by Craig Boldy
THE INFILTRATOR
Part One
Craig Boldy
A note from the author:-
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Copyright © 2015 Craig Boldy
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 9781973274414
Chapter One
Kalypso 114. That’s where it all started. At the time I was an undercover agent on the trail of a child killer who was held up in some shitty half star motel; the kind where you get a tiny room barely big enough to hold the type of bed that would probably glow under a black light. It was a sprawling, ramshackle building in the shape of a capital U with two floors, the lower floor doors opening directly onto the central car park. The upper level was accessible by two sets of stairs, one either side of the outstretched arms of the U. A long walkway connected each of the doorways of the upstairs rooms and ran along the inside curve with a decorative metal railing, just over waist height, guarding people against the drop below.
I had spent a few weeks infiltrating a local pack of sickos who barely dodged the sex offenders register, and after a little while, one of them began to open up, telling me all about the range of drugs he could get his hands on and the people he could name as 'friends'. I soon figured that most of what the guy told me was bullshit, but I got just enough out of him to force him into becoming an informant who was more than willing to give up the information in return for a reduced sentence. I milked the informant for as much information as I could get, which turned out to be the pivotal point in my investigation. Finally, I had enough to arrest my guy.
The confidential informant had been a supplying one of the group with Rohypnol for an extended period and had told me that, apparently, one of my suspect’s habits was to spend an hour every day sitting at a bench, feeding pigeons in the local park. The one he mentioned was inconveniently close to the children’s playground.
I was driving one of the undercover cars at the time; a beat up old Ford truck with its back fender missing. I remember it well, mainly for the fact that the interior smelled like something had gone bad under one of the seats a long time ago.
I’d parked it on a side street about a quarter of a mile away from the hotel, a couple of minutes walk straight down the road. It wasn’t a great location for the hotel, and there wasn’t any traffic on the road. Other than the two cars parked in the hotel car park, I didn’t see any others around at all.
I called in on the reception desk on the way. A set of revolving doors with a large glass pane either side fronted it. One of them had a large crack in the centre of it; someone had tried to fix it with some packing tape.
The pimply youth behind the desk gave me the information I needed and the master key card to the rooms after a quick flash of the badge; I ignored the half-hidden bong under the back of the desk and the sickly smell in the air. It was the kind of place where half the rooms were rented by the hour; there was only one that had been rented out for longer.
The Kalypso had 26 rooms, thirteen on each floor. The management must have been a bit superstitious as at some point they had decided there would not be a room thirteen on either level, so I crept past room twelve on the second floor and pulled my gun as I approached fourteen.
The room was at the end of the row, right next to the stairs. It would have been easy for me to quietly prowl up the steps and come in from the other side but that would mean passing directly in front of the room’s main window. Instead, I came up the opposite side and around the walkway to come at it from the other direction. I wanted to take the guy by surprise.
Now I was in position; I set my locator to call for backup, just in case. I had been given it back at the station in case things went south. I could press the button, and within ten minutes, there would be a SWAT team at my position.
I took a second to psych myself up, taking a couple of quick deep breaths while I pressed myself against the wall near the doorway. I did it all by the book. Clearly and loudly announcing who I was and calling for the guy to come out quietly. I pictured the other side of the door; it would have a reedy bolt on a turn handle and a thin chain. When there was no answer I quickly stuck the key card in the slot and waited for the click; the handle pressed down, but the door wouldn't budge. The guy must have blocked the handle by some other means; maybe a chair pushed up against it?
I took a few steps back and lined up with the door, bracing myself against the railings before giving the door a hard kick just above the lock; right where it was secured. It must have been paper-thin, it gave out with only one blow and slammed loudly into the inside wall of the room; the deadbolt still attached to the surround but bent at an odd angle.
Stepping around the door slowly and quietly, I made my way into the room. It was dark. I could hardly see more than a few feet into the room, the thick heavy curtains were taped to the walls around the window, and the only light entering the room was through the now broken door. The twilight of the day and the shade of the overhanging roof were doing their bit to add to the gloom.
I didn’t see the guy until the swing of his baseball bat took the gun from my hand; it flew off into the room and bounced soundlessly on the thin carpet to finally rest somewhere underneath the bed. The shock lasted only a few seconds before my training kicked in. I was just fast enough to catch the bat on his second swing. He was aiming for my ribs, but I already had my hands out. The force in a swung bat is mostly at the end of a long swing. I took a quick step forward and managed to take most of the energy out of the swing with my arms before it hit me. I turned on my heel and caught the look of shock on his face as I wrenched the bat from his grip before he could react.
He was fast. Almost as soon as I turned back around to face him, he was pulling his arm back for a roundhouse punch with his right hand. Luckily, I was faster. I jabbed him with the handle of the bat right in his solar plexus, and he went down coughing.
I took a breath and felt the adrenaline rushing through my veins. A long time ago I would have been shaking, but my training had made me ready and more than capable of defending myself.
I reached behind my belt and pulled out the set of handcuffs. That had been my first mistake; I should have made sure he was going to stay down before getting complacent. I hadn’t expected the guy to be as capable as he was. He was playing at being winded. I started to bend down to turn him over so I could apply the cuffs and he kicked me in the chest from the ground and, before I realised what was happening, I was hurtling back towards the wall.
I felt my head hit and crumple the cheap drywall. It made me see stars for a second before I got my concentration back. The guy had taken the opportunity to jump up just after he had kicked me and then tried to tackle me as I stood against the wall. He came at me full force, and I felt the wind rush out of my lungs as his shoulder caught me square in the ribs. We grappled for what felt like hours; he got a few punches in on my kidneys, and I kneed him a few times in some soft places.
I heard the sirens of the police cars as they pulled into the car park and I shifted my weight slightly. Suddenly I was sliding against the wall, trying to keep my balance as we fought against each other. As I desperately tried to keep my balance, my foot landed on the bat. It slipped out from under me, and I began to stumble backwards out of the door, the weight of the guy pushing me uncontrollably.
I remember the shock as the railing hit my lower back; the rusty bolts giving way at one side and that awful screech as the metal twisted at the other. The feeling of gravity taking hold and my stomach tightening as we both toppled from the walkway.
I don’t remember the fall itself, or even hitting the stairs. The next thin
g I remember is two uniformed officers pulling the unconscious guy off of me and dragging him away. A third held out a hand to help me up and I raised my hand to his. At least I tried to. For a moment, I thought I was blacking out or had torn something in the fall. It slowly began to dawn on me; I couldn’t feel anything. I was numb everywhere. I should have been able to feel the edges of the stairs as they poked into my back or the cold of the poured concrete seeping into my skin, but there was nothing. I strained and strained to move my arms, my legs, to wiggle my toes even. I simply couldn’t move. It was at that moment I also realised I wasn’t breathing. It was a strange sensation to miss something your body did automatically.
I lasted a few moments more before I began to black out and my vision grew dark. The last thing I saw was two paramedics run over with a neck brace and a backboard.
I don’t know exactly how long I was unconscious for, but I heard the beeping of the machines and the unmistakable pressurised air noises of a ventilator a few minutes before I dared open my eyes. When I finally worked up the courage, I found myself laid in a hospital bed.
Glancing around the room, as much as the movement of my eyes allowed, I could see a nurse checking one of the machines I was hooked up to and making notes on a clipboard.
I remember her having had the tired look of someone doing overtime after a twelve-hour night-shift. She flipped the turned pages of notes back and dropped the clipboard of medical records into the hopper at the end of the bed, tucking an errant strand of her mousey brown hair behind her ear. My eyes followed her around the room as she went about her duties. I tried to speak, but it just came out as a raspy groan.
She came across and warned me not to try to speak; she just offered me a cup of water from which I took in small sips through the straw. It tasted like cheap plastic and was lukewarm like it had been sat too long, but I gratefully drank as much as I could. My mouth felt like desert sand as if I had not had a drink in years.
When I had finished, she patted my lips dry where I had dribbled slightly. I tried to ask what had happened and she told me to wait for the doctors. She had kind, although tired, eyes. Deep blue with slight flecks of green. She smiled at me slightly mournfully and gave herself a satisfied nod before leaving the room.
I think I must have fallen back to sleep, or at least passed out from whatever drowsy cocktail of drugs I was on. When I next opened my eyes, there was a procession of white coats walking through the door, the doctors coming in one by one until the room was almost full.
They began patiently explaining in a ‘so sorry for you’ voice, full of the fake compassion some doctors instinctively develop to be able to give out a plethora of bad news every day without it killing them. The doctors patiently explained how my spinal cord had been severed between C2 and C3. I was stunned. I refused to believe it at first, asking question after futile question about recovery times and probabilities until eventually the truth finally sunk in and realisation dawned. I would never be able to walk again; all the tests proved it. Not only that, but I would probably never regain feeling or control of any part of my body below the neck, and even if I did it would be unlikely it would extend beyond slight feeling in my chest. In fact, the damage was so severe that the automatic messages from my brain allowing me to breathe couldn't get through to my lungs and I would need to have a ventilator in my throat keeping me breathing and alive.
I asked how this could have happened and they told me it was a freak accident. The angle of the fall, coupled with the extra weight of the suspect falling on top of me, had meant the back of my head had hit one of the edges of the stairs at just the right angle and with enough force to shatter my spinal column. The shards of bone severing my spinal cord in the process.
It took me the whole of my first week in the hospital before I realised just how life-changing the accident was going to be. It was almost as if I kept forgetting about my injury and continued to try to grab a cup of water or scratch my face. It upset me at first, at one point I broke down and openly lay sobbing over the situation, but after a little while, I began to work through it stubbornly. So what if I couldn’t walk? It didn’t mean my mind wasn’t as sharp as it ever was. I used this to focus my attention on the things I could do. I asked one of the colleagues to get me a tablet computer with voice-activated software and proceeded to do as much as I could to take my mind off where I was throughout my time in the hospital.
All in all, I was in the hospital for 12 months, all the time reading and learning. By the time I was ready to be discharged, I had learned to speak six languages and read scores of books on many different subjects
Inevitably, shortly before the date of my release, I had a visit from a representative of the agency, or rather, of the agency’s insurance provider. The guy walked into my room after a single quiet knock at the door and started talking the second he stepped through the doorway. He was one of the stereotypical pen pusher clerical types, wearing a poorly fitting suit and speaking as if he were reading from some internal manual of rules and regulations, stating my rights and allowances under the policy in a drawling monotone voice and without giving me an opportunity to interject or ask questions.
He spoke at me for about two hours then said his farewells and left. Thankfully, as my injury had happened on the job, the insurance would be enough to support me, so all my care needs were at the expense of the Agency. I was sceptical at first, but they were true to their word. By the time I left the hospital, they had found me a large, single-story house with disabled access and round the clock carers to look after my needs. I even had a top of the range electric wheelchair I could control with a little gizmo I could work with my mouth.
I waited around in the house for a couple of months before contacting the agency. I had been hoping for a transfer to intelligence now I wasn’t able to be a field agent. For weeks, I was stonewalled. I had to call in favour after favour just for people to speak to me until finally, I got an answer. I had been permanently retired. I wouldn’t be able to continue working for the agency unless I was able to be a field agent.
I was devastated. I had gone from hunting and arresting criminals to worrying about pressure sores and fluid build-up in my ventilator. It was a miserable existence made worse by the fact that I was alone. I had no family, and all my friends and colleagues were in the agency. Not one person came to visit me other than the doctors and carers.
Long days turned into even longer months. The carers were there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week at first. They cared for me and transported me to and from my various medical appointments. Some treated me as if I was a thing to be looked after but others, and those were the days I enjoyed the most, became almost friends. I would chat the day away in some vain attempt to ignore my predicament, and they were more than happy to provide conversation. My life was a bolted down schedule: they gave me some time to myself once a day for a couple of hours. They put me in my wheelchair, and I sat in front of the TV with the voice recognition on so I could watch something in peace.
It was one of those days, sat watching drivel, I heard something I was unfamiliar with. There were footsteps behind me. Heavy, hard-soled shoes and a confident walk, not rushing but not creeping either. I knew immediately that this was not one of the carers; they all wore soft pumps when in the house, something to do with not scuffing the hard flooring.
“I won’t ask you to get up,” the stranger said jokingly, as he walked past me to stand in front of the coffee table between the TV and me. I was outraged up until the moment he moved into my field of vision, and I hastily cut off my retort.
He was about six feet tall with dark hair, government style; cut short and functional. He was wearing the same type of government suit of which I had a wardrobe full. He even had a pair of the standard issue dark sunglasses in his hand, which he had almost certainly just taken from his face; there was a small slightly red indent either side of the bridge of his nose. The telltale coil of wire leading over the back of his ear and down in
to his collar was a dead giveaway.
As he turned to face me, I looked into his eyes. They were the deepest blue and set in a stern expression. I wasn’t afraid. At this point, I would have welcomed someone coming in to kill me. It would have been a relief.
“Do you mind, I’m trying to watch this.”
“I think you will want to hear me out. You mind if I sit?” The man turned and reached over to switch off the TV before turning back and sitting on the coffee table right in front of me. He settled with his elbows on his knees and legs wide; the coffee table was a little short to be a seat, but its height along with the stranger’s stance put him directly on the level with me, looking right into my eyes, calm and steady.
“Firstly, can I just say congratulations for catching that serial killer. They found eighteen bodies buried in his back garden by the time they were done. He was booked onto a plane to Croatia under an alias the day after you found him. He would have gotten away with it if you hadn’t have kicked his door in, and put him where he belongs. You did this country a service, and now it’s time for the country to repay that debt.” It had been in all of the papers at the time. I even had a medal for it in a case on the bookshelf. The Director of the Agency herself had presented it.
“My name is Agent Wilson. I work for a satellite tech division of the agency, and I would like to extend an offer to you. I can’t tell you a great deal as the details are classified, so it’s a bit of a catch 22 situation. I can’t tell you much unless you agree to come to work with us, and I don’t think you are the type of person who would agree to something without hearing the details. You're going to have to take a bit of a leap of faith here and trust me. ”
“You know me so well,” I said sarcastically, before realising that this was the first real conversation I had had in weeks. I wasn’t sure if this was a legitimate offer, but I had heard of this kind of thing before. The agency set up task divisions working on one thing or the other all the time and generally had carte blanche to hire anyone they needed to achieve their objectives.