Meet Borden
Meet Borden, industrial saboteur for hire. Maybe he’s a little past his prime. Maybe he’s botched his last few jobs. But he’s been hired to pull off the biggest job of his career, and Vancouver doesn’t stand a chance.
By happy coincidence Borden was standing on Wreck Beach looking right at the target when his cell phone growled into the first few bars of Yuve Yuve Yu. The LNG tanker was cruising up and down Georgia Strait beyond the mouth of Burrard Inlet, waiting for the last bureaucratic squabbling to settle down before sailing in to prepare for her big day. He let the phone thrash out more Mongolian warrior-rock as he watched the ship through binoculars. It was a ridiculous tub, looking like a lowrider cargo hull with four monstrous white boils erupting out of its deck. Tiny men scurried around the top of the huge tanks, cleaning and scrubbing until they gleamed.
He flipped open the phone just before it went to voicemail. It was ancient tech, but it only needed to remember one number and had no GPS tracker. Borden had chosen the take-no-prisoners ringtone because he knew the man on the other end of the call, a medieval son of a bitch with a gold pen and a briefcase. They had met long ago during the heady days of radical action in the West Coast old-growth rainforest, two kindred spirits lurking amongst the hippies. They’d all lived in rusted-out vans, sharing joints and plotting to save the big trees, but both of them had instantly recognized the other wolf in the fold. Borden spent his nights blowing up logging trucks and grapplers while his friend drove ceramic spikes into trees to mess with the fallers’ chainsaws, and sometimes the fallers themselves. During daylight hours Borden had slept in the van, staying out of sight. His friend had spent the time talking, telling the hippies what they wanted to hear and learning to work the media.
Fast-forward 30 years or so, and guess which one of them had talked his way into the corner office of a major environmental concern.
“I’m here,” Borden said into the phone.
“How’s she look?” said the voice on the other end, a rich baritone gone a little sandy with the years.
“Like a sitting duck.”
Find out how Borden uses Jackson’s intuitive knack for ballistics. See what happens when Borden and Wendy meet. Pick up a copy of The Night Nurse today.