The Henchmen's Book Club Read online

  “We hope you enjoy your flight. If there is anything you require today, please let us know,” she said, handing me a complimentary packet of peanuts and a miniature bottle of Japanese whisky, before returning to the front of the aircraft.

  Oh yes, Captain Takahashi and his famously sexy flight attendants. He was well known for them the business over, which is probably why he got so many jobs now that I come to think of it. But I wouldn’t have dared try it on with any of his girls, not without a parachute. Takahashi’s attendants were strictly for show only.

  Well, not quite.

  You see, not all of the people who’d been employed by Doctor Thalassocrat were on The Agency’s books. Some of them came from other outfits, some were long time associates known to Thalassocrat personally, while others worked freelance – like the lab technicians for example.

  These were the guys who really came a cropper on this job.

  Three lab technicians survived the inferno and swam out to the plane with the rest of us. One of them was stupid enough to try using a dead Agency guy’s ID to get on board the plane and the same pretty girl who’d taken and stored my weapon a moment earlier now drew her own and shot him straight between the eyes without so much as a bow. There was always one, wasn’t there? On every pick-up, there was always one.

  The attendant slipped her weapon out of sight again and carried on disarming the boys as they came aboard with a smile and a bow as if she’d done no more than have a quiet word with an unruly passenger, but no one was left in any doubt as to the perils of trying it on with Captain Takahashi. The other technicians were wise enough identify themselves up front as not being on The Agency’s books and had to agree to recompense The Agency for their passage home. They are expensive tickets at two million dollars a seat but preferable to option B.

  As for the boys with rival outfits, they were in a slightly more fortunate position in that their bills got sent directly to their own agencies. If their outfits had standing agreements with The Agency, that was. If not, then they too were advised to have a few million air miles going spare or a rubber dinghy and arms like Popeye.

  Captain Takahashi’s co-pilot popped his head out of the cockpit and barked something at the Captain in Japanese. I couldn’t understand the words but body language is the same the world over, particularly the body language of someone who’d just seen the Old Bill closing fast on the radar. Captain Takahashi barked something back at him and the co-pilot disappeared to start the engines as Captain Takahashi finished dragging the rest of the survivors on board.

  Captain Campbell and the worst of the injured men were last to be pulled on board. One of them, another Russian I just about recognised as Mr Andreev, was in a terrible state. I really couldn’t see him lasting the journey, but Captain Takahashi took the time to get him onboard all the same because he held an Agency card. A few of the more unscrupulous blokes I’ve worked for would’ve just put two in his head and left him for the sharks, but Captain Takahashi didn’t even contemplate it despite his co-pilot’s running commentary over the intercom. He eased him through the door, then slammed it shut the moment Mr Andreev’s ankles were over the threshold and shouted at his co-pilot to step on it.

  Two of Captain Takahashi’s girls laid on top of Mr Andreev to stop him from plummeting down the aisles, while the rest of us were slammed back into our seats as the plane accelerated across the water. Captain Takahashi wasn’t the sort of bloke to let a take-off stop him from wandering around his own plane though and he fought his way forward until he was behind his seat and flipping buttons alongside his co-pilot.

  The first of these pinged a seatbelt sign on over all of our heads advising us that we were in for a bumpy take-off – as if we didn’t know – while rest started deploying flares and smoke from the rear of the plane.

  “Looks like it’s going to be a close one,” Mr Petrov said in the seat alongside of me and a moment later we left the water and banked hard right.

  All sorts of alarms started screaming in the cockpit up front and Captain Takahashi responded by pumping chaff and flares out of the back to tell us Mr Petrov was more right than he knew. Above the din of the engines I heard a whoosh as the first missile ploughed through the chaff and missed our tail by a whisker, and suddenly we were banking hard left. The plane was at a virtual right angle as Captain Takahashi dodged and weaved all over the sky and from the port side window I could suddenly see our pursuers; three warships, stretched out across ten miles of open ocean and closing in to mop up Tempest’s mess. While we’d been in the water we’d been sheltered by the island, but as soon as we’d taken off we’d announced ourselves to their radar.

  Captain Takahashi now dove toward the sea hard and levelled off barely fifty feet from the waves, only to then sweep north. All around me faces and knuckles were almost opaque with fear, all except those of Captain Takahashi’s girls, who looked like they were having another mundane day at the office.

  A stream of white-hot tracer fire suddenly lit up the skies around us as our pursuers realised they were getting nowhere with their Sea Sparrows but a little more dodging and weaving and we were across the horizon and out of range. More Sparrows were launched after us, but Captain Takahashi’s bird was jam-packed with the latest radar deflecting technology and after two more minutes of aerial dodge ball, he flicked off the seat-belt sign and announced that this afternoon’s in-flight movie would be The Time Bandits.

  Eighteen of us survived Thalassocrat’s job. Nineteen if you want to count the lab technician who’d got himself shot trying to sneak on board, but only eighteen of us made it onto the plane, lived through the take off and managed to last an hour of The Time Bandits before it was turned off by popular demand. It isn’t a bad film, I’ve seen it before, but no one was in the mood to watch Snow White’s mates running around history after we’d lost our wages – particularly the two surviving lab technicians who were near inconsolable at the thought of having to sell their houses, belongings and spare kidneys to pay for their flights home.

  But you know what, eighteen wasn’t bad.

  I’ve been on jobs where hardly anyone made it through to the other side. That Siberian job that Captain Takahashi had picked me up from being a case in point. Only four of us had survived that one, which was probably why Captain Takahashi remembered me. He came back to my seat during the flight and talked to me some more about that day.

  “You worked with that fella with the funny name, didn’t you? In Siberia? What was his name again?”

  “Polonius Crump.”

  “Yes, that it, Polonipus Crumb,” the Captain laughed, shaking his head and urging his girls to laugh along too. Some smiled politely, though the others just regarded me with cautious indifference. “Funny name him. Funny.”

  And a funny end he met too, old Polonius. He’d had some potty notion about knocking the Earth off its axis by a dozen degrees to melt the polar ice caps and bring the Equator further north to transform the frozen tundras into rich fertile land – while sinking every other square inch of rich fertile land under a few billion gallons of freshly unfrozen sea water, you understand. Of course he didn’t have a clue, he didn’t. Even the lads on the job didn’t think he could do it, but he was a nice enough bloke and paid well – in Russian gold no less. And if by some miracle he did manage to pull it off… well, I’d rather be sunning myself with old Polonius on the new Arctic Riviera than standing on my roof in Sussex wondering where all this bloody water had come from.

  But no, I don’t need to tell that you he didn’t manage it. Russian agents backed by Spetsnaz commandos brought the whole place crashing down around our ears while we were testing his stupid defridgerator (*patent pending). Polonius himself took a tumble into a temporarily defrosted lake trying to flee on his snowmobile, so that when the ice set again he was frozen inside a big block of it like something out of a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Apparently, I didn’t see it myself, but the Russians cut him out and carted him off as a souvenir.

  “Funny
,” Captain Takahashi smiled again, squeezing my shoulder and heading back to the front check if Mr Andreev wanted The Time Bandits back on.

  Yeah hilarious. I’d ended up with moths fluttering out of my pockets on that job too.

  A little while later Mr Smith came over and sat with me.

  “So Jones, what are you going to do when you get back?” he asked.

  I rubbed my face and opened another little bottle of Japanese whisky. “I don’t know,” I shrugged. I hadn’t met Mr Smith before this job but we’d got on well and become firm friends. He was an American while I’m British so it’s natural for people who shared a common language to eat their sandwiches on the same table of any international canteen, though it wasn’t just a language thing. Mr Chang for example, had been a lovely bloke, as had been Mr Fedorov, while I could’ve happily watched Mr Cooper getting blown up, and then revived, and blown up again all day long, so it was more than just a language I shared with Mr Smith. We shared a sense of humanity too. And in a profession predominated by killers and psychopaths that was a rare old thing.

  “Are you going to re-register with The Agency?” he asked, cracking open a half bottle of Okinawan Merlot.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t. I didn’t want to. Tempest might’ve had nine lives but I only had the one and I was rather attached to it. But then again what choice did I have? This job was supposed to have paid off my mortgage, settled my debts, gold-plated the farm and left me enough so that I never had to look at another price tag again.

  If things had worked out.

  Damn Tempest.

  Damn Thalassocrat.

  “I’m going to,” Mr Smith said. “I’ve got to go and see my kids first, but as soon as I’m done I’m heading over to Cody to put my name on the list again. Even if it’s a long termer, I don’t care, I’ll do it.”

  Long term contracts, middle term contracts and short term contracts. These were what we signed up for, with scant few other details available. Due to the generally secretive nature of the work we did, the employers cherry-picked their workforce, not the other way around, which makes sense if you think about it. No point tipping off MI6 or the CIA about what you’re up to with a card in the front window advertising for dinner ladies with space station experience. All we got to know was the length of the contracts and how much they paid. Short term contracts were usually anything between a month to a year, middle term contracts between a year to five years, while long term contracts could conceivably last the rest of your life. But then again, so could any of these contracts, so suck the bullets out of that if you please. Personally, I only ever signed up for short to middle term contracts. I had plans, namely finishing off my farmhouse and filling its wardrobes with Italian suits, so I didn’t want to see out my days tunnelling towards the Earth’s core in a silicone plastic bubble twenty thousand feet beneath the Azores (unless the perks were exceptional).

  “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.”