by Andy Maslen
Gabriel relaxed his grip around the young woman’s throat, and she collapsed onto her side, gasping and weeping as she filled her lungs. Her throat was marred by an ugly circlet of dark purple bruises, and the imprints of Gabriel’s thumbs stood out in stark relief on the pale skin at the base of her throat. He stood back from her and turned to Père Christophe.
“Is my test over? Have I passed?”
“Yes,” Père Christophe said. “You have passed. Now, help us with Child Elinor. She will need some time and healing in our infirmary.”
Gabriel squatted beside the still-weeping girl and hoisted her up and into his arms, one hand under her armpit, the other supporting her under her knees. He carried her back to the village where he left her with the two Uncles.
“Come with me, Child Gabriel,” Père Christophe said. “We have much to discuss.
Inside Père Christophe’s house again, Gabriel found himself looking at the aerial photograph of the hydroelectric complex.
“Do you know what this is?” Père Christophe said.
“It’s a factory of some kind. No, wait. Is that a dam across the river? Yes, it is. I know what this is. It’s a power station, isn’t it? Hydroelectric.”
“Very good. Yes, it is the Santa Augusta Hydroelectric Generating Station. And next Friday, there will be a grand ceremony to open it. But there is a grave problem.”
“What is that?”
“The men who are presiding over the ceremony are evil men, Child Gabriel. They have poisoned the well whereof they drink and whereof their cattle drink. They have sought mastery of the waters of the Earth and the rains of Heaven. And now they seek to destroy us. They would disperse the Children of Heaven to the four winds like chaff after the threshing. I will not allow them to do that. They must be brought low by the righteous. By you!” He whispered this last, short, phrase.
Gabriel nodded. “What do you want me to do?”
“Revelation, sixteen-four: ‘The third angel poured out his bowl into the rivers and the springs of water, and they became blood.’ You are my third angel. Even your name is a sign. You are our avenging angel. You will make the waters blood.”
“But how, Père Christophe? I was a fighting man. I know how to shoot and how to kill. But I can’t see how I can destroy a whole power plant.”
“That is not your concern. Those friends I mentioned? Whose fires you could smell. They are helping us. Now, go find Aunt Maria. She has some work for you in the garden. I will summon you soon. There is someone I want you to meet.”
With Gabriel gone, Jardin called Toron, who was supervising the work on the cocaine processing facility.
“Diego. I have our man. He is perfect. Ex-British Army. Special Forces. One hundred percent docile and controllable. I just had him choke a pretty young girl almost to death. He would have finished her off if I’d let him.”
“Good. Because those damned politicians are going to be congratulating each other on their war against the cartels unless we stop them.”
“When can you get hold of the parts we need?”
“Give me two days. I’ll be back here then with everything.”
*
As good as his word, Toron arrived back at Eden two days after the call. As he descended from the Cessna, he was carrying a brushed aluminium flight case big enough for most tourists to live out of for a week. On this occasion, there was nobody to meet him, so he wandered to the village and up the path to Jardin’s house. The door was open, so he strolled in, dumped the case on the table in the dining room and called out.
Nobody answered. Shrugging, he went into the kitchen and helped himself to a beer from the fridge, marvelling once again at the way Jardin managed to keep his followers living in a state of near-poverty while enjoying for himself all the luxuries modern living could offer. As he swigged the cold beer, he caught a movement from the corner of his eye. He whirled, FN Five-seveN pistol yanked from its worn leather holster inside his jacket, tracking left and right. The pistol was a gift from the boss of a Mexican cartel. Its 5.7mm rounds were capable of piercing body armour, giving it the informal name amongst its illegal users, mata-policia, or cop-killer.
Jardin stood in the doorway, hand aloft, a mocking, wide-eyed smile signalling that he wasn’t in the least bit afraid.
“No need for that, my friend,” he said. “There are no threats inside Eden. Just outside. Which is why you’re here, I hope.”
Toron grunted his displeasure as he reholstered the Five-seveN. “Creep up on me like that again, my friend, and you’ll never have to worry about enemies ever again.” He drained his beer in one long swallow and belched loudly. “It’s in your dining room. On the table.”
The two men went back to the dining table. Jardin stood back and watched Toron flip open the catches holding the flight case closed. The last catch unfastened, Toron lifted the lid and settled it back on the table. The case was lined with grey foam. Set into individually cut recesses were a professional video camera; six one-and-a-quarter pound M112 demolition blocks of C-4 plastic explosive, two by one-and-a-half inches thick and eleven inches long; four clear plastic zip-lock bags full of ball bearings; a button-operated, electrical remote detonator; batteries, detonator cord, and blasting caps. Lying across the top was a laminated ID badge marked MEDIA in bold blue capitals and declaring that the bearer, Gabriel Da Costa, was a cameraman for TeleGlobo. The mugshot, taken by Jardin when Gabriel was being indoctrinated, was pixelated and deliberately poor quality, but he was recognisable, and that was all that counted.
“Excellent. That should be enough to exterminate those two pests,” Jardin said. “Wait here. I want you to meet Gabriel. Help yourself to another beer, if you like.”
Ten minutes later, Jardin returned with Gabriel at his side. They entered the dining room to find Toron asleep in an armchair. Jardin turned to Gabriel, winked and held a finger up to his lips. Then he kicked Toron’s left foot.
Toron woke with a start and was reaching for his pistol as Jardin let out a high-pitched giggle. Scowling, Toron continued the movement, withdrawing the gun and pointing it at Jardin’s face.
“You know, Père Christophe,” he said, laying extra stress on the word ‘Père,’ “one of these days, I swear to God by the Holy Virgin, I will put a bullet in you just to stop you jerking my chain.” But he put the gun away nonetheless and looked up at Gabriel. “This is your boy, yes?”
Jardin nodded. “Gabriel, I want you to meet one of my … spiritual advisers. This is Diego Toron. He is the man supervising the construction of our new building.”
Gabriel stepped forward and shook hands with Toron, who had got to his feet.
“How do you do?”
“How do I do? Madre de Dios, you’re English?”
“Is that a problem?”
“No, no, my friend, no problem at all.” Toron laughed. “And Père Christophe here tells me you have a background in the military. That right? You were a soldier for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth?”
“That’s right. Parachute Regiment then the Special Air Service. That’s a bit like Delta Force in the US.”
Toron scowled again. “Yeah? Well you better be glad you’re on my side. I really don’t like Delta. Those sons of bitches are always on my back trying to fuck up our operations back in Colombia.”
Jardin touched Gabriel lightly on the shoulder. “Which is why I asked you here, Child Gabriel. Do you have experience with explosives? Can you make an IED?”
Gabriel looked down at the contents of the flight case. “With that? Easily.”
“Good. Because that’s what I want you to do. There are two corrupt government officials who are planning to destroy our community. A Colombian government minister and the President of Amazonas State. They hate everything we stand for: prayer, obedience to God’s law, public service, selflessness. We must be strong and fight them. They have sown the wind. Now they must reap the whirlwind.”
Gabriel nodded, held rapt by his master’s carefully measured cade
nces. “With this, we can burn them from the face of the Earth, Père Christophe.”
“Exactly, my Child. Now, let me bring you some tools and you can begin. Diego and I have some other matters to discuss, so we’ll leave you to God’s work.”
Jardin returned within a minute carrying a black plastic tool chest with a yellow lid. He dumped it on the table next to the flight case. Gabriel pulled out a chair and sat, already focusing on the task ahead as Toron and Jardin left the house. He lifted the camera out of the flight case and weighed it in his hands before placing it on the shiny, polished wood of the table top.
The camera’s casing was held together with eighteen tiny, cross-head screws, which he removed and lined up in two rows of nine, like soldiers on parade. With the camera laid on its side, he eased the casing apart. Concentrating, he removed all the internal components and mechanisms of the camera until nothing remained but a hollow shell. Swift slices with a box cutter opened the M112s’ black film wrappings, which he swept onto the floor. With the oily, burnt plastic smell of the C-4 making his nostrils sting, he squashed the separate blocks together into a rough cube. He carved and shaped using the box cutter until the block of plastic explosive fitted inside the camera body with a quarter-inch gap all the way around. The ball bearings were next. He slid the fastenings on the zip-lock bags open and began inserting the silver spheres into the C-4, pushing each one down until only half protruded from the surface. When he was finished, each shiny ball bearing reflected Gabriel’s serene face back at him. He pushed in a blasting cap and attached a yard of detonator cord.
With the charge seated inside the camera, he reassembled the casing and tightened the screws in place. An experimental shake revealed that he’d judged the fit perfectly. There was no noise from the ball bearings against the inner surface. He’d threaded the detonator cord through a hole in the casing designed to take an external mic. Now he wired it into the detonator. He didn’t insert the batteries. Better safe than sorry. He stood, and hefted the camera onto his right shoulder. It felt about the same weight as it had before he’d modified it. He inhaled, then began to speak, in a quiet monotone.
“If I sharpen My flashing sword, And My hand takes hold on justice, I will render vengeance on My adversaries, And I will repay those who hate Me.”
Then he pressed the detonator’s red ‘fire’ button.
And smiled.
43
Semper Fidelis
AS THEY WALKED BACK FROM the clearing where their cocaine factory was rising out of the grass like an ark, planks being hammered and nailed into place, even some drywall panels being nail-gunned with rapid-fire pops onto the wooden studs, Toron and Jardin were arguing.
“You’re telling me you’d run away if the government sent police over here? Leave all this,” Toron waved his arm around him. “And that?” He stopped abruptly, grabbed Jardin by the bicep and swung him round so he could point at the factory.
“I’m telling you,” Jardin said, shaking himself free of the other man’s grip, “that I’m not interested in getting into a shooting match with the Brazilian police. If the plan fails—and it won’t, by the way—but if it does, well, all I’m saying is I have an escape route planned. We can restart somewhere else.”
“And what I’m telling you,” Toron jabbed a finger into the other man’s chest, hard enough to make him wince, “is that the Muerte Eterna do not run. I have men—many men—with all sorts of skills. If the police come, we do what we’ve always done. We fight them off, kill as many as possible, capture a couple, and use them to send a message back to the media, the president and their families. Believe me, this is a tried and tested method of keeping them out of our hair. We do it in Colombia, and we can sure as hell do it here.”
Ever the manipulator, Jardin decided on a different tactic. His voice softened, and he stopped to face Toron, drawing him into the role of follower. “Diego, you are a powerful man. Yes, you have men at your command. You are a soldier. But I am a man of God.” Toron snorted at this but stayed silent. “A firefight? No, that is not the right way to go. You are on my land now, and we do things my way. I said there’s an alternative to a gunfight at the OK Corral and there is. A much better alternative.”
Toron frowned. Looked back at the factory, then at Jardin. Then he burst out laughing. “I tell you what, you have cojones, my friend. Big fucking cojones! OK. Fine, whatever. Let’s just hope your boy Gabriel does his thing next week.”
“Oh, have no doubts. He will do his thing exactly as I have programmed him to. Now,” he checked his watch, “let’s go and find a news channel. My message to Hollywood is about to be delivered.”
*
Child Zack was twenty-four. He’d been captain of his university’s water polo team, a member of a fraternity and a star scholar in his chosen field: business management. But when his girlfriend died after taking a single white tablet supplied by a Puerto Rican drug dealer outside a club in Boston, Zack had found it impossible to hold himself together. A DUI charge was narrowly averted only because his father, a hedge fund manager, bailed out his drunken son with a promise to the police lieutenant to have him attend therapy and buy the other motorist a brand new car. After that, Zack dropped out of college and began drinking seriously. He found the Children of Heaven, or they found him, in the open air market at Faneuil Hall down by Boston’s waterfront.
Now he sat behind the wheel of a late-model, white Ford Transit Connect minivan heading for a film company lot at the end of a long street running north off Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. His left leg was jittering, and he felt as though there were a frightened version of himself blanketed in a calmer outer layer. The effects of the special sacrament he had received that morning, he supposed.
Behind the partition, separating him from the load space, were six, fifty-gallon plastic drums filled with petrol. A detonator sat on top of the centre-left drum, connected by a length of household bell wire to a trigger device in Zack’s lap—a simple electrical switch activated by a red button. He was to drive through the gates, bursting them open if they were closed, head at full speed into the busiest part of the lot he could see, then press the button.
He made a right turn onto North Detroit Street. At the end of the road, he could just make out the ornate gates of the film studio, surmounted with its name in curling steel capitals: Monstrous Regiment Pictures.
Thirty minutes earlier, Jardin had placed calls to half a dozen media outlets advising them that, should they want a hot story concerning a particularly attractive Latina actress, they should have their helicopters airborne and ready to film above the studio lot.
As Zack locked his elbows on the steering wheel and jammed his foot down hard on the accelerator pedal, he was dimly aware of the chatter of rotor blades above him. He smiled, despite the distant nerves jangling deep inside him. He was ready.
The guard on duty that day at the studio’s front gate was Frank Hemmings. Unlike his counterparts in the studio security department, Frank wasn’t an overweight ex-cop, or even a moonlighting real cop. Frank, at fifty-four, was a trim, one-fifty-four-pound former US marine. He still wore his grey hair in a military buzz cut and carried himself upright, gut—what there was of it—sucked in, shoulders thrown back, chest out. ‘Ramrod,’ his colleagues called him behind his back. He knew, and didn’t care. Liked it, in fact.
He looked up at the choppers hovering a couple of hundred feet above the lot and wondered what the jackals were after. There was a rumour that Cora Mendes and Lane Bradley were doing a nude scene on a closed set today, so maybe that was it. Idiots! There’d be nothing to see from the air or the ground. The studio had the whole place on lockdown until the scene was in the can. That meant there were a hell of a lot of extras and non-essential crew milling about outside the soundstage. But that was hardly worth scrambling six choppers for.
Back at ground level, the distant roar of a vehicle engine grabbed hold of Frank’s attention. Shading his eyes against the sun, he squinted along
the street. He didn’t like what he saw. A van accelerating hard towards the lot. Frank had served two tours in Afghanistan and done guard duty outside the US Embassy in Kabul. He’d seen what truck bombs could do, and he’d developed a finely tuned sense for when a vehicle’s driver wasn’t planning on delivering bread. It was broadcasting on full alert right now. He pressed a button marked ‘CLOSE’ and stepped out from his kiosk by the right-hand pillar as the electrically powered hydraulic rams began pushing the heavy steel gates together.
The van roared onwards.
Standing in front of the gates, Frank unsnapped the press stud on the highly polished brown leather holster on his right hip. He drew his weapon, a Beretta M9 semi-automatic pistol he’d used in his Marine Corps service. As the van roared towards him, closing now to three hundred yards, Frank racked the slide to feed one of the fifteen 9mm Parabellum rounds from the magazine into the chamber. He brought the pistol up in front of his eyes in a two-handed grip and looked along the barrel, lining up the iron sights on the windscreen.
Now the van was close enough for Frank to make out the driver. It was a male, face a blurred blob at this distance, blonde hair. Tall on the driver’s seat. Both hands on the wheel.
He knew the driver wasn’t going to stop. It wasn’t a feeling or an intuition. It was hard-edged knowledge, gained and proven in combat. The engine note of the van, whose white and blue oval grille emblem told him it was a Ford, rose steadily, then dropped a couple of semitones as the auto box changed up. Frank waited. His weapon was reasonably accurate at ranges of up to fifty-odd yards. He wanted a good clean kill shot, but he also wanted to take it before the van got so close it detonated its payload at or near the studio.
When the van had closed to a distance of fifty yards, Frank opened fire. He put the first five rounds through the driver’s side of the van’s windscreen, the M9 jerking in his hands, deafening him with the explosions from the muzzle and filling his nose with the sharp stink of burnt propellant from the cartridges being ejected from the chamber. He must have hit the driver because the van slewed left, then right, as Frank emptied the rest of his magazine into the side of the cab. The van smashed into a couple of parked cars, setting off their alarms. As it bounced back into the centre of the road and overturned on the hot tarmac, the driver, dressed all in white, was flung through the shattered windscreen to land in a bloodied heap on the far side of the road. The horns of the damaged cars blared in asynchronous frenzy. Then, with a roaring explosion, the van exploded outwards in a boiling cloud of tangerine flames.
