"Vodka martini - shaken, not stirred."
James leaned against the bar, his throat gasping for something wet, alcoholic and most important of all, cheap.
"Sorry, Jim, we ain't got any vodkas. I can do you a WKD. The blue ones taste a bit like bubblegum!”
Eve, the barmaid, went rummaging through the fridge of multicoloured atrocities, finally finding the sickly sweet drink she’d mentioned.
“How much?” James asked, flipping through the remaining notes in his wallet. A Navy pension should’ve been ample enough to fund his drinking habit, but that had all changed since the Shanghai incident. You sleep with one diplomat’s daughter and the country calls you a hero. The diplomat’s daughter is 16 and you accidentally kill her with your biro that is also a very small, capable gun, and suddenly you’re “too old for service”, “lucky to be alive”, or “get the fuck out, James, and don’t let me see your face again.”
Eve slid the fluorescent bottle across the counter.
“£2, Jim.”
James handed over a fiver, waved away the offer of change, and went to sit in a booth.
It’d been five years since the incident. He’d killed hundreds of people in his career, maybe thousands, but he’d never lost so much as a night’s sleep until the girl. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, really. She had a habit of chewing pens, and one thing led to another, and suddenly he found himself cleaning up bits of the diplomat’s pretty head off his dresser, Moneypenny frantically trying to get an extraction team into Chinese airspace.
His therapist couldn’t help, because he couldn’t tell her the real reason behind his sleeplessness without getting her vetted by MI6, and the spook shrinks were looking for any excuse to lock up him for being mental. No, he was just going to have to keep drinking this blue poison until he blacked out.
As James got down to the last sip, his old friend Felix came through the door. He hadn’t seen him in years, and it wasn’t like him to come unannounced. James tried to get up to greet him, but his bad back combined with the cheap alcohol made it difficult to do so without feeling like he was going to vomit bright, hitherto unseen colours.
“Jimmy! Don’t get up on my account. How the hell are you?”
James was having none of this small talk nonsense, he was going to get right to business.
“What’s the job, Felix?”
“Oh, Jimmy, what happened to your charm, your swagger? You Brits always knew how to talk your way out of trouble. You can’t even pretend with me?”
Felix sat opposite James in the booth, shouted an order at the barmaid, who promptly ignored him, then pulled out a cigar.
“You can’t smoke in here, Felix.” James felt ashamed for both saying that and feeling it was the right thing to say. 50 years of smoking and drinking, and now he was anti-smoking and drinking children’s drinks all day. What the fuck had happened?
“Since when?” Felix asked, putting the cigar away.
“I’m not sure. Feels like a lifetime ago. Look, I’m sorry, but I’m busy, what do you want?”
Felix beamed, like he was about to make James’ day.
“You know we were talking about getting you a job? Well, a departmental position just opened, in the garden.”
The way Felix said that, James knew it had to be a capital G on garden. Various departments had innocuous nicknames. The brainwashing section of MI6 was called The Classroom. The biological weapons section was called The Playground. The Garden. Yeah, this was going to be interesting.
“What am I going to be doing there?”
“Mostly pruning.”
Pruning. He was always amused by how organisations like the CIA or MI6 could take such a heartless, terrible act like murder and give it such an innocent name. He’d “cleaned”, “washed”, and “retired” people during his career, but pruning was a new one. He always thought he’d had green fingers.
“Okay, who’s the target?”
“Sorry?”
“Targets?
“Er, hydrangeas, mostly.” James squinted at him, sucked out the last of the sugar vodka, and slammed the bottle down onto the table.
“Felix, stop fucking around. You know I can still go. I don’t need a piece of paper to kill someone, I don’t need M’s permission, you know I can work under the radar. I haven’t worked in five bloody years, I can’t sleep Felix. Now buy me a drink and tell me where I’m going.”
Felix got up and walked to the bar without replying.
“Vodka martini - shaken, not sti-”
“Do you lot not drink anything else? We ain’t got no vodka, we ain’t got no martini. You can have a lager, a Guinness, or something from the fridge.”
Eve waved toward the fridge, rapping her fingers on the bar impatiently.
“Let me get one of those green drinks.”
“£2.”
Felix handed over a fiver and stared a hole in her head when she didn’t immediately hand over the £3 change.
Walking back to James, green potion in hand, he tried to think of how to break the news. Did Jimmy really think he could still go in the field? He’d put on about 50 lbs over the years. His hands shook terribly and the psych report from MI6 said he wasn’t fit for a desk job, let alone active service. He’d tried for years to find him something, anything, and a quiet spot in the garden would be perfect.
“James, I don’t know what you think you’re going to be doing if you take this job, but it’s not going to involve action. I got you a job in the company’s garden. As a gardener.”
“Capital G?”
Felix absent-mindedly pawed at the cigar in his pocket, desperate to take his mind off this conversation.
“Jimmy, I don’t know what that means. Look, you can do some weeding, some pruning, get some fresh air, exercise, and get paid a healthy amount for doing so. Or, you can spend the remainder of your years in this dive, talking to that idiot over there, drinking this glow-in-the-dark filth. What’s it to be? I need an answer today.”
Felix’s eye twitched a bit, a tic left over from years of work in the field. James mistook it for a wink.
“Oh, I see. Pruning. Weeding. Yes, yes, we’re in public, I know what you’re saying. Okay, where do I sign?”
Felix sighed and sent a text to his superior.
JIMMY007 WONT BE COMING IN. CONSIDER NEXT TARGET, DR NEIL C
“I’ll sort it out, Jimmy. We’ll get the paperwork sorted out soon. I’ve got to go. You take of yourself, okay? We’ll talk soon.”
Felix headed out, pulling the cigar out and lighting it as he left. Eve shouted at him, Felix ignored her, James smiled.
I’m getting back in the game, James thought, as he took a swig of the green swill. It’d been too long, he was going to have to get back into shape, but he knew he could still do it, he knew he could be an asset. James pulled out his biro, started scribbling notes on the back of a beer mat. He listed the equipment he was going to have to requisition, the people he was going to have to call. He had some favours left to call in. A couple of months was all he’d need, then he’d be ready to go.
He slipped the biro in his mouth, chewing mindlessly, when the world suddenly went black.