Complicity

CHAPTER 3: DESPOT

Despot is a world-builder game from the HeadCrash Brothers, the same team that brought us Brits, Raj and Reich. It's their latest, biggest and best, it's Byzantinely complicated, baroquely beautiful, spectacularly immoral and utterly, utterly addictive. It's only been out for two months and I've played it practically every day since the muggy Monday morning in late August when I first stepped out of the Virgin games shop on Castle Street clutching my shrink-wrapped copy and scuttled back to the office reading the outside of the pack like some "sixties ten-year-old with the latest Airfix model.

I'm sat in the flat in Cheyne Street, playing the game when I should be working on a story. The trouble is that the game and the machine go together so well; the HeadCrash team designed Despot so that it takes advantage of whatever configuration of system it's being played on, with the maximum on a PC being a 386SX running at 25Mhz with at least 2Mb of RAM and 8Mb of hard-disk space free plus an S3-based graphics card fitted. The game will run on anything down to an Atari 520ST and still work (but it won't look remotely as good, run so fast or have all the interactive features) and obviously it'll look just as good and do everything on a better-than-maximum machine, but it just so happens that the above spec is exactly what I've got on my machine.

This is purely a coincidence, of course; it's not fate, not karma, not anything except a fortuitous accident, but dammit, it's just so neat! No waste! No fat! Just exactly the right, most elegantly eco-optimum system — as near to state-of-the-art as I could afford at the time, barely a year ago and I'm still paying the now quite superseded bastard off — to run this stunningly Machiavellian turbo-screamer of a game; an instant classic, easily a year ahead of its time and just possibly better than sex.

I'm playing Despot but I'm thinking about sex. I'm definitely seeing Y tomorrow and I can't stop thinking about sex. I've got an erection and I'm sitting here in front of the machine in the darkness, crouched here in the box room of the flat with the light off and the radio on and the computer screen awash with the seductive, gently scrolling graphics of Despot and the light from the screen — blue, ochre, red, green — throws the shadow of my cock onto my belly and the damn thing's getting in the way all the time so that I keep putting it under the desk where it rubs hard up against the metal strut at the front of the desk until that gets cold and uncomfortable and I have to push back in the chair and let the thick, bobbing weight of it rest against the edge of the chipboard, its big purple head and one little slit-mouth-eye staring dumbly, questioningly up at me like some mute, warm little puppy, distracting me, and I keep thinking I ought to have a wank but I don't want to because I want to save it all for Y, not because Y particularly desires that or it affects my performance but because it just seems important, part of the correct pre-coital ritual.

Maybe I should just put some pants on and control the thing but I kind of like sitting here in the nude and feeling the gentle breeze of warm air from the fan heater in the corner blowing over my skin. So, the big wee man is throbbing, looking forward to a welcome in the hillsides, a homecoming in the glen (even if it's prepared to be palmed off with less), but meanwhile the game is there to be played, and threatens to play with itself if I do the same. Because Despot is interactive, Despot will go on building your world for you even if you leave it alone because it actually watches you; it learns your playing style, it knows you, it will actually try its little damnedest to become you. All world-builder games — emulating life or at least some aspect of it — develop and change according to their programmed rules if you leave them running alone, but Despot is the only one that with a bit of coaching will actually attempt to emulate you.

I light another Silk Cut and sip a little whisky. I'm staying off the speed for now but when I get to the next era-level in the game — and I'm hovering within a few GNP points of it at the moment — I'm going to roll a number. I draw hard on the Silk Cut, filling my lungs with the fumes. I've smoked a packet since six this evening when I started working and then turned to the game. Half a bottle of whisky's gone too, and the inside of my mouth's got that rough, granular feel it gets when I've been drinking the stuff.

I gag on the smoke.

This happens sometimes when I've been smoking too much. I grind the fag out in the ashtray and cough a bit and then look at the cigarette packet. I've been meaning to give up for a while. I keep thinking, What is the point of using this drug? The only cigarettes I ever get any actual hit from are the ones I have first thing in the morning (when I'm barely half-awake anyway and in no state to enjoy it and my chest's usually hurting from the morning cough), and sometimes the first one after I've had a few drinks. Oh, and the one I have after I've given up for a few days. Or hours.

I take the packet up in my hand. My fist almost closes. In fact it seems to me that I do actually see my hand close, see the packet crumple and contract, almost as though I've actually done it. But then I think, Shit, there's only five fags out of the box. I ought to smoke those first; it would be a waste not to.

I take out another cigarette, light it and draw deeply. I gag again, coughing and hacking and feeling the whisky and the can of Export I had earlier slosh around inside me, almost coming up. My eyes are watering. What a stupid drug, what a completely useless fucking drug; no real hit after the first drag, highly addictive and lethal in all sorts of ways, and even if the lung cancer or the heart disease doesn't get you you can look forward to gangrenous legs in your old age, bits of your body just rotting away still attached and dying in instalments for you, rotting and stinking while you're still alive and then they have to cut them off and you wake up after the operation wheezing and burning with pain and gasping for a fag. Meanwhile the tobacco companies sponsor sport and fight off advertising bans and look forward to all the new markets in the East and the Far East and more women taking up the weed to show that they can be brainless fucks too, and suits with worm-shit in their brains go on television and say, "Well, nobody's actually proved how tobacco causes cancer you know," and you sit there seething and then you find Thatcher is taking half a million from Philip Morris for a three-year consultancy and you swear never to buy any of their products ever again but at the end of the day you still light another cigarette and suck in the smoke like you enjoyed it and make more profits for those evil fucks.

Okay. I've worked myself up enough; I crush the packet. It doesn't crumple very satisfactorily because there are so many fags still inside it, but I persevere and use two hands and get it down to about half its earlier volume and then take it to the toilet and tear it open and empty the broken, folded cigarettes into the pan and pull the handle and watch most of them just float and swirl in the churning water and get so annoyed at them for not all just flushing away out of my life like I want them to that I get down on my knees and put my hands into the water and one by one push their broken bodies and the rest of the paper and tobacco debris down into the water and back round the U-bend so that they float up on the other side and I can't see them, then I wash my hands and dry them and by that time the cistern's full again and I flush it and this time the water's clear at the end and I can breathe at last.

I open the skylight in the toilet and the one in the box room to get a through draught and stand there shivering until I pull on my dressing-gown, feeling mightily pleased with myself. I sit down at the computer to find that my era-rating in Despot has slipped back a bit while all this has been going on, but I don't care; I feel righteous.

I suck the cold night air in and laugh, snapping the mouse around the desk surface like a wild thing while the little hand sprite on the screen flashes from control surface to display, grabbing icons and throwing them about my empire like thunderbolts, building roads, dredging ports, burning forests, digging mines and — using the very ironic Icon icon — opening more temples to myself.

A horde of barbarians from the unexplored steppes to the south tries to invade and I lose an hour fighting the bastards off and have to rebuild the Great Wall before I can get back to the Court display and continue my long-term strategy of weakening the power of the regional lords and the Church by making the palace so luxuriantly, sumptuously steeped in the ways of the flesh that the barons and the bishops become hopelessly decadent voluptuaries and hence ripe for the picking while my merchant classes prosper and I encourage cautious technological development.

I have another whisky and a bowl of Coco Pops with lots of milk. My hand keeps reaching for the place where the cigarette packet would normally be, but I'm coping with the cravings and surviving so far. I really want some speed but I know if I have any I'll want a cigarette afterwards, so I leave it alone.

I have a brainwave and get my secret police to go down to the bazaar and find some drug dealers; bingo! The dealers are introduced to the Court and soon most of the people I've been working on are thoroughly hooked. It occurs to me this might actually be a better way of controlling things than just bumping people off, which is what the secret police are usually best at. I call it a day at 4 a.m. and only feel slightly jittery as I head for bed. I can't get to sleep and I keep thinking about Y; after half an hour I give in and have a wank and fall gratefully asleep afterwards.

The building is warm and smells of dog. You pull him through the door and lock it. The hounds are already yelping and barking. You turn on the light.

The kennels block is about the size of a double garage; its breeze-block walls are bare. Strip-lights hang from the ceiling. There is a broad central corridor between two rows of pens, also made from breeze blocks. The internal walls extend to just over head height and are open at the top; the pens are floored with straw over concrete and the front of each pen is formed by a gate made from light angle-iron and chicken wire.

So far everything has gone well. You came across the fields and through the wood just after sunset, checking the place out with the night sight and finding the big house dark and empty. The alarm box high up on one gable wall glowed soft red; you had already decided not to attempt breaking in. You went down the drive. The gatehouse was dark, too; the gamekeeper would be back after the pub in the village closed. Far enough up the drive so that it wouldn't be seen from the main road, you felled a small tree with the handsaw, then sat down to wait. The Range Rover came growling up the drive two hours later. He was alone, still wearing his city suit; you coshed him while he was standing looking down at the tree; the car's idling motor covered any noise you made and he didn't even turn round. You just drove the Range Rover right over the tree.

His arms move weakly as you haul him across the concrete and prop him against the gate of one of two unoccupied pens. The dogs" barks change as they see their master. You put your day-pack down on the concrete, take out some plastic ties and hold them in your mouth as you try to haul him to his feet, but he's too heavy. His eyelids are flickering. You let him slump back again so that he's sitting against the chicken-wire gate and when his eyes start to open you pull his head forward by the hair and cosh him again. He falls to the side. You put the plastic ties back in your pocket. You're thinking. The foxhounds continue barking and yelping.

You find a hose attached to a tap beside the doors; you remove the hose, throw one end over the breeze-block lintel of the empty pen, pull it through the chicken wire and tie it under his armpits. He makes a moaning noise as the hose tightens round his chest; you start to haul him upright, but the hose breaks and he falls back against the gate. "Shit," you say to yourself.

Eventually you have an idea. You lift the gate off its hinges and lay it down on the floor beside him. Then you roll him over onto it. He makes a noise somewhere between a moan and a snore.

You secure his wrists and ankles to the chicken wire with the plastic ties, using two at each point. You've tested the ties yourself; they look flimsy but you couldn't burst one when you tried, and you've seen US police on television use similar devices instead of handcuffs. Only you're not sure how strong the chicken wire is, so using two on each wrist and ankle and tying them round different hexagons in the wire seems a sensible precaution. The hounds are still barking intermittently, but they're making less fuss than they were. You use a length of the hose to tie his waist to the angle-iron strut that makes a Z-shape through the gate. You undo his belt and pull his trousers down; he has a deep tan from a holiday in Antigua last month, fading now. You haul and scrape the gate over to the wall of the empty pen, then you squat behind the top of the gate and heave it and him up, sucking in your breath and grunting and then pulling the gate up still further and then letting the top edge of the gate rest against the wall of the pen you took the gate from. The gate rests there at an angle of about sixty degrees.

He's starting to come round. You change your mind about letting him talk and take the electrical tape from your day-pack and bind it round his mouth and the back of his neck, through the wire, so that his head is held tight too. There is some blood leaking from under his long fair hair; it trickles down the nape of his neck and onto the collar of his shirt.

Then, while he's still making moaning noises through his nose, you take the two cut-out bits of newspaper and the little tube of glue from your day-pack and stick the articles onto the breeze-block wall straight across from him, one on either side of the gate. The dogs inside leap up and snarl at you as you do this, shaking the chicken wire.

The headline of the first article reads EX-MINISTER IN IRAN ARMS DEAL ROW, and in smaller writing underneath it says, "It was my judgement that the interests of the West would best be served if the Iran-Iraq War went on for as long as possible."

The headline of the second article reads PERSIMMON DEFENDS CLOSURE PLANS — "PRIMARY CONCERN SHAREHOLDERS', and underneath are the words, "1000 jobs go after only five years as grant runs out."

You wait for him to come round but he's taking a while. You were impressed by how far the house is from any others, and decide that rather than the silenced Browning you brought you will risk using the shotgun he was carrying in the back of the Range Rover. You go back out to the car and fetch the gun and a box of cartridges. You lock the door behind you again.

He's awake, though his eyes look glazed and uncoordinated. You nod to him as you walk up and stand in front of him, slotting a couple of the brown-red cartridges into the gun. His eyes move oddly as he tries to focus on you. You are wearing dark blue overalls and a skiing balaclava similar to the one you used in London. The gloves you're wearing are black ski-silks. The Rt Hon. Edwin Persimmon MP is mumbling behind the tape and still trying to focus on you. You wonder if you hit him too hard with the cosh, and whether you ought not just to do it with the gun here and now and forget about the rest because it will be quicker and less dangerous for you, but you decide to stick to the plan. It's important; it shows that you are not just some nutter, and the extra risk lifts you onto another plane of chance and luck.

You turn and go to the pen full of foxhounds; they start barking again. You work both barrels of the gun into one of the chicken-wire hexagons at about waist height, until the gun fits, then you angle it downwards, bend slightly so that your shoulder is firm behind the stock of the gun, and fire both barrels into the mass of snarling dogs.

The gun kicks against your shoulder. The noise is stupendous in the breeze-block space. Smoke rolls through the pen, where one dog lies blown in half, two more are lying prone and whimpering on the concrete and the rest are barking madly; several of them are running round furiously in tight circles, scattering straw. You break the gun; the cartridges pop out and one of them hits Mr Persimmon in the chest. His eyes are wide and he is shaking the chicken-wire gate he's tied to with all the might he can muster. You reload the gun without taking it out of the mesh, then aim more carefully and fire a barrel at a time, killing two more of the dogs outright and wounding three or four. The smoke is thick for a moment, and tastes acrid in your throat.

The dogs sound frenzied now, howling high and anguished. One of the animals is still running round all the time, but it keeps slipping on the blood. You reload and fire again, killing another two of the foxhounds, leaving maybe half a dozen of them still leaping up at the walls and barking. The one running round in a circle is bleeding from one back leg, but hasn't slowed down.

You turn to Mr Persimmon and pull the bottom of the balaclava up over your mouth, and above the squeals and the howls and the barks you shout, "They enjoy it really, you know!" and wink at him. Then you reload the gun and blast another couple of them. You avoid the one running round in circles because you've decided you like that one.

The smoke makes you cough. You put the gun down and take the Marttiini out from the sheath in your right sock. You go over to Mr Persimmon, who is still shaking the gate he's tied to as best he can. It starts to slide down the wall with a scraping, grating noise, and you haul it upright again. His eyes are very wide. There is a lot of sweat on his face. You feel quite sweaty too. It's a warm evening.

You've left the bottom of the balaclava up so he can see your mouth. You go close to him so that he can watch you only through his left eye, and over the whimpers and whines and the few weak, hoarse barks from the pen opposite, you say,

"In Tehran, in the main cemetery, they had a red fountain; a fountain of blood, to the martyrs who died in the war." You stare at him, and hear him trying to say or shout something, the noises coming down his nose sounding clogged and distant. You're not sure whether he's swearing at you or pleading with you. "Those found guilty of capital offences during the later stages of the war weren't shot or hung," you continue. "They were made to contribute to the war effort too."

You hold the knife up so he can see it. His eyes can't go any wider.

"They bled them to death," you tell him.

You crouch down in front of him and make a deep downward incision into his left thigh, opening the artery to the air. The scream comes down his nose as he shakes the chicken-wire frame. The bright blood pumps out and up, spattering onto your gloved hand and jetting upwards in a pink spray that soaks his underpants and rises as high as his face, freckling it with red. You alter your grip on the knife to cut into the other leg. He's rattling the chicken-wire gate for all he's worth but everything holds and the gate can't slide forward because you're squatting there in front of it, blocking it with your boots. His blood spurts fiercely, shining in the overhead lights. It runs down both his legs, and drips off his underpants; it runs down to the trousers round his ankles and soaks into them.

You stand up, reach forward and take the neatly folded handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his jacket, flick it open and wipe the blade of the Marttiini on it until the knife is clean. The knife comes from Finland; that's why its name has such a strange spelling. It hasn't occurred to you before, but its nationality seems appropriate now and even funny in a grim sort of way; it's Finnish and you've used it to finish Mr Persimmon.

The blood is slowing now. His eyes are still wide but they look glazed again. He has stopped struggling; his body hangs limply, though he's breathing hard. You think he might be crying but maybe it's just sweat on his face, which is very pale now.

You actually feel rather sorry for him because he's become just another dying man, and so you shrug and say,

"Oh, come on; it could have been worse."

You turn and pack your stuff away and leave him there, the blood only dribbling now, his skin very white beneath the tan.

Some of his blood has gathered on the concrete in front of him, and joins with the pool slowly spreading from the cage full of dead or whimpering dogs.

You put the lights out and hold the Browning up at your shoulder as you open the door and then check the grounds outside with the night sight.

I want to weep. I'm with Y but she's brought her husband along. They turned up together at the paper but when reception rang through they just said that she was there so I went skipping down the stairs like a kid on a promise and then I saw them together in reception standing looking at the display showing staff photographers" most recent efforts and my heart sank into my shoes. Yvonne; tall and lithe and sveltely muscular in a dark skirt and jacket. Silk shirt. Black hair short, trimmed to the nape in a new, even more severe haircut, but jutting peaked over her forehead. She turned to me just as my face was completing its fall. She smiled apologetically.

And William, turning too; broad, handsome face bursting into a grin when he sees me. William; blond as Yvonne is dark, built like an Olympic oarsman, perfect teeth, and a handshake like a gorilla.

"Cameron! Good to see you! Been too long. How are you? Okay?"

"Fine, fine," I said, smiling as sincerely as I could, nodding up at him. William is high as well as broad; he towers over me and I'm a shade over six foot. Yvonne put her hands on my shoulders and kissed my cheek; she's almost my height in her heels. Heels; she prefers flatties and only wears heels because they bring her ass up to the right level when I'm taking her from behind. As she brushed her lips across my cheek I smelled her perfume: Cinnabar; my favourite. I exchanged pleasantries thinking, So much for taking the afternoon off.

"Right." William clapped his hands together and rubbed them together. "Where are we going to go?"

"Well, I was thinking of just popping down to Viva Mexico…" I said (and almost added "as usual'), looking plaintively at Yvonne's bright red lips.

"Na," William said, grimacing. "I fancy some oysters. Let's go to the Cafe Royal, what d'you say?"

I said, "Umm…" I thought, Oysters…

"Our treat," Yvonne said, taking her husband's arm and smiling.

I met Yvonne and William at university, back in the cusp of these times, our years at Stirling neatly bracketing Thatcher's first and second victories.

They were doing business-studies courses. He was from Birmingham, though his parents were Scottish. She was from Bearsden, outside Glasgow. They met in the first week and were an item when I bumped into them in the sports pavilion a term later, one Saturday afternoon when William was about to play rugby and Yvonne was looking for a squash partner. I'd been waiting for my opponent — a guy from my media-studies course — to show for half an hour and was about to give up and head for the bar when Yvonne suggested we played each other. She thrashed me. We must have played a couple of hundred games over the years since then and I've beaten her exactly seven times, usually when she's been about to go down with — or is just recovering from — a cold or some other ailment. I blame the drugs, and the fact that, apart from the occasional athletic sex session with Yvonne, a fortnightly game of squash is about the only exercise I get.

Yvonne and I were just pals until she and William moved to Edinburgh three years ago and one time when William was away she and I met to go and see — of all things — Dangerous Liaisons, but never made it to the film because we just got drunk in the pub instead and somehow started kissing, and then in the taxi on the way back to Cheyne Street had to be told to cool it by the driver because we were practically fucking on the back seat. We got half a metre inside the front door of the flat then it was knickers down, trousers down, and a knee trembler against the wall, her head forced forward by the gas meter and my backside getting cold from the draught coming in through the letter-box.

We usually make it to the bed these days but it's been an interesting and varied physical relationship and Yvonne swears she does things with me she'd never even mention to William, whose predilections seem to begin and end with quite liking his wife to wear a basque and stockings. Considering he looks like such a broth of a boy it's slightly disappointing to be told he's squeamish about blow jobs and quite horrified — however politely and apologetically — at the idea of going down on Yvonne. So that, plus wrestling covered in baby oil, eating ice-cream from her vulva, pretend rape and bondage sodomy are all treats reserved for me, apparently.

So we're sitting in the Cafe Royal after a breezy walk down North Bridge and William has slipped a dozen live oysters down his throat (Yvonne and I had chowder) and we're talking computers because I use them and I'm interested in them and William works for a company that makes them; their Scottish manufacturing base is in South Queensferry but the company's HQ is in Maryland in the States. He was due to fly out there today but just as he was about to kiss the lovely Yvonne goodbye this morning and leave their delightful, triple-garaged, split-level lounged, sauna'd, jacuzzi'd executive villa with ensuite facilities and satellite dish set in an exclusive walled prestige development amongst mature trees with a residents-only country clubhouse, restaurant, pool, Nautilus gym, squash and tennis courts, he got a phone call telling him the trip had been postponed for a few days.

We're sitting at a table in a corner of the restaurant; William and Yvonne sit side-by-side on a green leather bench seat opposite and I'm on an ordinary chair, directly across from Yvonne. She's playing footsie with me under the table, her shoe off, her black nylon foot stroking my right calf. I'm assuming the starched white tablecloth is long enough to hide this.

Meanwhile I'm talking about 486s and clock-doublers and the up-coming P5 chip and CD-ROM and there are at least three things going on in my head because part of my brain's busy handling my conversation with William, another part is revelling in the sensations being produced by his wife's foot sliding up to my knee, giving me a monstrous erection under my napkin, and a third part is sort of sitting back listening to me talk to this cheery, affable man I'm cuckolding and it's thinking what a cool bastard I am, and how chatty, informed and charming I'm being while suffering this delicious, hidden, public, prick-engorging distraction. We're talking about multi-tasking and I almost want to say to him, "You want to know about multi-tasking? I'm doing it right now, pal."

Yvonne is looking just a little bored with all this computer talk, which is probably why she started fondling my leg in the first place. She's not into computers; she's into bankruptcy management. Straight from university she joined a small firm specialising in easing the death throes of failing businesses. She's been all over Britain doing this stuff and last year they made her a director. It's not a small firm any more. Growth industry.

She delicately stifles a yawn and sits back in her seat, and I take a sudden breath which I have to disguise with a cough as her foot suddenly slides up between my legs. I foolishly lift my napkin to dab my lips after the pretend cough, and Christ, there's her foot resting on the front of my seat, her stockinged toes flexing forward to stroke my cock through the material of my trousers. I put my napkin down again quickly and return to the subject of full-motion video from CD-ROM, hoping nobody saw her foot. I don't think so. Could have been embarrassing if there'd been a waiter nearby. I surreptitiously pull the tablecloth over my lap and her foot as well. She's sitting back in her seat grinning slightly at me, toes curling and uncurling as they stroke me.

I lift my champagne flute, nodding wisely at something William has just said.

"Anyway, must dash for a slash," he says, rising. Yvonne's foot tenses against my crotch, but she doesn't take it away.

Yvonne and I watch him go then we lean over the table towards each other at the same time.

"God, you look fuckable," I tell her.

"Mm-hmm," she says. She shrugs. "Sorry about all this."

"Never mind. God, you look fuckable."

"Want to meet up the day he goes?"

"Yes," I gulp. "Yes yes yes."

"Take off your shoe and get your foot up between my legs," she says quietly. "I'm not wearing any knickers."

"Oh, Christ."

An hour later and I'm standing in the gents toilet back at the paper with my right sock wrapped round my dick, masturbating. The smell of the sock clings to the skin around my nose; before I wrapped it round my cock I sat sniffing it, hauling its scent deep into my lungs. This is the second wank I've had; I really was about to come as I sat there eating my lobster with Yvonne's foot stroking my crotch and my foot up her skirt. I had to excuse myself, withdraw my foot, get my shoe back on and walk awkwardly down to the gents in the Cafe Royal to pull myself off before I disgraced myself at the table. Barely had to touch the thing. This is taking only a little longer. The sock reeks with a fiercely erotic woman-scent. Thank God we were eating seafood. Yvonne… Ah, here we go…

"Cameron. You all right?"

"Fine, Frank."

"You look a bit pale."

"Feel all right."

"Good. Carse of Gowrie."

"Pardon?"

"Carse of Gowrie. You know; near Perth. Guess what the spell-check prefers?"

"I give in."

""Curse of Gorily"!"

"Stop it, you'll make me cry."

"There's a better one —»

"Look, Frank, I've really got to do some research," I tell him, grabbing a notebook and heading for the library. Hell, I have to work with the guy; better to stage a tactical retreat in the face of the utterly unamusing spell-check running-jape than lose the rag and tell Frank where to stick his software.

The Caley still has a library, where the cuttings are kept. When you start getting into a story the first step is usually getting the cuts up, and this is where they come from. I suppose in a few years absolutely everything will be stored in databases and you'll be able to do this sort of thing from anywhere in the world by modem, but for now there's a real place you have to come to if you want to look up the more obscure reference books, the paper's pre-computer files and back issues of the Caledonian itself (though even these are held on microfiche rather than actual newsprint). The Caley's library is housed in a single cavernous room deep inside the building, two floors below the reception area; it has no windows, you can't hear any traffic or trains and it's actually pretty restful unless the presses are running. I exchange a few words with Joanie, our head librarian, then settle in and start exploring.

Apart from confirming that Ares is the god of massacre, which may or may not have any relevance to anything, I can't find much. There's no reference to anybody or anything called Jemmel. I find myself leafing through the stuff I've already discovered about Wood, Bennet, Harrison, Aramphahal and Isaacs.

Wood and Isaacs worked for British Nuclear Fuels Ltd, Bennet for the Nuclear Inspectorate, Aramphahal was a cryptography expert at GCHQ and Harrison was a DTI guy with rumoured links to MI6. Aramphahal went down to the railway track that ran at the bottom of his garden near Gloucester, tied a rope round his neck, secured the other end to a tree on one side of the track and himself to a trunk on the opposite side, and waited for an express. Wood lived in Egremont, a small village in Cumbria; he took a bath with an electric drill. Not the battery-powered type. Bennet was found drowned in a farm cesspit near Oxford. Isaacs tied an ancient and very heavy typewriter to his feet and threw himself into Derwent Water, and Harrison sat in a hotel room in Windermere and swallowed the two liquids which react together to make cavity-wall insulation foam: choked to death. They all seemed to know each other and they all had very hazy work records with long gaps in them when nobody seemed to know where they'd been, and none of them had any close colleagues — or at least none who'd admit to being close to them.

It all looked suspicious as hell and I know people on a couple of the London broadsheets who were trying to find out if this was more than a series of coincidences, but nobody ever got anywhere. There was a question asked in Parliament and a police investigation was launched but it promptly submerged and didn't discover anything either, or if it did it was kept very quiet.

According to Mr Archer the five dead men all had one thing in common: an injection mark on the arm and/or a contusion on the back of their skull where they'd been hit. The implication was that none of them had been conscious when they'd supposedly killed themselves. Mr Archer claimed to have seen copies of the original forensic records that proved this, but I — like other hacks — had checked with the relevant local cops and coroners and discovered nothing untoward, though admittedly the old guy in Cumbria who'd done the PMs on Isaacs, Wood and Harrison had died of a coronary shortly after the police investigation began, which was either a coincidence or not but unprovable either way, especially as he'd been cremated, like the other five had.

I'm shaking my head at all this conspiracy-theory stuff and just starting to wonder whether the sensation at the back of my eyes is the start of a headache or not when the library extension rings. Joanie calls me over; it's for me.

"Cameron?" It's Frank.

"Yes," I say through my teeth. This had better not be another spell-checkism.

"Your Mr Archer's on the phone. Shall I put him through?"

Ah-ha. "Oh, why not?"

There are a few clicks (while I think, Shit, I can't record this call either) and then the Stephen Hawking voice: "Mr Colley?"

"Speaking. Mr Archer?"

"I have more."

"What?"

"Jemmel's real name still eludes me. But I know the name of the agent, the sales representative for the end-user."

"Uh-huh?"

"His name is Smout." He spells it for me.

"Okay," I say, thinking the name sounds familiar. "And —?"

"He's the one they don't talk about, in Baghdad. But —»

But, the line goes dead. There are a couple of clicks, a sequence of faraway noises like touch-tones and a faint, barely audible echo: "… they don't talk about, in Baghdad. But —»

I put the phone down, feeling just a little dizzy; still somewhat tipsily drunk from lunch, cock-sore from two heavily frustrated wanks, and mind reeling with the implications of what Mr Archer's just told me, not to mention the heavy hint that — even if I wasn't able to — somebody somewhere was recording it all.

The thing is, I know who Smout is: I did an article on him. The forgotten hostage, the man who — like Mr Archer says — they don't talk about.

Daniel Smout is — or was — a medium-ranking arms dealer who's been in prison in Baghdad for the last five years, charged at first with spying and then convicted of drug smuggling; he was sentenced to death but that was commuted to life imprisonment. HMG has always shown a marked reluctance to have anything to do with him and the last time any diplomatic representative saw him was three years ago. But there's been a persistent rumour that he was an agent for the West, working on something so sensitive that nobody involved wanted the press or anybody else to know anything about it, and the reason he's been banged up is to stop him talking, after whatever deal he was working on finally fell through.

So we're talking about a project with the code-name of the god of massacre, involving Iraq, a very secret deal and five dead men including at least three who had access to nuclear intelligence and two to physical nuclear product — plutonium — in the place where they've managed to lose more weapon-grade material than your average nuke-ambitious third-world dictator has ever had wet dreams of acquiring. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, General Communications Headquarters, the Nuclear Inspectorate, the Department of Trade and Industry, and an agent — a sales rep for the end-user, Mr Archer called him — in Baghdad.

Dear holy shit.

I hit the news room to show my face and just as I get to my desk my phone goes and I jump and grab it and it's Mr Archer again. I get the Pearlcorder working this time.

"Mr Colley, I cannot talk now but if I can call you at home on Friday night I hope to give you something more then."

"What?" I say, putting a hand through my hair. At home? This is a departure. "All right; my number —»

"I have your home number. Goodbye."

"… Goodbye," I say to the silent receiver.

"Everything all right?" Frank asks, eyebrows arched in concern.

"Fine," I say, grinning wildly and probably unconvincingly. "Just fine."

Retreat to toilets again claiming dodgy ingredient in lunch-time chowder and snort some speed, then take a walk out to Salisbury Crags and sit on rock looking out over the city, smoking a spliff and thinking, Oh, Mr Archer, whatever are we involved in?