I've only done one bad thing in my life, but it truly was despicable. Eventually my past caught up with me. Directly due to that one heinous act, many years later, I was forced to share my gorgeous loving wife with another man. Some might say that my troubles are fully deserved.
I majored in physics and maths at university, but although I am quite intelligent, I was heading toward a merely average degree due to my predilection for seeking out willing female company at every opportunity.
Throughout my stint at university, I shared a flat with an exceptionally clever guy named Tom who was my opposite in that his studies were the only thing that occupied his mind. He read constantly, always science oriented stuff, spent hours on his PC researching, and filling ream after ream of paper with his scribbled equations and calculations. One day Tom sat me down, and with an excited gleam in his eye, confided that he thought he had discovered something that no one else in the world knew to do with quantum physics, the home of string theory and that strange molecular-level world where the past can be changed. What Tom had worked out in his head was a breakthrough to all current accepted thinking.
He spent the whole of the next year perfecting all the small details and working it up to be presented to the world as his finals thesis. During this time we talked about it constantly; he used me as a willing sounding board to clarify his thoughts, and, I am sufficiently clever that by the end of the year I could grasp the principle, discuss it intelligently and explain it to others if the need arose, but I totally lacked the genius to have conceived it in the first place. Tom existed on a completely different mental plane than I, and I was convinced that his name would one day be mentioned in the same breath as Einstein and Hawking.
Tom didn't smoke, very seldom drank, and as far as I could gather he had never fucked a girl. Some might think that, as the perfidious beneficiary of the coming tragedy, I deliberately took advantage of his abstemious nature. Toward the end of the year Tom's thesis was polished, typed and printed, and the finished product enjoyed the benefit of my scrupulous proofreading. Tom was now content to sit back and bask in a well deserved feeling of satisfaction, but I insisted that we could not allow such a momentous event to pass without some kind of celebration.
Rather reluctantly Tom accompanied me on what turned into a bit of a pub crawl, just he and I because he had no other friends. We had a good evening and it conveniently drew to a close at a tavern not too far from our flat, but at that point I found myself talking to a real cracker of a girl: face, figure, legs, the works. The real bonus was that she seemed to think that I was pretty special too. I knew she was primed to go. Although Tom, usually not a drinker, was obviously very inebriated by that time, I selfishly pointed out my situation and he reassured me that he could manage the ten minutes home by himself.
Sadly, during his short journey Tom was knocked down and killed by a speeding hit and run driver.
The accident was blamed on joy-riders after the stolen vehicle was later found nearby, burnt out and abandoned. I found out when I returned the next morning and discovered it was my sad and unpleasant duty to identify him at the mortuary. Afterward, returning in sombre mood to the empty flat, the first thing I saw was Tom's thesis, sitting temptingly on the desk.
The vital fact was that nobody but myself knew about his discovery. Tom had told no-one about his work, not even his tutor because he had heard too many apocryphal tales of student breakthroughs stolen by those monitoring their work. My immediate thought was that, was that as Tom was no longer able to enjoy the benefit of his work then why shouldn't I? After all, I put a fair number of hours into the damn thing myself.
I let it be known that I was devastated by what had happened and wanted to be left alone. In fact, I spent that time of seclusion transferring Tom's thesis from notes and pages in his hand to my own. It took twenty-four hours of solid toil, but at the end of that time I had moved all his files to my own PC and eradicated all sign of the thesis from his. Finally I printed a new pristine copy with my name as the author, not his.
I then waited a decent grieving time before delivering the thesis to my tutor.
The science world went crazy, and suddenly I found I had a hell of a lot of money and celebrity. I had more grants and funding than I knew what to do with. I gained a double first and was offered a couple of very lucrative lecture tours with a good job to follow at the main particle accelerator when they were completed. As long as I continued to present Tom's thesis topic, which I knew by heart at this point, without expanding upon it, I was able to keep up the illusion that I was the brilliant, rather than merely clever, one. I found the run-of-the mill physics work just about within my capabilities, but there was always an air of expectation surrounding me. I admit that I played to this by appearing intense and reclusive, but after three years I detected disappointment in the constant queries about what I was working on, which was becoming a bit of a strain. Just in time, I was contacted by a head-hunter to something completely different, working as a civil servant for a British government department at Whitehall, where I spent the next fifteen years.
In the UK, governments come and go but the work of the state carries on almost unchanged from one administration to the next. Whenever a fresh government takes power with its grandiose new policies, it is the Whitehall power elite who advise on what is possible and what is completely unfeasible. After fifteen years in the job, I was not yet at that level, still hovering a couple of bands below. Those years had been good to me; I earn a fantastic salary and have acquired a totally gorgeous wife, Fiona, whom I absolutely adore.
Fiona is eight years my junior and we met when she was temporarily assigned to me as secretary for a special project, three years after I started my government job. One can get an idea of how beautiful she is by the fact that before me, she dated a couple of premiership footballers, each for a few months. My good fortune was that she dumped them both, throwing away the chance to become a 'WAG'. She was far too intelligent to find the life of a celebrity partner fulfilling and had little desire for wealth for its own sake. We clicked from the start and by the end of the project; she was sharing my flat and had agreed to become my wife. After twelve years of very happy marriage, we live in a Georgian period house in the best area, regularly attend state banquets and the countless parties we are invited to cater only to intellectual elite and strictly A-list celebrities. We remain childless through choice, mainly because life was too good to take time out for pregnancy, but of late I think she is aware that her biological clock may be running down.
This particular Monday started like any normal day, but after an hour I was summoned to the big boss's office. There was nothing ominous in this because I was often called in to give a report on some ongoing situation. Usually it would start with him offering me a drink and we would conduct our business standing in a fairly relaxed manner but this time it was very formal, with a chair waiting for me directly in front of his big desk. Sitting to the side was another man. He was completely unknown to me, but his one defining feature was a singularly hard looking face.
I won't give the name of my boss except to say that it started with the word 'Sir'. Without any preparatory greeting he asked, "How patriotic are you, John?" His voice was cool.
I gave a short laugh to ease the tension I was suddenly feeling and replied, "About the same as any average guy I suppose. Perhaps a bit more than most."
Sir was not amused. "We expect a great deal more commitment than that from a person in your position; I would have thought that goes without saying."
I bristled slightly at his tone. "Well I'm certainly not giving away any secrets. Perhaps if you told me what exactly we are talking about, I may be able to give you a more meaningful answer."
"In that case, I will hand you over to Mr Smith here. I can tell you that he works for one of our security services but you don't need to know which one."
I turned to look at the mystery man. "You have quite a large social circle," he began without preamble, "A mixture of friends and acquaintances I would guess."
"Mainly the latter," I confirmed.
"What about Grigor Vasovnovitch?"
