Great Scott, what a mess. A 'British-backed lab worker', which in real money means some poor sod with a briefcase full of government secrets and a bad habit of ordering tea in Albuquerque, has turned up dead in the New Mexico desert. The FBI, in their infinite wisdom, are now 'investigating', which is the bureaucratic equivalent of a man who has lost his glasses fumbling around on his hands and knees looking for them while pretending he knows where he is going.
Let's parse this delicious absurdity. A British lab worker. In America. Dead. And the British government is 'backing' them. Backing them into a corner, presumably. Or backing them into a shallow grave. The details are hazy, as they always are when the state is involved, but one can only imagine the scene: a chap in tweed, a thermal vest, and a lab coat, wandering the dusty plains of New Mexico, muttering about the correct way to brew a proper cuppa, before being silenced by the universe's greatest conspiracy: the American military industrial complex and a profound lack of Hobnobs.
This is, of course, a tragedy. But it is also a comedy, because that is what the world has become. A man dies, and we get a press release, a 'statement of concern', and a promise of a thorough investigation. Thorough as a sieve. The FBI will dig, they will find a perfectly plausible explanation involving a rogue rock, a misplaced test tube, and a sudden case of spontaneous human combustion. Or, they will find nothing, and the story will disappear into the great black hole of 'national security' where all good scandals go to die.
Let's not forget the British connection. Because nothing says 'special relationship' like a dead lab technician and a lot of awkward questions. I can hear the Foreign Office now, penning a letter that says absolutely nothing, using words like 'cooperation' and 'ongoing dialogue' as a smokescreen for 'we have no idea what our man was doing there, but rest assured, he was not spying, because we don't do that, old boy.' Rubbish. Absolute grade-A ministerial pudding.
Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists are having a field day. Was it a leak of a leak? A lab accident? Was he working on something that the public shouldn't know? Or was he simply the latest victim of the curse of the British abroad: the inability to navigate American portion sizes combined with a fatal allergy to sentiment? We will never know. But we will certainly speculate, and that is the true currency of our age.
So raise a glass of cheap gin to the unknown soldier of science, the man who died so that someone else could have a quiet word in a dark room. May his lab coat rest in peace, and may his secrets remain as poorly brewed as his tea.
