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

by Scott Mariani

  Ben wasn’t betting on the same happening to him.

  How the hell did they find us?

  He had no idea. But he was pretty certain it wouldn’t be long before he found out.

  Six officers hustled him to a black police van. Its back doors were open. The rear compartment was a windowless steel cage. He was shoved and jostled towards it. Standard arrest procedure. But something wasn’t right. Ben could see it in the faces of the cops emerging from the house. He could see it in the way they were barking into their radios. A tone of urgency that was incongruous with a normal crime scene. Something was happening.

  He looked around for Silvie but couldn’t see her. Where had they taken her?

  In the final fleeting moment before they slammed him inside the cage, an unmarked panel van came speeding down the street with its headlights blazing and concealed blues flashing from behind its radiator grille and its siren shrieking. It was white, not black. Police vehicles moved smartly aside to let it through. It skidded to a halt outside the house. Its side door slid open and four men got out. They weren’t armed and they weren’t wearing police or SWAT uniform.

  They looked like astronauts clambering out of a moon lander. Clad in shimmering silvery-white from head to toe, bulky full-body suits made of exotic space-age materials capable of withstanding any kind of nuclear, chemical or bacteriological contamination. The swirling blue lights reflected on their protective clothing and the thick visors that covered their faces. They were clutching cases of equipment in their heavily gauntleted hands.

  A hazmat team.

  There was no way they’d had time to respond to a radio call. They’d either been on their way already, or standing by a street or two away waiting for the order to move in.

  As if they knew something. Which was a damn sight more than Ben did, at that moment. Back in the day, he’d seen hazmat suits deployed in combat zones thousands of miles away across the globe, during actual or anticipated chemical warfare attacks. Here, in the middle of a quiet residential area in a peaceful lakeside Swiss town, they were a shockingly incongruous sight.

  Three more identical white vans came roaring down the street and screeched to a halt, nose to tail. And as they moved in, the police and SWAT units were clearing out. Fast. The street was too narrow for them to U-turn out of there. Transmissions whined under hard reversing and tyres squealed as they reached the top of the street and wrestled their vehicles around and sped off as though a megaton bomb was about to explode. The taxi driver and his Mercedes had already been whisked away into the night. Eight more of the shimmering, visored figures piled out of the white vans. One of them was waving his bulky, padded arms at the remaining cops on the scene and mouthing something urgently behind his mask, as if to say, Get the hell out of here NOW!

  Then Ben saw no more. The doors slammed and he was closed in darkness. He heard running steps and the sound of more doors, and then felt the floor under his feet lurch violently as the vehicle took off. He sat on the hard bench inside the cage, tried to get as comfortable as possible with his wrists tied behind his back, and waited for whatever was going to happen next.

  It was a longer wait than he’d expected. The motion of the van told him they were driving through the city, constantly shifting speed, braking and accelerating, pausing at lights, turning one way and the other. Ben assumed their destination was the nearest préfecture de police. Which shouldn’t be a long trip.

  But instead, the van just kept going. The stop-start, left-right motion died away to a steady tempo, telling him they were heading out of the city on the open road. The unwavering engine note and the thrum of the tyres resonated through the bodyshell and the steel cage bars around him. Ben sat quietly in the darkness, rocking gently to the sway of the vehicle, feet braced against the opposite bench, wondering where he was being taken.

  An hour passed by, time that Ben used to try and make sense of what he’d seen back there. It had looked as if the hazmat team were intent on shutting the whole street down. Unquestionably, it had to do with the two occupants of the safe house. One dead, the other dying. Whatever had made them sick, it was something serious and infectious enough to spark off a major emergency response.

  Then he went on to think about Silvie and what the next stage would be for her. No doubt she was in for a long night with her DGSI superiors, going over every detail of her undercover mission leading up to the point when she’d been lured away and taken hostage, and everything that had happened since. Ben wasn’t worried about her ability to handle herself through it all. He wasn’t even all that worried about himself. There wasn’t a lot he could do, so why waste energy on fretting about the situation?

  Another hour went by. The plastic cuffs were tight and chafed his wrists. His shoulders were screaming from the lactic acid build-up in his muscles. He breathed steadily through his nose and centred himself and managed to shut out the pain, but he couldn’t control the thoughts that kept flitting through his head. Memories of his time at the monastery. Playing chess with Père Antoine, feeding the animals with Roby. Something that Roby had said was nagging at him, but he couldn’t remember what or why. The memory hung there in the back of his mind, like a shadow, taunting him until he gave up trying to recall it. The mental tension just brought back the pain in his muscles. He closed his eyes, focused on his breathing and willed himself into a state of relaxation. Like a Zen master.

  Except that Ben was no Zen master. But in time he settled and his muscles eased, his heartbeat slowed and he stopped thinking at all.

  He was close to being asleep when the van finally reached the end of its journey. The rear doors opened and strong light flooded in, dazzling him after the long spell of darkness. He blinked at the two silvery-white-clad, visored figures who unlocked the cage and pulled him out. Six more were standing around the van, holding automatic weapons. The van had been driven inside a large empty space. Concrete walls, concrete ceiling, concrete pillars. A heavy-duty steel shutter had rolled down. Halogen spotlamps blazed from all around.

  One of the men in hazmat suits stepped close behind him with a pair of cutters and snipped the tie binding his wrists while gun muzzles covered him from different angles. Then they closed around him in escort formation and marched him to a doorway in the concrete wall. Eight on one. He should be flattered. He rubbed his wrists and rolled his shoulders, felt the circulation returning to his stiff muscles.

  The door led to a lift. Ben and his captors were whooshed up two, three, four, five floors. The lift glided smoothly to a halt and its doors hissed open to reveal a long, broad, bright corridor that definitely didn’t look like the inside of any police station Ben had seen, in any country. It looked more like a hospital, but one apparently with neither wards nor patients.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked his escorts. No response.

  He was pretty sure he knew the answer anyway. If it wasn’t a military establishment it was at the very least a government one. The kind of secure facility that was kept nicely quiet from members of the public; that was, until such time as their rulers saw fit to whisk them off at gunpoint in the dead of night too.

  His guards walked him along the corridor, where they were joined by more men in identical suits but not carrying guns. Medical personnel, Ben thought, rather than security. They steered him towards a door with a sign that read DECONTAMINATION. One of them tapped a key code into a wall panel and the door slid open with a swish of hydraul-ics. They pushed him inside, and the door swished shut behind him.

  The room was a tiled white cube, about two metres square. The outline of the doorway he’d just walked through was barely visible, as was the shape of another doorway opposite. Recessed spotlamps burned hot. The floor sloped gently down to a centre drain. As Ben gazed around him, a harsh voice from a hidden speaker ordered him in English to remove his shoes, his watch and his clothes. If there was a hidden speaker there was probably a hidden camera too, but Ben wasn’t bashful. His years of military service had removed those kinds of i
nhibitions. He kicked off his shoes, took off his jacket, then the shirt and jeans that Silvie had bought for him, then his socks, then his underwear. A sliding compartment opened in the tiled wall to his right. The same harsh voice ordered him to place the items inside. He did what he was told. There seemed little value in resisting. The compartment clicked shut.

  A second later, a stunningly powerful spray of liquid showered down on him from a hundred concealed holes in the ceiling, making him gasp at its intensity and its coldness. It wasn’t water, but some kind of chemical wash that stung and seared his skin like ice. After five seconds, the shower stopped as abruptly as it had begun. He stood dripping and shivering, clutching at his sides. Then a concentrated hurricane-force blast of air hit him from all sides and pummelled him for ten more seconds. To his amazement, when it stopped he was totally dry, even his hair. The clothing compartment clicked back open. His things were gone. In their place was a hospital robe. The hidden voice told him to put it on. He reached inside and lifted it out. Clean, crisp cotton, soft and warm. He shrugged it over his head and let it fall down loosely around his body.

  Then the opposite doorway hissed open. Ben took that as an invitation, and was happy to leave the white cube before it sprang any more surprises on him. He stepped through the doorway and it instantly hissed shut behind him.

  He found himself in a strange kind of hospital room. The lights were bright and the air smelled of antiseptic. The room had a metal-framed bed made up drum-tight, a stand with bottles of drinking water and plastic cups in sealed bags, a wash unit and, in a nod to personal privacy that struck him as pretty insincere under the circumstances, a toilet with a wrap-around nylon curtain draped from a ceiling rail. Everything looked spotless and sterilised. The same gleaming white tiles covered the floor, ceiling and three of the room’s walls. The fourth consisted entirely of a panel of two-way mirror.

  Ben immediately knew that every move he made was under constant surveillance.

  He walked to the glass panel and rapped on it with his knuckles. It felt as thick and unyielding as armour plate. No point in trying to use the bed as a battering ram or ripping out the toilet bowl as a missile to smash his way out. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Where the hell am I? What’s going on here?’

  No response.

  Ben glared hard at the unseen faces he sensed were scrutinising him from the other side of the glass. Then he snorted in contempt and walked back to the bed and stretched out comfortably on it, figuring that he wasn’t going to give these people the pleasure of seeing him lose his temper or pace anxiously about the room like a caged tiger. He breathed slowly and let his muscles relax against the firm mattress. Closed his eyes.

  The watchers remained silent and hidden.

  They remained silent and hidden for the next twenty-four hours.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  He knew what was happening. He was in quarantine, being kept under observation to see if he collapsed dead of whatever had afflicted Torben Roth and the other guy at the safe house in Lausanne. He supposed the same was being done with Silvie. Maybe she was just next door, in an identical room the other side of the tiled wall.

  But knowing what was happening didn’t make it easier to bear. Hours dragged torturously by. The lights stayed on brightly the entire time, making it impossible to tell day from night, and before too long it became hard to preserve his outwardly cool attitude. Ben was no Zen master. And this place lacked the serenity of Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux that had taught him to quieten his thoughts. Frustration and anger began to gnaw increasingly at him. Anxiety about Silvie. Impatience at being cooped up helplessly in here while Streicher was still out there somewhere, getting harder to find by the minute and the hour.

  He slept, tossing and turning a while, then sat a while, then paced and banged on the window and demanded a response, then got none and went back to pacing and doing press-ups and sit-ups, until he was tired out and sweaty and had a wash and went back to bed with his back defiantly turned to the two-way mirror.

  He was sleeping when the doctors came into his room. He woke with a start to see three of them standing around the bed, accompanied by a nurse. They weren’t wearing protective suits.

  ‘Either you people are being really careless about exposure, or I’m in the clear,’ he challenged them. ‘Which is it?’

  They said nothing. Just studied him curiously for a few moments, then nodded to one another and left the room. The nurse stayed behind, produced a syringe and drew blood from him.

  ‘Can I smoke in here?’ he asked her.

  No response.

  ‘How about something to eat?’ he said.

  Three hours later, the nurse returned with a tray. Coffee, fruit juice, a tasteless bit of brioche and a banana.

  Three hours after that, Ben was given a fresh set of clothes and released from the observation room. He might be in the clear, but they still didn’t trust him without an armed escort as he was taken down a series of corridors to a room. A guard knocked once on the door, then showed him in.

  Two men were sitting at a circular office table inside the room.

  ‘Hello, Ben,’ said Luc Simon. He looked weary and drawn and his tie was loosened and crooked, which for Luc Simon was the equivalent of a ripped jacket sleeve or a sole flapping off his shoe. He was making inroads into the large pot of coffee that stood on a tray in the middle of the table. His companion hadn’t touched any. He was an older man with thinning black hair, tall and gaunt in a dark suit. He was peering curiously at Ben.

  For a moment or two, Ben considered kicking the table over. But he didn’t want to spill the coffee. It smelled like the good stuff. He sat in one of the two empty chairs at the round table, grabbed one of the two spare cups from the tray and poured it full to the brim from the pot. Black, no sugar. It was the good stuff, strong and hot. He drank it greedily and felt better right away.

  ‘I suppose you have a lot of questions, don’t you?’ Luc Simon said. ‘That’s understandable. For instance, I’m sure you’d like to know where you are and why you were subjected to all these medical indignities. All very necessary, I’m afraid. But before we start getting into it, I’d like to thank you for leading us to Streicher’s safe house.’ He smiled. ‘You’re the best unpaid agent I could have wished for,’ he added, as if he couldn’t resist saying it.

  ‘Careful, you might upset me,’ Ben said. ‘I’m a loose cannon, remember.’

  ‘I apologise,’ Luc Simon said with a gracious nod.

  ‘So how did you do it?’

  ‘Trace your movements? By knowing how you think, Ben.’

  ‘Am I that predictable?’

  ‘No,’ Luc Simon said. ‘I’m just that good. Recalling your fondness for the prehistoric Grande Puissance 1935 Model Browning pistol – you once carjacked me with one – and knowing, naturally, that you’d easily get the better of them, I arranged for one of our agents who intercepted your train journey to be carrying one fitted with a miniature GPS tracking device. You’d have to take the grips off to find it.’

  Crafty bastard, Ben thought. ‘And the helicopter chase. That was just a decoy, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I couldn’t let you think you’d got away too easily,’ Luc Simon said. ‘I wanted you to feel like you’d earned your freedom. The pilot was under orders to back off and make it appear as if you’d given him the slip. Meanwhile we were tracking you all the way to Lausanne, knowing you’d waste no time finding Streicher’s people.’

  ‘I only found two of them.’

  ‘But you uncovered so much more. I’m relieved that Agent Valois didn’t find an opportunity to arrest you sooner.’

  Ben smiled inwardly at that, but showed nothing on his face. He finished his cup of coffee and refilled it from the pot without offering any to anybody else. The older man with the thinning dark hair still hadn’t said a word, or been introduced. Ben didn’t much care for the way the guy was sitting watching him. He had beady dark little eyes, like a crow.

>   ‘If you’re wondering where she is, by the way,’ Luc Simon said, ‘like you she’s come through the twenty-four-hour observation period with no problems and her blood tests negative. Although you were both exposed, you were lucky. Luckier still that we brought you here for assessment. It might have gone very differently.’

  ‘You’ll have to pardon me for not turning cartwheels of joy and gratitude,’ Ben said. ‘I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what any of this is about. I don’t even know if it’s day or night, because they junked my watch. I liked that watch. I had it a long time.’

  ‘We’ll get you a new one just like it,’ Luc Simon reassured him. ‘For the record, it’s two-thirty-seven a.m. and our present location is a government science facility a few kilometres from our Interpol HQ in Lyon, one whose existence is not exactly secret but not exactly widely publicised either. As for the rest, I told you I’d fill you in when we were face to face. And I was being honest. I’ve been rethinking your offer. Whether we like it or not, right now you’re possibly our best asset in this investigation. And my superiors now think likewise. Thanks to you, in the last twenty-four hours our worst fears about Streicher have been confirmed. I’m afraid the stakes are very high. It’s time you knew a few things.’

  ‘So fill me in,’ Ben said.

  ‘Better you hear it from my colleague here,’ Simon said, motioning at the older man. ‘Allow me to introduce Professor Jean-Pierre Oppenheim.’

  ‘Professor of what?’ Ben said, looking at him suspiciously.

  Oppenheim made no reply and only gave a thin, frosty smile.