Abaddon - Chapter 8

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 20, 2010

“It is simply not possible that such a weapon could have remained undiscovered by our security forces”, says the head of the security forces. Ivan (for it is he) looks thoroughly ill at ease sitting in a huge floral print armchair with a cup of bone china tea on his lap and a slobbery labrador at his left elbow. Ivan being treated with the utmost hospitality, but a sort of hospitality thoroughly un-Russian, making him look like a vodyanoi out of water.

In his best dress uniform, with every silver button, star and eagle polished, Ivan is also heavily overdressed. Her Majesty’s ambassador to the Republic of Vzeng Na, Sir Reginald Washburton, OBE, is in his carpet slippers, slyly feeding scraps of breakfast bacon to his dogs beneath the eyes of Mrs. Washburton.

“Well”, announces Sir Reginald, “we do have a problem there, I’m afraid.” He goes on to say that he fully appreciates how much of Vzeng Na’s GNP is dependent on tourism, people flying in to look at the big hole in the ground and so forth. Her Majesty’s government, he says, have no wish to inflict damage on the Vzeng Na economy by issuing, for example, an official advice against travelling to Na. But the safety of British citizens also has to be considered. As Her Majesty’s representative in Na, not only has he to receive assurances that no danger of weapons of mass unpleasantness exist under his and Ivan’s feet, but his own staff have to see that it does not.

Ivan fidgets with his cap badge and replies that he cannot prove that a thing does not exist. At this point, I posit loudly that Ivan has just conclusively proved his own brain doesn’t to my full satisfaction. Ivan shoots me a look of crocodilian coldness, then claims not to have understood my Russian.

There are five of us in the room, the best room in the British Embassy, a place my social-climbing grandmother would have called a drawing room, and which Sir Reginald slummingly refers to as ‘the back parlour’. The floral curtains match the chintz on the armchairs. Despite this, everything manages in some bizarre impossible manner to clash with everything else. The flowers on the chintz curtains are red, green and orange. The wallpaper is blue and pink. The carpeting can only be described as Battenburg.

Seated round the fire - a roaring log fire, very jolly, technically illegal inside Na city limits - are Sir Reginald, Ivan, and myself, having a cosy fireside chat, along with a young man who remains standing behind Ivan and who has been introduced only as “Mr. Keogh, our technical advisor”, and Lady Washburton, without whom the presence of Sir Reginald would be inconceivable. I am recovering well from my terrible ordeal (in actual fact, the worst physical damage I’ve sustained is skinned knees and blisters). Sir Reg., though, is of the opinion that I’ve also suffered untold invisible trauma to my psyche, and has been trying to convince me to undergo counselling ever since. Said counselling, however, seems to involve being flown back to England at government expense whenever he suggests it. This would mean letting go of the sort of story any decent journalist needs to be prised away from with tyre levers and blowtorches. It’s the “at government expense” part that makes me particularly suspicious. Normally anyone who, say, accidentally cuts off their own head in foreign parts can whistle for any government assistance whatsoever for the price of a sticking plaster, no matter how much invisible trauma they may have undergone.

No, Sir Reginald does not want me in his back parlour, so to speak, and for this reason I am determined to stay lodged in there like a bad piece of sweetcorn.

Sir Reginald asks if it would be possible for an armed police detachment to be sent down into the caves or catacombs or whatever they might be to ensure no risk to human life remains. And whether it would be possible for this detachment to be accompanied by Embassy staff. Ivan clearly does not like this one little bit, and points out that all that is known so far of these so-called drug caverns is derived from the story of one excitable, possibly sex-maniac woman with an overactive imagination, who might in any case have inhaled drugs whilst on an illegal visit to the Abyss. Ivan claims never to have heard of Oracle Smoke. He denies ever having discussed it with me.

Sir Reginald looks at Ivan for a very long time.

Then, still in his carpet slippers, he gets up out of his floral armchair, and walks over to a small window in one corner of the room. The window is covered by a curtain. Sir Reginald opens the curtain, then opens the window, then climbs out of the window and beckons for Ivan to do the same.

Sir Reginald is standing in the centre of a light well sunk into the Embassy building. In the centre of that light well is a metal grating, and on top of that grating is what looks like the engine block of a Czaer 2000.

Patiently, and with some difficulty, Sir Reginald shuffles the engine block aside into a corner. Then, standing on the opposite side of the grating from Ivan, and looking him straight in the eye, he lifts the lid and flourishes a hallmarked silver teaspoon, which he must have palmed before he went out the window. Then, still looking Ivan dead in the eye, he drops the spoon carefully down into the dark, and theatrically cups his hand to his ear to listen for any impact.

There is no impact...

...until there is an almighty BANG. Ivan, myself, and even Sir Reginald himself, jump.

“Spoons being fairly aerodynamic”, muses Sir Reginald, “I imagine that to have been the sound of a spoon hitting the bottom of something over five hundred metres deep at an appreciable percentage of the speed of sound.” He peers into the darkness worriedly. “I shouldn’t really have done that. It might play havoc with the foundations.”

He replaces the grating, and looks up at Ivan again.

“Sewers”, he says, “and cesspits, and wine cellars, even subways, don’t tend to be five hundred metres deep.”

“Perhaps”, says Ivan stolidly, “it is a mineshaft.”

“Perhaps”, says Sir Reginald. “But mining what?”

Somehow, this shuts Ivan up.

“We will supply members of our Embassy staff”, says Sir Reginald, “as observers.” He nods across the room at Mr. Keogh, who I already know speaks execrable Russian, and whose only talent seems to be possession of (a) buttocks fit to crack walnuts, and (b) if the bulge in his breast pocket isn’t the world’s biggest mobile phone, a gun. “If, as Miss Simpson claims, this Oracle Smoke is any sort of military hardware”, continues Sir Reg., “Mr. Keogh is well qualified to recognize it. Her Majesty’s government can recommend his services. He has many years’ experience of working with the IAEA in Iraq, South Africa and the Ukraine. We are fortunate he happened to be here.”

“You are very interested in old Soviet military hardware”, notes Ivan. “I remember that it was the British who first discovered the German nerve gases sarin and soman, yes? And that you later developed them further to produce newer and still more exciting substances.”

Sir Reginald nods. “V-agents”, he says.

“VX”, says Ivan.

“VX was one of ours, I believe, yes.”

Ivan nods back. “You are the world’s experts in poison gases, I believe. Is Mr. Keogh one of your poison gas experts, I wonder?”

Sir Reginald shakes his head and sips his tea. “Well, I certainly wish, Captain Gushin, that we were as expert as everyone seems to think. If Miss Simpson’s story is to be believed, it would seem that there were people sixty years ago who could knock our poison-making skills into a cocked hat. And if those people existed here once, we can only assume a second, third and fourth generation of them might exist today, in Russia or the United States of America, because certainly, to my knowledge, no such expertise exists in Britain. Which means, Captain, that it is our duty to find out as much as possible about these people, because one day, we might have to defend ourselves against them.”

“Just like you defended yourself against Iraq”, says Ivan.

Sir Reginald nods, smiles, and sips his tea. “Quite right. Britain has a terrible history of inventing things, you see, only to see them put to actual practical use by foreigners.” He looks across to me. “Obviously, I’m not expecting you to go back down there with the investigating officers, Miss Simpson; that would be far too traumatic.”

“But I’ve got to go down”, I say.

He blinks like a startled toad. “Why ever would you want to do that?”

“Because if I don’t, you’ll discover some sort of new nerve poison down there, come to an agreement with the Vzeng Na government to keep quiet about it, and synthesize it yourselves; and no-one will breathe a word, and the world will never know until you actually use it.”

Sir Reginald blinks again; more this time, I think, like one of those big carnivorous toads that squirts blood at its enemies out of its eyeballs. It is a look of blood he gives me. I reckon I’ve hit the toad on the head.

Then he becomes the kindly old vicar again, rather than the shifty serial non-executive director with share options in fifteen Eastern European oil, nuclear and defence companies that I know him to be.

“Well, really, this is most untrusting”, he says. “All I can do is assure you Her Majesty’s Government really aren’t like that any more. What would the editor of your paper say? I went to school with him, you know.”

“I’ve already mailed my story to five newspapers”, I say. “The enclosure I’ve mailed is encrypted. Only I have the key. Whoever bids highest gets the key.”

He nods sagely. “As I say, I went to school with him. Frightful little tick. We all thought he was homosexual.”

“He is homosexual. He lives quite openly with a gay restauranteur called Jeremy.”

This nonplusses Sir Reginald badly enough for him to pour scalding hot tea into his lap. He screeches in pain and yells for water. Servants (did I mention the servants? They’re always there in the background, but one doesn’t notice them, dahling) scurry in and scuttle for taps and buckets. Lady Washburton actually titters behind her hand and winks at me. Even Ivan’s glacial composure breaks for a moment, and he grins daftly for a split second before realizing he has a reputation to maintain as the sinister secret police captain.

Sir Reginald’s groin is eventually mopped down with cold water by a nice young Vaemna maid. He seems to enjoy the mopping process rather too much for Lady Washburton’s liking, and she sends the girl back out to disinfect her dishcloth. Sir Reginald’s groin bacteria are going nowhere near Lady Washburton’s best silver, oh no. After all, the silver gets put in her mouth.

Sir Reginald agrees to allow me, even in my traumatized condition, on a “fact-finding expedition” into the abyss depths, to which Ivan also agrees to contribute two police officers. Ivan also agrees, warily, to the inclusion of Mr. Keogh the International Atomic Energy Agency Expert, who has MoD written all over him more clearly than a quadropheniac’s knuckles. Keogh makes me nervous. He is as perfectly formed as an Action Man. I wonder if he has a completely smooth, hairless plastic crotch.

I ask if the police officers will be armed. Ivan reminds me that all Vzeng Na police officers are armed. I ask if they’ll be armed with military weapons. Ivan replies that a few heroin addicts and the odd spelunker who has lost his way (and possibly mind) are hardly likely to present a military threat. He asks me whether we located the missing caver, the man called Sean, on our visit. I reply that we didn’t. Ivan nods sagely and announces that this is obviously the explanation. Mad from hunger, possibly even dosed with illegal opiate painkillers self-administered to kill the pain of an injury sustained in a fall, this man failed to recognize his companions in the dark and attacked them, perhaps with a sharp climbing piton or a heavy rock. We, meanwhile, bewildered by the sheer ferocity of the attack, and possibly tired and confused in our turn, mistook the repeated and determined assaults of this one man for an entire horde of narcotic addicts.

Then he sits back in his chair, hands clasped round his knee, evidently hugely pleased with himself. I suggest to him that he do the worst thing I can possibly think of in Russian.

“Hardly”, he says. “My mother was a very ugly lady.”

He smiles.