The second part of the Smith series.
A puzzled policeman considers.
It’s like the IRA all over again. The IRA and the Krays and the Angry Brigade. Why haven’t they all been looking for this killer, this Stephen Smith? Why isn’t the country on high alert?
He discovers why. There are ‘sensitive’ aspects to this case. The public mustn’t be alarmed. In other words, he used to be one of ours and now he’s gone off the rails, got himself the weirdest gang - a posh lawyer couple, an Irish builder, a Croatian stripper, a Cockney chancer and a crazy poet - and a serious amount of cash from a bank robbery in Switzerland, laundered and sequestered who knows where. A highly funded commando unit who are after… what? The report calls them ‘anarchist’. What do anarchists want? Blow everything up? Well when they do, it’s the strangest places.
Then there’s the deaths: a dentist found in the waters of Cardiff Bay – shot. The bits of another one, apparently blown up. A woman, executed in a car park. A general assassinated at an English public school.
Too much mystery.
‘Something stinks. There’s something about this whole situation that’s not right. None of it fits. You all know it. I know it. But our job is to find and catch the criminals. Nothing else is important here. We are going to get this bastard using old-fashioned police work and then we’ll worry about anything unusual going on. So. I want a life story. I want to know the colour of his underpants and the smell of his farts. And I want it all by the end of the day.’
Should be easy enough, after all, Smith wants to get caught. The question is… why?
Violence has been privatised. Smith works for a company that specialises in violent solutions.
“The natural government of the world is gangsterism. The establishment is the biggest gang in town.
But gangsters worry that some day they won’t be frightening enough, charismatic enough, clever enough . . . to prevent a revolution.”
Smith isn’t interested in revolution.
Revenge will do.
For the moment.
Stephen Smith is a translator. He is also trained to kill and hurt. Employed by a private security company owned by two brothers with a grotesque sense of humour, he goes out to the highest bidder, mainly the UK government who prefer not to use their own for any really dirty business. After a particularly gruesome event pricks his conscience Smith has a break down and is imprisoned ‘for his health’. The brothers disagree about what to do with him. One of them, Cornelius, wants him dead. The other, Horatio, likes the idea of keeping him alive, to annoy his brother.
After a failed attempt on his life Stephen decides to go rogue, escaping and embarking on a series of escapades that will expose the company and the people who employ them. Cornelius orders Blake, a serving policeman, disturbed and psychopathic, to track Smith down. The two outsiders, both being used by people who hold them in disdain, create bloody mayhem across a violent Britain where, if ‘the establishment’ is the biggest gang in town, it is also an unwieldy dinosaur, vulnerable to attack from the wildly unpredictable Smith.
Is Smith a revolutionary? An anarchist? He doesn’t think so. As far as he is concerned, this is the response of reasonable people to an unequal society. And he’ll keep it up as long as he’s having fun.
