by Andy Maslen
Don laughed.
‘Absolutely not. Not after the telling off I got last time.’ He turned to Eli and Gabriel for support. ‘All I’m saying is, Joe Tammerlane is out of touch with the people of this country. We don’t want a revolution. And do you know why?’
‘Why?’ Eli asked.
‘Because we’ve already had one.’
She frowned.
‘Really? When?’
‘Let’s say 30th January 1649. That’s when Oliver Cromwell had Charles the First’s head cut off,’ Don said, adopting a scholarly tone Gabriel had rarely heard. ‘We ended up with Cromwell as Lord Protector, which was a fancy term for a military dictator.’
Eli grinned.
‘And there was I thinking you were just an old warhorse! Now I see you missed your vocation. You should have been a historian.’
‘Huh. With a general election coming up, I’ll probably end up having to apply for a job as a window cleaner if Tammerlane gets in.’
Christine tutted and laid an affectionate hand on Don’s shoulder.
‘Don’t be silly, darling. Britain doesn’t go in for revolutionaries, like you said. That dreadful Tammerlane’s so far to the left he’ll meet himself coming the other way.’
She smiled as she said this, but Gabriel noticed the way his boss’s face darkened. Did the old man know more than he was letting on? The election was in two weeks and nothing was as it had been for decades.
The Labour party had self-destructed earlier in the year after the ‘liberal elite’ and ‘blue collar’ factions had engaged in civil war. And although all the political commentators were predicting a slender Conservative majority, he’d watched with interest, and no small measure of alarm, the rapid rise of Joe Tammerlane’s Freedom and Fairness party.
Following the model of insurgent populist parties of both right and left persuasions across Europe, Freedom and Fairness had risen from nowhere to become the second most powerful party in the UK.
Its charismatic thirty-five-year-old leader looked like a movie star. His boyish good looks – ice-blue eyes and dark, stylishly ruffled hair – and engaging smile had netted him several million Instagram followers. His tweets were read, re-tweeted, commented on in what remained of the mainstream media and argued about in pubs and around dinner tables across the country.
That he was somewhere to the left of Karl Marx bothered nobody, so readily digestible were his promises of homes for the young and jobs for the woke, urgent action on climate change and a diversion of Government spending from armaments to the NHS.
The black-clad man at the front of the briefing room eyed each member of his squad in turn. Grim-faced, the men’s cheeks blued by stubble, they stared back, caressing their weapons as if they were alive. He waited until he had their full attention.
‘When you’re all in position, you radio in with call sign. Tom and Kit, you’re on the princess and her new husband.’
The two squad members he’d just addressed nodded.
‘Rules of engagement, Skip?’ another man asked.
‘Simple. Anyone moving faster than a walking pace towards the happy couple, you take them out,’ he said. ‘Anyone inside a fifteen-metre circle acting nervously or wearing anything thicker than a sports jacket, you take them out. Anyone spotted carrying any kind of weapon, anywhere they could use it against the targets, you take them out.’
‘Force level?’ Kit asked.
‘Lethal. Head shot if possible, otherwise centre-mass. Multiple shots authorised by Gold Commander.’
‘I heard the Knights of Albion are planning a protest, Skip,’ a tall, heavyset man said from the left-hand side of the group.
‘MI5 are in the crowd, plus Special Branch and covert teams from the Anti-Terror Command. So long as they stick to shouting, they’ll be filmed but left alone. They’re keeping them well back from the route. Any more questions?’
Heads shook in synchrony.
‘Good. Let’s go.’
The eight men and one woman left the briefing room and headed out to the car park. Bright sunshine, unobscured by a single cloud, bounced off the white paint and blue-and-yellow chequered livery of the police vehicles. Parked in a row, three dark-blue, unmarked transit vans waited for them. Three to a van, plus their rifles. They climbed in, and three high-performance engines roared into life.
Half an hour later, all nine sharpshooters were in position, their rifles resting, variously, on the parapet of a multi-storey carpark, the training tower of a decommissioned fire station, a couple of the tallest office blocks in the town centre and a turret of Windsor castle itself.
Sarah Furey, the team’s most recent, and only female, recruit, adjusted her position slightly, wedging herself more firmly into the angle between the floor and the redbrick retaining wall of the fire station training tower.
A veteran of the Iraq War, she had left the army with an honourable discharge and immediately applied to join the Metropolitan police as an authorised firearms officer or AFO. She aced the selection process, graduating top of her class and earning an approving pat on the back from the urban sniper course instructor, a former Royal Marine.
She was proud to be keeping her family’s military tradition alive. Her grandfathers on both sides had served in the armed forces, as had her father and two of her three brothers. Not a day went by when she didn’t mourn Robbie, the youngest, killed by an IED in Afghanistan in 2005.
A couple of the men she’d trained with had tried intimidating her, but after she’d dumped one on his arse and cold-cocked another who’d unwisely got in her face at the end of a post-course drinking session, they’d left her alone. Resentment turned to grudging respect as they saw what she was capable of.
Her tactical gear was still new-issue stiff, and she rolled her shoulders trying to ease the pressure on her left side.
‘Control from Whisky Foxtrot Two-Five, in position,’ she said into her cheek mic.
‘Thanks, Two-Five,’ came the reply, crackling in the stillness fifty metres above ground level. ‘All squad members, from Control. They’re leaving the church now. Radio silence apart from operational comms till they’re back inside the castle.’
Sarah ran her fingers along the rifle’s ergonomically designed stock. Checked her Schmidt & Bender Flashdot scope. She’d shot many different rifles in her time, including the G3K’s junior siblings, the G36 and the SG 516. But the G3 was her favourite, and, she knew, that of the SAS and 14 Int in Northern Ireland. Its pedigree comforted her.
The young man with George and the Dragon tattooed onto his left arm had been a member of the Knights of Albion for three years and four months. He’d joined mainly for the fighting, stayed for the comradeship and risen through the ranks for the cause. He jabbed his finger at the TV screen, spilling his lager in the process.
‘She’s married a nigger!’ he spat. ‘Can you believe it? A fucking nigger! She’s a princess for god’s sake. Wasn’t there one single white man on the planet she could’ve picked?’
Beside him, Jonathan Ballmer, the group’s deputy leader, shook his head and took a sip from his own can.
‘Race traitor, Marky-boy. Don’t you worry, our lads will make sure the world gets our message.’ He consulted his watch. ‘In about two minutes thirty.’
‘Excellent,’ Marky-boy said, draining his lager and crushing the can between the heels of his hands. ‘I can’t wait.’
From his vantage point in the churchyard, James Farrow, the BBC’s newly appointed royal correspondent, watched as the newly married couple emerged from the church. They smiled through a cloud of tumbling rose petals tossed skyward by enthusiastic flower girls drawn from the younger members of the royal family’s growing ranks.
Princess Alexandra beamed her famously toothy grin left and right like a laser beam. Her peaches-and-cream complexion was flawless, her natural beauty heightened by the skilful application of makeup. Her blonde fringe peeped out from beneath an antique lace veil, thrown back to reveal its wearer’s gleefu
l expression, blue eyes flashing in the sun.
Beside her, Thad Carty, the sixth richest black man in America, founder of a software firm now worth billions, beamed. His looks had been compared, favourably, to leading men in Hollywood, former presidents and Olympic athletes. His close-cropped moustache and goatee framed his widely smiling mouth.
‘You OK, honey?’ Carty asked his bride as they sat back against the centuries’-old leather upholstery, waiting for the coachman to settle the horses.
‘Of course I am, darling. It’s our wedding day.’
‘Only, I saw you frowning back there.’
She shook her head.
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Come on. Tell me. After all, I am your husband,’ he said, flashing her a grin.
‘That interviewer from Germany.’
‘You’re not still upset about that, are you?’
‘No! I mean, not really. But he made it sound like I was pro-Palestinian just because I spoke at that charity event. He said I was taking a political position. And you know what Granny is like about that sort of stuff. “Leave politics to the politicians, Sasha”, that’s what she always says. “However much of a balls-up they make of it”.’
He took her hand in his.
‘Hey, come on now. You were talking about poverty. Education for those kids we met. Medical supplies. Nobody could object to that, surely?’
‘The Telegraph did. They published an editorial, for god’s sake. They said I was, and I quote, “gullible at best and misguided at worst”. Told me I should stick to fashion design.’ She turned and gripped his hand in hers, remembering at the last minute to keep her smile in place for the crowds and the TV cameras. ‘How was I to know the charity had links to Hezbollah?’
‘You weren’t, baby. Nobody could have known. Let it go.’
‘I can do so much more, Thad. I’ve got it in me!’
‘I know, baby, I know. Now, let’s wave to our fans. This is going to add millions to your Insta account.’
She turned away from him, smiling, waving. Then turned back again.
‘That’s another thing. Those awful Knights of Albion people on Twitter. You saw what they called me.’
‘Hey,’ he said, softly, intentionally deepening his voice. ‘So, you married a black man. This is 2019. They need to get over themselves. Anyway, you’ve got protection, haven’t you? Look around. I bet half the people in this crowd are packing heat.’
She giggled.
‘Packing heat? Oh my god! Where did you learn that? The Big Boy’s Book of Gangster Slang?’
3
Turning away from the scene in front of the church’s magnificent front door, Farrow checked his tie knot in a handheld mirror wielded by Rosie, the new gofer, adjusted it by a fraction, and practised his smile.
‘You look great, James,’ she said, smiling. She was remarkably pretty. Wide-set eyes that radiated intelligence. Like Rachel’s used to.
His producer’s voice in his earpiece snapped him back to the present.
‘Coming to you in five, James.’
In front of him, the camera operator signalled he was running and the sound woman nodded to him, raising the boom mike into position on outstretched arms. He listened to the studio feed. Millie Campbell, the lunchtime co-anchor, was doing her link.
‘And let’s go back to our royal correspondent, James Farrow. James, she looks beautiful, doesn’t she?’
He switched on the smile, and looked into the camera lens.
‘Millie, I think radiant is probably the most overused word to describe new brides, but in the case of Princess Alexandra, I can’t think of a better one.’
Christine Webster leaned into her husband’s side and sipped from her glass.
‘Mmm, this really is very nice. Doesn’t she look pretty, Eli?’
Gabriel watched Eli from the corner of his eye. She smiled as she answered.
‘That dress. It’s…’
Gabriel knew what was coming. A meringue. No good in a fire fight. So girly. He smiled inwardly.
‘…beautiful. If she wasn’t already a princess, it would make her look like one.’
OK, I did not see that coming.
‘I agree,’ Christine said. ‘She’s just… Oh, I know it’s such a cliché, like James Farrow said, but she looks radiant, doesn’t she?’
As Farrow delivered his pre-written lines, he turned from time to time to look at the bride and groom. It was true, he reflected. She did look happy. Twenty-three years old: the same age as his daughter had been before breast cancer drew a red line across her life, leaving twin boys motherless and her husband devastated.
The treatment that might have saved her was not available on the NHS. That’s what Rachel’s oncologist had told them. Austerity was still biting.
Then came the day he knew he would never forget. The short, apologetic call from the doctor.
James had rushed to the hospital straight from covering yet another royal event, raging internally at this privileged family for whom nothing would ever be ‘unavailable’. He’d been stuck in traffic and arrived in time to find his son-in-law and the twins in a state of shock. The doctors had let him see his daughter’s emaciated, waxen-skinned body, from which the life-force had faded and then winked out ten minutes earlier.
‘James?’
He started. Millie was asking him a question. Never dry on camera. Ever. His golden rule. He smiled.
‘I missed that, Millie, sorry. I was caught up in the moment.’
Her bright-as-a-button voice bubbled in his earpiece.
‘I think we all are. I was asking what the crowd’s reaction to the royal couple has been.’
‘Well, Windsor is used to royal events, but I have to say this wedding has really brought out the best in people.’
‘Even the leader of the opposition is there, isn’t he? Joe Tammerlane?’
‘That’s right, Millie. Or supposed to be, at least. Apparently there was a train delay and, as you know, he doesn’t run a car, preferring to use public transport.’
She laughed.
‘Well, if this doesn’t change his mind about supporting the monarchy, what will?’
Farrow laughed dutifully.
‘Yes, Millie. He’d have to have a very hard heart indeed not to be moved by this magnificent spectacle.’
The screams and shouts from the crowd caught him by surprise. These weren’t the usual noises of joy and welcome for newly married royal couples. Shock and anger mixed into a swelling roar.
Farrow swivelled instinctively towards the sound and quickly saw the reason for it. Two shaven-headed youths had unfurled a banner on which the words RACE TRAITOR = RACE WAR had been professionally rendered in a font that suggested dripping blood.
Four men acted as a barrier as some of the braver members of the crowd lunged towards them, intent on tearing the banner out of their hands. Farrow saw a man and a woman filming the fracas on phones. He even had time to think very professional before several heavily built men in jeans and bomber jackets converged on the banner-wielding group and wrestled them to the ground, still under the watchful lenses of the cameras.
Don was still extolling the virtues of the country he’d pledged his life to protect.
‘The monarchy is one of the most flexible, adaptable—’
‘Oh my god, look!’ Christine said, sitting forward and jabbing her own finger at the screen.
Gabriel watched as the protesters with their bloody banner were briefly visible, yelling their slogans, before a group of men, clearly law enforcement, tackled them to the ground.
‘Idiots!’ Eli said.
‘Maybe they are, dear girl,’ Don said, ‘but look how we treat them. They weren’t allowed to get any closer or spoil the party, I’ll grant you. But there are places in the world, places you and Gabriel have been to, where they’d find themselves staring down the business end of an AK-47 for pulling a stunt like that.’
She grunted, clearly unwilling to cede
the point to her boss.
Furey watched the incident in front of the church through her G3K’s telescopic sight. Her heart rate had settled once she realised the protesters were just intent on making a noise. They were well outside the fire zone Skip had laid down and she could already see some of Special Branch’s finest pummelling the protesters into submission.
She hadn’t been out of the army long, but long enough to have forgotten a lesson drummed into her. Stay situationally aware at all times. Watch for the absence of the normal or the presence of the abnormal.
The extraordinary events taking place in the crystal clarity of her scope’s reticle were partly to blame. But whatever the cause, she missed the faint scrape of a boot on the concrete behind her. By the time she registered the presence of her attacker, it was too late.
His knee drove the breath from her body and the knife that swept left to right across her throat ensured she’d never replace it.
4
Together, the men dragged the cop’s body to the far side of the tower. The spotter laid a black ripstop nylon groundsheet over the blood pool, then reached for his binoculars to monitor the procession.
The sniper picked up the police markswoman’s G3K. He ejected the magazine and checked it, then slotted it back into the receiver with a soft click.
He rested the bipod on the parapet and began adjusting the scope. Trying to avoid thinking about his wife and children, or the woman he’d just murdered, he focused on the princess and then moved the crosshairs over to her new husband, walking slowly to the coach and waving to the crowds.
Five-fifty metres. A student’s shot. Back in the day, he could have made it drunk. He could smell the spotter’s aftershave. Knew he would never again be able to endure it.
The princess was first into the coach, her ivory gown arrayed around her like a bubble bath. Beside her, the schvartze was grinning like an idiot, waving to the crowds. Man, you have only a few seconds left of your married life, so make the most of it.