Transition (31 page)

I met with some ill feeling from a few of my new colleagues in the police force at first, perhaps because I had been brought
in at a relatively senior level. However, I like to think that I soon won the respect of almost all of them, though of course
there will always be those in any organisation who will find something to be resentful about and one simply has to live with
that fact.

I found myself in the civilian police, albeit the more senior and serious national police force, at a moment in time when
the full extent of the Christian Terrorist threat was just beginning to become clear even to those, not least our own government,
who had persuaded themselves that such people could be dealt with effectively by negotiation and the occasional slap on the
wrist.

I think the first airport massacre ended that policy of folly. The CTs sent in a small suicide team of big, well-trained men
who simply overpowered one of the two-man armed police teams who patrolled our ill-defended airports at the time. The two
officers stood no chance; they were bundled to the ground by three or four fanatics of substantial physical size, their throats
were cut without mercy and their machine guns and ammunition clips taken from them and turned on the nearest check-in queue.
The members of the suicide team not firing the guns set about slashing at as many of the screaming, fleeing holidaymakers
as they could, chasing down women and children and slitting their throats too, without mercy. Nearly forty innocent people
of all ages were butchered in this orgy of violence.

When the machine guns ran out of ammunition everyone in the team was meant to kill themselves but two of them were overpowered
by angry citizens before they could take that coward’s way out. One did not survive their summary justice but the other did
and it was on him that I had what I will freely confess was the pleasure of working subsequently, with the aim of discovering
as much as possible about the organisation and aims of the CT organisation.

I felt intense pride that I had been chosen to conduct this interrogation. I took it as a compliment both to my technical
skills but also to my reputation for the measured and considered application of my techniques. Such was the national outrage
at the attack at the time that a more hot-headed operative might have botched the assignment. It is a myth that the police
and other security personnel are immune to emotion, both their own and that of the law-abiding populace at large. We may be
trained to combat the deleterious effects of acting on such emotions, but we are not inhuman.

I too felt a cold fury towards the wretched individual who had carried out such a cowardly attack, but I would not let that
emotion, however understandable, cloud my professional judgement regarding the task in hand or allow any rashness or overreaction
so caused to effectively offer this animal of an extremist an overly quick escape from the torments he so richly deserved.

The specific operational details of the interrogation need not detain us here. The desire to know of such things can be almost
prurient at times, in my opinion. My colleagues and I are paid to do such things and are trained to cope with the psychological
fallout of our actions and there are good reasons why a veil is drawn over such matters to protect the general populace, who
do not deserve to have to confront the realities that we have to face every day to keep them safe.

Suffice to say, despite the subject’s attempts to convert me to his bizarre, perverted and cruel religion with its emphasis
on martyrdom, cannibalism and the alleged ability of their holy men to forgive all sins no matter how horrendous and barbaric,
I did not reconvert to become a Christian! And let me just say that I do not even concede that he was displaying any real
bravery or strength of will in trying to do so. Fanatics are driven purely by their own fanaticism, and anyway it is a common
technique used by subjects trained to resist interrogation to try to turn the resultant discourse back upon the questioner,
not so much in any realistic hope of altering their views or causing them to cease or go easier in what they are doing, of
course, but simply as a way for the subject to take his mind off the process itself.

In any case, I am satisfied that while the cell system of the terrorist organisation sadly protected the identities of its
other members apart from the six in the suicide team itself, I, along with my colleagues, extracted all that there was to
be extracted from the subject and, thanks to our restraint, we were able to deliver him alive if not intact, and certainly
not unbroken, to the Justice Ministry for his trial and subsequent (well-deserved in my opinion) execution.

Adrian

I made a lot of money for Mr Noyce. Not like that dingbat son of his. Barney lost Mr N a lot of money. Soaked it up, pissed
it away and snorted it. He would reappear from his bar in Goa every couple of years and announce he was coming back to stay
in London and do something useful but he never did. Always ended up going back to the bar. He thought his dad ought to bail
him out by giving him a job with his own firm, but Mr N wasn’t having it. Blood might be thicker than water but it’s no match
for liquidity, know what I mean? Money is serious. You fuck about with it at your peril.

Barney was always at Mr N to give him the bar, too, to turn it over to him legally but Mr N was too clever for that as well.
He knew Barney would just sell it or lose it in a poker game or use it as collateral to fund some shitwit scheme that he’d
make the usual unholy fucking mess of and be back at Mr and Mrs N’s with the begging bowl shortly after.

Frankly, I think Ed found his boy a bit of an embarrassment. He was glad he was mostly arm’s length away in sunny Goa. Barney
and me weren’t getting on so well any more either. I found him a bit of a moaner, always on about how tough things were for
him when this was clearly a load of bollocks. Little cunt had had a charmed life with all the advantages, hadn’t he? Not my
fault or his dad’s that he’d fucked it. And I mean, running a bar on a beach? That’s the fucking jackpot prize for most people,
that is, that’s what your average geezer would regard as a brilliant retirement. Hard done by, my arse.

And he had the nerve to blame me for this, at least partly. Good as told me this when we were drunk together once during a
weekend at Spetley Hall. Like it was all my fault because I’d replaced him in Mr and Mrs N’s affections. So what if I had?
I was a better friend to them than he was a son. I mean, the soft git.

But I was the golden boy, wasn’t I? Never mind that the Noyces were like a second family to me, Mr N’s firm was like the first
national bank of AC. I made a fucking mint. Most of it went to the firm but a lot came back to me in the way of a decent salary
but especially in bonuses. Mr N and I had some heated discussions on the subject of bonuses on a few occasions but we always
came to an agreement in the end.

I suppose we both always knew I’d be leaving and going elsewhere eventually, but in the meantime the good times rolled with
no hard feelings.

Bought a bigger flat in delightful Docklands and a succession of less and less practical cars. Thought about a yacht but decided
they just weren’t me – you could always charter if you really needed to. Took me hols in Aspen, the Maldives, Klosters, the
Bahamas, New Zealand and Chile. Not to mention Majorca and Crete, doing a bit of old-fashioned raving in the big hot loud
clubs.

And the girls. Oh, bless their little cotton gussets, the girls: Saskia and Amanda and Juliette and Jayanti and Talia and
June and Charley and Charlotte and Ffion and Jude and Maria and Esme and Simone. There were lots of others, but those were
the non-casual ones, the ones I took the trouble of remembering their names and was happy to have stay over more than once.
I loved them all in my own way and I guess they returned the favour. Most of them wanted to take things further but I never
did. There’s no “us” in commitment, I’d tell them, there’s just a “me.” They couldn’t complain. I was generous and if there
were ever hard feelings then it wasn’t my fault.

And every month that 10K in US greenery appeared in my main spending account, and every time I saw it on the statement I got
a little leap of the heart, remembering what had happened or what had seemed to happen that night in chilly Moscow, at the
Novy Pravda.

After our visit to the room with the black furniture and the amber light, Mrs M and I went back to the table where Connie
Sequorin was chatting to two large Russian guys. They didn’t look very pleased to see me and Mrs M, especially me, but they
left their cards and a bottle of Cristal and fucked off soon enough. We ate more blinis and caviar, drank more champagne and
Mrs M and Connie both danced with me. I was still in a daze, though, not really paying attention to very much at all. Soon
enough Mrs M paid the bill, we got our coats and walked straight to the waiting Merc that had brought us here. Snow was swirling
from the orange-black sky. We went to this massive, very bright and warm hotel and I was handed the key to my own room. Mrs
M said she’d be in touch and pecked me on the cheek. Connie said the same and did the two-cheek pretend-kiss thing. They had
a suite and I wondered, as I padded down a very broad tall corridor to my room, if they had something going together.

I slept till mid-afternoon the next day and found an envelope had been shoved under my door with a thousand roubles in it
and a first-class BA ticket to Heathrow on a flight leaving four hours later. The room had been paid for. Mrs M and Connie
had checked out hours earlier. A note left behind reception by Mrs M just said, “Welcome abroad. Mrs M.” Welcome abroad. Not
Welcome aboard. Welcome abroad. I couldn’t tell if this was a mistake or a bit of cleverness.

I went back. Back to Moscow and back to the club, the following month. I made friends with the manager guy Kliment (after
a bit of suspicion – he didn’t really remember me or Mrs M or Connie Sequorin and probably thought I was police or a journalist
or something) and got to have a look round the place one day. I found the room, the bedroom where Mrs M had taken me and we’d
seemed to go on the weirdest of weird trips to a marshy wasteland where there was no Moscow, just ruins.

It hadn’t occurred to me at the time to bring back a flower or a pebble or something – I’d been too fucking freaked out, I suppose.
Not that that would have proved anything anyway. I knew something bizarre had happened but I didn’t know exactly what. I had
the use of the room and the run of the place for the afternoon, until the staff arrived in the early evening to make the club
ready for the night’s fun, and I had a good look round the room, the rooms on either side and even the cellar underneath and
the little private bar directly above but it all looked plain and kosher, just slightly seedy in the cold strip light of day
and I couldn’t see how the trick, assuming it was a trick, obviously, had been pulled. Drugs, I supposed. Or hypnosis. Suggestion
and all that, know what I mean?

No, I didn’t know what I meant either. It had just been too fucking real. I left the place no wiser than when I’d arrived
and even turned down the offer of VIP entry, a nice table and a free bottle of bubbles from my new friend Kliment. Tired,
I said. Some other time. Flew straight back to dear old fuck-off Blighty that night.

I looked into travelling back to the Zone, around Chernobyl, but it was properly difficult to arrange and I never really felt
happy with the whole idea. The more I thought about it the more sure I was I’d go back, at some risk to my future health,
find the place where Mrs M had been hanging out and discover, oh wow, it was empty and deserted and it was as if it had all
never been. No office, just an old supermarket or warehouse or whatever the fuck.

Tried asking Ed about it but he claimed he knew nothing. Never met or heard of a Mrs Mulverhill. Connie S was just a woman
he’d vaguely heard of recently at the time when she asked to be introduced to me. He swore he’d never heard of anything called
the Concern and he certainly wasn’t getting any mysterious dosh every month, eight and a half K or otherwise. I’d have pushed
further but he was just on the edge of getting annoyed with me, I could tell, and I was pretty sure I knew when Mr N was telling
the truth by now. I hadn’t told him any more than I’d needed to but he was obviously intrigued just from the little I had
said and started asking me questions. I stonewalled him, told him he didn’t want to know any more.

Connie herself seemed to have disappeared off the face of the fucking Earth. Phones disconnected, business address a briefly
rented office in Paris, unheard of by anybody who might have known somebody in her line of work.

Checked the account, saw the money, waited for the call that never came. All that happened was that a couriered letter arrived
from a C. Sequorin in Tashkent, Uzbekistan with a bunch of weird-looking names that were codes, apparently. I was to commit
them to memory if I could, otherwise just keep the letter safe for future reference. I put it in my safe. (I hired a private
eye in Tashkent, because you can do that sort of thing these days in the wonderful new globalised world, providing only that
you have access to piles of dosh. Nothing. Another deserted office. No joy tracing the source of the funds in the Cayman Islands
either. Well, of course not. If governments can’t trace anything in tax havens, how the fuck was I supposed to? When I thought
about this it was actually highly fucking reassuring.)

A week after the letter with the codes, a padded envelope arrived with something the size and weight of a brick inside. It
was a black box of thick plastic and inside that was a steel box with a sort of dial on the top made of seven concentric rings
of different metals arranged around a very slightly concave button in the centre. These rings circled round and back with
a sort of smooth clickiness, if you know what I mean, and if you looked carefully they had lots of little patterns of dots
on them but they didn’t seem to do anything. There was a thinner-than-hair fine line around the middle of the box, like it
was meant to open, maybe if you got the dials on the top arranged just right, like a combination lock on a safe, I suppose,
but with the box came a note from Mrs Mulverhill saying I was to keep this metal box safe, guard it with my life and only
give it to somebody who knew the codes from the letter.