The Gambit (Ben Lewis Thriller Book 2)

by David N Robinson

  Lewis lengthens his stride. His one hundred and seventy pound body mass builds momentum as he picks up speed. He heads straight towards where Ashraf is holding the camcorder. Lewis deliberately avoids making eye contact. If he does, Khan will see the menace in his eyes and could be tempted to do something precipitous with the knife. So Lewis advances with his head down, looking at the floor at an angle of about forty-five degrees. He is a charging bull, albeit one that is walking not running. He counts the seconds in thousands in his head. He gets to seven thousand before he hears Khan stop speaking. Less than two seconds to go before first contact.

  As predicted, it takes Ashraf about a second to figure out what might be happening before he decides to turn around. By then Lewis’s left shoulder is connecting heavily with Ashraf’s right upper forearm, causing the camcorder to go flying. Forward momentum isn’t lost at the point of impact; instead Lewis rotates his upper left forearm through one hundred and eighty degrees at the elbow. The rotational movement, being in a vertical plane, enables him to swing his clenched left fist with massive force directly onto the bridge of Ashraf’s nose: without missing a beat, Lewis continues charging forward. In his wake, there is a sickening sound of broken bone and splintered nose cartilage.

  One down.

  The distance between Lewis and the knife-wielding Khan is less than two metres and closing fast. Khan is by now screaming angrily at Lewis. For a split second he dithers, contemplating whether to press his knife blade more firmly against his victim’s throat. Time is not on his side. He wakes up to the fact that unless he does something dramatic, Lewis is about to collide with him head on. So Khan does what Lewis always knew he was going to do. He moves the knife: away from the man kneeling beside him; attempting instead to stab Lewis’s advancing body directly in the chest. Except that Lewis’s chest is no longer where Khan expects it to be. At the moment immediately before contact, Lewis sidesteps to his left. He grabs Ashraf’s knife hand and twists it hard, spinning Khan’s body around, as he executes a rapid arm lock. Aided by the torque generated by this manoeuvre, Lewis uses the power and strength inherent in his right hand to snap several bones in Khan’s wrist. With his left, he grabs the knife, discarding it well out of reach. Khan screams in pain but Lewis is not in the mood for listening. Still holding on to Khan’s broken wrist he uses Khan’s body weight as an anchor to slow his momentum down. This way he is able to spin his own body through one hundred and eighty degrees: Lewis ends up with his face close to Khan’s. Not yet finished, he head-butts Khan between the eyes, followed by an upper cut from his right fist directly onto Khan’s jawbone. The man sinks to the floor, writhing in pain.

  Two down.

  One, at least, will be on a liquids-only diet for a while.

  2

  Oleg Panich had not had a great year. He had been shot twice, both times whilst on active service in Europe early in the year. One of the bullets had caused surgeons at the Military Hospital Burdenko in Moscow to amputate his right arm below the shoulder. As if losing an arm wasn’t enough, the injuries had also caused the chain-smoking field agent to lose his job.

  The cause of Panich’s pain and suffering had been down to one man: former Royal Marine commando Ben Lewis. Panich had been pursuing Lewis in a lethal race against the clock that had begun in London, crossed the English Channel into France, before finally taking them both to Switzerland. Panich had been charged with safeguarding the existence of a Russian mole: Lewis had been trying to lay his hands on a missing, and highly explosive, dossier that risked the mole’s exposure. Along the way, Lewis had escaped death and Panich had taken two bullets: once when Lewis had shot the Russian agent in the elbow at a disused airfield near Epérnay; and a second time high in the Swiss Alps. Assuming the Russian was fatally wounded, Lewis had left him for dead. It had been the former Marine’s biggest mistake. All alone, and thought to be dying, Panich had somehow struggled to remain conscious. He had dug deep, finding an inner reserve of strength before summoning a Russian evacuation team. The badly wounded agent had then been spirited away over a high mountain pass beyond Martigny, to the relative safety of France.

  Panich’s rehabilitation had been protracted and depressing for such an active man. The bullet he had taken in his chest had passed clean through his body. It had caused only superficial damage to nerves and ligaments. Surgery had been followed by a period of rest and then gruelling physiotherapy to restore movement in his left shoulder and arm. The loss of his right arm had been more problematic. Once the skin had healed over the newly created stump, the Russian doctors had moulded a suction-fitting inner liner to fit over it; the end of the liner contained a notched pin for attaching to his new prosthetic arm. The good news had been that his superiors back at the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki – the former first directorate of the KGB more commonly known as the SVR – had authorised the procurement of the very latest carbon fibre prosthesis: a powerful and lightweight model that was state of the art. Movement was controlled by tiny microprocessors that received instructions to bend at the elbow, or to move the wrist and finger joints, myoelectrically, from the residual muscles in Panich’s upper forearm. The bad news had been the lengthy process of rehabilitation: time, and yet more gym work, had been needed to restore muscles in his upper right arm sufficiently to allow him to become dextrous with his new prosthesis.

  As if all this hadn’t been enough, during his period in hospital Panich had been diagnosed with an advanced form of lung cancer. Doubtless exacerbated by years of incessant smoking as well as his former, highly stressful, lifestyle, overnight it changed his whole outlook on life. The message had been clear: without any chemotherapy he would have six, possibly twelve, months left to live. With chemotherapy, assuming his body tolerated the treatment, he might earn some remission: but there could be no guarantees. Having faced potential death so many times in his career, the decision had been easy: Panich had refused chemotherapy. He had decided to take his chances and make the best of the rest of his life. Irrespective of his cancer, the senior staffers back at SVR headquarters in Yasenevo had concluded that his other field injuries precluded Panich from remaining on active service. They had therefore given him a big thank you and a small, derisory pension. Panich didn’t really care. He didn’t have that long to live whatever happened.

  Oleg Panich had always been a private man. During the days of his active field duty, outside his work he had chosen to live a solitary existence. Now, no longer called upon to disappear abroad for unspecified periods of time, he had withdrawn to the meagre comforts of his tiny apartment in the Taganskaya district of Moscow. He had found himself in unfamiliar territory, overnight becoming an ordinary Moscow citizen. Week after week in those early days, his principal focus had been on the slow process of recovery and rehabilitation. Spending hours in the gym had not been something he found either enjoyable or interesting. Up until his cancer diagnosis, he had not been aware of any of the symptoms that might ordinarily have indicated that he had the disease. He had previously put the occasional pain in his chest and shortness of breath down to the rigours of the day job. Once he had been told of his affliction and had refused chemotherapy, his reaction had been typically Panich: complete denial whilst attempting to carry on as normal. He had certainly not been about to quit smoking.

  Although not outrageously rich by Russian standards, he had saved enough from his days as a field agent to be able to afford two specific luxuries that made his enforced period of recuperation and rehabilitation bearable. One was a specialist coffee maker, able to dispense endless amounts of the strong, black, liquid that his body continued to crave. The other was one of the best music and loudspeaker systems his hard-earned savings could afford. Thus it was that the former field agent would spend his days: lifting weights; drinking numerous cups of freshly ground black coffee; chain smoking his foul-smelling Turkish cigarettes; and listening to the complete operatic works of his two favourite composers, Verdi
and Puccini, usually at full volume. Often he would do this whilst hunched over a large chessboard in the centre of his apartment. Panich had become hooked on chess, liking to copy the moves of Russian grandmasters in some of their more famous games. He had memorised whole segments of gameplay, trying to get inside the heads of various grandmasters in order to discover their strategies for winning so consistently. It had kept him occupied: and it had also kept him sane.

  In time, he became confident about using his right arm again. It was never going to be as dextrous as previously. There were some things he could still only do with his left hand – such as firing a gun. In many respects the prosthesis function compared favourably with what he had before. In one aspect it had been a significant improvement: the strength of his grip.

  Panich had always been a big proponent of violent acts of retribution. During his daily, high intensity workouts, he would imagine his new hand closing around Ben Lewis’s throat. With the carbon fibre digits jammed hard against the former Marine’s neck, Panich would imagine sending electrical signals from the muscles in his arm. These, in turn, would cause the tiny electric motors in his fingers and thumb to close tightly. Lewis’s windpipe would be slowly crushed; the strength in his prosthetic hand would continue building until the vertebrae in his neck separated: until finally, they would snap. Panich would imagine the sickening sound of it all, the grizzly gasping noise as Lewis struggled pathetically to utter a few final sounds before a very painful death consumed him.

  The thought of exacting retribution against Ben Lewis had been one of the deciding factors in Panich not accepting chemotherapy. He wanted to be fit and well, relatively, in order to see Lewis suffer and die before he did.

  It had been one of the things making the whole rehabilitation process bearable.

  3

  Paddington Green police station is, as the name suggests, located close to the mainline railway terminus that serves the west and south west of England. It is situated on London’s Edgware Road, just to the north of the Westway flyover. It does function as a normal police station. However, deep below the unattractive and utilitarian 1960’s building, there are sixteen special police cells reserved for prisoners suspected of terrorism awaiting trial. Each of the twelve-foot square cells has no access to natural light and contains the bare minimum of facilities.

  Ben Lewis knows about the cells, not because he has been placed in one; he has just returned from a visit to the basement and seen them for himself. A short while ago, two guards led him from his holding room on the ground floor to the basement cellblock. Here he had been required to make a positive identification of the two suspects, Ashraf and Khan. Several hours have passed since the incident at Westminster Cathedral. By this time, both men have had their broken noses set in crude splints. Lewis has seen that Khan’s jaw is heavily bandaged, his face and eyes puffy and swollen. They are being kept in separate cells. Lewis has noted, with some satisfaction, that the accommodation being provided by their Metropolitan Police hosts would at best be described as meagre, and certainly basic. In what Lewis thought was a pointless, if futile, gesture, he had made a positive identification of both men before being escorted back to his holding cell on the ground floor.

  Thus far, the questions from various officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command, SO15, continue to be repetitive and routine. They seem interested in his reasons for being in the vicinity of Ashraf and Khan in the first place. That no one, ostensibly from MI5, deigns to make an appearance to corroborate his story and expedite his release seems curious, if not bizarre. The interrogation team treat him with reasonable courtesy despite that, even bringing him a slice of tepid, soggy pizza at one stage.

  Sometime after nightfall during a lull in the questioning, Lewis manages to sleep. He lays his head on his arms on the small square table in front of him and drifts off. He is unaware of how long he has been dozing before the door is flung open. A familiar face enters the room. This particular visitor walks across to an empty chair immediately opposite Lewis. With an air of authority, he removes his coat and drops it on the table.

  “Couldn’t keep away from all the fun and excitement, is that it, Ben?”

  Lewis looks up and smiles, getting briefly to his feet.

  “Something like that, Saul. It’s good to see you.”

  There is an air of mutual respect between the pair of them. They shake hands. Saul Zeltinger looks tired, but then Lewis is hardly at his best either. Despite the hour, the half-German Detective Inspector is smartly turned out in a navy suit, blue shirt and a nondescript tie: what Lewis thinks of as Zeltinger’s standard uniform. In point of fact, Lewis has never seen Zeltinger wear anything else.

  “What brings you here?”

  “Why, you, of course, Ben. You’re the Metropolitan Police’s latest celebrity guest. Quite the hero of the hour, or so it would seem.”

  “I didn’t think Paddington Green was your patch, Saul.”

  “It’s not really. But then Detective Inspectors have this habit of poking their noses into things that don’t immediately concern them.”

  Zeltinger places his well-worn raincoat on the table before sitting down and facing Lewis. There is more than a hint of Germanic precision about the way Zeltinger speaks. Born to a German-Jewish father who, as a young metal trader, had come to England and met an English nurse whom he had later married, Saul still occasionally speaks with a slight German inflection, something that he attributes to his father.

  “Not so very long ago, Ben, when you were a wanted man, you had me running around all over Europe trying to keep up with you. Now that’s all over, I find it ironic to discover you as an uninvited guest at one of our humble police stations.”

  “It’s not exactly the Ritz, you know, Saul.”

  “I should hope not.”

  “Why am I being detained, by the way? Your lot are not about to arrest me, are they?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. No, as I understand it you’re being kept here for your own protection – as much as anything to keep you out of the public eye. Jake Sullivan thought it better to put you in a place where no one would find you. There is some logic in that.”

  Lewis pulls a face.

  “It’s a bit twisted, that kind of logic. Besides, I can usually take care of myself. Whilst it’s good to see you, isn’t it a bit late in the day for you to be making social calls? I thought you were a family man, with a beautiful wife and twin boys to lure you home at nights.”

  “The capital has been on a heightened state of alert since this morning. There’s been a lot going on today. Several other arrests have been made. The man who was about to be beheaded: he was an RAF Tornado pilot. Back from Afghanistan and on home leave, visiting friends and family in Luton.”

  “Doesn’t sound like your normal line of work, though, Saul – or are you doing different things these days?”

  “No, I was interviewing someone else here earlier this evening when I discovered that you were on the premises.”

  “Small world, isn’t it? Perhaps we should have that game of chess you’ve been promising me, if you’ve got the time?”

  Zeltinger looks at his watch and shakes his head.

  “I need to get back to the office.”

  “Another all-nighter, is it, Saul?”

  “London has the Islamic State jitters all of a sudden. The world’s gone mad. Come to think of it, I never seem to have the time to play chess. I’m surprised you do.”

  “You should make time, Saul. I’ve downloaded this great chess app on my phone. Hardly a day goes past when I don’t play. Why don’t you try it?”

  Saul shakes his head slowly.

  “I’m too busy. Tell you what, though, why not come over for supper? The day after tomorrow could be good, if that works for you? It’s meant to be my night off – in theory. You
can meet Hattie and the twins, and the two of us can play a little chess. I need to find out whether you’re as good as you seem to think you are.” He smiles at Lewis as he says this, his head on one side.

  “Okay, it’s a deal. As long as I’m not still cooped up in here. How long are they planning on keeping me?”

  “Probably until morning. I’ll see if we can find you somewhere better to sleep.”

  “You mean an upgrade? Like on the airlines?”

  “I’ll have to pull rank,” he says getting to his feet. “Business Class cells are hard to wrangle in the Metropolitan Police these days.”

  They shake hands and Zeltinger grabs his coat before heading towards the door.

  “No promises, Ben, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  4

  Viktor Plushenko, one of the most powerful and wealthy businessmen in Russia, drew heavily on his Cohiba Splendido cigar, the brand that reputedly was Fidel Castro’s personal favourite. Hand-rolled exclusively by Cuban women, for many ordinary Russians such an expensive cigar was an outrageous luxury. Most could only dream of spending so much money on something that was firstly set fire to, before ultimately being reduced to ash and smoke. Lying sprawled on the luxurious sofa in his Moscow penthouse waiting for his visitor to arrive, Plushenko briefly considered that there wasn’t much in life that he couldn’t afford: the finest food and wines; the best cigars; the biggest and most luxurious super yachts; and most important of all, the most expensive and prettiest young women that his hard-earned Russian money could acquire. Just like his present companion, most were blonde, most wore the latest Parisian haute couture, and most were more than willing to do anything that was likely to be asked of them. Making money made Viktor childishly happy. Which was why, at that particular moment, he was becoming childishly excited about the prospect of stealing several billion dollars from his arch-rival, Arkady Nemikov.