Topaz : A stunning espionage thriller debut. (The Topaz Files Book 1), page 1
TOPAZ
IS DENIABILITY ENOUGH?
RICHARD ROBINSON
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
Prologue
The sound of ruptured metal from the parking bay gave way to a horrific explosion as the Fiat burst through the hydraulic doors and its fuel tank spectacularly detonated. The flames burst high into the rafters of the warehouse and the press and terrified MI5 agent sprinted to the back of the room. The double doors leading to the main room were then kicked open and standing there was a single gunman in a paramilitary balaclava. He held a pistol and in one shot killed the policeman, who was already prostrate on the floor from the impact of the car exploding. The gunman then looked around the room, he stared over at the assembled media with his gun still raised and without blinking picked out the agent who took a shot to the head and immediately collapsed.
Topaz knew that they were safe behind the metal fence at the top of the viewing gallery. They needed to stay quiet and motionless but all three were still peering over the balcony, transfixed on the scene. Jones was sure one of the journalists had noticed them but the horror of the unfolding situation had kept their attention away from the figures hidden in the rafters.
“Where is he?” shouted the gunman, with a clear and unmistakable English accent. Topaz recognised the voice.
Chapter
One
Jones hated heights. In the days leading up to the start of his new employment as a labourer, he had imagined fetching and carrying, sweeping up, and even mixing cement. But scaling a large country house on a trembling over-extended ladder to re-point a chimney wasn’t part of the vision.
His two colleagues, both older, wiser, and much better versed in the art of banter, found his inability to swing his leg over onto the top rung of the ladder whilst gripping a bucket of wet cement hilarious. Jones had been stuck up there in the same position for almost 15 minutes, gripped with fear and trying not to look down.
Worse still, was the fact that he was horribly hungover. He’d spent the previous evening in the Seven Stars waiting for his three friends to emerge from the cinema. They’d gone together to watch Braveheart but at the last-minute Jones opted to see an entirely different film from everyone else. It was an attention-seeking move. He had a desperate need to be different from the crowd and had opted for an arthouse movie with Korean subtitles. On realising it was almost incomprehensible, he walked out and ordered a Kronenberg from the pub opposite. This became four or five Kronenbergs and by the time his friends arrived from Braveheart, he was hammered. Jones lied to his friends about the ‘astonishing’ Korean film and how they were too corporate and brainwashed to appreciate its brilliance.
But at the top of the ladder, sixty feet up, he just couldn’t force his 18-year-old body to teeter over that huge drop and his head was spinning. The nightmare was over in a flash when the more heavily tattooed of the two men grabbed his shaking leg and thrust it on the second rung from the top. There was laughter. Jones felt foolish. This job wasn’t for him he quickly decided.
At one point Jones saw himself cascading down the ladder as he momentarily slipped down a few rungs but once he’d steadied himself, he was safe. And he climbed slowly down to the floor. His Walkman, previously clasped onto his back pocket, dropped gently onto the shingle below and he glimpsed the foreman rolling his eyes. It hadn’t been a good start to the week, and he still had a beery aftertaste.
“You’d best mix the cement and stay on the ground, we haven’t got time to babysit you,” the foreman announced at the bottom. Or Caddick, as the lads called him.
“I’ll take a length of rope up and you can attach the full bucket and we’ll pull it up. Unless you’re scared of the ground too?” He added, with a grin.
“I’ll be fine,” Jones replied, picking up his cassette player and looking for damage. With Caddick looking on he quickly grabbed a trowel and threw a pile of concrete dust into the bucket and started mixing. The foreman started up the ladder with a thick rope tied around his waist.
“I’ll chuck the rope down when I get to the top, you attach the bucket. Can you manage that?” Caddick called down.
Jones ignored him.
Behind Jones, a grey Volkswagen pulled up next to the builder’s archaic Bedford van and the shingle crackled under the tyres. An older man in an ill-fitting business suit stepped out of the car and strolled over to Jones, he still had the remains of breakfast ketchup on his lapel. Instead of looking at Jones he focused upwards and watched Caddick take confident steps slowly towards the summit and the ageing chimney stacks.
“You must be Jones, I’m the Site Manager here, and you are about to win the award for the shortest employment tenure with us,” he announced. Jones looked shocked.
“Your mother’s been on the phone,” he said, finally looking at Jones.
“You’re to go home and pack. They’ve found you a university place, but you’ve got to leave today. I’ll drive you back home. It seems your exam results weren’t quite appalling enough for a permanent job with us!” He laughed.
As they both walked towards the car, the end of the rope landed a couple of inches from the bucket. Followed by some howls of derision from the roof above. Jones shrugged his shoulders and looked up at Caddick. They won’t miss me, he thought.
They barely spoke on the journey and Jones’ mind was in overdrive. It was the summer of 1995 and Jones assumed he had crucified his chances of a university place by drinking his way through sixth form. His drinking had reached Olympic standard and he barely revised for his ‘A’ Level examinations. His parents had almost tied him to a chair and made him apply to various universities via UCCA despite Jones’ pleading that he didn’t care. Life was easy and there was plenty of time to make plans. The bottom of the application barrel must have been reached, he assumed. Somebody must want me and I may as well give it a crack. He reached for his Walkman from his back pocket and pushed play on a cassette by The Smiths.
Jones was a chancer and stumbled his way successfully through school life. He occupied his time by doing the bare minimum in studies and the rest of the time playing his records or walking to the pub with his friends. He was average in height, had average brown hair and was averagely attractive. He lived in a small commuter-belt town in South-East England and was the only child of two London-born parents, who both worked in local government. They were attentive and interested in his life but he often needed to dumb down some of the more leftfield elements to save their feelings. They weren’t aware of girlfriends, alcoholism or the occasional dabble with narcotics in the park. He was happier with them in a state of careful ignorance and that left him free to experiment Life was just fine and dandy.
He’d had countless menial part-time jobs. He’d assisted the milkman in the dairy, had swept up hair in the hairdressers, had helped set up computers in the local newspaper office and had even written a few articles for the newspaper. And whilst he enjoyed being industrious outside school, he’d only succeeded in using the money to swell his record collection and in enhancing his reputation as a generous and reliable drinking partner. The thought of leaving home and creating new networks, following an academic career and changing his lifestyle was a shock to the system. But at the same time, scaling a ladder and re-pointing a chimney needed swerving, and for this he was grateful.
On arriving home to his proud parents, he learned quite how much of the barrel they’d scraped before his application was successful. Two fee-paying international students had their visas rejected at the last minute and therefore a place in the BA(Hons) course in Communication Studies at Milton College was his. He barely remembered applying. The last three months were hazy, at best.
His parents, perhaps too enthusiastically, helped him pack ready for a meeting with his tutors the following morning and the imminent start of term. Jones wondered what nightlife existed in Milton and how quickly he could recreate his charmed lifestyle. He was in the car and heading down the motorway less than an hour after arriving home. His parents, sitting in the front seats, were keen to pass on their advice about campus life but Jones put his headphones back on and un-paused The Smiths ‘Strangeways Here We Come’ tape on his Walkman, the title seemed oddly prophetic.
Milton College, formerly t
The nearest city was Cheltenham and this was the home of the Doughnut. The odd-looking structure served as the base for Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). This was the intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence and information to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom and very hush-hush. It was an organisation which, for most of his young life, Jones had never heard of. He simply assumed intelligence meant whatever Magnus Magnusson could crowbar out of petrified contestants on Mastermind.
Chapter
Two
Milton wasn’t one of the great Universities of Britain. There were no magnificent statues of former Chancellors in the gardens, busts of Queen Victoria in the hallways or rooms named after Prime Ministers who were amongst the alumni. No, according to the prospectus, Milton was a 1930s college originally designed for local girls to learn shorthand, to touch type in rooms filled with rows and rows of typewriters. The photos showed uptight-looking women in round spectacles teaching secretarial etiquette to the masses. Its heyday was undoubtedly in the 1950s when women were no longer house-wives and homemakers, they had proven their talents during the Second World War and whilst misogyny and chauvinism were still the go-tos for the men returning from the war (and wanting their jobs back), this was probably a turning point. Albeit a very slow one. Milton was, for a while, competing with Wimbledon Ladies College as the gold standard for secretarial skills.
By 1995 the glamour had long gone but the original carpets and furnishings hadn’t. Leaving a kind of musty smell which was perhaps comparable to the stench when Howard Carter opened Tutankhamun’s Tomb. However, not everything that remained from the glory days was tired and obsolete. One such example was Virginia Curry, a shorthand tutor par excellence, who had been teaching Pitman’s Shorthand since the dawn of time and probably taught Pitman himself. She was quite simply brilliant at her job and could spot a great mind, a potential star or hidden talent amongst the herds of inadequates that otherwise frequented Milton’s woodworm-infested corridors. The pool of talent was particularly dry of late though and the question of her possible retirement had even been mentioned by Virginia when breakfasting with her husband, Charles.
One further fact that eluded 99.9% of those who attended the rebranded and gently modernised Milton College, was that Virginia Curry was married to Sir Charles Curry, a retired Director General of MI5, former station head in multiple locations across the globe for Her Majesty’s Secret Service and retained recruitment sergeant for the Secret Intelligent Services and GCHQ. This meant that Milton was not just a home for more mothballs than the nation’s branches of Woolworths, but also home to the most dedicated recruitment and training base for spies in the United Kingdom. It was an enormous clandestine operation hiding in plain sight.
Milton College simply continued to exist and to shape the UK’s future espionage networks without appearing to do much more than teach rather antiquated Communications degrees, a few token Media Studies qualifications and a dozen other useful but outdated qualifications. Including shorthand, naturally. Most left with their certificates and being none-the-wiser and that meant they had failed to impress the Currys but had done enough to please the examination boards.
Virginia, this particular Tuesday morning, was scheduled to meet a long list of new students who were joining the Communications Studies undergraduate course.
She acted as a tutor for a carefully selected dozen or so which she handpicked based on her almost unique intuition for skills, patterns of behaviour and potential. Gone were the days of all-female groups as males had been admitted into Milton since the early 1980s but she liked to prioritise any female recruits. They were the best spies, she considered. However, as shorthand tutor for the Communications Studies course, she was able to run the rule over the whole cohort, as the syllabus demanded at least 120 words per minute of shorthand proficiency by year three. That was rather like writing at warp speed.
At precisely 10.32am, there was a knock on Virginia’s door and she immediately summoned in the latest candidate. Jones was dressed in a pair of unwashed beige jeans, an untucked navy-blue polo shirt and some tired-looking brown loafers which had clearly been around the block a few times. Jones sniffed and was quickly awe-struck. The room was probably three times the size necessary for a meeting of this type and was empty aside from the table, two chairs and wall-to-wall fraying brown carpet revealing antique wooden floorboards.
His nose was still full of dust from the previous night of unpacking into the student halls, which were relics from a bygone era of questionable provenance. Jones had barely slept, not just from nervous anticipation for his first day on campus. But also, from the umpteen strong coffees he downed to stave off the aftermath of the hangover.
As he walked in, still clutching his appointment letter, his brain was armed with questions about the location of the local launderette and when he’d be receiving his student grant and wasn’t expecting the careful interrogation planned by Mrs Curry. His attire, not the tailored sharp suit one would expect from a keen-to-impress new student, was the first negative mark on his file.
“So,” she started, peering over her glasses, “please introduce yourself and give me some background about why you chose Milton College.”
“I’m Jones,” he began, not proffering a first name, as he barely used it. “And I didn’t really choose Milton College, it chose me. You see, I came through the clearing system and this appears to be the only route available to me. My exams were really not my finest hour.”
“Nonsense” she replied and hastily leafed through Jones’ file and CV. “You’re an all-rounder. You’ve done a bit of this and that. You’ve even had some stories published in your newspaper. You showed some real promise there. Let’s drop the confidence-bashing stuff. What is your ambition, Jones?”
“I’d always fancied myself as a football reporter,” he announced, which resulted in an almost silent sigh from Virginia. “But I’m keen to learn and develop before I make any decisions about my future. I’ve been quite fortunate to get myself on the academic ladder and therefore I’m focused on being sponge-like and soaking up information and skills. This is a real opportunity. Milton College already seems like an exciting prospect.”
This rather earnest response won him a few ticks in Virginia’s boxes. And there was something about Jones which she had warmed to. It was true, he was an all-rounder. Someone who was truly keen on being industrious and keeping busy across a range of activities. Neither of them knew quite whether this was going to shape itself into something meaningful or, like most who Virginia peered over her glasses to examine, whether Jones might just leave with a certificate to frame and a career in a provincial newspaper writing up births, deaths and marriages.
“Tell me about your journalistic career, young man,” she asked.
“The Editor of my local newspaper asked me to help set up his computer systems in the office. To replace all the typewriters. It was easy. Sixteen machines, three printers and a server and a large Winchester disk. I had it all up and running pretty quickly.”
“That’s impressive. How did you land this opportunity?” she inquired.
