First and Only (16 page)

Steve moved to leave the room.

‘Night,’ said Psimon.

Steve paused at the door.
‘Goodnight,’ he said. And as Psimon pulled his shirt over his head Steve could
see the angry red line of the injury in his side.

‘
Christ!
’ he thought for
the umpteenth time. ‘
How the hell does he live with this?
’

Steve shook his head as he ducked
out of the room. He pulled the door to but he left it open by three or four
inches as if he had just said goodnight to a child and wanted to make sure he
would be able to hear them if they cried. Then he went to finish checking the
flat.

The fire escape door was half
timber, half glass. Not the most substantial of doors but the lock was solid;
no one was getting through there without making one hell of a racket. That
would be warning enough.

Steve found a second bedroom to
the rear of the building. Then he went to the bathroom before checking the
final room in the flat, a third bedroom opposite the phone in the hall.

Feeling like he could fall asleep
on his feet Steve flicked on the light in the room. Despite his exhaustion the
vision that greeted him brought him back to startled wakefulness.

*

Lying in his bed, his head
resting on the deep feather pillow, Psimon opened his eyes.

*

Steve stared in disbelief at the
far wall of Psimon’s ‘spare room’. It was like the scene from a serial killer
movie. Only in this case the obsessive psycho was in fact an obsessive psychic.
The wall was covered with information: newspaper cuttings, photographs,
diagrams, maps, computer-printed sheets and hand-written notes on small pieces
of fluorescent paper; the whole thing haphazardly tied together with
interconnecting lines of masking tape and permanent black marker. Some of the
lines had been scribbled out or redirected and many of them pointed to nothing
at all, or in other cases to a frenzied hatching of frustrated marks. And
behind it all, like some kind of macabre wallpaper, were newspaper cuttings
chronicling horrific murders going back more than a decade.

Captivated, Steve moved closer to
the wall.

Far to the left, where the wall
was almost clear, was a photograph of what he took to be Psimon’s parents.
There was something of each of them in Psimon’s pleasant features. From this
unassuming photograph the lines expanded, the continuum unfolding to cover the
entire wall. And then it struck Steve. This was not the depiction of a mind in
turmoil; this was a planning wall. The army used the same kind of thing when
planning an operation; simplified, more efficient and far, far neater but
essentially the same.

There were hundreds of names;
most of them crossed out. There were maps of Manchester, of Fort Lauderdale in
Florida and even an Ordnance Survey map of Alderley Edge, where he and Psimon
had met for the first time. There were flight schedules, and receipts for
tickets. There were articles on the James Randi Foundation and the
million-dollar challenge. And, more alarming to Steve’s mind, there were
articles on the structure of MI5 with tables of hierarchy showing the names of
employees. Leaning in more closely Steve saw one name outlined in red…

Richard Chatham, International
Liaison for National Security

Beneath this name was pinned a
return ticket to London and beside it a large, assertive tick.

As Steve’s eyes continued to scan
the wall he came to pages on nuclear submarines from Jane’s Defence Weekly, a
publication produced by the renowned authority on the armed forces of the
world. There were more detailed articles taken from subscriptions to Jane’s
exclusive information packs, information that governments used to plan their
defence strategies. Subscription to such material cost thousands of pounds. And
then there were obscure technical diagrams of electrical circuits, ballast
systems and even the nuclear reactors at the heart of the subs; diagrams of
such detail that they were way beyond the reach of even Jane’s much vaunted
analysts. And within these diagrams several discreet components had been
circled in red; inlet valves, temperature gauges and electrical circuits.

Steve traced his finger outwards
from these diagrams to promotional photographs of nuclear submarines cutting
through anonymous swathes of ocean. Two submarines were featured. The USS
Virginia, a US Navy attack sub, and the HMS Vigilant, a Vanguard class
ballistic missile submarine from the British Royal Navy. Beside the subs were small
photographs of men in naval uniform and beneath each was a name, location, date
and time.

Commander Douglas Scott,
Manchester Airport, Wednesday March 4th, 6 - 7.00pm

Captain Philip Kern, Orlando International Airport, Thursday March
5th, 7.45 for 8.00am EST (cutting it fine)
.

‘Huh,’ exclaimed Steve quietly,
recognising the two men and seeing that the dates and times coincided with
their flights to Florida. And then he realised; meeting up with these two
submarine captains was the real reason for their transatlantic jaunt. Could it
be that taking the challenge at the Randi Foundation had been nothing more than
a side-show, something to do while they were there? But what was the
significance? Why was it so important to make contact with these two men?

He followed the lines radiating from these pictures to a small, intense
knot of information.
Bootle Street
, one of the notes read, and beneath
it a list of names:

Chief Constable David
McCormack

Admiral Joseph Grant (watch
this tosser!)

Vice Admiral Edwin T. Fallon

Mr Chatham

The lines radiating from here
were fewer. Only one thread seemed to have a coherent endpoint; it lead to an
advertisement cut from a newspaper…

CHALLENGE THE PSYCHICS…
An open debate

And from here there was nothing…
lines leading to empty patches of wall. Masking tape hanging in crumpled
ringlets. Dense scribbled blocks of permanent marker and other areas where any
writing had been scratched from the wall with such force that the wallpaper was
torn and the scrape marks gouged deep into the underlying plaster. Steve looked
more closely at one of these obliterated scribblings where the same sentence
seemed to have been written over and over before being scrawled out.

S##v# ##st k### m#

Ste#e #ust #il# me

###ve mu## ki## ##

With a growing sense of dread
Steve saw what had been written there.

Steve must kill me

Steve must kill me

Steve must kill me

Feeling nauseous and light-headed
Steve stumbled back from the wall. This was all becoming too much for him. He
felt that he was living through someone else’s nightmare and he could no longer
distinguish what was real from what was not. How long had it taken to compile
this information? What did it mean? What was it for? What did any of it have to
do with him?

Standing with his back against
the doorframe he fumbled for the light switch as stark newspaper headlines
stared back at him from across the empty room.

Torture… Missing… Mutilated…
Psychiatrist Found Dead… Torture… Missing…

Steve felt an unpleasant
sensation of panic crawling in his guts and he steeled his mind against it.
Finally he stared defiantly at the wall before turning off the light with a
decisive flick of the switch. He was about to leave the room when he noticed a
small square of fluorescent orange paper lying on the table beside the door.
With a deep sense of apprehension Steve reached down and turned the piece of
paper over…

Steve Brennus

Mobile - 0774 0673394

Steve’s fist closed around the
note. He crushed it to a small tight ball and tossed it aside. Then, feeling
more confused and frightened than he ever had in his life, he went to find the
half-finished bottle of brandy.

*

Lying in his bed, his head
resting on the deep feather pillow, Psimon closed his eyes and went to sleep.

Chapter 18

Saturday March
5th

Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Shackleton, poured
himself a second cup of coffee and finished off the last of his croissant. With
a relieved sigh he pushed the pile of newspapers aside. There was nothing in
today’s headlines that would require his presence in the office today. In fact
he was free until his meeting with the French President tomorrow afternoon. It
was Saturday morning, his wife had taken the boys to their respective rugby
matches and the Chancellor was enjoying a rare moment’s peace.

He opened up his laptop and
logged on to the LSE website, idly scrolling through the pages of financial
data and business news from around the world. He went to the Investor Centre
and before clicking on ‘Market News’ his attention was drawn to the tables
showing the top ten risers and fallers of the day.

‘Huh,’ he exclaimed with mild
interest when he noticed that the top three performers had all risen by the
same 13.39%.

‘
That happened just recently
,’
he seemed to remember but, as his eyes moved down the list, it suddenly struck
him. This had not happened before but he had seen this before; seen these
figures before…

The list went on but the
Chancellor had risen suddenly from the table and was rifling through the mass
of notes, telephone numbers and ‘to do’ lists on the family’s notice board
beside the kitchen door. His wife had stuck it up here, he was certain of it.
But where the hell was it now?

There it was…

There, under a damned rugby newsletter… a folded piece of A4 paper with
the words,
A bit of forecasting fun !
, written on the front.
Please
keep until Saturday 12th of March
.

The Chancellor recalled being
given the piece of paper at a charity function in Manchester almost five weeks
ago. He remembered the young man with his shy, pleasant smile and piercing grey
eyes.

‘I will donate a thousand pounds
if you will keep this to hand for the next five weeks,’ the young man had said.

The Chancellor had glanced down
at what was written on the paper. It was a list of companies and their share
prices, a forecaster’s guess at the top ten risers and fallers.

‘You have a deal,’ the Chancellor
said with a manufactured smile. But…

‘No,’ the young man said as if he
knew that the Chancellor had not taken him seriously. ‘I want your word that
you will do as you say.’

The Chancellor looked more
closely at the sincere young man and nodded.

‘Five weeks,’ he said.

The young man smiled. He produced
a cheque from his inside pocket and handed it to one of the nearby volunteers
who was only too happy to take his cash.

‘What’s this?’ the Chancellor’s
wife had asked the following morning when she was hanging up his jacket.

‘Just something I was given at
the dinner last night.’

‘Can I bin it?’

‘Yes,’ the Chancellor had said.
Then, ‘No!’ he amended.

His wife had raised her eyebrows
and stood there hovering.

‘Just stick it on the
pin-board... I’ll hang on to it for a while.’

The Chancellor brought the piece
of paper back to the table and held it up beside his computer screen.

There were twenty companies
listed; ten risers and ten fallers, and by the time the Chancellor reached the
end of the list his hand was shaking so much that he struggled to read the rest
of what was written there.

Figures for Saturday March
7th, 9.30am.

For more information contact
Richard Chatham, MI5

Yours truly...

The Chancellor reached for his
mobile phone. ‘Kirsty?’ he said when his call was finally answered.

‘Yes, sir? I didn’t ex…’ began
the Chancellor’s chief personal aid.

‘Kirsty,’ the Chancellor said, an
audible tremor in his voice. ‘Get me the number for MI5. And find out if
there’s someone there by the name of Richard Chatham. Then contact Lesley
Stevens in Camp David. Tell him I need to speak with the Prime Minister
immediately.’