Rattlesnake

by Andy Maslen

  Gabriel woke four hours later, slumped in the chair and with a back that felt like somebody had bolted it together from three bits of planking instead of thirty-three separate vertebrae. He rolled the cricks out as best he could, showered and changed into jeans, T-shirt and navy windcheater and headed out to grab some breakfast from a street stall. Munching the fried chicken and rice, he hailed a tuk-tuk.

  “Hospital, please,” he said in passable Khmer.

  At the hospital, he dismounted, paid the driver and crossed the street to observe the comings and goings before entering. The building looked more like a futuristic hotel or airport terminal than a hospital. Sleek geometric design, modern materials and manicured lawns out front, with the name rendered in large blue capitals.

  Inside, he marched up to the reception desk, which was staffed by two navy-uniformed women, one white with blonde hair, one with the characteristic round face, olive skin and dark hair of a Cambodian.

  He approached the desk on the blonde’s side. She was on the phone and smiled in welcome to him as she spoke into the receiver. The call ended, she looked up at him.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I’m the deputy director of Flowers of Hope. I just got in from Paris. Our director is here. Marie-Louise Hubert. I must see her.”

  He injected a note of command into his voice, knowing that in all likelihood there would be an order not to permit visitors.

  The woman consulted her screen, short unvarnished nails clicking on a hidden keyboard.

  “Well, sir,” she said, in an accent Gabriel immediately placed as Stockholm, which made him think of Britta, “Madame Hubert is here, but her condition is critical. Nobody may see her.”

  “I understand completely. But I must see her. It’s very urgent. Which floor is her room?”

  “It’s the third floor, but you can’t see her, sir. I’m very sorry. Hospital rules.”

  Which is fine, Gabriel thought. Because the floor number was all I wanted.

  “OK, I understand,” he said. “Thank you.”

  He walked away, back to the revolving doors and out onto the street. Outside he turned left and walked to the corner, walked the length of the block and turned left again. He was now at the back of the hospital. Halfway down the block he came to the entrance he’d imagined he’d find. Ambulances were entering and leaving through a wide gateway. Beyond the entrance he could see two loading bays, one that appeared to be for the patients brought in the ambulances, the other for supplies. The latter was presently occupied by a white-painted truck, which faced out towards Gabriel.

  Knowing that acceptance in bureaucracies, from office buildings to hospitals, was ten percent authorisation and ninety percent confidence, he strode up to the loading bay, head high, and simply walked in to the storage facility beyond. A couple of Cambodian workers were unloading the truck. They shot Gabriel cursory glances but on his cheerful “Suostei!” they nodded and went back to their cartons and drums. He was looking for something in particular. He found it on a chromed rack in a corner.

  48

  I Didn’t Have Any Grapes

  DIETER Grunwald’s fatigue was threatening to overwhelm him. He’d flown straight to Phnom Penh from a one-month stint in Yemen and had been surviving on an average of three hours’ sleep a night for the whole time. As a volunteer with Médecins Sans Frontières, the thirty-one-year-old plastic surgeon spent a quarter of his year travelling from one trouble spot to the next. His job was to perform cleft palate operations on babies and young children, and, where necessary, routine surgery up to and including limb amputations.

  So when the black-haired hospital doctor asked if he wanted a hand unloading the surgical equipment from the truck and onto an ancient-looking trolley, he accepted gratefully.

  “You look exhausted,” the other doctor said with a sympathetic smile.

  “That’s because I am,” he replied ruefully, struggling with the heavy rear door of the truck.

  “Here, let me get that. You take your kit into the hospital. There are a couple of porters back there who’ll give you a hand.”

  “Thank you. Make sure it latches.”

  Dieter pushed the trolley away from the truck as the rear door banged shut behind him.

  Watching the German doctor leave, Gabriel banged the door closed, leaving the locking lever down so it prevented the door from latching. When the man moved out of sight round a corner, Gabriel opened the door and climbed in. On a row of hooks screwed to the left-hand side of the cargo space, white coats hung like the ghosts of medics too tired to continue. He riffled through until he found the right size and swapped it for his own. They were in virtually all respects identical, except this one had the charity’s red-and-white logo stitched onto the left breast. A box of MSF name badges on scarlet lanyards sat atop a steel filing cabinet. Gabriel rummaged through looking for one with a digital photo that approximated his own features. At the bottom he found a match: Doctor Peter Eikorn. The man in the photo was fatter in the face than Gabriel and he had longer hair, but the colouring was right and the discrepancy could easily be explained away as the result of fatigue, stress and weight loss.

  With the badge bouncing against his chest, Gabriel marched into the hospital along a grey-painted corridor, searching for the stairs. He emerged onto the ground floor through a plain wooden door. Immediately, he was part of a throng of medics, nurses, patients, police officers and visitors, all in a hurry, faces turned up as they searched for signs or down at smartphone screens or clipboards. Nobody looked at him. Hidden in plain sight.

  He found the main signboard at a T-junction of corridors, the leg of which led back to the reception desk. He turned his back before the blonde from Stockholm caught sight of him, and stared up at the board. Finding the department he wanted, he moved towards a door marked with a green-and-white stairwell sign.

  He bounded up two flights and pushed through a swing door into another corridor, this time painted in that shade he had always mentally labelled, “institutional green.” He followed signs until he came to the pharmacy.

  He took a few deep, rushing breaths, ruffled his hair into spikes, took two steps back, then rushed the door, barging it open and right back against the wall.

  The pharmacist, a middle-aged man with gold-rimmed glasses and an almost-bald head look up, startled.

  “Morphine, now!” Gabriel barked in English. Then again in French, “Morphine! Maintenant!”

  The pharmacist’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth and Gabriel guessed he might be about to ask for a prescription or some other piece of paperwork. He decided to forestall him.

  “It’s Marie-Louise Hubert. She has a brain bleed. I need it now!”

  The pharmacist glanced at the MSF logo and Gabriel’s badge. Gabriel was counting on everyone on the staff knowing about their VIP patient. His heart was pounding as hard as it would be if he were genuinely trying to save a patient from the agonies of a brain haemorrhage. Outwardly, he presented as a harried foreign doctor expecting immediate help.

  “I need authorisation,” the pharmacist eventually said in English, pushing the glasses higher on his nose and scrutinising Gabriel.

  Gabriel pushed his face up against the pharmacist’s. He spoke one set of words, disrupting the normal pattern of pauses for breath, while inserting another, and began moving his eyes in a ritual pattern taught to him many years before by Master Zhao. The pharmacist’s pupils dilated, magnified by his glasses to huge black circles.

  “Listen to me. Marie-Louise Hubert (as you) is in great pain. She has (listen to me) many powerful friends on the (you want to help me and) hospital’s board and executive committee and within the (you want to get me) Royal Gendarmerie (lots of morphine). I have (right now) flown here from Berlin to treat her (because they’ll punish you) and you must give me morphine right (otherwise) away. Or would (like in the bad times) you prefer to explain yourself down at Police Headquarters?”

  Gabriel stood back, feeling sick at having to use memorie
s of the genocide to intimidate a perfectly innocent civilian who was just following protocol. The pharmacist blinked and shook his head, then passed a hand over his forehead, which was beaded with sweat. He hurried away from the counter and returned a few minutes later with a white cardboard carton the same size and shape as Gabriel had seen in the window of an upscale cake shop. He flipped open the top and nodded at the row of vials of clear liquid sitting on a bed of cotton wool.

  “Syringes, too, please,” Gabriel said. The pharmacist bustled away and returned with a second, smaller carton. Gabriel placed it on top of the first, thanked the man in English, French and Khmer, then left.

  Arriving on the third floor, Gabriel looked each way down a corridor that led to what he assumed were private rooms. It was easy to see which was Marie-Louise Hubert’s. A uniformed gendarme sat slumped on a hard plastic chair outside a door about thirty feet away. Gabriel hurried towards the guard, who looked up at the sound of his footsteps on the hard, polished floor. He jumped to his feet and reached for the pistol on his belt.

  Gabriel reached him before he could draw his weapon.

  “I need to draw blood. You understand?”

  The gendarme shook his head.

  Gabriel tried again in French. Received the same response. His Khmer wasn’t good enough for a third try, so he held up the syringe he’d filled in the stairwell.

  “Urgent, yes. Medicine?”

  The gendarme shrugged and opened the door. He followed Gabriel into the room, closing the door behind him.

  Gabriel chopped the man hard on the left side of his neck, just above the collar of his shirt. He crumpled to the floor, banging his head against a wooden bookcase on the way down. Gabriel removed the pistol – a Makarov identical to the one Christie had dropped in the mud – from its holster and stuck it in the back of his waistband beneath the white coat.

  At the centre of a mass of wires, tubes and coiled cables, lying in a white hospital bed beneath a sheet, was Marie-Louise Hubert. Her face was pale and bore faint traces of her makeup, which had clearly been hastily wiped off.

  Around the bed, monitors and drug delivery devices beeped. She had been intubated, and her lips were taped closed around a clear plastic pipe connected to a ventilator that hissed and wheezed as it pumped air into her lungs.

  Gabriel stepped closer. Blood was leaking from the corners of her eyes, her ears, her nostrils and the corners of her mouth.

  Her hands lay above the sheet, each punctured by a cannula fed by a thin plastic tube that led back to a hanging bag of clear fluid. Holding the cannula on her right hand firm against her skin, he disconnected the tube and folded the end over, then placed it between his teeth.

  He inserted the hypodermic into the cannula and pushed until the needle was as far as it could go. Just for a second, he hesitated, thumb on the plunger. Then the images from the photos, and the sound of the bombs detonating over the orphanage playground flashed in his mind’s eye.

  In a single, smooth movement, he depressed the plunger, pumping a solution containing ten milligrams of morphine into her bloodstream. He refilled the syringe from a second vial and injected her again.

  He watched the monitor’s yellow digital readout for her pulse rate.

  It jumped from sixty to sixty-five.

  He repeated the injection.

  Then the digits fell back to sixty again.

  Repeated.

  Forty.

  An alarm sounded from the machine. A frantic beeping that he knew would be triggering an alarm on a central panel somewhere.

  Repeated.

  Then all the elements of the display flickered and turned from green or yellow to red. The machine emitted a single continuous tone.

  She was flatlining.

  The pulse rate indicator read zero.

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “I didn’t have any grapes.”

  Gabriel reconnected the tube to the cannula, dropped the used syringe and the remaining morphine into a yellow-and-red hazardous waste bin, and left the room.

  Instead of heading for the elevator he’d arrived in, he ran for the door at the far end of the corridor that led to a stairwell. As the door closed behind him, he heard the sound of running feet.

  The stairwell ended in a basement. Through a grimy rectangle of glass in the door between the elevator lobby and the floor beyond, Gabriel checked that the coast was clear. He’d found the hospital laundry. Huge stainless steel washing machines and dryers were thrumming, and here and there he observed people carrying neat piles of bedlinen or roughly bundled scrubs in mint green and coral pink.

  He pushed through the door and headed for an exit on the far side of the vast space. He drew a few stares but pantomimed being lost, holding his hands out to his side, palms uppermost, and shrugging apologetically.

  The exit led to a short corridor that opened out into a parking garage. Most of the cars were Japanese or Korean, although along one wall, he did notice a small but impressive collection of German cars. He trotted past the Audis, Mercs and BMWs and up a one-storey, circular ramp that led to the outside. Blinking in the sun, Gabriel looked around, getting his bearings. He was at the side of the hospital, on a quiet road free of pedestrians and vehicles. He stripped off the white coat, rolled it into a ball and stuffed it into a rubbish bin, covering it with a crumpled newspaper he’d fished out first. As he turned away, the pistol dug into the small of his back. Should he keep it? He wasn’t expecting to have to shoot his way out of the country, but a gun was a gun. He adjusted his windcheater to cover it, then walked to the end of the road and merged into the crowds. He called Jack once more and offered to return the knife. They agreed to meet at the InterContinental in an hour.

  When Gabriel walked in to the bar, he saw Jack immediately. And he wasn’t alone.

  49

  Mission Planning

  JACK and Davey rose from their buttoned-leather club chairs as Gabriel arrived at their table. The three men shook hands. Gabriel wasn’t surprised to find Davey there. He’d put together a picture in his mind of who the hunters might be, and it seemed likely that ex-forces guys would predominate in the membership.

  “Drink?” Davey asked.

  “I’ll get them,” Gabriel said. “What are you guys having?”

  “G and T, please. Large one,” Jack said, sitting back down into the chair’s comfortable embrace.

  “Me too,” Davey said.

  Gabriel returned a few minutes later with three large gin and tonics on a tray. As he moved through the tables, the bursting bubbles from the tonic released fragrant aromas of juniper and lime.

  He handed the two men their drinks. “Cheers, chaps!” he said.

  They chinked glasses and each took a pull on the fizzing cut-glass tumblers of alcohol.

  Gabriel pulled the knife out of his jeans pocket and handed it back to Jack.

  “Thanks for the loan.”

  “Get the job done, did you?”

  “Yes. You might want to give that a bleach bath.”

  “Got it.”

  Jack opened his mouth to speak but was cut off by a scream of sirens. Gabriel looked over his shoulder and saw a stream of police cars ploughing through the traffic towards the hospital.

  Davey jerked his chin towards the door once the noise had abated.

  “They something to do with that bit of kit you just handed over?”

  Gabriel shook his head.

  “Honestly? No.”

  “Fair enough. So, listen. We’ve got an operation planned for tomorrow night. We call them round-ups. There’s a place on Koh Pich Street where the nonces like to go. We’re raiding it at midnight. We could do with an extra pair of hands.”

  “What do you mean by ‘round-up’?”

  Jack spoke.

  “Exactly what it says, mate. Don’t worry, we don’t go in tooled up like you lot used to. There won’t be any need for body bags. We make citizens’ arrests and leave them outside the Royal Gendarmerie headquarters. Take a shitload o
f pictures and put them on the internet. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter. Kind of a name-and-shame thing, isn’t it, Davey?”

  Davey nodded, finishing his drink.

  “The idea is to put the paedos off from coming here and cause the local cops some embarrassment. Half of them are taking kickbacks from the pimps and the brothel owners.”

  Gabriel took another long drink of his gin. Why not? These boys had helped him out. And the men they were planning to take into custody made his flesh crawl.

  “OK. When and where?”

  Jack and Davey filled him in on the details. They were to meet at a backpackers’ bar called The Happy Kangaroo at eleven thirty the following evening. There would be a raiding party of ten. Two to disable the door staff and replace them, keeping watch for police. Eight to form the snatch squad. They would burst in, relying on the element of surprise, and grab as many perverts as they could, using cable ties to handcuff them. Two more hunters would wait at the end of the street in a rented truck. They would drive up to the door to collect the prisoners when the two on the door sent a pre-arranged text. From infil to exfil and extraction, no more than five minutes.

  After leaving the InterContinental, Gabriel called Lina.

  “Everything OK?” she asked.

  “Yes, fine. Why do you ask?”

  “I’ve been hearing whispers about Flowers of Hope and Marie-Louise Hubert. There was an attack at their orphanage. And she died earlier today. Heart failure, apparently. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  “How about dinner?” Gabriel asked.

  “Dinner would be lovely.”

  Before she could suggest any more fried-spider joints, Gabriel made one of his own.

  “Great. Let’s eat at Indochine. I’ll book a table for eight. Do you want to meet there?”