Thunder in the Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

cabinet table, it was only in a distant, uncurious, faintly benign way. Governments were like rain or gravity, always there, a fact of life. They needed intelligence in exactly the same way they needed taxation. In that sense, we were simply another of the oils that made the machine work, and as long as the machine worked then everyone would benefit. Wasn’t that how it went? Wasn’t that Rory’s favourite line?
    Rory I was now seeing on a fairly regular basis: drinks, meals, the odd visit to the cinema or (a passion of his) the opera. I enjoyed his company enormously, partly because he was such good fun and partly because he freed me from the chore ofpicking up with somebody else. I’d already had offers from work, serious young men with heavy glasses and appalling skin, but I was perfectly happy living by myself and I had absolutely no appetite for getting involved with anyone else. By twenty-three, I’d had quite enough relationships to know the difference between love and a good fuck and just now I’d no need of either. In this sense, Rory was perfect, a big uncomplicated friendship warmed by the odd bottle of wine and a great deal of laughter.
    Exactly what Rory was doing in London he never made clear but as we saw more of each other it became something of a challenge for me to find out. I was, after all, supposed to be in the intelligence game and after six months at Curzon House I began to use a little of my time on the computer to wander into certain Registry files, looking for the odd clue. This was harder than it sounds. Many of the files were technically closed to people at my level, but I’d acquired some supplementary access codes and one of them, coupled with the odd slip by Rory himself, led me to form some very definite ideas.
    ‘DIS,’ I said, ‘for sure.’
    It was mid-June. An early heatwave had taken us to a Putney pub. We were sitting by the river in the half-darkness, watching a lone sculler pulling hard against the falling tide. Rory was in jeans and shirt-sleeves. The remains of his third pint stood on the table beside his motorcycle helmet. Lately, I’d noticed he was drinking quite heavily. I’d no idea why.
    ‘Defence Intelligence Staff?’ he murmured.
‘Moi?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Evidence?’ He glanced across. ‘Care to tell me why?’
    I shrugged. ‘You got me into this. You must be connected. You’re not on the MI5 register. You don’t work for Six. You’re still a serving soldier—’ I looked at him. ‘… Aren’t you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Then it must be DIS.’ I paused. ‘Unless there’s another lot they haven’t told me about.’
    ‘Ah…’ he nodded, non-committal, ‘the Wild Bunch.’
    He fell silent, refusing once again to elaborate, and I thought about the proposition some more. The Defence Intelligence Staff was an outpost of the Ministry of Defence. They worked closely with MI6, keeping an eye on foreign armed forces. Rory, withhis Aberdeen University degree and his near-perfect Arabic, would have been a likely recruit. The way the system worked, he’d be on some kind of attachment. Then, after a couple of years, he’d return to the stockade.
    I reached for my drink. The lone sculler had disappeared under Putney Bridge. Rory was yawning.
    ‘I’m bloody tired,’ he said, ‘and you should be in bed.’
    ‘Thanks.’ I lifted my drink. ‘Am I keeping you up?’
    ‘No,’ he said.
‘Au contraire.’
    He looked at me for a moment, a strange expression on his face, an uncertainty I’d never seen before. Then he shook his head, leaning back on the wooden bench, closing his eyes. For a second or two I assumed he really was tired – a busy day, an early start – and I reached across, patting his arm, his sympathetic chum from the West Country. He caught my hand in his and squeezed it, opening one eye as he did so. Rory was never less than honest. He had a candour that was occasionally close to brutal. It was one of the reasons I thought the world of