Foretold by Thunder: A Thriller

by Edward M. Davey

  Jenny recalled Waits’s face in Istanbul when she’d drawn attention to his obesity.

  For a start he was very overweight …

  “If Charlie’s got an Achilles heel it’s his pride,” she finished. “Get them communicating and he’ll boast to her. I’m certain of it.”

  The challenge was formidable, but they had righteousness on their side. They were energized now, convinced it could be done. And by the end of the day they had their plan.

  80

  Sent: 14.06

  From: evelyn.parr@mi6.gsi.gov.uk

  To: charles.waits@mi6.gsi.gov.uk

  Dear Charlie,

  Just a thought – what with this inquiry the opposition want I thought we should go over the security of you know what file. Are you available at 11am tomorrow to discuss securely?

  Best,

  Evelyn.

  Sent: 14.13

  From: charles.waits@mi6.gsi.gov.uk

  To: evelyn.parr@mi6.gsi.gov.uk

  whatever wrong with my security old girl?

  C

  Sent: 14.20

  From: evelyn.parr@mi6.gsi.gov.uk

  To: charles.waits@mi6.gsi.gov.uk

  There’s no-one I’d rather trust with it. But this does strike me: it’s had the same name, as far as I know, since the war. I wonder whether that’s wise. I have booked SSR B19, assuming you can make.

  Best,

  Evelyn.

  Sent: 14.22

  From: charles.waits@mi6.gsi.gov.uk

  To: evelyn.parr@mi6.gsi.gov.uk

  oh ye of little faith! i have renamed every two years. pain in arse to sort but suppose prudent to change again. yes 11 fine.

  C

  *

  Sent: 14.23

  From: charles.waits@mi6.gsi.gov.uk

  To: evelyn.parr@mi6.gsi.gov.uk

  evelyn

  want to talk re: you know what file. think we need to rename. whats your diary like tomorrow.

  C

  Sent: 14.45

  From: evelyn.parr@mi6.gsi.gov.uk

  To: charles.waits@mi6.gsi.gov.uk

  Dear Charlie,

  Happy to meet of course. Won’t there be a lot of hoops to jump through? Why necessary?

  Best,

  Evelyn.

  Sent: 14.00

  From: charles.waits@mi6.gsi.gov.uk

  To: evelyn.parr@mi6.gsi.gov.uk

  bit hot upstairs & no10 sniffing about. feels like sensible precaution. have booked SSR B19 for 11.

  C

  81

  Queen Elizabeth II’s foremost computer expert bit deep into his knuckle. It was nerve-racking enough hacking the email accounts of his bosses, but already it was 11.05 a.m., with no sign of them. That meant Waits was late. And Charlie Waits was never late.

  De Clerk readjusted his earpiece, nudging up the volume. Nothing but the hiss of recorded silence. Perhaps he hadn’t mimicked his boss’s voice well enough in the emails. Or – worse – someone else had booked B19 between his early-morning slot and Charlie’s session. For all his brains de Clerk knew then that he was a fool. If Jake and Jenny fled he had no evidence of his own. They would do him for breaching the Official Secrets Act and prison was a certainty. De Clerk shoved the backpack further under his desk; the feel of the toolbox inside it did nothing to calm him. His pulse was soaring and his shirt clung to the shoulder blades with the sweat. An unsent email from Waits to the head archivist filled his screen. Serial number, date, belt3 – and a gap for the codeword. Chickening out was still an option. Just.

  Keep calm, Edwin, keep calm.

  A door opened in his ear and he scrabbled to readjust the volume. He heard chairs being moved, the rustle of coats. And finally: a voice.

  *

  Charlie Waits blew the steam off his tea. “So, how the devil are we?”

  “How the devil are we?” Parr repeated. “Rather stressed, I’d say. And you?”

  A few strands of hair had fallen over her eyes and she tossed them away, fixing him with the stare of an iguana.

  “I’m enjoying myself,” said Waits. “This is what it’s all about, remember? This is the sharp end, the buzz. Once everything’s done and dusted I’m going to take a trip with the wife, leave the kids with the in-laws. The Amalfi Coast perhaps. Been too long.”

  “Lovely. But if we could move on from your holiday plans for just a moment …”

  “But of course,” said Waits.

  He held up his hand and turned on his mobile, the three chimes of the start-up process loud in the soundproofed room. At once the Nace began beeping and a red light twinkled at them, like a Vulcan eye, monitoring proceedings.

  “Bloody thing reminds me of 2001 A Space Odyssey,” said Waits. “Let’s hope it’s not reading our lips, eh?”

  He turned off his phone, which emitted a ‘plonk’ as it powered down; the Nace ceased its racket and the agents relaxed.

  “Well then,” said Waits. “Goodbye Elvis. Hello – what? Go on my dear, you choose.”

  *

  Yes! De Clerk slapped his knee, mimicking, though he didn’t know it, the characteristic response of Adolf Hitler to news of a triumph. He tugged out his earpiece and drilled the word into the keyboard like a woodpecker. Then he paused, cursor hovering over the ‘send’ button. Once this email was gone there really was no way back. He closed his eyes and sent the bastard.

  A response came within the minute. Elvis was not in Gosport. Elvis was in the building. De Clerk half-walked, half-ran through Vauxhall Cross – an observer would have guessed at an upset stomach. A lift whisked him to the third floor below ground level and he stepped into a corridor. Signs warned that it was a restricted area, ordering him to display identification at all times. At the end of the corridor was another lift, this one guarded by security guards with MP5 machine pistols; they carried ID passes, but their uniforms bore no insignia. Beside them a young woman with horn-rimmed glasses and a Shoreditch-type haircut sat at a computer. She would be a graduate and smart, but not brainy enough for the fast track. De Clerk showed her his identity card and authorization code.

  “Thank you very much, Mr de Clerk. And if you’d like to look into the camera?”

  Click!

  The machine studied de Clerk’s bone structure and retina and it liked what it saw. The blast-proof elevator doors rolled open, beckoning him down to MI6’s archive.

  He was almost in.

  The lift took an age to descend. It was made of foot-thick steel panels – the most powerful IED yet encountered by the British Army could have gone off inside and it would have contained the blast like popcorn in a saucepan. With each floor the level of restrictedness increased. De Clerk was going right to the bottom.

  Keep calm, Edwin, keep calm.

  The elevator stopped. The doors opened. And de Clerk stepped into what resembled an aircraft hangar, divided into corridors by steel cabinets. Stepladders set on rails could be slid along each row; his mind swam to think what secrets this room must hold.

  “Mr de Clerk?” A ginger-haired archivist with handlebar eyebrows looked up from his classic car magazine and beckoned him forward, a twinkle in his eyes. “Look into the camera please. I’ll need your identification, and you’ll have to sign here, here and here.”

  Seven floors up Parr suggested a new codeword.

  The archivist began perusing the labels, walking to the far end of the corridor. “No, wait, that can’t be right.” His eyebrows twitched. “We must have gone right past it. Back the way we came then.”

  De Clerk wanted to scream and drag him down the aisle.

  “Ah,” said the archivist, coming to a halt. He unlocked a cabinet, sliding out the drawer to reveal a large metal box. When he opened the lid there was the hiss of escaping gas, and de Clerk caught the whiff of decaying paper. Two dozen files were stacked inside.

  “Dum de dum,” the archivist hummed as his fingers skipped through the paperwork. “Dum de dum de dum.”

  De Clerk realized he was opening and closing his
fists. He forced himself to be still. This was taking too long.

  Eighty feet above them the two spies reached agreement.

  “Here we are,” said the archivist. “You’ll find the inspection table at the end of the corridor.”

  Four pages were in his hands. Brittle; yellowed; sporting an array of ‘top secret’ stamps. De Clerk reached out to take them …

  82

  Charlie Waits held court to an audience of one.

  “The good news,” he began, “is that GCHQ’s managed to get a trace on Chung’s line of communication to Beijing. A routine fishing expedition picked it up this morning. She’s still in Italy for now, but funnily enough she’s just requested a private jet to … guess where?”

  Parr hated being toyed with like this. “Where?”

  “London!” cried Waits. “If Chung is anything like you or me, and I fancy that she is, she’ll keep the inscriptions close by. We know from experience that their lot are no match for our Frank. And it’ll only be a matter of time until we pick up Wolsey and Frobisher, what with de Clerk on the case.”

  “He is good,” admitted Parr.

  “No man I’d rather have on side,” said Waits. “There’s nowhere to hide from a computer genius in this day and age. So you see, my dear, we’ll get out of this yet.”

  “I never doubted you, Charlie. And good idea to rename the file too.”

  The tranquillity cleaved from Waits’s face.

  “That was your idea,” he said.

  “No it wasn’t.”

  “Yes it was.”

  Waits’s lips formed a pink circle. “Oh glory,” he said.

  The spymaster switched on his mobile. This time the Nace remained silent. His chair was sent skittering across the floor as he dashed for the device. He saw it at once: the panel above the LED display was not flush with the casing. Waits tore the section away to reveal a bundle of foreign electronics soldered inside. A power source, a listening device, the beeper de Clerk had installed to impersonate the disabled machine. A wire led from a battery to the flashing LEDs. With growing horror Waits saw how it had been done. Whoever had pulled off this outrage knew his ritual of turning on his mobile to test the Nace. At the start-up tone the beeper had been activated remotely.

  “No.” Waits spoke calmly, as if someone had handed him the wrong change in a shop. “Oh dear me, oh dear me no.”

  Parr looked on; there was nothing to be said. Their most precious secret had been whisked from right under their noses.

  *

  De Clerk stepped out of the lift at ground level. Beyond the X-ray machines and the olive-green glass he could see sunshine; he was almost out. Five security guards manned the exit, machine pistols slung under arms, and another wave of sweat broke over the traitor’s chest. His brow glistened, his skin was pale. A muscle in his cheek wouldn’t stop twitching and he felt a weight pressing down on his lung, as if an invisible stone was crushing the air out of it.

  Oh Jesus. Not this again. Not now.

  At the age of twenty-one de Clerk had been talked into a lad’s holiday in Magaluf. After a week of drinking and attempts to chat up girls – neither an activity he excelled at – he had suffered a panic attack and been rushed to hospital. And the attacks had continued throughout his entire twenties. He hadn’t suffered one for years, but now the old feeling came back stronger than ever. The racing heart, the shrinking lungs, the constriction of his windpipe by a malevolent inner hand.

  A guard scrutinized him. “You all right there, sir?”

  “Fine,” de Clerk croaked.

  The room was spinning.

  “Are you sure, sir?” The guard was a liver-spotted gent in his sixties with whom de Clerk usually had a good rapport. He oozed suspicion.

  “Feeling a bit fluey,” the spy managed, fighting to control his breathing.

  Keep calm, Edwin, keep calm.

  Two armed officers appeared, footsteps echoing in the space. A drop of sweat detached itself from de Clerk’s nose, splashing on the floor.

  “You do look at bit peaky,” said the guard. “There’s a lot of it about this time of year. You go and have a good lie down.”

  The sentries clicked off in the opposite direction.

  “Thank you,” gasped de Clerk.

  The guard nodded. “Mind how you go, sir.”

  As de Clerk staggered into the fresh air the alarms went off, a multitudinous shriek that erupted from the building in a wall of sound. He stumbled into a black cab, slamming the door as the first guards rushed from the building.

  “Just drive,” he uttered. “Get me out of here.”

  As the taxi shot over Vauxhall Bridge, de Clerk surrendered to the panic attack – bent double on the back seat, eyes rolling in his head like those of a drowning man. The towers of Battersea Power Station were an upturned table juddering across the Thames and a pillar of cloud rose above the chimneys, as though the generators had kicked into life. The thunderhead climbed hundreds of feet, billowing with wrath until it connected with the stratosphere: like a wormhole linking central London to outer space.

  83

  Jake jumped at the fusillade of frantic knocks. It had been a morning of mental crucifixion in the Islington flat, the minutes dragging out until they were convinced de Clerk had been taken. But there were three fast raps, two slow: the sign that all was well. Jake ran to the door, yelping as he bashed into a table in the hallway.

  “It’s him,” he shouted to Jenny as he peered through the spy-hole. “He’s alone.”

  De Clerk stumbled through the door. “I did it,” he breathed. “I actually did it.”

  He collapsed onto a sofa and lay there panting, hairs plastered across his forehead. Jenny pressed a glass of milk on him – it was what de Clerk had fetched himself after the fight at The Oval. Only then did she ask to see the report.

  “Oh, I don’t actually have the pages,” said de Clerk.

  There was a moment of stunned silence.

  “It’s a top secret archive, not a bloody lending library. They don’t even let you make notes there.”

  Jake recovered first. “Well, what was the sodding point in that then?”

  “It’s all in here.” De Clerk tapped his cranium. “I’m a genius, remember?”

  She laughed. “Of course, I knew this. He’s only got a photographic memory. As do I, as it happens.”

  Jake pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and index finger, glancing between the faces of the two spies. They were a different breed of human.

  She fetched some paper and de Clerk transcribed the missing pages of the Dicks Report. Fifteen minutes later he passed them his handiwork.

  And this is what they read:

  Such was his psychological state that we were all prepared for some major deterioration. The one thing I had in my mind was that Hess would become homicidal or suicidal. I had considerable concerns he might turn on me, like many paranoiacs do when they are feeling cornered. It was on the 15th that this climax was reached. I had already given extra instructions for the guards on duty to be especially watchful. What I did not reckon with was that at four in the morning or thereabouts, Hess demanded to see me. The door of the cage behind which was his room on the landing had to be thrown open. Hess, fully dressed in his air force uniform including his flying boots, rushed towards me and hurled himself over the banisters. There was a thud on the floor below and groans from Hess. We rushed downstairs where Hess was lying fully conscious at the bottom of the oak staircase with an obviously broken leg. I tended to his injuries. It was then that, crisis reached, he began talking freely. It was as though some final barrier of reserve had been broached. The delusions he went on to outline were so extraordinary not only in their imagination, but in the vividness of detail, that I am bound to recount them at length. I feel sure they may be of use, not only in expanding upon our understanding of the patient, but also for what they might reveal about the Nazi psyche at large – and indeed for the wider discipline of psychiatry.
>
  Hess began by outlining at length what he claimed were his ‘true’ reasons for fleeing the Reich. He first described how he had felt increasingly an outcast at what we might call the ‘court’ surrounding Hitler. Hess felt he had fallen down the ‘pecking order’. He no longer enjoyed the special favour of Hitler and he had relinquished the role of ‘gatekeeper’ to his Fuhrer. All this he couched in the kind of catastrophic language that might be employed by, for instance, an obsessive and spurned lover.

  From our earlier conversations, it is easy to see why Hitler may have dispensed with the services of so limited an individual. It is also clear what psychological damage this must have caused, for Hess regarded – and I believes still regards – Hitler with a kind of fawning hero-worship for which there is no obvious equivalent among the British to their politicians.

  Hess says he had also begun to have second thoughts about the general approach of the Nazi regime, particularly with regard to the Jews and other persecuted minorities. While his hatred – it is not too strong a word – for the Jews remains undimmed, he claims to have become disturbed by pronouncements made by Heinrich Himmler of the SS and his deputy, a man named Reinhard Heydrich, on the plan for dealing with what he describes as the ‘Jewish problem’. Hess intimates this may go far beyond their forcible resettlement in Palestine or Madagascar, though he remained vague on the specifics.

  This may seem surprising, for Hess has been assumed as radical as Hitler himself on the subject. And yet we should perhaps not be wholly surprised by this apparent contradiction. Hess is, as I have already detailed, a conflicted individual – the sort of man who might within the duration of a single conversation swing between one conviction and its diametric opposite, between amiability and sullenness, between pride and a sense of crippling inadequacy. Moreover I sense there is a grain of good in the man, unlike some other members of that blasted coterie with which Hitler has surrounded himself. Hess said it was the combination of these two factors that brought about a nervous crisis which must have resembled closely that which we have observed here in Mytchett Place.