The Henchmen's Book Club (27 page)

So if the leaders of the remaining twenty-nine countries
ever wanted to see their cherubs again, it was a case of asking (or if you were
China, ordering) their best agents to do the honourable thing and offer
themselves up for sacrifice.

Answers on a postcard if you can guess two of the names on
this list? Winners will receive an all-expenses paid trip to sunny
Île de Roc
.

“Oh,” I finally got, fluffy tingles warming my innards in
the most delightful way. “Awkward.”

“Yes, isn’t it,” Tempest agreed.

“So when are you off?”

“We’re not,” Tempest replied.

“Why not?”

“Why not? Because
Triple X
would never
live up to his end. He’d simply kill us and either make more demands or kill
the children anyway. We’d be playing right into his hands,” Tempest reckoned.

“But if you could get reassurances…”

“We’ve had plenty of reassurances but they’re not worth the
paper they’re written on. The man’s a maniac. There’s no telling what he’s
capable of.”

“But surely if you could somehow arrange it so that you did
the exchange one at a time, so that you could all take your turns as…”

“How about I stick my boots up your fucking ass one at a
time?” Dunbar suggested, obviously not keen to explore the strategy further.

I allowed a smile to flash across my lips then asked for
one of Tempest’s cigarettes. He dillied up without a crack, telling me my stock
had risen a few points, so I tried again with a question that was at the
forefront of my mind.

“So, what’s in it for me?”

Tempest pushed back in his chair and glared at me through a
haze of cigarette smoke.

“Okay then, Jones, let’s talk.”

You know what, I still don’t think I’ve explained my part
in all of this yet, have I? What I was doing here? What did Tempest and Dunbar
want with me? Well it was a strange quirk of fate that dealt me a hand at this
table. And one that surprised me as much as it had surprised Tempest and
Dunbar.

It was book club.

For a couple of years now, various agencies around the
world had been receiving intelligence that Affiliates were reading.
Surveillance photographs, seized property, bugged conversations, etc. They were
just tiny snippets of information, insignificant pieces of a greater puzzle,
and for a long long time, most agencies didn’t even realise there was a puzzle
here to be completed. After all, it was only Affiliates reading. Big deal. So
what? The nature of our work meant that most Affiliates spent long hours
sitting around in trucks, guarding corridors or manning work stations before
the inevitable balloon went up. This could be boring work at the best of times,
so it was only natural that we should try to pass the time somehow. But, little
by little, a pattern began to emerge from all of this unrealised intelligence
that didn’t add up; that many of the Affiliates were reading the same books. On
different jobs. For different employers. On different continents? Time and time
again the same titles would crop up. And they weren’t always best sellers or
Richard & Judy’s must-reads either. Some odd and unexpected books were
being carried through jungles and deserts of this big wide dangerous world of
ours.

The Aristocrat
by Ernst Weiss

A Short History
of Tractors in Ukrainian
by Marina Lewycka

Bodies
by Jed Mercurio

The Book of
Illusions
by Paul Auster

Beloved
by Toni
Morrison

The Kraken Wakes
by John Wyndham

Code breakers began logging our reading lists to see if
there were any sorts of signals to be found within the titles. After all, how
was it possible that three different Affiliates, working on three different
plans of global domination, in three different countries, could all be reading
Monty: His Part in My Victory
by Spike
Milligan? It didn’t make any sense.

Finally, some clever clog somewhere figured it out; that
the Affiliates must be talking to each other. Back channels had to be open.
Recommendations were being swapped. Gossip exchanged.

Even now, the various intelligence agencies didn’t realise
the full significance of what they’d stumbled upon because regardless of what
the connotations might be, they were still only books, weren’t they? But they
listened in anyway, and began to ask questions about our book club when
interrogating captured Affiliates, because as everyone knows, there are often
juicy nuggets of information to be found amongst the back channels, but what
they actually found was more startling than they’d ever expected. This book
club of ours had a rigid structure. There was a hierarchy to it. There were
rules. And most extraordinary of all there was loyalty. Affiliates were saving
each others’ lives and tipping each other off when they became aware of
double-dealings. Most staggering of all, this was often at the expense of our
own employers and it was with shock and awe that the authorities discovered
several plans had even come apart at the seams thanks directly to book club
intervention.

The planned Wall Street gas attack had been one such job.
Thirty guys in breathing apparatus and bio-suits had been set to walk canisters
of a sleep agent into the New York Stock Exchange to obliterate all evidence of
the insider deal of the century. Unfortunately billionaire financier, Miles
Hawthorne, who’d been the brains behind the operation, had made the mistake of
ordering his equipment through Grevelink Systems, a black market supplier of
stolen military hardware. So when an engineer at Grevelink was ordered to fill
the canisters with the deadly nerve gas sarin and not the supposed sleep agent
the Affiliates thought they’d be carrying – and more shockingly fix all
but two of the bio-breathers to make sure they failed after five minutes
– he logged onto his favourite website and shared this treachery with his
friends. SEO and the CIA had always known Miles Hawthorne was dirty. They knew
he was fraudulent. And they knew his greed knew no bounds. But what they could
never figure out was why, two days before his company bought out one of oldest
banks in America, he opened the doors of his private jet and jumped out along
with his chief accountant.

The case had remained a mystery for almost a year until a
dying Affiliate on a different job told a Spanish CNI officer the truth; that
greed had finally caught up with the billionaire. And that a stowaway with a
gas mask, a parachute and a pipette full of Hawthorne’s own double-crossing
medicine had taken that flight too.

Now this was a revelation, the CNI decided.

More had to be found out about this mysterious book club.

More had to be known.

Investigations started in earnest.

Lines were drawn.

Books were read.

Even
The Kenneth
Williams Diaries
.

In the months that followed, a complex web of loyalties and
links were sketched across Ops tables the world over. Usernames were
discovered. Scoring trends charted. Lines of communication uncovered. This club
was bigger than they’d ever imagined. And they’d only scratched the surface.

So they dug deeper. They eavesdropped on communications.
They cross-referenced intel. And they co-operated with rival intelligence
agencies until names began to emerge.

Snowman.

Tech Boy.

Page Turner.

Shotgun.

Big Cat.

The agencies learned the usernames and monitored
communications. And the more they monitored, the more one username kept popping
up over all others.

Book Mark.

This was the organisation’s founding father. This was the
person at the club’s heart. If there was anyone with influence over all the
others, it was he.

But where was he? He’d not been heard of in almost three
years. He’d simply disappeared off the map.

“Mark Jones.”

“What?”

“You’re
Book Mark
,”
Tempest said. “
Book – Mark
.”

“So what? Give yourself a bun if you like.”

“It’s not a very clever username, is it?” he pondered.

“I didn’t realise it had to be,” I said, before reaching
into his silver case for another of his cigarettes.

“Er, not that one,” Tempest said when I picked out the
cigarette at the very end of the case. “It’s got a thing in it… look, just not
that one, okay?”

“So what I want to know is how you got out of that pipe,” I
said catching Tempest off-guard.

“What pipe?” Tempest pretended.

“Don’t give me that. You know what pipe.
Thalassocrat’s
pipe. How did
you get out of it?”

“That would be telling,” Tempest cheesed.

“Yes it would. That’s why I asked.”

“Trade secret,” he winked.

“Oh but it’s okay if I tell you all about my secret
organisation and call in a load of favours to get you and Mighty Joe Young to
slip ashore though, is it?”

Tempest thought about this then checked over his shoulder
to see if Dunbar was within earshot. Better than that, he’d left the room to
get a cup of coffee so I told Tempest to use the opportunity and make with the
story.

“Magnetic belt,” he simply said.

“What?”

“My belt buckle, it’s magnetic,” he repeated, standing up
to show me his silver belt buckle. “It contains a powerful electro-magnet that
can be switched on and off at any time.”

“So?”

“So when
Thalassocrat put me in the pipe, I
activated the magnet to clamp myself to the inside of the tube so that I didn’t
get sucked through the blades when he started the turbines,” he said,
demonstrating by clicking a switch and sucking himself onto the table.

“How did you breathe?” I asked.

“Now that really is a secret,” he
insisted, trying to sit down but finding himself stuck to the table.

“Just tell me, fuckwipe,” I said, taking
my inspiration from Rip, before doing an impression of a child who’d just been
shot in the head. My twitching and pleading for mummy to take the pain away
appalled Tempest, as it was meant to, but it had the desired effect.

“I’ve had an implant.”

“An implant?”

“A tiny canister of compressed air, just
above the windpipe. All XO officers have it done. It’s about the size of a
double A battery, but it means we can stay submerged for up to eight minutes if
we control our breathing,” he said, wiggling the switch on his belt when he
found he was still stuck to the table.

“Bullshit!”

“It’s the truth.”

“Then what about old big tits? How did
she breathe?” I said referring to the girl he’d come ashore with.

Tempest smiled. “She shared my air,” he
told me, before elaborating unnecessarily. “I kept her alive with my kiss.”

“God give me strength,” I groaned,
finally wishing I’d never asked.

Tempest chuckled when he saw my disdain
then carried on trying to deactivate his magnetic belt. It was at this moment
that Dunbar walked back in and clocked Tempest struggling to distance his
trousers from the table.

“Holy shit!” he gawped. “I thought they
were joking when they told me you’d fuck a table if you could.”

When Jack was all done, the three of us sat down together
and thrashed out the finer points of our deal.

“Twenty years, that’s the best we can offer,” Tempest
insisted.

“For fuck’s sake!”

“You still have crimes to pay for. And twenty years will
see you out in your lifetime.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” I snapped.

“Would you rather the ninety-six you’ve left to do?” Dunbar
suggested.

“Ten,” I tried.

“They won’t wear it,” Tempest said. “You have to do a
serious stretch.”

“What, and ten’s not a serious stretch?”

“Not for murder and crimes against humanity,” he reckoned.

“Have you even tried talking to them?”

“Hey, we don’t negotiate with killers,” Dunbar grunted, his
forehead casting an even greater shadow than usual. “Take it or leave it.”

“But I won’t get out until I’m an old man!” I fumed.

“That’s the idea,” Tempest pointed out. “They won’t release
pros like you while you’re still in your prime. Besides, sixty’s not that old.
Not these days.”

“Time served.”

“What?”

“If I agree to twenty, I want what I’ve already done down
as time served,” I said.

Tempest thought about this, then looked at Dunbar.

“If we give you that, then you’ve still got seventeen to
serve,” he said.

“That’s right.”