North of the Rock

by Ian Jones

  ‘Yeah, I do know that, but thank you very much old friend. Look, I’m sure you are thinking this is all bullshit and you know what? It probably is. But soon as I started looking at this alarm bells started ringing loud and clear and we are real exposed if this Raymer follows this through. Thank you for helping me out John, I have to say I am feeling a bit better. So when will you go?’

  ‘I’ll look into flights tonight, and then I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Perfect. Look John I am your backup. Store my numbers, I am available twenty-four hours a day, whatever you need. You find anything, come to me ok?’

  ‘Yeah of course. Ok, I’ll let you know the details later on tonight.’

  ‘Thanks John, and one other thing?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s not just the bureau that’s keeping this quiet. I’m not advertising this either ok? Reading through all this I think the agent down there is no good. Something stinks anyways. Speak only to me.’

  John checked his watch; he was an hour into the drive. There were really only two roads into Gray Rock, and they both eventually led into the town from the north. He could head south down the 67, or carry on into Fort Stockton and take the 385. From memory there wasn’t a lot of time difference, although the 385 was a better road. Either way it was along the 90 and then southeast to Gray Rock.

  He thought about how Anthony Collis had come into his life.

  Chapter Two

  Eleven years ago, John was working in the Department, and considered one of the best agents in the team. He was always away somewhere around the world, working deep undercover, never knowing what would happen next.

  He enjoyed his work, most of the time.

  Out of nowhere a right-wing organisation called One Race suddenly appeared on the radar. Apparently, they had been making some noise for a couple of years but John had completely missed it as he was away so much. They had political aspirations but weren’t really being taken any notice of, from time to time they would have someone pop up at a by-election somewhere who would normally come last and promptly be forgotten forever. But over time it was discovered that there were some alliances in unexpected places, even some senior members of the current government were found to be supporters, and a mosque was set of fire in Southall, with a One Race flag left at the scene. Suddenly they were taken a lot more seriously. They had several chapters around the UK; two in London, and then Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Hull and Glasgow. They were also present in other names and denominations around the world, France, Germany, Italy and particularly the USA where the movement had originally started.

  It was decided that the Department should find out more, and John was sent in undercover. He joined one of the London chapters, which met every Tuesday evening upstairs in a pub in Victoria. He was John, unemployed from South London. They were always looking for new members so were very pleased to accept him into the fold, and even more pleased at the fifty pound subscription that he paid. He very quickly discovered that this was not much more than a group of blokes who wanted to get pissed while complaining about how hard done by they all were. He went to six meetings, which varied in attendance. Some weeks there could be thirty or more, and others less than ten. John would just sit there while various men would stand up and rant, always the same thing, week in week out. ‘Send them back,’ ‘No immigration,’ ‘Hitler had it right,’ and so on. John learned very quickly to close his ears, and he became heartily sick of the job.

  All the men were just right-wing stereotypes, Hitler had never been right, but even he would have been embarrassed to be surrounded by these idiots.

  The morning after the sixth meeting he sat down at the office with his department head Neil. He tried to keep the moaning to a minimum but it was difficult. He wanted out, the job was a depressing waste of time. Neil sympathised, he would not want to be doing this either. They agreed that this was just a drinking club for racist losers, with some lucky individual getting fifty quid in his back pocket every time a new member started. There was no threat. The attack on the mosque had clearly been done by one or possibly more members, but likely to have been arranged by themselves rather than through the group. John had never heard any talk about any actions. There had been rumours of a demonstration outside the immigration office in Croydon but it quickly became obvious that actually nobody could be bothered.

  Eventually after some persuasion it was agreed that John would attend three more meetings, and then a sign off report would be compiled covering everything that had been discovered. Which wasn’t a lot, because there was nothing to find out. John had been very happy to agree to it, but the following Tuesday after spending a couple of hours in the gym and gearing up to go to Victoria he was annoyed with himself for not pushing it to be just one more rather than three.

  It all changed that evening. When he got to the pub, the place was buzzing, practically full. There were many more people there than he had seen before, he didn’t recognise pretty much any of them. There were even a couple of women there, the first time that had happened. John sought out a man he had spoken to a few times to find out what was going on. The man looked at him in amazement.

  ‘Don’t you read the bulletins then?’ he asked.

  John thought back. When he had joined up they had asked him for an email address which he had given, it was just a throw away one that he would use for this job and he had never once looked at it. He mumbled something about his computer being broken and the man looked at him pityingly.

  ‘Martin Scanlon is here. Tonight!’ he declared happily.

  John had no idea at all who that was, so he excused himself and went and sat on the toilet. He Googled the name. Martin Scanlon was an American businessman from Iowa. He was one of the founding members of the movement that spawned One Race. There was a picture of him, a good looking man in his fifties with neatly parted grey hair and wearing an expensive suit.

  John went back into the room and wondered what Scanlon would make of the great unwashed who were standing around here waiting for him. A small stage with a microphone had been hastily assembled at one end of the room and promptly at eight o’clock Scanlon stepped onto it.

  He gave a pretty speech, how they were misunderstood, that they were not racist, but they were representing those that had become forgotten, the men and women of this country and many others who were searching for and deserved more. Devalued, and all they were looking for was a better, fairer world. It was politics at it’s very worst, all they wanted was to make themselves heard. John had heard all this crap before, so stopped listening. Scanlon talked for nearly forty-five minutes, and when he ended it was to rapturous applause. He had not come alone, there was another man standing on the stage, behind and to the left. He wasn’t introduced, and looking at him John couldn’t seriously believe he was there as any kind of a minder. He was younger, short, with brown hair and fluid eyes that were always moving around the room. Scanlon finished his speech and waving moved off the platform, and then the other man stepped up and lowered the microphone to mumble ‘Sometimes a life has to be taken to improve your own.’

  The gathering either didn’t hear or took no notice, they had already stopped paying attention.

  But John wondered who the man was and what he had meant.

  Afterward it was clear that Scanlon was keen to get away but that was never going to be easy. Everyone wanted to shake his hand or talk to him and he had no choice other than to smile a lot and gradually edge closer to the door. The other man just stood to one side. John went to the bar and bought a pint of Guinness, and politely asked the man if he would like one. The man looked at John then silently gazed over at Scanlon for a while and then surprisingly said he would, he’d have the same.

  John passed the drink over and the man looked at it doubtfully.

  ‘It’s good for you. Apparently. Lot of iron,’ John told him.

  The man took a sip and John introduced himself.

  ‘Anthony Collis,’ replied
the man, and they shook hands. Collis’s were limp and cold.

  Up close Collis was unremarkable. Short and slim with a pot belly, and thinning hair. But it was his eyes that John found fascinating. They were so liquid it looked as if he was going to burst into tears at any moment, and they shifted constantly, never still for even a second.

  It was disconcerting.

  He said he was from Texas, and asked John if he had ever been there. Mesmerised by the eyes and momentarily forgetting he was unemployed John from South London he said yes.

  Collis looked interested when he heard that, and asked where.

  ‘Dallas,’ John replied.

  Collis shrugged.

  ‘That’s not Texas,’ he said dismissively.

  John asked him how long he was in London for and Collis told him just one night, they were flying to Germany in the morning to address the chapter in Dusseldorf. John didn’t know there was a group there but Collis told him One Race backed a movement that was big in Germany.

  At last discovering that there could be something worth knowing John tried to get more information out of Collis but it went nowhere. Small talk was obviously not something he did. By this time Scanlon had reached the door so Collis put down his barely touched pint and moved away and the two men were gone. John fleetingly wondered if he should take the glass for fingerprints but realised that it was most likely that Anthony Collis would be his real name, so he should be able to find information on him anyway.

  The next morning John went through the previous evening with Neil, who was also very interested. He set to work finding out exactly who the two men were, and then came back to Neil with what he had discovered.

  Martin Scanlon was born in Des Moines fifty-four years ago. His father started a successful printing business which Scanlon had taken over when he was still in his twenties, and the company was doing very well to this day. He had invested in several other local businesses and was something of an entrepreneur. He was regarded as a poster boy for Des Moines industry, and had no criminal record. He had become involved in starting up an equal rights movement (which was clearly nothing more than right-wing propaganda) after a company he was involved with had been fined for not hiring a black woman who was more than qualified for a job with them, instead they had taken on a white woman who had been sacked after a couple of months because she was so inept. It was then discovered that no business that Scanlon was part of, including the printing company employed a ‘person of colour’. Scanlon had determined that he was an American first, and an employer second. He wanted America to be a great country again, and to that Americans had to be in charge, it was them who should have all the jobs. Soon after One Race was born, with Scanlon as its flag waving leader. The initial reports they could find was that the group was well funded and grew quite quickly, at least in the early days.

  Anthony Collis was twenty-three years younger. He was born and still lived in a small town called Gray Rock in West Texas. Once again, there was no criminal record, but there were some interesting things that had been discovered. Currently it appeared that he worked in a local internet café, but his employment history was strange reading. He had applied to join the FBI when he was nineteen, but his application was rejected forthwith; there were issues with his education. Then he didn’t seem to work at all until he got a job aged twenty-three working on a support desk for an ISP. This meant he worked from home. However, when he applied for the job he stated that he had served in the army, and just come out that year. Following some complaints against him the company eventually did cursory background checks and discovered that this was a lie. There is a big army base about thirty miles from Gray Rock, so initially his story had been believed as it seemed a logical choice for a young man leaving school.

  The company let him go, only to get a furious letter from the mayor of Gray Rock asking why he would be singled out in this way, claiming that Collis had worked for a secret division in the army which could never be admitted, hence his love of computers and why the army had denied his existence.

  Rather than have to face any battles, the company re-employed him, but as second line support so he would never need to speak to any customers.

  But very soon there was a new problem. Collis had a line manager, a black woman who had been with the company a long time. Collis was supposed to complete all sorts of online forms and documents as part of his job but never did so. They never had any idea of what he was doing, so the woman drove down to see him. He gave her such fierce abuse that she was so shocked she sat in her car for an hour in tears.

  There was no other choice; Collis was sacked again.

  He joined the local gun club and became a volunteer local deputy then started his own IT support business, fixing local people’s computers, which failed quickly. Then he went to work at a local motel as the night clerk, before being fired following an altercation with a female resident.

  Then there was one piece that John found very interesting. When he was twenty-six, and supposedly at the time acting as a deputy, he had shot a young man who was one of two attempting to rob a local petrol station. The man was seriously hurt, he had been hit in the upper back. However, there were two versions of the story; Collis’s was that he was driving past at around eleven o’clock at night and noticed the two black men threatening the clerk in the petrol station, which had large glass windows right across the front. He had stopped, and the men had spotted him and run out. The victim had been carrying a gun, and fearing for his own life Collis had stated that he fired as the man turned to aim. But the second man, who was unhurt said that they had been driving and had gone into the petrol station hoping to buy a map. The clerk had been very rude and unhelpful, so there had been an argument. The two men were students at Houston University and were travelling to the National Park near the border and had got lost. He said despite the rudeness there were no threats made by either side, and they did not have a gun, neither man had ever owned one. Collis had walked into the station and approached them aggressively and they could see he was armed so walked straight out and when they had run for the car, Collis had shot his friend in the back. When the state police turned up no other gun was found. Collis then claimed there was a third man outside who had snatched it and run off. The clerk had not been able to give a statement claiming that he was under stress and taking medication so he couldn’t remember the events clearly. There was a security camera, but it had been ‘accidentally’ switched off that day. The man who had been shot survived, and was able to provide a full statement, which completely matched the original his friend had given. Both men stated categorically that they had been on their own, there was no third man, there was no gun, no hold up. Collis’ explanation regarding the circumstances that the man was shot in the back was that his victim had been running, twisting and turning and shooting which fortunately missed but Collis had fired because he had been very scared while trying to uphold the law. This meant it was one word against the other’s. The state police washed their hands of it and handed everything over to the local sheriff, who said they would deal with it, as it was an internal matter.

  Nothing further, and no mention of why a volunteer deputy would be carrying a gun in the first place. Case closed. No further action.

  Then there was a list of small time, basic jobs leading up to now, when he was thirty-two years old. He was not married, and lived in the same house he always had, both his parents were deceased. He was still a member of the gun club in Gray Rock and had two guns registered to him. Both were .22s, one a Smith & Wesson revolver and the other a Ruger rifle.

  John and Neil looked at each other.

  ‘Bit of a fuck-up,’ Neil said.

  John agreed. The guy had been weird for sure. One to watch maybe.

  Later that day John returned to his flat in St John’s Wood. He was tired, he had been in the gym for a long session again and then gone for a run. He made some pasta and put the TV on.

  Headline news; a German politician had been
assassinated in Cologne. Helmut Romann was a good looking, clean cut and reasonably young man, thirty-seven years old and a member of the liberal Free Democratic Party. He was their spokesman for education and had been visiting the university in the town. He was shot in the head as he left the building to walk back to his car. As he wasn’t regarded as being particularly high profile, his visit hadn’t warranted any additional police presence and everyone was shocked.

  John had no idea who the man was, but Cologne was at most an hour from Dusseldorf, which immediately seemed like more than a coincidence. But why kill Helmut Romann, what was the benefit? He checked Google again, to see what he could find out. Initially, there wasn’t a lot. He had trained as a teacher but had taken a job working for the administration in Hanover and had just worked his way up, entering into politics. Nothing spectacular.

  But then he stumbled upon something not well known about Romann. Four years previously he had been involved with Redefreiheit Jetzt, a part of the One Race movement in Germany, there had been an increase in right-wing candidates and it was part of a push to gain a parliamentary seat. He had made a televised speech which basically said that all One Race were doing was putting to words what everybody was thinking. Less than one month later he had renounced it, saying he was misguided and had been pressured into speaking publicly. He had completely misunderstood the manifesto as it had been presented to him by One Race because it had not been the version that was later released. He had honestly believed at the time that the party was looking to act in the best interests of the German people. He had realised his mistake and was now admitting it. Because he was so clean cut, and urbane, and carried himself well he was believed and forgiven, even by the media, and the Free Democratic Party leapt in for him immediately, and he continued his upward climb with them.