Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  Gough stepped back to the edge of the pavement to check the numbers of the buildings on either side (belonging to an oil exploration company and a book restoration guild, respectively) against the address on the screen of his phone. Unlike some of his colleagues, who still clung to the use of a pen and a spiral-bound notebook when out on assignment, Gough had embraced the new technology of the digital age. His interviews were carried out using a voice recording app on his smartphone whilst his tablet computer was large enough for the cover to fold out into a full-size QWERTY keyboard. The phone and tablet were linked by Bluetooth so that documents automatically synced between the two and the tablet’s 3G connection meant that he could finish his copy on the bus ride back to the office and have it on the website before he arrived. It had to be a bus trip because he still couldn’t get a good enough signal in the Underground.

  The oil exploration company’s logo trapped the number 65 in a facsimile of a black splat. Considering the damage that oil spills caused to the environment, Gough considered it to be a particularly insensitive and inappropriate logo. The fancy classic font of the book restorers’ guild window announced that it resided in number 69. By historical tradition and precedent, that meant the anonymous door in the middle had to be number 67 and that was the address on his phone screen.

  Putting the phone away, he stepped up to the anonymous door and pressed the completely unremarkable doorbell fixed into the frame. He did not hear anything from inside, so couldn’t be sure that the bell had even sounded, but that was hardly surprising considering the amount of ambient noise on the average city street. The doorbell didn’t even have one of those small LED lights to let you know that it has registered your press and that somewhere inside, a poor electronic version of Big Ben’s chimes was sounding. He was caught in that dilemma of not wanting to appear pushy and impatient, but also not wanting to stand around on the shaded side of a chilly city street because the bell wasn’t working.

  Just as he reached out to press the doorbell again, the door opened. The man framed in the doorway was tall. It was the only word that came into Gough’s mind. The man was so tall that it was the single overwhelming impression that swept away every other consideration for a few moments. He was seven feet tall at least and his close-cropped grey hair was almost hidden by the top of the doorway.

  Once the impact of his height had diminished, Gough was able to take in other details. The man was not thin, but he appeared to be because of his height. He wore a dark, sober business suit and surveyed Gough with a dark and sober regard. The steady gaze had an almost physical weight, falling as it did from so far above Gough’s five foot six inches.

  Gough didn’t like feeling intimidated. He was a member of Her Majesty’s press (though Buckingham Palace had probably disowned them all long ago) and that made him more important than most ordinary people. He wrote the stories that shaped how the people of the capital perceived their world. It was his job to bring down the good and the great, or even the merely famous, through reporting on the indiscretions of their youths or revealing their most recent secrets. What people wanted to hide, he was there to uncover and hold up for the world to see. The importance and respect that had been afforded to his profession had been undermined by foreign owners with pretensions of global influence, editors for whom the bottom line of sales figures trumped every other consideration and the idiots who hadn’t covered their trails well enough when hacking other people’s phones. It should have been standard practice to have back up sources for any information learned so that the hacking itself was completely deniable. Now, the public, whose opinions he helped to form, considered all journalists to be unprincipled scumbags who were barely any better than politicians or terrorists.

  “Gough,” he introduced himself when there was no sign of the tall man speaking. He used the irritation of being intimidated to fuel his determination for the task ahead and to overcome the embarrassment of not knowing whose turn it was to speak. “I’m expected.”

  This seemed to have no effect. The tall man in the sober suit continued to regard him silently with his even more sober eyes.

  Gough, who knew the power of uncomfortable silences to goad someone into saying something they ought not, was prepared to wait the other man out, but the tall man suddenly stepped aside to allow him to enter.

  “Don’t get a lot of visitors, I guess,” Gough muttered petulantly as he stepped inside and hated the fact that they had managed to rile him enough to get him acting this way before he had even entered the building.

  The door closed behind him and cut off most of the available light. As his eyes adjusted, Gough assessed the lobby area in which he found himself. Whilst it was much like any such entranceway in any other similar working building, it was missing things other than just adequate illumination. There was still nothing visible that identified the residents of the building or the nature of their business. In a world where anyone had to be increasingly loud to be noticed over the visual and aural noise, that was very unusual. There was a reception desk, but nobody stood, or sat, behind it. There was no uniformed security guard presence (usually only good for meeting insurance requirements anyway). The almost ubiquitous flat-screen display showing the most recent promo or a photographic slideshow of popular products and smiling workforce was noticeably absent. None of the flat surfaces carried a display of glossy brochures or information leaflets. The space left him with the impression that it had come with the building, but the residents didn’t know how it was supposed to be used.

  The tall man strode past him and crossed the lobby in relatively few strides. He then paused on the far side and looked at Gough expectantly. The reporter took that as a sign that he should follow. As soon as he took the first step, the tall man turned and continued out of the lobby, confirming Gough’s choice.

  The corridor that the tall man had led the journalist into turned once and then ran straight for the entire length of the building. All the doors along it were firmly closed and none of them was marked in any way. Nobody entered or left the rooms and there was no other evidence of any activity. No phones could be heard ringing, no printers were whining, nobody could be heard giving tedious PowerPoint presentations by simply reading what was already on the slide for the audience to read.

  The tall man led the way to the very end of the corridor and knocked politely on the door there. If anything, it was even more anonymous than the one that led in off the street and identical to all the others that Gough had passed along the corridor.

  “Come in,” someone called and Gough found himself thankful for the sign of life.

  The tall man opened the door and stood aside. Gough went through the doorway into what was, by all appearances, a standard government-issue higher-level management office. In the plush but ergonomically-designed chair, behind a desk that managed to seem modern and traditional at the same time, sat a man who appeared in every way the opposite of the building’s only other visible resident.

  “Come in, come in,” the portly man greeted Gough effusively, rising out of the chair and coming halfway around the desk to meet him before stopping suddenly and returning halfway in order to press control+alt+delete on the keyboard of his outdated computer.

  “Sorry about that,” he apologised as he came around the desk once more, the shock of light brown hair bouncing on top of his head in an uncontrolled manner, “but it wouldn’t do to have all our secrets out on display with the press around, would it?”

  He held out one chubby hand and Gough took it, surprised to find that the amount of flesh did not soften the strength of the grip at all. The reporter did not say that getting at the secrets was why he was there in the first place.

  “I’m Chamberlain, by the way, like the Prime Minister, but less prone to wave pieces of paper in the air. I’m sort of in charge around here. Come in, come in and sit down.”

  He all but dragged Gough over to an equally plush, but much less ergonomic, armchair in front of the desk.

  �
�Now, can I get you anything? Coffee, tea, any of those ridiculous fruit or herbal concoctions that they call tea nowadays? Hmmm?”

  “No, thank you,” Gough declined. He didn’t like to get too chummy with the people that he was investigating. Though it could sometimes reveal more information, it usually ended up being messier than it was worth. He had learned that the hard way. He was slightly surprised not to be offered anything stronger. The sun was well over the yardarm, as the Admiralty might have it, and it often seemed that the wheels of government were lubricated by whisky and brandy and port. Most senior officials and especially the elected representatives, seemed keen to flaunt their taxpayer-funded drinks cabinet. The age of austerity had not impacted on the supply of luxury biscuits to high-level Whitehall meetings. Here, though, there was no sign of cut-glass decanters on silver trays.

  “Right then,” Chamberlain said, not taking Gough’s refusal in any way personally. “Let’s get to it then, shall we?”

  “Do you mind if I record this interview?” Gough asked, taking his phone out of his jacket pocket and activating the voice recording app. He usually found that people had a much harder time refusing the request when he had already started.

  “Ah, so it’s to be an interview, is it?” Chamberlain seemed momentarily surprised, but then continued, “Of course, no problem. Go ahead. Nothing to hide here.”

  “Really?” Gough asked, his tone carefully calculated to show how much he doubted that to be the case. If there wasn’t anything to hide, then he wouldn’t have been here in the first place. “Then why have you fought so hard and so long against my Freedom of Information request?”

  “Fight? I wasn’t aware that it was a fight,” Chamberlain blustered. “I thought that we merely engaged the relevant exemptions as the legislation allows us to do. No, as the legislation requires us to do.”

  “Especially section 35, the formulation of government policy and other governmental interests and section 36, disclosure prejudicial to the effective conduct of public affairs if I remember correctly,” Gough said. “What government interests were you trying to protect?”

  Chamberlain shrugged, “There is a reason why they were exempted.”

  “Those are two very convenient exemptions for government departments to hide behind.”

  Chamberlain smiled and spread his hands as if to say c’est la vie. What he actually said was, “I’m afraid that we did not write the legislation.”

  “Are you sure?” Gough complained sourly. It would do him no harm to give the bureaucrat the impression that he was in control.

  “Fairly sure,” said bureaucrat responded cheerfully.

  “But you do know how to employ it,” Gough commented.

  “We have people we pay who know that,” Chamberlain amended.

  “How many?” Gough demanded, trying to catch the man off guard with a direct question, showing his journalistic teeth just a little to remind him that he wasn’t dealing with a cub reporter.

  “I am sure that we have a staffing list somewhere,” Chamberlain answered amenably and Gough couldn’t tell whether it was deliberate evasion or a genuine lack of interest.

  “Hopefully amongst the documents that I have requested,” he jibed.

  “If you requested it, then it has been prepared for you.” There was no bitterness in the department head’s tone.

  “Only after the second-tier tribunal ordered you to,” Gough reminded the civil servant. The battle over his Freedom of Information request had taken them through all the levels of the Information Commissioner’s Office’s appeals process over the past year before the final decision-makers had made their decision in Gough’s favour.

  “Yes, bless the little darlings,” Chamberlain said, as if praising the mediocre artwork created by a primary school year one class.

  “Full disclosure,” Gough insisted, twisting the knife just a little.

  “I believe that was the wording in the decision notice,” Chamberlain refused to be baited.

  “So you’re not holding anything back?” Gough enquired. It wouldn’t hurt to have the man on tape (the phrase persisted even though no tape was involved in the recording process) when the opposite turned out to be true.

  “We comply fully with all aspects of UK law,” Chamberlain assured him, with a slight accusatory stress on the first word.

  “When finally ordered to,” Gough pointed out. “Your response to my initial request for documents to explain certain accounting items was barely one step up from simply ignoring the request altogether.”

  “We were interested in where you got hold of those,” Chamberlain said artlessly, either by accident or design.

  “I cannot reveal my sources,” Gough said with a hint of triumphalism.

  “Yes, that’s the funny thing about Freedom of Information,” Chamberlain commented. “It’s only free in one direction. We are required to be open and transparent whilst you are not.”

  “One of the drawbacks of public service,” Gough dismissed the complaint.

  “Once upon a time, the provision of accurate news was considered to be an important public service,” Chamberlain countered with a superior undertone, adding as a final flourish, “Sadly, no longer.”

  Gough gritted his teeth to prevent himself from snapping an angry response to the insult. He had used this tactic enough to get unanticipated responses and was wise enough not to fall for it now. When he had regained his composure, he said, “Whatever your personal opinion of the current state of my profession…”

  “Parlous,” Chamberlain interrupted.

  “What?”

  “Well, since you are asking, my personal opinion on the current state of your profession can be summed up by the word ‘parlous’.” He pointed to the smartphone on the desktop, “And you can feel free to quote me on that.”

  “I didn’t ask,” Gough said with more growl that he intended, or would have wished for.

  “No? Oh well, please accept my apologies for the misconception.”

  Gough knew well enough that Chamberlain understood perfectly and was just trying to get in a little petty revenge for the humiliation that the defeat before the ICO tribunal represented for the secretive department. Gough was content to let the man have his small win in these verbal skirmishes because he knew that he would be able to crucify the civil servant at length in both print and pixels. The smiling-faced hostility just made him more determined to pour as much vitriol into the other man’s destruction as he was able. Other smug, self-satisfied lardbuckets had learned to their detriment what it meant to cross Gough.

  “I want to see the documents now,” the journalist demanded. He almost winced at how much he sounded like a complaining teenager who wasn’t allowed to go out and play with his friends.

  Chamberlain’s smile widened just a little, just enough to show that he believed he had won this small battle of the barbs.

  “Of course,” the civil servant rose from his ergonomically-compliant chair and indicated a second doorway leading out of the office.

  Gough pulled himself out of the armchair with much less grace than his host had managed, scooping up his phone from the desktop, but failing to cancel the voice recording app. He suspected that the choice of seating had been quite deliberate to give his host this advantage.

  Chamberlain passed through a second doorway and led the way down a short corridor that was unencumbered with either doors or windows. There were no adornments of any kind other than the frosted panels that were the only source of lighting. He stopped outside the door at the far end. “All of the documents that you requested are on the other side of this door.”

  “ ‘All documents pertaining to the purpose and activities of the department’,” Gough quoted to remind the other man of the extent to which he had failed to protect his secrets.

  “Quite so,” Chamberlain agreed. “A particularly woolly and ill-defined request.”

  This time there was just the slightest hint of something in his tone that might have
been bitterness. The sound of it warmed Gough’s heart.

  “You will understand, I am sure, why we cannot allow copies of the actual documents to be removed from the room,” the civil servant continued. “I must insist that no kind of recording device is taken inside. You can leave your computer and smartphone here. They will be quite safe. I would turn off the recording app on your phone before you go in or you will exhaust both your memory and the battery before you return.”

  Gough made to object, if only to assuage the annoyance he felt at having his subterfuge with the smartphone recording app revealed so easily.

  Chamberlain continued, “You may make as many notes as you wish. A pad and pen have been provided for your convenience.”

  The Information Commissioner’s Office decision had gone against the journalist in only one way. The watchdog of UK information rights had added a caveat to his right of access stating that, whilst he should be allowed to view everything he had requested, he could not make copies.

  He dropped his backpack onto the floor and belatedly hoped that the impact hadn’t been hard enough to crack the tablet’s touch screen. It was notoriously susceptible to bangs on the corners. He took the smartphone out of his jacket pocket and ostentatiously switched off the voice recorder app before slipping it into one of the pack’s side pockets.