by Andy Maslen
Leaving his man to crash heavily to the ground, with a sound that suggested he’d fractured his cheekbone on the pavement, Gabriel bent and retrieved the butcher knife. He jumped back, delivered a short but brutally effective kick to the fallen man’s throat, eliciting a choking cry and ran back to the bar, where he snatched up the lid of the bin by its rim.
“Come on, Thomas, we can take him, and his money,” the gang’s leader said.
They started towards Gabriel, but he had another trick waiting for them. He swung his arm back then flung the steel lid over their heads. The lure of the flying disc was too strong, and both men looked straight up at it. In the time it took them to straighten their necks, Gabriel moved closer and chopped first one, then the other, across the throat.
They staggered back, looking at him, eyes wide with surprise and, good, fear for the first time. They clutched their throats and were focused entirely on trying to drag air into their lungs past their rapidly swelling windpipes.
Gabriel had never been keen on the more balletic karate moves Master Zhao had occasionally demonstrated to him during his apprenticeship in Hong Kong: the jumping kicks and spinning manoeuvres designed to throw opponents off balance mentally as much as physically. Now, however, he felt it would be appropriate.
As his body rotated in midair between them, the men must have sensed they were on the losing side of this particular conflict. What happened next confirmed it. Gabriel’s boot heels connected with a temple here and the point of a jaw there. They went down like creatures stunned by a slaughterman, their butcher knives clattering to the pavement between them as they fell.
Looking around, breathing heavily, Gabriel realised he was still not alone. A small group of children were watching him. They wore scruffy T-shirts and hoodies, zip-up cardigans and jeans, trainers and wide-eyed expressions of admiration. He collected the other two butcher knives from the ground and dropped all three down a drain in the gutter a few feet further up the street. They landed with a shallow splash.
He unpeeled a twenty from the roll in his pocket and held it out. The children hung back.
“It’s all right,” he said offering them a smile. “They were bad men. I was defending myself. Take the money and don’t tell anyone you saw me. Okay?”
An older girl, maybe the same age as Nathalie Smith, came forward, taking tiny steps. She wore her hair in braids, coiled tightly on the top of her head. She stretched her arm out in front of her and gently plucked the banknote from between his fingers.
“Are they dead?” she whispered.
He shook his head.
“No. Just sleeping.”
“Good.” She looked over at the man who’d done all the talking. He lay still, eyes closed, leant half-upright against the wall of the building. She walked over to him and kicked him in the stomach. “They make us give them half what we make from our jobs.”
The she turned to her entourage.
“Come on!” she shouted. “Who wants fried chicken?”
They all shouted at once then turned and ran off back down the street.
Marvelling, once again, at the strange ways of children, Gabriel moved away himself, taking a right into a brighter street, then a left and another right figuring he should put as much distance between himself and his attackers before they regained consciousness. He estimated the lawyer’s building was ten minutes away.
37
Antisocial Climber
SASHA Beck was an expert in all the ways one might separate a person from the life force that pulsed in their blood vessels, nerves, muscles, brain, and that mysterious entity called a soul. She had also acquired specialist knowledge in a range of complementary skills. These included explosives, commercial and improvised. Breaking and entering. Computer hacking. Free climbing. Forgery. And physical transformation.
She sought out her instructors on the Internet. They were always in need of extra money and were invariably glad to make some on the side in return for sharing their expertise. Actors, computer programmers, demolition experts, career criminals, athletes. She knew where to find them and exactly what to offer them. It was another of her talents.
On this particular evening, she was drawing on the techniques taught to her by a Frenchwoman named Marielle Zadou.
Marielle was a free climber – a lunatic in Sasha’s opinion – who set off for the tops of vertical cliffs wearing only two pieces of Lycra and a pair of thin-soled, rubberised canvas shoes, and carrying nothing for the ascent but a pouch of powdered resin.
However, their relationship as master and pupil did mean that she had just been able to scale the exterior of the office block in which Penduka, Ballantyne and Farai conducted their business. She had ascended the rear of the building, despite there being neither fire escape nor any sort of drainpipe. Now she rested on a window ledge no more than five inches wide, careful to keep the small black rucksack she carried away from the wall so it didn’t lever her off the ledge.
Pulling a dull, red, rubber sucker the size of a side plate from her belt, Sasha placed it against the window and twisted the plastic covered handle through ninety degrees. She felt the vacuum build under her fingers and gave the sucker an experimental tug. It was glued to the glass as tightly as a limpet to a rock.
Sasha withdrew a glass cutter and inscribed a circle around the edge of the sucker. With a jerk, she pulled the glass disc out from the window. Reaching in, she bent her wrist so that she could unlatch the handle. Then it was a simple matter of leaning out seven storeys above the traffic and pedestrians while she half-pulled-half-pushed the window out so that she could shimmy round the frame and slide her body into the office.
Hamilton’s intelligence was gold-plated. The back wall of the open-plan office was decorated with the firm’s name in foot-high, brushed aluminium letters. As a partner, Alice Farai enjoyed the luxury of a private office. There they all were, arrayed down the longer side of the main space, glass from waist-level upwards, dark wooden panels from there to the thickly carpeted floor. Sasha walked between the spotless desks in the centre of the room. She held a slim, black, rubber torch, and swept its narrow blue-white beam along the offices. And look, darling! They’ve even painted her name on the door to make our job easier.
The door was locked. Had Sasha been planning merely to steal the dossier, she would have picked the cheap lock in seconds, tutting at its slipshod construction and rudimentary engineering. As, on this occasion, she had no such plans, she reared back and kicked the door open with a crash and splintering as the frame gave way. Once inside, she stopped for a moment.
“Now, Miss Farai,” she said aloud. “Desk drawer or filing cabinet?” It didn’t really matter, since she intended to break into every locked space in the office till she found what she was looking for. But Sasha prided herself on her ability to intuit where normal people might hide their treasures. “It’s a client folder, like any other. But I bet Marsha Agambe told you to guard it with your life. Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo,” she said in a sing-song voice, before crossing to the desk. “Into the desk drawer you must go.”
The drawers were locked on a common rail located behind their fronts. With nothing on hand to force them, Sasha fished her lock picks out of her belt. She inserted the two slim steel tools and gave them a few twists to separate the tumblers inside the barrel. Then, using a gentle bumping movement with the heel of her hand while holding the picks in place, she had the lock open.
Reasoning that the top would hold a few items of stationery, maybe some paper handkerchiefs and a packet of painkillers, she started with the deep drawer at the bottom. It housed a set of suspension files, each topped with a plastic label holder enclosed the letters of the alphabet.
“Oh, darling. This is too easy,” she whispered.
Pushing her fingers down into the first, fat, hanging V of card, Sasha extracted all the documents within and laid them on the desk in front of her. They were enclosed in individual manila card wallets, hand-lettered in neat blue capitals with
the client’s name at the top-right. The second file bore the name, AGAMBE. She opened it. Then hissed out an oath. “Shit! I didn’t climb up here for your fucking last will and testament, darling, now did I?”
Standing up and knocking the fatly padded leather chair over behind her, she hurled the thin wallet of papers at the wall. It opened in mid-flight, spinning the sheets of paper into the air, which was still cool from the day’s air-conditioning.
“The filing cabinet it is, then.”
After another few seconds’ work with her lock picks, the steel cabinet was broached. Starting at the top, Sasha worked methodically, running her fingertips along the tops of the suspension files, searching for the dossier on Barbara Sutherland.
The top drawer yielded nothing. She moved down to the second. Again, after a careful study of each file inside, she puffed her cheeks out and slammed the drawer shut with a clang. She hit her target inside the third drawer. Unlike the first two, it did not contain any suspension files. Instead, it held a stack of shallow cardboard boxes, each secured with a red ribbon, tied with a bow over a knot.
“Well, now,” she breathed. “What have we here?”
Sasha lifted the stack of boxes out and squatted down beside the filing cabinet to start her search. Using a short-bladed knife, she slit all the ribbons and opened the boxes one by one. As each box failed to reveal the dossier, she tossed it away, scattering its contents on the carpet. With one to go, she frowned as she lifted the lid. Then she smiled, all the tension draining way from her facial muscles. Inside the box was a pale blue folder, secured with a thick brown rubber band. Written across the top were two words:
SUTHERLAND / GORDIAN
Her brief from Hamilton had been clear: destroy any and all files relating to his company. But Sasha believed in the power of information. She decided to make the files vanish, though not in the way her client wanted. Smiling, she pinched the black plastic clips holding her rucksack closed, loosened the drawstring and slid the folder inside.
Her hand, when it emerged, was closed around a lump of Semtex the size of a grapefruit. It smelled of putty and hot plastic. Her colleagues in the business laughed at her for using “that old Soviet rubbish”, but as she liked to point out, it was just as destructive as more modern plastic explosives, such as C-4, and far easier to get hold of.
Sasha pushed a blasting cap into the Semtex and wired the whole lot to a battery and a cheap watch she’d bought from a street vendor the previous day. With the watch’s timer set for ten minutes, she squashed the grey lump down onto the desk, wiped the greasy residue off on her trousers and headed back for the window.
Two minutes later, her plimsolled feet hit the ground and she turned and walked off towards downtown Harare. She found a bar that didn’t look too fussy about dress codes, went in, bought herself a large gin and tonic, and settled down in a corner booth to wait.
38
The Absence of Evidence
EMERGING back onto Simon Muzenda Street, Gabriel stopped and looked around to get his bearings, then continued on towards the crossroads and the office building housing Penduka, Ballantyne and Farai. Ideally, there would be a back entrance, perhaps protected by a flimsy lock or a door secured with a push bar, neither of which would present much of an obstacle.
When he had identified the building, a handsome edifice of red brick and sandstone rendered a soft grey by the moonlight, he turned down a side street, looking for the rear entrance. As he found the even narrower road that led to the back of the office block, something made him look up. What he saw made him dart into the shadows and watch more closely.
A slender, black-clad figure was climbing down the outside wall of the building, apparently without ropes or gear of any kind. The figure, as it neared the ground, resolved itself into a female form, with long, straight black hair tied up somehow. She reached the ground and strolled off away from Gabriel, before disappearing round the far corner of the block.
There had been times, during his military service, first in the Parachute Regiment, and then in the SAS, when Gabriel had heard an inner voice telling him in no uncertain terms that he and his men were in terrible and immediate danger. Not in the way he still occasionally heard from Smudge, though. And even those moments were becoming less frequent since Fariyah Crace had explained how his hallucinations were really his own subconscious attempting to communicate with his conscious mind. No, these early-warning messages were more like intuition, enhanced by some of the world’s toughest training, and then given voice.
Gabriel had learned to trust this inner voice, and it had had saved lives each time he had listened. He listened now. It was telling him that to attempt to enter the building now would be an extremely unwise course of action. Yes, the figure might have been a mere cat burglar after property deeds, jewels or stacks of high-denomination dollar bills. But the explosions and burning-plastic smells of the apartment block fire were still fresh in his mind. As was the sight of the bullet-riddled corpses of Marsha Agambe and her brother. So he tended to believe that she was connected to – or the same person as – their killer.
What would I do, if I’d been hired to assassinate Philip Agambe’s widow and erase all traces of a potentially incriminating dossier against Barbara Sutherland? Torch the apartment, obviously. Yes, but what else? Search out the copy. There’s always a copy. And destroy it.
He looked up at the building. And waited.
He counted his heartbeats.
. . . One . . .
. . . Two . . .
A pigeon alighted on the pavement in front of him and began pecking around a scrap of discarded fried chicken.
. . . Four . . .
A good-looking black couple passed him, laughing, holding hands.
A taxi sped by, electric guitars blaring from its stereo.
. . . Seven . . .
. . . Eight . . .
. . . Nine . . .
The explosion was almost beautiful.
Above the loud crump as the Semtex detonated, the hypersonic blast wave pushed the floor-to-ceiling ball of fire outwards in a compressed sheet that shattered every window. The flying splinters of glass were lit by the moon and for a moment appeared to be a floating layer of diamonds, suspended above the street on a sheet of orange fire.
The smashing began seconds later as the glass hit the pavement and road.
A few pedestrians who were too close screamed as they suffered cuts from the tumbling shards and fell to their knees or sat heavily against cars or on the kerb.
Car alarms were set off by falling lumps of masonry smacking into their thin steel roofs. And overlaid on the whole scene of destruction was the smell: burnt paper, the sharp ozone tang of electrical fires as PCs and office equipment caught fire, and the acrid, throat-catching aroma of plastic and upholstery foam turning into gas.
From his vantage point, Gabriel watched as the remains of the law firm’s documents flamed and fluttered in the breeze, swirling in eddies and miniature whirlwinds, glowing fragments of blackened paper, their edges crawling with strings of orange sparks.
Somewhere among them were the remains of the dossier allegedly incriminating the British Prime Minister in corruption on a breathtaking scale. And now? There was nothing. The Agambes were dead and their “evidence” had been reduced to carbon atoms swirling and separating in the air above Harare.
Sirens interrupted his train of thought, and soon the streets around the building were blocked by fire engines, police cars and ambulances. Time to move on, Wolfe. You’re done here.
*
A faint ringing from the cocktail glasses hanging from their bases in racks above the barman’s head sounded a tinkling counterpoint to the basso profundo rumble from the Semtex detonating.
As a fan of Mozart, Puccini and Verdi, Sasha often imagined her work in terms of the voices of each member of an opera cast. Knives were the sopranos: virtuosi but temperamental, requiring great delicacy in how they were handled. Pistols were the tenors: flashy sh
owoffs that demanded centre stage. Rifles were the baritones: less glamorous than their slighter colleagues in the armourer’s locker but equally devastating. And explosives were the basses: deep-chested shouters who could make the walls of your chest vibrate. Or, if you were the target, burst like a balloon.
Now she smiled, raising her glass to her reflection in a mirror on the far wall and signalling to the barman for another gin and tonic. The other customers had run from their tables and disappeared onto the street where they were busy filming the conflagration on their phones or texting friends about this latest outrage on Harare’s streets.
As the barman placed the new drink on her table, releasing its perfume of juniper and quinine substitute, the door opened and in walked – of all people, darling! – the man from the Agambes’ apartment. Sasha watched him intently, taking in his muscular but not overdeveloped build, his dark eyes and his short, straight, black hair. Something about the way he carried himself lit up a sign in her brain. “Soldier”, the sign said, in bright, white letters. It wasn’t a problem. She’d dealt with soldiers plenty of times in her career, and besides, he was cute. It was why she’d shot the idiot brother as well. The question that flickered on and off behind the sign was this: is he one of Hamilton’s missing mercenaries?
As he turned from the bar with a gin and tonic, she smiled at him and raised her voice so that he would hear her, adopting, on a whim, an accent from the Deep South.
“A dangerous place, Harare. One never knows what sort of devilry might occur.”
He looked over at her, and came over.
“It certainly is. May I join you?”
She nodded and pushed a chair out towards him with her right toe.
*
Gabriel took in the woman’s appearance in a glance. She was strikingly good looking. Straight, dark hair pinned up at the back of her head with a couple of coils escaping to lie against her long, pale neck. Lips a deep, blackish red, almost as if she’d stained them eating cherries, the lower fuller than the upper. Her black eyebrows were finely curved and perfectly graduated from a square edge at the bridge of her nose to tapering points just above the outer edges of her eye sockets. Below them, her eyelids were shaded in a smudgy combination of purple and gold. Asked to estimate her age, he would have said, mid-thirties. Too old to be scaling office blocks and blowing them up? He wasn’t sure. Maybe he could find out.
