Chosen

by Paddy Bostock

Feeling a little better, he left the office on wobbly legs, telling underlings he was going out and was under no circumstances to be disturbed by phone calls or emails. Heads turned and eyes strayed from desktop computers as he stumbled through the plush accommodation muttering to himself and twice banging into cubicle dividers, but the underlings knew better than to question the boss when in a bad mood and/or legless. That way lay instant dismissal as they’d witnessed to their chagrin when, in similar circumstances, junior assistant under-secretaries Mildred O’Flannery and James McCloud had asked Sir Magnus if he was okay and been told to clear their desks and fuck off out of his sight forever.

  Out on the street, where his midnight-blue Bentley 4x4 was parked on a double yellow line, its windscreen plastered with multiple fine and towaway notices, Sir Magnus took several deep breaths, none of which eased the fibrillations, and leered lubriciously at the direction he would take, namely to the Soho establishment of Madame Francine La Fouette. If anyone could ease his troubled mind, if would be Francie or one of her girls. There were always several to choose from. Yellow ones, black ones, pink ones in see-through schoolgirl uniforms with ribbons in their hair. Do anything you asked them, they would, and all for a mere two hundred quid per half hour.

  “Yesss!” said Sir Magnus, tearing the multiple fine and towaway notices from the Bentley and tossing them into the gutter as the fibrillations pleasingly shifted from his chest to his crotch. And into the midnight blue 4x4 Sir Magnusmobile he climbed.

  A pity its battery was flat. You know how it is when you climb into your car feeling powerful, turn the key and goose the gas in full expectation of an explosion of energy only to hear a dull thud, then nothing. How you turn the key and goose the gas some more, but all that produces is a winking red warning light...then even that is extinguished. Crap, that’s how you feel, disempowered. Which is when you succumb to fury, climb out of the car, and take to kicking it. Or, if you’re Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers, giving it a damn good thrashing with a tree branch.

  Well, that was pretty much how Sir Magnus Montague reacted when the midnight blue Bentley 4x4 failed to start, although there were no tree branches on hand to thrash it with, so he was reduced to kicking at its wheels, hammering on the roof, and screaming it was a “useless piece of shit” he wished he’d never bought.

  “This year’s fucking model too,” he was hollering when the wah-wahs and the flashing blue lights started up in an adjacent street, and then, only moments later, drew up right alongside him.

  “Care to stop doing that, sir?” said PC Jason Humphreys. “Only you’re disturbing the peace.”

  “FUCK the FUCKING peace,” shrieked Sir Magnus, making the big time mistake of punching PC Humphreys on the nose, then, as the fibrillations headed back heartwards, collapsing onto the pavement in a cardiac arrest which was only prevented from becoming terminal by PC Humphreys administering CPR until the paramedics arrived.

  But cardiac wasn’t the only arrest Sir Magnus was to suffer. Attached to a defibrillator though he was in the ambulance on his way to Intensive Care, Jason Humphreys also read him his rights where the assault of police officers was concerned. And such rights were few and far between, so Jason wished Sir Magnus well on the heart issue but added he’d be seeing him in court when, and if, he recovered.

  Not one of the best days in Sir Magnus Montague’s life so far therefore.

  Fifteen

  Maurice Moffat had never liked “Capricious” Clarissa, as he’d dubbed the prime minister. Too wishy-washy even to run a laundrette never mind a country, he reckoned. The sort of person who’d be hard put to organize footballs to roll down a hill let alone corral her cabinet into obedience. And this at the very time the UK needed a canny leader to see it through its worst crisis in modern history, a subject Maurice was able to speak about with authority, given his Oxford starred triple first PPE and the chats he’d shared with Prof Broadbent in his rooms after tutorials. Like the professor, Maurice was no xenophobe, but since the fiddled Brexit vote he was beginning to rue the way Britain had become the laughing stock of not only Europe but the rest of the world. Capricious Clarissa could say what she liked about Russian meddling in “democratic” elections and how we would stand firm against it, but did the Kremlin give a monkey’s when the United Kingdom was at its least united in living memory and seeking divorce from very economic bloc to which the Kremlin might pay attention? Of course it didn’t. Ripurpantzov just rubbed his hands, chuckled, and advised his top brass to go on laundering their ill-gotten rubles by continuing to buy up empty mansions in London’s most salubrious enclaves.

  But Maurice wasn’t paid to be political. He was a spy. And thus it was only with Terpsichore/Tiddles he shared such thoughts as the pair sat on their late evening sofa channel surfing for relevant news. Well, that’s what Maurice did. Terpsichore/Tiddles just nodded off. As did Maurice when the news became too tedious to bear.

  Nonetheless, when “Phoebe’s” call came through as expected, he was as polite as he was able. Almost felt sorry for the woman as she told him a cock and bull story about the “vital importance to the nation at this critical juncture” of finding the megalomaniac bonkers banker Jeremy Crawford and thereby diverting attention from as many of lies told about her government’s “achievements” as conceivable. Even possibly blaming him for them. How, for example, his involvement in covert money laundering and systematic tax evasion on behalf of rogue regimes worldwide was depriving the Treasury of billions of pounds annually and threatening the demise of “our beloved NHS.” How his collaboration with the Russian Internet Research Agency to produce Twitter bots had destabilized not only the entire banking system but also threatened the very Mother of Parliaments herself.

  “What we require in Downing Street, Casanova, is an incredible story,” she said, as this fiction ran away with her and became practically a faction. “But first we need to catch the blighter. And it is to you, on excellent recommendations from Milly and Hubby at Six and Five, that we have chosen to entrust this noble, dare one say it, ‘nation saving’ enterprise.”

  “Most honoured I’m sure, Milady,” said Maurice in his best Uriah Heep voice.

  “And so you should be. Upon your shoulders shall fall responsibility for the maintenance of the very fabric of the British society we all so cherish and in which we trust, the unflinching backbone that has seen us through so many centuries of turmoil and always ensured we came out victorious. The never-say-die Dunkirk spirit and reliance on the wisdom of our noble queen, who...”

  Maurice held the phone from his ear. As if this mumbo-jumbo weren’t bad enough, there had to be mention of the bally queen. Many a time Maurice had wished Charles II had never been invited back from France after England’s only ever successful revolution and then spawned the better part of four centuries’ worth of totemic wastrels.

  A hiatus, therefore, while OO17 struggled to retain his sang froid.

  “You still there, Casanova?”

  “Still here, ma’am. So it’s more fake news we’re going to be spreading, is it? Always assuming I can find this megalomaniac bonkers banker chappie.”

  Another hiatus while Capricious Clarissa attempted to compute what sounded to her a lot like disbelief, possibly even an objection. But then she hit her rhythm again.

  “There’s fake news, Casanova, then there’s fake news which is simply alternative truth,” she retorted robotically. “As you should know from the special relationship with our friend in the White House. And, in your position, it is not a question of reasoning why. Yours just to do or die, eh? One assumes you have signed the Official Secrets Act and pledged allegiance to the Crown.”

  Despite his inbuilt loathing of said crown, Maurice couldn’t deny he had. It had been a humiliating experience, but without such nauseating oblation he would never have been given the job he’d most wanted since leaving Oxford.

  “Indeed so, ma’am,”

  “Well then, get to it, man,” said “Phoebe,” who was starting t
o feel a tad cross at having to boss someone around like this. Why couldn’t people just do the jobs they were paid for and stop being so pernickety about everything?

  “Please,” she added after a moment’s silence.

  At which backslide into unexpected decency, Maurice again felt a pang of sympathy. Just the wrong woman in the wrong job, he reckoned. How long would it take her to realise?

  “Okay,” he said, running a hand along Terpsichore/Tiddles’ fur, which caused her to roll on her back and dangle her four legs in the air. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Thank you, Casanova. Thank you sooo much,” said “Phoebe,” cutting the call as her foreign secretary barged into the office with disturbing news concerning the president of Iran’s reaction to a “misspeak” the FS—some read the acronym as “Fat Slob”—might or “might not” have made in response to the “Muzzie” president’s claim his country had every right to nuclear weapons given the hostility to everything Muslim emanating on daily tweets from the madman in White House.

  “I mean, for fuck’s sake, what was so wrong with my telling him he’d be better off building a yellow submarine?” huffed and puffed Fat Slob, pulling at his blond-going-on-whitish toupée.

  “Nothing, dear boy. A jolly good thing to say, I’m sure. Now, why don’t you pop off and get yourself a cup of tea and a bun? Then you’ll feel a lot better,” said Clarissa. “And close the door behind you.”

  ~ * ~

  Maurice Moffat pondered long and hard on the new task he’d been set, employing all the super-neurons he’d been born with and therefore examining the problem from every conceivable angle. First the entirely pragmatic matter of where to start looking for this Jeremy Crawford fellow. Whether to stay at home and employ only the top-of-the-range computer bank in his third bedroom, or whether to use the old-fashioned gumshoe methodology and skulk about in his three-piece tweed suit asking obscure questions of Jeremy’s ex-coworkers and family in the hope of picking up the scent of a trail. A tricky choice. Additionally, however, he had at his disposal a tool of his very own invention he had not yet shared with MI5, MI6 or GCHQ because it was still in its experimental stages. The GRNAV (Genetic Response Navigator) he called it, a machine that combined the wonders of satellite imagery with advances in microbial genetics and could, in principle, detect any person at any distance when fed only a smidgeon of that person’s DNA. All he would need for this course of action would be such a dab of the bonkers banker’s genetic coding smeared onto a converted Satnav app and Bob would be Maurice’s uncle. He’d never so far tried it out, but might this be an appropriate moment for a test run? After considerable reflection, Maurice thought so. What, after all, was the point of months of painstaking invention if it were to be mothballed and never to see the light of day? No point at all, he concluded.

  From this example you will begin to understand the genius level at which Maurice Moffat’s mind operated. An intellectual he was, but not one merely at the pedestrian level of disputing and revamping the work of others. A loner with both the rational and creative capacities to imagine the unimaginable, think the unthinkable, take the risk and maybe, just maybe, make something new. In other words, someone whose left and right brain hemispheres didn’t just bicker with each other—“I’m the clever one, you’re daft; no I’m not, you’re the daft one, I’m the clever one” and so on—but worked together in constructive harmony.

  “Ookay then, cat, this shall be our path,” he told Terpsichore/Tiddles, now “Cat.”

  “Miaow,” said Terpsichore/Tiddles/Cat.

  Maurice took that as a yes, laid back on the sofa with his hands laced behind his head, nodded off, and took to dreaming.

  ~ * ~

  In Maurice’s dream, Jeremy Crawford is located in no time at all by GRNAV and turns out to a thoroughly decent chap in some mysterious way connected to Maurice’s old pal Prof Broadbent, who hovers about out of focus on the irritatingly ungraspable oneiric fringes of perception like some spirit. You know how it is with dreams, how they work vertically rather than horizontally. Like stacks of tarot cards that won’t reveal their narrative meaning until laid out and interpreted, which they never allow in dreams. Just jumbled upside-down and back-to-front metaphors of all the dross on your mind they remain until you awaken perplexed.

  So it was in Maurice’s dream, although it wasn’t puzzling him. In fact he was quite enjoying it. Apart from the elusively hovering Prof Broadbent, there were other folk around Jeremy too, all of them chuckling and having fun. And there were several animals. No cats as far as Maurice could make out. More like dogs, although there may even have been a wild boar in there in the mix. Anyway, not the sort of party Maurice wished to gate crash with threats to Jeremy of him being scapegoated for all the mistakes of Capricious Clarissa and her hapless government. Especially not after he was invited into the company, introduced to everyone and, after initial reserve, licked by the animals and accepted by the people. Even asked if he he’d care for a glass of the local brew. Not the Cockburn’s Special Reserve port wine Prof Broadbent kept in his Oxford rooms, but tasty nonetheless.

  It was at this juncture that the laced hands behind Maurice’s head went numb and he was obliged to re-position himself further down the sofa on one side, thereby squashing Terpsichore/Tiddles/Cat, who said miaow in protest, waited till Maurice was off in cloud cuckoo land again, then sat on his head.

  Immediate shift in dream scene possibly occasioned by having a confused tabby sitting on his head. Suddenly and inexplicably Maurice is in Moscow, where he has been many times before as a spy during the Igor Ripurpantzov regime. But this isn’t the new Moscow he’s dreaming of; this is the old one in the days of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Glasnost and perestroika are in the air and Beatles’ songs are being allowed on the radio for the first time ever. Pretty girls in short skirts and longhaired lads in blue jeans are dancing in the streets to John Lennon’s “Revolution.” And in “Back in the USSR,” Paul McCartney is screaming about the Ukraine girls who really knock him out, the Moscow girls who make him sing and shout, and how Georgia is always on his mind. Also, and for no connected reason (right brain was having a ball), Maurice hears lines from Lennon’s much later “Working Class Hero.” How you were hated if you were clever but despised if you were a fool.

  That’s when Maurice awoke, took Terpsichore/Tiddles/Cat from his head, and sat bolt upright.

  “That’s it,” he muttered as his limbic system shut down and Left Brain got in on the act, supplying Maurice with the memory of a TV programme he’d recently managed to stay awake for, which explained how much influence The Beatles had had on the revolution that led to the demise of the Soviet Union. Dimly he remembered the image of an old man in St Petersburg with lank hair who was building a shrine to John Lennon and peering out at the sea awaiting his return. Thinking even one of the seagulls might be John flying home.

  “Never mind he is dead. He shall return. We need him now more than ever,” the old man told the TV interviewer in Russian, before singing a croaky version of “Imagine” in English.

  “Mmmm,” mused Maurice, closing his eyes again and allowing Right Brain to do the thinking.

  And some dream scheme it came up with. From way out in left field, so fantastical and audacious was it. Yet, given the common knowledge of Ripurpantzov’s cyber finagling in Western elections, these days it was not beyond the bounds of practicality. But Maurice wouldn’t mention any of this to Downing Street any time soon, if ever. First thing tomorrow he would prime his GRNAV, go in search of a smear of bonkers banker DNA, and with any luck find the fellow. And if, as he had dreamt, Jeremy was indeed in the company of Prof Broadbent and some other decent types, well who knew what might follow? After all, in many parts of the world before Freud took to his meddling, dreams were regarded as prophesies.

  Leaving Terpsicore/Tiddles/Cat to her dreams on the sofa, Maurice went downstairs, tucked his trouser cuffs into his socks, extracted his bike from the garden shed, and headed out into the
midnight streets. Nothing he liked better for calm reflection than the dark winter streets of Tooting when the world had gone home, taking with it the fuss and the fights.

  Sixteen

  If you’re as sceptical of the narrative potential of dream prophesies as I, you’re not going to like what happened next, but the fact of the matter is that the part of Maurice’s dream in which he finds Jeremy came true, so it’s suspend-your-disbelief time for both of us, I’m afraid.

  Anyway, what happened next was that Maurice Moffat found Jeremy Crawford the following day with his GRNAV, which to his delight worked with pinpoint precision. Leaving Terpsichore/Tiddles/Cat in the care of Hank and Butch, his neighbours at number eleven Oakshot Street, all he had to do was motor up to Fanbury in his Morris Minor Traveller at the dead of night, find the barn Jeremy had holed up in, according to all the newspaper and Internet stories, pick the lock and, with a special DNA detector device also of his own concoction, scrape from the palliasse the required smidgeon of the essence of Jeremy’s being, feed it to GRNAV, and bingo! Within the half hour he was tapping at the front door of Barry’s mobile Shepherd’s Hut saying he was sorry for the disturbance, but...

  It was Barry who opened the door.

  “Moffat? Maurice Moffat?” he said. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  It took a second for Maurice to recognise his old prof. He had to have aged since their Oxford days, but if anything, with his shoulder length hippy hair and the glint in his eyes, he looked sprightlier.

  “Prof Broadbent?” he said.

  “The same, old chap.”

  “But you look…”

  “Different from when we first met?”

  Maurice nodded.

  Barry smiled. “I was older then, Moffat. I’m younger than that now. A small matter of what the Germans call Weltanschauung. May I repeat, however, what are you doing here? Not still some bally spook, one hopes. Speaking as someone who wrote you a rather flattering reference for MI6.”