Atom Bomb Angel

  In the cabin next to Harry Slan was a man who had never been very successful with women. He had taken out a few before he had met the one who was to become his wife, but he had never got anywhere near seducing them, much as, timid though he was, he would have liked to. Marriage provided a sex life that he supposed was adequate, not that his wife was ever the whore in the bedroom he had read that good wives were supposed to be. There was something in particular which had begun as mild curiosity, but had been slowly turning into an obsession as the years went by: his wife was fair-haired; he wanted to know what it would be like to make love to a dark-haired woman. For the past twenty-one years, every remotely attractive woman who smiled at him, unwittingly sent him reeling into an erotic fantasy. One day, he had been promising himself, he would take off to Shepherd Market, and buy himself an hour or two with one, but he knew, that when it came to it, he would not have the courage.

  But now, finally, his fantasy had come true; he was lying naked on a bed, on top of an equally naked raven-haired woman. She was more beautiful than anyone he had ever dared to hope he might conquer. And here she was, naked in bed with him, on a paradise boat in a paradise port on a balmy late-summer’s evening, a million miles away from his home, from his wife, from, he thought happily, any possible chance of being found out. Like Harry Slan, he too had wondered why he had been invited; but right now, he didn’t give a damn. He opened his eyes to look at her, to reassure himself that she was real, that his dream had come true; that he was finally – after all the years of dreaming – making love to a dark-haired woman. His name was Horace Whalley. Whalley wasn’t under any suspicion the night I made a routine search of his office, and the search was no more and no less thorough than the search I made that week of half the other offices of the staff of the Atomic Energy Authority. But the letter of invitation from Deke Sleder to spend a long weekend on his boat, earned Whalley his position between the glass slides under the Maximilian Flynn microscope. Deke Sleder might have been on Cosmopolitan’s ‘ten sexiest men in the world’ list; he was on quite a different list in the files of British Intelligence.

  7

  The small brass plate to the right of the front door of the building had engraved on it the words Portico Investments Ltd. Nothing else gave the casual passer-by any clue as to the activities that went on behind the white-painted, five-storey Regency façade of 46 Carlton House Terrace.

  There was nothing to hint to the casual passer-by that number forty-six did not in fact stop at basement level, but continued down into the ground for another five storeys, and continued along, down the Mall, occupying five more houses.

  Inside the entrance hall of number forty-six was an attractive brunette in her mid-thirties. What singled her out from the thousands of receptionists in London that looked not unlike her was a cabinet on her sitting-room wall at home which contained some forty-five cups and medals; most were from Bisley, but one had pride of place: it was an Olympic Silver for Rapid Pistol Fire. By making the most local of movements with the hand she used for pushing her intercom buttons, she could, within one and a half seconds of anyone coming through that front door, have produced a hefty Colt revolver and started firing it.

  To her left was a glass display booth featuring an array of extremely large uncut gemstones, including a diamond, sapphire, emerald and ruby. A montage of colour photographs behind the stones depicted a drill-bit grinding into the earth, with the caption Amarillo, 1935, a pair of tongs holding up a ruby ring, with the caption Nairobi, 1955, and an aerial photograph of an area of hilly desert.

  The display was for the benefit of visitors, not that this building had many strangers visit it, nor did it encourage them. The regular inhabitants of the building knew that the gemstones were nothing but bits of glass, and the photographs were prints from a handful of negatives found in the vaults of the Science Museum.

  The entire complex onto which the front door of number forty-six opened housed a daytime staff of seven hundred and fifty people, the majority of whom entered and left via a battery of innocent-looking doorways dotted around the Mall, Trafalgar Square and Cockspur Street, or by one of the three entrances to the car park which sprawled below the complex.

  On the fifth floor, through a secretary’s anteroom, and through a massive, heavily beaded double door, was the man who presided over this domain. He was a powerfully built man with a bullet-shaped head rising from a bull-neck; a nose that was long, but did not protrude much, and was broken in a couple of places like a prize fighter’s; his hair was a mixture of dark greys, with occasional black strands, and there were elegant silver streaks either side of his temples. He wore a Turnbull and Asser lawn-cotton shirt, pin-striped down the chest, but with plain white collar and cuffs, a very up-to-date Lanvin tie, and the entire package elegantly wrapped in five hundred pounds’ worth of Dormeuil navy-blue chalk-striped cloth and Hawes and Curtis expertise. He wasn’t a particularly tall man, being no more than five foot nine, but he had the sort of presence that would make the most belligerently drunk of rugger-buggers move over to make room for him at crowded pub bars.

  A close look at the wrinkles around his eyes would indicate he was in his late sixties, but in spite of that age, he looked capable of vaulting the giant desk, which he dwarfed with his presence, in one leap – that was, unless you knew that, tucked somewhere under the back of that massive expanse of mahogany, was a thin but strong walking stick. It wasn’t age that had brought on the necessity of this stick, but a hail of bullets from a would-be assassin’s sub-machine gun just over a year ago.

  Closeted behind the front door of 46 Carlton House Terrace, behind the brass plate with Portico Investments Ltd engraved on it, was an organization that could trace its roots back to the days of Queen Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada. It was a secret organization, so secret, in fact, that it did not officially exist, in spite of the fact that it spent its way, annually, through some one hundred and forty million pounds’ worth of British taxpayers’ money. Outside the organization itself, there were only two people, at any one time, who had the faintest clue what it was up to: the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister, and what they knew could be written with a fairly thick felt-tipped marker on the back of a postage stamp.

  The organization sprawled across three other complexes of its own in London, largely as a result of Fifeshire’s expansion plans, as well as sharing a massive complex beneath the Hyde Park underground car park with the Army, the police Special Branch, the Secret Intelligence Service – MI6 – and no doubt, half the leading Russian moles in England. The organization was MI5, and the man who sat on the fifth floor of Portico Investments, Sir Charles Cunningham-Hope OBE, better known by his code name, Fifeshire, was its Director General.

  Fifeshire rarely saw most of his operatives from year in to year out, but I was privileged – if any of the hundred, different, rotten assignments I have had could be called a privilege – to work directly for him. He was my control. We had got on extremely well at my first ever interview with him – whether he had taken pity on a waif in distress, or had spotted a gullible mark who could be manipulated, or had any of a thousand other reasons, I could not tell, so I consoled myself by believing that Fifeshire was intelligent enough to recognize a fine man when he saw one.

  Fifeshire’s ace agent had, however, little desire to be the most admired man in the graveyard, and for that reason I kept more than a wary eye open whenever I went to see him. I walked in to the familiar room, and he stood up behind his desk, and stretched out his massive hand. It was the kind of hand that leaves delicate ladies who shake it with speechless smiles on their faces, while their cheeks flush bright red, and they transfer their weight from one foot to the other for several moments, until the numbness in their hand subsides and the full strength of the agony hits them; then they let out a short, sharp, but elegant and restrained, ‘Owww’.

  I was prepared for his clamp, and braced my hand against it; he held my hand for a few seconds, shaking it hard, and just at t
he moment at which the knuckles were about to crumble to dust, he mercifully let go and waved me to sit down. Beside his desk was a twenty-six-inch television monitor, wired to a video-cassette player. They had been put there on my instructions.

  ‘How are you, Flynn?’ he asked.

  ‘A bit better than last week,’ I replied. It was last week that I had reported that I was bored stiff watching Whalley do nothing. I wasn’t bored any more.

  Fifeshire looked wryly at the monitor. ‘How kind of you to be concerned I might miss Coronation Street.’

  ‘I know you like to be kept informed,’ I said.

  ‘Well I wish more people did,’ he said. He threw a copy of the morning’s Times across the desk top. ‘Did you read the paper this morning?’

  ‘No, I was busy watching a television programme called Horace Whalley Goes to the Office.’

  Fifeshire grinned for a brief moment. ‘Look at the front page.’

  The headline read: Prince and Princess of Wales start Belfast Tour.

  ‘Did you know they were going on a Belfast tour?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, nor did I. Forty million pounds is the budget I have this year to spend on spying on Northern Ireland terrorism, and there isn’t anyone that knows more about the subject than I do, yet they go and send the Prince and Princess over there without even asking our opinion. Anyhow,’ he said, abruptly changing the subject, ‘that’s not your problem. Let’s hear what you have to say.’

  ‘On Monday Whalley left his office and drove to a pub ten miles this side of Porthmadog in Wales. Moments after he arrived, a Ford Capri drove out. I had the Capri tailed, and whether or not the Capri knew he was being tailed, I don’t know, but he shook our men off after about fifteen minutes. From the description of the way he did it, my guess is he’s a professional, but didn’t know whether he was being followed and just went through a standard routine – a security procedure. What is interesting is that he had false plates on his car – he certainly wasn’t taking any chances. The plates bore the registration number of a Datsun that was written off in a smash four years ago. Now there might not be any connection between him and Whalley, but I watched Whalley most of the time he was in the pub and he didn’t communicate with anybody, yet when he came out he had a package on him, which contained the videotape he delivered to the BBC, a copy of which is ready to roll on your machine.’

  Fifeshire nodded. ‘As you don’t have any information about this man in the Capri and, by the sound of it, little chance of finding out any more unless he shows himself again, it’s not of much help is it?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Would you recognize him if you saw him again?’

  ‘No, I might recognize the car. I’m having all possible leads followed up – anyone that might have sold the fake plates, all the usual.’

  The intercom buzzed and Fifeshire pushed a button on the machine on his desk. The voice of his secretary, the Honourable Violet-Elizabeth Trepp, came out. ‘Mr Wardle and Captain Coleman are here to see you, Sir Charles.’

  ‘Send them in please, Miss Trepp.’

  To call the Honourable V.-E. Trepp a battleaxe would be to do a cruel injustice to battleaxes. She was to gorgons what a neutron bomb is to a pea-shooter. The whole of MI5, Fifeshire included, were terrified of her. If one didn’t know the personnel department better, one might have thought she was a joke perpetrated by them; but personnel didn’t have a sense of humour.

  Her efficiency, or at least her view of what efficiency should be, drove everyone to the depths of despair. She was not merely protective towards Fifeshire, she protected him like a nuclear-blast shelter. To get a telephone call put through to Fifeshire required a university degree in diplomacy, an enormous amount of patience, and plenty of time to spare. ‘Who is calling?’ she would say, followed by, ‘Is he expecting you?’, followed by ‘I’ll see if he wishes to speak to you.’ No one escaped this treatment – not even those who called every day; nor those who called several times every day; not the low-grade bosses, nor the middle-grade bosses, nor the top bosses; not even the Home Secretary, nor the Prime Minister. All got exactly the same treatment. She had been mentally strangled a thousand times, and several hundred of those times by me alone.

  By an act of secrecy worthy of the entire organization, Fifeshire had had installed a direct line of which she was unaware, so that he could once again receive urgent calls in time to take some action.

  The double doors opened and two men came in; one, a short man, balding, with greying strands of hair, aged about fifty-five, in a green worsted suit that was too small for him and a cream shirt that was too big; the other was in his late thirties, with jet black hair, about six foot tall, wearing a brown double-breasted blazer with plain gold buttons and dark-grey flannel trousers.

  ‘Sir Charles,’ I said, introducing them, ‘this is Ken Wardle and Dick Coleman from the Playroom.’ The Playroom was the nickname given to the gadgetry department of the Combined Central Information base underneath Hyde Park. Some of the most up-to-date equipment in the world was down there, constantly being improved and adapted and applied to all forms of Intelligence work by a team of some of the finest underpaid technicians in the country. Wardle and Coleman were two of these.

  ‘How do you do,’ said Fifeshire. ‘How very nice of you to come. I’m looking forward to seeing the show!’

  Wardle and Coleman smiled politely, and caught my eye. Without moving an eyelid, the three of us winked at each other. We were together in the big boss man’s room, like privileged schoolboys; we had to be on our best behaviour and as time was even more precious to Fifeshire than to most people, we hoped he wasn’t going to feel we’d wasted his time.

  ‘Shall we start?’ I said.

  Fifeshire nodded. Wardle switched on the monitor, and Coleman pushed the play button on the video-cassette machine.

  The picture that came on the screen was a steady pan across Moscow’s Red Square. Into the camera, wearing a Burberry mackintosh over a suit, walked Sir Isaac Quoit. He strode straight up towards the camera, until he was in full close-up, and then stopped.

  ‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘I am Sir Isaac Quoit and I am the chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. For those of you who have not heard of this organization, it is the body responsible for the development and organization of the nuclear energy industry in the United Kingdom.

  ‘The reason I am here in Russia is that I do not feel safe in England, nor virtually anywhere in the free world. You may wonder if I have gone mad. The answer is no, I have not gone mad; but I am tired of lying to you, the British public, of feeding you an endless farrago of twisted statistics, of statements from corrupt scientists who have been paid to make statements that they do not themselves believe; I am fed up with doing nothing but heading and running a massive propaganda machine that has been set in motion by the government to cover up its complete inability to understand the implications and dangers of nuclear power, to cover up the fact that it has ruinously overestimated the demand for electricity for both the immediate and the long term, and has, even more ruinously, underestimated the cost of generating this electricity.

  ‘I am tired, in a nutshell, of lying to you that nuclear power is safe and cheap. It is not. It is immensely dangerous; not only has it been responsible, almost totally, for the ever-increasing incidence of death from cancer in the last twenty years, but it can, and almost certainly will, one day wipe out our entire country. And during the next five years, the cost of nuclear-generated electricity will become as much as eight times higher than the cost of conventionally generated electricity.

  ‘These lies are put upon you to protect the face of the government, and to protect the jobs of the many thousands involved in the nuclear energy industry. On the question of jobs, I can say that many thousands more jobs would be created as a result of generating electricity by conventional methods, and exploring new methods, than are currently available in the nuclear energy indus
try.

  ‘Why, you might ask, is this massive and lethal deceit maintained? Look back to the origins of the nuclear industry in this country, and an answer may begin to emerge.

  ‘Our first reactor, Calder Hall, became operational – went critical, as they say – in 1956. In front of the press of the whole world, the Queen switched the power from Calder Hall into the national grid, and the nuclear age was born. But the amount of power Calder Hall put into the grid was miniscule. That was not the reason why Calder Hall was built; it was built to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. The electricity was a by-product.

  ‘The answer becomes clearer still if you look behind the scenes at the British government’s commitments to NATO; that same answer emerges again if you look behind the scenes at the British government’s commitments to the US – and we do have a major, very secret, defence treaty with the US. With regard to both these commitments, the major part of our contribution is not in ships, or in tanks, or in guns, or aircraft, or personnel; it is in plutonium. Our contribution is to supply NATO and the US with plutonium for nuclear weapons. The easiest way to manufacture plutonium is through nuclear power stations. Plutonium, at close to the ideal level of enrichment for nuclear weapons, is a waste product of nuclear power stations. The major percentage of the defence budget of the British government is concealed in your electricity bills.’

  Sir Isaac continued for a further twenty minutes’ worth of impassioned and highly plausible-sounding speech. His theme seemed to drift at times, and he didn’t always explain clearly what he meant, but he got the basics of his message through loud and clear: the British public were being conned by a government that was too clever by half, and the result of this conning was a spreading network of nuclear power stations on an island far too small to cope with them. Britain, he said, was on the edge of a dark and deep nuclear abyss. She was about to ride, like her countrymen a century and a half before in the Charge of the Light Brigade, into a valley of death and despair from which she could never return. She was too small a land to have so many nuclear power stations, not to mention the fuel-reprocessing plants and the waste plants. One major accident in any of a couple of dozen of nuclear establishments could distribute, across every inch of the land, a cocktail of radioactive horrors so thick and so strong, that nobody would be able to inhabit Britain for generations to come.