by Andy Maslen
“Bloody hell!” she said. “I don’t believe it.”
She excused herself from the cramped room and found a quiet stairwell off a corridor.
“Hello, Mr Webster. To what do I owe the pleasure? It must be five years since we spoke.”
“Six, in fact, and do please call me Don. Otherwise I shall feel obliged to call you Detective Chief Superintendent McDonald, which is quite a mouthful.”
Callie smiled. She also nodded with appreciation that Don had taken the trouble to find out about her promotion.
“OK, then, Don. And you’d better call me Callie. What can I do for you?”
“Do you remember when we helped you clear up that little bit of business?”
“What, you mean when we handed you a list of civilians and you killed them all?”
Don chuckled, causing the short hairs on the back of Callie’s neck to rise.
“That’s the one! Pulled the Met’s fat from the fire, didn’t we?”
Callie had to agree, reluctantly, that the secret assassinations of the remaining Pro Patria Mori conspirators had been the least worst option. If the politicians or, God forbid, the press, had discovered that senior law officers were acting as judge, jury and executioner on Britain’s streets, the fallout would have flattened Scotland Yard, the High Court, the Department of Justice and dozens if not hundreds of careers.
“You might be right at that, Don.”
“I said back then that perhaps you might not be averse to some mutual aid down the line.”
Callie could sense what was coming. Her stomach clenched.
“I remember. You also tried to poach my detective inspector.”
“Nothing so crude, Callie. I merely suggested that, as we had interests in common, we might share intelligence from time to time, or work together.”
Callie was growing impatient.
“And now, what? You want some intelligence? You want to share some?”
“Actually, I need some help.”
“What sort of help?”
Don must have caught the suspicion in Callie’s tone. She admitted to herself she had made no effort whatsoever to hide it.
“Oh, completely legal, ethical and above board. No need for men in black bursting in and shooting everyone. One of my teams was attacked. We suspect the attackers were mercenaries. We need to find out who hired them, and why.”
“You don’t have that sort of capability in your organisation?”
“Ha! Not as such. We are rather the shoot-first-ask-questions-later department. Tell me, does the delightful Detective Inspector Cole still work with you?”
Callie’s hackles rose.
“Yes, she does. Why?”
“Perhaps she might be a useful asset on this investigation.”
Callie sighed. Nodding to a colleague using the stairs, she waited until he’d gone through the door. Counted to three.
“I’ll assign whoever I see fit, Don. As I’m sure you do on your own operations.”
“Oh, of course. I was merely enquiring.”
Yeah, right, you wee little liar. Plus, I have a feeling suggestions from you are more like orders .
She sighed. “What have you got for me?”
“We have the car they used, a Mercedes GLS. Four pistols: Sig Sauer P229s. Two Heckler & Koch MP5K sub-machineguns. An Accuracy International AT308 sniper rifle. Four mobile phones, locked.” A pause. “And four bodies.”
“Well, that should give us plenty to be going on with. Where are you keeping all the evidence?”
“Let me see, it’s eleven now. I’d say, if you look outside your office window, you’ll see a large refrigerated truck parked on the double yellow line. It’s all inside. Except the GLS. That’ll be with you shortly.”
Callie’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. I’ve been played . She inhaled deeply through her nose and let it out in a controlled exhalation through her mouth. Two can play at that game .
“Excellent. That means we can make a start straightaway. I’ll call you when we have something.”
“I’ll await your call, Callie. Thank you again.”
He ended the call.
Callie stood with her back to the cool concrete wall of the stairwell. She closed her eyes. No. This was not what I signed up for. I’m not running the investigations branch of some fucking Government death squad .
No? said another voice, which might have been that of Stella Cole, her DCI. You were pretty happy when Don helped you finish off the non-Government death squad. You owe him . Then she opened her eyes again and spoke aloud.
“Hang on a minute. A gang of heavily armed men attacked two British citizens working in service of the Crown. That’s pure, one hundred percent legitimate police work!”
Not Quite Our Class of Punter
With the Audi key fob swinging from his right index finger, Gabriel headed for the visitor parking area. When he arrived, it was to see twenty-odd spaces occupied by cars in every colour of the rainbow, if the rainbow in question ran from black through midnight-blue to gunmetal, grey, silver and white. He squeezed the fob’s door-unlock button as he got within blipping distance and watched for a pair of orange indicators to signal which ride was his. He heard the quiet plunk of a central locking system but couldn’t see any winking lights. He frowned, and tried again, drawing closer to the row of identikit rear ends.
Lock-plunk -unlock-plunk .
Now he did see the orange glow from a pair of rear indicators. They were reflected in the pearlescent black paint of a Mercedes S-Class saloon’s rear wing. He hadn’t seen them at first because the car they belonged to was about two feet shorter than the Merc, and the Jaguar XJ saloon on the other side. Sitting between them, like a pint-sized gangster between two brawny minders, sat an Audi RS3 hatchback. The paint may have been a yawn-inducing metallic grey, but Gabriel was grinning. Two tailpipes the size of the Channel Tunnel peeped out from beneath the rear end. And a spoiler protruded from the top of the rear windscreen.
Don had once told Gabriel that he liked his people to be able to get wherever they were going as fast as possible. Advanced driving courses were mandatory for new recruits unless they had joined from the relevant branch of the police. Couple enhanced skills in pursuit and defensive driving with a small but impressive fleet of punchy off-the-shelf motors, and you had the recipe for a highly efficient way of covering the ground. And, when circumstances permitted, a certain amount of don’t-ask-don’t-tell fun and games.
Inside the Audi’s leather-scented cabin, his back and thighs cushioned by quilted bucket seats, Gabriel started the engine. Five minutes later, he was turning left out of the main gates, pointing the feisty little hatchback’s nose towards Swindon, and waiting with eager anticipation for the A303 and the fast A-roads across the North Wessex Downs.
Once on the dual carriageway, he pulled out into the outside lane and floored the little car’s throttle. With a yowl almost as satisfying as the bellow from his old Maserati’s V8, the Audi picked its skirts up and surged forwards, pressing Gabriel back into the contours of the seat.
Sixty-three minutes later, he exited a roundabout flanked by a Holiday Inn Express and a branch of Costa Coffee and pulled into the carpark of a Ferrari dealership.
The showroom reminded Gabriel more of a contemporary art gallery than somewhere to buy a car. The white walls were hung with expensive, limited-edition modern art prints that suggested , while never doing anything as vulgar as depicting , speed and power. Much red in evidence, which picked up the Rosso Corsa paint of the cars artfully arranged on the sparkling white granite floor. As he entered, a slender blonde in her midtwenties looked up from her lectern and cast her eye over him. The smile appeared a brief moment later, as if he’d ticked enough boxes on a checklist headed, “Client or Clown?” Having clearly decided that he was at the very least worth a greeting and not the bum’s rush, she came out from behind the protective shield of the aluminium and blond-wood tower and clicked her way over to him on high he
els the same shade of red as the paintings and the cars.
“Good morning, sir,” she said, extending her hand for him to shake: cool, dry, fingers tipped with metallic-red nail varnish.
“Good morning.”
Gabriel noticed her gaze flicking from his eyes to his watch. The Breitling his father had given to him when he’d joined the Parachute Regiment in 1999 now lay somewhere beneath metres-deep red mud in a Cambodian killing field. In its place, on a black alligator strap, was buckled a rose-gold Bremont 1918. Gabriel had treated himself to the English-made timepiece to mark his return to The Department after his self-imposed exile in Hong Kong and then his travels in the US and Cambodia tracking down an old comrade’s murderer. It had cost him the thick end of sixteen thousand pounds, and perhaps Ferrari salespeople were trained to recognise the different brands and their price tags.
“How can I help you?” she asked, hazel eyes now locked on to his own.
“I’d like a test drive, please.”
“Any particular model?”
He felt he was playing poker with a battle-hardened gambler. One who was alive to the tell that would scream “timewaster” and lead to his early ejection from the game. He turned and pointed at a convertible, its metallic, kingfisher-blue paintwork reflecting its surroundings like a mirror.
“That one, please.”
She smiled a polite smile and looked past his right shoulder.
“There’s Anthony,” she said. “He deals with new customers.”
She raised her eyebrows and within seconds, a young man dressed in an immaculately tailored, dove-grey, two-piece suit and highly polished black monk strap shoes appeared at Gabriel’s left elbow.
The blonde spoke again.
“Anthony, this gentleman has expressed an interest in the 488 Spider.”
She turned on her heel and retreated to the sanctuary of her lectern.
All the time she had been speaking, Gabriel had listened to the way she stressed certain words, and paused before others. “Deals with,” came out sounding as if the next word might be trash or, possibly, athlete’s foot. In articulating the word gentleman, she managed to suggest that the casually dressed man in front of her was more likely to be a tramp who had stolen someone else’s watch and clothes, or perhaps a door-to-door salesman offering poor-quality cleaning products. He decided on the spur of the moment to have some fun.
“You’re interested in the 488, is that right, sir?”
“Yeah,” Gabriel replied with a smile, dropping his accent a few rungs down the social ladder. “I read a review in some magazine or other. At the airport. The bloke what wrote it reckoned it was, you know, the mutt’s nuts. So I thought, well, why not give it a whirl?”
“Well, the 488 is certainly a thoroughbred sportscar, sir. If I may ask, are you aware of the price?”
“Two ’undred and twenty grand, right? It was in the article.”
“And you’re comfortable with that amount?”
Gabriel leaned towards the man and poked in the soft flesh between the shoulder and ribcage. Just hard enough to hurt. He winked.
“Lottery numbers came up, didn’t they? Been doing the same ones since I was in the army. I’m fucking minted, aren’t I?”
The salesman winced as Gabriel’s finger found a pressure point. But he was maintaining his composure. Just.
“Congratulations, sir. But I’m afraid we don’t have a car available for a test drive today. In fact, Ferrari are very selective about whom they allow to buy certain models. To protect their brand equity. For someone with your … obvious good fortune, I’m sure a Lamborghini or even an Aston Martin or a Bentley would be a far more suitable choice.”
Was that a hint of a smirk on his clean-shaven face? Satisfaction at having given this ex-squaddie the brush off? Gabriel countered.
“Oh, yeah. No. I see what you mean.” Gabriel stared intently at the salesman’s right pupil. Then the left. He flicked his eyes back and forth between them. “After all,” flick, “we can’t have,” flick, “the riff-raff tooling,” flick, “around in a,” flick, “Ferrari, now can we?”
The salesman blinked. His left pupil was twice the size of the right, now.
“Er, no. Exactly. I’m glad you understand, sir.”
Gabriel continued, now breathing in time with the salesman. He added minute forwards and back movements of his head to the eye movements and murmured a second set of instructions among the normally voiced banter.
“Of course I understand. You just realised you want to help me. Bad for business to Go get the keys have someone and open the big glass doors like me sitting behind the wheel of a 488 Spider. I’ll just toddle off and and let’s test drive the 488 Spider find a Lambo to test drive. right now . What’s that on your forehead?”
Gabriel darted his right index finger out and tapped the salesman once, lightly, between his eyes. “Do it now,” he murmured.
The salesman blinked again and looked at Gabriel as if seeing him for the first time. He smiled.
“Wait there, sir. I’ll just go and get the keys and we can take the 488 out for a spin.” He turned to the svelte blonde who appeared to be engrossed in her phone’s screen. “Christina? Could you ask Dave to open the doors, please?”
Gabriel watched with amusement as she left her station, frowning, to find “Dave.” He checked his watch while he waited. A burly man in his forties appeared from somewhere at the back of the showroom. He wore a scarlet overall with the Ferrari prancing horse logo embroidered in black on his left breast pocket. Without a word to Gabriel, he took a set of keys from his hip pocket and bent by the plate glass sliding doors at the front of the space and began unlocking the chromed bolts securing it to the highly polished floor. He straightened and eased the massive sheet of steel-bound glass back in its rails, then repeated the process on the other side. When he’d finished, the entire front of the showroom was open to the air, and the smells of an English spring wafted into the air-conditioned room: new-mown grass and some elusive, floral, fresh scent Gabriel always thought of simply as home.
The salesman reappeared, a set of keys on a scarlet leather fob dangling from his finger. He handed them to Gabriel.
“Here you are, sir. Take it easy out of the showroom, won’t you?”
Gabriel eased himself down into the Ferrari’s snug bucket seat and buckled the seat belt. He waited for the salesman to do the same. The car started with a crisp bark as its V8 caught on the first turn of the starter motor. He gentled it out of the granite and glass palace, across the tarmac forecourt and onto the road. Finding his way to a quiet stretch of road, he checked behind and ahead, then floored the throttle.
As the car leapt forwards with a howl from the exhausts, the rev counter’s needle jerking right then falling back as he zipped through the gears, he turned briefly to the salesman and uttered a short phrase.
“You’re awake.”
The man shook his head sharply and then, as he came out of the hypnotic trance Gabriel had put him into back in the showroom, jerked back in his seat. His polished manner deserted him, and, in an accent not so very far from the one Gabriel had adopted, swore.
“What the fuck? What’s going on?”
Braking hard for a roundabout before swinging left then right then left again to exit at maximum revs, Gabriel laughed.
“I said I wanted a test drive. Now we’re having one. Hold on tight!”
Over the salesman’s screams, Gabriel flipped the gear change paddle to drop down a gear and then floored the throttle again to accelerate wildly past a pensioner trundling along in a little car the metallic pink of a Christmas chocolate wrapper. Coming straight towards them at roughly double the little pink car’s speed, an oncoming supermarket truck sounded its airhorns in a series of belligerent honks. Gabriel gripped the wheel tighter and flicked the Ferrari back onto the correct side of the road. The truck roared past on his right, airhorns still blaring, and the car shimmied in its wake.
Gabriel looked sideway
s as he braked from a hundred and sixty to a more manageable ninety and took the car round a sweeping left-hand bend. The front of the salesman’s suit trousers was a darker grey than the rest. Hurriedly, he clasped his hands over the damp patch.
“Look, I’m sorry for what I said back there. But please, you have to slow down. I’ll get the sack if I bring this back dented.”
Gabriel nodded, as he accelerated into a long straight section of road. He could see a tractor up ahead.
“Fine.”
“But you’re speeding up!”
“I know. I meant fine, I won’t dent it, not fine I’ll slow down.”
His sightline was better than his passenger’s and he could see that the road ahead was clear to overtake. But he saved the manoeuvre until the last possible moment, racing up behind the tractor and then jinking out from behind the massive rear tyres to sweep past it, exhausts howling, wind dragging its fingers across his scalp.
Ahead, he saw a sign for a roundabout with the fourth exit that would take them back to the showroom. As he reached it, the last car on the roundabout took the exit for London. He glanced to his right and saw what he had hoped to see: nothing. He flicked the wheel left and right and, as he took the car onto the curve of the roundabout, pushed harder on the throttle until the rear end stepped out of line. The wide rear tyres squealed in protest as he controlled the drift and made a complete circuit looking sideways out of the passenger window. Finally, he indicated left, and shot out onto the wide road leading back towards Swindon.