Breakout

by A P Bateman

  King took another breath, closed his eyes and tried to make sense of the situation. His mind taunted him again. He pictured his mentor, Peter Stewart. A tough Scotsman who started the day with a dram of Scotch and ended it the same way. A man who once killed a man and then ended up using his body as a pillow until morning. He looked younger in his mind, because they were in Africa and around two-hundred men were hunting them through the bush armed with machetes and AK47 rifles. They had butchered the rest of the team, and in a show of force they had eaten parts of them as King and Stewart had awaited their fate. When it was their turn to be led from the cages, the two had overpowered the men and fled through the bush. They had been hunted for days, surrounded. King had wanted to get to the river and swim, chancing the giant crocodiles, where if they survived long enough, they could build a makeshift raft and flow with the Congo river until they found civilisation. Stewart had told King their only way out was to fight. To take the battle to them because they would not expect it and that way, they had a chance of seeing their objective through. Their training and tactics would eventually win out. King knew what his memory would bring back to him. Knew it before he heard the words in his mind.

  “We’re pretty much dead already,” Stewart had pressed. “So, let’s fight like hell and see if we can beat the odds and get out of this mess…”

  King opened his eyes. He looked into the polished steel mirror, his eyes hard and cruel and cold. Sometimes, he scared himself with the intensity his reflection could return. He was going to finish what he had started. He palmed the screw, then picked up one of the paperbacks and laid down on the bed, resting on his stomach, his back to any potential camera in the ceiling. He opened the book and pretended to read. He took a deep breath and dug the flat, shaped tip of the screw into his right upper molar and started to work the tip into the slot of the metal filling. His hands shook a little, because of the enormity of what he was about to do next. He checked himself, breathed steadily and found a good fit. He eased counter-clockwise, surprised at how stiff and secure the fixing was. Slowly it began to turn. He twisted and twisted, and the cap dropped out. He could feel cold on his tooth. He dug into the cavity with the screw and a capsule dropped out and into his mouth. He carefully retrieved the capsule and set about replacing the cap back in the hole and getting it to secure into the threads. After a few attempts he worked the cap clockwise with the screw and felt it tighten. He was nearly there.

  King had visited the dentist on five occasions in preparation for the operation. Twice, a good tooth had been drilled and hollowed out and a threaded filling put into the cavity. A cavity within a cavity. The cavities had been packed with rice paper and sealed. Two weeks later, the cavities had been opened and the rice paper removed. Both pieces were bone dry. Both cavities were filled and re-sealed. In this instance, the cavity had been filled with a gelatine capsule containing a powerful cocktail of adenosine, verapamil and cocaine. It was all in the timing now. Because timing would be the difference between life and death.

  Twenty-minutes later and the cell door opened.

  “Get up, Johnson wants to see you,” said the guard.

  “No cuffs?”

  “There’s more of us outside, you won’t get very far.”

  King got off the bed and followed the guard. Brett was outside, but he barely glanced at King. King followed the guard, expected a jab to his kidney at any moment, but it never came. The guard opened the door and Johnson was seated behind the table with two cups on the table. King conceded it wouldn’t get any better than this and coughed, put his hand to his mouth and took the capsule to the back of his throat. He sat down, and the guard remained, but Brett and the other two left and closed the door.

  “I got you some tea,” Johnson said.

  “Great,” he said as he sat down and reached for the cup. He drank the capsule down and placed the cup back on the table.

  It was done.

  There was no going back.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “You said that Chicago would be first,” Johnson said. He sipped his coffee, a more relaxed manner to his questioning. He had clearly thought over King’s words, maybe he had plans of being the hero. In fact, King was certain of it. “It’s clearly not a coincidence, so tell me what you know.”

  “You haven’t had a report yet?”

  “It’s fluid. The investigation is in full flow, but we naturally have access to it.”

  “Naturally,” King commented flatly, then asked, “What is today’s date?”

  Johnson looked at him sceptically. “Why?”

  “I’m not sure how long I’ve been here,” he replied.

  “But you must have a clue. There would have been a date for the attack on Chicago.”

  King rubbed the perspiration off his brow. He was getting hot. He took a sip of tea. “Do you have any water?” he asked.

  “You okay?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m really hot…”

  Johnson looked up at the guard. “Get him a glass of water.”

  “But…” the guard went to protest.

  “Oh, Mister King is not going to do anything stupid.” He looked at King. “Is he?” King wiped his brow again, then placed his right hand over the left side of his chest. He felt as if he were having an outrageous bout of indigestion, but he knew it was so much more than that. He coughed, felt the pain ease, but it came back as quickly and more acutely. “Are you okay?”

  “The date…” King said. “What is the date?” His arms ached, and he started to pant for breath.

  “The eighteenth,” Johnson said, watching King, who had turned ashen and swayed in his chair. He looked up at the guard. “Get the doctor!”

  The guard bolted out of the door and slammed it shut behind him. Johnson was wary of King, didn’t rush to his aid, but he could see that he couldn’t put on the colour or the perspiration. He sidled around the table and touched King’s brow. It was cold and clammy despite the perspiration. He snatched up King’s wrist and checked his pulse. King was having difficulty sitting up unaided. He lolled to one side and slipped off the chair, Johnson just breaking his fall enough by still holding onto his wrist.

  The doctor burst into the room, followed by the guard. He was carrying a compact defibrillator and his old leather medical bag. He dropped both down beside King and took a pen torch out from his top pocket. He checked King’s pupils, holding his lolling eyelids open. Then he pressed his fingers deep into King’s neck, found the carotid artery and checked his watch. He didn’t count for long. King started to shudder and almost as suddenly, he went still.

  “Don’t fucking lose him!” Johnson shouted.

  The doctor started to unpack the defibrillator and snapped at Johnson, “Get him unzipped, I need to get to his chest!” Johnson unzipped the orange jumpsuit and pulled it open. “Check his airway!” Johnson did so and looked back at the doctor. “Tilt his chin back, he may have swallowed his tongue!”

  Johnson tilted King’s chin backwards. He looked back at the doctor and said, “I think he’s okay…”

  “Clearly…” the doctor snapped. “Start chest compressions!”

  Johnson recalled doing this in his early training, he found the spot and started to rock on his heels. He continued as the doctor pinched King’s nose and breathed steadily. He checked King’s pulse again, then frowned and picked up the defibrillator. He opened the lid and peeled off an adhesive pad. He secured it against King’s chest, then peeled off another pad, struggling with the wires which had twisted. He untangled it and fixed it on King’s left side, just under his ribcage. The machine ran a quick assessment and the red light illuminated on the box.

  “Stand back,” he told Johnson and pressed the button. The amber bulb on the machine flashed and the doctor started performing chest compressions. He pumped thirty times, then breathed twice for King, before repeating. He checked King’s pulse, then looked at Johnson and shook his head. “I think we’ve lost him…”

  “Don’
t fucking tell me that!” Johnson raged. “Do it again!”

  “But…”

  “Do it!”

  The doctor pressed a button on the box and the unit processed the information of the ECG. The red button illuminated again, and he said, “Stand back…” the machine shocked. There was no dramatic arc, judging by King’s reaction it wasn’t even clear the machine had shocked him. The doctor watched Johnson perform another thirty compressions, then when he stopped the doctor breathed for King twice more. He checked the pulse.

  “Again!” Johnson shouted.

  The doctor allowed the defibrillator to perform another shock. He checked King’s pulse, frowned. He dug into his medical back and brought out a syringe. “He has a pulse…” he said. “It’s faint, but there’s sign of life.” He found a vein in King’s well-muscled arm and administered the drug. “Bretylium,” the doctor said to Johnson. “Outlawed now, but my budget is fuck-all and there’s no traceability of this stuff.” He looked up at the guard and said, “Get a trolley and a couple of medics!” He turned back to Johnson. “He’ll need to go to the infirmary. And he’ll be there for a day or two at least.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The beacon that had been installed in the second molar on the other side of King’s jaw used the metal lining of the cavity as both an electrical conductor and an aerial. Installed in an inert state, making it undetectable to scanners and x-rays, it had enough power in its lithium battery to emit a high-frequency pulse signal for one week. All it needed was over seven-hundred volts of electricity to kick-start it. King’s height, weight and physical condition, combined with the severity of the cardiac arrest induced by the cocktail of drugs in the capsule he had taken, meant that anybody using a defibrillator would be unlikely to dial in any less than eight-hundred volts. It had taken a great deal of analysing, especially as the average defibrillator could be dialled in between two-hundred and fifteen-hundred volts. The drug had been concocted by a team of chemists and a cardiothoracic specialist tasked with stopping King’s heart without causing permanent damage and leaving his heart in a receptive state after unconsciousness and organ failure. A derivative of drugs used to stop a patient’s heart for rhythmic irregularities, it was a procedure that in theory would work so long as facilities for resuscitation were readily available. The rest had been down to King. It was imperative he kept his weight within the parameters, and that before he took the capsule, he would be over-hydrated. In short, he was to drink water until it became physically impossible to drink any more. Even so, he had still drunk down the tea that Johnson had offered him. The hydration would keep his organs in a healthier state once his heart had stopped, and the excess fluids ensured the electric charge from the defibrillator would maintain a good contact.

  Somewhere between three-thousand and fifteen-thousand miles above the earth, three orbiting communication satellites piggy-backed by GCHQ triangulated the signal emitted once every thirty seconds from the beacon inside the molar in the back of King’s mouth. The signal co-ordinates were sent directly to GCHQ in Cheltenham via the Echelon system, where an algorithm detected the coded signal and forwarded it directly to Simon Mereweather’s computer inside MI5 headquarters at Thames House and straight to Marnie’s smartphone. Upon receiving notification that the beacon was live, Marnie fired up her laptop and connected to the internet. She found the dedicated webpage that had been created without metatags and keywords. A webpage that nobody would stumble across unless they had the direct coded web address. She signed in, clicked on the icon and found the coordinates.

  The three vehicles were on the move within fifteen-minutes. Ramsay, Caroline, Rashid and Marnie formed the head of the convoy, with Marnie’s laptop plugged in and monitoring the signal through a wireless dongle working on 3G and 4G. Powell and Adams followed, with Big Dave and Tattooed Mick bringing up the rear. Everybody’s phone had the coordinates punched into Google Maps. This was their secondary location. Their primary objective now was to get to a staging post. Ramsay studied the map and for logistical reasons and anonymity, chose a town in the Black Hills called Custer, over one-thousand miles away.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  King woke, his head thumping, his mouth dry. He had tubes in his nose which ran down the back of his throat and a canular fitted to his wrist. He followed the tube and saw the drip beside him hanging from a trolley stand. He was hooked up to a monitor with various sticky sensor pads stuck to his chest. He could see his blood pressure reading. It was a little high. His pulse was seventy-seven. He rested at around sixty, so it was high and in line with his blood pressure. Not altogether surprising considering what he had been through.

  The room was completely clad in plastic and the floor linoleum ended a foot up the wall. King supposed it was for heavy sluicing and cleaning. There were three other beds, all of them empty. Either the Russian and the two supremacists had returned to their cells, or this was one of multiple rooms. King could see medical equipment on the counter tops, alcohol wash and paper towels beside the sink. He went to move, but heard the clang, felt the restriction and realised he was cuffed by his right hand to the bed. He was thirsty. There was a jug of water on the table beside him, but he couldn’t reach it.

  The door opened, and the doctor walked through breezily. “You’re awake, then,” he stated.

  “Could I have a drink?” King asked.

  The doctor nodded. He was around thirty, dark skinned, slim and preppy-looking. He poured the water into a plastic cup and passed it to King. “Who are you?” King drank the water down, held the cup out for a refill, but the doctor shook his head. “No, you’ll be sick. Give it thirty-minutes. I asked, who are you?”

  “I’ve already done the interrogation with Tommy-Lee Jones.”

  “Funny,” the doctor said. He looked at the monitor, picked up the records at the foot of the bed and frowned. “I’ve taken bloods,” he said. “Johnson, or Tommy-Lee, can be told they’re clear, or he can be told you took a cocktail of drugs that induced a heart infarction, leading to cardiac arrest.”

  “I’d prefer if he was told they’re clear.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “So, who are you?”

  “That was my question.”

  King shifted in the bed. He felt as if he’d been thrown off a tall building. He tried and failed to get comfortable. “That you offer two options to the blood tests infers that you are not what you seem, either.”

  “It’s not right,” the doctor said. “What goes on here.” King was cautious. He knew that the doctor could be working as a stooge. The discovery of the drugs in his blood could have led to the opportunity for a different approach to questioning. He waited for the doctor to speak again. Sometimes the best way to get someone to speak was simply to remain silent and allow them to fill the void. “People are killed when they are no longer of use. I’m not saying these people aren’t bad, Lord no. But like in Guantanamo, there are a few scooped up. Wrong time, wrong place. They might have thought it a good idea to fight with ISIS, but a few weeks and they’d be high-tailing it back to Uncle Sam, swearing allegiance and never talking about their mistake again. Bravado and ideals are easily worn out on the battlefield. I know we need to be tough, but…”

  “It’s a tough world,” said King. “The fight against terrorism is hampered by legal constraints.” He knew this all too well. Had it not been for Simon Mereweather’s predecessor, Charles Forrester, then King would not have been drawn into working for MI5. The then deputy director of the Security Service had tired of fighting a constant battle through the courts against an Islamic extremist and prominent Imam who recruited for ISIS. Forrester needed to sever the link with extremism and was willing to fight dirty. The same Imam had secured a nuclear device through the very man King was here to break out. Vladimir Zukovsky. Full circle. Only now, what information Zukovsky had would counter a threat every bit as lethal as his stolen nuclear device. In the long term, even more so.

  “I’m a doctor,
” he said. “I built up a great deal of debt during my medical training. And then I made a stupid mistake, tried to take a shortcut. That bit me in the ass, because it allowed me to be pressured. Before I knew it, I was working here. I get leave and great pay, but my life is not my own. I know they keep tabs on me when I’m at home. My parents think I work in a research facility in the Arctic. That’s what they told me to say. God only knows how I wish that was really the case.” He hung the notes back up at the foot of the bed. King could see he was stressed, his mannerisms. A twitchiness to him, erratic. He had seen junior doctors look the same way, but this guy would be a few years past that stage. “Are you a reporter?” he asked.