Deadline
A Novel By
Craig McLay
CONTENTS
CHAPTERS
ONE YEAR LATER: Knightsbridge, London
Copyright © 2012 Craig McLay
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.
Edition: January 2013
C
olin Mitchell was still half asleep, so he didn’t see the severed human leg when he stumbled into the bushes.
It wasn’t easy to spot, lying in the undergrowth at the base of a tree on south side of the path that led through the woods to the Westhill College arts building. It was just past 8 a.m., so it was also dark. The sun didn’t do much to light up the path until it was dead overhead at noon and, despite repeated requests from the Campus Safety Association, the school had never forked over the money to install electric lights. Most students avoided using the forest path, but Colin was in a hurry.
“Shit!” he hissed as hot coffee spilled down his wrist. He had just received another email from the journalism program coordinator, Hal Watterson, asking where in the hell he was and was in the process of texting back the fact that he was in transit when he had tripped over a loose chunk of interlocking stone and almost gone face-first into a scraggly patch of hydrangeas. He recovered his feet, but lost most of his coffee in the process. He was more pissed about losing the coffee than the mess. The coffee in the newsroom was like bilge water. He shook his hand to get the worst of it off and was relieved that none of it had soaked into his watch, which had once belonged to an Iraqi doctor who had been killed in a surprise rocket attack eight years ago. The doctor had given the watch to Colin’s father only moments before. Colin had received the watch when his father was killed under similar circumstances only two months later.
Colin looked around for something to clean his hand, but of course there was nothing except for a large, leafy bush that could be, for all he knew about things arboreal, poison oak. Deciding that a wet, sticky hand was better than one covered in a burning, itchy rash, he waved it a couple of times in the chill October air, sending brown droplets flying everywhere. Once his hand was as dry as it was going to get using this method, he returned to the path, hit ‘send’ on his text message and continued on his way.
Had he taken one more step or actually tried to dry his hand on the bush (which was a common
ilex mucronata
, or holly bush, not poison oak), he would have seen the leg, which was partially obscured by the undergrowth at the base of a tall birch tree. It was the lower half of a right leg, severed neatly between the femur and tibia and again, although less neatly, at the ankle with a high-powered reciprocating saw. He might also have seen the insignia that had been painted on the tree, the bright red brushstrokes standing out sharply against the peeling white bark: a simple cross surrounded by an interlocking circle of thorns. The image looked like it had been painted on by someone in a hurry.
As it was, Colin didn’t see either of them. He was also in a hurry and rarely at his most observant first thing in the morning.
P
eter Devries eased his Mercedes SLS into his executive parking spot and wondered if he should leave the Glock in the glove compartment.
There was a press conference at 2 p.m. to talk about the construction of the new tech wing, which was scheduled to start in the spring. They weren’t expecting him to say much. He had a prepared statement that he had timed out to 31 seconds. He couldn’t pass it off on anyone else, least of all his dipshit communications specialist. This was a big announcement and, as president of Westhill College, they would be expecting him to make it. Still, it would be hard to explain if his briefcase fell over and 17 rounds of Austrian-manufactured personal deterrence fell out on the floor in front of the local press corps.
He looked up nervously to make sure nobody could see him holding the gun. The parking lot was still mostly deserted. His spot was right next to the door near his office. Most of the staff who worked in the admin building used the main parking lot on the other side. This one was reserved for himself and a selected few board members and department heads, none of whom ever made it in before 10. Still, it would be just his luck that one of them would walk past and see him sitting in his car holding a gun first thing on a Monday morning. His luck had been incredibly shitty of late.
They’d probably think that I was sitting here contemplating the notion of blowing my brains out
, he thought.
And they might not be entirely wrong.
He considered the matter for a few more seconds before stuffing the gun in his briefcase and locking it tightly. If somebody spotted it, he would make a joke about tuition hikes and get the hell out of the room as quickly as possible. Appearances were not number one on his list of things to worry about at the moment.
He grabbed a couple of tranquilizers out of the front pocket of the case and swallowed them dry. It wasn’t even 9 a.m. yet and he was already sweating like a pig. It was too late to re-schedule the press conference. He decided that he would take the rest of the day off as soon as it was done. Maybe the rest of the week. Tell his wife he was going to some educational conference in Toronto and head off to Cabo with Vivian. That way she wouldn’t find out that her most recent rent cheque had bounced until after they got back into the country.
He got out and walked to the front of the car, pausing, not for the first time, to inspect the damage the tow truck had done when the winch had slipped, scraping ugly black claw marks in the bright red metal. The body shop had quoted $12,000 to repair and repaint.
“Mitchell, you little fucking prick,” he grumbled as he stood up. He heard a clunk and looked down to see that the Glock had fallen out of his briefcase because he’d forgotten to re-fasten it after fishing out the pills. He scrambled to stuff it back in just as he spotted the black Audi belonging to Jerome Ludnick, the head of campus security, pulling into the lot. He breathed a small sigh of relief. Ludnick wouldn’t be surprised to see the gun. Ludnick had sold him the damn thing.
H
al Watterson looked up to see Colin walk into his office and quickly closed his open browser window. Since his divorce the previous year, he had been spending an increasing percentage of his free and a good chunk of his work time surfing online dating and homemade porn sites. Normally he avoided doing it at work, but his date from the previous night hadn’t gone so well and he needed to let off some steam.
As the head of the Westhill journalism program, his computer was supposedly free of the usual nanny software that the student terminals were subjected to, but sometimes he wondered. More than a few times, he believed, he had caught the head of system integration giving him funny looks in the parking lot. Watterson liked to think that it was because he was a trim and relatively handsome man in his late forties (he had recently gotten back into marathon training) and there was a rumour that the systems guy was bisexual, but it was hard to tell.
He cleared his throat and tried to assume an authoritative air, which he did with relative ease considering that he’d spent the last four minutes watching a 350-pound woman pleasuring herself with root vegetables.
“Colin,” he nodded. “Nice of you to finally make it in.”
Colin sat down in a chair and put his feet up on the desk. He had washed his hand in a drinking fountain and dried it on his jeans on the way up the stairs. It was a stopgap solution at best.
Colin grunted acknowledgement. He did not actively dislike Watterson, he just thought of him as mostly useless, like an appendix or Pause/Break key. As the head of the journalism department, it was Watterson’s job to oversee the college newspaper, of which Colin was editor. As far as Colin could tell, that responsibility consisted entirely of Watterson doing exactly what the administration told him to do, every single time they ordered him to do it. The man appeared to have as many backbones in his body as a shark. Important stories had been chopped, modified beyond recognition and even pulled if they portrayed the college or its board of governors in anything less than an ethereal light. In his time on the admin beat, Colin had seen many stories subjected to such treatment.
Watterson sighed and dropped a copy of the latest edition of the
Westhill Sentinel
on the desk. “Devries called me at four o’clock this morning.”
Having written, formatted and printed the story himself, Colin did not need to lean forward to read it. “I wonder what our president was doing up at such an hour.”
Watterson took off his glasses and rubbed his face. His words came out in a mishmash as he worked his cheek muscles. “I thought we agreed that we weren’t going to run that.”
“Agreement implies consensus,” Colin said. “You said you didn’t think it should run. I disagreed.”
On the front page of the paper was a banner headline that read: “College President Busted”. Directly beneath it was a three-column black and white photo of an expensive sport car being hooked up to a tow truck while a short, balding man in a dark overcoat (identified in the caption as the college president, Peter Devries) screamed at a heavyset man in coveralls (identified as Tomaz Klienczjk, employee of the ambitiously named International Auto Service). Colin didn’t consider himself much of a photographer, but he was proud of that one. He had blown it up just enough that careful viewers could see the spittle flying from the president’s lips.
“As you’ve been made aware numerous times, Colin,” Watterson said, “I am the head of the journalism department, which makes me editor-in-chief of the newspaper and its corresponding website. Nothing goes in there unless I agree to it first.”
Colin shrugged. “Hey, I don’t make the rules. I just call the towing company and hide in the bushes with my camera when somebody else does.”
“This isn’t news, Colin. This is petty-ante bullshit designed to piss off a guy with total control over everything we do.”
“Over you, maybe,” Colin said. “Not me. And the expression is
penny ante
, not
petty ante
. You know he wrote an email to security advising that he would fire any member of the unit that dared to give him a ticket. You know that because I showed it to you. He then proceeded to park in every fire route and handicapped spot he could find, sometimes for the whole day. You know that two whole skids of that stuff the cafeteria passes off as food went bad on the dock because he was blocking the freight entrance? In that sense, he probably did everyone a favour.”
“That tow truck did $12,000 damage to his car. He repeated that several times.”
“It’s not his car,” Colin pointed out. “It’s a lease. And I’m sure he’ll charge the whole thing against the college’s liability insurance, so he isn’t out a nickel.”
“Oh, no? Well, your friend, the tow truck driver, is out of a job. His company’s service contract with the school was also cancelled thanks to you.”
“Don’t thank me, thank our illustrious president. I don’t have the authority to cancel tendered procurements.”
“You know a lot of people are gonna be looking for a job next year, Colin. Yourself included. And there aren’t any out there. The journalism program’s being shut down and merged with broadcasting.”
Colin sat up. “So that’s what this is all about? You’re worried that you won’t get to be a department head anymore and you’ll have to scuffle like the rest of us? When was this decided?” Colin had heard rumours that this was coming, but the earliest anyone expected it to happen was in three years. It wasn’t really surprising. The post-grad employment numbers for the journalism program were so bad that the college scrupulously avoided publishing them in its annual reviews.