by Andy Maslen
‘I hope we get the chance to see some wildlife while we’re out here.’
Mafombe’s eyes flicked between the two of them. He checked his watch, then started twisting the cufflink on his left wrist. Finally he sighed.
‘You drive a hard bargain, Joyce. Nine and a half. I take it to my colleague, then I call you with details of the meet.’
Stella nodded at Eli, who lifted the briefcase onto the table and popped the catches with a double snap. Stella raised the lid, shielding the contents from prying eyes elsewhere in the bar.
She lifted out a handful of bundles and passed them to Mafombe. He ran a long-nailed thumb across the edge of one of the stacks of bills, smiled and nodded, then stuffed them into his inside pockets.
‘Wait!’ she said sharply.
She pulled a ballpoint pen from the inside of her jacket and grasped his hand. She turned it over and wrote a number on his palm.
‘Call me with the details.’
He stood, then bent down towards Stella.
‘You are not afraid I will simply take your money, and to hell with the meeting, Joyce?’
She smiled up at him, a forgiving expression such as a patient school teacher might bestow on a slow but harmless student.
‘You are going to call me with the details by midnight tomorrow,’ she said quietly, maintaining the smile. ‘Fail, and we’ll come back here with a couple of RPGs and blow you, your customers, your house band and the Oasis Lounge into tiny, little,’ a brief pause, ‘fucking pieces.’
Mafombe patted his breast pocket, over the money. Nodded once, then turned on his heel and worked his way back through the crowd.
Gabriel waited until Mafombe had disappeared.
‘We should go. Now. You beat him down on the arrangement fee, but my guess is, a man like that isn’t used to having his pride kicked so hard. There’ll be trouble unless we’re quick.’
‘I agree,’ Eli said. ‘Let’s go. Nice and easy, but nice and fast, too.’
Gabriel and Eli formed a wedge and pushed their way gently but firmly through the drinkers and the dancers until they reached the doors and stepped out into the warm night air.
25
‘Stay alert,’ Gabriel said, as they began walking away from the Oasis Lounge, down the street and back towards the spot where they’d left the car.
After five minutes, when they hadn’t seen anyone, Gabriel permitted himself to relax a little. The absence of streetlights meant visibility was poor, but the moon was bright, giving them enough light to see.
‘How far to the hotel?’ Stella asked.
‘Half a mile? A bit less?’ Eli said. ‘Those kids better have done a good job of watching it.’
‘No reason why they shouldn’t, is there? It’s a pretty standard way of earning a little pocket money. Plus Gabriel asked them,’ Stella replied. ‘Even in London, there are places where the local villains-in-waiting do it. There’s a code of honour.’
‘It’s a mini-protection racket.’
‘Exactly! “Bad area, this, Miss”,’ Stella said, roughening and lightening her voice into a Cockney squawk. ‘“You pay us some cash and we’ll stop your nice shiny motor getting its paintwork keyed or your rims nicked”.’
‘They’d actually steal your wheels?’ Eli asked with a grin.
‘When I’d just qualified as a DC, one of the lads left his patrol car parked in a very dodgy estate in East London while he went to attend a domestic. He came back and the local pond life had stolen the rear wheels. Put the poor sod’s Mondeo up on bricks!’
‘Aren’t they locked on, though?’ Eli persisted, laughing now.
‘Of course! But these little gangs, they build up a set of locking wheel nuts for all the popular makes.’
Gabriel laughed, too, though his eyes were still roving the street ahead, watching for side roads, darker patches of shade, anywhere potential trouble could be lurking.
He inhaled deeply as they passed a creeper that enveloped a single-storey whitewashed house. A wrought-iron ornamental lamppost lit the scene with pale-yellow light.
The overwhelming smell of oranges and honey swirled up into his brain and made him smile. Yellow trumpets with maroon centres hung from pale stems and he watched as a fat-bodied moth resembling a hummingbird hovered just beneath one, poking its rapier-like proboscis deep into the centre of the flower.
‘Smell that,’ he said.
The two women craned their necks upwards and sniffed at the exotic blossoms.
‘Wow!’ Eli said. ‘It reminds me of a flower that grows in Israel. I don’t know its scientific name, but in Hebrew, we call it Lotus Sweetjuice.’
Stella took another sniff. She nodded.
‘I know what you mean. I think it’s a—’
A deep male voice interrupted.
‘What is this? Two beautiful ladies out for a stroll, is it?’
Gabriel cursed himself for not being more alert. Should have heard him coming up on us. From the corner of his eye he registered Eli and Stella adopting non-threatening postures. Non-threatening, but with their weight balanced between their feet. Hands loose by their sides.
Five men faced them, in a loose group. Their dress suggested some sort of gang affiliation. Baggy black basketball vests, each bearing the number 9 crowned with a Nike swoosh. Spotted bandannas tied around their foreheads. Suspicious bulges at the waist beneath the vests. All wore squishy-soled running shoes. Gabriel couldn’t remember if he’d seen the men in the Oasis Lounge.
The man at the centre of the group grinned. Taller than Gabriel by a head, impressively muscled arms folded across his chest, he jerked his chin at the flowering plant.
‘Who is he?’ the man asked Eli, pointing at Gabriel. ‘Your hairdresser?’
The other four men chuckled. Unable to keep still, they shifted from foot to foot, stroking their close-cropped heads and exchanging sidelong glances.
Was it worth reasoning with them? Gabriel dismissed it as a waste of effort. He knew what they could see. Three dumb Western tourists who should have known better than to walk G-City’s streets after dark. Probably loaded with dollars, fancy watches, iPhones, credit cards, the works.
‘If you think you’re going to mug us, you’re going to come off worst.’ He pointed to Stella. ‘Metropolitan Police.’ To Eli. ‘Mossad.’ Finally, he jabbed a thumb into his own chest. ‘British Army.’
The gang leader followed Gabriel’s pointing finger on its three-stop trip round the incomers’ forces. Then he threw his head back and guffawed.
‘Man, you tell a funny story. I give you that,’ he said. ‘Now, hand over all your shit and we’ll let you go back to smelling the sweet flowers of Botswana.’ He looked at Stella’s briefcase. ‘You a sales lady? Got some nice aftershave in there? Face cream for my girlfriend?’
Another chorus of cackles from his subordinates.
Eli took a sharp step forward, causing the closest of the five men to take a step back. She smiled.
‘What are you carrying under the vests, boys?’
With a grin, the leader lifted the hem of his garment. Gabriel saw a gun butt. From the look of it, a small-calibre revolver. The others revealed knife hilts protruding from their waistbands. No match for the Glock or the SIG, but he really didn’t want to start a firefight that would lead to the muggers’ deaths.
‘That enough for you, my lady?’ the leader asked, resting his right hand on the gun butt and grabbing his crotch with his other hand. ‘I’ve got something much bigger down there. Maybe I show you what it can do to a little girl like you.’
‘Very impressive. Shame such a big man as you feels the need to carry a gun just to rob three tourists. Especially when two of them are women. What’s the matter, you worried we’ll kick your arses?’
His eyes widened. Then he threw back his head and laughed for the third time.
Which was a mistake.
The sound died in his throat, as Eli’s blade-like right hand chopped across his larynx. She stepped in close and jerk
ed her knee up hard into his groin, dropping him to the ground. Two punches to his left temple and he was out cold.
Gabriel and Stella moved in together as if they’d been fighting side by side for years. Clearly the heels weren’t an impediment.
He felled one man with a kick to the knee that sheared the tendons and ligaments with a loud crack.
Stella head-butted a second, stunning him so that he fell backwards, hingeing at his ankles. A third man punched Stella in the face, but his aim was off and the blow barely grazed her cheek. Gabriel was dodging knife thrusts from his man, waiting for the chance to inflict a deadly blow of his own.
‘That’s enough!’ Eli shouted, bringing the remaining fighters, Gabriel and Stella included, to a stop.
She pointed the little revolver into the face of the only gang member still standing. The terrified would-be mugger’s hands shot skywards.
‘Don’t kill me!’ he stammered.
‘I’m not going to,’ Eli said. ‘Unless you try anything. In which case I’ll shove this little popgun up your arse and pull the trigger. Now, on your belly.’
He pressed his palms together at his sternum.
‘Please. I am begging you.’
‘Now!’ she shouted.
He dropped to the ground, hands clasped above his head.
Eli whipped a bundle of cable ties from her trouser pocket. In a series of economical moves, she linked his right wrist to that of his nearest neighbour, then repeated the process until all five men were daisy-chained together around the ornamental lamp post.
She flicked out the chamber and emptied the six rounds into the palm of her hand. The now-useless revolver she dropped into the centre of the group. She collected their knives and dropped them into a plastic dumpster nearby.
Then, as calmly as if the whole episode had never happened, she pulled out her phone.
‘Hello? Yes, police? Come to the junction of Old Lobatse Road and Samora Machel Drive. You’ll find four gangbangers handcuffed round a lamp post. They have an illegal firearm.’
Despite the obvious string of questions chirping from the phone’s tinny speaker, she ended the call.
‘Let’s go,’ Eli said.
Ten minutes later, they regained the safety of the well-lit streets of the commercial district and the Avani. The Mercedes was exactly where they had left it. Gabriel glanced at the wheels; all on the Tarmac, not a brick in sight.
Reaching the car, he whistled, loudly. A ‘Hey! We’re back!’ signal to the protectioneers.
He needn’t have bothered. The two boys were already crossing the street to meet them, hips rolling, hands thrust deep into their shorts pockets.
‘Everything cool?’ he asked the taller boy.
‘Chilled, man. Icy,’ the kid said, affecting a half-decent American accent.
He held his hand out.
Gabriel pulled two ten-dollar bills from his wallet and slapped them down into the budding entrepreneur’s palm.
‘Good job. Thanks.’
‘You betcha!’ he said, pointing a finger at Gabriel then clicking his tongue as he dropped his upraised thumb. ‘Gotta blow, Joe.’
‘Gotta scram, Sam,’ his partner piped up.
Shaking his head, Gabriel blipped the fob to unlock the car. He, Eli and Stella climbed inside.
As he pulled away, he heard Stella sigh from the back seat.
‘Well that was intense.’
The next morning, Gabriel answered a knock on the door to find Stella standing there with a triumphant smile on her face.
He beckoned her in and closed the door. Eli emerged from the bathroom.
‘Hey, what’s up?’
‘Guess who just called “Joyce”?’
‘Mafombe came through?’
‘He did. Friday. Back at the Oasis. Four in the afternoon.’
Eli smiled.
‘Good. We can get a couple of steps closer to the killers.’
‘On which subject, now we’ve got a lead on the poachers, can you guys help me work on finding whether Lieberman ever came through here?’
‘Of course,’ Gabriel said. ‘I don’t know why, but I get the weirdest feeling it’s no coincidence we’re all out here together. What are the odds, after all?’
Stella shrugged.
‘He didn’t visit the university. That was just a wild guess.’
‘I’ve had a look up as we’ve been walking around. No CCTV apart from outside some of the big hotels,’ Gabriel said.
‘I know. Not quite the surveillance society we’ve got back home.’
‘Could you try calling Uri again?’ Gabriel asked Eli.
26
TEL AVIV
The three men and two women clustered around the desktop PC had over two hundred years’ service between them defending Israel against its enemies.
Uri Ziff stared at the screen. To his left he could hear the breathing of his immediate superior, Director Avigael Peretz, as she scrutinised the action unfolding in slow motion. To his right, Saul Ben Zacchai, the prime minister, remained silent, though his pungent aftershave gave plenty of signals he was in the room.
‘Back it up again, please,’ Uri asked the young intelligence analyst operating the controls for the CCTV playback.
The keyboard clicked, the mouse whispered across the mat and the footage restarted.
Two men, clad in baseball caps and dark clothes came into shot as they walked along the narrow balcony that led to the front door of Flat 27, 19 Yahalal Street. They kept their faces turned away from the camera mounted on the underside of the next floor up. Both were slim, both tall, both walked with the weight-balanced gait of professional men of action.
They stopped outside Lieberman’s home. The broader of the two stretched out a finger and rang the doorbell. A few moments passed, then the door opened, framing Sarah Lieberman. She brushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear, smiling and nodding as the man who had rung the bell spoke.
Then her expression changed. Her forehead crumpled and her mouth turned down. Eyes wide, she began gesticulating at the men, her mouth working. She nodded in response to another question and stood aside to let the men in. The door closed.
Unbidden by his superior, the analyst fast-forwarded the images for approximately five minutes then slowed the playback once more.
The front door opened and Sarah Lieberman emerged, holding her three-year-old son, Shmuel, by the hand. Her face was a mask of panic, eyes tight, mouth a stiff line. The boy was crying. The two visitors came next, one holding a baby wrapped in a white blanket in his arms.
The group turned left and hurried along the balcony before disappearing from the camera’s view.
The analyst clicked a couple of keys and a new rectangular playback window opened on the screen. It showed a white SUV with blacked-out windows driving away from a parking spot outside the Liebermans’ apartment block, heading west towards the coast.
The analyst stopped the film and turned to look at Uri over his shoulder.
‘We picked up the SUV sporadically after that. Last contact on 91, heading towards Damascus.’
Uri patted the young man on the shoulder.
‘Thanks, Yacob. Good work.’
The senior officers and the prime minister retired to a glass-walled conference room.
‘What happened, Uri?’ Saul asked.
‘I think it’s fairly obvious. Two Syrian agents tricked Sarah Lieberman into coming with them by posing as security agency employees. Us or Shin Bet. Spun her some story about Dov being in trouble. “No time to explain, you’re in mortal danger. Come with us.”’
‘And this happened when, exactly?’ Saul asked.
‘Three weeks ago.’
‘So, two before the princess was shot.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did Lieberman report that his family were missing?’
‘No. We checked with the school. He turned up for work every day just like normal. The headteacher said he even ran the after-school Physic
s club on the Wednesday afternoons. She said he looked a bit off-colour, but he told her he had a cold.’
‘You think the Syrians blackmailed Dov into committing the assassination?’
‘I do. We have him leaving Israel on an El Al flight for London the day before the hit.’
‘Avigael, do you believe that bullshit Tammerlane put out about just happening to be passing by and seeing the shooter’s rifle barrel?’
She put her fingertips to her pursed lips.
‘You know the training, Saul. “There’s no such thing as coincidence. If something smells fishy, start looking for fish”,’ she said.
‘Then what? Tammerlane was involved in a plot to murder a member of the British royal family? Why?’
‘You saw the news! It was a pretext to break off diplomatic relations with us. He’s expelled our citizens. He’s a lifelong enemy of Israel!’
Saul patted the air.
‘Calm down, Avi, I get it.’
‘Plus, I heard a whisper from our friends in London that Tammerlane’s making noises about a referendum on the existence of the monarchy.’
Saul smiled.
‘It’s fine. That’s my view as well. I just wanted to hear it from your lips.’
‘Fine. So hear this, too. After Dov took the shot, Tammerlane killed him. Otherwise he could have spoken out.’
‘Would he, though?’ Uri asked. ‘Even if the Syrians gave him back his family, they could have threatened to kill them at any time if Dov opened his mouth. He was a teacher, remember. He had no training for this sort of thing.’
‘It made Tammerlane look like a hero,’ Saul said, emphasising the final word. ‘He won the election with a landslide after that. One of the most royalist countries on Earth elected a republican. I should have his luck. Sorry,’ he added, as his two most senior foreign intelligence officers looked at him wide-eyed.
‘The wife and kids are dead, too,’ Uri said.
Saul and Avigael nodded. No loose ends. The training.
Uri’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out and glanced at the screen.