by Jay Tinsiano
"This 'civvie' was framed by the Chinese, probably helped by your man!" Brown shouted, standing up, as if to rise to the rage that seemed to be at boiling point in the room.
"That's enough!" barked Grant, who had been drumming his fingers on the desk throughout the confrontation. "We need to get over there."
"I'm coming with you," said Frank.
"No you're bloody not," retorted Fowler, who hadn't quite calmed down.
"He's with me and I'm going," said Brown, in a steady, low voice. Fowler shook his head in disbelief. "You're responsible for him, then. Grant, get some armed back up, in case."
Chapter 43
The blinds blocked out most of the light, shrouding a veil of darkness across the living room in which Peter Chapman sat in his favourite armchair. Hesitation and indecisiveness had clouded his mind in the previous few weeks. A suitcase, packed with his most treasured possessions, stood ready in the hallway, but he was unable to leave and wasn't even sure where he would go.
It had become obvious that his paymasters in Beijing had abandoned him to his fate and might even be considering killing him. That had closed off the option of defecting to the Chinese but, more importantly, there was Maria. The guilt of involving his beautiful daughter kneaded at his stomach like an untreated wound, growing more infected with every day that had passed since the attacks. He gulped another mouthful of Jim Beam and clunked the heavy crystal glass back on the side table.
A creak made him turn and his eyes blinked, as if to reconfirm the sight of his daughter standing in the doorway.
"Dad?" her voice was quiet and uneven. He leapt up and went to her, his eyes welling with tears as he wrapped his arms around her. A huge wave of relief swept over him.
"Maria! Thank god you're alright. I thought I'd never see you again." She tried to speak, but a lump caught in her throat making her gulp. She looked up at him, her eyes filling with wetness that dulled their usual emerald clarity. "Are you OK?"
Peter nodded and they moved into the room. He cleared a space on the sofa that was draped with clothes that he had previously been shifting through.
"I'm so sorry about everything. I need to tell you something," he said quietly. She perched gently on the leather sofa, looking around at the mess. It was a surprise to her as he always kept his house immaculate.
Peter sat next to her and breathed heavily as if preparing himself. "I did a terrible thing that you might not forgive me for. I wouldn't blame you. I'm not supposed to tell anyone, but I have been working for MI6 for over ten years." He paused, allowing Maria, who nodded grimly, to take it in before he hung his head and continued.
"Obviously there are serious consequences in me telling you this. But this is not the half of it. I've also been working for the Chinese MSS." Maria's eyes widened in surprise, her mouth remained closed.
"I was passing information to them regarding the 1997 takeover, as well as intelligence secrets. I had information on the recent attacks before they happened, no details though and I was not involved in the planning or anything like that. You have to believe me, Maria."
Maria squeezed her eyes shut as a tear ran slowly over her left cheek and then she got up suddenly and stood with her back to him.
"I had no way of stopping it or knowing the details of where it would take place. I did, however, pass the false information about the two lads," he paused, "Jimmy and your friend, Frank."
His daughter's face contorted with anguish, lower lip quivering uncontrollably. She gasped, suddenly desperate for air. "All those people...You knew?"
"I gave Beijing the information about Li Wu arranging a passport for Frank," Peter continued grimly, as if his window of confession was about to close. "If it makes any difference, I had no idea they would track Frank down to your house. That mess with the killer. I would never have knowingly put you in danger, Maria. You have to believe that." He looked at her, pleadingly.
Maria looked up at the wall, tears streaming down her face, fixing her sight on an old colonial painting of Hong Kong harbour. She remembered it from when she was a little girl, like an old friend that anchored her to a happy childhood. Now it seemed to be cruelly taunting her as everything she thought she knew about her father was evaporating like some kind of mirage.
"So you met Frank at my house, gave him Li's information and then told the Chinese about Li. What did you think would happen then? You must have known they wanted to track Frank down and kill him?"
"I needed to give them something. They already knew that Frank had met you. There are always causalities in war," he said, as firmly as he could. "I didn't know everything that was going on, Maria, and I wanted to keep you out of it, to protect you!"
Maria snorted with derision as she paced up and down the room, shaking her head.
"Look, it's all been a shitty mess. I regret it all. You are the most important thing in my life. All I can do is apologise and ask that you forgive me, somehow," Peter said.
She looked at him through weeping eyes, shaking her head. "I don't know. I really don't know. I need time."
He looked at the floor. "Unfortunately that's something I don't have," he said quietly. A silence hung in the air, only the low background hum of the air conditioning filled the room.
"Do you remember when we were on the beach on a visit to Cornwall in England? You, me and your Mum… You were about five, I think. A boy was wandering around in the sand, crying his eyes out. He had completely lost his family and we looked after him for hours."
Maria stared at the blinds on the window, as if seeing the view of the city that lay behind them. She spoke quietly and smiled at the memory. "Yes, I do. I helped him build a huge sandcastle. You helped him calm down. You told him not to worry and that he'd see his mum again. You were always really caring like that," she said.
Peter breathed out heavily: "I'm still your father, Maria. Still your dad. The same man. Please don't remember me as anything else."
Maria glanced at the bottle of Jim Beam on the side table. "I think I need a drink. I'll get a glass."
"Maria," he looked across at her, the pain still very much apparent on his face. He held his hands out to her and she went to him. Peter Chapman held his daughter tightly for a moment and then looked into her eyes before nodding. "Go," he whispered, smiling faintly.
Maria stepped into the kitchen and opened the glass cabinet before grabbing a crystal whiskey glass. A distant thumping at the front door caused her to inhale quickly.
As Maria had left the room, Peter had walked to a mahogany wooden table in the corner and opened one of the drawers. Inside it was a Glock pistol that he had loaded before Maria had turned up, which he now picked it up in his sweaty hand. He knew that this was the only way. There was a high chance they would target Maria to get to him. If not, he would be hung out to dry in a long drawn out trial for treason, putting his family through hell.
He had shamed himself and nothing was going to change that. The banging at the front door seemed to focus him, as if signalling that it was time.
The loud sound of the gunfire reverberated throughout the house, a shockwave that made Maria drop the glass, smashing it into hundreds of shards on the hard, marble tiled floor. A sickening horror careered through her body – as her legs automatically carried her back into the living room, glass cutting into the soles of her feet; pain she didn't feel or acknowledge – fear realised in the worst possible moment of her life as a daughter as she stared wide eyed at the limp figure of her father, sprawled on the floor. Her mouth opened to scream without a sound as she scrambled onto her knees, pulling at his blood stained shirt. Then an agonising wail shook at every wall in the house, as if willing them to succumb to its force, closely followed by sudden loud crashes from the front door.
Benjamin Fowler inched into the room holding an automatic pistol, looking around as he took in the scene of agony, followed by Brown and Grant. Frank pushed past them and stood over Maria, who was desperately punching her father’s chest.
/> "You don’t get out of this that easy, you fucking bastard!"
Her whole body heaved with violent sobs as she shook her father by the shoulders, as if willing him to wake up from a dream. His face was frozen by the impact of the bullet that had ripped through the back of his head. A splatter of brains, blood and sinew plastered the wall that had been behind him when he had taken his life a moment earlier.
"Jesus," Frank uttered and he leaned down to touch Maria's shoulder and comfort her. She ignored him and continued to clutch Peter's lifeless body.
Grant and Detective Inspector Brown were now in the room, looking down grimly at the tragedy that had just unfolded.
"Check out the rest of the house could you, Grant?" asked Fowler, quietly. His colleague nodded and disappeared out of the door. "Inspector Brown? Can you get you men to secure the perimeter, just as a precaution?"
Brown nodded and immediately turned to the sergeant who signalled his understanding and disappeared quickly from the room. Fowler circled round to get a better view of Peter's body and looked at Brown, sadly, as if to confirm that he was definitely dead.
Chapter 44
"Dean Whiteman was probably just an actor or a conman. Without a positive identification it’s hard to know, but we have the photo fit from your description on file, so you never know," Carl said.
Frank and Carl sat in the sunshine on the Victoria Embankment by the Thames, watching a large group of tourists clambering onto a ferry.
"I know you're close to Maria. She knew nothing about her father; the whole Hong Kong situation, and wasn't involved in any way."
Frank nodded. He had long stopped suspecting her of anything and now just felt incredible pain for her. He remembered Maria telling him that her dad had told her how much he loved her on the phone in Malaysia. He was probably saying goodbye, thinking he would never see her again.
"At least she got to see him," Frank said, continuing his own thoughts. "Before he topped himself, I mean." He sighed and shook his head. "What he was thinking, shooting himself like that?"
Carl patted Frank's shoulder sympathetically. "He was looking at a charge of treason. I guess he couldn't handle it. Perhaps, not mentally all there at the end."
Maria had said little since that horrendous incident a month previously. She'd given no hint on what her father had told her and Frank hadn't forced it, just repeating that he was there if she needed him.
"How is she?"
Frank shook his head again. "Not very well, I'm afraid. She needs time. She's with her mother in Amsterdam at the moment. She's mad at me, her Dad, she's…in a dark place. I'll go over there, soon. See if I can help. Got to do something."
Carl nodded and the two men stared out across the water, under a blue sky, as the tourist ferry passed them, slipping through the dark water.
"The part Peter Chapman played in this whole sorry affair will be kept under wraps by the Official Secrets Act, for now," said Carl as he stood up, clapping his gloved hands together.
"Come on, Frank. Let's walk along the river for a while."
Pandora Red Chapter 1
March 1999. GCHQ Cheltenham, England.
Sarah Edwards glanced at the wall clock, noting it was 23:17 hours. Nearly time. The plan was to get started as the shifts changed to the night staff. During late shifts, the hexagon shaped green building, flanked by prison-like towers, had the feeling of a ship silently moving through the night. There was a faded sound, like a distant roar from outside the double glazed windows of her office, a downpour of rain Sarah could see coming down in sheets from an external building light.
The main GCHQ building was planted in the sprawl of the Oakley site in Cheltenham, England, where she had been an employee for 6 years. As Intelligence liaison officer, Sarah had access to top secret information that would never become public, even under the official secrets act. The glass walls of her office cast artificial light across the floor and she glanced outside into the main section area once again. A few people were still milling around, flickering screens showed worldwide operation updates, while the central heating hummed in the background. She moved her slight figure back into the large swivel chair and tapped once again on the screen, logging herself out of the main network. To access and copy the information she wanted meant using another terminal on the floor above.
Sarah cast her eyes around the office for the last time. The feeling weighed heavily that after tonight, she would possibly never see her family, her friends, or anyone she cared about again. She wouldn’t be able to say goodbye either, that was the most painful part of it. For the last 3 months, she had churned the decision over and over in her mind and kept arriving at the same conclusion.
She put on her jacket, grabbed her bag, and slipped out across the thick carpet along the corridor, caged by metal and glass partitions that seemed to go on forever. Her feet quickly ascended the metal steps at the end, the echoes adding to her anxiety as she left G block and an entire lifetime behind her. No more after work drinks with the boys. No chin wags with her friend in the service, Janet Chambers. How surreal it would all soon seem.
She could only imagine the shock of her colleagues when the news spread about what she had done. They would understand, in time. Surely they would?
In a few years, this site would be empty of its machines, the people and the families in the housing complex would all be moved to the new GCHQ location at Benhall. The new 'doughnut' shaped complex would be state of the art at the cost of hundreds of millions and Sarah knew the security would be much tighter there, another reason to act now.
A quick flash of her identity card on the wall scanner and she was allowed through to the floor above. It would only be a matter of time before her access and subsequence actions were traced back to her but by then, all shit would have hit the fan and it wouldn’t matter anymore.
Even now, it wasn’t too late and she could still turn back. She could leave the building as normal and continue her life, keep her friends, and stay in touch with her family. She shook that idea out of her head quickly. This was no time for second thoughts or doubt. It seemed like a dream but she steeled herself and pressed on across the carpeted floor that hosted rows of cubicles, a haphazard mix of screens that flickered in the darkness, as if watching her progress. The truth must be leaked, no matter what the consequences.
She stopped at a monitor, sat down, and quickly typed in her login and encrypted password to access the main system. There seemed to be a temporary freeze on the screen and Sarah frowned while she waited.
Access Denied flashed at her in large letters on the monitor.
She cursed under her breath. There was no logical reason she would be denied access at this level. Sarah retyped, her fingers stumbling across the keyboard, and she hit return to see the same ‘Access Denied’ once more.
Come on, Sarah, keep it together!
Slowly, she re-typed, voicing the letters and numbers in her head and breathed a sigh of relief as the familiar green coded access came up. She carefully plugged in the thumb drive that had been meticulously moulded to look like a key-less entry remote for a Honda Accord Acura TL, the exact same car she owned. It had been made through a contact that she had outside of the agency. Working with those outside the law had its benefits and discretion was essential.
She immediately hit the short cut keys to launch the Shell access command line and typed in a sequence to bypass the computer's automatic security scan of her device.
Once again, she needed to fill in her login credentials to the remote server and then the black console screen filled with a fast moving list of file names as they copied from the ‘Project Oculus’ folder.
The same files that she had found and read with increasing alarm and exasperation over the previous months. She had not liked what she saw one bit.
“Good evening,” the voice came from behind her, making her gasp out loud. Game over, before she had even started. The sounds of the footsteps grew nearer and she spun around, squint
ing at the night guard. He smiled at her, nodded, and walked on by. Sarah felt her heart pumping so loud, she was sure he could hear it. “Good evening,” she replied.
Time slowed down, the file transfer was still reeling through its list and there was nothing Sarah could do to speed things up. There were a lot of files to copy.
She thought about her mother and father, seeing life drift by from their Brighton semi with a fine view of the sea and the pier. Had she really forsaken them? Would she really never see them again? Sarah refused to believe that. She would find a way.
She remembered first seeing the GCHQ advert in the newspaper. It was a test to find an apprentice and Sarah’s mother had encouraged her to apply. Sarah had always been top of her classes, wiping the floor with everyone else and her future glittered like gold. But dark shadows loomed in the corners of her memory: the bullying. There were a few in her class who had targeted her. She could only guess it was because of her intelligence or maybe the social inadequacy.
The only thing she lived for was her studying, the knowledge that she so eagerly soaked up like a sponge and the books she buried herself in.
She passed the test, a puzzle to decode a series of seemingly random letters and then after a yearlong selection process, began her intelligence career, working in the foreign sources section and then later transferring to anti-terrorism monitoring.
It was at the ‘firm’ she met her first real friends. For the most part, anyway. There were a few comments from some of the male colleagues, but all in all, it was like a family. Besides, Sarah had always seen herself as a trail blazer, working hard to fight her way into a male dominated environment.
A bleep sounded and the copy was complete. She took the drive and slipped it inside her bag then typed in: sfc /purgecache in the command line to delete the cache and dump any record of her folder access before shutting down the workstation. She didn’t want to leave unnecessary breadcrumb trails.
Sarah braced herself for getting out of the building. For obvious security reasons, no files of any kind were allowed to leave the walls of GCHQ. She knew the routine and just hoped she had thought of everything. There was a risk. There always was.
