by Andy Maslen
He shrugged and reddened, embarrassed at being caught revealing his thoughts so obviously.
“It’s nice. I suppose salaries here are low for everybody compared to the west.”
She laughed, a joyful sound in the small room. “No! Actually, pay for doctors in Kazakhstan is good. But I am,” she hesitated for a second and glanced at her daughter, “divorcing my husband. He abused me and Nadya. With his fists, you know? He liked to hit me there, too,” she said, pointing at Gabriel’s back.
“I’m sorry. I wish I could help. I hate men who do that.”
“Maybe you can.” She spoke to her daughter. The implication was clear. Go to your room.
Nadya rolled her eyes and clutched Gabriel’s hand tighter. She replied. I want to stay. He needs me.
Once more Alina spoke, and this time her tone of voice carried an extra note of command. Gabriel knew how to use his voice to bend men to his will and nodded appreciatively at the way this second instruction shifted Nadya off her bottom. Reluctant, pouting, she dropped his hand and stomped away through the door. Her footsteps were audible all the way down the narrow hall. The adults looked at each other, waiting.
One.
Two.
Three.
Bang!
The bedroom door slam: standard practice for disaffected children everywhere.
Gabriel smiled at Alina and was rewarded with another of hers, lighting up her face and crinkling the soft pale skin at the outer corners of her eyes.
“So. What can I do to help you?” he asked.
“Artyom comes by every single night. He bangs on the door. He frightens Nadya. Calls out her name. Calls me qanşıq. Is the Kazakh word for the female dog. You know?” Gabriel nodded, grimly, a plan forming in his mind, whatever Alina might ask. “He is rich. Says he will have lawyers take Nadya away from me.”
“Do you want me to speak to him?”
“No. What I want is for him never to come back.”
“I can’t—”
“Kill him? Do not be silly. But you can threaten him, yes? You can make him frightened to come back. If he thinks you will be here to watch for us.”
“Does he speak English?”
“Some. He is a businessman. He works for KazPetroGas, it is an oil company.”
A Debt Repaid
AFTER answering more of Gabriel’s questions, Alina stood.
“Would you like something to eat?” she asked.
“Yes, please. If it’s not too much trouble. Anything would be good. A sandwich. Bread and cheese.”
“Nadya and I had spaghetti with meat sauce earlier. I will heat some up for you.”
With Alina gone, Gabriel checked his phone. No message from Carl. He called up his contact details and tapped the number. Five or six seconds of silence passed, then a click as the call connected. Gabriel inhaled, ready to ask how Carl was doing, how he’d managed to get away. The call didn’t connect at all. Instead, a high-pitched continuous tone whined from the phone’s earpiece. Then it cut off and a pre-recorded message in an American accent announced that the number called was out of service.
That doesn’t make any sense, Gabriel thought. Even if Carl had dropped his phone in the chase, or the attackers had relieved him of it and smashed it under a boot sole, that wouldn’t affect the number itself.
He reached round to the back of his head. Under his probing fingertips, he found the smooth, rounded blobs of congealed blood that sealed the cut. Then he leaned forward and rubbed the site of the kidney punch. That would be the one to cause more problems. Blood in the piss would mean a trip to his doctor when he returned to the UK.
His speculations about his own health, and that of Carl, were interrupted by Alina’s returning with a white china bowl heaped with spaghetti and a rich-smelling ragù of shredded meat, tomatoes, red peppers, mushrooms and garlic. He breathed in deeply through his nose and sighed.
“That smells wonderful. Thank you.”
Alina smiled and handed him a thick, green-tinged, stemmed glass brimming with a deep-red wine that smelled of blackcurrants and ripe plums.
Gabriel forked the herby, spicy food down, twisting the spaghetti around and around into great, glistening mouthfuls, and washing it down with gulps of the wine. The wounding and subsequent spell out cold – literally – on her doorstep had made him ravenous, and the food was gone in just a few minutes. He checked his watch.
“It’s nine thirty. What time does your husband normally arrive?”
She put her hands out and shrugged, making a who knows? expression.
“Ten, eleven, midnight. Late, like I said. So he can wake up Nadya. Make sure she hears the names he calls me.”
“I need some things. Can you get them for me?”
Gabriel gave Alina instructions to assemble a few household items in the kitchen. That done, they waited.
Half an hour later, a loud knocking on the flimsy front door startled them both. Gabriel had been half-asleep, under the combined influence of shock, alcohol, the painkillers and the huge portion of pasta Alina had served him. He looked at Alina. Her green eyes were wide with fear and apprehension, and her face was pale, her cheeks drained of their earlier pink tinge.
“Don’t be frightened. I won’t let anything happen to you. Or Nadya. Go to her and keep her company. I’ll call for you when I’m ready.”
With Alina and Nadya safe in the girl’s bedroom, and the knocking increasing in ferocity, Gabriel stood and made his way into the hall. The husband – what had Alina called him? Artyom? – was shouting now. Angry oaths, including multiple references to qanşıq.
Gabriel readied himself. Inhaled once, deeply, then let it out again in a sigh. Tensed his muscles, ignoring the pain. Reached out and placed his left hand on the door handle.
Adopting a fighting stance, with his left foot in front of his right, knees flexed, Gabriel pushed down on the door handle and then, in one explosive movement, pulled it back so that it banged against the wall.
In front of him, fist raised, eyes wide, stubbled cheeks suffused with blood, stood Artyom Kaliyev.
Taking advantage of Kaliyev’s surprise, Gabriel leaned forward and grabbed his tie, then yanked him across the threshold, pulling down so that the man stumbled. His ungainly progress was stopped dead by Gabriel’s right knee, pistoning upwards as Kaliyev’s chin jerked down.
With a satisfying clack as his jaws snapped shut, Kaliyev fell full-length onto the hall floor, and lay inert.
Kaliyev was not a big man, maybe a couple of inches shorter than Gabriel – five foot six or seven – and no more than ten stone. Gabriel hooked his arms under Kaliyev’s armpits and dragged him down the hall, thankful that the landlord had fitted linoleum instead of carpet, and into the kitchen, where he hefted him onto a pine kitchen chair. Using the pairs of tights Alina had provided, Gabriel lashed Kaliyev’s arms behind him, winding the stretched nylon ropes in and out of the slats of the chair back before tying them off. He repeated the process at Kaliyev’s ankles.
“Alina! You can come in now,” he called out.
She appeared in the kitchen, a look of fear in her eyes, which disappeared as she took in her husband’s trussed limbs, lolling head and closed eyes. She placed her thumbs against his eyes and lifted the lids. The eyeballs were rolled back in their sockets so that only the lower edge of the dark-brown irises were visible.
“What now?” she asked.
“We wait. Does he speak Russian?”
Alina nodded. “He does. Most Kazakhs do, but people like Artyom speak it fluently.”
Fifteen minutes passed, during which Gabriel asked Alina to teach him a few rudimentary phrases in Kazakh. Somewhere in his genetic makeup, a random mutation had bestowed on him a facility with languages that had surprised and then amazed his parents. His mother being half-Chinese, his ability to pick up first Cantonese and then Mandarin was pleasing, but not especially noteworthy. But then, as he heard visiting diplomats speaking amongst themselves at embassy cocktail par
ties, he seemed to absorb their languages through his skin. By the time he entered the SAS, the 25-year-old Wolfe was fluent in six languages, Russian among them, with a working knowledge of another half dozen.
He was just repeating back to her a key phrase he wanted when the husband moaned, opened his eyes, then lurched forward and vomited over his own lap.
Gabriel ignored the acrid stench and went to work. He tapped the man on the forehead twice. As his eyes snapped open, struggling to focus on Gabriel’s face, Gabriel spoke to him, in a mixture of Russian and English. As he spoke these disjointed phrases, he synchronised them with a sequence of eye movements he’d learned many, many years ago, as he studied with Zhao Xi.
“You know why you are here, but not for how long.”
“Koshka sidel na kovrike.”
“Count to ten then skazhite tsveta radugi.”
“Think of your earliest childhood memory.”
“Kto prezident Kazakhstana?”
“Now tell me how many sides a hexagon has.”
His traumatised brain struggling to process these random and conflicting instructions, Artyom Kaliyev experienced a phase change in his consciousness. The faster beta waves associated with wakefulness were replaced by slow-cycling theta waves that distorted his perceptions of reality and made him receptive to hypnosis. As his grasp of where and even when he was deserted him, so did his ability to think rationally.
Gabriel was monitoring the other man’s skin tone, breathing and eye coordination like a hawk watching a rabbit way down below its fluttering wings. As Kaliyev’s eyes moved independently of each other, he pounced. Speaking in phonetically learnt Kazakh, he issued his orders.
“You will leave Alina and Nadya alone.”
“You will never come near them again.”
“You fear Alina. She has the power to blind you by looking at you.”
“Do you understand?”
Kaliyev nodded his head as a drunk might, a floppy gesture of assent with no crispness to it. A string of spittle dribbled from the corner of his mouth. Gabriel took the man’s chin between his thumb and forefinger and raised it so that he could look the man in the eye.
“I will be watching you, Artyom. You will know this. And I will kill you if you harm or threaten Alina or Nadya.”
Then he slapped him on the forehead with the outstretched fingers of his right hand.
Kaliyev shook his head and stared up at Gabriel, who was looming over him, a nine-inch cook’s knife in his right hand. His eyes widened and he stuttered out, in English, “No-no. Do not hurt me.”
“I won’t. This is to cut you free.”
Gabriel slashed at the tights binding Kaliyev to the chair. As his limbs came free of their bonds, Kaliyev stood, uncertainly, like a newborn calf. He turned to Alina, then inhaled sharply and looked away.
“Let me go. I have to leave. I mustn’t be here.”
He turned and fled the kitchen. His footsteps in the hall were hurried, and moments later, the front door slammed. Then all was quiet.
Alina stood there, just staring at Gabriel. Then she took the knife from him and very slowly, replaced it in the knife block. She turned.
“It worked.”
“It usually does. But have you thought about moving? Getting away from here?”
“How can I? Nadya is at school here. My clinic is here. Our friends are all here.”
Gabriel looked at her, then. Saw the doubt already creeping into her face.
“Then get yourself a good lawyer.”
Fired
BACK at the hotel, and with his muscles starting to stiffen and ache despite the painkillers and alcohol, Gabriel stopped at the front desk.
“Has Mr Mortensen returned, please?” he asked the balding and bespectacled young man on night duty.
“Mr Mortensen has checked out, sir,” he said, looking down and retrieving something from the shelf hidden beneath the top of the reception desk. “He left this for you.” He handed over one of the hotel’s white envelopes. On the front, it simply said, “WOLFE.”
Frowning, Gabriel thanked the man and went up to his room.
Inside, he stuck the card key in the slot that activated the lights, then sat on the bed to open the envelope. Inside was a folded sheet of paper. He unfolded it and read the message.
I hired you to protect me.
You failed.
I’ve returned to the US.
If you want the rest of your fee, get a lawyer.
Gabriel rubbed a hand over his face. Shit! The guy had a point. But where had those men come from, and why had there been so many of them? And why hadn’t they taken anything? Too tired from the night’s adventures to find any coherent answers among the jumble of thoughts fighting for airtime in his overstressed brain, Gabriel undressed and climbed into bed. Sleep wouldn’t come, though, and as he lay there, listening to the sound of a distant dog barking and the occasional truck lumbering past the hotel, crashing up through the gears after the road junction, he let his mind go wherever it wanted to.
He wondered what Britta was doing. Hoped she was safe. He realised he’d never had that precise feeling about the redheaded Swede before. On hazardous joint operations with Swedish Special Forces, on arduous training exercises in places either numbingly cold or swelteringly hot, on semi-authorised infiltrations deep into enemy territory, he’d known she was up to the job, and at least as deadly a fighter as he was. Yet now, doubts had begun to creep in and make themselves felt. Not doubts about her competence. Not exactly. More like doubts that she would survive. Having circled each other for years like two wary animals who feel a mutual attraction yet know each is potential trouble, they had found a new way of being together – almost conventionally happy in their engagement, he thought – and now he feared its being taken away. One random shot from a cornered trafficker or slashing blow from a knife-wielding terrorist, and down she’d go, and with her, Gabriel’s chances of a normal life.
Mortensen Vanishes
MANHATTAN
CARL Mortensen AKA Guy Jaager flew first class to New York via Frankfurt. The next day, after clearing immigration and customs at JFK, he slid into the back of a yellow cab smelling of pine air freshener and gave Erin’s address on Fifth.
“Very smart address, sir,” the Indian driver said. “You are successful businessman?”
“Me? No. But my boss is. And she’s a woman, by the way.”
“That is America, sir. Land of the equal opportunities. Myself, I have PhD in computer engineering. My plan is to work for top US tech company.”
Whatever, Jaager thought. Just shut the fuck up and drive. He hated taxi drivers. Hated the surly ones, the talkative ones, the newly arrived immigrants with their shit sense of direction and even worse command of the English language. Hated the experienced ones with their stories of celebrities they’d driven to this party or that opening.
Had his driver been able to read minds, he would have been only slightly mollified to discover that he wasn’t alone in being on Jaager’s hate-list. The Dutchman hated all kinds of other groups. Politicians. Officers. Feminists. Government employees. Lawyers. Middle class liberals. Jews. Blacks. Hispanics. Asians. Left-wingers. Animals rights freaks. Vegetarians. Vegans, God help us – he reserved a special contempt for them, with their crazy “philosophy,” giving up meat and cheese and even leather, then walking about letting the whole fucking world know how goddamned good they were.
So just who, exactly, did Jaager not hate? It was a short list. His former comrades in the Légion Étrangère, the blacks excepted. The Afrikaners, who after black majority rule were really the oppressed minority in South Africa, according to a mercenary he’d fought with in Zambia in the nineties. And, occupying a glistening white palace in his heart, though he would never tell her this, his current boss, Erin Ayers.
She was tough, and he admired her for that. He’d loved the way his instinct to avenge the insult perpetrated on her by the English cyclist had been allowed. He’d seen her
negotiating with white-shoe lawyers acting for her business rivals and just take them apart. Not with her hands, or with weapons – she had Guy for that sort of work – but with her command of the details of the financial transactions she was orchestrating.
She was also ruthless.
He’d flown over to Bulgaria with her to talk to the local managing director of one of her companies; the man was being threatened by a gang of extortionists. Having pressed the man to reveal the name of the gang’s leader, threatening him with the sack, and a lawsuit besides, she had driven with Guy out to a mountain village presided over by a looming château surrounded by thick woodland. There, the boss of the thugs lived in apparent splendour. Erin brought the hired BMW X5 to a stop in front of an ornamental fountain in the centre of a circular gravelled drive in front of the house.
“Nice place,” was all she said.
Then she opened the tailgate and collected two assault rifles. She handed one to Guy and cocked her own, a swift efficient movement that sent the charging lever clacking back against the stop and Guy’s heart banging against his ribs.
She pressed the doorbell. After giving her name to the black-leather-clad man who came to the door and peered through the gap left by the security chain, she shot him through the left eye. Switching to full auto, she blasted the chain into shrapnel and kicked the door open.
Four more men came running, pulling pistols from their waistbands. Erin and Guy didn’t even give them time to aim their weapons. All four went down screaming, blood, tissue and brain matter splattering the walls of the hallway as they crumpled, marionettes suddenly dropped by a bored puppeteer.
“Veshkov!” Erin yelled in a thrillingly deep contralto voice that actually gave Guy the beginnings of an erection. “It’s Erin Ayers. I’ve come to get my money back.”
