by Andrew Tudor
About to dispute his claim, Irene stopped when over his shoulder she saw that Julie was coming up the path.
“Well,” she said, inclining her head towards the window behind him. “You can try to recruit her to your cause. She’s here now.”
“Hiya,” Julie called as she came through the front door. Then, sounding pleased with herself: “I’ve found us four eggs. We can have omelette.”
She carried her shopping into the kitchen and finding no one there shouted, “Where are you?”
“In here,” Irene replied. “In the living room. We have a visitor.”
“A visitor! That’s a first,” Julie said, entering the living room just as Jonathan got to his feet to greet her.
“This is Jonathan,” Irene said, waving in his direction. “What you need to know is that he’s your real Deep Throat.”
Julie stopped in the midst of reaching to shake Jonathan’s outstretched hand.
“What!” she said. “Really?”
The query was addressed directly to Jonathan who replied, “Yes, I’m afraid so. Not too much of a disappointment I hope.”
Julie looked across at Irene for confirmation and the older woman nodded.
“Well, umm, no,” Julie said. “I never expected to meet you at all so it could hardly be a disappointment.” She smiled suddenly. “Though a dark underground car park might have been preferable to Irene’s living room.”
Jonathan looked puzzled.
“Ignore me,” Julie said. “Just an image from a film.”
Jonathan, still not understanding the reference, pressed on regardless.
“I’ve got some more information for you,” he began, as he rummaged in his bag and produced an anonymous-looking CommsTab. “You’ll find it all on here – documents, some bits and pieces of video, maps, all sorts.”
Julie’s eyes lit up. “That’s great,” she said, “but I’m out of contact with my usual sites. I haven’t dared to use my CommsTab in case it was being tracked.”
“I’m coming to that,” he replied. “You’re right not to use your CommsTab. There’s certain to be a trace out on it. That’s why I’ve brought you this modified one. I’ll take yours away with me and get rid of it where it can never be connected back to here.”
“So what’s so distinctive about this one?” Irene asked.
“It’s specially shielded,” he said, holding it so that they could see the screen. “Unlike ordinary ones it has three modes. In Mode Zero, which it’s in now, it’s completely dead. Normal CommsTabs are never entirely that, even when you think you’ve switched them off. They keep some basic processes running and in principle they can be traced, though it can be rather difficult. But in Mode Zero this one is effectively an inert lump. The switch here turns it on,” – he pointed to a small slider on the side which he moved – “and requires your identity. At the moment it’s a passcode but we’ll set it up to read your biometrics, Julie. And yours, Irene, if you’re willing. This is Mode One. You can access data held on it, you can feed data to it, like record a vlog or create a document, all the usual stuff. But in this mode it doesn’t connect to the Net – no signals emanate from it.”
“So that means it’s untraceable?” Julie asked.
“Not a hundred per cent, but near as dammit. Less traceable than an ordinary CommsTab would be even when completely switched off. It should be safe for all practical purposes.”
“And Mode Two?” Irene and Julie chorused.
“Then it behaves like a normal CommsTab though a lot faster and more powerful, as well as using more elaborate encryption systems. You access Mode Two from this menu here and it always gives you a chance to pull out before it runs. In this mode you can download and send. What I suggest you do, Julie, is prepare your material in Mode One, then when it’s ready to transmit put the tablet in Mode Zero and take it as far away from here as is practical, then put it into Mode Two, send the stuff, and then immediately switch back to Mode Zero. It won’t take long to send and doing it this way will minimise any chance of tracing it to source. Clear?”
“Yes, seems straightforward enough.” Julie looked at him curiously. “Where on earth do you get hold of something like this?”
“Oh, I have contacts in security and technology areas. Benefit of a lifetime working for the government,” he added, glancing towards Irene to ensure that she understood he wanted to keep his DSD identity a secret.
Julie, however, had caught the glance, and knew that whatever Jonathan was holding back she could find out from Irene later. “OK,” she said, “shall we sort out the biometrics and then I’ll make us all a cup of coffee – or whatever it is that passes for coffee at the moment.”
“Ah, that reminds me,” said Jonathan, handing his shopping bag to Julie. “I brought this for you. It’s food of various kinds. The government safe havens are rather well provided for. You’ll find some proper coffee in there. Drink first, biometrics after.”
Julie peered into the bag and beamed. “You’re not joking are you? Right, I’ll make the coffee.”
Once Julie was in the kitchen Irene spoke quietly to Hart. “You do realise, don’t you, that I shall have to tell her who and what you are.”
“Yes, I supposed as much,” he said with a sigh. “But at least this way I’ll be spared her interrogating me about DSD today. I don’t think I could deal with that right now.”
“I’ll make sure that she doesn’t use your name. She has no need to anyway and from her point of view it will be better to keep you as a secure source.”
“True enough.” He thought for a moment. “Have you still got that little Comms device I gave you?”
Irene nodded.
“Get in touch if anything goes wrong. Not just about my identity but anything at all. You never know, I may be able to help.”
Irene just had time to nod her assent before Julie returned, and once coffee was taken and the technology dealt with, Hart departed carrying Julie’s old tablet in the now empty shopping bag.
“Right Irene,” Julie said when they were alone. “Out with it. Who is he? I saw that little exchange of glances.”
“He’s in intelligence. Director of the Domestic Security Division.”
Julie gave a low whistle. “That is something. But why is he passing information to me?”
“I’m not sure now. Back at the beginning it was because he wanted to force the government to act in the hope that they could mitigate some of the effects of the flu. But now?” Irene frowned. “Something’s happened. He’s changed. He says he wants to hold them to account, but to me it’s more as if he wants to punish them.”
They sat in silence for a minute lost in their different thoughts, then Julie picked up the new CommsTab.
“What the hell!” she said. “Let’s see what we’ve got stored on here.”
The cluster of gas rigs looked from the distance like a strange copse of artificial trees struggling to hold their own on the rolling surface of the Pacific Ocean. As the helicopter closed in on one of them, easing carefully down towards its landing pad, it was apparent to those on board that almost all the structures were abandoned, left dark and lifeless. This one, however, was still functioning, and they had received a desperate emergency call from it that morning. Clad in anti-contamination suits, they disembarked from the chopper and spread out through the rig. They found its skeleton crew in various states of illness or death, victims of a particularly aggressive mutation of the flu virus. At last, in its control room, they came upon the author of the emergency call, the rig’s cook, slumped in a swivel chair and surrounded by screens. He was alive but unconscious. To anyone qualified to read them, the screens told a terrible story of malfunction and growing pressure. Unfortunately, the person who first reached the control room was a medic not an engineer, so when it did come the explosion was entirely unexpected, its massive fireball visible from the
coast some forty miles away.
10
April had given way to May by the time Julie’s third vlog appeared. Hart had been waiting for it, checking the newsfeeds compulsively every day. She was smart, he thought, drip-feeding her audience, keeping them waiting for the next instalment of her revelations, encouraging them to imagine her out there investigating on their behalf. The first vlog had been a straightforward report on the retreat of the government to unidentified safe havens. The second had singled out Northwood as a key location and named many of the prominent figures now housed there. Hart was pleased to note that this list included James Curbishley, former Director of Porton Down, whom Julie identified as the person principally responsible for developing Zeno. The third was even more explosive, revealing the relative luxury in which politicians and officials were living in the Northwood Homestead, detailing their facilities and food supplies even down to the range of wines and spirits with which they could comfort themselves. To a population reduced to bare essentials, and little enough of those, this was more than sufficient to encourage anger and yet further unrest.
So it was time, Hart decided. Time to put into practice the riskiest and most unpredictable part of his plan. There was already a permanent encampment of protestors outside the Northwood perimeter, one that the authorities had allowed to remain, despite the curfew, for fear of worse consequences if they were forcibly removed. But after the detailed revelations of Julie’s third vlog, pressure was building for a much larger demonstration to be mounted at the end of the following week with most dissident groups across London and the South-East mobilising their supporters. Direct co-operation among them would be difficult, Hart knew, since they covered every shade of political opinion from liberal hand-wringing to permanent revolution. But he did have a tenuous link to a leading figure in one of the groups, the English Revolutionary Anarchists, a link which he was hoping to exploit.
No point visiting the ERA dressed like a government bureaucrat, he thought, changing out of his customary suit and into a battered pair of jeans and a nondescript jacket. As one of the most senior intelligence officers in the Northwood Homestead he was free to come and go at will, even provided with his own transport. The little City Car was housed in a lock-up close to one of the Homestead’s emergency exits, an exit which was itself outside the perimeter and effectively disguised as a shed in the back garden of a safe house. It was guarded both inside and out, but Hart was its most regular user and therefore well known to the guards who waved him through that morning with a cheerful greeting.
Emerging from the shed, he disconnected the car from its charging point in the lock-up and drove east through the seemingly endless suburbs of north London, finally coming to a halt in a street of large houses in the Harrow area. Leaving the car parked some way from his destination, he walked down the street to a house with an unkempt front garden and in need of some decoration. I don’t suppose that’s popular with the neighbours, Hart thought, assessing the house as he rang its doorbell. It took three rings before the door was finally opened by a young woman.
“Yes?” she said, looking at Hart with complete disinterest.
“I’d like to speak with Jerry Rowlands. Is he in?”
“No one of that name lives here,” she replied, making to shut the door.
Hart blocked the closing door with his foot and leaned in until his face was inches away from hers.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said coldly. “I’ll walk down the road to that little green area down there and I’ll find somewhere to sit enjoying the sunshine. Meanwhile, you’ll tell Jerry that Jonathan Hart is here to see him. Tell him that I have information that he might find very useful. If he doesn’t meet me down there I’ll come back in half an hour.” He leaned a little closer. “Got that? Jonathan Hart.”
The woman nodded nervously, closing the door as soon as Hart released it. Smiling to himself at his little show of melodrama, Hart strolled down the road and settled on a low wall just inside the entrance to a children’s play area. While he waited he rehearsed the history that had brought him to this spot. He had first met Jerry Rowlands on arriving as a rather nervous first-year student at Oxford. Jerry had been a year ahead of him, already a flamboyant figure in college and much given to dramatic political gestures. At a time when students were relatively depoliticised, Jerry stood out as a kind of throwback to an earlier age. Although it made him cringe now, Hart had rather hero-worshipped Jerry for much of the two years that their paths had crossed at university and had found himself drawn into what was for him an entirely unfamiliar world of dissident political discourse. They had certainly become friends, if a somewhat lopsided friendship, the one a confident, larger-than-life product of an affluent background, the other a diffident, even shy child of the lower-middle classes. It was, Hart thought, the old cliché of a leader–follower relationship among young men, but it had meant a lot to him at the time and their mutual affection had seemed genuine enough.
Jerry had graduated a year before him, by which time Hart had begun to assert some independence from his friend, both politically and personally. They hadn’t exactly drifted apart but it had become apparent to both of them that Hart’s developing sense of his own identity was leading him in a different direction. After graduation Jerry had moved away, first to his family home in Surrey, and then into London where he survived on a trust fund and various inheritances, and where, charismatic as ever, he gathered around himself a group of like-minded dissenters.
Meanwhile, during his third year Hart had been subjected to the infamous ‘tap on the shoulder’ which had for so long been the mode of recruiting Oxbridge students into the intelligence services. To his surprise he found himself quite at home in this role, using his contacts with the remaining radical students in Oxford to feed information to his handlers. They had been sufficiently impressed by their new recruit to offer him a full-time job on graduation, the beginning of what had become a formidable career. But in all those years he had never tried to cash in on his links with Jerry, even when Jerry’s group had become of interest to the police and intelligence services. Residual sentiment perhaps, he thought, a desire not to betray what had after all been a formative relationship for him.
These reflections were interrupted by the arrival of the man himself, the tall smiling figure of Rowlands still a striking presence in spite of the passage of time.
“Well, well. Jonny Hart has come to visit after all these years. How long has it been?”
Hart grimaced at the forgotten diminutive of his forename. “Must be about ten years, Jerry. That college reunion. You didn’t stay long.”
Rowlands sat down on the wall next to Hart and draped a companionable arm over his shoulders.
“Oh yes, I remember. The college trying to screw money out of us. Cheeky really, considering how much land they own.” Rowlands shook his head. “I only went to say hello to old friends. Like you. You still working for the government? Which department was it?”
Hart had not told him that he was in intelligence though he rather thought that Jerry may have suspected as much.
“Oh, different parts of the system at one time or another,” he replied with deliberate vagueness. “We bureaucrats get shuttled around.”
Hart’s evasion produced a knowing smile from the other man. “Of course. It’s all very complicated isn’t it.” Rowland’s face hardened into what on somebody else might have been an unfriendly expression. “Jean said that you claimed to have useful information for me. So what’s that all about?”
“Maybe a bit more than just information,” Hart said. “This big demonstration that’s being planned near Northwood next week. You’re part of the umbrella group of organisers aren’t you?”
Rowlands nodded. “No secret about that. All the organising participants have been made public so as to encourage the widest possible range of support.”
“Right. But it must be pre
tty difficult getting all those groups to act in unison. A lot of jockeying for position?”
Rowlands grinned. “If you mean there’s a lot of the old People’s Front of Judea stuff, well yes, of course there is. You remember what it used to be like back in Oxford days.”
Hart smiled at the memory and at Rowlands’ invocation of the famous Monty Python routine from Life of Brian. They used to recite it to each other whenever they were involved in the internecine feuding of student leftist groups.
“Yes, I do remember,” he said. “Frustrating and counterproductive…”
Rowlands interrupted him. “But all an entertaining part of the game, though I don’t think you ever really grasped how significant those sectarian distinctions were for keeping things going and ensuring people’s involvement.”
Hart thought about that for a moment. “No, maybe I didn’t. I never properly understood the psychology of political posturing about minor ideological disagreements. What was Freud’s phrase? ‘The narcissism of small differences’, wasn’t it. Still, I do have a bit better grasp now, which is why I’ve come to see you.”
“OK. I’m listening.”
“If you could make a big splash at the demonstration, pull off something really striking, then you’d be in a prime position in the movement, wouldn’t you?”
Rowlands looked doubtful. “Maybe,” he said. “It would depend a lot on what it was.”
“What if I could give you somebody important, somebody you could parade as a captive, proof of your effectiveness as a revolutionary group?”
“Again, maybe. Have you someone in mind?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I do.” Hart paused for effect. “You’ve heard of James Curbishley?”
“Curbishley! The Porton Down guy who ran the Zeno project. You can produce him? How the fuck do you propose to do that?”
