Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

Hello, son , it began. Happy birthday.

It wasn’t his birthday and wouldn’t be for another three months. There followed four paragraphs of utter banality, an expanded version of the things people wrote on postcards. Weather’s fine here , wherever here was. Missyou and hope to see you soon was how it ended.

Darius read the message repeatedly, printing it out and poring over it at school, during homework, late into the night. The breeziness, the sickly platitudes, were unlike anything he’d ever heard come out of his father’s mouth in his presence.

It was then he began to take an interest in cryptography.

*

He broke the code sixteen months and five days after he first read the email, and for the briefest moment the blankness inside was displaced by a rush of such euphoria it was like a drug high.

It was a difficult one, deliberately so because it had been used to outwit professionals. Yet he, Darius Pope, his father’s son, had cracked it all on his own.

His father’s son…

The message, denuded of its camouflage, read:

Darius, this is of vital importance. Ring the number below. Ask for Llewellyn. Tell him about this message and give him these co-ordinates: 17˚ 24’38”N 83˚ 55’19”W. There’s a compound with a basement, the only one on the island. Under one of the flagstones at the bottom of the steps is a mini-disc in an oilskin bag. This must be found and played. Your father.

The phone number followed.

After the euphoria ebbed, Darius felt let down. The message was almost ludicrously cloak-and-dagger. Was it some kind of joke? A warped way for his father to amuse himself at his son’s expense?

Then he remembered there’d been no clue that the original email had been in code. He’d been expected not only to break the code, but to recognise it as such in the first place. His father had trusted him that far.

Darius was aware his father worked for the diplomatic service, and was aware too that this was often thin cover for unofficial, clandestine activities. But he’d never until now fully confronted the notion that his father was a spy.

He didn’t know who Llewellyn was. Probably his father’s handler or control or whatever they called it. He never found out, because he never rang the number. Instead, Darius Pope saved his money and, in the university summer holidays of 2001, he travelled alone to the Caribbean.

The island — islet, really — was a bulge of scrubby rock little more than a mile wide and three miles long. He reached it by sailing boat, having come to an arrangement with a local yachtsman who ferried him there and back. Pope was on the island for a little over six hours, but in that time he saw no other living thing apart from the gulls that wheeled overhead.

There was no compound, only the wreckage of one. Timber and stone lay strewn about as though a city had been hit by a nuclear blast. Eventually Pope found the steps to the basement of what he’d later come to learn was called the Box.

It took him three hours to clear the rubble enough for him to reach the floor of the basement, by which time the salt sweat burned his eyes and his forearms streamed with blood from his ravaged hands. Finding the right flagstone and prising it up took a further hour.

He found the bag, the mini-disc intact inside it.

Not until two days later, when he was back home and almost unconscious with fatigue, did he listen to the recording.

*

25th October

It’s unlikely I’ll get another chance to dictate anything once the storm’s hit. It reached hurricane status yesterday off Jamaica. Portentous though it sounds, this will be my final entry.

We evacuate this evening. Apart from me, only a few of the locals, Taylor and W himself are left. Jablonsky and Grosvenor left by plane last night.

Taylor knows about me. He barely hides it. And from the way Jablonsky and Grosvenor behaved towards me before they left, I think they know too. Which means Z must. Still, though, he behaves affably towards me.

Z killed his wife yesterday. I didn’t see him do it, but I didn’t have to. When she discovered the little girl had been shipped out she became hysterical, even though it was for the best. She stormed over to the Box and demanded to know where Z had sent her. Z took her back to their house, kicking and screaming.

She hasn’t been seen since. We all know what’s happened, though we all pretend not to.

Now Z is making out his wife has left the island. When and how this happened, he doesn’t say. I could have saved her. I could have saved many if not most of the other lives that have been lost on this island. But I didn’t, because I hung on too long. I let the ultimate goal, of getting right to the head of this operation and cutting it off, rule me. And now I’ve failed utterly, and the chance to do any good at all is lost.

They’re either going to kill me, or simply strand me here. Either way I’m dead. The basement will provide little protection against the hurricane. I’d end up entombed there like a character from an Edgar Allan Poe story.

I sent the email yesterday, with Z’s express permission. Right up until I hit the ‘send’ button, I found it hard to believe he was allowing me to do so. The rules were clear. No electronic communication with the outside, for obvious reasons of security. Z read what I typed, of course, and made sure I wasn’t attaching any files. I’d said it was my son’s birthday and that I didn’t know when — if — I’d see him again. Z seemed to sympathise. He feels something for his own daughter, I’ve no doubt.

So all hope now rests with my son. If by some quirk of nature somebody is listening to this, it means my son has come through. Has shown the commitment and the downright canniness I know he’s capable of. I’ve been a terrible father, one of the worst kind, because my abuse has been not physical but of the neglectful variety. Now it’s too late to make amends. But if this is reaching anybody’s ears, please — at the risk of sounding maudlin — please tell my son that I love him.

I’m alone now, but it’s almost time for us to begin the final preparations for our departure. I won’t go quietly, whatever they have in store for me. But I will go, of that I have no doubt.

May the God I cannot believe in have mercy on them for what they’ve been doing here. And may God preserve my own soul.

*

It was the final entry in almost four hours of recorded material, most of it transcribed from his father’s memory and now committed to his. Pope had played it over, countless times, listening to nothing else through the rest of his university career, no music or recordings of seminars. He’d absorbed every detail until it was part of his own history as well as his father’s. It had taken all he had to focus on his studies and pass, comfortably but hardly with flying colours.

Towards the end of his final year he’d started to sound out the political groups on campus, ones of diverse hue. He developed a finely tuned sense of who the genuine students were and who the agents provocateurs and the talent scouts. And he’d let himself be approached — had put himself in the direct path of the recruiters, once he’d identified with them.

In October 2003, a month after graduating, Pope had signed up with the Service. And his plan began.

Sussex County, New Jersey

Tuesday 21 May, 12.40 am

‘The man who phoned me couldn’t get hold of his two friends,’ said Purkiss. ‘It means they’re incapacitated. So Pope’s got to them.’