by Andy Maslen
As if the effort of attacking Elsbeta had exhausted her, Sarah sank back against the seat and sobbed quietly, her face covered by her hands.
Chloe was sitting upright, tense, arms crossed, sandwiched between mother and kidnapper. Kasym leant across her body and pinched her mother’s chin between his strong thumb and forefinger. He wore a heavy gold ring on the third finger of his hand set with a red carved seal. A dragon, it looked like.
He breathed in, then out again, clenching his jaw. It would not do to let these English women see the other side of his character. For now, the courteous kidnapper was the trump card.
“My dear Mrs Bryant,” he said. “Please do not be aggressive to Elsbeta. She was assaulted by Russian troops in our capital city, Grozny. It left her with a horror of violence. Will you promise me that? Please?”
Sarah Bryant lifted her head and glared at him.
“Fine. But if you hurt as much as a hair on Chloe’s head, I will kill you.”
“Oh, I have no doubt you would try. Which is why we must all agree to get along peaceably. We have a long trip ahead of us, and I do not want to have to restrain you beyond the bare minimum necessary to prevent your escape.”
“What do you mean, ‘a long trip’? Aren’t we staying in Stockholm?”
“Tell me something,” Kasym said. “Have you ever visited Estonia?”
“Estonia? No, of course we haven’t been to Estonia!” Sarah Bryant said. Her eyes widened and she reared back away from Kasym.
“Why ‘of course’? The Baltic States are very beautiful countries. Friendly people, lots of money now. Ideal tourist destinations. You agree, don’t you, Elsbeta?”
“Tallinn is Estonia’s capital and cultural hub. Its walled, cobblestoned Old Town is home to many cafes and shops. Kiek in de Kök, a fifteenth-century defensive tower, guards the city centre like a sentinel.” She paused. “Wikipedia.”
Kasym grinned at them, showing a row of mottled teeth.
“We will put you up somewhere nice, and you can learn all about the history and culture of this fine city.”
“Mum,” Chloe said. “Leave it for now. Think about Dad. He’s going to be worried.”
Kasym approved of the younger woman’s tone, and her suggestion. The father would need to be contacted. But not until he had the women safely in Tallinn. For now, they could keep their counsel.
Elsbeta stuck to the speed limit. Kasym didn’t want any attention from the police, even though he was a skilled corrupter of underpaid public officials. Keeping his knife in plain view, he looked out of the window, thinking about the Swedes and their designer shops and upmarket restaurants. So much affluence in the West. So much freedom. So much softness, too. Try this little stunt with a couple of Chechen women and you’d likely end up eating your own balls instead of succeeding in the kidnap. He checked his watch: 11.15. Dukka and Makhmad should be tied up at the jetty by now, the boat fuelled and provisioned for the trip. They’d reckoned on a trip of perhaps 12 to 15 hours depending on wind and currents, which meant they’d be at the dock in Tallinn at about two o’clock the following afternoon.
Something caught his eye through the windscreen. A flashing blue light. Elsbeta was already braking. She said a single word.
“Police.”
Chapter 2
The taxi dropped Gabriel Wolfe and Annie Frears outside the National Portrait Gallery on Charing Cross Road, just north of Trafalgar Square. Gabriel squinted as a shaft of sunlight pierced gathering rain clouds and temporarily blinded him. He paid the driver, then turned to the gallery door with Annie squeezing his arm and chattering about the exhibition of photographs they’d come to see. As they were about to go in, a wizened man approached them. He wore a filthy cream and blue anorak, and had one tooth in his upper jaw and sunken cheeks where the rest had fallen out. He stank of piss and booze, and clutched a handful of copies of The Big Issue magazine.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said to Gabriel, in a cockney accent rasping with cigarette smoke. “Would you care to purchase a copy of possibly the worst magazine in the whole world?”
The owners of this thin publication sold by homeless people would probably not approve of their salesman’s unorthodox technique.
“Er, no thanks. Not after that pitch.”
“Well, in that case, ’ow about a donation for a moderately amusing beggar?”
Gabriel laughed and gave the man a pound.
As he and Annie entered the gallery, it started to rain.
*
Three miles north, Dain Zulfikah was making his penultimate delivery: 200 litres of chemicals to a big commercial laundry in Islington. He dumped the last of the ten-litre cartons in a humid storeroom with a slosh and a thud, and got his docket signed by the manager. Then he swung himself back into the cab of his truck, slammed it into first with a metallic gnashing from the gearbox, and lurched into the traffic. One more drop, and then home for lunch and maybe a quick tumble with the beautiful Amira, his wife of three months. Dain drove in a hurry, speeding towards amber traffic lights, cutting up slow-witted car drivers and frightening over-eager pedestrians back onto the kerb with a sharp blast on the twin air horns he’d retrofitted to the truck. The transport manager had turned a blind eye to this unauthorised modification in exchange for some of Dain’s weed. “Best skunk in Peckham,” Dain had said at the time.
*
Gabriel and Annie entered the gloom of the gallery’s lobby. After checking in their bags, they headed for the stairs and the sign announcing a new exhibition by Annie’s brother, Lazarus.
Annie stopped at a poster. The young man staring off to the side wore a dusty combat helmet, canvas strap dangling at his chin. He looked too young to be wearing it, as if he’d been snapped while playing soldiers.
“Look! There he is. He’s only twenty-two and Magnum have invited him to join. Can you believe that? You know who they are, don’t you?”
“War photographers,” Gabriel said.
“Not just war, but yes. They’ve been everywhere. Laz is in the same group who had Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. It’s the big league.”
Laz had won his Magnum entry ticket with a series of wrenching pictures of civilian victims of American drone strikes in Afghanistan. This exhibition marked a departure from his war reporting. It was titled, simply, “Angels”, and was the result of a three-month trip to the US when Laz had ridden with a chapter of the Hells Angels. Gabriel had met some members of this organised crime gang not long before the exhibition had opened. The experience had not left him eager to renew his acquaintance, even through photographs. But Annie had persuaded him in bed one morning, pushing her tousled hair out of her eyes and pouting in a way she knew Gabriel found hard to resist. They weren’t in a relationship, according to her. She’d used the phrase “friends with benefits” which he’d never heard before. Apparently, it meant shopping, hanging out and sex, but “definitely not anything serious”. That worked for Gabriel. Commitment was a hard word for him, and as he had no intention of settling down, the arrangement suited him perfectly.
*
“Out my way, loser!” Dain yelled over the drum and bass pounding from the truck’s stereo as he tailgated an electrically-powered city car. The little vehicle veered into the bus lane to let him through, a tinny beep from its horn letting him know of the owner’s disapproval. Holborn was slow and Dain was impatient. Reaching the crossroads where Southampton Row and Kingsway join, he raced for the dregs of the amber light to make it across and into High Holborn, scattering a crowd of office workers and tourists mooching across the pedestrian crossing on the far side of the junction.
He peeled off to the left down Monmouth Street, stabbing the brake pedal and swearing as a taxi swung into the curb in front of him to pick up a fare whistling for a ride. Then he found himself enjoying an unexpectedly empty stretch of road that took him barrelling south towards St Martin’s Lane, Cranbourn Street, and then Charing Cross Road, heading for Trafalgar Square. He reached for his ph
one as he visualised Amira’s generous hips and rounded bottom, and spoke into the mic.
“Call Amira.”
*
In the gallery, Gabriel and Annie stood before the first of several whitewashed walls hung with 50 cm-square black-and-white portraits. Seven hard faces stared out at them. Starting at the right, they stared back. The first man had a tattoo of a death’s head on his right cheekbone. His eyes looked like ball bearings.
“He looks bad, Gabe,” Annie said.
“He probably is,” Gabriel said.
“Oh God, look at him,” she said, pointing to the next man along.
The face above the leather waistcoat with a Flint Chapter patch was pockmarked from acne, and weirdly pale. Odd for someone who spent his life on a bike.
As Annie stared into the fat man’s fleshy face, Gabriel looked around the room. There were a few twentysomethings with notebooks and heavy-framed glasses who he assumed were photography students; a middle-aged couple who looked like they had been aiming for the Titians and Caravaggios in the National Gallery round the corner and been waylaid by a mischievous tour guide; and a guard in a cheap navy-blue uniform with half-hearted silver badging, slumped on a plastic chair against the far wall and picking something out of his left ear.
“Gabriel, look at this one,” Annie said. “He gives me the creeps.”
Gabriel turned to look at the portrait. As he took in the scar bisecting the man’s ruined eye, and the shiny, gold, canine tooth winking out at him, he felt a tingling in his fingertips. His breathing became fast and shallow and the room seemed to recede around him. Sweat broke out on his brow, his palms, and under his shirt. He knew this man. His name was Davis Meeks. Gabriel had met him, twice, on his last mission. First at his clubhouse in Flint, Michigan, then at the farm belonging to a South African arms dealer named Bart Venter. Neither man was now alive.
Then the face of Davis Meeks spoke to him, right out of the portrait.
“I’m coming for you, boy. Like I said the last time. Gonna put you down like a dog.”
Gabriel’s body flooded with adrenaline. He started hyperventilating, and his pulse rate jerked upwards.
An immense tide of fear broke over the internal barriers he’d erected so carefully over the years to protect his psyche. As Davis Meeks leered down at him, Gabriel’s arms and legs began trembling violently. He turned away from Annie, who was still engrossed by the Hells Angel’s wickedly disfigured countenance.
Not now. Please. Meeks is dead. This isn’t real.
Gabriel looked over at the seated guard. But now the man wore the face of Mickey “Smudge” Smith – an SAS Trooper Gabriel had left, dead, in a Mozambican jungle, his body pinned to a tree by machetes through both palms. The guard looked up and smiled. His dark brown skin was shining. The smile widened until the skin at the corners of his mouth split and blood started flowing down onto the white collar of his shirt.
“Smudge?” Gabriel said, heart racing now. “Is that you?”
The guard spoke.
“How could it be me, Boss? You left me behind after we took out Abel N’Tolo. Couldn’t survive this, now could I?”
He looked beseechingly at Gabriel as the whole lower part of his face splintered into bloody shards and fell into his lap.
Gabriel shouted “No!” and ran from the gallery towards the main doors.
*
Driving down Charing Cross Road, Dain was enjoying the call with his wife.
“Why don’t you wear your birthday present? … Oh, you would, would you? Well we’ll have to see about that, won’t we … God you’re a dirty tart!”
He didn’t notice the cycle messenger a few feet in front of his front bumper. Her Lycra and carbon-fibre gear might have looked good, but afforded little protection from a three-tonne delivery truck.
“Shit!”
He dropped the phone and swerved at the last possible second, hearing her curses flash by the open passenger window as he crossed the white lines down the centre of the road to avoid her. The island placed in the road by Westminster Council to bracket the pedestrian crossing rushed at him. No option but to skirt it on the wrong side of the road. God was smiling on him at that moment: either Him or whoever set the timing programme for the traffic lights at the exit from Trafalgar Square. They changed to red, halting the cars, bikes and vans, and giving him a free run around the traffic island and back onto his side of the road.
Even without its load, the truck was an unwieldy vehicle, and its designers had never intended it to take corners as viciously as Dain was forcing it to now. Up ahead, at the red lights, three bikers revved their machines impatiently, the sound carrying in the still air. He didn’t want to be facing them in a head-on: the company’s insurers would kick up a fuss and his job would go down the toilet just like that.
He passed the crossing island and wrenched the wheel over hard to the left, dimly registering the black-haired man racing from the plate glass doors to his right. The truck skidded, its tyres unable to grip the greasy road surface under so much lateral force. The rear end slewed around and mounted the pavement.
The bang was loud inside the truck’s cabin.
Dain slammed on the brakes, cut the engine and leapt from the cab.
Lying on his back, bleeding from a gash on his scalp, was a man in a dark suit. His eyes were closed.
Dain pushed through the circle of onlookers taking video on phones.
“Get out the way! Call an ambulance!”
Dain bent over the prone figure on the pavement, kneeling carefully to avoid the blood pooling underneath his head, and checked his pulse. Then he leant closer still and felt the cool whisper of breath on his cheek.
“OK, he’s alive. Stand back. Give him some air.”
Minutes later, a siren’s wail made everyone look round, then Gabriel was being lifted onto a gurney and pushed quickly but carefully into the interior of the ambulance. Annie jumped in beside him, batting away the paramedic who tried to restrain her from cradling Gabriel’s bleeding head.
“Leave me alone!” she said. “He needs me.”
“What him need is a hospital, my love,” the woman said, her soft Jamaican cadences at odds with the harsh lighting and stainless steel inside the cramped space. “You can ride here, but please, sit yourself over there so we can do our work. What’s his name?”
“Gabe. I mean, Gabriel. Please, is he going to be all right?”
“He’s had a nasty bump, love. We’ll get him to St Thomas’ and the doctors can look after him.”
Chapter 3
Kasym leaned forward.
“Be calm. There’s been an accident. Just be who you’re supposed to be – a chauffeur with three important passengers. Talk them round.”
He turned to the two women in the back seat.
“You will stay silent and Elsbeta or I will do any talking that needs to be done. You might feel that you can signal with your eyes, or scream for help, and they will save your lives.” He shook his head. “One word and we will kill them. Then you. We are fighting for our homeland. The lives of two Englishwomen and a couple of Swedish cops do not even make the scales tremble.”
Elsbeta brought the car to a smooth stop a couple of yards away from the traffic police officer standing behind the blue and white Saab that half-blocked the road. She pressed the switch to lower the window. The blond policeman leaned down and spoke some words of Swedish. Elsbeta gave him a blank, uncomprehending look and shrugged.
“British?” he asked.
She flashed him a wide, toothy smile.
“Estonian. Sorry.”
“It’s OK,” he continued, switching seamlessly into English. “Sorry to hold you up. There was a hit and run. Did you see a red van passing you in that direction?” He pointed back behind the car, the way they had come.
“Sure, yes we did. On Lidingövägen. Going like a bat out of hell. All over the road.”
“Excellent. Thank you.” He glanced into the back of the car. “Good e
vening, folks. Sorry to disturb your journey.”
“That’s perfectly OK, officer,” Kasym said. “Just taking my cousin and her daughter to the ferry terminal.”
“OK. Enough room in the back there for the three of you?”
“Ha! It’s OK. We like to sit in the back. Road safety statistics show it’s five times safer for a passenger than sitting up front.”
“You got that right. You wouldn’t want to see what we see on a Saturday night after the bars close. Have a good night.”
“Good night officer,” Kasym said with a gracious smile. He could feel Chloe’s arm muscles tense against his side and pushed his left elbow firmly but slowly into her ribs. Just a reminder to play it by the rules. Her arm softened. Then the policeman was back in his car and driving off, siren wailing in the night.
After that, they encountered no further interruptions, and five minutes later they were pulling off the main road and onto a feeder road to the ferry terminal. They drove the whole length of Frihamnsgatan, then pulled up in the lee of a huge blue corrugated steel shed. A warehouse of some kind.
“We’re going to get out now,” Kasym said. “Our friends Makhmad and Dukka are waiting for us down there.” He pointed towards the water. “We have a very nice motor boat for the trip. There are berths for you both so you can get some sleep. Please don’t think of running or screaming. The only people round here this time of night are truckers sleeping in their cabs, and they’ll just assume it’s a couple of disgruntled whores.”
To emphasise his point, he pulled back the flap of his suit jacket. Tucked into his belt was his second-favourite pistol, a Makarov he’d pulled from the shaking hand of a teenaged Russian soldier in Grozny before knifing him in the gut. He’d felt bad for a moment, killing the kid, but he’d probably have gone on to rape a few more Chechens so no sleep lost. The gun wasn’t as accurate or as well made as Kasym’s Glock 17, but it symbolised the struggle. It symbolised the victory.
