The Phoenix Series Box Set 1

by Ted Tayler

  Dessert was light on the palate. They enjoyed a slice of champagne cheesecake with elderflower and raspberries. Erebus informed him they came from the walled garden as did the beetroot and cabbage for the main course.

  “My compliments to the gardener,” said Colin, “in that case.”

  Athena stifled a laugh.

  Had that been the first crack in her armour Colin wondered? Erebus ordered coffees and brandies for the drawing-room and suggested they moved along the corridor for the night’s main event. The stories behind the other founder members of Olympus, and how they came by their chosen code names.

  “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. Goddess 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 owned 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 1995 with a first-class honours degree. Until I went up to Cambridge, I’d never met any real people. My parent’s friends, if I saw any when home for the holidays, were upper class, privileged and wealthy, as are my mother and father. None of them had much to say to a small child, nor a teenage girl. Even at University, there existed a divide between us and them. Students from schools such as my own were well represented, and it was deemed we must stay within our own social circle; join the right clubs and societies and so forth. I heard an accent different from my own on occasion that marked that person out 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. We spent hours talking, reading and absorbing new ideas on politics and society. In those three years, my eyes opened. I could never return to the closeted world my parents 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 closeted existence because it stifled me. My ambitions were to move up the ladder, but the truth of the matter was I felt lost. Everything I learned in my first eighteen years had been disturbed by what I found at Cambridge. Yes, ‘disturbed’ best describes it.”

  Athena paused to remember the quote she needed.

  “I still clung to the values 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.’ At University, I came to appreciate another world existed out there. Where the savageness of man was omnipotent and unreachable. 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 help change that, but as an ingénue of twenty-one vacuous years, I didn’t know how to take that first step. I continued to live in Belgravia. One Friday evening after work a friend and I visited a crowded local pub. It was better than drinking a bottle of wine in her flat. She spotted an old school chum across the room and threaded her way through the scrum of people for a chat. I sat alone at our table. A casually dressed woman in her late thirties, stopped as she passed. She dropped a card in my lap and said if I wanted a more challenging job, I should ring this number. That proved to be the turning point although I didn’t realise it. I put her card in my handbag and forgot it. My friend returned with her pal in tow, plus a trio of young chaps. The rest of the night involved several drinking games. Later a tussle in the back of a taxi resulted in a young man receiving a knee in the groin for his troubles. A week passed before I used that bag again. As I hunted through it for my mobile phone I saw the card and remembered that evening in the pub. I’d had another obnoxious author to work with that week. Feeling fed up once I’d found my wretched phone I rang the number on the card. They invited me to a meeting in an unmarked building in central London. When I arrived, I found myself sat across a desk from a young man who informed me he was an intelligence officer. I took the first step towards my life as a spy. After that exploratory conversation, the intelligence world enveloped me. It was akin to being returned to the womb. I was totally insulated from the outside world. Yet my everyday working life at Random House carried on in the same humdrum manner; until they completed my vetting process. That process seemed interminable. They have to be sure they have targeted the right people. I understood that. I couldn’t tell anyone what I might be doing. My family, friends and work colleagues were gradually at arm’s length. As soon as I signed the Official Secrets Act, it became less and less possible to keep the same familiar degree of contact with them. My wish to make a difference attracted them. They told me I would be protecting the country, helping to save lives. Although the secrecy part is huge, little glamour or financial reward comes with the territory. Later on, I received a home visit. My parents were abroad in Cannes. Just as well too, as the personal questions, they exposed me to for the next hour would have turned my poor parent’s hair white overnight. They interrogated me over every single personal relationship. No stone left unturned. That sense of being cut off from the real world became all-consuming at the outset. 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 became an MI5 officer, coordinating various counter-terrorist operations. It was imperative that the team worked as a cohesive unit. I only socialised with other officers and developed several close friendships as it became impossible to have a life in my old world. We talked the same ‘in-house’ language and if anyone overheard snatches of our conversations, they would have been hard-pressed to work out what we discussed. Most of the operations we tackled were fast-paced and officers work around the clock on those occasions. If things go well and a terrorist threat is nipped in the bud, you crash into bed, absolutely bushed. When you get up later, you find no mention of it on the news or in the papers. You’re so proud of your efforts. The damage to property and loss of life you prevented. Yet nobody knows it ever happened and you can’t share your contributions with anyone. Those were the times of greatest isolation. The service didn’t always get it right. If we missed something. The tiniest piece of information that might have avoided a bomb exploding and prevented people from dying. That’s when frustration and anger creep in, and above everything guilt. In 2005, we were inundated with new recruits, training, and new initiatives. The terrorist threat on the streets of the UK had risen. The government’s reply was to pile more work on us. MI5 became stretched to breaking point. I joined a team investigating the threat of a terrorist attack in 2004. Two of the suicide bombers who carried out the July London bombings had appeared on the fringes of that inquiry. Surveillance photos of them existed, but we had not identified them or followed up in any detail, as they appeared to be petty criminals, not involved in attack planning. We had no reason to believe they were going to do what they did. We finished up the 2004 investigations 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 how my life might have turned out if we’d put those two bit-part players under the microscope. Over Christmas at the end of that year, I attended several parties with friends and colleagues from the service. I drank far too much and slipped on an icy pavement as we left the seventh bar. One of my friends helped me get to the closest Emergency Department where a young doct
or attended me. He judged my ankle to be sprained, and I’d be suffering from a hangover in the morning. As he held my ankle gently and looked into my eyes, I sensed something I’d never experienced.”

  “Cold hands?” Colin asked with a mischievous grin.

  Athena glared at him and continued.

  “Despite the problems that my job posed and the unsocial hours he worked, I had to see him again. We started dating in the New Year and by the end of June, we got engaged. I can’t tell you his name for obvious security reasons, but I loved him. On the morning of the seventh of July, he rang me minutes after I 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 just finished a crazy day-night shift. I had to be at Thames House and he needed to crash on the bed I just left. We tried to work out whether we could snatch an hour 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 prepared me for the next few hours as I travelled to work with hundreds of other people going about our normal routine. I remember a sudden heat coming from further along the train. I must have been knocked out by the blast for a minute. 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 around me, I heard people crying, screaming, terrible screaming. I tried to stay calm and work out what had happened. Did we hit something on the track? A derailment perhaps? From either end of the carriage, the groans and screams continued. Then the driver spoke and people quietened to listen. He managed to edge the train forward. Those of us who were walking wounded got out of our carriage. We edged our way in semi-darkness to Russell Square station.”

  The memories were still raw, and Athena struggled to continue.

  “Then we emerged above ground, in the station foyer. Every one of us in shock, our clothes blackened. People comforted us there, 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 realised, I never even noticed the pain. They ferried us to UCL hospital and in time I was treated, my cuts cleaned of glass, I received several stitches. Around me, they dealt with people with far worse injuries. 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. Early in the afternoon people around me referred to it as being a terrorist bomb, not a collision or derailment. They said the Metropolitan Police Commissioner confirmed it as ‘a coordinated attack’. I tried to find out what that meant. How many bombs had there been? When they released me from the hospital I took a taxi home to my parent’s house. None of the buses was running. I wondered how long they had stopped and how my boyfriend managed to get back to the flat. I rang him again, and someone answered. It was a nurse at the Royal London. I asked her why she had my boyfriend’s phone.”

  Athena couldn’t 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 reported in the media. Confusion remains around the identity of the bombers, how many actual casualties there were and so forth. There are more conspiracy theories surrounding this event than every other catastrophic event in living memory. After a protracted shift at GOSH, Athena’s young man was shattered. Confusion reigned over the earlier bombings and transport across the city had been disrupted. Why he boarded the bus he did, we’ll never know. He died at the Royal London from the injuries he received. His name never appeared on the official list of casualties. Athena’s employers deemed it embarrassing if a victim was in a relationship with a security services officer. Doubly so, if the press uncovered the information she worked on a covert investigation only twelve months earlier where two of the suicide bombers might have been apprehended.”

  Athena was still clearly emotional, but she recovered sufficiently to finish her story. Erebus stayed on her shoulder to give her moral support.

  “I couldn’t carry on in my job. I took time off to recover physically and to grieve for my late fiancée, but going back to Thames House wasn’t on the cards. I suffered from PTSD. The nightmares I still suffer six years on are horrible, ghastly. During my waking hours, the sound of a siren makes my spine shiver. On the outside, looking in I saw that the public was fed an awful lot of misinformation on the attacks. The advert in The Times gave me a purpose in life, a cause I believed worth the fight. Until that time, I drifted alone, reading reports on inquests, inquiries, and conspiracy theories. Nothing made sense, the numbers never tallied. The timelines became jumbled and I couldn’t untangle them. The only conclusion I drew, in the end, was there had been a degree of a cover-up. HMG needed an atrocity to sell the anti-terrorist legislation it had formulated, and it got it, one way or another.”

  Athena returned to her chair and sat unsteadily on her chair. Colin wanted to go to her, to reassure her, but he knew that would not be appropriate. She was vulnerable, as Erebus suggested, but she didn’t want pity. After hearing Erebus and Athena tell their stories, he recognised what a formidable number of grievances these two alone brought to the Olympus group. No wonder the scope of the project was so wide-ranging.

  Colin looked to see which man would next tell his story.

  CHAPTER 8

  Christopher John Rathbone MM, former SAS Sergeant (code name Thanatos)

  Thanatos-the demon personification of death; often referred to, rarely seen in person.

  Thanatos remained seated and with a fresh glass of brandy, began his story.

  “I was born in 1958 and joined the regular army at sixteen. Ten years later as an SAS sergeant, I worked with FRU (Force Research Unit), an undercover security op. Alongside other soldiers and double agents, I carried out covert intelligence and military operations. My superiors encouraged me to infiltrate the UDA. In 1987 after three years of taking part in various armed robberies and other criminal activities to gain their trust, finally, they accepted me as one of them. Over the next five years, I provided details of suspected IRA members to the UDA. Details supplied by my army paymasters. On occasions, I carried out assassinations myself, when directed to by the British Army. Every day was a nightmare. I risked being killed by the IRA in one of several reprisal attacks or uncovered as a British agent by the UDA. Throughout the Troubles, the British government colluded with paramilitary organisations. People such as me worked on the inside of those organisations. Little security existed during that period. In spring 1992 they withdrew me. My handlers became concerned about my mental state. Later, they posted me to Bosnia for Operation Joint Endeavour. A pig of a job, yet oddly I didn’t feel as threatened there as in Ireland. Then at Christmas 2004 after I served my country for thirty years, they dispensed with my services. The act of extracting me from my undercover role in the UDA exposed me as a mole. I received several death threats in the post. I demanded the MoD gave me a new identity, relocated me if necessary. They promised protection and support when I agreed to act as an agent. Without that support, I was sure to be assassinated. I discovered that I wasn’t alone. The majority of us were discarded without protection. In fact, the authorities have never officially acknowledged the existence of FRU and have taken steps to prevent sensitive and classified information surrounding the network ever being reported.”

  Thanatos looked at his glass and knocked the contents back in full, and then he leant back in his chair; his tale at an end.

  Colin couldn’t imagine what living a double life for so long must have done to him. He wondered how many demons still lurked in the poor devil’s mind.

  CHAPTER 9

  Michael James Purvis,
Major, Blues and Royals Retired (code name Alastor)

  Alastor–was the avenger of evil deeds, specifically, familial bloodshed. The Greek tragic writers use his name to name any deity or demon who avenges wrongs committed by men.

  “I was born in 1954 in Aldershot. My father served in the British Army and I joined as an officer after University in 1975. I was stationed in Detmold at the Lothian Barracks with the 4th Armoured Division. I did two tours of Northern Ireland. Londonderry in 1977 and Belfast in 1979, both well before Thanatos came over for his stint. The MoD had at last woken up and acknowledged this was a guerrilla war. They put into place special counter-terrorism training and a covert role for us soldiers. We slowly got a handle on things. We had lost the best part of fifty soldiers since the Troubles began, and the Provisionals still had two hundred gunmen and several dozen godfathers. One thing was clear though. The pictures on the wanted posters in the operations rooms were of younger and younger kids. They looked as hard as nails. A look of hatred and ill-will emanated from those faces. Inside the barracks, we scarcely saw the light of day during our four-month tour. We may as well have been on a submarine. The threat of mortar bombs flattening our quarters ever-present. We lived in bandit country but we maintained a level of professionalism, discipline, and excellent morale throughout. It was inspiring to a young officer. I got married in 1982 and moved into married quarters with Jennifer at Detmold. The Eighties and Nineties were happy times for us there. I soldiered on, literally, and we looked forward to me getting out of the Army and moving back to England. I thought teaching might be a job I’d enjoy. Jenny came home to stay with her parents for a while. We looked at houses near their place in Yorkshire. We’d never managed to have children. The two of us was enough if you know what I mean. Things kicked off in the Middle East and everything went pear-shaped. The Iraq business escalated, and we transferred out there in May 2004. My regiment formed part of the First Mechanised Brigade. Jenny flew back to Yorkshire from time to time. It helped to cope with me being away. There were plenty of wives in Germany to get together with, but she hated the hordes of screaming kids around her ankles when she visited them. On September the twenty-third I got the call. Jenny was dead. Her parents had gone out for the evening and as she felt under the weather according to her mother, she went to bed with a book. The police told me she was stabbed several times in the chest. The intruder thought the house would be empty having seen the car pull off the driveway. When she heard someone moving around inside the house, Jenny must have got up and confronted them. There were signs of a prolonged struggle inside the house. They never caught whoever lashed out with a knife and took my wonderful wife from me. Just a burglary that went wrong as far as the police were concerned. The intruder left empty-handed. If he stole something and tried to sell it for quick cash to buy drugs, then the police said they might have found him. The investigation stalled within weeks. I tried to throw myself into my work but I found it difficult to think of a reason to get out of bed in the morning. I kept asking the police what was happening to Jenny’s case. It got to the point where they appeared to be on the verge of charging me with wasting police time. I left the Army at the end of 2006 and looked into the possibility of teaching; although my heart was no longer in it. Six months later I saw the advert in The Times and knew, instinctively, this was what I needed. A way to strike back at the criminals and get this country back on the right track.”