Post by James G on Jun 28, 2018 19:31:17 GMT
This is just something I knocked up.
It isn't going anywhere at the moment.
March 2019
The Ministry of Security was located in the Neave Building on New Whitehall. It was a fortress-like structure, constructed during the rebuilding of the much of the very centre of London in the late Nineties by the British Government. The Neave Building wasn’t one which ordinary members of the public normally walked into. They could and they did, it was just that was unusual unless there was a specific reason to do so.
Melissa Brown had a specific reason to do so.
The pair of posted security guards at the front door gave her a quick but complete look over as she passed through the metal detectors and towards the help desk, one helpfully highlighted with a sign alerting visitors to its purpose. They each carried a slung semi-automatic rifle yet everything about her gave no indication of a security risk. She wasn’t carrying a weapon nor a bomb. She was carrying something far more dangerous, though something small and thus seemingly harmless.
At the help desk, Melissa was asked her business. Did she have an appointment with someone at the Ministry? Nope, she didn’t. She would like to see someone though, Melissa told the woman she spoke to, because she had a ‘matter of security’ to discuss. There had been far stranger things said to those at the help desk before. This was unusual but not wholly surprising: sometimes people came into the Ministry of Security for a wide variety of reasons which they considered important. Could – oh sorry, can I have your name please; Melissa Brown it is – you supply more details, Miss Brown? What is it all about? We need to know so we can have you see the right person. We’ll then be able to make an appointment for you to come back at another time. Melissa wanted to see someone today, now in fact. What she was here for concerned Paul Whittaker. The woman at the help desk made out that that name meant nothing to her. Did Miss Brown have something more than that?
Welcome to Whitehall Officialdom!
She wanted to see someone in Department D. It was a matter concerning a former employee of the Ministry of Security who had something to give to his past employers, something entrusted to Melissa to bring here on his behalf. Well… if only Miss Brown had said that, been as forthcoming as she was now, at first. Things would have then moved much faster. She could wait over there in the seating area to the left. Someone would be along shortly.
Forty minutes later, Melissa was approached by Harriet and Tom. She was surfing the ’net on her phone, sitting cross-legged in one of the plastic chairs with her back to them and focused on the screen in front of her. Trained to as they were, Harriet and Tom each formed a judgement of Melissa when meeting her. This came from the examination of recorded surveillance footage since her arrival in the Neave Building, her conversation with the woman at the help desk and the first words spoken with her as they introduced themselves (with forenames only) to her. She wasn’t considered to be someone very bright nor with a serious persona. They’d watched her and had her wait. The two of them worked for Department D and were habitually very good at evaluating and correctly reading someone. With Melissa they were wrong though.
Harriet spoke first, asking Melissa if she had any identification. A driver’s license or a passport, maybe? Melissa had the latter with her. She told Harriet that she had just returned from holiday. The passport wasn’t fake. It was real and Melissa was who she said she was. Tom asked Melissa to come with them. He pointed to a room off to the side, one with a glass frontage which looked out over the waiting area. Melissa got up and Harriet gave her a nod and a smile with the intention to display that it was alright to come with them. Everything would be okay. Melissa picked up her handbag, dropped her phone inside it and followed Tom while Harriet trailed just slightly behind keeping all eyes on the young woman who’d walked in here talking about Paul Whittaker.
The interview room – it had no sign saying what it was – was covered with hidden cameras. The door could be locked at the push of a button and the glass darkened with another similar action. If it became necessary, Melissa wouldn’t be able to leave the room of her own free will nor would anyone come to save her if it was decided that was to be the way it would be. Tom invited her to take a seat and pointed to one on the nearest side of an empty desk. He sat down opposite her on the other side. Harriet stood by the door, leaning back against the glass and facing Melissa from the side. The cameras could see and hear plenty but there were two experienced sets of eyes and ears in this room too.
What had Whittaker asked her to bring here?
Melissa reached down and put a hand in her bag. She tutted and there was a rumble in there. Both of the intelligence officers she was with watched every movement and studied her face too. She didn’t look like she was play-acting. Her frustration as she continued to search for what she had, as she brought the handbag up to her lap and shook her head, came across as real.
“Ah, gotcha.” There was triumph in her voice. “I thought I’d lost the stick.”
It was a flash drive. It was bright red, post box red, and shaped like a lipstick applicant. Melissa used her thumb to open the USB connection and placed it on the desk between her and Tom.
“He gave you this himself?” Tom asked. “And told you, Melissa, to bring it here to someone in Department D?”
“Paul said you would have questions.” There was a grin which came with this remark from Melissa, one which Tom read as a strange delight while one which Harriet understood as their ‘guest’ finding amusing but still expected.
“How is Paul?”
Melissa turned her head to look across at Harriet before responding. “Do you know Paul?”
“Yes. We used to work together.”
Turning back to Tom, Melissa began the story which she wasn’t asked to give. It didn’t seem rehearsed to neither him nor Harriet. It was very honest too, it was one which they believed. Melissa was telling them the truth. She spoke of her unplanned trip to Russia over the summer when she was travelling through Eastern Europe and how once there in Red Square, all alone away from any organised tour, she ran into someone else from the UK like her. Paul had chatted her up and romanced her. He’d then saved her life when someone tried to kill her, a mugger who’d she was certain had been ready to knife her because she wouldn’t hand over her phone to him. Paul had saved her though. She’d stayed with him afterwards, living for more than a month with him outside of Moscow. Paul had asked her to help him. Melissa had been concerned about what he had asked her to do but he had told her that she would be fine. Therefore, after arriving back in Britain yesterday, she’d come straight to the Ministry of Security today and done as he asked. He wanted her to hand over the flash drive: nothing more. Their holiday romance was over with but she was doing this for him. Paul had told her that the people he used to work for – spies like Harriet and Tom she said – would have questions yet he had urged her to tell them everything and be honest about it all.
Tom had a question at the end of the uninterrupted story given by Melissa: “Have you put the stick into your laptop and opened what is in there?”
Harriet had a question of her own, one asked just as Melissa went to reply to Tom’s, and one to throw her off balance and witness her reaction to see if she really was being honest or whether this was all a deception: “Melissa, was Paul any good in bed?”
That reaction was watched later on across several television screens. Harriet and Tom were joined by others who worked with them in examining how Melissa reacted to such a remark. She had physically left, gone to her home where there was a watch being set up upon her starting tonight there, but she had left behind quite an ongoing drama. Melissa had meant it when she had told Harriet to ‘fuck off’. There was a thumbs-up for Harriet from Tom for her timing with that question. The way she turned her head as well as positioned herself in her chair ready to jump out of it and go for Harriet was decided by those who watched the playback to be very real. Melissa had clearly felt something for the man she had been with in Russia, something more than just sex, but Harriet had brought it all down to just that. She’d made that sound cheap. Melissa had not been best pleased.
Department D officers watched Melissa’s earlier physical movements in comparison. When she’d spoken of her near-death experience, talking about the man who’d held a knife to her throat, she stared down at her nails when her hands were placed face down on the table. She’d kept those hands still and examined each polished and manicured nail, one after the other. Her whole body had tensed up and she’d clearly been uncomfortable. When speaking of Paul, that tension had disappeared from Melissa. Tom told his colleagues that she’d smiled and her eyes were bright. The others watched her sit up and Melissa casually, nonchalantly sweeping her hair from out of her face every time it fell there.
Harriet and Tom’s line manager, Mike, was with them as they and two others watched the footage again. He had assigned them to Melissa when she had come into the building saying what she did and also afterwards green-lit the priority surveillance tasking of Melissa after she had left here. Like Harriet, he knew Paul from back when he too worked for the Ministry of Security… before he committed treason and ran off to Russia.
“Paul used a young lass like this before.” There was hatred in him. Hatred for someone who he took as betraying not just their organisation and their country, but him personally too. “He had that about him. He could just work the girls he’d meet. He said he’d like to have been in the field, doing that for his country.”
Harriet shook her head and pulled a face at that. “He wanted to be James Bond.”
Tom had never met the missing traitor. He knew all that he had done though and how also he was hated here for that. The shadow of Paul’s treason wasn’t something that would go away for some time despite him leaving the Ministry almost three years ago now. That was because he’d legged it and carried on poking Britain in the eye from afar, from inside the home of the country’s most implacable enemy.
“He’s done a number on this girl.” Mike froze the image of Melissa on the screen, smiling and still in thrall when it came to Paul. “So, now that that is out of the way, let’s look again at what he has sent us, shall we?”
There had been a video on the flash drive along with some documents. The latter were not known to be among the stolen files that Paul had taken with him when he left. He’d put others onto the internet for the whole world to see. Those hadn’t been these though. They were top secret Ministry of Security files dating back to 1984. Neither Harriet nor Tom was aware of the subject matter they covered and had no idea whether they were true or fantasy. Mike had confirmed that they were authentic. He hadn’t needed to remind them of their responsibility to forget what they had read. The Official Secrets Act had been broken by Paul yet they weren’t about to join him in doing such a thing. Nonetheless, what they had read had opened their eyes to many things from the past.
None of the three of them had been here thirty-five years ago. Harriet wasn’t even born, Tom was still in nappies and even Mike – ‘old Mike’ he was sometimes called in jest – was a schoolboy then. They had all heard the unofficial rumours and read the official history though. 1984 had been quite the year for the Ministry of Security (then the previous several independent government agencies) and Britain too.
Then there was the video which Paul had recorded. He’d sent the Ministry of Security a message from Moscow where he hid behind the organs of the Russian state. Paul had fled after stealing and leaking files from his workplace and now he was threatening to release more. Those which he had sent using Melissa were just a taste of what he claimed he had. Paul boasted that he’d taken far more than his former colleagues thought he did. He laughed at them in thinking they knew all that he had done. Once again, he would post what he had on the internet for the world to see and cause Britain much international embarrassment. He said he had documents stretching all the way back to 1980 but also some very recent ones too.
However, he declared that he wouldn’t do this if something was done for him. What he asked for was certainly not a small thing.
After watching that video, Mike took Harriet and Tom with him to see their Department head. It was the two of them who had met with Melissa. They were asked for facts but also opinions from that meeting as well. Why use the girl, their superior asked, when Paul could have just emailed or posted his threat and demand? He could have made another one of his video broadcasts on the internet – he’d done so before, when the British state was hunting for him – alluding to all of this and warning he would release what he had in that manner. It was all very odd and no firm answers could be given.
It was known that Paul like to use and dupe young women though. He was thirty-eight and preferred woman ten to fifteen years younger, especially those who (to put it politely) weren’t very bright. Melissa fitted that bill, so too did the further two young women in the computer and archives departments at the Ministry whom he had made use of beforehand. As to Melissa, the Department head wanted to know all about her. Harriet filled him in. The girl was twenty-four and a PHD student, seemingly taking her time about that too. She was born in the East Midlands to respectable middle-class parents and had been schooled well. She lived now in Birmingham (Britain’s student hub) where she studied and did some part time work in the service sector from time to time. Her parents sent her money, plenty of that. They had paid for her trip through Eastern Europe though didn’t seem to have been aware at the time that she would go to Russia as part of that. Melissa’s politics weren’t that well known yet – the whole infodump on her was taking time; the Ministry of Security didn’t have all the powers detractors said it did – but she appealed to be the typical soft-liberal, semi-progressive of her age and background when it came to social views. She had no criminal record nor had before attracted the attention of the nation’s security service. Visa and flight confirmation of the dates she had given for her travels were confirmed. The personal viewpoint of the officers who had spoken to her, and the surveillance footage captured on camera, said that she and her story were real.
Surveillance on Melissa to see if Paul got in touch again – in person (telephone or email) or using someone else – began as she arrived back in Birmingham on the train. Security officers picked her up at the station and followed her home where physical and electronic surveillance was fast in-place. In the meantime, the minister himself was briefed that evening on what Britain’s most-wanted man had been up to now. That was because the self-declared whistle-blower and ‘a warrior for freedom’ (yes, Paul had an almighty ego) had made the demand that the newly-elected British Prime Minister herself, a Social Democrat elected in May 1984, stand up in the House of Commons and say what he wanted her to say. She wasn’t yet told: a decision on that was yet to come from the Minister for Security.
As to Melissa, a shallow and self-centred dupe according to those who had met her and formed that low opinion of her, she that night slipped those watching her and did a vanishing act from her home. It would appear that those at the Neave Building might have been the dupes, not her. Harriet and Tom, also Mike, had been taken in by her and her fine acting. With her disappearance, the shadow of 1984 and the Clockwork Orange events was going to come back to haunt Britain.
It isn't going anywhere at the moment.
March 2019
The Ministry of Security was located in the Neave Building on New Whitehall. It was a fortress-like structure, constructed during the rebuilding of the much of the very centre of London in the late Nineties by the British Government. The Neave Building wasn’t one which ordinary members of the public normally walked into. They could and they did, it was just that was unusual unless there was a specific reason to do so.
Melissa Brown had a specific reason to do so.
The pair of posted security guards at the front door gave her a quick but complete look over as she passed through the metal detectors and towards the help desk, one helpfully highlighted with a sign alerting visitors to its purpose. They each carried a slung semi-automatic rifle yet everything about her gave no indication of a security risk. She wasn’t carrying a weapon nor a bomb. She was carrying something far more dangerous, though something small and thus seemingly harmless.
At the help desk, Melissa was asked her business. Did she have an appointment with someone at the Ministry? Nope, she didn’t. She would like to see someone though, Melissa told the woman she spoke to, because she had a ‘matter of security’ to discuss. There had been far stranger things said to those at the help desk before. This was unusual but not wholly surprising: sometimes people came into the Ministry of Security for a wide variety of reasons which they considered important. Could – oh sorry, can I have your name please; Melissa Brown it is – you supply more details, Miss Brown? What is it all about? We need to know so we can have you see the right person. We’ll then be able to make an appointment for you to come back at another time. Melissa wanted to see someone today, now in fact. What she was here for concerned Paul Whittaker. The woman at the help desk made out that that name meant nothing to her. Did Miss Brown have something more than that?
Welcome to Whitehall Officialdom!
She wanted to see someone in Department D. It was a matter concerning a former employee of the Ministry of Security who had something to give to his past employers, something entrusted to Melissa to bring here on his behalf. Well… if only Miss Brown had said that, been as forthcoming as she was now, at first. Things would have then moved much faster. She could wait over there in the seating area to the left. Someone would be along shortly.
Forty minutes later, Melissa was approached by Harriet and Tom. She was surfing the ’net on her phone, sitting cross-legged in one of the plastic chairs with her back to them and focused on the screen in front of her. Trained to as they were, Harriet and Tom each formed a judgement of Melissa when meeting her. This came from the examination of recorded surveillance footage since her arrival in the Neave Building, her conversation with the woman at the help desk and the first words spoken with her as they introduced themselves (with forenames only) to her. She wasn’t considered to be someone very bright nor with a serious persona. They’d watched her and had her wait. The two of them worked for Department D and were habitually very good at evaluating and correctly reading someone. With Melissa they were wrong though.
Harriet spoke first, asking Melissa if she had any identification. A driver’s license or a passport, maybe? Melissa had the latter with her. She told Harriet that she had just returned from holiday. The passport wasn’t fake. It was real and Melissa was who she said she was. Tom asked Melissa to come with them. He pointed to a room off to the side, one with a glass frontage which looked out over the waiting area. Melissa got up and Harriet gave her a nod and a smile with the intention to display that it was alright to come with them. Everything would be okay. Melissa picked up her handbag, dropped her phone inside it and followed Tom while Harriet trailed just slightly behind keeping all eyes on the young woman who’d walked in here talking about Paul Whittaker.
The interview room – it had no sign saying what it was – was covered with hidden cameras. The door could be locked at the push of a button and the glass darkened with another similar action. If it became necessary, Melissa wouldn’t be able to leave the room of her own free will nor would anyone come to save her if it was decided that was to be the way it would be. Tom invited her to take a seat and pointed to one on the nearest side of an empty desk. He sat down opposite her on the other side. Harriet stood by the door, leaning back against the glass and facing Melissa from the side. The cameras could see and hear plenty but there were two experienced sets of eyes and ears in this room too.
What had Whittaker asked her to bring here?
Melissa reached down and put a hand in her bag. She tutted and there was a rumble in there. Both of the intelligence officers she was with watched every movement and studied her face too. She didn’t look like she was play-acting. Her frustration as she continued to search for what she had, as she brought the handbag up to her lap and shook her head, came across as real.
“Ah, gotcha.” There was triumph in her voice. “I thought I’d lost the stick.”
It was a flash drive. It was bright red, post box red, and shaped like a lipstick applicant. Melissa used her thumb to open the USB connection and placed it on the desk between her and Tom.
“He gave you this himself?” Tom asked. “And told you, Melissa, to bring it here to someone in Department D?”
“Paul said you would have questions.” There was a grin which came with this remark from Melissa, one which Tom read as a strange delight while one which Harriet understood as their ‘guest’ finding amusing but still expected.
“How is Paul?”
Melissa turned her head to look across at Harriet before responding. “Do you know Paul?”
“Yes. We used to work together.”
Turning back to Tom, Melissa began the story which she wasn’t asked to give. It didn’t seem rehearsed to neither him nor Harriet. It was very honest too, it was one which they believed. Melissa was telling them the truth. She spoke of her unplanned trip to Russia over the summer when she was travelling through Eastern Europe and how once there in Red Square, all alone away from any organised tour, she ran into someone else from the UK like her. Paul had chatted her up and romanced her. He’d then saved her life when someone tried to kill her, a mugger who’d she was certain had been ready to knife her because she wouldn’t hand over her phone to him. Paul had saved her though. She’d stayed with him afterwards, living for more than a month with him outside of Moscow. Paul had asked her to help him. Melissa had been concerned about what he had asked her to do but he had told her that she would be fine. Therefore, after arriving back in Britain yesterday, she’d come straight to the Ministry of Security today and done as he asked. He wanted her to hand over the flash drive: nothing more. Their holiday romance was over with but she was doing this for him. Paul had told her that the people he used to work for – spies like Harriet and Tom she said – would have questions yet he had urged her to tell them everything and be honest about it all.
Tom had a question at the end of the uninterrupted story given by Melissa: “Have you put the stick into your laptop and opened what is in there?”
Harriet had a question of her own, one asked just as Melissa went to reply to Tom’s, and one to throw her off balance and witness her reaction to see if she really was being honest or whether this was all a deception: “Melissa, was Paul any good in bed?”
That reaction was watched later on across several television screens. Harriet and Tom were joined by others who worked with them in examining how Melissa reacted to such a remark. She had physically left, gone to her home where there was a watch being set up upon her starting tonight there, but she had left behind quite an ongoing drama. Melissa had meant it when she had told Harriet to ‘fuck off’. There was a thumbs-up for Harriet from Tom for her timing with that question. The way she turned her head as well as positioned herself in her chair ready to jump out of it and go for Harriet was decided by those who watched the playback to be very real. Melissa had clearly felt something for the man she had been with in Russia, something more than just sex, but Harriet had brought it all down to just that. She’d made that sound cheap. Melissa had not been best pleased.
Department D officers watched Melissa’s earlier physical movements in comparison. When she’d spoken of her near-death experience, talking about the man who’d held a knife to her throat, she stared down at her nails when her hands were placed face down on the table. She’d kept those hands still and examined each polished and manicured nail, one after the other. Her whole body had tensed up and she’d clearly been uncomfortable. When speaking of Paul, that tension had disappeared from Melissa. Tom told his colleagues that she’d smiled and her eyes were bright. The others watched her sit up and Melissa casually, nonchalantly sweeping her hair from out of her face every time it fell there.
Harriet and Tom’s line manager, Mike, was with them as they and two others watched the footage again. He had assigned them to Melissa when she had come into the building saying what she did and also afterwards green-lit the priority surveillance tasking of Melissa after she had left here. Like Harriet, he knew Paul from back when he too worked for the Ministry of Security… before he committed treason and ran off to Russia.
“Paul used a young lass like this before.” There was hatred in him. Hatred for someone who he took as betraying not just their organisation and their country, but him personally too. “He had that about him. He could just work the girls he’d meet. He said he’d like to have been in the field, doing that for his country.”
Harriet shook her head and pulled a face at that. “He wanted to be James Bond.”
Tom had never met the missing traitor. He knew all that he had done though and how also he was hated here for that. The shadow of Paul’s treason wasn’t something that would go away for some time despite him leaving the Ministry almost three years ago now. That was because he’d legged it and carried on poking Britain in the eye from afar, from inside the home of the country’s most implacable enemy.
“He’s done a number on this girl.” Mike froze the image of Melissa on the screen, smiling and still in thrall when it came to Paul. “So, now that that is out of the way, let’s look again at what he has sent us, shall we?”
There had been a video on the flash drive along with some documents. The latter were not known to be among the stolen files that Paul had taken with him when he left. He’d put others onto the internet for the whole world to see. Those hadn’t been these though. They were top secret Ministry of Security files dating back to 1984. Neither Harriet nor Tom was aware of the subject matter they covered and had no idea whether they were true or fantasy. Mike had confirmed that they were authentic. He hadn’t needed to remind them of their responsibility to forget what they had read. The Official Secrets Act had been broken by Paul yet they weren’t about to join him in doing such a thing. Nonetheless, what they had read had opened their eyes to many things from the past.
None of the three of them had been here thirty-five years ago. Harriet wasn’t even born, Tom was still in nappies and even Mike – ‘old Mike’ he was sometimes called in jest – was a schoolboy then. They had all heard the unofficial rumours and read the official history though. 1984 had been quite the year for the Ministry of Security (then the previous several independent government agencies) and Britain too.
Then there was the video which Paul had recorded. He’d sent the Ministry of Security a message from Moscow where he hid behind the organs of the Russian state. Paul had fled after stealing and leaking files from his workplace and now he was threatening to release more. Those which he had sent using Melissa were just a taste of what he claimed he had. Paul boasted that he’d taken far more than his former colleagues thought he did. He laughed at them in thinking they knew all that he had done. Once again, he would post what he had on the internet for the world to see and cause Britain much international embarrassment. He said he had documents stretching all the way back to 1980 but also some very recent ones too.
However, he declared that he wouldn’t do this if something was done for him. What he asked for was certainly not a small thing.
After watching that video, Mike took Harriet and Tom with him to see their Department head. It was the two of them who had met with Melissa. They were asked for facts but also opinions from that meeting as well. Why use the girl, their superior asked, when Paul could have just emailed or posted his threat and demand? He could have made another one of his video broadcasts on the internet – he’d done so before, when the British state was hunting for him – alluding to all of this and warning he would release what he had in that manner. It was all very odd and no firm answers could be given.
It was known that Paul like to use and dupe young women though. He was thirty-eight and preferred woman ten to fifteen years younger, especially those who (to put it politely) weren’t very bright. Melissa fitted that bill, so too did the further two young women in the computer and archives departments at the Ministry whom he had made use of beforehand. As to Melissa, the Department head wanted to know all about her. Harriet filled him in. The girl was twenty-four and a PHD student, seemingly taking her time about that too. She was born in the East Midlands to respectable middle-class parents and had been schooled well. She lived now in Birmingham (Britain’s student hub) where she studied and did some part time work in the service sector from time to time. Her parents sent her money, plenty of that. They had paid for her trip through Eastern Europe though didn’t seem to have been aware at the time that she would go to Russia as part of that. Melissa’s politics weren’t that well known yet – the whole infodump on her was taking time; the Ministry of Security didn’t have all the powers detractors said it did – but she appealed to be the typical soft-liberal, semi-progressive of her age and background when it came to social views. She had no criminal record nor had before attracted the attention of the nation’s security service. Visa and flight confirmation of the dates she had given for her travels were confirmed. The personal viewpoint of the officers who had spoken to her, and the surveillance footage captured on camera, said that she and her story were real.
Surveillance on Melissa to see if Paul got in touch again – in person (telephone or email) or using someone else – began as she arrived back in Birmingham on the train. Security officers picked her up at the station and followed her home where physical and electronic surveillance was fast in-place. In the meantime, the minister himself was briefed that evening on what Britain’s most-wanted man had been up to now. That was because the self-declared whistle-blower and ‘a warrior for freedom’ (yes, Paul had an almighty ego) had made the demand that the newly-elected British Prime Minister herself, a Social Democrat elected in May 1984, stand up in the House of Commons and say what he wanted her to say. She wasn’t yet told: a decision on that was yet to come from the Minister for Security.
As to Melissa, a shallow and self-centred dupe according to those who had met her and formed that low opinion of her, she that night slipped those watching her and did a vanishing act from her home. It would appear that those at the Neave Building might have been the dupes, not her. Harriet and Tom, also Mike, had been taken in by her and her fine acting. With her disappearance, the shadow of 1984 and the Clockwork Orange events was going to come back to haunt Britain.