LONDON ALERT (27 page)

‘Actually, my being so pure
and angelic had nothing to do with you not being aroused.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You couldn’t have done
anything anyway.’

‘How come?’

‘I slipped a powerful
tranquiliser into your coffee on the terrace while waiting for you to return
from the loo. Enough to calm a horse.’

‘So that’s why the coffee
was so awful.’

‘You must understand I was
acting under orders from Blackwell. He said it would make things much easier
for us both in the long run and that it was my duty. When I expressed my doubts,
saying I did not join the service to be an exhibitionist and put drugs in
colleagues’ coffees, he said that if I refused, I would be replaced. As I both liked
you and wanted to go to Japan, I accepted.’

Holt could imagine
Blackwell debriefing Celia after their stay at The Loughty, laughing to himself
at how he had watched helplessly as the Virgin Mary pranced naked around the
room. Thank heavens The Loughty had refused to comply with Blackwell’s request
for the video.

‘Blackwell insisted the
first night was critical, and if it went according to his plan, you would get a
mental block and no longer think of me sexually. And, to be fair, it worked a
treat.’

‘The tranquiliser – How
many times did you use it?’

‘Blackwell said it
should only be necessary for the first night, but to be on the safe side I might
like to top you up from time to time. He said that the tranquiliser had not
been needed in the case of other agents, but then none of the women had been as
desirable as me!’

‘You were toying with
me!’

‘Not really. I never
took advantage of the situation to wind you up or play cat and mouse with you. Though,
to be honest, having a man dangling helpless before me was pleasurable.’

Holt wanted to tell her
that dangling was an unfortunate choice of vocabulary and suggested she was
more experienced than she appeared, but before he could do so she gripped his
hand tightly and batted her eyelids, just as she had done in bed the night
before.

‘I have no regrets,
though. For me, last night was all the better for having waited.’

How could he not believe
her?

T
he colleagues betting on when
Celia
would lose her
virginity failed
to
do so
when she
return
ed
to work after her secret trip
with Holt to
the
Maldives
.
Yet it was they who some weeks
later
were
the first to sense something di
fferent about her.

‘She must be getting it – she looks so satisfied,’ said
one. ‘More like beatified,’ replied another. ‘A bit strange if you ask me,’ added
a third

She was pregnant!

After waiting in hope for the red dragon and then doing
five tests, a worried Celia met up with Holt in the St James’s Park – she was
working nearby, attending a meeting at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office
between British officials and dignitaries from a South American country.

‘We were careful. I don’t know what went wrong,’
she said after telling Holt the news.

‘No point in a postmortem,’ replied Holt.

‘I know the service would prefer I got rid of it –
in fact, they would never need to know.’

 ‘But do
you
want to…?’

‘Not really.’

 ‘We could get married.’

‘Yes…that’s one possibility.’

‘Of course, with your looks there would be no lack
of men more than happy…’

‘That’s true.’

‘No need to get married at all, come to that. I
wouldn’t tell anyone. Leave them guessing. The only trouble with that is that
people in the service might think it was one of your VIPs…a cabinet minister or
a fusty old general. That would not look too good.’

‘You’re right there. Tongues
would
be wagging.’

 ‘No need to rush. Think it over. I’m always here
for you…whatever you decide.’

‘You shouldn’t underrate yourself, Jeremy. I could
do a lot worse than you. Please don’t take that badly. I’m being horrible
because I feel bad this has happened.’

They wanted to mull it over more but had to get
back to work.

The next morning Holt left his mobile phone on his
desk at Farringdon, hoping she would not call, for if she did it would surely be
to decline his offer. To get it over with.

He therefore picked the phone up with a feeling of
resignation when it indicated a call from her. Her voice was merely a whisper, no
doubt to avoid others overhearing.

‘…you are the father after all…I’ll marry you,’ was
all he could catch, but enough.

 
Sir Charles, Cut-Glass and
envious
colleagues
,
including the
always affable
Farringdon
bureau
receptionist
,
attended the simple
wedding
some
three weeks later
.
The only outsiders were Celia’s
parents
,
who were
doubt
less
already aware
in general terms
of the secret nature of their
daughter’s work. Holt was not
at all
surprised to find they were middle of middle
class, and decent enough people and not pretentious.
Of course, the service would
have probably checked
them
out
too
before taking her on.

His nominal boss, Peter, was there too, somewhat
miffed that Holt had not heeded his order to avoid any hanky-panky. He
had lost his ‘daughter’ but like all fathers had to reconcile himself to the
fact that it must have been partly his innocent child’s fault, which was indeed
the case.

The ceremony over, Holt had to get right back to
work, since the Owl had been upping the ante, angry that most of his or her
demands had been kicked into the long grass. Something of which Sir Charles and
Holt were only too well aware.

To avoid Holt having to carry around the bulky
OwlPhone, they had come to an arrangement whereby, except in a crisis, the Owl would
only use it to contact them for major communications twice a week, on Mondays
and Thursdays at 2 p.m. At other times the Owl would leave messages.

Before the wedding there had been the relatively
short message expressing the Owl’s dissatisfaction at the lack of progress and announcing
that there would be a major communication on the following Monday.

Bringing the phone with him, Holt arrived at
Sackville Street slightly beforehand and went straight up to see Sir Charles, who
stood up to greet him and congratulate him on the wedding.

‘No ghastly relatives. You see, working for the
service has some advantages.’

‘Thank you, Sir Charles, for coming. It was nice you
brought Sandra.’

‘She wanted to come – seems to have taken to you
in a motherly rather than a Moneypenny way. She feared we had lost you when you
disappeared from sight while undercover and grew quite concerned.’

‘Really,’ replied Holt, somewhat surprised by this
revelation, only to be caught off-balance by what Sir Charles was to say next.

‘Sorry you and Celia only had Saturday night and
Sunday for the honeymoon. Though I suppose your trip together to the Maldives had
some of the trappings. It’s said to be famous for honeymoons.’

Holt had not realized such close tabs were kept on
staff, not difficult with them both having travelled on the same flight to the
Maldives under their own names. The security people probably flagged up such trips
as a matter of routine. They knew that double agents would often arrange to
meet their handlers abroad, where surveillance was more difficult and extremely
costly. He wondered whether Cut-Glass was privy to their report – she had
given him a knowing smile with raised eyebrows on his return, even though that
had been on a different day than Celia.

It was approaching 2 p.m. The OwlPhone rang on the
dot, and Holt immediately pressed the Answer key, having made sure the Record
light was on. As usual it was the synthesized voice that spoke.

Many of the problems in the country arise from short-termism.
Well-meaning people trying to avoid, say, children suffering the consequences
of their parents’ stupidity, sloth or even extreme religious beliefs.

Thus impecunious mothers can blackmail society into
supporting five or more children and themselves because we cannot make the
children suffer.

Likewise mothers who allow their daughters to be mutilated
cannot be put in prison because the daughter herself would suffer, though in
that case political correctness may also be a factor.

Going to the extreme, one could say that when having AIDS was
a death sentence, before the development of new drugs to treat it and even help
prevent it, marking anyone HIV-positive likely to be sexually active – say by
having the letter ‘A’ tattooed on their forehead – was an option no one dared
contemplate.

Sounds awful and cruel, but it could have meant relatively
few people would even have had an ‘
A’
and many lives would have been saved. Of course, rather than the tattoo, one could
have easily used a more subtle marker.

No pain, no gain.

More to follow in ten minutes.

‘You know,’ said Sir Charles, ‘I am beginning to
think the Owl must be a highly educated, intelligent person with a logical mind,
like Enoch Powell or Lee Kuan Yew. Did you know that those two both got the
exceedingly rare distinction of being awarded double firsts
with a star
at Cambridge?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Look what Lee Kuan Yew made of Singapore!’

‘Yes, though when I was there,’ replied Holt, ‘I
heard their government’s campaign to persuade university-educated women
to have more children had failed.’

‘There’s a limit to what you can do in a democracy
– even in dictatorships – when it comes to procreation. Do you know that they
found that the best way to get people to have fewer children in some
underdeveloped countries was to provide electricity?’

‘No.’

‘Well, with electricity the people could have
televisions, and consequently not while away their time fornicating.’

‘That’s unforeseen consequences being positive
there, though not in England, where the welfare system results in people better
off not working at all. But, to return to the Owl, do you think we should look
for people with starred double firsts? I got a double first, but not a star.’

‘I would not go that far. There are hardly any
anyway. There’s no reason why someone clever but without exceptional academic
qualifications cannot be the Owl. He could be a hedge fund manager – or one of
us.

‘The point is,’ said Holt, ‘that the Owl wants
what many intelligent people more or less want. Can’t we get the government to
do more?’

‘If nothing is done,’ replied Sir Charles, ‘the
Owl may start thinking in terms of a coup, though making one work in this
country, with the unions and the lower ranks in the services and the police unlikely
to follow, would be virtually impossible. Also, there is no one of stature who
could be made the figurehead. No one respects anyone these days – least of all
politicians.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, there was talk of a coup when Wilson was
prime minister, and Mountbatten’s name was put forward as a possible interim
leader – not that he would have gone along with it. There is no one of his
stature or calibre nowadays.’

Their discussion was cut short by the OwlPhone
ringing again. As before, Holt pressed the Answer key after making sure the
call would be recorded.

Though I believe in ‘no pain, no gain,’ I think we can start
off by using the financial stick and carrot to make the changes we seek. After
all, it is the financial carrot that is largely responsible for the hordes
gathered at Calais.

There are some relatively painless things that can be done using
financial incentives and disincentives.
The first is to tackle the obesity epidemic by taxing sugar and salt, doubling
the tax when they are combined, as in breakfast cereals, soups, and tomato
ketchup. The government, whether it be Conservative or Labour, must stand up to
the food industry and refuse to deal with its lobbyists.
Soft drinks with large amounts of sugar would also need to be taxed.

That would be an incentive to reduce the amount in bread, which
is far higher than people realize and means they become addicted and fatter.
Finally, child abuse needs to be more broadly defined to include the
enslavement of children by devout parents who make them relentlessly study
religious texts. This should apply to Jews and Muslims alike.

No one proselytising should enjoy any social benefit. Limits
should be placed on faith schools to ensure pupils get a rounded education.

There were a number of other recommendations, some
easy and others virtually impossible to put into effect in a democracy, unless introduced
forcefully. One of the most problematic was the idea raised at the seminar on
the
Vessos
that there
should be weighted voting, with the votes of pensioners and some of those on
benefits having less weight. The Owl stressed his intention was not to
victimise such sections of society but to ensure that they could not electorally
sway society the wrong way.

The Owl said he would be conveying the same
demands to the prime minister and the media, and that he was informing Captain
Holt and Sir Charles as a courtesy and in the hope they could persuade the
government to take the necessary action, even though he did not expect 100 per cent
success.

With the prospect of less immediate activity on
the Owl front and unable to exert any influence himself, Holt was continuing
with his other work and was finally able to clock up a success, enhancing his
and Giraffe’s reputation.

The idea came up at one of their weekly Sackville
Street meetings, when he said, ‘Sir Charles, if I were a terrorist wanting to
do something drawing a lot of attention, I would go for the Shard.’

‘How would you go about it?’

‘The obvious way would be to go up to the
observation platform with a bomb. However, as everyone’s bags and handbags are
checked, an inside job would be virtually impossible. Anyway, bomb scenarios
are not really my remit.’

‘So what else would they do?’

‘Use the window cleaners – or rather, take their
places. Have a long banner made of extremely thin material so it would not be
difficult to bring it up in the cradle without drawing attention. Then, when half
the way up, attach the top of the banner to the glass and let it unfurl for thousands
to see. There would be photos in all the papers.’

Sir Charles, rather than informing MI5, sent his men
from Farringdon to keep watch on the off chance. One of them called in to say
there was some suspicious action, with two suspicious-looking individuals
having joined the window cleaners.

Sir Charles then set wheels in motion, informing
MI5 and the prime minister. In the end it was quite dramatic. On the day the
suspects came to work with a package, they were hauled up to clean the windows,
but the ropes kept pulling up their trestle until they reached the top, where,
to their surprise, they were arrested before they could achieve anything.