Malik of America Square

Malik of America Square

By

Mike O’Sullivan

Copyright © 2013 by Mike O’Sullivan

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Chapter 1

London - 54 days to the Election for President of England

In a demon led night of rioting, the stench of burning buildings clogging his throat, Patrick McCarthy hurried along the Albert Embankment towards his office. He was directly across the River Thames from the smog shrouded old Houses of Parliament. Suddenly he realised the man coming towards him out of the chaos was taking aim with a handgun. Both men stopped abruptly with twenty paces between them. Patrick could hear running feet behind him but concentrated on trying to dodge the bullets. Shots exploded and whistled by his ears. He was still standing as he saw the man with the gun collapse to the ground. Running feet passed him aiming a gun at the prone man whose face was consumed by blood. Running feet spoke.

‘Close one that Sir. We picked him up on camera. If you had dived to the left you would be dead. Don’t worry Sir I’ll take over.’

Patrick noticed a cab at nearby St Thomas Hospital.

‘America Square,’ he called out.

‘What kind of election is this Gov,’ the cabbie nervously squeezed between his teeth. ‘It’s more like war to me.’

‘You might be right,’ Patrick agreed.

A few minutes later he jumped out of the cab at the bottom of steps leading up to the glass tower that was America Square and Malik’s campaign HQ. He raced up the steps, pressing his automatic entry key as he reached the glass doors. He rode the lift to the thirty fifth floor and his own company HQ Galleyheads, ‘caterers to the world.’ Reaching his desk he slumped into his chair in a heap, clothes clinging to him in fountains of sweat. He tried to clear his mind, as the whole country was trying to do.

Time for thinking hard and fast. Which stance to take? Whose philosophy to follow? What direction? Who counted? There were no easy answers and many options. Some starting points had dubious backgrounds. But time was short and the nature and tradition of political thinking was slow to change. Most routes led nowhere. Personal security, that basic instinct for survival took high priority. The whole country was searching for answers.

Patrick stretched his lean six-foot frame further under the desk, his arms straight out over it. This was his breathing space. He searched thirty years of easy living for comparisons with the present time. In vain. As head of H6, one of Malik’s election research teams he should have expected to be closer to the reality of what was happening. He turned slightly in his chair, looked out over the Thames, and reluctantly concluded the masses would have to change habits of a lifetime to follow Malik’s philosophy. They were being asked to think of themselves as a community, whereas they only thought about themselves.

Then he noticed his flashing wrist phone. It was in recording mode. He switched it on. It was Davinia.

‘I hope you are in good health. I wouldn’t know. Hint, hint.’

He wearily eyed the scene. No rain for weeks. Smothering June heat. Dust everywhere. The city had become a living nightmare. Fires raged in his mind. Fires ravaged London’s streets. His world was on fire. Only one man had pointed to the balance between law and order being inadequate for the times. Revolution had hung in the air for months. London was gripped by fear. Rumours and mobs finally emerged onto the night streets together.

Patrick knew that grey men continued to watch from glass towers. They searched for answers and solutions that would not require their funds. Others looked up at them. Torrents of resentment fused minds and funds. Frightened bankers and company investors froze, threatened with fire and death if they moved assets out of the country.

Two years earlier one man had forecast this nightmare scenario. Maybe he would be blamed for its reality. But Patrick now clearly saw how Malik was the only one who stood between the mobs and country-wide devastation. In the present climate there was callousness on all sides with nobody except Malik making any sense. And sense as far as Patrick was concerned was to lead by example, not saying one thing and doing another.

Malik’s philosophy was the difficulty. He believed in people, not funds. As someone running for President of England, this put him at odds with the powerful and influential. Power and influence hid behind high walls of traditional reasoning. Malik had outgrown tradition. Therefore he wasn’t considered a reasonable man. He was after all an Egyptian.

Patrick’s land line phone rang.

‘You have a scrambled H6 call coming in from Singapore.’

He put the phone down so that he could see the message coming up on screen.

The main question Patrick wanted answering was whether people trusted a foreigner more than the crooks they thought ran the country. They would get this answer soon enough. Voting in the first English Presidential election was less than two months away.

Patrick sat and wondered if the country could hold out until August 1. As the key member of Malik’s election team H6, he was as likely as anyone to know how Malik thought, planned and operated. So far, Malik had forecast everything to perfection. He must have something else up his sleeve. Patrick shuddered when he thought what that might be. Throughout the night as he watched the river and fires he had come to the conclusion that the Egyptian’s cool thinking was balancing the mobs’ destructive capabilities against the willingness of the grey men to come to the nation’s rescue. And if this really was Malik’s strategy it was an extremely dangerous one. He would have to judge exactly the time when power would go to the heads of the mob. If he got it wrong, order would collapse. Revolution would be inevitable. It would then be too late to hold an election.

His screen read ‘Anna in Singapore. Important data scrambled. Wait. Also en route. Found in street. Strange.’

Patrick knew that the Singapore authorities bugged communication networks for the least reason. Therefore he suspected they had picked up Anna on their wavelength. Or so she thought. He rejoined his night’s thinking.

The ‘twelve grey men,’ as Malik called the covert group that orchestrated national politics and business, always raised the stakes. Each side made their calculations. Royals, whom ‘the twelve’ supported, did not want a foreigner to run the country. What was not clear was how far they would go to stop it happening. A few months ago the election result would have been predictable with Royal’s Anne Forsyth, the former Lady Anne, squeezing in past Labour’s Philip Gasgot and Liberal’s General Cartwright trailing in third place. Malik, leader of the Peoples Party, would have been knocked out on first count. But there was talk that with the new proportional representation system of voting Malik stood a good chance of getting in by default. The right-wing media, whose iconic owners stayed abroad, and their home-based supporters piled into a very public offensive against Malik. They carried the fight onto the streets. Malik supporters felt failure and defeat in the air. They too took to the streets.

Jennifer Rashleigh, another member of H6 but also a key player in Malik’s administration, couldn’t sleep. She had been tossing about for hours. Now thirty-nine, still satisfied with the way she looked, outgoing, with a firm hold on the times before recent events, her sense of security was beginning to waver. There was something instinctively cautious about the way she separated her bedroom curtains. The red glow must be Royal House on the Strand. She switched on Channel 12. Royal House was suffering a furious orgy of violence. Demented people were still ripping it apart. Her last seven years dedicated to the poor and underprivileged, what of those years now? Who were these people, these rioters? Until now she had felt safe in the fortified surrounds of Belgrave Square. But armed guards hadn’t saved Royal House. She rang Patrick.

‘Patrick how widespread is the rioting?’

‘Haven’t got a handle on it yet Jennifer. But more intriguing is that Anna has managed to trace me to my office.’

‘So she thinks she’s in danger?’

‘I’m keeping an eye on it.’

‘Patrick….’

‘I can guess what you’re going to say. Had it in mind myself. Last time I got this sort of call from her the Australian Government closed all the airports for a week.’

‘Don’t close your eye.’

Jennifer remembered that former distinguished Royal followers and members of England’s aristocracy watching from their overseas estates, created mischief world wide for England. Channel 12 reported that many important buildings were now burned out shells. Several secret societies were out and about. Criminals, adventurers, serial molesters, killers and sadistic brutes latched on to rioters and added a chilling embrace of fear.

She knew these nightly battles were part of a wider power struggle between what had become known as the ‘haves’ and ‘soon to haves’ false and true democracy. Malik didn’t think democracy was working in England. She knew that as part of the current power struggle Malik’s idea was to draw England’s powerful and influential out into the open. Those invisible people manipulated things behind elaborate scenes. He wanted their presence to be made public. Once out in the open they would have to spend their time answering questions rather than getting in his hair.

She had mixed feelings about what would happen after the election, even if Malik became President. He was both their strength and their weakness. She set her alarm clock for 8am and went back to bed.

Singapore

Anna Larson stopped suddenly, her sixth sense calling. She had just emerged from the English Embassy onto the wide pavement in what was considered the safest city on the planet. The avenue of palm trees bordered with a fusion of white, pink, red and blue rising waves of flowers and bushes were incredibly scented. It made her light-headed. Her hotel was only five minutes walk from the Embassy. The serene quiet was broken by the electric hum of a Muca, the vehicle driven by the secret police. It was capable of 200 kph. It came around the corner like a whirlwind, turned towards the pavement and jolted to a stop. Both rear doors opened and three men in dark green uniforms jumped out and ran towards the flowerbeds to scuffle with a third man dressed in white shirt and beige trousers. They all looked Chinese. The men in uniform bundled the white shirt into the back of the Muca and it sped off. Anna wasn’t noticed, she thought, because her dress was close to the colour of the mixed flower border. Curious to know what the incident was about, she inspected the border under the tree where the white shirt had been hiding. Casually leaning against the tree she spotted a clear plastic envelope containing what looked like data slides and a bundle of paperwork. She discretely picked it up and slid it into her shoulder-bag in one subtle movement and continued walking towards her hotel thinking that maybe she should retrace her steps to hand in the package at the Embassy. But that thought passed and she continued towards her hotel. She did so in the knowledge that the whole place was known to be saturated with secret police cameras. However she reasoned that the attention of the cameras would have swung around to get in the movement of the Muca and that she was therefore in the clear. As she walked briskly along the avenue she wondered what would happen when the police discovered that the arrested man did not have the envelope. She thought they might review who else was around at the time and obviously pick her out. Therefore she believed she had to deal with the contents quickly. Safe though Singapore was, for people who stepped outside the rulebook there was always the chance they could end in a secret police torture cell. The trouble was there was sometimes no telling where the invisible red line of rulebook breaking was.

She took the lift to the 20th floor of her hotel and pressed her room entry key before getting out of the lift. She reached her room hoping that she had acted normally, though she knew her face was a little flushed with excitement. Once in the security of her room she dropped her shoulder-bag onto the bed. She put on her service gloves and wiped the envelope clean of fingerprints before opening it. She poured herself a mineral water from the fridge and sat down to check out the find. With her stomach muscles gripped by the tension she pulled open the button holding the envelope together. Besides the data slides there were some photos and a few pages of shorthand in English. She wondered about the language. The shorthand described briefly what was on the data slides. She was astonished by the first paragraph and hurriedly read on. There were three photos of older men with young attractive women. Anna just about grasped the story when she recognised one of the men. Why me, she thought? Why let me have it, if indeed that was the intention? This was an attempt to blackmail. But why give the information to her? She thought about this over and over. Maybe it was what she might do with it that was behind the intent. Maybe there had been calculations made by the people who dropped the envelope. She took out her laptop and put in each data slide in scramble mode to Patrick at his company to download. It was ironic she thought that he worked for a Chinese company. She waited for confirmation that the contents had been sent on. She placed the contents in a hotel jiffy bag, addressed it and passed it to a colleague who would be flying to Copenhagen in the morning with instructions to send it on.

But the intrigue would not go away. What troubled her more than anything else were the cameras. If she was not seen picking up the envelope which had been planted for her she would be in the clear. But if she wasn’t supposed to see the incident then she would be in trouble. She would soon know.

Patrick McCarthy still feeling the effects of his ordeal, but thinking on, thought Londoners in particular felt over-burdened by the rioting. Every night now last-stand battles were being fought by the Royals. They were a loose collection of unlikely allies: monarchists, little Englanders, Nazis, National Front survivalists, old Tories, and other hooligans. They were prodded into action by middlemen who fronted the grey men with City funds. Behind them were ‘the twelve’ who pulled all the strings. At street level, bully boys had worn down city centres and almost emptied them of people especially at night. Ghostly streets were left to the brave, the foolhardy, and street creepers. Suburban streets were no longer safe places either. Although these were being partially clawed back from the creepers by vigilantes and private security armies who took delight in breaking the back of anyone who disturbed residents. And they did it quietly. It was violence greeting violence. Not a solution.

Patrick thought he understood Malik’s broad plan to get elected President. He was familiar with the way Malik worked. There was a pattern. An idea, an innovation followed by research, discussion, a plan, a pilot scheme which would be cloned and then written into the broader Party way of doing things. Malik’s hand also searched around in the murky depths of corruption, an area from which detail did not always emerge into daylight but where success was vital. He once told Patrick after he’d just explained a devious method of achieving an objective, ‘Never face a swindler with your bag full of principles.’ But Patrick seldom asked about projects in which he was not directly involved. His phone rang. It was Andrew Cross, leader of Malik’s People’s Party in the House of Commons. Andrew was a member of H6.

‘Patrick, I’m just not going to make our meeting. We are held up outside Peterborough. I think its rumours on the track.’

‘I’ll forgive you Andy. Go straight home when you arrive in London. Security is non-existent. Not a rumour.’

As far as Patrick was aware Malik hadn’t known failure. Were these fires a sign of success or failure? Whichever, the contest had entered a new phase.

Political debate on television never rose too far above moaning. This turned the spotlight on Malik. The fact that Malik was a foreigner was the main reason he was trailing behind in opinion polls. His honesty and clear thinking put him streets ahead in any debate. Malik’s training equipped him to analyse complicated puzzles and present facts in straightforward language. He had the grace to allow a discussion to air the views of participants to their satisfaction. Most people felt he understood what they said and appreciated their point of view. And Malik was an expert in judging their thinking.

People who looked to the future with Malik, looked forward to a state of reasoned philosophical discussion and action which moved forward at a pace where dust could not settle. Prior to Malik, self-interest had been the prime interest. With Malik, the future seemed more idealistic, fresh, new; people could picture themselves in it.

To a growing number it seemed that with Malik as President the future could hold hope. With him in charge there would be a future. But Malik wasn’t chasing voters as much as his ideals. Patrick looked over the river as history passed and beckoned. Grey men looked at profit margins and sliding fortunes. London burned. And Malik? What was Malik’s part in all this? Patrick thought about that a lot.

Chapter 2

London - 3am

Andrew Cross, was a self-assured thirty-four-year old, a Malik prodigy. He was Member of Parliament for Hull and leader of Malik’s Peoples Party in the House of Commons. He left the Continental Edinburgh to Budapest express at Thames Central. Smouldering fumes attacked his eyes as he hailed a cab to take him to his Rotherhithe apartment.

‘It’s the menace I can’t take Gov,’ the cabbie complained.

‘You’re on the same wavelength as the miserable wretches getting off the train.’

‘I’ve delivered ten casuals to various hospitals today and I only started my shift three hours ago.’

‘So it’s more than menace.’

Andrew knew about menace. He chose to live in Rotherhithe which was part of City. City was one of only four areas in the country working twenty four hours a day every day, and was known to have tight security. Out of all the muddled thinking which was at the heart of England’s troubles, City was one of very few success stories. Andrew felt good about having been there from the start. It was a Malik experiment which had begun four years earlier. Then, it was known as the Extended City project. Four- six- and eight-hour shifts incorporated the six old London boroughs on either side of the Thames. Gains were tremendous. It was all City people talked about. Their sense of pride was easily understood by Cross, a Yorkshireman born into proud Yorkshire traditions, though now with years of Malik training behind him, there were times when he would have been glad to ditch his Yorkshire legacy.

It was 3.15am when Andrew reached the Surrey Towers Complex. A few minutes later he entered Lavender Tower, overlooking Lavender Dock. His home, a large five- bedroom apartment fifty-six floors up, always relaxed him. He stole in quietly, made himself a coffee and went to ‘the bridge’ his viewing seat where he could see the Thames wind and stretch out through London to the sea.

He waited for the sun. Eventually, warm colours took over London’s sky. Sun a golden glow filtered through white haze and reflected River Thames like a watery paradise. Andrew never tired of the sight. Small boats and ripple water sent yellow, silver and gold slivers to merge with mellow calmness further downstream. Couples slowly passed along Embankment like microdots disappearing into time. A very private world each sunrise. Andrew allowed himself to relax and drift into the space.

Singapore

Anna Larson took a sleeping pill because she knew from experience that the night’s events would otherwise keep her awake. But the pill did not release her immediately from troubled thinking. She couldn’t concentrate on her next shift to Sydney. The way her mind worked to get herself security was to seek refuge in her past. Denmark was her comfort zone.

Back in Copenhagen her mother and father now lived in separate parts of town after a life of fighting each other’s moods until they could no longer stand it. Her father who couldn’t make a living as a novelist had been a cab driver and took out his frustration on the family. When he finished his work shift, he’d arrive home only to shut himself away in his study. It was her mother, a top chef who had decided to send the young Anna to stay with her grandmother in Holstebro a small town in north Jutland. There Anna had mixed it with the wild bunch. Maybe now she was trying to find a role for herself which meant something to her, where she would also be recognised for herself. She had been popular with boys later with men until fearful of boredom she had taken to the skies to see the world. This she had discovered was more or less the same as Holstebro, boys and men. Malik was different.

They had been caught out together in a snowstorm at the Stockholm office. He had been working for her airline on a special consultancy project and she had offered to be his secretary for the evening. Almost immediately they formed a natural trust. She began to treat Malik as the father she didn’t have. Some months later Malik had asked her boss, head of the airline at Copenhagen if he would allow his air hostess to fulfil a few odd jobs for the Malik organisation. She subsequently agreed to join Malik’s H6. In H6 she had found Pedro Pordomingo a Spanish hotel manager with whom she enthusiastically set up home in Chiswick. She had now found stability in her life. It was their dream which kept her alive. They planned a small hotel and restaurant on the north coast of Spain close to where the Spaniard was born. Their wait for the right time to make the move was agonising. But now they were only four months away from realising their dream. Nothing else could be more reassuring. Sleep drifted in like a wave of comfort to her.

London

Patrick McCarthy concluded after some indecision he would have to spend the night in his office chair at Galleyheads, ‘caterers to the world.’ He felt he had tested the night streets enough for one night. He wanted space to reflect. But when he saw a flashing red light on the ‘shared screen,’ the screen shared with other H cells he had a feeling this space was about to be closed down.

According to H4, one of whose task was to monitor the movements of major world criminals the Chinese were on the move. He could taste trouble. This news by itself was worrying enough. But he knew that there was a big surplus of cocaine in Columbia and a gigantic crop of opium in Afghanistan. The rich Chinese opium crop could produce a contest of harrowing danger if they decided to export it to Europe. This was what H4 were forecasting. He phoned the H4 duty desk and was surprised to find its head still on duty.

‘Jake, I see the danger and now I know you’re still on duty I can taste it as well.’

‘Patrick, I’m working out when, not if, the trouble will start. The threat from Afghanistan and Columbia is not immediate because they are unaware of the Chinese movements. But in China there are two major groups, deadly rivals, planning to export to Europe. That’s the immediate problem. They are unpredictable, well armed, desperate, and as far as we can tell are unaware of the dangers they both face in Europe.’

‘You think Jake that they will bring this rivalry to the streets of Europe?’

‘Astute of you Patrick. You may also see England as a place where the trouble could start.’

‘You’ve anticipated my next question Jake. I’ll keep an eye on it.’

He switched back to reflective mood. H4 also monitored people arriving and departing England and drew conclusions. There was an emerging trend. Powerful men, bankers and landowners moved out mainly to France to orchestrate wide-spread disruption with the objective of unseating the English Government and have it replaced by the military. While these antics unfocused the country’s rulers it left a vacuum that was quickly filled by provincial Chinese, Columbians and Afghans mostly fronted by English partners.

Malik employed people world wide to listen and report the world’s word on England. Some were not always as discreet as they thought they were. Anna Larson for example took chances.

Throughout this muddled period of the authorities reacting to chaos, which for the moment was mercifully confined mainly to city streets, the ‘twelve grey men’ played a fatalistic chess game with Malik behind the scenes. It seemed to Patrick that the Government and the current political structure might get side-lined in this battle. Patrick put his faith in Malik’s perception, his sharp rate of recovery from sticky positions in contrast to the ‘twelve’ who inevitably took time to agree their response to anything Malik threw at them. He reckoned Malik was trying to split the opposition of ‘the twelve’ by providing enough reasons for them to question one another’s ability and motives. They only worked together to sustain their own individual power and influence.

Patrick believed that Malik’s political adventure had grown out of a general frustration with commerce as practised in the City. Malik had tried to draw the City’s attention to the need for Chinese and Indian business groups who would be looking for more flexibility in financial centres outside their own country borders. Apparently little agreement was ever reached unless Malik browbeat the City Councillors who included bankers and their officials.

Malik had confided in Patrick when he recognised him as a fellow free thinker. The Egyptian had explained to the Irishman how English management had committed itself to a system that tended to self destruct from within. Patrick recognised how it operated. All specialists were given their own departments to manage. This resulted in department heads defending their own against all-comers. When one of these specialists became a company leader, they would retain their previous departmental allegiances, subordinating other specialists and broader management thinking. In company politics, therefore, other specialists countered by forming alliances to unseat the company leader.

Patrick had first met Malik five years earlier at the media giant London Research where the management consultant had been hired by the board. Malik headed