THE TUNNEL: A Ben Hope Story (4 page)

‘Operation what?’

‘You heard me,’ Ben said.

‘I heard you. I’m not aware of any mission of that name.’

‘Then let me be a little more specific, to refresh your memory,’ Ben said. ‘Twenty-three minutes after midnight on the last day of August, 1997. The Pont de l’Alma road tunnel on the banks of the Seine River, in Paris. I was in Bosnia at that time, chasing down war criminals. Where were you? Did you oversee the operation in person, or did you just run things from a cosy little office somewhere?’

Falconer pressed his left hand more tightly against his stomach. Blood leaked out from between his fingers. He groaned. ‘I won’t talk.’

‘Yes, you will. Because I don’t take silence for an answer. And because you’re a dying man. If you don’t get to a hospital, that bullet in your belly is going to make you bleed to death. You don’t have very long, so you’d best get started.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Falconer said. ‘Do yourself a favour and walk away now. Call me an ambulance on your way out. No reprisals. It’s over.’

Ben took another step closer. ‘We’ve gone from “I don’t remember” to “no comment” to “let’s make a deal”. So far, I’m not hearing any hot denials.’

Falconer spat again. Redder this time. ‘Would it do me any good?’

‘None whatsoever,’ Ben said.

‘What if I were to plead my case? Lay out the evidence to prove to you that whatever it is you
think
we did, you’re making a huge mistake?’

Ben shook his head. ‘I’m not here to listen to more evidence, Liam. The official version of events has become a matter of historical record now. If they ever open another inquest, it’ll be just the same old rubber stamp job. As far as anyone’s concerned, you got away with it. And as for the Increment, they never existed.’

4

The Increment. Inside the secretive walls-within-walls of UK Special Forces, Ben had always believed they were more myth than legend. What the verifiable facts said was . . . nothing. Because nothing about the Increment was, ever had been, or ever would be, verifiable. What the rumours said, and had repeated persistently for years, was that the Increment was the name given to an ultra-covert black ops organisation that worked invisibly under the auspices of the British Ministry of Defence, so low in profile as to be known only to an élite core of individuals. It was whispered that the unit was composed of secretly-selected recruits from the Special Air Service, Special Boat Service and MI6, and existed to provide military and intelligence services of the kind that could quickly and easily be denied by officialdom, in the event of such covert operations becoming compromised.

In other words, the Increment was an illegal paramilitary assassination team. Employing only a certain breed of operative, possessed of the necessary qualities above and beyond those of normal Special Forces soldiers. Above and beyond, not in terms of their physical or mental ability, but in terms of their moral flexibility and willingness to accept missions so dirty that normal men couldn’t be asked to carry them out, or trusted not to speak out in protest at what they were being asked to do. For that reason, the very existence of the Increment was kept hidden even from the closest comrades of the men within it.

That was, if you bought into the rumours. Ben never had, because wild speculation and crazy conspiracy stories had forever buzzed around the closed world of SF like flies trying to land on a foil-wrapped turd.

But now he knew differently.

Falconer coughed. He wiped red from the corner of his mouth. The colour was arterial bright. ‘Who said they did exist?’ he rasped.

‘Jaco Lennox did,’ Ben replied. ‘He was one of them. You should never have trusted him, Liam. The problem with hiring men of loose morals is that they tend to have large appetites. To keep them happy, you have to pay them a hell of a lot. But the likes of Jaco Lennox don’t believe in stashing it away for a rainy day. Once he’d drunk himself into a hole and the money ran out, you should have known that he’d fall apart. He was a loser who was guaranteed to burn out and start blowing his mouth off. If it had been me, I’d have kept a closer watch over him.’

Falconer let out a bitter, resigned-sounding laugh, and his shoulders sagged. ‘We had our suspicions. But we couldn’t mount constant surveillance. We didn’t have the resources.’

Another piece of the puzzle slotted into place in Ben’s mind. It was all beginning to make sense.

‘I wasn’t the only one Lennox blabbed to, was I? Talking to me was what broke the dam. My guess is that soon afterwards, he started making calls. And I’m also guessing that MI6 were listening in. That’s when they realised Lennox was going into serious meltdown and drinking heavily. How were they to know who he might talk to next? What if he went to the media? What if some idealistic reporter locked him down and sobered him up and got the whole story out of him? It would have been unsurvivable. He had to be silenced before the worst happened. Another little job for the Increment. How am I doing so far?’

Falconer said nothing. Which was the same as saying everything. Ben knew he was right.

‘A drunk like Lennox couldn’t have been hard to pick up. The usual method. A dark street, no witnesses. One guy comes up to ask the time. The other steps up behind and puts a bag over his head. Then they cuffed and stuffed him into a van, drove him out into Epping Forest, popped two in his head for good measure and then strung him up with his hands still tied. Not the neatest job in the world, was it?’

‘I had nothing to do with it,’ Falconer protested.

‘Of course not. You’re retired,’ Ben said. ‘Now, I’d imagine that before they killed him, they pressed him to find out who he’d already been talking to. I’m guessing he confessed that he’d spilled his guts to someone from the regiment. Hence the guard dogs. You were expecting trouble. But you didn’t know who was coming, or else you’d have made damn sure you got to them first. My guess is, the night I met Lennox he was so pissed he couldn’t remember afterwards who it was. Am I right?’

Falconer gave a weary sigh. He slowly closed his eyes, then reopened them. Something rattled in his throat. ‘We narrowed it down a list of four potential names,’ he said, after a beat.

‘Was I on the list?’

Falconer nodded. ‘We knew that if it was you, you wouldn’t take it lightly. A team was dispatched to Ireland to look for you, but you weren’t at home.’

‘I’m a restless soul,’ Ben said. ‘What about the other three? You’d better not tell me they’ve come to any harm.’

‘Still watching them,’ Falconer said quietly.

‘So then you decided to post your guys here and wait. Nice work, Liam. You’ve got a great big guilty sign hanging around your neck. Just as I thought.’

‘You know damn all,’ Falconer said, his anger flaring up. ‘You’re shooting in the dark with only the ravings of a drunken idiot to go on.’

‘Not quite,’ Ben said. Not taking his eyes off Falconer for a second, he tore open the Velcro fastener of one of the pockets of his black combat jacket. He slipped out a slim package wrapped in waterproof plastic. Inside were four glossy 9x13 photographic prints. He drew one of them out and flicked it into Falconer’s lap. Falconer hesitated, then slowly peeled his left hand away from his stomach and reached down to pick it up. When he did it, Ben could see the fresh blood leaking from the bullet hole in his abdomen. Falconer must have been in terrible pain.

The photo was of a white car, a boxy, no-frills hatchback. It was parked on grass with trees in the background. The angle of the shot showed that it had French number plates.

‘Fiat Uno,’ Ben said. ‘Familiar to you?’

Falconer tossed the photo on the floor, where it landed in the pool of blood and started absorbing red. ‘I don’t remember having seen it before,’ he murmured, exhausted from the movement. His energy was steadily ebbing away.

‘Neither does its former owner,’ Ben said. ‘That’s because he’s been dead for four years. His name was James Andanson. You knew him, didn’t you, Liam?’

Falconer stared at Ben but said nothing.

‘Need me to jog your memory again?’ Ben said. ‘Andanson was a photographer. A very successful, very wealthy photographer. Born in England, lived in France. Aged fifty-four when he died. He made his money hounding a lot of silly famous people all over the world to sell his snaps to the press. Personally, why anyone would want to pay to see those kinds of pictures is a mystery. Celebrity gossip never was my thing and I don’t read the papers. But I do know that Andanson was in the Pont de l’Alma road tunnel that night. And I also know that he wasn’t just your regular lens hound. Once upon a time, or so I’ve been told, he served a spell in the Territorial SAS. Later on he worked as an informer and freelance agent for MI6 and French Intelligence. Some might even go so far as to claim he was working for the Increment. That sounds about right to me.’

‘You’re insane, Hope.’

Ben smiled darkly. ‘I must be. What a way to spend your Christmas Eve.’ He drew another photo from the plastic wrap. It showed another car. This time, a black BMW saloon. It was parked in a clearing in a forest, dappled sunlight filtering through the foliage. The car was a burned-out wreck, sitting on bare rims, its glass streaked with soot, most of the plastic trim shrivelled away to a crisp. The fire had been so hot that it had melted the paint down to the bare metal in places. The forest floor around the car was scorched black.

‘Seems like working for the Increment must be a stressful occupation,’ Ben said. ‘Judging by the suicide rate among its members. Jaco Lennox wasn’t the first, was he?’

Again, Ben spun the photo into Falconer’s lap. Again, Falconer just gave the picture a momentary glance before he silently discarded it.

Ben said, ‘That was the car James Andanson owned at the time he killed himself in May 2000, in woodland near Montpellier, four hundred miles from his home in Nant. Did a pretty thorough job of it, too, just like Jaco Lennox. It took a month for the French police to identify him from dental records. Some people take pills, others slit their veins in the bath, others jump off cliffs or under trains. Seems that our man Andanson drove hundreds of miles into the middle of the sticks, with no ignition keys anywhere on his person or in the car, then doused himself with twenty litres of petrol from jerrycans he’d bought en route. After he’d emptied the lot, he fastened his seatbelt and locked the car doors. Still with no keys. Then he shot himself twice in the head,
then
torched the car from the outside, with himself locked in it.’ Ben smiled grimly. ‘Now that shows some kind of ability, even for a former Territorial SAS guy. Wouldn’t you say so, Brigadier?’

‘There’s no evidence of any of that.’

‘Of course not. At least, none that would be admitted to an official investigation. Maybe that’s why the coroner decided to write it up as suicide. Or maybe someone just paid him to. We’ll never know, will we? I tried to find the coroner who signed off on the body, but it turns out the guy died of cancer last year. Shame.’

Ben took out the third photograph and tossed it down for Falconer to see. ‘But this guy here had some interesting things to say.’ The photo was of a white male, forties, receding dark hair and sunglasses.

‘His name is Christophe Pelât,’ Ben said. ‘He’s a fireman who works in Montpellier, and he and his crew were the first to arrive at the scene of Andanson’s burnt-out car. Now he lives in fear. When I tracked him down at his home, he had the strangest notion that I was an assassin come to shoot him. Then when he realised I wasn’t, he became a little more amenable. He confirmed that even though the body was heavily charred, to the point of being virtually unrecognisable, he was certain that the victim had been shot at least once in the head, and probably twice.’

‘That’s all just hearsay and speculation,’ Falconer said. He broke into another fit of coughing that doubled him up in agony.

‘Maybe so,’ Ben said, taking the fourth and final photo from the plastic wrap. ‘I wonder what this man would have to say about that.’ Once more, he tossed the picture at Falconer. Once more, Falconer barely looked at it.

‘Actually, he probably wouldn’t say too much,’ Ben said. ‘Not any more. Because guess what? He’s dead too. His name was Frédéric Dard. He was a French crime novelist who lived in Switzerland. Famous one, too. Wrote more than three hundred books, sold hundreds of millions of the damn things. I tried to read one of them, on the plane back from France. I thought it was trash, but what do I know?’

‘Is there a point to any of this?’ Falconer grated. ‘I’m bleeding here.’

‘Oh, there is,’ Ben said. ‘As it turns out, Dard wasn’t just interested in writing fiction. He and Andanson were friends, and they’d been talking about co-writing a book about what really happened in that tunnel in Paris seven years ago. They were going to blow the lid off the whole thing. Except it never happened, and it never will. Dard died just five weeks after his would-be co-author. Heart attack.’ Ben smiled. ‘Tell me, Liam. Are the CIA and MI6 boys still using poison to induce fatal cardiac arrest, or have they come up with fancier methods since the Cold War?’

‘You’re talking rubbish,’ Falconer snapped. ‘Not a shred of this bullshit is conclusive in any way.’

‘You’re right,’ Ben said. ‘The Increment always cover their tracks well. Just like they did that August in Paris. Who’s going to remember the traces of white paint on the wreck, from Andanson’s Fiat? Nobody who matters. Just like nobody’s going to bring up the testimony of the witnesses who claimed they saw a bright flash from inside the tunnel, a second before the accident happened. The real evidence was removed, along with the debris on the road and the CCTV footage that was never recorded because someone turned off the cameras. The rest was all buried under a ton of disinformation. All the carefully-orchestrated grandstanding and finger-pointing. The wild conspiracy theories. The royals did it. The French did it. Terrorists did it. Aliens from outer space did it. The blood samples that may or may not have been fiddled to show the driver was drunk. The debates about whether she was pregnant. All whitewash. All the usual weapons of mass distraction. You dump enough conflicting information on the public, pretty soon everyone’s head is spinning so badly that nobody even cares any more. You and your Secret Service pals had it all so neatly sewn up. Nobody would have known anything for sure. Except you left out the one key witness who could sink the lot of you. It was a bad mistake, Liam. You should have had someone put a bullet in Jaco Lennox the morning after Operation Solitaire.’