The Five

by A P Bateman

  King had then slipped on his jogging bottoms and a T-shirt and ran the short distance to the market and bought a selection of Caroline’s favourite pastries from a stall. They were baked fresh each morning and he chose pain au chocolat for Caroline and plain croissants for himself. Then he picked up some glazed pastries with chopped pecans and a heavy fondant glaze and jogged back. It wasn’t exactly a workout, but he dropped the bag of pastries onto the counter and walked out onto the balcony overlooking the lock.

  He started with an 8kg kettle bell and French pressed until failure. He topped out around the eighty mark, but wasn’t really counting. He gave himself twenty seconds recovery, picked up the 12kg kettle and went back to it. He pushed to failure, lost count after fifty. After twenty seconds recovery he worked with the 16kg, again pressing until he could manage no more. Then he dropped straight into abdominal crunches. He worked to one hundred, rolled over and did one hundred push-ups. He gave himself a full minute to breathe, then dropped into a low squat and swung the 12kg kettle bell, changing hands after he reached twenty. He repeated five times, then went back to crunches and press ups once more. Hanging from the ceiling was a heavy punch bag and King went straight to it - punches, blocks, strikes, kicks and knees - timing himself for three-minute rounds. After each round he dropped and held a low squat while he breathed and rested for one minute. When he broke away after twenty minutes, he was soaked with sweat and breathing hard. He reached up for the two hand holds he had fitted into the ceiling and started a series of pull-ups. He rested in between, but merely dangled, never touched the floor. He could feel his shoulders burning like fire. Upper body strength was so important in King’s work, or at least the work he had done up to a year ago. Now that he was tasked with investigating and surveillance, he did not need to be so physically fit. But King knew he would need it again one day. He was certain of it. He started raising his legs, crunching his lower stomach muscles, controlling the speed and maximising the effect. When he finally dropped back down, he stretched for five minutes, each time gaining more flexibility and healing the muscles he had so strenuously worked on. He glanced at his watch, finishing exactly on the forty-minute mark. He had done more than most people would in a ninety-minute gym session, and all without spending a penny on membership, or looking in the mirror.

  King stripped off and ran the shower. He ran the cold tap and drank his fill over the sink. Then he shaved, using traditional sandalwood shaving soap in a mahogany bowl. He had discovered the brand online and found it to foam and retain moisture far better than mainstream foams or gels. He worked the soap into a lather with a traditional badger hair brush and applied it generously. King always wet shaved, and used a traditional vintage safety razor with a single replaceable platinum blade. He found it shaved far smoother and closer than modern multi-blade razors, and had the distinct advantage of converting to a weapon or survival blade if needed. It was the life he had led, that had shaped his decisions in such a way. Nothing was taken on face value and he always made decisions based on what ifs. King left nothing to chance.

  He stripped off and stepped into the hot shower. He moved around, letting the hot water douse his aching muscles. Then he ran the water cold for a while, targeted the muscles he had worked again. The icy water would repair the damage. King had lost count of the times he had sat in iced water baths when he had boxed semi-professionally and in prize fights as a younger man, and he’d lost count of the times he’d done the same in some dingy hotel in some fly ridden country, recovering from secret battles nobody would ever hear about.

  Eventually, he turned up the heat again and sprayed the water on his neck. He shampooed and soaped himself and leaned his hands against the wall as he rinsed. He was using the time to think. Play over the events of the past two days. Two days, was that all? It felt like much longer. Meeting Amanda Cunningham, seeing the bodies at the farmhouse, the body of Sir Ian Snell on his patio. Then the attack, the man he’d killed and the destruction of his cottage. The sight of Snell’s wife and her Russian lover yesterday, the autopsy, the drive back, the fight on the train… He shook his head, water hitting the shower screen forming rivulets which ran down, clearing pathways through the condensation. Too much had happened to draw conclusions, he’d barely had time to draw breath.

  “Now that’s a sight I’ve wanted to see…”

  King spun around, smiled when he saw Caroline standing next to the bath. She was naked, wearing only a smile.

  “Ditto,” he said, trying and failing to hide his excitement at seeing her. “It’s good to see you…”

  She smiled. “I can see that,” she said, stepping over the edge of the bath and into the shower’s spray.

  They kissed, tenderly at first, but soon built in both passion and urgency, their tongues exploring and probing as if it were the first time. In truth, it had not been that long, but at the pace in which they had both been working, and with entire continents between them, it had felt like weeks. Caroline took his hands and placed them on her, then slid her own hands slowly down his torso. She fingered at the scar on his waist, ran her hands over the rough tissue. He moved her hand away. He always did this, but she couldn’t help it. She thought of how it had happened, how she had nearly lost him. Touching it reminded her how fragile life could be, and in doing so, she felt more alive. She took his cue, moved her hand lower, hovering teasingly, then taking hold of him, kissing harder as he grew in her hand.

  Caroline wrapped around him, positioned herself, taking the lead and letting him know exactly what he should do. Despite his rigorous exercise, King was strong and fit, and he didn’t struggle as he held her, he was able to take his time, but as the passion built, so did his pace and together they soon peaked, and as they ebbed and relaxed, King let her go and they embraced, kissing more softly, and far more tenderly than before.

  Caroline broke away first. She smiled as she stroked his muscular chest. “I’ve missed you,” she said.

  “I noticed.”

  “Miss me too?”

  “Didn’t you notice?”

  She giggled and kissed him again, but this time it was a quick peck on the lips. “Right, get out, I’m taking over the shower,” she said, and slapped his backside as he stepped out onto the bath mat. “And get some coffee brewing to go with those pastries.”

  40

  King had made a double espresso for Caroline and a cup of tea for himself. Nothing fancy, just a cup of monkey, as he called it. The one that was advertised for years by chimps, but the generic blend that coffee houses annoyingly called ‘English breakfast tea’. They had made short work of the pastries, and while they ate, Caroline had told King what had transpired in South Africa. In turn, King had given her a brief synopsis of his past two days. He had included the destruction of the cottage and the gunman, but had omitted to tell her that Amanda Cunningham had come over for dinner. He had told her about the fight on the train, but had skipped over removing the man’s finger. She’d only just had breakfast.

  Caroline had changed into a navy trouser suit with a white blouse. King had put on his cleanest pair of jeans and a light blue shirt.

  “Not wearing a suit?” she smiled, sipping her coffee.

  “Funerals and weddings.”

  “You’re struggling with this, aren’t you?”

  “With what?”

  “This new role,” she said. “They won’t like you attending a meeting at that level wearing jeans and a shirt.”

  “And a leather jacket,” he quipped.

  “I mean, if this doesn’t suit you…”

  He shrugged. “It’s not so different, I’ve killed a man and fought two more in as many days.”

  “Well, I top trump you there,” she said quietly. “And isn’t it two men?”

  “No. He hit his head.”

  “Technicality?”

  King shrugged. “This chap, Ryan Beard, I want to contact him and say thank you,” he said.

  “You’ll do no such thing!” she put the empty co
ffee cup down and stared at him. “I’m not your property! I thanked him myself, both times.”

  “I just…”

  “I know what you just!” she said. “Christ, Alex, I’m an experienced agent carrying out my duties. It got hairy, MI6 were the closest friendlies, they helped because that’s what we would do if an MI6 agent got into trouble and had no help in the vicinity. And for the record, I got out of it because of my training. I wasn’t some Disney damsel in distress.”

  King held up his hands in mock surrender. “Okay!”

  She stood up from the table and hovered at the coffee machine, glancing at her watch. “We’d better be going, we have to meet at nine and the traffic is going to be awful.”

  “I’ve made it ten, thought it would give us a bit more time.”

  “What?” she asked incredulously. “You re-scheduled on the Director General? Alex, the Home Secretary will be there!”

  “At ten,” he said. “Mereweather didn’t text back, so I’m guessing it’s okay.”

  She shook her head. She was either flabbergasted by his actions, or doing a pretty good impression of it. “The agent I met in South Africa knew you,” she said. She had been thinking on Beard’s comments, his ridiculous anecdote. She couldn’t see the man she had just made love to in the shower as the same person in Ryan Beard’s tale.

  “Unlikely,” King said.

  “I showed him our picture in Majorca. The one I carry in my purse.”

  “What?” King stood up. He was around six feet and towered over her. “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “Alex?” she stared up at him. “I wasn’t sure if he was really from MI6, or part of the attempt to kill me. Obviously, I knew you were with MI6, and I thought it was worth a shot. He was an Embassy man. He would have given assistance to special operatives on missions.”

  King turned around. He was shaking, enraged. He took a deep breath, forced himself to take a step back. “That was information I told you. Forester doctored my past, had me down as an unofficial asset working for MI5. He used that to bring me into MI5 for the operation. After he died, and I continued to work with MI5, it was all kept official – pension updated, salary re-evaluated. I just went with it – so I could keep working with you. My past with MI6 was never known. By anybody.”

  “But your name?”

  “I used dozens of aliases with MI6. You know Alex King isn’t my birthname, I had a past. One I’m not proud of. The only people who knew me as Alex King in MI6 are dead.”

  “Dead?”

  King nodded, leaned back on the countertop. “The director, his deputies…” he said. “After I left MI6, I disappeared. But Charles Forester found me, pulled at my conscience, used Jane’s name to get me to help him. Get me to come over to MI5. I should have moved on after that operation, changed my name, started a new life. But,” he paused, looked at her, his eyes softening. “I’d met you by then. And then, it was too late.”

  Caroline looked up at him, then stepped in and cuddled him. She rested her head against his chest. She hadn’t told King she had told Beard his full name. She hadn’t seen King react like this, and didn’t feel she wanted to pour flames on the fire. She wondered if telling the MI6 agent King’s name would have repercussions. She eased backwards, touched his shoulder, rubbed him gently. “I know you’ve done a lot for your country, Alex. I know you’ve killed. And not just in the heat of battle, or in self-defence. But I didn’t realise just how renowned you were. Ryan Beard told me you once went after a traitor in Switzerland. That you sat drinking a coffee and caught the man’s eye. You stared at him and left. The man went home and killed himself. Such was your reputation. He knew he was as good as dead.”

  King laughed. “For crying out loud, what a load of bollocks!” he paused. “I was sent to pick him up. Bring him back for an interview without coffee, as we called it. An interrogation. The police had already found him and were working on an arrest warrant that could be granted in extreme circumstances in a neutral country. His Russian paymasters had cut him off financially. The man was ruined, had nowhere to go. He couldn’t come home, he knew we were after him and he couldn’t use the frozen assets he’d built up with the Russians. He topped himself after one too many peach schnapps.”

  “Why so edgy then? Nobody else knows you worked with MI6. Why should Ryan Beard care?”

  King shook his head. “Simon Mereweather knew something about me. Information that would only have been in MI6 recruitment files. I think he knows about my past. And that’s worrying, because there should be no reason for him to have looked.”

  “And does that matter? It’s our opposite intelligence service. You worked overseas for them, now you work domestically for us.”

  King said nothing, but pulled her towards him and rested his hands on her shoulders. He knew then, as he looked into her glossy eyes, that he would never tell her what he had done. What action they had forced him to take when they had betrayed him, sent him into hell hoping that he would not return.

  41

  It was only the second time that King had attended a meeting on the top floor of the Security Service’s headquarters at Thames House. He had initially been brought into MI5 to work on an assignment with Charles Forester, the previous deputy director of operations, and taken his briefings outside of MI5’s headquarters. When Director Howard and the administration Deputy Director Elizabeth Chalmers had been killed in a terrorist attack on the building last year, much of MI5’s offices had been housed in Whitehall and a floor set aside at the River House, MI6’s distinct looking headquarters on the other side of the Thames.

  Both King and Caroline had taken briefings either in the field or in office suites in Whitehall. Now that Thames House was fully operation once more, King had only had one previous meeting. And it had been memorable.

  King knew what he was. He was a blunt instrument. A hammer to hit nails. Much of the intelligence service’s most commendable work was now done online. Its surveillance carried out by satellites. Its sentence handed down by drones and their lethal hellfire missiles. By many, King was viewed as a relic. A product of people still thinking in terms of the Cold War. Times had changed and men like King were outdated. The newly appointed director of MI5 had voiced this to King, then asked for his opinion. King had said if he truly believed that, then he wasn’t up to the appointment of Director.

  Times had certainly changed, but a man’s eyes on the ground was worth a dozen cameras in the air, and once those hellfire missiles launch, then the die was cast. A man with a gun can not only eliminate a single threat without collateral damage, but can choose not to fire as well. King had asked Amherst how well he would sleep at night if his decision to launch an airstrike killed women and children, put there to act as a deterrent, human shields. He had then asked if he’d lose sleep knowing a terrorist leader took a bullet to the back of their head in the middle of the night and the children sleeping in the next house still had the chance to grow up. It had given the director something to think on, and King noted that drone strikes were less common since Amherst had taken over MI5 and ran joint intelligence operations with MI6 and military intelligence.

  Director Amherst was a young man for the role, in his early forties, but he was an experienced mandarin, having served in the MOD and several prominent civil service roles in Whitehall. He wasn’t an intelligence veteran, but his speciality was in streamlining government departments with remarkable success. MI5 was receiving the streamlining treatment, but the rebuilding of Thames House was rumoured to have cost almost ten million, mainly because of the use of the depleted uranium rounds used in the terrorist attack and the subsequent fire damage caused by phosphorous incendiary ammunition. There had been a great deal of HAZMAT clearance, and further security precautions put in place to prevent a similar attack.

  Amherst looked up at both King and Caroline as they entered. He looked impassive, but made a show of looking at his watch. It was ten o’clock. Caroline looked uneasy, but King nodded a confid
ent acknowledgment and headed for the chair nearest the wall.

  “Well, I believe this means we can finally start.” He looked King up and down, then adjusted his own silk neck tie. It was tied in a Windsor knot. King noticed the handkerchief matched and was poking rather a long way out of his breast pocket.

  King eyed the other people in the room, the cups in front of them. He looked up expectantly and caught Mereweather’s eye. “Point me in the direction, Simon. I could do with a cup of tea,” he paused, looking at Caroline. “Coffee?” She looked up at him, her face flushed, her eyes wide. They seemed to say - sit down! but King winked at her and looked back at Simon Mereweather.

  Amherst shook his head as Simon Mereweather went to stand, and buzzed through his intercom. He ordered tea and a coffee and looked back at King. “I believe you have had an eventful couple of days. What are your thoughts?”

  King looked at the people seated in the crescent in front of Amherst’s desk. Simon Mereweather was closest to him and he was seated next to Neil Ramsay, the MI5 officer who had taken the body of the gunman away from King’s cottage. Sir Hugo Hollandrake, the Home Secretary sat cross-legged, slightly effeminate, his legs almost wrapped around themselves, his foot swinging rhythmically up and down. He hadn’t looked up. He was clearly disgruntled at having to wait for King and Caroline to arrive, and King’s insistence upon having tea and coffee served before they could commence. King looked past Hollandrake and felt a surge in his stomach. Amanda Cunningham sat on the end of the crescent, a folder resting on her lap. She was looking straight ahead, apparently not wanting to catch King’s eye.

  King sat back in his seat. His heart rushed, his pulse surging. He knew it had been a mistake to invite her over to the cottage. A bigger mistake not to tell Caroline what had transpired. It had been innocent, with no intent, but in omitting telling Caroline, he had made it something more. Now the woman was here, and one thing he had discovered about her, was that she was far from predictable. With a drink or two inside her, she was downright unstable. He had expected to see her at some point, as she deliberated her findings, but the fact that it was today, in this meeting had unsettled him.