London
Roger was running the Kyiv desk when it all went to shit.
It wasn’t his fault, but it was, at least a little bit, his responsibility.
Moscow rolled up Odessa, compromising every asset, every agent.
Roger’s networks ran those networks, so somewhere down the chain they got fucked and the Russians wasted no time.
Worse was how it compromised the Americans, as well, which at the end of the day was the real problem.
Roger had to write three different reports, speak to a dozen different interrogators, and even sit for a confidential inquiry with the foreign secretary.
He was transferred back to Head Office, placed in the pool, and told to cool his heels.
When he got operational status again, all he did was debrief agents coming in from Budapest or Karachi or wherever. Kid stuff.
His section chief never let him forget about Odessa, either. Anytime Roger was read into an operation, the old man would immediately shut him down if he ventured an opinion.
“Pendleton,” he’d say, because he called only people he respected by their first names, “if we wanted to fuck this one up we’d listen to what you are saying, but until then I’d advise just letting the adults talk.”
It was all nonsense, anyway. Computer hacks and reams of data analyzed by algorithms. Little men in little cubicles, in the deep recesses of SIS, writing reports about what other reports might mean.
Foreign desks weren’t finding fresh angles, weren’t training Joes, weren’t working through one asset or another until they found the piece of treasure that actually mattered.
They tried to catalog everything and in the process learned nothing.
Roger still wore a suit and vest into the office, still smoked tobacco out of a pipe, and still followed supper with a brandy.
He did these things not because he particularly liked them.
The suits were uncomfortable, the pipe a pain to clean, and he had recently concluded that he actually did not enjoy spirits at all.
No, Roger did these things because it’s how things ought to be done.
Carefully, deliberately, with the best of ethics and intentions.
Men had served Crown and Country well for quite a long time before deciding it would be all right to wear khakis and vape and drink seltzers, and maybe there wasn’t a correlation between the lax standards and the denuded mindset of the analysts and agents of the Secret Service, but it bloody well didn’t hurt to try to give a shit.
Roger wasn’t old-fashioned, he was just practical.
That was also why he still took time every day to practice his street work, walking down alleys and into the Tube, out of the Tube and down other alleys, working his way circuitously home to his flat in Islington in order to throw off any shadows.
It wasn’t that anyone from Head Office was going to follow him—they knew where he lived, of course—or even that there was much chance that the Russians or Iranians were trying to find his residence.
They, again, probably already knew that if they wanted to.
You could find it online. But you could never be too careful.
And it was good practice. A spook had to be good at these things.
An idle mind was a recipe for imprudent action, as Roger knew from too many empty afternoons and weekends at the racetrack.
So when he had nothing else to do after a day of accomplishment, he put his mind to work, reading the classics.
John le Carré’s bickering bureaucrats were eerily recognizable, but it felt excusable when you had an actual enemy to fight, out there somewhere.
Graham Greene made him nostalgic for real men, and Fleming was silly but romantic.
Alan Furst and David Downing gave him an appreciation for the old-timers.
Even Patrick O’Brian had plenty of espionage amid the sailing and cannon-fire.
Oh, how Napoleon’s eagerness so inspired the science of spycraft!
He read Eric Ambler and John Buchan for historical perspective, and even as far back as Robert Louis Stevenson you could find secrets and the men who made them prowling the Scottish Highlands.
Roger didn’t go in much for general mystery and crime.
He didn’t want detectives solving murders on the moors, he wanted men fleeing on trains and preventing war.
He also didn’t care for what became of his intelligence-gathering heroes once the Wall fell and the Cold War became a War on Terror or War in the Assistance of a Morally Compromised International Ally or War Against Our Own Citizens For Their Own Good.
Those more recent books had a lot of moralizing, first of all, but also there were too many computers.
There were fewer trains. People didn’t write down coded messages in newspapers anymore.
He also preferred his spies British. A bit of national chauvinism on his part, perhaps, but that was simply the truth.
Unfortunately, when he got tired of reading and instead switched to a movie—usually after the brandy made him drowsy enough to nod off mid-page—he found most of the spy movies he preferred were American.
He could watch a Bond or a le Carré adaptation or even something a little more contemporary, but by the time the telly was on he really preferred a steroidal idiot from Iowa or Texas or some other dumb place in the United States smashing people through windows.
He was not proud of this personal preference, would never tell anybody, but the truth was that he ended almost every night falling asleep with tobacco dust from the pipe all over his vest while Jason Bourne tried to remember who trained him.
It was in one those half-awake bourbon-induced film binges that Roger recalled a task force he was briefly on, many years before.
This would have been not long after Sandhurst, when he was early enough in his military intelligence career that SIS had not yet even reached out to him.
It was a technology summit with the Americans, a knowledge-sharing conference in good faith.
The British had some new drone system, something technical but dull.
And the Americans had discovered how to map and program neurons.
They were, it seemed at the time, trying to make real-life Jason Bournes.
Trying to calibrate superspies who went undercover without even realizing they were undercover.
Roger was seconded to a committee, his only purpose to aid senior staff in their discussions, and briefly had eyes on a preliminary précis of what the Americans were cooking.
But the entire event was canceled at the last minute and the technology never deployed.
Some civil liberties issue in the United States.
But Roger also knew that the tech worked, that subsequent American administrations would, if they could, give it another try, and that the tech did in fact still exist. The vagaries of international law meant it was sold to some film directors in Portugal for some fantasy show, that even the studio had seemingly abandoned the use of it, and that the Americans would, no doubt, like to have that technology back in their hands.
What better treasure, what better way for Roger to rebuild his reputation with Head Office, than if he could find a neuroscanner as a gift for our dear, beloved American friends.
Roger sat up in bed. Bourne was crashing his car into a bollard.
Roger had one of those ideas people really only have once or twice in their entire lives.
If you are lucky, that idea is the internal combustion engine or general relativity and you can change the world.
Roger’s wasn’t quite so ambitious, but he knew it was still a good one.
But if he was going to see his idea through to fruition, he was going to have to do everything himself. Off-the-books. Old-school.
He was methodical. First he read every publicly available bit of information he could about this fantasy series.
He watched all the films and put together a timeline.
In 2040 they announced a new series of movies made with “unique neurological technology.” He read Portuguese news reports about fires on the island of Madeira, he watched behind-the-scenes documentaries of early films shot on the island, he read about special exemptions the Portuguese government made to the studio to help revitalize the Madeiran economy, and he read hundreds of fan blogs, wikis, and subreddits from the early 2040s about the production of the films. Learned how people were volunteering to move to Madeira to participate, found a deposition with families suing the studio after no one had heard from their children and spouses.
There were online fan communities dedicated to “Finding Your Lost,” combing through stills from movies and identifying extras in the background who looked like your family members.
Roger used his discretion, though, and skipped reading the original novels. Too long. Not really important.
He read interviews with film producers, directors, set designers, production assistants, sound editors, and even actors.
Everyone was a little bit vague about how the movies were made, but clear enough that the characters were “real” now, that the fantasy world actually existed, that if you visited it you felt transported.
He looked at Variety and Hollywood Reporter stories about the productions, watched a documentary about Cristiano Ronaldo visiting the set, saw photos of press junkets and film premieres.
Here’s the guy who played the king. Here’s the guy who played a wizard.
Here’s a crowd on Hollywood Boulevard outside the Chinese Theatre screaming at them.