There was a green five-litre plastic petrol can in the rear of the van. Ben gave it a shake. Empty. He carried it back around to the fuel tank, which was bolted to the vehicle’s underside below the filler tube. The metal tank was as badly pitted with red rust as the van’s chassis, pretty much ready for the scrap heap. Ben knelt and used the sharp tip of the stiletto blade to punch a hole about halfway up the side of the tank, and held the opened mouth of the can underneath as the stream of petrol arced out. By the time the level in the tank had dropped below the hole, the can was nearly full.
Ben carried it back to the cab, opened up the driver’s door and cranked down the driver’s window. He looked around him, spied a dead branch lying by the track and picked it up. Using the knife to slash a strip of cloth from Alejandro’s shirt, he wrapped the material around the end of the stick, tying it into place. He dipped the cloth end of the stick into the petrol can. Sloshed the rest of the can’s contents all over Alejandro’s lap, then up to his chest and then over his head, soaking the dead guy’s clothes and his hair, careful not to get any on himself.
Wolf was closely observing every move. ‘So what’s the story, you shot me and then the van somehow, magically, caught fire like in a movie?’
‘Something like that,’ Ben said. ‘Unless you’d rather take his place to make it more realistic?’
‘Thanks, I’ll settle for this way.’
Ben tossed the empty can inside the cab and slammed the driver’s door. Then stepped away from the vehicle, took out his Zippo, clanged it open and thumbed the flint. The petrol-soaked rag burst alight at the first touch from the flame. Ben tossed the burning stick through the open window, where it landed in Alejandro’s lap.
The vehicle interior instantly filled with spreading fire that licked and curled from the open window and consumed the body in a crackling fury. Ben took another step back from the heat. He muttered, ‘And there you go. R.I.P. Jaden Wolf.’
Wolf shook his head ruefully. ‘Never thought it would end like this for me. What a way to go, eh?’
Within minutes, the whole van had become an inferno as the remaining contents of the fuel tank caught light and the flames spread everywhere. Ben and Wolf retreated to a safe distance in case the thing blew up, and watched. The sweet night air filled with the sickening stench of burning rubber and scorched flesh. Both of them had seen plenty of vehicles burn, and they knew exactly what the extreme high temperatures of a gasoline conflagration could do to a human being trapped inside. When the fire eventually died out, all that would remain of Alejandro Morales was a charred, crispy, hairless, featureless mess, his only readily identifiable characteristic a perfectly preserved set of titanium and gold teeth.
‘Crude,’ Wolf said. ‘But effective.’
‘I’m glad you approve.’
‘You owe me for the teeth, though.’
‘If I die, you can take it out of my life insurance.’
Ben just had to hope that his plan would give him the breathing space that he needed to rescue this whole messed-up situation. The blaze could probably be seen for miles and would doubtless attract all kinds of local attention, but not even the boldest of looters would be too inclined to stick their hand in a burnt corpse’s mouth on the off-chance of finding something worth stealing. The odds were that the cops would get here before too long, and that Alejandro’s remains would be carted off by the coroner before Saunders’ spooks landed on the scene. Ben wasn’t too worried about that, because he was betting that Saunders had more than enough power and influence to gain access to the morgue to examine the evidence.
Ben had been keeping the tablet phone that Saunders had given him turned off, to avoid the risk of being tracked. He turned it on now to fix the GPS location and then take multiple pictures of the burning van from different angles. As the wind changed direction for a moment he was able to snap some closer-up shots of the rapidly charring body.
Meanwhile Wolf was putting his holdall into the back seat of the Alpina and getting into the front. Ben joined him a moment later, fired up the engine, slewed the car around on the track and they sped off. Wolf bade a sad goodbye to the town of Albarracín, and then they were racing northwards towards the French border. Wolf remained silent for a long time, leaning back with his eyes closed. Ben smoked and concentrated on making maximum progress.
He waited until they had crossed into France before he pulled over, turned on Saunders’ tablet phone once more and dialled the number as he’d been instructed. The person on the line picked up after a single ring. A sombre, gravelly voice that wasn’t Saunders’ answered, ‘Hope?’
Three in the morning, and they were just sitting there waiting for Ben to report to base.
Ben said, ‘Tell your boss that Jaden Wolf is dead. I’m emailing you the details right now. Stand by.’
The voice on the line said nothing. Ben hung up without another word. He brought up the secure email address Saunders had provided him, entered the GPS location, attached the images and then hit SEND. Once the message was delivered, he ripped out the tablet’s SD card and tossed both it and the device out of the car window and into the roadside bushes. He restarted the car and they sped onwards. Things were in motion now, the clock was ticking and there was no turning back. No stopping. Ben’s forward momentum would have to be unrelenting until this was over. For his own sake. For Grace’s.
He lit a Gauloise and pressed harder on the accelerator. He could still taste the burnt-meat smell of the barbecued corpse on his lips.
But more death was coming. He could almost smell that, too.
Chapter 22
The day that Chrissie Cassidy turned twenty-nine years of age, she was a fulfilled and successful Millennial girl, living the dream as a young executive partner in the financial consultancy firm she’d co-founded with her boyfriend Gerald Shaw, who, like her, was a graduate from London Business School. The couple had recently moved into a nice two-bedroom apartment in the buzzing, happening new neighbourhood of Wembley Park. They enjoyed a rich social life, loved to explore ethnic food markets together, frequented theatres and exhibitions and were into yoga and healthy living. They talked about getting married, and dreamed of parenthood at some point in the future. It seemed that their prospects couldn’t have been more stable.
Life was good.
That was, until two days after her birthday, when Chrissie’s happy existence suddenly fell apart upon the shock discovery that Gerald had, for the last four months, been screwing Annabel, their PA. Gerald at first protested his innocence, then confessed with much grovelling and pleading for mercy, then blamed Chrissie for having provoked him to infidelity with her cold and unloving ways. What was a guy to do?
Too heartbroken and distraught to try to patch up the broken relationship, Chrissie moved out of the apartment, quit the consultancy and went to live with an old girlfriend in Greenwich who had a room to let. A month went by, during which she grew increasingly restless and depressed. Spring was springing. She had some money in the bank. Why sit here festering at home when the whole world out there was bursting into life, full of hope and promise? She decided that she ought to buy herself a little van, hit the road and go off to rediscover herself.
Which was exactly what she did. On her travels Chrissie soon hooked up with Wes and Sonia, a freewheeling bohemian couple who travelled around Britain and Europe in a loose convoy with a bunch of their hippy friends, camping out on beaches, pursuing a natural lifestyle and generally meandering wherever the tide took them. Chrissie found herself drawn into their little community, and was warmly accepted by them. Lionel was a poet; Fleur professed to be a Reiki Master; Tammy could read your fortune; Louise was a reincarnation of various famous figures from history and would occasionally experience what she called a ‘past life regression’; Greg played the guitar and taught Chrissie a few chords to strum around the campfire during the chilly early spring nights. Sometimes a tin whistle or bodhran player would join in as they all clapped their hands and sang heartfe
lt songs about saving the planet and humanity coming together as one.
Chrissie found the hippies to be somewhat naive but pleasant company, and their easy-going lifestyle was certainly a welcome change from the fast track. People tended to come and go. There was always a lot of music and dancing, various forms of illicit substances were indulged in, and romantic arrangements were open and laid-back. It wasn’t the kind of life she wanted to live forever, but for the moment she had no problem following her nose from place to place as one of the loose-knit merry band. She would give it a few months through summer and reassess her situation in autumn.
Chrissie had been a tag-along member of the community for a couple of weeks when their motley collection of campers, vans and cars made the trip to Stonehenge for the spring equinox, as part of a larger gathering of Druids, Pagans, Wiccans and various other denominations of New Age tribes who made the annual pilgrimage to watch the sunrise above the stones and celebrate the deity of their choice. For many of Chrissie’s group, this was the time to venerate Eostre, the ancient Saxon goddess of fertility and new beginnings. She didn’t share their spiritual beliefs but was moved by the sense of togetherness.
It was during her visit to ‘the Henge’ that a newcomer hooked up with the band. His name was Alan, and over the course of that day and the next Chrissie found herself spending more and more time with him. He was about her age, slim and good-looking, with blond hair and blue eyes like hers. His personality was endearing and he had a sharper mind than some of the folks she’d been hanging out with lately, the Rohans and Galadriels. Alan didn’t roll up a joint or whip out a Tarot pack at the first excuse, or tell you what colour your aura was, or claim to be a reincarnation of someone from Arthurian legend. She found him quite attractive, and she sensed that he liked her too.
On the second night at the campsite near Stonehenge, Chrissie and Alan sat in her tent, shared a bottle of wine by the light of her gas lantern and talked for hours. She told him a little about her life in London, but she felt so drawn to him that she avoided recounting the torrid tale of Gerald and Annabel, not wanting him to think she was on the rebound. Instead she switched track and described her childhood and her family, surprising herself at how candidly she could open up to him. She’d been an only child, she explained, and life with her parents had been an unhappy period from which she’d been glad to escape. Her mother was remarried now. Chrissie disliked her step-father and seldom got in touch. She hadn’t seen either of her parents for a long time. And now here she was, she confessed, at a crossroads and not really knowing what the future held. Happiness, she hoped, and love, and a new start.
‘What about you?’ she asked when she became self-conscious that she was talking too much. ‘Tell me all about yourself.’
‘Oh, there’s not really much to tell,’ he said modestly as he topped up their wine glasses. ‘Studied languages at university, came away without any clue about what to do with my life. I headed south, and before I knew it I was in the south of France, where I somehow ended up teaching English.’
‘You speak French?’
‘Mais oui,’ he said. The way the lantern light pooled in the dimples in his cheeks when he smiled made Chrissie want to lean across and kiss him.
She hoped that her blush wasn’t too obvious. ‘I’d love to travel around the south of France. What made you come back?’
‘I met a girl there. Thought it was forever, you know? I guess I’m a romantic. But some things aren’t meant to be. She broke my heart.’ Alan talked about how he’d moved restlessly from place to place after that, never quite managing to find himself. Now he was back in Britain, he hoped to find a way to make more sense of his life. ‘There are so many people in need. I feel it’s my calling to help them somehow.’
‘That’s so lovely,’ she said, entranced by his general wonderfulness as a human being.
‘It’s just who I am,’ he replied.
But it was all a lie.
The name of the man sitting alone with Chrissie in her tent wasn’t Alan. He didn’t speak more than a couple of words of French, had never taught English, and wasn’t searching for his purpose in life – because he already had one. He was an infiltrator who worked for a secret society of powerful men, though he knew nothing about their organisation and worked through a handler. His job, for which he was highly paid, was to search out people who lived on the margins of society: vagrants, rolling stones, runaways, rebels who’d dropped out of the system, anyone who didn’t have too many close social or family ties, wouldn’t be too easily missed and could readily be made to disappear. Hundreds of thousands of people were reported missing every year in the UK and many of them were never found; a few extra here and there, carefully selected, simply went unnoticed.
The infiltrator often targeted alternative communities, because they offered easy pickings. It was a section of society where it was normal and expected for folks to drift in, drift out and never be seen again. And in his experience there was no better source of pretty, single, footloose and fancy-free young women on whom he could use his natural charm and good looks to lure them into his clutches. He generally managed to ensnare five or six a year. Tranquillised and trussed up, they were transported to a rendezvous point where he delivered them to his contact. What happened to them after that, he neither knew nor cared. At ten grand a head, cash in hand, it was all about the money, nothing else.
And he’d decided that Chrissie Cassidy was just what he was looking for. She wasn’t at all unattractive. Whatever his employers had planned for her, he was sure she’d make the perfect object of their entertainment.
‘I’m glad I met you,’ he said.
Now there was no holding back the blush. ‘Me too.’
‘I’m renting a cottage not far from here. Would you like to see it?’
Chrissie’s eyes sparkled in the lantern light. ‘Now? Tonight?’
‘It’s just a simple little place. But it beats a tent.’
She smiled. ‘I’d love to see it.’
Chapter 23
With 144 kilometres per hour reading on the clock and the road zipping towards them like a black ribbon Wolf said, ‘Okay, now that I’m officially dead, what’s our next move?’
‘You worked for these people. What’s your take?’
Wolf considered. ‘We don’t know their real identities, where they live or where to find them. So that’s a dead end. The one lead we do have is Karswell Hall itself. Whoever owns the place, you can bet they’re part of it. So we hit the place, grab ’em, take ’em away somewhere where nobody can hear us getting rough on the bastards, make ’em talk, find out what we want to know, go from there.’
Ben had already considered that option, and rejected it as too risky. ‘As you found out yourself, the hard way, the place is highly surveilled. A hidden security camera gets one glimpse of us coming, it gets straight back to Saunders and the first thing he does is make a call to Scotland.’ He shook his head. ‘Can’t happen. Besides, for all we know, the place isn’t even used as a residence. Could be a serious false move for us to make. But it’s not the only lead we have.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘The man you were sent to kill. You told me he lives near Brighton?’
Wolf replied, ‘Seven miles north, to be exact. Just outside a nice little West Sussex village called Pyecombe.’
Ben pulled up his mental map and calculated distances and times. The Franco–Spanish border to Calais was about eleven hundred kilometres, just over seven hundred miles. Once they were across the Channel, Dover to Brighton added another couple of hours to the journey. He estimated that without too many delays, if they drove like wild men, they should reach their destination sometime not long after midday.
Sometimes the world was just too damn big for Ben’s liking.
He said, ‘If the target was one of their own people, inducted into their cult or whatever the hell this is, then he’ll have useful information. He obviously knows enough to make him a threa
t to them in some way. Why else would they want him dead?’
‘Makes sense,’ Wolf said. ‘But there’s just one problem. He’s a marked man. Odds are he’s dead already.’
Ben knew that Wolf was right. ‘That’s a chance we’ll just have to take. Who is he anyway?’
Wolf smiled. ‘Well, seeing as I’m no longer bound by the constraints of professional discretion, I don’t mind telling you. His name is Abbott. Anthony Abbott.’
Ben took little interest in current affairs and paid scant attention to the news. But some names stuck more in his mind than others, and a distant bell rang from deep within his memory. ‘Sir Anthony Abbott, the Member of Parliament?’
Abbott’s career had briefly flared up in public knowledge when he’d been a member of the Shadow Cabinet, back when Labour were still in power, and come to prominence over some political flap or other whose details Ben had barely been aware of at the time and had since all but forgotten. As far as he was concerned, the whole politics thing was a chimpanzees’ tea party.
‘That’s the man. Just another over-the-hill grey-haired arsehole in a suit who nobody in the normal world gives a shit about.’
‘I’m surprised a man like him didn’t have private security protection.’
‘Couldn’t afford it any more,’ Wolf said. ‘The guy’s finances were in the shitter, or so I was told. He was on his way down.’
‘For all that, it’s not every day a British MP is found murdered. Hard to keep it discreet.’
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