Debatable Space (9 page)

I said yes immediately. I was so excited.

I was a thieftaker!

And I looked like an idiot in it. But it seemed to be the right style code for my new job, my new vocation.

My boss in the crime-busting squad was Detective Superintendent Tom Greig, a kindly, tall, powerful, overwhelming giant of
a man. I met him in a café near Victoria, and watched with goggle-eyed respect as he ate not one but two cooked breakfasts
in front of me, without ever pausing for breath or ceasing his rat-a-tat briefing on what my job would require.

Tom saw that I was nervous, indeed panicky, but he reassured me enormously with his gentle, old-fashioned manners. He adopted
me as his “sexy boffin” and treated me with a courtesty and respect I had never before known.

Within a month, this gorgeous hunk of a man was also fucking me. I could hardly believe my luck.

A week after that first meeting, he introduced me to the rest of the team, who were based in an office near Tower Bridge in
London. There was Tosh, a beer-bellied Glaswegian, with a fondness for practical jokes. There was Mickey “Hurly-Burly” Hurley,
who was a wide boy, and a wisecracker par excellence. There was Michiyo, a sleek graduate who was a martial artist and languages
specialist. “Blacks” was the computer geek; Rachel was the sergeant, the team leader, the sorting-everyone-out one; Natasha
was a Ghanaian princess with more charisma than any one person deserved to possess.

We became a tightly knit team, a collision of unlikely opposites. I was teased for my sensible shoes and air of restraint;
they loved to call me the Prof, and shock me with their bawdy humour. Our squad room was a hive swarming with foul invective
and casual insults. It could not have been more different to the academic environment to which I was accustomed. I learned
to use the word “motherfucka” as an endearment. I discovered that “twat” could be an adjective. I even, to my own amusement
if no one else’s, developed the knack of cursing in iambic pentameters.

Five astonishing years followed. The aim of our squad was to identify, harass and psychologically destroy the world’s top
criminals. These were our “target nominals”. They included South American drug dealers, Mafia
capi
, Eastern European oligarchs, Chinese Triad bosses, white-collar fraudsters, coordinators of paedophile rings, gangster paramilitaries,
death squads, and more many more. There were no jurisdictional rules; we could operate in America, Europe, Asia, Eastern Europe,
Africa – anywhere. There were no rules of fair play either; once we had targeted a top criminal, we used all the means at
our disposal to subvert and shatter them.

Hate mail.

Random tax audits.

Psychological game playing.

And, most commonly of all… Mental warfare. The art of mind-fucking.

For instance, Wong-Kei, the Chinese Triad boss, worked out of Beijing and came from a long dynasty of gangsters, people traders
and pimps. One hot March morning Tom briefed us on his history. We watched videos of his victims. We studied flowcharts of
his criminal empire. And we made our plans.

First, Michiyo went deep undercover in his organisation. She became a drug mule, carrying heroin in condoms that she swallowed
and carried in her colon for days on end. It was a horrendously dangerous assignment, and we had a team of paramedics constantly
trailing her. But as a result of her courage, we were able to get access to the inner reaches of Wong-Kei’s organisation.
Michiyo never met the boss himself, but she met his underlings, and she visited all the hangouts and bars used by members
of his crew. And, everywhere she went, Michiyo sprinkled microscopic self-replicating bugging devices. Every hand she shook,
every cheek she kissed, she left behind a trail of molecule-sized radio transmitters that could only be removed from the subject’s
skin by intensive steam jets and chemical baths.

Before long we had an audio bank giving us the ability to instantly eavesdrop on the conversations of all Wong-Kei’s henchlings.
Michiyo herself was rushed to hospital to have an enema treatment that flushed out the deadly condoms. For the next six months,
she walked with a stagger and slightly bowed legs.

Meanwhile Tosh and Rachel coordinated a surveillance operation that allowed us to create a compellingly detailed psychological
portrait of Wong-Kei and his family and his many lovers and illegitimate children. Blacks coordinated the whole affair, creating
computer patterns of bewildering complexity that uncovered hidden connections between the smallest facts.

And then I went to work. I read the phone-tap transcripts, I studied the photographs of his daily movements. I read his emails,
I scrolled through photocopies of his private coded diary. I learned the life stories of his former lovers, his present lovers,
his friends, his employees, his children. I psychoanalysed his parents and his brothers and sisters and childhood friends.

And I converted all my data into complex emergence equations, and came up with a game plan to destroy him.

My tack was to play on the fact that Wong-Kei was deeply superstitious. So we haunted his daily life with bad omens. We poisoned
his meals with psychotropic drugs, to induce hallucinations and panic attacks. We forged apocalyptically bad horoscopes and
smuggled them into his home. We trained black cats to walk across his path. We installed a mirror in his favourite restaurant
that
did not show his reflection
. (But then removed it before other diners noticed.) We stole the bones of his grandparents and crushed them into ash and
sprinkled them on him as he slept. (Later, during a routine police DNA test, Wong-Kei was stunned to learn that the skin of
his face was tainted with the DNA of his long-dead grandmother.)

Then we moved to stage 2. We spread rumours that he was a sexual pervert who had abused his grandchildren; and we watched
his marriage shrivel.

I knew this would happen. I knew his wife was already suspicious of him, and feared he was sleeping with under-age prostitutes.
And I knew also that Wong-Kei was haunted by sexually explicit paedophile dreams that made him deeply anxious about his own
sexuality. (This was on the basis of an employment questionnaire he completed at the age of twenty-three, together with a
conversation with a man he had just met in a bar in Beijing when he was thirty-nine and had just consumed three large Rémy
Martin brandies, together with my deep psychoanalytic reading of a short story he wrote as a nineteen-year-old at university.)
And I knew that Wong-Kei would never be able to sit down with his wife and honestly discuss the lies being told about him.
His pride would not allow it. His father had always told him, “Never discuss your personal affairs with your wife. Merely
tell her what you are going to do.” And those instincts, so deeply ingrained, made him deeply vulnerable – at a time when
the constant bad omens he was encountering made him fearful of everything.

And thus, at every stage of our campaign, I was guided by a knowledge of the man so intense, so detailed, I felt at times
like his God, meticulously assessing him at the Last Judgement. I knew his favourite colours, the flowers that annoyed him,
the words that grated on him, the fact that he loathed having people sneeze in his presence. I knew his every psychological
blip and blemish.

Our slow campaign of persecution worked. Wong-Kei became forgetful, bad-tempered. He neglected his ageing mother. He slapped
and brutalised his younger sister, then abased himself in remorse. He started to forget vital facts – on several occasions,
he struggled to recall his own favourite beer. And he found his libido dipping dangerously.

And, as Wong-Kei’s mind slowly unravelled, so his judgement started to slip. His normally tight security measures became more
slapdash. He began to feud and bicker with other Triad bosses. He accused a close associate of being a queer. Dissension sprang
up in the ranks.

This is when our Pick Up team came into action. They launched a conventional “sting” operation against Wong-Kei and allowed
him to implicate himself. Bereft of his usually astute judgement, Wong-Kei blundered and floundered and was easily suckered
by the crudest of police set-ups. And when enough video and forensic evidence had been gathered, Wong-Kei was arrested and
charged by officials working for the World Police Federation. Our people weren’t involved, we were never seen, never gave
evidence in court. We did not exist.

And even Wong-Kei himself had no idea that his personal failures and weaknesses had been
induced
. He blamed himself. He assumed that he had been going through a mid-life crisis. Half-way through his trial, he committed
suicide, and his organisation was taken over by his nearest descendant, Billy Shen. Billy we knew of old. He was one of our
best informants. And so we ran him, and through him we ran the biggest Triad gang in the Far East, for two whole years. And
then we made some more arrests, let Billy go, and started up a massive surveillance operation. Slowly his empire crumbled
– thanks chiefly to information supplied to us directly by Billy himself, the supposed gang boss.

A power vacuum was created; other gangsters began taking over Wong-Kei’s wrecked empire. New maggots replaced the maggots
we had killed. But never again did a Triad boss have the unfettered power and authority once enjoyed by Wong-Kei.

And our work continued… and with each new assignment, I grew in confidence and expertise. I became a pioneer of a new
kind of criminal investigation. I was the master of computer systems which could describe and collate every character flaw
and foible in even the most complex individual. I would study witness statements and learn the target’s fears, his or her
favourite fantasy during masturbation, the content of the websites the target had visited in the preceding ten years, the
clothes the target wore, the target’s love affairs and friendships and secret dreams and aspirations.

One of my favourite jobs involved the “virtual destruction” of an eminent merchant banker who for decades had been engaged
in money laundering and the selling of stolen artworks. His name was Robert Roxborough.

Once again the team set forth to acquire all the information we needed. Michiyo and Tosh went to work in an art gallery owned
by a Portuguese philanthropist called Ramon. Phone taps were placed on all of Roxborough’s employees and families and the
prostitutes he employed were astutely analysed and interrogated. And, after all of this, I put the information into my people
matrix and came up with a strategy to destroy him. I quickly decided that Roxborough was too astute and well balanced to be
mentally undermined in the way that Wong-Kei was. So I went for a more subliminal approach.

I arranged for every painting in Roxborough’s private gallery to be smeared with the aroma taken from a dog’s sweat gland,
mixed with human sexual pheromones. Then, for ten solid weeks, I arranged for him to be followed every day by dogs super-saturated
in the same aroma. Wherever he walked, the dogs followed. So he stopped going into parks and out into the streets, in order
to avoid the dogs. But in his gallery too, the same stench in the back of his mouth stifled him. And yet, though it disgusted
him, the smell made him rampantly horny. Every time he looked at a Poussin or Jackson Pollock or the work of some gifted new
artist he was championing, he was overwhelmed with a sick sexual frenzy.

At the end of ten weeks, this sad specimen didn’t know whether to fuck his paintings, or collect feral dogs.

And as a consequence, Roxborough developed a phobia for artworks of every form and description, and quietly resigned from
the art-theft game.

Then I had his pocket picked; and in the lab, I planted a slow-release gland to disperse a different aroma onto the banknotes
and credit cards he carried in his wallet. Then the wallet was restored to his pocket, less than twenty minutes later. The
gland did its work; the faint but impossible-to-ignore smell seeped on to his money and credit cards. This particular stench
was a brilliant concoction made out of putrefied maggots and mashed-up human corpse flesh. And so from this point on, Roxborough
would associate money with decay and death.

Eventually, we had him arrested him for a series of offences – we had more than enough evidence stockpiled. But we kept the
game going as long as we possibly could. Because punishing this man wasn’t enough – first, we wanted to
spoil the bastard’s fun
.

Then we moved our attention to the East. The Eastern European oligarchs were divided into four major factions, bonded by a
common interest despite different ethnic backgrounds. They observed a strict truce interrupted by random assassinations. It
was a flawed peace, but it worked.

So we raped a gangster’s daughter.

The “rape” was, of course, a virtual one. The daughter’s name was Anya; we paid her a million dollars to make up a story of
being abused and raped by a dozen Russian gangsters. Then she quietly slipped to the West and made a new home in Minnesota.

Anya had in fact, according to the police medical report, been brutally sodomised over a number of years and had survived
several bouts of gonorrhoea. This, we deduced, was a product of her father’s wayward notions of child-rearing. But nonetheless,
the father, Grigori Valentin, when told by his daughter of her gang rape, was deeply outraged at the insult to his first-born
child. And when independent evidence came his way that the leader of Faction B had authorised and actually participated in
Anya’s rape, Valentin went ballistic. Gang war was declared. Most of the members of Faction B were bloodily assassinated.

Then Faction C received evidence that Valentin had been informing on them to the American FBI, and Valentin himself was brutally
murdered.

After six months of bloody warfare, Faction D quietly stepped in to scoop up the spoils. By this time, however, our surveillance
devices were planted deep, and we were able to build up a comprehensive case against Faction D. Mass arrests ensued and the
age of gang oligarchy was over.