Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (20 page)

The looks in their eyes then would tell him plenty about who really had the stomach for this and who just wanted to play at soldiers. At thirty grand, it was an expensive game, but an undertaking such as this needed substantial seed money. The first Ministry of Vigilance had been built on no more than patriotism and duty, and look how that had ended. This time, as he had explained to Fotheringham, like any other concern of worth these days, it would be a privatised, profit-making venture. Fotheringham had seemed a little petulant about this at first, muttering about not having broken him out of jail so that he could strike out on his own, but Shiach assured him that his bidding would still be done. Government contracts would be tendered, of course, but having rotted in jail for over a decade, protecting said government by keeping his mouth shut, it was time to look after number one. The real money was in the corporate world: that was who really ran countries these days, and they required just the same vigilance with regard to threatening and seditious individuals as any government did. Besides, Fotheringham had a bloody cheek playing the ingratitude card considering the time it had taken the bastard to come to the rescue.

'I was just too small a fish,' he'd said by way of apology. 'I had to bide my time, same as you. Play my hand too early and we'd both have been fucked. And we both know Selby was keeping an eye on you. If I'd engineered a stunt like your supposed suicide while he was alive, he wouldn't have bought it unless he actually saw a corpse. Williams was less fussy: he just needed to know it was done.'

Shiach had to hand it to Fotheringham: he didn't just owe him his freedom, he probably owed him his life too. As soon as Selby was gone, Fotheringham guessed Williams would prefer to have Shiach simply wiped out than the worry of him still rattling around the prison system. It had been therefore typical of the Architect's talents to place himself in Williams's path and get himself nominated for the job. He'd always been a genius at being what people wanted him to be, and understood that people trusted you more if they thought they had come to you, that your actions were their idea. It was no surprise that Fotheringham had risen like he had; more so that he'd held on to his principles in doing so. That said, he did confess he had thought for a while that Shiach was something best left in the past.

'It all looked like it was working out,' Fotheringham said. 'The Cold War ended, and we'd won it. Thatcher was gone, but the important thing was there was no way back for the hard left. The advent of New Labour confirmed that. Some of it still hurt, though. The Roland Voss debacle, for instance. Hateful, deceitful, nasty little man, deserved exactly what Dalgleish and Co did to him, but some friends of mine went down with that ship.'

'George Knight, I heard. Can't you get him out too?'

114

'I wish I could, but he's a prisoner who
does
officially exist. I have promised him a consolation, though.'

But it wasn't petty score-settling that had made Fotheringham realise the MoV's time had come again, for its purpose had never been anything personal, nor even truly political. It had always been about protecting this country from threats that its own laws - and political squeamishness - left it vulnerable to, and since September 2001 that vulnerability had taken on a whole new scale.

'What I resent most about them,' Fotheringham told him, 'is that they can exploit the freedoms and processes we stand for, while despising and condemning us for holding them. They're using the liberties our country allows them in order to plan attacks on us, and what can we do? Snoop, intercept, maybe make a few arrests, after which they regroup and try again. Like the IRA said, we have to be lucky every time: they only have to be lucky once, and slapped wrists aren't going to deter them from rolling the dice again.'

Looking at the recruits assembled before him, it didn't look like the MoV

were ready to take on Al Qaeda quite yet, but you had to start somewhere. In their case, you had to start by clearing obstacles from the immediate path, and that was what this initial exercise was about. Innocent people would have to die, but the way Shiach saw it, the state owed him a few. Fotheringham had been sceptical about quite what some of the recruits could bring to the table, other than thirty thousand a head, but Shiach's answer was simple. The last time, they had made the mistake of recruiting guys out of an ideological motivation, and things had fallen apart because they weren't up to practising what they preached. This time, he had gone for men who wanted to kill first and foremost, and would be happy to let other people worry about the reason. Again, some of them would fail to walk the walk like they'd talked the talk, but they would be few and they were expendable. They were hungry for action, already electrified by anticipation. The rush of a lifetime? In retrospect, no doubt, but in the moment it would be no surprise if they felt nothing. That's how it tended to be in the extremes of existence. Processes took over that were older than the civilised soul, that pre-dated the way the mind made sense of things. Serial killers, it was said, felt nothing at the time, but got their juice in the anticipation and the remembering thereafter. Crash survivors often had no recollection of what they'd gone through, not even of the fear.

'We're about to leave for our destination,' he told the assembly, his voice reverberating around the girders above. 'This is your last chance to walk out if you have any doubts about your wishes or abilities to go through with this. After we leave here, however, there will be no desertion. We will kill you, that's a promise, because once this begins, if we cannot trust you, we cannot let you live. If you leave now, no questions will be asked, no recrimination 115

will follow, though we will expect your discretion, and you do not wish to imagine the lengths to which we will go if that discretion is not observed. So I say again, this is your last chance to leave.'

He stopped and looked at the floor, hands behind his back, in a gesture intended to convey to anyone bailing out that they would not have to face him should they wish to do so. No-one moved.

He waited a few moments in silence, giving everyone a lingering opportunity to confront their own doubts and allowing any ditherers to do themselves a favour. Still the company remained strong.

'Everything in your lives so far has just been a warm-up,' he told them. 'Tomorrow is when you will really become yourselves. Tomorrow is when you'll be getting your money's worth in what is inarguably the ultimate experience of its kind. Any divisions among you will be forgotten. The people you were outside, already half erased, will be forgotten by yourselves, not just each other. Presumptions, prejudices and conceits will be discarded like worthless wrapping paper as you find out what each of you is truly made of. Weakness will be exposed, in arm, in head and in heart, and it will bring failure, humiliation and ostracism upon itself. Not everyone is going to go home happy with what he's learned about himself. But a team will be built, each member as aware as he is reliant upon what the others are worth.

'It will be a team united by that most ancient human commonality of purpose, older than war, blade and even flame: the hunt. Since men first combined their efforts to bring down some less savage beast, there has been no stronger bond than between those who united in the kill. For they knew that together they were lords over their foe, kings of men. And blood would ever anoint them.'

116

Saturday, October 26, 2002

Torture

He could see nothing, whether his eyes were open or not. His clothes felt like they were swallowing him: pressing, pulling, dragging, some enveloping parasite determined to squeeze the fight from his limbs until he drowned there in the darkness. He had no idea how long he'd held his breath, how much further there was to go or whether the figures overlapped in favour of survival. Only the thought of a mammoth corporate-killing lawsuit assured him that it felt a lot scarier than it actually was.

Okay. Parlabane really had to chalk one up to Baxter:
this
was what you called a trust exercise.

There had been a drysuit and a pair of heavy-duty walking boots (both his size, in accordance with details supplied on his RSVP) lying on his bed when he returned from breakfast. The former had been the most worrying sight of the weekend so far. There were two portents that truly depressed Parlabane in this world, and one was anything that suggested deep water - unheated, unchlorinated and unattached to a changing suite and a lounge bar - would be featuring on the day's agenda. (The other was Christian fish logos on cars parked outside any house where he was about to have dinner.) Heights were no problem, as many of the more noteworthy episodes in his career would testify. Neither exertion nor exposure could summon any dread, not even when combined with the prospect of it being in the company of Thatcherite recidivists and unreconstructed Trots. But water,
outdoors
, why? There was just no need at this point in mankind's evolution to be in it or on it. We had invented other, superior ways of traversing the stuff that involved far less risk of coming into direct contact with it. It was dangerous. It denoted the parts of the planet that we were unable to inhabit, a very big heads-up being the fact that we couldn't fucking breathe in there. But most of all he hated it because, this being Scotland, it was always freezing and he was an unrepentant Big Jessie.

They had all been shepherded aboard the minibus with no indication of their destination or intended activities, beyond the odd teasing remark from the UML pair. This had made for a quiet journey, as the prevailing climate among the rest was simmering suspicion with intermittent outbreaks of mu119

tual embarrassment. Parlabane started whistling
We Are Family
at one point, which inexplicably failed to usher in a new mood of laughter, forgiveness and reconciliation.

There was a light drizzle falling as they climbed on to the minibus, turning to misty smir by the time they got off. The cold and damp had steamed up the windows with the breath of twelve drysuited, befleeced and lightly sweating adults, which had made it difficult to follow where the road was taking them. They found themselves at the foot of a ridge, the river at their backs and the hotel absent from the visible horizon as Campbell drove off. There were a few anxious pairs of eyes watching the departure of their transport, no doubt roughly calculating the time of their trip against approximate speed and its ramifications for what lay between this valley and their next hot meal. With no idea how they might have looped and doubled back, Parlabane knew it was a pointless exercise. He guessed they could as easily be ten miles out from base or less than two. Still worrying about the implications of the drysuit, he had actually been grateful to see the minibus leave, as it would spare him the concentrated 'wet dog' assault on his nostrils during the return trip that would have been the result of a dozen damp fleeces in a confined and unventilated space.

Baxter led them up the side of the ridge, rising in a diagonal that made the climb tolerably gentle for those who had failed to resist the black pudding and potato scone options on the breakfast menu. At the top, instead of a plateau as expected, there was a long U-shaped trench, running like a gigantic rain gutter along the ridge. It began shallow-sided but steep, tight and narrow about a quarter of a mile west, and broadened, widened and deepened towards a small corrie-loch a further couple of hundred yards east. From above, the body of water would have resembled a giant teardrop, much like the one Parlabane felt like shedding when they began making their way down and Baxter pointed out what lay in store ahead. The tail of the 'tear' had a break in it shortly before it widened dramatically to fill the horseshoe corrie at the east end of the ridge. The land rose at the break just enough to lie above the water level, which made it difficult to imagine what geological quirk could have accounted for it. Gravity argued none: water ran downhill, and yet there was water either side of a dry platform in the middle of a slope. There was only one possible explanation, and Parlabane's scrotum was already going into pickled-walnut mode in anticipation of it.

'A lot of the area around here used to belong to the army,' Baxter explained.

'Some of it still does. It's okay, I don't think it's one of the spots they used to blow the shit out of, so you shouldn't need to worry about stumbling on any unused artillery shells. They used it for training exercises because of the variety of the terrain, I'm told. Forests, moorland, swamps, hills, cliffs and, 120

as you can see here, water. Now, if any of you are wondering about that implausibly convenient stretch of ground across the tail of the corrie loch, it may clarify things to inform you that beneath the sparse covering of weeds and scattered gravel are several tons of concrete. And the reason the water doesn't simply flow around this partial dam is that just beneath the surface are four tunnels. This, I should emphasise, is not evidence of worryingly daft design and engineering on the part of army bridge-builders, because the purpose of the construction was not to get the squaddies
over
the drink. . . '

Baxter left it at that for the moment, a chorus of groans confirming that no further clarification was required.

'Tunneltastic,' Rory remarked with dark relish, proving that the chorus was not unanimous and that he for one was lapping up their discomfiture. Parlabane might normally have respected such gleeful misanthropy, but at that moment he would have happily slapped on a 'Hypocrite' baseball cap above his 'Big Jessie All-Star XI' baseball jersey while energetically lamping Rory with a 'Shut Up You Smug Tory Twat' baseball bat.

'But don't worry,' Baxter resumed, unslinging his backpack and laying it on the ground. 'I'm not going to shove you all down there on your lonesome. I understand from my colleague Francis that last night's post-prandial deliberations were, shall we say, full and frank. Well, now's the perfect time to kiss and make up. Kind of a hands-across-the-water initiative, you could say.'