Blast from the Past

7

General Kent’s meeting had long since finished and he was alone, sitting at the wheel of a car parked in a small residential street in the Stoke Newington area of London. The car was unmarked, there were no military or diplomatic plates, no official driver, no bodyguard. Just Jack and the girl on his mind.

On Kent’s lap was a file marked, “General Kent: For sight of. Secure file. Absolute discretion required. No non-authorized viewing whatsoever”.

A few years before, it would have simply said, “General Kent: Private”. Kent reflected that military industrial complex bullshit was now expanding at such a rate that soon there would be no room on a file for the description of what was in it and they would have to attach extensions to the cover.

The contents of the file were biographical. Details about the life and current circumstances of a thirty-four-year-old Englishwoman: Polly Slade. There were photographs too, old ones and new. The new ones were very similar to those that had been taken by the Bug. Polly walking, Polly standing, Polly at the bus stop, etc. The pictures in the file were rather better than the Bug’s blurry efforts, having been taken by professionals, but they were no more revealing. Just a woman in a street. That was all. Of course the Bug did not know of the general’s photographs and the general did not know of the Bug’s. How astonished they would have been to find out the other’s existence. After all, the chances of the same woman being covertly photographed at the same time and in the same place by two completely separate and unconnected people must be millions to one. But that is what had happened.

General Kent looked at the face in the pictures. Such a nice face. A little careworn, perhaps, but very pretty. Not everyone would have thought the woman beautiful, but General Kent did, ravishingly so.

The file also contained a telephone number.

Kent carried a mobile phone, but this he left in his pocket. Instead he took up the little stock of ten-pence coins that his security contact had furnished him with and got out of the car. Nearby was a public phonebox. Not one of the solid red ones that Jack remembered, but a phonebox none the less, not merely a phone in a hood on a pole.

It was very late and the street was quiet. Empty almost, save for one other man, a nervous-looking fellow loitering further up the street. The other man appeared to have been making for the phonebox himself, but when he saw Kent he stopped.

Kent wondered whether the man had been planning to call one of the extraordinary number of girls who advertised their sexual services on little cards inside the phonebox. Judging by the pictures on the cards, some of the most impossibly glamorous and attractive women in Britain were advertising cheap fucks in Stoke Newington. Kent suspected that if the fellow ever did pluck up courage to call he would be disappointed.

He pushed twenty pence into the machine and dialled. It was 2.15 a.m.