The Whitehall Syndicate: A time travel conspiracy thriller

by Malhar Patel

  Reaching them, Tony quickly found the correct one and they opened up the contents. Sifting through it didn't take long, and Tony's face lit up as he found what Frank had been looking for. There was an MFD labelled 'backup'. Gathering the rest of the items they shut the locker and signed out the contents on the sheet next to it.

  Both men left the dreary building in a hurry, glad to be free of the stench of cheap detergent and rancid blood. They got into Frank's car where Tony's laptop was sitting and after some fiddling he opened the files up and scanned across them.

  Tony was slow to realise what they were, but Frank was already looking deeper into them. He stopped as he saw money transfers between Michael Green and five other names. Tony saw them too and pulled up a second list of names from a police database, causing both men to look at each other with confusion. According to the bank document, there was a substantially large transfer from MP Michael Green's account to five known thieves, all on parole.

  Chapter 18

  It was a slow day at the studio and Pete was using the time to look over the instruction guide on attack skills. It showed a whole range of simple moves that would incapacitate anyone almost instantly, without any messy fighting or trading punches. Pete practised in a spare dressing room, imagining there was an attacker coming towards him. The tricks to subduing attackers seemed simple and effective, in theory at least. He heard a knocking and opened the door to the stage choreographer who told him the girls were ready.

  Quickly checking his phone again he saw Anisha and Jack still hadn't called. Anisha had been acting strangely all morning and he was hoping for some sort of explanation but she hadn't returned his message.

  Pete reasoned that Jack was probably still busy at the hall, and Anjali was working. He would check again later. For now he had to take plenty of pictures of two naked girls having a mud fight in front of a car. His face perked up at the thought. It was a guilty pleasure, but something to enjoy nonetheless. He needed to release some stress anyway, so he slipped the booklet into his pocket and strode out of the door.

  The noise of the crowd was phenomenal. Jack could hear them from the street and he wagered that even inside, Green was barely audible. The building resembled a luxury hotel from the outside, with a canopy and a marble walkway. It was as high as the Royal London Theatre and equally lavish, with stone statuettes hung from the walls and a gold rim covering the roof. Inside, cameras clicked, audio equipment whirred and journalists chatted to each other at unnecessary volume.

  Jack peered through a window with his binoculars and was surprised at how small the interior of the building was. Then again he only had a limited view. A man on the left exit looked like he had an earpiece, and stood wearing a black suit jacket with a tan long sleeve underneath. Jack looked back at his sheet and, confident he was a guard, mentally ticked him off the list.

  The debate was taking place below and all the entrances where restricted off. Jack looked at the room and compared it to some kind of bunker within a fortress: there was no way he could have attacked Green here.

  He was stood on the roof of the fifteen-floor Sacred Heath hospital, and from that high up, everything seemed minute to him. Without magnification, the people looked like little toy soldiers walking across a huge dollhouse.

  Jack didn't have a view of Green or some of the back seating section, but he could still discern some parts of the stage. He peered through his binoculars and saw another obvious guard stood outside the door on the right. There were still six guards he had to spot and three plain-clothes men in the audience. It wasn't going to be easy.

  The press kept on shifting around and he could barely see anyone as it was. He looked over at the man standing in the crowd wearing a faded suede jacket. He looked different from the rest of the group around him; he was looking around every few seconds. Then Jack saw the man tap his ear and he knew for certain that he was one of the security officials, checking his earpiece.

  Jack wondered how long this event would last. With his limited view there was no guarantee that he would be able to confirm all the security guards in time. This high up, he was fairly sure he wouldn't be spotted, but he felt his nerves jangling nonetheless.

  As the sky grew dark and threatened its second downpour of the day, he grabbed the clammy stone arches of the roof for support and stretched every last muscle in his body to swing out his head to the left. Focusing his eyes until they hurt he just managed to see part of the security guard by the back door.

  This was becoming time consuming and wreaking havoc on his neck. With the tips of his fingers he gently massaged the muscles on the right, trying to loosen them up and reduce the stiffness.

  He looked down at the crowd again and, with beady eyes, began to ferret around for another insider. At just that moment a woman looked out of the window. Jack shot his head to the side and ducked. He was breathing hard now and he shut his eyes. There were guards all over the building and perimeter. If he got caught it was all over. He would be arrested and in the next few days he would probably be dead.

  There was one ever-reliable thing about the city's camera network. Active surveillance was redundant and for the most part, completely useless. The only thing the network was really useful for was crimes that had already taken place and were now being investigated, or crimes suspected of happening.

  The problem was that there couldn't possibly be enough staff to cover the activities of every man and woman in London, unless at least one fifth of London residents were security workers. That in turn would need a huge increase in Internal Affairs agents.

  As it was, Frank sat in the station pondering over the records. He was nervous about the nature of the information he had but was fairly sure that he wasn't being watched, by other policemen or by cameras.

  This was the stuff of conspiracy thrillers and paranoid delusion. Ever since he had heard that the tapes of the Winchester shooting were missing, he had a feeling in his gut that something wasn't quite right. Now, things seemed even more complicated. Michael Green seemed to be linked to known criminals and furthermore, may very well be the man who murdered Bob Winchester; to keep him quiet about what he found out.

  He had a gut feeling that Jack knew about this, and maybe more, but he couldn't prove it. He was looking at the tapes from the night the station had been bombed and he couldn't find any clue to trace who had been behind it.

  Somebody didn't want the truth coming out about Bob's shooting. At that moment, as if he had just been shocked awake, Frank grabbed the phone and called the hospital. Speaking to a receptionist he gave his name and card number and asked that they place an extra security detail on Mr Winchester. It had only just occurred to him that if the shooter could alter tapes in that way, then he might be able to view them.

  Hospitals had their own security but in case the shooter came back to murder Bob, Frank wanted to be ready. He was the best lead they had. For now, he began pulling up the notes on the five names from the MFD. Maybe they would yield a clue.

  The bell rang with a deafening ring and blue alarm lights flashed everywhere, illuminating the den in a now-familiar glow. Running out of the room, Chad jogged hard all the way down to the road level car park. An ambulance was already prepared and set to go and he jumped into the back and slid the doors shut.

  Two other men already sat inside, wearing the same navy blue uniforms as him. Within a few minutes a woman in uniform jumped into the front and slammed the door shut. The engine roared as the driver stormed the vehicle out of the exit.

  As the ambulance continued to speed down the road, flashing its lights and blaring its siren, the team in the back began preparing the stretcher and getting out possible equipment they would need. This was a gunshot wound so they would need a drip as well fresh Lidosol.

  The ambulance was the part of his job Zhang hated the most. Staff problems recently meant they had put her on shift rather than a qualified paramedic, and it racked her nerves every time she got in one. In the ambulance you had to do eve
rything quickly and correctly and you couldn't afford a mistake. The extra pressure was overwhelming. Luckily she was working with some of the best medics at the hospital.

  She heard the sound of brakes screeching and looked out of the window to see someone had slammed her car to a halt as they ran the red light. Her nerves were like a mass of quivering jelly now, despite having done this so many times before. A man in Kensington was bleeding to death and they were his last hope of staying alive.

  The ambulance rocked violently as it went over a string of speed bumps, and Chad grimaced, expecting the worst as all the equipment rattled around. He was visualising every step of what he would have to do so that when they went into the field he could just do it from instinct. Everyone in the back came crashing over to one side as the ambulance made a sharp turn.

  From the front the driver yelled out, “We'll be there in less than a minute.” Everyone grabbed their instruments and prepared themselves. They felt the ambulance starting to slow down and heaved open the door while it was still moving.

  The call sheet said there was a man shot on the pavement. They all swung their heads around, not seeing anything. Looking around again they saw everyone was all right. There were no panicked faces and no bloodstains. Zhang yelled at the driver, who called dispatch.

  After a beat the radio crackled and the driver asked for confirmation. There was another pause and the medics checked the area while they waited. Finally the driver turned to them and yelled, “It's an OC114”. Chuck clenched his face and swore. It was nothing but a prank call.

  Getting back into the ambulance, they quickly headed to the hospital again, in case of another emergency call. From across the road Gina looked at her watch. The response time was twelve minutes.

  Green sat at his desk, reading over the message he had received from Doctor Ruhbaker. The laboratory was closed due to a radiation leak. Green contorted his face, realising this would slow down the progress of his plans. He only had a few days as room for error.

  Tapping his finger against the desk, he began pondering about how things would be if it all worked out. Then something occurred to him and he sprung back to reality.

  Reaching into his desk he pulled out the list of passwords Klaus had tried to steal. The files were encrypted but Green couldn't tell whether or not Klaus had been able to decode them or not. It didn't matter anymore; he was just another corpse in London's wasteland.

  Reading through the doctor's message again, it said that the lab might be closed until Monday. This was the chance Green was looking for. He could recover the items from his safe boxes at last, without anyone knowing about it.

  The senior staff at the laboratory knew there were vaults in the building, but not the specifics locations or the contents. Green could finally get them out without giving away the locations. It had always worried him that someone else might find out what was inside them, but now he wouldn’t have to tell anyone anything.

  Green smiles at the ingenious way he'd used this setback to his advantage. Still, doubt lingered in the back of his mind. He wouldn't trust even the senior staff with information about the safes, but somehow Klaus had found out about them. He should get out the contents soon while he still had the opportunity and before someone else found it.

  Anisha sat at her desk, counting down the minutes on the large overhead clock. The quality of her work had taken a fall recently and she was striving hard to mend it. Today she had finished early and was clearing up the groups' video records for the day.

  Every day she replaced camera feed with old footage, and altering dates for different frames, making it look like Jack was planning the assassination when he was really chatting about the plan to fake it. She could garble the audio so that it looked as if it was recording badly, but at the same time was completely useless. It was a long task though, and had meant staying late at work every night.

  Anisha heard a voice from behind her and nearly jumped out of her skin. Turning around she saw that it was just Lana hanging around as usual. She looked a lot like Anisha, but she was half Indian, half oriental so her skin was fairer and her cheeks slightly pinker. “What you doing Anisha?” she enquired in her typically poor English.

  “I'm just refreshing some logs to send over to the bureau of Time and Crime. It's nothing exciting really.”

  “Ain't that your place?” She continued.

  “No it's somebody else's,” she replied and promptly closed the screen.

  Lana was a sweetheart really, but she was also widely considered to be the most annoying person in the whole office and Anisha was glad when she finally took the hint and wandered off back to her work. The trick was to sound monotonous and tired and she would guess you were doing something boring and leave.

  Checking nobody else was watching her she opened up the files again and continued her work. At the same time she was thinking about meeting this Kim girl. Jack had already told her Pete wasn't trustworthy, which she still refused to believe. How did either of them know they could trust her?

  Kim heard a knocking on the door and quickly sprang up to open it. She had tidied up the clutter of her flat and it showed as Jack walked in. She turned and continued to stand by the door, expecting Anisha to enter, before Jack told her she'd be arriving once she got off of work.

  Jack had several bags in his hands, which she was curious about, but she didn't say anything yet. As they walked into the living room Jack saw that she had already laid out the five boxes on the coffee table.

  He asked about the sixth one was and she said it was in the kitchen because it was a bit messy. Letting the comment go for the time being, Jack leaned over to the five green cubes and began rattling them and tapping them. He picked up one and looked at it more carefully, while Kim explained again about the fingerprint lock.

  Jack agreed and ventured that it might be Green's print since he was behind all of this. He and Kim smiled at the same time, realising that they had their very own copy of Green's fingerprints. Green senior.

  Jack tried his prints on the boxes anyway and as he expected, nothing happened. He walked over to one of his bags and got out a shoebox and a bundle of cables connected to a few electrical devices. Kim had heard the story, and knew exactly what was in the box.

  Even so, she twitched as he opened it up, the image bringing back memories of when she first opened the red container. Jack began describing the DNA tester Anisha borrowed from work yesterday and straight away Kim suggested it might tell them whose eyeballs they were. With all that Jack had seen in the last few days, the comment barely phased him.

  He had brought the fingers so he could also test the blood in the eyes against those. Kim shuddered as she listened to how clinical he sounded. As he opened the shoebox he remembered the thumb that hadn't matched.

  With the help of a tissue in the box, he pulled it out and took it over to the green boxes. While he got more tissue to carry it with, Kim backed away, something in her gut forcing her to keep her distance from the severed body part. Jack was also looking squeamish; though unknown to her he was calmer than the last time he did this.

  Pressing the print on the first box nothing happened. He tried again on the second. Nothing. Pressing it on the third box the display flashed yellow for a second, and then there was a grating sound as the locking pins depressed. Kim came closer and waited for Jack. He dropped the thumb, wiped his clammy palms on his beige trousers and took a deep breath. Yanking off the lid, his eyes dilated and his expression filled with awe.

  Chapter 19

  Yet again, Frank and Tony were at the station late. Tony sipped on a frappuccino while Frank held a black coffee, no sugar. It was a surprisingly simple drink for such a complicated man thought Tony, as he took another mouthful of icy cherry. After a few mind-numbingly boring hours of going over these records, neither of the men had found anything.

  They were all expert thieves who were all caught only due to some extreme luck by the police department. All of them had also skipped parole and
vanished somewhere, but again due to the limitations of surveillance compared to its demand, they had been classified as a low priority.

  So far there seemed to be no connection to Green. As details flashed up on his screen, Tony noticed something. Just to check, he called Frank over to show him. On the monitor was a mean looking mug shot staring back at them.

  Pointing to the computer screen he said, “This is a list of dated, compiled, phone line reports, and that's the date this guy last phoned the extension for his parole officer.” Flicking a switch he said, “This is the last date this guy did it. And here's this one. And this one.” He went through all five and all were at the same time on the same date: around twenty days ago. “That's got to be a cover for something.”

  “Great work, Tony. Right, now let me think. The calls where all on the same day so that means it was a confirmation call.”

  “I think I know where you're going with this. You're saying someone, possibly Green, leaked out word of a job-”

  “And the phone call was a front. Whoever phoned for their parole officer on that date was confirming they wanted the job. Which means the employer had access to phone calls or a phone tap, or a contact at the parole office.”

  “It’s likely Green would have access to that kind of thing,” he added ominously. “Okay so what do we do now?”

  “We get the video logs and follow Green around on that date, and for the few days after it, and we might be able to work out what happened. Assuming the logs haven't been removed”

  With that Frank immediately got on the phone and started shouting at the surveillance representative to get them the relevant video feeds for the area around Green's house, by tomorrow. Satisfied at having done some good police work, the pair went back to their homes.