He opens the envelope and, for the first time in his career, feels a moment of indecision. Not because he doesn’t wish to kill the target – that is far from the case, the face is all too familiar and the Assassin relishes the idea. No, the regret he feels is that the man will die quickly. It is something he would have far preferred to take time over. Momentarily he wonders whether to ignore the directive but then, as in the shop earlier, common sense prevails. He has no wish to gather more enemies and, whoever wants this man dead is likely to be a dangerous client indeed. He will carry out his job to the letter.
The Assassin leans back in his chair and looks into the face of the man in the photograph. The shot has been taken from some distance, a telephoto lens aimed through traffic, but the target’s face is all too clear as it gazes into the window of a gentlemen’s outfitters.
‘August Shining,’ says the Assassin, ‘looks like your past is about to catch up with you.’
August Shining stared at the photographs on his wall and remembered better days. It wasn’t nostalgia, his feet were too firmly placed in the now for that, just an awareness of happiness lost.
‘You being all maudlin again?’ April, his sister, was piled on one of the sofas like a collection of unwanted bric-a-brac someone hadn’t yet dumped outside a charity shop. Sometimes the pile of mismatched clothes and cheap, garish jewellery would shuffle or exude menthol cigarette smoke, sometimes it would speak. Either way, the air was a little worse off.
‘I am not,’ Shining replied, aiming a poisonous look at her. ‘I was simply thinking.’
‘Amounts to the same thing these days. You’re barely there. Half a man.’
‘I haven’t a great deal to be jolly about, April, as I’m sure even someone as self-obsessed as you must have noticed.’
‘Self-obsessed? Well, if you’re going to be rude…’
‘Please don’t feign offence, darling, we both know you better.’
He settled down behind his desk and tried to find something constructive to do on the computer. It was like walking into a room having forgotten what one wanted to do when there. A minute’s aimless spinning of the cursor mouse led to him emptying the recycling bin and staring once more at the walls.
‘They’ll be fine.’ April said. ‘They’re both horrendously capable, you know. Probably even more so than we were at their age, though I hate to admit it.’
‘I don’t doubt their capabilities, just wish I could be more proactive in helping them. Is that so strange?’
‘Of course not, but sometimes one simply has to accept one’s powerlessness and find something else to rail at. Haven’t you got any godawful manuscripts you should be publishing?’
She was referring to Section 37’s cover as Dark Spectre, a small publishing house of horror novels that didn’t sell. In actuality, Shining left all of the work to a young man in Milton Keynes who brushed up submissions and slapped questionable covers on them. Occasionally the young man became irritated by his boss’s lax attitude towards the business but never so much so that the power and minimal freelance wage didn’t compensate.
The telephone rang, saving August the need to argue. The caller did nothing to improve his mood.
‘Shining?’ said a voice that seemed to resent being there, despite the fact that it was making the call.
Shining recognised the voice and his mood slumped even further. Sir Robin, a particularly vocal opponent of Section 37. The man filled the hours he avoided his Whitehall desk by breaking the springs of an armchair at the Cornwell’s Club. Shining suspected that would be where the pompous old sod was dialling from, that dusty old graveyard of colonials and kings. The call would be a chaser to another large brandy.
‘I’m sorry?’ Shining replied. ‘I think you may have the wrong number. This is Dark Spectre publishing, can I help you?’
‘Oh piss off, Shining, you know damn well who I am.’
He did, but knowing the pleasure Sir Robin would take should he ever catch Shining breaking security protocol, he was damned if he was going to turn a blind eye.
‘Actually the line is rather bad, could you hang up and try again?’ Shining put the phone down and enjoyed his very first smile of the day. Its brevity made it no less enjoyable.
The phone rang again.
‘Dark Spectre?’ asked Shining, keeping his voice perfectly civil.
‘It’s a secure line, you hateful old bastard!’ shouted Sir Robin. ‘There’s a car coming for you in half an hour.’ Sir Robin hung up first this time.
‘Problem?’ April asked.
‘Yes,’ admitted Shining, ‘I think there must be. Sir Robin is sending a car for me.’
Shining made a point of being early, not because he wanted to seem eager but rather because he wanted to keep the buggers out of his office. There was no particular reason, nothing specific he wished to hide, he just didn’t like the idea of unknown officers poking around in his private space.
As always, the main road was busy, shoppers weaving between one another as they made their angry way from one shop to another.
Oman, the owner of the mobile phone shop beneath the Section 37 office (and occasional technical adviser, cash paid, questions asked but answers never given) was stood in his doorway, attempting to stuff a limp kebab into his mouth.
‘Didn’t have time for lunch,’ Oman explained through a swamp of meat and yoghurt.
Shining might reasonably have pointed out that the man had found time for it now but he wasn’t going to take his irritations out on a friend.
‘Off somewhere nice?’ Oman asked.
‘I doubt it,’ Shining admitted. ‘A mystery tour. They’re never good news.’
‘My old mum went on one of those once, ended up trapped in a bus just outside Eastbourne. Twenty pensioners fogging up the glass and staring at the rain while waiting for the AA.’
‘Sounds charming.’
Shining was distracted by a figure across the road. A man staring at him from behind the window of a sandwich takeaway shop. The reflection on the glass distorted his features but Shining was quite sure that man was watching him. Perhaps aware that he had been spotted, the other man looked away, turning his back on the window and retreating inside the shop. Shining, still feeling combative, had half a mind to walk over there and take a look but then the car arrived and he had more immediate irritations to contend with,
It was a suitably innocuous hatchback in metallic grey. Four men were inside, all wearing nondescript business suits from high-street stores, people designed to be forgotten. One of the men sat in the back climbed out and stepped to one side so that Shining could climb in. He did do, annoyed to see the man close the door on him and walk off towards the Section 37 office, ignoring a stare from Oman completely. So much for not having his office invaded.
‘Should I have warned your chap that the office isn’t empty?’ Shining asked, wondering who was designated to reply.
‘I’m sure your sister will be happy to help,’ replied the man sat next to him on the back seat. Shining was only too aware that the man was scoring points. They knew who was in the office. Fine, bully for them. It hardly mattered. He looked at the man, ex-military most likely, eyes constantly scanning the world outside the car as if expecting an attack.
‘I don’t suppose anyone is cleared to tell me where it is we’re going?’ Shining asked.
‘No,’ the man replied, watching a young mother push her child across a pedestrian crossing. Shining couldn’t tell if his gaze was appreciative or whether he suspected the woman represented a threat. Perhaps the man had been in the security business so long he could no longer tell either.
They drove north towards the A10 and an escape from London, Shining no longer bothering to maintain the pretence of civility as a pregnant silence filled the car with the breathless atmosphere of a gym locker room. Instead, he took a few moments to analyse his companions and decide what had brought the car to his door.
The men reeked of special forces. UKSF had a bearing, a solidity that never waned, even when not involved in anything more intimidating than the act of filling out suits. Whatever meeting he was on his way to was therefore both secret and outside the normal channels of any specific department. These men were on loan. They probably knew nothing more than that they were to collect him and deliver him to his destination, wherever it may be. Outside London, that much was obvious, and equally worrying. This wasn’t to be a simple debrief by one of the other section heads; if that were the case he’d have been called to the meeting not ferried in ignorance. This was the sort of treatment reserved for the enemy.
Petty animosity aside, he couldn’t imagine what he’d done to earn himself that status. If anything, Section 37’s last operation should have seen their reputation in the ascendance. Naturally, a good many of the details would be hidden away in obscure files, known by few, believed by fewer. Those facts aside, their involvement in the recent trade talks between the UK and South Korea had saved lives and unearthed an MI6 traitor of long standing. Shining could fully imagine Six were somewhat irritated by the fact – nobody liked it when outsiders discovered these things. If there was a bad apple, better you found them yourself, hopefully in a manner that might suggest you had always had your eye on them – but that wasn’t due cause for victimising Shining. Right now, the last thing Six would want to talk about was Mark Fratfield.
They had left someone behind to poke around his office. Why had they done that? What were they after? What files would the man be trying to lay his hands on at this very minute? Had April already killed him? Shining couldn’t help a brief smile at the thought.
The moment the security officer entered the Section 37 office, April had him tagged as a problem. The only thing she was uncertain about was how best to solve it.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked. She smiled at him in precisely the sort of way that a mad old woman might.
April Shining had gone a long way in her various careers. She had done so thanks to a number of different skills, not least of which was knowing when to seem unimportant, annoying or mad.
‘April Shining?’ the officer asked, fixing her with a stare that suggested he was considering how easily she’d fit in a bin bag.
‘That’s me,’ April replied. ‘He lets me stay here when my boiler’s on the blink. My boiler’s always on the blink. I don’t suppose you’re any good with old boilers?’ She winked in case the double entendre was lost to him. You never could tell with security officers.
‘I won’t be in your way, I promise,’ she said, taking him by the arm. ‘What are you looking for? Perhaps I can help? He has all manner of old rubbish here, old books, old papers, old sisters.’ She laughed again.
‘I’m just retrieving some paperwork,’ he said, ‘nothing important.’
Which meant it obviously was, decided April. Some people were just no good at lying.
She looked the man up and down. Solidly built, ghost of a tan. Recently divorced – or, at least, recently stopped wearing a wedding band – some men took time before the message finally got through and they ditched the jewellery. He had flinched slightly when she’d taken his arm though it moved easily enough as he gave it a squeeze and a shake. It hadn’t been a gesture of awkwardness so she decided to be brave and test an assumption. She patted him on his bicep and he flinched again.
‘You’ve muscles on you,’ she said flirtatiously. ‘Bet you get in a lot of fights.’
‘Not for a while,’ he admitted. He sounded sad about the fact.
‘Got any good tattoos?’ she asked.
‘A few.’ His mood brightened. ‘Just had a new one on my arm, actually.’
April looked surprised, though she wasn’t. If he was sore on his arm the most likely reason was either a wound or a tattoo. He hadn’t been in any fights lately, apparently, so… ‘Oh go on, give us a look!’
‘I’m really busy at the moment.’
‘Oh come on! It’ll only take a minute!’
He looked around, as if expecting his commanding officer to have come into the room unnoticed, then grinned and pulled off his jacket. She helped him, lifting his wallet out of the jacket pocket as she did so, dropping it on the floor and nudging it beneath the sofa with a gentle backwards kick.
He tugged at his tie so he could unbutton the upper half of his shirt and expose the tattooed arm. Lifting the thin gauze, he revealed a particularly awful picture of a character from a popular fantasy TV show.
‘I’m a fan,’ he explained.
‘It’s gorgeous,’ April lied, wondering how the actress in question might feel about being reproduced in a manner that made her breasts larger than her head. ‘Sexy.’
The officer nodded and made no move to cover it back up, as if April might need a little more time to fully appreciate it. She didn’t but she tried to pretend to bask in its wonder for a few more seconds.
‘Wonderful work,’ she announced finally, helping him cover it back up, ‘I’d love to have something as brilliant as that.’
‘It was expensive,’ he replied, as if that were all the proof needed to grant it artistic merit.
‘I bet.’
‘I really ought to get on.’
‘Oh, do, don’t let me hold you up.’
She stooped down in front of the sofa to pick up her handbag, snatching the man’s wallet while she did so and dropping it inside. She disguised the action by pulling out a packet of menthol cigarettes.
‘I’ll just sit here and mind my own business,’ she said, taking out a cigarette and lighting it. ‘I hope you don’t mind but August does insist I never leave the office unattended.’
The officer looked as if he might argue for a moment but then remembered how much she liked his tattoo and just smiled. ‘I won’t be long. Maybe you can even help?’
‘Darling, I’m at your service completely.’
He moved over to the pair of large filing cabinets on the far wall of the office, tried to open a drawer and discovered it was locked.
‘I don’t suppose you…’ He turned to April.
‘A key?’ April replied, dropping her cigarette packet on top of the set she kept in her bag, ‘I’m afraid not, he never trusts me with anything other than the office door.’