James Long - Sixth Column

Sweat was starting to run down the inside of Johnny’s neck from his soaked hair. The balaclava he’d brought with him was intended for the Arctic, not a Mayfair mews house with the central heating up full blast. He looked at Clicker, bent over the safe, then rolled the wool up over his forehead and opened another drawer. There was a short crackle from the radio and his heart jumped. Clicker turned his head sharply, eyes and mouth rimmed clownlike in white against his black mask, listening, but nothing else came.

He couldn’t see anything interesting in the last drawer. He cast around for something else and saw the end of the briefcase sticking out from behind an armchair. He moved towards it, opened it. Inside was a passport and a fat envelope. Pulling out the envelope, he flicked up the flap and saw inside a wad of currency, large denominations wrapped up in some sort of list.

‘Yeah!’ he said softly. Clicker turned, and he put a thumb up, tossed him the envelope which he pushed into his bag. At that moment there was a noise outside. Somewhere below and downstairs – and with a rattle of sliding locks that was the overture to disaster, the front door opened.

Clicker recoiled from the safe door, rocking back on his heels, then stayed crouching, poised with one hand steadying himself on the ground, ready to leap. Johnny’s brain turned to mush. He looked towards the door, heard the sound of two voices, one male, American, one female, English, moving up the stairs. They should both be American, he thought, and anyway, they shouldn’t be there at all. He looked helplessly at the radio. Why hadn’t Mac warned them? Clicker was gesturing violently at him, at his face, desperately miming something. He got it, pulled the balaclava down again. Clicker picked his tools up silently, put them in the bag. Johnny reached for the radio then it was too late for anything else.

The door opened and a light went on revealing a fat man in evening dress, pulling a giggling blonde girl by the hand. The pair stopped abruptly, the man’s expression changing from drunken lust to frightened anger in a moment, then Clicker was moving, charging at the door, his shoulder taking the man in the chest throwing him backwards, his legs getting caught up with Clicker’s so that they both somersaulted back across the landing. The top banister rail caught Clicker a blow across the neck, dropping him, while the fat man flipped over Clicker’s flailing legs and careered on his back, head-first down the stairs. His yell was cut off by a cracking thump as his head reached the bottom and he lay still, chin forced hard into his chest by the weight of his body pressing down.

The girl’s screams were stopping Johnny thinking.

‘Out,’ yelled Clicker, picking himself up. He took the stairs three at a time, hurdled the fat man’s body and was gone. Johnny looked back at the girl for a moment, wishing she’d stop, and could think of no other course but to follow. Out of the door, he turned left for the street corner where Mac and the car were waiting. He was a second too slow at taking in the van parked outboard of the car, blocking it in and the profile of the uniform caps on the heads of the two men standing by Mac’s door in the darkness. They were looking in his direction hearing the screams and as he turned they shouted and started to run.

Fear came over him, not disabling him but lending him speed he’d forgotten he had. This wasn’t in the script. It should have been a doddle. Down Park Street, the pavement empty, he was holding them off. Over the pounding shock of his feet on the stones and the rising thud of his blood in his ears he heard a whistle and a vague feeling of surprise came over him that they still used such things.

It was the personal radio that got him, though. The second policeman dropped back to call in some help and halfway down Culross Street, his breath starting to go, they seemed to come at him from all directions. He was slowing down to give up when an over-zealous PC with a lot of club rugby behind him tackled him hard.

Three of them piled him into the van, rough despite his lack of resistance. The police radio was crackling with messages.

‘What’s your name, then?’ shouted a sergeant in his ear. Johnny kept his silence. That was the thing to do, keep quiet. Say nothing. Don’t let them hear the sound of your voice.

‘We’re bringing him in,’ said the driver into the mike. ‘No sign of the other one. Over.’

The speaker squawked, ‘All units. Upper Brook Street area, blue Cavalier, number starts G Golf four niner three. Stop and apprehend with care.’

That’s Mac, thought Johnny. The bastard must have got clear when they were chasing me. Lot of use he was. Then he realized the police must have stopped in the first place to check Mac out, must have been standing there right by him so he couldn’t pass on the warning. What about Clicker, he wondered, and more to the point, what about me?

They were taking it oh so seriously at the police station. He was surrounded by men on the way in, bundled into an interview-room, cautioned and then confronted by a burly plain clothes man who set the tapes rolling.

‘Detective Sergeant Frankland interviewing suspect. No name given. 10.20 p.m., June 18th,’ the man said and looked hard at him. ‘All right, let’s start with your name.’

Johnny didn’t meet his gaze, just sat staring down at the table wondering how everything had got quite so messy.

‘Listen to me,’ said Frankland. ‘The man you pushed down the stairs. He’s snuffed it. Skull and neck. So that puts you in major trouble, right? If you want any kind of break, you’d better start talking, and we’ll begin by you telling me who you are and who your mate in the car might be.’

It was all new to Johnny. He’d imagined scenes like this before, even come close on a couple of occasions when jobs had gone wrong, but this was the first time it had ever been for real. Clicker and Mac, he thought. Give them time. Mouth shut, he kept saying to himself, keep your mouth shut.

Half an hour passed in one-way pointless interrogation before the door opened. The detective looked round as a man in chief inspector’s uniform came in looking extremely angry.

‘Jim, a word outside,’ the man said.

The detective turned the tape off. A uniformed constable came in and stood by the door. Johnny avoided his gaze. Ten minutes went by then the Chief Inspector came back in.

He jerked his head and the PC left. He paced up and down the room, swung sharply on his heel and stared at Johnny. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t like this one little bit. If it was down to me, I’d teach you a bloody good lesson. You’re just like anyone else, whoever the hell you are. You break the law, it stays broken.’ His voice and his colour were both rising. ‘Unfortunately, it’s not bloody well down to me, is it? I don’t have a choice, so that means you get to go.’

A vast sense of relief swept over Johnny. The Chief Inspector stared at him with a face like the prelude to a punch. ‘There’s a car down in the garage. Just get the fuck out of here before I forget myself.’

John Aubrey de Ham; Kay, junior officer in the Counter-Proliferation Directorate of Her Majesty’s Security Service, more colloquially known as MIS, walked out, still without saying a word.

The relief didn’t last long. The car waiting for him had one of the older drivers at the wheel, an ex-Met squad-car man who occasionally forgot that in this job discretion usually came before speed. For once he drove the car as if it were a hearse and he wasn’t heading for Thames House. Both factors, Johnny realized, were bad signs.