In 1997 I had been working at the agency for only a couple of years and in that time I had been assigned very little field work, but I always suspected they had employed me with a view to making use of my particular abilities when the need should arise.
On the 20th of February, Peter Donaldson, the acting chief at the time, called me into his office.
He pushed a photograph towards me.
“What do you know about Dr. Raymond Delittle?” he asked.
“I’ve never heard of him.” I said, truthfully.
I was a bit on edge talking to Donaldson and I wasn’t sure whether I ought to be calling him “sir”. But to my ears that would have sounded a little ridiculous, as if I’d been watching too many spy films.
Fortunately Donaldson was actually quite easy-going, in spite of his position. His hair was immaculately-groomed and he tended to peer at people over the top of a pair of half-moon glasses that he constantly took on and off. He more resembled a doctor in some well-to-do countryside village than the second most powerful person in Britain’s intelligence community.
“He’s a physicist.” he said. “He’s been working on a highly classified device. Top secret. Yesterday, he went missing, and he took the only prototype with him.”
“Kidnapped?”
“We thought so at first. But all the evidence points to him deliberately absconding with the device. We now believe he flew a small plane to an airfield in France, and then crossed into Italy. After that, so far, we have no further information on his whereabouts.”
Donaldson placed a series of further photographs on his desk facing me.
Delittle was sixty years of age and looked, if anything, older. He was wiry, and possessed a shock of unruly grey hair. His eyes were the most striking thing about him. They were a deep blue in colour and, even in the photographs, seemed to bore into the camera. I can’t precisely define the look I saw in his eyes. Perhaps there was pain in it, and a sort of earnest imploring expression, but there was also something cold and evil.
I’ve often been accused of lacking in imagination, but even I could see all of that, even with the briefest of glances. With those eyes, Delittle was never going to be able to maintain any kind of disguise successfully; not even coloured contacts could hide the look in them. The only thing he’d be able to do, if he wanted to remain incognito, would be to wear sunglasses.
“You’re to go to Italy immediately and attempt to locate him.” Donaldson told me. “You’ll be given all possible support, no expense spared, but the operation must be completed covertly, with the utmost secrecy. When you find him, retrieve the device.”
“And what do I do with Delittle?”
“Kill him.”
“Kill him?” I said, a little incredulously.
“Doesn’t matter how you do it, just do it.”
“Can you tell me why he has to die?”
Donaldson took his spectacles off and stared at me coldly. The village doctor charade seemed to melt away.
“This device is unbelievably dangerous and we believe Delittle is planning to hand it over to foreign agents. He must not be allowed to do that and we cannot run the risk of a knowledge transfer taking place either. The existence of the device has never been officially acknowledged, which is why we need you to get it back with as little fuss as possible.”
“What does the device do?”
“That’s above your pay grade. All you need to know is, this prototype is unfathomably dangerous.”
I sat there thinking for a moment. Then I said, “Why me? I’ve never done this type of thing before.”
“You speak Italian fluently. Also, Delittle is a keen outdoorsman, like you. He may try to make use of those skills in evading capture.”
“That sounds a little far-fetched.”
“Not according to our psychologists. Now, level with me, Andrew. Can you do this for us? Have we made a mistake?”
“No mistake.” I said, shaking my head. “I can do it.”
“Good. Go and tell Angela what you need. She’ll see to it you have everything within the hour. A car will then take you to an airport, and you’ll be in Italy in under four hours.”
“Right.” I said, rising to my feet.
“Andrew,” he said abruptly, “if you can’t bring the device back, destroy it. The most important thing is that neither the device nor the knowledge of how it’s made fall into the hands of our potential enemies.”
I went away from Donaldson’s office with a curious mixture of emotions. The mission sounded very exciting, like something out of a spy novel, but I also knew there was a lot I wasn’t being told. Regarding the matter of killing Delittle, it sounded like he was a dangerous traitor, and the thought didn’t bother me much. In any case, if I didn’t do it, someone else would.
Whether I could actually find him, that was another matter altogether. It didn’t sound like there was much to go on. What was I suppose to do, exactly? I couldn’t just go to Italy and start asking people if they’d seen Delittle. Even if I could do that, I’d never find him in time, if he really was planning to sell the device to some foreign power.
The agency had employees who were skilled in locating missing people. People who knew how to access camera networks, people who maintained close relationships with police forces, people who were experts in psychology and could make an excellent guess at where a man like Delittle might go. I wasn’t one of those people.
I had to just trust that, among the many things that Donaldson clearly hadn’t shared with me were sound reasons for my involvement actually making sense.
On the plane I remember sitting there feeling like a proper spy. I was the real deal now. But I still had severe doubts about my ability to find Delittle, and in another way, I felt totally bogus. Imposter syndrome, you could call it.
A friend of mine used to say that the reason so many people suffer from imposter syndrome now is that they’re all imposters.
Surely there were people far better-trained than me, who might know how to locate an errant scientist with very little to go on. I wondered if perhaps I was just one of dozens of people, all with the same mission. Perhaps I was some kind of backup plan, in case the real professionals didn’t manage to find him.
At the airport, a small private effort in the Aosta valley, a man approached me wearing a dark blue suit and sunglasses. To me he looked like a stereotypical Italian. Behind him were two men who I assumed were some sort of military police, in beige uniforms and carrying Beretta AR70s.
“Marchetti.” said the man, holding out his hand.
I guessed that was his name and I told him mine. Or at least, I told him the name I’d been assigned for the mission.
He ushered me into a side room. I did half wonder if I was being arrested, but it turned out he had information for me.
“The … individual in which you are interested,” he said, in English, somewhat laboriously, “he has been seen here.”
He unfurled a map and pointed at a village.
The name of the village was unfamiliar to me.
“We can take you there.” he said.
“That would be very kind.” I said.
Marchetti drove me there himself in a German car, without the armed guards.
He was surprisingly chatty but I couldn’t tell him much. He claimed to work for AISI, the Italian internal intelligence service, and he had all the right documents, but one can never be too careful. In any case, I wasn’t sure how much we had shared with them.
He dropped me off at a hotel, which he said made excellent polenta with sausage.
The village was small enough to walk across in five minutes. Apart from the hotel there was a small grocery shop, a bar, a church, and not much else.
The hotel, I assumed, must have catered to hikers. The village was almost surrounded by mountains and the hotel had a sign on it that said we were at well over a thousand metres altitude.
Some details, obviously, I’ve had to leave out, for security reasons. Not that it really matters which village I was in, but a lot of this is still classified.
After checking in at the hotel and making enquiries about the other guests, I began to scour the village.
There was one prominent trail leading directly out of the village up the side of a mountain, so I asked some old men at the bar if they’d seen anyone go up there today.
Surprisingly, to me, they had. Apparently winter hiking is a thing in Italy. This was news to me. My mother is Italian but I had never been in Italy, aside from visiting Rome once.
I told them I was looking for my father, whom I claimed suffers mild dementia, and I was worried he’d got confused.
They were extremely helpful.
They told me at least five people had walked up the trail, and one man in particular sounded rather interesting. He had stopped in at the bar wearing a large backpack, and had ordered coffee. He hadn’t said much, but he’d said enough for them to notice he had a strong English accent.
His description matched Delittle quite well.
I couldn’t help but wonder if the folks back at the Agency had foreseen Delittle’s apparent flight into the hills, and if they had, why hadn’t they suggested the possibility to me at the outset?
Regardless, I set off to try to find this alleged Englishman, since that was my best and only lead.
The trail from the village led up an abandoned ski slope, consequently very steep, but in those days I was extremely fit and I basically ran up it, or as much as I could considering it was covered in snow.
I’d made about six hundred metres of additional altitude when I stopped for a rest and a spot of reconnaissance. Scanning the mountain with infra-red binoculars, I spotted a figure walking back and forth on a plateau some way off, near an ice-bound cave. Whoever it was, he must have diverged considerably from any trail to get there.
I abandoned my rest stop and made straight for the figure.
As I got closer all my doubts evaporated. The figure was Delittle, lightly-disguised, if one can call it a disguise, with a short beard and swept-back hair.
I paged a message back to HQ.
TARGET LOCATED.
The reply came swiftly.
ELIMINATE.
I took out my pistol and made my way steadily towards the figure.
There was nowhere for him to run. I could even chance a shot from some distance away. I was confident in my ability to chase him down if needed.
The main possibility that worried me was that someone was surely planning to meet him on that hillside. Why anyone would choose such a place for a rendezvous was quite unfathomable. Most likely he was expecting a helicopter.
When I was almost close enough to get off a shot, he disappeared into the cave. That was fine by me; in a way it made my task easier. Unless, of course, the cave led somewhere and he knew it, perhaps to an exit elsewhere on the mountain. That thought caused me to break into a run.
When I reached the cave I stopped and listened for a moment, but I could hear nothing. I scanned the dark blueish recesses with my binoculars, and they picked up no heat trace.
Almost immediately, when I began to walk forwards, I felt a sharp sting in my side. Then the world seemed to turn sideways.
I awoke to find myself propped against the rocks just outside the cave, my hands handcuffed behind my back and the handcuffs secured to a loop of metal wire that had somehow been fixed to the underlying rock. My ankles were similarly locked together and attached to a bolt driven into the ground.
Peering at me with those unsettling eyes was Delittle himself.
“You’re probably wondering what happened to you.” he said. Without waiting for me to say anything, he continued. “You were shot with a chemical pellet fired from this.”
He held up a long plastic tube.
“My own design. In airport scanners it looks like part of the frame of a suitcase.”
“What do you want with me?” I said, my words a little slurred due to the lingering effects of the drug.
Delittle smiled.
“I want you to understand.” he said. “Also, since you were evidently planning to kill me, I want you to suffer. It will be a comfort to me, to have someone else next to me when I activate the device.”
“What are you talking about?”
He peered into my face, and I had the feeling that his eyes bored right into my soul.
Then he took a suitcase out of his backpack. Donaldson had described exactly this suitcase to me; it was made of ridged titanium and could only be unlocked via a fingerprint sensor.
Delittle held his finger to the sensor, the suitcase emitted a beep, and he opened it to reveal a pair of control panels and some digital meters, embedded into the two halves of the suitcase.
“It’s a remarkable effect.” he said. “Probably they’ve told you nothing about it. They don’t want anyone to know. I was developing it on behalf of the Ministry of Defence; a poor choice of name for a ministry if ever there was one.
“I discovered it myself. I’m probably the greatest living genius on the planet, false modesty aside. Tell me, are you familiar with LSD?”
“The stuff that rots the brains of hippies?”
He carried on as though I hadn’t said anything.
“The tiniest of doses, far smaller than ought to have any effect, completely deranges a person’s mind. It sets some sort of cascade in motion, a few hundred micrograms deftly pressing the brain’s levers.
“I discovered an analogous effect, except it involves very precise frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. The right frequencies, passing directly through the skull, barely even interacting with the brain at all, can produce an overwhelming sense of despair. A feeling of deep hopelessness beyond anything you can possibly imagine.”
“Sounds lovely.” I told him. “What a fantastic innovation.”
“They wanted to keep it for themselves.”
He was becoming angry.
“The British government, that bunch of degenerate imbeciles, wanted only Britain to wield this power. Imagine! Any country they took it into their heads to quarrel with, they could immediately reduce to nothing but a collection of weeping halfwits.”
“If you want to tell me politicians are degenerate imbeciles, I’m with you there.”
He laughed, and I began to think perhaps I could get on his good side, if he had one, and persuade him to unchain me.
“I’ve tasted the power of the device.” he said, patting the suitcase. “Only the slightest taste, but that was enough to clear the scales from my eyes. I’m going to give the world a taste of its own medicine. When I activate the machine, half of Europe will fall into suicidal despair.”
The whole talk sounded ridiculous, but certainly it was true that whatever the device actually did, it was bad enough for our leaders to want it destroyed, rather than risk it falling into the wrong hands.
“Isn’t it possible that thing’s addled your brain?” I asked him. “What’s going to happen to you if you set it off?”
“That no longer matters.” he said, and he began to fiddle with the knobs and dials and buttons inside the suitcase.
“Is someone meeting you here? You might as well tell me; I can’t do anything about it now anyway.”
He gave a short sarcastic laugh.
“I simply needed a suitably high location from which to deploy it.”
“What kind of range does it have?”
“Hundreds of miles. But you’ll feel its greatest effect, since you’re sitting next to it.”
“You’re planning to kill yourself?”
“In effect, yes.” he said.
“Just to send some sort of message?”
“You’ve got it.”
“I don’t understand why.”
“You will.” he said.
I tried pulling at the bolts that held my handcuffs to the rock, but there was no shifting them.
“I wouldn’t bother.” he said, over his shoulder.
Eventually he sat on the ground facing me and said, “It’s time.”
“Wait,” I said, “you don’t have to —”
But then, with a horrible grin that will remain seared into my memory for the rest of my life, he casually flicked a switch.
It’s impossible to really convey what happened next. The expression on his face changed immediately to one expressing a kind of blank horror. To me, this facial expression of his seemed indescribably terrifying, as though I was looking upon something wholly unnatural and evil, something no human eye should ever see.
It appeared to me that there was no longer anything human in him at all, but only a pitiless malevolence, as if his bodily frame was now inhabited only by a spirit of distilled destruction, yet at the same time his face seemed to express a pure and unfathomable suffering, which somehow failed to evoke pity in me nonetheless.
My mind immediately attempted to run to the possibility of escape or rescue, and there, instead of comfort, I found only hopelessness swarming with every evil in the world, assembled together like a demon horde.
Every catastrophe of history seemed to crowd my mind, pushing out every other thought: tortures ancient and modern, gulags, the murder of innocents, hideous diseases of the mind and body; all suffused with a spirit that flickered somewhere between intentional malice and an uncaring purposelessness.
The entire universe seemed nothing but a yawning abyss, existing only to grind sentient suffering beings in its gears.
I cried out in anguish, and as I did so, Delittle took my gun, placed it in his mouth, and blew his brains out.
His lifeless body fell backwards against the rock behind him, his features still contorted into an expression of utter terror.
I prayed for death but nothing with even the smallest measure of goodness seemed to hear my prayers.
In total, this terrible experience can have gone on for only a minute or two, yet it seemed to last for years. Slowly I became aware of the sound of an engine, growing ever-louder, the sound imbued with a monstrous and ineffable animosity.
I don’t remember becoming unconscious. I only remember awaking surrounded by pieces of wreckage. The terrible feeling was gone, replaced by a gnawing depressive sensation whose awfulness at least lay within the bounds of the ordinary.
I spotted pieces of helicopter blade and realised a helicopter had crashed directly in front of me, part of it landing on Delittle and smashing his infernal machine. A logo indicating that the helicopter was intended for mountain rescue was visible on parts of the wreckage. It certainly wasn’t hard to imagine why it had crashed; no-one could have piloted a helicopter successfully anywhere close to Delittle’s invention while it was running.
Somehow I didn’t spot the corpses at first. They were strewn among the broken pieces of copter. I counted three, besides Delittle’s mangled body, then I realised that the one closest to me was actually still alive. His arm was broken and bloody, but he was in one piece. He lifted his head and groggily watched me for a moment.
He shuffled over to me and began to fiddle with my restraints. He didn’t seem surprised by them. I would later learn, and was already beginning to suspect, that the mountain rescue logo was only serving as a disguise, and in reality the helicopter had contained military personnel charged with killing Delittle by whatever means they had available and, quite likely, me as well in the process.
Now my putative assassin had become my saviour.
“You’ll have to get the keys off his body.” I said, nodding towards the remains of Delittle.
“Fair point.” he said. He was English.
He retrieved the keys and unfastened me.
“Is anyone else coming?” I asked him.
“I don’t think so.” he said.
“Can you stand?”
He forced himself up.
“Looks like it, mate.” he said.
“Can you walk?”
“I reckon so.”
“Then let’s get out of here before the real mountain rescue turn up.”
I watched him to see his reaction. He didn’t contradict me. By build and bearing I’d say he was SAS, or some other elite military unit.
“Wait a minute.” he said, and he began to search among the wreckage.
His arm was bent at an odd angle and I don’t know how he could bear the pain, but I suppose they train them pretty well.
Soon he found what he was looking for: an unusually large grenade.
“You’re going to have to do it.” he said. “When we’re clear I need you to throw this at the crash site.”
I didn’t bother asking questions. I knew better.
We made our way along the hillside till we found a dip that could cover us.
“Take cover.” I told him.
In the distance I could already see hikers making their way towards us. We didn’t have much time.
Once he was in a safe position I threw the grenade, then threw myself down the slope.
There was no boom, only a rising crackling sound. An intense white light shone over the ridge behind which we hid, heat searing the snow. After it died down I scrambled back up the slope to look, and it appeared as though the crash site had been levelled, with the wreckage and the corpses pulverised. All that remained were charred blackened metal pieces.
My companion insisted on checking it himself, in spite of the pain he must have been in. After that we made our way towards the village.
At first I thought we had saved Europe. My boss was pleased with my work, even though, in truth, I had done almost nothing of use and had almost ended a basket case, but for the intervention of a fortuitous accident—or God, if you believe that kind of thing.
However, as I walked around London in the weeks afterwards, composing my thoughts, I found I wasn’t so sure.
On almost everyone’s face I saw, or thought I saw, the same worn-out bleak expression.
The device’s brief run had caused some serious problems in the immediate area, within a hundred or so miles; there had been a number of suicides and an even greater number of fatal accidents, but not so many that the governments of France, Italy and Switzerland weren’t able to control the flow of information and prevent anyone raising awkward questions.
The period of activation had been mercifully short.
It was only afterwards that I began to wonder if the real sting of the machine wasn’t in its aftermath. In the same way that the fallout from a nuclear bomb can cause more damage than the actual explosion, this device had shown people something that it was impossible to forget, inflicting grievous psychic wounds that may never heal.
Once you have looked into the abyss, you can never forget it’s there, hovering on the edge of ordinary life, remaining just out of sight, waiting patiently for its victims to momentarily lose their balance and fall into its unknowable depths.
What light can dissolve the shadows that still cling to people’s minds? Has the machine dealt us a mortal blow?
These questions remain unanswered.
