Chapter 37

Oxford city centre. 5th November.

“Remember, remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot,” the singing voices were loud, raucous, and drunk. There was a pause, and then the lines were repeated.

“What comes next?” slurred another voice after the third repetition had finished. There was a short pause before someone laughed. “Who cares? Sing it again.”

The two Safety Patrollers looked on in distaste as the half dozen or so drunken youths approached them, singing lustily, if badly. “Didn’t know there was a tune to that rhyme,” one said.

“And this is the sort of person who goes to one of the oldest universities in the world!” the other added sarcastically. “Ready to take in some scum?” he asked with a harsh laugh.

“Of course. Better call for backup though. We can’t take in all six at once.”

“Depends on how co-operative they want to be!”

“Huh?”

“Well,” laughed the senior Patrolman, “if they’re really co-operative they won’t mind sitting or lying on top of each other.”

“Yeah, true. I guess we should just allow them to go past us and follow them until a van arrives, then pick them up?”

“Oh aye. Load ‘em unconscious.” He raised his voice slightly and addressed the youths as they approached. “You should be getting home quickly now. Curfew is in twenty minutes.” It was bonfire night and curfew had been extended by ninety minutes in many parts of the country.

For a brief moment the youths surrounded the pair of patrollers before they carried on, but behind them the patrollers had gone.

Anyone looking carefully would have seen two extra pairs of feet, both of them dragging along the ground. But this was mid evening in November with few street lamps, and fewer cars around, so no-one was looking.

The moment the patrollers were surrounded and hidden, the youths stopped being a drunk rabble, and became instead a disciplined group. The patrollers each had a stinger jabbed into the back of the neck, rendering both men instantly unconscious. They were grabbed, and then whisked swiftly away into the courtyard of Jesus College, just thirty feet away.

Two evenings later, slightly earlier in the evening, and thirty miles away on the edge of Swindon old town, two more patrollers were just finishing their patrol when they came across a young man lying in the street. Standing next to him, and laughing, were two other drunken youths.

“What’s going on?” The senior of the two patrollers asked harshly.

“Davy boy’s pissed,” the first of the standing youths laughed. “Can’t even fuckin’ stand up.” He broke off into peals of laughter. The other man with him just giggled, trying to hold his friend up, but having difficulties because of his own inebriation.

“Well get him off the street before I arrest you all,” said the patroller.

“Gi’s a hand gettin’ ‘im up?” the second youth slurred. He reached down to his friend, and stumbled, going to his knees in front of one of the patrolmen.

Instinctively the patrolman moved half a pace backwards, but then bent down to help the kneeling youth up. He didn’t notice the first youth take something out of his pocket.

There was a brief sound like bacon frying on a griddle, and the patrolman went down like a sack of potatoes.

“Hey!” Both the kneeling youth and the other patrolman shouted at the same time. The second patrolman, not having seen the stinger to the neck of his colleague, moved forwards to see what was going on, and two seconds later he too was unconscious on the ground. Instantly the three youths, completely and totally sober, were up, just as a small van came around the corner and stopped with a brief squeal of brakes. The back doors were opened from the inside, and the three youths outside, with help from two more men in the back of the van, quickly bundled the two patrollers inside. The van drove off quickly but smoothly, leaving no-one behind. It had been stopped for barely twenty seconds.

The following evening, at about the same time, a two man Safety Patrol was walking past one of the senior houses of Cheltenham Ladies College. “Too much bloody money if you ask me,” one muttered to the other. They were getting towards the end of their patrol and they were bored.

“What?”

The junior man indicated the college they were passing. “Too much bloody money. These fuckin’ girls seem to think they’re god’s gift.”

“Oh, yeah, know what you mean. Mind you, look at her.”

About twenty yards in front of them, a young woman, who may or may not have been from the college, was leaning against a wall, obviously waiting for passing traffic. She turned her head and saw the two men. She strolled half a dozen paces towards them, then stopped, turned, and began to run the other way.

“She’s a flamin’ Tom,” one said. ‘Tom’ was British police slang for a prostitute, the local patrol had adopted the same slang. “Come on.”

The girl, who couldn’t have been yet twenty, was wearing heels so after a few paces she paused to take her shoes off, allowing the two Patrollers to gain on her. She carried on for a few more yards then turned into a gate, the two patrolmen now only a few yards behind her and closing fast.

The patrolmen chased the girl through the gate, and skidded to a quick stop on the gravel drive. In front of them were six or seven women, all looking under twenty, holding some sort of device in their hands, pointed at the gate and the Patrollers. “What’s going on here?” one patrolman started to ask. There was a sound like bacon frying on a griddle and the two patrolmen dropped to the ground. Seconds later the two men had been grabbed by the young women, all sixth-formers at the college, all still under eighteen, and dragged away into the college grounds.

The following evening, in Warwickshire, two more patrollers went missing in Shakespeare’s Stratford-Upon-Avon, the next evening it was Rugby, and the evening after that Sutton Coldfield just north of Birmingham, and two nights later Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. Over the next twenty nights, always just before the end of shift, and never closer than about thirty miles from the previous day’s incident, or indeed any other similar incident, a Safety Patrol went missing. Never a Security Patrol, and never a mixed patrol. And never bigger than a three man patrol. Once a planned kidnapping was aborted because the expected two-man Safety Patrol had become a four-man patrol, another time it was because the expected Safety Patrol had turned out to be an armed Security Patrol. One patrol never turned up as expected: it had been delayed earlier in its shift, and skipped that part of its route.

The kidnappings moved slowly north, swinging east then west across England and Wales, until eventually nearly sixty men had been taken. Then they stopped. Few had been taken from any of the larger towns and cities, and where they had it was generally from the outskirts. Most of the rest had come from smaller towns with somewhere between 20 and 40 thousand population.

Each of the victims had been brought to a base in Cumbria, drugged, questioned briefly about their identity and then housed, deep underground, in small, individual, sound-proofed but surprisingly comfortable cells. The only way in and out of the cell block was by a disguised transporter in what appeared to be a short lift.

“What on Earth is that damned racket?” asked Graham Thorn sharply, looking up from his desk. There was no one in the room with him, it was a purely rhetorical question. The noises outside had slowly come into his awareness, before something suddenly broke his concentration. He snatched up the phone.

“What is that noise outside?” he demanded.

“It’s the parade forming up on Horse Guards parade before marching to the Cenotaph on Whitehall sir,” came the reply from the telephone operator seated two floors below. “It’s the eleventh sir, remembrance day.”

Thorn blinked for a moment in surprise, then frowned, a stony look stealing over his face. “Why?” he demanded.

There was a brief moments silence from the operator. “Sir?” she said tentatively. “The main remembrance day parade is always held on the Sunday closest to the eleventh of November, but if the eleventh is a weekday then there’s usually a small parade. There has been every year since at least the nineteen fifties.”

Thorn frowned again. “So what you are telling me,” he said slowly, angrily, “is that there will be armed men near here today, and again this Sunday?”

“No sir. Today it’s just the Royal British Legion, about sixty of them, along with a brass band, but I don’t know where that’s from. There’s normally a few police just to marshal traffic et cetera, but the last couple of years the safety patrol have done it and there’s been no problems. There will be a few prayers spoken, a wreath or two laid, then they’ll just disperse.”

“The safety patrol have allowed...” Thorn’s anger almost got away from him, but he held on. “Are you trying to tell me that a parade of soldiers happens just yards away from here?”

Down in the basement telephone exchange, the young woman on the phones positively quaked with fear. Fortunately she managed not to show it in her voice. “Not for the last two or three years sir. It’s just been old soldiers and sailors. The Chelsea pensioners. Various kids groups like the scouts and guides. Even the Safety Patrol marched in formation last year, but they’ve already said they won’t be there this year.”

“Well I want Sunday’s event cancelled. Now. And if...”

“I’m sorry sir,” interrupted the woman, “but I can’t do that, you’ll need...”

“Fine!” Interrupted Thorn in turn, and slammed down the phone to pick it up again straight away.

“Get me Boase,” he snarled, not quite realising he was asking the same woman he had been speaking to only moments earlier.

“Yes sir,” she said softly as Thorn hung up again.

“Good morning Mister Allen.”

“Who are you? Where am I? What am I doing here?”

“My name is Les, you are in an interrogation room, and you are going to answer some questions.” Les looked at a notebook he was holding. “First, I see your name is Gerald but you generally go by the nickname Taz, why is that? Where does that come from?”

Gerald just shrugged.

“Would you prefer me to call you Taz?”

Again the shrug.

Les returned to his reading. “You are twenty-seven years old; were born in Oldham in Lancashire, from where you moved with your parents to Lincoln when you were seven, and then at thirteen you moved to Stafford with your father after your parents split up. You were continuously in trouble at school for truancy, low-level bullying, minor thefts and general laziness. Interestingly, it says here you were not particularly a trouble maker or rabble rouser when you were on your own, but you did hang around with those that were. Hmm. A follower rather than a leader then. After leaving school you went on the dole and then had a succession of short term, low-paid jobs, generally in warehouses or similar. You were sacked twice, once for petty theft, once for insubordination.” Les looked up from his reading. “What did you do by the way? It doesn’t say here.”

Again Gerald just shrugged.

“Four years ago you joined the Safety Patrol and were transferred to Oxford where you were eventually promoted to Senior Squad leader. What would be known in the army as a staff sergeant. That’s the easy stuff. Now, we would like you to tell us a bit about your time in the Patrol, what you did to get those promotions, what you think of it, and of the Security Patrol. Even why someone of your rank is out on patrol? That in itself is odd don’t you think? I would have thought you would have had rather more than just a single trooper with you, or at least, you would have been in a command post somewhere.”

There was no answer. “Hmm. Well Mister Allen, I could just sit here and keep asking you the questions like this. In principle it’s easier and quicker, on the other hand I could inject you with something to knock you out, then extract the answers from you, er, in a different way.”

“Torture you mean,” came the sullen reply.

“Oh no, not torture. Torture implies pain, you won’t be hurt at all. In fact you might even feel better after it. But it does take time and effort, which is why we prefer doing it this way.”

“Huh.” Gerald, “Taz”, Allen just looked at Les with a surly expression.

Les steadily watched his subject, barely moving a muscle, just staring. He was good at general interrogations, but didn’t particularly like doing them. Eventually, after a couple of minutes, Gerald stirred. “You can call me Taz.”

“Thank you. Now Taz, first, how do you like the Patrol?”

There was a pause before Taz stirred. “It’s okay I guess.”

“Only okay? You mean there’s parts you don’t like?”

Taz thought for a moment. “Not really.”

“Things you do that you’d rather not do?”

Again the pause. “No.”

“Hmm. So you do like it?”

“I guess.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes. Okay? I do like being in the Patrol. Okay?”

“Calm down please Taz, I’m just trying to get a feel for how much you like it. Do you actually enjoy being in the Patrol?”

“Yeah. I do. Most of the time.”

“Why only most of the time?”

“Well,” there was a pause, “you know.”

Les smiled slightly. “No, please explain.”

“It’s okay when we stop the terrorists and revolutionaries, but I hate doing the fuckin’ paperwork.”

Les laughed. “Paperwork. Yeah, the bane of everyone’s life, including mine. Don’t you just hate bureaucracy?”

Taz looked up for the first time. “Fuck yeah. Do you know how much we have to do every time we bring someone in? It’s enough to drive a man fuckin’ bonkers. As a squad leader I have to go through everybody else’s and make sure they are all filled in properly. Fuck I hate it. It’s why I go out on patrol, that way I don’t have to do as much, give it to that fuckin’ little squirt Glover.”

Les had no idea who ‘Glover’ was, but now that Taz had started talking Les just had to gently guide the torrent of expletive filled invective to the subjects he was interested in. It took well over an hour to get everything he wanted, and anytime Taz slowed, Les just had to bring the discussion back to paperwork and that was enough to get him going again.

“Okay, I think that’s enough for now, I’ll arrange for some slightly better food for you, but I think you’d better go back to your room for the time being.”

“Why? When am I gonna get out of here? Are you the Political Office?”

Les smiled slightly. “Not exactly, but close enough for your purposes.”

Taz was led back to his cell, while Les went to get something to eat and write up his report. Everything was recorded and there were a couple of stenographers who were already transcribing Taz’s words to paper, but he found he got far more out of just writing up his own report. He could note down things that no mere stenographer would have seen or heard. He needed to write his own report himself. He actually found it easier to do this in the main staff canteen rather than his own tiny office as things going on around hm had a habit of triggering thoughts that needed to go into the report. He heard the rising tide of conversation around him as people began to express anger at Thorn for cancelling the following day’s Remembrance Parade at the London Cenotaph, but took little notice.

Not all of Les’s interrogations went as easily as the first, though in many cases once he had found the one thing that each man would spout off about, the interrogation would appear to turn into a discussion between colleagues, and usually went reasonably well. In only four cases could he not get them to talk at all, which was much better than he or anyone else had expected.

“Did you know that Patrollers are expected to be, if not actually celibate, then at the very least unencumbered by romantic association?” Les was talking to one of his own colleagues at lunch a few days later.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that before. I’ve been told they sometimes get call-girls in.”

“Not what I’ve just been told.”

“Oh?”

Les looked a bit upset. “Apparently they have been known to just take women off the street.”

“Huh. Doesn’t surprise me, but I’d not actually heard that one before. Gang rapes I’m guessing?”

“Basically. Sometimes they let them go fairly quickly, other times...” Les shook his head, anger and disgust on his face. “You really don’t want to know.”

“I can guess. Have you managed to get anything worthwhile out of them?”

Les shrugged. “Depends what you mean by worthwhile. I’ve confirmed a lot of what we already knew or guessed, in particular that the Safety and the Security elements of the Patrol don’t generally get on that well, but on the other hand I’m not sure there’s enough of a difference to easily use it as a lever. Most Safety Patrollers want to be Security Patrollers and are jealous of them for being armed. We’ve also picked up two who I think realise the Security Patrol are just armed thugs, without realising they themselves are just as bad.” Les shook his head. “This was not a good idea. I wanted to wait a while. They’ve got to notice the missing men.”

“We can’t,” his colleague insisted urgently. “We have to go now. There was a couple of senior officers here a few days ago. I accidentally overheard them talking. Apparently they are expecting the next alien attack before the end of March. Ideally we need to be rid of Thorn before Christmas to have time to get ready.”

Les frowned. “There’s no guarantee...” he began, but was cut off sharply.

“Of course there’s no guarantee. There’s no guarantees in anything, but can you guarantee it won’t? No. So ... so you need to get on with the ... how far have you got in the first round?”

“Finished this morning.”

“Okay, so we put the truth drug in their evening meals, and take them out tonight and question them all a second time.”

“That’s the plan,” Les said simply. “Fortunately for me, I don’t have to do that bit. I’ve just gotta finish writing up the results from the first set of interviews.”

Exactly twenty-four hours later, deep in the bowels of the old foreign and commonwealth office building that now housed the Ministry Of State Security, Senior Assault Leader Reg Griffiths paused in his journey to his own desk, reached over and picked up a piece of paper off the adjacent desk. “This was on my desk twenty minutes ago, why’ve you taken it?”

His colleague, Senior Assault Leader Mike Temple, whose desk it was, looked up in irritation. “I didn’t. What is it?”

“It’s a report of a patrol going missing a couple of weeks ago.”

“What are you talking about? That’s been on my desk for a few days.”

“No it bloody well hasn’t. It came off the top of that pile of paper right there.” Griffiths pointed.

Temple snatched the piece of paper back, stood up and stalked across the office to Griffiths’ desk. “You mean this piece of paper?” he asked in irritation, jabbing at a piece of paper with his finger. “You should learn to open your friggin’ eyes.”

Griffiths, not believing what he had just been told moved across to his own desk, looked at the piece of paper, and just grunted. “Uh. Okay.” He was still a little hungover after the previous evening, and didn’t feel like apologising. He shoved past Temple to his chair, and sat.

“Arse!” muttered Temple, and went back to his own desk.

Griffiths heard but made no comment.

Neither man wondered why the same report had been sent to both of them. In fact neither realised they were actually reporting two different but similar incidents. Similar reports sat on other desks elsewhere in the building, but no desk contained more than one report, and since the various offices almost point blank refused to talk to each other, no one had yet connected them. Moss, and Boase in particular, didn’t trust computers very much, so he liked to keep as much of the bureaucracy on paper as he could, and this meant that no one saw more than one report. While he didn’t believe in The Confederacy or the Sa’arm, he had heard about the AI’s and assumed they were just advanced computers owned by ‘the enemy’. He knew nothing about computers really, but had heard just enough about human ‘Artificial Intelligence’ work to assume it could easily penetrate any computers owned by Moss. Some computers were necessary and unavoidable, but Boase wanted as much information as possible kept off the computers.

“It’s no good. There’s just no truly useful information to be got. Nothing we don’t already know or suspect.” Six men and three women were sitting around a conference table in the old manor house not far from Eskdale Green. This was the team that would, it was hoped, co-ordinate a general uprising of the populace, without resorting to the use of either the military in hiding, or the Maquis forces themselves.

It was four afternoons later, and all of them looked tired. The speaker, an elderly man in his seventies, and the person in charge of the interrogations, looked frustrated. “They’ve all been interviewed five times and by different people every time. Les’s chat got almost as much out of most of them as the more forceful interrogations got.” He nodded at Les, who was sitting next to him. “All my deep mind probes using hypnosis and drugs got was enough information to send half of them to gaol for life had it been obtained legally and put before a proper judge and jury.”

He sighed. “Beyond that, confirmation of numbers and strengths that we already knew or guessed; we were slightly wrong in that the Security Patrol is slightly stronger than we thought, or at least, a bit bigger and more numerous than we thought.”

“You mean in the patrol houses?” one of the women asked.

“Yeah, sorry, the patrol houses have more Security Patrollers in them than we thought. Not by much, but enough it could have been a nasty surprise in a few cases.”

“Right. Thanks Will,” the man at the head of the table nodded. Only two people in the room knew he was Lieutenant-General Tom Stafford, who only a couple of years earlier had been the British Army’s third most senior officer. Most of them just knew him as ‘Tom’, but all knew he was ex army. Will Astley was one of those two: he had been a Royal Naval Commodore in intelligence until his retirement over ten years earlier, but Tom was the only person who knew this, and had recruited him himself, just for this sort of job. None of the rest of the room’s occupants were military, current or ex.

“Okay,” said one of the women, an ex-personnel director from ICI. “What do we do with the forty-odd men now we’ve finished with them? We’ve now only three free cells.”

“Any particular ideas, Jaquie?”

“Sixteen of them are self-confessed rapists,” she said, her voice going cold, “they at least must be executed.”

“Two of them did say they only did it under peer pressure,” another man said. “Well, five said it, but I only believe two of them.”

Jaquie looked at him coldly. “Look Eric, I don’t care what your psycho probes pulled out of their minds, whether they did it voluntarily or not. Rape is still rape. They die.” She looked down at her notes again.

Eric Hoffmann just shrugged. He wasn’t that bothered by her pronouncement, indeed in a general way actually agreed with it. He just wasn’t that comfortable with capital punishment in general. He had been a professor of applied psychology at Lancaster University until he had carelessly let slip his less than complimentary opinion of Graham Thorn to the wrong people. As Les had told Gerald “Taz” Allen a week earlier, his method of interrogation had indeed been painless, and indeed many of the men had woken up feeling much better and more relaxed than when they had gone to sleep. Though all knew exactly what they had told him.

“Anyone have any particular objections to at least those sixteen being sentenced to death?” Tom asked the room.

There was momentary silence before Les slowly raised his hand. “I’m fundamentally opposed to any death penalty, no matter how serious the crime. To me sentencing someone to death is just as much murder as pulling a trigger, or whatever. I vote against.”

A few others were nodding at his words, but Tom intervened before anyone else could speak. “Stephen, do you have anything to say on this?”

Lord Stephen Miles had been a high court judge before Thorn had effectively sacked him, along with all of his colleagues, for refusing to sanction some of Thorn’s earliest legislation. “In Britain the death penalty for murder was abolished in 1964, and for all other crimes in 1998. I think that was right and just. In about 2004 we signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, part of which explicitly forbade the UK from re-instating the death penalty while we were signed up. Again I think that was the correct thing to do. Peter Lester, almost certainly under instruction from Thorn, pulled us out of both the EU and the Council Of Europe, which for those that don’t know, is an older organisation and completely unrelated to the EU. At the same time he withdrew us from the convention. Officially Thorn still hasn’t re-instated the death penalty,” he paused. “Officially,” he added heavily. “Even Thorn knows that is just a step too far for a lot of people. I don’t think he feels truly secure enough in his position to be able to do it officially, but on the other hand we all know the reality. As a judge, if I’d had the option of the death penalty, I would have moved heaven and Earth not to apply it. I don’t like the idea of it, it’s immoral, it’s wrong. I don’t care what the Americans, the Chinese or the Iranians say, the death penalty is ultimately crude and fundamentally wrong.”

Jaquie was glaring at him from across the table, but she was not so crude as to try and interrupt him.

“I can’t remember, if I ever knew, whether this country has ever had the death penalty for rape alone, but if we did, it wouldn’t surprise me to find it was many hundreds of years ago, and not just a couple of hundred. Rape-murder on the other hand did attract the death penalty, but that was for the murder. I personally am against capital punishment, it’s always possible that an innocent person is put to death, and...”

Jaquie could hold back no longer. “INNOCENT?” she practically screeched across the table. She jumped to her feet and now leaned across the table, glaring at Stephen, practically spitting her fury. “That’s the last thing they are. We have absolute, incontrovertible...”

“ENOUGH!” yelled Tom. Jaquie turned and glared at him, but her fury subsided a little. “You may have your say in a moment.” Tom stared hard at her. He dropped his voice to a quiet, calm tone. “For now, please let Stephen finish.”

Jaquie nodded stiffly, her expression closed and angry, but nevertheless she sat down again and listened, her fury held under tight control.

“As Jaquie has so rightly pointed out,” Stephen said smoothly after a brief pause to allow everyone to settle down again, “in this instance we do indeed have absolute, incontrovertible proof that sixteen of those men are rapists. Now, it wouldn’t be admissible in a real court of law, but that’s not what we are. That all said, I still don’t think capital punishment is ever the right answer. To any crime. Even, for those that believe in the bible, the bible agrees. I can’t remember exact chapter and verse, but it’s in Romans, about 12:19.” He paused for a moment, his eyes closed as he tried to recall the appropriate passage.

“Avenge not yourselves, for it is written, vengeance is mine; I will repay saith the lord.” He looked around the table at the seven other people. “There are many times I have genuinely thought that someone deserved to die for the crimes they have committed, but just because they deserve to die doesn’t mean we have the right to put them to death. Capital punishment IS state sanctioned murder. I have absolutely no doubt about that, I vote against.”

Tom turned to Jaquie, but Stephen’s last few phrases had torn a partial hole in her argument. By accepting that the men were guilty, and even by admitting that he himself sometimes believed a person should die for their crimes, had hurt her arguments. On top of that she was a practicing Christian, and quoting part of the bible had taken the wind out of her sails.

“I still vote yes,” she said softly. Tom just nodded without comment.

In the end it was six to two against, Tom himself didn’t vote. The only other person who had voted for the death penalty was one of the other two women, Sally Wheelwright, a Deputy Vice Chancellor from York University. She had herself once been the victim of a failed rape attempt, which she had never told anyone about. Her only argument had been that the death penalty was available in a number of other countries, in some cases including for rape.

“I think that just goes to prove we are more humane and enlightened than all those countries that do still have the death penalty,” Tom said softly. “But it still leaves us with a dilemma. What do we do with those men? All of them. Not just the rapists.”

“Can we pass them to the Confederacy? Will they take them?”