The Mandrake Effect– ONE– by P J Searle

Five hours on, New York is in darkness. In his Agency office Harry is still shaking with fear. He is sitting with a telephone rammed to his ear, the number is ringing but as yet not connected. It has been ringing for some time and he has remained motionless not daring to move, mesmerised by the continuous monotonous peal. Lost in semi-delirium his face is illuminated by a strange, eerie halo of green light.

Finally the phone connects. ‘Rose!’ He gasps, shaken from his stupor, ‘Thank God it’s you. Where have you been, your phone’s been unobtainable for ages? I think it’s being tapped. Be careful – Rex is dead. You were right, they did want to kill me, bastards! To hell with the lot of them, Rose… I’ve had it… I’m out of here. We–’ His incoherent ranting is momentarily interrupted by Rose’s voice on the other end urging him to calm down. He calms slightly and continues, gushing, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry… I’m okay now. She killed Rex, and I’ve bloodywell killed her! ––I’ve booked a flight for us to Edinburgh… in four hours… say you’ll come. I know it’s short notice, but please say you’ll come… I need you to help me … I love you Rose. You won’t regret it, I promise–’

‘Okay, okay!’ Rose’s voice yells over his rambling.

‘You will? I promise there’ll never be anyone else. I … okay, I’ll shut up… Right… Right!… Okay! I’ll meet you in four hours, at Kennedy. I love… Okay!’ He puts the phone back on the receiver next to a bank of telex machines, through which he is running a continuous pile of documents. The green running lights of the machines being the only illumination, hence the eerie halo to his face.

He checks the machines and loads more documents. Now reasonably calmed he opens Rex’s attaché-case, the one he’d grabbed from the hotel. As he takes out his customised holster a huge silver pistol drops onto the floor. He picks it up and sticks it awkwardly into his belt. Then takes up the empty syringe he’d emptied into Rex and Rosette, and fills it from a bottle taken from his drawer. He starts to load it back into the holster. He stops and studies it. The second one, the unused one still in the holster, has a clear transparent fluid. The one he has just filled has the normal, cloudy novocaine. He takes the second syringe and squirts out the clear fluid onto the floor and refills it from the bottle. Suddenly, it dawns on him. He has a look of horror in his eyes.

Rex smiles, the big man is just visible in the green light, he is standing half way in the open doorway. His automatic weapon is hanging nonchalantly in his hand. He looks as ridiculous in Harry’s ill-fitting suit as Harry does in his – the fly and waist of his trousers stretched open, only the belt keeping his alien modesty intact. ‘Hi, Harry,’ says he, smiling. ‘You didn’t think that cop would give you back pure novocaine, did you? God, you worry me sometimes. What are we going to do with you? Just let them fall to the floor.’

Harry is stricken rigid with terror. Rex gestures with a little wave of the Glock. Harry obeys and tosses one of the syringes to the floor. It sticks in point first.

Rex smiles. ‘Clever. Now the other one.’

Harry tosses the other… but not quite as before. As Rex’s eyes follow the expected trajectory, a little twist of the wrist, pub dart-championship fashion, has the heavy projectile set onto a new target.

BALLSEYE!

The razor-sharp tip finds the soft, dollar-sized area of flesh between Rex’s collarbones, just below the Adam’s-apple. The weight of the metal grip plunger, plus the force of inertia, injects half the contents deep into the big man’s windpipe.

Rex gasps, chokes and coughs out a huge gob of blood, slime and burning novocaine into the direction of a fleeing Harry, followed by a hale of automatic fire. The random impacts sending sparks and debris crashing around the room. The serpentine tongue leaps from Rex’s mouth, slit down the centre by the razor-sharp needle deep in his throat, and throwing curtains of blood-slime droplets into the dust as it thrashes in agony. In his death-throes Rex manages, instinctively, to fit a new clip, which he empties as he dies on his knees, gurgling blood and mucus. The last half of the magazine firing aimlessly into the ceiling showering the room with shards of plaster, white dust and bullet fragments.

Rex is still. His gun raised to the heavens, frozen like some sculptured war monument: Absolute silence, absolute stillness, only a waft of gun smoke lingering around the petrified, slime-caked body. No other movement, no Harry, just settling dust. Total serenity.

A sudden pistol shot! Followed by five more in quick succession then silence again – still no Harry. Rex is held in his petrified pose, his gun pointing upwards as if in some divine state of grace. Gradually there is a slight shift, very slowly Rex’s head starts to turn. It stops, leans to one side then lazily slides down his neck and onto his chest. It rests for a second then tips sideways, allowing the syringe to fall to the floor, revealing a line of six bullet entry-wounds. The head slithers off the remnant neck, sliced through. Harry’s six bullets completely severing it from the body save for a strip of loose skin, causing it to dangle like a swaying pendulum. The fine balance now disturbed, Rex’s body pitches slowly forward and falls to one side with a thud, sending the dust up again – Still no Harry.

The middle door of the row of steel cabinets, riddled with bullet ricochet indentations, moves! It squeaks as it slowly opens to reveal Harry, crouched, trembling and cowering. His hand emerges, still pointing the great silver pistol, gingerly followed by the rest of him. His face is a mask of terror.

Gradually this look of terror changes to one of wonderment, and then to disgust as he reacts to a repugnant smell. He looks in disbelief to his lower body. He rolls his eyes as to say, ‘Oh no, pleeease! not again.’ He slowly waddles off to the lift, to the gymnasium below.

A half-hour later Harry enters his apartment, once more sporting purloined tracksuit and trainers. He quickly disrobes and showers. Once dressed, he places new supplies of documents into the bank of telex machines and starts sending, then he picks up the phone and attempts to call Rose. He sits impatiently waiting for the connection. – It won’t connect. ‘Stupid Yankee-bloody-Doodle, lousy, bastard, rotten phones,’ yells he angrily into the dead handset, ‘Wake your sodding selves up! Christ, you can put a man on the moon but you can’t make a simple, sodding telephone connection!’ He rams the receiver back, rips it from the wall and hurls it across the room in tantrum. ‘Bugger the lot of you!’

To curb his approaching panic he bites hard on his knuckle. Having calmed slightly he takes up the pistol, reloads it from Rex’s case, and sticks it awkwardly into his belt. He then packs a few things and makes for the door, stopping only to give the upended telephone a hard kick sending it to the other side of the room, then walks out, slams the door and heads off into the night.

As he exits the Agency building the first glorious rays of dawn are breaking over the city. And, as could be said of any city in the world, this early morning light held the power to lighten the gloomiest heart and herald, with increasing hope, a brave new day… Not so for Harry, not this morning. ‘Airport, quick as you can,’ he barks at the driver as he enters a yellow cab, ‘Big tip if you do… toute suite!’

The cab leaps away with squeal of tires before Harry has barely shut the door. The old city streets and magnificent buildings splay out and merge with Harry’s reflection in the cab window, he looks at neither. Only when the airport looms does he pay any attention. ‘Interstate, quick as you can,’ he growls.

The cabbie takes a couple of turns, a couple of reckless passes and they arrive. Harry takes the pistol from his belt, removes the shells and, holding it by the barrel with the cuff of his coat, wipes it clean with his handkerchief. The cab stops, Harry pays the fare, tips handsomely then offers the cabby the pistol, handle first.

‘By-the-by,’ says he, nonchalantly, ‘I found this on your back seat… can’t just leave it there… God knows who’ll get in next. Hand it in to the authorities, there’s a sport.’ He then walks away, leaving the bewildered cabby holding the enormous silver pistol. Harry deposits the cartridges into an adjacent trash-bin then continues on into the terminal, to meet Rose at the check-in.

Rose is not happy. She is standing, one hand across her middle and the other in the small of her back in classic pregnant stance – a look of thunder on her face.

Before Harry can kiss her hello she turns on him coldly. ‘You’re still going on with it, aren’t you?’

‘Rose,’ greets Harry, ignoring her bad mood, ’how are you, you look worried. By-the-by, old girl, I’ve thought of a name, ‘Barney’ short for Barnaby, my uncle’s name.’

‘It’s rubbish. And it still might be a girl.’

‘No, it’s definitely a boy… it runs in the family.’ He attempts to kiss her again.

‘Well, girls run in mine. Drop it Harry, for Christ sake drop it! Don’t you realise? They’ll follow you, they’ll kill you, us, the baby!’

‘I can’t, Rose,’ says Harry pulling back from his rejected kiss, ‘I need it more than ever now… insurance, don’t you see?’

It’s obvious by the caustic look on her face that Rose doesn’t want to see. She turns and walks toward the check-in. Harry shrugs and loads their luggage onto a trolley, then follows after her.

On board Concorde, Harry offers to help Rose off with her jacket. She shrugs refusal and sits awkwardly in the window-seat, hands together across her stomach. Harry sits beside her and fiddles with her special, pregnancy seatbelt, attempting to fit it around her huge, swollen breasts. She gives him a filthy, ‘are you having a good time’ look. Harry eventually secures it then turns away.

The aircraft takes off. As the elegant craft skims effortlessly through the sound barrier Harry sits quietly working on his papers, trying his best to ignore Rose’s brooding anger. Throughout the three hour flight there is little conversation, just a curt yes and no to Harry’s inquiry as to food and drink, Rose, sometimes dozing, sometimes just gazing moodily out of the window, all the time looking angry and uncomfortably pregnant.

The order to ‘secure seat-belts’ flashes, prior to imminent landing. Harry tries again to cajole her.

‘Everything okay, Rose… the baby?’

‘What do you care?’

‘Snap out of it Rose,’ says Harry, rolling his eyes, ‘You must see… I’d be forever looking over my shoulder. I know what that’s like, I’ve led my whole life like that, waiting for the inevitable knock on the door. I don’t want that for us. Those bastards owe me… owe us. They were going to kill me, I’m convinced of that… and that’ll cost them. I’m on to something and–’

‘Shut up! I don’t want to hear. I’ve got other things on my mind.’

‘You sure every thing’s okay, Rose?’

Rose, with enormous effort forges a half-smile, ‘Sorry Harry, I’ll be okay. Just go back to your papers… you think more of them than you do of us.’

Harry shrugs and they fall to silence again.