Killing State

by Judith O'Reilly

  From his corner vantage point he walked softly, his leather-soled shoes barely touching the marble floor, the authentic Commons pass he’d pickpocketed in Westminster tube-station swinging on the lanyard round his neck. The gun with its silencer, which he’d smuggled through security in 15 pieces distributed between an umbrella and a briefcase, was complete. The umbrella turned inside out and discarded in the same gents where he’d assembled the gun. The briefcase open and abandoned in an unoccupied office as if left behind by a visitor. The gun itself he’d covered over with order papers and a folded newspaper held close to his chest.

  He estimated there were nineteen steps between them.

  At the entrance, he counted eight policemen, two of them armed, and four New Army soldiers all of them cradling semi-automatic machine guns. Did they know he was here? Was it a trap? It was simple. He wanted to break free of the Board, and rules and blood. To be himself. Why then was he walking towards the complication that was Honor Jones when he should be running in the other direction?

  He thought back to the park. The faint sweat on her upper lip. The smell of smoke on her breath. The black pupil widening in the pale green iris.

  And here she was again. His breathing quietened. The pulse in his blood hesitating, dropping away – his heart beat slow. If she saw him too soon, if she opened her mouth to shout, he would have to kill her. He should have killed her this morning.

  Fifteen steps.

  As he kissed her cheek, he would settle her in the chair, tip and rest her head on the palm of her hand. A still life. No life at all.

  Nine.

  It would be some time before anyone thought to interrupt, and sit in the seat opposite her hoping for a quick word.

  Five.

  Then the screaming would start, the terror and panic – policemen pushing and crowding their way through the doors. And he would be long gone.

  One.

  Tarn would be delighted.

  She didn’t look up until he pulled the black padded chair out from the table.

  “Do you think they miss the rain?” He gestured towards the spreading trees and the dried and shriveled leaves shrouding their soil, palming the gun with his other hand before she could notice it. “It seems cruel to make them live this way.”

  He sat down across from her and Honor flung her body against the back of the seat, putting space between them, the chair screeching backwards at the force of her recoil.

  No panic, though she checked the state of security at the entrance. Too far. Their attention was focused on the comings and goings of MPs and constituents, lobbyists and schoolchildren. The unarmed and innocent. Her best chance of help would have to come from someone much closer to hand. The portly, Tory gentleman? The twenty-something secretary? The nine-year-old child on a school trip from Bolton? Honor was doomed. He watched as she reached the same conclusion.

  She swallowed hard, and he sensed her fight back a cry of protest as he used his right hand to slide her phone from the table, burying it in the loose earth next to them, tamping it down, covering it over with dried leaves – all the time looking at her.

  “They’re recording audio and video remotely,” he said as he extracted a vial from his top pocket and swivelled the laptop towards him. “They’ve copied every text, document and contact you have.” Opening up the lid, he snapped the glass with his thumbnail and poured its contents over the keyboard. “There’s no one to go to, and no one to call without them knowing.” Tiny twists of smoke emerged as he closed the lid again, sliding the laptop off the desk to rest between the table leg and the wall before it could attract attention.

  Her eyes darkened to the green of a jade tiger he’d once seen in the penthouse apartment of a Chinese industrial spy he strangled. The tiger was snarling, he remembered with razor-sharp teeth and curved claws. It made him bleed when he picked it up to admire the workmanship.

  “You’re the one who should be worried about cameras,” she said.

  “Cameras don’t bother me.” He pushed the clear-glass designer frames up on to the bridge of his nose. An affected gesture of an attractive man who wore a bespoke suit and Gucci glasses all the better to find his way up the greasy ladder.

  She leaned in towards him. Her look hating. “Why didn’t you kill me this morning?”

  He’d asked himself that question a dozen times before he’d cleared the park.

  He didn’t kill her because she was innocent and he’d had enough of killing. Because as a dying man he didn’t want to make a mistake he would regret the rest of his short life. And because, maybe, he could save Honor Jones from herself. All she had to do was take a hint. Freedom, he thought. Even the taste of it in his mouth felt right. Freedom and white sands and warm sunshine and smooth bronzed skin against his. He had this one detail to sort, and it could all be his with a clear conscience.

  He drew out the envelope from between the folds of the newspaper and pushed it towards her. He shook it and bundles of red £50 notes and a passport slid out. He eased back the money into the envelope as she picked up the passport – her fingers moving to the photo ID page. Checking that it was indeed hers – the one she kept in the locked filing cabinet in her garden flat under Personal Papers (Passport. Expiry: 2025.) Processing the fact North broke into her flat within minutes of her leaving it this morning in order to rifle through her files.

  “The best flight for you is a Virgin out to Washington at 11.25am. It’s tight but you might make it. There’s a Delta out to New York at noon but that’s half an hour waiting to get picked up if they put an alert out for you. If you have any kind of luck though, you’ll have landed by the time they wake up to the fact you’ve gone.”

  She was letting him talk, and North decided that was a good sign.

  “The trick is to dig yourself as deep into the city as you can and disappear. Don’t reach out to anyone you know over there, and if you want to carry on to Boston or Chicago or anywhere else, catch a bus or a train, and use cash. There’s £10,000 here. No more flights. No more credit cards. Make the money last and when you need more, get a job cash-in-hand. Waiting-on – something like that.”

  “Or sex work, maybe?” she said.

  She wouldn’t starve, he figured. But she wouldn’t get many tips for her congenial disposition.

  He stood up, smiling. His good deed was done and his conscience clear. It was up to her now. Live or die. She could take her chances along with everyone else.

  “If you don’t sit down,” she smiled at him in turn. “I’ll have to scream.”

  “And then I’d have to kill you.” He had stopped smiling.

  “True.” She nodded towards the armed police at the doors. “But it will all get terribly messy, terribly fast.”

  He contemplated walking past the schoolchildren and the policemen out into the damp November air. Despite the threat, he guessed she wouldn’t cry out, that she’d allow him to slink back to the shadows and lose himself there again.

  Or she might not. Honor Jones was the all or nothing kind.

  The berry-red sheen of her lip-stick was wearing off, he noticed, and kisses tattooed the coffee cup. Shrugging, he sat back down, leaned over, picked up her cup and drained it, pressing his own mouth against the shadows of hers. He was right. It was cold.

  “I’m supposed to believe you’re trying to help me?”

  “I’m a boy scout.”

  “Why?”

  Because if he didn’t, Bruno or someone just like Bruno would put his hands around that slim neck and squeeze the life out of her.

  She didn’t seem to expect an answer.

  “Are you in trouble after this morning?” she said.

  He was in enough trouble to last a lifetime – especially his. He had refused to follow orders, thereby turning his back on a man who saved him from the gutter. And by warning a target who posed a possible threat to the security of the nation he was making it worse.

  He wasn’t going to kill her, she’d decided. He could tell by the l
oosening of her shoulders as she sat forward, closing down the space she first made between them. Her voice dropped. Intimate. Persuasive again. They were on the same side now.

  “I can help you if you help me find Peggy.”

  He laughed, a brief explosion of air, and the frown line between her eyebrows deepened.

  “I know you want to.”

  “I lied when I said I was a boy scout. They wouldn’t have me.”

  She waved her hand, pushing to one side his comment.

  “‘Peggy’ is Dr Margaret Boland. She’s an astronomer – a genius. She’s disappeared and I’ve no idea where she is.”

  North turned over the name in his head. Boland? Had he ever heard it? Read it? He didn’t think so.

  “I’m marrying one of the richest men in the country. I can pay you hundreds of thousands of pounds. Half a million. A million?”

  “But as you can see,” he glanced at the glittering diamond on her ring finger, before tapping the envelope between them, “I don’t need your money.”

  “Please.”

  He didn’t doubt her sincerity, but she had bigger problems than finding her friend. Like the fact she should already be dead.

  “Honor, I don’t know anything about anyone called Peggy.”

  A light went out in the green eyes. A closing-down.

  Sighing loud and hard, as if she’d heard out a troublesome constituent, but now had better things to do – she gathered up her papers. She was finished with him – he felt the dismissal in her, the disappointment. He’d yielded nothing. He could live with disappointing her. But, would she do the sensible thing and run?

  When he first woke in hospital and the voices came at him, he raved at the doctors and nurses who warned him that “severe loss of cognitive function” should be expected bearing in mind the nature of the head wound. They sedated him. When he came round the next time, he knew better. He blamed the drugs for the confusion, said he felt surprisingly well considering. They were all delighted.

  He didn’t reveal that the senior nurse planned to leave her husband for the neuro-surgeon, and the neuro-surgeon was having second thoughts. True? Or a bizarre construct around a lingering smile between the two, the sexiness of the nurse, the arrogance of the neuro-surgeon, the wedding bands of both.

  As time passed, it became less of a distraction, though if his own emotions were heightened, it got worse – voices grew louder, pictures sharper. But hour to hour, like finding a pirate station on a radio, the signal came and went as he moved the dial.

  He believed Honor was thinking about home. About the flat. Peggy’s picture on the fridge. Flowers in her kitchen. She wasn’t thinking about planes or New York City. North caught her hand as she made to stand, and it was warm.

  “Forget Peggy for now. Catch a cab, and a plane – somewhere far away. You have one chance to stay alive – maybe. If they aren’t watching you. If they are watching – then it’s already too late.”

  She pulled her hand out from his and he let her.

  He had done what he could. Honor Jones was guilty. Tarn said so and the Board ruled on it. Summary justice was still justice.

  And Honor was nothing to him. Innocent or guilty.

  Peggy. Whosoever Peggy was – astronomer, genius, best friend – was nothing to him either, however vital she was to the woman across from him.

  Honor’s face was the shape of a heart drawn by a child with two fingers in the air.

  A note of pleading entered his voice. “This isn’t your world, Honor. I don’t know what your friend did or if she’s alive. But if she’s dead, you’re already too late. If she’s alive, the very fact you’re looking for her might make them kill her. But if you keep looking, what will certainly happen, is that you will die.”

  Honor dropped the passport into her handbag, and her tone was almost friendly. “I’m an MP because Peggy told me that I could make a difference. I don’t by the way. Politics isn’t who I am, it’s just what I do. And it has its downsides like these loony-tunes who arrive in Central Lobby with shopping bags bursting with papers, raving about conspiracies. No one warns you about that on election night.”

  She stood up from the table, still talking. As if he was a colleague.

  “Ned was like that. Peggy attracts waifs and strays. Right now there’s a Chinese girl who’s a force of nature. There’s a traumatised family over from Syria. Ned. Me. He dropped out of uni but Peggy refused to write him off. She visited him in the psych unit and when he got home, she helped him out with money. We took him out for Sunday lunch together, walks in the park. I like him. I should say I ‘liked’ him.

  “But the other night, to be truthful, I wasn’t all that pleased to see him. In my defence, I’d a lot on my mind with Peggy gone and I kept thinking ‘get to the point, Ned baby’.” North strained to make out what she was saying, the hubbub in the café rising around them as the need for morning coffee intensified. “I didn’t listen hard enough. And I should have. He was a clever guy and I should have given him more credit, because Ned is why the two of us are here.”

  She put her hand on North’s shoulder, and the immediate shock of her touch coursed through his bloodstream.

  “Did you throw that boy off the bridge? Did you kill Ned Fellowes?”

  Her voice invited confession – held out the prospect of full absolution to the repentant sinner, as the warm expensive scent of her wrapped round him.

  Ned? North ransacked his memory. Ned. Ted. Ed. Edward Fellowes. The headshot published in the newspapers had him clean-shaven, younger, but when he met Honor Jones in the hotel, he sported a hipster beard. The “jumper” off Westminster Bridge. That’s how Honor knew to watch for him. How she’d known she was a target. The guy drinking wine in the photos with Honor Jones was the guy who leapt from Westminster Bridge. Except he didn’t leap to his death. North did the sums. He suspected it as soon as he read the piece.

  Someone pushed Ned Fellowes to his death, and since he didn’t favour coincidence – North presumed that it was an agent of the Board.

  Peggy disappeared. Ned was dead. Honor was next.

  “You didn’t. I can see that much and I’m glad.” She lifted her hand, freeing him and he felt the loss of her. “But even if you didn’t kill him, someone just like you did.

  “I kept hoping Peggy would reach out. Even when Ned died, part of me believed it had to be a mistake. Even when I went up to Newcastle. But then, there you were – standing in the dark. Ready to kill me. I’m not brave – or reckless – but if I don’t find her, Peggy isn’t coming back. And you can tell whoever you work for, that is simply not acceptable to Ned or me.”

  As she walked away from the table with its manila envelope of money, away from the cover provided by the trees, and the stranger trying to help her, out into the bustling foyer, he kept watching, but Honor Jones didn’t look back.

  Chapter 8

  “Are you in trouble?” Honor said it and she got that right. One thing was for sure and certain, North didn’t need her dragging him any further into her mess.

  He warned her.

  If you disregarded a warning, that was on you. Caution saved lives. Fact. Surveil the territory, assess the risk, decide your next action accordingly. Advance? Retreat? Dig in and send for reinforcements? If you were outnumbered and outgunned and there were no reinforcements a-comin’, it was sheer stupidity to advance. Retreat was not dishonourable when it was a strategic necessity. It was required.

  North was leaving her to her fate.

  The black cab was parked up on a quiet Westminster back-street along from a think-tank. Black cabs attracted no attention wherever they were parked. He’d called the cabbie an hour ago. Keys under the front wheel-arch on the driver’s side. Usual deal. A mutually beneficial arrangement that had served him well over the past five years. He bought the discretion of a cab and an official green badge to hang round his neck, while the divorced cabbie enjoyed three weeks in Florida with his new partner and both sets of kids. Win win.<
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  The key turned clockwise in the ignition and the engine caught. For an intelligent woman, Honor Jones behaved like a no-brain fool.

  He glanced at the clock. The flight to Washington had landed at Heathrow by now. Cleaners would be going through it for the turn-around flight back. If she’d listened to him, he could be driving them both to the airport instead of driving away and leaving her to certain death.

  He turned the key again, anti-clockwise this time, and the engine died. What would she do?

  He rested against the cabbie’s wooden-beaded seat relief. It annoyed him. He’d ask the guy to take it off next time. He was paying him enough. He checked himself – there wouldn’t be a next time. He was out.

  Would Honor stay in the safety of Parliament?

  He shifted around trying to get comfortable.

  Impossible.

  He just demonstrated safety didn’t exist in Parliament or outside it.

  He gave up on the beads, sliding off the suit jacket and undoing the silk tie, rolling up his white sleeves, before tossing the clear glass spectacles out of the window.

  Honor Jones MP. He wished he’d never heard her name. Or seen it, written in green ink on the back of a black and white photograph which showed her sitting with a man who was already dead. Never think of them as real people. Only as targets. Too late now.

  A small groan escaped him.

  She must have gone to the police about Peggy and got nowhere. Otherwise there’d be a hue and cry all over the news. He wasn’t surprised. The Board had centuries of experience at covering up their operations.

  He pulled out the pay-as-you-go he’d picked up an hour ago. Margaret Boland.

  Astronomer. 302,000 results. Newcastle University physics department. A professor with a list of incomprehensible publications to do with cosmology. Honor appeared to be right. Peggy was a genius. The professor stared out from his phone screen. Not to-die-for lovely like Honor, but striking enough with dark eyes, wild black hair and high cheekbones. The strong face of a capable woman who regarded life as a serious business. And if she didn’t before, she did now. He hesitated over a TED Talk she’d given a year ago – Listen: the earth is singing. She bowed her head as the applause started. Tall. An hourglass figure in a plain grey marl tee-shirt, jeans and dark jacket. Excited. Pleased to be there. Moving from foot to foot. She lifted her hand. Enough applause. North pressed the off button. What did it matter if the earth sang and Peggy Boland heard it. He didn’t need to listen because he was a free man.