by Gareth Flood
Falcus recognized it as the calling card of a certain exclusive tailor from Saville Row. The austere man tilted his head slightly. One eyebrow slowly raised at the sight a man dressed like a Columbian drug lord, with eyes the size of saucers, standing in his imposing doorway.
‘Jurgen from Production says you have an analysis for me.’ Stated the man behind the desk, his voice floating out in a timbre of subtle ordering.
Falcus had already started making his way towards the desk.
‘Yes, yes. Mr. Willis.’ he replied eagerly, ‘I have it right here.’
After what seemed like an eternity, where he crossed an area that a five-a-side football match could have quite comfortably been accommodated, he arrived at the desk.
‘Delivered just as Jurgen stated in the brief.’ Falcus said, as he slid the document across the table. ‘Everything cross-checked. The analysis expanded upon. More hypotheses generated. I have had the best man in my team working on this night and day to get the result for the organisation.’
Mr. Willis picked it up and started reading. After a few pages he leant back in his chair, looking impressed. He had not offered Falcus a seat and Falcus was certainly presumptuous, but not enough to sit down in an office at this level without being asked.
Mr. Willis continued to look impressed till he got near the end. On a few pages his brow furrowed and his eyes widened momentarily at one point before he quickly regained composure.
He read all the way to the end and snapped the document closed before breaking a smile for the first time.
‘Very impressive.’ he said.
Yessss! Falcus thought.
‘Who wrote it?’ Mr. Willis asked.
‘Ah, well, one of my consultants. With strict direction from me - of course.’
‘Of course.’ Mr. Willis smiled again. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Marshall. Jonathan Marshall. I have been his mentor ever since he joined the company.’
‘Good. He deserves singling out as well. Very…thorough…piece of work. I predict a bright future for both of you with the organisation. I am going to send this to the rest of the boys on the floor.’ Mr. Willis said.
Yessss! Falcus was doing back flips in his mind.
‘Thank you Mr. Willis.’
11
London, Paris
It was now Friday and Jonathan – exhausted by working on the report, and the pressure he’d been under to complete it, had taken a days leave, slept most of the day and was finally starting to feel more relaxed.
When he eventually got up in the afternoon, he was glad that Harry was still at work so that he had the place to himself to chill out for a while.
A text message came through on his phone from the office saying he was due in Paris Monday morning for his next assignment.
As he fixed himself breakfast, he decided to go to Paris early and spend the weekend there. He pictured himself sitting in an outdoor café, sipping coffee and mentally blowing up obese Americans in white shoes and baseball caps that were trying to say ‘Montmartre’.
After eating, he packed his bags and set off to catch the Eurostar to Paris. The journey to the train station and ticket purchase were completely hassle free.
Jonathan’s mood had definitely improved since the report had been handed in. He could feel himself relaxing a lot more and even caught himself smiling for no reason at all.
Falcus should be gone now, he thought, chasing after the next mirage in his life and leaving me to mine. I’m feeling good! I’m looking forward to the assignment in Paris, doing something new and spending some time in the city. All I need now is a nice girl to share things with, and life would be pretty much complete.
He took a seat in the in the boarding lounge, put his arms over the seats next to him in a relaxed manner and smiled at the departures board.
Maybe I’ll meet a nice girl in Paris this weekend. he mused, after all, it is the city of romance.
His phone rang, interrupting his reverie. He pulled it out of his bag and his body stiffened in a jolt and his eyes widened as he looked at the little screen flashing repeatedly: Falcus!
Jonathan groaned. He knew Falcus would just keep calling, like the obsessive-compulsive psycho that he was. He hit the green receiver button, slumped lower in his chair.
‘Hello?’ Jonathan answered in a tentative whisper.
‘Hey buddy!’ Falcus yelled, clearly failing again in the distinction between a phone and a megaphone, ‘Guess where I’m calling from? Guess.’
Silence. Interminable.
‘I want you to guess!’ Falcus yelled.
‘I’m in a public place.’ Jonathan whispered.
‘I’m in a company Lear, boy!’ Falcus roared, oblivious to any of the organisation’s information laws on sharing information in public places. The only rulebook Falcus followed was the one with his own name embossed in gold on the front - written by either Bacchus or Faust himself. Jonathan could never decide which, believing it was probably a co-authored event.
‘Oh you should feel the leather.’ Falcus said, ‘I’m writhing in this seat right now. It’s better than some women I’ve had…Oooh…’
The edge of Jonathan’s right eye started twitching uncontrollably.
‘…Anyway,’ Falcus continued, ‘they obviously liked the conclusions you gave in the report and I’m rocketing to promotion. I’m on board the Space Shuttle baby. I’m using one of these new G-Sat phones on the plane, on the way to Lagos, just entering Nigeria now. Tasked with restructure of major importance. I made it baby! So just wanted to say, well done to you. I put in a good word for you. You will get yours as well.’
Like Hell, thought Jonathan.
‘Lagos huh?’ Jonathan said, not knowing what else to say. ‘That’s still a pretty dodgy assignment. Heard it can get a bit hairy out there. What with guerrillas, kidnappings and villagers none too pleased about pipelines coming through the village-’
Jonathan’s conversation making improvisation was cut off by a loud noise coming out of the phone, followed by the connection going dead.
He tried to redial the number that had called him, but could was only greeted by a metallic voice recording saying the number was no longer available.
Oh well, he thought, so much for new technology.
There was nothing else he could do and the train was beginning to board. He closed his phone, picked up his bags and looked forward to having a two-hour nap in the carriage.
Hopefully not filled with dreams of writhing girls made of leather. he thought, as he walked towards the boarding gate.
If Falcus had lost signal, he would not be calling again for a good while, Jonathan could feel his happy mood returning already.
A few hours later, Jonathan opened the door to his hotel room in Paris.
The journey had been mercifully uneventful. There were no messages on his phone when he had alighted from the train onto French soil. He immediately turned his phone off again. A taxi had taken him straight to the hotel and after checking in, he went straight his room. Kicking the door closed behind him, he threw his bags into a corner and dived on the bed to flick on the news.
When he reached the allotted channel for BBC World, he bolted upright in the bed.
‘Holy Shit!’ he exclaimed out of shock.
A presenter in the studio was talking to some correspondent somewhere in a standard cream parka. Jonathan did not even hear what they were saying. His ears where ringing and his eyes were wide at the headline taking up the bottom third of the screen:
BREAKING NEWS: OIL COMPANY PLANE BLOWN UP BY SURFACE TO AIR MISSILE OVER NIGERIA.
Falcus!
Falcus’ last words echoed in his mind: On a company Lear heading for Lagos.
The phone had not been cut off by lack of signal; he remembered there had been a split second noise of something else before the phone cut off.
Was it an explosion from the plane being hit by a missile?
He felt dizzy.
Wher
e would those guerrillas get surface to air missiles? And why shoot the plane down? Jonathan thought frantically.
All the international Oil Companies had reached a tacit agreement with the local militias. The militias could occasionally kidnap and ransom some company personnel, which the company would then pay a couple million for. As long as the groups left the infrastructure and pipelines alone - which pumped out a couple billion a day.
So why blow a plane out of the sky? It doesn’t make any sense. he thought.
Finally jarred to action, he scrambled for his phone and switched it back on. It immediately rang. An unlisted number was flashing on the screen. He jabbed at the answer button.
‘Hello?’ Jonathan said.
‘Who was in my room?’ asked a high-pitched male voice.
‘Harry?’ Jonathan asked incredulously. ‘Why the hell are you calling me?’
Harry Shaftsbury, Jonathan’s flat mate in London, was a product of the English upper class boarding school system who had been “tapped up” at Oxford to join the secret service. Although secret service staff were never supposed to talk to anybody about what they did, the fact that he worked for MI6 was probably the worst kept secret in British government, though nobody could figure out what his role there was.
Jonathan thought he probably did not have the nous to be a fully-fledged agent. Harry was always twitching and sweating when times became slightly frustrating. That probably made him an analyst, which was less of a role than Jonathan had.
They had met through a mutual friend, who had given him Jonathan’s number when he had first arrived in London and was looking for a place to stay. Since neither of them could afford a flat in central London by themselves, and neither were ever really at home due to work commitments, meant the relationship worked fine. To be receiving a call from Harry now, of all times, bordered on absurd.
‘Someone was in my room. I can tell.’ Harry said.
‘Oh yeah, how can you tell?’ Jonathan asked.
‘Traini-…I just can. Was it you?’
‘No. I’m in Paris for God’s sake. Or didn’t your spy computer tell you that.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Harry retorted.
‘C’mon, Mr. Bond. Every time you call me it is from a different unlisted number. So unless you have some information about the plane that blew up over Nigeria, I have bigger things on my mind than you having moved your X-ray specs while dusting!’
Jonathan hung up on him. His phone immediately beeped again as another message came through. It was a text message from the preying mantis looking woman inhuman Resources. The message read: PLEASE CHECK IN. SENIOR LEVELS ENQUIRING ABOUT YOU.
He threw the phone back into his bag in disgust.
Falcus was dead. He could not believe it.
What a freakish way to go, he thought. Dying in Nigerian airspace. Still, Falcus would have preferred that on his epitaph to ‘pissed himself and went dribbling in his sleep in a care home’.
He considered calling Captain Pink but then decided there would be no point. No- one in the office would know any more than the news channels right now.
There was nothing for it but for him to order room service. Get his mind off things, that was what he needed. The menu was standard international hotel fare and he randomly ordered five dishes. There was nothing else on television. His mind was still running in a hundred different directions like a newly branded bull. He was getting itchy with the room he was in, the trip, Falcus’ death, the job, life…everything.
He decided he would go for a run later and began packing his gym gear into a small black satchel in preparation for going out. There was a sharp rapping at the door.
Room service.
He let the flunky in who wheeled though a large trolley draped in cream table cloth and festooned with plastic plate covers. Jonathan paid him but decided even as the man was leaving that there was just too much going on and he had lost his appetite.
The run would come before dinner.
He finished stuffing the running gear into the small black satchel, grabbed his coat and headed for the door. He would change down in the gym. As he closed the hotel room door behind him with a click, he decided to take the stairs. It was three flights down and would already start warming his body up in preparation for exercise.
Once he got onto the first stairwell he started taking the stairs two at time, almost mini-jumping them. As he hit the first floor, the building shook with an almighty, muted thud.
Jonathan flattened himself against the wall and away from the stairs.
What the hell was that? he thought. Earthquake?
He deliberated whether to keep going down the stairs or poke his head back into the corridor on the first floor to see what was going on. He did not particularly fancy mini-jumping stairs if there were going to be aftershocks.
His face scrunched up.
Do you get earthquakes in Paris? he thought.
His hand was already on the cool metal handle of the door to the first floor and opening it. He poked his head through. All down the corridor were other heads poked out of doors. The hallway reminded him of some kind of weird surrealist painting of disembodied heads choosing doors.
An intensely loud fire alarm began trilling nearby and the sprinklers in the roof burst into life to shower the hall in umbrellas of wet. There where large windows nearby, opposite the lift that looked out onto an outside park and nearby buildings. He gingerly stepped into the hallway and moved to the windows to have a look outwards and see if it really was an earthquake.
As he neared the windows he became puzzled. He could already see other tall buildings across from the hotel, they looked fine.
Was it a gas leak that ignited? he thought. I can’t smell any gas.
As he got to the window, he became even more confused. There were bits of black ash floating downwards from above. He stopped right in front of the windows and pressed his face against the glass, craning his head to look upwards at what was going on. He could see flames licking out of the building a few stories above.
Hotels don’t run gas up into the rooms, he thought, too risky with leaks and guests; they may use it in the kitchen or basement, in which case the smoke would be coming from the ground floor.
He turned his head and looked at the buildings around the hotel again. One of them was almost the same height and the windows were slightly reflective, so he could make out his hotel as though looking at a dirty mirror in looking at the building opposite. He could see a black burning square two floors above him. He counted in the reflection the floors upwards from the ground floor of his hotel and then the number of windows along to arrive at roughly where the burning square was in his hotel. Through the oil on his skin, the glass would record the changing of his expression from one of puzzlement to absolute horror when he figured it out.
Holy Shit! That’s my hotel room! That was no gas leak or any other kind of natural explosion. What natural occurrence would only take out one room in a hotel floor? Was it some kind of bomb? Planted before I got there? Was it in the room service? Actually, who cares when it got there - someone is trying to kill me!
His face went ashen as many things fell into place at once.
Falcus’ plane was not an accident.
He looked around him in a mixture of fear and desperation. His mouth was dry and palms were wet. His heart was pounding in his chest as the fight or flight response kicked in.
Run! his brain screamed. Get the hell out of here!
He spun and bolted for the stairwell. People had been coming out of their rooms in the interim and were either looking around for an exit or starting to head toward the fire escape.
He brushed passed the first arrivals at the stairwell to burst through the doors himself and begin leaping down the stairs, taking them three at a time.
How did they find me so quickly? Why is someone trying to kill me?
At the bottom of the stairs he forced himself to stop and take deep
inhalations of air to even out his breathing.
Walk out coolly, he told himself, hide behind other people and get out of this hotel alive.
As he tried to casually walk out the door, he entered a lobby of pandemonium. Guests were not walking out calmly. Guests were employing an ‘all for one’ attitude that involved elbowing anyone of a weaker disposition out of the way.
There was a large group nearby and Jonathan sidled up to the back of them. Everything and everybody was wet through from the sprinklers. Jonathan flicked the collars on his jacket up, before hunching in with the herd as they went past reception and out the main doors.
As his eyes adjusted to the outside light, he resisted the urge to look around wildly. They may still have been watching the exits. He hunched a bit lower and stayed with the group. He reasoned that if anyone was looking for him, they would be looking for a lone man, potentially in a panic.
The area outside the entrance and surrounding streets were beginning to clog up with the outpouring of the hotel. Jonathan could hear the ever increasing wail of sirens, approaching in the distance. The group began to disperse as they walked up the main street heading directly away from the hotel entrance.
The group was splitting up fast and Jonathan manoeuvred himself to walk in step and in close proximity to a red-haired woman, hoping that to the casual observer that they would appear as a couple. They were approaching a small side street to the right. Jonathan decided to duck down it and get away from the hotel quickly. Then disappear through the maze of small streets off the main thoroughfare.
As he turned into the street, he glanced around back towards the hotel.
It was definitely my room that had exploded. he thought.
He resisted the urge to run but was still walking briskly, turning left and right up streets in a random fashion.
People were still looking, as his clothes and hair were completely wet.
I stand out a damn mile. he thought. Need to get out of these wet clothes.