Tom Cain - Assassin

The stables were empty, but as Carver came back outside he heard country music coming from the open-fronted, three-bay garage nearby, so he ambled across the compound till he came to a radio, left on a concrete floor next to a plastic bottle of mineral water and an open toolkit. Maddy’s German Shepherd, Buster, was lying asleep beside them. Her open-top, metallic champagne Ford Bronco truck was lifted up on jacks just beyond him.

A pair of feet in battered old workboots poked out from underneath the truck, attached to legs encased in oily blue dungarees. Carver took a sip of coffee, put down his cup and peered under the Bronco with an inquisitive frown on his face.

‘Hello?’

There was a muffled, high-pitched ‘Shit!’ then the boot-heels pushed down on the concrete and pulled their owner out from under the truck on a low mechanic’s trolley.

Maddy got to her feet. One hand held a wrench, the other was making a futile effort to neaten the hair pinned up on the back of her head. Rebellious dark brown strands had escaped and fallen either side of her face, which was bare of make-up, other than a few smears of motor-oil. The top of her dungarees was tied around her waist. All she was wearing above that was a cap-sleeved white T-shirt with the words ‘[semi]sweet’ written across the chest. The shirt was lightly speckled in dust and grime, as was the strip of flat, caramel-tanned tummy peeking out beneath it.

‘Shit!’ she repeated. ‘I was hoping to get this done before you got up. Figured you’d be out for hours, the way you were lying there, snoring like a big ol’ hog.’

She stopped for a moment and looked at Carver. He suddenly realized he was grinning like a village idiot.

‘Yeah, go ahead, laugh,’ she said. ‘I know I look like crap.’

‘No, you don’t, you don’t at all,’ he said, slowly shaking his head, but still unable to take the smile off his face. ‘You look great.’

‘I do?’

Now she was smiling too and the way she was looking at him had changed. Carver was suddenly uncomfortably aware that not only had he not bothered to shave before he came looking for her, he had not brushed his hair or even put on a shirt.

Maddy pulled off her gloves and ran a single finger down Carver’s chest. ‘Well, you don’t look so bad yourself, Mr Six-Pack. Couldn’t resist showing it off, huh?’

Her finger was still moving down.

He reached out for her backside and pulled her towards him.

‘We can’t!’ she said, giggling. ‘Not in front of Buster!’

‘He’s asleep,’ he said, and kissed her bare neck. ‘How about the back of the truck – reckon the jacks’ll hold us?’

Carver started nibbling Maddy’s ear. She squirmed with pleasure and whispered, ‘You’d have to take it real slow and gentle. Think you can manage that?’

‘I can try,’ he said.

He let go of her for a moment, clambered up into the back of the Bronco, then turned to give her a hand as she climbed up to join him.

The last words she said before his mouth covered hers were, ‘Remember, slow and gentle…’

A while later they walked back up to the house, arm in arm, with Buster bounding along beside them, wagging his tail so hard it was making circles in the air. He didn’t seem too traumatized. They took a shower that seemed to take a little longer than the business of getting clean necessarily required. Then Carver sat on the edge of the bed and watched Maddy dry and brush the tumbling mane that fell halfway down her back.

She looked at him over her shoulder and said, ‘So, you freaked out by a girl who does her own auto-mechanics?’

‘Not at all. I respect all forms of competence. I like people who are good at things.’

There was just the hint of a dirty undertone in his voice as he said that.

‘I agree, skill is very important,’ she said with impeccably ladylike cool.

Carver wasn’t sure he had the strength to take that thought any further, so he took the conversation on to safer ground: ‘Seriously, how did you learn all that stuff?’

‘I was an only child. I guess Dad didn’t have anyone else to pass on his knowledge to, so he took me hunting every season for deer, pheasants and grouse. I learned how to shoot, how to keep a weapon properly maintained, how to service his truck. Maybe he thought I could be the boy he never had…’

‘Not too much like a boy, thank God.’

Maddy was silent for a few moments, brushing her hair, her mind elsewhere.

‘Suits you, being single,’ he said. ‘You look more relaxed, like you’re a real woman, not someone’s prize possession.’

Maddy gave her hair one last brushstroke, ran her hands through it to get precisely the right degree of artless tumble, then got up from her dressing table.

‘Feel like some brunch?’ she said.

‘Thank God,’ said Carver, ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

Bill Selsey was sitting at his desk at the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, at Vauxhall Cross, London. If he got up and walked to the windows looking out on to the river Thames he could see the Gothic towers and spires of the Houses of Parliament across the water, a few hundred yards downstream. He had given his entire working life to this agency, protecting the values that parliament embodied. Now he was about to betray it all. True, it wasn’t as terrible a deception as those of some of the traitors who had gone before him. He wasn’t working for enemies bent on his country’s destruction: he was just doing favours for a gangster. But in a way, that pettiness only made it worse. He couldn’t claim he was working for any great cause. He was simply selling out.

It had all begun with Sir Perceval Wake. Selsey had helped destroy Wake’s Consortium and consign him to an enforced, ignominious retirement, deep in the Shropshire countryside. But the old man had always been a compulsive networker and the love of intrigue had never left him. He had enticed Selsey down to his modest farmhouse with the promise of new revelations about the Consortium’s activities. Wake had thrown Selsey a few titbits of useful information, just so that he did not return to his superiors empty-handed. That task accomplished, it had proved simple – surprisingly so, to both men – to persuade Selsey to carry out a few straightforward orders for which he would be rewarded on a scale that far outstripped his modest government salary.

Money, of course, has always been a motive for treachery. As Selsey well knew, it provided the ‘M’ in ‘MICE’, the intelligence-business acronym that described the four motivations through which undercover spies could be recruited: the other three being ‘ideology’, ‘coercion’ and ‘ego’. Neither ideology nor coercion applied to Selsey. But ego, he admitted to himself, yes, that might have had something to do with it.

For years, Selsey had been a loyal second-in-command to Jack Grantham, a younger but more brilliant, more driven man. Selsey had always told himself, and anyone else who asked, that he was happy to leave the heavy lifting to someone else. Let Grantham suffer the stresses of leadership and the poison of inter-departmental politics: Selsey was happy to do a good day’s work, then head home to a quiet life in the south London suburbs. But much like a loyal spouse, too long taken for granted, Selsey had begun to harbour feelings of bitterness and an urge to upset the status quo. When he was offered the chance to go behind Grantham’s back, to withhold secrets and to mislead him with false information, it was as enticing as a pretty young woman offering the promise of an affair.

And it was, after all, such a little thing that had been asked of him. At some point, as yet to be determined, a mechanism would be set in motion that would end in Samuel Carver’s death. Selsey had no particular reason to feel any loyalty to Carver. Nor would he be responsible for any harm that Carver suffered. He would just be one cog in a much bigger machine, one step on a long road, and for this small favour he would receive a total of two hundred thousand pounds, tax-free, in a Cayman Islands account.