2.
I
Julian Sabreur was, he had to admit, no young Sean Connery or even Roger Moore. Perhaps a little Daniel Craig about the eyes and chin, if Craig had dark hair and narrower cheekbones. At just shy of forty, he felt that he should have left such comparisons behind with the rest of his adolescent baggage. When he first started shaving, though, he’d taken to staring at his newly adult features, saying “Moneypenny,” or “Shaken, not stirred.” Even doing the sudden point-the-gun-at-the-camera bit from the credits. His dad had walked in on this once, to his eternal chagrin. Still got brought up at Christmas dinner, that one.
So now the eminently adult Sabreur, Julian Sabreur, could not banish the thought of 007 entirely whenever he took up the razor. It was just one of the many things he would never, ever share with any of his colleagues. Except Alison, who he’d told two years ago. They’d both been drunk and off-shift at New Year’s, she still reeling from her divorce, he from the death of an old friend and mentor. And there hadn’t been anything like that between them, even if Josie had cast suspicious looks Julian’s way come January 3rd when he finally came home. But he couldn’t talk to Josie about his work, and recently he couldn’t talk to her about much at all—apart from John’s long crash-dive towards GCSEs or whether they should sell or rent her late mother’s flat in Scarborough. Instead, Julian spent his time defending the country. It sounded very grand, put like that, but was mostly forms and reports and meetings.
The most dangerous-looking part of Julian’s face was the faint scar above one eyebrow. It was jagged enough that one subordinate had, for about two weeks, taken to referring to him as “Harry Potter” behind his back. Until Julian had called him in for a Meeting Without Coffee to explain that (1) that sort of thing was generally not conducive to a chap’s career prospects and (2) if he didn’t understand that people talked, then maybe the Security Service wasn’t the right place for him. Julian had inherited the tradition of Meetings Without Coffee from his late mentor, Germaine Willoughs, who’d had it from his own and so on back, probably, to the days of Kipling and the Great Game.
It was his turn to do the school run this morning, and once John had been abandoned to the last miserable few yards with the bell already sounding and Josie had vanished to the coffee shop she called her “office,” he had time to catch up with work. Working from home two days a week seemed an odd luxury for someone in the Service, but he had a secure phone, and so long as he didn’t leave his encrypted laptop somewhere, it wasn’t a problem. Julian considered that 007 would not be on Her Majesty’s Secret Service wearing yesterday’s joggers and a faded Marillion T-shirt. However, 007 was foreign service rather than home. Probably they had different standards.
There was a stack of reports waiting for him on one Billy White, including one from Alison. She hadn’t flagged it as urgent and he knew how thorough an analyst she was, so he decided he’d skim everything else first, then give it the time it deserved.
Billy White, born William Tams Wellish, should have been small fry, but somehow he’d found a pond to be a big fish in. There was the usual police record, plenty of wrist-rappings for criminal damage, a little ABH, threatening behaviour. His wife had also suffered suspicious injuries including a broken arm, but she’d insisted she was just “clumsy.” These days he had lawyers, which meant that his appearances at the nick and in the dock had ebbed, even if his actual activities had only grown. Right now, White was the darling of greatgeorgengland.com—the missing e a constant visual stumble every time Julian saw it written down. The website greeted visitors with a wealth of St. George regalia surrounding a sensationalist news feed which collected every conceivable scare story about how England was under threat from… just about anyone whose ancestors had come over post 1066.
Alison’s initial intel gathering had already followed White through two dozen websites and message boards, highlighting links with the already radicalized, both here and abroad. White had never been stupid enough to make one of the dangerous lists; his involvement was always just second-hand enough to keep him from the spotlight. Julian had monitored several far-right potential troublemakers in his career, and he knew White wasn’t quite in the elite of those circles. He’d never made it to a local council seat either, though he’d stood in the last election, and he wasn’t smooth enough to wrangle a mainstream media platform outside of the usual websites. Julian reckoned he knew the signs of someone making that transition, though, going from foot soldier to commissioned officer in the nationalistic war. All of which would have been entirely a problem for the regular police and outside Julian’s remit, had not Billy clashed with an individual on a very different government watch list.
Julian caught up with the most recent addenda from the Extremist Analysis Unit, which still reckoned White would huff and puff but not actually blow anyone’s house down, or indeed up. Next he needed to check what White’s antagonist had done overnight that might have added more fuel to this fire.
Dr. Kay Amal Khan was never going to be one of Billy White’s favourite people, even back when she was a he. Julian remembered her from way back, when she was still deep within the DST crowd—Defence Science & Technology. A slender man with a pencil-thin moustache and sideburns; he’d been awkward, gangling, frustrated—a brilliant mind unable to express itself. Academically and in the workplace he’d ended up losing the spotlight to more forthright colleagues. But Julian and his superiors were well aware who was really giving them the clever sums, and who therefore needed to have an eye kept on them. Following Khan’s transition, she had… come out of her shell, Julian supposed. She was like a different person, and that included not backing down or taking shit from anyone. Her social media profile (which the analysts endlessly dissected) now read like a war journal. She regularly clashed with bigots and white supremacists, hence the current reason she was giving Julian Sabreur a headache. More than one of his team was muttering about “PC gone mad,” too. Traditional values being hardwired into the Secret Service, it wasn’t hard to find people there who scowled at the whole idea of Khan and obstinately clung on to their masculine pronouns.
Julian had met Khan twice himself, once before and once after. Prepping for the second interview, he’d braced himself, expecting to experience his own establishmental knee-jerk of prejudice, which he knew must reside within him. And then Khan had turned up, a tall woman, elegantly dressed in a turquoise-and-gold kameez. Loud, quick to laugh, foul-mouthed, a world away from the retiring young man Julian remembered. Halfway through the interview, when she went out for a cigarette (because she smoked now), he had to admit that being a woman suited Khan a whole lot better. She was obviously far more comfortable in her own skin and making more progress with her rarefied work.
As for Khan’s faded-red-carpet treatment by the security services, she was a world-class authority within a tiny niche of experimental mathematics, one of only three people who had ever made any headway with whatever the hell it was, and the only one HM Government could call on. She was therefore gently discouraged from meeting too many foreign nationals or going on holidays abroad.
Catching up with the Extremist Analysis Unit’s report took Julian to midday. It told him that while White’s followers were still rattling sabres against Khan, this was likely as far as it would go.