The Henchmen's Book Club (16 page)

“Good for you,” I said, still feeling my way around this
conversation. “Can they do anything for it?”

“Tell your boss, if he wants it, he’ll have to deal directly
with me,” Glory then instructed.

“And he’ll know what this means? Because Stewart’s
not…”

“Remember, if he doesn’t want it, I can always deal with the
British,” she warned me, before knocking back her Red Bull, ice cubes and all.

“I’ll bear that in mind,” I assured her,
scribbling down
Dymetrozone
on the corner of my
paper, tearing it off and folding it up.

“You have twenty-four hours to answer,”
she said, crushing the ice cubes between her teeth without even flinching.

“That can’t be good for you,” I was just
saying when she swept away, knocking over her chair and rushing headlong for
the door without checking her stride or taking her peanuts with her.

Old Trevor look up from his pie again.
“Friend of yours is she, Mark?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied, thoroughly
baffled by the whole exchange.

“Seems nice,” he said, a piece of mash to
his mouth as he thought to qualify his assessment. “I would.”

I did as Glory asked and gave Stewart her message, but I might as well have
given it to the cat for all the meaning it held.

“Like I said, if you don’t want it,
she’ll deal with the British,” I repeated for the umpteenth time.

“The British what?” Stewart asked.

“I don’t know, she didn’t say.”

“But I’m British. Does she know that?”
Stewart furrowed.

“I don’t know,” I simply shrugged. “I
don’t think it matters.”

“What did she say she had again?”

“
Dymetrozone
,”
I said, reading the little corner of newspaper I’d torn off.

“Perhaps it’s a book,” he pondered,
picking a random hardback off the shelf to look at its copyright page.

“It could be,” I agreed, before heading
off to the backroom to sort through a box of Dick Francis that Stewart had
picked up on his way to the shop this morning.

“Did she give you her number?” he called
after me.

“No,” I called back.

“Well, did she say how I should get in
touch with her?”

“No.”

“Is she going to the pub again tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well how am I meant to give her my
answer if I don’t know how to get in touch with her?” Stewart exclaimed.

“Beats me,” I replied, unwilling to get
drawn into Stewart’s affairs too deeply.

I didn’t know how much of his ignorance
was genuine, because some odd things had been happening to him just lately so
he was clearly up to something. I preferred not to know though. I liked this
job. And I liked being around the books. I only worked here a few mornings a
week so I could stay clear of whatever he was getting himself into, but if it
was dealing hooky books (which was my guess) then he was odds-on to lose his
shirt, socks and pants because he wasn’t savvy enough to go head-to-head with
some of the sharks that swam in that pond.

Oh you might laugh, but there’s a lot of
money to be made from trading rare books. They were lightweight, practically
untraceable and eminently forgeable. For every £1,000 of genuine sales, there’s
always a couple of hundred done away from the public gaze. And this money was
easy to hijack if you were so inclined. And a little bit of cleavage and a
suggestive look or two would certainly dazzle Stewart into parting with his
life savings if that was Glory’s plan. Or whoever had hired her.

I wondered if I should take Stewart for a
beer and tell him about the facts of life but reasoned this could open up a
whole horrible can of worms for me, so I kept my mouth shut, played deaf, dumb
and blind, and continued filling our recycling bin out back with Katie Prices.

Stewart went to The Star that night. He
had a shave, wore his best jumper and waited there until closing time, much to
the concern of the landlord, who’d insisted on patting him down for his car
keys at eleven but Glory Days never showed up. And she didn’t show up the next
night either. In fact, she left Stewart sitting there for three nights
straight, drinking alone and vehemently denying he had a problem to whoever put
an arm on his shoulder.

It was only on the fourth night, when
Stewart had given up and I’d popped in for a cheeky half on my way home that
she finally appeared again, decked out head-to-toe in a purple latex cat suit
that was so tight, I realised why she’d not been able to leave the house for
the last three nights.

“So, what’s your answer?” she demanded
without so much as a “how’s it going?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I sighed at the
sight of her camel’s hoof.

“You think I’m bluffing, don’t you?” she
snapped in response.

“Listen, seriously, I don’t care. Tell it
to Stewart, he’s the bloke you want.”

“Twenty per cent, that’s my offer. If he
can’t come up with that then I
will
go to the British,” she warned me.

“Then go, this has nothing to do with
me.”

Glory thought about this for a moment,
then turned a chair around and sank down on it in a way that had old Trevor
choking on his ploughman’s.

“But it could,” she purred, dispensing
with the spikes and all but liquefying before me. “I don’t have to sell it to
your boss, you know. If you help me get a copy of the accelerant software, we
can always go to the British together. And I know they’d pay more than twenty
per cent too. I’d be personally extremely grateful.”

She dipped a finger into my Guinness’s
head, let the creamy froth dribble down her digit, then sucked it clean with a
murmur of indulgence.

“Are you alright Trevor?” I heard someone
ask across the pub.

“That’s an interesting offer,” I
admitted, momentarily wondering if I could con a quick handful out of her on
account. “But I really think you should speak to Stewart. He’s in the shop most
days.”

Glory’s demeanour changed yet again. She
refound the scowl she’d temporarily pocketed and snatched her more than
generous offer back up off the table.

“Fine, if that’s the way you want it,”
she hissed. “And there was me thinking you were someone I could talk to.
Someone important.”

“Nope, not me. Never,” I promised her.

Before I could say another word, Glory
was off again, flying through the door in a hail of stiletto sparks and chairs.

I spent the next hour carefully reviewing
my mental transcript of our last conversation and came to two conclusions;
firstly, she probably wasn’t selling books; and secondly, the boss in question
probably wasn’t Stewart.

As slow as I was to grasp this, when I
finally did, it almost suffocated me like a blanket of nerve gas. My
professional life had somehow caught up with me at home. But how? And who could
be the boss Glory was referring to?

To the best of my knowledge, almost every
boss I’d ever worked for had died, and died horribly at that (except for
Stewart, although there was still time). Connaughtard Cottletrophff, Zillion
Silverfish, Polonius Crump, Condoleezza Vice, Jed Choo, the Tamar twins, to
name but a few. I wrote all their initials down the right hand corner of my
newspaper and saw that only Morris Merton, Hope Verity and Kimbo Banja had been
alive when I’d left them, though Morris had just been taken into custody by the
Turks, so I didn’t fancy his chances of still being in large enough pieces to
get anything going. Hope Verity, on the other hand, had shacked up with that
hairy-arsed Italian secret service agent and blown the Nepal job just as we
looked like pulling it off. A lot of boys had got roasted on that one, so there
was a fair amount of ill-will floating about for her, not least of all from the
Calcutta mob, who’d put up a ten-million dollar contract on her the day after
their outlay went up in smoke. Literally. But still, that had been seven years
ago. And I’ve never known anyone to survive that long with a ten-million dollar
contract on their heads. Which left only Kimbo Banja. And the less said about
him the better.

No, the more I thought about it, the more
it worried me.

I stayed for another hour, chewing my
fingernails off and worrying about unseen demons before leaving to go home.

And that’s when things really got fucked
up.

20.
IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO DILATE

The night was quiet and the weather chilly. One or two cars were veering around
the town’s tight bends but there were precious few people about on the street
itself. I pulled my collars up around my ears and lurched in the direction of
home.

I was halfway along Station Road, just
past the mini-roundabout, with the bright lights of Petworth on my back, when a
black Transit van screeched to a halt beside me and flung open its doors. Two
burly bruisers leapt out as I tried to flee, grabbing me by the lapels and
repeatedly flapping a cosh against my head until they found the switch.

Lights out.

I’ve been knocked out a few times in my
career so these days I’m able to judge just how long I’ve been unconscious by
the size of the headache when I awake, and this one throbbed away like billy-o,
telling me I’d only been under a matter of minutes.

My first sensations were rocking, as
Bruiser-A threw the van around the twisting country lanes of Sussex, while
Bruiser-B tore through my pockets. They were talking, discussing my fate as
though I were a bag of compost, though I was barely able to make out the
specifics because of the grinding split that ran down the middle of my senses.
When I finally did manage to feel past it, I heard a third voice barking orders
at the others and this one caught my attention; a female voice – harsh
and authoritative, yet alluring and self-aware. I didn’t even need to come around
fully to know it was Glory Days.

“Give
me his cell phone. And pull his wallet apart, he may have the key in the
lining.”

I groaned without meaning to, tipping
them off that I’d just joined the conversation and Bruiser-B immediately
reached into his pocket to sing me another lullaby, but Glory granted my brain
a stay of execution.

“No, not yet. I want to hear what he’s
got to say first.”

“Onnhh, my fucking head!” was the first
information they got out of me, followed by an off-the-cuff observation about
their heritage and what they could all go and do to each other.

Glory shoved Bruiser-B aside and laughed
in my face.

“You’ll talk, just see if you don’t. Oh
yes Mark Jones, you’ll talk alright.”

Bruiser-B leered at me as if his bonus
depended on it, so I decided not to invite him to join book club and instead
told them I wasn’t working for anyone at the moment. I propped myself up on my
elbows and tried appealing to my brother Affiliates.

“You’re probably both Agency boys,” I
implored, nausea all but clogging my throat. “Check the waiting lists with
them, short and middle termers. I’m not signed up with anyone at the moment.”

“Agency? The Agency? I don’t hire through
The Agency,” Glory Days spat. “I want lions, not donkeys.”

“We’re RS,” bruiser B informed me,
meaning
Regenschirm Stellenvermittlung
,
one of The Agency’s every growing number of petty rivals, employing mostly
ex-Stasi men.

As discouraging as it was not to be in
the clutches of fellow Affiliates, it did offer me a chink of light, so I told
Bruiser-B to give my respects to his disabled grandmother the next time the RS
got together for Christmas and sure enough he clobbered me up the side of the
head.

“Arhh, you fucker!” I gasped, curling up
into a ball and clutching at my face with both hands.

Bruiser-B just laughed and made a few
disparaging remarks about the manliness of Agency pansies, but like most great
apes he didn’t know what he was talking about. Agency Affiliates were the most
professional, most loyal and most disciplined soldiers-of-fortune in the business.
If anyone were lions it was us, not those fucking knuckle-draggers from the
RS
or
Executive Elites
or
los
Hombres de Guerra
. It was just our misfortune that more often than not we
were employed by donkeys; donkeys like Thalassocrat or Jed Choo or Hope Verity.
Fucking narcissists who could take an audacious plan, a dedicated following and
a winning position and throw it all away over the merest slight to their egos.

But then paradoxically, it was the
loyalty of Agency Affiliates that more-often-than-not allowed them to do this.
How’s that for irony?

Still, that was by-the-by, and none of it
was going to help me out of this van, but there was one other thing Bruiser-B
failed to realise about us Agency boys. Besides being the most professional,
most loyal and best-disciplined soldiers in the game, we were also the best
equipped.

“There’s more where that came from,”
Bruiser-B assured me, slapping my hands away from my face.

When I looked up, Glory Days recoiled in
horror.

“Oh my God, you knocked his eye out?” she
gasped, but had little chance to expand on her revulsion as a deafening crack
suddenly blasted out the rear doors and sent Bruiser-B tumbling into the
darkness.

The blast dumped Glory flat on top of me,
so I headbutted her in the kisser, kneed her in her perfectly-formed clump and
threw myself headlong into the night as Bruiser-A parked the careering van
halfway up a Scots Pine. I hit the ground running and fled into the darkness,
only to tumble straight over one of the larger bits of Bruiser-B.

Glory Days and Bruiser-A finally got
their act together and came after me as I scrambled to my feet. The first whizz
of hot lead told me the interrogation was over and that this was now about
payback. See what I mean? So pointless.

More shots buzzed my ears, chasing me
through the night like angry hornets and I ducked and dived this way and that,
desperate to dodge that terrible sting of death for as long as I could, only to
be suddenly blinded when a set of car headlights clicked on just ten feet in front
of me.

I dropped to my knees and turned away as
a whirling click thrust two mini-guns out above the wheel arches and they
illuminated the blackness further still when they began spitting out three
thousand rounds-per-minute.

To my on-going surprise, none of these
rounds found their way into me, but Glory Days, Bruiser-A and that poor Scots
Pine who’d never done anything to anyone all felt the full force and left this
earth in a cloud of blood, sap and flames as the Transit’s petrol tanks
exploded to duly cremate all three of them.

The guns stopped firing and then trained
on me with a whirl.

I braced myself for more pain than I’d
ever known, but the guns stayed silent. Instead, the Jaguar XKR’s passenger
door simply swung open and a voice commanded me to get in.

“Unless you’d rather stay and explain to
Gloria’s friends what happened to her, of course,” an unmistakable smugness
snorted.

No! It couldn’t be!