Thin Men, Paper Suits

by Tin Larrick

  “Sitrep!” hissed Team Leader.

  “No visual at all, sir. Young couple behind him obscuring him completely. Waiter approaching. Looks like they’re waiting for a table. Yes… yes… he’s showing them to a table. Visual regained.”

  “Christ! Has he got his bloody food yet?”

  “Negative. Looks like he’s playing with his phone.”

  “Do we have a clear shot? Backstop?”

  “It’s all good, sir. All wait staff busy on the main floor. The only thing behind him is the bar – those optics are going to make a hell of a mess.”

  “Someone getting a splinter in their heel I can handle,” Team Leader said.

  There was a high pitched splutter of laughter from the back.

  “Shut the hell up!” Team Leader barked. “Right, we have a clear shot. Prepare to take him. Now remember – that glass is going to dink your trajectories, so make it long and loud. And I want him down before they bring out his bloody poppadoms – no civilian casualties.”

  There was silence.

  “Well? Go go go!” Team Leader screamed.

  *

  The waiter emerged from the kitchen out and, with profuse hand-wringing apologies, explained to Switch that they could find no record of his order. However, if it would please him, they would prepare him an order from fresh and throw in a bottle of house red as compensation. They promised to make him wait no longer than ten minutes. A somewhat befuddled Switch agreed, and sat back down.

  A thought occurred to him. He stood up again, pulled out his mobile phone and scrolled through the call log.

  There. He’d called The Golden Samosa at eighteen-hundred exactly. The call placing the order had taken less than two minutes – one minute and forty-eight seconds, actually, according to the log – and the man taking the call had told him twenty to twenty-five minutes for the order to be ready.

  He’d left immediately, stopping off for cash and beer on the way. This had taken less time than anticipated, and he’d arrived at the restaurant at eighteen-twelve exactly…

  That was odd. It never took him less than fifteen minutes to arrive at The Golden Samosa, especially with a stop on the way.

  So how?...

  His eye caught the stack of yellow order chits again, with the restaurant’s logo emblazoned at the top of each one, and laughed out loud.

  *

  Williams had to admit, given the amateurish frantic radio exchanges immediately beforehand, the execution of the intercept was – to the casual bystander anyway – deftly done.

  The vans screamed in unison as they raced out of the car park and converged on the restaurant door in a snowplough.

  The doors slid open and eight men resembling positively terrifying futuristic robots – four from each van – debussed, levelled their weapons and liberally sprayed the front window of The Golden Samosa with machine-gun fire.

  The explosions rang out in an apocalyptic, deafening roar of gunfire and the shivering fragments of destroyed glass. The sound was at a level one might associate with a multiple car crash, or an airliner jet engine, or being front and centre at an AC/DC concert – unexpected, horrifying and totally obliterating the other ambient sounds of the high street of a nondescript town on a Saturday evening. It was a full frontal assault on the senses, and if it was intended to shock – and, indeed, awe – then it was likely to have succeeded.

  Whether it succeeded in the operation’s ultimate objective – neutralising their target – well, they didn’t hang around to find out. Working on the premise that no one caught in that dragnet of fire could possibly have survived, they were back in the vehicles and screaming away into the night before the curtain of glass fragments had finished crashing onto the pavement.

  When the final particles of glass finished tinkling onto the ground, there was a heavy silence. A siren could be heard far off in the distance.

  And then the screaming started.

  *

  Switch was still laughing when he got back in the car. Having told the hand-wringing waiter in The Happy Bhaji not to worry about his order, he made the short run across town to The Golden Samosa in ten minutes.

  Switch had three takeaways on speed dial. He tended to rotate them on a more or less random basis, although it was usually informed by whom he had visited last. Tonight he had ordered from The Golden Samosa, but so wrapped up was he in his retirement daydream that he had, on autopilot, mistakenly driven to The Happy Bhaji. Where, of course, they had no record of his order.

  In fact, he only stopped laughing when he arrived at the restaurant to a kaleidoscope of blue strobing lights, crime scene tape and gawking onlookers. When he saw this, the laughing stopped abruptly. (As it happened, four of his hairs turned white and an extra crease appeared on his forehead also, but he was unaware of this.)

  He got out of the car and shouldered his way to the front of the cluster of rubberneckers. A grim-faced police officer in hi-vis jacket and hat stood, hands clasped, on the cordon.

  The Golden Samosa had been decimated. The front window was completely gone; a field of glass had been spewed across the pavement and into the restaurant itself. The paper decorations hanging in the window had been shredded by gunfire, and their remnants floated in the breeze. Distraught customers were being tended to by paramedics, while the white-shirted wait staff stood in a solemn circle around a calculator, presumably working out what stage of the business plan this set them back to.

  Switch went from wide-eyed wonder to hard-jawed anger inside a minute. The pricks. This had been meant for him. They’d been waiting for him. Shit, were they monitoring his calls?

  And who the hell were ‘they,’ anyway?

  Well, whoever they were, they’d just lucked out. Switch pulled out his wallet and retrieved a handful of the Latvian currency. At least he had a use for it now.

  He lifted his hand and opened his fingers. The breeze caught the notes and they floated towards the carpet of glass outside the restaurant.

  *

  “Well?” Fire said in his ear.

  Despite the situation, he felt some of the tension ease from his shoulders on hearing her voice. “No go. They missed him.” From a camera built into the hat of an operative posing as a cop on scene guard, Williams watched the live video feed from the scene of destruction outside The Golden Samosa.

  “You missed him?”

  “Not I. They missed him.” The shit was going to fly when Retallick got the update, and Williams was already in self-preservation mode. Unfortunately, he was the one with the privilege of informing the boss.

  “How the hell did you miss him?” She was incredulous.

  “I just told you, it wasn’t…”

  “It was like the OK Corral down there. And you missed him? I told you – this job needed a sniper. Now you’re left with a bunch of headlines to clear up and a whole lot of attention. Retallick’s going to shit a brick.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “So tell me again…Hey. Are you seeing this?”

  The video feed had shifted inside the restaurant. A pair of legs stuck out from underneath a white tablecloth that was dark with blood. She was obviously looking at the same feed.

  “How are you getting this? Where are you?” Williams asked.

  “I thought you said they missed him?”

  “They did. The guy under a blanket was a decoy.”

  She was quiet for a moment.

  “A decoy?” she said eventually.

  “Yeah. He threw us off. Phoned The Golden Bhaji, ordered from The Golden Bhaji, then drove somewhere else entirely.”

  “Where?”

  “How should I know? He obviously knew we were listening.”

  “Clever,” she said after a beat.

  “You’re telling me. He’s no dummy – that much is obvious. Even left us a few Latvian banknotes at the scene as a fuck-you.”

  “So who’s the guy under the blanket?”

  “Wrong place, wrong time.”

 
; “Family man? Or an operative?”

  “Don’t know yet. I really really hope the latter.”

  “Got to go,” she said, suddenly. There was a click in his ear, and then the hiss of emptiness. She was clearly distancing herself from him, and his heart began to drum in his chest. He was in a lot of trouble – whether it was justified or not did not seem to be relevant. It was Team Leader’s mistake, but he, apparently, was in the wind. Certainly he was not answering his cell phone – for all Williams knew, he was already on a military transport back to the comparatively safer mercenary environs of Basra.

  Williams swallowed, and picked up the telephone receiver on the control panel. There was no keypad, no number input – it was a single line comms-link, going to one place and one place only.

  It didn’t even ring. It just hummed for a second and then the connection was made.

  “Yes?” The voice was artificially robotic – it caused Williams to shiver. He’d never even heard Retallick’s real voice.

  Williams pulled at his collar, his nerves threatening to overpower him. Why was it always him giving Retallick bad news?

  “Boss? Um… not good news, boss.”

  *

  When it finally dawned on Switch that sheer fluke and absent-mindedness had prevented him from being riddled with machine-gunfire, it took a quarter of a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red to ease his nerves and put sufficient strength back into his knees to hold him upright. When the bottle was gone, his knees gave out again – but for different reasons.

  So they’d made him.

  This in itself was of no particular concern to him. In fact, he was almost a little relieved. Twenty years he'd been undercover. Twenty years, and the job was becoming stale. It was almost liberating – were the fact not synonymous with an apparently irresistible need to strafe him with hollow-points.

  He’d felt them on his heels before, of course, but – like now, in fact – he’d always managed to keep ahead of them. There was just one more gig. Just one, and then he could leave this two-bit life behind him once and for all.

  Labelling Ian Switch’s principal occupation was not easy. During the Cold War, it was easy – he was a spy – but in these days of alliances and partnerships, he tended to straddle disciplines. In essence, he broke into places, stole information and sold it to people who wanted it – it might be a police station one week, a local council office the week after, or GCHQ the week after that.

  Information was a commodity, and when he was feeling existential – which tended to happen when he’d necked a bottle of blended whisky – he would marvel over the fact that a single sheet of A4 paper could be worth ten pounds or ten thousand pounds depending on what patterns the ink had been printed in.

  He’d always been slick. Ian Switch was a grey man, and a significant amount of his success depended on the fact that people did not tend to pay him much attention at all. But now… now someone was onto him. Some bright young upstart, a clever dick – someone who bothered to look at things a bit closer than the average drain-brain and join the dots. Someone with a personality. One of the few left in the service who didn't have a ‘too-difficult’ light.

  But he was far too good for them. Too quick, too slick.

  Too quick, too slick.

  Too… drunk.

  Ian Switch passed out on the sofa.

  Clever dicks…

  *

  When match day rolled around, Switch’s nervous system began to work overtime in a way it never usually did before a gig. Maybe it was the prospect of imminent retirement, or – as was more likely – it was the near-miss at the takeaway.

  Or maybe it was just Monday morning melancholy. He checked the reflection of his weathered face in the rear view mirror of the van, and tried to console himself with the fact that by Friday afternoon he would be sipping gimlets in the executive lounge of Heathrow’s Terminal 5. In the meantime, however, he needed to remember the things that made him good at his job.

  He fingered the laminated ID badge in his hand, and clipped on his tool belt. He locked the van and shuffled across the car park, a nasty-smelling roll-up in hand. The building itself sat on an industrial park and was sandwiched between a chemical plant and an industrial laundry company. It was flat grey concrete, ten storeys tall, and it was, apart from the apparently indestructible fortified steel perimeter fence, utterly nondescript.

  The automatic doors slid open as he approached. He showed his badge to the receptionist and signed himself in, and a serious-looking operative in a suit you could cut your finger on appeared to escort Switch to the ground floor annex marked OPERATIONS/INTELLIGENCE. The prick even held the door open for him.

  Yes, people would have to look at Ian Switch very closely indeed to ever suspect him. Even clever dicks.

  *

  No one in their right mind would ever have described Magine Taylor as a clever dick.

  “Excuse me, love.”

  She looked up. Switch gave her a smile.

  “Sorry to bother you. Just got to take a look at the ceiling lights. Carry on as if I’m not here.”

  Magine waved him on without a word. Switch erected his stepladder. Once at the top he put on some goggles, and made a show of removing some ceiling tiles.

  Concealed inside his goggles was a tiny, high-powered camera, and once he was satisfied Magine was not interested in his presence, he began photographing the array of documents strewn about her desk.

  While taking the photographs, he kept a watchful eye on Magine. She did not appear engaged in anything other than navigating her way around a web page – in fact other than punctuating her movements with the occasional mouse click, she did not seem to be doing much of anything at all. Once or twice her cell phone sounded, and after replying by text message, she returned to her computer screen.

  The gig was straightforward enough. A top-level tactical intelligence meeting, with senior members of the police, the security services, the Home Office and the NCA. Each was bringing their own information to the table – individually, the information would mean very little to anyone, but pooled together, the completed jigsaw puzzle would be worth a fortune.

  To administrate the meeting, however, only one person beforehand had full access to the intelligence portfolio in its entirety – the attractive and slightly vacuous-looking creature sitting at the desk at the foot of Switch’s ladder.

  This was the weak junction in the integrity of the pre-meet administration. As far as Switch could see, it was a monumental vulnerability that had been overlooked – a secretary earning peanuts was, for the best part of a week, the only person holding all the aces. How could they overlook that? Were it not for Switch’s intercept methods, he probably could have bought the information from her for the cost of a two-week holiday in the Bahamas.

  But overlook it they had, and Switch was exploiting the vulnerability that his employer had identified. All he had to do was photograph the full range of intelligence, take it to his buyer, pocket the cash and then he was out of this overpopulated landmass, never to return.

  He began to grow uncomfortable at the top of the ladder. He had been waiting for Magine to leave her desk so he could have a better look around her workstation, but it appeared this would be a long wait. He stared around the office from the top of his ladder, catching his reflection in the one-way mirror glass used in the building’s windows, then descended and went outside for a break.

  He left her slouched back in her chair, idly clicking her mouse in a slow, metronomic rhythm around the screen; her chin resting in her left palm, a pose that squashed her mouth and cheeks into a malleable pout.

  *

  Procrastinator. Pro-cras-tin-a-tor. Magine rolled the syllables around her tongue as she flicked through the online dictionary. Someone – she couldn’t remember who – had asked her why she procrastinated so much. She had placed her hands indignantly on her hips and pouted I don’t. Retort safely delivered, she had made a mental note to find out what it meant as a priority.
r />   There. Found it: Delay. Put off taking action. Defer till a later time.

  I don’t, she thought. Do I?

  A half-empty coffee cup with a vivid pink lipstick stain on the rim stood on the desk next to a smouldering cigarette, both of which flanked a desk telephone. Her eyes wandered to the telephone as it rang, and her gaze remained fixed on it for a moment, as if she were trying to calculate the amount of surplus movement that would be required to actually answer the damn thing.

  Eventually, her sense of responsibility just about got the better of her, and she hauled herself upright to answer it, knocking the coffee cup over her keyboard as she reached for the receiver.

  “Oh, shit,” she cried, frantically trying to mop up the spillage with the contents of the intelligence portfolio.

  Yes, Ian Switch would have laughed until he cried.

  *

  He stood under a willow tree bordering the station car park, smoking quietly and sipping at some awful coffee in a styrofoam cup. He gazed through the windows and surveyed the open-plan chaos of the offices that was rendered smoky-grey by the one-way glass. To the outsider the workers could have been administrating absolutely any business at all. That they were dealing in information they couldn’t possibly comprehend the value of was almost irrelevant.

  He shrugged inwardly. Their loss, he thought, and trampled his cigarette underfoot. He returned to the building’s main doors and was again escorted to OPERATIONS/INTELLIGENCE and the procrastinating PA.

  When he arrived, however, he was perturbed to find the office empty. Moreover, Magine Taylor’s previously occupied workstation now appeared to be in something of a mess. The chair was on its back, the mouse was dangling over the edge of the desk, and dark brown coffee was spreading across the desk towards a pile of papers.

  Realising she had either left in a hurry or been taken against her will, Switch decided to follow her lead. He gathered up his belongings, stuffed a USB stick and wad of coffee-stained papers from the desk into his bag – no time to assess their importance – and fled from the building.