Sample Chapters continued (4)

Book 1, Chapter 4 – The Acorn Project

Mackie snorted in contempt. It was like taking candy off a baby. Guys like the duty officer were a dime a dozen in the Ottawa bureaucracy – spoilt sons of the old, moneyed families of Upper Canada, as they still pretentiously called Ontario, the products of Upper Canada College, Canada’s colonial imitation of Eton College. It was all about privilege, in the end, wasn’t it?

Mackie knew the score on how the duty officer got his job. In the grand old Canadian tradition of political patronage, his lawyer daddy had been made a Queen’s Counsel in Ontario because he was a bag-man for the provincial Conservative Party, collecting cash gifts from clients. Political balance was restored by his firm’s discreet matching donations to the federal Liberal Party. A few lunches at the Château Laurie for the party hacks in Ottawa and, at the age of twenty-eight, sonny-boy gets a glamorous one-year assignment to the High Commission in London as a stepping-stone to a better public relations job in Bay Street. His sort used the Public Service as the extension of their tennis club to generate their precious career networks all neatly cross-referenced in their leather-bound Filofaxes that they carried around like Bibles. They wouldn’t know an Indian if they tripped over one on the sidewalk outside a Cabbagetown bar.

In dealing with the duty officer’s enquiry, Mackie had adopted the cynical, worldly-wise tone, which fitted the role he had honed over the years of the “old Indian hand”. As soon as the conversation ended, he closed his eyes, grasped the arms of his chair and waited for his asthmatic wheezing and related heart palpitations to come under control. The surge of adrenalin had taken him by surprise. His quick and incisive analysis for the benefit of the duty officer had been almost reflexive. Now that he was alone he was conscious of a gnawing sense of dread. He had learned from long practice that to deal with stress he must confront the cause and analyse it.

“What’s the old buzzard up to now,” he said through clenched teeth, referring to Clearvoice, “is this a bad omen for the Acorn Project?”

***

The Acorn Project was his code word for a secret deal transacted about twenty years previously. There were elements of it that could be construed as abuse of office, fraud and worse. There was a time when he thought that Clearvoice had uncovered it and that the sit-in of his office in 1973 was his revenge. Clearvoice would not have been able to admit what he knew about the Acorn Project without damaging his own personal interests in it, so he would have used the cause of Indian education as a politically correct smokescreen to hide his true motivation.

Mackie believed every man had his price, especially an Indian, and when the sit-in first started his first thought was to buy off Clearvoice. But he hesitated. Whatever else he might be, the old man was an unusually straight arrow and it would be too dangerous to try to co-opt him.

During the next nine years, following his transfer to Ottawa, Mackie’s discreet enquiries and constant monitoring of the situation satisfied him that the Acorn Project was still a secret – Clearvoice did not know about it.

He had called it the Acorn Project because he had thought of it as a seed that would grow into a mighty oak tree. The posting to London inspired a new metaphor. Like one of the black squirrels of Ottawa he had buried an acorn in times of plenty for later recovery in time of need. There was neither a better place than London, nor a better context than the constitutional lobby, to dig up the acorn and make a meal of it.

Since he had arrived in London, ten months earlier, he had methodically done his research and prepared for every conceivable contingency to reduce the risk. Time was running out. If the deed were to be done it must be done quickly, before the Canada Bill passed the House of Lords, after which the constitutional task force would be stood down and he would be recalled to Ottawa. The stakes were high. Failure would ruin him. Success would compensate him for the lost opportunities and injustices of the last nine years and set him up for the rest of his life. It would also wreak terrible revenge on Clearvoice.

“That’s it, isn’t it,” he concluded aloud, referring to the cause of his unease, “I’m spooked because in all my clever planning I didn’t expect Clearvoice to show. It’s a caution, isn’t it? If an octogenarian from the sticks can blindside me, who the hell else may be hiding in the bushes?”

He conquered anxiety with logic. He reasoned that the real question for an old pro, like himself, was how, precisely, he could exploit Clearvoice in the unfolding of the Acorn Project.

***

Ray Mackie looked all of his fifty-seven years. A web of fine red veins extended from his neck and jowls across a puffed face, even to the whites of his watery, green eyes. His thin, ginger hair was grey at the temples and cut short with a razor in a straight line across the back. Corpulent, but not overly obese by Canadian standards, his clothes strained under the pressure of his flesh. The points of his shirt collar were splayed, revealing too much of the knot in his tie, and its pressure against his meaty red neck caused white creases to appear as he moved his head. His jacket of artificial fibre was a shiny, grass green with a subdued check of red and blue. Its hem rode higher in the front than the tailor had intended, revealing a soft, wide paunch that threatened to overhang a leather belt fastened at the centre by a pewter buckle in the form of buffalo head. His brown leather shoes had elevated heels and were decorated with panels of imitation crocodile skin.

In a small prairie town his appearance would have been unremarkable for a middle-aged, middle-manager in a mall’s middle-market department store. In the context of the Regency décor and under the high ceilings of Canada House, he looked more like a day-tripping tourist than an incumbent.

With coffee in one hand and a muffin in the other, he rose from his desk and walked to the window. The previous summer he had stood at the same spot to enjoy a privileged view of the wedding procession of Prince Charles and Princess Diane as it passed between Buckingham Palace and St. Paul’s cathedral. He had watched crowds of quarter of a million people protest the deployment of the Cruise missile by the United States, and seen intense demonstrations in front of South Africa House noisily calling for the release of Nelson Mandela as well as angry political rallies against Margaret Thatcher and her proposals for a new Poll Tax. He had witnessed the rare sight of the square totally deserted in the middle of the day when it was cordoned off during a security alert because the Provisional Irish Republican Army had placed a bomb in the toilet of a public-house in a nearby side street. It all contributed to his feeling that he had arrived at one of the most celebrated crossroads of the world.

As his sense of achievement returned, his face relaxed and a smile of satisfaction began to spread. He finished the dregs of his coffee with a flourish, crushed the cup in his fist, flipped it across the room into a metal rubbish container and, with growling aggression, he relapsed into the Scottish accent of his childhood as he said aloud: “Och aye, laddie, if only your ma could see you the noo!”

Extract 2

His mind was racing. The RCMP in Canada kept close watch on Indian organisations and activists. They worked closely with the FBI and the CIA and he knew they had turned to MI5 to extend their surveillance to Britain. It was obvious that Simpson was in the loop and that he had bundled bits and pieces of disconnected information and gossip and massaged it into a pattern.

Mackie had learned through the years that bureaucrats addicted to trading information were very good at dreaming up rationalisations to justify and expand their habit. Perhaps Simpson wanted information on the Indians to trade it with MI6, the RCMP, the CIA and FBI. Who cares!

It was all very satisfying from Mackie’s perspective. He wondered if Simpson knew that he had been a regular informant for the RCMP since his Yellowknife days. The same information could now be traded to two different clients and no doubt they would trade it with each other and in the process each of his customers would provide him with information he could pass on the other. It was like Country Western dancing.

As he reviewed the conversation, Mackie was already working out how he could use Simpson’s ideas about the international aspects of the Indian campaign at the meeting at the High Commission in an hour or two. Why had he never thought of it before? This international angle could yield a rich vein of clients.

***

It was only after Mackie emerged from the dim light of the restaurant into Shepherd’s Market that he realised how tense the meeting had been. His nerves were stretched, his adrenalin flowing, his body aching. He needed release. It was a familiar sensation after a confrontation in which he had acquitted himself well. In his own mind he referred to it as “the wolf” – a rushing feeling, flooding his mind with a voracious compulsion to seek and devour a submissive victim. When the wolf went hunting it loped along familiar tracks. In Canada the tracks took him to the back streets, bars and rooming-houses in downtown Winnipeg or Regina, or in the malls, motel bars and bus stations of the small country towns near the Indian reserves he visited on official business. More recently he had discovered tracks in Ottawa, Montréal and Toronto. He knew what he was looking for and more often than not he found it – cringing Indian women, sometimes befuddled by alcohol or the fumes of bottled glue, with broken teeth, black eyes and needle marks in their arms. They could be younger and physically healthier, too, but emotionally broken by family or community abuse or simply lost and confused in urban surroundings: The more abject their degradation, the more trembling their anxiety, the more satisfying his release.

In the early years, when he was drifting across Canada, his lingering religious scruples inhibited him. But after he joined the Department of Indian Affairs he had learned to quieten his conscience with the thought that he was following in the footsteps of the 17th and 18th Scottish traders and fur-trappers who relied on Indian women for company. He convinced himself that, as in their case, his appetite was a form of patronage, one side of a symbiotic relationship. As age and power in the bureaucracy advanced, his need for justification faded and his sexual cravings became fixed and routine, impatient and demanding. He came to regard ready access to broken, submissive Indian women as a perk that went with the job. The posting to London had interrupted his habit.

When Mackie left the restaurant, Shepherds’ Market was still busy with the late lunch crowd circulating between the three pubs, the open fruit and vegetable stalls in the narrow alleys, the betting shop, and wine shop, the tiny cafés where strangers squeezed on benches and flimsy chairs shoulder-to-shoulder at rickety, plastic-topped tables. A few foot-weary American tourists wandered through. Groups of builders and decorators took a break from renovating some of the 18th century town houses in the area that had been converted to offices after the Second World War and were in the process of being converted back to residences for the rich. Hotel staff fetched laundry, or flowers and intense, silent businessmen in pinstripe suits stalked through the throng. Arabs with sorrowful or angry faces, in flowing dishdasha robes, worry beads in hand, headed to or from the rear of the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane that loomed over the market from its position on a slight rise to the west.

Mackie loitered before he took a corner table in the shadow of one of the alleys. Private doors to the buildings that enclosed the squares led to the appartments and offices above the shops. Some of the doorbells were back-lit by red lights, too weak in the midday sunlight to be seen by anyone passing who was not looking for them. The previous week, sitting at the same table, his spotted a dark-haired girl. He thought she might be a Gypsy. Her complexion was hard and shiny unlike the soft matte finish he had come to appreciate in Indian girls. He watched her enter a door and reappear at a first floor window and look down at him. On that occasion he lacked confidence. Until then he had restricted his hunting to the vicinity of King’s Cross railway station, where many of the women on the streets were abject drug addicts, and he had used a room in one of the anonymous guest houses near the station. Lately he had begun to toy with the idea of moving up market, to the backyard of the High Commission, MI5 and the Indian activists. It would be both more convenient and more exciting.

He scanned the upstairs window for signs of movement. When the girl appeared, his eyes met hers in a fixed, hard stare as they assessed each other’s intentions. He nodded, waited for her to reciprocate, checked one more time for onlookers, and quickly crossed the alley to the doorway.

He was right. She was an illegal immigrant from Romania. At first her blousy, cockney madam tried to restrict him to a fixed menu but when he got the girl alone he talked about the good life in Canada and how much better it was than Romania or Britain and how she deserved it. When she asked in broken English if he could get her a “paper” to enter Canada, he smiled knowingly and showed her his security pass at the High Commission. He had a friend on the prairies, he told her, who owned a cottage motel and was hiring. It was a variation on the theme he used with Indian girls and he knew how to make it convincing. Gradually, she abandoned her defences and succumbed to his more unusual demands.

Emerging less than an hour later, he headed for the High Commission in Grosvenor Square. He walked briskly up Waverton Street through the gardens behind the Jesuit Church in Farm Street and across Mount Street to the Connaught Hotel, before passing through Carlos Place to Grosvenor Square. Twenty minutes after his tryst in Shepherd’s Market he took his seat at the committee table.

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