by Andy Maslen
For this particular piece of wetwork, he’d selected a pistol. The scratched and dented but perfectly serviceable Colt 1911 was nothing fancy. No Picatinny rail housing a light or reflex sight. No suppressor or muzzle brake. No adjustable backstrap. No under-barrel laser. Just a couple of pounds of black steel housing seven .45 ACP hollow-point rounds in the magazine.
But they’d been made in their millions and found their way into the hands of criminals as well as soldiers and law enforcement professionals from Argentina to Zimbabwe.
In other words, the perfect disposable weapon that would point a million fingers, none of them at him. He’d bought it a week earlier from a dealer in Block 8, a sketchy Gaborone neighbourhood that made Old Naledi look like Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
He stretched out a hand and patted the venerable semi-automatic, where it lay beside him on the Corolla’s dirty grey velour passenger seat.
The hotel lay a couple of miles to the north. The women would have to pass through Bontleng Extension, a four-square-mile neighbourhood where the Africans had run out of money, energy or both to install and power streetlights.
He planned to make the hit roughly in the centre.
After the truck shimmied around a pothole big enough to dump a body into, it resumed a steady path and speed – thirty miles per hour – towards Avani resort. They crossed Old Lobatse Road and entered the kill zone.
The Syrian nodded with satisfaction. Like most of his peers, he was a meticulous planner. How else to command the high fees that kept him in mistresses, sports cars and fine wines? He watched the pinkish-red tail-lights make a right and followed the women into a narrow street lined with cinderblock houses roofed with rushes or corrugated iron.
A dog darted out from an alley, barking at his front wheels. He had time to swerve but held his line, nodding with satisfaction at the dull thump from the rear tyres. He watched the cur limping away in the rear-view mirror. The dog was lucky. They wouldn’t be. They had five minutes to live.
He accelerated to forty-five, then braked suddenly, shot down a side street and floored the throttle, driving along an unnamed, dirt-surfaced street running parallel to the road the women had chosen. At the far end, he cornered hard again, took another right then jammed on the brakes and slewed the car to a halt. He yanked the bonnet release catch, stuck the Colt in the back of his waistband under his jacket, ran round to the front of the car and raised the bonnet.
With his head stuck into the engine bay, which smelled of hot oil, he could look sideways under the bonnet and watch the Hilux approach on the other side of the road.
Seventy yards to go. Sixty. Fifty.
He straightened, looked round as if in surprise and waved his hands in the air from side to side. The universal ‘I need help!’ gesture of broken-down motorists.
For good measure, he pasted an embarrassed yet hopeful expression onto his face. He’d practised in the bathroom mirror back at his hotel until he had it just right. Eyebrows drawn together. Eyes widened. Half-assed smile.
Forty. Thirty. They slowed. Good. Come to me.
Twenty. He heard the Hilux’s brakes bite onto the pads.
They stopped.
Of course they stopped! I’m not white, like you, but I’m sure as hell not black like these Africans.
He turned the volume up on the helpless yet harmless expression until his cheeks quivered with the effort.
Through the windscreen he could see the women conferring. He was no lip reader but it wasn’t hard to decode the conversation.
We should help him.
What if he’s dangerous?
He doesn’t look dangerous. Besides, there are two of us.
I don’t like it.
Come on, the poor guy’s broken down in the shittiest neighbourhood in this shithole country.
The woman with the lighter complexion, the detective, settled the matter. She opened her door and climbed out. Stayed behind the comforting slab of steel, though. OK, so she wasn’t completely innocent in the ways of the world.
‘What happened?’ she called out.
‘My car. It broke down,’ he answered, using his BBC World Service accent. Arab desk, obviously. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but you wouldn’t be able to run me back to my hotel, would you?’
He stayed where he was. No threat. Not yet. The Colt felt good, pushing against his lumbar spine. Comforting. He put his hands behind him and rested them on the front wing. Look, they said. Even less of a threat.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ she asked. Staying behind the door.
The other woman, the one with the darker complexion, stayed in the cab, staring at him through the windscreen. Arab, like him? Israeli? It didn’t matter. She was dead.
‘I’m not one hundred per cent sure, to be honest. I’m a journalist, not a mechanic. I think it might be something electrical.’
He inched his right hand behind him until he could brush the back of it against the Colt’s grip.
‘A journalist? Who for?’
‘What?’ He could feel his smile slipping. Jacked it back into place. She was ten yards away. Not the easiest of shots, especially as he’d have to hit her through the window glass. But not impossible. Not for him.
‘Who do you work for? The BBC?’
‘Yes. I’ve got my ID here. Hold on a second.’
He reached behind him, still smiling, and curled his fingers round the Colt’s chequered grip.
The cop turned to the woman in the cab. She said something. The other woman nodded. The cop started to climb back into the Hilux.
He brought the Colt round in a tight under-arm swing so that the barrel brushed his right thigh on the way up. More economical than a roundhouse move.
The driver was gunning the engine. He had split seconds before the cop slammed her door and they took off.
His first shot shattered the windscreen. Fuck! The round passed harmlessly between their heads, blowing a hole in the rear glass before disappearing into the trees.
He fired again, a double tap. The truck was moving. No time to think. She was bearing down on him. He jumped to one side, firing again. Four more hollow-points slammed into the truck.
He meant to dodge the onrushing vehicle and give chase in the Corolla. But something grabbed the sleeve of his jacket. He whirled round to see the cuff buttons caught in the angle between the front wing and the bonnet prop.
The Hilux’s rowdy engine note boomed in his ears. He wrenched at his jacket and the sleeve tore. Scrambling to find safety, he tried to climb onto the roof.
The slabby front end of the pickup caught his left leg, mashing it against the Corolla’s door. The driver hauled the wheel right, rolling him all the way along the car’s grimy body, crushing him between a combined three and a half tons of Japanese steel.
He screamed as his right shoulder dislocated, then again as the ligaments in his right knee parted in a series of pops he felt rather than heard.
The Hilux screeched its way past the Corolla’s rear bumper, dragging it off its mounts. He fell to the road, clothes ripped from his body. Something hurt deep inside his abdomen and the right half of his field of vision had disappeared.
They’d stopped again. And he knew why.
He had a spare magazine in the front pocket of his trousers. They hung from his belt in shreds, but the lining was intact and he could feel the hard rectangle of metal jammed against the top of his thigh.
He tried to straighten enough to insert two fingers into the pocket and retrieve the magazine. A dark, bad feeling uncoiled like a snake from the region of his kidneys. He gasped with the pain.
Time slowed down. His ears were ringing.
The magazine came free. Somehow he’d maintained his hold on the Colt, even as the bitch driving the Hilux had crushed him half to death. His hand was trembling so violently it took him three tries to drop out the empty magazine.
With shaking fingers, he upended the pistol and tried to feed the magazine into the grip.
It was hard with only half his sight. His hand kept disappearing into the vanished sector. Finally it slid home. He pushed it hard to seat it, ignoring the snake and its needle-pointed fangs that dug into his side.
He raised the Colt in the direction of the Hilux.
Then it flew from his grasp. He couldn’t understand how. When the driver’s second kick landed, he realised.
She loomed over him, a half-woman, wearing a half-expression of fury. In her half-hand, a half-revolver. A tiny thing. Chromed. Little more than a toy.
She squatted in front of him.
‘You’re bleeding badly and it looks like you’ve got an internal haemorrhage as well,’ she said. ‘You’re going to die unless we take you to a hospital. Who are you? Where are you from?’
He’d spent his adulthood taking the lives of others. Now death had come calling, he realised he wanted to save his own.
‘My name is Nazir Aboud al-Javari. I am Syrian.’
‘You’re not a journalist, are you?’
He shook his head and the world lurched. He swallowed against his rising gorge.
‘I am an assassin,’ he whispered. ‘I need a hospital. Take me and I will pay you whatever you ask.’
The other woman, the cop, got to her knees in front of him. Half a face looked at him. The visible eye was narrowed with concern. She was holding something up to his face. Something black. Shiny. A bright white light dazzled him. He squinted into the light.
‘You…illed…rincess…dn’t you?’ she asked.
Her voice warbled, dropping out like a bad short-wave radio connection. He nodded, then retched as the snake surged halfway up his throat.
‘Who hired you?’ she shouted. ‘Who? The Israelis?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Not…them.’
He turned to one side and vomited blood onto the road. When he looked back at her, the visible half of her face began to shrink, a receding pale oval. And he was a boy again, at the National Museum of Damascus on Shukri al-Quwatli Street with his father. In the little auditorium, they sat with half a dozen other people watching a speeded-up film of the phases of the moon. The dark half grew larger and the shining silver oval shrank, first to an ellipse, then a crescent, then a sliver like a curved knife blade and then, finally, like an eye closing, it winked out. All dark now.
His father spoke in the blackness of the auditorium, fragrant with cigarette smoke.
‘Come, Nazir. Time to go home.’
‘I want to watch again, Father. From the beginning.’
His father held him gently by the elbow.
‘No. Your mother is waiting, she —’
Stella stuck two fingers under the man’s jaw, probing for the artery, then held them there while she searched for a pulse. She closed her eyes. Nothing.
She prised the Colt from his grip and stuck the pistol in her waistband. She stood up.
‘Dead?’ Eli asked.
‘Dead.’
‘Shit!’
Stella shrugged.
‘It’s actually not so bad. I recorded his confession.’
‘Will that be enough?’
‘Should be. Deathbed confessions are pretty solid in terms of the law of testimony. No further reason to lie.’
‘How did you know he wasn’t a journalist?’
Stella shrugged.
‘Partly, he just didn’t look right to me. There was something off about his body language. His accent was all wrong, too. BBC journalists haven’t spoken like that for decades.’ She paused, winked. ‘Plus, Don told me the BBC’s only African bureau is in Johannesburg.’
Eli’s eyes widened.
‘You really had me going there! I thought you’d been taking tips from Gabe and all his Oriental mind-control shit.’
Stella grinned.
‘Me? Nope. Just a hardworking copper who knows how to ask the right questions. Now, shall we stay here with another dead body, or get going?’
Eli looked around. Despite the racket they’d created, the street was still dark. Nobody had come out from one of the shacks to see what was going on. In an area like this, residents would know better than to investigate the sound of gunfire or automotive accidents in the middle of the night.
She nodded.
‘Come on.’
Together they ran back to the Hilux. The assassin they left for whoever reached him first, the cops, or the hyenas.
Back at the resort, Eli texted Gabriel a short summary of the day’s events.
The following morning she drove the Hilux out to the Kagosi Group compound and returned the materiel to Taylor, plus one Smith & Wesson Airweight Model .38. One of his men drove her back to the resort, dropping her off at reception with a smile and a wave as he floored the throttle to swerve the pickup round in a tight, rubber-burning circle on the tarmac.
She and Stella checked out, drove the rental Merc to the airport and, after a little research on the part of the sales clerk, bought two one-way tickets to Vientiane. They paid for access to one of the lounges and kept their heads down inside its cocooned, sound-deadening confines, drinking gin and tonics and eating salty plantain chips until their flight was called.
A TV was playing a rolling 24-hour news channel in the corner. The crawl caught Eli’s eye. She rose from the leather armchair and wandered closer to read the yellow-on-red text.
Murder and mayhem in Old Naredi… Local businessman and four other men brutally attacked at Oasis Lounge, three slain…police searching for four Afrikaaners…
She nodded. Good boy, you earned your extra fifty.
35
DUBAI
With the rental Jeep Wrangler’s air con blowing icy air into the cabin, Gabriel pulled out from the Hertz parking lane at Dubai airport. His taciturn companion grunted out directions at each intersection.
In total, Gabriel reckoned the man, who hadn’t given his name, had spoken no more than twenty words. Even when they’d stopped at a roadside grill to get breakfast, he’d merely pointed to a sandwich and drink and handed over his money to the cook in silence.
Gabriel named him Jiàntán – ‘chatty’.
The drive took an hour and five minutes, including ten for the breakfast stop. The E88’s tarmac was glassy-smooth, and Gabriel relaxed, steering with a single finger resting lightly on the bottom of the wheel.
To each side, the flat, sandy landscape extended to the horizon, punctuated here and there by scrubby bushes low to the ground and the sun-bleached skeletons of long-felled trees. Gigantic red wooden spools lay in groups every five miles or so. What were they? Electrical? Left over from when the highway was cabled for streetlight?
Jiàntán jerked a stubby forefinger at the windscreen.
‘Left.’
Gabriel nodded and turned off the highway onto a dirt road that curved lazily eastwards. He smiled to himself. Twenty-one.
Even off-road, the Jeep’s suspension and four-wheel drive had little work to do. After half a mile, the track began breaking up, before disappearing altogether. Now the stocky 4x4 could dig in and prove its worth. Gabriel let the wheels slide over the sand, enjoying the sensation of the four-wheel drive system finding-losing-finding grip and powering ahead all the while, its turbodiesel engine making light work of the terrain.
A snaking line on the horizon resolved into a ridge of rock and sand. Beyond its crumbling edge, Gabriel saw a dried-out riverbed – a wadi – as he crossed a short stretch of metalled roadway that spanned it. He glanced left and followed the ancient watercourse until it disappeared beyond a distant dune.
The sandy track replaced the Tarmac and he searched the way ahead for a building or some other sign they might be nearing the factory.
The track split in a soft, curving Y and Jiàntán indicated the right-hand fork. After five hundred yards he pointed to the right. A long, low concrete building, painted the same colour as the greyish sand it stood amidst, squatted behind a row of low-growing trees.
‘That’s it?’ Gabriel asked.
Jià
ntán nodded and unclipped his seatbelt. Within seconds a warning chime bonged inside the cabin. Gabriel ignored it and swung into an access road leading from the track to the factory’s front gate.
No guard came out to question them. Gabriel saw no dogs prowling on the other side of the chain-link fence, then mentally slapped his forehead. Idiot! It’s fifty Celsius out there. A dog would fry from the inside out.
A metal squawk box mounted on a wooden post seemed the likeliest method of gaining admittance.
Gabriel turned in his seat.
‘Shall I go?’
Jiàntán grunted. Stayed put. Gabriel climbed out, grinning, and flinched as the wall of bone-dry heat smacked him in the face.
Feeling runnels of sweat dripping from his armpits and the space between his shoulder blades, he thumbed the button beneath the speaker grille.
He looked round while he waited for someone to answer. Even through his sunglasses the sun was blinding, bouncing off the sand, the white-painted building beyond the wire, the Jeep’s white paintwork.
‘Tahduth.’ Speak.
‘Aismi hu Gabriel Wolfe. Yusuf yatawaqaeni.’ My name is Gabriel Wolfe. Yusuf is expecting me.
He heard a harsh buzz from the speaker, then the latch to his right clunked. Sand must have entered the hinge mechanism: the gates screeched as they juddered apart.
Gabriel climbed back into the Jeep’s chilly interior, pushed the gear sector into drive and eased between the gates and on towards the white-painted, windowless building housing the Four-Point Star’s ivory-processing operation.
The front of the building was as bland as the side of a refrigerator – an unbroken expanse of white-rendered concrete that stretched for a hundred yards end to end. A single door interrupted its minimalist surface. Gabriel parked the Jeep in front of it. To each side, white cars and 4x4s were lined up in a straggling row. No need for accurate parking when there was this much space to play with.