The Assassin Who Never Smoked

This is a non-erotic story, which just to labour the obvious, means exactly what it says. There's zero sex. I mean zero.

So why read it? Because it's a nice little mind control mystery thriller with a twist in the tale, and it's short.

Joe.

Lee stands leaning against the kitchen sink while she reads the hand-scrawled pages, her expression blank. When she finishes it, she puts a hand to her lips in thought. Dan, her husband watches her, waiting. Finally she speaks:

"So, you've known all this since January. You've known for the last two months, and kept quiet about it all that time."

If you're reading this, either I'm dead, or you're an expert safe-cracker. Or there's another possibility: Maybe I finally broke down, Lee, and told you the truth about my job.

It's January as I write this. Up until last November I worked for the British Secret Service. My field was assassination. My usual method was poison, which I would administer by various means, depending on the target: For a man of letters, a drop of sarin on the page of a book; for a keen horticulturalist, the inside of his gardening gloves. In some cases I got to meet my target and gain his confidence. But none of them ever suspected me in the least. Not until it was too late.

I received my instructions anonymously, by post: Every few weeks an envelope would plop through the letterbox at my home, postmarked from Westminster, London. The letter consisted of a name and address, no more. Nothing to identify the sender. Anonymity was pervasive in my field. Once I had the details I would work on my assignment. It would usually take no more than two or three days to plan, then execute the killing. And then I'd wait until the next assignment came.

My wife, Lee, was unaware of my real job. She knew I was a civil servant of some kind, and that I worked in Whitehall. Lee worked from home. She was a psychotherapist, specialising in adolescent emotional and cognitive disorders. The majority of the time I would leave the house at 8:30 in the morning, off to my fictional job at Whitehall. Then I would just hang around the West End, reading in cafes, bookshops and libraries, until it was time to go home. This was my daily routine. Except, of course, on those days when I had a killing to plan. In any case, I would usually arrive home promptly every weekday at six, hug Lee, and we'd ask each other how our day went. Lee might tell me a little about one of her current cases, as far as patient confidentiality would allow. But I would keep gently quiet about my work, which she knew was classified. She was happy that I didn't bring my work home with me. She never asked me about the times when I'd arrive home late in the evening, when my assignment required darkness to complete. She knew that my secretiveness was entirely due to the nature of my work, and that I'd never have an affair or do anything like that.

This was, as I say, my life until last November. It was the 11th. I'd received an assignment that morning, but hadn't read it. I left the house with the unopened envelope in my jacket pocket. It could wait until later. I took the tube to Covent Garden. I went into the little newsagent at the station exit to buy my usual snack, but came out with a pack of cigarettes. This was a very strange thing for me to do, as I didn't smoke. In fact I'd never smoked. In all my born days.

I stared at the pack of cigarettes in my hand in shock, and turned to go back into the shop to return them. But then I stopped still. A sudden thought had arisen in me, from nowhere, it seemed: "Why not try one?" I tried to laugh it off, but the thought wouldn't go away. I hurried away from the newsagent, still clutching the pack.

I walked rapidly but without purpose through the busy West End streets, lost in thought. There was a definite possibility that there was a sinister cause for my odd behaviour: perhaps someone from a rival group was trying to get to me. I'd heard rumours about mind-control drugs being used in my field, but even as an insider I'd never witnessed anything that would convince me that it was anything more than spy fiction. But what had just happened to me seemed to me to be exactly the sort of thing that would indicate such an attempt to manipulate my mind. Paranoid? Accusations of paranoia don't apply in a job like mine.

After a while I found myself on a bench in Green Park, the unopened pack of cigarettes now in my pocket. A man sat down next to me. He was wearing a high visibility jacket and work boots. He nodded and smiled.

"Morning," he said. To my horror, he lit up a cigarette. He caught my stare.

"Sorry, do you mind...?" He added, wagging the cigarette in indication.

"Not at all!" I said automatically.

He surveyed the trees and wide lawns of the park idly.

"This is about the only place they let people smoke these days." I detected an East European accent. A Polish immigrant builder perhaps? Or was that just a disguise?

To show him that I too was a supporter of personal freedom, I nonchalantly fished the pack out of my pocket and popped a cigarette in my mouth. I feigned fumbling for a lighter, even though I knew full well I didn't have one. He handed me his.

I inhaled the hot smoke deeply, and, surprisingly, it felt completely natural to me, as though I'd always smoked. But it should have felt awful: This was the first cigarette of my life.

I wished I could talk to Lee about it. But I couldn't talk to her. It would mean a lot of awkward questions, which is something I couldn't risk. No, best to leave Lee out of it for the moment, I decided.

I thought about my strange, murky job. And the more I thought, the more I puzzled over it. How could I be sure I really was working for the British? I tried to recall how I got into the business. And with growing bewilderment, I found I couldn't remember! In fact I couldn't recall much at all about my previous life, other than that I worked at a pharmaceutical lab that was attached in some way to the military. But it was all vague. It was as though, as though.... I felt close to a revelation... but the feeling subsided, and I returned to the present. The man who had sat next to me was gone. My cigarette had burned down to the filter.

I suddenly remembered the envelope in my pocket. As usual, just a name and address. But this time there was something out of the ordinary about the address: It was a houseboat, moored on the Grand Union Canal in West London.

"Death by drowning, I think", the assassin in me decided.

I was tired. It could wait till tomorrow.

I returned that day earlier than usual. Parked a few yards from my house was a battered and dirty pale blue van. It was so decrepit it looked as though it had been dumped there. I knew all the cars belonging to my neighbours, and I was suspicious of any unusual vehicles parked nearby. I could be under surveillance. I looked inside the front window, then I peered in through the back window and saw that the van had been piled high with logwood. I decided it probably belonged to a gardener. Certainly no visible electronic equipment in there.

As I approached the front gate to my house, I saw a striking-looking red-headed girl in a Khaki anorak smiling at the threshold of my front door talking to Lee. Then they hugged goodbye. I didn't go in, but walked past my house. The girl was one of her patients, I guessed. Lee didn't like her patients to know anything about her personal life. And that included me. I stopped and pretended to tie my shoelace. The girl passed me, talking on her phone. "Hi, it's Clare. I'll be home in an hour."

So her name was Clare. Pretty name for a pretty girl. I watched her as she continued down the road. To my surprise she got into the blue van. Something seemed incongruous about that, I thought. Then I decided I was just being sexist, there are plenty of female gardeners.

Lee and I hugged as usual.

"How was your day?" I asked, cheerfully.

"Oh Dan, if you knew..." She trailed off angrily, her bond of privacy with her patients preventing her from continuing. How frustrating it could be for both of us not being able to discuss our respective days, I thought. And then I remembered the cigarette again. I felt such a strong urge to let her know about the cigarette, about -- my job, everything. I took off my jacket.

"Darling, do you remember..." I was going ask if she remembered how we met, because I just couldn't recall anything at all. But I checked myself: She looked so careworn and worried that I couldn't bring myself to add to her anxiety by letting her know I thought my mind was being tampered with. So I finished the question with "... the last time we had a holiday? Because I think I need one."

She smiled grimly and answered, "You and me both."

When she said that I felt better. I realised that all that was wrong with both of us was simply exhaustion and stress. I decided to take a sleeping pill and get a good night's rest. That was what I needed.

I was right about needing a good night's rest. I slept well that night, and awoke feeling refreshed and ready to tackle my assignment. I went straight to the address I'd been given the previous day and surveyed the houseboat and the area. It was quite isolated. Definitely drowning the target would be easy. Or carbon monoxide from the wood-burning stove. At this last thought I felt sudden shock. Across the canal a little narrowboat was moored, and on its roof were firewood logs. I remembered the blue van. I walked around the streets by canal until I found it, still with its load of firewood.

I couldn't figure it out. It couldn't be coincidence. Lee's patient was in some way connected with my target. Was the girl -- Clare -- an enemy spy? I kept some of my classified documents in a safe under the stairs at home, which was alarmed directly to Whitehall. The combination was known only to me and had never been written down. Maybe my mental lapse yesterday was also connected to that. Maybe "they" were trying to get at the combination number in my head, and they'd dispatched her to my house to try to crack the safe, posing as one of Lee's patients. But Clare made an unlikely safe-cracker, even more unlikely than her being a gardener.

I altered my plans regarding disposing of my target quickly, and decided to find out more about him and his relationship with Clare. After ten minutes' research (I simply asked people along the towpath if they knew a red-headed girl called Clare), I discovered that Clare and my target shared the same last name. More likely to be father and daughter, I thought, than brother and sister or husband and wife. Not a typical set-up for agents. Perhaps they were members of some eco-group, I thought, considering their choice of a narrowboat. Suddenly I had the urge to smoke again. The cigarettes were still in my pocket. Unable to control myself, I lit one up (It seemed I'd pocketed the lighter from the man in the park).

I loitered on the towpath, smoking and thinking. Overhead, the clouds broke to reveal thin strands of pale blue. And I felt that my mind started to clear with the clouds. Or with the rush of nicotine. I tried to recall my past life. Still nothing. How I met Lee. Also nothing. But now, I could remember, with sudden clarity, my last five or six assassinations, and could see a similarity in them. They had been very different in some ways: A fall from a high-rise in a run-down housing estate, a poisoned mobile phone belonging to a city worker, a sleeping pill overdose of a classical music scholar in Hampstead. But now I realised they had one thing in common: They had all been men in their forties or fifties. And of the three men whose lives I had found out about, all of them had had -- I put a hand to my forehead -- children around Clare's age. And now I knew that one of the children was Lee's patient.

Although I found it pretty hard to suspect Lee in any way, I now felt pretty sure, that, possibly unbeknownst to her, as well as to me, the two of us were both being used in some way by Whitehall. But for what purpose?

I had to check if any of the other victims' children were also Lee's patients. That would mean breaking into Lee's private filing cabinet when she wasn't there. Easier said than done, I thought. She was always there. "I don't want you hanging around the house while I'm seeing patients. It's unprofessional," she had said. But she hadn't needed to say it. Life had conveniently arranged it that I was never in the house during the day. In fact I was never alone in the house. How could I get Lee out of the house without arousing her suspicion? No, there was another way. Wait until she'd gone to bed. I returned to the task at hand. I'd do it this evening, and return home late.

I staked out the houseboat from the towpath until it was dark, smoking cigarette after cigarette, until my target appeared. I wasn't surprised to see that he was a red-headed man in his forties. I'd found out that he was a nightly regular at a local pub, and would stagger home around half past eleven at night after closing time. Tonight he'd slip on oil into the canal and drown. Too easy. But, no, I wasn't going to do it tonight. Not until I knew how Clare was involved. And how Lee was involved.

I sometimes used a bugging device, when planning my murders. I decided to use it on Lee. I intended to attach it to the underside of the armchair in Lee's treatment room while she was asleep upstairs. I assumed that during sessions her patients used to sit in the armchair while she sat at her desk, on the only other chair, an ordinary office chair, where she'd presumably be taking notes and looking professional. The armchair was low to the ground, and the bug would be well hidden there. And it would pick up any conversations and relay them in real-time to a small receiver. It could also record up to an hour of audio and could be remotely controlled to play the recording back to the receiver. But as I came in late that night, hoping to quickly plant the bug, I saw that Lee was not upstairs in bed, but dozing in front of the TV. She'd been waiting for me to get home. She stirred and yawned.

"Hi Darling, what time is it?"

"I don't know. Midnight." I leaned over and kissed her. Mistake.

"You smell of tobacco smoke! Have you started smoking?" She was fully awake now.

"I've never smoked a cigarette in all my born days!"

"Oh, come on."

"I, yes... one or two cigarettes."

"One or two! Smells like you smoked one or two packets, not one or two cigarettes."

I knew what was coming next: "I can help you with that, you know."

I didn't want her to start doing her hypnotherapy on me. Not that I was worried about revealing anything. Hypnosis can't get people to reveal secrets. Unless used in combination with sodium thiopental. I'd got my hands on that stuff once or twice, but it was of limited use in my line of work. No, the problem with Lee's style of hypnotherapy was not to do with its possible effectiveness in exposing any secrets. To indulge her, once, I'd let her try it on me, and had to bite my tongue not to burst out laughing. She'd played some horrible new-age music, and waved an interminable succession of crystals and pendulums in front of my face. It not only failed to work on me at all, but annoyed me. Of course I didn't have the heart to tell her to her face what I thought about it.

"Mm. Maybe tomorrow," I said, smiling.

"No come on, I'm awake now, it will be fun." she said. I looked at her warm, loving face, with her flirtatious smile, and cursed myself for suspecting her. But I was still resolved to plant the bug. I decided that Lee was innocent about any relationship between Clare and my target, but listening in on their hypnosis session together would help me get to the bottom of things, and find out who Clare actually was. And now here was an opportunity for me to plant the bug, while I played along with Lee trying to hypnotise me to stop smoking.

"Okay, but let's do it in your office, with me on the armchair," I said, making it sound like a little role-play game. It worked; her eyes lit up and she laughed, "We can play doctors and patients!"

I sat in the chair and quickly stuck the bug underneath it. Lee turned the lights down low. The room was all oranges, reds and deep brown shadow.

"Now," she said, adopting a serious tone. "Breathe deeply. In.... and out...."

I remembered little of the session. I thought that I had fallen asleep in that chair within minutes, until I listened back the next morning. Without comment, I transcribe it here:

"Dan, do you remember how we met?"

"I came to see you last year. To help me give up smoking."

"Smoking cessation. That's right."

"And what happened?"

"I -- we fell in love at first sight."

"Yes. And you saw me again a week later, even though you only needed to come once."

"Yes. I saw you again. And..."

"..And?"

"...and then I told you, told you..."

"You told me under hypnosis that you were a covert assassin working for the government -- and a convicted criminal. Do you remember what you said you were convicted for?"

(Weeping) "Murder. But it wasn't me. It was suicide. They blamed me, but it was suicide. They forced me to become, to become..."

"Yes, a professional murderer. And I didn't believe you, until you proved it to me. You showed me your files, the ones in your safe. And then..."

"And then I said that nobody must ever find out that you knew about me, or you would be killed as a security risk."

"That's right. And you asked me to -"

"-to forget that I'd told you anything. And to make me forget too, so I couldn't possibly implicate you in any of my work, even under torture."

"And that's what I did. Just as you will forget everything we're saying now. Say it. Say, 'I will forget this conversation'".

"I will forget this conversation".

"Good. Now, let's help you with your relapse into smoking. Listen to me. Listen to me. You won't feel the urge to smoke any more. You will believe that you've never even smoked. Say it: 'I've never smoked a cigarette in all my born days.'".

"I've never smoked a cigarette in all my born days."

"Good. Now sleep, darling. Sleep in the chair."

So, she knew about my work! And it turned out she was a far better hypnotist, and I was a far better hypnotic subject that I'd imagined. And it proved that there was undoubtably a connection between Lee, Clare, and my target. Far from forgetting about my job, Lee was now actually involved too, working alongside me in a weird partnership. Maybe she too had been coerced into her role in this by Whitehall. Had they threatened her? And that meant that perhaps it was Clare who was innocent, and was somehow being used as a means to get at her father. It was vital that I found out who she was.

I pretended to leave the house for work the next day, but instead sat in my car within reception of the radio signal from the bug. I listened in to Lee's sessions, as patient after patient arrived and left, waiting for Clare to come for her daily session.

Each kid that came had a variation on the same story: Victims of violence, abuse, drugs. I'd had no idea what Lee was having to put up with in her work. I'd thought callously that most of her subjects were suffering from ordinary teen angst, with one or two eating disorders thrown in. But no, these were really bad cases.

And then I heard Clare's session. Like the others, she revealed under hypnosis how her drunken father had raped her and her mother and driven her mother first to alcohol, then to heroin, finally to suicide. And now Clare too was addicted to heroin. And then, when I heard Lee speaking, I finally understood everything: