Trajectory

By John S. Barker

The truth is, the Cold War didn't end. The truth is, freedom is a lie. Even today, a handful of men and women control the destinies of civilizations and cultures. Jake Grant was one of those men, a soldier in service to truth, an inside witness to the geopolitical transformation of the world.

In this darkly philosophical tale of espionage, Jake Grant recounts his life as an assassin in the decade leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the shift in world power.

Jake reveals the foundation of a plot, formulated in the 1970s, to engineer the destruction of the Soviet Union, and the struggle of his partner, Stewart Hunt, to stop it. Twisted together through nearly half a century of lies are the lives and loves of the men and women who worked, suffered and died for a fabricated secret cause founded on one man's personal vendetta. Getting to the truth means getting to know Jake. Knowing Jake means confronting the face of a psychopath, assassin and liar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781329853041

Book preview

Title Graphic

Copyright

First digital edition published by Anarchy Books, September 1, 2012

TRAJECTORY - Second edition. Copyright © 2016, John S. Barker. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced without permission of the author, except for brief quotations for review purposes.

ISBN: 978-1-329-85304-1

This is a work of fiction. Places, characters, names and incidents are fictitious, and are unrelated to any actual events, or persons living or dead.

Liquid Metal Press Logo  Liquid Metal Press

http://www.liquidmetalpress.com

Contact [e-mail]

Dedication

Dedicated to the memory of my father, Cedric Barker (1916-2014), my mother, Marie Barker (1913-1998), my brother, Robert Barker (1947-2011), and my wife, Janice Ristow (1960-2015).

Epigraph

‘In doing this you will cause pain to many people.’ – I know; and I know also that I shall have to suffer twofold for it: once from pity at their suffering, and then through the revenge they will take on me. Nonetheless, it is no less necessary that I should do as I do.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak

May 1, 2007

Dear N.

Happy May Day. Ha ha. We came to an agreement about an hour ago, so this project is a go. Hope you have deep pockets, oh fearless one.

I can tell you – and you’ve said so yourself – this is terrifying. I don’t know what to expect. I can’t say that I trust him, but I can’t ignore the opportunity to do this, either, can I?

I’m exhausted. I’ve been trying to make final arrangements all day long, even though I have only the slimmest of itineraries.

I’ve been treating this whole thing like a last-minute permanent relocation, so you can imagine the chaos my life’s in. Thanks. Much appreciated. Maybe I can return the favor someday.

I’m flying out in about an hour and a half for Buenos Aires. I go from here to Denver, then to D.C., and then on to B.A. He says he’ll contact me on Tuesday next week with further instructions. I’ll try to keep in touch, but I can’t give you any commitment to schedules and all that. And don’t expect this will be cheap, either, so please don’t go cutting off my expense account, at least not until it’s up into the seven figures. Ha ha. Not to make too fine a point of it, but this was your idea, right? I fully expect you’ll continue to back me up. You always have before. But I don’t expect to hear from you until this is all done with.

I have two photos of him that I’ll text you. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t aware I was taking them. At this point, they are the only photos of him I know of, and certainly, they are the only ones taken within the past thirty years. They aren’t great quality, but they are clear enough. Even if he did know I was taking them, he must not have cared, because he didn’t make any noise about it.

I look at those photos, and I find it all so hard to believe. This guy doesn’t look like an assassin. I know that sounds ridiculous. What does an assassin look like? Good ones must look like you or me. He must be close to sixty-five now. I guess the older you get, the more innocent you look. That’s true of old war criminals, too, isn’t it?

We were down at the port, last night. It was quite cold, and the water was inky black. The port lights lit up the docks, of course, but all the same, it’s an eerie sensation when you look out over the water into that void, with him standing there, just inches from you.

We talked about the interviews in general. He wanted to know what I was interested in the most, what I was hoping to find out. I lied. I think he knew right away.

He stood there, looking out over the water as he asked me, looking out into the blackness, and just kept on looking for the longest time after I answered, and after standing there for what seemed like an eternity, silent, he said something that made me feel sick to my stomach. He turned to me, leaning on the railing on the pier, and then he pointed his right index finger at me, touched my forehead, just between the eyes, and he said, Taking everything into consideration, do you think you make one iota of difference? He just held his finger there for a few seconds, and then he tapped my forehead with his finger, three times.

I went weak, and I thought to myself, you imbecile. What have you got yourself into? Well, I don’t know the answer to that.

Regards, J.

First Session: June 24, 2007

Thank you for agreeing to this. Can you tell me why you agreed?

I think it’s time for people to understand what happened then.

About the end of the Cold War?

The Cold War didn’t end. That’s the first misconception.

But the Soviet Union fell.

The bear fell asleep for a while. That’s all.

Why was the Department of Foreign Influence Studies formed?

It started as an offshoot of the Agency, but no one acknowledged it. Originally, it was supposed to be a special committee that reported to the president, but the 40 Committee was already doing that, and the Department was completely separate. Its history is pretty sketchy. There are almost no records of it left.

How long were you in DFIS?

About ten years. They started trying to recruit me in 1970. I did some time in Vietnam –

Intelligence work?

No.

And you were Canadian. How did a Canadian get involved in Vietnam?

I went and volunteered.

Really?

Around thirty thousand Canadians did, by some estimates. Some say more. Not everyone thought the war was wrong.

What did you do in the army?

I was a rifleman.

You were right on the front line.

Yes.

Why did DFIS want to recruit you?

I suppose I had the right mind-set.

When did you join DFIS?

That was in seventy.

Did they train you to be an assassin?

The army did most of that kind of training – how to kill someone – so I would say the answer is no. [He pauses to light a cigarette.] My training in DFIS was more like surveillance training. And most of that was in how not to be seen, and how not to leave evidence. Not exactly ninja training, though. [He laughs.] There were two types of operatives then: the minds, and the bodies. The thinkers and the doers. There was a balance in every op, and the two of you were in this thing very closely with your handler, who was always standing back, like an overseer, judging how you were performing. So we had this kind of trinity we worked in, all the time. You had to have this structure.

When was your first real mission?

I’d say it was during CHAOS.

That was what?

The name of a program the Agency started in sixty-seven, to spy on American citizens with the intention of determining how strong foreign influence was being exerted within the country.

So you’re saying that DFIS was an outgrowth of Operation CHAOS?

Yes.

So what happened after CHAOS was shut down?

It wasn’t shut down. DFIS took ownership.

How could you go about spying on Americans without some form of congressional order? Surely the processes were in place, especially if there was any funding from the government.

There was no direct government funding or involvement. After DFIS started, we operated autonomously. The Agency funneled funds to DFIS to get it going. It had a black ops branch already, and the CIA Act made the Agency completely non-reporting, so funding wasn’t a problem. We had to do it that way because one of the big concerns at that time was infiltration into the Agency by foreign operatives. So we needed a special group to monitor what was going on.

What did you monitor?

People in the Agency, mostly, at first. Operatives in the field, people in administration. We continued compiling the information. CHAOS proved that there was a strong foreign influence on the intelligence community in this country, so DFIS was charged with internal covert operations to eliminate these kinds of threats.

So DFIS was breaching the privacy and civil rights of American citizens – civilian citizens.

In order for us to figure out whether double agents had infiltrated our own intelligence community, we had to potentially violate some civil rights of some citizens. Look. We were involved in a war. No, let me rephrase that. We were involved in several wars. The US was under attack, in a very real sense, from Middle Eastern, Asian, Central American and Russian enemies, attacks from all over the globe. Some of those enemies were moving to undermine Western security. Don’t think for a minute that the anti-war protest movement hadn’t been infiltrated by foreign operatives. Our own intelligence community had been infiltrated. This had been going on since the Second World War.

The intelligence community is the eyes and ears and hands of the country. Hoover used to speak about how we needed people who were willing and ready to fight for the morals and freedom of the nation. That’s what we did.

Does the end justify the means?

Sometimes it does. We were highly trained. We were experts in our field. We had the knowledge, and the skill, to make correct assessments. This was not Wild West justice. This was not a bunch of gunslingers throwing drunks out of bars, and hanging cattle rustlers and horse thieves without a trial. We were experts.

Let’s talk about that. What was it you actually did when you started with DFIS?

Surveillance. Someone who gathered information and passed it along to those who needed it. I was set up in Toronto as the owner of a club downtown in the King and Front Street area. We used legitimate businesses all the time. They generate revenue, and they also establish communication channels critical for intelligence gathering.

I know that was true of the CIA at the time. Mostly those apparently legitimate businesses were huge investments – airlines, that kind of thing.

There were small businesses as well. Lots of them. The kind of work I was doing – well, that’s a different type of clientele. And by then –

Which was?

About 1973. At that point I was making lots of contacts, both in the US and Canada, and overseas as well.

These contacts were for what?

A personal network. People you could depend on outside of, well, more official channels. Deception is all around you, everywhere, at every level. We always sit at the boundary between those we trust and those who are strangers. You need people you can trust.

You know what? When people are being deceitful, when they lie to you, you can smell it. I’m serious. It changes the way they smell. Just like when you’re under stress. When your body starts metabolizing adrenaline, it changes your breath, and it changes the smell of your sweat. So, one of the things that I learned early on is that you don’t wear after-shave, deodorant, or any other colognes or perfumes. If you meet someone who wears those, you know they are liars. They are covering something up. In order to trust someone, they have to be clean and free from any masks like that. Over time, that’s the only way you can be sure they aren’t double-crossing you.

The way you dress, the way you groom, the way you work out, the places you go, the people you meet. There are lots of times someone I trusted was compromised by someone else, like in a romantic situation. Like wives who know their husbands are cheating on them. They start smelling like the other person. You know you can’t trust them when they start to smell different. [He stubs out his cigarette, and lights another.]

Doesn’t smoking have the same effect on smell?

Not only that, it deadens your senses, too – taste and smell. That’s why I didn’t smoke then. No one I trusted did. [He laughs.] My mother smoked.

Well, that seems pretty telling, actually, even if you were joking. You seem to be saying that family bonds did count for something in your life.

That doesn’t mean you can trust them.

That seems contradictory.

What I mean is that once you are on the inside of this war, everyone else in your life must disappear. You take a personal oath. You can’t talk about the work. If you do, you run the risk of drawing them in. If you love them, you leave them out. If you don’t love them, you leave them out anyway. You isolate yourself from them, to protect the both of you. That’s why you can only have trust with other people on the inside.

You keep mentioning the war.

People think that by the eighties the Cold War was over. It’s simply not true. In fact, the Cold War is being waged even today. It’s as real as any overt conflict, including terrorist attacks.

You have to understand that in terms of global conflict, what pays the biggest dividends is knowing which trigger to pull, and when to pull it. Our soldiers, covert or otherwise, are not traitors. They are, so to speak, part of society’s immune system. And, just like the body’s immune system, they can ferret out invaders, including internal ones – the cancer cells. But they are not themselves invaders, or cancers.

That is not to say another country’s intelligence forces didn’t back a mission to make sure al-Qaeda succeeded, for example. And it also doesn’t mean those who needed to know about 9/11 didn’t know. I’m sure they did know. I’m also sure that the risks were weighed. Oh, you could argue about faulty intelligence, or breakdowns in communication. But chances are, the response you saw to 9/11 was calculated to be what was required.

But what about corrupt governments? What about administrations that trick the country into doing what, in your analogy, amounts to an allergic reaction – the body attacking itself?

Governments wage wars, sometimes even on their own citizens, but they don’t win wars. Wars are won and lost by individuals, not governments. At its most fundamental level, every war is immensely personal, because every war comes down to a line, in a desert, in the air, on the sea, wherever, where one man or woman stands toe-to-toe against another. Smart bombs and drones notwithstanding, wars are not won by technology. They are won by men and women who believe in the rightness of the act they are executing. They are won by a bayonet, a bullet or a stranglehold. They are won – and lost – by the individual’s conviction that I am right and you are wrong. I am just and you are unjust. I am free and you are an oppressor.

Governments tell individuals those things, sometimes, to convince them to fight. Sometimes they effectively brainwash people into believing that.

Who in the government does that?

The military, the agencies, like the CIA or DFIS.

Those aren’t the government. Those are the soldiers.

Isn’t that just semantics? Those are institutions controlled by the government, instituted to defend the government and society at large.

The government has very little to do with it, actually. The ideology of a nation transcends governments. Ultimately, it is our culture that instills ideals in individuals. It is bred into the members of its society. People know right from wrong. Just as you can tell when an evil drug lord does wrong, you know that a surgeon does right. That doesn’t require analysis to figure out. And it doesn’t require someone to brainwash you. You’ve been raised to know what is right and what is wrong, from your cultural perspective. All anyone has to do to manipulate that is to be aware of it. That’s why propaganda is so easy and powerful within a nation, but not outside of it. It’s easy to peddle falsehoods to your own countrymen. You just emphasize what you need to, to confirm what they already believe.

But governments can be oppressive. They can be corrupt. People may know right from wrong, but corruption can radically distort cultural ideologies, can’t they?

The ideology of oppression is still a cultural one. People in oppressive cultures have been bred and raised with it as part of their life. That’s what is normal to them.

That sounds like you’re saying people want to be oppressed.

They probably do. Human nature is fundamentally self-preserving, not self-destructive. Each culture has its own pragmatic solution to the problem of survival. Totalitarianism succeeds, when it succeeds, because the culture allows it to.

That’s grossly simplistic. Often it is the greedy ruler who uses covert operations to gain the power required to subjugate a nation’s people, regardless of what the people want.

When totalitarianism succeeds, it rarely succeeds for a long time. By that I mean generations. When it does succeed for generations, then the culture wants it to succeed because it works for them. The dictator becomes a god. The dictator becomes someone who has understood how to balance oppression with provision. By providing the necessities of life, including the required ideological ones, the good dictator can maintain a totalitarian regime by convincing the people that the alternative is worse. That’s why Castro worked so well in Cuba, but Idi Amin did not work well in Uganda.

Both men were revolutionaries who used force to overthrow their respective governments. By definition, that’s treason.

A successful revolution is never treason. It’s reform. The only way that kind of reform can work is if the people have chosen it for themselves, through a cultural imperative.

Cultures that do not permit choice can never have a successful, enduring revolution. At the same time, cultures that have made decisions based on freedoms, such as the freedom of choice, sometimes require soldiers to protect their freedoms, even when the protection they are offering may infringe on that very same freedom.

I’m confused. On the one hand you seem to be saying that freedom of choice is a moral imperative. On the other, you are saying that the soldiers of democracy, especially covert ones, are permitted to intervene in a free society.

To preserve and protect that society from itself, yes. Moral correctness in a culture does not mean individuals, as individuals, are necessarily moral. The principles of the culture can be correct. That doesn’t imply that all members of a society are. Disease can spread in a healthy body. The body may appear healthy for the most part. If the disease goes untreated, it can be devastating. The body may know the best way to look after itself, but disease may prevent it from doing so.

And that was the purpose of DFIS?

Yes.

So the Department was a morally correct institution?

Yes.

Absolutely?

Yes. There are moral absolutes. There are moral imperatives. There are cultural imperatives. There is, in fact, a right way to think, and a wrong way to think. There is a right way to act and a wrong way to act.

So it is right to kill?

Soldiers, especially covert ones, are acting to keep the nation safe – from itself, as well as from other forces – and that sometimes, not always, but sometimes, self-defense requires preemptive strikes. Sometimes you know when an attack is coming before it happens, so you take control to stop it. That’s why covert wars save lives.

The reason we do what we do is that we believe it to be right. The infantryman, the rifleman, doesn’t require that. He may also believe it, but what is required is that he obeys direct orders. His believing in what he is doing is secondary to doing what he is told. We’re different.

When did DFIS start looking at expanding its influence into other nations?

That would have been about 1976. It wasn’t in the best interest of the nation to allow foreign governments to attempt to control domestic or global affairs. We all knew terrorism was on the rise. It started with a rash of commercial airline hijackings. Then there was the Munich Olympics. We knew that these activities were well organized, and backed by international forces that were attempting to destabilize the West. Disease can come from within, or from without. You need defenses against both.

Sometimes, you have to strike first. Sometimes you have to strike even before the President knows that a strike is necessary. You can’t accomplish that kind of thing through the Agency. Even its black ops aren’t black enough. That’s why you need something that is so well covered that not even the President knows about it.

But how can you do that?

The Department of Foreign Influence Studies appeared to be a quasi-government institution, or a lobby group, or maybe a blend of both. It did do actual work, published position papers, things like that. I don’t know who read them, or even if they were circulated outside Washington.

Who wrote them?

Most were authored by Graham Ferris. He was the Deputy Director of DFIS.

Who was the director?

Harold Farthing. But it was Ferris who really drove things.

I’ve got a photocopy of a page which I think is from one of those reports.

[He takes it and looks at it quickly.]

Yes, that’s the kind of thing they would have been doing then. I would never have seen these kinds of things. But they would have done this kind of report and taken extracts from them and published them to make it appear as if DFIS was doing some kind of legitimate research. I was focused on other things as well at this time.

What kinds of things?

We were planning several missions.

What kinds of missions?

Different kinds. Intelligence gathering, surveillance, assassination. There was a lot going on around that time.

Who were you planning to assassinate?

Many people.

Who was Stewart Hunt?

He was my partner. We were both Victories. He was the mind; I was the body. He was Victory One. I was Victory Two. The executioner.

What is a Victory?

Victory was the code name for operatives tasked with assassinations. There were twelve two-man teams in all. Our partners were our life. They were the ones we trusted first and last. [He puts out his cigarette, and exhales the last puff of smoke, almost a huff.]

What was going on at that time?

In what sense? Politically?

In any sense you’d care to answer.

Globally, we were at war, a war that was edging toward the certain domination of the Soviet Union over the West. You see, we weren’t actually winning the Cold War. And we hadn’t really learned anything from Vietnam, either. We hadn’t learned that cultural conflicts superseded the term of an administration. We hadn’t learned that we had to think in terms of twenty, fifty, a hundred years, not two, or five or ten, that conflicts had transcended what could be accomplished by conventional military means. DFIS was in it for the long haul.

And personally? What was going on personally?

Sometimes, things involve you even when you don’t want them to, and it’s from that kind of sting that things fester. Sometimes the disease spreads. Sometimes, there are casualties. My partner became a problem.

separator

In the summer of 1976 DFIS created a plan to bring down the Soviet Union. It was code named Blue Monday, after the Gershwin opera. Farthing liked Gershwin. The idea was to create certain tipping points in the global theatre, like weakening the foundation of a house so that the walls will eventually come down on their own. The operation would take place over a one-year period, beginning around the spring of 1979, and ending in the spring of 1980. Critical to the success of this plan was the absolute integrity of everyone involved in it. The Victories had to be beyond reproach. There could be absolutely no question about their integrity.

I became suspicious that there was a problem with my partner one night in Toronto in the spring of seventy-nine, just a few weeks before Blue Monday was supposed to begin. I was in my bar. He came in. It had been raining outside, and he’d obviously been walking for a long time, because he was soaked. The rain was running off his head like he’d just come out of the shower.

He looked pale. It must have been in May or early June, because there wasn’t any chill left in the air by then. It was just one of those Toronto spring storms that leaves the air feeling as humid after it stops as it did before it started, reminding you that summer thunderstorms aren’t that far off.

The breeze downtown still smelled of Lake Ontario and smog when he opened the door. It wasn’t that late – probably around ten or eleven. By ten the place was mostly dead. He walked past me and sat down at the bar. I knew something was not right. He placed his hands flat on it, like this [he demonstrates, hands outstretched, palms down]. He sat there for maybe two minutes, kind of looking down, looking at his hands, not really acknowledging anything.

The strippers were still going, so the music was still loud. I remember it was Money – the cover by The Flying Lizards. That techno trash sound. The best things in life are free. Cha cha cha cha. I remember the music, but not the stripper. What does that tell you?

The girl who was bartending poured him a shot of MacCallan. He sat and looked at it a long time. I watched him from where I was, which was just off to the side, near the stage, where I could keep an eye on everyone coming and going.

Finally, he picked up the shot and drained it into his mouth, but didn’t swallow right away. He just held it there twenty, maybe thirty seconds. I thought that was strange, so I went over to him. I came up from behind, put my hand on his shoulder, and said something to him like Problem? or something like that.

He didn’t react, just shook his head slowly, then swallowed a bit at a time, still said nothing to me when he’d finished. I stood beside him, and leaned on the bar, both forearms on it. I checked his hands out – they were shaking a bit, just a bit, so little you’d be forgiven if you didn’t pick up on it. But I noticed.

He stayed another five or ten minutes at most. Just before he got up, he looked up at the stripper, who was dancing in a very detached kind of way. He paused for a second or two, and gave a slight smirk. Then he left.

He was angry. Really angry. And I knew he practically gargled with that scotch for a reason. We both knew it. It changed his breath. He was covering something up.

The next night, I sent a message to Ferris to tell him something was up. I was ordered to keep a close watch on Hunt.

I was never one for relationships. I was pretty independent, and didn’t really feel the need for emotional security or fulfillment. I guess I had a tendency to live more in the moment than my partner. Vietnam had something to do with that. See, Hunt never had those kinds of experiences, so in a way, you know, he was more removed from it all, and I think that ultimately made him the weaker for it. Because he did have this emotional need that he wanted satisfied. The lost father, the broken home. DFIS knew that and they were able to manipulate that in him, to keep him close. They gave him a place where he could belong, and they rewarded him for it. They rewarded all of us, of course. But I mean, for him, it was more emotional. They made him feel that he was the only one who could do what they made him do.

He was emotionally susceptible in a way that I wasn’t. He had a tendency to trust people when he shouldn’t. But given the right motivation, he was someone who could just go off, too. Boom. Just like that. You just never knew.

He was in a relationship before his mother died. Regan Golding. Do you remember her? They met quite by chance, from what I hear. She was a journalist who eventually became an associate editor at Time or one of the other big New York weeklies. After that, she was moved to Washington, and not long after that, she was associate editor of World News Report and AMP wire service. DFIS had what you might say was a controlling interest in WNR and AMP. It was a tremendous coup for DFIS when they got her to join, because with those two media vehicles, the Department had a really strong media arm at its disposal. But for whatever reason, DFIS didn’t want her officially in the driver’s seat. The best she could do was become Acting Editor, which was a title she held onto until the end. That pissed her off.

Hunt had no idea she was DFIS, either. None of us did. It was a real fluke that they ended up meeting each other.

She and Hunt were both in Washington, D.C., she lived there most of the time, he was in town for some reason, and from the way they tell it, he just ran into her and they hit it off right away. But, in this business, nothing lasts. How could it? Then he suddenly broke it off. That made her bitter.

I guess about two days after he’d been in my bar, he was spotted in the UK. OPCOM in London managed to pick up on his location.

What is OPCOM?

Operational Command. They monitored operations and movements in the field. They were the Department’s eyes and ears all around the world.

I don’t think Hunt really cared if they knew where he was or not, at that point. If he’d been trying to hide, he would have. I guess he knew as well as any of us that hiding was really not an option. In any case, he played it that way for a reason.

We were supposed to be working an op together. There was a double agent, a KGB agent, NEST, who was working inside the CIA. We got a directive from VICTOR – Graham Ferris – that we were to terminate NEST. NEST had probably been passing information to his Soviet handlers for a year, maybe two. We needed to know exactly what he’d given them. In order to do that, we needed to establish a relationship with him. Our own handlers were about to set that up, but things never got that far.

Hunt took off to London on his own. I was supposed to fly down to Langley the following day to pick up a couple of dossiers on NEST and take them back to Toronto. Hunt was supposed to connect with a contact in Sudbury where we were supposed to arrange some training at a safe house.

NEST flew to London the day I was supposed to go to Langley. I found out, and I told Ferris, that Hunt was going to meet with NEST. OPCOM started tracking him when he landed in London.

I arrived in London the day after that, and learned that Hunt had rented a car and driven it out to Avebury, which is about six miles west of Marlborough. There’s an ancient stone circle there, you know, kind of like Stonehenge. He’d taken the A4. I took the M4 and actually got to Avebury before he did.

It was about two in the morning when he arrived. I saw his car pull up, lights out. I was watching some distance back, near the Red Lion Inn. It was cold, and a fog was coming in. There was no moon that night, so the only light was coming from the village itself, and from his car. When he opened the door, I could see him, illuminated by the interior light. I heard him step out, and gently close the door. He had a camera with him. He was doing a bit of surveillance.

He started walking toward the Red Lion, so I held back a bit, but then he went past, and followed High Street, up towards St. James church. When he got to the door, he tried it, but it was locked. I could hear it rattle, but I knew he wasn’t about to break in.

By now, the air was getting really damp. I wasn’t anxious to stay out much longer. Muscles start tightening up. And, soon enough, the sun would start to light up the sky, so I guessed he’d want to get a safe distance away before it became too bright.

There must have been a fox or some other animal around, because a dog woke up and started barking. For a moment I thought that might make someone in the town react, but it didn’t. A minute later, he was backing his car down the road, lights out. I got back into my car, and started following him.

He went back to his hotel room. I watched for him from the lobby. It was about five in the morning. London was waking up, and the sun was shining. There were a few clouds in the sky, and only the faintest breeze.

Around noon, he came out of his room, still with his camera, and then back to his car. He had on his skulking clothes – he was so predictable. Black turtle-neck sweater, black jeans, black shoes. No jacket that day, though. He dropped an envelope in a mailbox on his way out. Well, that could be anything, and I wasn’t going to waste time finding out what it was. I stuck with him.

I had no trouble following him up the highway.

He stopped several times along the way, and took photos. I don’t know why he did that, either. Maybe he was checking to see if I was following him. But I don’t think he saw me.

I learned to ignore hunger, of course. I’m sure he’d done the same, because neither of us had had any food for at least a day. I knew that, because I knew him. You work better hungry. I have this three-day rule. You can go three days without sleep, and three days without water, and three days without food. But you can’t do more than two at once.

It was getting on to about four in the afternoon when we pulled into Avebury again. He went straight to the Red Lion. I drove past. That’s when I saw NEST. I knew he had no idea what I looked like, so I didn’t react at all, just kept on my business.

He was a stocky guy, about five six, five seven. Graying hair, glasses, about sixty years old by the looks of him. Pale and nervous