Drunken bums could relieve monotony or pose a threat. It would go either way. He had materialized without warning, was leering at them, approaching with the unpredictable off-balance gait of defiant intoxication. They could always give him a fright, or a slap, divert him. He halted, swayed, came on in an erratic infant-stagger.
‘Why us?’ the detective groaned.
‘Let’s just see what he does.’
‘We don’t need this shit.’
‘He’s not going to be a dicker for the local gangs in that state.’
‘Don’t care what he is. How ’bout moving the car?’
‘Nah.’ The driver’s hands stayed on his lap. ‘If he causes trouble, we’ll make sure he takes his booze intravenously for the next year.’
‘No fucking w …’ The exclamation trailed as the cop lowered his window to shout at the vagrant unbuttoning himself for a leak against a rear tyre. ‘Oi, piss off.’
‘Hey?’
‘I said sod off. Fuck … off. Okay?’
The man looked confused, then gave a high-proof content grin. ‘Or what, mon?’
‘You piss on this car, we’ll piss on you. Understood?’
‘That don’ scare me.’
‘It should. Step away, you black bastard.’
He ignored the demand, chose to stay, opted to draw a silenced H&K automatic and move to the open window. The Reverend had given his blessing, should be here for this. In Kingston, Jamaica, one in every 150 inhabitants was murdered each year. People could be killed for politics, drugs, lack of respect, spilling a drink, for being in the wrong place, on a whim or according to a mood swing. Or they could die for being two undercover cops whose legends were blown and brains about to follow. It was of no consequence. So they might have families, might lead blameless, conventional, law-abiding, law-upholding existences. They only had micro-seconds to appreciate what was left, to think of loved ones, to hope it was quick, to make ridiculous bug faces. His eyes quelled resistance, always did. He could hypnotize with their stillness, pacify with a stare that drained energy. There, there… the look said. Give up, the look said. It’s over. To Tottenham, London, with love.
The Tiger fired, incapacitating the nearest with a chest shot, before aiming across and putting three rounds into his companion. Back to the closer target, point-blank gunfire into the bucking torso and a coup de grace through the left ear. He followed by emptying the magazine into the body of the slumped driver. Quick, effortless. He sniffed. A smell of scorched flesh, cauterized skin and smoked clothing diffused into his senses. Nothing quite like it. The car had stopped jumping; the corpses continued to twitch in the aftershock. Honda to tenderized-meat locker in under ten seconds. It was done. He ambled away.
* * *
The USA
Some sixteen hours later, it was early evening on the same day in Los Angeles. Choir-practice, MacArthur Park. A handful of LAPD officers had gathered after work to drink beer, bond and loose off at the duck flights coming in to land on the pond. It was camaraderie in the midst of murder territory, the Mexican Barrio, where blacks and Hispanics lived – jostled – precariously on the bottom and meanest rung. To fall or be pushed off was to disappear, to become an indefinite absentee from the austere-white Welfare Office on 6th Street, to progress to indelible statistic. Policing was a euphemism, an irrelevance to an area that had its own code, its own gangs, its own rhythm. In the world around Albarado Street, an existence bounded by medical centres and lavanderias, trade was brisk, racketeering endemic, prices quoted for guns and Green cards, passports and prostitutes. Frontier lands. No one took any notice of the tattered roach coaches drawing up with their poster-painted sides of putrescent burgers and enteritis hotdogs, nor would locals recall the men who spilled out to gather at the memorial to the Hungarian Uprising. Wise not to speak, to get involved. Nine Los Angeles police officers were massacred in the cull, overwhelmed and ripped apart by automatic fire. Not a single witness came forward. Yet a rumour was soon to circulate that the killers had been black.
* * *
The UK
‘They’re burning your books.’
‘And they accuse me of being the fascist.’ Soapwater eyes gazed calmly at Kemp as he stood in the lecture-room doorway.
‘You’ve offended a lot of people.’
There was a stillness in Duncan Pitt, a dry acceptance. ‘Controversy is marketability. I thought giving offence was a cornerstone of democracy.’
‘As is sensitivity.’
‘The best way to stamp out thought is to make it impossible to write or say things. George Orwell, circa 1949.’
‘If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it. The Kemp family nanny, circa 1960.’
‘Eventually people leave the nursery for the real world.’
‘A shame, in my opinion. May I come in?’
‘Company’s not something I expect while touring. Please do.’ Kemp entered, pulled up an institutional plastic chair and placed himself a few feet away. The professor kept his hands folded, body at ease in its uncompromising rigidity. A state of mind, of attitude. Little would shake him. ‘I was briefed you’d be coming. Security Service?’
‘Home Office.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Knowingness that came without the self-indulgence of a sigh. ‘The disingenuous catch-all. Home …Office. So much more acceptable than Interior Ministry or Thought Police.’ A pause. ‘Should I be flattered you’re here or should you be disappointed at such a bum assignment?’
‘Whichever one appeals.’
‘So, Mr Josh Kemp, whoever you are, from wherever you come, messenger or minder, bag-carrier or senior officer. You’re the embodiment of Whitehall’s nervousness.’
‘Their caution.’
‘Uncomfortable truths terrify power-brokers. It breaks their little conspiracies of silence, their complacency, their lazy consensus, forces them to take a position, to give answers.’
‘Is that what you’re giving?’
‘I simply pose the questions.’
‘The easier option.’
