JAY WORE HIS ARMANI-LOOK-ALIKE SUIT to LAX. He liked the way it was roomy: you could strap a holster to your ankle, tape a knife to your leg, and nobody would know. You could carry a small semiautomatic beneath your jacket, an Ingram or one of the folding-butt Kalashnikovs, especially if you had a special pocket and release strap sewn into the lining, as Jay had. The tailor in Singapore had made the alterations after Jay had been measured for the suit. Jay had drawn a picture of what he wanted, and what he wanted it for. The tailor had been bug-eyed, and had knocked a few dollars off his original estimate. It was a tactic Jay had tried since, with similar success.
He toted a Heckler & Koch MP5 to the airport, its stock fully retracted. He had a little snub-nosed revolver around his ankle, and ammo in his pocket. He was chewing gum and wearing Harley-Davidson sunglasses. He wore brown loafers and ice-blue socks with the yellow suit. He fitted right in.
He didn’t carry his two-way radio or a telephone of any kind, but he was wearing a wire. He had three men in the terminal building and two more outside. Not that he was expecting trouble. He was grinning, the way he often did these days, though nobody but him got the joke. He tried to blow a bubble, but it was the wrong kind of gum. It was hard to find the right kind of gum these days. Jay whistled a little tune, knowing the guys listening in wouldn’t appreciate it. He was wondering what kind of stunt Gordon Reeve would pull. Should have finished the fucker off in France. Funny the way fate threw old shadows in your face, blotting out the sun. In-where was it? Yes, Singapore, same trip he bought the suit-in Singapore he’d bumped into a guy he’d known in 2 Para, before he’d joined Special Forces. Jay had been sinking dark rums at some bar, maybe three in the morning, and this guy had literally bumped into him. They’d sized each other up, both keening for a fight; then the man took a step back and dropped his arms.
“Jay,” he’d said. “Fuck me, it
So they’d had a drink-a few drinks actually-then Jay had taken the guy, whose name was Bolter or Boulter or something like that, to a brothel he knew. It was just a small apartment of two bedrooms above an electrical shop, but it did such good business they had to wait in the rank hallway, plied with beer laced with Christ knew what, for twenty minutes, until Jay kicked down a door and dragged a weary punter off one of the girls. The service got better after that; they had a bloody good time after that. Then Jay and his pal went for a walk down by the docks. You’d never seen so many little boats bobbing on the water. It was getting on for six in the morning, and though both men were bushed, neither wanted to go to sleep.
“Here, this’ll help,” Jay had said, sliding a narrow-bladed knife into the back of his old colleague’s neck. He dragged the body behind some trash cans, took a wristwatch and all the cash on the body, plus any papers he had with his name on them. He got rid of the stuff on his way back to his own hotel. Thing was, he couldn’t have anyone from the old days knowing he was still around-the SAS would want to talk to him about desertion. They’d be terrifically keen to talk to him, and not just to catch up on the good old days. He didn’t know what story Reeve had given, whether he’d told the truth or not; he hoped he’d never have to know.
Funny thing was, next time he was in Singapore and went back to the brothel, one of the girls complained that his friend had given her herpes. So Bolter or Boulter had left something behind. Everybody did.
Jay liked the life he had now, a life he’d carved out for himself-sometimes literally-in America. It hadn’t been easy. In fact, it had been fucking hard-especially those first weeks in South America. On the run, a one-man slaughterhouse. He’d killed three Argentine soldiers that first night, one for each man who’d died on the glacier, but it hadn’t been enough to erase the memory of that doomed mission. Jay had seen something on that glacier, his eyes peering into the whiteout. He’d seen the bland white face of Death. It was an absence, an uncaring void, and the more chilling for that, the more hypnotic. He’d stared at it for a long time, not bothering with goggles. When they’d lifted him onto the helicopter, he’d been snow-blind. But when the blindness receded, there was a clearer vision in its place, a knowledge of helplessness and the will to power. It had taken him all the way through Tierra del Fuego and into Chile.
He’d killed one poor bastard because he needed civvy clothes, and another for his motorcycle, which duly packed up after thirty miles, forcing him to walk for a while. Big fucking country Chile -north to south anyway. He’d stuck to the west coast, killing some bearded Australian backpacker for his passport. Jesus, backpacking in fucking Chile: that was asking for trouble.
He’d crossed into Peru, smiling for the border guards like the man in the picture in the passport, rubbing his chin and laughing, to show he’d shaved a lot of his beard off since the photo had been taken. They stayed somber throughout but let him go. The backpacker’s body would never be found, not while it had skin on it, though one day the skeleton might be found. He bypassed Ecuador and went into Colombia. People in Peru had told him not to do it, but he didn’t see why not-and it was lucky he didn’t heed their warnings, because Colombia turned out to be a great place, and the site of his first civilian job. He’d met up with some hard cases in Cali and ran a few errands for them. He got to know the kingpin, Edouard, and Edouard told him there was always work for those willing to undertake personal risk.
“I’ve taken more risks than you’ll ever know,” Jay had said, though in fact he’d already told Edouard most of the Rio Grande story, exaggerating somewhat and turning Reeve into an early corpse.
Eventually, Edouard had given Jay a job which involved liaison with some Americans. The Americans took him with them to Venezuela and from there to Jamaica, where he decided to stay awhile and was duly passed to yet another new employer. He was learning fast what his employers wanted, and how to know if a proffered fee was a rip-off or not. He stayed in Jamaica more than a year and saved enough to buy an American identity. Later on, homesick, he bought himself a new British passport, too, and now he had a Canadian one as well-all in different names of course, none of them his own.
When the Jamaican police started asking questions about a headless, handless corpse that had been dragged out of a trash dump on the edge of Kingston, Jay left the island, not without regrets, and headed to the USA, feeling immediately at home in Miami. Jesus, what a madhouse. It was in Miami that he found himself talking like an American, even though most people he spoke to still mistook him for an Australian. Jay set up his stall in Miami, but found work hard to come by. It was all organized, mostly along clan lines: he wasn’t Cuban, so the Cubans didn’t want him; he wasn’t Puerto Rican, so the PRs wouldn’t take him. They had their own firepower, and if they needed freelancers, there were a hundred kids on the street, each one with something to prove and nothing to lose.
Jay got in touch with Edouard, who put him in touch with an old friend. Edouard had been good to Jay, and Jay had liked him. There was an affinity between them, two men who only ever liked to be called by a single name. The only hit Jay had ever turned down had been on Edouard.
Edouard’s old friend brought Jay to L.A. The man’s name was Fessler, and Jay had worked for Mr. Fessler- that was what you had to call him, Mr. Fessler; Jay sometimes thought even Fessler’s wife called him that-for three years before setting up on his own. He liked the regular income, but itched to be his own boss. It was tough at first, but got easier after the first couple of jobs. In fact, the money got so good, Jay developed a nose-talc habit which he broke only with the aid of a lot of booze. A
La-La Land, that was what Jay called Los Angeles. He’d come across it in a book about snuff movies. The appellation stuck in his mind, and he pretended he’d made it up, even to people who knew he hadn’t.
He liked La-La Land. He liked being his own boss. Above all, he liked working for big companies. Big companies paid well and let you get on with it. They didn’t want to know the details, the procedures-they just wanted the job done. And they paid on the nail. No fuss, no mess, minimum paperwork. Jay’s cover was as a “corporate restructuring adviser,” and he’d even read books on the subject. Well, articles anyway. He bought the
Kosigin wasn’t like anyone Jay had ever worked for. For a start, he wanted to know
