by Andy Maslen
Gabriel met Astrid at the end of the bar, and they went through the door to the staff area.
He knelt down and unsnapped the latches in the case. He swivelled it round to face her and lifted the lid.
Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open.
“What the fuck is this? Did you rob a bank?”
“Not exactly. It’s Yuri’s. Well, it was. He won’t be needing it any more. I want you to have it. You could buy a bigger place maybe, get Joonas’s band new gear. I don’t care. I don’t want it.”
She looked up at him, tears running down from the inner corners of her eyes and rolling onto her top lip.
“I said you were too good to be true, you fucker. And now you prove me wrong.”
He helped her to her feet and she threw her arms around him and squeezed as if she could drive the breath from him and force him to stay with her. She drew away and kissed him hard on the mouth, searching out his tongue with her own. Finally he eased her away, cupping her damp cheeks in his palms.
“It was fun, knowing you.”
“Yeah, you too. Now fuck off and catch your plane. I have a bar full of drunken office workers to serve.”
Astrid barged the door open and went back to serving drinks, swiping a forearm across her eyes as she went. Gabriel waited a few more seconds, then followed her. He walked out through the crowded bar without looking back. The cold air hit him as he emerged from the muggy atmosphere of the bar, and he realised Astrid wasn’t the only one with wet skin.
He drove to the airport, left the FF in long-term parking with the keys in, and found a room in one of the budget hotels.
*
At half-past twelve the following afternoon, Gabriel was climbing the stairs to a British Airways ATR 72 twin turboprop on the apron at Tallinn airport. At the top, he paused while a portly businessman in a wrinkled grey suit rootled around in his jacket pockets for his boarding card.
“It’s here somewhere,” the man muttered, while the stewardess smiled her professional smile, never letting her immaculately made-up face betray the irritation she must surely be feeling. Finally the card was produced with a flourish from a waistcoat pocket.
“Ta dah!” the man said, as if he’d conjured a dove from a hat instead of a small piece of card from his own pocket.
Gabriel moved forward, holding his own boarding card out ready for inspection. She took it and when her eyes returned to his, her smile widened. “Welcome aboard, Mr Wolfe. Did you have a pleasant stay in Estonia?”
“I may need some time to think about that.”
“Well, enjoy the flight. We’ll do all we can to make it comfortable for you.”
Then he was waiting in the aisle, then sitting, staring out of the tiny plastic oval window, then feeling the familiar tug in the pit of his stomach as the plane parted company with the ground.
He sighed and rubbed his hand over his face, as if he would scrub it away altogether. He was thinking about fixing another session with Fariyah Crace, and about a therapist called Richard Austin and what EMDR might do for him.
“Mr Wolfe?” a voice said.
He looked to his left. The speaker, leaning over the empty seat next to him, was the stewardess. She was holding a plastic tumbler that chuckled with ice cubes, floating in what smelled like a very strong gin and tonic, laced with lime juice, just the way he liked it.
“Let me put this down for you.” She put a circular cocktail napkin on his tray table and placed the drink on top of it.
“Thank you. I didn’t see the trolley.”
“Special service,” she said with a wink.
Gabriel picked up the tumbler and took a long pull on the chilled drink. Then he looked down at the napkin. He picked it up, and grinned.
There was a message written on it in blue ballpoint.
“Cheers! You earned it. D.”
Chapter 48
The Farnborough Air Show’s final spectacle took place on a glorious July day. In a VIP stand directly in front of the takeoff zone, a group of very senior Royal Air Force officers drank flutes of champagne. Their guests included a number of politicians and officials from the Ministry of Defence and the Department of Trade. In the centre of a group of five men, all dressed in virtually identical navy-blue, two-piece suits with white shirts and dark ties, sat a tall, white-haired Russian: Oleg Abramov. They applauded along with the crowds at the end of each display of military hardware.
Two rows further back, Tom Ainsley sat beside Niamh, he in his RAF dress uniform and wearing sunglasses so dark as to be opaque, she in a simple green silk dress. Tom followed the flight path of each aircraft as it performed stunts or low-altitude passes over the airfield.
Finally, the moment the crowd had been waiting for arrived. Over the Tannoy, the announcer explained that they were about to see one of the world’s best pilots taking the world’s most agile jet fighter to its limits.
Five seconds passed in absolute silence, then with a shriek of combusting aviation fuel and an earsplitting rumble of exhaust gases, an RAF Typhoon, delta wings bristling with missiles and spare fuel nacelles, roared over the airfield, two hundred feet above the heads of the spectators. The thrust from its two screaming Rolls-Royce engines took the plane to nine hundred and ten miles per hour. The jet pulled up into a vertical climb to fifteen thousand feet, then fell sideways towards Earth, spinning and flickering like a silver sycamore seed. So focused that she felt she was a part of the Typhoon’s avionics systems, the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Shiona Webb, demonstrated to the crowd the incredible acrobatic abilities of her plane, and to the officials and Air Force officers the stunning cognitive enhancements made possible by Gulliver.
Niamh leant closer to Tom and kissed his cheek as he tracked his fellow pilot’s rolling, tumbling, looping flight through the crystalline blue sky above the Hampshire countryside.
As the display came to an end, and the Typhoon disappeared over the horizon on its way back to its home base at RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland, Abramov smiled. But then the smug expression on his face changed, as the men sitting to his immediate left and right stood, together. The man to his right put his hand on Abramov’s shoulder and bent to speak into his ear. The Russian frowned and shook his head. The man spoke again and lifted his jacket away from his shirt, showing Abramov something concealed inside. Abramov stood, clearly reluctant, and together with the two men, made his way along the row of seats. At the back of the VIP seating area, Don Webster waited. He had identified Abramov’s true business partner. And now he wanted to talk to him about international dealings in British Government-licensed pharmaceuticals technology. It would be a long conversation.
THE END
Andy Maslen
Andy Maslen was born in Nottingham, in the UK, home of legendary bowman Robin Hood. Andy once won a medal for archery, although he has never been locked up by the Sheriff.
He has worked in a record shop, as a barman, as a door-to-door DIY products salesman and a cook in an Italian restaurant. He eventually landed a job in marketing, writing mailshots to sell business management reports. He spent ten years in the corporate world before launching a business writing agency, Sunfish, where he writes for clients including The Economist, Christie’s and World Vision.
As well as the Gabriel Wolfe series of thrillers, Andy has published five works of non-fiction on copywriting and freelancing with Marshall Cavendish and Kogan Page. They are all available online and in bookshops.
He lives in Wiltshire with his wife, two sons and a whippet named Merlin.
*
Want to know more?
To get regular updates on new Gabriel Wolfe books, and exclusive news and offers for members, join Andy’s reader group at www.andymaslen.com.
Email Andy at [email protected]
Follow and tweet him at @Andy_Maslen
Like his page “Andy Maslen Author” on Facebook
Gabriel Wolfe returns in a new novel, Condor. Turn the page to start reading.
CONDO
R
God’s tears
THE NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL formerly known as Eloise Alice Virginia Payne, and now simply as Child Eloise, stood in front of the older woman, naked but for a pair of white, cotton briefs and a much-washed, plain, white bra, the thin straps frayed at the point they crossed her bony shoulders. They’d given her an extra cup of the sacrament that morning, and now she was blinking rapidly and couldn’t stop clenching her jaw. She was thin, and her skin was so pale the blue of her veins showed clearly on the insides of her thighs and down her neck onto her breastbone. The insides of her forearms were laddered with fine, white scars. The room in which she was standing was on the top floor of a sand-coloured, terraced house on a crescent flanking London Zoo. It was flooded with pale September sunlight that caught the fine, blonde hairs on Child Eloise’s arms and legs.
“Will it hurt, Auntie?” she asked.
The short, silver-haired woman took the dressmaking pins from between her thin lips to answer, first pushing her glasses higher up on her beaky nose.
“No, child. You will feel God’s breath on you, that is all, just as Père Christophe taught you. Then you will be with the Creator, safe and sound. Now, hold still while I finish your raiment.”
The young woman stood, trying to be still, but the muscles in her legs quivered in a relentless beat. She tried to imagine what it would be like. A flash of light and heat, and then some sort of awakening in Heaven. Would God actually be there to meet her? What if he was busy? But Père Christophe was clear on this point of doctrine. She was doing His will by serving Père Christophe, and of course He would be aware of that and would be there, ready to receive her.
As she shuddered and quivered, frowning with the effort of standing still, her Auntie pulled the cotton garment over her head and down her narrow torso. It had no sleeves, nor collar. It did have a series of ten sagging pockets that circled her chest like something a hunter or a fisherman would have on his jacket, each three inches wide, three deep and nine from top to bottom.
With a few deft stitches, her Auntie sewed a narrow strip of cotton from front to back between the young woman’s legs, forming a crude leotard.
“There!” Auntie said, standing back to admire her handiwork. “All finished. Now we just need to fill those pockets and you're ready for your glorification.”
*
Three miles away, Harry Barnes was getting ready for another day's sightseeing. He was a trim sixty-three, and liked to keep in shape playing golf and the odd game of tennis. He had a year-round tan, and he thought it set off his close-set, pale-blue eyes just fine. Since the divorce had come through, he'd been enjoying “every Goddamned minute” of his life, as he'd put it to a fellow he'd met in a pub the previous night, over a couple of pints of that weird, flat British beer. That included this no-expense-spared, two-week vacation to the UK.
The day looked like it was going to be fine, but Harry was from Reno, Nevada, where he managed a casino, and counted anything below seventy as dangerously chilly. He shrugged on his fawn windcheater over the sweater, and the Tattersall check shirt and undershirt he'd already tucked into his grey pants, or what did the Brits call them? “Trousers?” Funny word.
He sauntered down the short path from his hotel to the street, pausing on the edge of the black-and-white-chequered tiles to admire the park and its trees opposite the hotel. Back where Harry came from, there wasn’t a whole lot of greenery. Bayswater was full of other tourists, folks heading to work, even a party of kids, all wearing plum and grey school uniforms, and matching caps or floppy felt bonnets, like something out of Masterpiece Theatre. They were being led in a crocodile by a pretty young redhead in a lime-green dress with patent leather pumps on her feet. She reminded him of his daughter.
No bus in sight, but Harry didn't mind. Linda had been the one who was always in such a hurry. Well, now she'd rushed off with half his money and her skiing instructor, so fuck her. Harry liked waiting. Gave a man time to think.
*
Gabriel Wolfe sat at a small, circular, brushed aluminium table outside an Italian café on the northern end of Regent Street. From his vantage point on Biaggi's pocket handkerchief-sized terrace, he looked south to Oxford Circus, a throbbing crossroads where pedestrians swarmed around the junction, pushed and jostled their way down into the tube station beneath the pavement, or darted across the road in front of hooting taxis and buses groaning with passengers.
He sipped his flat white, savouring the smooth, strong coffee beneath the creamy milk, and took a mouthful of the delicately lemon-flavoured cake. It had been brought to him a few minutes earlier by the owner, a scrawny old guy who still spoke in a strong Italian accent despite having lived in London, as he told Gabriel, “since the sixties. Swingin’ London an’ all that, innit?”
The day was bright, and the bite in the air was counterbalanced by the warmth of the sunshine on his face. It was “a real Indian summer” as his father would have declared it, before finishing his tea and toast, folding his newspaper under his arm, ruffling his son’s straight, black hair, and heading off to his job as a diplomat in Hong Kong.
Gabriel’s three-piece Glen plaid suit in a lightweight grey wool was perfectly suited to the air temperature. Today, he’d paired it with a pale-lavender shirt, a knitted, black silk tie, and a pair of highly polished, black brogues. He was on his way to meet a prospective client: the CEO of a firm that offered close protection to foreign celebrities and VIPs visiting London. She wanted help training her operatives, as she called them. Firearms, unarmed combat, defensive driving. Bread and butter for Gabriel, and very well-paid bread and butter at that. Early for the meeting, he'd stopped for breakfast on this wide boulevard, only a hundred yards or so from the streaming crowds of London's main east-west thoroughfare, but as quiet as a village high street in comparison.
With a clatter from its diesel engine, a very high-mileage example to judge from the grey smoke rolling out from its exhaust pipe, a car drew up at the kerb, blocking his view across the street. Nothing fancy, a silver Ford Mondeo estate, one of millions like it on Britain's roads, with the rear windows blacked out with plastic film. A common-enough modification these days, when every suburban middle manager wanted to look like a drug dealer. From the rear seat, a young woman got out. Her hair was blonde and cut short. Nothing stylish – in fact, it looked like someone had done it for her at home using kitchen scissors. Her shoulders were hunched inside a black, padded jacket, and the muscles around her pale-blue eyes were tight. She kept grimacing as if she had just tasted something unpleasant; her mouth kept stretching wide then releasing again. He caught a glimpse of a middle-aged woman ushering her from her seat, gold-framed glasses glinting as a shaft of sunlight penetrated the gloomy interior of the car.
Without looking back, the young woman shuffled down the street towards Oxford Circus.
*
Harry was enjoying himself. He’d caught his bus, a 94, after ten minutes' wait, and was sitting on the top deck chatting to a new friend. Her name was Vivienne. She was a little younger than Harry, fifty-eight or nine, maybe. No wedding ring. She was a looker all right, and Harry told her so after a few minutes’ idle conversation about the weather.
“My ex-wife would kill for hair like yours,” he said. “Real natural blonde, none of that peroxide stuff. It kills the shine, and probably the planet too, for all I know.”
“Aren't you the Sir Galahad,” Vivienne had replied, patting her hair and smiling. Her lips were a pale pink, and seemed to shimmer in the light coming through the grimy window of the bus. Harry was close enough to see the way traces of lipstick had worked their way along thin creases that ran over the edge of her upper lip.
“Hey, at my age, we call it like we see it. Am I right? Plus, we got taught good manners, which in my book includes complimenting a beautiful woman on her looks.”
He really hoped he hadn’t just overdone it, but Vivienne seemed happy enough with this gentle flirting. Her figure was just what Harry liked, too
: round in all the right places – none of that bony, sucked-in look so many of his ex-wife’s friends paid so much to achieve. “Why wouldn’t a woman want to look like a woman?” Harry had asked Linda one day when they were still talking.
“Jesus, Harry, you’re such a fucking dinosaur,” had been her baffling reply, leaving Harry none the wiser but one tick closer to hiring a divorce lawyer.
As the bus lumbered along the start of Oxford Street, they stared down at the tacky tourist shops. Displays of T-shirts emblazoned with union jacks jostled for pavement space with circular racks of sunglasses and displays of miniature red telephone boxes, bear-skinned soldiers in sentry boxes and teddy bears dressed like Yeomen of the Guard. Just in front of them, a bright-yellow metal fitting was vibrating in time with the big diesel engine some ten feet below them. The buzz was loud enough to make Harry have to raise his voice.
“This could be a mite forward of me,” Harry said, after clearing his throat, “but would you have some time this morning to see a couple of sights with an American on his first trip to the United Kingdom of Great Britain?”
He held his breath as he watched Vivienne. She checked her watch. Rolex Perpetual Oyster Lady Day-Date, Harry noted with a professional’s glance, a nice model. You could tell a lot about a punter by their choice of watch. Then she looked at him. And smiled.
“You know what, Harry? I think I might.”
Harry smiled right back.
*
Something about the young woman had troubled Gabriel. Now, his antennae were flickering and twitching, and a thin blade of fear was lying on its edge inside his stomach. She’d looked anxious, but so did lots of people. She was so tense she couldn't walk easily. Her coltish legs looked uncoordinated, as if she had only learned how to use them a few hours earlier. A job interview? The clothes didn't look right. Black jeans, black quilted jacket. And no make-up. Which would have been a good idea, as her eyes were red from crying. She'd looked skinny. The jeans were narrow cut, and her thighs didn't even fill them. Her wrists looked bony too. Yet her body looked bulbous, bulky somehow, even allowing for the stuffing of the jacket.
