Chameleon

by Michael K Foster

  ‘Don’t you trust me, you mother-fucker?’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t trust you,’ the man said warily, ‘it’s all about traceability nowadays.’

  Chameleon shot him a daggers look. ‘What have you heard?’

  ‘Nothing. Why?’

  ‘What! You think I’m some sort of undercover police officer or something?’

  ‘You never can tell these days.’

  Chameleon considered his options, picked up the cool bag and tucked it under his arm. As the doors to the lift slid open again, he stepped inside and pressed the descend button. He could see the man’s reflection in the lift mirror and knew he was being watched. No surprise there, he thought.

  The moment he reached ground level, and just to be sure, he decided to head for Grey’s Monument. Bugger the lot of them, he cursed in Russian. Now he had what he came for, he was itching to finish the job.

  ◆◆◆

  Later that day, the weather had picked up, and Ronnie Flanigan was feeling on top of the world. He’d heard on the grapevine that the man he was looking for was holed up in one of the back streets in Walker. He was in no hurry. The silver BMW parked up in front of him hadn’t moved in days. It was a 08 registration, Flanigan noticed, and it belonged to a guy two streets away. A good sign, he chuckled, as nobody gave a damn about anything around here.

  After hours sat in his car watching the property opposite, there was still no sign of the Russian showing. Sometimes you got lucky, but most times you had to dig deep. There was always the back entrance, of course, but he’d covered that with an electronic breaker switch which he’d fitted to the suspect’s door stanchion. Nothing elaborate, but if anyone did try to open it, it would transmit a bleeper signal to a receiver he carried in his pocket. It was a trick he’d learnt whilst in prison, and it had never failed him yet.

  He stared at his watch.

  In many ways Flanigan didn’t mind the long hours spent shadowing suspects. He’d been paid well for his services, which was always a bonus in this game. Besides, he didn’t have a lot of energy these days, not since the chemo treatment. Getting out of bed was a monumental effort, even the pain-relieving medication never completely took away the discomfort. It had been a long emotional rollercoaster ride, and he still wasn’t out of the woods yet. Not by a long chalk. There again, Flanigan thought. If he could buy himself a few more extra weeks of time it would have all been worthwhile in the end.

  A figure approached from the bottom of Welbeck Street. A short man, middle aged, portly, and wearing a stupid grin on his face. At a glance he looked remarkable like the man that Jack Mason had asked him to hunt out – but he wasn’t one hundred percent sure.

  He lowered his car window just as the man had levelled with him and tried to get a closer look. ‘Excuse me for asking,’ Flanigan said almost apologetically, ‘do you happen to know if Caroline Cummings lives in this area?’

  ‘Just a minute,’ the man said, eying him up and down. ‘I’ll ask my partner. She’s bound to know.’

  The man had barely been gone a few minutes before he returned carrying a large brown paper bag in his hand. Half expecting trouble, Flanigan fired up the car’s engine just in case his hunch was right. Then, as the man stooped down alongside the driver’s door, he slid his hand inside the brown paper bag and pulled out a long hypodermic syringe and pointed it towards Flanigan’s face.

  The informant froze.

  The next thing that Flanigan felt, was his body being trussed back and his head hitting the headrest hard. Dazed, he tried to struggle free, but his seatbelt had locked solid and prevented him from moving. Then, he caught the man’s arm as it slowly rose to eye level, followed by a sharp searing jab to the side of his neck.

  Flanigan yelped out loud. ‘What the––’

  ‘Take that, you bastard,’ the man smiled.

  Within seconds of being injected, Flanigan felt a tingling sensation running through his fingers; followed by a numbness travelling down his arms. He desperately tried to fight it, but his brain was too jumbled up to think clearly and he was slowly losing control of his movements. As his foot hit the accelerator pedal hard, the man shot sideways suddenly, and banged his head against the car’s door frame. At first, he thought he had killed him, but Flanigan wasn’t hanging around to find out. He cried out, but nobody came to his rescue and he was fighting it every inch of the way.

  But there was something else that was fuelling Flanigan’s anger, something more sinister he couldn’t put a finger on. Whatever substance had been pumped into his veins, he knew it had to be lethal.

  He needed to act fast, get himself to a hospital!

  Slipping in and out of consciousness he somehow managed to stay in control of the wheel. Speed was vital. It was his only hope of survival.

  The pain now unbearable, he tried to stay focused.

  A narrow main street, a church and three pubs. Barely a mile from the hospital’s A&E, he saw the stationary vehicle at the very last minute and swerved to avoid it. Then he saw people standing at the bus stop – their faces white and etched in fear as he bore down on them at speed. Dozens of them, scattering in all directions as though under attack.

  Shit, shit, shit, Flanigan screamed out.

  Hands gripping steering wheel, eyes firmly shut, he swung on the wheel as hard as he could. What Flanigan didn’t see, not until the very last second at least, was the nose of the 20 Ton dump truck now bearing down on him.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  The news of Ronnie Flanigan’s sudden demise had hit Jack Mason hard, but the report from the Coroner’s Office made for even more disturbing reading. Confused at first, then mortified, Mason laid the slip of paper down on the desktop in front of him and tried to get his head around it all. It had taken emergency crews the best part of forty-five minutes to free poor Ronnie from the wreckage of his beloved Ford Escort estate, and it was in one hell of a mess. According to Road Traffic, the force from the impact was so great that it had pushed the engine block back into the driver’s seat crushing Flanigan to death in the process. At least it was instant and no one else had died in the incident, but it was little consolation to Mason.

  He sipped some water from a jug, checked the overnight crime serials, and made a few phone calls to set the wheels in motion on another full-scale murder investigation. It wasn’t the fact that Flanigan had been blamed for the incident that upset him, it was the fact he’d been injected with a massive dose of black mamba snake venom. According to a leading zoologist at the Kruger National Park in South Africa, just two small drops of the stuff were enough to kill a person in as little as twenty minutes.

  Not only did it contain fast-acting neurotoxins that shut down the victim’s nervous system causing paralysis, without antivenom the fatality rate from a black mamba bite was almost 100 percent. No, Mason thought. Flanigan must have been close to death minutes before the incident occurred. This was a massive dose he’d been injected with, and a highly lethal one at that. One of the deadliest snakes on earth, these speedy reptiles could move faster than a human could run. But that was in real life, and this was a lethal neurotoxin that had been injected into Flanigan’s neck using a hypodermic syringe.

  As he stared in bewilderment at the spider’s web of prompts now pinned to the crime board, Mason began to wonder – where on earth could anyone have acquired such a deadly serum?

  It wasn’t looking good suddenly. This wasn’t an everyday poison and would have been extremely difficult to obtain. Having searched the rented property close to where his informant had been injected, he found the perpetrator had long gone. There were no eyewitness accounts, no CCTV coverage, and nothing following a door-to-door enquiry. Part of him wanted to make amends for Flanigan’s death, as if it was his fault. Yes, he’d sent him to do a job for him, but he’d warned him to stay well clear of the Russian. He hadn’t, and Flannigan had paid the ultimate price because of it.

  Mason looked down at his notes.

  ‘So, you found no tr
aces of the deadly serum in the property?’

  ‘No, nothing,’ Tom Hedley the senior forensic scientist replied.

  ‘Where in hell’s name would someone obtain such a poison?’

  Tom Hedley scratched the side of head confused. ‘More importantly, we’ve picked up the slightest traces of a military toxic nerve agent in the property, which the experts are currently analysing.’

  ‘The same chemical footprint as that used to kill Stephen Rice?’

  ‘According to Porton Down, it’s believed to have come from a batch developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s.’

  ‘Sounds like we’re making some progress at last?’

  ‘Not really, everyone’s refusing to comment.’ Hedley stared at him from across the desk. ‘It may prove one thing, though. Has Yavlinsky inadvertently contaminated himself whilst handling the stuff?’

  Mason drew breath. ‘Courier or hit man, do you think?’

  ‘It’s hard to say.’

  ‘What is it with these individuals, Tom? Why are Special Branch feeding us full of crap and treating us like mushrooms in the dark for God’s sake! They’ve known for weeks that Yavlinsky was implicated in Stephen Rice’s murder, as minute traces of a military type toxic nerve agent were found on the steering wheel of the Russians hire car.’

  Hedley hunched his shoulders as if he didn’t have an answer to give. ‘The Foreign Office is obviously facing a dilemma and trying to keep a tight lid on things for reasons of national security. If the Russians are willing to cooperate, then there must be more to this than they are letting on about.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Let’s face it, military type toxic nerve agents are in no way exclusively used by the Russian State, or non-Russian mafias for that matter.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Other countries who have already developed these agents have been in the public domain for at least a decade. We know the USA and Israel have it, not to mention China, Japan and various other Eastern European nations––’

  ‘What are you driving at?’

  Hedley held Mason’s gaze. ‘Counterintelligence is way beyond us mortals, especially where threats to national security are involved.’

  Mason thought about it.

  ‘Maybe Rice’s death was a way of deterring other Russian agents from defecting?’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ said Hedley, ‘and you need to bear in mind that some nerve agents can kill without delay. As far as we know, there are some radiation compositions that do not set off standard radiation detectors because they emit only alpha particles. What makes them ideal for a would-be assassin is that they are easy to conceal and transport across borders and can be diluted in a bottle of liquid or carried in crystallised form. Detecting them is not only time consuming. . . it requires an experienced analyst to identify them.’

  Mason considered the facts. His conversations with MI5, his meetings with the Chief Constable, and his discussions with Superintendent Gregory. Hedley was right. This was way over his head and had nothing to do with everyday policing in the slightest. It was his job to protect the public, nothing more, nothing less. One thing for sure, though, now that Yavlinsky had gone to ground having injected Flanigan with a lethal dosage of deadly snake venom meant he was capable of almost anything.

  This was the wakeup call that Mason had been dreading, which meant that anyone remotely involved in the forthcoming trial against the Russian bank was now a potential target. The question was, who else was pulling Yavlinsky’s strings?

  Mason felt the burden of responsibility just as strongly every time. It wasn’t that simple, though, and Flanigan’s tragic demise had certainly put the cat among the pigeons – in more ways than one.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  The boy had long gone when Chameleon returned to Seaton School that morning. Waiting at the school gates, it was amazing how much gossip you could pick up. Rumours ran rife, and the woman standing next to him couldn’t keep her mouth shut. He’d only been there a few minutes, but in that short space of time she’d told him everything he wanted to know. Who the boy’s foster mother was, the special protection needs he’d received at the school – everything. In many ways, Chameleon knew how to extract information out of people and how to pull at their heart strings. Street gossip was priceless, but this woman’s nattering was doing his head in.

  It was a beautiful day, unseasonably hot for September. Dressed in a white open neck shirt, black trousers and brown shoes, the Russian assassin felt ill at ease as he strode towards the Kings Arms opposite Seaton Sluice harbour. The view across the shoreline was superb, reminding him of Kerch in Autumn – not that he was wistful. He wasn’t.

  Nearing the long row of cottages, he took a deep breath and paused in reflection, thinking about the task ahead. All those weeks spent trying to find the boy’s whereabouts, and here he was closing in on the kid’s foster mother’s house. His plan was simple enough, but it was strange how some events developed. One minute you were riding the crest of a wave, the next you were scraping the bottom of the barrel and trying to stay afloat. If he’d have only known then what he knew now, he wouldn’t be in the mess he now found himself in.

  He opened the gate, walked up to the large brass knocker, and gave it a sharp rap. His knock was answered by a short slender woman in her early-fifties wearing a rust-coloured dress and a pair of bright green slippers.

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ Chameleon said, ‘you must be Mrs Broadbent.’

  ‘Yes, I am. How can I help you?’ she warily asked.

  ‘I was wondering if I might have a word?’

  She looked him up and down, and then said. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Let me introduce myself,’ Chameleon said, holding out a hand. ‘I’m Peter Tetley and it’s about the cottage next-door. I work for one of the local estate agents, and before we can put the property back on the market again, we’re having some alterations done to the place.’

  ‘Can I ask what you’re doing?’

  ‘Certainly. We’re extending the back bedroom and the whole place is having a major makeover before the new owner moves in.’

  ‘New owner?’ she said, with a look of surprise. ‘It’s not going to be turned into one of those second homes, is it?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because most of them are usually let as holiday rentals.’

  ‘It’s nothing of the sort.’ Chameleon replied, intrigued by the warmth of her tone, and the notion that he may have finally won her over. ‘It’s actually a well-known crime writer who has bought the cottage, and she intends to make it her permanent home.’

  ‘An author,’ she gasped. ‘What, here in the village?’

  ‘Yes. Isn’t that wonderful?’

  ‘Do I know her?’

  ‘Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to divulge the client’s name but I can tell you her books are extremely popular.’

  ‘Goodness – and she’ll be living next door to me?’

  ‘Indeed, she will.’

  ‘When is she moving in?’

  ‘If the work goes to plan, we’re hoping to have everything done and dusted within the next few weeks.’

  ‘An author. I’ve never met one of those before.’

  Chameleon was quick to signal his thoughts. ‘I hear you’re a bit of a celebrity yourself, Mrs Broadbent.’

  She looked at him oddly but refrained from answering.

  ‘You’re a foster mother, I believe.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ she countered warily.

  ‘One of the police officers who handed me the keys to the property. He said you were recently looking after a young boy?’

  ‘Yes, I was.’ Her head dropped momentarily. ‘But he’s no longer living with us anymore.’

  Bullshit! Chameleon groaned. Just give me his name!

  He gestured with his hand as if to take in the whole of Seaton Sluice. ‘Taken to school in a police car every day, he must have been the talk of the village.’


  She smiled. ‘I’m not sure about that, but we were all sorry to see young Martin go.’

  There was a hint of sadness in her voice, but the mere mention of the boy’s Christian name sent shivers down Chameleon’s spine. All he needed now was a surname. But these things took time, and time was a luxury commodity and he was desperate to get going.

  ‘Where did Martin go?’

  ‘I’ve absolutely no idea, Social Services were dealing with it as far as I know. It all happened so quickly,’ she confessed. ‘One minute he was here, the next he was whisked off to another place.’

  ‘What about the boy’s parents. . . are they still alive?’

  ‘His father is. He has something to do with the building trade, I believe.’

  Chameleon’s eyes narrowed a fraction. ‘Really? What’s his father’s name?’

  ‘Why would you want to know that?’

  ‘Builders are in high demand, Mrs Broadbent. Me being an estate agent, I may have some serious work to offer him.’

  ‘It’s Kennedy,’ she replied.

  ‘Kennedy!’

  ‘Yes, and now that you mention it his father is working down in Nottingham, I believe.’

  Still unsure of what he was up to – or what his intentions were – she’d fallen into Chameleon’s trap. He swung to face her. ‘You mentioned social services, do you happen to have a contact name?’

  She shot him a glance as if the realisation had suddenly hit home. ‘Why would you want to know that?’ she asked brashly.

  ‘Just curious, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s a rather an odd question for an estate agent to be asking?’ she glowered.

  He could see she was agitated and noted her stubby fingers were trembling slightly. He’d considered strangling her, but quickly thought the better of it the minute a white van pulled into the street. Besides, he wasn’t in the game of killing old women, and certainly didn’t want to rouse unnecessary panic in the village. Not now, he didn’t. Not until he’d finished his mission.