Authors: Scott Mariani
‘Disinformation is a key part of the department’s work.’
‘I can think of another word to describe it.’
‘In this business, we’re sometimes forced to make unpleasant decisions,’ Sinclair said.
‘I’ve heard that line before.’
‘It doesn’t mean we don’t bitterly regret the collateral damage those decisions sometimes cause. The harm to a man’s good name. The appalling psychological effect on his family. We were extremely distressed when we heard that Chapman’s daughter had walked out in front of a car. Believe me, we do not take these matters lightly.’
Ben didn’t say anything for a long time. ‘So what now?’ he asked eventually.
Sinclair spread his hands. ‘Well, naturally, if you were a normal everyday member of the public, we would never have taken you into our confidence like this.’
‘No, you’d probably have left me for the sharks,’ Ben said.
Sinclair ignored the comment. ‘Given who you are, and the fact that as one of Her Majesty’s armed forces you’re bound by a raft of non-disclosure agreements …’
‘I keep my mouth shut about this.’
Sinclair nodded. ‘We’ll make it worth your while, I can assure you. You’ll be well looked after.’
‘I can hardly wait,’ Ben said.
‘We know we can trust you, Major.’ Sinclair looked at his watch. ‘My, how the time has flown. We’ll be arriving in London in a few more hours. I’d suggest you get some rest.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Thin drizzle was slanting out of a leaden early-afternoon sky as Ben stepped out onto the tarmac at Heathrow’s private jet terminal. ‘God, this is bloody awful,’ Sinclair muttered at his side, putting up an umbrella.
Entering a country unofficially wasn’t a new experience for Ben. He’d done it all over the world – but even so, the speed with which they breezed through the cursory check-in made him raise an eyebrow. No questions were asked, no passports were needed. A pair of serious-faced men in dark suits joined them, one speaking frequently on a radio, the other remaining silent and sticking very close to Ben. Ben didn’t let it bother him.
When they were through, Jack Brewster handed Ben the leather jacket and green army bag they’d recovered from the
Santa Clara
, gave him a wry smile and walked away, motioning for the two dark-suited men to follow and leaving him alone with Sinclair.
‘Now,’ Sinclair said with a twinkle. ‘I have a surprise for you.’ He led Ben across an empty VIP lounge, punched a security code to open a door marked STRICTLY NO UNAUTHORISED ENTRY, and up a short corridor to a set of fire doors. ‘Here we are,’ Sinclair said with a flourish, pushing through the panic bar and swinging the doors open onto a covered forecourt at the rear of the building.
The row of parked cars outside made Ben raise his eyebrows a second time:
a Porsche 911 Turbo; an Aston Martin DB7; a Ferrari Maranello; a Bentley Arnage; a TVR Tuscan S, all lined up like something out of a millionaire’s fantasy.
‘Your choice, Major,’ Sinclair said, beaming. ‘If you decide you don’t like the one you picked, you can swap it for another. Just say the word.’
‘That one,’ Ben said, and pointed out the tomato-red Ferrari.
‘That would have been my choice too.’ Sinclair rattled a set of keys and tossed them through the air to Ben. ‘Didn’t I tell you we’d look after you? And here’s a little something extra,’ he added, holding up a credit card. ‘Now these we don’t give out to just anybody. Special expense account. Everything on the house, so to speak. Our little way of expressing our appreciation. I hope you’ll use it to enjoy the remainder of your convalescence.’
‘You bet I will.’ Ben snatched the card from him, climbed into the cockpit of the Ferrari and fired it up. The engine thundered like a twenty-one gun salute. Sinclair grinned a toothy grin, leaned down at the window and was about to say something – but his words were drowned out and he jumped back as smoke poured from the spinning tyres and the Ferrari took off.
Jack Brewster’s goons opened up a gate. Ben roared through and stepped on the gas. Slashing through the traffic, the Ferrari covered the fifteen miles into central London in a ridiculously short time. The V12 was just getting nicely warmed up as Ben screeched to a halt outside the Ritz in Piccadilly, walked up to the desk and asked for a suite. ‘The biggest you have.’
Minutes later, Sinclair’s expense account was down £3,800 and Ben’s sole, decidedly non-designer, piece of luggage was being taken up to the split-level grandeur of the Royal Suite. Ben’s next act was to call up room service and have the kitchen run him up an extremely sumptuous, very late lunch, at an exorbitant premium he was more than happy to pay. The bottle of wine he ordered to go with it cost more than a full tank of fuel for his Ferrari. While he was on the phone he arranged for a hotel lackey to run across the street to Davidoff of St James’s, the cigar merchants, to fetch him a box of Cohiba Esplendidos. He’d been in town less than an hour, and already Sinclair’s expense account was taking a hell of a battering.
After eating his mid-afternoon lunch at the head of the table in his own private dining room overlooking Green Park – antique crystal, finest porcelain and silverware – Ben retreated to a master bedroom that would have made Marie Antoinette blush, flopped on the giant bed and lit up a cigar. When he’d smoked it to the stub he napped for almost three hours, then showered and changed into the last clean clothes that were stuffed in the bottom of his canvas bag.
By now it was after seven-thirty, and the drizzle had cleared into a fresh, pleasant evening. Ben called back down to room service and ordered a limo for the evening. ‘The biggest and most expensive one you can get me,’ he specified. When the sixteen-seater glittering white stretch monstrosity arrived, complete with mirror ceiling, giant TV and fully-stocked bar, Ben had the chauffeur drive him a decadently short distance down St James’s Street to a noisy bar where a single measure of ordinary whisky cost over six pounds.
Several hours passed before he finally emerged, now accompanied by two cackling, high-heeled young women whose names he was fairly sure were Linzi and Bev. He had the waiting chauffeur ferry them back along St James’s Street to the Ritz, where he escorted his noisy companions into the hotel bar, fired up another Cohiba Esplendido and ordered three bottles of the most expensive champagne they had, at £500 a throw.
Sometime after dawn the following morning, a dishevelled, puffy-eyed Linzi and Bev came teetering uncertainly out of the lift and exited the revolving doors of the Ritz lobby under the disapproving gaze of the front desk attendant. Three hours later, after a lavish breakfast, Ben checked out, climbed into the Ferrari and blasted out of London.
He headed north-west on the M40 towards his old stamping-ground, Oxford. Leaving the motorway, he skirted the city and took the familiar A40 west. Cheltenham; Gloucester; Ross-on-Wye; over the Welsh border towards Abergavenny: the road grew emptier and the countryside greener the closer he got to his destination. He stopped off in Brecon to buy some provisions at the local Co-op with his own money, as well as a hefty piece of roasting beef from Mr Evans the butcher.
He was back at the cottage by midday. The grass in the front garden was an inch longer than he’d last seen it, but nothing else had changed by the banks of the burbling River Usk: the events of the wider world didn’t make much of an impact out here.
Shifting down a couple of gears after his time in London, Ben spent most of the afternoon strolling by the river and exploring the surrounding countryside. Beyond the fence at the rear of the cottage, a broad meadow filled with wild flowers led to a stretch of woodland, untouched for centuries and thick with ancient gnarly sycamores, beech and laurel. Ben wandered in there a while, sometimes straying off the public footpath that wound for half a mile through the trees, crouching now and again among the ferns to examine the tracks of foxes and badgers on the moist, leafy forest floor. Twice he met a fellow walker on the footpath, smiled and wished them a good afternoon.
Back at the cottage, a light meal; then he settled in a comfortable armchair by the living room window with a glass or two of Laphroaig and the book he’d been slowly working his way through before leaving for the Caymans, Aristotle’s
The Nicomachean Ethics
. Just after eleven o’clock, he laid the book down, rubbed his eyes and climbed the stairs to his bedroom for an early night. Seven minutes later, his bedroom light went out and the cottage fell into pitch darkness.
Not long afterwards, they came for him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The team leader waited until the cottage windows had been dark long enough for the target to fall asleep. He carried out a final, silently efficient check of his machine carbine and then muttered the command into his throat mike that his two colleagues hidden among the trees had been waiting to hear.
Without the least sound, not the crack of a twig, the three-man team stalked out into the long grass of the meadow and converged on the cottage, virtually invisible in their black assault vests and ski-masks. The infra-red night vision goggles they wore were the latest military issue. They were professionals at what they did, were thoroughly familiar with the nature of the target and would take no chances – but the observation of his behaviour since re-entering the country showed that he was entirely off his guard. The three men had been watching him earlier that day from leafy cover as he wandered unsuspecting through the woods, and they might have picked him off if it hadn’t been for the proximity of the public footpath and the risk of being seen.
Now, under cover of night, was the time.
The team reached the fence at the rear of the cottage and silently climbed over into the garden. Without a word they split up: the team leader skirted around the stone wall to the front entrance; the second man crept towards the back door, and the third leaped, cat-like, up the grassy bank at the side of the house, where the corner of the thatched roof dipped low enough to jump across to. He landed lightly on the thatch, signalled to his colleagues and made his way stealthily towards the point their careful planning had told them was directly above the target’s bedroom.
The back door snicked open with the barest sound and a black-clad figure stepped inside the hallway. The assassin paused a moment, listening keenly for any sound. The cottage was utterly silent. Through his goggles, its pitch-dark interior was lit up green and as clear as day.
He sniffed the air, caught the scent of tobacco smoke and whisky, and smiled to himself. They’d all seen the way the target had been knocking back the booze that evening. He’d be fast asleep now, dead to the world.
The assassin padded across the hallway towards the stairs. Raised the toe of his combat boot to the bottom tread, gently testing it with his weight in case it creaked. But the staircase was solid oak, soundly built, and didn’t make a squeak. He climbed the next step, then the next. Halfway up the staircase, he could see the bedroom door through the turned oak banister rails. He silently pushed off the safety catch of his weapon with a gloved finger. Climbed another step.
And crashed downwards feet-first through the staircase, letting out a grunt of shock and surprise as it gave way under him with a crackling rending of wood. He dropped his weapon and lashed out with both hands to save himself, but there was nothing he could do to avoid falling straight down into the space below. He landed heavily on his back, whacking his head against something solid. He was in an under-stairs cupboard.
The door was bolted from the outside.
And the cupboard was filled with coils of barbed wire.
* * *
At the sounds of confusion and panic in his radio earpiece, the second assassin reacted instantly without trying to guess what had happened to his team member. That could wait until later. Slashing though the last layer of thatch with his combat dagger he kicked his way through to the inside. His boots connected with the thick bedroom ceiling beam. He leaped quickly down to the floor, and before the huddled shape of the man under the bedclothes ten feet away had had any chance to awaken or make a move, he’d emptied half a magazine of 9mm copper-jacketed bullets into it, filling the bedroom with the muffled chatter of the machine carbine and the tinkle of spent shell cases on the bare floorboards. The bullets ripped through the thin sheets. Blood spattered green in the night-vision goggles.
The sleeper hadn’t stood a chance.
Maybe if the silly bastard had laid off the whisky
, the killer thought as he stepped quickly through the drifting gunsmoke and whisked away the bedcovers to put a final three-shot burst through Ben Hope’s brain.
In the half-second that it took him to register the large, bleeding lump of raw beef and the cushions arranged under the sheets to look like the shape of a man, the wardrobe door had burst open behind him. The assassin whirled around – straight into the chopping double-handed swing of the cricket bat. It caught him across the temple with a resounding crunch of well-seasoned willow against bone, and he hit the floor in a coma.
Ben tossed the bat away and snatched up the fallen MP5. With a hard stamp of his heel he crushed the assassin’s windpipe. Then he was across the room, through the bedroom door and out on the dark landing. He flew down the stairs, avoiding the gaping hole where he’d half-sawn through the oak treads earlier that day.