Short Story in Progress

            A cold and oppressive rain fell on Turin. A talkative group of French tourists passed Simon Rowan in a hurry, splashing his shoes with muddy water as they tromped through the puddles on their way to the Mole Antonelliana. Rowan looked down the street at the massive structure, his eyes studying its majestic features, but his mind unable to devote much thought to its countenance. It used to be a synagogue, as he understood it, but now functioned as a National Museum of Cinema. Drawing his scarf tightly around his neck, he stepped under an awning, taking leave of the monument’s sight.

            It had been eleven days since he arrived in Italy. At first he had been excited to receive this assignment; he often visited Italy as a child and had a great appreciation for the architecture and culture. But as the days went by and he was no closer to his objective, he grew silent and pensive, never diverting his attention from the task at hand.

            Simon Rowan was a British intelligence agent of nine years’ service, and had through much strife earned a stellar reputation within the highest echelons of the Secret Intelligence Service, more famously known as MI6. He was a charming and personable man with a distinguished face and dark hair. But fewer than ten people in the whole of the world even knew who Simon Rowan was. He had no family, and few friends. He was assigned to F Section – one of the more secretive divisions within the service, whose members did not officially exist. But this didn’t bother him, and in fact it pleased him. He had fairly little contact with other operatives, whom he considered untrustworthy and distasteful company.

            He took out his radio and held his thumb down on the biometric scanner. It subtly vibrated as the channel to SIS Headquarters in Vauxhall Cross, London opened. “XO, confirm position of contact, Baptist six-eight-delta-ninety.”

            “Good morning, Baptist. CIDS confirmed. Contact is inside the Museum. A friend of yours, in fact. It’s Honeycomb. She’s waiting for you.”

            “Affirmative,” Rowan replied, now jogging briskly through the rain toward the huge monument. Honeycomb was the codename of a familiar colleague, whom he had not seen in several months. He disliked her overzealous enthusiasm for the Service, but he would admit that she was a capable operative. There was a line at the entrance, which he quickly bypassed by showing a false police ID.

            Once inside he quickly spotted her standing next to an antique projector. He approached casually and stood beside her. Without looking away from the display, she whispered, “Good morning, Baptist.”

            “What have you got for me?” he replied softly. She drew a large envelope from her satchel and passed it to him. He placed it into his briefcase and began to step away from the display, toward a large photograph on the wall.

            “Hall. Cyber division confirms he accessed his agency portal from a hotel in Cape Town. We have reason to believe he’s established a safe house there. Documentation, briefing, and passage are in the envelope. Now get going before he moves again. ” He quickly took leave of Honeycomb and hailed a taxi to the airport.

            Albert Hall was it. The mission itself. The target. The enemy. Two years ago he had been responsible for leaking top-secret documents that contained the location of a secret detention facility in Palau. A local terrorist sect attacked the facility three days later, leading to twenty-two deaths and the escape of several detainees. The incident caused uproar in the Commonwealth, and the Prime Minister was nearly removed from office. Hall was officially wanted “dead or alive”, but Rowan’s mission from the very start had been to locate and terminate him.

            The journey to South Africa was long and uneventful. On the way he studied the briefing documents: a collection of photographs, the computer surveillance report from Cyber division, and a Service dossier on Hall. He was once an accomplished and trusted operative. It was thus all the more shocking when he betrayed the Crown the way he did. His service record was incredible. Sixteen overseas assignments under deep cover, two high-sensitivity assassinations, and over a dozen foreign spies uncovered. Hall used to be the kind of agent Rowan idolized. How could he have suddenly turned against the nation he had so proudly and tirelessly served? It didn’t make sense.

            Espionage was never the future Simon Rowan saw for himself. As a boy in Birmingham he wanted to be a football player. At nineteen he joined the Royal Navy, and it was as a Lieutenant aboard HMS Avignon that he first met Richard O’Donnell. O’Donnell was his Commanding Officer, and he took Rowan under his wing, noticing his aptitude for tactics and diplomacy, and encouraging him to pursue a career in the Intelligence Department. Years later, as a Commander, Rowan was processed into the SIS, where he found himself once again under the command of O’Donnell, the newly appointed Chief of the Secret Intelligent Service.

            Upon arrival in the sweltering city of Cape Town, Rowan acted quickly. He secured a vehicle and traveled as swiftly as subtlety allowed to the Hotel. The desk clerk would not simply direct him to Hall, he knew, so he waited for the clerk to be summoned down the hall by the manager, and checked the registry. None of Hall’s known aliases appeared in the registry. In fact, the hotel was nearly empty. Only three rooms were occupied. He looked at the key case. Four keys were missing. 101, 124, 125, and 204. The registry revealed that Room 101 was not listed as occupied.

            The hallway was dim, and silent as the grave. As he approached the door, he heard a footfall inside. He drew his Walther PPQ, and knocked. Before the door opened, he withdrew into a dark corner of the hallway and trained his pistol on the doorway. He listened for movement. He heard none. Finally he heard a window being flung open inside the room. Hall was making a run for it.

            He sprinted down the hall, his leather shoes clacking on the hardwood floor. Reaching the end of the hall he leaped through a window into the courtyard and scanned for Hall. He spotted him running into a nearby office building. He pursued. Hall had somehow injured himself in his flight. A trail of red droplets down the hall revealed his path. Office workers pointed in the direction he had run, and Rowan followed, until finally he became lost in a crowded cafeteria. He scanned the room for Hall, or for any disturbance, but saw none.

            A shot rang out from the kitchen. The diners rose in a screaming panic and stampeded out of the room, and shortly an alarm sounded. Rowan crouched behind the counter, clutching the back of his neck. The bullet had grazed him. He decided to try to get Hall to reveal his position. “Hall!” he cried out.

            “Welcome to South Africa, Baptist!” Hall replied. “Have you come to silence me?” From what Rowan could tell, he was in the back of the kitchen somewhere.

            “You betrayed Her Majesty and all the Commonwealth, Hall. I’m here to make sure you don’t do it again,” he replied. He chanced a look over the counter. The kitchen was dark. Hall had switched off the lights. He quietly moved to the kitchen entrance.

            “That’s what O’Donnell told you, I’m sure. But is that what really happened? Ask yourself, Baptist. You know me. I trained you, for God’s sake!”

            “Enough,” Rowan said. “It’s time for you to stop running. Own your sins, Hall. You’re a traitor.” He rolled silently behind a large refrigerator and peered through the dark room, searching for Hall.

            “What if I told you that it was O’Donnell who leaked the documents?” Hall asked. He was close.

            “I wouldn’t believe you. What would Chief O’Donnell have to gain from compromising national secrets?” Rowan could hear him breathing now. Before Hall had time to respond, he rolled out from behind the refrigerator and fired a single shot, striking Hall in the upper chest. Hall dropped his weapon and slumped against the wall. Leaping on top of him, Rowan prepared to finish the job.

            “I can prove it,” Hall sputtered, coughing up blood. “Go back to the hotel! Inside the toilet tank … there’s a case. Open the … case. O’Donnell …” He spoke no more. Rowan heard police vehicles approaching outside. He searched Hall’s body, taking his weapon, identification, and room key. He then lifted Hall’s body and carried it quickly out of the building, depositing it in an old car parked out back. The sun was going down. He slipped away in the growing shadows.

            The day Rowan received his commission in the SIS, he stood in Chief O’Donnell’s office, looking out the window across the Thames, to the north. O’Donnell poured two glasses of Scotch and sat down at his antique desk. “Simon,” he said warmly, “You and I are cut of different cloth. That lot out there – they’re not like us. They see nothing beyond this island, they fear no evil, and they know no danger. Why? Because men like us lurk in dark rooms all over God’s green Earth, splicing wires and cutting throats. And do they thank us? Fuck no. They don’t even know who we are. They look at us, and they don’t see us. We’re shadows. We’re spiders in the cellar, and what a tangled web we weave. Welcome to the business, lad.”

As he welcomed his young friend into the Service, and regaled him with exciting stories from the last years of the Cold War, he seemed to be constantly chuckling to himself. Rowan remembered thinking that O’Donnell seemed eerily satisfied in his job. Rowan joined MI6 because he possessed a natural talent for the work, not because it was fun. But O’Donnell had an air of wicked bliss about him when he spoke of conspiracies and assassinations of old.

            Returning to the hotel room at half past one, he stealthily unlocked the door and stepped cautiously inside, weapon drawn. After all, it could be a trap. The room was empty, however. He searched the room, finding only a few files, a computer, and a weapon. Finally he stepped into the bathroom and lifted the lid off the toilet tank. Just as Hall said, there was a small gray case. He removed it and examined it. It was locked. He searched the room again, and found a small envelope, in which was a key. Fortunately, it was the key he required.

            Inside the case was a USB thumb drive. He took it to the computer and prepared to examine its contents. Before he got that far, he came to an uncomfortable realization. He was unable to access the computer. He was unable to do this because the computer belonged to Richard O’Donnell.

            The biometric scanner blinked patiently, waiting for O’Donnell’s fingerprint input. Why hadn’t O’Donnell said anything about this? There was no mention of a stolen computer in the mission briefing. He thought perhaps that Hall had simply stolen the leaked intel from O’Donnell’s computer, but the thumb drive reminded him that perhaps all was not it appeared to be. It suddenly occurred to him that the drive must contain some means of bypassing the biometric login safeguard. He inserted the drive.

            It took less than twenty minutes to uncover the awful truth. Secret communiqués, encrypted lists of foreign contacts, and unofficial instructions passed between O’Donnell and someone referred to as “Sprite.” O’Donnell was the leak. It was all part of some grander plan, but he didn’t know what it could be. The sting of reality hit him as he reflected on the mission. He had chased an innocent man from England to France, from there to Italy, and ultimately to South Africa, and killed him needlessly, while the real traitor was sitting in Vauxhall, smoking cigars and feeding Her Majesty’s government all manner of vicious lies. Unless there was a reason. Something from on high; the secret of secrets. Surely this was not a malicious attack from within, but a calculated move in the interest of greater national security. He had to return to London. Questions needed answering.

            The next day he stood in the airport, arranging a return flight. The terminal was full of people going about their business, but he noticed that several large groups had formed around a few television screens tuned to BBC. Special military correspondent Leslie Chakworma was speaking.

            “Earlier today, Foreign Secretary Leona Cambridge confirmed that the Palau Leak was originated by MI6 agent Simon Rowan, codename ‘Baptist’. Rowan is believed to have stolen the information along with a computer from the Director of MI6, Chief Richard O’Donnell. In response to questions regarding Rowan’s location, Secretary Cambridge assured the press that authorities throughout the Commonwealth have been briefed, and MI6 personnel are currently in pursuit. Simon Rowan is charged with treason, and according to the Joint Intelligence Committee, is wanted, dead or alive.”