The Conspiracy Theorist (32 page)

‘Carstairs said the men who attacked me
had been released on bail.’

‘And you knew that?
 
Last night?’

‘No,’ I said, thinking I should
have.
 
I should not have trusted
Richie.
 
‘No, I didn’t.’

She was silent again for a few
minutes.
 
I could hear her
breathing heavily.

‘Meg?
 
Meg, are you
..?’

‘So is it them, Thomas?’

‘I think so.
 
I just don’t know why Marchant’s lawyer is involved.
 
He handed me the phone...’

‘Tom, I'm not that interested in
why
we are here.
 
Just when are they going to let us go.’

‘I don’t know.
 
They will probably let you go now I am
here.’

She was quiet for a minute or two.
 
I wondered if I had said the right
thing.
 
I thought about saying
something else.
 
But I would
probably only make it worse.

‘I’m so thirsty, Thomas.
 
What are they waiting for?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Stop saying
I don’t know.
 
It’s
pathetic.’

‘Maybe, it’s to soften us up a bit.’

I
was wrong.
 
It was not about
softening us up.
 
We were soft
enough already.
 
They were waiting
for someone.
 
An hour or so
passed.
 
It gave me time to
think.
 
I even could have dropped
off, because when I heard a car door slam it seemed to wake me.
 
I had that feeling of surfacing from
somewhere deep within myself.
 

Now there were footsteps approaching
across the gravel, muffled voices, and the door was dragged open.
 
More steps, and I was pulled to my feet.

Meg cried out.
 
Perhaps she had been asleep, too.

‘Please,’ I said.
 
‘Water.
 
She needs water.’

I felt a pin prick at my throat and
then a ripping sound as a blade tore through the sacking.
 
I felt air on my lips, but still I
couldn’t see anything.
 
A plastic
bottle rattled against my teeth. I drank in great gulps.
 
Below me, I could hear Meg spluttering
water.
 
Then I was dragged from the
building and out into the open air.

My legs were still tied, so they
frogmarched me back across the gravel, pushed my head down as we entered
another building.
 
We went through
several rooms, each time they dipped my head for me, and then I was pushed down
onto a chair and held there.

A voice said, ‘Please leave us.’

The hands released me, footsteps
receded and a door closed, dragging wood on stone; an old door, warped and aged.
 
An old house.
 
I heard a chair creak and someone moved
closer to me.
 
I flinched as he
touched my waist and loosened the belt with a jerk.
 
My arms were deadened and ached as I moved them up inside
the sack.
 
I heard his feet retreat
from me.
 
Leather soled shoes,
floorboards.

‘You can take it off now,’ he
said.
 
‘Take your time.’

From the inside, I could work my arms
up and through the gap under my mouth.
 
I was in no mood to take my time.
 
The sacking tore with a satisfying rip.
 
I pulled it up over my elbows so I could grip it from the
back of the neck and pull.
 
It
scratched my face, but I didn’t care.
 
I threw it away from me, a despised thing.
 
It was a restraint vest with ‘US Army’ embossed on the
side.
 
It looked unthreatening
lying discarded on the floor, this thing that had been the cause of all my
fears.

I gulped air and my eyes took in the
light, blinking away tears, trying to focus.
 
Light kaleidoscoped at me as if through stained glass.

‘Better now?’ the voice asked.
 

Suddenly it all made sense.
 
I wiped at my eyes with the back of my
hands.
 
There was a small bottle of
water at my feet.
 
I tried to focus
on it.
 
Next to the bottle was a clear
plastic bag with my possessions: tobacco, lighter, wallet.
 
I bent and picked up the water.

And finally I turned to look at him.

‘So,
tell me,’ he said.
 
‘Am I the
person you expected?’

I looked at him with what I hoped was ‘ill-concealed
disgust’, but I probably just looked ill.
 
To be fair, in the state I was in, it was impossible to appear competent
enough for the higher emotions.
 
I
was at the bottom of the hierarchy of need.
 
I was a long way from self-actualisation, or even
sarcasm.
 
I formed words but they
came out translated by a tongue that had somehow managed to get
itself
bitten in the process of incarceration.
 
I sounded like an idiot, a half-wit.
 
That seemed about right.

‘Let her go and I will tell you.’

It was the longest sentence I could
manage.
 
I gulped down some water
as a reward.

‘Your wife,’ he corrected himself, ‘your
ex-wife is actually on her way home as we speak.
 
She will not be harmed.
 
And she will not be much use to the police either.
 
She hasn’t seen anyone and she doesn’t
know where she has been.’

He paused.
 
I looked around the room.
 
It seemed to be an extension on the side of an old farmhouse.
 
Low slung doorways,
beams etc.
 
We were in a
sort of box room, a collection of discarded furniture: an office chair with the
back missing, a Chesterfield sofa with ripped cushions, a rowing machine and matching
exercise bike.
 
The far wall was
covered floor-to-ceiling in mirrored glass.
 
I stared back at myself, a shrunken figure holding a water
bottle.
 
I looked like a naughty
boy in the headmaster’s study.
 
The
back of Sir Peter Watterson’s sleek grey head, his urbane presence, Jermyn
Street suit and polished brogues, before me, quite unruffled by my
misdemeanours.
 
We were alone:
we and our mirrored selves
.

‘Besides she knows we still have you,’
he said.

Don’t
believe him
, I told
myself.
 
Don’t believe anything he has to say.
 
He will play on your hopes, however small they are.
 

‘You don’t know her,’ I said.
 
‘Meg will still go to the police.’

‘A touching faith in the criminal
justice system,’ he said lightly.
 
‘I
thought you would have cured her of that by now, Becket.’

‘As you said she is my ex-wife.’

He thought about that one.
 
‘So, she got out,’ he said.
 
‘I’m interested.
 
Were you surprised?
 
When you saw me just now?’

‘Not really.
 
I just hoped it wasn’t true.
 
I don’t like my illusions being shattered.’

He smiled thinly.
 
I went on.

‘As you know, it is relatively hard to
tell when someone is lying.
 
Especially when they have had a lot of practice.’

‘Thank you,’ he said.
 
‘I think.’

‘You see...’

I paused and drank some water.
 
My head ached and I was thoroughly pissed
off.
 
But I had to keep talking.
 
I knew it wasn’t for his benefit, but
for whoever was behind the mirror.
 
Richie, the spooks, the NCA, it didn’t matter.
 
All that mattered was I had got to the bottom of
it—rock bottom.

‘You see, there was just one thing that
didn’t make sense,’ I said.
 
‘You told
me Sir Simeon Marchant asked your advice on
two
occasions.
 
A couple of occasions
, you said.
 
So I began to think what the other time could have been.
 
It took me a while to figure it out.
 
But there were too many distractions.’

‘And your conclusion?’
 
He sounded impatient.

‘It’s a long story.
 
I’ve only just figured it out.
 
When I saw you.’

‘So, I
wasn’t
expected,’ Sir Peter Watterson said.
 
‘Good.
 
Tell your story.
 
We have time.’

I took a sip of water.
 
My whole body ached.
 
I looked past him at my own reflection.
 
A man talking to
a mirror.
 

‘The first bit you know.
 
It is in the public domain, although
the obit writers did their best to conceal it.
 
Young Simeon Marchant was stranded in France in the war.
 
He posted Morse signals back, and
generally did a jolly good job.
 
He
hoped to get a boat out.
 
At first he
was told to go to Lisbon, and then, later, he was told to stay.
 
He was too useful.
 
The Admiralty found he had a knack for
it.
 
Spying.
 
He had found his vocation.’

Another sip of water.

‘Then, after the war, he finished his training
as a submariner and was stationed at Cheltenham.
 
Not a well-known naval base, you’d think.
 
But it was GCHQ, of course.
 
There were all sorts of people there in
the early Fifties: the best of Bletchley Park, the eggheads, the computer
scientists, the freaks, and the dyslexics like Simeon Marchant.
  
He was one of the first to spot
how useful they were at dismantling codes.
 
They saw things in different ways.
 
They were wired differently.
 
Saw patterns, the ones other people missed.
 
He was put in charge of a section of
them: they were known as the Dizzies.
 
Marchant made sure the equipment was modified to suit their needs.
 
He is still fondly remembered for it—the
British Dyslexia Association named an award after him—not for the
cryptography but for the fact he found a position for all those people who felt
they were wired wrongly.
 
As he
said at the time, they were just wired differently.
 
One of his team was a young South African of Indian extraction
called Arun Prajapati.
 
His job was
to come up with new and interesting algorithms, but he also took a keen
interest in the way the dyslexics thought.
 
Of course, there was no way computers could learn from them
at that time.
 
They were too basic,
too linear.
 
It was only years
later that Prajapati put the theory to good use.’

Watterson looked sceptical.
 
I hoped Kat Persaud’s research was
correct.
 
It had enough footnotes.

‘But Simeon Marchant did not really
know Arun Prajapati that well back then.
 
They were no more than acquaintances.
 
It was only after Prajapati had returned to his native South
Africa that Marchant really got to know him.
 
Marchant was stationed in Cape Town in the early
Sixties.
 
He was shocked by the
pre-apartheid regime as much as the world would be shocked by what was to
follow.
 
He watched Prajapati play
cricket—it was a passion they shared—at his club, the same club the
great Basil D’Oliveira played at before he came to England in 1960.
 
At the time, South African Indians, no matter
how good they were, could not play against their white countrymen, and yet it
was often the best cricket.
 
D’Oliveira
was also captain of his country’s ‘Non-White’ football team.
 
Imagine a concept like that now!
 

‘At Prajapati’s club, Marchant was
sometimes the only white in the small crowd.
 
Of course, at first they thought he was a Government spy, an
irony that made Arun Prajapati laugh.
 
He told his friends it was okay, Marchant was an old friend from England.
 
One of the club members had a daughter called
Preeti, described by Arun Prajapati’s wife ‘as a flighty girl just 19’.
 
Marchant was 35.
 
They married, some say so she could get
a British passport.
 
(Marchant, as
you know, looked for conspiracy in everything.)
 
But, it was more likely that he took her fancy and she
became pregnant.
 
Of course, by
then he realised that she was promiscuous—he was not alone in her
favours—but honour dictated he married her.
 
Their son was born while Marchant was at sea and he never
saw the child.
 
The boy lived just
long enough to be christened.
 
It
was Marchant’s great regret and source of guilt.
 
By the time the child died, Marchant had never met his son,
never touched him.
 
They divorced—quick
and easy then with the racial laws back then—and Preeti remarried.
 
She died in childbirth a few years
later.
 
Perhaps there had always
been complications.
 
It didn’t
matter.
 
Marchant referred to it as
the lost part of his life.’

I paused, and drank some more water.
 
Watterson had a faraway look, like he
wasn’t really listening.
 
I continued,
picking up the pace, wanting to get to the end.

‘Arun Prajapati moves to India and
works for Tata.
 
He travels around Africa selling trucks,
sometimes tractors.
 
It must have
been purgatory for him but he has a family to support now so needs must.
 
Meanwhile, Marchant goes back to GCHQ,
but now ostensibly he is teaching at Greenwich.
 
He is on their staff list anyway.
 
We suspect it is a cover, but we don’t know with any
certainty.
 
He marries again.
 
His wife has a daughter, Jenny.
 
At Greenwich, he teaches systems
thinking, counter intelligence, all the Cold War skills naval officers needed
at the time.
 
Once again, he was
too useful to send to sea, but it was a requirement to see active service and he
got his three-month tour every year on a nuclear sub.
 
Ironically, these were the happiest times for him.
 
While the other officers hated the long
stints away from home, Marchant thrived on them.
 
He wasn’t popular with the other officers but they
appreciated his presence kept them safe.
 
We do tend to get our husbands
back when Marchant sails with them
, one of the wives observed.
 
He was known as ‘the first computer
admiral’ and he would see the patterns where no one else saw them.
 

‘When the Falklands came along he was
the first one to plan the logistics of the ‘window of opportunity’ theory
before the Antarctic winter set in.
 
He was hit badly by the loss of
HMS
Coventry,
which he thought could have been averted.
 
It was as if the politicians were
cutting through the crap of the systems, cutting the Gordian knot when not
attacking the
Belgrano
could have led
to a better long term solution.
 
He
was shocked when he read the popular press on his return.
  
He saw the manipulation behind the
headlines.
 
Reading all of them one
after another, not each day, he could see the pattern of misinformation fed by
the government.
 
But he didn’t resign.
 
That would have been the easy way
out.
 
It interested him.
 
And it was gone.
 
He could learn from it.
 
So he did.
 
He continued to lecture.
 
Post Cold War, it got even more interesting, he
thought.
 
There was more
complexity.
 
Sometimes his students
could not even follow him, they said.
  
His reasoning.
 
Once or twice, he was firmly told to stick to the script.
 
Being Marchant, he didn’t of course.
 
He couldn’t, it just wasn’t in his
nature.
 
Post 9/11 he saw many conspiracies
at work.
 
He wondered which were put
up as genuine smoke screens and which were genuine.
 
He was fascinated by it.
 
The shadowiness of the enemy was interesting.
 
The way they existed in cyber space
made him think there was more at stake more than met the eye.
 
He briefed one or two top Whitehall
committees, including Cobra itself.

‘That was when he heard from Arun
Prajapati again.
 
Congratulations
on the knighthood and his condolences—perhaps, the other way round—Sir
Simeon's wife had recently died.
 
Arun
Prajapati’s son, Sunil, had set up a company and was looking for
investors.
 
It was a sure-fire
success: surveillance devices that degraded when they touched water.
 
The boy was a genius.
 
There were already contracts with the
UK and US government.
 
Sir Simeon knew
once the MoD committed to anything then it was guaranteed for a long time, the
sheer bureaucracy of vetting a new supplier made it easier to stick with what
you knew.
 
Marchant invested.
 
Modestly at first.
 
More bullishly after he met Sunil, a young
man he was very impressed by.