Killing State

by Judith O'Reilly

  “Honor Jones?” North smacked the other man’s face once with the palm of his hand, and once with the back. He needed him focused and sober. “Where is she?”

  The struggle stopped. The tycoon leaned back against the wall as if he needed its support, and laughed. A hollow, cold noise. “I don’t know.”

  “Is she alive?” The touch of Honor’s skin, her lips against his. He didn’t know whether the sensations were from his own desire or Armitage’s memories.

  A piece fell into place somewhere. “You’re the one she talked about at the Savoy. North.” Armitage took in the brutality. The gun. His youth. “Then you’re one of these people – or you were. ‘The Board’. You’re one of their killers, except you couldn’t do it, could you? Were you as flattered as I was when you were recruited? That’s what they count on, you know.”

  As Armitage talked North thought of the elegant, dark-eyed woman at the reception, crackling with desperate sorrow. The memory of her nagging at him.

  “We were at a party like this one when Tarn said ‘Do the right thing.’ Invest in defence, in the New Army. Help us stand against Russia and China. It was patriotic, and privatization brings its own efficiencies. The country’s all but bankrupt. Men like me – we keep it together. Everything I’m doing is for the right reasons. The fact it’s been profitable has been a bonus, that’s all. Tarn persuaded me to manage the money for them, launder it, act as banker. Who knows where my investments start and theirs end? Not even me any more. But whatever it used to be, the Board today is made up of fanatics, North – you must know that. They think democracy is over, that the market only gets us so far, that the country is dying without the leadership it needs.”

  North had seen her before. He knew he had. The fearful almond eyes turning, assessing, dismissing him. Turning away.

  “As for this? They’ve assured me it’s necessary. I’ve chosen to believe them, because they have Honor and I have no choice.”

  “Someone’s stepping out of line,” Stella said before she died. JP Armitage had stopped being a believer, if he ever was. Had stopped thinking about the money he could make, and started thinking about everything he had to lose. They took Honor to keep him loyal.

  Hesitation on Armitage’s side. “You’ve only known her days. I’ve known her since she was a child.”

  Honor’s face younger. Smoother. Rounder. Sprawling sun-tanned limbs by the pool.

  And there was guilt in there. A narrow black line running through Armitage and buried deep. Covered over. Betrayal and money and figures on a page. Honor’s father didn’t commit fraud. Armitage wanted him out of the way – coveting what the other man had.

  His firm. His model wife. His teenage daughter. Nothing he deserved. The daughter and the mother would be better off in his care, Armitage assured himself. Happier. Looked after. How was he to know his friend was so close to the edge of sanity?

  North’s brain felt as if it was flooding with blood. Was he constructing his own narrative for Armitage or was the tycoon’s sin darker than North had even imagined?

  “I loved her mother, North, and I’ve seen Honor grow into a remarkable woman.” Armitage’s face contorted and North realised it was with regret – an emotion so strange to the tycoon that the muscles of his face weren’t sure what to do, where to go. How many years had he spent justifying his role in the tragedy, the destruction and unravelling of the perfect girl by “being there” for her? An old friend of the family who smashed that family apart and put the picture back together with the jagged pieces of a guilt-racked survivor who thought she had to save the world or die trying.

  “I tried to keep her out of it till this was over. Somewhere safe. She’s important to me – you have no idea how important.”

  The tycoon had Honor committed to hide her from the Board. From his own people. Armitage was the reason Honor was “off the books”, the reason North wasn’t sent the usual briefing. JP didn’t care what happened to Peggy once he had the smart chip. But Honor was different. The Board didn’t want the tycoon knowing they were going to kill the woman he wanted to marry. When he found out, he threatened to bring down the temple.

  “Tell me where she is, Armitage.”

  That was it – the dark-eyed woman at the reception next door was at the camp, sitting at the table surrounded by children. And she was pregnant. Peggy’s refugee whose name was Sonja. The same Sonja standing in the reception with a curled fist pressed into her ribs, her knuckles white. The beating heart of the child inside her.

  Armitage shook his head, impatient with his captor. “They want Honor close by so I don’t ‘disappoint’. I’m not letting them down, North. Everything’s ready to go. Anyone who might get in our way has a personal stake in our success – their children, their husbands and wives. I’m no different. Peggy’s smart chips are already out there. We started manufacture months ago and they’re going into everything. This country first but it’ll be global fast enough, especially because we aren’t charging anyone for the technology. We’re embedding the chips in their weapons systems. Communications. Utilities. In time, we’ll control all of it. Peggy did something magnificent. She’s making the world a quieter place. And more energy efficient.”

  “And what else?” Armitage looked sick.

  “We tweaked it. Bannerman put in a backdoor. Information is power and we’ll have all the information we need, and if information isn’t enough, we’ll take control, dismantling GPS, disabling entire industries, oil, nuclear, defence systems, turning them on and off to suit.”

  “Peggy found out?”

  Armitage’s eyes went to the door again and North felt the panic building in the other man, infecting him. His own panic running alongside that of Armitage, matching it pace for urgent pace. Trying to make sense of it.

  The Board wanted Honor dead because she was looking for Peggy. And now she was more use alive to bring JP in line.

  A hammering against the door. Perhaps it was the noise of their fight or perhaps security had decided the door had been shut for too long? That the President was in the banqueting hall and not in a private meeting with a British industrialist?

  “Did Peggy find out?”

  “She was always too damned clever for her own good.”

  North stood over him. They were of a similar size. Neither had to look down. They breathed in time with each other. Honor’s mouth. Dust on the black silk lapel of Armitage’s jacket. The chimes of Big Ben striking eight o’clock hanging small on the cold wintry air.

  “Look after her,” Armitage’s whisper was barely loud enough to be heard. Afterwards, North thought that perhaps he hadn’t heard him say it at all.

  Perhaps North only joined the dots as the room blew apart.

  Glass and dust took the place of air. The noise came later. The end-of-all-things – an enormous bang travelling through the marrow of him as if the explosion started and finished in his bones. Bricks and stone and metalwork started to fall – a few at first then all at once, travelling towards him faster than thought. Armitage lost – darkness so black it was as if the light of the world had been extinguished. A black hole. Dark matter. Peggy lost. Honor lost. North fought for oxygen as the air was sucked out of the room almost sucking out his innards with it. He tried to persuade his body to sip its breaths. Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do? Wasn’t that the training in another existence? But desperate for oxygen that wasn’t there, his body wasn’t listening. Lifting, shifting, as if gravity had been suspended – the world upside down and roundabout, his eyes rhimed with grit and ash he could see nothing as he flew, turning, spinning, slamming, the door, the thick stone wall gone, the twisting staircase, the wall into the banqueting hall disappeared. Trying to remember what he had been supposed to see, what should-have-been, finding nothing. Jacko. Where was his unit? The young Second Lieutenant dead again. And where the party had been, the throngs of statesmen, the great and good, the unborn child, everything covered in white ash, tattered flesh and blood. No Jacko
then. Relief. But no anybody.

  There should have been somebody.

  North must have lost consciousness for a while. He didn’t know how long. Minutes not hours, and when he came round, he spat blood and dust from his mouth, coughing as he brought up he didn’t want to know what – a high-pitched squealing the only thing to cling to. The rest of the world muffled, dead. There must have been screaming, but he couldn’t hear it. As his vision came and went and came again, he attempted to get to his feet but they slipped on the stone, a sensation of softness under him. He patted himself down. Reeling. Was he there? All of him? No limbs missing, blood in his hair again. He reached for a door – missed it, stumbling, on his knees, sharp pain pushing though the cloth, into flesh. He stood up again, extracted an inch-long nail and threw it to the floor – or where there should have been a floor. Beside him the floor had fallen away, the sides broken beams, yawning open ready to swallow him down. Limping, he kept to the walls, what there were of them – hoped what was left wouldn’t decide their time was done and take him with them.

  “Armitage…” he knew himself to be calling but he couldn’t hear the words. He called again, coughing with the exertion of it. Perhaps Armitage could hear even if North couldn’t?

  Armitage knew about the bomb. Had been trying to leave. And he stopped him. Killing him. Killing his only hope of finding her. And the only reason the Board had to keep her alive.

  Flames were catching, creeping up the walls, crawling across the end of the hall.

  Time to leave. He took off his shredded jacket to press it against his nose and mouth, the cloth sticky and wet. Briefly wondered about the bullet in his brain. This much he knew about bombs, the impact of the blast waves on the brain could kill you without leaving a mark. What damage could they do if they already had a bullet in there to work with? Fire caught somewhere. Electrics. Burning wood and roasting meat mixed with the cordite and what he was guessing was PTN – pentaerythritol tetranitrate. A major ingredient of semtex, from the same family as nitroglycerine. Colourless crystals capable of detonation by electrical impulse. The explosive of choice for terrorists everywhere – including it seemed dear old London Town.

  He stepped back as his foot caught, pressed against something under it. Crushed under a collapsed beam, his body half-hanging over the gaping hole into the arched vault below and beyond, JP Armitage, billionaire industrialist, traitorous lover, with an estimated personal fortune bigger than the GDP of some countries. Dead and gone. No mark on his face, only a thin layer of white powder covering the mane of hair and the heavy features like a Georgian dandy. They were keeping Honor alive to keep Armitage in line. The building shifted, the slightest tilt as history gathered itself. Plaster-dust fell, ancient timber struts snapped, and Armitage still tethered to the cast iron radiator slipped inch by inch away. North grabbed for him. Cloth. The tail of the silk-lined dinner jacket sliding through his hand. A dry slither, Armitage’s body picking up speed all of a sudden, down, hands tied, a swallow dive into what North could only guess was Hell.

  Amid the billowing dust and gathering smoke of the banqueting hall, there was movement on the floor a rolling and unfurling, arms reaching as if the guests had been dead and were rising again because the trumpet had sounded and Judgment Day come upon them. To his knowledge there had been eight heads of state in this room together with some of their key ministers. He wondered how many of them were dead.

  The young waiter lay crumpled over the debris – an ever-expanding pool of crimson seeping out from beneath him. “It’s carnage out there,” he’d said, excited to be part of it. North sank to his knees. A tinkling sound as he lifted the handsome head on to his lap – the body covered with sparkling fragments of glass reflecting the flames. A pieta, the thought came to North from some religious tract of his mother’s, a marble Madonna and Christ cut down from the cross, but a floppy-haired Christ not yet dead and smelling of aftershave, and dust and blood.

  “It’s all right,” he tried to say but he still couldn’t hear himself. The boy opened his mouth and North thought he groaned, the groan turning into a cough that convulsed the broken body and then a guttural rattle – his panicking eyes fixing on North. “You’re going to be fine.” He laid a hand over the curly hair. He’d comforted soldiers before. Waited with them as they bled out.

  Something in the brown eyes shifted as the boy recognised him from the kitchen, and his hand found North’s and squeezed. North smiled. For the sake of the boy, as if he was glad he had this chance to talk together. As if this was their lucky day.

  He wanted to move him, but North had seen death in the field before and it was coming on fast. But the boy didn’t have to know that. All he needed to know was that he wasn’t alone, because no one on this earth should face death alone and sooner than he should. North knew that for a fact now if he had never known it before. A noise came up from the young waiter, North felt the sensation. The boy’s urgent need for his mother’s touch. But there was no mother, no time – blood leaking from the corner of his mouth.

  Stillness. In the sudden space where there should have been a heartbeat, the eyes glazed. North moved his palm down over the face. Pennies, he thought though he didn’t know from where. There should be pennies to weigh down the eyelids. One final price to pay for being alive, alongside the loss and the suffering. He swept the narrow chest of glass – tidying him, making him presentable for the next life, regardless that the glass was making his fingers bleed. He laid the boy back on the ground, gently does it, so as not to wake him and stood.

  His ears ringing, in the silent movie of billowing dust, a figure was waving him over. Man or woman, he wasn’t sure. It took time for him to recognize the curvaceous blonde who had taken his last flute of champagne, the American in the black silk dress who winked at him. Her mouth moved, the gloss stuck over with ash like tiny grey feathers, but he couldn’t hear her. Then the voices came:

  I can’t feel my legs.

  Mom.

  Oh my God.

  Dead – he has to be dead.

  An agonised weeping babble from a mixture of nationalities – some he recognised, some he didn’t. German. Danish. Japanese. A dark-suited man with blood running down his grey face, laboured regardless in the corner, moving pieces of rubble, throwing them right and left, determined to get to what lay under it, knowing already there was no point. North gazed around the ruined hall, the scraps of what he took to be flesh, the limbless and the crushed, one or two of the more able-bodied bent over the injured, the dying. He couldn’t understand the barrage of voices that rushed into his head, there were too many speaking too many languages and the panic too intense – he fought to block them out before they swept away all reason. He was glad he couldn’t understand most of the words, but the screaming? The screaming didn’t need a translator. It filled his mind with the white noise of anguish.

  Fire caught the dry timbers of the hall as he left it. He carried the blonde in his arms, keeping tight hold against the slippery wet cloth. She’d said “Thanks hon” again though he didn’t think she recognised him, smiled as he’d lifted her – though she had to be in agony. White smoke billowed from the building turning blue as it caught the flashing blue lights of the emergency services parked across Whitehall. A yellow-jacketed paramedic came to lift the woman out of his arms but he could tell from the weight of her head against his chest, from the stillness, that she was dead, and he didn’t want to let her go. She’d said “Thanks, hon,” and smiled at her luck in getting the last champagne. She’d have wanted him to hold her – not some stranger. Someone threw a silver foil blanket over him, and he felt a steadying hand on his forearm. The paramedic blocking him was speaking, but he couldn’t hear him. He watched the mouth move up and down, the sympathetic eyes. He wanted North to let her go. So he did.

  Chapter 66

  LONDON

  2.35am. Saturday, 11th November

  They dressed his knee in A&E, pumped antibiotics into him, counted three broken ribs, che
cked him for concussion, and for wounds that had drenched him in gore but the blood wasn’t his. If the junior doctor wasn’t so overwhelmed by the casualties and the trauma stacking up in triage, she might have asked about the ridged scar through his hair. But she didn’t. There were lives to save, limbs to save. No time for conversation. Instead, the walking wounded sat with sweet tea in the waiting room and along the corridors of the hospital. Someone made a joke that they had to be the best-dressed patients the hospital had ever seen but no one laughed. A TV played out in the corner: estimates had it at more than 48 dead and more than 250 wounded. Unconfirmed reports claimed the Prime Minister and her Italian counterpart were dead. They could confirm the German Chancellor was seriously wounded and five other UK ministers believed to be dead including the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Home Secretary. President Trump was unharmed and already on Air Force One heading home. He’d tweeted his outrage. No one had yet claimed responsibility. The bomb, however, was believed to be the work of an ISIL splinter group operating out of Libya. Complaints were already coming in about the response of the emergency services.

  At the news of the Prime Minister’s death, a young girl began to sob and an elderly man who had earlier described himself in a clipped tone as “Foreign Office” rubbed her back, round and round, patting it every now and then as if she was a babe-in-arms. Two policeman in bullet-proof vests wandered the corridors, catching the injured, harvesting names and addresses, asking them what they had seen, where they had been standing when the bomb went off. If they had consulted their pocket notebook they would have remembered the big guy who had wrecked his knee was Jack Keegan, a waiter with Blue Arrow Catering, and no, he hadn’t seen anyone suspicious. He’d been by the door, his tray empty about to head back in for refills when the bomb went off. Thank God eh? Or he might be dead too. Of course they could have his address and mobile – whatever they needed. All he could tell them was it was just the usual function with more security. His friend died, another waiter, and he’d carried some nice American lady out – she was dead too. He’d gone quiet then which hadn’t been an act. They’d liked that though. The sergeant patting him on his upper arm. Telling him “It’s all right, son.” And North thought about the Army and how much he missed it.