by Andy Maslen
He unsnapped the nylon strap holding his treasured tactical knife in place and withdrew it from its sheath. It was not a showy weapon with giant blade or chunky grip. A five-inch black blade, the bottom edge sharp enough to deal with bone, the top serrated in vicious eighth inch saw teeth, the point fabulously sharp. And a narrow groove from tip to hilt, designed to funnel blood away from the working edge.
With careful, silent cuts he sliced away a thin sliver of bark and began carving out a deep slot in the soft cambium underneath. Each chip of wood, each piece of bark, went into a small, black plastic bag he’d brought from his dog-walking kit. After five minutes’ painstaking work, Gabriel had hollowed out a perfect recess in the tree trunk to house the camera. Its integral battery was good for 48 hours – plenty of time for what Gabriel had planned. He slid it home, then retrieved the first sliver of bark and glued it back over the camera using a small tube of adhesive from a press-stud-closed pocket in his chinos. He twirled the point of the knife half an inch from the top edge of the sliver, cutting a circle that revealed the tiny lens. The disc of bark joined the other debris in the plastic bag. Finally, Gabriel stooped to take a pinch of earth from the ground at the foot of the tree, which he rubbed into the white outline of the bark sliver. He leaned back to evaluate his work. It was good. You’d have to be within a few inches to see that the bark was no longer a smooth skin. And you’d have to know you were looking for something. He was willing to gamble that Lander Reeve was not big on pruning, or any other type of garden maintenance.
One last job. He placed his cheek against the cool trunk of the tree, so that his left eye was just inches from the tiny electronic eye of the camera. He sighted down to the Audi, which was obscured by a handful of the serrated leaves. With the edge of his knife, he removed the offending leaves close to the branchlets on which they grew. These he pushed down into the black bag along with the wood chips and bark.
He turned away from the tree and began tracking back towards the cover of the bracken that grew in such profusion beyond the formal beds of the garden. His breathing was just starting to slow, his anxiety to weaken, when a ferocious barking from the direction of the house jacked his pulse rate back up to a peak of fear. He calculated the distance to the ferns – and relative safety. Too far for a sprint, and anyway, he didn’t want to leave any obvious signs of his infiltration. He also needed to sweep behind him as he left the property to erase the boot prints.
Gabriel’s education prevented him from panicking. It had begun early, when he was a wayward teenager in Hong Kong and had been entrusted by his parents to a family friend. Together with tuition in school subjects, Master Zhao had also schooled the young Gabriel Wolfe in long venerated arts including hypnosis, meditation and a technique for silent and almost invisible movement called Yinshen Fangshi, which translated as “The Way of Stealth.” This had taught Gabriel to master his emotions, which he did now, willing himself into a state of calm, rational awareness. His SAS training also helped, allowing him to begin a combat appreciation: enemy forces, strength and disposition, cover, risk factors, weaponry. In milliseconds, he had decided on a few salient factors. Enemy likely to consist of one fearful but possibly armed householder. Likely weapon, shotgun. Potential supporting forces, wife or girlfriend, almost certainly told to stay in the bedroom but be ready to call the police. Plus, one dog. A large breed, judging by its deep-chested barking. German Shepherd? No. Not for a brash, money-man like Lander Reeve. More likely something a little more exotic. A Weimaraner, maybe, or a Hungarian Vizsla. Big, anyway, and as hounds, used to chasing down prey for a hunter.
He slid the knife from its sheath once again, holding it point upwards, the razor-edge towards him, the serrations facing outwards. He didn’t want to hurt the dog, but he couldn’t afford to be caught prowling – the only word for it – in Lander Reeve’s garden in the dead of night.
Crouching, he watched, and waited. The barking had grown frenzied now and the next moment the whole front of the house was bathed in light so bright Gabriel gasped as the night vision goggles blazed, searing his retinas with flaring white explosions. He snatched them off his head and stowed them, blinking away the after-images that danced across his vision. He had moderate cover among big flowering shrubs, but that wouldn’t count for much if the hound came after him. Then the front door opened, framing a figure in a dressing gown and holding, as predicted, a shotgun. Beside him, on a lead, Gabriel noted with a small measure of relief, was an English pointer, its hide dotted with black splotches. The dog was pulling and jumping so that at times it was almost standing upright. Lander Reeve bellowed into the dazzling brightness.
“Who’s there? If it’s pikeys, you can fuck off. I missed you last time but I won’t aim high again.”
Gabriel slid the dead rabbit from his rucksack.
“Right!” Lander Reeve called. “I’m letting the dog off. Go get ’em, Barney!”
He unclipped the pointer, which scrabbled to get past its master then took off across the gravel, paws throwing up sprays of small stones that peppered the Aston’s flanks.
“Ah, you fucking stupid hound! Watch the car!” Reeve shouted as the dog hurtled into the undergrowth, coming straight for Gabriel.
The pointer came barging through the shrubs and stood, chest heaving, hackles erect, lips pulled back from its gums exposing big yellow canines.
Standing, a man of moderate height can feel intimidated by even a small dog, if it’s aggressive enough. Make it a big dog, and have the man lie down, and the feeling escalates from one of trepidation to something altogether more primal. It may be that crinkled snout that causes the amygdala to start firing way down deep in the lizard brain, telling the body to prepare for flight or fight. The age-old sign that says, “you’re within seconds of becoming dinner”. At this point, Gabriel’s body was churning with adrenaline, but instead of succumbing to the panic reflex, he simply laid it to one side.
“Hey, Barney,” he murmured, extending the back of his ungloved right hand for the dog to sniff. “Hey, boy. Are you hungry? You like rabbit?”
The dog, puzzled by the human’s apparent lack of fear, and friendly tone, put its head on one side, just like Scout did when he couldn’t figure out a puzzle. The lip slowly returned from its retracted position until the fangs were covered. Gabriel held out the warm corpse of the rabbit. Unsure whether to trust this stranger, who was most definitely unauthorised personnel, and yet who smelled of dog and was offering a delicious treat, Barney whined softly in his throat.
“Come on, Barney,” Gabriel murmured. “Take it. It’s yours.”
He placed it on the ground between them and nudged its flank with his hand, rolling it towards Barney’s slavering jaws.
“Come on, Barney!” Reeve yelled from the safety of the porch. “Haven’t you found them yet?”
The dog looked over its shoulder.
Back at the rabbit.
Then at Gabriel.
Gabriel slowed his breathing and looked down at the ground, then back into the dog’s brown eyes.
“Take it,” he whispered.
The dog came forwards the last pace and bent to the rabbit. Sniffed once, then grabbed it in its jaws, turned and loped back to the daylit gravel where its master now paced, pointing the shotgun unconvincingly into the bushes.
As the dog bounded over to its master, the buck flopping and bouncing in its soft mouth, Reeve swore.
“For fuck’s sake, Barney! It’s one in the morning and you got me up to go after a bloody rabbit. Jesus, I ought to take it off you and eat it myself. Come inside. Now!”
Head down, but jaws clamped around the rabbit, Barney trotted jauntily after Reeve. The door slammed. Gabriel stayed low in the bushes and waited five minutes until the security lights went dark. Then he waited three minutes more until his eyes had readjusted to the moonlight, which seemed so insubstantial after the megawatt illumination of the halogens. Finally, when he judged that master and servant would both be asleep, he moved.
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Taking the same route home as he had to arrive, and scumbling the earth behind him with his knife to erase all trace of his presence, he closed his own back door behind him at a little after two.
Sitting in an armchair, with a finger of Armagnac in a tumbler on the small table at his elbow, he launched an app on his phone. The screen faded into life: a rectangular grey window and an array of controls along the bottom. A slider for ON/OFF, play/pause, fast forward/fast reverse and record. Plus a little animated joystick.
He swiped the slider to ON. Within a few seconds, a grainy black and white image popped into view. As planned, the central portion of the rectangle was occupied by the Audi SUV. The nose of the Aston edged into the frame on the left, and between the two cars, the camera picked up the outline of the front door.
“Let’s try the joystick, shall we?” Gabriel said into his glass, then inhaled the volatile aromatic vapour rising from the inch of brown liquid that swirled inside.
Using the tip of his index finger, he swirled the little grey and red knob in a tight circle. In the garden of The Bond House, inside a black plastic box housed in a Japanese maple, a camera lens the size and shape of a lentil – which Gabriel knew shared a linguistic root with the optical glass – rotated on its gimbals. The field of view shifted slightly. Not much, but what could you expect from such a tiny package? The edge of the bark circle Gabriel had cut showed as a rough blurring at the perimeter of the frame.
Everything was ready – in the digital domain at least. Gabriel closed the app and headed upstairs to bed. The morning would bring its own challenges.
He was showered, shaved and dressed in another set of clothes by seven. Not the all-black outfit of the previous night: instead, mottled green-brown and sand camouflage trousers and jacket. A different rucksack, matching pattern to the clothing, and a different payload. This time, a coiled steel wire hawser and two red warning triangles. Gabriel headed west again, keeping to the woods that fringed the single-track road through the village.
First, some preparation. He placed one of the triangles in the centre of the bumpy tarmac just after a junction where the main road through the village forked and a longer loop took traffic around the periphery before rejoining the route towards London. That would divert drivers away from the field of action. Then he walked back along the blocked off road to a point equidistant from the first junction and the angled T where the loop rejoined the principal carriageway. There, he positioned the second red triangle. The only source of traffic from the west would be Lander Reeve’s house. Gabriel had observed the comings and goings from the big house and was sure that, at the moment of observation, only the ex-bond trader was in residence. So much the better.
He made his way from the improvised roadblock to a sturdy oak tree growing so close to the road that its root system had begun to disrupt the smooth tarmac. He set his rucksack down on the moss-covered earth and unclipped the plastic catches. From its nylon interior he withdrew a coiled 30m length of braided steel hawser, each end terminating in a bright yellow forged steel hook. A lot of people would have opted for the cheaper cast-iron alternative, but Gabriel wanted resilience as well as strength; cast-iron stood a high probability of fracturing under sudden stress, whereas forged steel would stretch a tiny bit, but remain intact.
He swung the end of the hawser around the base of the trunk and caught the hook as it looped around, centrifugal force accelerating its circular motion. With a sharp click he clipped the hook on to the hawser, fashioning a basic loop. The locking bar snapped shut over the wire, forming a durable, unbreakable connection. With a couple of hard tugs, Gabriel cinched the wire loop tight to the circumference of the tree, noting with regret how the wire bit into the bark. Leaving the second hook free on top of the piled loops of wire, he settled down to wait.
He tapped the screen of his phone to launch the app that controlled the covert video camera outside Reeve’s house. The grainy monochrome picture confirmed that the SUV was still parked on the drive, occasional incursions from blurry shapes confirming that the breeze ruffling Gabriel’s hair was also moving the leaves on the Japanese maple.
Waiting was something Gabriel was good at. Even though it had started to rain, he felt perfectly at ease, hunkered down in a hollow behind the oak tree, half-covered with leaf-mould and twigs. All he needed to do was wait. As the minutes ticked by, he fingered the small plastic object he’d bought at a local toy shop the day before. An unnecessary touch? Possibly, but the simplicity of the message he intended to send Lander Reeve cried out for a tiny little flourish.
His phone beeped quietly, and he brought it up to his eyeline. The pixelated image of an Audi SUV in motion told him what he needed to know. Time for action.
Five minutes later, Lander Reeve swept past him at a brisk clip, overhanging branches and flopping bracken swiping the mirrored black paintwork of the four-wheel drive. He waited. A screech of tyres and the audible judder of the SUV’s anti-lock braking system confirmed that the closest red warning triangle had done its job.
Gabriel crept out of his leaf-filled hollow and crawled down the bank until he was crouching at the side of the road. Roughly level with the oak tree, the Audi sat at the end of two dark streaks of melted rubber, its huge diesel engine mumbling under the bonnet, plumes of silvery-grey exhaust fumes condensing in the early-morning air. He waited. Then, as if commanded by an invisible and unimaginative film director, Lander Reeve stepped down from the commanding heights of the Audi’s cabin, placed his hand on his corpulent hips and bellowed into the air.
“Oh, come on! Some of us have places we need to be.”
He leaned inside the cabin and sounded a long, angry blast on the car’s twin air horns. The discord fractured the remaining peace that lingered in the wooded bowl through which the road drove its manmade path. With nobody to respond to his entreaty, Reeve was left to himself as the dying vibrations of the horn blast echoed around him.
He climbed back up to the driver’s seat and pulled out his phone. Even at a distance of a dozen yards, Gabriel could hear every word Reeve spoke, or, to be more accurate, yelled, into the phone.
“Yah. Going to be a bit late for our conflab. Some peasant’s broken down on my bloody road, for Christ sake. I can’t go back, and why the fuck should I? I know, I know. Look, just hold tight and I’ll be there as soon as, OK?”
Not long now. A couple of minutes more? Maybe less? Not much time left to make the move.
Gabriel slithered out onto the tarmac keeping belly-down on the road surface, the hawser coiled around his shoulder and chest. Well below Reeve’s eyeline, he approached the rear of the car. In a smooth, continuous motion, he shrugged off the thick wire rope and slid the free end around the rear axle of the SUV. He smacked the self-locking hook onto the taut length of wire on the other side of the axle and drew it tight into a stranglehold around the thick steel tube. Then he scuttled back into the verge and submerged himself into the leaves once more.
Gabriel began counting. One, parachute, two, parachute, three, parachute...
He got as far as 11 before Reeve yanked the door closed. A second later the engine roared into life. Clearly Reeve had had his foot down on the throttle as he’d turned the key in the ignition. He heard the transmission drop into Drive and then Reeve committed himself to the course of action that would ruin the £80,000 car, at least for a week or two.
With a roar from the exhausts and a rough squeal as the tyres scrabbled for grip on the loosely surfaced road, Reeve shot forward.
The nearside tyres smashed the warning triangle into blood-red fragments of plastic as the car surged forward. No doubt in his head Lander Reeve was hearing Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries as he piloted his ride through enemy lines.
From his foxhole, Gabriel enjoyed the three seconds of relative calm and watched the coils of steel wire unzipping themselves like a rattler raising itself to strike. Then, as the final yard or so of wire straightened, he hunkered down further and squinted through scre
wed up eyes.
Tensile strength is a curious physical quality. You’d think that to support a two-tonne vehicle you’d need a rope with a maximum tensile strength of, well, let’s say two and a half tonnes, just to be on the safe side. And, if you were lifting said vehicle on a crane from a standing start, that would be just peachy. But when a mass is accelerating, the maths gets a little more interesting. Suffice it to say, Gabriel had spent a couple of hours calculating, and recalculating, the physics involved in bringing a two-tonne mass to a complete, and devastating, stop after 27 metres of travel. Assuming the likely acceleration, he had arrived at a force of seven tonnes. Consequently the hawser was specced to eight.
As the final inches of play disappeared, the hawser tightened like a guitar string. From a loose-limbed oscillation, it transitioned into a hellish harmonic that was audible as a deep thrumming in the air. The next event that disrupted the rural peace was the wrenching explosions as eight high-tensile steel bolts attaching the axle to the transmission sheared. To Gabriel, the reports sounded like nothing so much as 5.5mm rounds exploding out of the muzzle of an M-16 assault rifle in a controlled burst.
With a huge, tearing bang, the entire rear axle – wheels, differential gears and all – parted company with the rear end of the four-wheel drive transmission. Like a barbell jettisoned by an angry weightlifter, the assembly of wheels, tyres and steel half-shafts careered madly back towards Gabriel, bouncing wildly along the road on its braided steel tether. The Audi, meanwhile, slewed left and right in a crazy dance across the road surface, spraying bright yellow and white sparks from the sheared suspension mounts that now gouged deep ruts in the tarmac. It came to a halt, half on, half off the road, nose downwards in the ditch that drained surface water away.
