by Geoff Wolak
An hour later Johno sat staring at the wall of a cheap hotel room, several empty beer cans littering the small window table. With pursed lips he blew out, long and slow. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘We both know you’re a good actor,’ General Rose reminded his unwilling guest. ‘Good undercover. And, in the short term, all we need you to do is to be your annoying self. Keep your eyes open and your ear to the ground. If, and when, over the next few months you happen to hear the name, try and get the list – lookout for the treasure. We’re not asking you … to betray Beesely.’
Johno turned his head, making strong eye contact. ‘And I wouldn’t,’ he snarled. ‘Her Majesty’s Government, bless ‘em, left me in Kosovo. He got me out!’
General Rose sighed and straightened. ‘Let’s not go back over old ground. This is about the safety of the UK–’
‘Yeah, yeah, we did the patriotic speech bit. I sat up to attention, remember.’
‘In effect, we’re not asking you to do anything. We’ve given you the details and the clues, so that if and when the times comes you’ll know what to do.’
Johno faced the wall again. ‘Bloody … hell,’ he let out. ‘And what’s these Swiss boys’ interest in Beesely again?
‘You tell us … when you find out,’ General Rose stated.
‘We’ll drop you around at the lap-dancers,’ the second man offered.
Johno faced his old boss, offering a hard glare. ‘Like I could get it up now!’ He finished the last beer can. ‘Any backup on this deal?’
‘None,’ came quickly back, the reply sounding final.
‘Contact routes?’
‘The usual.’
Johno stood. ‘Love to say that it’s been a pleasure, but all things considered, I really wish I hadn’t got out of bed this morning, fuckers.’ He tipped his head at the second officer and left.
With the door slammed shut the second officer stood. ‘Can we rely on him?’
General Rose eased up. ‘All our psych’ evaluations say he’s certifiable. If he were still in the service he’d be sectioned. If he were a horse or a dog – he’d be put down! But I know Doc’ Manning, and he has faith in Johno, although God knows why. We even bugged some of his sessions. He has acute Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; regressive childhood behaviour, shouting nightmares, chronic drinking, hand tremors, the works. He wears t-shirts with little messages on them, phones people at random and takes the piss. About the only adult thing he partakes of is the prostitutes, and even that’s weird.’
‘Weird how?’ the second office asked, dreading the answer.
‘Never takes his clothes off, just gets the old todger out, keeping the scars hidden.’
‘Why are we even using him?’ the second officer complained. ‘On something this important!’
General Rose sighed. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers. And right now he’s in the right place … at the right time.’
Five minutes after the officers had vacated the room an elderly cleaner let herself in, an unlit cigarette balanced on her lip. She reached under the bed, fiddled around and removed a listening device, pocketing it. She took another from behind the mirror, a third from the bathroom before leaving, the beer cans still littering the room.
3
‘Not a pleasant way to die.’ Willis uttered the words as much to himself as his superior, stepping now across the spacious office of the new director of Britain’s overseas intelligence service.
At forty-five she remained attractive, if a little thin in the face for his liking. In her subordinates’ opinion, she had earned the post despite being noticeably younger than her predecessors; he regarded her as being more politically astute. He placed the report that he had been reading onto her desk then, as an afterthought, rotated it the right way up for her to study.
She shot him an intolerant look. ‘I doubt there are too many pleasant ways to die,’ she commented, a dry and husky voice out of character with her trim and pleasant appearance.
Willis slipped down into one of two large leather chairs arranged in front of her noticeably uncluttered desk; it supported just two flat-screen computer displays, a neatly recessed keyboard and a multi-buttoned desk phone. ‘Not something you’re going to want to read before bedtime,’ he pointed out as she started to scan the front page. She raised her eyes toward him without moving her head, then focused again on the report as he pointedly added, ‘Or any other time, come to that.’
She hesitated as she held the document, issuing a sigh. ‘Give me the highlights.’
‘This poor guy was tortured at length. And expertly, might I add. They made sure he stayed awake and understood the full weight and magnitude of what he had done, whom he had upset. They administered adrenalin injections, supplemented with cocaine on the gums – finger toothbrush!’
‘Cocaine?’ she puzzled.
‘Apparently it makes the tactile senses stronger, and it stops the attendant party from falling asleep, or inconveniently fainting too often during torture.’ She eased further back into her chair, her expression blank. ‘They took to him with a blowtorch, all captured on high quality video, this guy surviving for some six hours. Towards the end of the tape they, well, got rather nasty with him.’
‘Nasty with him?’ she repeated with a pained expression.
‘Yes,’ he grimaced, remembering some of the video images. ‘As best we can figure, the victim was our Mafia hit man, the guy on our watch list. Not an easy task, getting reliable intel’, since these guys play their cards very close to their chests.’
‘And our man’s connection?’ she asked, rising and walking to the window.
‘Our man had been tailing the deceased from Italy to Switzerland. Just at the point that our luckless Mafia man was being bundled into a van our man became aware of five other men, agents of some sort, suddenly surrounding him.’ She glanced over her shoulder briefly with a questioning look. ‘Anyway, they politely escorted him back to the Swiss-Italian border, gave him some local wine and cheese and bade him a fond farewell.’
At that Dame Helen turned around, her eyes widening. ‘Bade him a fond farewell?’
‘With a gift basket of wine and cheese for his troubles. Good quality stuff, apparently.’ She lowered her head, thinking hard as she returned to her desk. He added, ‘Local police or intelligence services seemed to be in on it, waved them through an impromptu checkpoint.’
‘The Swiss Intelligence Services’ abilities rank just above those of Luxembourg, and slightly lower down the scale than those of my local boy scouts,’ she illustrated. ‘We should know, we used to train them until they went all political in the 1990s. Now the Germans and French train and equip them.’ She took a breath, staring out of focus. ‘So just what, exactly, is going on over there?’ she thought aloud, tapping a foot.
‘All we know is that the Mafia hit man, alleged hit-man, was linked to those on our watch list, hence our interest. And it’s definitely the same Mafia guy in the video.’
She eased forward. ‘Which was sent to the supposed Mafia man’s boss, found its way into the hands of the Italian not-so-Secret Service, and to us some four weeks later.’
‘In a nutshell. Doesn’t make a lot of sense I know –’
‘It doesn’t make any damn sense!’ she pointed out. He sank further into his seat. ‘This unknown group is well connected - enough to influence or corrupt Swiss police - ruthless beyond Russian standards in what they do to this poor man, but send our man off with a packed-lunch and his tail between his legs.’ She pulled a file out of a drawer. ‘I‘ve been doing some digging.’
‘Oh?’
‘I can tie this group in to five other murders with the same taste in snuff videos. Apparently, it’s called ‘getting the chair’. They were all video taped, all victims sitting in a chair as they’re tortured. One lasted fourteen hours.’
He pursed his lips. ‘Ouch!’
She regarded her assistant for a moment. ‘Yes, ouch.’ Focusing back on the report she said, ‘All of the victims were mal
e, well built. Two more were Mafia hit men, several were Russians - one rumoured to be a particularly nasty Russian hit man with Chechen links. Another was a former Serbian special ops man, rumoured to have raped and killed the children of a German industrialist before attempting to ransom the father, and one was later identified as a Slovakian planning an attack on the Pope. A very oddly mixed bag.’
He raised his hands, palms upturned. ‘All bad boys, no tears shed.’
His boss shot him a disapproving look. ‘Perhaps. It’s almost as if there is a … vigilante element to these killings. It’s definitely the same group, cheekily confident in their ability to evade the authorities, and cheekily sending in a video each time, usually to the employer of the victim … or associates of the victim.’
‘Quite a deterrent,’ he emphasised. ‘Any details from the police in these countries?’
‘Nothing. Great professionalism each time by the attackers, not so much as a fingerprint or witness in any of the cases. Suspiciously little evidence, as if the police themselves were colluding across four countries.’
‘That hardly seems likely.’
She glanced up at nothing in particular. ‘Then we have a mystery on our hands.’
Willis stood. ‘Not to worry,’ he offered. She had put her glasses back on and now frowned at him over the rims. ‘Whoever this group is, they’re only killing the scum of Europe.’ He stepped towards the door as she returned to her previous file. Stopping and turning, he said, ‘Oh, one more thing, completely unrelated. Some old files have gone missing.’
‘What?’ she barked.
With a pained expression he informed her, ‘Yes … seems that someone has removed all files that we had on an old boy, well before your time, former section head in the seventies and eighties, a Sir Morris Beesely.’
‘Beesely!’ She jumped up, slamming her hands onto the desk. ‘Oh, God,’ she added, her shoulders dropping.
He took a step closer, surprised by her reaction. ‘This… gentleman is almost eighty years old.’
She forced herself calmer. ‘He was rumoured to have stolen Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s private journals, from Number Ten, in the seventies. We’ve been searching for those journals for a long time. Besides…’
He waited. ‘Besides … what?’
‘Never mind.’
4
On a small sailboat in a Washington D.C. marina, senior CIA analyst James Kirkpatrick studied the report that had just been placed down for him on the polished galley table. As he read and absorbed each line his face inched closer to the paper, his features hardening, his eyes widening. Finally he raised his head and stared at the elderly, white-haired man sitting opposite.
‘You see the problem?’ the white-haired man enquired, although it had clearly not been meant as a question. He glanced at the yacht’s brass barometer, gently tapping it as the boat moved, a familiar creaking sound issued by the boat’s rope moorings.
‘I do, Henry.’ Kirkpatrick eased back, taking off his glasses. ‘How do you wish to proceed?’
‘Simply close observation for now. We have to be very, very careful with this. When he was active, Beesely knew about our ... activities in this area. If he reappears with a connection to this Swiss group just as we are finalising activities then, well …’ He upturned his hands.
‘A serious impediment,’ Kirkpatrick finished off. ‘What’s Beesely’s link to our Swiss cousins?’
‘We don’t know yet, but I have taken steps to find out. Pity is, there’s a prize greatly valued in Switzerland, at least in the short term, if that’s what Beesely and his people are up to … to get at it.’
‘Do you think Beesely knows what’s hidden in Switzerland? Or what’s hidden within the K2 organisation for that matter?’
‘All we have at the moment is a great deal of K2 intercepts, all concerning Beesely.’
Kirkpatrick glanced again at the report. ‘Do you think they aim to kidnap him, to get information?’
‘Beesely hasn’t attended a meeting for ten years, hasn’t worked on any sensitive projects for twenty. What would be his value to K2?’
‘Well, they’re interested in him for some reason?’ Kirkpatrick pressed.
Henry took a breath. ‘Worst case scenario ... they’ve found something, something old that they think he can shed some light on, from the sixties or seventies - either MI6 business, or possibly us. But as far as I know, the K2 organisation has never shown any interest in anything this side of the pond.’
5
‘What kind of man is Beesely?’ the front seat passenger asked in a mildly accented voice. The driver turned his head, but the question had been meant for the passenger in the rear.
The three men sat in a darkened Range Rover, the inside even darker than the rain-swept dusk outside due to the vehicles’ tinted and bullet-proof glass. Those rain clouds had brought on dusk an hour early on this otherwise mild June day in the English countryside. From their raised positions, the men could see out over hedgerows on either side of the country lane they had stopped in. In the distance they could just make out a large house with its lights on, nestled between a wood and a small lake.
The rear passenger began, ‘He’s a unique man, and he was a good officer back in the day – a good leader of men. He coined the phrase leading from the front. He’s also an old-school gentleman, a proper gentleman, not like some of the public school twats that run the intelligence services these days. You could image Beesely on a hunt in Africa with a line of slave bearers behind him.
‘I’ve known him almost twenty-five years, right from my first days in SAS. He wasn’t there then, he was working for Army Intelligence, but I heard the stories and met people who knew him. When I did finally meet him I took to him straight away. He’s simple in his attitude, no messing about. If he’s wrong he’ll admit it, not like most of the Ruperts I worked for… who’d do anything to advance their own careers.
‘He takes care of his boys, those he send outs. Breaks his fucking heart if one gets hurt. What he did for Johno in Kosovo was no isolated case, he would have done it for anyone working for him if he could. He’s eighty now, but still sharp as a tack and going strong. I haven’t seen him for two years, but I don’t reckon he’s changed much.’
The front seat passenger sighed.
‘You’ll be fine, boss. It’s going to be like frigging Christmas in there when they see me. Smartest move you made - bringing me along.’
The front seat passenger announced, ‘I would rather … climb Everest again than be here. I hate things that are not ... controllable, not black and white.’ He spoke with a clipped accept, even-toned, and with no hint of emotion.
‘Well that’s because you’re a tight-arsed Swiss banker. No offence. You can control the figures on a balance sheet, but you can’t control people, especially not the ones in that house.’
‘Sir?’ the driver asked in English, but clearly not his first language. ‘Why is Lower Church Fenton called lower, and Upper Church Fenton called upper, when the signs are there … and this land is flat?’
The ‘sir’ in the front seat turned his head towards the rear. ‘I have wondered this myself. The land here is flat, no hills, yet many place names are ‘lower’ or ‘upper’?’
‘Streams, Boss. The villages are roughly at the same height above sea level, but a stream flows from one to the other, and in the old days a stream was a valuable commodity for all your frigging cows and crops and the like. Downstream was ‘lower’ and upstream is ‘upper’. In those days, if you widened or dammed-up the stream, your neighbours downstream cut your bollocks off.’
The two men in the front nodded their understanding, less so for the quality of the explanation.
‘Great,’ the rear passenger complained. ‘Now I’m frigging hungry. Shall we roll, Boss?’
The ‘tight-arsed Swiss banker’ picked up his mobile phone.
Unknown to the three men, their Range Rover came into view through a night-sight, the central
feature of a bright green-grey image. With a gloved finger a button was selected, doubling the magnification, the sight’s built-in software taking a moment to adjust and settle. The vehicle’s occupants were not clearly visible, their general outlines appearing as distorted pale green blobs through the tempered, tinted windows.
The observer focused on the shapes, a wry smile forming. ‘Two, this is One,’ he whispered in an American accent. ‘That vehicle has bullet-proof glass.’
The observer swept left then right, the thermal image adjusting itself. The car’s bonnet displayed as bright orange, indicating heat, the headlights a rich red colour that was being toned down automatically by the system software. He turned on Video Record, a red flashing square of writing appearing in the bottom left of the image, its too small to be legible. The laser-rangefinder displaying in the top right hand corner showed ‘60m’; sixty metres. An audible beep in the man’s earpiece caused him to hold his breath. He lowered his stance quickly and put solid ground between himself and whoever else might be around, a large tree and small ditch offering him protection from being viewed with another night sight.
‘Two, this is One. You have movement?’ he whispered.
‘Standby,’ came the confident response.
He listened, unwilling to elevate himself to a position where he could see, or risking being seen.
‘We have two stealthy unknowns across the lake, kitted with night-sights. Two more rear of house.’
‘Am I clear, egress route one?’
‘Affirmative, you’re shielded from both parties. Haul it, buddy, got us some professional company for a change, not just irate Limey farmers.’