Ben quietly finished his coffee, then sat back. ‘So I’m back to square one. Which is to say, nowhere.’
‘I’m sorry. I know you were counting on me for information.’
‘It’s a setback, that’s all.’
‘I know you’re upset about your friends. I’m sorry about that as well.’
He said nothing.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
Ben said, ‘I’m going to find him, hunt him down and put him in the ground. Him, and whoever else was involved.’
‘He has a lot of protection.’
‘He’s one man down already.’
‘There are plenty more, and Breslin wasn’t the worst.’
‘It won’t do him any good. I’ll go through his people, layer by layer, one by one, whatever it takes, until I get to him.’
She looked at him. ‘Are you really good enough?’
‘This kind of thing isn’t exactly new to me. And I’m still alive.’
‘I was right about you, wasn’t I?’
‘I was in the SAS, yes. For many years. About half your lifetime.’
‘I’m older than I look. And I was right about the officer part, too?’
He shrugged. ‘Final rank of major. Not that it matters.’
‘It says a lot about who you are.’
‘No. It says nothing about who I am.’
‘Why did you leave?’
‘I wasn’t happy in my work,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like the way they did things, and I didn’t always agree with why they needed doing in the first place. Politics isn’t my game. I wanted to do good, to help people. That’s why I left.’
‘I can sympathise,’ Silvie replied.
‘Sure you can,’ he said.
‘I mean it. I’m not happy in my work either. I don’t like being put into a vulnerable situation like that without being told the full story. I don’t like taking orders from faceless bureaucrats who keep their cards close to their chests. I don’t like the way they allow innocent people to be murdered, like some kind of acceptable sacrifice, while they wait in the wings playing the bigger picture game. And I want to get Streicher for what he did. No way they’d let me back on the case now. I’m compromised. But no way am I going to let myself be reassigned to some second-rate posting, to sit gnashing my teeth and twiddling my damn thumbs while all this is going on.’
Ben could see a spirited flash in Silvie’s eyes as she talked. He liked it.
‘So?’ he asked.
‘The way I see it, being your hostage gives me an opportunity. A time window. I don’t have to return to base with my tail between my legs, at least not yet. I’m free, for as long as we can stay a step ahead.’
Ben smiled and lit another Gauloise. ‘Are you trying to tell me you want to team up? Because the answer is, forget it. I don’t need you any more. I’ll go it alone from here.’
‘Meaning what? That you’ll just let me go?’
‘The door’s over there. I won’t stop you. An hour from now, you’ll have no better idea of where I am than Luc Simon or any of them.’
‘And I tell them what?’
‘You could just tell them you got away. Make up all kinds of harrowing stories about your ordeal and how you risked your life escaping from me. You’ll be a hero.’
‘Think again. You might find me useful to have around.’
He shook his head. ‘You’ll slow me down. I work alone.’
‘Don’t give me that “I work alone” crap. A lone man on the run is an easy target. Especially when they plaster your face all over the news, because everywhere you go people will be afraid of you. A man and a woman together don’t arouse suspicion. Just a normal couple, going about our business.’
‘You don’t have the training. You said so yourself.’
‘I’m a quick study. Anyway, I might surprise you.’
‘Surprise is the last thing I need.’ He yawned. Waves of fatigue were hitting him. The caffeine in his system had taken only the slightest edge off it.
‘Rest is what you need,’ Silvie said. ‘You look exhausted.’
‘And I want to sleep easy,’ he replied, ‘knowing that I won’t wake up with a gun in my face.’
‘You’re scared I could arrest you?’
‘Given what you do for a living, it crossed my mind.’
She smiled. ‘The fact is, Ben, I could have arrested you any number of times. The moment we got out of the Hummer, for instance. When you cut me free of the seat, before you taped my wrists back together. The whole time you had me hiding under the tarpaulin. Or before we walked into this place, and any time since. Right this moment.’
‘You think so?’
‘I know so. Your weapons are all in the car, except for my Glock there in your jacket pocket. You’re tired, your reactions are slowed. You’d never get to it in time. Not before I got to mine.’
‘You’re not even armed. You thinking of pronging me with a fork? Taking my eye out with a sugar spoon?’
She smiled again. ‘They didn’t teach you to frisk girls in the British Army, did they? Or maybe you were just too gentlemanly to check my underwear.’ Her right hand emerged from under the table. It was holding a tiny black automatic, just a few ounces of polymer and steel, as smooth and rounded as a sucked sweet. Then it was gone, as the hand gripping it ducked back under the table.
‘Say hello to my micro Kel-Tec,’ she said. ‘Seven rounds of .380 that have been with me the whole time, and that I could plug you with right here, right now. The law would be on my side. Kidnapped government agent, defending herself against a heavily armed, highly dangerous desperado? No problem. And before you ask, yes, I have shot a man before. In fact there are three of them on the other side of the grass because I put them there. So you need to ask yourself: why doesn’t she shoot?’
Ben said nothing. The gun was out of sight but he could feel it pointing at his belly under the table, the way you could sense someone watching you across a room. A .380 auto was no man stopper. It wasn’t a .44 Magnum. But at close range a full magazine of those stubby, zippy little copper-nosed rounds would tear through him and make a real mess inside. It would kill him stone dead. That was for certain.
‘The fact is, Ben, I can take you hostage just as easily as you can me. We can keep passing the baton back and forth, switching hats, captor and captive, all day long, until one of us gets hurt. But we don’t have time to waste on silly games. What you and I need to do is make a deal. Work together. Partners, until this is over and we go our separate ways. Agreed?’
Ben said nothing.
‘Trust me,’ she said.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The first act of the newly formed alliance was to leave the routier café in search of somewhere to hole up and rest a while. ‘I can sleep fine in the car,’ Ben kept insisting as they headed down the road. Silvie drove, with her Glock back in her pocket.
‘Don’t tell me – you’ve slept in a lot worse places. You Special Forces characters seem to take some weird pride in subjecting yourselves to shitty conditions. What’s wrong with us getting a room, with a proper bed in it?’
‘Partly that I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea about me,’ he admitted.
She laughed. ‘A gentleman to the last.’
The gentleman sat and kept a lookout for police, until his eyes wouldn’t stay open any longer and he fell into a doze. Just seconds seemed to pass before he sensed the pickup had stopped, and opened them again to see that Silvie had pulled up in front of a roadside motel. ‘This place looks like it might do us,’ she said, getting out.
Within five minutes, they were unlocking the door to room twenty, which was situated at the far end of a block around the back of the motel, with a designated parking slot just a few steps away. Silvie grabbed the weapons holdall from the Toyota while Ben wearily brought in his green bag. She was strong and handled the heavy weight easily.
The room wasn’t big, and it offered nothing more than t
he barest essentials. A pair of worn single beds, a wardrobe, a utilitarian bathroom, a lopsided standard lamp in one corner, a flimsy table in the other with a phone, cheaply framed bad art on the walls.
‘Is this place scummy enough to satisfy your delicate sensibilities?’ she said, smiling.
‘Perfect,’ he replied. He locked the door, walked straight back to the left-hand bed, nearest the window, and collapsed face down on it without taking his shoes off. The hard, lumpy mattress felt like feathers to him. He shut his eyes, breathed once, breathed twice, and then was spinning downwards into a dark deep pool where there were no thoughts or dreams and nothing really mattered.
More than five hundred kilometres to the north, Luc Simon hustled off the Learjet at Le Bourget airport, dived into the waiting black Citroën sedan and let himself be driven into the heaving traffic of Paris. He was restless and irritable. Irritated that he’d had to abandon his frenetic command post in Lyon just to report to a bunch of government suits. Irritated that he hadn’t had a decent cup of coffee for the last several hours. Most of all, he was irritated that the high-powered and very secret meeting he was about to attend couldn’t have been held in a simple boardroom. Trust these damn politicians to piss around at the Georges V when there was so much at stake and so little time.
When he walked inside the grand hotel’s ridiculously opulent lobby and was ushered up to the Presidential Suite on the third floor by dark-suited men with radio earpieces and concealed weapons, his expectations were proved sadly correct. The silver platters of gourmet finger food and champagne on ice were already disappearing fast. It wasn’t even lunchtime yet. And still not a decent drop of coffee to be had.
Present around the palatial room were several important faces he hadn’t seen before, along with some that were more familiar. Jean-Yves Saunier, Central Director of the DGSI, was accompanied by the agency’s Terrorism Division chief, Patrick Bideau. Keith Hillier, fresh off a flight from London, was MI5’s liaison officer overseeing the joint Streicher operation. Simon knew Jürgen Ganz of the FIS, the Swiss Federal Intelligence Service, only by sight. Likewise François Aumont, the French Minister of the Interior, who was taking up most of a Louis XV settee and helping himself liberally to the Dom Pérignon. After a long round of introductions and hand-shaking and several infuriating minutes spent politely refusing food and drink, Simon was grateful finally to get down to business.
Central to the agenda was the worrisome figure of Major Benedict Hope, who overnight had rocketed from total obscurity to being considered a high-priority fugitive in connection with the ultra-secret Streicher operation. Thankfully, the intelligence guys were all up to speed on Hope’s military file – made available courtesy of the British Ministry of Defence and the involvement of MI5 – and on what little information existed on the man’s activities in the years since he’d quit the army. Police reports on the crime scene at the Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux had been more or less skimmed by everyone in the room, so Simon didn’t waste too much time in delving straight to the heart of the matter.
‘The latest developments, gentlemen. This morning the Briançon gendarmerie received a report of a stolen Toyota pickup truck, taken some time in the early hours from a farm less than a kilometre from where our air search team discovered the abandoned H1 Hummer. Police are hunting for the Toyota. The Hummer’s owner is one Omar Adeyemi, forty-eight years of age, currently unemployed, a resident of Briançon. He told the police he’d only just realised it had been stolen, and was about to report the theft.’
‘Think he’s telling the truth?’ asked Bideau, the terrorism chief.
‘Frankly, there’s not much we can do to prove otherwise,’ Simon said. ‘Meantime, one of the search teams combing the Hautes-Alpes area came across two more abandoned vehicles, just a few kilometres from the monastery. One was a Nissan SUV. Chassis and engine numbers filed away, stolen plates tracing back to a scrapped Peugeot that was written off in an accident last year. Fingerprints and DNA samples found inside the Nissan match up to our missing agent, Silvie Valois, and one Kurt Breslin. Who, as you all know, is, or as it now appears was, one of Streicher’s followers. Breslin’s body was recovered nearby. Looks like someone shot him with a high-velocity rifle at close range. We’re still looking to determine the calibre and possible provenance of the weapon.’
‘But we can safely assume this Hope pulled the trigger,’ said one of the lesser government suits whose name Simon hadn’t made a priority of remembering.
‘I don’t think we can safely assume anything about this case,’ Simon replied. ‘But right now, that’s a realistic scenario, yes. It’s possible that Hope managed to arrange some kind of rendezvous with them, whereupon he shot Breslin and took Valois prisoner, believing at that point that she was one of Streicher’s team. Which is, obviously, the impression we’ve been working very hard to convey. Most of all to Streicher himself.’
‘Looks like it’s gone and backfired on us,’ came the helpful comment from the Minister of the Interior.
‘But now Hope knows who she is,’ said the DGSI director, Saunier. ‘Which says the bastard must have tortured her. My agents don’t give up information readily. Christ knows what shape she must be in now.’
‘That’s not his style,’ Simon said. But the notion of the young female agent being sadistically tortured by a ruthless fugitive seemed to strike a chord and had the whole room rumbling speculatively for a few moments, until Simon patiently managed to regain their attention.
‘The other vehicle is the recently burned-out wreck of an old Citroën truck. Not a lot left of it, but enough to trace its ownership back to the monastery of Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux. Forensic examination revealed charred human remains inside a tool locker on board. They’re still working to identify them, but my instinct tells me it’s going to turn out to be our second missing agent, Jon Ruddock, alias Dexter Nicholls.’
‘Murdered by Ben Hope,’ growled Keith Hillier, the MI5 man, who was into his third flute of champagne since Simon had entered the room.
‘He says not.’
Bideau peered at Simon over the top of his spectacles. ‘You trust him?’
‘One thing Ben Hope isn’t is a liar.’
‘These SAS are psychopathic killers,’ another nameless suit ventured. ‘Everybody knows that. It’s so trained into them that it takes nothing at all for them to turn bad.’
‘You’ve had dealings with this man in the past, Commissioner,’ Saunier said, flicking a report in his hand. ‘Some years ago, matter of an abduction case while you were still with the police here in Paris. Hope was involved in some shadowy private capacity that I don’t believe was ever fully explained. Never mind that for the moment. The question is, how well do you really know him?’
Simon heaved a sigh. ‘Well enough to know that we have a problem. Bringing Hope into a situation like this is like sticking a live wire into a ton of high explosive.’
‘I still don’t understand,’ the Minister of the Interior said. ‘How is he involved?’
‘The truth is, we don’t know for sure,’ Simon said. ‘You can see from the transcript of my brief phone conversation with him that he said “I was in peace”. That suggests to me that he’d been living at the monastery. As you can see from his record, he has a background in theology.’
‘A warrior monk,’ Jürgen Ganz scoffed.
‘It’s the warrior part that concerns me,’ Simon said. ‘These people were his friends. He’s angry and he’s on the warpath. Put that together with the kind of specialist expertise he’s already amply demonstrated, and that makes him just about the most deadly person imaginable. The real problem is that he has no idea what he’s dealing with here. More specifically, who he’s dealing with. Our greatest concern at present is that he’s liable to force Streicher’s hand and aggravate the current crisis in a critically dangerous way. A very great deal is at stake here, gentlemen.’
Bideau nodded. ‘We’ve got one crazy guy g
oing after another crazy guy. It’s a volatile situation, to say the least.’
‘How do things stand on the Streicher front?’ the Minister of the Interior asked, turning around towards Bideau and Saunier. ‘I mean, do you people even know where he is?’
Bideau swallowed, pursed his lips and said, ‘No.’
‘We haven’t been able to locate him,’ Saunier said.
The minister turned the other way, to glare at Jürgen Ganz. ‘And what about our Swiss colleagues?’
‘We don’t know where Streicher is either,’ Ganz admitted sullenly after a beat. ‘All our efforts have turned up nothing. No addresses. Not even an email or phone. He pops up, eludes us completely and then disappears again before we have time to react. It’s as if he vanishes into the ground.’
‘But Hope will find him,’ Simon said. ‘Rest assured of that. He can find anybody. That was his job. Which is our biggest problem. And which, as of now, makes stopping him just as much of a priority, before he sets the whole damn tinderbox alight.’
The Minister of the Interior shifted his bulk to the edge of the Louis XV settee and slammed his empty glass down on the table. ‘Then what the hell are we wasting time for?’
Excellent question, Simon wanted to say, eyeing the half-empty platters and bottles that littered the Presidential Suite.
‘I want a national television campaign,’ the minister rasped, and two aides instantly started scribbling notes. ‘Effective immediately. Half-hourly newsflashes showing Hope’s face and that of his hostage. If the poor girl’s even still alive. I want everyone in France to be on the lookout for this maniac.’ He wagged a thick finger at Simon and showed his teeth. ‘Meanwhile, Commissioner, you’re authorised to do whatever it takes. Mobilise armed response teams. Stop and search vehicles. Scour the countryside. Man like that, he’ll have gone to ground in the woods or holed up in a derelict barn somewhere, planning his next kill. I want you to throw everything we have at the bastard.’