by Andy Maslen
They made eye contact and Gabriel nodded.
Twist, push, step through fast at a crouch, weapon out in front.
Standard room entry protocol.
Back-up man follows, levels weapon over first operative’s right shoulder.
Occupants faced with two weapons, no target at expected height – operatives both have clean field of fire.
Sitting at a vast dark wood desk was a man. Gabriel took him in with a glance. Immensely fat. Swarthy. Bald but for a topknot tied with a red cord. His sausage-like fingers were flattened over stacks of fifty-pound notes.
As Britta and Gabriel entered the room, his eyes widened until the brown irises were afloat in a sea of white. In the space under the desk they could see a woman’s rear end, covered, just, in a denim mini-skirt. The man pushed back from the desk and yelled out.
“Hafiz! Rafi! Help!”
The woman reversed out from under the desk. Her dull eyes were wet with tears, and when she turned and saw two armed intruders, her hand flew to her mouth, further smearing her red lipstick.
Britta pointed behind her at the open door.
“Out!” she said. “Wait for us there.” Then she turned back to the fat man who was scrabbling to do up his trousers. She levelled her pistol at him. “Well, well, Omar El-Hashem. Now I have a problem.”
“Yes,” he said, his voice shaking. “You are fucking dead, that’s your problem. When my men get up here they will kill you and then we’ll put your bodies in the Thames.”
Gabriel decided to let Britta do the talking. It was her case after all.
“Is that who you were calling? What did you call them? Mickey and Minnie, was it? I’ve got some bad news for you, kuksugare. They’re dead. Me and my partner just sent them on their way. And I’m guessing where they’re going there won’t be any virgins waiting with glasses of nectar for them to drink.”
The man’s eyes flicked past Britta to the open door. Then back at her. Then Gabriel.
“Who are you people? You, man. Tell me, what do you want? Are you from Dmitri? We had an agreement. Girls are my business here. I control the trade and pay him a management fee. He knows this.”
“Dmitri?” Gabriel asked. “I know of no Dmitri.”
“Dmitri Gavas. Of course you know him. Everybody in the trade knows him. He works out of his antiques shipping firm in Chelsea.”
Britta walked closer to the desk. She sat on a corner so she could look down at El-Hashem.
“Like I said, we have a problem. And the problem is, we’re the good guys. Only now we’re in a tricky situation. You see, there are two dead bodies downstairs. The girl’s seen us. And how can I arrest you when we’ve slightly fucked around with due process?”
El-Hashem leaned forward, then back again as Britta’s weapon came up. He pointed at bundles of banknotes in front of him. A sly smile crept over his features. He took both of them in with a look that made what he said next unnecessary, so much did it reek of corruption.
“There is much money there. If you are good guys, your government salaries are peanuts compared to what is there. To what I can pay you. Regularly.”
Britta stuck her bottom lip out.
“Oh dear, now you made me even more sad. You tried to bribe us. When we are loyal servants of the Crown.”
El-Hashem’s hand, the one not pointing at the money, had disappeared under the desk. Gabriel had noticed but he wasn’t sure Britta had. He tensed. The next few seconds seemed to stretch out for ever.
“Then fuck you!” El-Hashem shouted.
He flung two handfuls of banknotes up into Britta’s face.
Britta reared back and stretched her gun arm out in front of her.
El-Hashem’s hidden hand emerged from beneath the desk clutching a tiny black pistol.
He fired.
13
Briefing Britta
EL-HASHEM’S shot went wide.
Gabriel’s didn’t.
He put a single round into the centre of El-Hashem’s forehead,
Britta fired three shots that hit the man in the head and neck. The first two blew away most of the flesh from the lower half of his face but the third tore into his carotid artery. As his head snapped backwards over the top of his chair, jets of bright scarlet arterial blood squirted over Britta before streaking long spatters of red across the ceiling and the side wall of the office.
The smoky smell of cordite and the iron tang of blood were thick in the air. The woman was screaming from just beyond the open doorway: she’d been watching.
Gabriel ran to her, shoving his pistol into the back of his waistband.
She’d sunk to her knees and he knelt in front of her and cradled her head in his palms, getting her to look at him.
“It’s OK,” he said. “He’s dead. He can’t hurt you any more. Don’t be frightened. We’ll get help for you.”
“I am not frightened,” she snapped back. “He was a pig. There are five of us here. In this house. Come. I show you.”
“Gabriel,” Britta said, wiping blood off her face with her sleeve. “The women. In the other house. They’re going to wake up before we get back.”
“Let them. You’ll have to get some people round there to sort them out. ‘No need for police, Madam’ that sort of thing.”
“I’ll call it in. Though this fucking mess is going to get me suspended.”
Gabriel said nothing. He turned to the girl.
“Show me,” he said.
She walked in front of him, twitching at the hem of the skirt to pull it a little lower. She took him up a further set of stairs then along a narrow landing. At the end, she turned a key in the door and opened it, then stood aside.
Gabriel motioned that she should go in first.
“They don’t need to see another strange man come in unannounced,” he said.
She went in first and he followed. Inside the room, sitting huddled together on one of the two narrow single beds that dominated the tiny space, were four young women. They were aged, Gabriel estimated, between eighteen and twenty-five. They were all similar in looks: long blonde hair, pale-blue eyes, skinny. They looked scared, with taut facial muscles and trembling lips. They wore no make-up, and all four had dark circles under their eyes. But there was something else about their faces. A heaviness around the eyes and an unfocused gaze, maybe even a looseness to the muscles around the mouths.
The woman beside him spoke to them in an Eastern European language Gabriel didn’t recognise. He spoke Russian. This sounded, to his linguist’s ears, more like Bulgarian. As she spoke, he watched the other women’s expressions, hoping to see them lose their wariness. Little by little, they did. The shoulders descended to a more normal position, the hands unclenched, though they still held onto each other, and their faces relaxed, which only made the slackness around the eyes and mouths more pronounced.
She looked at him. “I tell them, Omar and his guards are dead. You and woman are police, yes? We are safe now.”
He nodded. “Yes, you are safe. But we’re not police. Not exactly. We will call them for you now, though. Come on, we need to get you and your friends out of here.”
The young woman uttered a couple of short sentences and the four women on the bed stood as one and followed her and Gabriel out of the room, down the stairs and back to where Britta was waiting for them.
“Jesus!” she said. “Is that all of them?”
“Yes,” the woman who’d become their unofficial interpreter said. “There is a new batch of girls coming the day after tomorrow. Omar was talking on the phone about them just before you came in.”
“Well, we’ll be waiting for them when they do. Now, we need to go.”
Between them, Britta and Gabriel decided that subterfuge was no longer necessary, so after Britta had cleaned the rest of the blood off her face, they left by the front door and gathered, like office workers during a fire drill, on the paved parking area behind the gates.
A few minutes later, they heard sirens.
Then a screech of tyres directly outside the gate. Gabriel hit the button in the steel control panel to open the gates and, as they swung back, a marked police car nosed between them and came to a stop just in front of the small group. Behind it they could see two unmarked cars: Audi saloons in gunmetal and black with blue lights flashing a staccato rhythm from inside the radiator grilles.
A lean, fortyish man wearing a scowl and a plain grey, two-piece suit stepped out from the passenger side of the marked car and strode over to them, warrant card out in front. He was a detective chief inspector.
Britta showed him her ID card. He looked at Gabriel. Gabriel stared back. Hard. Then one of the women rushed forward and grabbed the detective’s hands.
“Please,” she said. “You help us now. Please. God sent them to save us from Omar.”
“It’s a bit of a mess in there,” Britta said. “My boss is sending a clean-up team. The girls are all yours. We need to go.”
“You do the glamorous bit then leave the Met to tie up the loose ends and do the paperwork, eh?”
“Well, we did break the trafficking ring without you, so yes, maybe you should do the admin on this one.”
Gabriel noticed the way Britta had thickened up her Swedish accent as she spoke to the hard-faced DCI in front of her. It was a good trick. It made her seem more of an outsider, notwithstanding her MI5 status.
“Whatever,” the detective said. “I assume we’ll get the intel we need from you lot?”
Britta shrugged. “Above my pay grade. But one of the girls back there said they’re bringing some more in a couple of days.”
By this time, the DCI had been joined by three uniformed officers including a sergeant, and a female detective, who was now talking to the women in their own language.
“Come on,” Gabriel said. “Time to go.”
They left through the gates, not looking back.
“I told my boss about the civilians in the other house,” Britta said. “He’s got a team heading over there right now and they’ve informed the police too, so there shouldn’t be any fallout for us. Or not about that part of the operation, anyway.” She smiled, wrinkling her nose. “But he wants to see me straight away. Can we meet later on?”
*
“How did it go with your Boss?” Gabriel asked. He and Britta were lying side by side under a sheet in his hotel bed.
“Not so good, actually.”
“Because?”
“Because, apparently, hypnotising innocent householders and then breaking in to a suspect’s house without a warrant and then shooting three people dead while accompanied by a non-authorised security operative is, quote unquote, ‘against departmental protocols’.”
Gabriel propped himself up on an elbow and looked into her eyes. “What about probable cause? You had the intel that he was trafficking women. We heard a scream, felt we had no option but to go in to prevent violence.”
“I know, I know. I said all that.”
“And?”
“They’re implementing damage control. Which includes putting me on administrative leave for two weeks.”
Gabriel smiled down at her. “Poor you. A fortnight off and nothing to do.”
She pouted. “It’s not funny. What am I supposed to do? Visit fucking art galleries?”
“How about an all-expenses-paid trip somewhere hot with yours truly?”
Britta sat up and grinned, showing the little gap between her front teeth.
“That sounds like fun. Equipment?”
Gabriel looked at the gold-plated bullet between her breasts, suspended there on a thin gold chain. How it moved slightly with each beat of her heart.
“It’s all covered. Two of everything. More toys than we’ll need, but . . .”
“Better safe than sorry, I know. So when do we leave?”
“I was thinking first thing tomorrow. Don’s lined up an RAF flight.”
Her eyes widened. “Well, Mr Urgent, you don’t like to keep a girl waiting do you?” She pushed Gabriel back down onto the bed so he was facing her and straddled him. “Maybe we better have one last mission briefing before we leave, then.”
14
Mozambique
“WELCOME to Beira,” the pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom as the Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules touched down on the tarmac. As they were passengers on an unofficial military flight, cleared through African Union-NATO backchannels, Gabriel and Britta simply walked off the plane, collected their gear and headed for the distant taxi rank.
The front of the terminal building was covered in huge posters advertising credit cards, obscured at one end by a vigorous palm tree. Seven-foot-tall red capital letters mounted above the roofline declared, “AEROPORTO INTERNACIONAL DA BEIRA”.
Gabriel spoke reasonably good Portuguese so he was hoping language, at least, wouldn’t be a problem in the days ahead. Although the sun was burning the tops of their heads, there was a cooling breeze blowing across the apron of tarmac, and the humidity was surprisingly low.
As the two figures made their way to the line of lemon and lime Toyotas and Mazdas in the taxi rank, anyone wondering about their business would have furrowed their brow. Clearly not tourists, despite the sunglasses and relaxed body language and smiles as they chatted. But not business types either: no suits, no briefcases. Engineers? From an oil company or construction firm? Possibly. The boots looked serious and those bags looked bulky. Full of tools maybe? No. They both looked lean and fit. And the woman would be an unlikely engineer out here. However many of her sex were building bridges and designing oil refineries elsewhere in the world.
If the observer were worldlier, and had travelled around the less glamorous parts of Africa, they might have wondered, mercenaries? Private security? Bodyguards? Close. But no cigar.
“Yes, boss?” the smiling taxi driver at the head of the queue said, in English. His wide smile looked genuine as Gabriel and Britta arrived at his car, a late-model Toyota Camry, sun glinting off its gleaming paintwork. “Where to?”
“We need a hotel. Not too flashy. Clean. You can do that?”
Once they had registered at the Hotel Freedom’s front desk, refusing the offer of help with their bags, they made their way up to the room the clerk had allocated them – on the top floor. Gabriel’s phone buzzed as they were unpacking.
“It’s an email from Don,” he said. “We’ve got a meeting with our local contact. He’s a ‘cultural attaché’,” Gabriel air-quoted round this phrase, “which basically means CIA. We’re to meet him at a bar called Sonny’s, on the beach. Guy’s wearing ‘a revolting Hawaiian shirt’, Don’s words. He’s sent the code phrases too. And the GPS reference for our original extract point.”
Thirty minutes later, they were walking along the beach, heading for a rush-roofed cabana with a green-painted sheet metal sign on the front with ‘Sonny’s’ hand-lettered in red gloss.
Sitting at the bar, drinking from a tall glass of pale lager, was a balding, overweight man wearing khaki shorts and scuffed beige deck shoes. His top half was covered by a baggy Hawaiian shirt patterned with flamingos flying against a turquoise and black background of palm leaves.
“What do you reckon?” Gabriel asked as they approached. “Think he’s our man?”
“I hope so. There can’t be two shirts that bad in Mozambique.”
As they arrived and ordered a couple of beers from the barman, Gabriel turned and nodded to the man.
“Nice evening.”
“Sure is,” he replied in a drawl from somewhere in the southern states of the US. “Especially if you got a nice cold beer to go with it.”
Gabriel took a pull on his glass of Impala. “Not bad,” he said, wiping the foam from his top lip. “Brewing standards are rising in Mozambique.”
The man nodded. “Especially in lagers.” He held out his hand. “Darryl Burroughs.”
“Gabriel Wolfe.” He turned to Britta, who stepped forward, her own hand extended.
“Britta Falsko
g,” she said, with a smile.
“Let’s get a table where we can talk,” Darryl said, indicating a pale blue moulded plastic table at the edge of the decking in front of the bar.
“You two working for Don Webster?” Darryl asked, once they’d sat down.
“Yes. I served under him in the SAS and now I’m freelancing for him.”
“How about you, honey? You part of Don’s little hit squad?”
Britta put her glass down on the table and leaned towards Darryl. “I need to tell you something, Darryl. Actually two things. First of all, no. I am with MI5. I’m here in a private capacity. Second, don’t call me honey, please. This is the twenty-first century.”
Darryl reared back, a wide smile on his face. “Guess we got us a genuine feminist agent, Gabriel.” He held his hands out in mock surrender. “So, do you want to tell this dumb old Southern boy what he should call you?”
“You can call me Britta, or Agent Falskog. I am happy with either.”
“I guess I’ll call you Britta, then,” Darryl said. “Agent Falskog sounds kind of formal.”
“Fine. Now, maybe we can talk business.”
Darryl sat forward in his chair and drained his glass.
“I’ve lined you up with a four-by-four. Land Rover. Extra cans of gas, roof rack, satnav, but no air con, sorry. Plus a week’s rations including water. You got purification tablets?”
Gabriel nodded. “Full survival kit.”
“Good, you may need them. Now, the nearest burg to your destination is a little place called Muanza. I’d suggest heading for there and establishing your forward base, then travelling into the bush on foot. We’ve arranged back-up with the Zambian army – strictly speaking they’re supposed to keep to their side of the border, but it’s the boonies where you’re going: no Mozambican police or military surveillance. Your Zambian contact is a nice guy called Major Anthony Chilundika. Sounds like a typical hoity-toity Brit. Built like a linebacker.”
He slid a piece of card across the table towards Britta.
