The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET

by Scott Mariani

  Ben Hope had pulled the rug out from under him. For all his appreciation of the man’s skills, and for all his own cunning, he’d managed to underestimate him disastrously. He still couldn’t understand what the hell had just happened.

  ‘You there,’ said a voice. ‘Put your hands behind your head.’ Usberti rolled his eyes up to see two men in black uniforms standing a few metres away in the darkness pointing guns at him. A radio fizzed. Slowly, he moved away from the tree and lifted his arms. To be caught, like this…

  One of the men reached back to his belt for a set of cuffs.

  But then the two officers were lifted off their feet like straw men. They flew into one another and their heads smashed together with a dull, meaty crunch. They dropped to the ground without a noise.

  Usberti’s face split into a wide grin of relief as he recognized the tall figure standing over the slumped bodies. ‘Franco! Thank the Lord!’

  Bozza drew out his knife and quickly, efficiently, cut the throats of the two men. He picked up one of their radios and a fallen MP-5. With a glance over his shoulder he calmly took his archbishop by the arm and guided him through the trees into darkness.

  It was a half a kilometre across the woods to the road. Bozza helped Usberti down the leafy bank to the tarmac. He saw the approaching lights of a car in the distance. Letting go of Usberti’s arm, Bozza stepped out and stood in the middle of the road, bathed in the headlights as the car came closer. As it came near, he pointed the MP-5 at the windscreen. The car squealed to a halt diagonally across the road.

  There was a young couple inside. Bozza ripped open the driver’s door and dragged the man out by the hair. He sent him sprawling across to the edge of the road and casually fired a fully automatic burst into his chest. The man crumpled bloodily into the leaves.

  Inside the car, the girl was screaming hysterically. Bozza pulled her bodily out through the open window, looked coldly into her face and snapped her neck in a single twisting movement. The Inquisitor dragged their bodies into the ditch and covered them with pieces of shrubbery.

  ‘Good work, Franco,’ Usberti said. ‘Take me away from here.’

  Bozza helped him into the back seat and then they were gone, heading for the airfield.

  The last item Ben had packed in his kit-bag earlier that day was a small armour-piercing shape charge. He pressed the connected blobs of plastic explosive against the steel cellar door, stuck in the two electrodes and quickly retreated back down the corridor before thumbing the button on the phone. The percussive detonation ripped the air, and when the smoke cleared the door looked as though a giant mouth had taken a perfectly oval bite out of it. The edges around the hole glowed faintly red. Ben stepped through into the smoky cellar, gun first.

  The one cellar guard must have been standing near the door when the charge went off. Ben shone the pistol light on him. He was on his back, blood running from his ears and nostrils. A triangular shard of steel protruded eight inches from his chest. Ben grabbed the ring of keys from his belt and ran down the cellar steps into the huge smoky room. He called her name.

  ‘Ben!’ Roberta shouted, recognizing his voice through the high ringing in her ears that the sharp explosion had set off. ‘There’s a boy over there.’ She pointed to the next cell along. Ben flashed the light and saw Marc’s drugged, slumped figure. He opened both cage doors. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said quietly, gently avoiding her embrace. He stooped and lifted the stirring boy over his shoulder.

  The puzzled officers found Marc Dubois lying in the back of one of the police cars ten minutes later. ‘Where the hell did he come from?’ asked one. ‘Beats me,’ said his companion. It was a while before it dawned on them that he was the kid on the Missing Person posters.

  Simon watched, deeply satisfied, as his men brought more than thirty coughing, spluttering, smoke-blackened personnel out of the shattered building. Six bodies had been recovered so far, and enough weapons and ammunition to lay serious criminal and terrorism charges against the whole organization.

  Speed, Aggression, Surprise. He’d heard that that was the unofficial motto of a certain British Army regiment. He grinned and shook his head.

  56

  Roberta was swinging between wild elation and trembling exhaustion as Ben led her away in the darkness. With one arm around her waist he steered her through the shadowy woods. Back towards the little lane outside the police cordon where he’d hidden the rental car. He was evasive and silent, ignoring the questions she fired at him.

  They arrived at the car. He turned sharply at the sound of the foliage rustling behind them. But it was just an owl, disturbed by their passage.

  He kept to the backroads, and they sat in silence for a while as he drove. Roberta closed her eyes. Already the details of her imprisonment were beginning to seem hazy and distant in her mind.

  After two kilometres of cutting across rough country lanes they came out onto a narrow road.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

  ‘I rented a place.’

  They passed through a couple of small villages and twenty minutes later they arrived at a country cottage tucked away behind a clump of trees up its own private track. Ben led Roberta up the path, opened the door and flipped on the light. The cottage was bare and functional, but it was safe.

  She flopped down in an old armchair, leaning her head back and shutting her eyes. He came and handed her a glass of red wine. She drank it down quickly, and could feel the immediate relaxing effect of it. She watched him as he piled kindling wood and logs and lit a crackling fire in the stone inglenook fireplace. He was strangely quiet, distant.

  ‘Are you OK, Ben? What’s wrong?’

  He said nothing, kneeling in front of the fire with his back to her, stirring up the flames with a poker.

  ‘Why won’t you talk to me?’

  He dropped the iron poker with a clang, got to his feet and turned round to face her. ‘What the hell were you playing at?’ he demanded furiously.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Have you any idea how worried I was? I thought you were dead. What possessed you to go wandering off like that?’

  ‘I–’

  ‘Of all the stupid, idiotic…’

  She stood up. Her lip was quivering and her hands were shaking.

  He softened when he saw her face. ‘Look, don’t cry. I’m sor–’

  He didn’t get to finish the sentence. Her fist flew up and connected with his jaw. He saw lights, and staggered back two steps.

  ‘Don’t you talk to me like that, Ben Hope!’

  They stood facing each other. He rubbed his jaw. Then she threw her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder. She felt him tense up and she backed off, looking at him uncertainly with hot tears in her eyes.

  But then his tension broke and something welled powerfully up inside him. He wanted it now, that warmth he’d rejected for so long. He wanted to plunge into it like a diver into a warm ocean lagoon, and never come out again. As he stood looking into her sad, wet, blinking, searching eyes he knew that he loved her more than he’d ever realized.

  He reached out for her, grasped her arms and drew her to him. They held one another tight, caressing, gasping, running their fingers through each other’s hair.

  ‘I was so scared,’ he whispered. ‘I thought I’d lost you.’ He ran his fingers up to her face and wiped away the tears from her laughing cheeks. Their lips drew together and he kissed her, long and longingly, as he’d never kissed anyone in his life before.

  She was woken up the next morning by a crowing cockerel in the distance. Her eyelashes fluttered open and after a couple of seconds she remembered where she was. Sunlight was streaming through the bedroom window. A little smile spread across her lips as the memory of last night came back to her. It wasn’t a dream. When she’d told him how much she loved him, he’d said he felt the same way. He’d been so tender with her, a whole new side to him opening up as their passion had mounted.

 
; She rolled on her back and stretched her body out under the sheet, luxuriating in the crisp cotton. Brushing the tousled hair out of her eyes, she stretched out an arm to touch him. Her hand felt an empty pillow. He must have gone downstairs.

  For a while she swam in that nebulous, drifting haze between sleep and wakefulness. The horror of her kidnap and imprisonment seemed a faraway memory, as though they belonged in a different life, or a half-forgotten nightmare from long ago. She wondered what it would be like to live in Ireland, by the sea. She’d never lived by the sea…

  More awake now, she wondered what he was doing. She couldn’t smell coffee, and couldn’t hear any sounds apart from the singing of the birds in the trees outside. She swung her legs out of the bed, and walked naked across the bedroom to gather up the trail of discarded clothes she’d left from the top of the stairs to the bed. More fresh memories, and she smiled to herself again.

  He wasn’t downstairs making breakfast. She searched around the little cottage, calling his name. Where was he?

  It was when she saw that the car and his things were gone that she began to worry. She found his note on the kitchen table, and knew what it was going to say even before she unfolded and read it.

  Tears gathered in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. She sat at the kitchen table, sank her head into her arms and wept for a long time.

  57

  Palavas-les-Flots, Southern France, three days later

  Autumn was setting in now. The busy season was coming to an end for the seaside resort, and the only tourists still out there bathing in the sea were Brits and Germans. Ben sat on the beach and gazed out at the blue horizon. He was thinking of Roberta. By now she should be heading back home to safety.

  He’d left early after their night of love. You shouldn’t have let that happen, he thought. It wasn’t fair on her. He felt terrible that he’d admitted his feelings to her, all the while planning to slip away at first light while she was asleep.

  At dawn he’d sat at the kitchen table and written to her. It wasn’t much of a letter and he wished he could have said more, but it would only have made his leaving more painful for both of them. Beside the note, he’d left her enough money to get her safely and quickly back home to America. He’d grabbed his things and been about to head straight out of the door.

  But he couldn’t just walk away. He wanted to see her one last time, and he tiptoed back up the creaking stairs, careful not to wake her. He’d stood for a moment or two, watching her sleeping soundly. Her body was rising and falling slowly under the sheet, her hair spread out across the pillow. Very gently, he pulled a curl away from her eye. He’d smiled fondly at the look of complete childlike relaxation on her sleeping face. He’d wanted so badly to take her in his arms, kiss her, make a fuss of her, bring her breakfast in bed. Stay together, live happily.

  But none of that was possible. It was like a dream that hovered out of reach. His destiny lay another way. He remembered what Luc Simon had said. Men like us are like lone wolves. We want to love our women, but we only hurt them.

  He’d blown her a last kiss, and then forced himself to leave.

  And now he had to turn his mind back to his quest. Fairfax was waiting for him. Ruth was waiting for him.

  He walked back to the boarding-house by the beach. In his room, he sat on the bed, picked up the phone and dialled a number.

  ‘So I’m officially off the hook?’

  Simon laughed. ‘You were never really officially on it, Ben. I only wanted you in for questioning.’

  ‘You had a funny way of showing it, Luc.’

  ‘But the unofficial answer is yes, you’re free to go,’ said Simon. ‘You kept your side of the bargain, and I’ll keep mine. Marc Dubois is back with his family. Gladius Domini is being investigated and half their people are in custody under murder, abduction and a whole shitload of other charges. So I’m willing to forget certain matters as far as you’re concerned, if you understand me.’

  ‘I understand you. Thanks, Luc.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, just don’t cause any more trouble for me. Make me happy and tell me you’re leaving France today.’

  ‘Soon, soon,’ Ben assured him.

  ‘Seriously, Ben. Enjoy what’s left of the weather, go to a movie, see the sights. Be a tourist for a change. If I hear you’ve been up to anything, I’ll be on you like a ton of bricks, my friend.’

  Simon put the phone down, smiling to himself. Despite everything, he couldn’t help feeling a certain liking for Ben Hope.

  The office door swung open behind him, and he turned to see a balding, ginger-haired detective walk in. ‘Hello, Sergeant Moran.’

  ‘Good morning, sir. I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were still here.’

  ‘Just leaving,’ Simon said, looking at his watch. ‘Was there something you wanted, Sergeant?’

  ‘Just wanted to pull a file, sir.’ Moran went over to the filing cabinet and slid out a drawer, thumbing through the cardboard dividers.

  ‘Well, anyway, I’m off.’ Simon picked up his briefcase, gave Moran a friendly slap on the shoulder, and headed for the lobby.

  Moran watched him disappear down the corridor. He pushed the filing drawer shut, quietly closed the door and picked up the phone. Dialled a number. A female voice answered from Reception.

  ‘Can you tell me the last call made to this phone?’ he asked. He scribbled down the number. Then he hung up. He dialled the number he’d scribbled.

  A different woman’s voice answered. ‘Sorry, I must have the wrong number,’ he said after a pause, and hung up.

  He dialled a third time. The voice that replied this time was a rasping whisper.

  ‘This is Moran,’ the detective said. ‘I have that information for you. The target is at the Auberge Marina in Palavas-les-Flots.’

  Sitting at his desk in the boarding-house, Ben sipped his coffee, rubbed his eyes, and started combing through all his notes. ‘Right, Hope’, he muttered to himself. ‘Let’s get on. What do we have so far?’

  The unavoidable answer was, he didn’t have an awful lot. A few disconnected scraps of information, a whole load of unanswered questions, and he was out of leads. He just didn’t know enough. He was worn out from lack of sleep, mentally drained from endless days of running, planning, and trying to balance all the elements of the equation in his head. And now, whenever he tried to focus, all he could see was Roberta’s face in front of him. Her hair, her eyes. The way she moved. The way she laughed, the way she cried. He couldn’t shut her out, couldn’t fill the void he was feeling now that she wasn’t there any more.

  He was almost out of cigarettes again. He took out his flask and gave it a shake. Still some left. He started unscrewing the top. No. He put the unopened flask down on the table and pushed it away from him.

  He was still bothered by those seemingly random and meaningless clusters of alternating numbers and letters that appeared on nine of the notebook’s pages. Wearily grabbing up a pen, he combed through the notebook and wrote the strange numbers and letters down in the order in which they appeared.

  i. N 18

  ii. U 11 R

  iii. 9 E 11 E

  iv. 22 V 18 A 22 V 18 A

  v. 22 R 15 O

  vi. 22 R

  vii. 13 A 18 E 23 A

  viii. 20 R 15

  ix. N 26 O 12 I 17 R 15

  Written in normal script, they looked even more like a code than they did in the notebook. What did they mean? He knew enough about cryptography to know that a code like this required a key to crack it. The key often used by spies and intelligence agents was a line chosen at random out of a book. The first twenty-six letters of the line could be matched up to the letters of the alphabet, or to numbers, or both. These could run forwards or backwards against the key line, giving different variants on the code and throwing up completely different readings. If you knew what book, what page and what line to use, it was a simple matter to decipher the coded message.

  But if you didn’t know,
it was completely unbreakable. And Ben had no way of knowing. Fulcanelli could have chosen absolutely anything, from any book or text, as the key line for these sequences. He could have used any of the languages he knew, French, Italian, English, Latin, or a translation from or into any of them.

  He sat for a while, desperately thinking over the possibilities. The proverbial needle in the haystack was an easy challenge by comparison. He cast his mind back and suddenly remembered the recording that Anna had played them of her session with Klaus Rheinfeld. Rheinfeld had been muttering similar sequences of alternating numbers and letters. Ben had written them down.

  He searched through his pockets and found the little pad. Rheinfeld had been repeating the same sequence of letters and numbers over and over. N-6; E-4; I-26; A-11; E-15. But these didn’t appear anywhere in the notebook. Did that mean Rheinfeld had been working the code out for himself? Ben remembered Anna describing how he’d obsessively counted on his fingers while he repeated the figures. He’d also counted on his fingers while repeating that other phrase…what was it again? Something in Latin, some alchemical saying. Ben screwed his tired eyes shut, trying to recall.

  The phrase was somewhere in Rheinfeld’s notebook. He flicked through the grimy pages and found the ink drawing of the alchemist standing watching his bubbling preparation. There it was inscribed on the side of the cauldron. IGNE NATURA RENOVATUR INTEGRA. By fire nature is renewed whole.

  If Rheinfeld was counting on his fingers while chanting the phrase…did that mean…Ben counted the letters of the Latin phrase. Twenty-six. Twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Was this the key line for the code?

  He wrote the phrase out on a piece of paper. Above and beneath the words he ran the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 1-26. It looked too simple, but he’d try it anyway. He quickly discovered that while the numbers in the code could only equate to one letter, because of the repeated letters in the phrase the coded letters could have a variety of meanings. Using this key he decoded the first two words of the hidden message, N 18 / U 11 R: