Blind Impact (The Gabriel Wolfe Thrillers Book 2)

by Andy Maslen

  She walked off down the corridor, her sensible flat shoes silent on the thick woollen carpet, a custom job with repeating Dreyer logos woven into the pattern. She half-turned to him as they neared a door and stopped before they reached it. Her forehead furrowed and the muscles around the eyes tightened.

  “Please help him, Gabriel,” she whispered. “I’ve worked with James for over five years and I know when he’s keeping something from me. He’s resilient, that’s what the HR bunnies call it. He’s a fighter, too. But he’s really frightened, I can tell.”

  She did something surprising then. She took his hands in hers and squeezed them. The she knocked on the door, waited a beat, and pushed them open. The bottom edges of the solid timber doors brushed across more of the branded carpet.

  “Gabriel Wolfe is here to see you, James,” she said, then left, drawing the door closed behind her.

  Gabriel looked around. The room was vast. At least thirty feet square. Bryant had full glass walls on two sides, the fabled corner office. The glass stretched from floor to ceiling, but by luck, or because Bryant was the first to sign a lease with the business park’s developers, his view was unimpeded by any other buildings. It stretched to the horizon over unbroken farmland. Hanging on one of the two solid walls was a large painting of a molecule of some kind. Gabriel was no chemist, but he recognised the complex assemblage of coloured spheres and rods. He guessed it was the drug that had made Dreyer’s founders rich. The space under the painting was taken up by a pair of saddle-brown leather sofas facing each other across a low table. Bryant’s desk was itself a singularly impressive piece of furniture, a thick slab of frosted glass supported by a delicate geometric scaffolding of brushed aluminium. Through the glass, Gabriel could see shallow aluminium drawers apparently suspended in space.

  Unlike many of the CEOs Gabriel had met since forming his own company, Bryant had resisted the urge to dump an ugly PC onto his workspace, cables snaking every which way. Instead, a folded laptop sat discreetly to one side. Other than that, the desk held nothing but a silver-framed photo, its back to the visitor.

  Bryant came out from behind the desk to greet Gabriel. He was smiling, but it was a social expression only. He was conservatively dressed in a charcoal grey two-piece suit, white shirt with buttoned, not French, cuffs, and a navy tie patterned with small, white polka dots. His blond hair was cut short and parted. Was there a factory that turned out these handsome, trim men to order? Oh, yes. Harvard Business School.

  “Hi Gabriel, I’m James,” he said, shaking hands. Firm, but damp. “Pleased to meet you. Thanks for coming at such short notice.”

  Gabriel returned Bryant’s pressure, adding a genuine smile of his own. “It’s a pleasure. Dreyer Pharma would be a very welcome addition to our client list.”

  Bryant returned to his side of the desk; Gabriel took one of the chairs opposite him, lying his briefcase flat on the floor. The two men looked at each other across the modernist desktop. Gabriel waited for Bryant to speak. He’d noticed that Bryant’s right knee was bobbing up and down under the glass.

  “Thanks for coming to see me. Oh, didn’t I just say that? Sorry. I’m just not sure where to begin.”

  Then he did a surprising thing. He began sobbing. Gabriel was totally and utterly unprepared for this. He’d sat in front of marketing directors as an advertising account manager and suffered their spit-flecked rants about the work he’d presented. He’d been dressed down as an officer-in-training by burly sergeants who’d threatened to pull his bollocks off and make him use them for ping pong balls, sir! He’d faced suspicious tribal leaders toting Kalashnikovs and toking reefers the size of Cuban cigars. But a well-dressed CEO crying in his own office? No. That was a first.

  It was a first in his business career, but Gabriel had comforted enough crying soldiers in his life to know what to do. He sat quietly, not moving, not saying anything, waiting until the other man’s tears exhausted themselves and disappeared as suddenly as they had arrived. Then he drew the spotless, white handkerchief from the top pocket of his suit and proffered it across the expanse of glass that separated them.

  Bryant stretched out a hand and took it, wiped his eyes and then half-offered it to Gabriel, his hand hovering in No Man’s Land, the white square now limp.

  Gabriel smiled his warmest smile and softened his voice to a soothing, low-toned murmur. “It’s OK, James. Keep it. I have plenty more.”

  “God, I am so sorry about that. How embarrassing. For both of us.”

  “I said on the phone my services are confidential. That extends to everything that passes between me and my clients. But it seems like we just skipped the small-talk stage of our relationship.”

  Bryant laughed at this, swiping at his reddened eyes with the handkerchief.

  “Yes, I think you could say that. Look, I’ll be honest with you. I know who you are and what you’ve done in your life. That’s why you’re here. After I got your letter, I did a little bit of research.” He nodded towards the folded computer. “You’re a war hero. The Military Cross. SAS: ‘Who Dares Wins’. Then advertising. Now you work as an independent corporate troubleshooter. I was impressed. I daresay you did the same sort of thing with me. Nothing so glamorous, I’m afraid.”

  “Nothing glamorous about any of it,” Gabriel said, looking down, then back up at Bryant. “The Army was a job. A great job, by the way, but a job all the same. Great bunch of lads doing something incredibly exciting or else sitting around playing cards or writing poetry. And advertising? Please! You know the score there. I was a salesman, nothing more, nothing less.”

  “Nonetheless, I checked you out. And on your website you mentioned you handle, I quote, ‘sensitive matters’.”

  Now we get to it.

  “And you have a ‘sensitive matter’ of your own to contend with?”

  “Oh, oh . . . fuck, yes I do!”

  Bryant was twisting and interlacing his fingers then untwining them and running them over his face and through his hair. Gabriel doubted he was even aware he was doing it.

  “Look, whatever it is, and I’m going to stick my neck out and say I don’t think it’s a problem with your next investor presentation, why don’t you tell me? Put it on the desk between us and let’s have a look at it together.”

  Bryant’s lips were working soundlessly, compressing and releasing. Gabriel waited. Bryant’s eyes flicked down to the photograph. Gabriel noticed. And realised what the problem was. Just like that. A flash of insight. It was an ability that had kept him alive on more than one occasion as an SAS patrol leader. The whispery click of a twig snapping out of his eyeline, or a path through a village that looked a little too straight and easy. The guerrilla hiding in a pile of leaves died, while he lived. The bomb disposal team detonated the IED while he and his three men found another route through. He spoke.

  “Has something happened to your family?”

  Bryant looked up in shock, eyes wide, mouth open.

  “How did you know?”

  “I wasn’t sure. Now I am. Tell me, please. Are they being threatened?”

  Bryant leaned across the desk and fixed Gabriel with a wild stare, his hands closed into fists, knuckles white and shining, reflected in the pale mist of the glass.

  “Threatened? No, it’s gone way beyond that. They’ve been . . . Oh, Jesus, they’ve been kidnapped. Weeks ago. I don’t know how I’ve kept going, I’m so worried. And don’t say ‘call the police’ because they said not to, and I have . . . they’re barbaric . . . I have it here. Proof, I mean. They’re evil. It’s a man, at least one. But there have to be more, right? I mean it’s a gang of some kind.”

  Bryant was free-associating and Gabriel needed him to calm down. He stood and moved round the desk to stand at Bryant’s left shoulder. Put a hand on the man’s back, which was taut with nervous tension, the muscles stiff beneath the suit jacket.

  Bryant looked up at him. “What is it?”

  “Come and sit with me over there,” Gabriel said, po
inting at the sofas. “And do you think your secretary could bring us some tea?”

  “Yes, of course. Good idea.”

  Bryant depressed a button on the slim, grey intercom unit sitting on a bookshelf to his right. “Jill, could you bring us some tea, please.”

  The secretary’s tinny vice crackled back, “And biscuits? Of course. Won’t be long.”

  “I hate to sound like a therapist,” Gabriel said, prompting a rueful smile from Bryant, “but why don’t you tell me how it started?”

  Chapter 25

  Bryant had the look of a man who had finally been told he could drop the sack of rocks he’d been carrying. His shoulders slumped and he leaned forward, palms pressed together between his knees.

  “My wife and daughter have been kidnapped. They were on holiday in Stockholm. I got a call about six weeks ago from a man who said he was a Chechen. He said they’d keep them safe but I had to mislead an MOD inquiry and keep quiet about the kidnap, or . . .”

  “Or harm would come to your wife and daughter,” Gabriel said, leaning forward to mirror the other man’s pose. “Tell me their names. Please.” He knew them already, from the dossier, but it would help establish a closer rapport with Bryant.

  “My wife’s name is Sarah. My daughter’s is Chloe. She’s only twenty-five. How did this happen? Sweden is safe, isn’t it? It’s hardly Mexico or the Congo.” He looked beseechingly into Gabriel’s eyes, mouth downturned. “They should have been safe, shouldn’t they?”

  “Yes, they should. But if these Chechens wanted to get power over you, they would have found a way wherever Sarah and Chloe were. Have they made any other demands or communicated with you again?”

  Bryant looked at the ceiling. Then back at Gabriel. “They sent me two packages. One had a video cassette in it, a micro one. The other . . . it didn’t.”

  Bryant levered himself up from the soft leather cushions of the sofa and went to his desk. He slid open one of the slim silvery drawers and extracted two small, white boxes. Brought them back over to Gabriel.

  “They sent this one first.”

  He placed the pads of his fingers on the box’s lid and slid it towards Gabriel. Gabriel lifted the lid and placed it beside the open box. Inside was a small tape cassette and a silver earring, crusted with dark brown flecks of what Gabriel realised was blood.

  “Then this one.”

  He repeated the oddly precise movement with the second box. Gabriel opened it and drew in an involuntary gasp. Centred on a square of white cotton was a human earlobe, sliced off by a craft knife or some equally sharp blade. Piercing it at the fattest part was the twin of the ear-ring in the first box.

  Bryant was crying again, silent sobs that heaved his shoulders up and down as he hung his head down to his knees.

  Gabriel replaced the lids on both the boxes, picked them up and walked over to the desk, where he placed them inside his briefcase and pushed the lid closed with a damped click. When he returned, he sat next to Bryant, who looked up, eyes red and puffy.

  “Listen to me, James. We’re going to get Sarah and Chloe back safely. I promise.” I don’t promise any such thing, but I have to get you right-side up emotionally, at least for now. “I have friends I can call on to do some intelligence gathering, and I’m pretty handy in that area myself. But now I want you to tell me about what’s happening here. At Dreyer.”

  Bryant heaved a huge sigh, then looked round his office as he spoke. “They’re messing around with a drug we have in development for the RAF. It’s called Gulliver. It gives pilots a cognitive boost, helps them fly the new Typhoon fighter jets better. They’ve screwed around with it and now two pilots are dead.”

  One, actually; I’ve spoken to the survivor.

  “Screwed around with it how?”

  “Do you know much about chemistry?”

  Gabriel smiled. “I wasn’t exactly academically gifted. I scraped a GCSE in chemistry but that was a long time ago.”

  “I’ll try to make it simple then. In its original form, Gulliver used a Benzedrine-based amphetamine coupled with a mild antidepressant called paroxetine to speed up reaction times. Paroxetine retards the bloodstream’s reabsorption of serotonin, which is essentially a happy chemical we manufacture in our gut. More of it drip feeds into the brain and promotes feelings of wellbeing. We engineered Gulliver to reward pilots who executed tricky manoeuvres with a little extra squirt of serotonin into the reward circuits of their brains.”

  “I’m still with you, just. Go on.”

  “I think the new guys have stuck on an additional chemical from the methyl group. It affects solubility of the original active compound in the brain’s fat cells. That turned the Benzedrine into an inhibitor of its own uptake.”

  Gabriel’s brow puckered in concentration.

  “You lost me there.”

  “Sorry. In the new version of Gulliver, because of the additional methylated molecules, the amphetamine works initially, but then actually reduces alertness and slows down reaction times. Like giving Ritalin to kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. ADHD, heard of that?”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “They bolt on lysergic acid diethylamide - LSD - to create the hallucinations, and use an oxyphilic . . .” Gabriel frowned again. “. . . an oxygen-loving coating round its molecules using a modified amino acid called gamma-butyl-amylase. As the pilot flies higher, the oxygen concentration in his air supply, coupled with the change in cabin pressure, activates the LSD.”

  “But what about the blindness? I’ve heard of moonshine causing temporary sight-loss. Could that be involved as well?”

  Bryant scrunched his knuckles against his eyes, then looked blearily at Gabriel.

  “To be absolutely honest? I have absolutely no fucking idea. I used to know every last detail of the pharmacology side of things, but these days I’m more of an administrator than a scientist. I’m supposed to let them carry on and deflect a MOD investigation. I’ve got half my corporate affairs team on it – I’ve promised them double bonuses, threatened them with the sack, whatever it’s taken. The Typhoons have to fly at Farnborough or Sarah and Chloe, they’ll . . . and I can’t carry on. There’s too much pressure. Our investors would be happy to see my head on a spike as it is.”

  “I understand.” Gabriel stopped. He’d had a sudden idea that might, just, get round the problem. “Tell me, is your whole research and development department working on Gulliver?”

  “No. I mean, half of it is. Under a guy my head of R&D recruited.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Dr Solmin Tarbosy. He checks out. He’s eminent; that’s what the scientific lot call it when you’re a hotshot.”

  Gabriel fished a slim black notebook from his jacket and made a note.

  “Obviously, we can’t let any more pilots take Tarbosy’s version of the drug. Can you whisk up a new batch?”

  The crass representation of the pharmaceutical manufacturing process was a calculated attempt to pump some air into Bryant’s deflated ego. It worked. A wry smile curved his mouth.

  “Could we ‘whisk up’ some more? It’s a little more complex than that. But, yes, we could. I’d have to keep it away from Tarbosy and his team. I assume they’re reporting in to the man I spoke to on the phone.”

  “I’m sure they are. And any changes in the way your R&D department operates will be picked up and relayed back to the kidnappers. Could you outsource it?”

  Bryant frowned, thinking for a few seconds, his eyes roving the ceiling as if checking for hidden microphones.

  “We’d need a couple of our senior scientists to run the process, but with the data and a cooperative lab, I think it would be possible. Why though?”

  “Because we need to keep things stable here while I find your wife and daughter. The Typhoons will fly and the pilots will have the drug. But they’ll have our version in their bloodstreams, not Tarbosy’s.”

  “But if the pilots don’t crash, they’ll know. The kidnappers, I me
an. Then they’ll . . . harm Chloe and Sarah.”

  Gabriel paused. “I’ll have them back in England before then. We’ll round up Tarbosy and his gang of eggheads, and other people will chase down the kidnappers.”

  “You can do that? We don’t even know where they are, and Farnborough’s only a few weeks away.”

  The man was pleading for certainty in a world where it was in increasingly short supply. And Gabriel hated making promises he wasn’t certain he could keep. However . . .

  “You know my background. I give you my word. I will bring them back.”

  I just hope we’re not sitting here in a couple of weeks’ time with your right arm wrapped in a black band.

  Chapter 26

  The following morning, after leaving his bags at a hotel near Waterloo Station, Gabriel was sitting next to Don Webster in a sparsely furnished room deep within the corridors of the MI6 building on London’s Albert Embankment. The contrast between this taxpayer-funded office and the one enjoyed – if that was the right word – by James Bryant was stark. The desk was surfaced with cheap veneer, stained to resemble mahogany, or so the manufacturers had obviously hoped. Repeated trips around the building had resulted in numerous scars and wounds, and the veneer had disappeared altogether from the corners, revealing chipboard beneath. There were two chairs, steel-framed and padded with scratchy grey cushions, stained by countless spillages of coffee and tea. Apart from a battleship-grey, four-drawer, steel filing cabinet, the room was empty.

  Gabriel and Don were staring at the open screen of Don’s official MOD laptop, a creaking, black thing. An MI6 tech had transferred the video Gabriel had brought with him onto Don’s hard drive, and now they were watching and re-watching the video of Sarah and Chloe Bryant.

  Don cued up the video again.

  “Listen to how Chloe speaks and watch her eyes. God, she’s a clever girl,” he said.

  Gabriel leaned forward on the hard chair and watched Chloe intently, frowning with concentration and pulling on his lower lip. She was frozen in a stare of defiance mixed with fear.