‘I won’t see you out,’ says Seethrough. ‘Cross the river and head down Albert Embankment. The walk’ll do you good.’ I’m still trying to take in the substance of our meeting, and perhaps it shows. He detects my feelings and, in an unexpectedly avuncular gesture, switches his long overcoat into his left arm and puts the other over my shoulders. ‘Let it settle,’ he says in a near whisper. ‘Get your stuff tied up so that you can do some travelling, and I’ll have some briefings organised. I’ll contact you in a week on the mobile. Look after the things I gave you.’
I walk outside. It’s overcast and has begun to drizzle. I’m at the south-east corner of St James’s Park, looking along Horseguards Road and a stone’s throw from Downing Street. I don’t mind the walk. I can’t help thinking how confident and grown-up Seethrough seems. I picture him retiring at fifty-five to sell his expertise to big businesses from his Home Counties mansion, dividing his time between Glyndebourne, charity balls and unofficial meetings with heads of UK industry.
I reach Gerhardt half an hour later, remove the parking ticket from the windscreen and, resisting a momentary urge to weep, start up and head for home.
Jason Elliot
The Network
5
For days I’m hoping to continue with life as if nothing’s really happened, feeling all the while like a man condemned. My meeting with Seethrough has stirred up memories I’ve preferred to forget, and now they return to me like ghosts, visiting at unexpected moments. From time to time I wonder whether Seethrough’s proposal is no more than an elaborate hoax, and imagine him jumping out at me one day in his long coat, waving his chequebook from Coutts and declaring the whole thing a joke.
My sleep grows disturbed, and I have strange dreams in which I’m wandering along the secret corridors of Vauxhall Cross. In one I’m walking under a giant portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh that hangs in the main atrium, but the face is Seethrough’s, grinning cynically at me. Recalling our meeting gives me a jittery feeling akin to panic. It’s as if the visible events of ordinary life are now no more than a stage set that ordinary people believe is real, but behind which I alone know what’s going on. I tell myself I’ll get used to keeping things secret, and push thoughts of the future aside. But I know too that a secret can enliven one’s life or poison it, and I’m wondering which way things will eventually turn out.
Seethrough has said he’ll contact me again in a week’s time. But the lack of news makes me anxious, and the evenings fall heavily. My working routine has gone haywire. I drink a bottle and a half of wine every night, and I’m smoking again, a vice I’ve managed to evade for over a year. For most of the week I avoid contact with people, stop shopping and, worst of all, run out of decent red wine. I take to going for long walks alone and driving Gerhardt cross-country on the muddy tank routes over Salisbury Plain, thinking to test my nerve in the event of getting caught and arrested by the Military Police. I shouldn’t, because it would be a bad moment to be arrested. But you do odd things when the craving for adrenalin begins to set in.
Then two things happen. The following Saturday morning, along with a reminder that I haven’t paid my television licence, a postcard arrives from Afghanistan. It’s strangely timely. On the front is a poorly reproduced colour photograph, probably taken in the 1970s, of a turbanned Kuchi tribesman leading a caravan of camels, silhouetted against a background of barren mountains. It’s postmarked Kabul, but I can’t make out the date. Nor do I recognise the hand. It reads,
Be doubly warned that the journey here takes at least thirteen hours, in temperatures of up to forty degrees. We all look forward to seeing you here. Please do keep in touch. Your old friend, Mohammed.
I’ve had the occasional letter and postcard from Afghanistan, but I’m embarrassed not to remember a Mohammed who considers himself to be my old friend. Certainly not one who speaks English well enough to know his prepositions and such an expression as ‘be doubly warned’. I think of the English-speaking people I’ve met in Kabul and on de-mining missions over the years. Most of them are foreigners. I wonder if Mohammed might be a Western-educated Iranian. But my mind’s a blank. I’ve simply forgotten. Odder still, it’s winter now and nowhere in Afghanistan does the temperature reach forty degrees. Perhaps the card was posted months before, and has only just been flown out. The Taliban postal service is hardly famous for its swiftness. I walk into the living room, put the postcard on the mantelpiece and stare at it. It bothers me that I can’t identify the sender. I decide I’ll leave it there until I can.
The second event is a phone call from Seethrough. I’ve yet to get into the habit of calling him Macavity. When the mobile he’s given me begins to ring, I have no idea at first what it is. The tone resembles a two-tone police siren, and makes me think some kind of alarm has gone off in the house, only there aren’t any alarms in the house. After a few moments of bafflement, I find the handset with its blinking green light, disconnect it from the charger lead and press the answer button.
‘This is Macavity,’ says a watery-sounding voice, as the data packets are digitised and encrypted, then reassembled again in the handset. At some point the Firm’s special microchip begins sending out its impenetrable white noise. ‘Confirm please.’
‘This is Plato,’ I say, feeling silly.
‘All well?’
‘Can I change the ring tone on this thing?’ I ask.
‘No, you can’t. Now just listen. I’m going to send you someone.’
‘That’s nice,’ I say. ‘Will she jump out of a cake?’
‘It’s a he. He’s going to help you to get up to speed on a few things. If you get along, I’ll send him with you. He’s ex-Regiment and I want you to do whatever he asks.’
‘Whose regiment?’
‘The Regiment.’
That’s different. The Regiment is what the SAS calls the SAS. I picture a black-booted figure in body armour and respirator, Heckler amp; Koch MP5 at the ready, swinging through the window of the house as I lie in bed reading the Sunday papers.
‘I hope it’s not Andy McNab,’ I say. ‘He’s far too intellectual for me.’
‘Don’t be facetious. It’s not Andy McNab; it’s the fellow who trained him.’
That shuts me up.
‘Roger that. When?’
‘That’s his business. Just be nice to him. He’ll introduce himself as a friend from London. By the way, he’s a Mirbat vet, so I advise you not to mess him around.’
‘A what?’
‘Mirbat. Look it up. I have to go. Good luck.’
There’s a bleep, and a recording of a severe-sounding woman’s voice repeats, ‘Please hang up, please hang up.’
I’m impressed. Both by the mobile, which seems to do its job, and by a man who seems to do his. A man so busy he has no time for small talk. I’m about to reattach the handset to its cable when looking at it gives me an idea. Hearing Seethrough’s voice has reminded me of the mobile’s other functions, and I wonder now if they really work.
There’s a way, I realise, to test the infrared. I can switch my video camera to ‘nightshot’ mode, when the camera uses its own infrared source to film in total darkness, and then see what the mobile looks like. And it’s easy to test the ultraviolet function. There are dyes that show up under ultraviolet light in all sorts of things.
As soon as it’s dark, I’m thus able to waste several hours. In pitch blackness, viewed through the camera in infrared mode, the little screen on the mobile is, as promised, as bright as a searchlight. It lights up the entire room and is even visible from under a blanket. Handy, as Seethrough has suggested, for landing a helicopter in the garden.