The Orsinni Contracts

by Bill Cariad

  1 Understood, Teacher.

  Chapter Six

  Cloaked and Daggered Conscience

  ‘We can choose to use our growing knowledge to enslave people in ways never dreamed of before, depersonalising them, controlling them by means so carefully selected that they will perhaps never be aware of their loss of personhood’.

  Professor Carl R. Rogers, ‘Science’, 1956

  ‘Of all the dictatorships espoused by utopists, this is the most profound. Incipient dictators might well find in this utopia, a guide-book of political practice’.

  Professor B.F. Skinner, ‘Science’, 1956

  ‘The Soviets are attempting to develop a technology for controlling behavioural patterns among the citizenry of the USSR in accordance with politically determined requirements of the system’.

  Extract from CIA document to the Warren Commission, 1964

  London, England, 7th January 1985

  He was, by nature, a vain man. The sole offspring of parents who had long ago convinced him that the sun shone directly from his anus, and a lifelong bachelor by default, Chief Constable Jonathan Forsythe had travelled unhappily incognito. He had been forced to leave behind the chauffeur-driven car and distinctive uniform which automatically commanded respect, and had instead ventured forth alone and in plain clothes as directed. The gravitas of the occasion had caused him to opt for the double-breasted dark suit with light pinstripes, and he had told himself that it lent him the air of ‘something in the city’ rather than admit the fact that it sartorially deflected public scrutiny of the bulging waistline betraying his weight problem.

  He had also wisely, though still unhappily, decided that driving himself wouldn’t guarantee his arrival on time. So the aggrieved middle-aged Forsythe whose jurisdictional region took in the county of Oxford, had reluctantly elected to follow British Rail’s currently advertised advice to ‘Let the train take the strain’ for his journey. Ahead of him was the meeting to be held in the hallowed environment of London’s Whitehall.

  Forsythe was unaccustomed these days to being ordered about, and was a dyed-in-the-wool anglophile to boot, so the peremptory summons from the Whitehall mandarin’s office had annoyed and unnerved him in equal measure. Not only did he anticipate wriggling under the mandarin’s microscope at the meeting, he had also been told to expect questions from American representatives of the seemingly ubiquitous cloak and dagger tribe.

  Forsythe had been comfortably seated in first class, but the words comfortable and first class could hardly have been used to describe his current frame of mind. ‘You might care to bring along your own file on the Shrivenham business’ had been the unmistakable command phrased to sound like a polite suggestion, and the object containing enough dynamite material to blow several careers sky-high was concealed now by the briefcase which lay gripped on his lap as the train came to a halt under the glass canopy of the London terminus.

  The Chief Constable was met at the end of the Victoria Station platform by a long-haired individual holding to his chest a small placard bearing the single name Forsythe, and led without ceremony by the casually dressed escort to the black taxi-cab illegally parked outside the station’s entrance. His annoyance increasing with every passing moment, Forsythe climbed into the back of the taxi and settled himself behind the unspeaking driver who needed a haircut. Jonathan Forsythe’s mood was now as dark as the sky he could see menacing the tall office blocks on either side of the street. They passed what he knew to be Westminster Cathedral and the involuntary prayer, selfish and irreverent, silently chanted in his head, ‘Dear Lord let me come through this unscathed’.

  Forsythe was not to know that the south London dawn’s heavy rainfall had already forced the huddled homeless to pack up their makeshift beds of cardboard and vacate Victoria Street’s shop doorways earlier than usual. He was not to know that those work-bound commuters, brought by trains from their affluent suburbs, had therefore been spared the normal routine of avoiding eye-contact with their less fortunate brethren whilst silently mouthing variations of their own prayer: ‘There but for the grace of God, go I’.

  Leaving the main thoroughfare, the taxi turned to enter the narrow curve of a street bearing the name Petty France. The vehicle’s catholic driver, with a Browning automatic pistol holstered under his jacket and a Cambridge ‘First’ in history under his belt, wondered how many people knew that this small English street had been so named as a consequence of King Louis IV’s persecution of protestants which had driven them from their native France to settle in this area three centuries ago. As the driver brought the taxi to a halt at the barrier for the obligatory registration check, he silently mused that the only French heard or seen around here nowadays came in the form of camera-wielding tourists taking their snaps of the building housing London’s Metropolitan Police Headquarters. In his rear-view mirror he noted that his miserable looking passenger had finally realized they were outside New Scotland Yard.

  “Driver, my meeting is being held in Whitehall. Why have you stopped here?”

  “We won’t be here very long, sir,” replied the driver, injecting politeness into his tone as he added, “We’re collecting the London Met’s Commissioner,” he watched his rear-view mirror for a reaction as he continued, “and a Chief Superintendent Wilson from your own neck of the woods. Both will also be attending your meeting, so it was thought you might all appreciate an opportunity to chat with one another on the final lap, so to speak.”

  The Chief Constable sagged back in his seat as if physically deflated. His thoughts now in complete disarray, he was visualising the Whitehall table around which he would shortly be sitting. ‘Bloody Bulldog Wilson, the man who wants my job; a Whitehall Mandarin; London’s Metropolitan Police Commissioner; and an unknown number of questioning American spooks. Could this bloody awful day possibly get any worse?’

  Jonathan Forsythe’s unhappiness was, he fervently hoped, now complete.

  A worried looking Harry Albright, the London Station Chief of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, was en-route to Whitehall from the US embassy in Mayfair’s Grosvenor Square. His chauffeur-driven and armour-plated Mercedes was passing the Playboy Club in Park Lane before one of the two other CIA men seated beside him spoke.

  “Cheer up, Harry, it might never happen.”

  The speaker was Theo Burbeck, his warm breath close to Albright’s left ear, his words sounding tired and unconvincing. Denial was this man’s professional forte, Albright reminded himself as he glanced at him. What he saw was all teeth and smiles in a face that could have belonged to an over-fed and over-eager Spaniel. Burbeck irritated him.

  “It’s already happening, Theo,” he replied tersely, “and more than just the expression of wishful thinking will be required to prevent it from spiralling out of control.”

  “Jeez, Harry, lighten up,” said Burbeck, “control is our thing, remember? We’ll take care of this.”

  Albright sensed the undercurrent of doubt in those closing words, and saw the Spaniel eyes avoid his own. Burbeck’s plane had landed at Heathrow four hours ago and his feet had barely touched the ground since. Albright knew that, as with all experienced field-operatives, the man had quickly recognized the potentially hazardous gaps between a headquarters briefing and the situation on the ground upon which he would be expected to carefully tread.

  The London Station Chief gifted the man a tight smile as he raked him with another knowing glance. He knew that Theo Burbeck was what the up and coming agency modernists liked to call ‘a containment specialist’. He was the guy Langley sent whenever the lid needed to be kept on over something delicate or nasty. This project qualified on both counts, so he was the one they had sent this time to prevent any effluence hitting the diplomatic fan. But Burbeck had never operated in England before, and Albright wondered if the man possessed the qualities which would be needed to contend with Limey
subtlety.

  “You have to be careful, Theo,” he told the man. “Don’t rub the Brits’ up the wrong way.”

  “I won’t be rubbing any Brits up, or out, Harry,” replied Burbeck. “I’m on a tight budget here.”

  Albright ignored the attempted humour and the reference to budget allocations. He almost felt sorry for the man. The Shrivenham project might very well be shown on a board at Langley as a ‘Black-Op’, but the spotlight would be shining brightly and firmly on Theo Burbeck from the get-go. Additionally, the budget for this affair couldn’t be skimmed down the usual black hole of under-the-table political funding, ghost payrolls, or sweeteners. Because this theatre of operations just wouldn’t wash that kind of dirty laundry.

  “Keep in mind,” said Albright, “that some of the people you’re about to meet are going to be unhappy about this arrangement. They will have doubts about our ability to do the job.”

  Albright watched as his words were received and digested. Burbeck was a fifty-year-old seasoned veteran of clandestine operations in places around the world where American foreign policy had needed a kick-start. But even he had unsuccessfully attempted to pass on this one back at Langley, and Albright knew that.

  “The Brits’ you will be replacing are very good at what they do,” said Albright, “but even their best people have had problems with this arrangement in its current form.”

  “Well the form’s about to change,” came back Burbeck, sounding as if he was tired of the whole thing already. He was a physically small man, made to look even smaller now seated between two larger men and bundled up inside the overcoat he still wore within the heated car. His chubby-cheeked face was shiny with what could have been operational zeal, or the sweat of uncertainty, as he added, “if anyone can keep our boy on a leash, it’s Curtis here.”

  Concealing his scepticism, Albright remained silent. He did however uneasily note that, completely unresponsive to the mention of his name, the athletic looking and shaven-skulled figure of Curtis Melcher might have been carved from stone. His handsomely featured Negroid face was expressionless. Occupying the window seat on Burbeck’s left, the black suited and booted man looked coolly immaculate as he gazed out the car window giving every appearance of being anything other than the psychopath the London Station Chief considered him to be.

  But Albright knew that they were a matched pair these two, brains and brawn, and when you got Spaniel-faced Burbeck pissing on your territory you also got his body-building Rottweiler who reputedly had turned the installation of fear into an art form. Harry Albright averted his gaze. He himself hailed from New York’s Bronx district, and had seen his fair share of tough guys and weirdoes even before he’d joined the agency. But he couldn’t decide whether he’d been more uncomfortable reading about Melcher in the man’s personnel file, than he felt now about actually being this close to the guy in the flesh. ‘Where the hell does Langley find them these days?’ was only one of the thoughts Albright was currently choosing to keep to himself. There was much to think about.

  The Mercedes was passing Buckingham Palace, the building’s black and gold-tipped high railings ring-fencing it from the tourists ignoring the threat of more rain and thronging to watch the changing of the guard. The red and white uniformed Coldstream Guards were performing to order with clockwork precision, and the CIA’s London Station Chief sourly wondered how Her Britannic Majesty would feel about Mister Harry Albright’s current predicament.

  Thanks to the so-called special relationship between his country and hers, boosted into orbit by the political love affair being conducted by her Maggie and his Ronnie, he had been tasked to provide all facilities and support at his command to Burbeck and his hatchet man, Melcher. Whilst he knew that fulfilling his orders was a given, he also knew that the trick would be to do so whilst distancing himself from any of Burbeck’s decision making which might produce potentially destructive fall-out. It was a trick he had performed many times throughout his professional life, and he had no intention of fumbling the moves this time.

  From the time he’d been given the ‘heads-up’ about what was coming down the Langley and political pipelines, he had pre-empted his director and had ordered covert surveillance on the subject along with analysis reports. The ‘our boy ’ being casually referred to by Burbeck had prompted one prescient CIA analyst to label him ‘Killer Chameleon’, because the devious bastard had been linked to three child ‘kills’ soon after their covert surveillance had commenced. Believed to have been involved was as far as Albright’s surveillance team had gone in writing at the time, because whilst the subject had reportedly been in close proximity to each sickening crime, he had never been witnessed performing what police had later described as ‘Bestial acts of depravity.’ Christ alone knew how many bestial acts they and Albright didn’t know about, but the Station Chief privately reckoned that Burbeck’s ‘boy’ would give Curtis Melcher the slip whenever he chose to. One of the best field surveillance operatives Albright had on his staff had lost the guy nine times! He had embarrassedly described the cunning son of a bitch as ‘A match for any agent we have, Harry.’

  Having discreetly called in favours from his British law enforcement connections, Albright now knew that the Oxford police wouldn’t have got anywhere near Burbeck’s ‘boy’ in the first place had it not been for the deductive instincts of the Foster guy, and might even have dropped their investigation entirely but for the combined and sustained pressure from Foster and the Italian carabiniere guy. Before Albright’s team had invisibly trawled, only those two had linked the Shrivenham atrocity to others perpetrated in London.

  Appraised of the two-year-old background to their interest, Albright’s admiration for the tenacity of the Englishman and the Italian had grown throughout his own ‘fact-finding’. Now based at New Scotland Yard and a fast-tracked police Inspector himself, Foster’s inside knowledge of the forensics regarding the London killings had obviously been shared with the Italian and Oxford ’s Chief Inspector Duggan. The Oxford police had finally been forced to face the fact that the Shrivenham connection could no longer be ignored. Duggan had duly pressed his superiors to arrange another entry to the restricted area of The Royal Military College of Science, but had been denied. Albright shifted in his seat, uncomfortable with the knowledge of why Duggan had been denied. He had been denied because unbeknown to Foster and Sabbatini, and Oxford’s police up to Duggan’s level, the spicy dish of politics had been beefed up on the menu. The ruthless politics of expediency.

  Harry Albright could never admit it to anyone else, but he still remembered his own shock upon finally being told officially that within the top echelons of Whitehall, British Intelligence, Special Branch, and the London ‘Met’, it had already been known that seriously poisoned fruit had been blooming in a laboratory within Shrivenham’s Royal College of Military Science. Not for the first time had Albright found himself in conflict with his conscience, but his own often less than honourable actions in the service of five Presidents to date had left him unable to hold the moral high ground for any great length of time. So he had kept, and was continuing to keep, his private feelings to himself.

  Subsequent American financing towards an accelerated Shrivenham programme had given Washington a bigger say on who should be doing what, which had ultimately led to Albright’s now overt involvement and the current scenario occupying his troubled thoughts. The meeting he was about to attend would introduce Burbeck and Melcher, a double-act he disliked, to the new game-plan. A game-plan which would effectively deflect the persistent duo of Foster and Sabbatini, with whom he entirely sympathised.

  Albright released a frustrated sigh. His own children were full grown now, but this affair had brought back precious memories of their early years. Consequently, from the early weeks of covert surveillance and its reported conclusions, he had been tempted to have the subject buried alive and to hell with the consequences. But whether he liked the
fact or not, Albright told himself now, his trained and hard-bitten CIA persona with a mission had prevailed. So he must now take professionally cold comfort from the fact that whilst the whereabouts of the subject was strongly suspected by a select few, the person’s actual identity and status remained as yet unknown to them. Albright squirmed in his seat again. Just mentally reviewing this disturbing business, and thinking about the British Press picking up the scent of a scandal which could rock two political administrations and disgust every parent with a vote, was giving the CIA London Station Chief the shakes.

  The Mercedes automobile smoothly glided down the London Mall, passing the lake and lush greenery of St James’s Park, and Albright quietly sighed at the scenery. Another eight months and he would have been home and dry. The last posting of a thus far illustrious career. Retirement dreams had kicked in months ago. Daydreams of he and his wife Carol doing all the things together they’d hardly found time to talk about over the years. He’d even thought of finally getting the chance to use the fine Abercrombie rod his opposite number in Century House had gifted him following a particularly successful joint operation. ‘If he knows about this shit, and he probably does, I can kiss goodbye to the country weekends and the best fishing this side of the pond’, was Albright’s unhappy afterthought.

  “We’re almost there,” he told Burbeck, seeing the Spaniel eyes open, unsurprised that the man had dozed off.