The look on Tom’s face told his boss all he needed to know. By the time Frank Oates had become the director of the CIA, he was a master of both hiding secrets from other people and knowing when other people were hiding secrets from him.
‘What’s happened, Tom?’ Frank asked.
‘The President is in our custody and the clone is going to be assassinated any minute now. The readiness exercise at the Emergency Response camp hit a snag but appears to be proceeding in spite of the complications. Everyone who caused us any trouble today is being rounded up and taken to the camp, along with everyone who witnesses the assassination at the TV studio. Doctor Conway’s plane went down in the Med and I had to deploy the Needle a second time to extinguish a potential leak.’
‘It all sounds good, Tom,’ Frank said as he studied the look on his assistant’s face.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘So why do I think you’ve got bad news for me?’
‘The investments, sir. We lost money. Well, we haven’t lost money yet but I’m afraid it’s likely.’
‘How much?’
‘Well, I can’t say for sure, sir–’
‘What’s the exposure, Tom?’
‘Seventeen million dollars, sir.’
Frank sighed. ‘I’m very disappointed.’
Tom could see the anger in him growing. ‘I know, sir–’
‘Shut up slave! Let me finish!’ Frank shouted, then spoke in a more measured tone. ‘Why do we do all this? Why do we spend so much time and money joining the nations of the world together under one banner? I know you know why—to make money. To make a shit load of money. To make more money than anyone could possibly imagine. On the back of that, I make my scraps on the side, and you get to make your scraps on the side. Our timescales are tight, Tom, and there’s only so much money to be made before the world out there goes tits up. I can’t afford one day where I don’t make money, and I definitely can’t afford one day where I lose money.’
Before Tom could plead ‘I’m very sorry sir, it won’t happen again’, Frank drew a silenced pistol from his jacket and shot Tom twice in the forehead. Blood and brain sprayed all over his desk, chair and bed, covering the project folders and laptop with a thin film of blood. Tom’s body hit the ground in a heap. Frank knelt down and put his pistol in Tom’s right hand.
Tom’s phone rang. It took Frank a few seconds to find the phone under the piles of bloody papers, but he decided to answer it when he saw that it was Eric, the President’s aide, who was calling.
‘What?’
‘I need to speak to the man who usually answers this phone,’ Eric said, with fear causing a high pitched wobble in his voice.
‘He’s not available.’
‘Please. I need to speak to him urgently.’
‘I’m his boss. What do you want?’
‘It’s about the President.’
‘My sources tell me he’s being taken care of and the clone is about to do his duty.’
‘No! They’re the wrong way round. The clone was in the car and the President is on the show!’
What a clusterfuck, Frank thought. For a day that’s going to go down as a success by the High Command, it sounds like there’s been some serious fuck-ups. Seventeen million in the hole and we’re about to kill the real President. At times like this you have to laugh.
And he did.
‘How the hell did that happen?’ Frank asked, struggling for words through the hilarity.
‘I don’t know. I need help. I don’t know what to do.’
Frank heard a muffled, crackly scream in the background.
‘Sounds like it’s too late to do anything,’ he said. ‘Good luck. Enjoy the journey.’
‘Enjoy the journey? The journey where?’ Eric asked.
‘You’ll see.’
Frank hung up and threw the phone onto Tom’s lifeless body. He left his dead assistant’s bedroom and walked along the plush carpet of the corridor to the elevator, where the bellhop took him down to the ground floor. Even though it was after midnight, most of the delegates from the conference were still sitting at their dinner tables, drinking wine and smoking cigars. The hotel staff didn’t dare remind them about the hotel’s no smoking policy.
The tables were labelled with the area of the world where the delegates had travelled from. Representing the United States, Frank had been sitting at the head of the table labelled ‘Gitmo Nation West’. He sat down next to an ex-President who was sitting at the ‘Gitmo Nation East’ table, talking to an ex-chancellor of the exchequer of the United Kingdom. They were laughing and joking.
The ex-President looked concerned as soon as he saw Frank’s stony face.
‘Everything okay, Oatesy?’
‘Remember when we’d just go out and hit people in the mouth?’
‘Yeah, and they’d just give us their cash. They were the good old days.’
The ex-director of the CIA, the ex-President and the ex-chancellor stayed up long into the night, drinking, smoking and plotting. The day ended like any other.
For full details on how to get your hands on a copy of One Day in Gitmo Nation, visit www.noagendanovels.com
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