The Henchmen's Book Club (14 page)

“Well obviously,” Mr MacDonald (username:
Small Fry
) said. “I mean, who’d do it
the other way around?”

“You’d be surprised,” I replied. “And no
favouritism. You’re voting for the book, not your boyfriend’s recommendation.
There are no prizes for having nominated the most popular book.”

“I’m not gay,” Mr Nikitin objected,
interrupting my flow.

“What?”

“I’m not gay.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You said we can’t vote for our
boyfriend’s nomination. I don’t have a boyfriend. I have girlfriends. But not
at the moment,” said Mr Nikitin, who The Agency had busted out of
Yekaterinaburg Prison Camp a month earlier.

“I didn’t mean literally. I take it
you’re not an actual maggot either, it was just a euphemism. You know, an
insult?”

“Oh,” he blinked. As time was of the
essence and as Mr Nikitin didn’t come across as someone who enjoyed the rough
and tumble of blokey banter, I decided to skip straight to the end of the meeting.

“Tenth and final rule of book club is,” I
told the guys, pausing to make sure I had their total attention, “No
chick-lit.”

“What’s chick-lick?” Mr Bolaji obviously
wanted to know.

“Here are your scramblers,” I said,
handing out USB sticks disguised as .38 hollow tip specials. Most of the covert
equipment Affiliates used on jobs was weaponry disguised as household objects,
yet the equipment we used in book club was the exact opposite. I hoped the
irony wasn’t lost on them.

“Don’t lose them. They’re encrypted with
your usernames and IDs, so you’ll need them to post your scores or nominate
your books,” I told them.

“What happens if you put them in a gun
and fire them?” Mr MacDonald asked.

“They produce an image of a computer
screen that you’ll be able to see if you look up the barrel. It’s got pull down
menus and everything and you can scroll through them by pulling on the trigger
repeatedly.”

“Really?” Mr MacDonald cooed.

“No not really. You’ll just break the USB
and probably blow you own head off, but do give it a go if you want because I
might be wrong.”

“I was only asking.”

“Okay, so you all understand the rules
and the need for complete secrecy?”

They did. Or at least, they said they
did, which were two subtly different things, but indistinguishable from each
other without the benefit of crocodile clips and a car battery.

“Alright then,” I told them with a final
nod of approval. “Welcome to book club.”

17.
THE GIRL WITH SPYDERCO HEELS

I don’t know what it is with right-hand men but for some reason they love to
fight everyone – even their own men. They’re like small-town bar room
brawlers. They strut about the place, eyeballing anyone who looks at them and
beating their chests at the
merest
inkling of
disrespect – which again, just like small-town bar room brawlers, they
see everywhere.

Zillion Silverfish had a guy like that;
five feet tall, six feet wide, fists like bazookas and the sense of humour of a
hungover elephant. He used to have this stupid cowboy type boot-lace neck tie
too that he’d whip off and throw at people whenever it wasn’t his birthday. If
he got them right, which he did more often than not, it would wrap around their
necks like mini boleadoras and choke them in seconds.

What was his name? Oh yes, that was it,
Mr Karlssen.

“Mr Karlssen, show the gentleman out,”
Silverfish would say with a knowing smirk, then next thing you’d know –
whoosh
, the poor unsuspecting fella
would be on the floor turning purple. Which would have been fair enough. I mean
anything work related, but Mr Karlssen couldn’t keep it to himself and I
personally had to rescue several of my colleagues from a stifling death just
because they’d either let Jack Tempest get away or had eaten the last
strawberry yoghurt in the canteen. Of course Silverfish should’ve kept him in
check but he never said a word, not even after Mr Karlssen killed that little
Argentinean lad who’d made the mistake of wafting a hand in front of his nose
when he’d tried entering the toilet just as Mr Karlssen was leaving. For five
minutes he’d lain there before anyone had been allowed to go to him, but Mr
Karlssen didn’t get so much as a fiver docked from his pay packet.

Oh well, what goes around comes around,
as they say, and while it’s well documented how Silverfish met his maker handcuffed
to that Patriot missile, it’s less well known how his lapdog choked on his own
particular bone. Obviously, it had been at the hands of his own tie –
ironic deaths being harder to avoid in this game than the Child Support Agency.
Jack Tempest had caught it with that hat stand that Mr Karlssen had bought for
his Stetsons and twirled it around like a cheerleader’s baton and thrown it
straight back at him, scoring an unbelievable bull’s-eye first time. It had
been a hell of a shot. I personally couldn’t believe it. I mean, of all the
things to be good at! Tempest must’ve had one of those neck ties himself (and
presumably a similar make of hat stand) because I couldn’t see how he could’ve
possibly made a shot like that without months of practice. Still, that’s Jack
Tempest for you. And he wonders why everyone hates him.

Anyway, that had been the official
version of Mr Karlssen’s death although it hadn’t actually been the end of him,
because Tempest had ducked out to go after Silverfish while Mr Karlssen had
still been struggling. Under normal circumstance one of us might have come to
his aid but no one lifted a finger to save him. Oh we’d all been there, and
close enough to untwine the boleadoras, but no one felt so inclined, not after
all we’d endured at his hands, so we folded our arms, passed around the fags
and watched him turn several shades of scarlet as he choked on this ultimate
betrayal.

Mr Gonzales made sure with a bullet to
the head – which is what Tempest should’ve done – then rejoined the
battle. Personally, I decided to leave it when I saw all those airborne troops
parachuting in and I got as far as Panama before The Agency had to pick me up
once more.

So I’d had my fair share of run-ins with
right-hand men but none, not even Mr Karlssen, compared with Sun Dju, who was
the fruitiest bird I’d ever known – in every sense of the word.

I’d not crossed her path before but she’d
come to the island just as we were completing the cherries’ basic training.
She’d been accompanying her boss, Xian Xe Xu, who liked to be called X
³
– which would’ve been okay had we been his Facebook friends but which
created problems when we’d had to address him verbally. No one knew what to
call him. X cubed? X to the power of three? Triple X? Nine X? I mean,
seriously, what’s your name mate? In the event most of us had simply played it
safe and called him “sir” to his face and “that X bloke” behind his back, which
seemed to do the trick.

But I was talking about Sun Dju, wasn’t
I?

The first time I laid eyes on her was in
the unarmed combat gymnasium. All the cherries were sat around a big crash mat
while Mr Sato walked them through a few basic moves – knocking away a
dagger, throwing someone over your shoulder, holding your hand in front of your
face to stop someone poking you in both eyes with two fingers, that sort of
thing. Easy enough and occasionally even useful, but hardly kung fu, which was
when I noticed Sun Dju skulking around behind us in that painfully provocative
way I’d seen too many times before.
  

X
³
was with her, smiling to
himself because he knew what was coming, while I was desperately trying to
avoid both of their eyes and keeping my fingers crossed that everyone else did
the same.

Some hope. See, Sun Dju was one hell of a
saucy bit of crumpet; six feet tall, as slender as a pack of Camels and peachy
in all the best places. She also wore a red figure-hugging leather one-piece
suit that was so tight you could make out what she had for breakfast.
Yesterday.

I swapped my eye patch across from my bad
eye to my good and carried on making out like I was monitoring the combat,
hoping someone would give me a nudge when we broke for coffee. Big mistake.
See, while I could no longer be temped to gawp at her delicious candy
wrappings, I could no longer look away either when she wandered past, then back
again, stepping up in her six-inch stiletto heels to ask what I was staring at.
“You wanna fuck or fight me?”
 

When nobody answered I peeled my eye
patch back to see everyone in the gymnasium suddenly staring at me.

“You what?”

Sun Dju’s face contorted into a deadly
snarl and before I had a chance to explain my negligence, her utility belt hit
the floor and her long painted nails were beckoning me onto the crash mat.

Mr Sato and Mr Nikitin bowed at each
other then quickly fled the square to make room and all too quickly I had no
place left to go – except the mat. It didn’t matter that I didn’t want to
fight or fuck Sun Dju – at least, not without the benefit of a shin pads
and a bottle of Rohypnol – I suddenly had no choice. As one of the combat
instructors at the institution, I was expected to rise to any challenge. By the
cherries, by my fellow instructor and by the Agency staff, who were now
regarding me with raised eyebrows. See, X
³
was hiring. And it
seriously wouldn’t do to have members of the organisation they were hiring from
chickening out and feigning back problems when challenged to a fight.

I slid the patch back across to my face,
slipped my ‘eye.Pod out’ and dropped it into one of my shoes when I kicked them
off at the edge of the mat.

Captain Bolaji looked up at me, as if to
ask if I knew what I was doing, but unfortunately I did. And it didn’t make the
slightest bit of difference. However, I did have one thing going in my favour.
And that was that everyone to a man knew I was about to get the shit kicked out
of me, including The Agency’s senior staff (it’s a done deal when one of these
fruit-loops decides to prove themselves – you might as well kick your own
head in and save them the trouble), so I didn’t have the weight of expectation
on my shoulders. Just the problem of getting in there, getting hit and going
down as quickly and as believably as possible, before she could do any real
damage.

She shaped up before me on the mat.

I was savvy enough to know not to bow and
sure enough one of her boots missed my head by millimetres as she aimed a
vicious spin-kick into my coconut.

“Fucking cheating bitch…” I spluttered
falling back on my arse and scrambling away to the peels of evil Mandarin
laughter. It was then that I also noticed she’d kept her heels on, only the
sheaths of her stilettos were now missing, exposing two glistening six-inch
blades to slice the crash mat to pieces.

Well now, I hummed, that hadn’t been in
the brochure.

She came at me fast, kicking and spinning
furiously, throwing cartwheels and splits as she attempted to stab me with her
ferocious footwear. I ran around in circles at first, backwards and forwards
and from side to side trying to put as much distance between myself and Sun
Dju’s killer heels. But when I felt them rake the backs of my calves and spiral
upwards into my vulnerable buttocks, I realised I was setting myself up to be
sliced little and often, until the weight of my wounds slowed me down and
allowed her to land the big one, so after several more seconds of scrambling, I
finally turned to face her.

Sun Dju saw my pained and desperate
expression and cackled accordingly.

The
cherries and staff lapped it all in too, transfixed by the spectacle, but
guarded enough not to display their excitement lest they be next. Captain
Bolaji gawked on with morbid disquiet, too fearful to look, too excited to
blink. I was one karate kick from the mortuary.

Sun Dju finally dropped the laughter and
came at me one last time, but far from fleeing, this time I darted straight at
her, throwing myself between her whirling legs and engaging her at
close-quarters. I made it with fractions of seconds to spare and planted a
thrusting forehead into the epicentre of her surprise with as much force as I could
muster. The resultant crunch almost made me sick, so appalling was the jarring
thunk, and I staggered away with stars popping in my head and fell into the
front row of cherries immediately behind me.

Still, if I think I’d caught it badly,
this was nothing compared to Sun Dju, who was flat on her back and looking as
if a grenade had just gone off in her face. Nose, mouth, teeth and eyes, they
were all still in there somewhere, but now concealed beneath the geyser of
blood.

“I think you got her there, Mr Jones,”
one of my cherries pointed out helpfully.

“What have you done? What have you done?”
X
³
hollered, rushing to his comatosed lieutenant’s aid and bundling
her up in his arms. The Agency seniors were also looking at me in displeasure,
somewhat stunned by such an unprecedented turn of events and wondering where
this left their lucrative supply contract. Well, I might’ve proved myself but
I’d also just undermined X
³
and Sun Dju’s authority in front of a
batch of potential recruits. Not a good thing if you’re hoping to rule with an
iron fist and a steel heel.

“What have you done?” X
³
demanded again, but Captain Bolaji and a couple of the other cherries kept him
at bay until I could wobble to my feet.

“She made me an offer,” I eventually told
him, X
³
’s face now just inches from mine. “Well there’s my reply.
Though if you don’t mind I think I’ll forgo the fuck if you don’t mind, I’m not
really feeling up to it any more,” I groaned, hobbling off towards the medical
bay.

X
³
continued to piss and moan
in my wake, calling me an “ant” to his “colossus”, the usual stuff, but his
protestations were now only falling on deaf ears when The Agency’s senior staff
reminded him where he was and who’d picked the fight in the first place. They
eventually sent him packing in humiliation by asking the question that was
dying to be asked; that was if he and his hard-boiled lieutenant couldn’t even
defeat a mere “ant” like me, what chance did they have against Jack Tempest of
the British Secret Service?