The Dastardly Mr Winkle Meets His Match

by Rufus Offor

  “Oh really?”

  “Yes… really!”

  “That’s funny, because I envisage standing behind a wall and lobbing a grenade over it to be more of a cowards stance on things.” The Boss stabbed his words at Shoop with a content little smirk decorating his pointy, greasy little face. It was clearly his turn to land a few punches in the verbal parry.

  “You better not have just called me a coward!” Shoop hissed through his teeth, his hatred for the snivelling little bureaucrat coming out in a cloud of venomous spittle. “And you’d better not have been spying on me!”

  The Boss was as pleased at the reaction as Shoop had been about The Bosses, maybe a little more.

  “Oh don’t look so damn surprised Winkle.” Said The Boss calmly, “What the hell did you expect? You’ve gradually become more and more disagreeable and insolent as the years have disintegrated. For the last year I’ve barely been able to get anything productive out of you at all. How long did you expect me to just sit around and take it?” The Boss was looking very pleased with himself indeed as he rose from his chair and slithered over to his drinks cabinet to pour himself a Scotch. He sipped it, leaning against the bar and continued. “And don’t pretend that you haven’t noticed some of my little spies. You put one of them in a coma a few months ago, he woke up and told us that the last thing he remembers is you bouncing him off the front of a double-decker bus.”

  Shoop’s anger gave way to sheepishness for a moment as he said, “Well, he was being sloppy. I was trying to teach him a lesson.”

  In truth, Shoop had not wanted the man to live after he’d hospitalised him. It would have given away how aware he was of the Sphere Of Influence’s tightening grip on him. With this in mind he hoped to kill the man in hospital, but the security had been far too tight. The only thing that Shoop could do was to sit and wait for the man to wake up and hope he hadn’t remembered anything. Apparently he had been hoping in vain.

  “I really don’t think that sloppy surveillance technique deserves bone liquidation.”

  “Well, that’s just you’re opinion now isn’t it, you’ve always been too soft on your operatives!”

  “The point is Winkle that you’re becoming a liability. I can’t continue to support you if you keep acting like this. There are dozens of people starting to ask questions about where the money I pay you goes. I needn’t remind you that my support of you needs absolute secrecy and you’re making it very hard. I’m the only one stopping them from finding out about you. There are rules to be followed Winkle, they have to be adhered to for everyone’s sake. The more you play with me the harder it gets to hide you.”

  “Oh Jesus not that fucking line again!” Shoop’s patience was running out, “For starters I’d like to say…. SUPPORT?!! You’ve been about as supportive as a marshmallow brassiere on a fat sweaty woman! You’ve had it in for me from day one, and don’t think I don’t know the years you’ve spent plotting against me.” Part of Shoop realised that he shouldn’t be saying the things he was saying. Part of him knew that he was giving away too much information about himself and the contents of his mind, but then there was another part; the part that had kept his mouth shut for decades, that loved the sweet release of giving his arch enemy a good sound bollocking, “I know how much you want me out, I’m not a fucking moron. I know that if you ever find anybody even half as effective as I am, even on a bad day, then I’ll be out of the picture permanently. I’m just trying to have a little fun while I’m here.” This was the single most honest exchange the two men had ever had. For decades it had been spies, paranoia and guesswork with neither gaining the upper hand. “And as for the fucking rules. You can stick those up your arse because I invented them. I made your poxy rule book and have been re-writing it for longer that you’ve been sucking air. I gave you your position, your wealth, your power and that scares you doesn’t it. You hate having someone that’s vaguely superior. You want all the power and I’m too much of a terror to you to have me brought down. You don’t want me, you just want another fucking puppet, and you always have done.” The rage and relief in Shoop had reached feverish proportions and had The Boss not had another ace up his sleeve, he would have been wetting himself at the sight of Shoop’s clear and acidic hatred.

  The voice in Shoop’s mind was still telling him to stop, but the fact of the matter was that once the flood barrier had been breached, the torrent was stopping for nobody.

  Shoop’s voice had been raised and full of sharp rattling scorn before, but now, as he bent forward to hold his vicious face inches from his enemy’s, his voice dropped to a guttural, tear gas spreading whisper “Have you got any idea how easy it would be for me to snap you clean in half right now? You’d be dead before you’d even seen me move.”

  Although The Boss had backed off and was firmly stuck to the wall of his office, he didn’t appear to be in the least bit fearful. This would normally have confused Shoop a little as the man should’ve been dropping the contents of both bladder and bowel at that point, but Shoop wasn’t worried, because he knew about The Bosses ace.

  “Oh really?” Quizzed The Boss. He glanced up at the ceiling and said, “You can come down now boys. Shoop didn’t budge an inch.

  The lights that hung from the ceiling were low and bright so as to leave a black void in the space between them and the ceiling. Six men dropped down from the shadows dressed completely in black cloth. They had metal claws on their hands and feet that they’d used to attach themselves to the ceiling. The only visible sign of humanity could be seen through small slits in their headgear that revealed their eyes. The men dropped down from the blackness of the top of the room with out making the slightest sound apart from a slight poof as they expertly touched the ground, instantly adopting fighting stances on landing. That is to say, five of them landed perfectly, surrounding Shoop and brandishing a number of different sharp, metal pain educing implements. The sixth man didn’t. He dropped from the darkness, hit the large boardroom table with a loud thud, bounced and then just lay there, motionless and apparently unconscious.

  The five others and the Boss noticed this and their heads flicked back and forth from one another in perplexion.

  Shoop had still not moved an inch.

  He grinned through his grimace, raised an eyebrow and glared at The Boss, which is a difficult facial feat to accomplish but extremely effective in the right circumstances.

  “Do you really think that I hadn’t seen them?” He said.

  The look of terror on The Bosses face clearly suggested that he did think that Shoop hadn’t seen them.

  All of a sudden, the ace up The Bosses sleeve had turned out to be a cardboard Marks and Spencer label and for the first time since they had met, Shoop had the upper hand.

  “I could’ve killed all of them and you wouldn’t have known about it.” The sweat bubbling up on The Bosses greasy skin said that he believed him, “As it happens,” continued Shoop, “That poor chap isn’t dead. He’ll be awake in a couple of hours with a very nasty headache and over active bowels.”

  The five remaining ninjas looked around at each other, somewhat disconcerted, their fierceness robbed from them they relaxed their fighting poses and started looking a bit awkward. Nobody in the room seamed to know how Shoop had done what he’d done.

  Shoop pierced The Boss with eyes that were directly linked to the revulsion of hell itself. “Don’t... fuck… with… me!” He hissed.

  The Boss promptly fell back into his leather throne and lost control of his bladder. A puddle started forming by his feet.

  “I’m leaving now. I’m going to go and get on with my job and you’re not going to stop me. Are we clear?”

  The Boss nodded through an interesting mix of emotions consisting of fury, embarrassment, loathing, fear with a wee touch of humiliation thrown in for good measure.

  As Shoop barged his way through the remaining ninjas, The Boss gathered himself enough to shout after Shoop “One of these days Winkle, I will end you!” The pr
oblem was, though, that his fear made the shout sound more like a whimper and robbed it of all of its intended aggression. He sounded like a schoolboy threatening a bully after a beating.

  Shoop smiled to himself internally, turned and said with stabbing sarcasm, ”I’m shaking in my boots Boss, shaking in my boots.” Shoop could’ve done a lot of damage in the room, he had chosen not to because he was fairly sure that he’d be dead or at least severely beaten before he managed to reach The Boss. He may have made the six ninjas look incompetent, but had it come to a fight, he surely would’ve been damaged, possibly mortally, but with his actions he had injected fear into the veins of everyone in the room. Nobody had wanted to go near Shoop because of the fear of the unknown (that being what Shoop was actually capable of), which made it easier for him just to walk out.

  His actions did have a nasty side effect though. After losing his cool he knew he didn’t have long before the Boss had someone aiming a gun at him from some unseen rooftop or passing car. Shoop’s performance in the room, to his mind, had done nothing but make sure that the Boss would try to kill him much sooner than later.

  He left the room gently pulling the door closed behind him.

  The ninjas stood looking sheepish, which was quite hard to do as they were completely covered in black fabric, but they managed it very well. They stood looking at The Boss who’s frown seamed to weigh more than the rest of his body.

  “Prick!” grunted The Boss venomously.

  He picked up the phone, pushed some buttons and waited for an answer.

  “Hello? Yes it’s me, it’s as we feared. He’ll never come round. He’s leaving the building now. Follow him, make sure he doesn’t see you and when he gets somewhere quiet, take care of him. Oh, and make sure you take a lot of men. He’s more dangerous than I’d anticipated.”

  He hung up the phone, smiled to himself for a moment at the prospect of Shoop’s corpse being shown to him and then, remembering that he’d just pissed himself, looked at the five remaining conscious ninjas.

  “If any of you breathe a word of this you will be tortured for decades, do I make myself clear?” He said squeakily but with conviction. The ninjas nodded. It was a good job that they’d all worn their head gear as it meant that The Boss couldn’t see them all desperately trying not to crack up laughing as they looked at the puddle at The Bosses feet.

  The Boss pressed the button on an intercom on his desk.

  “Betty! I need a change of clothes immediately!”

  “Yes sir, right away sir” crackled the intercom.

  He began to take his clothes off as he walked over to the en-suite shower room.

  The ninjas, once the Boss had disappeared; took their masks off, had a bit of a laugh at the puddle on the floor and, after some deliberation on how badly their confrontation with Mr Winkle had gone, decided that they needed to get a hell of a lot better at being ninjas. Within twenty-four hours they were flying to Japan while the sixth member of the group suffered the worst case if diarrhoea he’d ever experienced.

  To this day they have no idea how Shoop had managed to knock him out.

  Chapter 6

  Jeeves

  Shoop went through the building to the car park, found the executive section, deftly stole one of the executive’s Jaguars and pointed it westward out of the city centre.

  Earlier, when he’d left George in the underground village, he’d felt elated. He’d been sensing a chance to turn his life around, to make it his own again and had a very potent feeling that he’d just screwed it all up.

  Shoop couldn’t quite explain his sixth sense, and quite often didn’t want to as it meant that people would know more about him than he wanted them to. Mystery is a place where fear grows, and Shoop liked using that place as much as he could.

  His sixth sense didn’t let him see into the future, it didn’t let him see dead people and it didn’t let him sense immediate danger. What it did do was allow him to pick up the scent of what the future might bring. It was as if the molecules in his body could sense a sort of potential in certain courses of action. It pointed him towards weirdness and, more importantly, profit. When his sixth sense kicked in he let it lead him wherever it felt like going. He felt a little like a bloodhound on the trail of a bag of money when the tingle took over and it had never failed, before it plain stopped altogether that is.

  It was a strange talent that had stood him in good stead in the past but had been dormant for many years.

  The sixth sense was not the only of his talents. He was capable of many abnormal feats but he liked to keep them all to himself, partly because he didn’t trust anyone, and partly because he really didn’t have a full grip on them himself.

  The sixth sense started Shoop on a trail, but these trails could be broken, and Shoop had the horrible feeling that he may just have broken the first trail he’d clearly and acutely sensed in over ten years.

  He’d made two unforgivable mistakes. By letting the Boss lure him into an open argument, Shoop had given away some of his most black hearted opinions. Primarily that he believed the Boss to be a snivelling dung weasel. By giving this away he had given away some, if not all, of his bargaining power. As long as he sucked up (which in Shoop’s terms was saying “good morning” and not vomiting at the same time), the Boss was oblivious

  The other mistake he’d made was to flick a small poison dart at the unseen ninja hanging from the ceiling in The Bosses office. Not only had he poisoned the ninja but he’d done it at such a speed that nobody in the room had noticed him move. He’d also given away his ability to detect even the most skilled of shadowy assassins. The Boss now knew two things about Shoop’s abilities that he’d previously been unaware of, that he was potentially had super human speed and that he could sense invisible assassins without raising an eyebrow. All of this meant that The Boss had a much clearer picture of the feats that Shoop was capable of.

  It hadn’t been particularly hard for Shoop to render the ninja unconscious. He’d been aware of the six invisible ceiling danglers for months now.

  The Boss had started bringing them in when he’d decided to become more and more stringent with Shoop. Shoop had noticed them on the first day. He had quite unnaturally good hearing and could hear them breathing as they hung there. His hearing was so freakishly acute that he could tell exactly where each of them were by listening to their near silent panting.

  In the many years that he’d been affiliated with The Sphere Of Influence he’d managed to keep the true nature of his faculties fairly well hidden. Even George had holes in his knowledge of Shoop’s abilities. The Boss knew that Shoop was dangerous, but had no idea of the full extent of his destructive attributes. At least, he’d had no idea until earlier on.

  Shoop cursed himself for making such a fundamentally stupid mistake as letting his abilities be known. He had clearly been drunk on the elation of regaining his sixth sense after it had been missing for so long. In the heat of the moment he’d let himself get carried away. The Boss was sure to step up his surveillance of Shoop. In fact, Shoop had a strong inkling that The Boss would go one step further and do everything he could to have Shoop killed. Upon revealing something of his opinions of the Boss and some of his powers, Shoop had made sure that he was too great a threat to be left unchecked and running free.

  Shoop knew that he wouldn’t, even with his various abnormal abilities, be able to avoid the Sphere Of Influences assassins forever.

  Life had suddenly become a lot more complicated. It flashed into Shoop’s mind that the Sphere would go back over the previous night’s activities with a different perspective. He knew that if the roles were reversed he would definitely give his discourse with Bunty Autumn further consideration. He began to fear that they might look a little further into the belt buckle that he’d taken.

  Before the meeting in the Bosses office they would’ve thought that Shoop was just taking a souvenir from the encounter, as he was sometimes prone to do, but now things had a different light on th
em. Now Shoop was more dangerous and intelligent than they’d thought. Maybe Shoop had a different reason for taking it.

  Shoop punched the dashboard and swore maniacally at himself.

  How could he have been so stupid?

  “Bugger!” he hit the dashboard, “bastard!” and again, “shitting hell!” and again “twating well bugger bastarding well fuck it all!” ending on a crescendo of thumps, punching straight through the lovely walnut panelling of the cars dashboard.

  There was nothing for it now. The only way out was forwards, forwards as fast as he could move. His anger having been expressed, he saw that there was no sense in crying over spilt milk. He just had to get on with what he was doing.

  Besides, even with all he’d done wrong, he’d still managed to make the Boss piss himself all over his nice, plush, one hundred pound per square inch, fluffy carpet and board room leather throne. That cheered him up substantially.

  All Shoop could do was to try and follow the senses that were pulsing through him and hope that it they lead him to his salvation. It had become all or nothing and the thought started to weigh heavy on him making him a tad gloomy, or was it that he hadn’t had a drink for the last twenty minutes.

  “Yes,” He thought to himself, “That must be it. I must find some gin!” but as he scanned his mind for the nearest off licenses in the area he happened to glance in his rear view mirror and noticed that he was being followed by a great number of Sphere agents. They had been mobilised much quicker than Shoop had anticipated. On the up side though, they appeared to have no idea that their surveillance expertise was galaxies behind his. They were ten year olds with walkie-talkies and tricycles in comparison to Shoop’s superbly honed senses. They probably believed that they were doing a good job but Shoop could beat the best in the world at this game and his pursuers were far from being the best.

  They were on motorbikes, in fake taxis and a number of other inconspicuous looking vehicles. They appeared to be coming out of every side-street and alleyway that he went past and then slinking into streets further along the road, handing the pursuit over to other agents as they went. The thing that gave them away was the way that the vehicles ducked down side streets and then appeared further on down the road, well, that and the fact that they were barking into CB’s the whole time. They were running a tag relay. They weren’t going to let Shoop get away easily. At least that’s what they thought. The shear number of them was blatant. Shoop almost felt sorry for them.