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

by Scott Mariani

  The woman handed over the torch. Breslin gritted his teeth in rage and held it steady while Ben patted her down. Up close, he could smell her subtle perfume. He did the job quickly, then snatched the torch from Breslin and backed away a step so he could shine the light on the two of them together. He kept the rifle in a one-handed grip at waist height, the muzzle wavering between them.

  ‘Now let’s talk,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s Dexter?’ the woman asked.

  Ben stuck the torch under his gun arm so it stayed pointed at them while he slipped out his phone. He turned it on and scrolled one-handed to the mugshot picture file he’d taken of the dead man shortly before burning the truck. He flashed the picture at the woman. ‘Look familiar?’ he asked.

  Michelle Faban flinched and her eyes clouded briefly. ‘You killed him,’ she said, tight-lipped, staring into the light.

  ‘No, he was dead when I found him,’ Ben said, putting the phone away. ‘He had a couple of nine-millimetre bullets inside him. Something tells me he had it coming. But my friends didn’t. Someone’s going to pay for what happened to them, and right now you’re top of my debtors’ list.’

  She frowned, narrowing her eyes, trying to peer at him more closely. ‘You were there, at the monastery?’

  ‘I should have been,’ Ben said. ‘I live there. Or I did, until you people came along.’

  ‘You’re no monk,’ she said.

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Every plan has a flaw,’ Ben said. ‘That’s who I am. The guy you didn’t account for. The small oversight that’s come back to bite you on the arse. You’re going to wish I were a monk.’

  ‘You’re getting this wrong,’ she said. ‘You need to let me explain.’

  ‘That’s exactly what you’re going to do,’ Ben said. ‘You and Kurt here. It’s just us. We’re all alone out here. Shout for help, nobody’s going to hear you. Nobody’s going to come and rescue you. A bit like the situation at the monastery, except now you’re on the receiving end. That doesn’t feel so good, does it?’

  ‘Let me explain,’ Michelle Faban said again.

  ‘I think Kurt should open the discussion,’ Ben said. ‘He hasn’t said a word yet.’

  Breslin didn’t speak, just stood there breathing hard, every muscle tensed. Ben could see the tendons in his neck standing out like cables.

  ‘You’re a real tough guy, aren’t you, Kurt?’ Ben said. ‘Or trying to look like one, at any rate. So tell me, tough guy. How many of my friends did you kill?’

  Breslin still said nothing. But the answer was there in his eyes. As if at the mention of them, he couldn’t help but replay the events of the previous morning in his mind. Relishing them. Savouring them.

  So Ben shot him.

  The crashing boom of the rifle shattered the stillness of the dark. Night birds exploded in alarm from the treetops. Breslin caught the bullet precisely where Ben had been aiming, at the middle of his chest. The high-velocity round burst his heart and lungs apart. The force of the impact slammed him down on his back as hard as being hit by a freight train. He was dead while he was still in mid-air.

  Ben turned the gun to point at the woman. She was frozen in shock, eyes wide open. Flecks of Breslin’s blood were spattered on the side of her neck and face that had been closest to him.

  ‘I’m not going to waste a lot of time here,’ Ben said quietly. ‘You’re either going to give me some answers, or I’m going to put you down next to your friend and leave you both here for the rats.’

  Michelle Faban looked down at the dead body. She seemed to have recovered quickly from the shock. The sight appeared not to bother her unduly, nor the blood on her. Ben even thought he saw a flicker of satisfaction pass over her face.

  ‘It’s all down to you now, Michelle,’ he said. ‘Better talk to me.’

  ‘Did you have something to do with that?’ she asked, nodding in the direction of the burned-out truck.

  ‘You’re a quick study,’ Ben said. ‘Smarter than your friend. The brains of the operation.’

  ‘He wasn’t any friend of mine,’ she said. ‘He was a degenerate piece of trash. I’m glad you shot him. I’ve wanted to do it myself, many times.’

  Ben stared at her over the top of the rifle. ‘Is this how you think you’re going to talk your way out, by appealing to my sense of empathy?’

  Michelle Faban gave a shrug. ‘I suppose not,’ she said. ‘I suppose you might as well shoot me too. Because now I’m not so sure if you’re going to believe what I’m about to tell you. Just know that if you do shoot me, you’ll open up a world of trouble for yourself that you can’t imagine.’

  ‘I don’t know, I can imagine quite a bit,’ Ben said. ‘But as for believing you, you have nothing to lose by trying me.’

  She shrugged again. ‘Okay. I wish I could show you some official ID. Under the circumstances, you’ll understand that’s not a practical option for me right now. I’m not really Michelle Faban. That’s an undercover identity. My real name is agent Silvie Valois of the DGSI.’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  DGSI was the acronym for Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure. The French government agency responsible for counter-intelligence, counterterrorism and surveillance of threats against French territory and national security. As spook agencies went, it wasn’t one of the best known. Back in the day, Ben and his team at the Le Val tactical training centre had run a few of them through their paces in advanced pistol-craft and hostage rescue skills, and not found them to be too badly lacking. They were a tough, well-drilled and intensively selected bunch. If Silvie Valois was telling the truth, it explained to Ben why she hadn’t freaked out on being spattered with the blood of the man who’d accompanied her. But he still had more questions than answers.

  ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘You don’t believe me.’

  ‘Some verification would be nice,’ Ben said.

  ‘Like I told you, I haven’t exactly been in a position to carry my agency ID card around. For the last four months I’ve been Michelle Faban, posing undercover inside Streicher’s organisation as part of an agency investigation.’

  ‘Who’s Streicher?’

  ‘Udo Streicher. Their leader.’

  ‘Leader of what? A criminal gang?’

  ‘You could call them that. They call themselves the Parati. It’s Latin.’

  ‘I know what it is,’ Ben said. ‘It means the prepared ones. Prepared for what?’

  She shrugged. ‘Well, that’s a very good question, isn’t it?’

  Ben’s mind was spinning as he stared at the woman telling him this wild story. The mystery was deepening faster than he could make sense of it. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What colour’s your agency HQ building in Neuilly-sur-Seine?’

  ‘None,’ Silvie replied, straight off the cuff. ‘It’s in Levallois-Perret.’

  ‘How many departments is the agency divided into?’

  ‘Eight.’ She rattled them off. ‘Economic, Terrorism, Intelligence Technology, Violent Subversion, General Admin, Support, Counter-espionage and Internal Affairs.’

  ‘There’s a senior agent there. Big guy, six-three, scar on his cheek, bushy moustache. What’s his name?’

  ‘Jean-Loup l’Hermite,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘He took early retirement a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Tattoo on his arm. Left or right?’

  ‘Left arm, high up.’

  ‘What was it of?’

  ‘It was a mermaid,’ she replied.

  ‘What was his wife’s name?’

  ‘Didn’t have one. She’d already been dead for five years when I met him. He’s never looked at another woman since.’

  Ben stared at her, long and hard and penetratingly. She might be telling the truth. Then again, she might just be a genius at preparation. It was still too early to say for sure, but he let the rifle muzzle droop towards the ground and clicked on the safety.

  ‘You hav
en’t told me who you are yet,’ she said. ‘Someone who seems to know a lot about my agency, that’s for sure. And someone who can get hold of a military-issue rifle. You know as well as I do that thing’s off-limits to civilians.’

  ‘I told you, I’m not a monk,’ he replied. ‘And I’m asking the questions here. Who was Dexter?’

  ‘Dexter Nicholls,’ she said. ‘You mean, apart from being the dead man you impersonated tonight to get me here?’

  ‘You seemed especially anxious about him. Why?’

  ‘Dexter was one of ours, too,’ she replied after a beat.

  ‘He wasn’t French.’

  ‘English,’ she said. ‘Like you. Am I right?’

  ‘Just keep talking.’

  ‘I never knew his real name, only that he was with British Intelligence. It’s a joint investigation.’

  ‘Bullshit. He was one of the hit team.’

  ‘He didn’t harm anyone,’ Silvie protested. ‘You can be one hundred per cent certain of that. He had no choice but to be there. And now Dexter’s body is among the dead, for the cops to find. If they haven’t already. That could cause a lot of trouble for the agency, if they identify who he was.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ Ben said. ‘Because Dexter was properly cremated. There’ll be no trace left of him on the mountain, or anywhere else.’

  ‘Cremated? What the hell are you talking about? Where?’

  ‘Right there,’ Ben said, pointing at the dark shell of the Belphégor. ‘The tool locker. I had to fold him up a little to get him in.’

  She turned to stare at the truck, then back to gaze in horror at Ben. ‘Jesus Christ. Who are you?’

  ‘Someone who doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for anyone who was present at the scene of the crime with a gun in their hand.’ He looked her up and down. ‘What’s your height?’

  ‘One seventy-one,’ she said, taken aback by the question.

  He shone the torch down at her feet. She was wearing high-leg combat boots. They were small. ‘Shoe size?’

  She frowned. ‘Thirty-seven. Why the hell do you need to know that?’

  ‘I found footprints at the scene. Combat boots, just like the ones you’re wearing. One set of prints was smaller than the others. As if they belonged to a teenager. Or a woman with small feet.’ He stared at her questioningly.

  ‘Those weren’t my prints you saw. They must have been Hannah’s.’

  ‘Who the hell’s Hannah?’

  ‘Hannah Gissel. Streicher’s girlfriend. She was part of the team. She hardly leaves his side, and she’s as dangerous as he is.’

  Ben looked into her eyes. There was a truthfulness in them that would have been hard to fake. Hard, if not impossible.

  ‘You have a lot more explaining to do,’ he said. ‘But not here.’

  He walked her at gunpoint through the trees, shining the torch ahead towards the concealed Hummer. Twigs crackled underfoot. The night birds had returned to their roosts after the gunshot and were calling nervously in the darkness. Ben marched the woman up to the passenger door and held the gun on her while he yanked it open.

  ‘Get inside,’ he said.

  She put one boot on the high sill of the door, found a purchase and hauled herself inside. Ben leaned the rifle against the Hummer’s dull metal flank and took out the switchblade and the roll of tape. The blade flicked out with a click and glimmered in the moonlight. Ben pulled a length of tape off the roll and sliced it off. He used it to bind her right wrist to the tubular frame of the seat, another length to tie her ankles together and a third to connect them to her bound wrist. Then he slammed her door, walked around to the driver’s side, stashed the rifle behind his seat and climbed in and used a fourth length of tape to attach her left wrist.

  When he was satisfied she wasn’t going anywhere, he climbed back out of the Hummer, locked it and walked over to Breslin’s body. He grasped the dead man by both limp wrists and dragged him into the bushes. Then he strode fast across the clearing to the SUV his two visitors had arrived in and left blocking the mouth of the track.

  It was a Nissan hardtop pickup truck, black and filmed with road dirt, the legend OUTLAW splashed in big letters down its flanks as if to proclaim the bad-boy virility of its driver. The keys were in it. Ben climbed up behind the wheel. The car smelled new. Nothing of interest in the glove compartment. He fired up the engine and lights, engaged gear and drove the big car across the clearing. He parked over Breslin’s body, straddling it with a chunky off-road tyre either side. Not perfect, but better than nothing. Ben didn’t have time for burials.

  He returned to the Hummer and clambered in next to his prisoner. The engine growled into life and the lights glared back at them against the close cover of the trees. He let it idle for a moment as he took the woman’s compact Glock from his trouser pocket and laid it in his lap.

  ‘A gorilla couldn’t break free from this tape,’ she said, eyeing the gun. ‘You don’t take a lot of chances, do you, mister whoever-you-are?’

  ‘That’s why I’m still here,’ he replied. ‘And the name’s Ben.’

  He put the Hummer in gear and they lurched away over the uneven ground, crushing a semicircular path through the bushes until the lights washed over the space of the clearing. He drove past the Belphégor for the last time. Down the rutted track, he reached the junction with the lonely, winding dark road, and hesitated. Right would take him back in the direction of the monastery, left in the direction of the old rural filling station. He swung out left and gunned the throttle, the Hummer’s headlamps carving a channel down the empty night road like the beam of a lighthouse.

  Chapter Thirty

  ‘Where are we going?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Nowhere yet,’ Ben said. ‘You still have some explaining to do, Silvie. Or is it Michelle? You still have time to change your mind.’

  ‘It’s Silvie.’

  ‘What about your pal Breslin? Was that his real name?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s the one on his police file. Pretty unpleasant record, I might add.’

  ‘So you’re still sticking with the government agent story.’

  ‘Of course I am. It’s the truth.’

  ‘All right,’ Ben said. ‘Then tell me about Breslin’s record. Any military past? Explosives experience?’

  ‘Just your run-of-the-mill criminal stuff,’ she said. ‘Breslin was one of the bad ones. The guy was known to be hanging around the fringes of the reformed Red Brigade when it carried out a number of murders of prominent liberals and anti-fascists in the late nineties. He was a crony of convicted European terrorists like Roberto Morandi and Marco Mezzasalma, before he fell in with Streicher. More recently he was suspected of keeping himself financially stable by dabbling in the odd ransom job. Often hauled in for questioning, never convicted. Streicher turns a blind eye to his gang’s extra-curricular activities. The rest of the time, he keeps them busy.’

  ‘Busy with what?’

  ‘His grand plan.’

  ‘Theft and murder’s not much of a grand plan,’ Ben said.

  ‘It goes beyond that. Above my pay grade.’

  ‘Are you saying you don’t even know?’

  ‘I know as much as they wanted me to know. Which isn’t a lot.’

  ‘Sounds like a shitty assignment,’ Ben said.

  She let out a sarcastic laugh. ‘Really? A hundred and twenty-four days without any backup or contact with the outside sounds shitty? It was like living in a pressure cooker. Day to day, never knowing when they might bundle me in a car, take me out into the middle of nowhere, force me to dig my own grave and then put a bullet in my head. It wasn’t until two months in that Dexter identified himself to me as an agent.’

  ‘That was taking a risk.’

  ‘He knew who I was,’ she said. ‘Even my real name. Somebody screwed up with that one. But Dexter must have figured that an ally on the inside was worth taking the risk for. I didn’t believe him at first. I almost cut and run, thinking that the
y were on to me and it was a trick to flush me out. Took a week before I started to trust him. From then on, we tried to communicate when we could. We had to be so damn careful.’

  ‘Obviously not careful enough, in Dexter’s case.’

  Her lips tightened. ‘I have no idea how Streicher made him. Maybe it was during the attack. Maybe Dexter openly refused to harm anyone. Or maybe Streicher got suspicious before, and put Dexter on the team so he could kill him.’

  Ben asked, ‘So how did the agency get you in there? Download an application form from Streicher’s website?’

  ‘He surrounds himself with all kinds of fanatics and crazies. Michelle Faban had to fit a certain profile. In her case, it was eco-terrorism and extreme animal rights stuff. The car bombing of a pro-vivisectionist. Arson attacks on fast-food restaurants and fur farms, breaking into animal research labs, harassment, intimidation, that kind of thing. DGSI inserted me into the group by setting up a chance meeting with a guy called Willi Dorn, a Green anarchist and sometime bank robber who’d been seen meeting up with Streicher. The insertion took time. Finally, Streicher met me in person.

  ‘He was very suave and charming, not what I’d expected. He asked me a lot of questions about my experience, my philosophy of life, how I viewed the world, how I’d like to change it. Then asked me if I’d like to get involved in an organisation with a very special future and some really big ideas. When I asked what they were, he just smiled. Then I was introduced to some of the others, and before I knew it I was one of them. DGSI didn’t even know where I was.’

  ‘They let you go completely off the radar?’