The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Maybe not.’ Ben dug in his pocket, took out the little blue memory stick and laid it on the table. ‘Morgan’s notes, taken straight from his laptop.’

  Kirby snatched it up. ‘How the hell did you get hold of this? On second thoughts, don’t tell me.’ He held the memory stick in front of him, gazing at it. ‘What I wouldn’t give to see what’s in here.’

  ‘You’re not the only one. The bad guys have it too.’

  ‘But they’d never get into it,’ Kirby smirked. ‘Not a chance in hell. The most fiendishly crack-proof encryption ever known. Morgan’s and my secret.’

  ‘We need computer access,’ Ben said. ‘We can’t go back to the house.’

  ‘But we could drive to my office.’

  Ben looked at his watch. They’d been sitting in the pub for over an hour, and night had fallen. ‘Then let’s go. Right now.’

  Chapter Forty

  Back in St Andrews, Ben parked the Mercedes under the amber glow of a street lamp and followed Kirby to the iron gates of the Faculty of History building. They were locked.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Kirby said. ‘We all have a key, in case we need to come back to the office after hours.’ He unlocked a creaky side gate and they walked across the dark, empty car park to the entrance. Ben glanced up and down the street as Kirby opened the door. There was nobody around. Inside, Kirby was about to turn on the lights when Ben stopped his hand. ‘Keep the place dark,’ he said.

  They climbed the stairs by the moonlight that shone from the windows, and Ben led the way through the shadowy corridor to Kirby’s room.

  Ben drew down the blinds in the dark office as Kirby fired up the laptop on his desk and fumbled blindly to insert the memory stick. After a few moments the screen lit up, casting a bluish glow over his face in the darkness. ‘Hardware recognised. OK, here we go.’ He clicked the mouse, tapped a few keys. ‘Now for the password. Calypso Jennings.’

  ‘Calypso Jennings?’

  Kirby glanced up. ‘She was a junior lecturer in ancient Greek, when Morgan and I were undergrads together at Durham. Hottest academic you’ve ever seen. We were both nuts about her. She seemed the obvious choice of password. Like I said, the most crack-proof encryption known to man.’

  Ben watched as Kirby’s podgy fingers scuttled quickly over the keys, typing in the password. The file unlocked instantly, and they were in.

  ‘Here we go, the Akhenaten Project research file,’ Kirby said proudly. He held down a key and scrolled down through the document, text skimming across the screen faster than Ben could read it. ‘Nothing new here so far,’ Kirby muttered. ‘This is all stuff we already know.’ He took his finger off the key and an image froze on the screen. Ben peered at it. It looked like some ancient document, covered in old script that meant nothing to him.

  ‘This is a high-resolution scan of the Wenkaura papyrus,’ Kirby said. ‘You can see how aged some of the inscriptions are. We had a hell of a time deciphering it.’ He gazed at it for a moment longer, and went on scrolling down, staring hard at the screen.

  Ben moved away from the desk, parted the blinds with his fingers and glanced cautiously out of the window. The street below was deserted.

  Kirby clicked his tongue, shook his head. ‘All this stuff is exactly what I already have. There’s nothing new. What I want is to see if Morgan added anything at the bottom. That last entry could be—’

  He broke off mid-sentence, craned his neck forward. ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘What?’ Ben asked, stepping back to the desk.

  ‘I don’t fucking believe it.’

  ‘What?’

  Kirby looked up from the screen. ‘Sahure,’ he breathed. ‘Sahure. Of course. What an idiot I was, not to get that.’

  ‘Sahure?’ Ben echoed.

  ‘So you didn’t learn about him in Bible class?’

  ‘Theology. And no, I didn’t.’

  Kirby was giggling to himself, clenching his fist in triumph. ‘Morgan, you were a frigging genius.’

  ‘Are you going to explain this to me, or do I have to beat it out of you?’ Ben resisted the urge to grab Kirby’s throat and drag him across the desk.

  Kirby stopped giggling, and looked serious. He tapped the screen. ‘Look here. The final entry, right at the bottom. Morgan worked it out. It’s the first clue.’ He smirked.

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘You remember that the clue was the tomb of “He who is close to Re”?’ Kirby said. ‘Well, get this. “He who is close to Re” is the literal meaning of the ancient Egyptian name, Sahure. And Sahure was the second ruler of Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty. He reigned from 2487 to 2475 BC and is buried at the pyramid complex at Abusir, just south of Cairo on the edge of the desert. Which means we know for sure that’s where Morgan found the second clue.’

  ‘Do we?’

  Kirby’s eyes twinkled. ‘Absolutely.’ He prodded the screen enthusiastically. ‘And it gets even better two lines lower down. Morgan’s added to his notes that he also found out that Sahure was a distant ancestor of Wenkaura. And the High Priest Sanep, to whom the papyrus was intended to be delivered, would have known that about his former master. He would have picked up on the clue right away. See how perfect it is? There’s no doubt whatsoever that we’re on the right track.’

  Ben nodded. ‘OK. It sounds plausible.’

  ‘Happy you met me?’

  ‘I can barely contain my joy.’

  Kirby’s smirk widened into a grin. ‘What a team. The brain and the brawn. An intellectual genius and a soldier boy. We’re going to find the treasure in no time.’

  Ben looked at him. ‘Hold on. Were going to find the treasure?’

  Kirby nodded. ‘You and me. You don’t think I’m not coming along, do you?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Ben said.

  Kirby looked crestfallen. ‘Why?’

  ‘Lots of reasons. The main one being that it’s dangerous.’

  ‘Seems to me it’s pretty damned dangerous if I stay here,’ Kirby protested, flushing bright red. Apparently my life just went up in smoke. I can’t go home any more.’

  ‘So you want to team up with me.’

  ‘You’re a soldier. I’ve seen what you can do. You’re exactly the kind of person Morgan and I could have done with sooner. I need you, and you need me. It’s perfect.’

  Ben shook his head. ‘I’m not going to nanny you all the way round Egypt. I’m going to do this my way. Alone.’

  ‘Really? Can you read hieroglyphics? Decipher clues that are thousands of years old? Because if you can, I’ll be impressed.’

  Ben didn’t reply.

  ‘Here’s the bottom line,’ Kirby said. ‘If you want to find the heretic’s treasure, you bring me along. Let’s face it. Alone, you’ve got no chance.’

  ‘Say we find this thing together. I can’t let you have it. I told you, I need it.’

  ‘I’ll settle for academic stardom,’ Kirby said. ‘And maybe a trinket or two, so I can prove to my esteemed cretinous peers that they were dead wrong and Morgan and I were the superior scholars. That’s all I want. I’ll tell the boffins that the tomb robbers got there first. That’ll rub it in even more. Come on. You know it makes sense.’

  ‘What about your passport? We’re not going back to the house for your things.’

  Kirby smiled. ‘No need for that. I keep all my important personal documents right here in my office.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at a lockable steel filing cabinet behind the desk. ‘Including my passport. It’s the only place I wouldn’t lose them. That big old house just swallows things up.’

  Ben was quiet for a long moment. Thirty seconds went by, then a full minute. Then he made a decision. ‘All right, Kirby. You can come with me to Egypt. We’ll head back south to Edinburgh and see if we can catch a late flight that’ll get us into Cairo by morning.’

  ‘Now you’re talking,’ Kirby said.

  ‘But when we get there, you’ll do as I say. You’ll give me no trouble, won’t slow me down. I’m goin
g to move hard and fast. One peep out of you, get under my feet just once, and you’ll be on the first plane back.’

  Kirby beamed. ‘You won’t even know I’m there.’

  Chapter Forty-One

  Dawn was breaking over the Mediterranean as Ben reclined in the business-class armchair, sipped on an espresso and watched the sunrise from above the clouds. They’d been lucky to grab the last-minute seats on the night flight. It would be early morning in Cairo when they landed.

  He felt weak with fatigue. His eyes were burning, his head was throbbing with worry and lack of sleep, and his heart palpitated every time he thought of Zara and what was happening to her. But he knew he had to keep moving forwards, stay alert and see this thing through to the end. He couldn’t even begin to contemplate what would happen if he failed.

  At his left elbow, Kirby was awake, sitting with earphones on and watching the in-flight movie. Every so often his podgy hand would dip into the packet of potato crisps he was eating for breakfast, and he would jam a pile of them in his mouth and chew loudly.

  Ben gazed back out of the window and took another sip of the hot coffee. He could only hope he was doing the right thing. He wondered again where Zara was, and how she was. He remembered their time together in Paris. Then his thoughts drifted off into darkness, and the nightmare image of the three severed heads of Valentine, Wolff and Harrison came flashing back to him. He thought for a long time about what he was going to do to Harry Paxton when this was over. So much had changed, so fast.

  Finally his exhaustion caught up with him, and he gave in to sleep. His dreams were unsettled and frightening. He was roused from them by the sound of Kirby’s voice asking him something.

  ‘What?’ he said sleepily.

  ‘I said, how long were you a soldier?’

  ‘You woke me up to ask me that? Long enough.’

  ‘My dear departed father, the Laird, wanted me to join up. I wasn’t having any of it. I think that’s what Morgan and I had in common.’

  ‘That you both hated your fathers?’

  Kirby grunted.

  ‘That’s something I don’t understand,’ Ben said. ‘If Morgan didn’t get on with his father, why did he tell him so much about his project?’

  ‘He had mixed feelings about his dad,’ Kirby said. ‘There was a part of him that resented him for all that macho-wacho military stuff he stood for. But there was another part of him that wanted to prove to his dad that he was really worth something, that he could make something of himself against his expectations. That’s why, the last time he went to visit his dad and his trophy wife on board that silly yacht, he got pissed one night and said more than he should have. He told me after how much he regretted it, but it was almost a compulsion.’

  Ben flinched at the mention of Zara, but kept quiet.

  ‘After that he got really paranoid,’ Kirby went on. ‘He thought his father was after the treasure. That’s when he made me promise that, if anything ever happened to him, I should never breathe a word to anyone, and especially not to his father, that I knew anything about this.’

  ‘Probably wise.’

  Kirby turned to him. ‘So, did you like it?’

  ‘Did I like what?’

  ‘Being a soldier.’

  Ben sighed. ‘Yeah, I loved every minute of it, Kirby. We all had a terrific time. Now, if you don’t mind, I was sleeping.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Ben fell back to sleep quickly, and the next thing he knew was Kirby shaking his arm and his voice saying, ‘We’re landing.’ He stretched and looked out of the window. The morning sunlight hurt his eyes.

  Cairo-again. His second mission for Harry Paxton in a matter of days. Whatever happened, this was going to be his last.

  After clearing passport control and customs, Ben led Kirby to the airport’s car hire centre and picked out a black four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi Shogun, did the paperwork and used some of Harry Paxton’s expenses money to pay for it. They were about to get in and drive off when Ben’s phone rang.

  ‘I was just wondering how we were doing,’ Paxton’s voice said pleasantly. ‘I hope for Zara’s sake you’re making good progress.’

  Ben shut the car door and walked a few yards out of earshot. He waved at Kirby to get inside.

  ‘I was hoping you were going to call, you piece of shit,’ he said to Paxton.

  ‘Now, now, Benedict. Let’s be civil about this. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m where you wanted me to be. Where’s Zara?’

  ‘With me,’ Paxton said. ‘Right close by, where I can keep an eye on her and where you’ll never find her.’

  ‘I want to talk to her.’

  ‘You don’t make the rules.’

  ‘Proof of life,’ Ben said. ‘The number one principle of kidnap and ransom negotiation, and I didn’t invent it. Let me talk to her. Otherwise it’s a deal-breaker. Instead of going after the treasure, I’ll just dedicate the rest of my life to coming after you.’

  There was silence on the line for a few moments. Ben strained to make out the muffled background sound. Voices, footsteps. Then someone was picking up the phone.

  ‘Ben?’ Zara’s voice. She sounded scared and anxious.

  ‘Zara—’ Ben started.

  But Paxton had snatched the phone back from her. ‘Happy now, Benedict? You have your proof of life. Get on with the job. You have six days left.’

  ‘Hold on, Harry. Don’t hang up. There’s something more I want from you.’

  * * *

  At 9.28 a.m., Ben and Kirby were waiting at a prearranged spot on Sharia Talaat Harb, central Cairo’s main street, a hubbub of roaring traffic and bustling crowds, cafés and shops. Ben was leaning against a signpost, smoking his last cigarette and watching the street as he waited for Paxton’s contact to come and pick them up.

  Kirby coughed and made a big show of wafting the smoke away. ‘Do you have to do that?’

  ‘Worried about passive smoking?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ Kirby said. ‘Everyone should be.’

  ‘Then you’d better get off this street, and out of Cairo. Just standing on this spot, the air pollution is equivalent to smoking thirty cigarettes a day. So I don’t think my extra little contribution is going to accelerate your demise much, Kirby.’

  ‘And I don’t like this situation,’ Kirby muttered. ‘Who are these people, anyway? Where are they going to take us? I thought Harry Paxton was your enemy.’

  ‘If you’re having second thoughts about being involved, now’s the time to tell me,’ Ben said. ‘You can still back out. Head back to the airport and go home to Drummond Manor.’

  ‘You know I can’t go back.’

  ‘Then sit it out in a nice hotel somewhere, out of harm’s way and out of mine.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about me,’ Kirby said. ‘I’ll be OK.’

  ‘Good. Because you said I wasn’t even going to know you were there. And I do. It’s annoying.’

  Kirby shut up, and Ben went on smoking and watching the street.

  A moment later, at exactly half past nine as arranged, a big SUV darted out of the traffic flow and pulled up alongside the kerb. Its bodywork glistened black, and the windows were tinted opaque. The rear door opened, and Ben saw three men inside, two black-haired, olive-skinned Egyptians and a white-haired Westerner sitting behind them. Nobody was smiling.

  ‘Get in,’ said the Westerner. His accent sounded German.

  The SUV had three rows of seats. Ben and Kirby climbed inside and sat at the back. The German slammed the door shut and the vehicle took off and slipped back into the fast-moving traffic. He turned and handed Ben and Kirby each a black hood. ‘Put these on.’

  Kirby looked in horror. ‘What the fuck? I’m not wearing this. It’s what they put on people about to be executed.’

  ‘Put it on,’ Ben said quietly. ‘And shut up. Or I’ll execute you myself.’

  The drive seemed to last a long time, and nobody spoke. Blind behind the hood, Ben tried for a
while to keep track of the twists and turns, but after a few minutes he’d lost his bearings and had no idea where they were being taken. He rested back against the seat, feeling tension emanating from Kirby next to him. Then the car swerved right, bumped up a short ramp and rolled to a halt. He heard voices from outside. They echoed, as though the car had driven into a large empty space. There was the noisy clatter of a steel security shutter being pulled down. The doors of the SUV clunked open, and someone ripped off their cloth hoods.

  Ben blinked and looked around him.

  ‘Get out,’ the German guy said, and Ben and Kirby stepped down from the vehicle, closely watched by their escorts.

  They were inside an enormous empty building. The walls were bare block, and the floor concrete. Overhead were thick riveted steel girders and neon striplights suspended from chains. At the far end of the building were racks of empty industrial shelving.

  He and Kirby were surrounded by a group of men, the three from the car ride plus another three. Two of them were cradling compact submachine pistols-not just for show, but in a way that showed they thought they might need them. Clearly, Paxton had given his associates an idea of who they were dealing with.

  Five yards to Ben’s right was a long industrial steel workbench. It was covered with firearms of all shapes and sizes. Scores of them.

  Kirby glanced nervously at the men, then his gaze rested on the arsenal of weaponry. ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ he whispered furiously.

  Ben silenced him with a look, and walked over to the bench. The men stepped aside to let him pass, and the German smiled coldly and gestured as if to show off his wares.