by Tom Marcus
Eventually making it back to the car, I started the engine and let the interior warm up before setting off. My trousers were still soaking wet and, given there was no massive rush to get to debrief, I knew I could afford the time. The drive back to London was straightforward and using my cover credit card, issued to all operators, I bought a shitload of junk food, so the journey went quickly as I ate my body weight in burgers, chips and onion rings.
In Thames House, the anonymous grey building on Millbank that is the headquarters of MI5, I took the lift up to the briefing room, sharing it with two women from HR. They knew I was an operator from the way I was dressed, the complete polar opposite to their smart office wear.
Leaving the lift on my floor, I walked straight into the briefing room and was surprised to see only the operations officer and my team leader. It looked like they’d been there a while.
‘We’ve sent everyone home, mate,’ Graeme said. He was keen to look after the team and give us time with our families, especially with the amount of hours we’d been doing lately. ‘We’ll give a full update tomorrow but so far it looks a solid arrest. We’ve got snippets of intelligence coming through already that they were going to hit a busy cathedral in the city. Have you got that phone you picked up?’
‘Yeah, it’s still in Helen’s bag of dry rice. Hopefully techs can pull something off it. I’m not sure if it is GREEN ATLANTIC’s or not, but worth a shot. The cameras are in there too. Video is time stamped in case you need that for evidence.’
‘Thanks, Tom. See you tomorrow morning. So far we are back here at half six.’
By the time I got back to my house I’d have roughly eight hours before I had to set off again.
‘No dramas, catch you later. I’m on my phone if you need me.’
The video footage I’d recorded of the targets praying outside their tents would likely be used in their prosecution, but all of that wouldn’t involve operators like us. Most of the time we are kept away from court cases to allow us to do our jobs on the ground, but right then I didn’t give a fuck about the terrorist cell we’d stopped earlier in that remote area of Wales, I just wanted to get home to see my wife.
2
SURVIVAL INSTINCT
I was confident in my ability as an operator for MI5, you have to be. You need to be 100 per cent sure you can do the jobs your team needs you to do, whether it’s following a suicide bomber from their makeshift bomb factory all the way to their intended target without being seen, or talking your way out of danger when local drug dealers want to know what you’re doing on their turf.
Some confuse this confidence for arrogance. It’s not. I never claim MI5, particularly the surveillance officers in A4, are superhuman. We do, however, have a unique set of skills that allow us to keep people safe. We never doubt our reputation of being the best covert surveillance operators in the world and I make no apologies for that. When our country is under attack from thousands of hostile threats, the public need people like us to stand between them and pure, unrelenting evil.
Are we all likeable people? No, of course not.
Are we good at our job? You better believe it!
You can’t politely ask our enemies to kindly not blow our children up while they are at a concert, or offer forgiveness to those who hire a van and mow people down in the street. If the intelligence officers tell us you’re a threat to our country and its people, we’re going to track you down and every single person helping you.
My early life was the perfect training for my job at MI5. Although a part of me wishes I’d had a normal childhood, if that had been the case I might never have ended up in a job I loved. As a kid, I didn’t have any of the security most children take for granted. Instead I learned to recognize and trust the one very basic animal element that is hardwired into our DNA – our survival instinct.
You know when you’re in a dangerous situation, the same as any dog or cat does. You can feel something not quite right in the atmosphere around you, either through experience or a simple process of observation. An animal knows when it’s time to fight to stay alive or to run away. As a kid you can’t always run but I was going to learn that this didn’t have to make me totally powerless.
I was sent to a Catholic school, not because my mum and dad chose it but because it was the only local school that had a place. Although a small northern school run by nuns might sound idyllic to some, to others it might suggest somewhere much harsher. The second picture would be right. By a distance. But the school did accelerate the development of skill sets I used as an adult to keep me alive. I remember one cold Monday morning in the middle of January, when I was sitting with the rest of the school on the wooden floor of the assembly hall listening to one of the sisters, who was our school head, talking. I was six years old.
‘I hope everyone came to church yesterday,’ she said. It wasn’t meant to be a question, at least I didn’t think so. ‘Stand up if you didn’t come to church yesterday.’
Well, I didn’t go. I never went. I wasn’t really sure what church was at that age. Standing up, it took a few seconds for me to realize that everyone, including the three nuns in charge and all the other teachers, was looking directly at me. Completely unaware of doing something wrong, I looked around. I was the only one standing up. Just me.
Was this good or bad? I guessed I was about to be in trouble. I was right. The oldest of the blue-clad sisters pulled me out to the front. One of my black plimsolls fell off as I struggled to stay upright, a combination of being yanked like a dog and having nowhere to place my feet other than on the rows of kids.
‘Christ gave his life for all of us. For all of you. We go to church to pray, to show respect and to confess our own sins.’ The sister had hold of the back of my neck, her fingernails clawing at my skin. The door out to the schoolyard was closed, the other door leading to the classrooms was blocked by kids and teachers. I was trapped, but my instinct was telling me to run. It was only my young, naive nature that stopped me trying. I’d just lost my front two baby teeth; I wasn’t old enough to have the confidence to run. Yet.
‘Marcus, you haven’t confessed your sins. You have let yourself and this school down. For that you must be punished to make sure you stay on the correct path.’
Punished for what? I thought. How can Jesus love everyone but punish you if you don’t go to church? Even at this young age I thought this was odd.
No time to think about it too much. As soon as the vice-like grip left my neck I felt a sharp fast slap against the back of my legs. It was so unexpected I jumped forward. Turning around, trying to understand what had just happened, I saw the sister holding a wooden ruler. I still remember the stinging sensation.
‘Go and sit down, Marcus!’
Making my way over the sea of kids, trying to find the missing pump for my left foot, I wasn’t angry at what had happened. I wasn’t sad either. If anything I was determined for it not to happen again. By the time I walked myself home from school, which was a good few miles, I was soaking wet. Using a key tied to a bit of string around my neck to let myself in, I knew my dad was home. I could smell him. At that age I didn’t have any idea what being drunk meant nor did I recognize what I was smelling. Today I know it as alcohol, especially cheap vodka, which almost smells like hairspray.
Finding my dad swaying in his chair in the front room, struggling to see what was on the TV, I innocently asked, ‘Daddy, can I go to church? Teachers say to go on Sundays.’
Nothing. As he leaned forwards trying to gain some sort of balance, I tried again. ‘Daddy? Church?’
That was the day I harnessed the ability to spot the danger signals. Understand the picture in front of you: what’s wrong here? What is likely to happen next and how do I survive it?
‘CHUURRRRCCCHHHH?!’ The slurred word spat out of his mouth, saliva clinging to his lips. He grabbed a fistful of my hair in one hand and my neck with the other, much tighter than the sister at school that morning. I felt myself being lifted off the
ground. To this day I’m not sure how I ended up in the back room of the house but I remember flying to the floor from the ceiling and my head leading the way like a plane in a nose dive. Except it was my dad who was accelerating me towards the bare floorboards.
I remember hearing a lot of words I hadn’t heard before, a handful of ‘fucks’ and ‘bastard’ as I was pinned down before being hit repeatedly over the head with a large book. ‘Da . . . Daddy . . .!’
That’s the last thing I remember, saying ‘Daddy’. This is the first time I’ve admitted this took place. I didn’t even tell the psychiatrist in MI5 who specifically asked me if anything like this had happened to me as a kid. In part, I think I’ve blocked these memories, but writing this feels like the right time to talk openly about my childhood.
I was obviously knocked out for a short period as I woke up in a state of undress, my clothes ripped and my body hurting all over, my neck more than my head. I could see a bible on the floor that was obviously the book used to teach me a lesson, another one. It had bits of my hair stuck in the bindings.
It must have been the sound of the front door closing that brought me round. My mum had come home and she flew into an argument with my dad straight away. I’ve no idea what was being said, although I do remember her coming into the back room and sharply shouting at me for looking a mess. I’m not sure why she couldn’t see what had happened.
As I took myself to bed, piling up my clothes on top to hide underneath and help block the sound of my parents screaming at each other, I still wasn’t angry or scared about what had happened. I was determined to not let it happen again. This Sunday I would go to church.
Where was the church? What was church like inside? Maybe it’s why the other kids are happy and don’t get hit like I do? Because they go to church.
Done deal. As I drifted off under the suffocating heat of the pile on top of me, I tried to count how many get ups it would be till I could get to church. I remember I would always call it ‘get ups’ instead of sleeps. Somehow, sleeping reminded me of dead people. Still, unresponsive, cold. Some part of me even then wanted to see the positive in life, to make the best of a bad situation, but accepted that boys like me had to make sure they weren’t seen. That was okay – keeping out of sight gave me breathing space to think about what I was going to do next.
I was almost asleep when I felt a wobbling inside my mouth. Another tooth was loose, towards the back. Reaching in my mouth, I pulled it straight out. It must have been knocked loose when I hit the floor earlier. I held it tight in my fist. There was very little bleeding and, touching the new gap in my teeth with the tip of my tongue, as all kids do, I knew that the tooth fairy would not be visiting this house. She didn’t know who I was.
As the days ticked by, I learned to recognize the smell of my dad when he was blind drunk and made sure I was quiet. I would take a tin of beans, a spoon and a cup of water up to my bedroom without being heard. It became like muscle memory, avoiding the squeaking floorboard and remembering how much pressure a door would need to open and close so I could avoid slamming anything. The only problem I had was at night, when I’d always need the toilet. I avoided walking into the firing line of my increasingly violent parents by having a wee on a Spiderman costume a neighbour had given me a couple of years earlier. It was thick, horrible material but seemed to soak up fluid well. It didn’t soak up the smell though; my tiny bedroom quickly stank of stale urine. Ironic, really, that twenty years later I would purposely be making sure my clothes stank of piss so I could blend in as someone who was homeless in order to keep eyes on a target.
Finally, Sunday came and I’d made it relatively unscathed apart from red raw legs after my mum found out I’d been using my bedroom as a toilet. All week I’d been asking the other kids at school how to get to the church and avoiding questions about the bruises covering my body. Luckily it turned out that the church was just around the corner from the school itself. I knew that when the little hand on the kitchen clock was at eight and the big hand at the top I had to set off for school, so I would use the same principle to get to church. Hoping I would be able to get there and save myself a week of pain afterwards.
I remember how much quieter the roads were that morning compared to when I walked to school during the week. Also, it felt really strange walking there in my own clothes rather than my school uniform. At the time I didn’t appreciate it but I did feel more grown-up. Moving past the school, I repeated to myself the instructions for the church and made it to the front gate. No one was there yet and the door was shut. Moving into the grounds of the church, which were surrounded by old stone walls, I sat on some dry ground underneath a tree and waited. I remember thinking it would make a brilliant Christmas tree, and imagined it full of lights and decorations like everyone else had at Christmas.
Eventually people started to arrive, including the priest and the sisters from my school as well as kids and their parents. I wasn’t sure what to do once inside so stayed out of the way, waiting until everyone had gone in and I could hear the muffled sounds of the service starting. Now I felt comfortable enough to enter – my first time ever inside a church, as far as I could remember. I noticed how intricately carved the double wooden doors were as I walked through and under an arch made of huge stones.
Rows and rows of people were all facing towards the far end of the church, listening to the priest read something. I was desperate not to be seen and asked to do something, so I tucked myself away in the back, finding a huge cast iron heating pipe to sit on. It was so warm that after a few minutes I started to drift off, a combination of not sleeping well, coming in from the cold and the monotone rhythmic sound coming from the altar at the front of the church. I only woke when the service had finished and people started to move around, getting ready to leave.
The sudden noise shocked me; panicking, I instinctively ran out before I could be seen and sprinted around the side of the church where the gravestones were. I’m still not sure why I did this, given that I wanted to be there. I could see a couple of the kids from my class walking out with their mum and dad, holding hands and asking to go to the park. The sisters followed afterwards and everyone made their way home or into their cars.
I still didn’t know what happened during a visit to the church, but everyone seemed happy. Kids weren’t being dragged around, no screaming or shouting from the parents. Strange.
Going to bed that night, warm inside my cave of clothes and blankets, I fell asleep thinking Monday morning assembly would be good because I would be like all the other kids. I would be normal.
The walk to school that Monday was particularly cold, I remember the icy breeze hitting my gums where my missing teeth had left gaps, but I felt good. I was looking forward to school that day.
Sitting in assembly with the children from my class and surrounded, as every Monday, by the nursery children in front of me and the confident older kids behind, I listened to the sister talk about the coming week and tell some story about Jesus. My attention drifted as I noticed the state of my footwear compared to the kids sitting on my row.
All had leather shoes that were clean and not falling apart. My left pump had a mouth where the front of the sole had come away almost completely. But my right pump was the worst. It was split all around the bottom where the rubber had almost completely disintegrated. And I’d only just noticed that they were too small, my toes right at the edge. I was so engrossed in the state of me compared to everyone else, I didn’t notice the assembly was standing up.
‘MARCUS!’ the sister yelled.
You always know you’re in trouble as a kid when people shout your surname. Scrambling to my feet, I wasn’t sure what I’d missed. Maybe it was time to go back into class. I was smaller than the kids to my left and right and hoped that I would be invisible, despite the sister already shouting my name. Looking for movement, I focused on the gaps between the kids to try and see if anyone was coming for me. Silence apart from the odd sniffle from the nursery ki
ds in front. Suddenly, I was grabbed round the back of my neck, the force of it almost giving me whiplash. It was another sister, who’d come from the back of the assembly hall.
I was dragged backwards and straight to the headmistress’s office, where I was dumped into a chair and told to wait. What had I done wrong? The office was small, just room for the head sister’s chair and desk, my chair and a small bookcase. That was it. The sister who was standing guard over me, for whatever reason, left the office briefly.
Even though I was just six years old and smaller than the other kids I was learning fast. Not maths or reading – I couldn’t hold my own with my classmates in any of the normal lessons – but I was learning vital skills.
I knew I was about to be hurt. I could sense the atmosphere, I’d been hit before at school, chances were it was going to happen again. Ruler!
Spotting two wooden rulers on the sister’s desk, I checked the open door for my guard; still on my own. Sliding off the chair, which was just high enough that my feet couldn’t touch the floor, I grabbed both rulers and hid them behind the books on the bookcase. Wriggling back onto my chair, I hoped what I’d done had saved me rather than being about to make my punishment even worse.
Seconds later, both sisters walked in.
‘Marcus, why didn’t you come to church yesterday?’ the head asked in her stern Irish accent. Immediately I looked up, my eyes widening. I can tell her the truth!
‘I was, I was there, I went.’
Her voice rose with anger, thinking I’d lied to her. ‘Then why, when I asked the children to stand up if they went to church, didn’t you stand up?!’