You Think You Know Someone

by J B Holman

  ‘Is the PM on the plane?’ They nodded.

  ‘Is Tenby flying?’ They nodded again. ‘Anyone else on the flight?’ They shook their heads.

  ‘Arseholes! You just killed your Principal. You’ll never work again.’ He kicked them sharply and looked back at the flight tracker. They were over the channel. Their light was still flashing. Flashing was good. He willed it: Keep flashing, keep flashing.

  ‘Yes!’ said the geek, clapping his hands like they had magic in them. ‘Bettie Slaker had access to his computer and his emails.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Five years ago, when she was his secretary, but it was never terminated. Theoretically she never left, she just stopped getting paid. And when she was here, he really trusted her. She accessed all his files, emails, even the GCHQ mails. She had complete rights to everything and still does, no matter how confidential. That’s so against the rules.’ He exclaimed, oblivious to his own activities.

  ‘So when did she last access his computer? Either at work or at home? When?’

  ‘Woah. That’ll take a bit longer. Slow down.’

  ‘I can’t slow down.’

  ‘Why? What’s the mad hurry?’

  ‘She’s about to murder the Prime Minster and her ex-husband.’

  ‘Seriously?’ he said grinning , not through humour, but nerves.

  ‘Yes. Please hurry.’ His grin faded. His mind could not compute. He was now in the front line. She was depending on him. He blushed.

  Foxx needed to think. He needed a plan. It was too late to stop the flight. His only hope was stopping the explosion. The plane was over France, their radio was down. There had to be answer. Fox needed to think.

  Julie ‘Serafina Pekkala’ waited. She waited for what seemed like forever.

  Neil nodded and moved his chair an inch or two further from the screen. He had finished.

  ‘So? Did she send that email?’

  Neil thought for a while and gave the best answer he could.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So, what do you know?’

  ‘I know that she has accessed his computer recently, mostly just nosing around, usually at two or three in the morning – kind of electronic stalking. She didn’t leave much trace, but she did go through his files and get into his emails. So she could have sent it, or she could have just been nosey.’

  ‘But she definitely accessed it, recently and often?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she could read his emails and all his files?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he wouldn’t have known?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘I love you,’ she said as she kissed his forehead.

  ‘So,’ he whispered in her ear, ‘do I really get, a y’know . . . what you promised?’

  ‘What – here?’ she said loudly. He blushed. She smiled and looked at a nearby meeting room. ‘I’m going in there,’ she said, leaving Neil uncertain if that was information or invitation.

  She stood, turned and her world changed.

  ‘Julie Connor? I am arresting you in connection with the assassination of the Prime Minister under the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005. You do not need to say anything, but anything you do say may and will be used in evidence against you.’ She looked to see where she could run, how she could hide. She was cornered in an open-plan office by the Head of Security, two armed guards and Frankie, the grandfather to his Janice’s new-born child.

  ‘I suggest you come quietly, my dear,’ said Frankie shakily. ‘There’s a shoot-to-kill order out on you and they won’t hesitate to use it.’

  She complied. They walked her down to the Security Office on the ground floor and awaited the arrival of the Military Police. She had no way out. She was caught, stuck, trapped - like a fish.

  Foxx sat on the ground, leaning on his bike, still in the airport, too agitated to move; too preoccupied to leave. He wrestled with impossibility. Dirk had gone, free to continue his killing spree. The bomb was on the plane. His father was going to die. The coup was ever closer and there was nothing he could do about it. He remembered the words of his first boss in Operations: You can’t stop a coup. But for now, he didn’t care about the coup; all he wanted to do was to stop a plane from being violently ripped apart at 35,000 feet. He wanted to save the man who had saved him. He sat. He thought. He did all he could to cast emotion to one side and focus.

  The explosion had not happened on the way up, so wasn’t triggered by increasing altitude. It was his guess it would be decreasing altitude that would trigger the explosion, but it could be a phone signal.

  Foxx was a tactician. It was his job to achieve the impossible. But how?

  How do you get someone out of an aeroplane, that you cannot contact, that’s doing 500 miles an hour, at 35,000 feet, at a temperature of minus 70 degrees, over foreign soil? Even if he could jump out, he hasn’t got a parachute and would be hit by 500 mile an hour wind then sucked into the turbine, which wouldn’t matter because he would have frozen to death anyway. If he signalled them to land, the bomb would be triggered by decreasing altitude. It was impossible.

  Foxx needed help. He stared at his SSS phone. To turn it on could be the end of him; not to turn it on could be the end of his father. It lit up, as did someone’s screen in GCHQ. He scrolled through his directories of numbers and selected France. The list of French Connections was short.

  ‘Jean-Paul, Bonjour! C’est Eduard le Renard ici.’

  ‘Ello, Monsieur Foxx. ‘Ow are you?’

  It would be a stretch to say they were friends. Jean-Paul was French Secret Service. They had worked together in Syria and South America, but they weren’t close.

  Foxx asked for help. He gave the call signal of the plane and its present location, then demanded that two fighter jets be sent up to observe it. The answer was short.

  ‘Non.’

  Request denied. He added that the Prime Minister was on board and that there was an emergency, but not exactly what it was.

  The request was reluctantly accepted.

  Seven minutes later, two fast jets took to the sky, heading for the PM’s plane at a cruising speed of over 1,500 miles an hour.

  Jean-Paul hung up and wondered if he’d just been a hero or had just lost his job. The pilots enjoyed a hunt and seek mission and envisaged flicking some rigid digits at Le Rosbif Premier.

  Foxx sat with his eyes shut, letting his internal on-board computer work through every possible scenario. How to save the life of the Prime Minister?

  ‘Got it!’ shouted Foxx. He called his friend back.

  ‘Patch me through to the pilots.’

  ‘Bonjour,’ said Foxx. ‘Nous avons un problème catastrophique, mais j’ai une idée.’ Foxx was fluent in Kazakh, Russian and five other languages. French was not one of them.

  ‘I speke Ingleesh,’ said the pilot. ‘I zee ze plane now. Is normal, no problème catastrophique. Iz good.’

  ‘I need you to do something. Can you . . .’

  ‘Putain de merde,’ cursed the pilot with shock and consternation, as he banked at 90 degrees to avoid the debris.

  ‘Is blow up. Ze plane is blow up! Bordel! Une boule de feu. Finit!’

  As the two jets had approached from behind, gaining rapidly, flying towards the red sunset, a short mile or two out, the Prime Minister’s private jet exploded, erupted into flame, was engulfed by a ferocious fireball and burst into a million pieces.

  Three thousand feet above them, a jumbo jet heading for Heathrow saw it all.

  Foxx had been watching on the screen of his flight tracker. The light had flashed and flashed and stopped. He had lost. It was over.

  31

  Going Home

  The pilot of the British Airways jumbo jet heading to Heathrow from Central Africa saw it all. The flight check mechanic, the co-pilot and the purser, they all saw the executive jet flying a few thousand feet below them. They saw the French fighter planes. They saw and misinterpreted the reflection of the suns
et as a flash of red on the wing of the French jets, and less than a second later they saw the executive jet burst into flames, then explode into a catastrophic supernova of shock waves, fire and debris. It was fierce, ferocious and final.

  ‘Holy Mother! Did you see that? They just shot it down!’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the co-pilot breathlessly, scarcely believing what he’d seen. ‘Did you see the flash of red on the wing? That was the missile being launched. They shot him down. Jesus! There gotta be some bad people in that plane!’

  The gasps started in First Class: seven separate people had seen it happen and ten more had seen the fighters bank sharply away - almost a hundred saw the fireball cross the sky. The news spread rapidly through the cabin. By the time they landed, 400 people on a jumbo jet arriving from Africa knew that the French Air Force had just shot down a plane over French soil, but not one of them knew who had been on board.

  Foxx sat on the ground motionless. He tried to make it real, tried to focus. The police sirens got closer. He was numb. Dumbfounded. The wailing of the approaching police convoy seeped slowly into his consciousness. The police: they were coming. For him. He turned off his phone. He stood. He had to go home. He had to tell his mum. He had to be with her.

  He mounted the bike, and with no real recollection of starting it, nor of the roads he travelled, he found himself a mile away, his mind a blur, as he headed instinctively for home.

  Debris rained down on French fields, like confetti at a funeral. It covered gardens, houses and villages: scraps of burnt-out wreckage, a wing tip, tiny pieces of charred black flesh and a suitcase - the Prime Minister’s suitcase. A farmer and a hundred other people called it in, but the gendarmes already knew. The Armée de l'Air Française had told them before the brutality even hit the ground.

  ‘Mum. It’s me.’

  ‘Hello darling, how nice to hear from you.’

  He was in a call box five minutes from home. On any other day, he would just have walked straight in, but today was not a straightforward day.

  ‘I’m coming home.’

  ‘That’s lovely, dear.’

  ‘I have something to tell you,’ he said, in sombre tones.

  ‘Then tell me now, dear,’ said his mum, ever practical. He didn’t know how to put it, how to say it, how to warn her; but she had to know before she learned it from the news.

  ‘It’s about Dad.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘It’s bad, very, very bad.’ He was having difficulty focusing his thoughts, let alone expressing them.

  ‘Just tell me,’ said his mother in her most matter-of-fact, pragmatic voice.

  ‘He was in a plane, flying over France and the plane . . . it blew up. There’s nothing left. I’m afraid he is . . .’ he couldn’t bring himself to say it. ‘They blew it up and there were no survivors.’ There was a long silence on the end of the phone. His mother chose denial as the best reaction.

  ‘Don’t be so silly, dear. You can be so melodramatic sometimes. He’s fine. We were only talking about his retirement this morning and he intends to live it long and hard.’

  ‘I’m not being silly, Mum, nor melodramatic. He’s dead.’

  ‘No, he’s not. He’s alive and has just passed Waitrose. I just spoke to him about ten minutes ago. He asked if I wanted anything because he was passing the supermarket. I said no. He’ll be here in five minutes.’

  Foxx hung up. He chose denial as the most suitable reaction. He simply didn’t believe it.

  The Prime Minister sat in the back of the black Jaguar, as it drove gently past his local Waitrose. He hardly believed what had just happened. As if it weren’t hard enough being a Prime Minister, particularly one that was trying to negotiate an impossible exit from Europe with a minimal majority drawn from a flimsy coalition of uncomfortable bed partners, all this extra security was getting him down. He understood the threat was real. Colin Lewis had died right next to him; Barrow had been highly emotional, with the loss of two military lives scarcely two hours before he made his speech. He knew it was real, but he tried to shut it from his mind. It was not callous, nor cavalier; it was the only way he could concentrate. So, the shenanigans of today were just plain and simply discombobulating.

  He was not happy with pretending to be in Number Ten. He was unhappy about abandoning the military precision of Northolt for the enthusiastic civilian approach of Biggin Hill. But if his security advisers told him it was safer to have only two bodyguards rather than an army and fly from a field, rather than a world class military base, who was he to argue?

  He wrote notes in the back of the car that he would transcribe into his memoirs.

  Biggin Hill. Waited fifteen minutes for the plane. So much for being a world leader. Boarded - me, Tenby and the security officers, but plane was marked as unsafe. Waited around. A sniper’s dream. Then we all boarded another aircraft.

  Dirk someone turns up, one of Brekkenfield’s agents, tall guy with a long scar, tells me my wife has been reported ill and is in hospital. I call but none of our phones work. Bloody Biggin Hill. Dirk says he arranged for me to visit her and I will fly tomorrow. Tenby was keen to get there early, he had some meeting with someone, a woman no doubt. It was agreed that the two security officers would stay with me, but after a meeting between them in one of the hangars, it turns out that Dirk is my minder for the night and the other two guys caught the plane.

  Went to Bromley General. I waited in the car. Dirk goes in to find out which ward Sally is in and it turns out that it’s some ninety year old woman of the same name and someone had got their wires crossed. Relieved and delighted it was not Sally - pissed off someone got it wrong. An extra night at home – good for me! I’ll fly from Northolt tomorrow – back to original plan. Bet this never happened to Obama!

  ‘I’ve got a signal, if you want to call your wife, but best be quick, the whole network is playing up tonight,’ said the driver, as he switched off the phone jammer under his seat.

  The Prime Minister phoned, said he was coming home and handed the phone back to his new protector.

  ‘Why are we going this way?’ asked the PM, as the car turned off to arrive at the back of the house. The real answer was to avoid the policeman at the front of the house, but the answer given was, ‘New security procedures.’

  It was a quiet rural location. There were neighbours to either side, fields and woodlands behind the house and a back gate. The Jaguar pulled up at the gate. The driver kept the doors locked and turned to face the VIP passenger.

  ‘Just thought you’d like to know, the plane you were on has just exploded over France. All dead.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked the PM, surprised.

  ‘Because I blew it up.’

  ‘Really?’ asked the PM in disbelief. ‘So why did I escape death a second time?’

  ‘Who said you did?’ The driver produced a pistol and pointed it at him. ‘Prime Minister, prepare to die. I’m going to shoot you here, so your wife can see your dying body and hear the last gasps leave your lungs. And as you’re dying, in no state to protect her, I will shoot her in front of you. And the dog too.’ He paused. He held the gun tight and prepared to shoot. The PM was rigid and stalwart. He didn’t move a muscle. If he was going to die, he would die a hero. He closed his eyes. He heard the click as the gun was cocked. The PM opened his eyes, stared at the gunman right in the eye and saw his finger curl round the trigger. He heard no bang.

  The gunman slowly pressed the end of the barrel right against the cold stolid forehead of the Premier.

  ‘You’re dead and your wife is dead too, unless you agree to stand down.’

  ‘I will not subject myself to terrorism,’ he said, with his loving wife filling his every thought. ‘I will not resign as Prime Minister, just because you’re holding a gun at my head. It is not going to happen. So shoot me.’

  ‘You’re not reading this right,’ clarified Blackheart. ‘You are already not the Prime Minister, either because you step down or becau
se everyone thinks you’re on a plane above France. Everyone, except your wife, thinks you were on board. That’s why I have to kill her too. So stand down. Announce it tonight. And don’t get smart with me. If you say you will step down and then you don’t, I’ll kill your wife, your brother, your sister and all their children, then cripple you, so you live to feel the pain. Get it in your head: one way or another, you are no longer Prime Minister.’

  The man who was still Prime Minister said nothing.

  ‘On your way now,’ said his captor, as he unlocked the doors. ‘Resign tonight. Or everyone you care about dies. And I mean everyone.’

  The Prime Minister opened the door and closed it firmly behind him. Danger turned to anger, but he had no weapon, no skills of karate; he was a politician, all he had was words. He leant in though the open front window, standing on a pedestal of moral high ground, and had the last word. It wasn’t much, it was churlish and inconsequential, but at least it wasn’t nothing. Blackheart engaged ‘Drive’ and drove off into the night.

  Julie’s eyes flicked around the concrete room with its one small high oblong window, a table and four chairs, all occupied. She sat, in silence, thinking, waiting to be collected, to be at the mercy of the Military Police. Military Prison, in some basement of a top-secret military base: no lawyer, no rights, no record. They could do what they liked. I could just be disappeared or a sitting duck for Blackheart. In a civilian police cell, it would be harder for a military man to get in and take her out. She was in danger of death or a life condemned to a dank dark prison cell.

  But none of that seemed to matter. She was on a mission. Her mind whirled. She had to get it right in her head.

  Bettie Slaker had needed Tenby’s money; they were still married, she would inherit. It was simple: need and greed. Or was it anger? Bettie was in danger of losing her house, not to mention the clumsily concealed jealousy of all the young floozies; or revenge – maybe Tenby really had been driving when the accident happened. Or was it political? Had she used her husband to help create the platform and now she needed to dispose of him? That would leave the way clear for her reign of terror through the marionette man who would soon be leading the country - the automatic accession to PM from DPM . . . that was Bettie’s work for sure.