When Ben woke up, his first thought was that somebody had decided to pull his brain out through his temple with a blunt corkscrew – until he realised it was just the cruellest, most punishing headache he’d ever known. He groaned, and blinked his eyes to clear away the blurriness in his vision.
He was sitting on some kind of hard bench. He could feel vibrations coming up through his feet and against his spine, where his back was pressed to a hard wall. When he tried to move, he found that his ankles and wrists were secured tight.
That realisation cleared his senses and he opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was the unsmiling face of the Portuguese cop sitting opposite him in the back of the police van. The second thing he saw was the short-barrelled shotgun cradled over the cop’s chubby thigh, its muzzle pointed accurately enough at him to blow him in two if he tried anything. Not that he could – he could see now that his wrists and ankles were chained tight to the tubular frame of his bench.
‘Fine,’ he mumbled. ‘Be like that.’ And passed out again.
Chapter Sixty
The Ferris residence
Kensington, London
It was Brewster Blackmore’s voice on the line again, and from his tone it sounded as if he hadn’t called in the middle of the night for nothing.
‘Wait,’ Mason Ferris said. He swung his long, thin legs out of bed, stepped into his slippers and carried the phone out of the master bedroom, out of earshot of Mrs Ferris.
‘Who is it, Mason?’ she murmured sleepily as he left the room. He ignored her, stepped out into the long, broad landing and snicked the bedroom door quietly shut behind him. Moonlight shone in through the house’s high windows. He stood and looked out at the view across London, without really seeing it.
‘It’s after two, Blackmore,’ he said into the phone. ‘Tell me something I want to hear.’
‘Ben Hope’s just been arrested in a village in northeastern Portugal,’ Blackmore said, and Ferris was suddenly much more alert. ‘Local police recognised him after being called out to a bar brawl. He’s being flown back to Rome as we speak, to be treated at Sandro Pertini Hospital before being transferred to Regina Coeli prison.’
‘Hospital?’
‘Gunshot wound to the arm. He managed to get the bullet out and clean himself up. No secondary infections, but he’d lost a lot of blood and there was enough alcohol and codeine in him to kill a horse. We’re lucky we still have him. They want to keep him in for observation for a day or two. That should give us enough time.’
Ferris pondered this latest development for a moment. His plan was back on track. A thin smile traced itself across his lips, then disappeared as his pleasure gave way to darker thoughts.
‘Kane?’ he said.
‘Negative so far,’ Blackmore said. ‘We’ve lost track of her.’
‘Not good enough,’ Ferris said softly.
‘You told me to deal with the Lister situation,’ Blackmore protested. ‘I dealt with it, and I’ll deal with this. I’m doing all I can. For all we know, she’s dead and her body will wash up somewhere down the Seine.’
‘Get it done,’ Ferris told him. He shut off the phone and turned back towards the bedroom.
Chapter Sixty-One
Sandro Pertini Hospital, Rome
Two days later
It was almost a relief for Ben when the doctors came into his tiny private room early that morning and told him he was going to be moved to the prison pending his first hearing. Two days spent lying in a narrow steel-framed bed hooked up to a drip, with nothing to count the hours go by except for the changing of the guard outside his door, had felt like twenty. Other than the grim-faced police officials who’d come to formally arrest him and read him a long list of charges and rights, two doctors and four different nurses had been his only visitors. The youngest of the nurses, a waiflike thing from the deep south of Italy, seemed mortally terrified of him; while one of the older ones, a steel-haired matron with the heft of a Cape buffalo, gave him looks of such intense hatred that he was worried about being left alone with her in case she tried to inject him with some lethal drug.
So far, he’d managed to stay alive, despite the tasteless boiled vegetables they were feeding him, and some kind of pulpy grey matter that passed for meat. It was like being in the army again.
The whole time, they’d kept him strictly as far away from newspapers and TV as a person could be. He could only imagine the fun the media were having with the arrest of Urbano Tassoni’s murderer. His favourite Italian reporter, Silvana Lucenzi, would be right in the thick of it, playing to the gallery and watching her ratings climb.
‘How are you feeling?’ the doctor asked.
‘Like an innocent man about to go to jail,’ Ben said. ‘How are you?’
The murderous-looking nurse came into the room carrying a bulky paper bag, which she laid on a chair before stomping over to Ben’s bedside and unhooking him from his drip with all the delicacy of a person ripping tail feathers out of a dead turkey. Ben gave her his sweetest smile as she left, then climbed out of bed and picked up the paper bag. Inside were his clothes, cleaned and pressed, and his shoes with the laces removed.
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Foiled again. I was planning to use those laces to throttle everyone on the ward and then escape out of the window.’
The doctor just stared blankly. Ben walked through to his little bathroom, changed out of the hospital gown and dressed. His arm was still a little stiff, but healing up fine now. When he came out again, four armed Carabinieri guards were waiting for him with handcuffs. Ben put out his wrists for the bracelets, and was escorted from the room. More police were outside in the corridor with shotguns. Among their faces was one Ben recognised. Roberto Lario avoided his eye, looked pensive and said nothing.
The guards ushered Ben out of the ward and down a short corridor to a lift. The door whooshed open, and they all piled inside. Ben faced the door, conscious of the loaded and cocked weapons just inches away. His knees were trembling with the thought of what was happening to him, but he was damned if he’d let them see him nervous. As the lift descended towards the ground floor, he turned to the silent Lario.
‘I have to say, I’m disappointed,’ he said. ‘I’d expected Darcey Kane to make an appearance. To thank me in person for letting myself get caught. That’s gratitude.’
Lario looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ he replied softly, as if even that was saying too much. Ben wanted to ask him what he meant; but then the lift bell pinged and the doors slid open. The guards shoved him forwards, and moments later he was being walked out into the pale morning sunlight.
A group of plainclothes police agents and armed Carabinieri were waiting by a pair of police Alfa Romeos and a bulky white prison van staffed by uniformed security staff. The van’s rear doors were open, revealing a stark interior that consisted of two facing steel benches, sheet metal walls and ceiling. No seatbelts. Ben guessed the Italian prison service were concerned about inmates strangling themselves, or each other, in transit. Or maybe they just didn’t care about them getting pulped in an accident. The windows were barred with high-tensile mesh on the inside, black-smoked glass on the outside.
As Ben was marched towards the back of the van he saw there was another cuffed prisoner waiting to be loaded on board with him. It seemed he wasn’t the only bad boy being transported from the hospital. The second prisoner was a stocky, dark-haired guy of about thirty. He didn’t have the look of a hard-boiled criminal. Ben wondered what the guy must have done to deserve being locked up in the back of a mobile cell with a notorious psychopathic killer.
Ben’s travel companion remained sullen and silent as the two prisoners were steered into the back of the van and the doors slammed behind them. It was dark in the back. The steel shell resonated with the growl of the diesel starting up, and then the van pulled away with a lurch. After a moment’s pause at the gates, they drove out into the streets of Rome.
Chapter Sixty-Two
/> With the doors shut, the inside of the prison van quickly turned into an airless sweatbox under the Rome sun. It was a jarring, jolting ride, and Ben steadied himself as best he could against the bare metal wall, trying to keep his mind blank of thoughts of where they were taking him and the fate that awaited him.
Nobody had even mentioned a lawyer yet. No phone calls, no contact with the outside world. Jeff Dekker at Le Val must be tearing the world apart trying to find out what was going on.
And Brooke . . . she’d know, too. She’d know that Ben had been caught just a few kilometres from her place in Portugal. Would she guess that he knew her secret? That he’d seen her there with . . . with whoever this guy was?
What am I going to do, Ben asked himself. If he ever got out of this mess, could he even bear to see her again? Did he want to hear what she had to tell him? Should he just try to forget that the last few months had ever happened? He had no answers. He felt lost, and so very alone.
The prison van must have been on the road for some twenty minutes when a sudden violent swerve sent Ben and his travelling companion sprawling across the bare metal seats. Ben was about to say something when he heard the sound of gunfire outside – a ragged string of single shots cracking off somewhere behind the van, followed by a long sustained burst. The two of them dived for the floor as a flurry of percussive impacts clanged against the flank of the vehicle. But Ben quickly sensed that the prison van wasn’t the principal target of whoever was doing the shooting.
The van was suddenly rocked in the shockwave of a huge explosion that was deafening even from inside. Something other than bullets cannoned off its side: flying pieces of whatever it was that had just been blown apart nearby. The van went into a skid, its tyres shrieking as the wheels locked, then hit something solid. With nothing to hold on to, Ben and his companion were hurled forwards, hit the sheet metal partition separating them from the cab, and sprawled to the floor.
A second explosion boomed out. Ben smelled the acrid stink of burning fuel and plastic. They heard the front doors of the van opening, the sounds of men yelling. Then more shots, and yells turned into screams.
Then, as suddenly as it had started, the shooting stopped. Ben turned towards the van’s rear doors as he heard running footsteps and more voices. They weren’t Italian.
He hadn’t heard the sound of the Russian language since that day in the art gallery.
The voices were drowned out by a final blast of gunfire from right behind the van, a ripping flurry of bullets chewing through the locks. The doors flew open. Sunlight flooded into the back of the van.
Two men stood framed in the open door, holding stubby black submachine guns. From the cold efficiency in the guy’s eyes, Ben could tell that the one on the left had done this kind of thing before. Ex-military, a gun for hire.
The one on the right, with the buzz-cut hair, who looked as if he’d had his face torn off and stitched back together with a nail and string – he was different. This wasn’t just a job for him. If a shark could smile, it would have contemplated its next meal the way the guy was looking at Ben right now. He jerked the barrel of his SMG. ‘Get out,’ he said in guttural English.
Ben guessed it was meant for him. Big surprise. He stood up, keeping his head ducked low, stepped towards the back door and jumped out.
The guy with the scar shouldered his weapon, and before Ben could react, he fired a single shot into the back of the van. The second prisoner’s head exploded in a red mist and he slumped to the metal floor. The scarred guy’s companion unholstered a pistol and aimed it at Ben’s heart. There wasn’t much Ben could do but stare at the scene around him.
What must have been a normal street on the edge of Rome just moments earlier now resembled a scene from Kosovo at the height of the Bosnian war. The two police Alfas that had been escorting the prison van were burning wrecks. One car was lying roofless and twisted on its side, flames pouring out. A charred arm sticking out of the driver’s window was all that remained of the cops inside. The other car was buried under the front of the van, crumpled and blackened like a Coke can tossed in a fire. The bodies of the van driver and prison guards were littered bloodily across the road.
They weren’t alone. Through the smoke, Ben could see at least half a dozen dead passers-by strewn about the pavements, cut down as they went about their business. A taxi was stopped in the road, its horn stuck and blaring. The inside of its shattered windscreen was smeared with blood.
One of the Carabinieri had obviously managed to leap clear of his car before it exploded. Not clear enough. He was crawling pitifully away from the burning wreckage, dragging himself with bloody fingers. His legs were ablaze.
Six men had done all this in under a minute. Four of them were heading back in a group towards a big black Mitsubishi SUV nearby, carrying automatic weapons and a couple of ex-Soviet rocket-propelled grenade launchers. As they passed the burning cop, the tallest of the men casually shot him in the back of the head. It wasn’t meant as an act of kindness. One of the others let out a laugh.
The badly-scarred Russian shoved Ben roughly towards the Mitsubishi. ‘Walk,’ he said.
Ben walked. The hijackers didn’t even seem to be in a hurry as they climbed aboard the seven-seater SUV. Ben was bundled in the middle of the centre row with the pistol still aimed at his heart. The man with the scar sat beside him. He gave a command to the driver in Russian, and the Mitsubishi took off.
Chapter Sixty-Three
The Mitsubishi’s driver was fast and skilful. Ben sat quietly among his captors with his cuffed hands in his lap as the car sped away from the scene of the hijack and headed for the city’s outskirts. A couple of Carabinieri vehicles flashed by in the opposite direction, but nobody came after them.
Beyond Rome’s outer fringe of suburbs and used car lots, furniture superstores and discount warehouses, the Mitsubishi passed through a dilapidated iron gateway, crossed the weed-strewn concrete forecourt of a dingy industrial building that looked like a disused factory or packing plant, and drove inside. The SUV’s engine boomed in the empty building, then died. The six men climbed down from the vehicle and hauled Ben out at gunpoint.
The abandoned building smelled of urine and decay. The place was scattered with empty bottles and other debris left behind by itinerant homeless people. Rays of sunlight shone in through tall, grimed windows. A pair of pigeons flapped about among the rusty iron roof girders, their wing-beats echoing in the huge, empty space. The only furniture in the building was a cracked plastic office chair that sat alone in the middle of the concrete floor. The scarred man shoved Ben over to it. ‘Sit.’
Ben figured that unless he was going to try and take down six heavily-armed men with his wrists cuffed together, he might as well sit down.
The scarred man motioned to one of his crew, the tall one who’d executed the burning cop earlier. The tall guy approached Ben with a grin and crouched down. He grabbed one of Ben’s feet and yanked off one of his laceless shoes, then the other, and tossed them over to his boss.
‘First place we look,’ the scarred man said in his guttural English. ‘Then we look other places.’ He propped his weapon against a concrete pillar. Holding Ben’s left shoe by its toecap, he smashed the heel hard against the pillar’s edge, two, three, four times, until the shoe’s heel broke apart. He inspected it, then did the same with the other. Ben watched, confused, as the right heel fell off to reveal a hollow compartment inside. The man dug his fingers inside, pulled out a small black device, and the mass of scar tissue crinkled into a mirthless smile.
Ben stared at the thing that had been in his shoe. How long had he been walking around with a GPS tracker attached to him?
‘They are not so smart,’ the scarred man said, tossing it away. ‘We have jammer.’
They, Ben thought. Whoever they were.
The man walked up to him. ‘Nobody can find you here, Mister Ben Hope. Now we have business.’
Ben knew there wasn’t much point in playing
the ‘you’ve got the wrong man’ card. Not when he was Italy’s most overexposed celebrity of the moment.
‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘You’ve just found out the Goya you and your boys stole is a fake, and you want to know where the real one is.’
The man snorted. ‘We do not care about the Goya. The Goya is shit.’
‘But you still thought it was worth killing for.’
‘You know nothing. You are ignorant man. You know who I am?’
‘Someone who stuck his face in a combine harvester.’
The scarred man slapped Ben hard across the face. ‘My name is Spartak Gourko. Spetsnaz, Russian Special Forces. Now private contractor.’
Ben had a feeling he knew what was coming next. Anatoly Shikov hadn’t bought that Spetsnaz ballistic knife from a mail-order catalogue.
‘And I was friend of someone you kill,’ Gourko said. ‘I know Anatoly for many years. Now he is gone. This makes me very sad.’
Ben’s cheek was burning fiercely from the slap. ‘I’m glad I killed him. He was a piece of shit and he had it coming.’
Gourko’s face hardened, the patchwork of gristle across his jaw pulling tight. ‘For this you must die. You die slow and in lot of pain. I wanted you to know this. But you will not die now. I must let you live.’
‘That’s considerate of you,’ Ben said. ‘You think you are tough guy?’
‘I’ve known tougher.’
‘You will not be so tough when my boss is going to work on you. Grigori Shikov is not gentle man like me.’
‘I take it we’re going on a trip, then,’ Ben said. ‘I’m guessing east.’
Gourko nodded. ‘First there is matter to take care of. You have taken away the son of Grigori Shikov, and for this he will take away your life. But you have also hurt me. You have taken away my friend. And so now I will hurt you.’ He shrugged, as though this were the most straightforward and reasonable thing in the world.