Chameleon - A City of London Thriller (20 page)

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.

Twenty
body-numbing minutes later a workman came out of the same door. He
was carrying his tool bag and he hugged his high visibility coat
around him as a meagre defence against the cold north wind. Once he
had disappeared from sight, Gil made her way to the side entrance
of the Strand Underground Station.

***

Tim looked at
his watch for the twentieth time in five minutes. Gil was due any
time now. He was ready. It wasn’t warm in the abandoned lobby, but
at least it was sheltered from the biting wind. The agent felt for
his Browning one more time. He had loaded it with armour piercing
rounds – which were highly illegal – because he felt sure that Gil
would be wary enough to be wearing a Kevlar vest.

Gil stood
within feet of Tim, yet he had no idea she was there. She was an
assassin, and he was a desk jockey. She realised that she could
have taken him out there and then, but what would be the point?
They would only send someone better next time.

Tim sensed
more than heard Gil’s approach, and turned to face her. She was
smiling brightly as she approached him, anticipating another big
payday, thought Tim. Gil wandered over to the unused lift shaft
that had been left uncovered.

“
You need to
cover that opening, Tim. Someone could kill themselves falling down
there. It must be at least seventy feet down, straight onto
concrete.”

“
Yes, I
know,” Tim, replied. “The wooden cover had disappeared when I got
here. I’ll tell the works department.”

Standing in
front of the lift shaft, Gil spoke.

“
You don’t
look like a man carrying a quarter of a million pounds in
cash.”

“
No,” he
agreed. “I have five bearer bonds, though, each with a face value
of fifty thousand pounds. They’re probably already worth more than
that, given the financial situation.”

Tim loosened
his coat and withdrew five sheets of rolled parchment paper, which
he handed to Gil. Gil opened the rolled sheets and saw the forged
bonds. When she looked up, Tim was pointing his gun at her
chest.

“
No, Tim!
Please!” she yelled as he pulled the trigger three times. Tim was
no marksman, but the three rounds shredded the bearer bonds as they
passed through and pounded into Gil’s torso. For a brief second she
looked shocked, and then she toppled backwards and fell down the
shaft.

The MI5 man
was pleased that Gil had fallen into the deep shaft. He hadn’t
wanted to look into those familiar, pretty, dead eyes as he tipped
her body over the edge and into oblivion and a sealed
tomb.

Tim was about
to fasten his coat and leave when he noticed tension on the rope
hanging into the lift shaft. He ran over and looked down into
complete darkness, but when he held the rope he knew that somehow,
in her death throes, Gil had grabbed onto life. Taking his
Browning, he placed the barrel close to the rope and fired. The
rope was partially severed. Tim fired again and the hanging part of
the rope slackened and fell into the void. As it fell he heard a
scream echoing up the shaft, coming to an abrupt end as his victim
hit the concrete in the darkness below.

***

The telephone
rang in an office cubicle across London. The occupant of the
cubicle was no longer senior enough to warrant an office or a
Thames river view.

“
Internal
Investigations,” the slightly scruffy man announced as he answered
the phone.

“
Barry, this
is Tim. I can confirm that both Chameleons have now departed the
Earth.”

“
Are you
certain the Chameleon is dead?”

“
Well, I shot
her three times in the chest at close range with armour piercing
rounds, and she fell seventy feet onto concrete. She is in a dark
and damp morgue of a tube station which has been sealed for over
sixty five years.”

“
All right,
point noted. Get yourself back here and report.”

Tim slipped
the Nokia into his pocket and started to leave. Rather than climb
yet more stairs, he decided to take his chance with the side
entrance. He couldn’t use the front because entrance security grill
was accessible only from outside and, unfortunately for Tim, Gil
had closed the side entrance grillage and had locked it with a
heavy duty padlock. The key was probably seventy feet down the lift
shaft in the dead woman’s coat pocket. Tim didn’t have any lock
picking tools with him. In any case, he couldn’t pick a lock to
save his life.

“
Damn those
stairs!” he complained out loud.

The darkness
and the vague fluttering shadows that formed on the walls
surrounding the spiral staircase had never bothered Tim before, but
now, somehow, they seemed spooky. Perhaps it was the fact that he
was separated from a fresh dead body by only a single wall of
bricks. He breathed a sigh of relief when he alighted onto the
Aldwych platform with its welcoming bare lighting.

Tim jumped
onto the track and walked towards the exit door. Something felt
different down here, but he didn’t know what it was that was
bothering him. Tim got to the old wooden door and then he realised.
He looked back and saw with alarm that the safety bar had been
removed. The lines were live. Six hundred volts of electricity were
passing within an inch or two of his leg. Thank goodness his
natural caution had kept him clear of the third rail as he walked
along the tunnel. He had no doubt who was responsible.

“
You nearly
had me there, Gil, you mad bitch,” he laughed out loud, his voice
reverberating down the tunnel.

Being careful
to keep a safe distance from the live cable, Tim reached for the
exit door. He depressed the handle and withdrew the latch
carefully, anticipating further skulduggery, but it worked as it
always did. Thanking his lucky stars once more, he opened the
door.

***

The M84 stun
grenade is a non-lethal weapon, usually. It emits a deafening blast
and a blinding flash that disorients and deafens temporarily. Don,
a man of many talents, had accepted the Chameleon’s commission to
remove the safety bar and attach a stun grenade to the door. The
grenade was tubular and around five inches long. Don carefully
removed the safety pin, which had a circular ring pull, and armed
the ‘flash bang’. He duct taped the grenade to the inside of the
door, having looped the second and final ring pull, this one
triangular, over the door handle.

Don admired
his handiwork, set the delay on the ‘flash bang’ to one second and
ascended the stairs. He exited the door onto the Aldwych and looked
around to see if anyone had seen him. Nobody was paying any
attention, except for a pretty young woman huddled up against the
cold, who seemed more concerned about keeping warm than any workman
going about his duties. Don wrapped his coat around himself and
headed for the tube and a warm journey back to Hackney.

***

Tim opened the
door leading to the staircase and all hell broke loose around him.
There was a flash of bright light that seemed to sear his eyes, and
he realised that he had been left temporarily blinded. At the same
moment there was a deafening bang which came close to perforating
his eardrums and which disrupted his balance. Completely
disoriented, he instinctively recoiled from the booby-trapped door
and stepped into the live third rail.

Within a
second or two the disorientation was replaced by excruciating pain
as he felt over four hundred volts coursing through his body.
Intuitively he knew he had just seconds to live unless he could get
off the line. He leaned forward for support and unthinkingly rested
his right hand on the cast iron tunnel wall.

The current
from the third rail passed through Tim and into the cast iron. He
became a conductor and a resistor at the same time. Mercifully, he
died before his insides fried and his clothes caught fire. A few
minutes later, nothing remained of him except for a charred husk,
along with the smell of burning and the vague aroma of roast
pork.

***

Gil’s plans
had not included passing out. She had allowed Tim to shoot her in
the torso. If the useless desk jockey had dared to try a headshot
she would have dived for the shaft before he got a round off. The
nasty piece of work must have been using some kind of heavy duty
ammunition. She had guessed he would; amateurs always go for
overkill. As a result, Tim’s three rounds had penetrated her
clothing and the Kevlar bulletproof vest, but had stopped at the
shaped ceramic body protection underneath.

Once she had
been shot she had made every effort to rappel as far down the rope
as possible before Tim could cut the rope. It was much better to
fall forty feet than sixty. Luckily he had been slow to react, and
she had been less than thirty feet from the bottom of the shaft
when she started to free fall.

As usual after
a heavy fall, Gil used her tradecraft and training. She lay
extremely still while she examined her body with her right
hand.

“
Good. No
compound fractures, anyway.”

She then
checked her limbs one at a time, moving each one slowly until she
was happy there were no broken bones. Finally she proceeded to test
for muscle or ligament damage by flexing every muscle group in
order from her feet to her neck. She ached all over, but the only
real pain she felt was where the ceramic body shield was pressing
into her flesh. Twenty minutes had passed since the shooting,
according to her
indiglo
watch. If all had gone according to plan, Tim
would have met his own fate by now.

Gil shouted
‘lights’, and immediately two voice controlled lights were
illuminated. They were rated at five hundred watts each and they
cast their light widely. Obviously the areas closest to the lights
were the most brightly lit, but even the far ends of the platforms
were visible, albeit barely.

Slowly Gil
rolled off the debris of her landing pad and set her feet on the
ground. She removed her coat, her Kevlar vest and the ceramic
shield. All were ruined, and when she saw the slugs trapped between
the two layers of protection she could see why.

Only two parts
of her plan had been outside of her control; would Tim go for a
headshot at such close distance, even though he had always been a
useless shot? And, would he then report her demise before he
himself passed on? Clearly Tim had played safe and placed three
armour-piercing shots in her chest. As useless as the grouping of
the shots might be, any one of them would have been fatal. In any
event, he would have tipped her injured body into the lift shaft
and let gravity finish his job. Gil could only hope that he would
report in as soon as the job was done. She relied on her
understanding of the psychology of agents who rarely ventured into
fieldwork. They tended to become rather excited and the excess
adrenaline pumped them up until they had to tell someone about
their success. Tim was just such an animal, and so she was
confident that Thames House now believed she was dead.

Gil’s gaze
swept around the old platform; some agents had found it a little
scary but she had always found it interesting. When the platform
had been stripped and sealed after the Second World War, they had
uncovered original Victorian ironwork and even some old advertising
that must have predated 1917. If there had been enough time, Gil
would have unscrewed the painted tin advertisement board, which,
although very faded, showed a lady in Edwardian dress carrying a
parasol and recommending Swann & Edgar’s Department Store at
Piccadilly Circus. In an odd coincidence, the department store was
damaged by the last ever Zeppelin raid over London in 1917, the
same year these platforms were last used for tube travel. But the
Chameleon simply did not have time for nostalgia. She had work to
do if she was to escape from the UK and build a new life for
herself elsewhere.