The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (142 page)

‘I didn’t have your number.’

‘I gave it to you.’

Salt shrugged. ‘I didn’t write it down. I don’t like to use the phone. You never know who might be listening in.’ He leaned across the table with a conspiratorial look. ‘Listen to me, man. Something’s up. Something bad.’

‘You’re not suggesting that Julia’s and Michio’s deaths are connected?’

‘Of course that’s what I’m suggesting. It’s obvious. Someone murdered them, and now they’re coming after us. We’re all that’s left of the old Kammler Krew. Now it’s just you and me.’

At that moment, deep within the acres of dense forest that surrounded the training facility at Le Val, Brooke was sitting reading a paperback in the specially adapted cottage that Ben Hope referred to as his killing house.

It was the place where the bulk of the tactical raid and assault exercises were carried out, the many bullet holes and ragged splinters in the plywood walls silent witnesses to the amount of live-fire practice that went on there. The two-seater sofa Brooke was reclining on, deep in her novel, had looked better in the days before it had become riddled with 9mm rounds; one end was resting on bricks, and the stuffing was hanging out all over the place.

Today, though, there was to be no live shooting. Brooke was playing the role of a VIP, albeit the kind of VIP that would be hanging out in a semi-derelict cottage wearing faded jeans and an old rugby top. Shannon’s guys – Neville, Woodcock, Morgan, Burton, Powell and Jackson – were stationed at strategic points inside and outside the building, assigned to protect their charge from Ben’s squad of ‘kidnappers’. The imminent raid was a test designed to expose any weaknesses in Shannon’s team and form the basis of the training sessions to come. They’d been waiting for what seemed like an eternity, and so far no sign.

As team leader, Shannon had insisted on remaining closest to his principal. He was padding up and down the room in his black tactical clothes, glancing at her occasionally, trying not to look edgy, the empty 9mm Glock slapping on his thigh in its holster. The only sounds outside were the singing of the birds and the whisper of the breeze in the trees.

‘I don’t like this place,’ he muttered. ‘Too quiet.’

Brooke flipped a page and went on reading.

‘You’ve always got your face in a book,’ he said irritably. ‘You read too much. I don’t know how anyone can read all the time.’

‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘You’re the bodyguard, remember? You’re supposed to be protecting me, not chatting to me.’

He snorted and walked over to the window, stared out at the rustling greenery. ‘What’s keeping the bastard?’

Brooke glanced up at him. ‘You mean the guy you came here to learn from?’

He ignored her. ‘Come on, Hope,’ he murmured to himself.

‘He’ll come.’

‘He’ll never get to you, you know. No way he and his guys are going to get past my boys. There’s a reason why Steiner picked us, out of all the thousands of close protection outfits out there. It’s simple. We’re the best there is. Yeah.’ Shannon made a fist.

‘Nothing to do with your uncle the brigadier’s connections, then,’ Brooke said quietly, without looking up from her novel.

But Shannon didn’t hear. He gazed out of the window for a while longer, breathing noisily.

‘Maybe we didn’t even need to come here. Maybe I’m wasting time and money here. I mean, we’re ready. We’re fucking ready. You can’t improve on perfection.’ He turned away from the window, grinning to himself.

Then his grin froze.

And so did he.

‘Morning, Rupert,’ Ben said. He was sitting on the sofa beside Brooke, a pistol dangling lazily in his hand. The worn cushions were sagging in the middle, pressing them together so that their thighs were touching.

The door swung open, and Jeff Dekker walked in with Paul Bonnard and Raoul de la Vega, the two ex-military fitness trainers Ben employed as assistants. The shapes of Shannon’s men were visible through the doorway, face down on the bare floorboards, tape across their mouths, struggling against the plastic ties that bound their wrists and ankles. Trussed up like turkeys.

Shannon stared for a long moment. Next to Ben on the sofa, Brooke was trying to suppress a smile.

Ben stood up, slipping his pistol in its holster. ‘You need to pay more attention, Rupert. A gang of clog dancers could have come hopping and skipping in here, and you wouldn’t have noticed them. Maybe you should spend less time chatting to your principal, and more time focused on your job.’

‘You set me up,’ Shannon protested. ‘It was your idea to make her the principal.’

‘Good training,’ Ben said. ‘Teaches you to remain objective. That’s something we can work on a bit more over the next couple of days.’ He reached out a hand to Brooke and pulled her gently to her feet. ‘Break for coffee?’ he said to her.

She smiled. ‘Love to.’

‘Like fuck we will.’ Shannon ripped his Glock from its holster and pointed it at Ben. ‘Stand down. This isn’t over. Give her back.’

Ben wasn’t worried about having an empty pistol waved at him. But he was annoyed at the pointless gesture, and he didn’t like the way Shannon was shoving it in his face.

‘Drop it, Rupert. You’re out of the game. Your principal
is taken. We’re having a break, and then we’re going to do this again, and keep doing it until your team’s providing effective protection. You do want to be worth that million, don’t you? You don’t want to be sent home from Switzerland in disgrace.’

But Shannon wasn’t listening. ‘Stand down,’ he yelled again. ‘Get on your knees. Hand over the principal.’

‘Rupert—’ Brooke began. Shannon ignored her and took another step towards Ben.

‘Put the weapon down,’ Ben said quietly. ‘You’re wasting everybody’s time. I’m not going to say it again, OK?’

Shannon kept the gun levelled. His face was burning red. ‘On your fucking
knees,’
he bellowed. ‘Throw down your guns and let her go.’

Ben stared at him for a second, then moved. He carried out the disarming technique gently and at half speed. Because doing it properly at full speed, he would have trapped Shannon’s finger in the trigger guard and broken it like a twig when he twisted the weapon round out of his grip, disarming and crippling him at the same time. He didn’t want to do that.

But Ben was quick enough that Shannon’s hand was empty before he even knew what was happening. He tossed the weapon to Jeff, who was looking at Shannon in disgust.

‘You think you’re pretty fucking smart with your SAS tricks, don’t you?’ Shannon sneered. ‘None of that stuff’s worth shit in the real world.’

‘Change of plan,’ Ben said. ‘No coffee break. We’re going to work straight through the morning. Maybe through lunch, and through dinner if we have to. Nobody leaves this house until we get it right. Understood, Shannon?’

Shannon said nothing. Instead he came on another step and took a swing at Ben.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Jeff groaned.

The punch was long and curved, and Ben had plenty of time to anticipate it. He stepped easily back out of the arc of the blow. He didn’t try to block it. He didn’t want anyone getting hurt.

‘What’s wrong with you, Major Hope? Forgotten how to fight?’ Shannon took another swing, and again Ben moved out of the way.

‘You’re being ridiculous, Rupert,’ Brooke shouted. ‘This is supposed to be an exercise, not a bar-room brawl. What’s got into you?’

But Shannon had completely forgotten the exercise. ‘Just like I said, Hope. You’re getting too old and too slow for this, you fucker.’

Ben ignored him and calmly turned away. ‘Enough. Everyone back into position.’ He clapped his hands, twice. Pointed through the open door at Shannon’s trussed-up team. ‘Paul, Raoul, untie them. Let’s go again.’

It was partly the look on Jeff’s face, but mostly Ben’s natural instinct that made him sense the movement behind him.

It happened fast. He half-turned. This time Shannon was flying at him with all his weight and power.

If Ben had done nothing and stayed where he was, the incoming punch was on course to take him on the side of the head. Shannon was a muscular guy, with a broad back and thick shoulders. A blow like that could do considerable damage. Loss of hearing in one ear. Damage to an eye. Or worse.

Naturally, the blow couldn’t be allowed to land. Instead, Ben moved again. And this time he moved at full speed.

Shannon hit the floor with a crash that almost broke
through the planks and sent him tumbling down into the foundations. He writhed and rolled and howled in agony, clutching his arm. ‘You bastard!’

Brooke ran over to Shannon and kneeled down beside him. ‘Let me see.’

‘He’s broken my fucking arm!’

She looked angrily up at Ben. ‘What did you do to him?’

Ben didn’t reply. Apart from Shannon’s groans, there was absolute silence in the room. Shannon’s men were lying there staring in horror through the open door at their prostrated leader.

Jeff had his arms folded and one eyebrow raised. Ben caught his look. Jeff didn’t have to say it.
Respect the client, no matter what?

Shannon was still whimpering on the floor.

Ben turned to his assistants. ‘Raoul, call an ambulance, will you?’

Twenty minutes later, there were flashing blue lights in the yard at Le Val as paramedics took Shannon away on a stretcher. Ben watched from a distance, saying nothing, trying not to contemplate what had just happened. He looked on numbly as Brooke climbed into the back of the ambulance. The paramedics closed up the back doors and Ben lost sight of her.

‘Ben?’ said Jeff’s voice behind him, and Ben turned.

‘I’ll go along too. Best you stay here, OK?’

Ben nodded. ‘Fine.’

Jeff held his eye for a moment. It was hard to tell whether he was about to laugh or start yelling at him. Maybe both. Then he ran over to the ambulance and clambered in the front, leaving Ben standing there on his own. A blast of
the siren, and the ambulance took off. He watched as it drove out of the yard and started making its way down the long drive towards the gates. He guessed they’d take Shannon to the hospital at Valognes, a few miles away.

There was nothing left to do except wait. Ben slumped on a low wall and lit up a cigarette. Storm, his favourite of the German Shepherds, and more of a pet than a guard dog, came running over and licked his face. Ben ran his fingers through the dog’s fur, genuinely grateful for the company.

He sat on the wall and smoked as Shannon’s team came filing past about thirty yards away, firing hostile looks across the yard at him and muttering among themselves in low voices. They disappeared one by one into the trainee block. Neville was the last to go in, shooting a long stare at Ben before slamming the olive-green door shut with a bang that echoed around the buildings. Paul and Raoul had repaired to the office, maybe awaiting his instructions.

He couldn’t think of any to give them. They might as well go home now.

He blew out a cloud of smoke and ruffled the dog’s ears.

‘Well, Storm, that surely was a fine morning’s work.’

The outskirts of Dublin shrank away in the Saab’s rearview mirror as Adam O’Connor drove southwards into the green countryside. A choral air by the medieval composer Thomas Tallis filled the car from the six-speaker CD player, but Adam hardly heard the music. He was thinking about the deaths of his old friends, and feeling sad. And just a little guilty, too, that he’d allowed himself to lose contact with them.

Michio and Julia and him. Part of Adam missed those days. The three of them might have seemed an unlikely bunch of friends – the sober American professor quietly going crazy with his marital problems, the ebullient, fun-loving Japanese planetary scientist and the brilliant, hard-driving young head of the Applied Physics Department at Manchester University – but it had been great for a while, a refreshing antidote to the daily drag of teaching and research, lectures and seminars and department politics. There’d been a kind of innocent camaraderie between them, almost like schoolkids. From the outside, it might have seemed even stranger that what had drawn the trio together from across the world was their shared interest in an obscure, all-but-forgotten, wartime Nazi engineer and SS general. Hans Kammler had been personally appointed by Adolf Hitler in 1943 to work on some very, very strange things indeed.

Their first meeting had been a chance encounter at a physics conference in Cambridge, just about the driest and most uninspiring series of lectures Adam had ever listened to. He’d actually fallen asleep in the middle of the morning session, until he’d been prodded awake by the grinning little Japanese guy sitting next to him and he’d realised with a flush of embarrassment that he’d been snoring.

When the lecture ended, Michio had laughed about it all the way to the delegates’ lunch. Adam liked him right away, and sat with him. Across from them had been a bright-eyed, attentive and switched-on young British physics PhD who introduced herself as Julia Goodman.

Instant friends. Just one of those moments in life when people seemed to chime with one another. They’d endured the rest of the afternoon’s lectures as a threesome, then got together again for the evening in the bar at the hotel where many of the delegates were staying.

That had been when the ever-smiling Michio had first mentioned the name Kammler to them. He’d kept them up until after midnight in the bar, babbling on about his discoveries. The little guy’s almost hyperactive enthusiasm had been infectious, and it hadn’t taken him long to persuade them that this obscure piece of science history was more than just bizarrely compelling. Adam could still remember the rush of amazement he’d felt, and the look on Julia’s face, when Michio had told them what he reckoned the Nazis had really been into. If you were even half-alive, if academia hadn’t yet dried out your soul, it was the kind of physics that could turn your blood to wine just thinking about it.

‘Are you sure about this?’ Adam had asked Michio. Sometimes the most exciting theories were nothing more than a cool idea waiting to be destroyed by an ugly, inconvenient
truth. But even as he’d asked the question, the sparkle in Michio’s eyes told him this was no fanciful notion.