Chameleon - A City of London Thriller

by J Jackson Bentley

  The ancient premises were reputed to be the only building on the Strand to have survived the Great Fire of London. Built in 1625, number 230 was the home of the Gatekeeper of Temple Bar who, it is said, unwittingly began the catering tradition at this site by offering “a penn’orth of meat and bread” to the crowds who used to gather at the Temple Gate. Even now, the Outer Temple Building is just a few metres away along the Strand in the direction of Trafalgar Square.

  The last time Dee had been in the disreputable old pub it had a roaring fire and the snug feel of an old inn. It was the sort of place where you wouldn’t have been surprised if someone came and sat down opposite you wearing a frock coat and nodded a greeting with a head covered by a powdered wig.

  Today, whilst some character had been retained, the Thai Square Restaurant which now occupied the old building was bright, fresh and modern; everything that the old Wig and Pen was not.

  The pair sat down and ordered from the menu. The food looked good, the service was attentive and, for London, the prices were very reasonable. Whilst Dee waited for her Dim Sum and sparkling water to arrive she kept her eye on the door.

  A waiter appeared with her drink and her starter. He also brought out a Tiger Beer and a Chicken Satay for her lunch companion. As they were finishing their appetisers the door opened and in walked Norris Boyle, the ex policeman who had taken a bullet last year whilst trying to save Dee. He looked thinner and there was a pained look on his face. After an apparently nonchalant perusal of the clientele, he wandered over to their table.

  Dee stood and hugged the MI5 man, showing the kind of camaraderie that can only be cemented by being shot by the same gun. Boyle was taken aback by the show of affection, but nonetheless returned the hug heartily.

  “Miss Conrad, you look great. The last time we met neither of us were at our best.” He smiled and then grimaced.

  “Sorry. The bullet I took caused some intestinal damage and the cold weather seems to set it off. They reckon it’ll heal eventually. I bloody well hope so. I’m getting rather tired of bland food and Complan.”

  Dee moved across the bench seat and Boyle slipped in beside her. He nodded to the waiter and silently mouthed ‘the usual’ before leaning over the table and taking DS Scott’s last stick of Satay Chicken. Dipping it into the peanut sauce, he added unnecessarily, “You don’t mind, do you Paul? It’s one of the few things I can eat these days.” DS Scott clearly did mind, but he smiled anyway. His ex colleague had earned a lot of brownie points with the DS when he was on the job.

  ***

  Dee was eagerly tucking into a dish listed as ‘weeping tiger’, sirloin beef with a rich North Eastern Thai sauce on steamed rice, when Norrie interrupted his attack on the Lamb with black pepper on noodles, to speak in hushed tones.

  “I don’t like murderers getting off scot free, so I’m going to give you a leg up on your investigation.” He scooped a forkful of lamb and noodles into his mouth and chewed slowly, clearly savouring the taste. Downing a good mouthful of the house red, he continued.

  “Shouldn’t really, you know. Red wine is one of the worst things for my stomach. Anyway, let me tell you a story.” The MI5 man finished the last mouthful of food, set down his cutlery and placed his elbows on the table. He leaned in and spoke quietly, conspiratorially even.

  “MI5 and MI6 are widely misunderstood, mainly because of the films and TV series that show spies in a very adventurous light. Not so in reality. Over ninety per cent of our people are desk bound, here or abroad. They gather information, analyse it and decide if there is any threat to us, or to our allies.

  I wouldn’t say this to anyone else but it’s all a bit of a sham, really. The mystique and the fiction surrounding Five and Six help us to maintain our budgets and give the impression that our spooks have their hand on the tiller. We keep our jobs by persuading the country that we are all safe as long as the security services are keeping the terrorists at bay. I have no idea why the public believe it. We couldn’t even control the IRA during the 1970s, and there were only a handful of them just across the Irish Sea.

  Truth is, we usually find out about terror threats and terrorist acts on CNN or Sky News, same as you. We had four guys, full time, running contacts in Eastern Europe, shelling out bribes to get the specifications of the Ukrainian Hand Held Rocket launchers sought after by Al Qaeda. They came up with nothing. Last August, an edition of Jane’s Defence Weekly published the full specs, capability and weaknesses. We now have an annual subscription that gives us all fifty two copies a year for a hundred and ninety six quid.

  Don’t get me wrong. Five do a good job, but we have a handful of analysts. Jane’s alone have a hundred and thirty correspondents around the world. CNN, Fox, Sky and BBC News have thousands. If we’re being realistic, who is likely to get the news first?”

  Dee couldn’t work out whether she felt any more or less safe after hearing Boyle’s rant.

  “For your information. Miss AD 34792, does not exist. Neither the initial nor the number relate to any individual in our employment, past or present.”

  Both Dee and Scott looked puzzled. Either Boyle was lying, or, the MI5 email was nonsense.

  “AD is code for ‘avoid disclosure’ and 34792 is the finance code for funds spent under the ‘special operations’ budget. The Special Operation Group was disbanded when the Labour Government realised they would not be getting back in.

  The partial fingerprint you found probably belongs to Gillian Davis, formerly Special Operations, UK and Europe. She was predominantly a field operative and her file is marked ‘HVA-S/O’. Before you ask, it stands for High Value Asset – Strategic Control/ Offensive.”

  “Are we talking a Licence to kill? Did she have a 00 rating?” DS Scott joked. Boyle wasn’t amused.

  “Paul, Dee – I’m being serious here. In essence, High Value Assets are used to carry out assignments that save British or Allied lives. They may take out the charismatic head of a terrorist organisation, hoping that it can’t function without his military or religious leadership. If they’re right, then numerous squaddies’ lives can be saved because close engagement with that group never becomes necessary.

  Your suspect, Gillian Davis, was strategically controlled whilst in the service; that means that someone handled her, someone from very high up in the command structure. That someone must have had the power to order her to act offensively on behalf of the UK government. Then, once ordered, she was free to kill or maim personnel and destroy enemy assets or reputations at her discretion.

  She could not, however, decide her own targets. An HVA-S/O who picked their own target or ignored orders would be severely disciplined and may well not make it home.”

  There had been a lot to take in. Dee had promised herself a dessert, but now didn’t feel in the mood.

  “How sure are we that the print belongs to this Gillian Davis?” she asked.

  “Well, the partial print alone will convict no-one; it has fewer points of comparison than we need to convince a judge. But add that to the fact that your man was taken down by a very professional female with a rare chemical or venom of some kind - typical spook behaviour, by the way - and you have Gillian Davis.”

  “Has she used this method of killing before?” DS Scott wondered out loud.

  “Possibly. The opposition don’t usually send us post mortem results. But a quick look at her profile might help.”

  Boyle reached into his inside pocket and withdrew a sheet of A4 paper, folded into three. He unfolded it to reveal the black and white picture of a pretty fair-haired girl and lines of closely printed text.

  Dee and Paul Scott read the sheet together, each holding one side of the paper.

  “Hell’s teeth, you’re good, Boyle. You need to get back to the Met. We need guys like you. She has a BSc. in Chemistry, with honours, no less, and a Masters in Forensic Chemistry! So, we let a pretty young chemist loose on the world’s bad guys. Man, the glass ceiling is well and truly shattered. It’s equal opportuni
ties for all at MI5.”

  “It does look damning,” Dee contributed. “But what will you do if the police pick her up and her bosses start looking for the leak?”

  “Don’t sweat it, Dee. Her former boss - let’s just call him Barry - heads up internal investigations and he couldn’t find a leak in his own underpants. He fell from grace just before they shut down the special operations team. It seems that he authorised the destabilisation of that guy,” - he pointed to a picture on the front page of the Times - “when he was running for his party’s nomination.” The picture portrayed an imposing African American man shaking hands with the Chinese Prime Minister, whilst standing at the White House Podium in front of the Stars and Stripes.

  Dee and DS Scott uttered the same expletive in unison.

  ***

  It was late in the evening when DS Scott finally returned Dee’s call, which he had promised he would as they left the restaurant.

  “Dee, the address we have on file for Davis is useless. The local constabulary say that it’s a former gamekeeper’s lodge in the grounds of a big house near Basingstoke in Hampshire. There are dozens of people called Gillian Davis around the country, and Facebook lists forty-six in London alone, none of whom look like our girl. I’m sure we’ll find her, but it may take some time.”

  “OK, Paul. Let’s just hope we find her before MI5 do, otherwise she’ll never see the witness box. The likelihood is that she will find herself in a box of the terminally enclosed kind.”

  “You’re probably right about that. We’ll work as fast as we can, but if your computer genius - what’s his name?”

  “Simon?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. Simon. If Simon can work his database magic while we’re doing the legwork it would really help.”

  “OK, Paul. He’s on the case as of now!”

  ***

  Simon left Dee’s office with his instructions. There would be hundreds of women named Gillian Davis around the country, but it was likely that he would find only one with her qualifications and skills, and only one with her stunning good looks.

  He sat down at his console and ordered in pizza. He would work through the night, grabbing what sleep he could in one of the office sleeping pods at the end of the corridor.

  Simon looked like a geek, but a smartly dressed geek. Vastrick had standards that applied to all, even the oddball IT types. Simon had a degree and several other qualifications that suggested he could make any computer sing and dance or recite a soliloquy of one’s choosing. That description was not too far from the truth. The young analyst typed in the name Gillian Davis, and ran his first combined high-level search which interrogated the White Pages, the Electoral Rolls and the Registers of Births and Marriages. His enquiry returned over two hundred premium results. These were women of all ages who matched the input data exactly.

  Simon clicked on the left hand bar of the results page and typed in Gillian Davis’ age, then ticked the box +/- 5 years. The results were instant, and the list narrowed to twenty-three premium results.

  He was just five minutes into his ‘overnight’ search when he clicked on ‘show only results with photos’.

  There were only five results, but he was quite certain that the person he was looking for was showing at number one. Just to make sure, he clicked on the hyperlink. It was her; there was no doubt in his mind. Gillian Davis MD of Celebrato Cards was shown receiving the Young Business Leader of the Year award at the London Chambers of Commerce dinner in 2008, and the photograph captured the same alluring face he had seen on the black and white print which Norrie Boyle had supplied.

  In another twenty minutes the young analyst had found another six photos of the suspect, including one of her being awarded a Prize for Chemistry, along with an old press article from the Times, explaining that the British Olympic Committee had ruled the young Gillian Davis out of the National Rifle Team due to a recurrent shoulder injury.

  Simon hoped that Dee had not left for home. He had taken less than thirty minutes to do what Dee had thought would take a day. In forensic computing you got lucky occasionally, finding the right data at first pass rather than at the hundred and first pass. It was a bit of a fluke, really, but Simon wouldn’t be telling his boss that.

  Chapter 29

  The Aldwych, London. Tuesday 9:40am

  Tim used his usual method of accessing the disused tube station, entering via the Aldwych before descending down a narrow, and seriously claustrophobic, steel staircase. At the bottom of the stairs lay a small passageway, around two metres in length, leading to an old wooden door. The staircase and passageway were only just wide enough to accommodate a well-built individual; anyone seriously overweight would be likely to become stuck.

  The old wooden door had a modern lock to which Tim had a key. He opened the door and, before stepping down onto the track, he looked to make sure that the safety bar was in place. Without that bar the third and fourth rail would be live. Unlike other railway systems, the London Underground has four rails. The first and second are in the lines or tracks which carry the trains. The third rail is next to and above the rail, and carries a direct positive current of four hundred and twenty volts. The fourth rail is laid between the tracks and carries the returning current of negative two hundred and ten volts DC. Together these lines give six hundred and thirty volts of traction. The third rail is a real risk to anyone walking in the tunnel if it is live, and most engineers walk down the tracks to avoid it, even when they know it isn’t energised.

  To add to the risk, this old section of the Piccadilly Line had a cast iron lining, rather than the concrete lining of later tunnels. Naturally, electricity will pass into and along cast iron, given the chance. Because a continuing charge in the cast iron lining is dangerous and because it would lead to corrosion, the third rail is placed sufficiently far away from the lining to prevent any chance of the walls becoming live.

  Tim had no need to worry about all of this because the safety bar was in place, cutting off the electricity to this section of the tunnel. He wouldn’t have been tempted to use this route if that had not been the case; one minor slip on the track bed and he might easily make contact with the third rail, which carries more kick than the electric chair used for executions in the USA.

  The agent walked toward the lights which illuminated the most recently abandoned platform, sporting the traditional underground plaque of a red ring split in two by a horizontal blue line bearing the single word ALDWYCH. The lighting here was not particularly bright, as the platform was lit for emergency use only, but it was enough to allow him to see what he was doing. As he climbed onto the platform he looked around. It was like entering a time capsule. Although this platform had closed to the public in 1994, it had been earmarked for closure for so long that it had not been considered for a full refurbishment since the commencement of the Second World War, which was good news for various filmmakers who had used it on occasion when they required the backdrop of an old wartime tube station for their latest drama.

  Tim climbed half a dozen wide tiled steps leading to a tiled circular tunnel that served as a corridor to the lower lift lobby. He walked a few yards along the shadowy corridor until he could see the two unused lift shafts, their gates welded closed, and the spiral staircase leading up to the entrance lobby. To his left he observed a dark passageway, which ran in a left hand curve for a hundred meters before literally hitting a brick wall. Beyond that brick wall lay the original parallel platform which had opened in 1895 and closed just a few years later in 1917 due to lack of patronage. The platform, which bore the station name of STRAND on its underground sign, had been reopened briefly during World War Two to provide safe shelter for the City’s artworks and its people, but as Tim passed the entrance to the dark chamber he calculated that it had been resealed for over sixty five years. Since 1946 there had been only one access point to the abandoned Strand Station platform, and that was via the cover of the unused lift shaft in the ground level lobby. The tactical support
teams who used the station platform, abandoned in 1994, for anti terrorist training would often compete to see who could rappel to the 1917 platform and climb back to ground level quickest. MI5 and the SAS won the unofficial competition, with the occasional policeman or emergency responder coming a close second. Back in 2002 Tim had managed the seventy-foot descent and climb in just over five minutes, way behind the record. He shivered as he recalled the fetid, damp odour of the platform, the cloying darkness, and the instant claustrophobia of knowing all exits were sealed. It would make for an eerie and uninviting tomb.

  Before ascending the spiral staircase, Tim braced himself, then took out his military issue Browning Hi Power pistol and double-checked that it was ready for use. He would be sorry to see the old girl go. In a month or so the familiar Browning Hi Powers were due to be replaced with modern Glocks. Satisfied that he was ready for the task ahead, both mentally and physically, he began the long climb to ground level.

  ***

  Gil knew that this would be her last meeting with Tim. She was certain that her association with the service was coming to an end, and that meant only one thing; Tim was coming to serve a ‘D notice’. Of course, there was still a remote possibility that they would pay her fee and bid her a fond farewell, but if that was their intention, why the meet? Why bring cash to an abandoned tube station? In the past she had been paid discreetly through nominee accounts. The amounts transferred to her would usually be listed as ‘commission’ from companies with names such as Thames House Consulting, Riverview Personnel and Special Projects International Inc.

  Gil didn’t like it; the Chameleon was usually the hunter, not the hunted. She knew very well that if a ‘D notice’ had been issued, then her former employers would not stop looking for her until either she was found, or until they were sure she was dead, hence her extreme precautions. In her heart she knew that the Chameleon had to retire, but only from work, not from life.

  The cold winter air was freezing Gil’s bones, even though she was huddled under a thick coat and was wearing lined leather gloves. Nevertheless, she stood where she could see Aldwych House and the innocuous door that allowed entry to the deserted underground station. A full thirty minutes before the meeting was due to begin, Tim arrived, looked around and unlocked the door before covertly looking around once more. He was certainly not carrying a quarter of a million pounds in cash, but he was carrying a gun. Although it was concealed beneath his winter coat, he made the novice’s mistake of patting it through his coat to be sure it was still there.