Read The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET Online
Authors: Scott Mariani
Torréjon military base
24 kilometres northeast of Madrid
The airfield’s floodlights gleamed off the sleek fuselage of the SOCA Cessna Citation jet as it waited on standby a hundred metres from the giant hangar where Darcey had set up her temporary command centre. The huge space was alive with heavily-armed police and soldiers, technical personnel and government agents, and filled with vehicles and military trestle tables and flight-cased racks of radio and computer equipment. At the rear of the hangar, silhouetted in shadow, stood the official planes of the King of Spain and the country’s President.
Darcey was deep in a meeting with Comisario Miguel Garrido, one of Madrid’s most senior-ranking police chiefs, when, just after midnight, Paolo Buitoni came sprinting across the hangar and broke in on their conversation. He was out of breath and clutching a card file, full of apologies for the interruption but bursting with news.
‘I just had a call from Rome,’ he said excitedly. ‘Your idea to bring Ornella De Crescenzo into custody and put some pressure on her? We’ll probably get our balls – that is to say, we’ll probably get disciplined, but it worked. She remembered. She got it.’
‘Don’t beat about the bush, Paolo,’ Darcey said. ‘Tell me.’
‘The name of the man her husband rushed off to meet is Segura. That was all she could remember, but I ran a search using “Segura Spain fine art”. I came up with this guy.’ He plucked a glossy printout from the file. Darcey took it. It showed a serious-looking man in his fifties, with swept-back silver hair and broad shoulders, pictured at some kind of arts event, shaking hands with another man in front of a huge canvas.
‘Juan Calixto Segura,’ Buitoni said. ‘A well-respected art collector based in Salamanca.’ He snatched a sheet from his file. ‘I have the address right here. Million to one, Ben Hope followed Pietro De Crescenzo there tonight. And there’s more. Our men just discovered that Ornella’s car is missing. She says her husband left for Spain in his own Volvo.’
‘Ben Hope took it,’ Darcey said. ‘We’re looking for a bronze Maserati GranTurismo. Not too many of those around.’
Darcey turned to Garrido. ‘Comisario, we need your tactical teams and every available patrol officer in there, hard and fast.’
Garrido was already summoning his aides and issuing commands.
‘Darcey, Salamanca is just a hundred and fifty kilometres from here,’ Buitoni said. ‘The jet can get us there in less than fifteen minutes and I’ll have a police chopper waiting for us at the military base outside the city.’
‘Nice work, Paolo.’ Darcey flashed a brief smile at him, and then her jaw tightened and the fierce glint came into her eye. She grabbed her Beretta from a nearby steel table.
As she strode towards the mouth of the hangar she jacked a round into the breech, flipped on the safety and shoved the weapon into her hip holster. ‘Ben Hope isn’t getting away this time.’
‘She has that look again,’ Buitoni muttered under his breath as he ran after her. ‘God, I love that look.’
Salamanca
Pietro De Crescenzo’s eyes became huge and round in the rear-view mirror. He twisted round in horror to stare at the man who’d suddenly appeared in the back of the Volvo.
‘Good to see you again,’ Ben said. ‘Remember me?’
‘
Mio dio
. The murderer.’
‘That’s right,’ Ben said. ‘I’m a sick, sick man. A raving psychotic, just like the papers say. I killed Urbano Tassoni and I enjoyed doing it, just like I enjoyed killing a hundred other men, women and children before him. And I’ll kill you, too, Pietro, unless you do exactly what I say.’
De Crescenzo cowered behind the steering wheel. Ben dangled the Volvo keys from his fingers. ‘This town’s pretty by night. Why don’t we take a scenic tour while we talk?’
De Crescenzo took the key from him with a trembling hand. He was shaking so badly it took him three attempts to fit it into the ignition.
‘Don’t drive too fast,’ Ben said. ‘Don’t drive too slowly. Don’t do anything that might attract attention to us.’
De Crescenzo nodded frantically, took a deep breath and pulled away. The Volvo glided through the night streets. Traffic was thin. As they skirted the old city, the ancient sandstone buildings and domes and steeples were lit gold under the moonlight.
‘How did you know where to find me?’ De Crescenzo quavered.
‘The contessa was a great help,’ Ben said. ‘She even lent me her car.’
‘Ornella! You did not—’
‘You can relax, Pietro. She’s fine, apart from a hangover. Needs to ease up on the Smirnoff a little. As soon as I’m finished with you, you should think about getting home to her before she overdoes it. You’re not giving her the attention she deserves.’ Ben Hope, marriage counsellor.
De Crescenzo’s shoulders slumped at the wheel. ‘What is it you want from me?’
‘I came to ask you what the hell’s going on,’ Ben said. ‘But now I can see you don’t know any more than I do.’
De Crescenzo glanced back at him in the mirror. ‘You were there? In Segura’s home?’
‘I heard every word you said, Pietro.’
‘Then I can tell you no more. Please. Let me go. I promise – I
swear
– I will tell nobody that I saw you here tonight.’
‘Tell me one thing, and you won’t see me ever again,’ Ben said. ‘Tell me about the first time.’
‘The first time?’
‘Something you said to Segura. “The first time, the crooks left with nothing.” You weren’t talking about the gallery heist, were you?’
De Crescenzo was silent for a few moments, then let out a long, sad sigh. ‘When Gabriella Giordani passed away in October 1986 from a heart attack, it was as the direct result of a violent intrusion at her secluded home outside Cesena. She was all alone when it happened. Her former maid and longtime companion and confidante was no longer living with her. When Gabriella was later found dead at the scene, the coroner’s conclusion was that the heart attack had been induced by acute terror.’
‘What were they looking for? Cash? Valuables?’
De Crescenzo grunted bitterly. ‘That is the strange thing. Gabriella Giordani had been an established artist for quite a few years and her work was worth a fortune. She was
extremely
wealthy, her home filled with beautiful things. Antiques, jewel-lery, artwork, every piece itemised for insurance purposes. The burglars could have helped themselves to everything. And yet, they touched not a single item of her possessions, though they searched the house violently from top to bottom. What they were looking for remains a mystery.’
Ben could see a pattern forming here. Criminals broke into a house full of valuables, were willing to cause death in order to obtain what they wanted, yet left the place apparently empty-handed. Twenty-five years later, an armed gang committed multiple murder, just to obtain a relatively valueless drawing once owned by the same person, which now moreover turned out to have been a fake. When history repeated itself like that, there had to be a reason.
‘You think they were looking for “The Penitent Sinner” the first time round?’ he asked.
De Crescenzo shrugged helplessly. ‘I have asked myself this many times. There is no way to know the answer.’
‘I can think of one way. Talk to the people who did it.’
De Crescenzo said nothing.
‘Tell me again about this drawing,’ Ben said. ‘What was it, a pencil sketch?’
‘Charcoal, drawn on laid paper.’
‘Laid paper?’
‘A special kind of art paper, thick, textured rather like a fabric print. But essentially just a piece of paper, nothing more. The sketch itself is interesting and masterfully executed but, as you have seen yourself, it is by no means a spectacular piece of art. Its only possible value was the signature at the bottom. If it had only been genuine,’ De Crescenzo added sourly.
‘The sketch couldn’t have been superimposed on some other piece of artwork?’ Ben asked. ‘The original painted out, then redone over the top?’ He was thinking that maybe whatever the thieves had been after was hidden underneath – but he was clutching at straws and he knew it.
‘Impossible,’ De Crescenzo said. ‘On canvas, this could be feasible. On paper, however, such an overpaint would be immediately apparent, as well as highly impractical. No artist would do such a thing. The mystery is simply unsolvable.’
Ben leaned back against the seat as De Crescenzo drove on, and thought for a while in silence. Then an idea hit him. ‘You mentioned Gabriella had a longtime companion. Someone she might have confided in. Maybe that person would know something.’
‘I do not know what happened to her after she left Gabriella,’ De Crescenzo said. ‘If Mimi is even still living, she would be impossible to trace.’
‘Did you say Mimi?’
De Crescenzo looked blank. ‘Yes.’
‘That wouldn’t be Mimi Renzi, would it?’
‘Her surname was unknown. In all the biographical accounts of Gabriella’s life, she was referred to only as Mimi.’ De Crescenzo’s bemused look turned to one of desperation. ‘Now you know everything I know. That’s it. There is nothing more I can add. Will you please let me go?’
‘I’m true to my word,’ Ben said. ‘I’m not who you think I am.’
‘Why did you kill Tassoni?’ The question burst out of De Crescenzo’s mouth as though it had been burning on his tongue all day.
‘You really think I did?’
‘It was on television.’
‘I thought you were smarter than that, Pietro.’
At that moment, something caught Ben’s eye out of the car window. He turned and saw it again – a blinking light suspended high in the air over the rooftops. He whirred the glass down a few inches, felt the hot sticky night air on his face.
And heard the thump of helicopter blades over Salamanca – as well as the high-pitched chorus of police sirens.
Ben reached into his pocket for the Maserati keys. It was time to be out of here.
Within minutes, the dark, quiet street outside Juan Calixto Segura’s home was filled with noise and activity as a whole fleet of police vehicles pulled up outside and armed officers spilled out. Segura was standing at his front door wearing a silk dressing gown and a bewildered expression as eight cops came storming up the steps, bundled him aside and poured into the house with their weapons drawn. Within moments, the radio signal came back that the place was clear.
Two kilometres across Salamanca, a black Eurocopter deployed by the Grupo Especial de Operaciones, Spain’s specialist tactical firearms police unit, was hovering low scanning the streets with its powerful spotlamp when the co-pilot spotted the bronze Maserati GranTurismo making its way out of the city. In a flurry of radio calls the chopper overtook the car, banked round one hundred and eighty degrees and came down to block the Maserati’s path. Ropes tumbled down from the aircraft’s open sides and six heavily-armed cops in black fatigues, helmets and goggles came abseiling down and hit the road running.
The Maserati halted in the middle of the road as they circled it, six bullpup FN submachine gun muzzles trained steadily on the dark figure behind the windscreen. The men had all been briefed on the nature of their target. They were taking no chances. Over the roar of the chopper the team leader yelled into his throat mike, ‘Fugitive apprehended!’ The others were shouting at the car: ‘Get out of the vehicle NOW! Hands on your head! Move SLOW or we WILL shoot!’
The Maserati’s door swung open. In the blazing spotlight from the chopper the driver got out very nervously and dropped to his knees on the road with his fingers laced over his head. Laser sight dots danced around his head and chest like a swarm of red insects as the cops advanced warily. But the man didn’t seem like the fearsome adversary they’d been briefed to expect – in fact he didn’t match the description of the fugitive at all. This guy was much older, skinny and gaunt. The team leader signalled to his men to bring him in anyway.
‘I didn’t do anything!’ Pietro De Crescenzo screeched in Italian as they put him face down on the road and fastened his wrists behind his back. ‘He told me to take my wife’s car home—’ His protests were lost in the noise as an armoured police van skidded up to the scene and he was dragged into the back.
Three minutes’ fast sprint away in a quiet backstreet overshadowed by tall houses, Ben was working his way up a line of parked vehicles looking for a ride out of Salamanca. Stealing cars wasn’t something he liked doing, but when he saw the rusted-out Renault 5 at the kerb he had a feeling the owner would probably thank him for taking it. No alarm, no immobiliser. Auto theft, the old fashioned way. The passenger side window gave after just a couple of hits. Ben popped the locks, and then he was in and working on the wires behind the steering column. The engine fired with a rattle.
He pulled away and drove calmly through the empty night streets. Not fast, not slow, attracting no attention, observing the rules of the road. Over the wheeze of the Renault’s engine he could hear the rhythmic thud of the police helicopter and a chorus of sirens that sounded as if every police vehicle in the region was heading for the vicinity of Segura’s house.
Ben stopped for a red light at the mouth of a wide T-junction, indicating right to follow the signs out of town and toeing the gas to help the Renault maintain its idle speed. The junction ahead was deserted. After a few seconds, the lights changed and he pulled out.
A massive impact tore the steering wheel from his grip and threw him sideways as the Renault was sent spinning sideways, mounted the kerb and hit a wall.
For a few moments, Ben was stunned. His vision floated unsteadily, his hearing muffled. Seconds passed before he understood that the dazzling light shining through the cracked windscreen was the remaining headlight of the car that had been speeding across the junction and hit him. It was stationary at an angle a few metres away in the road, its nearside wing badly crumpled and a smashed mirror dangling like a half-severed ear.
Two figures got out of the car, moving towards Ben’s Renault. As his senses cleared, he realised they were wearing uniforms – and that their car was a dark blue Citroën C4 with a light bar on the roof and POLICIA written across its side.
One of the cops was an older man, mid-fifties. There was a smear of blood on his mouth where the airbag had punched his lip into a tooth. The other was maybe late twenties, already on his radio reporting the accident. Ben tried to open his car door, but it was jammed. He turned sideways in the driver’s seat and kicked out with both feet together. The door burst open with a grinding of buckled metal. As he clambered out, the two cops met him with humble and apologetic looks, and the older one launched into an explanation in rapid Spanish.
Then stopped. He frowned at Ben, peering at him closely under the streetlights. He turned to his colleague, who was staring too. A rapid nod, a heartbeat’s silence, and both cops went for their pistols.
The younger cop’s SIG was the first to clear its holster, but it never made it to aiming position. Ben was on him in one step and about half a second. He slapped the pistol downwards and twisted it out of the guy’s hand, throwing a solid elbow in his face. At the same time his left foot lashed out in a straight low kick that connected with the older cop’s knee and sent him tumbling on his back. Before the younger cop had hit the ground, Ben had stepped over to his colleague and knocked him out with a kick to the head.
Neither of them would have any permanent damage. Ben shoved the younger cop’s SIG in his waistband, scooped up his partner’s weapon and ejected the mag and pocketed it. The pistol was quick and easy to dismantle. With the slide off the frame rails, the barrel fell out and Ben dropped it through the slots of a nearby iron drain cover. He tossed the other useless pieces into the shadows, then picked up the cops’ radios and smashed them on the road.
The Renault was undriveable, but the police Citroën still had the keys in it. As he took off, Ben knew that it was tactically a bad move and that he’d have to ditch the car within the short time it would take for the alarm to be raised.
Only a few seconds passed before he knew it was already too late. As he rounded a bend, there were suddenly two more police C4s right behind him. They weren’t after him – not yet. He could either stay with them and gamble on their not spotting him behind the wheel, or he could take evasive action before fifty more of them joined the party, together with air support and the whole of Spain’s rapid response firearms units combined. That was a little more trouble than he needed right now.
It wasn’t a difficult decision to make. He floored the gas and threw the Citroën into a screeching hard left turn. The two following cars seemed to hesitate, then turned in after him. His in-car radio began to shout at him. He ignored it. No point pretending any more. He hammered the car up onto the kerb and the revs soared as he sent it over the top of a flight of concrete steps that descended steeply down to a pedestrianised street below. The Citroën bucked and juddered down the steps. There was a loud
whang
and a shower of sparks as he hit the bottom. As Ben took off again he glanced in the mirror and saw that his pursuers hadn’t dared risk the steps. Four cops were out of their vehicles. He heard a ragged series of popping pistol shots. His rear window shattered. There was a junction twenty metres ahead. Ben threw the Citroën into a skidding right-hander out of pistol range and then redlined it. He was heading away from the old city, into the modern urban sprawl that had grown up around its edges.
He was scanning left and right for a good spot to pull over and ditch the police car when he heard the thud of the chopper overhead. An instant later, he was caught in the strong circle of white light it was throwing down over the street. He pressed harder on the gas, leaving the chopper behind momentarily as the speedometer climbed past a hundred and twenty and buildings and parked vehicles zipped past on both sides in a blur. Pedal to the floor, his stomach rose into his ribcage as the road dropped down through a flyover tunnel. The chopper banked steeply to clear the bridge, then it was on him again as he zipped by signs for an industrial estate. Tall warehouse buildings loomed against the night sky. The chopper dropped down low, keeping pace just thirty metres to his left. Its side hatch slid open and a police shooter in a black tactical vest hung out with one foot on the skid and a large shotgun in his gloved hands. He was aiming for the front of the car.
BOOM
. Ben felt the heavy buckshot load punch into the front wing, sending the car skittering to one side. The shooter was going for the tyres. At this speed, a blowout could send him into a spin, flip and roll that would turn him into corned beef. He hit the brakes and skidded around another bend. He was heading deeper into the industrial estate.
A scream of sirens tore his eyes from the road to the mirror. Police cars were joining the chase from all directions, converging into a fleet that filled the road in an ocean of swirling blue lights.
Not good. But the chopper worried him more. It was swinging back parallel to him, closer now, and the shooter was lining up for another shot. Ben could see the guy’s black-gloved hand tighten on the weapon’s pistol grip. Quarter of a second before he heard the shot, he stabbed the brakes and the blast of pellets passed in front of the Citroën’s nose.
But braking meant he’d lost precious speed, and now the pursuing cars were coming up fast behind him. More shots rang out. Ben felt the impact as bullets punched into the bodywork of the car.
The shotgunner fired again from the chopper. This time he scored. The front corner of the C4 dipped hard as the tyre exploded into flying ribbons of rubber. Ben sawed at the wheel and just about managed to control the skid that sent him screaming into a narrow alley between warehouse buildings. The helicopter pilot pulled up into a violent climb.
Ben’s car was lurching and bumping wildly as he gunned it down the alley as fast as it could go. There were extensive building works going on up ahead – a yellow JCB, a concrete mixer and a giant dumper truck with its flatbed elevated to tip a load of gravel by the roadside. The chopper’s lights were reflected in the windows of another tall warehouse directly opposite the exit of the alley.
Another police C4 was right on Ben’s tail. As he wrestled with the erratic steering, it nipped past his right flank and overtook him, trying to block his path. The alley was narrowing for the building works. As the car in front braked heavily, Ben realised with a shock that he was running out of road.
With half the Spanish police behind him, there was no way he was about to slow down. He flattened the pedal to the floor and aimed the speeding car at the heap of gravel behind the dumper truck.
If this didn’t kill him, it might even work.
Fuck it.
Ben braced himself for the impact.
As the car raced towards the gravel pile at almost a hundred and sixty kilometres an hour, more shots rang out over the scream of the engine and his windscreen suddenly turned into an opaque web of cracks. Something thumped his upper left arm hard, but his senses barely had time to register it before the car crashed into the gravel pile with massive force and the airbag exploded in his face. He felt the crunching shock through the steering wheel as most of the front suspension and the underside of the Citroën’s chassis were sheared away. The car’s nose jerked brutally skywards as it hit the uptilted flatbed of the dumper truck and sailed up it, tearing through the wire mesh barrier at its end and flying upwards through the air like an F-16 fighter launched from the deck of an aircraft carrier.
For a snatched moment in time that seemed to linger for an eternity, everything was almost peaceful. Ben thought of summer breezes and wildflower meadows. He thought about Brooke. Heard her laughter echo in his mind.
Then he was engulfed in a maelstrom of deafening noise and pain and chaos and bone-crunching destructive forces as the airborne car hit the building opposite. A dozen metres above the street, the Citroën went smashing through the plate-glass warehouse windows. It careened into the building in a storm of flying glass and spinning masonry and timber. There was a massive shower of sparks as it ploughed across the concrete floor. Stacks of wooden pallets and crates cannoned off the shattered windscreen. The car spun across the warehouse and buried itself in one of the brick pillars holding up the roof.
Suddenly, all was still and quiet again, just the ticking of hot metal from the wrecked car. The police sirens sounded muffled and a long way away.
Ben groaned, stirred and painfully released his seatbelt. There was no need to open the driver’s door, because it wasn’t there any more. He stumbled out of the Citroën and stared at the devastation around him illuminated by the flashing blue lights from down below. A moment earlier, the place had obviously been some kind of furniture warehouse. Now it looked like the ruins of Dresden, February 1945.
It was only then that Ben felt the burning agony in his upper left arm and remembered the impact he’d felt. He couldn’t move it properly. Touching it, his fingertips came away dripping red. He could feel blood trickling down inside his sleeve. A cold wave of nausea gushed through his body and his heart began to hammer at the base of his throat. He blinked sweat out of his eyes, willed himself to keep moving.
Stepping over the wreckage to the shattered warehouse window, he could see the police piling out of their vehicles down below, pulling guns and scattering into teams searching for an entrance to the warehouse. The police helicopter that had chased him was still hovering over the industrial estate.
Then, as Ben watched, a second chopper came thudding in out of the night sky and settled beyond the cluster of police vehicles. Before it had fully touched down, its hatch flew open and a figure in black jumped out.
Her black hair flew loose in the wind from the rotor blades. Even at this distance, Ben could see the look of ferocious determination on her face.