Black

by Sophie Lark

  Marina was a plump, olive-skinned woman with large, dark eyes, and a lot of exotic-looking bracelets clinking on her wrists. She was eating lunch at her desk when Black came in. He encouraged her to continue eating, assuming she only had a short break before her students would come streaming back into the room.

  He could see she was an enthusiastic teacher, her room filled with brightly colored charts, artwork, and dozens of photographs of her present and previous classes. Black noticed that many of these photos included groups of Asian students in classrooms that he assumed were overseas.

  “Sorry,” Marina said, eating her lunch as quickly as possible, “it’s been such a busy day.”

  “Thanks for squeezing me in,” Black said.

  “I don’t know how much help I’m going to be,” Marina said, “I haven’t seen Gemma in years. Not since university.”

  Black paused.

  “Gemma was killed, sixteen years ago,” he said. “Were you not aware of that?”

  “What?” Marina stopped with her sandwich halfway to her mouth. “What happened?”

  “Have you heard of the NSC building bombing?”

  Marina shook her head.

  “It happened in 2003. Gemma Morris was the only victim.”

  “Oh my god,” Marina said, putting down her food. “I can’t believe that. You’re going to think I’m completely out of touch, but I spent most of my twenties and thirties in Japan. I taught English there. I only came back to the UK four years ago.”

  “But you did know Gemma at university?”

  “That’s right. We grew up in the same neighborhood and went to the same university. We roomed together first year. And we kept in touch afterward, at least for a while.”

  “Can you tell me about her?”

  “She was such a sweet girl. She was very sheltered. Her parents were religious zealots, and they never let her watch TV or movies or anything like that. So she was kind of like someone who’d been frozen in carbonite for fifty years or something—she was experiencing everything for the first time. She went a little bit wild at first. I mean, that’s normal for students anyway. But she was definitely trying to make up for lost time.”

  “Did you have the same friend group?” Black asked.

  “Some of the same friends, but not all. I was basically a nerd, and she was a little more artistic. She mixed with all kinds of people. She was very idealistic, so she liked going to rallies and protests and all that kind of stuff on campus.”

  “What kind of protests?” Black asked.

  “Every kind. She seemed to like the energy. She had all these different friends that were anti-war, or anti-animal testing, or pro-gay-rights or whatever it was that week.”

  “Did she have any boyfriends?” Black asked.

  “A few. There was this one guy she saw off and on, but she was sort of secretive about him. He wasn’t a student.”

  “Do you know if he was the one who got her pregnant?” Black asked.

  “She never told me who the father was,” Marina said. “But I kind of suspected it might be that guy. I don’t think she was sleeping with anyone else at the time. I was mostly just worried about her, because I figured that meant she wouldn’t get her degree. And she didn’t. She dropped out after that semester.”

  “You don’t know his name, though?” Black asked. “The guy she was seeing?”

  Marina shook her head.

  “She always called him by this nickname, Wrigley. Like the gum. I did meet him one time, at a party. It wasn’t really my scene—the people there were super intense. A bunch of militant vegan and animal-rights types. I love animals, don’t get me wrong, but these people seemed the type to blow up a research clinic or something.”

  “What makes you say that?” Black asked sharply.

  “Just some jokes they made about killing people the same way that people kill animals. It just seemed really dark and aggressive. Plus, they were smoking a lot of weed, which I wasn’t into at the time.”

  “And what did Gemma’s boyfriend look like?”

  “He was sort of average height, skinny, decent looking. Too intense, though. He had this really piercing stare. Really bright blue eyes that kind of looked into your soul.”

  John William Wright had eyes like that. Black remembered them vividly.

  And he wasn’t the only one.

  Tom Morris had bright blue eyes as well.

  “You said you kept in touch with Gemma? After she left university?”

  “Yeah, for about four or five years after. Then she kind of disappeared, and I moved to Sendai.”

  “Do you know if she was still seeing Wrigley?”

  “I think she was. I think they were living together after she had the baby. But I don’t know for sure, because I never saw her place.”

  The bell rang, signaling the end of lunch period.

  “Oops, I’d better pack up,” Marina said, gathering up her lunch things. “Kids’ll be inside in a minute.”

  She drank the last bit of coffee from her thermos.

  Black stared at the thermos.

  Morris had one just like it. He brought it to the Houses of Parliament every day, along with his lunch.

  “Thanks for your help,” Black said, slowly.

  He felt as if his brain was spinning around in his skull, performing a slow revolution, then slipping back into place. But now he could see everything a little differently.

  “God, I really can’t believe it,” Marina said, shaking her head. “You lose touch with people and you assume they’re just out there, living their lives. I had no idea Gemma was dead.”

  “Yes,” Black said vaguely.

  He bid goodbye to Marina, then left the school, the playground already abandoned by the students, a few swings still creaking sadly now that they were empty.

  He pulled out his phone and called Holly.

  “Hey!” she said, after only a few rings. “Where are you? I thought you were coming to meet us?”

  “Holly,” Black said, “Morris told me you bring him coffee all the time. Is that true?”

  “Yes,” Holly said. “He likes lattes, so if I’m getting one, I always bring him one, too. He pays me back though!”

  “Did you say he brings his lunch every day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he always bring that thermos with him?”

  “Uh, I suppose so. These are strange questions. Why are you so interested in his lunch?”

  “Does he drink the coffee from his thermos?”

  “I don’t know! I would guess he does.”

  “But you’ve never seen him do it.”

  Holly paused for a moment, thinking.

  “No,” she said at last, “I guess I’ve never seen him drink it. Why? Why are you asking?”

  “Holly, this is going to sound crazy, but I need you to get out of there, and go home.”

  “I can’t leave! Tom’s about to give his speech. You don’t have to worry though, your friend Emerson is here with about thirty officers. They’ve searched every inch of this place. I don’t think anything’s going to happen.”

  Nothing was going to happen there.

  “You might be right,” Black said. “Have you seen Clark?”

  “No, he’s back at the office, remember?”

  Back at the Houses of Parliament.

  “I’ve got to go,” Black said. “But listen to me, Holly. Don’t be alone with Morris, not even for a minute.”

  “You don’t think Tom has something to do with the bombings?” Holly asked, in a hushed tone, as if she didn’t want anyone around her to overhear.

  “Yes, I do,” Black said.

  “That does sound crazy,” Holly said. But he could hear the fear in her voice.

  “Just stay away from him,” Black said. “We’ll know one way or another soon enough.”

  He hung up the phone and called Emerson instead.

  “What is it?” Emerson asked.

  “You need to send a team over t
o the Houses of Parliament,” Black said.

  “But Morris is at the convention center,” Emerson said.

  “I don’t think Morris is the target. I think he’s the bomber.”

  Emerson was silent, digesting this.

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  “No,” Black admitted. “But I think he’s been carrying explosives into Parliament every morning. I think he carries it through security, inside his thermos.”

  “Then you’d better meet me there,” Emerson said.

  18

  The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.

  Ben Okri

  At that moment, in a convention center on the bank of the Thames, Morris was giving an impassioned speech in favor of environmental reform. Black watched it on his phone as a taxi carried him through the congested city streets, toward the Houses of Parliament.

  Morris stood behind the podium, looking handsome and polished, young but distinguished in his well-fitted suit and his mature haircut. He was articulate, measured. He smiled at the right moments and made a few gentle jokes to warm up the crowd. But when he switched to the meat of his speech, he became serious and impassioned.

  But Black saw it all differently now. He saw a performance, one that had probably been rehearsed dozens of times in front of a mirror, with each chuckle and each wry smile as calculated as the words themselves.

  He thought that the gleam of excitement in Morris’s eyes had nothing to do with the environment. He was anticipating the culmination of his plan. Any minute, he might hear a distant booming sound, and he would know that his plot had succeeded.

  There would be a flurry of activity among the reporters present, all the attendees pulling out their phones to check the news alerts, and they’d hear that Parliament had been attacked.

  Then Morris would pretend to be outraged, sympathetic, galvanized. He’d milk every moment of attention he could get, capitalizing on his own tragic connection to the terrorist group. After all, he had been one of their first victims. Who else would the media turn to for interviews?

  Other benefits to this strategy streamed through Black’s mind. Depending who Morris managed to murder with the bomb, he might clear the way for his own progression. Knock off a couple dozen senior party members, and who would fill that void? Black could guess.

  However, the thing he didn’t know yet was where the bomb might be found. And that was the real problem. Because if Emerson and the team burst inside, guns blazing, Clark might set the bomb off immediately. They had to sneak in and find it, without tipping off Clark or Morris.

  Black was quite certain Morris had snuck in the explosives inside his thermos each day. But then where did he plant them?

  Emerson waited outside the building with twelve plain-clothes detectives. The head of security for Parliament met them at the base of the steps, with four members of his team.

  “Where do we start?” Emerson asked.

  “We should search the Central Lobby Basement first,” the security head said. “In case he’s got some idea of replicating the gunpowder plot.”

  Black was, of course, familiar with the story of Guy Fawkes, who had tried to blow up Parliament in 1605. During his class tour in his school days, he had visited the series of chambers under Parliament that had once been used for storage, and later for ventilation.

  It might appeal to Morris’s sense of history to plant a bomb there, but Black wasn’t sure that Morris would put it in such an obvious place.

  The two teams separated, fanning out to search the building.

  Black wasn’t looking for the bomb itself, but for Clark. If he were anywhere inside, he might have the trigger, or be able to tell them where it had been set.

  It was crucial to find him in any event—if he saw anything amiss, he could tip off Morris.

  After thirty minutes of searching, Emerson crossed paths with Black and said, “We haven’t found anything yet. Are you sure about this?”

  “I don’t know,” Black said.

  “Maybe we’d better just evacuate the building.”

  “Give it ten more minutes.”

  It was horrible, feeling the seconds tick away, knowing that any moment the building might explode with all these people inside. Every oblivious person they passed was someone who would be killed if they failed to find the device.

  Black knew he might be making an awful mistake, and they should clear everyone out. But they might be signing their death warrants by doing so. It would be impossible to keep an evacuation quiet. The first hint of panic might cause the triggering of the bomb, before anyone had time to escape.

  Black had gone to Morris’s office first, finding nobody but Cara inside.

  “Have you seen Clark?” he asked her.

  “No, not for an hour at least.”

  He was about to leave, but he paused in the doorway.

  “Holly says for you to take the rest of the day off. She said you should go home right now.”

  “Really?” Cara said in surprise.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s great,” Cara said. “I missed taking my dog on a walk this morning.”

  Black hurried off as she started to gather up her coat and purse.

  No one had spotted Clark yet, but Black was sure he’d stay on the premises to keep watch on the bomb and to give himself plausible deniability when it went off.

  But he’d want some distance. It was hard to perfectly calculate a blast radius.

  Meeting up with Emerson once more, Black said, “Let’s check the towers.”

  The Victoria Tower and the Elizabeth Tower—commonly known as Big Ben—bracketed Westminster Palace. Black followed Emerson to the Victoria Tower, which was the taller of the two, located at the southwest corner of the grounds. Emerson sent a half-dozen other men over to Big Ben.

  They passed between Black Rod’s Garden and the Old Palace Yard. The square gothic tower looked dark and malevolent, silhouetted against the slate-gray sky. Black knew it was essentially a library now, housing the Parliamentary archives, but it gave him a chill, thinking it might also be the lookout for a madman who wanted to see everything beneath it burst into flame.

  Emerson planned to search the whole building systematically, but Black said they should start at the top and work their way downward, focusing on the windows that faced north and east. That’s where Clark would be looking, if indeed he was lurking within.

  They tried to move as quickly and silently as possible. Still, Clark heard them coming. He tried to slip away, down the labyrinthine stacks of documents. It was Emerson who tackled him, bringing him down two feet from the elevator.

  Clark was kicking and struggling, even trying to bite. Emerson handcuffed him furiously, while Black started searching his clothes for a remote detonator.

  “Nothing!” Black cried in frustration. “He’s got nothing on him.”

  Emerson radioed down to the men on the ground to begin the evacuation of the Parliament grounds.

  Two of the other officers searched the area around the windows, but they found only a pair of binoculars.

  “Where’s the bomb?” Emerson demanded.

  Clark closed his eyes and clamped his mouth firmly shut, turning his head away from them like a petulant toddler.

  Black had never wanted to punch someone more in his life.

  But he knew Clark was a zealot. Whatever insane reasons he had for planting that bomb, he wasn’t going to cooperate without a much greater degree of violence than Black could stomach.

  Black ran to the window, looking down at the venerable old buildings spread out below him. Where would Clark have put it? It could be anywhere—in an air conditioning duct, in a closet, under a chair...

  And then, Black remembered something from a very, very long time ago. His class trip to the Houses of Parliament. They’d been taken all over the grounds, even inside the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Their tour
guide had been a genial old fellow who seemed to know and love every piece of scrollwork and every stick of furniture as if it were his own. He told them dozens of anecdotes about how the place was now, and how it had once been.

  Black could see the House of Lords directly in front of him. Unlike the House of Commons, it didn’t include elected officials, but rather members drawn from the peerage. He remembered the old man had said that seat of the Lord Speaker was called the Woolsack. It symbolized the huge importance of the wool trade to the economy of England.

  It really was a massive red cushion, stuffed with wool from all over the Commonwealth.

  Clark was a militant vegan, who hated the enslavement of animals for human use.

  Black looked back at Clark, sprawled stubbornly on the ground. His hands were still covered in that bright red rash.

  “I know where the bomb is,” Black said to Emerson.

  Two hours later, the bomb disposal team had located and neutralized the device, which had indeed been stuffed inside the Woolsack in the center of the House of Lords.

  The Lord Speaker had been sitting on it for almost two hours before Parliament was evacuated. He was more than a little surprised to hear that he’d been resting on approximately fifty pounds of C-4, enough to annihilate the House of Lords, and a good portion of St. Stephen’s Hall as well.

  Black could only take a peripheral interest in this, because he had been trying to contact Holly that entire time. She wasn’t answering her phone or his many texts.

  His worst suspicions were confirmed when Emerson told him that Morris had disappeared from the convention center. They’d sent a dozen officers to arrest him, only to find that he’d finished his speech, then slipped away.

  Black guessed that Daniel Clark had used his last few seconds of freedom to send a warning to his boss.

  Black was sick with guilt and worry. He should have been more forceful with Holly, telling her to get away from Morris. He hadn’t trusted his own conclusions.

  He took a cab to her apartment, but he already knew she wouldn’t be there. He bullied the apartment manager into letting him inside regardless. All he found was the clean, sweet-smelling space he’d already come to know and love. Holly wasn’t there.