Blind Impact (The Gabriel Wolfe Thrillers Book 2)

by Andy Maslen

  Coffees ordered from the skinny, pale waitress, the three Chechens got down to business.

  “So, tell me,” Kasym said. “What’s happening in England?”

  “It’s what we expected,” Makhmad replied. “The Ministry of Defence has launched an enquiry. Our friends in London say the British Government still wants the trial and demonstration at Farnborough to go ahead. They want the drug to be safe, and they want their pilots ramped up to the hilt with it. Powerful people are pushing for a clean bill of health. And once it’s proven, there are channels they’ll use to exploit it commercially – under the radar you might say. That’s where Abramov comes in with his dirty money and his connections. He’s told them he can funnel the drug to Ukrainian separatists to give them an edge over the Russians. It’s the other way round, of course, but they don’t know that.”

  “Which is good news, Boss, isn't it?” said Dukka. “I mean, we still get to nail Abramov?”

  “In time, Dukka, yes, in time. But first, we have to make damn sure that inquiry finds nothing that will cause them to shut down Gulliver.”

  Makhmad took a sip of his coffee, then centred it in front of him on the scratched red plastic tabletop. He spoke.

  “So we put more pressure on Bryant. I think we should send him another video. Another present from his daughter.”

  Kasym sighed. “I agree. He’s ours as long as he believes his womenfolk are alive. And Western plastic surgeons are geniuses at reconstruction.”

  *

  Leaving Makhmad and Dukka to drive back to the scrapyard in the truck, Kasym climbed into the Peugeot and started the engine. There was someone he needed to speak to in Tallinn about the next phase of the plan. With Bryant under pressure, the British end of the operation was holding up well. Now to meet a man whose organisation made the Corleone family look like missionaries.

  Ninety minutes later, he pulled up in a back street in the city centre. He walked for half a mile to a brightly lit avenue thronging with youngsters out for a good night. Boys and girls, sometimes girls and girls or boys and boys. By the prophet, the world had changed. Even free, Chechnya would never descend to this level of depravity; he’d see to it, one way or another. Though he had no political ambitions of his own beyond independence, he still felt he’d be able to exert a degree of influence over whichever self-serving bunch of “patriots” got to rule a free Chechnya. As he went to pass them, one of these brightly dressed couples swayed and fell against him, giggling. He bunched his right hand, but then forced himself to relax again. He was here for business, not pleasure.

  Ahead, he saw the sign for the bar he was looking for: red and white neon spelled out the words “Uncle Sam’s”. Pathetic. You exchange serfdom under the Soviets for enslavement to American culture. He pushed open the door and was enveloped in a cloud of cheap-smelling aftershave, perfume and beer fumes. The music was overpowering, and he couldn’t see much through the darkness, punctuated as it was by strobing pink and green spotlights. He shouldered his way through the brightly dressed customers and was trying to catch the bartender’s eye when a hand seized his left forearm in a tight grip. He spun round to his left to see the man he had come to meet.

  The man inclined his head – “follow me” – and released Kasym’s arm. Which was probably wise. He headed away from the bar and pointed above the heads of the bar customers to a door marked Private, set between American movie posters: Independence Day and Ghostbusters. Kasym followed him, elbowing a few people out of the way for good measure. Beyond the door was a dimly lit hallway where the sound levels dropped to a burble. A door stood open to his right, and he went through it. The room was decked out with all the trappings of a corporate CEO’s lair, or at least one as imagined by a violent Moscow-based gangster obsessed with the 1980s: a bank of dark blue steel filing cabinets; a glass-topped chrome coffee table surrounded by low-slung, white leather and chrome armchairs; a drinks cabinet open to reveal a clutch of high-end spirits and cut-glass tumblers; a gleaming, silver Mac on the blond wood desk; even an aquarium, in whose limpid water swam small striped fish, like postage stamps from somewhere in Africa.

  The man stood in front of the desk, right hand extended. They shook, then he returned to sit in a black leather swivel chair. Kasym took a matching chair facing him across the expanse of beech or whatever it was, noting as he sat that this chair didn’t rotate. He stood again and pulled the chair back until he could stretch his long legs out in front of him. He toyed with the idea of putting his crossed feet up on the desk, but then parked that particular piece of provocation.

  Instead, he looked closely at the man he come back to Tallinn to meet. He was the head of a Russian Mafia operating group, a former Russian special forces soldier – Spetsnaz – a murderer, rapist and committer of war crimes. Not that anyone would form that impression from his appearance. Media executive, they might say. Or football manager. Industrialist, even. He was average. Mid-grey business suit, white shirt open at the collar. Average height, average weight, average looks, short, silver-grey hair. No scars on that pale face. No break to that short stubby nose. But there was something behind those average pale-blue eyes. Something distinctively not average. A capacity for ferocity. For violence. It came through in the gaze. Kasym had seen it many times before. He’d even wondered what, precisely, it was that led one to back away from certain people when they looked at you. Elsbeta had it; this man in front of him had it. Whatever it was, it made small men piss themselves, and big men get ready for a beating, in one direction or the other. He stared back.

  They had yet to exchange a word, but now the man spoke.

  “Kasym Drezna. The Butcher of Beslan. Delighted to make your acquaintance. We do business at last.”

  He smiled, but it was a predator’s grin. A show of teeth, not humour.

  “Ruslan Gregorovich. Torturer of innocents. How are you keeping?”

  The man behind the desk narrowed his eyes and inhaled deeply through his flaring nostrils before letting the air out in an explosive laugh.

  “‘Torturer of innocents’! I like that. Though if you call those peasants innocents, you don’t know much about life in the Russian countryside. In any case, they should have known better than to rat me out to the authorities. What’s a few less alcoholics in Russia anyway? She has millions more to fill their place. So, now the pleasantries are out of the way, tell me the news.”

  “We are making ready to move on Abramov. The Gulliver drug will be demonstrated at the Farnborough Airshow in a few weeks’ time. Abramov will be in the audience with a few of his friends. He will be expecting to see the fruits of his investment. Instead? Boom!” Kasym smacked the desk with the flat of his hand. “With a bit of luck, the plane will crash right into the VIP stand, and he will be obliterated without us needing to use a single bullet. Either way, when the Typhoon hits the ground, so does Abramov’s standing with his masters in the Kremlin. Then you and I will move in on his business interests and carve them up between us as agreed.”

  Gregorovich smiled a doglike smile, revealing big, yellow teeth, the points of the canines extending fractionally below the upper incisors.

  “As agreed,” he said. “And if he survives Farnborough, you will carve up Abramov yourself, hey?”

  Kasym nodded, his mouth set in a thin, humourless smile.

  “After what he did to my family? I will use a very small, but very sharp knife.”

  “Ah, you Chechens are all the same. Family, always family. What did he do anyway? Evict them from some housing estate he owns?”

  “No. Before all this ‘new Russia’ bullshit he was KGB. You know that about him, I’m sure?”

  Gregorovich nodded, unscrewing the cap on a bottle of Grey Goose vodka. He motioned at the thick-bottomed cut glass tumblers he’d taken from the cocktail cabinet, tilting the neck of the bottle towards Kasym and raising his eyebrows.

  “Please,” Kasym said. Then, “Grey Goose? Not Russian?”

  “That rotgut? I’d rather drink my
own piss. No, my friend, one of the advantages of my position,” he swept his hand around the office, “is that I get to drink better hooch than we did in the bad old days.”

  “In those bad old days, Abramov commanded a specialist unit with the army. They went into Grozny first in ’99. Old men castrated in the street. Old women – and young – gang-raped by teenage soldiers. Babies gutted and hung from lampposts like fucking dolls. My wife and daughter suffered before they were shot like dogs. So yes, Abramov has it coming to him – at the point of my knife.”

  “Then let us drink to his downfall and his death.”

  Kasym liked his business partner scarcely more than Abramov, but needs must, so he clinked his heavy tumbler against Gregorovich’s, and knocked back the smooth imported vodka. The spirit coursing down his throat gave out a deep warmth, though it was silky compared to the Chechen-made firewater he was used to. As it hit his belly, the fumes in his nose left a lingering smell of aniseed and black pepper.

  Chapter 15

  After Annie left, promising a full report on Dreyer in a couple of days’ time, Gabriel felt twitchy, unable to settle. The stitches in the back of his head were itching, and he couldn’t concentrate on the book he was reading.

  He shook his head, then headed upstairs for a shower. As he undressed, a pale lilac and brown carton fell out of his trouser pocket. It contained the painkillers given to him by Doctor Norton: Tramadol. He read the tightly folded leaflet inside the packet. Worked his way down the long list of side effects, from dizziness and diarrhoea to anxiety and itching. He decided he’d be happier, and safer, with a known quantity. Something that came in a slope-shouldered green glass bottle.

  After the shower, he put on some clean jeans and a grey T-shirt and went barefoot down to the kitchen.

  First, he needed music. He found what he wanted on his hard drive. As Jimi Hendrix played the plaintive opening bars of Little Wing, he pulled open the fridge door, then slammed it as he realised he had nothing fresh to work with. Some dried chillies and a few slugs of olive oil went into the wok, followed by a squirt from a new tube of garlic paste and packet of vacuum-packed noodles. Finally a splash of soy sauce, Chinese rice wine and lime juice. As the steam rose above the hob, he chucked in a handful of coriander leaves fresh from the garden and scraped the whole lot into a bowl. Then he poured himself another large glass of white Burgundy, and took wine and food to the table.

  Hendrix was soloing, soaring somewhere in outer space, as Gabriel sucked in the slippery noodles and washed them down with mouthfuls of the cold, white wine.

  “Tell me, Squadron Leader Tom,” he said out loud. “Who fucked around inside your head? And did they know what would happen to you . . . and to Eddie Hepper? The snakes and spiders and everything? Because I am going to find out. Just watch me.”

  Chapter 16

  High above Eastern Europe, on a great circle route that took it directly over the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, a US Navy Lockheed EP-3 spy plane was completing a sweep. Its four million dollars’ worth of digital surveillance hardware and software were crunching terabytes of data from smartphones, social media feeds, websites, chatrooms, short and long-wave radio transmissions, GPS pings, walkie-talkies, CB radio sets and encrypted military radio communications.

  The senior comms analyst onboard was Petty Officer First Class Maria Damasio. She was running a standard spectrum-sweep analysis or “Triple-Ess-Ay” in the lingo of her trade. The computers did all the sorting and sifting, cleaning up some signals, boosting others, but it was Maria’s job to let the data run through her fingers, feeling for nuggets that might mean more than just random squeaks or blips. There! There it was again. A regular three-beat signal from some kind of GPS-enabled smartphone app. Two things bothered her about the signal, which was metronomic in its regularity.

  First, she’d never come across a signal with this electromagnetic signature before. It wasn’t civilian and it wasn’t military, or not in her experience, which was ten years and growing. Second, smartphone apps didn’t do this in the first place. They weren’t powerful enough for a start. And where was the need? You wanted to know where your friends were, you wanted to find a hook-up in a one or two mile radius of the bar you were in. You didn’t want, or need, to send a signal that would radiate out from your phone to the edge of the troposphere.

  Yet here it was. Beep-beep-beep . . . beep-beep-beep . . . beep-beep-beep. Packed in amongst the ones and zeroes was enough positional data to get a fix on the transmitter. She ran a back-find algorithm and tapped her bitten nails rapidly on the edge of her keyboard. A dialog box opened in her screen.

  Latitude: 58°22’35” N

  Longitude: 26°43’27” E

  A GPS reference. She tapped another key and the digits were replaced by decimal degrees.

  Latitude: 58.3806200

  Longitude: 26.7250900

  Estonia.

  She swivelled her padded leather chair round and pulled her headphones off, scratching through her short red hair to her itchy scalp where the cans had pressed down on her head.

  “Mike?” she called. “I’m picking up some very strange shit over Estonia. Can you ask the pilot to take another pass, a thirty-klick radius holding pattern over these coordinates?” She pointed at her screen and waited for Chief Petty Officer Mike Rollings, her boss, to squeeze his ample frame between the chairs of the other four analysts staring intently at their monitors and join her.

  “What is it?” he asked, when he arrived and began to peer over her shoulder at her screen.

  “I’m picking up a strange GPS ping from somewhere in the southeast of Estonia. It’s coming from a smartphone, that’s what the rig’s telling me, but something’s off. For a start, why does a smartphone user have an app that’s capable of reaching us all the way up here anyway? For Christ’s sake, are they trying to talk to their granny on a space station?”

  He frowned and scratched his chin, then looked down at her.

  “I’ll call it in to Ray, ask him for a twenty-minute hold.”

  As Mike went forward to talk to the pilot, Maria bent over her keyboard again. Her fingers flashed across the keys. The screen launched new windows that overlapped each other, closed others down, brought up frequency spectrum analysers, mapped coordinates, and finally started beaming pictures from the ground centring on the map reference still chittering away in its high-energy beam of ones and zeroes from the surface of the planet.

  It was a cluster of buildings in a 10.1-acre site, surrounded by a fence or an enclosing barrier of some kind. Lots of dead metal, cold, no heat signature, all over the shop. There was a truck of some kind parked near the buildings. Maria flicked a switch. Any living organisms would show up as white figures on the screen. She held her breath as the image flickered then stabilised in front of her. In the enclosed area outside the buildings she could see two small blobs moving in random patterns around the perimeter. Quadrupeds. Guard dogs? In the largest building, she could see two people in full outline, close together. Lying down. In a separate room she could see two more people, one standing, one sitting. As she watched, a second vehicle drew up next to the truck and a couple more people emerged. They went inside the occupied building and joined the two upright figures. They embraced, coalescing into larger indistinct blobs before parting and resuming more recognisable human forms.

  The big plane banked to port, and Maria watched as the signal strength indicator on her monitor ticked up another couple of notches. Someone in that building had a real dope smartphone. Finding out who was above her pay grade.

  Mike came back.

  “Ray’s happy to fly a holding pattern for twenty minutes, then we have to continue on up to the Arctic Circle. What in God’s name is that?”

  “I don’t know. Could be something, could be nothing. Could be a student hangout, could be a couple of hostages and four captors. What do you want to do?”

  “Call it in. Hand it over to the NSA. And Maria?”

 
“Yes, Mike?”

  “Good job.”

  *

  In a small, windowless room at CIA headquarters in Langley, Fairfax County, Virginia, 4,300 miles to the west of the Lockheed EP-3 and 26,000 feet closer to sea level, a classified email dropped into the inbox of Deputy Chief Intelligence Analyst Cory Miller. She’d been about to head out to grab a deli sandwich and a coffee, and swore under her breath. Nevertheless, she returned to her desk and clicked the email.

  “Hmm,” was all she said, though she did raise her eyebrows a quarter-inch. Which for Cory, the department’s best poker player by a country mile, was a sign she thought this was interesting. Very interesting.

  “First my BLT-on-rye and a doppio espresso. Then take a look at Sparky there,” she said out loud, even though the office was empty but for her and a stuffed honey badger. The honey badger was the team’s unofficial mascot. Personal decorative items are forbidden within the precincts of the intel dept. excepting a maximum of two photographs of close family members, stated the departmental manual. But they all ignored it. The honey badger was reputedly the bravest animal in all of Africa. Would take on lions for a laugh, apparently. They liked to think Harold reflected their own do-or-die philosophy, even though their battlefield was composed of pixels not pinewoods, desks not deserts.

  When Cory returned to her desk, already munching on her BLT – the doppio was long gone – she took another look at the email. It was from a colleague at the NSA.

  Subject line: Inter-agency intel-share

  Message: Unidentified GPS location ping from civilian smartphone over Estonia. Plus the coordinates. OK, this was worth kicking upstairs, and maybe they’d decide to alert the nearest field office. She didn’t know if they had bodies on the ground in Estonia, but they did in Scandinavia, and that was right next door.