The Henchmen's Book Club Read online

  “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 Tid
al 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.”

  “Not every operation goes wrong,” Bill said.

  “Most do,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, well maybe, but you always get some up-front money.”

  “A few grand.”

  “Enough to keep the wolf from the door.”

  “But for how long?”

  Bill thought about this and chewed on a smile. “Until the next job,” he conceded.

  “Exactly. It’s no way to earn a living,” I told him.

  “Yeah, but Mark, all you need is for one of these jobs to pay out. Just one and you’ll be sitting pretty, you’ll see,” Bill said before knocking back the last of his pint, grabbing his stick and hobbling up to the bar for two more bitters.

  I thought about this while he was being served and came to a few conclusions. First off, it was dangerous doing what I did for a living. The stakes were high, but accordingly so were the rewards. The trouble was, the whole thing was a catch-22 situation. With The Agency contracts the way they were, we never knew what sort of jobs we were signing on for until we were on the boat or the plane or the submarine or rocket ship. And what’s more, we never knew what sorts of guys we were signing on to work alongside until it was too late too. And as any given operation was only as foolproof as the most foolish member of the company, each job was like playing a hand of poker blind.