Fury

by Andy Maslen

  “All of which is very impressive, or maybe not, given your service record. But we’re still looking for it.”

  “What about the sniper nest?”

  “Yes, we’re on that.”

  He shrugged. “I could help you. I’ve worked with snipers. I know what to look for. Please. I’m sorry for being off with you. It’s been a long day and I’m still in shock that she’s gone.”

  Anita appeared to relent. Her shoulders dropped and her eyes lost the tightness in the surrounding muscles that had pulled them into slits.

  “Tomorrow morning. Nine a.m. Come up to the white tents on the field. I’ll be there. Maybe you can help us pinpoint where the shooter was hiding.”

  Killer

  THE woman’s face was pin-sharp in the scope’s reticule. Dark, bruised-red lips curving into an ironic smile. Long, straight hair drawn back into a ponytail with some sort of clasp. The dog was being a pest, though. Every time Gabriel had her lined up for a head shot, the terrier would bark and its mistress would fling the ball for it to retrieve. He kept his finger curled round the rifle’s trigger, concentrating on his breathing. His chest felt wet, despite the sun on his back and the dry earth beneath his ground sheet. He looked down. The dent his torso had made in the ripstop nylon was full of blood. It was seeping through his clothing. The smell was an intense coppery hit that made his eyes water. He could taste it in the back of his throat. The wind whispering through the branches of the tree above him was actually human voices. Dozens of them. Talking to him. You killed us, they said. You did. Gabriel Wolfe, killer. He shook his head and settled down more firmly into the pool of blood, which squelched as his weight forced it out between his rib cage and the edges of his combat jacket.

  Then he saw his moment had arrived.

  The dog was nosing around for the ball in a hedgerow. The woman was standing perfectly still, shading her eyes against the sun with a hand pulled into an approximation of a salute.

  He moved the cross hairs up a fraction until their meeting point was centred on her forehead.

  Breathed in.

  Tightened his finger on the trigger.

  Breathed out.

  Squeezed until the trigger released the spring that sent the firing pin into the primer pocket in the centre of the cartridge case.

  The woman looked at him. Her smile was gone. She looked terrified.

  It wasn’t Sasha Beck any more. It was Julia Angell.

  “Gabriel!” she screamed across the field at him. “What have you done?”

  He tried to answer, but his throat had filled with blood. He coughed a gout of it onto the grass in front of him.

  He was riding the boat tail round as it cruised towards Julia’s face, straddling it, wind ruffling his hair as he sped on towards his friend’s death.

  Then he was with her, holding her upright despite her buckled knees. She was weeping, and the dog was yapping around their ankles.

  At the moment of impact, he thrust her forwards to meet the bullet and dived to one side.

  As her face disappeared, he hit the ground and rolled away. The thump of the rifle report caught up with the bullet as it exited her skull and buried itself in the ground under the hedge.

  Up on the hill, a figure waved at him, then blew a kiss.

  Julia was lying beside him, arms and legs spread at unnatural angles, a runner in mid-sprint, but horizontal. Her voice sounded inside his head.

  “You did this, Gabriel. Now you have to stop her doing it again.”

  He turned to speak to her, but the world had turned dark. Three luminous green numbers floated in space.

  3.08

  Gabriel groaned and sat up in bed. His chest was slick with greasy sweat, and the sheet beneath him was soaked.

  He put his face in his hands and wept. Loud sobs wracked him, and he hammered his fists against his forehead.

  When he was done, and all that was left was an ache in the muscles between his ribs and over his kidney, he climbed out of bed and sank to his knees. With his arms above his head, he bent forwards until his palms were touching the rug in front of him, in a pose of submission.

  Gabriel had never prayed before. Never really thought about God before. Had seen too much cruelty and death to believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good being. But something in him told him now was a good time to ask for help.

  With his eyes closed, he began to speak.

  “Please, God. I have always tried to be a good man. But people get hurt around me. People I love. Help me keep them safe. Please. Help me protect Britta. I love her, God. Please don’t let Sasha Beck take her from me. I know that’s what she wants. I can tell. Help me. Amen.”

  He stayed in that position, prostrate before a God he wasn’t even sure he believed in, until the sun came up. At some point he fell asleep. When he awoke, the numerals on his bedside clock showed 7.15. He tried to move and yelped as his frozen muscles creaked into action and blood flooded them. The numbed nerves woke up, too, with a surge of pain as the screaming muscles demanded relief.

  He staggered into the bathroom, showered and shaved, then returned to his bedroom to dress for the search for the sniper’s nest.

  At 8.55, he was striding across a meadow towards the white tent erected around the scene of Julia’s murder. His dark-brown moleskins were tucked into high, leather boots. A hiking jacket in bright red kept the wind off. A tight knot of plain clothes officers stood to one side. As he approached the perimeter formed from plastic stakes strung with blue-and-white police incident tape, a uniformed constable stepped forward, right hand extended, palm up.

  “Sorry, sir, you’ll have to move back. This is a crime scene.”

  “I know. Detective Superintendent Woods asked me to meet her here. I’m not one of the ghouls hoping to see something bad.”

  This seemed to take the young PC by surprise. He blinked, once. Then regained his composure.

  “Wait here, please, sir.”

  But Gabriel had no need to wait for the young officer to find Anita Woods.

  She detached herself from her colleagues and walked across the rough ground to where Gabriel was standing.

  “It’s OK, Lee,” she said. “He’s offered to help me find the shooter’s vantage point. Friend of the victim and ex-army, too. Knows a bit about snipers, does our Mr Wolfe. Come with me, Gabriel.”

  Thanking the constable, Gabriel dipped under the incident tape, catching his hood on it with a snapping sound. Leaving the clearly disgruntled PC to knot the fluttering ends of the tape back together, he entered the tent behind Anita.

  He drew in a sharp breath. Dead bodies held no worries for him. He’d created many and seen many more. In fact, there was no body. What remained was somehow even worse. More shocking. In front of him was a roughly human-shaped depression in the long grass by the hedge. The narrow path where countless walkers’ boots had rubbed and flattened the turf to a hard, mud track was only a couple of feet wide. Each side of it was long, unmown grass. The shape Julia’s body had made ran east-west, across the north-south path. Beneath the round indent her head had made was a huge, sticky mess of blood and the mottled, porridgey mess of grey and red tissue that he knew to be parts of her brain. The hedge to the side of the body was spattered with blood and more tissue on its glossy, pale-green leaves.

  “Oh, Jesus, Julia, I’m sorry she came for you, not me.”

  “You all right?” Anita asked, touching his elbow.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I dreamt I killed her. Pulled the trigger.”

  “Look, it’s traumatic, OK? Takes people in different ways. Some people get survivor guilt, you know?”

  “Yes. ‘It should have been me,’ that sort of thing?”

  “Exactly. But you didn’t pull the trigger. This Sasha Beck character did. According to you. Now look.” She stepped round the indent, which was still being processed by a couple of crime scene investigators in white Tyvek overalls. “Our blood spatter expert was here yesterday. From the direction and sha
pe of some of the blood droplets, she can pin down the origin of the shot to a pretty tight angle. Combining her assessment with the direction of travel, footprints before Julia fell, the entry wound and other factors, we’ve narrowed it down to a fifteen-degree segment.”

  She turned her back on the edge and extended her arms in front of her in a narrow V.

  “I’ve got guys out there searching already, but why don’t we go outside and you can do your Special Forces voodoo and maybe save us some time?”

  Outside the tent, Gabriel turned in the direction Anita had just indicated. Between them and the horizon, he could see a dozen or more uniformed officers combing the field, poking through tussocks of grass with long, thin poles.

  He shaded his eyes against the sun, which was streaming down from a cloudless sky, and scanned left to right along the horizon.

  “The world record for a confirmed sniper kill is 2,707 yards. With an Accuracy International L115A3. But they’re strictly controlled, and while she could have got one, there are easier rifles to get hold of on the grey market. I’d bet she did it from no more than a thousand yards, probably less. Julia was a civilian target. No weapons, no armour, no cover, no support, and no awareness she was a target. I’d find somewhere no more than five hundred yards out. Just enough to stay out of sight and avoid compromising the kill by being spotted.”

  As he spoke these words, he was simultaneously aware that he’d slipped into that damned ingrained habit of seeing everything as a logistics or strategic puzzle. Your friend is dead, you idiot and you sound like you were impressed with Sasha’s planning! He ground his teeth together and squeezed his eyes shut. Opened them again.

  Brass

  ANITA had one eyebrow raised as she scrutinised his face.

  “Seems I’m not the only one who speaks in service lingo.” Then it was her turn to frown. “I’m sorry. That was unnecessary. Let’s leave the sensitivities about our language till we catch this woman.”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Whatever you say. Like I told you last night, you won’t.”

  He pointed to a stand of trees on the brow of a low hill about four hundred yards away from where they were standing.

  “You see those trees?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “There’s an oak on the extreme right. Uninterrupted field of fire from there down to here. It would give cover, some rain protection. I’d say we go take a look.”

  “Lead on, Macduff.”

  They trudged up the incline in silence until they were within twenty yards of the tree. Anita stopped Gabriel with a hand on his right bicep.

  “Stop. OK, if that is where she was shooting from, there could be physical evidence. Hairs. Fibres. Skin cells. Sweet wrappers, even. I’ve seen it all. Even the so-called professionals get careless from time to time. We get a break, we could find her. I’m going to get a couple of the CSIs up here, and one of my colleagues.”

  She made a call, and five minutes later, they were joined by two of the crime scene investigators and two more detectives, a man and a woman.

  “Lindsey, Ben, this is Gabriel Wolfe. Gabriel, this is Detective Sergeant Lindsey Robinson and Detective Constable Ben Whicherley. Gabriel lives near here and was a friend of the victim. He’s ex-military and reckons that oak tree over there could be the place where the shooter was positioned. Get a couple of uniforms to put a cordon round it, please.”

  She turned to the CSIs, who were holding their kit boxes and waiting to be given the go-ahead to start ferreting around for evidence.

  “We believe it was a professional hit. So whatever we’re going to find, it’s going to be small. Shiniest tweezers, please.”

  They smiled and went to work, walking towards the tree with slow, controlled steps before dropping to their knees and crawling the last few yards.

  The female detective spoke. She had white-blonde hair cropped and gelled into short spikes.

  “Gabriel?” He nodded. “What makes you think it’s a pro job? More likely to be a local shooter with a bad case of the crazies, don’t you think? Or some village dispute gone to shit?”

  He shook his head.

  “Like I told your boss, I know her. She called me last night. Told me she did it.”

  She turned to Anita, a frown of disbelief creasing her otherwise smooth forehead. “That right, boss?”

  “Apparently so. We’re checking with the phone company. But at the moment, that’s the theory I’m working on.”

  The detective shrugged. “Sounds a bit too Mafia for this neck of the woods, but OK.”

  Her male colleague wandered away to watch the CSIs at work. She continued with her questions aimed at Gabriel

  “Do you know who’d want Mrs Angell killed?”

  “I honestly don’t. She used to be a fight arranger in the movies. Did that action film about zombies that won all those awards a few years back. She could have made enemies in that business. Lots of firearms guys hang around the scene, she told me. But I can’t see it. Someone losing out on a payday and then coming after her with a rifle. Really?”

  “I don’t know. You’d be surprised what turns people into killers.” She squinted at him. “Or would you?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know what turns people into killers. If you mean soldiers, they’re not killers.” Her eyes widened. “That’s not the point of their job. It’s part of the job, sometimes, but it’s never the point. I’ve met killers. They have this look in their eyes. Dead, cold, scary. Torturers too, and executioners. They’re killers. They enjoy it. You can tell. But whether they were born to like it, got changed somehow or just learned to like it, I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Let’s leave the philosophy for another day, then. Because—”

  She didn’t get to finish her thought because one of the CSIs shouted across.

  “Ma’am? We’ve got something.”

  Gabriel and the three detectives ran towards the spot where the CSI was kneeling under the oak tree.

  “Whoa!” she shouted, both palms out. “Stop there. I’ll come to you.”

  She stood and, as if walking on coals, placed her feet delicately, one in front of the other, as she stepped her way from the trunk to where the small party of investigators was standing.

  She held her right hand out.

  On the palm of her turquoise nitrile glove lay a brass cartridge case.

  With the index finger of her other hand, she pushed it so that it rolled over.

  A collective gasp.

  Someone murmured, “Fuck me!”

  The yellow metal of the cartridge was not completely smooth. It was engraved in a tiny, but completely legible, copperplate hand. Anita read it out.

  “Fury is coming for you. SB.” She looked up at Gabriel. “Kiss, kiss.”

  “Who’s SB?” Lindsey asked.

  “Sasha Beck,” Anita said, cutting across Gabriel, who closed his mouth so that his back teeth came together with a click. “She’s the assassin, the pro he’s been telling us about.” She turned to Gabriel. “Right, it looks like you had it down from the beginning. I’d like you to go down to the station with Lindsey and Ben. Tell them everything you know about this Beck woman.”

  “I can’t. I need to get after her. She won’t be hanging around. She’ll be on a plane to Tokyo or Berlin or Marrakesh. You have to let me go. There’s nothing to tell, anyway. She’s a hit woman. If she left the brass it’s because she felt like it. You won’t get fingerprints.”

  Anita’s voice hardened. She took a half-step closer to Gabriel and poked a stiff index finger into his chest.

  “You’ll go to the station.”

  A beat.

  “You’ll be interviewed.”

  A beat.

  “If, as you claim, you know the murderer, then that puts you in an interesting position.”

  A beat.

  “And if you think I’m going to let our only decent lead go swanning off to Morocco on a one-man vigilante mission, you’ve got another think coming. Understand?”<
br />
  Gabriel nodded, sensing that her next move would be to arrest him.

  “Can we make it quick, please?” he asked.

  Suspicions

  AT the police station, the detectives took Gabriel to a room furnished with two bright-green sofas at right angles to each other. A wooden coffee table sat between them. The walls were blank, and painted in a complementary shade of green to the sofas: darker but not oppressively so.

  “Can I get you a coffee, Gabriel?” Lindsey asked. “Ben, want one?”

  “Magic! And a biccie, if there are any left.”

  She snorted. “Fat chance! That tin’ll be empty bar a few crumbs. So, coffee?”

  Gabriel answered. “Yes, please. Milk, no sugar.”

  While she was gone, Gabriel turned to her colleague. He was young. Younger than Gabriel, at any rate. Maybe late twenties. Smooth cheeks, not much stubble. Curly brown hair cut short so he didn’t look like a hippie.

  “What line of work are you in, Gabriel?” he asked now. Conversational tone of voice. No notebook or tape recorder.

  “Security contracting.” Catching a fleeting frown on the detective’s face, and realising he’d been abrupt, Gabriel immediately tried again. “Which sounds very gung ho and paramilitary, I know. But it just means I help people who need advice.”

  “On what?”

  “On, uh, well, on security.” He didn’t want to reveal that his work had involved killing foreign politicians, going undercover, fighting his way into – and out of – the territory of hostile gangs of terrorists, infiltrating cults and all manner of extremely gung ho activities. “You know, corporate stuff, mostly. Foreign executives who feel a bit jittery in a country where only the bad guys are allowed to carry guns.”