A Binding Contract

It had become one of the central tenets of his new belief system and he hadn’t so far experienced anything that persuaded him to revise his opinion. All the same, he felt on the most basic level that unless there was at least a modicum of whimpering during the proceedings, he wasn’t doing the job properly. And it was a job, after all. Not in the traditional sense of the word, true, but he did receive payment in exchange for services, which enabled him to define it as such. And he did have a set of terms and conditions – notionally, anyway - to which he strictly adhered, as did his clients: 50% up front and 50% on completion. To him, this was more than a quirk; it was what gave the transaction validity, what turned something that could have been regarded as a mere hobby into a professional contract. Reconciling the end-to-end transaction also rationalised any reservations he may have had at the back of his mind. Not that there ever were any. Despite his initial anxiety, it turned out he had quite a talent for his work. Taking pride in the art of instilling a real fear in his prey - while not overdoing the physical damage - was an unexpected bonus.

The brief was always different. That was another term that made it all the more businesslike. The process of extinguishing someone’s life, although a relatively easy task, was anonymous, quick and, he always thought, a little sterile. Why anyone who needed a straightforward extermination would go to the trouble of commissioning someone like him to make the hit was beyond him. In truth he enjoyed those contracts less, harbouring a niggling feeling that it was a waste of his gifts. Sure enough, every job involved careful planning in terms of timing, location and method - and subterfuge was usually required - but once everything was in place, it became a foregone conclusion. The real pleasure was to be had from the more unusual projects. He suspected women had a much crueller streak when it came to despatching the object of their hatred, the revenge element often much more specific. Salome had nothing on some of the requests he had undertaken. His client base may vary, but the means of communication remained the same. The camouflage afforded by Internet proxy services, offshore broadband provision, triple DES encryption, and a host of other misdirection technologies and double-blind methodologies had shaped the way in which he was engaged by his clients. Technology was as much a friend to him as the macabre tools of his dark trade.

Studying the outsized face of his Panerai Marina in the half light indicated that it was time to call it a day. Tomorrow held its own challenges. He had to be suited and booted for a meeting in Milton Keynes at lunchtime and that was at least a three-hour road-trip. The meeting promised a massive pay day, so it was important he was in tip-top form to close the deal. If he didn’t get the full eight hours his body needed, it took him days to recover and made him irritable and, worst of all, inefficient. With time pressing, he made sure that the ropes were secure. Standing behind the trembling frame of his hapless victim, he checked the gaffa tape stretched tightly across his mouth, took a polythene bag from his pocket and placed it over his head.

The first time he had done this was several years earlier and it had all gone horribly wrong, when, at the crucial moment, the bag had split. His victim had thrashed around gulping for air like a fairground goldfish. Though potentially serious, the situation had also been darkly amusing, and the memory of it caused the corners of his mouth to curl into an approximation of a smile. What was no laughing matter was that he had had to resort to leaping on his victim’s chest, holding him down with both hands over his airway until his bulging eyes rolled up into his head for the last time. His own sweating and grunting form was the last thing this unfortunate human saw on earth, before he reluctantly expired. He hated it when, in his estimation, a well-thought-out plan went wrong. After that, he made a mental note to have a backup plan next time - or a stronger bag. The thing he had learned about bags was that it was all a matter of getting the strength-to-cling ratio right. If the bag was too thick, it didn’t cling, and clinginess is good if you want the job done effectively. A thick bag is less likely to puncture under pressure, but it takes a bit longer for life to expire and - let’s not beat about the bush - holding someone down while you suffocate them, is pretty tiring, even if you are over 6ft and work out.

He took out a small Lenser LED torch hanging from his key ring, and shone it around the dingy flat in short bursts. The wallpaper on the walls was an early eighties faux regency stripe with contrasting dado rail, now dull with mould. The units in the kitchen had been ripped off the walls and lay discarded on the floor. In what was once optimistically called the lounge, net curtains fluttered lazily in the wind through the broken window. He wondered why anyone would want, or need, net curtains on the seventh floor of a block of flats. Who was going to see in for God’s sake? But he also wondered why anyone in their right mind would want to live in a block of flats in the arse-end of a depressing post-industrial mill town. Perhaps, no-one did, as they were scheduled for demolition the next day. The local newspaper had delighted in running a competition for a lucky reader to be the one who pressed the destruct button. It had been a month-long campaign; hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people had placed their bid to rid the town of its most prominent eyesore the shabby legacy of 1960s town planning at its parochial worst. In the event, the proud button-presser, Mr Latif Tariq, would be blithely oblivious of his subsidiary role as undertaker.

Good planning being his forte, he needed to conceal the still-warm corpse and ensure that if all the rooms were to be checked again, which he seriously doubted, the body would go unnoticed. Double-checking the complex was a mammoth task, even with heat detectors, and his faith in the idleness of unskilled workers left him confident that his special package would remain untouched until the explosives began to rip through the infrastructure. He had watched a couple of young work-experience types do the first - and possibly only - pass earlier that day, and by tomorrow morning there certainly wouldn’t be any heat emanating from the cold heart of his victim. Propping him against the wall, he carefully removed the garish tie from around the slender neck of the new corpse, slipped it into a bag and placed it in his pocket. He bundled the body into a dark twill mail sack and shoved it into an empty airing cupboard. Leaning his full weight against the door till it clicked shut, he lifted some debris from the flat’s impressively orange melamine kitchen and discreetly braced the door to prevent it from accidentally swinging open.

The front door had long since been removed, so he walked unhindered through the jamb, along the balcony and into the dark and piss-stained stairwell. As he descended, he noted the graffiti scrawled along the walls that indicated that Baz! had lingered there more than once, and that Shazzer was anybody’s for the right price; in fact it seemed that many had staked their claim to her virtue. The local football team also featured quite prominently in felt-tip daubs, as did the team of the neighbouring town, who it transpired, were more than a little partial to onanism and sodomy. Most touchingly, he thought, was the timeline of a doomed love affair. A large spray-painted red heart with an arrow through it, declaring Tracy’s LUV for Wayne, had been superseded at some point by ‘Caz 4 Wayne 4eva’. In particular, he felt that the legend: ‘Tracy is a SLAG’ and the resulting riposte: ‘Caz is a FAT LEZ’ beautifully expressed the futility of love in the modern world, though spelling and grammar were clearly not uppermost on the agenda of the underclass that had inhabited this particular edifice.

He waited in the gloom of the stairwell checking his watch again. Timing was paramount here; he needed to depart at just the right moment, when the fat security guard swapped his shift with his even fatter and more follicly challenged workmate. He had watched them for several nights and marvelled at the unchanging nature of their routine. Bald guard waddled over to the makeshift hut, newspaper under his arm, flask and extra-large lunchbox in his hands, all set, no doubt, for a night of indolence. Slightly-less-overweight guard greeted him with a handshake and they stood for about an hour on his blindside smoking cigarettes and chewing the fat (he presumed about something inconsequential such as the performance of the local football team, or the relative merits of the women from the pages of the rag they read in the mistaken belief that it was a newspaper). He slipped out of the darkness and into the spotlights that now sparsely surrounded the building. This was the most dangerous part of the operation; even dressed all in black he still would stand out like a neon sign against the grey brickwork of the building. The fear exhilarated him, his heart was pumping, his face flushed. Racing around to the back of the flats, he scaled a high wall with the practised skill of a free runner and fell cat-like to the ground on the other side. He fell into a casual stride in the darkness of the disused car park of a small industrial estate that bordered the complex. Most of this area had been earmarked for demolition, too; there were no lights, no security cameras to see him as he emerged onto the main road.

A brief walk took him to the street where he had left his car, close to the town-centre entertainment district. No one paid any attention as the indicator lights flickered into life on his black X6. Scantily clad girls staggered across the road hugging their chests and moving inexorably from bar to bar, where equally inebriated lads shouted raucously after them. He wondered how many times ‘nice tits love!’ or ‘show us your ass!’ worked as a pick-up line. He suspected the shag-to-slap ratio was probably disappointingly low, even here. That said, two giggling and inappropriately dressed girls, whose body image was clearly better than the fashion magazines would have you believe, bent over in the middle of the road, revealing rather more flesh than their diaphanous and transparent undergarments were designed to cover. The combination of stripper heels, excess weight and alcohol proved to be too much for them, as both teetered on their vertiginous platform shoes and ended up in a prostrate heap on the floor. Getting up proved rather more time consuming than their descent. He observed all this with complete detachment. He felt no affinity with these people; he belonged to a different world.

Slipping into the cool solace of his BMW, he savoured the smell of the Merino leather mixed with the citrus notes of his air freshener. As he keyed the engine into life, the dashboard lit up with a pleasing array of dials and digital displays. He calmly made his music selection and the custom Bose sound system filled the interior with Carmina Burana. He always listened to O Fortuna after a job, it was part of his routine and it appealed to his sense of the dramatic. Checking his mirror and shifting the gear to Drive, he indicated and pulled out into the road. Late-night revellers whistled and cat-called his car as he drove past. Soon he was on the bypass and then the motorway for the rest of his journey.

As he rolled up to the glass-fronted shrine to modernity that he called home, sensors in his car caused the gate to open automatically. He descended noiselessly into the residents’ garage, dropped the headlights and drove to his reserved spot, then kicked the reversing camera into life. He sat absorbed in thought for a few minutes, before relinquishing his hold on the wheel and exiting. He removed his key card from the calfskin billfold wallet and swiped to summon the lift; the doors opened almost immediately as if his arrival had been somehow anticipated. He stepped inside and the lift shuttled him silently to the penthouse, opening on to a stark and spacious hallway. A large mirror hung on the wall and below that a console table. Dropping his keys and wallet on the table, he keyed the combination on the panelled door that led to his office on the left. The office was simple, but efficient. On top of a long glass-and-steel desk stood a slender LCD monitor, below that, a thin wireless keyboard and mouse. He grabbed his Blackberry and thumbed distractedly through his emails. In the corner was a large safe. Crouching down he opened it and placed the bag from his pocket inside. He slammed the door shut and swivelled the dial. Back in the hallway he removed his shoes and socks and padded across the terrazzo floor to the bathroom. As he entered, lights illuminated automatically, washing the walls with a soft blush. Disrobing he took time to admire his muscular frame in the full-length mirror. Entering the shower, he gasped as the cold water streamed down in a heavy current, awakening every pore in his body. Slowly he raised the temperature and relaxed as warm jets massaged his body in sharp bursts. Carefully washing, he rinsed, grabbed a robe and moved to his bedroom. After setting the alarm for 6am, he slipped between the freshly laundered linen sheets, hit the light switch and fell almost at once into a dreamless sleep.

Robert Alden was a successful sales director for VuTel, a publicly listed, leading-edge technology company. Everyone who knew him, or had worked with him, would say of him that he was charismatic, a great orator, someone who always had your back and was the man to have by your side in any dispute. Alden had worked his way to the top from the earliest days, operating out of a terraced house in a backwater northern town. He knew the business inside out; not only where it had come from but where it was going. His CEO said he was the rudder that steered the corporate ship and as captain he was happy to have him at the helm. Truth be known he should have been CEO or at the very least MD. The word on the floor was that he had been offered both jobs. He and Jim Roland had been friends from the offset, both mirror and foil in their business dealings. It was a formula that worked, neither ever feeling that they needed to outdo the other. On top of his generous salary, Alden had benefited over the years from substantial bonuses with an OTE off the chart. Now that they were publicly floated, the options he had been granted were paying real dividends in more ways than one. Alden had more money than he had ever dreamed of. Over the years he’d worked in every kind of environment. He’d been a dishwasher, telesales rep, tour guide, door-to-door salesman and bartender. He knew people. He could read a situation and used his knowledge to his own advantage. He prided himself on his fairness, and, whatever he claimed of the products and services he sold, he would always deliver. He enjoyed the cut and thrust of the deal. But he didn’t carry passengers; anyone not pulling their weight would likely end up having their desk cleared and a personal escort off the premises. In this way, he had built around him a formidable workforce.

On the face of it Alden had everything he could possibly want, but he was an adrenalin junkie. He still loved closing the deal and getting a fat bonus from the proceeds, but it wasn’t enough. He had done the obligatory bungee jump off a tall bridge, sky-dived from a great altitude in Australia, base-jumped off a stack in Colorado, abseiled a tall building and formed his own parkour team. He had even hired the Cresta run for his President’s Club as a reward to his high achievers, but there was certain inevitability about all of those risks. Hell, he didn’t want to die, he just enjoyed the rush of thinking that it might be a possibility. With high-risk sports, the only way you were going to die or injure yourself badly was if you hadn’t done the right planning, and that just wasn’t in his nature, he needed something else.

Alden knew that wealth brought access to any excess you cared to indulge. He ate at the finest restaurants, attended the best nightclubs, was the guest du jour at all the popular social functions and a generous benefactor at charity auctions. He revelled in the plaudits from his peers and kept an extensive portfolio of cuttings - or at least instructed his PA, Ruth to do so. Photographs of various high-profile events adorned the walls of his offices. Alden knew that networking with people from all walks of life was as much a key to his success as was his daily analysis of the business and financial press. It wasn’t just what he knew from his research, it was what people told him, sometimes in confidence, but often to demonstrate kinship to garner his favour or advice. It was from those intimacies that the seeds of a new and possibly lucrative venture had originally begun to germinate in his fertile mind. The credit crunch and failing economic climate had a stranglehold in every corner of the business community; every day, somewhere, someone was being throttled by circumstances out of control. With less business to go round it was always hard fought for, often with devastating consequences for the losers who had invested so much in desperation. And he knew that failure breeds a deep-seated resentment. Sure enough, there were those who were resigned to their fate. But if Alden knew people in the way that he thought he did, there were those who simply wanted to get even, or take out the competition at any price.

So, when John Carter, a successful property developer, bid and lost the contract for the only public works development in the region, he was pretty pissed, to say the least. He had done everything right. He thought he had the planning officers onside, thanks to some generous, if anonymous gifts. The contracting authority had been wined and dined and had been given presentations up the yin yang. He had assurances from Will Ronan that the deal was in the bag. But when the tender came to fruition it was Fuller Holdings who won the prize, an out-of-town developer now basking in the glory of a multi-million-pound contract. Alden knew that Carter was a poor-boy-made-rich, who had trained as he put it in the school of hard knocks, literally. His father had been a miner who wasn’t ashamed of punching him from one side of the room to the other when he came home from the pub after a skinful - or whenever the mood took him, in fact Carter had told Alden in confidence one day that, when he was eighteen, he had knocked his father out cold to stop him beating one of his younger brothers. Carter had started life at sixteen as jobbing labourer on the building projects of the early seventies. Planning departments were knocking down their Victorian heritage in favour of high-rise dreams. Work was plentiful and well paid, but Carter was ambitious, he didn’t want to end up like the no-hoper he thought his father was.

So it was he had the opportunity to start building new homes for the growing population and from those small beginnings Carter had created a successful property development company. But a combination of bad investment and over-capitalisation had brought his company in recent years to the brink. This contract had been make or break and now Carter was facing certain ruin. Bankruptcy was looming and everything he held dear - his home, his marriage, his lifestyle – was under threat. Alden knew that Carter would want to get even, especially since the word on the street was that Fuller had out-bribed and out-manoeuvred Carter at every turn. Everyone Carter had met or schmoozed, had been annexed by Fuller. Carter had a long list of people he wanted to get even with, but, most of all, his pride had been severely dented. It was Fuller who had masterminded it and it was Fuller he despised the most.

Alden knew Fuller; one of his largest clients had used Fuller Developments for a new office a few years previously. Alden knew from conversations he had had with his large network of contacts, what lengths Sebastian Fuller was prepared to go to in order to secure the deal. It didn’t fit into Alden’s sense of fair play. Sure, he would wine and dine his clients, but he drew the line at out-and-out bribes; he didn’t see the point. If the deal couldn’t be won on merit, it wasn’t worth having. Fuller was everything he despised in a man. He was a cocksure, vain twenty-something who’d had everything given to him on a plate. His business was founded on daddy’s money and he had bought his way into every deal he had ever won. Alden felt he wasn’t a man’s man. He dressed in suits with garish linings, kitsch embroidered shirts and had a penchant for flamboyant kipper ties. He was the kind of preening, metrosexual ligger that Alden had little time for. All of Alden’s top salesmen were sporty, womanising, lager-drinking good old boys, who would stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a fight. Sebastian Fuller was a cocktail-sipping effete milksop who would run a mile at the first sign of a punch-up.

Carter was poring over the list of receipts he had to settle by the end of the month at the laptop in his office. A small window popped up over his spreadsheet.

- Want to get even with Fuller?

Carter frowned at the screen. Where the bloody hell had that come from? The window disappeared and a new one appeared.

- £10K, no questions

Intrigued, Carter drew his chair closer to the screen. A chat box replaced the window, inviting Carter to respond.

- Who the hell are you?

- Someone who can right your wrong

- What are you talking about?

- Do you want to get your own back?

Carter paused for a minute, removing his glasses and passing his hand across his forehead. New words formed in the dialogue box.

- Well?

- Yes

- £10K, no questions

- I don’t have £10k - can’t even afford Special K. My business is on its ass, don’t you read the papers?

- Borrow it. Ask a friend. It will be worth it

- How do I contact you?

- I’ll get back to you, same time next week.

John Carter had a week of dodging traders, investors and his bank manager. He called in a few favours and managed to scrape together £3k from acquaintances and family he didn’t already owe money to. His gold Rolex Daytona fetched another £4k in the local jewellers – it irked him that it was a fraction of what he had paid for it - and his prized 1961 Gibson 335 had provided the remaining £3K on a three-day eBay sale. Sure enough a few days later Carter’s screen kicked into life and his new best friend gave him explicit directions for the transfer of funds through a Western Union account – plus the reassurance of a money-back guarantee, should he not be entirely satisfied. A brown envelope bearing a local postmark and containing a collection of newspaper clippings concerning the mysterious disappearance of some prominent business people, dropped on to his mat the following day.

Carter was curious; he certainly hated Fuller and would do anything to wipe the self-satisfied smugness off his face, but he wouldn’t want to take any risks himself. This presented a prime opportunity to get his own back, anonymously. And it was only £10k. He had dropped more than that in the bookies, and there was always money to be made if you had a small stake and you worked hard enough. His conscience niggled him, but no-one had said anyone would die, had they? Maybe his nameless benefactor would just teach him a lesson. Maybe he’d get a good kicking and slink off with his tail between his legs. Maybe he’d go abroad and no-one would hear from him again. Yes, that sounded like the most credible solution; that’s what would happen.

A few days later Robert Alden was at his desk. The light from the screen washed his face with a spectral glow as, with a few clicks of the mouse, he keyed in his security details and checked his offshore account. As expected, his funds had increased by a recent £5K deposit, less, he mused, than the interest he had earned since he had last looked. Not much in the whole scheme of things, but the size of the fee wasn’t the issue, it was the principle. It came down to winning the deal, doing a good job and getting paid. That was the contract. He picked up his Blackberry, clicked on the contacts tab, shuffling through the alphabet and stopping at ‘F’. Crossing over to his safe, he turned the dial and opened the door. A collection of bags containing assorted pieces of jewellery, watches, ties and cufflinks was neatly stacked at one side. He took out a box containing a new cell phone and closed the safe door. He prised open the back of the phone, selected a battery from his store and inserted a new SIM from his wallet. Reassembling the components, he switched it on and dialled the personalised number he’d highlighted. He knew Fuller was a sucker for the quick buck. It wouldn’t be that difficult to get him to clandestine meeting, especially if he thought there was easy money to be made. And he’d already picked the perfect location for the drop. It came to him after reading an article about a competition in a local paper. He loosened his tie and smiled. He loved his job.