The Oktober Projekt

by R. J. Dillon

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked Nick, ‘because I was just about to make one.’

  She’s the sort who always would decided Nick; whatever the triumph or tragedy, and he politely declined her offer.

  ‘I’m sorry about Jo,’ said Nick, never any good at offering his condolences and Milneshaw nodded dumbly, the words not sinking in.

  Milneshaw had become a prisoner in his mother’s protective custody, surrounded by empty cups and newspapers scattered on the carpet around his feet.

  ‘I’m trying to find out what happened to Jo,’ Nick said, taking a seat in an armchair across from Milneshaw who could only smile at his girlfriend’s name.

  ‘Jo,’ said Milneshaw, his voice broken, flat. Then as though he’d been waiting for an excuse he was suddenly off, describing how they met, the times they spent in the staff bar at Vauxhall Cross, before he ended his narrative embarrassed. ‘She didn’t….’

  Unable to continue Milneshaw sat back, rubbed his eyes and sniffed. ‘She didn’t kill herself,’ he said, angry and hurt. A Service software engineer, Milneshaw reached over six-foot; his ginger hair running to his neck, a straggly beard around the rim of his chin.

  ‘That’s what I want to establish,’ Nick told him, deciding that Milneshaw’s face had never borne too much bad luck, his eyes were immature and soft; they were the eyes of a child who’d received its first taste of tragedy.

  ‘She was here… the other night,’ Milneshaw said, ‘came round as usual and we’d watched a DVD, Gladiator, it was one of her favourites and she always cried at the end.’ He patted the chair arm determined not to cry himself.

  ‘The night she died, did you know if anyone had called her?’

  ‘She never said she was meeting anyone, if that’s what you mean,’ Milneshaw replied.

  ‘But if someone she trusted had arranged to meet her, she would have gone?’

  Milneshaw nodded, reached over to a coffee table, lifted up a photograph of Lister and put it straight back down.

  ‘Did she tell you why she had asked to see one of my colleagues in internal security?’

  ‘We’re not allowed to discuss each other’s duties.’

  ‘That’s the official policy,’ said Nick, ‘but the Service is a hotbed of gossip, we all know that. And I am here to find out exactly what happened to Jo.’

  Out of Nick’s question, perhaps from its tone, Milneshaw grasped a measure of hope in place of despair.

  ‘She was concerned about an operation,’ he said.

  ‘Which one, did she say?’

  ‘Sentinel… Sanctuary… I don’t know… I can’t remember,’ Milneshaw said, agitated, upset.

  ‘Salvage,’ suggested Nick, ‘Operation Salvage?’

  Nodding, Milneshaw gave a weary ‘yes, probably’, followed by what sounded like a choked sob. And with Nick promising not to reveal his sources, he went to the very limits of his cover. ‘If Jo was concerned about any operational issues, why didn’t she take it up with the head of RUS/OPS instead of coming to us?’ Nick proposed quite gently.

  ‘She did, don’t you see, that’s why she was coming to internal security,’ said Milneshaw, his voice rising, his patience, quite understandably, long gone.

  ‘Why would the head of RUS/OPS ignore Jo’s concerns?’

  ‘She didn’t.’ Milneshaw sat back and Nick, needing more, prompted him.

  ‘I’m not sure I follow you?’

  ‘After the operation went sour, Jo was really down, somehow feeling she shared some of the blame. I know she shouldn’t have discussed it with me, but she wasn’t sleeping, not herself. I tried everything to bring her out of it, but she was in a deep rut, so I…’ Milneshaw closed his eyes, shook his head. ‘So I told her that if she felt so badly, why didn’t she find out what had gone wrong.’ He broke off to take a gulp from a cup commemorating a royal wedding or jubilee, Nick couldn’t be sure which from where he sat. ‘You see it’s my fault.’ He collapsed back into the chair.

  ‘I know it’s painful,’ Nick assured him, ‘but I need to know what Jo did next?’

  ‘She went back through all the operational procedures and protocols that she knew had been put in place and agreed in advance. But when she checked, the operational records were corrupt. I remember that because we’ve had a bagful of problems with different IT systems, nothing traceable, no viruses, no errors.’

  ‘And there were no hard copies for the operation that Jo could consult?’

  ‘She never told me.’

  ‘Is this when Jo took her concerns to the head of RUS/OPS?’

  Gripping the chair arms Milneshaw forced himself on, his face utterly pale and wan. ‘Jo came round that evening and said she was going mad, she’d discussed it with the head of RUS/OPS who went through the records with her, there and then on her own screen. The records were all there, but there were anomalies, subtle changes.’

  ‘Someone must have hacked the electronic files,’ said Nick.

  ‘No…’ Milneshaw shook his head, not this time in sorrow or grief, but frustration. ‘The systems are protected by primary and secondary firewalls preventing internal or external breaches or hacking. I can’t give you details, but when information is saved, I mean it is really saved, tamper-proof saved.’

  ‘Did Jo give any examples of what had been altered?’

  ‘The original operational procedure had been for the agent to use a digital scanner to be supplied by his handler,’ Milneshaw said, and for the first time, he gave Nick a questioning glance. ‘The new version was for a physical collection,’ said Milneshaw, staring at Nick, something troubling him. ‘Jo said the system was lying.’ Milneshaw inched himself forward and Nick saw how puffy his cheeks and eyes were as his face came into a pool of light from a table lamp. Rubbing his hands together, he took a deep sigh. ‘And that’s why she was going to internal security. Do you believe Jo died because of that?’

  ‘I think it is tied in with it, Steve,’ said Nick, sick and weary of having to carry another death on his shoulders. ‘It’s a good idea in the circumstances to forget I called.’ Jo said the system had lied, Nick thought, also recalling Lubov’s words to Bensham: Moscow have not recruited agents to pass on secrets, they have recruited agents that plant secrets… tell the senior ex-officer I have discovered three of them, tell him three. Nick was suddenly alert with a fresh sense of momentum.

  ‘I know, but I can’t forget Jo,’ said Milneshaw with a sad smile.

  For some reason he’d never understand, Nick stopped at the door, his hand half turning the handle.

  ‘Steve, whatever people say about Jo, you’re the one who knew her and I think for that you’re a lucky man.’

  In the hallway Nick declined a tea from Steve’s mother, mumbled some inadequate platitude and hurried off for home. He didn’t care if Angie hated him he just needed to sit and reflect, find some familiar territory to escape from this madness.

  • • •

  Nick had been on the road for five minutes when his mobile rang and he took the call. He heard Jane’s breathless voice; terse, a register he thought he’d forgotten, giving precise information without any feeling. Where had he been? She’d been trying to reach him for ages? He’d had things to do, he told her. He didn’t know she cared that much, he continued until Jane’s urgency cut him off mid-flow. There’d been an incident with Angie. Yes, Angela. She’d been attacked. In hospital, the Royal London. Serious, it sounded bad, intensive care. Late this afternoon. No she didn’t know. Yes, she was at the hospital, yes she’d keep in touch.

  He drove with the same recklessness as he did to be at his son’s birth, though this had a different sense of urgency and fear. Thirty minutes to reach the hospital through slow Sunday traffic meandering aimlessly along. Seeping from the back of Nick’s neck, a deep pain that spread up through his skull as he parked in a space reserved for consultants only, which he was in a way, except his speciality was secrets and the application of force. Going in through casualty he followed
overhead signs down corridors quiet and deserted, with a lingering scent of warm food and fear. Porters wheeling trolleys of linen to a central store passed him, their own importance brimming in their eyes. In intensive care a waiting area was set off to his right, double-glazed, but you could still hear the machines fighting against the odds. Serious professional faces moving past; technology and quiet, the inconsistency of life and abrupt endings.

  At a nurses’ station Jane was already waiting, a coffee in her hand as staff passed silently into small wards, their voices conspiratorially low.

  ‘Thank God you’re here,’ Jane said.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Let’s talk,’ she nodded to a door leading to the family suites, spilt some of the coffee over her fingers and pulled a face.

  ‘I need to see her.’

  ‘Nick, I need to explain,’ said Jane.

  ‘Explain what?’

  ‘Angie, it wasn’t just a beating… she was raped… a multiple rape,’ Jane told him, her voice low, guiding him into one of the temporary family quarters.

  Reserved for relatives who needed to stay close to intensive care, the suite was a series of interconnecting sterile boxes someone had tried to make as welcoming as home with green armchairs fighting against a floral pink paper. Sighted high on one wall, a flat screen TV could be viewed when taking meals or snacks at a round wooden grain laminate dining table. Under the window, a small waist high bookcase loaded with an eclectic mix of classics and paperbacks, a box of tissues placed discreetly on the second shelf. There was a bathroom and a double bedroom in the same depressing functional style and to Nick everything seemed too empty, shells waiting for shadows to give them a taste of life.

  ‘Raped?’ he repeated.

  ‘I’m sorry Nick.’

  ‘How did it… what happened?’

  ‘She was with someone. A male called Guy?’ Jane began not looking at Nick.

  ‘An art dealer…gallery owner,’ said Nick, numb.

  ‘He was shot in the head when he opened the front door and died at the scene.’

  ‘And Angie?’

  Jane lifted her head slowly, taking her time. ‘She’s in a bad way Nick, she put up a determined fight.’ Jane tried to hold him, but he broke away, took a step backwards.

  ‘Show me….’

  ‘Look, you can’t blame yourself.’

  Gesturing for Nick to follow her, Jane led him into a small unit and pointed to an end bed. Angie in a coma, a machine making all the effort as it did the breathing for her; tubes, wires, machines beeping, counting, measuring out her struggle. Flinching at her sallow face, Nick stepped forward to her side. Both Angie’s eyes were closed and swollen; her lips bloated, misshaped, translucent and cracked. On one of her cheeks a deep bruise caused by a solid ring. Intravenous drips were running into the back of her hands and nose. Small scabs of eyeliner were dried around her lashes and he imagined her eyes packed with life before she was attacked. By the tape round her wrist, more swelling on her pale skin; bruises in a fingertip pattern where she’d been held down.

  He spent ten minutes trying not to listen as a doctor gave Angie something close to a fifty-fifty chance; stressing how for someone her age the odds were seriously in her favour. So, it came down to medicine administered as roulette. Well, wasn’t life a lottery after all, thought Nick, squeezing her hand, watching as Jane motioned that she’d be outside. Except Nick’s eyes refused to provide a normal service, blurred, he saw only Jane’s distorted face. A dimension had slipped allowing particles to scamper and dance into dozens of objects waiting to be invented. Nothing was normal any longer, and it never would be, he decided sitting back.

  Angie didn’t make it through the night. As her condition deteriorated, Nick and Angie’s parents made the decision to take her off life support. Sharing his vigil with her mother and father, Nick had sat tight stroking her hand, a supplicant gesture that made him feel mute and inadequate. After he’d watched her fade away as her breathing changed pitch and finally ceased at three-twenty-two a.m., Nick was gripped by an abject panic pushing him down the corridor, longing for air untouched by clotted institutional scent. Jane found him outside, her entreaties to come inside ignored, her attempts at comfort brutally repelled, stepping away from her arms each time she tried to hold him tight.

  ‘Come back to my place, use the spare bed for as long as you like,’ she offered, nothing else to give.

  ‘No,’ he yelled, his voice surly, his refusal angry and sour.

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Who cares.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I’m better left alone, that’s the best thing you can do.’

  Kissing his cheek she walked off as Nick began a choked round of calls to friends and family, ringing from his mobile in the hospital’s cold foyer, repeating every word twice, his throat narrow and raw.

  Most of the morning he spent with CID, getting nowhere. Asinine questions and repetition; fact and fantasy mixed as they attempted to suggest it had been a burglary gone wrong. Nick’s statement made no difference to their theory and it was recorded, witnessed and dutifully signed the 11th November at twelve thirty-five. Nick, not for the first time in his life was off the rails, out of control. Someone had gone and irrevocably tipped the scales towards destruction; Nick’s or those responsible was hard to say right now. A hunger for finding the bastards who’d carried out the rape and murder starting to consume him and he’d a sensation of walking on air as he went to the first pub he could find open.

  Drinking became Nick’s direct route to grieving. Four days of drunken hell when Nick disappeared off the radar, his only altercation came that very same afternoon in a small pub where they knew Nick quite well. On his way to the bar, Nick brushed the shoulder of a young City trader numbing the pain of a Monday morning back at work. ‘Prick,’ he snapped at Nick level with his shoulder. Nick grabbed the trader by the throat, pushed him back against his leg and slammed him to the floor. He was only prevented from delivering a fatal punch by two bar staff pinning Nick’s arms around his waist.

  ‘My wife’s been raped and murdered,’ he yelled.

  A nervous silence absorbed the conversation and laughs. ‘That’s enough,’ ordered a barman gripping Nick’s arms tightly, brushing him through bewildered groups of drinkers. Nick laughed in their faces and their relief swelled to a noisy echo again as the barmen jostled him to the door. Walking in a daze, Nick’s system buckled under the whisky, his legs soft and weak, his steps unsure and wooden as he bumped passers-by, muttering apologies or curses. Staggering until there was no one around, he slumped on a bench in a square on Victoria Embankment, heaving his coat around his knees, tears running down his cheeks.

  After that, it was downhill all the way. Five feet-eleven tall and just under twelve stones, Nick would never be big enough to face the memories of Angie. Another hard shadow he’d have to outrun, exposing his nerves and inadequacies. His wife was gone. He visualised Angie at the final second before she was attacked, wondering what she was thinking, what she’d been planning? For Nick, reality was a thing of the past, a forgotten world. The only tangible facts were the here and now, the events he created as a distraction, as a diversion, a narrative of his own to block out the memories.

  That first night Nick found a room in a bed and breakfast hovel for those on a rock-bottom budget. Sitting by the window a cushion under his head on a straight-backed chair, he watched the street in case it had all been a dream and Angie would be looking for him out there under the street lamp’s fine glow. No lights in his room, just a plastic tumbler and a half drunk bottle of Laphroaig by his side as he was tortured by the injustice of life; how he’d kissed Angie’s forehead for the last time, her skin already very cold.

  Terrified by his dark mood, he made a bolt for the waiting day. Catching a bus at random, Nick found his way to Kilburn realising he was shaking so badly he was drawing stares. Punishment? Revenge? Had he gone plain crazy? His head ached from trying to pu
sh missing segments together or was it from the whisky? Confused, scared, he took the next stop turning down streets he didn’t know. Nausea hit him with the heat of a plague, doubling up he vomited bile and watery whisky into the gutter, his eyes wet with the effort. Across the street a nursing home promising residential care, and from its shabby state, it appeared nothing but a farm trading on human weakness. In one of the front windows a wasted eighty-year old, her dressing gown grubby with egg and tea. She saw Nick straightening up and rapped on the window. It took a couple of moments before his stinging eyes could translate her lipped words behind the glass.

  ‘Where’s my husband? You seen my husband? Where’s your father?’ She mouthed, on and on until Nick turned and ran, another traitor too afraid to answer her questions.

  Heading up the street a Salvation Army band floated towards him, a good three feet in the air. Out of each instrument came words not music, voices of people he’d known; colleagues, lovers, parents, the living and dead. Forming a circle round Nick one female Salvationist pushed through the band; Angie, her bonnet askew. Swimming up to Nick she touched his cheek.

  ‘You’re keeping the wrong company, Nick, booze isn’t going to save you.’

  ‘I need you Angie.’

  ‘That was a bad one that came calling with his friends. You were a good husband, but now Tom is taking care of me.’

  ‘I need you Angie.’

  ‘Why not come to mass with the family, have a word with Father Antley.’

  ‘Sure, book a bench for us all.’

  ‘Repent, Nick, that’s all you’ve got to do.’

  Squeezing past Angie, Nick rolled and bumped his way down the street not daring to look back, his mind already denying him the prospect of repenting. A weird power had control of Nick’s senses, his body drifted its lever stuck on automatic. Thoughts were no longer becoming positive or succeeding concrete actions, a breakdown in the trillion of tiny wires in his brain. The tiredness suddenly crept through him in long heavy waves, his mind infected with grotesque faces, the day turning into a freak. Another drink would be required to shift him into a higher gear.