Thunder in the Blood Read Online Free Page A

offer me a job, I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to accept. Who were they? What did they want? And why did they find it so bloody hard to smile?
    Rory dismissed my questions with a wide grin and a wave of the hand. The restaurant was nearly empty now. A waiter hovered patiently in the background with our bill.
    ‘Spooks,’ he said.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Intelligence. Security wallahs.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Brothers in arms.’
    ‘You mean spies?’
    ‘No. Spycatchers. MI5. The home team.’
    ‘What do they want with me? What have I done?’
    Rory hooted with laughter. Laughter suited him. The pale, freckled planes of his face were seamed with deep lines, and when they filled with laughter he created the sensation, at once dangerous and playful, that something was about to happen: a prank, a joke, some wild physical adventure. For a man in his early thirties, with a mortgage and two kids, he could sometimes be deliciously adolescent.
    ‘They want you,’ he whispered. ‘They want you to work for them.’
    ‘Why?’
    He leaned forward. The melodrama, the big eyes, the clowning had quite gone. Instead, there was another expression, utterly serious. ‘Because you’d be bloody good at it.’
    ‘Who says?’
    ‘Me.’
    ‘What do you know about it?’
    ‘Quite a lot,’ he said, reaching for the bottle, ‘as it happens.’
    Ten days later, back in Devon, I got another phone call, from a woman this time. I was to return to London for a formal interview. The interview took place two days later in an overheated office on the second floor of an anonymous building in Gower Street. The office was shabby. The paint had bubbled on the big iron radiators and the nylon covers on the chairs were printed with swirly patterns in orange and olive green. The place reminded me of my one and only visit to the DHSS outpost in Exeter: good intentions, zero budget and absolutely no taste.
    The interview was conducted by two men and a woman. One of the men was the younger of Rory’s colleagues I’d met at the restaurant. Ten days had done nothing for his conversation and he spent most of the morning making notes on a large yellow pad. The other man was older, with a small, white face and a habit of gazing out of the window. Of the three of them, the woman did most of the talking and it was she who led me patiently through my life, pausing from time to time to ask a question, note a date or ask me to expand a little on this or that. She was evidently senior to the other two – there was a very definite sense of deference when they occasionally conferred together – and when she’d mapped out my twenty-three years to her satisfaction, she became suddenly brisker, closing her file and returning her fountain pen to her bag.
    ‘You’ll be sitting a couple of tests: English language and mental agility,’ she said. ‘The latter is a bit of a game.’ She smiled. ‘You ever play dominoes?’
    I took the tests in a room down the corridor. The dominoes were arranged in certain sequences. The test was to guess the next sequence. I spent half an hour toying with various pieces. As a preparation for defending the state, it seemed a curious exercise.
    The woman reappeared before lunch. She carried her bag in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. On top of the papers, clearly visible, was a copy of the Official Secrets Act. She put it carefully on the desk. Beside it, she laid another official-looking document.
    ‘This is the Maxwell-Fyfe Declaration,’ she said. ‘You’re welcome to read it but I’m afraid you can’t take it away. The photocopier’s broken.’ She smiled thinly, nodding at the document. ‘It’s the only one we’ve got.’
    I picked up the declaration and read it quickly. It turned out to be a statement of the aims of the security services. I looked across at the woman. Thus far, no one had spelled out what I was doing or why I was here.
    ‘Are you offering me a job?’ I