the odyssey

“You and your friends killed JFK”: Excerpt from Game Of Killers: The Spartan

The inside of the elite retirement home boasted the sort of wood-meets-marble-meets-money look that rich retirees and Bohemian Grovers drooled over. Judging by the level of comfort and the contented demeanor of its occupants, the casual observer would never think that the mighty USA was suffering outside. This was a port from the storm, an oasis of calm in the surrounding scorched earth.

Garin shuffled along the blond wood floor past patients, nurses and doctors, keeping his face hidden under his sailor hat, until he came close to the door he wanted. Checking to make sure no one was watching, he silently let himself in.

Inside, the room’s single, white male occupant – a man in his mid-80s – was sleeping lightly, snoring under the blankets, his nose making a whistling noise.

Looking at him, he seemed like just another old coot . . . hardly the man behind one of the 20th century’s most terrible crimes.

Garin recalled images he’d seen of his suspect: first as a vital young Turk, then as a middle-aged powerbroker with his face blacked out in secret photos, and finally as he was today, thinned out, face like sandpaper. Yes, it was him. Eyeball confirmation. Target is green.

The colonel pulled a chair from the corner and brought it near the bed, the chair complaining with a squeaking noise. As he moved closer, Garin looked at the cross above the patient’s bed. He smiled a wry smile, briefly remembering his own holier-than-thou youth. It had been a long time since he had heard His voice. And he probably never would again . . . regularly coveting his neighbor’s ass was the least of his trespasses against the 10 Commandments.

Meanwhile, the asshole in the bed kept snoring.

Garin grabbed the vase, threw out the flowers and tossed its water into the man’s face. A second or two later he spluttered. Joe Patient’s eyes came to life.

“What? What?”

“It’s time for your sponge bath, sir,” said Garin merrily.

“Who are you?” said the other man, eyes blinking rapidly. “What are you doing in here?”

“What, you’re not buying the sponge bath story?” said Garin conversationally, removing his hat, folding his legs and taking a seat. “Anyway, who am I is classified. I could tell you who I am, but then I’d have to kill you.”

The patient stared at Garin warily. “I don’t know you. Get the fuck out of here.”

“And here I thought all men were brothers.”

“To hell with this,” said the patient, reaching out for the control with the “nurse” button on it. Garin gently removed it from his liver-spotted grasp.

“Ah, ah. Don’t be naughty.”

“If you want money there’s some in the drawer,” said the man, now afraid.

“It’s not about money.”

“Then what do you want? Get to the point, then get out,” said the man in the bed, pointing his eyes at the door.

“No foreplay? Fine. Why am I here? JFK.” Three letters that hung in the air like an accusation. An accusation that travelled through the decades of history, begging for an answer that never came.

The man opposite looked like he’d just seen a ghost.

“JFK?” he croaked.

“Yes, John F. Kennedy, former President of the United States of America. Someone you know only too well.”

There was another long, fraught pause, interrupted only by the sound of the humming air-conditioner.

“Everybody knew JFK,” came the weak reply.

“Some better than others. Like you. Even if your name never came up during the Warren Commission. Even if your finger wasn’t on the trigger that day in Dallas.” Garin leaned in. “Only the rest are now horse glue. You’re the last. And I’m not about to let you get away clean.”

Garin then said the man’s real name. The patient made a strange, choked-off noise, as if he hadn’t heard those unfamiliar words in a long time. His hands shook. If it were another man, Garin might have placed a gentle hand on his to calm him. Yet he didn’t. Instead, he said: “You’re at the end of the road. So why not bare your soul?”

The man’s eyes lit up in panic again. Then, a certain acceptance came over them. Then calculation.

“You open the kimono first,” he said slowly. “Who are you?”

“My name is Colonel Garin. Lover, fighter, retweeter.”

“I’ve heard of you. What was it, special forces? SOCOM?” SOCOM being short for United States Special Operations Command.

“And Homeland Security, among other things.”

The patient fixed Garin with a malevolent look. “Are you like one of those assholes who never got over Vietnam?”

“Wrong war.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, colonel, but don’t you have better things to be doing right now? Have you looked outside the window? The country is godforsaken. FUBAR, even.”

Garin’s eyes were drawn to the window in the room, then back towards the patient. “I do have better things to do. But I thought you didn’t deserve to die peacefully in your sleep. You and your friends robbed the US of a great President.”

The patient shifted under the sheets. “Didn’t you hear? Oswald did it.”

“Very funny. But I do the jokes here.”

“Who sent you? I can’t imagine anyone giving you clearance for this.”

Garin laughed. “You’re the first person I ever met who hoped that red tape would save them. No, I sent myself. One of the benefits of giving orders. Occasionally you can give one to yourself.”

“You still can’t do this. This is America.”

“This was America.”

Garin’s target exhaled as the weight of a great secret left him. “I always wondered if someone like you was going to turn up on my door one day. For years, I used to check underneath my car for bombs. I watched for strange cars in the driver mirror. I woke up in the middle of the night, covered in sweat, expecting to find a hitman in the bedroom.”

Garin nodded. “Guilty conscience, eh?”

“But after so many decades, I realized no one was coming. So, I got on with living my life. A rich, full life I may add, asshole.” Garin didn’t react to the barb. “Now I suppose you want to know why. Like every other dime-store detective out there.”

Garin nodded.

The patient sneered. “Why is a child’s question. You already know why. Because it had to be done. JFK was soft on Communism. Hell, he let the Beard install nuclear weapons on Cuba. On our very doorstep!”

“Permit me to ‘Greedo’ you here . . .”

“What?”

“’Greedo’. It’s Star Wars speak for violently cutting someone off. Which is what I’m doing over your claim that the Commies unilaterally installed nukes in our backyard. Because we had our own Jupiter missiles in Turkey. Right on the USSR’s doorstep. So it was natural for the Russkies to respond by putting theirs in Cuba.”

The patient was unimpressed. “So what? That doesn’t mean Kennedy shouldn’t have backed our boys during the Bay of Pigs. JFK was losing the Cold War. The arrogant bastard was threatening our interests all over the world. He was going to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces. If we’d left it to him he would have cut off our balls and handed them to the Russians.

“So . . . we did what needed to be done. We acted. With the help of our friends.”

“Your friends . . . I know all about those ‘goodfellas’ of yours,” Garin said with disdain.

“You hypocrite,” spat the patient. “Are your hands clean? What have you done for God and country?”

Garin nodded his head slowly, finally agreeing with the cur on something. “You’re right. I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of. But I’ve never had a President assassinated.”

“The world is full of sin,” came the reply. “Is this what you’ve been reduced to . . . avenging one sin at a time?”

Garin carefully considered this surprising riposte. Eventually he said: “In the end, every man draws a circle around himself and says, ‘Everything inside this circle, I accept. Everything outside this circle, I cannot accept.’” Garin pointed his finger at the other man. “And you, I cannot accept.” Garin then stood up, reached over and removed the man’s pillow from under his head. “Anyway, you seem uncomfortable. Let me fluff up your pillow.”

The JFK conspirator knew what was coming. In Garin’s experience, men could be divided into two categories at this point: those that attempted to beg, plead or rationalise at the end; and those that said “fuck you” in the face of oblivion.

The JFK conspirator was the latter.

“Damn you to hell!” he shouted. “It was 50 years ago! No one cares any more!”

“I care,” said Garin sadly.

“Who do you think you are, some kind of hero? Who will ever know what you’ve done here?”

“I’ll know. And in some strange way, history will know.”

The prone figure laughed bitterly. “History won’t know dick.” He laughed again, then shook his head. “Whacking a senior citizen in a retirement village . . . they’ll give you the Medal of Honor for sure!”

“Hush now.” Garin loomed over him, holding the pillow above the man’s head. “Incidentally, the pillow’s not for your benefit. It’s for the maid’s.”

“I regret nothing!” yelled the conspirator with his last ounce of strength. “I’m a patriot! I did my duty!”

“I’m doing my duty, too.” Garin bunched up the pillow, feeling feathers in his fingers and the rush that always came before the kill. “JFK sends his regards.”

The pillow descended.

Continue reading with Game Of Killers: The Spartan, out now as an ebook and paperback. Then read the first instalment, The Spartan, out now as an ebook.

‘The Premier denies responsibility’: Excerpt from The Spartan

The Chinese Premier had learnt how to handle unexpected phone calls from the US President. Typically his American opposite asked him to address the vast difference in their balance of trade, to let the yuan appreciate or to do something about Chinese protectionism. Or, most tiresome of all, he would lecture him about human rights like he was addressing the White House press gallery in public and not the Chinese Premier in private.

The premier would listen politely, promise to look into it – and then, just like the Japanese had done with the Americans decades before, when they were at the height of their powers, do nothing. He wasn’t about to hamstring China for winning at a game that the Americans themselves had help create. The Americans had forgotten one of the rules of international diplomacy: never ask for something you don’t have the strength to take.

The latest G20 summit, where the heads of Europe had offered him and China’s money a rock star welcome while the US President sat fuming on the sidelines, should have told the Americans everything they needed to know about the new global realpolitik.
Yet it was with great alarm that he heard the president rage about the presence of biological weapons of mass destruction on American soil. Worse, that he had proof of Chinese involvement in bringing them to the States, and plans to detonate them. The furious president said that if even one went off he would hold China responsible, and he couldn’t guarantee what would happen next. America had invaded Iraq on the strength of suspected weapons of mass destruction. They were stone-cold paranoid about WMDs. If they had proof of real ones on US soil …

Now coldly angry, both at the threat and the idea that someone had planned this attack behind his back – he would never have authorised something like this during China’s catch-up phase – the premier promised he would do everything in his power to assist the president. That as soon as he got off the phone he would launch an immediate investigation, starting with the background of the assailant that had been caught, now dead. (Did the Americans torture him to death, he wondered.) He would send some of his best men to assist in the investigation. The premier offered the US President China’s full co-operation, and he meant it. The president said he’d phone again soon and that he hoped they could avert catastrophe together.

When the call was ended, the Chinese Premier slammed his fist on his desk. He did not need this kind of headache. He did not want any disruption to the status quo, anything that might make the people restive and question their leaders. He did not want an Arab Spring sweeping his country, where the West hypocritically turned on its former partners and installed new leaders. The lesson of Colonel Gaddafi, that strutting buffoon, was that any country without weapons of mass destruction could be invaded and overthrown by the West. China would never make that mistake. Its leaders would never allow themselves to be pulled out of a drain pipe and shot in the head by rebels like the late Libyan dictator. They would not die suspiciously of “exhaustion” on military trains like the late Kim Jong-il. There would be no Chinese Spring.

He knew that some of his generals had talked about war with America – seemingly welcomed it, even, yearning to embrace China’s glorious military heritage. The military was always pushing the civilian establishment, jostling for position, seeing how far it could go and how much ground it could win from the soft civilians. The premier knew how the military thought: they viewed politicians as weak, corruptible. Yet the premier and his cohorts were far from weak. And corruption was a country-wide problem, from the lowest villager to the most powerful general.

The Communist Party as a principle was firmly against such a war with the US. Not until China’s economy rivalled America’s, along with its army, would they consider such a step. And it wouldn’t be a full-scale war: more like a lesson. Such as seizing the recalcitrant Taiwan and fending off the inevitable US response. Or discouraging American warships in Asia with patrols of their own. No, with trillions of Chinese yuan pumped into the US economy and millions of Chinese working in factories making products to sell to the US, China didn’t want to destroy the US. You don’t destroy your best customer. But China did hope to supplant it, in Asia, in Europe, in Africa.

The Chinese Premier picked up the phone. “Get me everyone,” he said.

Continue reading with The Spartan, out now as an ebook. Then keep reading with the sequel, Game Of Killers: The Spartan, out now as an ebook and paperback.

 

Author Q&A: Charles Purcell

Who are you?

Charles Purcell … lover, fighter, retweeter.
Also a journo with 20-odd years of experience, mostly with the Sydney Morning Herald. Oh, and author of two books: The Spartan and Game Of Killers: The Spartan.

Where are you from?

I was born and raised in Sydney, Australia.

Tell us about your new book, Game Of Killers: The Spartan.

It’s the sequel to the 2014 ebook military thriller, The Spartan.

What’s the plot precis?

“Millions died in the United States when a weaponised plague was unleashed upon the world. Now a new menace threatens the country just as it begins to recover.
The perfect assassin’s tool has been stolen from America’s high-tech labs.
No one is safe … not even the President.
And in the hands of the assassins’s leader is a legendary lost sword: the Honjo Masamune.
Now Tier 1 soldier the Spartan and his ex-Mexican policewoman partner Teresa Vasquez must save the President from being murdered by a bold new enemy – one that seems to be constantly ahead of them every step of the way.
If the President is killed, America will be brought to its knees and the world plunged into war. Plus the ghosts of the past have come to haunt the Spartan: Mexican cartels out for blood, elite operatives chasing revenge and a scarred US General looking to end their deadly grudge match forever.
Can the Spartan and Vasquez defeat their enemies and save America itself?”

Is it inspired by real-life events?

Yes. Particularly the so-called Thucydides Trap: that when a rising power replaces another one, the usual outcome is war. It has happened many times in the past, from Athens and Sparta to Germany and Great Britain.
In this case, we’re talking about the potential for conflict between China and the US. That is the ever-present backdrop for both of my books … what exactly it might take to tip them both into war.

You’re interested in history, then.

Yes, very much so. I studied history at both high school and university. I particularly loved ancient history. I don’t want to live like a Spartan – I’m too much of a pleasure-loving Athenian, fond of my modern comforts – but I do admire the Spartans.

Tell us about your hero, The Spartan.

He’s a Tier 1 soldier, mid-thirties, 250 pounds of tight muscle, cobalt blue eyes, steely brown hair shaped in a buzz cut.
His partner is Teresa Vasquez: special forces trained operative, possessor of the world’s only set of invisibility combat armour, late twenties, brunette, beautiful, smart.
Their job: protecting the United States from all its enemies, both domestic and foreign. And there are a LOT of enemies that fall into both categories.

You’ve written before about the age of the hero being over. How does that apply to the Spartan?

I feel he’s a lot like Ray Donovan, the baseball-bat wielding fixer from the TV series of the same name … a man whose time has passed.
Liev Schreiber once said of Ray: ““Ray is working on old software, functioning in a world that no longer appreciates men as breadwinners and warriors. And there is a lot of pain in that.”
The Spartan is a bit like that: a soldier and a warrior in a world where there’s not much of a place for warriors anymore.
I also feel he’s a bit like The Punisher, Frank Castle, a man on a lonely quest few understand. I love this quote from an emissary of The Hand from Punisher Max: Homeless, as he refuses to take the contract to kill The Punisher: “Frank Castle is an endangered species. And one does not hunt an endangered species. One preserves it. And marvels at its beauty. And on the day it finally succumbs and dies, one mourns its passing, knowing we may never see its like again.”
We like to admire these heroes, but essentially they are people at war with a world that fears and hates them. As Liev says, there’s a lot of pain in that.
So I like to think I’m paying homage to this endangered species before it disappears forever and all the fighting is done by robots or artificially enhanced soldiers.

You’re not a fan of the idea of the Singularity, then?

No. It sounds like a nightmare.

What was the toughest part about writing your book?

Overcoming the hoodoo of the “difficult” second novel.

What was the saddest thing you ever saw as a journalist?

I once saw a star of a comedy series that was huge in the ’80s and ’90s sitting at a comic book convention booth … and no one was going up to him to get his autograph. The look on his face said it all.

You’ve interviewed a lot of famous people: Chris Rock, Robert Downey jnr, Kathy Griffin, Jason Alexander. What quote from one of them stayed with you forever?

When I spoke to Woody Allen about what made him happy … and how we all distract ourselves from the knowledge that one day we will die.
He said: “It’s like what Auden said about death being the distant sound of thunder at a picnic: that’s what [life] is, you’re at a picnic but there’s a distant sound of thunder. You know some day you’re going to die.”

You’re a newspaper journalist. Are newspapers dying?

No. They just smell a bit funny, like a zombie extra from The Walking Dead.

Will there be a third book in the Spartan series?

Maybe. I have some ideas. I particularly liked what Hugh Jackman did with Logan.

What writers do you admire?

Lee Child, Mario Puzo, Don Winslow, Shane Kuhn, Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, John Birmingham from Australia, the guys from The Onion, Hilary Mantel, Tina Fey and probably too many to mention.

What’s something people don’t know about you?

I once hugged Lou “The Original Hulk” Ferrigno.
His arms were soft and strong. I felt so safe.

Any final words?

I hope you enjoy reading Game Of Killers: The Spartan as much as I did writing it.

Game Of Killers: The Spartan is now available as an ebook here and Print On Demand novel here. You can also buy the first instalment, The Spartan, here.

Top 10 lies, crimes and misdemeanours from my first cooking class

  1. Does your oven have at least one umlaut in its name? If not, you’re some kind of prole.
  2. Chefs refer to table salt as “shit salt”. Behind your back, they probably refer to you as “shit customers”.
  3. Three glasses of white wine – also known to chefs as “bitch diesel” – will aid your fine motor skills as you chop onions.
  4. Cous cous was invented by the Nazis as a cheap, barely edible alternative to rice.
  5. Chef: “You’ve touched worse things than that.”
    You: “My God … how does he know? He is some kind of SORCERER.”
  6. No, it is not just like a TV cooking show, apart from the comparable levels of shame, fear and ostracism.
  7. Your “hilarious” gluten jokes will die a horrible death when someone says they’re coeliac.
  8. When someone says your spring rolls are “fatty boom-bahs”, remember to scream “Don’t you fat-shame me!”
  9. Have you added pine nuts to everything? Go back and add pine nuts to everything.
  10. No matter how many movies you’ve seen featuring buxom Tuscan peasant women blissfully serving elaborate, time-consuming meals to grateful hordes, no meal tastes better if you’ve cooked it yourself.
    In fact, they taste worse.

    Laugh at any of these jokes? Go on and buy my ebook military thriller The Spartan.
    I know you probably won’t but I always ask anyway.