Always Secret

Martin Fisher stood in front on the large rectangular mirror in the bathroom adjoining his compact, clean and tidy hotel room. He stared carefully at himself, looking deeper and deeper into his own eyes, searching for the knowledge that he was ready. He gazed at his brown eyes and noted again the small grey flecks which were almost his only notable facial feature. An ordinary face. An ordinary man.

This was always the worst moment – the time before the operation actually started and before he had something to actually do. Still – that was why they used him. He was good at the waiting and able to remain, apparently, calm no matter what delay, no matter what changes were necessary at the last minute. He breathed deeply and watched his chest rise. He breathed like a musician, from the diaphragm and not from the upper chest and shoulders. Concentrating, he felt his pulse slow slightly, and return to the range he was comfortable with.

Martin finished his soul-gaze, checked that the collar of his shirt sat perfectly under his jacket and left the bathroom. He looked once around the room before reaching into the wardrobe by the door for his overcoat. The room looked lived in but not untidy. Two aluminium cases rested at the foot of the bed – black and silver anomalies in an otherwise standard room. He wasn’t worried about the cases – on this occasion they were a wonderfully elaborate double bluff, and one that he was resigned to never needing.

This was a difficult time of year – not yet cold enough for a heavy winter coat, but just cold enough, and certainly wet enough, to require a rain coat. He disliked wearing this kind of overcoat since he always felt that it made him look exactly like – well exactly what he was. Even in his own room, he knew better than to pat his jacket pocket to feel the comforting bulge of the padded envelope. He had put it there himself only minutes before and so there was no need to draw attention to it – even in an otherwise deserted room. It was an ordinary looking envelope. As usual, it was sealed and Martin had no way of knowing what it contained. He had learned the futility of guessing and so, other than assuming that it was something which could not be safely or sensibly posted – or send by a six or seven digit man or even a commercial courier – he gave it little thought.

He strolled to the lifts – a business man going for an early evening stroll in the old town after a long and honest days’ work. The art of looking innocent when not innocent is a difficult one to learn – to exist without being noticeable, and to be apparent and uninteresting. It is the true art of invisibility – not to be invisible, but to the there and uninteresting. The edge of a guide book poked from the left outside pocket of the coat – a pointer to those who might look for one that he was not local, not interesting, not a threat. Having pressed the “down” button, he looked back along the already twilight corridor. Why did every corridor in every hotel in the world look the same? Perhaps in better, more expensive, hotels they were different, but in the working hotels that Martin frequented, it was impossible to locate oneself in the world. “I am in… Belgrade…”, Martin found himself thinking as he waited for the lift. The sign on the wall opposite the lift doors reminded him (in English, oddly) that, this time, he was in the Hyatt Regency. For a brief moment, however, he was in every city he had ever visited – and in every hotel.

The lift pinged to announce its arrival just as he shook himself from his thoughts and took him on a solo journey to the main ground floor. He walked through the hotel lobby, failing to find any geographic identifiers there either, and out of the main, glass, doors. Martin briefly considered suggesting a system of colour coding – blue for eastern Europe, warm reds for western Europe… He stopped that line of thought too – perhaps he needed a holiday – a journey without any of this… stressful distraction. It was never a good sign that he was thinking randomly about…well, anything.

He turned left and started walking towards the river. He had checked the time (again) in the clock in the lobby to confirm what his watch had told him in his room and would now keep “internal” time to avoid continuously checking his watch. He was automatically walking as anonymously as possible. It was a walk he had been trained to do by some of the most anonymous people he had even met. He was unable to describe the man who had first taught him to disappear in full view by becoming nondescript. John (it was always first names only, and in any case, it was unlikely that his real name was John) had spent many days with Martin in a number of different cities, towns and villages and yet Martin was only able to think of John as “average height, normal build, possibly fair haired” – and this from a man trained to notice and remember. He had learnt his lessons well and was only a brief shape for most people on the street.

So – not too fast, not too slowly, avoiding contact with other people without seeming to do so, Martin made his way by an planned circuitous route with frequent, if apparently innocuous, stops, all designed to make it obvious to all but the best trained, best resourced, team of followers, that he was a nothing and of no interest. If a team of any decent size and quality were following him, there was no point in worrying since he wouldn’t identify them – and they wouldn’t be after him anyway. He knew he alone was not worth that sort of team. He knew that – but his heart keep wanting to accelerate in excitement at the thought that, this time, they might. He passed cars and buses and a looker-on (and there were none) would have found it difficult to remember if Martin had seemed to notice them. He fitted into the early evening pedestrian traffic as if a normal part of it. All the time, however, there was a commentary going on in Martin’s head: “Slow up, watch the car turning left. Group of businessmen coming up – four men, eastern-european suits, three dark haired, one bald, two with cases, no apparent weapons. Nine minutes now and about three-and-a-half to the bridge. Car on the right – just dropping someone off. Teenagers, male. Two faces, top right window. Seem to be watching behind me….”, and on it went all the time. Awareness of his environment was critical, and bitter experience had re-enforced the need to do it while working. The regular time and distance updates were now so much a part of his life that he often found himself doing it when “off the clock”. He had become incapable of being late and hated to be early.

Eight and a half minutes later Martin was pleased to see that he had timed it perfectly. He could see his target coming towards him as he strode onto the bridge. Both parties were in exactly the right place at the right time. None of the cut-out signals had been visible and the target was showing no problem signs. He was casually opening his coat and Martin started to do the same. At the second lamppost, Martin stopped and started to pull a map out of the inside pocket of his jacket. Just as he had during his training and as he had on many, many operations, the padded envelope was now in his hand behind the map. As the target neared, Martin dropped his hand with the map as if to compare reality to the two dimensional truth he had been reading. As Martin’s hand came up again – another comparison necessary – his hand brushed that of the target. By the time Martin had the map back at eye level, the envelope had been successfully transferred. A perfect, text-book, transfer.

Martin was not happy. Oh the transfer had been done well, but there had been a split moment during which his line of vision had intersected that of the target – who had promptly winked at him. He had winked! That meant…

“Damn, damn, damn”, muttered Martin. What did it mean? Was it a test?

Martin had continued walking over the bridge – he was professional enough to continue his apparent invisibility – and towards Knez Mihailova street. As he walked he was thinking furiously. The target had winked at him! No-one was supposed to wink – never wink. Ok it probably wasn’t written down anywhere – there was no Standard Operating Procedure against winking – but, no-one winked! No-one was ever supposed to acknowledge another player – people looked out for that sort of thing and it was dangerous, very dangerous. Martin could feel his mind speeding up, thinking through possibilities, dangers, options. None of these was healthy. The pass had worked and had been safe. No-one had seem them, he was sure. As the “bag man” he would have been picked up by now if they had been seen.

He found a coffee shop and sat down – map spread before him and now accompanied by the guide book. As he drank his coffee he started to spread the unusual event out in his thoughts in order to calm himself down. He mentally listed out his thoughts: he recognised the target – a three-digit player who was as close as people got in his firm to being famous; the target had apparently recognised him! Perhaps that meant that this was a training mission. One never knew beforehand whether one was engaged in a “trainer” or a “live” engagement – and often one never found out even afterwards; perhaps the target was just pleased to see a familiar face. Did it matter? That was the real question.

Now, with his coffee comfortably warm inside him, he decided that it did not matter and that he would simply mention it briefly in his report. His only concern was that his three-digit colleague would get into trouble for it – but then he decided that a “three” could probably cope with any trouble and that winking during a transfer was likely to be the least of the man’s problems.

Right. He would relax now. Martin sat back to watch the evening crowd before sauntering up the pedestrianised street slowly. An hour and a half later he was back in his hotel room. He pulled out his rather battered, and certainly not up-to-date laptop, and waited while it wandered through it’s long and tedious boot sequence. Once up and running, he opened an innocent piece of software, wrote up his report and hit the send button. This encrypted the message, wrapped it in a number of other messages and burst-sent it back to the office. Two minutes later the expected “out of office” rely came through confirming receipt. One more click removed all trace of the message from the laptop. Martin could now concentrate on dinner and on planning his photo-shoot the next day. He was most concerned about the light on the bridge – it was going to be tricky to get the light right without letting all the cars into the shot, and as for finding a quiet spot in that pedestrian street…