First Casualty (The Gabriel Wolfe Thrillers Book 4)

by Andy Maslen

  “As I say, Wolfe Cub. Whatever you need. I will go back to the club now. Thank you.”

  Gabriel noticed a photo booth outside a pharmacy. Five minutes later, a still-sticky strip of miniature Gabriels was drying in the night air between his fingertips. Suddenly hungry, he ducked into the first restaurant he passed. It was lit with bright fluorescent strip-lights that gave the place a cold, bluish cast and turned the diners’ faces an unhealthy whitish-grey. The restaurant, it turned out, only served a soft, creamy milk pudding in various flavours. Too tired to change venues, he ordered a banana-flavoured dish from the waitress and spooned the warm and surprisingly tasty concoction into his mouth. The canteen-style seating arrangements meant he was joined moments later by a couple of young Hong Kongers who barely spoke to each other, so engrossed were they in their smartphones.

  Before he went to bed, he placed the strip on top of his passport on the kitchen table with a note asking Xi to send it all to Mr Fang. The last thing he did before sleep overtook him was to send a text from Sasha Beck’s phone. He scrolled through the list of contacts until he found Robert Hamilton.

  Contact completed. Gabriel Wolfe dead. No wire transfer this time. Sending someone to collect in person. US bearer bonds. Text when you have them.

  That puts you on notice, you bastard. I’m coming for you.

  54

  The Wizard Works His Magic

  Gabriel woke to the sound of Xi talking. He checked his phone. It was eleven o’clock. There was a text waiting from Hamilton.

  US Bearer Bonds not issued since 1982. May take some time to locate. No problem. Thank you.

  Forty minutes later, Gabriel was standing outside an apartment building on Ko Shing Street. He pressed a button and after a few seconds a tinny voice crackled from the intercom speaker.

  “Who is it?”

  “Gabriel Wolfe. Mr Fang – “

  “Yeah, yeah. I was expecting you. Come on up. Sixth floor, number six-one-four.”

  The door latch buzzed and Gabriel pushed through into the lobby.

  The lift smelled of incense, a heady jasmine perfume, so strong as to be almost sickly. Gabriel was grateful when the doors opened and he could step out into the hallway on the sixth floor. He turned left, realised he’d picked the wrong direction and turned back on himself, finding Wūshī’s door twenty feet beyond the lift. He knocked three times and stood where anyone peering through the spyhole would get a good look at his face.

  The door swung inwards and there stood the wizard: a slightly built man in his late teens or early twenties, bleached blond hair gelled up into a pompadour, high cheekbones and a nose ring.

  “Come in, Man,” he said. “I got my machine purring away waiting for you.”

  Gabriel smiled as the geeky Hong Konger with a fake American accent led him down a narrow hallway and into a room that could only be described as a control centre.

  Dominating the small room was a desk on which sat three flat-screen monitors behind a wireless keyboard and mouse. On a shelf to the left of the desk sat a dull golden cylinder about nine inches in diameter and maybe a foot tall. It emitted a quiet hum. Cables in yellow, black and a startling cobalt blue snaked away from it to the monitors, a printer and a couple of other peripheral devices whose purposes Gabriel couldn’t even guess at.

  “Nice,” Gabriel said, nodding at the cylinder, which he assumed was the guy’s computer.

  “Nice? She’s better than nice, man. She’s ripped. I built her myself. Faster than a speeding bullet, more memory than a herd of elephants, know what I’m saying?”

  The shelves were crowded with toy robots, replicas of spaceships from science fiction films and scale models of superheroes, the men with absurdly overdeveloped muscles, the women with huge breasts and impossibly narrow waists. A toffee-apple red electric guitar stood in a corner, a dozen or so bright green plectrums stuck to the headstock.

  The room smelled of fried chicken, and a small pile of fast food cartons teetered on one end of a bookshelf. There were two chairs pulled up in front of the desk: a big leather recliner and a smaller, mesh-backed number with a matching seat that appeared to float a couple of inches above the gas strut supporting it.

  Wūshī took the leather chair and Gabriel sat beside him, surprised at the comfort offered by the space-age contraption in which he was sitting.

  “Mr Fang said you needed some help tracking down a company?”

  “Yes. It’s called Gordian Security. Its CEO is a man called Robert Hamilton. They’re not on the surface web, I’ve searched.”

  “Oh, the surface web? Sounds like somebody’s been doing his homework. Your teacher tell you about the deep web?”

  “Actually, she did. Until then I’d never heard of it.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s kind of like the bottom part of the iceberg. Look, I’ll show you.”

  Wūshī clicked on an icon on his desktop – a white skull and crossbones on a red square – and the screen displayed a basic-looking browser, just a solid black background with a white search box and a menu bar at the top. The logo in the top-right corner of the screen was a snake eating its own tail. Beneath it was the word, “Tor”.

  “This is where all the truly weird, illegal and evil shit goes down. None of it’s indexed, so your regular, vanilla search engines can’t see it. Most of the sites are encrypted, too. You need to know in advance where you’re going and what the passkeys are. So, let’s just type Gordian Security in here and see what we get.”

  Gabriel leaned forward as Wūshī hit the Return key. A split second later a handful of results popped up: the first looked like it pointed at a corporate web site.

  Gordian Security Inc. Defense contracting, security strategy, specialized military equipment.

  “Try that,” he said, feeling his pulse notching up by a few beats per minute at the thought of getting closer to the man who had tried to have him and Britta killed. Twice, he reminded himself.

  The mouse clicked. Up popped a graphic of a knot. A very beautifully drawn and extremely complicated knot. There were no other icons, navigation buttons or text of any kind on the screen.

  “Now what?” Wūshī asked, leaning back and picking at an angry-looking red spot on his neck. He moved the cursor over the knot and immediately a free end of the rope flicked free and waved seductively to one side. Wūshī clicked on it and held the mouse button down and the arrow icon changed to a grabbing hand. He moved the cursor to the right and slowly the rope began to unravel. It seemed to vibrate as if tautening, and then it snapped back into the body of the knot. “Shit! We have to undo this fucker. It’s going to take all night.”

  Something he’d written in a notebook back in his cottage was knocking at the door of Gabriel’s consciousness, waiting to be granted admission.

  “Wait,” he said. He closed his eyes and tried to picture the page in front of him after he’d Googled ‘Gordian Zimbabwe’. There! A search result talking about the Gordian knot. “You don’t need to unpick it. You just need to cut it.”

  “What do you mean, ‘cut it’?”

  “Like you would with a sword. You know, slice it through the middle.”

  Wūshī shrugged. “You’re the boss.” He held the mouse button down and swiped the cursor from right to left through the centre of the knot. It stayed in position. “Maybe we need to go the other way,” he said, repeating the action, but this time swiping from left to right. Still the knot hung in space before them, unmoving and definitely not unravelling.

  “Try slicing downwards,” Gabriel said.

  Down went the cursor, through the centre of the knot, and with a smoothly animated transition, the ropes flew apart and tumbled in slow motion to the bottom of the screen, where they faded and then disappeared.

  Wūshī turned to look at Gabriel. “I think we’re in.”

  55

  Proof Positive

  WHEN Gabriel and Wūshī looked back at the screen, it was filled with a corporate home page illustrated with tough-look
ing, ex-military types in black fatigues carrying an impressive array of automatic weapons, from M16 assault rifles to shoulder-launched, FIM-92 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. Beneath the logo in the top right-hand corner, a knot like the one Wūshī had just cut, in black and grey, was a slogan:

  Fighting the good fight. Always. Everywhere.

  “Go to the Contact Us page,” Gabriel said.

  And there, as if inviting him to join them, was the company’s street address:

  Gordian Security, Inc.

  Tactical Campus

  11785 Lincoln Street

  Shiloh, PA 17899

  “This is fantastic,” Gabriel said. “Thank you.”

  “What, this? This is, like, baby stuff. What do you really want?”

  Gabriel ran a hand through his hair. “What I really want is to find out whether Hamilton has been emailing Barbara Sutherland. She’s–”

  “The British Prime Minister. I check the news sites, you know. I’m not a total code monkey.”

  “Sorry,” Gabriel said. “Shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.”

  “No problem. I fit the stereotype.”

  “So, is that even possible?”

  “Sure it’s possible. They’ll be encrypted, but that’s what makes my job interesting.”

  “And what is it exactly? Your job, I mean? Do you work for Mr Fang?”

  “On and off. But if I told you what I do for him, I’d have to learn to code with my toes. That’s what he said when he hired me. He showed me his knife. It looked wicked sharp, man.”

  Gabriel held up his hands in mock surrender, smiling. “It’s fine, I was just being curious.”

  “I’ll need some time, maybe a day, to get into their mail server and poke around to find Hamilton’s account. You want me to send the stuff to you?”

  “That would be great.”

  Wūshī held out his phone, the screen facing Gabriel. “Email me and I’ll send you the stuff when I get it. You want everything, yes?”

  “Everything you can get, yes.”

  “You know how to unpack a zip file?”

  “I think I can just about manage. You know, if I can find the right key on my big-button phone.”

  Wūshī nodded his appreciation. “Got me back. Cool.”

  Gabriel watched as the young man’s slender fingers scuttled over the keyboard. After a minute or two he realised he’d disappeared from Wūshī’s perception, to be replaced by the dancing lines of white-on-blue code, so he got up, patted the young guy on the shoulder and let himself out of the flat.

  *

  At three the following afternoon, while he was sitting with a gin and tonic on a wicker chair looking out over the mountains looming above Xi’s house, Gabriel’s phone buzzed. The alert told him he had an email from wushi@daimahauzi.com. He clicked the icon and read the message:

  Zipped all the files. Check it out.

  A few moments later, Gabriel was frowning with concentration as he read the first of a series of emails between the CEO of a private defence contracting firm based in Pennsylvania, USA and the Secretary of State for Defence of the United Kingdom. The first email was from 23 August 2012. By the time he reached the three at the end of the chain, he had a sick feeling in his stomach as if a black toad were squatting there, leaking poison into his guts.

  From: Barbara Sutherland

  To: Robert Hamilton

  Subject: Search and destroy mission: target Abel N’Tolo

  Robert,

  SAS are planning to eliminate Abel N’Tolo and take his plans for the diamond field capture.

  Will call with mission details.

  Suggest warn/equip AN’T urgently. Have worked too long on this to start again with new local contact.

  B

  From: Robert Hamilton

  To: Barbara Sutherland

  Subject: Re: Search and destroy mission: target Abel N’Tolo

  Barbara,

  Agreed. Thank you for the intel. Once our counter-mission succeeds, are you ready to move ahead with our arrangement?

  R

  From: Barbara Sutherland

  To: Robert Hamilton

  Subject: Re: Re: Search and destroy mission: target Abel N’Tolo

  Robert,

  Yes. Ready and waiting. I have all relevant accounts set up including for the diamonds. Defence procurement contracts and sourcing protocols also finalised.

  B

  Gabriel’s jaws were clenched so tight his back teeth were aching from the pressure and he had a violent desire to hit something. Or someone. Before he could hurl his smartphone deep into the undergrowth beyond the garden wall, he placed it, hand shaking, on the glass-topped table next to his empty glass.

  He stood, suddenly, knocking over the chair, and swore, loudly.

  “Fuck! She fucking set us all up.”

  He thought, first, of Smudge, brains blown out through his face by a 7.62 mm Kalashnikov round, his lower jaw flying away into the forest. Then of Damon “Daisy” Cheaney, who’d lost his left arm to a .50 calibre copper-jacketed projectile from a Dushka heavy machine-gun. The breakdown he’d almost had before resigning his commission. The nightmares, flashbacks, hallucinations and sudden uncontrollable rushes of anxiety or suicidal feelings. All now lying at the door of Barbara Sutherland, who had betrayed her own troops, her own country, in the pursuit of wealth.

  Pacing up and down in the garden, between neatly clipped box hedges and towering bamboo and banana palms, Gabriel didn’t hear Xi approach. He started when the older man laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “What is the matter, Wolfe Cub?”

  As he looked at his old teacher, Gabriel’s eyes filled with tears. He let them come, until they were running freely down his cheeks and dripping from his chin. He sank to his knees, laid his forehead on the ground and wept, pounding the soft green moss with both fists.

  How long he stayed there, he had no idea. When his racking sobs finally ended, he looked up to see that Xi had not moved. Now, he did. He squatted beside Gabriel and took both of his hands.

  “Come with me. You need to exercise.”

  *

  The fighting room in Xi’s basement was just as Gabriel remembered it. Bare of any furniture, laid with thin canvas pads in the centre of the wooden floor, racks of Kendo sticks, practice swords with dulled edges and throwing stars lining the walls. Because the house was built on a slope of the mountain, one long wall was composed of floor to ceiling windows, which gave onto the harbour.

  Both men were wearing white outfits of loose tunics and short, wide-legged trousers. Both were barefoot. Both wore bamboo masks secured with leather straps and buckles.

  Xi went to the weapon rack and selected two Kendo sticks. The thick bamboo would not maim but it could still inflict a powerfully painful bruise. He threw a stick to Gabriel who caught it one-handed. Then they faced each other, two yards apart, bowed low, and began.

  Driven by his anger and overwhelming hatred for the woman he had once sipped cold Burgundy with and called by her Christian name, Gabriel lunged forward and slashed down at Xi’s head. By the time his stick arrived, it whistled through empty air.

  Xi had simply been in the way one moment, and gone the next. With the end of his own stick, he jabbed at Gabriel’s mask, knocking his head back with a clack as bamboo met bamboo.

  Breathing heavily, Gabriel danced away then returned in a sliding leap, feinting with the stick to Xi’s head before reversing the direction of his blow, aiming for the right forearm.

  Once more, Xi seemed, simply, to dematerialise then rematerialise out of range. His chest was still, unlike Gabriel’s, which was heaving in and out as his overstressed lungs struggled to suck in enough oxygen.

  This time, Xi swept his stick right to left, slapping into the side of Gabriel’s head.

  Gabriel retreated a second time. He shook his head and re-centred himself. In a third furious attack, he plunged forward, stick whirling, jabbing, and managed to land a blow on Xi’s left shoulder.
This time Xi fought back in full heat, and the two men spent the next three minutes engaged in a flurry of feints, counter-feints, lunges, parries, jabs and cuts. The rattle of the sticks sounded like small-arms fire.

  Twenty more minutes passed in bouts of furious fighting. Finally, Gabriel held his right hand up, palm outwards. He went to replace his stick and pulled his mask up and over the back of his head. His face was wet, with sweat this time, and bright red. He was panting, but smiling.

  Xi replaced his own stick in the rack and lifted his own mask from his face.

  “Master Zhao, I have to leave. As soon as I can get my new passport from Mr Fang,” Gabriel said between heaving breaths.

  Xi nodded, barely sweating, his breathing normal. “Then before you go, tell me how you intend to draw out the snake far enough to kill it.”

  Over tea, Gabriel explained the plan he’d been formulating ever since his first meeting with Wūshī.

  56

  Day Trip

  TWO days later, Gabriel was back in England. He called Britta the same evening.

  “Hej! What’s up? Where are you?”

  “Home, for now. After I called you last time, I went to Hong Kong. I stayed with Zhao Xi. He showed me where Michael was killed. And where he’s buried. Then he introduced me to a triad boss who suggested a way to get to Sutherland. Then an assassin called Sasha Beck tried to kill me but I drugged her and took her phone. This computer geek called the Wizard hacked Gordian’s email servers, so now I have concrete proof that Sutherland isn’t just corrupt but evil, too.”

  “Shit! No boring days with you, are there? What do you mean, she’s ‘evil’? Isn’t that a bit melodramatic?”