by Oisin McGann
“In some ways, taking on the terrorists in Northern Ireland was worse. It’s a small place and everything’s that much more personal. I lived a few hundred yards from guys who’d happily have taken me out into the hills, shot me in both knees, and left me to die if they found out who I was. I kind of liked some of the Germans we worked against; it was a cold-blooded affair, but there was a certain mutual respect. The Irish guys though, they hated us. They didn’t give an inch until the peace process started.”
The bus pulled up at another stop. No one came upstairs, but the old man threw a glance at the few scattered passengers up loading at the front before carrying on.
“When people think of spies, it’s all James Bond or Jason Bourne or that Mission Impossible lot,” Robert explained. “Action, guns, that bleedin’ martial arts and hanging from ropes. All very dramatic. What happened back there with those clowns in that flat, that’s the kind of thing we avoid at all costs. If things get to that point, it’s normally a sign that you’ve cocked up. Most of the time, it’s not a case of someone throwing fists or sneaking into a place or using a disguise. That’s a bloody last resort. No, what you do is you recruit an asset, someone who’s already inside where you need to be—someone you hope the enemy will never know is working for you.”
“You mean someone like me?” Chi interrupted.
He said it in a casual tone that attempted to hide the hint of pride he felt at being an “asset.” Robert threw him a look that suggested his patience was being tested, then carried on.
“It’s much more effective to use someone who belongs in a place than to try and introduce someone new. We’d persuade, bribe, seduce, blackmail … Whatever it took to get the job done.
“When I started out in Northern Ireland, I thought we were there to solve the problem. But every time we interfered, we seemed to make things worse. We gave the nationalists more reason to hate us, drove more people into their ranks as new recruits. In the end, we were just feeding the conflict. I lost the faith; I couldn’t do it anymore.
“The way I see it now, we’re causing problems across the world and it’s all coming back at us. I used to think this was only incompetence on the part of our bosses. And God knows they’re not the masterminds they think they are.
“After years of working in GCHQ though, I’ve come to understand the game a bit better. There are good people in the service, people who believe in protecting our country, but the problem is, the nature of our enemies has changed. We’re not up against nation states anymore. I mean, sure, there’s China and Russia, Iran and the rest, but it’s not like they’re going to start a war, right? Not a proper, gloves off, global punch-up between the main contenders. Sure, there’s a little spat over oil or some other resource every now and then, but really, we’re all in each other’s pockets. Big business has too much to lose if any of the major powers lay into each other.
“Everything is secondary to doing business. And the more big business dictates the actions of government, the less we worry about falling bombs and invading armies. We go on about terrorism, but you know how many people were actually killed in terrorist acts in the US or the UK last year? None. Compare that with the number of fatal attacks carried out by the IRA back in the day—but that was about forty years ago. No, the greatest enemy now is anyone who challenges the status quo—and most of the time that threat to the people in power comes from their own citizens. A massive part of our security apparatus is being turned inward, directed at our own people.”
“Yeah? So tell me something I don’t know,” Chi snorted. “Come on, man! Welcome to the twenty-first century. Tell me about the goddamned brainwashing.”
“I’m getting to that bit,” Robert growled. “But that’s just the means, you understand? First, I’m going to tell you about the end. That’s what it’s all about. I’m going to give you what you’ve always been looking for, Goldilocks. A real conspiracy. The biggest and worst you’ve ever heard of.”
Chapter 6: Where We’re Headed
Robert took a labored, rasping breath as if the words were causing him physical strain.
“What I’m about to tell you is rated Top Secret, as in protected by the Official Secrets Act, as in I go to bloody prison if anyone finds out about what I’ve done. You cannot mention anything about me when you write about this, got that?”
“Yeah, yeah. I understand! Of course!” Chi nodded eagerly, casting his gaze around the bus to double-check that nobody was close enough to listen, even with a long-range microphone. A laser mike could be aimed at the window from outside, but it would be very difficult to get a clear signal while the bus was moving. The old guy probably had that figured out before he got on the bus.
“Right … right,” Robert regarded him with anxious, calculating eyes before continuing. Robert nodded toward the front of the bus.
“You see that camera up there?” he asked.
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Imagine that box had a microphone as well as the camera. Imagine it had x-ray capability or millimeter wave, infrared. Maybe even a chemical analyzer. Now imagine it’s on every bus, every train, every major street, and in every public building and a lot more besides. Imagine there are guys going around wearing rigs with the same gear. They can follow you, examine you, and stare straight through your body. The kind of security you have at airports, only they can come into your home without permission, without even a warrant. They can go anywhere they like. You have no right to refuse them. Nobody has any right to privacy anymore—any right at all. The government can peer in where it likes. They can rifle through all your dirty laundry. That’s where this country’s headed.”
Chi stared at the old man, frowning. Then he turned to gaze out the window.
“Do you hear what I’m telling you?” Robert snapped at him. “Those clowns back in the flat, talking about a totalitarian state, as if we’re living in old East Berlin these days? They haven’t a bloody clue. They don’t know how good they have it at the moment. What I’m talking about isn’t some science-fiction future concept. It’s not just some elitist, right-wing prick’s wet dream. This is the plan. Some seriously powerful people have already started taking measures to make it happen.”
“I spent years in Berlin going up against the Stasi, fighting just this kind of crap. Men and women, friends of mine, died trying to bring down the system in East Germany and now I see shitheads in my own organization planning stuff that the Stasi could only fantasize about.”
Chi cast his eyes back toward Robert, then squeezed his hands together, rubbing his thumbs over his knuckles.
“Are you listening to me?” Robert pressed him.
“Yeah, sure. Of course,” Chi replied, a slightly dazed expression on his face. “It’s just that … I’ve discussed this kind of thing with people for years. I’ve just never heard someone talk about it as if it was, y’know … real.”
“Well, you’re down the rabbit hole now, princess,” Robert snorted. “And those terms you found—the ones you stuck in your blog without knowing what they were about? That’s the root of the plan right there. Because to achieve all of this, the powers that be need people to be petrified—scared enough to give up their privacy for good.
“Now,” he added. “How about you tell me about this fridge?”
Chi took the little hard drive from his pocket and stared down at it. “The fridge belonged to a guy named Lidby, Gordon Scott Lidby. He’s a spin doctor for the Minister of Defense. You know the kind of guy everyone says could sell fridges to Eskimos? That’s him. Anyway, as a ‘political protest,’ those anarchists broke into his London pad. They’d needed help cracking the security system in the apartment building, so a friend of mine put them onto me. I hacked the system to get them in. It was stupid, really. I just thought it sounded like a bit of a laugh at the time. I only realized how big a mess I’d got myself into after I heard about all the damage they’d
done. They chucked his stereo, TV, and everything in the bath, sprayed paint on his clothes, wrote a load of graffiti all over the walls. I mean, Jesus, they destroyed the place. And then, on a whim, they stole his fridge.”
“Well, this guy Lidby must know something about the Scalps’ operation,” Robert said. “Doesn’t come as a huge surprise. Bloody spin doctors. He must have talked about it to someone while he was standing near his fridge, and all those new words got recorded.”
“Hmmph. Loose lips sink ships,” Chi murmured.
The bus was approaching another stop, and Robert indicated that they should get off. Chi followed him down the stairs. They were at Stratford train station. Chi hardly paid his surroundings any attention at all. His mind was racing. He was dying to connect that fridge’s hard drive to his laptop and see what else was on it. And then there was the thumb drive Robert had given him. This could be it; the huge story that would vindicate all his suspicions and make his career.
Not that his career was what was important here, of course. Obviously the fate of the free world was his main priority. But carving out a career was a practical necessity he had to bear in mind, too. Still, he couldn’t help being suspicious of this old spy and his motives. As Robert had said himself, he’d do anything—and use anyone—to get results.
“This surveillance state thing you were talking about,” Chi said in a low voice, as they walked toward the entrance to the station. “I dunno. It just sounds like an exaggeration of what we already have, but it’s hard to believe people would let things go that far. We still have a democracy … sort of. Why would people give up what little privacy they have left?”
“They started doing it a long time ago,” Robert assured him. “Reality TV, GPS on your phone, taking selfies. Most people want to be seen. They crave attention. Pretty soon they’re going to get it in spades. They just won’t realize the cost until it’s too late. Really, this is just the final stroke. So these fascist gits are going to use terrorists to create the fear they need to get the public on board, only real terrorists are kind of hard to control, as we found out in places like Ireland and Afghanistan and Iraq. Too unpredictable; you can’t trust them to stick to your plan. It’s easy to get ’em started, but they’re impossible to manage once they’re on a roll.
“No, instead, a special ops group known as the Scalps is going to kidnap some innocent fundamentalist types with the right backgrounds and they’ll go to work on their brains. I’m talking real-world mind control here.”
“I’ve written about that,” Chi told him eagerly. “Implanting alien biotechnology that grows into the brain stem—”
“There you go with the aliens again! Will you forget that crap? Screwing up a guy’s brain with drugs and torture works just fine.”
“Hardly reliable though—”
“For Christ’s sake! Shut up and listen! The Scalps are going to convince these poor bastards that they’re part of a new international organization—based in Sinnostan—whose intent is to terrorize Western Europe and the States with weapons of mass destruction. As if Sinnostan hasn’t got enough problems already. The place is poverty-stricken; their bloody economy runs on goats and rice. The manufactured terrorists will put videos online expounding their views, then they’ll be ‘captured’ by police forces in different countries. What they say under interrogation will be key to the plan. See, that way the information isn’t coming from some government with a political agenda. People are getting wary of that now. Instead, you’re hearing it from the police as part of a criminal investigation. The story’s ironclad.”
“But nobody’ll fall for that unless there are some real terrorist attacks,” Chi said.
“And there will be,” Robert said tersely. “Just enough to be convincing. Not too many casualties, but plenty of property damage. And once those captured ‘terrorists’ have convinced everyone that this threat exists, and public fear has reached fever pitch, then … Well then, just to make things worse, we’re going to start a goddamned war in Sinnostan.”
Chapter 7: Word Search
Robert left Chi at the station, reminding him to look at the USB drive as soon as possible. He’d barked Sharon Monk’s address at the younger man again, telling him to get his thumb out of his arse and contact the journalist before she left for her meeting with the editor. Then the old spook jumped on the first available train out of there. Chi took another train in the opposite direction, heading back into the city. Sitting in a half-empty car, he spread his coat and bag across the seats on either side to deter anyone from joining him, then he booted up his laptop and connected it to the hard drive.
He left Robert’s thumb drive wrapped in foil in his pocket. He wasn’t opening that little Pandora’s box without some serious security. There was no telling what kind of malware was on it. He’d prefer to wait until he got home and plug it into an air-gapped server he had there. That thing could take more punishment than Wolverine, but there wasn’t time to get to his house and back before Sharon Monk left for her meeting, so he’d have to set up some new firewalls on the laptop. The fridge drive shouldn’t be too dangerous though, so once he had run some basic checks on it, he opened it up on his desktop.
The fridge’s computer had a thousands-strong vocabulary of terms for food, but voice recognition software often struggled with unusual pronunciations or strong accents. If it came across a sound it didn’t recognize, it translated it into strings of numbers that, in turn, were translated into text that displayed on the screen. In this way, it could show its owner a word and ask if this was what he’d meant. If it wasn’t, the owner could key in the word by hand and the fridge would recognize it from that point on.
Gordon Lidby was from Newcastle, and while Chi thought the spin doctor’s Geordie accent was perfectly intelligible, the German-made fridge clearly did not. There was a very long list of queried words on the hard drive. There was no direct recording of Gordon Lidby saying anything, but there was an extensive list of words he’d used within range of the fridge’s microphone that the fridge did not understand.
Thankfully, Lidby must not have corrected his fridge’s interpretation very often, or he’d have seen all those secret terms it had picked up and had them deleted.
Scanning down through the thousands of words, Chi started copying and pasting any interesting vocabulary into a document on his desktop. In among things like: avocado, quinoa, foie gras, and stottie were more interesting ones, such as: collateral, deployment, and weaponized. They were in chronological order, not alphabetical, and without context, they looked hopelessly random.
He was still scanning through the list when the train arrived at Bethnal Green station. Chi snapped the laptop closed, got off, and headed toward Shoreditch. Sharon Monk lived with her girlfriend, the policewoman, in one of those narrow, four-story brick buildings that probably dated back to the early eighteenth century.
Monk lived above a bookmaker’s. Chi stood looking at the place for a minute, unsure of what to do next. It was almost half past two and he still hadn’t read anything that Robert had given him. He’d hoped that checking out Monk’s home would give him some insight into her life. It didn’t really. Robert had said Sharon would be leaving her flat at three-thirty. There was a café a little farther down the street with a window that would give him a view of Monk’s building. If she left early, he wanted to be able to catch her. In the meantime, he could start putting together a profile on her.
The café was a typical London meeting point, with bare brick walls, shelves full of exotic useless things from other countries, and framed, stylized prints of cups of coffee. The furniture was made from new wood sanded and treated to look like chunky reclaimed old wood. A few minutes later, armed with a vanilla latte and a pecan Danish, Chi started downloading and installing new firewall software. Rather than watching progress bars, he did a search on Monk. He felt the slight burn of jealousy as he scrolled down through all the mainstream
sites she’d been published in, the awards she’d won, and the people she’d interviewed. He reminded himself that he was an alternative journalist who kept himself outside of that sphere, but still … she had an impressive record.
She was a good-looking woman too: a face too long and a nose too big for conventional beauty, but fine-boned with lively green eyes and full lips and that look of confident intelligence Chi always found to be a turn on. She had auburn hair worn in a short, wavy style. He was between girlfriends at the moment so, as he often did when he liked the look of someone, he found himself weighing up the odds of her being interested in him. She was gay so … no chance there, but he looked forward to meeting her anyway. It would be an interesting conversation. He blew his cheeks out and flicked his gaze out the window, half wondering if he’d catch her walking down the street.
He clicked a fingernail against his teeth, and went back to the file he’d transferred over from the fridge’s hard drive. Pouring through the list of questionable words, he stopped and stared at one. He copied it over to the document he’d opened. Seconds later he found another odd one and copied that over, too. Then he added two more.
He chewed his thumbnail, gazing intently at the four new words on his screen: aliens, UFO, abductions, and experiments. He exhaled a shaky breath and gripped the sides of the screen.
“No aliens, eh?” he muttered, jutting his chin toward the words. “Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, you old bastard.”
Chapter 8: The Copper
Chi was staring out the window of the café, lost in thought, when a woman pulled out the chair beside him, plonked herself down, and smiled at him.
“Eh, would you like to sit down?” he said irritably, jarred from his musings.
