Connery (Part 13)

A Speculative Novel

I would wake up with this dread. I don’t know where it came from. It was as if someone had beaten me up the night before and I woke up and I felt the pain, the bruises, the possibly broken ribs, the abrasions concrete makes when it toothily kisses skin and the dull grief of being wronged, being trodden on, being humiliated before I remembered the assault. I knew there was pain and there was probably a reason, but the reason wasn’t there yet. It would come. Just blink. Let the ceiling resolve itself. Use the light fitting as a focal point. Hear the noise from the street. The world exists. Yes, it does. The bus hissing at the stop, the electric toothbrush of a scooter motor, the hiccup of the speed bump. That manhole cover that de-dunks every time a car drives over it. Some kid shouting; some parent shouting back. A distant siren pretending to be a New York TV show. When did our sirens become American? The late 80s, early 90s? When I was in Manchester.

Who beat you up? What’s the damage? Who started it?

But there was no story. There was no beating, no assailant, no revenge to be taken, no police reports to be filed. No hospital, no repair, no painkillers. There was just this awful, grotty feeling of having been rolled in the dirt and left at the side of a busy road of early morning indifference. In the tube station, on the escalators, on the platform, in the carriages, I would look at other people and around me. I had headphones in, but I didn’t play music: I listened to the people not talking. There is nowhere quieter than an underground carriage in the morning before the tourists have arrived with their happy anxious multilingual clamour. All these people. All these ages. All these races and ethnicities; these religions; these sexualities; these genders. All these stories. There were so many of them. If one of them disappeared, no one would notice. How did other people even see each other? It didn’t make sense to me. I luxuriated for a moment in utter anonymity.

Ollie told me once that commuters only used ten percent of their visual field. Everything else was blurred out as they went to and from work. Which meant that someone like me, awake and watching and listening had a huge advantage. I was walking through a moving ambulatory dormitory, looking for weaknesses, strays, stragglers, separated and vulnerable, those that wouldn’t be missed, not immediately, biding my time. But resisting, resisting. Resisting.

Of course, it occurred to me that perhaps killing someone would give my life some direction. A mission that I would be able to carry out to my own satisfaction. It was getting difficult to keep going to the gym, going for runs, going swimming. I did yoga. For what? To what purpose, I mean? I even did some parachute jumps over a series of weekends, but the thrill was gone and after a fatal accident left a fellow jumper plummeting to her death, I decided it wasn’t worth the fuss. Although killing Kirkby had been a huge screw up, it had at least been a moment where I genuinely felt alive. I had shaken the box a little. It had been for want of a better word: fun. I needed some more fun in my life.

The crisis point came when we went on a team building exercise to Wales. There were name badges, kayaking, orienteering, workshops, whiteboards, PowerPoints, counsellor sessions and a paintball battle. The latter was huge fun and was the highlight of the week, though I was reprimanded for shooting a few of my colleagues multiple times when they had already been tagged. It became a joke, though Sasha from Russia Section was genuinely angry at me and wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the trip. She called me a psycho during one of those exercises where we’re supposed to write down what we think of another team member and we go around the room. When she wrote ‘Psycho’, everyone knew immediately that it referred to me and for a moment I was struck by this unanimity. Apparently and unbeknownst to me it had been my nickname for some time.

‘Psycho Sam,’ someone blurted out and the others glared. A private joke accidently aired in front of the target.

I laughed weakly. Nodding and holding my hands up in a ‘it’s a fair cop’ gesture. But it hurt. And more than that it worried me; I had been so unaware of how I was being perceived. I had become lazy. I had let my own defences down, lulled perhaps by a sense of easy superiority. The illusion that simply because I have secrets, doesn’t mean others don’t have secrets and some of those secrets could easily be about me. Who was I? Who was I really? What did I want out of life? What was I aiming for? How did I define success? How did I define happiness? Where did happiness come from? Wouldn’t murdering people just to get me out of this malaise ultimately reduce that event into some kind of therapeutic tool? A habit? A compulsion even?

My father sent me a clipping from the North Western Evening Mail. Elliot Comb had been charged with assault and given a forty-day prison sentence after having hit his wife. According to the report, the defendant wouldn’t stop shouting in court. His defence lawyer asked the court to consider a history of mental health and addiction issues. A restraining order would be in place upon his release and he would not be allowed to see his daughter. I pasted this clipping above the kitchen sink. But that was before I went to Wales, and I was talking about Wales. I’m sorry. It is not entirely my fault that the chronology sometimes gets mixed up. The doctor gives me medicines, three different types and one of the side effects is a lack of focus. I enjoy it actually, but I understand how for others it can lead to rambling and confusion and that would be the last thing I would like to be accused of. Well, not the last thing. But I’m being tedious again. 

Sasha’s words were hurtful. Of that there was no doubt. Her words and the realization that the group had a certain solidarity against me. And so it was that the last night of that Welsh trip, I found myself stumbling around the woods in the night countryside darkness. It was the first time I had ever had an episode like this. It was like sleepwalking, I suppose. Sleep staggering was more accurate. But I was fully dressed in my track suit, and I had a knife from the kitchen in my pocket. If someone had found me, I would have been in trouble. I certainly would have had a job explaining what I was doing. This is the intelligence community after all. They’re a trusting bunch, but there’s only so far you can push them and like any work environment the wrong kind of gossip can damage your reputation and your career. Where was I heading? What did I plan to do? I crouched and let the mizzle sift through the branches of the trees above me and gently soak me to the skin. I took the knife out and hacked at a tree for a few minutes. My eyes could see quite well in the dark and the lights from the various chalets glimmered through the intersecting tree trunks. I stabbed the knife deep into the tree, hugging the trunk and then broke the hilt off and threw into the bushes.  

Luckily, I got back to bed with no further incident. I remembered slowly what had set me off as I lay in bed. I had dreamed of it. The ghosts were there: all of them, in the room. There was not enough room in the room for the ghosts. They brought their own string and cobwebs, thread and they seemed to be made more of teeth than anything else these nights. Kirkby was with them for the first time. They wanted to know what they were to do now. What orders they could carry out. I had complete power over them. Killing them I had become their god and now it was up to me what they did in the afterlife. It was a pain. I didn’t need this responsibility. This baggage. I much preferred the dreams where I flew places or went through a door and ended up somewhere on the other side of the world. For a brief period, I had dreamed of interplanetary explorations. I would be a captain of my own spaceship. But now my dreams were full of ghosts and my days were tormented by the terrible sense of having been beaten. I wondered if I too was perhaps full of teeth. All teeth below the skin. That’s what the knife was for and that’s why I was outside. I was going to cut myself open and see if the teeth all fell out and poured on the ground. Would I be full of cobwebs like the stuffing of old furniture? Or hair. All the hair growing inside my stomach and my brain. Luckily, I woke up before my experiment proceeded further.   

I knew what was needed but I felt like I needed someone else to ask me, or if not ask me at least to put it in my way. I didn’t want to have to go towards it. I was like someone who had given up smoking but who would take a cigarette if offered. But it had to be offered. Like a vampire, I needed to be invited in. There was still a qualm in me at this stage. I was coming back from dad’s funeral and I hadn’t changed out of my suit. Ollie asked me to step into his office. How he had got an office was beyond me. Through some strange mastery of PowerPoint, he’d gained the confidence of our superiors and a few adroit moves on the golf course circuit and he was suddenly on a fast track to promotion. I didn’t resent it. Far from it. I had been attempting to get myself fired or sent on some kind of gardening leave. I won’t lie I was drifting.

‘Condolences and all that,’ he said, waving at the suit.

I looked down at it as if he had been alerting me to some spillage, or my flies were undone. It took me a second to realize what he was referring to. I nodded said something appropriately soothing – the supposedly grief-stricken are always soothing bystanders I’ve noticed – and slumped comfortably in the chair opposite his desk. He had a block of carved glass on the desk, a paperweight of some sort, that was curved in such a way as to become a magnifying glass if you looked through at the right angle and shrunk everything if you looked at it from a different angle. It had as much of the carnival hall of mirrors as the detective to it and perfectly summed up Ollie and his strange amalgam of ideas and tendencies, excesses and capabilities. I wondered about killing him, not for the first time.

‘You like travel, don’t you Sam?’ Ollie said. ‘Like to get out of the funk of the city?’

I told him of course. And he gave me the rundown of a new job – ‘a plum’ – which when I got through the misty vocabulary turned out to be essentially a courier. I was to escort the diplomatic pouch on certain journeys, when the security was paramount and at the same time, I would be encouraged to carry certain items on my person which were also to be delivered.

‘There’s an arrangement,’ Ollie said. ‘The courier is as impregnable as the pouch. But whereas the pouch has to be documented at both ends, no one interferes with the courier. So, when it behoves us to deliver something which we don’t want in the paper trail, then you come in, with your placid look of self-assurance and your deep pockets. This is strictly paralegal …’

I raised an eyebrow.

‘Well, illegal. And there is a risk. An obvious risk.’

‘A risk?’

‘Arrangements have a way of sometimes coming unstuck,’ Ollie shrugged, his head looming large in the cube of glass before shrinking to nothing as he leaned back in his creaking chair. Outside London was grey and a passenger jet seemed to hang immobile in the air as it began its decent into Heathrow.

‘Unwritten rules are annoyingly easy to rewrite,’ shrunken headed Ollie said. ‘And should you be searched at any point, or your position compromised then of course we would simply deny we had anything to do with it. You would be a rogue agent. And given your reputation over the last year or so, that would be very easily sold as a story.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said though I knew exactly what he meant.

‘Your psych assessments, your monthly reports, your speedy transfer from the States a few years ago,’ Ollie spread his hand across the front of his desk. ‘It all points to exactly the kind of instability that might make an agent like you do something a bit untoward, out on a limb. We wouldn’t like that to happen and we’ll do all we can to protect you, if it came down to it, but you fit the bill. Do you copy?’

When you learn how to operate a grenade launcher, something changes in your life. There is something about that power which is fundamental and yet even with such destruction accessible in a portable weapon, there’s also that strange understanding that ultimately, it’s just a tube like the drainpipe cannon we made to kill birds in the orchard when we were kids. There’s something small about it. It’s a piece of machinery. It has a button, a small lever at the side – the safety – it has an instruction manual. There are tricks, little things which you get to know about it. Glitches which can hamper easy use and accuracy.

The briefing we had in Ollie’s office was only the prelude to another three weeks in the Sussex countryside as I was trained in the specific arts of concealment and smuggling. There was also a psychiatrist who instructed me in techniques to mask the little tells that law enforcement officers are looking for when screening the public. How to behave when interviewed by the authorities. We workshopped a lot of scenarios. I was also briefed extensively on different cultural expectations in many of the countries that I would be expected to operate in. I was given a series of profiles that I would seek to match depending on where I was travelling to and from. I was issued with a whole new set of luggage replete with hiding places and deodorant sprays which could be applied in order to put off sniffer dogs.

It was beginning to turn cold and the leaves were mostly off the trees and the ones that remained hung like wet rags under the insistent rain. The skies expanded above my head as a good omen to my new direction, the white and grey cloud ceiling cracking to let in fragments of cold blue upper atmosphere. I ran five miles every morning before breakfast and the first of my classes. Everyone seemed happy with my progress and my application and when I saw Ollie on returning, we went to a grotty club which aspired to the age of candlelight and smoking jackets. It was mainly barristers and upper level civil servants and no women and beyond its exclusivity, I could think of no reason I would ever want to go there and sit under ill lit paintings of forgotten naval actions and long dead racehorses. In the toilet there was a huge painting of a farmer with his cow. It would have been forgivable if it had been a prize cow, but it looked like a wizened old beast that wasn’t worth butchering. But Ollie had been a member because his father had been a member. He had a few whiskeys and I drank tea and then took a whiskey so as to not make him feel uncomfortable and let it sit there until he absentmindedly drank it for me so it wouldn’t go to waste. Once fortified, he broached the subject that was entirely the reason for his invitation.

‘You will be mostly travelling with empty bags,’ Ollie said. ‘You will do the pouch obviously and that will be enough to justify your pay and what not, but most of the time we don’t need you delivering stuff and we don’t want you only to turn up when there’s something shifty going on, so we have to have you well inserted into the routine, lull the bastards into a false sense of security. If you follow me. You can’t be a tell in and of yourself.’

‘I see.’

‘Won’t be all excitement all the time.’

I nodded and let him get to his point.

‘The thing is I know you are an enterprising young chap much like I used to …’

‘We’re the same age Ollie.’

‘… and this is where there are some benefits to this role that I felt better to leave out of my original pitch if you like. And they actually help a lot with our other things when it comes to it.’

‘You mean…’

‘There’s a chappie I’d like you to meet, tonight actually,’ Ollie said. ‘He’ll be able to propose something that will make for a very rewarding side-line. Very rewarding.’

Barney Churston was a large black man. He walked like a bus driver, as if his backside hurt and his arms swinging at his sides as if he was still steering that large wheel. I met him in the Starlight Billiard Club in Soho which was walking distance from Ollie’s club. He wore a lot of jewellery and an audacious cravat with an adidas tracksuit. His breath was short and wheezing and his eyes small and curiously dry-looking. He inspected me without a sign of approval or disapproval. I was just there. He looked at the young women who occasionally were brought to his attention – sex workers and exotic dancers of different vintages and nationalities – and the hard men who self-consciously moped around him awaiting paid employment and preference. They all looked at me with wary contempt and I let myself imagine an action scene in a movie where I beat them all up as each awaited his turn to attack and be devastatingly repelled.

Churston told me: ‘Your services will be well remunerated; your discretion depended on. And your balls will belong to me for the duration. I’ll let you keep carrying them around as long as things go well, but at any point, I’ll take them. You feel what I’m telling you.’

‘Feel?’

‘Understand.’

‘Why didn’t you just say understand?’

‘This isn’t important. Are you listening? Or are you being an arsehole?’

I nod.

He could tell himself anything he liked. He wasn’t even talking to me. He was talking to everyone around him.

I didn’t like this level of exposure. It was stupid. And I didn’t like black people. They’ve got different coloured skin. Their faces are different. This could have been done in an office probably with a calendar on the wall of naked girls, but by involving everyone he seemed to be trying to demonstrate his reach. His empire. There was the smell of chip fat and aftershave, carpet shampoo and cigarettes and human excrement. I listened with barely concealed impatience. It did not bode well if this was the calibre of person I was to be dealing with.

I walked out into the night air and felt immediately that beautiful drifting London mist which is so damp it’ll drench you in minutes like you’ve been dipped in the Thames.

I got a taxi back to my place off the Holloway Road. It was my third house in three years, and I was only occupying the kitchen, bathroom and the bedroom. It seemed pointless spreading out into the house because once the redecorating was done, I was going to be flipping it again. I’d even given up on the idea of a lodger.

My first trip was to Berlin and back. The pouch was my carry on. The next day I flew to Hong Kong. At the beginning of each week, I would be given a sheaf of tickets and printed itineraries. These could be amended as the week went on and I was usually handed green slips at the embassy that I was to append to the itinerary I already carried, but it at least gave me some idea. I got very good at travelling light. I never took much in terms of proper luggage except when it was a long-haul flight and one of Churston’s juvenile delinquents turned up on a moped with a pizza box full of something that needed to be in Rome or Moscow the next day. I knew Churston was working as a middleman. Sometimes, there were drugs; sometimes a swath of false documents; sometimes money. Often all I got was a padded envelope and I had to work it out for myself, gingerly fingering it. Payment came in the form of an entry into a bank account that Ollie had arranged for me in Switzerland via his father’s preferred banker. I had an interview with him at a squash club in Wimbledon. He told me squash was invented in prison. I told him that I knew. We played as if we both wanted to die of heart attacks. I had already began funnelling money from my property deals there. I sold the cottage on Feather Lane via an agency and put all the money there as well. I talked to Taylor about it on the phone and she told me should wanted nothing to do with it and gave me a free hand. She said she had enough money to go silly with. I could have told her the same but in reality, I didn’t have enough money at all. I wanted to be rich. I wanted to have enough money to never have to work again and yet always have the opportunity to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted to.

It’s funny that there’s an American Dream and yet no English Dream. There’s no ideal to which we all aspire. The idea of having an ideal or a dream is distinctly un-English, I suppose. I’ve never really thought about it. But if there was an English Dream, it was winning the lottery. Just having a sickening amount of money dumped on your life like God’s diarrhoea and all your problems replaced with a whole new set of shiny expensive looking problems. I wanted the largesse of the National Lottery without having to play the stupid game. A big magic finger pointing to me from the sky. But before I could get there, I needed to do this for another couple of years. And I’ll admit it straight away, it suited me down to the ground.

Every airport became my place of work. The inside of aircraft became familiar to me. The noise of the engines, the rituals before departure. The way arrivals and departures dovetail so that you pass through so close and so far, opposite ends of the same experience. They pass like late reflections of you in a parallel universe. Or like ghosts. The airline food, the snacks, the towels, the movies, the concourse, the shops, the duty free, the restaurants, the bathrooms where men shaved and brushed their teeth between flights, the boarding and alighting, customs and passport control. Anything to declare? Are you traveling on business? What is the purpose of your visit? And as for the criminal aspect of what I was doing, I was in such a whirl between waking and napping, time zones and jet lag, that I could quite easily forget whether I was carrying contraband or no. My look of bland English innocence was not counterfeit. The left-hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing. Turbulence would wake me up, or a passenger on her way to the toilet, asking if she could squeeze past, or the captain telling us we could all see a lovely sunset over Cairo if we looked out of our left-hand windows. Seats back in the upright position, seat belts fastened until the sign has been turned off. The occasional wit of the air steward, the dry reassurance of the ‘this is your captain speaking’, all became a part of the texture of my day and night. And day and night really didn’t mean anything anymore. I had a different relationship to time. I was an astronaut and so day and night were meaningless as I orbited the Earth a hundred sunrises and sunsets in a single day. I could open and close the window and I could see the sun glinting on vapour trails of other flights passing below. Being above the clouds and then having to descend through the weather, the shuddering white cloud and within an hour, I would be standing in a noisy warehouse filled with scrolling illuminated posters for aftershave and perfume and gift shops selling the local specialities and mugs saying that I hearted wherever I happened to be. I stood on floors that moved me through airports. I was always waking up. I was always falling asleep. The babel of the airport gave way to the babble of a foreign language all around me. And yet much of the time I knew the language well enough to tune into. I already had French, German and Spanish to the point of near fluency. My Arabic was coming on, improved by my reading of the Koran, and my Cantonese was serviceable; my Mandarin not so good. I took every opportunity to talk with fellow passengers if they had a language which I hankered after or that needed polishing. I became skilled at the small talk conversation which morphed subtly into something like a debrief of an entire life. On a long-haul flight such intimacy could be dangerous, but it was worth the risk and if it became unbearable, I always had the sleeping pill that I would bite in half and would send me into a slack-jawed coma within minutes. I got to know the different types of passengers. The businessmen and women, the frequent fliers with their knowing efficiency, aloofness and their own rituals. The young families with too much luggage and at least one wailing sick child. I didn’t mind babies crying. We were all babies once, I reasoned. But when they would fill their nappies and the air would reek with the smell, it was difficult to maintain equanimity. I usually had a list of stuff to buy at the duty free on my return trip which I would then distribute around the offices when I got back to London. I think I cemented my position in GCHQ right there and then. Suddenly, I was looked at in a fonder way as cheap cigarettes, aftershaves and cognac became a perk of being in my good books and everyone was in my good books.

I read so much I began to run out of books and then every place I went to, there was the official reception. The handover and the niceties, the inhouse gossip, the questions about home from the home sick veterans. What is going on with the government? Have you seen any good TV? Yes, The West Wing was excellent, I’d agree. Questions about sport which I had little to no interest in though I tended to scan the back pages of the newspaper like I would a briefing document to glean the requisite facts and give them out with the appropriate noise of revulsion or celebration depending on the allegiances of my interlocutor. If I was lucky, I might get invited to some do that was going on, or out on the town with some of the local agents or embassy people. But timing was everything and many times I arrived in the middle of the morning or late at night and there was only the duty officer to talk to as he or she wiled away the last hours of their shift. To be honest, I actually preferred to finish up my official business and either get back to the airport or to my hotel to get some proper bed rest before my return flight. The bed became my favourite item of luxury. I decided that one day I would buy a massive and comfortable bed and never leave it. An official car would definitely pick me up if there was something special to be collected and then the driver would serve as my point man to deliver whatever I had. We could usually do this very discretely in the car or an underground garage if it was something bulkier. As for Churston’s errands they would turn up later in my stay usually as a taxi called for the return to the airport or a visit to my hotel room by someone who could credibly claim to have got the wrong room. ‘That’s quite all right,’ I would say. And then as an afterthought, ‘Oh, while you’re here could you take this down for me. I don’t know what it was doing in my room. Perhaps the previous guest.’

All of these exchanges were quick and involved no drama whatsoever. There was no checking of contents or counting of bills, or holding documents up to the light, or assembling of weapons and checking of serial numbers against a manifest. None of these people were anything other than couriers and I was a courier as well. If anything went wrong that went to a totally different part of their respective organisations. We were all cut outs in one way or another. Barney Churston was a cut out as well. Ollie was too. The real clients were unknown to me and I liked it that way. All that was important is that things went off smoothly and my bags were handled with respect by the relevant authorities. I would check my bank account and would make sure the correct fees had been deposited. But other than that, I had no communication with Ollie or Churston. Sometimes all I had was an envelope, like for a normal letter, and I would meet a contact and hand over the envelope and that was it. Somehow, I got the feeling these envelopes, weighing no more than a sheet of paper folded in four, perhaps a photograph, were the most significant transactions. And so, it would prove.

My house was on the market for less than a week and Ollie emailed the next bargain I could go up to which was in Greenwich. I managed everything over the phone and one weekend when I was back in London had my stuff moved to the new place and the keys handed over.

I murdered a black woman in Johannesburg. To be honest, I had been mulling the possibility for a bit of murder for some time. It felt like a throwback to how I felt in the days of La Rochelle and then Paris of course. The temptation had been to just go wild. I was in these different cities on different sides of the world. Often in cities as well in which the murder rate was such that one more wouldn’t raise eyebrows or call for a sudden surge in efficiency and zeal on the part of the law enforcement agencies. But I was also aware that the last thing I wanted to do was have a series of murders that could somehow be linked up and shown to follow my flight itineraries. Apparently, there are now algorithms for this kind of thing. The kind of random murder I did might make headlines and a member of the British legation might start putting two and two together. This was highly, highly, highly unlikely. Really and truly. But there was no point in risking it.

The idea remained, however. Lingered. I could kill someone on the way to the airport and be hundreds of miles away before the body was even found. Airborne while she would be earthbound. The woman was a prostitute, I think. A streetwalker.  But I wasn’t hanging around to find out. The point was it would be quick, and it was night. I killed her with a metal pole that was lying with a heap of broken masonry by the side of the road.

I dragged her body off into a field away from the streetlighting and then carried on along the road until I got to the taxi rank. Cars were passing, but I’d chosen my moment skilfully if not carefully. I think it was relatively painless. She was certainly unconscious for the next five or six blows. The last two of which were overkill. I threw the pole into the long grass. It was a chill night, so the gloves looked fine. A bit old fashioned, but I was in a suit with a trolley bag and an overcoat, looking lost and in need of directions and, more than anything, a taxi. When I got into the back of the first cab on the rank, the driver said that someone like me shouldn’t be wandering around this area: ‘Dangerous! Very, very dangerous here. Bad people.’

For some reason, I was apologetic. I came up with a long stupid story about how I had got lost. I had been looking for some restaurant a fellow traveller had recommended. He took me to another part of the city where there was a restaurant that he said was very good. I went in and ate a wonderful steak with fried potatoes and green beans. I had a glass of Coca-Cola which tasted cold and sweet. I honestly think Coca-Cola has become my favourite drink. It’s delicious. Especially with ice and lemon, the glass beaded sexily.

I looked around me at the other diners who were in groups or couples and I became aware that the waitress was looking at me with wry amusement. She caught me looking at her and she pointed at my hands.

I was still wearing my gloves. What a complete muppet.