The money had already arrived by the time Ben, Jude, Jeff, and Tuesday had reached Le Val, although it hadn’t been until a couple of days later that Ben had told them about it and gathered them around the old pine table in the kitchen, over a bottle or three of wine, to explain to his stunned audience how he intended to divide it up.
Sizwe was still in Brazzaville, living at Mama’s and unsure of anything in his immediate future except his desire to adopt Juma as his own son. Ben planned to give Sizwe $5 million with which to build a new life for them both. Another $10 million was to be allocated to a tax-free trust fund Ben had already started setting up, which would provide a comfortable future and education for little Mani, Akia, Sefu, Steve, and Fabrice, in the capable care of Mama Lumumba. $2 million would go to Le Val, to repay the business for the severe financial hit it had taken over the ‘Africa thing’, and maybe help it expand a little more.
A further million of the reward money was already in another fund Ben had set up for Jude, much to Jude’s initial protest and refusal when he heard this news. Jude settled, though, when Ben told him he intended to donate an equal amount to help Rae pursue her crusade against the illegal coltan trade in Africa, on the strict promise that neither she nor Jude would endanger themselves by ever returning to the Congo. Rae already had all the evidence she needed to sink the corporate players involved.
On those terms, Jude grudgingly accepted Ben’s deal.
So far, that accounted for nineteen of the twenty million.
What of the rest?
Ben didn’t want to be rich. Never had been, never would be, never gave it much thought. But with a cushion under him, he would no longer need to sell his place in Paris. It would give him peace of mind, and who didn’t want peace of mind?
As for the roving life he’d lived since leaving Le Val in Jeff’s hands, drifting around Europe and the wider world getting himself into all manner of scrapes and generally honing his talent for trouble – that was over now. From this moment onwards, all that lay before him was a life of peace and quiet.
Or so Ben liked to tell himself.
Then again, who could ever really predict what the future held?
Epilogue
Six months later
Somewhere in Africa
He stopped what he was doing and paused, as though he had lost track of what his next action should be. Slowly turned his head and fixed his slack gaze on the area of dirt he had missed.
He thought dully to himself, ‘Ah.’
Then his hands tightened on the long shaft of the yard brush and he shuffled over a few steps and resumed sweeping. Clouds of dirt blew up and soiled the trouser legs of the torn denim dungarees that were his only clothing, but he did not notice and wouldn’t have cared anyway.
A chicken strutted across his path. He paused again and looked at it. Its beady eyes met his, and for a few moments they gazed at one another. The man smiled. He liked the chicken. It was his friend.
He did not know its name, however, just as he struggled to remember his own. Memory didn’t come easily to him.
The man went on sweeping. Then a harsh voice called across the yard to tell him that he had missed another bit over there, you stupid bastard. Placidly, he shuffled a few more steps and obeyed his master’s command.
It was very hot under the sun. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes and put the broom down for a moment as he rubbed his face, feeling the ridges and bumps that marked his features. He didn’t know why he had them. People said he was ugly, and sometimes that hurt his feelings, but most of the time he didn’t really take notice. He took off the ragged baseball cap and ran his fingers over his moist scalp. There was a bit on his head that still hurt, where the hair had been shaved away and a tender scar ran across his skull. He had mostly forgotten the doctors who used to come and see him in the hospital, and the bandages that used to cover his head until they were removed. That was before he came here, a distant and irretrievable past that no longer had any relevance.
The chicken strutted away. He smiled as he watched it go. Later, he would get back together with his friend, where they both slept on a bed of straw in the barn. Sometimes, it let him stroke it. Other times it pecked him, which made him sad.
The man cocked his head and put a finger to his mouth. A fresh thought had come to him. His name, remembered now as if appearing through a veil of cobwebs in his brain.
His name was Jean-Pierre.
But he supposed it didn’t matter, and so he went back to his sweeping.
Read on for an exclusive extract from the new Ben Hope adventure by
Scott Mariani
The Babylon Idol
Chapter 1
So many times in the past, when Ben Hope had vowed and declared that his crazy days of running from one adventure to another were over and that he was going to stay put at home for the foreseeable future, for one reason or another it hadn’t been long before some new crisis had come barrelling into his life and whisked him off again – the latest in a sorry, never-ending series of broken promises, to himself and to others, that had sometimes made him wonder if he was cursed by fate.
This time, though, he was determined to be true to his word. This was it. Mayhem, violence, war, intrigue, chasing around the world – he was done with the lot of it, once and for all.
It wasn’t so much that, as his longtime friend and business partner Jeff Dekker sometimes joked, ‘we’re getting too old for this shit’. In his early forties, Ben had plenty of life left in him and could still outrun, outtrain and, if necessary, outfight guys half his age. But he’d have been lying if he’d said that the recent African escapade hadn’t taken a lot out of him, physically and emotionally. The same went for Jeff, who’d been right there at Ben’s side in what had to be the deadliest, most complex and disturbing rescue mission either man had ever experienced, either during their time in British Special Forces or in the years since. Likewise for Tuesday Fletcher, the young ex-trooper who had not long since joined their small staff at the Le Val Tactical Training Centre in rural Normandy but proved himself ten times over to be a stalwart asset to the team and forged bonds of comradeship with Ben and Jeff that could never be broken.
Just nine days had passed since they’d all returned to Le Val, to find a mountain of mail waiting for them. The business was growing by the month, attracting so many bookings from military, law enforcement and private close protection agencies worldwide looking to refine and extend their tactical skillset, that it was hard to keep up with demand. Now that the operation had received a substantial cash injection in the wake of the Africa mission, they were set to grow still further. But all of that had been set aside for a week, as an official Le Val holiday was declared.
Ben had spent that time recuperating. For most people, ‘recuperating’ might have meant lying in bed, or sitting around idle, licking their wounds and feeling sorry for themselves. For Ben it meant getting back into the punishing exercise routines he’d followed for most of his life. Working back up to a thousand push-ups a day, lifting weights, honing his marksmanship skills on Le Val’s pistol and rifle ranges, scaling cliffs and sea-kayaking off the Normandy coast and going for long runs through the wintry countryside with Storm, his favourite of the pack of German Shepherds that patrolled the compound. The harder Ben trained, the more he emptied his mind and the further he left the horrors of Africa behind him.
Jeff Dekker was no slouch either, but he’d used his recuperation time differently. His romance with Chantal Mercier, who taught at the Ecole Primaire in the nearby village of Saint-Acaire, had grown more serious over the last months. In all the years Ben had known Jeff, throughout the never-ending sequence of on-off, part-time, short-term girlfriends whose names were too many to remember, he’d never seen him so committed to a relationship. He was happy for his friend, and Jeff seemed happy too. Even Jeff’s French had improved.
Meanwhile, Tuesday Fletcher had taken advantage of the week’s holiday to fly home to London to see h
is parents, Rosco and Shekeia, second-generation immigrants from Jamaica. Tuesday was still recovering from a gunshot wound to the arm, sustained during their flight from the Congo. Ben had no doubt that he’d come up with some white lie to conceal from his parents just how close he’d come to being killed. If anyone could make light of a bullet in the arm, it was the ever-cheerful Tuesday.
The second week back, the three of them had started easing themselves back into business-as-usual mode and begun working their way through the backlog of emails, letters, accounts, orders, bookings, hiring new staff to cope with the expanding Le Val operation, and a hundred other matters that had accumulated during their absence.
That was where Ben found himself at this moment, sitting alone in the prefabricated office building across the yard from the old stone farmhouse. It was an early December morning, and the icy rain that had been drumming on the office building roof since dawn was threatening to turn snowy. The fan heater was blasting waves of warm air that engulfed Ben as he sat at the desk sipping a steaming mug of black coffee. Storm and two more of the guard dogs, Mauser and Luger, appeared to have given themselves the morning off and were curled contentedly at his feet, like a huge hairy black-and-tan rug spread over the floor. Ben didn’t have the heart to kick them out into the cold.
From where he sat, through the window he could see the parked minibus that had brought the current crop of trainees to Le Val: eight agents from the French SDAT anti-terror unit anxious to up their game in expectation of more of the troubles that had been rocking Paris in recent times. Tuesday was currently out with them on the six-hundred-metre range, probably all freezing their balls off as he took them through their sniper paces. Trembling hands and numb fingers were no great boon to long-range accuracy. Poor sods. Ben was scheduled to teach a two-hour session that afternoon in the plywood and car tyre-walled construction they called the ‘killing house’, covering elements of advanced live-fire CQB or close-quarter-battle training that they were unlikely to learn anywhere else. At least they’d be indoors out of the wet. Two more members of the Le Val team who’d be happy to huddle indoors with mugs of coffee were Serge and Adrien, the two ex-French army guys who manned the new gatehouse – the latest addition to the complex – and controlled people coming in and out.
As for Jeff Dekker, Ben wasn’t quite sure where he was at that moment. He’d said something about checking the perimeter fence for wind damage; the region had been buffeted by one winter gale after another that week. With the kind of arsenal that Le Val kept locked up in its special armoury vault, and the sort of work that went on within the various sections of the compound, government bureaucracy insisted on the property being ultra-secure. Not that Ben had lately noticed any gangs of Jihadi cutthroats roaming the Normandy countryside in search of military hardware. But rules were rules.
Ben reached for his Gauloises and Zippo lighter, flicked a cigarette from the familiar blue pack, clanged open the lighter and lit up in a cloud of smoke. It suddenly felt even better to be home. Puffing happily away, he reached across the desk for the stack of mail he’d been sifting through. So far it had all been bills, bills, and more bills. But this letter looked different.
‘Strange,’ he said.
Chapter 2
The letter certainly was unusual. More than the Italian postmark, Ben was surprised to see the ink-stamped legend ISTITUTO PENITENZIARO BOLLATI on the envelope. He’d heard of the Bollati medium-security prison in Milan, but never been there, could think of no connections the place could have to him, and wouldn’t have expected to receive a letter from anyone there. Yet there was no denying his name and address neatly handwritten on the front of the envelope. Above it, the date on the postmark showed that the letter had left Milan while Ben was struggling to survive somewhere in the middle of the Congo jungle.
‘Hm,’ he said.
At his feet, Storm cocked an ear and glanced up as though to see what the fuss was about, then lost interest and went back to sleep.
Ben took another slurp of scalding coffee and another drag on the Gauloise, then put down his mug and rested the cigarette in the ashtray and picked up the old M4 bayonet that served as a letter-opener in the Le Val office. He carefully slit one end of the envelope, reached inside and was about to draw out the single folded sheet of paper when his phone suddenly came to life and started buzzing on the desk like an upturned bee.
‘Got a problem in Sector Nine.’ Jeff’s voice was barely audible over the crackle of the wind distorting his phone’s mic. Sector Nine was what they called part of the east perimeter fence. ‘That sodding apple tree Marie-Claire wouldn’t ever let me cut down? Well, we won’t need to now. Sorry to drag you out here, mate, but I need your help.’
Ben could imagine what had happened. He’d read the letter later. He grabbed his leather jacket from the back of his chair and slipped it on. ‘You want to come?’ he said to Storm, who instantly sprang to his feet as if it was feeding time. Life was simple when you were a dog.
Outside in the biting wind, the sleet was turning snowier by the minute. Ben pulled up the collar of his jacket and crossed the yard, past the minibus and over to the ancient Land Rover. It was a tool box on wheels, filled with all kinds of junk including a greasy old chainsaw. Storm hopped in the back and found a space for himself while Ben got behind the wheel, and they set off across the yard and down the rutted track between the buildings that ran parallel with the rifle range, skirted the butts and led across the fields towards Sector Nine. He heard the muffled boom of a rifle coming from the range, the ear-splitting report and supersonic crack of the bullet in flight muted by the high earth walls that ran parallel from the firing points to the butts at the far end and prevented any ‘flyers’ from escaping the range boundaries. Not that such elementary mistakes could happen, under Tuesday’s expert supervision. He could splatter grapes all day long at five hundred metres with his modified Remington 700, and he was one of the best instructors Ben had ever seen.
The old tree had been a bone of contention for years. Marie-Claire, the local woman they’d employed since the beginning as an occasional cook, swore by the particular apples it produced as being essential to her mouth-wateringly delicious traditional Normandy apple tart recipe. As popular as her tart was with the parties of hard-worked and hungry trainees at Le Val, Jeff had always griped that the tree was too close to the fence and had argued that they could get perfectly decent apples at the grocer’s in Saint-Acaire or the Carrefour in Valognes. It had been an endless and hard-fought debate with neither side giving an inch, while the tree kept growing taller and spreading outwards year on year. Now it looked as if the winter wind had settled the argument for them.
The track wound and snaked through the grounds. To Ben’s right, he passed the patch of oak woodland, now bare and gaunt, that in summer completely screened the ruins of the tiny thirteenth-century chapel where he sometimes retreated to sit, and think, and enjoy the silence. To his left, beyond hills and fields and forest, he could see the distant steeple of the church at Saint-Acaire pointing up at the grey sky.
He loved this place, in any season. He couldn’t imagine why he’d ever wanted to leave it.
But then, he’d done a lot of things in his life that he couldn’t understand why, looking back.
As Ben approached Sector Nine in the Land Rover, he saw Jeff’s Ford Ranger over the grassy rise up ahead. Then saw Jeff himself, standing in the diagonal sleet with his arms folded and frowning unhappily at the branches that had become enmeshed in the wire. The whole tree had uprooted and toppled over, flattening a ten-metre section of fence with it. Those ever-lurking Jihadis had only to come running through the gap, and they’d be just a step away from total European domination.
‘What did I always say?’ Jeff grated, pointing at the fallen tree, as Ben stepped down from the Land Rover. ‘What did I always warn that old bat would happen one day? And did she ever listen to a word? Did she buggery.’
‘No use crying about it now,’ Ben sai
d. He grabbed the chainsaw from the back of the Landy. The dog clambered into the front seat, fogging up the windscreen with his hot breath as he watched the two humans set about dismantling the tree.
Ben started with the smaller branches, trimming them off while Jeff dragged them away and tossed them in a heap to one side. Once the gnarly old trunk was as bare as a telegraph pole, it was time to start chopping it up into sections before the real work of rebuilding the broken fence could begin. By then, the sleet had delivered on its threat to turn snowy. Ben and Jeff took a break, and sat in the Land Rover watching the snow dust the landscape. Ben lit another Gauloise, smoking it slowly, savouring the tranquillity of the moment.
‘I love her, you know,’ Jeff said, out of the blue after a lengthy pause.
‘The old bat?’
‘Chantal. I’m in love, mate.’
Ben had never heard his friend say anything like that before. From his lips, it was like Mahatma Gandhi saying how much he loved a good juicy beefsteak.
Jeff shook his head, as though he could hardly believe it himself. ‘I mean, I know what it sounds like, and I never thought this would happen to me. But I think she’s the one. Christ, I really fucking think so.’ He glanced at Ben. There was a look in his eyes something like helplessness.
‘Chantal’s great,’ Ben said, even though he’d only met her briefly a couple of times.
‘Yeah, she is.’ Jeff swallowed, like a man about to make a confession. ‘Listen. I … uh, I asked her to marry me. She said yes. Wanted you to be the first to know.’
Ben masked his complete astonishment and said, ‘I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.’ The subject of marriage wasn’t one that was ever discussed between them, given Ben’s patchy history in that department. He wasn’t well qualified to extol the joys of married life, but it was all he could think of to say right now.
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