Killing State

by Judith O'Reilly

  “Eat,” said North reaching down a discarded box, its bottom greasy. He flipped open the lid and picked up a slice of cold, oily pizza before handing it to her. “Then we make it disappear. But there’s one more thing before we do that.”

  He placed the notebook on the desk between them. Stella’s speckled blood was dry now but the cover had rolled back on itself and the edges of the pages were curled up and edged in brown.

  “What did Peggy always tell you to do?”

  Her little jaws were busy and her lips greasy. She chewed noisily as she remembered. “Look for the unexpected,” she said.

  North took hold of a corner of an early printout and peeled it back. The page underneath was covered in tiny black symbols. Coding.

  Fang sat forward. She was all woken up.

  He made more ancient coffee to go with the pizza. He didn’t open the fridge, and this time Fangfang demanded one. Her cup sat under a blank monitor, steam condensing over the screen. He didn’t approve, he’d have stopped her drinking it, but he didn’t believe he could stop Fang doing anything.

  The pictures were grainy and in black and white. Nine suited men and two women sat around in a horseshoe of polished desks.

  The figure of the woman in the black suit was unmistakable – Honor Jones, her head on one side listening, smack-bang in the heart of the establishment, and the heart of the conspiracy.

  “She’s pretty.” For a second the child sounded envious of the woman before she blew an enormous bright blue bubble and popped it. To one side, the blank computer screen had been rubbed clean and dry as if by a sleeve.

  Fangfang’s tongue was still bringing in the remains of the bubble gum from the corner of her mouth. Bored. Finding Honor hadn’t been a stretch compared to picking her way through Armitage’s financial empire.

  “She’s not hiding. She’s in the Intelligence and Security Committee meeting in the House of Commons. Private session.”

  With a blare of static, the voice came through – the warm, authoritative, and persuasive tones of Honor Jones.

  “We’ve been too scrupulous. The security agencies couldn’t predict the attacks because we castrated them. Let them off the leash. Together with the New Army on the streets, they’re our only real protection. People deserve to feel safe. We have to give them that.”

  The committee didn’t like it – not all of them anyway – he could tell from the unhappy faces and the murmurings of dissent, but she carried on regardless, waving her hand to dismiss whatever they were saying as if it was so much smoke.

  “I need to talk to her, Fangfang.”

  “Bad idea moron-person.”

  “They turned her round. She needs to face in the right direction, and I need to get their attention, Fang. Do it. St James’s Park. The bridge of spies.”

  The girl snorted. “You old people have zero imagination.”

  Fangfang pulled down a screen of green numbers and attacked the code. On the screen, Honor stopped talking to reach for her iPhone, sitting still as she read the message. North’s eyes flicked back to Fangfang’s green screen. “St James’s Park. The bridge. Meet me. ” Honor barely moved. Another committee member took over from her – it was the time for drastic measures he agreed, his double chin quivering with excitement. They were coming round. North stopped listening. The only noise the thudding beat of his heart loud in his ears. She wasn’t leaving the committee room. She had no intention of meeting him on the bridge or anywhere. She had no intention of ever seeing him again. Bleakness filled him up, overwhelming him. Fangfang chewed her lip. She tapped at the screen again, pressing Send before North realised what she was doing.

  “Nxoxo” Fang dry-retched, her shoulders hunching as she tapped out the hugs and kisses.

  Honor must have heard the ping of the message as it came in but she left the phone where it lay. One. Two. Three seconds. Didn’t she care? Then she reached for it, her hand sliding it across the desk and into her bag in one smooth move. She stood up from the table. Her back to the camera, North couldn’t see her mouth moving, her voice if she spoke at all was soft and low, but judging by the perturbation of her fellow committee members as she walked out of the door she hadn’t explained her departure at all.

  Fangfang looked up at him. “My granny always says ‘One misstep can cause a thousand year disaster’.” He put his hand on the teenager’s narrow shoulder, the fragile collarbone, and she let it rest there for a second before she shrugged him off. “Mind – Granny Po’s a right buzz kill.”

  Chapter 71

  LONDON

  10.05am. Monday, 13th November

  The air was cold and damp on his face as he let himself out of the building, pulling the heavy door behind him with a thud. Fang needed another five minutes to set up the playback of the session recording her working, then would use the kitchen’s fire exit to leave the building.

  They were watching – not just virtually, but eyes-on. He left his regard soft, casual as he swept the street. It was too busy a thoroughfare to sit any watchers in a car – they’d be too obvious, the neighbourhood too monied and vigilant. It was a neighbouring apartment or one close by. An apartment like the one opposite. Probably with its own corpse. Behind the heavy nets of the bow window on the second floor, a dim golden light was just visible. A shape moved as he did. The watcher waking up to the fact that North was out and on the move. As the front door pulled open, North turned. They heard him tell Fangfang he was going out. They had spotted him and they knew where he was heading. All they had to do now was follow him down the rabbit hole.

  Did the one-eyed man pose a risk now they had found the money?

  He wanted North to take apart the Board and tracing the money was only one part of that. Money though had a way of concentrating minds. North wasn’t one for chances – the chance they would stop wanting blood and start wanting the money more.

  He had to break the Board before the Board broke him. Him and Honor and the entire country. The one-eyed man and his cronies weren’t going to help. They were going to use him to get to the Board and when his usefulness was done, they would tidy him away along with Fangfang. He glanced at his watch. It was all in the timing.

  North took a cab for the first few streets, but when it ground to a halt round Green Park, he got out and ran. He wasn’t sorry – remembering to breathe through the pain from his ribs, the movement of his legs, his feet pounding against the pavements. The steady stride gave him something to do – other than dwell on the woman he was going to meet. Maybe he’d be late? Half of him hoping she would have changed her mind, reached the bridge and when he wasn’t there, turned away. It was because he was thinking of Honor, that he ran straight into the protest spilling across the Mall.

  Barriers lined the broad avenue. The police were attempting to funnel the crowd along the Mall rather than letting them spill into the parkland and across to Downing Street and Whitehall. Blocking his way to Honor.

  Ahead of him and either side young and old stood, arms aloft, smartphones and wristwatches to the sky filming the nano-drones which were filming the crowd of ad hoc civil rights groups, anarchists, socialists and liberals – all of them apparently unhappy at the security clampdown. The drones buzzed and swooped and hovered as the crowds jeered – the more reckless throwing up stones which missed the machines but fell back amid screams and shouts. Placards were everywhere. Not in my Name. New Army – Old Story! Democracy matters! If Nasty-boys are the Answer. What the Hell is the Question? Numbers grew by the minute – protestors bumping against North, closing off his exit. The initial good humour and enthusiasm for the cause sharpening minute by minute into a more dangerous mood – more reckless. North fought off other people’s fear, their urge to do violence as a bearded man hurled a bottle out from the crowd and into the ranks of the police, glass and urine shattering over their polished boots. The mood shifted again. Another bottle came and another. Protesters at the front of the crowd yelling abuse at the police, others yelling at the bottle-throwe
rs safe behind them.

  North fought his way to the side of the road where the police line was thinner, elbowing protesters out of the way. His only chance of making it to Honor was through the barricade. Next to him a young boy in a scuffed-up biker’s jacket was looking around him wildly.

  “The coppers won’t let anyone out,” he said to North – a note of rising panic. The lad spoke into the visor of the policeman in front of him. “I’m not in this, mate. Let me through will you please? I’m late for my shift – I’ll get fired.”

  The policeman laid a large hand on the boy’s chest and pushed him away, the boy almost falling, almost bringing down North.

  An unseen command and the riot police moved into the crowd, pushing them back with their shields, spreading out in a V, two of them grabbing the bearded bottle-thrower, his arms behind him, lifting him off his feet to carry him back out of the crowd behind their own lines, their ranks closing up again before the protesters further away knew what happened.

  A cheer went up. When the massed ranks of riot police had closed up again, they’d fallen back – a footstep, no more, but the crowd felt the realignment. An easy victory to those who hadn’t witnessed the take-up – except it wasn’t.

  A scuffle next to him as the teenage boy grabbed at North, using him as an anchor against the pull of a policeman attempting to drag him from the crowds.

  “Hey,” North put his arm on the policeman’s. He had to shout to make his voice heard, swatting off a drone as it buzzed them to film the arrest. “He’s done nothing. Don’t take him.”

  The policeman’s gauntleted arm swept away North’s. His face vicious behind the visor.

  “Piss off,” the policeman grunted as he took better hold of the kid.

  North wasn’t sure what the sound was at first – the pounding. The roar of diesel. Heavy machinery. Motor vehicles. Lorries. So many that he didn’t immediately distinguish the other sound – the rhythmic tramp of soldiers on the move, of boots against a road, the sound of an Army on the move. The New Army. They were reinforcing the police with soldiers. Out on the streets exactly where Tarn wanted them. It was happening.

  North had his own fight. But he was trapped in this one. Balling his fist he took the policeman in the solar plexus – holding him upright before punching him again, followed by a knock-out punch to his right temple. The copper’s eyes closed. North didn’t want him falling, drawing attention to himself. He gestured to the teenager to support the policeman on the other side – yelling as they approached the police ranks to let them through. At the sight of their colleague ranks parted. “Some bastard back there,” yelled North, gesturing with his head into the crowd, making a silent apology to the protesters and the police went back in.

  He put a hand on the teenager’s shoulder and pushed him through the lines, past the armoured weaponry. “Keep moving,” he muttered to the lad.

  Only when they made it to a quiet side street did he let go of the boy.

  “Thanks, mate,” the teenager was pale. He remembered to hold out his hand, the gesture of a civilized man rather than a scared child, and North shook it. “It’s like that Honor woman says – at least we can rely on each other, eh?”

  North slowed as he reached the entrance to the park, the bank of oaks and elms occluding his view of the bridge; his breath ragged, shallow, his heartbeats fast. Honor was there, waiting. He watched her. As he’d watched her before when all he had to do was kill her. Before it got complicated. Across the dark-grey water, the reflection of trees and clouds, her head turned towards the orange-beaked pelicans, their ungainly walk over the sloping, fouled concrete bank, their elegant ride through the flat, clear water.

  She saw his reflection before she saw him – didn’t look round, her hands gripping the iron rail, the knuckles white.

  “Pelicans are a symbol of the Resurrection did you know that, North? Of Christ. The Pelican in her Piety shows the mother pelican piercing her flesh and letting the chicks drink her blood. Some stories have it the pelican actually kills the babes then revives them with her blood.”

  “Sounds like an excellent reason not to be a pelican.”

  The noise of the protest carrying on the wind – the shouts, the blare of loudspeakers. “I’ve a soft spot for flamingos,” he said. “They change colour depending on how much blue-green algae they eat.”

  “And here I was thinking you’d prefer the phoenix rising from the ashes. I should have guessed.”

  “Too showy. More your style. So tell me – what happened to the old Honor Jones? The woman who never gave up?”

  She pulled out a packet of cigarettes and made to light one. The flame flickered then caught. Inhaling. Exhaling. Smoke curling between them. Ignored him.

  “You nearly killed me in a park like this. You’d have saved us both a lot of trouble.”

  “I like trouble.”

  What did Jess say? “You attract trouble like meat attracts flies.” “You say that, like it’s a bad thing,” he’d told her. As if it wasn’t.

  Finally, she turned to look at him. Her eyes as cold and deep as the sea.

  “You killed JP.” It wasn’t a question. He killed the man she was about to marry. He would have killed Armitage without hesitation if he had to. Snapped his spine. Squeezed that thick neck without compunction. But all he did was stop Armitage leaving the banqueting hall. Did that put the death on his shoulders? He didn’t think so. He felt no guilt, no responsibility. He didn’t strap explosive around a pregnant woman.

  North moved his left hand up to Honor’s collar to brush off a dead leaf carried there in the wind. “In Newcastle when I was arrested, I met a policeman – DCI “Slim” Hardman. You met him too. Now, Hardman’s an honest man, decent, and I wanted him to think well of me. I didn’t feel that way about your JP Armitage.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was listening. “JP and my father were friends, you know that. When I was with JP, it reminded me of the happy times in my childhood. Without him, there’s only how it ended.” She gave up on the cigarette, tossing it over the railing and into the rippling water. “Tarn told me JP died with his hands tied together, and that you died with him.” She watched as it sank. “I wore black.”

  “For me? Or for him?”

  “You were both dead – does it matter?”

  He willed her to look at him again, so that he could read her better, and as if she knew, she looked up, winter sunlight across the left side of her face softening it, the other side shadowy and cold. And he thought of Stella – her treachery, her friendship, and he grieved for both of them.

  The last time he saw Honor she was hunted and struggling between the hands of her captors. Today she was the heroic poster girl of change. What did the Board plan for her? To stand for the party leadership? To win? To lead the country for real exactly where Tarn wanted it to go. He could reach out and touch her but they’d never been further apart and it came to him that Stella was right. Honor was never meant for him. She’d never been anything but a stranger.

  “Tarn promised me they’ll let Peggy go as soon as everything calms down.” Tarn, who always promised what you most wanted. A father. A family. A friend.

  “Is she alive?”

  Honor closed her eyes as if there were things she didn’t want to see. “Peggy has to be alive, North, or all this has been for nothing.”

  “Has he proved she’s alive to you?”

  A winter’s storm of grief broke in Honor – harsh and cruel and noisy as a cold wind moved across the white-iced buildings, the trees, and the two of them shivered and broke apart in the water. She turned her face to the grey sky. “They say it might rain. It’ll move the protests off the streets.”

  “Honor…”

  “I can talk to Tarn for you, North. Explain. You only did what you thought was best.”

  “I’m sure he’d appreciate the irony in that.”

  “You need a longer game. I can help you.”

  “I never learned the rules, Honor. All I know
is when they knock on the door and ask you to play – when you get that call, you have to pick a side.”

  She was a collaborator. She was worse than a collaborator – she was a fool to believe Tarn’s promises, and the urge to hurt her crashed against him. To wound her, anger her. To reach her and wake her and restore her to who she really was.

  “What do you want from me, North?” She looked at him, and it was like the first time. Stripped bare and desperate. “I messed everything up. It’s too late.”

  He knew what she did before rough hands reached him and the nape of his neck understood the metal of the gun pressed into it, before the needle sank into his neck and there was violent sudden darkness. She opened up a hunger in North he fought against his entire life. She did exactly as he wanted. Exactly as he never wanted. Made him love her.

  Chapter 72

  One of them knocked her to the ground – the hand pushing against her chest, keeping her away from North. She landed badly, her head slamming against the metal railings. She attempted to stand, nauseous suddenly, calling after North, her vision blurred with tears as they hustled him away, their arms around him, the toes of his boots scraping along the path.

  From somewhere a cyclist and an elderly lady were holding her upright. Passers-by.

  Strangers. But no one who could help.

  She touched the back of her head and her fingertips came away bloody.

  North was a fool – they were both fools. She was under surveillance at all times. She thought she’d given them the slip in the Commons. And they had to be monitoring her calls.

  He had to know that, so why did he come?

  The desolate, desperate thought came to her that North was dragged away thinking she betrayed him. Betrayed him twice over. Betrayed herself too. And Peggy. Because there was no way Peggy would have wanted Honor to do what she was doing and compromise her very soul. To stop fighting, because she was frightened of something that had already happened.