Girl Who Fell 1: Behind Blue Eyes. Offbeat Brit spy series-cum-lesbian love triangle. Killing Eve meets female James Bond meets Helen of Troy returns (HAIL THE QUEEN series)
Page 7
‘Dad’s put ice in your office for the Caol Ila.’
Back in the elevator he inserted a digital micro key into the control panel and turned it. When he pressed the button for the top floor—5—the display light registered the number 6.
Carrying a burgundy leather briefcase bearing crown insignia, C emerged on to the non-existent floor 6, which was empty and appeared to be undergoing rebuilding work.
Opening a fire alarm panel to reveal a keypad, he inserted his micro key and entered a 10-digit code. A maintenance door clicked open a few inches.
Beyond it, in front of a massive steel door, C went through the ritual at a palm, retina, and voice recognition sensor.
Satisfied on all points, the sensor bade him welcome and the door softly whooshed open.
78 ≥ GIRL WHO FELL 1
The antique Napoleonic leather-topped desk in C’s secret-secret office commanded views east and west along the coastline.
On a clear day you could see the Isle of Wight (though not Jersey). In front of Brighton’s stylish Regency architecture, rose the revolving tower of the British Airways i360, described by its supporters as a space age capsule ascending to the skies.
But architecture was the last thing on C’s mind.
He had invested a lot of time on his plans for disposing a British supply of the secret weapon Metapox, and he needed to find a way to prevent Major Grinin from producing a vaccine.
Opening his burgundy briefcase, he threw down a pair of government issue manila square cut folders (color: buff). They were label ed OhZone 7 and Major G. Grinin respectively.
Felicity’s damaged photograph protruded from the one, but C opened the other, and careful y spread its contents on his desk—with a mugshot of the Major on top.
He dropped two cubes of ice into a whisky glass before half fil ing it from a bottle of Caol Ila 1999 and adding water from a ceramic jug. Sipping his single malt and wreathed in the smoke of his embargo-busting Cuban cigar, C considered his options.
His eyes wandered to the Hologram-Comms-link set up in the far corner—a device reserved for communications between himself and one other person— and he felt his anxiety increase.
Seeking a distraction C turned his mind to the evening ahead.
He wouldn’t change here, he’d take an overnight bag and shower at the hotel. Opening a black attaché case, he set it on a side table and turned to his safe. Confident in his outer security measures, C’s wall safe had only a twin tumbler combination, and was hidden in the first place anyone would look: behind a hinged portrait of the Queen.
R A E C H E L S A N D S ≥
79
He took out one of the five-gram plastic bags of cocaine resting beside a purple Bonham’s diamond case. As he put the cocaine into the attaché case, his mind flashed to his altercation with Blanka at the conference.
Like mother like daughter, he reflected.
‘ I don’t see any blood, she says. The brat. But you wil see it, I promise.’
He looked at the date on the bottle—Caol Ila 1999.
A good year, he thought. The year the brat’s interfering mother died.
He returned to the safe, and reached deep inside to a bottom shelf packed with manila square cut folders (color: blue).
He flipped through the folders until he came to one marked Operation Fatima.
At his desk he opened the file. He knew the contents wel .
The first page was a black and white photograph, a corpse shot.
Dead woman, mid-30s, pretty. On an ambulance gurney with her wet dress stretched tight over her.
Her swollen breasts and abdomen clearly showed she was near the term of her pregnancy.
The top corner of the photograph was marked:
‘Television journalist, Kitty Maguire.’
He addressed the photograph. ‘It doesn’t show the color of your dress, but you were wearing blue. I remember that—it didn’t match your green eyes.’
He smiled at the corpse.
‘It wasn’t murder. You threw your life away. Admiral’s daughter, who acted like white trash,’ he spat out. He put on Kitty’s Virginia accent. ‘“You can’t stop the Fatima Secret. I told Major Grinin of the KGB.” We’l see about that, won’t we?
…Kitty real y should’ve stayed at home. As for stopping the Secret—far, far more important people than you have met their
80 ≥ GIRL WHO FELL 1
end trying to reveal it. Now, with the good Major, I can kil two birds with one stone.’
The corpse shot was struck through with a red line and stamped across the bottom. The letters on the stamp spelled Terminated. They were followed, in an unusual red flowery writing, by these words:
Vatican City, 1999: Operation Fatima
A bold pre-emptive action had served him wel in that case, and it would serve him wel now.
He walked to his stationery cabinet, taking out a fresh folder (color: blue), a gray operations name book, and a red marker pen. Grinin’s fate was sealed.
At his desk, he considered careful y. What name for the black Op? He drained his glass, stubbed out his Cohiba Lancero cigar, and turned to the middle of the gray book. He studied the pages, nodded and closed it. Then he slid Grinin’s mugshot over.
He set a ruler across Grinin’s face, and struck it through.
Then he wrote in red with his left hand, in the unusual flowery handwriting.
Operation Penthouse
There wasn’t a trace of C’s usual green ink anywhere.
C H A P T E R 58 ≥ 81
To Russia With Love
This
is
the
most
horrible
crime
ever
committed
in the whole history of the world
JULY 1944, PRIME MINISTER SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL, UPON
READING THE FIRST DETAILED ACCOUNT OF AUSCHWITZ.
5
The next day. 8 a.m.
Wonderland.
C was watching his loyal Crown Servants again on the security monitors. On one, a London double-decker (the 452
to Kensal Rise) passed in the fog, its ad banner reading: Save a life this Ramadan.
Yesterday had been surreal. Blanka on her white horse; the other directors in a rare show of independence voting 6 to 2
against him in favour of the vaccine. Then his executive decision, behind their backs, to close the file on Grigori Grinin.
He cal ed to mind his maxim: If you’re going to beat the bad guys and make democracy work, you’ve got to think like the bad guys. The finale was a rollicking night with Tess in the Grand Hotel, Brighton. Simple uncomplicated Tess. He was musing on the absurdity of it al , of life, when The Walrus and the Carpenter, tattooed on his boyhood memory, popped into his head to
82 ≥ GIRL WHO FELL 1
underscore the madness.
The sea was wet as wet could be
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead –
There were no birds to fly.
He considered his staff arriving for work; and images of queens and bees jumbled about with thoughts of their dress code.
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed, Their shoes were clean and neat —
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn’t any feet.’
The league of extraordinary rendition.
C winced, remembering a particularly gory wet job. The victim’s feet, as well as his head and hands, had been cut off.
His mind turned to the man who had given the head of British Intel igence the codename—C—his eccentric one-legged predecessor, Mansfield Cumming.
Cumming masterminded another gruesome wet job, in Moscow. Major Grinin was always banging on about it. Before assassinating the famous Russian monk, Grigori Rasputin, MI6
agents had slo
wly castrated him to make him talk.
Since then the head of MI6 had been known as C. Quite literal y: C for Cumming.
With the exception of Probe, no agent employed a sword-stick any more, and male agents’ semen was no longer used as
R A E C H E L S A N D S ≥
83
invisible ink. But the rule of law never control ed the actions of MI6, any more than it restrained the sexual exploits of its most famous fictional spy, James Bond. The Official Secrets Act hid what MI6 did from the British public—but not from its sister Intel igence service, MI5.
In 2003, Colonel Gaddafi of Libya paid over $2billion compensation to the families of victims of Britain’s ‘worst terrorist outrage’—the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie—
though he consistently claimed he had never ordered such an attack.
Only months later, at Gaddafi’s request, C arranged for opponents of Gaddafi to be rendered* and sent to him.
[* lawless kidnapping carried out by Intel igence agencies, and cal ed, in their jargon, extraordinary rendition].
The victims included four young children, and a heavily pregnant woman, Fatima Boudchar. The head of MI5 was so concerned, that she banned MI6 agents from its premises, and warned Prime Minister, Tony Blair, that MI6 threatened Britain’s future intel igence gathering and security.
The British government would pay £3m compensation to these victims, and the woman Prime Minister would say she was, ‘profoundly sorry about the role MI6 had played in their kidnap, rendition and torture.’
It didn’t trend on social media, so no one noticed it.
The river bank—Fox Hall.
C glanced at his Rolex anxiously, locked the security overwatch room, and ran up the fire stairs. He punched the day’s code into a pad, and when the door clicked open he emerged into a garden on the southwest corner of headquarters building.
MI6 staff were discouraged from leaving by the Thames Gate,
84 ≥ GIRL WHO FELL 1
and C needed the code again to exit through the military style turnstile.
He stepped onto the river bank, and into the thick fog rol ing off the Thames.
When C was young, it had been cal ed a pea-souper, and the river had been as dead as a dodo.
He kicked a lump of frozen snow off the bank into the river where it fizzed weakly as it was engulfed by fog and water.
As he strolled along the Thames footpath, under Vauxhal Bridge, the intolerable damp made him shudder. He’d been a director, and now head of MI6. He’d worked his way to the top, tooth and claw. Years it had taken him, and he stil had to assign the bloody wet jobs. How much longer must he endure this?
Now off-camera, he scurried past St George Wharf pier thinking just how much this area of London—Vauxhall—had changed.
The rich now jostled with the poor for river views, but in the Dark Ages it was a place of ill repute, a swamp around a series of islands. Only those who knew the paths through the marshes dared to hunt here.
Later, King John’s chief enforcer, Falkes de Breauté—a man the likeness of C, if his portraits were anything to go by—owned it. Over time, the name Falkes Hall became corrupted to Fox Hal and, eventual y, Vauxhal .
It vexed C that the annoying senior psychiatrist from the ministry, Dr Fox, referred to the area as Fox Hal .
‘He even has it on his bloody cards!’
Then they’d been the incident with the mints. He felt sure that Fox was behind it.
R A E C H E L S A N D S ≥
85
The Scif.
C sat glumly at an easy chair and table in a Secure Room below his apartment in St George Wharf Tower. The Scif* was an Archimedes cage, impenetrable to OhZone Scanners, and to all surveil ance by Blanka or anyone else.
[* Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility]
The Hologram-Comms-Link on the wall retained a faint after-glow of its activity, and its words stil stung.
‘You too old for this, Jasper?’ the voice laughed. Then came the warning. ‘If you can’t control Felicity, it’l be on your head.’
He gritted his teeth and stared at the vacant hologram.
10 Buckingham Mews— Casa Blanka.
Blanka’s bedroom.
The alarm rang at nine on Blanka’s day off. Unlike a run of the mill spy, the alarm was inside her head: her in-board AI backup, Hebe. It told her the time, and dismissed itself.
Sokol had run Blanka home last night. They’d jammed on guitars and drunk champagne. But yesterday’s celebration segued to today’s pain, and she felt nauseous. Hebe told her that she needed to start her kidney dialysis within 90 minutes.
One kidney didn’t work any more, and the other was struggling. She needed a transplant. She was a young woman, loved by many, with a brother and cousin of the same common blood type, it should’ve been straightforward.
But there was a problem. Blanka’s kidneys had been modified in the OhZone process; now only a donor, who was also a purple-blood, could donate her a kidney. And there wasn’t one.
86 ≥ GIRL WHO FELL 1
She heard meowing, cracked open the door, and let her rescue kitten, Luna, in. Cuddling the small black creature, Blanka remembered her last cat, Mungle, who’d died the year before.
He’d hid a lot. The animal rescue retrieved him from kids in South London who cut off his whiskers and tortured him, posted videos of it on Facebook.
At least he spent the last year of his life happily, and without torment, Blanka said to Hebe in her head.
You were his guardian angel, the AI replied.
Blanka smiled, gave Luna a little kiss, and the kitten scurried under the comforter.
When Blanka was away, Miss Banks and an eccentric neighbour cal ed Sir Geoffrey cared for her pets.
Mungle was buried in the orchard where he loved to hide.
‘He doesn’t need to hide any more,’ Blanka said aloud, and tears ran down her cheek.
He died of kidney failure; she’d nursed him through his last 10 days. There was just no escape from the spectre of kidney failure.
‘Don’t cry, stupid,’ she said to herself. ‘Crying won’t help.’
Luna pounced about under the bedclothes, and stuck her head out. Blanka tickled her, and she pretend-bit her hand.
Blanka put her face close, and Luna rubbed her head against it.
‘Shal I tel you a story?’ Blanka whispered, in a squeaky voice.
The kitten meowed.
‘About Jack a Nory?’ Blanka giggled, tickling Luna’s tummy.
The cat patted her hand with its paws.
‘Shal I begin it?’ she said, squeaking higher.
Luna froze, and stared, captivated.
‘That’s all that’s in it!’ exclaimed Blanka, throwing the bedclothes off.
Luna shot up in the air vertical y, landing on Blanka’s blonde head. They chased each other round the bed a few times, then
R A E C H E L S A N D S ≥
87
out the door. Downstairs, in the kitchen, Blanka fed Luna, fil ed her pink tea kettle with water, and put it on the gas ring.
She’d fallen asleep in her contact lenses, and her eyes hurt, so she trotted upstairs to the bathroom.
She squinted in the mirror, gently squeezed a blue contact between her thumb and index finger, and removed it from her eye. Her actual eye was the same blue color underneath, but with a slight violet glow.
‘A contact lens to hide the monster,’ she hissed, then dropped the contacts in the disinfecting solution.
Back in the kitchen, Blanka peeked out a window onto what the English called a cottage garden, and beyond that to her orchard, her beehives. Her AI vision cut through the fog.
My bees are huddled like a rugby scrum, she thought.
Since childhood, she’d loved to see shapes of animals in the trees, and she fancied she saw the shape of a fire dragon in her English oak tree.
Inside the sill were herbs, stones and figures laid out in
a miniature Zen garden; a Buddha sat in the relationship corner next to a shiny purple bag.
Wanting some calm music, she selected one of her own mix CDs. Now, her pink kettle complemented her kitchen, where sculptures of endangered animals in a wall-to-wall rainforest were animated by her mix of piano and drums sampled from the intro of Love, Reign o’er Me in the Sting movie Q uadraphenia.
A little bit of The Wild in the midst of S-W-1, she thought.
Like the ghost of goodness past, the sound of Live Aid rang
out from the CD, and from South Phil y’s long-forgotten J.F.K.
Stadium. Jack Nicholson introduced the historic 1985 event: Got a big surprise coming up for you from Wembley.
88 ≥ GIRL WHO FELL 1
Here’s a truly legendary rock ’n’ roll band, please welcome—The Who.
‘We called your Mom by her initials, K.S.K.,’ Blanka’s grandmother Jane once explained. ‘After President Kennedy’s nickname, J.F.K. …As they were busy gunning down the young president, your Mom was busy being born…’
‘Isn’t that something,’ Blanka had said.
She swallowed hard at the memory—her Grandma
describing her mother, whom she’d hardly known at al .
‘She liked the label, said it must have been Kennedy’s karma to be murdered,’ her Grandma continued. “Sad to say. I wonder who he’l be reborn as,” is what she said. Such a strange thing to say, don’t you think? At any rate, I remember your grandpa Bil y’s words when your Mom was just one hour old. He was a tough naval man, but his face was pale. He held Kitty in his arms, and kissed her. “I’m sorry Jane dear,” he said. “The President has been assassinated.”’
That’s the past, thought Blanka.
From the Zen garden, she lifted up a pink envelope addressed Miss Emma and Miss Olga Grinin, and stuck a stamp with the Queen’s face on it. She selected a box of loose green tea from the cupboard, as piano, cymbals and rain mixed with kettle sounds.
One for each person and one for the pot, she said to Hebe, heaping two teaspoonfuls into the galaxy teapot. No offense intended.
None taken, Hebe replied.
She lifted the purple bag and closed her eyes. ‘Let’s see what rune we get for the future,’ she said, shaking the bag.
She stuck her hand inside the bag, and took it out with a rune clasped between her finger and thumb.