Blind Impact (The Gabriel Wolfe Thrillers Book 2)
Page 32
No, it wasn't the woman herself. It was her ride. After she'd left the car, the driver had executed a rapid U-turn in the street, tyres screeching on full lock as their treads scraped across the tarmac, forcing a taxi to slam its brakes on, and the cabbie to curse, loudly and fluently, from his open window. Acrid, blue rubber-smoke drifted across towards Gabriel’s table.
*
Child Eloise waited at the bus-stop on Oxford Street. She looked behind her at the shop window. It was filled with a display of what she had initially taken to be fruit or perhaps cakes, but which, on closer inspection, turned out to be handmade soaps, things called ‘roulades’ and ‘bath bombs’. Funny name. Her neighbours in the queue were all busy with their phones, swiping, scrolling and tapping. The women wore bright clothes and high-heeled shoes, and they were slathered in make-up. Painted like whores. Sinful. The men ogled the women, peering at their breasts or eyeing their stockinged legs. Lascivious. All seemed more interested in the little slivers of plastic and glass in their hands than in God's creation around them, even if it was mostly concrete and steel here. Decadent.
Despite her quilted nylon jacket, she couldn't stop shivering. She grunted involuntarily from time to time and her tongue kept poking out between her lips, causing one or two people around her to smirk before looking away. Auntie had told her not to be afraid and had given her a sweetie, “to bring you a little calmness as you do God's work, child”, but she felt frightened all the same.
Under her jacket, the cotton leotard was packed with seven pounds of homemade explosive, a mixture of diesel oil, bleach, wax and potassium chloride from a health foods website. Each of the ten pockets was packed with a sausage of it; she had helped Uncle and Auntie mould them herself, rolling the sticky, greyish stuff between her palms and inserting a blasting cap and a length of detonator wire into the tops. Around the sausages lay the shiny steel spheres Uncle called, “God's tears”.
The ball bearings were twenty-one millimetres across. Uncle had been most specific on that point when ordering them from the factory. He said the number was significant because it was the product of the seven deadly sins and the Holy Trinity. Together, they’d dropped twenty-five into each of the ten pockets, where they nestled against the yielding surface of the explosives.
The woman looked around again. Her phone wasn't as shiny as these others. It didn't even have a camera. Not that she could have reached it to take a picture, in any case. It, too, was sewn into her vest, in a channel sitting right over her heart. The wires from the explosives ended in a control box soldered onto the phone's battery charger socket.
*
Harry and Vivienne’s bus pulled up outside a shop selling soaps and bath products. Through the narrow windows on the top deck, wafts of scent – tropical, spicy, lemony – insinuated themselves, causing Harry to smile without realising why. He was happy. Happy Harry.
Vivienne's thigh was pressed against his, and even though he knew it was just an accident caused by the stingy seating arrangements, he felt a prickle of desire. And it had been a long time since that had happened. Linda had stopped putting out for him years ago, and he'd never been a guy to go off looking for pleasure in a cat house or a strip club. Not that he’d have had time, the hours he put in.
“Look at her,” Vivienne said, prodding the glass on her left and looking down. “Poor thing looks so miserable. And on a beautiful day like today. You'd think she’d manage a smile.”
Harry leaned across, taking the opportunity to glance down the front of Vivienne's blouse. Great rack!
“Who? Her? The skinny one in the puffy jacket? Yeah, she does look kind of sad.”
*
Gabriel finished his coffee, dabbed a wet fingertip into the yellow crumbs dusting his plate, sucked them into his mouth, and then stood. His meeting was in an office on a side street leading east from Regent Street. He took one final glance towards Oxford Circus, then picked up his battered Hartman briefcase and strode off towards Great Portland Street.
His phone rang. He saw the small circle enclosing a face he knew and smiled. He swiped his thumb to the right to answer the call.
“Hi, Britta, how are you? Where are you?”
“Hey, Gabriel. I’m good. I’m at my place in Chiswick, actually, painting my nails. My boss pretty well ordered me to take some leave. Been burning the midnight oil at both ends.”
Gabriel laughed. However good her English was, Britta Falskog hadn’t quite mastered all the subtleties of British idiom. On the other hand, he liked her very much; always had. They’d run joint ops for a while, back in the day, she in Swedish Special Forces, he in the SAS. And there had been the odd overnight stay. Now, since she’d been seconded to MI5, working out of their Vauxhall offices, maybe there was something in the air between them.
“So, do you want to meet up?” he said. “I’m in town, too. Going to see a new client.”
“I would like that. Do you want to get dinner?”
“Sure. Then I’m heading back to Salisbury.”
“Oh, OK. Well, you know, I do have a few days to kill, so maybe …”
“A trip to the countryside? Sounds like a lovely idea.”
While they bantered, Gabriel made his way along the uncrowded roads to the north of Oxford Street, heading for the offices of Faulds & Vambrace (VIP Protection) Ltd.
*
Eloise Payne slid her Oyster card over the scuffed magnetic reader and made her way to the stairs of the bus, which she climbed, gripping the handrail tightly. There was one free seat, about halfway back, behind a couple who were chatting away about museums and art galleries. The man reminded her of Uncle. He had the same short, white hair. Only this man spoke with an American accent.
She took the seat, next to a black woman in her thirties who was chatting into her phone and admiring her fingernails, which she extended in front of her in a fan. There seemed to be yellow flecks, like gold, floating in the orange varnish, and the tips were white.
*
Standing by the drawing room window in the elegant terraced house where Eloise Payne had so recently been stitched into the garment that was to become her shroud, a grey-haired man named Robert Slater, known to the Children as “Uncle Robert”, looked out at the oaks, beeches and hornbeams dotting Regent’s Park. He was six foot, slim, and wearing a white shirt and white trousers. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that magnified his eyes. In the distance, he could make out the long, dappled necks of a pair of giraffes grazing in their enclosure in the zoo. Through the open window, he could smell burning leaves from a bonfire somewhere in the park.
In his hand, he held a smartphone, a number keyed in and ready to be called. Beside him, Irene Stevens, Eloise Payne’s Auntie and a former manager of a dressmaking business, spoke.
“Père Christophe will be pleased.”
“Yes. We have proved our worthiness.”
Then he tapped the green phone icon.
*
Inside the neat, stitched channel covering Eloise Payne’s heart, the phone's circuitry woke up as the incoming call was beamed in from a cell tower on top of an office block two hundred yards to the north.
The electric current it generated was tiny. Just enough to cause a glimmer from a Christmas tree light. Or to cause a child's toy robot to take a buzzing half-step across a polished tabletop. But also enough to excite the atoms in ten, foot-long pieces of copper wire. The wave of energy travelled along the wires at the speed of light until it reached the fat cylinders of explosive corseting their wearer.
There, something curious happened. The energy of that tiny electrical charge multiplied itself billions of times as the chemical reaction it initiated gathered pace, and violence.
Exactly seventy-three milliseconds later, the atoms comprising the charges became unstable and, searching for equilibrium, set off a chain reaction that released all their pent up energy into the surrounding space.
*
Gabriel had just turned into the side street where his client was bas
ed. He and Britta were fixing the details of a pre-dinner drink.
“So meet at six-thirty at the French House.” Britta was saying. “Shall I book the restaurant?”
“Yes, please. Anywhere we can get a decent burgundy. And I hope you …”
Gabriel didn’t finish his sentence. A roaring, shattering boom cut him off.
He recognised the sound. It sounded like a truck bomb. There was a second or two of total silence, then distant screaming.
“Call you back!” he said. He stuffed the phone in his pocket, then spun round and ran back towards the main road. He turned left at the junction and sprinted towards Oxford Circus. And hell.
*
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