Watchman (novel)

by Ian Rankin

  A crowd had gathered, as was customary, and Miles embedded himself in it. Having satisfied himself that there was no blood on view, he turned his attention to the crowd itself. What kind of person was attracted to a car crash? There were a few old ladies, a couple of young girls who chewed gum casually as though to say that they had seen it all before, some derelicts who were trying to cadge money from those around them, and then there were the other, blank faces, the faces of those anonymous souls who kept locked within themselves dreams of violence.

  And, of course, Miles himself, his own dreams of violence kept under lock and key, watching it all with the reserve of an expert witness, should such be needed.

  “He’s famous, he is,” said one old woman. “I seen him on the telly.”

  “Get away,” said one of the girls. “Which one?”

  “The posh one talking to the policeman.”

  The woman made sure that her whispered conversation was loud enough to be heard all around. The Rover driver, trying to ignore the woman’s voice, examined his watch testily, late for some appointment. The constable, as was his privilege, began to take things more slowly than ever.

  “Is he an actor then?”

  “No, it was the news he was on.”

  “The news?”

  “Not so long ago either. Last night, night before.”

  “Is he a newsreader, then?”

  “No, he’s a politician.”

  Miles began pushing his way out of the thinning crowd, to whom not even this was newsworthy enough in a city under siege, and made his way the hundred yards or so to the shop, where Dave, the proprietor, was playing some new early recordings by the Miles Davis Quintet.

  “He’s the boss,” he called to Miles, jerking a thumb toward the turntable. “You can say what you like, but Miles is the boss.”

  Miles was not about to argue with that.

  He went off to the racks to browse, finding this a good way to concentrate. With his fingers walking through the packed record sleeves, his mind was free, and time seemed to vanish. He had rejected an offer to lunch with Jeff Phillips, and wondered whether he might start to gain a reputation for frugality or even downright meanness within the firm. Billy had told him that one or two people in the past had tried to give him the nickname “Skinflint” but it had never stuck.

  Miles preferred his other nickname—The Invisible Man. As an undergraduate, he had joined his university’s Officers’ Training Corps and had enjoyed some of the weekend exercises. He was very good at these for the simple reason that he never got caught, and he never got caught for the more complex reason that, as other trainees told him, he “seemed to disappear,” though in reality all he had done was to make himself as innocuous as possible.

  Nowadays, he was aware of a beetle which did that too, an expert in camouflage. It was called the tortoise beetle, and its larvae carried lumps of excrement around on their backs, beneath which they could not be seen. Perhaps Miles was a bit like the tortoise beetle. But no, for he had been found out by a smiling Arab, and all because he would not go home to his wife.

  He had first met her at Edinburgh University. They were both undergraduates, invited to a certain party where Miles had become roaring drunk and had wormed his way into a fight from which Sheila had rescued him. The following Monday, having put the weekend and his bruises behind him as a lost forty-eight hours, Miles had gone into the lecture hall yawning and ready for the fresh week’s work. A girl had slid into the row beside him.

  “Good morning, Miles,” she had said, squeezing his arm. Shocked, he had tried to recall her face, pretending all the time that of course he knew who she was. He was bemused to find that, apparently, he had found himself a girlfriend without any of the long, painful searching which he had assumed would precede the event.

  And that had been that, more or less: Miles’s first girlfriend had become his wife.

  “I wouldn’t have put you down as a jazz fan, Miles.”

  Miles turned from the rack of records to find Richard Mowbray standing beside him.

  “Oh, hello, Richard.”

  Billy referred to him as “Tricky Dicky” because of his slight American accent, but Miles knew that Richard Mowbray was as English as his name suggested. He had been schooled for five years in the States while his father had worked in a university there, and those five crucial years had left him with a slight mid-Atlantic inflection to his otherwise thoroughly orthodox voice.

  Mowbray was looking around him. He wore tinted glasses—an affectation—and looked older than his thirty-five years—another affectation. He, too, was a watchman.

  “I’ve heard the news, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Miles. Was this a coincidental meeting? He thought not. Mowbray was supposed to be watching a suspected IRA cell in Forest Hill. He was well out of his territory.

  “What do you think of it all, Miles?” Mowbray’s face had the sincerity of a president and the teeth of an alligator. Miles could not help asking himself what he wanted.

  “What do you want, Richard?”

  “I want to talk.”

  “Shouldn’t you be somewhere else?”

  “It’s not my shift. Besides, it looks like another dead end, surprise surprise.”

  “So what is it you want to talk about?”

  “The CIA, of course.”

  Miles looked for a smile, for some acknowledgment that a joke was being made. None came.

  “OK,” said Miles as a trumpet strained its way toward climax behind him, “let’s talk.”

  “Great. There’s a coffee shop across the road. Advertising execs mostly. That do you?”

  “Fine.”

  And Mowbray led him across the street and into a sweet-smelling café where Jeff Phillips was already waiting for them.

  “What is this?” said Miles.

  “Milk and sugar?” asked Mowbray, pouring the coffee.

  “No thanks. I think I’ll take it black and bitter.”

  “Suit yourself. Jeff?”

  “White, no sugar, thank you.”

  Miles checked his watch. He was tired of these games of protocol. It seemed that business could not be discussed without a preamble of sham courtesies and responses. Phillips sipped his coffee just a little too appreciatively: this, too, was part of the game. Miles felt his patience ebb, leaving only wrack and salt.

  “You mentioned the CIA, Richard.”

  “Yes, I did. I’ve got a little theory about our cousins. I’d like to hear your reaction to it. You see, it struck me a while back that the cousins are every bit as interested in our activities as are the Russians. Agreed?”

  Miles nodded.

  “So,” continued Mowbray, “why does it never occur to us that there may be CIA moles inside the firm, eh? Or Israeli moles, or Australian?”

  “In fact,” interrupted Phillips, “any country you care to mention.”

  “Madagascar?” countered Miles, remembering some textbook geography. “Mali? Mauritania? Mongolia?”

  Richard Mowbray held open his arms, a smile just evident on his face.

  “Why the hell not?” he said.

  Yes, thought Miles, everything but British moles. He had dropped a teaspoon on the floor at the beginning of this conversation, and picking it up, had checked beneath the table for bugs.

  “What do you think, Miles?” asked Phillips now.

  “I think it’s banal.”

  “Do you?” This from Mowbray, leaning forward in his chair now, taking on the pose of the thinker. “Then maybe I shouldn’t tell you the rest.”

  “The rest of what?”

  “What about if I told you that the U.S. embassy in Moscow has all the parts for a small nuclear device located in different sections of the building? The wolf already in the fold: what would you say?”

  “I’d say you were mad.”

  “Maybe he’s not as ready as we suspected,” Phillips said to Mowbray.

  “Look, Richard, what is all this about?”
Miles was concerning himself with Mowbray. Phillips was wet behind the ears, hardly out of nappies. He’d go along with anything that might mean a commendation or the chance to make a fast reputation. But Mowbray was different: Miles had no doubt that it was Mowbray’s baby in the pram, for it was Mowbray who had looked disconsolate when Miles said what an ugly child it was.

  If possible, Mowbray leaned forward even farther.

  “I’m compiling a sort of list, Miles, a dossier of, well, let’s just say the slightly odd, the irregular. You know, those hiccups in certain operations, the occasional slip-ups which appear to occur for no good reason. I’d like, quite unofficially, to have your version of last night’s events on paper. If there are moles in this department, then we—and I would have thought you’d be included, Miles—want to gas them once and for all.”

  Miles looked to Phillips.

  “Jeff is part of my little team. There are others, too. What do you say, Miles?”

  “I say you’re off your trolley, Richard. Sorry, but there it is. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He had already risen to his feet, coffee untouched, and now waved back as he went, went back out into the sanity of the unchanged street.

  He breathed deeply as he walked. There was madness everywhere. The bottom fell out of a woman’s carrier bag and tins of food went rolling across the road. Miles dodged them and kept on walking. He noticed that passers-by were wary of parked cars, and rightly so. Any one of them might contain another bomb. People glanced in windows, searching for anonymous packages, or steered well clear of any driverless cars by the roadside. Well, on a day like this, thought Miles, I may as well cut through Oxford Street. Having encountered so much madness, a little more could do no harm. What was Richard Mowbray’s game?

  The pavements were packed with lunchtime shoppers, seeking those items without which they would not last the afternoon. Insect life. Miles was about to shake his head slowly when in front of him a large window exploded silently into the street, followed a split second later by earth-rending thunder. Silence reigned as shards of glass poured down like silver, and then there were the first screams, and Miles checked himself for cuts. No, he was all right. He was all right. But only yards ahead of him was chaos.

  Later, he would wonder why it was that he veered away from it all and back into Soho, not wanting to get involved. A ten-pound bomb it had been, easy, planted inside one of the garish shops while the pedestrians had been checking out the cars only. Later, he would wonder, too, why he found the go-go bar and paid his money and watched the show for ten minutes, why he went to the peep show and crouched in a rank cubicle, where he could watch from a slit not much bigger than the mouth of a postbox. The peep show was of circular design, and instead of watching the parody of lust, he had concentrated on the pairs of eyes he could see past the two girls. Dear God, they looked sad. He thought that he might even recognize one pair of eyes, but, too late, the slat came down like a judgment upon him, and only the reality of the cubicle remained, replacing for a time that much greater and much more incomprehensible reality: Oxford Street had been bombed.

  A young boy, running past, screaming with joy, brought Miles awake. He was in Hyde Park, seated on a damp bench beside an old woman surrounded by black plastic bags. The bags were tied with thick string and were arranged about her like a protective wall. She was staring at Miles, and he smiled toward her.

  Slowly it came back to him: the car accident, meeting Mowbray and Phillips, and the bomb, dear God, the bomb. It was half past five, and his lunchtime had turned into another afternoon off. A sort of panic had overtaken him this afternoon, so that he had felt less in charge of his life than usual. Yes, he remembered a similar sensation from his student days: those weekend blackouts, the anger and frustration, the fights…But in those days he would not have walked away from an explosion, would he? He would have stayed to help the injured, the survivors. But not now, not now that he was a watchman.

  The old woman rose slowly from the bench and began to gather together her bags. Somehow she managed to heave them onto her back, and Miles felt a sudden impulse to help her.

  “I can bleedin‘ manage!” she growled at him. Then, moving away through the park, “Watch out for yourself, dearie, just you watch out.”

  Yes, that reminded him, there was a puzzle he had to solve. He hadn’t got very far, had he? Well, he knew just the cure for that now: send in a mole to catch a mole.

  Everybody who knew him thought that Pete Saville had just a little too much love for his computer. He seemed to be at his desk before everyone else in the mornings, and he was always—always—the last to leave. Didn’t he have any social life? A girlfriend? But Pete just shrugged his shoulders and told them that they should know better than to interfere with a man who loved his work. So no one paid him much attention nowadays, and no one asked him to the pub or out to a party, which was just fine by Pete Saville.

  It meant that he could forge ahead with Armorgeddon 2000.

  Armorgeddon was going to make Pete Saville’s fortune. He had only to iron out a few bugs, and then the whole package would be ready. It was hacker-proof, it was easy to learn and to play, and above all, it was addictive. Yes, Armorgeddon 2000 was the computer game to beat them all…

  “Hello, Pete.”

  He almost leaped out of his chair. Recovering quickly, the first thing he did was switch off the screen.

  “Sorry, did I startle you?”

  “No, it’s just, well, I didn’t hear you come in, that’s all.”

  “Ah.”

  Miles walked around the room, inspecting the individual consoles, while Pete watched him.

  “Working late again, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “You work late a lot, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lots to do, I suppose, being a processor?”

  Approaching Pete’s desk, Miles crouched slightly, gazing into the blank screen. Reflected there he saw his own face, and, in profile, the face of one very anxious young man.

  “Am I disturbing you, Pete?”

  “No, not really.”

  “I couldn’t help noticing you switch off the screen when I came in. Something top secret, I suppose?”

  Pete smiled.

  “You could put it like that.”

  With a quick movement, knowing exactly which button to press, Miles brought the screen back to life. A green space zombie was obliterating the Orgone commander.

  “Haven’t you added the soundtrack yet?”

  Pete Saville was silent.

  “Have you found the bug yet?”

  What color there was in Pete Saville’s face fell away. Miles was smiling now. He began his tour of the room all over again.

  “I’d like a favor, Pete.”

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s my job to know. Everything. I’ve stood here behind you and watched you work. What’s it called again? Armageddon 2000?”

  “Armorgeddon,” Pete was quick to correct. “It’s a pun.”

  “Is it now?” Miles nodded his head thoughtfully. “Yes, I can see that. But I’ll tell you what else it is. It’s an abuse of your position here. R2 is not your toy to play with.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Peter, I’m only here for a favor, and I want to know if you will do me that favor, that’s all.”

  “How could you stand behind me and watch me work without my seeing you?”

  “What’s my nickname, Pete? What is it they all call me?”

  Pete remembered, and swallowed hard.

  “What’s this favor?” he asked through dry lips.

  “I need to look at some personnel files, and a few other bits and pieces. Nothing sensitive or classified…well, not really.”

  “It’s no problem then—”

  “But I don’t want to leave any record on the computer that I’ve been through the files. That is possible, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure.” Pete thought again of Armorg
eddon. All he needed were a few quiet weeks, perhaps three more months at the outside, and then he could leave this place forever. “I’m not sure it’s been done before,” he said, “not on this system. So I’m not sure that it can be done. Tampering with the memory…getting past the codes…I don’t know.”

  “If anyone can do it, Pete…I have faith in your ability to worm your way inside the system. Will you have a go?”

  Pete’s head felt as light as helium. He touched the computer screen, touched the place where the Orgone commander had been standing.

  “Yes,” he said, “yes, I’ll give it a try.”

  “I thought you might,” said Miles, pulling a chair over toward the desk.

  SIX

  NO ONE HAD BEEN KILLED, that was the miracle. But over the next ten days everyone became more cautious than ever. An empty shoebox could not sit for long in an open rubbish bin without one of the bomb disposal teams being summoned. It was a busy time for them. A busy time, too, for Miles Flint, sifting through what information he could find. He asked discreet questions of a few uninvolved colleagues, tracked as far as was possible the daily affairs of those closest to the Latchkey case, and was himself interviewed on three occasions by men from internal security.

  He had been assigned to the Harvest surveillance, working with Richard Mowbray and his team in Forest Hill. This gave Miles the chance to apologize to Mowbray, then to pick his brains about what dirty dealings he thought he had uncovered. Most of these were simple paranoia.

  Then one day, having driven the Jag home, Miles opened the door of his study and saw, jumping across his desk, the largest beetle he had ever set eyes on. Astonishment turned into panic when he noticed that the beetle was a joke-shop affair, with plastic tubing trailing from its rear to a point beneath the desk. Looking down, he saw a man there, bundled up like a fetus so as to squeeze into the space beneath the desk.

  The man was grinning, and, letting go of the rubber beetle, he began to extricate himself from his cramped position. For a moment Miles wondered, who the hell is it? And he even considered the possibility of some outlandish execution before realizing that the tall young man was Jack, who now rubbed his shoulders as he stretched.