Rattlesnake

by Andy Maslen

  “Really? Isn’t that all a little … I’m sorry Gabriel, but you know, fanciful?”

  “It could be. But in my world, that kind of scenario is something we have to take seriously. Even in yours. I mean, look at the books you teach. The best stories are always the ones where there’s good and bad people in conflict.”

  “Sure there is! But that’s literature. Stories. Not real life.”

  “You’re probably right, but even the four-legged critters are dangerous down here, aren’t they?”

  She nodded and smiled.

  “‘Critters.’ That’s good. You’re starting to talk like a Texan.”

  While they discussed what specific critters he might meet, Gabriel took the Mossberg down from the cabinet and picked up a box of shells to go with it. He placed it on the floor of the Ram, behind the front seats, and sat the ammunition beside it.

  “There,” he said. “Good to go.”

  Terri-Ann frowned.

  “You know you need to prove you’re a Texas resident to carry those, don’t you? Legally, I mean. A driver’s license would do it.”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “And I’m working on that. But I have something that’ll do in a pinch.” He reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a fine-grained black leather wallet, shaped to its contents and bearing the signs of long years of use: scuffs, creases, shiny patches and a few loose stitches. He extracted a piece of plastic with the dimensions of a credit card and held it up for her to see.

  “What is that? All I can see is some kind of official-looking crest and a couple of phone numbers.”

  Gabriel smiled.

  It’s a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. Literally. In fact, it’s more of a “Don’t Go to Jail in the First Place” card. It’s a work thing. All any law enforcement agency in the world has to do is call that number and a kind, patient and very powerful person in London gives the reader an excellent reason to let the bearer go about their business.”

  Terri-Ann rubbed a hand across her mouth, eyes wide.

  “You know what? I really, really, hope you don’t have to pull that stunt in Texas. I can picture the reaction of an SAPD patrol officer or worse, a Texas State Trooper, being told to call London and speak to a Brit about some Englishman with a concealed carry firearm. Believe me, Gabriel, it would not be pretty.”

  He smiled.

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, then.”

  19

  Needle, Haystack

  THEY’D checked the journey on Google maps the previous evening. It gave total driving time as just under six hours. Gabriel wanted to arrive in plenty of time, so Terri-Ann had volunteered to make him breakfast and prepare some food for the journey.

  “There’s no need,” Gabriel said. “Just show me where the kettle and the toaster are, and I can fend for myself. I’m a bachelor, I’m used to it.”

  But Terri-Ann wouldn’t hear of it, protesting that, one, he was her guest, two, he was a friend, and three, if he was going to drive all the way over to the middle of nowhere searching for the place her husband had been found, the very least she could do was feed him.

  Now, it was three in the morning, and dark outside. In the kitchen, blinking in the bright lights let into the ceiling, Gabriel sipped his coffee and munched his way through a plate of bacon, eggs and toast. While he ate, Terri-Ann was slathering bread with mayonnaise before adding slices of smoked ham, pimento cheese, lettuce and tomato. She poured water into a tall metallic-blue flask and screwed the lid on tight before capping it with the aluminium cup. She grabbed a couple of apples from a bowl of fruit on the island counter top and added these to the growing pile of supplies she was assembling. A handful of granola bars completed the ration pack, which she packed into an insulated red canvas tote bag with a white H-E-B supermarket logo on the side. Next to it stood a black leather case containing a pair of binoculars.

  “You have everything you need?” she asked, sitting opposite Gabriel. “I know the Ram’s got plenty of gas.”

  Gabriel wiped his lips with a napkin she’d placed beside his plate.

  “I think so. Out of interest, what kind of gas mileage do you get in that monster?”

  She laughed. “Oh, yes. I forgot you Brits have to pay so much for, what do you call it, petrol?” She assumed a comedy British accent for the last word and they both laughed, though more out of nervous tension than appreciation for her comic talents. “’Round town, only about thirteen to the gallon. If you drive super economical on the highway, you might get as high as nineteen. It’s a five-hundred-mile tank so you’ll easily get to, you know” – her eyes dipped to the table top for a second – “the location. But you’ll need to fill up at some point so don’t get overconfident. If you see a gas station, use it.”

  He nodded. His plans definitely didn’t include being stranded in the desert.

  Gabriel shrugged on a cotton windcheater, then climbed back into the spacious cab of the Ram. He tapped the GPS reference from the police file into the satnav and watched as the display redrew itself, marking the route from Terri-Ann’s house to the spot on the Chihuahuan Desert where Vinnie’s body had landed. Vinnie had installed a remote control for the garage door, and Gabriel pressed the soft green silicone button on the dash. While he waited for it to open, he fired up the pickup’s engine. In the confines of the garage, the burble of the big V8 was like the growl of a slumbering bear. A very big bear. That snored. It brought a smile to his face, and as the white shutter came to rest overhead, he eased the truck out, across the sidewalk and onto Greenhill Drive.

  After four and a half hours, in the centre of Fort Stockton, the satnav on Gabriel’s phone instructed him to exit I-10 and then take a left. An hour later, he was still driving due south on 385. The road ran straight as a laser beam through the desert, and a single-wire fence marked off the road from the scrubby land to each side. Just ahead was a white wooden gate. He drove the Ram parallel, climbed down from the cab, stretched and rolled his shoulders, then wandered over to the gate. Whoever owned the land – he was guessing the State of Texas or the Federal Government – clearly didn’t feel the need to go overboard on security. The gate was held closed against the right-hand post by a simple latch, which he lifted before swinging the gate back on itself on the other side of the fence, where it met with a mild squeak of protest.

  He swung the Ram’s steering wheel right and manoeuvred the truck through the open gate and onto the sandy desert soil beyond before dismounting once again to close and latch the gate. According to the display on his phone he was six hundred and fifty yards from the spot where Vinnie Calder’s body had come to earth, if not to rest. Feathering the throttle, he trundled across the rough ground until, using a tone of voice Gabriel chose to interpret as implying a minor triumph, the satnav lady told him, “You have reached your destination.”

  Gabriel killed the engine, removed the keys from the ignition and climbed down onto the hard-baked ground. If he had been expecting black-and-yellow crime-scene tape, flapping and snapping in the breeze blowing from the southwest, he was disappointed. He turned a full circle, using a flat hand to shade his eyes from the sun, which at 10.00 a.m. was blindingly bright, even through the lenses of his Ray-Bans. He pulled on the Roadrunners ballcap she’d given him.

  “Well, Wolfe, now what?” he said, hands on hips.

  He scanned the area for anything that might have indicated a police presence, but there was nothing beyond the tyre tracks of heavy road vehicles, trucks like Vinnie’s Ram. Next, he superimposed a grid on the ground, one-metre squares in lime green. It was a trick of the imagination, taught to him by an FBI forensic investigator on a course in the Bureau’s headquarters in Quantico. He started walking in measured paces, north-south, then east-west, visualising the glowing green squares and attempting to be methodical in his visual search of the area.

  After an hour of slow, steady pacing, head down, eyes flicking restlessly over the ground, he was beginning to think the whole trip had b
een a waste of time. He marked his spot on the imaginary grid with the sunglasses and walked back to the truck. He had half the coffee left and one of the sandwiches. He sat in the cab with both front doors open, legs dangling over the side, drinking, chewing and above all, thinking.

  A memory came bubbling up. Another search, another hot place, another death. Though the remembered death was still, despite all he had learned since about its causes, all the sessions with Fariyah Crace, a burden of guilt he carried with him.

  He addressed the man whose skull, single cervical vertebra, and identity discs he had, finally, retrieved from the dried riverbed and tree trunk in Mozambique.

  “Help me out, Smudge, mate,” he said, looking into the distance, where a range of mountains shimmered like a mirage. “They found Vinnie out here, and according to the pathologist, his body was smashed up as if he’d been in collision with a massive object. We know what that means, don’t we?”

  “Yes, boss, we do,” came the answer from deep inside his head, no visual this time. Trooper Mickey “Smudge” Smith had stopped appearing to Gabriel in physical form. Those hallucinations, at least, had stopped. The voice in his head was soft and quiet, with a south London accent. “Body dump. From the air. Al Qaeda used to love doin’ it, didn’t they?”

  Gabriel nodded, then spoke.

  “Not just Al Qaeda, though, was it, Smudge? The Syrians, the Saudis, any mad fucker with a few secondhand choppers bought off the Russians tried it out from time to time.”

  “Don’t forget our American friends, boss. Remember those blokes we met in Colombia on that joint op with DEA? The ones who came in those massive black SUVs? They seemed pretty gung ho about chucking bad guys out of helos.”

  Gabriel hadn’t realised he’d closed his eyes, as he conducted this imaginary conversation with his dead comrade. But they snapped open now.

  Nobody’d said anything out loud on that mission to scoop up the leadership of a cartel, but it was commonly understood in the camp that the implacable men in the Chevy Tahoes were from a certain agency based not a million miles from Washington, DC. And yes, they seemed remarkably relaxed about discussing the way they’d encouraged terror suspects to break their silence in the past. What had they called it, “VIP”? Yes, that was it. It stood for “Vertical Interrogation Protocol”. He and his fellow SAS men had shrugged off the sinister name as typical spook humour.

  But that was then, and it didn’t signify anything here. No evidence Vinnie had been dropped from anything, let alone a CIA chopper. Except, except … Gabriel’s intuition was tingling. Vinnie’s job: head of security for a biotech firm. Two words jumped out from that phrase like wolf spiders pouncing on unsuspecting insects from the shade of a rock. Security and biotech.

  “Might mean nothing, boss.” Smudge’s voice, sighing on the warm wind blowing up from Mexico, offering reassurance he knew was only his subconscious trying to avoid looking an unpleasant conclusion in the eye.

  He shook his head, but the answer wouldn’t be silenced.

  “It might mean nothing. Or it might mean something. Biotech could just mean drought resistant tomatoes. Or it could mean biological weapons. Security could just mean running background checks on new employees. Or it could mean surveillance, industrial espionage or armed guard duties.”

  Shit!

  Gabriel suddenly very badly wanted to be doing something, not staring into the far distance speculating about becoming embroiled in anything, anything at all, to do with the CIA.

  “Right, let’s find something,” he said in a loud confident voice that didn’t match what was roiling inside his gut, as he considered a series of unpleasant alternatives to a straightforward murder or suicide, if such a thing existed. “You fell, Vinnie. From a height. Don’t say a black chopper with no markings, just a height. That means you left a dent. A big fucking dent in the ground. It was only a week or so ago. So it should still be here.”

  He marched back to his sunglasses and bent to retrieve them. The plastic was hot to the touch, and he could feel a burning sensation as he put them on. He placed his hands palm-down on the sandy soil and jumped back into a press-up position, before lowering himself down until he was lying flat against the Texan earth. Like lying on a griddle, he thought. Sweat gathered in the corners of his eyes, making them sting. He wiped it away behind the dark lenses of the Ray-Bans then stretched his neck out and placed his chin down in contact with the gritty surface.

  20

  The Scent of Blood

  WITH his face just a few millimetres from the wind-blown sand and the hard-baked earth beneath it, Gabriel could smell a faint trace of blood. It was a useful attribute to have acquired, though he would willingly have surrendered it to whichever deity assigned human beings their skills. He closed his eyes, willing himself to ignore the searing heat penetrating his skin, muscles and internal organs, warming them like a barbecue grill. He inhaled carefully through his nose, and waited. Had it been a trick of the mind? No. There it was again. That faint but unmistakable organic smell, part metallic, part salt, part meat.

  He remembered the first time he’d encountered it. A full-blown sensory overload when he’d entered a barn on a deserted farm in County Armagh in Northern Ireland. The year was 2000. He’d been with the Paras then, on a short deployment to help the local boys. He’d joined the Paras the previous year and was finding his feet as a twenty-year-old second lieutenant. The Provisional IRA had laid down their arms two years earlier, in keeping with the Good Friday Agreement, the culmination of the Northern Ireland Peace Process. But there were still plenty of hard men who considered the fight far from over.

  Acting on a tipoff, two patrols, one paras, the other SAS, had torn off in a high-mileage Ford Sierra, deep into bandit country. The anonymous source had said that they’d find a missing officer from the Northern Ireland Police Service – the renamed but still equally reviled Royal Ulster Constabulary. They arrived at the farm thirty minutes later and, assault rifles cocked and held across their bodies, crept towards the barn where the captive was being held.

  Gabriel arrived first, wrenched the red-painted barn door open and moved inside. What he saw, and smelled, would never leave him. The RUC officer had been dismembered and his body parts left in a huge pool of his own blood, blackened and congealed now, and swarming with fat bluebottles. He staggered out into the rain, yelling for help, then lurched over to a wall where he retched until his stomach was empty and cramping.

  And now here he was again, smelling blood, but under the nuclear heat of the Texan sun instead of the grey rain of Northern Ireland. He looked across the flat land, maintaining his focus on the area just a few metres in front of him. He swivelled his head slowly from left to right and back again. Nothing. Staying prone, he rotated his body through forty-five degrees and tried again. Despite his intentions to stay focused on the place where Vinnie might have fallen, the view of the distant mountains was too beautiful to resist. He lifted his head a little to take in their misty, purple-grey serrations. Between his current position and the range of peaks, nothing but empty desert. Above him a buzzard soared on a thermal. He scowled. Gabriel Wolfe loved birds of prey, except for the species now wheeling directly overhead. One had landed on Smudge’s shoulder after his makeshift crucifixion by Mozambican rebels and commenced eating his brain through the bullet hole in the back of his skull. He shook his head to dispel the image and returned to his search for another dead comrade.

  What he was looking for, in detail, he couldn’t say. Beyond the idea of a body-shaped crater, he hadn’t spent any time figuring out what that might look like in reality. As he scanned the glittering crust in front of him, he began to notice smaller and smaller elements of the picture. A large, black ant dragging a dead beetle towards a dime-sized hole. A triangle of mica flakes, twinkling like diamonds. A cactus spine, detached from its parent plant and now resting on the sand like a miniature, yellow javelin. No, Wolfe! Too close. Widen out. But he couldn’t. The heat was too intense, and he was
feeling dehydrated as the sweat poured off him, only to be evaporated instantly in the super-dry air.

  With a grunt of effort, he heaved himself into a squatting position. He was about to stand when he heard the sound that had signalled death for many hundreds of men, women and children before him.

  21

  Texas Rattler

  FOR a split second of hallucinatory calm, Gabriel imagined the rapid chik-a-chik-a-chik was being produced by a maraca player from a mariachi band. Then reality asserted itself again. Come on, Wolfe. He’d be the world’s loneliest musician playing out here, and it sounds like he’s about to OD on speed.

  Moving his head in infinitesimally small increments, and striving to keep every single other skeletal muscle immobile, Gabriel locked on to the source of the manic maraca music.

  The snake’s eyes drew his gaze. Twin olive-green ovals, bisected by a narrow, black, elliptical pupil, and hooded by a flat brow-ridge that created the impression of a seriously pissed-off reptile. The pink, forked tongue flickered in and out. And emerging from the thick, muscular coil of the snake’s body was the source of the maraca music. A six-inch rattle of bony-looking segments, vibrating so fast its tip was a blur.

  Gabriel knew that the next few moments might be his last; or the first of the rest of his life. Time slowed down, and he helped the perceptual shift along with a breathing exercise taught him by Master Zhao. He knew exactly what species his opponent belonged to. He’d done a course on venomous creatures while training for the SAS. They had to know all the things that could kill or injure them. Not just IEDs, bullets and knives, but nature’s own Special Forces. The spiders, the scorpions, the snakes; the innocent-looking plants, whose spines, leaves, saps and fruit could blind or poison; and the more straightforward enemies, armed with fangs, claws or just sheer, brute strength. Thirteen months earlier he’d seen the damage an American black bear could do to a human being.