Free The Network by Jason Elliot Page A

to enter. I’m reminded of French high street banks where the customer is isolated for a few moments in a glassy pod before being able to escape. Then the door in front of me slides aside and I join Seethrough in a tall and spacious inner courtyard with tropical-looking plants overhanging a cream-coloured marble floor. There are broad corridors radiating from a pair of central lift shafts. Kew Gardens, I’m thinking, meets Terence Conran. The plants are plastic.
    Seethrough watches my reaction. ‘Welcome to Babylon-on-Thames.’ He grins. He’s visibly proud of his workplace. We take the lift to an upper floor, where the pale marble turns to grey floor tiles. Halfway along an anonymous-looking corridor we come to an empty briefing room identified by a letter and a number. Seethrough offers me a chair at a large oval table with expensive veneer, from which the cables of two slim computer monitors and a pair of complicated-looking telephones run into plugs recessed into the floor. He picks up a handset and says, ‘Ready now,’ and a few minutes later we’re joined by a woman carrying a handful of variously coloured files.
    We sit down and Seethrough ignores me for a few minutes as he types at a keyboard.
    ‘What’s the reg on your car?’ he asks and types it in. ‘Look at that.’ He grins again. ‘We’ve got you on camera 150 times since you left home.’ His eyes are glued to the screen. ‘You’re actually speeding in this one. Eighty-two miles an hour. I didn’t know your Unimog could go that fast. What were you doing in Amesbury?’
    ‘Petrol,’ I say. ‘And it’s not a Unimog.’
    He peers more closely at the screen, and his fingers tap and scroll at the keyboard.
    ‘You bought thirty-five pounds of four-star. And a Mars bar. Bloody clever, this point of sale stuff,’ he mutters, then looks up. His assistant is standing beside him.
    ‘Sorry. This is Stella,’ he says. ‘Inside joke.’ She’s about fifty, slim and slightly built, and has a gaunt sad-looking face with large dark eyes. She puts the files on the table, glances at me and utters a timid hello. Then she leaves the room.
    ‘Right, let’s take care of the paperwork,’ he says, opening a Manilla file and pushing it towards me. A document marked top secret in big red letters glares back. It’s a copy of the best bits of the Official Secrets Act.
    ‘Haven’t I already signed this?’ I ask.
    ‘Yes, but it’s got a bit more draconian since then, I’m afraid,’ he says. ‘Now it authorises us to kill you and sell your children.’
    I let him know with a look that this isn’t a good joke.
    ‘I’m sorry, I forgot. In Washington, aren’t they? Mother was American, wasn’t she?’
    ‘Yes.’ As if he didn’t know.
    ‘Rotten luck. Well, just sign the bloody thing so we can get on. I can’t brief you until you sign.’
    As soon as I’ve signed, Seethrough begins a short lecture about the Service, sparing me what he calls the grisly details but wanting, he says, to give me an outline of where the operation he’s planning fits within the intelligence jigsaw. Seethrough’s fellow Intelligence Branch staff, of whom there are fewer than I imagined, divide their efforts between a number of regional controllerates and another called Global Issues. The combined work of the controllerates is carried out by P and R officers, standing for production and requirements, a division of labour, roughly speaking, between the first half and second half of what is called the intelligence cycle. I’ve already been introduced to the idea in the army during my stint with the Green Slime, as members of the Intelligence Corps are affectionately known on account of their spinach-coloured berets.
    Intelligence is broadly described as having four main phases: raw intelligence is first gathered or collected by a variety of means and technologies, then converted or collated into a form useable by analysts. It is then disseminated to the right people at the