Deadly Sin

by James Hawkins

  Lefty and Pimple are hot on Edwards’ tail and pull up at the gatehouse just a minute later.

  “We have a meeting with Mr. Edwards,” says Lefty, handing over their American Embassy ID passes, and Fred ticks them off Edwards’ list.

  “Just one moment, sir,” says Fred as he disappears into the backroom of the gatehouse, where he seemingly morphs into a couple of uniformed police constables and two detective chief inspectors.

  “Would you gentlemen please step out of the car,” requests David Bliss, emerging with the Americans’ IDs in hand, while Peter Bryan and one of the constables make their way around the car to the passenger’s door.

  “What is this, Bliss?” sneers Lefty as he tries to snatch the passes back, but Bliss grabs his arm and spits, “I said, step out of the car.”

  “And you as well,” says Bryan to Pimple, wrenching open the passenger’s door.

  Time stops as Lefty’s arm tenses under Bliss’s grip, and his eyes burn into his captor’s brain as he weighs the odds. The moment of decision for a cornered man whose entire future turns on this moment. Make the right move and he can be free. But what is the right move — fight or flight?

  “What the hell’s going on?” demands Edwards, breaking the spell as he spots the commotion and races across the car park in their direction.

  “I am arresting you for administering a noxious substance under Section 24 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861,” cautions Bliss as he hauls Lefty from the car. “You do not have to say anything —”

  “On what evidence?” cuts in Lefty as he struggles to free himself from Bliss’s grip. “You ain’t got no witnesses.”

  “Mr. Edwards here saw it happen. Didn’t you, sir?”

  “Now look here, Bliss …”

  “Unless he would prefer to be arrested as an accomplice.”

  “Now you’re going too far.”

  “I haven’t even begun,” says Bliss as Pimple is pulled from the passenger’s seat and rubbed down by Peter Bryan.

  “Oh,” says Bryan as he draws a loaded Smith and Wesson from the CIA man’s shoulder holster. “That’s very naughty.”

  “I am authorized to carry …”

  “In America, maybe. But this is dear old Blighty,” says Bryan as he drops the magazine out of the pistol and hands it to the constable. “We get very touchy about people having guns. In fact, all handguns are illegal here — didn’t anyone warn you?”

  “Bliss, Bryan. You two are finished,” snarls Edwards from the sidelines as he pulls out his cellphone. “The U.S. Ambassador will have them out in no time. You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”

  “That may well be true, sir,” says Bliss while the two struggling Americans are being handcuffed and Peter Bryan is reading them their rights. “But in the meantime, as long as they are in my custody, I have the right to search them and anything in their possession for evidence.”

  “That’s American Embassy property,” shouts Pimple, squirming to free himself from the handcuffs as Bliss begins a search of the car. “Touch that and you’re dead.”

  “Threatening to kill a police officer. Now that is a very serious offence under Section 16 of the same Act,” says Bliss delightedly as he sticks his nose into the American’s face. “So now you’re under arrest for another crime, but we shouldn’t overlook a further offence under the Firearms Act of committing a crime whilst in possession of a loaded weapon.”

  Michael Edwards eventually attempts conciliation. “Look, Dave,” he tries warmly. “This is ridiculous. Just save yourself a lot of grief and let these men go.”

  “I can’t do that, sir. You know that,” says Bliss with a deliberately smarmy smile. “They’ve committed serious crimes. What would the Home Secretary say if he knew we were letting foreign terrorists rule our streets?”

  “They’re not terrorists …” explodes Edwards as Bliss opens the trunk of the car and lets out a low whistle. The transceiver taken from his office cupboard still has his signed evidence tag attached when he lifts it out and holds it aloft.

  “Oh. Look what I found,” he says gleefully. “I do believe this is stolen property.”

  “It ain’t stolen, it’s ours …” starts Lefty, but Pimple kicks his shin.

  “Shuddup. We ain’t ever seen it before. He’s trying to stitch us up.”

  “Yeah. I’d agree with that,” says Edwards, and Bliss spins on the ex–chief superintendent and jabs a finger into his chest.

  “You’re not attempting to pervert the course of justice are you, sir?” he says with deadpan sincerity. “’Cuz I ought to remind you that such an offence at common law carries a maximum punishment of life imprisonment.” And then he digs deeper into the car’s trunk.

  “I wonder what this is — gentlemen?” he says, unwrapping a very familiar blanket and drawing out a steel box the size of a large biscuit tin.

  “That’s U.S. government property,” warns Pimple in a voice that suggests it should be considered sacrosanct.

  “Really,” says Bliss. “Then I’d better take very good care of it until you both get out of jail in a few years.”

  “Look here, Chief Inspector,” says Edwards, bootlicking. “I’m really not trying to interfere, but you have to understand that sometimes the end justifies the means.”

  “Absolutely, sir. My feelings exactly,” says Bliss, before helping bundle the detainees into a car and instructing the constables to drive them to the nearest police station by the longest possible route. “And don’t take them anywhere near Scotland Yard,” he whispers to the driver, knowing that Fox will have them out of the front door as soon as they are in the back. And then he turns to Bryan as he switches off his cellphone. “Get back to the office, Peter, and stall Fox for at least an hour.”

  Lawyer Robert Jameson has a clean handkerchief in his pocket, a fresh rose in his buttonhole, and a swagger to his step when he walks in the front door of Westchester Police Station at precisely nine-thirty and doffs his Panama hat to the desk clerk.

  “Detective Chief Inspector Roberts is expecting me,” he says, announcing himself as if arriving to defend a local miscreant rather than himself.

  “You’ll find all the paperwork’s in order,” he claims to Roberts as he blusters in to the chief inspector’s office and hands his Panama hat to the senior detective as he would hand it to a coat check girl. And then he pulls sheaves from an enormous document case and carefully piles them on the D.C.I.’s desk.

  “I’m sure it is,” replies Roberts handing back the hat, knowing that it would take a sharp-eyed forensic accountant to spot a deliberate slip of the pen in most lawyers’ ledgers. Which is why the detective chief inspector is more interested in Jameson’s answers to awkward questions, such as, “Why would so many residents at St. Michael’s choose you to administer their power of attorney?”

  “Who else can they trust when they have no living relatives?” replies Jameson with an open face.

  “But you must appreciate that it could look a little suspicious.”

  “I warned Mr. Davenport about the optics,” agrees Jameson. “But I can assure you every penny can be accounted for. It’s all in here,” he adds, tapping the paperwork. “Keep them as long as you like.”

  “So where has the money gone?”

  “You’ll find that much of it went to worthy causes.”

  “Really,” says Roberts. “And that wouldn’t by any chance include the lining of Mr. Davenport’s pockets would it?”

  “Good grief, no. Is that what you think?”

  “Well he does have a large, expensive house.”

  “More like a mansion,” agrees Jameson with a jealous edge. “But that’s all his own money. He never received a penny from St. Michael’s he wasn’t entitled to in wages and expenses. He was most particular about that.”

  “So if I said we’d received a tip about certain irregularities …?”

  “I would say you have been grossly misinformed, Chief Inspector,” Jameson says, putting
his hat on. “I can assure you, St. Michael’s affairs are entirely free of sin.”

  “So where has the residents’ money gone?” asks Roberts as the lawyer terminates the interview by picking up his case and turning to the door.

  “Most of it has gone to God,” he says with his hand on the door handle. “But you’ll find all the details in the files.”

  Hoskins, the videographer, is on his way out and locking his door when Bliss grabs him.

  “I need you to take a look at this,” he says, turning the technician around and closing the office door behind them.

  Hoskins shakes his head at the large metal container that Bliss has unwrapped onto his desk, together with the transceiver. “I suppose it could be some kind of anti-personnel mine,” he suggests, backing away.

  “I never thought of that,” confesses Bliss, retreating a couple of steps. “Maybe we should get it outside.”

  But Hoskins steps back in for a closer inspection and puts two and two together. “Look,” he says, pointing out the similarity of the materials used in the construction of the transceiver and the box — especially the stub aerials that protrude from both. “These two go together, whatever they are.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I think the transceiver is the control unit. It receives a signal from a distant transmitter, maybe even from a satellite in orbit, and redirects it to the box.”

  “But what does the box do?”

  “Well. If it’s a mine it will detonate,” he says fatalistically as he opens a toolkit and selects a screwdriver.

  The box’s innards are a jumbled maze of components that leave Hoskins with a furrowed brow. “At least it’s not a bomb,” he says, once he’s picked at the circuit boards, batteries, and miscellaneous elements.

  “But what is it?”

  “There’s one way to find out,” he says as he plugs the satellite transceiver into a power bar and plays with a couple of wires.

  “Absolutely nothing …” starts Bliss in relief. And then his brain explodes.

  Excruciating pains and incredible pleasures jerk him rigid, while fireworks rocket around inside his mind with brilliant flashes of colour and a deafening cacophony of sound that coalesces into a maelstrom of sensations, kicking his nervous system into overdrive.

  “Off!” he yells, fighting to escape the nightmare, but Hoskins is under attack as well and stands in spasm.

  “Turn it off!” Bliss tries again, but the technician is locked into place by an invisible hand.

  “I can’t!” shouts Hoskins as demons chase through his head and threaten his sanity.

  “Help!” Bliss is screeching when the machine cuts out by itself.

  “What the hell?” Hoskins says as he pulls out the plug, but his mind is still in turmoil, and he has to sit.

  “Oh my God,” says Bliss, slumping to the floor.

  “Did you say you got this from the CIA?” asks Hoskins once the room has stopped spinning.

  Bliss nods. “A couple of our so-called friends from the evil empire. Why?”

  “Have you ever heard of Mk-Ultra?”

  “No …” starts Bliss, then he thinks back. “Yes,” he says. “I remember someone mentioned it,” he adds, although he doesn’t attribute it to Edwards. “What is it?”

  “It’s not what it is. It is what it was supposed to be. Mk-Ultra was a secret CIA program in the sixties. They experimented on people with all kinds of drugs and electromagnetic devices to win the Cold War by scrambling the brains of people who didn’t agree with their philosophies.”

  “That gave them a pretty wide target. So what happened?”

  “The whole thing was a fiasco. They tried to nobble Fidel Castro with drugs, and they killed God knows how many people, including one of the top researchers — a Canadian professor, if I remember rightly. And there was a huge stink in Congress when it was discovered that they used prisoners and psychiatric patients for deadly experiments without anyone’s permission.”

  “And you think this could be connected?”

  “They were supposed to have shut it down when they were caught,” says Hoskins, but he deliberately leaves his answer open. “If you go online you’ll find plenty of information.”

  “So what do you think happened?” asks Bliss, with his mind on the day of the royal visit.

  “If I still had the pictures of the Duke —” Hoskins starts, but Bliss jumps in and takes off for his office, saying, “I do. You made me a copy, remember?”

  “What have you got on Jameson?” Anne McGregor questions as she wanders into Matt Roberts’s office and peers over his shoulder.

  “Do you mean Saint Jameson?” says Roberts. “I’m beginning to think our dearly beloved Miss Lovelace was in the right place — talk about befuddled. If these records are straight, Jameson and Davenport could knock Mother Theresa off the Nobel podium for philanthropy. ”

  “Oh, dear,” says McGregor. “I’ve just had the police doctor on the phone. He reckons the medications seem perfectly above-board to him.”

  “That’s it then,” says Roberts, bundling Jameson’s files and dropping them into a box. “I’ve got some real crimes to deal with.”

  “Chief Inspector,” shouts Fox, catching Bliss in the open again as he makes a run for his office to collect the DVD. “Found you at last.”

  “I didn’t know I was lost, sir.”

  “Don’t give me that innocent crap, Bliss. I know what you’ve done,” carries on Fox as junior officers scatter, while civilian clerks slink by with their heads in their paperwork.

  “Done, sir?” says Bliss, with no intention of helping the commander tie a noose.

  “The American Ambassador has been on the phone to the Home Secretary,” Fox continues, before saying that the CIA are demanding the return of their property, and their men, with a full apology.

  “CIA?” Bliss says blankly. “Are you trying to tell me that those two men who attacked me with nerve gas —”

  “They didn’t attack you.”

  “That’s a matter for a judge and jury,” says Bliss as he starts to walk away. “And they were certainly in possession of an illegal weapon and stolen property.”

  “Cut this nonsense right now, Bliss,” Fox calls after him. “I’ve ordered them to be released and I’m dropping all charges. Now where the fuck is their stuff?”

  “He’ll never find it,” Bliss laughs to Peter Bryan as they slink into a dimly lit booth of a backstreet joint and order a couple of beers in celebration. “It’s labelled ‘Sonic Generator — A/V department use only,’ and Hoskins already had his screwdriver out when I left.”

  “So. Show me,” says Bryan, sliding closer as Bliss opens his laptop.

  “Keep your eyes on the rest of the entourage,” Bliss whispers as they focus on the screen with the eagerness of teenagers watching porn. “And see what happens when the old boy makes his way to the pavement.”

  “Wow!” exclaims Bryan; the protection officers and footmen all seem to freeze for just a second at precisely the same moment as Prince Philip.

  “I thought they were just reacting to him,” explains Bliss as he reruns the clip several times. “But they obviously felt it as well.”

  “Yes. But they were just on the fringe. He obviously took the full brunt of it.”

  “Hi,” drawls a husky-voiced female with a dolled-up fifteen-year-old Korean girl in tow. “Would you two hunks like to buy me and my friend a drink?”

  “Police,” says Bryan, flicking open his warrant.

  “Sorry. We don’t do freebies for the law, luv,” sneers the hooker.

  “I don’t want a freebie,” says Bryan. “I want you to piss off before I’m forced to arrest you for impersonating a woman.”

  “And fuck you, too,” she mutters as they strut off to the next booth.

  “So, where was it activated from?” asks Bryan, but Bliss can only speculate. According to Hoskins, the transceiver’s dish on top of the lamppost could have picked up a satellite signal fro
m just about anywhere.

  “Either the U.S. Embassy or direct from Washington is my bet,” he says, although he has to admit that anyone watching the event on television anywhere in the world could have triggered the signal.

  “So,” summarizes Bryan. “Someone pushes a button and zap, the gizmo under the pavement gives Phil a very nasty shock.”

  “That’s it,” concurs Bliss. “And if it was anything like the shock I got, the poor old devil could’ve been so screwed up that he thought it was Armageddon.”

  “So he attacked his missus?” questions Bryan skeptically.

  “No,” says Bliss as he reruns the clip and points to the confused man struggling with his sword before lunging for the reception line. “First he went for the holy rollers. Then the Queen started in on him and he was so far gone he just turned on her.”

  “That’s pretty far-fetched,” suggests Bryan, but Bliss shakes his head.

  “Here,” he says, as he goes online and Googles Mk-Ultra. “Have a gander at this and then tell me it’s off the wall.”

  “You’re friggin’ crazy,” laughs Misty Jenkins as she leans on her broken front gate and watches Trina Button supervise the delivery of a new fridge to Daphne’s house. “She ain’t ever coming out.”

  “Misty,” Trina starts, dying to tell the woman that Daphne is actually in hospital for a check-up and is well on her way to coming home, but then she pauses to reflect on Angel’s admonition at the labyrinth. “You can’t influence other people’s actions or beliefs,” the free-spirited woman told her. “You can only change the way you see them.”

  “You could be right,” Trina concedes to Daphne’s neighbour. “But I just thought I’d get the place spruced up anyway.”

  “Well, you’re wasting your friggin’ money.”

  “Mebbe,” says Trina, and then she turns to the delivery driver. “Straight into the kitchen and would you please plug it in. Thanks.”

  But the refrigerator is only the beginning. A painter’s van is scheduled to arrive at three, and a gardener has promised to get digging on Friday morning — weather permitting — which only leaves the inside of the house. Mavis would help, but she has her hands full with Trina’s mother.