Ethereum

by N C Mander

  Turning, he looked back up to the ninth floor. Kat, wearing only an oversized T-shirt, was watching him from the full-length window overlooking the courtyard. She lifted her hand and wiggled her fingers at him. Edison slowly raised a hand and returned the wave, adding a perfunctory nod for good measure. With a sigh, Edison turned on his heels and set off in the opposite direction from which he had started, bracing himself for the long walk to Old Street tube station and hoping to pass somewhere that could service him with a good, strong cup of tea.

  *

  Kat cradled a mug of coffee in her hands, wondering whether Edison was likely to reply to her message. The previous evening had been fun. The old gang back together, enjoying a drink and one another’s company in The Prince of Wales, just across the bridge from New Scotland Yard. As the night wore on, Mo and Natalie made their excuses and Jock wasn’t far behind them, leaving Kat and Edison nursing their drinks and chatting amicably. It had been Edison who had suggested another drink, the evening was following their usual pattern, and Kat, dutifully adhering to the script, had proposed heading back to Hoxton, closer to her flat.

  ‘He’s making a habit of skulking off early in the morning,’ said Sarah as she entered the kitchen and interrupted her flatmate’s thoughts. In contrast to Kat, who was petite, dark-haired and fine-featured, Sarah was tall and blonde.

  ‘I guess so,’ replied Kat. Sarah picked up the coffee pot and poured herself a cup, adding a generous spoonful of sugar and a glug of milk. She flopped onto the sofa, opposite the window where Kat still stood, and pulled a peroxide lock away from her face.

  ‘You having fun?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Kat. She meant it, although her reply didn’t come out as convincingly as she had hoped. Sarah raised an eyebrow. ‘He’s a good guy. We have a good time.’

  ‘I thought he left the Home Office under suspicious circumstances.’

  ‘Hardly suspicious,’ Kat protested. Working for the Home Office was the standard cover story for MI5 employees. ‘He’d had a difficult time after the death of his wife, and he and the boss really didn’t get on.’

  ‘That guy’s gone too though, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Ummmhmmm,’ Kat confirmed.

  Sarah hoisted herself out of the sofa, sensing that the conversation about her flatmate’s lover had run its natural course. ‘I better shower.’ She crossed the room and gave Kat a squeeze. ‘Did you say you were working today?’

  Kat rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, I’d better get going.’

  ‘Jeez, they work you hard as a civil servant. But I already called first dibs on the shower.’ Sarah lunged at the coffee pot for a top-up and skipped out of the room.

  Kat had turned back to the window, her thoughts returning to Edison. ‘He’s all right, you know,’ she said to no one. ‘Bit messed up, but aren’t we all?’

  *

  Edison sourced a strong cup of tea once he was almost on top of Old Street tube station. He handed over what he considered to be a ridiculous sum of money for a teabag and hot water with a dash of milk. Despite this, he was grateful for the paper cup of steaming tea he received in exchange. He parked himself at a table by the big glass windows and absentmindedly bobbed his teabag up and down, waiting for the colour to turn from what he called ‘mouse piss’. Tea too weak to crawl out of the pot, his father used to say. Edison preferred his, like his father had, creosote brown.

  London was awakening, although it was not yet seven, and he watched as workmen made their way to building sites and confused tourists emerged from the underground’s many entrances to discover they were on the wrong side of the enormous roundabout. They would take an age to navigate their way above ground, and the more intrepid would revert to the subterranean concourse only to reappear minutes later, more often than not barely a hundred yards from where Edison had first seen them.

  Edison gulped down a few mouthfuls and began to feel more himself. The hangover was receding with the fresh air and tea, but he popped a couple of paracetamol, which he had made a habit of carrying in the last year, just to make sure. Leaning back, the chair groaned under his bulk. He breathed out deeply.

  *

  Emerging at Waterloo, Edison pulled up the collar on his jacket against the driving rain and hurried along the South Bank. Usually teeming with tourists, he encountered only the hardiest of sightseers, all reconsidering their choices for the day. There was a short queue for the London Eye, huddled under too few umbrellas. He hurried past St Thomas’ where he had spent those last few painful months with Eloise, although crucially, not the last moments, and pressed on toward his apartment block.

  Closing the door behind him, he was hit by the silence. Even after all this time, he couldn’t get used to it. He retrieved his phone from his pocket, shook off his wet coat and left it to fester in a crumpled heap by the door. Without unlacing them, he pulled off his shoes. He left those where he removed them, knowing that he would trip over them later. His phone vibrated in his hand, and he looked down, expecting to see another message from Kat. But it was telling him that finally, it was giving up, its battery empty. An angry red warning flashed on the screen before it went black.

  Edison considered plugging it in. Instead, he chose to leave it on the sideboard and embrace the peace that being severed from the digital world offered. There had been a time when that would have been unthinkable to him. He needed to wallow for a while. He flicked on the kettle and assembled the necessary components of another cup of tea whilst he waited for the water to boil. Tea made and stewing, leaving the teabag in the cup, he started to undress. The flat’s floor-to-ceiling windows afforded views over Westminster, but its position on the twenty-first floor of the high rise offered privacy without the need for curtains or blinds. In just his boxers, Edison returned to the tea just as the phone rang.

  ‘Damn it,’ he said out loud. He regularly forgot that Eloise had insisted on installing an old-fashioned landline in the flat. There was only one person who ever called that number. It could only be Eloise’s mother – the formidable Jane de Courcy. Edison took long enough deciding whether to pick up for the answering machine to kick in. ‘You’re through to Edison and Eloise,’ his dead wife’s voice rang out around the open-plan apartment. ‘We can’t get to the phone right now.’ Eloise went on to promise that if the caller left a message one of them would be sure to get back to them. Edison felt sick. The machine beeped loudly, reminding Edison that his hangover wasn’t to be readily forgotten, and he winced.

  ‘Scott,’ said the familiar plummy voice of his mother-in-law, ‘you really ought to change that message. It is not fair on anyone. We will be in London on Thursday to meet with agents. We need to expedite the sale. Make sure the place is respectable. I will let you know times once I know.’ Jane paused, considering what to say next. ‘Well,’ she stuttered, ‘I may see you then.’ She hung up. The subtext was clear. She hoped not to see him. It was too awkward. The unpleasantries that had passed between them in the period after Eloise’s death were not easily forgotten. Now Jane was evicting Edison from the marital home. It had been bought for Eloise when she moved to London, but she had never officially owned it. This was Jane’s master move that would end the game of one-up-man-ship chess they had been playing ever since Eloise had taken him home to meet her family, seven years ago. The de Courcy’s lived in a chateau, surrounded by expensive vines making expensive wines, near Dijon. Edison seethed. Jane de Courcy had been born plain Jane Wright from Manchester with an accent to match. Leaving school at sixteen, she had worked hard on her diction and her secretarial skills before taking a job in the typing pool for a London-based wine merchant. It was there that she had met and married Gauthier de Courcy.

  Edison looked around his home. Hardly a home – in the last two years, he hadn’t thought of it as anywhere other than a place to occasionally sleep and to store his meagre possessions. When Eloise has been alive, the apartment had effervesced with her unique French style. Modern, elegant and slightly eclectic, just
like her. The surfaces gleamed white. The expensive furnishings were islands in the sea of space, around which Eloise would host parties with people who didn’t drink beer and didn’t spill their red wine onto the leather upholstery. Edison had been a curiosity amongst the curious in those gatherings, but he engaged with the crowd amiably, a skill for which his expensive education (underwritten by scholarship after scholarship) had equipped him.

  Since the gathering of London-based mourners in the flat, none of that crowd had crossed the threshold. Only a sweet colleague of Eloise’s from the fashion magazine had occasionally texted, checking in on her friend’s heartbroken widower. The party, as Jane had insisted on calling it – ‘I can’t abide the word “wake”,’ – had been hosted a month after the actual funeral. The funeral had been in France. Of course. It wasn’t a subject for discussion. Check. Your turn, Edison.

  Edison’s next move had been to get horrendously drunk on Eloise’s father’s red wine at the reception following the funeral. He had smashed a full bottle of vintage burgundy, and the contents soaked into the plush cream carpet of the drawing room.

  ‘Are you still my in-laws?’ Edison had asked through the misty fug of his drunkenness, as his father-in-law had guided him gently out of the room and up the grand sweeping staircase before his wife discovered the scene.

  Gauthier was an ally. He had adored his daughter and, by extension, loved anything she loved. He led Edison into a guest room and encouraged him to sit on the edge of the bed. This wasn’t the room Jane had allocated him for his short stay. She had put him in the room he had always shared with Eloise – her daughter’s childhood bedroom – in which Edison struggled to sleep, overwhelmed by the memories of his dead wife.

  Gauthier reappeared with a large glass of water. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘you should take a little time out.’ His English was perfect, but he spoke with a strong French accent. Edison nodded, accepting the glass and drawing a long sip. The cold water flushed through his foggy head, and he felt his hand begin to tremble. Water sloshed onto his suit trousers. Gauthier took the glass, placed it on the bedside table and sat down beside his son-in-law. He reached upward and placed a slender arm around Edison’s shoulders. He was not a short man, but Edison towered over him, filling every bit of his six-foot and four-inch frame. The act of tenderness opened a dam in the younger man, and Edison exploded into heart-rending sobs.

  ‘Gauthier,’ Jane called, she was halfway up the stairs. Hastily, Gauthier withdrew his embrace and patted his son-in-law on the thigh. He hurried onto the landing, closing the door behind him just as his wife reached the top of the stairs.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ said Jane. ‘We need more of the red. Have you seen Scott, and have you seen the mess in the drawing room?’ She reeled off the questions in French in a single breath.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Gauthier replied with studied nonchalance, ‘it was one of the dogs.’ Jane raised an eyebrow. ‘I’ll sort out the wine,’ he went on, heading for the stairs.

  ‘And Scott?’

  ‘It’s been a difficult day, he’s just having a lie-down.’

  ‘It’s been a difficult day for all of us, people expect to see him,’ Jane said to the empty hallway. Her husband had already descended the stairs and was making his way to the kitchen cellar where he could retrieve a case of the estate’s more recent vintages.

  *

  Edison had slept through to the following morning when he had made his half-hearted apologies to his mother-in-law for his absence and left to return to the sparse flat in which he now sat.

  He moved over to the windows, lost in thought. He leant his forehead against the cool of the glass and surveyed London spread out below him. The window offered views over the Thames and many of London’s most famous landmarks. An estate agent’s dream, thought Edison and turned to survey the room. The flat, grey light revealed a sparsely furnished room. At least it won’t take long to pack.

  Right, he thought, and pushed himself away from the window on which he was slouching, what now? Shower probably. He turned on the water and went to plug in his phone.

  Washed and wrapped in a towel, he revisited the three missed calls on his mobile he’d been ignoring all morning. There were two accompanying text messages and a voicemail. They were all from Charlie, one of his oldest and dearest friends. He played the first message.

  ‘Eddie,’ Charlie addressed him in his familiar Scottish accent, pausing as if expecting his friend to reply despite speaking to Edison’s voicemail, ‘Everything ok?’ Another pause. ‘Shall we get a drink?’ Edison nodded as the voice message ended and read Charlie’s text messages. The first left instructions of Charlie’s preferred location for meeting. The second qualified the time. There was no need to confirm that he was referring to today. They both knew that Edison not only had nothing else to do but even if he had prior arrangements, they would be cancelled in favour of a drink with Charlie.

  Edison consulted the clock. He had enough time to dress and eat before making his way to the pub. If he walked, he might even think up a story for why he hadn’t picked up the phone the previous evening.

  *

  1035, Saturday 24th June, Thames House, Westminster, London

  ‘Anything from Skagen?’ Tanya asked as she swept past Kat on her way toward her office. That Kat should follow her boss was implicit.

  She jerked her head at Mo, ‘You had better come with me. You’ve been on point with the guy in Denmark.’ Mo grabbed his tablet and trooped after Kat.

  ‘Are we in a position to put an asset in the bank?’ Tanya demanded as the door closed behind her two intelligence officers.

  Kat was momentarily caught off balance by the director of counter-terrorism’s change of topic.

  ‘Yes,’ Kat said, gathering her thoughts, ‘I spoke to Tom, the MD there, yesterday. The recruiter rouse has bedded in nicely, and he wants to see my candidate next week. He’s pretty jumpy about the regulators cracking down on his trading activities, so it’s a perfect opportunity for us to put someone in with carte blanche to dig deep.’

  ‘Perfect. I know exactly who we need.’

  ‘Really, who?’

  ‘Scott Edison.’

  Mo drew a sharp breath at the mention of the Security Service legend. He had joined MI5 just after Edison’s departure the previous year but had been regaled by the team with stories of his exceptional field skills and ability to hack into any corner of the internet.

  ‘Edison?’ Kat argued, ‘I’m really not sure he’s the right fit.’ Forgetting the fact that she had been sleeping with Tanya’s proposed agent, Kat didn’t like the idea of her predecessor being brought onto the biggest operation she’d ever handled at MI5. She had been promoted in the wake of Edison’s exit from the Service. She didn’t want her authority undermined.

  As if reading her thoughts, Tanya said, ‘His involvement will be very much off-grid. His interaction with the team limited. It’s an unofficial role.’

  ‘I was thinking Mark could do it.’

  ‘I’ve made my decision, Kat. Get Colin to run up a legend for Edison. I’m briefing him tomorrow.’

  Kat opened her mouth to disagree, but Tanya’s expression brooked no argument.

  ‘What do we have from Skagen?’ Tanya changed the subject again.

  Kat gave Mo an encouraging nod and he spoke, ‘Six’s asset in Skagen has seen the Boston Jubilee a handful of times in the past six weeks.’

  ‘But there’s been no activity at Billingsgate?’

  ‘No, Jock’s had eyes there since the guys in Vienna suggested that the route was up and running again. I’m wondering if they’re bringing the contraband in somewhere else,’ Kat said.

  ‘Or they’ve changed their cargo. That’s what Martijn thinks,’ Mo interjected.

  ‘Who’s Martijn?’ queried Tanya.

  ‘Six’s asset in the port at Skagen. He’s seen a few new faces floating around. One boarded with the crew of the Boston last week. He left port but didn’t return when the boat
did later in the week.’

  Tanya narrowed her eyes. ‘Human assets being brought into the country. That suggests VIPERSNEST is on the move don’t you think?’ She paused, a pregnant silence hung in the air before Kat nodded. ‘It’s time to up the threat level on HAPSBURG. Kat, this is to be everyone’s priority.’

  Kat nodded again, feeling the mixed thrill and fear that came with any operational escalation.

  *

  1905, Saturday 24th June, The Windmill, Clapham Common, London

  The Windmill on Clapham Common on a Saturday night was buzzing with drinkers. Edison pushed his large frame through the crowds to find Charlie sat in their usual spot, toward the back of the main bar. He stood up as his friend approached and gave him a broad grin before embracing him in a manly hug, pounding him on the back three times. ‘I’ve set us up,’ said Charlie, waving at the two pints of real ale in front of him.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Edison, loudly, struggling to be heard over the noise of the busy bar. He jerked his head back toward the door, ‘Shall we get some air?’

  Charlie paused, unwilling to give up his hard-fought barstools and nook but conceded it was difficult to have a proper conversation over the hubbub of Saturday-night revellers. The pair struggled back the way Edison had just come, holding their beer glasses high above their heads to avoid spillage. The long tables outside the pub were sparsely populated with a few smokers and drinkers. Although it was June, a long spell of wet weather had left the city cold and damp. Charlie and Edison pulled their coats around themselves. The pair took a couple of seats as close to the outdoor heaters as they could.