Gone Underground

by Phil Brett

  ‘’Partly why you’re here?’’

  ‘I do not agree that murdering people is the way to protect democracy.’

  ‘I think I could name scores of wars where that’s been the case.’

  ‘Oh, Peter, I have not come here for a debate. For heaven’s sake, you’re just like Mum, always wanting argue politics.’

  ‘It’s a shame you’re not more like her, or Dad – good, decent, working-class Labour Party members.’

  She sighed heavily, in that tone she had when she wanted me to know just how silly I was being. ‘Oh, Peter, come on. Spare me the rendition of the Red Flag. They might have been Labour Party members, but they were also monarchists. They always wore a poppy on Remembrance Day and thought your politics were well-meaning nonsense.’

  ‘At least they thought I was well-meaning. I doubt if they’d think that of you.’

  ‘This is neither the time nor the place to have this well-worn argument, but Peter – do you think they’d approve of what you and your party are doing?’

  ‘And what about what you are doing?’ I replied.

  ‘Oh, shut up!’

  She went silent and closed her eyes, stroking the bridge of her nose. ‘This is silly. Goodness, why is it that after a few minutes with you, I become thirteen years old?’

  ‘I’m flattered that I help you mature,’ I said, with a dead-pan straight face, before being unable to control a broad grin.

  A hairline crack went across her irritation, then split it open. She laughed and looked as if she was from back in time. For a second or two, I was in another place, back home, we as teenagers and mum and dad enjoying the show.

  But the respite was brief, and seriousness returned. ‘But, Peter, this is important. I’m worried about you. You are getting yourself involved with dangerous people. You were lucky last time. I still cannot comprehend how you outshot an MI5 agent, but you can’t rely on being able to do that a second time. I mean, Pete, they know about you.’

  ‘Did they threaten me?’ I asked, panicking.

  ‘No, that is not their style. They were full of sympathy of how tangled our sibling relationship must be. But as nice as they were, it was obvious that they were using you as leverage. They even said that when they overturn the revolution, my help will save you.’

  Damn.

  ‘Was it them who told you that I was here?’ I asked.

  She shook her head, ‘Oh, no. It was one of your neighbours, the Somalian family, the Farhans I think they’re called. They knew. You’ve mentioned this place, or more accurately moaned about it, a few times to them. But that’s not important. What is important is that during those long years when your Workers’ Councils undercut, challenged and competed with Parliament for control of the country, the security agencies made contingency plans. They are working as hard as they can to overturn your control of power. And they will do anything in the pursuit of that. Anything, Pete.’

  ‘Such as?’ I asked.

  ‘I honestly don’t know. Not details.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘They seemed unconcerned with what it might cost in lives if an extraction plant could be sabotaged.’

  ‘Then tell me: what you do know? Describe who you met.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I have come here out of concern for you, not your revolution.’

  I was about to ask again, but she was getting to her feet.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said.

  I looked at my watch. She’d be right on time if she left now. Working twelve to twelve; Tuesday to Saturday. Just the way she liked it: giving her time with colleagues to communicate face to face and the rest to work on her own. That’s why I had known she’d be there when he had visited. What I still didn’t understand was why she was still working there at all. Why hadn’t she just stopped turning up to work, like all the others who felt like she did? I didn’t have time to ask, though.

  With me now on my feet, she kissed my cheek and whispered for me to be careful. Then she left, striding off to her car.

  A strange feeling spread across my soul.

  19. Rosa alba semiplena

  The idea had been a fine one: Easy Rider meets Quadrophenia – taking to my scooter and blowing away the mental restrictions and feeling the winds of freedom. At least for a short but precious time, I wouldn’t be Victoria Cole’s passenger seat cover. I’d be in control – at least of two wheels. The problem was that the wind was ice cold and so was I. Technology may have come up with heated helmets and thermo-extreme clothes, but nature could take them on, no probs. I arrived at the church hall where the CIM was taking place, managing somehow to be simultaneously rigid and shivering.

  And late. The unexpected visit of my beloved sis had put me behind time. The state of the roads had compounded the problem, forcing me to keep the speed lower than my usual. Whilst pretty much cleared of snow, there were definite patches of ice which I took care to avoid.

  Warily riding into the car park, I could see several people hastily leaving, clutching papers. Being an expert on meeting body language, I would guess that it had just, or was about to, finish. Shit.

  By the entrance, a tall, slim woman stood, gently smoking a cigarette. She wore a navy-blue long coat with her collar up and a beanie woollen hat; her face was partially obscured. Slipping off the over-clothes by the bike and avoiding falling on my arse whilst doing so, I wondered where I had seen her before. Then she turned, saw me, smiled and waved. It was Emily Messager, Gita Devar’s friend and comrade from the green anarchists.

  I crunched over to her, the snow messing up my winkle-pickers. I had never attuned my dress sense to winter. Seeing me, Messager nodded, took one large puff and dropped the fag, stamping it out by twisting her foot, like she was going to twist the night away.

  She chuckled. ‘Pete, you’re late. Comrade Bale mentioned that you’d been otherwise detained.’ Her amusement grew. ‘Not that anyone believed him. It was obvious that he was lying and not enjoying doing so. Poor man didn’t have a great meeting. The forensic cop, Roijin Kemal, had also been “detained” on other business. Another whopping fib. I guess we should be grateful that your members are so transparent when lying.’

  ‘Oh. How did it go otherwise?’ I mumbled, feeling a little embarrassed.

  The smile remained. It was friendly, warm and generous – the type that encouraged confidences. ‘Long. Very long.’ She blew out her cheeks, making water vapour waft out of her mouth. ‘To be fair, it was useful and informative, but that boy, er, Jack what’s-his-name?’

  ‘Jack Foxton?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s him. He needs to learn how to chair a meeting. There was too much repetition and people talking just for the sake of it. Still, it was profitable.’ She laughed heartily. ‘That is, if we're allowed to use that term. Anyway, it was helpful. We ended up with a clear strategy. I hate to say it, but that was down to the twin efforts of your cop mate Cole and Glen Bale. He's a boring bastard, but he's effective. To be honest, Pete, I think they both felt rather sorry for Foxton and did their best to take control of the meeting.’

  ‘Anything new emerge?’

  ‘You tell me!’ She laughed again, shoving her hands into her pockets. ‘You’re the one who is on the secret little committee. It was bloody obvious that we were only told what you thought was appropriate. The adults minding their words in front of the children.’

  She held her hand to stop me saying anything. Not that I was going to. ‘Which, I suppose we just have to accept for the time being. We’re all new at this, and the balance between openness and effectiveness is a difficult one.’

  She gave me a brief resume of what had been said. She had been right – it was pretty much what we had discussed at the committee meeting. There were a few additions, with people mentioning a few more sightings of people in the vicinity of the car park. Teams had been arranged to do another search of any type of monitor which might have captured something. Bale had announced that th
ere would be a NWC call put out to see if anyone could provide any information on the period of time between when Harrison left the fracking site on Tuesday afternoon to the evening when she arrived at home. Foxton had volunteered to talk again to Nick Morgan, Olivia’s partner, to see if he could remember anything.

  From his performance so far, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Everything we’d asked him to do would be met with a sullen commitment to do so, but it would never actually get done. It was the “teenager-cleaning-his-bedroom” scenario.

  People were beginning to trickle out of the meeting. From the number, I reckoned it had yet to reach optimum mass and be declared finished.

  She stopped talking and then gave me a theatrical look. She moved slightly closer and I could smell her last fag floating above mid-range perfume. She touched my arm. ‘But, Pete, what I really want to know is - what the hell happened yesterday? Because something bloody well did!’ A peel of laughter rang out. ‘The tension in there between the committee members was almost visible. Gita was looking daggers at Bale and Cole, with Asher Joseph doing likewise at Cole. She must have felt like Julius Caesar. Et tu comrade! And, I’m sorry to say, they all seemed to be well pissed off with you.’

  She paused, presumably waiting for me to explain what the cause of the friction might be, but I wasn’t of a mind to. I was rather worried that if what she was saying was true, then we were showing signs of strain, which we could hardly afford to be doing at this time. We weren’t playing a game here. We were investigating a murder.

  ‘Seems your girlfriend has pissed off a few people. So, spill the beans,’ she said.

  It seemed that Messager shared Bale’s view of me. I was just a shallow dilettante, merely interested in trivia.

  ‘If you mean Victoria Cole, she isn’t my girlfriend. She’s just a, er . . . colleague . . . comrade,’ I said, rather confirming her view of my depths.

  Taking the bait only encouraged her and, in mock horror, she exclaimed, ‘But you seem so close, Pete – peas in a plod.’ She laughed again, hopefully not at her pun, which was truly dire. I was getting some of my own medicine here. She explained. ‘Just kidding. I’d never think of Cole as romantically linked to you. She’s not your type.’

  Her hand, I noticed, was still on my arm.

  ‘Too earnest, lacking any sense of humour,’ she continued. ‘Not a semblance of individual thought. No, I get it – you’re bound together by what happened with Alan Wilshire. She stood by you, whilst your party comrades distanced themselves. All credit to her: she showed loyalty. What happened must have shaken the pair of you.’

  She paused again, and I got the distinct impression that she was fishing with a bloody great rod for the gossip on what had happened back then. I didn’t take the bait, but just looked at her.

  Realising that it was a memory which I did not share, she continued with her discussion of the suitability or otherwise of a romantic match. ‘Nah, Cole’s not for you. Too po-faced and robotic. No I’m guessing your girlfriend, or boyfriend, would have a healthy questioning of the world, not just a hack-like acceptance of it.’

  ‘And you see Victoria as a hack?’

  Sensing, that I didn’t agree, she backtracked a little. ‘You know her better than I do, but to me—’

  For reasons which I couldn’t fathom, I informed her that, in fact, I was single, clarifying further: ‘Widowed. Three years.’

  Her hand squeezed a touch firmer.

  ‘Yeah, I heard that. Sounds shit, but I presumed that you’d have no problem finding someone else. Sorry, no offence.’

  We looked at each other. Her smile deepened and so did her look. Was she flirting with me? With Me? In this weather?

  Our little tȇte-a-tȇte was shut down when more people started to come out of the hall, wrapping themselves up in scarves, mittens and overcoats, their breath clouding out of their mouths as they chattered in the brisk winter morning. A voice yelled from the opposite direction, away from the hall, from the main road. ‘Pete!’

  We both turned to see Roijin Kemal striding towards us from the road. I hadn't seen her drive up, but there she was, marching like a World War Two storm trooper.

  Neither of us jumped for joy at the sight of her advance, which was eating up the distance between us. I, in my new found calmness and in the spirit of comradeship which I occasionally gave an airing, contented myself with merely rolling my eyes. Emily, however, was more vocal: ‘Christ, there are so many fucking coppers about. I thought we’d got rid of them all after the revolution. Yet, here we are, having bloody meetings with them just a few months after the fuckers were shooting at us.’

  Kemal arrived, looking agitated.

  Emily didn't bother with a smile. Ignoring her, she winked at me. ‘Anyway, Pete, gotta go. See ya!’ She nimbly skipped off, oblivious to the ice underfoot, towards a cream estate car, waving as she did.

  Kemal didn't wish her bon voyage. ‘Where’s Vic?’ she barked.

  And good morning to you, comrade. ‘In there,’ I answered, trying to match her curtness and reflecting that, whilst I had come to think better of Cole and didn’t share Emily’s perception of her, I had a lot of sympathy for her general view of police officers playing at lefties.

  Kemal stroked the side of her shades. Not because she liked the smooth black plastic. As fine a day as it was, it didn’t warrant sunglasses, so I cunningly deduced that they were computerised. Personally, I found such glasses rather dated and somewhat tacky, but then I liked the good old ways – a phone should be in your hand.

  She spoke ahead to no one in particular. ‘Vic? Yeah, sorry. Something came up. I’m outside. We need to talk.’ Either she had just contacted Cole via the glasses, or she was hallucinating.

  I couldn’t quite catch Cole’s reply as, at that precise moment, Messager’s car left the car park, crunching against the snow and gravel. Watching it leave, I wondered what had just happened between us and what that conversation had meant.

  Reality was quick to break into any dormant feelings. Kemal ended the conversation, which had sounded like a verbal telegram to me, with the words: ‘He’s here outside with me. No. He was here when I got here. Okay. Cheers.’

  So, I found myself, for a second time in less than ten minutes, standing outside the church hall with a slim attractive woman who was much younger than I was. Any thoughts, however, that I might be wearing mightily effective aftershave, or that the female gender had gone temporarily insane and was finding me fabulous company, were dispelled by the atmosphere between us. Impressively, it was even colder than the weather.

  She looked ahead, past me, towards something in the distance. Possibly at something more agreeable than looking at me – a dustcart or a dog having a crap, maybe. Her face was so fixed and hard that you could have cut bread on it. Not a muscle moved. Plainly, she wasn’t inclined to enlighten me as to what she had found out. No doubt, in her view, she was being comradely by not kicking the shit out of me. I could have passed the time by making small talk on such matters as my sister's visit or how it was ironic that socialist meetings so often met in church halls. Or, failing that, the old Brit standby of how the forecasts were predicting a warmer spell. But I was stuffed if I was going to give her the satisfaction of attempting any type of dialogue. So, I just shot her a look of disdain and watched the people streaming out the hall, hoping to face down her indifference with my own.

  Cole seemed to take ages to emerge, but when she did, she clearly had taken the weather forecast too literally. In skin-tight jeans and light-weight green leather jacket with matching slim gloves, she looked like she was out for a spring stroll – in marked contrast to the rest of us, who looked as if we were ready to mount a sleigh.

  On joining our happy pair, Cole gave no preliminaries or questions as to why we both had missed the meeting, nor indeed a hello, but instead, she just asked, ‘What’s up, Roijin?’

  Kemal's hostile attitude instantly disappeared. There was even a smile. A professional one, but a smile nonethe
less. ‘I was doing as you asked and monitoring recent communications activity by Youssef Ali. That’s why I couldn’t make the meeting, and I found three very interesting things. Firstly, Ali has been in verbal contact with a number of energy-producing plants, both before and after Olivia Harrison’s death. That included the South Downs fracking site. He contacted a number of people there. These increased in frequency over the last few days.

  ‘With regard to written communications, all are pretty innocuous and pretty much in line with what you might expect for someone who would be attending the upcoming environment conference. A lot have been erased, though, and done so very thoroughly. The only trace left of them is that they existed in the first place – their length, subject or even date of creation are gone. I can only find out that a lot of files have been destroyed and at the same time – midnight last night.’ She stopped, waiting for Cole to speak.

  Cole took the offer up. ‘Do we know what the phone conversations concerned? Have you spoken to those he contacted?’

  ‘No. I wanted to talk to you before chasing them up. Doing so could have obvious repercussions, whether he is guilty of anything or not. If he is, it could alert him. If he isn’t, then we could find ourselves in trouble because this has not been agreed on by the CIM committee and is clearly undemocratic. We would have to have a clear reason to go down that road . . .’

  Cole looked straight at her, and her voice dropped a little. ‘And would I be correct in guessing from your tone that you would disapprove of doing so?’

  I swear Kemal swallowed hard, like they do in cartoons. Something was sticking in her throat, almost literally. ‘I found a device loaded on his personal server which can be used to monitor other people’s communications. I should say that it wasn’t operating, but that’s only because the people at whom it was aimed have effective cyber-protection. You’ll remember Glen Bale’s initiative six months ago to defend the workers’ state from cyber-attacks? Well, that extended into everyone’s communication devices. It has had a patchy success in protecting us from all-out national attacks. The Omega attack last month well and truly outsmarted it. We found out it was Washington and eventually fought it off, but it was damaging. But localised bugging such as this we are pretty reliable against.’