Rattlesnake

by Andy Maslen

  To seal the deal, Christie strode round the corner of the reception desk and took up a position behind the shiny chrome bell sitting dead-centre on the counter. He turned to Dan.

  “See? We’re good to go. Now, be a sport and deliver my message, and I’ll look after anyone who stops by while you’re gone. OK?”

  Dan nodded and hurried away, heading for the door to the stairs rather than waiting for an elevator. Smart guy, Christie thought to himself, following Dan as he pushed through the door. Never pays to keep the Agency waiting. Not that you’d know that. Or not if you keep your nose clean, anyway.

  The push-bell pinged, interrupting Christie’s musings on the varying methods he knew to ensure compliance in the unwilling. He turned to find himself facing a man with a bushy moustache below a nose stippled with blackheads. A lime-green T-shirt was stretched over his belly. Another example of that breed of criminal for whom Christie reserved his deepest contempt.

  “Yes, sir, how may I help you today?” Christie asked, staring hard at the man’s pale-blue eyes.

  “Get me a taxi. Koh Pich Street.”

  Christie squinted at the man. Fucking chicken hawks. Fucking British chicken hawks. He gripped the edge of the reception desk, drawing a squeak from the laminated edge.

  Christie shook his head.

  “Not a good idea, buddy. Not tonight. The Royal Gendarmerie are conducting a sweep of the kiddie zone. All the perverts are being taken in to HQ for questioning.”

  The man flushed.

  “What do you mean, ‘perverts’?”

  By way of answer Christie shot a hand out across the two feet that separated them, grabbed the man by a fistful of his hair and slammed his head down onto the counter. He bent his head and growled into the man’s ear.

  “Only one kind of man goes to Koh Pich Street at night. Your kind. If I see you again, you’ll need a wheelchair for your flight home. Now fuck off!”

  He released the man, who reared back, reaching for a handkerchief to stanch the bleeding from his nose. For a moment, Christie thought he was going to argue, but he obviously thought better of it, turned on his heel and fled out into the street.

  He was cleaning the blood off the countertop when Dan reappeared, envelope-free.

  “All done, sir. I handed the envelope to Mr Wolfe personally.” His gaze fell on the bloody tissue in Christie’s hand. “Everything all right, sir? There has been an accident?”

  Christie wadded up the tissue and tossed it into a wastepaper bin under the desk.

  “Nope. No accident. Listen, thanks for helping me out, Dan.”

  He fished a five-dollar bill from his pocket and handed it to the bemused Cambodian.

  Outside the hotel, Christie looked up and down the street. It was starting to rain and there were no taxis to be seen. To his left, about a hundred yards away, he spotted a lime-green T-shirt threading its way through the crowds scurrying for cover. Whistling his favourite tune, Christie took up the chase.

  41

  Not Alone

  I’M not alone. Gabriel felt a sense of relief as he reread the note from Brian Cray. Far from being a one-man crusade in a country he barely knew, it seemed he had allies in every quarter. First Lina, then Visna and now this American journalist, all looking at Marie-Louise Hubert and presumably figuring out a way to bring her to justice. Vinnie had been onto her as well, before someone at Orton Biotech had killed him. No ambiguity here, he thought. This is black and white. Good versus evil.

  He’d spent the last two hours reading the file Visna had lent him. And he was convinced, once again, that evil was real. You didn’t need to be religious to see that. Whether evil existed independently of the people who enacted it on their fellow human beings, or whether evil was simply what people did, he neither knew nor cared. But here, crawling off the page like a spider, was a woman who had enriched herself by exploiting in the absolute worst ways possible, children who had already suffered more than any person should ever have to.

  He took out the bottle of gin he’d bought on the way back to his hotel and poured a couple of fingers into the glass the hotel provided. He’d collected a bag of ice on his way along the corridor and emptied a few chunks into his glass before emptying the rest into an ice bucket. The gin was labelled Gordon’s and came in the trademark green bottle. The label looked right, too. But the fierce spirit coursing down his throat made him cough. He picked up the bottle and turned it to read the label on the back. One phrase stood out.

  Distilled in traditional fashion from Junniper berries.

  “Junniper?” he said out loud, before shaking his head. “Last time I checked, that was juniper.”

  OK, so it was knock-off gin. Probably Chinese vodka mixed with local herbs. But it was strong and not obviously poisonous, so he settled down in the single armchair by the open window and picked up his book. He’d read it before. Crime and Punishment. But that didn’t matter. Watching Raskolnikov dig himself deeper and deeper into trouble was a form of meditation for Gabriel. He let the liquor and the book’s familiar lines seep into his consciousness until it drifted away from the present

  “Du kan inte förråda en dröm,” Britta said from the other side of the room, which appeared to be several hundred miles distant.

  “Hej!” Gabriel said. “What does that mean?”

  “You can’t betray a dream.”

  “And you’re the dream I can’t betray? With Lina?”

  She shrugged and pulled her plait of copper-red hair out behind her head.

  “You worry too much, Wolfe. I dumped you, remember? You love those Old Testament emotions. It’s like you live in 200 BC. But life isn’t always about guilt and betrayal.”

  A white flash blotted out his vision for a second. When the blue afterimage had stopped dancing across his retinas, Britta was gone. A rolling boom of thunder followed a second or two later. He put Raskolnikov down and stood at the window. More spears of lightning were making landfall all over the city. Away to the south he saw a bright orange flash. Maybe an electricity substation had taken a direct hit. Little by little, like snipers taking exploratory potshots, then in a rattling fusillade of an entire rifle company, rain hammered down onto Phnom Penh. Gabriel watched people running for cover, hearing the splashes of their feet in the growing puddles, even from the third floor. He watched for a while longer, then returned to his chair, frowning. Something Britta had said was rubbing up against a sore spot in his brain, but he couldn’t place it.

  Hours later, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. A smell of warm earth rose from the street, blotting out the pervasive smell of dung that, he now realised, he had stopped noticing.

  The next morning, Gabriel locked Visna’s file in the safe inside his wardrobe. He dressed in the black cotton pyjamas again, substituting black boots for the running shoes he’d been wearing since he arrived in Phnom Penh. He tied the black bandanna around his neck and looked at himself in the mirror, fingering the fine silver scar that ran across his cheekbone.

  “You look like a proper Phnom Penh gangster,” he told his reflection. He patted his pockets. “Except gangsters usually have some form of protection.”

  Surely a freelance journalist didn’t warrant this kind of thinking, he mused. Then he heard a different female voice in his mind’s ear. Not Swedish. Israeli. Eli Schochat, the former Mossad agent, was delivering a lesson on the virtues of preparedness.

  “Someone runs into a market with an AK and starts spraying bullets around. A teenager comes at you with a knife. You’re going to … what? Reason with them? Get real, Gabriel. And get a gun.”

  He shook his head. No. No gun. Not necessary. And not enough time, either. But maybe a blade would be a good idea. And he had a shrewd idea where he could find one. He pulled a rectangle of card from his wallet and called the number printed beneath the name.

  “Hello?”

  “Is that Jack? Jack Hunter?”

  “Who is this?”

  “My name is Gabriel. Hunter. Yo
u gave me your card at the airport.”

  “Huh. Same last name. What are the odds? What do you want, Gabriel?”

  “A tactical knife. Something with a nice sharp edge. I can pay.”

  “You ex-forces, are you, using words like tactical? Or just a weekend warrior?”

  “Paras and SAS. We might have a mutual friend. You know Davey Flynn? He’ll vouch for me.”

  “Give me two minutes.”

  The line went dead.

  Ninety seconds later, Gabriel’s phone vibrated. He answered the call before the first note of the ring tone.

  “Davey says you’re OK. What do you need the knife for?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Meet me outside the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum on Street 113 in half an hour. And forget the money. Call it a loan from the quartermaster.”

  The location was an ideal place to meet. Locals and tourists bumped and jostled their way past each other, dodging motorbikes and rickshaws, yakking on mobile phones, taking selfies and generally ignoring Gabriel, which suited him fine. He walked a ten-yard stretch of Street 113 before returning to the corner and repeating the exercise along Street 320. Back at the corner for the fifth time he got tangled up in a group of Chinese tourists, chattering in Mandarin and Cantonese about the “authentic Cambodia.” As he amused himself by simultaneously translating both languages, he almost lost his footing as someone bumped into him hard from behind, grabbing him round the chest to regain their balance. He turned to protest. Whoever it was had disappeared into the crowd. He smiled. Neat move, Jack. Very stealthy. Worthy of a Yinshen fangshi master. He slipped a hand into the pocket of his jacket to find it now contained a rough fabric pouch. He squeezed the sides and felt a hard, roughly cylindrical object inside.

  Next on Gabriel’s shopping list was transport. He didn’t fancy his chances against the nose-to-tail traffic in anything with four wheels. Too slow and clumsy for what he had in mind. A minute or so on the web and he found what he was looking for. An expat going back to England was selling her bike. Gabriel called the number in the ad. A woman answered, confirmed that the bike was still for sale and offered to meet Gabriel at the Independence Monument in half an hour.

  Gabriel walked there, using Samdach Louis Em Street and made it in twenty-four minutes. He sat on the edge of a low wall. Plenty of people were milling around the monument, but no police that he could see. While he waited, he took the package from his pocket. Keeping it tight to his body he looked down at the black nylon pouch and flipped the press-stud off with his thumb. He slid the knife into his palm, curling his fingers round it to keep it hidden from curious eyes. It was a flick knife, with a brass and rosewood handle. Through a narrow slot in the handle he could see a steel blade. The steel was rust-free – not even a speck. What I’d expect from an ex-Para. Letting his hands dangle between his knees and affecting a nonchalance he wasn’t feeling, he pressed the release button. With a damped snick the blade sprang from the handle and locked into place. He glanced down and saw a gleaming sliver of bright steel about five inches long, its double edges winking at him. He folded the blade away, replaced the knife in the pouch and pocketed it again.

  Suddenly the light disappeared. Shadows vanished and everything took on a duller version of its previous colour. Gabriel looked up. Dark grey clouds he could have sworn weren’t there a moment before now boiled up from the horizon. They obscured the sun and he felt the temperature drop by a handful of degrees. Had he been in England someone would, by now, have up rolled their eyes, tutted and muttered, “looks like rain.” As it was, the comings and goings around him didn’t falter. Nobody looked up. Nobody fumbled for an umbrella. As he mused on the apparent indifference Cambodians showed towards the prospect of a drenching, the raspy noise of a small-capacity, four-stroke motorbike engine made him look round.

  He stood and waved at the rider, who was riding directly towards him. She waved back and coasted to a stop in front of him. As if acting in an advert for the biking lifestyle in Cambodia, she took off her open-face helmet and shook out a mane of long blonde hair. A band of freckles crossed the bridge of her nose and petered out on her cheeks.

  “Gabriel?” she asked, smiled to reveal gappy front teeth.

  “That’s me. You must be Christine.”

  She dismounted and offered her hand. After shaking, she turned and pointed at the bike.

  “Meet Dorothy.”

  “In case I’m following the yellow brick road?”

  She laughed.

  “No! I named her after Dorothy Parker, the wild woman of the Algonquin Round Table. Hard living, hard drinking and a fantastic writer.”

  “‘Four be the things I'd have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.’”

  Christine’s eyes popped wide, white round the hazel irises.

  “Very good! You know her work?”

  “I had a girlfriend with freckles.”

  Christine touched her cheek.

  “Did you like them?”

  “I did.”

  “I hate mine. Here’s my favourite quote of hers: ‘If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.’”

  Gabriel frowned. People like me? He switched back to business.

  “Tell me about the bike.”

  “Oh. OK. Well there’s not much to tell, to be honest. She’s Vietnamese. A Detech Espero, basically a copy of a Honda Win, which everybody rides down here. A hundred and ten cc, mechanically sound, blah blah blah and yours for three hundred dollars.”

  Gabriel pointed at the front wheel, which was shod in a rough-treaded tyre.

  “Is that standard rubber?”

  She smiled and shook her head, making her hair bounce.

  “Nope. I put knobblies on fore and aft. Lifted the mudguard, too, and had a guy weld on a bash plate to protect the engine.”

  “I didn’t realise Phnom Penh was such difficult terrain.”

  “I like off-roading, what can I say? So, you want to adopt Dorothy?”

  “Sure.”

  Gabriel handed over the money and received a thin sheaf of paperwork in exchange.

  “You’ll need to register your ownership. Or if you get pulled over you could just flash more of this,” she waggled the bundle of dollars in the space between them. “It’d be cheaper and a hell of a lot quicker.”

  With the deal done, Christine wished Gabriel good riding and turned to flag down a tuk-tuk. He took a moment to admire the curve of her backside in her jeans before turning to the more pressing matter of starting the bike and threading his way into the traffic on Preah Norodom Boulevard and finding his way out of the city and onto National Highway 5.

  Warm from the ride in, the engine caught easily with one push down on the kick-starter. The bike sounded more like a sewing machine than something capable of raising his pulse. He thought briefly of his beloved Maserati, which had been blown into a million pieces by a rocket-propelled grenade a year earlier. Then shook his head to dispel the image. There would be a time for a new car. For now, the modified little motorcycle was perfect for his needs. He toed the gear selector into first, let out the clutch and zipped through the crowds, heading north.

  42

  EboMalX34

  ORTON watched Perec lift a glass cylinder free of the straw. The Frenchman handled the flask as if it were alive and likely to jump free of its captor’s hands. The vessel was roughly the same size and shape as a two-litre water bottle. He held it up so the white crystalline powder within caught the light and glinted here and there. His hands were steady, though sweat ran freely from his forehead and into his eyes. It was only a few paces from the crate containing the EboMal to the pallet housing the bombs, but Orton was tense. Perec turned to face Orton, cradling the glass cylinder against his sweat-stained vest.

  “Your conscience is clear, my friend? Using this on little children?”

  “Let me worry about my conscience,” Orton snapped. “You don’t think your usual ca
rgo destroys lives?”

  Perec shrugged.

  “Just asking.”

  “Well don’t. I’m paying you ten times what your Thai friends scrape together. That gets me your help, not your lazy moralising, OK?”

  He carried the cylinder over to the pallet and laid it in the specially modified interior of one of the cluster bombs. Straightening, he exhaled loudly and wiped his palms on his chest. He stood back to let Orton past as he placed his own cylinder into the remaining bomb.

  “And these are definitely going to work?” Perec asked.

  Orton put his hands on his hips, resenting being questioned by a French junkie pilot.

  “I paid a very skilled Syrian gentleman considerably more than I’m paying you to rework them, from timing sequencer to the detonators and the charges. They’ll work, believe me. We ran trials in his home country.”

  Perec offered another Gallic shrug, all hunched shoulders and pooched out lips, and went to work assembling the bombs.

  43

  A New Source

  FREE of Phnom Penh’s clammy embrace, Gabriel began to enjoy riding. With no helmet to interfere with his vision, he had a wide-angled view of the flat countryside opening out before him. The sky was still an uneasy mixture of greys, purples and the weird sickly yellow. But the clouds were, mercifully, holding on to the rain they clearly contained. He’d last ridden bikes in the desert outside Mosul. That had been purely for fun, racing mates from other patrols across the scrubby sand, going hell for leather on stripped-back Paris-Dakar bikes.

  Dorothy seemed content to chug along at forty miles per hour in top gear. Gabriel checked his watch: 9.15. His calculations for the journey time would give him a safety margin of twenty minutes, allowing for detours or the need to smooth his passage through a police checkpoint with saamnauk. Overhead, flickers of pale grey danced inside the clouds: chain lightning finding areas of higher or lower ionisation, but not yet ready to surge to earth.