by Andy Maslen
He tapped Britta on the shoulder and then nodded towards the family.
“So that could be us in a few years. How weird would that be?”
Britta looked briefly at the retreating backs of the parents and child, now swinging from their outstretched hands. She turned back to Gabriel and as she did so, he saw a look of sadness flitter across her face.
“I heard from my old CO. In Stockholm. They’re putting together a new unit. Counterterror. He’s asked me to lead it.”
Gabriel frowned, then smiled.
“That’s excellent! Kudos to you. So I guess that settles it. We’re moving to Sweden.”
She sighed and reached for his hand, pulling him round to face her and then taking his other hand in hers.
“We’re not. Just me.”
“What? But you said you’d marry me. That you just needed time to think through the practicalities.”
“I know, I know, and I feel such a shit for doing this to you. But I can’t. It just wouldn’t work.”
“Yes it would!” Gabriel said, his voice getting louder. “Of course it would. If anything, it would work better. You’d be in a command role, so fewer crazy foreign outings.”
“Oh, Gabriel, can’t you see? You know what I call you? Riddare i skinande rustning. The knight in shining armour. Always galloping off on your white horse to rescue some damsel in distress, or slay a dragon. I had a lot of thinking time in that house in Ithaca. And I realised something. That description fits me at least as well as it fits you. I’m just not the settling down kind. I mean, can you really see me bouncing a fat baby on my knee and baking cakes all week? I’d go crazy inside a month. The new job is a command role, but it’s an active role, too. Travel, undercover work, everything.”
Gabriel felt a hollow void open in his stomach, worse than when he’d heard about Julia, or Dusty, or Daisy, or even Zhao Xi. He wanted to argue, wanted to hold her tightly until she relented.
“Please Britta,” he said, realising even as the words left his lips how pathetic he sounded. “Take the job. But let me come with you. We’ll get married and then figure out the practicalities later.”
She smiled, but Gabriel saw no happiness in it.
“Come on, Gabriel. You and me were never going to be settled down with babies and dogs and family holidays at the beach. I’ll always love you, but you’re not going to settle for a desk job, are you? Well, nor am I. I have to keep doing what I love, too.”
He just looked into her eyes, then, not speaking, not crying, not feeling. The silence lengthened from seconds to minutes to what felt like hours. Time enough to register the strand of copper-coloured hair that had escaped the plait at the back of her head and was now blowing across her face. To notice, once more, the triangle of freckles on the side of her neck, where he’d often kissed her and where, so recently, Sasha Beck had held the blade of a knife. To remember the day she’d walked back into his life, driven, really, behind the wheel of a Range Rover, chasing him out of his village and skidding to a stop in front of his car to pull him back into a world of violence.
“So that’s it, then,” he said, finally. “When are you leaving?”
“I have until next Friday to wind things up here, then I leave for Stockholm. I’ll send for my things later. You can stay in my flat for as long as you like. I’ve put it on the market, so until it sells, it’s yours. You know our paths are bound to keep crossing.” She stretched up to kiss him on the lips. “And perhaps we’ll settle down when we’re in our 70s.”
Gabriel turned away from her. The hollow in his stomach had ballooned upwards into his chest cavity and his skull. He felt like he might float away at any moment, up into the clear blue skies above London and keep ascending until the thin air ran out, the sky turned black, and he simply ceased to breathe.
A Life of Ease?
HONG KONG
COMPARED to the clamour, and the crowds, and the smells of the city, the house on the hill was an oasis of calm. The only sounds were the clock-clock-clock of bamboo stems knocking against each other in the breeze and the twittering of sparrows coming from a bright-pink flowering shrub.
Kneeling in the centre of the moss lawn, wearing simple white cotton trousers and a white jacket belted at the waist, Gabriel settled his weight onto his heels and looked down at the harbour. Sailing boats scudded between larger pleasure cruisers, heeling over into the wind and leaving frothy white trails on the blue-green surface of the water.
Behind him, the glass doors of the dojo were open. He’d just completed a two-hour training drill: yoga, kendo, and karate.
A year earlier, he’d presented himself at Kenneth Lao’s offices, where he’d signed half a dozen documents that gave him legal title to the estate of his former mentor and surrogate father, Zhao Xi. He was, as the lawyer said, rich. Three million dollars, give or take, in US bearer bonds secure in a Zurich bank vault. Zhao Xi’s investments and his priceless collection of jade. And the insurance settlement from his own car and house, together with the proceeds of the sale of the plot of land on which it had stood. Gabriel enjoyed a position many men of his age would envy. He had no need to work for a living anymore. He could spend the rest of his life travelling the world, or staying right here in Hong Kong, reading, learning to paint watercolours, visiting museums and historical sites, or mastering new martial arts, as he had been doing for the previous twelve months.
He could do that.
But he wouldn’t.
He picked up his phone.
Swiped the screen to unlock it.
And read again the short message that had arrived five minutes earlier.
Vinnie’s gone. Remember your promise? T.
Gabriel closed his eyes, raised his hands above his head and pressed his palms together, breathing deeply and clearing his mind of everything but his own will.
“I do,” he whispered.
Thirty minutes later, Gabriel lowered his arms, stood, and went inside to pack.
THE END
Read on for the first three chapters of the next book in the series, Fury
Falling Man
THE man was whistling as he fell to earth. It wasn’t a tuneful sound. As it came from a neat nine-millimetre-diameter hole in his chest wall, that was forgivable. The air pressure in his collapsing lungs was higher than that of the surrounding atmosphere. So he whistled.
The F-15 Silent Eagle, from whose starboard conformal weapons bay the dead man had so recently been ejected, roared away to the east, climbing from thirty to fifty thousand feet. The pilot was singing “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” interrupting himself to laugh hysterically every few lines.
From the ground, the jet’s contrail appeared pink in the rays of the sun setting over the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. The man’s bare skin shone like burnished copper in the slanting light.
After twelve seconds, when the forces of gravity and wind resistance reached an accord to stop fighting each other, he achieved terminal velocity: one hundred and twenty-two miles per hour. The whistling had stopped by this point, another result of equalising forces.
Had he been able to see, the man would have marvelled at the beauty of the landscape rushing up to greet him. A spine of mountains, in shades of petrol-blue and steel-grey, ran north-south beneath him. Low, thorny shrubs and sword-leaved agave plants punctuated the hard-baked earth, throwing shadows far longer than their own height, in grey stripes.
Sixty seconds after being ejected from the bomb bay, the man had travelled a little over nine thousand feet. His limbs flailed in the uprushing air, and as he fell into the path of a powerful crosswind, he slid sideways like a wheeling bird.
Ninety seconds after that, face up, he made landfall.
Although his body stopped instantaneously, his internal organs continued their downward travel at the same speed he’d been falling, crashing into the back of his ribcage, his spine and the thick sheets of his back muscles. Liver, heart, lungs, kidneys, spleen, pancreas, intestines: all ruptured and split as they slammed in
to the buffers.
His brain was pulped as it bounced around inside his skull, before spilling from the smashed head into the sandy earth.
From the moment the nine-millimetre full metal jacket round stole his life away, the man’s body had begun to decompose. The hot, dry air of the desert slowed the process and began to mummify the soft tissue. But Mother Nature abhors waste, and, in the absence of any cover or protection, the man’s destiny was to become part of the food chain.
The flies came first.
Then the beetles.
The first large scavenger, an adult male turkey vulture, arrived after fifteen minutes. Circling in a thermal, 20,000 feet above the ground, the vulture had seen and smelled the corpse. Mantling its wings over the man’s broken body from ankles to collar bones, like a pair of black capes, it raked its beak and claws at the soft skin of the torso. Then it plunged its boiled-looking head into the belly and began to eat.
Five minutes later, the first bird was jostling for elbow room with half a dozen more of his species, and a clutch of black vultures, all eager for a share of the carrion, hissing at each other in irritation as they tore at the carcass.
Fifteen minutes after the vultures, the apex predators appeared. First was a female mountain lion, ribs visible on her flanks, with three hungry cubs to feed. The vultures flapped away in an untidy mass of black wings like tarpaulins blown free of a car by the wind. She wrenched away a portion of one arm, trotted back to her cubs with it, then returned to the fray.
Finally, the coyotes arrived. A tawny trio, three brothers, who bossed their way in, yipped and growled at the mountain lion until she fled, and began squabbling over what remained of the body.
Cop Suicide
DYLAN Frasier was forty-two, a veteran of the second Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan, a decorated trooper with the Arizona Highway Patrol, a father of two, an alcoholic, occasional coke user, and a man with a serious gambling problem. He was into a local poker player – a man with connections in the Arizona gang scene – for thirty-two thousand dollars. As a result of his addictions, he’d emptied his children’s college fund, run up debts on his credit cards, borrowed money from colleagues and bowling buddies, and missed his last three mortgage payments. He hadn’t told his wife.
Seeing no way out of his troubles, suffering from depression, and figuring his life insurance, on which he had kept up the payments and specifically included cover for death by suicide, would help his family out of the jam he’d created, Dylan had decided that this was the day to resolve everything.
He woke early, 5.55, dressed in his uniform, kissed his wife and children, all sleeping, and left the house in Glendale. By eight, he was pulling away from the precinct house in a Ford F-150 truck painted in the AHP’s blue and copper livery, heading for the desert. Traffic heading towards Tucson on I-10 was light, and after an hour, he pulled off onto West Battaglia Drive. The name made the street sound like some chichi suburban avenue, but actually denoted an arrow-straight, dusty, two-lane blacktop with nothing but thousands of square miles of the Sonoran Desert to the north and south.
Turning left onto South San Simon Road, little more than a concrete track edged with low growing weeds and the odd flowering shrub, he drove on for a couple of miles before swinging the wheel right and pulling onto the desert itself. After another mile, he killed the truck’s engine. He put it into park and climbed out, grabbing a quart of Wild Turkey from the glovebox.
He walked away from the truck, heading for a boulder he thought might make a decent resting place for a man at the end of his miserable life.
With his back to the hot rock, he cracked the seal on the bourbon, took a long pull, then a second, then stood the bottle by his right hip.
He pulled his Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm pistol from his belt holster. The pistol was an older model and didn’t have the optional thumb safety. He shrugged and took another pull on the bourbon. Then he laughed.
“Doesn’t really matter, now, does it?” he asked a little brown lizard scuttling up to his right boot.
He racked the slide, tilted the gun and opened his mouth to receive the muzzle.
He tried not to think of his children as he tightened his trigger finger.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
Then he opened them again.
A chorus of yowls, yips, grunts and guttural hisses had erupted from somewhere behind him. It sounded like a bar fight, if the drinkers were all doing animal impressions at the same time as throwing punches and swinging pool cues.
He stood, uncertainly, and walked round to the other side of the boulder. Two hundred yards to the southwest he could see the source of the commotion. A gang of vultures were getting into it with a handful of coyotes, and on the edge of the brawl he could make out the sandy fur of a mountain lion.
“Hell, might as well have one last look-see before I go,” he said, walking towards the animals. When he got to the fifty-yard mark, he fired a couple of shots into the air over the heads of the scrapping scavengers. The lion and the coyotes fled at the sound of the gunfire.
“Hey! Scram! Get lost!” he yelled at the vultures, which had risen into the air in an ungainly crowd, then settled again. He fired three more shots, not taking so much care to aim high this time.
He hit one of the vultures, which flopped around on the ground, its wing torn off by the Speer Gold Dot Hollow Point round. The other birds took to the air, hissing and cawing in anger at this intrusion.
Dylan reached the site of the scrimmage, shot the wounded vulture dead, then let out a sound halfway between a groan and a sigh.
“Oh, man. I guess this ain’t my time after all.”
He was looking down at the remains of a human body. Most of the flesh had been removed and what remained was a bloody skeleton, minus an arm, the rest hung with scraps and tatters of muscle, skin and sinew.
Promises
TERRI-ANN Calder packed her books and her students’ assignments into her tote bag and left school for the week. She loved her job at the University of Texas at San Antonio almost as much as her husband.
Outside, on her way to the staff carpark, one of her students called out to her.
“Hey, Mrs Calder? You going to be supporting us tomorrow? We’re playing Texas State.”
She smiled and called back to the student, a rangy black kid with his hair cut short, bulked up under his bright orange UTSA basketball polo shirt.
“You bet! I’ll bring my husband too. He’s back tonight. We’ll make a day of it. Good luck, David.”
“You promise?”
She laughed.
“I promise! Go Roadrunners!”
Still smiling, she climbed into her car, a three-year-old VW Jetta, white to reflect the sun’s heat, switched on the ignition, cranked up the air and hit play on the stereo. With George Strait singing “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” she pulled out onto the road and headed for home. Vincent had been away working up north for a couple of weeks, and she was looking forward to snuggling up with him on the sofa with a bottle of wine and a movie, then a long, delicious night in bed with the man she’d married at seventeen and still loved like a giddy schoolgirl.
After changing into a simple white cotton dress that showed off her figure, she laid the table for two, placing tall, red candles in the sterling silver candlesticks her mother and father had given them as a wedding present. In the kitchen, she tied on an apron and tended to the meal she was cooking: rack of lamb, new potatoes and French beans.
At ten to seven, she opened a bottle of Californian Merlot, poured herself a glass and lit the candles.
At half-past seven, she called Vincent’s cell phone. It went straight to voicemail.
“Hey, honey. Everything OK? I’ve got dinner waiting for you and I picked up something special for dessert. From Victoria’s Secret.”
Vincent’s plane would have gotten in at three thirty that afternoon. She went online and checked the airline’s site. Then the airport. The plane had landed on schedul
e.
A little flicker of anxiety raced around her bloodstream. She took a swig of the merlot and called Vincent’s secretary on her cell.
“Hey, Kristin. It’s Terri-Ann. Did Vincent make his flight OK?”
“Oh, hi, Terri-Ann. I guess so. He didn’t come in to work this morning, but I just assumed he finished up with Clark yesterday and then went straight from his hotel to the airport. Why? He’s not home yet?”
“No. I’m kinda worried. The flight landed fine, but he’s not home yet.”
“Look, honey, he probably stopped off on the way home to buy you flowers or a gift or something. You know what he’s like. Such a romantic.” She sighed. “I should be so lucky.”
“OK, thanks, Kristin. I gotta go.”
At eleven, Terri-Ann called the San Antonio Police Department. The officer who answered the phone told Terri-Ann not to worry and to call again in the morning if her husband hadn’t appeared by then.
The weekend passed in a fever of worry. Terri-Ann called her father, and they spent the two days together at her house, praying, calling the SAPD and everyone they could think of, and drinking. He returned home on the Sunday evening, leaving Terri-Ann to try and get some sleep before the week ahead. Vincent hadn’t returned by the morning so she called the English department’s secretaries and explained she wouldn’t be coming in that day, then called the SAPD once again. This time she insisted on talking to a detective and eventually found herself talking to a female detective called Perez. The detective sympathised, took a note of her husband’s name, then took her name, address and cell phone number and asked her to come in and complete a missing persons report.
Terri-Ann arrived at the substation at ten. She presented herself at the reception desk and asked for Detective Perez.
