The Martyr’s Curse (Ben Hope, Book 11)

  He threaded his way between the bench press set-up and stacks of weights over to the gun rack. They weren’t replicas. He took one down. AK-47. Romanian, with a folding stock and unloaded thirty-round curved steel magazine. Old, but well looked after, the metal parts covered in a light sheen of oil.

  Ben thought, Hmm.

  He replaced the weapon on the rack and looked at the one below it. It was a FAMAS rifle, service weapon of the French army for the last thirty years or more. FAMAS stood for Fusil d’Assaut de la Manufacture d’Armes de Saint-Étienne. It was a strange-looking contraption, built on the design concept the military designated ‘bullpup’, with the receiver placed behind the pistol grip and trigger unit instead of in front of it. It was a way of creating an automatic weapon that was short and handy without sacrificing too much in the way of barrel length. Some hated it, some loved it. To Ben’s eye the thing looked ungainly, but he knew it did the job it was built to do. This one was standard military issue with the twenty-five-round straight magazine, even fitted with the regulation bayonet.

  The real question was what one of these was doing in the room with him. Ben was beginning to wonder now if he’d fallen down a cosmic wormhole and woken up in a parallel universe.

  He tentatively left the room and found himself at the end of a narrow passage he was certain he’d never seen before. He followed the beat of rock music and the scent of fresh coffee to a door at the other end, and swung it open.

  The other side of the door was a small kitchen. Seated alone at a scarred pine table, listening to a radio and holding a mug that said ULTIMATE WARRIOR, his host in this strange place flashed him a brilliant smile. Suddenly, Ben’s fragmented memory was beginning to slot miserably back together.

  ‘Hey, big man,’ his host chuckled in French, rising to greet his guest. Maybe he was being modest. Six-six at the very least, with skin the colour of burnished ebony, he wasn’t the smallest Nigerian guy Ben had ever seen. He made the muscle-bound oaf Ben had beaten up the day before look like a dwarf. He was somewhere in his late forties, his hair grizzled at the temples. A tattered Gold’s Gym T-shirt showed off his weightlifter’s shoulders and powerful, vein-laced arms.

  Ben stared at him, struggling to recall the name. ‘Omar,’ he said at last.

  The dazzling grin widened. ‘Brother, I’m surprised you remember a fucking thing.’

  Ben slumped in a wooden chair. ‘That’s about all I do remember.’ But the rest was slowly coming back. He wasn’t sure he wanted it to.

  Omar filled in the missing pieces with obvious amusement. How he and his bar-room buddies had found a new drinking companion the previous evening when this already toasted English guy had wandered into their regular haunt clutching the remains of a bottle of scotch. It had turned into quite a night.

  ‘Did I say anything?’

  ‘Just kept rambling on about some woman. You got it bad, my friend. I know how that goes, believe me.’

  ‘Nobody got hit, did they?’ Ben dared to ask. He looked at his knuckles. No sign of fresh bruising, and they didn’t hurt. Still, that didn’t prove anything.

  ‘Didn’t get that far,’ Omar told him with a booming laugh. ‘Not quite. Shit, I never saw anyone put away that much whisky before. Me and the boys were taking bets on when you’d drop, man. Incredible.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a real talent,’ Ben muttered. ‘I hope you won your bet.’

  Omar shook his head, still beaming. ‘Nah. You cost me big time.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it. Did you bring me back here?’

  ‘Wasn’t going to leave you lying in the gutter for the cops to scrape up, now was I?’

  ‘I appreciate that, Omar.’

  ‘Hey, no worries. How’d you like the room?’

  ‘Interesting,’ Ben said, rubbing his eyes. ‘Especially the wall decorations. I don’t mean the posters.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ Omar replied dismissively. ‘Just a few souvenirs.’

  ‘That’s a G2 FAMAS. You won’t exactly find one in the local gun shop.’

  The bright grin again. Ben was going to need sunglasses for the glare. Omar said, ‘That one came home with me from a little spree called Opération Daguet.’

  ‘You fought with the French Army in the Gulf?’

  Omar shrugged it off. ‘Long time ago.’

  ‘1991,’ Ben said. ‘Around the time I joined up.’

  ‘I knew there was something about you.’

  ‘British Army. Special Air Service. Long time ago, too.’

  ‘Want a coffee, bro? Look like you could do with it.’

  ‘And a favour,’ Ben said, nodding and then wincing at the pain the movement cost him. ‘I need a lift. Have you got a car?’

  Omar looked at him. ‘Shit. Have I got a car?’

  Chapter Eleven

  Omar’s pride and joy was a H1 Hummer, the civilian version of the M998 US Army Humvee, the nickname that was the nearest anyone could pronounce to HMMWV or High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle.

  The last time Ben had been inside a real one had been on a classified SAS mission in the Middle East. The demilitarised version might not have been bristling with heavy armament, but it was still a monster of a truck that dominated the road by sheer force of intimidation. Painted a deep, gleaming metallic gunmetal that was halfway between charcoal grey and black and all tricked out with mirror-tinted glass and oversized wheels and crash bars and enough auxiliary lighting to fry an egg at thirty paces, it could have been custom-built to suit Omar’s own huge frame.

  ‘Won it in a poker game,’ he explained loudly over the roar as they muscled their way across Briançon with all the noise and presence of a tank battalion, scattering lesser traffic into the verges. ‘I can hardly afford the insurance, but what the hell, I like it.’ Ben might have appreciated it more if every jolt of the off-road suspension hadn’t sent another arrow of pain through the middle of his skull.

  The garage opened for business at 8.30. As the Hummer roared up on to the forecourt, Ben saw the Belphégor truck sitting waiting there for him.

  ‘Thought you weren’t coming back,’ the mechanic said. ‘Had her all fixed up and ready for you yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ Ben replied.

  The mechanic tossed him the keys. ‘Wouldn’t take her on a grand tour of Europe, but treat her kind and she’ll do fine.’

  Ben waved a final thanks to Omar, and the Hummer took off with a large hand extended in a goodbye wave from the window. Ben watched it roar away. Now he just wanted to get out of Briançon as fast as possible and try and put this shameful episode behind him. He paid the repair bill from his own money, and clambered into the truck. It rumbled into life at the first twist of the key. As long as it got him back, that was all he could ask.

  It was coming on for 8.45 as Ben set off. His thoughts were dark and brooding on the drive back to the monastery. It was another bright and sunny morning, but he was too swallowed up in self-loathing and penitence to take much notice. He’d let himself down, and not just himself. He’d turned his back on the monastery for just a few hours, and look at the result. This relapse meant there was a lot more work to do.

  His stomach felt queasy and his blood alcohol level was probably still too high for him to be driving. He swigged down an extra-large emergency dose of Père Antoine’s tonic en route, thinking it might somehow purge the toxins from his system, or at least help clear his head. It did neither, but was a small comfort to him nonetheless. The greater comfort was knowing he’d be home soon.

  Home. It really was beginning to feel like that to him. Secure, closeted. A safe zone. He yearned to be there.

  He drove doggedly on. The mountain road lifted him up and up, until the pine forests were far below and he could taste the pure mountain air that whistled in through his window. The closer he got to the monastery, the more the darkness in his mind seemed to lift. When at last the walls came into view, he felt a surge of optimism.

  But as he neared the gates, he sense
d something that unsettled him. Because the gates were normally shut, and now they were open. Maybe the monks had been anxious about his return after all, and had left them open as a gentle hint to God to speed him safely home. Or because everyone was at prayer. Or maybe not. It wasn’t that. There was something wrong.

  Then he got closer to the gates and he saw what was wrong. The gates themselves, for a start. They’d been built to open outwards, but now they were hanging open inwards. Ben saw shattered wood. Buckled hinges. One of the gates was listing at an angle where its mountings had been ripped from the stone pillar.

  Ben stopped the truck. He stared at the smashed entrance. Something had happened here while he’d been away. Something significant and irreversible and not good.

  Those gates had withstood centuries of weathering. The steel-banded oak was eight inches thick, age-hardened, tough as slabs of slate and locked from the inside by an iron deadbolt you could have hung a battleship from. To smash them open would require an immense force. An extremely violent impact from a very heavy object moving at quite some speed. Like a seriously large and powerful battering ram.

  Ben drove through the broken gates and rolled the Belphégor inside the yard. Then he stopped again.

  And stared.

  Chapter Twelve

  He stopped, because of what he saw in front of him.

  The crow that had been pecking at the body spread its wings and flapped away. There was blood on the pale cloth of the monk’s robe. Blood spread across the ground underneath him. He was sprawled face down in the dirt with his arms out to his sides and one leg crooked, as if he’d been trying to crawl forward on hands and knees before his limbs had given way under him.

  Ben’s stomach clenched like a fist and he shut off the truck engine, ripped the key from the ignition and booted open the door and jumped down from the cab. His first illogical thought was that the monk had suffered a heart attack or a stroke. He ran towards the body, then abruptly halted a few yards short of it. He looked around him, and blinked, and his stomach clenched even more tightly when he saw that there were other bodies in the yard.

  They were everywhere.

  He could see five, six, seven of them from where he stood gaping in disbelief. Then an eighth, spread-eagled face-up in the shadow of the store building. Then a ninth, hanging out of the low arch of the cloister wall as if trying to clamber through it. More blood. Blood all over the place. Spatters of it on the stonework. Pools and spots and trails of it on the ground, congealing and going dark and sticky in the morning sun. There was a hum of buzzing flies in the air, dark clouds of them swirling and hovering over and around the bodies.

  Ben hurried towards the nearest body and felt something small and hard under the sole of his boot. Even through thick rubber, he could tell right away that the object wasn’t a stone. He crouched and picked it up. A dull brass cartridge case. Its circular base was concentrically stamped in small lettering WIN 9mm LUGER.

  It might have been an incongruous sight here in Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux, but it was an extremely familiar one to Ben’s eyes. Standard nine-millimetre ammunition, the casing manufactured by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company under licence to Browning Arms of Morgan, Utah. A relatively diminutive cartridge, but famously effective. High-pressure, high-velocity, beloved of practically every military force on the planet since its invention in 1902, making it the world’s most popular combat handgun and submachine gun round. It also lent itself very well to being downloaded to subsonic velocity levels, eliminating the ear-splitting crack that a bullet makes when breaking the sound barrier, and allowing the report to be further subdued by a sound suppressor. In layman’s terms, it was easily silenced. Which made it a natural for any kind of covert work, or the kind of criminal operation where a lot of shots would have to be fired without drawing unwanted attention.

  Ben turned the spent cartridge over in his fingers and sniffed at the blackened case mouth. The whiff of cordite told him it had been recently fired. No surprises.

  And it was no surprise either to see plenty more of the cases lying about the ground. Random patterns and clusters of them all over the place, scattered little yellow sparkles catching the sunlight.

  Ben tossed the case away and clenched his jaw and assessed what he was seeing. One gunman hadn’t done this: that much was fairly obvious to him. It was the work of a team. How many strong, Ben couldn’t say. To carry out an orchestrated attack of this scale, he’d have estimated the need for upward of six, maybe eight shooters. That left the question why. And that was a question he couldn’t even begin to answer.

  He crouched by the body. The man’s white tonsured hair was matted with blood that was dried almost black. Where the crow had been pecking at the blood-soaked cloth of his robe, there was a bullet-hole between his shoulder blades. A trail of blood led back a few paces. He’d been shot in the back, probably while fleeing. He’d fallen on his face and then managed to crawl a little way before his killer had stepped up close and fired a second shot to the back of the head.

  Ben reached out and grasped the monk’s shoulder to roll him over. His skin was cool. There was little point in checking for a pulse as the body was stiffened up like a board with the onset of rigor mortis. The point-blank headshot had exited the middle of the monk’s forehead, an exit wound big enough to drop a golf ball into. It had made a mess of his face, but Ben was able to recognise him. It was old Frère Robert, who’d helped him rebuild part of the frost-damaged outer wall in the wintertime. Ben had liked him. He’d liked them all.

  He stood up and stepped across to another body, then another. Then a fourth, and a fifth. Same result. All dead, all cooling, all stiff, all shot with what looked like nine-millimetre expanding hollowpoints. Small entry hole, tapering out to a big exit hole. Very lethal, and very messy. And expertly executed. From the quantity of brass on the deck and the way that every victim had been double-tapped, one to the chest and one to the head, Ben could tell that the killers had been armed with pistols. They’d done their work the same way he had been taught to do it in the army: the first shot snapped off centre-of-mass to bring the target down, the second aimed more closely to finish the job. Brutal and effective. No quarter given, no survivors left behind.

  The trail of death led him from the yard to the store building to the church. Everywhere he went, he kept finding more of them. There was Frère Patrice, slumped in a sitting position against the low wall of the little garden that surrounded the church, still wearing the support bandage on his twisted ankle, his walking stick on the ground next to him, blood spattered across the stonework from the through-and-through headshot that had taken away part of his skull. Then a few yards on there was the lay brother Olivier, who’d been on the work detail carrying up the beer from the cellar. Then there was Frère Gaspard, the greedy one. Shot in the belly and the throat, as if the killers had been starting to get bored by the time they got to him and were experimenting with variations.

  Ben walked on. His head was spinning and he wanted to wake up from the nightmare.

  It was beyond imagining. Who had done this? What had happened here?

  Ben wasn’t a pathologist. But he’d seen a lot of death in his time. Enough to know that a human body loses approximately 1.5° centigrade per hour after death until it reaches the ambient temperature around it. The colder the environment, the faster the cooling. It was a pleasantly warm morning for the time of year, by Alpine standards, maybe eighteen degrees. Living human body temperature was nearly twenty degrees warmer, at thirty-seven point five. Which would mean a rough maximum of thirteen hours for the corpses’ temperature to drop to the same level as the air. Allowing for the lower temperature of the early morning and therefore a faster rate of cooling, probably less than that. Say, ten hours. But the bodies felt a little warmer than ambient temperature. They were still cooling, not yet sta-bilised. Without a thermometer it was impossible to gauge accurately, but Ben estimated that the attack had taken place about five hours a
go. That gave plenty of time for rigor mortis to set in, which generally happened sometime after the first couple of hours.

  Ben looked at his watch. It was coming on for 9.30 a.m. At an educated guess, the slaughter had happened around half past four in the morning. Just before dawn. A time when the monks had wrapped up their final night-time prayers and would be slowly returning to their cells to take some rest before the day began again.

  I should have been here, he was thinking over and over.

  If he hadn’t been delayed, he would have been. If he hadn’t been drinking himself stupid in some bar with a bunch of strangers. The truck would have been ready for him to collect and drive home. He’d have got back yesterday afternoon. He’d have been here, with his friends, when the attack happened. He might have been able to do something to stop this.

  But he hadn’t. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to change that sorry fact.

  He spent the next twenty minutes checking inside each and every one of the monks’ cells. Most were empty. Some weren’t. He found no survivors. Then he checked the Father Master of Novices’ quarters, and the prior’s. The two monks were nowhere to be found.

  Until Ben moved on and ran to the church.

  A thin white-haired body lay sprawled on the church steps. His robe had ridden up his legs as he’d fallen. The blood pool had trickled down three of the stone steps before it had begun to congeal.

  Ben recognised him and said, ‘Oh, no.’

  It was Père Jacques, the Father Master of Novices. The palm of one outflung hand blown through by a gunshot; the same shot that had hit him above the left eyebrow as he’d tried to shield himself from the bullet. The nine-millimetre round had exited the crown of his skull and made all the usual ugly ravages on its way out. Ben didn’t want to have to look too closely, but then something drew his eye and made him bend to scrutinise the gruesome mess in more detail.