Thunder in the Blood (3 page)

Our own computer system lay at the heart of the whole operation and a great deal of those early months was spent making myself comfortable with the way it worked. ‘Comfortable’ was a favourite MI5 word. It was a word we wrapped around ourselves. It insulated us. It kept us snug and warm. We were ‘comfortable’ with the prospects for a certain operation. We were ‘comfortable’ that Special Branch, or MI6, or the RUC or countless other agencies didn’t know what we were up to. We were ‘comfortable’
that the intelligence yield (something we often referred to as ‘the harvest’) would be put to good and proper account. And we were ‘comfortable’, above all, that the growing calls for accountability would be faced down. We were, after all, simply defending the state. That, in particular, was a great source of ‘comfort’.

Looking back, I’m astonished at how easily I slipped into it all. Most of what I had to learn was totally new to me, but its sheer novelty – the daily challenge of trying to make sense of this technique or that computer program – kept me from thinking about the wider questions. The days sped past in a blur and at the end of the day I had neither the time nor the energy to ask myself what might happen to the fruit of our painstaking labours. The anxiety I’d felt in Zaire, all the stuff about how fragile society was, had quite disappeared. In its place was a determination to master my brief, tinged with a faint awe at the sheer reach of the machine of which I was now a part.

People at Curzon House often referred to the place as ‘the Factory’ and to some degree they were right. The commodity we produced was intelligence and mere mortals like me were simply workers on the assembly line, putting together little parcels of data, seeing whether they looked like other little parcels, testing this fact against that, comparing dates and locations and the small print of some businessman’s travel records, wondering all the time about circumstance and coincidence, quality-checking the product at every stage until it slipped out of the door and away to what the older hands referred to darkly as ‘the end-user’.

The end-user was, of course, the government, but if I thought about them at all, those faces around the cabinet table, it was only in a distant, uncurious, faintly benign way. Governments were like rain or gravity, always there, a fact of life. They needed intelligence in exactly the same way they needed taxation. In that sense, we were simply another of the oils that made the machine work, and as long as the machine worked then everyone would benefit. Wasn’t that how it went? Wasn’t that Rory’s favourite line?

Rory I was now seeing on a fairly regular basis: drinks, meals, the odd visit to the cinema or (a passion of his) the opera. I enjoyed his company enormously, partly because he was such good fun and partly because he freed me from the chore of
picking up with somebody else. I’d already had offers from work, serious young men with heavy glasses and appalling skin, but I was perfectly happy living by myself and I had absolutely no appetite for getting involved with anyone else. By twenty-three, I’d had quite enough relationships to know the difference between love and a good fuck and just now I’d no need of either. In this sense, Rory was perfect, a big uncomplicated friendship warmed by the odd bottle of wine and a great deal of laughter.

Exactly what Rory was doing in London he never made clear but as we saw more of each other it became something of a challenge for me to find out. I was, after all, supposed to be in the intelligence game and after six months at Curzon House I began to use a little of my time on the computer to wander into certain Registry files, looking for the odd clue. This was harder than it sounds. Many of the files were technically closed to people at my level, but I’d acquired some supplementary access codes and one of them, coupled with the odd slip by Rory himself, led me to form some very definite ideas.

‘DIS,’ I said, ‘for sure.’

It was mid-June. An early heatwave had taken us to a Putney pub. We were sitting by the river in the half-darkness, watching a lone sculler pulling hard against the falling tide. Rory was in jeans and shirt-sleeves. The remains of his third pint stood on the table beside his motorcycle helmet. Lately, I’d noticed he was drinking quite heavily. I’d no idea why.

‘Defence Intelligence Staff?’ he murmured.
‘Moi?’

‘Yes.’

‘Evidence?’ He glanced across. ‘Care to tell me why?’

I shrugged. ‘You got me into this. You must be connected. You’re not on the MI5 register. You don’t work for Six. You’re still a serving soldier—’ I looked at him. ‘… Aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it must be DIS.’ I paused. ‘Unless there’s another lot they haven’t told me about.’

‘Ah…’ he nodded, non-committal, ‘the Wild Bunch.’

He fell silent, refusing once again to elaborate, and I thought about the proposition some more. The Defence Intelligence Staff was an outpost of the Ministry of Defence. They worked closely with MI6, keeping an eye on foreign armed forces. Rory, with
his Aberdeen University degree and his near-perfect Arabic, would have been a likely recruit. The way the system worked, he’d be on some kind of attachment. Then, after a couple of years, he’d return to the stockade.

I reached for my drink. The lone sculler had disappeared under Putney Bridge. Rory was yawning.

‘I’m bloody tired,’ he said, ‘and you should be in bed.’

‘Thanks.’ I lifted my drink. ‘Am I keeping you up?’

‘No,’ he said.
‘Au contraire.’

He looked at me for a moment, a strange expression on his face, an uncertainty I’d never seen before. Then he shook his head, leaning back on the wooden bench, closing his eyes. For a second or two I assumed he really was tired – a busy day, an early start – and I reached across, patting his arm, his sympathetic chum from the West Country. He caught my hand in his and squeezed it, opening one eye as he did so. Rory was never less than honest. He had a candour that was occasionally close to brutal. It was one of the reasons I thought the world of him.

‘I’ve fallen in love with you,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re supposed to have guessed. Your line of work…’

I blinked. ‘What?’

‘Love. I’ve fallen in love with you.’ He paused. ‘I’ve thought about some of the other words, but love comes closest.’

‘Why?’ I said. ‘When?’

I winced at the questions. They sounded, at best, infantile, but I was trying to catch my breath, wondering why on earth I hadn’t picked up the signals, seen the smoke in the wind, headed off this appalling scene. Intelligence, for God’s sake. Analysis. What a joke. I withdrew my hand, reaching for my drink.

‘You’re pissed,’ I said gently.

‘No.’

‘It’s the heat.’

‘No.’

‘Summer flu.’

Rory gazed at me for a moment. ‘Fuck off,’ he said softly. ‘At least allow me to do it properly.’

‘What?’

‘Make a fool of myself.’

‘You’re not.’ I reached across the table again and took his
hand. ‘You’re a lovely man. You’ve got a lovely wife and great kids and you shouldn’t be living up here. Miles away from them.’

Rory nodded, thinking about it. His hand was warm in mine. ‘And you?’ he said.

‘I’ve got a terrible memory. Famous for it.’

‘Meaning?’

‘You never said it.’

He looked at me for a long time, unconvinced. I’d never seen him so deflated, so utterly forlorn. He looked about twelve. Or seventy.

‘Yeah,’ he muttered at last. ‘I never said it. You’re right.’

We went back to Fulham on his motor bike. Outside the flat, he pulled into the kerb and waited for me to get off. I stood on the pavement, shaking out my hair, offering him the spare helmet.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

Rory took the helmet and attached it to the back pannier. He hadn’t killed the engine and he was trying his best not to look at me. I stepped towards him, calm at last, back in control. This was a friendship I didn’t want to lose. There’d been a misunderstanding. He’d simply got things out of perspective. A little time and it would all sort itself out. I put my hand on his arm.

‘Do you want to come up?’ I said. ‘Coffee? Something to eat?’ I shrugged. ‘Whatever?’

He stood upright, straddling the machine, adjusting the buckle on his own helmet. He looked, if anything, angry. ‘Christ no,’ he said, his voice muffled. ‘God forbid!’

3

I didn’t see Rory again for nearly four years and by that time events had taken both Wesley and me by the scruff of the neck. In my case, it meant what my bosses termed ‘a career adjustment’. In Wesley’s case, it was rather more serious.

The fifteenth of June 1987 was the day it first occurred to Wesley that an early death might be less than physically pleasant. Dying before his time was something he’d almost come to terms with, but somehow he’d never got round to translating the graph lines and the paragraphs of cold prose into a physical reality. The last thing he seems to have expected was pain.

By now, he was keeping a diary in earnest. Lots of HIV positives do it. It’s meant to be a help and I suspect it probably is, a private cupboard for storing the darker and less acceptable nightmares. Wesley kept his on a series of lined pads, which he later filed in the same ring binders I’ve raided for some of the earlier material. There are four of them in all. I had a chance to read them before he died and we discussed some of the key bits. What follows is the closest I can get to the way it must have felt for him. Reproducing the entries themselves, for June and July 1987, would be pointless. He was so ill, and so frightened, he could scarcely manage to complete a sentence.

It began with a headache and a general feeling of nausea. Wesley had been away, in southern Ireland, spending some of Aldridge’s features budget on a big, ambitious story about drug smuggling. He’d driven round the coves of West Cork and Kerry, armed with leads from contacts he’d made in a number of North London pubs. He was trying to source a recent flood of high-quality cannabis, and by the time he returned from Ireland he was near certain that he had the makings of a sensational exposé.

The guts of the story concerned the involvement of an MI5 agent who had the smuggling operation under surveillance and was actively helping to move the stuff into the UK. In its own right, this was startling enough, but what gave it (in Wesley’s phrase) ‘legs’ was the fact that profits from the drug runs were going, via a series of laundering operations through Kilburn betting shops, to the IRA High Command in Dublin. This, of course, was why MI5 had got involved in the first place, but this kind of logic wouldn’t, Wesley felt, be immediately obvious to the Great British Public. Instead, they’d doubtless see it as yet another example of the spooks and the criminals working hand in hand.

When he got back from Ireland, the headache got worse. Crouched over the electric fire in his bedroom, the typewriter on a tray on his knees, he began to shiver. He wrapped himself in a dressing gown. Over the dressing gown he put on an anorak. For the best part of a day, sensing the shadow at his door, he typed and typed, checking and re-checking his notes, getting down what he could and sending it by courier to Aldridge with a brief note and a list of expenses.

That night, for the first time ever, he began to sweat. He’d read about the sweats that often accompany HIV. They didn’t come as a surprise, but as the fever took a real grip and the pile of sodden T-shirts grew on the floor at his bedside, Wesley began to panic.

By this time, he’d taken a lover, a quiet, gentle twenty-three-year-old called Mark. Mark was an aspiring actor, and, like Wesley, HIV positive. He features again in this story and I’ve talked to him at length about what happened next. His recall is perfect, largely because he was sure that one day the same thing would happen to him.

Mark came looking for Wesley three days after the fever began. He found him exhausted, curled under a pile of blankets, his knees to his chin, shuddering with cold. The mattress beneath his body was soaking wet. The path to the lavatory was strewn with paper cups. There was a terrible smell. Mark did what he could, helping Wesley out of bed, propping him up on a chair, changing the sheets, turning the mattress, opening the windows, filling the place with air freshener. When the doctor came, he retreated to the kitchen, making another pot of Wesley’s favourite
herbal tea, watching through the half-open door while the doctor ran a stethoscope over Wesley’s chest. In three days, he seemed to have shrunk. Weight, in Mark’s phrase, had just fallen off him. Chalk-white, wild-eyed, still shivering with cold, he crouched in the chair, his hands pushed into his crutch, staring at the carpet while the doctor went tap-tap across his chest, up over his shoulder and down his back.

The doctor sent him to hospital. Within an hour he was occupying a bed at St Mary’s, Paddington. By now, he’d lost all track of time. Dimly aware of the activity around him – nurses taking blood samples, Mark’s face at the foot of the bed, two visits to the X-ray department – Wesley surrendered to the fever. With his temperature nudging 103°, he was quite certain he was fighting for his life. His head was bursting. His stomach felt hot and raw. There wasn’t an inch of his body that hadn’t been scorched by this monstrous, implacable fever.

He stayed at St Mary’s for nearly a month. After a week or so, the antibiotics began to get the upper hand. His temperature fell, he was able to keep liquids down and as the fever gradually receded he was left with a feeling of total exhaustion. He slept a great deal, sweating again when his temperature rose at night, then sinking into a kind of half-life, detached from his surroundings, monosyllabic, acknowledging visitors with a weak handshake and a glassy smile.

One of the visitors was his mother, a small, timid woman of whom he saw very little. She lived out on the coast in Essex, and Wesley had never told her a word about his HIV. Mark, alarmed enough to phone her, had been less than specific and when she arrived, the consultant obliged Wesley with a vague reference to viral pneumonia. She stayed for half an hour, her woollen gloves folded on her lap, telling Wesley how terrible the trains were.

Another visitor was Aldridge. He sat by the bed for the best part of an afternoon, reviewing the prospects for Wesley’s Irish drugs story, trying to mask how shocked he felt, what a difference a week could make to someone he thought he knew well. At the end of the visit, the nurses wheeling the screens into place around the bed, he bent quickly to Wesley’s ear and promised to return as soon as he could, but Wesley reached up, caught a fold of his jacket and shook his head. He didn’t want Aldridge to see him
this way. He’d get better, quicker, on his own. Time, he muttered as Aldridge turned away. Just give me a bit of time.

The tests, at first, revealed nothing. The consultant, aware of Wesley’s HIV, told him that it could be any of a dozen infections. His immune system wasn’t working too well. Some bug, resident or otherwise, had got the upper hand for a while. Wesley thought about it, the hot dark spaces of his body crawling with infection. He felt, he said, a sense of betrayal. Not by fate. Not by the guy in New York. But by the feeble chemistry of his own system. Sitting in a bath in the tiny tiled room at the end of the ward, he looked down at his pale flesh, astonished at how thin he’d become. As he tried to shave, his eyes followed the razor in the mirror, exploring unfamiliar territory, the skin tauter, thinner. Even the bone beneath, he told me later, felt raw to the touch.

After the first bout of fever came the depression. Wesley lay in the bed, quite still, a needle in his arm dripping yet more antibiotics. When the trolleys from the kitchen appeared, clattering down the ward, he shut his eyes and turned his head into the pillow. The smell of food, any food, made him want to vomit and he tried to visualize other things, scenes from his recent trip to Ireland, the shape of a fold of land, the twists and turns of a particular conversation, peat smoke shredding in the wind, fat little parcels of cloud bellying in from the Atlantic. Once or twice he tried to read, picking up a paper, letting his eyes wander down the page, unable, for the first time in his life, to make sense of any of it. This failure of concentration compounded the physical hurt, and by the tenth day he was wondering whether there was any point in carrying on. Part of him, an old man already, had had enough. But there was another part, too, that was still angry, still hurt, still determined to get better.

A week later, the doctors no wiser, the fever returned and with it came yet more tests. Semi-delirious, Wesley tried to concentrate on counting the tiles in the ceiling while the nurse coated his upper body in KY jelly and a technician arrived with an ultrasound scanner. The pictures of his spleen and liver, though, revealed nothing, so the consultant decided to do a liver biopsy, half a syringe of local anaesthetic and two fine wires inserted through the body wall while Wesley lay immobile, on his side, forbidden to move for hour after hour. The following day, still in
the dark, they wheeled him away for a CT scan, inching his body through a big white plastic arch, building up a 3D picture of his stomach. Back in bed, surrounded by bottles of Badoit, Wesley felt worse than ever. Every bit of him hurt. The bits that touched the pillow hurt. The bits beneath the sheet hurt. The bits in contact with the mattress hurt. Even the soles of his feet hurt. Unable to sleep, he simply lay there, thinking about the next hour, and the hour after that, and all he felt was dread.

Next morning, the consultant arrived. It was 8 July. He was smiling broadly. The CT scan had caught the offending bug. Wesley had TB of the stomach. Now they could set to work and make him better.

And they did. Within ten days, still very weak, Wesley left the hospital with Mark and took a taxi back to Stoke Newington. Waiting for him there, a nice touch, was a letter Aldridge had sent by courier that same afternoon. In it he promised Wesley that his job was safe for as long as he wanted it and that he should take his time getting better. Only at the end of the letter did he mention the Irish story. The piece, he wrote, was sensational. Wesley had done a fine job. But certain aspects had proved especially sensitive and after a great deal of thought Aldridge had decided not to run it. Nothing personal. Just an old-fashioned editorial decision he hoped he’d understand. Wesley didn’t understand, but what was more important was the realization that, just now, he didn’t much care. Mark, coming in from the kitchen with yet more soup, had watched the letter flutter to the floor. Years later, he still remembers the expression on Wesley’s face: pure indifference, a residue of the fever that had very nearly killed him.

My own career, meanwhile, had ground to a halt. By now, I’d been at Curzon House for well over a year. The novelty had gone, the challenge had worn off and I’d had more than enough time to ask myself some of the harder questions. One or two of them had to do with a growing sense of claustrophobia. The offices themselves were dull and airless. No one ever seemed to laugh. There was no spark, or sense of real involvement. My colleagues, most of them, were obsessed by status and petty slights. My superiors were largely invisible. And away from the building, out
in the real world where the product was gathered and spent, there was only a mysterious void. I’d said yes, all those months ago, because I thought I could contribute. Now, I spent my working life in front of a computer screen, a million miles from what I fondly thought of as the action.

MI5 has a form for moods like these. It’s called an HR7. You fill it in and send it upstairs. After a while, if you’re lucky, they ask to see you. In my case, it was autumn before the summons came, a peremptory phone call telling me to report to an office on the fourth floor. I recognized the voice at once. It was a voice you didn’t forget: flat South London vowels half-buried under a thin, nasal whine. It belonged to the younger of the two men I’d met with Rory at the Soho restaurant, the one who’d subsequently reappeared at my formal interview. Since then, I’d seen him perhaps half a dozen times, awkward meetings in lifts or the central lobby, a nod and a grunt and a passing reference to the weather, nothing I could dignify with the word ‘conversation’. The only thing I really knew about him was his name, Eric Stollmann, and that fact that he’d come to us a couple of years back from Customs and Excise.

The latter was occasionally a subject of canteen gossip. Customs and Excise were well known as zealots, keen-eyed shock-troop types with terrible complexions and inner-city educations and absolutely no sense of humour. As far as I could judge, Stollmann was the perfect example of all three. Quite why he’d transferred his affections to our little brotherhood no one seemed to know, but he was universally mistrusted, not least because no one had a clue what he did.

I knocked twice on his office door and stepped in. He was sitting behind a desk with his back to the window. The sun, low, cast a long shadow over the blotter. He was toying with a paper clip, thin bony fingers, bitten nails. For the first time ever, he smiled.

‘Long time,’ he mumbled, ‘no see.’

We talked for nearly an hour. I remember everything about the conversation because – to be frank – it was the first time I’d got any real sense out of any of my superiors. He began by saying he was sorry. My induction had taken rather longer than had been planned, more the firm’s fault than mine. Unexpected resignations
in Registry had left the department undermanned. In consequence, I’d been obliged to backfill. Under the circumstances, the view was that I’d done rather well. A series of source reports I’d analysed on certain developments in Northern Ireland had attracted a great deal of attention. I obviously had a knack for the work. I could recognize what was important and what was rubbish. I had the intellectual courage not to qualify my conclusions. I was bright and forthright and I obviously wasn’t frightened of hard work. One of the things he wanted to say, he muttered, was thank you.

By this time, as you might imagine, I’d rather warmed to the man. With the blinds down on the window behind him, shielding me from the sun, I had the opportunity to take a real look. He was certainly young – I guessed maybe early thirties – but the tightly cropped hair was beginning to grey at the temples, and his face was hollow with fatigue. Physically, he was medium height, thin, with a white, indoor face and coal-black eyes. He was carefully dressed – blue shirt, subtly striped, nicely cut suit, quietly original tie – and there were no rings on his fingers. The desk, likewise, was virtually bare – blotter, wire basket, telephone, internal directory, two cheap Biros in a plain white mug – and it somehow matched the impression I was beginning to form about the man himself. It looked spartan. It spoke of efficiency, hard work and long hours. Empty of photographs or ornament, it made no concessions to a life outside.