If Looks Could Kill

by Gary Kittle

  Dan, Richard, Fiona and Devina looked hopelessly from one to the other.

  ‘None of you get it, do you?’ Jenkins sounded bored again.

  Downstairs the banging grew louder, more concerted. They heard boots echoing up the stairs again. Jenkins steadied his gun in the direction of Richard.

  ‘Wait! We had a deal, remember?’

  Fiona shot her husband a look filled with contempt and disbelief.

  ‘Like the one you had with your two comrades?’

  ‘No. it wasn’t like that, Leighton. Jamie - the park keeper, yes? - he was working for them all along. I only found out about half an hour ago. I swear!’

  Fiona was weeping again, seemingly lost in a world made entirely of her own miseries.

  ‘Ha! He was working for me, Simmons, no matter who he thought he was working for. Just like the rest of you!’

  ‘But I didn’t try to screw you over, Leighton. I kept to the bargain and you have the girl. That has to be worth something?’ Richard’s voice was high pitched, close to pleading.

  From his seated position Dan noticed Fiona, still weeping, shuffling out of the line of fire.

  The shouting downstairs was extremely close now.

  ‘Goodbye, Simmons.’

  Trevor Jenkins set his feet shoulder width apart, and with both arms forming a triangle out in front of him he leaned forward slightly, ready to fire. His eyes narrowed along the length of the weapon, Richard Simmons’ bemused features squarely in his sights.

  ‘No!’

  Jenkins saw the disfigured woman moving forward from the periphery of his vision, but in a heartbeat decided to discharge his first shot at its intended target. The bullet took Richard in the lower left lung. He let out a grunt and collapsed onto his knees. Fiona was still moving towards Jenkins and her glass bottle of acid was already swinging forward to release its deadly corrosive spray.

  But Jenkins was quicker and got off a second shot almost immediately. The bullet caught Fiona in the upper arm, and with a scream she could only look up as the glass bottle tumbled through the air above her.

  The majority of the acid hit her full in the face.

  Jenkins stared in horror as smoke rose quickly from between the fingers clutching into her face. He put another bullet into her head to end her misery. As she slumped to the ground, however, he saw the previously prone figure of Richard Simmons assume a combat pose and bring up the revolver previously held by Devina.

  With the speed of a gunslinger Jenkins had put two bullets into his chest in quick succession before Richard’s finger could so much as twitch.

  ‘Shit, I’m hot,’ he whistled.

  Then his gun was turning through the air again and Dan found himself staring down the fat cylinder of the gun’s silencer.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jenkins whispered.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Husband and wife lay crumpled together on the floor. The acid was still doing its work, sizzling through Fiona’s contaminated flesh. The strap of her wedding dress suddenly snapped, causing the swollen tissues beneath to sag downward and spill their contents onto the vanishing floor planks. White tendrils rose from her twitching corpse like smoke from a compost heap; those from the wood slightly greyer in shade. As they watched, more lumps of skin corrupted by Foedus dropped from her back, revealing angry pink tissue beneath.

  Dan leaned back in his chair, resigned to the fact that this was end of his ride. He closed his eyes. ‘No you’re not; but you will be if you don’t pull that trigger.’

  Jenkins glanced down at the injured Devina. ‘Been chatting, my dear?’

  Downstairs they could all hear the assault team closing in. There was more banging and shouting. Jenkins backed over to the door and shut it. Dan opened his eyes again. Jenkins looked perplexed, suddenly ill at ease with what they both knew he had to do.

  ‘There’s something I need to know.’ Jenkins scowled.

  Dan made no reply.

  ‘How the hell did you get this far?’

  It was a question Dan had asked himself in recent hours. He thought back over the events of the last few days: The email, Fiona’s burqa with the faint outline of a child’s hand print on it, the rosary ring on the ransom image, the ‘stake out’ at the Catholic School. How best to summarise that lot in ten seconds? He was too tired to even begin trying.

  ‘Divine intervention,’ he offered lamely.

  Jenkins shook his head in sadness. ‘You’ve done better than I could ever have imagined.’

  ‘Not well enough, apparently,’ Dan answered with sarcasm.

  ‘No, actually: too well.’

  Dan closed his eyes again and hoped the end would be painless. He still had a dozen questions to ask, but none of them were going to extend his life beyond a few seconds, so he kept his shaking body as still as he could, and prayed for a clean shot between his eyes.

  ‘No, no, no!’ growled Jenkins, forcing Dan to open his eyes once more.

  Jenkins had lowered his weapon, his expression darkened by a frustrated fury. Dan and Devina looked at each other, confused; but it was only when they looked back at Jenkins that they noticed the small red dot in the centre of his chest. Boots rumbled up the final flight of stairs. Jenkins seemed to consider one last attempt at getting away a single shot but another red dot appeared on his forehead and then a third. With a curse he threw his weapon down and raised his hands.

  The red beams of half a dozen more laser sights penetrating the room, nearly all of them on Dan’s back, despite the fact he was effectively secured.

  ‘See, I told you,’ he gazed into Jenkins’ eyes. ‘Divine intervention.’

  Jenkins had no time to reply. The door crashed open and the room was swamped by heavily armed men covered in body armour and face masks. A man charged towards Jenkins and screamed into his face to lie down. Jenkins did so immediately, his fingers already laced behind his head.

  Incredibly, the same faceless man screamed at Dan to lie down, too. If he hadn’t been too exhausted he might well have burst out laughing. As it was he kept rock still as Devina was quickly bundled out of the room. He knew he would never see her again; he just prayed that someone would.

  His eyes fell on his prostrate boss; the man who had nearly got him killed more than once, and for what? National security was a smokescreen, according to Devina. Jenkins was in this for personal gain. And that made him as dangerous as any terrorist Dan was likely to meet.

  Whatever happened next, at least he wouldn’t have to see that weasel’s face again.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  ‘Welcome back, Dan,’ Trevor Jenkins said warmly, opening his right arm to indicate the spare chair in his plush new office. ‘Drink?’ But he was turning towards the cabinet without waiting for an answer. He continued talking to Dan with his back turned. ‘I hope this past week hasn’t been too rough for you.’

  ‘To be honest, I got the distinct impression the whole ‘interrogation’ was a charade,’ Dan answered, still standing. ‘Sir.’

  Jenkins poured two whiskies from a cut glass bottle, and returned to the desk. ‘Please, call me Trevor.’ He extended the arm holding his guest’s drink.

  Dan stared into his eyes for several seconds before taking it grudgingly. ‘Or maybe I should call you Leighton.’

  Jenkins let out a short laugh. ‘What’s in a name, ‘Dan’?’

  ‘Funnily enough I was asking myself that same question when those goons you threw me to kept calling me Jamie.’

  ‘Ah, well, you see that really was the only way I could dig you out of the hole you’d made for yourself.’

  ‘I think you’ll find it was someone else that supplied the shovel.’

  ‘Glad you had the good sense to play along with my little charade,’ Jenkins continued. ‘But you realise that for all intents and purposes Dan Rhodes is dead and Jamie Martin was rescued successfully.’

  Dan started to speak.

  ‘I know what your next question is, son,’ Jenkins said, with what
sounded like genuine compassion. ‘You can’t see your Mother or Sister; or anyone who knew you as Dan Rhodes. You need to find yourself somewhere to live in the South-east, too. Keep out of Essex. One day, when things have blown over, we can arrange for you to meet up with your family again. But for the foreseeable future there can be no contact; not even a text message. Understand?’

  ‘You’re a ruthless bastard, Jenkins!’

  ‘In my world that constitutes a compliment, believe me,’ Jenkins replied.

  ‘And what if I don’t want your ‘protection’?’

  Jenkins looked at him hard, and raised an eyebrow. ‘Let me show you something.’

  He picked up a TV remote and the large flat screen television mounted to the long wall on his right flashed into life. He punched in four numbers and some handheld video footage that obviously wasn’t from a news channel filled the screen.

  Dan stared as a squad of white suited figures wearing oxygen masks chased a naked woman down a busy shopping street. Along the pavements pedestrians turned their backs or hid their faces in their hands. One man bent towards the gutter and threw up. Even without a close up shot it was clear the woman was in the full grip of Foedus; her skin, for want of a better word, was ravaged by a disease that seemed to be slowly eating her alive.

  ‘Sometimes they go this way; driven to insanity by the horror they have to face in the mirror every day, by the disgust, the shame, the hopelessness.’

  ‘The smell,’ Dan thought as he remembered the acid eating its way through the Foedus.

  Back on screen, the woman became cornered in an alleyway. She raised her arms to the narrow rectangle of sky above, as if imploring God to save her, before the white suited pursuers closed in.

  ‘Turn it off,’ Dan said, turning his head away. ‘I think I get it. It’s your motives that don’t convince me.’

  ‘Devina, yes? ‘Told you everything’, did she?’ Jenkins failed to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. ‘But how do you know she wasn’t a terrorist?’

  ‘I know you lied to me.’

  ‘It isn’t just me that’s been lying,’ Jenkins sighed, as if he were dealing with a very small child. ‘Devina isn’t immune. Richard Simmons kept her quarantined the whole time.’

  ‘What?’ Dan shot Jenkins a look of pure contempt. ‘I don’t believe you.’ But something in his guts did.

  ‘But you believed Simmons? You must be a very good judge of character.’ Jenkins punched a new number into his TV remote. ‘Or a very poor one.’

  Instantly they were both looking into a hospital ward staffed by white coated nurses wearing visors, gloves and masks. There were no windows and the doors had been replaced by thick plastic screens. The camera zoomed in on the only occupied bed.

  Dan’s eyes narrowed as he recognised the now familiar devastation that was Foedus. The girl in the bed was naked, breathing with great difficulty and the bedclothes around her were heavily stained and soiled with reds, browns and yellows. ‘It wasn’t deliberate. She must have picked it up from the Simmons woman.’

  It seemed impossible that this could have happened in just three weeks.

  Dan’s mouth dropped open as the ravaged girl turned her encrusted hairless skull towards the camera and opened her only functioning eye.

  It was the colour of a freshly cut emerald.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Jenkins tapped his desk with a forefinger, waiting. Dan had taken nearly five minutes to bring his horrified grief under a semblance of control. Jenkins was surprised the younger man could be so attached to the girl, but young men had a tendency not just to fall in love but to dive in headfirst. Up until then, he’d led quite a sheltered life, too; and the girl made quite an impression on every man she met, by all accounts.

  ‘Why?’ Dan spluttered.

  ‘As Jamie Martin, you have the makings of a first class field agent. Do you know that?’

  ‘There is no Jamie Martin!’

  ‘Actually, you’re right. He never existed, except as a cover name. Until now.’

  ‘Is she dead?’

  Trevor Jenkins took a sip from his drink, considering how best to word his response. ‘That footage is three days old. I’m sorry.’

  Dan buried his face in his hands again, but only for a moment. ‘Did you learn anything new?’

  ‘About the disease? Actually, plenty. So I’m told.’

  ‘Did she suffer?’ Dan asked with difficulty.

  ‘I won’t lie to you this time.’ Jenkins examined his glass. ‘This is Foedus we’re talking about.’

  ‘Just tell me it wasn’t for nothing.’

  Trevor Jenkins had to admire the younger man’s taste. Those alluring eyes and athletic brown legs that seemed to go on forever were quite something; especially when your wife resembled a B-movie monster.

  ‘We’ll beat this, Dan. We’ll beat them. And bright field agents like you will be on the front line in the War on Terror as much as the scientists. You’ve seen action for the first time. It hurts, I know. I haven’t always been behind a desk.’

  ‘I believed what she told me.’ It was less of an admission, more a confession.

  ‘They brainwash others the way they were brainwashed themselves. It’s a cycle of evil.’

  ‘I won’t believe she was a terrorist.’

  ‘No. I don’t believe she was. I think she was as much a victim of terrorism as any of the millions of women the length and breadth of this country. They used her, Dan.’

  Dan burst out excitedly: ‘But she showed no symptoms in that hideout.’

  ‘That was three weeks ago. You know it was her in that hospital bed, Dan,’ Jenkins said firmly. ‘Don’t torture yourself. Do something to hit back.’

  Dan took a deep breath and raised his reddened eyes to stare at Jenkins. He put down his drink on the desk untouched.

  ‘You need some time off. When you come back, we’ll get you some proper training.’

  Dan stood unsteadily and slowly made his way to the door. ‘She didn’t deserve that.’

  ‘The same could be said to every woman in the United Kingdom,’ Jenkins reflected.

  ‘She told me there was something else. That she’d overheard people say things when they thought she was asleep.’

  ‘Dan, what could possibly be bigger than Foedus?’

  ‘I don’t know. She didn’t know. But she was convinced it was for some other reason.’

  ‘You’re exhausted, Dan.’

  ‘And she wasn’t immune in the end, was she?’ Dan exclaimed. But the effort seemed to use up the last of his strength and he sagged back into his chair.

  ‘See our medical team before you leave. They’ll give you something to help you sleep, look after you physically and mentally. You’ll be OK.’

  ‘What about,’ Dan began, ‘afterwards?’

  Jenkins understood immediately. ‘She was cremated.’ He knew why Dan had asked, too. ‘We still have the ashes.’

  Dan nodded once before turning away and reaching for the door handle.

  ‘I’ll keep her safe until your return.’

  Dan spoke in a low monotone: ‘Thank you, Sir.’

  Two seconds later their meeting was over.

  ‘No. Thank you,’ Jenkins called to the closed door, ‘Jamie.’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Trevor Jenkins, also known as Leighton and several other aliases, replaced the receiver with his first genuine smile in weeks. He had acted swiftly and decisively when his back was against the wall. Putting himself in the firing line at the gang’s hideout would have been suicidal had he not already made his enemies aware of information that would be released to the media on the event of his demise.

  It was almost a clichéd tactic in the world he worked in, but one surprisingly difficult to pull off unless you had several decades of experience, as he had. In that respect it was rather similar to a nuclear deterrent, in that your enemies had to be aware that in essence your nuclear warheads were locked on target but would only e
ver become airborne if those enemies attempted to strike first. He found it ironic that back room diplomacy had so many similarities with its larger International equivalent. Jenkins even had a name for his new strategy: ‘Mutually Assured Promotion’. Though in truth it was more like a roadmap to peaceful retirement.

  As for Dan Rhodes, to be known as Jamie Martin from now on, Jenkins was confident his new protégé would grow up eventually. Once upon a time he had even had ideals of his own, he recalled. Life in the big world had certainly put that all into perspective.

  Jenkins took the car across London to his small flat in Kensington. He let himself in with deliberate clamour so as not to startle the flat’s new occupant. The flat itself was immaculate. His new tenant had only arrived the week before, but had obviously settled in to her new home very quickly.

  ‘Cassandra?’

  Jenkins slipped off his coat and thought about another whisky. His alcohol consumption had spiralled alarmingly for a while, but there was no need for it now. He switched the kettle on instead. He heard movement from the bathroom, a sink gurgling and a lock unbolting.

  He looked over at the bookcase, his eyes fixing on the small black urn that contained Devina’s ashes. It was a good decision, he decided. He owed that much to Dan, after all. The search for a cure, the War on Terror, it would go on for decades more, long after he had retired. But that didn’t mean everyone had to suffer.

  When the bathroom door opened the girl inside was completely naked. She smiled impishly, her perfect skin a light brown in colour. ‘The first of many,’ Jenkins thought. Devina had been so unlucky, and eventually of course Cassandra would succumb to Foedus, too. But in the meantime Jenkins, and other men of influence and power, could enjoy the holding at bay of sexual frustration. He returned the girl’s smile. And how.

  ‘The master has returned, I think?’ she said.

  Awfully good English, considering. He let his eyes take in the full extent of her youthful beauty. Behind him the kettle clicked off.

  ‘You are boiling?’ she asked.