Wolf still didn’t move.
Ben found himself locked in an internal struggle. Part of his mind told him that Wolf had to die. Another part of him, the part that had so dreaded having to kill a former friend and comrade, was relieved at the prospect of letting someone else do it. Which would happen in about the next two seconds if he simply stood by and did nothing.
But there was a third part of his mind that wanted to overrule both. The part that couldn’t let this happen either way. And that was the part that prevailed. Ben raised his pistol, squared his sights on the man with the hook, and now it all came together, smooth and effortless. The four-pound trigger broke crisply and the gun flashed and boomed in his hands and the 147-grain full metal jacket bullet erupted from the barrel and reached the target in six hundredths of a second and drilled him straight through the brain pan.
One shot, one kill. The man with the hook was dead even before his body slumped over the edge of the shelf and dropped like a sack of wet washing into the hollow, still clutching the sawn-off. His hook clanged against the rocky ground. He twitched once, then lay still.
Wolf had jumped to his feet like a startled leopard, poised for action, moving to reach for the rifle at his side. Ben stood up and put away the Browning. Raised both hands in the air to show that he was unarmed. He called out, ‘Jaden. Stop.’
Wolf froze. Staring at Ben, his eyes narrowing in recognition. He said nothing.
Ben called out, ‘You know me. I’m Ben.’
Wolf replied, slowly and suspiciously, ‘Yeah, I know who you are. Major Hope. What a surprise, you just happening to turn up like this.’
‘I’m not a major any more.’
‘Then what are you? Just another gun for hire, right?’
Ben said nothing. In that moment he had no plan, no clear idea of what he was doing. All he could think was that somehow they could talk their way through this. But Wolf had other ideas. His arm flashed out to make a grab for the rifle.
Ben whipped out his pistol again and beat him to the draw. ‘Don’t even think about it, Jaden. We’re not going to do that.’
Wolf stopped. He let his arm hang loose at his side, but he didn’t move back from the rifle. ‘Then what are we going to do?’
‘We’re going to talk,’ Ben said. ‘You and me. Right here. We’re going to figure this out. But first I need you to take a step away from the weapon.’
Wolf edged away. His eyes were hard. ‘They sent you here, didn’t they?’
‘I’m not going to lie to you, Jaden. I never have.’
‘Then don’t, Ben. Tell me that they sent you to kill me.’
‘You’re right,’ Ben told him. ‘They sent me here to kill you.’
Wolf pulled a sour face. ‘Looks like everyone’s out hunting for me these days. Nice to know I’m so popular.’
‘But if I wanted you dead, all I had to do was let Captain Hook there do it for me. He had you cold.’ Ben motioned the barrel of the gun towards the dead man.
Wolf allowed himself a dark smile, a glint of gold catching the moonlight. ‘Must be getting slow in my old age. Then why didn’t you?’
Ben shrugged. ‘I’m still trying to figure that one out myself. Maybe it’s because you were one of my guys, back in the day. Or maybe it’s because I’m just a big softy at heart.’
Wolf pointed at the body. ‘Tell that to him.’
‘When I shoot someone, I like to think that they had it coming. He doesn’t strike me as the friendly type.’
‘So you don’t think I have it coming?’
‘Do you?’
Wolf shrugged. ‘Does it matter what I think?’
‘I don’t know what you’ve done to piss these people off so badly,’ Ben replied. ‘I don’t even know who they are.’
‘The gypsies?’
‘Not them. The other guys.’
Wolf said, ‘They’re bad people.’
‘You’re no angel yourself, Jaden.’
‘Trust me. Next to them, I’m a saint.’ Wolf shook his head and sighed. ‘I’m done with them. Finished. Should have got out a long time ago.’
‘Wisdom sometimes comes a little late. They’re obviously not so keen on letting you just walk away.’
‘How much did they pay you?’
Ben shook his head. ‘That’s a hell of a thing to say to me.’
‘But you still took the job.’
Ben said, ‘I had to.’
‘Then why don’t you finish it? You got me. I’m a sitting duck.’
‘Because there has to be some other way,’ Ben said. ‘It can’t go like this.’
‘Prove it. Put the pistol down.’
Ben put it down.
Wolf said, ‘Now kick it away.’
Ben kicked it away. The pistol tumbled over the lip of the ledge. He heard it clatter down the slope, well out of reach.
Wolf nodded. Another glint of gold caught the moonlight. ‘Nice one, Major.’ He took a fast step back towards the rifle and scooped it up. ‘Self-preservation,’ he said. ‘The strongest and oldest instinct we have. I learned that a long time ago.’
‘I know you did,’ Ben said. ‘From me. So if you’re going to shoot me, shoot. Make it quick.’
Wolf raised the rifle to his shoulder and took careful aim at Ben through the scope. His finger was on the trigger and his hold was steady. There was no way he could miss. Ben stood there ready to take it. A chill settled over him. If he’d failed, he deserved what he had coming now.
After a few seconds, Wolf seemed to change his mind. He lowered the rifle. Shook his head. ‘Well, there you go. Looks like we’re both a couple of softies at heart.’
Ben replied, ‘The four men you killed tonight might not see it that way. Or was it five?’
Wolf shrugged, like it was nothing. ‘Day I got here, some bunch of arseholes in the town were trying to set fire to a stray dog. We had a minor disagreement over it. Had a feeling they might raise a few pals and come looking for me, to settle the matter.’
Ben had to smile. ‘Still standing up for our furry friends, I see.’
‘You’d have done the same.’
‘Yes, I would.’
‘Can’t say I was expecting you, though. How’d you find me?’
‘It wasn’t as hard as you’d have liked it to be,’ Ben said. ‘Even the most careful man leaves a trail, if you know where to look. And that’s your problem. Because you have some very motivated enemies. You’re in deep shit, Jaden.’
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
‘So what now?’ Wolf asked.
Ben replied, ‘Now we try and figure out how we’re going to come out of this alive.’
Chapter 15
Ben and Wolf dragged away the body of the dead man with the hook, then sat together in the rocky hollow. They seemed to have arrived at an uneasy kind of truce, but there was still tension between them. Ben lit a Gauloise, not offering one to Wolf since he knew the man had never smoked in his life and wouldn’t start now.
‘Those things’ll kill you,’ Wolf said, watching with a frown.
Ben took another puff and blew smoke. ‘Says the guy whose employers put a hit out on him. We’re all living on borrowed time, one way or another.’
‘Former employers,’ Wolf reminded him. ‘I told you, I don’t work for those scumbags any more.’
‘Doesn’t sound as though you handed in your formal resignation. Sounds more like you just walked away.’
‘What difference does it make? Once you’re in, there’s no getting out. Unless you get all the way out. You have no idea what you’re dealing with.’
Ben asked, ‘Who’s Saunders?’
Wolf gave Ben an empty stare. ‘I don’t know anyone called Saunders.’
Ben wasn’t surprised by his reply. Everything in Wolf’s former world was lies and shadows. ‘You were a government spook.’
‘I was never on the inside,’ Wolf said. ‘I was just the guy they called when they had a problem that needed to
be dealt with.’
‘What kind of problem?’ As though Ben couldn’t guess.
Wolf shrugged. ‘I suppose you could say I worked in the sanitation department. Cleaning up other people’s mess.’
‘Tell it straight. You became a professional killer.’
‘Isn’t that what we all were, back in the day? We never really knew the truth behind all the dirty little wars we risked our necks for all those years. Money, oil, political double-dealings, whatever the inside track was. Half the time we were as much in the dark about the reality of it as the people back home reading the censored version in their newspapers. It wasn’t our job to ask why. We just went where they sent us and did what we were told.’
Ben knew that was true. It was the moral dilemma that had eventually caused him to quit his military career and seek to use his skills in better ways. ‘We’ve all done things we’re not proud of,’ he said.
‘Yeah, well, that’s just how things are,’ Wolf said. ‘I had the skills. They had the cash. A lot of cash. I was tired of the army, looking for a new gig and I took the job. Seemed like a good idea at the time.’
‘So that’s what it was all about, the money?’
‘I got around to thinking that if I was going to put my arse on the line every day, I wanted to get properly paid for it.’
Ben was saddened that Wolf had stooped to becoming a killer for hire. But that was one of the realities of their world. Men with little to no experience of the civilian world, who’d received years of expert training in the art of death and knew how to do nothing else, often found it hard to adapt to a normal life. For many, who over the years had become hardened and cynical towards the value of human life, the money was just too much temptation.
‘How long did you do it for?’
‘Too long,’ Wolf said.
‘Sounds like you weren’t happy in your work.’
‘You don’t do a job like that because you enjoy it. Sometimes it really gets to you. I had rules. One golden rule above all. No women, no kids. I had to trust that the scumbags I took out were the bad guys. But I had my doubts. Serious doubts, more and more. I started wanting out years ago. But the jobs kept coming, and I kept thinking, just one more and I’m done. I just kept putting the money by and looking forward to the day that I’d eventually walk away.’
‘And then that day came,’ Ben said. ‘What made you finally decide to make the break?’
Wolf was silent for a beat, then replied, ‘Some things are just too fucking crazy, that’s what.’ He looked uncomfortable and didn’t seem to want to say more. ‘So what’s your story?’
‘I’ve been in business for myself for a long time,’ Ben said.
‘Doing what? Working contracts on guys like me?’
‘No, Jaden, trying to use the things they taught us to bring a bit of good into this world.’
Wolf laughed bitterly. ‘Good luck with that. I hope business is going well.’
‘Well enough.’
‘And yet, somehow, here you are, showing up looking for me with a gun in your hand. So much for doing good.’
‘You want to know how this came about.’
‘Damn right I do.’
Ben filled him in. ‘A man calling himself Saunders approached me on a plane. He told me very little about himself, but he knew all about our shared past history. Which means he has access to top-level clearance Ministry records. Said you’d left the reservation and had to face the consequences. That he had people on your trail but so far they’d failed to track you down. And he enlisted my services with an offer that was hard to refuse.’
Wolf pulled a cynical smile. ‘I get it. Business is never quite good enough. Not when they dangle a big bag of money under your nose.’
‘It wasn’t about money. They have me in a clinch, Jaden. The deal is that someone I care for will die if I don’t serve them your head on a platter. And I’ll admit, until I got here tonight and found you, that was exactly what I intended to give them. I didn’t change my mind until the last minute.’
Wolf looked piercingly at him. ‘What’s stopping you from changing it back again?’
Ben shook his head. ‘There has to be another way. For everyone’s sake.’
‘This person you care about. It’s a woman, right? They’re threatening her?’
Ben nodded. ‘And the clock is ticking.’
‘But right now you’re risking her life, for the sake of mine. Sounds like you got your priorities in a twist. Not that I’m complaining.’
Ben was silent for a while, then replied, ‘The fact is, Jaden, even if I was okay about killing you, killing you wouldn’t end this. It’s like you said. Once you’re in, these people don’t let you go. I do this job for them, they’ll line up another. And another. They won’t go away. And neither will the axe hanging over Grace’s head. She doesn’t know it yet, but that’s the price she pays for getting mixed up with a man like me.’
‘That’s her name, Grace?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Nice name. I like it.’
Ben said, ‘Me too. And I kind of like the person it belongs to, as well.’
‘Do you love her?’
Ben paused a beat. ‘I think I do, yes.’
‘Too bad. Romance is a bitch for the likes of us. That’s why I never got too involved with anyone.’
‘It’s not only Grace. I have a sister, Ruth. Saunders knew all about her, too. No specific threats, but there didn’t have to be. They know all the weak points they can use to make me their puppet. Sooner or later, if I refused to go on doing their dirty work for them, the people I care about would be made to suffer. The only way out of it, for me and for them, would be to put a pistol in my mouth and blow my own brains out. That’s not an option for me, not yet.’
‘Looks like you need to find another option, then,’ Wolf said.
Ben looked at him. ‘Not just me, Jaden. You too. Because this doesn’t stop with me. You’re not safe here.’
Wolf shook his head. ‘Screw that. They won’t find me.’
‘I found you,’ Ben said.
‘Yeah, but you’re you. Who else is that good?’
‘That’s an assumption you can’t afford to make,’ Ben said. ‘Just like I can’t afford to assume that the men watching Grace aren’t every bit as skilled as the likes of you and me.’
Wolf fell silent. Thinking. Measuring Ben’s words, and frowning as though something was deeply troubling him.
Finally he said, ‘You asked me what I’d done to piss them off so badly. The answer is that I screwed up a hit. It happens sometimes. Not to me, not before this. But there are contingency protocols just in case. They could either assign it to someone else, or they could give me a second chance at it. Doesn’t do your track record any favours, but it’s not the end of the world.’
Ben said, ‘Okay then, so why are they so keen for you to be dead?’
Wolf replied, ‘It’s what I know, Ben. It’s what I saw.’
Chapter 16
Ben stared at Wolf, not understanding. Here was a stone-hard former Special Forces warrior and self-confessed professional assassin, a man Ben had seen maintain total calmness and composure in the most intense heat of battle when everyone else was losing their mind, a man who must have committed all manner of terrible actions during his post-military career, looking positively freaked out by whatever secret he was holding onto.
Ben said, ‘What you saw.’
Wolf nodded hesitantly. He swallowed. Tried to smile, but it came out as a twisted, nervous grimace. ‘Yeah. That’s right.’
Ben said, ‘You’ve watched your friends and comrades get torn to pieces and their body parts scattered over the ground. You’ve been into raided villages where every single man, woman and child had been hacked to pieces by the troops of crazy warlords. Witnessed things that most people couldn’t dream up in their worst nightmares. What could be worse than that?’
Wolf held the grimace for a moment longer, then his expression
hardened. ‘You really want to know, then I can show you something like you’ve never seen before.’
Wolf reached for his holdall and unzipped a side pocket, from which he took a glossy black slimline phone. He said, ‘They issue us phones, but this one is my own. It can’t be tracked or traced to me. I always use it for work, and I had it with me that night.’
Ben shook his head. ‘What night?’
‘The night of the spring equinox,’ Wolf said. ‘The night I used it to video what I witnessed.’
Now Ben was even more confused. ‘What are you talking about, Jaden? What the hell does the spring equinox have to do with this?’
‘There are things in this world that are best not known about,’ Wolf said. ‘Forces at play you can’t imagine.’
Ben looked at him. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? This thing has got you scared shitless.’
‘And so would you be, if you had any idea of what I’m talking about.’
‘Try me.’
‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Wolf said. ‘Because once you see this, there’s no going back. You’ll never be the same again.’
‘Enough,’ Ben said. ‘Just show me.’
‘Fine. You asked for it.’ Wolf turned on the phone and spent a moment swiping and tapping. When the thing he was searching for came up on the screen, he keyed in a password. ‘I’ve encrypted the video file. This isn’t something I’d want anyone to see.’ Quickly, as though he couldn’t bear to look at it, he thrust the phone into Ben’s hands.
And for the second time in thirty-six hours, Ben found himself being shown a video clip. He looked quizzically at Wolf, but Wolf had his eyes averted. Ben looked back at the screen. The image was fuzzy and dark and moving about too much to make sense of. Thin black lines crisscrossed and obscured the frame. He said, ‘There’s something in front of the lens.’
‘Branches,’ Wolf said, keeping his head turned away. ‘I was hiding in the trees. Keep watching and you’ll understand why.’
‘Where did you film this?’ Ben asked.
‘Just watch.’
Ben watched, and after a few moments the picture became clearer and the scene began to unfold. The image was unsteady but the definition was sharp enough to make out details. It was night-time. He saw a lake, its waters still and dark except for the shimmer of moonlight glittering on its surface. At the centre of the lake was a wooded island, all in shadow. This side of the water, a sloping lawn led down to the shore. In the background stood a large, impressive house that could have been described as a mansion. Its windows were dark and only the moonlight illuminated its stately architecture.
The Demon Club Page 9
