by Andy Maslen
“And so?” Don prompted.
“And so I propose we hide in plain sight. It’s the Tehran International Book Fair in May. We develop cover as publishers’ sales representatives under the auspices of the British Council and infiltrate that way.”
“MOIS people will be everywhere. It may be a book fair, but it’s still in Iran. This won’t be some lovey-dovey cultural exchange; they’ll be scrutinising every stand, matching staff against visa lists, the works.”
Eli smiled, and Gabriel realised how much he was enjoying being in her company again.
“I know, Boss. So we’ll have to show our faces, talk literature with academics from the University of Tehran, give out business cards. We can manage that can’t we?” she ended, turning in her chair to face Gabriel.
The movement stretched her grey T-shirt across her chest and Gabriel’s gaze slid downwards for a second. He couldn’t help himself. All of a sudden, he wanted Eli.
“Gabriel?” she asked again, her eyes appraising him, a shadow of an amused smile playing on her lips.
“Yes,” he said, too loudly. “Yes,” again, quieter this time, “I think we could manage to pretend to be cultural ambassadors for a day or two. How hard can it be?”
Don looked at his two operators, taking his time and breathing loudly through his nose. Finally, he spoke.
“You’ll need support, both here and in Iran. Our friends in the Secret Intelligence Service have people in the embassy, but there’s someone I’d like you both to meet in London. His name’s Tim Frye. He’s a good man and an expert on Iran and its nuclear ambitions. Here.”
Don pushed a sheet of paper across the desk.
Gabriel turned it round to face him and began tapping the contact details into his phone. Eli did the same. When they’d finished, Don retrieved the sheet of paper and fed it into a crosscut shredder conveniently positioned beside his desk. He waited for it to finish and once the rough-edged whirr had stopped he spoke again.
“Eli’s driving a pool car, but she can leave it here for now. No sense in your driving down to London in separate cars, is there?”
“No, Boss,” Gabriel and Eli chorused, sounding like well-drilled soldiers, or perhaps just obedient children sitting in front of their stern, Victorian-style paterfamilias.
“You’ve some spare kit in the boot, Old Sport?”
“Weekend bag, Boss. Always got it with me. Better—”
“Safe than sorry, hmm, mm-hmm. Your favourite saying.”
They said their goodbyes at the door to Don’s office, the older man explaining he had “another bloody meeting to go to” before shaking their hands and returning to his desk. They made their way along the well-worn, blue-carpeted corridor and out onto the grassy area in front of the admin block that housed “Colonel” Webster and his ambiguous, “Admin Offices – Spec. Ops,” as the metal sign screwed to the brickwork had it.
Gabriel knew there were still plenty of people in the UK who would be horrified to learn that their current government – and many preceding it – ran a covert assassination squad out of a boring-looking military base deep in the Essex countryside.
Plenty of politicians. Plenty of civil servants. Plenty of retired and not-so-retired generals who regarded anything short of outright warfighting to be not quite cricket. Yes, they could see the need for commandos, and they could just about tolerate Special Forces units.
But a squad of misfits deemed too unruly even for the SAS with its “rules are for other people” mentality? Special Branch rejects? Foreigners with useful weapons skills but lousy people skills? MI5 operators too ready with a trigger squeeze when a shutter press is all that’s required? All trained, disciplined, briefed and if necessary psychiatrically “prepared” to kill without compunction, mercy or a second thought? No. This they could not swallow. Yet, somehow, this was how he was earning his living nowadays. Eli’s voice punctured his inner dialogue.
“What the fuck’s this?” she asked, jerking her chin at the grey Ford Mondeo he’d hired while he looked for a replacement for his beloved Maserati.
“It’s a car. Why, don’t they have them in Israel?”
“Cheeky fucker! You know what I mean. I thought you’d have replaced the Maserati with something a bit better,” she wrinkled her nose and pointed at the car as if it were a field latrine, “than this.”
Gabriel shrugged. He unlocked the car and they climbed in, continuing the conversation as he trundled around the perimeter road towards the gates.
“I have been looking but I haven’t found anything I like yet. At least this is anonymous.” Why do I feel the need to justify myself to you?
Eli snorted.
“Anonymous? You can say that again. Why not go the whole hog and buy a grey chain-store suit while you’re about it?”
Bested in the banter department, Gabriel kept his counsel as he rolled up to the gate. He buzzed down the window.
“Thanks for having us, Sergeant,” he called, catching a waft of polleny spring air from the field across the road from the base.
The uniformed guard waved him on his way, and he eased the Ford over the one-way traffic treadles, listening to them clunk and clatter under his wheels. He turned left and, in an attempt to impress Eli, floored the throttle. The car did its best to respond, emitting a rough-edged roar as he hit the red line in the first three gears before easing off at a hundred, changing up into fifth and letting the car coast until it reached a more respectable eighty on the gently curving country road.
Without turning, Eli spoke.
“Was that for my benefit?”
He heard the gentle mockery in her voice. Liked her all the more for it.
“Did it work?”
“I suppose my pulse might have risen.” A micro-pause. “A little.”
“Then it was.”
“So where are you living these days? I mean, now that your lovely little house in Salisbury got blown to bits?”
“I bought a new place. Plenty of room for guests.”
He glanced sideways at Eli, who was staring to her left, apparently consumed by the English countryside rushing past.
“Oh, yes? Well I’m glad one of us has a nice place. I’m in a tiny rented flat in East London while they try to find me a decent place to live. I mean, have you seen house prices in London? Back home you could buy a street for what they want for a two-bedroomed flat.”
“Yeah, it has got a bit crazy.”
“Not for you, though, Mr Millionaire. With all your money, you must be—” Gabriel heard Eli catch her breath. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” she said, laying a hand on his thigh for a second. “I know you only got it because she killed Master Zhao. I can’t believe how tactless I am.”
“It’s fine,” he said with a shrug.
It isn’t .
“I’m dealing with it. Keeping busy helps.”
It doesn’t .
“He’s still with me in here,” he said, placing a hand over his heart.
I just wish he was still with me out here .
Gabriel pictured the face of the man who had raised him: Zhao Xi. Aged just five, Gabriel’s younger brother Michael had drowned in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour in an accident Gabriel still believed was his responsibility, if not his fault. Driven temporarily mad with grief, the nine-year-old Gabriel had woken from a two-week semi-trance with no memory of his brother. His parents had been unable to cope with his behaviour after that and had entrusted their remaining son to their friend.
Zhao Xi, or Master Zhao, as Gabriel had always called him, calmed the “Wolfe cub” down. He educated him in traditional academic subjects, including the languages for which the boy had a preternatural affinity. And he trained him in martial arts, both Chinese and Japanese. Oh God, how I wish I’d arrived early enough to save you, Master. Five minutes would have been enough. I’d have recognised Beck and we could have fought her together. Now you’re gone. And it’s all because of me . Wherever I go, wherever I turn, Death follows me like a
—
“Gabriel, look out!”
Concentrate on the Road Ahead
Eli’s yell snapped Gabriel back into the present moment. His speed had crept up to a hundred and twenty and the windscreen was filling rapidly with the squat rear-end of a little, red car whose name – Suzuki Wagon-R – and hatted driver he still had time to take in as he swerved round the cuboid vehicle on the wrong side of the road.
The driver of an oncoming car flashed his headlights in a frantic semaphore of dismay. Horn blaring – interesting, his being able to hit the button and flash his lights, good driving skills – the blue VW Golf veered over to the verge as far as the driver could manage, and Gabriel squeezed through the gap, elbows locked on the wheel, eyes wide open.
He pulled back over into the left-hand carriageway, heart racing, knees aching from the newly released adrenaline, watching the comically upright red car disappear in his rearview mirror.
Eli’s mordant remark punctured the silence.
“I’d say our closing speed was just short of 300 kilometres per hour. Don would have been looking for a new team.”
Gabriel ran a hand through his hair, scragging at his scalp.
“Sorry,” he said, finally. “That’s been happening a lot lately.”
“What’s been happening?”
“I just zone out. When I’m driving, mostly. Long motorway journeys are the worst. I get in at home and I get out at Rothford, or wherever, but I have no recollection of anything that happened on the way.”
“Fuck me, Gabriel! I wish you’d told me that before I accepted the offer of a lift.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Really.”
Eli laughed
“Oh, please! Enough with the naughty puppy act. So you shat on the carpet? Big deal! You cleaned up after yourself, didn’t you?”
Taken aback, once again, by Eli’s forthright humour and quirky way with the English language, Gabriel smiled.
“So you don’t want to take the wheel, then?”
“Nope. But if you’re going to drive like that, at least get yourself some better wheels. Something that won’t roll if you throw it round a bend at a hundred and fifty.”
The rest of the journey to London passed without incident. Gabriel had driven as carefully and law abidingly as possible, earning the commendation “like a rabbi” from Eli. They arrived in Eli’s road in Shoreditch at 5.30 p.m., having agreed that Gabriel would stay with Eli so they could travel to the meeting with Frye together. Both sides of the narrow-terraced street were jammed with parked cars, and Eli swore as Gabriel made a slow pass from one end of the street to the other.
“Shit! Fucking two-car families. Look at them all. Fucking Mercedes, Audis, BMWs and Porsches. You know, this used to be housing for ordinary, working-class people. Now look at it! Wall-to-wall German engineering and every one driven by some hipster idiot dressed like a lumberjack.”
Gabriel laughed.
“Not a fan, then?”
“Of the Germans?”
“Of social mobility.”
“Is that what you call it?” she said, as Gabriel turned left at the T-junction and started searching for a parking space a little further afield.
“Isn’t it a good thing? People being able to afford better things?”
She folded her arms across her chest.
“Yes, if I can park outside my own house – sorry, flat. No, if I end up leaving my own car two fucking streets away.”
Unable to keep the smile off his face, Gabriel couldn’t resist teasing his suddenly irascible partner just a little more.
“And tell me, given her obvious distaste for my current set of wheels, what particular form of vehicle is the anti-social-mobility Miss Schochat driving these days?”
“A Mini,” she said, flatly.
“A Mini?” Gabriel asked, injecting as much bogus surprise and astonishment into his voice as he could manage. “Now there’s a car that simply screams working class. Does it have quotes from Lenin stencilled on the side? And they’re owned by BMW. You do know that, right?”
“Oh, ha-ha, very funny. It’s just, they’re not the friendliest people round here, OK?”
“What do you mean?” Gabriel asked, frowning, as he scanned the sides of the street for a space into which to squeeze the car.
“It’s nothing.”
“No, go on. What did you mean?”
Eli sighed.
“I was invited round to a neighbourhood drinks party, and I mentioned that I was Israeli and that I’d served my country in the IDF. This fucking, bearded,” she huffed out a breath of frustration, “guy , he just started in on me about Israel being an apartheid state.”
“Okay. And how did that go down?”
“Oh, you know, fine. Although he did trip and fall into their goldfish pond later on that evening. I think he was drunk.”
Gabriel smiled. He was thinking back to their trip to Kazakhstan to investigate a far-right politician who had a day job as managing director of an ammunition company. Timur Kamenko had ended up dead at Eli’s hands, so an embarrassing soaking in a Shoreditch goldfish pond counted as getting off lightly for crossing the volatile Israeli.
With the car finally wedged in between an ageing Mercedes saloon and a Porsche 911, both the same approximate shade of metallic grey as Gabriel’s Ford, Eli led Gabriel to her flat on the first and second floors of a Victorian terrace house not unlike the one owned by Melody Smith, Smudge’s widow. Red bricks, with white-painted window ledges, sash window frames and eaves. A red-and-grey quarry-tiled path up to the canary-yellow front door. Terra-cotta window boxes filled with scarlet geraniums on all three ledges of the bay window.
Eli showed him around, waving her hand desultorily into each room like the world’s worst estate agent, before pausing at a bedroom painted a vivid shade of pink Gabriel supposed would be called “cerise.”
“That’s my bedroom,” she said, unnecessarily. “And before you ask, no I didn’t choose the colour. The spare’s at the end of the hall. You want a shower?”
For a second, Gabriel thought she meant together and wasn’t sure how to respond, but then reality asserted itself as Eli continued speaking.
“There’re fresh towels in the airing cupboard and you can use my shampoo or whatever.”
Gabriel slid the slender chromed bolt home on the inside of the bathroom door and undressed. Then, leaning on the edges of the sink, he addressed himself sotto voce in the mirror, not wanting his murmured words to reach Eli.
“Are you picking up the signals, hmm? She did make a pass at you last time, remember? Yeah, I remember. But I pushed her away. Women don’t like that kind of thing.”
Then, faint as a breeze whispering through distant bamboo, he heard master Zhao’s voice.
Wolfe Cub. Do not be too sure what women want. Listen to her. Not just what she says but the way she says it. How she moves. There are ways of communicating that do not require words; you learned that lesson well.
He frowned at himself, noticing the way the old silver scar on his cheekbone puckered slightly.
“Give me a good old-fashioned enemy combatant over a woman any day, Master,” he said, and turned on the shower.
While Eli was taking her turn in the bathroom – “Make yourself at home,” she ordered him before closing the door, though not, he noticed, sliding the bolt across as he had done – Gabriel made himself a gin and tonic, added two lime segments, and took it through to the sitting room. The bay window looked down onto parked cars. He grinned: Eli was right. The residents of Haberdasher Street, Shoreditch, were clearly doing well for themselves. Eli’s Mini – painted a vivid metallic blue, its roof emblazoned with a Union flag – was bracketed by a pair of black Audis. The rest of the parking spaces were occupied by similarly luxurious cars, mostly German as she’d said, but dotted here and there with Swedes, Italians and, a brash interloper from across the pond, a fire engine–red Ford Mustang.
He’d read in an airline magazine about the new w
ave of entrepreneurial types turning this part of London into a version of Silicon Valley, albeit one with greyer light and more traffic jams. “Startups,” that was the fashionable career choice nowadays. He’d lost interest halfway through the piece, when the journalist had admiringly referred to some 25-year-old CEO as an “app rockstar.”
“Christ!” he said out loud, taking a pull on his drink. “You’re getting old. You sound more and more like the old man.”
Eli appeared in the doorway, towelling her hair. She had a second towel wrapped around her body, which, owing to luck or judgment, barely reached her thighs.
“Talking to yourself, Wolfe? You know, that’s the first sign of madness.”
“Yeah, and when they answer back, that’s the second.”
She came to sit next to him on the sofa. She smelled of lemon shampoo. A twist of her auburn hair had escaped from the towel at the nape of her neck. He was seized with a sudden urge to kiss her there, right on the knobbles of her spine. He rested a palm on the warm skin between her shoulder blades.
“Mm, that feels nice,” she said. “Want to give me a back rub?”
She slid over his left leg and positioned herself between his knees. As Gabriel began massaging the muscles of her neck and shoulders, she arched her back and leant back against him.
“Mmm, that’s perfect. Don’t stop.”
Under his probing fingers, Gabriel felt hard knots in her trapezius muscles. He dug in a little deeper, eliciting a groan of pain mixed with pleasure.
Eli dropped her head forward. Her hair towel unwrapped itself and tumbled to the floor between her feet. Gabriel looked at the other towel encircling her body, then he reached around to the front and tugged at the loose knot she’d tied between her breasts.
“Excuse me, Mr Wolfe!” Eli said, in an affronted tone that froze Gabriel’s hand where it was. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”
Feeling a blush heating his cheeks, he withdrew his hand.
“I’m sorry. I just thought, you know, giving a girl – a pretty girl – a backrub, well, I thought maybe …?”
