Honorable Assassin

by Jason Lord Case

  “Never mind. It’s not even appropriate.”

  “Well, I’m leaving in a couple of days so I got no jobs coming up. I’m going to drink beer and chase women here, and then I’m going to drink beer and chase women there.”

  “Capital. Sounds like a plan, mate.”

  “Oy, we’ll have you sounding like a backwoods Aussie yet.”

  Ginger got the letter with the address of the PVC factory and its adjoining warehouse a couple of days later. Terry explained in his missive that he did not really think it was necessary, but that he had been given the cruise by direct order of the top men and that to refuse would be a faux pas with long-reaching consequences. A simple explosion would be sufficient and something indicating it was the Irishman behind it would remove all suspicion from Terry’s head if any remained. He wrote that if nothing happened while he was gone then he would be unable to continue his present path. He felt sure the cruise was the Scotsman’s idea. His respect for this “specialist” was growing. This was becoming a dangerous game. At the same time, his reputation was growing and his position was becoming less tenuous.

  Terry had been gone a week when the Irishman put a bundle of dynamite under a propane tank outside the warehouse, blowing half the building off in the middle of the night.

  Terry had the time of his life on his Mediterranean cruise and flew back after two weeks, departing from Gibraltar. He was surprised to be met at the Sydney airport by the large Scotsman. He was taken to a tavern where they had a couple of beers and the specialist told him he wanted an assistant. Thompson Barber was the assistant he wanted and that was what he had gotten. Terry’s acceptance of the position was all that was wanting. Terry ran his fingers through his blond hair and asked what the job consisted of, knowing he was going to accept it anyway.

  Ginger got a surprisingly well written letter from his nephew a few days later.

  Uncle,

  I wish to thank you for the details of the endeavor you undertook on my behalf while I was on holiday. It made for a wonderful surprise upon my return. I have been selected to be an assistant to a specialist, who is charged with the pursuit and apprehension of the Irishman.

  I am particularly pleased with this turn of events as it allows me to refrain from delivering loads of a questionable nature. While I was sailing, I had serious misgivings about my chosen path. I had visions of myself acting as that which I have detested for so long. It is fortuitous that I have been chosen for a calling more near what I would care to pursue.

  I will be in touch but I feel it imperative that you maintain your current anonymity for the present. My new mentor is a man of exceptional ability and fortitude who has much to teach me. I will visit when I feel comfortable doing so. Give my best to the dogs.

  Sincerely,

  Thompson Barber

  Ginger laughed uproariously when he read the letter, then he read it again and burned it.

  Terry Kingston was in high spirits. He loved the cruise and was delighted to have been chosen to find himself. His good humor was not to last long however. He began to wonder what he was about to embark upon. He went to the library and began to look through the newspapers from the past couple of years. It was tremendously time consuming but they had not begun scanning them into a database yet so the only way to find anything was by hand.

  The Olympics began and the city was overrun with tourists. There were crowds on the streets all day and night, most of them with mistaken preconceived notions of the nature of Australian life. The police forces were kept on overtime just controlling the crowds. The tavern owners were overjoyed. The beer flowed freely and the influx of foreign money was a welcome boost to the economy.

  Terry was in constant contact with his mentor by phone. It was almost the only number he dialed. They ate dinner together nightly, in different restaurants, and coordinated what they had learned. Terry was fascinated by the man’s methods which combined a sort of amateur forensic science, study of human nature and interrogation. His own research was revealing a few things as well.

  When the pair walked into The Roo in the downtown business district, they had not been expecting anything but dinner. Terry was thinking about the gym and his mentor was thinking about dinner.

  “God bless me, Gordon MacMaster!” came from a man seated in a booth with a tall attractive blonde woman. The woman started chattering in German.

  “Seien Sie ruhiger Dummkopf. Kennen sie nicht meine Name hier,” came from the Scotsman’s mouth.

  The man in the booth slowly and carefully put both his hands on the table on either side of his meal. “I am not here looking for you and I do not seek trouble. I am here for the games. I’m sorry I thought you were somebody else. I apologize.” His accent was thick but his diction was good. He turned his eyes from the Scot and told his woman, in German, that they would be leaving now and there were to be no questions.

  Terry watched them closely as he took his own seat. They waited only until the Scot turned his back on them and then they headed for the door.

  The rack of lamb was good in The Roo and they drank it down with beer. Terry did not know how to broach the subject discreetly so he waded in. “Where did you learn to speak German, Gordon?”

  Gordon MacMaster tossed a rib bone onto his plate and said, “That fool was mistaken. He thought I was someone else.”

  “No worries, mate. I’ve got no secret agenda. That man knew you from somewhere, though. He was terrified. He thought you were here to kill him.”

  “He was mistaken. I never saw him before in my life.”

  “Let’s cut the crap, Gordon MacMaster. You might not have known him but he knew you. He knew who you are and what you do.” The look on his face told it all. If Satan himself had sprung up out of his dinner plate, he would have gotten the same look.

  “Call me Glasgow. Do not use my proper name again or Satan himself will spring out of your rack of lamb.”

  Terry grinned but Gordon did not; it was clear he had issues with his given name. The two sat looking at each other for a few seconds and Terry’s grin faltered. He dropped his eyes to his plate and addressed himself to the remains of his dinner. He did not know how far Gordon would go to protect his identity and did not want to find out the hard way. He felt he had won a round but there could be repercussions. His uncle’s words rang in his ears, “Never leave a witness.” It was a standard of the industry.

  The next day, in the library, Terry did a search for “Gordon MacMaster” on the computer. There was nothing appropriate. He looked up the “Royal Scottish Dragoons” and found a long and illustrious history of combat and honor leading back to the seventeenth century. He studied the history of the “Royal Scots Greys” and paid particular attention to their recent exploits. No names were listed but the regiment was honored for their work in the deserts of southwest Asia. There was no mention of assassinations, but they would not have been acknowledged if there were any. Assassination was against the rules.

  After a bit more research, Terry found his mark, his Irishman.

  Indicted twice but never convicted, Lee Pierce had been drummed out of the police department. His crimes, it seems, were a manic desire to enforce the law by whatever means necessary. He had beaten suspects to a pulp on a number of occasions and even shot one to death. It was the one he shot but didn’t kill that had finished his career. As is usual, the powers that be had supported or at least turned a blind eye to his methods as long as they could. He was apparently as honest as could be desired but much too brutal to maintain his position. He seemed the perfect candidate. This was compounded by his recent retreat into a sort of seclusion. He had managed to get a pension of sorts from the government and was living on it, as well as arms sales, in a trailer north of Sydney.

  When Terry suggested Lee Pierce as a potential candidate, Gordon went to Henry Cuthbert to ask Henry to get registration and purchase records for the ex-constable. The records were obtained but not really necessary. Henry knew Lee and had purchased weapons fro
m him in the past. It was determined that he owned not only the trailer but the land it resided on. It was determined that Lee’s wife had left him during his legal troubles and that no others claimed the trailer as a residence. It was further determined that Lee was a legal arms dealer of sorts who sold weapons out of his home and possessed an arsenal. The license was current and his client list, though unavailable officially, was rumored to include customers from both sides of the judicial divide.

  Terry made a convincing case for his choice of suspect and Gordon was in agreement. The man’s history of moral indignation backed up by force and brutality played well. The only thing missing was proof. Terry tried to convince his mentor that there was no need for proof. They did not need to catch the man in the act to know it was him and they were not tied by the government’s rules of engagement. The proof would be in the pudding. They would take out Lee Pierce and the attacks would stop. Gordon was not so easily convinced, however.

  “Assassination is an art,” he told his protégé. “If he is the Irishman, then, yes, the job is done but I need to be sure. If the Irishman gets his weapons from this man, and we decommission this man, then the attacks will stop for a time due to the supply lines being cut.” He took a huge guzzle of beer, belched and then continued. “If the Irishman knows this man in a different capacity and the man has some sort of unfortunate accident, it may spook him and send him underground, temporarily. This would lead us to believe we had gotten our man, when in reality all it would do is make us his next target. Or you, possibly, since I will have been gone for other venues. Assuming he is good enough to know who caused the accident. The profile is undeniable, but I would like some further indications.”

  Terry popped the last of his chips into his mouth and chewed on them slowly. His mind was racing a mile a minute. He was learning so much about what he was up to that his head hurt getting around it all. He did not dare take direct action without Gordon’s approval. To do so would be a fatal error in judgment. The fact remained however that Terry was assisting with finding the Irishman and the sooner a scapegoat was found, the sooner the specialist, Gordon MacMaster would leave for parts unknown and stop complicating Terry’s life. It was not that he did not appreciate the education, but the Scotsman scared him as well.

  Lee’s business had no posted advertisement except on the trailer itself. There was no need for him to accept new customers from unknown regions. He had implemented a private policy whereby he expected anyone buying from him to have been referred by a prior customer. The laws regarding firearms had been tightened up as a result of recent actions, some of which the Irishman had taken credit for, but that had not diminished Lee’s customer base; it had actually enhanced it.

  When Terry and Gordon showed up at the door with a reference from Henry Cuthbert, they were escorted in without question. A call was made and the reference confirmed. Since it was the first time they had done business together, it was inadvisable to ask too many questions about unusual munitions such as hand grenades.

  Lee asked a few questions about criminal records. He could not legally sell weapons to Gordon MacMaster under any name since Gordon was not a legal resident, but he was not asked to. The customer was Thompson Barber and Thompson had a clean record. He purchased two .38 caliber Smith and Wesson revolvers, some ammunition for them, and promised to return in a week or so. As a stringer, he did mention that there may be some custom orders in the future. Lee’s response was that he was in the business of making his customers happy and that custom orders were just part of the job.

  On the trip back to the city Gordon asked, “What did you see?”

  “Well, the man had the large bedroom on the end set up with all the racks of guns. One of the small bedrooms on the side had the ammunition. The walls… the walls had some steel plate on them, except for the outer wall. I’m assuming to keep the bullets blowing out if there’s a fire, not chopping through the trailer.”

  “It was stainless. Fewer sparks and tougher than regular plate. A bit costly but not unheard of. What else?”

  “Well, he had a fire control system set up, sprinklers. I know they don’t make trailers with sprinklers. There were a couple of closets I couldn’t see in. No telling what he had in the closets. He had air conditioning set up in the trailer but he also had it set up for the shed in the back. He probably does gunsmith work and reloading back there. Too much heat would cause problems.”

  “He might do work back there but that was not what the air conditioning was there for. You didn’t see the dogs?”

  “No, I didn’t see any dogs.”

  “Neither did I, but I did see a couple of large piles of dog shit out back. He does keep the area clean and raked, but he had not cleaned these up. There is at least one big dog in that shed to prevent sticky fingers.”

  “I thought the place smelled a bit but the smell of machine oil covered the dog stink mostly.”

  “Always remember that the best defense against unwanted intrusions is a big noisy dog. Anyone willing to shoot the dog would shoot you on the way in too.”

  A grin lit Terry’s face as he thought of Hercules, Ginger’s new mastiff.

  Once they were back in Sydney, they went to the hall of records. Gordon looked up everything about Lee; Terry researched Linda Pierce. It seemed that Lee had been indicted twice by Internal Affairs for brutality. Both times he had managed to walk when the witnesses refused to testify when scheduled. The third time, he actually shot someone and didn’t kill them. With a willing witness and a third charge pending that would most certainly stick, Lee was forced to retire. That was about four years earlier. Linda had left him for good about the same time.

  Linda was the daughter of a farm family, good if simple stock. Long-time owners of grazing land and livestock, they had managed to buy up the properties on both sides of them when the land came on the market and so owned a substantial spread. The court orders were sealed, but it looked likely that she had returned to the family farm.

  When Gordon mentioned he would like to pay them a visit, Terry insisted that he had more knowledge and experience and he should be the one to go. Gordon did not argue but it led him to ask where Thompson Barber had been raised. Terry told him Tarrytown.

  A few kilometers north of Orange, Terry pulled his Holden to the side of the road and opened the petcock on his radiator. He was careful not to drain off too much of the coolant. He didn’t want to damage the engine, just make a convincing show of it.

  The Pettigrew farmhouse was warm and inviting, the farm well maintained and modern. The family was friendly and more than willing to give him some water for his radiator. He explained that he was a representative of the Kingston Insurance Agency and he was going out to examine some claimed damage when his temperature gauge indicated he was low on coolant, so he pulled in. Having lived in the general area since he was eight years old and on a similar farm, it was not difficult to strike up a conversation about weather and pests and crops and yield and then he got around to insurance. He told them he was certain that he could give them a better rate for insurance than they currently paid if he could just get their names and the particulars on the equipment.

  The head of the household was quite old and set in his ways but, while he still ran the farm, his sons and daughters did the work. He had three sons and two daughters. Two of the sons were married and lived in the refurbished farm houses on the properties to each side. The youngest son, Paul Pettigrew, was unmarried and though a large and beefy man, Terry suspected he was a homosexual. The two daughters both lived in the family home. Linda and her sister Lisa were almost the same age. Lisa was a school teacher in nearby Euchareena and Linda worked on the farm, having been recently divorced.

  It was not difficult for Terry to catch Linda’s eye. She was by far the oldest woman he had ever made a pass at but that diminished neither her looks nor her personality. After he had the particulars recorded for an insurance quote, he was reluctant to leave. He spent some time talking about farm wor
k and noted that he was fond of hunting foxes and rabbits. It worked perfectly. Lisa was still at school and Paul, the youngest son, could not stand the sight of blood, but Linda was more than happy to lend him a rifle and take him out to the woods for a little shooting.

  If Terry had thought it would require some work to seduce Linda Pierce he was mistaken. She took him to a secluded glade, set her rifle down and grabbed him. He was more than willing and she was a wildcat. The lack of male companionship on the farm had left her ravenous and when presented with a handsome and well-formed man such as Terry Kingston she was quick to take advantage.

  Linda was in phenomenal shape for a woman of her age and had never had any children. Terry was bulging with muscles from his regular trips to the gym and particularly well endowed. The two of them copulated in the woods like wild animals until they collapsed, completely drained. Twenty minutes and a cigarette later they were at it again.

  Later that day, Terry insisted that he still needed to inspect the damage he had been on his way to see, but promised he would be back the following day to deliver a quote for a policy on the farm.

  The following day he did return, much to Linda’s delight, and though it was a bit old fashioned, he asked if he could escort Linda to dinner in town. Linda’s parents were charmed, and so she and Terry went to dinner, eschewed the movie and rented a motel room for the night.

  In the soft romantic glow of the night, Terry pressed her delicately for information on her past. She was reluctant to talk about her previous marriage. She would only say that he had been a bastard and that she would gladly give up the pittance of alimony he paid her to see him in the ground. She refused to tell him how she had gotten the scars on her bottom. This worked well for Terry and he pressed her no further for information. As soon as he was able, he reached for her again and found her ready.