Authors: Scott Mariani
Sitting beside Stinker in the cramped interior of the Trislander was a good deal worse than aboard the spacious Gulfstream. Bandy Legs folded himself into the seat behind. Ben could feel the dead eyes boring into the back of his head. After the short, bumpy takeoff the flight attendant came round serving drinks. Ben had nothing. Stinker bought a can of Coke, cracked it open and took the occasional slurp.
Fifteen minutes into the flight, ignoring Stinker’s astonished stare, Ben casually slipped his last pack of Jordanian cigarettes from his pocket, took one out and lit up with a flourish. He smiled and leaned back in his seat, watching the smoke drift across the aircraft’s narrow interior.
A few feet away, a woman passenger twitched her nose, gave a little splutter and elbowed her husband as if to say ‘
do
something’. The guy twisted around in his seat and his face turned purple. ‘Hey. Maybe you can’t read, pal? There’s no smoking in here.’
‘It’s for the smell,’ Ben said, pointing at Stinker. ‘I couldn’t stand it any longer.’
A small argument broke out, during which Ben kept on puffing at the cigarette. It wasn’t long before the flight attendant emerged from the front of the plane. ‘Sir, I need you to put that out right now,’ she said sternly. ‘We operate a strict no smoking policy on board.’
‘You’re right. I’m sorry, everyone.’ Ben dropped the half-smoked cigarette with a sizzle into Stinker’s Coke can. ‘And it’s about time I gave up this disgusting habit. Would you mind disposing of these for me, please, Miss?’ He held out the cigarette packet. The flight attendant looked at it hesitantly, glanced back at Ben and then took it from his hand. ‘I’ll do that for you, sir.’
‘I appreciate it. The name’s Ben.’
‘That’s enough chatting up the women,’ Stinker muttered when she’d headed back towards the front of the plane. ‘Don’t pull any more capers like that again.’
‘I won’t,’ Ben said. ‘That’s a promise.’
On arrival at Little Cayman airport, Ben’s chaperones led him to another car. ‘I guess you know the way,’ he said as they bundled him into the back seat. They did, and a few minutes later he was making his second visit to Palm Tree Lodge. The damage to the door had been repaired and the fresh woodwork painted white. The goons opened the place up, marched Ben inside and made him sit on a chair while his right trouser leg was rolled up, his sock rolled down and the electronic tag clasped around his ankle.
‘Don’t even think about messing with it,’ Bandy Legs warned him when the device was locked into place.
‘Repercussions,’ Ben said. ‘I know the routine.’
‘This is your phone,’ Stinker said, laying a mobile on the sideboard. ‘You can’t make calls with it. Incoming only.’
‘So the Little Cayman Sex Hotline is out?’ Ben said. ‘What I am going to do for entertainment?’
Thirty minutes later, he was alone. Wandering about the house with the tag weighing uncomfortably on his ankle, he found the fridge stocked full of provisions: nothing too fancy, mainly cold chicken legs and salads, but enough to keep him reasonably nourished for the next three days. There was a six-pack of mineral water, cartons of fruit juice and – delight of delights – even a few bottles of Red Stripe Jamaican lager.
Whoever had gone shopping for him had also been busy removing the TV, radio and landline phone and installing the base station for the tag device. The steel box that contained it was securely bolted to the living room floor. A red LED flashed more or less quickly depending on how far away Ben stood from it. He guessed it would trigger a remote alarm the instant he moved more than a hundred yards from that spot: just far enough to allow him to dip his toes at high tide and stroll a short distance up and down the beach. After studying the metal casing for a few minutes he decided there probably wasn’t any way to deactivate either it or the tag without alerting his captors.
With nothing else to do, he grabbed a Red Stripe from the fridge and went to sit on the front steps to drink it. The bottle was small, amber glass, twelve fluid ounces in volume and nicely chilled.
As Ben sipped the cold beer and gazed out across the beach to the gentle blue waves, he pondered what he’d said earlier on about giving up smoking.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Mid-afternoon on the third day, Ben was sitting barefoot on the warm sand in front of Palm Tree Lodge when he felt the tingle of the phone’s silent ringer in his pocket and fished it out to answer.
‘Have you made your decision?’ said Roth’s gravelly voice.
‘I have,’ Ben answered.
‘Then what is it to be, Benedict: are you in or out?’
‘You don’t leave me a lot of choice, Roth. I’m coming on board.’
‘Excellent. The
Hydra
is at anchor a couple of miles offshore. My colleagues are all looking forward to meeting you.’
‘I’m looking forward to it too,’ Ben said.
‘The boat’s on its way. Twenty minutes.’ Roth hung up.
Ben padded across the sand to the house. Walking into the kitchen he tore two sheets of kitchen roll from the dispenser. When he’d finished with them he poured himself a glass of chilled grapefruit juice and drank it slowly. In the hallway he slipped on his shoes and laced them up, then left the house and walked back down the beach as far as the tag would allow, close to the lapping tide-line. The sea breeze ruffled his shirt and his hair. Shielding his eyes from the bright sun, he scanned the horizon.
Soon afterwards, a tiny white dot appeared on the sea and grew rapidly larger until Ben could make out the splash of foam from the motorboat’s bows and the faces of the two men on board. A few yards from the shore, its pilot cut the motor and let the boat glide to a halt in the shallow water. Ben didn’t recognise him, but the second occupant was familiar enough. Stinker gave a leer as he climbed out and crossed the wet sand towards Ben. The black rubber butt of a 9mm protruded from the holster in his waistband. ‘Been a good little doggy?’ he said.
‘Good as gold,’ Ben told him. ‘You flossed today?’
Stinker’s face reddened. He motioned for Ben to hold out his leg, took a key from his pocket and bent down and roughly undid the ankle tag.
‘Let’s go,’ the pilot said, and fired up the outboard.
Ben splashed over to the boat and climbed in, his leg feeling strangely light after getting used to the lump around his ankle for three days. The pilot steered the burbling boat around and away from the shore. ‘Pickup complete,’ Stinker said into his phone. ‘We’re on our way.’
Ben sat quietly as the motorboat rode over the sea and Little Cayman shrank into the distance behind them. For the first few minutes of the journey, Stinker eyed him with suspicion; then, realising Ben wasn’t going to be any trouble, he grinned smugly to himself and looked away.
That was when Ben slipped his hand in his pocket, took out the small package he’d carefully double-wrapped in kitchen roll, and laid it on the seat next to him. He started unwrapping it.
Before Stinker could take notice of what he was doing or react in any way, Ben had stepped across the boat towards him, drawn back his elbow and punched the pointed end of the four-inch sliver of broken Red Stripe bottle hard into the side of his neck, just below the ear.
Stinker would have let out a scream, but Ben’s hand was over his mouth and once the razor-sharp glass sawing rapidly across his throat had sliced through the gristle of his trachea, he had no air to make a sound. Ben moved out of the way of the blood spray. He let the man’s upper body flop backwards over the side and held onto his belt long enough to grab his phone from his pocket and the pistol from its holster.
The pilot hadn’t heard a thing over the noise of the outboard, but sensing the rock of the boat he turned to see what was happening behind him. Ben shot him twice in the head and heaved his body into the water with Stinker’s. The motorboat’s wake turned frothy red. It wouldn’t be long before the sharks turned up.
Taking over at the wheel, Ben used Stinker’s phone to make a call. ‘It’s me. Everything ready?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The beautiful, stately three-masted hundred-metre sailing yacht had cost her present owner just a shade over eight million pounds. She was capable of twenty knots under a full spread of canvas, more if her massive auxiliary engines were brought to bear. At the moment, though, her loose-hanging sails crackled in the soft breeze and cast a welcome shade over the deck as she stood at anchor just out of sight of Little Cayman.
Lounging in that shade, sipping on tall iced drinks, chatting and laughing, most of them casually attired in shorts and sandals and polo tops or florid Hawaii shirts, were nine of the world’s publicly least-known but most influential power-brokers: the senior committee of the organisation known only as Tartarus. Their ages ranged from early fifties to late seventies; between them they possessed over three and a half centuries’ worth of experience at the highest, most secretive level of international politics, and the kind of knowledge that could tear a government down and reduce its country to rubble overnight. With the recent exception of Hayden Roth, not one of them had personally discharged a firearm at a living human being for many years – yet the total of the victims they’d claimed during their careers couldn’t easily be counted.
‘Excuse me one moment, gentlemen,’ said Roth. He carried his clinking gin and tonic over to the chrome rail that lined the deck, and looked at his watch. The boat should arrive soon, he thought. His eyes shaded from the sun by the brim of his Panama hat, he scanned the blue horizon. No sign of it yet. Had there been some delay?
At that moment, his phone rang. He snatched it up. ‘Jenner, where are—?’
‘Jenner’s indisposed at the moment,’ Ben said on the other end of the line.
Roth was too thunderstruck to utter a reply.
‘Look up,’ Ben told him. ‘Due south. You should be able to see me. I’m that little yellow speck in the sky.’ He had to talk loudly over the thrumming rumble of the single radial propeller engine a few feet above him. From where he was sitting behind the Supermarine Sea Otter’s mass of dials and gauges, he could just about make out the majestic sails of the
Hydra
far below. He eased the joystick, bringing the aircraft down in a shallow dive closer to the waves.
‘Hope? What … y-you were supposed to meet the boat,’ Roth stammered.
‘I did,’ Ben said. ‘But there’s been a slight change of plan.’ He checked his readings: air speed, engine speed, flaps; the altitude gauge spun freely as the Sea Otter dropped another hundred feet, almost skimming the waves. She was so heavily laden that it would take all her power to get her up again. But that wasn’t Ben’s idea.
The
Hydra
was coming closer with every second. Ben could see the little matchstick figures on the deck. ‘Is that you in the dinky straw hat, Roth?’
‘Hope, what the hell are you doing?’ Roth’s voice growled on the end of the line.
‘I told you I was coming on board,’ Ben said. ‘That’s what I’m doing.’
* * *
Things might have been different if Hayden Roth hadn’t made one mistake: that night at the disused military base, he’d let it slip that it would be a CIC flight taking Ben to Little Cayman.
From there, the new plan had hatched quickly in Ben’s mind. In the bathroom of the Gulfstream he’d used a pick-pocketed ballpoint to write a message to Tamara on the inside of his cigarette packet, asking her to get back to Grand Cayman as quickly as she could, and giving her the coordinates to fly Nick’s Sea Otter to Little Cayman and meet him on the shore outside Palm Tree Lodge. A hastily-scribbled footnote said: ‘BRING DRUMS SPARE AVGAS. MANY AS POSS.’
On the outside edge of the cigarette packet Ben had written in block capitals the words: “FOR TAMARA MARTÍNEZ, FROM BEN HOPE. URGENT!!”, and below them the secret phone number on which she could be contacted. When he’d used his smoking ploy on board the Trislander later that day to get the attention of Jo Sundermann, the CIC flight attendant, he’d held the cigarette packet out in such a way that she was sure to see what was written on it. From the look on her face as she’d taken the packet, he’d been sure that she’d call the number. Tamara would surely realise that the message could only have come from Ben, and once she returned to Grand Cayman and Jo Sundermann showed her the cigarette pack, she’d recognise the unusual brand from the night they’d sat in her kitchen.
As to whether Tamara would respond to his call for help in time – that was something Ben could only hope for.
The first day of his captivity at Palm Tree Lodge had passed without anything happening. As the second day had dragged on, Ben had grown steadily more and more anxious and painfully aware of the far too many weaknesses in his plan: Jo Sundermann might have binned the cigarette pack without calling Tamara; or maybe Tamara hadn’t answered her phone; or maybe she’d been too frightened to help. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Towards sunset on the second day, just as he was starting to become despondent, Ben’s heart had leapt at the rumble of the approaching aircraft and he’d hurried outside to see the bright yellow Sea Otter touch down on the water and taxi towards the shore.
Tamara had come running to meet him on the sand, and hugged him tight as she explained how she’d come rushing back the minute Jo had called her. Ben had returned her embrace with a real surge of affection.