Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [6]
On the inside, they call it COPEX. The Covert and Operational Procurement Exhibition.
On the outside, they try to make sure nobody talks about it at all.
* * *
1
Gibberish
(introducing Mr Llewis and all his neuroses)
Extract from the transcript of the BBC 2 documentary Seeing Eye, first broadcast 3/2/97. Programme title: ‘Voodoo Economics’.
[The programme opens with footage of an office building, evidently taken with a small portable camera. We see a car pull up in front of the building, and its single occupant climb out of the driver’s seat. This footage is obviously fly‐on‐the‐wall, taken without the subject’s knowledge.
[The man drags an enormous suitcase out of the passenger seat before he closes and locks the car door. The suitcase is of the ultrahigh‐security variety, the kind you need two keys and a passcode to open.]
REPORTER [voice‐over]: This man works in a perfectly ordinary office building in London’s Barnes Road. He’s a thirty‐eight‐year‐old businessman, with a wife, one child, and a home in the suburbs of Twickenham.
[The man crosses the pavement and heads towards the office, not once looking in the direction of the camera.]
REPORTER [voice]: He also happens to be an international arms dealer.
[As the man vanishes through the office doors, the view changes. We’re looking at the same building, but now the camera focuses on the first floor up. We can’t see through the window; it looks like it’s tinted, maybe some kind of one‐way glass.]
REPORTER [voice]: In this building, tucked away between a pizza restaurant and an office‐supplies shop, he and his colleagues buy and sell technical equipment the British government doesn’t even like to admit exists. Over the next three weeks, we’ll be revealing evidence which proves, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the people in this office have been involved in sales of military hardware to countries such as China and Iran, sales which are not only illegal under British law, but also in breach of every European code of human rights.
[The camera zooms in on the window.]
REPORTER [voice]: But what’s disturbing isn’t the fact that the dealers are operating from a location as innocuous as this one. Nor is it the fact that our subject, and others close to him, are also responsible for selling instruments of torture to countries as diverse as Algeria and Colombia, countries well known for their appalling civil‐rights records. What’s disturbing is that this office is just one part of an entire underground subculture of illegal and morally suspect technology, at work right in the heart of suburban Britain.
[Scene change. We see the reporter, standing in front of the House of Commons, facing the camera.]
REPORTER: This is a story of corruption, deceit, and hypocrisy. It’s not exactly the story of a conspiracy, but it involves the complicity of the British government, not to mention the involvement of several paramilitary organisations under the control of the United Nations. And at the centre of it all is a clique of people so secretive, it can only be described as a cult…
* * *
COPEX: 18 August 1996
‘Ghana,’ said the greasy man.
Llewis couldn’t remember the man’s name. He’d introduced himself when he’d oozed his way up to the bar and taken the next stool, but it hadn’t taken Llewis long to work out that he wasn’t anyone important. The man was a rep working for one of the companies that specialised in riot foam, which, in Llewis’s view, marked him out as a loser right from the start. Nobody cared about riot foam, not at COPEX. The buyers here wanted heavy‐duty hardware, big sleek