Fury

by Andy Maslen

  “How have you been,” she asked, sitting opposite him and smiling.

  Gabriel scratched at his scalp.

  “Up and down. Things are rough at the moment.”

  “Tell me about the downs.”

  “OK. Since I last saw you, my best friend, two of my former comrades from the Regiment, and my childhood mentor have all been murdered by a female assassin called Sasha Beck. She’s been sending me messages as well. Taunting me. She also destroyed my car, not that I care about that. I have been interviewed by the police in Wiltshire and Hong Kong, and I’m not entirely sure they’ve ruled me out as a suspect.”

  Fariyah’s expression didn’t change. Or not in any melodramatic way, eyes widening, mouth dropping open, hands flying to cheeks. Gabriel supposed she had either heard worse or been trained to mask her own emotions no matter what. But he did notice the way her pupils contracted for a split second, and that the fingers holding the pen above her notepad tightened so that the brown skin of her knuckles paled.

  “I am very sorry for your loss. I know how much Zhao Xi meant to you, and I’m sure your other friends were equally important to you. How are you coping?”

  “I’m working. I have a solid lead on who’s behind it all. The client, I mean.”

  “In yourself, I meant. How are you sleeping?”

  He paused before answering, then decided lying to one’s psychiatrist was a somewhat pointless exercise. It would be just as easy simply not to go to an appointment as to go and then avoid the truth.

  “Very badly,” he said. “Drink helps, but I’m awake for a couple of hours in the night worrying about who’s next. And the nightmares are back, worse than ever.”

  “Who do you think might be next?”

  “Britta. My fiancée?” Fariyah nodded. “She’s working undercover, and I can’t reach her. I’m frightened she’s already been taken.”

  “Have you heard anything from her?”

  “No. She’s not returning my calls and—”

  “No, I meant the assassin.”

  Gabriel sat back, recalibrating his answer. “No. No, I haven’t.”

  “But you said she’s been sending you messages. So if you haven’t heard from her she can’t have done anything to Britta, can she?”

  Gabriel inhaled deeply and let the breath out in a sigh.

  “I suppose not. And she’s tough. Britta, I mean. I wouldn’t bet against her in a face-off with Sasha Beck. It’s just I spent my whole life avoiding being tied down and then the moment I decide to go for it, this … this shit happens.”

  Fariyah frowned. “It’s funny, isn’t it? How we use that phrase – ‘tied down’ – to mean entering an enduring loving relationship. Is that really how you feel about marriage, Gabriel?”

  “Of course not!” he said, then realised he’d answered too quickly. “Of course not,” he repeated. “I want this. She does, too. We’re right for each other. We love each other.”

  “Love is a strange thing, Gabriel, believe me. Tell me, what do you think marriage will be like?”

  “What?” he asked. “What do you mean? It will be like being married, won’t it? Like normal people.”

  Fariyah smiled. “That really isn’t much of an answer. Let me put it this way. If you picture a typical day in your marriage to Britta, say five years from now, what will you be doing?”

  Gabriel stared at the ceiling. He was trying to follow Fariyah’s suggestion and finding it almost impossible. He closed his eyes. Tried to visualise a room with the two of them in it. Or a park. Or a theatre. Nothing. “Well,” he began, playing for time, “I suppose we’d be —” stripping assault rifles, going undercover in a Thai drug smuggling operation, trading shots with stoned militia fighters —

  He opened his eyes and focused on the plump face of his psychiatrist.

  “It won’t be a typical marriage. But we’ll make it work. She wants kids. That’s normal, isn’t it?”

  “Very. Which one of you will do the three a.m. feeds, do you think?”

  Gabriel could feel his heart thudding in his chest. He felt unaccountably anxious and rubbed the sweat from his palms onto the thighs of his jeans.

  “I don’t know. Is this important?” His voice sounded strained, even to his own ears. God only knew how he sounded to a trained shrink.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was being unnecessarily provocative. You said there were ups as well as downs. Tell me about them.”

  He shrugged. “It’s not meant to balance the scales or anything, but I took out a bunch of Nazis in Switzerland and rescued this girl they were using for some sort of grotesque reenactment. And whether I like it or not, I seem to have become a wealthy man. But only because that bitch murdered Zhao Xi.” He shouted this last phrase and clapped his palm across his mouth, eyes wide with shock at the violence of his reaction. Tears started from his eyes and, silently, Fariyah passed him a box of tissues.

  “Tell me, Gabriel. Tell me again about Michael. It all stems from that one moment in your life, doesn’t it?”

  Gabriel let out a pained sound, somewhere between a moan and a deep, shuddering sigh. He rubbed both hands over his face and then let his hands fall to his lap.

  “I told you before about what happened. How I kicked a ball into the harbour and told him to go and fetch it. How he drowned.”

  “Yes, you did. You told me what you did and what Michael did. The things that happened. But I want you to tell me what it felt like.”

  “That’s just it. I can’t. I don’t remember.”

  “That’s all right. Those memories may come back one day, or they may stay buried deeply inside you for ever. So instead, can you tell me how you feel about it now?”

  Gabriel steepled his fingers under his chin, leaned back in the armchair and looked at the ceiling.

  “I feel, when I think about what I did, to Michael, and to Mum and Dad, I just feel so guilty. One minute we were a happy family and the next, I blew it apart.”

  “How do you know you were a happy family?”

  “Of course we were, what do you mean?” he said, sharply.

  She held up her hands, placatingly. “Many families are happy, of course. But in my experience, many are not. Or not as happy as their members believe. Are you familiar with Leo Tolstoy’s famous line about happy families from his novel Anna Karenina?”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “Tolstoy wrote, ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ I wonder whether there was any unhappiness in your family. Your father was a senior diplomat at a very challenging time in Hong Kong’s history. You have told me you were bullied at school because of your mother’s, and your, mixed heritage. There may have been stresses and strains in the family of which you were unaware. You were only nine when Michael died, yes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, nine is very young to be able to fully grasp all that happens within a family, let alone one’s parents’ marriage.”

  Gabriel could feel anger bubbling just below the surface.

  “What are you implying?” he said in a low voice.

  “I am implying nothing. I am telling you that a nine-year-old boy isn’t always the best judge of the state of his family.”

  “Even if it wasn’t always perfect, so what? I still killed him, didn’t I?”

  “Oh, Gabriel, there you go again. Let’s remind ourselves of the facts. You kicked a ball into the water. You told Michael to get it. He chose—” she paused and held her hands up again as Gabriel leaned forward to interrupt, “—yes, he chose to go along with you and then, in a tragic accident, he drowned. Let me ask you. Did you expect him to drown? Did you want him to drown? Did you hope he would drown?”

  Gabriel heard Fariyah’s words as though through ear defenders, blurry and muffled, overlaid with a high-pitched ringing. He felt a cold descend over him and seep into his belly. Sweat broke out on his forehead and he felt nauseous. All of a sudden, he was remembering. A two-year-
old boy, raging at his mother as she breastfed the new baby. Beating at her legs with his impotent, balled fists. Standing over the cot, looking down and hating the swaddled infant as he lay, gurgling contentedly to himself. And then, the turbid green water of Victoria Harbour. The floating timbers and snaking, half-submerged ropes at the dockside. And

  (No! This wasn’t how it happened.)

  that sudden, savage impulse as he

  (I didn’t want him to die.)

  kicked the ball high into the air over Michael’s head

  (It was an accident.)

  and into the water, before shouting at the brother who idolised him to—

  (No, it wasn’t. I said, “Get the ball, you idiot!”)

  dive in and retrieve it.

  (“I hope you die. Then Mum will love me again.”)

  “Oh, God, no!” Gabriel moaned. “I did. I wanted him to go. I wanted Mum and Dad to myself.”

  Health and Safety

  DON Webster looked up as Gabriel was shown into his office by a secretary. Seeing his visitor’s face, he narrowed his eyes.

  “Everything all right, Old Sport? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Gabriel’s voice was curiously flat, as though reciting poorly learned lines in a school play.

  “I’m fine, thanks. I’ve just seen Fariyah Crace. We had what she called a breakthrough. But there is more work to do. Her words.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it. She’s done some amazing work with some of our people. Now, let’s get your stuff sorted.”

  Don got up and walked to a table positioned under the window of his office. Gabriel joined him. The view wasn’t much, just more glass, steel, and concrete office blocks, but if he pressed his face against the bulletproof glass and looked down at a forty-five-degree angle, he could see the tips of some trees growing in a small square below.

  On the table were a few pale-green cardboard folders, stacked loosely together. Don opened the top one. He selected a map, opened it out and jabbed an index finger down into a largely green area, devoid of settlements, centring his fingertip on a cluster of grey rectangles joined to a motorway by some sort of access road.

  “That little block is TKI’s manufacturing plant. Kamenko has an office there. His house is over here,” he lifted his finger and stabbed it down again about five miles to the east. “He conducts most of his political business in Astana, but uses the house to meet his cronies in Kazakh Purity.”

  Next, Don drew out a set of stapled sheets of A4, clipped to the front of which was an eight by ten colour photograph of the man himself: Timur Kamenko. High, flat cheekbones, a heavy ridge of bone above his thick, dark-brown eyebrows, brooding eyes and a slit of a mouth.

  “Ugly bugger, isn’t he?”

  “I’ve met uglier.”

  “So you have, so you have. Well, he’s ugly on the inside as well as the outside. Suspected of war crimes in the Balkans and elsewhere. Ran a little outfit that specialised in rape as an instrument of terror.”

  “You want us to bring him in? Or deliver the Queen’s message?”

  Don shook his head.

  “Much as I’d like to, my political masters – and mistresses – would rather we left Kamenko alone. For now. Bigger fish to fry and so on.”

  “Do we know what sort of security he’s got around the factory?”

  Don opened a third folder and extracted some grainy but legible aerial photographs. Several were close-ups, with armed figures clearly visible.

  “Our friends across the pond supplied these. Kamenko’s your typical Eastern Bloc heavy – bunch of hired thugs with AK-47s and cheap leather jackets. Nothing you and Eli can’t cope with, I’m sure,” he said with a wink.

  A fourth folder yielded passports and travel documents for Gabriel and Eli, or Mr and Mrs Craig Esmond, according to the machine-printed details.

  “So that’s everything?” Gabriel asked. “And the mission? Go in, find Kamenko, identify Erin Ayers or at least get some sort of lead on her, then exfil?”

  Don returned to his desk and motioned Gabriel to the chair opposite him.

  “Not quite all, Old Sport. You see, although the Privy Council want Kamenko left alone, I did manage to persuade them that it mightn’t hurt our broader SASOs if—”

  “Sorry, Don, what the hell are SASOs?”

  “Sorry. More bloody bureaucrat-speak. They have more acronyms than the Army, and that’s saying something. SASOs are security and stability objectives. Broad policy goals for our global presence, both armed and diplomatic.”

  OK, got it. You were saying?”

  “A few top cops, counterterror people and politicians might sleep a little easier in their feather beds if Mr Kamenko’s factory were to suffer a, what shall we call it …?”

  Gabriel smiled for the first time since leaving Fariyah’s office.

  “A business-critical health and safety situation?”

  Don nodded. “You speak the lingo admirably. Yes, possibly something a little more permanent than a slip-and-trip hazard.”

  Gabriel started to rise, then sat down again.

  “One last question. How are we getting in? And out?”

  Knees and Elbows

  BRITTA woke from a dream where she’d been fishing for lake trout with her farfar Falskog. Grandfather had just been showing her how to gut a fish when the scraping of the lock in the door jarred her into wakefulness. She sat up on the mattress and ran her fingers through her hair. It hadn’t been washed for five days and was greasy to her touch.

  The one called Zuko appeared in the open doorway, dressed in that universal gangster style: black, leather bomber jacket and tight, stonewashed jeans. He leered down at her as he placed a plastic plate in front of her. It bore two slices of white bread, spread with strawberry jam. A mug of black coffee followed it. His rubbery features were arranged into an expression she could read only too well: If I was in charge, I’d have fucked you by now.

  Just try it, she thought. You’ll be eating your own cock.

  After he locked her in again, she devoured the bread and jam, slurping gulps of the bitter coffee down on top of each bite. They’d allowed her at least the semblance of a civilised prison cell. The room had no window, but she had enough space to walk around in, if only repetitive sets of six paces forward, and six back. A tatty bible lay beside the mattress. It was the only reading matter in there with her and she’d begun on page one of Genesis on the first night they’d kept her there.

  She didn’t believe in God, not after what she’d seen people do to other people. But reading the simple, affirmative verses reminded her of Farfar and Mormor and their cosy cottage outside Uppsala. Reading the Bible together on winter evenings with the log burner roaring and the smell of Mormor’s cinnamon buns baking in the oven. How she’d always beg for just one more of the delicious, warm Kanelbullar and how Mormor would say no, at first, then relent, her grey eyes crinkling with humour, and offer the tray of buns to her granddaughter.

  The lock scraped again, and this time her visitor was the leader. Torossian himself. Every day, he would come in and engage her in conversation. About history, about politics, about science – the man seemed voracious in his appetite for knowledge. Perhaps his men were cut from less inquisitive material than their boss. She hadn’t found a way to use his thirst for conversation against him – yet – but talking was still more interesting than sitting reading the bible.

  “Good morning, Britta,” he said, sitting opposite her on a hard chair he brought in with him. She remained sitting, cross-legged, on the mattress. The chair was the only one in the room. “How did you sleep?”

  “Like a baby. I was dreaming about gutting fish,” she answered in a pleasant voice, smiling up at him.

  On his first visit, she’d leapt up at him when she detected a wavering in his attention, and been rewarded with a pistol-whipping. The man’s reflexes were as fast as a cat’s, and although he was happy to talk about Aristotle or Nelson Mandela, space travel or European
history, he was equally happy to dish out violence. She kept still now. The time to escape would be once she was out of the lockup, which would have to happen soon.

  “And I’m sure you were very good at it, too,” he said, grinning. “I’m afraid you will be our guest for a little while longer. My contact is on her way back from a business trip. She should be here tomorrow to pay for your release.”

  “And then what?”

  He shrugged. “Then, I don’t know. I will be a quarter of a million pounds better off, and you will no longer be my concern.”

  “Don’t bet on it. Once I’ve dealt with her, I’ll be back for you and your gang of thugs. We have what we need to put you away.”

  “Everything except the power of arrest. And you may be surprised to know that those people who do have that power will not be exercising it on me. You’ll find that I am not the only one swayed by the promise of large sums of money.”

  “It doesn’t matter who you’ve bribed. We’ll just work with another force to bring you in.”

  “We’ll see. Now, take your clothes off.”

  Britta’s eyes opened wide.

  “What?”

  Standing, he looked down at her. “You heard me. Undress now.” He pointed the pistol at her. “You’re going tomorrow and I’ve been looking forward to this.”

  “Fuck you!” she said, pushing herself back against the wall then sliding up it so she was facing him.

  He thumbed the hammer back.

  “You can get out of this alive. And who knows, you might overpower Sasha and escape. Then you can come back for me and try your luck. But right now, you’re going to take your clothes off or I’m going to put a bullet into each knee. Then each elbow. A little trick I learned from an Irish friend of mine. You’ll find it takes the fight right out of you. Not fatal, but very painful. And I’ll still have you.”

  She stared at him, breathing hard, weighing her options. With the hammer back the trigger pull would be light. And Torossian was no amateur.