by Andy Maslen
Don clicked on Play, and Chloe began to speak.
“Every nation should be free to govern itself. Its people should have the same basic human rights as all other peoples. This is true for Chechnya. This is true for the Chechen people. Think back, Mr Bryant . . .”
Don clicked paused the video.
“Notice anything?” he said.
“No. I mean, not really. She just looks a bit scared, wide-eyed.”
“Look again. When she says, ‘Think back’.”
Don rewound the video and hit Play again.
“Think back,” video-Chloe said.
Gabriel’s eyes narrowed.
“She just pushed the ‘k’ sound a little harder than she should have. Stressed it.”
“Yes, she did,” Don said. “And that’s not all. Look how her upper eyelid retracts just a tiny bit.”
“Yes, I see it. You get a flash of white above the iris. Just a tiny line.”
“So. She’s sending us a message inside the one the kidnappers have her reading out. Now, keep watching.”
He clicked Play for the third time and let the recording run until video-Chloe said, “We intend to free our country from Russia’s stranglehold. But to do that . . .”
Gabriel jabbed his finger at the screen.
“Stop!” he said. “She does it again. On ‘Russia’s stranglehold’.”
“Good boy,” Don said. “So that’s a ‘k’ and an ‘s’ she’s signalled us. Right, on to number three.” He clicked Play.
“You will hire them directly, bypassing your HR department.”
“See it?” Don said.
“Yes. Clear as day. Once you know what you’re looking for it’s easy, isn’t it? The ‘m’ in ‘them’ is where she does it.”
Don closed the lid of the laptop.
“So, she’s given us three letters. K.S.M. If you run the rest of the message, she pulls the same trick again, on ‘project’, ‘safe’ and ‘involvement’. Trouble is, we’ve searched through every database available: MI5, MI6, Europol, Interpol, FBI, CIA, plus a good old poke about on the dark web. Nothing. No criminal gangs, militias, organised crime syndicates, terrorist groups or freedom fighters go by those initials. I was hoping you might be able to play around with them using your linguist’s mind.”
“OK. Can I have a copy of the video?”
“Here,” Don said, handing Gabriel a USB stick.
Looking down at it, Gabriel laughed.
“It’s got an MI6 logo!”
“I know. Hardly James Bond is it? Apparently too many spooks have left laptops on trains so they’re trying to shame people into taking better care of the Firm’s IT.”
“Well, I promise I won’t lose it.”
“Good. I’m going to set a couple of the brainiacs here on it after you go. They’ve got all sorts of clever toys they love to play with. We’ll see whether there’s anything else on the video that could be useful. Now, lunch, I think. My club, my treat. You can brief me on what happened with Mr Bryant yesterday.”
Outside, Don flagged down a black cab and gave the driver an address in St James’s, home to the bespoke gentlemen’s outfitters of Savile Row and dozens of members-only clubs. Don’s club was a comfortable-if-stuffy establishment in which they were attended by decrepit men in frock coats who looked as if they had served the Duke of Wellington in their boyhood. Over pink-fleshed lamb chops, Gabriel filled Don in on the conversation with Bryant.
“I suggested they start parallel manufacturing of Gulliver. That way the flyboys – and girls – can do their thing in the Typhoons at Farnborough. In the meantime, I can track down Chloe and Sarah, exfiltrate them, then you can put some men on the ground to mop up after me.”
“Ah yes, mopping up, the job of an old soldier,” Don said with a rueful smile. “So while Bryant’s real people are turning out a safe batch of Gulliver, Tarbosy and his gang will carry on regardless.”
“Do you think it will work?”
“It’ll have to, won’t it?”
After lunch, the two men shook hands with an agreement to speak by phone the moment Gabriel figured anything out – even a wild theory would be acceptable according to Don.
Later that day, in his hotel room, Gabriel booted up his laptop and loaded the video. With a bottle of chilled Burgundy by his right elbow, and a half-full glass in his hand, he clicked Play on the video and leaned forward.
He watched and listened as Chloe Bryant read out the speech prepared for her by the kidnappers. It was a very clever trick. The eye-widening and vocal emphasis on the ‘k’, ‘s’ and ‘m’ was subtle enough to be missed by a kidnapper looking through a camcorder’s viewfinder or LCD screen. The fact she’d done it twice spoke of courage and determination. He’d seen the results of failed kidnap rescues in Afghanistan. In one village, the remains of two American oilmen were found in a cellar beneath a dusty, greyish-white concrete hut. The Taliban had removed their eyes, crudely, to judge from the jagged tears around the empty sockets, and their genitals. Their stomachs were painted with the Arabic word ‘Infidel’ in their own blood. He doubted the people holding Sarah and Chloe Bryant were as bloodthirsty or as unconcerned about human life as the Taliban, but it still took guts to risk your life when your captors were filming you up close and personal.
Taking a long swallow of the wine, he pushed the laptop away and picked up a pencil. He scribbled the letters on a sheet of the hotel’s notepaper, first in lower case, then in upper case.
k s m
K S M
Then he rewrote them in different orders.
k m s
s m k
m k s
m s k
s k m
Nothing. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, leaning back in his chair and letting his head flop back. “Come on, Gabriel,” he said to the ceiling. “She’s trying to tell you something.”
He got up from the desk and went to the window. Across the street, a row of cheap restaurants and takeaway joints competed for the custom of the passing commuters and tourists. Each outlet, whether selling pizza, falafel, fried chicken or burgers, advertised itself with a gaudy plastic sign. The concept of branding had clearly passed these restaurateurs by, since their signs were a random mixture of bright colours and typefaces. The lack of consistency amused Gabriel, and a smile crept over his face as he spotted spelling errors, wonky typography and other mistakes repeated from shop to shop. Clearly one enterprising shop-fitting firm had cleaned up, winning the business of each place on the little strip.
Our Customer Always Come First, read one slogan.
You’re burger, you’re way, said another.
OlyMpiC ChiCkeN, another.
Pizza, spahgetti, lasagne, a fourth.
Something clicked in Gabriel’s brain. He tracked back along the row of orange, yellow and red plastic signs.
OlyMpiC ChiCkeN
He rushed back to the desk, knocking into the standard lamp on his way. He shot out a hand and steadied it without breaking step.
He fell into the chair and wrote out the three letters again.
K S M
It wasn’t an acronym at all. No wonder Don Webster hadn’t found a gang called the Knights of Strife and Murder, or the Kenya Street Mechanics. It was an abbreviation. Just the consonants of a word.
He wrote them out like a half-solved crossword clue.
K_S_M
Now, what are you? He repeated the word dozens of times, using different combinations of vowels, but quickly realised he was going nowhere. Time for a different approach.
“Kessem,” he said aloud. “Kossam, kissem, kuzzum . . . chasm.”
On the last try he stopped. Smiled. Took another sip of the burgundy, now approaching room temperature.
“Not chasm. Qasim. Is that who you are?”
He wrote it down then picked up his phone and called Don, tapping his teeth with his pencil and making a quiet ticking sound as he waited for the call to connect. Don answered.
“What do you have for me?”
“I think I know who has the Bryants.”
“That’s my boy. So enlighten me.”
“It was the letters. KSM. It’s not a group: it’s a name. An Arabic name. Qasim. Sometimes it’s spelt with a Q, sometimes a K. So I think we’re looking for a guy called Kasym.” He spelled it out. “It’s a European variant of the Arabic spelling. It feels more likely somehow, given they were picked up in Stockholm.”
“Fantastic work, Gabriel. OK. Get some dinner or go for a walk. I’ll have some people run another search.”
Chapter 27
Somehow, among all the preparations for a search-and-rescue mission to Scandinavia, Gabriel had committed himself to seeing a psychiatrist. Fariyah Crace sounded friendly enough, but that was probably headshrinker voodoo. He, himself, was moderately adept at hypnosis, and therefore distrustful of anyone who claimed a direct line to the unconscious.
He walked from his hotel in Waterloo to a private hospital – The Ravenswood – in the heart of Mayfair. This was where Valerie the secretary had told him to present himself. “Professor Crace runs her private practice there. Her NHS work is on a peripatetic basis.” Fancy word for ‘travelling’, Gabriel had thought at the time, but then Valerie seemed to delight in obscuring anything about her boss that might make her seem merely mortal.
If he’d ever wondered where the rich came to play in London, he found his answer in the neat geometry of the streets bounded on the south by Piccadilly, the west by Park Lane, the east by Regent Street and the north by Oxford Street. With the exception of sandwich bars and traditional, family-owned Italian trattorie, the commercial properties seemed to divide equally between art galleries, boutiques, jewellers and luxury car showrooms. All, regardless of the merchandise they purveyed, were staffed by thin, beautiful women. They stood, like models, balanced atop four-inch-high stilettos, dressed in severe but beautifully cut clothes and turning on smiles like flashbulbs whenever a potential customer approached.
The streets were lined with expensive cars. On the ten-minute walk through the district that almost confirmed the old image of London’s streets being paved with gold, Gabriel lost count of the Mercedes S-Classes, BMW 7 Series and Audi A8s. These were just filler, the rides, chauffeured or otherwise, of business-types. The jewels in the German setting were British or Italian. Gabriel counted three Maseratis like his own on Albemarle Street alone. Sleek Ferrari 458s cosied up to the back bumpers of barge-like Rolls Royces. A vintage lime-green Lamborghini Miura, surely no more than three feet tall from tyre-treads to roof-line, dominated a street of grey, silver and black execmobiles. Best – or worst – of all, a Bugatti Veyron, its squat, bug-like bodywork wrapped in what was essentially red flock, the type of stuff you’d find gracing the walls of old-style tandoori restaurants in every city in the world. Gabriel saw the sign for The Ravenswood ahead of him, and quickened his step. Looking up at the midnight-blue and white signboard, he collided with a young woman with long, silky, black hair and olive skin emerging from a dress shop, a multicoloured clutch of glossy paper bags looped over her wrists by their twisted, silken handles. He apologised, but she ignored him, blipping a plastic key fob in her right hand and striding across the pavement to a powder-blue Lamborghini Aventador.
The quarter of a million pound hypercar – all angled planes and sharp points – hunkered down at the side of the road, about the same height as the cropped waist of her leather jacket. The woman, hardly more than a girl, dumped her purchases onto the passenger seat and moments later, roared away from the kerb, causing a black cab coming up behind her to screech to a halt. The driver leaned on the horn, but the prolonged parp seemed comedic compared to the feral growl of the Lamborghini.
Inside The Ravenswood, all was calm, unlike the NHS hospitals Gabriel had seen. More like a corporate headquarters or one of the upmarket art galleries nestling alongside it. Behind a reception desk constructed from translucent green glass blocks, a brightly smiling woman in nurse’s whites looked up at him, eyebrows raised in enquiry.
“Yes, Sir. How may I help you?”
“My name’s Wolfe. I have an appointment . . .”
“With Professor Crace. Yes. Here we are. You’re a little early. Please take a seat, and I’ll let her know you’re here.”
Impressed with her knowledge of what he assumed were many doctors’ appointments, Gabriel had one more question to ask.
“Will you call me or something, when she’s ready? I’ve never been here before.”
“Oh no,” she said. “Professor Crace will come and collect you.”
Gabriel found an empty chair in a quiet waiting area supplied with current copies of Vogue, The Economist, Car and The English Garden – a far cry from the tatty celebrity magazines that littered the waiting rooms of dentists, doctors’ surgeries and A&E departments. His neighbours were sipping cappuccinos and herbal teas, procured, he saw, from a low table stocked like an airport lounge. He was just considering whether he could be bothered to decipher the pictograms on the coffee machine when a tall, dark-skinned woman wearing tailored cream trousers, high heels and a rose-pink hijab came towards him, a white and deep-blue identity card on a matching blue lanyard bouncing against her chest.
“Gabriel?” she said, as she stopped in front of him.
The other waiting patients looked up briefly then returned to their magazines.
“Yes. You must be Professor Crace.”
“I am, but please, Fariyah is fine. Only my parents, my students and my secretary call me ‘Professor’. It makes me sound like some crusty old Oxford don, which, as you can see, I am most decidedly not. Come with me.”
He took an instant liking to this woman. She radiated energy, from the glinting deep brown eyes to the firm pressure of her warm, dry hand as they shook. They walked down a corridor lined with tasteful, inoffensive paintings and prints – they were mostly landscapes and still lives, no abstracts. Too unsettling for people who need help making sense of the world, he thought. Fariyah stopped outside a plain door made of the pale, satiny wood. Her name and title were rendered in elegant, white capitals on a midnight-blue strip of plastic slotted between aluminium runners.
“This is me,” she said, brightly, swiping her ID card against a flat, plastic rectangle set into the wall to the right of the door.
Gabriel had seen the inside of hundreds of offices, from his time in military service, to advertising, and now his own business as a security consultant. Military, corporate, public sector, government, each had its owner’s personality stamped on top of the generic flavour determined by budgets, brands and ideology. He took the comfortable leather-upholstered chair she offered, then, from his side of the desk, cast his eye over the furnishings and decorations as Fariyah assembled a toolkit of clipboard, sheets of paper from a filing cabinet, and a generic, black fineliner pen.
That she was an observant Muslim called for no Holmesian levels of observation; her hijab was enough for that. A painting of a butterfly, executed in bright, garish oils, reinforced the impression she’d created that she was a woman who wanted to make a mark on the world. The desk was clear apart from a computer screen, keyboard and mouse, and a photo frame turned away from him. Someone important. He checked out her left hand – a ring of intertwined strands of white, yellow and rose gold encircled her fourth finger. Husband then. Or perhaps husband and children.
She sat next to, rather than behind, the desk and crossed her legs at the knee. Gabriel shifted to his right in his own chair to face her, momentarily surprised that she had not chosen to sit behind the desk. The lack of any physical barrier between them created an intimacy that discomfited him. Surely, not the effect the manoeuvre was intended to produce.
“Have you ever visited a psychiatrist before, Gabriel?” she asked him now, her eyes watchful.
“To be honest, no. No therapists or counsellors of any kind, I’m afraid. If it counts, in the SAS, they had trick-cyclists train us to resist interrogation
.” He blushed. “Sorry. Not ‘trick-cyclists’, psychiatrists. Army slang, old habit.”
She smiled, resting the top of the pen against her lower lip. “If we’re going to work together, and I have a strong feeling that we are, then let’s establish a quick ground rule: we’ll save our outrage for things that are truly outrageous. I’ve been called a lot of things by my patients over the years, from ‘sadistic Arab bint’ to ‘Mummy’. Calling me a trick-cyclist didn’t even move the needle. Is that all right with you?”
That dispelled the tension. Gabriel laughed. “Fine. Agreed.”
“Good,” she said. “I know Don referred you. Do you want to tell me why?”
He ran a hand through his hair from front to back and clamped it around the back of his neck. Took a breath and let it out slowly.
“I’ve been having . . . moments, where, I don’t think I’m where I am, really. Sorry, that was rubbish. Look, Don thinks it’s PTSD. He didn’t say it but I know that’s why he gave me your card.”
“How did Don come back into your life? You left the Army some years ago, I think.”
“I was involved in an accident.”
“What kind of accident?” Fariyah wasn’t writing anything. She cocked her head to one side and waited.
Gabriel heaved a huge sigh. Rubbed his neck again. “I ran into the road outside the National Portrait Gallery and got hit by a lorry. Which was on the wrong side of the road, by the way. Ended up in Audley Grange.”
“Did you forget to look both ways, then?” she said, face impassive, not even a hint of irony in her tone. “Listen, I think something must have happened to shake you up. It’s not easy for everyone to talk about these things, so rather than you struggling to decide how much of your story to tell me, I’m going to take charge and ask you some questions. How would that be?”
“Yes,” he sighed. “That would be much better.”
Fariyah uncapped her pen and held it poised over the clipboard. She asked Gabriel a series of questions, beginning with innocuous facts about his birthplace and date (“Kingston, Surrey, 1980”), childhood homes (“King’s Norton, Surrey, Hong Kong”), number of siblings (“none”), parents’ occupations (“diplomat, private tutor”), schooling (“chucked out of loads of schools, private tutor”), hobbies (“nature”), friendships (“no memorable ones”) and religion (“basically Church of England”). Then she asked more intimate questions, from the age he lost his virginity (“sixteen”) to how he would describe his sexuality.
