Annex C
Definition
One of the Park’s classified annexes rather than a file anyone reads: a database of known mercenaries, “legit, grey area and downright nasty” (C04). Its value to the book is as a search engine with a conscience-free index — a face-recognition hit on a ferry arrival returns an Annex C match, and the match does the work an interview would have done in an earlier kind of thriller.
It is also the book’s shorthand for a class of person. JK Coe recognises the type before the name: the mercenary at the barn is “dressed like a soldier — combat boots, khaki trousers … Annex C material, then — legit/ grey area/ downright nasty” (C12). When he finally places the crew at the end, it is as “one of the Annex C characters … Anton, Lars and Cyril” (C13) — the database supplying the only identities some of the book’s dead ever receive.
Book 6 — Joe Country
- C04 — Coe’s face-recognition run on the ferry hits a flagged face; the prompt says “Refer to Annex C”, and the picture is Frank Harkness.
- C05 — Coe reports three more hits on the same ferry, all on the Park’s Annex C: Harkness has a team in the country, and Jackson Lamb sets the office to tracing them.
- C12 — Coe, facing a mercenary at the barn, reads the type off the clothes and the accent before a name is given.
- C13 — The crew have names because the database gave them names: Anton, Lars and Cyril.
Tells
The book’s other indexes are about the Service’s own people and paper — Molly Doran’s Records, the personnel files, the annexes a report cites. Annex C is the one that catalogues the people the Service does business with and does not employ, which is why the slow horses find their enemy listed there with a career note — and why a man with no file still arrives with a label.
Related
Joe Country · Snow White · JK Coe · Anton Moser · Lars Becker · Cyril Dupont