The Rhythm Section--A Stephanie Patrick Thriller

by Mark Burnell

  Stephanie wanted a cigarette, then a whole packet. She wanted vodka, then heroin, then anything so long as it stopped her thinking. She wanted to be a child again; safe, at home, in a warm kitchen with her mother moving around her, spinning the protective web of parental love. She wanted Reza Mohammed to disappear. She wanted to go to sleep and never to wake up. She wanted to be someone else, someone who wasn’t scared and exhausted.

  Dawn brought drizzle to the city. Perfect. She tried breakfast and was sick almost instantly. The day moved like a glacier. She kept expecting the adrenaline to run out and the nervous collapse to begin but it never did. Now, at eight-thirty in the evening, with her body running on empty, and with her thinking as fractured as it was ever likely to be, Stephanie was a wreck.

  Reza Mohammed was in full view, a sight that forced her heart into her throat. There were half a dozen students watching the TV. Mohammed sat behind them, his chair turned in the opposite direction. He was talking to an older man, the two of them facing one another, sitting forward, elbows on knees. Mohammed held a paper cup between his hands. Stephanie guessed their voices were lowered; there was a conspiratorial look to their body-language.

  In her mind, the plan was thoroughly rehearsed. She would get Reza Mohammed to the pay-phone. Next, she would open the gate in the railing—she had already established that it was not locked—and would then go down the steps and shoot him through the window in the fire-exit door. She had estimated the distance from barrel to bone at less than ten feet. This way, there was a chance of escape. Shooting him through the fire-exit window meant she didn’t have to enter the building, which lessened her chances of being caught, or even seen. And since she imagined that gun-shots would cause confusion, she hoped that this and the night would offer her some form of cover as she tried to get away. With five rounds left in the gun, there was no reason for her to fail unless the failure was her own; she was the only weak link in the chain.

  It felt as though her entire life had been crystallized, reduced to a single, defining moment. And this was it. All that had gone before had led to it, and all that was to happen after would be as a consequence of it.

  * * *

  She dialled the number and pressed Proctor’s mobile phone to her ear. It rang three times before it was answered.

  ‘Good evening.’

  It was the voice of the receptionist.

  ‘Could I speak to Reza Mohammed, please?’

  ‘Who is speaking?’

  She plucked names from nowhere. ‘Mary Stuart. I’m Professor Pearson’s secretary at Imperial College.’

  A pause. Then: ‘Please hold the line.’

  She was standing on the pavement by the railings. The gate was fractionally ajar. Her left hand held the phone, her right hand held the gun in her pocket. Icy rain was dripping down the back of her neck. As before, another phone started ringing in her ear, the one she could see through the fire-exit window. A stranger answered and she asked for Reza Mohammed again. She saw the man disappear along the corridor, only to reappear, moments later, in the room next door. She watched the silent movie; Reza Mohammed’s head turning, his mouth moving—a quick word to his companion—his body rising from the plastic seat. He wore khaki trousers, old trainers and a navy fleece over a white T-shirt. She imagined the bloodstains to come.

  Stephanie nudged the gate open and moved on to the broad, top step. Reza Mohammed arrived at the phone and reached for the dangling receiver. Stephanie withdrew the gun from her pocket.

  Don’t carry a gun unless you’re prepared to use it.

  His voice was deep. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is this Reza Mohammed?’

  ‘Yes. Who is this?’

  * * *

  The phone was gone, the gun was gone.

  There was a hand over her mouth stifling a word, then a scream. Now there were hands all over her, fingers digging into her flesh through her clothes. She was going backwards, upwards, being dragged, her heels scraping against stone steps. Strong arms bound her. She heard terse exchanges she could not absorb. There was rain in her eyes. And then there wasn’t.

  Suddenly, she was in a vehicle of some sort—a van, perhaps—being pushed on to an uncovered floor. It was dark inside. She heard: ‘Go, go, go!’

  She managed to twist her face slightly and this allowed her to bite the hand that had covered her mouth. A man let go and cried out in pain. Stephanie struggled as violently as she could and, finding a leg free, lashed out, connecting with something that recoiled and grunted. The vehicle swung round a corner. Everyone shifted.

  Someone else muttered, ‘For God’s sake, get her fixed!’

  There was no time to think, less time to act. Stephanie went emotionally blank, not even finding time for fear. She kicked and flailed as wildly as she could, finding unexpected reserves of strength, until a fist the size of a boot crashed into her eye. Twice. Once would have been enough. After the second punch, her power evaporated completely. Rough material was wrapped around her head and shoulders—a coarse blanket or a sack, something damp that reeked like a dustbin—while her body was subdued by invisible arms and legs. Fingers of steel were clawing at the sleeve of her right arm, tearing the material away. Then the arm itself was pinned to the cold metal floor by two powerful hands.

  A voice murmured, ‘We’re ready.’

  11

  When she opened her eyes the darkness was as absolute as it had been when they were closed. Stephanie drifted back towards consciousness slowly. She felt dizzy and the darkness didn’t help, not allowing her a visual anchor. She had never seen—or rather, not seen—or even imagined what total absence of light might be like. Her cheap plastic watch had been removed, so that even the feeble back light behind the digits was denied to her. This, surely, was the utter darkness of the dead.

  She was lying on a hard surface. A floor, presumably, but how could she know? Maybe she was on a ledge one hundred feet from the ground. She ran her palms over the surface. It was cool and smooth.

  She knew she had to discover the dimensions of her confinement. There had to be limits and definition. Darkness and infinity were too terrifying. Already, she was aware of her brain sowing seeds of panic in her stomach. She got to her hands and knees with some difficulty; her balance was impaired. The darkness was bad enough but whatever was oozing through the blood in her veins was making it worse. She retched violently, her spine drawn out like a stretching dog’s.

  Apart from her watch, her coat, shoes and belt had also been removed. Her pockets had been emptied. On her right arm, the puncture point left by the needle was tender to the touch. She was cold. She crawled slowly, sliding one palm forward, then the other, increasingly nervous about what her fingers might find. With her navigational senses damaged, she hoped she was moving in one direction. Otherwise, she could be crawling in circles inside a small room while believing she was travelling as straight as an arrow through a vast hall.

  Her fingers stubbed themselves against something hard. She flinched, retracted her hand and caught her breath. Then she reached forward again. Smooth, hard, cold, vertical. A wall. She pressed both palms to the surface and used it for support as she rose unsteadily to her feet. She chose to go left. A corner followed, then another wall and another corner. The third wall provided the first break: the finest of lines running vertically to the floor and then along it and then up again. An outline, a door. But a door with no handle. She hammered it and called out but her hands told her that no one would hear her. There was no give in the door; it was as solid as the wall in which it was set. It had clearly been built to be airtight, which meant one of two things: either her air was being provided through a vent that was out of her reach—she wondered how high the ceiling was—or there wasn’t a vent and her air supply was limited. Stephanie tried to dismiss this idea. The last thing she needed was another reason to panic. But the possibility, once thought, lingered.

  She travelled the fourth wall and the length of the first wall again, to complete an en
tire circuit. She estimated each wall to be roughly twenty-five feet in length. What kind of room was it? A cell? A storage room? And wasn’t that exactly what a cell was? A human storage room.

  Stephanie retreated to the first corner and sat down in it, hugging her legs close to her body. At least she now had some frame of reference, even if it was invisible; there was no longer any emptiness behind her. Along with the darkness, it was all in front of her.

  * * *

  I urinate in the third corner. I waited as long as I could but I have no idea how long that was. Half an hour? An hour? Several hours? The isolation of darkness is affecting my judgement. With no watch to glance at, no sky to monitor, I am suspended in time. I make my way back to the first corner, physically relieved, but ashamed. I am being reduced.

  Where am I? Who brought me here?

  These are the two questions that won’t go away. The answer to the first seems obvious. I am nowhere. As for the second question, the possibilities are less clear. I never saw any of my abductors. They grabbed me from behind and dragged me backwards. By the time I had the chance to catch a glimpse of one of them, I was in the gloom of the vehicle, being pinned to the floor. This is not the work of the police, I am sure. But is there another agency involved? Proctor’s informant at MI5—alias Smith—warned of potentially sinister consequences if the authorities ever learned of Proctor’s investigation. Is this the work of MI5, or SIS, or of some service of which I have never heard? I find this prospect alarming but I also find it strangely comforting because the alternatives are worse. Suppose my captors are linked to Reza Mohammed, or Ismail Qadiq? My runaway imagination reminds me of the way Keith Proctor looked when I last saw him.

  I am truly frightened. All the frosty aggression that kept me focused has gone. Nothing I’ve experienced in the last two years has felt like this. Even in the worst situations, I always felt that I would have a chance, that there was something I could do to help myself. But not now. I am alone and there is nothing.

  Total darkness getting darker, emptiness getting closer. To me, this is what claustrophobia is. It’s my first experience of it and it’s petrifying. Logic abstains. I can’t see anything—I hold my hand close enough to my face to feel my breath on the palm without even a suggestion of an outline for the eye—but I know the walls are closing in on me. The darkness is shrinking. I can feel it. The air is crushing my lungs. I am sweating. My breathing grows yet shallower. Is this anxiety or is this the last of the oxygen running out?

  A fear of being trapped, of small spaces. The emptiness and the darkness are simultaneously infinitely vast and terrifyingly close. They are amorphous yet they form a second skin that is choking me. My mind is buckling beneath the pressure. I am disintegrating.

  Forget fractured aircraft. This is what explosive decompression feels like.

  * * *

  The light was painful. Stephanie cowered in the corner, shielding herself from the brightness until she could adjust to it. When she finally raised her head, she saw the silhouette of a man standing in the doorway.

  He said, ‘Follow me.’

  She didn’t think to ask where she was or where they were going. Anywhere was preferable to the darkness. She rose to her feet and, still blinking, stepped barefoot into a passage with rusting pipes running along the low ceiling. There were lights on the wall, behind protective wire covers.

  The man led her to the end of the passage and up a staircase of concrete steps. The walls had been painted grey and green many years before; now, they were peeling. The hard surfaces gave an echo to the tap of his shoes. They passed the ground and first floors. Stephanie looked through filthy stairwell windows and saw nothing familiar, just an industrial estate in the distance and a building site masquerading as a car park. It was nondescript urban. She supposed she was still in London but couldn’t be sure. On the second floor, the man pushed through a set of swing doors and led her down a corridor that bisected an abandoned office. He showed her into a room, told her to wait and then locked her in. She tried the handle, just to be sure.

  A wooden desk dominated the room. On its top, there was an old Bakelite telephone. She picked up the receiver but the line was dead. There was a Rolodex, which she flicked through. The cards were yellow with age; the London phone numbers were still prefixed by 01. On a side-table, there was an old typewriter, a relic from the pre-electric era. There was no hint of a computer or a fax machine. Stephanie felt as though she was in a social museum: a middle-manager’s office from the Fifties. The dust added to the impression. The air was stale.

  She rubbed the crook of her arm, then looked down and saw the dark bruise around the needle’s puncture point.

  By the time she heard the key scraping in the lock, she had grown weary of inspection and was sitting on a swivel chair, her bare feet on the desk.

  One man entered the room—not the one who had escorted her into the office—and she saw two more in the corridor. He closed the door. There was a fat file under his arm. Stephanie guessed he was in his fifties, although his hair was almost completely white. He was no taller than she was and had a slim build and fine features; a long, narrow nose, almost Slavic cheekbones and a severe mouth bordered by thin, pale lips. His skin was ruddy, as though wind-blown. But it was his eyes that were most striking; they were pure aquamarine. He wore an old overcoat over a thick, check shirt and a pair of worn corduroy trousers. His tan brogues were scuffed.

  He dumped the file on the desk by her feet. The impact blew a cloud of dust into the air.

  ‘Miss Stephanie Patrick. Age? Twenty-two. Profession? Prostitute. Home? Anywhere and nowhere.’ He withdrew a pack of Rothmans from his pocket and pointed at the file on the desk. ‘Your life is collected in there, Miss Patrick. At least, the life you led before you dropped out of society and slithered beneath it. But what of you now? Who are you now? You don’t have any bank records, doctor’s records or tax records. You have a driving licence, apparently, but the address is out of date. Your passport has expired and has not been renewed. You are not registered to vote, you don’t pay Council Tax. You don’t have a National Insurance number. Actually, you do, but they don’t know if you are dead or alive. And they’re not the only ones.’

  His accent was Scottish. It wasn’t strong but it was unmistakable. The voice itself was, somehow, deeper than suited a man of his physique.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘It seems you have always attracted trouble. Expelled from two schools, once for persistent smoking and drinking offences, and once for sexual misconduct. At Durham University, it only took a month before you received a warning–’

  ‘A lecturer made a pass at me.’

  ‘That’s not what it says in the file.’

  Stephanie removed her feet from the desk. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘It says exactly the opposite. And that when he rejected your advances you lied to his wife to punish him.’

  ‘Believe me, my punishments are more imaginative than that.’

  He smiled but it was an expression entirely without humour. He withdrew a cigarette from the pack and lit it. ‘What it doesn’t say in the file is how you came to be in Earls Court with a loaded gun, apparently prepared to fire it into the back of an unarmed man’s head. But let me take an extravagantly wild guess. You are the young woman who was recently seen in the company of Keith Proctor, the murdered journalist.’

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘My name is Alexander.’

  ‘Alexander who?’

  ‘Mister Alexander.’

  ‘What are you? Police?’

  ‘No.’

  Stephanie considered the other options. ‘MI5, or something?’

  ‘Something. Something else.’

  Something you never knew existed.

  Alexander said, ‘The file makes interesting reading. Apparently, you are a very intelligent young woman with a particular gift for languages. Frankly, I find that hard to believe. What I find less hard to believe is that you have an extraor
dinary capacity for self-destruction. Personally, it is of no interest to me that you feel you can kill someone in cold blood. I’m sure you’d be very good at it. You seem to have a genuine taste and talent for those practices that the rest of us take trouble to avoid. All that concerns me is that Reza Mohammed is not harmed.’

  Stephanie rediscovered a little of her anger. ‘Where’s the justice in that?’

  ‘You’re prepared to shoot an unarmed man in the back of the head yet think you can lecture me on justice?’ Alexander watched her through a veil of blue cigarette smoke. ‘Mohammed is more useful alive than justly dead.’

  ‘He’d still be alive if he was doing twenty-five years in a maximum-security prison.’

  ‘Alive but useless. He has to be free and … uninhibited.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That is not your concern.’

  ‘He killed my parents, my sister and a brother, and you’re protecting him. How much more of my concern could it possibly be?’

  ‘You have a point, I agree. But that’s all you have.’

  ‘That isn’t good enough.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s going to have to be.’

  ‘Then tell me why I’m here. Wherever here is.’

  ‘You are here to be assessed. By me.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Risk. You have to convince me that you pose no further physical threat to Reza Mohammed and that your silence is assured. I need to feel you can make those promises and keep them.’

  ‘Or what?’ she retorted.

  Alexander shrugged casually, as if it was of no importance. But Stephanie saw what was in his eyes and, then, what was in her mind: charred aluminium wreckage in the Atlantic, Keith Proctor’s shattered knees, Reza Mohammed in a lecture theatre.

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  Alexander raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ll find I’m not a humorous man, Miss Patrick. So you can assume I’m not joking.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I have to go now. Perhaps you’d like some time to think about it, although it seems simple enough to me.’