Chameleon

“You need to cover that opening, Tim. Someone could kill themselves falling down there. It must be at least seventy feet down, straight onto concrete.”

“Yes, I know,” Tim, replied. “The wooden cover had disappeared when I got here. I’ll tell the works department.”

Standing in front of the lift shaft, Gil spoke.

“You don’t look like a man carrying a quarter of a million pounds in cash.”

“No,” he agreed. “I have five bearer bonds, though, each with a face value of fifty thousand pounds. They’re probably already worth more than that, given the financial situation.”

Tim loosened his coat and withdrew five sheets of rolled parchment paper, which he handed to Gil. Gil opened the rolled sheets and saw the forged bonds. When she looked up, Tim was pointing his gun at her chest.

“No, Tim! Please!” she yelled as he pulled the trigger three times. Tim was no marksman, but the three rounds shredded the bearer bonds as they passed through and pounded into Gil’s torso. For a brief second she looked shocked, and then she toppled backwards and fell down the shaft.

The MI5 man was pleased that Gil had fallen into the deep shaft. He hadn’t wanted to look into those familiar, pretty, dead eyes as he tipped her body over the edge and into oblivion and a sealed tomb.

Tim was about to fasten his coat and leave when he noticed tension on the rope hanging into the lift shaft. He ran over and looked down into complete darkness, but when he held the rope he knew that somehow, in her death throes, Gil had grabbed onto life. Taking his Browning, he placed the barrel close to the rope and fired. The rope was partially severed. Tim fired again and the hanging part of the rope slackened and fell into the void. As it fell he heard a scream echoing up the shaft, coming to an abrupt end as his victim hit the concrete in the darkness below.

***

The telephone rang in an office cubicle across London. The occupant of the cubicle was no longer senior enough to warrant an office or a Thames river view.

“Internal Investigations,” the slightly scruffy man a

“Barry, this is Tim. I can confirm that both Chameleons have now departed the Earth.”

“Are you certain the Chameleon is dead?”

“Well, I shot her three times in the chest at close range with armour piercing rounds, and she fell seventy feet onto concrete. She is in a dark and damp morgue of a tube station which has been sealed for over sixty five years.”

“All right, point noted. Get yourself back here and report.”

Tim slipped the Nokia into his pocket and started to leave. Rather than climb yet more stairs, he decided to take his chance with the side entrance. He couldn’t use the front because entrance security grill was accessible only from outside and, unfortunately for Tim, Gil had closed the side entrance grillage and had locked it with a heavy duty padlock. The key was probably seventy feet down the lift shaft in the dead woman’s coat pocket. Tim didn’t have any lock picking tools with him. In any case, he couldn’t pick a lock to save his life.

“Damn those stairs!” he complained out loud.

The darkness and the vague fluttering shadows that formed on the walls surrounding the spiral staircase had never bothered Tim before, but now, somehow, they seemed spooky. Perhaps it was the fact that he was separated from a fresh dead body by only a single wall of bricks. He breathed a sigh of relief when he alighted onto the Aldwych platform with its welcoming bare lighting.

Tim jumped onto the track and walked towards the exit door. Something felt different down here, but he didn’t know what it was that was bothering him. Tim got to the old wooden door and then he realised. He looked back and saw with alarm that the safety bar had been removed. The lines were live. Six hundred volts of electricity were passing within an inch or two of his leg. Thank goodness his natural caution had kept him clear of the third rail as he walked along the tu

“You nearly had me there, Gil, you mad bitch,” he laughed out loud, his voice reverberating down the tu

Being careful to keep a safe distance from the live cable, Tim reached for the exit door. He depressed the handle and withdrew the latch carefully, anticipating further skulduggery, but it worked as it always did. Thanking his lucky stars once more, he opened the door.

***

The M84 stun grenade is a non-lethal weapon, usually. It emits a deafening blast and a blinding flash that disorients and deafens temporarily. Don, a man of many talents, had accepted the Chameleon’s commission to remove the safety bar and attach a stun grenade to the door. The grenade was tubular and around five inches long. Don carefully removed the safety pin, which had a circular ring pull, and armed the ‘flash bang’. He duct taped the grenade to the inside of the door, having looped the second and final ring pull, this one triangular, over the door handle.

Don admired his handiwork, set the delay on the ‘flash bang’ to one second and ascended the stairs. He exited the door onto the Aldwych and looked around to see if anyone had seen him. Nobody was paying any attention, except for a pretty young woman huddled up against the cold, who seemed more concerned about keeping warm than any workman going about his duties. Don wrapped his coat around himself and headed for the tube and a warm journey back to Hackney.

***

Tim opened the door leading to the staircase and all hell broke loose around him. There was a flash of bright light that seemed to sear his eyes, and he realised that he had been left temporarily blinded. At the same moment there was a deafening bang which came close to perforating his eardrums and which disrupted his balance. Completely disoriented, he instinctively recoiled from the booby-trapped door and stepped into the live third rail.

Within a second or two the disorientation was replaced by excruciating pain as he felt over four hundred volts coursing through his body. Intuitively he knew he had just seconds to live unless he could get off the line. He leaned forward for support and unthinkingly rested his right hand on the cast iron tu

The current from the third rail passed through Tim and into the cast iron. He became a conductor and a resistor at the same time. Mercifully, he died before his insides fried and his clothes caught fire. A few minutes later, nothing remained of him except for a charred husk, along with the smell of burning and the vague aroma of roast pork.

***

Gil’s plans had not included passing out. She had allowed Tim to shoot her in the torso. If the useless desk jockey had dared to try a headshot she would have dived for the shaft before he got a round off. The nasty piece of work must have been using some kind of heavy duty ammunition. She had guessed he would; amateurs always go for overkill. As a result, Tim’s three rounds had penetrated her clothing and the Kevlar bulletproof vest, but had stopped at the shaped ceramic body protection underneath.

Once she had been shot she had made every effort to rappel as far down the rope as possible before Tim could cut the rope. It was much better to fall forty feet than sixty. Luckily he had been slow to react, and she had been less than thirty feet from the bottom of the shaft when she started to free fall.

As usual after a heavy fall, Gil used her tradecraft and training. She lay extremely still while she examined her body with her right hand.

“Good. No compound fractures, anyway.”

She then checked her limbs one at a time, moving each one slowly until she was happy there were no broken bones. Finally she proceeded to test for muscle or ligament damage by flexing every muscle group in order from her feet to her neck. She ached all over, but the only real pain she felt was where the ceramic body shield was pressing into her flesh. Twenty minutes had passed since the shooting, according to her indiglo watch. If all had gone according to plan, Tim would have met his own fate by now.