Sacred Sword (Ben Hope 7)

  Cutter grimaced and slapped the watch aside. ‘I’m not talking about a bunch of sodding trinkets. Talking about money, pal. Twelve hundred a day per man. Six of us, that comes to more than seventy grand for the last fucking ten days we haven’t been paid. Not to mention the boys who never came back from Cornwall, or Gant’s team. You got widows and families out there to take care of. Say three-fifty, and we’ll call it quits, all right?’

  ‘But I don’t have three hundred and fifty thousand,’ Penrose protested. ‘I’ve been trying over and over to access the online banking system, and it won’t let me in. The Trimble assets have been frozen.’ That last part was perfectly true. There was no more money, no more jet. No more backing from his sponsors, who’d now turned against their star protégé. He knew it was all over – yet his mind felt strangely detached from the situation, as if these things were all just a dream.

  His words had been heard by the rest of the men, who’d filtered into the bedroom after Cutter and were standing around looking extremely displeased.

  ‘I don’t give a fucking monkey’s ringpiece about your Trimble!’ Cutter shouted at Penrose. In his anger he slammed a fist against the wooden partition of the walk-in wardrobe. It was solidly built, but the blow made the whole structure judder. Not enough to cause any damage.

  But enough to shake loose a slip of purplish-coloured paper that drifted down in a spiral like an autumn leaf from an overhead compartment and landed at Cutter’s feet.

  ‘Hello, what’s this, then?’ Cutter said, scooping it quickly off the floor.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Penrose said, suddenly more alert.

  ‘Doesn’t look like nothing to me,’ Cutter said, holding it up for his men to see. ‘Looks a bit like a five-hundred-euro note, doesn’t it, boys?’ He peered up at the overhead compartment and spotted the black garbage bag that had been hastily stuffed into it, ripping the plastic to reveal the bunches of banknotes nestling inside.

  ‘You sneaky little bugger,’ Cutter said.

  ‘You leave that alone. It’s mine!’ Penrose tried to stand in his way, but Cutter shoved him easily aside, reached up for the bag and hauled it down. It landed with a thump. ‘About forty grand,’ he said, inspecting the contents.

  ‘All right,’ Penrose said testily. ‘You can have it. It’s yours.’

  ‘Too right it’s ours,’ Cutter said. He handed the bag to Grinnall, who stuck it under his arm. ‘Now where’s the rest of it?’

  ‘Rest of what?’ Penrose said, flushing.

  ‘Don’t you even fucking think about lying to me,’ Cutter growled. ‘You’ve got a lot more than this stashed around the place. I’ve fucking seen it.’

  The others nodded. Cutter had already told them about the cash-stuffed holdalls he’d spotted in Penrose’s office.

  In fact, Penrose had over 2.3 million euros hidden in the villa, cash that he’d been siphoning off from the very start of his operation under the broad heading of expenses – the fewer questions had been asked, the more he’d clawed back for himself. The contents of the garbage bag were just what he’d had left over when the holdalls were already crammed so full he could barely zip them up.

  But there was no way Penrose was going to let all that loot fall into Cutter’s hands. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he protested. ‘And I object to being spoken to this way by my employee.’

  Cutter grabbed him by the collar and shook him violently. ‘I don’t work for you any more, you little shit. Where’s the fucking money?’

  ‘I don’t have anything more to give you!’ Penrose yelled.

  ‘Give him a slap, Steve,’ Grinnall said.

  Cutter slapped Penrose across the face, hard. The impact sent him crashing into the wall. He slid down to the floor, his face turning white. He touched his fingers to his burning cheek and stared at them, as if expecting to see blood. ‘Traitors!’ he screamed up from the floor. ‘After all I’ve done for you! This is how you treat me?’

  ‘We’re not leaving here until we get paid off,’ Cutter said.

  A wild light came into Penrose’s eyes. ‘Money! That’s all your kind care about, isn’t? Good old hard cash! Well I’ll tell you. There’s millions! Millions, all mine, all hidden away right here in the villa. And guess what, Cutter? You’ll never find a single solitary penny of it. You bloody brainless Cockney ape.’

  Without taking his eyes off Penrose, Cutter stuck his arm out behind him. Terry Grinnall instantly pressed a Glock 19 into his outstretched palm. Cutter aimed the boxy black pistol at Penrose’s face.

  ‘Kill me, would you?’ Penrose screeched. ‘How’ll you find your money then, you moron?’

  Cutter pursed his lips, then lowered the pistol so that it pointed at Penrose’s left kneecap.

  ‘Go on, shoot me! Shoot me!’ Penrose started laughing hysterically, then burst into tears.

  ‘Leave it alone, Steve,’ said Mills. ‘I mean, look at him. He’s fucked in the head. You won’t get nothing out of him.’

  ‘I want the money,’ Cutter said.

  Penrose was writhing on the wardrobe floor, raking his wet face with his fingertips and babbling incomprehensibly.

  ‘What’d he say?’ Doyle said.

  ‘Think he said, “hell rip and roast you”,’ said Suggs.

  Prosser said, ‘I told you he was fucking gone.’

  ‘Shoot the fucker,’ Grinnall urged Cutter.

  Cutter stared at the babbling, weeping Penrose for a second, then shook his head and stuffed the gun in his belt. ‘I’m not a fucking animal, boys. Come on. Let’s go and find where the bastard’s hidden that money. It’s got to be around here somewhere.’

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  In two hours, Cutter’s men had torn meticulously through the rest of the villa’s five bedrooms, its four bathrooms and the lounge and dining room, ripping out drawers, upturning mattresses, rifling through sideboards and bookcases, even tearing up the carpets to check for loose floorboards under which the cash-filled bags might have been hidden. They’d checked the attic space and found only dust and a stack of empty packing cases. Nothing. Now, as the small hours of the morning wore on, they were getting desperate.

  ‘Kitchen,’ Cutter said, and led the way through the rambling passages. The kitchen area could have served a medium-sized restaurant. There were dozens of possible hiding places. Cutter stormed over to the row of large cupboards on the right, while Grinnall, still clutching the money in the garbage bag, tried the ones on the left and the others crashed about the rest of the room. In moments the tiled floor was rolling with cookware, smashed plates and glasses.

  ‘I don’t think he put it in there, you twat,’ Mills said to Prosser, who was bending down to gape inside the oven.

  ‘You never know what that nutter’d do.’

  ‘There’s bugger all in here,’ Grinnall said, and smashed his foot into the cupboard doors with a crunch of wood. ‘This is bollocks. I’m going back upstairs and making that fucking nutjob talk.’

  ‘He won’t talk,’ Cutter said.

  ‘He will when I slice his—’

  Grinnall was interrupted by a cry from Mills, who was leaning inside a deep freeze. ‘Hey! I think I found something!’ With a grunt of effort, he wrenched out a frost-covered black cloth holdall and dumped it on the floor. They all ran over and stood around as he unzipped it, revealing the taped stacks of banknotes inside.

  ‘Nice one,’ Cutter said, and slapped Mills on the shoulder.

  ‘Good thing paper don’t freeze,’ Grinnall muttered. ‘How much is there?’

  Cutter crouched down next to the holdall and poked around inside. It was a big holdall. The stacks were piled four wide, four long and eight deep. The cash was all in purple five-hundred notes, twenty to a bunch. He was quick with that kind of mental arithmetic.

  ‘One-point-two-eight mil,’ he said.

  ‘It’s the fucking mother lode,’ Grinnall said.

  ‘It’s not a bad start.’

  ‘What’s
that come to six ways?’ Suggs asked, virtually rubbing his hands together.

  Cutter looked at Grinnall, then looked at Mills. The three of them all turned to look at Suggs, Prosser and Doyle.

  Cutter whipped the Glock 19 out of his belt and shot Suggs twice in the chest. Mills pulled his Taurus and put a bullet in Prosser’s head. Before either of the corpses had hit the floor, Grinnall had Doyle in a stranglehold and was twisting his head around. There was a crackling of cartilage, then a crunch. Doyle slipped lifelessly out of Grinnall’s arms.

  ‘Never liked them much anyway,’ Grinnall muttered.

  ‘Three ways.’ Mills smiled. ‘That’s more like it.’

  Cutter zipped up the bag and hefted its weight over his shoulder. ‘We ain’t done yet, boys. There’s at least one more of these hidden away. He can’t have spent it all.’

  ‘Where next?’ Mills said.

  ‘Sauna room,’ Grinnall suggested.

  Cutter dismissed the idea. ‘Nobody’d put cash in a sauna room.’

  ‘Tool shed? Gardener’s hut? Lodge house? Garage?’

  ‘Not secure enough, any of them.’

  ‘Swimming pool?’ Mills said. The enclosed all-season pool, with its luxuriant changing rooms, had always been strictly off-limits to the hired help. Penrose was a poor swimmer, but had been seen splashing around in there once or twice.

  Cutter nodded. ‘Can’t fucking hurt to check it out. Let’s go.’

  They stepped over the spreading blood of the three dead men and left the kitchen. The pool was housed in a metal-framed glass building adjacent to the main villa, most directly accessible from where they were via an outer walkway that spanned the length of the house and overhung the cliff’s edge. The men passed through an arch and out into the cool night. The stars were bright, their reflection glittering like diamonds over the surface of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the rolling surf.

  ‘I’m dying for a slash,’ Mills announced as they walked.

  ‘Can’t you hold it in for a few more minutes?’ Cutter said scathingly.

  ‘Seriously, I’m fucking bursting. Catch up with you in a sec, okay?’ As Cutter and Grinnall headed on towards the pool building, Mills paused to undo his flies and step up to the iron railing at the edge of the walkway. He braced his feet a little apart and sighed with relief as he urinated through the gap in the railing. His arc of piss disappeared over the edge, dissipated in the breeze and splashed on the rocks far below.

  He barely had time to react as a pair of hands grabbed him by the ankles and pitched him headlong over the edge of the balcony. By the time Mills opened his mouth to scream, he’d already dropped fifty feet, a dark cartwheeling figure silhouetted against the starlit surf. His brains were dashed out on a jutting piece of rock halfway down the cliff face, and it was a silent corpse that splashed down into the water and was immediately engulfed by the waves.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  It hadn’t been long before Penrose had recovered his wits and scrambled to his feet to run back into his office. Cutter’s invasion of his personal sanctuary, and the loss of the forty-two thousand euros in the garbage bag, were quickly bringing reality home to him.

  And it wasn’t just money he stood to lose. He was suddenly convinced that the police must be on their way at that very moment to arrest him. Scurrying to the window, he threw it open and listened hard. He could hear nothing but the roar of the surf. No sirens, not yet. But they could come at any minute.

  He hurried over to his desk and started hunting through the drawers for all the plans he kept inside. Lists of names, photographs of his victims; the discs containing the child pornography downloaded onto Lalique’s computer; the artist’s impression of the sword; detailed descriptions of every operation he’d painstakingly designed. All his hard work was now nothing more than evidence, enough to sink him so deep he’d never come back up.

  He had to get rid of it all immediately. Grabbing the waste paper basket from under the desk, he shook out all the crumpled pages of book notes and started throwing the incriminating material into it.

  Now, he had some matches somewhere, he thought feverishly, left over from the romantic candlelit dinner that had never happened, thanks to that ungrateful bitch Daria Pignatelli. He found them on the side, struck one and tossed the burning match into the waste paper basket.

  He watched as the flames leapt up and the evidence began to blacken and curl. The incriminating paperwork caught light. The computer discs twisted and melted. He was safe now.

  That was when it occurred to him that it was a wicker basket, and it would catch fire along with its contents. By then the flames were already spreading fast and he couldn’t stamp them out with his bare feet. The office began to fill with smoke. Penrose coughed.

  The pool building comprised four integral changing rooms behind wooden doors labelled SPOGLIATOIO 1 – 4. Each contained its own luxurious shower cubicle, large wardrobes for clothing and shoes, storage units for towels, robes, hairdryers and assorted items, and lockers for personal effects, offering several possible hideyholes for a bag full of money. After a couple of minutes’ fruitless search of Spogliatoio 1, Cutter went next door to see how Grinnall was faring.

  ‘Bugger all luck,’ Grinnall said, standing in a heap of towels and slamming the lid of an empty storage unit.

  ‘Where’s Dave?’ Cutter asked with a frown. Grinnall shook his head. Cutter sighed and headed for the entrance, pausing at the poolside to glance lovingly at the holdall and its one-point-two-eight-million cargo. Grinnall bustled angrily into Spogliatoio 3, ripping into the storage spaces and muttering to himself about what he’d like to do to that twisted little fuck Penrose Lucas.

  ‘Dave?’ Cutter called outside. ‘Oy! Mills!’ There was no sign of him anywhere. Cutter strode back inside the pool building. He was about to say something to Grinnall when he stopped and did a double-take.

  The holdall full of money was no longer where it had been sitting just a moment ago.

  ‘Terry, why’d you shift the bag?’

  Grinnall came out of the changing room, looking disgruntled. ‘What?’

  ‘Where’s the money?’

  ‘I don’t know. Where’d you put it?’

  ‘Right there. Don’t wind me up.’

  ‘I’m not fucking winding you up. I never touched it.’

  ‘Then where the fuck is it?’ Cutter said, frowning deeply. His immediate thought was that Dave Mills must have sneaked in and made off with it. He panicked for a second and was about to run outside after him – but then he realised that wasn’t possible. His back had only been turned a moment. He looked all around him. Was he going crazy?

  Then he spotted it. A dark shape at the bottom of the pool, sitting on the tiled floor of the deep end. ‘Oh, fuck, no!’

  Without an instant’s hesitation, Cutter dived into the pool and began swimming towards the bag with powerful strokes. As he reached it, six feet underwater, he prayed the money wouldn’t be ruined.

  Grinnall was standing anxiously at the edge of the pool, watching and praying much the same thing, when an arm suddenly snaked out from behind him, locked tightly around his neck and hauled him backwards off his feet towards the open door of Spogliatoio 3.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Ben knew exactly who he was dealing with. Brown had provided detailed profiles on Penrose Lucas’s hired guns. The big guy in the leather coat was Terry Grinnall. Thirty-six years old. Ex British Army, but he’d only followed that career long enough to learn that he could kill more people, with greater impunity and for a lot more pay, as a private soldier. Bosnia, Afghanistan, Africa, the usual trail of blood and money. Somewhere along it he’d encountered former Para, Steve Cutter.

  But the trail ended here. Ben dragged Grinnall inside the changing room and slammed the door shut with his foot. He grappled the man to the floor, keeping his left arm locked around his throat and his right hand over his mouth.

  Grinnall was as strong as he was heavy. He flailed out with h
is fists and feet and tried to smash Ben in the face with the back of his head and bite his hand. Ben squeezed harder, flattening his windpipe shut. Grinnall bucked and thrashed like a wild man.

  In just a few more seconds, Cutter would be out of the pool, and Ben would have problems if he faced having to deal with them both at once. Cutter was smaller and less powerful, but he was also smarter and more dangerous. Ben had seen enough to know that as he’d watched them move through the villa.

  He also knew that he’d encountered the guy once before.

  Just seconds. But Grinnall had only a few seconds, too.

  Or maybe not. Just when Ben thought Grinnall was beginning to lose consciousness, the man suddenly gave a violent buck that broke Ben’s grip on him. He twisted round and flung a vicious punch at the side of Ben’s head. Ben blocked it – only just.

  The next few instants were a life or death struggle for both of them. A powerful knee flew up and caught Ben in the stomach, almost knocking the wind out of him. Ben drove the heel of his hand into Grinnall’s chin, slamming his head down hard with a crack against the tiled floor. Grinnall reached up with both hands clawed, going for Ben’s eyes.

  And Ben drew the Fairbairn-Sykes commando dagger from his leg sheath and punched its slender tip downwards through the leather coat and into Grinnall’s heart. Clapped his hand over the man’s mouth to stifle the terrible sucking gasp that people made when a cold steel blade penetrated deep inside their body. He stabbed the knife in again, then again, feeling the razor-sharp edges grind against bone as they parted Grinnall’s ribs on their way through.

  Grinnall’s eyes rolled back and his body went limp. Ben clambered painfully to his feet. He plucked out the knife and wiped it quickly on the dead man’s trouser leg, slipped it back into his sheath. Bundled the heavy corpse into the shower cubicle, then opened the changing room door a crack and peered cautiously out.