James Long - Sixth Column

‘I didn’t tell you which way to go,’ she said. ‘Turn left at the end. Follow the Harrogate signs.’

He waved her away. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’m not in a rush. I’ll find it.’

She looked at him for a few moments longer than was necessary, nodded and blew him a kiss and he stood watching long after the car had disappeared around the corner, until its bumble-bee buzz had faded from his ears.

He didn’t go to London, he drove west towards the Pennines, took the road to Malham again and walked up to the high rocks above Malham Cove, sitting in the sun where he’d sat as he’d watched Heather and Margo climb the slope that day.

For the first time in his entire life, he opened the trap door to the deepest, darkest oubliettes of his soul, letting out the pallid imprisoned thoughts that he had been forcing down into them through all the years of his upbringing. In the clear upland air, it was no longer seditious to question the guiding principles of his childhood. He felt happy, strong and certain and, looking down the hill, remembering the contorted contradictions of duty and impulse which had fought in his head last time he had been here, he knew that the two most important people in his life were the two he had left that morning. Fulfilment seemed just within his grasp.

In a backstreet that was little more than an alleyway near the walls of the Portsmouth naval base, where the wind off the harbour carried with it a mixed smell of salt, paint and diesel fuel, an unmarked blue door in a high brick wall led into the protected world of a man known to his customers almost universally as the Magazine Man.

The first door was monitored by a discreet camera and led, in any case, only to a second door from where the Magazine Man, who had no other staff, could see his visitors for himself through a smoked glass panel. The precautions were to reassure his customers of their privacy, rather than for his own sake. Nothing that happened here was, by itself, illegal. Teddy Goodman’s books were above board. VAT inspectors came to his door only for their routine inspections. He paid tax, a lot of tax, but then he also made a lot of profit.

The Magazine Man’s main business expenditure, apart from the goods he bought in to resell to his customers, was on information. He subscribed to every obscure technical and industrial journal that he could, from every technologically advanced country. Language was the only limitation and to spread his net wider he studied a new one every year. He wasn’t fluent in any of them but his German, French, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Spanish and Italian were already good enough to alert him to the need for more expert translation when he stumbled over something promising.

The roots of his operation lay in the fact that as industrial processes became ever more complex, so the problems they raised demanded increasingly sophisticated solutions. Usually the devices and products that made up those solutions got very little airing outside the industry for which they were intended, but in many cases, he had found, a bit of lateral thinking could find other applications in completely different areas. He liked the industries where the pay-offs were high and the battle for profit produced a war-time mentality of no holds barred, no corners cut inventiveness. The offshore oil business, Formula One motor-racing, aerospace, they were all grist to his mill. The collapse of the Soviet Union had opened up new areas of defence know-how to anyone with the cash to pay. He’d had to take on a local Russian partner to get the best out of that. His great skill lay in knowing about every new idea, making the links to those other applications and supplying needs that his customers didn’t even know they had until he called them.

Over the years he had found that some of his keenest, most generous customers came from organizations which preferred to remain anonymous. He didn’t ask whether they had legal or illegal purposes in mind and he certainly didn’t want to know the details. Teddy’s rules were that they just defined a technical need to him in technical terms. If, often, his inventive mind could easily put two and two together, he chose to ignore the answer. The rules were that if they didn’t tell him, then it was all right. Business came first and spook money was the best of the lot, so when he scanned the magazines and catalogues, applications in the spook trade were always high in his mind.

Similarly, his phone number appeared in a lot of strange notebooks.

The man who came to see him this time was a stranger to him but carried a note of introduction from someone with whom he’d done business on several occasions, someone whose requests were always at the peculiar end of the spectrum, someone who answered his questions very obliquely indeed.

They sat there in Teddy’s office, the two, of them, an indoor man and an outdoor man. The Magazine Man was overweight, pale faced with a small mouth and pouchy cheeks. He wore reading glasses. He had good distance vision but he never needed to look at anything further away than the computer screen or the printed page. The customer looked to him like a football referee, as fit as he needed to be, his authority kept tucked in his back pocket, there when it served his purpose, someone who would disappear in a crowd or run up a mountain, whatever you needed.

‘Hang on,’ said the Magazine Man over the coffee, ‘I don’t want to know any of that,’ cutting him off abruptly as the customer started to go into far too much detail about his needs. ‘I’m sure you recognize that from my point of view all I need is the tech specs. That’s where my interest begins and ends. What you want it for is none of my business, right?’

‘Right. OK, then. It’s got to be soluble in petrol.’

‘How long?’

‘I don’t know. Depends on the width.’

‘No. How long to dissolve, I meant.’

‘A few hours certainly. Be nice to have a choice, but the timing has to be consistently accurate.’

‘And the shape?’

‘Long and thin’s better than short and thick. Maximum outside diameter of about two inches.’

‘Sit tight, then.’

The supplier swung round on his swivel chair, knowing he’d seen it somewhere, just the thing, thinking. He called up a database on the Apple Mac, skimmed it, clicked to a subsection, sucked his teeth and jotted down a reference note.

He got up and went down the passage to one of the eighteen rooms that made up his reference library, the backbone of his organization. The note told him the catalogue he wanted was in a box file on the very top shelf of the fifteenth shelf unit. He had to climb a ladder to get to it. The date sticker on the catalogue was three years old which worried him a little. He put it in a plain folder before he went back to the customer. No sense in losing the business because some smart ass saw the name on the cover and thought he might cut out the middle man.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘I think you’re in luck. There’s just the thing. Made of stuff called PIB. Comes in thirty different sizes and each one has twenty different possible wall thicknesses for release times between five minutes and twelve hours. Hang on, there’s a note.’ He read it carefully to himself. ‘Oh yeah, the exact time depends on the level of fraction of the distillate it’s in.’

The customer looked blank.

‘I mean,’ he said patiently, ‘if you stick it in crude oil, it might take ten hours to dissolve. If you stick it in aviation spirit, it might be ten minutes.’

‘Got it,’ said the customer. ‘This’ll be quick acting. I still need a choice, though. What are they for really?’

‘Refineries,’ said the supplier, figuring it didn’t matter him knowing that, ‘refineries and oil platforms, anywhere you might have to get some special liquid a long way inside the pipe work before you release it. Cleaning, neutralizing, that sort of thing.’