Wolf in Shadow-eARC

by John Lambshead

  “Our brave reporters were repeatedly fired on,” said the anorexic and over made-up presenter, silicone-enhanced bosom heaving with excitement.

  The next video sequence showed a truck burning in the distance. Then they ran it all again in slow motion with little circles picking out men who were running, firing, and falling.

  “Astonishingly, a large fighting dog was involved,” said the male presenter.

  A new set of blown-up fuzzy sequences showed the wolf jumping into the back of an open truck and attacking three men. Gun muzzles flashed, but all three men went down. They repeated the sequence in slow motion at least twice.

  Rhian ran for the bathroom and talked to Hugh on the big white telephone. She only had the tea to throw up so was soon dry-heaving. She washed her face before carefully removing the blade from her lady-shave. Slowly and deliberately she sliced the blade across her arm, welcoming the pain of punishment.

  “Where’s Karla?” Randolph asked.

  “I left her in the underground car park,” Jameson replied.

  “I suppose she is terrorizing the security staff,” Randolph said.

  “She’s asleep in the car,” Jameson said, somewhat defensively.

  Actually, Karla never slept, but she did need to shut down every now and then. Jameson thought that this was when she sifted and catalogued the memories in her head, like defragging a computer drive. Just how much information could she store before the disk was full and memories had to be deleted?

  Randolph’s office was a model of Spartan efficiency, neat shelves of hard copy in cardboard sleeves and a line of civil service light-grey filing cabinets. One glass wall looked out over the Thames, Jameson could see a twin jet Airbus in the red-and-blue livery of British Airways climb steeply out of London’s City Airport. The runways were sandwiched between the Royal Albert and King George V docks, so the airport was almost an island.

  The small airliner passed over the tower which housed the Commission. The building’s sound proofing was so good that the jet seemed to fly silently, like an airship. It would refuel at Shannon in Ireland and then head out to Kennedy Airport in New York, an air bridge that spanned the ocean between the financial districts of the North Atlantic’s twin cities. The planes used the old Concorde flight numbers. They consisted entirely of business-class seats so the “masters of the universe” were not exposed to the hoi polloi.

  Jameson jerked his attention back, aware that Randolph was speaking.

  “What?”

  “It amazes me how you’ve lasted this long, Jameson. You have the attention span of a crested newt.”

  “Sorry,” Jameson said.

  “But then, I must admit you have a good minder,” Randolph said. “I asked you about the Martin Street Massacre, as I believe the drunken halfwits in the press have dubbed last night’s incident.”

  “It seems to have been just an outbreak of gang warfare,” Jameson said. “Although there was one singular observation.”

  “Oh, yes?” Randolph lifted his head.

  “A large dog was involved.

  “A guard dog,” Randolph waved a hand dismissively.

  “Apparently not.”

  “One of the attackers had a pet pit bull?”

  “Possibly,” Jameson replied.

  “We have enough problems without creating phantoms to chase.”

  Randolph was right, of course, but something about the incident bothered Jameson. He had some half-recollection of an old case, but Randolph was talking again.

  “So tell me about this Shternberg fellow?” Randolph said.

  Jameson marshalled his thoughts. “Rich city fat cat, ruthless, intelligent, unemotional, narcissistic with a massive sense of self worth—he is probably a functioning psychopath.”

  “I see. He sounds like a fairly typical financier. Do you think he would be capable of killing?”

  “I think he could be capable of anything, if he thought it in his interest and that he could get away with it,” Jameson replied. “And I suspect his overweening sense of superiority leads him to conclude that he could get away with quite a lot.”

  “Right,” Randolph scribbled some notes on a pad with a pencil-thin silver fountain pen. “I suppose he is human?”

  “Yes, Karla was certain, and he had no smell of magic about him.”

  “So he didn’t personally summon a daemon,” Randolph said. “It wouldn’t astonish me if Shternberg knew where to hire a hit man, but how the hell would he know how to find a sorcerer capable of opening gates on the scale we’ve measured?”

  “It would help if we knew more about his background,” Jameson said. “Our enemies in MI5 must have a file on him.”

  Randolph gave a hollow laugh. “They would hardly tell us. The only people MI5 have ever voluntarily shared information with are their friends in the KGB.”

  He tapped the silver pen on his teeth, and Jameson looked out of the window. A turbo-prop short-haul airliner descended steeply down to the runway. Landing gear extended, it looked like a stooping hawk.

  “He’s the only lead, so we’ll prod him a little and see if we get a reaction,” Randolph said. “We’ll start by triggering a revenue investigation into his affairs. Nothing puts the wind up a corporate like the tax man.”

  “I doubt you’ll find anything. He strikes me as too fly to commit tax evasion.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, but the investigation will tie him in knots.”

  “Maybe, and if it doesn’t?” Jameson asked.

  “Then we apply direct pressure.”

  “If he’s sorcerous connections, the reaction could be unpleasant,” Jameson said.

  Randolph smiled like Sweeney Todd, the daemon barber of Fleet Street. “Nothing you and Karla can’t handle, I’m sure.”

  CHAPTER 16

  DR. FAUSTUS AND

  OTHER PROBLEMS

  Jameson was seriously pissed off, well and truly miffed. He accepted that a pension for a Commission field operative was largely a theoretical concept because he wouldn’t live to collect, but he never expected to die of boredom. He also hated getting up in the early morning. In fact, the list of things he hated about the current operation would fill a Kindle. He fidgeted in his car seat, playing with the radio. The popular classic station was playing Wagner, for the fifteenth time that week. Radio 3, the BBC serious music channel, was broadcasting an experimental symphony for massed lawn mowers and typewriter. BBC Radio 2 fielded a chat-show presenter reminiscing about his upbringing in rural Ireland. You had to be seven or have had a frontal lobotomy to like BBC Radio 1.

  Reluctantly, he put on Radio 4’s morning heavyweight news analysis. The formidable BBC journalist, Jeremy Paxman, was skewering a politician to the proverbial wall. Jameson wondered why they all bothered. The politician was lying, he knew he was lying, and he knew that the listeners all knew he was lying. What was the point? Even Paxman sounded bored.

  “You know what gets me about corporates?” Jameson asked. “It’s their weird need for money-based status symbols that make their lives difficult. Take Shternberg here. He locates his business in the Docklands financial center, the most expensive office space in London, East London. Then he insists on living in a country mansion in the fashionable green belt west of London, so he has a horrendous commute. The only sensible way to get into the city is by train, like the lumpen proletariat. So does he do that? No! He takes a car from his estate north to a light airfield, where he boards a helicopter. Helicopters aren’t allowed into City Airport, so he has to land in a disused power station coal yard in West London, on the wrong side of the river. He then grinds by car through the traffic jams all the way to Docklands. I mean, where’s the sense in that? It takes four times as long as the train and is a lot less comfortable. The only advantage of the helicopter is that it wastes an obscene amount of money.”

  He paused for breath before continuing.

  “Surely, there are less inconvenient ways of showing off your wealth. Julius Caesar built a luxury
villa at huge expense then pulled it down at first viewing on the grounds that he didn’t like the color scheme of the master bedroom. Now that’s conspicuous consumption. All it cost him was one day. And a shedload of cash, but he’d borrowed the cash. Karla, Karla?”

  Jameson was ranting to himself. Karla had put her seat back and switched off. Jameson looked at her enviously. She had many qualities; even when switched off she could vitalize in a microsecond if her keen senses detected potential danger. But she didn’t do routine surveillance, so he had to. He could not even lose himself in literature.

  He had promised himself the pleasure of a reread of Marlowe’s Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus. In it Marlowe addressed the Calvinist world picture of absolute predestination. The idea was that God marked out the damned from birth and there was nothing they could do to alter their fate. Free will in this philosophy was a delusion. This was an important theme when Marlowe was up at Cambridge in the 1500s.

  Jameson wished he had paid more attention to his tutors when he was there. Sin, damnation, and death were vague concepts to a young man more interested in girls and sport. They meant rather more to him now.

  Faustus was thrice damned, first by God, then by Satan, and finally by his own choices.

  “If we say that we have no sin,

  We deceive ourselves, and there’s no truth in us.

  Why then belike we must sin,

  And so consequently die.

  Ay, we must die an everlasting death.”

  Faustus’ sin was greed, the academic’s sin of greed for knowledge beyond mortal reach. It ended with a pact with the devil. Jameson had it on good authority, the Library, that Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus was a thinly disguised parody of Dr. Dee.

  Marlowe was too good an artist to answer his own question but left it for every man to consider for himself. Predestination or free will? Jameson looked fondly at Karla. How much free will did she have? She seemed to choose, to show free will, but she was eternally bound in a love geas to him. Theologians might argue that she had no more soul than a cruise missile, so free will, sin, and redemption were theoretical concepts in her case.

  But what about Jameson, how much free will did he have? His class and talents predestined his life: public school, Cambridge, an indifferent degree, sports blues, Sandhurst, the Guards, combat tours, and finally, The Commission. Had he chosen this life, or had it chosen him? Faust ended up ripped to pieces by a daemon and his soul consigned to Hell. Jameson was not sure he believed in Hell, other than the one we all lived in, but he believed in daemons. By God, he believed in daemons. It was all too likely that he would end his life, like Faust, on a daemon’s claws.

  The arrival of Shternberg’s helicopter snapped him out of it. The little corporate toy flew down the Thames and circled the empty shell of Battersea Power Station, disappearing for a moment in the rising sun. It flared, pitching up its nose, and settled slowly onto the circular helipad in the empty coal yard. Shternberg was out and running to the waiting Bentley while the rotors still turned.

  “Sweet Karla, make me immortal with a kiss,” Jameson said, taking a startled Karla in his arms and carrying out the act with passion. He was delighted to have something to do other than watch an empty concrete pad. He dropped her and started the Jag’s engine.

  Shternberg’s chauffeur closed the door for his boss and doubled around the car to the driver’s seat. He moved off while still clipping on his seatbelt. Jameson swung in behind the Bentley, making no attempt to be discreet. After all, the whole idea was to make Shternberg sweat a little.

  Randolph’s attempt to use the Inland Revenue had been an utter failure. He had been blocked. MI6 apparently had Shternberg under their protection for reasons unknown. Randolph surmised that he was seen as an information asset, but MI6 weren’t telling, so The Commission moved to Plan B.

  The cars crossed Battersea Bridge and turned east along the embankment. Jameson used the power of the Jag to hold like superglue to the Bentley. He ran a red light, sliding through the junction in a blare of horns from outraged motorists on green. Shternberg looked back out of the rear window. Jameson winked at him and semi-quoted.

  “Sweet Karla, make me immortal with a kiss.

  “Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!—

  “Come, Karla, come, give me my soul again.

  “Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,

  “And all is dross that is not Karla.”

  “Oh, Marlowe,” Karla said, dismissively.

  “Dr. Faustus,” Jameson said.

  “It’s Helen, not Karla.”

  “I was improvising,” Jameson said. “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Troy.”

  “Illium, not Troy.”

  “You’ve been reading my books again.”

  “No, I remember seeing the play. Marlowe invited me. Now there was a devious sod. The secret service chopped him after Walsingham died.”

  Jameson gave Karla a sideways glance. At that moment, the traffic ground to a halt and he had to slam on the car’s brakes to avoid mating with the Bentley in front. A Mercedes van pulled alongside. The slob at the wheel flicked ash out of the open window. He could look down into the Jaguar from his vantage point. He put his head out of the van to drink in Karla, who was dressed in her working clothes of tight-fitting black leather jacket and trousers.

  Van-man said something to his mate, who also slid across for a leer. Karla was always conscious of attention, so she turned to look at them. Van-man made an obscene gesture, indicating what he would like to do to her. Karla smiled at him, showing her teeth, indicating what she would like to do to him. He turned white and rolled up the window. The traffic started to move and van-man stalled the engine. His vehicle was soon lost behind in a sea of maneuvering cars and blasting horns.

  Rhian returned to work at the Swan. As she had feared, it was not the same. Gary was polite enough, but the wolf hung between them like a steel bulkhead. Gary stayed mostly in the office when she was working. She told herself that it was because of his injuries, but she knew she was lying. Taking a deep breath, she decided to take the mountain to Mohammed. She stuck her head around the office door. Gary sat at his desk, adding up figures on a calculator.

  “Gary,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder.

  He looked up at her and flinched, pulling away so her hand dropped free.

  “Oh, Rhian, what did you want?”

  “Nothing, Gary,” she said dully. “You just answered my question. I’ll work my shift and then leave. No need for any unpleasantness or embarrassment. You can send my last paycheck to Frankie.”

  “Service,” said a querulous voice from the bar.

  Rhian grabbed the chance to leave the office. “Coming, Willie.”

  She poured Willie the Dog’s half pint of ordinary while blinking back tears. She thought she had found a home here, but somehow it never worked out for her. It would be easy to blame the wolf, but this was the pattern of her life. She burned out her welcome wherever she went.

  The pub door opened with a ding of the bell and a group of students walked in. One of them waited at the bar while she took Willie’s money.

  “Rhian, could I have a word?” Gary asked from behind her. “In private, if you please.”

  “Sure,” Rhian replied.

  “Hey, I’m waiting to be served,” complained the student.

  “So wait, your mother had to and life’s a bitch,” Gary said.

  Rhian blinked; rudeness to a customer was most unlike Gary. She followed him into the office, where he handed her a tissue.

  “You’re crying.”

  “Hay fever,” she replied. “I’m allergic to something.”

  “Yes, a stupid, selfish, gutless boss,” Gary said. He put his arms around her. “All the management training courses I’ve been on, and that’s quite a few, insist that hugging young women staff guarantees a trip to the Industrial Tribunal. I�
�m going to live dangerously and do it anyway.”

  Rhian burst into more tears.

  “Um, I was trying to be nice,” Gary said in alarm, releasing her.

  “You are,” she replied. She hugged him hard, causing Gary to wince. “Sorry, ribs still tender?”

  “A bit,” Gary replied. “You’re stronger than you look. I suppose that’s the, ah . . .”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  Gary laughed, a little forced, but Rhian was pleased he made the effort. She wiped her eyes and went out to serve the student. She took the order and poured the drink, but he hesitated after paying, staring at her.

  “Is there anything else?” Rhian asked.

  He straightened with a visible effort.

  “Yes, there is. Don’t hang around when your shift ends. I’m taking you clubbing and I don’t like to be kept waiting,” the student said.

  “What?”

  “I, er, don’t like to be kept waiting,” repeated the student, taking a step backwards.

  “Of all the arrogant . . .” Rhian ran out of words.

  A tubby blond with brown eyebrows at the students’ table gave a peal of laughter.

  “What that girl needs is some firm handling,” she said, lowering her voice an octave to imitate a man. “You’ll see she’ll respond to a real man who shows her who’s boss.”

  The other students sniggered and Rhian’s would-be escort flushed.

  “I think you’d better sit down,” Rhian said, her voice dangerously calm.

  “Good advice, son,” Gary stuck his head around the office door. “The last suitor to try the ole cave-man act with our Rhian is still in intensive care having his arm reattached.”

  Everyone laughed, including Rhian. She didn’t care for the joke, but she was delighted that the old Gary was back. She still had a place.

  He joined her at the bar.

  “The pot in the bet to take you out must be getting pretty substantial,” Gary said.