by Andy Maslen
“Where are you taking us?” Chloe said.
“Tell me something,” Kasym said. “Have you ever visited Estonia?”
Chapter 2
The taxi dropped Gabriel Wolfe and Annie Frears outside the National Portrait Gallery on St Martin’s Lane, just above Trafalgar Square. Gabriel squinted as the sun temporarily blinded him. He paid the driver then turned to the gallery door, with Annie squeezing his arm and chattering about the photographer whose work they’d come to see. As they were about to go in, a wizened man approached them. He wore a filthy cream and blue windcheater and had one tooth in his upper jaw and sunken cheeks where the rest had fallen out. He clutched a handful of copies of the Big Issue magazine.
“Excuse me, Sir,” he said to Gabriel, in a cockney accent rasping with cigarette smoke. “Would you care to purchase possibly the worst magazine in the whole world?”
The owners of this thin publication sold by homeless people would probably not approve of their salesman’s unorthodox technique.
“Er, no thanks. Not after that pitch.”
“Well, in that case, ’ow about a donation for a moderately amusing beggar?”
Gabriel laughed and gave the man a pound.
Three miles to the north, Dain Zulfikah was making his penultimate delivery: 200 litres of chemicals to a big commercial laundry in Islington. After he’d dumped the last of the 10-litre cartons with a slosh and a thud, and got his docket signed by the manager, he swung himself back into the cab of his three-tonne truck, slammed it into first with a protesting squawk from the gearbox and lurched into the traffic. One more drop and then home for lunch and maybe a quick tumble with the beautiful Amira, his wife of three months. He was in a hurry, speeding towards amber traffic lights, cutting up slow-witted car drivers and frightening over-eager pedestrians back onto the kerb with a sharp blast on the twin airhorns he’d retrofitted to the truck. The transport manager had turned a blind eye in exchange for some of Dain’s weed. “Best skunk in Peckham,” he’d said at the time.
Gabriel and Annie entered the gloom of the gallery’s lobby. After checking in their bags, they headed for the stairs and the sign announcing a new exhibition by Annie’s brother, Lazarus. Laz was only 25 but had already been invited to join Magnum, the world’s most prestigious photography collective. His photographs were now bracketed with those of luminaries like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. He’d won his entry ticket with a series of wrenching pictures of civilian victims of American drone strikes in Afghanistan.
This exhibition marked a departure from his war reporting. It was titled, simply, “Angels”, and was the result of a three-month trip to the US when Laz had rode with a chapter of Hells Angels. Gabriel had met some members of this organised crime gang not long before the exhibition opened and was reluctant to go. But Annie had persuaded him one morning, pushing her tousled hair out of her eyes and pouting in a way she knew Gabriel found hard to resist. They weren’t in a relationship, according to her. She’d used the phrase “friends with benefits” which he’d never heard before. Apparently it meant shopping, hanging out and sex but “definitely not anything serious”. That worked for Gabriel. Commitment was a hard word for him and as he had no intention of settling down, the arrangement suited him perfectly.
“Out my way, loser,” Dain yelled cheerfully over the drum and bass pounding from the truck’s stereo as he tailgated an electrically powered city car. The little vehicle veered into the bus lane to let him through, a tinny beep from its horn letting him know of the owner’s disapproval. Holborn was slow and Dain was impatient. Reaching the crossroads with Kingsway, the big north-south road leading from the Strand up to Kings Cross and Islington, he raced for the dregs of the amber light, scattering a crowd of office workers and tourists mooching across the pedestrian crossing on the far side of the junction.
He peeled off to the left, stabbing the brake pedal as a taxi pulled a U-turn in front of him to pick up a fare whistling for a ride on the far side of the street. Then he found himself enjoying an unexpectedly empty stretch of road that took him barrelling southwest towards St Martin’s Lane. He reached for his phone as he visualised Amira’s generous hips and rounded bottom, and spoke into the mic.
“Call Amira.”
In the gallery, Gabriel and Annie stood before a whitewashed wall hung with 50cm-square black and white portraits. Seven hard faces stared out at them. Starting at the right, they stared back. The first man had a tattoo of a death’s head on his right cheekbone. His eyes looked like ball bearings.
“He looks bad, Gabe,” Annie said.
“He probably is,” Gabriel said.
“Oh God, look at him,” she said, pointing to the next man along.
The face above the leather waistcoat with an “Oakland Chapter” patch was doughy and very pale. Odd for someone who spent his life on a bike in California.
As Annie stared into the fat man’s fleshy face, Gabriel looked around the room. There were a few earnest-faced twentysomethings, photography students he assumed, with notebooks and heavy-framed glasses. A middle-aged couple who looked like they been aiming for the Titians and Caravaggios in the National gallery round the corner and been waylaid by a mischievous tour guide. And a guard in a cheap navy blue uniform with half-hearted silver badging, slumped on a hard plastic chair against the far wall and picking something out of his left ear.
“Gabriel, look at this one,” Annie said. “He gives me the creeps.”
Gabriel turned to look at the portrait. As he took in the scar bisecting the man’s ruined eye, and the shiny gold canine tooth winking out at him, he felt a tingling in his fingertips. His breathing became fast, and shallow and the room seemed to recede around him. Sweat broke out on his brow, his palms and under his shirt. He knew this man. His name was Davis Meeks. Gabriel had met him, twice, on his last mission. First at his clubhouse in Flint, Michigan, then at the farm belonging to a South African arms dealer, named Bart Venter. Neither man was now alive.
Half a mile away, Dain was enjoying the call with his wife.
“Why don’t you wear your birthday present? … Oh, you would, would you? Well we’ll have to see about that, won’t we … God you’re a dirty tart!”
He didn’t notice the cycle messenger a few feet in front of his front bumper. Her Lycra and carbon-fibre gear might help in a messy collision with a kerb, but were unlike to afford much protection from a 3-tonne delivery truck.
“Shit!” He swerved at the last possible second, hearing her curses flash by the open passenger window as he crossed the white lines down the centre of the road to avoid her. The island placed in the road by Westminster council to bracket the pedestrian crossing rushed at him. No option but to skirt it on the wrong side of the road. God was smiling on him at that moment and switched the traffic lights at the exit from Trafalgar Square to red, halting the cars, bikes and vans and giving him a free run around the traffic island and back onto his side of the road.
Gabriel was losing control. An immense tide of fear broke over the internal barriers he’d erected so carefully over the years to protect his psyche. As Davis Meeks leered down at him, his arms and legs began trembling violently. He turned away from Annie, who was still engrossed by the Hells Angel’s wickedly disfigured countenance.
The guard in the chair looked up and smiled. His dark brown skin was shining. The smile widened until the skin at the corners of his mouth split and blood started flowing down onto the white collar of his shirt.
“Smudge?” Gabriel said, heart racing now. “Is that you?”
The guard spoke.
“How could it be me, boss? You left me in that clearing in Mozambique after we took out Abel N’Tolo. Couldn’t survive this, now could I?”
He looked beseechingly at Gabriel as the whole lower part of his face splintered and fell into his lap.
Gabriel shouted “No!” and ran from the gallery.
Dain’s heart rate was accelerating, too. Even without its load, the truck was an unw
ieldy vehicle and its designers had never intended it to take corners as viciously as Dain was now. Up ahead, at the red lights, three bikers revved their machines impatiently, the sound carrying in the still air. He didn’t want to be facing them in a head-on; the company’s insurers would kick up and his job would go down the toilet just like that.
He passed the crossing island and wrenched the wheel over hard to the left, dimly registering the black-haired man racing from the plate glass doors to his right. The truck skidded, its tyres unable to grip the greasy road surface under so much lateral force. The rear end slewed around and mounted the pavement.
The bang was loud inside the truck’s cabin. Fifty cubic metres of air in a hermetically sealed aluminium cube make a pretty good resonating chamber.
Dain slammed on the brakes and cut the engine.
A woman was standing on the pavement, her hands pressed to her cheeks, screaming. Lying on his back, bleeding from a gash on his scalp was a man in a dark suit. His eyes were closed.
Dain pushed through the circle of onlookers taking video on phones.
“Get out the way! Call an ambulance!”
Dain bent over the prone figure on the pavement, kneeling carefully to avoid the blood pooling underneath his head, and checked his pulse. Then leant closer still and felt the cool whisper of breath on his cheek.
“OK, he’s alive. Stand back. Give him some air.”
Minutes later, a siren rent the air with its hysterical crying and Gabriel was transferred onto a gurney and pushed quickly but carefully into the interior of the ambulance. Annie jumped in beside him, batting away the paramedic who tried to restrain her from cradling Gabriel’s bleeding head.
“Leave me alone!” she said. “He needs me.”
“What he needs is a hospital, my love,” the woman said, her soft Jamaican cadences at odds with the harsh lighting and stainless steel inside the cramped space. “You can ride here but please, sit yourself over there so we can do our work. What’s his name?”
“Gabe. I mean, Gabriel. Please, is he going to be all right?”
“He’s had a nasty bump, love. We’ll get him to Charing Cross and the doctors can look after him.”
Gabriel’s coma, caused by the truck, then maintained by his doctors, would last for a month. He would find, on waking, that he was no longer in Charing Cross Hospital.
Chapter 3
“Estonia? No, of course we haven’t been to Estonia!” Sarah Bryant stared in horror at the olive-skinned man sitting next to her daughter.
“Why ‘of course’? The Baltic States are very beautiful countries. Friendly people, lots of money now. Ideal tourist destinations. You agree, don’t you, Elsbeta?”
“Tallinn is Estonia’s capital. It lies on the Baltic Sea. It is also the country’s cultural hub. It retains its walled, cobblestoned Old Town. There are many charming cafes and shops. Kiek in de Kök stands proudly in the city centre: a 15th-century defensive tower.” She paused. “Wikipedia.”
Kasym grinned wolfishly at them, showing a row of mottled teeth.
“There you are, then. We will put you up somewhere nice and you can learn all about the history and culture of this fine city.”
“And all this. This is for your cause, is it?” Chloe said. “You’re, what, nationalists? Separatists? You want to get out from under the yoke of Russia, is that it?”
“You are a clever young lady,” Kasym said. “Yes. No doubt they don’t teach Chechen history in your English private schools, and I will spare you the details. But let us just say that I have no love for Russians, and nor do my countrymen.”
“You fought in the war?”
“I fought in many wars. I fought for the Russians in Afghanistan against the Mujahideen. Then in 1994 against the Russians for a free Chechnya and again in 1999. Now I fight once again to free my country from the yoke of the oppressor. I would not expect you to understand, as children of a great colonial power, but Chechens were not born to be slaves to the Soviets, or the Russians.”
The car swung right at a roundabout leaving Birger Jarlsgatan for the E20. They had to wait while a long blue and white city bus pulled passed them, its rubber concertina joint flexing as the double-length vehicle negotiated the tight turn.
Without warning, Sarah Bryant leapt forward from her seat and clawed wildly at the back of Elsbeta’s head, tearing out a chunk of her dark brown hair.
“You take us back right now! Take us back!”
The car swerved as Elsbeta let out a yelp of pain and swung her free hand behind her, landing a glancing blow on Sarah’s cheek.
“Shit! You bitch. You could have killed us all. Kasym, do something or I’ll stop the car at the next junction and deal with her myself.”
As if the effort of attacking had exhausted her, Sarah sank back against the luxurious leather seat and commenced sobbing quietly, her face covered by her hands.
Chloe was sitting stiffly, sandwiched between mother and kidnapper. Kasym leant across her body and pinched her mother’s chin in between his strong thumb and forefinger. He wore a heavy gold ring on the third finger of his hand set with a red carved seal. A dragon, it looked like.
He breathed in, then out again, controlling his temper. It would not do to let these English women see the other side to his character. For now, the courteous kidnapper was the trump card.
“My dear Mrs Bryant,” he said. “Please do not be aggressive to Elsbeta. She was assaulted badly by Russian troops in our capital city, Grozny. It has left her with a horror of violence. Will you promise me that? Please?”
Sarah Bryant lifted her head and glared at him.
“Fine. But if you hurt as much as a hair on Chloe’s head I will kill you.”
“Oh, I have no doubt. Which is why we must all agree to get along peaceably. We have a long trip ahead of us and I should not be forced to restrain you beyond the bare minimum necessary to prevent your escape.”
“What do you mean, ‘a long trip’. Aren’t we staying in Stockholm?”
“Mum,” Chloe said. “Leave it for now. Think about Dad. He’s going to be worried.”
Kasym approved of the younger woman’s tone, and her suggestion. The father would need to be contacted. But not until he had the women safely in Talinn. For now they could keep their counsel.
Elsbeta kept the car nicely under the speed limit. They didn’t want any attention from the police, even though he was a skilled corrupter of underpaid public officials. Democratic it might be, but Sweden no doubt paid its cops as little as it could get away with, so they’d be as open to a little extra folding money as cops anywhere else in the world.
Keeping his knife in plain view, he looked out of the window as shops and restaurants sped by. So much affluence. So much freedom. So much softness, too. Try this little stunt with a couple of Chechen women and you’d likely end up eating your own balls instead of succeeding in the kidnap. He checked his watch: 11.15. Dukka and Makhmad should be tied up at the jetty by now, the boat fuelled and provisioned for the trip across the Baltic and into the mouth of the Gulf of Finland. They’d reckoned on a trip of perhaps 12-15 hours depending on wind and currents, which meant they’d be at the dock in Talinn at about two o’clock the following afternoon.
Something caught his eye through the windscreen. A flashing blue light. Elsbeta was already braking. She said a single word.
“Police.”
*
Check Amazon or join Andy’s mailing list at www.andymaslen.com to find out the publication date for Blind Impact.
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
&nb
sp; Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Andy Maslen
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Excerpt - BLIND IMPACT
