The Henchmen's Book Club (3 page)

“You’re not serious are you?” I asked.
“Long term?”

Mr Smith just shrugged. “Gotta do
something, I guess.”

“Signing your life away isn’t doing
something, it’s doing nothing for the rest of your life, for no good reason.
You can’t be that desperate,” which he couldn’t. Only refugees, unemployed
Taliban and condemned men ever signed on for long term contracts. Guys from
Philadelphia with nothing in the bank and debtors at the door may have been
desperate, but they couldn’t have been that desperate surely.

“How we’ve changed,” Mr Smith pondered.
“A hundred years ago a job for life was what we all aspired to; safety and
security, knowing what we were going to be doing and how we were going to be
eating when we were fifty-five. That was all we wanted. Now it’s seen as a
curse. Interesting don’t you think?”

“Yeah,
fascinating. Why not get a job at the Post Office then?” I suggested.

“I don’t like lines.”

“And your kids? What about them?”

Mr Smith didn’t answer. He merely
contemplated his cup of wine and glossed over that one with a frown. He didn’t
say more and I didn’t press him. Well you just don’t, do you. The fact that Mr
Smith was on The Agency’s books at all meant that his past was a no-go area,
just as it was with mine and every other Affiliate on this plane. The basic rule
was, don’t ask and we won’t kill you. I knew Mr Smith had kids and returned
home to the East Coast after each job because he’d felt comfortable enough to
confide this much personal information to me. Just as I’d been comfortable
enough to confide in him that I lived in the south of England, had been married
once before and hated sweet corn on my pizzas. This was actually quite a lot
for Affiliates to tell one another. There were some fellas on this plane, like
Mr Petrov for example, who I’d worked with several times before that didn’t
even know this much about me. And vice versa by the way. Which was why we often
looked for other things to talk about. Safe things. Neutral things. Unrevealing
things.

As if to demonstrate, Mr Smith stroked
his stubble and finally said:

“I’ll tell you what, if we end up on the
same job again, we should start another book club, you and me. That was good,
that was. I enjoyed that.”

“Yeah, sure,” I agreed, suddenly
remembering the late but unlamented Mr Cooper. “And if it turns out to be a
long contract, we can even read Vinnie Jones’s book if you like.”

Mr Smith chuckled. “Man you really do
have me down as desperate, don’t you?”

3.
TIME ON TIME AGAIN

We landed in Sendai and spent the next two weeks debriefing to an infinite number
of Agency monkeys. Some Affiliates didn’t like the whole debriefing palaver,
the sheer utter mind-numbing repetitiveness of the process, but it’s a
necessary evil if The Agency are to continue to offer the service they do and
we’re all to stay out of prison.

Besides, the accommodation’s not bad and
there’s all the music, movies and exercise equipment you could wish to distract
yourself with during your stay. And in return, all you had to do was repeat the
same story over and over and over again until you didn’t even know what the
words meant any more.

And then, just when you’d reached the
point at which the words “I see, and what happened then?” caused you actual
physical pain, you were asked to repeat it all again some more.

It’s boring and it’s frustrating, annoying and exhausting, but no worse
than visiting your Nan in hospital. And as long as you stuck to the facts and
your account tallied with everyone else’s, you had nothing to worry about, not
even if you’d dropped the clanger that had sunk the whole sorry operation. The
Agency was good like that. They understood. I mean everyone makes mistakes,
don’t they? We’re not robots, in spite of what some of our employers like to
think, so The Agency didn’t get nasty if you’d made a mistake, because what
would be the point? It wouldn’t bring anyone back or resurrect whatever
hare-brained scheme you accidentally thwarted when you left the front gates
open and let all them Ninjas in, so they just made a note of what happened,
what went wrong and who’s fault it was, then dropped you from their books to
end your career. But that would be the worst of it. You wouldn’t get a bullet
in the brain. Not if you’d been honest with them. As long as you’d been honest
with them, you’d usually be okay.

If, however, you tried lying or passing the buck that was generally when
your head started developing new and unnecessary holes. The Agency has no time
for anyone with anything to hide, hence the repetitive debriefing. It’s the
best way to catch someone out.
Deceptions
lie flat when a
story’s told in chronological order, as that’s the way a liar learns his lies.
But if you were to turn the story around and ask it from a different angle, or
from Mr Smith’s perspective or from Mr Cooper’s, suddenly that’s when the lies
stand out, like boot polish on a bald spot or reading glasses on a footballer,
and the façade begins to slip.

“And so who else was in this reading group of yours?”

“Mr Petrov, Mr Smith, Mr Chang, Mr Cooper, Mr Schultz and Mr Clinton.”

“So there were seven of you in the Pump House?”

“No, six of us; Mr Clinton was on duty.”

“But you were not?”

“No, we were all off-duty. Me and Mr Chang had just come off, while Mr
Smith, Mr Petrov and Mr Cooper were just about to go on.”

“And Mr Schultz?”

“It was his free day, so he wasn’t due on until the next morning.”

“I see. And the book you’d all read was
The Time Machine
?”

“No,
The Time Traveler’s Wife
.”

“Which scored three point six out of five?”

“No, three point eight out of five.”

“And who gave it the lowest score?”

“Mr Cooper, he gave it a zero.”

“Really? I thought it was rather good myself. Better than the film.”

“I haven’t seen it.”

“It had Eric Bana in it as the guy.”

“Who’s he?”

“He was in the
Hulk
.”

“Really? I thought that was Edward Norton.”

“No, they did a Hulk film before the Edward Norton one.”

“I don’t think I saw either of them.”

“He was also Henry the Eighth in that Anne Boleyn film with Scarlett
Johanssonn.”

“Edward Norton?”

“No, Erica Bana, the guy in
The
Time Traveler’s Wife
.”

“Oh, I think I know who you mean now. Who was Clare?”

“I can’t remember.”

“I’ll have to look out for it.”

“I’d probably give it a three and a half.”

“The film?”

“No, the book.”

“That’s a bit harsh.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, I thought you said you thought it was rather good?”

“I did, but it wasn’t brilliant. It had some good bits in it, but I
wouldn’t say it was the best book I’d ever read. I was just saying it didn’t
deserve a zero, that’s all.”

“Oh.”

“So when did you last see Mr Clinton?”

“We don’t do halves.”

“What?”

“In the book club, we don’t do halves. It has to be a whole number.”

“But you said
The Time Traveler’s
Wife
scored three point eight out of five.”

“It did. But we all gave it a whole number score. It just came out as
three point eight as a mean average.”

“I see.”

“So what do you want to do, give it a three or a four?”

The interviewer thought on this for a moment before answering.

“Four,” he eventually concluded, another triumph for the gay wanking
stuff no doubt.

After twelve days of debriefing, one of The Agency drivers drove me back
to Sendai and I caught a commercial flight back to London via Tokyo. I didn’t
see Mr Smith when I left, but The Agency never releases its men at the same
time at the end of a debriefing so I didn’t think anything of it, although I
did wonder if I’d ever see him again. I hoped so, because we’d got on well and
had enjoyed a few nice chats during our time on the island. And in this
testosterone-charged business of ours, that’s a dividend that’s not to be taken
for granted.

I arrived back in Britain in the early hours of Sunday morning. I didn’t
know it was Sunday as I’d lost all track of the days over the last couple of
weeks, but I saw that it was when I saw the Sunday papers on a newspaper stand.

I bought a copy of
The Observer
and read it from cover to cover on the train down to Sussex but there was no
mention of Thalassocrat, Nanawambai Atoll or Hawaii’s recent pickle with the
Pacific. But then again I didn’t think there would be. Very few of our jobs
ever made the headlines, not least of all because very few of them ever came
off. But more because few governments felt the need to panic their people into
rioting or taking to the hills on a daily basis, so most of these jobs went
unreported. After all, if the masses in the major metropolitan centres knew
just how many plots, plans and schemes there were to blow them up, sink them,
freeze them, bury, blind or bugger them on any given week, property prices
would plunge through the mantle. And as most of the world’s governments were
little more than glorified landlords, this was not a situation that would win
anyone a stay in office.

This was also why most of the boys lived in the sticks and all of The
Agency’s branches were in piss-pot little backwaters like Cody, Lincoln,
Furukawa and Limoges instead of New York, London, Tokyo or Paris. Well what
self-respecting megalomaniac would go to the trouble of destroying Limoges when
they could be remembered for toppling the Eiffel Tower?

So most of us bought places far enough away from the seas to dodge
tsunamis, high enough in the hills to escape flood waters and remote enough
from the neighbours to avoid questions.

My own little bolthole was a nineteenth century farmhouse just outside
of the town of Petworth in West Sussex. It had original oak beams, adjoining
stables, two acres of land and a mortgage you wouldn’t wish upon your worst
enemy.

A cab dropped me off outside my gate just before lunch time and the
driver accepted the fact he wasn’t going to get a tip with all the grace of a
dog being pushed away from a plate of chips. But my Agency allowance had to see
me home, get my phone put back on, fill my larder with rice and tinned soups
and get my hair cut, so I was buggered if I was giving him an extra quid just
for demonstrating he could do twenty minutes on Tottenham Hotspurs without stopping
to breathe. Especially after I’d foregone the luxury of a First Class seat on
the way back from Tokyo just to bank a little extra.

I watched the cab vroom off up the winding country lane, checked my
mailbox to see if I had any post and headed on through the gate and up my
drive.

After six months in the Pacific, almost two thousand hours on patrol,
three fire fights, a hostile extraction, twelve days of debriefing and
twenty-four hours in transit, I was finally home.

4.
IN-LAWS AND OUT-LAWS

The first thing I had to do was see Linda’s mum and dad in Arundel. Bill beamed
when he opened the door, but his beam dipped a shade when he saw the apologetic
look I shone back at him.

“No luck?”

“Not much Bill,” I shrugged, gutted to find myself in such an
embarrassing position. “Sorry.”

Bill frowned, looked at the ground, nodded a couple of times then
revived his smile.

“Well it’s good to see you anyway. Glad you’re in one piece. Let’s go
and get a drink.”

Bill almost had his stick out of the brolly stand when Marjorie gave up
calling from the back room and came to see who’d just knocked on her door for
herself.

“Mark!” she cried, wrapping her fingers around my neck and planting a
big ruby kiss on my face.

“Hello Marjorie.”

“Oh it’s lovely to see you. Did you strike it rich?”

Bill and me exchanged withered looks.

“Not quite, Marjorie, no.”

“Well how much did you get?” she asked, refusing to read between the
lines.

“Nothing I’m afraid. We struck out,” I shrugged.

“You struck out?” Marjorie glowered, letting go of me and stepping back
into the hallway. “What do you mean you struck out? What about our money?”

“Marjorie…” Bill started but Marjorie just cut him short.

“Shut up Bill. Now you listen here Mark, we lent you that money in good
faith because you were in a hole, but we have no intention of subsidising you
as well as our daughter so we’d like that money back if you don’t mind. With
interest as promised, if you remember.”

“Marjorie…”

“I said shut up Bill, I’m dealing with this.”

“Marjorie please, I’m so sorry but I don’t have it. Things didn’t work
out…” I tried to explain but Marjorie wasn’t overly interested in what did or
didn’t work out. All she was interested in was the thirty grand’s worth of
interest I’d promised her in April in order to convince her to let Bill lend me
the money (that’s one hundred and fifty per cent in case you’re interested).

“You owe us that money!” she demanded. “You owe us that money and you
said you’d have it by now.”

“I know. And I thought I would but I promise I’ll pay you back. Money
and interest. Fifty grand, you’ll have it all.”

Marjorie baulked in shock.

“Fifty grand?”

“Yeah,” I confirmed, “Fifty. What?”

“How much did we lend you?” she asked.

I looked to Bill but Marjorie was absolutely adamant I didn’t have any
“phone a friends” left so I told her the truth. “Twenty grand.”

“Twenty!” she croaked, and suddenly she opened up a second front on
Bill. “You told me you were only lending him ten. You lied to me.”

Me too as it happens, which meant Marjorie had actually been expecting
three hundred per cent in interest back. Jesus!

“Marjorie please…” Bill tried once more, but Marjorie wasn’t for
appeasing. She held twenty grand’s worth of IOUs on us and that bought her a
lot of airtime.

Where was Takahashi when we really needed him?

Bill
finally managed to grab his walking stick and we beat a stuttering retreat to
his local, determined not to darken his and Marjorie’s door again until we were
in no fit state to be argued with.

“Women hey?” Bill tried to apologise, but there was no need. I was, or
at least had once been, married to his daughter and Linda was nothing if not
her mother’s child.

“I’ll pay you back, Bill, honest I will. Interest and all.”

“I know. When you can Mark. When you can,” he said, patting me on the
back with his free hand.

We found a quiet corner of the pub by the fire and settled down to catch
up properly.

“So what was the job?” Bill asked; his eyes not just illuminated by the
flicker of wood flames but by the promise of adventures yet to be relayed.
Duly, I told him everything that had happened over the last six months; Doctor
Thalassocrat, the Tidal Generator, the plans, the pay off and the conditions
and Bill listened intently. I’d not seen him since I’d first accepted the
contract so this was all new to him – every little detail. He sipped his
beer and asked the odd clarifying question here and there, but for the best
part of half an hour he just listened.

Bill was a good listener. He didn’t hold up the story with a dozen
unrelated anecdotes of his own and he didn’t feel the need to tell me what he
would’ve done in my shoes, like so many people did. Linda had been terrible for
this. I don’t think I’d ever been able to finish a story in her company because
she liked to take issue with every aspect of my anecdotes. Something like this:

“Red boats? What did they want to use red boats for? I would’ve used
blue boats.”

“Yeah, well anyway, that’s not important, the point
is…”

“No it is important Mark, because you can see red boats from a long way
off, whereas if they’d been blue they would’ve been invisible against the sea.”

“Linda, we weren’t trying to be invisible so it really doesn’t really
matter. What did matter was that the ferry was suddenly…”

“Look, just because they didn’t need to be invisible for this particular
part of the operation, you should always plan for the unplannable because you
never know what’s going at happen once an operation starts and if you’re
suddenly trying to get out of there, you’ve got a much better chance in a boat
that doesn’t stand out against the sea than one that’s red.”

“For fuck’s sake.”

“Now I remember this girl in the shop who used to use brown lipstick.
Brown, can you believe that? Anyway I said to her…”

That had been Linda. Not that she’d ever been on an operation in her
life or even in a boat as far as I knew, but that wasn’t the sort of thing that
would stop her from knowing all there was to know about boats, blue or
otherwise. No, in fact Linda had been a hairdresser, which is how she’d known
everything there was to know about everything and counted as her specialist
chosen subject whatever anyone else cared to talk about. Yep, there’d been
nothing my ex-wife hadn’t known, except perhaps how to shut the fuck up.

Bill wasn’t like that though. Bill was a good listener and brought two
things to the conversation that his daughter never did – ears and a
brain. More than that though, Bill positively enjoyed hearing about the jobs
I’d been on because it took him back to his own operational days when he’d been
in the game.

Oh yes, Bill had been an Affiliate too.

Madagascar, Bermuda, the North Sea, Switzerland, South America; he’d
worked on jobs that had threatened pretty much every corner of the globe but
he’d hung up his guns more than a dozen years ago when an injury had eventually
got the better of him and he missed the life greatly. Not so much the death and
danger aspects of the job – no one liked these, except perhaps the main
players – more the camaraderie and sense of purpose that came with each
operation. After all, there were few better feelings in life than being part of
something, particularly something monumental, such as taking off across White
Sands in fleet of moon buggies to steal the Space Shuttle. What overgrown
schoolboy didn’t dream of such adventures? Only Bill didn’t have to, because
he’d been there, done that and lived to tell the tale, which was no mean feat
considering the number of jobs he’d been on. There weren’t many old timers on
The Agency’s books. Not too many veterans. But Bill had always been a cautious
old stick and with each job came experience. “Just use your common sense. It’ll
save you nine out of ten times better than any bullet proof vest,” he would
always say, so I respected and valued his opinion. And because I generally took
his advice, he respected and valued mine. It was a nice relationship. In fact,
if we’d been able to keep his daughter out of it, it might have been even
better.

“Tempest again?” Bill frowned. “That little sod’s got more jam than Robertsons.”

“Didn’t you run across him back in the eighties?”

“Yeah, eighty-nine it was. Up in Canada. He was only a whipper-snapper
back then of course, but he beat the crap out of me and killed my mucker.”

“How did he get the better of you?” I asked.

“Oh it was stupid really. He had something hidden in his tie-pin which
he dropped on the floor. I bent over to pick it up and it blew up in my face,
choking me.”

“Tear gas?”

“Yeah, bloody stuff. Anyway, I couldn’t see a thing and got a smack over
the head in the fight. When I woke up Tempest was gone and poor old Jack Cotton
was dead, strangled with these fairy lights Tempest grabbed off our Christmas
tree,” he lamented.

“Christmas tree?”

“It was the boss’s idea, meant to brighten up the base would you believe.
I think he was trying to be ironic.”

“Oh, one of them,” I understood.

“Yeah.” Bill looks at me with hate in his eyes. “Anyway, get this, when
I came round, guess what that arsehole had done.”

“Who?”

“Tempest.”

“What?”

“He’d only gone and put a Santa hat on old Jack’s head, the evil
bastard.”

“What, after he was dead?” I recoiled.

“Yeah, like he was having some sort of joke or something,” Bill fumed,
bile clawing at his throat.

“That’s just sick,” I agreed.

“Yeah, too right it is. You don’t do that to someone, no matter what.
That was a man’s life that was.”

I could see Bill was genuinely upset about this. Even more than twenty
years on it still gnawed at him. Losing a friend was bad enough, but having his
memory so dishonoured to boot was an unforgivable act of desecration. How did
he live with himself after doing something like that?

“You should’ve just shot him as soon as you found him, shot him in the
head and taken no chances,” Bill told me.

“I would’ve if it had been up to me, but Thalassocrat had ordered us to
bring him any prisoners,” I explained, which was an understatement to say the
least. Thalassocrat had been most insistent on this point. He’d bullshitted us
that he wanted to interrogate any and all prisoners personally but we all knew he
really just wanted feed them through the turbines, the big sadist.

“Couldn’t you have shot him anyway, you know, sneaky like? Sorry about
that boss, it was an accident,” Bill suggested.

“You know what these maniacs like Thalassocrat are like. If I’d tried
that, I might as well have taken my shoes and socks off and climbed in the
turbines myself,” which was always a danger whenever you worked for a
megalomaniac with disappointment issues.

“So how did Tempest get away?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But we all missed out on a big payday because
of him.”

“You reckon Thalassocrat let him out?”

“He’s bound to have. I mean, there was no other way out of that pipe,
short of swimming in a screw-like fashion at a hundred-and-eighty knots,” I
asserted. No, it was obvious, Tempest had probably teased Thalassocrat about
Operation
Blowfish
’s chances of
success or his own lack of physical prowess and Thalassocrat had fallen for it,
pulled him out of the pipe to go
mano-a-mano
and blown it for everyone else whose Christmas bonuses depended upon wiping
Midway off the
Pacific A-Z
.

“Someone should put a contract on him and be done with it,” I suggested.

“It’s been done before, in my time. You ever hear of Carlton Franks,
XO-13?” Bill said. I hadn’t. “He was around in the sixties and seventies.
Spoiled a lot of jobs. Killed a lot of nice blokes. In the end a contract was
taken out on him before a particularly big job and he was shot in Monaco on his
way home from the shops. Broad daylight. Dozens of witnesses. No attempt at subtlety
or subterfuge, just bang bang bang right through the eggs and goodnight
Vienna.”

Bill took a sip of his pint as he recalled the reaction.

“Didn’t make any difference though,” he shrugged. “French Secret Service
just followed the assassination squad’s trail right back to the guy who’d hired
them and sent him to the bottom of the Aegean with a pair of handcuffs and an
anchor. The irony was that no one would’ve probably even heard of this guy or
what he was up to if he hadn’t bumped off Franks, so it just goes to show that
you can never pre-empt these things. Just worry about yourself and keep your
eyes on the prize.”

He was right of course. Besides MI6 and the CIA there were a whole
alphabet of intelligence organisations out there; French, Russian, Hutu and
Basque, practically every nation and every creed on Earth had their own secret
service. Only the Maoris didn’t bother any more, but that was only because
their agents stood out in casinos no matter what colour hats they wore.

“I try, but what’s the point when nobody else can?” I said bitterly.

“Mark…”

“Bill seriously, it’s getting me down. I do everything right. I do
everything you showed me and thanks largely to you I’m still here, alive and
healthy and in one piece, but I’m skint.”