Age of Heroes (9 page)

“Killed-in-an-avalanche dead?”

“Crushed. Mangled. A hell of a mess. Face only just about recognisable.”

“So it might not be him,” Theo said. “Might be a lookalike. I mean, this is standard procedure, isn’t it? Or rather, was. Find a stand-in, a substitute, a corpse that resembles you. Dress it in your clothing. Put your personal effects on the body.
Voilà
. Before fingerprinting, before DNA testing, that’s how we did it.”

“It was him, Theo,” Chase insisted. “I’d know if it wasn’t. We can tell, can’t we? We recognise our own kind. It goes beyond the visual. What I was just looking at in the morgue of the Hospital Gobernador Ernesto M. Campos in Ushuaia was, so help me, a dead demigod.”

SIX

Airspace above the Coral Sea, South Pacific

R
OY
Y
OUNG WAS
reading a Jake Killian novel on his Kindle Paperwhite as the Embraer Legacy 650 large-cabin jet banked on its ascent from Vanuatu’s Bauerfield International Airport, turning northward.

It wasn’t a great book, in his opinion. Decent enough story, but the prose lacked finesse. Plenty of narrative oomph, but the author, Theo Stannard, could have crafted his sentences a little better. They were punchy, terse, too much in thrall to Chandler and Hammett, without their masterful, jazzy sense of rhythm. The style seemed intended to bludgeon readers into submission, rather than caress and cajole them along.

The novel was absorbing, at least, and Killian was a compelling wish-fulfilment protagonist. A man with a dark past, trying to bring light. Roy needed distraction, and
Killian’s Rage
, the third in the series, was providing it.

As the jet levelled out, Roy heard a seatbelt being unbuckled. From the front of the cabin, Holger Badenhorst headed aft to the toilet. “Got to drop the kids off at the pool,” he announced to everyone and no one. He emerged several minutes later, wafting a hand in front of his nose. “Phew! What a
klankie
! I’d leave it a while if I were you. Damn islander food. Plays havoc with the guts.”

Roy guessed, from the way he had said it, a momentary hesitation, that Badenhorst had substituted “islander” for a crude racial epithet. The Afrikaner was not what you would call politically correct, but he was making an effort to be, in deference to the sensibilities of the multicultural team he had assembled.

As he made his way back up the aisle between the dual rows of plush seats, Badenhorst shared a word or two with his employees. “How’s it today? You okay? Travis, great work. Sean. We got him,
nè
? Pulled it off nice and smooth. Hey, Serge. You’ll get a go soon enough, don’t worry. Onward and upward, eh?”

Finally he came to Roy. He laid an arm on Roy’s headrest and leaned in.

“What you doing there? Reading, huh?”

“Yeah.”

A fellow Englander might have picked up on Roy’s tone, and left him alone. Badenhorst was not English, and something of a stranger to subtlety.

“What is it? Novel?”

“Yeah. Sort of a crime story. Action-adventure.”

“Who by?”

“Bloke called Theo Stannard. Heard of him?”

Badenhorst gave him a complicated look he couldn’t quite fathom. “Ha! Interesting. Why’d you choose that one?”

“I like thrillers, and his stuff kept coming up on my Amazon recommendations. Some algorithm obviously decided he was my thing, so I thought I’d give him a shot.”

“And...?”

“I don’t feel qualified to comment yet. I haven’t got very far in, you see.”

Again, the brisk summation carried a subtext:
I’m really not interested in talking to you
.

“Well now,” said Badenhorst, oblivious. “Listen. I just wanted to say, you’ve been doing great so far.” The Afrikaner raised his voice so that everyone in the cabin, all fourteen of them, could hear. “You all have. You’re earning your paycheques, and no mistake. But you, Roy...” He dropped the volume back down to conversational level. “Hiding the axe in the reef beforehand – stroke of genius, my friend. I wish I’d thought of it myself. That stupid
kont
Merrison would never have seen it coming.”

“Don’t call him a
kont
,” said Roy. “If that means what I think it means.”

“
Ach
, why do you care what I call him? He wasn’t a person to you. Just a job.”

“Still. Have some respect.”

“Whatever.” Badenhorst flapped a hand. “I’m complimenting you. Take the praise. You played your socks off yesterday, just like you did in Argentina.
Ja
, Argentina. That was a hell of a thing, that was. Perfectly sprung trap. Target One thought you were his
chommie
. Trusted you. Went along all meek and mild. Lamb to the slaughter. Didn’t suspect a thing. And the idea of the avalanche...”

“It seemed logical. He was a skier.”

“Ideal. Plant charges, blow up a snowbank, leave the body at the bottom of the slope to get buried... Too bad that a search-and-rescue team decided to comb the area and found him, but, hey. That’s the breaks. We dug the bullets out of him, no alarm bells.”

“Maybe not straight away.”

“Not ever. And on the off-chance that there are, and our targets get wind of what we’re up to, it won’t make any difference. We’ve got what it takes to bring them down, each and every one of them.” Badenhorst jerked his head in the direction of the cargo hold, where eleven steel flightcases were stored, along with boxes of armaments, uniforms and other matériel. None of these items was listed on the flight manifest; nor were the names of anyone on the jet. Bauerfield International was a medium security airport, and no customs or immigration checks were performed on private aircraft landing or taking off from there. This was true of every airport the team had used and would be using. As long as they avoided the major international hubs, they could slip in and out of sovereign nations with the kind of impunity reserved for diplomats and monarchs.

“Let’s not get complacent,” said Roy.

“I never do.” Badenhorst beamed from one side of his broad Boer face to the other. “All I’m saying is, you’re a true asset to the Myrmidons, Roy. I’m glad I chose you. Well done, me.”

“Yeah, well done, you,” said Roy. “Now, if you don’t mind...” He nodded at the Kindle.

The Afrikaner finally took the hint. “Sure, sure. You get on with it. Not much of a reader myself. But this jet comes loaded with movies. I think there’s some Jean-Claude Van Damme stuff on there. Bam! Pow!” He mimed punches. “Give me that over a book any time.”

Shortly, Badenhorst was back in his seat up front, headphones on, watching a film on the 9-inch HD LCD monitor that swung out on an armature beside his seat armrest. Almost everyone else in the cabin was doing much the same. They had a long flight ahead of them, a little over twenty-four hours, not including refuelling stops. Movies helped alleviate the tedium, and the tension. There was also the option of falling asleep. Jeanne, the French Canadian sitting directly across the aisle from Roy, had plumped for that. Immediately after take-off she had reclined her seat, collared herself with a neck pillow, and closed her eyes determinedly.

She opened them briefly, catching sight of Roy as he looked at her. He gave a cockeyed smile. She nodded, not in an unfriendly way. Then she aimed a glance forward at Badenhorst, grimaced in distaste, and closed her eyes again.

Roy got it. Smart move. If only
he
had had the idea.

He liked Jeanne. Out of the entire squad, she was the one he got along best with; her and the other Englishman, Gavin. The rest weren’t disagreeable by any means, except maybe the German, Hans Schutkeker, who was just a little too full of himself for comfort, and of course Badenhorst himself, who was as aggravating as they come but at least seemed to know it. Gavin Martin and Jeanne... Chevrier? Was that her surname? Something like that. Gavin and her, they had a temperament similar to Roy’s own. They didn’t enjoy what they did – they didn’t get a kick out of it, as some of the others appeared to – they did it because they were good at it and weren’t suited for much else.

Outcomes facilitators
was the official, somewhat euphemistic term for them.

Myrmidons
was the group name Badenhorst had given them.

Assassins was what they were, if you wanted to get down to the nub of the matter.

Paid killers.

Wetworkers.

Currently flying aboard a luxury private airliner from the scene of their last operation to the scene of their next.

Roy tried to settle back into
Killian’s Rage
, but the mood was gone. He could no longer concentrate on the novel. Instead, he stared out of the window at the glittering ocean for a while. Then he hoicked his phone from his pocket, opened the pictures folder and scrolled through.

There were photos going back years stored in the phone’s memory. Not many; Roy was neither a sentimentalist, nor nor a compulsive recorder of his life, as so many were these days. The images were personal: cherry-picked and cherished.

Here was him and a handful of his mates from the regiment, on one of their tours of duty, stationed at Camp Bastion. Young men grinning in the blinding sunshine outside their billet. Arms around shoulders. Desert camo fatigues. A couple of chests bare. Fun in one of the lulls between tiptoeing around IEDs and returning enemy sniper fire.

Here was him and Karen on their wedding day. Josie as bridesmaid, three years old. Mummy and Daddy belatedly tying the knot, both happy, but as far as she was concerned it was
her
day. Hence the pretty dress, the beribboned bunch of flowers, the tiara in her hair.

Here was Josie aged thirteen, not long after her first stay in a psychiatric unit. Smudges of grey beneath her eyes. Hair long and lank. Her shirtcuff not quite hiding the bandage around one wrist. Trying to smile. Putting on a brave face for the camera during a family outing at the seaside. Studland Bay in Dorset. Cloudbanks on the horizon. Sand and marram grass.

Here she was again, sixteen now, looking almost skeletally thin, brittle, in a shot taken just last year. Her and Roy, in the grounds of the clinic in the Swiss Alps. A spread of lawn. Pines. The elegant but rather severe main building behind them. A ridge of white mountaintops in the far background, sawtoothing a blue sky. Neither of them smiling, at least not so as you would notice, despite the encouragement of Benedikt, the orderly taking the photo. Bodies close but not touching. A portrait of the things money could buy, with the things it couldn’t notable by their absence.

Roy closed the folder. It always hurt to see what he had had and didn’t have any more. The ache of loss was acute.

But it was salutary too.

Karen was gone. She was out of his life. She had a new man. Divorcee, like her; decent bloke, by all accounts. Kid of his own. Last Roy had heard, they were planning to get married.

Good on her.

Josie was not gone, but she was hanging on by a thread. The clinic in Switzerland, just outside Chur in the east of the country, was doing its utmost to keep her alive and hold at bay the despair that wanted to consume her. The doctors were implementing every therapy in their arsenal, from antidepressants to CBT to transcranial magnetic stimulation. The UK’s National Health Service had failed her, repeatedly. So had a string of private British mental health institutions. The Gesundheitsklinik Rheintal, which had an international reputation and counted Hollywood A-listers and internet billionaires among its clients, was her best and last hope. But its services did not come cheap. Far from it. Josie’s sanity, and her life, were being preserved only at eye-watering expense.

Roy did not begrudge a penny of the cost. He would gladly have paid double, treble. Anything for his daughter.

Help kill a few people he didn’t know?

Anything for his daughter.

SEVEN

New York, New York

T
HEO MET
C
HASE
off the plane at JFK, two days after they had last spoken on the phone. They shook hands and embraced, and Theo offered to carry Chase’s holdall. Chase shrugged. His cousin was a stickler for courtesy, and Chase was a stickler for not carrying his own luggage if he didn’t have to.