Vengeful: A Conspiracy Crime Thriller (The Gabriel Series Book 3)

by David Hickson

  Vengeful

  The Gabriel Series - Book Three

  David Hickson

  Aeon Books

  Contents

  I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  II

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  III

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Also by David Hickson

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  About the Author

  I

  First is a Judge

  One

  Justice Francois Rousseau – as a man of the law – might have been expected by most people to speak the truth.

  But I am not like most people, which was why I had broken into his house this Sunday morning to ask my questions in person. And I was finding that Justice Rousseau was reluctant to speak anything, let alone the truth.

  “Disappeared?” he said, in a voice tight with anger.

  “She disappeared,” I confirmed.

  Justice Rousseau grunted. He was a short man with a balding head, wisps of grey hair straggling in all the wrong directions because he had woken unexpectedly upon discovering that there was an intruder in his house, and had not taken the time to comb his hair into place. The body beneath the head was substantial, and although he had his back to me, he contrived to have his heavy shoulders broadcast his sense of superiority.

  I had asked my questions about the missing journalist gently, almost kindly, but he had not taken it at all well. He stood in a gesture of dismissal and gazed out through the tinted glass wall at the infinity pool, which reflected the azure sky above a sleepy Johannesburg.

  “What does this journalist have to do with me?” he asked, his eyes still fixed on the view offered by his modern monstrosity of a mansion, which was perched high on Northcliff Ridge. Beyond the carefully tended garden, we could glimpse buildings between the trees of the world’s largest man-made forest that sheltered the sprawling metropolis of the business capital of South Africa.

  “I believe she came to see you,” I said. “Interviewed you, perhaps?”

  “Believe!” scoffed Justice Rousseau. “Perhaps! What would she have come to see me about?”

  We had gone through his sneering rejection of the idea that he knew anything about Sandy or her disappearance, and then he had played the outright denial card. Now we were doing the harder ‘why me’ stuff. This was harder, because Justice Rousseau knew very well why him. I had already explained that his name was on a list of men that the journalist had been investigating before her disappearance.

  “She came to see you about the girls,” I said.

  Justice Rousseau turned, his silk dressing gown fluttering open beneath his corpulent belly, revealing for an unfortunate moment his shrivelled manhood. The silk gown was black with yellow and orange dragons, a Japanese kimono made for a less substantial person. His face, now that I could see it clearly, was not the most attractive I have encountered. A pockmarked ball of greasy clay with a bulbous nose pinned on the front and two small seashell ears below the halfway level.

  “Those girls are here of their own free will.”

  He gave a twitch of the head to indicate the three young women lounging in the early morning sun beside the pool. Three slender beauties who represented the range of ethnic diversity in the country, from the pale-skinned descendant of European colonists, to the sculpted dark chocolate of the Masai warrior. The cultural link was a toffee-brown girl of mixed race. I had noticed, when waiting for Justice Rousseau to join me, that there was a distinct lack of clothing between the three young girls. Only a couple of thongs, a modest set of briefs, and they all seemed to have forgotten to pack anything to wear on the upper part of their bodies. Which was probably how Justice Rousseau liked his girls to dress on the morning after a night of satisfying his appetites.

  “It is not those girls that I am speaking about,” I said.

  Justice Rousseau considered me, his capillary-veined nose scrunched up as if I had a foul smell, although I was fairly clean this morning, and fully clothed, which he was not. But that was my fault. I had bypassed his security by arriving shortly after dawn with the team of garden workers, and had surprised him with my presence when he had stumbled into his entertainment room, pulling the inadequate kimono about his naked body, just moments after being woken by the strains of ‘Parigi, o cara’ from Verdi’s La Traviata, which I had found in his wall of musical entertainment. I had increased the volume a little more than might have been necessary because I had grown weary of waiting for him. We had been building to the second chorus when Justice Rousseau stumbled through to find me enjoying the view from the embrace of his reindeer-leather couch.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked now, avoiding the question that would clarify which girls I was speaking about, and choosing instead a return to aggression. “How dare you threaten me?”

  “I know who you are, Justice Rousseau.”

  He was one of the most senior judges in the country, a man who had built an impeccable career over the past forty years, starting way back in the apartheid years.

  “I also know about a club you belong to.”

  “Club?” said Justice Rousseau, and his tongue came out of his mouth like a deep sea creature emerging from a cave. It squeezed itself across his upper lip, and then retreated, leaving the lips damp enough for the denials that he would need to make.

  “One which provides young girls to men with particular appetites. The club that you are a founding member of.”

  “I have no idea what you are saying. I haven’t founded any clubs.”

  But if he had ever been a convincing liar, it was a skill that he had lost as his sense of his own importance had grown to match his swelling body.

  “Admittedly, your name is not to be found on the club documents,” I said. “But I suspect that is because of the nature of its activities.”

  “Who the hell are you?” said Justice Rousseau.

  “Gabriel,” I said. I had told him before, but that had been when he was recovering from the shock of finding me in his entertainment room so early on a Sunday morning. “Like the angel,” I added.

  “Angel?” he said, as if I had insulted him.

  “The Archangel Gabriel.”

  “You with the police?”

  “No, I’m not with the police.”

  “You’re with one of those new military outfits, aren’t you?”

  “Not any longer.”

  “What is that accent?” Justice Rousseau’s nose wrinkled again with displeasure. “Is it British?”

  “I was raised in Britain, but my father is Canadian – my presence in this country is owed to my mother.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She was South African,” I explained, and brought us back on topic by addi
ng, “She was not one of the girls you trafficked.”

  Justice Rousseau drew in breath as if he was about to start shouting.

  “Get out,” he said as a feeble start, then his voice rose to a shout as he repeated, “Get out!”

  “If you are quite sure you cannot tell me anything about what happened to the journalist.”

  “I'm calling security,” said Justice Rousseau.

  “I wanted to give you the chance to speak off the record. Unofficially, before the law gets involved.”

  “I am the law!” declared Justice Rousseau. He strode across the deep pile carpet of his entertainment room, his silk kimono opening regrettably in the rush, and he pressed a button on an intercom in the wall. His eyes stayed on me, a moment of panic appearing behind them as it occurred to him that I might have gained entrance to his property by disabling his security with extreme violence. But his press of the button was responded to a moment later by the squawking of a man’s voice.

  “There's a man in my house,” complained Justice Rousseau, the tension squeezing his voice several tones higher. “Come and remove him. Now.”

  The intercom uttered a surprised squawk, and Justice Rousseau gave me a look of cruel satisfaction.

  “They are armed,” he said.

  “I don’t doubt it,” I replied. “I am not.”

  Justice Rousseau’s eyes narrowed, as if he might better spot hidden weapons in that way. But only a fool would break into a house with armed security carrying a weapon. He stayed with his back against the wall beside the intercom, his false bravado dissipating.

  We stood in silence for a moment, and then I said: “Is this considered art?”

  I indicated the framed illustrations of exotic sexual poses and moody erotic photography that adorned the walls of his entertainment chamber. “Or is it simply pornography?”

  Justice Rousseau's tongue came out of its cave again and licked his upper lip, but he did not deign to reply. There was no time anyway, because a door opened at the far end of the room, beyond the grand piano, and a security guard followed his Sig Sauer through the opening.

  “This the man, boss?” he asked, unnecessarily, it seemed to me. I raised my hands to identify myself as the man to be removed.

  “You can tell your coloured journalist,” spat Justice Rousseau, his confidence restored by the presence of his armed protection, “that if she has accusations to make, she will need to make them personally, not send some out-of-work gun-for-hire.”

  I said nothing in response to that. When I reached the door, I turned back to find his frightened eyes on me, gave him a farewell nod, and left the room.

  Justice Rousseau might not have answered my questions, but his fear provided me with answers more clearly than any words could have. And he had – unintentionally – spoken a word of truth in that last moment. Because I had not mentioned the colour of Sandy’s skin, and there was no way he could know she was of mixed race, unless he knew who she was, and perhaps also knew what had happened to her.

  Two

  The disappearance of Sandy had not been a dramatic affair. It had occurred some months ago when she failed to return from a trip on which she had been investigating a story that involved human trafficking.

  The police suggested I fill out several forms and make a sworn statement about her failure to return. They opened a missing person case and looked regretful as they squeezed the file into a cabinet that was bursting with other files. The police officer who helped me fill out the forms didn’t look at all accusatory. He gave the impression of a man experienced in the matter of relationships that had turned sour, even to the point of one party needing to disappear entirely. He had rested a reassuring hand on my shoulder and told me he believed me when I said Sandy had not been desperate to escape.

  However, when Sandy’s clothes and belongings disappeared from my apartment several days later, the police didn’t agree that there was anything sinister in that, and without regret, they closed the missing person case.

  Because what kind of missing person collects their own clothes?

  My efforts to find Sandy over the following months had proved fruitless, until a small department of military intelligence offered me what they called a ‘ten-figure remuneration’ for a minor job they wanted me to do for them. The ten figures were the digits of a phone number Sandy had called. She had called it several times, but only one time of interest to me – after her disappearance.

  Which was why, four days before Justice Rousseau’s denials that he knew a journalist called Sandy, I had set off in a rental car for a three-hour journey in an easterly direction from Cape Town, to the address of a building which held the telephone that bore the number of my ten-figure reward.

  As I drove through the outskirts of Cape Town, I passed a team of soldiers mounting a shiny aluminium pod beside the road. These ribbed metal boxes had become a familiar sight since the declaration of a State of Emergency. They sprang up unexpectedly and squatted like alien craft, their generators humming, cold halogen lamps buzzing through the rain as they transformed into operating centres beside which the army conducted road blocks and harassed the citizens in a show of military force that reminded us, lest we forget, that the country was teetering towards civil war.

  An hour further into my journey, I was stopped at one of these roadblocks. The rain was coming down hard, so the cold-eyed military policeman didn’t spend too long comparing my fake ID photo with my face. The picture was genuine enough, if a little old and blurred. It was the name that bore no relation to reality. The man scanned the ID card with a glowing reader wrapped in plastic to protect it from the rain, then waved me through impatiently. I didn’t make any jokes about weapons in the trunk of my rental car, and I tried not to show enthusiasm as I accelerated away from him. As it happened, I did have a licence for my Glock 9 mm pistol, which was the only weapon I had with me.

  In any case, weapons were not the only thing they were searching for. I knew that well enough.

  Although weapons, explosives and even propaganda were the declared reason for the roadblocks, they were also looking for something else. One occupant of each of these alien pods was not a soldier at all, but a member of a private security company, and tucked into his, or sometimes her, breast pocket was a collection of photographs. Blurred and indistinct photographs of the suspected members of what the media were calling the ‘Gold Heist Gang’: three men and a woman who had robbed a prominent and wealthy member of South African society of some gold. Riaan ‘BB’ Breytenbach, chairperson of the South African Gold Mining Conglomerate, had suffered an unfortunate accident on his game farm a couple of months ago when a man wearing the uniform of his private security had shot him three times. He had lost his left leg as a result, but he had survived the incident, and had recently been discharged from hospital.

  While recovering in his hospital bed, BB had reported that a few London Good Delivery bars of gold were missing from his private game farm. Only a few, because it was illegal to store large amounts of gold on private property. As each bar was worth three quarters of a million dollars, he had been motivated to support the government’s initiative to control the traffic of illegal weapons across the country and he had partly financed the roadblocks. In every roadblock, he posted a member of his small army of private security, allegedly to keep an eye on the way in which his money was being spent. These black-uniformed security guards ensured everyone looked after their new silver spaceships, polished all the shiny bits and didn’t break any of the windows – and referred to their photographs of the Heist Gang whenever someone fitting the description of a gang member passed through the roadblock.

  The roadblocks had succeeded in finding many weapons, a large quantity of illegal drugs and reams of anti-government literature, but they had located none of the Gold Heist Gang, and had not recovered a single Good Delivery bar. And so Breytenbach had pumped more money into the system, making it almost impossible to travel anywhere without being stopped, searched and
generally harassed.

  Three hours from Cape Town, I reached the point where the highway twists through a couple of hills and crosses a languid river. Signs encourage drivers to reduce speed as they pass the outskirts of a small town called Heidelberg. I turned off the highway and took the straight stretch of road directly into the heart of the town, nestling between the hills. The ubiquitous Dutch Reformed church presided over the inhabitants from its neatly trimmed patch of lawn, the whitewashed spires glowing dully in the overcast gloom of the afternoon when I arrived, as they stretched up to get closer to the heavens. Across the road, cowering under the church’s reprimanding glare, I found the Heidelberg Inn.

  The inn is the second oldest building in town, because the Afrikaans farmers had recognised the need for providing refreshment as a close second to their spiritual needs, and had staggered across the road after building the church to create the inn. No reaching for the skies here; it was a squat and faintly castellated building dedicated to matters of a more earthly nature. Thirty years ago a misguided hotel manager had painted the building a deep purple in contrast to the ethereal white of the church, a move that had shocked everyone so much that they had done nothing to the building since, although the purple had faded over the years of blistering Cape summer sunshine, and the paint had peeled in places.