by Andy Maslen
“‘Hey, darling,’ he says, ‘just got in? First time in LA?’
“She’s just dazzled by everything. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I can’t believe it.’
“So the guy says, ‘Where are you staying?’
“The girl hasn’t booked anywhere and she only knows one street in the whole of LA, so she says, ‘Rodeo Drive.’
“The guy offers her a lift and five minutes later, she’s throwing her bag into the trunk of a bright-red, shiny, Mercedes convertible. And she can’t believe her luck. They’re driving along a road lined with palm trees, and the sun is shining, and the girl is basically just in heaven. After a while, she notices that the shops and houses have changed a little. Not so upscale, you know? A few pawn shops, a few sex shops, cheque-cashing joints, junky kinds of places. The guy seems relaxed, though, and he hasn’t tried anything so she figures, well, OK, maybe this is a shortcut to Rodeo Drive.
“Then the guy pulls in at a bakery, more of a factory, really, and says, ‘I have to get some keys to my sister’s place. You could stay there while she’s out of town.’ And the girl is starting to feel like maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all, but her bag is locked in the trunk. She says, ‘I don’t want to do that.’
“But the guy shakes his head and says, ‘No, I think it’s a good idea.’
“She can’t cut and run, so she waits, and sure enough he comes back out and he’s got two sets of keys and he gives one set to her and says, ‘Look, I got you your own set so you can come and go as you please, just till you get settled, OK?’
“So now the girl is a bit more reassured and pretty soon, he turns off the road and down what is basically a building site track to this really scuzzy apartment building.
“They get inside and take the stairs to the second floor, past a guy bringing boxes up to an apartment down the hall, moving in, she guesses. And when he lets her in, she gets a real surprise, because she’s been expecting some kind of crack house or whatever, shit all over the place and cockroaches, and it’s actually really clean. Spotless, like a show home.
“‘Look,’ he says, ‘I have to go out and do some shopping, just for an hour or so. Lock yourself in.’
“He goes out of the front door and closes it. Now, the girl is thinking, well, I can just pretend to lock the door and then after he’s gone I’ll just take off and find that normal-looking guy down the hall who was just moving in and get him to help me. So she sticks her key in the lock but doesn’t turn it, and twists the knob but doesn’t lock it. Instead she leans against the door with all her weight. The guy tries the door and it doesn’t open. Then she hears his footsteps getting fainter as he walks away from the door.
“Now she’s alone in the flat and she needs the toilet so she goes in the bathroom and it’s clean and tidy, but there’s nothing in the cabinet. No pills, no toothbrush or moisturiser. Nothing. Then she pulls the blind up and guess what? There’s foil over the window. Which is odd, she thinks, like maybe they have damp problems or something.
“Then she goes into the kitchen and pulls a few drawers open: nothing in them. Not so much as a teaspoon. And when she opens the curtains? More tinfoil. Finally she checks out the bedroom and it looks fine, except there are no clothes in the wardrobe. She pulls the curtains: more foil. The bed looks clean enough and she’s starting to get really tired from the flight, almost out on her feet, and she’s just thinking, maybe I’ll have forty winks and I can still be gone before he gets back, when she sees something peeping out from under a corner of the pillow.
“She pulls the pillow away. Underneath it is an axe. The guy must be into snuff movies, is what the girl is thinking. And now she is truly losing it. Shaking. Sweat pouring off her. Thinks she might wet herself even though she’s just been to the toilet.
“She grabs her bag and runs to the front door and twists the doorknob but it’s locked from the outside or stuck or jammed or something, and she is well and truly freaking out because now she is convinced the guy is coming back with a couple of friends, going to party hard with her, film the whole fucking thing and then they’re going to off her on camera.
“But then, something really odd happens to the girl. She goes very, very calm and cold inside. She isn’t going to be a victim. Not this time. Not ever again. She puts her bag down and walks back to the bedroom, lifts the pillow aside and picks up that axe. Hefts it in her hand. Takes a couple of practice swings. Then she smacks it down onto the bed as hard as she can. It doesn’t do any damage, just puts a dent in the bedclothes that she smooths out with her hand. Then she just sits on the bed and waits. About an hour later she hears the guy’s key in the door. Very calmly she slides in behind the bedroom door.
“He calls out, ‘Hey, little Miss England, where are you?’
“And she calls out to him, ‘I’m in the bedroom.’
“There are two voices, both male. They’re laughing, but it’s a cruel laugh, like before they do something bad. Then in steps the guy who picked her up at LAX.
“‘What the fuck?’ he says, because there’s nobody there.
“But it’s the last thing he ever does say, because the girl slams the door back on its hinges, which catches guy number two in the face, and swings the axe down on guy number one’s head. It’s not a good shot, because she’s shaking so much. It goes wide and takes a slice out of his scalp and his right ear off. Then guy number two bursts back into the room, only now his nose is pouring with blood and he is swearing and cursing. He’s got a camcorder too, a professional one, which is hanging from his left hand. The girl turns and she hits him in the face with the axe. This time it is a good shot. Right across the eyes. He screams and goes down. The first guy is moaning and crying, clutching his head. She goes to him and rests the blade of the axe on his neck.
“‘You were going to kill me,’ she says. ‘You were going to rape me and kill me and film it and sell it to perverts on the internet.’
“He starts to say something, but like I told you, he’d already said his last words. The girl lifts up the axe and brings it down on his neck and cuts right through the spinal cord and all the blood vessels and shit in there. The second guy is on his knees, hands over his eyes and he is screaming, over and over again. Really high pitched. So she whacks him in the centre of his skull. There’s this cracking sound, and a little bit of brain comes out round the edge of the axe blade. It’s stuck, so she just leaves it in there.
“There’s a ton of blood. The bedroom carpet is sticky with it, and it’s sprayed all over the walls and the ceiling and right across the bedlinen, which was white, with these little spriggy blue flowers, forget-me-nots, maybe, I’m not sure. The girl goes to the bathroom and strips off and climbs in the shower and stands there under the hot water, rinsing all the blood off her. Then she pulls out her only change of clothes from her bag and gets dressed.
“Then she leaves. The door is unlocked now. Bastard must have given her a dummy key or something. She runs down the hallway, past the guy who’s still humping his boxes into his new apartment. He gives her a funny look, probably he heard the screaming. But she doesn’t stop. Out on the street she looks around for a cab, but this neighbourhood? It’s not so good for hailing a yellow cab. Then, and she thinks maybe someone is looking out for her after all, a minicab – they call them gypsy cabs – turns a corner at the end of the street and comes towards her. She jumps right out in the middle of the street and puts her hands out in front of her. The cab stops and she races around and jumps in.
“‘You all right, miss?’ the driver asks. He’s an Indian guy, middle-aged, paunchy. ‘This very bad neighbourhood. You shouldn’t be out on the street on your own.’ And he seems okay, you know? First impressions.
“She just says, ‘Take me to LAX. Now! I need to go.’
“So he shakes his head and just takes off. Thirty minutes later, she’s at the airport. She uses her cash to buy a ticket back to England. An hour and a half after that, she’s sitting in Economy with a double vodka on the r
ocks, still shaking.”
Sasha stopped speaking, emptied her glass and refilled it. During the whole story, Erin had sat motionless, not even sipping from the glass of champagne at her elbow. Now she spoke.
“Was there ever any trouble with the police?”
Sasha shook her head. “My fingerprints must have been all over the place, but I wasn’t on any databases. Never been arrested or in any kind of trouble. No motive. By the time the cops would have been asking around, I was back in London.”
“And after that?”
“And after that, I did in London what I would have done in LA. I found somewhere to live. Found a job. Got on with my life.”
“The job?”
“Started off working in a bar. Ended up managing it. A punter got leery one night and I chucked him out. The boss got to hear about it. I ended up working in his personal security team. Things just snowballed from there.”
“To being an assassin?”
She nodded. “He had me trained. In Serbia. My master was a man called Stefan Zcilowic. We did firearms: pistols, assault rifles, submachine guns, shotguns, sniper rifles. We did knife-fighting. Unarmed combat. Some other, more, how shall I put it, refined techniques. When I was ready, he sent me back to London. I worked for my first boss for two years, then we fell out over pay and conditions. So I went freelance.”
Erin raised her glass. “Then I salute you. And I’m sorry for my remark about missing. But in any case, I don’t want you to kill Gabriel Wolfe.”
“No?”
“No. I intend to perform that particular act myself. But I want his life dismantled first, then you can lure him to me or march him at the point of a bayonet for all I care. Here’s the brief.” She pushed a sheet of notepaper across the table to Sasha. It was a new version of the list snatched by the wind from her desk in Manhattan. She’d reordered a couple of the items but in every other respect, it was the same.
Sasha read in silence, nodding at each item and then breaking into a wide smile at the final line. She made up her mind. Good. Gabriel stays alive. With his old life gone, perhaps I can make him see sense. Sasha raised her own glass. “I am at your service, Erin.”
Putting on the Ritz
LONDON
FOR his meeting with Carl, Gabriel decided to play up the English gentleman act. Carl had referred admiringly to Gabriel’s un-Brit-like willingness to talk about money, yet he’d clearly been won over by some Washington contact’s description of his skills and experience.
“Was it you, Lauren?” he asked the mirror as he dressed. He was thinking of Lauren Stevens-Klimschak, the smart, sexy Department of Defense agent he’d met on a previous trip to the US. “I bet it was. Some space exploration CEO knows people in Washington, there’s bound to be a defence angle, and the DoD would be his first port of call.”
He’d selected a lightweight, three-piece suit in a Prince of Wales check. The soft, wool-cashmere blend was black and silver-grey with burnt-orange. The shirt was white poplin in a herringbone weave with a cutaway collar that exposed the neat, four-in-hand knot of his tie, knitted silk in French navy. He looked down. His freshly polished black monkstrap shoes gleamed in the light streaming through his bedroom window. A burnt-orange silk pocket square and lapis lazuli cufflinks set in eighteen-karat gold completed the outfit.
At 12.45, he was nodding to the frock-coated doorman outside the Ritz and leaving the hubbub of Piccadilly behind for the tranquillity of this most famous of hotels.
Inside, it was as if the golden age of luxury had never ended, which, Gabriel supposed, it hadn’t for the world’s super-rich. As he crossed the marble floor to the reception desk, itself a masterpiece of overblown woodcarving, with classical buttresses and decorations, he took in the gold, the cut glass, the chandeliers; huge vases full of tropical flowers; uniformed porters and bellhops with flat-topped hats; and a cocktail pianist in white tie and tails, competently working his way through something Gabriel thought was probably Mozart. Not a patch on Oscar Peterson.
He paused at the door to the restaurant. An elegant young woman was standing behind a lectern. She might have been Iranian, to judge from her colouring: olive complexion, dark-brown, elliptical eyes, full lips enhanced with a plum-coloured gloss. She, too, wore a tailored suit in the hotel’s signature colour scheme of midnight-blue and gold.
“Welcome to The Ritz Restaurant, sir. Do you have a reservation?”
Gabriel smiled. “I’m meeting a friend at one. His name is Carl Mortensen.”
She bent to the leather-bound bookings diary on the sloping top of her desk, running a burgundy fingernail across and down the neatly squared paper.
“Here we are.” She ticked against the name and turned to her left. She signalled to someone with the merest hint of an eyebrow-raise, and a few seconds later, a waiter, sixtyish, trim build, appeared at her elbow. “Jean-Pierre, would you show Mr …?”
“Wolfe,” Gabriel said.
“Would you show Mr Wolfe to table eleven, please?”
Table eleven turned out to be a secluded perch in a corner of the restaurant. It sat on a low platform that raised it by six inches. The seating comprised a three-quarter circular booth with the opening positioned so that those seated within its soft, leather confines would have an uninterrupted view of their fellow diners. A screen of potted plants meant that Gabriel and Mortensen would be neither overlooked, nor hemmed in by other tables whose occupants might easily overhear their conversation.
“May I bring you an aperitif, sir?” the waiter asked, with a smile. His accent was French, Parisian, Gabriel judged.
“Un martini, s’il vous plaît. Fait de Tanqueray Numéro Dix. Pas trop sec. Avec trois olives.”
The waiter beamed. “Bien sur, monsieur.” He spun on his heel and stalked away through the tables to the bar.
Five minutes later, he returned bearing Gabriel’s drink aloft on a silver tray. A martini made with Tanqueray No. Ten gin, not too dry, and garnished with three pimento-stuffed olives, threaded onto a plain cocktail stick.
Gabriel took a mouthful of the ice-cold drink. Perfect. As the alcohol hit his stomach and spread its warming fingers through his gut and into his bloodstream, he began to relax. He looked around.
Here were London’s super-rich. Not too many Londoners, though, to judge from the babel of languages being spoken at the white-linen-dressed tables. Plenty of Russians, the men all wearing ostentatiously well-cut suits in fabrics too heavy for the time of year, the women in designer dresses, furs slung carelessly over the backs of their chairs, despite the best efforts of the waiters to remove them to the cloakroom. Chinese, too. Gabriel was fluent in both Mandarin and Cantonese, and here was an opportunity to listen in on the newly wealthy mainlanders as they paused for a break in their shopping. Arrayed at the feet of these eager capitalists were glossy paper bags with twisted silky ropes for handles, bulging with merchandise from Prada, Rolex, Tiffany’s, Ferragamo and a dozen other brands unreachable for the remaining ninety-nine percent of the capital’s population.
“You would have loved this, Dad,” Gabriel muttered, taking another pull on his drink. His father had been a diplomat in Hong Kong. Had assisted in the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese. From time to time, as a boy, a teenage rebel, and then an adult, Gabriel had wondered whether there was more to Dad than met the eye. Was he simply a diplomat, or were there times when his work involved more clandestine activities than hosting embassy cocktail parties and shepherding visiting politicians from Britain around the colony? It was too late to ask him. He’d died of a stroke while sailing.
His musings were interrupted by Carl’s arrival. Gabriel stood as his prospective client approached. They shook hands and then Carl slid onto the leather banquette seating so he was sitting at an angle to Gabriel, neither facing him nor next to him.
“Gabriel, it’s my pleasure,” Carl said with a broad smile, once he’d ordered a drink – bourbon on the rocks – from the waiter who’d brought Gabriel his martini.
Gabriel smiled back. “It’s good to meet you, Carl. Are you over here on business?”
“Mm-hmm,” the older man said, before pausing to accept his drink from the waiter, swallow half of it, then put the cut-glass tumbler on the table. “Finance guys. Bunch of money men in three-thousand-dollar suits at some fancy merchant bank over there in the City.” He nodded at the back wall of the restaurant, roughly eastwards.
“You’re not a fan of bankers, then?”
Carl shook his head. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by space travel. Apollo 11 landed on the moon the year before I was born, and I grew up with that. My dad was an engineer at NASA as well. The old man used to take me to work with him. I grew up, put away childish things for a while, made my money on Wall Street. Then, a few years back, I started SBOE. Put all my money into it. We’re doing OK, but like I said on the phone, it’s an expensive business, and we need additional investors from time to time.” He paused, finished his drink, then signalled the waiter for a refill. “You need another drink?” he asked, gesturing at Gabriel’s glass. Gabriel nodded. “Would I rather be talking to bankers or rocket designers? What do you think?”
As he was talking, Gabriel was listening with half an ear, but also thinking. You grew up in the States? So where’s that northern European edge to your voice coming from, then? Parents were immigrants? And you own it outright but you also need finance? He answered, even though Carl’s question had been rhetorical.