Rattlesnake

by Andy Maslen

  “JJ’s right,” Gabriel said. “I should lie low for a while. It’s certainly not safe for me – or you – if I stay here any longer.”

  “Oh, no you don’t mister!” Terri-Ann burst out. “I’m not having you hunted like a rat by some corrupt bunch of thugs from the CIA. You’re staying right here! I play poker now and again with the news editor of the university’s website and their social media manager. They have tens of thousands of followers. If we see any black helicopters hovering over the house, I’m calling her and we’ll livestream the whole thing. We’ll get you on Good Morning America, Nightline, BuzzFeed, 60 Minutes, The Huffington Post, the works! We’ll create a media shitstorm that’ll have them scurrying for cover.”

  Gabriel dragged his fingers through his hair and watched, amused, as JJ ran his palm over the shining dome of his own head.

  “You’re the boss,” he said, holding out his hands in surrender. “But we have to take this seriously. Even if Smith wasn’t authorised, he clearly has backing from somebody. And now that somebody is going to be out looking for him. At some point, we have to face the possibility that they’ll come back to me. They sent him after me in the first place, after all.”

  “Fine. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  She turned and wrote on the whiteboard.

  CIA agent (deceased) fingered Clark Orton.

  - blowback?

  “Fingered. Blowback,” Gabriel said with a smile. “I like the hard-boiled style.”

  “I did my dissertation on Raymond Chandler,” Terri-Ann replied, returning the smile. “JJ, you want to tell us what you have?”

  He inhaled deeply, then let it out in a sigh.

  “Like Gabriel, I have good news and bad. The good news is, my forensics lab guy came back with a match to the slug Gabriel brought back from the desert.”

  “And?” Terri-Ann said.

  “And it was fired by a blue-flag weapon. Which, if y’all aren’t up with current ballistics terminology, means one issued to, and owned by, the federal government.”

  “So no name, no pack drill?” Gabriel asked.

  “None. And no digging, either. I asked my guy at the lab whether the search would show up anywhere and he said no. But anything deeper would probably ring a bell somewhere we don’t want bells ringing. Especially not after Gabriel’s little escapade last night.”

  Terri-Ann’s face was impassive. Gabriel could discern no emotion in the movements of the tiny muscles around her eyes, nose and mouth. Yet she’d just learned her husband had been murdered by someone working for the government. The government who’d recruited him, trained him and paid him, first as a US Marine and then a member of Delta Force. He wanted to feel shocked. But his own experience with elected politicians had recently bred a deep cynicism in him that made shock impossible. Weary recognition and a sense of disgust, maybe. But shock? No. It was too late for that.

  Terri-Ann was busy writing.

  Murder weapon owned by Federal Govt.

  She turned back from the whiteboard and held a silver flash drive up in front of her face, between her thumb and forefinger.

  “You two aren’t the only ones who’ve found something important.”

  She placed the drive onto the table between them.

  “OK, I’ll bite,” JJ said, eyeing the slim rectangle of aluminium. “Where’d you find it and what’s on it?”

  “It was in the bottom of the gun cabinet, in a carton of hollow points. It’s a journal. Vinnie’s journal.”

  “I never would’ve figured Vinnie for much of a writer.”

  Terri-Ann shook her head.

  “It’s a video diary.”

  30

  Vinnie Speaks

  VINNIE looked healthy in the video. His face was brown, and he had a shine to his skin that could have been sweat. He wasn’t smiling, though. His face bore a wary expression. Behind him, luscious ferns and what might have been banana palms swayed in a wind that ruffled his hair. Gabriel, JJ and Terri-Ann watched in silence as the dead man spoke to them.

  “I met with Visna Chey again today. We’ve almost got enough to put before the UN Commission on Illegal Weapons of War. Orton’s just left for the US. We have film of him meeting with a couple of former Khmer Rouge generals organising protection. And audio of him discussing trials on kids”—he ground his teeth together before continuing—“on kids, like I said, with Marie-Louise Hubert.” He pronounced her name in a rough approximation of French – “Hugh-Bear.”

  “For the record, she’s director of a charity in Cambodia called Flowers of Hope. Pretty nice name when you know what she’s been up to for ten years. She claims to be finding western parents to adopt Cambodian orphans. It’s not even all genuine orphans, either. Since that dumbfuck actress adopted a kid from here, poor parents have been dropping their kids off at Flowers of Hope, trying to get them to America.

  “But what they, and the media who keep runnin’ profiles of Hubert don’t know is she ain’t gettin’ them adopted. She’s trafficking them. Thailand, mostly, but also Vietnam and Laos, and even over in the UAE, Saudi, shitholes like that. Woman’s ridin’ round in a Lexus, livin’ in a twenty-room mansion, by selling little kids into prostitution and slavery.

  “So, Orton’s got some bio-weapon programme he’s runnin’. No idea who the client is, but you don’t have to be a genius to make a pretty accurate guess. Plenty of countries in Asia or the Middle East where the government’d just love to get their hands on something that would strike at their enemies before they even grew up. And it’s not like the US was ever too fussy. Half this country is mined and ruined by cluster bombs that never detonated. That’s where most of the genuine orphans come from. One day mom or pop’s out planting rice or steering an ox plough and then boom! The ox treads on a mine or the plough hits a cluster bomb and it’s party over. Six kids left without parents.

  “Orton ain’t tried it yet. But it can’t be long. I’m leaving next week. He’s advertising for a head of security, and I know a guy in HR there who reckons I’d be a shoo-in. It’s the last link in the chain. I get intel from inside the business, and then we make a case and go to the UN, the FBI, hell, the fucking Dalai Lama if we have to.”

  Terri-Ann leaned forwards and stopped the video, then shut the laptop with a snap. The silence in the room was broken only by the clock ticking above the table. Gabriel thought of all the evil people he’d encountered as a soldier and then as a freelance troubleshooter for The Department. A cult leader who’d poisoned his six hundred-odd young followers with cyanide. Warlords who kidnapped, brutalised and drugged small boys before handing them Kalashnikovs and machetes. Terrorists who thought nothing of massacring a school full of children. He shook his head. Where did they come from? What made them able to commit such atrocities on the youngest and most innocent of all? Maybe Fariyah Crace had the answers. He didn’t. All he knew was that no children would die at Orton’s hands while he could still draw breath, hold a knife or pull a trigger.

  “Gabriel?” Terri-Ann asked. “You with us?”

  “Sorry. Miles away,” Gabriel replied. He blew out the air in his lungs. “Just when you think you’ve seen it all …”

  “There’s someone who takes evil to a new level,” JJ finished.

  “I’m going,” Gabriel said. “To Cambodia, I mean. I need to find Visna Chey. I need to see it for myself. And we need to find a way to stop Orton and this Marie-Louise Hubert woman from running their trial.”

  “What about Orton himself?” Terri-Ann asked. “The CIA guy, Smith, said you should talk to him.”

  “Oh, I will, don’t worry. And this time I won’t let him play me like he did before. But, and I’m sorry to say this, Vinnie’s gone. Those kids are still alive, for now. It looks like there’s some unholy pact between Orton, Hubert and some rogue outfit inside the CIA, and that has to be the focus right now. Don’t you agree, JJ?”

  The big man nodded.

  “He’s right, Terri-Ann. It looks to me like Vin
nie got too close to the truth and Orton or one of his friends in the CIA killed him. If they’ve put the squeeze on the SAPD, we need to move carefully. I can reach out to a contact there and see what I can dig up. Right now, there’s a bunch of kids we have to protect.”

  She tightened her lips into a thin line, eyed each man in turn, then relaxed. A little.

  “All right. But someone has to pay for Vinnie. It was murder, not suicide. I want a trial, I want a guilty verdict, I want justice. Hell, I want the death penalty for whoever shot him and threw him out of a plane.”

  If Gabriel was surprised at the vitriol in this speech from a lecturer in the liberal arts, he kept it to himself. A Texan woman who shot guns, played poker and grew up on Army bases was not one to trifle with.

  He reached across the table and took her hands, which were clenched into fists, in his own.

  “I promise. We’ll get justice for Vinnie.”

  Shortly after she dropped Gabriel off at the airport, Terri-Ann’s phone rang. She switched to hands-free.

  “Hello?”

  “Mrs Calder, this is Burton Cavanagh. Do you have a moment?”

  “Well, I’m driving Mr Cavanagh, so we should probably keep it short.”

  “Oh, of course. I understand. Well, I just wanted to speak to your friend, Gabriel Wolfe. Just to satisfy myself as to his status.”

  “His status?”

  “As a family friend and nothing more. As I said, we need to be sure that your husband’s passing is not the subject of an investigation, ah, of whatever nature.”

  “Well, that’s going to be difficult. He’s about to get on a flight to Cambodia.” Something made her add another line. “He’s going travelling.”

  She waited for Cavanagh to respond.

  “Oh. Well, in that case I suppose I can assume his interest in your husband has come to an end?”

  “Absolutely,” Terri-Ann said. “I have to go Mr Cavanagh. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Mrs Calder.”

  31

  Predators ... and Hunters

  CAMBODIA

  AS a soldier, Gabriel had never fought in Indochina. But he knew men, had served under men, who had. It was a tightly held truth, particularly among left-leaning people in the UK, that Harold Wilson had kept the UK out of Vietnam. The prime minister, it was said, had resisted US pressure, even when applied directly by John F. Kennedy. And he had resisted. At least publicly. In the messes of the SAS and other elite regiments, however, it was an open secret that UK Special Forces had indeed been deployed in Vietnam. They may have flown in to Thailand to help build airbases or train the Thai Army in counter-insurgency tactics, but in twos and fours, they slipped across the border with Vietnam to conduct reconnaissance missions. And if an SAS patrol monitoring the Ho Chi Minh Trail happened to encounter some NVA troops or a detachment of Viet Cong, well, circumstances might dictate that they engage the enemy.

  And now, here he was, more than forty years after that war ended, and the grisly Cambodian genocide that followed, standing at a creaking luggage carousel inside the grandly titled Phnom Penh International Airport, waiting for his bags, as he might in Paris, Singapore, Chicago or London.

  He’d cleared immigration without a hitch. The armed, green-uniformed passport control officer had scrutinised his tourist visa for what felt like hours. She glanced back and forth between real and digitised features a dozen or more times before whacking a stamp down onto a free page of his passport as if she were killing a cockroach. The passport was one of several he carried, this one in his own name. He’d acquired the others either from Don or from a less official source: an IT fixer for a Hong Kong triad. He closed it on the smudged blue entry stamp, nodded a terse thanks without smiling and went through to the luggage hall.

  His suitcases toppled from the up-ramp conveyor belt onto the carousel one after the other. He noticed a few more scratches around the locks than had been present when he packed in San Antonio. But these were special-order items constructed from Kevlar and aluminium. It would take more than a baggage handler’s pocket knife to breach them. Some of the other, less sturdily constructed bags lying on the black plastic belt hadn’t fared so well. Brightly coloured clothes spilled like viscera from long slits in their nylon sides. Lifting his cases off the belt, he made his way through the customs hall and out into the arrivals lounge.

  He looked up, searching for the TAXI sign, always in English whether you were in Manchester, Murmansk or Milan. As he did so, he collided with an immensely fat, pale-skinned man dressed in leather sandals over beige socks, baggy cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt depicting parrots in overbright reds and greens.

  “Hey, watch where you’re going,” said the fat man, glaring at Gabriel.

  “Sorry, stranger in town,” Gabriel replied, taking in every detail of the man’s appearance. Thinning ginger hair combed over a shining bald patch splashed with liver spots, pasty, indoor complexion, thick-lensed glasses that magnified his light-blue eyes, beads of sweat along his upper lip.

  The man tutted before waddling off, dragging a wheeled tartan suitcase behind him.

  Gabriel looked after him as he headed for the doors leading to the taxi rank. Then he noticed other men who bore the same facial expression. Equal parts excitement and nervousness. Tongues darting across lips to moisten them, eyes flicking left and right, and something restless, pent-up, in their body language, too. He scowled, realising who – or rather, what – the men were. And why they’d travelled halfway round the world to this impoverished dictatorship. It had nothing to do with Buddhist temples, of that he was sure.

  “You see them too, do you?” another male voice murmured from just beside and behind him.

  Gabriel turned towards the voice. Its owner was thirtyish, fit looking and tanned. Almost the complete opposite of the fat man he’d just bumped into. Cropped, dark hair, clean-shaven, military bearing. He was dressed in pale chinos and a navy polo shirt. But where most of the westerners milling about in the marble-floored hall were shod in sandals, high heels or boat shoes, this man wore tough-looking work boots. His arms and chest were heavily muscled. A tribal tattoo encircled his right biceps, a Royal Artillery badge decorated his left. Despite his aggressive looks, Gabriel sensed no threat. Or not to him, anyway.

  “See who?” Gabriel answered.

  The man jerked his chin in the direction of a trio of overweight, blond men speaking loudly in German as they, too, headed outside to get a cab.

  “The paedos.”

  “Is that what they are?”

  “You’re joking, right? ’Course they fucking are. Nonce paradise, this place. Now the Thais are cracking down, they all come down here. Or Laos.” He pronounced it correctly – to rhyme with Cow – not Louse or Lay-oss. He looked left and right as if acting in a low-budget thriller. “Listen. Me and a few mates, we’re hunters, OK? Paedo-hunters. We track them. Film them. Hand evidence to the cops if we can find an honest one. Trouble is, half of them are in on it, getting paid to look the other way. So sometimes we give ’em a bit of our own justice instead. We could always use a fit bloke to bump up the numbers.” He handed Gabriel a business card. “Get in touch if you want to do some good.”

  Then he was gone, striding through the crowds towards the exit and speaking into a phone.

  Gabriel read the card. It was cheaply printed, maybe on one of the terminals dotting the airport itself. The information was minimal. A name – Jack Hunter – a mobile number and a Gmail address. He was about to flip it into a rubbish bin when instinct made him hold back. Instead he tucked it into his wallet.

  The hotel and the room it provided were as blandly international as the airport had been. Beyond a cheap reproduction of a painting of Angkor Wat, there was nothing to indicate that he was in Cambodia, or even Indochina. The white bed linen, blue carpet and beige walls spoke of global hotel design and nothing else. The flat screen TV bolted to the wall was Japanese, the phone on the desk was Chinese and the toiletries in the bathroom were Fren
ch, or claimed to be. Gabriel switched on the air conditioning and slid the fragile slider up to MAX. With a click and a whisper, the wide plastic vanes in the unit above his head rotated open and emitted a welcome breath of cool, dry air. Outside, the temperature was hot but bearable; less bearable was the humidity, which stuck clothes to skin as if they had been rained on.

  Gabriel showered and changed into narrow-legged grey linen trousers and a T-shirt, then locked his room, having shoved his travel documents, spare dollars and laptop into the safe thoughtfully provided by the hotel management.

  In the days before the internet, he supposed, travellers to such far-flung places as Phnom Penh would have met their contacts in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, or perhaps the bar of the biggest hotel. He didn’t have any contacts, yet, but the strategy seemed sound enough. He headed out and made his way on foot to the InterContinental Hotel on Mao Tse Toung Boulevard. The humidity wasn’t too bad, but his nose was still twitching from the ever-present smell of dung, and the dust that swirled everywhere in pale-red clouds.

  Once inside, he followed the signs to the Club Lounge and found himself a table on the edge of the room. A pretty Cambodian waitress hurried over and left a drinks menu, her iridescent blue-green silk dress rustling as she bent to wipe the table free of some invisible crumbs.

  “Thanks,” Gabriel said as she spun on her heel and disappeared to the other side of the bar.

  She returned a minute or two later.

  “Yes, sir?” she said in lightly accented English.

  “A glass of the Sancerre, please.”

  She nodded, smiled and was gone, returning with a tall, angular wine glass beaded on its sides with condensation. She placed a scalloped cocktail napkin on the table, centred the glass on the napkin, then set a thin-walled, white porcelain bowl of green olives beside it. Nodding to herself as if satisfied with her arrangements, she left a till receipt under the bowl and withdrew.