Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

The British assassin smiled at the curvy brunette waitress with big black-rimmed eyes as she stopped before him with a tray filled with bottles of Budweiser and champagne in flutes.

He was going to grab a few lagers, but then his wife elbowed him, and he thought again. A second later, another chesty serving wench brought caviar and hot dogs. This one was a no-brainer. He liberally sprinkled beluga onto two franks.

“Welcome to America,” he said to his wife after a surprisingly tasty bite.

They were in luxury suite 321 on Yankee Stadium’s private level, and it actually fit its ridiculous billing. It had leather seats and couches, flat screens everywhere, a pine-scented private loo. The suite even had a heated balcony overlooking the field, which was coming in quite handy now, this far into November.

Leeds United’s American debut was a true to-do of the old school, so it was filled with posh expat Brits, and even richer real Brits from the other side of the pond, in the Northern Territories.

There were obnoxious Brit big oil crooks and obnoxious Brit big media crooks and obnoxious Brit too-big-to-fail central banking crooks who lent them other people’s money. Coming in, they’d almost knocked down a former Brit supermodel famous for getting busted snorting heroin on the prime minister’s plane. There was even an old rock star from the early eighties drunk off his ass in one corner, slurring into the ear of a bitchy Brit magazine publisher who talked on the news shows from time to time.

It was the wife’s idea, of course. An old friend of hers from boarding school had married a Leeds boy who’d stepped in it and was actually a minor owner of Leeds United. So here they were. His wife was all about status, social networking, moving up the ladder. He couldn’t care less. Whatever she wanted. He was no dummy. As it turned out, “Happy wife, happy life” applied even to hired killers.

Besides, he was in a fairly good disguise, having dyed his hair silver gray to go along with his fake goatee. With some artfully placed stage makeup, he easily looked ten years older than his thirty-nine years.

They had done their homework. They could squeeze in a quick drink or two now that everything was set up. Especially for the one and only Leeds United.

Then the lady of the private suite came by and grabbed his wife, and he stepped out onto the field balcony, from which he saw that Leeds U was inexplicably still tied up with the American hacks. He had to say, the stadium was impressive. The vastness of it, the scope, and yet everything clean and crisp and polished, no expense spared. He looked out at the white scalloped frieze that rimmed the top of the venue, down the bowl of the terraced seating that increased in price the closer you got to the field.

Something Ancient Rome about it. All the different classes in separated seating. Senators and knights in the front row, sweaty plebes and slaves back in the bleachers. Come one and all to cheer the bloody circus.

“We might be scum, but we never run! Leeds, Leeds, Leeds!” said the wife’s friend’s boorish ass of a hubby, Terry Rich Jerk, as he came out onto the terrace in his smart tailored jacket and posh jeans.

“You know, I haven’t been this pumped up since me and the boys sent a manhole cover through a pub window in Millwall,” he said, reeking of Scotch as he clapped the British assassin on the back.

He was referring, as so many others liked to do, to the legendary brawl between Leeds and Millwall fans in 2007. Only problem was that Terry, like so many others, hadn’t been there, the assassin knew.

As one of the top head breakers in the Leeds service crew—the gang of hooligans who had supported Leeds U since the midnineties—he never missed a game when he wasn’t abroad.

There’d been no manhole covers through pub windows that day, but he and a few chums had set a chip van alight when things started getting interesting. Come to think of it, he’d actually broken a K-9 cop’s arm with a length of black pipe when her evil bloody dog bit his friend.

The British assassin smiled as he lifted his flute.

“The good ol’ days,” he said.

“Sally was saying you were in the Royal Marines, was it?”

The British assassin nodded vaguely.

Terry peered at him with his red face.

“What are you in now? Corporate security?”

“Executive protection, they call it these days,” the assassin said. “Ya need an armored S-Class? Tell Sally I know a guy.”

The British assassin looked at Terry as he laughed. He was an upper VP at the Bank of England. The Bank of bloody England! Who the fat sot had had to strangle in order to finagle his way into the upper realms of finance—where the real players pulled the strings, loaning to governments and setting the currency rates as they saw fit, out of thin fucking air—was beyond him. And the whole government-approved scam run for everyone in the small exclusive club getting richer and richer 24/7/365, year in, year out, no matter if rain fell from the sky or buckets of burning lava.

“It’s shit, New York,” Terry mused as he drunkenly looked out at the crowd. “Innit? I mean, London is shit, too, but this is worse. Now they’re playing football like it’s some kind of progress. Don’t they know bloody Liberia has football? It’s like they actually want to become a third world craphole. Anyway, where’d you grow up? In Leeds proper?”

“Off the York Road in Seacroft. You?”

“The other side. In Bramley. You’re in Brighton now, Sally said?”

“Yep,” he lied.

“Well, you’ll have to come by the place in town some Friday night and reminisce.”

The place in town, the assassin knew, being a town house mansion in the Boltons in Chelsea, where the gated piles started at about twenty million quid.