Free Debatable Space by Philip Palmer Page B

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     astonishment, offered me a job as scientific adviser to a worldwide Crime Task Force devoted to the neutralisation and incarceration
     of target nominals – the “big fish” of international crime. This was of course based on the main body of my book, the case
     studies of psychopaths and criminals – not the philosophical underpinnings, which the coppers all found impenetrable. But
     as far as these senior policemen were concerned, I was a “boffin”, an expert. And so they wanted me to join their crack crime
     investigation team.
    I said yes immediately. I was so excited.
    I was a thieftaker!
I bought a leather bomber jacket.
    And I looked like an idiot in it. But it seemed to be the right style code for my new job, my new vocation.
    My boss in the crime-busting squad was Detective Superintendent Tom Greig, a kindly, tall, powerful, overwhelming giant of
     a man. I met him in a café near Victoria, and watched with goggle-eyed respect as he ate not one but two cooked breakfasts
     in front of me, without ever pausing for breath or ceasing his rat-a-tat briefing on what my job would require.
    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