Condor (The Gabriel Wolfe Thrillers Book 3)

by Andy Maslen

  “You with them?” the pilot asked, pointing again at Gabriel’s shirt.

  “Visiting.”

  “By parachute?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “Fucking big surprise. You gonna land on the big man’s head?”

  “Something like that. You know him?”

  “A little. I flew stuff out there for him when he came to Brazil.” He turned to look at Gabriel and tapped the side of his head. “You want to watch yourself with him.”

  Gabriel nodded. “I intend to.”

  After this brief flurry of conversation, the man lapsed into silence, and they flew on, towards Eden.

  60

  One Last Day in Paradise

  CHRISTOPHE JARDIN WOKE EARLY. THE girl next to him was eighteen. She lay with her slender limbs spraddled across the sheets like a dropped marionette. She’d told him her name was Rebecca. Appropriately Biblical. And in a couple of hours, she’d be dead. He grinned, stroking his moustache and staring up at the bullet hole in the ceiling. Why wait? He slid from under the sheet and wandered, naked, into the kitchen.

  Having selected a deep-bellied cook’s knife from a magnetic bar attached to the wall, he went back into the bedroom. The girl was still sleeping. She looked very peaceful, her unlined skin so pale as to be translucent. Not having been at Eden very long, she had yet to acquire the golden tan that made all the other Children, Uncles, and Aunts look like residents at some sort of exclusive health club deep in the rainforest.

  She stirred in her sleep, mumbling some nonsense in a whisper of outflowing breath. Then she rolled over, arms flung wide as if greeting the sun, which was creeping across her torso through the uncurtained window.

  Jardin crossed the room and eased himself onto the bed beside her. She had a mole on her left breast, just above the nipple. Pale brown, like a drop of spilled café au lait. It made a good target.

  “Bonjour, Rebecca,” he whispered. And then, “Adieu.”

  He raised the knife to the limit of his reach, gripping it in his right hand, paused for a second, then brought it down, fast, plunging the long blade through the mole and into the girl’s heart. Her eyes opened wide as she died, and she gasped out a mist of red droplets. Jardin left the knife sticking out of her chest and went to shower off the blood.

  Half an hour later, he was sitting at his dining table, eating breakfast with Toron.

  “How are your quarters,” he asked the cartel boss.

  “They’re fine. Everything ready for your little group of followers?”

  “More or less. I thought I’d give them a little sermon before we administer the final sacrament. Something to put them in the right frame of mind to meet their Maker.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in God. I heard you screaming at him yesterday.”

  Jardin smiled. “I don’t. But they do. And they believe I am his conduit. The Messiah. It’s the least I can do, leaving them to die with a smile on their faces.”

  “Good. Because this has been a massive waste of time and money, my friend. There’s a half-built coke plant out there and we’re just going to leave it all behind.”

  “Would you rather wait for the Brazilian anti-cartel squad to arrive with guns and tear gas?”

  “Why not? We’ve done it before. In Colombia we don’t just run at the first scent of danger.”

  “I know you don’t. But without a workforce, you’d be left with a shed and some machinery.”

  “Round up some Indians. Give them Levi’s or TVs or whatever the fuck they want. Drug them, why don’t you?”

  “I’ve made my mind up. I have a feeling things are going to get a little too hot around here for comfort. No. We stick to the plan. Your plane will be here at ten, you said?”

  “Should be. A Beechcraft King Air. Plenty of room for us and my men and anything you want to bring out.”

  “Good. Well, I’ll leave you to finish your coffee. Help yourself to whatever you want from the fridge. After all, we won’t be coming back.”

  “Don’t take too long. We need to go back to Bogotá and make some serious plans for our future operations.” Toron paused and looked Jardin in the eye, then leaned across the table and poked him over his heart, “… if we have a future together.”

  Jardin smiled. “No need for the melodrama, Diego,” he said. Then he poked Toron back, hard, enjoying the look of fury that flitted across the younger man’s face. “Where there are human beings, there is weakness. And where there is weakness, there is also money to be made. Now, get everything ready. And relax.” He smiled again, calculating just how wide he could make it without irritating Toron to the point he pulled a gun. Or a knife. “I’ll be back soon enough.”

  With that, Jardin left, strolling down the path from his house towards the main kitchen. Inside, the Elect were preparing the sacrament, lining up the silvery canisters and decanting bottles of fruit cordial. They turned as he entered, bowing to him and then standing, waiting for him to speak.

  “Good morning,” he said, injecting a cheery note into his voice. It was what the poor fools expected, after all.

  “Good morning, Père Christophe,” they chorused, smiling at him as he walked among them.

  He stopped beside one of the women, a former bookkeeper from Cincinnati.

  “Aunt Nina, God be with you,” he said, his hand alighting on the small of her back.

  She looked down, blushing. “And with you, Père Christophe.”

  “I think it will be a good day, today, don’t you?”

  She looked up and smiled. “It’s always a good day here.”

  He smiled back, letting his hand slide down over her ample buttocks, noting her look of surprise and, was that pleasure? Then he walked on, absorbing the smiles and looks of gratitude and of love from his chosen lieutenants in the biggest mass slaughter in Brazil’s history. Of course, they would also be dying today, so their culpability would be a matter of purely academic debate. One for the murder ghouls only.

  “We will meet in the square at nine-thirty this morning. I have a few words I wish to say to the Children.”

  “Very good, Père Christophe.”

  He left the way he had come, continuing his leave-taking. All around him, the Children of Heaven were walking to their allotted chores: gardening, feeding livestock, mending clothes, repairing machinery. There was singing coming from a clearing behind a row of the simple adobe huts.

  Jardin watched from behind a palm tree. He saw a group of about twenty young men, with guitars and tambourines, singing some dirge one of them had composed about loving God and doing good. Or maybe it was loving good and doing God. He suppressed a snigger. Who fucking cares, you idiots! Enjoy your little sing-song while you can.

  As he turned to go, a young woman stepped out in front of him. Her face was a mask of worry.

  “Yes, my child,” he said. “And what can I do for you?”

  “I am troubled, Père Christophe. Can you help me?”

  He pursed his lips and stroked his moustache, then spoke.

  “Why not? What’s wrong, my child?”

  61

  LALO

  GABRIEL LOOKED OUT OF HIS side window, then down. Below them, the rainforest, a vast tract of green interrupted only by the sinuous golden ribbons of rivers and the lakes they fed. From the south, a flock of flamingos rippled above the canopy, thousands of flickering pink wings setting up a rhythmic pattern that shifted and pulsed as the flock maintained the gaps between its individual members. He pondered the best way to proceed once he was on the ground. Without a weapon, he would either have to improvise or use his hands. Both suited him fine. There’d be plenty of timber, so a clubbing weapon would be an easy option. Maybe there’d be a rock in a stream bed. Or, higher risk, he could break into the tool shed by the vegetable gardens and snag a machete or a pruning knife. Or he could just snap the bastard’s neck.

  “Hey,” the pilot said, breaking his train of thought. “You hungry? Thirsty?”

  G
abriel realised he was. Both. “Yes, very.”

  The pilot reach down and pulled out the canvas shoulder bag, then handed it across to Gabriel.

  “Coffee and sandwiches. Help yourself.”

  “Do you want some?”

  “When I get back. Knock yourself out.”

  Gabriel poured a cup of coffee from a dented aluminium flask and took a gulp. It was very strong and very hot. He gasped.

  “Wow! Is this how you deal with hangovers around here?”

  The pilot laughed. “Good, huh? My wife makes it for me every morning. Woman’s a saint.”

  Gabriel unwrapped one of the foil packages shoved down inside the bag. It contained a sandwich of rough, homemade bread filled with thick slices of cold pork, and slathered with a sweet-sharp apple sauce. He took a bite and sighed as the food hit his stomach.

  “You should take care of your wife. She’s a very good cook.”

  The man nodded. “She’s a fucking good mechanic, too. Keeps this baby flying, anyway.”

  Gabriel smiled, acknowledging the pilot’s good fortune. For the next five or ten minutes he munched contentedly on the sandwich, taking restorative draughts of the coffee.

  “We’re getting close,” the pilot said. “You got a drop zone you want me to hit? Wind can be unpredictable out here, so much above ten thousand feet you may have problems sticking your landing.”

  Gabriel thought back to his training in the Paras. And his favourite jump.

  “Somewhere a few miles from the village. Any clear spot. But we don’t want to go high.”

  “No?” the pilot frowned.

  “No. A thousand feet will do it, even a little less. No lower than six hundred, though.”

  “A thousand?” The pilot whirled in his seat to look at Gabriel. “You crazy? You’ll get about ten seconds tops, and you’re gonna kill yourself anyway. What the fuck do you want to go in so low for?”

  “I’m in a hurry to see my old friend.”

  The man looked at Gabriel steadily for a few seconds, pursing his lips. “I only know one kind of person goes in on a chute below five thousand feet. Couple of the boys I used to hang with back in the day did it.”

  “Oh, yes? Who were they, then? Extreme sports enthusiasts?”

  “You could call it that. Used to have special equipment for the kind of sports they did, though.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. Government equipment, know what I’m saying?”

  “As you can see, I don’t have any special equipment.”

  “But you want to do a LALO.”

  “A what?”

  “Please, my friend. Don’t insult me. You turn up out of the blue dressed like a member of our local religious cult, only you sound like that ain’t your bag. You pay way, way over the odds in cash for a jump—and by the way, I recognise that chute, and it ain’t yours—and you want to go in like a paratrooper. To my way of thinking, that’s a pretty strange kind of a deal. What are you up to?”

  “Like I said. I’m dropping in on an old friend.”

  “Oh yeah?” A note of irritation, mixed with suspicion, had crept into the man’s voice. “Well the boys I was telling you about? Before? They were Comando de Operações Especiais. You know what that means?”

  An easy translation job for an ex-SAS linguist. “Special Operations Command.”

  “Exactly. So when they dropped in on people, those people kind of stayed dropped in on, if you know what I’m saying.”

  Gabriel stared straight ahead. More complications. He had cash left in his pockets. So he could buy the man’s silence, at least for a while, hopefully till he was out of the country. Or maybe he could tell him the truth. Or some of it. He sounded like he might be ex-military. And he clearly thought Jardin was crazy. Gabriel made his decision.

  “Their leader is called Christophe Jardin. He’s been organising bomb attacks. In Europe and here in Brazil. I work for some people who want him stopped.”

  He waited. The pilot took his time answering.

  “He slapped a girl,” the man said.

  “Pardon?”

  “He slapped her. One of his, you know, followers. I was flying them back there after they’d been on some sort of shopping trip in Nova Cidade. Pretty little thing, too. With that short hair he makes them all have. She dropped one of the packages and something inside it smashed, and he just yelled at her, then he slapped her. Hard, I mean, knocked her off her feet.”

  “He’s not a very nice man. Slapping girls is probably the least bad thing about him.”

  “Whatever. So you’re going to go in there and read him his rights?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “Fine. And if he can’t hear you no more, well, you can still read them can’t you?”

  “I guess I can.”

  “OK, then. Eden, clearing, three miles out, Low Altitude Low Opening jump. Coming up, chief. Hey, you need anything else?”

  Gabriel shook his head, then clambered into the back of the plane and buckled himself into his chute. He checked and double-checked every strap, latch, and buckle. And was grateful again for the care its owner had devoted to its maintenance. In another three minutes, the pilot called over his shoulder.

  “You see down there? There’s a clearing. Looks like someone’s been building something.”

  Gabriel looked down as the pilot banked into a turn. Through the Plexiglas window, he could see a huge clearing with what looked like a half-built wooden building of some kind, little more than the exterior walls, half the roof and piles of discarded timber and other hard-to-identify materials.

  “That looks perfect,” he shouted back.

  “OK. I’m going to go out a ways then lose some altitude and come into the wind at a thousand feet. You go when you’re ready, and send that fucker my best wishes.”

  The pilot banked again and took the Cessna maybe a mile away from the drop zone. Then he turned and eased the throttle back and the nose down. As the thrum of the propellers decreased in pitch and volume, Gabriel felt the plane losing altitude. He hoped he could remember all his training. If he hit the ground wrong and smashed his ankle, it was game over.

  He pulled the door to one side and latched it. The inrush of air roared about his ears as he readied himself for the jump. Holding on tight to the vibrating door frame, he leaned out just enough to check the approach to the clearing. The pale green expanse was coming up fast. He looked down. The trees were clearly distinguishable as separate specimens now.

  Then the knobbled green canopy flicked out of his field of view and they were over the clearing.

  He took a breath.

  And jumped.

  Yelled, “one-one-thousand”.

  And pulled the ripcord.

  With a fluttering snap, the chute deployed above his head.

  The ground was rushing up to greet him.

  The rigging opened the edge of the chute, and it gulped in air before bellying outwards like a huge, white jellyfish.

  His descent speed was slashed by ninety percent as the chute grabbed at the air above him, jerking him out of his freefall, and Gabriel let out the breath he’d been holding since leaving the Cessna.

  After what seemed like just a few seconds, he hit the ground, yanking upwards on the rigging lines at the last second and rolling to his left in a perfect landing.

  “Ah, Scotty, you’d have been proud of me,” he said, as he freed himself from the harness and began cramming his chute into a messy ball of nylon. Ralph MacArthur Scott had been Gabriel’s jump instructor in his training for the Parachute Regiment. Scotty was a man of boundless patience and few words, most of which had four letters apiece.

  He stowed the billowing mess of nylon under a thorn bush, whose inch-long spines hooked into the chute and prevented the wind snatching it away to possibly inflate like a hot air balloon and give away his presence. Before, he’d not paid much attention to the landscape, being physically and mentally drained for most of the time, and und
er Jardin’s psychological and chemical influence. Now he needed to find the village. He needed to find Jardin. Gabriel aimed his watch’s hour hand, which was currently just past ten, at the sun, then split the angle between it and twelve. That marked south.

  “OK, Wolfe, so you’ve got directions. But where’s the village from here?” He looked around, staring at each corner of the clearing. “If they’re building here, they must be bringing the materials in from somewhere else.”

  There! In the northeast corner was a dark space in the trees. A gap, in fact. A gap where a road entered? He began making his way round the clearing, keeping ten or twelve feet inside the treeline to avoid detection if any of the Children should be out for a morning constitutional. The temperature was climbing and his grubby white clothes were soaked in sweat by the time he reached the gap in the trees. It was a track, rutted and scored by off-road tyres. He leaned against a tree fern, its thick, ridged trunk almost as tall as he was and at least twice as thick around its middle. The rosette of deeply cut leaves above his head cast striped shadows across his arm.

  Something tickled the back of his neck.

  62

  A Father’s Discipline

  “IT’S CHILD RYAN. HE HAS made, you know, advances to me. Physical ones. He knows we are dedicated to your service, but he said ‘what the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over’.”

  “Did he now?” Jardin said, frowning. “Remind me, my child, which one is Child Ryan?”

  She turned and pointed at a tall youth strumming a guitar. “That one, Père Christophe, with the tiger tattoo on his neck.”

  Jardin turned to face her and cupped her cheeks in his palms, bestowing on her a smile of what he hoped was bottomless compassion. “Leave Child Ryan to me. Now, be on your way.” He pulled her head towards him and kissed the top of it, breathing in the smell of her hair as he did so.

  The girl gone, Jardin ground his teeth together so hard they hurt. Fixing a smile on his face, he stalked into the middle of the group of singers. The music died, mid-bar as they realised who had come among them. Jardin walked up to the man known as Child Ryan.