The Prague Ultimatum Read online

  The stirred familial memories sent a twinge of guilt in the soldier’s gut for having been incommunicado for the past few days and he quickly rattled off a text to his boy in apology alongside the usual but sincere declaration of love. Taking a deep, lungful of breath as the melody came to its gentle conclusion, Stone allowed himself a brief smile then jumped to his feet and flung the waiting coat over his shoulders, heading out of the apartment. He directed a cheery ‘dobrý deň’ to the young girl on reception who smiled warmly back at the handsome military man who stepped out onto the street.

  He headed down past the scene of his altercation the previous night, the sunshine robbing the more nefarious of darkened alleyways to hide in but unsavoury characters aplenty still occupied the streets, waiting for the opportunities the day would surely bring them. Stone clocked one or two more poisonous glances in his direction, but fresh, rested and his head clear of booze, he presented too much of a challenge for the average street thug, and he merely scanned their faces for any recognisable visage, although frustratingly none met his gaze. A few shards of broken glass remained in the spot at which he’d been attacked, which he casually brushed to the side with his shoe, while the wide, dark red stain on the pavement was being greedily dried by the emerging sun.

  The street before him, he’d learned, would lead him to the bottom of Wenceslas Square which, with its over abundance of branded shops, franchised eateries and rowdier bars hedonistically defying the beauty of the location, Stone had long since decided to avoid. Despite his reluctance, he followed the road, reasoning that the Square would be relatively free from the clogging of tourists and hollers of street vendors this early in the morning. He could stretch his tight muscles with a brisk walk across the bottom of the Square and down through the increasingly recognisable maze of Old Town, before catching the train at Náměstí Republiky and heading through to Jinonice, where the internet told him filming was due to take place that morning for the much vaunted movie. Since speaking with Barry on his first day in the country, a nagging itch had played in Stone’s mind which he suspected the friendly roadie could help scratch. Whatever information he could glean would aid him in making his apologies to Svobodova later that day, and then he’d be free to attempt the most likely more difficult task of reconciling with Abelard. Though it hadn’t been his intent, he knew his sour demeanour so soon after spending the night with her had caused her pain, and he cursed himself for the dark mood swings which had plagued so many of his relationships with family and lovers alike; yearning for the simpler days when he could carry the weight of the world into battle without feeling even a fraction of the pressure an ignorant word or a badly parked car could cause him today. The Greyson situation was hardly of her making and surely no easier for her to deal with and he squirmed in embarrassment at his own selfish reaction to it over these past days.

  Allowing his mind to dwell a little longer than perhaps he should on the thought of Greyson, the Captain chastised himself for letting his brighter start to the morning cloud, if even slightly; but even as he tried to push them back, they would return to consume his reasoning with a vengeance barely a few steps later, as he rounded an ancient building dressed in fading, crumbling yellow. There before him, stood among the cobbles like a spectral portent of mocking tribulation, was the wraithlike figure of Jonathan Greyson himself. His cheeks sallow, his features almost skeletal, but his gaze strong and the hint of a smile, however cruel, still playing on his lips.

  “Good morning, Captain,” the figure said, unperturbed by the tourists heading past the soldier and himself and tutting at the blockage to their ambling.

  “You…” Stone quietly whispered, a moment of confusion captured on his face.

  Greyson pulled his hands from his coat pockets and held them out to Stone in a stance of apology. The soldier though, his resentment restored, marched up to him and grabbed him, subtly but firmly by his coat, and began ushering him away from the tourists and down a narrow, isolated alley.

  “You lying bastard!”

  The alleyway was decorated with more than its share of abusive words and pictures, crudely sprayed onto the walls, and stunk of a potent mixture of stale urine and spent joints. Stone flung the politician in front of him, a punch to the head knocking him to the filthy ground and stood above him to block any possibility of escape, although the sprawling MP in truth showed few signs of wishing to.

  “Ok, yes; I lied.” Greyson rose shakily to his feet, his voice groggy but calm in spite of the assault. “I needed someone on the ground I could trust not to give up on the job. Who better than a man trying to clear his name for the sake of his child? I just thought I had more time to get everything in place.”

  “Like my exoneration?” Stone icily asked, “Or your next political appointment? Well you can exonerate this!”

  The sum of Stone’s rage and frustration flooded into his coiled arm, as though revelling in its own potency, robbing the seasoned professional of every trace of his hard-learned discipline and fuelling the irresistible urge to strike the passive figure. Greyson himself was swaying, his body limp in Stone’s grip, his eyes betraying the tell-tale bewilderment of a beaten man, and offering little resistance to the soldier’s onslaught. The unwillingness of his quarry to fight back in no way diminished Stone’s desire to continue and he swung the powerful arm down, eager for the satisfying smack of fist upon cheek and the electrifying surge of pain through the hand that offered the congenial signal of victory.

  The arm swung uselessly through the air, inches from Greyson’s face. Stone twisted in confusion, feeling himself yanked backwards, hard, knocking him off balance and away from the politician. He spun to face the unknown threat, ready to employ the still swelling rage against whoever the mystery newcomer was but stopped, instinctively and barely in time, as the familiar prick of a knife’s blade touched the skin of his throat. The sensation allowed reason to return to Stone’s mind, although the reluctance to back down from the ecstatic pursuit was physical, the built-up energies, desperate for their own climactic expenditure, screaming through Stone’s body as he sought to return himself to normal.

  He followed the knife with his eyes, steadfastly guarding his neck, down the bony hand which held it, taking in the figure that stood before him, in all its inelegant glory. A thin - almost painfully so - figure stood at the end of the arm, bedecked in an oversized, frayed and weathered, grey pea coat, hanging over a faded t-shirt; Stone’s mystery guardian angel, there before him in the flesh. He looked old, his unkempt hair grey, his skin thin and wrinkled, yet the defiance in his eyes leaving Stone in no doubt that he was both able and willing to use the weapon at his disposal, should Stone be foolish enough to struggle. It was the seriousness in those eyes that persuaded him. This man was a killer.

  Despite the certainty of the threat, Stone’s normalising mind deduced the unlikeliness that murder was the newcomer’s primary concern, the knife having remained immobile since pressing his skin. Once more in control of his senses, Stone sought a way to likewise regain control of the situation, raising an eyebrow at the strange figure before him.

  “It seems you have me at a disadvantage,” he opened.

  “Good,” said the figure, a faint Scottish hint to the voice, with no other feature on the figure moving. “Now far be it from me to intrude on your lover’s tiff,” he nodded to the recovering Greyson behind the Captain, “but I’m thirsty and one of you fuckers is about to buy me a drink.”

  He whisked the knife back from Stone’s throat, deftly closing and pocketing it in one swift, refined movement which defied his outward appearance.

  “What?” Stone frowned in puzzlement, rubbing his neck, while Greyson hauled himself to his feet and stood between the pair.

  “You took your time,” Greyson said, groggily, “how long were you watching?”

  “Long enough,” came the reply, “I had a bet with myself you could get a punch in before he knocked you out. You lost. That’s a scotch you owe me.”
/>   Stone felt his feral aggression quickly replaced with an equally severe confusion, coupled with a frustration that Greyson was regaining the advantage. As though sensing the soldier’s emotions, the faintest of smirks formed at the corner of Greyson’s mouth.

  “Captain Stone,” he began, “Allow me to introduce a man as unwelcome in the grounds of MI6, as you are with the Parliamentary Committee for Defence: Mr Williams, my own, personal bastard.”

  ELEVEN

  THEIR JOURNEY TO THE PUB in whose garden they now sat had been lengthy in distance but passed quickly, though in complete silence.

  The entrance to the bar seemed as dishevelled as this ‘Williams’ character, paint peeling from the dry wooden doorframe and old pictures of guest ales and promotional bottles faded to insignificance as they adorned the crumbling concrete of the outer wall. Leading them down a steep stone staircase, Williams strode through the almost empty, dark room, uttering a few words to the man behind the bar before exiting into an adjacent beer garden, enclosed all around with high metallic fencing and attached to what looked like an enormous outdoor cage, filled with shrubs, trees and greenery. Stone sat down on the hot wooden bench, and leaned on the table, staring in silence at Williams, the scent of stale beer mats and unknown dishes from the kitchen invading his nostrils. Williams, for his part, stared back, unblinking and eyes furrowed, seemingly sizing Stone up, while Greyson quickly excused himself and moved to the far edge of the enclosed garden, whispering into his phone. A tattooed and pink haired waitress brought a tray to the table, leaving three tall glasses of cold beer and a bowl of some kind of soup which Williams took possession of. Offering her a few quiet words of impeccable Czech, Williams took the soup and dropped his eyes to it, spooning it into his mouth without a thought for etiquette.

  As Williams tore a slice of bread in two and began dipping it in his soup, Stone saw the blackness and filth of his hands, which suggested to him that his new counterpart had spent more than a couple of nights sleeping rough. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small bottle of hand sanitizer, rarely used but bought for him as a joke by his son some months before and kept since as a memento. He held it out to the dishevelled man who stared at it for a brief second before returning to his bowl.

  “If you want to go through the day smelling like a fucking flower that’s your business,” Williams said, “as for me I’ll make do with soap and water.”

  Tiring of games, Stone was eager to understand what was happening, refusing to let this strange figure return to his angry silence.

  “So why does he call you a bastard?”

  “Why did the kids in the playground call you a nigger?”

  The retort was matter of fact, delivered between mouthfuls of soup by the scruffy figure, who sat pointedly unfazed by the visible contempt it elicited in his companion and carried on, answering his own question.

  “Because they were small minded people telling you something intrinsic about yourself in a particularly cuntish way.”

  Stone’s stare hardened, his rich voice dropping deeper in disgust at the word Williams had employed.

  “I’d hardly call it the same thing.”

  “No? Well, being a bastard comes as naturally to me as wearing my fucking skin, so…,” he spooned the last drops of liquid into his mouth and pushed the bowl to the side, “I beg to differ.”

  He looked up, finally, his grey eyes meeting Stone’s, offering neither fear nor defiance, merely cold indifference; an attitude the Captain didn’t so much mind as long as it accompanied a general willingness to answer questions.

  “How long have you been following me?”

  “Since you arrived.”

  “That easy to find was I?”

  “What? Finding a black guy in Myska’s Prague? That’s like trying to find a Magic 8 ball in a bowl of porridge.”

  Stone grabbed the man’s arm as he raised it to his lips, spilling the soup from the spoon it held onto the table.

  “Mr Williams,” he quietly intoned, “if you’d rather continue this conversation from a hospital bed while being fed on a drip then by all means, carry on with your repertoire of Seventies brand jokes - I’ve a lot of pent up frustration to release today.”

  Williams made no move to pull his hand free, instead reaching over with his left hand and plucking the spoon from the restrained appendage, taking another mouthful while keeping his eyes on Stone’s, who couldn’t help but smile at the gesture.

  “Captain Stone,” he mimicked, setting the spoon to the table and letting his arm slip from Stone’s released grip. “if you invested as much energy in staying undercover as you do in reacting to my more unsophisticated humour, you might have gone longer than ten minutes in this country without being tailed by the very people you’d come to observe.”

  Stone’s frown deepened at the implication.

  “Meaning?”

  “You were spotted at the airport,” Williams confirmed exasperatedly, “and not just by me. They had your flight, your description and a pretty fucking good idea of what you were up to. Which is why I was shadowing your arse at Náměstí Míru - you’re welcome by the way - and why I’ve been sleeping on the street outside your apartment for the last couple of nights; although a lot of that has to do with the petrol bomb thrown through my flat window.”

  “Petrol bomb? I never heard about that?”

  “Well it wasn’t likely to make the front page. I got back from Brno earlier than expected to find the place gutted. It seems they’re onto me too now, although in fairness it could just as easily have been thrown by my ‘colleagues’ in MI6. When Greyson finally reappeared from up his own backside it was time to meet properly.”

  Stone quickly assimilated the information Williams was throwing at him.

  “Wait a minute,” he interrupted, “how could they know I’d be arriving? That’d mean…”

  “It means we have a leak,” Greyson dragged a rickety wooden stool up to the table and sat alongside the mismatched pair, his voice not quite as grim as the inference it contained, “and considering our band of Merry Men is finitely small, I’d say it was a pretty fucking catastrophic leak.”

  The politician took a drink from the beer in front of him and continued. “And before we go any further, yes Captain Stone, I apologise for lying to you, but exoneration is still on the cards if we play this right.”

  “You’ll forgive me for not being too optimistic,” the Captain responded, “from where I’m sitting you have decidedly less influence with the Committee than apparent at our previous meeting.”

  “You know what they say about a week in politics,” came the response, “it’s all a game of musical chairs and the final round is still in play; we get this right and we can all end up in the comfy seats at the end and make sure the right people end up on their arses when the music stops.”

  Though his distaste at the political chicanery on display was profound, Stone swallowed any remaining temptation to give in to his aggressions, theorising that however unpleasant, these two sat with him remained his best and only chance of achieving the outcome he had come for.

  “Go on,” he said quietly.

  Greyson took another drink, clearly revelling in his role of story-teller.

  “You saw the details of my dismissal on the news?” he asked rhetorically, Stone nodding affirmatively none the less. “Ostensibly due to irrevocable differences with the Prime Minister on post Brexit foreign policy. In reality it was due to my comments on the night of the attack here; I told the press that Britain stood with their Czechoslovak brethren in horror at the events and were prepared to fully support them in their quest to uncover the truth of what happened.”

  “Very statesmanlike, I’m sure,” remarked Stone, to his surprise bringing a snort from the still eating Williams.

  “Oh I was,” Greyson replied, ignoring the intended barb, “but what I was supposed to express along with my heartfelt regrets was the hope that Czechoslovakia would welcome their allies, specific
ally America, into the investigation. Coming from me it was supposed to be a signal to Svobodova that Britain would withdraw from recent agreements should she choose not to cooperate. I decided not to go along with that.”

  Despite his lingering antagonism, Stone felt a reluctant pang of admiration for Greyson’s choice and willingness to accept the consequences of his actions, but questions still plagued him, not least the government’s willingness to side with America over their alleged allies Czechoslovakia and the insistence of American operatives that the investigation be surrendered to them. The MP shrugged at the question.

  “I think loyalties are beginning to get mixed,” he said. “I’d known for a long time that most of the government and certainly a large part of the security services were being unduly influenced by The Institute for European Harmony, but as I understood it The Institute and the Americans haven’t exactly been on the same page since reunification. It’s possible some of the government have had their heads turned by Washington…”

  “And is it possible that any of the government are actually interested in working for the people who elected them?”

  Greyson gave in to a brief but audible laugh.

  “I’m afraid Captain that the first duty of most politicians these days is to their own career, with country coming in some way behind that and Party in their list of considerations; surely the referendum would have convinced you of that.”

  “Well then how lucky I am to be sharing a table with the one incorruptible example.” Stone drank deeply from his own beer, Williams allowing himself a brief cynical smirk at the Captain’s remark.