James Long - Sixth Column

‘So we go for the flight?’

‘We? No way. You’re going, not me. I hate planes. I’m sure I’d get airsick in one of those little jobs.’ She gave Heather a shrewd look. ‘You do like him though, don’t you?’

Heather reached up and unclipped the fabric roof so that it flipped open in the slipstream and a sudden rush of air sent her hair streaming backwards.

‘I like him. I just smell something very fishy.’

They didn’t smell a thing, thought Johnny, hammering his car around the bends back towards Gargrave. Mission accomplished. I’m alongside them, just as ordered, and what’s more the office is going to be paying for some flying. Brilliant. He said it out loud to himself, ‘Brilliant,’ because just thinking it wasn’t quite enough to quell the clamour of self doubt caused by the lurking fear that he’d just betrayed his own moral standards. Above all the image of Jean Davies, a faceless body – blue with asphyxiation – slumped over a steering-wheel, kept hovering in his mind’s eye whenever he gave it space. ‘Brilliant,’ he said again but it didn’t convince him at all. He put a tape in the cassette, turned it up loud and drove hard. Long after the 2CV had disappeared from his rear-view mirror he kept glancing back, subconsciously hoping for a sight of it.

He was in London at midnight and in the office at nine the next morning and he could tell from Sibley’s response that the news he brought with him came as a complete surprise.

‘Bloody well done, young Johnny,’ said Sibley, leaning back in his chair, ‘on the job ten minutes and you’re ahead of the game already. Raises a few questions though, doesn’t it? If the NSA’s in there with an interest, Sir Greville had better watch his step. I think you’ve probably done your bit for now.’

‘Oh no, I don’t agree,’ said Johnny quickly. ‘We don’t know nearly enough yet, surely. We don’t know for absolutely certain that stuff came out of Ramsgill Stray and it was only part of a document anyway. Won’t GKC want to know what else there is?’ He avoided using his stepfather’s name.

‘I don’t know. I don’t see where else it could have come from. I’ll be briefing him later on. Don’t make any plans yet and I’ll tell you as soon as I speak to him.’

Johnny turned to go, then plucked up his courage. ‘Ivor?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Jean Davies.’

‘Yes?’

‘I was wondering what happened.’

‘Who’s Jean Davies?’ said Ivor with a completely blank look on his face.

Sir Greville was quite clear what he wanted. He read the briefing delivered by Ivor Sibley’s messenger, didn’t bother with the cautionary note at the end and got straight on the phone.

‘Put that bloody f— put my stepson across this one, Sibley. Get him on this call, I want no bloody misunderstandings.’ He was paying the bills so he got his way. Ivor Sibley buzzed Johnny and switched him into the conference circuit.

‘Is he on?’ barked Sir Greville.

‘I’m listening,’ said Johnny.

‘Right. I’m up in front of this bloody inquiry in a week or two about this bloody Rage business and I—’

‘Sir G. wait a second,’ said Sibley urgently, ‘did you read my note?’

‘What damned note and what’s this bloody Sir G. business? Who the hell do you think—’

‘No, no, read the note. On the end of the report? Please? Telephone procedures are very important bearing in mind the nature of the information we’ve provided to you. You must avoid specific names and products.’

There was a pause at the other end of the line and Johnny distinctly heard his mother’s voice in the background, reading something out loud. He knew what it was. Sibley had pointed out that NSA interest meant any communications were likely to be intercepted and anything containing sensitive trigger words on the watch list would be transcribed and read.

‘This is bloody absurd!’ bellowed his stepfather in a few seconds. ‘Are you saying these bloody Yanks could be listening on this phone?’

‘It’s possible, yes.’

‘God Almighty.’ He paused for thought. ‘Get round here, then. Both of you.’ He put the phone down.

They were taken in Sibley’s Mercedes, driven by Sibley’s driver for the short ride to Grosvenor Square.

‘Bit of a character, your stepfather,’ said Sibley with fake joviality as they moved off.

‘He certainly can be a little abrupt.’

‘Your mother’s quite a forceful woman too.’

‘Yes. I think I heard her there. I expect we’ll be seeing both of them,’ said Johnny and saw Ivor blanch.

They were shown straight up to the Beckenden Room. On his election, Sir Greville and Lady Viola had bought Beckenden Manor in his Leicestershire constituency for their weekends, mostly for the hunting that went with it, and Johnny’s mother had decided that what GKC’s head office needed was a private retreat within it. To that end she had duplicated Beckenden’s drawing room to the last touch, even having the Whistlers and the Dutch landscapes copied. Ceiling heights, doors, everything had been adjusted to match the prototype. Only the view towards the Post Office Tower lacked the appearance of the Leicestershire original. For Johnny it worked perfectly. He felt just as uncomfortable here as he did at Beckenden.

There were no niceties. As soon as the door had closed behind them, Lady Viola turned from the window, nodded curtly at them and launched into full flood before her husband could open his mouth.

‘This is outrageous,’ she said, ‘the idea that our allies should be eavesdropping on our commercial activities from within our own country. The question is what are we going to do about it? The very first thing we need to know is exactly what else these ghastly women have got their hands on.’

Johnny’s head started to ache. Sibley spoke too soon, ‘Of course, Lady Viola, we don’t know anything really about what they have given the Hurst Inquiry.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ she said scathingly, and she stabbed a finger at some papers on the table. ‘I’ve got an idea. No bloody point in spending half your life doing favours for Civil Service morons if you can’t get a favour out of them when you need it. I know what they’ve got is only part of a document.’

Sir Greville waved a languid hand and she let him speak.

‘It sounds as though it could be part of a sales document we have sent out to a few potential customers for this product so far,’ said Sir Greville. ‘We don’t know which document it is and so we don’t know which of our secure communications routes has been compromised – but it is certainly about our product known until now as CN512 which we are marketing under the brand name “Rage” which of course we’ve briefed you on.’

Ivor Sibley said, ‘It’s not exactly a new concept – the idea of a performance enhancer for troops in field conditions. Something that gets them through high-stress combat situations. You know they gave them rum in the First World War before they went over the top? Well, this is the same without the alcohol.’

Johnny remembered Den Bramfield’s words in the office and light began to dawn. ‘Jungle Juice. So it was field-tested in Romania?’

Ivor looked a little embarrassed and Lady Viola, who had been cruising restlessly around them, her face looking more than ever sprayed with some brown, glossy chemical hardener, snapped, ‘Damn stupid name.’ She glared at Johnny as if it was all his fault. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘it’s very simple,’ in exactly the tones she’d used when he was ten and she’d tried to tell him how to get his pony to jump the huge fence at the end of the paddock. ‘What we need to know is which lines these bloody Americans are listening to, exactly what Hurst’s got and what else these dreadful peace women know. Shouldn’t be beyond you Johnny, I don’t think?’ but her inflection made it clear she wasn’t sure.