by Andy Maslen
At this, there was a scraping of chairs and another handful of people got up and left, keeping their eyes down as they did so. That left about eleven or twelve visitors, along with their wide-eyed and smiling chaperones. Sophie reached out and squeezed Gabriel’s hand.
“I’m so glad you’re still here Gabriel,” she whispered, bestowing on him another radiant smile. “Robert is so inspirational, don’t you think?”
Actually, I think he’s full of weapons-grade horseshit, but OK.
“Totally,” he said. “I can feel God’s love pouring out of him.”
She turned to him, eyes glistening. “I know! It’s like he’s speaking God’s truth to us right in this room, isn’t it? I love him.”
“He’s really something,” Gabriel whispered back.
The speech was drawing to a close. Exhortations to live a purer life. To release oneself from the shackles of doubt and greed and a whole lot of other unsavoury personality characteristics. And, most importantly, to join the organisation of which Robert was the local shop steward: The Children of Heaven. Gabriel tuned back in for Slater’s concluding remarks.
“If you are ready, come to God now. Do it now. Now is the time to begin to live as God intended you to. We have everything you need here. Clothing. Home-cooked food. Warm, comfortable, safe accommodation. Meaningful work. Friends.” He paused. “We even have Wi-Fi!”
There was a big laugh at this, though Gabriel saw it for what it was, a disorientating juxtaposition of a cutting-edge contemporary reference with some fairly old-school talk of redemption and purity. He looked around the room. Apart from himself and Sophie, there were five other lost souls still with their smiling handlers. The rest of the audience consisted of initiates or whatever they called themselves. He turned to Sophie.
“What about my stuff? My rent? My whole life is still out there. I can’t just put it on hold.”
“Oh, you don’t put it on hold, Gabriel. You press ‘delete’. Join us and you won’t ever have to worry about anything ever again. It’s a life of blissful connection.”
Until you make the ultimate electrical connection, you mean.
Gabriel frowned, ran his hand through his hair, looked around, rubbed his chin. Performed a little act for Sophie: ‘the waverer’.
“You know,” she said in a low voice, closing the distance between them and placing her right hand on his knee. “When Robert talked about transitory sexual relationships with strangers, he meant out there. Not in here. I mean, I’m not a nun.” She widened her green eyes a fraction as she stared into Gabriel’s dark brown ones.
Gabriel decided it was time to stop wavering. He inhaled deeply and let it out with a smile, then spoke.
“And I’m not a monk. Where do I sign?”
She clapped her hands and her face lit up with what appeared to be a genuine smile of happiness. Her eyes crinkled at the corners and she showed those immaculate teeth again.
“Oh, Gabriel. I’m so thankful. Come on. Let’s go and meet Robert.”
33
How to Kill a Politician
OVER THE YEARS, JARDIN’S TASTE for killing had mutated. In the early days of Eden’s existence, he’d amused himself by driving out into the rainforest in a 4x4 pickup with a high-powered Mossberg hunting rifle equipped with a telescopic sight. The rifle had been his first purchase in Brazil, and he had become an expert shot. The local Indian tribes were peaceful, unused to seeing white people. When he first glimpsed one of them, pin-sharp through the precision-ground optics of the sight, he’d been entranced by the man’s utter focus as he puffed out his shiny, ochre-daubed cheeks to expel the poison-tipped dart from the end of his blowpipe. A black and white monkey crashed through the lower canopy and bounced off the thick leaf mould beneath, the scarlet feathers of the dart like a splash of blood at its scrawny neck.
As the man straightened after picking up the monkey by a hind leg, Jardin fired. It was a perfect kill, straight through the heart. The man dropped in a heap, crushing the monkey’s carcass underneath his own. Jardin didn’t bother to bury the man’s corpse, reasoning, correctly, that scavengers would do a far more effective clean-up job than he could.
Exhilarated, he’d returned to Eden and summoned two of the most beautiful female Children to his house. The following morning, as the girls had lain sleeping in each other’s arms, he’d driven into Nova Cidade and purchased five more boxes of shells for the Mossberg.
Even though he was careful, and restricted himself to very occasional trips into the forest, he knew the local Indians would eventually become suspicious of the tribe of white people living next door to their lands.
He’d planned the first attack on the outside world a year to the day after shooting the hunter. It was a gun attack on a nightclub in Berlin. He’d had one of his Children there secure a job in the kitchen, then simply begin her shift armed with a mini-Uzi submachine gun and two spare thirty-two-round magazines under her chef’s whites. Fifteen clubbers had been seriously injured or killed, and the Child herself had been shot dead by police as she left the club by the front door, still carrying the smoking Uzi. Media reports described her as smiling, “beatifically”.
From that moment on, he’d abandoned retail killing for wholesale slaughter. Initially, he’d found the sheer pleasure of wielding such power and control over people utterly fulfilling. But purely by chance, he’d discovered that he could also turn his amusements to financial advantage. After he’d arranged the murder of half the board of directors of a French bank at a charity football match, the bank had become the subject of a fierce takeover battle among two of its closest rivals. The shares, of which Jardin held 200,000, doubled in value inside a week. His profit was almost five million euros. It was, as he confided to one of the Aunts at Eden, “my conversion on the road to Damascus”.
From then on, he had contrived to find ways to benefit financially as well as emotionally from the attacks. By spreading his operations across the world, he’d managed to go undetected by the various law enforcement agencies who would always spring into impotent action every time one of his disciples detonated a suicide bomb, shot up a government building, or unscrewed the valve on a canister of poison gas on a crowded underground train. Oh, they might claim to have leads, but that was just posturing for the media. The Children never survived; he’d programmed them not to, and there was never enough of a pattern for police or counterintelligence agencies to join the dots. When it amused him, he would even arrange for the local Aunts and Uncles to make anonymous calls to the principal news media outlets, claiming responsibility on behalf of this Muslim group, or that Trotskyite gang. Neo-Nazis worked brilliantly if he wanted to blow up a centre for refugees from the Middle East. And when was there ever a shortage of those to target?
And now, his business partner, a man who definitely favoured the one-victim-at-a-time approach to the business of killing, had asked him for help taking out a couple of interfering politicians. What a challenge!
Spread out before him on his dining table, a deep-red slab of mahogany cut from one of his own trees, was an aerial photograph of the Santa Augusta Hydroelectric Generating Station. Blown up and printed out on a sheet of paper the size of a bus-stop poster, the photo showed every detail of the plant’s layout, from the dam itself, to the pumping station, control room, substation, and management offices. The network of pylons and high-tension cables snaked away from the plant like strands of pale grey barbed wire laid across the deep, rich green of the forest.
According to Toron, the opening ceremony was to be held in a small courtyard in front of the pumping station. A large, fake ‘start’ button would be mounted on a wooden box attached to the dais, and when the two men jointly pressed it, a worker inside the control room, watching on CCTV, would press the real button and start the generator turbines.
Clearly, the best approach would be to have one of the Children insinuate themselves into the crowd marshalled by the state president’s media minders to applaud dutifully at his c
lichés. Someone with the strength to muscle his way to the front, but also the ability to blend in and not draw attention to himself. Yes, it would have to be a man. Someone preferably with a background in the military, as Jardin could imagine there might be a need to deal with security personnel on his way to the event’s climax. Which was a problem. Having consulted his database, he knew that he had any number of junior bureaucrats among the Children, whether from the world of business or that of officialdom. There was also no shortage of over-privileged brats from families so wealthy they’d had no need to learn a trade or get their hands dirty. But the one category of disciple he lacked was ex-soldiers.
He lacked them at the moment, at any rate. He opened the lid of his laptop and composed an email to all the members of the Elect around the world.
34
How Time Flies
THE FREEING, THEY CALLED IT. Along with the five other recruits he’d seen in the house behind Sloane Square, Gabriel had taken part in a ritual of destruction that reduced two of the three women in the group to tears. Whether of joy or sadness, it was impossible to tell. They had stood in a circle and placed their phones in front of them, plus any MP3 players, tablets, and laptops they’d brought in with them. Then, to the background of a softly sung piece of baroque choral music—Gabriel hazarded a guess at Bach—they had stamped and ground their heels into the slivers of technology. The screens cracked, the cases splintered and, for one or two devices, bright white sparks leapt and fizzled from their ruined interiors, releasing an acrid smell of ozone and burnt plastic. Next were their purses, wallets, and handbags. Banknotes, plastic cards, all forms of ID, credit card receipts, and even dry cleaning tickets were cut in half, dropped into a steel bowl half-full of a transparent gel, and finally set alight, whereupon they released greenish-blue flames and the unmistakable aroma of burning petrol.
They followed Robert Slater through a corridor into a room blazing with blue-white halogen light where two older women, both with grey hair cropped short, handed out loose white trousers with drawstring waists and matching smock-like shirts. They looked around for changing cubicles, but there were none.
“Do not feel shame, Children,” one of the women said. “You were made in God’s image, and you are beautiful in his eyes.”
And so, shyly, without making further eye contact, they changed out of their own clothes and assumed the uniform of the Children of Heaven. They were a mixed bunch: an overweight young man with black plastic discs in both earlobes and a wispy beard, whose pallid, doughy flesh looked as though he had spent his entire life indoors, possibly behind closed curtains; two young girls of maybe seventeen or eighteen, gym-trim and toned; and a woman, maybe mid- or late-twenties, whose voluptuous frame reminded Gabriel of an Old Master painting of Venus.
Out of the corner of his eye, Gabriel noticed racks of thin scars on the insides of both the skinny women’s arms—just like those on the poster model in Eloise Payne’s bedroom. The plump woman lacked the scars, but her back was decorated with a tattoo of a Geisha that stretched from one shoulder blade to the other. The older grey-haired woman who hadn’t spoken yet gathered up their clothes into a multi-coloured bundle and left through a side door.
That was when the cult revealed its true nature. Separated from their friends and families, colleagues and contacts, with no way of reaching the outside world, no money, and no way to get any, Gabriel and his fellow inductees were powerless within the grip of the Children of Heaven. He supposed he could have fought his way out if he’d wanted to. But he doubted that was an option for the others. Even the two younger women, who looked fit enough, were unlikely to be much good at punching anything harder than a personal trainer’s sparring glove.
They were ushered into a small room with twelve red plastic chairs arranged in a circle. Six stern-looking cult members, all between eighteen and twenty-five, he judged, were sitting in alternate chairs. Once they were all sitting, Slater walked in. He sat in the twelfth chair and looked round at the new recruits. A stern, unsmiling gaze. Then he spoke.
“You have all done terrible things in your lives. Things of which you are ashamed. Things that make you wish you could go back and undo the damage you did. Now is the time to confess those deeds. Cleanse yourself of this guilt. Let it out and let it go.”
His tone was not kind, but earnest. He stared at each of them in turn until one of the women broke down in tears. She related a story of how she’d bullied another girl at her private boarding school until her victim had first begun self-harming, then taken a craft knife and slit the arteries in her wrists and feet and bled to death in a bath full of warm water. Her story opened the floodgates and soon each of them, including Gabriel, had unburdened themselves with stories of romantic betrayal, criminality, cheating in university exams, even, in one young woman’s case, animal cruelty. Gabriel had enough demons of his own to trump all their stories put together, but he contented himself with a fabricated narrative of spying on a work colleague and revealing his affair to his wife.
This ‘cleansing circle,’ as Slater put it, was merely the first in a series of demeaning and shaming exercises that went on for three days, from five a.m. until one or two in the morning, the cult members taking turns to sit in on and run the meetings. Such food as they were allowed may have been home-cooked, but it was served in tiny portions and consisted of steamed vegetables and plain rice. The starvation diet, the endless cleansing circles, the sleep deprivation, and the lack of any contact with the outside world, or even the other ‘Children,’ depleted their energy and psychological resilience to the point that the new recruits were listless, fretful, and often in tears. For Gabriel, it was a delicate balancing act. He had to maintain a facade of helplessness while drawing on deep physical and mental reserves instilled by Master Zhao and by his SAS instructors to stay outside the closed world the cult was building around its latest members.
Now, though, that period of indoctrination had ended. They had been driven in a minibus out of London, along the M4 motorway to a manor house set deep in a wooded estate in the Berkshire countryside. Gabriel had developed an aversion to such residences during an earlier mission and experienced a flutter of anxiety as the rambling Elizabethan building came into view.
Elysium, they called it, and it housed almost a hundred cult members. Most were the so-called Children—young people, very few of whom looked older than twenty-five and many younger than twenty, from privileged backgrounds. Their names were a giveaway: Tabithas and Jemimas, Emilys and Sophies; Rafes and Jeremys, Jontys and Florians. Not a Dean, Crystal, or Tiffany in sight. Their voices were another. Cultured, cultivated drawls, now inflected with a bright, breezy tone that Gabriel quickly found wearying, even as he affected the same shining-eyed wonderment at their apparent good fortune.
Aside from the Children, there were the Uncles and Aunts. These were the officer class. Sentinels, whose job it was to maintain discipline, assign tasks each day, and, most importantly, conduct the regular sessions of breast-beating, confession, and question and answer meetings on matters of cult doctrine.
On his first day at Elysium, Gabriel was interviewed by a woman who called herself Aunt Christine. She wore the prescribed white outfit, in her case a snug trouser suit that outlined her muscular frame. Her sandy hair was cut in a short bob that she pinned back with two white plastic clips, and she smelled strongly of honeysuckle. In a sterile, white office equipped with a computer, fax machine and a row of white filing cabinets, she had him run through his background, from childhood to the day he had walked into the house behind Sloane Square. At his mention of the Army, she looked up.
“Which regiment?” she asked, pursing her lips, her fingers hovering over the keyboard.
“Paras to begin with, then SAS.”
Her fingers danced over the keyboard, and she smiled as she typed.
“Excellent. I think Père Christophe will be delighted to hear you have joined us, Child Gabriel.”
“Who is Père Christophe, Aunt?�
�� he said.
“He is our leader. Did Sophie not mention him to you at your Freeing? How forgetful of her. I must speak to her later. He is a wonderful man, a deeply spiritual shepherd of his little flock. He has studied the Bible in the original Hebrew. He has also studied the other great religious works—the Torah and the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, and all the rest—and has divined the flaws in each. The places where their authors misread the simple truths God offered us in return for our salvation.”
“Can I meet him?” You see, I have this contract on his life from the prime minister, and I would very much like to fulfil it.
“That is not for me to say. And anyway, he does not live here.”
“Where does he live?”
“In Eden.” She smiled at him, waiting for a response that, he guessed, she’d heard many times before.
He let his mouth drop open and widened his eyes.
“Eden? You mean…”
“It is our true home. Père Christophe founded Eden some years ago. A paradise, yes, but alas, for the moment merely an earthly one. In Brazil. Many of our Children—your cousins—live there with him, far from the corrupting influences of the world outside.”
“But do you not wish you were there with him? In Eden?”
She looked out of the window, her eyes shining in the weak Autumn sunlight.
“Of course I do. But my place, for now, is England. We search out lost souls. There are so many in London. We have another house in Manhattan and one in Paris. One day, yes, I will join Père Christophe in Eden. But it is not my position to question his will. I serve him, that is all.”
And that was indeed all. Having completed his file, she dismissed him. He returned to his allotted chore for the day, which was feeding the pigs that lived in a field on the estate. As he slopped the swill from the bucket into the silvery-grey, galvanised trough, he breathed in the aroma of vegetable peelings and yesterday’s leftover apple crumble and custard. At least the Children were fed better now. They’d had roast pork, too.