Читать книгу The Zima Confession - Iain M Rodgers - Страница 12

He was a young man then. Now what was he? Nearly sixty! His life had gone past like a dream. He’d got into IT, then banking software. He had never settled down anywhere.

More years had passed than he had expected. He felt like one of those Japanese soldiers hidden in the jungle from the forties until the seventies, not realising WWII was over – except this war, the Class War, was not over. It hadn’t even started. The memory of choosing all those code words had faded to a blur. It all seemed not quite real any more. The codes themselves were firmly imprinted in his mind, even though, for many years, he had given up on ever hearing them. He even wondered if they had been totally serious at the time. Well, they must’ve been, because here he was: about to take the biggest risk of his life to put their plan into action.

In fact, he hadn’t climbed very far up the ladder to a position of any particular power. He hadn’t climbed to the dizzy heights he might have imagined as a student. Even Stuart’s progress had been greater – university lecturer, or whatever he was. That part of the plan had been a complete failure. In the end it was just luck that had put him into an IT job in the banking industry, where he believed he could carry out his plan. Where he was now, he was too lowly to attract much attention, but he had real opportunities to do damage – he was trusted to deploy software for an important private bank. If only the Party realised what they could do with him, and if only they had the right resources to exploit the opportunity. He had access to a weak point in the banking system. He could deploy software that could sabotage an important private bank. He could deliver a psychological blow that would spread uncertainty and panic among some of the richest and most powerful people in Europe.

He’d almost given up on getting anything from the Party when now, at last, it had become obvious that the financial system, still recovering slowly and painfully from the financial crisis of 2008, would not survive a further shock. At last they had sent him the package he’d been hoping for.

He’d lost touch with Stuart and Eddie years ago. Of course, losing touch was part of the deal. The last he’d seen of Eddie was an angry face, mouth wide open, shouting. Eddie’s enraged face shouted out of a photo in the Evening Times. That was Eddie: he had a short fuse. The accompanying story was that he, and several others, had been arrested on a demo in support of the miners during the miners’ strike in the eighties. The strike had failed. After that, the old-style socialism that Richard had grown up with, but never really believed in, had died worldwide.

Richard could remember the photo of Eddie almost as though it was projected into space in front of him. The furious anger of his face shouting out of the newspaper was iconic of those times. So many of the activists back then were angry young men. Angry, but not well focussed. Richard speculated that, deep down, Eddie wasn’t motivated by a desire to change society; he merely wanted to exorcise his own demons. Give vent to his fury at the world.

But Eddie was never more calm than he was that day when Richard handed the codes to him. That day they had both been focussed on achieving something.