Thunder in the Blood Read Online Free Page B

said.
    ‘Yes. Subject to the usual checks.’ She paused. ‘We’ll need four names. Four referees. Just to make sure.’
    ‘But what for? What’s the job about?’
    She paused again, frowning.
    ‘It’s a government post,’ she said at length. ‘Security service. F branch. I understood you’d been briefed.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Oh.’ She nodded, sighing, ‘I see.’ She looked at me a moment, speculative, then glanced down at the papers on the desk. ‘Do you have a pen?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Then perhaps you’d like to sign this.’ She picked up the copy of the Official Secrets Act and indicated the relevant page.
    I didn’t move. I was still looking at her. ‘But what if I don’t want the job?’ I hesitated. ‘Whatever it is?’
    ‘It makes no difference. You still sign.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because you’re here. Because you’ve met us. Because—’ shebroke off, glancing at her watch. ‘It’ll save time later.’
    ‘Later?’
    ‘Yes.’ She glanced up, that same thin smile. ‘After you’ve had a little think and accepted.’
    I joined MI5 on 15 December 1985. Each of my four referees had been interviewed by a suave young man from the Ministry of Defence Police and he completed his trawl through my life with yet another personal interview. Quite what he made of my ramblings about Zaire I can’t say, but a thick bundle of forms arrived through the post five days after he left, and I began my induction at the MI5 Registry and Documentation Centre at Curzon House in Mayfair.
    The important thing to say here is that at no time did I express any real enthusiasm to join the intelligence services. I certainly welcomed the prospect of a regular wage and I had no objection to a year or two in London, but I was totally honest about my impatience with paperwork and my loathing of desk jobs. Something they called ‘fieldcraft’ sounded more enticing and when they pushed the conversation in the right direction I readily admitted a liking for unusual encounters and physical risk. But in every other respect I was never less than sceptical, an attitude which I now believe exactly matched what they wanted. Thus, perhaps, the offer of the job. And thus, amongst the pink balloons and the cheap champagne, my first taste of MI5 at play.
    Christmas 1985 also found Wesley on the move. The outcome of his exchanges with the editor was an invitation to resign and he finally left on New Year’s Eve with a boxful of office stationery and a generous cheque. The latter was big enough to keep him eating for the best part of the following year, and he retreated to Stoke Newington and set himself up as a freelance, generating a stream of stories from the battered Olympia portable he kept on the desk beside his bed.
    Because he was such a good journalist – tireless, nosy, bold – he achieved a remarkable strike rate, cashing in on the goodwill and respect he’d already earned in Fleet Street, and pushing his copy to any editor who’d pay. Each published story he scissored carefully from the appropriate paper and glued it into the scrapbook which now lies on my bedroom floor. Beside each item,usually in his favourite green Biro, he added his own judgement on the worth of the story and what he’d managed to do with it. Many of these judgements are harsh, a kind of relentless self-mutilation, but what’s very evident is the direction his journalistic interest quickly began to take.
    For a while, that winter, he stuck to the style he’d made his own: tabloid, punchy, the vivid conga of breathless three-line paragraphs he was later to dismiss as his ‘Doc Marten period’. This idiom had won him his first real job in Fleet Street, but by early spring he was plainly tiring of it. Working at his own pace, freed from the tyranny of the news desk, he at last had time to sink his teeth into real stories, hunting a succession of quarries, dragging one or two of them to earth. Many of these stories had a business background, totally