by Hylton Smith
*
It had been a very long day for Jack Renton and yet he arrived for dinner in good spirits. Daniel came to the door and embraced his Dad, while Jane said she would begin serving up the home-made Moussaka. He was surprised at their level of interest in the Banks case. They had never shown this type of curiosity when he had lived there. He put it down to them personally knowing Ben Adams and that it could so easily have been himself lying in hospital. He indulged their questions without compromising information not yet in the public domain. It was really an embroidered version of what had already been on the news. He did not want the evening to end but was in serious sleep deficit and got up to leave. He was pushed back into his seat by Daniel.
“I’m sleeping on the sofa tonight, so you can have my room.” He was taken aback and looked at Jane while asking if she was happy about that arrangement.
“It was her idea Dad; you don’t really think I would give up my space without a fight.” He thanked them both and said he would sleep well.
Chapter 17
Tuesday November 13th 2018
Simon Halliwell-Jones’ career had benefitted massively by being a product of Eton. One such example was the assistance it generated in his scaling of the ranks of H.M. Intelligence. He had the main attributes deemed necessary to reach the very top of the pyramid, including the ability to cope with all manner of adversity, emanating from leaks. Burying the truth was also part of his perceived armoury. A colossal hereditary ego was a great asset in spinning or selling the alternative truth. Today was however not a situation he relished, as it had the more tricky challenge of appearing to be subservient to the Prime Minister, when he actually considered him to be lacking the subtlety of the people with whom he interacted on a daily basis. After all, Patrick Carlyle often had to communicate directly with the populace, an activity which was destined to corrupt, unlike absolute power.
“Prime Minister, good morning to you, I am sorry to take up your time over an item with which you should not be overly concerned at present. It is felt to be prudent however, that you know we are ahead of the curve, and I fervently hope that I will not have to trouble you further after today, until we run the quarry to ground. We have credible evidence of a cell in the Midwest which is working on a terror threat. The trail goes back to Iran, so you will appreciate the need for containment. Now that you know we have it under control, you can relax in the confidence which mirrors our own, in that we will have flushed out the threat without the genie getting out of the bottle. When we have neutralised it I will brief you fully, and that explanation will justify our current position.”
The P.M. knew that there were things he should not know too early, but this was more worrying than the disappearance of the Genetic Profile Directory, it involved a maverick nation with a poor track record in diplomacy.
“Thank you Simon, I will call you in a couple of weeks. Having travelled all the way across the city to tell me this in person it would be discourteous of me not to take it seriously.” Halliwell-Jones was preparing to contest this when the P.M. put an arm around his shoulder and walked him to the door. “In a fortnight then.”
*
As the Mercedes rolled off the ferry and they made their way to the eastbound motorway toward Arnhem, Parrish asked, “Do you know the address of this woman in Bonn?”
“Not personally, but we are going to pick up someone who does. I suppose I could have asked the German police, but I didn’t want to make her nervous. This man I have recruited will meet us at a service station on the other side of Oberhausen, the name of which is on this piece of paper.”
Parrish became curious. “Is he a private detective or something?”
“No, nothing so sinister Martin, he is a journalist. He works for one of the smaller daily publications and jumped at the chance of an exclusive. He will of course pose as my business advisor.”
“Well, you have been busy. Are you sure this is wise? Whoever killed Alistair either wanted something or wanted to prevent something, at least that’s my reading of the situation. You say that you are looking for his briefcase, and that could be the same objective with Harry. When the two of them called the pilot after the match to say they weren’t flying back, I recall them telling the rest of us, as we split up to go shopping for our peace offerings, that they were going to retrieve the briefcase from the airport lockup. As it has disappeared there can only be a few explanations. One of them is that these people killed Alistair in order to get it. Please be careful Vivienne.”
“Yes I know I have to be cautious Martin, but it bothers me that he went to the airport with Harry to retrieve the briefcase, yet phoned the pilot to let him know he shouldn’t expect them to arrive. Why didn’t he and Harry just pass the message on through the three of you, or speak to the pilot at the airport when they got there, especially as we now know they were booked on a flight to Cologne? And don’t you think it’s strange that they booked the flight to Germany without telling me, you, or the pilot that this was their plan?”
“Oh right, I see why you are confused. Alistair’s plane was flying in and out of Stansted, but the Cologne flight was from Heathrow. And he probably wanted to let the pilot know as soon as he could so he could alter the paperwork, fuel load, and stuff like that. However this does suggest that he’d always known he was going to Germany, and waited until the last possible moment to disclose his intent. Also, they were giving themselves a hell of a tight schedule to get to Stansted then get intercepted, yet Harry still made it to Cologne. The police have still not said for definite where and when they think Alistair was killed.”
“Yes, somebody made it to Cologne, and then went through immigration as Harry, but we only have his wife’s word that it was really him. That’s why we need to talk to her. You have raised another possibility Martin, because of this tight schedule. If they knew from the start that they were going on to Cologne, why would they leave the precious briefcase at Stansted? That’s a sloppy arrangement, and Alistair was meticulous about such detail. Maybe the briefcase was somewhere else. If he didn’t want me, you or anyone else to know of the German trip, he would probably have tried to avoid you asking him why he was taking it at all. Maybe they never went back to Stansted.”
“This all makes perfect sense to me now, but I can confirm he did have it with him. I know he had it on the flight to London. The rest of us had disposable bags for waterproof jackets and stuff, and we ribbed him about always being the poser, with his designer accessories. He laughed it off and said he was going to wrap up warm in his North Face Jacket before we went into the ground. It comes back to me now, he said, ‘You don’t think I am going to pull an exclusive jacket out of a plastic supermarket bag like you Philistines, do you?’ That’s why he said he was going to check the presumed empty briefcase into the airport lock-up. We all retrieved our stuff together on landing. When we were inside the terminal it gets a bit fuzzy, because there were toilet visits, newspaper browsing, throat lozenges for the match, mobile calls, and checking to see that our driver had arrived to take us to the Emirates Stadium. Jesus! That could have been it. Alistair went outside to find the guy because he had the booking slip. He was away maybe ten minutes. Now that I think back, when we got near the ground, the driver dropped us at a tidy little bistro for lunch. It didn’t seem important at the time but the driver went there without being told to during the journey. When we left the airport Alistair didn’t have the briefcase with him. We had all downed a couple of drinks with our lunch, and exchanged banter with a couple of Arsenal fans, and in anticipating the build-up to the game inside the stadium, we never gave the briefcase another thought, until we knew he had died. He gave the driver a very generous tip, and now I wonder if he also arranged to meet him after the game when we had split up.”
“Do you think you should mention this to the police?”
“Yes, let’s do it as soon as we get back.”
*
The Home Secretary was getting more nervous by the day. Ch
en had been working almost around the clock and had covered less than two percent of the fragments. He had devised a programme into which he could feed a restored fragment, so that it would automatically seek a match-up with another fragment, whether or not it was another restored one. He had only one such restored type at present and there were no matches to any unrestored ones. Lawrence Morton had a scheduled meeting with the P.M. soon and he felt he had to report some progress. Chen was ultra-confident that he would succeed; it was just a question of when.
“Yes, I understand that Wah, but we don’t have the luxury of unlimited time. I know you are doing everything you can.” Chen brightened Morton’s outlook a little by bombarding him with a statistical probability chart.
“You see, the first fragment is always likely to be the most elusive. As more are found the probability of finding more increases and reaches an exponential rate. When we find and restore new fragments it also reduces the number with which they can be compatible, and the diagnostics become much more efficient.”
“Yes I see, well I don’t actually. However I will keep checking with you on an increasing frequency. That is not only related to your explanation but also to my credibility with the Cabinet.”
“Mr Morton, look at it this way. We have a few needles in a giant haystack. Because of my search programme, when we find one we also make irrelevant parts of the haystack disappear. So, after perhaps five to ten are isolated, they alter the search process dramatically and the haystack is decimated as a consequence. Ask me again tomorrow.”
*
Renton arrived at the office and peered over Stephanie’s shoulder. He saw a chart, and scribbles on another piece of paper.
Name-Location-Employment-Faith-Date of Death
Alistair Banks - Angel of the North - Company Owner – None - Mon 5th Nov
Younis Khan – Old Hospital (Lon) - Ex-Doctor – Muslim - Wed 7th Nov
Nisha Servil - Tower Bridge - (Lon) - Thames Water – Muslim - Fri 9th Nov
Purdil Pitafi - Newcastle March – Solicitor – Muslim - Sat 10th Nov
Mohammed Barek - Derwent Reservoir - North Water – Muslim - Mon 12th Nov
“What’s troubling you Steph?”
“You said you thought we were being steered in some way by the killer, and I’ve been trying to make it all fit. It seems logical in one way to take Pitafi out of the pattern. Unlike the others, he was killed exactly where he was found, and on camera. On the other hand, he was targeted through his car, and in that way he was connected to Banks’ death.”
“Go on, I’m with you so far.”
“Looking at it a third way, they’re all Muslims except Banks. Now, coming back to my initial idea about location, three of them are connected by their profession and where they were found. I can’t make it all fit neatly, although there is another aspect we should not discount – the dates.”
“Uh-huh, you mean we already have two at roughly the same time on a Monday?”
“Well we won’t have to wait long to see if that is a spurious observation. If you’re right insofar as we are being led, then it implies that in no way were these people chosen purely at random. Even if some of the individuals were unknown to the killer in a personal sense, they may have been selected for what they did rather than who they were. I can’t get rid of the feeling that Pitafi has to fit in for it all to make sense.”
“Ok, let’s look at it from yet another angle. He was by all accounts a galvanic influence in trying to get Muslim moderates to speak out about extremism. That did not go down well with the Muslim Shield. I can see they would like him to stop his sermons, but they surely would not set about killing innocent moderate Muslims, would they?”
“I don’t know Sir. Extremists have a track record of claiming the lives of innocent people to achieve their objectives. However, it doesn’t seem logical to deliberately target fellow Muslims, unless there is a perverse idea that this is an effective counter-strategy, to that of all of the Pitafis in the country.”
“Yes, I was musing over things recently and oddly came to the conclusion that we have, as a society, drifted into an era of Resident Fear. I wasn’t on any mind-expanding substances D.C. Baker; I was merely espousing a philosophy. Let’s keep at your little chart here and add evidence as we go.” He got another call from Daniel to ask if he wanted to come for dinner again.
“Is your Mum there?”
“Yes, she suggested it.”
“Right, put her on.” Renton wanted to get the intonation across as genuinely grateful. “Jane, many thanks for the offer, and I really want to accept. I had such a good time last night and I’ve been feeling really chipper today. I’m going to sit with Ben at the hospital tonight, and wondered if you and Daniel would like to meet me there, and we could go out for a bite – on me. If this appeals, you and Daniel pick out a restaurant. I’m hoping you are going to say yes.”
“Sounds good to me, and I don’t think Daniel will turn down an offer to eat from a menu instead of my cooking. See you at the hospital.”
Chapter 18
Peter Beresford had been advised of Grimes’ fate. He wanted to move on to plans for the Midwest.
“Have we come up with a suitable location from the shortlist we talked about yesterday?”
Seth Graham and Eddie Finley said there were two main options. It was Graham who highlighted the main concerns of each.
“I’ve been in London recently as you know, and I’ve discovered just how slender the margin was in how we avoided detection of our presence; it was by luck rather than good management.”
Beresford queried this. “You are referring to the Banks fiasco?”
“Yes. We need to stick to the script. Our intervention was well intended, but hurriedly arranged, and it almost blew up in our face.”
“Hold on Seth, although we didn’t terminate him, his demise in London would have provoked more questions than shipping him north and therefore deflected any inquisition on intellectual property motives. We wanted it to look like a local job.”
“Of course, but to offset that we had to abandon protest plans in London at the last minute. In addition, we haven’t deflected the fuzz in the way we hoped. The cause of death didn’t help, the witnesses at the Angel created complications, and we still don’t have the data in the briefcase. We had to send one of our people to Cologne, posing as Baumann, to ensure his wife was ‘persuaded’ to keep quiet about his abduction. Then, the late arrival of the corpse delivery man almost torpedoed everything.
“The short notice of all the changes was the main contributor to the knife-edge situation. I agree that we didn’t anticipate the corpse, and only wanted the briefcase, but now we have Baumann without the information, and he insists the only person who had the combination is dead. He also has convinced us that if we try to open it without the combination we will destroy the contents, as he demonstrated this with his own briefcase. We have a dilemma – open the case to see if he is bluffing, or put further pressure on him through his wife, to cough up the code, if he has it. He’s smart enough to know that it is the only thing keeping him alive. Either way he will have to be disposed of sometime soon. What I can’t understand is that he knows nothing of who killed Banks. He was genuinely expecting him to make the flight and was totally surprised at our appearance at his agreed meeting point with Banks. If he was lying he would not have waited there for us, or anyone else, to catch up with him.
“Our people also took him to the abandoned hospital where we had hurriedly decided they should take Banks’ body. It really was flying by the seat of our pants. In retrospect it would have been better to pull the plug on transporting Banks back north and frame Baumann for the murder. The package, as far as the delivery man was concerned was supposed to be exactly that – a briefcase. When he saw an arm dangle from the sack he was understandably disturbed, but told what he had to do. When he was reluctantly on his way and called Grimes, who we then informed of the change of plan, he was placated, and agreed to
the new contract with an extra bonus.
“It has all become a bit untidy and he is apparently being charged with Pitafi’s murder, and as a consequence it became necessary to clip Grimes. What I’m really trying to say Peter, is that when you were deciding what to do about your son-in-law’s death, sipping brandy, and basking in the ambience of the Mediterranean, we were acting as a relay to operatives at the sharp end in London. This method of rolling out the programme isn’t acceptable, especially as it will steadily intensify in complexity.”
“There isn’t really an alternative Seth, you know why I have to remain offshore most of the time. It was a one-off problem. Now let’s talk about the next step, and stop moaning.”
Finley had not said a word so far. He fired the tazer from behind Beresford and at close range. The two of them bundled him into the car. They set off for Scotland. Graham and Finley had discussed the situation many times and eventually decided that this was the only sensible course of action. Beresford had become little more than a figurehead, and one with whom London could never work. This was an opportunity to streamline decision-making, and build bridges with the Capital. It also avoided them being sucked into a similar predicament to that which Beresford had created for himself. At the very worst it was breathing space.
*
Wolfgang Schroder introduced himself and gave Parrish the autobahn exit number for the Bonn residence. He sat in the back and Parrish lowered the dividing screen which Banks had financed to allow private conversations when he was discussing confidential technology stuff with visitors to the corporate office. It was quite a prestigious addition to the Mercedes, and got Parrish more high-flying clients than he expected. It was another example of Banks attention to detail and his generosity toward his friends. With the screen down, Vivienne could converse with Schroder and in turn he could keep Parrish up to date with traffic information on tailbacks, from German radio. The journey proved to be uneventful except for Parrish hearing the plan first hand. Vivienne had offered Schroder the exclusive in exchange for him ‘acting’ as her business advisor. It would be quite straightforward with Frau Baumann, but may be tested by executives from Bio-Synth. Vivienne was quite confident.
