Another Day, Another Jackal Read online

  Published in 2016 by Kaybec Publishing

  441 Avenue President Kennedy

  Suite 1003

  Montreal

  Québec

  H3A 0A4

  Copyright © Lex Lander 2016

  Lex Lander has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work under the terms of the 1988 Copyright Design and Patents Act.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All the characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-9917063-0-3(Paperback)

  ISBN: 978-0-9917063-1-0(mobi) 978-0-9917063-2-7(epub)

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  Another Day,

  Another Jackal

  Contents

  Cover page

  Title page

  Copyright

  Part One - OCTOBER - Another Kind of Revolution

  Part Two - NOVEMBER - A Plot Without Gunpowder

  Part Three - JANUARY - Happy New Year, Mr Chirac!

  Part Four - FEBRUARY - A Leap Year of Faith

  Part Five - MARCH - Madness in the Air

  Part Six - APRIL - No Place for Fools

  Part Seven - MAY - Bugs Everywhere

  Part Eight - JUNE - Midsummer Execution

  Part Nine - JULY - Missing Persons not Missing

  PART ONE

  OCTOBER

  Another Kind of Revolution

  One

  * * *

  Professional killer, contract killer, hired assassin, hit man, enforcer. Lux had been called all these and more during his career. All of them described what he did: he committed murder for money.

  This latest job was south of the border, in Baja California. The target was a Mexican drug baron who had gone to earth in Canada the year before, but was now being enticed back by one last killer deal. Purported killer deal. In reality, the deal was phoney. The Mexican, a certain Federico Vazquez, had powerful enemies who wished him dead.

  As part of his preparations, Lux had crossed into Mexico and checked into an unassuming hotel in the resort town of Rosarito, part of the southern sprawl of Tijuana. His stay would be short. Just long enough for a delivery of goods, a payment, and a transfer of the goods to a secure place. Then back over the border.

  The air-con unit in his room had something metallic loose inside. Its incessant rattle was driving him crazy, though he had no complaint over the amount of Arctic air it was pushing out.

  His visitor was not impressed by chill factors. Hottest part of the day or no, he insisted on going out on the balcony for security reasons.

  ‘No way is it bugged, Mike,’ Lux said for a second time, running a hand through his muddy-blond hair in exasperation. ‘I walked in this place off the street, they weren’t expecting me.’

  ‘Humour me,’ Regan grunted, paranoid about wiretaps and the like, even more so than Lux, who had far more at stake.

  Grumbling, Lux clapped a baseball cap on his head and dark glasses on his nose before venturing out. The room being south facing, the balcony was hellishly hot. The sun felt like a blowtorch on the unshaded part of his face.

  The balcony overlooked Boulevard Benito Juarez, the town’s main street. It was noisy - another plus for Regan - colourful, and fume laden. Directly opposite the hotel was a stall selling pottery to tourists: row upon row of blues, yellows, and terracottas, a pot for every purpose, even pissing, Lux heard tell. The stallholder had spent most of the morning slumped in the shade, sombrero tilted over his face. Sure to be a pose to attract tourists influenced by local colour.

  The briefcase Regan set down on the tiled floor, screened by the balcony wall, was of the rigid variety with a combination lock. He twisted the dial in a 3-9-3 sequence and opened the case. Inside were the components of the M25 sniper rifle Lux had ordered:McMillan polymer stock with customised monopod, detachable barrel, Leupold tactical scope, screw-on bipod, two 20-round magazines, silencer. Chambered for 7.62mm NATO ammunition. Snuggling in nests of polystyrene were two hand grenades.

  ‘All present and correct,’ Regan said, like a travelling salesman of the old school displaying his samples. ‘It’s nearly new.’

  ‘Looks swell,’ Lux said non-committally, shutting the case without examining the contents. He trusted Regan. Not only that, the apartments opposite had a fine view of his balcony. ‘No problems at the border?’

  ‘Shit, no, Dennis. Short of taking the heap apart with a welding torch, there’s no way those greasers would find it.’

  ‘It’s not the greasers I was thinking about, it’s our guys.’

  Regan tapped his nose and winked. ‘Our guys are taken care of.’

  This raised Lux’s eyebrows. US border control officers were notoriously resistant to graft. Lux had used Regan on four previous occasions to smuggle weaponry over an international border, but the US-Mexico crossing was a first. An unknown quantity.

  When Regan left, ten minutes later, he was heavier by a hundred $100 bills, the balance of his fee.

  * * *

  In the late afternoon Lux drove to the Central de Autobuses in Tijuana and deposited the briefcase in a baggage box he had rented the day before. There it would remain until he received a call that Federico Vazquez was on his way.

  Two

  * * *

  When Eddie Nixon told Sheryl Glister in just so many words that he was a dying man it took several beats to register with her.

  His voice carried no timbre of regret, no self-pity, not even resignation. It was as flat and neutral as an electronic message. Seated across from him in the boxlike black leather armchair, one of a dozen strewn about the twentieth-floor lounge of Auckland’s exclusive Cavalier Club, Sheryl was nonplussed.

  ‘I … I’m sorry to … er … to hear that, Mr Nixon,’ she said, a little hoarsely. It wasn’t often she fumbled with words. But then it wasn’t every day the third richest man in the country summoned you to announce his imminent demise. She wondered if she should ask what he was dying of, but decided against. If he wanted her to know he would volunteer it.

  ‘Six months the experts give me - at the outside.’ Again the matter-of-fact tone.

  Sheryl supposed he had learned to live with it, learned to roll with the punch, KO though it was. He didn’t look like a man with only six months to live. He was broad and heavily built, but far from obese: bulk, not fat. A cube-shaped head with somehow squashed features, central to which were his blue eyes, brilliant as sapphires. They gave her the uncomfortable feeling they could delve into her mind.

  He was sixty-eight, according to a feature on him in an August issue of The Dominion; she had taken the trouble to raid the newspaper’s archives to brief herself. Three times married, his current spouse less than half his age. Old rich man’s folly. Worth, according to the feature, over two hundred million Kiwi dollars.

  Sheryl knew him only via the media. He was an international hotelier and casino owner amongst other things, outside the circles in which she, a Greenpeace activist and part time schoolteacher of modest means, circulated. No reason for their twains to converge before today. His summons had come out of the blue, issued by a
woman with a voice that had reminded Sheryl of something metallic and shiny.

  In the expanse of window behind Nixon, Harbour Bay was alive with boats of all shapes and sizes under a sky of purest blue. The Harbour Bay Bridge, the ugly-eccentric ‘coat hanger’ that connected Auckland City with the prosperous North Shore, dominated the panorama. It was a holiday brochure sort of scene. But then Auckland was like that. A fair city, traditional and modern, friendly, outgoing, not big enough to be impersonal in the way the aesthetically superior Sydney was.

  ‘I’m real sorry,’ Sheryl said again, with a grimace. She wasn’t good at dispensing sympathy. ‘It must be hard to adjust to. Is there no room for doubt - about the prognosis, I mean?’

  ‘I wish.’

  The dialogue lapsed. Nixon studied her: she was tall enough to have been on level terms with him when they shook hands, big boned, small breasted, dead-straight dead-black hair with threads of grey that contradicted her thirty-two years. Not pretty yet certainly not ugly. The face of a woman hell-bent on getting her way with no compromises. A smudge of down hazed her upper lip. He privately bet she scorned depilation as her way of saying stuff ’em. He found himself wondering - without the slightest justification - if she were a lesbian. Whatever her sexual orientation, she seriously impressed him.

  Her style of dress was surprisingly sober, not at all Bohemian like many Green supporters. Pinstriped black trousers married to a grey silk blouse; her jacket, which was looped through the strap of her shoulder bag, was a creamy colour with a Greenpeace badge pinned to the lapel. Middling-good quality, none of your Farmer’s department store trash.

  He had invited her to this meeting, not on the basis of a head-and-shoulders shot in the local press, nor even because of the street interview on Channel 1 television that he had caught last week, but because of her firebrand reputation. Forever at loggerheads with the Greenpeace leadership, on whose fringes she skulked over what she saw as their ‘pussyfooting’ tactics.

  ‘It’s time to show the mailed fist,’ she had stormed at the TV cameras, following a demonstration over some whale hunting protest against Japan. ‘Our boats are never going to make an impression until we start loading them with torpedoes!’

  Hot air rhetoric? Or was she genuinely prepared to back tough talking with kick-ass action? He’d arranged to meet her here to find out.

  ‘Before I go, I want to do something really worthwhile with my money,’ he said, reaching for his beer.

  To go by Sheryl’s expression this was a routine, redemption-seeking line. Do a good deed, make your peace with the Almighty.

  ‘Very commendable,’ she said drily as he guzzled from his glass. Her own black coffee was untouched and getting cold.

  ‘Before I go,’ he said again, undeterred, ‘I want … I intend to make an impact. I intend to spend a large part of my wealth doing some good for the world.’

  ‘Wow.’

  The flat irony didn’t escape him but caused no offence. He was past taking offence over anything. In his case, life really was too short.

  He paused, an invitation for her to elaborate. She said nothing. Fair enough. It was his party. It was for him to make the running. She was no doubt waiting for the big bang.

  He spread his hands, a gesture that reminded Sheryl of an old Jew who used to live next door to her parents.

  ‘I could throw money at a few million starving Africans or make donations to the WWF, UNICEF, Save the Children, or a whole bunch of worthy causes, but I’ve decided to fry bigger fish … the biggest fish of all in fact.’

  Now Sheryl came alert. Suddenly she knew what he was about.

  ‘I got you. You want to save the world.’

  His lips twitched, as close as he had yet come to a smile.

  ‘Astute of you. How did you guess?’

  ‘Easy. The fact that it’s me you contacted. You know my history and it’s not about making collections for Oxfam. As you say, the issue is the state of the world, not its population, which is replaceable. Very replaceable. But without a habitable planet it’s goodbye human race.’

  Nixon settled back into his seat, placed the palms of his hands flat against each other as if about to intone a prayer. ‘You’ve had more practice than me. Why don’t you make my speech for me?’

  Sheryl was only too glad to oblige. An audience of one was still an audience. This particular individual, with his multi-millions, was worth a whole auditorium-full of Mr and Mrs Averages in terms of what he could help her accomplish.

  ‘It’s been said before, by others as often as me.’ She shuffled to the edge of her seat. ‘First we got to get rid of the weapons of mass-killing - nuclear, biological and chemical. Vaporised, pulped to nothing, buried, whatever it takes. Then we deal with the governments who deploy them, and the scientists, the scum who create these monstrosities …’

  ‘Deal with them?’ Nixon interrupted. ‘How exactly?’

  ‘Lock them away for fucking-ever.’ She almost spat the words at him. ‘When we’ve established the basis for a peaceful world, we take care of the despots, the dictators, and the demagogues. Eliminate them and we eliminate genocide. Afterwards we tackle the problem of pollution - of the air, the seas, and the land. Crippling fines for first offenders, prison sentences if they do it again. And I’m using the term pollution in all its senses. I list the clearing of rain forests and the indiscriminate slaughter of wild life under the same heading. Only then, when the planet’s been cleaned up, can we start to improve the lot of the individual and tackle poverty.’

  ‘You paint with a broad brush,’ Nixon said, a whiff of awe in his voice. ‘How can you hope to accomplish all that, or rather, since you have no powers, influence its accomplishment, in your lifetime?’

  Sheryl snorted, causing a lone striped-suit in the nearest chair to glance up from tinkering with his palmtop. She eyeballed him and he looked down at once. Sheryl Glister was not the kind of woman you exchanged loaded winks with.

  ‘This is not a lifetime agenda, Mr Nixon. This is about forever, about infinity. Maybe you know already, maybe you don’t, but it’s literally gonna take centuries to restore health to the world. The immediate objectives, the ones I feel we have some hope of attaining while I’m still young enough to play an active role, are the removal of all weapons of total war, beginning with nuclear.’

  Nixon quaffed what was left of his beer, wiped his mouth on the tissue mat provided. ‘Your coffee’s getting cold.’

  She dismissed her coffee with a discreet snort. ‘Okay, so now you know my cause. What are you offering?’

  He had noticed that so far had she had not once smiled. Not on account of her teeth, which were white and straight, if on the large side for a woman.

  He voiced the thought.

  ‘Smile?’ She stared at him, almost with distaste, as if he had just farted noxiously. ‘What are you looking for - a cover girl? A candidate for a toothpaste ad? There’s nothing about this shit to make anybody smile!’

  ‘Accept my apologies.’ Nixon was contrite but not about to grovel to her. She needed his money more than he needed her militancy. ‘But you should, just occasionally, lighten up a little. It wouldn’t diminish your arguments or demean your standing, you know.’

  She nodded tersely. Up to a point he was right. She should ease off the gas pedal now and again. So much intensity was hard to maintain. Maybe that was why she had so many migraine headaches, like the one coming on now.

  ‘I’ll try,’ she said, stern-faced, and when he grinned indulgently at her she found herself grinning back. All at once she liked him. Feeling self-conscious, she brushed her fringe from her eyes and fumbled for cigarettes in her shoulder bag.

  ‘All right then,’ Nixon said briskly. ‘Down to brass tacks. I’ve met you and I’m impressed. I reckon you could do the job.’

  ‘What job?’ she said, talking around the unlit cigarette. ‘Who says I’m in the market for a job? I thought this was about giving money to Greenpeace.’ She flicked her lighter.<
br />
  ‘This is a no smoking area,’ he admonished mildly. ‘But you go right ahead. Nobody will say anything as long as I’m with you.’

  ‘Money buys its own house rules, eh?’

  ‘It has its uses. But in this instance it’s going to be used to rescue planet Earth. I’m going to place at your disposal the sum of one hundred million Kiwi dollars.’

  Clichéd response though it was, the cigarette fell from her fingers. Before she could retrieve it, a passing waiter stooped and did it for her. In unspoken reproof he handed it back.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said absently. Then, to Nixon, ‘Are you kidding or are you kidding?’

  ‘I’m not kidding or kidding. But there are conditions …’

  Now she actually laughed, again distracting the striped-suit from his calculations.

  ‘I’ll bet there are. Enough strings for an army of puppets, I reckon.’

  ‘You’ll like them. Believe me.’ He scrutinised her over his glasses. ‘I want you to quit Greenpeace and form a breakaway organisation, dedicated to the aims you outlined a few minutes ago, but using your methods, working to your formula, and with absolute control over the whole fighting fund.’

  Finally he had taken her breath away. Her jaw didn’t exactly sag but she lost a little colour and put a hand to her cheek, a feminine act that seemed at odds with her otherwise manly persona.

  ‘Really wow this time. This has got to be a joke of some kind. Father Christmas doesn’t come in October.’

  ‘He has this year,’ Nixon said, attracted to the human side of her face that she had fleetingly let slip.

  ‘One hundred million you said. For real?’

  ‘That’s what I said, that’s what I meant.’

  ‘But why me? Why not Steffie Mills, for instance.’

  New Zealander Stephanie Mills, leading woman activist in Greenpeace, had been Nixon’s preferred candidate. His tentative soundings had been rebuffed. Not only that, but she was banned from France as a consequence of her leading part in the protests at Mururoa Atoll, which he felt might limit her effectiveness one day.