Debatable Space Read online

  Tom saw that I was nervous, indeed panicky, but he reassured me enormously with his gentle, old-fashioned manners. He adopted me as his “sexy boffin” and treated me with a courtesty and respect I had never before known.

  Within a month, this gorgeous hunk of a man was also fucking me. I could hardly believe my luck.

  A week after that first meeting, he introduced me to the rest of the team, who were based in an office near Tower Bridge in London. There was Tosh, a beer-bellied Glaswegian, with a fondness for practical jokes. There was Mickey “Hurly-Burly” Hurley, who was a wide boy, and a wisecracker par excellence. There was Michiyo, a sleek graduate who was a martial artist and languages specialist. “Blacks” was the computer geek; Rachel was the sergeant, the team leader, the sorting-everyone-out one; Natasha was a Ghanaian princess with more charisma than any one person deserved to possess.

  We became a tightly knit team, a collision of unlikely opposites. I was teased for my sensible shoes and air of restraint; they loved to call me the Prof, and shock me with their bawdy humour. Our squad room was a hive swarming with foul invective and casual insults. It could not have been more different to the academic environment to which I was accustomed. I learned to use the word “motherfucka” as an endearment. I discovered that “twat” could be an adjective. I even, to my own amusement if no one else’s, developed the knack of cursing in iambic pentameters.

  Five astonishing years followed. The aim of our squad was to identify, harass and psychologically destroy the world’s top criminals. These were our “target nominals”. They included South American drug dealers, Mafia capi, Eastern European oligarchs, Chinese Triad bosses, white-collar fraudsters, coordinators of paedophile rings, gangster paramilitaries, death squads, and more many more. There were no jurisdictional rules; we could operate in America, Europe, Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa – anywhere. There were no rules of fair play either; once we had targeted a top criminal, we used all the means at our disposal to subvert and shatter them.

  Hate mail.

  Random tax audits.

  Psychological game playing.

  And, most commonly of all… Mental warfare. The art of mind-fucking.

  For instance, Wong-Kei, the Chinese Triad boss, worked out of Beijing and came from a long dynasty of gangsters, people traders and pimps. One hot March morning Tom briefed us on his history. We watched videos of his victims. We studied flowcharts of his criminal empire. And we made our plans.

  First, Michiyo went deep undercover in his organisation. She became a drug mule, carrying heroin in condoms that she swallowed and carried in her colon for days on end. It was a horrendously dangerous assignment, and we had a team of paramedics constantly trailing her. But as a result of her courage, we were able to get access to the inner reaches of Wong-Kei’s organisation. Michiyo never met the boss himself, but she met his underlings, and she visited all the hangouts and bars used by members of his crew. And, everywhere she went, Michiyo sprinkled microscopic self-replicating bugging devices. Every hand she shook, every cheek she kissed, she left behind a trail of molecule-sized radio transmitters that could only be removed from the subject’s skin by intensive steam jets and chemical baths.

  Before long we had an audio bank giving us the ability to instantly eavesdrop on the conversations of all Wong-Kei’s henchlings. Michiyo herself was rushed to hospital to have an enema treatment that flushed out the deadly condoms. For the next six months, she walked with a stagger and slightly bowed legs.

  Meanwhile Tosh and Rachel coordinated a surveillance operation that allowed us to create a compellingly detailed psychological portrait of Wong-Kei and his family and his many lovers and illegitimate children. Blacks coordinated the whole affair, creating computer patterns of bewildering complexity that uncovered hidden connections between the smallest facts.

  And then I went to work. I read the phone-tap transcripts, I studied the photographs of his daily movements. I read his emails, I scrolled through photocopies of his private coded diary. I learned the life stories of his former lovers, his present lovers, his friends, his employees, his children. I psychoanalysed his parents and his brothers and sisters and childhood friends.

  And I converted all my data into complex emergence equations, and came up with a game plan to destroy him.

  My tack was to play on the fact that Wong-Kei was deeply superstitious. So we haunted his daily life with bad omens. We poisoned his meals with psychotropic drugs, to induce hallucinations and panic attacks. We forged apocalyptically bad horoscopes and smuggled them into his home. We trained black cats to walk across his path. We installed a mirror in his favourite restaurant that did not show his reflection. (But then removed it before other diners noticed.) We stole the bones of his grandparents and crushed them into ash and sprinkled them on him as he slept. (Later, during a routine police DNA test, Wong-Kei was stunned to learn that the skin of his face was tainted with the DNA of his long-dead grandmother.)

  Then we moved to stage 2. We spread rumours that he was a sexual pervert who had abused his grandchildren; and we watched his marriage shrivel.

  I knew this would happen. I knew his wife was already suspicious of him, and feared he was sleeping with under-age prostitutes. And I knew also that Wong-Kei was haunted by sexually explicit paedophile dreams that made him deeply anxious about his own sexuality. (This was on the basis of an employment questionnaire he completed at the age of twenty-three, together with a conversation with a man he had just met in a bar in Beijing when he was thirty-nine and had just consumed three large Remy Martin brandies, together with my deep psychoanalytic reading of a short story he wrote as a nineteen-year-old at university.) And I knew that Wong-Kei would never be able to sit down with his wife and honestly discuss the lies being told about him. His pride would not allow it. His father had always told him, “Never discuss your personal affairs with your wife. Merely tell her what you are going to do.” And those instincts, so deeply ingrained, made him deeply vulnerable – at a time when the constant bad omens he was encountering made him fearful of everything.

  And thus, at every stage of our campaign, I was guided by a knowledge of the man so intense, so detailed, I felt at times like his God, meticulously assessing him at the Last Judgement. I knew his favourite colours, the flowers that annoyed him, the words that grated on him, the fact that he loathed having people sneeze in his presence. I knew his every psychological blip and blemish.

  Our slow campaign of persecution worked. Wong-Kei became forgetful, bad-tempered. He neglected his ageing mother. He slapped and brutalised his younger sister, then abased himself in remorse. He started to forget vital facts – on several occasions, he struggled to recall his own favourite beer. And he found his libido dipping dangerously.

  And, as Wong-Kei’s mind slowly unravelled, so his judgement started to slip. His normally tight security measures became more slapdash. He began to feud and bicker with other Triad bosses. He accused a close associate of being a queer. Dissension sprang up in the ranks.

  This is when our Pick Up team came into action. They launched a conventional “sting” operation against Wong-Kei and allowed him to implicate himself. Bereft of his usually astute judgement, Wong-Kei blundered and floundered and was easily suckered by the crudest of police set-ups. And when enough video and forensic evidence had been gathered, Wong-Kei was arrested and charged by officials working for the World Police Federation. Our people weren’t involved, we were never seen, never gave evidence in court. We did not exist.

  And even Wong-Kei himself had no idea that his personal failures and weaknesses had been induced. He blamed himself. He assumed that he had been going through a mid-life crisis. Half-way through his trial, he committed suicide, and his organisation was taken over by his nearest descendant, Billy Shen. Billy we knew of old. He was one of our best informants. And so we ran him, and through him we ran the biggest Triad gang in the Far East, for two whole years. And then we made some more arrests, let Billy go, and started up a massive surve
illance operation. Slowly his empire crumbled – thanks chiefly to information supplied to us directly by Billy himself, the supposed gang boss.

  A power vacuum was created; other gangsters began taking over Wong-Kei’s wrecked empire. New maggots replaced the maggots we had killed. But never again did a Triad boss have the unfettered power and authority once enjoyed by Wong-Kei.

  And our work continued… and with each new assignment, I grew in confidence and expertise. I became a pioneer of a new kind of criminal investigation. I was the master of computer systems which could describe and collate every character flaw and foible in even the most complex individual. I would study witness statements and learn the target’s fears, his or her favourite fantasy during masturbation, the content of the websites the target had visited in the preceding ten years, the clothes the target wore, the target’s love affairs and friendships and secret dreams and aspirations.

  One of my favourite jobs involved the “virtual destruction” of an eminent merchant banker who for decades had been engaged in money laundering and the selling of stolen artworks. His name was Robert Roxborough.

  Once again the team set forth to acquire all the information we needed. Michiyo and Tosh went to work in an art gallery owned by a Portuguese philanthropist called Ramon. Phone taps were placed on all of Roxborough’s employees and families and the prostitutes he employed were astutely analysed and interrogated. And, after all of this, I put the information into my people matrix and came up with a strategy to destroy him. I quickly decided that Roxborough was too astute and well balanced to be mentally undermined in the way that Wong-Kei was. So I went for a more subliminal approach.

  I arranged for every painting in Roxborough’s private gallery to be smeared with the aroma taken from a dog’s sweat gland, mixed with human sexual pheromones. Then, for ten solid weeks, I arranged for him to be followed every day by dogs super-saturated in the same aroma. Wherever he walked, the dogs followed. So he stopped going into parks and out into the streets, in order to avoid the dogs. But in his gallery too, the same stench in the back of his mouth stifled him. And yet, though it disgusted him, the smell made him rampantly horny. Every time he looked at a Poussin or Jackson Pollock or the work of some gifted new artist he was championing, he was overwhelmed with a sick sexual frenzy.

  At the end of ten weeks, this sad specimen didn’t know whether to fuck his paintings, or collect feral dogs.

  And as a consequence, Roxborough developed a phobia for artworks of every form and description, and quietly resigned from the art-theft game.

  Then I had his pocket picked; and in the lab, I planted a slow-release gland to disperse a different aroma onto the banknotes and credit cards he carried in his wallet. Then the wallet was restored to his pocket, less than twenty minutes later. The gland did its work; the faint but impossible-to-ignore smell seeped on to his money and credit cards. This particular stench was a brilliant concoction made out of putrefied maggots and mashed-up human corpse flesh. And so from this point on, Roxborough would associate money with decay and death.

  Eventually, we had him arrested him for a series of offences – we had more than enough evidence stockpiled. But we kept the game going as long as we possibly could. Because punishing this man wasn’t enough – first, we wanted to spoil the bastard’s fun.

  Then we moved our attention to the East. The Eastern European oligarchs were divided into four major factions, bonded by a common interest despite different ethnic backgrounds. They observed a strict truce interrupted by random assassinations. It was a flawed peace, but it worked.

  So we raped a gangster’s daughter.

  The “rape” was, of course, a virtual one. The daughter’s name was Anya; we paid her a million dollars to make up a story of being abused and raped by a dozen Russian gangsters. Then she quietly slipped to the West and made a new home in Minnesota.

  Anya had in fact, according to the police medical report, been brutally sodomised over a number of years and had survived several bouts of gonorrhoea. This, we deduced, was a product of her father’s wayward notions of child-rearing. But nonetheless, the father, Grigori Valentin, when told by his daughter of her gang rape, was deeply outraged at the insult to his first-born child. And when independent evidence came his way that the leader of Faction B had authorised and actually participated in Anya’s rape, Valentin went ballistic. Gang war was declared. Most of the members of Faction B were bloodily assassinated.

  Then Faction C received evidence that Valentin had been informing on them to the American FBI, and Valentin himself was brutally murdered.

  After six months of bloody warfare, Faction D quietly stepped in to scoop up the spoils. By this time, however, our surveillance devices were planted deep, and we were able to build up a comprehensive case against Faction D. Mass arrests ensued and the age of gang oligarchy was over.

  Thus, peace came to Eastern Europe. By the year 2055, democratic governments independent of organised crime were sweeping across the whole of Eastern Europe. Albania became a beacon of prosperity, famed for its nanotechnology and spellbinding modern architecture.

  And Anya Valentin died at the age of 104, renowned as a school principal of deadly asperity and feared wit, admired and loved by generations of schoolchildren in the little Minnesotan town she had made her home.

  I so vividly recall those squad-room days; and I still have audio tapes of the banter and the briefings which, in my later years with the squad, I downloaded every night from the microchip in my hearing aid. Hurly-Burly had a tender side, he was always very protective of me, and had the sweetest friendship with the stunningly unsociable and socially disconnected Blacks. Natasha was fierce, full of rages, but learned to treat me like a maiden aunt rather than as a sexual rival. (That woman was such a whore…)

  And I remember Michiyo, at our office party, singing a cappella karaoke hits from the 1970s, with an unexpectedly powerful soul voice. I remember Rachel, the day she was shot in an abortive arrest attempt, laughing it off in her muttery casual way. She was back at work in two weeks; she used to love taking her trousers off to show off the scar on her left buttock. And there was Tosh, a borderline alcoholic who regularly forged interview transcripts which ended with the words, “At this point DI Greig battered the wee fecking suspect.” Tosh had been suspended three times for tampering with official documentation, and each time he laughed loudly and long. Tosh was, I learned many years later, a bigamist; but both his wives were bitterly neglected. He spent his life in the office, with his team. That was his world.

  I can conjure them all up with a simple thought-prompt, even without the aid of the audio tapes. I can feel their presence, their energy, their stupid scurrilous humour. And I can still vividly recall Tom making love to me, naked and panting, orgasming, whimpering, sleeping afterwards. Just with a thought, I can put him there again, even though it is… oh, so many years since we last met or spoke. He died, of a stroke, at the age of ninety-two. I didn’t attend the funeral. I wasn’t, by that point, attending funerals.

  But while he lived, he had such life. Such zest. The stories he told… his effortless assumption that you would want to listen to whatever it was he wanted to say. His command of a room. “This is a really good story,” he’d say calmly, and pause. And the room would hush until he was ready to tell it.

  After five years the squad was disbanded, amid murmurs of disgrace and corruption. Tom was, of course, fabulously corrupt, and left the force a wealthy man. I resigned too and went to live with him in Dorking, England. Within six months we were driving each other insane. So I caught a plane to Florence, to swot up on my art history.

  And it was there, in the Piazza Signoria, looking towards the loggia where the stone Perseus was lopping off the Gorgon’s head, that I felt myself becoming overwhelmed. My breath rushed into my throat. I was hyperventilating. I was in pain. For a moment, I assumed it was Stendhal Syndrome, that I was simply overcome by too much joy.

  The truth was more prosaic. I speed-dialled f
or an ambulance and a cardiac arrest kit. Then I hit the ground – hard. Paramedics were with me in minutes, and certified me clinically dead.

  I was put on a life-support machine. The ventilator kept my brain alive, as my heart shuddered and spasmed. I had died, but now I was reborn.

  And so began the next phase of my long long life.

  I never wanted to live for ever.

  But there’s a good chance that I will.

  Health has always fascinated me. Largely, I suppose, because of my lack of it. When I was five I had to wear glasses. When I was nineteen, I started to suffer from hearing loss, and from the age of thirty-one I was regularly using a hearing aid. And, of course, my skin was regularly subject to burning and scarring in the light of the sun.

  So I tried to turn these weaknesses into advantages. After years of wearing chunky glasses, I was eventually able to purchase a pair of toric multi-function soft disposable contact lenses that fully corrected my vision. These were “smart” lenses, able to adjust on a daily and even hourly basis for the needs of the eye, and the environs. With these lenses, I could see perfectly at night; I could read fine print that was invisible to 99 per cent of people with 20-20 vision; my eyes were never dry or dusty; I could even, with some fiddling, amplify my vision to the level of a pair of cheap binoculars.

  These lenses cost me almost six months’ salary, but I felt it was worth it. Then, when my deafness got worse, I cajoled the university’s medical insurance department into paying for me to have a pair of inner-ear hearing aids to replace the chunky clip-ons I’d originally been allocated. These sleek plastic tubes slipped easily into the ear itself, and moulded perfectly to the contours of my inner ear passage. Ever since they’d first been introduced – in the early years of the twenty-first century – these digital hearing aids were computer-adjusted and tailor-made to amplify only those frequencies that the wearer had difficulty hearing. So the sound quality was flawless. And, with some fine tuning, I was able to improve the accuracy of these hearing aids so that I could follow a conversation taking place at a table on the opposite side of a crowded restaurant. I could eavesdrop both sides of someone’s mobile phone conversation. I could, literally, hear a pin drop.