Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (41 page)

‘Whit? I never ordered this.’

‘I know. Mr Khan says it’s on the hoose, tae make up for the wee misunderstandin’ last night. Hing oan, you are Mr McGraw, aren’t you? Ninety‐
nine Foxhill Avenue?’

‘Whit? Eh, aye. McGraw, that’s me. On the hoose, you say?’

‘Aye.’

‘Magic.’

‘There’s your curry, then.’

‘Cheers.’

Mickey Fagan, you had thirty thousand pounds. You now have enough heroin to kill Keith Richards. Thank you for playing.

So his graduation from revenge killer to professional assassin was as inadvertent as it was instantaneous, though its fortuitousness was a factor of time, not destiny. It became very obvious very soon that he and murder were star‐
crossed, and it had merely been a matter of them finding one another.

Simon had improvised the means of Pagan’s untraceable death in a twinkling, then proceeded from concept to realisation in a near effortless matter of hours. And what had really taken him by surprise was that he got a greater rush from killing Pagan, a man he only clapped eyes on at the moment he handed over his deadly gift, than he had from killing Morris, with whom he had a decade of scores to settle. The latter had been all gut‐
tangling emotion; the former nothing but raw power, coursing through him, energising him, making him feel he could do anything – and kill anybody. It was the most vivid, thrilling, invigorating sensation he had ever experienced, and he already knew he’d want more.

Besides, ‘professional killer’ sounded a far cooler way to think of himself than ‘marketing exec’.

He stopped off one last time at the snooker club, where he left instructions on how he could be contacted. The hotmail address he quoted didn’t exist yet, but he was pretty sure the username would not have been taken. If his services were required, Hannigan had to email him: the message would be meaningless, but the number of letters in each word would provide a newly bought pre‐
pay mobile number for Simon to call, once he’d nipped to the supermarket and bought a new pre‐
pay of his own. After that, details could be offered: names, locations, motives, money.

Nothing happened for quite a while; long enough to begin to feel like it had all been a delusional fantasy, and in a more coldly rational light, long enough to think that they hadn’t taken him seriously, and might even throw him to the cops if it would somehow benefit them. Mitigating against that was the fact that they had comped him three grammes of uncut smack, but it was still difficult to reconcile the ice‐
cool figure who’d negotiated that deal with the suitful of frustration stuck in the Persley Bridge tailback every morning.

Then one Wednesday night he was checking his email and felt his whole body electrify when he saw that a message was coming in from the new account, addressed to [email protected] Never have the words ‘Retrieving message 1 of 1’, had such life‐
changing significance; when Simon saw them, he knew nothing would ever be the same again.

When he called, it wasn’t Hannigan who answered, nor even one of his underlings. The voice was accentless middle‐
class English, newsreader neutral.

‘I got your details from a Bud,’ the voice said, by way of introduction and explanation, then rhymed off the info with no pause for formalities. ‘Paul Noblet. Forty‐
six. Planning officer, Teasford County Council, Yorkshire. Interested party believes Noblet’s successor would be more sympathetic to his petitions. Accident or no fee. Fifteen offered; that’s minus twenty per cent commission. Interested?’

Simon had more bother sorting out a pseudonymous PO box to receive the unmarked bills than he had despatching the unfortunate Mr Noblet. The lot of the professional killer was far less arduous than he could have possibly imagined. No briefcases, no dossiers, no hasty assembly and dismantling of high‐
powered rifles inside towerblock windows, and not even a binding obligation to dress in black.

The targets were not heavily guarded statesmen or senior underworld figures, but ordinary men (occasionally women, but generally they tended to be the ones holding the invoice) who someone else considered it advantageous to be rid of: husbands, lovers, bureaucrats, rivals, bosses, creditors, none of whom had any idea what was coming. Simon took it as an unspoken gauge of improving western living standards, among the items and services that not just the rich could afford: in the Sixties it was television sets; in the Seventies it was foreign holidays; and these days it was assassination.

He regarded it as a point of professional pride as well as a valuable security consideration not to repeat the same method, and even made a principle of not using firearms, like Queen had made a principle of not using the otherwise ubiquitous synthesiser on their first ten albums. This kept his imagination finely tuned, as well as providing constant fresh perspectives on the risks of detection; the simplicity of a bullet in the head could engender sloppiness borne of complacency. Like Queen recording The Game, eventually he decided he did need a gun, but by this time he knew that in the end, the method didn’t matter: if you had the will, everything else was merely detail. And if you didn’t, then it made no odds what weapon was in your hand. It was the will people were paying for – that and the security of being several clandestine removes from the man who wielded it.

What they’d make of the fact that that man was still nine‐
to‐
five‐
ing for Sintek Energy, he didn’t like to contemplate. Flexi‐
time arrangements made for a few midweek sorties, but he was constantly reminded of Billy Connolly’s song about the Territorial Army: ‘And we’ll have the revolution on a Saturday, ’cause I’ve got to work through the week.’

Until Marseilles, that was. He was tipped off that something was different when he carried out a traceroute on the incoming email, something he always did to confirm the source: the quoted address varied, but the English middleman’s relay server was always the same. The traceroute revealed that it had arrived via a French ISP, confirmed by the accent that answered the phone.

You know you’ve really arrived when you start your first European tour.

The target was a Parisian businessman, Jean‐
Pierre Lacroux, who had humped one too many secretaries and good‐
time girls for his wife’s liking, and now she fancied his life insurance as compensation. He was given a copy of the bloke’s itinerary for a forthcoming business trip to Marseilles, including flight times and hotel details, hotel rooms having proven a happy hunting ground thus far.

Simon arrived the day before Lacroux and checked into the same hotel. He hired a car, made the purchases he required, had an excellent dinner and then retired to his room for some shuteye, a good night’s sleep always bulwark number one against stupid mistakes.

He was woken by sunlight shining through a gap in the curtains, which even without the attendant grogginess would have been confusing, as the last thing he had done the night before was close a set of blinds. The room had shrunk, as had the bed, while the number of doors had been reduced by two. More disturbingly, his travel bag and all of the room’s furniture had disappeared, a glimpse through what turned out to be a porthole behind the curtains revealing that so had not only the entire city, but the land as well.

The cabin’s door opened, and in walked two men who both had to bend to get through it.

‘There’s someone who’d like to speak to you, Mr Darcourt,’ one of them said, his voice the same as had relayed the now apparently bogus details about Monsieur Lacroux.

Simon followed them through several corridors and a steel‐
glinting kitchen up to the sun‐
kissed deck of a luxury yacht (luxury as in the ten million notes category; the word, he now appreciated, having been previously rather over‐
liberally applied). His sense of geography told him he had to be somewhere in the Med, but there was a seaplane moored off the aft and he felt woozy enough to have no idea how long he might have been unconscious, so he couldn’t be sure. He was led to a canopied area, where a bottle of champagne sat in an ice‐
bucket on a table, next to two flutes. To the side of it was a TV and VCR, and in front of it were two sunloungers facing the prow, backs to Simon.

‘Marcel, pour Mr Darcourt and myself some champagne, would you?’ said a voice, revealing one of the sunloungers to be occupied. ‘And Mr Darcourt, please come here and have a seat.’

Simon walked around the table as one of the man‐
mountains poured the drinks, the bottle looking like a miniature in his hands. There was a bald, podgy little man in sunglasses sitting waiting for him, a laptop resting on his thighs, a telephone at his elbow on a short wooden table. He was Caucasian but not white, Simon unable to discern whether his skin was merely dark from the sun or from ethnicity. The man smiled and gestured to Simon to take a seat. Simon, still in his T-shirt and boxer shorts, felt a microscopic bit more comfortable to observe that his host was dressed only in a pair of extremely ill‐
advised G-string trunks. Proof, he very quickly appreciated, that this was a man who was far too powerful for anyone to dare offer any sartorially constructive criticism.

‘I’ve had my eye on you,’ he said, his accent as unplaceable as his origins. ‘And I think we might do business together.’

The man‐
mountain Marcel handed them both their champagne, serving the bald man first.

‘I’m sorry, I’m at a bit of a loss here,’ Simon said. ‘I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.’

‘You haven’t. And if you’re angling for my name, nor will you. But to ratify future communications, you should refer to me as Shaloub N’gurath. On a sunny day like this, however, you can call me Shub. Cheers.’

They talked for hours; or rather, Shub talked for hours, with a garrulousness that suggested he maybe spent too much time floating on the ocean, where visitors had to be brought, drugged, by overnight seaplane. However, for all his loquaciousness, he nonetheless had a disciplined gift for not telling the listener anything concrete, never mentioning names, locations or indeed any specifics whatsoever. If Simon had walked into the first police station on dry land, intent on alerting them to this uniquely dangerous Blofeld‐
alike, he would have been hoofed into the street as a time‐
waster half an hour later. ‘No, I don’t know who. No, I don’t know where. No, I don’t know how. But there was this guy on a boat. No, I don’t know where it was. No, I don’t know what it was called.’ Boot. After which Shub’s people would have picked him up and … well, he wasn’t going to be walking into any police stations, he was damn sure about that.

‘Criminals cannot help but talk,’ he told Simon. ‘That is why I do not employ criminals. I employ professionals, and professionals do not talk. They do not talk to each other, they do not talk about each other. In this world, happy is the man who does not know his comrade’s name, for he does not have to worry that his comrade will slit his throat tonight. Most important of all, professionals do not talk to the authorities. Do you know why?’

It seemed a rhetorical question, but Shub was staring intently at him as though demanding a response. Simon couldn’t think of any way of articulating something so monumentally obvious without resorting to platitudes that would make him sound like a schoolboy. That was when he realised he was floundering because it was something of a trick question.

‘Because professionals don’t get caught,’ he answered. ‘Very good,’ Shub said. ‘Professionals do not get caught. However, I am experienced enough to know that nobody is perfect. Accidents can happen. How is it your own poet puts it, Mr Darcourt? The best laid plans of mice and men …’

‘Gang aft agley.’

‘Go often wrong, yes. The professional knows when the situation is retrievable and when it is not. If it is not, he knows when to walk away, and he knows to clean up the mess. If you compromise yourself, as far as I am concerned, you have compromised me. Remember that, any time you consider taking a risk. If you fear you are contaminated, it is your responsibility to amputate and cauterise before the infection spreads. You find yourself on the run? You do not run to me. If you can stay hidden, stay hidden, but always remember my people will be looking for you too. And this is what will happen when they find you. Marcel.’

Marcel wheeled the sunloungers around so that they were facing under the canopy, where he put a cassette into the VCR and switched on the TV. The picture warmed from black to show a male face, sweat‐
drenched, contorted and hyperventilating.

‘Sound, please,’ said Shub. Marcel pressed the remote. Simon could now hear fevered breathing, and a whimpering beneath it.

The camera pulled back to reveal that the man was strapped naked to a steel table like he had seen in the yacht’s kitchen, resting upright against a portholed wall. On either side of him stood one of the man‐
mountains, dressed head to toe in white plastic overalls, each of them holding a two‐
handed power drill.

Marcel placed the champagne bottle on the table and tossed the ice overboard, returning with the bucket in time for Simon to vomit into it a few seconds of videotape later. This, he felt, was ample evidence that Shub’s point had been made, but he was wrong. Shub sipped champagne and stared at the screen, motionless, unflinching, for a full ten minutes.

‘If the authorities reach you first, we will get to you wherever you are held,’ he said, holding out a beckoning hand into which Marcel placed the remote control. ‘We will break you out if possible, to find out what you told them. We broke this guy out. If that’s not possible, we can get to you inside. There’s a lot of things we can do inside too, but ideally we’d bring you back to the boat. These are double‐
length tapes. It lasts more than three hours.’ Shub turned up the volume until the screaming and the sound of the drills was deafening, turning to observe Simon’s stomach‐
wrenching discomfiture. ‘I’m sure you’d agree,’ he shouted above the noise, ‘a bullet in your own head would be much quicker.’ With which he suddenly switched off the TV, silencing the cries, the drills and the grinding, leaving only the lapping of waves and the calls of gulls.

‘Professionals do not get caught.’