Текст книги "Chameleon"

Автор книги: Jackson J. Bentley

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

Chapter 3 2

MI5 Headquarters, Thames House, London. Wednesday, 11am.

Barry Mitchinson had been in the office since seven in the morning and he was flagging already. The beta blockers weren’t helping his panic attacks, and the more of them he took, the edgier he seemed to become. Reaching into the bottom of his movable pedestal drawers, he lifted out a new bottle of No.7 Sour Mash Whiskey all the way from Lynchburg, Tennessee. He splashed a generous serving into a disposable plastic cup from the water cooler, and stashed the bottle again.

Looking at his monitor, he watched with disgust as rodents crawled over the face of a prostrate body, eating their fill.

***

It had been almost midnight when he had managed to usher out the last of the police, the HSE and other sundry interfering busybodies from the Strand station platform. Left alone, he ascended the spiral staircase to the ground level lobby and lifted the old wooden cover from the abandoned lift shaft. There was nothing to see. It was pitch dark in the shaft, and the expected smell was thankfully absent.

If Gil Davis really was down there, as Tim had claimed, she would have been dead for no more than a few hours; the odours of decomposition would, no doubt, follow later. There was a rattle as the padlock on the shutters was cut off and the cage shutters rolled aside.

Two men from Technical Services entered the lobby and closed the shutter behind them. The first nodded to Barry and the second spoke.

“We have the equipment. Do you mind if we measure up first?” he asked more politely than was necessary, given Barry’s precarious position in the service as of tonight.

“Do as you wish. Let’s just get on with it.”

The two technicians measured the opening and marked the dimensions down in a yellow covered flip over pad, much like a policeman’s notebook. They spoke between themselves.

“It’s a standard diameter, so a cast Iron cover will do. We’ll have a ring around the top, and the manhole cover in the middle will be hinged to allow access. Might as well put some hydraulics on it to make it easy to lift.”

The older man addressed Barry, who was staring blankly into space. “Does that sound OK, Guv?”

“Whatever it takes to seal it off, I don’t really care. Can we get the camera down there now?”

Slightly annoyed at the perceived lack of appreciation for their attending a dusty old tube station in the middle of the night, the older technician produced what looked like an oversized metal attaché case. The body of the case was black but the reinforced edges were brushed aluminium. Setting the case down and unclasping the two metal restraints, the Technician opened the case to reveal what looked like a professional photographer’s camera case but with a five and a half inch colour monitor built into the lid.

The case was split into two longitudinal compartments; the camera and cable were closest to the lid and the transformers and lens adapters closest to the front of the case.

“Seth, we need the battery and the extra cable out of the box, please,” the technician noted.

The younger man, Seth, quickly extracted the cable and what looked like a car battery from the pull along trolley they had brought in with them, and within a few short minutes the camera was sliding down the seventy-feet-deep shaft.

Once the camera hit the bottom, Victor, the older technician, switched on the camera. After a few seconds of fuzzy lines and then pixilation, the picture steadied.

“OK, Seth. Up about a foot.”

The young man lifted the camera cable as requested. “Right, Guv, I’m putting on the active light. This only illuminates the immediate area, especially in the pitch darkness, OK?”

Barry nodded, too tired and demoralised to speak. He just knew that there would be no body down there and that Gil Davis was already out of the country.

“Bugger me!” Victor flinched as he said it, and looked at Barry, who was transfixed at the awful scene.

***

Sitting back in his chair, Barry swigged the last of the whiskey and crumpled the cup before discarding it in a recycling bin. Throwing a stick of Trebor gum into his mouth to mask the smell of the alcohol, he watched the final moments of the DVD the technicians had recorded last night.

There in extreme wide angle was a body; it was broadly in profile but it was definitely a body. The body had a coat, a scarf and gloves, as one would expect on a cold day. The hair was long and fair, loosely styled as a woman would wear it. The camera zoomed into the face but there was little to see. One at a time rats would crawl up onto the exposed skin, bury their sharp incisors into the flesh, tear off a strip and run away to enjoy their meal.

Obviously no one could say that this was definitely Gil Davis, but the corpse had her build and was wearing her style of dress. The hair colour was a rough match, given the poor video quality, and who else was going to be down there? It looked very much as if Tim had done his job and then got himself killed on the way out. Never mind. He hadn’t been much use, anyway.

Barry was contemplating one more drink to calm his agitation when the phone rang. It was the Director himself; no PA this time.

“My office. Now!” he demanded, his voice betraying barely concealed anger.

Barry took the DVD and his written report, and hurried towards the elevator.

***

The holiday flight had left on time from a very quiet Newcastle Airport. The charter flight, operated by a well known holiday company, was code-sharing the route with another household name from the travel industry. Holidaymakers from two of Europe’s largest tour operators mingled in the concourse, dressed in a variety of tee shirts, denims and football shirts. They were all dressed for sunnier climes, as the temperature outside the glass atrium was only fractionally above zero.

Gil had no problems checking in using the Gold Class desk. There was no-one ahead of her and she was ushered through quickly. Her seat was on the aisle and was the equivalent of a business class seat on a scheduled airline. The seat was pale tan leather with ample legroom and a good one hundred and thirty five degree recline. Her TV screen was around ten inches across and boasted an enviable range of movies, games and TV on demand. The one fly in the ointment was her immediate neighbour, John from Sunderland.

“You aren’t from Sunderland, are you, bonnie lass? I can tell. I can always spot a Mackem girl.”

Gil smiled in pretended comprehension. She had barely understood a word of the man’s statement, concealed as it was behind an unfathomable accent. John was well into his life story when the plane took off. He was just getting to the ‘exciting part’ where he joined the National Coal Board as a welder, whilst playing trumpet in a dance band, when the plane left the ground and John was silenced. He went several shades of grey before his sallow complexion settled on white. His knuckles were bloodless as he gripped the seat with an intensity that suggested he would never let it go.

The man was in his sixties and seemed gentle enough. Gil placed her left hand on his right hand and gave it a gentle squeeze in an effort to comfort him. He looked at her, his lips set in a straight line. She smiled back and told him that he could relax; there was nothing to worry about.

Taking advantage of the sudden silence, she clamped her Bose noise reduction headphones around her head and over her ears, where she would keep them for the duration of the flight.

Whilst the sunshine beckoned and the beaches on offer on this package holiday appeared clean and white, Gil knew that she would not be sampling them. Their island destination was simply a staging point for the remainder of her journey, but she did have forty eight hours to play with before her next flight, and so she thought she might just top up her tan.

She smiled to herself, wondering what the reaction of the holiday rep would be when one of their guests missed the welcome brunch, disappeared from the hotel and failed to make the return flight next week.

***

The door to the director’s outer office was closed, but the slider confirmed that the director was ‘available’. Barry tapped on the door and opened it. Immediately in front of him to the left sat Maureen Lassiter. Directly ahead of him was the open door which led to the Director’s inner sanctum, overlooking the river.

Barry looked at Maureen, tight lipped. She flicked her eyes to the left, indicating that the director was waiting and there was no time for small talk, or even so much as a cursory greeting. The bespectacled underling stepped forward and into the boss’s office with all of the trepidation of Daniel entering the lion’s den, except that Daniel had known that God would save him. Barry had no such high hopes for deity stepping in on his behalf.

“Ah, Mitchinson. I was just wondering how things were going on your stated objective of eliminating the Chameleon, AKA Gill Davis.” The Director had a curious look on his face, and Barry was immediately wary.

“Good news, sir. She is dead and permanently entombed on the old Strand Tube Station platform. We are sealing the lift shaft tomorrow with a permanent cover and a manhole access.” Barry lifted up the DVD and offered to slide it into the Director’s laptop. The director waved his arm in what Barry took to be permission to proceed.

Inside a minute, the DVD whirred into action and the line camera pictures were showing on the screen. Barry had hoped to shock the Director, but instead he witnessed a morbid fascination on his boss’s face. The Director pressed the mouse button to halt the DVD, which he ejected and dropped into the waste bin beside him with a cruel smile playing across his lips.

He leaned on his desk, his forearms resting on the walnut veneer, his hands clasped with fingers interlocking. He was mere inches away from Barry Mitchinson’s face when his own contorted into what appeared to be rage.

“Barry, I am not certain whether you are deliberately misleading me or whether you truly are cretinously stupid. I don’t know who or what that video purports to show, but whatever it is I can assure you that it is not Gillian Davis.”

Barry was beyond crestfallen; he was paralysed with despair. He was unable to summon the power of speech.

“Let me explain in terms that a simpleton like you can understand. Gillian Davis obviously killed Tim McKinnon, whose death luckily can be portrayed as an accident, but then I suppose Wondergirl planned it that way. She then foresaw that you would check she was dead, and so placed something, or someone, on that platform for you to find. If only she was working for me instead of the team of incompetents I currently have at my disposal.

She seems to have completely outfoxed MI5 and the establishment, not least your good self. Worse still for me, and that means for you too, I have to explain what the hell we are doing killing our own people, on our own turf, when they threatened no one except a bunch of bad guys we would rather see dead!” He was yelling by the time the last sentence came to an end.

“That isn’t strictly true, sir.” Barry tried to restore his credibility, knowing that his boss was beyond listening. “She murdered the Israeli Foreign Minister. They are a friendly country and he wasn’t someone we would like to see dead. He was the minister of culture, for God’s sake.”

The Director tapped a key on his keyboard and a prepared page flicked up onto the screen. It was headed ‘Yakir Bluwstein: Supplementary Research – Analytical Profile’.

“Let me read you something that you would know if you weren’t a moron of the first order.

Yakir Bluwstein was still a teenager when he killed his first British Serviceman. The man was unarmed and lying in his sickbed when the boy sneaked into the hospital and shot the man in the head, leaving the symbol of the Stern Gang on the body. Sergeant William Docherty, or Billy to his friends, had served bravely in the desert for the allies in the Second World War and was awaiting demobilisation just as soon as he recovered enough to travel home. Ironically, Billy had been instrumental in the release of inmates from the death camps and had been welcomed as a hero by Jews in Europe and England.”

“Shit,” Barry thought as the Director read on, “this is going to get worse.”

“Minister Bluwstein was a member of the Stern Gang, known as Levi to the Zionists. He planned and helped execute the driving of a truck load of explosives into a British Police Station. Four were killed, and this is where it gets personal.”

The director looked up to ensure he had Barry’s undivided attention. “My uncle Ben, a Jew himself, incidentally, lost a leg and the sight in one eye in that attack. That raid was both wicked and pointless because only weeks later Israel became independent, and the Stern Gang had known very well what was going to happen. So did the minister repent, or change his odious ways? I think not. Bluwstein was the Minister of Defence when the Israeli Air force bombed unprotected Lebanese civilian targets with phosphorous armaments during the last Labour government. He went on TV and denied the use of phosphorous bombs, and declared that an internal Israeli enquiry had cleared Israel of wrongdoing. We shared our proof that they had indeed used phosphorous bombs, but nothing was done. The Americans vetoed a war crime tribunal. As a sop to international outrage, he was demoted to Minister of Culture.”

The Director turned away from the screen and looked at the defeated man sitting opposite before continuing.

“So, Mr Mitchinson, which part of Yakir Bluwstein’s glorious history would make your average Englishman feel sorrowful at his passing? As much as I despise your little Wondergirl, she did the world a favour that day.”

Barry knew there wasn’t an answer that would keep him in a job, and so he looked down at his scuffed shoes.

“So, Mitchinson, when you appear in her cross hairs – as you undoubtedly will, as you tried to kill her – tell her my late Uncle Dan sends his regards.”

A terrible silence engulfed the room and Barry heard Maureen Lassiter quietly close the door between her office and the Directors office. There was obviously only so much blood letting a sensitive woman could take in a day.

“I’ll seal the ports and airports as soon as I get back to my desk. We will apprehend her, soon enough.” Barry tried to regain some of the momentum.

“You know, you really do disgust me, you odious little man. Men have died this week because of your incompetence, and you are still protecting your own worthless hide.

Gillian Davis flew out of the UK under her own name on a charter flight this morning. She is in the air as we speak, heading to the sun.”

“Well, I’ll have her picked up as soon as she arrives. We have operatives in most cities and we can rely on the local authorities everywhere else. She can’t escape.” Barry sounded more confident now, but the director laughed.

“Does your stupidity know no bounds? Let me see, this woman has outsmarted you every step of the way and made you and the firm look incompetent. The only reason I knew she was flying out this morning was that she bought a book on her credit card at Newcastle Airport.”

Barry looked puzzled. “But she must know any transactions would be flagged.”

“Of course she did! The title of the book was ‘Getting Away to Cuba, a traveller’s guide’. She is mocking us; she knows very well that the one country in the civilised world that will not cooperate with us at all is Cuba. Once she lands there, we lose her forever. We will never know where she is. She could stay and enjoy endless Mojitos in Hemingway’s favourite bar, or she could fly to any communist enclave in the world. At least we can sell off her company and bang another few million into the treasury’s coffers. Contact Lena at SOCA and get her to make an application to the Assets Agency under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.”

Barry hardly dared speak. His heart was racing and he could feel an anxiety attack coming on as he answered.

“She doesn’t own any assets in the UK any more, apart from a few hundred pounds in her current account. The remaining assets of the business were sold to the employees for one pound under a legal covenant last week. Later the same day the employees transferred their assets in the company to another greeting card company for an undisclosed amount.

SOCA says that the deal is watertight without clear evidence that criminal funds purchased, or were invested in, the company, and we have no such evidence. It seems that she paid around three million for the business when she acquired it and took around three million when she left. SOCA say that the courts would accept the argument that the illegal assets , if any, were paid into the company and paid out by the company in equal amounts, and so no money laundering has taken place and no illegal assets remain in the company. In short, their lawyers say that we have no case, even if we could prove Gillian Davis had accrued her three million investment money illegally. None of that is relevant anyway; we simply have no idea where her money is now.”

The director flung back the stressless office recliner he used as a desk chair, which was clearly not working to reduce his stress, and leaned over Barry Mitchinson, hatred burning in his eyes.

“I’d say Cuba has a good chance of being the new home of Davis’s fortune, wouldn’t you? Idiot!”

Sorry, sir,” Barry responded meekly. This seemed to send the Director into an uncontrollable rage.

“Sorry? You spineless piece of garbage! Are you just going to sit around for the rest of your life and let people defecate on you from a great height? You were a Director here, for heaven’s sake. You had a Thames view, and when they told you the special operations division was going you meekly sat back and let the DG demote you. Have you no pride?

Do you know that the powers that be had a bet on how low you could be demoted before pride kicked in and you raised a fuss? But you never did, and so they all lost their bets. I won because I said you’d stay even if I sent you to work in the cafeteria. They had a good laugh at that. You are a joke. Now, get out of my office. I need to call your wife and tell her I need a good blow job tonight. She’ll come running, as she always does – as she always has. Then, whilst she is mopping up, she’ll make some joke about you not being able to get it up. Poor Eloise; she deserves a good shagging and I’ll make damn sure she gets one.”

***

Something in Barry Mitchinson snapped; the stress, the drugs and the drink combined to produce a white heat of rage such as he had never before experienced. He toyed with the idea of telling the Director that he knew all about his wife and her many conquests, and how he used his wife to extract useful information from the Director in their post coital banter.

Barry wanted to tell him that for years he had been banging the Director’s own secretary, the delicious Maureen, often over the Director’s own desk and in his precious thousand pound ‘stressless’ chair.

He wanted to humiliate the man by telling him that between them he and Maureen had amassed almost a million pounds from foreign governments, who believed it was the Director they had in their pockets when they had never even spoken to him. But he did none of these things; he reacted as he had never done before. He reacted physically.

The first blow was a head butt that spread the Director’s nose over his face, blood trickling down the crevices made by his jowls. The second blow was a firm punch to the solar plexus, which doubled the Director over towards Barry’s third blow, an uppercut that sent the older man back into his chair, unconscious.

***

Mitchinson was still shaking when Maureen came into the room.

“My word, Barry, I heard what he said, but this! This will get you sent down.”

Barry was suddenly back in control. He looked at Maureen, and with the hand that seconds before had inflicted a terrible violence on his boss, he gently stroked her cheek.

“It’s still early, and there aren’t many people around. We need to act quickly. Bring me your keyboard and mouse.”

Maureen looked confused, but she did as her lover asked and returned with a standard keyboard and mouse.

Barry plugged both appliances into the Director’s laptop and opened Microsoft Word. Typing carefully on Maureen’s keyboard, he wrote a note on the Directors machine.

To Security Service Director General; Dame Monica Stewart – Smith.

Dear Monica,

I realise this will come as a shock but I cannot go on, I have made mistakes, too many to mention, but they have taken their toll. I was never there for my children and my wife is well aware of my continuing infidelity. I have betrayed my college friend Barry Mitchinson by conducting a long term affair with his wife and my former girlfriend Eloise, and on this issue I simply cannot find it in me to be ashamed.

Where I do feel ashamed is in my illegal dealings with foreign agencies who have asked for, and have been granted favours and access they were not entitled to receive.

I have betrayed you, my wife, MI5 and my country.

Having removed the people who knew about my indiscretions, I believed I was safe, though I do regret that Doug and Tim had to die to keep my secret safe. Unfortunately one more person knows all about my secret arrangements, and she has avoided my attempts at assassination and has flown to Cuba. I have no doubt she will reveal all as soon as she lands.

I am, at heart, something of a coward in these matters and I cannot take the shame and opprobrium that awaits me and so this will be my last missive. Please ensure that my wife receives all of the benefits to which she is entitled. She has been faithful, true and blameless in all of this.

I hope that this final selfish action can, in some way protect the agency and the country from embarrassment.

Ian.

Barry did not bother to print the note, rather he saved it to the ‘documents’ folder and left it displaying on the screen. He unplugged the keyboard and mouse and handed them back to Maureen. She took them back to her desk and re-attached them to her own machine.

With both office doors secured, as they had been during their passionate lovemaking in the past, Barry spoke as he wiped the blood from the desk with a screen wipe.

“This is how it happened. You heard a loud noise and so you tapped on the door to see if the Director needed assistance, only to discover he was beyond help. You then noticed the message on his screen. And this is the most important part, you will say that it is not possible that anyone passed you, either in or out, between his closing the door and his suicide. Do you understand?”

Maureen nodded blankly. Barry held her shoulders gently. Looking into her tear-filled eyes, he continued.

“Responding to his earlier call to me to join him for coffee, I arrived to find you sobbing uncontrollably on the sofa. OK?”

“Yes. But what are you going to do?”

“You’ll see. When it’s done I’ll leave and return in a few minutes. Are you with me on this?” Maureen nodded again. “Now is the time for us to move on and spend some of that money we‘ve salted away, to spend more time together.”

Realising the nature of the proposal, Maureen buried her face in his shoulders. Barry held her at arm’s length and said, nodding in the direction of their dead boss, “Save your tears for him. He will need someone to mourn his sorry life.”

***

As with all other buildings in the UK, smoking was not allowed inside Thames House, and so smokers were expected to congregate outside in a designated area. The trouble with that arrangement, of course, was that it smelled awful and cigarette debris overflowed the bin and contaminated the whole area. It was a foul place, and it was meant to be that way. Perry Jameson was cleverer than the bosses, though; or so he thought.

Perry worked on ground minus 1, the floor which enjoyed the benefit of a patio overlooking the Thames. At the rear of the building floor G -1 was a floor lower than street level at the front of the building. The night had been long, and Perry would be off duty soon and back to his warm bed in Camden, hopefully with a warm body beside him. His current girlfriend was a nurse, and she worked nights, too.

He sat glancing out at the patio beyond his window. He wanted a smoke, badly, and that was his secret place. When Perry had first moved to this office, he was warned, somewhat pointedly, that the outside patio had been designated as an ‘inside area’ for the purposes of the smoking ban. The duty officer was familiar with such bureaucratic doublespeak. The powers that be had even alarmed the door to prevent random access to the patio, which was used for cocktail parties in the summer. The alarm could only be disarmed by the entry of a six figure code into the keypad by the door.

As duty building security officer (level two), Perry was not entitled to the security code required to exit the fire door without setting off the alarm. That was a privilege restricted to the Section Security Manager (the SSM) and the Chief of Building Security (CoBS). Fortunately, the SSM had a memory like a sieve, and so wrote the keypad code on a piece of paper taped to the pencil drawer in his desk. Perry had memorised it long ago.

As soon as her shift ended, Suzy, the overnight relief administrator, packed her bag and said goodbye. Perry would be alone for an hour, waiting for the SSM to turn in and take Perry’s report, which would be brief and uneventful as usual, and so he keyed in 3-6-3-2-8-9 and disabled the exit door alarm.

Perry was drawing in a deep lungful of the calming smoke when he heard a noise. He looked up to see an old style computer monitor heading straight towards him. Darting back inside, he watched the monitor explode into a million pieces on the concrete patio. Still theoretically in charge of the building, he stepped outside to see which idiot had thrown the monitor out of the window. As he looked up he could see clearly that the fifth widow up was shattered. That would be one of the Directorate offices, he thought. But his thoughts were interrupted by the figure of a man flying through the air in his direction, arms and legs flailing, with his face fixed in a rictus of fear. Diving to his left, the young security guard only just managed to avoid the falling body, but he did not escape the awful squelching sound of the body hitting concrete. He looked on in horror as the body twitched for a few seconds, before finally lying still.

Following procedure, Perry called an internal number, not the police, as it was obviously way too late for an ambulance. The Chief of Building Security was at his desk and Perry explained the situation. The Chief hurried down the stairs from his office, his mind already turning to how they could keep this quiet and how they could restrict the Metropolitan Police to a minimum involvement.

***

The Director had started to come around when the old and unused computer monitor crashed through the toughened glass window at the third attempt, the first two attempts merely cracking the large pane without penetrating it.

Barry lifted the man roughly to his feet. The Director caught sight of Maureen sitting on the sofa, a frightened expression on her face.

“For God’s sake, Maureen! Call Security! He’s lost his mind!”

Barry turned the Director to face the window and the older man realised what his fate entailed.

“Sorry, sir,” Barry intoned ironically, “Maureen doesn’t take orders from you any more, if indeed she ever did.”

Barry laughed as he hauled the weakened director towards the opening. “Strange how things turn out, isn’t it, Gordo? You’re going to be flying out head first over the same windowsill where I shagged your PA last week.”

Mustering all of his remaining strength, the Director pushed himself away from the broken glass, but two severe punches to the kidneys subdued him and he folded again, only to fully recover his wits as he fell from the window and caught sight of the concrete patio, five floors below, racing towards him.