"Deepthroat?" I murmur.
"Are you the journalist?" he says, tilting his head back to peer at me through half-rim spectacles. I nod, showing the case in my hand. "Let's go somewhere more public." he says, leading the way down the road.
"Were you followed?" I ask.
"No."
"What is it you had to tell me?" I say. We are walking at a fast pace, past the rumble of buses and a construction site. Anyone trying to listen in will struggle to hear what we're saying.
"There's a conspiracy at the top layers of UKIP. It changes everything." he says. UKIP. The four letters that mean more to the future of politics in England moreso than any other. The party was a hard right neo-conservative grass roots amalgamation of bourgeois soft nationalism and anachronistic jingoism lead by a cabal of ridiculous husks of men. And of course, they were gaining popularity.
"How so?"
"We were wrong...so wrong." he says. We begin to cross a road and he stops, turning around. "Look, if I'm not alive by the end of this will you promise me-" a gunshot echoes from above. He looks down in slow motion and watches as a bullet sends his shirt flapping apart. And a truck hits him. I run over to his mangled body and pick him up by the shoulders, trying to shake him awake. I check his pulse, after finding nothing I bow my head.
"Goddamn it...you sons of a bitches." I say. I look up and notice the sniper on the roof of the Arndale centre. I begin to run.
Through the shops and sets of doors, I take the stairs two at a time as I reach the roof. The sniper is a good distance away from me and so I begin to sprint after him. He suddenly spins around and begins to shoot at me, though I do a forward roll and dodge the fifty millimetre teflon-coated bullets. He runs to the edge of the roof and jumps! He just about clears an alley and lands on the roof of the next building. I am not too far behind him, easily leaping the gap and running. We then begin a rooftop parkour chase across Manchester until we run out of buildings.
"It's over." I say. The sniper looks at me with scared eyes. There's nowhere left to go, unless he was just mad enough to jump down. The sniper turns and begins to run in slow motion. "Son of a bitch." I say to myself, running after him. Just as he's leaps off the building I reach forward and grab his ankle, swinging him down through the window in the floor below us. He crashes through the glass and disappears from view, though once I've swung myself down it doesn't look like he's going to run again. My expensive shoes crunch fragments of glass into the plush red carpet as I walk towards him.
"Looks like you need an ambulance." I say, looking at the lacerations all over his body.
"Leave me alone!"
"No way pal, we're just getting to know each other. Now how about you tell me who sent you to shoot Stuart Wheeler and I won't break your face! Quid pro quo motherfucker." I say, kneeling down.
"Nigel sent me."
"Farage?" I say, eyes narrowing.
"Please...kill me." he says.
"With pleasure." I say, picking him up and tossing him back out of the window. Turns out Farage had sent an assassin to kill one of the members of his staff. But why? What secret did my informant have for me? I flash back to earlier that afternoon, for some reason everything is white and blue and all the sound is really echoey. I replay my meeting with the snitch. "Deepthroat...conspiracy....changes everything....wrong...promise me...deepthroat...promise me...wrong...throat...everything...everything changes...deepthroat..." I focus more, putting my fingers to my temples. I remember what he was wearing, zooming into his inside jacket pocket. There was the menu for a takeaway tucked in there, I knew it as being close to a budget hotel in the area. Seemed like as good a place to start as any.
Half an hour later I am emptying out a suitcase belonging to my contact as I stand in his hotel room. After rooting through his dirty laundry I manage to find a keypass to a UKIP facility just outside of Manchester. I drive as the sun sets, listening to a shitload of retrofuture cruelpop.
I enter the compound, flashing the keycard to the guard on the gate and park up outside. The night is a cool turquoise around, the lights from the city twinkle like distant nebula clusters against a cubist backdrop. There is a soldier stationed on one of the doors.
"Hey bub, you got a light?" I say, taking a Lucky Strike from out of its packet. He nods, taking out a zippo and holding it out, shielding the flame with his hand. I give him an uppercut to the jaw and knock him out.
"Didn't anyone tell you that smoking is bad for your health." I say, giving a little 'heh' afterwards before taking the uzi submachine gun off him and checking the ammo. I go through the door and do this weird sidestep sort of skipping as I dodge from crate to crate, stopping once I reach a corner and peeking around it, sweat gathering on my brow. Two guards are quietly talking to each other in the middle of the corridor. At the end there are a set of double doors with radiation signs printed onto the windows. I tap on the wall.
"Huh?" says both of the guards at the same time. They begin to walk towards me. Just as they're about to turn the corner I leap out and bang their heads together.
I pause just before I enter the next room. Who knew what secrets this facility held? Toxic waste mutants, cyborg animals, a clone army. I cocked the uzi and burst into the room. Farage was stood in the centre, lit by a single spotlight, drinking a pint of bitter in the darkness.
"Farage." I growl.
"You should have let me know you were coming. I'd have got one for you." he says, taking a sip of his beer. I walk up to him and point the gun at his face.
"Give me one good reason not to blow you to kingdom come dirtbag." I say.
"Just one? How about...five?" he says. Behind him a wall of televisions turn on, showing a map of the UK. There are five atomic symbols marked in the same places as London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast...and Manchester!
"Is that what I think it is?"
"If you think that I have five nukes hidden in the most important cities in the UK, then yes. You're right."
"Why I oughta-" I say, though Farage cuts me off with a flourish of his hand, revealing a detonator.
"Now now, no need to lose our temper. Let's talk, shall we?" he says. I notice he sounds similar to Jeremy Irons in Die Hard With A Vengeance.
"Sure...let's talk." I say, lowering my gun. Farage takes a sip of beer and begins his monologue.
"The United Kingdom Independence Party is my child. Literally. I gave birth to a conceptual humanoid that has over one thousand heads, although those are attached to the bodies of actual people. Are you familiar with mind control? I am...a puppet master. I was trained in the KGB then sent undercover to England to pose as a right wing politician, although my true mission is to separate the UK from the EU, destabilising the continent for Putin to come and take over. England is the anus of Europe, everything ends up going through this country before crossing the Atlantic. An excellent place to launch an attack against America from, wouldn't you agree? I am not a politician for pot smoking I.T consultants to complain about on the internet, I am who your parents vote for as they get older and more racist. I am the most important person in European history since Franz Ferdinand. I hope a future band names themselves after me too. I am the alpha and the omega. I am the one who knocks." he says. I look behind him at the map of the UK. Maybe five cities were worth trading to stop this maniac. But I wasn't a murderer. I simply lean forward and spit in his beer.
