THE AGENCIES AT WAR

These are early online drafts for the upcoming novel Dark, Dark Policing.
They should not be taken literally.

The agencies are at war.

The message came through loud and clear as he stirred from excessive sleep.

For weeks, perhaps it was months, a pterodactyl sat hunched high on ancient cliffs, rarely stirring, rustling down ever further into the alcove.

Normally highly intelligent and well awake, instead it was in a kind of dreaming, hibernating, dormant state, rarely even moving. 

An occasional disgruntled squawk, an occasional attempt to hide even further inside the stone alcove, that was it. 

The previous season'at summer's chicks were gone, and the creature was alone, surveying the lengthy valley below.

It did not move from its aerie. 

Below the heated air currents were more malignant than it had ever known them, thick with a kind of spiritual treachery. Such were its antennae, its unique psychic abilities, that it could see the danger visible on warm winds.

Perilous.

The world had become a very dangerous place. 

It wasn't kind. 

It wasn't the welcoming, remarkably fecund place where they had originally landed.

High in those cliffs, looking down across once drowned valleys, it was impossible not to notice the changes.

Step by terrible step.

Back on Planet Earth, well back in the future where Old Alex was now anchored, he continued to give the Watchers on the Watch the benefit of his views.

Bored, frustrated, fed up, much maligned, everything had changed since the death, or was it killing, of Bill Leak.

Was Bill Leak killed showed up as a Google prompt.

He wasn't the only one wondering.

Under the alleged protection of the Australian Federal Police, there was no coroner's report, no inquest, no details of his final hours.

Short and sweet: heart attack.

For years now, ever since the fetid heat of Bangkok, he had heard the malicious operatives within the agencies whispering: heart attack, heart attack. 

Auto-suggestion.

They hoped it worked. Save them the murky difficulties of a kill.

"Surveillance is harassment," Old Alex repeated over and over. "And I have been very, very, very badly harassed."

And occasionally: "Think how much money you could have saved with a little cooperation. Journalists are all the same. They just want stories. I am not above trading information."

But they didn't care about the money. It wasn't theirs. 

Some sucker taxpayer had gone to work to support the secret bureaucratic edifices of the agencies. 

And they would never know just how ineptly their money was being squandered.

Just how poor the oversight.

Just how truly, profoundly incompetent the agencies were.

But the time had passed, in the deep delinquencies and contradictions of surveillance. 

It was nothing but bullying.

And bullying didn't work. 

In yet another striking move in a failing democracy, the Australian government had set out to deliberately target and harass journalists, passing outlandishly oppressive legislation aimed at the Fourth Estate.

The bureaucratic instinct to control everything, to dictate everything, to control what people did at every point in their lives, at every passing moment, what they thought, how they worked, how they interacted, how best they could serve the state, was backfiring in spectacular fashion, causing them considerable grief.

Old Alex kept up the chants, all the more to annoy them.

Incompetent and oppressive legislation which turning journalists into POIs, Persons of Interest, under AS  IO legislation, had already created considerable grief for the government, and would continue to do so.

The worst totalitarian instincts of the government were in play when the legislation was in play.

And the oxymoronically titled Liberal Party was there at the helm, waving sticks they did not understand.

Everything the Australian government touched turned to disaster, and the oppressive legislation targeting journalists was no exception.

And the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation was no exception.

"We've done a great job of exposing the corruption and incompetence within the agencies," Old Alex told the microphone in the car. "Congratulations to everyone involved."