by Daniel Kemp
After a few days of sitting beside that girl, questioning her whilst she fiercely battled against the acceptance of her blindness, I went to see a man who told me of the whereabouts of an IRA bomber of a Belfast pub. That bomb killed three and maimed five fellow Irishmen and two women in the name of freedom from Protestant choice. By the time I got to him he had entertained some members of the Ulster Volunteer Force who had nailed his feet to the floor and his hands to a wooden beam above his head then set about removing his reproduction organs by savagely hacking them from his body and as that was not enough for their shared pleasure, they slowly peeled away his facial skin. I wonder how murder and mutilation can be justified in using such terms as freedom for the oppressed while suppressing those who disagree with the philosophy of force. I would have gladly asked the hierarchy of the IRA, if I had been given permission to go and find them. But I'm a man after all and none of what I've told you should have affected me, should it? That's what I'm supposed to do, isn't it? Be the hero that Geoffrey Harwood reveres. Bite the bullet and sing 'God Save the Queen'. After all people like me should be the first through the doors to count the bits of bodies hanging from the ceilings so that the reports in the daily newspapers get the sums right. That's what we're paid for, right? But there were times during that last tour that left me thinking I was getting slower through the door and laying the blame for that on having only half of one foot. The other half had been shot away, but I do try to keep swinging on door handles, after all, who would appreciating reading there were fifty-one dead when someone had missed a body or two?
The foot thing was one of the reasons for my first visit to the surgeon's rooms in the clinic in Harley Street. I lost three toes to a bullet when on the very first mission I undertook on behalf of the SIS, Secret Intelligence Service. It was meant for my head but in the wrestle for his gun the shot took my toes off. It was when I was recruited for that mission I met Jack Price and the ex-soldier I've mentioned by the given Biblical name of Job for the first time. That adventure, and all subsequent ones were of my choosing, losing toes was not. Another reason for my first visit to the clinic was because I killed the man who had shot my fictional twin; the girl who had become very dear to me. I watched her die from a bullet that took most of her head with it when she was sitting in the passenger seat of the car I was driving in New York. When all that happened I was a baby of twenty-three years of age. Time moved on and others died for other causes, three more at my hand, but any feelings I had for the death of others were depleted from any remorseful side I may have been born with. I watched death and destruction from the distance I constructed to keep myself safe, unconnected to anyone.
But not this last time. Not on the Green for my fourth tour— No one does four tours in that shit hole of Ireland, Webby. So nobody will be looking for you.
Over the Irish Sea I went, not looking for anyone except the bastards who bomb the innocent for their version of freedom. But Ireland being Ireland, something beautiful will always emerge. Kerry found my weakness after I'd been there for less than a month. Hers were the latest and hopefully last screams the surgeon wanted to pull from my head. I played the man of courage, saying there were none, tucking them away in a place to find sleep, but everywhere was overcrowded. I awake to pictures of Kerry with her agony of both knees and hands shattered by hammers before being raped and the word TART slashed across her breasts. So what's a little drive to a phone box compared to running from IRA cell to English cell, ducking the inquisitions at both ends by the grace of my two-toed right foot? Metaphorically speaking of course, because I never ran. All I was supposed to do was gather the intelligence, collate and make sense of it then decide what others could do in response. Nothing safer, eh! How about lying on the floor of a pub amongst the carnage of desolation after the detonation of a nail bomb that kills the man I was speaking to only four foot away and leaves me with one kidney less to siphon the evil whisky through?
During that six months' idleness of mine I had managed to keep physically fit and in shape using the apparatus Job and I had added to a room in my apartment when he'd stayed for a few days. It had become part of my daily routine, but it wasn't my physical side that bothered me as I grabbed a hat and coat and waited for the lift from my top-floor apartment. It was that mental fight against the crashing waves of memories that flooded my head at times with no escape other than forming their own scream. But men aren't supposed to find bitterness in heartache, are they? I did though. When the lift door opened I shut the screams away and went in search of a new life-conquering telephone box.
* * *
The brief conversation I held with the normally gregarious and chummy Adam, who I hadn't spoken to since returning from Ireland, was concise and cold. The opposite to what I'd expected—“67 Lavington Street, Ezra. I know you know where that is. Jacob said to be as quick as you can,” and then silence apart from the sound of a replaced receiver. He could have just been having a bad hair day, he was that way inclined, although I thought I detected a hint of bitterness in his voice as though he resented my call for some reason.
Adam was the connection operatives such as I used for the verification of orders plus those things beyond the reach of ordinary soldiers. Ezra was my assigned Biblical label, while Jacob was the soubriquet of whoever sat in the chair overseeing Group. I never had enough of an interest to enquire into the motives or calculations for everyone who worked directly inside that secret organisation to have a biblical name. The 'point' of any decision is for others to justify and find a cause. It was not mine. There were a host of similarly constructed names; Job being one. Jack Price worked outside of Group for a separate party who held the shared interests of putting the British Isles above all else. I could, as a man on the spy as it was known, appreciated the need for covert arrangements, but asking me to visit an established, well-known company location would put a face to a name and was tantamount to declaring my decision to leave the service. Had I refused Geoffrey's 'invitation' my dissent would have brought about the same end result; resignation. Whereas by going to the appointment, I turned the word resignation into the phrase of retirement from street work, with one hand holding on just in case it hadn't completely disappeared as the yearly manure added to St Stephen's Green, in Dublin, Ireland no doubt had.
Chapter Two: The Borough
Number 67 was halfway along Lavington Street notable by its boarded up windows and general dilapidation to the upper two floors. The sign on the plain black-painted door was broken; reading 'undry Supplies' which I presumed meant Sundry, rather than something wet. I could identify two distinct company cars with four indeterminable men inside, amongst the parked vehicles along the street, making my prognosis of retirement all the more probable. But why two, I wondered? One would obviously be Harwood's car, but I was at a loss to explain the other one.
This part of London, known as the Borough, was undergoing a huge redevelopment agenda giving rise to many properties left to decay in outward appearance but appreciate in value. I wondered if that was the decision behind its continued government use. The lack of a bell push came as no surprise, which along with a dreary sense of melancholia rekindled my dislike of every government that had reached the power they sought since my coming of age and how little had been spent on improvements anywhere. I knocked loudly, using the hooked end of the walking stick that in the cold of winter I found more and more obligatory owing to the pain in my foot. A light shone from the camera lens, beside the door, and a distorted voice addressed me asking who I was and to show some identification. I did, and as all was considered to be in order, a buzzer sounded and I was instructed to pull open the heavy door. It closed decidedly quicker than it opened.
I was standing in front of a thick glass transparent screen which crossed the whole width of the passageway. Beyond the screen stood five armed Ministry of Defence guards. To gain entry into this secure area, and subsequently the whole of the building, one had to pass through an electronic scanning machine. The plac
e had changed!
I was in charge of an operation from here some eight or nine years earlier when Geoffrey Harwood was Director General at Group and when a Scotsman named Fraser Ughert was Chairman of The Joint Intelligence Committee, or JIC. I was working alongside one of the men I previously mentioned; Job. Being used to shortened names, Job and I christened what was a hovel in those days, The Hole. That was when the walls were covered in graffiti, bare bulbs were dangling from single wires giving off a cold dim light that cast murky shadows wherever its impalpable glare failed to reach, and rats could be heard scurrying around on the two floors above where we worked. That was then, when devices to examine what's under clothes did not exist, well not in places like The Hole. Now with its battleship grey painted walls and downlighters sunk into smooth plastered ceilings with the ornate coving restored to its Victorian beauty, I was waved through the twenty-first-century contraption into the guarded winding corridor. As I was thinking how wrong I was about quintessential government stinginess, I was addressed by another one of the guards.
“Good morning, Mr West, sir! They are waiting for you in the basement.” Who told this man my name? Does everyone I've passed by in here know it?
Totally confused by my recollections of the past and unable to focus on any actuality, my disjointed thoughts took hold.
Was I still out on the 'spy' trapped by some shit-arsed official Irish Republican Army terrorist group who were fishing for a name and threatening me with a gun? What to do next? Training, man! Training. If it's there, use it.
Reeling from the shock that my body and mind was in, I stepped backwards as though making room to swing a punch into his throat to disarm him, use his weapon first then my own and shoot my way out the front door. That's what I was taught. If caught, shoot them all and get away, half a foot or not. I felt for my holstered, service issued handgun, but it wasn't there.
Why am I unarmed? Was Adam so unusually matter-of-fact because he and Harwood were working together and I was in a trap of their making?
Perhaps it was remembering Geoffrey's name that switched my mind into logical thought. My gun was left the other side of the glass screen. Of course I had left it there, I'm on service premises, you fool. If the sentry thought I was insane his manner never reflected it. He carried on as usual as this garbled mind of mine speculated as to the they whom the guard referred to. Were they beer swilling Group disciples waiting to condemn me to an office on the back of a sausage roll party? Or a party of Group's finest interrogators wanting to know the names of my agents to pass on to the Irish desk at MI5's prestigious property on Millbank?
That's why I'm here without a sidearm. It's clocking-off time and playing the clown in appreciation of a ring-fenced, inflation-proof, armoured-lined pension. I couldn't be bothered to ask who the they, who waited for me, actually were.
I headed off along the well-worn stone floor in the direction of an under–the-staircase door which Job and I never opened but always smelled of damp when walking past it towards the noxious toilet. The staircase had gone. There was no door!
“I'm sorry, but there's nothing in that direction apart from the boiler and service areas. The lift that will take you to the basement is over here, sir,” my personable guard politely told me.
Feeling rather conspicuous by both the awkwardness of my movement and the raw naivety of my surroundings, I turned to see a door that simply blended into the side of a painted wall. The guard pushed it and as though anaesthetised I entered and pressed the Down marked button. Quite a few seconds later the door opened onto a far more spacious open area than where I'd left. What appeared to be bank after bank of droning electronic television screens greeted me. In front of these flickering machines sat lines of motionless headset-wearing figures. Some were quietly speaking into their microphones, others were staring straight ahead. On the furthest brick wall was yet another screen but unlike the others. This one took up the space of the whole wall, made up of smaller screens mounted together with the pictures alternating between seemingly unrelated sites then switching to one enormous location I'd seen on the smaller screens.
The place smelled of artificially warmed air with a whisper of the standard authorised civil-service disinfectant. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It was just another impediment of an office job. From this huge central surveillance area I could see six opaque glass-door-protected corridors leading off in opposing directions. On the walls in between each spoke of this imaginary wheel were more television screens that kept switching from one scene to another. The two middle screens on each of the walls were showing overhead shots of a barren, sandy terrain devoid of movement other than a few birds on some expanse of water in the far distance, and the second, the inside of what appeared to be a fairly busy airport departure and arrivals lounge with people going to and fro carrying, or pulling, suitcases of various colours and sizes. I was gazing around, open-mouthed, when one of the glass doors opened with Geoffrey Harwood standing in the opening.
“West, how splendid and on the same day as invited! Welcome to the Hub, come through.” He turned and I followed like his pet dog waiting to be patted on the head and shown where to sit and beg. I didn't have long to wait. After a short walk along the softly lit passageway he turned left and entered a spartanly equipped large office that had a fresh appeal to it I had not experienced elsewhere.
“Take a seat,” he instructed as he walked behind the centrally positioned white marble topped desk supported either end by two matching rounded white pillars. In front of this monument to power were four soft white upholstered, wingback chairs. His seat, the Joseph seat, was a red and yellow leather wrap-around, tilting chair that he delighted in showing me how it effortlessly rolled across the floor.
“Better than the last time you were down here in the basement, eh?” he asked, spreading his arms wide to encapsulate the whole room.
“I never came down here, Geoffrey. I thought there were only rats living down here.” As I sat I thought better of that childish comment. “I had better stop making stupid, derisive statements like that, hadn't I?”
“Yes, I think that would be wise. Let's get down to future business and forget the past, shall we?” I nodded my agreement, but could not resist smirking as I moved my chair closer to his throne.
* * *
Until roughly a year ago my role within the secret service had demanded being on my own or part of a small team answerable to a single master. During the last eight years or so of my covert operational usefulness of being on the spy, Geoffrey was that master, but I hadn't always obeyed his instructions. Geoffrey was one of those who cared passionately about the correctness of, and suitability of a person to an assignment and the willingness to agree to his uniformity of thought. I didn't always do that. My regard centred on how the operation could be accomplished without my, or any other, unnecessary death.
He explained how the position I was being offered became vacant because of his promotion to the chair of permanent secretary to the Her Majesty's Minister for Home Affairs, becoming the one that the Director General of Group would have to ask before dropping a bomb on someone or the need to replace civil service toilet rolls. Not only does the Minister rarely know about those sort of things that I and my like do during his or her five years of elected tenure, he or she is dissolvable. Whereas Director Generals of intelligence departments are not. They are immutable, unless the lure of retirement beckons too strongly. Up until now it has been the order of things that Harwood, and those who went before him, and those who will follow, are the ones I must listen to and comply with, albeit in my own way. He removed his heavy framed spectacles, picked the sleep from the corner of each eye then gently massaged the bridge of his nose. He began as he replaced his glasses.
“A package arrived at the Russian Consulate in Notting Hill Gate last Monday. The Russians have him listed as an under assistant trade attaché, but unless Hampshire has fallen into the English Channel he's anything but. He certainly is not here to und
erwrite trade agreements. I want you in charge of finding out what he's up to and why, that is, Patrick.”
Instead of directing his gaze at the screens on the wall, he paused to look at me as if he was expecting me to say something. The lines of age were drawing their patterns across his tanned forehead and around his mouth and eyes, which were of a cloudy iris with dull hazel pupils. Despite the amount of time he spent in the gym the skin of his neck had creased as had his once taut but now heavy jowls. His voice and alert manner may have belied the truth of his years but his features could not deny the severity of it.
“We have him registered as a spook and an important one at that. Fyodor Nazarov Razin, a full lieutenant general with rows of medals of honour to his name. He is an old school Moscow Centre trained hood. His relatively narrow file records him under that name with the appendage of Raynor as his working code. As I said, he arrived at the consulate last Monday and has visited the Russian Trade Delegation on Highgate West Hill each day since. He goes nowhere else, Patrick. Which is strange to say the least. The Delegation premises have been on statutory watch for donkey's years and the Russians have known of the house opposite since the day we unloaded our camera equipment. There was no point in trying to keep it secret. It's now an automated site, permanently staffed by two lamp-burners from this department who spend all day drinking tea and eating my budget out of biscuits. The Russian General's travelling arrangements have not altered one iota. Tube to Charing Cross, an unhurried stroll to the Savoy for a late breakfast, then on to the Silver Vaults in Chancery Lane and when finished in there, a number 191 bus from High Holborn to the Swains Lane bus stop at Highgate. He then walks sedately up the hill to the Delegation. Likes a walk, does our Mr Raynor hyphen Razin, but not as far as the Karl Marx family's tomb in the cemetery. Strange race of people, the Russians.”