The Cornmarket Conspiracy

by Sharon Hoisager

  Although Rasul had made his home in this part of Paris for more than a decade, he hated this neighborhood. Avenue de Flandre flanked what is known as a “No-Go” zone for French citizens and other mainstream Westerners. Thousands of hard-working immigrants eager to live productive lives make their home within its borders, yet the notorious neighborhood has become a slum for a large swath of Muslims who are living on the fringes of French society. It is a dangerous place largely ruled by a mixture of drug lords and Muslim Imams who command more respect and authority from the neighborhood inhabitants than the French police.

  It is a rough neighborhood for most, but not for Rasul. Though he is a French citizen by birthright, his parents emigrated from Yemen before he was born and still speak their native Arabic at home. He blends in with the people of this Muslim neighborhood effortlessly and moves easily between his Western persona, and the identity of his childhood and native culture. He is not fully Yemeni, nor is he fully French. Raised by Yemeni parents in the French Capital, and educated at the finest university in England, Rasul can never shake the feeling that he is a man with no real home and no real nationality.

  As Rasul hurried down the street with his prayer rug tucked under his arm, he thought about his old friend Andy Bolling — or Andrew as he was now called. No doubt dead, his body must be blown into a thousand fragments and lost forever deep under the English Channel. Images whip through his mind of the four years he and Andy had melded a friendship that had now spanned almost two decades. He could still see Andy’s boyish face that first morning in September, now almost twenty years ago, as his friend burst into his 1st year dorm room at Oxford. “Hey, I’m Andy Bolling,” he blurted out, thrusting out his right hand. Rasul, quiet and intense, had never had an English friend, at least not really. But they became fast friends, real mates, from the first day.

  Andy, always the jokester, insisted on calling him “Raz,” and the name had stuck. All over the small medieval college town of Oxford, he was simply Raz. For four glorious years, he wasn’t the Muslim boy, unwelcome in so many French shops and bistros. He wasn’t the immigrants’ son, the kid from the Muslim slum. The brilliant, yet shy, kid who excelled in school didn’t truly fit in in either world. He wasn’t French, and yet he wasn’t completely a Yemini Muslim either. He was Raz, a young man with no place to truly call home.

  But Andy had been his real friend. Roommates all four years of their Oxford career, he had opened up Raz’s eyes to everything the world could be. They studied Latin, physics, and philosophy by day, and hung out in all of the pubs that line the cobblestone streets of Oxford by night. Raz viewed it as his four-year vacation from Islam. For four years he lived life as almost any other western college guy. Four years of intense study, marinated in alcohol, and seasoned with women.

  His third year at Oxford, he, Andy, and two American foreign-exchange students Charlie Turner and Jorge Morales had shared a flat a few blocks from campus. Charlie and Jorge were Americans, both from Dallas, and both studying abroad for their junior year. For almost ten glorious months, the four of them had a blast. Late on weeknights, after studying all afternoon, they’d hang out in the dark little bars of Oxford. On the weekends more often than not, they’d catch a train into London and hit the bars and dance clubs in SoHo and Mayfair. Raz had never been around Americans too much, and he found them fascinating. Hard working and wildly ambitious, Charlie and Jorge introduced their flat mates to Texas Hold ‘em, Tequila, and day trading on the London and New York Stock Exchanges. Raz never knew where Charlie and Jorge came by their money, but they always seemed to have a little nest egg to make smallish trades. It was loads of fun and a good way to entertain themselves and make a little pocket change between physics exams and Latin quizzes.

  After junior year, their year of studying abroad over, Charlie and Jorge returned to Dallas, and two new flat mates moved in. Jeffrey Hunter and Trevor Wellington were the complete opposite of Charlie and Jorge, but Raz welcomed the change. Too much drinking and partying was threatening his grade point average, and as graduation neared, it was time to get serious about his future.

  Jeffrey and Trevor were great guys, very active on campus, studious and serious. Instead of partying the nights away in London’s club scene, the four new roommates smoked cigars and argued about the future of Great Britain and its place in the political and economic global landscape. Grand debates about the future of the European Union and the rising political and economic threats of the Middle and the Far East, this was how the four of them finished out their university careers. They were four mates, each one brilliant, hardworking, and idealistic. No one could have foreseen how these seemingly ordinary students’ lives would intertwine and converge to affect the world at large, in just a few short years.

  But Oxford was a very long time ago. Many of the friendships he made in and among Oxford’s seven-hundred-year-old Medieval and Gothic buildings had lasted most of his lifetime — at least he and his old friends stayed in touch with the occasional text or holiday card. But the world was changing. Raz was no more, and Rasul Aziz had taken his place. The world was in a state of political and economic turmoil, and Great Britain, in many ways, was ground zero. As it stood now, Rasul was tired of being a second-class citizen. He was tired of never having enough money or opportunities, and he was tired of the British hierarchy that had kept him out of the social elite, and now in a French slum with little opportunity to move up economically. He wanted position, money, and power, and all the privileges that went with it. And he wanted it now.

  Unfortunately, Andrew Bolling’s life was just a small part of the price that had to be paid. Rasul Aziz had his instructions, and he had carried them out. But he still had much to accomplish. Rasul brushed aside the thoughts of Andy and his days at Oxford, and focused on his next assignment. He crossed the street again and rounded the corner onto Rue de Crimee’, arriving at the front door of his book shop, Paradigm Books.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jeffrey Hunter stood staring at his refection in the bathroom mirror. As the fog on the glass slowly started to dissipate, the look on his face reflected back the shock and confusion racing through his mind. For a moment he could not make sense of the words he’d just heard, the implications too complicated and enormous to wrap his mind around. Water dripped down his body and onto the floor forming a small pool on the ceramic tile. Hunter stood motionless, waiting for the fog in his mind, like that on the mirror, to clear.

  The words he’d heard, spoken quickly in a thick foreign accent, reverberated through his brain:

  “The incident on the train last night was just a warning shot, the consequences for your complicity with the Great Satan. The British people will pay the price for the sins of their government, and we will begin to extract our revenge on the leaders of your government as well. Andrew Bolling had become a problem, so he had to go. He was just the first in line, but many will soon follow. More British blood will soon be running in the streets.” Click.

  Hunter stared at the black screen. What the hell? He touched two or three buttons, pulling up his list of recent calls. ‘Private Caller’ was at the top of the list. He punched the redial. Nothing. With his heart pounding in his chest, Jeffrey pulled a fresh shirt out of his closet, ripping the plastic dry cleaner bag off of his newly pressed white shirt. He pulled back on the same suit that he had worn to work on Friday and was still laying discarded on a side chair, grabbed his phone and his work bag, and ran out of the house. Shaken and disoriented, he was in his gray Audi and half way down the street before he realized he’d forgotten to even lock his front door. But it hardly mattered now, he was exposed and he was in danger. Hell, the entire country was in jeopardy.

  Could it be true — could Andrew have been on that train last night? In all the chaos and confusion overnight, Jeffrey had hardly realized that Andrew was not among those who showed up at the office last night to handle the disaster. Could the call just be some sort of hoax…a bid for attention by some loser looking for
attention? Or was the call a legitimate claim of responsibility — and his friend and colleague was somehow a target of the terrorist hit? If this were true, and Andrew were somehow a target because of his job or his connection to the Prime Minister, then this tragedy wasn’t just a random act of terror but a warning shot for the entire British government. Jeffrey’s heart raced as he pressed harder on the gas petal, realizing how the need to get back to his office was now more urgent than ever.

  His entire life, Jeffrey Hunter had been at the helm and in control of almost every circumstance in his life. Everything had been laid out like a cozy checklist for success. Little had threatened his ascent to power, and he took comfort and security as his birthright. But now he realized for the first time that this situation was completely out of his scope of control. If these people could take out the Chunnel Train — one of the most highly guarded and secure transportation links in the world — they could do whatever they damn well pleased. There was a target on his country, and now there was a target on his back as well.

  As he dodged traffic on Brompton Road, he thought about his friend Andrew Bolling, dead in a train tunnel seventy-five meters underground. How could a person who he had worked alongside all these years, a friend who had been a part of his life for two decades, just simply cease to exist — his body disintegrating in a massive underwater grave? Like most of the other four hundred passengers, his body would probably never be recovered. News reports coming in from the rescue site offered little hope. Two survivors had miraculously scrambled from the wreckage before the train was engulfed in flames, but there were no signs of additional survivors.

  First reports from investigators on the scene were saying that the initial explosion was believed to have been relatively small, probably an IED of some type, probably nothing bigger than a shoebox. After the two survivors from the first car had somehow escaped the wreckage, a second larger explosion and subsequent fire had incinerated almost everything. There was little left except for a tangled mass of iron and steel, much of it melted into one giant tangled pile of molten metal. The heat and smoke from the explosion and fire in the west bound to London tunnel had emanated through the connecting tunnel, causing additional damage in both the eastbound to Paris tunnel, as well as the smaller maintenance tunnel that ran between the two main tunnels. The death toll was going to be just over four hundred, including passengers and the thirteen-member crew.

  Britain had a long history of fighting to defend itself over its more than ten centuries. It had endured two World Wars, Civil Wars, uprisings, bombings, battles, and no small amount of bloodshed in its storied history, but no single act of terrorism had ever waged anywhere near this level of death and destruction. The bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie took 270 lives, but this would be so much worse, not to mention causing the destruction of one of the world’s most important transportation routes. It would take years to reopen the tunnel. The damage to Britain’s financial and economic sectors would be enormous.

  Turning again onto Downing Street, Jeffrey Hunter pulled into his reserved parking spot, and surveyed the crush of television trucks, cameras, lights, and their respective journalists all lined up like bobble heads in a carnival midway. He grabbed a baseball cap from the back seat and pulled it low over his eyes, and pulled a rumpled gray wool coat from a bag in the backseat that had been destined for a charity collection. Flipping the collar up on the well-worn coat, he dodged a couple of reporters milling on the end of the line, and circled his way around the back of #10 Downing, heading for the back door that was used just for these kinds of emergencies. He usually detested the media, and this morning was no different. His country was under siege and now he had an important phone message to deliver.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Annelise arrived in the back alley behind #10 Downing, and squeezed into a small spot between two news vans. The place was crawling with reporters, and she figured no one would be leaving anytime soon. Darting into the building, she tried ringing Andrew’s cell again for the third time. No answer. Where in the hell was he?

  Annelise wasn’t used to being out of touch with Andrew. The last eighteen months had been a whirlwind since she went to work at the Prime Minister’s Central London office. Being Jeffrey Hunter’s assistant was a dream job come true. What she had not bargained for was falling in love with Andrew Bolling, Special Assistant to the P.M.

  She had only been married four years, and was very much in love with her husband Richard. Or so she had thought. She would have been the last one she or anyone else ever suspected of having an affair. But that changed the day she first caught a glimpse of Andrew Bolling in the hall on her first day of work. Medium build with dark wavy hair, he wasn’t even her type. But something about the way he glanced into the room she was sitting in as he passed by, caught her attention. When he walked in and introduced himself, she remembered thinking he was the best-looking man she’d ever met. He was smart, intuitive, creative, idealistic, and worst of all, a real ladies’ man. After two or three office conversations, she was thinking about him constantly. Soon, she had fallen hopelessly and completely in love with Andrew Bolling.

  But right now, he wasn’t answering his phone, or even responding to text messages. She knew that he had caught a puddle jumper plane to Paris over the weekend to hang out with some college buddies, but he should have been back early last evening. With the train attack last night, he was probably holed up in an office somewhere with the P.M., trying to lay out a course of action. That’s problem #501 with having an extra-marital affair, she thought… in an emergency, you often can’t contact each other, and even worse, you can’t express excessive concern for the other person. You’ve got to be a top-notch actor, with impeccable skills of deception and self-control. But she was sick and tired of acting. She was tired of these games. But for now, she would just have to wait until he contacted her.

  Once inside the building, she made a beeline for her desk, up front near the Prime Minister’s Suite, and just outside her boss’s office. As she rounded the corner at the end of the first hall, she came face to face with her boss, Jeffrey Hunter. He didn’t look good.

  “Annie, come in to my office. We’ve got to figure some things out.”

  Annelise Craig — Annie to almost everyone in the office — dropped her purse and her leather tote bag on her desk, pulled out her lap top and rushed into his office. Taking the first seat in front of Jeffrey’s desk, she noticed that Fletcher LaForge, the Deputy National Security Advisor was already there, as was George Stanthrope, the press secretary. But no Andrew.

  “Annie, glad you’re here. We’ve already been going over some things we need to accomplish, and we’ve got to get you up to speed.”

  “But first, I’m sorry to tell you, I’ve got some terrible news.…”

  Annelise braced for more bad news…. What the hell else could be wrong now? flitted through her mind.

  “ . . . Andrew Bolling was on that train last night. We’re assuming, of course, that he didn’t make it. I’m sorry to have to tell you this. I know you and he were good friends . . . .”

  For a moment, Annelise stopped breathing. Her heart seemed to stop beating. A wave of nausea washed over her. The words coming out of Hunter’s mouth became unintelligible, and then as if time were going in reverse, the room started to spin. Everything went dark.

  When Annelise came to thirty seconds later, she was laying across Jeffrey Hunter’s brown leather couch, with Hunter, LaForge, and Stanthrope peering down at her with concerned looks all around. After gathering her composure, she was horrified at the emotional and physical vulnerability she’d just exhibited. This was the Prime Minister’s office, damn it. She couldn’t be passing out in a crisis situation. She mumbled a quick apology, offered a lame excuse blaming exhaustion and dehydration, and regained her position in the chair opposite Hunter.

  Only when everyone’s attention was focused back on Jeffrey Hunter’s stoic face did she allow herself to once again let the realizat
ion of Hunter’s words sink in. The thoughts began to race around her brain: What the hell? Andrew?? Dead? There’s no way . . . There must be a mistake. He wasn’t on that train last night . . . He’d told her that he was flying back around 7:30 p.m. on BritAir. He must be at home still or stuck in the traffic gridlock outside. She just needed to get back to her desk and try again to get him on the phone.

  Hunter was still talking. She reassured herself that Andrew Bolling, the man she had fallen desperately in love with over the last year and half, was somewhere en route to the office right now. There was just a misunderstanding about his itinerary last night, and it would all be cleared up as soon as he got to the office.

  In the meantime, Annelise forced herself to focus on the matters at hand. The P.M.’s office had an enormous task ahead to handle this crisis, including a brief speech by the Prime Minister at 9 a.m. and then another Press Conference at 6 p.m. to address the British people. They would also be coordinating the rescue and recovery operation with their counterparts in Paris, coordinating communication with other heads of state, and most importantly, working with the British police and national security agencies to find out who committed this horrific crime. She forced herself not to think about Andrew or where he might be. She would deal with that later.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jeffrey looked down at his watch…12:30 p.m., and thought again that he was ready for this meeting to break up. Even though it was a meeting with the P.M. and his National Security Council, Jeffrey was desperate to get back to his desk and get some real work accomplished. But right now, he was stuck listening to a bunch of blowhards and paper pushers eager to be in on the action. The real work being accomplished was taking place deep below the English Channel at the explosion site, and across town at the Secret Intelligence Service headquarters where the nation’s top investigators and intelligence operatives were doing the tough work of trying to decipher who actually committed this heinous act and figuring out how in the hell a bunch of vile terrorists were able to blow up one of Britain’s most important assets.