Atom Bomb Angel

5

Horace Whalley was a pragmatic-looking man, in his early fifties. He had a thick-set face at the front of a conical head, with a large nose that dipped slightly downwards, and grey hair that was cropped short, and he looked as though he carried the burdens of the world on his shoulders. He was about five foot seven, wore unassuming worsted suits, drab wool ties, and had a generally meek air. He stooped slightly, and never took large footsteps. Unknown to him, there was a tiny electronic microphone concealed in every room of his house, inside his car, inside his office, and inside his Rotary Club tie-pin, which normally he always wore but had recently mislaid.

He munched his bran and prunes breakfast, unaware that the sounds of his eating were being heard, with perfect fidelity, by six men in three motor cars, parked in the vicinity of his house, in the tree-lined Surbiton avenue, in such a manner that they could follow him unobtrusively, regardless of which direction he decided to take on leaving his house.

It was the seventeenth morning of their vigil, and they had heard him, as usual, take his wife a cup of tea in bed, murmur. ‘Goodbye, dear, I’ll see you later,’ go downstairs, pick up his briefcase and umbrella from beside the door, go out and into the garage. A few moments later, the tail of a powder blue Vauxhall Cavalier would start pouring out choked exhaust smoke, the reversing lights would shine on, and the car would start to move backwards down the short concrete driveway. None of the six men needed to look at their wristwatches: they knew it was 6.15 a.m. precisely.

There were twelve men in the team altogether, six were always on while the other six rested. All twelve of them had come to the conclusion several days ago that following Horace Whalley was a waste of time. His routine each day was exactly the same: from the time he left the office at four forty-five in the afternoon to the time he returned to it at seven in the morning, any one of them could have told me, with his eyes shut and his ears blocked, exactly where Whalley was and what he was doing. But they were professional enough to understand that this was the point. Whalley’s normal routine was completely taped; any deviation from it would stand out like a sore thumb — and it was a deviation that we all waited for.

The three cars that followed him in the morning, changing places every few miles, were different makes and colours from the ones that followed him in the evening, and none of the cars was ever used more than once in the same week. At six twenty as usual the three cars that followed him in towards central London heard him turn on Radio 4, keeping the volume control low as he listened to the end of the Farming Report, and then turning the volume up to listen to the news headlines. The men thought perhaps he’d turned it up louder than usual on this particular morning, but they couldn’t be sure.

The first item on the Monday morning headlines was the shooting of four soldiers in Belfast. The second item was a sharp fall in the cost of living. The third item was the disappearance of the chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, Sir Isaac Quoit. He had last been seen, the announcer informed listeners, on Saturday afternoon, walking his pointer across Ashdown Forest, near his Sussex home. The dog had returned home alone, but nothing had been seen or heard of Sir Isaac. The breakfast programme newscaster gave the information to the nation, or at least to that portion of the nation that were up at this hour, tuned into Radio 4 and actually listening to their sets, with a degree of gravity in his voice that was ideally suited to the occasion, and had been selected from a file of fifty different tones of gravity for fifty different types of serious announcements stored in the memory banks of his brain after a quarter of a century doing this job. The police, he stated, were treating the matter as ‘foul play’, and left his audience to decide for themselves whether this implied that the police were intending, shortly, to arrest the dog.

By the time the blue Cavalier’s radio reception had faded into nothing but a crackle as the car descended the ramp to the car park underneath the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority’s Charles II Street headquarters, Horace Whalley and the six men who were following him had listened to the newscaster report the same story, in the same tone, five more times. They had also listened twice to Sir Isaac Quoit’s wife relating precisely what Sir Isaac was wearing when he set off, what he had said to her, which was pretty much what anybody who was setting off to walk the dog for forty-five minutes might say to his wife, and debating whether the fact that he had had a second helping of pudding might indicate he had been stoking up for a long journey. They had also listened to her relate how the dog had come home with someone else’s frozen leg of mutton in its mouth, which didn’t indicate anything at all, except that either the dog was underfed or it was a kleptomaniac.

‘Daphne’s coming in.’

I switched off the tiny radio receiver built into my propelling pencil. Daphne was the code name for Horace Whalley. I looked at my watch and knew I needn’t have bothered. It was exactly 7.00 a.m. I yawned, and cursed Whalley. Having to be at work at 7.00 a.m. was not my idea of fun, and after seventeen days I still had not got used to it. I decided I probably wouldn’t ever get used to it. My circadian cycle, as the twenty-four-hour clock in one’s body is called, is not geared to be in harmony with the gentle glow of dawn; it prefers to commence its daily cycle several hours after the sun has first appeared over the far horizon, and it likes to be jolted into action by a succession of cups of thick, black coffee delivered by a warm, naked girl. Much to the chagrin of myself and my much abused innards, my current coffee-mate wasn’t into 6.15 a.m. deliveries.

I took out my first Marlboro of the day and then stuck it back in the pack. I wasn’t giving up — I like smoking — but I had promised myself I was going to cut down drastically, and that definitely meant not lighting up at 7.00 a.m., for openers. If my metabolism was in ruins and my lungs in tatters, it was Whalley who was to blame. My hatred of his working hours, and the knowledge that the sooner I either gave him up as a bad job or nailed him doing something, the sooner I might have some chance of returning to a normal existence — or at any rate, to as near to a normal existence as my job would ever allow — spurred me to a degree of application to this task that appeared dangerously like enthusiasm.

The office at the Authority, which the Energy Secretary had commandeered for his hot-shot analyst, was small, and tucked away in a quiet corner of the building, with a window that looked down onto Charles II Street, and it had two features uncommon to the other offices in the building: firstly, with the door shut, it was completely sound-proof; secondly, concealed in the back of the desk was a twenty-one-inch television monitor, linked, via closed-circuit to three television cameras and as many microphones elaborately concealed in the office of Horace Whalley two floors above.

From seven in the morning to a quarter to five in the afternoon, I watched and listened to Horace Whalley at work. From ten until five past ten he slurped at a cup of hot coffee that was brought to him, and from one until a quarter past he munched his way through an egg and cress wholemeal bread sandwich, followed by a spam and chutney wholemeal bread sandwich, followed by two chocolate digestive biscuits and a small carton of milk, all supplied by his wife. From a quarter past three until twenty past three he slurped at a cup of hot tea. His daily adventures into the world of gastronomy were unlikely to land him a job as an inspector for the Michelin Guide.

Apart from the brief interludes to nourish the inner man, Whalley was a prolific worker. His official title was controller of system safeguards, and his job was to ensure that the safety systems and procedures at the sixteen nuclear power stations in Great Britain were properly maintained and adhered to, within the confines of their budgets. Much of his work was to check up on the work done by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and the National Radiological Protection Board, and to analyze their recommendations.

Whilst most of Whalley’s work was done from his office, he was entitled to, and did frequently, make random checks on the stations, and in order to be able to carry out these checks effectively he was allowed access, without having to seek any permission whatsoever, to every square inch of every power station in Britain.

For the past seventeen days he hadn’t made any such checks; in fact he had done nothing of any interest at all. From the camera that was concealed above his desk, I could read any of his documents that I wanted to; I hadn’t yet noticed anything that was my taste in literature. It was the third week of October, over six weeks since my rudely curtailed meeting with Ahmed in the lavatory, and in that short time, I had added a new subject to that list of subjects upon which I could talk, if required, at great length, without actually knowing very much at all: this new subject was, not surprisingly, nuclear power. From my visits to each of the stations in Britain, and my seventeen days in the Atomic Energy Authority, I had acquired, whilst certainly not sufficient knowledge to build a nuclear power station, more than was adequate to blow one up. But if this was what was in the mind of my friend Whalley, in seventeen days he hadn’t yet showed his hand. Not at any rate until this particular day when, at 1.00 p.m., instead of taking out his sandwiches, he got up from his desk, put on his coat, picked up his briefcase and left the office.

I pulled out my propelling pencil, pushed the tip in and spoke into the clip. ‘She’s coming out.’ I pushed the button a second time, which switched it onto the receiving cycle and walked over to the window. A couple of minutes passed and there was no sign of Whalley. I figured he must have gone down into the car park, and if he had I wouldn’t see him come out from here, since the car park entrance was at the back of the building. I held the pointed end of the pencil up to my ear. It contained a tiny directional speaker, through which, if pointed at my ear, I could hear perfectly clearly, although someone standing right beside me would not hear a thing.

Another minute passed, then a voice came out of the pencil.

‘This is Sheila. We’ve got her.’

It was our practice to code name both the person being tailed, and the cars tailing, with girls’ names. The names of the three cars today were Sheila, Mavis and Ethel. My name for today was Carol.

‘Stay with her, Sheila,’ I said, ‘I’m coming out too.’

I left the building by the front entrance, turned left and walked up to a grey Cortina that was parked on a jammed meter. It was one of five different cars that were parked on this meter on a daily rotation; I had keys to all five. I started the engine, then pushed into my ear a device that looked like a miniature hearing aid, but was a radio receiver tuned in to the frequency of the three surveillance cars. I could have tuned in to Whalley as well, had I wanted, but I didn’t think he would have a great deal to say to himself whilst driving along on his own. I clicked the top of my propelling pencil and spoke into it. ‘This is Carol. Where’s the party?’

‘At the fairground. Looks like we’re going on the helter skelter.’

The fairground was code for Hyde Park Corner and the helter skelter was Park Lane. It was highly unlikely that Whalley was eavesdropping on us, but in surveillance we avoid taking risks. Although we changed our frequency daily, and sometimes more often than that, there was always the danger he could stumble across it accidentally, and if he heard places mentioned where he was actually driving at the time, it wouldn’t take him long to put two and two together. So, like the police, we had an elaborate language for tailing, complete with its own vocabulary and key-place nicknames.

I caught up with Ethel, the back-marker of the cars, going around Swiss Cottage; Ethel was a brown Morris Ital. I overtook Ethel and sat behind Mavis, a mustard Chrysler Horizon. That’s one thing about the security services — they always buy British cars. Anyone worried about being tailed by MI5 can relax if he sees foreign cars behind him.

We headed onto the M1, and the traffic was thin. About half a mile ahead, I could see Sheila, a navy Ford Escort. Somewhere in front of him was Whalley.

After about ten minutes, Ethel moved into the fast lane and passed me, then Mavis and Sheila, to give Horace Whalley a change of view in his mirrors. In spite of the seventy miles per hour permitted limit, we maintained a steady fifty-five. Whalley was no speed merchant, but it helped us in tailing him on the exposed motorway, for it meant that plenty of cars passed, reducing further the very slim chance that Whalley might notice us.

After a while, to break the monotony, I pulled into the fast lane and accelerated past Mavis, and then past Ethel, and saw Whalley’s Cavalier for the first time on this journey. I passed Sheila and drew level, after first making sure there were no turn-offs for a good way ahead, and passed him. As I went past, I looked at him out of the corner of my eye; he was driving like a frightened rabbit, hunched up over the wheel, and concentrating far too much on the business of keeping his car going forward and in a straight line to take notice of anything at all going on around him.

I carried on pulling away from him until he was nothing but a speck in my rear-view mirror, and then saw a sign for services in one mile, followed by another sign indicating junction fourteen in five miles. I pulled off into the service area, but Whalley carried on down the motorway; I waited some moments, then pulled out and sat some way behind Mavis. None of the cars spoke to each other; there was no need.

We passed Birmingham and turned off onto the A5. We passed Telford and Shrewsbury and hacked through into Wales. I was glad I had a full tank, as Whalley showed no signs of stopping either for fuel or food. The light was fading fast and I put my sidelights on, and then, after another twenty minutes, my headlights. The road became little more than an Alpine pass, twisting through the Welsh hills, and tiny villages containing ten craft shops per head of their population. It was seven o’clock and for the past two hours our average speed had been no more than thirty miles per hour. For another hour it remained the same, and Ethel made a stop for fuel.

When Ethel had caught us up, Mavis stopped for fuel, and Sheila sat behind Whalley. Just after half past eight, the left indicator of the Cavalier started flashing, and the car pulled off the road onto the crowded forecourt of a pub. Sheila’s driver, evidently numbed with the monotony of the tail, nearly rammed him up the back, his car snaking about the road with a howl of rubber; he then hooted angrily, flashed his lights and accelerated sharply forwards, which was textbook procedure for a near-accident when tailing. Whalley would never see that car again.

I pulled up a hundred yards past the pub and spoke into the microphone. ‘She’s gone in the German cruiser.’ German cruiser was rhyming slang for boozer. Cockney was alive and well and living in British Intelligence.

Ethel went past me, and didn’t stop, but I knew a short way up the road he would turn round, come back and find a discreet place to wait and watch the pub’s entrance. Mavis would be waiting a hundred yards or so back from the pub, also with a clear view of any vehicle or person leaving it.

I got out of the car and sprinted back towards the pub. As I came in sight, I stopped running and began to walk normally. A dark-coloured Capri — bottle green, I thought, but couldn’t be sure in the poor lighting — pulled out of the parking lot, with one man at the wheel and no one else in the car.

‘Pick up a fare, Mavis.’ I spoke into my breast pocket, whilst memorizing the Capri’s number at the same time. I had instructed the Chrysler to follow the Capri. There was probably no connection between the Capri and Whalley’s stop, but having come all this way, I wasn’t in any mood to take chances.

I could see Whalley’s Cavalier, empty. Whalley must have gone into the pub. I looked through the window into the lounge bar; it was a large L-shaped room, with chintzy, rose-coloured lighting, a long bar with a drab buffet selection at one end, and a battery of slot machines, including an ageing Space Invaders.

It was a dreary-looking pub, large, granite-walled, with about as much character as a multi-storey car park. Whalley was standing by the buffet, with a pint of beer in his hand, ordering some food. I thought about it for a moment. The pub was fairly full. Horace Whalley wasn’t a man of particularly striking presence. From the time Whalley had pulled off the road into that parking lot, to the time I had driven a hundred yards, stopped, got out of my car and sprinted back up to the pub, a maximum of ninety seconds could have passed. It would have taken Whalley at least twenty seconds to park his car, and another twenty seconds to get to the pub, assuming he was moving like lightning — unlikely after a seven and a half hour drive without a break. If he’d marched straight to the bar, and been served immediately, and had given the exact money, he would have beaten the world record for time taken to get a pint of beer in one’s hand from entering a pub door. There was a throng of people at the bar trying to get served, and the staff behind the bar were slow old biddies. No way.

The woman behind the buffet buttered two slices of white bread, plonked a couple of pieces of white turkey meat onto one slice, closed the second slice on top of it, placed the sandwich on a plate, added a sprig of parsley that looked like it had been cultured in the Gobi Desert, and passed it over the glass counter to Whalley. He produced his wallet and handed her a bank note. All the while, he kept the elbow of his left arm pressed tightly to his chest, as though there were something in his coat he didn’t want to let drop.

Dismal though that sandwich looked, I could have paid a very handsome sum for it right now; I was starving. I tried to remember if I’d eaten anything yet today: one Twix bar at about half six this morning on my way in to the Atomic Energy Authority. That was all. I was hungry right now — damned hungry — but something told me I had a long night ahead and that there wasn’t going to be much food in that night for me.

Whalley took his sandwich and his beer and sat down in a corner on his own. Someone had bought that beer for Whalley, but Whalley had been late, and that someone couldn’t stay to drink with him. Only one person had left the pub since I’d arrived. I decided I had been right to have the Capri tailed. What I needed to know was whether Whalley was collecting, or delivering, or both. From the way he continued to hold his arm tight to his chest, he had certainly done a spot of collecting.

I left the window and ran back out to the road. Diagonally across from the pub, backed deep into a gap in the bushes, was the Morris Ital, Ethel. I walked over and spoke to the driver, then went to my car, opened the boot, and removed the items I needed. Then I ran back down to the pub and looked in through the window. Whalley had finished his sandwich, and was draining the last of his beer.

I went to the car park, opened the Cavalier’s door with the duplicate key I had had made a couple of weeks back, and wedged myself down onto the floor behind the front seats, carefully stretching the black blanket I had brought over me. I positioned a gas mask close to my face, and removed the safety cap on the tiny cylinder that I gripped in my hand.

Some moments later, I heard footsteps approaching the car, the sound of a key in the lock, the sharp click of the black lock-pin popping up, and the sharp creak of the driver’s door opening — it was in desperate need of oil on its hinges. Even under the black blanket, the glow from the interior light seemed as bright as a floodlit cup-replay football pitch. I felt the seat-back sag as Whalley lowered his body with all the gentleness of an elephant bouncing onto a trampoline.

The door slammed shut, and the interior light, mercifully, went out. Whalley belched, then let out a loud fart.

I heard the click of a seat belt, and then the sound of the engine starting, followed by the sound of an unsuccessful attempt at marrying a motionless gear cog with a rotating gear cog without the assistance of a clutch. There was another belch. Whalley to me sounded dangerously drunk on his one pint of bitter. He finally got the sequence right, and I felt the car begin to move forward. We slowed, and then accelerated out, onto what I presumed was the main road. Several hundred yards behind, and without front lights, I knew the Morris would be starting to follow.

I secured the gas mask over my nose and mouth, and then turned the valve. Whalley would have had to have been listening very closely indeed to have heard the tiny hiss, and right now the organs that conveyed sound waves to his brain were flooded with the sound of one Welsh and seven French radio stations in rapid succession, as he struggled to find the elusive one that played music that was not accompanied by undulating wailings and distant Germans holding earnest conversations.

I closed the valve and allowed time for Whalley to inhale the sleeping gas into his lungs. I waited some moments, then opened the valve again for a five-second burst. A sudden blast of cold air, accompanied by the noise of rushing wind, told me Whalley must have wound down his window. No one does that on a cold night unless they are getting tired.

I was a little concerned about the gas. It was the first time I had used this particular type, fresh off the production line of the Playroom — the dirty tricks department of British Intelligence. Messrs Trout and Trumbull, its inventors, claimed it was the first non-inflammable sleeping gas in the world; not having used it before, I had no real idea of its strength.

I waited the minute and a half it took him to decide he had had enough fresh air and wind up the window, which he did, then opened the valve again, this time for eight seconds. Again he opened the window. I hoped to hell he would do the sensible thing and pull over and stop, and not fall asleep at the wheel with an articulated lorry coming the other way.

The window went up again, and I released another five-second burst. This time, the car slowed noticeably. Suddenly he braked very hard, the car swerved, and I felt a bumpy surface under the wheels. We carried on for some yards, then stopped, and Whalley switched off the engine. He yawned loudly, and I released another burst as he yawned. There was the click of a lever in front of me, and the driver’s seat tilted back a few degrees. Whalley was sound asleep before he had even leaned back into it.

Everything was quiet for a few moments. There were some clicking sounds from the engine as the coolant dribbled through the pipes, the roar of a lorry in the distance, then the heavy rhythmic breathing of Whalley. It was pitch dark, we were either in a lay-by or on the grass verge. I put the valve right under Whalley’s nose and opened it for four seconds. According to my instructions, he would wake up in a couple of hours, feeling very thirsty and slightly queasy — neither sensation being particularly out of the ordinary for someone who is attempting to shake off fatigue by sleeping in his motor car.

A lorry thundered past and the Cavalier shook. I switched on the car’s interior light, and right away saw a small Jiffybag on the front passenger seat. Fortunately, it had not been sealed, and I removed its only content: a thick plastic container. I pulled out my torch and shone it on the container. Nothing was written on the outside, but I knew what it would contain. I had frequently seen such containers before. I opened it, and I was right: it was a video-cassette.

I searched Whalley thoroughly, but there was nothing else of interest on him. The most common subject matter recorded on unmarked video-cassettes in plain brown wrappers is hard-core pornography. But if it was hard-core pornography my friend Whalley was after, there were easier places for him to obtain it within a few minutes’ walk of his office. He didn’t have to drive half-way across England and Wales. No. I had a distinct feeling that naked girls with thongs and spurs were not going to start performing on any video-screen this particular tape was played into. My feeling told me that the vigil of the past seventeen days had paid its first dividend.

I put the tap back in the bag. and placed it onto the seat, then I picked up my various bits of equipment, left the Cavalier and walked a couple of hundred yards back up the road to where Mavis was stopped. I opened the front passenger door, and spoke to the two men inside.

‘Can you drive back to the pub and pick up my car? I’ll stay here, but I don’t think he’s going anywhere for quite a while.’

‘Why don’t you come with us?’

‘I’ll wait — just in case he’s got any friends that come looking for him.’

‘One of us will stay if you want.’

‘No, it’s okay, I’ll do it.’ Until I’d found out where he was taking that tape, I wasn’t going to let either Whalley or the tape out of my sight for one second. I slammed shut the Morris door. Chris Allen, the driver, started up, and put the car into gear, and the car moved forward. I ran after it and tapped on the window. He stopped and wound down the window.

‘While you’re at the pub,’ I said, ‘you might get me a turkey sandwich — and ask for a double portion of parsley, preferably green, if they’ve got any.’

‘Yes, boss,’ he grinned.

Either the pub was further back than I had thought, or there was a problem finding green parsley, or the pub served a particularly good pint of beer, for it took the crew of Mavis one hell of a lot longer to return with my car and sandwich than I had expected, and standing on a freezing-cold Welsh roadside watching a car with a slumbering man in it wasn’t my idea of fun. They say that food tastes better when you are hungry, and if that is true, I wondered what the hell the sandwich would have tasted like if I hadn’t been hungry. The bread had the texture of mildewed asbestos and the meat tasted as if it had been marinated in creosote. Somewhere between the pub and me the double portion of parsley had gone on the missing list. If I’d had any sense, I should have thrown away the sandwich and eaten the paper napkin it came in — it would have probably been a lot tastier and a damned sight more nourishing.

I must have been over-generous with the gas, because it was nearly three hours before Whalley started up his engine and drove on. Two cars followed him through the night as he headed back towards London. I sat, yawning dangerously, behind the wheel of one of them. At a quarter to seven, Whalley stopped a short distance from the BBC Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush. He went in, with the Jiffybag, and came out, thirty seconds later, without it.

I waited until he had driven off, with Mavis following him, then went into the Television Centre myself and up to the twenty-four-hour reception desk.