The Entertainment Bomb

Enter the Apache

By the end of May, the first big accommodation tents of Entertainment Enterprises had been pitched on patches of newly filled and graded areas, of the EuroDump, just by the hangers of The Most Unusual Aeroplane Company. This area had rapidly become the main assembly point for all incoming elements of Entertainment State. Already, there were extraordinary scenes. Each morning started with the orchestrated shouts of the mass callisthenics sessions, and parade and carnival rehearsals; these were often led and conducted by Famous Faces, who took to their new sergeant-major roles better than anyone ever thought. With the arrival of such great Stars, the camp-following tentacles of money, influence and technology were spreading the body of Entertainment State through the city. The Eat-I organisation was saturating Belfast with any and every aspect of modern Entertainment technology Marshall noted with great satisfaction that now these much­admired constructions were in place, his popeyed American colleagues no longer referred to his native country as the old curiosity shop.

With this satisfying thought in mind, Marshall commenced his morning's business by opening a Red Box which contained four single­spaced sheets of A4. These were part of the regular ultra-secret General Index for the first week of June, distributed three times a week. Each issue usually consisted of some thirty or more pages circulated to Heads of Departments only. In his hand were reports on the hundreds of spider­lines which radiated from Tower House to an astonishing range of the world's compass. Anything in the slightest way relevant to Northern Ireland might be included, from a remark heard on a Madrid railway station to the tracking of a major arms shipment, a certain face in an unusually expensive restaurant, a postal worker's tip, or a railway driver's phone-call. Times were changing very rapidly, and those Intelligence analysts who still had managed to retain a sense of humour called most of what they were now engaged in `The Watch On The Self'.

Each item in the General Index had been filtered a score of times before being taken from a log-jammed river to its appropriate significance

section, that choice being an art no machine could yet match. Only then were the computers really put to work. What was the strategic-materials talk in Stockholm or Rome this particular week? To obtain, pay for, and transport weapons, and strategic nuclear material across Europe was not easy. Good experienced operators might well get the material through, but the manufacturing base of tactical, never mind strategic, hardware was narrow and unique; it involved relatively few highly specialised interest sectors, most of which were crammed with inbuilt alarm­channels, both human and material. Such a channel would open and flicker just long enough to enable a Hamburg GSG9 computer to tell the Surete, Guarda, or Special Branch, where and when to catch hold of a fast disappearing tail. The main-frames would then be let loose, their extensive linked networks being the only hounds fast enough to work up the inference speed required.

His thoughts were interrupted by his secretary bringing in yet another Red Box. He looked up, surprised. He had not had two Red Boxes in one day since the Gulf War. Alex Spencer gave him the faintest of smiles as he caught her eye. He opened the battered case as if it might contain a cobra. A single sheet of A4. An Apache Signal. Direct from Her Upstairs.

He gazed in wonder at the report. Although he had heard of such things, he had never received such a signal in his entire 30-year career. John Carlton had been correct. A privateer was on the loose. Rare in Intelligence as he once heard Benson say, `as a sighting of a foot-high hobgoblin in green hose and pointed shoes along Westbourne Grove.' Here was Minister John Carlton's Pirate. And to generate an Apache Signal, a bloody good one. A loner amongst loners. Amazing, he thought, reaching for his cigarette papers. Most such buccaneers got wasted before they stepped out of their back-bedroom. His breath whistled through his teeth. He didn't think there were any of these comic-strip heroes left. With an Apache, what was being looked for was not just another isolated clandestine arms or drugs shipment, but the very highest measure of human skill and determination.

And this one acted apparently for pure moral and political idealism, now supposed to be the rarest of commodities, whether amongst innocent or guilty. Motivation without profit was the wildest of cards. Yet all the major assassins (left, right, and anarchist) of the past forty years had something of such motivation. They were very different to conventional criminals, who usually had a record, could easily become informers, were not the brightest of folk, and certainly not the most disciplined. Most such had a sentimental streak, and could usually be caught by the net-full, flashing and shouting and spouting, their blond girlfriends all over the front pages of The News of The World. The police loved this largely working-class game-show. It came complete in itself, with TV stars, fallen boxers, drinking clubs, and nightclubs crammed with informers and policeman enjoying themselves, a lot of whom finished up in gaol alongside their underworld friends and associates.

            The first sign of a true Apache being active was the deafening silence from this heaving stew, who usually knew anything and everything there was to be known or told about anyone, from roadsweepers to Royals. The first spore of a very different kind of creature stalking Europe was the complete absence of trails of misappropriated property, money, passports, myriad licenses, tax returns, and the inevitable social security records. To achieve twentieth century invisibility proper was a quite unique art-form. Every kind of contact-life had to be cast off or reforged, changed and reforged again, then further changes and forges were again scattered, split, shredded in their turn before further false paper-trails could again be laid.

To continue to remain invisible in the twentieth century was to some, Marshall supposed, the only interesting game. The compensations were the taste of real blood, some equally real action, and the sound of Authority falling, which to some peculiar folk was far sweeter music than any mass of beautifully harmonised string instruments.

In his experience, most assassins were pre-Freudian creatures. Despite the efforts of popular psychiatrists and the press and media who would have them as psychopaths or maladjusted middle-class trendies, almost all assassins were quite sane, and drawn from a broad class spectrum. Some lived secretly in a private land where valour and moral purpose were not yet sullied by overprotective democratic rationalisations. In what Fields called The Great Age of Clerks, he was always surprised to realise that there were still many who secretly dreamed and lusted for the simplicity of the assassin's view, with its complete dedication, and its resurrection of genuine mystic purity of moral purpose. This, he supposed, was part of an anarchist religion in which all the old lost codes of righteousness and rites of Old Testament vengeance appeared to be very much alive and well.

If the Apache trails didn't plunge deep into the criminal forests, they nevertheless led to a world which to Marshall was just as fascinating. With the sound of the trains in the night, the ennui of what he called the Hidden Ones was at its most painful and acute. Some were simply too old, many were completely thrashed out, others had lost their gun­nervelittle known outside the Intelligence services. The broken hearts of hardly-known old subversives tended to beat again when the almost inconceivable smell of sulphur was again detected on golf course, in

and there were a few whose many covers in the past had so confused

them, they didn't really know who they were any more. This was a society boardroom, on factory floor, or before mirrors which revealed the belly hanging over the gut.

This was a college as secret as any himself or Fields belonged to. If the Hidden Ones really believed in anything at all any more, they still served to open doors, arrange a journey, help with bundles of used notes, clothes, transport, new documents, food in tins, or a place to lay the weary plotting head. Often, in Northern Ireland in particular, a bloody plotting head needed a surgeon, a nurse, and a well-scrubbed room at the back of the suburban garage. Here was a subterranean community only partially known even to the conspiracy theorist and the professional investigator. Such coast-watchers were often rightly baffled by the incomprehensible movement of weapons and information by shadowy figures at the limit of the focus of the discursive investigating eye.

When the Apache moved, Marshall conjectured it would be through this particular forest. He imagined by now the whole of the globe was pulsing with her electronic ghost: Sex: female. Country of origin: Northern Ireland. Motivation: moral. Age: mid-thirties. Appearance: master of disguise, cross-dressing frequently suspected....

With Fields about to go public under the guise of early retirement, and Entertainment Enterprises getting underway in Northern Ireland, this was just what he needed. How long would it take she who was known as Nora Harcourt, to detect Entertainment State?

     Not very long, he guessed.

            Not very long at all.