The Cult of The Enemy: The Dark Places Trilogy

by S. G Mark

  Covent Garden was a good thirty minutes’ walk from the flat, but he had left early so as to ascertain his surroundings and ensure he wasn’t being followed. Kyle hadn’t specifically mentioned where in Covent Garden he was to meet him, which Jack now found annoyingly strange, but he supposed it was going to be one of those situations where Kyle would locate Jack from the crowd. He wasn’t worried, at least he told himself not to.

  The leaves on the trees that flanked the streets had already turned to auburn and the glowing hue from the buildings radiated a warmth that made him feel as comfortable as if he were a child. The wealth of history transcended the generations and seemed embedded in the brickwork, the cobbled streets and the glowing lights that would twinkle once twilight set in.

  The place was thronging with tourists and shoppers. It seemed contradictory that in a country so reliant on Rations that designer outlets were thriving, and yet the shoppers were laden with logo inscribed bags, wearily carrying them as their eyes yearned for caffeine and their feet screamed for rest.

  It was from the corner of his eyes that he noticed the words; emblazoned in the headline grabbing font outside a corner shop.

  MP Graham Harries Found Dead

  Jack found his feet had stopped without permission and they were slowly walking over to the adjacent newspaper stand and picked up a copy of the latest verbal vomit. The man’s face had made the front page - a nice little family photograph with his wife Sylva. As he scanned the page, he picked up as much as he could - he knew the risks of lingering too long. The man was found dead in his hotel room this morning, and the coroner had already confirmed death by self-inflicted asphyxiation. Tributes had apparently already flooded in and the Prime Minister confirmed he would make a statement in due course.

  Taking a step back from the stand and letting the paper slide from his fingertips, he felt slightly separated from reality for a moment. Not for a second did he believe that it was suicide. Nothing was that coincidental. Not twelve hours after their brief encounter the man was dead? Jack could see the puppet strings: they were that obvious, he could almost see the hand. At some point last night, Graham had become dispensable - his worth belittled to a hanging body in a soulless hotel room. Jack needed little imagination to understand the events that led to that change. The one person that had met both The Man who ruled the country and the man who sought to overrule it had just died. Jack felt a fleeting sadness, an innocent man’s guilt at an effect caused by such ignorant actions. And then it was time to go.

  As Jack approached the streets around Covent Garden, something inside his chest swelled uncomfortably, constricting his breathing. It was a doubt - one that he refused to listen to, or even acknowledge existed. But as he continued through the dense crowd, that voice grew louder and louder each time. Something, no matter how much he wanted to deny it, wasn’t right. Though he had grown accustomed to keeping his head down, this location was far too busy for his liking.

  Straying eyes leered, shoulders slammed into others, densely packed shoppers frustrated at the world weaving their way through the narrow streets; this didn’t feel right. The market underneath the magnificent arches was brimming; the sweet scent of roasting chestnuts dosed the air as street performers desperately gathered people around them in preparation for the next show.

  Keeping to the edges of the square, Jack scanned the horizon for any sign of a familiar face. Nothing appeared on his radar. A round of applause erupted as a street performer bowed to a pleased audience. Beggars wandered amongst them all, shaking paper cups at anyone who would pay them attention. Some shops had even begun erecting their Christmas decorations, a sure sign of the time that had lapsed in the time Jack had been in isolation; the hum of the city electric and vibrant. Within minutes, Jack’s calmness disintegrated, and he was now frantically looking for Kyle within the crowd.

  This wasn’t right. Had he not been distracted by Graham’s death, he might have noticed how overpopulated this meeting place was well before he arrived. This was the last place for Kyle to request to meet anyone in The Resistance. Overcrowded, over-central, it was a vulnerability that neither could afford.

  The paranoia set in. Jack remembered the scribbled note and his gut leered forward. It could have been written by anyone. He’d only see Kyle’s handwriting once or twice - there was no way he could tell it apart from any other scrawl. He’d just trusted the signature…

  Instantly he moved from his position, submerging himself into the thickest part of the crowd. But everywhere served as a reminder; headlines of the death of Graham Harries, another of The Resistance bombing a small village in Yorkshire. God Disciple’s supporters threaded their way through the throng with their blessed leaflets and twiglets of twisted wisdom. Tall posters, affixed to the buildings and lampposts, imploring readers to be aware of those around them: Be Vigilant, Be Safe. CCTV cameras craned their necks, perched upon poles above everyone; watching, waiting.

  The crowd buffeted him around as he staggered with no direction, everywhere equally as daunting as the next. He needed to escape, he needed to leave. Nothing felt right. Blood pressure rising, he was scouting around for the nearest viable exit, somewhere secluded and safe. And as his eyes raced around, something grabbed his arm abruptly and he was pulled clear of the crowd.

  “We need to leave,” Kyle ordered, looking around as frantically as Jack had been.

  “Oh thank fuck -”

  “Shut up, we need to go,” he said, thrusting Jack forward.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Kyle pulled him forwards, “Keep walking. Run when I tell you to.”

  Frozen with fear, Jack forced himself to move forward, Kyle right behind him.

  “Are we being followed?” he asked, spying a clear alleyway to his left.

  “Worse,” Kyle grabbed Jack’s neck and pushed it down below the tops of the crowd.

  “Tell me what’s happening,” he demanded, nausea stung his insides.

  “Jack, I need you to believe me…”

  But Jack had already turned around, staggering backwards away from Kyle.

  “Believe you about what?”

  His voice was choked, as if he couldn’t swallow the truth. And he couldn’t. The idea of it devoured his very core.

  “Jack, you need to come with me,” Kyle demanded.

  “I trusted you,” he said slowly.

  They were at the very corner of Covent Garden now. Although the commotion continued and the shoppers relentlessly splashed their money, and the beggars shook their cups even louder at the passers-by, Jack stood still. His instincts yelling at him to run, but his emotions rooting him to the spot.

  “Who told you I was in London?” he said.

  Kyle advance on Jack, who backed away instantly, “We don’t have time for this.”

  “But then why are you here, why did you tell me to meet you here?”

  “I didn’t -”

  “Kyle, I trusted you, beyond anyone else, I trusted you the most… and you’re... you’re…”

  Alex would never have betrayed his whereabouts and there was no way that any senior member of the organisation would organise a pick up at this location. Suddenly an avalanche of thoughts cascaded through his mind as he thought back to all those times where the CRU had arrived on missions Kyle was involved in. Before Jack had arrived in London his friend had disappeared… and this monster had appeared in his place.

  “When did you turn, Kyle? What price did they pay for your betrayal?”

  “It’s not me, Jack,” Kyle pleaded with him, pushing him farther backwards into the alleyway.

  “It’s you… it was always you…”

  “I’m not The Mole!” he shouted, and his mouth opened to screech something else, but a shot rang out and his body crumpled into Jack’s arms.

  Collapsing to his knees with the weight of his friend, Jack was not alone in scanning around him. The screaming crowd had dropped collectively to its knees. But there was one figure amongst the crowd who stood
. A figure Jack could never mistake for another. They lowered their gun, but by then it was too late. Their eyes had interlocked and tears were streaming down his betrayed cheeks. Her hair flew around her face at the mercy of the wind, and as much as Jack tried to see the regret in her eyes, there was nothing to salvage. Kyle’s body cradled in his arms, Jack could do nothing but stare into Emma’s cold eyes as she gently stepped backwards and vanished from view.

  “J-jack,” Kyle said, attempting to raise his head as blood poured from his chest, “R-r-run…”

  Jack shook his head, “No. I’m not leaving you.”

  There was not a chance in hell that he was ever going to leave Kyle dying alone on the street, and even if there was, the weight of the betrayal anchored him to the spot.

  “They’re here… you… you don’t stand a chance if you stay…”

  “I’m not leaving,” he grasped Kyle, tears streaming from his eyes.

  Kyle looked up, his docile expression not born of love, but of the brief moment where the light left his body; his muscles failed and his head rebounded into his chest.

  Seconds later, he could see them arrive on all sides. Machine-gun armed police cornering him from all sides. The black uniforms that symbolised so much fear somehow paled in reality. As he watched them break through the crowd, he did nothing. All fight had abandoned him. The scared crowd glared at him, some shrieking his name, others cowering in the shadow behind his approaching fate…

  They grabbed his shoulders first, tearing him away from Kyle’s corpse. Jack savoured the last second he had with his friend, as his fingers were prised from the body and he was forcibly dragged from the scene. The instinct to fight was gone. Instead, he was pulled backwards by an octopus of arms, his legs limp from all hope as Kyle’s body slowly shrunk into the distance, lying sprawled across the cobbled streets, which shone with a sheen of fresh rain.

  Words darted around him, but they had no meaning, Guns pointed at his head, but he cared little for their bullets. As he was carted into the back of a van, his eyes never broke contact with Kyle’s body. His heart was already broken with betrayal… and he felt as dead as the cadavers he’d murdered along his journey to this pivotal, pitiful moment.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Bruises and scars marked his body. Burns from the electricity, deep wounds from other nameless instruments. In six days he’d vomited more than he’d eaten. Dehydration tormented him, but every day when he was dragged into the room, he continued to sit and stare into the middle distance. Brain dead; emotionally dulled and his fight fractured. They hadn’t killed him yet, but Jack did not console himself with that. What was there to live for now?

  The dark cell encompassed him for twenty hours of every day. For the remaining four, they interrogated him, but he couldn’t manage much more than to keep his eyes open as they screamed questions at him that he never wanted to answer.

  They demanded a map of the safehouses, for Jack to name his second in command. They punched him to try and ascertain his next targets; they burned him to try and extract information on his investors, supporters and government moles. They tied him to a chair and fractured a rib. They hung him by the ankles from the ceiling and threw hot water over him.

  It was the nightmare he’d been reared to believe in. Every single day since Alex recruited him, this was the reason to keep fighting, to keep running. A part of Jack was numb to the inevitability of it all. After three years of evading capture, his luck was never likely to last much longer. For him to be brought here under such a convergence of death and betrayal; no torture could compete with that.

  Emma. In those dark, sleepless nights he thought of her and it made him sick. All this time? How many years had she been working against them, since the beginning? Had her eager eyes been watching, noting, preparing for this moment? Every mission: reported. Every word said, divulged as gossip to the CRU. He expected it from a stranger; he expected it from someone he hadn’t trusted, who hadn’t saved his life on countless occasions. She had controlled him right from the start. From arriving just as he needed her, to persuading him on tactics; she had manipulated everything for years.

  For hours he would lie awake, reliving the conversations he’d had with her. Emma had played her part so well - the hatred in her voice when she spoke of the government. Up on the hillside, it had been her who had persuaded Jack to stay and join The Resistance. Had that all been a ploy, to try and sabotage the organisation, or had she been turned after that?

  Reflecting the history of events, Jack was disgusted to realise the extent of Emma’s betrayal. She had been the one to report the safehouses to the CRU. It had been on her word that they were raided. Every single high profile location, she had been privy to. And even retreating back to the dawn of Jack’s involvement with The Resistance, on the night he chose to dedicate himself to the cause: the man he’d found dying in the forest told of a Mole who had caused the deaths of his comrades. Emma’s brother had been among them. Had she been involved, even then?

  What price had they bought her with that she would so easily discard her brother’s life? And there was more. As Jack delved into his memories, Emma lurked as an omnipresent vulture. Jack had handed Quentin’s diary information to Emma first. It had been her that had tipped the Home Secretary off about their mission to infiltrate his house. Two good men had died that night, Jack and Alex had nearly followed. How bitter she must have felt to see them alive and well after their escape. But how deliciously excited had she been to discover that Jack had been promoted internally, that she had the mascot of the revolution in her cosy back pocket. Biding her time, playfully whispering the right advice, Emma had been the poison all along.

  Lana. He’d killed Lana on her instruction. Emma had even tried to force Jack to feel good about it, that he had done the right thing. He felt used and completely abused by her. Every decision he had ever made felt tarnished by her manipulation. Had he ever made the right choices - had anything he’d ever planned been the right thing for the organisation, for the country? He felt such a fool, to be played with so easily.

  Over the years he had grown to trust her with every detail of his life. She knew so much: too much. Every little bit of himself that he’d divulged to her had been fed back into the loop, reported to the CRU and the great portrait of Steven Lennox was painted. They knew so much about him: now he understood why.

  The steel door opened, creaking on its hinges. Two armed guards flanked it on the inside, their arms rigid against their demonic weapon. A man in a pale blue suit entered, drawing the seat in front of Jack, who barely had the energy to look up at his latest visitor. So many of them came on a daily basis, all blurring into one figure in front of him. Sometimes he felt their presence even though there was no one there at all.

  The suited man withdrew a number of papers from his suitcase and placed them on the table between them. He scanned over each of them before signing the final document. Only then did he address Jack, whose response was a pained whimper as his burns itched underneath his shirt.

  “Mister Lennox, I will be representing you at the trial,” he began, “My name is Matthew Lawrence.”

  “Trial?” Jack said, “You lot don’t do trials.”

  His lips cracked and bled as he opened his mouth. It was the first words he had said to anyone in days; the screaming did not count.

  “The trial, yes,” Matthew continued, “It will be held in three weeks’ time.”

  “Why?” Jack asked, weakly and not entirely caring for an answer, “It’ll be rigged.”

  “Yes,” Matthew said, “It will be.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “So that I can stare at the walls and claim justice has been served,” he said.

  Laughing weakly, Jack slunk back into his chair - the chains around his wrists tightening, “And you wonder why there are people like me.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Terrorists,” Jack spat, “Dissidents. Anarchists. Revolutiona
ries.”

  “Mr Lennox, I am not here to discuss political ideology,” he said, “I am simply here to do my job and that is to ensure that you are imprisoned for a very long time.”

  For the next hour, they sat together staring at opposing walls in an uneasy silence. Matthew Lawrence then rose from his chair and instructed the guards to open the door. A minute later and Jack was taken away and thrown into his cell, into the abyss he now called home, where his only entertainment was to relive regret and to deconstruct his failings.

  Emma. Her imagined her most of all, her figure towering above him, watching him suffer. Mostly she would just stare at him, other times she would kneel on the ground with him, distractedly blinking and staring out at the one shaft of natural light to pour into the cell.

  “Kyle is dead,” he rocked himself on the floor, but he struggled to understand the truth behind it. He would never see Kyle again, but it was a thought that he couldn’t digest. It was impossible that it could be true, even though he had seen it with his own eyes.

  Jack was never going to see anyone again. Regardless of what happened to him, the others still - for now - lived. For endless hours he wondered what Alex was doing, what he was going through. Disgustingly, there was a high chance he wasn’t even aware at Emma’s betrayal. She was probably still weaving her way through the safehouses, gathering a catalogue of evidence to report back.