by J. S. Monroe
39
Jar checks the email folder on his mobile again, hoping there might be another message, but there’s nothing. Just one item in the drafts folder: a brief diary entry that appears to have been cut short.
He looks up at the platform indicator on the concourse at Paddington. The next train to Penzance departs in an hour, leaving him just enough time to see Anton. It will take him twenty minutes to get from here to the skate park at Ladbroke Grove. He wants to thank him – and ask about the latest entry, why it’s incomplete.
No one seems to be around when he reaches the skate park, so he makes his way over to the shipping container where he came with Carl six days ago. It’s even messier than before. Is this where Anton decoded Rosa’s diary? The computers have gone, though, just boxes of skate wheels, trucks, tools, scooter bars, broken decks, scattered every-where.
‘Can I help?’
Jar spins round. A man he recognises from the ticket gate is staring at him.
‘Is Anton about?’
‘Who’s asking?’
‘A friend – of a friend. He was helping me with a computer problem.’
‘He ain’t now.’ The man picks up a skate deck from the ground.
‘Is he OK?’
‘Ask the Feds.’
‘The Feds?’ Jar repeats, dread rising in him.
The man smirks. ‘He left in a hurry. Last night. Took all his computers with him.’
Jar’s heard enough. Two minutes later, he’s walking under the Westway, towards Ladbroke Grove Underground station, talking on the phone.
‘Carl, it’s Jar. Anton’s disappeared.’
‘He does that sometimes.’
‘I think it’s the diary, Carl.’
Jar hangs up and turns into the Underground. As the train draws into Paddington he remembers the package in his pocket. It’s not a book. Inside is one sheet of official-looking A4 paper, covered in type. On the top of the sheet are the words: ‘TOP SECRET STRAP 3, UK EYES ONLY’. The sheet has been wrapped loosely in cardboard packaging, which was why he thought it was a paperback. He checks the carriage, his heart quickening, and begins to read.
40
TOP SECRET STRAP 3, UK EYES ONLY
Programme: Eutychus (US)
DoB: 08.11.1992
University: St Matthew’s College, Cambridge
DoD: 01.07.2012
CURRENT STATUS: Global SIS station heads informed. Border Agency also alerted. No immediate next of kin. Deceased father’s sister in Cromer and a former boyfriend in London under 24/7 (A4/MI5).
41
Tucking the sheet of paper into his jacket pocket, Jar looks around the carriage. He doesn’t want to be seen reading a confidential document if he is under surveillance. There’s nothing unusual about the man standing at the far end, by the door’s open window, he tells himself. Just a regular commuter, getting some air, who happens to be looking in his direction. And the woman on her phone, catching his eye and turning away?
Who in the name of the Holy Mother Mary couriered this to him? Relax. He should have checked with the post room. There’s nothing on the envelope apart from his typed name. Could it have been sent by Rosa? Breathe. It’s her date of birth and death and it name-checks Eutychus, the programme she mentioned in her diary, and refers indirectly to Jar. If she’s been a part of a covert operation for the past five years, she must have had high-level access, got good at reading things she’s not meant to see.
It looks genuine enough, but he’s never been privy to raw intelligence, just a few documents that he’s read online, courtesy of Edward Snowden. He gets off the Hammersmith and City Line train at Paddington. His stomach churns when the man and woman do the same. As he accelerates down the ramp to reach the main station concourse, he feels so sick he’s almost giddy. Then his phone rings, cutting through his lightheadedness. It’s Max Eadie. Jar wants to tell him everything, about the memo, Anton’s sudden disappearance, but Max speaks first.
‘Jar, we need to meet.’
‘Everything OK?’ Jar asks, trying to ignore the tension in Max’s voice.
‘I’ve finished going through the diary.’
After much deliberation, Jar gave Max the password to the email account Anton’s been using. He figured that he couldn’t expect Max to help unless he shared everything he knew with him, including his late girlfriend’s private diary, sitting in his drafts folder.
‘And?’
‘We need to meet. Today. Now.’
Jar looks around him again. The woman has vanished, but the man still seems to be following him.
‘I’m at Paddington. About to board a train.’
‘Don’t. I’m in the West End. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’
Max’s serious tone worries him. Jar was hoping the diary might provide enough evidence for Max to resurrect his article, iron out the inconsistencies, republish it. But he sounded far from vindicated on the phone just now.
Jar puts away his mobile and sets off in search of somewhere to photocopy the document in his jacket pocket, as a precaution. After finding an office shop on Praed Street, where he makes a copy, he returns to the station.
The main concourse is packed, even for a Friday afternoon. An incident of some sort has delayed trains leaving the station and commuters are milling around, waiting for information. If he misses this one, he’ll have to catch the overnight sleeper service and find Rosa in the morning. (It’s more expensive, but it was payday this week.) She won’t sleep out at night on the headland. She’ll stay at the pub, where she can keep an eye on people walking down to Gurnard’s Head.
He glances at his watch, takes in the group of smokers standing just outside the station. He could do with a cigarette right now. His whole body feels taut. And then she is at his side.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ Rosa says, smiling. Jar stands there, stunned, hoping that if he doesn’t move, she might stay. But she’s already gone. At least she seemed well, her eyes radiant, like she used to look at university, not how she was when he saw her rushing for the train the last time he was here at Paddington. He knows it was a hallucination, but it gives him hope. She’s not far away now.
Five minutes later, Max Eadie is walking towards him in a creased linen suit. ‘Shall we walk?’ he asks, his voice still serious, urgent. ‘I hate crowds.’
‘Me too.’ As they pass the diaspora of smokers, back up towards Praed Street, Jar turns to him. ‘I think someone followed me here today.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘My friends say I’m paranoid.’
‘How many?’ Max continues to walk on, buttoning the middle of his bulging jacket as he quickens his step. ‘On your tail?’
Before Jar can reply, Max has broken into an unlikely run and jumps on to the back of a passing red Routemaster bus. Jar follows, hopping on to the footplate just as the double-decker pulls away.
‘That should buy us a few minutes,’ Max says, trying to conceal his breathlessness. ‘Upstairs.’
Jar wants to ask him what he’s doing, but Max is already mounting the stairs, two steps at a time. They take the front seats – the only other passengers are two older women at the back of the bus – and look down on to the Edgware Road as the bus makes its way towards Marble Arch.
‘If we’re dry-cleaning properly,’ Max continues, without explanation, still breathing heavily, ‘we should get off at the next stop, cross the road, catch another bus in the other direction, walk quickly through it, hop off again at the front, hail a taxi, and head into heavy traffic. But I’m too old for that.’
‘Have you done this kind of thing before?’ Jar asks. He is already prepared for Max to reveal that he once worked as a spy, too.
‘I’ve always thought that espionage and journalism make easy bedfellows: we’re both in the business of getting people to reveal things they shouldn’t. It doesn’t surprise me you’re being followed. We might not have long,’ he adds, more serious now. ‘There’s something you need to k
now about Rosa’s diary.’
‘Did it help? With the article?’
‘Not exactly. Do you remember Rosa ever talking about going on a retreat?’
‘Once. It was before we met.’
‘Anything else?’
‘It was a passing remark, nothing more.’
‘She didn’t say where it was?’
‘It might have been Herefordshire. I can’t be sure.’
Max pauses. ‘I’m not proud to say this, but there were – how to put this? – elements of my story for the website that were… elaborated… adorned… embellished.’ He coughs theatrically. ‘Made up.’
‘Like what?’ Jar asks. ‘Much of it seemed to tally with Rosa’s diary.’
‘That’s what’s worrying me.’
‘I’m not getting you here.’
‘You’ve read the article. I believed – and continue to believe – that a number of student suicides at Oxford and Cambridge were suspicious. Bodies never found. And I wrote that these students had been recruited by the intelligence services through a network of welfare officers and college counsellors.’
‘Which is what Rosa’s diary implies.’ And the document burning a hole in his jacket pocket, Jar thinks, but he says nothing about that. He doesn’t know Max well enough yet to show it to him, doesn’t quite trust him.
Max is holding up his hand like a traffic policeman as he glances around the bus, checking to see if anyone can overhear them. ‘I also wrote that the students were sent off to a retreat outside Hereford––’
‘That fits with what Rosa said, too,’ Jar interrupts.
Max clears his throat again, as if he’s about to confess a crime. ‘And that some of them were subsequently transferred to a secure site on the military base currently occupied by the Special Air Squadron.’ He pauses. ‘That’s the bit I made up. Informed guesswork – not my finest hour. A local told me the retreat’s owner was American and had a Special Forces background, nothing more. It surprised me at the time, didn’t fit in with a retreat. But I knew if I got the SAS into the story, preferably in the headline, it would sell. That was my hope, at least.’
‘What do you mean, you “made it up”? Rosa––’
‘I know. She implied in all but name that she was taken to the SAS headquarters. I’m not proud, Jar, but I had no proper evidence to support that part of the story. All I knew was that some unhappy Oxbridge students were once taken off to a spiritual retreat outside Hereford.’
‘It doesn’t mean some of them weren’t actually transferred to the SAS base.’
‘I’m sorry, Jar. I don’t think you quite understand what I’m saying here. I have no idea who wrote the diary, but whoever it was had read my story and copied some of the details.’
‘But that’s not possible. Rosa wrote it.’
‘My article was published on the dark web in July 2013 – a year after Rosa died.’
‘I remember the things she describes in the diary, our times together. Breakfast after the May Ball, skinny-dipping in the Cam, the first time we met in the restaurant. No one else could have written those words.’
Max pauses before he answers as their bus sits in heavy traffic, so still that Jar wonders if its hybrid engine has cut out. But then it shudders into life and the bus pulls away. Below them, a group of men sit outside a café, smoking hookahs, watching passing commuters with a mix of indifference and disdain.
‘I’m really not sure what to think, Jar. It was all a long time ago and my research was sketchy at best. I was under a lot of financial pressure in those days, desperate to get the story published somewhere. It was one of the reasons I switched to PR. What I do know is that there was no counsellor at Rosa’s college. I did a lot of digging around, made quite a nuisance of myself with the porters. Her dean, Dr Lance, was a well-known recruiting officer for the intelligence services, but I couldn’t find any evidence of a counsellor or welfare officer at St Matthew’s. Which was odd. I chose to overlook that in my story, focused on the colleges that did have counsellors.’
‘But Rosa writes a lot about Karen. She can’t have made that up.’ Jar tries to ignore the fact that Rosa never talked to him about any counsellor either; that he too had never been able to find evidence of a Karen at St Matthew’s or prove that Kirsten was Karen, as he had first thought. ‘That must help your story – it gives you something new, a reason to republish it.’
‘All I know for certain is that the part I fabricated – about the SAS – has somehow found its way almost word for word into Rosa’s diary.’ Max falls quiet before speaking again. ‘There’s something else, too.’
‘What?’ Jar asks, but Max remains silent. ‘Tell me.’
‘The name of the American who owned the retreat. I didn’t want to use his real one in my story so I made one up – I was on shaky ground, remember.’
‘What name did you give him?’
Max pauses. ‘Todd.’
‘The instructor Rosa mentions?’
‘I’m sorry, Jar. I think someone’s playing you.’
42
I shouldn’t be emailing you like this, Jar, but if we meet, we won’t have long together. They’ll find me. I know they will.
I don’t know where to start, how to explain the choices I made. I owe you so much more than an apology, but let me at least begin with an explanation (I hope you got the document I sent to your office). You knew I was unhappy at college, but I never told you how low I felt, the dark days. When I was with you, the sun came out and the trees in the Fellows’ Garden were shiny, like they were after heavy rain, but when we were apart, the storm clouds returned and I was ready to end it all.
Do you remember Dr Lance? The college dean and Goethe expert? A good friend of Dad’s, too. He was the one who set this all in motion, spotted my unhappiness and offered me the chance to start again. He and Karen, our college counsellor, the American blonde all the boys fancied. And I took that opportunity, shut out what you and I had together and looked to the future, to my father. Because the first thing they told me was that Dad had been part of a programme to help unhappy students. I don’t think I would have signed up if he hadn’t been involved – it felt like a way of getting closer to him.
The work was dull at first. I can’t say where we were, because just the mention of the name of the programme in this email would make the next few hours even more difficult than they will be (even though I’m using ‘onion routing’ to send this – you wouldn’t believe what I’ve learnt, Jar). But once we’d finished our training it became interesting.
The only problem was that they were training us to discover things we weren’t meant to find out and one day, a few years into our new lives, I learnt something about my father that changed everything. Dad had made a discovery that he shouldn’t have. He found out that people like me, British students recruited from Oxbridge, were deemed ultimately expendable by the Americans who were running the programme. We were dead already, as far as the outside world was concerned, so what was the problem if we died again? We were disposable, ideally suited for the more dangerous missions. Dad was about to blow the whistle, but they stopped him, made it look like a car accident in Ladakh. From the moment I found out, I was looking for a way to escape, but you can’t just leave. It’s not like that.
One day, though, an opportunity arose – they made a mistake – and I took my chance. I thought I was free when I finally reached the UK, but I realise now they were just watching and waiting to see what I would do. The Americans took me in after a couple of days and I was kept in isolation on a US airbase – in the UK, I think; I wasn’t flown anywhere – for months, maybe years. It’s hard to tell. They tortured me, body and mind.
But then, last week, I managed to escape again. I was out, on the run. I still am.
I need to see you, babe, prove to you that I’m alive. If we manage to meet, however briefly, you must tell my story. They’ll take me back and I’ll disappear, most probably be killed. I’m dead already, so nobody will c
are. But at least you now know and it’s up to you what you do with this knowledge. Find me, Jar, at the place we talked about, where we’d go if the world ever slipped off its axis.
43
The two people appear on either side of Jar as he reaches the ticket barriers for the night train to Penzance. Jar recognises them at once: the man and woman whom he had suspected of following him when he boarded the Underground train from Ladbroke Grove to Paddington.
‘Someone wants another chat,’ the man says, locking his arm in Jar’s and steering him away towards the taxi rank beside Platform 1. The woman moves in on the other side just as a car pulls up, the two of them lifting Jar’s feet off the ground as the rear door opens.
Miles Cato manages a thin smile from the far seat. ‘Sorry about the cloak and daggers,’ he says, as Jar is bundled into the car.
Jar stares straight ahead as they drive off into the London traffic, shocked, too angry to say anything or to be afraid, still thinking about the email he was reading on his phone a few moments earlier. There’s just the driver, separated by a thick glass screen, and Miles in the car. The man and woman have stayed on the pavement, melting into the crowds.
‘I don’t think you quite realise what or who you are dealing with here,’ Miles says, after a pause. He too is looking ahead. Jar wants to tell him that he has a good idea who he is dealing with, that he knows Cato is more than a policeman and that this is about Rosa, but he says nothing.
‘It’s an addiction, an illness. We’ve been following Martin for quite some time now. People like him operate in syndicates. They share indecent images on the dark web, hundreds of thousands of them. And they’ll do anything to get more. This is not some online fantasy – real lives are at risk here.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Jar says, his voice shakier than he would like.
