by Andy Maslen
Gabriel shaved and showered, taking his time under the water jets to assess the situation. The disposition of forces was asymmetric, and in the enemy’s favour: four to three. Plus, the men Volkov had assigned him were an unknown quantity. They were loyal to Volkov, not to him, and presumably only to Volkov because he was the paymaster. When push came to shove, literally, hired muscle was still hired. That meant it was always available to someone with more money – or power – to offer. They also decreased his chances of mounting an operation by stealth. Counterbalancing these problems, he reflected, having a couple of Special Forces veterans of Russia’s many wars and “police actions” would undeniably come in handy if things kicked off with Drezna and his associates.
Then there was the weaponry. They had enough firepower to take out anything short of an armoured vehicle, plus personal equipment including, in Gabriel’s case, the KA-BAR, switchblade and knuckleduster. He assumed the two Russians would be similarly well-equipped. However many rounds you start off with in a firefight, there’s always a point when the ammunition simply runs out. One moment you’re putting down fire, the next you have a very expensive club. At that point, short of fixing bayonets, which Gabriel had once been ordered to do on a jungle mission in Latin America, your next best option was handheld weapons, either issued or improvised. In his last year in the SAS, one of the favourite stories doing the rounds was of a patrol fighting their way out of a house in a remote village in Afghanistan armed with kitchen knives and an iron cooking pot.
Ranged against them were four Chechen separatists. Even allowing for Volkov’s visceral hatred for them, his broad assessment was spot on. Chechens weren’t exactly known for their timidity in battle. Whether it was a full-on firefight – the smell of burnt cordite and hot brass stinging your nostrils, and the crack-thump of rifle rounds all around you – or the desperate eye-gouging, gut-stabbing, throat-slicing and groin-kicking of hand-to-hand combat, nobody who had seen Chechens in full fury would ever forget it. Gabriel had, and he never would.
Dressed in jeans, T-shirt and windcheater, plus the combat boots, he let himself out of the room, deposited the key with the perpetually smiling receptionist and headed out for some food. Two hundred yards along the street, in the direction off the Old Town, was a café. He’d eaten there once already, and the fat old couple running it had taken an instant liking to him. Today, the woman was running the show, and when he entered, she bustled over, wiping her reddened hands on a flowered and frilled apron, beaming a gap-toothed smile at him.
“Mr Terry! Come, sit,” she said in heavily accented English, her voice loud above the chatter of the other customers, the hissing of the Gaggia machine and the intermittent shouting from the kitchen.
She showed him to a table by the window, and he took the seat facing the door. He didn’t need a menu. “Beef stew and dumplings like last time, please, Marta,” he said in the passable Estonian he’d learned from a phrasebook and a teach-yourself app on his phone. He had no idea where his talent for languages had come from. His parents both spoke Mandarin, Cantonese and English, but he’d not studied languages as a boy, so the rest was down to natural aptitude or a quirk of his DNA. “Some bread too, and a coffee. Large. Thank you.”
While he waited for his order, he made a call to Ferdinand Tarvas AKA Ferdy Motors. The ringing phone at the other end sounded a long way away, though Gabriel knew his quarry had business premises right here in Tallinn. Just a street or two away from Jonny Rocketz, as it happened. He held on, half-expecting to get voicemail. What would it say? Hi, this is Ferdy Motors. I’m out nicking a getaway car for the Russian Mafia at the moment, but if you leave your name and number and a brief description of the knocked-off wheels you want, I’ll get back to you?
“Hello?” The speaker managed to pack enough suspicion into those two everyday syllables to fuel a whole police station. He’d clearly had been engaged in a lifelong love affair with high-tar cigarettes.
“Hi. That Ferdy?” Gabriel stuck to Estonian.
“Who wants to know?”
“Terry Fox. Yuri told you I wanted a word?”
“Oh, yes, OK. Can you come here this afternoon?”
“Fine. I’m not far. I’ll be there about two o’clock.”
The phone clicked. Ferdy had hung up. His timing was unwittingly excellent: Marta approached, bearing a shallow, steaming bowl. She squeezed her elephantine hips between two chairs, knocking each diner forwards into their respective tables, and placed the food in front of Gabriel with a mother’s twinkle in her eye.
“Eat!” she said. “You are too much skinny.” She pinched his cheek as she put his mug of coffee next to the plate before swinging around and heading back towards the kitchen.
The stew was delicious: earthy, garlicky and gamey, with a generous dollop of red wine in the gravy. The dumplings were the approximate size and shape of cricket balls, chewy but not dense, and flavoured with herbs. Gabriel worked on his meal, washing down the heavy food with mouthfuls of the hot coffee. Every now and then, he’d flick his gaze to different points around the room, but there was no threat. It was a homely place full of office workers, builders and tourists filling their bellies before an afternoon of paper-pushing, wall-building or pavement-pounding. He felt sure he was the only person stoking the fires in preparation for a hostage rescue mission in the east of the country.
He signalled Marta for the bill, which came to sixteen euros, left a twenty-euro note under his empty mug, and headed out. Ferdy Motors was a ten-minute walk away.
He found the place easily enough; it was on a street he’d walked down on his way home from Jonny Rocketz. He pushed the button by the door and waited. The interlude was lightning-fast compared to the wait before Ferdy had answered his phone. Any friend of Yuri’s . . . Gabriel thought, as bolts scraped on the other side of the door.
The man facing Gabriel was about his height, but carrying an additional twenty or thirty pounds, mostly around his middle. His sallow complexion was pockmarked from childhood acne and his nose had been recently broken, to judge from his black eyes and the crude bandaging and sticking plaster in the centre of his face.
“This way,” he lisped.
Gabriel followed Ferdy down a narrow gap between a couple of dark-grey Škoda estates, their windows blacked out on the sides and back. In the centre of the yard, a heavyset boy of maybe sixteen or seventeen was kneeling by an old Jaguar saloon, one of the big V12 executive models, welding a steel plate onto the moth-eaten rear wheel arch, which had been ground back to the bare metal. Or appearing to. He didn’t have a welding rod in his hand and was just going through the motions. A crowbar lay by his side. Gabriel ignored him. He hadn’t come to cause trouble, and if having a wingman, even a skinny adolescent like this one, made Ferdy more comfortable, that could work for both of them.
Ferdy turned to face Gabriel, thumbs hooked into his jeans pockets. “Yuri said to give you information. Ask what you want, I have nothing to hide.”
“You sold a ride – a truck. Who to?” Gabriel already knew the answer but he wanted to gauge how much he could trust Ferdy Motors.
Ferdy’s eyes flicked up and to the right – a sure sign a lie was coming, according to an FBI interrogator Gabriel had once sat next to on a flight. “A man called Kasym Drezna. A Chechen.”
Good for you, Ferdy, you told the truth. That’s going to make this a much shorter and more pleasant conversation. “You know what he wanted it for?”
“He didn’t say.” The eyes flickered towards the roof again.
“You sure about that? Not even a hint or a little joke?”
Ferdy looked down, then back at Gabriel. “You’re making me write my own suicide note. If Kasym finds out I talked to you, he’ll kill me. Or worse, set that deranged bitch onto me.”
“And if you don’t talk to me, guess what? Yuri’s going to kill you. The difference is, Kasym might never find out you talked. Yuri definitely will if you don’t.”
Ferdy sighed. He’d been ou
tmanoeuvred, outgunned and outplayed. “Fine. But I beg you, if Kasym finds out? Come back here and kill me yourself. With a bullet. It will be a mercy. He told me he had some cargo to transport. That’s one of his code words. When he’s moving people about – you know, girls, migrants . . . bodies – he calls them ‘cargo’.”
“There, that wasn’t too hard, was it? Next question. I need an ID on the truck. Make, model, colour, registration plate.”
Ferdy’s eyes flashed in surprise for a split second. “Registration? What do you think this is, Avis? Truck didn’t have no plates. Kasym probably went out and ripped off a set from some commuter here in Tallinn, or had some he brought in from that bastard country he calls home.”
“All right, then, just the vehicle details.”
“Brown. Volkswagen. Three-tonne.”
“That’s it? No other details I can use?”
Ferdy’s eyes did their up-down and sideways dance again. “Oh Jesus, he’ll make me eat my own cock. On the roof. He never checked. It has a big Kodak advertisement stuck on there. A woman in a bikini holding a camera. It was old, from a factory. I didn’t have time to get it off, some stupid fucking superglue shit they must have used.”
Gabriel leaned forward and patted Ferdy on the shoulder, noticing as he did so how the boy with the welding rig stood up and took half a pace towards him.
“Thanks Ferdy, you’re a star. We’ll just have to hope Drezna doesn’t figure who ratted him out, won’t we?” Then he snapped round to face the boy, who had turned the control knob on the torch to extend the jet into a roaring blue and violet spear-point of flame. “Watch yourself with that,” he said. “You could give yourself a nasty burn.”
Then he was gone, back between the Škodas, through the steel door and out into the sunshine. He had a few hours until he needed to be back at Volkov’s office building. He didn’t feel like sightseeing and apart from Astrid, he didn’t know anyone in Tallinn he’d care to spend time with. But there were people he cared about, and who cared about him. He made his way to Toom Park, to the west of the Old Town, and a body of water called Snelli Pond. The sun was still out, and he found a quiet spot in the shade of a lime tree and sat with his back to the trunk. The grass was dotted with picnickers and students sitting in groups of five or six, strumming acoustic guitars or working on laptops, and there was a noisy group of winos way over to the south of him, but he had the tree and its immediate environs to himself.
He called Don.
“What news, Old Sport?”
“They’re in a brown, three-tonne, VW panel van. It’s an old Kodak delivery truck, I think. There’s a girl in a bikini on the roof.”
“A real one?”
Gabriel smiled. “A photo. And I think they’re heading for a scrapyard in Tartu.”
“OK, that’s fantastic. I’ll relay it to our eyes in the sky. See if they can’t pick it up. We’ve got thermal imaging off a US satellite coming down the pipe in an hour or so. I’ll call you with login details.”
“Thanks. I’ll call you if there’s anything new.”
He ended the call then scrolled through his contacts list to F, and tapped the first name in the list.
Chapter 37
“Hey you! How are you? And where are you?” Britta said.
“I’m good. I’m in Tallinn. I thought I was going to be blowing through Stockholm. I was going to look you up.”
“You wouldn’t have found me. I’m still in the UK. That temporary job I had with our friends in London? They’ve asked me to stay on for another six months.”
Gabriel knew Britta was talking about her extended secondment to MI5 from Swedish Special Forces, and was enjoying their little game of ‘disguise the spook talk’.
“So they liked your style with our little adventure in Wiltshire, then?”
“I got a commendation, as a matter of fact. Had to go to this fancy ceremony. I needed to get my dress uniform couriered over from Stockholm. What are you up to in Tallinn?”
“I’m doing my Sir Lancelot act – rescuing two damsels in distress. How about you. What are you up to?”
“Animal rights. I’ve joined an offshoot of PETA. You know them?”
“People for Eating Tasty Animals?”
Britta laughed, thrilling Gabriel even over the hundreds of miles that separated them. “Ja, det är korrekt!” she said, lapsing into Swedish, then laughing again. “Or maybe People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.”
“Eating animals can be ethical, if you cook them properly.”
“Stop it, Wolfe, you’re impossible. Anyway, so I am getting to know the guy in charge. He says animals have the same rights as humans only more because they haven’t fucked up the planet.”
Suddenly, Gabriel knew she was sleeping with the leader of the splinter group. Because that’s what he’d ask her to do if he was running the mission. What he was doing with Astrid. Pillow talk: the oldest form of espionage in the world. And he felt a tightening in his stomach.
“If you get time off from saving the planet, do you fancy getting together when I’m back? Dinner or something. I could come to you this time.”
“I would love that. I can return the favour. I’ll be ready for a big, juicy steak too, I tell you. They eat so many beans they’ve turned farting into an Olympic sport.”
“Jesus, Falskog, you Swedes and your humour. Not very ladylike, is it?”
“No, it is not! And nor is rifle-shooting, but I do that too when needed, remember?”
“Good point. I’ll call you, then. When I’m back.”
Gabriel got to his feet and headed across the park back to the hotel, texting Volkov with the details of the truck’s unusual roof decoration. He needed to collect his gear then get over to Volkov’s building to pick up the car. Why was it that he didn’t see Britta Falskog for months, maybe even years, at a time, and then when he did, he felt such a pull towards her deep in the pit of his stomach? And why the jealousy? He’d been sleeping with Annie Frears for a couple of months when they were both free and in the mood, and hadn’t he let Astrid seduce him – there was no other word for it – the other night? He couldn’t formulate an answer that didn’t make him sound like a hypocrite, even in this internal dialogue, so he decided to leave it alone. For now.
Chapter 38
“Hey, Ivar. Nice new car I saw you arrive in this morning,” Eva Kallas said to her colleague in the Tallinn Police traffic monitoring and control department.
The pudgy, fortyish man smiled and touched his bald spot as he answered.
“It is nice, isn’t it? Maybe you’d like to come for a drive some time.”
She touched her throat and blushed.
“Maybe I would. What are you up to?”
“Reviewing some footage from yesterday. Some big guy in CID is hot on the trail of some villain or other. You know, usual story.”
He turned back to his work. He didn’t want to cut Eva off; she was nice, always had a smile for him and sometimes brought him home-made cakes. But his client, who’d called him moments earlier, had been most insistent that he needed confirmation on the target vehicle immediately. And although he wasn’t in CID, he knew plenty about criminal investigations. He’d also paid for Ivar’s new, well, nearly new, BMW 3 Series.
Ivar set the playback to fast-forward, running the digital video at sixteen times normal speed. He had feeds from cameras on all four of the main routes out of Tallinn tiled on his screen: the E20 heading east towards Rakvere; the E263, southeast towards Tartu; the E67, southwest to Pärnu; and the E265, west to Paldiski.
His practised eye darted from one quadrant to the next in a random sequence. It helped that he had a detailed description of the vehicle he was looking for, and after all, there couldn’t be that many three-tonne trucks leaving Tallinn with a ten-foot, bikini-clad babe reclining on the roof, now could there?
Eva delivered a coffee to his desk after thirty minutes but Ivar was too engrossed in his work to do more than grunt his thanks.
> Then, just as his eyes were beginning to tire, and a break would be necessary, he spotted it. Unmistakable.
“Yes!” he shouted. Then he looked around in embarrassment. Jubilation was more of a squad-room kind of emotion, after a big collar. It was certainly not experienced in the library-like quiet of the CCTV monitoring room. Once his colleagues had turned back to their own screens, he grabbed a screenshot of the target vehicle and emailed it to his client along with a short message:
Miss Estonia was travelling on the E263 – towards Tartu.
Chapter 39
Gabriel packed a bag with a change of clothes, toothbrush and razor, then laid out his personal weapons and, one by one, packed them amongst his clothes.
The KA-BAR, which had come complete with its original tan leather sheath, he rolled inside a spare pair of jeans. He stuffed the knuckleduster into a pair of socks. The switchblade went into a jacket pocket. That left the SIG Sauer. The magazine was full, the chamber empty. He screwed on the suppressor and put the remaining rounds in their boxes in a nylon rucksack he’d bought in one of the many down-at-heel general stores that lined the back streets of Tallinn.
He considered sticking the pistol into the back of his waistband, then changed his mind and buried it in his bag. He still remembered fondly the story told by a grizzled former sergeant of his. “Tiny” Tim McDonagh, an eighteen-stone, six-foot-five Glasgow protestant, had been on a tour of duty in Belfast in the late 1990s. He’d walked into a supermarket in a staunchly Catholic part of Belfast to buy beer and crisps for a boys’ night in with a few videos, wearing civilian clothes and carrying a concealed sidearm under a tweed overcoat.