The Conspiracy Theorist (24 page)

‘They no longer know what is real.’

‘You show me your reality and I’ll show
you mine.’

‘What did you tell him?’ I asked.

‘Not my subject.
 
But it was a fascinating thought:
were
Burgess,
Maclean, Philby etc all suffering from pre-senile dementia?
 
Are you leaving that?’

She eyed the rest of my pizza in a
predatory fashion.

‘Go ahead.’

She did.
 

‘Nice choice,’ she commented.
 
‘
Pollo ad astra
.
 
Chicken to the stars.
 
Never
had it before.
 
Love the
peppers.
 
Where was I?’

‘San Francisco.
 
You said you were both there under false pretences?’

‘Well, we were both interested in the
subject, but this was a conference
for
conspiracy theorists.
 
 
Not for academics studying them or, for
that matter, nice old gentlemen with bees in their bonnets about the way their
country is run.
 
Our country that
is, not America, although the distinction is a fine one these days.
 
Culturally and politically.’

‘You wouldn’t say he was a conspiracy
theorist himself?’

‘Depends what you mean by the term?’

‘What do
you
mean?’

‘I thought you said you’d read my
book.’

‘Only the free bit online.’

Kat Persaud looked up and laughed.

‘Ha!
 
Honest, anyway.
 
It would be cheaper to buy it, Mr Becket.
 
Cheaper than a pizza, I mean.
 
Remaindered in all good bookshops.
 
Or can’t a legal investigator put books on expenses?’

She looked at me, smiled and pushed my
plate aside.
 
She had finished with
it.

‘Okay, the popular use of the term
‘conspiracy theory,’’ she made inverted commas in the air, gave me a
significant glance and continued, ‘is often derogatory in connotation.
 
That is to say, the term tends only to
be used, these days, for those theories that run counter to accepted knowledge.
 
So once something becomes an accepted
truth then it is no longer a conspiracy theory, but ‘investigative journalism’
or even ‘history’.
 
Okay?’

‘So far so good.’

‘So we tend to use the term and, thus, ‘conspiracy
theorists’ to denote crackpots.
 
Their crackpottery is known as ‘conspiracy theory’ until, such time as
society accepts that it is true and the conspiracy theorists become
historians.
 
Like me.’

‘So you are not a conspiracy theorist?’

‘I thought I had already made it
clear.
 
I’m
interested
in them, their crackpot ideas and why we tend not to
accept them.’

‘We?’

‘Exactly,’ she said as if she had at
last discovered a modicum of intelligence in a particularly dull
undergrad.
 
‘Who ‘we’
are is
at the crux of the issue.
 
The ‘we’ in this case tend to be big
institutions—universities, research institutes,
governments
—therefore
it is known as an
institutional analysis
.
 
This is what keeps conspiracy theorists
out in the cold, in the same way the Poetry Society used to exclude rappers,
and the art establishment pretends not to frown on graffiti.
 
No bad thing in my opinion, but I would
say that, wouldn’t I?’

‘Because you are an institutional
analyst?’

‘Correct.
 
And, and, and what really frustrates me is that conspiracy
theorists
contradict themselves
, and
they just don’t do their homework.
 
It is lazy thinking, for the most part.
 
There were those at ConGress 13 who thought that Osama Bin
Laden died prior to the 2011 raid
and
that he was captured alive and had been turned as a CIA agent, and is now no
doubt advising on security matters at Langley.
 
You just could not have a sensible conversation with
them.
 
They were like babies; they
wanted the world to be
explainable
.
 
But it just is not.
 
Manifestly.’

She took on board more water.

‘And Simeon Marchant was not like
that?’

‘Not at all,’ she said.
 
‘He was a sceptic.
 
Not a paranoid.
 
What one would call a healthy sceptic,
because he actually knew what he was talking
about.
 
Remember, this was all before the
Edward Snowden affair hit the news.’

She looked at her watch.

‘That was lovely.
 
Thank
you.
 
No desert for me.’

The waiter had appeared.
 
I asked if she would like a coffee.
 
To my surprise she accepted.
 

‘Double espresso, please.
 
Keep me awake.
 
I have a
seminar on Weapons of Mass Destruction this afternoon.’

‘You heard how Sir Simeon died?’ I
asked.

‘I did,’ she replied, sadly enough.
 
‘I assumed that was why you wanted to
see me today.’

‘What do you make of this
..?’

I paused.
 
The coffee arrived.
 
The waiter left.
 
I told her
the story of PiTech takeover, the disappearance of Sunny Prajapati, the
surveillance devices on board the
Cassandra,
and
the supposed muggings on the
Euston Road and in Chichester
.
 
 
I did not mention my suspicions about Sir Simeon’s
children.
 
It seemed too awful to
talk about.
 
More
appalling than everyday corporate intrigue, anyway.

‘Sounds like the plot of cheapo novel,’
Kat Persaud said.
 
‘But doesn’t
everything these days?
 
More to the
point, what do
you
make of it?
 
Or are you asking me what I think
Simeon thought about it?
 
There is
simply no way to know.
 
He might
have had his suspicions.
 
That
might have been the reason he brought you in.
 
But we have no means of knowing.
 
We can make up stories and then we would think we knew.
 
That’s another thing about conspiracy
theories: how they confirm and reconfirm aspects of ourselves, and our self.
 
The divided self.
 
The good, the bad and the ugly.’

She paused and waited for me to say
something.

‘You said he was not paranoid.’

‘I’m not talking about him.’
 
She smiled, giving me that indulgent
look the young sometimes bestow on elderly relatives.
 
‘Particularly.’

‘Why did you agree to meet me?’ I asked.
 

‘You haven’t worked it out?
 
No?
 
You really should have read the rest of my book.
 
Epilogue to the
second edition, 2008.
 
From 9/11 to 7/7 to 12/12
, I called it.
 
Good, eh?
 
That was the real reason they invited me to ConGress
13.
 
Jean Charles de Menezes.
 
The unlawful killing
of.
 
And
the police cover-up.
 
But
you would know all about that wouldn’t you, Mr Becket?’

For
Dr Kat Persaud, or at least her thesis, the Menezes case was indicative as to
how the world had ‘changed immeasurably’ since September 11
^th
2001.
 
For me, it was much more up
close and personal, and, indeed, measurable.
 
It became, for me, an indication of how the Metropolitan
Police, my employer at the time, failed to measure up to what was expected of
it.

But, as she said, it went back far
beyond July 2005, to the post-2001 War on Terror and in particular the Madrid
bombings of 2004.
 
What police
forces had learnt then was that it was absolutely wrong to approach suicide
bombers and say ‘you’re under arrest’.
 
In Spain, several officers and innocent bystanders were killed when that
tactic was tried.
 
The only way to
avoid terrorists blowing themselves up when challenged was, it seemed, not to
challenge them at all.
 
A
fundamental change in the way police services were meant to protect their
citizens, but one it was deemed necessary in the new context.
 
This was the so-called ‘shoot to kill
policy’ codenamed Kratos—fully compliant with the Human Rights Act, of
course—using 9 mm soft-cased bullets preferably via a Glock 17 self-loading
handgun and delivered up close and personal.
 

Some critics saw the Kratos policy as
capital punishment before the fact.
 
Before any criminal act was committed.
 
But, few of us in law enforcement, particularly those who
had attended the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings—I remember standing in
Tavistock Square looking at an open-topped bus that wasn’t meant to be
open-topped at all—had strong objections to the policy.
 
Naturally, we assumed it would only be
used on people with several kilos of Semtex belted to them.

But it was a strange time.
 
First, there were the 7/7 bombings and
then, two weeks later, the failed attempts in south London.
 
One of the principal suspects left his
gym card at the scene of one of these.
 
The gym gave officers the man’s address and a surveillance team staked
it out.
 
The next day, a Brazilian
electrician, Menezes, left the same block of flats and made his way to a job in
east London.
 
He took the bus to
Brixton underground station, found it was closed so caught another bus to
Stockwell tube.
 
Not knowing that
Brixton station was shut, ironically due to the previous day’s attempted
bombings, his watchers saw this as classic counter-surveillance behaviour, and
called in the firearms team that was on standby.
 
The watchers were still not able to give a positive
identification of Menezes as their real target.
 
(‘Positive’ was later emended to ‘possible’ in their logs.)
 
His complexion was variously described
as ‘Asian’ or ‘Arab’, but his identification code was IP1 (i.e. white).
 
All this was to come to light,
gradually, later.

Before all that, the electrician,
lightly dressed and carrying no bag—he had left his tools with a work
colleague—boarded a train followed by eight officers.
 
In the carriage, the watchers
identified Menezes and the firearms officers pushed him to the floor and shot
him seven times in the neck and shoulder.
 
No challenge, no warning.
 
Shoot to kill.
 
Kratos.

I was not on duty that morning.
 
When I got into New Scotland Yard later
that day, one of my colleagues, a detective superintendent in the Special
Investigations Section of the DPS, had left for Stockwell with a small team.
 
The word in the office was that SO13,
the Anti-Terrorist Command would have primacy at the scene but we would have
access.
 
It didn’t matter anyway,
everyone said, as the case would be handed over to the IPCC like all cases
involving a death by shooting.
 

But this was not to be.
 
By mid-afternoon, an examination of Mr Menezes’
wallet and phone indicated he was not a terrorist, and ‘primacy’ was handed
from SO13 to the DPS.
 
Still the
IPCC was not called in.
 

What we didn’t know at the time was that
the Commissioner himself was blocking their involvement and bringing in some
political big guns to support him.
 
Of course, they all had to give in eventually, too much media interest
from around the world.
 
And, by
that time, two days later, a lot of the evidence was missing—like CCTV
recordings—or compromised as in the case of the surveillance team’s log
books, where words had been added that changed the entire meanings of
sentences.
 
Words like ‘not’ tend
to do that.
 
Someone who was
positively identified suddenly was ‘not’ so.
 
In short, it was your classic bureaucratic dog’s breakfast.
 
As someone said, you could feel the
corporate carapace closing over the officers’ heads.
 
Despite the fact they may have acted out of the best of
intentions, it was still the wrong thing to do.