Organisation Man: Chapter 9

Barry Ryan returns to London. Things happen.

Ryan had to endure another briefing with Kearney about the practicalities of his mission – the name on the passport he would be using, how much cash he would get to bring with him, and so on. He asked about travelling to London, inquiring as to whether he would be able to travel by a more direct route this time. He would not. Kearney always gave the impression that he did not take pleasure in anything, but he did seem pleased to be letting Ryan now that he would once more be travelling to London via Athlone, Belfast, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. Ryan hoped he would not get the singing bus again this time.

Unlike with the passport retrieval mission, they were not sending him to London straight away. So he had about a week to prepare. But how do you prepare to kill someone? It was not something Ryan had had to do before and he had never seen it as anything more than the most theoretical of possibilities. He spent a lot of his time in the gym, trying to harden himself up again physically. And for want of anything better to do he played a lot of first person shooter computer games, in the hope that this would inure him to the idea of killing people.

And then the time came for him to leave. This journey to London was broadly similar to his last – just as time consuming and a similar selection of random incidents along the way. King's Cross was still crawling with National Security and cops when he arrived. He noticed from a newspaper headline that Bristol had apparently been recaptured. If this was true then maybe all the unpleasantness would soon be coming to an end and the Transition would become permanent. But this was no concern to him.

His thoughts were all on his mission. He remembered Agaskayon. He could not decide whether he liked him or not. Unlike the Chief, he did not have the same sense of nationalist outrage about the forgery of passports. Maybe it was a bad thing, but he found it hard to get worked up about it. He worked for the Organisation not because he wanted to defend Irish freedom, but because it was a well-paid job. He had not even twigged when applying for it that it was anything other than an ordinary civil service department, and he had worked there for several months before realising the true nature of the Organisation's deep work. Up to now the work had mostly been routine – processing information and writing reports – with occasional forays into fieldwork and the covert meeting of sources. That had been exciting in its way, but it was no preparation for murder. The thought of bringing an end to Agaskayon's life filled Ryan with dread. He saw the antique's dealer's opaque face in front of him and tried to imagine himself bringing death to it. Whether he thought of strangulation, bludgeoning, or a knife attack he found himself coming back to one terrible truth – he really was not sure that he could bring himself to kill the man.

He walked to the Cartwright Friendly, where the Organisation had once more booked him. The sour-faced woman on the desk looked at him suspiciously, perhaps recognising him from his previous visit, perhaps not. But she was still happy enough, or at least willing, to take his money. She gave him a room key and grunted him in the direction of the stairs. He was in a different room this time. It was smaller than the last, and the rooms seemed to close in on Ryan, making him feel like he was in a tomb. He left the Friendly and went walking the streets of London. The area around Cartwright Gardens is not really what one would call the mean streets of London, but Ryan increasingly felt that they were the by-ways of hell. But if it was hell then it was one of Ryan's own making, with the killing of Agaskayon seeming to have damned him even before he had committed it.

He ended up in the bar near the Friendly and began to drink heavily. He was buying drinks for anyone that came near him. But he could not buy company tonight. His student friends sense the darkness of his mood and were repelled by it, so had to drink alone. Perhaps because of his anxiety over his mission or perhaps because of the effects of a lot of drink on an empty stomach, Ryan found himself mutating into a belligerent drunk, eventually finding himself being thrown out of the pub. He was almost going to deck the barman when his training kicked back in – the last thing he needed was to find himself in the cells facing an assault charge. So he swallowed his pride and slid back to the Friendly.

That night was most unusual. He was in a different room on a different floor of the building, yet the ululations that had plagued him on his last stay were now in the room next to him. The strange moans, suggestive of a cat in heat being impersonated by someone with an intellectual disability, went on and on, with their maker undeterred by Ryan's banging on the wall or his occasional shouted threats of violence. His interactions seemed only to spur on the ululator, who would tease Ryan with a brief pause and then return to the moaning with a renewed intensity.

Ryan had however drunk too much alcohol for the moans to keep him from a fitful sleep. Instead they fed into his dreams, in which he found himself repeatedly striking Agaskayon's face with a crowbar to a soundtrack of depersonalised ululation. Ryan rained blows on Agaskayon's face. Even in the dream he could feel the bar connect with the antique dealer's head. But the blows did nothing to him. Ryan hit him and hit him again, but Agaskayon's features remained unmarked and he continued to stare back with that enigmatic face.

A more intense burst of moaning brought Ryan out of his slumbers. The ululation was so loud that it seemed like it was coming from within his very room. And then he realised that the sound had changed – the moaning was no longer coming from next door. Somehow the bestial moans were coming from a few feet away, no longer separated from him by a wall. His eyes flicked open. It was dark, but in his room he could see a presence. It towered above him in the bed. He tried to move, but he could not. Something came down over his face. As the darkness consumed him he wondered if the sound of inhuman moans would be the last thing he would ever hear.

Could this be the end of Barry Ryan and his mission? There is only one way to find out. Well, there are several ways… you could come back for later instalments, but if you give me fifty quid I will tell you how things end up.

An inuit panda production

13/11/2011