by Andy Maslen
“What do you think they are?”
“At a guess? Political files. He probably keeps all his business stuff at the factory.”
“Hmm. Could be useful. We should take it back with us. Give it to Don. If he doesn’t want it, I bet he knows people who do,” she said, still flicking through the documents. Then she drew in a quick, short breath.
“What is it? Find something?”
She looked down, then up at Gabriel. “Nope.” A small smile. “Just a paper cut.” She sucked her finger and handed the files to him with her free hand. “Here, take them. Then I think we should wait for Mr Kamenko. Plus I’m hungry and there’s cheese in his fridge.”
Le Démon Blanc
MID-ATLANTIC
BRITTA woke up with a metallic taste in her mouth and a fierce headache. Around her, their eyes either closed in sleep or wide open in terror, were half a dozen young women and girls. Some seemed barely out of childhood. Some were dark-skinned, some fair, all were slim and, she supposed, attractive one way or another, though their faces, pale and strained, bore the signs of long hours in captivity. They were lying on filthy mattresses and shackled by chains that looped through ring-bolts set into the floor. The air was rank with the smell of urine, sweat and naked fear.
Her ears buzzed with the after-effects of whatever drug Torossian had administered at the cargo terminal at Heathrow. Above that sound was the deep thrum of jet engines and wind noise. She shivered violently; the cabin was unheated.
“Hey,” she said to the nearest woman, slender, black-skinned, dark-brown eyes rimmed in red. “Are you OK?”
The woman started, and jerked her head round to look at Britta.
“No, I am not OK. I have a lot of pain,” she looked at her groin, “down there. Do you know where we are going?”
Her accent suggested to Britta that she had only been passing through Britain, and had originally come from somewhere in West Africa.
“I’m sorry, no. My name is Britta, what’s yours?”
“I am Marguerite. I come from Mali, but Le Démon Blanc, he took me in London.”
Britta tried for an encouraging smile. She wasn’t sure she’d succeeded.
“I am Swedish. Listen to me. When we get to wherever we are going, I will try to help you. But do what they say, OK?”
The woman nodded, and smiled, but it was a pitiful expression, and Britta knew that she didn’t believe this redheaded stranger could actually help her. Well, maybe not, she thought. But I’m going to stop him hurting anyone else.
Eli Admits Everything
KAZAKHSTAN
SNAPPING closed the gold-plated catches on his Louis Vuitton briefcase, Kamenko climbed out of the back of the G-Wagen. He leaned in at the driver’s window.
“Put it in the garage, then you can leave. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“OK, boss,” the giant known as “mouse” said. “Have a good evening.”
Kamenko grunted noncommittally and walked away.
Inside, he placed his briefcase on the floor, hung up his coat, and wandered through to the lounge to fix himself a drink.
He opened the polished doors of the antique cocktail cabinet and smiled as his eyes took in the array of expensive imported spirits. French cognac, Mexican tequila, American whisky, Icelandic vodka. He smiled as he trailed his finger along the bottles before stopping on the black-and-white label of a bottle of Jack Daniels.
“Ah, yes, Mr Daniels. Tonight we’ll spend some time together dreaming of Kentucky, yes?”
He poured a generous measure of the spirit into a heavy-bottomed tumbler decorated with gold tracery on its outside, took a pull, grimaced as it hit his empty stomach, then smiled as the bourbon’s heat entered him.
“I’m more of a gin and tonic woman myself,” came a voice from behind him – a voice speaking English.
The tall Kazakh whirled round, slopping whisky onto the carpet. His eyes widened in shock and his mouth dropped open. Eli enjoyed watching people caught unawares. That look as you disarmed a terrorist, or shot a suicide bomber outside their own home was priceless. She added the shocked expression on Kamenko’s face to her stock of memorable moments.
A semi-automatic pistol aimed at the face tended to focus the mind, Eli had found in her career. That this particular pistol was held by a smiling young woman at least doubled the effect. And that she was sitting in an armchair in what she supposed its owner regarded as a safe space armour-plated it.
“Who the fuck are you?” Kamenko growled, in heavily accented but perfectly understandable English.
She noticed that after his initial mishap with his drink, his hand was steady. Not so much as a ripple troubled the surface of the remaining bourbon.
“Me? I’m Eli Schochat. Late of Mossad, now working for the British Government in a security capacity for a deniable black-ops outfit called The Department. My boss is the ex-Commanding Officer of the SAS. Name of Don Webster.”
Before Kamenko could formulate a response, his eyes flicked over Eli’s right shoulder to the door. She heard the footsteps too, and, when the door opened, spoke without taking her eyes off Kamenko.
“Timur Kamenko, meet Gabriel Wolfe. Gabriel and I work together.”
She knew Gabriel would also be pointing a pistol at Kamenko, and relaxed, just a little.
“The goons are gone,” Gabriel said.
“Excellent. Then it’s just the three of us.”
“I said, what do you want?” Kamenko said, glowering at Eli, then at Gabriel.
“No, you said, ‘Who the fuck are you?’” she said. “But I’ll tell you what we want. We want to know about Erin Ayers.”
Kamenko’s heavily browed forehead furrowed and he drew his head back.
“Never heard of her.”
“Good. That means we get to do this properly. Gabriel, would you mind?”
With Kamenko bound to his office chair with thick black plastic cable ties, Eli resumed her interrogation.
“Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about Sasha Beck.”
“Who?”
“Sasha Beck.”
“Who’s she, your girlfriend?”
“Oh, Mr Kamenko. That’s not very original. Look, I know what you’re thinking. I’m just some silly little girl playing at soldiers and making up stories about being a spy, and you can just wait it out until your bodyguards come back in the morning to save you. So let’s begin again, with me showing you just what a mess you’re in.”
She picked a black-and-yellow pencil off the floor where it had rolled when Gabriel tipped the desk over. Holding it between her thumb and middle finger she tested the point with the tip of her index finger. Lightning fast, she spun the pencil round, and jammed it, point-down, into the flesh just above Kamenko’s left knee.
Gabriel’s hiss of indrawn breath was almost drowned out by Kamenko’s howl of pain, but not quite. Eli still heard it. Deep-red blood welled up around the shaft of the pencil, glistening darkly in the light from the table lamp.
“You bitch!” Kamenko said through clamped teeth, his lips drawn back like a threatened dog as he strained against the cable ties.
“Oh, that’s nothing. When I want to be a bitch, believe me, speech will be one thing you’re not capable of. Now, let’s try again. I’ll make it easy for you. A simple yes/no question. Is Sasha Beck a customer of yours? Think hard, Mr Kamenko. I can see lots more pencils on the floor.”
Kamenko’s gaze dropped to the floor, then his eyes met hers again.
“Yes.”
“Good. Because we already knew that. So now I feel we are building a nice trusting relationship. Keep going like this, and you’ll come away from this with only a little hole in your leg, and sore wrists.”
“Timur,” Gabriel said from his position behind Kamenko, causing Kamenko to jerk round to try to see his second interrogator. “I’m sorry. I had no idea Eli was going to do that. I specifically said to avoid physical violence. But you must understand, it’s vital we identify Erin Ayer
s. We already know she hired Sasha Beck, who, as you’ve just admitted, buys her ammunition from you. Is there anything, anything at all, you can tell us?”
Kamenko nodded. “Yes.”
“What?” Gabriel prompted.
Kamenko smiled. “Go fuck your cock-sucking whore of a mother!”
Betrayal
THE ringing in his ears wasn’t noticeable at first. Gabriel thought it was simply an after effect of Eli’s armour-piercing shot at the safe. But it grew in volume, making him shake his head. His vision darkened, leaving a tunnel of light through which he could see Kamenko’s grinning face.
He saw his mother’s face, streaked with tears, then bloated from her time in the water after she’d drowned.
The jolt in his right wrist barely registered.
Nor did Kamenko’s scream.
As the smoke reached his nostrils and the smell of burnt propellant reach the olfactory bulbs deep in his brain, he blinked, and observed the black-walled tunnel expand until his vision, then his other senses, returned to normal.
The Parabellum round had passed through Kamenko’s left foot and into the floor. Blood was pooling beneath the sole of the brogue; the perforations in the tan leather were filling with it.
Kamenko was thrashing in the chair, and Gabriel watched as the edges of the cable ties bit into the skin of his wrists.
“You can put a lot of rounds into a man before killing him,” Gabriel said, bending to hold Kamenko’s head still and speaking close to his ear. I know exactly where to place them. So, I’m going to ask you one more time. “Who is Erin Ayers?”
“I don’t know, all right?” Kamenko said, panic clear in his voice. “She never talks about her clients. Sasha, I mean.”
“Well that’s bad news for you, then, isn’t it?” Eli said, selecting another pencil.
“No! Please, wait,” Kamenko said, pleading now. “She said one thing. I said her client must have been rich if she could afford Sasha just to play some twisted game. And she said the woman owned a penthouse in Manhattan. On Fifth Avenue, overlooking the big reservoir in Central Park. So she could easily afford to hire Sasha.”
“Anything else, Kamenko?” Eli asked, twirling the new pencil between thumb and forefinger while keeping the muzzle of her pistol aimed at his head. “That’s not much to go on after we’ve made all this effort to find you.”
He shook his head. “That’s it. Please, let me go. I’m bleeding. You blew my fucking foot off.”
Eli stood. “No. You’ll have to wait for your men to find you in the morning.” She looked down. “That’s not fatal. It’s already starting to clot. But you know what? It helps to elevate the wound above the heart.” She walked towards him and kicked him in the chest, toppling him over backwards so that his head hit the thick carpet with a muffled thud.
Gabriel and Eli were thirty yards along the road leading away from Kamenko’s house when Eli put out a hand and tapped him on the shoulder.
“I forgot something,” she said, then turned and ran back to the house.
He stood and watched as her booted feet kicked up dust in Kamenko’s yard before disappearing around the corner of the building.
She’d had her pistol, and her backpack with her when they’d left. They hadn’t brought anything else into the house with them, had they? Gabriel turned and began walking towards the house.
The noise of the double-tap echoed off the side of the stone-built, two-car garage next to the house.
Five seconds later, Eli emerged from the front door. Her face was spattered with fine droplets of red. She trotted back to Gabriel.
“Why did you kill him?” was all he said.
“It was in the files I was scanning. I can’t read Kazakh but I saw one word I could make out: Hamas.”
Gabriel nodded. “You told him who we were didn’t you? Before I came in. So you weren’t planning to leave him alive.”
“He was evil, Gabriel. Not just for supplying hollow-points to Hamas or bomb-making equipment. I checked out his political party. Did you?”
“Didn’t have time.”
“Well it made charming reading. Explicit racist platform, expulsion of all immigrants, links with plenty of organisations hostile to Israel, and a pledge to rid Kazakhstan of Jews by any means necessary – their words.”
“We should get rid of him. At least make it harder for the authorities to investigate.”
Gabriel left the SandCat in the rear yard while he and Eli dragged Kamenko’s sagging corpse out of the house between them, the feet wrapped in plastic bags closed with more cable ties, the wound in the knee tied with a towel from the kitchen. With the body lodged in the loadspace, they returned to the house and spent twenty minutes cleaning up in the office and lounge. Having washed, dried and replaced Kamenko’s tumbler, they tugged the carpet across to cover the bullet hole in the floor. Lastly, they slid the now-empty safe out of the house on a rug, then half-walked, half-dragged it to the well.
Gabriel pushed the sturdy wooden cap off the well, then, grunting with the effort, they manoeuvred the safe up and onto the lip of the wall.
“OK, let go,” he said, then pushed it over the edge.
They leaned over, watching the safe as it tumbled and bounced down the shaft before hitting the water with a deep, echoing splash. The cap replaced, they ran back to the SandCat and were roaring away from the house looking for somewhere to dump the body.
After half an hour’s driving, Gabriel turned off the road and headed for a thickly wooded area about a mile from the road. The SandCat’s suspension and ‘floating’ seats – designed to minimise the effects of landline explosions on the occupants – soaked up all but the worst of the gouged and rutted terrain. As Eli had done, he simply powered the vehicle into the forest through a gap in the trees, smashing saplings and undergrowth under the huge tyres, until he found a small clearing.
They dragged Kamenko’s body from the loadspace and over to a patch of scrubby brambles five feet high. With a heavy rustle and a crackling of the dry grass beneath, it settled, out of sight in the centre of the weeds.
Gabriel looked up and nudged Eli. “See up there?”
She shaded her eyes with her hand. “The bird?”
“Yeah. It’s an eagle, or a vulture or something. That’s good. Aerial predators will find him, and so will whatever four-legged ones there are. Wolves, maybe. Bears. Certainly foxes.”
“Guess what else they have here?”
“Surprise me, professor.”
“Caracals – they’re wild cats. Like I told you. The SandCat, remember? Plasan originally called it the Caracal.”
“OK, good to know. Now let’s go. We have a health and safety incident to arrange.”
Noise Dogs
THEY pulled up in a stand of trees a mile away from the factory. It was 5.30 in the afternoon and, like factory workers the world over, the employees of the late Timur Kamenko were driving out through the gates. Gabriel and Eli watched through binoculars as the last of the stream of cars left the factory and drove home to families, or bars in whatever was the nearest town.
By seven, the sun was dipping below the horizon. Time to move. Gabriel put the SandCat into gear and drove towards the factory, looking for a particular geographical feature. Most of the terrain was flat and largely featureless, just the odd tree or shrub struggling to grow taller than a man in the thin, sandy soil. But about five hundred yards from the perimeter fence, he found what he was looking for. It was a depression in the landscape, invisible until you were almost upon it, like an empty lake. He drove down into the depression for thirty or forty yards until he reached the deepest part. Looking up through the windscreen he estimated that the depression was twice as deep as the height of the SandCat. On the side facing the factory, wind or earth movements had built up a natural, eight-foot rampart.
“We walk from here,” he said to Eli.
In their dark clothing, he knew they wouldn’t have to worry about being spotted by security guards. The
moon was mostly hidden by low clouds, giving just enough light to travel by, but not enough to throw a spotlight onto the two interlopers come to cause a permanent stoppage to the factory’s production.
She nodded and, shoulder to shoulder, they set off, AK-74s slung across their shoulders, GSh-18s tucked into waistbands.
As they drew nearer, Gabriel laid a hand on Eli’s shoulder.
“Check for security,” he said.
She brought the binoculars to her eyes, and he heard the whine from the electronics as she switched on the night vision.
“There’s a fence, but it looks pretty flimsy. Just chain-link.”
“Any wire?” he asked.
“Nope. Out here it’s probably just to prevent petty pilfering, though who’d have the nerve to come all the way out here to try stealing some copper or the petty cash tin from a guy supplying the local Mafia?”
“Good point. What about the gate?”
“It’s closed. Can’t see if there’s a padlock. Judging by the quality of the fence, I’d say it’s nothing we can’t handle.”
“Any guards?”
“Wait, let me look for a bit.” She swung the binoculars left and right and waited for a minute. “I can’t see anyone. I’m thinking Kamenko was relying on his reputation and his connections plus the isolation to do the job for him, otherwise—”
“What is it?”
“Wait. I see something. Dogs. Two.”
“They could be dangerous, but given Kamenko’s cut-price security so far, I’m guessing – hoping – they’re just noise dogs.”
“We’ll find out soon enough. Anyway, I’ve yet to meet a beast that I can’t take care of, on four legs or two.”
“Me neither,” Gabriel said, thinking back to a scrapyard in Estonia defended by two very dangerous dogs he’d had to kill. “But if we can do it by distraction, that would work better for me.”
