Condor

Book 3: The Gabriel Wolfe Thrillers

by Andy Maslen

Genres: Military Thrillers; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

Who sews a young girl into a suicide vest?

A young girl detonates her suicide vest on a crowded London bus. Ex-SAS covert agent Gabriel Wolfe hunts the man who gave the order. His target is a psychopathic cult leader with a taste for classical music, fine wine and extreme violence. Gabriel must also face a sadistic Colombian cartel boss nicknamed “The Baptist”.
Lost and alone in the cult's compound in the Brazilian rainforest, Gabriel is tortured and brainwashed by “Père Christophe” and fitted with his own suicide bomb.

With the stakes raised to breaking point, Gabriel needs to draw on all his training and resources to avoid obliterating a crowd of civilians at the launch of a new power station before returning to confront the man he came to kill.

This edge-of-your-seat action thriller is the third full-length outing for Andy Maslen’s “hero among us”, Gabriel Wolfe. Condor combines heart-stopping action with nightmarish scenes of psychological breakdown.

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Release date: July 27, 2016

Publisher: Tyton Press

Print pages: 408

Sample

THE NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL formerly known as Eloise Alice Virginia Payne, and now simply as Child Eloise, stood trembling in front of the older woman. She was naked but for a pair of white cotton briefs and a much-washed, plain white bra, the thin straps frayed at the points they crossed her bony shoulders. They’d given her an extra cup of the sacrament that morning, and now she was blinking rapidly and couldn’t stop clenching her jaw. She was thin, and her skin was so pale the blue of her veins showed clearly down her neck onto her breastbone, and on the insides of her thighs.

 

The insides of her forearms were laddered with fine white scars.

 

The room in which she was standing was on the top floor of a sand-coloured, terraced house on a crescent flanking London Zoo. It was flooded with pale September sunlight that caught the fine, blonde hairs on Child Eloise’s arms and legs.

 

“Will it hurt, Aunt?” she asked.

 

The short, silver-haired woman pushed her glasses higher up on her beaky nose, and took the dressmaking pins from between her thin lips to answer.

 

“No, child. You will feel God’s breath on you, that is all, just as Père Christophe taught you. Then you will be with the Creator, safe and sound. Now, hold still while I finish your raiment.”

 

The young girl stood, trying to be still, but the muscles in her legs quivered in a relentless beat. She tried to imagine what it would be like. A flash of light and heat, and then some sort of awakening in Heaven. Would God actually be there to meet her? What if he was busy? But Père Christophe was clear on this point of doctrine. She was doing His will by serving Père Christophe, and of course He would be aware of that and would be there, ready to receive her.

 

As she shuddered and quivered, frowning with the effort of standing still, her aunt pulled the cotton garment over her head and down her narrow torso. It had no sleeves or collar. It did have a series of ten sagging pockets that circled her chest like something a hunter or a fisherman would have on his jacket, each three inches wide, three deep, and nine from top to bottom.

 

With a few deft stitches, her aunt sewed a narrow strip of cotton from front to back between the young woman’s legs, forming a crude leotard.

 

“There!” Aunt said, standing back to admire her handiwork. “All finished. Now we just need to fill those pockets and you're ready for your glorification.”

 

Three miles away, Harry Barnes was getting ready for another day's sightseeing. He was a trim sixty three, and he liked to keep in shape playing golf and the odd game of tennis. He had a year-round tan, and he thought it set off his close-set, pale-blue eyes just fine. Since the divorce had come through, he'd been enjoying “every goddamned minute” of his life, as he'd put it to a fellow he'd met the previous night in a pub, over a couple of pints of that weird, flat, British beer. That included this no expense spared, two week vacation to the UK.

 

The day looked like it was going to be fine. But Harry was from Reno, Nevada, where he managed a casino, and counted anything below seventy as dangerously chilly. He shrugged on his fawn windbreaker over the sweater, and the tattersall shirt and undershirt he'd already tucked into his grey pants. What did the Brits call them? Trousers? Funny word.

 

He sauntered down the short path from his hotel to the street, pausing on the edge of the black and white chequered tiles to admire the park and its trees opposite the hotel. Back where Harry came from, there wasn’t a whole lot of greenery. Bayswater, in contrast, was verdant, and full of other tourists, folks heading to work, even a party of kids, all wearing plum and grey school uniforms with matching caps or floppy felt bonnets, like something out of Masterpiece Theatre. They were being led in a crocodile by a pretty young redhead in a lime-green dress with patent leather pumps. She reminded him of his daughter, who’d sided with his ex-wife and currently wasn’t speaking to him.

 

No bus in sight, but Harry didn't mind. Linda had been the one who was always in such a hurry. Well, now she'd rushed off with half his money and her skiing instructor, so fuck her. Harry liked waiting. Gave a man time to think.

 

Gabriel Wolfe sat at a small, circular, brushed aluminium table outside an Italian café on the northern end of Regent Street. From his vantage point on Biaggi's pocket handkerchief sized terrace, he looked south to Oxford Circus, a throbbing crossroads where pedestrians swarmed around the junction, pushed and jostled their way down into the tube station beneath the pavement, or darted across the road in front of hooting taxis and buses groaning with passengers.

 

He sipped his flat white, savouring the smooth, strong coffee beneath the foamy milk, and took a mouthful of the delicately lemon flavoured cake. It had been brought to him a few minutes earlier by the owner, a scrawny old guy who still spoke in a strong Italian accent despite having lived in London, as he told Gabriel, “since the sixties. Swingin’ London an’ all that, innit?”

 

The day was bright, and the bite in the air was counterbalanced by the warmth of the sunshine on his face. It was “a real Indian summer,” as his father would have declared it before finishing his tea and toast, folding his newspaper under his arm, ruffling his son’s straight black hair and heading off to his job as a diplomat in Hong Kong.

 

Gabriel's three-piece Glen plaid suit in a lightweight grey wool was perfectly suited to the temperature. Today, he’d paired it with a pale lavender shirt, a knitted black silk tie, and a pair of highly polished black brogues. He was on his way to meet a prospective client: the CEO of a firm that offered close protection to foreign celebrities and VIPs visiting London. She wanted help training her operatives, as she called them. Firearms, unarmed combat, defensive driving—bread and butter for Gabriel, and very well-paid bread and butter at that. Early for the meeting, he'd stopped for breakfast on this wide boulevard, only a hundred yards or so from the streaming crowds of London's main east west thoroughfare, but as quiet as a village high street in comparison.

 

With a clatter from its diesel engine, a very high-mileage example to judge from the grey smoke rolling out from its exhaust pipe, a car drew up at the kerb, blocking his view across the street. Nothing fancy. A silver Ford Mondeo, one of millions like it on Britain's roads, with the rear windows blacked out with plastic film. A common-enough modification these days, when every suburban middle-manager wanted to look like a drug dealer. From the rear seat, a young woman got out. Her hair was blonde and cut short, but nothing stylish. In fact, it looked like someone had done it for her at home using kitchen scissors. Her shoulders were hunched inside a black, padded jacket, and the muscles around her pale blue eyes were tight. She kept grimacing as if she had just tasted something unpleasant. Her mouth would stretch wide, then release again. He caught a glimpse of a middle-aged woman ushering her from her seat, gold-framed glasses glinting as a shaft of sunlight penetrated the gloomy interior of the car.

 

Without looking back, the young woman shuffled down the street towards Oxford Circus.

 

Harry was enjoying himself. He’d caught the 94 bus after ten minutes' wait and was sitting on the top deck chatting with a new friend. Her name was Vivienne Frost. She was a little younger than Harry, fifty-eight or nine, maybe. No wedding ring. She was a looker all right, and Harry told her so after a little idle conversation about the weather.

 

“My ex-wife would kill for hair like yours,” he said. “Real natural blonde, none of that peroxide stuff. It kills the shine, and probably the planet too, for all I know.”

 

“Quite the Sir Galahad, aren’t you?” Vivienne replied, patting her hair and smiling. Her lips were a pale pink and seemed to shimmer in the light coming through the grimy windows of the bus. Harry was close enough to see the way traces of lipstick had worked their way into thin creases that ran over the edge of her upper lip.

 

“Hey, at my age, we call it like we see it. Am I right? Plus, we got taught good manners, which in my book includes complimenting a beautiful woman on her looks.”

 

He really hoped he hadn't just overdone it, but Vivienne seemed happy enough with this gentle flirting. Her figure was just what Harry liked, too—round in all the right places, and none of that bony, sucked-in look so many of his ex-wife’s friends paid so much to achieve. “Why wouldn’t a woman want to look like a woman?” Harry had asked Linda one day when they were still talking.

 

“Jesus, Harry, you’re such a fucking dinosaur,” had been her baffling reply, leaving Harry none the wiser but one tick closer to hiring a divorce lawyer.

 

As the bus lumbered along the start of Oxford Street, they stared down at the tacky tourist shops. Displays of T-shirts emblazoned with union jacks jostled for pavement space with circular racks of sunglasses and displays of miniature red telephone boxes, bearskinned soldiers in sentry boxes, and teddy bears dressed like Yeomen of the Guard. Just in front of them, a bright-yellow metal fitting was vibrating in time with the big diesel engine some ten feet below them. The buzz was loud enough to make Harry have to raise his voice.

 

“This could be a bit forward of me,” Harry said, after clearing his throat, “but would you have some time this morning to see a couple of sights with an American on his first trip to the United Kingdom of Great Britain?”

 

He held his breath as he waited for Vivienne to answer. She checked her watch. Rolex Oyster Lady-Datejust, a nice model, Harry noted with a professional’s glance. You could tell a lot about a person by their choice of watch. Then she looked at him. And smiled.

 

“You know what, Harry? I think I might.”

 

Harry smiled right back.

 

Something about the young woman had troubled Gabriel. Now, his antennae were flickering and twitching, and a thin blade of fear was lying on its edge inside his stomach. She’d looked anxious, but so did lots of people. She was so tense she couldn't walk easily. Her coltish legs looked uncoordinated, as if she had only learned how to use them a few hours earlier. A job interview? The clothes didn't look right. Black jeans, black quilted jacket. And no makeup, which would have been a good idea, as her eyes were red from crying. She'd looked skinny. The jeans were narrow cut, but her thighs didn't even fill them. Her wrists looked bony, too. Yet her body appeared bulbous, bulky somehow, even allowing for the stuffing of the jacket.

 

No, it wasn't the woman herself. It was her ride. After she'd left the car, the driver had executed a rapid U-turn in the street, tyres screeching on full lock as their treads scraped across the tarmac, forcing a taxi to slam its brakes on and the cabbie to curse, loudly and fluently, from his open window. Acrid, blue rubber-smoke had drifted towards Gabriel’s table.

 

Child Eloise waited at the bus stop on Oxford Street. She looked behind her at the shop window. It was filled with a display of what she had initially taken to be fruit or perhaps cakes, but which, on closer inspection, turned out to be handmade soaps, things called ‘roulades’ and ‘bath bombs’. Funny name. Her neighbours in the queue were all busy with their phones, swiping, scrolling and tapping. The women wore bright clothes and high-heeled shoes, and they were slathered in makeup. Painted like whores. Sinful. The men ogled the women, peering at their breasts or eyeing their stockinged legs. Lascivious. All seemed more interested in the little slivers of plastic and glass in their hands than in God's creation around them, even if it was mostly concrete and steel here. Decadent.

 

Despite her quilted nylon jacket, she couldn't stop shivering. She grunted involuntarily from time to time and her tongue kept poking out between her lips, causing one or two people around her to smirk before looking away. Aunt had told her not to be afraid and had given her a sweetie, “to bring you a little calmness as you do God's work, child”, but she felt frightened all the same.

 

Under her jacket, the cotton leotard was packed with seven pounds of homemade explosive—a mixture of diesel oil, bleach, wax and potassium chloride from a health foods website. Each of the ten pockets was packed with a sausage of it. She had helped Uncle and Aunt mould them herself, rolling the sticky, greyish stuff between her palms and inserting a blasting cap and a length of detonator wire into the tops. Around the sausages lay the shiny steel spheres Uncle called, “God's tears”.

 

The ball bearings were twenty one millimetres across. Uncle had been most specific on that point when ordering them from the factory. He said the number was significant because it was the product of the seven deadly sins and the Holy Trinity. Together they’d dropped twenty-five into each of the ten pockets, where they nestled against the yielding surface of the explosives.

 

The girl looked around again. Her phone wasn't as shiny as these others. It didn't even have a camera. Not that she could have reached it to take a picture, in any case. It, too, was sewn into her vest, in a channel sitting right over her heart. The wires from the explosives ended in a control box soldered onto the phone's battery charger socket.

 

Harry and Vivienne’s bus pulled up outside a shop selling soaps and bath products. Through the narrow windows on the top deck, wafts of scent—tropical, spicy, lemony—insinuated themselves, causing Harry to smile without realising why. He was happy. Happy Harry.

 

Vivienne's thigh was pressed against his, and even though he knew it was just an accident caused by the stingy seating arrangements, he felt a prickle of desire. And it had been a long time since that had happened. Linda had stopped putting out for him years ago, and he'd never been a guy to go off looking for pleasure in a cathouse or a strip club. Not that he’d have had time, the hours he put in.

 

“Look at her,” Vivienne said, prodding the glass on her left and gazing downwards. “Poor thing looks so miserable. And on a beautiful day like today. You'd think she’d manage a smile.”

 

Harry leaned across, taking the opportunity to glance down the front of Vivienne's blouse. Great rack!

 

“Who? Her? The skinny one in the puffy jacket? Yeah, she does look kind of sad.”

 

Gabriel finished his coffee, dabbed a wet fingertip into the yellow crumbs dusting his plate, sucked them into his mouth, and then stood. His meeting was in an office on a side street leading east from Regent Street. He took one final glance towards Oxford Circus, then picked up his battered Hartmann briefcase and strode off towards Great Portland Street.

 

His phone rang. He saw the small circle enclosing a face he knew and smiled. He swiped his thumb to the right to answer the call.

 

“Hi, Britta, how are you? Where are you?”

 

“Hey, Gabriel. I’m good. I’m at my place in Chiswick, actually, painting my nails. My boss pretty well ordered me to take some leave. Been burning the midnight oil at both ends.”

 

Gabriel laughed. However good her English was, Britta Falskog hadn’t quite mastered all the subtleties of idiom. On the other hand, he liked her very much; always had. They’d run joint ops for a while, back in the day, she in Swedish Special Forces, he in the SAS. And there had been the odd overnight stay. Now, since she’d been seconded to MI5, working out of Thames House on Millbank, maybe there was something in the air between them.

 

“So, do you want to meet up?” he said. “I’m in town too. Going to see a new client.”

 

“I would like that. Do you want to get dinner?”

“Sure. Then I’m heading back to Salisbury.”

 

“Oh, OK. Well, you know, I do have a few days to kill, so maybe …”

 

“A trip to the countryside? Sounds like a lovely idea.”

 

While they bantered, Gabriel made his way along the uncrowded roads to the north of Oxford Street, heading for the offices of Faulds & Vambrace (VIP Protection) Ltd.

 

Eloise Payne slid her Oyster card over the scuffed magnetic reader and made her way to the stairs of the bus, which she climbed, gripping the handrail tightly. There was one free seat, about halfway back, behind a couple who were chatting away about museums and art galleries. The man reminded her of Uncle. He had the same short, white hair. Only this man spoke with an American accent.

 

She took the seat next to a black woman in her thirties who was chatting into her phone and admiring her fingernails, which she extended in front of her in a fan. There seemed to be yellow flecks, like gold, floating in the orange varnish, and the tips were white.

 

Standing by the drawing room window, in the elegant terraced house where Eloise Payne had so recently been stitched into the garment that was to become her shroud, was a grey-haired man named Robert Slater, known to the Children as “Uncle Robert”. He looked out at the oaks, beeches and hornbeams dotting Regent’s Park. He was six foot, slim, and wearing a white shirt and white trousers. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that magnified his eyes. They were the blue of a sunny day in February, promising warmth, but delivering none. In the distance, he could make out the long, dappled necks of a pair of giraffes grazing in their enclosure in the zoo. Through the open window, he could smell burning leaves from a bonfire somewhere in the park.

 

In his hand, he held a smartphone, a number keyed in and ready to be called. Beside him, Irene Stevens, Eloise Payne’s Aunt and a former manager of a dressmaking business, spoke.

 

“Père Christophe will be pleased.”

 

“Yes. We have proved our worthiness.”

 

Then he tapped the green phone icon.

 

Inside the neat, stitched channel covering Eloise Payne’s heart, the phone's circuitry woke up as the incoming call was beamed in from a cell tower on top of an office block two hundred yards to the north.

 

The electric current it generated was tiny. Just enough to cause a glimmer from a Christmas tree light. Or to impel a child's toy robot to take a buzzing half-step across a polished tabletop. But also enough to excite the atoms in ten, foot-long pieces of copper wire. The wave of energy travelled along the wires at the speed of light until it reached the fat cylinders of explosive corseting their wearer.

 

There, something curious happened. The energy of that tiny electrical charge multiplied itself billions of times as the chemical reaction it initiated gathered pace and violence.

Exactly seventy-three milliseconds later, the atoms comprising the charges became unstable and, searching for equilibrium, set off a chain reaction that released all their pent-up energy into the surrounding space.

 

Gabriel had just turned into the side street where his client was based. He and Britta were fixing the details of a pre-dinner drink.

 

“So meet at six-thirty at the French House,” Britta was saying. “Shall I book a restaurant?”

 

“Yes, please. Anywhere we can get a decent burgundy. And I hope you …”

 

Gabriel didn’t finish his sentence. A roaring, shattering boom cut him off. He recognised the shape of it. It sounded like a truck bomb. There was a second or two of total silence, then distant screaming.

 

“Call you back!” he said. He stuffed the phone in his pocket, then spun round and ran back to the main road. He turned left at the junction and sprinted towards Oxford Circus. And hell.

 

Eloise Payne simply disappeared in a cloud of wet, pink specks that combusted into oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen atoms and a few trace elements. The explosion leapt outwards from her torso, popping her head from her neck like a cork from a shaken champagne bottle. The roof of the bus split apart into flying shards of red metal, allowing the roughly spherical object, trailing bright arterial blood and gin-clear cerebrospinal fluid, to travel diagonally upwards for one hundred and seventy-five feet, and roughly south.

 

The force of the explosion blasted Harry Barnes and his new friend Vivienne Frost into a fine mist of flesh and blood. They had been discussing which museum they should visit first and had just settled on the Victoria and Albert, Vivienne’s choice.

 

The black woman with the orange nails was cut into rags. Later, a fireman would retrieve her feet from the wreckage where they had jammed against a twisted piece of steel tubing that had once been the frame of her seat.

 

Everybody else on the top deck of the bus was killed instantly, either by the compression wave of the blast itself or the ball bearings flying out in a sphere from their point of origin.

 

Downstairs, there were multiple fatalities from the blast itself and horrific injuries as limbs and bodies were torn and punctured by the God's Tears or the shrapnel created from the bodywork and fittings of the bus.

 

The shattered bus sat among piles of dead passengers and pedestrians. Body parts were scattered everywhere—lying on the ground, flung through shop windows that sliced them more cleanly than a butcher’s knife, impaled on railings, and dangling from streetlamps. The street was inches deep in blood. People were screaming and moaning, clutching bloody stumps, bleeding heads, and each other. Many had horrific burns that had blackened and charred their exposed skin. Others stood around in a daze. On the periphery, the unharmed were already filming the carnage on their phones.

 

Gabriel barged past a young guy with a smartphone held above his head and knelt by a teenaged girl with both her legs blown off above the knee. She would bleed out within a minute. He undid his belt and yanked it out from the loops of his trousers before cinching it around her right thigh and pulling it tight to staunch the bleeding. She opened her mouth, but the scream was silent. Her face was pale and she was shaking violently.

 

“You!” he shouted at the young man with the phone. “Give me your belt. Now!” He held out his hand, and as soon as the man complied, dropping his belt onto Gabriel's palm with shaking fingers, Gabriel wrapped it around the girl's other leg, tightening it hard against her torn flesh until that leg stopped bleeding too. She whimpered in pain. He took off his suit jacket, removed his phone and wallet, then covered her chest with it. The young man had woken up to what was happening. He ripped off his bright red hoodie, folded it into a pad and eased it under her head.

 

“You're going to be fine,” the young man said to her, looking down into her shock-widened eyes and reaching for her hand.

 

“Stay with her,” Gabriel said, then stood and ran to the nearest victim, a middle-aged businessman, his head pouring with blood from a five inch gash that had torn his scalp away from his skull.

 

Gabriel worked solidly for another hour, applying compression to bleeding wounds, fixing more makeshift tourniquets around limbs missing their extremities, and marshalling bystanders into trauma teams to do the same for as many people as they could manage. He implemented a basic triage system, telling people, “If they’re screaming, they’ve got energy to survive. Treat them after the alive but silent. They need you first. The dead can wait.”

 

As paramedics and firefighters arrived on the scene, he felt he had become more of a hindrance than a help. He staggered out of the devastated blast site, crunching over broken glass and mangled steel and plastic, before collapsing with his back against a wall. His shirt, waistcoat and trousers were soaked with blood. His face was spattered with it where the dying had coughed from ruined lungs. His hands were those of a slaughterman.

 

As he let the adrenaline metabolise out of his bloodstream, he felt a terrible fatigue settle over him. The scene reminded him of others he’d witnessed, as a soldier. One in particular.

He was thinking about Trooper Mickey “Smudge” Smith, the man he’d left, dead and mutilated in Mozambique after his final mission in the SAS had gone disastrously wrong. The man, though, wouldn’t take death lying down; he continued to haunt Gabriel’s sleeping—and waking—hours.

 

He looked down between his outstretched legs. Something shiny lay there. A silvery steel sphere, half covered in blood. He picked it up and held it close to his eyes. He could see his own reflection. And someone else's. Someone with a black face and no lower jaw.

 

“Hello, Boss,” the face said.

 

“Hello, Smudge,” Gabriel said out loud.

 

“Just like old times, eh?”

 

“Just like.”

 

Then he put the ball bearing in his waistcoat pocket and began, very quietly, to cry.