The Cut-Out

by Jon King

  “It’s in the van with the other stuff.”

  “The other stuff?”

  “A few desktop computers, half a dozen laptops, a couple of scanners, one or two other bits and pieces—whatever we could find that we knew we could sell on. You did say so long as we got the hard drive and the photographs we could take whatever else we wanted and keep it for ourselves.”

  “Well let’s hope you find a favourable price,” Mason said. “Shall we?”

  Turning, the man opened up the back of the van and craned inside. While he did so, Mason kept his hand tucked discreetly in his pocket and firmly clasped around the butt of his semiautomatic pistol. One false move and the man was dead.

  “One hard drive, one folder,” the man said, as he re-emerged from the back of the van with the goods Mason was about to pay him for. “The photographs are in the folder.”

  “They’d better be.” Mason handed the man a brown envelope. “If you get caught…”

  “I know the rules, Monsieur,” the man said. “If we get caught it was all our own idea. They would never believe me anyway, even if I told them the truth.”

  “Correct. Now you’d best be gone; the police are on their way.”

  The man nodded. He understood. He stepped around the side of the van, climbed in the driver-side door and fired the engine. Then drove off into the night.

  Mason hit the call button on his mobile phone. A beat, then: “Tell Sir Robert all is well. The archive will go the same way as the man himself: it will be incinerated.”

  A few moments later, hard drive and folder containing Andanson’s entire photographic archive safely in his possession, Mason’s climbed back in the ‘cab’ and closed the door.

  “Jon, it’s Jackie,” my voicemail told me. Evidently she’d phoned when JB and I had been out and about and I’d only just retrieved her message. We were at this moment making our way back to the UK, or more precisely, we were stuck in a somewhat disorderly queue at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport. In any event we were on our way home, and despite being nudged ever closer towards the customs security gate, shuffling along with my bag between my ankles, mobile phone pressed hard to my ear with my shoulder as I fumbled in my pockets for my passport and boarding pass, I was eager to listen to what Jackie had to say. I’d recently asked her to find out what she could about James Andanson, and I guessed the message she’d left contained her report.

  I was right. “It looks like you were right about James Andanson being in Paris on the night of the crash,” her message began. “Friends of his say he took telltale photographs in the tunnel immediately after the crash, and that he was planning to publish them in a book. But it seems someone had other ideas. His death was announced today…”

  No way…

  I almost dropped the phone. James Andanson dead? How? Had he been murdered? I asked myself. Who else were they prepared to bump off to keep the truth from showing its teeth? A shiver cut through me as I sent an instinctive glance left and right, then behind me, as though to make sure I wasn’t being watched. My paranoid instincts surfacing again.

  “He’s dead,” I mouthed to JB. I could scarcely speak.

  “Who’s dead?” JB wanted to know.

  I motioned for him to keep his voice down. “James Andanson,” I soft-toned. “It’s Jackie on the phone. James Andanson’s dead.”

  “What? Well … how…?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know. I continued listening to Jackie’s message.

  “The authorities are saying it was suicide,” she went on. “What they’re not saying is that, according to an initial report by AFP, Andanson was found four-hundred miles from where he was supposed to be with a bullet hole in his left temple. He was found in his car, in a clearing in secluded woodland just north of Montpellier. The car was completely burnt out. Andanson was unrecognizable.” She paused, and then added: “The AFP report has been withdrawn, by the way. They’re now going with the suicide story.”

  “Jesus.” The terrors were growing in me with every word Jackie spoke. Again I scanned around me, just in case.

  “There’s more,” Jackie continued. “AFP are also reporting that Andanson’s office at the SIPA press agency was broken into by an armed gang last night. His entire photographic archive was stolen, including presumably his portfolio of Diana, possibly even his photos of those who killed her. Whoever was behind this certainly did a thorough job.”

  “My God…”

  “Anyway, Jon, that’s all for now. Have a good flight home. I’ll see you when you get back. Bye.”

  I hit the End Call button and turned to JB. “It was suicide,” I heard myself say. “James Andanson committed suicide. Evidently he shot himself in the head, then threw his gun away, locked himself in his car, disposed of his keys, then set fire to himself.”

  “He was murdered, then,” JB said.

  I didn’t respond. And JB didn’t speak again. In fact I don’t think either of us spoke again until we landed in England. We were just too numb.

  CHAPTER 34

  2 Years Later, Odyssey Magazine Offices—November, 2001

  The sound of the phone ringing in my office. An electronic click-click on the line as I picked up the receiver and pressed it to my ear. Then a short silence, followed by the faintest of crackles as the call was rerouted through GCHQ’s echelon screening system and redirected via satellite back to me. All this in the space of a heartbeat.

  Was it worth it? All that taxpayers’ money to fund the surveillance of a ‘whacko’ conspiracy theorist—someone who, after all, they’d conspired to set up in the first place?

  No, I didn’t think so, either. But then, I wasn’t the one trying to cover up the murder of a princess.

  Though being back in England had made us feel a little less vulnerable, being constantly reminded that our phones were tapped was still a cause for concern. They weren’t even clever about it. It had reached the point now that every time I made a call or answered the phone the electronic crackles and pops on the line were louder even than the person I was talking to. At least that’s the way it seemed. Whether or not this was a deliberate ploy, of course, a form of psychological warfare designed to keep us freaked, I couldn’t say for certain. But if it was, it worked. If not, then to judge by the radio-ham crackles and pops that accompanied our every call, MI5 was in serious need of some new technology.

  On a positive note, we’d arrived back from our second trip to France to find that our new magazine Odyssey – a more straight-line investigative journal, no UFOs, no aliens – had received the green light from the new distributor we’d managed to find and was now doing well enough. Our new offices were comfortable enough, too. My office in particular – where I sat now, at my desk, answering the phone call that had just interrupted a feature I’d been working on for the past few hours – was clean and airy, and even boasted a reasonable view. All in all, it was good to be back in work—good to be earning an honest dollar again and able at least to some manageable extent to pay the bills, even though at times it seemed like I was having to share my new office with the gangsters at MI5: click-click.

  I slapped the receiver against the heel of my hand and put it back to my ear.

  “Hello?” I said, a little aggressively. “Who is this?”

  A small run of several more clicks, then: “Jon, it’s me,” Katie said. “Is everything okay?”

  “Oh, Katie, hi…”

  “Only, you sound angry at something.”

  “No, no, everything’s fine,” I lied, narked more than intimidated at the thought of some upstart tea boy at GCHQ listening in on my private calls. “I’m just not so keen on the company we seem to be attracting these days, that’s all.”

  “You mean the clicks on the line, don’t you. Jon, I find this all really frightening. Who are they? What do they want?”

  “I don’t know what they want, babe. It’ll be all right, though. I promise.”

  I could hear the alarm in Katie’s voice, and it cut me
to the bone. She’d been really suffering with the stress of it all lately—the financial struggles we still faced, the phone taps, the insanely long hours I’d been working in an effort to keep it all together. And the mood-swings that had plagued me as a result.

  But I guess the worst thing Katie was having to deal with was my seeming obsession with finding the truth about Diana. Without me realizing, it had grown to overwhelming proportions, even to the point that I was putting the investigation, my obsession, before everything – my work, the kids, my wife – and Katie was the one who was having to pick up the pieces. Which wasn’t fair. Katie had supported me from the very beginning, had stood by me while others had laughed, and scorned. She deserved better. And so did the kids. Trouble was, at this precise moment in time I was just too immersed to realize it.

  “It’ll be all right, I promise.” I heard myself saying it again, as if saying it twice would somehow make it more defensible. But if anything it just made it sound more hollow. I changed the subject. “What are you doing with yourself on your day off, anyway?”

  “Well at the moment I’m watching the news. Al Fayed’s lawyer has just been on. The French court of appeal upheld his claim but still ruled against a second inquiry.”

  “Can they do that…?”

  “They just did. Judge Stephan was found guilty of serious wrongdoing for failing to prosecute the paparazzi, but the verdict still stands. It was a drink-drive accident.”

  “Henri Paul was the lone gunman.”

  “Fraid so.”

  “Jesus. They’re not even subtle about it.”

  A short pause, then: “Anyway,” Katie said, and in a way that told me she was coming to the real point of her phone call. I braced myself. “The good news is mum can babysit for us tonight.”

  “Tonight…?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Well, I…”

  “You did promise…”

  “I know, but…” Damn! Katie was right. I did promise. See if your mum can babysit, I’d said. We’ll book a table, drink some wine, spend some quality time—together. It had completely slipped my mind.

  “Jon…?”

  “I know, babe, I know. I’m sorry,” I said, tripping hopelessly over my own excuses. “It’s just …there’s so much to do here and … I’m just so busy…”

  “You’re always busy. You spend more time with Diana than you do with me.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it? I’m serious, Jon. We can’t go on like this.”

  “Well … can we arrange for tomorrow?”

  “Mum can’t do tomorrow.”

  “The weekend, then? Saturday evening, I promise. I’ll make a note—”

  “I’ll tell you what, Jon, make a note of this. I’ll be staying at mum’s tonight. I’ll see you when I see you.”

  “What…? Katie, no, wait…” But it was too late. She’d already hung up.

  As if to underline the fact that I’d just been dumped, MI5 hung up, too. The familiar clicking sound that accompanied the conclusion of all my office phone calls – my home and mobile phone calls, too – punctuated the end of the call. I slammed the phone down in its cradle, frustrated.

  At which point JB came bounding through the door.

  “You need to pay more attention to your love life, mate,” he said, and dumped a pile of ripped-open envelopes on my desk. “Readers’ letters.”

  “That was them again,” I said, deliberately ignoring his sideways remark. “On the line. It was them.”

  JB raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “I can report it,” he said, tongue-in-cheek. “See if we can get a trace.”

  “Trace MI5? Ha-ha.”

  “Well have you got any better ideas?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.” I stood up and threw on my jacket. “I’ll go and talk to them face to face,” I said. “At least that way we cut out the middle man.”

  That said, I stormed out the office and headed for Hyde Park.

  “I did tell you your number was on file,” Lacey said, as if this would make everything all right. “You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “No. But surprisingly that doesn’t make me feel any better. Do you realize what it’s like being watched by faceless spooks all the time? Being followed everywhere, having your every conversation monitored and recorded? Not being able to talk about it to anyone because they’ll think you’re a paranoid idiot? I mean, for Chris’ sake. It’s gone beyond a joke, Lacey. It’s no longer funny.”

  “Well you know what they say, Jon. If you want the wheel to stop spinning, stop peddling.”

  “That’s not what I wanted to hear.”

  We were standing on Serpentine Bridge, Hyde Park’s impressive artificial lake stretching out before us, Kensington Gardens hiving at our back. I cast a glance across my shoulder, and in the near distance, through the trees, I could just make out the majesty of Kensington Palace, where Diana had spent her life as a wife and mother, as a divorcee: as a princess. A palace on the outside, she’d once told friends, a prison on the inside: the place, ultimately, where her coffin had spent the night before her funeral at Westminster Abbey, more than four years ago now. I could hardly believe it. Four years of lies, spies and cover-ups, and an ever-growing obsession to uncover the truth behind her death. My obsession.

  And throughout that time Katie had borne the burden of it all.

  I sucked in a deep, heavy breath and held it for several heartbeats. When I released it again my shoulders sagged. “It’s really started to affect my personal life,” I said, calmer now, more resigned. “The kids hardly recognize me these days. My wife hardly sees me anymore, and when she does I’m usually too involved or … or too tired … well, you know. It’s just, if I’d known at the start of all this what I know now I would never have—”

  “Don’t be so sure about that,” Lacey cut in. “It’s in your nature, Jon. No doubt that’s why you were selected. They would have profiled you well in advance.” He turned and caught my eye. “The American, as you call him, he knew when he fed you the information that you’d act on it. That’s why he told you and not someone else.”

  “When he fed me the information? When I was selected? What are you saying?”

  “More than I should.”

  “Are you saying I was set up? But … why? Why would they want to tell me their secrets in advance? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It’s not supposed to, not yet.”

  “Lacey you’re starting to creep me out. I can’t take much more of this, and neither can my family.”

  “You should have thought of that before you decided to write a book about it. It’s too late now, Jon. You’re in too deep.” He added: “But you do have one thing in your favour.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “They need you—alive. That’s why they keep such a close eye on you. It’s when the surveillance stops you’ll need to start worrying.” He threw a brief glance at a man standing on the road below us, on the water’s edge. He was in his thirties, dressed in bomber jacket and jeans and seemed intermittently to touch his hand to his ear, like he was listening to music on a walkman. Lacey knew different. “If it’s any consolation, I can assure you you’re causing them more of a headache than they’re causing you,” he said, tipping his head towards the man, discreetly, so as to point him out to me without him realizing. “Ask him.”

  I threw a discreet glance down at the man below. The realization that I was looking at an MI5 surveillance spook, that once again they’d known in advance of my meeting with Lacey and had turned up to monitor it, made me feel sick. How did they always know? “Did you tell them about our meeting?” I put to Lacey.

  “Of course not,” he said with a touch of irony. “You did.”

  Stupid question. Of course I did. I’d arranged the meeting on the phone a couple of days previously, and they’d obviously been listening in. Again I felt sick. “I just wish I’d never met the American,” I said. “I wish none of
this had ever happened.”

  “Yes, well, foreknowledge doesn’t always come with twenty-twenty vision, does it. You of all people should know that.” Again he turned and caught my eye, as though to emphasize what he was about to say next. “Listen, Jon, if you take my advice you’ll hang in there. You may not get the public inquiry you’re pushing for, but you may yet force an investigation, and that would likely result in a judicial inquest. A jury, Jon. It would mean the coroner would be forced to appoint a jury. It’s your best hope.”

  “You really thinks that’s possible?”

  “It won’t be easy. But yes, it’s possible. That’s the other reason they’re still showing such a keen interest in you.”

  I thought about this for a moment, and even though I felt like a fly in a spider’s web, unable to move, or even breathe, without the spider knowing about it, I had to confess the possibility of forcing the government to order an investigation did make it seem somehow worthwhile.

  The only downer was still that my marriage was on the line because of it.

  Again I sucked in a deep breath, and refocused my mind on the primary reason I’d arranged to meet Lacey again after all this time. Until now the possibility that Diana might have been pregnant when she died had been off-menu; we’d so far found no real evidence and had thus paid the possibility little heed. Recently, however, we’d got word that the pregnancy theory might just hold some liquid.

  “When we first spoke about this you said Diana was pregnant,” I said to Lacey, and noticed the guy down below us touch his hand to his ear again.

  Lacey noticed him, too. “Did I?” he said.

  “I received a message from someone, a student doctor. He said his lecturer knew Diana’s nutritional guru. He said they both knew she was pregnant.”

  “If you’re fishing for motive, Jon, you’re casting the wrong line. Whether or not she was pregnant is neither here nor there. Fact is, she didn’t need to be pregnant. The possibility that she could have fallen pregnant at any time was motive enough.”