The Bell Ringers (51 page)

‘Look, David, that's my job. I know how to do it. This is how I go to war. We'll manage. You rest up for tomorrow. Are you going to be OK about getting there?'

‘Yes, and you?'

‘It'll be a cinch. And . . . last night . . .'

‘Was wonderful,' he said. ‘I am overwhelmed. More than I can say.'

‘Me too,' she said, suddenly gripped by an inexpressible sense of doom. ‘OK, I'd better go now. We'll speak later. Stay safe.'

She hung up and immediately cursed her reticence – her failure to say she loved him. A moment or two of self-recrimination was followed by a brisk ordering of her phones and computer, together with the list she'd made of the Bell Ringers that morning. Laid out before her, it all seemed hopelessly inadequate, but she phoned each one, ticking off the name as she told them where and when to deliver the packages. Each was given a time the package should arrive. She reminded them that they did not have to make the delivery in person and that cabs and messengers could be used. She ended with the same instruction. ‘When you're done, get rid of the phone and make yourself scarce.' She knew they all had emergency accommodation arranged.

Last she spoke to Evan Thomas, the intense Welshman, and asked if he had any of the tools of his trade with him. He replied rather testily that of course he hadn't, but he could go to his friend at the Alinea Bindery in Bayswater and borrow some.

‘It means you'll be up all night,' she said.

‘Not a problem,' said Thomas.

‘Just let me know you've got what you need, then dump your phone.'

‘Righty-ho,' he said.

She too would have to remain awake all night. She lay on the bed, set the radio alarm on the bedside table and tried to get some sleep.

Just after six that evening Cannon ran into Jamie Ferris outside one of the washrooms in Number Ten. ‘We've got the bastard,' he said, punching a fist into his palm. ‘We'll have Eyam in the bag by the end of the evening; in fact, we'll have the whole lot. I have just told the prime minister.'

‘Well done,' replied Cannon, seeming to share a little of Ferris's excitement. ‘How did you manage it?'

Ferris tapped his nose. ‘Aristotle Miff, the man seen at Hotel Papa with Kate Lockhart, has been traced to the East End. We believe Eyam is in an estate known to be frequented by one of Miff's associates. We're watching both locations. It's just a matter of time before we track down that bloody woman.'

‘And the rest of them?'

‘We'll be yanking their fucking chains by morning because they've got to keep in touch with Daddy Eyam. They're nothing without Eyam. If he's got a phone on we will soon know the number and every number it has called and that means we'll have locations for every one of these fucking people.'

Cannon laid a hand on Ferris's shoulder. ‘That's wonderful news.'

‘Must be getting along – I want to be there for the kill.'

‘No, you mustn't miss out,' said Cannon.

Cannon slipped into the office occupied by the garden girls and dialled Kilmartin's number. Then, turning his back to the room, he murmured: ‘They've got a position for your friend. They are monitoring the phones in the area and are confident of an early arrest.'

She snapped awake with the first ring from Kilmartin. Before he had finished speaking she lunged for the other phone, tugging the charger from the wall socket, and pressed the last number dialled. ‘Get out now,' she shouted at Eyam. ‘They know where you are.'

‘I doubt it,' said Eyam. ‘But we'll leave anyway.'

She gave him the number of the set in her other hand – the one supplied by Kilmartin – and told him to use it only in an emergency and rang off. ‘I'll see you later,' she said to Kilmartin.

‘I await you,' he replied, also rather coolly.

Half an hour later she was let in a door at the rear of the British Museum in Montagu Place by a security guard. As instructed by Kilmartin, she said she was with the film crew and was led to the great Arched Room on the west of the museum.

Kilmartin was at the furthest end of a row of tables that ran down the centre of the room, reading in a pool of light thrown from an Anglepoise lamp. His hand fidgeted with the tray in front of him.

He stood up when he saw her. ‘Ah, welcome – glad you had no bother getting in.'

She walked to him, looking round. The Arched Room resembled a small church. Five arches separated six tall bays either side of a central aisle. Each bay acted as a large cabinet with hundreds of trays lining the walls right up to the point where a metal gallery ran around the top of
the room. On the tables in the centre were cutting pads, weighing scales, marked boxes, magnifiers and rolls of tape. ‘Where are we?' she asked.

‘In the great library of King Ashurbanipal of Assyria.' He smiled at her, pulled out one of the drawers nearest to them and selected a piece of pottery about the size of a packet of cigarettes, which was indented with regular, wedge-shaped cuts. ‘Cuneiform,' he said. ‘There are over twenty-five thousand tablets from Ashurbanipal's library alone, and maybe another hundred thousand tablets in the museum's collection.' He replaced the tablet. ‘Take a pew. Coffee?'

He reached down into a shopping bag and withdrew a Thermos flask. There were parcels of silver foil, a bottle of water and some fruit. Kilmartin had prepared as though he was attending races on a summer afternoon. He looked around with relish. ‘King Ashurbanipal was a scholar as well as a great general, you know. In his brief life he built one of the greatest libraries ever to exist – maybe the first library of them all. We know from his records that he sent agents to discover new texts and bring them to his library at Nineveh.'

‘Yes,' she said, more interested by Kilmartin's energised manner. He seemed different – younger.

‘When the Persians sacked Nineveh they burned the library,' he continued. ‘As a result the tablets were baked, which made sure they were preserved. However, a lot were broken and that's the business of this place. Making joins.'

‘Joins? What joins?'

‘Joining them up so the complete text can be read.'

‘Ah! Kind of what we're here to do with Eyam's documents,' she said, looking at her watch.

‘That's exactly right.'

She pulled out the papers she'd rescued from the car park with Diana Kidd and flourished them. ‘At least we've got something to start with.'

‘Oh, we have a lot more than that. So far eight packages have arrived.' He pointed under the table to a pile of envelopes. ‘I expect they couldn't wait to be shot of them.'

‘Have you looked?'

‘No, I was waiting for you.'

She drew the pile towards her. ‘Let's clear a couple of tables.'

They began rapidly spreading out the papers. Some were covered in clear plastic which included a flap at the left-hand edge so the document could be clipped into a file. She noticed that these often included handwritten notes and in some cases signatures. Eyam had tried to preserve any fingerprints or DNA evidence that might still cling to the surface of the papers.

They ordered the dated documents chronologically, but this gave no sense of what they had in front of them, nor did putting them into categories, such as memoranda, accounts, emails, letters, legislation and policy papers. There were impenetrable pages of departmental accounts, obliquely worded emails, turgid sociological studies. None of it seemed to add up to much. They sat at adjacent tables and began to read. Kate bent over
The Way forward: Social Intelligence
, a paper from 2009, and Kilmartin started working his way through a bundle from the Home Office and a think tank called Foresight, research that was all sponsored by the Ortelius Institute for Public Policy Research, a fact noted in tiny print at the base of the documents.

Over the next hour, more deliveries were made. A security guard appeared with two pizza boxes and a bunch of flowers – the cover for three packages. He advised that the pizza could not be consumed in the Arched Room and said he would find a home for the spring posy. Other packages were dropped off by messengers on motorcycles and bicycles, and in one case by a rickshaw driver. By half past nine, fifteen packages had arrived. Most of the Bell Ringers did not remember, or were too cautious, to put their names to their package so she had no idea who on her list still had to make their delivery. Part of her wished she hadn't told them to get rid of their phones, although of course it was vital that they did so to avoid being traced and picked up. She had no number for Eyam either and that bothered her.

But they were beginning to feel their way into Eyam's structure. There were three groups. The first showed how different policy documents and unnoticed paragraphs from different Acts of Parliament combined to create the conditions for wholesale invasion of privacy of the British public. For instance, a paper from Ortelius argued for a discreet observation of the behaviour of all adults to assess their suitability or performance as parents. Such information would alert
the state of the need for intervention in ‘problem families' long before social workers would spot it. A clause in a bill enabled a programme called ‘Family Watch'.

At the same time, ASCAMS was set up in anticipation of trouble at the London Olympics and this too involved trawling through enormous amounts of personal data. While the merger of all government databases under the ‘Transformational Government' programme made this possible, the steady flow of Ortelius policy documents chipping away at the right to privacy in the face of grave social problems made it all seem desirable.

Then came the moment of decision when it was suggested – again by Ortelius – that the government was missing an opportunity; people's lives could be vastly improved if the state could know everything about them, could anticipate their needs and mediate between agencies they dealt with. The state was cast in the role of the hyper-efficient and concerned servant; there were many advantages to a system that would automatically patrol benefit fraud, winkle out illegal immigrants or people who were paying too little tax. Much was made of the beneficial ‘outcomes' – the increase in ‘social capital' and ‘community cohesion', and ‘friendship networks between the poor'. Yet it was obvious that paper proposed a power grab, using software that was already in development by White's companies. The system would know everything about everyone and make judgements about supposed illegality, anti-social behaviour or the inconsistencies between, say, declared income and expenditure, and automatically initiate action through hundreds of different agencies.

She found an email from the Home Office legal department to the Cabinet Strategy Office pointing out the significant threat that the system would represent. The author raised questions about privacy, natural justice and accountability. The email had been printed out and bore Derek Glenny's scrawl and signature. ‘No need for primary legislation,' he wrote. ‘Refer all future queries to the Office of Social Intelligence. From now on this issue is classified.'

The decision had been taken to draw a line under the deliberation and go ahead with DEEP TRUTH. To all those involved in the discussion the government pretended that the project had been
abandoned. DEEP TRUTH went underground but not all traces were eliminated. Kilmartin found pages from the annual accounts of the ministries concerned with Justice, Education and Work and Pensions, and several agencies: police, customs and revenue. Each one had made large payments to the Office of Social Intelligence – which amounted in one year to £1.8 billion. But much larger amounts were paid out from the secret money allotted to MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.

‘That ties in with payments to Eden White's companies amounting to at least one point eight billion for one financial year,' Kate said, waving a piece of paper, but without looking up. ‘I wonder how many of these people are on his pay.'

‘There is a sheet of bank account numbers somewhere,' said Kilmartin, propping his glasses on his forehead. ‘Yes, here it is: Shoemaker, Glenny, Temple and several other names are listed as having bank accounts.'

‘Jesus, they were hiding the expenditure from the public accounts committee while taking backhanders. It's unbelievable. But you know, we've got nothing here that ties DEEP TRUTH to Temple and White personally.'

‘Maybe those documents were with Tony Swift and the other fellow.'

‘No, Eyam would have said.'

At eleven Evan Thomas arrived, carrying a large canvas holdall from which he produced four further packages that had accumulated with the security guard at the Montagu Place entrance of the museum in the past couple of hours. He'd found one in the street propped against the door. Kate did a quick calculation. ‘That means all the packages are accounted for.'

Thomas began laying out his equipment on the table in the alcove furthest from the entrance. Kilmartin and Kate tore at the envelopes and began to read. Almost immediately she let out a yelp. ‘This is an internal review of the first operation of a system known simply by a numeric code, which shows that it has an estimated failure rate of seven per cent. That would mean millions of people were wrongly identified, wrongly targeted and punished,' she said. ‘By the government's own admission their bloody machine is out of control. People have lost their homes, been prosecuted, raided, had their property seized, their
children removed by social services. It's harassment and persecution on a vast scale and no one knows how to stop it. The trouble is that there is no mention of DEEP TRUTH, just the numeric code.' She read out the number 455729328 and looked up: Kilmartin was holding a single sheet of paper in a plastic cover between his thumb and forefinger. ‘What's that?' she asked.

‘John Temple's signature on the bottom of a document that sanctions the purchase and secret installation of software in every government computer: the system is referred to by the same code and we have a date three years ago. We need to know what this bloody number stands for.' He looked in a leather folder and produced a copy of an email from Dawn Gruppo and started to write.