The Mozart Conspiracy

  Rage flashed through him and he kicked the TV off the table. It hit the floor and imploded in a shower of sparks.

  Maria’s door wasn’t locked, and when he went into the squalid room his first thought was that she was dead.

  She was the girl in the video. She was still breathing, but heavily doped. A grimy vest and knickers were all that covered her thin body. He lifted her carefully from the bed and carried her back through the house and out to the Land Rover. He gently laid her on the back seat, took off his jacket and placed it over her. Catherine reached out for her hand and looked up at Ben with questioning eyes.

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ he said softly.

  The sound of an approaching vehicle made him tense. They were back. The Land Rover was well hidden from their view. So was the pickup truck, which was still sitting half-buried in the hole in the kitchen wall at the back of the house, but they’d find that soon enough.

  Ben climbed into the driver’s seat and listened. He heard voices as one of the three men got out. The creak of the iron gates. The roll and crunch of the Suzuki’s tyres on the gravel. The engine burbling through a shot muffler as it pulled up in front of the house. Car doors opening and slamming. Footsteps and laughter.

  He pulled his door quietly shut and went to twist the key. They’d be out of here before anyone could react. Then Catherine would be back with her family and he’d hand Maria over to the authorities he could still trust.

  His hand stopped halfway to the ignition. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. He saw them again. The images on the TV. Big hands pawing at young flesh. Bad teeth flashing in wide grins. The imploring eyes of the girl on the bed.

  He looked over his shoulder at Maria’s slight body lying slumped in the back. Catherine was frowning at him from the passenger seat.

  Fuck it. He reached down under his seat and drew out his back-up weapon. The shotgun was an Ithaca 12-gauge, black and brutal, less than two feet long from its pistol grip to its sawn-off muzzle. Its tube magazine was loaded up with 00-Buck rounds, the type that would let you into a barricaded room without needing to open the door.

  He swung his legs out of the Land Rover. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he told Catherine.

  The three men were just at the front porch by the time he walked up behind them. Two of them, the fat one and the long-haired one, were joking about something in Turkish. The third guy looked serious, tattoos, slicked-back hair, jangling a bunch of keys. He had a Chinese Colt 1911-A1 copy tucked in his belt, behind the hip, hammer down in amateur fashion.

  When the metallic clack-clunk of the Ithaca slide-action cut the air, all three of them wheeled around with wide eyes. Nobody had time to reach for a gun. A cigarette dropped from an open mouth.

  He stared at them coldly for half a second before he emptied the Ithaca’s magazine into their bodies at point-blank range.

  Chapter Three

  Somewhere over France

  Two days later

  Benedict Hope gazed out of the window of the 747 and took another long sip of whisky as he watched the white ocean of cloud drift by below. Ice clinked in his glass. The whisky traced a burning path across his tongue. Airline Scotch, some nameless blended thing, but better than nothing. It was his fourth. Or maybe his fifth. He couldn’t remember any more.

  The seat next to him was empty, as was much of the business-class section of the plane. He turned away from the window, stretched out and closed his eyes.

  Three jobs this year. He’d been busy, and he was tired. It had taken two months in Turkey to track down the men who were holding Catherine Petersen. Two long months of dirt and sweat, following false trails, chasing up dud information, overturning every stone. The girl’s parents had despaired many times of ever seeing her alive again. He never made promises to people. He knew there was always a chance of sending the subject home in a body-bag.

  That had only happened to him once. Mexico City, one of the big kidnap-and-ransom hotspots of the world. It hadn’t been his fault. The kidnappers had slaughtered the child even before the ransom demands. Ben had been the one who found the body. A young boy, just short of his eleventh birthday, stuffed in a barrel. He had no ears and no fingers. Sometimes the kidnappers weren’t even doing it for the money. He still didn’t like to think of it, but the half-repressed memory drove him on.

  He’d persisted in Turkey, just as he always persisted. He’d never given up on anyone, even though there were plenty of times when it seemed hopeless. Like with a lot of these jobs, there had been nothing, no leads, just a lot of people too frightened to talk. Then a chance piece of information unlocked the whole thing and led him right to the house. People had died for it. But now Catherine Petersen was back with her parents and little Maria was being looked after until her family could be traced.

  Now all Ben wanted to do was go home, back to the sanctuary of the old house on the remote west coast of Ireland. He thought about his private, lonely stretch of beach, the rocky cove where he liked to spend time alone with the waves, the gulls and his thoughts. His plan after the Turkish job had been to rest there quietly for as long as he could. Until the next call. That was one thing he could be sure of. There’d always be another call.

  And it had come sooner than he’d expected. Around midnight the night before, and he’d been sitting in the hotel bar with nothing more to occupy him than a row of drinks, counting the hours before he could get out of Istanbul. He’d checked his phone for the first time in a week. There had been a message waiting for him, and the voice was one he knew well.

  It was Leigh Llewellyn. She was about the last person he’d expected to hear from. He’d listened to the message several times. She sounded tense, nervous, a little breathless.

  ‘Ben, I don’t know where you are or when you might get this message. But I need to see you. I don’t know who else to call. I’m staying in London, at the Dorchester. Come and find me. I’ll wait here as long as I can for you.’ A pause. Then, in a tight voice: ‘Ben, I’m scared. Please, come quick if you can.’

  The message was five days old, dated the fourth of December. On hearing it he’d cancelled the Dublin flight. He’d be at Heathrow in less than an hour.

  What could she want from him? They hadn’t spoken for fifteen years.

  The last time he’d seen Leigh Llewellyn was at Oliver’s funeral back in January, back on that terrible day, watching his old friend’s coffin go into the ground as the icy Welsh rain lashed over the desolate cemetery. With her long black hair streaming in the wind she’d stood at the edge of the grave. She’d already lost her parents, a long time ago. Now her brother was gone too, tragically drowned in an accident. Someone held an umbrella over her. She didn’t seem to notice. Her beautiful features were pale and drawn. Those jade-green eyes, whose glitter Ben remembered so well from years before, gazed dully into the void. She was oblivious of the photographers, hovering like vultures to get a snap of the opera star who had cut short her European tour to bring her brother’s coffin back from Vienna by private jet to her native Wales.

  He’d wanted to talk to her that day, but there was too much pain between them. She hadn’t seen him, and he’d kept away from her. On his way out of the cemetery he’d pressed a business card into her PA’s hand. It was all he could do. Then he’d slipped away unseen.

  After the funeral, Leigh had disappeared from public view and retreated to her home in Monte Carlo. He thought about her often, but he couldn’t call her.

  Not after what he’d done to her fifteen years ago.

  Chapter Four

  Ballykelly, Northern Ireland

  Fifteen years earlier

  On a washed-out Tuesday night, Lance-Corporal Benedict Hope turned in off the street and walked down the puddled alley past the bins and the fresh graffiti that said FUCK THE POPE. The sign for the little wine bar creaked in the wind.

  He went in through the stone entrance and shook the rain from his clothes, glad to be out of uniform. A rusty iron stairway led u
p to the double doors of the bar. As he got nearer he could hear the sound of the piano drifting down. He pushed through the doors and walked across the peeling linoleum floor. The place was almost empty.

  Ben pulled up a stool at the bar. The barman was polishing a pint glass with a cloth.

  ‘How’re you doing, Joe?’

  Joe smiled through his heavy beard. ‘Doin’ rightly, thanks. Same as usual?’

  ‘Why not?’ Ben said.

  Joe grabbed a spirit glass and filled it from the bottle of Black Bush that hung behind the bar.‘You’ll be through that one soon,’ he said, gazing at the level in the bottle.

  The pianist started up again. The battered old upright was missing most of its finish and badly in need of a tuning, but it sounded good under his fingers. He was doing a pretty good rendition of Jerry Lee Lewis boogie-woogie, keeping up a thumping stride rhythm with his left hand as his right churned out lightning blues scales.

  ‘Not bad, is he?’ said Joe. ‘One of your lot, from the look of him.’

  Ben turned round on the bar stool. ‘Yeah, as a matter of fact he is.’

  ‘Pity. I was thinking of hiring him. Might bring in a bit o’ trade.’

  Ben knew his name, too. Private Oliver Llewellyn. He was tall and slender, and his black hair was cropped short in a severe buzz-cut. He was too busy at the keyboard to notice Ben sitting watching him.

  A pretty young blonde of about twenty was leaning against the side of the piano, gazing admiringly as Oliver’s fingers shot up and down the keys. He suddenly played a fast downward run that terminated in a series of shimmering jazzy chords as Jerry Lee Lewis gave way to Oscar Peterson.

  ‘You’re fantastic, so you are,’ the girl breathed. ‘You’re not really a soldier, are you?’

  ‘Sure I am.’ Oliver smiled up at her, still playing. ‘SAS.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ she said.

  ‘Nope,’ he replied. ‘I never kid. SAS. Sexy-Attractive-Sophisticated. That’s me.’

  She giggled and thumped him playfully on the shoulder, and he kept playing with his right hand while he slipped his left arm around her waist and tugged her towards him. ‘There’s plenty of room on this piano stool for two of us,’ he said. ‘Come on, I’ll teach you a duet.’

  She sat up close next to him, her thigh pressing against his. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  ‘Bernie.’

  Ben grinned and turned back to his drink, exchanging a knowing look with Joe. Private Llewellyn didn’t waste time.

  The doors swung open and four guys walked in and took a table in the middle of the room. They were in their mid-twenties, surly, overconfident. One of them went to the bar for pints of lager, ignoring Ben’s friendly nod. One of his friends, the big overweight one with the pasty face, twisted heavily in his seat and called over to the girl as Oliver was showing her a simple duet. ‘Bernie! Get over here!’ His narrowed eyes shot a long glance at Oliver’s back.

  Bernie broke away from the piano and got nervously to her feet. ‘Got to go,’ she whispered to Oliver. Oliver shrugged sadly and launched into a Chopin Nocturne.

  Bernie sat down with the four lads. ‘Fuck were you doing with him?’ the fat one demanded, staring at her hard. ‘Can’t you see what he is?’

  ‘Just having a giggle,’ she said quietly. ‘Leave him alone, Gary.’

  Oliver stopped playing. He grabbed the half-finished pint from the top of the piano and drained it, glanced at his watch and walked out of the bar. Bernie craned her head and gave him a wistful smile as he went by.

  The four guys exchanged looks. Gary raised his eyebrows and jerked his chin at the door. ‘You wait here,’ he growled at Bernie. He pushed his chair back from the table. The four of them slurped down the last of their beer and stood up. They headed for the door. Bernie looked worried. ‘Gary…’ she started.

  ‘You-shut-your-hole.’ Gary pointed a stubby warning finger in her face. ‘This is your fault, you slag. I told you not to hang around with them fuckin’ soldiers.’

  The four of them filed out purposefully.

  Ben had been watching. He sighed. He set his glass on the bar and slid down from his stool.

  Outside in the alleyway, the four guys had already caught up with Oliver. They had him shoved up against the wall. Two of them had lock-knives. Gary aimed a punch at Oliver’s stomach that doubled him up. Oliver straightened suddenly and head-butted him between the eyes. The fat guy let out a scream and reeled backwards, blood pouring from a broken nose. The other three started on Oliver, two holding him with knives to his throat as the third kicked him in the belly. They had his wallet, ripping notes out of it.

  Ben had come up silently behind them. Gary was too busy with his broken nose, so he focused on the others. A fistful of hair and a sharp kick to the back of the knee, and one of the knifemen was writhing on his back. Ben could easily have killed him then. Instead he stamped hard on his genitals. The guy let out an animal scream. The other two let go of Oliver and ran.

  Gary raised his fists. His face was slicked with blood. Ben knew exactly what to expect from him. He was the typical sloppy brawler, no brains and no discipline. Rage and strength and luck would be the only things going for him. He’d come roaring in like a big dumb bull. His punches would be slow and fly in a curved arc that a trained fighter could take his time blocking. Once you blocked it and got inside the arc you could hit him hard.

  Gary came on just the way Ben had thought. The only problem was thinking of the best way to stop him without causing major injury. He caught the fist that swung at him, locked it and broke the wrist. He followed that up with a jab that pulverized Gary’s lips and sent him crashing headlong into a row of bins. Gary flopped down on the wet concrete and lay still next to his friend, who was still squirming on his back, screaming in agony and clutching his crushed balls.

  Ben helped Oliver to his feet. He was fighting for air after the heavy kick in the stomach. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ Ben said, supporting him. Something hard and brittle crunched underfoot. He looked down at the splintered pieces of Gary’s teeth on the ground.

  ‘Good thing you turned up when you did,’ Oliver wheezed. ‘I might have killed them.’ He frowned at Ben, recognition showing on his face. ‘Sir,’ he added.

  ‘Oh, I noticed that. SAS, huh?’ Oliver’s wallet was lying on the wet ground. Ben knelt down and picked up the papers that had fallen out of it. Driving licence, money, a photo. Ben folded it into the wallet and was about to hand it back to Oliver.

  Then he stopped. He opened the wallet again. Took out the photo. Unfolded it and looked at it again. He took a good long look at it.

  It was a shot of Oliver with a girl, taken at a party. He had his arm round her, fooling about, pulling a stupid face.

  But Ben wasn’t looking at Oliver.

  She was wearing a green evening dress that brought out the colour of her eyes, and her lustrous black hair cascaded over her bare shoulders.

  For a moment he couldn’t take his eyes off the photo. It took an effort to tear his gaze away. He waved it at Oliver before he finally folded it up again and replaced it in the wallet. ‘If I had a girlfriend like that,’ he said sternly, ‘I wouldn’t be getting myself into trouble chasing after the likes of Bernie up there.’

  Oliver took the wallet and dropped it in his pocket. He wiped blood from his upper lip. ‘Sound advice, sir,’ he said. ‘But that’s not my girlfriend. She’s my little sister.’

  Chapter Five

  London

  The present day

  Ben walked through the opulent foyer of the Dorchester Hotel and approached the reception desk. ‘Is Miss Llewellyn still in room 1221?’ he asked.

  Three minutes later he was walking fast over the soft carpet of the corridor approaching her door. He was thinking of what she wanted and what he could say to her after all this time.

  He rounded a corner. There was a guy standing just up ahead. He didn’t look like he was waiting for anyone, and he didn’t loo
k like a guest. He was just standing there with his back to one of the doors. Ben checked the number on it. 1221.

  He looked the guy up and down. He was a very big man. He was five inches taller than Ben, about six-four. And he was broad. Probably about twice his weight, maybe 350 pounds. He was wearing a dark polyester suit that stretched too tight over his chest and shoulders. His arms looked as though they were ready to pop the jacket sleeves apart at the seams. A decade or more of heavy steroid use had left his face cratered with acne scars. His tiny head was shaven to a polish and sat on his massive shoulders like a pea on a ruler.

  Ben walked up to him without breaking stride. ‘I’m here to see Leigh Llewellyn.’

  The big man folded his arms across his chest and shook his head. A flicker of amusement passed over his face. ‘Nobody sees her,’ he said in a bass rumble. ‘She’s not to be disturbed.’

  ‘I’m a friend. She’s expecting me.’

  The wide-set eyes bored hard into his. ‘Not that I’ve been told.’

  ‘Can you tell her I’m here?’ Ben said. ‘The name’s Hope.’

  A short shake of the head. ‘Uh-uh. No way.’

  ‘You’d better let me through.’

  ‘Piss off, dwarf.’

  Ben reached across to knock on the door. The man’s square hand shot out and the stubby fingers closed around his wrist.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Ben said.

  The big man was about to answer when Ben twisted his hand into a lock that was a fraction away from breaking the wrist joint. He bent the arm up behind the guy’s back and forced him down on his knees. Pain was like that. It didn’t matter how big they were.

  ‘Maybe we should start again,’ Ben said softly. ‘I came here to see Leigh Llewellyn. I don’t want to hurt you unless you make me. All I want is to be let inside. Do you think you can manage that?’

  ‘OK, OK. Let go.’ The big man’s voice was high-pitched and panicky and he was beginning to shake.

  The door opened. Two more men appeared in the doorway. They were both wearing the same cheap suits, but neither was as big as the first guy.