by Andy Maslen
The pigs jostled and shoved him out of the way to get to the food, and he moved off to one side, trying to figure out a plan. He’d assumed the cult leader would be based in the UK. That plan was simple: get in, kill him, forge or fabricate some damning evidence that would place him beyond the moral pale, and get out again, turning the remnants over to Don and his shrinks and deprogrammers at The Department. In a sudden flash of insight, he wondered whether that was how Don knew Fariyah. Perhaps she used to be a military psychiatrist. Lord knew there was enough material to work with, let alone all the PSYOPS shit the spooks were always talking about.
The grunting of the porkers was oddly soothing, and he stood there, watching his breath condense in the air around him, feeling his way towards Plan B.
35
Ask and Ye Shall Be Rewarded
AS HE READ THE EMAIL from Aunt Christine in London, Jardin’s pulse increased markedly. He could feel it behind his eyes and in the mysterious tubes in his ears, a rushing sound like when you put a seashell there, until your father swipes it from your grasp and tells you, “we’ve been at the beach all day, Christophe, it’s time to go home and when are you ever going to grow up and stop daydreaming?”
From: [email protected]
Subject: A very special Child
Dear Père Christophe,
God be with you.
We have a new Child amongst us. His name is Gabriel Wolfe. You asked me to contact you if any new Children possessed certain skills. Gabriel does.
He is obedient and good. The Freeing and our initial prayer and devotional sessions with him have proved very effective. He sees himself as a servant of God through your will.
Awaiting your instructions, as always, with prayers in my heart for your continued good health,
Aunt Christine
He paused for a moment, the tips of his spidery fingers twitching. Then they scuttled over the keyboard, tapping out a short reply.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: A very special Child
Chère Aunt Christine,
You have done well.
Send him to me.
God be with you, always.
Père Christophe
36
Summoned to Eden
IN THE END, PLAN B came to Gabriel. After a meeting where the Children meditated and listened to a webcast from Père Christophe, the woman known as Aunt Christine crooked her finger at Gabriel as he was heading out of the ballroom. He walked over to join her, where she stood underneath a seven-by-four-foot portrait of one of the house’s former owners, a Victorian industrialist, judging by his immense mutton chop whiskers, corpulent belly, and self-satisfied expression.
She was smiling as he approached.
“Child Gabriel, I have such exciting news for you.”
“What is it Aunt Christine? A new job? I’ve grown to like the pigs.”
“Oh, no, silly,” she said, wagging her index finger. “After my last report to Père Christophe, he got back in touch with me. As I thought he would do,” she added, with a wink. “It is such an honour. He has summoned you to join him in Eden.”
“When? How? I don’t have my passport with me or anything. After the Freeing, well, you know, I came here with nothing.”
“You have leave to fetch it. We will provide your tickets and money and some essentials for your journey. Go to your room, change into your old clothes—they are there waiting for you. I have booked a taxi to take you to your home.”
“But Aunt, I live, I mean lived, in Salisbury. That would be so expensive.”
She smiled again. God, these people did a lot of smiling. “Don’t worry about the cost. As Père Christophe teaches us, it is a grave mistake to imagine God and Mammon can’t be reconciled. We are living proof. For did He not endow us with money as well as faith? Now, go. Be outside on the drive in ten minutes.”
As he changed out of his cult-approved white garb, Gabriel wondered whether he’d be able to get a message to Don. Tell him the quarry was in Brazil and not in the UK at all. He’d no mobile any more, but the cottage still had its landline. Shit! Don’s numbers—for his mobile and his offices in Whitehall and MOD Rothford—were all on his phone. And who bothered to remember people’s numbers anymore? He had a couple of hours to think of something. Time to move.
He was downstairs and outside on the gravel drive five minutes later, just as a gleaming silver Jaguar XF saloon pulled up outside. “Apollo Executive Cars” read the green capitals along its doors. Below the name was a slogan, “Your comfort is our mission,” and a Reading telephone number. He climbed in to the back and fastened the seat belt.
“Where to?” the young black driver asked, turning round in his seat to smile at Gabriel. “I’m Joseph, by the way.”
“Salisbury, please, Joseph. Well, a village just outside. I’ll give you directions when we get closer.”
“No worries. You just relax. Like it says on the door. There’s an iPad in the seat pocket in front of you if you want some entertainment. It’s got a ton of games, and we’ve got Wi-Fi if you want the Internet. Do a little surfing, email, whatever.”
“Thanks. Maybe I will.” Yes, thanks. Truly.
As the Jaguar powered southwest, Gabriel retrieved the iPad and launched a browser. Then he realised he hadn’t a clue what to type into the search engine. Somehow, he didn’t think “The Department + contact us” would get him very far. Or, for that matter, “secret British government black ops”. Then he had a brainwave.
He typed in the name of Don’s club and up popped a basic name, address, and telephone listing. He leaned forward.
“Excuse me, I need to make a phone call. It’s very important. Please, can I use your phone? It’s just to a London number.”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
The driver held his phone out over his shoulder so Gabriel could take it. He dialled the number for the club and waited. When he’d almost given up hope, the call was answered. Gabriel spoke, aiming for a tone of voice that conveyed urgency without lunacy.
“Hello. I am a friend of Colonel Donald Webster. It is extremely important that I speak to him. I don’t suppose he’s at the club, is he?”
“I’m afraid, sir, we make a point of never revealing the whereabouts of our members. It’s club policy.”
Gabriel pictured some uniformed flunky enjoying keeping the riff raff away from the sanctum.
“And I totally understand that. I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but it’s a matter of national security.”
“I see. May I ask, sir, what is your name?”
“It’s Wolfe. Why? Did Don say I might call?”
“And, if I may, sir, what might one be referring to, if one talked of ‘Don’s Bombs’?”
“They were his jokes!” Gabriel said, sensing that his old boss was one step ahead of him, as usual. “In the mess. He used to crack us up. Even got the Queen once.”
“Hold the line, please, sir.”
Gabriel waited, heart pounding, listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, while the man on the other end presumably went off to make enquiries. Then there was a click and a buzz.
“Hello, Old Sport. Thought you’d gone off and left us.”
“Oh, Jesus, Don. It’s good to hear your voice. It was just a wild guess you’d be at your club.”
“I’m not. George just patched you through. I’m with the PM, actually.”
“Wow! I imagined those St James’s clubs were still holding out against the march of technology.”
“Oh, things have moved on a bit. And as you may have deduced already, I left instructions for what to do were you to make contact. So, how’s the mission going? Have you identified the target yet? Or better still, have you taken him down?”
“Yes and no. Listen, I’m in a cab so I can’t say much. They call him Père Christophe, so I’m guessing he’s a French national. And get this: he’s in Brazil. I’ve been summoned to meet him. In Eden.”
“Ha! Might be a long flight.”
“It’s what he calls his base, or compound, or whatever. And the place I’ve been staying in is in Berkshire. It’s called Elysium. A massive old Tudor pile with huge grounds. It’ll probably be in some parish record under a different name. It’s about twenty minutes due north of Reading.”
“OK, that’s fantastic intel. Proceed according to plan. If you can report in again, great. If not, don’t worry. When you’ve completed the task, find a way out of there and get a message to me via George. Exfiltrate from Eden and set up an extract point, and we’ll come and pull you out. I have to go. The PM’s tapping her watch. She says hello, by the way. Good luck, Gabriel.”
“Thanks, Don. Speak soon.”
Gabriel returned the phone to the driver then leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes.
“Journalist, is it, boss?”
He opened his eyes again. “I’m sorry?”
“Journalist. You investigating those weirdos up at Elysium, are you?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, we’re, er, doing an exposé on cults in the UK. You can keep a secret, can’t you?”
“Me? Absolutely. ‘Discretion comes as standard.’ That’s another one of our Guvnor’s slogans. She’s got loads. Like, ‘Speed, safety, security.’”
“Security?”
“Yeah. We do some high-level stuff. You know, celebrities, footballers, that kind of thing? She only hires ex-forces or ex-police for drivers on account of we’ve got what it takes.”
“Which are you?”
“Forces. Five years in the Rifles. Took a bullet in the shoulder, got my honourable discharge.”
“Well, like I said, if you could keep it on the QT, I’d appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
An hour and a half later, they pulled up in Gabriel’s drive. He hadn’t seen his cottage for ten days, but it felt like he’d been away longer. The bombing, the police investigation, tracking down Eloise Payne’s family, joining the Children of Heaven … had that all really happened in under a fortnight?
He entered the four-digit code in the key safe screwed to the wall beside the kitchen door, extracted the key and let himself in, reflecting on the fact that so many of the cult’s other recruits must never see their homes again. Did they just leave them unoccupied until either their landlord took them back, or the bank or building society repossessed them for non-payment of the mortgage?
He fetched his passport from his office filing cabinet and came back through to the kitchen. He was just about to leave when a niggling worry about the taxi driver prodded his anxiety circuit into life. Supposing discretion didn’t come as standard? Supposing the driver served two masters? Not God and Mammon, but his boss at Apollo and one of the Aunts or Uncles at Elysium? Snatching the landline receiver from its cradle, he redialled the number for Don’s club. The same man answered.
“Is that George? It’s Gabriel Wolfe again.”
Yes, sir. How can I help you?”
“I need to get this message to Colonel Webster. Are you ready?”
“Absolutely, sir. Fire away.”
“There’s an executive cab company in Reading. They’re called Apollo. They have a black driver called Joseph. He may need to be removed from circulation for a while.”
Gabriel concluded his message with the registration number of the Jaguar and then ended the call. He was back in the car a minute or two after that and drifting off to sleep, earbuds in, Ella Fitzgerald singing to him of backyard blues as the car merged with traffic on the A303 dual carriageway heading back to Elysium.
“Sir? Boss? We’re here.”
Gabriel woke with a start. Someone had been calling to him while he sank to the bottom of a lake, green water all around him, and the word “Gable” echoing in his ears.
The Jaguar sat, idling, outside the front door of Elysium. He thanked the driver, got out and made his way inside to find Aunt Christine.
37
Where the Nuts Come From
GABRIEL’S PREVIOUS TRANSATLANTIC FLIGHT HAD been in the company of an extremely rich and unpleasant man he was pretending to work for called Sir Toby Maitland. They had at least travelled First Class. On this flight, Gabriel was in the rear of the plane. The Children of Heaven could afford to live in Eden, but apparently, a certain amount of self-mortification was required before you got there.
The fat businessman next to him spent the first ten minutes of the flight getting himself comfortable, which seemed to involve jabbing Gabriel in the ribs and arm every fifteen seconds or so. As the man huffed and puffed, Gabriel began to fantasise about the best way to kill him and dispose of the body without being discovered.
“Bloody seats,” the man said, shuffling his immense bottom from side to side and pressing his warm flesh up against Gabriel’s right hip. “I swear they’re getting smaller.”
Because that’s more likely than you getting fatter, you big oaf. Why don’t you try going easier on the expense-account lunches instead?
“And for a man in your shape, that’s got to make a deep vein thrombosis a racing certainty, hasn’t it?” Gabriel said.
The man stared at him open-mouthed, then opened a copy of Forbes magazine with a snap and buried himself in its pages.
Twenty-six hours and fifty minutes later, Gabriel was standing outside the arrivals lounge at Brigadeiro Eduardo Gomes–Manaus International Airport, having transferred onto an internal flight at Rio de Janeiro International Airport. It had been sunny, warm, and humid as he emerged from the air-conditioned vault inside the airport terminal. But then a squally wind had arrived from the direction of distant, tree-covered hills, and with it bruised-looking clouds of charcoal and purple. The wind whipped his thin jacket against his chest and stinging drops of freezing rain beat against his face. Now what? He realised he had no firm idea of how he was to reach Eden, beyond an assurance from Aunt Christine that he would be taken care of by Père Christophe.
Amid the endless procession of yellow and green taxis—old American models mostly, Ford Crown Victorias dominant among them—a white Range Rover hove into view. It towered above the cabs as it bore down on Gabriel. The huge car pulled up next to him. The front passenger window slid down and a young woman in a white T-shirt leaned over and smiled at him through the opening.
“Gabriel?” she asked, though it was clear she already knew.
“That’s me,” he said, bending to pick up his bag.
“Jump in!”
He did as he was told and found himself in close proximity to surely one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. Her russet hair was cut short, like all the other Children of Heaven women he’d met in England, both in Sloane Square and Elysium. On her, it framed her face, which was almond-shaped, and concentrated his gaze onto her mouth, which was wide and full-lipped. She had light caramel-coloured skin that offered a soft contrast to her bright green eyes. A tiny bump on the bridge of her nose only accentuated her good looks.
“I’m Eve,” she said, flashing a brilliant smile at him and offering her hand.
“Eve,” he said. “And you live in Eden.”
“I know, right?” she said with a grin. “My job’s tending the apple tree. Ha! Just kidding.”
She spoke with an American accent, somewhere on the West Coast to judge from the lazy vowel sounds. The silent interior of the Range Rover smelled of her: a musky perfume of fresh sweat and clean hair. He inhaled deeply and let the molecules of scent activate pleasure circuits deep inside his brain. He smiled, the first time he’d felt like it since speaking to Don.
“Where are we going?” he asked her.
“Hold on,” she said, swinging the car around a taxi that had just pulled up sharply in front of her and giving him a good blast on the horn, “OK. Yeah, so we need to get to another airport. Well, airfield, really. It’s a little commercial place out in the boonies, and we fly from there to Eden. We have our own landing strip.”
“OK, cool. I hope you have decent showers, too,
because I’m starting to feel a little too human for my own good.”
She looked over at him. “God, you English and your accents. I swear I could listen to you read the phone book. Anyway, yes, we have showers. All mod cons.”
“So what about your accent? You’re American?”
“San Diego, born and bred.”
“And how come you joined the Children of Heaven?”
She glanced over at him, then back to eyes front.
“How does anyone? My life sucked. My stepdad, like, totally abused me from pretty much day one after he moved in with my mom. I was ten when it began. Hadn’t even started my periods. She wouldn’t do anything. Told me I was a liar and a slut. I got into a bad scene, staying out at night, running with the wrong kids, you know? Starting doing this …” she held her right forearm out to show him a now-familiar ladder of thin white scars, “… then doing drugs. On the day before my sixteenth birthday, my stepdad is like, ‘I got you something real special, for once you’re a woman,’ and he’s leering at me. I know he’s gonna rape me, ’cause up until then, he’s just been touching me, you know, with his fingers. Or getting me to touch him. Next thing I know, I’m standing on the edge of the Coronado Bridge thinking about just letting go when this woman calls out to me. She says, and I will always remember this, ‘God loves you, child. God loves you, even if nobody else does.’ So I climb down and I take her hand.” She looked across at Gabriel, her face serene where he thought she’d be angry or in tears. “At that moment, I left my old life behind.”
“Wow! I’m sorry I put you through that. I was just making conversation.” Gabriel ran a hand over his head and scratched the back of his neck.
