Island Hideaway 42 - Like a halibut in a polluted ocean

By Terrence Oblong

Tue, 21 Jan 2020

276 reads

"I owe you an explanation," Mo said. "My cutting ties the way I did."

"I understand. New life, new people."

"Is that what you thought?"

"Well, yes. You never answered my letters or emails."

"I never received them. I changed address, even changed email address. It was a new life, it had to be. It was deep cover."

"You kept in touch with Eddie though."

"He was my handler, my link to the real world."

"Handler, that's a word spies use isn't it?"

"Exactly, I was one of his agents. The enemy of the future isn't the Tories or the Sun, though both of course are enemy agents, they'll pass the Bills, spin the news, but only at the behest of the real power. The megacorps. So we started planting agents in the big megacorps to find out what they were doing?"

"Who's we?"

"Best you don't know."

"That's what Eddie said. But why you?"

"Because I wasn't a known activist. I wasn't one of the occupiers, I wasn't at the poll tax protests, I wasn't even a member of the Labour Party, let alone militant or Socialist Worker. Plus I had the grades, of course. And a cute stubby nose that no man could resist."

"It's true about the nose, I grant you, but were your grades that good?"

She pulled a face, a po-face, what I always think of as a Mo-face.

"So what happened?"

"I rose to the top."

"Like a dead halibut in a polluted sea."

"I was thinking more like the cream in a bottle of milk, but whatever works for you. Within a few years I was on the Board, I had access to everything, which meant that the movement knew everything we were going to do before it happened."

"But they found you out?"

"They must have. We were careful, but we must have foiled so many of their more dastardly plans that they got suspicious, hunted around, laid traps - you know, documents that only one person has sight of, so that they know who's leaking. But as to what happened to me, I've no idea. I went to bed one night as normal and next thing I know I wake up here. They must have poisoned me, or something like that, I go into a coma and Eddie comes and rescues me. Before they could finish the job."

"And he brings you here. To me."

"This place is a sanctuary. For me. For the dodos. For you."

"For me? I'm not hiding."

"You're hiding from the world, Terrence. It's too much for you. That's what this place is, an island hideaway.