Page 75 - double revenge 3.

PART TWO

VAUXHALL BRIDGE

TH
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 7 1998
‘Drop me here, will you Phillip?’

‘What, on the bridge Sir?

‘Yes. I’ll walk back to the office.’

George climbed out of the car and struggled to close the door against the fierce biting wind that
swept across Vauxhall Bridge. He pulled the collar up on his Ulster Tweed overcoat and tucked his
James Lock trilby into one of its deep pockets. He did not want that to sail down the Thames, Mrs
Mcluskey would not be best pleased.

It was not for the need of a bracing walk that George had given up the comfort of a warm limousine
but the supermarket, just beyond the railway station, that sold Johnnie Walker Black Label.

As he passed the water fountain in the office foyer, he took two plastic beakers and put them in his
coat pocket alongside the whisky. Using plastic beakers was his psychological argument that
drinking whisky was occasional, there was no need to keep a set of whisky glasses in his office but it
was an argument he was slowly loosing. He was not quite sure why he took two beakers, probably
out of habit in case anyone came into his office and wanted to join him. Bryant would join him at
the drop of a hat. He wondered just how many bottles they had shared over the years but this
afternoon he needed to be alone. He recalled the words of Edgar Allan Poe “Drinking has been my
desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness
and a dread of some strange impending doom.”

George’s memories were certainly stark but he had never felt tortured by them. As gross and
macabre were some of the acts he had committed and had had others commit, it was his job and
more importantly, they were performed in the service of his Queen and Country.

A sense of impending doom was certainly true but right now, it was his sense of loneliness,
insupportable loneliness, which required Johnnie Walker’s company.

The Cabinet Secretary is head of the Civil Service and as such was George’s boss. George knew that
when Sir Peter said “I am therefore asking you to rectify the situation” That was not an invitation.

When and he was certain it would be when and not if, it is discovered that the Head of a British
Intelligence Department was responsible for subversive activities in Guatemala, activities that could
revert the country to civil war and undo years of painstaking negotiation by the U.N.,the
government would hang him out to dry. The Cabinet knows nothing of the PM’s promise to the US
President and both would deny any such informal agreement. The loose cannon would be George
Francis Mcluskey.