Department 18 [04] A Plague of Echoes

by Maynard Sims

  She shook herself. “Pull yourself together, Trudy,” she chided, added a spoonful of sugar to her coffee, stirred it and carried it through to the lounge.

  The man sitting on her red leather couch was in his early thirties, handsome with piercing blue eyes and lightly tanned skin. His hair was black, curling over the collar of his cream linen shirt and the smile revealed a row of even white teeth. “Hello, Trudy,” he said. “Hard day at the office?”

  Trudy froze in the doorway. “Who are you? How did you get in here?” She’d never seen the man before in her life.

  “Come in and sit down,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable. We have a lot to talk about.”

  Trudy took a deep breath to steady herself and then walked across to the phone and lifted the receiver. “You have until I count to three to get out of here, or I’ll phone the police.”

  The man smiled and pointed to the telephone lead. It lay in a white coil by the skirting board, unplugged from the wall.

  Trudy replaced the phone in its cradle. “If I scream, the neighbors will hear,” she said.

  “They would if they were in, but at the moment they’re probably just starting dessert at the Italian restaurant in Clerkenwell Road, so if I were you I’d save my breath. Come on, sit down and we’ll talk.” The man’s voice was mellow, seductive, with the hint of an Irish accent.

  The decision was instant, almost without thought. Dropping her coffee cup to the floor, she spun round and ran to the door. A step away from the hallway there was a small sound behind her and the woodwork of the doorframe beside her head splintered. Trudy froze and turned slowly to see the man, still sitting, still smiling, but clutched in his hand and aimed directly at her was an automatic pistol, fitted with a silencer. The barrel was smoking.

  “And there was I thinking you were going to be sensible. Now are you coming to sit down or shall I blow out your kneecap?” The voice was still mellow, gentle almost, but the eyes were cold and Trudy had no doubt that, if she didn’t do as she was told, he would show no hesitation in shooting her.

  “Don’t take too long to make up your mind. I’ve had a hell of an evening already.”

  Trudy turned back to the leather couch, took two paces and sat.

  “Better,” the man said. “Now, you’re probably wondering why I’m here.”

  Trudy didn’t trust herself to speak. Fear was worming its way through her mind. First Simon, and now her. It couldn’t be a coincidence. She nodded her head.

  “I thought you might be,” he said. “Trudy Banks, secretary to the Director in Chief of Department 18. Comes to work each day, gets her head down and minds her own business. Lets her diligence at her job do the talking for her. Except for today, Trudy. What was different about today?”

  She was silent, staring at her feet, avoiding the questioning eyes.

  “Well? I’m waiting.” His voice was still pleasant but there was an undertone of impatience.

  “Simon was attacked.”

  “Exactly. Simon Crozier was attacked and you took it upon yourself to hack into his personal computer files to see what he’d been working on. Very naughty.”

  She looked up at him sharply. “How do you know what I was looking at on the computer, unless…”

  His smile grew wider. He put the gun down on the seat next to him and took a slim, cell phone from his pocket. He hit the touch screen and it glowed into life. “It’s all here. Every folder you accessed, every file. Isn’t modern technology wonderful?”

  “Who do you work for?” Trudy said.

  “Ah,” he said. “You’re angry. I get that. I would be too if I thought that everything I did on my computer was being watched by a third party. But you’ll have to accept it, I’m afraid. You have no secrets from us. None at all.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  The man sighed. “Trudy Banks, forty-eight years old. Parents, Jean and Albert. You were brought up in North London. Enfield. Willow Road. You attended Enfield County School and left with seven O levels and three A’s. A bright girl, but your parents couldn’t afford to send you to university, so you got a job with the local council. From there you climbed, job after job, until you got a position as a typist at the Home Office. You applied to join Department 18 fifteen years ago and have been there ever since.”

  Trudy said nothing.

  The man continued. “Up until eighteen months ago you shared this flat with Eric Fletcher, until he left you for a woman barely out of her twenties. It hit you hard…”

  “All right! All right, that’s enough. I’m convinced. But why? Why does my life interest you?”

  “Because I like to know all about the people who work for me.”

  “Work for you? In your dreams.”

  The man sank back into the cushions of the couch and crossed his legs. He picked up the gun again and started turning it over and over in his hands. “You’re not even curious about the job I have for you?”

  “I have a job,” Trudy said defiantly.

  “And one that suits me down to the ground. You know the Department well, you have access to Crozier’s computer and, I’m sure, the rest of the network too. So it should be easy to get access to files and pass them on or, in the case of the files on Alvar Liscombe, destroy them.”

  “Destroy them? Why?”

  The man tapped the side of his nose. “Reasons.”

  Trudy thought for a moment. “If you’re so bloody clever that you can hack in to my computer, why can’t you destroy the files yourself?”

  “Oh, didn’t I say? I have. I wiped them as soon as you and I finished looking at them. Digital files are easy. Why people put so much faith in them I’ll never know.” He paused, spun the gun again. “The problem is paper. The paper duplicates of the computer files the Department has stashed away somewhere. The paperless office is a myth, especially for government departments. No, the hard copies will be somewhere, and it’s now your job to find those copies and destroy them. I suggest the archive as a probable starting point.”

  “I won’t do it. You can’t make me.”

  The man almost winced. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” He got to his feet, stuck the gun into the waistband of his jeans and crossed to a bookcase in the corner of the room. Along with the untidy piles of modern novels and syrupy romances were a group of photographs in disparate frames. He took one from the shelf and spent a few seconds studying it. Trudy saw which photograph it was and her blood ran cold. It was a portrait shot of her niece, Angela, her sister’s daughter, taken on her eighteenth birthday just over a year ago.

  “Angela. A pretty girl,” he said, almost to himself. “And talented too. She’s a gifted pianist, I understand; studying at the Guildhall School of Music, and getting distinctions in all her classes.” He turned to Trudy and smiled, flashing his perfectly even teeth. “It would be such a shame if there were an accident. Imagine this: a knife slips as she prepares food and severs the tendons in her fingers beyond repair. Or maybe she falls through a plate glass window and puts out her hands to save herself. Think of the damage. She might never be able to play the piano again.” He paused and sighed. “She’s going to have to be very careful to avoid such things.”

  “You bastard!” Trudy said, getting the implication instantly.

  “Accidents happen,” the man said and replaced the photograph on the bookshelf. “Now, what were we talking about? Ah, yes, the job you’re going to do for me.”

  Chapter Six

  McKinley, Bailey and Jane sat in the lounge of McKinley’s Holborn apartment. The décor was minimal, as was the furniture. Bailey was sitting astride a hard wooden chair; McKinley was sprawled in a threadbare armchair whilst Jane Talbot was sitting cross-legged on a small oval rug in the centre of the wooden floor. There was a computer on a small desk in the corner of the room together with a cheap, folding chair. There was no te
levision, but in the corner was a mini hi-fi set up, surrounded by low piles of CDs. From where Bailey sat he could see some of the titles: Mozart, Nirvana, Alison Krauss and Miles Davis. An eclectic mix and not at all what Bailey expected…well, maybe the Miles Davis.

  “So what do you think Tyler will do?” Jane asked him.

  “She’ll pass it up the line to the Chief Superintendent who will then pass it on up to his boss, and he in turn will follow the instructions given to him by the Home Office,” Bailey said.

  “And release Mae Middleton?”

  “I expect so. I’ve no idea what Bates’s final instructions will be, but I suspect that will be the gist of it.” Francis Bates was the Home Secretary and, since his appointment to the post in a Cabinet reshuffle six months ago, had proved to be a staunch ally of Department 18 in government. “Bates will kill the news story, they’ll ship Mae Middleton off to a hospital somewhere and everything will be handled very discreetly.”

  “I can’t imagine Howard Middleton being very discreet,” McKinley said. “And I should think the death of that young solicitor will take some explaining.” He was sucking an ice cube, the only refreshment in the entire apartment apart from water from the tap. Through choice McKinley lived an austere lifestyle; he preferred the simplicity of it. Bailey and Jane had been here before, knew the score and had the foresight to buy a six-pack of San Pellegrino at a twenty-four-hour Tesco on the way over here. Now both of them sat swigging sparkling mineral water from green plastic bottles.

  “At the end of the day Middleton’s a business man,” Bailey said. “He’ll play ball. And as far as Fiona Meredith is concerned, a cover story has already surfaced. A head-on smash with an articulated lorry.”

  “So is this now officially Department business?” Jane asked.

  “Yes,” Bailey said. “It’s our baby now.”

  “Then I suggest we get a good night’s sleep,” McKinley said. “We’ll see how things look in the morning.”

  Carter was having a last cigarette before turning in for the night, when the intercom buzzed.

  “Hello,”

  “It’s me, Rob,” Jane said.

  Carter hit the button. Thirty seconds later she was stepping out of the lift.

  He held the door open wide. “I didn’t expect to see you again tonight,” he said.

  “There was a death at the police station. A solicitor called Fiona Meredith.” She walked past him into the flat and kicked off her shoes.

  “How?”

  “Mae Middleton again. Literally tore her apart. Possessed of course. In her normal state she’d have barely enough strength to ruffle the girl’s hair.”

  “Girl? Young then.”

  “About my age—maybe a few years younger—with her whole career ahead of her.”

  Carter went across to the Ikea sideboard, pulled open a door and took out bottle of brandy and two glasses. He poured a generous measure in each of them.

  “Here, drink this.”

  She took the balloon glass from him and took a mouthful of the smooth spirit, letting it trickle down her throat and feeling the warm glow spread through her stomach. Sitting down on the couch, she emptied the glass and held it out to him. He brought the bottle across and poured another shot. This time she didn’t drink it but sat, warming the glass in her hands. “Why am I here, Rob?” she said.

  He sat down in the armchair opposite her. “You expect me to answer that?”

  “Not really,” she said, staring down into her glass, as if all the answers she needed were swilling about in the amber liquid. “Harry took me back to Whitehall to pick up my car, and instead of driving home I came here. Why was that?”

  “Unfinished business perhaps?”

  “I think it was seeing what happened to Fiona Meredith. One minute she was a bright, confident young woman with everything to live for, and the next she was a bloody heap in the corner of a dingy room, all that life, that vitality just snuffed out.”

  “It’s not the first time you’ve witnessed violent death, Jane,” Carter said. “And I don’t suppose it will be your last.”

  “And that’s the point,” she said, suddenly leaning forward in her seat and slopping the brandy over the rim of the glass. “I don’t want to witness any more death, violent or otherwise. I want to live my life free of all that. I want to watch the girls grow up and revel in it, without the constant, nagging thought that, with every case we take on, I could end up like Fiona Meredith.”

  Carter said nothing, because there was nothing to say. He understood how Jane was feeling. He’d been to that place himself a number of times during the past few years.

  Jane put down the glass on the coffee table and stared across at him. “Make love to me,” she said.

  Carter took her hand and led her through to the bedroom.

  The Irishman stripped off his clothes and dived into the deep end of the pool. The water was warm and relaxing, clinging to his skin and easing the tension from his muscles. He swam six laps quickly, and then contented himself by swimming lazy circles, with his eyes half closed and fifteen feet of water beneath him.

  He heard the click of the door opening, carried on swimming, but now his eyes were open wide and he was alert.

  “I was expecting a phone call, O’Brien,” a voice said.

  “Oh? And why would that be? I wasn’t aware that my brief included reporting to you.” He continued to swim, not looking up at the speaker. There was no need. There would be three of them, two of them looking like apes in cheap, badly fitting suits. The other one, the one who had spoken to him, was a man called Leon Sultan, and he would be altogether more elegantly dressed, Armani or Paul Smith, his dyed brown hair crisply cut, the condescending look in his eyes almost a trademark now. He carried an ebony cane with a gold handle that some said was a swordstick. Supposedly inside the ebony shaft was thirty inches of razor sharp Japanese steel.

  O’Brien had no reason to doubt it and couldn’t be bothered to prove it one way or another. Despite the man’s suave manner, Michael O’Brien was in no doubt that Sultan was a killer through and through. He shouldn’t really antagonize him, they were on the same side after all, but sometimes…well, sometimes he just couldn’t help himself.

  “How did it go with the Banks woman?”

  “Well. It went well,” O’Brien said and rolled onto his back, floating in the water, just using his feet to propel his naked body slowly to the shallow end.

  “Define well.”

  “She agreed to the task. The files will be destroyed.” He climbed from the pool and wrapped himself in a large, white cotton towel. He was right about there being three of them. Leon Sultan’s henchmen would not have been out of place standing guard outside a sleazy Soho nightspot. Their faces were impassive but their eyes were watchful. O’Brien grinned at them but, as he reached for his jacket, one of the apes stepped forward, blocking his path.

  O’Brien turned to Sultan. “Tell your man to get out of my way, Leon, or I’ll have to damage him.”

  The ape smirked and didn’t move.

  “Don’t be a bloody fool, Karl. Let him pass. I really don’t need to spend the next few hours in A & E, especially at this time of night.”

  The smirk dropped from the ape’s face to be replaced by a look of surly resentment.

  O’Brien pushed past him, retrieved his jacket and took out a packet of cigarettes and lighter from one of the pockets. He eased one from the pack and lit it, blowing smoke up into the rafters of the pool room. He put the pack and lighter back into the jacket.

  “So tell me,” Sultan said. “How will you know when she’s completed the task? You should have told her to bring the files to us. We could have destroyed them ourselves, burnt them.”

  “Much easier to let her do the burning though, rather than her trying to smuggle them out of the building, don’t you think? I’ll kno
w when they’re destroyed. Trust me.”

  “That’s a big ask, Michael.”

  O’Brien’s eyes glittered with humor. “You really don’t like me, do you, Leon?”

  “That’s irrelevant,” Sultan said calmly. “The important thing is that Mr. Schroeder trusts you, trusts you to get the job done. Though why, after the debacle with Crozier and the mess you left at the police station, I don’t understand.”

  The humor dropped from O’Brien’s eyes. “I was in control.”

  “That’s an interesting perspective. Crozier’s still alive, and yet you ripped Fiona Meredith, an innocent in all this, to shreds. I’m sure Mr. Schroeder will be fascinated when he hears your explanation, assuming you have an explanation.”

  “Crozier might not be dead, but he’s out of the game…at least he will be after tonight. And the solicitor annoyed me. She kept asking asinine questions so I shut her up. Have you got a problem with that?”

  Sultan shrugged. “I haven’t, but then I’m not paying your salary, Mr. Schroeder is.”

  “Then he can take it up with me.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he will…in time.” A smirk appeared on Sultan’s face.

  O’Brien wanted to smash it off. He took a deep breath and tried to keep himself under control. “Was there anything else?” he said through clenched teeth.

  “Only to say that you, like the rest of us, are not indispensible. It’s worth remembering that.”

  “Well, I’ll bear that little nugget of information in mind.” O’Brien stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray, dropped the towel, and padded naked across the tiles to the edge of the pool. “Now, fuck off and take your goons with you.” Without a backward glance he dived into the water again.