All entries for Friday 13 March 2009

lent part 3: rejected monologue for the new series of Spooks

On my first day they gave me a small plastic packet in which two squat white cuboids sat resolute. I pried open the seal with my fingernails. It was contact lenses. One set was hazel, the other green. I considered giving myself one hazel and one green iris but obviously, that would’ve been foolish. It would’ve been suicide. Obviously I didn’t do that. It was obvious what they wanted – no blue or brown eyes. DNA samples can recreate a blue or brown iris with ninety-one percent accuracy. Green or hazel eyes reduce the accuracy of such measures to under seventy-five percent. I had brown eyes. Now I have hazel eyes in some countries, green eyes in others.

  In the locket round my neck is small camera that transmits to a smartphone in my belt-buckle. These are difficult to detect in x-rays because they are difficult to recognise. Because the technology is so rare. Because so few people have been trained to recognise such technology because it is too rare for precedents to be made available for recognition training. Making such training rare. It comes down to luck; luck is a synonym, referring to your preparatory measures compared to theirs. Bad luck is what happens when they are more prepared than you. Good luck is a direct result of your superior and more thorough preparatory measures. Bad luck would be facing another operative with an x-ray. Good luck would be either no operative operating the x-ray, or recognising that an operative is operating the x-ray and removing the evidence before it can be exposed by the x-ray.

  My pockets are stitched together with threads of magnetic tape. This was my own invention. Only I know about it. No other operatives, ours or theirs, will be able to receive the information written on that tape. I will personally unsew my pockets, remove the tape and read it. I will then pass the information on to my superiors. They can trust that it will be accurate. I am the source. They do not want to know my methods. Just like they don’t want to know that the reason I know so much about the x-ray machines and what they can or cannot recognise comes from an episode involving another man’s jawbone. I placed his jaw between my elbows. I brought my knee up. I felt a soft pain gnawing beneath my knee, I felt a beautiful snap, I heard a crack like tiny thunder cracking. He screamed from his gut and now I know what an x-ray machine can or cannot recognise. The information was received in a series of guttural sobs recorded on magnetic tape stitched into my pockets which I then removed and played back. The quality was poor, his pronunciation was worse. But I had enough precedents to make my conclusions. I removed my contact lenses and placed them into his dead eyes. I opened the second cuboid. I blinked green eyes at his glazed hazel eyes. I left him softly bleeding heartbeatless on the bathroom floor.

: 13 Mar 2009 12:29 |  Tags: Lent Story |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem