Guy Adams - The Clown Service

Toby felt he had been doing just that for a couple of years.

‘So how do we trace the radio transmission?’ he asked.

‘Ah,’ Shining replied, ‘like all good spies, I have a man for that.’

c) High Road, Wood Green, London

They entered the mobile phone shop beneath the Section 37 office. Its owner was being shouted at by an elderly woman who seemed a hair’s breadth away from mounting an assault on him.

‘It keeps calling Bolivia!’ she was shouting. ‘As if I’d ever want to talk to someone in Bolivia!’

‘Lovely country,’ said Shining, courteously taking her by the arm and leading her away towards the door. ‘Perhaps you should make friends with whoever it is you’re dialling and you could meet up for a holiday romance?’

‘Romance!’ she shouted, spraying the lapels of his jacket with spittle. ‘What nonsense! And who might you be?’

‘Flying Squad, madam. Kindly step outside while we arrest this filthy foreigner for you.’

‘Bang him up!’ she screamed as he closed the door on her. ‘That’s what I like to hear.’

‘Of course you do, you hateful old bigot,’ Shining replied through the glass with a charming smile.

‘Foreigner?’ the owner complained. ‘I was born in Finsbury Park, as well you know.’

‘Just having a little fun, Oman,’ said Shining. ‘Speaking to it in a language it understands.’ The old woman was still loitering on the pavement. He waved her away.

‘Lock the door,’ said Oman, ‘or she’ll be back in. I think she’s escaped from somewhere, she comes in every day.’

‘Have you considered replacing her phone?’ asked Toby.

‘Nothing wrong with it,’ Oman replied. ‘She just doesn’t know what she’s doing.’

‘That’s probably a naughty lie, Oman, my old crook,’ said Shining. ‘I doubt you’ve sold a fully-functioning piece of kit in your life. But as she’s so hateful I applaud your criminality.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with anything I sell,’ Oman insisted. ‘Yours works fine, doesn’t it?’

Shining removed a mobile from his pocket and looked at it as if surprised to have found it there. ‘That’s a very good point – was it stolen?’

‘Very funny. Now, what do you want before I make you eat the bloody thing?’

‘Temper, temper… I need you to locate the broadcast point of a radio signal.’

‘Great. So nothing annoying and time-consuming then.’

‘It gets better. I don’t have the frequency.’

Oman threw his hands in the air. ‘How can I even get started then?’

‘You tell me. I’m pretty sure it’s broadcasting locally, shortwave transmission…’

‘Shortwave? You might as well be asking me to hunt down a pair of kids talking to each other with cans and string.’

‘I know it’s difficult. I wouldn’t be asking otherwise.’

‘Difficult? It’s impossible.’

‘The impossible is in my job description, Oman, and by extension, yours. It’s a numbers station, likely to be broadcasting within five miles of King’s Cross.’

‘Five miles?’ asked Toby.

‘I doubt Jamie would be picking it up otherwise. It has to be close.’

‘That’s still one hell of an area to trawl for a shortwave broadcast,’ said Oman.

‘It is. But you can do it because you’re brilliant and because I’ll pay you well.’

Oman smiled at that. ‘Liar, you never pay me well.’

‘My budget is limited, true. Still, there’s a first time for everything. The first step has got to be picking the actual station up. Is there a way for you to run a scan? It should be easy enough to recognise it – it repeats the numbers one thousand, five, five, seven.’

‘Sounds fascinating.’

‘It may be nothing,’ Shining admitted, ‘but I don’t think so. And after the amount of years I’ve been doing this job, I’ve learned to listen to my instincts.’

d) Section 37, Wood Green, London

Upstairs, Shining took up residence behind his desk. It was then he realised something. ‘We’ll need to get you a desk. I hadn’t thought about that. Dear Lord… they dump you here but they don’t think the whole thing through, do they? It hardly seems right that an intelligence officer should spend his time shopping at Ikea…’

Shining looked around as if something useful might be lurking behind one of the bookshelves. ‘I must have had a second desk once. What on earth did I do with it? And what forms will I need?’ He began ferreting in his drawers. ‘I wonder what department I have to contact to sanction office supplies…’

‘It’s all right,’ said Toby, ‘I’ll sort it. I’d quite like to do something mundane for an hour, just while some of this sinks in.’

‘Fair enough. When you’ve employed whatever arcane skills one has to master to get kitted out, I was going to suggest you did a little reading.’ Shining got up and moved over to the filing cabinet in the corner. ‘I may not be terribly organised about office equipment, but I have kept case studies of everything I’ve worked on over the decades.’ He opened a drawer and leaned on it with a sigh. ‘After all, someone had to – I dare say they burn the copies I send to our noble paymasters.’

He pulled out a large card folder, bulging with paper, and placed it on his desk. ‘That’s the last six months, small beer for the most part: research and speculation. Dive in when you have a moment. Do you mind if I leave you to it? I sometimes find it useful to go for a walk and think things through.’

‘You’re the boss.’

‘Yes, I suppose I am. That’s going to take some getting used to as well. Right then, help yourself to whatever you need. The password for the desktop is written on the corner of the screen. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’

Toby waited until he heard the front door close then got to his feet and went over to Shining’s desk.

He sat down and looked at the computer screen. When Shining had said the password was written on it he had imagined it would have been on a sticky note, but Shining had been literal – it was inked neatly on the screen itself in indelible marker.

‘The man’s mad,’ he muttered to himself, tapping the word in. ‘MOCATA’ – it sounded like somewhere in Israel but was no doubt far more esoteric.

He reached for the phone and started the task of trying to get a desk, chair and computer requisitioned. During this typically labyrinthine process of shunted calls, denials of responsibility and more red tape than he would have needed to wallpaper the office, he began to explore Shining’s computer.

This proved harder than he expected.

The computer was like a house that had been hastily abandoned, the documents folder empty but for a handful of bizarre text files that could have no discernible value: half of what seemed to be a short story concerning werewolves, a recipe for clam chowder and a list of books by a man called Dennis Wheatley.

The pictures folder was better populated, if just as baffling. One folder, entitled ‘Sprites’ contained nothing but pictures of trees. Another, labelled ‘Revenant’ was even more dull, offering thirty-nine pictures of an empty room. Toby stared at the pictures, convinced that he must be missing something. He studied the photos, noting the peeling wallpaper, the splintered floorboards, a sagging wicker chair in the corner. But it was a puzzle beyond his ability to solve. As far as he could tell the pictures were just as pointless as they looked.

Toby opened the default web browser and checked the history. There were several Wikipedia articles, covering everything from a small town in Spain to the movies of Oliver Reed. A couple of the links appeared to be for Internet forums and Toby clicked on one. As soon as he’d done it he realised that Shining would probably notice the intrusion if he checked when his account had last been online. Still… who bothered to do that? He guessed that Shining would have stored his login information in the browser and was proved correct. He was logged in automatically and given free rein to wander amongst the black and green neon corridors of UnXplained.net. There were pages and pages of posts about unusual phenomena, from crop circles to UFO sightings, all discussed, debated and flamed by such regular devotees as TheBeast666, RidgeMonster and LuvBishop.