Jan pressed his button. “Passageway’s clear; stairs are clear as much as we can see, which is up to where they turn.” He was at the bottom of the stairs, looking up. Jackson was in the doorway to the outside. He wanted to be sure no one unaccounted for would double back. Tyler had gone back to cover the bottom of the main stairway in case the last man somehow avoided Phillips and Mrs. Tyreman and tried to escape that way.
Jackson pushed his button. “Ted, all clear out there? We’re still missing the one
guy?”
“Must be inside,” came the answer. “I’m okay. Got so much stuff in the doorway and on the stairs up here, I’d know if he’s trying. He won’t. He’d be a sitting duck up here with no way down. He’s somewhere below me.”
“Stay there, Ted. It’ll be over soon.” That was Mrs. Tyreman’s voice.
Jackson suddenly wondered how his brother was doing. He looked over to Jan. “Was Tyler okay after the shooting? He didn’t seem upset when he came in here.”
“Yeah. I think he was a little shaken up, but he wasn’t too bad. He’d never killed anyone before, but then, none of us had. I got one guy; he got the other. He did his job. The one I got didn’t need finishing off; my first shot got him in the neck. Tyler’s guy . . . I finished him. I could see Tyler didn’t want to.”
“Good. Glad it was you. He might have nightmares after this even without having to deliver any coups de grâce. It didn’t bother you?”
“Maybe when it’s over. I’m running on adrenaline right now.”
Jackson nodded, then thought of something. “Ted,” he said, speaking into his walkie-talkie, “can you check the area? We saw two cars come in, but it’s possible they had another or some people coming in on foot.”
“I’ll check,” Ted answered, then, “nope, no one in sight. I guess they figured eight was enough.”
“They were wrong.” That was Jan. Being Jan.
They settled in to wait. Jan stationed himself where he could guard the staircase, Jackson stepped out the back door so he could watch the grounds behind the house.
Then there was silence until they suddenly heard a quick bang of a shotgun, and then Phillips was on the walkie-talkie. “Be ready down there. We’ve spooked him, shot at him but missed. He’s running, and he’s headed toward your staircase.”
Just as he said it, a figure appeared at the bend in the staircase. He had his gun, but it wasn’t being pointed down the stairs. When he saw Jan at the bottom, he raised it. Jan already had his gun up and aimed, and he squeezed his trigger. The man was hit, center mass, and was slammed back onto the stairs on his back. He slid down to the bottom, unconscious.
He was wearing a vest, and they could see he was still breathing. Jan raised his gun, but Jackson reached out and pushed the barrel down. “He’s the only one left, he’s alive, and he can be questioned. We should secure him and see who Phillips thinks we should call.”
Phillips and Mrs. Tyreman joined them, along with Tyler from the front stairs. Phillips quickly found some wire in the maintenance supplies room and used it to secure the man’s hands behind his back. He was having difficulty breathing.
“Probably has a broken a rib or two. No lung involvement, though. He’d be exhaling blood if there was. He’ll be okay but hurting a lot.”
“That’s all of them, then,” Mrs. Tyreman said. “You boys were wonderful. Better than
some young men I went through training with. None of you panicked, and you did what had to be done. I guess we call
the police now.”
“No.”
They all turned to look at Jackson. He shook his head. “No, on two accounts. The first is, we got eight, but there’s one still unaccounted for: Conroy.”
“Damn!” Phillips shook his head. “I’m getting old. Forgot all about him. Well, he’ll be long gone by now. These guys weren’t going to take long to get us. The longer it took before Conroy saw them come back out, the more antsy he’d have gotten. He probably ran when he heard us firing back at them. They didn’t think we’d be doing that. He wouldn’t have stuck around. Taken down for conspiracy to kill the PM’s son? That’s a life sentence.”
“Okay then,” Jackson said. “We won’t worry about him, but we won’t forget about him, either. But the second reason for my saying ‘no’ is, we don’t call the police. This is way beyond what the police could handle. Mr. Phillips, you probably know who to call; maybe the Prime Minister should decide what happens next. I doubt he’ll want what happened here to be common knowledge in the country. It would be if the police handled it.
“In the U.S., this would be called a national security issue. The problem here is, Ted’s conversation with him about picking up the document had to have been monitored, and if he’s called now, that’ll very likely be overheard as well. We don’t want the bad guys knowing what we’re doing.”
“How do we communicate with Dad then?” Ted asked.
Jackson smiled. They were all looking at him for answers. Never had happened to him before, but he liked it. “We tell whoever shows up here, the person sent to pick up the document, what happened. I’m not sure I should give that document up, by the way. I’m still thinking about this whole business. But we can tell him what happened and give him our captive to take back for questioning instead.
“We can tell the guy who’s here to collect the document to tell your father, Ted, that we need him to come back right away so we can talk to him in private. He’ll hear how you, Ted, just escaped being killed. Do you really think he won’t come right after hearing that?”
> ( <
They were sitting in the same room where the PM had spoken to them before. In the room were Prime Minister Commoder, his son Ted, Jackson, Jan and Tyler. The PM’s bodyguard was stationed outside the room. A replacement for Lloyd was now in position, as well.
Mr. Commoder had hugged Ted firmly when he’d arrived. Then, being assured the boy was fine, they’d all repaired to the sitting room.
“I understand, Jackson, that you feel you have an explanation for all that’s occurred. I’d like to hear it. I’ve spoken to your President. He’s in the dark to the same extent I am. He’s now discovered from his State Department that they’d had an operation going of which he hadn’t been informed, sort of a test, State called it, and that the two men running it, Jonathan Berry and Thomas Asher, were called in to be questioned. They learned of the operation from Berry. They weren’t able to find Asher; he’d disappeared. He was a CIA employee liaising with State working under Berry. Further deep checking has discovered Asher is an alias, that the man’s real name is Ashastova, and he’s a Russian plant that somehow cleared the CIA’s background check. How that happened is being looked into, as well.
“No one at State or the CIA has any idea what this is all about. Berry said Asher had doubts of your loyalty, Jackson, and they were testing you by sending a document with you, telling you it was to be delivered to me. But Asher was the one to draw up the document you had with you. Berry said what he was shown was a packet of blank pages. He doesn’t know what you actually were carrying, which was the fake document I read.”
He stopped, stared at Jackson a little uncomfortably, and said, “If you know what this is all about, you’re probably the only one. Ted trusts you, and that, along with your actions today, is enough for me to trust you as well. But I’d like to hear what you’ve figured out that explains all this.”
“This will sound crazy,” Jackson said after spending a moment to organize his thoughts and taking a deep breath. “I know that, but it also accounts for everything that’s happened and what we know.
“I read somewhere that if all the improbables are eliminated except one, then that improbable become the most probable.”
“Sherlock Holmes,” the PM said. “He wrote: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ That’s where we’re at.”
Jackson nodded. “Yeah, I knew it was something like what I said.” He stopped, looking for support, for empathy, for something. All he got was the PM simply staring at him.
“Okay, here’s my thinking. My handler, who I know as Tom Asher and now we learn is a Russian mole named Ashastova—something I didn’t know till now—wrote or had written for him a fake document, a document I was told was approved by the President and the State Department. It was to go to the UK Prime Minister.
“Then, when I was on a boat from Sweden to Denmark, following a route that my handler had set for me, one he told me no one knew about but him, a violent attempt to retrieve the document was made. How could that happen? The only explanation was that Asher had leaked the operation’s details to someone, or he himself was compromised. But why? He had given me the document. Why not keep it if he wanted it so badly? His State Department boss thought it was simply blank pages. If Asher didn’t want the fake document delivered, why not just send the blank pages instead? Why even conduct the operation?”
Jackson stopped to see if anyone could answer that. No one said anything, so he continued.
“I can only think of one reason for this. The slaughter on the boat was to make me believe they were trying to recover the document, and that was done to make me determined to deliver it.”
Mr. Commoder stopped him then. “But everyone on the boat was killed. It was only by luck you two escaped.”
“That’s what I thought, too. But now I’m pretty sure the coat I was wearing, which was given me by Asher, had a tracking device in it. That was there in case I lost my phone, which they also could trace.
“When we were shot at, I was in the only area on the boat that wasn’t raked with gunfire. I think that wasn’t chance. They deliberately made sure I was spared. That Jan wasn’t killed was only because he was so fast at finding a safe place to hide.
“Then, when we were below, we moved boxes to get into the bow compartment, and I couldn’t move them all back before closing the partition. Someone came down below where we were. He had to see the boxes were out of place. It would have taken no thought at all to shoot into where we were hiding. He didn’t.
“He then set charges to blow up the boat, but the timer was set with plenty of time for us to see it and to figure out how to dismantle the bombs. And, as I see it now, we don’t know if they really would have blown up anyway. We thought they would, and the detonators did go off, but were the bombs really explosives? We don’t know that. In the end, there were not any explosions, and that might be because Jan was so smart and quick, but it may be because what we thought were explosives were simply blocks of modeling clay. They might have wanted us to think we had to keep going.”
“Why?” Jan asked.
Jackson turned to answer him. “Because they wanted us to deliver the fake document to the Prime Minister.”
“But that can’t possibly be true, because even after I’d read it, they still tried to get it.” Mr. Commoder was adamant, and an adamant Prime Minister was something Jackson would never have been able to deal with in his former self. Now, he simply shook his head and continued.
“They only tried to get it after you’d seen it. Not between the time we were on the boat and you read it. I said this was difficult to believe, but again, it can explain everything that’s happened. Let me continue from when we were still on the boat.
“Thinking about it now, it seems funny that the boat with the shooters on it wasn’t able to catch up to us as we were heading to shore. They didn’t. We were able to swim to shore, and then we never saw them again. We both thought we were going to be caught—or shot. But we escaped.
“We were almost killed again—maybe—by our driver who’d been assigned to take us to Hamburg by Asher. We were able to overcome him, but we don’t know what would have played out had we not. What we did . . . it’s doubtful that was supposed to happen. That was all Jan’s doing. I was just a chump throughout. I was a pawn. Asher knew I would be.
“But Asher’s people wanted me to get to the Prime Minister. They set it up so I’d be entirely on my own—without any help at all. They wanted the PM to see the document. Then they wanted to recover it. I don’t know how they expected that to happen, but it did happen, or at least the attempt was made to recover it. They probably had an inside man in your organization, sir, who was to get the document after you had it.
“I don’t know where the driver Asher arranged for me, Mikkel, came into this. I don’t know if we ever will. My feeling is that he wasn’t part of Asher’s plan, but who knows? Maybe he was just supposed to frighten me, too.”
Jackson paused to take a drink. He couldn’t ever remember saying so much at one time. Everyone was silent, focused on him. He took a deep breath and continued.
“But, here, we were able to fight off the attempt to get it. If they hadn’t been overconfident, if they’d sent more people, we wouldn’t have survived.”
“But again, why? Why go to all this trouble when they had control of the document in the first place?” Mr. Commoder was shaking his head. He still hadn’t seen what Jackson had.
Jackson wanted him to figure it out for himself, as that way he might be more able to accept it. So, rather than answer him, he asked him a question instead.
“Something was different with the document now than when I first had it. Can you see what that was, sir?”
“No . . . well, one thing, several people read it. You read it but hadn’t before. Perhaps others in the room when I read it saw it later. So, others knew what was in it. That was different.”
“Yes, sir, but that wasn’t the point of this whole episode. Let me approach this in a different way. I don’t know much about British politics and government. We aren’t taught much about it in school. You’ll have to tell me: are you facing any challenges for your position in Parliament?”
That caused Mr. Commoder to sit up straighter. He looked hard at Jackson. “What are you suggesting?”
“I’m questioning if you have any enemies, or if anyone is vying for your position.”
“None that would have anything to do with this mess! Tell me what you’re thinking!”
Jackson stared back at him, his heart beating faster. He hoped his face wasn’t showing what he was feeling. He sighed. “Sir, the one thing that changed with the document that I can think of that’s at all meaningful is that you read it. And why was that important? Because, in doing so, you handled it. Your fingerprints are now on it. So, let me speculate. If someone wanted to unseat you and take over the government of the UK, would they be in a position to do that if they could claim to have a document that had your fingerprints on it that contained an agreement that would be wildly controversial with the citizens in this country?”
The PM simply looked at him without responding, though his jaw seemed to have slackened, so Jackson continued.
“I did read the document after you left. It is, as you know, supposedly an agreement with the U.S. to base U.S. nuclear weapons in a multitude of locations here in the UK as a deterrent so Russia won’t use their nuclear weapons in fights like the one that just recently ended in the Crimea. In return, it is a formal agreement for the mutual defense if either of our two countries is attacked by Russia with British ground forces to be joined by American troops for a land war.
“NATO is supposed to be a shield against Russian aggression, but it’ll hem and haw and probably delay acting till it’s clear in what direction the conflict is heading. This paper makes sense in that view. But it isn’t meant to be a real thing. The President isn’t even aware of its existence, and neither were you. Instead, it’s meant to cost you your grip on the UK government.
“You know the document is false. You called it a fake as soon as you read it. That the President never saw or agreed to it. There’d be great denials by him and our government as well as by you and your supporters, yet the document with proof you’d handled it would be extant. They almost assuredly would forge your signature on it. The opposition would read the riot act at you in Parliament..”
“I can’t think why all this would have happened for any other reason. I think your opposition has tapped your phones. They knew you’d read the document and so it had your fingerprints on it, verifying you’d seen it, and making it plausible you were in agreement with it. They knew it was still here, too.
“Again, it’s speculation, but they could have supposed that you wouldn’t take it from here, that you didn’t want anything to do with it. It was too volatile for you to be carrying it. Or they could have assumed you did take it with you. They may have had something set up to recover it from you in London. But then, when it was verified by your phone call that it was still here, they were ready to act to recover it.
“I would think that such an agreement would be unacceptable to the vast majority of British people, or at best, that what it contained was something that should be debated in Parliament, not signed by you in secret. Yet if the enemies you have had the document, if they leaked it to publications like The Mirror or The Sun, I could imagine a vote of no confidence being passed in Parliament. Your enemies, using the furor caused by the tabloids, those who called for the vote, would come into power.
“No doubt some people would be willing to kill to make that happen.”