by J B Holman
‘Well? Do you?’
‘You are clearly well informed, so if I say yes, then you would know I was lying, because anyone who worked for such a secret organisation would clearly say no: First rule of Fight Club: you do not talk about Fight Club; second rule of Fight Club: you do not talk about Fight Club. I’m sure it’s the same for GCHQ-2, so I have no comment. I’m going to have to pass on that one.’
He smiled. It was a good answer. He looked her straight in the eye. ‘Hello, Serafina.’ Her look confirmed she had been caught bang to rights. ‘I am,’ and he emphasised the next two words slowly, ‘Eduard Foxx.’ A glimmer of realisation tilted her head and squinted her eyes in recollection. ‘Foxxtails, Foxxy Lady, or most recently Foxxgloves.’
‘Foxxgloves! You’re Foxxgloves? Edward Fox? Eduard Foxx, single U, double X!’
‘The very same. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Jesus Christ, Foxxgloves! What the hell are you doing breaking into my flat treating me like a bondage master’s plaything? We’re on the same side. What’s the matter with you? What’s all this home invasion, raping, bullying, beating up, tying down? Are you mad? All you had to do was tell me who you are and ask for my help.’
‘I tried that. You shut the door on me.’
‘Yes, but why the violence, why the threat?’
‘Sorry, no choice. You wouldn’t even tell me you worked for 2 when you clearly knew I knew. You would never have told me if I’d been nice about it. And don’t think it was a show. The threat was real; is real.’
‘We’re on the same side, you idiot. We’re a team. We are on the same team.’
‘Well, we used to be, but I’m not so sure now. Things change. And don’t think we’re friends or I’m any nicer just because we‘ve worked on Operations together.’
‘I never said you were nice. You killed sixteen people in an Azerbaijani jail and eight policemen in Georgia; and gutted a live bear in Norway. No, I never said you were nice.’
‘Yes. That’s me.’
‘You’re smaller than I thought.’
‘Thank you. And you’re frumpier. And why Serafina? I’ve often wondered.’
‘Serafina Pekkala. It comes from Dark Materials.’
‘So you like Philip Pullman books?’
‘No. They’re really well written, but they hurt.’
‘So why choose one of his characters as your code name?’
‘Because it fits. He’s an author who can’t keep a relationship together. Dark Materials is a thousand-page litany cataloguing the destruction of every single relationship there is. Whether it’s a young boy and girl in the same place but separated by parallel universes or angels that have been together for four thousand years, Pullman pulls them apart and destroys everything they ever had. It fits.’
‘Relationships not your strong point?’
‘Let’s just say that you’ve broken into my house, beaten me up, tortured me with cold water, stripped me naked and threatened my life; which makes this one of my better relationships.’
‘But why Serafina? She’s a witch?’
‘A good witch.’
‘Still a witch.’
‘So you don’t think it suits me?’
‘On the contrary, I think it suits you very well. She has strength of character, is kind, has a will of her own, is brave and . . .’ he hesitated for a second, ‘and she’s beautiful.’ Julie opened her mouth to refute at least the last point. ‘No comment required,’ he said closing her down. ‘The point is, Serafina Pekkala, Queen of the Witches, Ruler of GCHQ-2 Cheltenham, I need your help. I need your help to carry out my plan.’
‘I know you do, but I can’t do that. You know I can’t.’
‘Again inaccurate. In fact, it’s not so much that I need your help with the plan, to be honest: you are my plan. The plan is you and that’s why I’m here.’
‘Look you can try to seduce me with your charm or threaten me with your fists, but I took an oath and you’re asking me to break it by threatening my friends and my family.’
‘Yes. That seems like a good synopsis of where we are – except the bit about asking you to break your oath.’
‘Well, I don’t think I can help you kill the PM without smashing my oath to pieces. Why do you want to kill him anyway? And why did you kill those people in Brighton?’
‘I didn’t.’
Her eyebrows conveyed all the disbelief she could muster. ‘So the green dress and blonde wig are just coincidence?’
‘No. I was in Brighton. I was wearing the wig and the green dress. And stilettoes. I’d broken a heel so I headed down an alley looking for a place to change. They’d been tailing me and followed me, looking to the world like a bunch of gay-bashers. I figured they were Special Branch or Brekkenfield’s Ops guys that had come to arrest me, but some good Samaritan, an ex-SAS guy, got involved. He came to help and what can I say, it got messy.’
‘So he killed them?’
‘Meh.’
‘What does meh mean?’
‘Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.’
‘But you didn’t?’
‘No.’
Her face conveyed no element of believing him.
‘But you did plan the assassination of the Prime Minister?’
‘Yes.’
‘So why are you trying to kill him?’
‘I’m not.’
‘And I’m supposed to believe that? Really? You say I have to tell you the truth, but you tell me the most horrendous lies and expect me to believe them. I’ve just been through your bag. You have a step by step instruction manual on how to kill him in twenty different ways.’
‘Fourteen, actually.’ He went to his bag and pulled out the document. ‘Didn’t read it very carefully, did you? You should always start with the front cover.’ He threw it on the bed. ‘The title is not Assassin’s Instruction Book. What does it say?’
She read it aloud. ‘It says Risk Assessment.’
‘Yep, that’s my job. Like they use top class hackers to test the security of IT systems, they asked me to look for cracks and loopholes in how they protect the PM. I wrote a Risk Assessment to help keep the PM safe, but the person who asked me for it wanted an Instruction Manual on how to kill him. Someone has taken my document and rather than plug the gaps in security, is using the gaps to wipe out our country’s leader.’
‘It didn’t work very well first time.’
‘No, interesting that.’
‘So, you’re saying you didn’t do it?’
‘That’s right. I’m not the assassin. I’m a desk jockey, a planner, a tactician. I was just following instructions; instructions that I thought were approved and legitimate.’
She put her hand on his. ‘I kinda like you, even though I shouldn’t. You tell a great story and you tell it with sincerity and belief . . . but I don’t believe a word of it. You’re trained to be charming, but really you’re evil.’ She took her hand away.
‘You think? There was no evil intent in writing it. The evil lies in the malice and the premeditated hostility of whoever wants to upset the stability of the UK Government. That’s the deep, dark, danger; and that’s the evil that has to be destroyed. It’s the person who asked for it, not the person who wrote it, who carries the guilt.’
‘And do you know who that was?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Really? You know where the evil lies?’
‘Yes, 100 per cent. No doubt.’ He put the document back in his bag.
‘So tell me, who asked you for it?’
‘You did.’
8
One Out of Six
‘Put the gun exactly where it was. Exactly,’ ordered Commander Storrington.
Hoy, Head of Investigations, set up the long-range rifle precisely as it had been when the police found it. He checked the photographs and confirmed the measurements.
‘That’s it, to a millimetre.’
They were on the rooftop of the fifteen storey building. Storrington look
ed with a detailed eye at the scene, imagining the sniper lying there, gun to shoulder, eye to scope, silent, waiting.
‘Why d’you think he left the gun behind?’ he asked.
‘Who can say?’ replied Hoy. ‘Maybe he panicked or ran out of time, or lost the bag. It’s not here and the police haven’t found it yet, and without the bag he had no way of concealing the weapon. Or maybe it was part of his plan.’
‘Yes. Maybe it was. Who signed it out? I assume it was kept in the Triple S Armoury?’
‘Yes, it was. It was Foxx. It’s his gun; no one else uses it. Every officer is issued with their own weapon. We’ve checked serial numbers. It’s definitely his gun.’
‘I’m not doubting it. But was it him that signed it out?’
‘Yes, of course. It wouldn’t be released to anyone else.’
‘I know that! Did he sign? Did he sign for it? Do we have his signature?’
‘Yes, sir. His gun, his signature. His fingerprints all over it. It was him.’
‘Have you spoken to the QM who saw him sign?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Do it.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Keen to move the conversation on, Hoy continued, ‘We also have his detailed plan. It was caught there on the grille of that air-conditioning unit.’ He pointed to the exact spot. ‘I guess the wind blew it and it got wedged. The hit was planned in the minutest detail. It’s got Foxx’s name all over it.’ He pulled out two A4 plastic evidence wallets with a sheet of paper in each. The paper was torn and damaged; it had holes in it. Storrington examined it.
‘It’s typed,’ snapped Storrington. ‘It could have been typed by anyone.’
‘No, it’s got Foxx’s name all over it.’ Storrington looked disapproving. ‘Literally. Look here.’ He showed the diagram. ‘He’s labelled the Firing point as F, the Optics as O and the target with a double X – FOXX. It has got his name all over it. And here, on this sheet, if you look at the first letter of each paragraph it spells Eduard. And on this page, the first subtitle starts with an E and the second subtitle with an F. That’s his thing: he puts his name all over it.’
‘And he left it behind?’ asked Storrington rhetorically as he stared at the distant hotel and the kill zone. ‘What’s the distance?’
‘1247 metres.’
‘Did we measure it?’
‘No. That’s what it says in his notes. And he doesn’t make mistakes.’
Storrington’s face turned. ‘But he did, didn’t he,’ said the Commander emphatically. ‘He did make a mistake. He missed. He hit the wrong person. He’s not a god. He got it wrong. He failed.’ Anger dug deep in his voice. A nerve was hurting, and Hoy had hurt it.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Hoy, feeling the taste of his own foot in his mouth. His reporting on Foxx’s reputation for accuracy had been misread as misplaced adulation. This meeting was not going well and he didn’t know why.
‘Take a look, sir,’ he said, suggesting that Storrington should take up position lying in the sniper’s hide. Storrington tacitly declined the offer. He observed the scene with care, needing to see what he might have missed at first glance. The roof was flat and concrete. His eyes examined its rough surface. There were two scratches on the floor; recent scratches, one about fifteen inches long and the other about ten inches long. The lines were not straight, but curved, like they were part of the radius of a large, mostly invisible circle. Storrington looked closer. There was a third scratch, about half way between the gun and the two curved scratches. It wasn’t curved, it was just a zig-zagging mess. He said nothing. Hoy, believing he had not been heard, spoke again.
‘Take a look through the scope, get the view that he had. See for yourself.’
Storrington was not in the habit of following orders from staff more junior than him, which was everyone, except the Prime Minister, but it seemed churlish or suspicious to refuse. He knelt, then he lay, moving naturally into position. The weapon melted into his hand like a baton to a conductor.
‘Because, you used to be a sniper, didn’t you, sir,’ continued Hoy. ‘You were top marksman five years running according to your military records and you had the record for the longest range kill in your time. Beaten now of course, but at the time you set a new benchmark.’
‘You’re well informed.’
‘I’m an investigator, sir.’
‘As you keep telling me.’ Storrington, adjusted the sights and homed in on the now absent target. He swung his right leg to and fro as he focused, then his left, but not so much. Then he froze; and took the imaginary shot in his mind. Job done. He stood up.
‘Interesting thing,’ said Hoy, once Storrington was back at his full height, ‘you see those marks on the concrete; the scratches? When you lay there, they fell directly under your toes. Even when you moved your feet. Metal toe caps, I’d say.’
Storrington glowered. Hoy felt it.
‘I’ve seen enough,’ said Storrington abruptly, turned and walked away.
‘But I haven’t shown you Foxx’s cap. They found it in the stairwell.’ His words fell on absent ears. Storrington had left. Hoy was alone on the roof. He lay down and peered through the scope. It was set up exactly on target, with compensation for wind factor as prescribed precisely in the document by Foxx.
It was a dead shot. And no mistake.
Serafina Pekkala, Senior Communications Officer in the Government’s ultra-top secret GCHQ-2 sat in the bed, thinking. What do I say, what do I not say, what do I believe, what is a trap?
Eduard Foxx, secret agent, tactician and orchestrator of many assassinations sat staring at her. He was reading her face. Are you guilty, are you part of a conspiracy, are you the leader of the conspiracy, or are you as innocent as you pretend to be?
Serafina Pekkala, aka Julie Connor, needed to prove her innocence or she feared for her life. If Foxx didn’t finish her, the State would condemn her and the Special Operations Department would lock her in some dark military dungeon and vanish her away forever.
She racked her brains. Had she sent the request for a Risk Assessment to Eduard ‘Foxxgloves’ Foxx? She’d certainly written to him recently, she remembered that; but she’d sent hundreds, if not thousands, of emails since then. She couldn’t remember what the Eduard Foxx emails had said, even if she’d known at the time, which she probably didn’t.
Eduard Foxx was in a jam. He’d been sitting at his desk two days previously working late, as normal, making the Prime Minister’s country a safer place. He’d been tracking down and spying on bad people, as normal. This time it was Rafiq and his brother: two abhorrent, violent North London gangsters, who specialised in human trafficking, slave trading and child prostitution. His job was to stop them, this was normal. He’d finished work, gone home to his flat, in the dark. He’d put on his tea and flicked on the TV, as normal; and that is where normal ended.
The television had announced there’d been an assassination attempt on the PM in the exact place, at the exact time and in the exact manner that he had prescribed in his Risk Assessment. It had been a confidential document for only the very most senior eyes at the top of SSS. This was not good. Two and two added up badly in his brain.
For no reason, except inbuilt professional caution, he looked out of the window. A police raid was about to happen, except they were not police; they were SSS Operatives. They had big guns and one of them was pointing at his flat. He was in trouble; being hunted down to be shot as a well-framed assassin, to cover the tracks of whoever had ordered the document. He had to get out.
He had planned for such an escape, but had never expected it to happen. He would be in danger until he could find out who had set him up; and why - then prove it.
Serafina was the first link in the chain.
Serafina slowly let the reality of the situation dawn on her. If he was right, if Foxxgloves was telling the truth, then she was part of a conspiracy to murder the Prime Minister. If he was right, then she had indeed requested for the Assassination Plan and forwarded it to t
he assassin. She was complicit in crimes against the State, just by doing her job. She started feeling the noose of the set-up tighten around her neck. She was in trouble and she needed Foxxgloves to get her out.
Unless he was the assassin.
Eduard Foxx sat there and waited. Silence fell hard on her ears. The words ‘You did’ would not go away. She knew it was time to speak.
‘I might have done. I might have requested the document from you. Oh god, what a mess!
Most of my job is sending communiqués to our agents in the field, for your lot and 5 and 6, and even Special Branch when they’ve embedded their people oversees, but that’s not the part of my job that matters. Me and two other operatives are a forwarding station for emails from Top Officials and the whole of SSS to . . . well, to anyone really. If an email is so secret that it just cannot and must not be traced back to the sender, then it’s sent to us. Y’know, if the PM were to order a hit on a Russian agent in Ukraine, or the Head of SSS wanted to negotiate with, say Syria or the Taliban, they would want more than plausible deniability; they would want absolute deniability. So, they send me an encrypted email and I create a totally separate untraceable hyper-route email address, re-encrypt it and send it on.’
‘So who has access to this service?’
‘Everyone in SSS in one way or another, plus some high-ranking politicians. That’s about 1200 people.’
‘And there are three of you who do this in GCHQ-2, so you get 400 people each?’
‘Kind of, but it’s not evenly split. I’m more senior.’
‘So, you get what, about 100?’
‘No, six.’
‘Six hundred?’
‘No, six. Just six people. I lead the team so I get just the top six people. So if I sent you a request for a Risk Assessment, it would have originated from one of those six people.’ She thought of the consequences of what she had just said. ‘Jesus. That’s bad, isn’t it?’ She swung around to put her feet on the ground. ‘Can I get off the bed? I need my laptop.’
Nudity forgotten, she fetched her laptop and returned to the bed.