Defend or Die

by Tom Marcus

  Lo and behold, after a couple of minutes of moaning and wriggling about, while she let the dramatic tension mount, she made contact with the old bastard, and began to deliver a series of messages that even to a ten-year-old’s ears were stunning in their banality.

  ‘He’s missing you! He wants you to wear that special dress for him – you know the one – because up in heaven he can see you! Tell little Matthew I’ll be watching him playing football next Saturday!’

  What a load of bollocks – especially since I’d been kicked out of the football team the week before for fighting – but my mum lapped it all up and even asked for a second helping (for another twenty quid, naturally) of vague drivel which any idiot could have made up without knowing my dad from Adam. Leaving aside the football (to be fair, Dad was usually so pissed he might have forgotten about me being banned), just the fact that he was supposed to be in heaven should have sent up a bloody great big red flag.

  That bastard in heaven? Not unless they had a special section for wife beaters. Come to think of it, seeing Mum crying her eyes out listening to these post-mortem endearments from a man who’d beaten her black and blue every Saturday night had probably been the last straw. I left home for good soon after, preferring to live on the streets, where the people who beat you up and stole your stuff at least had the excuse that they weren’t family.

  So, no ghosts, then. But if I wasn’t seeing ghosts, what was I seeing? Hallucinations? That was a normal part of the grieving process sometimes, I knew that much, so it didn’t necessarily mean I was crazy. But at the time it was all so real. I could touch her. Well, she could touch me. It was impossible to accept it was all just a trick of my mind.

  Fuck it. I got up and started jogging back down the hill, my muscles already beginning to tighten up, resisting the temptation to look over my shoulder to check one more time if Sarah and Joseph were still there. In the end it didn’t matter whether they were real or not. All that mattered was that I didn’t want their visits to stop.

  I got back to the house just in time, before my hamstrings started to seize up good and proper. I stood under a scalding shower until my skin was raw, then put on a fresh T-shirt and jeans. I stuffed my filthy trainers and running gear into a black bin liner, put them in the holdall with the rest of my clothes, toiletries and a few books, then did one more look through each room to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.

  Nope: all packed away and gone, either to the charity shop or the tip. Nothing left to show that Sarah and Joseph and me had ever lived there. Like she said, just bricks and mortar. Time for a new family to move in with all their stuff, all their life.

  I caught sight of a mark on the wall where Joseph had somehow managed to flick a spoonful of raspberry dessert right across the room. Not quite every last trace gone, then. I felt a lump tightening in my throat and knew it was time to leave. I took my jacket from the back of the chair, picked up the holdall and walked out, closing the door firmly behind me. I opened the boot of the car with a beep, slung in the holdall, then got in. Before starting the engine I took my phone out of my back pocket and quickly tapped out a message.

  Hi Alex. I’m on my way.

  3

  I walked briskly past the entrance, head down against the drizzle, trying to look like an office worker running late, a takeaway coffee cup clutched in my hand. It was the second time I’d walked past it in the last hour. I’d also sat in the coffee shop on the corner with an unrestricted view of the building for half an hour, keeping an eye on the comings and goings, seeing if anyone was parked up – especially if two or more men were in a vehicle and showed no sign of going anywhere – or if the same person or persons walked past the building more than once.

  Was I just being paranoid? Maybe. The message Alex had shown me had been encrypted; the timing seemed right. Everything made sense.

  But then it would, wouldn’t it? Blindeye, I was fairly certain, had pulled off the rescue of the Foreign Secretary without anyone outside of the team being aware of it. I wasn’t expecting Special Branch or SCO19 – the Met’s firearms unit – to be waiting to pounce. But there was always the possibility that the DG had had a change of heart, realized the whole thing was too risky even though it was his baby – actually because it was his baby – and decided to clean house. Kick over the traces. Get rid of the awkward bastard who had actually done his dirty work for him.

  I had no reason to think he would, no reason to suspect he didn’t have our backs. But there was always the first rule of intelligence: never trust a man in a suit.

  I got to the end of the road and entered the newsagent on the corner, buying a packet of gum. I exited and began walking back the way I’d come, towards the nondescript office building that was my destination. I was as certain as I could be that there was no surveillance: no parked cars with no reason to be there, no pedestrians doing repeated walk-bys, no clear observation points in the buildings opposite. It was time to press the buzzer and see what happened.

  If there was a squeal of brakes and four men in jeans, trainers and bomber jackets hauled me into the back of a van, I’d know I’d been wrong.

  There were four brass plates with company names, one for each buzzer. The top one said Clearwater Security International. It was shinier than the others, as if it had only been screwed on that morning.

  ‘Yes?’ a voice came through the intercom. A woman, not young, sounding as if visitors were an unusual and unwelcome occurrence.

  ‘Logan,’ I said simply.

  The door clicked open and I went in.

  As I walked up the four flights, I paused briefly at each floor, but I could detect no activity from behind the doors of the other businesses occupying the building. I felt another little surge of adrenaline. The place had been cleared of civilians. Maybe a street snatch was too obvious. Maybe the offices of Clearwater Security, beyond the gaze (and the smartphones) of random passers-by, was where the action would be. Oh well, too late to abort now.

  At the top, another door, another brass plate. I turned the handle and walked in.

  Instead of hard-faced men with buzz cuts pointing Heckler & Koch sub-machine guns at me, I found myself looking at an elderly, grey-haired lady sitting behind a desk in a matching charcoal jacket and skirt, with a string of pearls around her neck, apparently absorbed with the Times crossword. She looked at me over a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

  ‘You can go through, Mr Logan,’ she said, indicating a door to the right.

  I walked in and the gang was all there. Or, at least, three of them. Alex had dressed up a little for the occasion, now looking more like a sales rep who had come down to London for a job interview in a neat dark-blue suit. Alan was, well, Alan: black jeans, black T-shirt just about keeping his belly under wraps, thick glasses and greasy hair over his eyes. And then there was Ryan, wearing a loud and distinctly unseasonal Hawaiian shirt, his long black hair in a neat ponytail.

  If you’d known these were the people standing between you and a major terrorist attack, you might have felt a little uneasy. The truth was, they were the best of the best.

  They were sitting at a round table in the middle of what looked like an open-plan office, a scattering of PC terminals and random office supplies giving it a Mary Celeste look, as if the staff had had to evacuate in a hurry because of a fire alarm or had just been raptured.

  I smiled. ‘Hi, guys.’ I shook hands with Alan and Ryan and sat down. Yeah, I’d missed them.

  There was one member of the team I hadn’t missed, though. In fact, thinking about seeing him again had been making my guts churn uncomfortably for the last twenty-four hours.

  Jeremy Leyton-Hughes. The DG’s number two and the man who had directed Blindeye’s operations. My bad feelings towards him weren’t just on account of the fact that he was Eton and the Guards from his spit-shined shoes to his regimental tie, although that would be more than enough in my book; it was more the fact that he’d been playing a double game, taking us off the board just when we
had the brothers in our sights, so the SAS could terminate them live on TV, thereby making the PM look good. The trouble was, the house where the brothers were supposedly holed up was a clever fake, a booby-trapped death-house, while the brothers were actually on a houseboat near Millwall Dock, preparing to do the business with the Foreign Secretary. In the end it was a fucking miracle there hadn’t been a bloodbath.

  When he briefly visited me in hospital, the DG had hinted that despite almost fucking the whole thing up, Leyton-Hughes was too useful to get rid of. I had to disagree, and if I hadn’t been hooked up to a drip at the time, I would have volunteered to do the job myself. Now I was dreading seeing the bastard back in charge.

  Before I could ask the others why he wasn’t here, the door opened and the receptionist walked in. I instantly clammed up, uncertain what the set-up was, and how much she knew about Blindeye.

  She closed the door behind her, a thick pile of files held to her chest.

  ‘Well, not exactly a full house, but perhaps we’d better begin.’

  I threw Alex a questioning look. She gave me a shrug in return.

  ‘My name is Margery Allenby,’ she began. ‘There’s no reason you should know this, I suppose, but I had the privilege of working for the Director General for the last twenty-six years as his personal assistant. A month ago, I retired.’ She made a sour face. ‘Or, rather, I was retired. It seems that in the Service, once you reach three score years and ten, it’s assumed by the powers that be that you’ve gone gaga.’

  She caught the look of bewilderment on our faces.

  ‘I can see by your expressions that perhaps some of you share that prejudice. Well, let me cut to the chase, as they say. I’m pleased to say the Director General has agreed that I still have something to offer my country, that some things even improve with age, like a fine wine. He also told me he had a vacancy he would like me to fill.’

  I really was getting bewildered now, though I managed to keep it from showing on my face this time. Was the DG’s seventy-year-old PA the latest recruit to Blindeye? Apart from top-notch typing skills and being able to help out when one of us was stymied by a tricky crossword clue, what exactly did she have to offer? We weren’t trying to infiltrate the WI, as far as I knew.

  ‘Mr Leyton-Hughes,’ she continued, ‘has been assigned a new, non-operational role in our Rio consulate. In his absence, I will be taking over the day-to-day operations of Blindeye.’

  She looked at each of us in turn, gauging our reaction.

  I thought for a moment. Actually, it made perfect sense. If she’d been the DG’s PA for twenty-six years, she’d know how to keep a secret. She’d know where all the bodies were buried and even whose fingerprints were on the shovel. She was probably the only person in MI5 the DG really trusted. And on top of that, now that she was retired, she didn’t have to explain her absence from Thames House.

  Which made me think of the brass plate on the door.

  ‘If Blindeye is to continue to operate in secret, it will need a legitimate front,’ she continued. ‘If half a dozen intelligence officers just disappear off the radar, eventually someone, somewhere will join the dots. Or one of you will be arrested –’ for some reason her eyes came to rest on me at this point – ‘and your cover story might not stand up to scrutiny. So, from today, all of you work for Clearwater Security International, an ultra-discreet consulting firm offering intelligence-based solutions for companies operating in high-risk environments. Our client list is highly confidential, so no one will be able to see that it has no actual names on it. Secrecy being our watchword, we don’t have a website, we don’t tout for business, and if clients try to approach us directly, we simply tell them that all of our resources are currently employed – and will be for the foreseeable future. Everything else about the company, however, is entirely legitimate. You are all salaried employees, paying your taxes and even contributing to a pension fund, though whether you will ever be able to draw on it is another matter. The main thing is that you will be able to come and go, getting on with your real job, without attracting undue attention. Please don’t ask me how all this was organized or where the money comes from. But you can rest assured that it’s not the first time I have had to concoct such a fiction.’

  I nodded to myself. Definitely more than just a secretary, then.

  ‘Any questions?’

  Ryan put up a hand. ‘Just one. Where are the others? Craig, Claire and Riaz?’

  ‘I’m afraid Mr Ahmed has decided to quit Blindeye for personal reasons. Mr McKinley, I am sad to report, recently suffered a fatal heart attack while on holiday in the Grampians. And Miss Maxwell . . .’ She frowned, looking at her watch. ‘Miss Maxwell should have been here some time ago.’

  We all took a moment to digest the news. Craig was ex-Army like me; he’d seemed tough and fit. It was hard to believe he’d gone, just like that. He was a solid guy, and Blindeye’s capability would be diminished as a result.

  Riaz deciding to turn his back on Blindeye was a shock, too. Like the rest of us, he’d seemed utterly dedicated to the cause. You didn’t join an outfit like Blindeye unless you were asked, but you didn’t say yes unless you believed wholeheartedly in its mission: to take the fight to the terrorists on a level playing field. I wondered if seeing me kill a man with my bare hands because we couldn’t risk him exposing the operation had been eating away at him. Maybe he’d finally come to believe the ends didn’t always justify the means.

  ‘Well, I don’t think we can wait any longer, I’m afraid.’ Mrs Allenby started handing out the folders.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked, trying to dispel my dark thoughts with a quip. ‘My pension details?’

  ‘No, Mr Logan,’ she said, tossing a folder into my lap. ‘This is some background information on Blindeye’s next target.’

  ‘Our target? You mean Blindeye has another op already?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Logan,’ she said, giving me a serious look, ‘we most certainly do.’

  I’d never been the fastest reader. Books weren’t my thing when I was growing up. When you were sleeping in shop doorways and under bridges, a bedtime story before lights out wasn’t usually an option. Even on the streets, though, you’d find some people whose most precious possession was a battered paperback they’d clearly read six times before, and you could see that immersing themselves in a familiar fictional world, whether it was learning spells at Hogwarts or slotting bad guys with the SAS, was the only thing that kept them going. Until some cunt came and grabbed their book off them and tossed it on the fire, of course.

  When it came to processing information, however, I was lightning quick, and I’d absorbed the salient points of the file before the rest of them were halfway through.

  The target: Viktor Shlovsky. Russian oligarch. Born in the small town of Lensk, Siberia, 1963. Houses in Monaco, Geneva and Montenegro plus a luxury yacht currently moored off Cannes, but his permanent home is a big pile on The Bishops Avenue, north London, bought for £47 million. Estimated net worth £4 billion, mostly from mining: minerals, precious metals, etc. Acquired the mines for a song during the great post-Soviet sell-off of state assets. Considered a loyal supporter of the current president. Wife: Ekaterina, a former model ten years his junior. Unconfirmed rumours of a previous spouse, fate unknown. Children: a son, Mikhail, aged twenty-two, and daughter Anastasia, nineteen. Playboy and man about town, often frequents high-end clubs and casinos in the West End, but otherwise tries to stay out of the limelight.

  I flipped the file closed. ‘This guy’s our target? A Russian oligarch? Sorry, I don’t get it.’

  The only thing I could think of that would make him a person of interest would be money-laundering. As a rule, no Russian ends up with that much money in the bank without having got their hands dirty somewhere along the way (there had to be some reason Shlovsky ended up with those mines and not someone else, right?), and the UK was a good place to invest some of that money in legitimate businesses. The trouble was, everybody kne
w that was going on. In fact, the UK government practically put up a bloody big sign saying: NEED TO GET RID OF YOUR DODGY ROUBLES? THEN COME TO LONDON! EVERYTHING FOR SALE! NO QUESTIONS ASKED! Unless Shlovsky had done something the government couldn’t overlook, like pushing a business rival off the top of the Shard, it was hard to see why they’d be interested. And MI5? They had other, bigger fish to fry.

  ‘You’re quite right, Mr Logan. There’s nothing in this file to indicate why Blindeye might want to get involved with Mr Shlovsky.’

  I shrugged. ‘Then . . .?’

  Ryan, Alex and Alan had all now finished reading, and looked up to see what Mrs Allenby had to say.

  ‘You recall the Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury? You might also recall that the two GRU officers responsible left a remarkably conspicuous trail. Perhaps the Kremlin wanted the world to be in no doubt who had done this – or rather they wanted other former Russian intelligence officers around the world to know what would be coming their way if they decided to start chatting indiscreetly with their new hosts.’

  ‘Well, at least after being caught red-handed, they won’t try the same thing again,’ Ryan said.

  ‘That’s no reason for complacency,’ Mrs Allenby replied. ‘It would be foolish to rest on our laurels. And the Russians are certainly not resting on theirs. In fact, we have every reason to think that they are scaling up their plans to destabilize Western democracies in general and our own in particular – and I don’t just mean troll farms and fake Facebook accounts. I’m talking about bombs and guns and bodies on the streets.’

  ‘But if they’re not going to risk infiltrating their own intelligence people, then how?’ Alex asked.