by Ted Tayler
As he descended the stairs towards the dining room he found Erebus waiting for him in the hallway.
“You look very presentable Phoenix, well done! A word to the wise; Athena had a pretty torrid time of it before she came to us, she’ll tell you some of it tonight, but she’s buried a lot more very deep inside and she’s vulnerable; despite her outer shell. I wouldn’t like to see her hurt dear boy, understood?”
“Perfectly Erebus” Colin replied.
He accompanied his host and leader into the dining room. The other four senior Olympus members fell silent. Clearly Colin was not to be privy to everything that was discussed when they were spending time together. Either that or it was Erebus who expected a respectful silence when he entered, or perhaps demanded it.
“Good evening” Erebus began “let us two get a drink and we’ll join you; I think we should make time for proper introductions then before we sit down to dinner.”
The steward who had brought the afternoon’s tea and cakes was now acting barman. There was nothing as vulgar as a bar in the room naturally, but a silver tray on a side table held a selection of light drinks and glasses. As soon as they returned to the others with their chosen drinks, Erebus began the introductions.
“May I introduce our newest operative to you; his code name is Phoenix.”
He moved to take a place next to Athena, between her and the three men.
“Phoenix, may I introduce Thanatos, Alastor and Minos.”
Each man stepped forward and shook Colin by the hand; he was surprised by the obvious warmth of their welcome, expressed by Thanatos:-
“Welcome aboard. We’re very glad you’ve been able to join us. People of your calibre are thin on the ground Phoenix. I’m sure the Olympus Project will benefit from having you around.”
Erebus took Athena by the elbow and gently persuaded her to step forward “You two have bumped into one another already! For a more formal introduction; Phoenix this is Athena.”
Colin took the hand she grudgingly extended and lowered his head a little; without breaking eye contact he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. Athena was not amused, but with Erebus watching their every move she quickly looked away and headed off to take her place at the dining table. Before she sat down she looked back and said:-
“I wouldn’t expect you to know this Phoenix” she said, stressing his code name as if it were something nasty or inferior “a gentleman waits for a lady to offer her hand with the knuckles towards him; this will indicate her willingness to receive a kiss.”
“I’m no gentleman” replied Colin “I can only apologise. Your colleagues had given me such a warm welcome that I assumed I was among friends. Perhaps the training I am scheduled to receive while I’m staying at Larcombe Manor will include matters of etiquette? Will you be my teacher I wonder?”
Athena scowled at him and shook her linen napkin vigorously as if she was wielding a bullfighter’s cape. Colin smiled to himself. He knew he was getting to her; it might be interesting to find out if the ice maiden would melt. He spotted Erebus at the opposite end of the table; the old man was frowning as he switched his attention from Athena to him and back again.
“I think we should forget all this nonsense and enjoy our dinner. We have a lot of ground to cover later.”
The drinks steward had slipped out to summon the dining room staff and they soon brought in the first course. The steward returned in the role of sommelier and the meal progressed, rather like the luncheon earlier, with superbly prepared food accompanied by sympathetically selected wines. Conversation was at a minimum on either side of the table and Colin just let the various courses excite his taste buds.
They had Var Salmon from the Faroe Islands for a starter served with Avocado and Grapefruit Sabayon; Colin wondered where the salmon paste in his sandwiches at Shaw Park Mines had come from because they never tasted anything like this!
As they waited for the main course the Three Amigos chatted to Colin about his grand tour and what he thought of the clever conversion of the ice house. The frosty nature of the sidelong glances coming from the lady on the opposite side of the table from his new friends reminded Colin of what the ice house would have felt like if it had remained untouched.
When the Bresse Duck with beetroot, cabbage and verjus arrived all six people around the table tucked in with relish; it was magical and the Pinot Noir the steward poured was a more than acceptable combination. Colin sat back and rested for a while as he finished off his third glass. He was mellow.
Their dessert was mercifully light on the palate; they enjoyed a slice of champagne cheesecake with elderflower and raspberries that Erebus informed him had come from the walled garden, as had the beetroot and cabbage for the main course.
“My complements to the gardener” said Colin “in that case.”
Athena stifled a laugh.
Was that the first crack in her armour Colin wondered? Erebus ordered coffees and brandies for the drawing room and suggested they all moved along the corridor so that the night’s main event; the unveiling of the stories behind the other founder members of Olympus and why their code names were chosen.
“Are we sitting comfortably?” asked Erebus five minutes later “then let us begin!”
CHAPTER 7
Annabelle Grace Fox, Cambridge, Random House, MI5 (code name Athena)
ATHENA – the goddess of intelligence; skill, peace and warfare. Also of battle strategy, handicrafts and wisdom. According to most traditions, she was born from Zeus’s head fully formed and armoured. Poets describe her as ‘grey-eyed’ or having especially bright, keen eyes. Her symbol is the olive tree.
Athena rose from her chair and stood beside Erebus.
“I was born in London in 1974; my parents had a place near Vincent Gardens in Belgravia. I spent my school days at boarding schools in Surrey and Berkshire. I studied Classics at Clare College, Cambridge leaving in ’95 with a first class honours degree.
Until I went up to Cambridge, I hadn’t met any ‘real’ people. My parent’s friends, if I saw any at all when I was home for the holidays, were upper class, privileged and extremely wealthy, like my mother and father. None of them had very much to say to a small child; or indeed a teenage girl. Even at University, there was an ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide. Students from schools such as my own were well represented and it seemed incumbent upon us to stay within our own social circle; join the ‘right’ clubs and societies and so forth.
Occasionally I heard an accent different to my own that marked that person down as among the ‘them’ tribe. A few of us mingled with fellow undergraduates from the North, the west of England, even overseas students, out of mild curiosity.
We frequented various Cambridge pubs, or went back to someone’s rooms. All the time we were talking, reading and absorbing new ideas about politics and society. In those three years my eyes were opened. There was no way I could go back to the closeted world my parents would have wanted for me. When I finished my degree I joined the publishers Random House as a Publicity Assistant. I spent several months writing press releases, preparing press kits and mailing publicity materials; I was involved in coordinating author tours and book signings. I wanted to break free from my background, because it was stifling me.
I had ambitions to move up the ladder, but in truth I was a little lost; everything I had learned in my first eighteen years had been disturbed by what I had been exposed to at Cambridge. Yes, I think ‘disturbed’ best describes it. I still clung to the values that Robert Kennedy alluded to when he wrote:-
‘Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.’
However, I had come to appreciate that there was another world out there which was where the ‘savageness of man’ was omnipotent and unreachable. I had learned that evil, poverty, injustice and more horrors besides existed with no-one to fight the corner of the people who lived under that oppression every day
of their lives. I wanted to do something about that, but as an ingénue of twenty one pretty much vacuous years I didn’t know how to take that first step.
I continued to live in Belgravia and one Friday evening after work a friend and I decided to visit a local pub, rather than drink a bottle of wine in her flat. It was pretty crowded and she saw an old school chum across the bar and threaded her way through the scrum of people to have a chat. I was alone at our table. A casually dressed woman in her late thirties, stopped as she passed by, dropped a card in my lap and merely said that if I wanted a more challenging job, perhaps I should ring this number.
That was the turning point although I didn’t realise it; I put her card in my handbag and forgot all about it. My friend returned with her pal in tow, plus a trio of young chaps. The rest of the night involved several silly drinking games and a tussle in the back of a taxi where a young man got a knee in the groin for his troubles.
It was a week or so later before I used that particular bag again and as I was hunting for my mobile phone, I saw the card and remembered that evening in the pub. I’d had a fairly obnoxious author to work with all that week and I was pretty fed up, so once I’d found my wretched phone I rang the number on the card immediately.
I was invited to attend a meeting in an unmarked building in central London and eventually found myself sat across a desk from a young man who informed me he was an intelligence officer. It was the first step towards my life as a spy.
After that first exploratory conversation, the intelligence world enveloped me; it was like being returned to the womb, I was insulated from the world outside and yet my everyday working life at Random House carried on in the same humdrum manner as before until my vetting process was completed.
That process was interminable. Of course, they have to be certain that they have targeted the right people, I understood that. I couldn’t tell anyone what I was going to be doing. My family, friends and work colleagues were gradually at arm’s length; as soon as I had signed the Official Secrets Act, it became less and less possible to maintain the same familiar degree of contact with them.
My desire to ‘make a difference’ was what attracted them. They told me that I would be protecting the country, helping to save lives, that sort of thing, but although the secrecy element is huge, there is very little glamour or financial reward.
Some time later I received a home visit. My parents were in Cannes at the time. It was just as well too, as the personal questions I was exposed to for the next hour or so would have turned my poor parent’s hair white overnight! I was interrogated about every personal relationship I’d ever had! No stone was left unturned.
Initially, that feeling of being cut off from the real world was all consuming. When I left Random House and my first posting came through, I walked from home to my new office and started as an Intelligence Analyst. In due course I would go on to become an MI5 officer co-ordinating various counter terrorist operations. It was imperative that the team worked as a cohesive unit. I increasingly only socialised with other officers and developed several close friendships as it had become virtually impossible to have a life in my old world. We all talked the same ‘in house’ language and if anyone overheard snatches of our conversations they would have been hard pressed to work out what was being discussed.
Most of the operations we tackled were very fast-paced and officers are required to work around the clock on those occasions; if things go well and a terrorist threat is nipped in the bud, you might crash into bed, absolutely bushed and get up later to find hardly a mention of it on the news or in the papers. You’re so proud of your efforts and the damage to property and loss of life that was prevented, yet nobody knows about it and you certainly can’t share your contributions with anyone. Those were the times when I felt most isolated.
We didn’t always get it right; if you missed something, the tiniest scrap of information that just might have avoided a bomb going off, people dying, that’s when you feel frustrated, angry and above all guilty.
In 2005 we were inundated with new recruits, training and new initiatives; the terrorist threat on the streets of the UK had been ramped up; the government’s reply was to pile more and more work onto us. We were stretched to breaking point.
I had been assigned to a team investigating the threat of a terrorist attack in ’04; two of the suicide bombers who carried out the July London bombings had appeared on the fringes of that operation. We had surveillance photos of them but we had not identified them or followed up in any detail as they appeared to be petty criminals, not involved in attack planning. There was no reason to believe that they would do what they did. We finished up the ’04 investigation with arrests of the main protagonists and switched our attention to another item on our ever growing list.
Hindsight is a great thing; every day I wonder what my life would have been like if we’d put those two bit part players under the microscope. Over Christmas at the end of that year I went to several parties with friends and colleagues from the service. I had a little too much to drink and slipped on an icy pavement as we left about the seventh bar; one of my friends helped me get to the closest Emergency Department where I was seen by a young doctor.
He judged my ankle was badly sprained and that I would be suffering from a hangover in the morning. As he held my ankle gently and looked into my eyes I felt something I’d never felt before.”
“Cold hands?” Colin asked mischievously.
Athena glared at him and continued.
“Despite the problems that my job would pose and the unsocial hours that he undoubtedly worked, I was dead set on seeing him again. We started dating in the New Year and by the end of June we were engaged. I can’t reveal his name for obvious security reasons but I loved him dearly.
On the morning of the seventh of July he rang me minutes after I had got out of bed; I had stayed at his flat overnight. He had transferred to Great Ormond Street Hospital to specialise in paediatric conditions only a fortnight before and was just finishing a crazy day night shift. I had to be at Thames House and he needed to crash in the bed I had just left. We tried to work out whether we could snatch some time together later in the day or have to wait until the weekend. I was in a rush to get in the shower, get dressed and then dash to King’s Cross for my ten minute tube journey to work. He was too tired to think straight and we ended our last phone conversation with nothing being agreed.
Nothing could have prepared me for the next few hours. I was travelling to work with hundreds of other people just going about their normal routine. I remember a sudden heat coming from further down the train; I must have been knocked out by the blast for a minute, maybe longer; when I recovered my senses I was groggy and the first thing I noticed was the silence.
How long that lasted I don’t know; it was eerie; then all around me I could hear people crying, screaming, terrible screaming. I tried to stay calm and work out what had happened; had we hit something on the track? Was it a derailment? From either end of the carriage the groans and screams continued. Then suddenly the driver was speaking and people quietened down to listen. Somehow, he moved the train forward and those of us who were walking wounded were able to get out of our carriage and carefully make our way in semi-darkness to Russell Square station.
Some time later we were above ground, in the station foyer; all of us were in shock, our clothes blackened. There were people there who comforted us, gave us bottled water. A woman looked at my left leg and left arm; they were peppered with fragments of glass and covered in blood. I hadn’t noticed before; I hadn’t even felt any pain.
We were ferried to UCL hospital and in time I was treated, my cuts cleaned of glass, I had several stitches; all around me people with far worse injuries were being treated. I felt guilty at having got off so lightly. Several times during the waiting periods I rang my partner to tell him I was safe but my calls kept going to voicemail. I assumed he was fast asleep in bed and didn’t have a clue there had been an accident.<
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It was early in the afternoon that people around me started to talk about it being a terrorist bomb not a collision or derailment; they said the Metropolitan Police Commissioner had confirmed it was a coordinated attack. I tried to find out what that meant; how many bombs were there?
When I was released from hospital I took a taxi home to my parent’s house. None of the buses were running; I wondered how long they had been stopped and how my boyfriend had managed to get back to the flat. I rang him again; someone answered.
It was a nurse at the Royal London. I asked her why she had my boyfriend’s phone.”
Athena was unable to continue; Erebus put a comforting arm around her shoulder.
“I don’t know whether you have followed the story of the bombings over the years Phoenix, but everything was not as was reported in the media. Confusion remains regarding who the bombers really were, how many casualties there actually were and so forth; there are more conspiracy theories surrounding this event than almost every other catastrophic event.
After a protracted shift at GOSH, Athena’s young man was dog tired; there was confusion regarding the earlier bombings and transport across the city was disrupted. Why he boarded the bus he did, we’ll never know. He died at the Royal London as a result of the injuries he received; his name never appeared in the official list of casualties.
Athena’s employers deemed it would be embarrassing if a victim was found to have been in a relationship with a security services officer; doubly so, if the press uncovered the fact that she had worked on an operation only twelve months previously where two of the suicide bombers might have been apprehended.”
Athena was still clearly highly emotional, but she had recovered sufficiently to complete her story. Erebus stayed at her shoulder to give her moral support.