Maltese Steel

by Stuart Field

  Steel looked over at Kane who returned the glance. And Steel had to wonder again, who was this tour guide?

  The coach parked up in front of a grand hotel in Mdina, and Kane ushered the group off.

  Steel waited to be last.

  He needed time to think about his next move. Kane seemed to have something he wanted to share. Perhaps the timing hadn’t been right for Kane to say anything yet. Which given the circumstances, Kane, being surrounded continuously by inquisitive tourists, made sense.

  Steel was in no rush. All he had to do was wait.

  The group moved away from the bus, following Kane’s direction towards a small restaurant that overlooked the rolling hills and diverse landscape. Kane had hung back slightly.

  Steel walked alongside Kane, watching the group in front of them open the gap between them.

  ‘So,’ Steel said. ‘When do we get to Gozo?’

  Kane said nothing but glanced about nervously. His eyes darting left and right.

  ‘OK, so if we aren’t going, why did you convince me we were?’ Steel asked. ‘Was it Samara’s idea?’

  Kane looked over to Steel as they approached the restaurant.

  ‘Not here. Not now,’ Kane said laughing, as though they were chatting about the tour. Kane gave Steel a business card from his wallet. ‘Please, come around tonight, dine with my family and me, and we will discuss this further.’ Kane hurried off, take charge of the group, who were piling into the restaurant.

  Steel stood for a moment and looked at the card. It was a dull-looking thing with Kane’s address and phone number in bold lettering. Defiantly not his business card. Steel imagined that to have Kane’s picture on it, a colourful logo of some kind. This was plain and simple.

  Steel watched as Kane disappeared into the restaurant, laughing and joking with the owners. All Steel could do was how Kane was connected to what was going on.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The phone rang in the Master’s office. The telephone was what most would consider a relic from the sixties. It was lime green with a clear plastic dial in the centre, and the receiver connected to the base via a coiled plastic cable.

  A simple operation. The clear plastic had ten holes on the outer rim each hole at rest over a printed number. There were no buttons, no electronic touch screen, no voice-activated function. Just stick your finger in a numbered hole and dial, wait for the disk to rotate back, select the next number and repeat. The Master was in his sixties, but his body was broken from the years, making him appear much older.

  This was as old school as it got.

  But the Master was happy with that. After all, he was old school. The boy who stood to his right lifted the receiver from the cradle and nervously passed it over. All the while wondering if it was the others reporting bad news. Would he become the same fate as the other boy?

  The Master took the receiver in his bony hand and placed it against his left ear. He said nothing, just listened in silence.

  The boy heard nothing but muffled sounds over the earpiece. Someone was explaining something. The boy watched as the Master’s grip on the receiver tightened.

  They had failed.

  The Master said nothing. He handed the receiver back to the boy calmly. The boy let out a gentle exhale of breath as he placed the receiver back onto the cradle.

  The Master remained silent and still.

  The boy wanted to run for the door, or at least move slowly out of reach. But he knew that he dared not move, just in case, he should set the Master off.

  ‘Leave me,’ the Master eventually said.

  The boy bowed and moved away slowly towards the door. The flickers of candlelight guiding his way. He was expecting to be called back, or a knife to be thrown, or a shot in his back.

  But there was none of these.

  Just silence.

  The boy opened the door and left the Master alone in the dark.

  As the boy began to close the door, he heard the telephone being dialled. Click-whir, click-whir, click-whir as the dialling drum was being turned.

  ‘We have…a problem,’ the Master said. His voice soft, calm. But behind all of that, the boy knew – he was angry.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Calver sat in his booth, watching the small shapes of ferries and cargo boats on his monitors. Most of the traffic was commercial aircraft bringing in the latest batch of excited tourists. The island was getting busier.

  All-in-all, it was a quiet day at the office. But after the raid the other day on the cargo ship, Calver was hoping for more. Unfortunately, all he had was what he considered to be ‘every day, humdrum.’ Even the bad guys must have a rest day, he had thought to himself.

  He rocked in his chair and drank from the bottled water he had fetched from the vending machine. The wrappers from the two candy bars he had brought with it lay twisted in the waste bin under his desk. He had thought about the sandwich he had seen in the machine, which was the last tuna salad. He did not know why he was thinking about it or even wanted it. Perhaps because it had been the last one? He shrugged and opened a bag of crisps. The waft of salt filled his nostrils.

  There was a blip on the screen, but that had been in Tunisia. Well out of their area. But he wondered what it had been. An aircraft of some kind? He was not sure, he thought about switching to satellite, taking a look real-time. But he knew if he got caught looking at anything other than his designated area without just cause, he would be dragged up before the director.

  ‘Not worth it,’ he thought.

  Calver looked at his watch and then around the room, almost as if he was expecting something. Anything. Samara with the food trolley, a frigging brass band, anything to break the monotonous hours.

  But there was nothing - just the quiet of the room. Calver did not count the background drone of radio chatter, the bleeps from machines, the whir from the computer's fans. He did not hear these sounds anymore. He remembered one guy had bought a Newton’s Cradle, it had lasted about twenty minutes before someone ripped it off his desk and smashed it to hell.

  Calver had to admit that he enjoyed the brutal way that Sandra from three booths back, had stormed over. In an utterly brutal attack, she had smashed the metal balls from the frame using the edge of the guy’s desk.

  Calver had seen her in a different light after that – been attracted even. But she was in a relationship with someone in the NSA.

  Calver sighed loudly and yawned. He needed to do something, the boredom was killing him.

  Nobody moved, said or did anything. It was as though they had been assimilated into the machine, their brains connected to the web. His mind began to wander again, thinking about sci-fi movies.

  Man and machine combined. The new race, the rulers of the world, the galaxy, the universe. But then he thought that it never really worked out very well for the machines, mankind always came up on top.

  Calver took another sip of water, and with a disappointed look, glanced around again. Hoping for something to be there.

  Anything. But it never came, and Calver doubted it would.

  ‘What’s up, man? Looked like you were expecting something.’ yelled Arnold Tanner from his booth to the left of Calver. Tanner was a short, overweight man with a severe sweat problem, the problem being he could not sweat. Poor bastard was born with no sweat glands.

  Tanner was a round guy. He had a large round head, atop a circular body, and small round glasses perched on a button nose. He wore beige chinos with a white shirt and a mustard-coloured waistcoat that he never did up.

  A nice enough guy Calver thought. In fact, he reminded Calver of the professor from the Muppets.

  ‘Only looking for something to happen, Arnold, only for something to happen,’ Calver smiled.

  ‘Yeah, I hear ya,’ Arnold laughed and got back to work. Calver looked at his watch again, then stared back at the monitor, his gaze fixed on that dot that kept blinking all the way over in Tunisia.

  The secure doors opened, causing Calver
to look up, then Foster walked in, and their eyes met. Calver quickly looked away, trying to make out it had never happened. Calver sneaked another look. This time Foster had his back to the workers, talking to the floor chief.

  Edward Bryce was the floor chief. His face was like the rest of his body, which was long and thin. Bryce would often scrutinize the workplace with his dark sunken eyes. Glaring down his hawk-like nose. He looked like a Halloween caricature.

  Long grey trousers with military-sharp creases covered his thin legs down to brown, highly polished shoes. His eggshell blue short-sleeve shirt was ironed to razor-like creases on the arms covered by a mustard-coloured waistcoat cardigan.

  Calver had always thought Bryce looked more like a librarian than the head of the day shift in an intelligence agency. Even down to the cardigan and the glasses that hung around his neck on a cord.

  Calver looked over at Foster and Bryce, intrigued by what the men were saying. So interested in fact; he was halfway out of his chair. Arnold tossed a ball of scrap paper at him. Hitting Calver in the eye.

  ‘Hey, what you doin, man?’ Calver asked angrily.

  ‘Stopping you getting canned,’ Arnold laughed.

  Calver smiled and nodded. As he sat, he tossed the paper ball back at Arnold, hitting him in the chest, it rebounded and landed in his coffee. Arnold shouted friendly abuse, and he pulled out the soaked piece of paper and tossed it in the trash.

  ‘Asshole,’ Arnold said, flicking the liquid from his fingers.

  ‘You love me really,’ Calver replied, going back to his screens, but keeping an eye on his two bosses.

  It was nearly five o’clock, and Calver was eager to get the hell out of there. He had things to do, people to see.

  Calver watched as Foster gave the floor chief a pat on the back and left the room. Bryce turned to head for his small office. His head hung low.

  Something had happened, and Calver assumed it wasn’t good, well not for the asshole boss anyway.

  Calver smiled at all the things that may have happened. ‘Maybe the garbage men finally ran over that stupid dog of his,’ Calver had muttered to himself.

  But then he saw the look on Bryce’s face, and Calver stopped smiling. Bryce looked shocked. The sort of look when you find out someone close to you has died. But there was no one close to him, just that stupid dog. A million solutions whizzed around in Calver’s head. Had he been canned? Had they finally gotten rid of the ghoulish moron?

  No. That look was something else, more like, heartbreak – remorse even.

  Something terrible had happened.

  And it wasn’t about a stupid dog.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  It was around five o’clock when the tour bus had dropped Steel back at the Grand Hotel Excelsior. It had been a more exciting day than he’d expected, but he still hadn’t made it to Gozo. Which made him suspect whatever was on that island was important? As Steel walked into the lobby, he took out Kane’s business card and flicked the edge with his index finger. The conflict inside his head and gut wasn’t resolving.

  To go or not to go, that was the question?

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t the only question, just one of many. Like who were those guy’s trying to snatch Samara and why were they after her?

  Yet one question had started to nag him louder than all the others. Why was Lucy out on Gozo that night? Had she gone to meet someone? Without seeing the place first-hand, he could not get an idea of possible circumstances.

  What the hell had Brad seen on Gozo?

  Gozo.

  Everything seemed to revolve around that small island. All Steel knew about the island was it had prehistoric ruins that predated the pyramids. It had a wonder called the Azure Window. The place where Lucy had jumped.

  Steel had seen satellite pictures and photos of the Azure Window. A fantastic natural arch that had reached out into the ocean but collapsed a few years ago. Something that nagged at Steel. Something felt wrong about the whole thing.

  Steel looked once more at the business card: the plain white card, the cheap print. He thought about what Kane had said near the restaurant.

  ‘Not here. Not now, Please, come around tonight, dine with my family and me, and we will discuss this further.’

  Steel remembered the look on his face. Not so much frightened as secretive.

  Steel’s gut told him it was probably another waste of time or perhaps even a trap, but his curiosity shouted far louder. He wanted to know what Kane knew – if he did indeed know anything.

  Steel headed for the elevator. The overhead lights reflecting on the polished floor, like moonlight on the ocean. The lobby was full of people checking-in and out. The bar area full of people grabbing a drink before heading downstairs to dine. Steel smiled and nodded to a tall woman behind the check-in desk. It had been the same woman that had checked him in days before. Her smile was warm and full of interest. Steel had returned the gesture wand a cat-like look suddenly crossed her face.

  The cat that got the cream or the cat that saw the bird?

  Steel smiled to himself. The game they were playing made for a pleasant distraction.

  But he did not need distractions. All he needed a clear head, a drink, and a shower.

  Steel stripped off his clothes and placed them on a chair. He would send them to get dry-cleaned in the morning. He walked across the carpeted floor towards the drink’s cabinet. Letting the crisp air-conditioned air sweep over his naked body. Steel poured two-fingers of an eighteen-year-old malt into a glass and sipped it slowly.

  He headed into the bathroom, his thoughts a jumble of ideas, facts, conclusions, and questions. He started to think about New York and the team, about McCall. He had left under a cloud.

  He had not even said goodbye.

  Was it?

  Was this goodbye?

  In truth, he had no idea. The whole NYPD thing was meant to be only for one case, and then the ship thing happened. Steel had to admit he missed the gang there, especially Detective Samantha McCall, his partner at the 11th precinct. He respected McCall. She was tough, savvy, funny, annoying, and beautiful.

  But he did not really see that part of her. There were women, and then there was McCall. Every man’s dream. The full package.

  But not for him, despite what people may have thought.

  Steel was not looking for anything permanent, sure casual came up now and then. But in his mind, he was still married. There had only been one woman for Steel, and she was gone.

  Taken from him.

  Steel was as broken a man as there ever was. That day at the shooting everything was ripped away from him: his parents, his brother and sister; his dear sweet Helen. SANTINI had destroyed his life, left him scarred emotionally and physically.

  It had been meant to be his homecoming, a celebration of his returning from a tour of duty. One that had itself had been bad.

  He had come home to gunfire, dead bodies of family and friends. The intruders had relentlessly gunned down people in the garden, not caring who they were or how old they were. It was a massacre. Steel had hunted the intruders through his home. Killing them one by one. Justice – revenge – anger – hatred? All the while, he searched for Helen. Steel had made it all the way to the attic of the old mansion. There, amongst the hidden away items of his youth, Steel had found his wife. She lay quiet and still on the dusty floorboards.

  Steel closed his eyes tightly as the memory resurfaced.

  As he held her in his arms, she turned and looked at him.

  Their eyes met.

  She was alive.

  Boom. The ground shook, his ears rang with the noise. A handgun, close range in a confined space is loud like an explosion, like sitting next to a ship’s cannon when it’s fired. But somehow, he did not hear it or feel the pain. All he saw was his wife’s eyes. Large pale blue, searching – scared.

  Boom.

  The handgun sang again, five more times. Steel’s felt the bullets hitting his body, like a prize fitter us
ing him as a punching bag. Each hit in an aimed location. The last one hit his midsection. His eyes continually staring into Helen’s, as if he was using his body to keep her safe. He felt her head nudge to the side, her eyes went cold. A single tear ran down her cheek. She was gone.

  He had failed her.

  Steel roared like a beast and tossed the empty glass. Blood lust coursed through his veins like fire. He grabbed the side of the washbasin. And breathed.

  In and out.

  He looked up at the long mirror. His soulless green eyes stared back at him.

  He breathed again deeper.

  In and slowly out.

  Steel wished he could cry. But that was another thing stolen from him. Emotionally, he could not cry – not anymore.

  Suddenly, he was calm, as though the fire inside of him had burnt out. Steel looked up at the mirror and sighed. Then a puzzled look crossed his face. He looked around quickly.

  ‘Where the bloody hell did I throw that?’ Steel said looking up at the long, wide, huge – expensive mirror, which was still intact.

  Steel found the glass embedded in the sofa. It had travelled the full breadth of the hallway, missed quite a few other objects – including the wall and the expensive wallpaper and had nestled safely into the cushioned back cushion of the sofa.

  ‘Why can I never do that at home?’ Steel groaned with a broken smile.

  He retrieved the glass, poured himself another which he took to the shower.

  Steel changed into a black suit with a black shirt and military shoes. If Kane was setting a trap, at least he would be overdressed for it.

  Steel walked onto the terrace and sat for a moment, looking out over the small harbour at the hotel's rear. The sun was just beginning to set. Flocks of seagulls swooped and dived in a show of aerial acrobatics. He smiled as three ducks swam happily in the large outdoor pool. He had to admit he loved it here. It was peaceful, serene. But he mustn’t let the beauty of the place cloud his thoughts. He had a job to do.