‘You fool!’ Streicher yelled over the din of the rotors, his shirt crackling and hair whipping in the powerful draught. ‘Fire that thing and you’ll blow the canisters. You’ll release the plague anyway.’
Ben was beginning to shake with the feverish cold that was spreading through him and the wind that was chilling his blood-soaked clothes against his flesh. He knew that Streicher was right. Not even an RPG blast at close range could be guaranteed to incinerate all the disease agent. He could visualise the unburned bacteria whipped up and carried high in the smoke from the explosion before slowly dissipating to drift gently on the evening breeze, with nothing but a prayer to stop them from carrying to nearby farms, villages, towns.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I can’t use this thing.’
He let go of the RPG and it slid off his shoulder and hit the ground with a dull metallic thud.
Streicher laughed again.
Ben felt himself losing balance. The darkness was encroaching further around the edges of his vision. He wobbled on his feet and managed to stay upright, the pain getting bad now. Getting worse than anything he’d ever felt before.
‘I’ll just have to use this,’ he heard himself say.
He saw Streicher’s expression change. The man took a step away. Then another, ducking back towards the helicopter.
As if in a dream, Ben felt his good arm reach back to that familiar place behind his right hip and his fingers close on the chunky grip of the Browning Hi-Power. Felt the steel clear the holster, registered the gun appearing in front of his blurring vision as he thrust it out one-handed, barely aware of it except as just an extension of his arm.
The sound of the report was half-drowned by the rotor blast, but Ben might not even have heard it otherwise. He was only dimly conscious of the snap of the recoil in the palm of his hand, and of Udo Streicher’s brains blowing out against the fuselage of his own chopper, and of the man’s knees folding and twisting under him as he went straight down like a sack of laundry, twitched once on the ground and then lay still with blood and pulped cerebral matter spilling over the concrete.
By then, Ben was already falling, falling, backwards off the edge of a cliff and tumbling for ever into nothingness.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
‘Come,’ Roby said, with a sunburst smile, beckoning enthusiastically. ‘This way, Benoît.’
Ben followed the boy over the meadow, wading through verdant grass and sunflowers that grew knee-high and filled the air with their perfume. The mountains twinkled and the sky was an unbroken blue. ‘This way,’ Roby called, further away now, and Ben quickened his pace to catch up with him. ‘Wait for me,’ he called back.
Then he was surrounded by a circle of pearl-white archways that seemed to grow out of the waving flowers, looming tall and splendid all around him. Roby stood waiting for him at their centre, smiling and extending his hand. He took Ben’s arm.
‘See,’ he said, and pointed.
Ben looked, and saw all his old friends stepping through the archways and gathering round to greet him. There was Père Antoine, his flowing robe and mane of white hair catching the sunlight, and his eyes glowing with that inner joy that Ben remembered from another life. Behind him came Père Jacques, and Frère Patrice, and the lay brothers Gilles and Marc and Olivier, the whole gang, all smiling and happy to meet him again. Jeff Dekker was there, too. And Ben’s son Jude, his blond hair shining like gold.
‘Welcome home, Ben,’ Père Antoine said.
Ben asked, ‘Am I in heaven?’
Père Antoine just smiled. He held Ben’s hand and squeezed it tightly with such love in his kind old eyes that Ben could feel his own tearing up and felt like a little boy again.
‘It’s all right, Ben,’ Père Antoine said. ‘It’s all right.’
Then the old man’s voice grew distant and his smiling face seemed to fade into the brightness of the sunlight. The circle of arches melted away, and all his friends, gradually merging into the light until they were gone and all that remained was the brightness.
Ben squinted up at it, blinking. ‘Where did you go?’ he said, confused.
‘I’m right here, Ben,’ said the same voice, only it was different somehow, closer and more immediate. The same warm hand gripped his tightly, fingers meshed with his own.
Ben’s eyes fluttered shut, then reopened. ‘Silvie?’
‘Welcome back,’ she said again, and tears spilled out of her eyes and fell on his skin like the dew from the wildflowers in his dream.
Ben closed his eyes and slept.
He drifted, sometimes on the edge of consciousness, other times floating through more strange dreams, though Père Antoine and the others did not reappear. He slowly became more aware of time passing, days merging into nights and back into days. Through it all he could sense the presence of people around him, and one presence especially.
On the fifth day, he was able to keep his eyes open for longer and sit propped up on an extra pillow in the hospital bed. The private room was white and shiny and full of flowers. Silvie sat at his bedside, where he now realised she’d been sitting for days. Her right arm was in a sling, as his left arm would be when it was out of traction. She moved stiffly, but she seemed not to notice the pain of her injuries now that Ben was going to live. She couldn’t stop crying and apologising for being silly.
‘I thought you were gone,’ he said when he found the strength to speak.
‘Wasn’t as bad as it looked,’ she replied, smiling at him. ‘Streicher was a terrible shot. Both bullets went straight through without touching anything.’
‘Lucky,’ he whispered.
‘It was you I was worried about,’ she said.
He rested again a while. Later, when he was a little stronger, she calmly explained to him how the surgeons had rebuilt his shoulder blade and reset the joint. Hannah Gissel’s shotgun had been loaded with small birdshot. The wound had been spectacular, but the force of the blast had been largely absorbed by muscle and bone and none of the tiny pellets had penetrated with enough energy to find their way to his heart or lungs. It had been the loss of blood that would have killed most men, and things had been touch-and-go for a while. Silvie had been in the room next door until three days ago, since when she’d been at his bedside for as many hours of the day as the nurses would allow her. ‘I’m your guard dog,’ she said.
‘More like guardian angel,’ he replied.
‘Glad I was there after all?’
‘Glad you’re here now,’ he said, and she squeezed his hand.
‘You’re going to be fine, Ben. And so is everybody else.’
He asked, ‘How did we get here?’
‘You can thank Luc Simon for that,’ she said. ‘He was the one who insisted on being kept informed of our movements. Didn’t think you’d take kindly to it. I secretly texted him the location we got from Donath. The police helicopters reached Streicher’s bunker just a few minutes after it all went down.’ She ran through how the cops had safely secured the plague canisters and sealed off the whole area.
‘That Luc Simon is something, isn’t he?’ Ben said, and laughed, and the laugh became a painful cough.
‘You can tell him so yourself. He’s pretty anxious to speak to you. Wants to give you the whole spiel on behalf of the French nation, thanking you for averting such a major disaster, etc., etc.’
‘And then throw me in jail,’ Ben said.
‘I somehow don’t think that’s going to happen,’ Silvie said with a chuckle.
Ben slowly recovered his strength over the next week. Luc Simon did come and see him, and did give him the whole spiel, and made it clear that no charges would be brought for any of the little misdemeanours Ben had committed in the course of saving the world.
‘Cheers for that one,’ Ben said.
‘Oh, I almost forgot to mention. We finally got back the lab results with the analysis of that liquid you were taking. Ever heard of colloidal silver?’
‘No,’ Ben said.
‘Tiny particles separated from pure silver by a simple electrical process, suspended in water. Your friend Antoine used an apparatus he built himself, powered by a nine-volt battery. I’d never heard of the stuff either, but I’ve been reading up on it. There have been a lot of scientific studies that seem to show it’s a pretty potent antibacterial.’ Luc Simon shrugged. ‘Maybe that explains how you were protected from infection down in the crypt. But I guess we’ll never know for sure.’
‘Not while the pharmaceutical industry is calling the shots,’ Ben said.
‘So damn cynical,’ Luc Simon said.
Epilogue
Nineteen days after the operation to put his shoulder back together, Ben was ready to leave hospital. Dressing took a long time, with his arm in a sling and thirty-five stitches pulling whenever he moved. But it felt good to be getting out of here.
‘I suppose you’ll be going home now,’ Silvie said on her final visit to his room.
He replied, ‘I don’t have a home.’
Silvie looked as if she’d been expecting him to say that. ‘But I do,’ she said. ‘Nothing special, but I’d like you to come and live in it with me until you get your strength back. You need someone to look after you.’ She smiled and added in another tone, ‘Besides, I kind of like your company.’
‘What about your job?’ he asked.
‘I quit. Decided to move out of my apartment, too. Fresh start, new job. Full-time in charge of getting you fully recovered.’
‘With just one arm?’ he said, eyeing her sling.
‘Hey, I’m not Superwoman for nothing, you know.’ She looked at him. ‘What do you say, Ben?’
He said yes.
They spent the next six weeks together. Silvie had rented a small beachside place in the Bay of Biscay, near La Rochelle, where she’d spent part of her childhood. As Ben gradually regained his strength, they went walking on the beach, watching the boats and the sunsets over the bay, and joking about how they could still hold hands with their good arms. Her sling came off soon afterwards. Ben was healing well, and not long after that, the doctors said he could start doing without his. His shoulder was very stiff at first, but with time and exercises, full mobility would eventually return.
In the meantime, they had nothing but the warm days, the sea, and the tasty French dishes Silvie regaled him with, to build up his strength and put back on the weight he’d lost. And they had each other. Gentle days, tender nights. For a time, it seemed as if it could go on for ever.
But they both knew that wouldn’t happen. It was too good a thing to spoil it.
One sunny August morning, Silvie woke to find him gone. His sudden departure came as no surprise to her, and she smiled when she read his note. All it said was:
Where he’d gone, she had no idea and didn’t try to guess. She didn’t know if she’d ever see or hear from him again, and tried not to think about it too much.
Read on for an exclusive extract from the new Ben Hope adventure by
SCOTT MARIANI
The Cassandra Sanction
Prologue
Rügen Island,
Baltic coast, northern Germany
16th July
The woman sitting at the wheel of the stationary car was thirty-four years of age but looked at least five years younger. Her hair was long and black. Her face was one that was well known to millions of people. She was as popular for her looks as she was for her intellect, her sharp wit and her professional credentials, and often recognised wherever she ventured out in public.
But she was alone now. She’d driven many miles to be as far away from anybody as she could, on this particular day.
This day, which was to be the last day of her life.
She’d driven the Porsche Cayenne four-by-four off the coastal track and up a long incline of rough grass, patchy and flattened by the incessant sea wind, to rest stationary just metres from the edge of the chalk cliff. The Baltic Sea was hard and grey, unseasonably cold-looking for the time of year. With the engine shut off, she could hear the rumble and crash of the breakers against the rocks far below. Evening was drawing in, and the rising storm brought strong gusts of salt wind that buffeted the car every few seconds and rocked its body on its suspension. Rain slapped the windscreen and trickled down the glass, like the tears that were running freely down her face as she wept.
She had been sitting there a long time behind the wheel. Reflecting on her life. Picturing in turn the faces of those she was leaving behind, and thinking about how her loss would affect them. One, more than anybody.
She knew how badly she was going to hurt him by doing this. It would have been the same for her, if it had been the other way round.
Catalina Fuentes gazed out at the sea and whispered, ‘Forgive me, Raul’.
Then she slowly reached for the ignition and restarted the engine. She put the car into drive and gripped the wheel tightly. She took several deep breaths to steady her pounding heart and deepen her resolve. This was it. The time had come. Now she was ready.
The engine picked up as she touched the gas. The car rolled over the rough grass towards the cliff edge. Past the apex of the incline, the ground sloped downwards before it dropped away sheer, nothing but empty air between it and the rocks a hundred metres below. The Porsche Cayenne bumped down the slope, stones and grit pinging and popping from under its wheels, flattening the coarse shrubs that clung to the weathered cliff top. Gathering speed, rolling faster and faster as the slope steepened; then its front wheels met with nothingness and the car’s nose tipped downwards into space.
As the Porsche Cayenne vaulted off the edge of the chalk cliff and began its long, twisting, somersaulting fall, Catalina Fuentes closed her eyes and bid a last goodbye to the life she’d known and all the people in it.
Chapter One
Ben Hope had been in the bar less than six minutes when the violence kicked off.
His being there in first place had been purely a chance thing. For a man with nowhere in particular to be at any particular time, and under no sort of pressure except to find a cool drink on a warm early October afternoon, the little Andalucian town of Frigiliana offered more than enough choice of watering holes to pick out at random, and the whitewashed bar tucked away in corner of a square in the Moorish Quarter had seemed like the kind of quiet place that appealed.
Pretty soon, it was looking like he’d picked the wrong one, at the wrong time. Of all the joints in all the pueblos of the Sierra Almijara foothills, he’d had to wander into this one.
He’d been picking up the vibe and watching the signs from the moment he walked in. But the beer looked good, and it was too late to change his mind. He didn’t have anything better to do anyway, so he hung around mainly to see whether his guess would turn out right. Which it soon did.
The bar wasn’t exactly crowded, but it wasn’t empty either. Without consciously counting, he registered the presence of a dozen people in the shady room, not including the owner, a wide little guy in a faded polo shirt, who was lazily tidying up behind the bar and didn’t speak as he served Ben a bottle of the local cerveza. Ben carried his drink over to a shady corner table, dumped his bag and settled there with his back to the wall, facing the door, away from the other punters, where he could see the window and survey the rest of the room at the same time.
Old habits. Ben Hope was someone who preferred to observe than to be observed. He reclined in his chair and sipped his cool beer. The situation unfolding in front of him was a simple one, following a classic pattern he had witnessed more often and in more places in his life than he cared to count, like an old movie he’d seen so many times before. What was coming was as predictable and inevitable as the fact that he wasn’t just going to sit there and let it happen.
On the left side of the room, midway between Ben’s corner table and the bar, a guy was sitting alone nursing a half-empty tumbler and a half-empty bottle of Arehucas Carta Oro rum that he looked intent on finishing before he passed out. He was a man around h
is mid-thirties, obviously a Spaniard, lean-faced, with a thick head of glossy, tousled black hair and skin tanned to the colour of café con leche. His expression was grim, his eyes bloodshot. A four-day beard shaded his cheeks and his white shirt was crumpled and grubby, as if he’d been wearing it for a few days and sleeping in it too. But he didn’t have the look of a down-and-out or a vagrant. Just of a man who was very obviously upset and working hard to find solace in drink.
Ben knew all about that.
The Spanish guy sitting alone trying to get wrecked wasn’t the problem. Nor were the elderly couple at the table in the right corner at the back of the barroom, opposite Ben. The old man must have been about a thousand years old, and the way his withered neck stuck out of his shirt collar made Ben think of a Galápagos tortoise. His wife wasn’t much younger, shrivelled to something under five feet with skin like rawhide. The Moorish Sultans had probably still ruled these parts back when they’d started dating. Still together, still in love. Ben thought they looked like a sweet couple, in a wrinkly kind of way.
Nor, again, was any of the potential trouble coming from the man seated at a table by the door. With straw-coloured hair, cropped short and receding, he looked too pale and Nordic to be a local. Maybe a Swedish tourist, Ben thought. Or a Dane. An abstemious one, drinking mineral water while apparently engrossed in a paperback.
No, the source of the problem was right in the middle of the barroom, where two tables had been dragged untidily together to accommodate the noisy crowd of foreigners. It didn’t take much to tell they were Brits. Eight of them, all in their twenties, all red-faced from exuberance and the large quantity of local brew they were throwing down their throats. Their T-shirts were loud, their voices louder. Ben had heard their raucous laughter from outside. Their table was a mess of spilled beer and empty bottles, loose change and cigarette packs. To the delight of his mates, one of them clambered up on top of it and tried to do a little dance before he almost toppled the whole thing over and fell back in his chair, roaring like a musketeer. They weren’t as rowdy as some gangs of beery squaddies Ben had seen, but they weren’t far off it. The barman was casting a nervous eye at them as he weighed up the risks of asking them to leave against what they were spending in the place. Next, they broke into a chanting rendition of Y Viva España that was too much for the ancient couple in the right corner. The barman’s frown deepened as they made their shuffling exit, but he still didn’t say anything.