‘You mean people like you?’
Roth waved a hand. ‘Oh, I’m really just a tiny, inconsequential component of the machine. As, indeed, is Tartarus itself. We fulfil a vital function, to be sure – but of necessity and for reasons you can now appreciate, we remain obscure to all but a precious few.’
Ben just stared at him.
‘I understand this must all come as something of a shock to you, Benedict. You’re a soldier, and as such your world is a relatively simple one. Your only responsibility is to the men under you. You don’t have a country to run. You don’t make the bigger decisions, so there’s never any need for men of your station – should I say your current station – to see the bigger picture. Believe me, if you could, you’d understand only too clearly that the things we do, unpleasant as they may be, are a necessary evil that serve the greater good.’
‘Like blowing up half of Oxford Street,’ Ben said. ‘Innocent men, women and children. Your own people. You’re a piece of terrorist shit.’
Roth shook his head. ‘I’m afraid that for all his efficacy as an agent, Egerton Sinclair had only the crudest understanding of Tartarus’ mission. We are not terrorists. Lord, no. Our role isn’t to create fear for its own sake, but to generate peace and social contentment among our citizenry. Exactly like small children, left to their own devices they will simply run out of control, ignoring their parents’ wishes, all notion of discipline gone by the board. However, it takes only a little fright, a little pervading menace, to make them come running back to clutch at their mother’s skirts for protection. At this moment, the people of London are more bound together by a sense of unity, and more responsive to the control of the state, than they have been in years. They object far less than they might have to the massive police presence on the streets, or to the cameras watching them from every rooftop. For the most part, they’re deeply grateful for what freedom they’re granted. Crime rates have dropped; the voter turnout at the next election will soar. The police haven’t had to deal with a single peace demonstration since the day of the attack. Why? Only thanks to our humble efforts.’
Roth waved his arm. ‘But I ramble on. Let’s get to the point. I mentioned earlier that I had instructed Sinclair to tell you the truth about the department; what I didn’t feel the need to make him aware of were my reasons for doing so. You see, I particularly wanted to have this discussion with you, Benedict. I’ve thoroughly examined your files. Your Oxford background caught my eye. You attended the same college as I did, as it happens.’
‘If you’ve read the file, you know that I dropped out.’
Roth chuckled. ‘No matter. The old boy network still counts for something in this decaying empire of ours. And believe me, it’s considerably harder to get out than it is to get in. Then there’s your superlative military record. Men of your qualities don’t drop into our lap as often as I’d like. I believe you would find a career with us highly stimulating. Indeed, I think you’d be ideal material. In many ways, you remind me of myself, at your age.’
‘That’s nasty,’ Ben said.
‘I understand your reaction,’ Roth said, peering at Ben with an almost affectionate expression. ‘In some small way, I even admire it. But stop. Think. We could make you a very handsome proposition.’
‘You want me to replace the likes of Moss and Sinclair.’
‘You’re thirty-three years old, Benedict. The peak of physical fitness doesn’t last forever. Sadly, I speak from experience. I was once a soldier much like yourself. The successive phases of a man’s career must inevitably yield to change. Where do you see yourself, five, ten, twenty years in the future? Still running around the world’s war zones, dodging bullets?’ Roth motioned at Ben’s injured side. ‘Indeed, not always dodging them. There are other avenues for a man like you to pursue; and I think you ought to consider them carefully and wisely.’
‘You can have my answer right now, if you like.’
‘Don’t be rash, my boy. Ira furor brevis est. That’s Latin for …’
‘I know what it means,’ Ben cut in. ‘“Anger is a brief madness”.’
‘More educated than you give yourself credit for, Benedict. And it would indeed be madness to reject my offer out of mere rage. For your own sake, why don’t you take the time to cool off and reflect objectively about your potential future with us?’ Sinclair jutted out his chin thoughtfully. ‘However, I’m afraid I can’t just allow you to wander about freely during that time, pending an assurance of your commitment. It seems to me that our safehouse on Little Cayman would be the perfect relaxing environment in which to decide on your future.’
‘Palm Tree Lodge?’
‘Of course – you’re already familiar with it. That’s settled, then. I shall arrange for the Gulfstream to fly you to Grand Cayman in the next few hours. From there, my men will accompany you aboard a CIC charter flight to Little Cayman.’
‘That’s a bit rich,’ Ben said. ‘Or maybe there’ll really be a bomb on board this time?’
‘Nothing could be further from the truth. Rest assured you’ll be well looked after. At a prearranged time on the third day, you’ll be picked up by boat and brought out for an interview with the Tartarus committee to discuss the terms of your recruitment. This will take place aboard my sailing yacht, the Hydra. I have a personal fondness for the Caymans and often travel there to attend to financial matters.’
‘I don’t suppose Tartarus uses internet banking,’ Ben said.
‘There will be some further conditions,’ Roth went on gravely. ‘The phone with which you’ll be issued will allow you to communicate with me, and me only. I shall require you to wear an electronic tag preventing you from venturing more than one hundred yards from the safehouse. Any attempt to tamper with it, or to make contact with anyone on the outside, will entail severe repercussions. Do you understand me?’
‘Would you understand me if I told you to stick your offer up your arse, Roth? Or shall I do it for you?’
Roth looked at him. The pale eyes seemed to burn for an instant. ‘That’s a rambling old place you have there in Galway. Your housekeeper, Winifred – perhaps a trifle elderly to be looking after it on her own? You must be aware of the potential risks. Accidents can happen. Fires are terribly common in these older properties. It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?’
Ben said nothing.
‘Three days,’ Roth said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Ben wished they’d picked a more companionable pair of goons to chaperone him. The older, less talkative one was rangy and bandy-legged, with a face pitted and bombed by acne and eyes as dead as a fish on a slab. The other had breath that smelled as if he chewed a pound of raw garlic a day. To make matters worse, he insisted on sticking to Ben’s side the entire time and was sitting next to him as the Gulfstream sped from Heathrow to Grand Cayman. Ben was barely allowed to visit the bathroom on his own. When he came out, the guy was standing there, breathing all over the corridor, waiting to escort him back to his seat.
‘What took you so long?’ the goon said.
‘I was looking to see if they had any industrial strength mouthwash for you, Stinker,’ Ben told him. ‘Maybe gargle with some neat bleach? That’ll do the trick.’
Hemmed into the window seat, he dozed for most of the remainder of the flight. After landing at Grand Cayman just after midday, local time, his escorts steered him away from passport control and walked him under the hot sun to a waiting car that blasted northwards up the Seven Mile Beach road to Cayman Islands Charter.
Neither goon seemed to appreciate the irony as the three of them boarded the CIC Trislander. Ben noticed there were only five other passengers – business didn’t seem to be picking up yet, and the gaunt face of the flight attendant, a dark-haired woman he took to be Jo Sundermann, showed that Nick’s former colleagues were still stunned by his loss.
Sitting beside Stinker in the cramped interior of the Trislander was a good deal worse than aboard the spacious Gulfstream
. Bandy Legs folded himself into the seat behind. Ben could feel the dead eyes boring into the back of his head. After the short, bumpy takeoff the flight attendant came round serving drinks. Ben had nothing. Stinker bought a can of Coke, cracked it open and took the occasional slurp.
Fifteen minutes into the flight, ignoring Stinker’s astonished stare, Ben casually slipped his last pack of Jordanian cigarettes from his pocket, took one out and lit up with a flourish. He smiled and leaned back in his seat, watching the smoke drift across the aircraft’s narrow interior.
A few feet away, a woman passenger twitched her nose, gave a little splutter and elbowed her husband as if to say ‘do something’. The guy twisted around in his seat and his face turned purple. ‘Hey. Maybe you can’t read, pal? There’s no smoking in here.’
‘It’s for the smell,’ Ben said, pointing at Stinker. ‘I couldn’t stand it any longer.’
A small argument broke out, during which Ben kept on puffing at the cigarette. It wasn’t long before the flight attendant emerged from the front of the plane. ‘Sir, I need you to put that out right now,’ she said sternly. ‘We operate a strict no smoking policy on board.’
‘You’re right. I’m sorry, everyone.’ Ben dropped the half-smoked cigarette with a sizzle into Stinker’s Coke can. ‘And it’s about time I gave up this disgusting habit. Would you mind disposing of these for me, please, Miss?’ He held out the cigarette packet. The flight attendant looked at it hesitantly, glanced back at Ben and then took it from his hand. ‘I’ll do that for you, sir.’
‘I appreciate it. The name’s Ben.’
‘That’s enough chatting up the women,’ Stinker muttered when she’d headed back towards the front of the plane. ‘Don’t pull any more capers like that again.’
‘I won’t,’ Ben said. ‘That’s a promise.’
On arrival at Little Cayman airport, Ben’s chaperones led him to another car. ‘I guess you know the way,’ he said as they bundled him into the back seat. They did, and a few minutes later he was making his second visit to Palm Tree Lodge. The damage to the door had been repaired and the fresh woodwork painted white. The goons opened the place up, marched Ben inside and made him sit on a chair while his right trouser leg was rolled up, his sock rolled down and the electronic tag clasped around his ankle.
‘Don’t even think about messing with it,’ Bandy Legs warned him when the device was locked into place.
‘Repercussions,’ Ben said. ‘I know the routine.’
‘This is your phone,’ Stinker said, laying a mobile on the sideboard. ‘You can’t make calls with it. Incoming only.’
‘So the Little Cayman Sex Hotline is out?’ Ben said. ‘What I am going to do for entertainment?’
Thirty minutes later, he was alone. Wandering about the house with the tag weighing uncomfortably on his ankle, he found the fridge stocked full of provisions: nothing too fancy, mainly cold chicken legs and salads, but enough to keep him reasonably nourished for the next three days. There was a six-pack of mineral water, cartons of fruit juice and – delight of delights – even a few bottles of Red Stripe Jamaican lager.
Whoever had gone shopping for him had also been busy removing the TV, radio and landline phone and installing the base station for the tag device. The steel box that contained it was securely bolted to the living room floor. A red LED flashed more or less quickly depending on how far away Ben stood from it. He guessed it would trigger a remote alarm the instant he moved more than a hundred yards from that spot: just far enough to allow him to dip his toes at high tide and stroll a short distance up and down the beach. After studying the metal casing for a few minutes he decided there probably wasn’t any way to deactivate either it or the tag without alerting his captors.
With nothing else to do, he grabbed a Red Stripe from the fridge and went to sit on the front steps to drink it. The bottle was small, amber glass, twelve fluid ounces in volume and nicely chilled.
As Ben sipped the cold beer and gazed out across the beach to the gentle blue waves, he pondered what he’d said earlier on about giving up smoking.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Mid-afternoon on the third day, Ben was sitting barefoot on the warm sand in front of Palm Tree Lodge when he felt the tingle of the phone’s silent ringer in his pocket and fished it out to answer.
‘Have you made your decision?’ said Roth’s gravelly voice.
‘I have,’ Ben answered.
‘Then what is it to be, Benedict: are you in or out?’
‘You don’t leave me a lot of choice, Roth. I’m coming on board.’
‘Excellent. The Hydra is at anchor a couple of miles offshore. My colleagues are all looking forward to meeting you.’
‘I’m looking forward to it too,’ Ben said.
‘The boat’s on its way. Twenty minutes.’ Roth hung up.
Ben padded across the sand to the house. Walking into the kitchen he tore two sheets of kitchen roll from the dispenser. When he’d finished with them he poured himself a glass of chilled grapefruit juice and drank it slowly. In the hallway he slipped on his shoes and laced them up, then left the house and walked back down the beach as far as the tag would allow, close to the lapping tide-line. The sea breeze ruffled his shirt and his hair. Shielding his eyes from the bright sun, he scanned the horizon.
Soon afterwards, a tiny white dot appeared on the sea and grew rapidly larger until Ben could make out the splash of foam from the motorboat’s bows and the faces of the two men on board. A few yards from the shore, its pilot cut the motor and let the boat glide to a halt in the shallow water. Ben didn’t recognise him, but the second occupant was familiar enough. Stinker gave a leer as he climbed out and crossed the wet sand towards Ben. The black rubber butt of a 9mm protruded from the holster in his waistband. ‘Been a good little doggy?’ he said.
‘Good as gold,’ Ben told him. ‘You flossed today?’
Stinker’s face reddened. He motioned for Ben to hold out his leg, took a key from his pocket and bent down and roughly undid the ankle tag.
‘Let’s go,’ the pilot said, and fired up the outboard.
Ben splashed over to the boat and climbed in, his leg feeling strangely light after getting used to the lump around his ankle for three days. The pilot steered the burbling boat around and away from the shore. ‘Pickup complete,’ Stinker said into his phone. ‘We’re on our way.’
Ben sat quietly as the motorboat rode over the sea and Little Cayman shrank into the distance behind them. For the first few minutes of the journey, Stinker eyed him with suspicion; then, realising Ben wasn’t going to be any trouble, he grinned smugly to himself and looked away.
That was when Ben slipped his hand in his pocket, took out the small package he’d carefully double-wrapped in kitchen roll, and laid it on the seat next to him. He started unwrapping it.
Before Stinker could take notice of what he was doing or react in any way, Ben had stepped across the boat towards him, drawn back his elbow and punched the pointed end of the four-inch sliver of broken Red Stripe bottle hard into the side of his neck, just below the ear.
Stinker would have let out a scream, but Ben’s hand was over his mouth and once the razor-sharp glass sawing rapidly across his throat had sliced through the gristle of his trachea, he had no air to make a sound. Ben moved out of the way of the blood spray. He let the man’s upper body flop backwards over the side and held onto his belt long enough to grab his phone from his pocket and the pistol from its holster.
The pilot hadn’t heard a thing over the noise of the outboard, but sensing the rock of the boat he turned to see what was happening behind him. Ben shot him twice in the head and heaved his body into the water with Stinker’s. The motorboat’s wake turned frothy red. It wouldn’t be long before the sharks turned up.
Taking over at the wheel, Ben used Stinker’s phone to make a call. ‘It’s me. Everything ready?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The beautiful, stately three-masted hundred-metre sailing y
acht had cost her present owner just a shade over eight million pounds. She was capable of twenty knots under a full spread of canvas, more if her massive auxiliary engines were brought to bear. At the moment, though, her loose-hanging sails crackled in the soft breeze and cast a welcome shade over the deck as she stood at anchor just out of sight of Little Cayman.
Lounging in that shade, sipping on tall iced drinks, chatting and laughing, most of them casually attired in shorts and sandals and polo tops or florid Hawaii shirts, were nine of the world’s publicly least-known but most influential power-brokers: the senior committee of the organisation known only as Tartarus. Their ages ranged from early fifties to late seventies; between them they possessed over three and a half centuries’ worth of experience at the highest, most secretive level of international politics, and the kind of knowledge that could tear a government down and reduce its country to rubble overnight. With the recent exception of Hayden Roth, not one of them had personally discharged a firearm at a living human being for many years – yet the total of the victims they’d claimed during their careers couldn’t easily be counted.
‘Excuse me one moment, gentlemen,’ said Roth. He carried his clinking gin and tonic over to the chrome rail that lined the deck, and looked at his watch. The boat should arrive soon, he thought. His eyes shaded from the sun by the brim of his Panama hat, he scanned the blue horizon. No sign of it yet. Had there been some delay?
At that moment, his phone rang. He snatched it up. ‘Jenner, where are—?’
‘Jenner’s indisposed at the moment,’ Ben said on the other end of the line.
Roth was too thunderstruck to utter a reply.
‘Look up,’ Ben told him. ‘Due south. You should be able to see me. I’m that little yellow speck in the sky.’ He had to talk loudly over the thrumming rumble of the single radial propeller engine a few feet above him. From where he was sitting behind the Supermarine Sea Otter’s mass of dials and gauges, he could just about make out the majestic sails of the Hydra far below. He eased the joystick, bringing the aircraft down in a shallow dive closer to the waves.
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