by Asia Mackay
‘The Mother’ was a new persona I was going to roll out whenever it was deemed appropriate for an operation. I was inspired by Norm. Norm was one of Eight’s most successful Rats. His unique talent was being Mr Forgettable. He looked so normal and insignificant people didn’t really notice him let alone assess him as a threat. He was in his early fifties, slightly balding and with large glasses that looked like they were NHS-issued in the eighties. Wearing an anorak, he’d shuffle around in scuffed shoes holding a Tesco plastic bag containing his mobile phone, keys and a bottle of water. The bag added to his overall look and was also for practical purposes as his pockets were full with the tools of his trade. I don’t even know if his name was really Norman or if Norm was just a nickname for Normal. All I could think about on maternity leave was how when I was out pushing a pram I felt like Mrs Norm. Mama Norm. No one really saw me. I was invisible. A non-threat. And now I knew how I could use that to my advantage. A pram full of weapons and ammo hidden under a stunt baby. They wouldn’t see me until it was too late.
But today I was just doing surveillance and a little mission for Geraint. Tucked inside the pram was a large black box designed to record the electronic signal of Ray Ray’s garage-door buzzer. I just needed to be close to the garage when it opened so the box could do its work. On my fourth round of the block the door finally screeched into action and rolled back; I got a glimpse of the make of the alarm keypad on the wall as a Bentley drove out with Ray Ray in the back. He was wearing sunglasses and looking at a broadsheet but I could just make out his distinctive bald head and the tweed cuff of a tailor-made suit. There was some shindig he was due at tonight in the country meaning the Ferrari would be left back here locked up and without the usual roster of security that went wherever Ray Ray did. I watched as a black Range Rover with a selection of well-built men inside followed the Bentley. With satisfaction I noticed not a single one of them gave a second glance to the mother hovering right next to their boss’s garage door.
The black box inside the pram beeped twice. It was done. Time to head back to the Platform and let Geraint work his magic.
Chapter Twenty-One
‘OH, THIS IS GOING to be fun. Isn’t that Johnnie Mac?’ Jake had found me outside Unicorn’s office debating whether to hide just as a group of men walked out of the meeting room. They were all wearing suits except one, who had on weathered jeans and a jacket that looked equally battered except the cut betrayed the fact it was probably extremely expensive.
Johnnie Mac was a rockstar. When nineteen-year-old Jonathan Macaulay had first started out, his boy band Daylight had found fame quickly by winning a TV talent show. Platform Eight had taken control of them pretty much as soon as they left the stage in a sea of sparkly confetti. Young, manufactured bands were ideal vehicles for coded songs; as it was their first foray in the business they were safe bets for doing exactly as they were told. With their talent and our management, Daylight had immediately become an enormous international success. Five years ago, Jake and I had been assigned to them for one of their early world tours; being a part of their entourage had given us the perfect cover for undertaking dark ops abroad without raising any suspicions. We were just another PR manager and record-label executive that were part of the Daylight circus.
‘How do you think he’s going to take the news you’re married?’ asked Jake as we watched him talking animatedly with the suits.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. He won’t give a shit.’
‘Who are you kidding, “Lady”?’ smirked Jake. ‘Lady’ was Johnnie’s breakout single. He had eventually left the band to go solo, reinvented his sound as more edgy rock than fresh-faced pop and that was the first track he released. It had been a massive hit, going platinum worldwide. I think it may have even won a Grammy. It was a song about a man who had his heart trampled by an older woman, a lady who ‘didn’t act like no lady I had ever met, but on her my foolish heart was set’. Other lyrics included ‘her green eyes flashed, she had scars to see, I had been afraid for her, but I should’ve been afraid for me’. I had naively hoped Jake had never heard it.
‘Don’t forget I’ve been down that “pathway” more than a few times myself,’ he continued. In case I had had any doubt the song had been about me the line ‘those three freckles were my pathway to heaven, a heaven that’d torment me to hell’ had made it impossible to ignore. I had three freckles beneath my hip bone, that someone with a flair for poetry could interpret as leading the way towards my foofoo, lily, front bottom, whatever you wanted to call it. I know most would have found it flattering to have inspired such a famous song but I just found it slightly uncomfortable.
‘Come on, let’s go the long way round.’
‘Now why would I do that?’
‘Jake, don’t be a—’ But it was too late.
‘Johnnie!’
Johnnie turned around. Although it was Jake who had shouted his name it was me he zeroed in on.
‘Lex!’ He came up and hugged me hard. ‘Jesus, it’s been so long.’ He was studying me so intensely I was starting to squirm.
Jake cleared his throat. ‘Good to see you, Johnnie.’
Johnnie turned to Jake. ‘Oh, hi, mate. How are you?’
‘You know, same old. Actually I just remembered I forgot a file I need. I’ll be right back.’ He walked back into our office merrily humming ‘Lady’ to himself.
Straight away Johnnie’s arms were round my waist.
‘Jesus, I’ve missed you. It’s been, what? Over three years?’
‘Come on, Johnnie, I’m at work.’
‘I’m here, you’re here, let’s have some fun before you bugger off into the sunset on some “data analysing” assignment.’ He grinned at me. He had always known more than he should.
It had only been the second stop of Daylight’s world tour when an encounter with one of our informants hadn’t gone as planned and I had taken a hard beating. I had got back to the hotel at 4 a.m. and, having noticed that the bar was still open, went for a sharp stiffener to ease the pain in my ribs. It was only once I had ordered my drink I noticed why the weary bartender was still serving. Johnnie was sitting alone in the corner smoking.
‘Busy night, PR lady?’ he had offered upon seeing my dishevelled state. Unlike the rest of the band, who were from nice middle-class backgrounds and pushy stage-show mums, Johnnie had grown up on a rough London estate. The extensive background checks we’d run had flagged up gang-related activity for which he had never been arrested. The Platform had been uneasy about him, although the genuine music executives insisted he was essential as he brought the band some much-needed raw sex appeal. He was a cocky twenty-year-old whose swagger hid an intelligence that was easy to underestimate. I certainly had. His pertinent questions about exactly what I did for a living made it clear he knew I was more than just entourage fodder.
In response to my ‘crazzyyy night with some old journalist pals’ explanation he handed me a napkin.
‘You’re bleeding from that cut on your head.’
‘Oh, drunken tumble. Man, I should know better at my age.’ I was only eight years older than him but it felt a lot more seeing as when he was a teenager learning how to sing, I’d been learning how to kill.
‘You’re not drunk, Lex.’ He took another long drag on his cigarette. ‘And you know fuck-all about music.’ He blew the smoke in my face. ‘And you have the worst press relations skills I have ever seen.’ (He may have been referring to the fact I had told a journalist, ‘I don’t know, fucking google it,’ when cornered about when the next album was being released.) I took the fag out of his hand as he continued, ‘So exactly what are you doing touring with a band whose names you haven’t even bothered learning?’
My earlier ‘Hey, In-the-closet-guy, pass me that bottle’ – directed at his gay bandmate – had obviously not escaped his attention. I took a drag of his cigarette.
‘Well, Johnnie,’ I said slowly to show I had bothered learning his name, ‘you have lots of interesting
questions, which I could either give long boring answers to’ – I looked up at him – ‘or we could get out of here and I could just do long interesting things to you instead.’
Seducing him was the quickest and easiest way out of the situation.
And there was the fact I had really wanted to.
Those record-label execs had known what they were talking about when they said he had sex appeal. He could make rolling a cigarette look like an obscene act. We had enjoyed late-night ‘press strategizing sessions’ for the rest of the tour. As to my suspicious behaviour, I had fobbed him off with a story that implied I hated my job but was still doing it as I was moonlighting in some shady sideline in drugs. I got away with being so vague as all the sex was a good distraction. A genius selfless move on my part.
When we were nearing the end of the tour the Platform agreed it was worth risking coming clean, to a certain extent, to recruit Johnnie as a golden Wolf. The band’s access as bona fide superstars was unlimited. I knew on that tour alone they had dinner booked at at least two presidents’ homes; even the most powerful men were still slaves to their teenage daughters. Johnnie had been unfazed by my revelations to the point where he pushed for a solo deal before he would agree. It was with a knowing look he accepted my explanation that I was officially a data analyst but unofficially a data gatherer, code for spy.
The tour finished and what I thought would be an easy goodbye turned into a messy one.
‘What the fuck do you mean, that’s it?’ he had demanded, as I got ready to leave our Istanbul hotel.
‘Johnnie, you’re insanely famous and could be with a different girl each night. You don’t want to be lumbered with an old lady like me.’
I thought I was doing him a favour; he thought I was a cold bitch who had used him to advance her career. The irony being I advanced his; with a solo record deal and by providing worthy inspiration for a hit single.
Yet time heals all wounds, although it didn’t dampen any desires, and over the years whenever we had bumped into each other at the Platform, we had ended up in bed together.
Which explained why he now thought we could just pick up where we had left off.
‘Johnnie, it’s different now.’
‘Babe, it’s never different. Let’s skip the bit where you play hard to get and we just cut straight to going to the nearest hotel.’ He grabbed my hand.
‘I’m married.’
He stared at me. ‘The fuck you are. You said you’d never settle down. What was all that other bullshit you spun me? That you could never be one of those dull people who lived the same life every day?’
I paused. That did sound like something I would have said back then.
‘People change?’ was the best cliché I could come up with.
Thankfully Jake had obviously decided I had been tortured long enough and was back at my side. ‘We need to leave,’ he said.
Johnnie’s eyes did not move from my face despite Jake’s reappearance. ‘It’s not this prick, is it?’
‘Johnnie! I thought we were mates?’ Jake feigned hurt.
‘God, no! Of course it’s not this prick.’
‘Lex, come on! Et tu, Brute?’ We both ignored him.
‘I’m sorry, Johnnie. We have to go. It was good to see you.’ I gently touched his arm. He shook it off.
‘You’re a fucking liar. A professional liar. Everything you say is toxic bullshit.’ He spun on his heel and stalked off.
‘Boo fucking hoo, go write a song about it,’ Jake called after him. He turned to me. ‘Good work, Tyler. You’ve just seriously pissed off one of our top assets.’
No one had ever suspected our country’s biggest superstar of planting bugs or tracking devices and Johnnie had helped us gain valuable intelligence in every territory he had ever toured in. He was, without a doubt, our most prized golden Wolf.
‘Johnnie knows we made him and that we can break him. He’s not going to throw his dream life away because he’s not getting the occasional shag from me. I’m good but not that good.’
‘Fair point. Come on, we need to go.’
I comforted myself with the idea Jake was still smarting from being called a prick and that was why he hadn’t challenged my modest assessment of my bedroom performance.
Johnnie’s surprise at my marital status was understandable. Back then ‘buzz kill, sex-drive kill, fun killer’ were all terms I used to describe marriage.
It was only when I met Will that I started to look at it another way. The big buzz of marriage, of any long-term relationship, was the whole fact someone wanted to do ‘boring’ with you. It was you they wanted to wake up to every single day, to stare at a wall painted five different shades of white and argue heatedly about which you prefer. It was you they wanted to debate with in the supermarket aisle about what to eat for dinner, and it was you they wanted to go to bed with and not have sex with when something good was on the telly. Marriage itself was mundane, but the fact someone wanted to be married to you was pretty fucking amazing.
Chapter Twenty-Two
IT WAS TIME TO steal a car.
I was sitting with Robin and Jake in a van opposite Ray Ray’s garage.
There was silence except for the tapping of Robin’s fingers on the laptop keys as Geraint talked him through his hacking programme for the security cameras.
Jake and I were both wearing jeans and dirty hoodies. We needed to look like down-and-out druggies hoping for an easy score, far less of a threat than professionals with questionable motives. Jake put his hood up and locked and loaded his gun. I did the same.
He looked at me. ‘Remember, no deadly force.’
‘Of course. Just hugs and high fives for anyone trying to kill us.’
This no-kill directive made the operation higher risk but even with the mighty Demon behind us, if anyone was badly injured or worse in a car robbery gone wrong it could make headlines. Someone as paranoid as Dimitri would be immediately on edge if he discovered the only car in London identical to his had just been stolen in a violent crime.
‘Okay, it’s confirmed.’ Robin looked up at us. ‘Cameras are down and the jammer is blocking the alarm signal.’
We walked across the street. Jake took Geraint’s remote out of his pocket and pressed it as he aimed it at the garage. There was a pause and then we heard the reassuring screech of the door rising. We slipped under and Jake went to disarm the alarm keypad. Two beeps and the light went green.
We looked at the line of cars facing us. The orange Ferrari was at the far end of the garage alongside a tarpaulin-covered large car, a yellow Porsche and a lime-green Bugatti. A fruit bowl of cars that proved money couldn’t buy taste. Next to us was the space where the Bentley had been and a vintage Land Rover, behind which was a flight of metal stairs leading up to a mezzanine-level workspace of filing cabinets and tool chests that arced round the whole expanse of the garage.
We walked down towards the Ferrari.
‘Okay, Tyler, let’s get to work.’ Jake took a small pouch of tools from his hoodie pocket. ‘You can be on top.’ He winked as he slid under the car to disable the security system. I sat in the driving seat and got to work on the ignition.
I checked my watch. If we got this done fast enough I could be home in time for bath time. I had missed tucking Gigi in all week.
Robin’s voice crackled into our earpieces. ‘Two hostiles approaching. Two minutes from the garage door.’
‘Dammit. I was nearly done.’ Jake slid out from under the car.
We both looked round the garage.
‘Under there.’ He motioned towards the indistinguishable covered car next to us.
I got out of the Ferrari and lifted up the bottom of the tarpaulin. Jake rolled up against the side of the car and I lay down next to him. The tarpaulin fell short – part of my midriff and legs were not covered.
‘I’m still visible.’
‘Lean in more,’ said Jake. His arm snaked round my waist and he pulled me further up against
him. His legs entwined mine. His head just above me. We breathed in unison. I could feel his heart beating up against my back. His arms were crisscrossed in front of me, one holding me close, the other holding his gun.
I’d forgotten how well we fitted together.
The tarpaulin now just brushed the floor. We were covered.
The garage door opened and two sets of footsteps entered. I heard the tail end of a bad joke, chuckling, then one of them said, ‘The bloody alarm’s not set.’
‘Maybe Keeno forgot to do it again?’
‘He’ll be out on his fucking ear if he has. Let’s do a check. You go upstairs, I’ll do down here.’
There were loud clanks as one of them ascended the metal steps to the mezzanine level. We heard steps as the other man came towards us. He was undoubtedly armed. I focused on staying completely still. One movement and the tarpaulin crinkling would echo round the garage. At least Jake had his gun in hand. And he was a fast draw. I knew he could down the man the second he lifted the tarpaulin.
Unless the man fired without warning. Our files on Ray Ray Campbell and his mob detailed their trigger-happy nature. I tried to block out images of their enemies’ bullet-ridden torsos in shallow graves. Jake must have felt my body tense. His grip tightened round me, he felt for my hand, his index finger brushed mine and he started gently stroking it. He was trying to calm me. And setting the rhythm to which I needed to breathe to. I slowly exhaled and then adjusted my breathing to his timing.
The footsteps drew closer. The man was now walking past us. I could see the shadow of his feet. He stopped halfway down the car.