‘Maybe,’ Gabriel shot back. ‘Why not? It wasn’t easy, you know.’
‘Well you’ve earned a medal for bull-headed arrogance, I’ll give you that,’ Redmayne snapped.
‘I’m going to Stockholm to get her,’ said Gabriel.
‘No you are not,’ Redmayne insisted.
At the time, Gabriel was furious about his new deployments, but now he admitted grudgingly that, on this occasion, the boss may have been right. He’d needed to break ties with Ella, more than he’d realized. His current London trip was a detour, tying up a few loose ends on his way back from a dangerous assignment in Moscow. That had gone well. Along with a small team, Gabriel had successfully ‘neutralized’ a group of assassins targeting Western journalists and filmmakers who had dared to criticize the Kremlin regime. It was dirty work. But the mission had gone as smoothly as could be hoped, and it reminded him that the life he had chosen – working for The Group, taking on forces of evil that even security services were afraid to target – was valuable and important. Yes, sometimes the ‘means’ sucked. Sometimes, oftentimes, you had to be shitty and duplicitous and immoral and violent to people who might not deserve it. But we lived in a shitty, duplicitous, immoral and violent world. The bottom line was that the ‘ends’ of The Group’s missions were always justified.
Well. Almost always. And that was good enough for Gabriel.
He still hated Mark Redmayne on a personal level. And every time he thought about Ella, and his role in dragging her into all this, he felt a knife twist in his heart. But with each passing day it hurt less, as his old, self-sufficient persona regained strength. The work had helped. Time had helped. Daisy had helped. Tonight, for the first time in a long time, Gabriel felt light. Free. He would return to the States renewed, refreshed, and ready to be of service.
‘Evening, Mr Mason.’
The receptionist at the Dorchester greeted him coyly, making no effort to hide her blatant sexual interest.
‘Hello, Anna.’
‘Are you turning in for the night? Can I … get you anything?’
Gabriel thought about it. She was a seriously beautiful girl. And he missed Daisy terribly already.
‘Not tonight, thank you,’ he said regretfully. ‘I’ve a horribly early start in the morning.’
Anna sighed. ‘Sweet dreams, then.’
She would miss Jeff Mason.
Upstairs in his suite, Gabriel poured himself a whisky from the minibar, drank it, stripped and showered. Powerful jets of hot water pummeled his aching shoulders, expelling the last traces of tension from his body. Stepping out, he reached for the oversized Egyptian cotton towel hanging on the rail when a movement in the mirror caught his eye.
‘Don’t move.’
He’d already spun around but it was too late. The Glock, complete with silencer, glinted menacingly about six feet from his face, pointed right between his eyes.
‘One more step and I’ll kill you.’
His eyes met those of his attacker, flashing a mixture of surprise and amusement as his fear dissipated.
‘Oh, I doubt you’ll do that, Ella.’
‘Try me.’
In skintight dark blue jeans and a white tank top streaked with red and gold, with her short hair slicked back and her shooting arm fully extended, she looked stunning – lithe and tiny and exotic and deadly, a jungle mamba ready to strike. In other circumstances he would have been overjoyed to see her. But the loaded gun, snarling voice and eyes ablaze with hate put a bit of a dampener on the joyous reunion.
‘You’re angry.’ He raised his hands, and stepped back, like a footballer admitting a foul. The step was a mistake. Without hesitation Ella fired, a barely audible shot that missed his foot by millimeters.
‘Jesus!’
‘I SAID DON’T MOVE!’
Gabriel’s amusement turned back to genuine fear. She wasn’t kidding around.
‘Ella—’ he began, but she cut him off.
‘You lied to me! About my parents. And Athena. You lied.’
He returned her stony stare but didn’t deny it.