Chapter 9

Act 3, Scene 2: Baiting the trap

I was marched into the Adjutant’s office at nine sharp.

“Major Ferguson, Sah!” yelled the corporal clerk, the least military man you could imagine.

“God, the country must be in dire straits if they have to call Apostle Ferguson out of his bath chair,” Jimmy Smythe-Carstairs joked as soon as the door was shut – at least, I think it was a joke.

Three hours later I drove out the barracks to return the hire car, staying at or under the speed limit for probably the first time since I sat my driving test. Corporal Riley took me to the station, commenting that I was a little quieter than usual: “Rough night, Sir?”

“Late night, corporal, work, you know.”

“Me too sir,” he grinned. Then, when I pointed out the dark circles under his eyes, he gave a friendly laugh: “You could never get anything past the Apostle!”

I knew, of course, that the troops called me the Apostle Mark, but it had been something of a shock earlier when the smart young lieutenant summoned by Jimmy said that he was honored, never having expected to meet the Apostle in the flesh. I am only thirty-five, a bit young to be a legend.

My meeting was at two o’clock in the British Museum and I arrived there in good time. The street outside was almost empty except for a council employee making a lifetime’s work out of pushing a broom along the pavement. He gave me a friendly nod as I entered the building. I was expecting him, so I had no difficulty recognizing the young lieutenant in his worn and dirty dungarees. I was supposed to make my way, quietly to the Egyptian room but Paul shouted across the foyer at me as soon as I entered.

“What the Hell’s going on, Mark?”

“It’s hush-hush,” I shouted back, speaking nothing but the truth.

I was not altogether surprised to find that Paul was the mystery man wanting to offer me employment. He has a high regard for my ability as a scientist and he almost certainly did not suspect me of leaking information to Molly. At the same time, he will be aware of Bowen’s interest and will wish to avoid open confrontation.

Jimmy Smythe-Carstairs is a captain who makes a career out of looking stupid; people tell him things because, he says, they think he is too thick to understand. This morning, when I described what I suspected was phone hacking, it took him two minutes to grasp what I was saying and less than five to raise the alarm. By the time I left his office I was an Agent (Espionage); temporary, acting and, of course, unpaid. The street-sweeping lieutenant is my liaison officer, and we are part of a hastily arranged mission with an unspecified purpose.

After this meeting with Paul, I was to return to Aldershot to spend the weekend learning more about my new trade, but we could not pass-up the opportunity to find out more from the man who had arranged a meeting to offer me a job. Jimmy telephoned my solicitor, who is still on the reserve list, and instructed him to change the venue. It was considered that the lawyer’s phone would not have been tapped by our enemy, whoever he was, but he might have placed someone near the office at the time of the meeting. The solicitor, enjoying the thrill of a covert operation, kept the call to Paul, who had asked for the meeting, so short that he failed to give the director anything but a headful of questions.

It took Paul two cups of coffee to stop complaining about our lack of trust in him. I finally had to remind him that he had not trusted me when he let me take the blame for the leak of information to Molly.

“Oh, I knew all along that it was James, but I wanted to get to the people behind him. You’re such a rotten actor that I couldn’t let you in on it.”

He lost a lot of his bounce when he had to admit that he had made no progress in identifying the people backing James. The fact was, that he had given up the hunt, becoming disillusioned by the intrigue in commercial science. His old university had offered him a lucrative position and he would be able to bring in his own team, so he planned to resign the directorship. He wanted me, David and Liz to join him. I raised my eyebrows when he mentioned ‘Liz’ as I could not think who he meant. He blushed.

“You know Elizabeth, Liz, she used to work for you, for God’s sake; you can’t have forgotten her.”

“I just never thought of her as a ‘Liz’. I thought she and James were practically engaged?”

Paul is a wonderful lecturer, always master of his subject, he responds to his audience. He told me that no one understood Elizabeth except him, because the rest of us, being shallow ourselves, were unable to appreciate the depth of her sterling character. Only he has penetrated to her inner being, where Liz has been hiding for too long. James had been an aberration, understandable in a lonely woman too modest to expect the best.

I made the mistake of asking if I sensed love in the air surrounding him and Liz, which led to an even longer lecture. Boiled down to its essentials, he thought he was too old and too dull for her, while managing to represent his restraint as in her best interests. I liked what I knew of Elizabeth, and I certainly thought she was too good for James. Using my well-known skill in solving the emotional affairs of others, I encouraged him to ask her on a date. I expected another lecture on the absurdity of the idea but all he said was: “What will I say to her?”

After we had solved his personal problem, we strolled through the rooms and galleries while he told me what was happening in the lab. Bowen is spending more time with them than in head office; he seems to do very little, but his constant presence is an irritant. He has formed a triumvirate with James and Peter; the official line is that James is cooperating by feeding false information to Molly. Peter is openly defiant of Paul, to the extent of refusing to take part in the Monday meetings.

David has gone back into his shell, talking to practically no one, according to Liz. She also reports that the work of the team has stalled again. Paul did not question my interest and I told him nothing of my phone being hacked. Jimmy thought that Paul’s calls were also being monitored, so I suggested, without telling him why, that we should not talk again except in a dire emergency. He picked that up at once, asking me if I thought something was going on.

“I sense something, Mark, but I can’t decide what it is. I’m not conceited enough to think they are plotting to oust me, but they are up to something.” He gave an ironic little chuckle. “My old prof used to say that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that there’s no one out to get you.”

He may have failed to identify the person behind James’ betrayal, and he is a bit besotted with Liz, but Paul is the most intelligent man I know. Perhaps if I was a proper spy or had more time to prepare, I might have concocted a believable story, but my choice now was to say nothing or confide in him.

“I need you to hang on as long as possible to your job at the lab. The work started by Molly may be interesting foreign governments. They are trying to get rid of you so your presence must be inhibiting them in some way, so the longer you stay where you are the better for our side.”

“What’s your role in this, Mark?”

“When we finish here, I’m going back to Aldershot to spend the weekend being briefed. I suspect that I’ll be a scientific adviser kept far away from the action.”

Paul said nothing more until we were on the steps outside the door, ready to go our separate ways.

“If I know you, my young friend, you’ll be in the thick of the action. I sense we are dealing with ruthless people. Please take care.”

Paul was right in suspecting my desire to be actively involved, but I was certain the army would keep me far from the action. Not only was I untrained in spying but I also had a track record of reckless behavior; I would not give me the job if it was my choice.

From the station, I took a taxi to my hotel where I found a staff car at the door and an armed truce inside. Jimmy had telephoned to settle my bill and have my luggage packed. The problem began when the manager refused to hand my possessions to the corporal who drove the car sent to collect me. I could see both sides of the argument, but I chose the diplomatic way out: I agreed with both of them and left a hefty tip with the manager to distribute to the staff.

I was driven to the Officers’ Mess where I was given a palatial room befitting my new rank of major. I had been lying flat on my back attached to monitors when I was promoted; this was my first conventional army duty at my new rank. There was a list of forthcoming activities on my desk; I telephoned Hector as soon as I discovered that there was a mess dinner that evening. The last thing I wanted was a convivial evening with my fellows; I was going to need my wits at their sharpest over the weekend. Morag answered, deflecting my invitation to take them out for dinner into a counter-invitation to share their family meal at home. I would have to watch what I said, but I reckoned that I could get through the evening without mentioning that my phone had been hacked.

Our chat during a relaxed and pleasant meal, was mostly about my mum and dad, although it was soon clear that we were also discussing the relationship between my hosts by proxy. The discussion lingered on general issues of fidelity in marriage until either Morag or Hector found the subject too hot to handle, at which point they would bring the topic back to mum and dad. My role was chiefly to provide facts or amusing anecdotes. Life in a dysfunctional family as confessed by their son; just the sort of story that would have been published in the defunct News of the World.

In a strange way, the discussion that evening helped to clear away the obstacles that had grown between us recently. The only concrete result was a dinner and dance date for the following evening. Hector was off to Catterick the next morning and he instructed me to take Morag as my partner to a dance in the Mess.

“Your legs need testing on the dance floor and Morag will keep the camp followers from mobbing you.”

I used to enjoy dancing, but I had not attempted it since I was wounded. It would certainly do my street cred no harm to walk in with the gorgeous Morag on my arm. You did not have to be Sherlock Holmes to guess that they both wanted a chance to talk to me without the other partner. In case I missed the point, Hector promised that he would spend a night with me in Cambridge on his way back from Catterick.

The following morning, the steward had laid out my uniform when I finished my shave and shower. That reduced my surprise at being shown straight into the colonel’s office. As a serving officer, I was obliged to bring the hacking to the attention of the Adjutant, but I had not anticipated his rapid response nor the personal interest of the colonel. There was another colonel in the room with nothing on his uniform to indicate his regiment or speciality.

My colonel asked after my mum, mentioning my wound as an afterthought. He did not introduce me to the visiting officer, but quickly ceded the floor to him.

“Even before Covid-19 we’ve been considering the security implications of viruses. Now it ranks alongside terrorism as a perceived threat to our way of life.”

He paused for a moment, glancing at my colonel before looking back at me.

“We would have been having this conversation in a week or so even if you hadn’t come to us. We’ve been quietly recruiting scientists but none of them have military training, far less front-line experience. You are unique and we planned to offer you a senior position in our organization.”

“They can’t order you to do it, Mark,” the colonel added his opinion. “At least, I don’t think they can.”

The visitor ignored this interjection, going on with what I thought was a rather cynical smile. I suspect that he can reach people a lot higher up the chain of command than the colonel of a regiment; if his lot want me, they are likely to get me. I would need time to think it through, but my first reaction was pleasurable excitement.

“I want to be frank with you,” he continued.

Even innocent young subalterns who still believe in the tooth fairy know enough to doubt that the army’s chief spook could ever be ‘frank’.

“We’ve been keeping an eye on you and, frankly,” (that word again) “we can think of nothing that would justify the expense of hacking into your communications.”

“All my work has involved paper chases using published documents. We put things together in a different way, I suppose, but it is hardly cutting-edge work where we might stumble on something worth pinching. I’ve been thinking about it since Thursday afternoon when I discovered that I was being spied on.”

He then took me through my meeting with Pat at the sport’s day; from there he went into great detail on my relationships with all the other people in the lab. He asked for details of my visit to America and the people I had met there. I had the impression that I told him nothing that he had not known when he entered the room: it was not only the hackers who had been keeping me under observation.

For the first time since I led a patrol into enemy territory, I felt the hair rising at the back of my neck. I had a reputation for meticulous planning when I was on the front line; I told no one that my secret was that I kept checking until the hair settled back in place. Up until that moment, I had assumed that the hacking was connected with the work I had been doing, but now I wondered if I was the target. The colonel had said that the combination of combat experience and scientific training made me unique; suppose it was this quality that had been recognized by the unknown hacker. Was I to be offered untold wealth to defect to some foreign golden cage? I think the colonel has read too much Ian Fleming literature.

The visitor sensed my distraction immediately. He asked a few more questions before smiling to himself and announcing that he would hand me over to his deputy who would drag out of me facts I had forgotten. He had shaken hands with my colonel and was heading for the door before I gathered my thoughts.

“Will you put a guard on Pat and her children until we know what’s going on?”

He thought for a minute before he shook his head: “I don’t think that’s necessary at the moment, do you? We don’t want to draw the enemy’s attention to them.”

“Your choice, colonel, but I have to warn you that my loyalty will not withstand a threat to those kids.”

He paused in the doorway for a long time, finally leaving without saying anything more. The colonel said that it was not like me to panic, which brought me round to face him, snarling.

“In the past I’ve had everyone under my eye, colonel, working with and for people I trusted. This time I must trust people I do not know. What you’re seeing is not panic but unease that events are moving out of my hands – perhaps they already are beyond my control – and that worries me.”

“Calm down, Mark. I’ve assigned Jimmy to guard your back and that young Lieutenant Ralph Fairbairn that shadowed you yesterday is one of our own. I don’t trust the spook any more than you do but in this regiment, we look after each other as we always have.”

The rest of Saturday was spent with a captain of artillery who took me back to my childhood to establish why I seemed to be attracting the attention of the enemy. He was a great deal more communicative than his colonel but he rather increased than diminished my unease. In the first place, he would not consider any other possibility than an enemy attempt to suborn or destroy me; I needed time to consider more carefully the work David had initiated on predicting new cross-over viruses. In the second place, he scornfully dismissed my concern for Pat and the children; given that he saw me as the target, that seemed foolish.

“You do understand that I will do anything to prevent a single hair being damaged on either Brian or Alice?”

“You’re a soldier, man! Show a bit of backbone!”

Now, I seldom make anything of my past actions, but I do not need a lecture on courage from a man whose only experience of enemy action has been falling foul of the Regimental Sergeant Major during basic training. He had lost my respect. It may be quite wrong of me, but I paid less attention from then on to what he was telling me. He stopped at five and I heaved a sigh of relief. His last word was that he would see me later.

Sure enough, the captain was at the dance, trying to ingratiate himself with Morag. When I pointed his single medal ribbon out to her, pretending I did not recognize it as having been awarded for spending time in the Afghan combat zone, Morag rose to the occasion by drawing his attention to the double row on my chest, chiding me for forgetting I had the same award as the captain – only mine had a bar, signifying a second tour of duty.

My array of medals did not trouble him, but he was gutted when Morag declined his invitation to partner him on the dance floor since, as she said, I was a much better dancer. I do not know what she said to the other girls during a visit to the powder room, but he left early when he was turned down by most of the belles of the ball. “He’s a right wee scunner,” Morag concluded. I will get Hector to translate when I next see him.

On the Sunday, Ralph Fairbairn and I were instructed by a couple of non-commissioned officers on the equipment we would need for our new duties. When I handed my phone and tablet to Jimmy, I expected to buy replacements. What I got was what appeared to be my own devices returned to me at the end of the day. They even used the same telephone number. Inside, they had been comprehensively altered. When I received a call or phoned out, there would be a brief delay as the call was routed through a listening station. I was assured that the effect would be undetectable unless I called from somewhere like Australia. All my calls would be recorded, and the source would be traced. If I pressed the ‘#’ key it would alert the listeners that I was in trouble and needed assistance.

The Sunday session finished earlier than planned since the captain had to dash back to London before lunch. By that time, he was the laughing stock of half the barracks. You could not say that he had seen the writing on the wall: that was in the ladies’ loo written on the mirror in Morag’s lipstick. The word soon spread, however, that a man who had never strayed beyond the perimeter of Camp Bastion had been giving lessons in courage to a hero – even if the hero was an idiot, as my mum pointed out when I visited her in the afternoon.

Later, Jimmy, Ralph and I dined with the colonel in his quarters. He openly voiced my feelings that the intelligence colonel and captain could not be relied on. They would use me, but I would always be expendable, an outsider who could be sacrificed for the greater good.

“We look after our own, Mark, so I’ve put Jimmy in charge; young Fairbairn will travel to Cambridge with you to give you cover – and that panic button they put on your phone will sound in our guardroom.”

We spent the rest of the evening in detailed planning; it was not perfect, as the colonel readily admitted, but it was the best we could devise in the available time. Peter’s disclosure of my London meeting was a loose thread, and we were now following it to its source. It seemed probable that I had been under surveillance before I was sacked, but we agreed that the pace was increasing. I wanted to be back in Cambridge as early as possible on Monday, convinced that Pat and the children were in imminent danger.

It was almost three in the morning when we finalized our arrangements. The colonel would not rest until he and Jimmy went to the guardroom where they waited with the Sergeant of the Guard until I pressed the panic button on my phone. The result was a satisfyingly loud noise. No one remembered that the Officer of the Day had been supplied with a repeater; roused from an untroubled sleep by the alarm, he acted with commendable speed, bringing the base to the alert. The colonel passed it off as a deliberate trial of the system, but I know he apologized later to the young captain who had been scared out of his bed, although he retained his wits.

I was on the road by six, driving through the summer dawn. Ever since Pat spoke to me at the sport’s meeting, my anxiety had been growing, but the closer I got to home, the calmer I became. I had no idea of the strength of the enemy, although it was clear that they must outnumber Ralph Fairbairn and me. I realized that it was not rational, but I felt that Pat and the children were already safer because I was on my way to protect them. This feeling was so strong, that I made a leisurely stop for breakfast, arriving at Audrey’s house just as she was returning from dropping Alice at school.

We spent the first hour on domestic arrangements. Audrey owns a granny flat at the bottom of her garden, converted from a garage. It is rented by two girls, but they had agreed to sublet it to me during the long vac, which had just started. My cottage was rented until at least the end of the month and the student flat had been suggested by Audrey as an alternative to a hotel. She makes no secret of her wish to see Pat and I get together.

The flat is cozy – the two girls must be very good friends to tolerate the lack of privacy. Downstairs there is a small living room and a well-appointed kitchen. A vertical ladder through a hole in the ceiling enters the bedroom right in the middle of the floor; the bathroom is above the kitchen. There is a plug that slides across the hole to allow safe movement around the bedroom. There is entry from a lane, but I will have to park on Audrey’s drive. I took her out to lunch where we settled the financial details of the deal and then I gave some thought to my plans until it was time to collect the kids.

At our meeting with the colonel the day before, we had agreed that I needed to find out what was going on and that I should take precautions to hide my interest from the enemy. There were three people I wanted to speak to without drawing attention to our conversations. David was, in my opinion, the hinge on which everything turned. I intended to bump into him at the model airplane meeting; I called the club secretary expressing an interest in membership and was invited to their next club get-together on Tuesday. Because of the long summer nights, they would be on the field actually flying. He made it sound as if launching the models was the least important part of the hobby.

I also wanted to talk to Elizabeth and Kate, but I had no idea how to make a casual approach to either of them. It was Pat who gave me the solution for one of them when she and I had a long talk after the children were in bed. We were both wary when we met; I was wondering how much I should tell her about what I knew and suspected and, I later discovered, she thought that I would give her a hard time about her date with Peter. I might have done if I had remembered about it, but it now seemed utterly trivial compared with the threat I perceived to her and the children.

It was only when I asked her to put out the light and join me at the window, that the tension was broken. I had arranged for Ralph to loiter near the lamp-standard outside Pat’s home so she could see him clearly. She got a fit of giggles, which made me realize how melodramatic I was being. It was at that moment that I decided to hold nothing back; I would not try to hide the unpleasant parts, not even try to sugar coat them. She is a grown woman, and she deserves my respect, not my patronage.

She had made coffee, but it remained untouched while we sat on her settee, holding hands, while I told her everything, including the possibility of danger to the children. After I had answered a few clarifying questions, Pat sat, still holding my hands, but with her eyes unfocused as she considered what I had said.

“Would you really betray your country to save Alice and Brian?”

No one had put the case quite so bluntly before.

“A country is just a collection of people and, if it does not cherish its children, then I want no part of it. So, yes, I put your kids ahead of my country.”

“What about me?” she smiled.

Every time I relax, I put my foot in my big mouth.

“You’re part of the package.” She pulled her hands away at once, and I was sure that I had blown my chances, again, but she surprised me by bringing them up to hold my face: “I can settle for being part of that package.”

She let me go and stood up, blushing, but not before leaning forward to kiss me briefly but firmly on the lips.

“Do you think your friend will still be there?” she asked moving to the window. It was only then I realized we had been sitting in a darkened room with only the light through the open kitchen door illuminating our tete-a-tete. I called Ralph, who promised to be back under the light in less than a minute.

I stood behind Pat and, when I put my hands on her shoulders, she covered them with her own. Ralph appeared with a dog on a lead. He is a Cambridge graduate and had arranged to occupy rooms in college, but I have no idea where he found the dog. I must admit that it gave the best possible excuse for being out, dawdling under lamp posts.

“There was so much I wanted to tell you tonight, Mark. I wanted you to know that the date with Peter was a mistake – I was back at mum’s place by half past eight, you know, having spent most of the time telling him he’s a rat. Do you think when this is over...?”

“I feel as if I’ve known you all my life, but we’ve never even dated. I’m not usually confident with girls but I feel Peter is an irrelevance – in a straight fight I’ll beat him and win the heart of the fair maiden.”

She put her arms round my neck and kissed me again, for longer and with a good deal of passion. “No contest, champ,” she whispered in my ear.

Then she held me at arm’s length and asked what I planned to do. I told her about my plan to meet David and my difficulty in finding a way to meet Elizabeth and Kate by accident. Pat smiled happily since she could tell me where and when Elizabeth did her weekly shop. I left shortly afterwards, so I could exchange greetings with the solitary dog walker on the street. He nodded when I asked in a low voice if he would recognize Pat when he saw her again.

It was a surprise to find Audrey’s house in darkness when I turned into her drive; a surprise, that is, until I noticed that it was after midnight. Pat and I had sat holding hands in a darkened room for more than three hours. We seemed to have by-passed the early stages of love where your hormones take control and gone straight to the deep understanding of an established couple. As I quietly crossed Audrey’s garden to my little flat, I hoped that I would find time for some passionate encounters with her daughter in the not too distant future.

On the whole, I was pleased with the progress I had made on my first full day as a spy. Pat now had a phone that connected to what the communications experts called my ‘burner’ network. There were eight of these phones, two masters held by Ralph and me and six slaves that would be distributed to Pat, Paul, David and, hopefully, Elizabeth and Kate. The master phones held all the numbers, but the slaves could only call my phone or Ralph’s.

I spent most of Tuesday learning every detail of the routine of Pat and the children. I gave the spare burner phones to Audrey, offering a version of the truth that my old phone had been hacked and I was afraid they would quickly find my new number. By eight, I was wandering amongst an almost entirely male group, tweaking and prodding large model ‘planes; there seemed to be a lot of fine-tuning required before they left the ground. Why do they bother? I wondered, when you can unpack a drone from a box and have it flying in five minutes.

It was fascinating, but totally frustrating since I could see that David was not present. That was when I discovered my weakness as an agent. I wanted to meet my former colleague without drawing attention to us. If I asked one of his fellow flying enthusiasts about him that would attract the attention I was keen to avoid. It was only when I returned to the flat that it occurred to me that it would have been entirely natural to represent myself as a newcomer seeking to meet up again with a fellow modeler. All I did learn was that there was a meeting on Saturday.

I had much better luck when I pushed my trolley round the supermarket on Thursday, although I hardy deserved it. I trailed Elizabeth down a few aisles wondering how to make my approach seem accidental. I finally plucked up the courage when she was lifting, inspecting and discarding bunches of bananas, all identical, so far as I could tell. I was planning to bump her trolley with mine and exclaim my surprise when she turned round to find it was my old friend Elizabeth.

As I neared her, she turned and offered me a bunch of ten or twelve bananas:

“What do you think of these, Mark?”

“I’m no expert Elizabeth but I would describe them as bananas.”