Текст книги "Chameleon"

Автор книги: Jackson J. Bentley

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

Chapter 29

The Aldwych, London. Tuesday 9:40am

Tim used his usual method of accessing the disused tube station, entering via the Aldwych before descending down a narrow, and seriously claustrophobic, steel staircase. At the bottom of the stairs lay a small passageway, around two metres in length, leading to an old wooden door. The staircase and passageway were only just wide enough to accommodate a well-built individual; anyone seriously overweight would be likely to become stuck.

The old wooden door had a modern lock to which Tim had a key. He opened the door and, before stepping down onto the track, he looked to make sure that the safety bar was in place. Without that bar the third and fourth rail would be live. Unlike other railway systems, the London Underground has four rails. The first and second are in the lines or tracks which carry the trains. The third rail is next to and above the rail, and carries a direct positive current of four hundred and twenty volts. The fourth rail is laid between the tracks and carries the returning current of negative two hundred and ten volts DC. Together these lines give six hundred and thirty volts of traction. The third rail is a real risk to anyone walking in the tunnel if it is live, and most engineers walk down the tracks to avoid it, even when they know it isn’t energised.

To add to the risk, this old section of the Piccadilly Line had a cast iron lining, rather than the concrete lining of later tunnels. Naturally, electricity will pass into and along cast iron, given the chance. Because a continuing charge in the cast iron lining is dangerous and because it would lead to corrosion, the third rail is placed sufficiently far away from the lining to prevent any chance of the walls becoming live.

Tim had no need to worry about all of this because the safety bar was in place, cutting off the electricity to this section of the tunnel. He wouldn’t have been tempted to use this route if that had not been the case; one minor slip on the track bed and he might easily make contact with the third rail, which carries more kick than the electric chair used for executions in the USA.

The agent walked toward the lights which illuminated the most recently abandoned platform, sporting the traditional underground plaque of a red ring split in two by a horizontal blue line bearing the single word ALDWYCH. The lighting here was not particularly bright, as the platform was lit for emergency use only, but it was enough to allow him to see what he was doing. As he climbed onto the platform he looked around. It was like entering a time capsule. Although this platform had closed to the public in 1994, it had been earmarked for closure for so long that it had not been considered for a full refurbishment since the commencement of the Second World War, which was good news for various filmmakers who had used it on occasion when they required the backdrop of an old wartime tube station for their latest drama.

Tim climbed half a dozen wide tiled steps leading to a tiled circular tunnel that served as a corridor to the lower lift lobby. He walked a few yards along the shadowy corridor until he could see the two unused lift shafts, their gates welded closed, and the spiral staircase leading up to the entrance lobby. To his left he observed a dark passageway, which ran in a left hand curve for a hundred meters before literally hitting a brick wall. Beyond that brick wall lay the original parallel platform which had opened in 1895 and closed just a few years later in 1917 due to lack of patronage. The platform, which bore the station name of STRAND on its underground sign, had been reopened briefly during World War Two to provide safe shelter for the City’s artworks and its people, but as Tim passed the entrance to the dark chamber he calculated that it had been resealed for over sixty five years. Since 1946 there had been only one access point to the abandoned Strand Station platform, and that was via the cover of the unused lift shaft in the ground level lobby. The tactical support teams who used the station platform, abandoned in 1994, for anti terrorist training would often compete to see who could rappel to the1917 platform and climb back to ground level quickest. MI5 and the SAS won the unofficial competition, with the occasional policeman or emergency responder coming a close second. Back in 2002 Tim had managed the seventy-foot descent and climb in just over five minutes, way behind the record. He shivered as he recalled the fetid, damp odour of the platform, the cloying darkness, and the instant claustrophobia of knowing all exits were sealed. It would make for an eerie and uninviting tomb.

Before ascending the spiral staircase, Tim braced himself, then took out his military issue Browning Hi Power pistol and double-checked that it was ready for use. He would be sorry to see the old girl go. In a month or so the familiar Browning Hi Powers were due to be replaced with modern Glocks. Satisfied that he was ready for the task ahead, both mentally and physically, he began the long climb to ground level.

***

Gil knew that this would be her last meeting with Tim. She was certain that her association with the service was coming to an end, and that meant only one thing; Tim was coming to serve a ‘D notice’. Of course, there was still a remote possibility that they would pay her fee and bid her a fond farewell, but if that was their intention, why the meet? Why bring cash to an abandoned tube station? In the past she had been paid discreetly through nominee accounts. The amounts transferred to her would usually be listed as ‘commission’ from companies with names such as Thames House Consulting, Riverview Personnel and Special Projects International Inc.

Gil didn’t like it; the Chameleon was usually the hunter, not the hunted. She knew very well that if a ‘D notice’ had been issued, then her former employers would not stop looking for her until either she was found, or until they were sure she was dead, hence her extreme precautions. In her heart she knew that the Chameleon had to retire, but only from work, not from life.

The cold winter air was freezing Gil’s bones, even though she was huddled under a thick coat and was wearing lined leather gloves. Nevertheless, she stood where she could see Aldwych House and the innocuous door that allowed entry to the deserted underground station. A full thirty minutes before the meeting was due to begin, Tim arrived, looked around and unlocked the door before covertly looking around once more. He was certainly not carrying a quarter of a million pounds in cash, but he was carrying a gun. Although it was concealed beneath his winter coat, he made the novice’s mistake of patting it through his coat to be sure it was still there.

Twenty body-numbing minutes later a workman came out of the same door. He was carrying his tool bag and he hugged his high visibility coat around him as a meagre defence against the cold north wind. Once he had disappeared from sight, Gil made her way to the side entrance of the Strand Underground Station.

***

Tim looked at his watch for the twentieth time in five minutes. Gil was due any time now. He was ready. It wasn’t warm in the abandoned lobby, but at least it was sheltered from the biting wind. The agent felt for his Browning one more time. He had loaded it with armour piercing rounds – which were highly illegal – because he felt sure that Gil would be wary enough to be wearing a Kevlar vest.

Gil stood within feet of Tim, yet he had no idea she was there. She was an assassin, and he was a desk jockey. She realised that she could have taken him out there and then, but what would be the point? They would only send someone better next time.

Tim sensed more than heard Gil’s approach, and turned to face her. She was smiling brightly as she approached him, anticipating another big payday, thought Tim. Gil wandered over to the unused lift shaft that had been left uncovered.

“You need to cover that opening, Tim. Someone could kill themselves falling down there. It must be at least seventy feet down, straight onto concrete.”

“Yes, I know,” Tim, replied. “The wooden cover had disappeared when I got here. I’ll tell the works department.”

Standing in front of the lift shaft, Gil spoke.

“You don’t look like a man carrying a quarter of a million pounds in cash.”

“No,” he agreed. “I have five bearer bonds, though, each with a face value of fifty thousand pounds. They’re probably already worth more than that, given the financial situation.”

Tim loosened his coat and withdrew five sheets of rolled parchment paper, which he handed to Gil. Gil opened the rolled sheets and saw the forged bonds. When she looked up, Tim was pointing his gun at her chest.

“No, Tim! Please!” she yelled as he pulled the trigger three times. Tim was no marksman, but the three rounds shredded the bearer bonds as they passed through and pounded into Gil’s torso. For a brief second she looked shocked, and then she toppled backwards and fell down the shaft.

The MI5 man was pleased that Gil had fallen into the deep shaft. He hadn’t wanted to look into those familiar, pretty, dead eyes as he tipped her body over the edge and into oblivion and a sealed tomb.

Tim was about to fasten his coat and leave when he noticed tension on the rope hanging into the lift shaft. He ran over and looked down into complete darkness, but when he held the rope he knew that somehow, in her death throes, Gil had grabbed onto life. Taking his Browning, he placed the barrel close to the rope and fired. The rope was partially severed. Tim fired again and the hanging part of the rope slackened and fell into the void. As it fell he heard a scream echoing up the shaft, coming to an abrupt end as his victim hit the concrete in the darkness below.

***

The telephone rang in an office cubicle across London. The occupant of the cubicle was no longer senior enough to warrant an office or a Thames river view.

“Internal Investigations,” the slightly scruffy man announced as he answered the phone.

“Barry, this is Tim. I can confirm that both Chameleons have now departed the Earth.”

“Are you certain the Chameleon is dead?”

“Well, I shot her three times in the chest at close range with armour piercing rounds, and she fell seventy feet onto concrete. She is in a dark and damp morgue of a tube station which has been sealed for over sixty five years.”

“All right, point noted. Get yourself back here and report.”

Tim slipped the Nokia into his pocket and started to leave. Rather than climb yet more stairs, he decided to take his chance with the side entrance. He couldn’t use the front because entrance security grill was accessible only from outside and, unfortunately for Tim, Gil had closed the side entrance grillage and had locked it with a heavy duty padlock. The key was probably seventy feet down the lift shaft in the dead woman’s coat pocket. Tim didn’t have any lock picking tools with him. In any case, he couldn’t pick a lock to save his life.

“Damn those stairs!” he complained out loud.

The darkness and the vague fluttering shadows that formed on the walls surrounding the spiral staircase had never bothered Tim before, but now, somehow, they seemed spooky. Perhaps it was the fact that he was separated from a fresh dead body by only a single wall of bricks. He breathed a sigh of relief when he alighted onto the Aldwych platform with its welcoming bare lighting.

Tim jumped onto the track and walked towards the exit door. Something felt different down here, but he didn’t know what it was that was bothering him. Tim got to the old wooden door and then he realised. He looked back and saw with alarm that the safety bar had been removed. The lines were live. Six hundred volts of electricity were passing within an inch or two of his leg. Thank goodness his natural caution had kept him clear of the third rail as he walked along the tunnel. He had no doubt who was responsible.

“You nearly had me there, Gil, you mad bitch,” he laughed out loud, his voice reverberating down the tunnel.

Being careful to keep a safe distance from the live cable, Tim reached for the exit door. He depressed the handle and withdrew the latch carefully, anticipating further skulduggery, but it worked as it always did. Thanking his lucky stars once more, he opened the door.

***

The M84 stun grenade is a non-lethal weapon, usually. It emits a deafening blast and a blinding flash that disorients and deafens temporarily. Don, a man of many talents, had accepted the Chameleon’s commission to remove the safety bar and attach a stun grenade to the door. The grenade was tubular and around five inches long. Don carefully removed the safety pin, which had a circular ring pull, and armed the ‘flash bang’. He duct taped the grenade to the inside of the door, having looped the second and final ring pull, this one triangular, over the door handle.

Don admired his handiwork, set the delay on the ‘flash bang’ to one second and ascended the stairs. He exited the door onto the Aldwych and looked around to see if anyone had seen him. Nobody was paying any attention, except for a pretty young woman huddled up against the cold, who seemed more concerned about keeping warm than any workman going about his duties. Don wrapped his coat around himself and headed for the tube and a warm journey back to Hackney.

***

Tim opened the door leading to the staircase and all hell broke loose around him. There was a flash of bright light that seemed to sear his eyes, and he realised that he had been left temporarily blinded. At the same moment there was a deafening bang which came close to perforating his eardrums and which disrupted his balance. Completely disoriented, he instinctively recoiled from the booby-trapped door and stepped into the live third rail.

Within a second or two the disorientation was replaced by excruciating pain as he felt over four hundred volts coursing through his body. Intuitively he knew he had just seconds to live unless he could get off the line. He leaned forward for support and unthinkingly rested his right hand on the cast iron tunnel wall.

The current from the third rail passed through Tim and into the cast iron. He became a conductor and a resistor at the same time. Mercifully, he died before his insides fried and his clothes caught fire. A few minutes later, nothing remained of him except for a charred husk, along with the smell of burning and the vague aroma of roast pork.

***

Gil’s plans had not included passing out. She had allowed Tim to shoot her in the torso. If the useless desk jockey had dared to try a headshot she would have dived for the shaft before he got a round off. The nasty piece of work must have been using some kind of heavy duty ammunition. She had guessed he would; amateurs always go for overkill. As a result, Tim’s three rounds had penetrated her clothing and the Kevlar bulletproof vest, but had stopped at the shaped ceramic body protection underneath.

Once she had been shot she had made every effort to rappel as far down the rope as possible before Tim could cut the rope. It was much better to fall forty feet than sixty. Luckily he had been slow to react, and she had been less than thirty feet from the bottom of the shaft when she started to free fall.

As usual after a heavy fall, Gil used her tradecraft and training. She lay extremely still while she examined her body with her right hand.

“Good. No compound fractures, anyway.”

She then checked her limbs one at a time, moving each one slowly until she was happy there were no broken bones. Finally she proceeded to test for muscle or ligament damage by flexing every muscle group in order from her feet to her neck. She ached all over, but the only real pain she felt was where the ceramic body shield was pressing into her flesh. Twenty minutes had passed since the shooting, according to her indiglo watch. If all had gone according to plan, Tim would have met his own fate by now.

Gil shouted ‘lights’, and immediately two voice controlled lights were illuminated. They were rated at five hundred watts each and they cast their light widely. Obviously the areas closest to the lights were the most brightly lit, but even the far ends of the platforms were visible, albeit barely.

Slowly Gil rolled off the debris of her landing pad and set her feet on the ground. She removed her coat, her Kevlar vest and the ceramic shield. All were ruined, and when she saw the slugs trapped between the two layers of protection she could see why.

Only two parts of her plan had been outside of her control; would Tim go for a headshot at such close distance, even though he had always been a useless shot? And, would he then report her demise before he himself passed on? Clearly Tim had played safe and placed three armour-piercing shots in her chest. As useless as the grouping of the shots might be, any one of them would have been fatal. In any event, he would have tipped her injured body into the lift shaft and let gravity finish his job. Gil could only hope that he would report in as soon as the job was done. She relied on her understanding of the psychology of agents who rarely ventured into fieldwork. They tended to become rather excited and the excess adrenaline pumped them up until they had to tell someone about their success. Tim was just such an animal, and so she was confident that Thames House now believed she was dead.

Gil’s gaze swept around the old platform; some agents had found it a little scary but she had always found it interesting. When the platform had been stripped and sealed after the Second World War, they had uncovered original Victorian ironwork and even some old advertising that must have predated 1917. If there had been enough time, Gil would have unscrewed the painted tin advertisement board, which, although very faded, showed a lady in Edwardian dress carrying a parasol and recommending Swann & Edgar’s Department Store at Piccadilly Circus. In an odd coincidence, the department store was damaged by the last ever Zeppelin raid over London in 1917, the same year these platforms were last used for tube travel. But the Chameleon simply did not have time for nostalgia. She had work to do if she was to escape from the UK and build a new life for herself elsewhere.

It had taken time to prepare the old platform for her purposes, but her hard work appeared to have been rewarded. As soon as the meeting had been planned she had known what to expect, and set about surviving the attempted assassination. First of all she loosened the brickwork that sealed off the old platform by placing a detonator into a mortar joint and triggering it remotely. Detonators of the type Gil used have a small explosive charge of their own called a primary charge. This is enough to set off a more stable explosive material like Semtex 10, but in many cases the detonator charge alone is enough to do a small job, and it removes the need to procure hard-to-get plastic explosive material such as Semtex or DHX.

As she had calculated, the brickwork had loosened enough in the centre of the wall for Gil to knock it through with a two-kilogram brick hammer. She expected the air to be fetid and un-breathable, but the lift shaft obviously provided enough ventilation because the air inside was slightly stale but not overly unpleasant. Gil didn’t worry about filling the hole she had created, as no one had been down this tunnel for decades, probably because the ancient sign at the entrance bluntly stated that the tunnel was a ‘Dead End’.

The Chameleon had known that if she was to survive she would need some supplies, and so she arranged for one of her greeting card delivery drivers to deliver twenty flat packed cardboard boxes to the side entrance of the tube station. If he was puzzled by this instruction he didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look particularly puzzled when his Managing Director appeared at the side door of an abandoned tube station covered in dust to take possession of them. Gil collected the lights and the other items herself, and delivered them under the cover of darkness in the early hours of the morning.

By the time she had finished Gil had filled the base of the lift shaft with three layers of large, empty cardboard boxes rising to above her head height. Three inches of latex foam covered the boxes, and the same material had been taped to the concrete wall surrounding the landing base. A first aid kit, also enclosed in foam, was wedged against the wall.

The lights, and the boat batteries which provided their power, had been carefully lowered down the shaft where earlier the foam and the cardboard boxes had been allowed to free fall to the bottom. Satisfied with her precautions, Gil retired to the Waldorf Astoria where her luxurious bathroom and bed were calling her. She managed five good hours of sleep in her executive room before she had to dress, don her armour and wait for Don to remove the safety bar.

When Tim had shot her she looked genuinely pained, because it hurt a good deal more than she had expected. Nonetheless, if she wanted the performance to be convincing she had to follow up with a seventy foot fall to her apparent death. Falling seventy feet, even onto her landing pad, was likely to be injurious, if not fatal; stuntmen had died falling shorter distances. So, as soon as she tumbled into the lift shaft, she grabbed hold of the recently replaced rope with her lined leather gloves, the stopping forces almost pulling her shoulders out of the sockets. She then slid and rappelled down the rope as fast as she could into the beckoning blackness. Gil was less than thirty feet from the platform when the rope gave way and she fell. Quickly she folded her arms across her chest and crossed her legs whilst lying as flat as possible. She had screamed, and not just for effect, when she hit the bottom. As planned, the foam absorbed the initial impact and then the boxes collapsed under the weight and momentum of a falling body. Despite the relative softness of the landing, Gil was shaken badly and had passed out with a mild concussion. Given the alternatives, it had been an acceptable outcome.

***

Having concealed her debris and equipment in the old platform office, Gil brushed herself down and smiled as she made one addition to the old platform which was now back in the state it had been for decades.

Moving through the formerly sealed tunnel, Gil climbed through the hole that Don would reseal shortly, at the same time he replaced the safety bar on the rails and the lift shaft cover that Gil had rolled into the loading bay.

Rather than exiting through the side door, the Chameleon left via the tunnel, wary of the live rail. She passed what she believed to be the remains of Tim, who looked as though he had been thrown onto a bonfire, and opened the door leading to the secret Aldwych staircase. Picking up the remaining pieces of the ‘flash bang’ grenade, she threw them down the tunnel onto the unused track and closed the door behind her.

Ten minutes later she was in her hotel room, discarding her bullet holed clothing and dropping onto the bed, planning her future in the comfort of the pale grey hotel room. In five more minutes she was asleep, dreaming of her upcoming expedition and what she might find.