Fury Read online

  “We’re working on rolling up the rest of his network. He mentioned that guy in Chelsea, remember?”

  “Yes, I do. What was his name?”

  “Dmitri. Full name Dmitri Torossian. A charming gentleman from Armenia. I’m part of the team tasked with collecting intelligence on his operation. It’s a nasty business. Trafficking, drugs, guns, Islamist terrorist groups. Think of an angle, and Torossian has his finger in the cake.”

  “Pie.”

  “What?”

  “His finger. It’s in the pie. Cake’s what easy things are a piece of.”

  Her eyes widened in mock anger and she punched him on his right bicep.

  “Fuck off, Wolfe! You’re so … so, fuck, what’s the English word? In Swedish we say pedantisk.”

  Gabriel laughed. “Pedantic.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s you. I notice you don’t speak Swedish among that babel of languages you picked up.”

  “Jag visste nog svensk att charma dig i säng, inte jag?”

  Her mouth opened into a perfect O, revealing her gappy teeth. “Is that what you think? You charmed me into bed by cooing in Swedish to me? Let me remind you, I was the one who made the move on you. In fact—”

  Britta didn’t get to finish her sentence.

  In the far corner of the bar, someone was shouting. A high-pitched, aggressive, man’s voice, the accent from somewhere in Essex.

  “Where’s my fackin’ coat? I put it down ’ere and now someone’s fackin’ taken it.”

  Another man’s voice answered. It was one of the office workers.

  “Leave her alone. She’s with me. Nobody took your coat.”

  “Oh really, sunshine? Well it ain’t ’ere, is it? That’s a fackin’ Burberry I’m talkin’ about. Not some cheap piece of chain-store shit like what you probably wear. I’m talkin’ quality. Fourteen ’undred quid it cost me. And one of you lot’s got it.”

  Gabriel stood. Britta looked up at him.

  “Need any help?” she asked, nodding in the direction of the shouter.

  He shook his head. Smiled. And began to make his way over to the other corner of the bar.

  On his way past the knots of drinkers, who had started, in that wary way big city dwellers instinctively possess, to smell trouble and establish a cordon sanitaire between themselves and the troublemaker, Gabriel conducted a swift combat appreciation.

  The aggressor was a short, little man, maybe five-five or six. Slight build, mid-thirties. Not an obvious candidate to be throwing his weight around. Then Gabriel noticed the source of his confidence. Behind the shouty guy stood two men cut from altogether different cloth. One was Gabriel’s height, five nine, or maybe a shade taller. He had a muscular build only marginally disguised by the cheap two-piece suit he’d stuffed himself into. But the real threat stood beside him. An ogre: six four, minimum. Constructed seemingly from blocks of muscle. No gym-built pecs or swollen biceps, just large and very solid. His face was impassive as he watched his boss insult the hapless office worker, whose own face had turned pale and whose colleagues were uneasily watching as the scene unfolded before them.

  Something was wrong with the bigger man’s features. The ridge of bone and muscle above his deep-set eyes was grotesquely oversized, giving him the hooded gaze of a large primate or even a textbook illustration of “early man.” His nose was huge and misshapen, and his lips were thick and wide.

  From somewhere deep inside him, it appeared the office worker had discovered a thread of primal aggression, and he was drawing on it now.

  “You can’t talk to her like that. Leave her alone. We haven’t got your coat.”

  To his left, Gabriel saw the barman, a moustachioed hipster with tattooed arms, shaking his head frantically at the office worker, eyes wide. His meaning was clear to Gabriel, if not to his intended recipient.

  Don’t do this! It’s a really bad idea.

  Too late.

  The ogre slid round his boss and slapped the office worker. Not hard. Not enough to put him down or knock him out, though Gabriel was sure he was more than capable of it with those slab-like hands. No. Just enough to deprive him of his dignity, and the small measure of courage he’d displayed so far.

  “Told you so!” the little boss-man crowed, as he pulled a tan Burberry trench coat from a chair off to one side of the group. “Some facker chucked it over ’ere. Come on, boys. We’re going.”

  The bar was silent as the little gangster and his two minders left. While the office worker’s colleagues gathered round him, offering comforting hugs and, in the case of the woman he’d been defending, a kiss on the slapped cheek, Gabriel followed the trio out into the street.

  They turned left after twenty yards, into a dark side street, at the end of which Gabriel could see a black Lexus parked on a double-yellow line.

  On silent feet, he closed in on the big man, who trailed his boss. The second minder led the way along the greasy pavement.

  “One of Don’s Boys”

  CLOSING the distance between them to no more than an arm’s length, Gabriel leaned forward and tapped the giant on the left shoulder. As the giant turned, Gabriel crouched and drove his knee upward into the man’s groin, simultaneously clamping his right hand across those oddly distorted, fleshy lips, and punching the straight fingers of his left into the soft flesh under his Adam’s apple.

  The man was screaming in pain; that was clear to Gabriel from the outrushing air that leaked between his fingers. But it was a silent scream. As he folded to his knees, hands scrabbling at his wounded throat, Gabriel stepped back and then kicked him hard on the side of the head.

  Had it been delivered by a bare foot, the kick would still have been devastating. But Gabriel was wearing a pair of handmade Oxfords, bought from a shoemaker’s not a hundred metres from where he now stood poised over his victim. The heavy, leather sole connected with the man’s thickly muscled skull with a sound like a cricket bat smacking a ball for six. He went down and stayed down. Neither of the other two had heard him fall, and they were now pulling away.

  As a teenaged boy – an unruly teenaged boy – Gabriel had been raised for the most part by a friend of his parents. A wise and tolerant Hong Kong Chinese named Zhao Xi. The English diplomat and his half-Chinese wife, a private tutor, had despaired of their older son’s increasingly hostile and antisocial behaviour. They knew it had been caused by his shock and grief when a misplaced rugby kick had led to his younger brother’s drowning in Victoria Harbour. But still they needed to find a way to live with him. Zhao Xi had taken the young boy in and begun to educate him. Alongside academic subjects, languages being Gabriel’s favourite, Xi had schooled his charge in ancient arts both martial and spiritual. They included karate, meditation and hypnosis, and a tradition handed down by the Shaolin monks of the island: Yinshen fangshi. Translated into English as “the Way of Stealth,” it enabled practitioners to enter another’s personal space unnoticed, even to the point of physical touching.

  It was the martial arts skills he had learned from Master Zhao, as he called Xi, that Gabriel was now employing.

  Silently disabling the ogre had taken barely five seconds, and ahead of him, the gangster and his remaining minder were still walking, oblivious to the one-third cut in their forces.

  Gabriel fell into step behind his quarry, heart beating fast, but not uncomfortably so, seventy-five, maybe eighty beats per minute. He shifted his weight, took a skip step forward and swiped his right foot at the gangster’s trailing shoe. As the man stumbled with a shouted, “What the fack?”, Gabriel hastened his fall with a shove between the shoulder blades. Minder number two spun round at the sound of his boss’s oath, only to catch Gabriel’s right fist in the throat. He gasped, eyes wide, trying to bring his hands up, then doubled over, retching, as Gabriel leaned back and kicked him in the stomach.

  “What are you doin’, you fackin’ cant?” the gangster yelled from his prone position, twisting round to stare up at Gabriel over his shoulder. He tried to rise, bu
t Gabriel knelt in the small of his back and dealt him a punch to the left kidney that brought forth a scream of agony.

  The second minder was on his hands and knees, vomiting a thin, stringy stream of yellow bile into the gutter. Too easy, Gabriel thought.

  He stepped over the squealing gangster and punched down hard onto the second minder’s neck. The point of impact was an imaginary target drawn on the skin just above the nerve junction his SAS instructors – and those in the Parachute Regiment before them – had referred to first as the basal ganglion and then as, “a bloody good place to hit someone you don’t want to get up. Sir.” The second minder went down onto his face in his own vomitus. Gabriel pushed his face sideways so he wouldn’t drown and then turned to the gangster, who was pulling himself to his knees and fumbling with his phone.

  “I don’t think so,” Gabriel said, snatching the phone from the man’s fingers. He turned and dropped it down a drain grating that led to the sewer beneath the street.

  “Listen, what do you want?” the little man said, catching on at last that he was alone with this apparently unstoppable attacker. “I got cash, right? There’s a monkey in ’ere,” he said, pulling a darkly gleaming wallet from an inside pocket. Crocodile skin, it looked like. “Five ’undred, yeah? Take it. It’s yours.”

  “I don’t want your money,” Gabriel said, dusting his hands together and standing over the man.

  “What then? Don’t hurt me, OK? Who are you, one of Deano’s boys? You are, aren’t you?”

  Gabriel shook his head. “No. I’m one of Don’s boys.”

  The man started snivelling. “Oh, fack! The Don? You mean the fackin’ Mafia? I never done nothing to them. I only operate ’ere, up west, I mean.”

  In Gabriel’s case, Don was a name, that of his boss at The Department, not a rank, but he wasn’t about to spoil the man’s illusion.

  “That’s right,” he said, improvising. “We’re here and we’re taking over. The Don says if you’re seen anywhere in the West End, we’re to bring you to him. Or part of you. He doesn’t care which. My advice? Leave town. Go and play cops and robbers somewhere quiet. Somewhere far away from London. Capiche?”

  The guy was scrabbling backwards through the muck now, smearing grime and grease from the pavement over his fawn raincoat.

  “Yeah, yeah. I get it. Capiche, mate.”

  Gabriel grinned, then lunged at the man. The thug ran out of room, backed up against the slimy brickwork of a rundown warehouse building, eyes wide, lip trembling.

  Gabriel turned and left, shaking his head. Cowards. They were the same wherever you found them.

  Rocket Man

  INSIDE Bar Toulouse, the noise had returned to the clamour of after-work drinking. A warm gust of alcohol-scented air breezed out at Gabriel as he entered the crowded space.

  He returned to the corner table, where Britta was scrolling through emails on her phone. She looked up at him, her freckled face enquiring but not worried or even relieved.

  “Everything OK, Sir Lancelot?”

  “Uh huh. There’s at least one local thug who thinks the Corleones are taking over the West End.”

  “How come you hate them so much, Gabriel?”

  “Hate who?”

  “Bullies.” She took a sip of her drink. “You’re always diving into some trouble just because you see someone throwing their weight around. You could get into trouble, you know. With the police, I mean. What if you killed someone?”

  He drained his glass. “I didn’t kill anyone. There’ll be a few bruises, maybe a thick head for a day or two, but that’s all. Anyway, those guys are the last people to go to the cops.”

  “I know that, dummy. But like I said, why do you go after them?”

  “Buy me another drink and I’ll tell you.”

  Five minutes later, Britta returned from the bar with two more cocktails. Gabriel noticed the way a couple of guys at the bar, and several of the women, checked out his fiancée as she shimmied through the gap they left for her. From her flame-red hair to her neat little rear, she was quite the looker, and over the years he’d known her, he’d watched as she’d playfully deflected the attentions of both sexes in clubs and restaurants, markets and even officers’ messes, around the world. And what was that he’d just called her? His fiancée? Jesus! He was going to be married.

  She placed a drink in front of him.

  “So, spill the peas.”

  “B—”

  “I know, fool! I was just testing your pedanteri.”

  “Fine. It was back in Hong Kong. In the last school I attended, there was a gang. Rich brats, mostly. I don’t know where they got their attitudes from—their parents, I suppose. They needed people to pick on, and they chose me. Because my mother was half-Chinese. Used to call me a half-breed, a mongrel, things like that. The name-calling I could take, for the most part. But one boy always took it too far. His name was Bruno Valdosta.”

  Britta snorted. “Hardly a purebred English name, that?”

  “No. Claimed they were descended from Portuguese royalty. One day, he came up to me, smirking. Crooked his finger and beckoned me over. I wasn’t going to go, but there were four of his friends behind me and they frogmarched me over to him. ‘I’ve finally figured it out, Wolfe,’ he said to me. He pushed his face right into mine. His breath stank. Like rotting meat. ‘Your mother’s not a whore at all. But hers was. Must have got knocked up on the game and she was too stupid to get rid of it. Your mother was the result, and you’re the result of her and your father breeding. Fancying Chinese food must run in your family.’

  “So I hit him. Butted him, actually. I broke his nose. His friends panicked and tried to run, but I caught one in the corner of the yard. They pulled me off him in the end but not before I’d knocked him out against the concrete. He was in hospital for two weeks. That was it. The headmaster summoned me with my parents to a meeting after school and expelled me in front of them. He pretty much took Valdosta’s side. Said it was just ‘part of the normal horseplay young gentlemen can expect to meet within the precincts of a schoolyard.’ Those were his exact words, but it was clear he didn’t consider me to be a gentleman. Sanctimonious prick.

  “It left me with, what shall we call it, a strong sense of injustice? Basically, I don’t like to see people throwing their weight around.”

  Britta had remained silent throughout this story, her right hand resting lightly on his thigh.

  “That’s why you went into the Army? To right wrongs? Prevent injustice?”

  He laughed. “Me? No! I did it to spite my father. He wanted me to go to Cambridge and then the Diplomatic Service. I loved the old man dearly, but he had this vision for me, and it just wasn’t mine. So I went into the Paras. We patched it up in the end, and he came to the ceremony when I got my MC.”

  “Well, I still think you should call the cops from time to time instead of taking the law into your own hands.”

  “I know you do. And your Swedish moral rectitude is one of the things I love about you.”

  She grinned her gap-toothed grin. The one that could reliably set his pulse ticking just that little bit faster. “Take me home, and I’ll let you see the other side of me, if you like. The one that’s not so upright.”

  Gabriel’s phone rang. He slid out of bed and grabbed the phone, leaving Britta snuffling somewhere in a dream where she kept calling out for “Farfar” in a quiet but insistent voice. According to the backlit blue display on his bedside clock, it was two thirty.

  He answered as he left the bedroom and settled in a chair in his office next door.

  “Mr Wolfe. My name is Carl Mortensen. I apologise for the late hour. I am the CEO of a company called SBOE, Incorporated. I doubt you’ll have heard of us.”

  It was spoken as a question, in an accent Gabriel found hard to place. Maybe Dutch originally but with a transatlantic twang that suggested its owner had lived in the United States for a while.

  “I’ll be honest, Mr Mortensen, I haven’t. What
can I do to help you?”

  “Please, call me Carl. We’re a new company, but we have substantial financial backing. Our field of endeavour is space research. SBOE stands for—”

  “Surly Bonds of Earth?”

  “Impressive, Mr Wolfe. Very Impressive. You know your Reagan.”

  “I know my Magee. It was his poem Reagan quoted when Challenger blew up. Now, it’s late, Carl. Or, rather it’s early. You have something you need help with?”

  As well as freelancing for The Department under his old boss from the Regiment, Gabriel maintained an independent business, troubleshooting for companies, governments, and foreign intelligence agencies that needed a tough, resourceful individual to help them deal with what one client in the banking industry had described as “non-standard operational threats.” In that case, it had been ex-Iraqi secret police trying to shake down his bank over a foreign investment in that country’s burgeoning reconstruction.

  “I’m sorry for the late hour, Mr Wolfe. Or Gabriel, may I call you Gabriel? I’ve been travelling tons recently. My internal clock is shot, to be honest, I have no idea what time it is! I may have some work for you. I have to take a trip to Kazakhstan. I’m researching potential sites for a launch facility. Only problem is, we’re hearing some unsettling tales about bandits there and, frankly, I’m scared. I want someone with me who’ll act as my personal security detail.”

  “Why me?”

  “Why you? Very modest. I did a little digging, asked a few friends in DC, and your name came up. Twice. So I figured if you were good enough for Uncle Sam, you were good enough for me.”

  “OK, look, Carl. In principle, it sounds fine. But as I said, it’s late. Can I call you tomorrow?”

  “Sure, sure. Glad to have you aboard. I’ll be in my office from ten, so that’s what, oh, jeez, let me think for a second, three p.m. your time?”

  An American in Venice