Borrowed Time. Hugh Miller

       1

      Malcolm Philpott’s attention was fixed on the television screen. He stared, unblinking, as the CNN camera panned across a pocket of hand-to-hand fighting and showed a mercenary sticking a knife in the chest of a Bosnian rebel. Over by the door behind Philpott, Secretary Crane gasped.

      ‘Brainless carnage,’ he hissed.

      They were in the semi-dark of Philpott’s office, watching a video Philpott had switched on a moment before Crane entered. He had come in soundlessly, without knocking. He was known throughout the Secretariat building as Creeper Crane.

      ‘The footage is sixteen hours old,’ Philpott said. ‘An orchestrated local outburst we’d been expecting.’

      ‘Where?’

      ‘South of Banja Luka. The men in grey battle-dress are our people, Task Force Four.’

      Desmond Crane stood with his back almost touching the door. His sallow skin looked tanned in the half-light from the shaded window. He winced as a TF4 man side-stepped a rifle-swipe and spun sharply, kicking his attacker in the ribs. Behind them another UNACO operative head-butted a mercenary who fell in the churned mud of the roadway.

      ‘Do you watch much of this stuff?’ Crane said, his words clipped, conveying censure.

      ‘Only what I have to. It pays to keep in touch. You weren’t suggesting,’ Philpott added coldly, ‘that I would watch combat footage for recreation?’

      ‘Heavens, no.’ Crane smiled, but his eyes stayed reproachful.

      Philpott tapped his handset and the screen went blank. He pointed the remote at the window and touched another button. The vertical slats of the blind turned smoothly inward and the room brightened.

      ‘So.’ Philpott got behind his desk. ‘How can I help Policy Control?’

      Crane laid a photograph face up on the desk in front of Philpott. It was a snapshot, black and white, and it showed Philpott himself, walking on a Manhattan street.

      ‘This must have been taken at least three years ago.’ Philpott picked it up and studied it. ‘That’s the amount of hair I still had in 1994, and the chalk-stripe suit went to the Salvation Army shop when I changed apartments a month before Christmas that year.’ He looked up at Crane. ‘What’s the significance?’

      ‘The picture was found by an NYPD detective among the possessions of a man called Arno Skuttnik who died last night.’

      ‘How did he die?’

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