The Cut-Out

by Jon King

  JB shrugged. “The coroner’s now saying he died of a stroke.”

  “What, by wrapping a rubber catheter hose around his own neck and strangling himself?” That was David, the magazine proprietor. He and his partner Claire ran the show.

  “We don’t know that for certain, David,” Claire said from her adjacent desk.

  “We do now,” JB corrected, buffing up his John Lennon glasses with the hem of his Nirvana T-shirt. “His ex-wife says he was found with the hose wrapped three times around his neck. Evidently he’d been dead for days when his body was found. She believes he was murdered.”

  “Well, see if you can talk to her,” I said. “We need to get something concrete before we run with it.”

  “I’m on it.” He put his glasses back on.

  “How about you, Mike?” I said, turning my attention to our features editor, the somewhat overanxious, though always industrious 40-year-old seated over by the window. “Still working on the Bill Cooper feature?”

  Mike was probably the most experienced member of the team, so I often entrusted him with the more in-depth research projects. For this month’s issue I was after a feature on well-known American conspiracy theorist and radio broadcaster, Milton William Cooper, probably best known for his groundbreaking book, Behold A Pale Horse, in which he claimed to have seen top-secret documents revealing US government collaboration with aliens. A prominent member of America’s southern-belt militia movement, Cooper was convinced he’d become a government target for exposing classified information, and had famously stated on his radio show that he “would never be taken alive”. He was right on that count. Some four years after Mike wrote his feature on him, in November 2001, Cooper was shot dead at his home in Eagar, Arizona, by US law enforcement officers. He’d been on the run for three years.

  But this wasn’t the only ‘prophecy’ for which Cooper had achieved notoriety. He’d accurately predicted another famous event, too, and some say this was the real reason he was taken out.

  Four months prior to being shot, in June 2001, Cooper announced on his radio show that the United States was about to face a “major attack … within weeks”. He said the attack would actually be carried out by “those behind the New World Order”, but that it would be blamed on a then unknown Saudi insurgent and CIA asset by the name of Osama Bin Laden. This was at a time, remember, when the world had never heard of Osama Bin Laden.

  In any event, as we all now know, a little over two months after Cooper’s prophetic broadcast, on September 11, 2001, the attack tragically happened. The Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan and a section of the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, were destroyed by hijacked aircraft, and almost 3000 people lost their lives. Overnight, Osama Bin Laden became a household name. And Milton William Cooper became a wanted man.

  Of course, back in November 1996, when Mike was researching and preparing his feature, Cooper’s forewarning of 911 was yet to hit the airwaves. But he was still a sufficiently well-known figure in the burgeoning world of conspiracy theory to warrant a feature in our magazine.

  “Mike…?”

  “Almost there,” he said, a well-thumbed copy of Bill Cooper’s book lying open on his desk. “I’m proofing it now. This guy really has something to say. I just wish he’d say it in a less belligerent fashion.”

  “He’s certainly a bruiser.”

  “A war-monger, more like. Frankly I’d rather be working on the remote viewing story.”

  “Sorry, Mike,” Jackie piped up. “That’s my territory.”

  Mike mumbled something into his work; I turned to Jackie.

  “How’s it coming along, Jacks?” Jackie was our newest recruit, a student fresh from college, and I needed to be certain she was on target for the end of the week. “Any evidence the CIA are actually able to remotely view enemy targets?”

  “I think they’d like us to think so,” she said, the budding pragmatist. Then she quipped: “I’ve found plenty on Diana being remotely viewed by MI5, though, if that’s any help.”

  Mike almost snarled. “Haven’t they got anything better to do?”

  “I know,” Candi agreed, disapproving. “I think it’s disgusting.”

  “Oh, I dunno,” JB threw in. “I wouldn’t mind remote-viewing Diana.”

  “You need a girlfriend, JB,” I said, and with that, made a timely exit, the sound of jibes and laughter fading as I headed back to my office and closed the door behind me.

  It was then, just as I sat myself back down at my desk and started to read through the article I’d been working on – CIA Behind Arms-For-Oil Deals In Angola – that the phone call came.

  CHAPTER 7

  Thames House, Millbank, MI5 Headquarters—November 1996

  Lacey exited the elevator into a corridor, accompanied by senior Whitehall spook Sir Philip Hemming. According to Lacey, it was Hemming who would later become the loudest voice of protest in the entire security sector against the planned assassination of Princess Diana.

  “She’s no longer HRH but she’s still the mother of the future king,” Sir Philip was saying as he and Lacey started off along the sterile, featureless corridor towards Room A6, where the meeting they were headed for was being held. “To make matters worse, Charles seems hell bent on marrying a divorcee. It’s all so messy.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “Which one?”

  “Tiggy Legge-Bourke. I heard she was pregnant by Charles, that she’d had an abortion to cover it up.”

  “A vicious rumour.” Sir Philip cleared his throat. “Anyway, I shouldn’t worry about Tiggy. Charles may well have added her to his already populous harem but I doubt there’s any danger of wedding bells. The public would never accept him marrying the royal nanny, not in place of Diana.”

  “But they’ll accept Camilla?”

  “At this precise moment in time, Robert, whether or not they accept Camilla is less a problem than his desire to marry her. That’s the problem.”

  A short distance along the corridor they stopped outside a regular, dark-wood door marked ‘A6’. Before opening it Sir Philip said something Lacey wasn’t expecting.

  “You know why you’re here today, Robert? Request from the top, which evidently originated with MI6. I hope you’re not keeping anything from us.”

  “Sir Philip?”

  “A Security Service Deputy Director of Counter-Proliferation, such as you are, wouldn’t ordinarily be expected to attend a meeting of this nature. Your presence here today is unusual, to say the least.”

  Lacey was a little taken aback by Sir Philip’s almost accusatory tone. “I had a meeting,” he heard himself say.

  “With our cousins at MI6. Yes, we know. Head of MI6 Special Operations summoned you personally. Must have been important.”

  “I suppose it was, yes.”

  Lacey’s mind was suddenly back at the Sincerity Club, the meeting he’d had with Mason scarcely a month earlier, when he’d learned about MI6’s plans to use a cut-out in an operation he’d yet to learn the full details of. Since then his senses had been working overtime trying to figure out what the end game might be, not wanting to believe the most palpable scenario, but at the same time not wanting to ignore his best instincts. All he knew for certain at this point was that the operation was being run by Mason and his deniable ops team, a fact in itself sufficient to have put his mind on amber alert. The fact that he’d been called up by Sir Philip in person late last evening, and told he was to accompany him to a in-house crisis meeting, had upped the amber alert to red, even more so when Sir Philip had then informed him that the meeting was to decide the way forward following the Lord Chancellor’s report on Diana’s recent divorce from Prince Charles.

  Again his mind raced back to his meeting with Mason at the Sincerity Club.

  A way to resolve the problem must be found, Mason had said to him as he’d stood up to leave, citing this as the reason behind his decision to use a cut-out. The situation has become unmanageable as a result of Diana’
s divorce from Prince Charles and the latter’s desire to remarry while the former remains alive. And that was the phrase that had lodged in Lacey’s mind: while the former remains alive. It had left Lacey in no doubt that Diana herself was the ‘problem’.

  “You know they want her out of the way, don’t you,” Sir Philip said, interrupting Lacey’s thoughts.

  “They?”

  “MI6. They want shot of her.”

  “Oh, they want shot of everyone they can’t control,” Lacey replied, endeavouring to shrug the remark off and yet at the same time conceal the growing sense of apprehension in him.

  Sir Philip opened the door. “She’s ruffled some very powerful feathers, Robert,” he said, shadowing Lacey into the meeting room. “Some very powerful feathers indeed. If she thinks she can take on the establishment and win she’s very much mistaken.”

  As Lacey and Sir Philip entered the meeting room they were greeted by a dozen or so faceless, suited officials, all but one seated at the impressive, oval-shaped table around which the meeting was about to be held.

  The one yet to be seated, Lacey immediately saw, was Richard Mason.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Mr King?”

  “Speaking.” I hit the button on my tape recorder and checked my wristwatch, a habit. It was 11.45 am. The tape recorder was wired to my telephone.

  “I’ve just read your article on the US government’s covert activities underground,” the American voice informed me—a male voice, mature, intelligent, engaging. “Project Noah’s Ark. Very interesting.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Sure.”

  “So how can I help you?” I was part with the conversation, part distracted by the article staring back at me from my computer screen: CIA Behind Arms-For-Oil Deals In Angola. It was still only part-way finished and the deadline was fast approaching. It was starting to bug me.

  “The article,” the voice went on, referring of course not to my CIA article, but to my Project Noah’s Ark article, which I’d published in the previous month’s issue. “It prompted me to call. I have some information.”

  “Go on.”

  “It would be best if you left your office,” the voice said in a slightly more guarded tone. “We’ll talk on another line. Go to a public call box and call this number.”

  “Now?”

  “It’ll be worth your while.”

  “Okay,” I said, my mind no longer distracted by the article I was desperate to finish but instead now fully focused on the call. I jotted down the number. “Who should I ask for?” I said. “Can you … hello?”

  But the line was already dead; the caller, whoever he was, had hung up.

  As the caller remarked, in last month’s issue I’d written a piece on what was already being referred to in conspiracy circles as the American government’s ‘deep-underground programme’. Rumour had it that a series of highly covert and extremely controversial military-industrial projects were being carried out in the United States – or more precisely, several hundred feet beneath the United States – and I’d set myself the task of finding out what they were and why they so intrigued the conspiracy community. In the main, the activities said to be taking place down there were experimentations in advanced-technology and biotechnology, while the facilities themselves were said to be powered by illegally run nuclear reactors. Or at least some of them were. Of course, there were rumours, too, of alien-government collaboration in some of the programmes, which provided not only an intriguing dimension to the story – especially at this time when the X-Files was so popular – but also the perfect angle for our readership.

  And in this regard there was an even more intriguing angle.

  The buzz at the time was that many of these underground facilities had been built with an ulterior purpose in mind—that the city-sized facilities, linked by a high-speed underground rail network, had been built as a contingency in the event of some imminent global catastrophe. Hence the title of my article: Project Noah’s Ark. When the apocalypse came, so the theory proposed, the elite would all dive underground while the masses would be left to the mercy of the ‘flood’. An unlikely scenario, perhaps. But at a time when so many feared that Area 51 really was a holding bay for captured aliens, that the recent Hollywood Blockbuster Independence Day was a precursor for the main event and that Fox Mulder really was the New Age Messiah come to save us all from alien takeover, it was a story worth the telling.

  And in any event, it was this article that had prompted the mystery caller to contact me. Or so he’d said. And rightly or wrongly – wrongly, it would turn out – I took him at his word.

  CHAPTER 9

  Avenue Marceau, Paris—April 1997

  The number plate on the black Mercedes S280 parked up outside Café de Baron on this dark and moonless night read 680 LTV75. It was a number plate Clive du Bois knew well enough.

  Having worked as a chauffeur for Etoile Limousine for the past two-and-a-half years he’d driven the vehicle on any number of occasions, and had come to memorize the number plate like he memorized everything else—faces, names, places. His mind was like a camera; it remembered everything, as it happened, frame by frame. The events of this night were no exception.

  He’d met his clients at Le Bourget Airport earlier that evening and had delivered them without incident to a sumptuous address in the affluent Paris suburb of Passy. Then, realizing he’d made good time, that he still had the best part of an hour to kill before his next pick-up, and figuring a strong café noir might be just what was needed to help him remain alert, and awake, he’d made his way back across town from Passy, driving first down by the river, then heading up along Avenue d’Léna and Avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie before swinging left on Avenue Marceau and pulling up outside Café de Baron, where he was now. His photographic mind had registered every detail of his journey—or rather, every detail except one. He’d been followed. The headlights he’d noticed in his rear-view mirror on his way to the airport, and then again as he’d pulled away after dropping off his clients in Passy, had been tailing him, yet so discreetly that even his mind couldn’t recall exactly when they’d appeared, or when they’d disappeared. And when they’d appeared again. From the moment he’d left the Etoile Limousine car lot at Place du Marché Saint-Honoré, scarcely a stone’s throw from Place Vendome and the Ritz Hotel in the centre of the city, and had driven all the way up to Le Bourget and back down to Passy, his pursuers had outmanoeuvred him. Now he was about to meet them, face on.

  As he opened the driver-side door and started to climb out, his intention to cross the several yards of dimly lit pavement to Café de Baron and order his late-night café noir, the chauffeur was met by a gloved hand that seemed to appear from nowhere, from the shadows, simultaneously wrapping itself around his neck and yanking him from his seat so violently that he buckled instantly to his knees on the pavement. Less than a beat later a second gloved hand slammed down on his head and opened up a gash fully four inches long with the butt of the pistol it held, sending du Bois tumbling backwards across the pavement like a drunk. He tried to yell, but he couldn’t. Instead he gave up this useless, stifled groan as the heel of a thick-soled boot thudded into his ribs and stole his breath. The last thing he remembered before losing consciousness was the number plate 680 LTV75 as it disappeared along Avenue Marceau and out of sight.

  And then, darkness, as du Bois’ photographic mind finally focused out.

  CHAPTER 10

  “It’s Jon King returning your call.” A raw November wind whipped through the call box in which I stood as I took out pen and notepad and thumbed my way through to an almost blank page—a page with space enough, at least, for me to scribble notes. I shivered. It was cold in here. The call box had been so convincingly demolished there was little of it left to keep the wind from penetrating my bones—windows smashed, door unhinged, so much so that a gap high enough for an ambitious limbo dancer to slither under now existed between the foot of the door and the concrete on which I
stood. Kids with nothing better to do, I figured. To make matters worse, the line was bad, the stranger’s voice faint and breaking up. I pressed a hand to my ear in an attempt to block out the drone of passing traffic. “Hello?” I said again. “It’s Jon King.”

  “I hear you.” The American voice was deep in tone, distinguishable from other stateside accents by its lazy, Southern drawl. “I hear you loud and clear.”

  I clicked open my ballpoint. “You say you have some information?”

  “In relation to your article about the deep-underground programme in America, yes—Project Noah’s Ark. Are you aware that there’s a similar programme in the UK—?”

  No, I wasn’t.

  “—I have the specifics. I can tell you all about it if you’re interested.”

  “I’m interested.”

  A brief pause, a static crackle on the line, then: “The thing is, what’s happening in America is happening over here, too. It’s just that over there the focus is mostly on advanced-technology projects, while in the UK it’s much more to do with biology, or more specifically, biotechnology—genetics, cloning, hybridization, all kinds of exotic bio-warfare experiments. It’s all pretty much beyond your worst nightmares.”

  “And you can prove this?”

  “I can help you build a case, put you in touch with those who are willing to speak out. I know people who work at these places. I can introduce you, help you get exclusives for your magazine. It would fit very well. For sure some of the biology involved in these programmes is pretty damn exotic, I can tell you that much, especially when it comes to the hybridization programmes.”

  “Exotic in what way, exactly?”

  “Aliens, man. The hybridization of aliens and humans.”

  Here we go, I thought, this is where we enter the twilight zone, but I refrained from saying it out loud. Instead I said: “That’s some claim.”