Well, isn’t Mademoiselle de Xavia quite the duplicitous little minx? Seriously, I’m starting to believe I might have been giving myself an unnecessarily hard time over Dubh Ardrain, as all my previous deconstructions of the fiasco failed to factor in just what a resourceful and audacious opponent I was up against. Not that I’m about to forgive her for shooting off two of my fucking fingers, but at least I now see there was a reason behind it, beyond gratuitous injury. I had to leave the things, knew in an instant that I’d lost them for good. The digits and blood vessels would only remain viable for a matter of hours. There’s no time and no point thinking about getting them stitched back on.
Never mind, there are greater things afoot, such as the real revelation of de Xavia’s worth, and it’s not in pointing a gun at her boss, because any desperate nutter can manage that. No, I’m walking behind her and Shaw, about halfway down the tunnel when, just as I’m thinking she’s dragging us all into some foolhardy and potentially catastrophic siege scenario, the whole picture changes in a twinkling.
A panel silently opens in the wall of the passage, and from it emerge two people, both wearing Rank Bajin headgear. The aperture appears behind the point Shaw has passed, though he isn’t seeing much anyway with that cloth over his face. The first to step through the gap is a woman in a dress identical to de Xavia’s, her doppelgänger outfit completed with gun, detonator and explosives (presumably as fake as the ones in my TV camera). She walks silently in step with de Xavia for the briefest second, during which some swift and subtle business takes place that leaves the newcomer handcuffed to the oblivious Shaw in de Xavia’s stead. Meanwhile, behind them emerges a man in a cloak matching the one she had me wrap myself in, his hands cuffed in front, the right one wrapped in a red-drenched bandage. I now understand that she wasn’t being entirely facetious when she said she shot me to make it look realistic.
The three of them proceed out towards the stage as de Xavia gestures to me to step into the aperture. She slides the panel back from the inside, and no sooner has it locked into place than I feel a lurch as we begin to descend on a platform, gliding smoothly but rapidly beneath the stage.
We both step off into a low-ceilinged room, one with thick walls going by the way the sounds of our footfalls are muted. It’s dry and dusty, bare but for some boxes of tatty Christmas decorations. There’s a door at one end, in the direction of the backstage area. De Xavia says nothing, just gestures with her gun to stay put for a moment.
I look at my watch.
‘I would remind you that the gas is released in eighty-two minutes,’ I tell her.
She shushes me. I wonder what she’s listening for, then realise it’s her earpiece. She’s monitoring the response to the decoys above. We wait in place for a few minutes, saying nothing. I imagine we have quite a few questions for each other, but it’s not only the need for silence that prevents both of us from asking any of them.
She exhales suddenly, like an athlete psyching herself for her next feat.
‘Follow me,’ she says, and who am I to argue?
She leads me through the door and into a narrow passageway. It snakes along through a couple of tight s-bends, suddenly emerging after the second of these into the dock where the props and scenery came in and out, a bare-brick relic of the venue’s past as a Victorian music hall. The area accommodates a narrow iron staircase, a disused pulley system and a double-wide sliding door. It also houses a cop with a pistol, which he draws as myself and de Xavia emerge from the passage’s last bend and into view.
‘The fuck’s going on?’ he demands, flabbergasted.
‘Put down your weapon,’ she tells him, levelling her own.
‘I can’t let you do this, Angelique.’
‘Put it down.’
‘I can’t. I have orders not to let anybody through this door, no matter who.’
‘You know I can’t do that. Give it up and stand down before one of us does something we’ll regret.’
De Xavia doesn’t reply for a second or so. The two of them remain locked in the stand-off, maybe six yards apart, guns levelled. It’s long enough for me to think my little reprieve might be over. Subterfuge and fake explosives are one thing, but we’re talking real bullets now.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. Then she shoots him three times in the chest. Blood sprays the sliding door as he is thrown back against it, before slumping, face-down, to the ground.
‘Nice shootin’, Tex,’ I remark. She doesn’t like this.
‘Fuck you. There’d be a whole clip with your name on it if I didn’t need you alive,’ she assures me, her voice breaking a little.
‘Well, the police want me alive, but I think you may have just resigned from the force. So are you going to let me in on your agenda?’
‘You’ll find out in good time,’ she says, hauling open the door. There is a police squad car outside, sitting in a rain-washed yard off a side-street to the rear of the nightclub. ‘But for now, the deal is the same. I want the hostages and you want five minutes’ access to a laptop. Get in.’
She opens the driver’s side door for me. I hold up my cuffed hands by way of indicating I’m neither free nor fit for driving.
‘It’s an automatic. You know where you’re going. Take us there.’
‘But my hand,’ I remind her.
‘Boo. Fucking. Hoo,’ she growls, climbing into the passenger seat. ‘Drive.’
It’s fucking agony every time my right hand touches anything, so I grip the steering wheel with my left, pressing my right wrist against the other side to steady it. The indicator stick is to the right, but I’m fucked if I’m bothering with that.
De Xavia notes this when we stop to turn right on to Theobald’s Street: a car gets blocked behind us as the traffic in the left-hand lane whizzes past. The driver honks his horn in protest at the lack of notice.
‘Try not to draw attention to us, would you?’ she says.
‘I’m in a police car,’ I remind her. ‘They never fucking indicate.’
‘No hand signals either,’ she mutters acidly, the bitch.
She switches on the police radio, scans the frequencies to pick up the chatter. The decoy car and its train of pursuit vehicles are heading west along Victoria Embankment.
‘Who were your accomplices?’ I ask. ‘Your boss said something about you hanging out with a bank robber. Obviously people who owe you big-time, given the fall they’ll be taking.’
‘They’ve got complete deniability,’ she replies. ‘They’re performance artists, showbiz wannabes. They had no idea what they were really doing. They thought it was part of the show, or rather a hijack of the show. They know they’ll get a slap on the wrist, but they also know it’ll be worth it, because they’ll be famous by the end of the week.’
‘Just what the world needs,’ I remark. ‘More fame-grasping nonentities.’
‘Well, you can hardly complain. You’re the prick who’s creating vacancies in the celeb market.’
Theobald’s Road becomes Clerkenwell Road, which becomes Old Street, before I turn left on to Kingsland Road at Shoreditch. For the last hundred yards, de Xavia has been tapping away at her phone, composing a text. She holds off and looks up intently, however, when I hang a right under an archway and into the courtyard of four interlinked Victorian warehouses, now converted into a light industrial complex. How, she must be thinking, could he be running this whole scheme from a place like this, housing at least a dozen businesses, a hundred-odd workers and no doubt couriers zipping in and out from dawn till dusk?
I bring the police car to a halt behind the only other vehicle in the courtyard, a large street-cleaning truck, its brushes tucked in tight to its underside and water trickling from the hose clipped to the rear. De Xavia opens the passenger-side door but I stop her before she climbs out.
‘Watch,’ I say, and reach for a thigh pocket. It’s awkward with the handcuffs, and even more so that I have to use my left hand rather than my right, but I get hold of the remote and point it at my invisibility machine.
‘How far do you think we’d get in a stolen police car?’ I ask her, as the cylindrical rear of the truck swings open, revealing it to be cavernously hollow, and a ramp automatically descends to the ground.
I had it made in Estonia so that it wasn’t traceable. It’s wider than normal cleansing trucks, but the design and liveries are sufficiently accurate that you’d need to see a real one right next to it to notice. It accommodates a Mercedes limo, an Escort van or indeed a police car, with just room enough to squeeze out round the sides. The brushes and suction pipes don’t work, but there’s a reservoir for the hose so that it drips water authentically, a timer releasing a volume every ten minutes so that it always looks like it’s recently been in use.
‘Appropriate, don’t you think?’ I ask her. ‘For cleansing the place of detritus.’
‘Except the shite usually goes in the back, not the driver’s seat.’
De Xavia gets out and I drive the police car up inside. I reach into another pocket and turn my phone off silent before climbing out of the car. She keeps a careful eye – not to mention the gun – trained on me throughout as I shuffle my way along the side of the vehicle and down out of the truck.
‘It’s a stick-shift,’ I inform her as I open the cab, indicating my handcuffs.
‘Need to make sure you don’t crash when you’re changing gear, then,’ she responds.
We climb in and I start the engine. I put it into first and pull away. Back on Kingsland Road, I manage the first gear-change with a minimum of swerve, taking both hands off the steering wheel as briefly as I can. I just hope we don’t hit too many red lights.
De Xavia gets her phone out again, resuming what she was working on before our detour.
‘Who you texting?’ I ask.
‘You’ll find out,’ she grumbles darkly. She presses the Send key and folds the phone shut.
‘I’m sure I will,’ I remark, turning my head so that she doesn’t see my face.
There’s a red light ahead. I have to stop. It means I’ll have to struggle all the way up the gears again, but it will be worth it, because it lets me take my eyes off the road and look at her expression when the sound of an incoming text chimes from my left thigh pocket.
It takes a while for the penny to drop. Christ, and I thought the woman was a detective. I can see the connections being made, the possibility presenting itself, being ruled out, ruled back in. I see incredulity, horror and, finally, appalled, gaping-mouthed acceptance.
‘Inform us once you have acquired the target, then your contact will make himself known to you,’ I say, quoting my final text to her, sent only a few hours ago. ‘So, this is your contact making himself known to you. Hello,’ I add cheerfully.
‘You,’ she breathes.
‘Take it as a compliment. I needed someone capable of getting me out of police custody, someone who would risk everything and stop at nothing to pull it off. I chose well, it seems, other than you mangling my fucking hand.’
‘If I’d known, it would have been your balls.’
‘Oh, dry your eyes, it’s simpler this way. You said it yourself: the deal is the same. You get the hostages, including your folks, and I get the money. You just don’t get me for a trophy. Sorry to short-change the constabulary, but I never fancied HMP as a provider of palliative care.’
We drive the rest of the way in silence, de Xavia sitting there numbed as she contemplates the humiliating enormity of what a mug she’s been taken for. It’s just a pity she won’t live to relate this embarrassment to her erstwhile brother-in-arms, Larry the Little Drummer Boy. I’ll have to live without avenging myself on that little cock-stain, however. I’ve put too much time and effort – not to mention every last penny – into this, and once it’s done I won’t be risking what I’ve built for anything so insignificant.
Three years I’ve been working on this: planning, surveying, constructing, purchasing, learning new skills, researching, reconnoitring, patiently putting all of the elements in place. That’s right, three years. It was the idea that germinated and grew on those visits to see my son: The idea that didn’t go away; the sense of untapped power and possibilities that grew and grew, while only the price never changed. What seemed inescapable was that identifying myself as the author of my deeds would be at the cost of my own life. Then one day I realised there was a way of paying that price with a dud cheque.
I’m made up in latex right now, distorting and disguising my features to a quite unrecognisable extent. It takes a bit of preparation, but it’s mandatory. I’ve worn the same face on all my recent excursions around celebrity-land. More significantly, I also wore it when I photographed myself for the plastic-surgery headshots I secreted in Lydon Matlock’s medical file – along with those forged hospital documents containing the sad, sad news about the big C.
The truck has a bit of a wobble as I change down in order to turn right, about a mile outside Marfleet docks in Essex. De Xavia comes out of her fug to look askance as I direct us towards what appears to be a rusty corrugated-iron fence. I push a button on the dashboard and a section of the fence slides inside behind another, opening a gap wide enough to let the truck pass through. From there, it’s a quarter of a mile down the single-track approach road to where my operations base sits in dry dock, a rusty old hulk of a container vessel. It’s in no shape to face the high seas, but it will play its part in my sailing off into the sunset nonetheless.
It won’t be cancer, but I will die tonight, much the same as I died over Stavanger. I won’t be able to sink all of the evidence in the depths of a fjord this time, but there will be too many half-incinerated body parts to make individual identification remotely possible, including whatever is left of Nick Foster, Four Play, Darren McDade, Wilson Gartside and the sad homeless fucker I selected because his age and build were a close enough match to my own. Simon Darcourt will die in a massive explosion, along with Angelique de Xavia, her parents and all the over-celebrated oxygen-thieves in the cells adjacent to them. All that will survive will be the farewell video I upload to the web before hitting the detonator. But just before the fireball engulfs the ship, a solitary figure will invisibly slip away. A new man, a reborn man. (Albeit reborn minus two fucking fingers.) Most importantly, though, a very, very rich man, able to provide handsomely for his dependents, as well as financing an extremely comfortable retirement.