The Whitehall Syndicate: A time travel conspiracy thriller

by Malhar Patel

  The woman next to Lazardou, presumably his wife, now spoke to the woman at the table. “I have to ask you this, I've got a bit of a gift for this sort of thing. Now let me guess… Did you used to work at the university with Jason?” She squeaked in excitement.

  “Yes, yes I did! I can't believe you worked that out! That’s spooky!” The woman exchanged some pleasantries with the couple and after getting a wrap to go, left the eatery. With the focus of attention gone, the group returned to more discussion about kidney beans.

  A short while later the trio got up to pay for their meal and as they reached the counter, Green's cohorts could hear every word they said. Lazardou was mentioning a party, saying how excellent it would have to be to warrant the trip back into London before Dunn interrupted to say he expected nothing less of Michael Green.

  Green's advisor smiled as he took in the situation. Here he was, a worker and close friend of Michael, and he didn't even know that Lazardou was invited. As they left, Juleen ventured a theory. “I bet them two are like special guests. They must have been like a surprise or something, for his party on Monday.” While her explanation left something to the imagination, most of the sextet nodded in agreement, before continuing their typically bland discussion.

  Outside the restaurant, the three continued walking down the street, huge grins on every face. Crossing the road they met up with Green senior, who was waiting anxiously. “It worked!” exclaimed Jack passionately. “They were exactly where you said they would be. You did well.”

  “I told you they would be.”

  “Well I think everyone did well, even Kenya,” said Pete. “It's a shame she isn't here now, but I told her to go back to the studio when she was done, so that we could talk. I don't really want to get her mixed up in this anymore.”

  Everyone was wearing giant smiles, excitedly chatting away. The first phase was complete and hopefully, by the time they got into Green's house word would have spread, and they could wander freely as guests. All they would have to do is avoid Green. Despite Jack's doubts, Pete had pulled through for them.

  Kim was feeling slightly nauseous, and her huge cafeteria lunch was malevolently crashing around in her stomach. Snapping back her orange safety goggles, which were beginning to give her a headache, she scratched at her scalp and the coarse, dry hair made a crackling sound.

  A little red light on the counter blinked and she tapped a few buttons on the huge dome shaped piece of equipment in front of her. It began chugging out a quiet sound as the contents inside span around, surrounded by a bubble of blue light. Kim began jotting shorthand scribbles on her sheet of paper, observations of the experiment besides just the data tables the computer collected.

  She heard her phone vibrating and waited for the machine to stop before she picked it up. It was Jack, texting her a message. She was so glad to hear from him that for a second her stomach felt less painful. Reading down she saw that it was basically telling her to try and get into a private space within an hour or so, at which point he would call her.

  She returned to the experiment and smiled randomly at her technicians, watching the clock nervously for the entire hour. Finally, with five minutes to go, she got off of her workstation and headed to the toilet. Reaching the lavatory she was so nervous she ended up going. She couldn't believe how worried she was about a simple phone call but in the back of her mind was the fear that her bosses were spying on, even in the toilet.

  Right on cue, Jack rang her up and began telling her about his adventure today. Finally able to get a word in edgeways, she began explaining her situation with the access codes. Once she finished, she waited for Jack's reaction.

  There was a long pause and for a second she thought she might have been disconnected but then she heard Jack slowly reply. “Hang on a second,” he said with a sense of urgency reminiscent of a zealous schoolboy. “I saw six of something in my brother's message.” He flicked open his laptop, where had had transferred the files, and stayed on the line to Kim as he searched through. His fingers were trembling and when he couldn't find it he started to panic. Not letting it show in his voice, he continued searching and breathed a sigh of relief as he located the missing file.

  “Okay, I've got it. According to this, Green bought six high specification safes, and hired someone to build them into a lab.”

  “Well that has to be the place I work at. Does it say where they are?”

  “Erm hang on,” said Jack as he checked the reams of information his brother had sent him. “Yes, I have a plan of the lab and the six locations. They're complicated though, and I don't understand the blueprints. They've been altered in some way.”

  “Okay, well I can help you look through them once I get off work. Can you make it to mine?”

  “Yeah I think so.”

  “I assume you'll let yourself in,” she joked.

  Kim suddenly stopped talking as she heard the door to the toilet creak open. Her cubicle was locked and there was no way to tell who was outside. Whispering goodbye she hung up the phone and turned it off.

  Not wanting to risk anything, she flushed the toilet again for show and walked out, passing Tammy as she went. She cursed herself as she left, for being too overcautious. Now she would have to wait until she got home to find out what Jack knew.

  Frank and Tony sat in Frank's car, computers on each lap. It was awkward for both of them and Frank wasn't convinced his coffee was stable on the dashboard. Mobile phone tracer software was making his life so much more complicated. There was no map data, only a series of numerical grid co-ordinates at given times. Even those weren't in order.

  Tony was the technophile of the pair and he had a program that worked like a map to show the movement more clearly. The laborious part was filling in all the values and discarding the ones that were false signals or when the phone was switched off. Those were values the system predicted, and they were always wrong.

  After spending most of their day on it, Frank finally declared his section was ready and Tony said his would be in less than a minute. Frank began to drift off into speculation again, wondering why somebody would want him murdered.

  The tech guys had looked over the video and found that the bomb was in a package that was posted to the police station. The post service at the station had no record of the package and the video quality was too poor to zoom in on the address of origin printed on the box, so that was a dead end.

  Tony nudged Frank back into the moment and crossed his fingers as he loaded the software. After a second a map came up and small red lines traced the phone's movements over the last twenty-four hours. There were records further back but it was a lot of effort to input them so they had decided to leave them out for now.

  Tony was about to start going through Jack's movements more slowly, hour by hour, when Frank stopped him. Instead he leaned across and accessed the records for the hours around midnight and saw the location was constant at one place. A small apartment near Elephant and Castle. “That's where he slept, so that's probably where he's staying,” said Frank and started up the car.

  Kim lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. She hadn't specified where she was meeting Jack or when, so she just assumed he would show up at her flat. The door was locked to try and keep her safe from anyone who might be coming after her, so despite what she's said, Jack would have to use the doorbell like anyone else.

  Lying on the bed was making her drowsy so she sat up before her eyes became too heavy. She was still in her work clothes; a typical smart casual outfit made up of a pair of slightly snug grey trousers and a pink and purple top, which was a little bit thin for today's weather. She heard the doorbell and walked downstairs carefully before answering the door to find Jack.

  Trading hellos, she let him in and he immediately asked for her laptop. He seemed all business but since his life was at stake, it seemed more than reasonable. She loaded up her machine and waited while Jack got out an Erbium Laser Disc with the data. Sticking the ELD in, he pulled up the schem
atics he had mentioned earlier on the phone.

  Kim looked at them for a second, frowned, and began bending her body and arching her neck, attempting to view them from several angles. Finally it clicked and she explained it to Jack. It wasn’t a blueprint but rather a sketch of the finished lab.

  The artist had clearly never seen the building before doing this part two dimensional, part three dimensional rendition, and it was only due to Kim working there that any of it made sense.

  Looking over the plans, Jack asked her how her day was and she replied that it had been as boring as usual. Right now Jack wished he was back at work and away from all of this.

  Kim was the only one he felt he could fully trust and suddenly he found himself opening up to her about everything. Green senior's ulterior motives, his own confusion over why he was being made to do this, and his betrayers, in particular Anisha. Kim could tell he still wanted her to be innocent. She in turn shared her concerns about her bosses to Jack, before he once again started to wallow in pity. Kim tried to comfort him but Jack, sensing her pity, closed off, becoming business like and rigid again.

  He turned back to the laptop then showed her the six points on the map and asked her if she knew where they were. Kim, feeling like she had touched a nerve, followed his lead. She looked over the map and in her mind tried to picture the location of each. She wrote the six down in simple sentences on a sheet of paper and thanked Jack for his information, half expecting him to leave there and then.

  He got up to go, and then turned back to her and took a gun out of his jacket. With a strained look on his face he handed it to her and told her to be careful. Kim took the gun and frowned, telling him it was mal-aligned. Puzzled, Jack sat back down again.

  “My dad was in the military for a while, he taught me a few things about guns. See look at this handle and this shaft. There're not locked together properly. The electric shock marks are in different places.”

  “What does that mean?” quizzed Jack.

  “Guns fire when a small electric charge ignites the explosive in a bullet. But each gun leaves a characteristic burn on the bullet and the shaft, which eventually forms and groove. When the handle and shaft lock in, you can see the groove run across them. But here it's broken. Okay think hard Jack. Where does Anisha keep her emergency piece?”

  “Locked in a box in her room.” But that's her gun, the one I found at Bob's house when he was…” trailing off he gulped and Kim nodded understandingly.

  “Do you have Anisha’s spare gun or a picture of it?”

  “I took it actually, in case anyone tried anything with me.” It was in a plastic bag and he handed it over, an ashamed look on his face.

  “You said there were no prints on the handle of the gun used in the shooting, which means someone used gloves. So there should also be none on the shaft. The only way I can figure it is that someone switched part of their gun with Anisha's so that her prints would be left at the scene. They probably couldn't plant the whole gun because Anisha might notice her gun was missing for a while. They couldn't substitute the whole thing in case she noticed the difference with her new gun. I think they had to hedge their bets and hope she wouldn’t spot the shaft had been switched”

  She went over to her desk and examined the guns with a lab microscope and her table lamp. Jack took a deep breath and waited silently. After a few minutes Kim slowly said, “I can't tell for certain and I'm no expert but I think I'm right. The patterns on this gun's handle synch up with the shaft of the other one.” Kim could see the relief in his eyes. “It wasn't Anisha's gun that shot Bob. She's innocent.”

  Chapter 16

  It was dark when Jack got back home, but his spirits were considerably brighter. He couldn't believe his relief at Anisha's innocence. Deep down he had hoped it was true but he never expected to find proof. It was one thing he was glad to be wrong about. At the same time though, a small part of him was more miserable than before.

  Now that Anisha was innocent he was at a dead end investigating his brother's shooting. All he knew was that whoever had done it was walking around right now with a badly fitted together Beretta.... possibly. He arrived back home to find everybody in their familiar places, and then it hit him, like a brick in the face. He wondered why it hadn't been obvious from the start.

  Pete was the only one involved here. He was using Anisha to protect himself, and Anisha being the sweetheart that she was, was defending him tenaciously. Jack gritted his teeth, his head filling with caustic, bitter thoughts. His fists clenched in sub-conscious rage. With a deep breath, he restrained his anger.

  As everyone noticed him entering the room they all greeted him and asked him how his planning on the ambulance front had gone. That had been his cover story for visiting Kim and as he sat down he shook his head to show he had no news. This recently adopted lifestyle, the lifestyle of a criminal; it was steadily wearing him down. He was meeting people in secret, keeping things from his friends because he wasn't sure who his friends were, and juggling with moral choices and situations that he never imagined he'd ever have to deal with.

  He looked across the room at the group of people, all hard at work trying to plan this crime for him. This was no game and Jack knew it. As he looked over what everyone had achieved for the day, he saw Anisha staring at him. She looked concerned for him, and gave him a smile. It was different from the normal kind she gave, warmer this time and more inviting. Jack smiled back, and felt as if he was looking at his only true friend.

  The day was escaping them and but it didn't seem like there was much anybody could do now so most of the group retired early, having to endure the grind of work tomorrow. Green senior was also tired and having no-one left to stay with, Jack went to bed too.

  It would be hard getting any rest he thought, not with Kim's small mission looming over him. As he was just about to drift off to sleep he heard a fierce knocking on the door followed by the brutish cliché, “Police! We'd like to ask you a few questions.” Jack was already weary, his body having begun to wind down. Looking around he saw all the plans for the attack where littered on the floor. He yelled out, “One minute officer.”

  By now most of the group were awake and looking just as anxious. Green senior saw what Jack was doing and ran over to assist him. All their ordered notes were being mixed up but the pair had no choice. Shoving things under the sofa and hiding them under stacks of newspapers on the coffee table, Gina tried to help them by shouting, “one second. Let me put some clothes on.”

  As Green senior and Jack got up from the job, Anisha opened the door and greeted the officers with a composed face, the smallest hint of a smile evident. “Sorry about that, we were all asleep.” Frank stroked his jaw line and tried to work out what was going on. “I'm looking for a Mr Jack Winchester and I'm authorised to enter the house if I have to,” he said carefully.

  His eyes peering into the apartment's interior, behind where Anisha stood in the doorway. Jack came out into the hall and up to the door. With his most convincingly innocent voice he proclaimed “That's me officer. What can I do for you?”

  “It's about your brother. If you'll step outside for a second, we can talk.” Jack's grin began to fade but he caught it just in time and strained his cheek muscles back into a smile. He wasn't supposed to know anything was wrong. Nodding, he glided his feet into his blue slippers and walked out into the hallway of the apartment building, closing the door behind him.

  The two men suddenly arched over him, becoming more hostile. “Jack Winchester, your brother phoned you prior to his being stabbed and then again after calling 999. Is that correct?” began Frank. Jack realised that the only way they would be asking was if they already knew, so he reasoned that he might as well answer truthfully.

  “Yes that's right. The first call was to send me a message about how he was doing with work. It was a typical thing, nothing out of the ordinary. The second one said he was injured.”

  “So he was injured,” he paused and made a speculative
face while gently bobbing his head left to right. “So…did you go to him? Try and help him?”

  “No I tried phoning 999.” Jack stopped as he realised that they would have his phone records. “But I was panicked, you know. I accidentally pushed some key on my phone or something and it wouldn't dial. All I could do was to check local hospitals later on when I did get it working again.” Frank stepped aside and Tony jumped in.

  “So you're telling me that you heard your little brother, your only brother, was seriously injured and you couldn't call 999?”

  “Yeah, that's right,” began Jack, not liking the tone. Before he could take the offensive, Tony interjected.

  “So your only brother is there, dying and you know about it. As far as you know, there's no help on the way, and we know how close you were too him because we have the co-ordinates of your phone when he made the second call, before you turned it off. Are you telling me that even then that close, and with that much at stake, you didn't go to your brother?” Jack wasn't sure if they knew anything but he was confident the logs had been erased, otherwise there wouldn't be any need to send two detectives here.

  “No, I didn't. I should have yes, but I didn't. I panicked and I did nothing. I just waited and hoped.”

  Frank eased down his partner and thanked Jack, then turned around and began walking off. As Jack asked what the visit was all about, Frank either didn't hear him or chose to ignore him.

  Kim walked out of the laboratory, a look of anguish clouding her otherwise cute face. She was on her lunch hour, which meant she finally had time to take care of the heist. It sounded daft when she thought about it like that, as if she was comparing herself to some sort of jewel thief. No, all she was doing was opening six safes and removing the contents. It was a straight forward task; at least that's what she kept repeating to herself, a simple mantra to calm her nerves.