by Andy Maslen
Gabriel had been half expecting a rebuke, delivered in the other man’s taut, upper-class tone. A tone he now realised had been bought from a voice coach.
He handed over the chunky key fob.
“Let’s get going, shall we?” Maitland said, rubbing his hands together and breathing silvery clouds into the chill early morning air.
As the big Bentley sped silently on towards the airport, the sky flooded with colour. The rolling farmland and pastures stretched away on both sides to the horizon, lit by creeping fingers of sunlight that drew long shadows across the landscape. Why do the media keep going on about this “crowded little island”, Gabriel wondered. You could fit boatloads of people in here and they’d disappear without a trace. A kestrel hovered above a hedge on the other side of the road. From his seat behind Franz, who drove fast and in silence, Gabriel watched the bird as it countered the drift of the wind with delicately modulated wing-beats, its head still even as its body swayed and rallied in the air currents. Then it fell towards its prey, wings folded into its body, and was lost from sight.
Maitland cleared his throat.
“Now, Gabriel. I think it’s time we had a proper talk”.
He pressed a button in the cream leather armrest that separated them and a thick sheet of glass slid upwards from the bench seat in front of them, stopping in a groove in the thick cream headlining.
Gabriel turned in his seat so he was facing Maitland, his body half-turned towards him.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“The fact is, I haven’t been entirely honest with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I need your communications skills, that part is true. There is going to come a time, not too long from now, when I will need a capable negotiator. Someone who can craft messages that bring the people around to my way of thinking – or force them to. But you must have wondered why I picked you?”
“I was, as a matter of fact. I mean, why me? You said you got my name from Martin Mackenzie, but there are plenty of ex-Army guys looking for work and I’m sure some of them hate Westminster politicians more than you do.”
“You really are far too modest. We drew up a very detailed profile for this particular job and you’d be surprised at just how few men matched up to our requirements. It’s true, Martin was most helpful. He and I go way back. But I did a little digging too. I have contacts in places other people find it hard to reach. Military records, for example.”
Gabriel knew what was coming but he let Maitland spin out his tale anyway. It never did to let the enemy know how much intelligence you had on them.
“So I did some reading on your army career before I called you. Very impressive stuff, I must say. Belize, the Congo, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Iraq … But it was a confidential note attached to your file that drew me to you.”
“What note was that?”
“A note of caution, advising future commanders that you were unsuitable for further progression as a commissioned officer. Some of your political views were, what shall we say, unpalatable to your then commander.”
“Nothing I ever said – or believed – ever affected my performance in action, or with my men.” Gabriel let his voice rise.
“Please,” Maitland said, patting Gabriel’s arm. “I admire what you said. I admire what you believe. Oh, yes, ‘believe’. I know you didn’t leave those ideas behind you when you left the Regiment. You see, we are kindred spirits. I believe them too. This country is being emasculated by politicians who care too much about sucking up to the EU and the UN. Bloody careerists who went straight from university to a stint as a researcher for a junior minister, then parachuted in as a candidate in some safe seat or other.”
Gabriel noted that Maitland’s voice had slipped down the social scale a few notches. He sounded less knight-of-the-shires and more self-made CEO. The man continued, wiping sweat from his top lip with a paisley-patterned handkerchief that he’d pulled from his breast pocket.
“With you at my side, and a few other talented and influential individuals, I believe I can effect lasting change in Great Britain.”
“I suppose you ought to get elected to Parliament first.”
Maitland looked away and pushed a lock of hair away from his forehead, flashing the watch again. He had the same smirk on his face Gabriel had seen in the photograph in the dossier.
“Yes, of course. Parliament first, then the country.”
Chapter 12
By the time Franz drove off, leaving them and their luggage on the pavement at Heathrow’s departures drop-off lane, Gabriel had formed a better impression of the man he was working for. There’d been no intimations of any specific plans on the journey so far, just a long and self-aggrandising account of how he, Sir Toby Maitland, would put things right in Britain. Their bags checked in, they walked through the bright departure hall towards passport control, and the tedious process of stripping belts from trousers, slipping off shoes, spreading arms and all the other security rigmaroles developed nations had put in place after each new terrorist outrage. Never before, Gabriel thought: afterwards.
They made their way to the airline’s First Class lounge past families and middle-ranking executives drifting around overlit shops or sprawling, blank-eyed, checking their phones or pacifying screaming kids with bottles or bags of crisps. Gabriel and Maitland sat in almost sepulchral silence, surrounded by quietly spoken people several links higher up the food chain than the teeming hordes just beyond the pale wood doors. The room was furnished with complimentary drinks, newspapers, business magazines and a buffet of snacks that would not have disgraced an embassy cocktail reception. Maitland had nothing further to communicate about his plans. He took out his phone and began making calls.
Gabriel wandered over to the bar, poured himself a coffee and took a cold roast beef sandwich. As he turned to return to his seat, his arm was knocked to one side. A tall, heavy-set man dressed in jeans and a fringed suede jacket reached across him to grab a small tin of tonic water from a little pyramid stacked behind the food.
Half Gabriel’s coffee slopped over the rim of his cup; its heat on his skin made him gasp. The coffee splashed down onto the snowy tablecloth that covered the bar-top, staining the starched cotton.
“Hey!” Gabriel said. The well-groomed travellers close enough to hear looked up from their newspapers or phones.
“Relax,” the man said. “Just get some more. It’s all free.”
The man stared hard at the tin, and with studious care hooked the tab open with a long thumbnail and emptied its contents into a tumbler already half-full of ice and gin. The scent of juniper rose into the air. In Gabriel’s past that perfume had been the prelude to a number of memorable evenings, one in particular, when he had been a guest of the Swedish Army and had met Britta Falskog for the first time. Now, in the stillness of the air-conditioned lounge, it seemed to herald a different story.
The big man was intent on topping up his blood alcohol levels thirty minutes before the transatlantic flight. Gabriel touched him on the right elbow. “Maybe have a coffee instead? That one’s going to come back and bite you in the arse up there,” he murmured, pointing at the ceiling, and through it to the sky beyond.
He had the man’s full attention now.
“I’ll tell you what,” the man said, looking down at Gabriel and not bothering to keep his voice low. “You stick to your artisanal-roasted java and get the fuck out of my business.” He pushed past Gabriel, and strode off to the furthest corner of the lounge.
“Everything all right?” It was Maitland, standing beside him and brushing imagined creases out of Gabriel’s right jacket sleeve.
“Yes. Fine. Just some idiot who’s never seen free booze before.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t worry. You get all sorts in First these days, I’m afraid. Pop stars, so-called celebrities, footballers. He’ll be back in coach when his fifteen minutes of fame are over. Come on, let’s go. They’re calling our flight.”
/> A smoothly-shaved young man checked their boarding cards and extended his arm towards the narrow flight of stairs behind him. “Lovely to have you flying with us, Sir Toby,” he said before turning to Gabriel. The young man looked Gabriel up and down: a rapid, but unmistakable assessment. “And your, companion, too, of course.” Gabriel, no stranger to turning left on flights, ascended the stairs in what he hoped was an assured manner.
Gabriel and Maitland passed much of the flight sitting at the in-flight bar, sipping gin. Maitland did a great deal of talking about his political philosophy and then, as if remembering his manners, he asked Gabriel about his military career.
“Tell me. You served in the Regiment, did you not?” Rhetorical, since both men knew it was true and Maitland had already mentioned that he’d done his research. Gabriel waited him out.
“What did you think of the politicians?” Sir Toby continued. “The men who sent you and your comrades to failing states? Who wanted you to prosecute meaningless wars in places nobody cared about?”
“We just did our jobs. You follow your orders, you get the job done. Politics doesn’t come into it.”
“Not even in Iraq, when that idiot Blair got the bloodlust and wanted to be a wartime Prime Minister? Thought he’d ride there in a tank himself, like Margaret Thatcher.”
The pre-flight drinks and the very large gin and tonic at his elbow – Maitland’s fourth – had pushed the man into drunkenness. This, combined with the depleted oxygen levels and lowered air pressure in the cabin, forced Maitland’s eyes to slide off their focus on Gabriel’s.
“Like I said, orders. Anyway, soldiers want to fight: it’s what they’re trained for. Give a nineteen-year-old an automatic rifle, a pistol, a bayonet and a handful of high-explosive grenades and tell him to chuck that lot at the enemy, well, you don’t hear many complaints.”
“I suppose killing is why they joined up, after all.”
“No!” Gabriel’s voice rose. A few other passengers at the bar looked round in surprise. “You get rid of those elements during the selection process. You join up to serve your country – to defend it. Killing may become necessary, and some people have quite an aptitude for it, but that’s not how it works.”
“Forgive me. So what matters is the orders, not who’s giving them. That’s what you’re telling me, is it?”
“In one.”
“Interesting. Let’s continue this conversation another time.” Maitland patted Gabriel on the shoulder. “Now, if you’ll forgive me, I need to catch up on some work.”
He slid off the barstool and stumbled to his seat; he was soon snoring.
Gabriel remained at the bar. He thought about his father. How he’d always trusted the British state; and about his passionate belief in Britain’s global role as a moral guarantor.
Would his father have taken instructions from Maitland, neo-fascist entrepreneur and Franco-admirer? Would he have served him had he found his way to the seat of power? Gabriel had a horrible feeling he knew the answer. Much like soldiers, diplomats were trained to execute policy, to follow orders. Politicking was for politicians. Analysis was for academics. Revolution was for students. His job was to keep the wheels of state turning through smoothly-mediated relationships with allies, and enemies. Oh, Dad, Gabriel thought. Was that true? Would you carry on, shake hands with the new leader of Great Britain while he started “purifying” the population? Before his father could answer, Gabriel’s train of thought was derailed.
“Sir, I think you’ve had enough for one flight,” said a flight attendant to someone slumped in one of the big seats a few rows from the front of the first-class cabin. It was the young man who’d checked Gabriel out as they boarded. His voice sounded calm, but there was a quiet note of anxiety behind the soothing tones.
“Oh, do you? Well, I don’t. I think what you should worry about is bringing me a cognac. A large one. Like I already told you. And none of the cooking stuff, either. Rémy Louis XIII. Something decent.”
It was Buckskin Man, bellowing for a £2000-a-bottle cognac to tip down his throat on top of God knew how much gin. The moment in the flight Gabriel had anticipated had arrived. He turned on his seat at the bar and watched how things unfolded. Maybe they’d calm the guy down. Maybe, like Maitland, the alcohol would kick in and disable him. But right now, that didn’t look likely. He must have been a good six-four or five and sixteen stone, at least seventy pounds heavier than Gabriel. Not a handsome man, but some kind of animal attractiveness suffused his features, even twisted into a contemptuous expression as they were now. Musician, maybe. Or some literary lion. Then it came to him. He’d seen the guy on TV. His name was Jack somebody. Duggan, that was it. A celebrity chef. He’d won a cooking show and had gone on to open a string of steak restaurants. In fact Gabriel had heard Maitland mention eating at one in Manchester a week or so back.
“Let me see what I can do, Sir,” the flight attendant said, running his hand over his hair.
He returned a few minutes later with another older steward: mid-forties, taller, average build.
“Excuse me, Sir,” the older man said, keeping his voice to a courteous volume. “I’m afraid we’ve run out of cognac. Perhaps a coffee? From the captain’s own private supply. It’s very good.”
“If I’d wanted a coffee, I’d have told Cinderella here to bring me a coffee. What I want,” he said, “is a bloody cognac. Now!”
He made a grab for the older steward’s tie, but, in common with those worn by many other professionals who have to deal with the occasional obstreperous customer, it was pre-knotted and secured to his collar with a spring-clip. It detached itself like a gecko shedding its tail to escape a snake: the chef was left holding it, like a trophy.
The atmosphere in the cabin had deteriorated into one of suppressed panic. As Maitland slept on, together with a couple of other business types who’d taken the more usual exit route from too much in-flight booze, the remaining passengers looked over, frowning, anxious, then buried their heads in laptops and business magazines.
Gabriel slid from his barstool and slipped across to the other side of the cabin. The two flight attendants looked up in surprise as he materialised between them.
“Let me handle him,” he said. “I think I saw a Sky Marshal heading for Economy. Go and get him.”
Though his voice was quiet, the tone of authority was clear. No doubt glad to be relieved of the stressful responsibility for placating an aggressive drunk, the two men retreated.
“Oh, it’s you again,” the celebrity chef said, trying to rise from his seat. “Make yourself useful and fetch me that cognac will you?”
“You’ve had enough. Now sit back, relax and keep your mouth shut. You’re scaring people.”
Instead of speaking, the man took an ill-advised swing at Gabriel. From a sitting position you have to generate an enormous amount of force to do any kind of damage with a punch. Uncoordinated from alcohol, the chef didn’t even get close to landing his. Instead Gabriel leaned a little to his left and, as the giant’s fist sailed past his cheek, twisted the wrist with his right hand while pressing down on a point just below the guy’s shoulder with his left. On an unarmed combat course, the instructor had explained how the brachial plexus is a thick bundle of nerves running from the spinal cord, through the neck, out under the collar bone and down the arm that forms a kind of motorway junction in the shoulder.
“Motorcyclists often suffer injuries to the brachial plexus when they fall from their bike headfirst and land on their front, in a press-up position,” the instructor had intoned, as if reading from a prepared speech. “As the head and shoulder become stretched in opposite directions, the plexus can be compressed, ruptured or separated altogether. The results vary but can include anaesthesia or complete paralysis. Needless to say, the injury is incapacitating.”
Gabriel was squeezing down hard. The arm was now useless and the man’s face was pale with agony, though he couldn’t make any further noise because as he opened his mou
th to scream, Gabriel chopped him across the neck with the side of his right hand. It was a banned move in karate, as too many practitioners had been incapacitated. But in his military service Gabriel had found it came in useful when silence was called for, but not death.
The guy’s eyes rolled up in their sockets and he was still, slumped back against the headrest, long blond hair messed up, skin flushed. Gabriel leaned across him and located the button that controlled the seat’s reclining action. Holding it under pressure, he waited for eight seconds as the backrest flattened and the squab slid forward. When the man was lying flat, though not in a pose the airline’s slick advertising featured, Gabriel cinched the seatbelt around his waist, having first fed his wrists under the red webbing strap. Turning the man’s head to the left to ensure he wouldn’t choke if he vomited, he stood straight and turned to go back to the bar. There was a slow, appreciative handclap from the other side of the First Class cabin. He looked over to see who had a sense of irony. A businesswoman – skin the colour of espresso; glossy, straightened hair – was watching him.
He was just wondering whether to go over and introduce himself when the two flight attendants returned with the Sky Marshal, a tall, rangy guy with a bushy moustache. The three men looked around, presumably wondering whether a deranged chef was going to leap out at them brandishing a butcher’s knife. Gabriel gestured to the man’s seat with his head.
“He’s asleep, guys. I think he just ran out of steam.”
While the Marshal busied himself lashing the drunk’s hands and ankles together with black nylon cable ties, Gabriel went back to his seat. Maitland was awake.
Chapter 13
Maitland chuckled. “That’s why I wanted you, Gabriel,” he said. “Personally, I think you should have killed him. Insufferable egotists, the lot of them.”
“Maybe, but we can’t kill everyone we don’t like, can we?”
