The Ministry of Love

by O'Mahony, Jason

  There was a knock on the door and a young aide peeped around the door. Fairfax nodded.

  DCI Switzerland stepped into the room, slightly nervously. The Prime Minister got to his feet quickly.

  “Oh Chief Inspector Switzerland, come in, come in. This is Bill Triscuit, my party chairman. Don’t worry, he’s not here in an official capacity, no bodies to dispose off, or anything. Or at least, he doesn’t tell me.”

  Triscuit shook hands with the policeman.

  “He’s a lousy liar. Better I don’t tell him at all.”

  Switzerland smiled, and took a seat as gestured to by Fairfax.

  “I’ve read your reports Chief Inspector, and I must say your work is greatly appreciated. I just wanted to get you in just to make it clear to you that any resources you need, just say the word.”

  The policeman nodded.

  “Thank you sir. Just to let you know, we have some suspects that we are very interested in, but I feel that I should run something by you. My team have been analysing the victims’ appearances in the media, on websites, TV, in the tabloids, and they are all featuring prominently. Nothing unusual about that, but they have all spiked in their appearances before they get killed. We believe it is possible that he is letting the media effectively choose his victims.”

  “Fascinating. Then, by that logic, could you possibly predict his next target?” The PM asked.

  “That’s what we’re working on at the moment, sir.”

  The PM thanked him, giving him a thumbs up as his phone rang and he snatched it up.

  Switzerland got up, nodded to Triscuit and walked to the door, just pausing for a moment.

  “Good luck in the election, Prime Minister. And I’m not just saying that.”

  Fairfax nodded gratefully as Triscuit escorted the detective to the door, closing the door behind him.

  “Well,” noted Triscuit, “that’s three votes we’re getting.”

  The PM, hanging up the phone, didn’t get it.

  “Three?”

  “The good detective. And I’m voting for you. And I’m assuming you vote for yourself. Or do you think that’s unsporting?”

  • • •

  Julian had put his foot down. The whole point of the NCA was to accommodate love between people and that was hardly going to be encouraged if NCA headquarters, in a gleaming new business park overlooking King’s Cross station, was going to be crawling with heavily armed police.

  “GI Joe,” Julian said.

  “I’m sorry?” Boo asked, as she closed the door behind her. His office overlooked a plaza surrounded by new businesses. He didn’t know it, but his fine view was through bulletproof armoured glass she’d had installed when he had departed for the weekend. She’d wanted to put marksmen on the surrounding roofs, but he wasn’t having it.

  “GI Joe. You know, Action Man. In the car park this morning there were men in more body armour than King Richard. I won’t have it, Captain Bradley. This is a place of work.”

  “Dr. Tredestrian, you have been attacked once.”

  “And I am very grateful having you as my…what do you call yourselves now?”

  “Close Protection Officer, sir.”

  “As my Close Protection Officer, I’m very grateful. But having half of the SAS in the building is just too much. I want them out.”

  “Firstly sir, they’re CI5, not SAS ….”

  “There are SAS people in CI5. But that’s not the point. I want them out and if I have to go to the Prime Minister, I will. There is no evidence that the attack on me was anything more than a random attack by bigoted thugs.”

  Boo nodded.

  “That’s true. But in my experience, the lack of hard evidence like this can mean that this is a very well organised operation.”

  “That’s the type of logic, Captain, that got us into Iraq. Don’t think I’m not grateful — I am — but last night I accidentally hit my panic button when I stubbed my toe getting up to go for a wee, and had twelve commandos in my bedroom. I was naked at the time.”

  “Nothing they haven’t seen before, sir.”

  “Out, Captain. I want them out.”

  • • •

  Switzerland decided, given the fact that they were dealing with a former Special Forces officer, not to take any chances. An Armed Response Unit was called in, and having first surveyed the building electronically to ensure that it wasn’t booby-trapped, initiated the entry into the terraced house in the quiet middle class suburban street. It was all a bit over dramatic for Switzerland’s taste and he personally found that the Met tended to overuse the ARUs. Someone had suggested to him that it was primarily for insurance reasons, in that the service could be held liable if something went wrong and due care and attention was not used. Which meant that ARUs were being sometimes used to deliver parking violation summons, which he wasn’t convinced was the best use of resources.

  It was a further five minutes before the ARU commander decided that it was safe for Switzerland’s team to enter the building.

  The interior of the small house was neat, simple and utilitarian, with the only real hint of the owner’s personality being the large amount of military history and related topic books on the shelves.

  Farrington wasn’t there which didn’t surprise them, as they had had the house under surveillance, but it didn’t lessen Switzerland’s disappointment. The fact that they still had not managed to find him was now deeply worrying. His abilities matched the profile and there was motive. Farrington was Suspect X and he was missing.

  The young DC finished a call he had received from base and briefed his superior.

  “The media sweep software, sir, it generated over 37 potential targets.”

  “Surely that’s meaningless,” the profiler suggested, but the DC shook his head.

  “No, the software has given us five high probability targets. We’ve been in touch with their agents. They’re all missing.”

  • • •

  Switzerland and the profiler returned to New Scotland Yard at speed, to coordinate the search for Farrington and to familiarise themselves with the five missing celebrities.

  “We could go public. Identify Farrington as a person of interest, get the public to find him,” she suggested.

  Switzerland wasn’t enthused about the idea. The public were beginning to get hysterical about the serial killer, at least if the monitoring of Twitter, Facebook, Bebo and radio talk shows were anything to go by. The DCI received a report every morning from the media monitoring unit summing up the media situation. Likker felt it was important for his officers to be “au fait with the zeitgeist”.

  Switzerland wasn’t sure which made him more nervous: the fact that a Deputy Assistant Commissioner was worried about what 13 year-old girls thought of his crime fighting strategy or that the public should be consulted.

  “He could end up being lynched if we’re not careful. Bear in mind that we only have circumstantial evidence on him that fits him to the profile. How is the phone scan going?”

  “Phone scan?” the profiler asked.

  “He doesn’t have a mobile phone in his name, but we can identify all the mobile phones used on his street going back months if we have to. All to do with triangulating masts. We then start to eliminate all the registered phones, ring people direct to eliminate pay-as-you-go phones, we can get it down to a relatively small number, which we can then trace. That’s the theory. Takes time, all the same. What about credit cards, debit cards?”

  Another member of the team shook her head.

  “A bit odd, sir. One bank account, set up for gas, electricity, council tax with income from an Army pension. But no daily deposits or withdrawals. One credit card, but it’s completely clear. Has not been used in months.”

  “Is it just me or is the absence of evidence, evidence in itself?” the profiler suggested.

  Switzerland nodded agreement.

  “It reads like a guy who does not want to be traced. Pays cash for everything. But it is
all pointing in the right direction.”

  The DCI pointed at the five new faces on the giant CSI glass board glowing in the middle of the room. Five pretty, identikit footballer wife wannabes stared back at him

  “Five models, all featured in the media recently. Their agents have all confirmed that they had been hired to film a pilot episode for a new show.”

  “About what?”

  “It’s called Celebrity Hate Crime, sir.”

  Switzerland shot a look at the profiler.

  “The idea, sir, was suggested after this model, Amanda Beaujolais, spoke out about how hard it was to be beautiful, and that hating beautiful people is like anti-Semitism.”

  “She said what?” Switzerland uttered, his jaw swinging open with the last word.

  “Well, she actually said, ‘that Jewish thing’. But her agent was contacted and offered a contract. The other four were models who had commented recently in the media in support of her. The agents says that they were contacted over the phone by a production company called Paradox Productions, which is a dummy name by the way, and contracts were sent. All were contacted on their mobiles by one-off disposable phones. They haven’t been seen since.”

  “Alright, let’s take their homes apart, and get the CCTV footage from the areas they live in.”

  The junior officers broke up from the meeting, and the DCI beckoned the DC to come over.

  Switzerland picked up the Farrington file.

  “What do you think, Detective Constable? Do we have enough for a Big Eye warrant?”

  The profiler looked suitably confused.

  “A what?”

  Switzerland smiled.

  “The most draconian piece of equipment anywhere in the western world, and the great British public don’t give a toss, because it doesn’t have big tits and a fake tan.”

  CHAPTER 7

  ---

  INSURANCE COMPANIES TO OFFER BREAKUP INSURANCE TO NCA COUPLES. - The Guardian.

  ---

  At least three insurance companies have begun to offer marriage break-up insurance to couples who have met through the NCA. Consumer lobbyists have attacked the companies in question for refusing to extend the insurance to non-NCA couples, the so-called ‘DIY Relationships’, and have said it is a cynical exercise as the statistical chance of an NCA marriage failing is far less than a traditional marriage, and therefore potentially lucrative on the basis that it is far less likely that the companies will be required to pay out.

  Claimants will be required to take lie detector tests to ascertain as to whether their relationship was genuine.

  Online bookmakers Paddypower.com has announced that it will permit potential claimants to place wagers on the outcome of the lie detector tests.

  ---

  The Serbian made sure that they all knew what they were doing and bullied anyone in the remaining group of eight who seemed to be having doubts. Dante was now completely on board, with what professionals would refer to as behaviour manipulation. The Stoat regarded it as pretty much making a fool believe his own bullshit. It was effective to such an extent that he was now sitting in a parked van across the road from the NCA, about to lead a group of other idiots in a frontal armed assault with automatic weapons.

  The Stoat, watching from the rooftop of a building across from the NCA, allowed himself a chuckle. It had been an audacious plan and he had been ready for it to fail, but to have got this far surprised even him. He had even planned that if this plan had collapsed, he would then have to do what he always regarded as the final option: doing the damn thing himself. It would have to be in such a way that he would not be linked to it. It would involve a belt, a plastic bag, some women’s underwear and a door, and Good old autoerotic asphyxiation. He’d used the method before, twice in fact, and it worked a treat. That’s what he would do, if he had to. He’d really prefer if these dickheads just shot Tredestrian.

  The group, not one of them under twenty-three years old, were just so unused to critical thinking, obsessed with conforming and their own petty emotional obsessions that he had convinced them to do this. Yet, bizarrely, not one of them had questioned what the reaction of the authorities would be to an armed terrorist attack on the government’s centrepiece social programme. Two of them had asked what to wear, and one had wanted to know in the event of a siege as to whether a low carb diet would be available. He wondered whether he was being hard on them but decided against it. They were smart enough to be able to use the most modern pieces of technology from their phones to downloading illegal music. They were just too fucking lazy to actually think about anything or question the sheer madness of what he, through Dante, was asking them to do. They’d be no loss to humanity.

  He settled comfortably, putting the binoculars to his eyes. The Serbian would lead them in, stiffen their resolve, make sure they headed towards their objectives and then quietly disappear before the security forces arrived. She’d be out of the country within two hours, would receive the second half of her money into her bank in Geneva, then vanish back to the Balkans. He would take care of the rest.

  Exactly on time, the door opened, and the eight, in balaclavas and clutching their assortment of light automatic weapons, moved quickly across the pedestrian courtyard, Dante leading as she subtly steered him. Some people stopped to stare in disbelief, some screamed, while younger pedestrians immediately began filming the events on their phones, peering blank faced at the tiny screens as if what was happening was only really happening in the phones.

  Irritated at this, The Serbian fired a shot at one of the teenagers, hitting him in the leg and causing him to collapse with blood spurting from a severed artery. His body was so stunned by the trauma of the bullet entering it that he didn’t feel the pain for ten seconds, during which he scrabbled around for his phone to make sure it wasn’t scratched. When his brain realised what was going on, it sent the searing pain signal to where it was supposed to go. He started screaming. His friends, horrified, stepped back from the spraying blood and started filming him as he screamed for help. They looked moonfaced at him, continuing to film as he begged for help. One stopped to upload the image to his Twitter account.

  The others were stunned by The Serbian’s actions but she screamed at them to keep moving, so they scurried through the automatic plate glass doors of the NCA as planned. The Serbian shot dead the security guard before he even realised what was happening, putting three rounds into his chest. The team, almost in a trance, followed her instructions as she ordered half them up the stairs and the other half into the lift. She then stepped into a bathroom, dropped her machine pistol into a bin, pulled the hat off her head to reveal her now bleached white hair. She removed her jacket, turned it inside out revealing a very un-terroristy bright pink jacket, which she pulled on and buttoned up. The Serbian then took a deep breath, removed her glasses, slipped them into her pocket and replaced them with smart but functional librarian style glasses, and then stepped into the lobby, screaming. The mob fleeing the building caught her and dragged her out into the courtyard and away from the NCA. The Stoat watched her flee with the other hysterics, before she stopped and calmly walked away, switching suddenly to look like someone’s attractive PA popping out for her lunch. He smiled at her professionalism and then turned his attention to the building.

  • • •

  Boo pulled her weapon from her hip holster as soon as she heard the shots in the lobby. She stepped out of the office into the atrium outside, which consisted of a series of balcony style walkways looking down into the main lobby, where she could see a security guard lying in his own blood and a group of armed individuals moving quickly up the main stairway.

  Julian hurried out onto the walkway with her and looked over the side.

  “Oh my God! That man needs help!” He moved towards the lift, just as the doors opened and four individuals in balaclavas emerged, slightly hesitantly.

  Boo grabbed the doctor, pulling him behind her and pushing him towards the emergency stairwell
. She fired towards the lift, hitting and knocking down one of the assailants, before she and the doctor slammed through the door.

  “Up! Up!” she shouted, pushing him towards the stairs, keeping her eyes and weapon on the doors they had just come through.

  “But shouldn’t we try to get out?” he protested.

  “Up!” she barked, shoving him. He started to run up the stairs with her in tow when the stairwell door opened. A shot from her weapon caused them to retreat.

  • • •

  As they turned on the landing, the other four terrorist-idiots saw a group of both heavily armoured and armed black-clad heavies come thundering through the main doors. They then saw the logo on the front of their uniforms. CI5.

  One of the terrorist-idiots stopped on the landing. The urge of a lifetime of protesting and demos against the state, the police, the system (be it capitalist, democratic or metric) overwhelmed him to stop and shout “Fascists!” at the approaching security officers. It gave him just enough time to see one of the CI5 men raise his Heckler and Koch MP5 and fire a burst of orange flame at him. This in turn gave him the bizarre experience of seeing his own body fall forward, as he viewed it from behind, recognising the sweater he had picked this morning and what looked like some dried tofu on the elbow. It was then that he realised that the CI5 man’s burst of fire had clean blown his head off.

  The other three turned on the stairs to see the head and separated torso bounce down the steps. One screamed, another raised her rifle to fire, and the third kept moving up the stairs before all three were gunned down in what could best be described not as a hail of fire but a horizontal downpour of lead.

  • • •