You Think You Know Someone

by J B Holman

  ‘Sounds exciting. What do you want me to do?’ replied Selina, the DPM’s Assistant Private Secretary. Julie told her in detail, step by step, but didn’t tell her why. ‘Got it,’ said the DPM’s APS. ‘This is going to cost you an evening of alcoholism, Miss Julie Connor.’

  ‘Sure. That’s a definite. So what’s it like working for the Prime Minster-in-waiting?’

  ‘OMG! It’s mental here! He’s all over the place. A lovely guy, but never held high office before, or any office really. We’ll beat him into shape, but he moves the goalposts every day.’

  ‘I thought he was a Steady Eddie.’

  ‘He is, but he has a political advisor, Bettie Slaker and she’s a head-case. Manic, gets him running around in all directions. We call her Marion.’

  ‘What like Maid Marion, because he’s her Robin Hood?’

  ‘No, we call her Marion because he’s her little marionette. If you want to know what he’ll be thinking tomorrow, you just need to know what she’s thinking today.’

  ‘So she’s the power behind the throne?’

  ‘Seems to be. I gotta go. Two o’clock to three o’clock, right?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘OK. Be good, little Connor. Bye.’

  Foxx wandered back and announced, ‘I have a guy that’ll be sending over a copy of the CCTV of the shooting. They’ve made it highly classified, but he owes me. You got anything?’

  ‘No, not yet, but I do need to be in an internet café between two and three.’ She pulled out cash to settle the bill. ‘Oh yes, there’s someone else we need to check out. Probably a dead end, but you never know with puppet masters.’

  The DPM sat in his office. It was 2.24 in the afternoon. His email pinged, it was marked urgent. He read it and phoned Selina, the APS who sent it. She wasn’t answering her phone, so he walked round to her desk. No sign of her.

  ‘Where’s Selina?’

  ‘At a Home Office meeting until three.’

  He returned to his office and responded to his high security, top priority email without delay. Then, as instructed to maintain security protocols, he deleted his reply. He had more pressing matters to worry about.

  The PM could be stubborn. How could he persuade him to resign? He would have the conversation next week after the Brexit talks in Marseille; but he wasn’t hopeful. The last time he’d brought up the subject, the PM had just looked at him and said,

  ‘Me? Resign? Over my dead body.’

  It had just gone 3.00 when Selina, popped her head round the door.

  ‘Were you looking for me, sir?’ she asked the DPM, keen to help.

  ‘Yes. Just to say I dealt with that security matter you sent me.’

  ‘What security matter? I didn’t send you anything.’

  ‘Look, here. It was at 2.24 today.’

  ‘I was in the Home Office meeting with the Home Secretary and twenty-three of his people, no laptop, phone or iPad. I didn’t send you anything. May I see?’ She looked at the email. It was sent from her account. ‘I didn’t send you that. You’ve been hacked. I hope you didn’t reply?’

  He sheepishly admitted he had.

  ‘Can I see the reply?’

  He confessed to deleting it. She looked at him amazed. ‘Sir, may I say that this is serious. There’s been a breach. I need to make the call – to Security. They’ll be able to confirm where the email was sent from, but if it wasn’t from within this building then you’ve just given a highly classified secret to an unknown hacker.’ His face fell. He knew he was in trouble.

  She could see he needed support. She put a reassuring hand on his forearm and their professional relation took an instant and immeasurable step forwards.

  ‘Richard,’ she said more softly, ‘I really should call Security, but let me call a friend in the IT Department first. Maybe we can keep this under the radar’

  She dialled knowing that the trace would lead to an internet café many miles away, where someone had gained remote access and somehow hacked her passcode.

  ‘How could that happen?’ he asked rhetorically. She shook her head and muttered,

  ‘One of life’s little mysteries.’

  ‘Yay!’ said Julie under her breath.

  ‘What’ve you got?’ They were sat together in her boyfriend’s sporty hatchback.

  ‘The DPM. You told me to ask him, so I did. He has just blindly sent me his top secret email address. And. . . . t’dah . . . he is not Dominion1431. He is not our man. He has given me a different email address.’ She deleted the email and closed the account.

  ‘Good call,’ said Foxx. ‘We’re now down to two. It’s Hoy or Tenby.’

  Charlie sat demurely outside her husband’s office, quietly absorbed in her laptop. There was no one around except for Lesley who had not said a word, but malice got the better of her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Lesley asked her, conversationally.

  ‘Online trading,’ replied Charlie, unaware of how odd that sounded coming out of her mouth. Lesley couldn’t resist the hint of a bitter smile.

  ‘Do you spend a lot of time doing that?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Most of us call it e-Baying, dear. Is it e-Bay you use or do you prefer that other one, what’s it called now . . . ah yes, HisCash.com?’

  Charlie didn’t answer the question, nor did she miss the slur it contained. She thought about what Julie had told her. You should call her out on it next time you see her.

  ‘Lesley, I want to say something to you, is that OK?’

  ‘Yes dear, anything you like,’ replied Lesley, eager for more ammunition.

  ‘It’s this,’ continued Charlie gracefully. ‘I bought you those concert tickets. They were very hard to come by. I got them for you because I know you enjoy jazz and Sanborn in particular. I gave you a set of old jazz records. You and I know they’re worth thousands of pounds and I just gave them to you as a present. And . . .’ she paused just slightly, ‘and I regularly give you my husband four nights a week for your pleasure and his. The least you could do would be to say thank you, or at a minimum, be polite to me. I don’t expect you to like me and of course, I don’t expect you to respect me, but manners cost nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean, me and your husband! How dare you?’

  ‘Lesley,’ she said calmly, ‘I copied the pictures and the videos from Nicki’s phone.’ She flicked through her pictures. ‘It was Saturday, when he was supposed to be having dinner with me and the DPM. I’m sure you remember: it was the first time you wore the spreader-bars. To be honest, they suit you. I refused to wear them, a bit slutty for my taste, but you seemed very happy in them. Here, look.’ Charlie showed Lesley the picture on her phone. ‘And I see you also enjoyed the new whip.’ She showed her a video clip. ‘Actually, it’s mine. I mean, I bought it. It’s my whip. Stings like a bitch, doesn’t it? I bought it with you in mind. He’s never used it on me - he respects me too much for that. I just left it in the toy drawer. He thinks I never go in there and wouldn’t miss it. But next time he uses it on you, just remember; it’s mine and I bought it specially for you.’

  ‘So does he know that you know?’ asked Lesley, seething deeply.

  ‘No, he doesn’t know and he doesn’t need to know.’

  ‘Well, he does, because I’ll tell him when I dump him. You can have your husband back!’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Charlie with soft, sincere sympathy. ‘If only it were that simple, but unfortunately Nicki is not a simple man. He really doesn’t take rejection well. You would need to find another job, outside the Civil Service. He can be terribly mean. The last person who left him ended up with a false criminal record. I’m so sorry, but I’m afraid you’re stuck with him, and me, until he’s finished with you. So, all I am saying is if you could just be polite, I would really appreciate it.’ She packed up her laptop and put it in her bag. ‘Tell Nicki, I’ll see him later, at home.’

  ‘Enjoy it while you can,’ said Lesley in a voice laden with threat. ‘Nickol
as is throwing you out and I’m moving in. He’s been planning it for weeks.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ replied Charlie. ‘He told you that?’

  Lesley smiled meanly and said nothing.

  Charlie sat down again, close to Lesley and looked sorrowful. Their eyes met. ‘Lesley,’ she said calmly, ‘d’you think you’re the first woman he’s said that to? If he wanted me out, he would’ve done it years ago. But there’s one reason why that’s never going to happen.’

  ‘What’s that then?’

  ‘It’s my house.’

  The shock on Lesley’s face was a picture. Charlie continued.

  ‘Mr Taylor did it. Nicki asked me to get Mr Taylor to arrange his Inheritance Tax Planning and he put the house in my name. Nicki signed the papers, but to be honest, I don’t think he really read them. So it’s my house.’

  ‘But you’ll never be able to run it without Nicki’s money,’ said Lesley, desperate for any point-scoring she could salvage.

  ‘Thank you for your concern, but I’ll be OK. Lesley, I didn’t mean to upset you. Nicki is difficult. It’s hard for us both, so we might as well be nice to each other.’

  There was nothing else to say, so she stood up to leave.

  ‘Charlie,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Yes?’

  Lesley squinted her eyes as evil consumed her face. She hissed quietly, ‘No one beats me. Least of all you. Mrs Morgan-Tenby; you’re dead. You are a dead woman walking. Goodbye.’

  With an unwanted half-tear in her moistened eye and with all the dignity she could muster, Charlie left. It would be the last time she would ever enter the building.

  And all because Julie had said the words: You should call her out.

  23

  Antelope-Beaver

  Foxx idly scanned the MSN news briefs on his phone.

  PM to talk today about employment after Brexit.

  Defence Industry prepares for cuts. ‘We are being neutered’ said a Senior Defence Official.

  Housing Bill passed with a majority of one. Benefits are on a sliding scale. ‘We can now help more people more fully,’ said the Social Services Secretary last night.

  Minimum wage higher after Brexit, but Labour says loopholes need to be closed.

  Home for troubled teenagers is to close through lack of Government funding - Foxdale Children’s Home is to close its doors for the last time at the end of the year.

  ‘Census statistics will show a more comfortable and untied Britain,’ said a Gallup spokesperson.

  Interesting typo, thought Foxx, but his mind was not really on the screen.

  ‘D’you think Mr and Mrs Hoy use Alexa?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Alexa is a marvellous invention. It’s like bugging your own home. You connect a microphone in your own house to the outside world of the Internet.’

  Foxx tapped into the Hoy’s IP address and then hacked into their private computer. ‘Deep joy! They do! It’s not Alexa, but something similar. Mr Hoy, Head of Investigations for the Special Security Services, has bugged his own home. It’s a long shot that he’ll say anything incriminating, but I’ll record it all anyway. I tried to do the same with the Tenby’s after our visit, but the firewall was too high. Let’s see what it brings.’ He hit a series of keys on his laptop and it was done. He continued, ‘What about you? What have you got?’

  ‘I’ve been working on the Bevan Report. It was important to Tenby, so I thought it might be important to us. Bevan is an apparently altruistic, do-gooder, university professor and Chair of the Faculty of Social Economics, but behind his fallacious façade of fairness, he’s a really pernicious and devious racist. The paper purports to be about the administrative requirements of making UK abortion services available to foreign nationals, but really it’s a review of how we charge non-residents to use our National Health Service.

  He doesn’t define the term “non-resident”, but in one of the fourteen appendices he’s done some serious calculations on how much the NHS would save if it only treated people whose families were here when the NHS was started on 5th July 1948, and at each ten-year point after that. In the 2000s he’s worked it out year by year. For example, if you had to be in the UK for five years before being entitled to use the NHS, then it would save the government over £6 billion, and if it were ten years, the amount saved would be three times as much, which out of a £102 billion budget is significant. The proposal is that, like abortions, the whole Health Service should not be used free by new immigrants who have not yet entered the UK. But the paper goes on to recommend that they should not have any rights to free health care for the first twelve months of working here full-time. In a post-Brexit Britain, that would be quite palatable to Parliament and to the voters.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘To be sure of getting it voted through, they removed the twelve-month limitation clause, initially. But get this: a new clause slipped in on page 89 of the green paper says that the timescale can be altered by the Minster of Health, at any time, according to need! And there’s no clause to say he can’t apply it retrospectively to people already in the country.

  The Bill was pushed through with a majority of one and it’s now law. If the Health Minister wanted, he could make everyone who entered the country after, say 2001, pay for all their health-care costs and nothing under the Law could stop him. That is the thin end of an enormous wedge of money.

  Now the really interesting bit: the research was sponsored by a private donation to the university from a certain Mr Nickolas Morgan-Tenby.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with us?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it’s the same with Anderson: different university, but Tenby financed the research in the same way. It’s about saving money in the military by combining command structures at the top. I don’t fully understand it, but it looks like it would make Storrington, Commander of the Joint Chief Staff Committee and that would somehow save hundreds of millions of pounds. It’s not law yet, but my APS friend says that the DPM signed a memo this week to recommend it should become law. It seems a hurried and slightly suspect piece of legislation, so they’ll no doubt bounce it through the House and into law while your dad’s busy sorting out Europe.

  I checked deeper and found five more pieces of legislation that Tenby has been involved with through select committees. It doesn’t make sense. What’s Tenby up to? He’s not even a politician. What’s his plan?’

  Foxx shook his head. His mind was elsewhere.

  ‘Take a look at this,’ he said, decrypting as he talked. ‘I have a theory about the hotel shooting and I’m hoping this will bear it out.’

  He showed her CCTV footage from another hotel’s loading bay that showed in the background the exit that the PM had used. The picture wasn’t good. Tenby and the PM came out together followed by Colin Lewis who stood behind the PM. Moments later, the shot caused panic and devastation. The Prime Minister had moved at the last second and both bullets penetrated the heart of his innocent aid behind him.

  ‘He missed,’ said Julie, stating what was already known.

  ‘No,’ said Foxx emphatically, ‘he didn’t. He didn’t miss. It was a dead shot. Colin Lewis was the target.’

  She rewound the last ten seconds.

  ‘See? A double tap straight to the heart; a perfect aim. Look at it again from the beginning.’ They watched.

  Tenby had stepped out next to the PM, but not in the sniper’s line of fire. Tenby dropped the file he was holding; deliberately or not it was hard to tell. The PM, true to character but not like a statesman, knelt to pick up the papers before they were spoiled by the rain-soaked ground. Four seconds after he knelt, Colin Lewis was hit by two shots to the heart and died instantly.

  ‘The distance was 1,247 metres. At about 1,700 mph, that’s 770 metres a second, so it would take a shade over one and a half seconds for the bullet to hit the target. The sniper pulled the trigger a full two seconds after the PM knelt. That’s a lifetime in the
mental clock of a sniper good enough to make that shot. He didn’t miss his target. The target was Colin Lewis, Head of Resources, the man who hired the sniper for the job - even though I doubt he knew what the job was. Dirk was covering his tracks.

  Think about it,’ continued Foxx, getting more excited. ‘Who knew about his plan? Me, because I wrote it, you because you forwarded it, Tenby or Hoy whichever it was who asked for it, and Lewis, the person who hired Dirk. Dirk tried to kill us to keep us quiet. He succeeded in killing Lewis for the same reason. He wants us out of the way before he assassinates his prime target.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. It makes no real sense to me. Come on, we’re going to Basingstoke to look for a man with a scar, a limp and a very bad attitude.’

  24

  Rafiq

  ‘Nickolas, Charlie was here.’ Lesley spoke with concern in her voice. ‘She was blabbing about the list. She knows something’s up. Somehow, she’s worked out what we’re planning. She was asking too many questions about select committees.’

  ‘What? Charlie? You’re kidding? She’s as dumb as a dog with dementia. She doesn’t even know what a select committee does. She thinks they’re called erect committees!’

  ‘I know she doesn’t, but I’m afraid she’ll ask someone to explain and she’ll shoot her mouth off. She said she was going to talk to some people about it, but she didn’t say who. Someone in the police, I think she said.’

  ‘Jesus. Are you sure?’ His tone changed. ‘This is serious.’

  ‘Yes, Nickolas, it is. She’s a danger. We have no choice now. You know what you have to do, don’t you?’

  There was a long, prolonged, protracted silence on the end of the phone. ‘Don’t you?’ repeated Lesley.