The Cut-Out

by Jon King

  “Jon?” JB said, following my gaze and fixing on the colourless, craggy face staring back at us across the crowded space. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen that ghost again.”

  “A ghost with a gun this time,” I said without looking at JB. I’d already discarded my coffee on the nearest windowsill and had started to slice my way through the crowd over to where the ghost was standing.

  JB started after me.

  A few moments later we both followed the American out of the door.

  ●

  “Good to see you again, Jon,” the American said, and tipped his head at JB. “I take it this is the famous John Beveridge.”

  “People call me JB.”

  “Oh, yes, I know. I know pretty much all there is to know about both of you.”

  We were outside in the car park, standing twenty or so yards from where we’d just exited the conference centre, JB by my side, the American opposite. It was growing dusky, the light falling in thin shadows across the American’s gouged features, giving them a pasty, almost sinister edge. His eyes, though, were smiling, and I couldn’t quite make out if he’d come as friend or foe.

  The latter, I was about to learn.

  “I caught some of what you were saying in there,” the American said to me in his slow, Southern drawl. He was referring to the first half of my talk. “You’ve put together a pretty strong case.”

  “Thanks…”

  “I especially liked the piece about intelligence agents being at work in Paris on the night Diana died. Man that really made me smile. I can see them all now, running for cover, disappearing over the hills and ducking underground to avoid being caught. They all must be terrified.” He grinned, as though amused by his own mocking humour.

  I wasn’t quite sure how to take it. So I ignored it. “You’ll be staying for the second half, then?”

  “Oh, no, I think not. Thing is, I have a prior appointment. I have to leave in just a few minutes.” He left a small pause, turned his eye to nothing in particular, then back at me. I couldn’t help feeling he was playing with us. “Anyways, I heard that you were giving this talk so I figured I’d drop by and say well done, you know? Congratulations. I’ve been real impressed with the way you took on what I told you all those years ago, even more so with the way you carried out your investigation and pieced together such a convincing argument. You even managed to get your book distributed over here—against all the odds. Very impressive.” He sucked his teeth. “Yep, we couldn’t have scripted it any better if we’d tried. Didn’t even have to work it. You just played right along, like the conscientious conspiracy theorist I always knew you to be, the consummate sandman, sprinkling false hope on the eyes of the grieving masses, telling everyone exactly what they wanted to hear. You did a real good job—”

  Before I could respond he added:

  “—Just like we intended.”

  “Sorry…?”

  Just like we intended.

  “Fact is, without you we’d still be trying to figure out how to deal with those grieving masses, all those bleeding hearts out there who can’t accept what must be done to maintain the status quo. There’s a lot of ‘em.”

  I still wasn’t sure exactly where this was going, but wherever it was I knew I didn’t want to go there. My gut was beginning to wrench. “Look,” I said, not sure quite what else to say. “I really don’t understand—”

  “Then let me spell it out for you, Jon,” the American said, his tone suddenly armoured, his eyes hard on mine. “You were set up.”

  “What…?”

  “You were set up, plain and simple, trussed up like a shop-front mannequin. Trouble is the mannequin has broken the rules.”

  “Rules? What rules? What are you talking about?” I wasn’t sure if it was quite the shrewdest move to argue with such a gnarly special forces veteran. But I found myself doing it anyway. “What do you mean by mannequin, anyway? I’m nobody’s pawn if that’s what you’re trying to say.”

  “Oh but that’s exactly what you are, a grade-one errand boy. You’re what’s known in the trade as a cut-out, a courier of carefully managed information: information we wanted in the public domain anyway; information we wanted the public to chew on without them knowing it was us feeding them.”

  “No…”

  “We needed a champion, you see, someone to rouse a little national fervour, give the public a release for their anger at the untimely death of their princess. We figured someone like you would take the bait. We just didn’t figure you’d take it this far.” He paused, his eyes firming over with ultimatum. “You’ve served us well, Jon, better than you know. But now it’s time to back off—”

  “Back off…?”

  “—Safely, while you still can.”

  “That sounds like a threat.”

  “Take it as you will. I’m telling you as it is. I want you to drop your call for a public inquiry.”

  “What—?”

  Drop your call for a public inquiry.

  “—But we’ve invested years of our lives in this. We’re not about to just give up and walk away, not now.”

  Beside me I could sense JB growing more tense by the second. He tugged at my arm. “Come on, Jon. We don’t need to listen to this.”

  “Oh but you do,” the American warned. “You need to listen good.”

  “Or what?” I fired back. “You’ll kill us, too? Should we check our brakes before we drive home tonight? Or is it the straightforward bullet in the head for us?”

  A smug grin turned the American’s lips. “Oh, we don’t kill people like you, Jon,” he said. “We use ‘em to our advantage.”

  “You bastard…”

  “We told you what we wanted you to say and now we’re telling you to stop. If you refuse you’ll be on the front page of every tabloid in the country, I can promise you that. I can see the headlines now: the crazy conspiracy theorist who claims the CIA forewarned him of Diana’s assassination.”

  “But that’s true and you know it. You’re the one who forewarned me.”

  “The UFO chaser who believes the moon landings were faked, that Roswell was real and that the American government possesses alien technology—”

  “What…?”

  “—Or how about this one? The man who believes some acid-rock story about Diana’s Stuart bloodline being responsible for her death, and that a nine-inch Belgian in a sporran and a kilt is the true King of Scotland. Oh, that reminds me, have you read the news?”

  He pulled a folded copy of the Sunday Mail from his coat pocket and tossed it my way.

  I caught it, unfolded it, and almost immediately fell backwards as the headline screaming back at me caught me full in the face. Fake King Of Scots Flees To Belgium, it read, and went on to say how the self-styled HRH Prince Michael of Albany faces fraud charges over his applications for British citizenship and a passport. I knew instantly that, fake king or genuine pretender, the American and his buddies had fitted Michael up.

  “Where is he?” I demanded to know, realizing now that this was the reason Michael had failed to show up for tonight’s talk.

  “Like the paper says,” the American said with a lopsided sneer. “He’s in Belgium, where he belongs. But there’s no need to worry yourself. He’s safe, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “All I’m wondering is how you people sleep at night,” I said, and stared back down at the headline and its accompanying article.

  A nine-inch Belgian in a sporran and a kilt, the American had said. He was of course referring to Prince Michael, whom we’d first met via our extraordinary rendezvous with the Doctor and his anonymous colleague—the Doctor whom we’d met on the London Eye, and his colleague whom we’d met down by the river following our abduction from outside BBC Broadcasting House. If we’d had any doubts up to this point, all had now come perfectly clear. That the American had just mocked me for believing the acid-rock story about Diana’s Stuart bloodline being responsible for her death meant that he
knew about our contact with these two shadowy characters, and that in turn surely meant they’d been part of the plot all along—didn’t it? That is unless they too had been set up, but I failed to see quite how. Marry into it, produce children, get rid of the mother. The Doctor had convinced us that Diana’s death had been due, at least in part, to the royal bloodline from which she’d descended: that some secretive, and powerful, neo-Templar group had wanted to restore that bloodline to the Throne using her as an unwitting figurehead. Crazy? Perhaps. But Michael had also reiterated this claim and, indeed, had told us that he too had been approached by this same secretive group, but that he had rebuffed their approach. Had Michael been in on it as well? I thought about this for a brief moment, and quickly realized: no. Michael had been as much the fall guy as John or I, of course, I was certain of that. The Doctor, on the other hand, with his tales of Muslim-Christian conflict, of a Jacobite uprising and a messianic bloodline so powerful it ruled the Western world … oh yes, the Doctor must surely have been the feeder we’d long suspected him of being; our meeting with him must surely have been arranged for one reason and one reason only: so that the Doctor could feed us information so very far off the beaten track that, whether true or not, it would serve by association to corrupt and discredit the evidence we were presenting in our book. Our God is Jehova, he’d said. Theirs is Allah. And never the twain shall meet. And again: Interlopers they may be, but their control of the bloodline is supreme. And because it is they occupy the seats of Western power today. Again still: You are aware that Diana was a Stuart by blood, that she too was a descendant of the Bonnie Prince and the original bloodline? She was a bigger threat than either of you realize.

  And we’d fallen for it, lock-stock. Indeed, the only good that had come from all this was that we’d actually got to know Michael – the man, the prince – but even he’d now been spin-dried, it seemed: deported, thrown out, sent back to Belgium.

  And there, sure enough, was the giveaway.

  Michael had been in Scotland since 1976, actively pursuing his claim to the Scottish Throne in the full glare of the Westminster establishment. Why hadn’t he been thrown out before now? Sure, he’d faced a few hassles, had had his home wired, his passport revoked, his birth certificate rewritten to support the ‘Fake King Of Scots’ headline glaring back at me now. But only now, today, after more than a quarter of a century – now that he’d started speaking publicly about the death of Princess Diana, and winning public support for his own cause in the process – only now had he been sought out and crushed. It spoke volumes.

  I tossed the paper back to the American. “There was no need to do this to him,” I said. “You’ve ruined him.”

  “Exactly,” the American said, snatching the paper from the air and holding it up so that its headline yelled back at me. “Let this be your warning. This is what happens when you piss off the wrong people. Born in exile, die in exile, end of story. He should have kept his royal mouth shut.” He stared me down for a long moment. “Let it go, Jon, or you too will end up like this—a laughing stock. All your hard work will have been for nothing.”

  “Only if people buy it,” I said, defiantly. “Only if the public believe the spin.”

  “Oh they will. Remember what I told you all those years ago?” He fixed me now with a glare so cold it made me shiver. “We can make anybody believe anything.”

  I remembered. I shivered again.

  “If you know what’s good for you you’ll let it go now. I can’t be responsible for what might happen if you don’t, but a very public character assassination will be the least of it, I can promise you that.”

  He held my gaze for a moment longer – long enough that I knew I’d been formally warned: no threatened – and he turned and walked away.

  I crumpled, right there on the spot, folded in on myself like an empty glove puppet. I felt so deflated it seemed as though every ounce of energy had been sucked from me, every fighting thought from my head, every last breath from my lungs. In that moment, as I stood and watched the American disappear across the car park, beyond the perimeter wall and out of sight, I realized there was no truth left to fight for, that everything we’d achieved would count for nothing if we dared to ignore the American’s threats. We were beaten. We would have to do as he said. And that was the end of it.

  CHAPTER 45

  “You were there, JB. Tell Mark what the man said.”

  I stormed into the backstage dressing room, throwing the door wide so that it slammed heavily against the bare stone wall, JB close on my heels. Mark scurried in behind us.

  “What are you waiting for?” I barked. “Tell him what he said.”

  JB went to convey the message to Mark. “He said—”

  But I cut him dead. “He said we’ve been set up is what he said. You, me and the dog makes three. We’ve all been stitched.” I threw off my suit jacket and angrily loosened my tie. Then started pacing aimlessly. “Beautiful,” I said, as though to myself. “Absolutely beautiful. They wanted us to do it all along.”

  “Who?”

  “MI6. The CIA. Whoever. They wanted us to do it from the very beginning. From the moment I first met the American. Can you believe it? They actually wanted us to do it.”

  “What?” Mark said. “What did they want us to do?”

  “Exactly what we’ve done, what we’ve been doing these past four years. Don’t you see?”

  Mark spun on JB. “For Christ’s sake, JB, will you please tell me what he’s going on about?”

  “Tell him. JB,” I said. “For Christ’s sake tell him.”

  “If you give me half a chance I will,” JB fired back at me, plainly exasperated. He turned to Mark. “Jon’s saying that they’ve been one step ahead of us all along. He’s saying that we’ve been led up a blind alley without a guide dog and now we’ve got to back off, or…” He faltered, his words trailing off.

  “Or what?” Mark demanded to know.

  “Or we’ll be sold to the nation as nutters,” JB finally told him.

  “Nutters?”

  “Conspiracy theorists.”

  Mark looked incredulous. “Well what did you expect to be sold to the nation as—national heroes?”

  “You’re missing the point,” I said.

  “What is the bloody point?”

  “We’ve been stung! That’s the bloody point!”

  Realizing I was now yelling like a schoolyard behemoth I reigned myself in, breathed, raked my fingers back through my hair and endeavoured to explain things in a less aggressive manner. It wasn’t easy.

  “Look,” I said. “We’ve just been warned off. If we ignore the warning and carry on with our campaign to force a public inquiry we’ll be splashed across the national media as nutters. Or worse. We’ll face full-frontal character assassination and national ridicule. If that happens every shred of evidence we’ve gathered will be ridiculed along with us, and our call for a public inquiry will be laughed at. It’s the perfect sting.”

  Mark chewed on this concept for a brief moment, but came back fighting. “Not everyone will believe what the media tells them,” he wanted me to consider. “People do have minds of their own.”

  “That’s what I used to think,” I said, and swung my gaze out the window, looking out on the car park where we’d just been bulldozed by the American. Up until that moment I’d firmly believed that I’d been a free-thinking individual who’d thought for himself and acted on his own volition in championing calls for a public inquiry. Now I knew different. Now I knew I’d been manipulated every step of the way—operated, like some unsuspecting puppet on the end of a string. It was pointless going on.

  “What’s important is what you think right now,” Mark said to the back of my head. “You’re back on stage in five minutes so you’d better get your head straight and—”

  “There’s no way I’m going back out there,” I spun and said to Mark. “No way. Not out there on that stage. Not now.”

  “You have to. People have
paid good money to come and hear you talk. More importantly, they’re relying on you for answers.”

  “They’ll have to find their own answers. I’m done with it. It’s cost me my marriage as it is. If I go back out there it could cost me a whole lot more. Just go and give everyone their money back and tell them it was an accident.”

  Just then a figure appeared at the dressing room’s still-open doorway, catching our attention and stopping us all dead in our tracks. It was a woman. I wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing there or how much she’d heard of our conversation, but she was fixing me with eyes that demanded answers.

  “Katie,” Mark turned and said. “Thank God you’ve come. Maybe you can talk some sense into your husband’s head. Someone needs to.”

  With that, Mark and JB promptly left the room, closing the door behind them.

  A few moments later Katie and I were standing in the centre of the dressing room, facing each other, within touching distance, but no closer. My eyes were locked on hers.

  “It’s good to see you,” I heard myself say, still not quite believing Katie was standing here before me, but so glad she was. “I didn’t think you were coming.”

  “I wasn’t,” she softly said.

  “So why did you?”

  She shrugged. “Just a hunch. I thought you might need me around. Seems I was right.”

  “I’ll always need you around,” I said.

  Katie lowered her gaze to the floor, then looked back up at me. Questions once again shone in her eyes. “Jon, what’s wrong with you?,” she said. “I heard what you were saying. It’s just not like you to give up.”

  “They set me up, Katie. I feel so stupid. For these past four years I truly believed I was fighting the bad guys. Turns out I’ve been working for them all along.”