Day of Absolution - Hardcover

Gardner, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0727858084 ISBN 13: 9780727858085

Publisher: Severn House Publishers Ltd, 2001

Synopsis

A thriller of style, wit and page-turning tension; Charlie Gauntlet, a retired lawyer who was 'something dodgy in the Foreign Office' is recently married to the much younger Rebecca 'Bex' Olesker, a Detective Sergeant in the Metropolitan Police's Anti-Terrorist Branch. Charlie has more or less come to terms with Bex's demanding and dangerous job, though it's hard for him to stay at home when his young wife is on the front line. Especially when she is facing the mysterious and deadly international assassin known only as Alchemist. She may find him, but will she survive the encounter?

About this title

About the Author

John Gardner is one of the world's premier thriller writers, and has published more than forty novels, many of which have been bestsellers. Among Gardner's works are sixteen books in the legendary James Bond series, including Win, Lose, or Die and Never Send Flowers; he has also written six books featuring Big Herbie Kruger, most recently Confessor and Maestro, which was a New York Times Book of the Year. A graduate of Cambridge University who did his postgraduate work at Oxford, he now lives in Hampshire. He has variously been a stage magician, an officer in the Royal Marines, a theatrical journalist, a lecturer in Shakespearean production and a priest in the Church of England.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Day of Absolution

By John Gardner

Severn House Publishers

Copyright © 2002 John Gardner
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780727858085

Chapter One

So it came about on a bitter and freezing Wednesday in February at the beginning of the new-millennium that Charles Vincent Gauntlet married Rebecca Louise Olesker, at a civil ceremony with people pulled in off the street as witnesses. They had lived together, in Bex's flat in Dolphin Square, for some months and, in spite of the perceptible age difference, were as happy as they had any right to be, if not happier.

Bex was particularly suited, for her work was - well, let's just say that any partner had to really understand the Job. She had given up looking for a husband when she first met Gauntlet. It had always been such a letdown. Men never understood, or they wanted to know more, or they just got jealous of the Metropolitan Police Force. Being a detective chief inspector in the Met was bad enough, but to be in the Anti-Terrorist OS13 Branch was something else.

They had met at the funeral of a colleague.

"You knew old Herbie for long?" Charlie asked her. It was almost a chat-up line, and he was quite surprised when Bex said that she had done some quite wild things with Herbie. "It was sudden," she said, giving a sad little smile, her big brown eyes drooping away. "Very quick I understand., Charlie Gauntlet gave her a kind of bracing nod.

This time her eyes locked on him, lips trembling. "Happened in my sitting room." Her voice cracked, "There one minute, gone the next, silly bugger. He went from life to death in the snap of your fingers. Poor old Herb." And now she fixed him with her eyes so that he felt like an insect skewered against a mount and was totally lost to her.

"What d'you do for a living?" Bex asked him sweetly.

"Me? I'm retired. Like old Herb was, out to grass."

Now, if anyone asked Charles Gauntlet what he had done, he would give a wry smile and mutter that he read law at Cambridge but eventually before he was really ready, went on to cio something dodgy for the Foreign Service. Their mutual dead friend, Herbie, had worked for the same firm, only his job had been even more dodgy. "Should've died years ago, Herb," one of his other iffy colleagues had said. "Took a lot of risks when the curtain was still up."

So that was how Charlie and Bex first got together, only Charles had taken early retirement, and one of the boons he brought to the relationship - and thence to the marriage - was that he was very much an ex-government employee who knew exactly how to keep his trap shut and not ask awkward questions. He knew how to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, which to Bex's mind was bloody nigh impossible.

In retrospect, the marriage was quirky because she wasn't looking for a husband. Sure, sometimes her thoughts strayed to the idea of tying the knot, then, like a sniper with a plethora of targets, she switched and considered better of it. That was until the Saturday evening when she came back to Dolphin Square and told him that, barring accidents and a change in the wind, she had five days free.

"What you want to do, then, Bex?" he growled, looking up innocent and paradoxically wise at the same time. The stare said, Okay, Bex, you want to go to the movies, or are we seeing Les Miserables for the thirty-sixth time and having a good cry? You want to go out and live it up - which meant have an Indian or a Chinese, or even an Italian - or you want to go to the movies? See Laurel and Hardy or Charlie Chaplin, like I first suggested?

Later she realized that Charlie, cunning bugger that he was, had led her into a trap simply by the way he looked: by his body language and the tilt of his mouth. He was suggesting that probably there was something exceptionally good to see at the movies, and after that they could have a Madras chicken with Bombay Potatoes and lashings of onion pickle and it wouldn't matter.

"What d'you want to do, my darling? You choose for a change." She could almost taste the Madras chicken. She was a martyr to Madras chicken.

"Okay." He shifted on the settee next to her, one hand straying to her thigh, grinned, dropped his voice, almost picked it up again, and whispered, "Well, I'm getting married Wednesday if you agree."

She did a double take, then a treble. He's joking. No, he's not, the bastard. I can see it in that sly little look he's trying to pull.

Gotcha!

"Charlie?" Stern and very grown-up.

The grin widened.

"Charlie, you've set me up ..."

"Only if you want it. Only if you want to get married, Bex. Make an honest man of me."

"You've arranged it already ..."She remembered that he had quizzed her several weeks before: "Got to make some arrangements, Bex, for when your next leave comes up: your away days, right? Maybe we do something stupid, like take the bus out to Hampton Court. See the armor. Do something daft like get married."

She heard her own voice hurtling from a few weeks ago, "That'll be the day, Charlie. I should live so long."

He now gave her another quick grin, flashing on and off like an Aldis lamp. "So?" Eyebrows lifting, eyes dancing, winking a challenge.

She took a deep breath and committed herself.

So, the police officer and the former lawyer with special duties and clark secrets were married on that raw, cold Tuesday with a delivery-man, a lady bank clerk, a council worker, and a housewife - only you cannot marry a house so she called herself a wife - as the witnesses; and the woman registrar beamed, looking like a coiffured owl as she pronounced them man and wife.

After that, Charlie Gauntlet took Bex-in his arms as though she were a fragile piece of porcelain, which she was not, and kissed her as tenderly as she would ever want to be kissed. And she wondered at the whole business: after all, we were up to our asses in platitudes about family values, on the one hand, while people had cast matrimony to the waves on the other. Nowadays people have "partners" and all that, We also have a lot of nonnuclear, single-parent happy families.

Anyway, they went out onto the ice-slick pavements and hailed a cab to take them to the little Italian place off Fleet Street, where they let the padrone into the secret and he treated them to a bottle of champagne on the house. They ate minestrone, calves liver and onions, tomatoes floating in olive oil and a dash of vinegar. The wedding cake was an apple torte off the trolley, with a fistful of cream, and they ordered brandy with the coffee.

Then they went home for the honeymoon, where Charlie announced that he had tickets for The Flying Dutchman that night.

"Not really the most popular choice these days, Charles," she joked.

"Who's worried by popular?"

She explained that opera was - wrongly - considered elitist by many. Particularly the current establishment, which made him glum, for he had always been politically slightly left of center. Even so, he had been a shade cutting when the prime minister and the chancellor had both chosen Madonna, Oasis, Boy Zone, and Michael Jackson on BBC Radio's Desert Island Discs.

"Thought they were adults," he said again now when his new wife explained the state of the musical nation to him.

"Doesn't stop me liking opera. The Spice Girls aren't obligatory are they?"

"Let's have a little lie down first, darling." She didn't even blush, trollop that she could be when it came to country matters.

Again she was amazed at what Charlie, at slightly less than twice her age, could pull off when he tried. She had learned that if she was not greedy, and if she allowed him to pace himself, she could not want for a better, more satisfying and attentive lover.

The truth about Charlie Gauntlet was that age had not withered him. He really was the kind of guy to whom-age did not matter, either to him or the people he was with. Adult women, unless they had some seriously sorry hang-up, truly did not think of him as late-middle, or even early-old, aged. Charlie was, well, simply Charlie: a man of the twentieth century who did not pin himself down, could not attach himself to a particular decade; just as, until the dosing years of the century, he was never one to really ally himself to any political ideology.

His one true secret was that he was made nervous by retirement. Thought being over-the-hill was a bit unbecoming. Yet that evening Charlie had a kind of epiphany that he thought marked a watershed in his life. Going down to the cab, on Bex's orders so that she could flounce and bounce herself up a little and look nice for him, he nodded to the cabbie who muttered, "Evenin', chief," as Gauntlet slung himself into the back to get out of the cold, said his wife would be down in a minute - his wife, yes. He did not have to repeat it for the cameras: they're never ready on time, are they? Always late when you'd made reservations, had a schedule, had to get her to the church on time. Never could stick to the program, letter, second. The cabby was loquacious, and Gauntlet was in a schmoozing mood.

So, smiling stupidly, Charlie suddenly realized that he had done the trick he had been trying to accomplish since the demise of the Cold War: he had accepted it as being over. In a couple of stray seconds he had managed to embrace the truth that he had retired and need not march to the beat of the secret silent drum anymore. His smile broadened and he made a slight movement: the stirring of a cat against a leg. His eyes dosed for a few seconds as he luxuriated in the knowledge that he never again had to walk the line and tread with care. It was over for him. He could pack up his troubles in his old kit bag and grin.

The only danger he had to face now was a rogue car, plane, or train, or even the attack of a mutant killer virus. No more the writing on the wall. Well, except for any ghosts that might just come a'haunting from the freezing iceberg year - and that wasn't all that likely was it?

So, Bex appeared looking wonderful and even statuesque in her big black coat with the turned-up collar that reached almost around her whole head. She pushed her shoulder next to his and moved in a snuggling motion against him as the cabbie tried to set a brisk pace under the impossible conditions of the early-evening London traffic.

Charlie dosed his eyes again, sentimental old fool that he was. When he had first met Bex Olesker he had thought her short of stature, but that was only a trick of the light, for she stood around five-seven in her stocking feet, and sometimes she was clever enough to appear only five-two, while other times she was six feet tall. And then there was the hair. Always different. Sometimes long and dark, then short and honey. After that, all the shades in between. Charlie said that if she could've grown a beard, she would've done it in months that didn't have an r in them.

Her real color, he knew from his unique vantage point, was near black, and as Alfred Hitchcock had said to Tippi Hedren when they were making The Birds, "Grab at it if one flies up your skirt, 'cos a bird in the hand ..."

In truth, Rebecca Olesker - Bex to her friends - copper of this parish, was a rangy young woman with a hint of the athlete in her long, up-to-her-armpits legs, and a definite way of moving her shoulders that would be enough to frighten off anyone planning larceny or terrorism had they seen her first.

Charlie loved the way she walked, loped really, long, soft strides that whispered if she wore a skirt. He often said to her that her thighs were like silk when they touched one another -"That's not original, Bex, but it's true."

And Bex? How did Bex view life from the sharp end of being just married? Never ever thought you'd say it, did you, Bex? Never thought you'd ever say you loved someone just like you love Charlie? Love him to pieces: love the scent of him, the maleness and the same cologne he always used, the sweet-smelling successful wonder of him. God, you can almost even smell his smile, just as the old song says, like the sun after rain. You can't put it into words. It's difficult, but you never had the talent with words. Even liked the fickle of his mustache.

Bex Olesker, wonderwoman of the Anti-Terrorist Branch, sat in the back of the taxi, lifted her head from his shoulder, peeked at him, saw the contented smile on his face, and put her head back in its nestling place, giving a sigh like a lovelorn loon, and trying to put it all into words.

"Take a card," Charlie whispered. "Any card."

When she had first met him, a hundred years ago, she had not even particularly liked him. It hit her hours later, all of a sudden, knocked her for six, with his medium height and broad shoulders: very neat the way he walked and moved. He could never be described as handsome, with his deceptively open face that had been the downfall of many an unwary man and woman in the witness box, or that safe house in which the Firm conducted close questioning - which is another word for interrogation. Once she got over that she was in love with him, she jotted down several little mental notes. Just to remember how he made her feel - like dancing down the street and throwing a bit of sunlight at her. He could come into a room and pow! - reach up, grab a handful of sunlight, and hurl it at her so that the whole room took on new dimensions. Bloody hell, Bex, is that you talking?

What would all her liberated, militant feminist friends say? More to the point, what would her mother say if she could listen in to the stream going sliding on the thin ice of her daughter's conscious waking thoughts? "Rebecca Olesker, I've never heard anything like that in all my born days," she would have said. "Becca, you're a wanton young woman."

Say it, Mum, tell me I'm a slut 'cos all I want is for this lovely, overgrown schoolboy of a man to wrap himself round me and pull me close, hold me forever. Bex was amazed to feel like this, because it really wasn't her. Nobody she worked with could possibly recognize her if they listened to this soppy cow.

So it was that they sat with shoulders touching and the ring on her left hand seeming to be out of place and very heavy as they let Wagner's opera rage and rumble over them. They saw and heard the Dutchman's ship enter Sandwike Bay with its bloodred sails and the curse that is on the captain, who must sail the oceans until the Day of Judgment unless he can find a woman who will be faithful only to him. A tall order, Bex thought, but one she could find easy enough if the man happened to be Gauntlet, who was himself thinking the same thing in reverse, but he did not let it show - at least until the interval, when he whispered, "See, you've to stay faithful to me, Bex, otherwise I turn into a lobster."

"You're a lobster already." She held on to his arm and they struggled into the bar, grabbing the drinks they had already ordered: Perrier water for her and a black coffee for her husband.

Two sips in and one comment on the tenor before Charlie heard the laugh, recognized it, and felt the short hairs rise on the back of his neck.

She saw him prick up his ears, like a meerkat. She doubted if anyone else would notice, but prided herself on her ability to spot the changes in him. Only the tiniest of movements, but to her it was a stretching of the neck, tilting of the head with the gray eyes set absolutely still.

"What's going on?" she all but whispered.

"Ghost. Tell you later." Another sip of the coffee and a turning of the head in the direction of the laugh. He was right, 120 percent, and what the hell was Kit Palfrey doing here in London of all places? They had just about run him out of this city on a rail, but that was thirty years ago. Thirty years and counting. Run him out and then suffered the embarrassment of hearing him tell the world from his new home in Moscow that he was a traitor to his country and proud of it.

Kit Palfrey, spy-about-town, more dangerous than any of them. Part of the so-called Cambridge Ring. Charlie himself had reason to remember Kit, for it was Kit who had ... Oh, what the hell. It was over and done with now, long gone, ancient history, and he would have to dredge his mind for the details. Just a bad dream, old Kit Palfrey - and he rooked pretty old now: sixty-five? Seventy? Well, he would, wouldn't he? It had happened thirty years ago. Doesn't time fly when you've been keeping secrets?

They used to say, the press used to say, and people in the Foreign Service also, that he looked like the film actor James Stewart. He certainly had that tall, thin, gangly frame, and a voice that drawled and seemed to splutter out what he wanted to say: reaching for words that were just over the skyline. But there the resemblance ended, as far as Charlie was concerned. The face was more like that of a different actor: more square, Stocky, angular - Claude Rains possibly. Yes, Claude Rains's head on James Stewart's body.

Continues...

Excerpted from Day of Absolutionby John Gardner Copyright © 2002 by John Gardner. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Severn House Publishers Ltd
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0727858084
• ISBN 13: 9780727858085
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352