by Tim Stevens
JOKERMAN
Tim Stevens
Kindle Edition
Copyright 2013, Tim Stevens
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One
Tullivant settled his right eye against the telescopic sight and waited.
The car carrying the target crawled along the driveway like the beetle that was making its unhurried way along the twig inches from Tullivant’s face. Tullivant tracked the vehicle in the crosshairs of the scope: an executive car, a silver Mercedes R Class, probably armour plated. In its wake a thin skein of dust dissipated into the morning air.
The Mercedes was moving from right to left, from Tullivant’s point of view. He took his eye away from the scope for a moment to obtain a broad view of the scene again. On the left-hand side of his visual field the driveway expanded into a gravelled forecourt which hugged the front of a large, Georgian-era house. Three more cars were parked before the house, and a knot of people thronged around them.
The Mercedes pulled up on the forecourt and stopped. Across the expanse of lawn, Tullivant heard its engine shut off.
He twitched his neck to one side sharply to get rid of a crick that was threatening to develop, shuffled his shoulders a little, and applied his eye to the scope once more, ignoring the cool sticky sting of sweat which had gathered between his collar and the skin of his throat. Nine in the morning, and the August heat was already threatening to soak the country in lethargy as it had done every day for the last five weeks.
On the distant forecourt, all four doors of the Mercedes had opened and men were getting out. Three of them, including the driver, had the solid sinewy movements of professional fighters. The fourth, like the others in a suit, was smaller, less confident. The cluster of people who’d been standing near the other cars began to move forwards. There were five of them. Once again, the majority had the watchful, springloaded demeanours of warriors; but one was a civilian. A woman.
Tullivant held the scope steady on her profile. She was in her middle fifties, with bobbed highlighted hair and a business suit.
The Home Secretary.
Tullivant had always thought it a strange title for the second most senior member of the government. It sounded like somebody a middle-class professional might employ to manage their household administrative tasks. Her face was impassive, no welcoming smile lighting it up. Not even a politically motivated rictus.
The civilian who’d stepped out of the Mercedes approached, extending his hand. The Home Secretary took it briefly. It was a functional shake, not the faux-hearty grip of a photo-opportunity. There were no cameras to capture this particular meeting.
Well, none if you discounted the hidden CCTV devices trained on the forecourt. The ones Tullivant, more than half a kilometre away, was out of sight of.
His exact distance from the small party in front of the house was six hundred and ten metres. His rifle, a Canadian C14 Timberwolf, was famous for its anti-personnel accuracy at a range of up to 1,200 metres. The margin was a large one.
A modified sports shooting weapon, the Timberwolf had been the standard sniper rifle of the Canadian Armed Forces for nearly a decade. Tullivant hadn’t served in the Canadian army – wasn’t Canadian at all – but he’d developed an affinity for the Timberwolf, and it was now his tool of choice for this type of work.
He felt the first flicker of an increased pulse rate, the swelling in his chest which signalled that his breathing was aligning itself with a state of imminent action, and he knew the moment had arrived.
Tullivant had positioned himself along a thick horizontal branch of an ancient, colossal oak. Among the dense late summer foliage, in his dark green overalls and olive balaclava, he knew he was all but invisible.
Through the scope, the Home Secretary’s face leaned towards that of the small civilian man, as though they were about to kiss. Her lips were moving in a murmur.
Tullivant centred the crosshairs on the side of the head, just in front of the ear.
He drew a moderately deep breath.
Released it slowly.
Squeezed back on the trigger as he did so.
The rifle was fitted with both a muzzle flash hider and a sound suppressor, but the thump and crack of the firing mechanism was startlingly loud in Tullivant’s ear.
The bullet that left the muzzle did so at a velocity of something under one kilometre per second, and was capable of bringing down a large game animal.
The head disappeared from the view afforded by the telescopic sight.
A ragged cluster of yells rose up from the party in the forecourt, sending jackdaws cawing and wheeling up above the trees around Tullivant. Somewhere below the canopy of the forest, some kind of four-legged beast took flight. A deer, perhaps.
Tullivant’s instinct was to drop down off the branch onto the floor of the forest and run.
Instead, he maintained his position, roving with the scope until he saw what he wanted amidst the blur of human movement in front of the house.
The crumpled body, its head an indistinct smear.
Tullivant swung down below the branch, holding on with one hand for a moment while he gripped the rifle in the other, and dropped, landing bent-kneed on the thickly carpeted forest floor.
Near his feet was a canvas bag. He removed the magazine from the rifle and dismantled the weapon quickly, zipping the components into the bag.
Leaving the balaclava on for now, he began to run, loping among the trees, taking just enough care not to trip over a raised root or snap his ankle at the bottom of an unseen hole.
Instead of making his way straight to the road which ran along the edge of the forest, Tullivant headed towards it at a slant, so that at one point he was almost moving parallel to it.
Ahead, through the trees, he saw the van. A plain white van, one of thousands on Britain’s roads this morning or any other.
For an instant, as he emerged from the dense cloak of the trees and scrambled up the ditch beside the road, Tullivant imagined cars screaming to a halt, guns being trained on him, men shouting. But of course that was absurd. Even if the people on the forecourt had worked out which direction the shot had come from, even if they’d made it over the wall surrounding the property, and even if they’d managed to follow Tullivant on his counterintuitive jagged path through the trees… they wouldn’t have been able to summon vehicles, or additional manpower, quickly enough.
Tullivant hefted the canvas bag containing the rifle into the back of the van, stowing it in a specially created compartment under the seat. He stripped off the balaclava and the overalls and stuffed them in the compartment with the rifle. Underneath, he wore paint-stained jeans and an old white T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a brand of lager.
He fitted a peaked cap to his head. Glancing in the mirror, he saw nothing behind him but the road, winding back and upwards through the forest.
Tullivant started the engine and forced himself to pull away slowly, as the post-adrenaline jitters began to set in.
Two
There was something wrong with the scene, and it perturbed John Purkiss that he couldn’t immediately put his finger on what it was.
Vale had fallen into step beside him as he’d emerged from Warren Street Underground station and turned right down Tottenham Court Road, as he’d been instructed. It was the way Vale often began their meetings, appearing from nowhere like a silent vampire. Even without his customary trenchcoat, which he’d forgone because of the summer heat in favour of an ancient tweed
jacket, Vale managed to look sepulchral. Tall, bone-thin and with a hunch that was growing more pronounced each time Purkiss met him, Vale was an oddity for his generation: a sixty-something-year-old member of the Establishment who happened to be of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity.
‘John.’
‘Quentin.’
It was all they ever required for a greeting.
Purkiss let Vale set the pace, turning with him off the noisy chaos of Tottenham Court Road towards the bohemian maze of Fitzrovia. The pavements were cluttered with early lunchers eating al fresco outside the Italian restaurants and French bistros that seemed to make up every second address. Bright, young laughter rang through the streets, the city wallowing in the unusual run of fine weather that had been granted it like the smile of an indulgent god.
Yes, Purkiss thought. There’s something very wrong here.
He’d taken the call from Vale two hours earlier. Weeks, sometimes months would go by without any contact whatsoever. Then, the phone would ring, Vale would request a meeting, and Purkiss would invariably be there. Always in a public place; as far as Purkiss knew, Vale didn’t operate out of an office.
Both men were former SIS, officers of British Intelligence. Each had left the Service for reasons of his own. Vale continued to be retained by the Service in some complicated way Purkiss didn’t fully understand. The Service asked for Vale’s help when there was a problem with one of its agents. A problem which needed to be taken care of discreetly, and outside official channels, to avoid unnecessary public embarrassment.
And Purkiss was the man Vale employed to take care of the problem.
They reached Clipstone Street, the giant Telecom Tower looming ahead, and Vale began to mount a short flight of steps leading up to a boxy, nineteen sixties office-block building. It was then that Purkiss realised what was wrong.
‘You’re not smoking,’ he said.
Vale turned. ‘That’s right. I quit three weeks ago.’
‘Why?’
Purkiss had never seen Vale without a cigarette in his hand. Even indoors, he held one between his fingers, unlit. He smoked with dedication, methodically, not like a craven addict fending off withdrawal symptoms but like a man who gained something positive, even life-affirming from the act.
Vale reached the top of the steps and pressed a button. ‘Angina,’ he said.
Purkiss caught up with him, was about to ask more, when the door buzzed open.
Inside was a gloomily lit lobby, unmanned, with a pair of lifts at the far end. Vale ignored them and turned up the fire stairs to the left, as if to defy the diagnosis he’d been given. They climbed to the second floor. At the top was a glass door, unmarked. Vale pushed through, and Purkiss followed him into an oblong room with a conference table down the middle.
A woman was seated at the table, a notebook computer open before her. Also on the table were a jug of water and three glasses, one of them half full.
Purkiss recognised the woman immediately, even though he’d never met her.
She didn’t get up, but glanced at them in turn.
‘Quentin,’ she said. ‘And John Purkiss.’
Her gaze lingered on Purkiss, roving over his face, as if she was comparing him in the flesh with an image, a file, in her head.
Then she half-rose, reached across the table to shake hands. Her grip was firm, the palm slightly callused.
‘Maureen Kasabian,’ she said.
Her blue eyes were sharp, but the pouches sagged heavily beneath them. In fact her entire face, seamed and weathered, seemed to be slipping downwards, as if she’d lost weight abruptly and the skin hadn’t had a chance to catch up. Slate-coloured hair, functionally trimmed and long enough at the back to be secured in an indifferent pony tail, matched her charcoal trouser suit. The jacket was slung across the chair beside her and she was in white, rolled-up shirtsleeves.
The two men sat. Kasabian indicated the water jug, and Vale poured them each a glass.
Purkiss mentally ran through all he knew about Mo Kasabian. She must be in her early sixties, around Vale’s age, and though her face made her look older, her movements were those of a much younger, more agile woman. A law graduate from Oxford, she had been president of the Students’ Union in the early nineteen seventies, and had earned a reputation as a left-wing firebrand, leading numerous high-profile protest marches against the Vietnam war, apartheid, and British army activity in Northern Ireland. She’d been arrested more than ten times, had convictions for breach of the peace and damage to public property, and narrowly escaped prison time for assault against a police officer.
As a barrister in the nineteen eighties, she’d specialised in cases that took on the Establishment. Victims of police brutality, asylum seekers facing deportation to countries with no concept of human rights, ordinary workers made ill through corporate irresponsibility. Unlike many other lawyers of her type, Kasabian had never gone in for grandstanding, had never worked the media in a self-aggrandising way. Her success rate was better than average.
In the nineties she’d gravitated towards counter-intelligence work, prompted by her interest in exposing extreme right-wing groups. At some point – Purkiss wasn’t sure when, exactly – she’d been recruited by the Security Service. Known popularly as MI5 or just Five, and Purkiss knew even some of the organisation’s employees had started to refer to it as such, it was referred to in Purkiss’s own circles as Big Sister. The larger, better-funded service, as compared to Little Sister, or SIS, or MI6, Purkiss’s own former stamping ground.
And now Kasabian was deputy director of Big Sister. The second-in-command of MI5. One step away from the most senior counter-intelligence position in the country.
Purkiss had been inside Thames House, the Security Service’s headquarters, on one or two occasions. If he was ever going to meet the service’s deputy head, he’d expect it to be there. In a well-appointed office, with a discreet retinue of bodyguards and administrative mavens close at hand. Not here, in a featureless and seemingly deserted office a few blocks away from the West End.
‘How much have you told him?’ she asked Vale. Her voice was a lawyer’s, commanding attention without being loud. The cut-glass vowels had had some of their edges smoothed over the years, as was inevitable nowadays.
‘Nothing,’ Vale said.
‘Okay.’ She drained her glass, sat back in her chair. ‘Mr Purkiss, I realise this meeting must seem unorthodox to you. And it is, of course. I’ll explain the choice of setting in a minute.’
She hesitated a second, as if testing whether Purkiss was the kind of person to jump in with questions. He wasn’t.
Kasabian continued. ‘Yesterday morning, at nine a.m., an agent of the Security Service called Charles Morrow met the Home Secretary at a secret location near Redhill, Surrey. A country home, which several ministers of state use from time to time in order to conduct meetings where absolute security is required. Morrow had approached the Home Secretary personally two days earlier to request the meeting, bypassing the chain of command within the Service. The Home Secretary granted the request. Which indicates the intended topic of conversation was something highly sensitive.’
She paused. Purkiss had the impression of a lawyer delivering a summing-up argument to a jury, making full use of silences for effect.
‘Morrow arrived under a plainclothes Special Branch escort. Just after he got out of the car – when he was shaking hands with the Home Secretary in the forecourt, in fact – he was shot dead by a sniper. The killer was in the forest surrounding the estate, on the other side of the wall. Early forensic reports suggest he, or she, was at least half a kilometre away, possibly more.
‘By the time Special Branch started their search, the sniper was long gone, of course. So far there’s nothing. No evidence anywhere of a clue.’
Purkiss didn’t ask the obvious question, but Kasabian answered it anyway.
‘This wasn’t a failed assassination attempt on the Home Secretary. She was a sitting duck, and the
sniper was a professional. Morrow was the intended victim. There’s no question about it.’
‘Did the Home Secretary say what Morrow wanted to speak to her about?’ said Vale.
‘Yes,’ said Kasabian. ‘I was in a meeting with her and the Director last night. Morrow had told her he needed to fill her in about a coverup within the Service. A criminal conspiracy. He gave no more details.’
Purkiss said, ‘But isn’t it unusual that somebody of the Home Secretary’s standing would grant a private audience to someone like Morrow? I’m assuming he wasn’t one of the top echelon. Surely the Home Secretary would want to talk to someone more senior instead. Like yourself.’
Kasabian regarded him. Not with hostility, Purkiss thought; there was fascination in her gaze, as if human beings and their endlessly varied ways of behaving and communicating afforded her a scholar’s delight. ‘Within the Service we have a special number, Mr Purkiss. A hotline, if you like. I imagine there’s something similar within your own organisation. Sorry, your former organisation. It’s for whistleblowers. People who for whatever reason can’t trust their superiors, and need confidential access to the highest level. The penalties for abuse of this number are severe. So anyone using it knows from the outset that he or she needs a very good reason to do so. Morrow used it.’
The silence was longer this time. It gave Purkiss a chance to assimilate and sift through the information, which was no doubt what Kasabian intended.
‘You’ve kept this out of the media,’ he said.
‘Of course.’ Kasabian poured more water for all of them. ‘There are all sorts of reasons why it’s not in the public interest for this to come out at the moment.’
‘You said you met the Home Secretary. And Mr Strang.’ Sir Guy Strang was the director of the Service. Kasabian’s superior.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Plus the Prime Minister, and of course the head of Special Branch and the Chief Constable of Surrey Police. A full police investigation’s been ordered, as well as an internal one within Five.’ She gave the word an ironic twist, as if she was succumbing to the popular terminology while mocking it at the same time.