to infiltrate the security team,’ he said. ‘She has a pass to any building on the Estate.’ He looked out of the taxi window and at his watch again: there were now exactly ten minutes until the service started. He peered at the golden-brown sweep of the Palace of Westminster up ahead and imagined it deformed by bomb blasts.

  ‘Alert the Palace authorities,’ he said. ‘Try to stop Rose Spencer getting anywhere near the chapel …’

  62

  Eight fifty-two.

  Vine looked at his watch again, willing the numbers to self-correct. But they remained stubbornly in place. He felt adrenaline seize him, plugging the gap where fear should have lurked, opening the taxi door and throwing himself out into the road.

  He narrowly avoided the rush of cars, navigating his way across to the grass of Parliament Square. His breathing was jagged, muscle movements edged with purpose. The crowds of tourists were already thick, slowing him down as he slalomed through them, contorting his body, eyes locked on the hands of Big Ben.

  In case we don’t meet again, I want you to have this. All wisdom lies in this book. Take care of Rose for me …

  It had all been there, staring at him. He cursed himself again for missing it. Wilde had been forced to disguise it, knowing the scale of the opposition he faced. Anything too obvious and it would have been intercepted long before it reached Wellington Square. Vine forced himself onwards, ignoring the stab of uncertainty in his midriff, all the time checking to make sure the Palace was still intact.

  He was nearing the end of Parliament Square now. Four lanes of traffic separated him from the Palace entrance. He saw the other pedestrians stop and jab for the green man, ignoring them all and wading out into the sludge of traffic. He swerved to avoid a passing grey Mercedes, then darted on, brakes screeching all around him. There was the sound of another horn and the narrow miss of a Land Rover. He had no time to dissect the experience. He just kept on until he felt the sure ground of St Margaret Street underneath his feet.

  He shouted at tourists to move and let him pass. But still they bunched up, forcing him to detour round them. A chilly blast of anger worked through him. A shout of frustration caught itself in his chest.

  Sweat soaked through his shirtfront and stung his eyes. His view was obscured by the spark of a camera flash, smartphones held aloft like trophies, a collection of toothy smiles.

  For a moment he hovered, the honking chaos of Whitehall and Parliament Square jumbling his senses. He felt his breath drain out of him. What was he doing
? He was a wanted man. If he made a scene he would be signing his own arrest warrant. Or – this close to flanks of armed DPG officers – much worse. He should let the security services, the police, the paraphernalia of the state deal with it, and with the consequences. Damn the lot of them. They had most surely damned him.

  He cast one more look at the side of the Palace and began to hear chatter rising from within the Parliamentary Estate. Then, from somewhere, he felt instinct grab him again, a primal energy that overrode all logic. It was channelled through his chest, the same feeling as before, pushing him forwards, this time careless of the wounds he inflicted as he jousted with his arms and used his brute strength to get to the turning.

  Finally, he swerved left towards the queues for St Stephen’s Entrance, the best route to the Crypt Chapel. He cast a glance back towards Big Ben and saw the oversized clock hand creep towards 8.55.

  Five minutes …

  Further ahead, he could see the Peers’ Entrance surrounded by cars, passengers hidden behind tinted windows. He froze for a moment, wondering what he could do now.

  It was then that he saw him, walking peacock proud in his long black coat, hair ruffled slightly by the breeze. Alexander Cecil was making his way up to St Stephen’s Entrance.

  Vine broke into a new run, dodging through the queues. There was not enough time to persuade the police guards to let him into the Parliamentary Estate or get the authorities to understand.

  There was only one option now.

  He reached the barriers as he saw Cecil nod to the police officer and begin walking up the steps to Westminster Hall.

  He stopped for a moment and tried to recover his breath.

  Then he shouted: ‘It’s Rose.’

  63

  The coated figure turned slowly. Vine caught the weary dip of the head, pausing on the steps as if debating whether to go back or press onwards. Vine walked up to the officer guarding the entrance and saw Cecil reluctantly descend the steps and make his way over.