by Condor
“Army, eh? Regiment?”
“Royal Artillery, sir.”
“A gunner, eh? Very good. Letting girls in, though. Bit of a change from my day.”
Chelsea smiled. The old guy wasn’t being snide, just flirting, she supposed, in a retired-general kind of way.
“Oh, we took a bit of flak from the guys, but once you’ve shot the balls off an insurgent with an SA80, they give you a bit more respect.”
The general harrumphed, taken aback at this sudden coarseness, his cheeks flushing an even deeper shade of pink.
“Yes, well. I expect you want to interview everyone here. I told them all to keep away from,” he turned and pointed, “that.”
“Thank you, sir. And, yes, we will want to speak to you all individually. There’s my Guvnor, excuse me.”
Susannah was coming down a flight of stairs in the far corner of the reception area. She was accompanied by a fortyish man in a charcoal-grey suit and navy bow tie, his paunch straining the material of his waistcoat so that ellipses of white shirt showed between the buttons. He was polishing a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles on a white-spotted navy handkerchief. She looked over and caught Chelsea’s eye.
“Over here, Sergeant, please.”
Keeping to the edge of the room, Chelsea made her way round to her boss.
“This is Simon Hammond. He’s the managing partner here.”
The man held out his hand and Chelsea shook it briefly. It was soft, and damp. He spoke.
“I was just explaining to the Detective Chief Inspector here, if there’s anything at all I can do, please let me know. This is just a terrible thing to have happened.”
“Could we have a room to interview these witnesses in, please, sir?” Chelsea said. “We might need it for an hour or so.”
“Yes, of course. Come this way.”
Susannah paused and turned to Chelsea.
“Get a couple of uniforms in here. Keep the witnesses from leaving.”
Chelsea nodded and pulled out her phone.
Hammond led the detectives through a door and into a corridor lined with old and expensive-looking oil paintings. Scenes of London in the nineteenth century, sailing ships on the Thames, portraits of whiskery men sporting gold watch-chains across their stomachs. He stopped outside a door.
“This used to be our boardroom, but we meet on the top floor now. Better Wi-Fi reception up there for transatlantic Skype calls and …” Susannah coughed quietly by his side. “Yes. Well, it’s yours for as long as you need it,” he finished.
The room was furnished with a long mahogany table, nine matching chairs to a side, upholstered in green and white striped fabric, and a carver chair at one end. The table was positioned beneath a pair of portraits of elegantly dressed middle-aged men with stern expressions, even bigger paunches than the current boss, and plentiful facial hair. The founders, Chelsea assumed.
“If there’s nothing else?” Hammond said. “I do have some pressing matters to attend to.”
“You’ve been very helpful, Mr Hammond,” Susannah said.
He nodded, then excused himself, leaving a faint aroma of spicy, woody aftershave in his wake.
The two female detectives settled themselves across the table.
“Get the pathologist over here, pronto,” Susannah said. “I want that head back at Savile Row and on his table as soon as possible. Could be another victim …”
“Or could be the bomber, Guv?”
Chelsea watched as her boss stared down at the polished surface of the table, following Susannah’s gaze and seeing her frowning reflection.
“Yes. It could be the cunt who did it. And I want to know.”
*
While Susannah and Chelsea spoke to the witnesses from Arbuthnot & Hammond, gathering a lot of consistent, but not very useful information—basically, smash, splat, scream, sick—Gabriel was recovering, sitting on the boot lip of the paramedic’s yellow-and-green-chequered estate car. He was drinking a mug of tea that had arrived courtesy of a coffee shop that had turned itself into a combination dressing station and canteen.
He’d seen the effects of roadside bombs and suicide bombers before. But never in London. Never somewhere he thought of as civilised. Worst of all, he knew that within a couple of days, everything would be back to normal. Sure, there’d be damage to put right, but apart from the victims and their friends and families, people would slowly, and surely, forget.
Except for the odd snippets of video that found their way onto the Internet, the whole miserable scene would fade from view. Well, not for him. The face of the young girl he’d saved in the first moments after the blast—skin white with shock, eyes wide, mouth frozen open emitting frantic, shallow gasps—wouldn’t let him. Well, are you going to sit here all day, Wolfe, or are you going to do something about it?
He pulled out his phone. Why wait to see if Don wanted him? He wanted Don. He called the man who’d commanded him in 22 SAS Regiment: Colonel Don Webster. Now retired from the Army, Webster ran a discreet organisation from a base in Essex—MoD Rothford.
Called simply The Department, it existed to bring the most evil men and women to justice. Not, as Don was fond of saying, into custody. There were plenty of terrorists out there who viewed a stint in prison as a chance to regroup and inculcate impressionable young men, and occasionally women, into their twisted philosophies. Plenty who used prison, assuming the Crown Prosecution Service’s barristers were smart enough to secure a conviction, as another operating division. They ran their organisations from cells as comfortable as many people’s living rooms. In short, plenty of very evil people who deserved more than a slap on the wrist. More like a very powerful slap to the body or head, in sizes ranging from 5.56mm to 9mm, with the odd .338 or .50-inch caning when getting up close and personal wasn’t an option.
Gabriel had already completed a successful mission for The Department, rescuing the kidnapped wife and daughter of a British pharmaceuticals CEO and disrupting a plan to disable Britain’s best fast-jet pilots. On that occasion, Don had come to him. This time, Gabriel wanted in on the ground floor.
Don answered on the first ring.
5
The Second Order
MILLIONS OF PEOPLE TAKE PSYCHOACTIVE drugs perfectly legally. Leaving aside products whose mind-altering properties are a secondary feature of their production (at least if you believe the advertising of their manufacturers) such as alcohol and tobacco, there are mountains of others. Billions of antidepressants, sedatives, sleeping pills, anxiolytics, stimulants, and antipsychotics, every single year.
The daily dose of tranquillisers swallowed gratefully, or at least obediently, by the Children of Heaven would hardly count as a pebble kicked off the path to the foothills of those mountains. Nevertheless, they did a magnificent job of maintaining a pliable docility in the young people of both sexes recruited into the cult by its Elect of “Aunts,” “Uncles,” and more experienced acolytes.
Initially, Jardin had not found the tranquillisers necessary to instil discipline in his followers. His charisma, their readiness to believe, and a healthy dose of psychologically disorientating induction techniques had served to bind them tightly to him.
But as his following had grown in the late nineties, and with it, satellite communities in Berlin, Manhattan, and England’s Berkshire countryside, he had hit on the idea of using drugs to simplify—or eliminate altogether—the problem of discipline.
The choice was fairly clear cut: uppers or downers. He believed his daily sermons would provide such uplift as was needed. So he opted for downers. Specifically, the class of antidepressants known as benzodiazepines, their most common manufactured form being diazepam, the active ingredient in Valium.
He took pains to cultivate relationships with criminal gangs in Albania, Turkey, London, and New York. In this way, he secured supplies of the drug in sufficient quantities to put his followers under the chemical cosh. After experimenting with the drug in tablet form, he and his main supplie
r, a then up-and-coming Colombian drug lord named Diego Toron, hit upon the idea of using a liquid formulation. This had the advantage of being impossible to hide under the tongue and also deliverable in soft drinks. He’d borrowed from that other leader of the lost, Jim Jones, and his Kool-Aid capers in the jungles of Guyana.
Now it was time to dose the flock. He left his house on the southwest fringe of the village square, robe flowing, hair blowing in the breeze that soughed across the grassland he had had chopped out of the forest, and made his way to the meeting space in front of the Temple.
Approaching the large wooden building, resplendent with an immense wooden cross outside and stained glass windows to each side of the double-doored entrance, he composed his features into something he felt was suitably messianic. Drop the grin. Crinkle the brow. And, for added saintliness, fix the gaze on a point thirty degrees above the horizontal, while trying to remember the names of all the women he’d fucked since setting up home in the jungles of Brazil.
One of the Uncles hurried over.
“Père Christophe! We were worried. It’s later than normal, and when you didn’t appear, we thought something must have happened. Your being so punctual, I mean.”
Jardin returned his gaze to Earth and fixed his purplish-blue eyes on the man. “I was meditating. Forgive me for communing with God when there was admin to take care of.”
“Oh no, I mean, of course, your spiritual practice must come first.” The younger man was blushing now, aware he’d displeased his master. “The Children are gathered for the obeisance.”
“Good. Come on, then. Let’s dose them up and get it over with.”
“Père Christophe?”
Jardin shook his head. He felt like saying, did I say that out loud?, but contented himself with a saintly smile.
“I said, let’s perform the obeisance ceremony. Did you not hear me?”
Panicked now, the Uncle nodded several times, keeping his eyes to the ground.
The Children were assembled in rows, dozens upon dozens of them, all dressed in white. Walking amongst them, the Uncles and Aunts placed hands on heads, murmured blessings, and patted hands. They carried brushed aluminium flasks that sloshed as they bumped on their thighs.
Jardin arrived in front of the crowd and mounted a dais constructed from planks of hardwood harvested from the trees growing all over the compound. Silence fell.
The Uncles and Aunts set up the flasks on collapsible camp tables placed at the end of each row of Children. Each table was equipped with a hosepipe connected to a pump in a corner of the compound. Beside them were stacked clear plastic cups of the type used at outdoor parties and barbecues, and bottles of fruit cordials in deep, jewel colours of maroon, lime-green and bright, acid orange.
Beneath the rough-plank platform, yellow cables as thick as a man’s finger snaked away to a plain, white, clapboard hut on the edge of the assembly area. There, a thousand-watt PA system stood ready to transmit his words to every corner of the compound, both here and way over in the vegetable-growing area, the water treatment plant, the workshops, the printing shed where the cult would create its leaflets to be distributed in towns and cities throughout Amazonas State, and the generator room. He slid the transparent cheek mic over his right ear and plugged its jack into the transmitter box under his robe. Then, assuming his slow, smooth, deep “Père Christophe” voice, Jardin began speaking.
“My Children. Blessings be upon you for following the First Order.”
They chanted back at him in a low murmur that, owing to the sheer weight of numbers, reverberated around the compound’s central village. “Serve God through Père Christophe’s will.”
“And you do it with grace and peace in your hearts. Today, we celebrate one of our family who yesterday carried out the Second Order.”
Again, the chant. “Give your life to cleanse the world of sin.”
“Child Eloise carried out a cleansing in London, that city of sin. She resides in the house of the Lord, now. She sits by his side, anointed by fire, handmaiden to the Creator.”
The rows of Children smiled at this news, turning their tanned, unlined faces to each other and nodding, each daring to hope that one day Père Christophe would give them the Second Order.
“There is much wickedness in the World,” Jardin continued. “Much sin. Greed, corruption, covetousness, lust, atheism. The great cities of the world have transformed themselves into modern-day Babylons, peopled by whores, fornicators and idolaters. Our God is not their God. For they HAVE no God. They pursue pleasure at all COSTS. They hanker for the empty acquisition of material goods and IGNORE the spiritual wealth God has already made theirs if they would only ASK.”
Jardin could feel his pulse ticking over quietly in the background as he adopted the rhythmic cadences and pauses of the seasoned preacher. He’d found the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. online and practised until he could emulate the civil rights leader’s every vocal leap and bound.
“We are the righteous ones who will CLEANSE this planet … we are the righteous. Who will UPROOT wickedness and consign it to the FLAMES of redemption … we are the righteous. Who will burn out SIN wherever it FESTERS … we are the righteous. Who will return this world to God’s grace. WE ARE THE RIGHTEOUS,” he thundered. His last shout flushed a flock of emerald-green parrots from a stand of banana palms at the edge of the gathering. They erupted from the foliage with a clatter of wings and a squawk of alarm.
He could feel an erection growing steadily larger beneath his robe and decided to cut this particular sermon short. There was a slim-figured blonde girl in the front row who had caught his eye and was even now gazing rapturously up at him.
“It is time for your obeisance, Children. Drink our sacrament. May the blessing of the Lord be upon your heads.”
“And upon yours,” the Children murmured in response.
With that, he dismounted the dais. He stood, watching, as the horde of Children queued like sheep to take their blackcurrant, lime or orange-flavoured tranquilliser. They were formerly the disillusioned, disturbed, disgruntled or just plain disaffected. The offspring of wealthy professional people with more time for their careers than their children’s well-being. Now they were now his Children. His to control. To play with. And, when he felt like it, to destroy.
The blonde had selected lime. He watched as she knocked back the sweet liquid in one. Then, when her eyes came to rest on him, as he knew they would, he smiled and beckoned. She blushed. Then she looked down at her feet, which moved towards Jardin.
6
Invitation to COBRA
“HELLO, OLD SPORT. I WONDERED how long it would take you to call. Heard about the bombing in London, then?”
“I didn’t hear about it, Don. I actually heard it. I was on Regent Street when the thing went off. I spent the last hour patching up victims. It’s like bloody Kabul down here.” Gabriel looked at his bloodstained hand, turning it this way and that. It was trembling. He shoved it between his thighs and clamped them around it.
“Jesus! How are you doing?”
“I’m fine. Bit tired, and I think my suit’s had it, but I’m good. Basically. Yes, good.”
Apart from the reappearance of a certain SAS trooper we both knew back in the day.
“And you’re calling me because …?”
“You know why I’m calling you.”
“Well, there’s nothing much to do at the moment. We need something to go on before The Department can be of much use. Hopefully the police will come up with some forensic evidence to give us a direction to start poking around in. Or MI5 will supply some credible intel. But at the moment, I’m on what the media would call high readiness, and you and I would call sitting on our hands doing sweet Fanny Adams. Once we know more, I’ll be putting a team together. And you’d like to be on it, I assume?”
“Yes. Very much so. I’m …”
“Hold on, got a call coming in from the PM.”
Gabriel heard a click as Don switche
d to the other call. He finished his tea and put the cup down on the pavement beside him. One of the young staff from the coffee shop rushed over, plucked it up, and dropped it into her black bin bag. She was very young, still a teenager, with pale skin, dark eye makeup, and a piercing in her left eyebrow, a little steel cone. Her T-shirt was black. It said Barista in Training across the chest. She smiled nervously at him and he realised he was staring. He looked away. As he waited for Don, a squad of infantrymen disgorged from the back of an army truck that had lumbered up Regent Street. They grabbed shovels and were marched off by a sergeant towards Oxford Circus.
He looked at the screen of his phone. Nine missed calls. All from Britta. Don came back on the line.
“Sorry about that, but when the PM beckons, one must come running.”
“So what did she want?”
“Meeting at two-thirty this afternoon at the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms, which the media, and our own dear leader, love to call COBRA. You want to come? I told the PM one of my team was directly involved. She’d like to meet you.”
“I’m not exactly dressed for it. I look like I’ve taken a few rounds from a Kalashnikov.”
“I can fix that for you. We’ve a couple of safe houses in town. One is unoccupied. You can get cleaned up and then meet me in Whitehall. I’ll text you both addresses and call ahead to have someone there to let you in. Got to go.”
The line went dead. Gabriel stared off into the middle distance. There was something he’d been meaning to do but now couldn’t remember.
Britta!
Gabriel tapped out a text to her.
Am fine. Don’t worry. Will call. G
A few moments later, Gabriel’s phone beeped as the text arrived from Don with the locations of the safe house in Victoria and the Cabinet Office building in Whitehall. He was just wondering how best to reach the safe house when the two detectives came out from Great Marlborough Street and hurried across the road towards him. There was no traffic but they reflexively checked in both directions.
