by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric
‘My heart bleeds. What kind of bombs were they carrying?’
‘Pipe bombs. Fourteen of them, stuffed into hunting jackets, packed with nails and wired by batteries. Another twist—’
Aslan stood up abruptly. ‘Yes?’
‘They brought bottles of petrol. The survivor was carried to an ambulance screaming “Damn Israel!” Said he wanted to burn the Freemasons alive.’
‘If only we had a time machine, we could send these dupes back to the Middle Ages where they’d be happy.’
‘It’s the paperback culture, Colonel. A kind of nostalgia.’
‘Romantics with pipe bombs. Potent blend. Not my idea of a night out.’
‘Love and suicide have always been close, Colonel.’
‘Among young fools, perhaps. If I’d mentioned suicide to my late beloved, she’d have killed me.’
The banter quickly evaporated into silence. Aslan’s eyes rose to the bulb in the ceiling. It had begun to flicker. ‘Jews… Freemasons… That broadens the palette. Anyone admitted responsibility?’
‘Not yet, Colonel. Not even IBDA-C.’
‘IBDA-C, the Islamic Great Eastern Raiders Front… Weren’t they first to claim responsibility for the November bombings?’
Celik nodded.
‘And did not our dear IBDA-C use pipe bombs in the mid-nineties?’
‘That was against churches and nightclubs, Colonel.’ Celik shook his head. ‘IBDA-C weren’t up to the November bombings. Not on their own, anyway. But something like this maybe?’
Aslan stared at the throne of King Solomon. ‘This is no chair for me, Celik. Suleiman had wisdom and was beloved of God.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘So, what do we have?’
Celik shrugged. ‘The usual suspects.’
‘Is this usual?’
4
The sinuous strings of the first movement of Debussy’s La Mer washed about the apartment. A storm was brewing. Toby Ashe looked up from his laptop to see the gorgeous figure of a golden-tanned blonde entering with a goblet of red wine, wearing one of his own white shirts and little else. Ashe turned back to his emails.
‘Can I drink this?’ asked the girl in a pleasant, county accent.
‘Didn’t you have enough last night?’
The girl knocked it back in one. ‘Ugh!’
‘That would be your last cigarette.’
‘I’m giving up.’
‘Self-denial, Amanda? Hadn’t thought of you as an ascetic.’
‘A what?’
‘Kind of nun.’
The girl approached and ran her fingers through the long strands of Ashe’s tousled, copper-brown hair. ‘A very horny nun.’
‘Weren’t you going?’
‘Is that what you want, Toby Ashe?’
He thought for a second. ‘Right now, yes.’
‘Well fuck you then!’ Amanda turned to the bedroom door, paused for a second, then launched the goblet at Ashe. The glass shattered on the back of his chair and fell into the sheepskin rug.
Unruffled, Ashe turned from his Mac and looked sympathetically towards Amanda.
‘If you really want to throw the book at me, Amanda, why not try one of mine?’
Amanda’s lively blue eyes focused on a small pile of paperbacks on the windowsill. Grabbing the first that came to hand, she hurled it hard at Ashe’s head.
Ashe ducked and returned to his laptop. ‘Judging from the weight and texture of your chosen missile, Amanda, I should say I’ve been struck by my most popular work to date, The Generous Gene. Pity you didn’t read it first.’
Slamming the bedroom door behind her, a muffled voice emerged from within. ‘I didn’t come for your books!’
‘Blast!’ Ashe’s eye alighted on a familiar email address. ‘Now what do they want?’ Faced with a choice of two possible worlds, his index finger hovered on the mouse: to open or not to open. He bit his lip. There was work to be done, but there was something about Amanda’s rage which turned him on.
Ashe entered the bedroom calmly, half expecting to be hit by another book. Amanda had stripped off his shirt and now lay sprawled on the crumpled bed.
‘Just because your real parents didn’t want you, Toby, it’s no excuse to be so bloody difficult.’
‘Vicious, Amanda? What I didn’t tell you last night was that my dear adopted parents regularly informed me that I was nothing less than a miracle. A gift from above.’
‘A git from above, more like. Typical of you to suggest you adopted them, rather than the other way round.’
‘Which way round would you like it?’
‘You know what I like.’
‘You can keep those on.’
‘Which? Knickers or stilettos?’
‘Both. It’s always interesting with the knickers.’
‘Heightens pleasure, does it?’
‘You were made for fucking, Amanda.’
‘Who isn’t?’
*
Post coitum, triste. Sex with Amanda had been exciting and Ashe wondered if dismissing her as a one-night stand had really been a good idea. But something was wrong in his life: lengthening shadows were threatening to envelop him, and poor Amanda had turned up at just the wrong moment.
For the last seven of his thirty-three years, Ashe had made the cathedral city of Lichfield, Staffordshire, his base. The first time he had set foot in this ancient market town, whose grand cathedral gave it city status, he had felt at once a kind of peace, almost a homecoming. He was not surprised to discover later that writers throughout history had described Lichfield as England’s ‘omphalos’: a kind of primordial navel, a centre and fount for the country’s soul.
Ashe’s decision to quit London in May ’97 had served him well, despite the scepticism of his many friends who had moved to the capital straight after graduating from Oxford and stayed there. Having left behind a successful career in TV documentaries to focus on his writing, Ashe found Lichfield’s relaxed pleasures and jewel-box of characters less distracting. He devoted his prodigious energies to producing a series of books – works that combined popular science with what Ashe called ‘experimental spirituality’. Thanks to two non-fiction international bestsellers, he could enjoy a pleasant lifestyle, so long as he kept his head.
The Generous Gene, his most widely appreciated book, was both a humorous refutation of popular atheism and a vindication of spiritual knowledge in a sane mind. Every age has its prophets of atheism and every age has its defenders of the spiritual life, though Ashe disdained to appear as a prophet of anything. Resolutely refusing all requests for media appearances and interviews, the man behind the bestsellers remained invisible to the general public. Ashe could have gathered a devoted following if he had wanted one; such behaviour would have attracted greater sales, but not contentment.
Ashe’s problem was his other job. It made him feel a kind of fraud, or ghost: someone removed from life. Strolling about the cold Cathedral Close in search of clarity, Ashe passed by the sandstone tombs of forgotten medieval dignitaries, clinging for salvation to the walls of the three-spired cathedral. He knew that even if he decided to see Amanda again, an invisible wall would always separate them, like the wall that kept the lesser servants of the Church outside the warm Lady Chapel within.
For he could tell neither Amanda nor anybody else that he had been recruited for the Secret Intelligence Service while studying psychology and behavioural sciences at Oxford. A tutor’s recommendation, a useful bout of ‘playing soldiers’ with the Oxford Training Corps, and a rugged talent for mountaineering, as well as impressive intellectual skills, had led to a secret rendezvous and subsequent invitation to join the Service shortly after graduation. Ashe liked to think it was chiefly loyalty to his country that had made him accept the burden of working for the Service, but in truth he was attracted to the idea of unknown agencies being determinative not only in science but in global power-politics as well. His superiors, nevertheless, had detected a maverick quality in Ashe which had, to date, kept him confined l
argely to research, presentational and advisory roles. Ashe had to slake his thirst for active adventure in foreign expeditions that served none but his own need to be relieved of discipline.
Surely now was the time to seize that holiday and head for France’s Languedoc region. Caught between Amanda’s attention seeking and a communication (unopened) from that Other Job, why not take this chance to accomplish the hike he had long dreamed of doing, from the medieval Cathar castles of the Corbières across the Pyrenees to Catalonia and the medieval churches of Lérida; lush vineyards, romance and no responsibilities.
Fired up with this new decisiveness, Ashe dashed back to his apartment, located in what had been the old Swan Hotel, across from the pool that had once been the cathedral’s moat. A quick scout of the net would secure him a first-class ticket to a better state of mind.
The apartment door was open. Ashe found a note lying on his old Bang & Olufsen record deck: eloquence, scrawled with a black mascara brush.
I only seem to go for bastards, Toby Ashe, and I’m not sure about you.
The inevitable phone number. The open door was symbolic; the note, he surmised, desperate. Ashe screwed it up. He opened the CD player in his black hi-fi stack. Out with the melancholy waves of Debussy, in with the boundless, star-bound freedom of Jimi Hendrix.
Soon the flat was vibrating with the magma-swamp, earth-core bass of ‘Hey Baby (New Rising Sun)’. Hendrix’s angel extended her mysterious invitation to step into her world ‘a while’. Long enough, presumably, to realise that she was The One: the angel of love, liberty and an elusive wisdom lost on the timid and the earth-chained.
Ashe poured himself an early tumbler of Talisker and typed his password into his Mac. Still flashing in a corner of the screen was that familiar greeting code:
OB_B5pearl.
He toyed with the mouse. What if he had already left for France when the message had arrived? He could be out of Lichfield in minutes. They’d probably never know.
OB_B5pearl.
He knew what it meant. A call from on high. An obligation. Tired of being at the beck and call of… someone, this was the fate of the man who knew something; he would never be left alone. To know is to be a marked man.
Ashe stared at the delete button. It grew and grew until it filled his mind’s eye. Delete and go! Delete and freedom. The angel was calling him.
‘Fuck it!’ said Ashe, out loud.
OB_B5pearl.
He double-clicked. The message was stark, boringly simple:
Saturday, noon.
Ashe sat back in his upright chair. Caught again. England expects… He sent a blank reply, deleted the message, swigged back the malt, looked at his watch and turned off the New Rising Sun.
5
What the hell was that?
Ashe’s Saab 9-3 convertible tore into a screeching skid and spun round 45 degrees. The figure in the lane didn’t budge. Pulling himself together, Ashe lowered the window, trying to discern the ghostlike figure standing bolt upright in the lane. Wrapped head to toe in green camouflage, the figure – apparently male – stared into space, his dark eyes framed by a veil like a Tuareg warrior.
‘You getting out of the road, or d’you want to commit suicide?’ Ashe’s voice failed on the word ‘suicide’. ‘Suicide’ now sounded more like murder, a refusal to die alone, a willingness to kill.
A hollow voice emerged from the creased camouflage. ‘The prophet has spoken.’
‘Oh fuck!’ A shiver shot up Ashe’s spine. The man approached him. Before Ashe could depress the clutch, a mud-stained hand reached into the Saab and stuffed a crumpled piece of paper into Ashe’s jacket. Then, as fast as the hand had appeared, the man was gone, dissolving into the bushes and trees that clawed at the lane’s edge. Ashe spread the paper over his steering wheel. Rough letters in black charcoal conveyed the word of the green prophet:
THE TOWER OF BABEL IS REBUILT AND MUST BE DESTROYED
Obviously a religious nut; Ashe knew all about them. Did this one merit attention? Maybe. The weird encounter had occurred uncomfortably close to his destination.
The committee of SIS Dept B5(b), known affectionately as ODDBALLS, met six times a year at a fine converted farmhouse in Broxbourne Woods, near Little Brickenden, Hertfordshire, close to the M10–M25 link between London and Cambridge. The house belonged to Admiral Lord Gabriel Whitmore.
Crunching gravel, Ashe approached the polished green door, framed by Doric columns. The admiral’s butler opened it.
‘Good morning, Dr Ashe.’
Ashe heard the grandfather clock in the hall chime midday. ‘Afternoon, Reynolds. Admiral aboard?’
‘No, not today sir, but the department is. May I show you to the Tower, sir?’
Reynolds, Whitmore’s one-time ADC and now fiercely loyal butler, was a stocky man in his early forties with a vividly veined, ocean-washed face. He shared his employer’s conceit that the house was a ship, albeit in dry dock.
Reynolds led Ashe through the echoing library to a parlour smelling of Brasso.
‘You haven’t seen a guy lurking round here in camouflage gear, handing out “end of the world” leaflets, have you Reynolds?’
Reynolds seemed shocked. ‘We do get some strange ones, sir. Couldn’t have been security staff, could it, sir? Training exercise, I mean.’
‘You never see the security round here.’
Reynolds thought for a second. ‘We’re not all that far from the psychiatric hospital outside Hatfield. You do get the occasional, er… waif and stray.’
‘Care in the community, Reynolds?’
‘I’m afraid so, sir.’
‘Might explain it.’
Reynolds smiled awkwardly and checked his waistcoat pocket watch. ‘I’m afraid they’re waiting for you, sir.’ He marched Ashe out across the neat rear garden towards the Tower.
Constructed as an observatory in simple but elegant red-brick in 1824, the Tower was King George IVs retirement gift to a favourite admiral of the fleet. Its past was colourful. Rumours persisted of house parties assembled within its cool curvature to practise white magic, and other things, in Edwardian times. An oriental dancer accompanied by a beautiful female violinist from New Zealand had performed a turn that scandalised the usually broadminded wives of the intelligence elite. It was even said that a spirit, manifesting itself before a select coterie, had accurately predicted the First World War two years before it happened. But the days when British intelligence entertained supernatural intelligences were long gone.
The genius behind ODDBALLS was Major General Maxwell Fuller-Knight KCVO. During the darkest days of the Second World War, Fuller-Knight realised that interest in ersatz occultism was a significant characteristic of both present and incipient dictators and terrorists. Not infrequently, the Oddball-type would inject cod mysticism and subjective ecstasies into their extreme political or religious views. Some Oddballs were cleverer than others. Very cunning Oddballs were not always so obviously odd. Bad magicians had always been as attractive as good ones – especially when their followers did not realise it was a form of magic they were being attracted to. Charismatic types used images and words, usually with the ‘Holy Book’ flavour – the ancient stock-in-trade of the magician. After the images and words came the bombs and the guns. Whatever degree of threat the Oddball’s appearance posed to the peace of the world, their appearance was likely to be as regular as a winter cold, and as difficult to predict.
Fuller-Knight’s insight was, like all insights of genius, so obvious that the idea of forming a group to consolidate the idea would have appeared sensible to anyone but a politician – or a potential Oddball. Fortunately for Fuller-Knight, the scheme was mooted to Winston Churchill who, initially amused, was subsequently captivated by the idea. But all that had been in the curiously enlightened days – and nights – of the Second World War. After the war, men’s minds were moved strangely. ODDBALLS itself began to appear decidedly odd; the world was surely getting better.
ODD
BALLS was put in mothballs.
Then, just in time for the millennium, came the smiling, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth image of Osama bin Laden. You could have read about him in a Fuller-Knight profile of 1946 – not by name of course, but by type. Fuller-Knight had foreseen the apostle with the machine gun, the rich but humble servant who looked like a prophet and dressed with the cameras in mind.
It had been hard to relaunch B5(b). However, once it was realised the Americans were considering a similar idea, SIS chiefs finally approved the department’s revival, under scrutiny. Resurrected in 2000, ODDBALLS extended the anti-fifth-columnist brief of its wartime predecessor to concentrate on locating, investigating and assessing charismatic movements and individuals whose commitments, propaganda or general direction indicated a stance of superior insight, knowledge or destiny to the rest of humankind. The method was first to assess potential security risks, and second to grade risks in order of seriousness, with recommendations for investigation or action. ODDBALLS’ remit was global.
Psychological profiles were important. Did the subject assume a superior morality or consider him or herself beyond good and evil? Did the subject believe he or she was specially chosen, called or otherwise marked out by God or some other remarkable authority?
There were many Oddballs and they came in many shapes, sizes and colours.
*
Sobering shafts of clean light beamed through the six portholes that pierced the whitewashed brickwork, illuminating the ODDBALLS committee as they sat at the round, varnished walnut table, set on the Tower’s chequered floor. It was appropriate that such a gathering of minds took place in a room whose atmosphere was reminiscent of a nursery.
Each member’s area of expertise was like a prized toy, be it psychology, esotericism, theology, politics and economics, code-breaking, field operations, history, science or technology. Among the dozen regular participants, Ashe alone lacked extensive service experience (undergraduate OTC activities were not taken seriously). As such, he could be regarded as somewhat suspect. His hair was a little too long; his Chelsea boots betokened a lack of discipline. His manner was at times too personal, even emotional. But Ashe carried lightly about him a natural, old-world charm that covered many a sin. Only one member found Ashe’s charm as suspect as the rest of him. Under the hard eyes and stentorian tones of the committee chair, Commodore Adrian Marston, Ashe could never do right.