The ornate ticket office and entrance was in pristine condition; the famous Leslie Green design was familiar from her childhood, as it was the same colour scheme used on most old tube stations. The back offices were cluttered, but somehow managed to convey the impression that the staff had just left for lunch. The age and style of the abandoned desks and equipment gave the room the appearance of a scene from an old black and white movie.

Oddly enough, the reason the whole station was in such good condition was that film and TV companies often used abandoned Tube stations such as this one for period dramas, and for blockbuster movies such as the James Bond and Narnia series of movies, amongst others.

Gil wandered through the station, relying on the dim glow emanating from the emergency lighting. There were two interconnecting lifts at ground level that formerly provided the main route to the platforms. These lifts, however, were going nowhere. When the station was closed to the public, steel beams were inserted under each lift, holding them forever in place. The lifts were labelled with the plate of the Otis Elevator Company, and were the original lifts as installed in the 1890s. Beside the lifts was a concealed shaft, circular on plan and lined with concrete blocks. This shaft had been prepared for the third lift, which had never been installed. The third lift shaft was deeper than the others; it sank seventy feet to give access to the abandoned platform that had been closed in 1917, and which was resealed after use in the Second World War. The lift shaft now offered the only access to those two long forgotten platforms.

Gil moved the wood plank cover aside, and was not surprised to see a rope suspended from a steel joist which spanned the three-metre opening, and running down to the platform level. This was nothing to do with the operation of the underground station; it was a ‘drop cable’. In training exercises, when operatives needed to descend in a hurry, they could attach a standard climber’s cable brake, which gripped the rope and released it when a hand-sized trigger was squeezed. The hand operated brake allowed the operative to descend at his or her own speed, like abseiling. Alternatively, one could do a free abseil, without equipment, but one needed good gloves and boots, not to mention nerves of steel.

Satisfied that she was alone, Gil sat in the refurbished lift car on the wooden bench and waited. As she waited she contemplated the technology that had been available to the Otis Elevators over a hundred years ago and marvelled that lifts today were only cosmetically different from their forebears.

As a child visiting London, Gil had once asked the lift attendant at Covent Garden Tube station why there was a door in the side of the lift. He explained that the lifts were not square but were shaped as a handed matching pair. In the event that one lift got stuck, the other lift could be lowered alongside, the doors opened and the passengers could easily be transferred into the working lift.

An ingenious idea, but not used in modern lifts. Why? Would we rather have people sitting for hours in stuffy lifts, waiting for an engineer or fireman to rescue them? Progress, she thought wryly. Have we really made any?

Her ‘Chameleon’ cell phone interrupted her thoughts. She was reluctant to answer it at that moment, but she switched on the electronic voice distortion and spoke to her answering service.

Concerned that the steel around her not only disrupted the cell phone signal but that it also reduced the effectiveness of the voice disrupter, she called her erstwhile African employer.

Jalou Makabate sounded panicked. He had just seen Victoria Hokobu at the conference and had immediately assumed that the Chameleon had failed to kill her. Gil was not alarmed. She had ensured the happy couple were at eternal rest before departing their Mercedes. Someone had obviously found a clone to replace the majestic Mrs Hokobu.

When Gil was handed the assignment she had seen the flaw in Makabate’s plan immediately, but it had not been her place to mention it. She had been instructed to kill the husband, too, in case he simply substituted for his dead wife at the conference, but what if they’d had yet another substitute waiting in the wings?

She told Makabate to calm down, and explained that if he bothered making even arbitrary enquiries he would discover for himself that the Chameleon had indeed completed the assignment and the Hokobus were dead. At that she hung up, hearing a noise on the spiral staircase.

***

“Gillian! Wow! You don’t look a day older!” Tim McKinnon said with all honesty, as he looked his old colleague up and down.

Tim did look a day older; many days older. He had always been an athletic five feet eight inches, but he had now developed a paunch and was carrying a good twenty pounds of excess weight. His skin looked sallow and tight, lines showing at the eyes. He still had radiant blue eyes, but now they were perched beneath a receding hairline of dark hair, cut in the military style.

“How did you get in without coming in through the doors?” Gillian asked.

“Old trade secret,” he smiled. “If you go down the line about twenty yards there’s an emergency exit that comes up at the Aldwych. It’s quite safe. The line has a safety bar fixed across the tracks, which prevents the line being made live in error. Every couple of years or so they go live and bring a train in here to test some new development. They were here last year, trialling the video projection system for advertising.

You’ve probably seen the door at the Aldwych. It looks like an emergency exit from the offices above, but in fact it was installed during the war for the bigwigs to be able to move about without being seen by the hoi polloi in the air raid shelter.”

“And to protect the nation’s art treasures, too, I suspect,” Gil replied.

“Hey, you remember all of that stuff! Great. Those old tunnels are bricked up now, and there’s no access to the parallel platform any longer.”

The MI5 man sat down beside Gillian and his face began to reflect the seriousness of his message.

“Gillian, the Chameleon has got to go.” Gillian was stunned, but she would not allow her face to show it.

“Who?” she enquired, perhaps a little too innocently.

“Come on, Gillian, you know better than anyone. Mac is the Chameleon. He must have told you. You two were always as thick as thieves.”

“I did suspect, but I could never be sure,” Gillian responded, probing for more information.

“Well, you can be sure. In 2007 the US Government wanted to take out Suleman Grenadiere, the Somali warlord and pirate. They knew he was travelling back to his encampment to trade hostages on a tanker being held offshore, with a well-known oil company.

The road to the encampment was known to be hazardous and narrow. It was easy to defend and there was very little cover. So the US sent in a unit of Army Rangers to watch the road from tree cover on the opposite hill. When Grenadiere’s truck started up the incline they would act as spotters for a F1/11 plane to be launched from the Nimitz aircraft carrier, which would blow the road and the truck to smithereens.

Anyway, the truck came into view and was approaching a hazardous tight bend when the Army Ranger Unit Leader took the coordinates. However, before he could call the coordinates in three quick shots were fired.

The spotter for the Rangers reported that the three nearside tyres exploded. These were the tyres closest to the drop, and the vehicle tilted dangerously but looked as though it might stop safely. Unfortunately for Suleman and his boys, the tyres were blown out on a tight bend and the driver could not manoeuvre the old truck around the bend with only half of his tyres. He lost control of the vehicle.

To cut a long story short, the truck, Suleman and his pirates plunged four hundred feet into the abyss. Not only would they all be dead, there would probably be very little of them left to find, and so the Rangers decided to call it a day.