by Andy Maslen
“I went to Mozambique to recover the remains of a friend of mine and instead I was deceived into committing a dreadful crime. Then I witnessed a couple more and I was powerless to do anything about it. Now I’m going home empty-handed and I have to visit my friend’s widow and say I failed.”
“That is sad. But is not shameful. If you were deceived and then powerless, then was not your fault. Tell me, dear Gabriel,” she said, leaning over the table from her seat and patting his left knee, “who deceived you?”
Gabriel swallowed, trying to equalise the pressure in his ears, which were throbbing uncomfortably.
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Try me. I am woman of world. I have met many liars in my life.”
“Barbara Sutherland.”
Tatyana’s eyes narrowed.
“Barbara Sutherland, British Prime Minister?”
He nodded. “The very same.”
“Yes. She is good liar. I met her at embassy party in Washington last year. She said she could never do business with our President. But I have seen her with him in Moscow. In restaurant I own. Definitely not talking about politics, I can tell you. What is story with you and Barbara Sutherland?”
As the plane continued climbing, Gabriel took another sip of the vodka, then pinched his lower lip between thumb and forefinger.
“A while back, there was an attempt to seize power by force in the UK. I stopped it, with some help, and saved her life in the process. Since then, I’ve been working for her, more or less directly. As a pat on the back for a successful mission I completed, she said I could ask her a favour.”
“What did you ask for?”
“I asked if I could go back to Mozambique to find the remains of a former comrade of mine from the Army.”
“That is honourable thing to do. Like before, with bag. You are good man, Gabriel.”
“That’s the problem. I’m not sure I am any more. The price for being equipped for the trip was . . . to commit a deeply immoral act, on her instructions.”
“Sutherland?”
“Yes. She lied to me to save her own skin.”
“Listen, Gabriel. I am not police. So whatever you did is between you and your conscience. But tell me and maybe I can help you put things right.”
He paused. Should he admit his guilt for murdering a foreign politician to a woman he had only met once before today? The decision took an instant.
“I killed a man who Barbara Sutherland said was channeling money to a terror group. Now it looks like he had information that would show she was corrupt. She’d been involved in some sort of deals involving defence contracts, land and diamonds.”
Tatyana finished her vodka and placed the glass on the table. The she unsnapped the catch on her seatbelt and came to sit next to Gabriel.
“In defence, I am not expert. In diamonds, I am expert. Probably these were blood diamonds. You know this phrase?”
“I’ve heard of it, but I don’t really know what it means.”
“Is when warlord, or government even, sells diamonds in exchange for weapons to fight civil war or insurgency. Reputable traders like Garin Group have piece of paper for every diamond shipment called a KPC.”
“KPC?”
“Kimberley Process Certificate. It says ‘this diamond is from accredited source, not war zone’.”
“But why would she be involved with blood diamonds? Why not ones with a KPC?”
Tatyana smiled and patted his arm. “You pick up diamond lingo very quickly. KPC diamonds are traceable. Blood diamonds are not. Like unmarked bills. Very useful currency if you want to do secret deals. Except for one thing.”
Gabriel twisted round in his seat so he faced Tatyana directly.
“What one thing?”
“Without KPC is very difficult to turn blood diamonds into cash.”
“So you’d have to get someone to forge one for you.”
“Da. Or steal blanks. But that is very difficult. Forging much better.”
“If you had blood diamonds and the paperwork to show they were legal, where would you trade them?”
“Oh, many, many places. Amsterdam, Cape Town, Manhattan, Tel Aviv, London. Plenty of gem merchants will buy certified diamonds.”
“Is there a central register of traders? Somewhere you can look up who’s been active in the market?”
She shook her head. “Is very secretive trade. For understandable reasons. But is not completely secret. If you know who to ask.”
“And you know who to ask?”
“I am Tatyana Garin. I know everybody in global diamond trade. You leave this with me. Maybe I can sniff out something – is right phrase? – that might help you.”
“You know it might bring down the Prime Minister of the UK?”
She snorted and flapped her hands, making her many rings click against each other. “Is not my problem. Prime ministers come and go. Kings and queens. Tsars and tsarinas. Even presidents. You know words of famous song, Gabriel. Only diamonds last forever.”
*
Sixteen hours later, the jet’s tyres met the tarmac at London Luton Airport. As the plane taxied to a stop at the private terminal building, Tatyana got to her feet. She had been asleep for much of the flight and her eye makeup was a little smudged from the mask.
“I have second driver in terminal, dear Gabriel. Tell her where you want her to take you. I have your number. I will call you when I have something useful to tell you.”
“Thank you, Tatyana. For getting me out of Zimbabwe. For your help with this business. I feel I owe you, not the other way around.”
She smiled, pulling him into an embrace, and whispered in his ear. “In my business, always is favours. One way, then other. But we can be friends, yes? Nobody owes anybody. Is OK?”
“Yes. Is OK.”
“Do svidaniya.”
“Do svidaniya.”
*
Beyond the discreet brushed-steel barrier of passport control, which he moved through without incident, Gabriel could see a small group of chauffeurs, standing around, talking into phones or holding up name boards. Only one was a woman. She wore a dark purple trouser suit with a small purple and gold enamelled double-G pinned to her lapel, and she wore a peaked cap low over her eyes. She held a rectangular whiteboard with his name printed across it in neat block capitals.
He walked over and smiled at her.
“Mr Wolfe?” she asked. Though it was more confirmation than question. He nodded. “Come with me please.”
*
Two hours and ten minutes later, the silver Mercedes S-Class drew up on the gravel outside Gabriel’s cottage. Gabriel climbed out, stretched and retrieved his bag from the boot. The chauffeur refused his offer a cup of tea and, as he stood in his drive, reversed back onto the main road and took off, back, he assumed, to Tatyana’s London office.
Inside, the fatigue he’d been keeping at bay overwhelmed him like a tidal wave. He dropped his bag, climbed the stairs as though they were a mountain, stripped off his clothes and fell into bed. He slept for twelve hours. Twelve dreamless hours.
When he woke, it was to the sound of rain hammering on the windows. He looked out over his garden to the woods beyond. Through the bare trees he could just make out the spire of Salisbury Cathedral in the distance, a narrow, pale-grey spike rising out of the land beyond the wood.
He showered and dressed, then went downstairs to make a pot of tea, mixing Kenyan Fannings, Russian Caravan and Earl Grey leaves in the pot. While the fragrant tea was brewing, he pulled out a sheet of paper from a drawer and grabbed a pencil from a mug on the kitchen counter.
Across the top, he wrote a single two-word question.
What now?
41
Shift Work
SOMETHING Philip Agambe had said in his final seconds came to Gabriel. It was bouncing off the edges of his consciousness like a moth at a window lit from inside, but he couldn’t get it to settle. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, letting his mind quieten, wa
iting for the familiar state of heightened awareness to descend on him.
Philip Agambe’s terrified face loomed out of the dark at him, eyes wide and staring, lips pulled back from his teeth in a grimace of fear and despair.
Gabriel could feel the cold metal handle of the butterfly knife in his hand and smell the bitter sweat rising from the man he was about to murder in cold blood. Bile rose in his throat and he swallowed it back as he willed himself to hear the words coming from Agambe’s lips:
“She’s in bed with Gordian.”
His eyelids snapped open and he jotted the word down on the sheet of paper in front of him. What did it mean? Had he even heard the word correctly? Maybe it was Gordon. A man’s Christian name, or anybody’s surname.
He opened the lid of his MacBook Air and launched a browser. He Googled, “Zimbabwean politician Gordon”. Precisely zero useful hits, just a bunch of irrelevant pages about a former British prime minister. He widened the search to the whole of southern Africa. Apart from a long-dead colonial administrator, nothing again. After twenty minutes trying an increasingly absurd set of search terms, Gabriel gave up on the idea of the word as a person’s name.
“Well then,” he muttered. “If not a person, then a company. And maybe it is Gordian.”
He typed, “Gordian Zimbabwe” and immediately groaned in frustration as a series of pages were displayed, all using the metaphor of the Gordian Knot in relation to southern African politics. It seemed Alexander the Great had once solved the puzzle of an intricately tied knot nobody could undo by slicing through its middle with his sword. Ever since, the phrase had come to mean an intractable problem.
Turning away from the screen, he doodled a knot on the paper, adding coils, turns and twists until the image took up almost half the space on the page.
“Are you a company?” he asked the doodle. “Gordian Group? Gordian Limited? Gordian Incorporated?”
Returning to the search engine, he tried every variant he could think of, from the obvious forms of incorporation – Ltd, Inc, LLP and PLC – to more esoteric designations including the Finish OY, the Polish SA and finally, the Albanian Shpk, all fruitlessly. If there was a corporate entity in the world calling itself Gordian, it had managed the seemingly impossible feat of hiding itself from Google.
He wrote Gordian – company? on the sheet beside the huge knot. Then he added a note: would Melody know? If her organisation was monitoring global corruption, maybe they’d have sources on the ground who could point him in the right direction.
There was someone he wanted to speak to a lot more urgently than Melody Smith, however. Someone either with hands blackened by dirty money, or who had been set up even more cleverly than he believed he had been. The only problem was, getting to see Barbara Sutherland wasn’t simply a matter of knocking on her front door.
Then he remembered. It was an election year. That meant Sutherland would be all over the place. Travelling on trains. Appearing in the constituencies of loyal MPs whose campaigns could do with a boost from the party leader and sitting Prime Minister. Making stump speeches at dockyards and factories. Reading stories to groups of bored-looking eight-year-olds. Yes, she’d have a security detail, but he was used to defeating people much better-trained and motivated than they would be.
Within fifteen minutes, he’d assembled a schedule of the Prime Minister’s appearances for the next two days. It was laughably easy. He just scanned social media, searching for “Prime Minister coming” and a few other variants, and the posts revealing her itinerary piled up. But Gabriel wasn’t cracking a smile. His mouth was set in a line and the muscles in his jaw were clenching and unclenching as he planned an intercept.
The place he chose was a car factory in Oxfordshire. It was a straightforward drive to get there, and by its nature, it would be physically easy to infiltrate. At most, he was expecting some chain-link fencing. At best, a stroll through wide-open gates. He could pose as a journalist; he’d done it once before. But on the whole, he favoured a covert approach. He had a day to prepare. More than enough time.
Next, he called Britta.
“Hej. How are you? And where are you?”
“I’m back home. I swung a favour. Flew back in style on a corporate jet, too. How the other half lives, eh?”
“Well, I don’t know about that. I flew economy and it was a fucking nightmare. Screaming babies and drunk tourists for fourteen hours is not my idea of fun.” She paused, and he listened to the sound of her breathing. “I got your text,” she said, finally.
“I got yours, too.”
“So?”
“So, what?”
“What do you mean, ‘so, what?’, you numbskull? I said I loved you and you said it back. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Or were we just being polite?”
“No! I mean yes. Yes, it does mean something and no, I wasn’t just being polite. It’s just, I don’t know, I’ve never been in this situation before. And I’m caught up in a little bit of business, in case you’d forgotten.”
“But you did mean it? You do love me?”
“Yes, Britta Falskog, you crazy Swede, I do love you. And I want to see you. Badly. But I just can’t. It’s too dangerous. I don’t know what she’s going to do and you’re not visible to her, so I think we should keep it that way.”
“Fine. I’m back at work anyway. My boss relented and put me back on active duty. But if there’s anything I can do for you, you let me know, OK?”
“I will. I promise. I have to go. I need to get in touch with Don.”
Gabriel ended the call and sat there, staring at his phone’s screen for a minute longer, wondering whether it was possible to lead a life where you loved someone and got married and did all those normal things other people did, and still run around the world burgling office buildings, planting bugs and shooting bad guys. He knew a man who’d know. But he had a feeling he needed to use a little subterfuge to make contact.
After a half-hour round trip, he was back at home with a cheap mobile phone and twenty pounds of credit. He called Don Webster’s number. Just when he was resigning himself to leaving another message, Don picked up. His voice sounded guarded.
“Who is this? How did you get this number?”
“Don, it’s me.”
The older man sighed, then spoke. “Quiet! Just listen. I’m going to give you a number. Wait ten minutes then call it.”
He read out a set of digits. Then he hung up.
It was a landline. Why the home phone, Don? And why the wait?
The ten minutes passed for Gabriel with glacial slowness. Even with a career’s worth of ‘standing by to stand by’ he found the wait unbearable. Nine minutes later, he stood, finger hovering over the phone’s buttons. As the second hand on his watch passed ten he started punching in the number Don had given him.
The phone answered on the first ring.
“Hello, Old Sport. I wondered whether you’d find a way to reach me.”
“Where are you?”
“Village phone box. There’s a committee been formed to apply to turn it into a library – bloody silly idea – but for now, one can still use it for the purpose God intended.”
“Are they monitoring your phone?”
There was no need for Gabriel to explain who ‘they’ were. Both men understood the term’s meaning in all its infinite variety.
“Not sure, Old Sport. And remember, to a certain extent, I am ‘they’. But one can’t be too careful. Here’s the situation. Barbara has expressly forbidden me to talk to you, offer you help or even acknowledge your existence. Some sort of spook accosted me the other day. They’re putting personal pressure on me. There’s not a lot I can do for you. But not a lot doesn’t mean nothing. Need a shooter?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not planning on taking her out like I did that poor sod in Zimbabwe.”
“No, but if they get desperate enough they might arrange to set some of our friendly neighbourhood firearms officers on your scent. ‘Rogue SAS ve
teran on the loose’, that sort of thing.”
“I’m still not sure.”
“Look, I tell you what. That hotel you favour in London, what’s it called? The Crow?”
“The Raven.”
“I’ll have one of my lads leave a package for you there. If you feel the need, you can collect it. If you don’t, we’ll retrieve it later. How about that?”
Gabriel smiled at the thought of his boss leaving a loaded pistol behind the reception desk of a hotel for him, like an umbrella.
“Sounds good. Thank you. Are you all right, Don? You sounded strained when you took me to meet Sam that time.”
“Me? I’m fine. I’ve faced worse than this in my time.”
“It’s just, you looked, I don’t know, off, every time we discussed this mission back in London.”
“Let’s just say Barbara’s documentary evidence against Philip Agambe failed to meet The Department’s normal standards. I queried it. She insisted it was kosher and ordered me to proceed. And that was that. Look, I can’t help you further. And we can’t speak again for a while. If you’re doing what I think you are, we may be able to in the future. Do what you think is right, Gabriel. And good luck.”
The line went dead. Gabriel held the phone to his ear for a few more seconds, listening to the unbroken tone, picturing Don Webster striding away from a red phone box in the heart of a picturesque village, past a duck pond to a half-timbered Elizabethan house and a wood-burning fire. He shook his head to dispel the image.
*
By seven the following morning, Gabriel was halfway to the car plant. He kept the Maserati to a steady seventy. Being stopped by the police for speeding would hardly help his plan to accost the British Prime Minister and – he realised he had no exact idea of how – interrogate her about whether she was up to her elbows in blood diamonds-for-arms-for-land deals in Africa.
At eight, he rolled to a stop in a layby a mile from the plant. Dressed in jeans, work boots, a dark grey hoodie and a leather jacket, he hoped he’d pass for a factory worker. He pulled a baseball cap down over his forehead and set off along the road towards the factory. The morning shift were arriving, mostly by car, though some were on motorbikes and a few cycled or walked towards the factory gates. Gabriel merged into the foot traffic and, keeping his head down and his hands jammed in his jacket pockets, wandered through the gates and into what he thought of as enemy territory.