Killers and Dreamers

Chris Page

Description

The hardest killers to find are those ordinary people living ordinary lives. Hiding in plain sight they are protected and hidden by their everyday conformity, yet are still able to take innocent lives.Herein we meet an intelligent and apparently upright middle manager on the verge of carrying out a clever mass genocide. You wouldn't know it, however, if you were his best friend, close work colleague, neighbour or lover - unless he decided to tell or recruit you. And he's hardly likely to do that, is he?We also meet a sexually taboo couple who are convinced that their revenge bombing campaign is equally foolproof.These are two situations that Albie Cork, our single-leg amputee and London counter-terrorist officer and his colleagues have to face in the line of duty.One or two of our ordinary killers will have success. The questions are; who and how many people will die?

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781785383366
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
Killers and Dreamers
Chris Page



Publisher Information
Published in 2015 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of Chris Page to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2015 Chris Page
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.



Quote
Only the killers seem to be extracting from life some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it. The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions.
Henry Miller - The Tropic of Cancer



Albie Cork - The Life so Far
Name: Albert Cork. It would have been Albert Finney Cork because his mother liked the actor but his father was jealous and they had a row in the maternity hospital and compromised on plain Albert. He didn’t mind, nobody called him that anyway, apart from his mum when she was mad at him, which was all the time before his parents moved to Australia where eventually they were executed by Japanese assassins looking to get at him.
Born: 31 October 1973. A Halloween baby and a Scorpio.
Education: Left school at sixteen a frustrated virgin with bugger-all qualifications and a love of football.
Family: One younger sister, Debbie, and his now dead parents, all of whom moved to Australia when he was seventeen. He stayed in a bedsit in Tottenham, chased girls and drank a lot of beer. Now lives in Ealing, London.
Work record: From age sixteen to twenty-three many menial jobs, all poorly paid. Then he joined the army.
Married: Twice, aged twenty-three and thirty-nine. No kids. The first one was a disaster, divorced after two years. His second wife was killed by an assassin’s bomb meant for him.
Military career: A disposal bombhead with fourteen years in an EODC (Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company). Double row of pips and associated gongs including the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, gained in Iraq. Was a WO1 (Warrant Officer Class 1) when he was invalided out. Holder of high status Russian medal presented by Vladimir Putin.
Income: Meagre army pension and monthly salary from current job with SO13 in bomb-based counter-terrorism.
Languages spoken: Epithet-laden laconic English laced with military banality.
Hobbies: Sex, Tottenham Hotspur FC, sex, Tottenham Hotspur FC, more sex.
Pet hates: Sexual abstinence after long periods in war zones without any female contact.
Physical disability: Only has one leg - a distinct disadvantage with his main hobby.
Height: 5ft 11in/1.83m.
Weight: 176lb/80kg (without prosthetic)
Profile
If it takes losing a leg above the knee to an IED in Afghanistan, having no luck with long-term girlfriends and being hunted by sinister, unknown professional killers to become a modern hero, then Albert ‘Albie’ Cork is one. If it doesn’t, then he’s just another flawed ex-soldier in counter-terrorism with a vigilante approach and an over-abundance of lustful genes who attracts a great deal of unwanted attention from the bad guys.
And he certainly doesn’t consider himself disabled. Embarrassed maybe, and inconvenienced perhaps at having to remove his prosthetic for sex with a new lover for the first time . . .
But that never stopped him.
You choose - he’s too intent on getting his good leg over, seeking those who would place bombs in and around London and staying alive to waste any time thinking about it.



Prologue
His first approach to her after his presentation had finished was tentative, hesitant even. Her response was coy, offhand, but she hadn’t moved away - standard encouragement tactics for a young and attractive woman showing casual interest in an older but good-looking man. She, of course, knew who he was having just watched him on the rostrum giving a dumbed-down slide show on his specialist subject of our drinking water and the clearing out of the particulates and biological threats therein. After packing up his laptop he’d approached her and, a few halting sentences later, finally plucked up the courage to ask her if she would like a drink.
One month later she moved into his cottage and bed.
The first three months of their relationship after that consisted of nightly clutching, biting and urgent entry followed by vital, energetic and loudly celebrated ejaculatory sex, particularly for him. For her it required a little more long-term effort. Afterwards, as they relaxed in the glow of their exertions, he began to employ the seducer’s artifice to introduce the outline of his secret cause, as if he thought that in her subsiding heartbeats there was vulnerability and acceptability to new ideas; that now, having chosen her as a permanent member of his personal club, was the time for him to begin to reveal to her his crazy scheme.
‘I am,’ he’d confided one Sunday morning after a particularly vigorous bout of lovemaking, ‘an anarchist with a plan that will shake the world for all of recorded time. And I’m employed in the perfect position to do it. Most of us never find our perfect place in the world, Kait, but I’ve found mine.’
He’d said no more and dozed off.
His anarchy was insistent but cultured. A gradual ramping up of the tempo and scope of his revelations over the next three months brought further intensity, innuendo and talk of subversion, peppered with quotations and erudition. Slowly she began to understand that the British state and its people were his target.
Unimaginable numbers of British people.
And that he wanted her to be a part of it.
‘I am a student of revolution, but for a whole bunch of different reasons from the other petty revolutionists,’ he’d said. ‘My drug is my own notoriety. All-time notoriety that the known world - if there is one - will still be talking about in the third millennium.’
At first she had hardly registered comments such as these - their reality was a world away from where they were - but he was nothing if not insistent.
The grooming had progressed with cleverly constructed harangues against the achievements of the current crop of radical global terrorists and their pathetic attempts to massacre vast numbers of the population. A fierce will and intention to outdo the very best historic examples of anarchic revolution infused his after-sex conversation, still his chosen time for her conversion. Sabotage and subversion, mass murder, military coups, genocide, and an intense fascination with any violent conflict against the state that came with a big body count. To him the numbers were all: the greater the number the better the impact on the consciousness of an indifferent world. Anything pro-urban rebellion and anti-establishment, anything against the prevailing status quo, regardless of political colour and outlook, wholeheartedly qualified. And anyone who didn’t agree was a single-cell Neanderthal shite-wipe with a severe dose of swivel-eyed Empirism.
Before he met her he had downloaded all of the infamous 1,500 pages of ‘Manifesto 2083’ and the ‘preparation phases’ of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian killer of seventy-seven innocents in July 2011.
One of his secret heroes.
He would quote sections from this work, declaring it a beautiful read. He was himself half Norwegian so that added further lustre to the grotesque shine.
To avoid getting caught up in any clandestine checks by the security forces being made on those who downloaded or even read Brevik’s Manifesto, he’d encrypted a secure file on his work computer, printed fifty pages or so each evening when his office and laboratory were empty, and brought them home in his briefcase for further study. When he had all of it he carefully bound it into a thick A4-sized document and kept it well hidden under the bed in his Somerset cottage.
An oft-repeated mantra of his went as follows: ‘Millions have been slaughtered in senseless wars down the ages to make a point. Well, I also have a senseless point to make.’ He was a fount of such mantras and pithy but selective quotations from the great and not so good, which he would adapt to suit. He would strut around the small bedroom naked after sex and wave his hands about as he expounded his themes.
‘Ever since I was a spotty teenager I just knew that I was to be the harbinger of genocidal doom to an unsuspecting world and that for me there could be no higher purpose in life. It was an obligation, my cause was absolute, a commitment without denial. After all, I began to seriously think about this campaign when I was fourteen years old. I am now thirty-six so it’s been gestating for twenty-two years. Twenty-two years of thinking, evaluating, developing and preparing, and here I am at last, a matter of months away from the event itself.’
Kait would nod. So long as he was happy then so was she.
That twenty-two-year period had encompassed getting the right high-quality GCSE exam results at his English public school then obtaining a good degree and doctorate in Chemistry at King’s College, Cambridge, all of it without any fanfare or fuss. Then, as he would boast quietly to her, ‘I had to get the right job and settle down to become a respected, quietly effective and trusted member of the scientific community. All th