Torpedo, page 1
part #9 of Gabriel Wolfe Series
Torpedo
A Gabriel Wolfe thriller
Andy Maslen
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
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
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Also by Andy Maslen
About the Author
Afterword
For Lorna Baines
“Anybody can become angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”
Aristotle
Torpedo /tɔːpiːdoː/ n. Russian criminal slang: contract killer.
1
ALDEBURGH, SUFFOLK, ENGLAND
My name is Gabriel Wolfe. Death walks in my footsteps. The further I travel in this life, the more Death enjoys himself. Sometimes, if I keep very still, I can hear the soft pad of his stinking, bloody feet as he dogs my trail.
I was a soldier for thirteen years – in the Paras and then the SAS. After a short, peaceful stint in civvy street, I started killing people for a living again. As a government troubleshooter.
My problem is, however much trouble I shoot for the Queen, I always seem to bring down a whole heap more onto my own, uncrowned, head.
I don’t begrudge Her Majesty the imbalance in our fortunes. Nobody forced me to accept my former CO Don Webster’s offer to join his “jolly band of cutthroats.” I re-entered service as an operative for The Department willingly. In fact, I was filled with a sense of excitement. It was good to be back in action. Helping CEOs negotiate takeovers – my former job – was eating away at my soul.
What’s consuming me now is my own ability to kill those dearest to me, as surely as a metastasising cancer cell. And I have come to believe that whereas you might dodge the incoming fire from the Big C with a dose of radiation, chemo or plain old luck, contact with me is one hundred percent fatal.
I can sleep. I’ve always been able to sleep, even when my PTSD was at its worst. But my dreams are populated with people I loved. Love, I mean.
My best friend from Salisbury, Julia Angell. My former comrades in The Regiment: Smudge, Dusty and Daisy. My mentor and the man who raised me after my parents ran out of patience, Master Zhao. All dead. All gone. All because of me.
And now, Britta Falskog. The woman I proposed to just a couple of years ago, who had just told me and Eli that she was engaged again, to a teacher from Uppsala. Britta did a dangerous job, just like I do. Just like Eli does. Counter-terror isn’t exactly risk free, even in social democratic Sweden. But she wasn’t killed doing her job. She was killed – murdered – because she got between a hitman’s bullet and its intended target. Yours truly, once again.
It was a beautiful day. The sun was streaming down onto the beach just south of my home in Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast. We could smell salt and ozone in the air. One minute she was laughing, the next she was dead. Falling away from me, half of her head missing.
As I sat beside her, I looked down into her sightless eyes. I wondered why my ex-fiancée wouldn’t answer me. Shock, obviously. I tried again.
“Britta! Wake up,” I said.
Her lips didn’t move.
The whop-whop of the air ambulance’s rotor blades distracted me. I stroked her right cheek with the backs of my fingers. Her head rolled to the left, spilling more brain matter onto the beach pebbles. I shook my head. That’s not good, is what I thought. I picked up the soft piece of tissue and gently replaced it inside her shattered skull.
From beside me, I heard a voice. A woman’s voice. Eli! That’s it, I thought. I’d gone down to the beach with Eli and Britta. For a walk. They were laughing. Then Britta fell.
Reality was knocking, but I didn’t want to meet it. If I opened the door, I’d have to acknowledge the truth. And I wasn’t ready for that. I squeezed my eyes shut. I started to hum. That didn’t work, so I started singing instead. Louder and louder. The national anthem.
“God save our gracious Queen! Long live our noble Queen! God save the Queen! Send her victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us, GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!”
By the end I was shouting. Shouting, and weeping. It didn’t work. I knew what had happened. Reality won. It always does.
Eli bent over me and hugged me to her chest. Her scent, of lemon and sandalwood, replaced the smell of the sea.
“The chopper’s here,” she said.
Her voice so full of compassion I wanted to scream at her.
“No! Leave me here!”
“Come on, get up. We need to let the paramedics take her now,” she said. “And you’ve been shot. You need surgery.”
As docile as a newly trained puppy, I stood, hauling myself to my feet on Eli’s arm. She drew me back a few paces, and together we watched as the two green-uniformed paramedics, a man and a woman, slid Britta into a black plastic body bag and zipped her in snug. The man brought out a smaller bag and sank to his knees. He began collecting the parts of Britta’s skull and brains that the hitman’s bullet had splattered over the pebbles.
I remember very little of the helicopter ride to Ipswich Hospital. They gave me some high-octane painkiller – morphine, I assume – and the next thing I recall with any clarity is sitting up in bed the following morning, my shoulder bandaged and hurting like a bastard, with Eli sitting at my bedside, holding my other hand.
“Take me home now, please,” I said to Eli.
They discharged me with strict instructions from the trauma surgeon that I should rest the arm for a minimum of six weeks, although it hadn’t turned out to be as bad as everyone thought. Then I left with a paper bag full of painkillers and antibiotics.
The next day, we went for a walk. Just down Slaughden Road. Nowhere near the beach. I saw someone coming, recognised the look. A detective. I pointed at her.
“Tell her to come to the house if she wants to talk to me.”
Eli unhooked her arm and went to speak to the cop. She nodded then walked back towards me with Eli. As we neared the house, I found I was struggling to breathe. I closed my eyes. But that didn’t help. I saw Britta, my freckled “super-Swede” laughing, revealing her gappy teeth. In happier times.
“Stop!” I hissed to Eli. “I can’t breathe.”
“Yes, you can. Look at me, Gabriel. Look at me!” she said. Ordered, really.
I complied, focusing on her grey-green eyes, noticing how the very outer rim of each iris was darker. The iron band around my chest released its grip. I gulped down air. The drowning sensation receded like the waves shushing in and out over the shingle. I knew what would happen next. I’d been there before. Questions. Statements. More questions. Raised eyebrows when the subject of my profession came up. Trips to a police station. Sour-tasting coffee.
We went inside and the cop began asking questions. Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Any idea? Can you? Did you? Were you? I gave her the answers I felt able to. Noncommittal, packed full of incontrovertibly true details that would prove utterly useless.
After a while, she left.
And then, from somewhere deep down, way beyond where my conscious mind lives, an ancient, primal emotion gathered itself and forced its way upwards. Like magma racing through a fissure in the earth’s crust before erupting and wiping out whole towns.
A desire for vengeance.
Gabriel Wolfe folded the sheet of paper into three and slid the narrow rectangle inside a thick, ridged envelope. This he placed in the top drawer of the desk in his study overlooking the beach. His teeth were hurting, and it was with a conscious effort that he unclenched his jaws.
He looked at his watch – 7.05 a.m. – then levered himself out of the battered old wood-and-leather swivel chair. He showered and dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, careful to ease the stretchy fabric over the dressing on his injured shoulder, then padded downstairs in his bare feet.
2
MEDELLÍN, COLOMBIA
Kneeling at the low mahogany tabl
Today, he had burnished his reputation. He had slit the throat of a business rival and pulled his entire tongue out through the gash with his fingers, draping it over the man’s bloodstained shirtfront. The infamous “Colombian necktie.” In a grotesque innovation of his own, which had earned him his nickname, he had proceeded to stitch the thick, twitching length of meat to the writhing man’s chest with an industrial staple gun.
Ruiz had discovered Willow Tree Tea House the previous month, and now visited the place at least once a week. Perhaps Colombia was the last place one would expect to find a club dedicated to the Japanese tea ceremony. He didn’t care. The girls who served the powdered green tea – matcha – were all slender and beautiful. Or, he supposed, as beautiful as you could be when caked in that oddly erotic white makeup.
His two bodyguards, Yago and Benny, had protested the first time he’d left them on the street. Yes, he’d agreed with Yago, the streets of Medellín were dangerous. And for a drug lord, especially so. But within the serene confines of Willow Tree, he was not in danger.
“What?” he’d teased his six-foot-six, two-hundred-fifty-pound minder. “Are you frightened one of the tea girls will stick a chopstick into me?”
Then, laughing at his own wit, he’d entered, enjoyed an hour of tranquillity in the company of a quiet, respectful and utterly subservient young girl who looked like the genuine oriental article, tipped her five hundred dollars, and rejoined Yago and Benny on the street, free of puncture wounds and feeling spiritually cleansed.
Today, Ruiz had something to celebrate. Yes, he had survived another seven days in a murderous, internecine war between his outfit, El Nuevo Medellín, and a gang of Chinese upstarts who called themselves the White Koi. But, recently, one of the drug squad cops on his payroll had informed him that the White Koi were expecting a huge shipment of heroin. The drugs were coming into Colombia from Afghanistan via Kyrgyzstan and then the Balkans. Ruiz had sent a hit team after the traffickers. Now the heroin was his. The traffickers were floating, or hopefully sinking, in small pieces, in the Caribbean Sea. And, he fervently hoped, the local White Koi underboss was shitting bricks, figuring out how to tell his overboss back East that he’d lost ten million dollars’ worth of white-powder heroin.
The table in front of him was set in the precise, ordered, calming way he so enjoyed. A narrow-necked, white-glazed vase held a shell-pink orchid. A bonsai tree, cultivated and pruned so that it appeared to have been blown sideways by some mysterious mountain wind, grew in a white porcelain trough. And, facing each other as if about to do battle, two jade figurines. A sword-wielding warrior and a thickly muscled water buffalo, head lowered, needle-pointed horns aimed at the swordsman’s midriff.
The serving girl entered his private room, her white-socked feet hissing as she slid across the rush matting. He looked up at her and smiled briefly before bowing. She returned his bow, though her face remained unreadable behind its thick mask of white makeup. Her lips, painted into a scarlet cupid’s bow, did, briefly, curve upwards. He noticed the way the girl touched the groove in the centre of her top lip, just beneath her nose.
She leant over and placed the ancient bronze teapot in front of him. A tiny, bone-china cup followed, its walls so thin that the light from the lanterns on the floor shone through the glaze, making it glow.
Her figure was slender, almost boyish, as far as he could tell, though he noted approvingly the swell of her breasts beneath the stiff silk kimono. Kneeling to his right side, she came a little closer as she poured his first cup of tea. He sat straight, resisting the urge, stronger with each visit, to grab her around the waist and kiss her. That would be an instant ban, and his status within the city’s criminal fraternity would count for nothing in here.
When the cup was ready, she sat back on her heels and bowed her head. Ruiz raised the delicate cup to his lips and took a sip, inhaling through his nose as he did so, the better to capture the intense, herbal scent that swirled from its steaming surface.
“Arigato,” he said, hesitantly. Thank you.
He had been practising his Japanese for a month now, mainly using YouTube, and had, he felt, mastered enough to try out a few basic words at Willow Tree. The girl turned to him and raised her finely arched, painted eyebrows with what he hoped was pleasant surprise.
“Sore wa idesu,” she said. That is good.
He nodded, feeling unaccountably pleased with this kindergarten conversation. He finished the cup and placed it reverently on the table. The girl smiled, more fully this time, and refilled his cup. He raised it to his lips, then coughed and had to pull the cup away from his mouth. He tried again, managing a sip before a second spasm shivered through his chest wall, making him cough again, harder this time so that he sprayed a fine mist of fragrant tea into the air in front of his face.
The girl frowned and said something in Japanese he couldn’t understand. Are you all right, master? he supposed she’d asked.
“Estoy bien. No es nada,” he said. I’m fine. It’s nothing.
In fact, he was not fine. The coughing intensified. Tears sprang to his eyes and he fished a fine white cotton display handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped them dry. He coughed into the handkerchief, and when he withdrew it from his lips he noticed with alarm that its pristine white was speckled with red.
His fingertips were tingling and he thought he could hear the faint ringing of bells. Then the coughing stopped as suddenly as it had begun. He reached for the tea. No. In his mind, he reached for the tea. In his body, in the real world, his arms remained motionless at his sides.
And in a flash of most unwelcome insight, he realised. Poison. He moved his eyes to his right. And he watched as the girl got to her feet, unfolding her legs and standing in a single, flowing movement, like a cobra emerging from a fakir’s rush basket.
Panicking, he tried once again to move. Although he could sense his legs pushing him upright and his right hand moving inside his jacket towards his pistol, in reality they were just dreams. Wishes, maybe.
She moved around into his sightline and pointed at the two jade figurines. Then, in fluent Spanish, she said, “Míralos. El guerrero y el toro. Yo soy el guerrero, y tú eres el toro.” Look at them. The warrior and the bull. I am the warrior. And you are the bull.”
From a gold silk purse tied to the belt at her waist she brought forth a palm-sized scroll of paper and placed it on the table. She walked to a black-and-gold lacquer cabinet out of his line of vision and returned with a small black pot and a bamboo-handled pen. He could hear the scritch of nib on paper. When she had finished, she held it up for him to read. In formal Castilian Spanish it said:
A quien le interese,
Robé del Koi Blanco. Ahora he pagado.
Martín Ruiz.
