At Vauxhall Cross, in a new HQ building, all post-modern with a thousand windows twitching, Elizabeth Boro and Jon Peters had been called to a morning meeting with Protheroe, their Controller. It was the same day that Blunt started his bus training and theday after the Blair Government had taken the decision to supportan American invasion of Iraq. March 2002. The propaganda, the lies, the surveillance and the dirty tricks were being put in place."You have a target." Was Protheroe's opening remark, "His names

Blunt and you have to learn to drive a London bus."

"What?" The surprised question came in unison.

"You heard. You have to learn to drive a bus. It has been arranged that you start in April. If you fuck this assisgnment up then you can get a real job as a bus driver. The target used to work for the Communist Party and the files in front of you have everything you need to know. Be back here in 4 hours after you have read it and we will go through the operation. Don't leave the building with the file." Protheroe walked to the door as he was finishing, indicating that this stage of the meeting was over.

Elizabeth Boro and Jon Peters picked up the 2inch thick files and headed for the canteen.

"Christ. My old man's a bus driver and its sent him fucking mad."

Peters said to Boro.

"Don't blaspheme." Elizabeth Boro had already decided that she
was going to put on a religious front for this job. It would keep a lot
of people away from her. She was beautiful. Not pretty. Beautiful.
Skin - red hued black burnished flawless. An oval mouth, small
with a curve in her upper lip not quite closing with the lower, the
peltrum hinting at infinite pleasures in a kiss. Fathomless jet-black
eyes deep as coal. To learn the secrets in those eyes would take
a life-time or two. And had done. Her walk and the swish of skirt
swung heads to an ass J-Lo would die for. Most men in the canteen
couldn't take their eyes from her and were jealous of Peters close
proximity. The women just looked in awe or with the green eyes of
envy.


He was pleased that at least this job meant he was working with her
again, though he knew he had no chance. The last time they had
operated as a pair she had kicked him in the balls for making an
advance. Her feminism came with steel capped boots.

"Well. What do you think?" Said Protheroe as the meeting
reconvened.

Peters was the first to respond. "He was done in Germany for
dope. Can't he just be picked up and done for suppling then
stuck in prison? It should be easy to fit him up."

"No. You've obviously not seen the obvious." Was Protheroe's
curt response. "Well Elizabeth?"

"I noticed that he seemed to have a nervous breakdown after the
break up of a relationship and took to stalking her. He is accessing
a lot of internet porn so I suppose I could hook him and get sex
crimes involved." She replied sneering at Peters.

"Exactly. But it's better than that. We now know that he has
multiple sclerosis and the event you referred to was a very severe
relapse. He didn't know he had it at the time and the diagnosis still
hasn't been confirmed but our medical experts are 99% sure. The
porn sites he is visiting on the Internet are free ones, so he has not
used his credit card. No kiddy stuff yet but maybe in time. Elizabeth
you hook him when we say, get him watched by sex crimes and
hopefully lifted, then we have discredit his politics as deviant and he
becomes fodder for the tabloids. A 'nonce' if he ever gets jailed.
Looking at his past we think he is a romantic so you probably won't
have to fuck this one."

Elizabeth Boro was relieved when Protheroe had uttered his last
sentence. Not that she had any qualms about fucking someone for
her controller. The job she was doing now was better than the life
of a sex-slave for the Nigerian gangsters who had originally brought
her to London. She was grateful that she had been saved from that
by the Secret Intelligence Services. The information about his
interest in porn made her skin crawl, reminded her of the old life and
what she was forced to do. The series of photographs of Blunt in the
file hadn't helped. They had shown that he was quite handsome when
younger but the latest depicted a tired, shop-soiled rogue and the
sex for her would just be mechanical, not enjoyable. She wanted to
enjoy her work.

"Peters, you will act as a decoy. The details still have to be sorted.
OK, you have a month between now and training which lasts a month,
so get to know the target as per the training manual, then report back
here in two months for the final briefing before joining Blunt's garage.
Goodbye, and pass the test. That's an order." Protheroe was impatient
to end themeeting. He had other operatives to brief and targets to
destroy.

“How have I got to here?” Elizabeth Boro was deep in introspection,
driving, crawling with the traffic and on auto-pilot heading for bus
driver training.

Born an Ujowbi in Warri 37 years ago and named Rosemary Oritse.
For hundreds of years the Ujowbi had lived in the Niger delta around
Warri.

The town was founded in the 15th Century by the Oba of Benin. When
Portugese and Dutch slave traders arrived later that century they used
Warri as their base. The Ujowbi collaborated with them, broke with
the anamistic religion of their ancestors and converted to Catholicism.
The break wasn't absolute, much to the chagrin of the Portuguese
missionaries but they was a realism attached to their obscurantism, and
they rationalised an acceptance to this Africanisation of Christ. It was
the age of discovery and they weren't in Lisbon or Rome but in Warri
at the edge of their known world. Some of the Ujowbi's traditional
beliefs and practises were squeezed between the cracks, the crevices
of doubt that inhabit the acceptance to a new spiritual culture. It is still
quite common for men to bring a log of wood in tribute to the family of
a new born girl and seek her betrothal. As long as they were not
cousins of the same clan and with a common ancestor - a taboo stronger
than European familial incest - the suitor stood a chance.

Collaboration with Europeans had been a useful political strategy in
maintaining some control by the Oba over Ujowbiland and in the
continual struggles against, and shifting alliances with, the Yoruba in
the west and north and the Ibo in the east. Great politicians and
warriors, the Ujowbi.

200 hundred years of growth and increased wealth from collaboration
helped Warri win independence from Benin in the 17th century, and
with it came the elevation of an Oba of Warri.

When the British supplanted the Portugese and Dutch in the
nineteenth century, they found the Ujowbi easy to deal with. Four
centuries of being told that black people were inferior had left its
pyschological mark on them. They came to believe it and lost any
semblance of self-esteem.

The super-profits extracted from the slave trade and its denigration
of a people to the level of the unter-menschen, the sub-human,
had been invested in the reseach and development that produced
the Industrial Revolution in Britain. By the time Britain had abolished
slaving in its colonial territories it was the pre-eminent industrial and
Imperial Power. It could afford to forego slavery's profits, and this
helped with cementing the collaboration of the Ujowbi to British
interests.

Collaboration had been successful for 400 years - a long time in
politics. But then, towards the end of the 19th century and the
heightening of imperial rivalries between France, Germany and
Britain the agreements of the Berlin West Africa Conference in
1884-85 were formally signed in an attempt to avert war. Africa was
divvied up, spheres of influence agreed and lines drawn on maps
that sundered great tribes, extensive nations, the millenial culture
of ancestors. Official colonialism now existed. No African chief from
any African tribe was ever consulted. Not the Oba of Warri.

Collaboration was now redundant, stood in the way of maximising the
short term profits demanded by laissez faire's fraudulent economics.

Victorian Britain acted. To consolidate her hold on the vast tracts of
West Africa ceeded to her by other European white states, the
Imperial Mother's military came out to play her favourite game -
Slaughter & Rape - and turned on the Ujowbi. Stole the Ujowbi's
cultural artifacts to display as booty in the British Museum. Exiled the
Oba after a rigged trial. Banned the centuries old democracy of the
Ujowbi's politics and forbade negotiations or treaties with Yoruba and
Ibo. They were now mere administrators of their land following the
orders of the Royal Niger Company. Collaborating with the Victorian
British ended this way where ever the British went. A once great
civilisation, The Ujowbi were reduced to a small corner of Nigeria
and subject to a foreign Queen. With a very British sense of gallows
humour they named Warri a 'Protectorate'.

“Why?” The Oba had asked.

“Because I can.” Replied the Imperial Mother.

By the time Rosemary Oritse was born, Warri was a big city. A
decade before her birth, oil had been discovered in the delta and
Warri had grown expotentially. It was already a major transshipment
point between the River Niger and the Atlantic. Shipping rubber,
palm products, cocoa, groundnuts, hides and skins. An energetic
industrial sector was developing, assembling bicycles, processing
rubber and repairing ships. Oil came with a rush and at a cost. Great
slums grew on the promise of work and food, the dream of the poor
and hungry. Sanitation couldn't meet demand. The retching stench of
sewage drapped the streets. It flowed with the mud to the creeks and
rivers, mingling with the seeping oil, the 'black tears'. Polluting.
Fishermen lost their fish. Tilapia and catfish were decimated and
fishermens families added their numbers to the city slums. Refuse
could hardly be called collected, more like dumped on the nearest
empty plot. Dogs scavenged and vultures circled casting shadows.
Gastrointestinal disease flourished, some years it scythed down a
years cohort of children.

She was lucky as a child. Warri is in a wet, low-lying marshy region
and home to the Anopheles mosquito. The drone, the stilleto
harbringer of malaria. It kills one child in three. Not one day would
pass without her seeing some poverty striken human writhing at the
side of the road after an attack. Their malnourished body wracked
with the tremors and deliriums of the disease, lying in pools of sweat.
Ice would course through their veins and arteries as their bones
calved icebergs amongst the body's soft tissue. It didn't matter that
the temperature was 40c - they were wrapped in a glacier. As the
tremors leave them they would be weak, lie were they where for
hours or days, pathetic and benumbed, unable to call for help.

Six months before she was born an Ujowbi in Warri there had been a
coup followed by a counter-coup in Nigeria. Six months after she was
born, civil war broke out. A hundred miles to the east of Warri,
Biafra had seceeded from Nigeria. During the previous twelve months
tens of thousands of Ibo had been returning to the ancestral home in
the eastern delta from all over Nigeria, running scared after the
Hausa in the far north had slaughtered 20, 000 of them. Muslim versus
Animist/Christian, again. This was partly the reason for the
secession and war, but oil was its driving force. Just as it was the
main reason behind the military coups. When ever oil seeps to the
surface it brings it's 'black tears' to cultivate corruption. Not wealth
but poverty it's footprint.

Within a month of the outbreak of war, the city had been raided and
overrun by the Biafran/Ibo Army. Two and half months of terror, her
mother, Isabella remembered. Col Benjamin Adekunle's 'Black
Scorpion' Division drove the Biafran army out of Warri. Then
another slaughter of the Ibo began. 5, 000 were murdered by the
'Black Scorpions' and local mobs in Warri, Sapele, Agbor, Benin.....
It didn't matter if an Ibo family had been in Warri for generations,
lived next door to Ujowbi for years and had broken bread together,
or had intermarried. They were still Ibo and Ibo were Biafrans, the
cause of her family's terror. She didn't know of the pogram at the
time being only six months old and carried on her mother's back. She
still doesn't fully know. No Ujowbi ever mentions it, though she has
a memory trace from two years later, a distant echo of being scared
at her mother's furious voice.

“We didn't kill enough of them, ” Isobella screamed as Warri was
bombed by mercenaries flying for Biafra.

The words are not exact (when is childhood memory ever exact?),
but they carried her mother's sentiment. That and the animosity her
brothers and sister had for Ibo, infected her over the years.

With access to the sea denied by the Nigerian Army and Navy over a
million Ibo would be starved to death by the end of the war. In the all
to human words of Col Adekunle, “I want to see no Red Cross, no
Caritas, no World Council of Churches, no Pope, no missionary and
no UN delegation. I want to prevent even one Ibo from having even
one piece to eat before their capitulation. We shoot at everything
that moves and when our troops march into Ibo territory, we shoot
at everything even at things that do not move....”

Into this she was born, lucky to survive her infancy. But not so lucky
with her family. She was betrothed two days after she was born.

Her father, Umukoro Oritse was a business man and tribal politician.
A wheeler-dealer in export-import who made more than he lost when
loose with the law and scruple. Like the British, the military regime
banned Ujowbi politics, but his intellectual grasp of the complex
interaction of clans and families, of who was obligated to whom and
why, which clans were fueding, and how to use had been noted prior
to the coups. He had moved quickly through the heirarchy. Making
alliances and deals. Building business on the way. Enemies came with
his looseness for the law and scruple.

He had read the signs following the coups and knew that his enemies
would attempt to undermine him. His alliances were good and strong
in Ujowbiland but he lacked contact in Lagos and thats where the real
danger now lived. To ensure his business' survived he needed a
powerful ally there, and found one. A cousin of his was obligated to
by Akinyemi Ola. It was a small obligation only capable of an
introduction when passed onto him. But that was all he needed.