I told Fifeshire it wasn’t possible for anyone to give me a rougher ride than he himself did. He assured me it was. The way he said it was such that I didn’t bother to argue the point. He’d convinced me.
I was assigned to Scatliffe for a twelve-month period. He was a man with less warmth than a cryogenically preserved corpse. He likened agents to insects, referring to them as common or garden spies, and treated us with as much respect as a gardener tending greenfly with a spray can of DDT.
Weekends he spent with his wife at their house in Surrey, but during the week he lived alone in London; like Fifeshire, rising early and working late. His workday would begin in a peculiar manner, when a nubile black hooker would come round to his Campden Hill apartment, punctually at 6.15 every morning, and jerk him off, before the Home Office Rover collected him at 7.00 to whisk him to the office.
Fifeshire enjoyed the photographs enormously. They were the only bright spot that year. It was a rotten year. I got the lousiest jobs going, and in the extra efforts I made to do them well I invariably buggered them up. At the end of it I was beginning to feel that I might be having a better time inside a French slammer.
Fifeshire went so far as to try and get me transferred out of MI5 altogether and into MI6, or some other department of the Secret Intelligence Service, but somehow Scatliffe had gotten his claws into every area and hadn’t spread much good news about me in any of those quarters.
Then early in May Fifeshire summoned me to his office. I entered the ante-room, and his secretary, Margaret, a smart, divorced woman in her early forties, sprang up from her desk. ‘Good morning, Max,’ she said brightly, ‘I’ll just tell Sir Charles that you’re here.’
‘Thanks.’
A few moments later I was ushered through into Mastermind’s blockhouse.
‘Good morning, young fellow,’ he said.
‘Good morning, sir.’
‘You look well.’
I presumed he must have been looking at a photograph of me; I’d gone to bed at half past five that morning, having spent most of the night standing in a doorway in Wandsworth while a new junior in the department, named Rodney Tweed, rogered a window-dresser named Derek, who’d picked him up in the Drayton Arms pub in the Old Brompton Road. I was white and shaking, my eyes bright red, and I was coughing and spluttering from too many cigarettes. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
Seven fifteen in the morning is a very uncivilised hour to hold a meeting, but Fifeshire looked bright-eyed and well settled into his day’s work. He was a powerfully built man, not particularly tall, but striking all the same. He had a thick neck, with a bullet-shaped head, and a nose that was long but did not protrude much from his face; it was the type of nose that, if punched, would be more likely to inflict damage to the fist than to be damaged itself. The hair on his head was a mixture of dark greys, with the occasional black, and the silver streaks on either side of his temples gave him a very distinguished appearance. His eyebrows were very bushy, forming an awning over his penetrating brown eyes. The bags under his eyes were heavy and wrinkled; they were the only feature on his face which showed his age; he was 66. When he had finished speaking he never completely closed his mouth, his lips were always slightly parted; it gave one a reassuring feeling that he was always concentrating intently on what one was saying.
‘I’m sending you to America,’ he said. ‘It’ll be the toughest job you’ve ever had, and you’ll be walking a tightrope in a political minefield. If you fall off you’ll be landing me personally in a lot of stick, to say nothing of putting the kibosh on a couple of centuries of fairly friendly Anglo-American relations.’
He paused, staring at me hard, then continued. ‘As you may be aware we spy on friendly nations as much as we spy on hostile nations, since all nations have, historically, a habit of changing their allegiances from time to time. For our national security we must have detailed inside knowledge of what every single country in the world is up to, both internally and in its foreign policies.
‘When British agents are caught in hostile nations it does little to impair relations, since such countries accept spying as par for the course; but when our allies catch us spying on them they get very, very upset — not that they don’t all do it themselves, because they do, but because it invariably opens up a hornet’s nest of embarrassing questions from the media. So rule one, young fellow, is don’t get caught.’
‘I thought the United States was MI6’s domain?’
‘It is; and it has far more autonomy than is good for it. When I took over MI5, we actually had to report to MI6. But not any more. He smiled. It has always been my view that to do my job effectively I must keep an eye on MI6, and to do this I arranged some years ago the establishment of MI5 cover operation in all countries where enemy penetration of MI6 could be seriously damaging to us. The United States is one such place: MI6 operations there are based at the British Embassy in Washington, but our base is, for a number of reasons, in New York.
‘Apart from the Prime Minister and myself, there is only a handful of people who know of this. We operate through a very legitimate front, a large company specialising in the manufacture of computer and calculator cabinets; it has branch offices throughout the United States, a head office in New York, and a factory and offices here in England, from which the company is now actually controlled. It is called the Intercontinental Plastics Corporation, and it is one of the market leaders in its field. The advantages of a company in the computer field are obvious: we get to know of virtually every new development in the computer field in the United States, without having to go and look for them: Intercontinental is asked to tender for the manufacture of the cabinets.
‘You are being sent over by the English parent firm in order to study and report back on the company’s production control methods, a role which will give you complete autonomy to go anywhere, talk to anyone, look at anything, without arousing any degree of suspicion.
‘I have a strong feeling, for reasons I shan’t bother you with, that when we acquired Intercontinental, we may have acquired more than we realised. I want you to go through its staff with the finest toothcomb you can lay your hands on, and to miss out nothing, absolutely nothing. Now, before I go on, do you have any questions?’
‘I do, sir: I don’t know the first thing about computers.’
‘You will, before you start your job, young fellow, you will.’
On 12 August, barely three months later, I was riding the elevator up to Intercontinental Plastic Corporation’s Park Avenue offices to start my first morning’s work as the whizz-kid production control analyst from London.
For three months I’d eaten, drunk, woken, slept, breathed and belched computers and plastics, 24 hours a day. I’d attended America’s elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I’d visited the leading electronics firms of Japan, Germany and England, and I’d been despatched to the furthest reaches of the globe to see examples of Intercontinental’s work in operation. God alone knew how much of it had rubbed off on me; riding up in that elevator I had a horrible feeling it wasn’t enough.
Three days later, on 15 August, Fifeshire was in hospital, fighting for his life, with six bullets in him and most of his essential internal wiring in shreds. He’d been riding in a car with President Battanga of the Mwoaba Isles, who was over for a conference of the Non-Aligned Countries. Two hooded motorcyclists had riddled the car with machine-gun fire, at a traffic light, killing Battanga and the chauffeur, and critically wounding Fifeshire. An outfit calling itself the Mwoaban Liberation Army later claimed responsibility, although the Mwoaban Government angrily denied the existence of any such organisation and vehemently accused the British Government of plotting unrest in the Mwoaba Isles; it didn’t state why Britain should wish to cause unrest, but hinted strongly that the Mwoabans might be about to discover a major oil-field.