by Matt Hilton
His Jaguar was black, but under sodium lights it had a sepia cast to the paintwork. He pulled out his keys as he approached, and after the second attempt, managed to disengage the locks. He slid into the plush leather seat, wriggling to make himself comfortable. He was about to insert the ignition key but paused. Three glasses of wine – large glasses – might be enough to put him over the limit, and could he bear to lose his driver’s license? After a moment of reflection he dug the key into the ignition and the engine purred to life. The police weren’t interested in stopping rich men like him; they had their hands full stop-checking black drug dealers. And, even if he was pulled over, he had friends in the Met who’d make any charge disappear. He pulled out of the car park, having fed his ticket into the appropriate slot.
From Jermyn, he followed St. James Street back to Piccadilly, passing Green Park, seeking Grosvenor Place and a route back towards Westminster, where, by his reckoning, he should have been at least ten minutes ago. The rain was all he needed. The traffic was heavy enough, and the rain only slowed it, as the roads grew slick and greasy. He huffed and puffed as he drove, more impatient by the second. As he passed Victoria Tube Station the lights at Bressenden Place were already flashing amber, but he thought he could nudge through them in time. As he did, a courier on a moped shot out from the side street, and Barry wasn’t quick enough to avoid bumping the back wheel. The moped skidded, but the courier – a veteran of the streets – wrangled the motorcycle to an upright position and continued, with only a two-fingered salute to show his anger at Barry’s bullish driving. Time was money to the courier, every bit as much as it was to Barry.
Breathing heavily at the near miss, Barry continued into Victoria Street, and that was when his nightmare began. Behind him a police van manoeuvred around the slower traffic, using its lights and selective bleats of its siren to clear a passage through. His first hope was that the van was responding to another incident further along the street, but no. The police pulled in behind his Jag and the blue lights went on a continuous roll.
‘Shit, shit, shit,’ Barry moaned. This was all he needed now. He glanced at his watch; saw that he was now quarter of an hour late for his meeting. Even if he managed to wangle his way out of a breathalyser test he was still going to be in deep shit. Why’d he hang around for that third bloody glass of wine? Greed. That was it, and the buzz from the alcohol that gave him the flippancy to think his bosses would wait.
He pulled the jag up close to the kerb, opposite the House of Fraser buildings, and felt the spectacle as pedestrians all swivelled to check who the bad boy in the Jaguar was whom the cops had stopped. He could feel his face reddening, and he wiped at his heated cheeks, adjusted his metal rimmed spectacles, while surreptitiously trying to smell his breath with the aid of a cupped palm. Shit, he thought, which businessman worth his salt in this city didn’t imbibe of a glass or two of his favourite tipple at lunchtime?
There was a sharp knock at his window.
Barry looked out at the hard face of a cop. A cap pulled low on the policeman’s forehead concealed much of his face with shadow, but Barry instantly recognised that he wouldn’t talk his way past this jobsworth. Still, it was worth a try. He unwound his window. ‘Can I help you, officer?’ Barry tried to keep his tone on the correct side of respectful.
‘Sir, please turn off your engine for me.’
‘What’s this about, officer? I’m late for a meeting and…’
‘Please turn off your engine and step out of your vehicle,’ the cop said a tad louder, a challenging edge to his words.
‘You can’t make me get out of my car,’ Barry said, his resolve to stay polite disappearing in an instant.
‘Sir, it’s raining, and if I’ve to stand out here getting wet, then I’m going to make sure my time is well spent. Now, turn off your engine, get out of your vehicle and follow me to my van where we can both speak in the dry.’
‘I’m late for a very important meeting, can’t you just get this over with?’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but no. Please do as I ask.’
Barry understood that every second he argued, was a second longer from reaching his meeting. He swore softly to himself, but came to a decision. He turned off the engine, and pushed open the door. The cop moved to allow him room to get out, then shielded him from the traffic creeping by. He led him to the van. Two more cops were sitting in the front, a driver and passenger. The policeman with Barry opened a side door on the van and showed him inside. Barry had never been in a police vehicle in his life, and his first reaction as he stepped up was to check out his surroundings. The van was as he might have imagined. Bench seats for the troops, a stack of loosely piled equipment bags, a cage for prisoners in the very rear. He didn’t expect to see a neat young woman in pinstripe jacket and skirt, with short-cropped blonde hair and immaculate make-up sitting inside. He wondered if the woman was a detective of some kind, given a lift by her colleagues to keep her out of the drizzle. The first cop climbed in behind him and slid shut the door. Suddenly Barry felt overwhelmingly confined, and knew that the odour of his breath would be stronger in the enclosed space. He opened his mouth to request that the cop left the door open.
The woman touched him on his left sleeve, tugging slightly at him. ‘Please sit down quietly, Mister Miller.’
That the detective knew who he was didn’t surprise him. They’d had time to run his plates through their database and would have learned his name, but what surprised him was that they had stopped him at all. Once his name was flagged and they saw how important he was, they should have cut him some slack.
‘Please,’ the woman indicated the seat beside her. ‘Take a seat.’
‘Is this about the light back there? If you were watching you’d have noticed that I was committed to the manoeuvre, and it would have been more dangerous to brake in the wet. It was that damn moped driver that-’
‘We aren’t interested in your inappropriate driving skills, Mister Miller, it’s another worth entirely that we wish to speak with you about.’
Barry was mid-way to sitting; he paused, feeling the pull in his thighs. ‘Pardon me? Another worth? What is this about?’
‘Please. Sit,’ the woman said again. ‘It will be much easier for us all that way.’
‘Wait, what’s this about?’
The woman looked at her colleague, a brief tip of her head. The cop placed something cold and hard alongside Barry’s right cheek. ‘You heard what she said; sit the fuck down,’ the cop growled.
He’d never been in the back of a police van before, and neither had he ever seen a silenced weapon in his life. The gun was big and black, the screw-on suppressor making it even huger. Barry knew enough to know that the weapon wasn’t police issue, particularly not with the illegal addition of a silencer. It wasn’t a cop’s gun, and quite frankly the uniformed man probably wasn’t a cop. That would mean that the woman was no detective.
‘Wh-what do you want from me?’
‘I want you to sit down quietly, and no harm will come to you. Try to shout or raise the alarm and my friend will shoot you in the head. Do you understand, Mister Miller?’
‘I, uh, I don’t-’ Barry’s words were cut off by the silencer pushing into the socket of his right eye, beneath the rim of his spectacles. The cop levered down on the gun, forcing Barry down on to the bench seat.
‘See, isn’t that more comfortable?’ the woman said as she smoothed out her skirt across slim thighs. ‘I’d hate for you to fall over and hurt yourself.’
‘Whoever you are, you’re going to be in deep trouble over this. Who are you? MI5? Special Branch? Who?’
‘None of the above,’ the woman said, and offered him a smile.
The uniformed cop continued to crowd Barry, the gun now aimed loosely at his chest. Barry wondered if he could push the gun aside, get to the door handle and leap out. Once on the busy sidewalks they wouldn’t shoot. But he was neither brave enough, nor physical enough to attempt such a daring plan. Plus, he
was probably too drunk to run more than a few paces before he tripped over his feet and fell flat on his face. His best hope of getting out of this unharmed was to comply with the woman, do what was necessary to appease her. He thought that if they wanted him dead, then the cop wouldn’t be waving the gun around as a threat.
‘What do you want from me?’ he asked.
‘For now? All I want is for you to sit still, stay quiet and let me do my job.’ The woman took from her jacket breast pocket a small leather case, which she unzipped. Taking from inside it a small vial and syringe, she applied the needle to the neck of the bottle and extracted a thin pale yellow liquid.
‘Shit! What are you going to do?’ Barry moaned. He tensed, readying to fight for his life. The cop tapped him on the forehead with the suppressor. Shook his head in warning.
The woman brought the needle towards Barry’s thigh. ‘This might sting a little,’ she said, ‘but not as much as a bullet through your head if you as much as flinch. Can I depend on you being a well-behaved patient, Mister Miller?’
Barry nodded, but his breathing had elevated and his quick exhalations made the lenses of his glasses steam over.
‘Sharp scratch.’ The woman jabbed the syringe directly through the cloth of his trousers and into the large muscle of his thigh, depressing the plunger. Barry could barely see through his rain-dotted glasses, but could tell enough that she emptied the contents of the syringe into his leg. Whatever the liquid was it stung like cold fire. He began to panic, thinking that he was wrong. They did want him dead, only the clean death brought by the poison was preferred to the mess made if they shot him in the head. He began to rise, to pull away, but the woman laid her free hand soothingly on his knee.
‘Don’t worry, Mister Miller. As I said, you have worth to us. The shot is only a sedative. You will wake again soon, and if you do as instructed, no harm will come to you. Trust me.’
The sedative was quick acting. Already the woman’s voice sounded squeaky, like they were words spoken by a cartoon mouse. Her final promise struck him as mildly absurd. Trust me. Those were the same words he’d used when promising to kerb his appetite, after Marjorie had warned him of over-indulging during lunchtime meetings. It was the same promise he’d made when reassuring his boss that he would be at Vauxhall Cross by one O’clock sharp for the strategy meeting for the upcoming VIP visit. They were two promises he’d broken, and he didn’t have much faith in the woman’s pledge either.
Chapter 18
April 5th 2018
Tempus Facility, England
‘Do you mind if I refer to my notes?’ Rembrandt shook a small stack of papers, some of them articles torn from newspapers and clipped to pages torn from a lined note pad. ‘There’s no way I’ll remember everything if I try to do it off the top of my head.’
He was standing in the conference room, surrounded by oil paintings and people equally immobile as they watched him keenly. Semple, Coombs, Doherty, and Heller had assembled around the table to hear his report.
Semple, ever the leader, raised a hand. ‘You have the room, Rembrandt. Do whatever you please, but just get on with it.’
Rembrandt nodded. He wasn’t one to enjoy standing at the head of a room like this. When briefing his team for duty, it had always been delivered on the move, or at least when they were all lounging about during downtime. This was too formal: he’d rather face a room full of cannibalistic scavengers than these cryptic observers. He cleared his throat unnecessarily, and referred to his notes, shuffling them to the correct order.
‘All right,’ he began. He shook a page for emphasis. ‘This is what I’ve been able to discover. On January twenty-fifth, nineteen eighty-eight, during a Joint Session of Congress, Ronald Reagan, delivered his State of the Union Address, talking about the values of work, family, religion and freedom. Apparently his address had proven popular and it was met with enthusiastic applause, particularly after he laid out several objectives designed to stabilize the economy, make use of the global economic revolution, tackle social problems through education, and control the budget for international security. He also made friends when speaking out against the subject of abortion-on-demand.’
‘I just bet he also made a few enemies on that final note,’ Elizabeth Heller interjected. ‘Abortion-on-demand is still an emotive subject today, let alone almost three decades ago.’
‘And some of them were likely the very people who clapped and cheered along with the other sycophants, hiding well their feelings on the subject,’ Doherty added.
Rembrandt nodded, a sharp jerk of the chin: so much for having the room. He replaced the page with another. Read it briefly to check the details. Then said, ‘You’re not wrong, Doctor. Three days after his address, Reagan and the First Lady, Nancy, boarded Air Force One and made a scheduled trip to the United Kingdom. On the second day of his diplomatic tour, the thirtieth of January nineteen eighty-eight, while greeting ex-pats and diplomats during a photo call on the steps of the US Embassy in London, placard-waving pro-abortion lobbyists heckled him. A larger group of anti-abortionists stood on the other side of Grosvenor Square, equally as angry, but their heckling was for their opposites, not the president. Emotions were running high on both sides, and the two groups ended up coming to blows. The Metropolitan Police and US Secret Service agents were hard put separating the crowds from Reagan, and that was all it took to break his security cordon. There was nothing any of them could do to stop the bullets that struck the president directly in the heart and head. After the near miss in eighty-one, when a ricochet from Hinckley’s gun had bounced off the door of his limousine and entered the president’s side,’ Rembrandt glanced briefly at Semple for confirmation of his facts, but received little more than a blink, ‘his protection detail had advised him to wear a bullet proof vest during public appearances. The vest saved his heart this time, but couldn’t save his head.’ Rembrandt touched his own face for demonstration’s sake. ‘The bullet punched through his right cheek, exited left of centre of the back of his head, and struck Nancy in her left shoulder before its force was spent.’
‘He died immediately,’ Heller stated, though her medical opinion wasn’t necessary. They could all picture the massive trauma that Reagan must have suffered. Semple wore a frown of disgust, whereas Coombs merely lifted an eyebrow as if it was just another day at the office for him. Fox looked visibly nauseated. Only Doherty had the good grace to bend his head in silent respect for the dead.
As was often the case with soldiers and cops, they could tell a good war story, and Rembrandt was no exception. He was getting into the swing of things, now that the details were growing bloody. ‘A further strafe of gunfire scattered the anti-abortion lobbyists, leaving some of them dead or wounded, and set off a stampede of people rushing to escape the chaos. Those agents nearest to the president bundled his unresponsive body into his car, others dragging Nancy to safety also, while the rest tried to force a path through the frightened crowd to corner the gunman none had seen yet.
‘With chaos erupting in Grosvenor Square and the adjacent streets, the gunman could have possibly slipped away, to brag about his mission later or to slip quietly into obscurity as he evaded justice, but he didn’t. A forty-eight year old civil servant with no apparent reason to harbour a grudge against the US President walked out from South Audley Street, still holding the murder weapon, a Kalashnikov assault rifle, to his shoulder. He was allegedly sobbing as he fired indiscriminately into the crowd, and his scream before an armed Met police officer shot Barry Miller in his chest was, “Forgive me, Marjorie. I did this for you and Jessie!”’
Doctor Heller sat bolt upright in her seat. Her action was enough to draw Rembrandt’s attention, and all the others followed his gaze. Under the surprised scrutiny of her fellows Heller placed a hand over her mouth, even as the pallor drained from her features. ‘Please,’ she said, her voice muffled by her palm, ‘you must excuse me. I…I have to go.’
Without waiting for permission, she scrape
d back her chair, then swept out of the room. The door slammed loudly behind her, cutting off the sound of her horrified sobs.
‘What do you suppose that was all about?’ Semple wondered aloud.
‘Must be her rag week,’ Coombs quipped bitterly.
‘Major Coombs! Must you? Really?’ said Doherty.
‘You’re right, Professor. Please excuse my absurdity. We all know Elizabeth doesn’t need an excuse to be either flaky or a bitch. But then, there’s the menopause, I suppose. My wife is…’
‘That’s enough, gentlemen,’ Semple said. He looked to Rembrandt, who, caught off stride, wet his lips before continuing. ‘Please go on, Rembrandt. It’s apparent that Doctor Heller has a weaker stomach for gore and violence than she has previously let on.’
‘I’ll tone things down a bit,’ Rembrandt assured him.
‘Not on our behalf,’ Coombs put in. He sat back, folding his hands on his stomach, smug and satisfied. For the first time Rembrandt thought that the guard, Craig, might have been correct in his summation of the major: he’d just shown himself up for an ass.
Rembrandt deliberately ignored the major, and after checking his notes, went on.
‘Wounded but not yet dead, Barry Miller was set upon by the mob and was beaten and kicked repeatedly before the Secret Service agents could force a way through. They didn’t want another fiasco like the one where Lee Harvey Oswald cheated justice at Jack Ruby’s hands, and circled the assassin, one of them waving a machine pistol in threat at the mob. An agent kicked away Miller’s assault rifle, and stepped in, checking his vital signs. Miller was on the verge of death. Blood frothed in his mouth from a punctured lung, and his whisper could barely be heard. Three initials were all it took to ensure the direction the subsequent investigation took: “K…G…B,” was all that Miller supposedly managed before he died, though someone else reported that he actually said “For Melody”.’ Rembrandt shrugged, ignoring the innocuous sounding statement. ‘Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security, was the national security agency of the Soviet Union, and did indeed hold a grudge against Reagan and the West.’