Thunder in the Blood (2 page)

The phone call came in October. Autumn had descended on Budleigh Salterton, and I was cutting back the roses behind the conservatory when my mother signalled through the sitting-room window. She gave me the phone. I recognized the voice at once.

‘Rory!’

‘Sarah. Long time …’

We chatted for a while. Rory had been a young instructing officer at the Commando Training Centre at Lympstone. We’d met a number of times before I went to Africa. He was tall and wild and very funny, with a ruddy, raw-boned face and a passion for windsurfing. He was nearly ten years older than me, but
we’d always got on extremely well, mainly, I suspect, because he regarded me as ‘a good bloke’. I wasn’t dainty, like the other girls. I didn’t lie around mooning about rock stars or fashion spreads in
Vogue.
On the contrary, like Rory himself, I was game for virtually anything, providing it offered physical excitement and a few laughs. Now, after a brief exchange of news, he suggested I come up to London. He, too, was working at the MOD. I caught myself frowning. Something in his voice made me hesitate.

‘Why?’

‘People I want you to meet. People who want to meet you.’

‘What kind of people?’

‘Good guys. You’ll like them.’

‘Why do they want to meet me?’

‘No idea. I’ve told them you’re an old slag. Made no difference.’

‘Will you be there?’

‘Sure. They’re civilized. Speak the Queen’s English. You’ll need an interpreter.’

I laughed. We agreed a time and a place. He hung up. Lovely man.

It was about the same time that Wesley found himself in trouble. At first, he’d greeted the news of his infection with disbelief, keeping it at arm’s length and treating it with a mix of derision and contempt. HIV was someone else’s nightmare, something that wouldn’t – couldn’t – happen to him. The diagnosis, Dr Webber’s glum letter, had been a mistake, some wild medical fantasy, a rumble of stage thunder in the on-going play that passed for his life. Accordingly, he decided to ignore it.

This period, he later told me, lasted about a week. Then, like any good reporter, he began to ask questions. He went to several voluntary bodies. He tried to work out who made sense and who talked bullshit. He did his best to separate the medical facts from the political hysteria. The latter, a bush fire whipped up by various gay factions, he found particularly hard to take. They were, he said drily, a pain in the arse.

But the facts, none the less, alarmed him. By 1985, doctors were putting a two-year tag on the period between infection with HIV and the development of full-blown AIDS. To some degree this was a guess, but the evidence from the States, acquired in
bulk by Wesley, made grim reading. Guys in San Francisco were dying in their hundreds. The word on the lips of the spokesperson from the Center for Disease Control was ‘exponential’. No matter how bad things looked today, tomorrow would be a whole lot worse.

Sobered by bis research, Wesley conducted what he later described as ‘a brief audit’ of his life. Two years meant twenty-four months meant 104 weeks. Ever impatient, he did the sums again and again, wondering how much of the two years would be surrendered to the doctors and nurses and how much he could rely on as his own. Without doubt, by now, he was in shock. An express train of his own making, he’d sighted the buffers rather earlier than he’d anticipated. No longer immortal, he was obliged to make a few decisions.

One of them had to do with his work. Wesley had never been remotely casual about journalism. From early adolescence, it had been his only choice of career, the one thing in his life that he wanted to do properly and do well. By nineteen, he was starring on a small Essex weekly. Two years later he moved west, to Bristol, accepting a job on a big provincial daily. He started on the general reporters desk. Within a year, he was business editor, filing copy by the yard, building a reputation for dogged footwork, exhaustive research and a bloody-minded defence of his right to ask the truly awkward questions.

Colleagues I’ve contacted from that period talk of him with affection and some awe: a driven man in his mid-twenties with an uncertain grip on the world that most of the rest of us inhabit. He had no dress sense, no social life, little time for small talk or gossip. He had few close friends and never forgave anyone who lied to him or let him down. On the other hand, he was utterly loyal and immensely generous. Money, I can vouch, meant nothing to him. If someone else’s need was greater than his, he simply emptied his pockets and gave it all away.

On 16 October 1985, after nearly a year on Fleet Street, Wesley made an appointment with his editor. The appointment and its aftermath occupy several pages in the loose-leaf ring binder that served at this period in his life as a kind of diary. Sitting down in front of the editor’s desk (‘totally fucking empty – just like his head’), Wesley explained that he was HIV positive. The editor,
wrongly thinking Wesley already had AIDS, was shocked. In the interests of the paper, for the sake of his colleagues, he said, he’d have to review the situation. Wesley, appalled, explained the difference between HIV and AIDS. He had the virus, no question. The virus was at large in his body, knocking off the warrior cells. He was infectious, certainly, but he had no plans to screw anybody and it would be a while before the virus got the upper hand. Once it did and his body’s defences were shot to pieces he’d doubtless succumb to something horrible, but until then he was still good for the odd story or two.

At this, the editor had evidently looked a bit dubious, and although he’d done his best to temper his disgust with a little sympathy, Wesley knew in his heart that his days in the sun were over. The newspaper world thrives on gossip and in his own small way, Wesley himself had become the current news story. ‘So how’s this for a sign-off?’ he confides to his diary.
‘Gay Plague Sweeps Fleet Street. Hack Banned From Newsroom. Bleach Sales Hit New High.’

I went to London in mid-October. I met Rory in the coffee shop at Paddington Station and we took a cab to a small Malaysian restaurant in Soho. Upstairs, at a discreet table by the window, he introduced me to two colleagues. One of them was in his late fifties, a sombre, jowly man in a dark suit, not Rory’s kind at all. The other was much younger, crop-haired, neat, watchful. Neither, as it turned out, was much interested in small talk.

2

I joined MI5 in time to attend the Curzon House Christmas party, an awkward, joyless affair that descended from perfunctory conversation and the exchange of witty presents to deep eddies of gossip, vicious and, past midnight, wildly drunken.

The recruitment process had seemed, to me at least, utterly haphazard. The lunch with Rory and his friends had lasted no more than an hour, me doing most of the talking. Rory filling the occasional silences with a series of badly told stories that he’d dredged up from our social get-togethers in Devon. Several of the stories were pure fiction, designed somehow to convince our hosts that I was on the level, a good sport, heart in the right place, a safe pair of hands, and afterwards, when our hosts had paid the bill and left, I asked him what he’d been up to.

The atmosphere throughout the meal had been chilly. Neither of the two men had bothered to explain themselves and I’d no idea why I’d been invited, or who or what they represented. If their intention had been to offer me a job, I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to accept. Who were they? What did they want? And why did they find it so bloody hard to smile?

Rory dismissed my questions with a wide grin and a wave of the hand. The restaurant was nearly empty now. A waiter hovered patiently in the background with our bill.

‘Spooks,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Intelligence. Security wallahs.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Brothers in arms.’

‘You mean spies?’

‘No. Spycatchers. MI5. The home team.’

‘What do they want with me? What have I done?’

Rory hooted with laughter. Laughter suited him. The pale, freckled planes of his face were seamed with deep lines, and when they filled with laughter he created the sensation, at once dangerous and playful, that something was about to happen: a prank, a joke, some wild physical adventure. For a man in his early thirties, with a mortgage and two kids, he could sometimes be deliciously adolescent.

‘They want you,’ he whispered. ‘They want you to work for them.’

‘Why?’

He leaned forward. The melodrama, the big eyes, the clowning had quite gone. Instead, there was another expression, utterly serious. ‘Because you’d be bloody good at it.’

‘Who says?’

‘Me.’

‘What do you know about it?’

‘Quite a lot,’ he said, reaching for the bottle, ‘as it happens.’

Ten days later, back in Devon, I got another phone call, from a woman this time. I was to return to London for a formal interview. The interview took place two days later in an overheated office on the second floor of an anonymous building in Gower Street. The office was shabby. The paint had bubbled on the big iron radiators and the nylon covers on the chairs were printed with swirly patterns in orange and olive green. The place reminded me of my one and only visit to the DHSS outpost in Exeter: good intentions, zero budget and absolutely no taste.

The interview was conducted by two men and a woman. One of the men was the younger of Rory’s colleagues I’d met at the restaurant. Ten days had done nothing for his conversation and he spent most of the morning making notes on a large yellow pad. The other man was older, with a small, white face and a habit of gazing out of the window. Of the three of them, the woman did most of the talking and it was she who led me patiently through my life, pausing from time to time to ask a question, note a date or ask me to expand a little on this or that. She was evidently senior to the other two – there was a very definite sense of deference when they occasionally conferred together – and when she’d mapped out my twenty-three years to her satisfaction, she became suddenly brisker, closing her file and returning her fountain pen to her bag.

‘You’ll be sitting a couple of tests: English language and mental agility,’ she said. ‘The latter is a bit of a game.’ She smiled. ‘You ever play dominoes?’

I took the tests in a room down the corridor. The dominoes were arranged in certain sequences. The test was to guess the next sequence. I spent half an hour toying with various pieces. As a preparation for defending the state, it seemed a curious exercise.

The woman reappeared before lunch. She carried her bag in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. On top of the papers, clearly visible, was a copy of the Official Secrets Act. She put it carefully on the desk. Beside it, she laid another official-looking document.

‘This is the Maxwell-Fyfe Declaration,’ she said. ‘You’re welcome to read it but I’m afraid you can’t take it away. The photocopier’s broken.’ She smiled thinly, nodding at the document. ‘It’s the only one we’ve got.’

I picked up the declaration and read it quickly. It turned out to be a statement of the aims of the security services. I looked across at the woman. Thus far, no one had spelled out what I was doing or why I was here.

‘Are you offering me a job?’ I said.

‘Yes. Subject to the usual checks.’ She paused. ‘We’ll need four names. Four referees. Just to make sure.’

‘But what for? What’s the job about?’

She paused again, frowning.

‘It’s a government post,’ she said at length. ‘Security service. F branch. I understood you’d been briefed.’

‘No.’

‘Oh.’ She nodded, sighing, ‘I see.’ She looked at me a moment, speculative, then glanced down at the papers on the desk. ‘Do you have a pen?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then perhaps you’d like to sign this.’ She picked up the copy of the Official Secrets Act and indicated the relevant page.

I didn’t move. I was still looking at her. ‘But what if I don’t want the job?’ I hesitated. ‘Whatever it is?’

‘It makes no difference. You still sign.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re here. Because you’ve met us. Because—’ she
broke off, glancing at her watch. ‘It’ll save time later.’

‘Later?’

‘Yes.’ She glanced up, that same thin smile. ‘After you’ve had a little think and accepted.’

I joined MI5 on 15 December 1985. Each of my four referees had been interviewed by a suave young man from the Ministry of Defence Police and he completed his trawl through my life with yet another personal interview. Quite what he made of my ramblings about Zaire I can’t say, but a thick bundle of forms arrived through the post five days after he left, and I began my induction at the MI5 Registry and Documentation Centre at Curzon House in Mayfair.

The important thing to say here is that at no time did I express any real enthusiasm to join the intelligence services. I certainly welcomed the prospect of a regular wage and I had no objection to a year or two in London, but I was totally honest about my impatience with paperwork and my loathing of desk jobs. Something they called ‘fieldcraft’ sounded more enticing and when they pushed the conversation in the right direction I readily admitted a liking for unusual encounters and physical risk. But in every other respect I was never less than sceptical, an attitude which I now believe exactly matched what they wanted. Thus, perhaps, the offer of the job. And thus, amongst the pink balloons and the cheap champagne, my first taste of MI5 at play.

Christmas 1985 also found Wesley on the move. The outcome of his exchanges with the editor was an invitation to resign and he finally left on New Year’s Eve with a boxful of office stationery and a generous cheque. The latter was big enough to keep him eating for the best part of the following year, and he retreated to Stoke Newington and set himself up as a freelance, generating a stream of stories from the battered Olympia portable he kept on the desk beside his bed.

Because he was such a good journalist – tireless, nosy, bold – he achieved a remarkable strike rate, cashing in on the goodwill and respect he’d already earned in Fleet Street, and pushing his copy to any editor who’d pay. Each published story he scissored carefully from the appropriate paper and glued it into the scrapbook which now lies on my bedroom floor. Beside each item,
usually in his favourite green Biro, he added his own judgement on the worth of the story and what he’d managed to do with it. Many of these judgements are harsh, a kind of relentless self-mutilation, but what’s very evident is the direction his journalistic interest quickly began to take.

For a while, that winter, he stuck to the style he’d made his own: tabloid, punchy, the vivid conga of breathless three-line paragraphs he was later to dismiss as his ‘Doc Marten period’. This idiom had won him his first real job in Fleet Street, but by early spring he was plainly tiring of it. Working at his own pace, freed from the tyranny of the news desk, he at last had time to sink his teeth into real stories, hunting a succession of quarries, dragging one or two of them to earth. Many of these stories had a business background, totally unsuitable for the tabloid cosh, and he began to develop a new style, still direct, still a treat to read, but making room for analysis and irony and the complex arithmetic of the real world.

The papers changed, too. By mid-summer, he’d given up on the tabloids altogether. Instead, he was writing for some of the weightier broadsheets, not too often and none too regularly, but winning for himself a reputation for solid, authoritative analysis, wedded to a growing contempt for some of society’s better-disguised secrets.

This contempt occasionally boiled up into something close to fury, and once I got to know him, putting a face and a voice to this scalding prose, I was able to recognize at once where it came from. Wesley wrote this way because, when it mattered, he really cared. Drunk or tired, he’d talk for hours about how much need there was for honesty and tolerance and simple courage, and the fact that the real world wasn’t about any of these things was a frustration he took to the grave. If that sounds like a speech it probably is, but I can hear him saying it now, shaking his head, the voice thickened with red wine and roll-ups, the big eyes wide with wonderment and rage.

But all of that came later. For now, Wesley was working and well. His career, to his own surprise, was flourishing and he’d begun to believe that he might yet have time to make it as a journalist. What happened next was Derek Aldridge.

Aldridge I’ve met on a number of occasions, a tall, good-looking
Welshman a few years older than Wesley. Wesley had known him on the paper in Bristol, where the pair of them had briefly shared a flat. Aldridge’s emotional life was as complicated as Wesley’s, though for different reasons. He had a passion for women, evidenced by a string of office conquests, and an early marriage to a girl from the valleys had already ended in the divorce courts.

Wesley and Aldridge spent a great deal of time together in their Bristol days. They were both loners, contemptuous of the pack, and although there were obvious differences between them, the chemistry seemed to work. Aldridge, according to Wesley, had an awesome sense of direction, knowing exactly where he was headed. Evidently he kept a private schedule, a blueprint for his career, a carefully tabulated list of dates by which he should have achieved certain targets. He showed it to Wesley once, the pair of them drunk, and Wesley memorized most of it and wrote it down when he’d sobered up, amazed at the man’s single-mindedness.

To Wesley, who believed emphatically in fate, having any kind of life plan was purest folly – where was the mystery? where were the surprises? – but the real point about Aldridge’s schedule was that it all came true. By twenty-seven, he was in Fleet Street. Two years later, he’d made defence correspondent on a big national daily. And by his thirty-fourth birthday, on the dot, he was occupying a desk in a large office on the fourth floor, the newly appointed deputy editor charged with infusing the feature pages with fresh blood.

One of his first calls went to Wesley. He said he wanted to offer him a job. Wesley, after some thought, asked two questions. One had to do with his health. He hadn’t seen Aldridge for several years. Aldridge might have picked up the rumour or he might not. Either way, it made no odds. Wesley now came as a package deal. Me and my virus. All or nothing. The second question also had to do with the virus. HIV had concentrated his mind wonderfully. He, too, now had a schedule, a series of deadlines he kept in the back of his mind, doubtless shorter than Aldridge’s, but no less important for that. So far, on the freelance market, he’d done well. He’d enjoyed the freedoms, the latitude, the time. He didn’t want any of that to change and the onward
march of the virus gave him the right to insist it wouldn’t.

The two men met for lunch at an expensive restaurant off Covent Garden. Aldridge, according to Wesley, had put on a little weight. He showed Wesley the label on his new Armani suit and told him how much the local garage was charging him for routine services on his Mercedes. He talked at length about his marriage, and suggested Wesley might like to pop down for supper. His wife’s name was Caroline. Until recently, she’d been working as a television presenter and media personality. Now, heavily pregnant with their first child, she was trading it all in for motherhood and a big mock-Tudor house on the outskirts of Godalming. It was the kind of relationship that Aldridge had always dreamed about and now it had come true. Wesley remembered the phrase from their days together in Bristol, and over liqueurs, bored, he enquired about the job. Aldridge had nodded at once.

‘Sure,’ he’d said, ‘no problem. Start whenever. Trust you to death.’

Wesley had smiled telling me the story and I’d smiled too, not at Aldridge’s talent for tactful dialogue, but at how similar it was to my own arrival in London, the door to MI5 opening with barely a touch.

I spent most of 1986 at Curzon House, commuting daily from a tiny flat on the Fulham Road. Attached to a succession of departments, I learned a great deal about intelligence: what it is, where it comes from, how you lay hands on it, and why analysis (the dominoes?) is so important. Destined for F branch, the bit of the empire responsible for countering domestic subversion, I learned about telephone taps, mail intercepts, on- and off-street surveillance, covert penetration, various cosy arrangements with other government agencies and the many techniques for shuffling quietly into other people’s computer systems.