Henry Garden sat in the armchair in front of the TV. He wasn’t paying any attention at all to what was happening on the screen. His mind was elsewhere, trying to deal with what he’d just read. He glanced over at the six-seater table behind him in the lounge-cum-dining room of his flat, at his laptop, open and still displaying the file he’d copied on to a USB flashdrive in the office. Dean Mayhew’s army record.
Garden stood up and went into the kitchen to pour himself another large glass of wine. He’d finished the first one without even knowing he was doing it. Coming back out he went over to the table and sat down in front of his computer, scrolling to the top of the document and reading it through again, hoping he might have made a mistake, misunderstood some highly relevant piece of information that would change everything. It was a vain hope. He hadn’t.
It was all there in black and white. Dean Mayhew was a dangerous and unstable man. Ex-SAS. Trained to kill, and seemingly very good at his job. His only problem was that he’d apparently found it almost impossible to differentiate between the theatre of war and life away from the combat zone. He was a complete wild card, as far as Garden could make out, and had been ‘let go’, Services No Longer Required, some five or six years previously. One violent incident too many. When Nick had introduced him to Mayhew, at the casino, he must only have been out for a year or so.
He was, according to his psych profile, a highly intelligent, if badly educated, man with sociopathic tendencies. Was that as bad as being psychopathic? For the life of him Garden couldn’t remember, and for one horrible moment he was catapulted back into a classroom at school. The room where his sadistic English teacher, Mr Bailey, had delighted in exposing any and all examples of what he called ‘the rampant stupidity of this ghastly excuse for a generation’.
Garden reached behind him for his dictionary, pulling it off the shelf and opening it. This was, he thought, as he flicked through the delicate, petal-thin pages, one of the best reasons for living alone: everything was always exactly where you expected it to be.
Sociopath, he read, An individual with a personality disorder that manifests itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behaviour, as well as a lack of conscience.
Nice. He flicked backwards and stopped at another page.
Psychopath, it said, A person suffering from a chronic mental disorder, with abnormal or violent behaviour.
From the Greek psyche, the soul, and pathos, meaning disease. Disease of the soul… it almost sounded tragic when put like that.
Not a lot to choose from there, then. Returning the book to where it belonged, Garden felt the cold aura of panic descend again, the sense that things were beginning to unravel uncontrollably and that it was all his fault. Which it was. Dean Mayhew was not a very nice person, and one to whom Garden had effectively handed the information he needed to find a group of people; people Nick Harvey wanted found and stopped. And the only reason you’d use a man like Mayhew was if you wanted them stopped permanently.
Garden was sure he could feel his heart pounding much too fast as he closed the file and shut down the laptop. He wished he could press an ‘undo’ button, like on his computer, so that he would never have met Nick Harvey, never have heard of AquiLAN. What was the man doing associating with aberrant dross like Mayhew anyway?
There was nothing intrinsically bad, or evil, with the idea of creating an anti-CCTV unit, which had been Nick’s original plan behind the idea of Omega Place. But there was a lot wrong with hiring a maniac like Mayhew to clear up the mess when your own creation refused to obey orders and started to threaten the status quo.
And even though Garden had known about the project right from the start there’d been nothing he, personally, could have done to put a stop to it. Harvey – a man whom he’d once heard described as having the morals of a horny wolverine – had him, figuratively speaking, hanging by his thumbs, his toes just touching the ground. There was nothing he could have done, not with Nick holding the substantial… really very substantial gambling IOUs over his head. And whatever other evidence the man now had of his continuing involvement.
The idea had seemed harmless enough, to begin with. Nick would use an old contact of his from university days to set up and run a fake, virtual anti-CCTV radical action group. This person, Garden had never met him, apparently knew all about agitprop and street protests and he would make Omega Place seem like the real thing, as well as an operation that appeared bigger than it actually was. Seem like the real thing, not actually be the real thing.
The plan had been for the group to operate in areas where AquiLAN had already got contracts in place, but wanted to expand the business possibilities. Omega Place’s antisocial activities, the perceived increase in vandalism and quasi-criminal behaviour – all reported in the local press – would give the impetus needed to persuade the public that more cameras were necessary. And councils that it was money well spent. A win-win situation all round.
Where had it all gone so wrong?
Garden knew he was kidding himself by asking the question. He knew precisely when it had all gone pear-shaped. When he’d had one of his good nights at the tables and had had too much to drink; he’d told Nick about the remotely piloted vehicle programme, and the next thing he knew the idiot had told the person running his covert operation and he’d put the information in print. The highly classified information.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, it seemed like Nick’s plan had backfired and his pet project wasn’t as under his control as he’d thought. From what Garden could work out, the man in charge had had another agenda and pulled a fast one by getting Nick to fund setting up Omega Place, then running off with it. The tail had started to wag the dog.
Never trust a radical…