Deadly States (Seaforth Files by Nicholas P Clark Book 2) (32 page)

Aman entered the room. His highly polished shoes indicated that
he was a diplomat, a politician, or a military man, and that just about
accounted for ninety nine percent of the people in the Embassy at any
one time. The man sat down on the edge of the bed and he took off his
shoes. He got up again and then he walked through to the bathroom.
Jack readied himself for
escape but the bathroom door
didn’t close behind the man to provide Jack with the cover that he needed. Jack waited and waited, but the door remained open. It was the height
of bad
manners in Jack’s opinion. The light in the bathroom went out and the
man came back into the bedroom. Jack could not see the
man’s face
from where he lay on the floor, but in turn it meant that there was no
possibility that the man could see Jack either. The man sat down at a
desk by the side of the room. Typical, thought Jack, he would have to
find himself hiding under the bed of the one hard working man in the
entire diplomatic core. Jack moved as much as he felt that he could get
away with in an effort to make himself a little more comfortable, but
the more he thought about his
own comfort the less comfortable he
felt. He had been in some tricky spots in the past and the hiding place
under the bed was not the worst of those, but he was a much younger
man back then and it was somehow less dignified for someone his age
to be hiding under a bed.

Jack’s conscious mind searched the archives of his brain to reminisce on some of his previous hiding places. The very
process
of
looking back somehow took his mind away from his present predicament,
but not too much as he needed to act at a moment’s notice should the
situation in the room suddenly
change. The entire set-up had something
of the classic British farce about it. In an Ealing comedy this
would be the moment when the bed hopping would begin.

Seven years ago...
The MI6 safe house in the Lake District was something
of a joke
within the security services. The term safe house conjured up thoughts
of a simple terraced house on any ordinary town street, or a bungalow
in a new housing development. The key with any good safe house was
that it should be ordinary. In fact, the more ordinary, the better. The
safe house in the Lake District was anything but
ordinary. It was an
old Georgian Manor house set in almost
one thousand acres
of dense
ancient woodland. The woodland was
private,
even though some of
the
Right to Roam
movement had carried out a decade long campaign
to
open the woods up to the public. Court sittings never went in favour
of the ramblers and because they
didn’t know the true nature of
the
estate they
didn’t
know that the
expensive legal
challenges they
were mounting would always end in failure. They were not only pushing against the government,
but they were pushing against the most
secretive and dangerous part of the government.
The house was powered by its
own generators and there were no
communications either in or
out
of the estate. It was the place where
the top brass within the British security
services and their
political
masters,
on
occasion, would meet to set sensitive policy
or to analyse
national threats. The twenty
million pounds that Westminster slavishly stumped up for the upkeep of the estate each year was the thing
that the agents smiled at most. Jack included. The politicians were so
scared of their own security services that they never asked why this one
safe house cost almost as much as all the other UK based safe houses
put together. Politicians had long since learned that
kind
of scrutiny
came at a cost.
Although the forests surrounding the main house would have been
an ideal place to train new agents, there was always a risk that the

identity
of what the estate was really used for would reach the Russians,
or
one of the other foreign powers for whom such information
was
of great interest. This safe house had to be different. It had to
be unknown and it had to be impeccably
protected. In a healthy
democracy with a thorough free press, Jack had wondered why no one
had thought to ask the right
questions about the estate. Or to put it
another way; why
did the secret services and the politicians go to so
much effort to ensure the place remained in operation, and that it did
so under a
blanket
of complete secrecy.
As he rose through the ranks
and got to learn a little more about the profession that he was in and
the country that he was sworn to protect, the need for the estate was
all too clear.

The problem with any democracy was that there was always the
possibility that the wrong
people could
end up in
power.
After the
rise
of the Nazis in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s a
commission
was set up by the Westminster government to determine how a cult of
personality, such as the one that surrounded Hitler, could be avoided
in the UK. The very notion
of
employing some very anti democratic
tactics to curtail the ambitions
of
democratic politicians would have
come as a huge shock to the great British public, but that shock would
have been nothing compared to the destruction that a UK version of
Adolf Hitler would have brought down on the nation.

For the
most
part the
old country
house was
used to
entertain
some ambitious young politician or
other and show them the error of
their ways, if the men at the top thought they were travelling down the
wrong road. There were many high ranking visitors to the house in the
early years of the Cold War; though as they were always brought there
under cover, or unconscious in some cases, the house itself managed to
stay
off the radar. With the expanse of television, film and radio as the
twentieth century
progressed, an altogether
different threat
began to
emerge. It was a threat that was more fantasy than reality but it was
taken seriously
enough by those who held power within the security
services to be given
more thought than it
probably
deserved—enter
the celebrity. Generation after generation the voting population grew
more and more weary
of the same empty
promises and dirty
political tricks. Little wonder then that in increasing numbers the public
turned to other sources for leadership and direction. In many respects