Iain Banks - Transition

I met with some ill feeling from a few of my new colleagues in the police force at first, perhaps because I had been brought in at a relatively senior level. However, I like to think that I soon won the respect of almost all of them, though of course there will always be those in any organisation who will find something to be resentful about and one simply has to live with that fact.

I found myself in the civilian police, albeit the more senior and serious national police force, at a moment in time when the full extent of the Christian Terrorist threat was just beginning to become clear even to those, not least our own government, who had persuaded themselves that such people could be dealt with effectively by negotiation and the occasional slap on the wrist.

I think the first airport massacre ended that policy of folly. The CTs sent in a small suicide team of big, well-trained men who simply overpowered one of the two-man armed police teams who patrolled our ill-defended airports at the time. The two officers stood no chance; they were bundled to the ground by three or four fanatics of substantial physical size, their throats were cut without mercy and their machine guns and ammunition clips taken from them and turned on the nearest check-in queue. The members of the suicide team not firing the guns set about slashing at as many of the screaming, fleeing holidaymakers as they could, chasing down women and children and slitting their throats too, without mercy. Nearly forty innocent people of all ages were butchered in this orgy of violence.

When the machine guns ran out of ammunition everyone in the team was meant to kill themselves but two of them were overpowered by angry citizens before they could take that coward’s way out. One did not survive their summary justice but the other did and it was on him that I had what I will freely confess was the pleasure of working subsequently, with the aim of discovering as much as possible about the organisation and aims of the CT organisation.

I felt intense pride that I had been chosen to conduct this interrogation. I took it as a compliment both to my technical skills but also to my reputation for the measured and considered application of my techniques. Such was the national outrage at the attack at the time that a more hot-headed operative might have botched the assignment. It is a myth that the police and other security personnel are immune to emotion, both their own and that of the law-abiding populace at large. We may be trained to combat the deleterious effects of acting on such emotions, but we are not inhuman.

I too felt a cold fury towards the wretched individual who had carried out such a cowardly attack, but I would not let that emotion, however understandable, cloud my professional judgement regarding the task in hand or allow any rashness or overreaction so caused to effectively offer this animal of an extremist an overly quick escape from the torments he so richly deserved.

The specific operational details of the interrogation need not detain us here. The desire to know of such things can be almost prurient at times, in my opinion. My colleagues and I are paid to do such things and are trained to cope with the psychological fallout of our actions and there are good reasons why a veil is drawn over such matters to protect the general populace, who do not deserve to have to confront the realities that we have to face every day to keep them safe.

Suffice to say, despite the subject’s attempts to convert me to his bizarre, perverted and cruel religion with its emphasis on martyrdom, cannibalism and the alleged ability of their holy men to forgive all sins no matter how horrendous and barbaric, I did not reconvert to become a Christian! And let me just say that I do not even concede that he was displaying any real bravery or strength of will in trying to do so. Fanatics are driven purely by their own fanaticism, and anyway it is a common technique used by subjects trained to resist interrogation to try to turn the resultant discourse back upon the questioner, not so much in any realistic hope of altering their views or causing them to cease or go easier in what they are doing, of course, but simply as a way for the subject to take his mind off the process itself.

In any case, I am satisfied that while the cell system of the terrorist organisation sadly protected the identities of its other members apart from the six in the suicide team itself, I, along with my colleagues, extracted all that there was to be extracted from the subject and, thanks to our restraint, we were able to deliver him alive if not intact, and certainly not unbroken, to the Justice Ministry for his trial and subsequent (well-deserved in my opinion) execution.

I made a lot of money for Mr Noyce. Not like that dingbat son of his. Barney lost Mr N a lot of money. Soaked it up, pissed it away and snorted it. He would reappear from his bar in Goa every couple of years and announce he was coming back to stay in London and do something useful but he never did. Always ended up going back to the bar. He thought his dad ought to bail him out by giving him a job with his own firm, but Mr N wasn’t having it. Blood might be thicker than water but it’s no match for liquidity, know what I mean? Money is serious. You fuck about with it at your peril.

Barney was always at Mr N to give him the bar, too, to turn it over to him legally but Mr N was too clever for that as well. He knew Barney would just sell it or lose it in a poker game or use it as collateral to fund some shitwit scheme that he’d make the usual unholy fucking mess of and be back at Mr and Mrs N’s with the begging bowl shortly after.

Frankly, I think Ed found his boy a bit of an embarrassment. He was glad he was mostly arm’s length away in sunny Goa. Barney and me weren’t getting on so well any more either. I found him a bit of a moaner, always on about how tough things were for him when this was clearly a load of bollocks. Little cunt had had a charmed life with all the advantages, hadn’t he? Not my fault or his dad’s that he’d fucked it. And I mean, running a bar on a beach? That’s the fucking jackpot prize for most people, that is, that’s what your average geezer would regard as a brilliant retirement. Hard done by, my arse.

And he had the nerve to blame me for this, at least partly. Good as told me this when we were drunk together once during a weekend at Spetley Hall. Like it was all my fault because I’d replaced him in Mr and Mrs N’s affections. So what if I had? I was a better friend to them than he was a son. I mean, the soft git.

But I was the golden boy, wasn’t I? Never mind that the Noyces were like a second family to me, Mr N’s firm was like the first national bank of AC. I made a fucking mint. Most of it went to the firm but a lot came back to me in the way of a decent salary but especially in bonuses. Mr N and I had some heated discussions on the subject of bonuses on a few occasions but we always came to an agreement in the end.

I suppose we both always knew I’d be leaving and going elsewhere eventually, but in the meantime the good times rolled with no hard feelings.

Bought a bigger flat in delightful Docklands and a succession of less and less practical cars. Thought about a yacht but decided they just weren’t me – you could always charter if you really needed to. Took me hols in Aspen, the Maldives, Klosters, the Bahamas, New Zealand and Chile. Not to mention Majorca and Crete, doing a bit of old-fashioned raving in the big hot loud clubs.

And the girls. Oh, bless their little cotton gussets, the girls: Saskia and Amanda and Juliette and Jayanti and Talia and June and Charley and Charlotte and Ffion and Jude and Maria and Esme and Simone. There were lots of others, but those were the non-casual ones, the ones I took the trouble of remembering their names and was happy to have stay over more than once. I loved them all in my own way and I guess they returned the favour. Most of them wanted to take things further but I never did. There’s no “us” in commitment, I’d tell them, there’s just a “me.” They couldn’t complain. I was generous and if there were ever hard feelings then it wasn’t my fault.