by David Evans
Cutler turned and went to the window overlooking the courtyard where graduates were enjoying themselves with families, friends, and lovers.
“I don’t mean to be ignorant, but I have no idea what you expect from me. My life has been academia for the past few years.”
Rockman sat down, filled his glass with more Napoleon brandy to just over the halfway point, sniffed the contents, and downed the contents in one gulp. He replied, “What would be required? Well, not wanting to keep you away too long from your family downstairs, let us see if I can give you a brief synopsis. New agent trainees are initially sent to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centre in Glynco, Georgia, where they enrol on the Criminal Investigator Training Program. This ten-week course is designed to train new federal investigators in such areas as criminal law and investigative techniques and provides a broad foundation for agency-specific training.”
Rockman was now on a roll, with his back to Max, looking into the fire as he continued.
“Upon successful completion of the Criminal Investigator Training Program, new agent trainees attend a seventeen-week Special Agent Training Course at the Secret Service training academy, outside of Washington, DC. This course focuses on specific Secret Service policies and procedures.
“Trainees are provided with the necessary knowledge and advanced application training in combating counterfeiting, assessing device fraud, and other financial criminal activity, protective intelligence investigations, physical protection techniques, protective advances, and emergency medicine.
“Then you progress and undertake another part of the core curriculum run by ex-Navy Seals, sadists to the core. The training includes extensive training in marksmanship, self-control and crowd control tactics, water survival skills and physical fitness.” Rockman took another full gulp of brandy and, after pausing to savour the contents, continued.
“After you complete the selection, which is only the very start of the process. Secret Service agents receive continuous advanced training throughout their careers. In part, this training consists of regular firearms requalification and emergency medicine refresher courses,” he added.
Cutler turned back to the window once again to watch the antics of some of his classmates outside, with the knowledge that his time here at the university was at an end.
“Anything else I should know?” he asked Rockman.
“We would expect you to beat a lie detector while swearing white is black, be as fit as a Marine, and as skilled with a gun as a Navy Seal. You will need to learn new languages to add to your Arabic. Also, have the analytical skills of an accountant, the perseverance of a New York cop, the attention to detail of a top prosecutor, and the patience of a chess master. And finally, to put the country and lives of others ahead of yourself. In other words, be willing to die in the line of duty. I think that about sums it up, young Cutler.”
Rockman topped up his brandy glass. He did not offer Cutler any; the young man had been so wrapped up in the interview, the original contents of his glass had not been touched, and it remained half full.
Before going to Saudi Arabia, Max had been clear about what his aims and objectives were. Three years as a junior in a Washington attorney’s office specializing in contract law. Junior partner by year four, senior partner by year eight, and the $500,000 salary and benefits that went with it.
The dream began to wear thin during his twelve months spent in Saudi Arabia. At first, he thought it was the oppressive heat, then the constant air conditioning noise in the office. Maybe it was the view or the printer noise. No, it was the whole bundle, stuck in an office hour after hour.
Cutler had begun to fret that he would be unable to spend the next four years, never mind the next forty, chained to a desk doing law.
The offer intrigued and excited Max, who saw this as a way of putting his academic skills, matched with his physical abilities, to good use. Never one to jump in blindly or to decide, Max needed time to think about the offer. But then, after a short silence, he stopped the Secret Service recruiter in his tracks.
“I’ll do it. Where do I sign?”
Rockman looked bemused. “Just like that, you’ll do it. What about the recompense? What about the training?”
Max thought for a moment. “I can’t influence either the money or the training; they’ll be set in stone. And if you have come from Washington to see me, and believe that I am your man, well, that’s good enough for me.”
Chapter Four
Robert Stahmer was neither short nor tall. He was six feet in his stocking feet, yet the extra few pounds he was carrying around his midriff made him appear shorter. Stahmer had short, cropped, salt-and-pepper hair, more salt than pepper lately, making him look older than his thirty years of age, having been born in 1973.
Today was a day off, a rare day away from work, and that frequently meant putting away the suit, putting on his jeans, and working in his beloved garden. He was a tropical plantsman; his garden looked like it belonged in the tropics rather than in St. Neots on the outskirts of Cambridge, UK. Robert Stahmer loved his garden and knew his plants.
Stahmer was from Newcastle originally and still spoke in the North-Eastern twang. The years had not diluted his accent, and others from outside England thought the Geordie version of English was Australian or Scottish.
With more than ten years in military intelligence and investigations, Stahmer had had several offers of employment after leaving the army. Both intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 had offered him the opportunity to work for them. To everyone’s surprise, he opted for the Health and Safety Executive as an inspector and accident investigator. What most people did not know was that Stahmer’s father had been killed in an explosion at the shipyard where he worked, and the investigation was lacking in fact and substance. Robert Stahmer wanted to make a difference.
Several years after joining the Health and Safety Executive, Stahmer had undertaken an accident investigation on a significant construction site in Newmarket. He had appreciated and admired the miles upon miles of rolling countryside interlaced with lazy waterways, and flora and fauna they supported. Stahmer’s bubbly, lovely little five-feet-nothing wife, Louise, had fallen in love with the magnificent university buildings and majestic cathedral. Both decided to move lock, stock, and barrel down to the area.
Stahmer was thinking about his Gunnera, a sub-tropical plant which looks like a giant rhubarb, with huge, prickly leaves. The Gunnera plant likes boggy, wet conditions, and his local water authority had enforced a hosepipe ban, as it had not rained for two weeks. He pondered whether the Gunnera would survive. Robert Stahmer was honest and straight as a die, but he did consider sneaking out in the dead of night, hosepipe in hand, to illegally water the precious plant he had nurtured the past seven years.
His thoughts were interrupted.
“Her Majesty will see you now,” said the suited employee of the General Department of the Royal Household.
Automatically Stahmer stood erect, today looking all of his six feet, and adjusted his tie. He suspected this suited man with a military bearing was not a footman or a butler, but he was not going to ask and look like a fool. Stahmer was a man of research; he should have researched palace protocol, such as who would greet him. Stahmer hated not knowing. He was angry with himself, as he should have looked it up.
“Your Majesty, Robert Stahmer, for your 3 pm meeting,” the suit said.
“Ah, Mr Stahmer. I have been so looking forward to meeting you. Please, sit down and please be at ease. One has been briefed, but I want all the bits that I don’t get told,” the Queen opened.
“Ma’am, where should I start?” Stahmer asked, after a slight bow.
“First and foremost, with this pleasant Darjeeling tea,” the Queen added, “and the Devon cream scones.”
“Special Branch has warned me never to mention this, but I gather you are an exception to the rule,” Stahmer said, knowing the answer.
“Well, I’m sure they have told you abou
t the situation. No medals, I am afraid. Nobody wants this to come out; not now, not in a hundred years. We have had one Guy Fawkes, and we don’t want another.”
Robert Stahmer took several minutes and explained his background; that he had worked for the Health and Safety Executive as an accident investigator for the past eight years. The Queen, of course, had been briefed on his background, but she remained impassive and very professional as he described what she already knew.
She moved in her chair a little closer to Robert as he began to get to the exciting parts of his story.
“Ma’am, the member of parliament for Grantham requested that my department send down an investigator to the Houses of Parliament after the Deputy Speaker of the House had contracted Weil’s disease and subsequently died.”
“I know about this disease,” the Queen interjected. “In 1978, the Health Minister at one of my garden parties told me a little tale. It appears that the masses at that time had begun to enjoy drinking Mexican beer out of bottles; not a pastime one would partake in,” she said, amused. “Anyhow, as they began this, let’s say, habit, Weil’s disease began to raise its ugly head again. No longer the odd case of the sewer worker, but twenty or thirty cases a year. Evidently, the female rats in Mexico, on the ships, and in the British ports, had a penchant for relieving themselves against the bottles of beer in the cargo holds. Well, next stop would be the lips of the masses, and for those unfortunate enough to drink from the infected bottles, they got Leptospirosis, commonly known as Weil’s disease.” The Queen paused.
“Yes, Ma’am, but probably what you were not told was how the importers and producers got over the problem,” Stahmer added, “without losing a penny.”
“Pray, do tell,” the Queen replied enthusiastically.
“They advertised the bottles of beer with a segment of lemon or lime, and the actors would rub the lime or lemon around the top of the bottle. Both citrus fruits are a disinfectant, and it killed off the disease. It caught on quickly, and the disease more or less disappeared overnight,” Stahmer replied.
“Fascinating. So, all these up-and-coming city types with a slice of lemon in their bottle of beer think it is stylish when in truth they are masking rat urine. So, how did our illustrious Members of Parliament contract the disease? Most of them are more gin than beer; one would suspect,” the Queen observed.
“On being appointed to undertake the investigation, my thoughts were that the Houses are on the River Thames. Where there is a river, rats will not be far away. However, when I met the pest control unit that is responsible for keeping the Houses pest free, they confirmed they had tests carried out on the rats they had caught over the last several weeks. The outcome of the tests: there were none with Leptospirosis or Weil’s disease.” Stahmer paused and took a sip of his tea before continuing.
“The first morning, I took the investigation to Parliament. I was escorted to the Lords’ Chamber, the Clock Tower, Westminster Hall, the Central Lobby, the House of Commons, and the House of Lords.”
“My, my… You may well have seen more than most of the Royal Household. Did you get to see the magnificent Lords Library?” the Queen inquired.
“No, Ma’am, the Lords Library and basement were out of bounds and roped off, as there was a program of asbestos removal underway. As you are probably aware, the Houses of Parliament had been stuffed to the gunnels with asbestos dating back before the Second World War, and further reinforced with asbestos during the war. Winston Churchill determined that he would not hand Hitler a propaganda coup by showing them on fire.”
“Good old Winston. They filled the palace up with the heinous material as well,” the Queen added, as Stahmer drained his cup.
“During the tour, I had become somewhat concerned about what I observed. I was escorted back to my car to get some bags and equipment. As per standing operating procedure, I put on a white coverall suit and took an FFP3 high-quality dust mask. The maintenance supervisor escorting me declined the use of the PPE; he probably thought I was typical Health and Safety and overreacting. I pulled rank and told him to put them on,” Stahmer explained.
“What was concerning you to go all Health and Safety, Mr Stahmer?” the Queen inquired.
“Dust, Ma’am. On the benches of the House of Commons, I noticed fine fibres. Just a few, but they were there. On asking, I was informed the cleaners had cleaned that morning, so I assumed they had arrived there recently. In the Lords’ there was evidence of wood dust. So, I went back and had the samples I took analysed.
“The analysis would take several days, so I started to do some desktop investigations. At first, I considered that it might have been poor craft and lack of professionalism by the asbestos removers. I got their details from the maintenance supervisor. From that point, I began to check the contractors out and look at their background.” Robert paused to take a little bite of the delicious scone filled with the lightest cream he had ever tasted.
“The Office of Parliamentary Security was helpful and showed me all the criminal record checks on the principal contractor. There were eight of their men on the site, including the proprietor, Mitch Mills. All had sailed through the audit.
“When the sample results were returned and confirmed my initial concerns, I started to dig deeper. First, we stopped the contractor on-site and removed his and all his employees’ passes. Whatever happened, they would never get back on site,” Stahmer reported.
“Is that when you found it was the asbestos dust?” the Queen inquired.
“Yes, Ma’am,” Stahmer replied.
“What made you think it was something other than an error or an accident?” the Queen asked.
“The dust I found in the House of Lords was MDF dust, Medium Density Fibreboard. This dust is banned in a whole host of countries and is widely known as a carcinogen: two separate materials, asbestos and MDF, both highly dangerous, and in both sets of Houses. Needless to say, Ma’am, my antennae were going haywire.
“After a day or so of hands-on research, I discovered that there had been a severe outbreak of salmonella in Bellamy’s, the restaurant at the House. A week after this, one of the government whips received third-degree burns from an electrical shock from a kettle in his office; the grounding wire had come loose. All these random incidents in one place? Odds are stacked against it,” Stahmer concluded.
“Is that when you had the Houses closed? The first time in an emergency for over a hundred years. Although I believe the excuse was it had been closed due to a gas leak,” the Queen added.
“Yes, Ma’am. I could not be sure what was happening, just that something was amiss. Special Branch got involved and started to delve into Mr Mills. They discovered that his wife, Christine Mills, had been made bankrupt by HMRC over a £17,000 unpaid VAT bill. Evidently, she was a woman who was bipolar. Three weeks after the court bankrupted her, she went to her local tax office, poured petrol over her head, and lit the flammable liquid.”
“How tragic! Did she die?” the Queen asked, somewhat saddened.
“Yes, Ma’am, she did. Mr Mills told anyone and everyone he would get some payback. The trouble is, this sort of thing doesn’t come up in the criminal records check,” he added.
“Once we had all the Houses cleared, I had specialist teams go in to check the whole complex over. We found crocidolite and amosite asbestos dust inside hundreds of books in the library. They are lethal, if not immediately, certainly at some time in the future. We found the same asbestos in the House records and papers. Further investigation found MDF dust and amosite asbestos in the House of Lords. If this was not bad enough, we discovered Legionella bacterium in the air conditioning units.
“We also found that Mr Mills was replacing the asbestos in the roof voids with fine acrylic powder, not one generally used in insulation. Dust and powder can explode if agitated enough, and we found fans up in the attic spaces. So although he is not admitting to it, we believe he was planning for an explosion at some time,” Robert continued.
“Mills had easy access to MDF and asbestos. Several months ago, he did some work in a lab in Oxford where they were looking at diseases such as Weil’s disease. They found vials of the stuff in his house.” Stahmer paused for another bite of the scone.
“So, has everyone been exposed to these toxins?” the Queen interjected.
“Luckily, the weather has been unseasonably cold, so the air conditioning units had not been switched on. I think it is safe to say now, I believe that we dodged the bullet there. However, when they interviewed Mills, he admitted he had been placing the asbestos dust for weeks. The house has had many full debates, so we can assume an awful lot of people and Members of Parliament have been exposed,” Robert explained.
“So, does that mean they will all die?” the Queen asked.
“Hard to say, Ma’am. Sure, some will die; not tomorrow, but in five, ten, fifteen years. The luck of the draw, actually; the older you are, and most MPs are, if you smoke, and many do, the bigger the chance of contracting it. They certainly have not dodged the bullet there.
“Of the previous incidents, an Under Secretary of State has had to have a kidney transplant after the salmonella outbreak, and then the whip has had some skin grafts after the electrocution,” he said.
“We don’t know how much of this you know, but we do know you have had to sign the Official Secret Act, so the least we can do is bring you up to date. Only a few in the House know what has happened, and that is the way it will stay; no use in worrying them.
“There will be no trial. Knowing my intelligence services, we think it is certain that Mr Mills will have an unfortunate accident sometime soon, and thus another secret that won’t be available for scrutiny, ever.”
“You have the thanks of a grateful nation, Mr Stahmer. No medals, alas, but the personal thanks of your Queen,” she said.
