by Andy Maslen
He did as she told him, while Don took a seat opposite them. He sipped the wine. It was chilled to the perfect temperature and tasted wonderful. He sighed as the cold liquid hit his stomach.
“So you’ve been helping Don out at The Department since saving me from those fucking neo-Nazis down your way?”
Gabriel nodded.
“And you’re OK with his special remit? Sorry, bloody civil servant speak again. You know what I mean. Killing evil people to keep this country and its people safe.”
“I did it once before.”
“I know. I’ve read your service record.”
Gabriel looked up suddenly. He’d remembered how MI5 had adjusted his Army personnel file to present him as a borderline fascist for the mission on which he’d saved the life of the woman in front of him.
She smiled at him now. “Relax. Everything back to normal. Good as gold. Loyal servant of the Crown, decorated for conspicuous gallantry. Worst thing anyone could say about you now is your infuriating habit of playing old jazz music too loudly on manoeuvres.”
Gabriel returned the smile. He was liking Barbara Sutherland more and more. “You heard about that, then?”
Don spoke.
“Barbara wanted a detailed briefing on everyone I proposed bringing on board for this mission. Your exploit came up.”
“It was a joke,” Gabriel said. “The Yanks were playing bloody Wagner—“Ride of the Valkyries.” Pretending they were in Apocalypse Now. I set up a sound system on our Bradley and put my Walkman through it. Bessie Smith singing “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” at a hundred and ten decibels. They weren’t happy because we had better speakers than them.”
“I love Bessie Smith,” Barbara said. “She, Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone are my three muses. However much shit I think I have to put up with, they keep it all in perspective. Oh yes,” she continued, smiling as Gabriel’s eyes widened, “we share a taste for old-time jazz as well as a decent drop of plonk. I was asking you about The Department’s ethical framework. Because I wasn’t joking down the road. I want this bastard found and brought to immediate and permanent justice.”
“I’m fine with it, Barbara, really. But let me ask you something in return. If I may, I mean?”
“Of course. Go on then. Surprise me.”
“Well, in the Army—the Paras and then the Regiment—we were one hundred percent sure who the enemy was. And that they were the enemy. Either they were in uniform or carrying weapons. How do you make sure you’re targeting the right people?”
She took a sip of the Burgundy. Then she looked him directly in the eye. Hers seemed to glitter in the lamplight.
“I think we both know that even in wartime, the intelligence isn’t always completely accurate. But even allowing for that, The Department is held to absolutely the highest standards of proof you can imagine. Way beyond reasonable doubt. Don can give you chapter and verse later if you really want it, but in terms of authorisation, I only give it if I’d be prepared to pull the trigger myself. No hearsay, blurry camera phone footage, or dodgy forensics. I’m talking about the kind of evidence that puts a noose around their neck and yanks the bloody knot tight.”
Gabriel put his glass down. Looked first at Sutherland and then at Don.
“I like the work, don’t get me wrong. So this is my last question. Why not use the forces you have that are under public scrutiny? Why have The Department at all?”
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and her loyal attack dog looked at each other. She spoke first.
“Shall you tell him, Don? A little history lesson?”
He nodded, took a sip from his glass, then cleared his throat and began.
13
Departmental Protocol
“THAT BUSINESS DOWN IN YOUR neck of the woods, when you saved Barbara,” Don said. “Do you remember I told you it had links back to the ’74 plot for a coup against Harold Wilson?”
Gabriel nodded, sipping the delicious wine and enjoying the spreading warmth it brought.
“After that, Wilson created The Department. He never trusted MI5 or the Army again. Can’t say I blame him after what they had planned for him. Its original brief was to work directly for the prime minister of the day, with oversight from the Privy Council. He handpicked the first five members himself, from outside the existing power structures. The story was he borrowed some Russian spooks to vet them, which was ironic given that’s why the plotters wanted him out in the first place.”
Don finished his wine and nodded his thanks as Barbara refilled his glass, and then moved to top up her own and Gabriel’s.
“Anyway, initially their job was to provide intelligence to Wilson on who was talking to whom inside government and the intelligence agencies. They did rather feed his incipient paranoia, but he was happy. And then, like Topsy, it just grew and grew. Took on a more active role in preserving the security not just of the PM, but the country as a whole.”
“So who funds it? I can’t imagine you’d want it appearing in the budget.”
“Do you know what a rounding error is?”
“Not exactly. Why?”
“There’s a famous story, probably apocryphal, about a banking scam. The thieves supposedly reprogrammed a bank’s computers so if any of their customers’ accounts had a balance ending in a single penny, that penny was transferred to a dummy account set up by the criminals. Well, nobody missed those individual pennies because we don’t look at our money down to that level of detail. Amounted to millions before it was discovered. Most people round up to the nearest pound, or even ten pounds, and simply don’t focus on any amount smaller than that. The difference is called a rounding error. In terms of government funding, for departmental programmes and so on, that rounding error is usually at the level of a few tens of thousands of pounds. There’s an algorithm buried deep in the Treasury’s IT systems that sweeps all those spare thousands into The Department’s coffers. Then there’s match-funding from the Queen. A quid from Her Majesty for every quid we put in, no questions asked and thanks for the tax cut.”
“You’re joking,” Gabriel said, scratching his head. “Aren’t you?”
Barbara just smiled, and sipped from her glass. “Any other questions?”
“I do, actually. If that’s OK with you, I mean?”
“I’m all ears.”
“So, what about secrecy? Whitehall is notoriously leaky so how do you keep it all under wraps? The media would have a field day if this all came out.”
“You’re right, they would. Although the fact they haven’t since ’74 would suggest our protocols work.”
“What are they?”
“Protocol One, plausible deniability. Nothing is ever written down, nothing is ever trackable. The entire operation is conducted by oral, face-to-face communication. In all the years it’s been operating, there hasn’t been a single memo, meeting minute, fax, or email. Protocol Two, anonymity. Everybody is selected personally and invited to join under the terms of Protocol One. No personnel records, no letters of appointment. Protocol Three, hygiene. The Department doesn’t leave footprints. And if people feel they’ve contributed enough, they’re free to leave, but their silence for life is required. We only select people who it’s felt are completely trustworthy, but in any case, whistleblowing would be met with the same level of determination as main operations. No quarter, no sanctuary, anywhere. There’s a code word that unlocks the door of any foreign embassy in London. That slimeball who recently leaked all those government emails would’ve been sitting in a windowless cell two hundred feet underground by now if we’d used it.”
Don spoke. “Having an attack of the civil liberties, Old Sport?” He was smiling, but for the first time, Gabriel detected an edge behind the older man’s genial manner.
“No. Not at all. Just getting it all straight in my head. Now I’m working for you. Just one other thing.”
“Go on,” Don said.
“Does it really make that much of a di
fference, not having the same levels of oversight as the Army and the security services?”
“It’s not just about oversight, Gabriel,” Barbara said. “It’s about operational effectiveness. Sometimes we get intelligence that someone we want out of the way is in a particular place at a particular time. Well, you know how long it takes to get a military unit into place. And let me tell you, MI5 and MI6 aren’t much better. The Department is fast. Really fast. And we can cherry-pick recruits from anywhere we like. Private-sector people like you. Men who maybe missed out on the SAS by a whisker and quit altogether rather than return to unit. All sorts. Now, I notice this bottle’s empty. Shall we have another?”
Don and Gabriel looked at each other. Don spoke first.
“I have to get back to work, Barbara, but Gabriel, I think you should stay. Talk about jazz if all the spook stuff gets too boring.”
He stood, and Barbara and Gabriel followed suit. He hugged Barbara briefly, then shook hands with Gabriel.
“I want to put Gabriel into the Met while they try to pin down their first lead. D’you think you could ask Justine Creech to square it with them?”
Barbara grinned, showing a single canine tooth.
“Oh, I’m sure my Right Honourable Friend would be more than happy to help,” she said. “It’ll give her an opportunity to build bridges with the police. She’s not exactly flavour of the month since her speech at their conference.”
“I’ll be in touch,” Don said to Gabriel, then he was gone.
Barbara pressed a button set into the wall, and within a couple of minutes, a young woman in white shirt, black trousers, and a black waistcoat appeared.
“Be a love and fetch us another bottle of this lovely wine, would you?” Barbara said with a warm smile.
After the young woman had left with the ice bucket, Barbara turned to Gabriel.
“I bet you’re thinking, ‘Champagne bloody socialist’, aren’t you?”
“Actually I wasn’t. I was thinking about the girl I saw this morning. The one I thought was the bomber. Your hospitality staff, person, looked a bit like her.”
“I want to hear more about that, but I have to tell you, being the prime minister’s all very well, and I do still believe in all the principles my dad drilled into me, but there are times when, do you know what? Having a few people to carry your bags or fetch your wine is just bloody brilliant. I mean, you can see how the landed gentry got their taste for having servants, can’t you?”
He nodded. “Though the only people I’ve met in the last few years with servants were, well, let’s just say I’m glad the servants are looking for new jobs.”
She laughed. “You mean that madman Toby Maitland, don’t you?”
“He was top of my list, yes.”
“Good riddance. Aha!” she said as the uniformed young woman returned with a refilled ice bucket and an uncorked bottle of the Burgundy. “Here’s our Cheryl back with the wine. Thanks, my love.”
Glasses refilled, Barbara sat back and was just about to ask Gabriel about the bomber when the door banged open, and in charged a young boy wearing a maroon school blazer and tie. He was maybe five or six years old. He had the same shade of hair as Barbara, though his was messier than her professionally cut bob, and there was something about the set of his jawline that made their connection plain.
“Hello, Mummy,” he said, running over and jumping onto her lap. “I got a sticker today for helping my friend Pradeep because he fell over and I got the first aid kit from Mrs Smith in the office and she said I was very responsible and I even put the plaster on and everything. And guess what …”
Gabriel smiled at the torrent of words and the unaffected enthusiasm Barbara’s son showed as he related his day. When the boy he knew to be called Tom paused for breath, Barbara set him down on the floor and turned him gently but firmly by the shoulders to face Gabriel.
“Darling, this man is called Gabriel. He’s helping me deal with some bad people. Say hello.”
The boy stood straight, hands clamped to his sides like a new recruit on his first parade and looked Gabriel in the eye, squinting at him as if he would divine his true reason for being there by telepathy.
“Gabriel was an angel. He helped God. Is God going to punish the bad people? Are you an angel?”
Not used to talking to small children, Gabriel found his interrogator’s direct question a little off-putting.
“I’m not an angel. I work for the, for your Mummy. But I’m sure that God …” he looked at Barbara, but if she had a view on whether he should discuss theology with her son or not, she wasn’t revealing it through so much as a wink, “… if God knew about the bad people, he wouldn’t be pleased.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” Tom said, in his stride now. “What he’d do is, he’d put them on the really big naughty step. For probably ten hundred minutes. Or else he’d kill them.”
“Darling!” Barbara said. “You know we don’t talk about killing people just for being bad.”
“But then they wouldn’t be bad again, would they? Not if they were dead.” He turned to Gabriel, who was marvelling, not for the first time, at how even the most sympathetic politicians could talk about the extra-judicial killing of terrorists one moment and then inveigh against the very same practice a moment later. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
Gabriel’s mouth opened but then he realised he had no idea what to say next. Barbara seemed content to spectate on this interchange between the man and the man-in-waiting.
“Well, I was in the Army, so we did lots of fighting. But we were fighting to keep people safe. Children, like you, and their mummies and daddies.” Yes, this is going OK. Stick to this line, and pray she gets rid of him to his bedroom or nursery or whatever they have here.
The boy rolled his eyes. “Yes, but did you actually fire a bullet into someone, and did they die?”
Gabriel slid off the sofa and knelt in front of the boy so they were on the same level. He spoke softly, seriously.
“Yes. I did.”
“What was it like?”
“It made me feel bad inside. Because that person was dead and they might have had a family. But it was my duty. Do you know about duty?”
The boy puffed his chest out. “Of course I do. I’m on cloakroom duty this week. It’s about being responsible. But do you know what I would do with bad people if I was God?”
“What?”
“If I was God, I’d parachute down to Earth, and I’d find the bad people with my X-ray vision, then I’d get them with my lightsaber, and then Mummy would probably give me a medal, and also a cake, which is what she does for brave people.”
This was too much. Gabriel and Barbara both burst out laughing. She swept the boy up and carried him to the door. With a kiss and a tousle of his hair, she shooed him out with an instruction to “find Emma”—an au pair, Gabriel assumed.
“Sorry about that,” she said when the room was quiet again. “He can be somewhat precocious, but it does him good to meet my guests from time to time. Since his dad left, he’s been magnetically drawn to any bloke who visits. He’s practically adopted Don.”
“I read in the papers about the posting. Costa Rica, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right. John’s advising them about pilot training. He’ll be over there for six months. It’s his last tour before he leaves the Air Force.
She stared out of the window, her face in repose drawn and sad. She looked tired, as if the effort of maintaining the bluff, no-nonsense persona had used up all her energy.
“I want whoever planned that bombing dead, Gabriel. I mean it. On God’s fucking naughty step for all eternity.” She stared at him, eyes blazing.
“That’s what I’m here for, Barbara,” he said quietly. “That’s what I’m here for.”
“People like that don’t deserve to benefit from our legal system. Don’t deserve human rights lawyers. They don’t deserve it!” She shouted the last line then tipped her head back and swallowed the wine in
her glass in a single gulp. “And I’ll tell you why.”
She leaned forward and he matched her body language, drawing on one of the techniques Master Zhao had instructed him in to get closer to someone’s emotions.
“What happened?” he asked, struck by a sudden insight that her fervour was personal as well as political.
“Nine eleven is what happened. My sister was the fundraising director of a charity based in Manhattan. They were actually raising money for orphans in Iraq, if you can believe it. She was on American Airlines Flight 11. The North Tower. Now, I don’t know who was behind this morning’s atrocity. They could be extremist bloody Buddhists for all I care. But we’re going to send them a message they won’t forget, and I hope all the other twisted cranks sending other people to do their dirty work get the message too. If you fuck with us, you’re going to regret it.”
14
Hollywood Aflame
THAT NIGHT, A FIREBALL BLOSSOMED above Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, destroying the sidewalk with its handprints, footprints, and autographs of movie stars, and turning the ornate Asian-style cinema into an inferno. The blast was contained, as it took place inside Christophe Jardin’s head. But the devastation was comprehensive. He lay in his four-poster bed, and as the screams of the dying mingled with the sirens, he grinned.
“Oh, Papa, Maman,” he said, staring up at the map of the world he’d had one of the Children paint as a fresco on his ceiling. “You always chided me for lying around doing nothing. But look at me now. You are dust; your flesh was eaten long ago by worms and beetles, while I am stamping my mark on the world.”
He leaned over to his right, taking care not to wake the lithe, handsome girl sleeping soundly by his side, and slid open the drawer in the mahogany bedside cabinet. Slowly, and with exaggerated shushing noises from his thin lips, he extracted a Colt .45 semi-automatic pistol. He curled his fingers around the grip and inserted his index finger through the trigger guard.
He pointed the gun at the ceiling.
