He excuses himself, discreetly exits the coach and heads for a safe house a few streets away in one of the hotels up the road. A very decent bunch of men deployed in South London these days, some still new to it and struggling with issues of identity and attachment but both the Met and their private sector partners deploy much more sophisticated counselling and psychiatric services and pre-deployment tests these days, many fewer officers going rogue recently. He remembered back when he started, for the first two years it was a head-trip, then he got lost in it, didn’t know who he was for a while, used to get in punch ups with other undercover cops over ideological concerns sometimes. He laughs to himself. Over the years things have separated out, there is a clear distinction now between Joolzy and Julian, the father and husband, the man who will retire soon at the age of 47 after a thirty year spell of service, one of the best data collectors and analysts in the business. He has been freelance now for a decade, re-contracted by the Met as a private intelligence officer, tendering for security and intel services online, recipient of a few big contracts, always tirelessly working to funnel information back to anyone who might monetise it. Endlessly networked and networking, an insider in numerous overlapping and contradictory oppositional domains.
He is tempted to have a drink, although he’s been virtually teetotal all his life, just never liked it, but that can of Stella he supped on the train down tasted surprisingly good. All the pills he had to take in the ’90s were a huge drag, the dancing, the endless conversations around portable stoves or smouldering fires, the inevitable sleeping with women he wasn’t attracted to. Smoking weed all day and living five to a caravan, printing up pamphlets and fliers, the terrible food. A miserable existence, away from Julie and then the kids as well for months at a time. Many people’s marriages wouldn’t have survived this kind of routine. She has been a tower of strength in all this, perhaps if she weren’t so committed to the cause of order she wouldn’t have been able to make some of the sacrifices she has, a career of her own, for one thing.
He will make all this up to her when he retires, when he has time to write his autobiography, the deal, six-figures, already more-or-less done. The publishers, he knows, are going to push him to write a “rags to snitches” story of a provincial, solidly lower-middle-class black boy inducted into the Met’s exceptionally hush-hush Special Youth Squad straight out of school and nine A passes at O-Level, focusing on his passage through to, he doesn’t mind admitting it, a fairly substantial personal fortune, garnered, ironically, by trading on information gleaned from some of the poorest and most marginal elements of British society. Joolzy is keen to reflect on all this, primarily on his shift from straight, salaried Officer on extraordinary levels of overtime to an intel-entrepreneur leveraging his street skills and his position in numerous subcultural, subversive groups and scenes to all kinds of end users, for private security firms, MI5, numerous police bodies, but also media groups, journalists, newspapers, cool-hunting for record and clothing companies, major players in the music scene anxious they are out of touch with what’s going on at street level, and now, increasingly, sounding out the level of potential opposition to property speculators, staying abreast of domestic radicalisation and keeping tabs on immigration for
USG
and
UKB
.
There is now no clear distinction between the dimensions of information he gathers, each infolept, as he has started to refer to them himself, is a multifaceted, multi-purpose instrument, amenable to being sold on again and again to numerous players, each of whom use it in different ways to formulate often quite different strategies even within the competing branches of the same company. Sometimes, often, the result is chaos, volatility, the need for more information to clarify how and where the problems are coming from, and Joolzy will be riding these waves and panicked oscillations feeding all sides and watching his account grow fatter. Sometimes, of course, there is a pleasing symbiosis, his role as frustrated suitor to Paula Adonor, a subset of his more general role as deeply trusted Deptford counterculture stalwart, opening up new channels of engagement, information and enrichment, the world of the Curectors and this attempt to find the work of Vernon Crane dovetailing beautifully with a whole set of other concerns.
He crosses the road and heads up the hill. Yes, he would like the book to have a more philosophical edge too, years and years of absorbing theory and argument from all angles, from Adorno to the Zapatistas has, he thinks, given him much to draw on in terms of formulating a particular and unique political philosophy, the kind of Modern Conservatism he feels can best knit together the values of traditional and new multicultural Britain, a system that he sees himself embodying.
He wonders why Clarke has got Ferris out of there? No doubt all will be revealed in the safehouse later if he’s up there. At a guess, and Julian’s guesses are usually pretty good, probably it’s Ferris’s unwitting involvement with some or other South London crew. Graeme Ferris, startled, sheeplike, buffeted and tugged about by the competing needs of the security services, the State, the big companies, his life just not his own. Well it boils down to one thing and one thing only, grafting, head down, accept reality, make something of yourself, think on your feet.
Yes, that’s what he’ll miss, those moments when time intensifies, moments of risk when it could go any number of ways, when you could be exposed, need to come up with an excuse, cover your tracks, head someone off, when it’s up in the air and you have to reach out, grab it, pull everything round in your direction, keep it on track. Those moments get addictive, the surge, the thrill, like driving too fast when you hit a bump and feel that tug down in your guts, in your balls, your heart flutters up and you have the wheel in your hand and the road coming at you. He knows guys who have pushed it too far. Those who seem to be fine, deep under, trusted, who have to push it, drop hints, take risks, live life on the edge like that. Of course, as his supervisors have told him at his bi-yearly psych sessions and evaluations, some people do all that because they want to be exposed, repressed guilt comes out in funny ways, slips, oversights, lapses in memory. But Joolzy’s always been watertight.
He quickens his pace, sees a couple of youths standing on the corner of Arnden road drinking something out of a bottle. It looks like they’re up here to intimidate; he can tell straightaway, he has seen this type many, many times. They clock him and dart looks at each other, a lone black man walking their way. Hey mate, one of them starts to say, heads toward him as the others hang back. There’s only four of them. Mate, where do you think, hand out to stop him and in a second Joolzy has him in a choke-hold, has squeezed the air out of him and let him drop, pulled his truncheon and a can of spray out of his coat and is angling into the others, head down. By the time he’s got there they’ve scattered, regrouped looking shaken on the other side of the street. Their faces will be on the
CCTV
and once he gets to the safehouse he’ll put out a call to have them picked up for Racially Aggravated Intimidation and into some Giveback.
Yes, perhaps he will have a drink.
The safehouse fridge is well stocked with beer and there are several bottles of whisky on the table. Clarke is in there as are a couple of the London boys, down as part of the round up just to keep their cover safe, who will claim to have luckily somehow slipped through the net and made their way back up into town. Clarke has already knocked back a few by the sound of things, fast work, but everybody straightens up slightly and adopts a more respectful mien when Julian enters. He is a legend. The joke goes round about him that he’s swum so deep when he comes up he’s going to get the bends.
Clarke looks a little ragged, like he needs some downtime. He’s justificatory, explaining himself to the two guys on the sofa and one Asian colleague he hasn’t seen before, probably part of an anti-radicalisation crackdown. There’s no shade on the light and the room is too bright. Joolzy scans the place for a lamp, half considers going down to reception to ask but can’t face the smell in the corridors, encountering the residents. He’s been in some rundown safe houses before but this must represent a new low. Perhaps it’s some kind of test or joke on the part of those higher up the food chain. Perhaps it’s cuts. He wonders where the cameras are hidden.
Bruv I have made something of my life, Clarke tells them. House, kids, wife, car, good salary, pension. On a career track.
Joolzy introduces himself, Steve, Clarke, some slurred name he can’t quite catch, nods and pours himself two fingers of scotch. He takes every opportunity he can to get into a safe house, get some of the other officers on the beer, loosen their tongues, offer a sympathetic ear, long serving veteran of the service that he is. He has set up a lucrative semi-secret internal market for information that he circulates on subscription between officers who need to figure out what their colleagues are doing, stay one step ahead of them, fuck up their plans if it’s a question of promotion or find ways to distinguish themselves, accumulating points within the ARS fastrack system, credits within
USG
and affiliate’s Actionability bonus scheme. He never trades all his information though; always keep a few key elements back for yourself, that’s how you stay at the top of your game.
I like working for the Met, Clarke is saying as he reaches over and takes a bottle of Jameson’s off the surface next to the grubby sink. In a few years, he starts telling them, he’ll get a job in a small town somewhere so he doesn’t have to bring his kids up in South London with all its Lefties and anarchists and junkies and dolescum and gangs burgling and fucking shanking each other, pissing in the streets and leaving all their shit lying about and fucking protesting and occupying everything and getting in everyone’s way instead of knuckling down and making the most of the hand that’s been dealt them.
Joolzy understands, his first few years there were some dark times, the constant paranoia that you’d get sussed, slip up, having to repeat again and again things you didn’t believe, until you didn’t know where you were anymore yourself some days. Plus the drugs, a lifestyle dominated by drugs, he tried to stay clear of as much of it as he could but that too would have given rise to suspicion. Lost days and weeks where he woke up wondering what he might have said or done, confessed to, revealed. Somehow he kept it together long enough until one day it just seemed natural, felt right to be this character he played, Joolzy, brash, tough, anti-authority, life and soul of the party, energetic, sympathetic, committed to his tribe.
Clarke’s Mum and Dad had nothing when he was a kid, Clarke is explaining, he never went to University, he had to go out at sixteen and find out how to make his way in the world and these cunts want to preach to him about justice and fairness. Call him filth. Shit he has had to swallow over the past few years to get where he is. Shit he’s had had to listen to the last two years from these cunts, especially all that shit about racism and disadvantage and how the filth just protect private property. The Filth, The Pigs.
ACAB
. He has said it himself a thousand times and because he is black they have eaten it up, any shit he wanted to say.
Joolzy has a sip of the scotch, takes his phone out of his jacket pocket. He tracks Graeme Ferris and sees that he is somewhere down by the theme park. Joolzy has pinned a device to his coat and his jeans, so tiny it’s virtually invisible. Probably Clarke’s got one on him, several other people too no doubt. He glances back as it buzzes an update; he’s made a call out to someone and received a call back from somewhere, temporarily at least, off grid. A few seconds later his phone goes off too, been told to turn it off, smash it, but Joolzy doubts anyone in Graeme Ferris’s financial position can face smashing his precious phone.
On an instinct he checks Paula Adonor’s place; the video stream shows her sitting poking at the laptop, cup of tea. Lewis is, tap, tap, in the bedroom with her girlfriend. No action at the moment. Some of the stuff they get up to. Joolzy shakes his head, flicks through the cameras he had secreted into Nick Skilling’s place. Nothing there, must be out, down at Dreamland helping to set things up. Back to the list of cameras and bugs he’s had dropped everywhere, subcontracting the work out as much as he can, always important to have an alibi that someone, somewhere went rogue, exceeded their remit, made an over enthusiastic but ultimately forgivable attempt to protect us all and so on. He needs to trim these down, there are 230 separate video streams accessible, 372 listening devices, 700 email and call monitoring attachments all filtered through a superb central algorithm designed to read the tiniest hint of anything suspicious, including involuntary lowering of the voice and unnatural pauses, aspects of circumlocution, gestures and facial expressions, in order to flag up actionable intelligence. The odds are so overwhelmingly in Joolzy’s favour sometimes he has had a twinge and wanted to say to people, you are wasting your life, you always were, your life has already been decided on, bought and sold, forget all this stuff, this world is sewn up, owned, lock, stock, and barrel. You’re fighting an enemy that’s ten, a hundred steps ahead of you, you are in its grip, cradle to the grave.
The conversation has moved on to money and pay, one of the colleagues saying it’s all right for you mate you are permanent, you get overtime, I am results-based, basic and commission, my pay doesn’t go up, no chance of a mortgage, you know, you can’t plan ahead, can’t get a decent car, and the guy across the table the one Joolzy doesn’t recognise takes offence.
Me, I don’t give a fuck for what the other man have. I will drop five, six,
TEN
,
TWELVE
bangs on whip like that, like that, if I see what I want. Mate, I got up to Undercover from
TEE PEE OH
, get me? One of the very few. You know why? I’ll tell you why. Delivering. Results. Bam, bam, bam. One after the other after the other. My rent goes up 10%, payments go up 10%, I am going to work 20% harder, 200% smarter.