Chameleon - A City of London Thriller (14 page)

Gil chalked
the large uncut key and inserted it into the lock and turned it
until she felt resistance. She then withdrew the key and looked at
the marks made in the chalk by the levers. She quickly selected the
master key that most closely matched the lever marks and inserted
it, and then, with a small amount of jiggling supported by brute
force, she turned the key and the levers clicked over. The door was
now unlocked. She stepped inside and pulled the door closed but she
did not lock it. A good operative always maintains access to a
quick exit route.

Almost
immediately inside the passageway she found the ornate public
entrance, secured by a trellis shutter and a modern Yale type lock.
This time her electronic lock pick would be fine.

Gil pulled
what looked like a torch from her pocket and slid a switch on the
tubular body of the object forward two positions. Three titanium
prongs sprang out of the end, all so closely grouped that they were
almost touching. The young woman carefully pushed the three prongs
into the lock until they each hit resistance. She then slid the
button back one notch, and there was a whirring sound as the prongs
moved back and forth into position. The red diode on the handle
turned green, and the end of the electronic pick rotated like an
electric screwdriver, unlocking the shutter.

***

Gil had
deliberately arrived early so that she could scout the area. Her
MI5 trainers had impressed upon her that accessing premises through
locked doors and securing the area were among the basic tenets of
‘spy craft’. As Gil had never considered herself a spy, she
preferred the term ‘tradecraft’.

The ornate
ticket office and entrance was in pristine condition; the famous
Leslie Green design was familiar from her childhood, as it was the
same colour scheme used on most old tube stations. The back offices
were cluttered, but somehow managed to convey the impression that
the staff had just left for lunch. The age and style of the
abandoned desks and equipment gave the room the appearance of a
scene from an old black and white movie.

Oddly enough,
the reason the whole station was in such good condition was that
film and TV companies often used abandoned Tube stations such as
this one for period dramas, and for blockbuster movies such as the
James Bond and Narnia series of movies, amongst others.

Gil wandered
through the station, relying on the dim glow emanating from the
emergency lighting. There were two interconnecting lifts at ground
level that formerly provided the main route to the platforms. These
lifts, however, were going nowhere. When the station was closed to
the public, steel beams were inserted under each lift, holding them
forever in place. The lifts were labelled with the plate of the
Otis Elevator Company, and were the original lifts as installed in
the 1890s. Beside the lifts was a concealed shaft, circular on plan
and lined with concrete blocks. This shaft had been prepared for
the third lift, which had never been installed. The third lift
shaft was deeper than the others; it sank seventy feet to give
access to the abandoned platform that had been closed in 1917, and
which was resealed after use in the Second World War. The lift
shaft now offered the only access to those two long forgotten
platforms.

Gil moved the
wood plank cover aside, and was not surprised to see a rope
suspended from a steel joist which spanned the three-metre opening,
and running down to the platform level. This was nothing to do with
the operation of the underground station; it was a ‘drop cable’. In
training exercises, when operatives needed to descend in a hurry,
they could attach a standard climber’s cable brake, which gripped
the rope and released it when a hand-sized trigger was squeezed.
The hand operated brake allowed the operative to descend at his or
her own speed, like abseiling. Alternatively, one could do a free
abseil, without equipment, but one needed good gloves and boots,
not to mention nerves of steel.

Satisfied that
she was alone, Gil sat in the refurbished lift car on the wooden
bench and waited. As she waited she contemplated the technology
that had been available to the Otis Elevators over a hundred years
ago and marvelled that lifts today were only cosmetically different
from their forebears.

As a child
visiting London, Gil had once asked the lift attendant at Covent
Garden Tube station why there was a door in the side of the lift.
He explained that the lifts were not square but were shaped as a
handed matching pair. In the event that one lift got stuck, the
other lift could be lowered alongside, the doors opened and the
passengers could easily be transferred into the working
lift.

An ingenious
idea, but not used in modern lifts. Why? Would we rather have
people sitting for hours in stuffy lifts, waiting for an engineer
or fireman to rescue them? Progress, she thought wryly. Have we
really made any?

Her
‘Chameleon’ cell phone interrupted her thoughts. She was reluctant
to answer it at that moment, but she switched on the electronic
voice distortion and spoke to her answering service.

Concerned that
the steel around her not only disrupted the cell phone signal but
that it also reduced the effectiveness of the voice disrupter, she
called her erstwhile African employer.

Jalou Makabate
sounded panicked. He had just seen Victoria Hokobu at the
conference and had immediately assumed that the Chameleon had
failed to kill her. Gil was not alarmed. She had ensured the happy
couple were at eternal rest before departing their Mercedes.
Someone had obviously found a clone to replace the majestic Mrs
Hokobu.

When Gil was
handed the assignment she had seen the flaw in Makabate’s plan
immediately, but it had not been her place to mention it. She had
been instructed to kill the husband, too, in case he simply
substituted for his dead wife at the conference, but what if they’d
had yet another substitute waiting in the wings?

She told
Makabate to calm down, and explained that if he bothered making
even arbitrary enquiries he would discover for himself that the
Chameleon had indeed completed the assignment and the Hokobus were
dead. At that she hung up, hearing a noise on the spiral
staircase.

***

“
Gillian!
Wow! You don’t look a day older!” Tim McKinnon said with all
honesty, as he looked his old colleague up and down.

Tim did look a
day older; many days older. He had always been an athletic five
feet eight inches, but he had now developed a paunch and was
carrying a good twenty pounds of excess weight. His skin looked
sallow and tight, lines showing at the eyes. He still had radiant
blue eyes, but now they were perched beneath a receding hairline of
dark hair, cut in the military style.

“
How did you
get in without coming in through the doors?” Gillian
asked.

“
Old trade
secret,” he smiled. “If you go down the line about twenty yards
there’s an emergency exit that comes up at the Aldwych. It’s quite
safe. The line has a safety bar fixed across the tracks, which
prevents the line being made live in error. Every couple of years
or so they go live and bring a train in here to test some new
development. They were here last year, trialling the video
projection system for advertising.

You’ve
probably seen the door at the Aldwych. It looks like an emergency
exit from the offices above, but in fact it was installed during
the war for the bigwigs to be able to move about without being seen
by the hoi polloi in the air raid shelter.”

“
And to
protect the nation’s art treasures, too, I suspect,” Gil
replied.

“
Hey, you
remember all of that stuff! Great. Those old tunnels are bricked up
now, and there’s no access to the parallel platform any
longer.”

The MI5 man
sat down beside Gillian and his face began to reflect the
seriousness of his message.

“
Gillian, the
Chameleon has got to go.” Gillian was stunned, but she would not
allow her face to show it.

“
Who?” she
enquired, perhaps a little too innocently.

“
Come on,
Gillian, you know better than anyone. Mac is the Chameleon. He must
have told you. You two were always as thick as thieves.”

“
I did
suspect, but I could never be sure,” Gillian responded, probing for
more information.

“
Well, you
can be sure. In 2007 the US Government wanted to take out Suleman
Grenadiere, the Somali warlord and pirate. They knew he was
travelling back to his encampment to trade hostages on a tanker
being held offshore, with a well-known oil company.

The road to
the encampment was known to be hazardous and narrow. It was easy to
defend and there was very little cover. So the US sent in a unit of
Army Rangers to watch the road from tree cover on the opposite
hill. When Grenadiere’s truck started up the incline they would act
as spotters for a F1/11 plane to be launched from the Nimitz
aircraft carrier, which would blow the road and the truck to
smithereens.

Anyway, the
truck came into view and was approaching a hazardous tight bend
when the Army Ranger Unit Leader took the coordinates. However,
before he could call the coordinates in three quick shots were
fired.

The spotter
for the Rangers reported that the three nearside tyres exploded.
These were the tyres closest to the drop, and the vehicle tilted
dangerously but looked as though it might stop safely.
Unfortunately for Suleman and his boys, the tyres were blown out on
a tight bend and the driver could not manoeuvre the old truck
around the bend with only half of his tyres. He lost control of the
vehicle.

To cut a long
story short, the truck, Suleman and his pirates plunged four
hundred feet into the abyss. Not only would they all be dead, there
would probably be very little of them left to find, and so the
Rangers decided to call it a day.

They were
about to leave when, twenty yards away from their position, the
foliage lifted up and a man appeared from nowhere. He waved at
them, smiled and disappeared into the forest. They must have passed
within inches of him on their way to their position without seeing
him. The Rangers spotter caught a few good stills of the sniper
with the video camera mounted on his scope. It was Mac.

Not only was
the shot almost impossible, but Mac had timed the three shots and
the ensuing blowout with a precision that seems impossible to
simple folk like me.”

When Tim
paused in admiration, Gil interjected.

“
How does
that prove he was the Chameleon?”

“
Under
pressure from Congress, the Oil Company ‘fessed up’ to the US
authorities, admitting that they had paid the standard one million
dollars to the Chameleon for a job well done.”

Tim could not
have known that he was telling Gil a humorous story she had heard
many times, but Gil’s overriding feeling was one of relief. Relief
that the service did not know that she was yet another embodiment
of the Chameleon.

“
OK Tim, I
think we can both accept that Mac is the Chameleon, but what has he
done that was so wrong he needs to be retired?”

“
In a
sentence, Paris and the Israeli Culture Minister.”

“
That was
Mac?” Gil asked, feigning shock. “I heard that was Hamas or some
other group.”

“
No, it was
Mac. He was making a point over an unpaid bill. He even called them
afterwards and demanded the money they owed. He got it.” Tim
smirked. He obviously liked the idea of Mossad being humiliated, as
MI5, MI6 and the police often had to clean up after illegal Mossad
operations in the UK in his day.

“
That’s
harsh!” Gil commented in what she hoped was the right tone, which
was intended to be disapproving but admiring.

“
I appreciate
that this may be difficult for you, emotionally, but Mac has to go
and we have to satisfy the Israelis and the FO that he is
dead.”

This was the
agent’s first mention of the Foreign Office, and Gil picked up on
it immediately.

“
Why is the
FO interested in the death of an Israeli Minister in Paris?” she
asked, looking puzzled.

“
Gil, this is
still Official Secrets Act, Classification 1 information, and as a
signatory you are still bound by it, OK?”

“
Of course,”
she replied, as though it was obvious and expected.

“
Well,
yesterday the Chameleon topped a visiting dignitary from Marat,
along with her husband, and she was unofficially the FO’s guest.
She was meant to be speaking at a conference this morning on
overcoming poverty and slavery in Marat. Mac put an end to
that.”

“
I’ve never
even heard of Marat. Is it in Asia?” she asked without apparent
guile.

“
No, I think
it’s the furthest African country from a coastline. I don’t know
where I dug that up from; maybe a briefing somewhere. Anyway, it
was created fairly recently after all the fighting in and around
Central Africa and the Congo.

It seems that
Mac took the Marati government’s money and snuffed out the
resistance.”

“
Doesn’t
sound like Mac, does it? He usually takes out bad guys,” Gil said
contemplatively.