RAT RUN GERALD SEYMOUR by Gerald Seymour

Author:Gerald Seymour [Seymour, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-03-30T23:00:00+00:00

She packed.

‘Don’t I get told where you’re going?’

Ronnie was watching from the door. It was her apartment and Polly was the guest imposed on the girl from the visa section. Polly would not have said that she was going to Hamburg, but could have said she was going to Germany and left it vague. She did not answer but went on folding blouses and skirts, laying them over the shoes at the bottom and her smalls—didn’t really have an idea of what she needed, whether the spring came warm up there or whether it would be perishing cold. The sharing arrangement had been intended as temporary, while a one-bedroom apartment for herself was redecorated, but then a refurbishment budget had gone dry and time had slipped on. It wasn’t satisfactory for an officer in the Service, however junior, to share but having her own room was good enough and she’d given up nagging the man at the embassy who allocated premises. She was precious little use to Ronnie, a lonely woman. Too early at work and too late back to offer company.

‘Well, how long are you going to be away?’

She didn’t know how long she would be away, and didn’t answer, just went on filling the case. She could share the apartment but not her life.

The bridling voice whipped her. ‘Don’t mind me. I’m not important. I’m not need-to-know. You have a good time, wherever. I’ll say this, you look like the cat that found the cream. You just come back when it’s finished, whenever.’

A last pair of jeans and a sweater went in. No photographs in leather frames, nothing personal. The cat that found the cream? Probably. Not very fair to show it because there was little enough cream in Ronnie’s existence in the visa section. While she was packing the bag Polly had thought she walked tall for the first time since the collapse of the unit in London.

Two years’ work there, hard and slogging study. Satellite photos of every corner of Iraq’s deserts pored over. Defectors’ statements gutted, analysed, each word weighed. Businessmen from every corner of that wretched region who travelled to Baghdad had been met in hotel bars, had money shoved at them, and been pestered for descriptions of factories and chemical plants. Phone calls and emails intercepted and transcribed. All to answer the great question—were there, in Iraq, programmes for the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction? Papers written. In Service tradition it was taught: Capability+Intent=Threat. Had Iraq the capability or the intent to justify the wolf cry of realistic threat? Caution expressed, caveats and hesitations. Papers returned with red-ink scratchings obliterating the cautions that were embedded in the Service’s work practices. Papers resubmitted with honesty seeping out from them.

Caveats and hesitations removed. What they wrote, by Service tradition, was supposed to exude ‘provenance’. But provenance had died, and the team—scattered to the winds—she assumed cursed themselves now for bending at the knee, for allowing valued practices—C+I=T—to be steamrolled and crushed.

She could remember the

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