Thunder in the Blood Read online

  ‘It makes no difference. You still sign.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re here. Because you’ve met us. Because—’ she broke off, glancing at her watch. ‘It’ll save time later.’

  ‘Later?’

  ‘Yes.’ She glanced up, that same thin smile. ‘After you’ve had a little think and accepted.’

  I joined MI5 on 15 December 1985. Each of my four referees had been interviewed by a suave young man from the Ministry of Defence Police and he completed his trawl through my life with yet another personal interview. Quite what he made of my ramblings about Zaire I can’t say, but a thick bundle of forms arrived through the post five days after he left, and I began my induction at the MI5 Registry and Documentation Centre at Curzon House in Mayfair.

  The important thing to say here is that at no time did I express any real enthusiasm to join the intelligence services. I certainly welcomed the prospect of a regular wage and I had no objection to a year or two in London, but I was totally honest about my impatience with paperwork and my loathing of desk jobs. Something they called ‘fieldcraft’ sounded more enticing and when they pushed the conversation in the right direction I readily admitted a liking for unusual encounters and physical risk. But in every other respect I was never less than sceptical, an attitude which I now believe exactly matched what they wanted. Thus, perhaps, the offer of the job. And thus, amongst the pink balloons and the cheap champagne, my first taste of MI5 at play.

  Christmas 1985 also found Wesley on the move. The outcome of his exchanges with the editor was an invitation to resign and he finally left on New Year’s Eve with a boxful of office stationery and a generous cheque. The latter was big enough to keep him eating for the best part of the following year, and he retreated to Stoke Newington and set himself up as a freelance, generating a stream of stories from the battered Olympia portable he kept on the desk beside his bed.

  Because he was such a good journalist – tireless, nosy, bold – he achieved a remarkable strike rate, cashing in on the goodwill and respect he’d already earned in Fleet Street, and pushing his copy to any editor who’d pay. Each published story he scissored carefully from the appropriate paper and glued it into the scrapbook which now lies on my bedroom floor. Beside each item, usually in his favourite green Biro, he added his own judgement on the worth of the story and what he’d managed to do with it. Many of these judgements are harsh, a kind of relentless self-mutilation, but what’s very evident is the direction his journalistic interest quickly began to take.

  For a while, that winter, he stuck to the style he’d made his own: tabloid, punchy, the vivid conga of breathless three-line paragraphs he was later to dismiss as his ‘Doc Marten period’. This idiom had won him his first real job in Fleet Street, but by early spring he was plainly tiring of it. Working at his own pace, freed from the tyranny of the news desk, he at last had time to sink his teeth into real stories, hunting a succession of quarries, dragging one or two of them to earth. Many of these stories had a business background, totally unsuitable for the tabloid cosh, and he began to develop a new style, still direct, still a treat to read, but making room for analysis and irony and the complex arithmetic of the real world.

  The papers changed, too. By mid-summer, he’d given up on the tabloids altogether. Instead, he was writing for some of the weightier broadsheets, not too often and none too regularly, but winning for himself a reputation for solid, authoritative analysis, wedded to a growing contempt for some of society’s better-disguised secrets.

  This contempt occasionally boiled up into something close to fury, and once I got to know him, putting a face and a voice to this scalding prose, I was able to recognize at once where it came from. Wesley wrote this way because, when it mattered, he really cared. Drunk or tired, he’d talk for hours about how much need there was for honesty and tolerance and simple courage, and the fact that the real world wasn’t about any of these things was a frustration he took to the grave. If that sounds like a speech it probably is, but I can hear him saying it now, shaking his head, the voice thickened with red wine and roll-ups, the big eyes wide with wonderment and rage.

  But all of that came later. For now, Wesley was working and well. His career, to his own surprise, was flourishing and he’d begun to believe that he might yet have time to make it as a journalist. What happened next was Derek Aldridge.

  Aldridge I’ve met on a number of occasions, a tall, good-looking Welshman a few years older than Wesley. Wesley had known him on the paper in Bristol, where the pair of them had briefly shared a flat. Aldridge’s emotional life was as complicated as Wesley’s, though for different reasons. He had a passion for women, evidenced by a string of office conquests, and an early marriage to a girl from the valleys had already ended in the divorce courts.

  Wesley and Aldridge spent a great deal of time together in their Bristol days. They were both loners, contemptuous of the pack, and although there were obvious differences between them, the chemistry seemed to work. Aldridge, according to Wesley, had an awesome sense of direction, knowing exactly where he was headed. Evidently he kept a private schedule, a blueprint for his career, a carefully tabulated list of dates by which he should have achieved certain targets. He showed it to Wesley once, the pair of them drunk, and Wesley memorized most of it and wrote it down when he’d sobered up, amazed at the man’s single-mindedness.

  To Wesley, who believed emphatically in fate, having any kind of life plan was purest folly – where was the mystery? where were the surprises? – but the real point about Aldridge’s schedule was that it all came true. By twenty-seven, he was in Fleet Street. Two years later, he’d made defence correspondent on a big national daily. And by his thirty-fourth birthday, on the dot, he was occupying a desk in a large office on the fourth floor, the newly appointed deputy editor charged with infusing the feature pages with fresh blood.

  One of his first calls went to Wesley. He said he wanted to offer him a job. Wesley, after some thought, asked two questions. One had to do with his health. He hadn’t seen Aldridge for several years. Aldridge might have picked up the rumour or he might not. Either way, it made no odds. Wesley now came as a package deal. Me and my virus. All or nothing. The second question also had to do with the virus. HIV had concentrated his mind wonderfully. He, too, now had a schedule, a series of deadlines he kept in the back of his mind, doubtless shorter than Aldridge’s, but no less important for that. So far, on the freelance market, he’d done well. He’d enjoyed the freedoms, the latitude, the time. He didn’t want any of that to change and the onward march of the virus gave him the right to insist it wouldn’t.

  The two men met for lunch at an expensive restaurant off Covent Garden. Aldridge, according to Wesley, had put on a little weight. He showed Wesley the label on his new Armani suit and told him how much the local garage was charging him for routine services on his Mercedes. He talked at length about his marriage, and suggested Wesley might like to pop down for supper. His wife’s name was Caroline. Until recently, she’d been working as a television presenter and media personality. Now, heavily pregnant with their first child, she was trading it all in for motherhood and a big mock-Tudor house on the outskirts of Godalming. It was the kind of relationship that Aldridge had always dreamed about and now it had come true. Wesley remembered the phrase from their days together in Bristol, and over liqueurs, bored, he enquired about the job. Aldridge had nodded at once.

  ‘Sure,’ he’d said, ‘no problem. Start whenever. Trust you to death.’

  Wesley had smiled telling me the story and I’d smiled too, not at Aldridge’s talent for tactful dialogue, but at how similar it was to my own arrival in London, the door to MI5 opening with barely a touch.

  I spent most of 1986 at Curzon House, commuting daily from a tiny flat on the Fulham Road. Attached to a succession of departments, I learned a great deal about intelligence: what it is, where it comes from, how you lay hands on it, and why analysis (the dominoes?) is so important. Destined fo
r F branch, the bit of the empire responsible for countering domestic subversion, I learned about telephone taps, mail intercepts, on- and off-street surveillance, covert penetration, various cosy arrangements with other government agencies and the many techniques for shuffling quietly into other people’s computer systems.

  Our own computer system lay at the heart of the whole operation and a great deal of those early months was spent making myself comfortable with the way it worked. ‘Comfortable’ was a favourite MI5 word. It was a word we wrapped around ourselves. It insulated us. It kept us snug and warm. We were ‘comfortable’ with the prospects for a certain operation. We were ‘comfortable’ that Special Branch, or MI6, or the RUC or countless other agencies didn’t know what we were up to. We were ‘comfortable’ that the intelligence yield (something we often referred to as ‘the harvest’) would be put to good and proper account. And we were ‘comfortable’, above all, that the growing calls for accountability would be faced down. We were, after all, simply defending the state. That, in particular, was a great source of ‘comfort’.

  Looking back, I’m astonished at how easily I slipped into it all. Most of what I had to learn was totally new to me, but its sheer novelty – the daily challenge of trying to make sense of this technique or that computer program – kept me from thinking about the wider questions. The days sped past in a blur and at the end of the day I had neither the time nor the energy to ask myself what might happen to the fruit of our painstaking labours. The anxiety I’d felt in Zaire, all the stuff about how fragile society was, had quite disappeared. In its place was a determination to master my brief, tinged with a faint awe at the sheer reach of the machine of which I was now a part.

  People at Curzon House often referred to the place as ‘the Factory’ and to some degree they were right. The commodity we produced was intelligence and mere mortals like me were simply workers on the assembly line, putting together little parcels of data, seeing whether they looked like other little parcels, testing this fact against that, comparing dates and locations and the small print of some businessman’s travel records, wondering all the time about circumstance and coincidence, quality-checking the product at every stage until it slipped out of the door and away to what the older hands referred to darkly as ‘the end-user’.

  The end-user was, of course, the government, but if I thought about them at all, those faces around the cabinet table, it was only in a distant, uncurious, faintly benign way. Governments were like rain or gravity, always there, a fact of life. They needed intelligence in exactly the same way they needed taxation. In that sense, we were simply another of the oils that made the machine work, and as long as the machine worked then everyone would benefit. Wasn’t that how it went? Wasn’t that Rory’s favourite line?

  Rory I was now seeing on a fairly regular basis: drinks, meals, the odd visit to the cinema or (a passion of his) the opera. I enjoyed his company enormously, partly because he was such good fun and partly because he freed me from the chore of picking up with somebody else. I’d already had offers from work, serious young men with heavy glasses and appalling skin, but I was perfectly happy living by myself and I had absolutely no appetite for getting involved with anyone else. By twenty-three, I’d had quite enough relationships to know the difference between love and a good fuck and just now I’d no need of either. In this sense, Rory was perfect, a big uncomplicated friendship warmed by the odd bottle of wine and a great deal of laughter.

  Exactly what Rory was doing in London he never made clear but as we saw more of each other it became something of a challenge for me to find out. I was, after all, supposed to be in the intelligence game and after six months at Curzon House I began to use a little of my time on the computer to wander into certain Registry files, looking for the odd clue. This was harder than it sounds. Many of the files were technically closed to people at my level, but I’d acquired some supplementary access codes and one of them, coupled with the odd slip by Rory himself, led me to form some very definite ideas.

  ‘DIS,’ I said, ‘for sure.’

  It was mid-June. An early heatwave had taken us to a Putney pub. We were sitting by the river in the half-darkness, watching a lone sculler pulling hard against the falling tide. Rory was in jeans and shirt-sleeves. The remains of his third pint stood on the table beside his motorcycle helmet. Lately, I’d noticed he was drinking quite heavily. I’d no idea why.

  ‘Defence Intelligence Staff?’ he murmured. ‘Moi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Evidence?’ He glanced across. ‘Care to tell me why?’

  I shrugged. ‘You got me into this. You must be connected. You’re not on the MI5 register. You don’t work for Six. You’re still a serving soldier—’ I looked at him. ‘… Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then it must be DIS.’ I paused. ‘Unless there’s another lot they haven’t told me about.’

  ‘Ah…’ he nodded, non-committal, ‘the Wild Bunch.’

  He fell silent, refusing once again to elaborate, and I thought about the proposition some more. The Defence Intelligence Staff was an outpost of the Ministry of Defence. They worked closely with MI6, keeping an eye on foreign armed forces. Rory, with his Aberdeen University degree and his near-perfect Arabic, would have been a likely recruit. The way the system worked, he’d be on some kind of attachment. Then, after a couple of years, he’d return to the stockade.

  I reached for my drink. The lone sculler had disappeared under Putney Bridge. Rory was yawning.

  ‘I’m bloody tired,’ he said, ‘and you should be in bed.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I lifted my drink. ‘Am I keeping you up?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Au contraire.’

  He looked at me for a moment, a strange expression on his face, an uncertainty I’d never seen before. Then he shook his head, leaning back on the wooden bench, closing his eyes. For a second or two I assumed he really was tired – a busy day, an early start – and I reached across, patting his arm, his sympathetic chum from the West Country. He caught my hand in his and squeezed it, opening one eye as he did so. Rory was never less than honest. He had a candour that was occasionally close to brutal. It was one of the reasons I thought the world of him.

  ‘I’ve fallen in love with you,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re supposed to have guessed. Your line of work…’

  I blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘Love. I’ve fallen in love with you.’ He paused. ‘I’ve thought about some of the other words, but love comes closest.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘When?’

  I winced at the questions. They sounded, at best, infantile, but I was trying to catch my breath, wondering why on earth I hadn’t picked up the signals, seen the smoke in the wind, headed off this appalling scene. Intelligence, for God’s sake. Analysis. What a joke. I withdrew my hand, reaching for my drink.

  ‘You’re pissed,’ I said gently.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s the heat.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Summer flu.’

  Rory gazed at me for a moment. ‘Fuck off,’ he said softly. ‘At least allow me to do it properly.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Make a fool of myself.’

  ‘You’re not.’ I reached across the table again and took his hand. ‘You’re a lovely man. You’ve got a lovely wife and great kids and you shouldn’t be living up here. Miles away from them.’

  Rory nodded, thinking about it. His hand was warm in mine. ‘And you?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve got a terrible memory. Famous for it.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘You never said it.’

  He looked at me for a long time, unconvinced. I’d never seen him so deflated, so utterly forlorn. He looked about twelve. Or seventy.

  ‘Yeah,’ he muttered at last. ‘I never said it. You’re right.’

  We went back to Fulham on his motor bike. Outside the flat, he pulled into the kerb and waited for me to get off. I stood on the pavement, shaking out my
hair, offering him the spare helmet.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  Rory took the helmet and attached it to the back pannier. He hadn’t killed the engine and he was trying his best not to look at me. I stepped towards him, calm at last, back in control. This was a friendship I didn’t want to lose. There’d been a misunderstanding. He’d simply got things out of perspective. A little time and it would all sort itself out. I put my hand on his arm.

  ‘Do you want to come up?’ I said. ‘Coffee? Something to eat?’ I shrugged. ‘Whatever?’

  He stood upright, straddling the machine, adjusting the buckle on his own helmet. He looked, if anything, angry. ‘Christ no,’ he said, his voice muffled. ‘God forbid!’

  3

  I didn’t see Rory again for nearly four years and by that time events had taken both Wesley and me by the scruff of the neck. In my case, it meant what my bosses termed ‘a career adjustment’. In Wesley’s case, it was rather more serious.

  The fifteenth of June 1987 was the day it first occurred to Wesley that an early death might be less than physically pleasant. Dying before his time was something he’d almost come to terms with, but somehow he’d never got round to translating the graph lines and the paragraphs of cold prose into a physical reality. The last thing he seems to have expected was pain.

  By now, he was keeping a diary in earnest. Lots of HIV positives do it. It’s meant to be a help and I suspect it probably is, a private cupboard for storing the darker and less acceptable nightmares. Wesley kept his on a series of lined pads, which he later filed in the same ring binders I’ve raided for some of the earlier material. There are four of them in all. I had a chance to read them before he died and we discussed some of the key bits. What follows is the closest I can get to the way it must have felt for him. Reproducing the entries themselves, for June and July 1987, would be pointless. He was so ill, and so frightened, he could scarcely manage to complete a sentence.

  It began with a headache and a general feeling of nausea. Wesley had been away, in southern Ireland, spending some of Aldridge’s features budget on a big, ambitious story about drug smuggling. He’d driven round the coves of West Cork and Kerry, armed with leads from contacts he’d made in a number of North London pubs. He was trying to source a recent flood of high-quality cannabis, and by the time he returned from Ireland he was near certain that he had the makings of a sensational exposé.