5

A spy unmasked

The man who talked too much.

JUDY WAS BEING hoisted off the stricken tanker. Nathan was stuck with the private cops outside the Beverly Hills Fortified Village. Tolstoy was in his kitchen, giving his people hell, and Rosalie Connolly, a Mother Earth unit leader, or terrorist, as Tolstoy would have called her, was standing in a California desert.

An Irish girl of twenty-five, she carried great responsibilities on her young shoulders, for it was her job to save the world. Not on her own, of course. Mother Earth was a large organization and, despite being a unit leader, Rosalie was by no means particularly senior. None the less, saving the world is a big job, even if you have help, and the romantic, slightly mystical girl who had joined Youth Natura at the age of ten had grown into a tough and cynical individual. Rather tougher and more cynical than she would have liked to have been had the world been different.

But the world, of course, is never different. Nothing ever is, and Rosalie had a nasty little job to do before she and her team could depart in the large personnel-carrying helicopter that stood waiting for them.

Shackleton, her tough ex-marine second in command, was priming the charges on the detonators when Rosalie approached him.

He nodded at her, she nodded at him, there was a pause, then she put a gun to his temple.

‘Mr Shackleton, I believe you are an FBI spook and I think I may have to kill you.’

Rosalie was right. The man was an agent, although in a very different mould to Judy Schwartz. This man’s name was Cruise and he was tall and tough and rugged and handsome. He was also one of the bullies who had tormented Judy, having been in the same training team. Cruise and the guys had regularly given Judy and the other nerds surreptitious dead-legs during forensics classes and compared their dick sizes unfavourably with a .22 slug from a ladies’ handgun.

Rosalie, of course, knew nothing of this, but had she done so, she would have liked Cruise even less, which was saying something because she did not like him at all. She had suspected him from the day he had joined them, ostensibly fresh from service against loggers in South America. The man had just talked too bloody green.

‘Sometimes I think it’s my own environmental impotence that makes me most angry,’ Shackleton (or Cruise) would say as they sat around the fire at night, while everyone else was trying to talk about sport or sex.

‘I mean, the logging is ten times worse than the press admit and the defoliants are so deep into the water table they’re never going to come out …’

The man was a complete bore. Greener than green, whiter than white and holier than thou. It was like he’d found God, started therapy and given up smoking all on the same day; he just wouldn’t shut up.

‘God, Shackleton goes on, doesn’t he?’ other members of the team would remark to one another. ‘I don’t think I can stand it much longer, let’s turn him in to the Feds.’

But Rosalie was beginning to fear that Mr Dull was a Fed.

Most Mother Earth activists had been in environmental politics so long they never discussed it. What was the point of talking about planet death? It was too depressing and everybody felt the same way about it anyway, so why go on? There was nothing worse than a bunch of self-righteous zealots sitting round the bean casserole, all nodding in agreement and going, ‘Yeah, doesn’t it make you so angry? I mean it’s just unbelievable! Don’t you think?’

At one point, the problem of endless talking about the environment had actually begun to have a seriously destructive effect on the whole Environmental Movement. People were forever getting trapped into spending entire evenings agreeing with each other. It was beginning to affect recruitment. The syndrome became known as ‘green discussion fatigue’ and so many potential fighters had drifted away as a result of it that eventually it became an unwritten rule within the Environmental Movement that you did not discuss the environment. Therefore, when an ostensibly experienced activist turned up in her unit, stating the bloody obvious about Eco-Armageddon over and over again, Rosalie was immediately suspicious.

And then there was Shackleton’s endless references to Mother Earth funding. Of course, everybody would love to know who was putting up the cash, but it had been a secret for thirty years and was certain to remain so. Rosalie herself had been an activist since leaving college. She was moderately well-advanced in the Movement, yet completely ignorant about the greater part of Mother Earth’s financial affairs. The FBI and indeed every other law enforcement agency in the world were endlessly probing and investigating, trying to get to the heart of it. But they never would. It was the big secret and, had Shackleton been the experienced fighter he pretended to be, he would have known not to mention it.

The clincher came when Shackleton got on to the subject of Jurgen Thor. He professed to worship the man, quoting that old chestnut about him being called the last sane person on Earth. That did it for Rosalie. Nobody who had been around Mother Earth long thought Jurgen Thor was sane, and nobody worshipped him. The people who dodged the bullets did not have much time for a personality cult egomaniac who would try to screw a tree if it had a dress on. Jurgen Thor was immensely talented, hugely charismatic and absolutely crucial as a spokesperson to the wider world. At the sharp end, however, the general impression was that he was a bit of a big hairy git.

Rosalie began to investigate the history of the man who called himself Shackleton.

On the surface it all looked fine. An American named Shackleton had been assigned to join her active service unit after seeing action under cover in Argentina. But anyone could switch a body, Rosalie thought. She had the Mother Earth database modem her up a photo of the real Shackleton. That checked out too, but since, if you had the money, you could get a temporary cosmetic rebuild done in an afternoon, that was also non-conclusive. Eventually Rosalie took a scroll of the man’s fingerprints from an organic carrot juice container that he was carrying around until he could find somewhere to recycle it.

The result was great news. Shackleton was a spook. Nobody would have to listen to him whine on about the environment ever again.

Rosalie continued to hold the gun to his head.

‘What did you do with our man?’ she enquired. ‘The real Shackleton.’

‘We’ve got him, that’s all, he isn’t hurt,’ replied Cruise. ‘How did you see through me?’

‘You just didn’t talk about the environment enough,’ replied Rosalie, ‘it just didn’t seem like you cared at all.’

Cruise was mortified. He had studied so hard, he had felt he could spout green crap in his sleep. He had got the majority of his environmental bilge from that asshole nerd Judy Schwartz. Cruise made a mental note to kill Judy at the next reunion.

‘Where’s your tracer implant?’ asked Rosalie. The spy glanced down at his arm. ‘Do you want us to cut it out or do you want to do it yourself?’

‘Hey, listen …’ Cruise protested nervously. No matter how tough you are, you still don’t relish having a hole cut in your arm.

‘Oh, come on! You know all about today’s hit,’ snapped Rosalie impatiently. ‘If we leave you wired up you’ll send out an alarm. Your pals will come and get you, you’ll tell them where we are and we’ll be blown out of the sky. Now you know very well that we either have to shoot you or cut out your tracer, so which is it to be?’

Reluctantly the FBI man offered his forearm. Rosalie drew her Swiss Army Knife. There was a brief hiatus while she tried to find a blade. She searched through the scissors, the toothpick, the digital video camera, the miniaturized two-way communications system, the BioShield umbrella, the thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves …

‘Christmas present,’ Rosalie said apologetically. ‘Stupid, really. I never use any of these things.’ Finally she found the knife, only the little one, but it would do. She advanced upon a rather scared Cruise.

‘Now you might feel a bit of a prick,’ said Rosalie. And she was right, he did.