Reid in Braid by Ryan Fleming

Author:Ryan Fleming [Fleming, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sea Lion Press
Published: 2018-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

1976

The first sensation he was aware of was a numbing pain in the centre of his brain, as though a shard of ice had formed there while he slept in the hours (if it should still be counted in hours) since his last drink. This was not an unknown sensation for a man who had, until twenty-four hours previously, served as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, but this time it was accompanied by an existential dread that, even on the worst of mornings after, he was not accustomed to. This dread manifested itself in a sinking feeling of emptiness in the pit of his stomach, like a miniature black hole. This new sensation that put his hangover into stereo gave him his first reasoned thought since coming to consciousness, the same thought he had no doubt gotten himself drunk to drive from his mind – was this how all traitors felt when they were caught out?

The thought that followed was that he had better source some more Scotch to drown out such thoughts. Then the gravity of his situation brought that sinking emptiness from his stomach down through his legs and up through his chest to his arms; conveniently leaving the now throbbing pain in his head, of course. He would never have cause to fear a lack of Scotch again, not now he supposed that he was defecting from the country of his birth to the Scots Democratic Republict.

He had never meant to become an agent for the feared State Security Committee that lay north of the barbed wire fences and guard towers that formed the border between the UK and the SDR. However, where commitment to socialism was not a possible route of gaining informants south of the border, State Security were just as likely to take advantage of the weaknesses of persons of interest once they found them – and they could always find them. The former Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister was a man of two major weaknesses. The first, women, they had used to first ensnare him. He had never seen her again after their single night of illicit pleasure at a trade unions’ gala – unless one counted the black and white photographs delivered to him in an unmarked envelope by a silent courier one Saturday afternoon weeks later, photographs he realised had been taken from behind the mirror in the bedroom at the bed and breakfast she had taken him to that night. He burned the photographs before his wife returned home. His second weakness, the demon drink, they had used to keep him on a leash. Every few weeks, regular as clockwork, a package would arrive by the same courier with a bottle of single malt from the Anglo-Scotch Whisky Society (whom research showed only existed as a listing in a shared Limehouse office and nowhere else); he always made sure to burn the package and the accompanying letter.

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