The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Getting drunk.’ He poured the last of the wine into his glass. The band had gone into a slow, melancholy set of traditional Greek songs, joined by a female singer.

  ‘What do you do for a living?’ Esmeralda asked.

  ‘I’m just a student.’

  ‘What happened to your neck?’

  ‘You ask a lot of questions.’

  She smiled. ‘I would like to get to know you better, that’s all.’

  He reached across for her hand. ‘Would you like to dance?’

  She nodded. He led her over to the small dance floor. She glanced back at the handbag on the table. ‘It’ll be OK there,’ he said.

  The dance was slow and sensual. Her bare arms were warm against his hands. The strap of her dress kept sliding down her shoulder. Her skin was the colour of honey, and the lights sparkled in her dark eyes. Ben drew her closer to him, felt her body crush up against him, and then the soft heat of her lips on his.

  ‘I have a place on the beach,’ he said. ‘It’s not far to walk. We could be alone there.’

  She looked up at him. Her face was a little flushed and her breathing had quickened. She squeezed his hand. Nodded quickly. ‘Let’s go.’

  They left the taverna and made their way back across the moonlit sand. The beach was empty, just the murmur of the surf and the music in the distance. She slipped off her high heels and walked barefoot. He circled his arm around her slim waist, feeling the litheness of her muscles as she walked. He stumbled again, and she laughed as she helped him to his feet. ‘You are ebrio’, she giggled.

  ‘Completely rat-arsed. I’ve been drinking all day.’

  They got back to the beach house. He fumbled with his key, dropped it and searched drunkenly around on the sandy doorstep, muttering curses. ‘Here it is,’ he slurred.

  Esmeralda tried the handle. ‘It’s open anyway,’ she laughed. The door swung ajar. She walked inside and he followed, holding onto her arm. He flipped on the light and let go of her as they entered. Let her move away from him until she was at arm’s length.

  Then he delivered a ridge-hand strike to the side of her neck and she crumpled to the floor without a sound.

  It was a blow designed to stun, not to kill. He kneeled quickly over her inert body and ripped open her fallen handbag. Feeling inside, his fingers touched cool steel. He quickly pulled the pistol out. It was more or less what he’d expected it to be from its weight when he’d picked up the handbag at the taverna. A Beretta 92F semi-automatic. The hefty 9mm was cocked and locked. He flipped off the safety.

  At the other end of the room, the door through to the kitchen burst open. Ben had expected that too. He fired a rapid double-tap and the Beretta bucked against his palm.

  The intruder ran right into it. The bullets struck him in the chest and he crashed back against the side of the door, his gun flying out of his hand and spinning away across the floorboards. He slumped down and lay still, chin on his chest, blood on his lips.

  Ben’s ears were ringing from the gunfire. He checked the front door. The beach was still empty. The walls of the house would have muffled the shots enough to prevent them carrying too clearly all the way to the taverna. He strode quickly back into the room and locked the door.

  The woman was beginning to stir, groaning and clutching her neck. He stepped over her and picked up the dead intruder’s pistol. It was the same model of 9mm Beretta, but with a long sound suppressor screwed to the barrel. With his left hand he pulled the slide back far enough to expose the breech and reveal the shiny brass of the cartridge inside. He looked down at the intruder on the floor. The guy was fair-haired and youngish, maybe thirty, good-looking. Ben remembered what Nikos had told Charlie about the couple at Zoë Bradbury’s party that night. A fair-haired guy, same age, and a woman who could have passed for a Greek.

  He shoved the unsilenced gun in his belt and pointed the other at the woman’s head. It was a much more useful weapon for indoor work. ‘Get up,’ he said.

  She coughed and raised herself slowly onto her knees and elbows, brushed the hair away from her face and turned to look at him. There was a very different look in those dark eyes now.

  ‘I saw you in the town earlier,’ he said. ‘I saw you in San Rocco Square and again while I was looking in the shop windows. I saw you before you even started following me today. I made sure you could see me the whole time, so that I could watch you.’

  She rose up into a crouch, tensed, one hand spread out on the floor in front of her, looking up at him with tight lips. Where the thick black hair was brushed away from her forehead, he could see a vein pulsing.

  ‘You weren’t following me,’ he said. ‘You were being led. I chose a busy taxi rank so that you wouldn’t lose me. You and your friend here jumped in the next cab, and I watched you all the way over here. I made it easy for you. I even pretended to be drunk. You walked right into it.’

  Her eyes were empty. He could see she was measuring distances, working out moves, calculating odds. She was someone trained. ‘You’re pretty good,’ he said. ‘That was a great cover story, about your sister. But you’re not good enough to get out of this. Talk to me, Esmeralda. Don’t think I wouldn’t shoot you.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Zoë Bradbury. Where is she?’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘Who bombed the café?’ he asked. ‘Was it to kill Charlie?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  He fired. She screamed and drew her hand away from the floor.

  ‘You’re fine,’ he said. ‘I aimed between your fingers. Next time I’ll take one off. Let’s start again. Zoë Bradbury. Where is she?’

  ‘Gone,’ she whispered.

  ‘Co-operation. That’s good. Gone where?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘Pick a finger,’ he said. ‘Maybe one you don’t use much. Hold out your hand. That way I won’t hit anything else by mistake.’

  ‘She’s not in Greece any longer.’

  ‘Then where is she?’

  ‘You’ll kill me anyway,’ she said. ‘Why should I tell you?’

  ‘I’m not like you,’ he replied. ‘I know the kind of treatment you had in mind for me tonight if I didn’t answer your questions. But I’m not a senseless killer. If you tell me where she is, what’s going on, and who you are, you won’t be harmed. I’ll put you where nobody can find you. When I find Zoë safe and well, I’ll come back and maybe I’ll let you walk free. It’s your choice. But understand that if you don’t tell me, you’re dead. Right here, right now. No more finger games.’ He aimed the pistol at her forehead.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ The Spanish accent was less pronounced now. She sounded distinctly American.

  ‘Nobody. Last chance. Where is she?’

  The woman heaved a sigh. ‘She’s been taken to the US. Five days ago.’

  ‘Good. We’re getting somewhere. Where exactly in the US, why and by whom?’

  ‘I don’t know everything,’ she said. ‘I just do what I’m told to do.’

  ‘Who tells you? Give me names.’

  ‘I don’t have any names to give.’

  ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Kaplan. Marisa Kaplan.’

  He watched her eyes and believed her. He pointed back at the fair-haired man on the floor. ‘What was his?’

  ‘Hudson.’

  ‘Why are you here, Marisa? Who planted the bomb?’

  Then the room was filled with noise. Ben felt the shockwave of a bullet pass close to his ear. A wall-light shattered. He whirled round and fell back simultaneously, returning fire. The Beretta kicked in his hands. The fair-haired guy was half-raised on one elbow, and the gun in his bloody fist was a small backup revolver. It fired again. The second shot went through the cuff of Ben’s shirt.

  Ben fired back. Saw the bullet strike. Fired again. The guy’s eye disappeared and his head dropped to the floor. There was blood up the wall behind him.

  Then there was silence
again. Ben clambered to his feet and checked himself. He wasn’t hit. But the intruder was definitely dead this time. Ben kicked the.357 Magnum snubby backup piece away across the floor.

  He heard a tiny sound behind him. He turned. The woman called Kaplan was sitting up, staring at her stomach. The blood was spreading fast over her cream dress. She clutched at the wound that her partner’s stray shot had punched into her gut, trying to tear the cloth to get to it. Her mouth opened and closed. Then she slumped backwards and died.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Creating corpses was much quicker and easier work than disposing of them afterwards. Ben found some heavy-duty plastic garbage sacks in the kitchen of the beach house. Stepping over the pools of blood on the tiles, he tore two sacks off the roll, opened them out and spread them on the floor in the passage near the front door.

  He took Kaplan by the wrists and dragged her. Her head hung down, eyes still open, her hair trailing in the slick of blood on the tiles. He dumped her corpse on top of one of the garbage sacks, walked back across the room to Hudson’s body, bent down and grabbed his ankles. Hudson was much heavier and much more bloody. His right eye socket and cheekbone were smashed by the impact of the 9mm bullet from his partner’s gun. Ben dragged him over the tiles and left him lying next to Kaplan.

  He crouched over them and frisked them carefully. No papers, no personal items of any kind. Hudson had a phone in his back pocket. He found Kaplan’s in her handbag. With a phone in each hand he redialled the last call she’d made, and Hudson’s phone vibrated in his other hand. He checked through their call records. The two phones had been used only to call each other.

  Ben left the corpses lying there and started cleaning up the house. The broken wall-lamp had sprayed glass shards over part of the floor, and he swept them up with a dustpan and brush and shook them out into the bin. In a kitchen cupboard he found a mop and bucket and a bottle of bleach. He filled the bucket with cold water, lugged it through to the other room and started mopping up the worst of the blood. Once that was done, he used a kitchen knife to hack at one of the doorframes, where a bullet had embedded itself deep into the wood. He dug the flattened 9mm bullet out and dropped it in his pocket. He winced at the mess he’d made of the doorframe.

  As he worked, he was thinking hard. Kaplan and Hudson hadn’t been the best surveillance and hit team he’d ever seen, but they hadn’t been the worst, either. The two Berettas were the exact same make and model. The serial numbers had been expertly removed. Those kinds of details pointed to a professional outfit. He was pretty certain that they had been sent to kill Nikos Karapiperis. If Nikos had really been involved in drugs, he wouldn’t have gone to Charlie for help to find Zoë. So the killers had planted the drugs on him. That was a neat touch. Then the bombing had been orchestrated to eliminate Charlie, after they’d seen him talking to Nikos. And it wasn’t a difficult step from there to figure out that they’d come after Ben for the same reason.

  Those pieces slotted together neatly enough. But when Zoë Bradbury was factored into the equation, it started falling apart. There was no ransom demand. No apparent reason for snatching her. Her parents were hardly the kind of people who could be screwed for millions to get their daughter back. If Tom Bradbury had been in politics or some other kind of position to be privy to valuable information, it might have made sense. But he wasn’t. He was a theology scholar in one of the world’s dustiest institutions, about as remote from the real world as it was possible to get.

  So whatever reason was driving someone to these extremes, it had to come from Zoë herself. But what was it? He thought about the money. She’d apparently got hold of twenty thousand dollars fairly easily, and was expecting a lot more to come soon. It certainly sounded like a blackmail deal. Whoever she was extorting the money from had to be pretty rich and powerful, and they were clearly desperate. Which meant that whatever she was threatening them with, it was real enough to be taken very seriously.

  But why go to the trouble of moving her halfway across the world to the States, when it would have been so easy just to put a bullet in her head right here on Corfu? He thought about it and could come to only one conclusion. She had something they wanted, and they wanted to keep her alive until they got it.

  But that led to another problem. Kaplan and Hudson weren’t soft types. They were ready and willing to kill. And Zoë wasn’t a soldier trained to resist interrogation. If all they wanted was to make her talk, it would have taken just a few seconds to get the information out of her. Just the sight of a knife or a gun and, like the vast majority of ordinary people, she would fold instantly.

  After that, they probably would kill her. And after twelve days, there was a good chance that she was dead already.

  At three-thirty in the morning, the beach taverna started closing up for the night. The last of the stragglers wandered off homewards. The music stopped and the lights went off, leaving the beach in darkness.

  Ben watched and waited for another half hour. The sands were deserted. He stuffed a Beretta in each of his jeans pockets, pushed open the front door and dragged Hudson’s corpse out across the sand, sliding him along on the plastic sack.

  It was a long drag, and a dead body on sand was a heavy weight. The pull on the stitches in Ben’s neck was agonising, and the muscles in his shoulders and forearms were pumped full of lactic acid by the time he reached his chosen spot a hundred yards away. He left the corpse in a nook between two dunes and walked back, breathing hard.

  Back at the house, he took Kaplan’s wrists, gritted his teeth and hauled her out onto the beach. As her head lolled and bounced he kept imagining that her staring eyes were meeting his. He didn’t like to see a woman dead like this, and he was glad that he hadn’t been the one to kill her.

  With the two bodies piled up next to him in the moonlight, he kneeled in the sand and dug a shallow hole in the crook of the two dunes. He rolled them in one at a time with his foot. Kaplan flopped in first, and Hudson sprawled in on top of her with a meaty sound as their heads collided.

  Ben filled the hole back in with sand. They were food for crabs now.

  Searching around, he found the barnacled carcass of an old rowing boat and hauled it across the sand. He laid it over the shallow grave and walked away towards the water’s edge. Retracing his footsteps he kicked over the tracks in the sand to hide them. Then he stripped the two pistols and threw the bits into the sea.

  Dawn was creeping up on the horizon by the time he finished cleaning up at the house. He showered and changed, burned the bloodstained jeans and shirt on the beach, and stamped the ashes into the sand. He left five hundred euros on the table and a note to apologise for breaking a lamp and damaging a doorframe, saying he’d drunk too much of the fine wine Spiro and Christina had left for him.

  Then as the sun was breaking free of the sea, he left the house and started walking towards town. He took a taxi to the airport, careful that he wasn’t being followed. The last thing he needed now was for Stephanides’ men to grab him just as he was about to leave Greece. He’d be in America long before they even noticed he was gone.

  At the airport he retrieved his passport from the locker, and used his return ticket to board an early flight to Athens. At midday, Greek time, he was sipping whisky on the rocks in the half-empty business class section of a 747 heading for Atlanta.

  He didn’t know what awaited him in the USA. But he was going to find Zoë Bradbury, dead or alive.

  And then, someone, somewhere, was going to pay.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Georgia, USA

  The thirteenth day

  Georgia wasn’t any noticeably hotter than Corfu, but it was about twice as humid. Ben’s shirt was stuck to his back within fifteen minutes of stepping off the plane at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.

  He adjusted his watch to US time. The zone shift meant that he was arriving pretty much the same time he’d left Greece, and the sun was high overhead. He hired a big silver Chrysler at the air
port and drove the long distance to Savannah with the windows down and the wind in his hair.

  It was late afternoon by the time he got there. Savannah was rich and verdant with picture-perfect colonial homes that looked as though they hadn’t changed since Civil War times. The first thing he did was to phone the number on Steve McClusky’s business card. But when he tried it, all he got was a message to say the number had been cut off. There was no landline number, and there was no S. McClusky, Attorney, listed in Yellow Pages. But he still had the address. He checked his map and turned the big Chrysler round.

  He found McClusky’s building on the edge of town, far away from the opulence of the old houses and the tree-lined streets. He’d been expecting some kind of proper law firm offices, either an imposing glass-fronted modern building or some elegant old colonial-style place with columns and steps leading up to the front door. What he found instead was a little old barber’s shop in the middle of a crumbling block. There was a small parking space outside, with yellowed weeds growing though the cracks in the concrete. He looked twice at the address on the card. It was the right place.

  A bell tinkled overhead as he walked in the door. It was cool inside, air conditioning working full blast. He glanced quickly around him. The fittings were straight out of the fifties, and the old barbers themselves looked as though they’d been there at least as long. One of them was busy cutting the hair of the single customer in the place. The other was perched up on a stool, sipping a can of lite beer. He was stooped and white and looked like an iguana. A young guy of about eighteen in an apron was sweeping up bits of snipped hair from the tiles.

  The old barber with the beer turned towards the newcomer. ‘What can we do for you, mister? Haircut or a shave?’

  ‘Neither,’ Ben said. ‘Where can I find Steve McClusky?’

  ‘That would be Skid you’re looking for.’

  ‘The name on the card is Steve McClusky.’