The Dastardly Mr Winkle Meets His Match

by Rufus Offor

  He was head to toe in grime and oil. It hid him perfectly, and suited the kind of drinking establishments that he preferred.

  There he sat, silent, angry and getting angrier with every sip of bourbon. He didn’t think that it mattered though as he wasn’t due to meet Shoop and the other independents until the next evening. One nights drinking wasn’t going to spoil anything, and he felt that he deserved a night off.

  Carl’s reasoning wasn’t very acute.

  After seven hours of bar hopping and an unreasonable amount of hard booze, he started feeling the need for some female companionship. His vision was getting a little blurry. He tried with a waitress to no avail and then turned his eyes on the rest of the room.

  He started scanning the bar to see if there were any likely candidates loitering in the thick smoke. He picked out three girls and went about making eye contact with each in turn. After glaring at them all for a while, he was politely asked to leave by the management, as he was scaring people.

  He destroyed the bar in a wild flourish of unheralded violence and then did as he’d been asked and left the bar.

  After that, he didn’t much like his chances of getting laid. He found an off license, it was shut so he broke into it, grabbed a few bottles of Jack and some cigarettes and headed back to the docks to drink until his liver imploded.

  Shoop was concerned. He’d done well in getting information out of Justin. He’d managed to ascertain that Justin hadn’t been posted to Singapore for very long and that it was pure chance that made him see Shoop walk into the Kazbar. He hadn’t contacted the Sphere Of Influence about it, wanting to find out what Shoop was doing before hand. He hadn’t known that Shoop was on the run and so he didn’t feel the need to alert head quarters in Edinburgh.

  Shoop marvelled at the Sphere’s lack of communication. It was almost unbelievable that Justin hadn’t known that Shoop was wanted. Shoop had thought that the first thing The Boss would’ve done would be to spread the word around the globe that Shoop was to be apprehended at all costs. It’s what Shoop would’ve done. He didn’t quite understand the Bosses motives, but it seemed, for the moment, that he’d got lucky.

  The destruction of the gang in the building in China-town, however, was more than probably going to attract Sphere attention. He had some time though. None of the men in the building had been initiated into the Sphere Of Influence properly. They were, as Shoop had suspected, being recruited, and Jason was the operative sent to run them until they were ready to join the fold. This meant that none of the men would have any idea of how to contact headquarters. They would go through Jason stain and him alone.

  Jason wouldn’t be alerting the Sphere as Shoop had put him in a coma.

  Shoop reckoned he had a day, probably two, before the Sphere found out about the gang and what had happened to Jason. It would make him suspect Shoop. When that happened, Shoop’s pace would have to pick up considerably, as would his need for caution. If this thing was going to be tracked through to the end, Shoop was going to have to be a damn sight more careful. He cursed his bad luck at being spotted, but was fairly happy with the result. Things could have been a lot worse.

  He was meeting the independents the next evening, they would be able to take whatever information they’d gathered and vanish for a while. They could withdraw from view and figure out their next move. With any luck, George would have something for them, something that would help them out. They would all be out of the city before sunrise the day after tomorrow.

  None of this concerned him too much.

  The thing that was bothering him was the tiny computer that he was holding in his hand. It was no bigger than a cigarette packet in surface area, and half a centimetre thick. It looked flimsy but was made with indestructible components. It was tiny but was capable of storing libraries worth of data and was quicker than some of the technology that NASA tended to use. It was just another handy little toy that he’d taken from the Sphere labs.

  On the screen was a map of Singapore. He’d been tracking the independents. All of them had been busy researching their given areas of the city and popping in and out of various reference libraries, until Carl had stopped in a bar. Shoop had been concerned about Carl ever since he’d had his little outburst in the Kazbar. It looked like his worries were proving to pan out. He didn’t want to jump the gun though, so he let Carl drink a little before he started getting really tense.

  He watched him for a couple of hours. It appeared that he’d given up his research and started a pub crawl. Shoop decided that he’d risk breaking the contact ban to call Carl and give him a bollocking.

  There was no answer.

  He tried again, no answer.

  He gave Carl a little more time and then decided that he would have to risk going out in public. He was going to find Carl and knock him around for a while.

  He left the relative safety of his hideout and headed for to an area near the port. He hated being outside. He was disguised well, but still. He had been seen by Justin and he’d only met him once. The lines, crevasses and grimace on Shoop’s face meant that, even with the fake beard, dyed hair and glasses, he was quite distinctive. There was nothing that he could do about it, save wear a rubber mask, which would’ve been silly.

  He followed Carl’s tracer for a while but it faltered slightly on the screen. Shoop was loosing his signal for some reason. It flickered on and off, on and off, and then cut out completely. Shoop picked up his pace, desperate to catch Carl before he left the area he’d last traced him to.

  Shoop made it to the bar that Carl had just been in. The state of the place made it clear to Shoop that the tracing device had been damaged during a massive bout of ultra-violent vandalism.

  Shoop fumed but walked past the bar, not wanting to be associated with the fray of police, ambulance’s and fire engines. It looked like Carl could be anywhere.

  It didn’t look good.

  Shoop’s only recourse was to listen in on the police radio channels and hope against hope that Carl would get picked up and that Shoop could rescue him before he got anywhere near a police station. He didn’t like the odds.

  He was going to have to call the other independents and get them to meet him. They were going to have to cut things short and head out of the city.

  Shoop cursed himself for involving Carl and made a promise to himself that if he ever caught up with the swine that he’d do extremely violent and unnatural things to him for a very long time, but for the moment, he had to concentrate on getting out of Singapore before Interpol, and therefore the Sphere, caught wind of Carl and his antics.

  Shoop picked up his phone and told everyone the bad news.

  Carl could handle his drink. The chip on his head gave him a superhuman tolerance of all poisons. He had a liver that most alcoholics would kill for, but he’d drunk down more than his resilient system could handle. Close to three full bottles of bourbon had invaded his system it a little less than four hours. He hadn’t been as drunk since he’d raided his parents drinks cabinet, poured a little of every spirit into a pint glass and downed it in one when he was twelve years old. He’d been trying to impress his friends. The drinking didn’t impress them as much as the greenish colour of his face and the violent fits of projectile vomiting. That really impressed them.

  He’d been sitting on the edge of one of the many docks with his feet dangling over the edge. He’d lost a shoe to the water. His clothes were ripped and torn and had a few scrapes and bruises. He looked very unsavoury. He threw down the remnants of his bottle of Jack, stood up and shakily searched for something for him to break it against.

  The destruction of the bar had done a little to purge his need for violence but there were still traces of it. He felt the need for a little wanton destruction. Smashing his bottle seemed like a good start.

  He swaggered along a street hunting for something acceptable to bounce the glass vessel off. There were some empty warehouses that he could’ve bothered for a moment, but he much preferre
d moving targets, there were simply more fun, and, as luck would have it, there was something moving his way. He saw, through blurred and doubled vision, some head lights coming toward him. He hid behind a massive bin and waited.

  The bottle shattered on the windscreen of the police car with frightening force, flying right through the car to the back seat, taking out the metal grate between the front and back. The policemen leapt from their car abruptly and drew their weapons.

  The drunken sailor that had thrown the bottle was meandering toward them with unnatural speed. It’s hard to meander at speed, but he managed it and the visual effect was quite distressing.

  The policemen yelled for him to stop, he drew a gun instead.

  It took nine bullets to stop him and the police were careful to avoid all major organs, they perforated his limbs and shoulders.

  Carl fought them with his bare hands while he was on the floor until the blood loss rendered him unconscious.

  It took the detectives a little while. But they managed to match Carl’s hospitalised face to an Interpol wanted persons site on the Internet.

  In Edinburgh, the Bosses phone rang

  Chapter 15

  Worries laid to rest, for now

  It was Thursday night, which meant only one thing. It was Shoop TV night.

  Shoop TV had been running in the castle for three weeks now and was already turning into a major event. Members of the Priory Of Sion made there way to the Isle of Skye and the Dunvegan castle where The Sion had set up her home for the last hundred years. There were musicians, DJ’s, acrobats, comedians and a hotchpotch of other entertainers attending every week to keep everyone happy. These people would perform both before and after Shoop TV was projected onto a huge screen in the main hall.

  It was the biggest thing to happen to the organisation since Houdini had visited and imprisoned himself in a cage at the bottom of the loch with concrete shoes on and escaped. In fact, it was bigger, much bigger.

  The local caterers had been stretched to the limit. They’d had to order in masses of supplies from the mainland, predominantly herbal tea, to deal with the weekly influx of revellers.

  Tents were thrown up all around the castle grounds, despite the snow, and every inch of the castle was made into either a bed or a tea station.

  Jill was ecstatic. She hadn’t had as much fun since the first ever Independence Day that she’d spent in Washington. Now that was a party. She knew and loved all of the people that came to visit her and was challenged to all sorts of amusing games. Speed puzzle making, chess, and she was even beaten at Jenga for the first time in her life, a feat that was a marvel to behold. The party after that was monumental. In fact, one of the artists who’d started to attend the event regularly made a one off Jenga trophy for the occasion; a full-scale league was set up.

  In the main hall, everyone sat around the huge round table and stared transfixed at the huge screen that delivered Shoop’s antics every week. The members had loved the attempts of Shoop’s crew to disguise themselves. The disguises were marvellous, a great many of the watchers had trouble figuring out who was who. They had marvelled at Yan’s rowboat journey to Ireland, had cringed at Shoop’s brutality in Singapore when he’d finally caught Jason Stain and laughed heartily when Dr Komodo’s transvestite tendencies had been revealed.

  It was truly a time to be remembered and Mike documented it all meticulously in his journal for future posterity.

  True, many of the events involved pain, torture and sometimes death, but every time something nasty happened, Jill would lead the throng in a chant of “Never mind, I’m sure they’ll all be just fine!” which made everyone feel better about it all almost instantly. They all knew that the universe wasn’t a very simple machine, that death wasn’t really all that bad and that pain was good. It gave the universe experience, much like joy did.

  That particular Thursday afternoon had been a happy bustle of activity, setting up stages, the huge drop down projection screen, putting the last editing touches to the latest edition of Shoop TV and getting all the refreshments ready.

  That night they had quite a few things to look forward to. The post Shoop TV show disco was to have one of London’s top Funk and soul DJ’s providing the music, and the pre Shoop TV show was the Cirque De Soleil, the largest and best acrobatic organisation in the world. They always put on a gob-smacking spectacle. It looked like it’d be one of the best nights on record.

  Jill was standing, sipping a nice hot cup of tea, over looking the hustle and bustle from the huge circular balcony over-looking the main hall. There were some people gleefully spreading a gigantic tablecloth over the round table that Merlyn had given her, giggling with anticipation and recounting the previous weeks amusements. She was smiling contently, marvelling at how simple and yet how great life was on Earth. Life here was great, even when it was troubled it was still awe inspiring and fantastic. The feelings of awe and contentment dripped over her existence like a slow flowing warm tropical stream.

  Shoop TV was a massive operation. They had to set up convincing clues all over the world that would lead Shoop and his independents wherever Jill’s whim took them. She’d had to commission teams to operate and maintain all the tiny darting and hovering cameras that followed them around the world. The pictures were beamed back to an editing suite that had been set up in the castle where they would be cut together to produce the maximum amount of entertainment for the watchers. Sometimes the films ran for twenty minutes, sometimes hours, but no-one ever got bored. It was always a riveting show.

  The tall, looming, athletic beach-bum physique of Mike entered the room and stepped onto the huge circular balcony. He was smiling broadly and fingering the ethnic beads that sat loosely around his ample neck. His mind was clearly miles away. He was completely lost in his own happy little thoughts. He walked up to where Jill was standing and surveying the activities below. He stood next to her for a while, not saying anything, staring off into the distance and smiling. Jill waited for him to come round. He often did this, wandered of into his mind with his body taking him wherever a previous thought had told it to go. His mind would let his body to its work while it went for a wee amble through the ether. It was one of the things that Jill liked most about him. She loved the quirkiness of it.

  She stood patiently, looking down at the bustle and silently loving Mike’s peculiarities. Ben came to join them.

  Finally, after ten or fifteen minutes, Mike ventured back from his mental ether and noticed Jill leaning against the ornate masonry at the edge of the circular balcony.

  “Oh!” He said, surprised, “hey Jill man! How’s it going?”

  “Good yeah, just basking in the bustle you know.” She replied.

  “Yeah I get ya.”

  “How you doing?” She asked

  “Oh yeah……pretty great man….yeah!” he nodded merrily, “I just found out about this monkey, somewhere in Borneo I think, it was seen in the wild making a bridge out of a felled tree to cross a river. In the wild man! Monkeys are getting smarter all the time; I love that sort of stuff. I think I’ll get myself a monkey, I love monkey’s, they’re very cool, them and penguins. Penguins are just so damn funny, one of the funniest animals on the planet. Yeah, I think I’ll get me a monkey and a penguin, and maybe a duck billed platypus. We could all go surfing together, that’d be cool.” Mike looked off into the distance of his imagination and chuckled, but then suddenly came floating back down to earth as if remembering something.

  “OOOH!” He exclaimed, “I was looking for you,” he said as the mission he’d sent his body on earlier connected with his brain, “I had something to tell you. Now what was it?” He tapped his forehead as if to jog the information out of his wayward brain, then it came to him, “Ooh, that was it, in fact, there was a few things, um, the first thing was that all the clues are set up for Shoop to lead him to Barcelona.” He furrowed his brow, thinking, trying to force out the rest of the information. “Yip, that was it, the Cirque De Soliel ar
e here, they’ve been set up with accommodation and refreshments. Last time I saw them they were practicing some very unnatural acrobatic positions, should be a good show, um” He tapped his head again, “Oh yeah, I’ve found out that if you take the main body of a suit of armour, breath deeply into it and speed in a deep voice, you can pull off the best impersonation of Darth Vader that I’ve ever heard outside of the film!” He grinned widely while bouncing on the balls of his feet excitedly.

  “Really?” asked Jill, genuinely intrigued.

  “Yeah man, it’s great! I had some of the guys rolling around the floor laughing at it. I did him in a Cornish accent, it was sooooo funny! I’ll have to show you later.”

  “Definitely, in fact, here’s a thought, we could work out some sort of stage show with it. Have you in the background doing the voice and some other folk acting out a scene from the film, but in Cornish accents!” Jill was getting into the idea more and more with every word that sprung from her mouth.

  “Oh man yeah!” There are levels of excitement that would kill some people, Mike reached these levels and then danced past them. He started talking faster than a caffeine junky after an over dose of amphetamines. In fact his next sentence came out as one long word, “There’stheselightsabersyoucangetfromtheinernetthatglowinthedark andmakethepropernoisesandeverything!”

  They talked for a while, excitedly figuring out exactly which scene they should do, or if they should just make one up about farmers in space. Ben joined in and, after figuring out what they were talking about through the excitement, decided that he absolutely had to play Luke Skywalker.

  This went on for a good twenty minutes until the conversation started calming down a little.