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Major Cleverly
I’d been aware of David for a while. Eugene had been reporting back to me about how the New Tomorrow major was competent, ruthless and efficient, but his sidekick David Goodall was just a boy dreaming of Cold War tradecraft, dead drops and honey traps.
Eugene had played it just as we’d planned. He hooked them, limited their upside, and funneled them into the only viable solution. He was one of my best students. An old hand now, especially after being shown the pictures of his honey trap with the Heritage Front intelligence fool, Bradley. Sometimes you have to balance which is most effective: the embarrassment to the other side or the actual intelligence gained.
I sat in with the old codgers in the security committee and waved through David’s clearances, sublimely staying my hand, so his journey didn’t seem too smooth.
You know, I don’t even feel like a spider anymore, orchestrating my prey’s death. With this, it’s almost as if I’m directing an Oscar-nominated movie, placing a player, anticipating his every move, cajoling and persuading, even if he struggles to improvise.
David was my star.
*****
David
I was killing it. Maybe I had it in me after all, but the thing that still bothered me was the sacrifice I needed to make. My present. What was I going to give them? I’d rehearsed it a million and one times with Major Jones, but, you know, this was the killing fields, not the cool, controlled atmosphere of the office.
Being walked through the tests by Eugene added a higher, more detailed dimension. He’d been through all the tests and knew the Return major. He’d given us a ton of intel on it during his debrief, so I knew what I was getting into. He also thought I had promise.
What could go wrong?
*****
Major Cleverly
I couldn’t remember the exact word, but there was a word or phrase for people who harmed animals when they were children. I had always been ambitious, so I hadn’t pulled legs off spiders or insects: I had pinned out cats or dogs, usually cats for some reason. You know, splayed them out, got out my old trusty penknife, and cut their legs off. Bones could be a problem, so I used a stone to hit the blade, which was much more effective than sawing I’d discovered.
It wasn’t the blow itself. It was the ritual. I needed to go through the process until he reached the point that he realised that, yes, I really was going to do it. Then I could sit back and watch the look on his face.
Orgasmic.
He lay there like a cat.
Waiting.
The air carried the tang of antiseptic and whisky, biting and intoxicating.
“So, what can you offer to cement our fledgling relationship, David?”
I could see it in his eyes.
He’d obviously rehearsed this extensively, probably with Jones.
“I’ve got some great files you guys would kill for, Major.”
“That I would kill for? Really?”
“Oh, you know; personnel, safe houses, passwords, that kind of stuff.”
“Where do you think you are, David? The Amateur Sleuth Society?”
“Eh?”
Leg one. “We have all these files already, David. Come on, don’t waste our time.”
He expected to negotiate which files. Beads of sweat dotted his lips.
He swallowed.
“Oh, well, I can give you incriminating evidence about the NT brass that would get them chucked out PDQ.”
You just couldn’t get the quality these days. What an amateur. I was going to overlook the fact that he shouldn’t have the clearance for this; practising late into the night had been a waste of time…
Leg two. “I imagine we’re talking about the great straw-nose himself, General Wigmore, and his courtesans du jour. Isn’t that right, David? You’ll need to dig deeper, don’t you think?”
I drummed my nails in a slow, deliberate rhythm on the desk.
He was going through the New Tomorrow training manual chapter by chapter. I knew; it lay on my desk at home. My daughter would have admired the way he tried desperately not to look as if he was panicking, but the strain was apparent in the way his wrinkles appeared and disappeared. From experience, I’d say we’d need the extractor fan soon, for the reek.
His eyes welled up.
“What about all the material your own guy’s given us, then you’ll know what to change and stuff like that?”
The drowning man, clutching at straws.
Leg three. “We use our own levers against our Eugene McDougal, David. He’s an open book to us. Dig deeper, boy! You’ve really got to make this worth our while.”
“OK, OK, I’ll tell you about Major Jones and his friends.” Tears dripped from his cheeks onto the desk. His breathing quickened.
“What about them?”
He was delighted that he’d mentioned something I didn’t know. He would have wrapped it up and put a bow on it if he could have.
He was shaking.
He wanted to stall, but he couldn’t.
The words came pouring out.
“They’ve got their own cell. They run their own agents. It’s just like a mini secret service. They’ve asked me to join, you know.”
“The group that meets in the back room of the Horsemakers Arms?”
Shock.
“Uh-huh.”
Leg four. SMASH! The stone hit the blade. “We’re bombing that place tonight.”
“No.”
The tiny little word was barely audible, but it told us what we needed to know loud and clear.
Memories of all the times he and his boss had worked together played across his tear-stained face: the laughs, the close shaves; his mentor steering him toward betrayal.
His little face. I wish I could have recorded it, but all that technology had been lost in the war.
What a shame.
David
I could vaguely hear the machinery grind into action through the door; barked orders, a muted phone call, heels clicking.
I’d handed them the key.
What the fuck had I done? Jonesy, Jonesy, what was I going to tell Ella and little Timmy? I didn’t know if I could ever face them again. We’d practiced and practiced, but nothing could’ve prepared me for Cleverly. I felt like I was his toy, fuck’s sake.
I wanted to throw up. I wanted to beat him up. Mostly, I wanted to bury myself alive.
And what about Eugene, who had been so supportive? Whatever happened to “I’ll cover for you”? “It’ll be fine,” and “You’re worrying too much.” Had he known this was how it would end? Had he set me up?
What a stupid, naive bastard I’d been. A little boy playing a mad, dangerous man’s game. How could I have been so vain, so ambitious, so keen to prove myself that it’d cost my colleagues their lives? I wanted to die.
I could see his face as clear as day. “You’ll get through this,” Jonesy had promised. “The important thing is that you get through the tests to the other side. Then you can do some actual damage.”
He couldn’t have known.
Could he?
*****
Major Cleverly
I walked into the office.
A faint smell of cigar smoke hung in the air, a cut-glass decanter on the desk.
“Well played, Cleverly. That was a delight to watch,” said the colonel, giving me a congratulatory slap on the back.
The others clapped, grinning from ear to ear.
Major Brown laughed as he collected his winnings. He must have won the sweep.
I took a sip of water. “Make sure they get every single one of them at their meeting tonight. If we don’t, it’ll make us look weak. This needs to be devastating.”
Brown nodded, “The boy’s pretty devastated already, don’t you think? I was thinking of getting a photographer in there. His face was such a picture, we could put it in our manual.”
*****
David
Where was the straightforward journey? Where was my boss, who had my back? What had led to this situation apart from my greed, ambition, and selfishness …apart from my own need to finally measure up?
None of the answers were good. They all showed off my deficiencies in the minutest detail. Zoom right in, see what an exquisite job I’d made of fucking absolutely everything up.
I hadn’t a clue what was on the horizon, but I seemed to have been allowed a few precious moments to relax and reflect.
So, I asked myself, what’s on the reflection menu today?
I ran a scan, systematically checking how each part of my body was feeling.
Head, whirling.
Arms, chest, normal.
Heart, dust.
Stomach, churning slowly.
Groin, broken,
legs, shaky.
Feet, ready to run.
I cleared my mind and let go.
Who was I? David. Where was I? The Return HQ. What was I doing there? Not killing my friends. I’d come for the codebook.
What was stopping me from getting it? Cleverly. What was he? A Return officer. Who was he? A man.
Exactly, it didn’t matter how good he was; he was just a man!
He was a man; I was a man, that was it.
He’d only won the first round, nothing more.
There was no one to help me. Major Jones was dead; Cleverly had shown me photos of the pub blast, including Jonesy’s hand sticking out of the rubble wearing his distinctive wedding ring. The shocking atrocities of the ‘terror attack’ caused a nearby agent to scream in frustration at losing a source that had taken her months to cultivate. Eugene was still theirs. I was alone. I had to be strong. I could rely only on myself.
Cleverly couldn’t cheat or know the answer. There was no one to tell him. He couldn’t know my weaknesses; he couldn’t know my strengths. Only I knew.
I was there for the codebook. That had to be my focus, but what did I know about it?
Nothing.
I kept remembering something my gran had said when I was a kid. ‘You’ve come this far. Some of your things have been broken, but if you give up now, breaking them will have been for nothing.’
That was it!
She was right. The only way to do Jonesy justice was to keep going and win. Get the book.
I needed to be more proactive.
I needed manageable steps.
The codebook: Where is it? Who keeps it? What did Eugene say about it? Did it really exist?
Cleverly: What did I know about him? Who was he? Where did he come from? What did he want? What did he want from me? What were his weaknesses, strengths, threats…?
Eugene: Was he lost, or could I blackmail him or threaten him with something? All I could think of was his fear of pain and torture.
The only people I knew there were Eugene and Cleverly. Only Eugene could tell me about the codebook, if I could persuade him by using torture in some way. How? He might tell me something about Cleverly too, if I played my cards right.
How could I find a way to speak to Eugene alone? If I could, then I would have to leverage his compromising photos with the HF intelligence leader and the best of his recent reports.
I’m still in Dreamland.
I’m struggling.
But Eugene McDougal was nobody’s fool. He must have felt he had to contact me, because he’d been waiting for me in the shadows between the office and the main door. As I was going outside for some much-needed fresh air, he just appeared and ‘accidentally’ bumped into me, pulled me into a small office and locked the door behind us. The room smelled of stale coffee and fear.
What the fuck did this slippery little eel want?
He spoke in a rushed whisper, “I’m so, so sorry about what happened earlier. You were left with no choice, but you have to believe me when I say that I hadn’t a choice either.”
I saw red.
I grabbed him by the lapels and head-butted him. Not enough to knock him out, but just enough to take control of the situation, “You’d better start coming up with the goods, McDougal!”
”OK, OK, what do you need? I’m truly sorry about Jones. He treated me fairly when I was in an awful place. Few people do that.”
So, I told him what I needed to know about the codebook, and he answered me freely and, I thought, truthfully.
“It’s in an office that has a couple of desks, but also a hatch that’s manned by a sergeant. You have to sign the book out and sign it back in when you’re finished with it.”
“OK, but what’s it look like? I need to know it’s the right one.”
It’s quite worn. A5 with a reddish marbled cover and a black or dark blue spine. You know the ones; you were at uni.”
“OK. And inside?”
“Absolutely crammed full of words, numbers and symbols.”
“So, I take it the security’s strict?”
“You’re going to have to have a good plan to get it; that’s for sure.”
After asking him for more details about the office, I could picture it roughly: how big it was, what I would see when I entered, who would be there, and what they would be doing.
I imagined the sounds, the smells… the atmosphere. The faint rasp of a typewriter, the smell of ink and paper, the scrape of a chair. That room was in my head.
So was Jonesy. It had been my fault, so I couldn’t let his death mean nothing. In some ways, he was still there beside me, helping me stay strong, guiding me through the steps he’d drilled into me since I’d been a raw recruit.
I’m still raw.
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