Nelson processed what had certainly been a strange turn of events. The pickup needed to be as close as possible to the blast date lest the target be declared a missing person. She would be stored at Picton’s clinic, medicated in the usual manner, and retrieved shortly before the operational deadline. Then it seemed that a bucket of Murphy’s Law had been tipped over their heads. They knew that a storm was coming; they had not expected the worst storm in years. Bloody global warming. A tree had fallen, just missing his Land Cruiser, but right in the path of the ambulance Selwyn was driving, with Jones riding shotgun. Selwyn had swerved, lost control, and slammed into a tree. Somehow the cat got out of the bag. But she wasn’t loose for long. Twenty minutes later, courtesy of another dose of desflurane, everything was back on track. Or so they thought. The next evening, the second half of the drop and pickup from Picton’s clinic, something that had gone through without a hitch numerous times before, had completely unraveled, largely due to their U.S. clients being caught on the hop and failing to flag a problem till the last minute.
They had done their part. There was no doubt in Nelson’s mind about that. On short notice, too. The junior member of the team, and resident chameleon, in the guise of Jonesy, had befriended Jane, providing that moment of trust necessary for the team to gain access to her. Jane possessed a combination of desirable attributes. A history of mental illness had been the starting point.
Dr. Picton had his ways of obtaining the files of psychiatric patients throughout the U.K., and had selected Jane Benedict/Alice Craddock for Nelson’s use. Her personal history and pathology made her a choice candidate. As an introvert unconnected to family, few people would ask questions when she disappeared. The pie incident was, as they say, cream. Other useful elements were Jane’s radical leanings in her academic work, her political activism, and general instability. A body with the right profile. Should the Alice personality take over, so much the better. Malleable clay. When Nelson and the others had subdued Jane, they added an email to her computer, drafted but not sent, to be discovered later. It stated that she had to do something to make Britain feel the pain it inflicted on the rest of the world.
As Nelson dragged the girl across the kitchen floor, her head swung, banging into the bottom stair rail. Paul saw her eyes pop open and react to seeing him bound to a chair.
“Villains!” she screamed. “Release him!”
Alice then saw Nelson—to her, the Inquisitor—above her. She sprang up, attacking him with her fists.
Paul saw that she was Alice again, her outmoded accent restored along with her fierce loyalty to himself. Nelson was taken aback by the girl’s sudden resurgence. He too noted the reversion to the Alice personality. A flash of anger overcame Nelson as she kicked him hard, and he only just stopped himself from breaking her nose. But he needed her unmarked to the end. He regained control of himself, quickly put her in an arm lock, and dragged her kicking and screaming up the staircase.
Paul craned his neck till she disappeared from view. Again he shouted “Don’t hurt her!” A look from Brandt told Paul they needed her unharmed for some purpose.
Paul heard Nelson shut her inside the tiny bathroom on the landing. Alice continued to scream and bang on the door. Nelson quickly reentered. Grabbing her by the hair, he hissed: “Make another sound and I will cut off his ears.” Alice had seen her father do that to a man judged guilty of lewd acts with children before he was driven from the village. She immediately fell silent.
Nelson studied her for a moment, as he had the previous night. She was a pretty girl, even in the harsh bathroom light. Impulsively he turned the dimmer down till her skin tones turned to honey. He saw innocence and sensuality in her frightened elfin face. It was a pity that circumstances would prevent them getting better acquainted. Nelson left her in the soft light, thinking it would keep her calmer, shut the door, then quickly secured the handle to an adjacent clothes closet with a length of bungee cord.
Alice calmed her breathing and looked around her new cell. Yet another privy. Was there one in every dwelling? she wondered.
A search quickly provided Brandt and Nelson with information supporting what they had already been told by their client. Brandt scrolled through Paul’s laptop, taking note of data about Dr. Picton’s hospital, hacked from its computers. But no outgoing email dispatching files. No email at all. By the time Brandt had finished skimming the data it was after three a.m. He wondered what the mysterious Dr. Montgomery knew and didn’t know.
Nelson, seated on the sofa across from Paul, had gone through the passports of four different nationalities all bearing Paul’s photo. He held Paul’s spray cylinder in his hand.
“Bet you’re wondering how we knew about your safe house, aren’t you?” he asked in mock sympathy. “There’s a tracking chip in this. They didn’t tell you that, did they?” Paul said nothing, inwardly furious. He would have dropped it in the parking lot if he had known. “Intelligence sharing is a wonderful thing,” Nelson observed dryly. He signaled Brandt to join him in the kitchen, where they conferred in tones too hushed for Paul to hear.
“How much does he know?” Nelson asked.
“More than we want him to.” They both thought for a moment, then Brandt looked up towards the landing at the top of the staircase. Nelson nodded. Hang him from there.
Nelson came out of the kitchen, and sat beside the rocking chair. “Who else have you told?” he asked with acidic joviality.
Paul played it deadpan. “That information is on a need to know basis.”
Nelson’s temperature was rising. “We could work something out.”
“You mean...if I become a greedy animal, wallowing in my own moral filth, like you?”
“Don’t be a comedian,” snapped Nelson, “or pleasantries are over.”
Brandt now left the kitchen, wearing latex gloves and carrying a length of coiled electrical cord under his jacket. Out of Paul’s sight, he reached up, and with his fingertips looped the end of the cord through the landing stair rail. He sat down on the floor behind the rocking chair, working on an efficient noose.
Paul continued his provocative attitude, probing for clues in the response. “You’re a national security officer. You swore an oath...”
Nelson shook his head. “Spare me the Pollyanna bullshit. ‘Nationality’ is for soccer hooligans to brawl over.”
“Doesn’t the land of your birth mean anything to you?”
“You can wrap yourself in the flag if you wish, but, bottom line, we all sell our skills to the highest bidder.”
Yes, Paul thought, the classic “It’s human nature” excuse. In the couple of years of ferreting out rogue agents, he had found that they all fell back on that. “You sleep well at night?” Paul asked flatly, which Nelson returned in kind.
“Sure, by dreaming of incalculable wealth almost within my grasp.” Indeed, if Nelson scored what he thought of as The Jackpot, his wealth would admit him to basement squatter level of the Global Players Club.
Upstairs, Alice noticed water dripping from a piece of metal that protruded from the strangely gleaming piece of pottery built into the wall. The hand basin faucet in the bathroom on the landing had a slow leak. She realized how thirsty she was, and bent down, licking at the drips. She steadied herself against the tap, which turned, releasing more water. Alice twisted the tap back and forth and grasped its purpose. Water you don’t have to fetch.
Her thirst satisfied, she looked out the window. The back garden was all of thirty feet below. Alice knew that she would be hurt if she jumped. Then she heard the front door open. She pressed her ear to the keyhole.
Dr. Picton was less than happy as he walked up the steps to a Brixton townhouse where he had been told he was to meet Nelson. He had made his feelings known volubly to the two underlings in Nelson’s employ who were accompanying him during the journey from Farnham. One of them, who looked young enough still to be at schoo
l, they had stopped to pick up from beside a wrecked car in a field, for God’s sake. The other, most inappropriately dressed, had the slight odor of urine about him. What kind of a circus was Nelson running? Picton had made it a condition of their arrangement that he not be involved in their activities. He did not want to know what they did with the subjects he selected or warehoused for them. It was always to be a simple arm’s-length transaction. Tonight, despite this clear understanding, he had found his staff in seeming mass hysteria. A patient had been kidnapped—by the American intern whom he’d already suspected. Then Nelson’s men had roused him from inadequate sleep on his office couch in the wee hours of the night. He hadn’t a clue where they were taking him, or why. All Nelson’s underlings would say, whenever he paused in his complaints, was that Nelson was the only person who could answer his questions. Dr. Picton was not accustomed to be refused by staff, anybody’s staff, and demanded that they get Nelson on the phone. Then their mood changed from routine politeness.
“Hey, Doc” said Selwyn, in a sharper tone, turning from the driver’s seat. Picton hated it when anyone abbreviated his title. “Do us a favor?”
“What?” asked Picton, sullenly.
“Shut the fuck up. No more chitchat till we get there. Got it?”
Picton then realized that these men was not his chauffeurs, but his captors. He was silent for the remainder of the journey, but a small furnace of anger had been building inside as he mounted the steps to the townhouse, carrying his medical bag. He wanted answers.
Selwyn led the doctor in. Jones closed the door behind them. Picton stood there in shock at the sight of the man he had dismissed from his hospital the evening before as a possible media snooper, and the subsequent kidnapper of a patient, now taped to a rocking chair. Anger was doused in an instant, replaced by icy fear. What on earth had he got himself mixed up in?
“Good morning, Dr. Picton,” said Paul with a steely look. “Long night for you, I see.”
Nelson told Selwyn and Jones to help themselves to anything in the fridge. He noted Selwyn’s track pants with a mocking look.
“This yours?” asked Nelson deadpan, handing Selwyn back his Glock.
“Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again.”
“Indeed it will not,” Nelson said.
The two junior agents snorted their “Who’s sorry now?” derision at Paul as they passed, then headed into the kitchen.
Picton was aghast. Things were going from worse to terrible. Now there was a hostile witness able to tie him to Nelson. Picton did not want to contemplate the implications. The electrical cord dangling from the landing, and Brandt tying a noose, had not yet registered.
“What...are you doing?” Picton stammered to Nelson, after a moment. He was rarely at a loss for words, but he had just caught sight of Paul’s open fly.
“Cleaning up your mess,” replied Nelson.
“Look, none of this is my fault,” Picton insisted, knowing that the opposite was true. “An old friend at NYU asked if I would take on this...”
Nelson interrupted. “He’s not NYU. He’s CIA.”
“Dear God...”
“Bit of a brawl going on there right now, Doc. All under the radar of course. But you’ll be pleased to know that our side is winning.”
“Don’t count on it,” Paul interjected. Bravado was his only weapon at the moment. Nelson glared at him.
Picton avoided Paul’s gaze. He turned to Nelson, talking in hushed tones as if it mattered what the man tied to the chair overheard. “Where’s the girl?”
“Locked in the upstairs bathroom,” replied Nelson. “Quite a little firebrand.”
Typical selective memory, thought Picton. “You read her file. Of all the patients I offered, she is the one who best fit your specifications. You approved her.”
“Oh no complaints about...her,” said Nelson pointedly.
“What are you going to do with…?” Picton’s words dried in his mouth.
“Ask him some questions. Watch. You might learn something.” Nelson walked over to Paul.
“Question time. I recommend you respond truthfully.”
Paul switched to conciliation. “Of course, then what?”
“Not much,” said Nelson breezily. “You’ll just hang around here for a bit, till our client decides what to do with you.”
Brandt suppressed a smirk. Nelson was in fine form tonight.
It was then that Picton noticed what it was that Brandt was doing; wrapping a hand towel around a noose made from electrical cord and taping the towel in place. Less of a mark was left that way by practitioners of autoerotic stimulus by temporary asphyxiation. Padded nooses were often found at the sites of such accidental deaths by hanging. Brandt would make sure that Paul’s fingerprints were all over the cord later when it was over. From Picton’s aghast expression, Paul realized that something was going on behind him.
Nelson moved to the kitchen door, snapped his fingers, signaling Selwyn and Jones back into the room, then he leaned towards Paul.
“I want the truth.”
Paul tried to play for time. “Can’t be truthful if I’m dead.”
“Oh, we will drain you of every drop of truth. Before we’re done, you’ll beg for death.”
Brandt quickly got up and slipped the noose round Paul’s throat, applying a metal clamp behind the knot. Selwyn and Jones hauled the rocking chair to a spot below the landing rail.
Dr. Picton snapped out of his paralysis. “Now, steady on! This has gone far enough...!”
They ignored him. Selwyn and Jones cut the tape securing Paul to the chair. Brandt pulled down on the cord, lifting Paul off the ground. His arms sprang free. He managed to get three fingers of his left hand and two of his right under the towel-wrapped noose, relieving some of the pressure on his windpipe. Just enough to suck in a lungful of air as Brandt tied off the other end of the cord. Paul now hung, wheezing, his feet swinging two feet above the floor.
Nelson nodded his approval to Brandt. Nicely done. Nelson turned to Paul with a smile. “Once, this sort of thing would attract crowds. People would bet money on how long the condemned would dangle, fighting for a few more moments of wretched life.”
“I’m not having any part of this!” blustered Picton. “This is not our arrangement.” Picton turned to leave. Selwyn and Jones blocked his path. Nelson barked at him: “You take my money, you do what I say. Go upstairs. Sedate that girl. Now!” Picton was cowed. He headed upstairs to the landing. A rasping intake of breath came from Paul. Nelson stepped closer.
“Used to be the breathing difficulty you’re now experiencing was sometimes just a warm-up, before castration, disembowelment and quartering, all of which is ahead, unless you tell me who else knows.” He was bluffing of course, if only in relationship to marking the man’s body, but such extreme statements at the outset often gave him the measure of his victim. Certainly as a message to those who sent him, this interloper had to die the most disgraceful and embarrassing accidental death possible.
Paul could find irony even in extreme situations. To convince them that he was now the only person who had put the pieces together would insure a quicker end to his pain, but he would die knowing he had probably helped them succeed. His mind raced to construct a story sufficiently convincing to keep himself alive long enough to find an opportunity to turn the tables. The balance of probabilities was not in his favor.
On the landing above, Picton unwound the bungee cord securing the bathroom door. He opened cautiously in case there was a raging harpy within. He found the cubicle empty and the window open. He lunged forward, puts his head out of the window, and saw Alice’s means of escape—a drain pipe within arm’s reach.
Picton ran onto the landing and shouted: “She’s gone!” He rushed downstairs.
Brandt moved to the living room window. The garden back gate was open. Nelson saw it, too. He sna
pped orders to Selwyn and Jones, as Brandt charged through the kitchen to the garden. “You! Circle the block.” They ran through the front door to Selwyn’s car across the street.
Nelson turned to Picton. “Doctor! Keep him breathing till we get back.” Picton’s head shook involuntarily. Nelson approached with a dangerous look in his eye. “Leave him hanging, but he must not die, got it? Not! Die! Yet! Have you got that?”
“This is insane!” gasped Picton.
Nelson stepped right into his face. “Do it or you’ll be next!” he hissed, leaving Picton in no doubt that he meant it.
Paul saw Nelson grab the laptop, containing all his accumulated evidence, and run out the front door, slamming it behind him.
Picton stared at Paul’s twisting body, unsure what to do next. He had to play along. Just survive the night. Once they caught the girl, he could disengage himself, and never have anything to do with these people again.
CHAPTER 18
Wicked Knots
Alice crouched on the townhouse roof beside the brick chimney, looking down. Nelson entered the Land Cruiser. Selwyn and Jones boarded the SUV. The cars took off to circle the house from different directions. Although she understood that in this world they had different names, she recognized the men getting inside the mechanical beasts as the Inquisitor Córdoba, Gareth, and Andrew, who for some reason had reappeared as her enemies here to torment her. And to threaten her James.
Alice turned toward the garden. Brandt—Cedric, to Alice—was outside the open gate, looking up and down the back lane. She had opened it to lay a false trail, before climbing back up the drainpipe to the roof, bringing with her a piece of broken tile. She lobbed it into a garden two houses away where it skittered along some paving stones.
The big man’s head whirled round. He immediately seized the top of the fence, and with surprising dexterity for a man of his size, swung himself over. Gymnastics as a teenager had brought him in contact with police volunteer sports coaches, which in turn eased his way into the Force. Brandt enjoyed its rough and tumble and maintained his fitness rigorously. Right now he was hungry; he had not eaten for ten hours due to the complications of the night. He needed to get his blood sugar up, so, Brandt told himself, the sooner he caught this little bitch, the sooner he would get himself a good gyro with humus.
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