Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (2 page)

"disaffected loner" recruits and so-called fanatics remain quite so committed once they start picking up their teeth.'

Williams shook his head. 'So a few public floggings, maybe a beheading in Trafalgar Square, that what you have in mind?' He walked backwards as he called out his disappointed scorn, then turned again and proceeded in the direction of that much-vaunted sausage roll.

Fotheringham stood his ground, undaunted by Williams's departure.

'I'm talking about OFP 857.'

Williams stopped and turned around. OFP 857 was one of MI5's more badly kept secrets, and it was no surprise that Fotheringham should know about it. The question was, given his ratified flaky status, how much he really knew, or how much he'd merely bought into the myth.

'Did I hear you right?'

'Yes, sir. Since September 11th we've found ourselves facing a real monster: multi-headed, poison-tongued, murderous and entirely ruthless. I think the time is right for us to unleash a demon of our own.'

Williams had to stifle a laugh. Ever since Selby's colossal fuck-up in not burying it properly when he should have, this was a story that had rattled around the organisation down the years, in rumours, half-truths, speculation and out-and-out bollocks.

'What do you know about OFP 857? Seriously. Do you know what it stands for, for a start?'

'Omega File Prisoner 857. Imprisoned without trial, detained indefinitely, in order to cover up his activities. Also known as army sergeant Maurice Shiach, assigned to train Territorials and student OTCs around the country. Originally recruited as an informant by Special Branch in the Seventies, investigating suspected extreme right-wing factions in the TA. In the Eighties he 6

was unofficially given free rein to recruit and assemble--'

'Bollocks he was.'

'Just the way I heard it, sir.'

'That's the problem. There's so much hair grown on that sorry tale, a lot of
Boys' Own
shit that people want to believe in. What else do you know, from

"the way you heard it"?'

'That he ran a prototype covert assassination unit, to take out subversive elements without raising suspicion over the motives of their deaths. Accidents, suicides. That's why I brought it up. The people we're facing these days love to have martyrs. It fuels their cause. This way, we could deny them that while taking crucial heads.'

'You believe we can enhance the security of our country by killing certain of the people who live here?'

'People who are planning to undermine that security, yes. If we'd popped Bin Laden coming out of Highbury one afternoon, several of our citizens might not have died on September 11.'

This was Fotheringham in full flake mode. He wasn't the first to be seduced by the Shiach myth: who wouldn't like to believe we had a secret unit who could almost invisibly wipe out the people who threatened us? The reality was less romantic, a repeat of it unthinkable. It was high time Fotheringham was disabused of his misconceptions, though if he seriously had the stomach for what he was deludedly contemplating, Williams might yet be able to use that. If nothing else, he had brought to the top of the agenda one of the unsolved problems Williams had just inherited from Selby.

'You start with Bin Laden, but where do you stop, David? Who's going to make that call? Me? You? Shiach?'

'Desperate times call for desperate measures.'

'We're not that desperate yet. Believe me, he wasn't some 007, licensed to kill. Shiach was a nightmare looking for someone to dream him: someone feeling like you do now, angry and frustrated and wishing you could just blow the bad guys away. He was a psychopath in need of a cause to justify his bloodlust, and Shiach was more interested in the blood than the cause. He was little more than hired muscle, impatient to provide the way if someone else had the will.'

'You mean the Architect?'

'Ah, you've heard that nonsense too. Shiach's
own
myth-making, that one. That was how he seduced his recruits: told them about his silent partner who was in MI5, giving the impression that what he was up to was sanctioned. Trust me, what he was up to was entirely off his own back. He was a selfdeluding nutter, and the myths came about because Justin Selby inadvertently fed his delusion by covering the whole mess up.'

7

'What exactly did this mess consist of?'

'Shiach's "unit" murdered some lefty activist lawyer and made it look like suicide. To this day, the widow doesn't know any different. Nobody does. Selby found out, though. He'd been worried about Shiach for a while and engaged the time-honoured paranoid ploy of sending an informant to inform on his informant. He got nothing from the main man, but one of Shiach's TA recruits spilled his guilt-ridden guts, and not a moment too soon, because it wasn't all clever little suicides they were planning. That's the myth: that they dreamt up subtle, invisible ways to make inconvenient people disappear. Not Shiach. He wanted mayhem. Hide in plain sight. The more messy and insane, the harder it is to see the motive.'

'What happened to the recruit?'

'Topped himself, ironically.'

'You sure he topped himself?'

'Oh, yeah. Shiach was locked up by then. I say ironically because there were no repercussions for him, apart from his own guilt, it would seem. Selby had to make the whole thing go away, and he impressed upon the guy that there'd be no murder case to answer as long as no-one knew there'd
been
a murder. But Shiach didn't just need to be silenced, he needed to be stopped. That's where Selby screwed up. He should have thrown the whole thing open to the cops, but he was terrified of the political damage. You can say the phrase

"rogue element" as many times as you want, but when you've got someone connected to both the security and intelligence services wiping out dissidents and making it look like suicide. . . '

'I can see the headlines, yes.'

'And you have to understand, the way Selby's mind worked, he wasn't protecting a government or a political party. He was protecting the very office
of
government, because what credibility would that office have, home or abroad, if we were perceived to be assassinating dissenters? He had to cover up the whole thing, and he had to get rid of Shiach. Me? I'd have given him a taste of his own medicine, suicided the bastard. Unfortunately, Selby's stubborn principles ruled that out. He considered what Shiach had done an affront to everything he believed this country stood for, which included not killing people just because you find them inconvenient.'

'So it's true he had him imprisoned without trial?'

'That part is true, yes. His identity has been effectively wiped, his files sealed and the only thing anyone on the inside knows is that he doesn't have a parole date. Selby made him disappear in his own bloodless way, no doubt feeding Shiach's delusion that he's some kind of martyr, wronged patriot or detained secret agent. "Omega File Prisoner 857". He must have loved that. Good job he doesn't know what happened to Omega File Prisoners 8

one through 856.'

'What?'

'Nothing. There weren't any. It was Selby taking the piss because he knew Shiach drove a white VW Beetle.'

'I don't follow.'

'Herbie's registration was OFP 857.'

Fotheringham laughed. Williams knew he could now consider the myth officially debunked. The sausage rolls would all have been scoffed by now, but it had been worth it, as it looked like he now had the answers to two of his inherited problems: namely yoking Fotheringham's loyalty and erasing Selby's big mistake.

'The bastard's been rattling around various prisons since 1991, out of sight while his legend gets bigger and wilder. And now that Selby's gone, he's my responsibility. Out of sight but not out of mind, it would be fair to say. There's safeguards in place to stop him talking to anyone on the outside, but nothing's perfect, and you can imagine the fallout if his story ever did reach the public domain. It was a risk Selby was prepared to live with for the sake of his principles, but let's just say he was a better man than I.'

'I think I hear you, sir.'

'You still think certain individuals' deaths would benefit our national security?'

'I do.'

'Well, I might just have a job for you.'

9

December 16, 2001

Shiach stared into the blackness ahead, above, below. Everywhere but behind. Behind, there were search beams, bright and penetrating, sweeping the decks in automated arcs, while sirens, klaxons and shouts rang pointlessly into the void. The ship was a tiny island of noise and light, its rage and ferment an insignificance amid this vast, indifferent nothingness. From the edge of such nothingness, it was easy to see just how small his world was, what little he would be leaving behind if he chose to make the leap. Somewhere within the cacophony, and despite the rush of wind in his ears, he heard the shriek of metal that announced his makeshift barrier had been breached. Two guards emerged on to the rain-lashed deck, looking urgently around and quickly spotting him as he gripped the rim on the starboard bow. They shouted something, lost to the night, then split up, preparing to move in cautiously from two sides.

Time to decide. Cold, unknowing blackness ahead; a vivid, endless certainty behind.

He'd been offered a starker version of this choice before, and in a way it had been available to him every day since. Until now, there had been more reason to remain upon this tiny world, even if that reason was little more than hope, or even merely defiance.

'You could, of course, save both our consciences a lot of trouble,' Selby had said, placing a jar of sleeping tablets and a bottle of whisky down on the desk. The whisky was a cute touch, deliberately archaic, Selby's revenge for Shiach telling him he belonged in a bygone era. 'I know it should be a revolver, but I didn't think that would be a wise thing to be giving you.'

'You never had anything to fear from me, Selby. You're the one who thinks we're on different sides.'

Selby didn't reply to that, just left the room and closed the door, the last time Shiach ever saw him. He wasn't going to stay and argue when he knew he'd made all the points he needed to, especially as solitude would be more conducive to the resolution he sought.

There would indeed be 'a lot of trouble' for the sake of Selby's conscience; trouble Shiach had no intention of sparing him, because his conscience was 11

clear. No amount of whisky was going to elicit any remorse for his past, but it was more likely his future Selby thought he'd recoil from. Imprisonment without trial, no sentence, no parole, no judges to appeal to and no-one he could tell his story. Leaving aside the fact that nobody would believe him (and the stinging irony that he had been fastidious in wiping out the evidence himself), there was the inescapable conundrum, as Selby had so sincerely pointed out, that it would be entirely self-defeating. If he somehow managed to make the truth known, he would achieve only the destruction of the things he had sought to protect, and deliver everything into the hands of the very people he detested. He would disappear, leaving no trace of what he had done, to enter a world where he could tell nobody who he was. There would be no communication, no trace to be left for anyone to follow, and in seven years he would receive a legal declaration of his own death, but in reality there would be no such definite end in sight.

The whisky and pills option was presumably supposed to look that bit more attractive by comparison, and Shiach would admit that for a bleak few moments it did. However, the problem for Selby was that it wasn't a limited-time offer. If he decided he couldn't take it any more, Shiach could check out any time he liked, and every morning he woke up alive was another day on which the world, the country or even just the right minds could change. That possibility was the price Selby would be forced to pay for his principles, just as silence was the price Shiach would be forced to pay for his. The difference was, Shiach trusted Selby's moral resolve far more than was apparently reciprocated, given the series of obvious MI5 plants he sent in to monitor him down the years.

At first he considered it deeply insulting that Selby should think his agents wouldn't be spotted by a man of his experience, but in time it dawned on him that perhaps it was only the screws (and maybe even their own handlers) they were supposed to deceive. It was Selby's way of letting him know he still had his eyes and ears on him, no matter how many years passed, no matter what changed in the world outside.

The world on the inside changed little, even when it changed completely, as upon the two occasions he was moved to new prisons, each supposedly surpassing the security of its predecessor. Like he could ever have escaped. Escape was for lucky and audacious opportunists, exploiting lapses and complacency, or for schemers who masked their intentions behind a placid, anonymous face in the crowd of a teeming population. There would never be complacency around Omega File Prisoner 857, nor would any screw be allowed to think at any time that he posed no threat. He didn't have an iron mask welded round his bonce, but it was still pretty obvious to the hired help that his was a special and extremely sensitive case. Their lack of even casual in12

quisitiveness, despite natural curiosity, was as telling as it was conspicuous. He would occasionally ask
them
how much they knew about him, but the most expansive response he'd ever got was that they were told 'the information is on not so much a need-to-know basis as a what-you-don't-know-can't-hurtyou basis'. And that went right up the chain, within a system that was too busy, too strained just getting on with itself to allow its functionaries to dwell long upon one little mystery. Even an intrigued governor would have simply too much else on his plate to get hung up on questions he had no hope of receiving answers to. OFP 857, or less formally 'Prisoner John Smith', with all his added security considerations (no visitors; no mail, out or in; no phone cards nor ever to be unescorted in an area containing a telephone; no recording devices; no blank paper; periodicals only to be read - and replaced, intact, unmarked - under supervision; etcetera, etcetera, etcetera) would send any intelligent mind into bouts of speculation at first. Then soon enough he'd just become part of the furniture, an albeit colourful permanent fixture, but as such one that, like all other permanent fixtures, everybody got used to. Everything becomes banal in prison, even mysteries. Whatever aura surrounds you when you walk in soon wears off once everybody's seen you getting on with the same routine as all the rest, day after day after day. There was this strange unspoken code that you never asked about each other's crimes. You could open up about your own, but you didn't ask, recognising an invaluable right of privacy. Thus he would not have been conspicuous for never discussing why he was inside, if it wasn't that, whether they spoke about it or not, everyone always knew what everyone else had done. Everyone else except John Smith, OFP 857. Christ knew what they guessed about him, but nothing they dreamed up could be as disturbing as the truth. He had suffered a gross miscarriage of justice, but he couldn't complain that the state had got the wrong man, and anyway he wasn't comfortable considering himself some hapless victim. He would not disown his acts even if he could seek absolution, so there was no journey of self rediscovery to embark upon. And given that successive governments would be deftly protected from knowledge of his existence, he could hardly be considered a political prisoner. However, he had been incarcerated indefinitely and without trial, for following what he believed in: for having the guts to carry out the deeds necessary to protect the way of life and freedoms enjoyed by the very people who would most vehemently condemn him. That was the moral cowardice of the unaffected. Easy to say over your
Guardian
and croissants: 'We must find better solutions than violence.' Meaning YOU, some other bugger, must find better solutions, while we'll be busy getting on with our comfortable lives. He was a prisoner of conscience.