by Andy Maslen
In answer to the last question, Gabriel said, “ninety-nine per cent straight”. When Fariyah frowned and repeated the percentage, Gabriel said, “I’m completely heterosexual but I thought you lot all think people are on a spectrum, so if I said a hundred you’d think I was hiding something.”
Fariyah laughed. “Well that’s a first. A straight man claiming to be a little bit gay to fit someone’s expectations. Normally it’s the other way round. You can be one hundred percent straight; it’s fine by me.”
This exchange finally broke whatever lingering ice lay between them. Gabriel felt he could trust this attractive Muslim woman, and decided at that moment to be as honest with her as he could manage. As she questioned him, listened and made notes, he told her about the bungled mission in Mozambique. He told her about his nightmares. He told her about his flashbacks and his sudden urges to take his Maserati up to its top speed and just keep it there until fate or a sharp bend in the road intervened. He told her everything.
After he had spoken for about twenty minutes without pausing, Fariyah held up a hand, palm outwards.
“Let me stop you just for a moment, Gabriel. What I’d like to do is administer a standardised, seventeen-question checklist for post-traumatic stress disorder. Try to answer each question as honestly as you can OK?”
Gabriel nodded, “OK.”
After she had finished asking the questions about moods, behaviours, beliefs and emotions, she laid her clipboard to one side and uncrossed her legs.
“This is the point where you’ve told me your story and now I try to build a narrative about you and tell you what I think,” she said. “Based on your answers, yes, you have PTSD, and I think it’s fair to say you are suffering from it as well. Not to the point where you can’t function, but I can see it’s affecting your ability to enjoy life, if nothing else. You use alcohol, and work, to cope, but they’re not working very well any more. In this session, I don’t want to go any further, and I’m not going to reach for my prescription pad. But I do want you to see a colleague of mine. His name is Richard Austin. He is a very experienced therapist and he works a lot with veterans of conflict. He uses a technique called EMDR. Have you heard of it?”
Gabriel shook his head. She smiled and continued.
“It stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. It’s been credited with some amazing results among PTSD sufferers. I’m going to write to him and ask him to call you. Then the two of you can arrange a set of appointments.”
Gabriel frowned, thinking of his imminent trip to Stockholm. “How many appointments? And how soon do I have to start?”
“Well, you’ve managed this far without EMDR, so the urgency I’ll leave up to you. Typically, people need between three and six sessions. It’s very effective, so don’t think you’ll be in analysis for years or any of that Freudian bullshit.”
Gabriel’s eyes popped open at the profanity. He’d heard – and spoken – far worse, but somehow, coming from her lips in this setting it seemed far more transgressive than any amount of effing and blinding on the battlefield or in the Sergeants’ Mess.
“Did I shock you?” she asked. “A good Muslim woman using bad language like that?”
“No,” he lied. “It’s just . . . you’re a . . . Actually, yes. Because of that. The hijab and everything.”
“Relax,” she said, smiling and leaning over to pat his knee. “I still say my prayers and I don’t eat pork.”
She looked at her watch. “That’s our session over, I’m afraid. Make an appointment with Richard and see how you get on. Come back for another session with me in, what? A month’s time? We’ll have a chat about the therapy and maybe at that meeting, we’ll discuss whether any drug therapy would be helpful to you.”
She stood and held out her hand. Gabriel took it.
“Your husband is a lucky man,” he said.
“I know,” she said, dropping her voice to a husky, seductive whisper. “That’s what I keep telling him.”
*
Five minutes later, Gabriel was outside The Ravenswood, heading back to his hotel. He felt elated, and strode along the streets feeling, finally, that someone other than him was carrying at least part of his burden of guilt.
Chapter 28
Deep within the Senate Building in the Kremlin, the former KGB officer who now ruled Russia sat behind his mahogany desk, reading a defence briefing on air force capabilities in the seven countries judged the biggest threat to his own.
There was a brief double-knock at the door, and his new secretary, a young woman fresh from Moscow State University, entered the office.
“Mr President, Oleg Abramov is here to see you, sir.” She was smartly dressed in the western style tailored suit, sheer stockings, high-heeled shoes, minimal make-up, blonde hair cut in a sharp-edged bob that emphasised her long, slender neck.
“Thank you, Valentina. Keep him waiting for another hour, then show him in.”
The president returned to the document before him. He underlined passages here and there with precise, arrow-straight lines of blue ink that he drew freehand.
Exactly sixty minutes later, Valentina returned, accompanied by a tall, smooth-faced man in an expensive suit, procured from a London tailor to judge by the cut and the fabric, his white hair cut short and brushed straight back from his forehead.
The president stood and came round the desk. He walked straight up to Abramov, grasped him by both shoulders and kissed him three times on the cheek: left, right, left.
He pulled back from the embrace and gestured to a chair.
“Please, my friend, sit, sit.”
Valentina turned on her heel and was gone, drawing the double doors closed behind her like a courtier.
Back behind the desk, the president looked at the man facing him, who did not appear to be nervous. In fact, from his posture, leaning back, one ankle resting on the other knee, anyone would think he was relaxed. That annoyed him. Had his power brought him no more than the professional respect anyone would pay to a run-of-the-mill CEO or party functionary? There had been times, in his KGB days, when merely to appear in the same room as a detainee would cause the man, or, more rarely, woman, to void their bladder, if not their bowels. That fetid, meaty stink made him smile then, as the memory did now. It spoke of the stark terror he inspired in people. Often, his reputation alone had sufficed to loosen their tongues, but he was more than happy to demonstrate his skill with a wide variety of implements whose designers had never, in their worst nightmares, imagined would be put to their current purpose. He spoke.
“Oleg Vasilievich – I hope you don’t mind my using your patronymic, Abramov sounds too Jewish to these simple Russian ears – I was speaking to our air marshal this morning. He leaves for a tour of our air bases tomorrow. I reassured him that he would be perfectly within his rights to preempt our official announcement and tell our pilots that they would soon be flying higher, faster and with more agility thanks to our forthcoming acquisition of the Gulliver drug.” He paused for a moment. “I hope I did the right thing.”
He watched the other man swallow, the lump of his Adam’s apple disappearing and reappearing above his shirt collar.
“Of course, sir,” Abramov said, running a finger around the inside of his shirt collar. “The Farnborough Airshow is just a couple of weeks away. It is the final proving ground and demonstration of the drug’s capabilities. After the show, I shall be meeting the British Secretary of State for Defence and some of her senior advisers, along with the Secretary of State for Trade, and a procurement consultant from McKinsey and Company. They are the world’s leading management consultancy firm.”
“Yes, yes, I know that,” the president snapped, his face darkening with a scowl. “Do you think I am some provincial durak who has never studied biznes?”
“A fool? Of course not! Never. My apologies.”
Good. Now I can see a few beads of sweat on your face and your hands have clenched. Not so relaxed now, are you, my bi
llionaire friend? “Continue, please.”
“We will conclude the deal that we have been negotiating for many months now. Gulliver will be licensed to one of my companies, a pharmaceuticals manufacturer in Germany named AbraPharm. The British believe I am selling it to Ukraine to help them resist the embrace of Mother Russia. You and I know whose pilots will eventually benefit.”
“Yes, we do, Oleg Vasilievich. And we know who else will benefit from this deal, to the tune of one hundred and seventy five million US dollars.”
“Of course, Mr President, that is true. But, as you said yourself, you understand biznes. My company profits at the same time as Mother Russia. And what is money compared to the resurgent glory of our military in a world dominated by the Americans, and even the Chinese?”
The president smiled and watched as Abramov relaxed again, believing his rhetoric had won the day.
“Of course,” he said. “There is always more money, after all, but respect for our country is an altogether more precious commodity.” His smile widened though the lips remained pressed together and the cold, grey-blue eyes remained flat and expressionless. “Let me show you something,” he said, pulling open a drawer in the desk.
He leaned over and picked up a small cylindrical object, and positioned it exactly halfway between them on the expanse of walnut.
“Do you know what that is?” he asked.
Abramov glanced at the object, twitched his lips, then looked back at the president, who was smiling good-naturedly.
“A bullet?”
“Exactly. Although technically, one would call it a round. Specifically, it is a nine-by-eighteen millimetre Makarov round. Steel cartridge, cupronickel ball. It costs about forty-eight rubles. Now, how about this?”
This time the president’s hand, when it reappeared from under the desk, held a pistol, dark-grey steel with a ridged brown plastic grip. He placed it next to the round with a soft clunk.
Abramov’s eyes flicked down to the pistol. He wiped his top lip with his forefinger.
“That is a gun. A pistol, I mean.”
“Very good. Again, to be specific, it is a Makarov semi-automatic pistol. My Makarov semi-automatic pistol. It costs us about six thousand rubles to manufacture. And do you know the most interesting thing about these two objects that sit between us?”
“What is that, Sir?”
“Simply this, Oleg Vasilievich. If I take this little round here,” he plucked the cartridge from the desk, “and push it in here,” he thumbed it into the magazine that he’d dropped from the pistol butt by depressing a knurled metal lever, “then push this home here,” he slotted the box magazine back into the pistol grip, “I have a weapon system just as capable of stealing a man’s life from him as one of those twelve-and-a-half-billion-ruble Typhoons. Imagine,” he said, pointing the muzzle of the weapon at Abramov’s chest, “how many Makarovs we could buy for the price of the Gulliver technology.”
Abramov swallowed. Beads of sweat rolled freely down his forehead and into his eyes, making him blink.
“Not much prestige in bullets, Mr President,” he choked out.
The president had his index finger curled round the Makarov’s trigger.
He paused for a few seconds, enjoying the older man’s discomfiture. Then he laughed and thunked the pistol down onto the desk, making Abramov startle and rear back in his chair.
“Of course, you are right. We can’t frighten NATO, or the Ukrainians, or those fucking black-asses to the south with bullets. For that, we need air superiority. So . . .” he leaned across the desk. “Just make sure we have it, yes?”
He stood and leant across the desk, offering a hand. Abramov followed suit, and the two men, each powerful in his own way, shook hands briefly, though only one had rivulets of sweat trickling from his armpits, dampening his shirt.
Once Abramov had left the room, closing the doors behind him as the young secretary had done, the president picked up the pistol, aimed at the door and mimed a shot.
Chapter 29
Gabriel was on the website of the City of Stockholm, cross-checking a list of hotels to find those close to the centre without being bang in the middle of the tourist areas. Preferably somewhere cheap and unflashy. A Holiday Inn or an ibis hotel, where he could blend in, coming and going with the minimum of attention from uniformed flunkeys.
His phone rang; it was Don.
“Hi Don, got something for me I hope?”
“I do indeed. One of those bright young things who wasted their teenaged years playing Call of Duty has had his finger in our pie since we last spoke, and he pulled out a plum. Did you notice the window was open behind Chloe in the video?”
“Yes. Her hair kept blowing across her face. Why?”
“Tell me. What comes in through open windows besides air?”
“I don’t know, smell? Sound? Wait. Did you get some audio?”
Don chuckled. “That we did, Old Sport. That we did. Church bells. They were muffled by the wind in the trees, but he did all kinds of jiggery-pokery, the technical description of which I must confess I have totally forgotten, isolated them, and cleaned them up. In fact they’re not just church bells, they’re cathedral bells. A carillon, know what that is?”
Gabriel felt he was back in the classroom, eager to please his instructor. “It’s like a tune isn’t it? A pattern of chimes.”
“Exactly. But it’s no carillon you’ll hear in Stockholm. I had one of our analysts here confirm it. We know Sarah and Chloe Bryant were taken from there. But where would Chechen kidnappers take them after that?”
“Out of Scandinavia,” Gabriel replied at once, beginning to assess the kidnap as an operation. “They’d probably travel by boat. Much lower visibility, more places to land the hostages. Not south – why risk German or Polish border security? So east, then. The Baltics, probably; Russia’s the enemy if you’re a Chechen.” He Googled ‘Baltic States’ and pulled up a map of the region. “My best guess? Estonia. Although Lithuania or Latvia would still be possible destinations.”
“Give him a medal,” Don said. “That’s what I thought, too. I contacted our field offices in Vilnius, Tallinn and Riga, and played them the recording of the carillon. The young woman in Tallinn took precisely no seconds to identify it. It’s St Mary’s Cathedral. Now, it was faint on the video, so they weren’t central. Our boy in the basement did some maths and estimated that for that volume level, the safe house was within a two-mile radius of the cathedral.”
Gabriel did a little quick maths of his own. “So that’s, what, somewhere over twelve-and-a-half square miles?”
“About that, yes. Twelve-point-five-five-six to three decimal places. Not great, but better than just flying to Stockholm and asking around.”
“I know. It’s brilliant. Give that tech a pay rise.”
Don grunted. “Huh! You think people like me have any say over the money? It’s all those smartarses in their designer suits and BMWs. We’re the same as we always were, my boy. The action men. Well, you are, anyway. Now, get yourself over to Tallinn and start sniffing around. Any thoughts on your line of attack?”
“I have. We’ve got a minimum of four targets, I’m thinking. A driver, two heavies and a boss. It’s the optimum ratio of kidnappers to hostages, too. Four Chechens are going to draw attention in a place like Tallinn. They’ll want to be under the radar, so they’ll be staying somewhere cheap and bland. No penthouses or underground lairs in volcanoes.”
Don laughed. “They’d be lucky. I think the highest mountain in Estonia’s only about a foot taller than you are.”
“Plus, they’ll have bought guns, cars maybe. Or booze, or drugs. The kidnapping has a specific purpose, but people like that always have other stuff going on to raise funds or to further the cause.”
“So . . .”
“So I’m going to head for the places where the action is. The docks, the railway stations, the third-rate nightclubs. If I find the strippers and the lap-dancers, I’ll find people who
know who’s new in town. Maybe who’s causing trouble for the local mob.”
“Right. That sounds good. Get yourself a hotel room. Text me. I’ll have someone drop you off a shooter. Any preferences? You used to be a dead shot with that SIG Sauer of yours. Never could persuade you to use anything official, could I?”
“True, but you didn’t have any complaints either, did you?” Even when I fucked up so royally in Mozambique, you stood by me, Don. “Yes, for choice, a P226 would be great. With an SWR Trident-9 suppressor, please. And a couple of hundred rounds.”
“A couple of hundred? What are you planning, World War Three?” Don’s gruff chuckle sounded down the line again. “Sure. Anything else?”
“I’ll pick up some stuff over there. I have a feeling that where I’m headed, there’ll be a couple of obliging pawnshop owners who can kit me out with a few little extras.”
“OK, good. Listen, I have to go. Bloody budget meeting with the Queen’s Own Versace Rifles. Keep in touch. And call me if you need me. Day or night. That’s an order, Captain Wolfe.”
Under the playacting, Gabriel sensed genuine affection from his old boss. He’d been a good commander. Willing to lead from the front and get his hands dirty. Now he was tethered to a desk and leaving the fight to others. Not Don’s style at all. I’ll make you proud Don. Don’t worry.
*
What do you pack for a hunting trip when your quarry is a group of Chechen separatists hiding out in the arse-end of Tallinn? No suits, that’s for sure. Gabriel had been shopping for one item especially. Folded on top of his other clothes in a black nylon holdall was a dark red and duck-egg-blue West Ham replica team shirt. The fabric was slick and shiny, and the colour was so intense it seemed to bleed out of the design. Just right for his cover – an ex-soldier looking for spare cash while bumming round Europe.
