Who is Sylvia - what is she?

"Godz rot Chas, isn't it blindingly obvious? Look we're all ex coppers, ex-detectives, at the end of our careers in the force we moved to this organisation. The office, the relationships, you - it's all pure Len Deighton. We have to be an arm of government - if I had to plump I'd plump for MI6. It's obvious."

"Well Gee, you've clearly fallen for every clue he's given but in a text such as this, a 21st century text, the obvious, the patent is least often what it seems to be. Power, what's your take on it? Come on earn your keep!"

"When you put it like that Charlie it kind of took me back a bit, I'd never given a second's thought to it but I suppose, on reflection, I'd have to imagine that Lory and I would be editors and you'd be the investigative journalist. You're following up the Litvinenko story an we are the office politics - a reflection of incompetent, and not necessarily well meaning, British middle management but with that slimy veneer that Waugh smeared on us in Scoop. Isn't that what all those toilet scenes are about - the grubbiness, the base side of our lives and ways?"

"Now there's a turn up for the books - Power, I never thought you had it in you - the Waugh reference I mean - very good but the thunder box is in Sword of Honour not Scoop, nonetheless very clever ... I'd missed that altogether ... and me a literary detective!"

Power and Lory looked at each other from behind the desk and then turned their gazes separately on Charlie. "Literary detective? What the hell is that?", Power. "Never heard of it - that's not a real profession is it? We are supposed to be a literary detective agency then?" Lory.

"Precisely, exactly. The leading literary detective agency in London - that's us the Power and the (G)Lory Incorporated, as in Murder Incorporated. Our mission is to expose the literary backbone of this very work,its beating heart, in which we all feature ... and in order to do that we have a layer one task which is to complete the Litvinenko mystery to everyone's satisfaction ... that's where our prime fictive motivation and purpose comes from ... that layer one task ... that is the surface layer of our onion. Do you remember this line? 'tell the man that he can forget ever getting this thing into print - there's not a publishing house that'll touch it ..." OK that was the giveaway - why would a secret agent know anything about the current state of publishing? That was the author acting through the writer to get me to write his way out. It fingered me fairly definitively. As for the toilet breaks - that's his homage to Johnson who notably berated himself in print ... in one of his own novels ... for not including enough toilet breaks in his own work to signify the true nature of humanity. That's where the revelation of his lower layer purpose seeps through between the layers again but let's clear up the top layer first before we move on to the more complex stuff. As we sit here Alex one is on his way to a date with death. He will be poisoned - this much we know from the exterior world. Boris, Bruno and our unnamed Italian will come together somewhere near Regent Street and will conflate into the classical assassination triumvirate. Our other Alex will surface sometime in the next days claiming inside information which he does not possess. Alex one's dossier on a certain Chechen businessman is his death certificate. Leaving it where Alex two could read it was his biggest mistake - not his only mistake but his biggest one. The Italian contact was clearly a major ricket too. Like they said - his greed got the better of him - he got sloppy. Greedy and sloppy - a specialism of the newly liberated east european states and their peoples. They, Alex's colleagues, will try to stick his death on the FSB/FIS but it will not stick - trust me it will not stick. This is Chechen shit - plain and simple - and Chechen commercial shit - fuck all to do with statist forces - and even the wankers in the British press will know that soon enough. Expect the whole story to flare brightly and dwindle quickly once the press start digging. Once they know - or even suspect who is really behind this shit. ..... OK - time for a toilet break. Gee, please ask Serena to bring us some coffee - I know it's a diuretic but I need it. I'll take questions when we come back. Remember to ask me about the locations."




(TBC)