Dossiers are usually kept on high profile persons such as politicians or industrialists and kept in tightly gaurded spy centres at MI5 or C.I.A. headquarters. Long empty corridors and quitely humming computers, and rows and rows of files in musty basements where spectacled assistants with sufficient security clearances retrieve and dispatch. Thick bundled envelopes in some cases boxes, brought to the top floor offices where super-spies and sleuths go over documents trying to extract information, making the words and letters give a confession, beating them into submission. The enemy’s strenghts and weaknesses examined minutely, looking for the opportunity to play a double deal, to slide the irrefutbale cards down on the table, lay down messaire with full house – aces high.

In an office with a bay-view window the spy-chief flips through the sections of the dossier. Some of the clippings and paperwork are dated with age , yellowing on the corners, the photos starting to fade. The ‘last known’ of the illusive terrorist suspect they long to catch, whereabouts unknown , rarely seen, how big is the dossier on Osama what’s his name? The physical is cross referenced with the electronic version online but not to those at home. Reems more information stored on a ticking server somewhere in the bowels of the building, down in the dark places only rats and lab technicians understand down with the bespectaled man with sufficient security clearance, in an air conditioned room that sounds like a fan forced oven servers sit patiently doling out information, the ones and noughts of the suprerconductor heaven, but sometimes the ones get stuck and you have to give the computer a good kick up the rear by turning it off, holding down that button until it clicks and there’s a brief silence, apart from the roar of the cooling fans, keeping all the information at a constant temperature – no variations, can’t have variation, can’t have wrong information or executions might be ordered on the wrong basis and missiles aimed which arive in places that they shouldn’t. Uproar in the media, angry peasants complaining bitterly abou the loss of family all becasue of a faulty dossier.