Good Reading dips into the first few paragraphs of new books to give you a taste of what’s to come.
Assassin Eighteen by John Brownlow
I am waiting for someone to kill me.
Tonight would be a good night for it. There was a breeze earlier, but the air’s almost still now, just a lazy sway in the tops of the trees, nothing that could divert a bullet from its path. The moon is almost full, high enough in the sky for a sniper to slip into position with ease, but not so high that I would be likely to see them. A month ago I’d have been invisible from the knob of the hill opposite, but the leaves have begun to colour and drop, and now the forest canopy provides a clear shot from a mile or more.
The house isn’t mine. It belonged to Sixteen, my predecessor, sixteenth in a lineage of professional killers stretching back to the Romanovs. Some started as spies, others as traitors, saboteurs, idealists, policemen and in one case an orphan plucked from the streets of St Petersburg. But all of them ended the same way: elbow-deep in the blood of their fellow men and, sooner or later, their own.
The bearings on which the world turns need grease. We are the grease. We’re flies who gorge on and dispose of the world’s shit, maggots who clean out its festering wounds. We’re the safety valve that stops the boiler exploding, the control rods that prevent another Chernobyl. We’re little Dutch boys with our trigger fingers stuffed in the dyke of history.
Or some crap like that anyway.
A number is a vanity plate awarded by acclamation of your peers. It’s like being voted Prom Queen or Advertising Executive of the Year (Southern Region), only for killing. In the old days we worked alone, on the tip of a hat or the touch of a nose, rewarded with diamonds sewn into the hems of jackets, suitcases full of used notes, bearer bonds, or that hoary old standby, a numbered account in Zurich. Now? Crypto, wash trades of non-fungible tokens, bogus real-estate transactions, offshore corporations, and the services of professional money launderers.
We also take cash.
Killers like us are the tip of an iceberg of death and betrayal, a perverse riff on the Hollywood star system with its moguls and day-players and marquee names. Top billing brings a hefty payday, but you’re only as good as your last job, and there’s always some starry-eyed motherf*cker clawing their way up towards you on the greasy pole with plans to retire you permanently.
One through Fifteen were all dead by the time I was born. None of them expired in their sleep, or expected to. Sixteen’s dead now, too. I didn’t kill him, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Once he was dead, I took his place, his routines, his identity.
He was Sixteen. I am Seventeen.
Somewhere out there is someone who means to become Eighteen.
The road they must travel passes directly through me.
I wish they would hurry up.
MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MORE ABOUT THE AUTHORJohn Brownlow holds British/Canadian citizenship and lives two hours north of Toronto. He wrote the film Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig, the TV series Fleming about Ian Fleming’s work as a spy and the genesis of James Bond, and the TV series The Miniaturist, adapted from Jessie Burton’s best-selling novel.
You can follow him on Twitter @johnbrownlow.
