The Whitehall Syndicate: A time travel conspiracy thriller (17 page)

Frank looked over at Tony, who seemed to be daydreaming. It didn't surprise him, their shift was ending in a few minutes and they had nothing left to look at. So far the hotel cameras had failed to yield anything. Their only lead was Jack and they were working under the reasonable assumption that he was at the scene.

Frank was fairly sure that, since Bob rang him up, Jack wasn't responsible. His questions had now become 'Why was Jack denying he was there?’ and ‘what did he know that they didn't?'

The computer gave him an error yet again and Frank groaned and threw his hands up in the air. He got up from his desk, quitting for the night. Maybe tomorrow he could look over this with a pair of fresh eyes and make something of it.

For now he was off home. If he was lucky he could still catch his favourite television show. Even without looking it was obvious Tony was itching to get back home to his girlfriend. He yelled across the room to his partner, telling him he could leave. Tony didn't need to be told twice.

Jack heard the door swing open and saw Anisha trudge in. She was exhausted from a long day's work, and hauled herself upstairs. Even now, sweaty and flustered, she was a vision. He had decided that he was going to tell her everything about Kim, and how Pete might be involved. He was just waiting for the right moment.

His day so far had been quite productive and he felt he was nearly reaching a plan for the theft of Green's body from the ambulance. All the pieces were starting to come together and the main worry he had now was how Kim was doing. She hadn't called him yet and her phone wasn't receiving any messages from him because of some sort of signal failure. That left him confused and worried, since there was multiple network coverage over every square foot of the planet nowadays.

He lay on the floor, looking at the heap of documents with Green senior. It had taken an age to sort them out after yesterday's visit from the police. Anisha came down now, wearing grey jogging bottoms and a faded baseball T-shirt, which revealed more of the gorgeous mocha skin on her arms. She came over and hunched down, taking a fleeting glance at the documents the pair were working on.

Loudly clearing her throat, she straightaway had their attention. From her pocket she whipped out a sheet of paper. Jack cleared an area for her and he and Green waited for her to explain. She said she had the plan perfectly made up for how they could get into the building.

Laying down her sketch of the house, it revealed her simple, subtle way of entering the building. Jack reached over and grabbed the security details and checked that Anisha's predictions were correct. As she explained it through in more detail they read through the notes again.

Green was the first to praise her and Jack followed suit. As Green senior read over it one more time, something occurred to Jack. He was thinking about how real this was, and the dangers of being caught or even being killed, and he realised that no-one had actually checked to see if these security details were correct.

What if he arrived expecting two guards and found six or seven instead? The thought was unsettling. He shared his concerns with the rest of the group, and immediately the mood shifted from congratulation and celebration to worry and doubt.

Jack decided that he would look at the paper details for Green's Royal Hall event and try and scope the real thing out tomorrow, to see if they matched up. It was already Thursday night and, seeing as how almost everybody else in the flat was working, his time was the most precious: too precious to be wasted. Still, it had to be done.

Thunder bellowed from the heavens, the dark nimbuses rippling like a stormy blanket in the sky. Eventually the rumbling reached a crescendo and with one huge boom, Frank's eyes snapped open. He was in an oversized white vest with blue and white striped boxer shorts, and his covers felt warm and clammy from sweat. He peeled them off and sat up, massaging his tired eyes.

The alarm clock on the counter told him it had just gone half four. His head was woozy but he found it difficult to block out the thunder so he buried his head under the pillow to try and muffle the sound. Roars and booms bounced around his skull and, accepting that the pillow wasn’t helping, he sat up in frustration.

There was a tingling on his skin and goosebumps started to settle as the cold set in, so he rubbed his arms a little to warm them up. With only the pallid glow of his night-lamp for company, he sat in bed thinking about the case and started to consider Bob.

How much did he know about what had happened, or about what Jack was trying to hide? He was shot in the chest so he must have seen who shot him. All Frank could really do now was to wait for Bob to wake up, but unfortunately that wouldn't happen for a few days at least.

There was no use in worrying too hard though, he thought. As soon as he woke up the case would solve itself, and until then, he just had to wait for inspiration to strike. He dropped his weary body back down into the bed and pulled over the covers, deciding to try to sleep again. About half an hour passed and he gradually drifted into a delicate state between waking and sleeping. With his body and his mind relaxed, all the chaotic elements of his case began to flow through his mind; to dance themselves into cohesion.

A few hours later, his alarm woke him up. His head was as clear as a bell and he now had one more theory he hadn't considered. Getting ready as fast as he could, he got into his aging saloon and speeded off to the police station. It was still early and the traffic was minimal.

Frank loved driving through London when they where only a few other cars on the road. The city felt so sparse and spacious and for a peaceful few minutes, the congestion and overcrowding of the capital seemed little more than a memory.

Arriving at the station in record time, he went up to the wrong floor by accident, the charred walls and hazard tape quickly reminding him his temporary office was now three storeys up. He reached his desk and began flicking through the stacks of documents piled up high; his
hawk likes eyes training on every word.

After leafing through several files he reached the one he wanted: the paramedic's report. He picked it up and turned to the 'compromises for life threatening behaviour' section. In the report it said that to feed in the correct tubes and medication at the time, and to correctly follow basic life support procedure, the paramedics had cut open and pulled off his jacket.

Looking back over the documents, he located the forensic crime scene report. According to the document, there had been no jacket, phone or laptop collected. Frank scratched his leathery chin and paused momentarily. Jumping back to the other report he read that the clothes had been taken for trace analysis by the hospital's own lab. He already had the findings of the lab investigation, but he frowned nonetheless. If the jacket had been taken to trace, where was the contents?

His desk was littered with huge stack of reports, on paper and disc. Each was from a different department, and all were too pressured by time restrictions and legislation to co-ordinate with each other. Frank sighed as he sat down, knowing he would have to work meticulously through every document to find out what happened to Bob's jacket contents. Maybe something in the pockets would give him a clue to this mystery.

Jack was still worried and checking his phone yet again, breathed a sigh of relief as he found the message he'd hoped for. Kim had called him some time last night and as he read her text he felt better knowing that she was okay.

Her message was panicked though, and he could almost hear the fear in her words. He wondered if everything was okay. In the video mail she had asked to meet up with him and Jack thought this would be a great time to introduce Anisha.

Presently, he was walking up another long London road on his search for a shop that sold binoculars. There weren't many items that Anisha needed for her part of the plan, but those that she did were crucial. Since Jack didn't have to go to work, he had been 'volunteered'
by the others to sort it out.

In truth he didn't mind much. He was a firm believer that you shouldn't over think things. He could remember many times when he had been searching his memory for something; a name, a word or just a simple fact. When he had thought hard about it he couldn't come up with anything but then when he had left it for a short while, the answer had suddenly popped into his head.

To that end, today he was taking a break from his usual planning. He would let Green senior do that for now. Jack's schedule for the day was already chocked full.

He estimated that collecting together all the items would take the morning, and then he would stop for lunch and finally go to the Royal Hall for the debate, which began at two. He had the security booklet in his coat pocket and he hoped that spotting the security wouldn't be too difficult. Stopping in his tracks, he spotted some binoculars in a shop window. All he had left to get now was another torch, a magnet, a lock picking kit and a few tuxedos.

The laboratory was closed for the next few days at least, which suited Kim perfectly. She lay in bed, hoping the rest would flush away the rotten feeling in her stomach. She had already seen a man die since she got involved in this job, and now she had a pair of dismembered body parts in her dresser drawer. This was a week of her life she would love to erase.

A different person might have gone out somewhere with her friends, to try to loosen her tension. But Kim wasn't the sort. She agonised over every little detail until she was a nervous wreck, and today she was doing just that.

She had woken up early this morning in an attempt to work out how to open the boxes. Realising they were fingerprint keypad locks that she couldn't possibly pick, she had gone back to bed and even now she wasn't asleep. Just lying there, wishing it was all over and waiting for Jack to call her back.

Finally, after an hour of staring at her ceiling, the phone began playing 'These Four Walls' by Shiatsu Massage. She pulled it off her bedside table and answered it, still lying on her back.

Jack was calling to tell her about Anisha and his progress so far. She listened patiently, waiting for the chance to tell him about the boxes. However, when her turn came, she never got the chance to mention them. Not being able to control herself she began blurting out everything to him, from how scared she was right down to her guilt for helping to build this weapon. Jack was good at making people feel better and after a few comforting words she perked up considerably: especially when he mentioned he would try and come over in the evening.

He could sense they were close to something now, but Kim still felt swamped. It was as if no matter how deep she investigated things, in the end it was inconsequential. It was just one clue after another and she wondered if they would ever be able to stop all these plans.

After some idle chat, Jack said goodbye as he entered an underground station and Kim quickly thanked him for listening. Having gotten things off of her chest, she finally got out of bed and resolved to make the rest of her day more productive.

Tony looked in admiration at his partner. This was a genuine detective. He had dismissed Frank's plan as a long shot but after hours of wading through documents Frank had finally found the jacket: it was being dry cleaned while the contents were stored in a locker at a second facility. By contrast, Tony had spent the whole time looking over Jack's movements, pretending to do police work until Bob woke up and solved the case for them.

Right now him and Frank were just pulling up to what looked like a huge laundry factory in the middle of a council estate. As the detectives walked inside, they could hear the mechanical churn of machinery rinsing, scrubbing and drying expired evidence for return to its owners or to the police for auction.

Frank flashed his police card and walked up to the desk clerk. He was a young man in his early twenties and looked like a typical University student doing part time work to ease his crippling debt. Frank asked to see the lockers and the clerk vaguely pointed to the left,
devoid of all enthusiasm to help.

Reaching them, Tony quickly found the correct one and they opened up the contents. Sifting through it didn't take long, and Tony's face lit up as he found what Frank had been looking for. There was an MFD labelled 'backup'. Gathering the rest of the items they shut the locker and signed out the contents on the sheet next to it.

Both men left the dreary building in a hurry, glad to be free of the stench of cheap detergent and rancid blood. They got into Frank's car where Tony's laptop was sitting and after some fiddling he opened the files up and scanned across them.

Tony was slow to realise what they were, but Frank was already looking deeper into them. He stopped as he saw money transfers between Michael Green and five other names. Tony saw them too and pulled up a second list of names from a police database, causing both men to look at each other with confusion. According to the bank document, there was a substantially large transfer from MP Michael Green's account to five known thieves, all on parole.

It was a slow day at the studio and Pete was using the time to look over the instruction guide on attack skills. It showed a whole range of simple moves that would incapacitate anyone almost instantly, without any messy fighting or trading punches. Pete practised in a spare dressing room, imagining there was an attacker coming towards him. The tricks to subduing attackers seemed simple and effective, in theory at least. He heard a knocking and opened the door to the stage choreographer who told him the girls were ready.

Quickly checking his phone again he saw Anisha and Jack still hadn't called. Anisha had been acting strangely all morning and he was hoping for some sort of explanation but she hadn't returned his message.

Pete reasoned that Jack was probably s
till busy at the hall, and Anjali was working. He would check again later. For now he had to take plenty of pictures of two naked girls having a mud fight in front of a car. His face perked up at the thought. It was a guilty pleasure, but something to enjoy nonetheless. He needed to release some stress anyway, so he slipped the booklet into his pocket and strode out of the door.

The noise of the crowd was phenomenal. Jack could hear them from the street and he wagered that even inside, Green was barely audible. The building resembled a luxury hotel from the outside, with a canopy and a marble walkway. It was as high as the Royal London Theatre and equally lavish, with stone statuettes hung from the walls and a gold rim covering the roof. Inside, cameras clicked, audio equipment whirred and journalists chatted to each other at unnecessary volume.

Jack peered through a window with his binoculars and was surprised at how small the interior of the building was. Then again he
only had a limited view. A man on the left exit looked like he had an earpiece, and stood wearing a black suit jacket with a tan long sleeve underneath. Jack looked back at his sheet and, confident he was a guard, mentally ticked him off the list.

The debate was taking place below and all the entrances where restricted off. Jack looked at the room and compared it to some kind of bunker within a fortress: there was no way he could have attacked Green here.

He was stood on the roof of the fifteen-floor Sacred Heath hospital, and from that high up, everything seemed minute to him. Without magnification, the people looked like little toy soldiers walking across a huge dollhouse.

Jack didn't have a view of Green or some of the back seating section, but he could still discern some parts of the stage. He peered through his binoculars and saw another obvious guard stood outside the door on the right. There were still six guards he had to spot and three plain-clothes men in the audience. It wasn't going to be easy.

The press kept on shifting around and he could barely see anyone as it was. He looked over at the man standing in the crowd wearing a faded suede jacket. He looked different from the rest of the group around him; he was looking around every few seconds. Then Jack saw the man tap his ear and he knew for certain that he was one of the security officials, checking his earpiece.

Jack wondered how long this event would last. With his limited view there was no guarantee that he would be able to confirm all the security guards in time. This high up, he was fairly sure he wouldn't be spotted, but he felt his nerves jangling nonetheless.

As the sky grew dark and threatened its second downpour of the day, he grabbed the clammy stone arches of the roof for support and stretched every last muscle in his body to swing out his head to the left. Focusing his eyes until they hurt he just managed to see part of the security guard by the back door.

This was becoming time consuming and wreaking havoc on his neck. With the tips of his fingers he gently massaged the muscles on the right, trying to loosen them up and reduce the stiffness.

He looked down at the crowd again and, with beady eyes, began to ferret around for another insider. At just that moment a woman looked out of the window. Jack shot his head to the side and ducked. He was breathing hard now and he shut his eyes. There were guards all over the building and perimeter. If he got caught it was all over. He would be arrested and in the next few days he would probably be dead.

There was one ever-reliable thing about the city's camera network. Active surveillance was redundant and for the most part, completely useless. The only thing the network was really useful for was crimes that had already taken place and were now being investigated, or crimes suspected of happening.

The problem was that there couldn't possibly be enough staff to cover the activities of every man and woman in London, unless at least one fifth of London residents were security workers. That in turn would need a huge increase in Internal Affairs agents.

As it was, Frank sat in the station pondering over the records. He was nervous about the nature of the information he had but was fairly sure that he wasn't being watched, by other policemen or by cameras.

This was the stuff of conspiracy thrillers and paranoid delusion. Ever since he had heard that the tapes of the Winchester shooting were missing, he had a feeling in his gut that something wasn't quite right. Now, things seemed even more complicated. Michael Green seemed to be linked to known criminals and
furthermore, may very well be the man who murdered Bob Winchester; to keep him quiet about what he found out.

He had a gut feeling that Jack knew about this, and maybe more, but he couldn't prove it. He was looking at the tapes from the night the station had been bombed and he couldn't find any clue to trace who had been behind it.

Somebody didn't want the truth coming out about Bob's shooting. At that moment, as if he had just been shocked awake, Frank grabbed the phone and called the hospital. Speaking to a receptionist he gave his name and card number and asked that they place an extra security detail on Mr Winchester. It had only just occurred to him that if the shooter could alter tapes in that way, then he might be able to view them.

Hospitals had their own security but in case the shooter came back to murder Bob, Frank wanted to be ready. He was the best lead they had. For now, he began pulling up the notes on the five names from the MFD. Maybe they would yield a clue.

The bell rang with a deafening ring and blue alarm lights flashed everywhere, illuminating the den in a now-familiar glow. Running out of the room, Chad jogged hard all the way down to the road level car park. An ambulance was already prepared and set to go and he jumped into the back and slid the doors shut.

Two other men already sat inside, wearing the same navy blue uniforms as him. Within a few minutes a woman in uniform jumped into the front and slammed the door shut. The engine roared as the driver stormed the vehicle out of the exit.

As the ambulance continued to speed down the road, flashing its lights and blaring its siren, the team in the back began preparing the stretcher and getting out possible equipment they would need. This was a gunshot wound so they would need a drip as well fresh Lidosol.

The ambulance was the part of his job Zhang hated the most. Staff problems recently meant they had put her on shift rather than a qualified paramedic, and it racked her nerves every time she got in one. In the ambulance you had to do everything quickly and correctly and you couldn't afford a mistake. The extra pressure was overwhelming. Luckily she was working with some of the best medics at the hospital.

She heard the sound of brakes screeching and looked out of the window to see someone had slammed her car to a halt as they ran the red light. Her nerves were like a mass of quivering jelly now, despite having done this so many times before. A man in Kensington was bleeding to death and they were his last hope of staying alive.

The ambulance rocked violently as it went over a string of speed bumps, and Chad grimaced, expecting the worst as all the equipment rattled around. He was visualising every step of what he would have to do so that when they went into the field he could just do it from instinct. Everyone in the back came crashing over to one side as the ambulance made a sharp turn.

From the front the driver yelled out, “We'll be there in less than a minute.” Everyone grabbed their instruments and prepared themselves. They felt the ambulance starting to slow down and heaved open the door while it was still moving.

The call sheet said there was a man shot on the pavement. They all swung their heads around, not seeing anything. Looking around again they saw everyone was all right. There were no panicked faces and no bloodstains. Zhang yelled at the driver, who called dispatch.

After a beat the radio crackled and the driver asked for confirmation. There was another pause and the medics checked the area while they waited. Finally the driver turned to them and yelled, “It's an OC114”. Chuck clenched his face and swore. It was nothing but a prank call.

Getting back into the ambulance, they quickly headed to the hospital again, in case of another emergency call. From across the road Gina looked at her watch. The response time was twelve minutes.

Green sat at his desk, reading over the message he had received from Doctor Ruhbaker. The laboratory was closed due to a radiation leak. Green contorted his face, realising this would slow down the progress of his plans. He only had a few days as room for error.

Tapping his finger against the desk, he began pondering about how things would be if it all worked out. Then something occurred to him and he sprung back to reality.

Reaching into his desk he pulled out the list of passwords Klaus had tried to steal. The files were encrypted but Green couldn't tell whether or not Klaus had been able to decode them or not. It didn't matter anymore; he was just another corpse in London's wasteland.

Reading through the doctor's message again, it said that the lab might be closed until Monday. This was the chance Green was looking for. He could recover the items from his safe boxes at last, without anyone knowing about it.

The senior staff at the laboratory knew there were vaults in the building, but not the specifics locations or the contents. Green could finally get them out without giving away the locations. It had always worried him that someone else might find out what was inside them, but now he wouldn’t have to tell anyone anything.

Green smiles at the ingenious way he'd used this setback to his advantage. Still, doubt lingered in the back of his mind. He wouldn't trust even the senior staff with information about the safes, but somehow Klaus had found out about them. He should get out the contents soon while he still had the opportunity and before someone else found it.

Anisha sat at her desk, counting down the minutes on the large overhead clock. The quality of her work had taken a fall recently and she was striving hard to mend it. Today she had finished early and was clearing up the groups' video records for the day.

Every day she replaced camera feed with old footage, and altering dates for different frames, making it look like Jack was planning the assassination when he was really chatting about the plan to fake it. She could garble the audio so that it looked as if it was recording badly, but at the same time was completely useless. It was a long task though, and had meant staying late at work every night.

Anisha heard a voice from behind her and nearly jumped out of her skin. Turning around she saw that it was just Lana hanging around as usual. She looked a lot like Anisha, but she was half Indian, half oriental so her skin was fairer and her cheeks slightly pinker. “What you doing Anisha?” she enquired in her typically poor English.

“I'm just refreshing some logs to send over to the bureau of Time and Crime. It's nothing exciting really.”

“Ain't that your place?” She continued.

“No it's somebody else's,” she replied and promptly closed the screen.

Lana was a sweetheart really, but she was also widely considered to be the most annoying person in the whole office and Anisha was glad when she finally took the hint and wandered off back to her work. The trick was to sound monotonous and tired and she would guess you were doing something boring and leave.

Checking nobody else was watching her she opened up the files again and continued her work. At the same time she was thinking about meeting this Kim girl. Jack had already told her Pete wasn't trustworthy, which she still refused to believe. How did either of them know they could trust her?

Kim heard a knocking on the door and quickly sprang up to open it. She had tidied up the clutter of her flat and it showed as Jack walked in. She turned and continued to stand by the door, expecting Anisha to enter, before Jack told her she'd be arriving once she got off of work.

Jack had several bags in his hands, which she was curious about, but she didn't say anything yet. As they walked into the living room Jack saw that she had already laid out the five boxes on the coffee table.

He asked about the sixth one was and she said it was in the kitchen because it was a bit messy. Letting the comment go for the time being, Jack leaned over to the five green cubes and began rattling them and tapping them. He picked up one and looked at it more carefully, while Kim explained again about the fingerprint lock.

Jack agreed and ventured that it might be Green's print since he was behind all of this. He and Kim smiled at the same time, realising that they had their very own copy of Green's fingerprints. Green senior.