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The year was 1997. The assignment Herb and I were working on was, in essence, simple. The Agency - a small group of freedom fighters with special forces training, then still very much in its embryonic stage - were on a mission to destroy key sites that served as operations bases for The Federation - an elite well-organised group of conspiratorial would-be totalitarians who worked above the law, then almost entirely unheard of and intensely secretive. Herbert Powers and myself - Maximillian Lombard - were at the most hands-on end of the job: Herb as the expert at entering buildings undetected and me as the chief don when it came to planting and concealing explosives. It was by its nature a thankless and extremely dangerous job, often causing the pair of us to suffer from crushing waves of guilt, self-loathing, and remorse. Still, the stronger part of our nature urged us to carry on carrying out these usually death-dealing deeds, convinced we were working for the common good, confident that the repercussions for our failure to cause these explosions that almost always incurred at least a handful of indiscriminate deaths and maimings would weigh upon humanity infinitely moreso than those particular regrettable losses. True, we had difficulty getting to sleep nights, but were The Federation to grow in might and power whilst The Agency attempted to expose and destroy it through more easily usurped means, our muddied consciences in ’97 might, in decades to come, seem as clean as the purest spring water compared to how we would feel then. Such was our philosophy and justification for what we did. Herb and I were model terrorists. At the address we had been given - a solicitors’ firm in the city of Gloucester on the surface - we set about getting into the offices and more secure, concealed rooms beyond, where I carefully moulded and adhered Semtex to places where I thought it was least likely to be detected. The plastic explosive was planted in the early hours of a Sunday morning and set to detonate at noon on Monday, when several important members of The Federation were due to meet there to discuss plans. As far as Herb and I were concerned, our part in the proceedings went smoothly. When we had finished, we retreated to the safe houses and anonymity provided us by The Agency where we impatiently and restlessly whiled away those long hours that were to take us through to the time of the devastating explosion. Somehow Monday noon eventually arrived. We heard the solicitors’ offices and the rest of the building they fronted blow up from our location a few miles down the road where we were holed up, and heard patchy reports about it on the news bulletins shortly thereafter. Although Herb seemed to take the news of the nineteen deaths and seven serious woundings the bomb we had planted resulted in in his stride, I found myself uncommonly tied up in knots over the grisly outcome of our actions. Only four of the deaths were of intended human targets, the rest of the carnage being, in crude Thatcherian terms, collateral damage. I began to think of the friends and families of those I had helped kill and maim, as well as the immediate victims themselves, and soon thoughts became obsessive until every single piece of sensory input seemed overshadowed with blatant connections to those I had been instrumental in putting in a state of mourning. My comrades within The Agency did their best to counsel me but soon it became clear to us all that I was beyond such help. Within weeks of the Gloucester explosion I made an unannounced departure from the safe house that had been my shelter but never my home and took to being one of the increasing number of ‘bums’ dossing down each restless night in England’s uneasy city streets. I suffered a crisis of faith - in The Agency, in my perceptions of morality, in the universal powers that be, in myself. That crisis of faith soon turned to a loss of hope which in turn developed into a pit of almost literally suicidal despair. Our bombing campaign had taken its ultimate toll on me - my once idealistic and impassioned soul had been reduced to one of the ranks of the non-supernatural living dead. One day, whilst tramping apathetically through a park in a town the name and location of which I was unaware and did not care, I slumped upon a public bench with the knowledge that a bout of deep depressing thoughts were about to rack my senses with their hostile, unbearably bleak cynicism. I closed my eyes, leaned forward and cradled my face in my grubby hands, waiting for the torment to be over. My mind played and replayed many ideas but chief among them were that of reporting everything I knew about The Agency to the authorities, which seemed as pointless and futile as not doing so; and the possibility of my own capture, doubtless brought to the attention of my consciousness by the dregs of survival instinct I still possessed and of absolutely no real importance whatsoever. When this wearying mental wave eventually passed, I sat back on the bench and fell asleep beneath the all too hot August sun, a sleep I hoped I would not awake from this side of death. But I did awake. And although still at least technically alive, I found myself in a fresh version of hell. The first thing I noticed was that I was staring down the barrel of an automatic machine-gun, the make and model of which I was unfamiliar with. The man brandishing it was wearing a dark combat uniform as were the half dozen others flanking him. ‘Hands where we can see them!’ the man with my face in his sights ordered me. I carefully removed them from beneath the duvet. Duvet? Within a second, realisation of who and what and where I was hit me in the way it usually does after just emerging from a state of unconsciousness. My name is Pete Saunders; I’m a graphic designer by profession living in Kingston-upon-Thames. I was also aware of when I was, for the year was 2018. I was in the apartment where I lived - my usual place of occupation at 05:39. ‘Slowly, oh so slowly, to your knees!’ I was further commanded. I obliged accordingly and dared to ask a question in the process. ‘What’s going on here??’ It was about the only thing that could be said. ‘We’re with The Federation,’ came the gruff perfunctory reply. The Federation? Well, sure, I knew they existed - who didn’t in 2018 - but what the hell were they doing here with me? Then a second wave of realisation hit me. The dream. That The Agency existed there could be no doubt. Every channel of the media was flooded with propaganda condemning them. It is hardly surprising that they have become the social pariahs in the eyes of the general public. And at the beginning of my dream I had been one of them. Despite the circumstances I was faced with, the dream still held a surreal sense of poignancy and realism for me. I had been Maximillian Lombard, even if only for a few nocturnal moments and I felt a tremendous sense of empathy with The Agency for no logical reason. The shame, the guilt, the unbearable weight of knowing one has been responsible for mass murder - such emotional baggage was still very much bearing down on me. Every image, every sound, every word, every sentiment, every detail of the dream had and still does feel infused with real life. The overall effect was so uncanny it was like I had just relived a past-life memory. But that still didn’t help me make head or tail of the threatening situation I was shocked to find myself in. ‘What do you want with me?’ I asked, as coolly as I could manage at the time. ‘You’re being taken in for questioning.’ ‘But I haven’t done anything.’ The uniformed man’s poker face gave way to a look of malevolent glee at that, and I felt confident that he had adopted the same expression under similar circumstances many times before. ‘We’re not necessarily interested in what you’ve done.’ His voice masked a barely suppressed laugh. ‘We’ve got a lot of technology at our disposal in this modern age, Mr Saunders. And we, believe it or not, are the new generation thought police.’ BACK |