Looking for Jake and Other Stories

He stared at the chocolate and thought but I was about to take the other one. It was a long time since he had dwelled on that phenomenon. He had thought himself inured to his instructors’ unerring knowledge of what he would pick.

In the first months he had been constantly aghast at the fact, had imagined unseen cadres watching him, gauging what he was about to buy, somehow pushing their messages into things just before he touched them, but that was impossible. The inserts were there already, waiting for him.

Morley, always knowing that it was useless, had attempted to trick those who contacted him. In shops he would hover for many seconds, his hand over a specific item; he would pick it up, walk on, then suddenly return and grab a replacement.

It made no difference. For weeks and months at a time his shopping was untouched, but when they wanted to pass on a command, he could not evade them. Twice, obscurely shaped, opaque containers were delivered in products he knew he had taken quickly and at random: in a jar of mayonnaise; threaded through a pack of dustbin liners.

Once Morley had spent days living only off translucent products, holding each glass or plastic container up to the light to see it was uncontaminated by commands before buying it, but he had been too hungry to continue like that for long.

The chocolate contained something like a fat pen-lid. Thankfully Morley had not bitten it.

LEAVE ON YOUR SEAT ON THE LAST SOUTHBOUND VICTORIA LINE TRAIN BETWEEN

PIMLICO AND VAUXHALL,it said.ASAP. YWBC.

Morley stared at the order, and hated it.

This time, when he obeyed it, he did not try to distract himself. With something between resentment and self-indulgence he let himself think only of his task, of what might go wrong. From the station at Vauxhall he went straight home and drew a chart of all the places the little package might be intercepted. He ranked them, in order of potential danger.

The next day and the day after that he called in sick and spent the day watching news. Police intercepted a bomb in Syria; Greek doctors saved the lives of twins; a strike by baggage handlers in Paris was averted; a serial sex offender caught in Berlin. It might be any of these, Morley thought, and he stared at the screen at these and other stories, and tried to read some secret nod to him in the reporters’ words, in the facts of each case.

Of course his actions might have their effects in the work of hidden agencies, which measured their successes precisely in stories that no one would ever hear. Morley knew that. He knew he could not know, that he might be wasting his time.

He knew also that what he forwarded might have no effect at all, on anything: he did not believe it, but he knew it might be.

This must be important work. He had long ago decided that was the only thing that made sense. It was what had first changed his opinion of his tasks, had turned his paranoia, his fear, into something like pride.

The truth was that it was not just the tedium of clear soups and water or white wine that had aborted his experiment with see-through goods: it was also a growing sense of anxiety, a fear that he was succeeding, that he was missing messages, and that he must not, that important things depended on him doing the duty given him.

He had never believed that the insertions were everywhere, that everyone received them randomly but that no one said a word. He had been chosen, for opaque reasons, to be the middleman. Whoever was contacting him must need anonymity, certainty that they were not traced. Hence this subterfuge, entrusting their deliveries to a stranger.

Morley had been watched for years, since he was a boy. It was the only thing that made sense. They must have had to make sure he was suitable, that he would not fail, that his curiosity would not goad him to open the little containers and let their contents get into the wrong hands, into his hands.

A few days on there was another grey baton in his bread.CONCEAL BY RUBBISH BIN AT

EASTERNMOST EXIT ST. JAMES PARK, it said again.ASAP. YWBC. Morley was horrified. He had never had an instruction repeated before. He winced at its corrective tone. Thankfully this time he had not cut the insert.

There was the bread-knife mark, twice my teeth dented the thing, there was that one I dropped and chipped. They must know it’s a risk, he thought, reiterating arguments he had had with himself many times. They wouldn’t put it where it could be scratched like that if it mattered. Probably this is nothing to do with that. Still he imagined whoever had received it examining the first tubular casing, touching the blemish, throwing it away unopened, unsure that they could trust it. The thing, the key it contained, might not be used, and that might be what lost the battle.

He obeyed quickly, but out of that reawakened anxiety came others. Watching the news stories, wondering in which braveries or tragedies he had played a tiny part, Morley felt a resurgence of another fear, for the first time in years, that those messages he had missed, if he had missed any, in the years he had tried to escape the instructions, had been crucial to a long-term plan. That everything he did now was too late, and that deserted in a landfill, discarded years ago by some confused consumer in his place, was the small dark box embossed with instructions which he Morley had been supposed to obey, a box that had been key to all these other, later packages, which were now pointless.

Throughout his life as an occasional courier of messages in his milk, his vegetables, his CDs, in hollows cut in the pages of his books, squeezed from toothpaste tubes, though he had wondered often about his unseen superiors, Morley had not speculated much on the hidden items themselves. For much of the time he had just assumed, vaguely, that they must be instructions, messages that could not be trusted to phone lines or email, rolled in protective carapaces. He could not fail to notice, though, that the small hard thing in his chocolate had resembled nothing so much as a bullet.

He thought of that as he watched footage of an assassination, the death of a strongman president in an ex- Soviet republic, shot once by a sniper. The murdered man was huge and did not look quite human. It may have taken a special weapon to end him. Morley tried to make sense of the politics of the place: he could not tell if the dead man had been a good or a bad thing, which at first made him think that the bullet he had passed on (if it had been a bullet) could not have been used for this job, because there was no obvious heroism here. But of course he was in no position to say: perhaps even if this had been an evil, the good that it also did necessitated it.

Morley knew where these thoughts were going. He had been on this route many times, back when he had rebelled against his unseen commanders. He knew what he would think next, and though he did not want to, though he had had this out with himself many times and thought the argument done, he could not stop.

He wondered again if perhaps his actions were on behalf of some body whose agenda he would not share, something malignant.

There was an explosion on an oil rig; an attack on Kurdish villages; rapes in Mexico City. A jockey tested positive for drugs, there was a bloodless coup, a bloody intervention. Morley saw the little bullet or bullet-shaped thing or tightly folded instructions in a bulletlike case held in the hand of the horse rider or the doctor whose test discredited him, in the pocket of the African general who took power promising peace, in the gun belt of the mercenary whose forces invaded the capital.

He knew also that these items and the others that preceded them might be nowhere he would ever see.

They could be hidden, with the orders they must have contained for those higher up than he.

Did I do that? Morley thought as he watched the successful docking of a shuttle with Mir. Did I do that? A child-smuggling ring broken. That? The torture and murder of a Russian antiracist. A company excelled. The end of a conflict came, and a new conflict.

Morley went to sleep an unsung hero but woke in the night, horrified at the knowledge that he was a dupe of criminal stupidity. He became a champion again and then a pawn and then an irrelevance.

At work, Morley thought of the men and women who issued him his real orders, in their white room, or their cave. Their satellite.

“You know all this stuff in Chechnya?” someone said to him in the pub, and he started. Yes, he knew about it, he watched the news, and now he thought about the death squads, the resistance fighters.

The person who had spoken was saying something like “they’re all as bad as each other,” and distractedly Morley was glad to hear that others were intervening and disagreeing, but he was not paying close attention. He hoped that when next he was issued commands, they concerned the Chechnyans. Or the South Sudanese.