Autumn Leaves Pt 09

Chapter 9: In the Bag

Boris had listened carefully to what the pretty young Receptionist told everyone in her briefing while the Manager disappeared into the kitchen with the driver and a couple of the passengers, Sally and George, although he wasn't sure why. The manger had said something but his accent was so weird he couldn't make out any of it

He did have a cup of tea and a sweet biscuit, before leaving the Sun Room via the downward ramp into the bar area. He was pleased that he had negotiated the ramp successfully without jiggling the contents of his overnight bag too much, which he had secured to the scooter earlier that morning, using the elasticated "bungee" ropes with handy hooks on the ends that came with the scooter and also used half a roll of "gaffer" tape that he had got one of the care home cleaners to get for him from the nearest hardware store.

He turned left, away from the windows, and passed the bar area towards a set of double doors leading to the corridor beyond. The double doors slowly and gently closed, using springs and hydraulics, immediately behind him. Once in the corridor he was faced with two signs on the opposite wall, one pointing right that stated was the direction of the "TV Room" and the other pointing left read "To Rooms 101-108", before he turned left and headed toward the bedrooms. He had already looked at his cardboard key with its magnetic strip on the back and arrows on the front, indicating how the card should be inserted in the lock, and noted that his room number was 107 and his table in the dining room was A3. So he was confident that he was on the right direction towards his room.

Very soon he passed the goods lift on the right, which he recognised using himself only a short while ago, as well as the ramp on the left leading up to the Reception Area and onto the Sun Room that he had just left. He went through another set of doors, again spring-loaded heavy fire-retardant doors which gently and silently closed behind him. Boris was faced with fresh signs on the wall, one pointing left indications that Rooms 101-102 were towards the front of the hotel while Rooms 102-108 were indicated on his right and towards the back. He steered his scooter past Room 103 and 105 next to each other on the left and 104 and 106 similarly positioned on the right and then, at the end of the corridor in front of a fire exit to the back yard area, he discovered Room 108 on the right and his Room 107 on the left.

Using the pair of arrows on the card as a guide he inserted the card where indicated and he heard the near silent click of the door, which he pushed open before remembering to remove his card from the lock. Then he entered the room, the door silently shutting behind him.

The room was in darkness but before the door closed Boris could see that there was a light switch conveniently lower than normal switches just inside the door on the right wall, which he flicked on. The central light came on as well as bedside table lights either side of the single bed.

It was a fairly Spartan room, not much different to what he had become used to at the care home. There was a short hallway just under two metres wide and about three metres long before entering the main part of the room, with a window on the right which had a pair of curtains fitted which he could draw closed or open easily with a cord handily hanging below the level of the curtains.

It was already twilight outside, there was no sight of the sunset so his window was facing mostly east, but could be between NNE and SSE. The window barely adding any light to the interior, so he stopped the scooter and closed the curtains.

Boris got off the scooter, as there really was little further headway that the vehicle could make into the room. There was a single bed just beyond the window, and another window on the far wall which had the view of a brick wall of another tall hotel next door, which he walked slowly around the single bed towards, his gait since the stroke was more of a shuffle than a walk. Hence his usual habit of using a Walker or a walking stick until the very recent use he was able to make of the recently vacated motor scooter.

The looped cord ran all the way up the side of the curtains, so it was no problem for Boris to reach and pull down to close the curtains on the second window. He turned. From his new vantage point he could see a wardrobe to his immediate right, next to it was a desk with a chair in front, with a row of three narrow drawers holding up the desk on either side of when the chair was tucked underneath. On one end of the desk there was a kettle and a couple of upside down cups and saucers, containers for tea and coffee and tiny sealed foil cups of UHT milk in a brown plastic tray. Above the desk was a wall mounted TV set opposite the bed. A tv remote control lay on the desk and at the far end of the desk from him was a telephone. Casting his eyes beyond that he could see that a door lead into another room, which he assumed was the en-suite shower and toilet.

The thought of the toilet reminded him that he needed to use it after the ninety-minute mini-bus ride and the top-up of his bladder from the hotel's cup of tea. The light switch was outside the shower room and, as soon as he switched on that light, an extractor fan in the shower room started spinning.

The soap, taken out of a fresh wrapping, suds up easily and felt creamy and pleasantly fragrant.

"Bourgeois soap," he mutters to himself and was pleasantly surprised that the towel rail in the shower room was heated as he dries his hands. After he left the room and switched off the light, the extractor fan continued quite noisily for a moment or two before turning itself off.

Boris took his coat off and hung it on one of the two hooks on the back of the room's front door. He noticed that there was a "Do Not Disturb Sign" hanging from the inside door handle but didn't feel a need to use it.

Boris spent a good ten minutes unstrapping the gaffer tape from the bag he had taped securely to the scooter. He had already removed his walking stick and left that hanging on the other door hook next to his coat.

He thought that at least for the evening meal and the breakfast in the morning he would use the walking stick in preference to the Scooter. That reminded him that he needed to plug the scooter into the mains to ensure that the battery was fully charged up by the next day. He pulled out the long plug lead from its storage space in the scooter and found a spare socket in the wall next to the bed. He plugged it in and looked at the power indicator, which showed that it was already 96% full.

Finally, he had all the tape removed and it was just a case of unhooking the elasticated ties and the precious bag was free to be removed. He took the bag to the bed and sat down gratefully.

He admits to himself that he was definitely too old and too tired for all this energetic espionage stuff. He had never said anything to the anonymous KGB handlers, the ones who sent his messages and texts on the supplied mobile phone he was given, but they clearly kept close tabs on him because they knew about his stroke and that he had to be relocated to the care home, so they must've been keeping an eye on him.

He wondered, as he had several times before, if the Nurse Sofija was also a spy who was sent to spy on him. He hadn't said anything to his handlers about his reliance on the hearing aids nor that he was really tired after almost any physical exertion on his part, so they must be aware of his disabilities yet still entrust him to do this ... thing, this momentous thing, for Mother Russia and has supplied him with the means to do so, contained in this bag, the contents of which had been delivered by Amazon "maybe" just the week before.

He wondered again, whether this trip, to this place he had never heard off, Weston Super Mare, with a driver who was a member of one of the Houses of Parliament, where he would be going on the Monday, was a set-up for the plan, knowing that he had little mobility to get to Westminster without some kind of external help. Yes, he agreed with himself, the evidence was clear he was intended to be on this trip and that the final hurdle to get here was his test. He was sure he had come through with flying colours, a gas mask, latex gloves and a little of the contents of one of the bottles supplied, ejected into Gladys led to the desired results: a place on the trip suddenly available and the electric scooter that would provide him with the mobility necessary. Indeed, the plan was coming together nicely.

He opened the bag and carefully removed the contents one by one and placed them on the bed well away from the edges. Firstly there were a few clothes, enough for overnight, a couple of changes of underwear and socks, a spare undershirt, pyjamas and spare shirt. He was expecting to wear the same trousers and fleece for Sunday; he hadn't been told about the trip to Westminster on Monday before doing his packing, he only heard it through Sofija's admission earlier today. Once he had removed the clothing from the bag, he got up to put them away into one of the drawers under the desk, Boris sat down again and started on the rest of the contents of the precious bag.

There were three gas canisters, made from reinforced cellulose coated in some substance to maintain the pressure inside and to prevent leakage. He lifted them out one by one and laid them carefully where they could not possibly roll off the bed.

Next he took out three smaller packages, similarly secured in coated cellulose. These he knew were explosives, each had a hinged lid which could be lifted to reveal a battery operated timer, which could be set for a future time, enabling him to get away when the explosion released the extremely potent nerve gas from the other cylinders.

The text message he had received on his phone and had deleted immediately after reading, said that in the enclosed space of the Houses of Parliament these three canisters were sufficient to fill the whole complex from Westminster Hall through to the two chambers and the MPs' offices with the gas. These canisters could create a gas that was so potent that only two active particles in 5000 particles was a lethal dose, that just by touching the skin would result in death in seconds by rendering all muscles and nerves unconnected to nerve instructions from the brain, so hearts and lungs would simply fail, the cause of death undetectable other than the only possible diagnosis: heart failure. Even the gas itself was only active for a limited period, two to three hours at most he was told, before it decayed into harmless everyday chemicals that would be unconnected and therefore untraceable.

The next item that Boris pulled out of the bag was a bundle of cloth wrapped around something hard and heavy. He hesitated before unravelling the cloth and revealing a handgun, an old fashioned looking handgun, in the form of a revolver. He had recognised it immediately he had opened the package after it was delivered to him by "Amazon" a week earlier.

"How clever!" he muttered to himself in Russian, "a Nagant M1895, a Russian gun, of course, but originally designed and made in Belgium in 1895 by the Nagant Brothers, Léon and Émile, and originally supplied to the Imperial Russian Tsar for universal use by the Russian Army and Police throughout the Russian Empire. Originally made in Liège, Belgium, the Russian Tsar bought the manufacturing rights of the weapon in 1898 and produced them at home in Russia in bulk amounting to millions.

"It was my first training weapon in 1973," he told himself, quietly so there was no way he could be overheard, "before I was sent to work for the KGB within the Stasi in Dresden. It is a lovely weapon, virtually silent and with hardly any recoil, it was a devastating weapon at close range and still used in target shooting. And, if it is found about my person, I can always say that it belonged to my Belgian grandfather and was so old I didn't realise it was loaded and couldn't even imagine it could still fire!"

He checked the weapon carefully, the cylinder was fully loaded with seven rounds. It wasn't the quickest weapon to load, he recalled, having to eject the spent brass cases one by one and reload fresh cartridges one at a time, but if he was caught and used the weapon to fire back within the Palace of Westminster, well, with so many policemen around the place armed with automatic weapons, he would be cut down before he got even those seven shots off. So speed, or lack of it, in reloading the weapon was academic.

He rewrapped the weapon in the cloth and put it to one side on the bed, careful to ensure that the weight didn't make such an indent in the bed that it might provide impetus for one of the gas cylinders to roll off the bed.

He hesitated, before pulling the next item out of the bag carefully, reverently, with both hands. It was round and slightly bigger than the gas cylinders, was quite heavy, and was wrapped in a white cotton bag with a drawstring at the top. He placed it carefully on the bed and, after another hesitation, he tugged at the drawstring on the top of the bag to loosen it, then he pulled the opening wide and shimmied it down the object until he exposed it to view.

He had seen it a week ago but still he marvelled at the beauty of its construction. A simple cylinder, this was lined with a thin alloy of lead which shielded the tiny amount of radioactive contents and the machinery that would trigger the chain atomic reaction that would, he was assured reduce a radius of about three kilometres in every direction to ash and a hole below it big enough to drain the Thames, or at least the water in the river that was far enough away not to have been atomised to steam by the initial explosion and thereby create a destructive tsunami up river from the Estuary and up the Thames from the sea that would sweep any survivors up to the county of Oxfordshire at the very least.

And, as Russia would never admit to this micro nuclear explosion and, because the active ingredient was easily identifiable as Iranian Plutonium, that there would never be any proof that Russia destroyed the decadence of Western Democracy at a stroke. However, even without being told, other than the tell-tale smirk of Vladimir Putin, but the people of Russia would know that their man, the leader of the Russian people, who was the hero who organised this monumental strike, the most powerful one ever in the cause of the working class, since the Bolsheviks took over Russia and wrested control from the corrupt and decadent Romanoffs.

"And I, Boris Wouters, will be the man who will pull the trigger on that glorious destruction. For Mother Russia!"

to be continued