The Saxon Network

by Norman Hartley

  ‘Just wanted to wish you luck and see if you’re all set.’ she said.

  ‘Yes. I’m on second.’

  Claiborne chuckled. ‘No, not the board. I meant your date with Kate. Is it still on?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ I said guardedly.

  ‘Good. You’ll be able to discuss her appraisal with her.’

  She handed me a file. ‘We’ve divided up the editor’s duties until the successor’s been appointed and I’ve given you the pending appraisals.’ She laughed. ‘Kate’s the only current one so it won’t be too big a task.’

  ‘Moira stop making mischief,’ I said.

  ‘Where would a newsroom be without a little mischief,’ she said, ‘would you rather have rotas?’

  She retreated to the door before I could answer.

  ‘Good luck with the board too, of course. We’ll be thinking of you.’ And she disappeared.

  And gossiping about you, I thought. The date with Kate was my other big problem of the moment. A month earlier, in the BBC club at the end of a particularly lively shift, everyone had been in high spirits and Moira had started a game. She had asked everyone in the group the same question: ‘if you were stranded on a desert island, which of your colleagues would you like to have with you?’ I had tried not to answer, but Moira wouldn’t let me duck it, so I’d said: ‘Kate Allison’, and quickly added ‘because she was most likely to be able to build a raft and escape.’

  Kate was an American who was on a short-term contract in the newsroom. Though barely thirty, she was already a distinguished sailor and had twice crossed the Atlantic single-handed and skippered an all-female round-the-world crew. Needless to say, word of my choice had got back to her. The next day, Kate had come up to me and asked, teasingly, whether I’d really chosen her only because she could build a raft. We had flirted for a minute or two then I’d asked her out to dinner. She agreed but she was going on leave the next day to take part in a sailing race, so we had set a date almost a month away – and what a month it had turned out to be!

  Three days after Moira’s desert island game in the club, the editor of the World Service had been seriously injured in a motor cycle accident and been forced to take medical retirement. I’d been invited to apply for the post and that had put my date with Kate directly into the limelight.

  Office relationships are always tricky but there was history in the World Service that took the problem to a whole different level. One of the former editors had ruined his career with an affair with a young producer which had ended with her being transferred out of the newsroom against her wishes. That had led to a Human Resources board of inquiry, a major union dispute and an acrimonious split in newsroom opinion. I knew this and the whole newsroom knew it. Dating Kate as an Assistant Editor might be tricky; as Editor it would not be on the cards. I was really unhappy about it because I had actually fancied her since she had first walked into the newsroom, looking deeply tanned and wind-blown and still bandaged from rope-burns sustained on the final leg of a recent yachting adventure.

  She was a breath of fresh air compared to my current girlfriend: a Parisian lawyer, Marie-Helene Cassia. Kate was tall and blonde, and incredibly athletic without being the games captain type. More importantly, she laughed more during a hectic shift than Marie-Helene had done during most of our Boulogne weekends. Had it not been for the office politics, I would have asked her out weeks before and I was secretly grateful that the dreaded Moira had given me the opportunity. But now, it had become a non-starter and the dinner was going to have to be a first and last date.

  It was no surprise that Moira was gently twisting the knife by making me the one responsible for Kate’s appraisal: the assessment of work and character which is crucial in deciding a BBC employee’s future. I knew I should be concentrating on preparing for the board, but couldn’t resist a quick look at the file Moira had left me. As I expected, it made hilarious reading. Kate seemed to regard the World Service as amusingly stuffy. She was a Newsgathering Duty Editor, an NDE, the person responsible for liaison with the correspondents overseas. She had already told the BBC’s political editor on an open phone line to stop behaving like an asshole and she had apparently sent an RTFE message to the chief Asia correspondent during a dispute over satellite bookings, followed by an explanation, again on an open line, that it stood for ‘Read The Fucking E-mail’. On quiet night-shifts, people all over the BBC had started listening to the open communications line in the hope of catching a confrontation between Kate and someone who was less than ready to do her bidding. One of the assessment contributions read: ‘While sailing, Allison has apparently learned to make do with four hours sleep in twenty-four, broken into periods of 20-30 minutes. Unfortunately, she does not seemed to have grasped that correspondents and producers like a little more.’

  That was Kate alright. I sat back and closed the folder. That was tonight’s problem. My immediate concern was Colonel Stuart Rance. I plugged the memory stick into the computer, entered the decryption key, which also prevented any of the contents being transferred to the computer’s hard drive and read Rance’s CV. It was impressive. He had been commissioned into the Parachute Regiment and had served in the Falklands, Bosnia and twice in Iraq. He had a DSO and had twice been mentioned in despatches but the good news was that Walsh had been right. Our paths had crossed only once when Rance had been seconded to be in charge of security with the British contingent of the Civilian Provisional Authority after the invasion of Iraq. I studied the photographs in the dossier and couldn’t place the face. There was something vaguely familiar about it but I was pretty sure we had never been in contact and I should be safe at the Board. I had just deleted the material on the memory stick when Irene Mason, one of the brightest regional editors, put her head round the door.

  ‘John, a word of warning,’ she said. ‘Emil Landesman is out to get you at the board. He hates the NDI and plans to try and undermine you because you’re too new. The word is he’s ganging up with Peter Skandon. The two of them are planning an ambush.’

  The NDI is the BBC’s Newcomers’ Development Initiative. The BBC had been accused of hiring high flyers from outside but neglecting people inside who had the potential to rise quickly. I had joined the World Service at age 38 in a job for which I was too old in theory. I had been put in the NDI programme and been tried out in a number of more senior posts. I’d done well in all of them which is how I had managed to rise so quickly to the post of Assistant Editor, providing the opportunity to be invited to apply for the top job itself.’

  I smiled. ‘Thanks, Irene. I’d had an idea there might be something along those lines.’

  Irene grinned back warmly as she turned to leave. ‘Good luck. We’re all rooting for you.’

  Terrific, I thought. With Landesman and Skandon attacking on one front and Rance potentially uprooting me on another, it was going to be a lively Board!

  When she had gone, I walked out into the newsroom to see if Kate was around.

  I knew she was supposed to be on shift but her desk was empty and I wondered if she might not have returned from leave. Perhaps she was becalmed somewhere in the southern Oceans or fighting a force nine gale in the Bay of Biscay. The desk was being run by the assistant, Keith Colegate, who was listening to an incoming despatch from a correspondent with the headset draped over his forehead and one ear and answering two phones at the same time. Eventually, Colegate put down both phones and I walked over to him. Colegate was in his early twenties, a stocky sandy-haired kid with a strong Essex accent who could have been a currency dealer or a bond trader.

  ‘Everything all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah fine. The World Affairs Unit at Tele Centre are mostly covering the arrests and the demos. All the Iran background is coming in nicely. No word on the plane since it lost touch with the control tower in Nouakchott but Liz Corey has been in touch with the Mauritanian authorities and she’s doing a holding piece. No idea whether there are any links to Al-Qaeda. Bainbridge is well acro
ss the Indian story and Heldon will be up from Jakarta before the top of the hour so we’re pretty much covered.’

  I was about to ask where Kate was when she suddenly appeared at the entrance to the newsroom. She was sprinting and carrying a piece of paper in one hand. She wore faded jeans and a bright yellow T-shirt with heavy black lettering on it. As she got closer, I saw it read: ‘I’m a natural blonde. Please speak very slowly.’ She skidded past me, heading for the fax.

  Behind her, apparently in pursuit, were a cleaner and a member of the uniformed building security staff.

  ‘That’s her,’ the cleaner shouted, ‘I just saw her breaking into a desk. She had a bloody crowbar.’

  The security guard moved closer, apparently uncertain what to do.

  Kate ignored him, and grinning at me, said to Colegate. ‘Can you carry on for a bit. I must do this. I’ll explain in a minute.’ She dialled a fax number and fed the sheet into the machine.

  ‘I tell you I saw her stealing stuff from one of the desks in the management office. Smashed the lock she did. Made a right mess!’

  Kate still ignored them and fed the sheet of paper carefully through the fax. When she had got an acknowledgement, she rushed back to a phone. The call was brief and I gathered it was to confirm that the fax had arrived safely, then Kate put down the phone, glowing with satisfaction.

  ‘It’s going to be OK,’ she said. ‘Berenger should be free by lunch time.’

  Tom Berenger was the Central Asia correspondent but I had no idea that he was anyone’s captive. By this time, a small crowd had assembled to watch the fun. Kate ignored them and turned back to the cleaner and the security guard.

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘let’s get a few things straight. I did force a desk open but I didn’t smash it with a crowbar. I sort of prised the lock back with a support strut off a computer stand.’

  She smiled at Marianne Astier who had come up beside them.

  ‘You won’t know what’s going on. Tom was travelling with the Red Cross in Uzbekistan near the Tajik border. Some rebels ambushed them and pinched all Tom’s kit. They took his passport so the Goddam Tajiks wouldn’t let him in and he spent last night stuck in a village in no-man’s land along the border. Anyway, I think I’ve got it sorted. Luckily, our ambassador out there is a really bright young Scotswoman and didn’t need any prodding into action. Not like that idiot in the Congo when Mark got into trouble. Anyway, I gave the ambassador Tom’s passport details and she’s flying someone down to the border with a temporary travel document. The plane’s leaving shortly, that’s what the rush was about. She said she needed a really official-looking letter certifying our high regard for Tom. Said it would impress the Tajiks. I’ve been scouring the whole specialist unit for some headed paper and some official looking stamps.’

  ‘So she says,’ the cleaner objected, ‘anyway she can’t just go around smashing open other peoples’ desks.’

  ‘Which do you want – a broken lock or a correspondent in rebel hands? Kate said.

  Astier smiled and turned to the security guard.

  ‘I’ll take responsibility,’ she said. ‘Kate is a bit impulsive at times but we do need to get our correspondent back.’

  When the crowd had dispersed, I said, ‘that was brilliant, but how come you got involved. You weren’t due that early.’

  ‘I did a deal with Maeve. I came in early, and she’ll take over tonight. To give me time to go home and change.’ She smiled. ‘Now, about tonight. There’s a restaurant called The River Garden and it has a terrific terrace by the Thames. It’s tough to get a booking but I pulled a few strings with some sailing friends and I’ve booked for eight o’clock. Is that OK?’

  What she wasn’t saying was that The River Garden had recently been named one of the three most expensive restaurants in Europe.

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been there. I’d love to try it.’

  She flashed me a mischievous smile. ‘I reckoned if this date is going to be a one-off, we might as well make it memorable.’

  Chapter 3

  As soon as I walked into the selection board I realised I did know Colonel Stewart Rance. I also realised that he might know me. As I was formally welcomed and introduced to the board, I could see Rance was staring at me, trying to place me but not immediately succeeding. I had no such problem. We had never met professionally but I could picture exactly where I had last seen him: in the Halliburton-run sports bar in the basement of the Al Rashid hotel in Baghdad.

  While I was undercover in Iraq, one of my assignments had been to investigate two corrupt British contractors. They had been part of a group calling themselves the ‘operationally singles’ -- married men who put away their wedding rings and dedicated themselves to procuring sex in Baghdad’s Green Zone, despite the discouraging ratio of ten men to every woman. Rance had been one of the group and though we had never spoken, I had often been in the same bar while observing the contractors. It took all my training not to let my face give anything away. Rance went on staring but I could see nothing was quite clicking in his mind. My best hope was that the last time we had been together he had been drunk enough to have to concentrate hard on the task of moving his hand up the skirt of an American nurse.

  The four members of the board were seated along one side of the big conference table. A single chair had been placed opposite them for the candidates. I already knew the three editorial members of the panel and I knew that with or without Rance I was in for a rough ride. My only ally was likely to be the chair, Oana Ionescu, the former head of the Romanian service. We had worked together often and got on well. The other two, Emil Landesman, the controller, South Asia, and Peter Skandon, the controller, Language Services, were definitely not admirers of mine. Landesman was a born bureaucrat. There was a game in Bush House, played to pass the time on long night shifts in the newsroom. It was called ‘collaborate or resist.’ It imagined the proud old-style World Service taken over by the suits at Television Centre and speculated on the reactions of the Bush House management. Landesman was always named as the most natural Quisling, the ideal candidate to be the Prime Minister in the World Service’s first Vichy government. Skandon was an aggressive egotist who fancied himself as the management’s hard man, but by my standards he simply did not rate and his efforts to ‘stand tough’, as he called it, always seemed to fall short of the mark.

  Ionescu opened the interview in a formal, but friendly way.

  ‘John you come with a good track record,’ she began when I was seated. ‘I’m sure we won’t need to spend much time going over your performance in charge of the newsroom.’

  Landesman wasn’t having any of that and jumped in straight away.

  ‘I’m sorry to disagree,’ he interrupted brusquely. ‘John’s track record may be fine but it seems to me to be rather too soon for us to make a judgement on whether he has the qualities to become editor, World Service.’

  Ionescu smiled, but without humour.

  ‘Emil, we all know your views on the Newcomers Development Initiative but some of us believe it is a very useful tool for identifying new talent.’

  ‘I have nothing against John personally,’ Landesman said sharply and entirely unconvincingly. ‘I agree he has done well in the newsroom but he’s been an assistant editor for less than a year and in the World Service for barely two. In my view that simply is not long enough for him to be considered for this post.’

  He glanced across at Skandon, obviously waiting for him to pick up the cue. Irene had been right, I thought. This wasn’t so much an interview as an ambush. Without the problem of Rance I could have handled it more easily, but I was more concerned with preparing some kind of defence in case the Colonel came to realise that he did know me. Could he possibly know my real name? If he did, would he risk talking about Baghdad when he had spent most of his time screwing around and finding excuses to be in Baghdad instead of Basra?

  Skandon swung into battle and I forced myself to pay attention.
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br />   ‘Let’s look more closely at this track record,’ Skandon said glowering at me, ‘your bulletins are regarded as excellent, but the word I hear is that you are too friendly, too easy-going and,’ he added, ‘too ready to see the other person’s point of view. In a word, too soft.’

  I knew I had to tread carefully. When I had joined the World Service, I had deliberately cultivated an easy-going, almost avuncular persona, to emphasise the break with my previous life.

  ‘The World Service newsroom is rather special,’ I said, ‘I doubt if you have a more dedicated group of people anywhere in journalism. There’s no need for the cattle prod. They’re committed to what they do and they want to achieve the best possible performance. Gentle guidance has been all that is necessary.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ Skandon said with a sneer, ‘but did you know there was a kind of black market running with the rotas section, people trying to switch shifts so they can be on when you’re in charge?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. But if it’s true, I’m flattered’

  Skandon stirred heavily in his chair. He overflowed it on all sides and there was barely room for his bulk under the edge of the big oval table. He was a huge man. His enemies - and he had many - said he defied the laws of physics by topping two hundred and forty pounds and still remaining a lightweight. I had a sudden urge to reach out and hook the chair out from under him, but instead I just smiled encouragingly, inviting the next question.

  ‘I shouldn’t be flattered,’ Skandon said, ‘it can be considered a sign of weakness to want to be popular. I’ve found myself that a strong line often pays off.’ His eyes bore down on me. ‘You may have shown you can get the newsroom to work well for you, but the question is are you hard enough to be able to take the big decisions? Are you tough enough to close a language service, to make 100 people redundant? Have you got the steel to face up to the government of a country that threatens to jail one of our correspondents if he doesn’t toe the line?’