Thunder in the Blood Read Online Free PDF

to Wesley, had put on a little weight. He showed Wesley the label on his new Armani suit and told him how much the local garage was charging him for routine services on his Mercedes. He talked at length about his marriage, and suggested Wesley might like to pop down for supper. His wife’s name was Caroline. Until recently, she’d been working as a television presenter and media personality. Now, heavily pregnant with their first child, she was trading it all in for motherhood and a big mock-Tudor house on the outskirts of Godalming. It was the kind of relationship that Aldridge had always dreamed about and now it had come true. Wesley remembered the phrase from their days together in Bristol, and over liqueurs, bored, he enquired about the job. Aldridge had nodded at once.
    ‘Sure,’ he’d said, ‘no problem. Start whenever. Trust you to death.’
    Wesley had smiled telling me the story and I’d smiled too, not at Aldridge’s talent for tactful dialogue, but at how similar it was to my own arrival in London, the door to MI5 opening with barely a touch.
    I spent most of 1986 at Curzon House, commuting daily from a tiny flat on the Fulham Road. Attached to a succession of departments, I learned a great deal about intelligence: what it is, where it comes from, how you lay hands on it, and why analysis (the dominoes?) is so important. Destined for F branch, the bit of the empire responsible for countering domestic subversion, I learned about telephone taps, mail intercepts, on- and off-street surveillance, covert penetration, various cosy arrangements with other government agencies and the many techniques for shuffling quietly into other people’s computer systems.
    Our own computer system lay at the heart of the whole operation and a great deal of those early months was spent making myself comfortable with the way it worked. ‘Comfortable’ was a favourite MI5 word. It was a word we wrapped around ourselves. It insulated us. It kept us snug and warm. We were ‘comfortable’ with the prospects for a certain operation. We were ‘comfortable’ that Special Branch, or MI6, or the RUC or countless other agencies didn’t know what we were up to. We were ‘comfortable’that the intelligence yield (something we often referred to as ‘the harvest’) would be put to good and proper account. And we were ‘comfortable’, above all, that the growing calls for accountability would be faced down. We were, after all, simply defending the state. That, in particular, was a great source of ‘comfort’.
    Looking back, I’m astonished at how easily I slipped into it all. Most of what I had to learn was totally new to me, but its sheer novelty – the daily challenge of trying to make sense of this technique or that computer program – kept me from thinking about the wider questions. The days sped past in a blur and at the end of the day I had neither the time nor the energy to ask myself what might happen to the fruit of our painstaking labours. The anxiety I’d felt in Zaire, all the stuff about how fragile society was, had quite disappeared. In its place was a determination to master my brief, tinged with a faint awe at the sheer reach of the machine of which I was now a part.
    People at Curzon House often referred to the place as ‘the Factory’ and to some degree they were right. The commodity we produced was intelligence and mere mortals like me were simply workers on the assembly line, putting together little parcels of data, seeing whether they looked like other little parcels, testing this fact against that, comparing dates and locations and the small print of some businessman’s travel records, wondering all the time about circumstance and coincidence, quality-checking the product at every stage until it slipped out of the door and away to what the older hands referred to darkly as ‘the end-user’.
    The end-user was, of course, the government, but if I thought about them at all, those faces around the