Chapter 16: Spies-Steam-Sodor
Peter Sam had a fairly normal middle-class upbringing in Kent. He had a father who went to work in the city, a mother who smiled, smelt nice and was otherwise fashionably distant, and two household maids who did the vast majority of parenting between them.
He did acceptably well in school, played polo for his House, captained the Fives team at his College, and succeeded in earning a fine degree at Cambridge University without forming much of a personality.
Things began to go wrong when, after a chance encounter at a drinks do in upper set, he met the man who would one day become Head of the British Secret Service. It is rarely a good thing when such men know personally of your existence. Peter Sam, being an agreeable fellow, athletic and forgettable after a five-minute conversation, was shortlisted for espionage work. Indeed, just two years after leaving education, he had served with distinction in Paris, Berlin and, critically, Milan. This last detail meant that when the Roman Empire came out of nowhere and reshaped the continent, Peter Sam was sent out repeatedly to spy on the new power.
For a few years, it was relatively easy if tedious work. The Italian government was so scrambled in the rush for more and more imperial possessions that, given the circumstances, no one was really checking on internal security. Beyond locking up the obvious communists and nationalists, of course.
In fact, the work was so easy and the supposed danger money so good that, by 1939, Peter Sam had completed six missions in various newly formed provinces of the Empire, and also found time to marry his childhood sweetheart. A daughter soon followed, one who was beloved of both parents, and her younger sister was well on the way.
In 1940, Churchill and Mussolini reached a détente, of sorts. The two great powers, so mighty and yet with so many other problems on their hands, agreed to (politely) disagree and ignore each other for the most part. The by now rapidly expanded SIM, Secret Intelligence Ministry, had in any event made the possibility of spying within Rome’s border’s a hazardous operation. With German codes already broken, and the fear of communist infiltrators higher than ever (mostly because the SIS kept finding communist infiltrators in its ranks), Italy was left alone by the Peter Sam’s of the world.
Unfortunately, for everyone involved, Germany then began making noises about waging war. This was nothing new, but it became somewhat vital for British planners to know where, when and how the Nazis would invade the Soviet Union. This meant an infiltration of Italy yet again, and worse still, it meant an invasion of Rome itself. The Italians had, in the meantime, broken the British codes and were in the process of stealing a great many British secrets from fifth column agents across the globe.
SIS needed Peter Sam in Rome. Get in, find out what the British have learnt, disrupt it if you can, get out.
Getting out, in the spy business, is of course contextual. It does not matter so much to the Spymaster if your agent gets out, provided that if he doesn’t, he at least kills himself and his identity first. It was, like the rest of the Intelligence business, a mixture of ruthlessness and luck.
Peter Sam, alas, had run out of both.
He awoke with a sack over his head, his arms wrenched painfully behind his back and tied together at multiple points, and then tied to the chair he was sat on. The chair itself was bolted to the ground, and his legs were, oddly, stretched out to their fullest extent in front of him, and secured by rope to the opposite wall. He was, in a word, immobile.
Peter Sam knew what was to come, since the game was apparently up. He would be interrogated, potentially very uncomfortably, and then shot. The British had no Italian agents in custody, and had little reason to bargain for his life. All he had to decide now was what he was going to say, if anything, and perhaps mentally prepare for what he was about to endure.
He knew, also, who it was who was probably in the room with him right now. The psychopathic mastermind behind SIM, who turned the Roman Empire’s virgin and untested agency into one of the world’s finest organisations of death and terror. The fact that he and his interrogator shared a mother country would not help him, in fact quite the opposite.
The man formerly titled as ‘Sir’ Toppham Hat was no friend of the British anymore. He was a monster, plain and simple. The things the investigators found when they finally breached his personal island in the Irish Sea…it still sent shudders down the hardiest of executioners in London.
The bag was ripped off his head and, yes, there he was. Standing a mere five feet tall, yet with hands like shovels and a stout strength that Peter Sam knew could crush steel girders and skulls alike. This was a man who drove a trainline like a colonial labour camp. This was a man who, when an engine met with trouble on a branch line one day, entombed the entire train, and all the people on it, within one of his service tunnels.
The screams of steam and anguish haunt the track even up to today.
Peter Sam stared into the unblinking, pitch-black eyes of a monster. His face unmoving, the voice of the devil itself seemed to echo within his head:
“Well then, you have caused much confusion and delay.”
