Free Age of Heroes by James Lovegrove

incident in Syria when he had witnessed a religious-fundamentalist terrorist open fire on a crowd in a city square with an unlicensed automatic rifle of just the sort that he, Killian, traded in. The tally of victims stood at 34, schoolchildren among them, and the masked gunman, riding pillion on a scooter, had got away without ever being caught and held to account. The attack had been Killian’s Damascus moment (literally, in this case), and he had thereafter employed his knowledge of weapons and the combat skills he had acquired during a stint in the US Marine Corps to stand up on behalf of people who had fallen foul of hostile forces and could not fight back for themselves. If he stumbled across a wrong, he did whatever was required to right it. As the strapline on the cover of every Jake Killian novel said, “When Killian comes to town, the bad guys better run.”
    This time round, Theo planned for Killian to take on international people traffickers. The setting would be Eastern Europe, for the most part. Research would entail reading books about the region, delving into websites, and maybe visiting a couple of locations, plus talking to journalists with first-hand knowledge of the subject matter.
    The first task, though, was to lock down the basic plot structure. The narrative needed to open with Killian encountering some situation that would put him at odds with the villains and provide an imperative for him to roll up his sleeves and get stuck in. That was how the other books kicked off. So, what if Killian was visiting a foundation he had set up for the rehabilitation of child prostitutes in, say, Romania, Lithuania, somewhere like that? And what if a bunch of armed goons stormed the premises in order to kidnap a young girl who had recently been rescued from the clutches of their boss, a sinister Russian oligarch? Outnumbered and outgunned, Killian would be unable to prevent the goons from taking the girl, but there was your plot catalyst, your inciting incident, right there. The rest of the novel would detail his efforts to retrieve her and bring down the oligarch and his private army.
    Bingo.
    Theo began composing an outline, transferring his ideas up onto the screen, feeling his way from one scene to the next, identifying where the chapter breaks should go in order to maximise suspense, establishing a couple of subplots that would weave around the linear main plot like the serpents, adding depth and texture ...
    He had been at it for over an hour when his phone rang.
    Chase Chance.
     
     
    H E COULDN’T IGNORE the call, much though he’d have liked to. He was in the throes of creativity. He was reluctant to break the flow. But...
    “Chase.”
    “Theo.”
    “What’s the word?”
    “Not good.” Chase sounded sombre. From someone normally so upbeat, this did not bode well.
    “How not good?”
    “It’s him,” Chase said. “It’s Aeneas all right. Pious Aeneas.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “I got to see the body. I viewed it in the morgue. Pretended I was a relative – not actually a lie, really. Took some doing. A bit of browbeating, a bit of bribing. But I did it. And...”
    “Categorically, unconditionally, you’re telling me you have just seen the body of Aeneas?”
    “Less than an hour ago. Fuck me, Theo, it was him and he’s dead.”
    “Killed-in-an-avalanche dead?”
    “Crushed. Mangled. A hell of a mess. Face only just about recognisable.”
    “So it might not be him,” Theo said. “Might be a lookalike. I mean, this is standard procedure, isn’t it? Or rather, was. Find a stand-in, a substitute, a corpse that resembles you. Dress it in your clothing. Put your personal effects on the body. Voilà . Before fingerprinting, before DNA testing, that’s how we did it.”
    “It was him, Theo,” Chase insisted. “I’d know if it wasn’t. We can tell, can’t we? We recognise our own kind. It goes beyond the visual. What I was just looking at in the morgue of the Hospital Gobernador