Now, listen to me for a moment, will you? Listen properly. You probably think that the intelligence services are properly named. You might have a presumption that MI5 and 6 and Special Branch and GCHQ and all of our opposite numbers all over the world are absolutely clued up as to what is secretly going on behind the scenes. You might think that there’s a big pot of highly trained men and women with white-hot intelligence and charm manipulating world events and forever staying one step ahead of the various agents of chaos trying to harm our way of life. I envy you that. When you’ve been in the Service, when you’ve been near the top, you don’t get to have that reassuring thought any more. You know that half the time we don’t know any more than any bugger else. There are half decent regional newspaper journalists with more of an idea of what’s actually happening in the world than the top tier of our sainted spymasters. We know bits, of course, and we’re very good at probing for weaknesses and gaps in the intelligence capabilities of the other countries involved in the game, but the majority of the Service is staffed with people with old-fashioned surnames who weren’t clever enough to make it as a stockbroker and not dishonest enough to become a politician. What I’m trying to say is that if you think I knew any more about Guatemala or Belize or very much more about Central America than the average bugger in the street, you’d be wrong. And I hated not knowing this. Hated it then, hate it now. So I was damn well going to use my time on the train to change that. The document in the beige folder was property of the fourth-floor archive Century House. I’d checked it out on my way out of the building, tucking it into my coat on the off-chance that I didn’t look too obvious if today had been selected for one of the random internal security spot checks. I could probably have talked my way out of it if called upon, but as it happened I left the building without so much as a wave from the door staff. The report had been compiled from different clippings, research papers and a handful of recent university essays and did a serviceable job of breaking down the political situation in Guatemala into something more easily digestible. I was thoroughly immersed in it, fingers in my ears, occasionally closing my eyes to allow the most important bits to really take. People have told me that when I read it looks like I’m chewing and swallowing, chewing and swallowing. I know that what I was reading was starting to make me feel sick. Although the report was littered with the words ‘allegedly’ and ‘unsubstantiated’, it was clear that what had been happening in Guatemala these past years amounted to little less than genocide. Successive governments had pulverized the indigenous Mayan population. For twenty years the country was immersed in a bloody civil war, pitting the army against Left-leaning guerrilla groups. The native Mayan population was deemed by the government to be harbouring these ‘terrorists’ and operation after operation had been mounted to terrorize them into giving them up. Reading between the lines it was clear to see that the fight was ludicrously unbalanced. The ‘guerillas’ were poorly equipped and few in number, while the Guatemalan forces were backed, trained and equipped by overseas allies who were willing to turn a blind eye to their extreme tactics in exchange for not letting these potential Communists get a toehold in the region. Things had escalated the year before when the military seized power and placed General José Efraín Rios Montt in the presidential hot seat. And Rios Montt, it was clear, was a madman.