by Danny King
“Victor Soliman? The satellite refractoriser, wasn’t it?” Tempest mulled, in an effort to show off his knowledge.
“I don’t know, possibly, I was just the bloke guarding the vending machine,” I told him. “But we were put out of business six months ago by Rip Dunbar of the SEO, which is where I got this,” I lied, pointing at my face.
“Rip Dunbar?” Tempest grimaced. “That ape?”
“He speaks very highly of you,” I told the big kettle, “but yes, that ape. Check with him if you like. Tell him I was the guy who shot his Nguni.”
“Painful,” Tempest quipped, “but that doesn’t mean you’re not working for anyone now, does it?”
“No, you’re right, and in fact I am,” I corrected myself. “Petworth Editions. It’s a second-hand book shop in town.”
“I know, I’ve been in it,” Tempest said.
I couldn’t remember Tempest popping in any time while I was there, which meant he’d probably toured the place with a flashlight hanging from his gob.
“And what did you find?” I put to him.
“A lot of books,” Tempest admitted
“Yeah, I bloody knew it wasn’t kids,” I said, referring to the break-in.
“Well you would, wouldn’t you?” Tempest accused.
“Presumably then, it was you who drugged Stewart and made it look like he’d crashed his car too? What were you doing, searching his load or planting a tracking STE?” I asked.
“Neither, that really was Stewart. He’s got a secret drinking problem, didn’t you know?” Tempest replied.
“Really?”
“Yes really, there’s a load of bottles hidden behind the Jilly Coopers if you look.”
“Oh,” I ohhed.
“I know a cover story when I see one,” Tempest then said. “You’re sleeping, aren’t you?”
“If I am, I’m having a fucking nightmare,” I told him. “You’re tailing me, aren’t you?”
“And lucky for you I was,” he said, referring to this evening’s earlier special guest stars.
“And that’s another thing, where did she come from? Glory Days? Did you put her onto me?”
“The Admiral told me not to trust her. I knew she’d try to deal the Dymetrozone independently if she knew about you, and I was right,” he congratulated himself.
I took an enormous sigh and rubbed my forehead. Unfortunately, I’d used up my only plastique organ, but I was of half a mind to pull out my real eye and throw it in his face just to get his attention.
“Look Jack, I’m an Affiliate for hire. I’ve worked for Thalassocrat. And I’ve worked for Soliman, just as I’ve worked for dozens of others in my time. You’ve got me banged to rights. But I ain’t working for anyone at the moment,” I tried to make him understand.
“You’d like me to believe that, wouldn’t you?” he said.
“God preserve me,” I gasped. “Just tell me this, how long have you been following me?”
Tempest considered the question before evading it. “Long enough.”
“Five days? A week? Two weeks even?”
“Long enough,” he simply repeated, though his lustre had lost a little of its sheen by now.
“Then in all that time, have you seen me do anything other than stack books, nip into Waylett’s for a pasty or struggle over the crossword in The Star?”
Tempest sipped his gin and ginger to buy time, before hitting me with the biggest revelation of the evening.
“What about Goodwood?” he levelled, then added, “And the man in the hat?”
“Goodwood?” I gawped, scarcely believing what I was hearing. “Goodwood was three months ago! You haven’t been following me for three months, tell me you haven’t!”
Tempest didn’t know whether to look triumphant or embarrassed, and settled for looking indignant.
“You’ve been following me for three months!” I pressed again.
“Gathering intelligence takes time,” he defended.
“Obviously,” I laughed. “Jesus Christ and you still haven’t got a jot of it!”
“The man in the hat?” Tempest reminded me, showing me a black & white surveillance photograph of myself buying a hotdog off someone at Goodwood races a couple of months ago.
“Would you believe he sells hotdogs?” I suggested.
“And drives the very latest Lotus Exige?” he countered.
“Does he? Fuck me, maybe I should get into that game,” I phewed. “Hang on a minute, you’re following me because I bought a hotdog off some bloke who happens to own a flashy motor?”
“But you didn’t just buy one hotdog, did you? You bought three?”
“What are you, my personal trainer? So what? I had three hotdogs. I like hot dogs. Phone Weight Watchers why don’t you?”
“You were Thalassocrat’s goon. I recognised you from the island!” Tempest shouted.
“Thalassocrat is gone and so’s my job,” I shouted back.
“Never! You’re working for someone, I know it,” Tempest insisted, turning over the table and grabbing me by the lapels, but it was the act of a man who’d spent the best years of his life lining his pants with toilet paper only to shit his hat.
“Take it outside will you chaps,” the bloke on the table next to us requested through a forkful of chips, so Tempest bundled me towards the doorway and threw me out into the road.
I tumbled over three times to put some distance between us, but I was too slow, Tempest was already on top of me, karate chopping my back and scissor-kicking my legs out from underneath me to dump me on my face again.
“Will you stop fighting me and notice I’m not fighting back?” I shouted as Tempest spun about in the car park blocking shots that weren’t coming.
Tempest eventually took a time out and asked me what was up.
“For fuck’s sake,” I growled, rubbing my shoulder. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Some might say I don’t like goons,” he glared.
“While others might say you’ve just pissed away three months of the company’s time following an unemployed hotdog enthusiast and you’re having trouble coming to terms with it.”
Tempest shaped into his fighting pose again, just as two old boys left the pub and walked past us to their Rovers.
“’night Ron.”
“Yup, ’night Mick, mind how you go.”
They barely afforded us a glance, Tempest hovering over me on one leg like the Karate Kid, me rubbing my elbows on the floor and the landlady wiping Shepherd’s Pie off the blackboard behind us.
“Aren’t you?” I demanded again when the old boys drove off.
The landlady turned, afforded us both a smile then also headed inside. Tempest’s lethal hands flexed a little longer before they eventually melted into his trouser pockets.
“Fuck it,” he spat. “The Admiral’s gonna bite his pipe in half.”
When Tempest didn’t offer me a hand, I hauled myself up and dusted myself down.
“Are you really not working for anyone?” he asked for the umpteenth time.
“No. No one,” I repeated, patting myself down.
“Then what are you doing around here?”
“I live around here,” I told him.
“Really?”
“Yes really. What are you doing around here?” I asked in turn.
“I live around here too,” he replied.
“Fucking nora!” I sighed for us both and we scratched our heads and wondered where we went from here.
“Fine, okay I believe you. You’re not working for anyone at the moment, but I still get to run you in,” Tempest said, pulling his Tomcat on me yet again.
“For what?”
“For what? You were one of Thalassocrat’s men. One of Soliman’s men. One of God knows who else’s men. You’ve got crimes to stand trial for.”
“Come off it, what happens on missions stays on missions,” I said. “You know the score.”
“You think you get to go home at the end
of the day after doing what you do?” he almost laughed.
“Why not? You do,” I replied.
“I’m one of Her Majesty’s officially sanctioned Executive Officers. Licenced to…”
“… flip over other drivers while showing off your flashy Jag?” I finished for him.
Tempest spent some time with his finger in the air considering this one so I hit him with a few of the juicier rumours I’d heard about him, such as the time he’d sunk an American Coast Guard’s Cutter by tearing underneath it in his mini-sub whilst being chased by a magnetised torpedo or the time he’d banged the Mayor of Bangkok’s sister when the Mayor of Bangkok only had brothers. Then I spiced the pot further still.
“Besides, how’s the Admiral going to take it that three months of costly surveillance work by one of his elite XO agents has produced nothing more than an unemployed goon and a hot dog vendor with an outstanding credit record?” I put to him. “I take it you do have people on him too?”
Tempest’s silence said all that needed to be said.
“I could always just kill you,” he said, jigging his gun up and down to remind me he still had options.
“Why? What’s the point? I’m just a foot soldier. A goon. You said so yourself. Kill me when you see me next out in the field if you’re that fired up about it,” I suggested.
“There won’t be a next time if I kill you now,” Tempest pointed out.
“No, that’s true, but there will be someone else. Someone you don’t know. Someone you don’t recognise. Would you rather that for a scenario?”
“It cuts both ways. I might not recognise them, but then again, they won’t recognise me,” he said, jabbing his gun in my ribs to underline the point.
“Oh leave it out, will you, everyone knows what you look like. We’ve got pictures of you pasted up in every base and laugh our socks off whenever you wander into our places of business introducing yourself as Jack Stock of the London Financial Times. Fuck me, I don’t know why you don’t just go the whole hog and put on a white beard and a big red coat and come in as Father Christmas.”
Tempest looked suitably insulted, which had been the intention, and told me he’d been highly decorated for his undercover work.
“Yeah well, perhaps you should try wearing your medals on the inside of your disguise next time you’re trying to infiltrate us, Beau Jangles,” I suggested.
“Now you look here…” Tempest snapped, less than happy to find himself the butt of a lowly goon’s put-downs, but he should try being a fly-on-the-wall of The Agency works canteen for five minutes if he really wanted to know what defamation sounded like.
“Information,” I said, catching him off-balance.
“What?” Tempest blinked.
“I said information. I can give you a juicy nugget of information to take back to the Admiral so you’ve got something to show for three months of overtime, and in return we’ll forget we ever saw each other, right?”
Tempest eyed me with suspicion, not knowing what to make of my offer and reluctant to show too much enthusiasm for it until he was sure it had nothing to do with the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man.
Before we could get into it, more locals started spilling out of the pub, so Tempest holstered his Tomcat and bid them all good night, as drinkers have a want to do in rural Sussex at closing time, before finally biting.
“What’s this information then?”
“It’s a bit vague, but I can tell you who’s hiring for a job just now,” I said.
“Who?”
“Got a pen and a bit of paper?” I asked.
Tempest slipped a hand into his pockets and told me he could do better than that, pulling out a suped-up Palm Pilot with laser-lighting guidance beam, GPS tracking radar and go-faster stripes.
“That’s no good, I can’t do the little threes on it,” I told him.
“It’s got a three on it,” he showed me.
“Not a little ones,” I said, looking around for dust and a stick to write with before spotting something much better. “Look here,” I said, leading him over to the pub’s outside menu board and wiping it clean. I found a splinter of chalk just below it and wrote ‘X3’.
“X-cubed?” Tempest read.
“Your guess is as good as mine, Jack. His real name’s Xian Xe Xu, but this is how he likes to refer to himself. Fucked if I know how to pronounce it, but he’s recruiting for something big at the moment,” I said, slapping my hands clean of chalk dust.
“And how do you know this?” Tempest asked.
“Because he passed through,” I said, without wishing to divulge too much. “I was offered a contract but decided against because I didn’t like the look of him.”
“Fussy aren’t you?”
“Not really, but some jobs you can tell are going to be trouble, particularly with that mad bitch he’s got in tow.”
“What mad bitch?”
“Sun Dju,” I said.
“Ah, of the genus Drosera. A carnivorous plant that captures its prey by exuding a sticky honey from its shoots,” Tempest lectured. “Beautiful, but deadly.”
“God, it’s no wonder you’ve got no mates,” I told the boring pub quiz nerd. “Different spelling.” I wrote Sun Dju’s name out on the blackboard for him and watched XO-11 play with his Palm Pilot for a bit, trying to make a little 3 before giving up and simply taking a photo of the board.
“I guess it doesn’t bother you that this information may lead to the deaths or arrest of whoever’s signed up with Three-X,” Tempest goaded. “Perhaps even friends of yours.”
“Is that how you’re going to say his name then? Three-X?”
“Just answer the question,” Tempest pressed.
“He isn’t taking on any of my mates, I know that for a fact,” I assured him, safe in the knowledge X3’s labour force would be made up of RS or EE monkeys, not Agency Affiliates. And if a little corner of the world was to be threatened with annihilation by some Oedipus nutjob, I’d really rather it was stopped unless I was a part of it and on a generous completion bonus.
“Anything else?” Tempest asked.
“Yeah, just one thing, watch out for Sun Dju’s shoes, she’s got killer heels,” I told him. Tempest clearly didn’t understand what I meant but he nodded as if he did anyway, ever eager to play it suave.
“I love ladies with feet to die for,” Tempest declared, starting his car and summoning it towards where we were both standing with a flick of his remote control key chain. The door sprang open and Tempest climbed in. “Fair exchange is no theft,” he trilled. “I’ll see you around then, Mark the Affiliate – either in Tesco’s or Tora Bora.”
“Oi!” I shouted after him.
“What?”
“How am I meant to get home? It must be bloody fifteen miles to Petworth.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem for a you. I thought you said you were a foot soldier?” he guffawed, before thrashing his Jag through the circular gravel driveway and spinning it a hundred-and-eighty degrees to rejoin the road.
“Oi, Tempest!” I cried after him again when he passed, and to my surprise he stopped and looked back.
“What?”
I knew he wouldn’t give me a lift or lend me twenty quid for the cab fare home, so I asked him the one question he still hadn’t answered.
“How did you get out of that turbine pipe on Thalassocrat’s island?” but Tempest just revved his V8 engine and roared off into the night.
“Cock smoker!” I frowned.
The pub’s lights suddenly dimmed behind me and the door clicked with the sound of a latch being flicked. Not that I’d had any money for another drink anyway, so I pulled up my collar, dug my hands into my pockets and began the long walk home all over again.
22.
PROPERTY OF A GOVERNMENT
“Target approaching. First strike operatives take your positions!” came the order as the twelve of us took to our chariots and clipped ourselves in. A rush of freezing air accompanied the bomb bay doo
rs spreading beneath us and all at once, the deep blue vista of the Atlantic far far below took our collective recycled breaths away.
I wasn’t altogether mad keen on this particular operation so I’d volunteered to be one of the first out of the plane, figuring I stood a better chance out there in the open skies than on-board our lumbering Tupolev once we’d broken radar cover. Now that I was strapped in, with nothing but 45,000ft and Flash Gordon’s shopping trolley between me and a really bad day, I was suddenly regretting not volunteering to stay back and organise the lads’ end of job party.
“Start chariots,” a tinny American voice told my left ear, so I twisted the key in the centre of the dashboard and the instrument panel lit up accordingly.
That whole business with Jack Tempest had occurred a little over eight months ago and I’d spent five nights stewing on it and living in a camouflaged bivouac across from my farm to see if anyone else came for me. When nobody did I eventually accepted I was safe. Well, more or less. Tempest still knew where I lived and I didn’t like that one little bit, but then again what could I do? Bolt? Of course that would have been the sensible solution, but then most of my money was tied up in my property so I would’ve lost everything if I'd ran.
After a few sleepless nights I eventually decided to put the whole lot on the market and up-sticks to East Sussex. Not exactly a monumental migration but the thought of a beachfront property and a boat suddenly appealed to me. Unfortunately, the housing market had taken such a tumble since I’d bought my farm that the pennies I was looking to make on it wouldn’t have got me half an hour in a dinghy, let alone anywhere to live. The estate agent had been terribly apologetic about the whole situation, so much so that he almost moved into a one-bed shallow grave in my back garden for his smugness.
I was buggered.
I put together an escape bag and started dropping cash, documents and weapons in various luggage lockers and deposit boxes right along the south coast in case I had to leave in a hurry, but then salvation came along. A job. And this one was a compact little international hijacking with a very, very tasty payday. There was just one thing:
