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

by Scott Mariani

  He spent twenty minutes under the shower with the water turned up hot, blasting off the last of the chemical wash he could still smell on his skin. He used one of the tiny complimentary bottles of shampoo to wash his hair. Then he towelled himself off, rubbed a hole in the condensation on the mirror and rasped his hand over his jaw. He decided shaving could wait a couple more days and put on a hotel dressing gown.

  Back in the bedroom, he turned off the light. Walked over to the French window via a detour over to his bag, stepped out on to the railed balcony and lit up a Gauloise. A cool breeze rustled the satin drapes and carried his wisps of smoke gently away, melting them into the night air. He savoured the cigarette for as long as he could make it last, leaning on the railing and gazing out over the twinkling city lights. A siren was wailing in the distance. Somewhere out there, an unseen night train was rumbling out of the city. He thought about the passengers on board, and where their journey might be taking them. He thought about all the people asleep in their homes across Lyon, across France, across Europe. So many innocent lives out there. So fragile, so vulnerable, so ignorant of the lunatic destructiveness that threatened them and of the unravelling thread from which the stability and security of their world was hanging.

  He smoked the cigarette down to a stub, until the heat of its glowing tip singed his fingers. Then he crushed it against the iron railing and the orange glow died away to nothing. He flicked the stub into the night and walked back into the darkened bedroom, leaving the French window open to allow the cool breeze inside.

  He stopped.

  Silvie was lying stretched out in his bed. The nightdress he’d found in her bag was a small pool of pale material on the rug nearby. Her hair was fanned out, dark against the pillow. He could see the curve of her bare shoulders above the sheet. She had one knee bent, the thin cotton draped over it like a tent. The light from the open window was reflected as bright little pinpoints in her eyes.

  ‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ he said after a beat.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said.

  ‘Me neither,’ he said.

  He took a step towards the bed. Then another. Lifted the edge of the sheet and peeled it back. Let the hotel gown slip off him and fall to the rug.

  And it wasn’t until a long time afterwards, lying there in the stillness of the night with Silvie’s head nuzzled against his left shoulder and the warmth of her skin against his, listening to the soft, steady rhythm of her breathing as she slept, that he realised he couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought about Brooke Marcel.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Altdorf, Switzerland

  The place didn’t even look like a prison until they were almost at the entrance. It was tucked away in what seemed like an ordinary street, among what seemed like ordinary buildings and offices and homes. Barely anything to differentiate it from its surroundings, apart from the heavy iron gate, and the bars on the upper windows, and the few token coils of razor wire that discreetly adorned the roof, gleaming dully in the morning sunshine.

  As Ben and Silvie walked up to the gate, it clicked open by some remote mechanism and whirred aside on smooth tracks. It was 9.24 a.m., and they were expected. Silvie was wearing the same dark trouser suit as yesterday, somehow unrumpled despite that morning’s helicopter ride from Lyon. Ben had nothing more formal to wear than his new jeans and black jacket. Not that it seemed to matter.

  No passes or ID were needed. The magic ticket from Interpol was opening all the doors for them. Wherever the road might be heading, so far it was green lights all the way.

  ‘I’m Special Agent Silvie Valois of DGSI and this is Major Hope, attached to Interpol,’ Silvie said in French to the woman who met them inside the gate. ‘We’re here to see the prisoner Miki Donath.’

  The woman shook their hands and introduced herself as Leila Amacker. She was tall and severe, threads of grey in the dark hair she wore tightly scraped back under a clasp. ‘Please follow me,’ she said. Ben wasn’t sure if she was offended or not by the use of the term ‘prisoner’. Inmate might have worked better. Or guest, maybe.

  She led them through the main double doors of the unlikeliest prison Ben had ever seen. He’d beheld the inside of a few penal establishments in his time, more than once from the wrong side of the bars. He’d never been in one like this before, not least because it didn’t appear to have any.

  ‘Why is everything pink?’ he asked Frau Amacker as she led them at a brisk walk through the corridors. Because everything was, the same way everything from the walls to the doors to the window frames of any military facility in the world was covered in gallons of generic drab olive green. Except this was fresh, bright pink, like the inside of a little girl’s bedroom. All that was missing were the spangly pendants and fluffy toy horses.

  ‘Colour psychology studies have shown that it reduces hostility levels in the inmates and promotes calmness,’ Frau Amacker said, as if explaining the obvious to a rather dim-witted child.

  ‘I see,’ Ben said. ‘And the pris— the inmates are free just to wander about the place?’

  ‘Of course.’ Frau Amacker cracked a frosty smile. ‘Now, before we proceed, the governor wishes to have a word with you.’

  She led them up another shining neon-lit pink corridor to a door, knocked softly and a man’s voice answered from inside. Frau Amacker showed Ben and Silvie into the large, comfortable, plant-filled office. At least that wasn’t pink, too.

  ‘Guete Morge,’ the governor said in Swiss-German, rising up from his desk, a small, wiry man with a worried look creasing his brow like rice paper. He sat them down, then mercifully switched to English and introduced himself as Mathias Heckethorn, governor of the Bezirksgefängnis Altdorf. After a few moments of pleasantries, he explained to them the reason for the worried look. A shocking, shocking incident had taken place just yesterday, during the inmate Miki Donath’s weekly reintegration session with the young woman who was his regular visiting sociotherapist. The upshot of which was that the sociotherapist was now in hospital with a broken collarbone and half an ear missing from where Donath’s teeth had severed it in a single bite.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not the first time,’ Governor Heckethorn said nervously. ‘There have been five prior incidents, the last of which was when Donath almost blinded another inmate and destroyed all of his teeth. It’s an intolerable situation; I have been compelled to arrange an immediate transfer to a more secure facility in Regensdorf.’

  ‘Maybe the paint scheme isn’t working too well, after all,’ Ben said.

  Silvie shot him a look. ‘Does that mean we won’t be able to see him?’ she asked Heckethorn.

  ‘No, but regrettably the interview will have to take place in a secure room, for your personal safety. You may also be pressed for time. Donath is scheduled to be out of here by midday.’

  ‘We just have a few questions,’ Ben said. ‘It shouldn’t take long.’

  ‘Thank you so much for your co-operation,’ Heckethorn simpered, virtually wringing his hands in relief. This guy would have gone down a storm in charge of Alcatraz, Ben thought.

  Ten minutes later, they were sitting in the interview room. Ben had studiously avoided using the word interrogate, on Luc Simon’s advice. The room smelled of antiseptic and was bare apart from two plastic chairs and a plain table. Miki Donath was seated in an identical chair, separated from his interviewers by a thick Perspex security window drilled with sound holes. A pair of prison guards stood behind him, looking just a little wary of the prisoner and clearly ready to jump him in case he tried to headbutt his way through the glass.

  Donath appeared perfectly calm. He looked older than his thirty-nine years, with a deeply lined face and hooded dark eyes that seemed as expressionless as a shark’s. His hair was cut as short as an electric trimmer would go. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Maybe the Swiss authorities believed that uniforms were disempowering, Ben thought.

  Silvie began the dialogue, leaning close to the sec
urity screen and talking slowly and clearly. ‘Herr Donath, as I’m aware that you speak English, I’m choosing to conduct this interview in that language. Is that acceptable to you?’

  Donath made no reply. The shark eyes were staring at Silvie as if wondering which part of her to eat first. Ben stared back at him.

  Silvie went on. ‘Okay, Herr Donath, my name is Special Agent Silvie Valois, and I’m here on behalf of the French General Directorate of Homeland Security to speak with you regarding the whereabouts of your former associate, Udo Streicher.’

  Donath smiled. Only his lips moved, curling in disdain. His eyes stayed blank. ‘Who’s the guy with you?’

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ Ben said.

  Silvie flashed Ben a furious sideways glare. Calmly resuming, she said to Donath, ‘It’s vitally important that we locate him. Your assistance in the matter would be greatly valued.’

  No reply. Donath kept staring, completely still, like a lizard on a rock.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, Miki,’ she said, switching tack. ‘I may call you Miki? Everybody hates a snitch, yes? But in fact you wouldn’t be informing on him. You’d be helping him. You see, we have reason to believe that Udo is involved in activities that could get him into a lot of trouble. We only wish to speak to him about what would be in his best interests.’

  Ben was deeply impressed with her professional aplomb in these surroundings. Warm and reassuring, the lies smoothly and believably delivered, her manner accommodating and reassuring, her body language relaxed. But Donath wasn’t taking the bait. Ben watched those still, dead eyes. In the absence of a loaded and cocked pistol shoved under his chin, you could glean a great deal about a man’s thoughts from his eyes. And Donath’s revealed a lot. There was a knowing look at their inscrutable heart, a muted glow of satisfaction, almost of pride, as if he were thinking to himself, Go get ’em, Udo!

  ‘I’m asking you to help us,’ Silvie said in a softer tone. ‘And your friend. Aren’t you interested in helping him?’

  Ben wanted to say something. Possibilities entered his mind, such as: Listen, arsehole. Co-operate and we’ll guarantee that your sentence is reduced to five years. That might work, and who cared if it was true or not? Tell us where Streicher is or I’ll stamp your spine into little pieces might work even better. Ben didn’t foresee any theoretical difficulty in putting the two guards out of action, if it came to it. It was the impenetrable Perspex security window that might cause more problems.

  But as the interview ticked by, it was Donath himself who proved the most impenetrable. Sylvie kept gamely trying. Ben admired her tenacity and inventiveness as she kept switching from one approach to another. In the end, nothing worked. After twenty-five minutes, the session was called to an end. Donath said nothing as the guards led him away. Ben and Silvie left the interview room empty-handed.

  ‘That didn’t go so well, did it?’ she muttered as they walked back towards the official car that had brought them from the airport. She was agitated and flushed. ‘You weren’t much help in there,’ she snapped at him.

  Ben didn’t speak. ‘I didn’t mean that,’ she added a moment later, quickly regretting her words. She reached out her arm and let her fingers brush his, softly, lingering just a fraction longer than they needed to. She managed a brief, unhappy smile. ‘It wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t lash out at you to cover my own failure. I messed up. Damn it, our one chance and I totally dropped the ball.’

  Ben paused in his stride and gently clasped her arm, easing her to a halt on the pavement and turning her round to face him. ‘You did fine,’ he said. ‘Don’t beat yourself up. It was an impossible job to start with. Suicide missions have had better odds than we had in there.’

  She shook her head, staring down at her feet. ‘You’re just saying that.’

  ‘No, I’d have been extremely surprised if it had gone any other way, under the circumstances. Because Donath knows perfectly well what this is really about. Whatever else he may be, he’s not an idiot. He was there in Korea, risking getting shot to pieces by People’s Army troopers for the sake of the Parati. He’s probably every bit as committed to the whole insane plan as Streicher is. And now, thanks to both FIS and us landing on him in quick succession, he knows that panic buttons have been pressed and that Streicher must somehow have succeeded in getting what he’s been after all this time. We might as well have typed up the whole report for him. Which makes it even less likely that he’d spill the beans on his old pal. Our timing couldn’t have been less subtle. So relax. This approach never stood a chance in hell.’

  She looked at him with a frown of consternation. ‘If you knew that all along, then why did you come here?’

  ‘I felt I had to,’ Ben replied simply. ‘Because what the governor told us just now only confirmed what Luc Simon mentioned in Lyon, about the problems they’ve had keeping Donath in this place. He obviously needs something more calming than four pink walls to quell his less peaceable tendencies.’

  ‘I know they’re moving him,’ she said. ‘What difference does that make for us? We can’t make him talk either way.’

  They walked slowly on towards the waiting car. It was another black DS5. Rudy, their designated driver, had spotted them coming and fired up the motor.

  ‘It’s like Luc said,’ Ben told her. ‘This isn’t Guantanamo Bay.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, the kind of penal system that allows dangerous and violent criminals to enjoy supervised holidays and horse-riding in the country isn’t exactly going to transport this guy between prisons in an armoured truck with a full complement of gunned-up guards and a police motorcycle escort. It’ll most likely be an ordinary prison service van with a driver and co-driver and nobody else. Which means a degree of vulnerability in transit. An easily exploited opportunity, for someone with the right motivation.’

  Silvie paused with her hand on the car door handle. ‘Shit. Do you think that’s Streicher’s next move? To try to get him out?’

  Ben made a non-committal gesture. ‘Hijacking a prison van wouldn’t be a one-man job. Minimum of two, I’d say. It’s been done plenty of times before. In the UK, springing fellow thugs out of the hands of private security firms is down to a fine art.’

  Silvie reflected. ‘Streicher and Hannah Gissel. I can see it. But Jesus, do you think they’d have the balls to pull it off? In broad daylight?’

  ‘I think it’s highly likely that somebody crazy enough would be seriously tempted to give it a bash,’ Ben said.

  ‘You could be right,’ Silvie said. ‘In which case, we haven’t got a lot of time to prepare. Heckethorn said Donath would be out of there by midday.’

  Ben glanced at his new watch. It was identical to the one he’d lost, minus a few scuffs and scratches that wouldn’t take long to reappear. He said, ‘We have a little under two hours. Call Luc Simon. Get him to lean on FIS and arrange for the Hummer to be flown right away to Emmen Air Base, which is the nearest military airfield from here. Tell him to load into it that equipment we talked about. He’s got to move fast.’

  Silvie whipped out her phone and started hitting keys. ‘What about us?’

  Ben opened the car door. ‘We’re going to go and grab some breakfast,’ he said.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  At precisely 11.58 that morning, Bezirksgefängnis Altdorf waved a relieved farewell to its former inmate Miki Donath. Guards stood by, trying not to smile with pleasure, and Governor Heckethorn watched from the safety of his window as the prison van drove out of the gates. Donath was finally off their hands. In two hours or less, he’d be arriving at his new home in Regensdorf, where the stricter regime might keep him in check as he served out the rest of his sentence.

  The prison van was manned by a driver and co-driver. It was a simple short-distance transfer, meaning no stops were required, meaning no extra manpower. They cut through the quiet streets of Altdorf and headed out of town, south-eastwards on Seedorferstrasse towards Bahnhofstrasse and then t
hrough a series of roundabouts and junctions to catch the A4 motorway heading up towards Zurich and Regensdorf a little way further north.

  It never made it as far as the motorway.

  The incident would later be described in detail to the Swiss police by a number of badly shaken eye-witnesses, among them a travelling British wine buyer named Greg Turnbull who’d been taking an easy, meandering route through Switzerland with a couple of days in hand before meeting a client in Italy. Turnbull’s police statement related how he’d been driving through the outskirts of Altdorf when his Jaguar had been overtaken by a speeding black Mercedes saloon that had cut him up badly and then swerved unexpectedly and violently across the road, forcing dozens of cars to slam on their brakes. Turnbull’s Jaguar had been among the snarled-up mass of traffic that ended up strewn all over the road.

  Forty yards ahead, the Mercedes had skidded to a halt at an angle, blocking the path of an unmarked white van. Turnbull said he’d been vaguely aware of the van’s heavy-built, boxy shape and reinforced window frames with unusually small, thick panes of glass. Only when it had been forced to a standstill did it strike him that it was a prison vehicle. That was when his heart started thumping and he began to realise what he was witnessing. Some drivers had been honking their horns in anger, unaware of the dynamics of the unfolding situation. They quickly stopped after what happened next.

  The doors of the black Mercedes opened and two people got out. Turnbull described them accurately as wearing black jackets and ski-masks. One was taller, perhaps six feet or a little under. The other was a few inches shorter and more slightly built. Turnbull wasn’t the only witness who thought it could have been a woman. The two figures strode quickly up to the prison van. The taller one pulled out a handgun and stood in front of the van with the weapon pointed at the windscreen. The second figure produced a hammer, smashing the driver’s window and then yanking open his door.