The Cut-Out

by Jon King

  CHAPTER 25

  St Tropez, France―April 1998

  James Andanson lit up a Havana cigar, sucked in a satisfying lungful of its aromatic smoke, then lounged back in his seat and admired the million-dollar scenery. He’d seen it all before, of course, on many occasions. But on this occasion the air smelled just that little bit sweeter, the sun shone brighter, the yachts, their owners and the gold they displayed seemed to gratify his senses just that little bit more licentiously. He knew St Tropez like an old friend, but this day it felt more like a new lover.

  “Beautiful,” he said to the man seated across from him. The two men occupied a seafront table outside La Souchet Café. “We are lucky men.”

  “We are?”

  “Yes, of course. In the space of just two short years you have masterminded and carried out the most audacious MI6 operation in the history of the organization. And I, Monsieur Mason, have become a very wealthy man.”

  “Yes, well, let us hope your luck holds long enough for you to enjoy your newfound wealth, James. From what I hear it might just be about to unravel.”

  “What do you mean?” Andanson’s buoyant mood was suddenly undone by Mason’s cloaked threat. He’d worked for his MI6 handler long enough to know when a warning had been issued, cloaked or not. This was one such moment. St Tropez suddenly seemed a tad less appealing.

  Dressed in casual cream suit and silk cravat, Mason swilled the ice around in his Cognac and Club Soda and gave Andanson his coolest stare. “I hear the police are interested in your car,” he said.

  Andanson’s reply was dismissive. “They asked a few questions, that is all. I told them I sold it.”

  “And the photographs?”

  “What photographs?”

  “Do you intend to sell them, too?”

  Suddenly Andanson realized what this meeting was really about, and the fear this realization spawned in him tried its damndest to close his throat. “I ... ahem ... I gave you the photographs,” he managed to say.

  “You did?”

  “Yes, of course. You know I did. The only photographs I have now are of the couple on holiday, in Monaco, Sardinia, and here in St Tropez.”

  “You were in Paris, James―”

  “Yes, but...”

  “―In the tunnel. We wouldn’t want those kind of photographs falling into the wrong hands.”

  Feverishly Andanson stubbed out his unfinished cigar and leaned forward across the table. His voice became an urgent whisper. “Do I look crazy? Do you think I would keep photographs of MI6 agents on the ground, outside the Ritz, inside the tunnel?”

  “Why not? Tabloid editors would give their rectal virginity for photographs like that. Worth a lot money.”

  “But I already have a lot of money, Monsieur Mason. Thanks to you I have a very good life.”

  “Yes.”

  As though deliberating Andanson’s fate Mason sat back in his seat and swilled his Cognac and Club Soda in its glass one more time. Then downed the liquid in one.

  “Long life, James,” he said, replacing the empty glass on the table between them. “Long life.”

  CHAPTER 26

  I was flustered. I’d promised to pick the kids up from school and I was late. It was raining outside like it never meant to stop, and I was dashing back and forth from closet to cloak cupboard looking for my rainproof. I couldn’t find it—anywhere. Reminding myself that, for the most part, I’d be in the car anyway, I decided to leave it and started fumbling around for my car keys. Where the hell had I left my car keys? In my jacket pocket. But which one? Which jacket had I worn last? Not that I owned a rich man’s wardrobe bulging with surplus outfits, but … shit! Now my phone was ringing. The last thing I needed right now was a phone call from the office. From anyone. I decided to ignore it; the kids would be waiting – in the rain! – and I needed to get myself down to the school, pronto. No time for phone calls.

  It kept ringing. Damn it! Still searching for my keys I pulled the phone from my pocket and checked the number: Unknown. Who could it be? No time to think about it. Right now I needed to find the keys and get the kids. Where the hell did I…? There! Glancing up I finally saw my car keys out the corner of my eye, on the mantelpiece, in clear view, gleaming at me like cheap diamonds: staring me full in the face! Why hadn’t I seen them? I made a bee line for the mantelpiece, snatched up my keys and headed for the door. All the while my phone was still ringing; all the while the number calling me was still unknown. Should I answer it? No! I’d be crazy to answer the phone right now, especially as I didn’t know who was calling. Opening the front door I stepped out into the rain and hit the answer button anyway.

  “Hello?”

  “You’re late,” the voice said. It was a male voice, English, with a seductively cultured accent.

  I froze. “Who is this?” I heard myself say.

  “Your alarm call,” the voice said. “You’d best be on your way. Your children are waiting for you. They’ve been let out early. They’re looking for you.”

  “What…? How do you know…?”

  “I can see them from where I’m sitting. They’re standing around in the rain, getting very wet. Little Rosie, Ben, Jack. You’d better hurry or they might think you’re not coming. You are still coming, aren’t you? I mean, if you can’t make it I could give them a lift … if you’d like.”

  “No!” I was instantly shaking: raging—part anger, part terror. “Who the hell are you?” I demanded to know as I slammed the door behind me and sprinted over to my car. “You hear me?” Turning the ignition. “You’d better back off, pal!” Screeching off down the road. “I’ll be there in two minutes, less than that. Back off!”

  “It’s you who needs to back off, Jon. Back off and you’ll never hear from us again, never be followed home again, never have your livelihood pulled from under you, ever again…”

  By now I could see the school ahead, maybe fifty or more kids wandering out of the gates, looking for their parents. I could also see a car I was certain I’d seen before, a black Ford Granada with smoke-tinted windows parked up opposite the school. It was the same car I’d seen in Marlborough on the day I’d met the American, I was sure of it.

  “Back off and your family will be safe.”

  I hit the end button and cut the caller off, then discarded my phone on the passenger seat. Whoever he was, whatever his threats, I didn’t need to hear anymore from him. I was there now anyway, pulling up behind the row of parked cars stretching back from the school entrance, jumping out and running over to the gates in search of my children, oblivious to the rain, the umbrellas, the parents escorting their kids out of the school gates and scurrying them off across the road into the warm, dry safety of their vehicles. I was oblivious to the black Ford Granada pulling off from across the street and coasting down the road away from the school, as well—too intent on finding my kids to even notice the son of a bitch, to give him even the merest glance. It wasn’t until I discovered all three of them hanging out in the school cloakroom, keeping themselves dry, out of the rain; wasn’t until I’d gathered them all up and escorted them back to the warm, dry safety of my own car that I noticed the Granada had gone. I didn’t care. In that moment I didn’t care. All I cared about was that the kids – Rosie, Ben, Jack – were all safely belted into their seats, chatting about their day, oblivious to the threat with smoke-tinted windows that only moments before had loomed outside the school gates like an ominous death cloud. I took a deep breath and sighed, inwardly. I was the most relieved dad in the world in that moment. As I signalled to pull off and head back home I even shed a solitary tear, discreetly wiping it away before the kids saw their daddy crying.

  And then I made a vow: this would be the last time ever I would be late picking the kids up from school.

  ●

  The next few months were tough. Both Katie and I had lost our regular employment. I managed to sell a few articles, get a few other scraps of freelance work to help keep us going, but it was a real stru
ggle. Katie, meanwhile, worked desperately hard on a new venture with her mum—a new shop that, initially, struggled even to pay for itself, never mind pay Katie and her mum anything resembling a regular salary. If it hadn’t been for JB I think I would have given up at this point; I think I would, at least, have forgotten about the book and the investigation and got myself another job. A regular job. A paying job. But thanks to JB I didn’t need to. For the several barren months following the collapse of our magazine he not only odd-jobbed in his second profession as a care worker to keep himself afloat. Every spare minute he had he also worked tirelessly to help me find outlets for my articles, as well as a publisher for the book, and at the same time arranged meetings with potential investors in a new magazine we were endeavouring to get off the ground. It was a heroic effort on his part, one that in the end paid dividends.

  “Got it!” JB was suddenly standing there, in my home, in my office doorway, the smile on his face so broad it touched both his ears.

  Startled, I looked up from the article I was writing on my computer and swung round to face him. “Jesus, you made me jump. Got what?”

  “A deal.”

  “A deal?”

  “A book deal. A company in New York want to publish the book. They’re not offering much of an advance but it’s enough to get us to Paris.”

  “Really?”

  “And that’s not all. I think I might have found an investor for the new magazine as well. I think we might be back in our proper jobs in a few weeks.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Deadly serious.”

  “My God…”

  I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. JB had well and truly come through, a fact reflected in the size of the smile still separating his ears, a smile mirrored on my own face now. True, it was a smile that would later disappear as we learned that the publishers he’d found would, in many ways, prove more hindrance than help, and would leave us ultimately to question them as much as we questioned everybody else. But for now JB’s news was manna from heaven.

  “You say the advance is enough to get us to Paris?” I said.

  “If we go by train.”

  “I’ll pack my bags.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Paris—Friday, July 31st, 1998

  Richard Tomlinson was a wanted man. He’d just served five months of a twelve-month jail sentence for breaking the Official Secrets Act and now here he was in Paris, in breach of his parole conditions and hell-bent on giving evidence to the French Inquiry implicating MI6 in the death of Princess Diana. No wonder he was number one on MI6’s ‘wanted’ list. True, others had given evidence claiming MI6 had murdered Diana, but their information hadn’t originated from inside the organization. Tomlinson’s had. He was himself a former MI6 officer, after all, and until his dismissal three years ago he was party to highly privileged information, some of which – the more juicy bits – he was about to make available to the Inquiry’s presiding magistrate, Judge Hervé Stephan. Indeed, he’d already prepared his affidavit, which revealed not only that MI6 had undeclared agents stationed in Paris on the night of Diana’s death, an unprecedented number of them, in fact; but also that Diana’s chauffeur, Henri Paul, and well-known French paparazzo, James Andanson, were both high-level MI6 assets. He’d seen the files containing this information, he said; the files were colour-coded and numbered and he would reveal the full extent of what they contained when he testified before the Inquiry in just a few days time.

  He would also reveal their colour-codes and numbers.

  And that’s not all. He would reveal too that, when serving as a deep-cover agent in Serbia in 1992, he’d been made party to an MI6 plot to assassinate then Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, by road traffic accident. According to Tomlinson, the plans he’d seen had outlined the proposed operation in some detail, and had involved firing a powerful strobe light in the eyes of Milosevic’s chauffeur as he drove his president through a tunnel, causing him to lose control of the limousine so that it crashed into the tunnel’s concrete wall—identical in many respects to the operation that had killed Diana.

  And still there was more. The question of who, ultimately, was behind the operation was already the subject of fierce speculation, on the street and in the press. Tomlinson threatened to add to that speculation by revealing the names of senior MI6 officers who, he said, enjoyed a ‘special relationship’ with senior members of the Royal Household. The implication was that certain ‘requests’ made by the Royal Household were routinely filtered through to MI6 Special Operations and carried out as ‘deniable ops’.

  And there was the problem.

  In short, the reason Tomlinson was a wanted man was not just that he’d pissed off MI6, nor just that he threatened to spill their secrets. More that those secrets led directly back, via the Royal Household, to the man currently in charge of MI6 Special Operations. And the man currently in charge of MI6 Special Operations, of course, was Richard Mason.

  If you mess with the Devil, as they say, expect Him to call you up…

  …Mason picked up the phone. “Put me through to DST,” he said, urgently, eager to speak to his counterpart at the Directorate de Surveillance Territoire, the French equivalent of MI5. The call went through in a matter of seconds.

  “Monsieur Mason?”

  “Tomlinson’s arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport. He’ll be at his hotel within the hour. I take it you’ll be there to greet him?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. I’ll be over later.”

  Mason put the phone down and started to thumb through the document lying open on his desk. It was a photocopy of Tomlinson’s affidavit that had found its way into Mason’s office at the British Embassy in Paris by way of the DST. The thick folder lying next to the affidavit contained Tomlinson’s MI6 file―a 6 x 4 photograph and detailed history of the man Mason knew as a traitor. For a brief moment he studied Tomlinson’s photograph, the puffed-up, self-assured expression the man always seemed to wear—his charm, his savoir-faire, his bright, athletic good looks. Mason loathed him, with interest. Discarding the photograph he gave his attention back to Tomlinson’s affidavit as he leaned across his desk and picked up a different phone to the one he’d just used to call DST. It was a direct line to London.

  “Have you seen what Tomlinson intends to say at the Inquiry?” an unusually fractious sounding Mason enquired, again thumbing his way through the traitor’s affidavit.

  “We have a copy.”

  “And...?”

  The stuffy, dispassionate voice on the other end of the line seemed unperturbed. “Oh, I shouldn’t concern yourself overly, Richard. No one will believe him, not ultimately, except perhaps the usual gaggle of liberals and conspiracy theorists. Which I would say is rather the point anyway.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “Speaking of conspiracy theorists, how is your cut-out shaping up? Still fighting the good fight?”

  “Rather more fervently than we’d anticipated, as a matter of fact. He’s found a publisher for his book. In America.”

  “But that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course. But it’s just ... I think we should keep an eye on him. I’m meeting with DST a little later. I’ll have them maintain a covert surveillance.”

  “DST?”

  “He’s on his way to Paris.”

  “King…?”

  “He’s travelling here with his accomplice, John Beveridge.”

  “Rather a coincidence, isn’t it? Messrs King and Beveridge in Paris at the same time as Tomlinson?”

  “I rather prefer to think of it as forward planning.”

  “Ah.” There was a slight pause on the other end of the line, the sound of muffled voices, as though plans were being discussed. Then: “Sir Robert requests you keep us abreast of developments. King and Beveridge are of little importance at this stage, but keep a shadow on them anyway, just in case. And make it one of our own. DST are not to be trusted.�
�

  “Affirmative.”

  “As for Tomlinson, let him know we disapprove of his decision to inform the Inquiry. But let him do it anyway.”

  “Right.”

  “Then throw him the hell out.”

  CHAPTER 28

  “You know what’s bugging me, JB?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The world’s most famous couple are killed in a car crash in the centre of Paris, one of the world’s busiest cities. At least three other vehicles are involved in the crash and yet they all just vanish, without trace. Can you imagine that happening in the middle of London?—”

  “Well, I....”

  “—She was the mother of the future King of England, for Christ’s sake. I mean, didn’t anybody get a number plate? What about the CCTV, or the speed cameras? Don’t they have cameras in France?”

  “I guess that’s what we need to find out.”

  We were in the back seat of a cab, on the outskirts of Paris. It was a muggy, overcast morning as we picked our way slowly through some of the city’s less desirable suburbs on our way downtown to meet a contact Lacey had said might be worth talking to. We’d arrived here the night before, and had booked a room at a modestly priced pension on Boulevard Saint-Germain, just across the river from Place de la Concorde and the affluent side of town. Although we’d fully intended to travel here by rail, on the relatively new Eurostar Channel Tunnel train, in the end JB had managed to find a last-minute deal on flights so we’d flown to Paris after all. And now here we were, somewhat out of our comfort zone and entirely out of our depth, on our way to meet a mysterious character called Thierry who, according to Lacey, was the man to plug the gaps. Or at least some of them.

  As we turned off the main drag into what turned out to be a seemingly endless warren of backstreets and alleyways I couldn’t help but wonder who might know we were here, and that we were on our way to meet a prime contact introduced to us by a serving MI5 officer: Lacey. I shivered. Strange how being in a foreign city, away from home, can make you feel vulnerable. Exposed. Paranoid.