by Andy Maslen
“You’re British, right?”
“Yes. Would you like to see my passport?”
“No, sir. But you do need an LTCF issued by the State of Pennsylvania.”
“And that would be?”
“That would be a License to Carry a Firearm. I’ll also need to conduct background checks and run them through the Federal NICS . . .” He stopped himself, smiled, and explained the second acronym. “The National Instant Criminal Background Check System. That’s a couple of bucks. And then, if you pass all that, I need you to fill out a purchase application. After all that, you can walk out of here with anything you see.”
Gabriel reached into his inside breast pocket, noting the man stiffen again, then relax as he brought out the folded sheet of paper Johnson had provided.
“I’m afraid I don’t have an LTCF. And I won’t show up at all in your NICS, being a British citizen” – subject, technically, but I don’t want to confuse you – “but I do have this.”
He handed the folded sheet of paper across the counter. The gun dealer unfolded it, read for a minute or so, held it under an ultra-violet scanner behind the counter, then refolded it and handed it back.
“Only the second time I’ve ever seen one of those. Some guy built like a terminator produced it and walked out with an AR15, a couple of Glocks and enough ammunition to start a small war. Didn’t ask what he wanted it for. So, a nine-mil, huh? Well, you got your Glock 17, Glock 19, Beretta FS92, that’s a nice weapon, SIG Sauer P226 like you said, 1911s, American Tactical, GSG, basically pretty much everything.”
“And a suppressor?”
“Yeah, we got the full range. Name your brand. One thing, we just sold our last SIG with a threaded barrel. If you’re in a hurry it’ll have to be a Glock 19.”
Gabriel shrugged. “The Glock’s fine. Do you stock Gem-Tech suppressors?”
“Yes, sir, we do. A lot of our customers who shoot suppressed like the GM-9.”
“Good. I’ll have a Glock, the GM-9, and a box of ammunition.”
“OK. We stock all the major brands. I’m not going to ask what you’re planning on shooting, but I’m guessing it ain’t targets. You have any strong feelings there?”
“Hollow-points.”
The gun dealer screwed his eyes up as he looked at Gabriel. “Well now, for personal defense,” he laid heavy, ironic emphasis on these two words, “I’d go for the Remington Golden Saber in nine-millimetre Parabellum, jacketed hollow-points. Folks’ll argue forever about which round is best, but this is a man-stopper, right enough. You got decent expansion, penetration and velocity. Do you want to try it out, get the feel of the gun?”
Gabriel shook his head. “I’m sure it’s all fine.”
“You want a holster?”
“No thanks. This has nice deep pockets,” Gabriel said, flapping the overcoat.
*
With the pistol bought and paid for, along with a couple of extra bits and pieces, Gabriel left the shop, overcoat pockets now weighed down by roughly four pounds of steel, plastic, brass, lead, copper and smokeless powder.
He hailed a cab on the street and gave the Gordian Group address. The taxi dropped him on a smooth curve of tarmac directly outside the main entrance.
Tactical Campus was a one-storey building. Why build up when you can sprawl? The exterior gave nothing away as to the kind of business transacted beyond the mirrored doors. It could have been a technology company, an engineering firm, a pharmaceuticals manufacturer or a business school.
To the left of the doors stood a bright silver sculpture – the knot Gabriel had seen on the unlock page before Wūshī had slashed through it with the cursor of his mouse. As he passed the six-foot tall metal tangle, he saw himself reflected back dozens of times in the distorting mirrors of its inch-thick strands. He checked the date on his phone. Yes. This is the day ‘Sasha’ told you her runner was coming for the bearer bonds.
Inside the building, the air was pleasantly warm, unlike the sub-tropical atmosphere in the gun store. Gabriel unbuttoned the coat and stuffed the hat and gloves into the capacious pockets. In the centre of the ground-floor space, the architects had positioned the reception desk. It was an aggressive, angular structure that appeared to be built of carbon-fibre, the intricate grey-and-black weave sending a message to visitors: strength, high-tech, functionality and fuck the aesthetics. A bit like the two burly security officers who stood each side of the reception desk, glaring at Gabriel from under lowered brows and military buzz-cuts, hands resting on pistol-butts at their waists.
The receptionist, on the other hand, appeared to have been chosen specifically on aesthetic grounds. Whether she had a PhD in weapons engineering or not, it was impossible to say. But he had no doubt her looks would cause even the most hardened defence procurement executive to lower his guard before a sensitive negotiation. Her lips, coloured a pale, frosted pink were wide, and curved into a genuine-looking smile, that popped dimples into both cheeks. Her glossy auburn hair was tied in a bun at the back of her head, exposing a slender throat.
“Yes, sir. How may I help you?” she said.
“I have an appointment with Robert Hamilton.”
“Your name?”
“Lang, but it’s not important. My employer’s is. Just tell him I work for Sasha Beck.”
“Let me just check to see if he’s expecting you, Mister Lang.”
She stared at the screen in front of her. Her smile slipped, and the dimples disappeared, to be replaced with a frown. “I’m afraid I can’t see your appointment in his diary.”
He leant across the reception desk, placing both hands flat on the pale wood each side of the visitors’ book, and looked deep into her eyes, which were, he noticed pale blue, with darker rings of pigment around the edges of the irises. He glanced at her name badge.
“That doesn’t surprise me, Tatum. But, as I said, it’s not my name that matters. Why don’t you try calling Mr Hamilton? Or his PA. He’s expecting me.”
She picked up her desk phone, shooting Gabriel a tight-lipped smile that lacked the warmth of its predecessor.
“Hi Patricia, it’s Tatum,” she said, half-turning away from Gabriel. “I have a gentleman here, a Mister Lang, who says he has an appointment with Mr Hamilton . . . Well, that just it. He seems awfully sure of himself. He says Mr Hamilton is expecting him and that his employer’s name is the one that matters . . . It’s Sasha Beck,” she said, looking at Gabriel to check she’d got the name right. He nodded. “OK. Thanks, Trish.” She replaced the handset in its cradle and looked at Gabriel, who had stepped back from her territory and now stood, hands in coat pockets, waiting for good news. “Mr Hamilton’s PA is just checking his appointments diary. Would you take a seat, Mr Lang?”
Gabriel wasn’t enjoying pushing the receptionist’s buttons, would much rather be doing something similar, but with more force, to her boss. But he needed to create the right psychological impression on everyone with whom he came into contact. So he refused her request and maintained his position, directly in front of the reception desk and an obvious obstacle to anyone who might enter the building after him.
He looked around while they waited for Trish to call back. Although the exterior of the building was devoid of clues to the company’s line of business, the interior was another story. Behind Tatum’s head, fixed to the wall by oversized black bolts, was a piece of stainless steel, two feet deep by eight across. In acid-etched type that suggested the text on the sides of military vehicles, it repeated the company’s slogan in capitals:
FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT.
ALWAYS. EVERYWHERE.
The material and the message seemed to be at odds with each other, suggesting a fascist worldview rather than something from the Bible.
Gabriel became aware that Tatum was speaking to him.
“Sir? Mr Lang? Mr Hamilton will see you right away.” Her expression, eyes wide, lips parted, suggested that this was not the answer she’d been expecting when Trish called back. “You fol
low the corridor down to the end. Mr Hamilton’s office is the door on the right.”
Without another word, Gabriel spun on his heel and marched off towards his appointment with the man who had very nearly caused his death, not once, not twice, but, as he now knew, three times.
The dark wood door bore a label: Robert Hamilton, CEO. It was done in the same acid-etched steel as the overbearing slogan in reception. Gabriel didn’t knock. He just pushed it open and strode through. As he’d expected, he was standing in an outer office, dominated by a large desk, around which an efficient-looking woman of forty or forty-five was already stepping. She wore high heels and a forbidding frown, and she looked as though she would like nothing better than to ram one of her stilettos though his eye socket. Instead, she contented herself with a clipped utterance. “You must be the gentleman,” how she loaded that much disdain into three syllables, Gabriel had no idea, “that Mr Hamilton is expecting. Follow me, please.”
She walked ahead of him, knocked twice on another dark door – mahogany was Gabriel’s guess – and stepped through.
Sitting in a thickly padded, leather swivel chair was the man Gabriel had come to kill.
58
The Debt Collector
WITHOUT turning, Gabriel sensed the PA leave the room, feeling the minute change in air pressure as she closed the door behind her, listening to the brush of its lower edge over the thick pile of the carpet. Good tight fit, he mused. Probably deadens the sound when Hamilton’s negotiating.
Hamilton was on the phone. A power play, Gabriel assumed. He tried to catch Hamilton’s eye but the man was staring intently out of the window as he spoke. Gabriel stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets, curling his right hand around the steel cylinder he’d not used in Mozambique, or Zimbabwe, but had held onto and brought all the way from the UK.
Not without a few plays of his own, Gabriel wandered around the room as if he was considering moving in. He pulled a dead leaf off a potted olive tree. Then, one by one, he began picking up framed photographs of Hamilton with smug-looking men in expensive suits, giving them a cursory glance, then lying them flat on the shelves they’d come from. On one wall hung an antique map of the world. There was no glass, so its rippled parchment surface was open to the air.
Reaching into his coat pocket, Gabriel pulled out one of his additional purchases from Falcon Sporting Goods, a hunting knife with a six-inch blade.
He poked it into the northwest corner of the map, just on the eastern coast of Alaska, and drew it diagonally down, southeast, until it bisected Australia before hitting the moulded wooden frame. The sound of the parchment pulling apart was a harsh creak, and, looking round, Gabriel found he’d managed to attract Hamilton’s attention.
The man’s long face, clean-shaven and tanned to an even, pale caramel, was contorted with fury, lips curled up, nose wrinkled like a predator’s.
“I’ll call you back, Frank,” he said, then slammed the phone down. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he snarled, the patrician mask slipping for a moment. “That came from the USS Constitution.”
“Miss Beck sends her regards,” Gabriel said, strolling over to Hamilton’s desk and sliding into the chair facing the enraged CEO. “I’m here to collect three million in US bearer bonds. And if you press that button under your desk, your new young wife’s car will explode exactly five minutes after she collects your stepkids from Morgan’s Vale Preparatory School.” He inspected his reflection in the blade of the knife. “Esme and Henry. Cool names.”
Hamilton’s face lost its high colour in a flash, as if someone had changed the filter on a digital photo.
“If you harm . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that speech before. ‘A hair on their heads, I’ll blah blah blah.’ Listen, do you have the bearer bonds or not?”
Without another word, Hamilton reached into a drawer on his left and pulled out a large, rectangular, brown envelope. He pushed it across the desk towards Gabriel.
Enjoying Hamilton’s discomfiture, Gabriel laid his knife on the polished surface of the desk, then took his time with the envelope. He turned it over in his hands and untwisted the wire tag that closed the flap.
The documents that emerged, gripped between his right thumb and forefinger, were elaborately engraved on sheets of thick, stiff, off-white paper. Stamps, signatures, presidential portraits and insignia competed for space with copper-plate text declaring that each sheet could be exchanged on presentation by the bearer for the sum of one hundred thousand US dollars.
“Thirty, right?” Gabriel said, looking at Hamilton while flicking the edges of the bonds with his thumb.
“They’re all there, if that’s what you mean.”
“Better count them. I don’t want Miss Beck to be disappointed. Who knows what she might do.”
Licking the pad of his thumb, Gabriel separated each bond from its neighbour in the stack and counted out loud, placing them face down on Hamilton’s desk to the right of the knife. Reaching seventeen, Gabriel paused.
“Oh, shit. Was that seventeen or eighteen?”
Hamilton’s lips tightened. “Seventeen.”
“Nope. Can’t risk it. I’m starting again.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, is this really necessary?”
“Hey, you want to wake up with your own head on your nightstand, that’s up to you. Me, I like that connected feeling. Now, one, two, three . . .”
By the time Gabriel reached thirty, Hamilton was fidgeting with a fountain pen on the blotter in front of him, clamping his jaws and chewing the inside of his cheek. Good, you bastard. Imagine feeling ten times this stressed, fighting your way past a gang of terrorists who knew you were coming.
He folded the bonds and slid them into an inside pocket.
“Happy now?” Hamilton asked, glaring at Gabriel.
“No, Mr Hamilton. I am anything but happy. I am so unhappy I feel like shooting you right now.”
He pulled out the Glock and pointed it at Hamilton’s head.
The effect was instantaneous. Hamilton reared back in his chair, eyes popping, hands scrabbling for grip on the armrests. For added emphasis, Gabriel racked the slide and let it snap back with a crack against the receiver.
“You’ve got your money. Sasha’s money, I mean. What are you doing? Is that even loaded?” Hamilton gabbled, his voice several tones higher pitched.
“Why don’t we find out?” Gabriel replied, extending his right arm towards Hamilton, until the end of the suppressor was less than three feet from Hamilton’s sweat-slicked forehead.
“No! Please. Don’t.”
“Relax, Hamilton. I’m not going to. Not yet,” Gabriel said, keeping the Glock held straight out in front of him.
Hamilton appeared to have made a deduction. His eyes widened.
“Wait. Do you even work for Sasha?”
“No. I don’t.”
Hamilton’s eyes, which had resumed their normal shape, popped open again like twin flashbulbs.
“Fuck. I know who you are. You’re the British operative. You’re Wolfe.”
“Yes, I am. Although if you use that name again, I’ll put a hollow-point in your ear. And I know who you are. You’re the man who took military intelligence from Barbara Sutherland in 2012 and used it to set up an ambush for me and my men in Mozambique.”
Hamilton clamped a hand around the back of his neck, as if holding his head steady.
“If you know that, then you know exactly who you’re dealing with. Kill me and you’ll bring some very powerful people into play. People who, believe me, you don’t want to tangle with.”
“What did you say just then? ‘Kill me’? I suppose I could. It would save a lot of time.”
Gabriel tightened his finger around the trigger.
Hamilton put his hands out in front of him, palms towards Gabriel. “No! Jesus! Look, just tell me what you want. I’m sure we can work something out. You’ve got three million there in untraceable bearer bonds. I’ll
double it. In gold.”
Gabriel got to his feet.
“I’ve got a better idea. You can buy me a coffee.”
Hamilton’s brow creased with the effort of decoding this offer.
“What?”
“A coffee. Come on. Take me out for a coffee. We’ll go and tell Trish we’re concluding our chat at the nearest Starbucks, find your car and shoot the shit about people whose deaths we’ve caused. Oh, and one last thing. Anyone spots anything off in your act and calls the police or your in-house security team and, boom! ‘Soccer mom tragedy, three killed’. If I don’t make a call to a certain number at a certain time and leave a certain code, blam! ‘A town mourns as kids, mom, stepdad, die on same day.’ Understood?” Hamilton grimaced, then nodded. “Oh, and what’s your phone unlock code?”
“Nine-zero-zero-five.”
“Unlock it and hand it over.”
In the outer office, Trish looked up from her computer as Hamilton emerged, with Gabriel following a few seconds later. He’d used the gap to twist the top on the electromagnetic pulse generator, setting a five-minute delay, before pushing it below the soil surface of the potted olive tree.
“I’m taking Mr Lang out for coffee, Trish. Cancel my meetings for the rest of the morning, would you? He’s an old friend. We have a lot to catch up on.”
Hamilton even managed a smile as he led Gabriel passed his PA’s desk.
The temperature had dropped, even though the morning was wearing on and there were a few slashes cut in the blanket of high, white clouds. Gabriel was glad of the coat and pleased to see Hamilton shivering in his elegantly cut, but lightweight, suit.
“Where’s your car?” he asked Hamilton.
“It’s round the back. The parking lot.”
“Fine. Let’s go then. Keep the happy face on and think of Esme and Henry.”
At the back of the building, the company’s parking lot sprawled over a couple of acres. In the spot closest to the rear door sat a gunmetal Aston Martin DB9. Hamilton blipped the fob and seconds later both men were sitting in the mulberry-coloured cabin, which smelled of expensive leather and the man’s own equally expensive aftershave.
