Dead Letter Drop

9

I awoke to the strange heavy-breathing sound of the wall-to-wall underfloor heating ducts pumping in a dosage of hot air to keep the temperature up at its present level. Whoever had set it must have suffered from low blood pressure. It was boiling.

I didn’t stir for several moments as I didn’t want to wake Sumpy, then I heard the sharp flick of the page of a paperback book and realised she was already awake and reading, filling her mind at this early hour of the day with the drivelling dialogue of yet another modern romantic novel: ‘Oh Rodney, darling, why don’t you tell Mary about us today?’ ‘I can’t, my angel, it’s the kids’ first day home for the summer vacation.’

For a bright girl, she really read rubbish. Maybe she found it therapeutic, an escape from the pressure of her work. She was an authority on Impressionist painting: a consultant to Sotheby Parke Bernet, on retainer, but she worked mainly freelance, valuing pictures for prospective purchasers. It had its own strains and stresses. Nobody would be too thrilled with her if they forked out a couple of hundred thousand dollars on a painting of a bowl of apples only to later discover it had been done by an unknown child of 4.

‘Morning!’ I said, turning and looking up at her; she really did look terrific in the morning — a great virtue in my book.

She tore herself away from the page to give me a quick peck on the cheek. ‘How about some coffee?’ she said.

‘Sure; and some eggs, bacon, tomato, sausage, fried bread, beans, mushrooms, toast, marmalade and cornflakes to go with it.’ I slid out of the bed and waded through the warm shag broadloom over to the window. I drew back the curtains and stared through the treble-glazing onto a mid-December New York morning. The sky was a stark red; some sleet was falling and there was a thick white frost on the grass below and on the windows of the parked cars. Out over on the Van Wyck Expressway a solid queue of cars crept along towards Manhattan, narrowing to a sausage to squeeze past some obstruction — an accident, probably — that was marked by the twin, intermittent, flashing red lights on the roof of a patrol car.

I got back into bed, lay against the pillows, and started to gather my wits and my thoughts; the more I gathered them, the more I wished I hadn’t woken up at all. They say that problems look different after a good night’s sleep, and they’re right; mine certainly did — they looked one whole lot worse.

Sumpy got out of bed to go to the washroom. As soon as the door had closed behind her I leaned over for her handbag. I poured out the contents then pulled up the bottom liner, which I’d carefully glued down the night before last, and removed an envelope from under it, then replaced the liner and the contents and put the bag back on the floor.

The envelope wasn’t addressed to me but to my boss, Sir Charles Cunningham-Hope, better known to all by his code name, Fifeshire. I was sure he would not mind my opening it, since he was currently out of any active service.

I held the envelope out in front of me, thankful that nothing had happened to it. It was a soft pink colour, and round the middle of it was a bright blue ribbon, neatly tied into a bow.

Fifeshire was the Director-General of MI5, and was directly answerable to the Home Secretary, currently Anthony Lines. I first met him six years ago shortly after my press-ganging by Wetherby, as he insisted on meeting all new recruits personally and expounding to them his view of the role of MI5, his role, and how the recruit’s role was to fit into the overall scheme of things.

For reasons that one cannot define — some call it chemistry, some vibrations — we hit it off immediately and he took me under his direct wing. I was lucky. Most of his agents had a thankless task. They had rotten jobs — rotten, stinking lousy jobs. They had to grub around the surface of the earth, furrowing and burrowing like maggots and weevils and moles and voles; they froze and hurt and hid, pretended and lied and twisted and turned; they inhabited cheap hotel rooms and expensive hotel rooms; they never had friends and never had wives and children, and were frequently dead within ten years.

My assignments were no different from anyone else’s; they were equally foul. But Fifeshire did at least thank me at the end of each one and dole out generous portions of whisky or sherry, or anything that took the fancy, in his cavernous, oak-panelled, sound-deadened office in Carlton House Terrace, overlooking the Mall and the stone pillbox-shaped and ivy-camouflaged building that had covered the Admiralty communications headquarters, deep in the vaults below, during the Second World War.

But in spite of the cheery reception he gave, Fifeshire always kept a distance. Most agents he called only by their numbers and referred to them only by their numbers, not that he referred to them much. He believed in isolation; that agents should never meet one another; that they should train in isolation, work in isolation and, when necessary, die in isolation.

Fifeshire had a country estate in Gloucestershire and a flat in Wimpole Street. He had never married, to anyone’s knowledge, and worked continuously, never stopping, whether he was in the office, or pacing the floors of his flat, or leading a bucolic weekend as the country squire. He had a missionary zeal for his work, to try and maintain the credibility of British Intelligence, to try and hold it together and build it stronger and stronger.

At his core he was tough as steel, quicker-thinking than any calculator, and ruthlessly hard. At the start of the Second World War he had joined the army and shot through the ranks to Major-General. Before his luck ran out and a German shell removed the head that contained his outstanding mind, the talent was spotted; he was airlifted out of the front into Whitehall and had remained there ever since.

Bombs had ceased to rain from the sky; the war passed and truces were made, but for Fifeshire the war went on, and would go on for ever. Cold war, warm war, bloody war, silent war — it made no difference, it all boiled down to the same thing: survival. He intended to survive, and for that to happen his world had to survive; and for the world to survive on terms he could accept, his country had to survive and be able to stand up and be counted. And so he fought — day in, day out.

In the post-war period, a number of events, highlighted by such major fiascos as Philby, and Eden’s stunning lack of foresight in the Suez crisis, had a devastating effect in the United States on the credibility of British Intelligence; Fifeshire therefore had an unenviable task.

And yet he was succeeding. Since he took command in 1957 all the major Western powers had come to look to him as one of their most reliable sources of information. Whatever they might have thought of the governments and the politicians that comprised them, Fifeshire, and the outfit he had honed and ground and sculpted and built, they listened to.

Facts were what Fifeshire sought to acquire during all his waking hours. He believed implicity in facts. Like Dickens’s Gradgrind, he instilled the message in his pupils; ‘What I want is Facts… Facts alone are wanted in life.’ Fifeshire lusted after facts. They were the life-blood of British Intelligence. His agents were merely tools for obtaining them. He wanted to know everything about everyone; no one was to be left to chance, no one to be trusted, not even those who worked for him — especially those who worked for him. ‘What good is the whole of British Intelligence,’ he would say, ‘if there’s one damn spy in it?’

I was deployed to spy on the staff of MI5. For the last six years I had followed various members of staff to shops, to cinemas, to the lavatory, to hookers and massage parlours and mistresses, to holidays in Bognor and Tenerife and Nassau and Moscow; I had seen husbands hanging from chandeliers while their wives beat them with willow canes, and a 60-year-old spinster secretary roller-skate naked around her living room; I had recorded a thousand meetings on sound-tape, video-tape, celluloid, hung around a thousand windswept street corners, eaten a thousand miserable ham sandwiches in ten seconds flat, and I hadn’t yet found a single damn traitor.

But there was one. I was sure of it. Fifeshire was sure of it. And he knew that if he kept on looking, and I kept on looking, and the others he deployed kept on looking, sooner or later, whoever it was would make a mistake.

It was in the fourth year of my work that I ran foul of Scatliffe. He had a hawk-nosed, skinny, wrinkly tartar of a secretary, who looked like a giant eagle that had escaped from its cage. She was one of those very meticulous people who keep everything carefully in its place and a careful record of the place it’s kept in. She was also, I discovered, an incredible hoarder.

She had a large flat in a decaying Georgian terraced house in Westbourne Terrace, off the Bayswater Road. It was packed to the gills with the most incredible rubbish: cartons upon cartons of tights reduced in a Debenham’s sale; hundreds of empty plastic powder puffs; piles of men’s nylon socks, reduced in another sale; rows and rows of different-sized shoes; magazines and newspapers dating back decades; empty food tins washed out and stored away. She had evidently seen the boom in old bric-à-brac and was determined not to miss out next time around.

Under every single object she had carefully placed a hair. By checking the positions of the hairs she could tell if anything had been moved. It had taken me days to search through it all and I hadn’t noticed the hairs. She arrived home early one day, having left work with a migraine, and spotted me leaving the building. She checked the position of the hairs and put two and two together. She reported to Scatliffe that I had been spying on her.

Commander Clive Scatliffe was second in command to Fifeshire. He was a waspish man in his late forties, short, thin and wiry, with greying hair swept back in a rakish manner that didn’t suit him, and made him look like a cross between a concert pianist and a second-hand car dealer. He had small, penetrating, ice-cold eyes, that forever darted around, never looking anyone straight for long; a small thin mouth that pursed tight, spat out words, then pursed tight again. His skin was pasty white, looking like it never saw sunshine, and his hands were small and bony, and rarely stopped clenching each other. He exuded a constant atmosphere of high pressure.

Scatliffe had come up through the ranks from out of left field. Three years ago no one had heard of him. But he worked like a demon, was extremely intelligent, kissed every ass that was attached to anyone of importance, then followed them round as they turned to say thank you and stabbed them in the back. He had been a close friend of the previous Home Secretary and now had Anthony Lines eating out of his pocket. Few people liked him, including Fifeshire, who never openly declared his hostility towards Scatliffe, but I could tell. The one undeniable fact was that Scatliffe was heading for the hot seat. Even Fifeshire declared that he was his most likely successor. He was professional enough to admire the man’s capabilities, though he made no secret of the fact that his personal choice was Victor Hattan, the well-liked director of Security for SIS.

Scatliffe was mad as hell that I had been spying on his secretary. He hauled me into his office and screamed at me for a full ten minutes. He didn’t care if God himself had instructed me, his personal staff were beyond scrutiny; for them to have to undergo surveillance was a slight on his judgement. He kicked up such a stink in the department that in the interests of peace and harmony the normally unshakeable Fifeshire was forced to soft-pedal and leave Scatliffe and his staff to their own devices for a while.

Some months after the dust had settled Fifeshire told me he felt I should try and make peace with Scatliffe. Ever since the incident Scatliffe had had the boot in for me, unfairly, as Fifeshire agreed, blaming me rather than Fifeshire for the incident. Fifeshire said that he would one day be stepping down — not for a while, but within a few years — and that when he did, Scatliffe would replace him; unless his vitriolic attitude towards me could be softened before then, I would be in for a rough ride.

I told Fifeshire it wasn’t possible for anyone to give me a rougher ride than he himself did. He assured me it was. The way he said it was such that I didn’t bother to argue the point. He’d convinced me.

I was assigned to Scatliffe for a twelve-month period. He was a man with less warmth than a cryogenically preserved corpse. He likened agents to insects, referring to them as common or garden spies, and treated us with as much respect as a gardener tending greenfly with a spray can of DDT.

Weekends he spent with his wife at their house in Surrey, but during the week he lived alone in London; like Fifeshire, rising early and working late. His workday would begin in a peculiar manner, when a nubile black hooker would come round to his Campden Hill apartment, punctually at 6.15 every morning, and jerk him off, before the Home Office Rover collected him at 7.00 to whisk him to the office.

Fifeshire enjoyed the photographs enormously. They were the only bright spot that year. It was a rotten year. I got the lousiest jobs going, and in the extra efforts I made to do them well I invariably buggered them up. At the end of it I was beginning to feel that I might be having a better time inside a French slammer.

Fifeshire went so far as to try and get me transferred out of MI5 altogether and into MI6, or some other department of the Secret Intelligence Service, but somehow Scatliffe had gotten his claws into every area and hadn’t spread much good news about me in any of those quarters.

Then early in May Fifeshire summoned me to his office. I entered the ante-room, and his secretary, Margaret, a smart, divorced woman in her early forties, sprang up from her desk. ‘Good morning, Max,’ she said brightly, ‘I’ll just tell Sir Charles that you’re here.’

‘Thanks.’

A few moments later I was ushered through into Mastermind’s blockhouse.

‘Good morning, young fellow,’ he said.

‘Good morning, sir.’

‘You look well.’

I presumed he must have been looking at a photograph of me; I’d gone to bed at half past five that morning, having spent most of the night standing in a doorway in Wandsworth while a new junior in the department, named Rodney Tweed, rogered a window-dresser named Derek, who’d picked him up in the Drayton Arms pub in the Old Brompton Road. I was white and shaking, my eyes bright red, and I was coughing and spluttering from too many cigarettes. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

Seven fifteen in the morning is a very uncivilised hour to hold a meeting, but Fifeshire looked bright-eyed and well settled into his day’s work. He was a powerfully built man, not particularly tall, but striking all the same. He had a thick neck, with a bullet-shaped head, and a nose that was long but did not protrude much from his face; it was the type of nose that, if punched, would be more likely to inflict damage to the fist than to be damaged itself. The hair on his head was a mixture of dark greys, with the occasional black, and the silver streaks on either side of his temples gave him a very distinguished appearance. His eyebrows were very bushy, forming an awning over his penetrating brown eyes. The bags under his eyes were heavy and wrinkled; they were the only feature on his face which showed his age; he was 66. When he had finished speaking he never completely closed his mouth, his lips were always slightly parted; it gave one a reassuring feeling that he was always concentrating intently on what one was saying.

‘I’m sending you to America,’ he said. ‘It’ll be the toughest job you’ve ever had, and you’ll be walking a tightrope in a political minefield. If you fall off you’ll be landing me personally in a lot of stick, to say nothing of putting the kibosh on a couple of centuries of fairly friendly Anglo-American relations.’

He paused, staring at me hard, then continued. ‘As you may be aware we spy on friendly nations as much as we spy on hostile nations, since all nations have, historically, a habit of changing their allegiances from time to time. For our national security we must have detailed inside knowledge of what every single country in the world is up to, both internally and in its foreign policies.

‘When British agents are caught in hostile nations it does little to impair relations, since such countries accept spying as par for the course; but when our allies catch us spying on them they get very, very upset — not that they don’t all do it themselves, because they do, but because it invariably opens up a hornet’s nest of embarrassing questions from the media. So rule one, young fellow, is don’t get caught.’

‘I thought the United States was MI6’s domain?’

‘It is; and it has far more autonomy than is good for it. When I took over MI5, we actually had to report to MI6. But not any more. He smiled. It has always been my view that to do my job effectively I must keep an eye on MI6, and to do this I arranged some years ago the establishment of MI5 cover operation in all countries where enemy penetration of MI6 could be seriously damaging to us. The United States is one such place: MI6 operations there are based at the British Embassy in Washington, but our base is, for a number of reasons, in New York.

‘Apart from the Prime Minister and myself, there is only a handful of people who know of this. We operate through a very legitimate front, a large company specialising in the manufacture of computer and calculator cabinets; it has branch offices throughout the United States, a head office in New York, and a factory and offices here in England, from which the company is now actually controlled. It is called the Intercontinental Plastics Corporation, and it is one of the market leaders in its field. The advantages of a company in the computer field are obvious: we get to know of virtually every new development in the computer field in the United States, without having to go and look for them: Intercontinental is asked to tender for the manufacture of the cabinets.

‘You are being sent over by the English parent firm in order to study and report back on the company’s production control methods, a role which will give you complete autonomy to go anywhere, talk to anyone, look at anything, without arousing any degree of suspicion.

‘I have a strong feeling, for reasons I shan’t bother you with, that when we acquired Intercontinental, we may have acquired more than we realised. I want you to go through its staff with the finest toothcomb you can lay your hands on, and to miss out nothing, absolutely nothing. Now, before I go on, do you have any questions?’

‘I do, sir: I don’t know the first thing about computers.’

‘You will, before you start your job, young fellow, you will.’

On 12 August, barely three months later, I was riding the elevator up to Intercontinental Plastic Corporation’s Park Avenue offices to start my first morning’s work as the whizz-kid production control analyst from London.

For three months I’d eaten, drunk, woken, slept, breathed and belched computers and plastics, 24 hours a day. I’d attended America’s elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I’d visited the leading electronics firms of Japan, Germany and England, and I’d been despatched to the furthest reaches of the globe to see examples of Intercontinental’s work in operation. God alone knew how much of it had rubbed off on me; riding up in that elevator I had a horrible feeling it wasn’t enough.

Three days later, on 15 August, Fifeshire was in hospital, fighting for his life, with six bullets in him and most of his essential internal wiring in shreds. He’d been riding in a car with President Battanga of the Mwoaba Isles, who was over for a conference of the Non-Aligned Countries. Two hooded motorcyclists had riddled the car with machine-gun fire, at a traffic light, killing Battanga and the chauffeur, and critically wounding Fifeshire. An outfit calling itself the Mwoaban Liberation Army later claimed responsibility, although the Mwoaban Government angrily denied the existence of any such organisation and vehemently accused the British Government of plotting unrest in the Mwoaba Isles; it didn’t state why Britain should wish to cause unrest, but hinted strongly that the Mwoabans might be about to discover a major oil-field.

10

I heard Sumpy start the shower. I untied the blue ribbon, and ripped open the envelope: it contained a letter and a small wafer-thin object about an inch long and a third of an inch wide. It was mostly the colour of white marble but on the top side it had a small metal box with a circle of hard clear plastic in the middle, through which one could see a tiny grey rectangle that had minute shiny wires all around it like a spider’s web. On the reverse side it looked like a member of the centipede family, with twenty-four tiny metal legs bent under it. Stamped on the underneath was the word ‘Malaysia’ and a serial number. If nothing else, my three months of training in the computer business had taught me to be able to recognise what this object was: a silicon chip. Doubtless it was programmed to do something, but not having a computer in which to insert it handy, I had no idea what.

I read the letter. It was short and didn’t provide a great deal of enlightenment. It said:

It was signed Doctor Yuri Orchnev. On the back of the envelope was some scribbling: the name Charlie Harrison, and an address: Coconut Grove, Duneway Avenue, Fire Island.

Fire Island is a sand-bar, over 30 miles long but only a few hundred yards wide at its widest point, a short way off the south coast of Long Island. It’s treasured by the islanders to a point of jingoism seldom encountered since the heyday of the British Empire. Untypically of most of the North American continent, cars are strictly banned — not that they’d be much use, since there are no roads. The island is famed as being a gay paradise, although in fact its largely vacation-only population is drawn from a wide cross-section of well-off New York City dwellers, who spread out into the independent communities of summer houses, shops and trendy friendly restaurants strung out along its length, and live out their summer weekends in a state of chic bohemia.

It struck me as being unlikely that the late Dr Yuri Orchnev, if it was the writer himself from whom I had obtained this letter as he lay dead on my apartment floor the night before last, was either en route to, or returning from, a holiday on this island. Mid-December down this part of the world is not prime beach time.

I studied the writing on the back of the envelope carefully. I knew the name Charlie Harrison all right; he was a computer operator, in charge of Intercontinental’s own computer system.

I read through the letter again. There was no date, no address. Why did the man who came into my apartment at half past two in the morning and shot himself have this letter in his pocket? I’d searched him thoroughly at the time, but he had no identification on him whatsoever; nothing; all he had was this letter.

I wanted to find out what that chip contained, and I wanted to find out what went on at Coconut Grove, Fire Island, and where Charlie Harrison slotted into the scheme of things. It was Wednesday today. If there was anything going on at Fire Island, it would most likely be at the weekend. It became a toss-up for Charlie Harrison or the chip first. I decided on the chip. Harrison would take longer to crack; surveillance of people was an arduous task. In the four months so far I’d worked through less than a quarter of Intercontinental’s staff; I’d cleared them all except for a secretary who was having an affair, because I hadn’t yet found out with whom, and a programmer called Howie Kottle, whom I thought might be gay.

My thoughts were shattered by Sumpy, who had emerged from the shower and was repeating the breakfast order for the third time to a slow-witted and apparently hard-of-hearing room-service operator.

I was worried about what to do with Sumpy. I had a feeling that if she went back to her apartment she would find the goons had taken it apart with a meat cleaver, and they’d probably still be hanging around, waiting to take her apart with the same meat cleaver. I wanted to keep her out of harm’s way until I’d got rid of the harm. Hiding her 5 feet 11½ inch blonde-haired, sun-tanned, highly volatile frame was not going to be an easy task.

‘How do you fancy a holiday?’ I said.

‘Before I do anything, Mr Maxwell Flynn —’

‘Maximilian,’ I interrupted, ‘it comes from the Latin, not from the instant coffee.’

‘I don’t care if you’re named after a Nigerian greenfoot monkey,’ she said ever so sweetly. ‘I want to know where you come from and where you plan to go, because I’ve just about had it up to here.’ She swung her hand to the top of her forehead. ‘And if you were the short-assed midget you’re acting like, you’d know that was one hell of a long way.’

I sat and looked at her for a long pause as she stomped up and down the room. Finally I spoke. ‘What do you want me to tell you?’

‘What do I want you to tell me? What do I want you to tell me? I’ll tell you what I want you to tell me: I want you to tell me why you shoot a man dead in your room in the middle of the night; why you tell me not to let cops into my apartment; why you dig a hole through my apartment wall while I’m taking a shower, and kidnap me; why you don’t stop when the cops point a gun at you; why you make me steal a car and come out and check into a hotel under a false name; that okay for openers?’ She stood and glared at me.

Had I been in her position, I’d probably have felt the same way. But I wasn’t in her position. And I couldn’t explain anything to her. I just didn’t want her to go back to her apartment.

‘Do you want to come to Boston with me today?’

‘I can’t. I’m having lunch with Lynn. Then I have to catch the three o’clock flight to Rome — I have to go look at some pictures. I’m not even going to have time to go home and pack, and I’m going to be away several days.’

Lynn, whoever she was, had just done us both a great favour.

A couple of hours later, and wishing to hell I’d been sensible and got on that plane to Rome with Sumpy, I was peering through the misting windshield of a rented Buick, slipping and sliding her through a blizzard of snow that was fast covering the Connecticut Turnpike. The snow had already started to fall when I dropped Sumpy off at the restaurant to meet her friend. It would be stretching the truth to say we’d parted on amicable terms. The muck that was now tumbling out of the sky did nothing to lift my cheerless mood.

An endless convoy of tractor-trailers thrashed past, chucking crate-load upon crate-load of slush, grit, salt and general gunge onto the windshield, while the wipers struggled to turn the combination into a translucent smear, through which I could vaguely make out the darkening road ahead. It was three o’clock and dark was falling very quickly.

I turned on the radio for some cheerful music, and was boomingly exhorted to turn off at the next junction, find the nearest church, and rush in and pray to the Lord God Almighty for the salvation of my soul and the souls of millions of others, all of which were, apparently, in imminent peril due to a multitude of sins too long for the Reverend Doctor Lonsdale Forrester, the Motorists’ Pastor, to relate in the air time he had available between commercials. ‘And while you’re driving, looking for the next church, give thanks to the Lord, yeah, give thanks to the Lord, for the gas in your tanks, for the tyres on your wheels, for your axles, for your transmissions, for the pistons in your cylinders…’

I turned the tuner and an immensely cheery voice was halfway through telling us about how an entire family of five had just been wiped out in an automobile accident. I tuned again: ‘Get your children ULTRA-DEATH this Christmas, the great new family game; draw a card, throw the dice — and you might get to choose euthanasia for your favourite aunt…’; I tuned again and a voice told me that if my journey wasn’t essential, not to start it as it was going to snow shortly. He evidently needed either a new set of glasses or windows in his studio. I turned off the radio and lit a cigarette. What should have been a four and a half hour run to Boston was going to take a lot longer, and at this rate, I would be lucky to get there this side of midnight.

I could have used Intercontinental’s own computer to prise the secrets out of my little plastic friend in my pocket, but I had a feeling right now that staying away from the offices would be the best thing for my health. I’d telephoned Martha, my secretary, and told her I wasn’t feeling too hot and was going to take a few days’ rest. Having seen Sumpy come into the office to collect me on a couple of occasions, Martha was discreet enough not to ask whether I’d be contactable at home, and merely wished me a quick recovery. I wondered about Martha; about whether she knew who her real employers were. She was a smart girl, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find she was a Fifeshire operative as well. If she was she’d covered her tracks well; since she happened to be extremely attractive, the idea of attempting to get to know her better in the not-too-distant future appealed to me as a pleasant diversion.

The traffic ahead came to an abrupt halt, and I pressed the brake pedal and released it several times in rapid succession to prevent the wheels locking up, and stopped. I thought hard about the layout of the campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I’d spent only a few weeks there during my computer training and in that time had been shown most of the billions of dollars’ worth of equipment that were laid on for the purpose of educating the brightest echelons of America’s student scientists in the technical ways of the world. I hoped no one was going to mind a small part of that equipment being put to practical use for a short while.

The weather got worse and the road got longer, and I camped the night on the floor of the Interchange 70 Howard Johnson Motel, in the company of most of the population of the North Eastern seaboard; they all appeared to be commercial travellers with urgent nine o’clock appointments in the furthermost points of the continent, men to whom earnest conversation about inventory control on gearboxes, vacuum packing of anglepoise lamps, weekly call lists and mileage rationalisation were evidently more important than sleep.

In the morning I felt foul, and didn’t feel like joining the long queue to the washroom. I went outside to start clearing the snow and ice from my car windows. The storm had been and gone, and left behind it a glorious morning of glistening white ground and stark deep-blue sky basking in the gentle glow of the winter-weak sun. The roads were clear, though wet with the melted snow, and I covered the remaining miles into Boston in time to join in the rush-hour traffic.

I drove down Mass Avenue, over the Harvard Bridge, and then turned right behind the main body of the Institute buildings. I parked the car in an open lot, and walked down to the stunningly graceful embankment, Memorial Drive.

Bearded, tieless, greasy-faced from not having washed this morning, jacket and trousers crumpled, and with the white pallor of a sleepless night, I felt I should easily pass as a post-graduate student.

I crossed over and walked along by the Charles River, and looked over the far side at Boston, with the gold dome of the State House and the John Hancock Tower rising from the snow-covered ground. A horde of 45-year-old joggers nearly mowed me down as I turned to start walking again.

The air was cold and the tiny warmth of the sun felt good. My shoes rapidly turned to pulp in the slush, and I cursed myself for not having any boots.

The Computer Science rooms would, I knew, be busy, but there was an IBM 370 in the Chemistry block that I remembered being told was rarely used, and I made my way to it. The whole place seemed to have shrunk since my first visit, the way places always seem to.

I reached the building and went straight in; a security man was standing in the entrance, which was a new addition since I’d been there.

‘I’m going up to the 370.’

‘You with the seminar?’

I nodded that I was.

‘Up the stairs, second on the right.’

I thanked him, cursing to myself that there was a seminar, walked up and went in through the door. It was a familiar layout of two rooms adjoining, with a large amount of window space in between. Through the window was the operator in the temperature-controlled room where a plethora of shiny blue boxes with winking lights and clumps of wires concealed something considerably more intelligent than the old cash registers upon which Watson founded his International Business Machines.

In the room I was in, the VDU room, were the visual display telescreens, the plotters, the card readers and the printers. There was also a large group of students, ranging from the younger ones in their cords or jeans, track-suit tops or faded jerseys, and mandatory Adidas shoes, to older ones in herringbone sports jackets and flannel trousers. Over half the entire group wore thick rimless glasses; the age group spanned 19 to 50. A tall thin man, with a sallow face and zipped up corduroy jacket, was expounding on some figures on a diagram on one of the visual display screens in the centre of the room. He stopped and looked at me almost apologetically when I walked in. ‘Oh — er — are you wanting to run a program?’

‘Well, I was — but I can wait.’

‘Not the Zee Beta Assignment is it?’

‘Er — no!’

‘Traffic control?’

‘No — it’s a new one I’m working out — part of my term paper.’

He peered at me. ‘You don’t look familiar.’

I wasn’t surprised. Fortunately I remembered some names from my previous visit. ‘Actually I’m up from Princeton. I’m on a special course under Dr Yass.’ I hoped to hell Dr Yass hadn’t been hit by a bus during the couple of months since he’d escorted me around Princeton for a morning. I was aware of nineteen of the other twenty faces in the room staring at me. The twentieth was busy plucking the hairs out of his head, one by one. Enlightenment glowed in the lecturer’s face; yet again the ancient art of name-dropping had worked.

‘Go right ahead, if it’s not going to take too long. I’ll be taking a while yet. It’ll be good for these students here to watch.’

My already overstretched nerves began jangling badly; blind panic was only inches away. My previous experience of actually running computers was very minimal indeed. The knowledge that I had acquired was suitable only for talking, in a seemingly knowledgeable manner, about such machines — not for operating them. I knew just about enough, given time and a fair wind, to perform the most elementary of operations. Given the current climate of this room, even if I could escape the attention of the operator there was no way I was going to achieve anything by plugging my chip into this computer, except perhaps to provide a good few days’ employment for an IBM repair team. Furthermore, in the unlikely event of my succeeding in obtaining any satisfactory results, I wouldn’t have been over-anxious for the secrets of the chip to be revealed to twenty-one strangers; there were other people, not a million miles from this room, who, had they been aware of my predicament, I am pretty damn sure would have shared that sentiment.

‘Thank you, but I’ve several hours’ work to do. It can wait.’

‘We’ll be through here by 5.00. If there’s no name down, it’s all yours.’ He jerked his head over at a sheet of paper pinned near the door.

‘Thank you,’ I said. I walked over to the sheet, and the lecture resumed.

‘Now, the early analogue machines had…’

I looked for today’s date. Beside the time of five o’clock there was a name, written in thick, untidy writing: E. Scrutch. I nodded my thanks to the lecturer and left the room. He didn’t notice; he was back in the days when computers were bigger than dinosaurs and a lot more ponderous; now they’re smaller than guns, and a damn sight more dangerous. The security man wasn’t there when I got downstairs; I ducked behind his desk and found a row of keys, all identical and tagged ‘Pass — must be signed for’. I pocketed one and left the building.

The name E. Scrutch stuck in my mind. Who was E. Scrutch? Who could possibly christen anyone E. Scrutch? It was one of the most singularly unattractive-sounding names I could remember encountering; I imagined him to be short, thin, with a jutting face, and stubble on both his chin and the top of his head.

I took my usual precaution of scanning the area as I walked away from the building; I didn’t feel there was much likelihood of my having a tail, but the scanning process had been so thoroughly drummed into me during my training six years ago, and during the yearly refresher courses, that it had become part of my normal movement. Within a second, and probably quite a bit less, and in one seemingly innocent action, I knew what was going on in the full 360 degrees of area around me, and to the casual observer would have appeared to have done no more than to have straightened some ruffled hairs on the back of my neck.

I carried on across the campus, towards downtown Boston and the hope of dry boots.

Half an hour later I was seated in sublime warmth in a cafe named Uncle Bunny’s Incredible Edibles, my feet having a good time inside a thick, dry pair of socks inside a thick, waterproof pair of boots. I had a mug of steaming coffee and a plate somewhere underneath one of Uncle Bunny’s smaller sandwiches. It wasn’t just the plate that had disappeared but most of the table as well, under a sprawling mountain of turkey, avocado, chips, wholemeal bread, bean sprouts and gherkins.

It was a student hangout cafe — everything this end of town was a student hangout — with orange tables and hard plastic chairs, advertisements in the window and a student staff. The cafe was quiet at the moment, the lunchtime rush hadn’t yet begun, and the few young hopes of America that were there sat, in the traditional arched back poise of students, staring mournfully into black holes, which, when they came out of their reveries, they remembered to be mugs of coffee, and they sipped.

In this great land of new awareness, of car-sharing, thought-sharing, experience-sharing, wife-sharing and God-knew-what-else-sharing, I sincerely hoped E. Scrutch would be into computer-sharing.