The Fish Kisser

by James Hawkins

  “Maybe you should call the press as soon as we land, before they have a chance to stop you.”

  Owain gave him a sidelong glance. “I thought you were supposed to be part of the Establishment.”

  “Not me,” said Bliss. “Never have been. Always a rebel. But freedom of speech and equality are dirty words in the police and The Establishment doesn’t like smut.” He snorted his disdain. “Hm! The Establishment: the old-boys club of politicians and senior officers who’ll cover-up anything inconvenient with a pack of lies and a veiled reference to the Official Secrets Act.”

  The Yank was back on the radio. “O.K., Davey. Everything checks out, we’ll be landing in about ten minutes. Just follow me.”

  “I think we’re going to make it, Owain,” he said confidently. “Maybe we will be able to stop them.”

  Owain had a confused look. “How?”

  “Isolate Iraq and cut off communications until you’ve discovered the antidote,” he answered with child-like simplicity.

  Owain shook his head. “It’s too late. Some of the infected computers have already gone out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The multi-national trade embargo’s a joke—it’s got more leaks than a Russian submarine. Computers and equipment pour in from Turkey, Jordan, and Allah knows where else. They’ve been shipping in computers from everywhere—new ones, latest models, even video games. They’ve got more variety than Radio Shack and they’ve built the C.I.D. program right into the hardware …”

  Bliss interrupted, thinking back to his nightmarish truck ride across the mountains with Yolanda, “Is that what was in the crates—computers?”

  “Yeah. They’re bringing them from Istanbul in crates marked ’plastic body bags.’”

  “But they can only doctor a few hundred at a time.”

  Owain sounded exasperated. “I told you. They only need one infected computer to do the damage. Obviously the more that get into the system the faster the C.I.D. will spread after ‘D’ day.”

  Feeling slightly foolish, Bliss changed the subject. “Wake Yolanda. She’ll need a few minutes to get used to the controls.”

  Yolanda opened her eyes as Owain gently prodded her arm.

  “Where are we?” she asked sleepily.

  “We’ll be landing soon. Can you take over?”

  “I’m very tired,” she said in a slurred voice. “I don’t think I can …” She made an effort to move then slipped back. “You do it, Dave.”

  The radio buzzed. “How’a’ we doing, Bud?”

  “The name’s Dave,”

  “O.K., Bud … sorry, Dave. So, have ya got the pilot awake yet?”

  Bliss looked to his left, Owain was gently shaking Yolanda but she obviously wasn’t able to fly. “It’s O.K., leave her,” he said. “I can do it.”

  The American was getting impatient. “Davey, old Bud, are ya there? We’re approaching the glide path.”

  “I’ll have to land,” he said.

  Yolanda heard and mumbled “Just be gentle Dave. Slow and gentle.”

  “O.K., Bud. I’ll be right alongside ya. Just try to keep level with me. Start by throttling back.

  There were a few moments silence as the planes flew in tandem, the other pilot gave him an encouraging look. “O.K., Bud. We’ve got clearance to land.”

  Bliss felt a surge of adrenalin.

  “Are ya sure you understand the controls?” the American was saying as the blood started pounding in his temples. He recalled Yolanda’s instructions as his eyes scanned the instruments. “I think I’ll be alright,” he replied.

  “We’ve still gotta few more miles. Ask if you ain’t sure.”

  His anxiety level rose another notch and put a tremor in his voice, “No. No, I’m O.K.”

  “Right. Just follow me. Let’s go.”

  The pilot’s face sank slowly out of sight as he called, “C’m on down, Bud.” Bliss eased the control column forward, dipping the nose until the ground appeared to be rushing up at him. Instinctively he pulled back.

  “No, keep the nose down.”

  “I can’t…” he started.

  “Sure ya can, Bud. It’s just like parking a car.”

  “At a hundred miles an hour?”

  His pulse was racing off the scale, his voice almost a scream.

  Owain tried to calm him. “Dave, you can do it,” he said with as much control as he could muster. “And I think you’re right. We will stop them. Get us out of this alive and we’ll come up with the antidote.”

  The headphones were singing in his ears. “Slow down, Dave, slow down, slow down.”

  “Airport,” shouted Owain, straining to look out the front window and seeing the control tower in the distance.

  Yolanda stirred. Bliss caught the movement in the corner of his eye, but his inner relief was masked by a veneer of terror.

  “You’re still too high,” the other pilot was saying in his ear.

  He edged the stick forward in response and eased the throttles. “Get down. Get down,” a voice in his head was saying.

  “Lower, lower,” the American insisted.

  “Runway,” shrieked Owain, seeing the end of the tarmac strip rush beneath them.

  “Still too high,” shouted the American. “Abort! Abort! Abort! Power up.”

  Yolanda’s words came back to him. “Go around again, Dave.”

  Bliss resisted. He couldn’t do it again. His nerves wouldn’t stand it. With his teeth clamped together he hit the flaps. The plane dropped fifty feet and he felt the seat slam into his backside as they plunged onto the runway with a crunch that should have ripped off the undercarriage. The control column came alive, leaping and bucking in his hands, threatening to wrench itself free.

  “Throttle back, throttle back,” someone was shouting, but he couldn’t risk losing his grip on the stick.

  “Brake! Brake! Brake!”

  Yolanda’s words calmed him, “Gently, Dave. Take it easy.”

  A clump of buildings shot past in a blur.

  “Slow down you bastard,” he screamed as he fought with the brakes.

  “Gently, gently,” her voice urged, and he felt her feet taking some of the strain.

  “Throttle back!” the American screamed, his composure lost.

  “End of the runway,” yelled Owain.

  Yolanda’s voice pierced his overburdened mind. “Push the throttles back.”

  He pushed: Fast and hard. The engines roared in pain as the propeller blades were flung into reverse. A convoy of emergency vehicles poured into the plane’s slipstream as it screamed toward the end of the runway, careening from side to side, wings tilting dangerously, first one way then the other. Unread warning signs flashed past. Owain braced himself as a huge wooden crash barrier raced toward them. Bliss tried to force the brake pedal through the floor. Too late. The heavy plane shot off the end of the runway, smashed through the barrier and tried to shake itself to pieces as the wheels ploughed through a patch of gravel before being ripped off. Wheelless, the plane belly flopped, and skidded to a standstill in a spectacular shower of sparks.

  “Out! Out! Out!,” he cried, grabbing Yolanda and physically dragging her through the fuselage to the cargo hatch.

  A blanket of foam showered them as they tumbled out. Bliss was blinded, and he stumbled with Yolanda in his arms until someone grabbed him and guided him away.

  He laid her down gently and caught hold of the airport fireman’s arm. “Doctor,” he yelled. “Quick, get a doctor.”

  Several men came running, one of them was Owain, his face and hands brushed with streaks of blood.

  “I am medic,” said a man wearing a facemask, as he knelt beside Yolanda and sought her pulse, then he gently pried open an eyelid and looked deep into her eye. His face was genuinely sad as he turned to Bliss and slowly shook his head. “I am sorry, Sir.”

  chapter twenty

  It was raining in London, just as Detective Inspector Bliss had predicted. It was still only
7 a.m., and, a few miles north of the city, the wet streets of Watford were alive with the bustle of commuters. The daily routine of the General Hospital was well underway—lives beginning and ending. Trudy hovered somewhere between.

  Lisa McKenzie’s grasp on her daughter’s cold, flaccid hand had rarely been broken in the past four days, and, now she had something to cling to, the leg cramps no longer forced her to her feet. The excruciating pain was merely a welcome wake-up call whenever she dozed. Only the bathroom drew her away, then Peter would replace her and slide his daughter’s limp hand into his.

  Peter fingered the diamond-studded brooches the policeman had dropped into his hand the previous evening. “LeClarc wants Trudy to have these—reckoned they had something to do with ancient religions, but they look like Nazi swastikas to me,” he had said. “Apparently she left them in the house.” The rest of Roger’s tearful message went undelivered. “Tell her these are symbols of the Sun God, and symbols of my love for her—tell her I’m sorry, I never meant to hurt her.”

  “Oh! by the way,” the policeman had added as he turned to leave, “the Dutch have got the three blokes that picked LeClarc up in the North Sea.”

  Peter, totally oblivious to the circumstances of Roger’s plight, merely shrugged, “Good—give them a medal.”

  Peter had accepted the brooches absent-mindedly and signed for them in a daze. It was only after the policeman had departed he really thought about them. “I wonder where she got them?” he said to Lisa.

  “They must’ve been in his house. She never had them at home.”

  “Then why would he want Trudy to have them?”

  “Do you think they’re valuable?”

  “I would think so. They’re probably worth a lot, but I don’t know if I’d want Trudy to have his things after what he did to her.”

  Lisa looked at Peter from under her eyelids. “Well, he won’t need them where he’s going.”

  He understood and gave her a wink. “She can always sell them and buy herself something nice.”

  A slight tremor tingled through Trudy’s hand. Lisa felt it.

  “She moved,” Lisa said in a disbelieving tone, and glanced at her ex-husband. A few seconds later she felt it again. “There it is,” she said, a flood of excitement lifting her voice.

  Peter quickly leaned over his daughter’s bed. “Trudy, love, can you hear me?”

  “Her eyelids moved,” cried Lisa, although she wasn’t entirely sure.

  Peter tried again, this time watching her eyelids, “Can you hear me?”

  Her lips started to move, she was trying to say something. Lisa bent close and Trudy whispered, “I’m back, Mum.”

  “Did you hear that, Peter?”

  He had heard.

  “I’m not dreaming am I? Please tell me I’m not dreaming.”

  “You’re not dreaming, Lisa, Love,” he said quietly, lovingly.

  The words sank in slowly. She looked deep into his eyes, seeking confirmation and found it. “Come home, Peter, please,” she breathed. “Come home.”

  Peter’s answer would have been the affirmative but, before he could speak, the screech of an alarm pierced the air and brought a flurry of uniforms.

  Ten minutes later the doctor and nurses stood back from Trudy’s bed in resignation. Adolf Hitler’s final victim had succumbed; Trudy’s war was over. Now Roger LeClarc’s battle would begin.

  chapter twenty-one

  The guest-room assigned to Bliss at the NATO base wasn’t a cell. “Theoretically you can leave anytime you like,” Edwards had claimed, his tone giving Bliss as much comfort as knowing, in a pinch, he might find a worm hole to transport himself from one sector of the universe to another. He had no idea where he was and didn’t care. There was only one place he wanted to be—with Yolanda in their room at the Yesil Ev or anywhere else for that matter—anywhere before the plane crash. He closed his eyes in an effort to turn back the clock and escape from the memories of his last few seconds with Yolanda. But the memories, still fresh and raw, were cut so deep they would forever scar, and all he could see was her splayed figure laid out on the parched grass of the airfield as a dozen emergency vehicles skidded to a halt.

  “Give her oxygen,” he had demanded, physically dragging an ambulance driver from the cab of his vehicle.

  With barely a look at the lifeless figure, the military paramedic summed up the situation, “It is no use, Sir. She is dead.”

  An iron fist grabbed Bliss’ chest and squeezed hard. “Get out of the way,” he’d shouted, throwing the man to one side with a vicious elbow dig. “You,” he shouted to another, “quick—oxygen; heart massage. Are you stupid? Hurry up.”

  The ambulance man’s expression was a study in professional detachment as he started for the injured men who might benefit from his administrations. Bliss grabbed him roughly. “Give her oxygen,” he yelled, his face no more than an inch from the mans’. “Oxygen you cretin.” Then he searched frantically: Wouldn’t anybody help. People were still walking around … why didn’t they stop? Why was that fireman still spraying foam? One of the freed prisoners was having a pee, another was vomiting with shock; the flashing lights on the emergency vehicles were still spinning. She can’t be dead, he reasoned, the lights are still working. Then he pulled the gun and pointed it at the ambulance man. “Do something. Do something,” he screamed.

  One of the hard-faced men who’d flown in with Edwards swooped unseen, tackled him harshly to the ground and had a hypodermic in his backside, while Bliss was still wondering if the plane had exploded behind him. Then the lights went out.

  Bliss opened his eyes to the bright little room where he’d awoken once the sedative had worn off, and searched around for another box of Kleenex as the tears streamed. Giving up, he went to the tiny neat bathroom for toilet paper, and was still drying his face as Edwards slipped back in, uninvited.

  “What do you want?” Bliss sneered, turning away, even the pretence of politeness lost in the turmoil of grief.

  “Just a few words, Dave.”

  “You’ve had everything you’re getting out of me.”

  “I know it’s hard, but I would strongly advise you to do what you’re told, Inspector,” said Edwards, his iron fist barely concealed by a touch of compassion.

  “Get stuffed,” replied Bliss, but Edwards knew how to ratchet up the heat and quickly scattered a few sections from the Official Secrets Act in Bliss’ future, like a minefield. Failure to answer questions and any attempt to communicate information about C.I.D., he said, would bring instant incarceration—the kid gloves were off.

  “And this is not incarceration?” Bliss queried glibly, scanning the starkly furnished room, only to catch another rebuke. “Careful Inspector—you don’t realize how deep you’re getting.”

  He knew how deep; had seen enough tight-lipped shady men in loose fitting leather jackets to know he was way out of his depth. “What about LeClarc? How do you propose to keep him quiet?” asked Bliss with a sneer.

  Realising that Bliss was oblivious to LeClarc’s predicament, Edwards dropped his confrontational tone and became chatty. “You remember that house you were watching in Junction Road?”

  “Where LeClarc went morning and evening?”

  Edwards nodded. “What you didn’t know was that he had a sixteen-year-old bint locked in the basement. He’d kidnapped her.”

  “Dirty bastard,” mouthed Bliss.

  “Anyway, on the ship he twigged he was being followed; put two and two together—came up with five. Thinking you were about to nick him for kidnapping the girl, he hoisted his fat ass over the rail and clung on.” Edwards stopped for a quick laugh, adding, “He was so bloody heavy he lost his grip eventually and fell.”

  Bliss wasn’t in the mood to laugh, especially at the plight of a child abductor who’d caused him considerable personal grief. “No wonder I couldn’t find him,” he mused, realising immediately why the time of LeClarc’s disappearance hadn’t coincided with King’s account. Le
Clarc had been clinging to the rail for several minutes before dropping into the sea, at roughly the moment King released the life raft.

  “He just fell,” repeated Edwards, still bemused by the coincidence, “’cos he thought you were trying to catch him, when actually you were trying to save him.”

  “And what about the others?” asked Bliss, meaning the released computer experts, and having had enough about LeClarc.

  “They’ll be taken care of,” said Edwards, instantly losing his smile.

  “Taken care of,” parroted Bliss, thinking: That’s a Godfatherly euphemism if I ever heard one. And Yolanda—who’s taking care of her? Every mention of her had elicited an officially blank face. Funeral arrangements; personal possessions; the plane: her aging father; her son? Who would take care of the details?

  “Captain Jahnssen will deal with everything,” said Edwards, the Godfather again—but hadn’t he always been?

  Bliss’ enquiry about Nosmo King brought a different reaction.

  “What about him?” demanded Edwards through clamped swollen lips.

  Go for the jugular, thought Bliss, with a sudden feeling of overweening power. “He told me what you did to him.”

  “King’s a liar,” spat Edwards, reddening. “You know that. He even lied to you about LeClarc and Motsom.”

  “I would have lied to me in the circumstances— that proves nothing.”

  “He’s a villain, Dave—forget him. He’ll get what he deserves.”

  Not the O.B.E. for services rendered and a cushy job at the Home Office if Edwards has his way.

  “So I guess you’ve charged him with assault then,” said Bliss, suspecting that Edwards was close to exploding and hoping to push him.

  Edwards bristled, “It was an accident—as if it’s any of your damn business,” but he kept control.

  Deny, deny, deny, thought Bliss, realizing that Owain had been right: None of this would ever reach the courts, or the press and, if he wasn’t careful, none of them would ever reach home.