The Assassin King

When León de Bruin had bought Fenton Airfield out of bankruptcy, it had been for its large plot of prime Lincolnshire land, perfect for a new housing development. True, it hadn’t yet been rezoned, but he was a patient, connected and wealthy man, confident of getting that changed. As it had happened, however, the business had owned several other assets, including a pair of light aircraft: a Piper Cherokee for training new pilots, and a Twin Otter for skydiving and parachute jumping. Being the kind of man who liked to squeeze a lemon to its last drop of juice, and ever keen on new experiences, de Bruin had hired the airfield’s former owner – an ex-RAF flight lieutenant named Victor Unwin – both to be his pilot and to teach him how to fly. He’d loved it from the start, circling proudly around his Tudor mansion and estate, buzzing low over Welbourn and Leadenham to repay the residents there for their endless complaints about his redevelopment plans, or circling the county to admire his housing empire and whet his appetite for more.

He typically took the Piper Cherokee, in which he’d learned to fly. But today he needed the extra space of the Twin Otter. Its original cabin seating had been stripped out and replaced by benches along either side, and its door had been permanently removed too, creating an open hatchway behind its starboard wing. A sturdy long steel platform step had been fitted beneath this hatchway for nervous parachutists to inch out onto, clinging grimly to the wing strut as they built themselves up to jump. But it also served as a step to help people climb aboard, as de Bruin did now before offering Ronan Calder a hand. But Calder brushed it irritably aside and made his own way up, before frowning in puzzlement at the block of broken masonry at the rear of the cabin. ‘What’s that for?’ he asked.

Andrei joined them aboard. They buckled themselves in while Victor taxied out of the hangar and to the end of the runway. They turned for take-off. Their propellers roared. They jolted along the pitted old concrete until they reached take-off speed, then lifted sharply up over the trees and banked into a turn before levelling off and heading east.

Last night’s storm had largely cleared the sky of cloud, giving them a good view of the patchwork fields beneath. They quickly neared the coast. Boston appeared through the open hatchway. De Bruin tapped Calder on the arm to draw his attention to it. ‘Looks so pretty from up here, doesn’t it?’ he said, having almost to shout to make himself heard. ‘Clean. Attractive. Historic even. A lovely church, a fine market. You’d think people would be able to build good lives for themselves there, wouldn’t you? Yet the way my tenants moan! A dribble of water through their ceiling, it’s like they’re living beneath Niagara Falls. Their boiler won’t start. Put on an extra jersey, for goodness sake. And am I really supposed to go sponge mould off their walls myself?’

‘You are exactly right, Mr Calder,’ agreed de Bruin. ‘You are exactly right. People have forgotten how to do for themselves. You and me, we’re out of place in this modern age. We have expectations. We have standards. Isn’t that so?’

Calder glanced at Andrei, sitting on his other side, his arms folded and gazing stolidly ahead. He’d been head of security for a dissident Russian oligarch when de Bruin had first met him, at one of his mother-in-law’s London bashes. He’d been struck not just by his extraordinary physique but by the coldness he’d radiated, like walking into an industrial freezer. When his boss had fallen, jumped or been thrown from his Park Lane penthouse balcony a few months later, de Bruin had checked to make sure that Andrei hadn’t been at fault, then he’d hired him to replace his previous bodyguard; because veterans of Russia’s Special Forces, to put it bluntly, were rarely afflicted by the kind of qualms that sometimes hobbled ex-members of the SAS.

‘Good. I’m glad. One of my expectations – you may think this is excessively pernickety of me, but it’s how I am, so it’s probably best you know – one of my expectations is that my employees don’t try to fuck me up the arse while telling me it’s a suppository.’

‘I’m speaking,’ he said again. He waited for Calder to fall quiet and drop his eyes. Then he continued. ‘As I said, one of my expectations is that my employees don’t try to fuck me up the arse. I don’t care whether they do this deliberately or through negligence, or because they have to take their son to the hospital. The bit I object to is the being fucked up the arse. Is that unreasonable of me, would you say?’

‘You’re not listening, Mr Calder,’ said de Bruin. ‘I don’t care why. I care what. The reason I keep you around is to serve as a conduit between the legitimate and the illegitimate parts of my organisation. That’s how a shitty little struck-off accountant like you has made himself rich. Your one job is to keep that conduit open, or at least to notify me that it might fail so that I can make arrangements, should I – to pluck an example at random – happen to get advance notice of a raid, and need to get word out. Instead I got screwed.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Calder. ‘Truly. But what could I do? My son couldn’t breathe. He literally couldn’t breathe. Check with the hospital if you don’t believe me. It messes with your head when your kid can’t breathe. Did I panic? Yes. Of course I did. It’s what parents do. Imagine if it had been your Melanie who—’

‘That was what you told me last time we spoke,’ said de Bruin. ‘Yet something else went wrong last night. And what I need to know is, was that an accident, or was it deliberate?’ He leaned forward to give Andrei the nod, and Andrei took a stun gun from his pocket and pressed it crackling to Calder’s throat, making him twist and scream and convulse for several seconds before finally slumping unconscious, held in place only by his belt.