James Long - Sixth Column

‘Sergeant Hayter spent the rest of the afternoon listing every single wrong-doing of his long and nasty life. That’s the effect it has. The York police have a very, very long statement, I gather. Anyway, I’ve made sure the right people know what’s going on. I think there’ll be a lot of pressure coming the way of GKC, and the Americans, for that matter.’

‘Oh…’

‘So tell me, what was your side of the deal?’

‘I gave the Americans some documents about Ramsgill Stray that they wanted back.’

‘Oh, dear; and Heather didn’t want that.’

‘No. I can understand. I should have asked her but there wasn’t a chance.’

‘Poor Johnny. She’s very important to you, isn’t she?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘You have to see it from her point of view. She’s known you as Johnny Kennedy the pilot, then Johnny Kay the spy. It can’t have been easy.’

‘I’d like to try something else now,’ he said, ‘if it’s all right with you. I’d like to try being John Parry, the person.’

‘That sounds well worth trying,’ said a voice behind him and he turned as Heather stepped out of the bathroom.

‘Let’s forget that Johnny Kay and the things he did,’ she said. ‘John Parry sounds a much nicer person.’

He got up with difficulty. ‘I found where the cables were,’ he said. ‘They’ve taken them away.’

‘Later,’ she said.

Their arms went round each other and she squeezed him hard before she had time to take in his white face. The pain of his broken ribs flared white hot and he sagged unconscious to the floor.

There was a sequel…

Lanie Gerow was happier. So maybe Puritan Bluff, Idaho, wasn’t Philly or Baltimore but it wasn’t Ramsgill Stray either and above all it wasn’t an Agency town. Lanie and Pacman had what felt like their final showdown back in England. He accused her of violating trust, of risking his position. She said she wasn’t going to go on being no goddam stooge for no goddam spook like Mackeson. She said she was up to here with the Agency and she was leaving and she’d meant it. Pacman went all quiet on her then and she felt a little bit sorry for him but she wasn’t about to back down. Whichever way it was, her message got through. The next day he came back grinning from ear to ear. She didn’t make it easy for him.

‘You wanna know something?’

‘No.’

‘Go on, baby. I got something to tell you.’

‘Only thing I want to know is when we’re flying out.’ She sniffed.

‘Thursday week.’

‘Don’t mess me around, Pacman.’

‘I ain’t.’

‘So where is it? Alaska?’

With a big smirk, he said ‘Idaho’.

She just stared at him. Couldn’t stop herself.

‘I said Idaho, doll. You hear me?’

‘I never heard of no Agency postings in Idaho.’

‘This ain’t Agency, baby.’

‘You leaving, Pacman? Leaving the Agency?’ She didn’t dare hope it.

‘Yeah, well, not quite. Got me a secondment. You and me, baby, we’re gonna be civilians for a while, maybe a long while.’

And so it was. He didn’t talk about the job at the Facility and she didn’t ask. It was enough to know he was out of it, away from the bugs, away from Ray Mackeson.

Had she known, only half of that was right.

Lanie was out doing the shopping in downtown Puritan Bluff, looking up at the Salmon River Mountains looming behind the Safeway parking lot. It was her dance class night and she’d found a Lycra one-piece at Twinkletoes which did all the right things for her. The clouds were blowing away from the mountains. Maybe they’d go to the lake for the weekend after all. Pacman was so relaxed these days, getting on with Billy, showing him how to fly-fish. He’d even grown his hair longer. It was different in Idaho with no Agency.

Pacman wasn’t thinking about fishing or anything like it. Pacman was glued to a phone and trying to stop himself climbing the wall. Ray Mackeson, now back at Fort Meade, Maryland, was on the other end and Pacman was giving him some of the worst news of his life.

‘He’s out there now, Ray. I mean, what the hell we gonna do? Goddam company’s screwed up on security. I told ’em. You know I told ’em. What did they think? This was some kind of cold cure? I told them, these guinea pigs gonna turn into grizzly bears. You gotta build a strong enough cage to hold ’em in.’

Mackeson, safely away from it, was annoyingly calm. ‘Pacman. Calm down. No one’s blaming you. One man’s out, that’s all. You got the National Guard coming and the Feds. They’ll fix it and I’ll tell you what they’re going to be saying after.’

Lanie was opening the trunk when the white Chevy Malibu came into the parking lot and she stopped to look at it because of the way the tyres were squealing with the speed. Puritan Bluff was a pretty safe town normally. Drivers who drove like that should be ashamed of themselves with kids around. As if to make the point a family came out the door of the Ribs Shack. Three kids, Mom, Pop, Grandma, the kids unhooking one of them shaggy English sheepdogs from where it had been patiently waiting, a picture of small-town American domesticity. That should show the Chevy driver this ain’t the place for screaming tyres, she thought.

The Malibu driver saw them all right. He swung the wheel hard over, put his foot on the gas and went into the middle of them like a giant bowling ball.

Lanie stared, rooted to the spot. Pop, Grandma and two of the kids took the impact, hurled apart in a human shell-burst. The dog went under one wheel and came out with a red woolly puddle where its head had been. Mom and the remaining kid, a teenage boy in a Nintendo T-shirt, stood there untouched, one each side – the goal posts – and they each began to scream. The Malibu slewed to a halt. The driver got out, a fit looking man of forty or so but for the veins standing out in his neck and the high-blood-pressure flush. He reached into the car, brought out a stubby-looking weapon and more or less cut them in two with a shrill, crashing burst of fire.

Then he looked across at Lanie.

Her knees lost all their strength as the gun came round towards her and she sank down behind the open trunk lid, knowing there was no protection, that he had only to take a few paces to the side to have her in full view again, but her body could do nothing.

The first police car crew saved her, but not themselves. They’d been chasing the Malibu driver half across town from the Facility, past five other similar scenes of savage annihilation. The first police car took forty rounds of nine-millimetre through the windscreen and neither the driver nor his passenger played any further part in it. The second car was unmarked, came in through the back way but did little better. The driver took a throat wound and slammed left into a delivery truck. The passenger bounced his head off the windshield and slumped down below the dash.

By then cars were coming in from all directions but it was the chopper that got him, spraying the Malibu with such a lethal concentration of fire that the ricochets injured three policemen and the manager of the garden store, who’d unwisely come to see what was happening. That was considered at the time a low price for making sure that Wayne Spargo, the Malibu driver, was well and truly dead.

Lanie Gerow didn’t get her weekend trip to the lake. She was in shock at the hospital, among the few other victims left alive by Spargo’s efficient trail of destruction. Pacman was at her side more or less constantly.

‘Why did he do it?’ she kept asking.

‘Who knows, baby?’ he said. ‘The news says he was an airman, on leave or something like that. Went crazy. Says they were considering dismissing him on medical grounds before that.’