The Doorstep
Chapter 1
Morris Carver was twenty-two in 1980. He was enjoying his first 'holiday' since joining the Civil Service nearly fourteen months earlier. He was an Administration Trainee in Her Majesty's Treasury, was from an upper middle class family, and so he had good prospects for advancement in future.
Morris was only ostensibly on holiday, his role at the treasury would require the occasional travel abroad incognito, and on this, his first occasion, he was 'vacationing' in Cairo.
On the day he was to meet his contact he naturally felt anxiety about participating in a potentially clandestine activity, and looked forward to seeing some of the tourist attractions before he returned to London. He had been told that a little sightseeing would be useful, in any case, if ever he was questioned by local authorities.
He saw soldiers everywhere he went as he made his way to Nile Corniche where he hoped to get a taxi to his meet point at the Giza Necropolis.
Even in the taxi the going was very slow, and he thought that being late would not look good on his report. Cairo had a population of about seven million in 1980, and he mischievously thought that half of them were on the road between him and the Necropolis.
It was late in the day by the time he got there. He looked at his watch as the taxi pulled up to the foot of the pyramids, and he saw that he was only a few minutes late. He timed it pretty well, he thought, as he paid the driver and got out of the car.
His first impression of the Great Pyramid was its sheer size. It was huge, and stood to this day as a testament to the ingenuity of the ancient Egyptians.
He saw the Original Entrance on the north face below which he was to meet his contact, and approached it at a steady pace confident in his timing of the afternoon.
He saw a likely candidate a short distance away and recognised the posture he had assumed which was the sign of his contact; his back against the stone, one leg crossed over the other, with arms crossed, and wearing a dark felt hat.
As he got close the figure spoke in a low voice, "You Carver?"
"Yeah," he answered, and the two relaxed after the introductions and pleasantries had been taken care of.
"You've got something for me?" Morris asked after a short lull in the conversation.
"No, I don't," his contact answered.
"Then what am I doing here?" Morris asked, slightly annoyed.
"It's a test," he answered. "You've got to make a decision. You've got to make up your own mind, and since I'll be gone by the time you make it, you'll be the only one who will ever know which way you went."
"Oh!" he replied a little taken aback. "And what is this decision?" Morris asked after a pause.
The contact flicked his thumb behind him. "It's whether or not you climb this thing."
Morris stood there dumbfounded, struggling to consider what this might mean to him.
He didn't understand. "It's just a tourist attraction, isn't it?" he asked bewildered.
His contact smiled menacingly. "That's for you to decide. It's got nothing to do with me. Matter of fact, it's time I got outta here," he said and started to move away.
"But, it's illegal, isn't it?" Morris called after him.
"Oh, don't worry," he answered. "If you hang around here, someone will ask you if you want climb it, for a small fee," and with that he was gone.
Morris felt alone for perhaps the first time in his life. He was stripped bare of all his beliefs and assumptions about the world, and had to decide something monumental, completely on his own.
He backed up a little so that he could take in the proportions of the thing, as if that was going to help. He glanced to the west and saw that he had about half an hour before it got dark.
"It's obviously more than a tourist attraction," he thought. He could feel the awe inspiring antiquity of the thing. "As a matter of fact," he thought, "that seems to be why it's such a difficult decision. It's scary!"
He thought about the simple geometry of a pyramid. "It's just a pointy thing, isn't it?"
"It's a metaphor for all of life, if not for human history and capitalism itself, isn't it?" he asked again.
"It's a picture of the struggle to rise to the top of society. The question is, do I want to have this relationship with the world?
"And, what's the alternative? Shrink back in fear, and decline to have this relationship?"
He paced back and forth lost in perplexity, trying to predict different combinations of outcomes.
As his contact had foreseen, it got dark, a representative of the Egyptian Antiquities Authority approached him, and asked him if he would like to climb it for the modest sum of five Egyptian pounds.
Morris reached deep within himself, paid the representative, and began the climb up the nearest lateral edge.
Chapter 2
It was fully dark by the time Morris began his descent after a half hour spent enjoying a view of the entire precinct.
Nothing remarkable happened while he was up there, a couple of other guys arrived, but it wasn't about to get crowded. The only remarkable thing about his experience was the inspiration he felt by being among the small group of people who got to be there that night. A part of himself felt like it would never leave this place.
It took twenty minutes to get back to the base, and another twenty was spent waiting for a taxi back to the hotel.
So, it was quite late by the time he opened the door to his room, and lay down on the bed. He was tired and hungry, but too tired to eat, so he just curled up under a blanket and dozed off to sleep.
Morris's dreaming had never been eventful throughout his life up to this point. If he could remember them at all, then his memories were dull and grey. But as he lay there unconscious of his surroundings, his dreaming burst into colour and hidden meaning.
Emerging from a dream he was suddenly wide awake, capturing in his permanent memory the scene he had just left. In his dream he was sitting on the floor beside Her Majesty the Queen, seated on her royal throne, and surrounded by a hoard of angry Arabs.
It felt like time had slowed down so that he could examine the details. He could see the fire burning in the eyes of the Arabs, but it was a glimpse of the Queen's expression that made a lasting impression on him. It was the steely strength of her resolve in the face of danger that he found impressive.
He sat up with an expression of astonishment on his face. He combed through the memory as best he could in search of clues he could use to construct its meaning.
The first thing he noticed was that it was unique in his experience. He then concluded that there had been a seismic shift in his relationship with the world in general, but more importantly in his relationship with his bosses, and the very government of Britain itself.
"This isn't how it works, is it?, he wondered. "Surely, my miserable existence isn't that important," he went on.
"How can I adapt to this when I have no experience with the mysteries of the mind?" he asked again.
Little did he know that he already had strings attached to him, which were only now being pulled.
Chapter 3
Morris still had another day left in Cairo when he woke up the next morning. His flight was booked for the following day so as to make his cover as a tourist work. So, he began thinking about what he'd like to do with the day.
He ordered a hearty breakfast to fill the emptiness in his stomach, and thought about the vivid dream he had the night before.
As he sipped a cup of hot coffee, he decided that he didn't really know what to make of it. But he knew he would never forget it, and warmed himself with the creeping feeling that he was now a departmental player.
He shuddered at the thought, and turned to the question of the day's activity.
He thought he'd like to visit a mosque, the Amr ibn al-As Mosque, as it had been his intention weeks ago when his trip was in the planning stage.
But in view of his dream, he now felt a strong desire to return to Giza and check out the two entrances to the pyramid he saw the day before. As it happened, he was in luck, the mosque was just off the route from the hotel to the Necropolis.
The Amr ibn al-As Mosque was the oldest mosque in Cairo, and was just back from the east bank of the Nile River. There were few tourists there when Morris arrived in a taxi, so he didn't feel that somewhat embarrassing shame of entering a house of worship as a tourist.
He took his shoes off upon entering, and stayed about a half hour sitting in the shade in quiet reflection.
It was late in the morning by the time he got to the pyramid. He looked at it with new eyes, after his dreaming experience of the night before. He had called it a tourist attraction yesterday, but it was by no means that to him today. It was a mystical beacon of destiny to him now, and would be so always.
There were a few tourists milling about as he approached the Original Entrance and went in. He wasn't expecting much from it; it looked heavily fortified, so it looked like it didn't go anywhere interesting.
The other entrance was a little lower and to the west, and looked promising. It was known as the robber's entrance and bypassed the fortifications altogether, allowing access to the inner cavities of the tomb.
Morris found a quiet corner in the dark and sat there for about twenty minutes feeling the oppressive heaviness of the stones. It was so oppressive that it gave him a headache. He would have stayed longer if he wasn't actually in pain.
When he came back out into the light his headache vanished, and he felt surprisingly good again.
He hung around the Necropolis area until mid afternoon, checking out the other pyramids at the site, another big one, Khafre, and one not necessarily small but dwarfed by the two larger ones.
By the time he got back to the hotel he had had enough of being a tourist, and began to look forward to returning to London. He had a formal dinner in the hotel's dinning room, and retired early in preparation for the day of travel ahead of him.
Chapter 4
His flight didn't take off until after midday, so it was after business hours by the time he landed, caught a taxi, and opened the door to his cozy two bedroom flat in Islington.
He thought about calling in at the office, but had second thoughts; it would rob him of leverage if he showed up before he had time to rest and organise his thinking.
He shared the flat with no one, so he was shouldering the rent himself, which took a toll on his salary. He enjoyed his solitude, it allowed him to adopt a sense of independence in most aspects of his life.
It was a long time since he did any serious dating, so he didn't have a girlfriend.
If you asked him to speak frankly about a relationship of this sort, he would say that he wasn't particularly impressed by the prospect of getting married. He had had his heart broken by a girl, and didn't relish the prospect of going though all of that again.
He kept a woollen keepsake she had left in his closet though, which he couldn't bear to part with yet, but he knew it had to go, sooner or later.
He kept the place tidy with a few nice pieces of furniture, but the place was otherwise noticeably Spartan to any of his few visitors.
The kitchen was well equipped and stocked, so he spent the evening doing a little cooking, and sat down to a tasty pasta dish and a glass of red wine.
After dinner he sat on an armchair and began to mentally rehearse the situation he would likely face tomorrow.
"Surely, everybody will know that I had a choice to make," he thought. "But they won't know how I solved it.
"So, it is imperative for me to keep from giving the game away." He wondered if he could pose a reliable poker face in the office. He doubted it; he had never really had any use for one.
Telling his boss about his dream was not going to be a risk he should consider. It would require an elaborate verbal construction, which he would struggle to negotiate at the best of times, much less accidentally.
He had signed an acknowledgement of the Official Secrets Act very early in his career as an Administration Trainee, and took it seriously. "There seems to be a lot of secrets in public service," he thought.
He was known for being an early riser, so retired quite early, and rolled over in bed with a map of Britain in his quickly collapsing consciousness.
Chapter 5
Morris took the tube to Westminster, entered the Treasury building from King Charles St, and went up to the first floor where the Overseas Finance Sector was located.
It was still a bit before half past eight, but already the office was in a flurry of activity.
Morris went to his desk without making eye contact with anyone. He had general administrative duties to do, managing files and researching information, so there was already a stack of files on his desk requiring attention.
James Butler, who was Morris's office rival, came over to his desk, sat on the edge of it, and asked, "How was your little trip abroad?"
"You know I can't answer that, James," he said.
They were on different career paths, but were members of a cohort, so they would probably run into each other for years to come. Morris figured it would be best to maintain an amicable relationship with him in spite of their rivalry.
Morris saw his boss approaching, and stood up, more out of genuine admiration than an automatic respect for a senior officer.
His boss, Henry Sinclair, a retired Colonel seconded to the treasury for an intelligence assignment, stopped and said "At ease, boys."
"How was your trip abroad, Carver?" he asked.
Morris met his gaze, anchoring himself against the ambient clatter of the office. He kept his tone firm, but quiet. "It was perfectly satisfactory, Sir. I'll have my report on your desk this afternoon."
"I'm glad to hear it, Carver. Carry on," the Colonel replied, and continued his morning office sortie.
Morris began to look through the folders stacked neatly on his desk, and before long James stood up, and went back to work without another word spoken.
He made steady progress with the files throughout the morning, and managed to complete a report of his recent assignment. It spoke of all the things Morris could think that the Colonel would already know. And virtually nothing more.
He had no desire to be untruthful, but doubted that the Colonel would even want to know what remained unspoken.
Such was the situation throughout the morning, but it was the afternoon that became a festival of surprises for him.
By mid afternoon he began seeing files containing highly sensitive material. At first he thought that someone had made a mistake, but looking further he found that so many of these on his desk would unlikely be accidental.
He looked up from the files furtively, to see if anyone was watching him, because the day just got very interesting.
Chapter 6
James Butler spent the afternoon feeling a little miffed.
He could tell that Morris was the Colonel's favourite, and felt a vague but irritating sense of jealousy.
He had a science background; his father was a chemical engineer for a food manufacturer, and he intended to follow in his father's footsteps, but a peculiar numerical ability had brought him to Whitehall. Surely, a data-driven perspective was worthy of the Colonel's respect.
He was very good with numbers, excelled at statistics, and was most at home buried in charts and diagrams. But these skills didn't impress many, so he often found himself gravitating to the background.
He had a thorough grasp of the mechanics of finance, but his thinking couldn't penetrate the murky world of politics and policy formulation. And he certainly wasn't privy to any secrets.
He looked up from his charts late in the afternoon, saw Morris turning pages, buried in his files, and wondered what he was reading. "Secrets, probably," he thought.
Chapter 7
A couple of days later, Morris was beginning to make sense of what he was seeing, and it was pretty scandalous.
He began looking at the most recent files because he could recognise the people and events listed in them. He saw a report dated late in October of 1979 discussing an act of Parliament that ended a system of financial regulation that had been in place since the beginning of World War II.
The report ended with the dramatic conclusion that nearly all restrictions on the movement of capital had been removed, and that capital was now free to trade in an unregulated global market.
Morris leaned back in his chair looking perplexed. "This doesn't add up in a world of honour and responsible government, does it?" The omission of oversight wasn't an error; it was by design.
He pushed the 1979 files aside and began digging into the older archive, tracing the lineage of the policy back to its origin.
He found documents dating from late in the 1950s that went through the British Government's post war balance of payments problems. It described how the Bank of England quietly permitted London banks to attract and lend US dollars, outside of the direct control of US authorities, which resulted in the creation of an offshore 'Eurodollar' market.
Following a vast interconnected network of specialised trusts, opaque legal structures, and post-colonial territories, the City of London acted as the regulatory and routing hub for these satellite jurisdictions.
Starkly in contrast with its public image, the documents attested to the City of London effectively becoming an offshore unregulated global tax haven.
He had no trouble joining the dots between actions taken in the late 1950s and parliamentary actions of today.
Morris sat there nearly choking on the realisation that the state had just recently stopped managing the economy for social stability, and had started managing it to serve the interests of global capital.
Chapter 8
Morris looked through all the folders left on his desk, but there didn't seem to be anything else in them, so he compiled a report of what he had learned with an emphasis on brevity, and a neutrality regarding any of the murky political considerations.
He couldn't resist feeling helpless though, faced with a future social transformation already too late to stop. The legislation opened a floodgate, and "there's no way of putting that genie back in the bottle," as the senior bureaucrats would have liked to say.
He took his report directly to the Colonel's office, and knocked on the door.
"Come in, Carver," the Colonel said.
"I've finished reading the list of sensitive files left on my desk, Sir, and here's my report," Morris began.
"Ah, well done, lad. And what did you think?"
Morris stood stiffly, almost at attention. "I suspect the deregulation will accelerate wealth concentration, Sir," he replied.
"Yes, that's how I read it too," the Colonel said. "And how do you feel about that?" he asked.
"I feel helpless, Sir. Unable to turn back the tide of change."
"Carver, governments don’t steer history. We just read the weather. The post-war consensus is dead. The winter is coming, and our job is to make sure Britain is the one left holding the coat."
"Yes, Sir."
"Carver, I've brought you into the circle because I want you to assist in an effort to get the City to be more forthcoming with data concerning their clients."
"Sir?"
"Don't get excited. It will just be more reading. They're providing us with some material, but it's heavily redacted. So I'll want you to see if there's anything useful left in what we can read."
"Yes, Sir," he replied enthusiastically.
"That will be all, Carver."
Morris returned to his desk, the quiet buzz of Whitehall intrigue replacing his helplessness.
Chapter 9
Later that night Morris was at home, deeply reflecting on Britain's place in the world. He mentally pictured his map of Britain, but now with the threads of an international network spreading across the globe.
He spent hours brooding over his vision of a tiny country with a subtle, pervasive power reaching not only into post-colonial territories, but potentially every nation with wealth listed on the City's client list.
He thought about what the redacted files might hold, and rolled over in bed thinking about the corruption and exploitation that an unregulated market might inspire.
But, smiling with amusement, he thought about the dirt that British Intelligence could potentially glean from these documents.
When he slept he dreamed of Eternity, which is a very subtle thing, so when he woke he had no recollection of it.
Chapter 10
When Morris arrived at the office next morning he found several boxes full of redacted documents stacked neatly next to his desk.
He picked one up, put it on his desk and flipped it open. What he found inside were sorted documents marked as copies, so he figured he could rearrange them without interfering with the integrity of the originals.
Later that morning, James was watching what Morris was doing with great interest. He could see that Morris had documents spread all over his desk, and was waiting for one of them to slip onto the floor.
He didn't have to wait long, so he got up and strolled towards it when eventually it did.
He bent over, snatched the document quickly, and had a very close look at it before he said, "Oh, look Morris. You dropped one."
James saw that it was redacted, but had an assortment of numbers on the page that looked like potential identity sorting numbers and account values.
Morris snatched the page out of his hands, and said, "Hey, don't look at that. It's classified."
"Then get me clearance, this has got numbers on it. You know I'm good with numbers."
"No!" Morris answered.
"Oh, c'mon Morris, you know you need an extra pair of eyes on these."
Morris looked at the chaos growing on his desk and said, "Alright, I'll ask the Colonel. But don't expect him to agree."
By mid afternoon Morris was standing in front of James's desk saying, "Okay, I've spoken to the Colonel about your request, and he wants to see you, now."
James disappeared for several minutes, but returned with a victorious grin, delighted to be given access to the material.
Not only did he have access to the documents but he had also been permitted to read Morris's report about financial deregulation. The documents were then spread out on two desks, and the two of them were discussing what to do with them.
Morris was saying, "You'd think that MI6 and the City of London would have come to an arrangement of some sort, given their interest in the matter."
James had been studying a document for a couple of minutes. "Well, maybe they have, Morris. Look at the numbers on the top of these receipts," he said.
"Yeah, I saw them, they look random to me," Morris replied. "What about them?"
"I recognise these numbers," he began. "They’re randomly distributed, but as a group they’re international telephone area codes. They’ve given us the geographic origin of the accounts."
By late afternoon they had a lot of these documents sorted by area code, so they could now associate numerous account balances with countries of origin.
It was getting late, but before he called it quits for the day, Morris apologised to James for being feisty earlier. He expressed the feeling that they may be office rivals, but hostility was both unnecessary and unwarranted.
James thanked him, and they parted as agreeable collaborators.
Chapter 11
On the Tube back to Islington, Morris had a sudden realisation. Perhaps it was the dozens of other civil servants around him, with some fairly senior members among them, but something niggling in the back of his mind over the last few days suddenly came forward.
With the deregulation of global capital, it occurred to him that he was witnessing the beginning of the end of the middle class, and that he was very close to the centre of all the action.
He had an uncanny instinct for finance, and knew that capital had a tendency to concentrate at the top of society, and that the situation in the City of London was only going to hasten this. He began to think that, sooner or later, the middle class was going to get priced out of existence, and his only unanswered question was, why? Why now, what had changed?
Later in the evening, after something to eat and a glass of wine, Morris sat comfortably in his arm chair thinking about the audacity of the Thatcher government; that they would consider something so brazen as this, that they would think that no one would notice what the consequences would be. What was she thinking, what had they seen?
His memory of the pyramid nudged his thinking a little. "What do you think has changed?" it asked.
Morris reflected on this for a moment. It could only be the accelerating tide of progress, he thought. He had heard about the 1972 publication of The Limits to Growth by the husband and wife team, Donella and Dennis Meadows, but such a drastic response seemed alarmingly sudden. Would Thatcher take such fringe thinking so seriously?
He thought he'd really like to ask someone about this, but the thought immediately froze in his mind in horror. You can't talk about this, he thought. Not only is it highly sensitive, but it's provocative to the point of revolution!
He tried to stifle this thinking, and hoped that no one would notice that he had even thought it, and he had begun to dread what tomorrow would bring.
Chapter 12
Several weeks prior to Morris's momentous realisation about current Thatcher government policy, a senior officer in MI6 met with a banker from the City of London, in an exclusive London club to discuss the possibility of getting some little titbits of intel from each other.
They knew each other from the Old Boys' Network and in spite of recognising each other's impeccable credentials, the banker looked on the MI6 officer with great suspicion. He knew what MI6 wanted, and was prepared to listen to his offer, but only if he liked what the other party brought to the table.
After some haggling over details, the banker suggested, "I could mark a lot of carefully redacted documents, but only if you can abide by my conditions."
"What sort of markings are you suggesting?" the MI6 officer asked.
"They would be regional identifiers, obscured, of course; I have to watch my back," the banker said. "But they would give you an idea of where the money is coming from, and where it is going."
"And what are your conditions?" the other party asked.
"They're not complicated. I want your assurance that the documents remain entirely within the confines of Her Majesty's Treasury, and nowhere else. My confidence in the institution you represent is wearing very thin indeed."
The MI6 officer smiled politely, consented to the conditions, and the two of them relaxed enough to enjoy their little brandies. With the formalities taken care of the MI6 officer breathed a sigh of relief, delighted to see a softening of the banker's resistance.
Discretion, it seems, is the priceless currency of the City of London.
Chapter 13
When Morris got back to the office the morning after his awkward mental slip-up the night before, he saw that his desk contained piles of region sorted deposit records, and found that the biggest of them were from regions in the Soviet Union and the United States.
James's desk contained records of bank payments, and were similarly distributed between the Soviets and the Americans.
Morris examined several of the ones on his desk in search of a pattern he could describe in his report to the Colonel.
From left to right the order of digits was always consistent with the area code but were randomly distanced apart from each other. From top to bottom the digits seemed located randomly within a vertical space of four typewriter line feed carriage returns. The documents were photocopies, so there was no telling at what stage the codes were added.
All the piles on the two desks had yet to be sorted into payment and receipt sizes, but ranged from several million USD to as little as a few thousand.
By mid morning Morris had concluded his report, and he and James made their way to the Colonel's office to explain to him what they had found.
The Colonel listened to what each of them had to say, with a look of mystification screwed up on his face. When they had finished their reports his face became an expression of certainty. "Well, that's no accident," he said. "Clearly, MI6 has made progress gaining the confidence of bankers in the City.
"Can you sort them into more precise geographic locations?" he asked.
"Oh, yes," James answered. "They can be sorted down to city and regional areas."
"How long will it take to get them into a form that the girls in the typing pool can transcribe onto index cards?" the Colonel asked.
"Oh, about a week, Sir," Morris answered.
"Good. Well, do that. We'll want to be able to see what's coming and going on as fine a scale as possible," the Colonel explained.
"Well done, boys. Thank you. That's all."
And with that the two of them returned to their desks to further refine the areas within the piles.
There would need to be two lists, Morris thought; a list of deposit receipts sorted alphabetically by location, and the other a list of bank payments similarly sorted by location. It was pretty tedious work, but he illuminated the hours with a memory of what he felt on the Tube the evening before.
"I'm right in the middle of it," he quietly reminded himself, and with that he resolved to give a purpose to his life. "One of these days, I'm going to document the demise of the middle class."
Chapter 14
Morris sat in his arm chair in the evening with a cup of tea and his new conviction, combing through his memory of what the Thatcher government had done since it came into office about a year ago.
"She's also selling government assets," he whispered to himself. "It's starting to look a lot like policy-panic to me. What has she seen? What's gotten into her?"
"Debt!" came the hasty reply. He had a vague memory of the previous government taking out a 1.8 billion pound loan from the IMF a few years ago.
But even so, he thought, it's not a good look. Business only exists to profit from its customers, and when the customers are the public, the broader trajectory looks like the dismantling of the welfare state itself. Isn't welfare the definition of commonwealth? Can we no longer afford it?
He remembered what the Colonel had said a few days ago, "Governments don't steer history, they just read the weather."
Yeah, he thought, there are definitely storm clouds on the horizon!
Chapter 15
Back in the office, the painstaking compilation of the lists was slowed significantly when James discovered that in major population centres the area codes could be resolved to individual suburbs, and even neighbourhoods.
"These lists are going to take a while, Morris. But they've given me an idea."
"Oh? Tell me, James. What do you have in mind?"
"Well, I was wondering if the Treasury had a global list of known offenders, because I think I could calculate a probability of their location coinciding with the area codes we've got here. We've got a lot of resolution in the big cities here."
"Brilliant, James. I'll ask the Colonel if that's even possible. Whatever happens to be the case, a formal request will be required." Morris paused while he considered his priorities. "I'll get on with that today."
Later that day, Morris had a written request prepared, and he took it to the Colonel's office with the hope that the department would even share this kind of information with them.
The Colonel listened to Morris's verbal request, and answered, "Oh yes, there is such a list, but our request would take several days to get approved."
The Colonel leaned back in his chair and considered the strategic costs and benefits of even possessing a correlation such as this. "Don't expect it anytime soon," he replied.
"I'm not surprised, Sir. The compilation of our lists is progressing, but will take a few more days."
Morris returned to his desk, and gave James a quick thumbs up when he looked to Morris for approval.
James smiled gleefully, delighted with the possibility of doing a statistical analysis of the data they were compiling.
The two of them worked through several otherwise uneventful days.
Chapter 16
The Colonel doubted that a request such as the one Carver was seeking approval for would be granted by administrative officials further up the chain of command, but it was at least an interesting one, and may even be taken seriously.
He swallowed the apprehension he felt about the enormity of the request. The Treasury was an extremely conservative branch of government, not likely to bend its formalities, and it was his reputation within the department at risk here, not Carver's.
He had been informed of the condition the banker had provided in exchange for the boxes of redacted documents, so anything to do with their contents would be subject to intense scrutiny. Nevertheless, what Butler was proposing was consistent with what the department ultimately wanted, so the only real question was the one of who gets to view it.
The Colonel gave it a fifty-fifty chance of success as he typed a formal request to the level of organisation immediately above his own, and was very surprised when, about a week later, he found a list of ten addresses in his inbox with a note saying that they had been selected for their special interest to the department.
He spent a few minutes absorbing the meaning of the list before he called Carver into his office to tell him that his request had been partially granted.
Morris took the list the Colonel handed him, and saw that there was nothing but addresses there, a neatly prepared list typed line by line against the left margin.
He found it a bit confronting to realise that the department was secretive to its core; the list looked like nothing, and yet it meant so much. It wasn't meant for his edification. It served the interests of those higher than his own lowly station, and they were very careful.
He thanked the Colonel, and returned to his desk with a grim expression on his face. He beckoned James to come over to see what he had.
"It's not a childish game we're playing, James," he said. "They're taking this very seriously."
Chapter 17
James was eager to get started on the list of addresses, and one by one collected subsets of deposit receipts from the piles of area codes associated with the addresses.
The deposit receipts were the crucial records to begin with because they listed account balances, and so he could associate numerous records with a particular customer on the basis of their balances. It was marginally probabilistic, but it was a good place to start.
He could also subtract account balances from matching deposit receipts, and look for the resulting differences in the piles of bank payments. The names and dates may have been redacted, but there was still quite a lot of useful data remaining, and subject to James's sense of reliable inference.
Pretty soon he had a comprehensive picture of the array of customers he could associate with the specific addresses.
In most cases there were few customers James could associate with the individual addresses, but in the few cases where there were more than one, James noted that there was not enough data from which to determine the identity of the suspect. Such was for more senior officers to decide, and none of his business.
He also kept a scrupulous record of the sums and differences which Morris later typed into individual reports for each of the ten addresses.
Not surprisingly, there were a lot of customers associated with population centres in the Soviet Union. There was very little private banking in Soviet Russia, so wealthy Russians had to resort to a more creative treatment of their money.
Both James and Morris concluded that the Treasury was more interested in Soviet suspects than American ones. There were no American addresses in the list of ten they were given.
By the following afternoon, the accounts had been tabulated, records had been noted, and a comprehensive report for each of the addresses had been written up which both Morris and James presented to the Colonel for approval.
The Colonel glanced through the report and admired the quality of their efforts.
"Thanks, boys," he began. "This is excellent work, both of a high standard and completed in a timely fashion. Senior members with an interest in this will take note of the quality of your work. Well done."
Morris and James returned to their desks wondering what to do next. So much of their attention had been devoted to this project that they had nearly forgotten what else they did with their day.
They shuffled papers, dreamed of glory, and remembered the rhythm of the day before the boxes of documents arrived at Morris's desk, only a few weeks ago.
Chapter 18
Such were the days and weeks following Butler and Carver's solution to the ten addresses during which time the boxes were handed off to the forensic accounting section, where they could be processed more formally. And then the days and weeks turned into months and years.
Butler was moved from the Overseas Finance Sector to the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency where he was a programmer, and Carver remained in this sector where he graduated to the rank of Grade 7 Administration Officer.
And so it was in the middle of October of 1986 that he sat in his armchair late in the evening, thinking about how his private musings concerning the gradual removal of support for the middle class were now consistent with his official job description.
Her Majesty's Treasury was unlike other government departments insofar as its structural hierarchy was horizontal rather than vertical. In other departments, a Grade 7 Principal might supervise a dozen subordinates. Carver, however, managed just one officer and reported directly to an Assistant Secretary, or on occasion, to the Chancellor or the Prime Minister herself.
Privately, over the last few years, he had entertained some serious doubts about the policy direction the Thatcher government had taken which he hoped to hide from her should departmental business ever bring them in contact with each other.
And there was the deregulation of the London Stock Exchange on the horizon, only a couple of weeks away, which he had strong feelings about. He had not yet grasped the full gravity of the situation, but a profound conflict of interest was looming on his horizon; a moral choice now only days away.
Chapter 19
"Good morning, Natalie," Carver said greeting her as he arrived at the office the next morning.
"Good morning, Sir," she answered.
Natalie was an Administration Trainee in her third month with Carver as her boss. Her job was to research questions given to Carver so that he could develop a variety of policy options for more central members of the government.
She was up to speed on the background of Thatcher's policy platform, tracing its roots back to the post-war consensus. She was a middle class girl, and felt strongly about the policy direction Thatcher was taking, but was not prepared to accept that the middle class was being deliberately dismantled.
Perhaps the deregulation of the Stock Exchange in a couple of weeks will persuade her to recognise that the 'horse has already bolted,' Carver thought with little amusement.
Carver was determined to maintain the appearance of an unbiased civil servant, politically neutral to the point of being unrecognisable. He achieved this result, ironically, by being in possession of a thorough grasp of what the Thatcher government was trying to achieve; he could predict the sort of policy suggestions that would most likely appeal to her.
He adopted this position, not so much to ingratiate himself with the ruling class, but in order to protect himself from being personally affected by anything he might suggest; it was a feigned ambivalence. His neutrality resided within himself in a place which he would never think to compromise. And yet, he was still very vulnerable.
"Anything interesting in the inbox?" he asked in an offhand manner.
"Yes, there is, actually," she answered as her eyes met his. "There's a note from No. 10, which should be interesting."
She handed him the note which he promptly opened and read.
"She wants to see me," he said after a moment spent blankly staring at the page steadying his nerve.
Chapter 20
It was only a matter of several minutes walk from the Treasury building around the corner to Downing Street, so Carver didn't have long to prepare himself for a completely unexpected encounter with the head of the government of the day.
While his heart was racing, he noticed that he wasn't exactly panicking, so he sifted through the possible reasons why she would want to see him.
He considered the approaching Stock Exchange situation which promised to be a major turning point for her government and its economic platform. Most players with an interest in the matter were expecting electronic trade volumes to hit the roof come Monday week.
He scanned through his memory of recent policy reports he had filed, but didn't recognise anything controversial. And then there he was, going through a number of security checks before knocking on the door and being admitted.
He was shown to a waiting hall on the first floor where the Prime Minister kept him waiting for half an hour.
He didn't waste his time; he took in as much as he could about the mood of the rooms that morning, noting people he knew of, or he was personally acquainted with.
When, at last, he was admitted to her office, he saw her with her head down scratching away at notes with a fountain-pen.
He stood there quietly waiting, until he ventured to interrupt her with a muted, "Ahem."
"Ah, Carver," she began.
"Yes, ma'am," he answered.
"Carver, there's something I want you to do for me," she continued.
"Ma'am?"
"Your father was an accountant, was he not?"
This took him by surprise. This wasn't policy business. What could she be getting at, he wondered.
"You grew up in a prosperous middle class family, did you not?"
"Yes, ma'am," he replied with some alarm.
"Oh, don't worry. My own family background is even more middle class than yours. My father was a grocer."
He paused briefly to gather his thoughts. "What are you getting at, ma'am?" he asked carefully.
"I've been reading your file, Carver. You were given the pyramid test in your youth, were you not?"
"Yes, ma'am, but that was a long time ago."
"Well, dear boy. It's time to bring in the harvest."
Chapter 21
"Please, sit down, Carver. I have a little story to tell you."
He sat in the chair in front of her desk feeling somewhat at a loss to her command of the situation.
"Have you ever thought how ironic it is for Italy to depict such a threatening attitude to Sicily, home to some of the most chronic offenders of the law?"
"No, ma'am, I haven't. But now that you mention it, it does seem grotesquely ironic."
"The map of Italy we know of today was first drawn in the 16th century by the cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi, and we can say that a few uniquely empowered individuals of the day wrestled with this very irony because the mapping of the world was largely begun in search of other geographic ironies."
"Oh, and did they find any?" he asked.
She took a couple of pages from a draw in her desk and thrust them at him.
Carver took them up and saw that they were simple outline maps, one of the whole world and the other of Britain.
The map of the world was labelled with body parts, the North American continent was labelled Pelvis, the Pacific Ocean, Belly, the African continent, Forelegs, Europe was the figure's head, and Australia was a foetus strung at the end of an umbilicus, the Indonesian archipelago.
The map of Britain was similarly labelled with body parts, Head in the vicinity of Scotland, Hind Legs east of Land's End, and Ireland was its juvenile offspring.
Carver paused for a moment while he digested the enormity of the proposition.
When he recovered his composure he supposed, "I presume the custodians of this have been fairly secretive with it."
"Yes, indeed. It has been handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. As a matter of fact, I'll have those back, please." She took the two pages over to a shredder on a table by the window and shredded them.
He paused while she returned to her desk, and gathered her thoughts.
"My point, Carver," she continued, "is that history is much deeper than we can even imagine. What we see around us today has been millions of years in the making. The tides roll in and then they roll out. Nothing is forever, and everything is by design. We may commiserate the demise of the middle class, but we must look forward to anticipate the future."
He considered the irony of her saying this to him, before he continued. "And what is it that you want from me?" he asked.
"I want you to be on the trading floor when the market goes live on Monday. We are attracting a lot of interest from around the world, but it can only be appreciated in the context of what I've just told you. You have a few days to organise your thinking about this, Carver. I hope you'll be prepared. That's all."
And with that he stood up, bowed his head in respect, and began his return to the office with a grave humility he had not known before.
Chapter 22
By the time he got past the security stations on Downing Street, the office felt too close for him to head to; he needed more time to restore feelings which were presently off the charts, so he wandered in the direction of the Library in St James.
He'd very much like to see a picture of the map of Italy the PM had told him about. He could have had Natalie go to the Library, which was something she did all the time, but he didn't want her joining the dots between his meeting with Thatcher and the map of Italy.
And perhaps more importantly he had to deal with the unavoidable conclusion that he had been set up going back potentially to his childhood. Certainly, the last six years had been spent waiting for the penny to drop.
Could his parents have been involved? He mentally scanned his memory of the sequence of events that led to his joining the Civil Service but couldn't find anything remotely suspicious. How long had bureaucrats been setting up young candidates like this? Was he among the very few?
It was almost a compliment to be selected, but at the cost of missed opportunities to become something very different. In the end he gave up feeling sorry for himself, and decided that it was a great honour to serve the Crown, which is something he had felt all along.
When he got to the Library he went to the Dewey Microfiche cross-referencing the collection, looked alphabetically for Gastaldi, and found references to books in the library.
He found a book containing pictures, one of which was the map he was looking for. It wasn't particularly remarkable, but it did look like the Italy he was familiar with, and he could easily see how it would have tempted a Renaissance thinker to wonder about the mysteries of the world.
He resisted the temptation to photocopy it, not for the sake of preserving secrecy, but because he already knew the shape of Italy well enough, and wouldn't forget the image in the short term anyway.
He put the book back in its place and headed back to the office. He was feeling much better, but along the way he thought he'd better have an excuse for why he was so late when Natalie inevitably asked. He thought his best bet would be to tell her that he shared a private confidence with the PM, and he wanted to check a fact in the library, which was strictly true if for another reason entirely.
Chapter 23
It was not until he was at home that evening that he dared to look into the implications of what the PM had told him. "What a far reaching and useful paradigm," he said quietly to himself when he was sitting comfortably in his armchair.
So, we're all the enfranchised constituents of an integral global organism, he thought, examining his mental map with his mind's eye in quiet awe.
"It gives 'currency' a new meaning to an economist. Money is the lifeblood of this global being," he whispered again.
The sceptical part of him tried to entertain at least some doubt about the validity of the model, but he kept on coming back to an unequivocal certainty. "All the bits fit together too neatly to be a coincidence."
"Irony," he thought, "has such depth for me now." He could look almost anywhere on his internal map and see how human behaviour reflects the social and economic role they play in this organism.
"And Britain is at the summit of it!"
"And it's not just functionally the summit, but symbolically as well. In fact, in the case of Britain, it's so symbolic that it's difficult to separate mind from matter."
Perhaps that's why she wants me on the floor on Monday, he thought. It's the sheer power of the symbolism she has given me.
When eventually weariness overcame him, he slept and dreamed of Eternity again, but this time it got caught in his permanent memory, so that when he woke the memory remained crystal clear. "That's odd," he muttered.
Chapter 24
Prior to Monday the 27th October 1986, the day they called the 'Big Bang', the London Stock Exchange consisted of a large hall housing several hundred men so that they could shout at each other.
They were divided into two groups, Jobbers and Brokers, each strictly forbidden from performing the other's role, and both with a keen interest in shouting at one another across the floor.
The Jobbers would offer commodity buy and sell prices when asked, and the Brokers would buy or sell commodities for their clients without having to tell the Jobber whether they were buying or selling. This kept the Jobbers from artificially inflating prices, and was thus subject to market forces.
This was an arrangement that had worked at the Exchange for close to two hundred years, but in a high volume market it was inefficient, and lagged behind more progressive exchanges, like New York and Tokyo, that had already transitioned to an electronic system.
The London Exchange began preparing an electronic system of their own three years prior to the Big Bang, and when it finally went live brokers could view commodity buy and sell prices on a screen, call a Jobber agency on the phone, and thus made the floor of the Exchange redundant.
Carver arrived at the Exchange just as it began trading, and had been there only a matter of seconds before the screens went blank and the system crashed.
There was pandemonium among traders as they reverted to shouting at each other from the market floor, and as Exchange officials tried desperately to correct the system and get it back online.
After an hour of confusion, the screens flickered on again and electronic trading began in earnest.
The market floor was suddenly quiet, and Carver drank in its relative serenity. As he wandered through the exchange facilities, he found a room divided into cubicles where brokers were quietly reading page after page of commodity prices.
The market was also freed from a lot of other legal restrictions that Monday, so it saw a lot of international traffic, which was the main reason why they called it the Big Bang. London suddenly became a global centre for finance.
Carver marvelled at the sophistication of the technology, and pictured in his mind's eye, the volume of electrical energy now coursing through the Exchange. Electricity was global currency in its purest form.
His previous vision of Britain at the centre of a dark clandestine web of fibres reaching into every corner of the globe, now became a beacon of light held aloft by a noble maiden. The symbolism may have been Gothic for a modern bureaucrat, but only more so in view of the vision he had evidently inherited.
Chapter 25
Some forty years later, sometime late in 2026, Morris looked back on that day as the day the middle class finally became doomed. It was the day that the vertical consolidation of capital became an irresistible certainty, at the expense of ordinary people living very normal lives.
Morris was in his late sixties by then, had retired, and had written his account of the financial redistribution of wealth in a memoir spanning more than forty years of public service.
He cited the decoupling of growth and wages throughout the 80s and 90s as a factor, and the shifting of financial returns from labour to equity as another.
But the early 21st century was so littered with examples of how wealth was extracted from poor people that it barely bore repeating.
Morris could remember a little homelessness in London in the early 1980s, but it was nothing compared with the widespread impoverishment and homelessness that became commonplace decades later.
People with very little savings could find themselves homeless after even minor unexpected expenses, and this was happening to people not only in Britain, but throughout the developed world.
Morris had to contain his frustration watching this unfold over many years of historic slow motion. He was not in a position to do much about it except become a witness in the inevitable trial of those responsible.
The only consolation he offered readers of his memoir was his view from the doorstep at the top of a pyramid. "Time is much more subtle than people think. Everywhere you look there's time in the things we touch and feel each day, that carelessness is the only obstruction to a knowledge of it," he wrote in one passage.
"If the seasons and the half light of day won't console you then consider the ecological context of the middle class," he wrote.
"There can be no doubt that the middle class has been the biggest consumer of natural resources. And besides a lot of noble talk and good intentions about climate change and global warming, virtually nothing effective has been achieved, so that pricing out the middle class is the only thing that makes financial and ecological sense."
In terms of his personal feelings Morris looked across the ages and saw the timelessness of his position. He thought about what it would have been like for a bureaucrat in ancient Egyptian times, and realised something his memory of the pyramid had been trying to explain to him all along.
The beginning and the end are symmetrical opposites of each other, and between the two of them there is only time.