Condor (The Gabriel Wolfe Thrillers Book 3)

by Andy Maslen

  Now the Elect were setting up the folding tables alongside the rows of the Children. Out came the tall, curved stacks of white paper cups, ribbed like spinal columns. Out came the heavy canisters, their usual contents laced with cyanide this bright November morning. Out came the jugs of fruit cordial, gleaming in the sunlight like potions from a fairy tale.

  Jardin rolled carefully out of the hammock. Years earlier, one of the Children, startled by his silent approach, had made a too-hasty exit from his hammock to greet him, landed awkwardly and broken his neck. No room in Eden for quadriplegics, so Jardin had smothered him in his sleep after administering a triple dose of that morning’s sacrament.

  He composed his features into a thoughtful half-frown, turned up the corners of his mouth, just a little, and marched down to address his flock for the last time.

  There was a hum of anticipation, murmuring voices, shuffling feet, as the Children of Heaven saw their leader approaching. Their gazes were all identical—wide-eyed, open, smiles, no worry lines on their perfect skin. A couple of mouths actually hung open. Dolts! Why are you boys always the ones to do it? He mounted the podium in front of them and waited for silence. He smiled at Rowena. Then he found Madison’s adoring gaze, held it for a moment, then winked. She blushed and looked down.

  Silence fell. Jardin waited. He loved this moment. Several hundred people kept in suspense until he chose the moment to break the tension. He counted. He liked to count at times like these. Once, he’d reached two hundred and still those idiots stood there in the boiling sun. Had one fainted? Can’t remember. Doesn’t matter. Look at you all. Trusting a perfect stranger to tell you the route to salvation. Fucking idiots. Oh, how my parents would have loved you. Proof positive of the failure of Western capitalism and its bourgeois adherents.

  He looked up, caught a quiver of mass movement at the edge of his vision as hundreds of them followed his gaze, perhaps hoping a giant hand with a pointing finger would emerge through the clouds and a booming basso profundo voice would intone, “It is time. Père Christophe was right. You are the saved. Now, form an orderly queue and no pushing at the back”. It was almost too much. He coughed to mask a laugh and covered his smiling mouth with a hand. Then he began.

  “My Children, God be with you.” Wait for it.

  “And with you, Père Christophe.” Idiots.

  “You have a chosen a life of purity, of reverence, of simplicity. A life devoted to God. A life guided by the First Order.” Again, please.

  “We serve God through Père Christophe’s will.” Fools.

  “Some of you have displayed the utmost devotion and have followed the Second Order.” And…

  “Give your life to cleanse the world of sin.” Morons.

  “My Children, you have no need of mass media. You have renounced all that is worldly, all that is corrupting. But on your behalf, I do follow world events. I must know how the ungodly think and act. And they are planning to act against us.”

  There was a low murmuring at this, at its core a note of anxiety.

  “The Brazilian and Colombian governments are planning to come here with guns and take you away from Eden, away from me.”

  The murmuring gave way to a rumble of dissenting voices and even a cry from one of the female Children. Jardin patted the air in front of him in exaggeratedly large movements that even those at the back could discern.

  “Do. Not. Worry. God will throw his arms around you and keep you safe in the bosom of his love. And I, your Père Christophe, I will go to meet them and to turn them back. This is Eden, my Children. This is our paradise. And nobody is going to take it away from us!” Aware that he was shouting, and that the faces of the Children were clouded with frowns and tight, worried-looking eyes, Jardin waited for a count of three before he continued, in a lower tone.

  “Today will be a day of prayer. All chores are suspended. Pray for me as I venture to meet Satan in human form, for the international conspiracy of sin will not defeat us today. God bless you, my Children.”

  “God bless you, Père Christophe,” they murmured, though the unity of the chant was ragged compared to their opening responses.

  Good. If you’re scared maybe you won’t notice the taste of the poison.

  “One final instruction today, my Children. Receive your sacrament, but do not drink. Not straight away. Return to your place and wait for my assent. Today, we will make this a very special act of devotion.”

  He’d instructed the Elect to make up the sacrament extra strong this morning, “to fortify them with a little extra sweetness for the trials ahead,” was how he’d phrased it. Now he watched them lining up to receive their medicine. The Elect would serve themselves last, as they always did.

  When every single human being gathered in the square was standing, facing him, their hands clasped around their paper cups, Jardin spoke.

  “In a sense, you obey the Second Order every day at Eden. You give your life to cleanse the world of sin simply by being here and serving God’s will through me.” There were smiles at this, nods here and there. You love it when I flatter your piety, don’t you? “So, let this day be a very special one in your lives. Let this be another day when you obey the Second Order. Now, drink.”

  Time to go. Night, night, sleep tight.

  He stepped down from the podium and returned to his house.

  66

  A Quiet Country Village

  THE BIG MAN STOPPED. HIS boss, who had been leading the way, turned and walked back to him, coming into Gabriel’s sightline. His eyes flicked right, over the muscleman’s shoulder and looked straight into Gabriel’s.

  “There!” he shouted in Spanish. He was still raising his Glock when Gabriel fired. He fell backwards, blood spattering the trees behind him.

  The big man was too slow. Gabriel shot him three times between the shoulder blades, the Glock jerking in his double-handed grip. The man fell forwards, half-covering the body of his boss.

  In the silence that followed, Gabriel closed his eyes, straining to catch the sound of onrushing boots, shouts in Spanish, more gunfire. But other than the ringing in his ears from the reports of the Glock, there was nothing. Soon enough, the jungle returned to its multi-layered soundscape of birdcalls, monkey hoots and the relentless buzz and chitter of millions of insects.

  His ankle was still hurting badly. He bent and pulled up his trouser leg to get a better look. A shiny red welt the size of a two-pound coin had blossomed over his ankle bone. It had a white centre and the tiny black puncture wound stood out like a bullseye on a target. But the pain was bearable. A long time ago, he’d been trained to take it until he passed out. He wasn’t going to pass out now.

  He dropped the magazine out of one of the Glocks and pushed the remaining rounds into the palm of his left hand. Six. He repeated the process with the second Glock. Nine. He reloaded the second pistol with all fifteen rounds, then stuck the first into his waistband.

  Jogging along the track, it took him fifteen minutes to reach the outskirts of the village. He paused only once, when he heard what sounded like a woman’s scream. But it was probably a monkey or a bird of some kind and he ran on. The white adobe huts looked abandoned. Nobody was moving among them, carrying laundry or talking in pairs or small groups. There was no sound of singing or musical instruments, no guitars being strummed or drums beaten. Apart from the natural sounds of the rainforest and the wind sighing through the trees, Eden was utterly silent.

  67

  Death in Paradise

  THE SCREAMS BEGAN JUST AS Jardin reached his front porch. He smiled and went inside, not bothering to close the door behind him. After a while, the noise began to irritate him, so he put a CD on the hi-fi—Mozart’s Magic Flute—and ramped up the volume until the house vibrated to the music. He lay back on the sofa and massaged his temples. Why does everyone conspire to ruin my plans? Why can’t they see that what I’m doing harms nobody—well, nobody who doesn’t deserve to be harmed anyway.

  No! The Mozart is
definitely not helping.

  He jumped to his feet and kicked out at the small silver cube into which he’d inserted the CD a few minutes before. The opera arrested in mid-aria as the player shot back off the low table and parted company from the speakers with a crash.

  Jardin dumped his holdall on the front porch then went back inside. He grabbed a box of matches from the kitchen counter and the jerrycan from under the dining table, and unscrewed the lid. He splashed the petrol over the soft furnishings first: the sofa, the cushions, the rugs on the floor, the curtains. Then he swung the can round to spray more over the floor and walls. He trailed it behind him, leaving a lake of fuel all the way down the hall to the front door. Once it was empty, he threw it back inside.

  When he stepped out of the house, his holdall bumping against his thigh, it was for the last time. He turned, struck a match, used it to light its sleeping fellows still in the box, then tossed it, flaring, into the hall. The petrol ignited with a soft pop, and Jardin watched for a second as the blue flames danced along the floor towards the sitting room where the soaking furniture ignited with a louder roar.

  He walked away without looking back, whistling Papageno’s tune from the opera. He continued on towards the village square with its mounds of dead followers, many of whom appeared to have clutched each other in their final moments. Then he turned left and began picking his way through a few of the Children who had staggered away from the others, perhaps hoping to reach water. The plane was a good half-hour walk away if he set a good pace, but he was in no hurry. Toron could wait, and it was a nice day. The sun was out, a cool breeze was whispering to him through the trees, and some late-blooming jacaranda were drenching the air in their sweet, almost cloying scent.

  68

  Condor

  GABRIEL CARRIED ON WALKING BETWEEN the huts, head scanning left, right, ahead and behind, looking for the Children of Heaven and for his target, the man he would never again refer to as “Père Christophe”.

  Then, directly ahead of him, in the direction of the village square, there was a whoomp and a roar. Seconds later, a plume of greyish-white smoke boiled up into the air above the roofs of the nearest huts.

  He ran towards the smoke, Glock held in a firing-ready position in front of him. He rounded one of the squat white huts the Children lived in and stumbled to a halt.

  What he was seeing made no sense. Why were all the Children of Heaven asleep on the ground in the village square? His mouth dropped open and he covered it instinctively with his free hand. His rational brain had switched off for a second at the sight, but now its circuits rebooted, carrying with them the knowledge that the bodies he was looking at were not sleepers but corpses. Hundreds of them. All those beautiful boys and girls. And the older ones too. The Aunts and the Uncles. All dead. They looked as though they had died of sunburn, with faces a bright cherry-red.

  Gabriel had seen death many times before. Had caused it when circumstances dictated. Had suffered, grievously, from one death in particular, that of Smudge Smith, whose brown-skinned ghost continued to haunt his nights and, occasionally, his days. He had witnessed scenes of mass slaughter, in places where normal people never travelled or would want to. Where children were kidnapped then brainwashed and abused into committing atrocities on their former communities with Kalashnikovs, clubs, and machetes. But this. This, somehow, was worse. This was the will of a single, crazy man. He could not advance war or tribal tensions or ideology as a reason for his actions. He’d just done it because he could.

  Gabriel knew it in his heart. And now he was going to make Jardin pay for his crimes. All of them.

  The village square was a carpet of white-garbed corpses, all with the same bright red faces, some with lips drawn back in their death agonies, some clutching each other in some final gasping desire for human contact. And all around them, as if a huge children’s birthday party had been abandoned in the rush to play sleeping lions, lay paper cups, each lined with a thin slick of green, purple, or orange. The bodies were too freshly dead to be smelling of anything, yet the air reeked of bitter almonds. Gabriel knew the smell from a course he’d undertaken in Quantico, under the auspices of the FBI. It was cyanide.

  “Shuts down the body’s ability to take oxygen out of the air,” their instructor had intoned, while she waved a test tube of potassium cyanide under the crinkling noses of her trainees from a dozen different NATO Special Forces commands. “Symptoms pretty much the same as for strangulation, only no petechial haemorrhaging in the corneas and no ligature or finger marks round the neck. Only giveaway is your victim’s going to look like they had a pretty bad case of sunburn.”

  So you poisoned them all, you bastard. Hundreds and hundreds of them, just to feed your monstrous ego.

  Gabriel’s jaw was clenched tight. Gripping the Glock tighter, he picked his way among the dead, avoiding looking at their faces, searching for movement. Searching for Jardin.

  There he was. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt under a zip-fronted windcheater and carrying a bulging brown leather holdall. And smiling. The bastard was actually smiling as he skirted the square. Gabriel broke into a run, leaping and swerving to avoid the corpses as he closed with the man Don Webster had sent him here to kill.

  Fifty yards.

  Forty.

  Thirty.

  Twenty.

  Jardin caught his movement and looked left. Saw him. And smirked.

  Gabriel brought the Glock up and slowed his run, getting ready to kill the man and complete his mission. But Jardin did something that surprised him.

  As Gabriel came to a halt, the pistol held in both palms, the iron foresight glued to Jardin’s heart, the man simply dropped his holdall and held his arms wide. No flinching, no frantic dash for cover. No dropping to the knees and pleading for his life. In short, none of the reactions the seasoned fighter in Gabriel Wolfe was ready for. Instead he smiled, then uttered a single word.

  “Condor.”

  As the final, soft ‘r’ left Jardin’s lips, Gabriel’s arms fell to his sides, the Glock still gripped in his right hand.

  Jardin was smiling wider than ever as he held Gabriel’s gaze with his own. He closed the gap between them to just a few feet, not bothering to watch where his feet went now, treading on arms, torsos, and chests, rising and falling as he traversed the corpse-strewn ground.

  “Child Gabriel,” he said. “Back to kill me, I see. After all I did for you. I gave you the chance to sacrifice your life for me, and you threw it back in my face. And brought the wrath of two governments down on my head. Or three, I suppose, if we count the British.”

  Gabriel watched Jardin approach as if through gauze. His voice sounded both very, very close and as distant as the far mountains. He could feel the brush of feathers on his skin.

  “What? What are you doing to me?” he muttered through slack lips.

  “Why, aren’t you feeling yourself?” Jardin laughed, then took a step closer and prodded Gabriel between the eyes before stepping back. “I gave you the second order, Child Gabriel, but guess what? I buried a third order inside it. You hear it? Condor. A magic word, yes? I knew you were a high-risk recruit. All that training. All that psychological conditioning. So I planted a little post-hypnotic suggestion in that stupid soldier’s brain of yours. I give the third order and you return to being my slave.”

  Gabriel tried to lift his right arm but it hung, useless, at his side.

  “I … will … kill …”

  “Yes, yes, yes. Of course, you will kill. Of that I have no doubt. I engineered it so that you would. But it is not I that you will kill, Child Gabriel. No.” Jardin stroked his beard between his thumb and fingers. “You will shoot,” he paused, “yourself. Do it now.”

  Gabriel stared into Jardin’s narrowed, purplish-blue eyes, trying to break away. Then he saw his right forearm levitate to the horizontal out of the corner of his eye. It rotated from the shoulder and locked into a right angle. Then his wrist flexed, bringing the muzzle against his right temple
.

  Sweat broke out on his forehead and trickled into his eyes, stinging as the salt hit the soft inner skin of his lower lids.

  His index finger tightened on the trigger, taking up first pressure.

  Jardin stood opposite him, smirking. Waiting. He checked his watch. Then returned to staring into Gabriel’s eyes.

  Gabriel could feel the muscles in his right hand quivering. No, please. Stop. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Help me, Master Zhao.

  69

  Smudge Redux

  THE HANDS THAT CLOSED AROUND Gabriel’s own weren’t those of Master Zhao.

  They were brown-skinned. They seemed not to be connected to any arms that Gabriel could see. Then a familiar voice spoke, deep inside Gabriel’s mind.

  “That ain’t a good idea, Boss. Bloke could do himself a mischief firing a Glock into his head. Fariyah’d agree. Here, let me help.”

  The strong brown hands gripped tighter and began to guide Gabriel’s own hand. Gabriel strained every muscle and sinew in his right arm and felt it begin to straighten, inch by painful inch, pulling the muzzle of the pistol down and away from his temple.