The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET

by Scott Mariani

Author’s Note

  Although The Doomsday Prophecy is a work of fiction, it is a fact that many millions of people across the world, the majority of them evangelical American Christians, fervently believe that we may at any moment be plunged into the apocalyptic End Time events that they claim to be forecast in the Bible. None of the biblical references in this book have been invented; it’s all there in the Good Book for those who wish to study it. As far as these millions of people are concerned, the prophesied horror scenario is for real, it’s coming, it’s unstoppable and those of us who aren’t ready for it are doomed to a hideous fate.

  Bible study being such an enormous and complex subject, in the writing of The Doomsday Prophecy some liberties have inevitably been taken in the interests of drama, and to some extent it was necessary to simplify. Real-life End Time prophecy believers tend to borrow here and there from various parts of the Bible, piecing it all together across the board, rather than simply lifting ready-made ideas from one single source as the characters appear to do in the novel. This is the reason why, in real life, End Time prophecies can differ slightly in their interpretation: some believe that the Rapture will take place before the Tribulation (known as pre-Tribulation belief), and others believe it will take place some time after the Tribulation has already started, meaning that all of us, faithful and unbelievers alike, would have to endure quite a long period of unspeakable nastiness together before the more fortunate are whisked away to Salvation. It is this ‘mid-Tribulationist’ stance that I have attributed to Clayton Cleaver and the End Time conspirators in this story.

  The Book of Revelation, which in the story forms the basis of the End Timers’ belief, is in real life only one of many prophetic texts of the Bible – others include the Old Testament’s Book of Ezekiel – but is by far the most intriguing, with elements such as the classic ‘666’ reference now embedded in popular culture. Bible buffs will spot that I lifted certain quotations from Ezekiel, Daniel, and elsewhere. In this respect I am guilty of some scriptural sleight of hand. Apologies to the purists: The Doomsday Prophecy is fiction, after all…

  … Then again, is it completely fiction? While researching this book I was struck by the number of strange events and apparent ‘signs’ becoming visible to me as I delved deeper into the subject. Halfway through writing the book, I was woken up in the middle of the night by what turned out to be an earthquake, an extremely rare and bizarre event in my part of the world. Further research showed up all kinds of weird global events that, in a certain light, could be interpreted as signs that the End Time dice are about to roll: weather anomalies, plagues of African locusts in France, outbreaks of rare illnesses, growing social chaos, increasing tensions in the Middle East. On a larger scale, astronomers are now finding evidence of collisions between entire galaxies – unsettling echoes of the forecasts in The Book of Revelation that ‘heavenly bodies will collide’. The more I read, the more I began to find Clayton Cleaver’s dire warnings eerily persuasive.

  Is it really going to happen? We’ll just have to wait and see.

  Finally, I would like to stress that the negative portrayal of certain fictitious End Time believers in this book is in no way a reflection on real-life Christians, whatever their interpretation of Bible prophecy may be. Ben Hope is a fiction hero, and heroes cannot exist without villains!

  Readers are invited to spot the hidden ‘Doomsday clue’ within this Author’s Note. A free signed copy of the book to the first five readers who contact me via my website with the correct answer.

  I hope you enjoyed reading The Doomsday Prophecy as much as I enjoyed writing it. Ben Hope will be back.

  Scott Mariani

  Acknowledgements

  Another round of thanks to my brilliant editorial and production team – the unsung heroes who bridge that gap between the solitary phase in a writer's work and the magic moment when the book becomes a tangible reality in your hands.

  Thanks to my agent Broo Doherty – you are a star. Also to Diana Davey, Tim and Dawn Boswell, and everyone else directly or indirectly involved with the development of this book.

  Read on for an exclusive extract from

  Scott Mariani’s new novel,

  The Heretic’s Treasure, coming in summer 2009.

  Near Valognes, Normandy, France

  Except for the light rain that pattered off the roof of the little house in the woods, everything was still.

  At the edge of the clearing, a twig snapped. A rabbit tensed, looked to the source of the sound, and darted for cover.

  The six men who emerged from the bushes were all wearing green camouflage fatigues and kept their heads low as they stalked out from the foliage, eyes darting cautiously this way and that, moving towards the house with their weapons cocked and ready.

  They knew the children were inside, and they also knew that it was going to be difficult to get in there.

  The team leader was the first to reach the old peeling door. It was locked, but he’d expected that. He backed off two steps and covered the entrance with his pistol, while the guy to his left with the cut-down Remington shotgun flipped off his safety and blasted the lock apart. The deafening gunshot was absorbed by the electronic earpieces they all wore. The shattered door crashed inwards.

  The team leader went through first. As the entry man, he’d been taught to expect to take a hit, or at least get shot at, as he went in. He’d also been coached that in the heat of the assault, the kidnappers’ fire would be rushed and inaccurate. He trusted his body armour to take the hits while he returned fire and took the shooters down.

  But there was nothing. The hallway was empty, showing only just the ragged splinters of door that the shotgun blast had blown across the floor. The team split into pairs, covering each other at every turn through the bare corridors. They moved smoothly, weapons poised.

  A door suddenly crashed open to the left. The team leader whipped round to see a man lumber out of the doorway, a stubby shotgun in his hands with the muzzle slung low at his hip. He worked the slide with a sharp snick-snack.

  The leader reacted instantly. He brought his Glock 9mm round to bear - relying on instinct and muscle memory more than a conscious aim - and fired twice. The kidnapper fell back, dropping the shotgun and clutching his chest.

  The team moved on. At the end of the corridor was another door. The team leader booted it in as the others covered him.

  In the corner of the half-lit room was a dingy mattress, and on it were the two children.

  The little boy and girl were strapped together, back to back. There were hoods over their heads, the girl’s long blond hair sticking out from under the rough sacking cloth. Their clothes were torn and grimy.

  The six men quickly covered the room with their weapons. There was no sign of the rest of the kidnappers. The silence in the place was total, almost eerie. Just the wind in the naked branches outside, and the cawing of a crow in the distance.

  The team leader strode up to the children, holstering his weapon.

  He was just three steps away from them when he saw it - but by the time his brain had registered the small incendiary device attached to the girl, it was too late.

  The flash was blinding and the team instinctively covered their faces.

  The children burst alight, the flames curling around them, melting their clothes. Beneath the flaming hoods, their hair burned and shrivelled and the sackcloth dropped away to show the white, staring eyes in the blackening faces.

  The room was filled with smoke and the acrid stench of melting plastic as the burning mannequins collapsed onto the mattress.

  A door flew open, and a blond-haired man walked into the room. He was tall, just under six feet, dressed in black combat trousers and a black t-shirt with the word INSTRUCTOR in white lettering across his chest.

  His name was Ben Hope. He’d been watching the trainee hostage rescue team on a monitor as they’d approached the purpose-built killing house he used for tactical raid exercises.

  The te
am lowered their weapons and instinctively flipped on their safety catches, even though every pistol in the room was loaded with blanks. One of the men stifled a cough.

  Behind Ben, another man came into the smoky room carrying a fire extinguisher. He was the simulated kidnapper the team leader had shot earlier. His name was Jeff Dekker, and he’d been a Special Forces soldier before coming to work as Ben’s assistant at the tactical training facility. He walked over to the burning mattress and the two half-melted dummies, aimed the nozzle of the extinguisher and doused the flames with a hissing jet of white foam. He looked up and grinned at Ben.

  ‘Thanks, Jeff,’ Ben said. He reached into the pocket of his combat trousers and took out a crumpled pack of Gauloises and his battered old Zippo lighter. He flipped the lighter open, thumbed the wheel. Lit a cigarette and clanged the lighter shut as he sucked in a deep draw of smoke.

  Then he turned to the team. ‘Now let me show you where you went wrong.’

  THE MOZART CONSPIRACY

  SCOTT MARIANI

  An ancient murder … A clandestine society … A conspiracy that will end in death …

  Ben Hope is running for his life.

  Enlisted by the beautiful Leigh Llewellyn – the beautiful opera star and Ben’s first love – to investigate her brother’s mysterious death, former SAS operative Ben finds himself caught up in a centuries-old puzzle.

  Officially Oliver died in a tragic accident whilst investigating Mozart’s death, but the facts don’t add up. His research reveals that Mozart, a notable freemason, may have been killed by a shadowy splinter group of the cult. The only clues lie in an ancient letter, believed to have been written by the composer himself.

  When Leigh and Ben receive video evidence of a ritual sacrifice being performed, they realise that the sect still exists – and will stop at nothing to keep its secrets.

  From the dreaming spires of Oxford to Venice’s labyrinthine canals, the majestic architecture of Vienna and Slovenia’s snowy mountains, Ben and Leigh must forget the past and race across Europe to uncover the truth behind

  THE MOZART CONSPIRACY …

  An electrifying and utterly gripping must read for fans of Dan Brown, Sam Bourne and Ludlum’s Bourne series.

  ISBN: 978-1-84756-080-3

  Out now.

  SCOTT MARIANI

  The Heretic’s

  Treasure

  Dedication

  This one is for Malu Pothi,

  a very special Bengal tigress

  Epigraph

  You are in my heart and none other knows thee

  But your son ‘Akhenaten’.

  You have given him understanding of your designs and

  your power.

  The people of the world are in your hand…

  From ‘Hymn to the Sun’

  The Pharaoh Akhenaten

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  The Western Desert, Egypt

  Late September 2008

  Nobody knew how many centuries the desolate Bedouin fort had been standing out here among the oceans of sand, its crumbling walls abandoned long ago.

  Perched up high on a ruined tower, a vulture cocked its head and peered down at the line of dusty 4x4 vehicles that passed through the gateway and pulled up in the courtyard.

  The passenger door of the lead vehicle swung open. A combat boot crunched down into the sand and a man stepped out of the car, stretching his cramped muscles after the long trek westwards and shielding his eyes from the sun’s white glare. There was no wind. The air was a furnace.

  The man’s name was Khaled Kamal, and he was one of Egypt’s most wanted terrorists. The man without a face, the one they could never catch.

  The rest of the group climbed down from the vehicles. Eleven men, all watching their leader. Nobody spoke. They wore a mixture of military combat fatigues, T-shirts and jeans. Six of them had stubby AKS-74 assault weapons slung over their shoulders. There were a lot more guns in the vehicles, the smell of cordite still on them.

  Kamal scanned the empty ruin. He scratched the three-day-old stubble on his chin and thought about the events of the last thirty-six hours.

  The diversion had worked well. If the choppers had been mobilised after the attack, then the anti-terrorist forces were hunting in the wrong place. Nobody would be looking for them out here in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles west across the desert from the Aswan to Cairo railroad where Kamal and his gunmen had opened fire on a northbound tourist train.

  He smiled to himself as he replayed the fresh images in his mind. The passengers had been sitting ducks. Six carriages ripped to shreds by automatic fire. Blood on the tracks and on the sand. Another successful job.

  But, after more than a decade, Kamal was getting bored with taking potshots at Westerners. Back in 1997, when the radical Gama’a al-Islamaya group had massacred more than sixty tourists at Hatshepsut’s Temple near Luxor, Kamal had been the only one who got away from the anti-terrorist commandos. Since then he’d been involved in dozens of bus ambushes, tourist resort bombings, gun attacks on Nile river cruisers, assassinations of US business travellers. Kamal had personally packed the nails into the motorcycle suicide bomb that had caused carnage at the Khan al-Khalihi bazaar in 2005.

  All small stuff. He had his sights on something bigger, much bigger. He had the talent, the will and the manpower. And, most importantly, he had links to networks all across North Africa, the Middle East and beyond. All he lacked was funding, and for the kind of plan that had been forming in his mind he knew he’d need a lot of it. A hell of a lot.

  But all that was for the future. Now the dozen men needed to escape the murderous desert heat for a while. It would be cool later, but the sun was hot enough to cook a man in his boots. The ruined fort offered shade-as well as something more valuable. Kamal unscrewed the top of his canteen and poured the last drops of water into his parched throat. He tossed the empty container into his blac
k Nissan Patrol and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

  Hani, the youngest of the crew, was gesticulating and grinning. ‘See, didn’t I tell you?’ he laughed, pointing at the round stone well in the middle of the courtyard.

  Kamal shot him a look. He hadn’t stayed alive this long by trusting people, and he was about to find out whether he could trust this one.

  They leaned over the edge of the well and peered down. The shaft was deep, disappearing into darkness. Kamal picked up a loose piece of stone and dropped it in the hole. He listened for the splash. Nothing.

  ‘You said there would be water here,’ he said. He slapped away a sandfly.

  Hani said nothing, just made a face and shrugged.

  Youssef joined them at the edge. His bald scalp was glistening with sweat. He wiped it and replaced the tattered green baseball cap that he always wore. ‘We should have headed for the Farafra oasis instead.’

  Kamal shook his head. The oasis area was only thirty miles to the south, and its inhabitants were mostly Bedouin. It should have been a safe haven for them-but you never knew when a police informant might be watching. The train attack would have been on radio and TV by now, the news spreading far and wide. He couldn’t afford mistakes.

  ‘Get down there,’ he ordered Hani.

  Hani thought about protesting, but Kamal wasn’t someone you protested against.

  The plump, bearded Mostafa and Tarek, the gaunt-looking eldest of the gang, fetched a rope from one of the 4x4s and fastened one end to its bull bars. They looped the other end around Hani’s waist. The young man’s eyes were bright with fear but he obeyed. He clambered up onto the stone mouth of the well and three of the men grabbed the rope to lower him.