Chameleon - A City of London Thriller (24 page)

“
Ah,
Mitchinson. I was just wondering how things were going on your
stated objective of eliminating the Chameleon, AKA Gill Davis.” The
Director had a curious look on his face, and Barry was immediately
wary.

“
Good news,
sir. She is dead and permanently entombed on the old Strand Tube
Station platform. We are sealing the lift shaft tomorrow with a
permanent cover and a manhole access.” Barry lifted up the DVD and
offered to slide it into the Director’s laptop. The director waved
his arm in what Barry took to be permission to proceed.

Inside a
minute, the DVD whirred into action and the line camera pictures
were showing on the screen. Barry had hoped to shock the Director,
but instead he witnessed a morbid fascination on his boss’s face.
The Director pressed the mouse button to halt the DVD, which he
ejected and dropped into the waste bin beside him with a cruel
smile playing across his lips.

He leaned on
his desk, his forearms resting on the walnut veneer, his hands
clasped with fingers interlocking. He was mere inches away from
Barry Mitchinson’s face when his own contorted into what appeared
to be rage.

“
Barry, I am
not certain whether you are deliberately misleading me or whether
you truly are cretinously stupid. I don’t know who or what that
video purports to show, but whatever it is I can assure you that it
is not Gillian Davis.”

Barry was
beyond crestfallen; he was paralysed with despair. He was unable to
summon the power of speech.

“
Let me
explain in terms that a simpleton like you can understand. Gillian
Davis obviously killed Tim McKinnon, whose death luckily can be
portrayed as an accident, but then I suppose
Wondergirl
planned it that way. She
then foresaw that you would check she was dead, and so placed
something, or someone, on that platform for you to find. If only
she was working for me instead of the team of incompetents I
currently have at my disposal.

She seems to
have completely outfoxed MI5 and the establishment, not least your
good self. Worse still for me, and that means for you too, I have
to explain what the hell we are doing killing our own people, on
our own turf, when they threatened no one except a bunch of bad
guys we would rather see dead!” He was yelling by the time the last
sentence came to an end.

“
That isn’t
strictly true, sir.” Barry tried to restore his credibility,
knowing that his boss was beyond listening. “She murdered the
Israeli Foreign Minister. They are a friendly country and he wasn’t
someone we would like to see dead. He was the minister of culture,
for God’s sake.”

The Director
tapped a key on his keyboard and a prepared page flicked up onto
the screen. It was headed ‘Yakir Bluwstein: Supplementary Research
– Analytical Profile’.

“
Let me read
you something that you would know if you weren’t a moron of the
first order.

Yakir
Bluwstein was still a teenager when he killed his first British
Serviceman. The man was unarmed and lying in his sickbed when the
boy sneaked into the hospital and shot the man in the head, leaving
the symbol of the Stern Gang on the body. Sergeant William
Docherty, or Billy to his friends, had served bravely in the desert
for the allies in the Second World War and was awaiting
demobilisation just as soon as he recovered enough to travel home.
Ironically, Billy had been instrumental in the release of inmates
from the death camps and had been welcomed as a hero by Jews in
Europe and England.”

“
Shit,” Barry
thought as the Director read on, “this is going to get
worse.”

“
Minister
Bluwstein was a member of the Stern Gang, known as Levi to the
Zionists. He planned and helped execute the driving of a truck load
of explosives into a British Police Station. Four were killed, and
this is where it gets personal.”

The director
looked up to ensure he had Barry’s undivided attention. “My uncle
Ben, a Jew himself, incidentally, lost a leg and the sight in one
eye in that attack. That raid was both wicked and pointless because
only weeks later Israel became independent, and the Stern Gang had
known very well what was going to happen. So did the minister
repent, or change his odious ways? I think not. Bluwstein was the
Minister of Defence when the Israeli Air force bombed unprotected
Lebanese civilian targets with phosphorous armaments during the
last Labour government. He went on TV and denied the use of
phosphorous bombs, and declared that an internal Israeli enquiry
had cleared Israel of wrongdoing. We shared our proof that they had
indeed used phosphorous bombs, but nothing was done. The Americans
vetoed a war crime tribunal. As a sop to international outrage, he
was demoted to Minister of Culture.”

The Director
turned away from the screen and looked at the defeated man sitting
opposite before continuing.

“
So, Mr
Mitchinson, which part of Yakir Bluwstein’s glorious history would
make your average Englishman feel sorrowful at his passing? As much
as I despise your little
Wondergirl
, she did the world a
favour that day.”

Barry knew
there wasn’t an answer that would keep him in a job, and so he
looked down at his scuffed shoes.

“
So,
Mitchinson, when you appear in her cross hairs - as you undoubtedly
will, as you tried to kill her - tell her my late Uncle Dan sends
his regards.”

A terrible
silence engulfed the room and Barry heard Maureen Lassiter quietly
close the door between her office and the Directors office. There
was obviously only so much blood letting a sensitive woman could
take in a day.

“
I’ll seal
the ports and airports as soon as I get back to my desk. We will
apprehend her, soon enough.” Barry tried to regain some of the
momentum.

“
You know,
you really do disgust me, you odious little man. Men have died this
week because of your incompetence, and you are still protecting
your own worthless hide.

Gillian Davis
flew out of the UK under her own name on a charter flight this
morning. She is in the air as we speak, heading to the
sun.”

“
Well, I’ll
have her picked up as soon as she arrives. We have operatives in
most cities and we can rely on the local authorities everywhere
else. She can’t escape.” Barry sounded more confident now, but the
director laughed.

“
Does your
stupidity know no bounds? Let me see, this woman has outsmarted you
every step of the way and made you and the firm look incompetent.
The only reason I knew she was flying out this morning was that she
bought a book on her credit card at Newcastle Airport.”

Barry looked
puzzled. “But she must know any transactions would be
flagged.”

“
Of course
she did! The title of the book was ‘Getting Away to Cuba, a
traveller’s guide’. She is mocking us; she knows very well that the
one country in the civilised world that will not cooperate with
us
at all
is
Cuba. Once she lands there, we lose her forever. We will never know
where she is. She could stay and enjoy endless Mojitos in
Hemingway’s favourite bar, or she could fly to any communist
enclave in the world. At least we can sell off her company and bang
another few million into the treasury’s coffers. Contact Lena at
SOCA and get her to make an application to the Assets Agency under
the
Proceeds of Crime Act
2002
.”

Barry hardly
dared speak. His heart was racing and he could feel an anxiety
attack coming on as he answered.

“
She doesn’t
own any assets in the UK any more, apart from a few hundred pounds
in her current account. The remaining assets of the business were
sold to the employees for one pound under a legal covenant last
week. Later the same day the employees transferred their assets in
the company to another greeting card company for an undisclosed
amount.

SOCA says that
the deal is watertight without clear evidence that criminal funds
purchased, or were invested in, the company, and we have no such
evidence. It seems that she paid around three million for the
business when she acquired it and took around three million when
she left. SOCA say that the courts would accept the argument that
the illegal assets , if any, were paid into the company and paid
out by the company in equal amounts, and so no money laundering has
taken place and no illegal assets remain in the company. In short,
their lawyers say that we have no case, even if we could prove
Gillian Davis had accrued her three million investment money
illegally. None of that is relevant anyway; we simply have no idea
where her money is now.”

The director
flung back the
stressless
office recliner he used as a desk chair, which
was clearly not working to reduce his stress, and leaned over Barry
Mitchinson, hatred burning in his eyes.

“
I’d say Cuba
has a good chance of being the new home of Davis’s fortune,
wouldn’t you? Idiot!”

Sorry, sir,”
Barry responded meekly. This seemed to send the Director into an
uncontrollable rage.

“
Sorry? You
spineless piece of garbage! Are you just going to sit around for
the rest of your life and let people defecate on you from a great
height? You were a Director here, for heaven’s sake. You had a
Thames view, and when they told you the special operations division
was going you meekly sat back and let the DG demote you. Have you
no pride?

Do you know
that the powers that be had a bet on how low you could be demoted
before pride kicked in and you raised a fuss? But you never did,
and so they all lost their bets. I won because I said you’d stay
even if I sent you to work in the cafeteria. They had a good laugh
at that. You are a joke. Now, get out of my office. I need to call
your wife and tell her I need a good blow job tonight. She’ll come
running, as she always does - as she always has. Then, whilst she
is mopping up, she’ll make some joke about you not being able to
get it up. Poor Eloise; she deserves a good shagging and I’ll make
damn sure she gets one.”

***

Something in
Barry Mitchinson snapped; the stress, the drugs and the drink
combined to produce a white heat of rage such as he had never
before experienced. He toyed with the idea of telling the Director
that he knew all about his wife and her many conquests, and how he
used his wife to extract useful information from the Director in
their post coital banter.

Barry wanted
to tell him that for years he had been banging the Director’s own
secretary, the delicious Maureen, often over the Director’s own
desk and in his precious thousand pound ‘stressless’
chair.

He wanted to
humiliate the man by telling him that between them he and Maureen
had amassed almost a million pounds from foreign governments, who
believed it was the Director they had in their pockets when they
had never even spoken to him. But he did none of these things; he
reacted as he had never done before. He reacted
physically.

The first blow
was a head butt that spread the Director’s nose over his face,
blood trickling down the crevices made by his jowls. The second
blow was a firm punch to the solar plexus, which doubled the
Director over towards Barry’s third blow, an uppercut that sent the
older man back into his chair, unconscious.

***

Mitchinson was
still shaking when Maureen came into the room.

“
My word,
Barry, I heard what he said, but this! This will get you sent
down.”

Barry was
suddenly back in control. He looked at Maureen, and with the hand
that seconds before had inflicted a terrible violence on his boss,
he gently stroked her cheek.

“
It’s still
early, and there aren’t many people around. We need to act quickly.
Bring me your keyboard and mouse.”

Maureen looked
confused, but she did as her lover asked and returned with a
standard keyboard and mouse.

Barry plugged
both appliances into the Director’s laptop and opened Microsoft
Word. Typing carefully on Maureen’s keyboard, he wrote a note on
the Directors machine.

To Security
Service Director General; Dame Monica Stewart - Smith.

Dear
Monica,

I realise
this will come as a shock but I cannot go on, I have made mistakes,
too many to mention, but they have taken their toll. I was never
there for my children and my wife is well aware of my continuing
infidelity. I have betrayed my college friend Barry Mitchinson by
conducting a long term affair with his wife and my former
girlfriend Eloise, and on this issue I simply cannot find it in me
to be ashamed.

Where I do
feel ashamed is in my illegal dealings with foreign agencies who
have asked for, and have been granted favours and access they were
not entitled to receive.

I have
betrayed you, my wife, MI5 and my country.

Having
removed the people who knew about my indiscretions, I believed I
was safe, though I do regret that Doug and Tim had to die to keep
my secret safe. Unfortunately one more person knows all about my
secret arrangements, and she has avoided my attempts at
assassination and has flown to Cuba. I have no doubt she will
reveal all as soon as she lands.