Execution

FORTY-ONE

George Paulton watched from the cab of a battered builders’ van as the tall figure of Keith Maine appeared at the junction of Lambeth Road and Kennington Road. The analyst was dressed in his usual suit and carrying what looked like a plastic Tupperware box. The pavement behind him was clear, with no obvious signs of pursuit or surveillance. Indications of either would have meant Maine was already being watched, or had panicked and sold Paulton out to the heavy treaders of MI5.

Paulton put the Ford Transit in gear and drove slowly along the street as if looking for an address. Half the skill in appearing normal was to do normal things. Nobody noticed the mundane and everyday activities, the background clutter of people going about their lives and jobs. And builders’ vans were ten-a-penny, not worth a second look, especially when aged and scuffed to anonymity. Not unless the builder he had liberated this van from happened to have made the trip all the way from across the river in Blackfriars in search of his beloved vehicle and saw him.

He timed his arrival just as Maine was beginning to betray signs of nerves. The analyst was looking around and evidently already feeling out of his comfort zone, his face creased with concern.

Maine did a double-take as the van stopped and he saw Paulton beckoning from the driver’s seat. For a second he didn’t recognise who was under the baseball cap and wearing a set of paint-spattered overalls, then he gave a weak smile and climbed in. The smile faded as Paulton set off south and took the first left down a side street.

‘Where are we going?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve got the information. Have you got the cash?’

‘Calm down,’ Paulton replied, taking a right turn, then another left. ‘We need to get off the main street, that’s all.’ He grinned, showing his teeth. ‘We don’t want everybody and his brother seeing our little transaction, do we?’

‘No. I suppose not.’ Maine sat back, careful not to brush against anything dirty, and held onto the door handle.

Paulton pulled into the kerb behind an old VW Golf, and cut the engine. They were situated between two tall buildings here, with no windows immediately overlooking them, a point Paulton had carefully scouted out earlier. There were no street cameras just here either, and he felt as secure as he could be.

He reached down by the seat and produced a heavy brown envelope. He opened it to show packs of cut paper, and peeled them back to show the edges of twenties and fifties. ‘Sorry I couldn’t get small denominations,’ he said, ‘but I figured the smaller the package the better you would like it.’

Maine’s eyes opened wide at the proximity of so much cash. He smiled nervously and opened the lid of the Tupperware box. Inside was a pack of sandwiches and a banana. He lifted the sandwiches and took out a memory stick with a plastic lid. He unsnapped the lid. ‘It’s all on there. I copied the file for you. There’s not much on it. . just a bunch of surveillance logs and the subject’s movements over the past six months, and some historical annotations and comments.’

‘What sort of comments?’

‘Who the subject is, her background, how she first came to be a person of interest.’

Paulton smiled like a tiger. ‘How interesting. That should save me a lot of chit-chat.’ He didn’t bother to explain what that meant.

‘It runs up to five p.m. yesterday. There’s a small delay for overseas traffic from our watchers, so we don’t know if she has moved since then.’

‘Excellent, Keith. Excellent. That wasn’t so difficult, was it? We’ll make a field man out of you yet.’ He took the memory stick before Maine could stop him and handed over the brown envelope. He was counting on Maine being too scared of being outed to his bosses and losing his pension, to have double-crossed him. ‘How did you manage it, by the way?’ He wasn’t really interested in the detail, but allowing Maine to preen was a useful way of deflecting his attention.

Maine almost smirked as he slid his fingers inside the envelope and ran them over the notes. ‘Easy enough, as it happened. There’s a common surveillance log on targets open to all agencies so we don’t trip over each other. Any one agency wishing to move on an individual or organisation merely checks the log to make sure there’s no on-going operation against them, and signs off the details as going “live”. Everyone else steps back until given the all-clear.’

‘The wonders of organisation. Are you certain you left no trail?’

‘Of course. I’m not an amateur, you know.’

Paulton smiled. ‘Of course. Aren’t you going to count it?’ He glanced in the wing mirrors on either side, and felt his blood beginning to race. The street was clear. No pedestrians or vehicle traffic, nobody watching. It was now or never.

Maine bent his head to check the money, the pull too much to resist. As he did so, Paulton reached down again and picked up a steel meat skewer from the floor. The curved end was wrapped with a pad of rag and gaffer tape which he’d arranged earlier, to protect his hand.

‘Wait a minute.’ Maine had noticed something wrong. ‘This isn’t right-’

His protest was cut off sharply as Paulton brought his right hand round and up in a vicious jab, aiming at a point just above the analyst’s belly. With his full shoulder weight behind it, he drove the point of the skewer into Maine’s body, punching through his suit, then his skin, and into his heart.

Maine grunted and turned his head to look at him, his jaw dropping open in shock. His eyes went wide for an instant in accusation, and he mumbled something unintelligible, and tried to shake his head. It wouldn’t work. A bubble of spit appeared at the corner of his mouth, and popped.

Paulton checked his pulse. Nothing. He glanced in the mirrors. Still clear. And no shouts of alarm. He sat back, breathing heavily, and flexed his right hand. In spite of the padding, his palm was going to be bruised to buggery. A pack of ice should sort that out, along with a stiff drink. He figured he owed himself that, at least. Then he needed to check the contents of the memory stick, to see what Maine had come up with.

He reached across and gave the skewer a sharp tug. It took a sharp twist before it slid free of the body with a faint pop, the cloth of Maine’s suit cleaning the metal of most of the blood as it came away.

He smiled and patted the dead man’s jacket back into place. Some things were just so simple. All it took was the brass neck to plan it and carry it through. And neck was something he’d never lacked.

He wrapped the skewer in a rag and put that in his pocket for disposal the moment he saw a rubbish bin, then picked up the brown envelope and tucked it inside his jacket.

As he climbed out of the van, he gave Maine’s shoulder a tug and allowed the body to slump sideways across the seats, so that it was below the level of the windows.

Locking the van carefully, he walked along the pavement to the VW Golf, another borrowed vehicle he’d acquired near Victoria Station. Seconds later, he climbed in and drove away.