I Spy

This is a new story I'm working on. A single, longer story and it doesn't feature Mad Dog. I will be writing more about Mike Madog but I wanted to try this out. I would really appreciate your comments so that I can improve my writing style, so please feel free to tell me what you think.

Enjoy

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Chapter 1 - April, 2005:

I put my left hand out and touched the padlock. The faint beam of light from the torch gripped between my teeth did little to aid vision. But then, anything has got to be better than nothing, right, and out here in the depths of the countryside when it gets dark you can't see your hands in front of your face.

I'm standing outside a ramshackle garage. Well, to be honest, it's more a shed really. I'm struggling with a padlock. I'm picking the lock, using a rake - an 'L' shaped piece of metal like a thick piece of wire, and a rake, a piece of steel with a notch cut in the tip.

Lock picking is a new skill to me. New as in I only learnt it this morning. To be honest I don't have complete mastery of the knack of it. I'd like some more practice, say a couple of days. Also, it's different learning to do this in a warm, brightly lit Portacabin classroom to doing it in the pitch black of a freezing cold night in the pissing rain.

This is the Farm, up in North Wales. Rhyd-y-Garnedd. When translated from Welsh it means the Farm Besides the Cairn. Since the people on this selection course are only speaker English and have difficulty pronouncing Welsh, we just call it the Farm.

My fingers fumbled with the lock. Wearing black leather gloves didn't help. It took me all of four attempts before I opened the door. I stepped carefully across the threshold.

The place smelt like every garage I've ever been in. You know, that mix of oil, antifreeze and damp. There's a shelf rack by the far wall, a work bench next to it, no car though.

I scan round the place. The bench has a vice and a slack handful of tools but not much else. On the middle shelf of a was a duster covering something lumpy.

I hesitantly reached out and lift the duster off. Underneath is the unmistakable form of a small semi-automatic pistol. I recognise it as a Walther PPK. It's not difficult recognising that kind of pistol, I've watched enough James Bond films to know what one of those looks like.

I reach into my pocket and pull the compact digital camera out of a pocket of my cargo pants. I'm concentrating on the LCD screen as I focus in on the pistol.

I become vaguely aware of a soft low noise behind me. What is that? A creaking

floorboard?

I freeze, holding my breath, as I strain my ears for any other sounds. Nothing.

I exhale and focus the camera. Squeezing the button there's a flash of light as the camera takes an image of the Walther.

The camera flash is replaced by the blinding flicker and buzz as a neon tube is switched on. I freeze, like I'm caught in the lights of an oncoming express train.

"Gotcha y' sod!" I can't see who's talking. Whoever they are they're behind me, but the voice is male, gruff.

Hands grab me and twist my arms behind my back. I'm swung round away from the shelves and pushed hard, face first into a brick wall. I bite my lip and wince. My mouth has the metallic taste of blood.

"You know what, you broke the eleventh commandment," he growled, "thou shall not get caught."

Things go dark again when a sack is lowered over my head.

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Chapter 2 - July, 2011:

A skinny kid in a ragged Manchester United top drove a herd consisting of a slack handful of goats past a Kalashnikov-toting soldier guarding the gateway to an airbase's runway. That just about sums Albania up in a single image.

So, let's get one thing straight from the start. Nobody in their right mind goes on holiday to Albania. I mean, why would they? But that, apparently, was what I had chosen to do.

Certainly tourism was the reason I gave for my visit when I cleared customs and immigration at Tirana International. Judging by the customs officers sceptical expression, she didn't believe me.

Before I'd come out here I'd done my homework. And by that I meant that I'd surfed the net and read about the place on the Lonely Planet website on my tablet on the flight out. Luton to Tirana courtesy of Easy Jet. I'd paid for it on a a company pre-paid debit card used to cover operational expenses, at a total cost of seventy quid each way. The cost of my railway ticket to the airport cost more.

The blurb describes Albania as Europe's enigma, with rumpled mountains and sparkling beaches. It makes no mention of roads with potholes so deep that when it rains they turn into ponds. The same ruts that are currently wrecking the rented Toyota Land Cruiser I'm driving. Or, for that matter, rampant organised crime. Still, what did I expect from the internet, honesty?

The runway was arrow straight, wide, and the tarmac was un-pitted and weed free. It pointed through shimmering heat haze to tree-covered hills in the distance.

As I passed him the sentry standing by the rusty metal nodded to me in greeting. I returned the gesture, and he went back to the tedium of his duty as I drove past.

My mobile phone, synced to the car radio, displays a sense of irony that I'd never credited an Artificial Intelligence algorithm with in the past. An eighties soul classic by The Untouchables is the next song to be played on shuffle.

"Just because he was wearin' shades, you think you didn't leave a clue, I got his name I know his game, He's double-O you know who, oh baby,..."

Yeah, that's right, that's what I do.

I begin to sing quietly along.

"...I spy for the FBI, and I spy for the MI5, and I spy for the KGB, and I spy for the CIA."

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Chapter 3 - April, 2005:

"I'm on holiday?" I sounded hesitant, unsure of myself. "I'm hiking, that's all I'm doing. I'm on a hiking holiday. I saw the door was open, I thought someone had broken in..."

"Don't lie to me," he snapped, "that's a load of fucking bollocks and you know it."

He had a brutally powerful build and his head was covered by a sparse stubble To be blunt he looked like a thug. So far his behaviour had done nothing to dispel that initial impression.

"I'm not lying, it's just like I said," I prepared to repeat my cover, "honestly, I'm on a walking holiday..."

"BOLLOCKS!" He repeated himself loudly, this time his fist hit the table top for added emphasis. "Stop fucking lying to me. Do you think I'm stupid or something? Now I'll ask you again and this time tell me the truth. What are you doing here?"

Here is, I suspect, the ramshackle barn with dry stone walls and a rusty corrugated metal roof that I noticed when I first arrived at the Farm a week earlier.

The reason I'm unsure of my exact location is that I've spent the last few hours since I was caught blindfolded and in a stress position. I could hear the muffled sounds of shouting, swearing and crying. In many ways it reminded me of my childhood.

Mum and dad used to argue a lot. Some of my earliest memories are of lying awake in my bedroom, listening to them screaming at each other.

I was stripped to my underwear and strung up to a beam. I'd spent the time standing on tiptoes, with my hands tied and arms stretched up attached to a rope hanging from the roof. A sack of some sort had been put over my head and cinched tight with a cord.

I had no idea how long I'd been like that, but it had to be hours. Had to be. Now my shoulders ached, my calves burned. It was actually a relief when I was grabbed and dragged off.

"My name's Steve Smith, I'm a tourist," I stick to my cover story, "and I'm on a walking holiday."

"Bollocks!" he snarled. "What were you doing breaking into the garage in the middle of the night? And what do you need a camera for?"

I bit my tongue before I could ask him what people usually needed cameras for. I reminded myself that my best bet was to play the grey man. Just don't do anything to antagonise him. He's probably looking for any excuse to give you a good kicking.

I heard a voice in my head speak quietly, calmly, repeating what I'd been told in resistance to interrogation training earlier this week. Stick to your cover story. Don't do anything stupid like trying to embellish it. Above all else, DON'T PANIC. Keep calm, control your breathing. White knuckle it for now and it'll soon be over.

Oh, and ignore your natural urge to kick up a fuss and demand to be released. It wouldn't do you a blind bit of good. He's got you - for now. You can hack this.

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Chapter 4 - July, 2011:

I've always been a nosy bugger. It's not anything I can help you understand, it just seems to be hard-wired into my DNA.

I was a kid, maybe eight years old at the time, and I remember walking into my parent's bedroom to tell dad that there was someone at the door asking for him. I caught him stuffing something into the pocket of his dressing gown as it hung in the wardrobe.

As soon as he left the room I was back in the bedroom and in the wardrobe snooping. I found a flat, hip flask-like quarter bottle of vodka. It was full, the seal unbroken. Hidden under a discarded shirt at the back of the wardrobe was a plastic carrier bag, it was crammed to bursting with similar bottles. They were all empty.

Being a nosey bugger with a sneaky bent is a requisite if you're a spy. And let's face it, it may not be the occupation listed on my passport, but that's what I do for a living.

Don't get me wrong, I don't work for MI5 or MI6. I work for the Security Research Group, the SRG. Never heard of us? Great, that's the way we like it. And the group's name, the Security Research Group, the SRG - because in the spook world everything that can be reduced to initials is - that's sort of nebulous isn't it. It can mean a lot of things, but it doesn't scream spy.

Everything's been privatised these days, and that includes the whole intelligence business. Apparently seventy percent of the US national intelligence budget's earmarked for the private sector. We're talking about fifty-six billion dollars a year.

In the UK, the amount of the long-suffering British taxpayer's money spent by the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies on private intelligence is considerably less. But it's still more than enough hard cash to make the private spy business very lucrative. And I have no doubts whatsoever that whoever Security Research Group's clients appear to be on paper our paymaster is Her Majesty's Government.

I've arrived at my destination. Well, not quite, but almost. I park the Land Cruiser in a small clump of trees halfway up a hill. I go to the car's rear and grab an olive green backpack and set off up a forest path at a jog.

The path leads me up a steep dirt track through thick woods. After a couple of hundred metres the track fades away and I'm left picking my way through the undergrowth.

My initial reconnaissance had been done on my laptop back in my hotel last night. I'd used Google Earth. According to that I had another eight hundred metres, about half a mile of this to go. Oh deep joy.

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Chapter 5 - April, 2005:

"END EX!"

I recognised the voice, the gruff Welsh accent, before they took the bag off my head again. It was Baldy, the thuggish bloke who'd refused to believe a word I told him when he questioned me.

I found myself blinking in a beam of light that shone through a chink in the wriggly tin sheets that made the barn's roof. Two guys helped detach me from the caribiner that had me on my toes. They had to help me stand up while Baldy took a knife and cut the rope I'd been tied up with.

"You all right bud?" Baldy asks, "no hard feelings, eh?"

"No," I answer, "no hard feelings."

I'm lying of course. I do have hard feelings and I'm not all right. Far from it. I can hardly stand and I'm angry. Extremely fucking angry.

"You'll be all right," he says with a grin, "when you get home have a good drink and it'll be all right."

It's that easy is it? That's all it takes to put the last twenty-four hours of rough treatment behind me. I say nothing. It takes an effort.

What I'd really like to say is: "I hope you get cancer and it takes a long time for you to die. Oh, and I hope you spend every second of that time screaming in agony. And then I hope you spend eternity in hell being tormented, you fucking sadistic bastard."

"Well, you'll be happy to know you've got the job," he announces as his two henchmen help me to shuffle out onto the grass. "You wait here a while, we'll get you a cuppa tea and a bacon butty eh. Then, someone'll be along to explain the next stage of the process."

The process. This is part of an extended bloody job interview! Just how desperate do you have to be for a job that you're prepared to spend a week in a bleak Welsh farm, running up and down a sodding mountain, learning how to be a burglar and undergoing torture?

In my case case, the answer is really desperate. I graduated from University with a halfway decent degree in History. Like many students I took a job to make my loan stretch. I'd joined the British Army, to be exact, the University Officers Training Corps.

When I graduated I took a full-time short service commission. For three years I was a lieutenant in the British Army. I served in the Staffordshire Regiment but I didn't see action. The closest I got was a deployment to Kosovo, and that was just before I resigned my commission with the regulars.

After I left the army I was at a bit of a loose end. The first gig I got was going door-to-door on one of the roughest housing estates in Stoke, asking a simple question: "have you had an accident that wasn't your fault?"

After that I had a period signing on the dole. Eventually the Job Centre sent me off on a course to get my license as a door supervisor. After that I was legally licensed to be a baby bouncer at Mothercare, or in my case, a lapdancing club.

Trust me, it wasn't as much fun as it might first seem. The girls weren't interested in anything that didn't keep them in flash designer gear and nose candy. The punters were much more badly behaved than you'd expect at at a nightclub.

I stuck it out for six weeks. I'm surprised I lasted that long to be honest. After that I had a job working three sixteen-hour night shifts per weekend minding a soon to be demolished hospital. That lasted three months. I didn't quit on that occasion, the security firm I worked for lost the contract and let me go.

The words of an old song by the Smiths kept echoing round my head: "I was looking for a job, and then I found a job, and heaven knows I'm miserable now."