“Someone is damned scared. Someone in the Department, I mean. Someone is so damned scared that they had Jim murdered.”
“We’re not sure of that.”
“I’m sure,” she said. “And no one is going to shut me up..”
“Cindy,” I said, and paused wondering how to put it to her.
“Don’t be offended. But there’s something you must tell me.
Truly.”
“Spit it out, Bernard.”
“You’re not just putting this pressure on to the Department as a way to get Jim’s pension, are you?”
She smiled one of her special Mona Lisa smiles. “They’ve agreed that already,” she said.
“They have?”
“They’re paying a full pension to me and a full pension to this American woman who says she married Jim in Mexico.” “They admitted Jim was still working for the Department?”
Now I was surprised.
“They admit nothing. It’s one of those “in full and final settlement” contracts. Sign here and shut up.” “That’s unusual,” I allowed.
“Unusual?” she chortled. “Jesus! It’s bloody unprecedented. It’s not the way the Department works, is it? They didn’t hesitate, didn’t confirm with anyone or check anything I said, Okay, they said. just like that.”
“Who authorized it?”
A scornful little laugh. “No one knows. They said it was in the file.”
“How could it be in the file?’ I said. There couldn’t be anything in the file about paying out two pensions to two wives of someone who’d stopped working for the Department years before. “Exactly,” she said. “Someone is damned scared.”
“Scared,” I said, “yes.” She was right: it was me.
Thursday was not a good day. I had to go down into the “Yellow Submarine”. The Data Centre was just about the only part Of the Foreign Office where Cindy Matthews would not be able to stroll past the security guard with some casual chat about getting the tin of biscuits for the Minister’s afternoon tea. They were fussy here: uniformed guards with hats on. A photo identity check at the ground floor entrance and more checks at the software library level and video at the third and deepest level where the secrets were really kept under lock and key. After my wife defected it was several weeks, nearly three months in fact, before I was required to go down into the Submarine again. I had begun to believe that my security clearance had been downgraded and that I’d never see the inside of the place again, but then one day Dicky stayed at home with a head-cold and something was wanted urgently and I was the only one in the office who knew how to work the consoles down there and they sent me. From that time onwards everything was back to normal again as far as I could tell. But with the Department you can never be sure. It’s not like a Michelin guide: they don’t publish a book each spring so you can find out how the inspectors feel about you. So I was happy enough to sit at the keyboard and tell the machine my name, grade and department and wait for it to come up with the request for my secret access number. It meant that I was still one of the nation’s trusted. Once the machine had okayed my number I spent a couple of hours sitting there, rolling around on one of those uncomfortable little typist chairs, calling up answers on the display screen and printing out yards of pale-green security bumf for Dicky. When I had finished everything he wanted I sat there for a moment. I knew I should get up and go straight back to the office. But I couldn’t resist probing into the machinery just once. just so I could go back to Cindy and tell her that I’d tried. And also to satisfy my own curiosity.
I keyed it in: “PRETTYMAN, JAMES.”
The machine gurgled before providing a “Menu’ from which I selected BIOG. More soft clattering came from deep inside the machine before Prettyman’s twenty-two-page-long service biography came up on the screen. I pushed the control arrow buttons to get to the end of it and found it ended with a summary of Prettyman’s last report. This was the standard Civil Service file in which one’s immediate superior comments on “judgement, political sense, power of analysis and foresight” but it didn’t say whether Prettyman” had retired from the Department or continued to work for it. When I pressed the machine for supplementary material I got the word REVISE. So I pursued PRETTYMAN J BIOG REVISE and got REFER FILE FO FX MI 123/456, which seemed an unlikely number for a file. I tried to access that file and found ACCESS DENIED ENTER ARCTIC NUMBER.
I couldn’t tell the machine the “Arctic” number it wanted because I didn’t even know what an Arctic number was. I looked at my watch. I still had plenty of time to spare before my appointment with Dicky. Dicky had been in a very good mood for the last few days. The Bizet crisis seemed to have faded. There had been no hard news but he told the Department that the Stasi prosecution office were about to release our men because of insufficient evidence and managed to imply that it was all his doing. It was a total fabrication, but when Dicky needed good news he never hesitated to invent some. Once, when I’d tackled him about it, he said it was the only way of getting the old man off his back.
Today Dicky had gone to lunch with his old friend and onetime colleague Henry Tiptree, who’d left his cosy Foreign Office desk for a job with a small merchant bank in the newly deregulated City. Morgan had gone to lunch with them too.
Morgan used to be a hatchet man and general factotum for the Director-General but since the D-G’s appearances had become fewer and further between, Morgan had nothing to do but pass queries to the Deputy D-G’s office and blow smoke at the ceilings of the City’s private dining rooms. I suspected that Morgan and Dicky were cautiously investigating their chances of getting one of the six-figure City salaries that I kept reading about in The Economist. In any case, Tiptree, Morgan and Dicky were not likely to finish judging the Havanas and old tawny port until three at the earliest, which is why I’d brought my packet of sandwiches to the Submarine. So I tried again. I entered the company for which Prettyman worked in Washington. TRANSFER LOAD then PERIMETER SECURITY GUARANTEE TRUST.
The machine purred contentedly and then the screen filled. Here it all was: the address of the headquarters, computed world assets, stock market price and names of president and vice presidents of the PSGT. This wasn’t what I wanted so I entered PRETTYMAN into the PSGT queries space. Hiccups. Then I got REFER FILE FO FX MI 123/456. I went back to REGISTRY ONE and entered that file number. On the screen came the same message as before:
ACCESS DENIED ENTER ARCTIC NUMBER. It was a merry-go-round. Had I not been seeking specific information it would not have seemed sinister. Had I not chosen those particular subjects it would not have produced the coincidence. Now I tried another angle. The data bank held details of departmental employees past and present. I entered the name of my wife SAMSON, FIONA and entered the UPDATE command for the final part of her file.
No surprise now. Up came that damned bogus number that couldn’t possibly have come from the normal filing system;
REFER FILE FO FX MI 123/456. And of course the subsequent keying was answered by the inevitable request for the ARCTIC NUMBER. So whatever the Arctic number was, it would give an enquirer answers about Jim Prettyman, his US employers - almost certainly a front for some sort of illicit business - and whatever my wife Fiona was doing during those final weeks before. her defection.
I went and walked around for a few minutes. Level Three was especially depressing. On one wall the long open room had dark metal shelving packed with spools and huge 12-platter disk packs, and other examples of sophisticated computer software. Another long wall was occupied with the work stations and on the third wall there was a series of desks and soft chairs that were allocated to senior staff. The last wall was of glass, and behind it the toilers came hauling trolleys piled with paper which the machines consumed with terrible appetites. I stretched my legs and racked my brains. I even drank some of the concoction that the “beverage dispenser” classified as coffee. I went to the toilet. For many months the question “Is there intelligent life in the Data Centre?’ had been posed in neat handwriting on the wall there. Now someone had scrawled “Yes but I’m only visiting” below it. The graffito was the only sign of real human life displayed anywhere, for the staff assigned -here soon became as robotic as the machines they operated and serviced. I went back to my work station.
I continued for another hour but it was no use. The damned machine always defeated me. In the old days everything was in Registry, and no matter that the files were grimy, and you had to take your own soap and towel down there, at least if you couldn’t find what you wanted there was always someone to show you the bottom shelf where the missing file was put because it was too heavy, or the top shelf where it was put because it was never asked for, or the door it was put against because someone had stolen the wedge that kept the door open. I preferred Registry.
“Where did you have lunch today?” Gloria asked me in that cheerful casual voice that she assumes when suspicion warps her soul. She wasn’t visiting her parents this evening: they were at a dentist’s convention in Madrid.
“The Submarine,” I said. We were at home and about to have dinner. I was sitting watching the seven o’clock Channel Four news. Gale-force winds were “lashing the coastline” and bringing “chaos” and “havoc” in the way that the weather is apt to do when camera crews have no real news to record. As if to bring the news home to me the window panes rattled and the wind howled loudly through the little trees in the garden. Gloria on her way to the dining room put two glasses of chilled white wine on to the side-table. She was trying to wean me off the hard liquor.
“In the Submarine?” she said with a slight smile and a voice brimming with that malicious one-sided delight for which the Germans coined the word Schadenfreude. “How perfectly awful!” She laughed.
“Rubber sandwiches from the Dinky Deli,” I added just to complete her pleasure.
“But you weren’t back until nearly four,” she called. I could see her in the dining room. She was setting the table for dinner. She did it with the same careful attention she gave to everything. Knives, forks and spoons were aligned with the plastic place-mats; serving spoons guarded the mustard, salt and pepper-mill. The napkins were folded and put into position with mathematical accuracy. Satisfied with the table she came back to where I was sitting, perched herself on the arm of the sofa and took a small sip of her wine.
“I had a meeting at four ... with Dicky.” I switched off the TV. It was just a regurgitation of ancient happenings. I suppose the news has to be expanded to fit into its allotted time slot. “The whole afternoon down there? Whatever were you doing?”
“I stayed on tinkering with the files. I do sometimes.”
“Jim Prettyman?”
She knew me too well. “That sort of thing,” I admitted.
“Any luck?”
“The same all the time. Have you ever heard of an Arctic coding?”
“No, but there have been a dozen new coding levels in the past year. And there are new top-level data-bank names coming in every month these days.”
“I kept getting the same Access Denied signal from everything I tried.”
“You were trying different ways to get the same data?”
“I spent well over an hour at it.”
“I wish you’d told me, darling,” she said, her voice changing to one of concern.
“Why?”
“I know those machines. I spent a month down there until you rescued me. Remember?”
I was working those machines.” I almost said before she was born, but the difference in our ages was not something I wanted to keep reminding myself about years ago,” I finished lamely.
“Then you should know about “sneaky-peek”,” she said.
“Who, or what in hell is sneaky-peek?”
“If you’d taken proper training, instead of just tapping away and hoping for the best, you’d not do silly things.” “What arc you talking about?” I said.
“When you get any sort of Access Denied signal the machine flags it and records your name and number.” “Does it?” I asked as she went into the hall and called upstairs to where Billy and Sally were supposed to be doing their homework under the supervision of Doris.
“Dinner, children! Are you ready, Doris?”
She came back into the room and added, “And that’s not all. It lists every file you fail to access. When the Data Security Clerks run their analysis program they can see exactly what it is you were trying to get that is beyond your security clearance.” “I didn’t know that.”
“Obviously, darling.” A kitchen timer sounded and she uttered a muffled Hungarian curse that I’d learned to recognize , and went to the kitchen to get our dinner.
I got up and followed her and watched her getting bright new pots from the oven and loading them on to the trolley. “You don’t know how often they run their security program, do you?” “Make yourself useful,” she said, and left me with the trolley. I pushed it into the dining room. “You can’t erase it, darling. If that’s what you’re hoping for, forget it.”
Sally and Billy came in carrying their school books. Billy was fourteen and had suddenly grown tall. He had wire bracing on his teeth. It must have been uncomfortable but he never complained. He was a stoic. Sally was a couple of years younger, still very much a child, and still suffering from the loss of her mother. The truth was that both children missed their mother. They never said so, they kept their grief hidden deep inside and I could find no way of even beginning to console them.