The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET

by Scott Mariani

The door swung open.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ Kamal asked with a smile. He was leaning casually against one of the pillars in the doorway, arms folded nonchalantly, his smile almost pleasant. The van was parked in the moonlight outside the villa. Claudel could see two of Kamal’s men sitting in the front seat-Youssef and the one who never spoke, Emad.

  Claudel struggled desperately to come up with a plausible excuse for the bags. ‘I…I was just t-taking some suits and things for dry cleaning,’ he stammered.

  ‘The midnight laundry?’

  Claudel was silent.

  Kamal’s smile never wavered. He pushed himself off the pillar, walked inside the house, clicked the door shut behind him. ‘That can wait, can’t it? Come and have a drink with me.’ He slapped Claudel jovially on the arm. ‘I have something to celebrate. I’ll tell you all about it.’

  Claudel sighed heavily and tried not to show his absolute despair and panic as he set down the cases and followed Kamal across the hallway and through the tall double doors into the living room.

  Kamal was grinning as he flipped on the lights and padded over the cashmere carpet to the drinks cabinet. ‘I see you’ve been having a private celebration of your own,’ he said, noticing the empty champagne bottle and the single glass that Claudel had left sitting on the table. ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if it turned out we were both celebrating the same thing?’

  Claudel laughed nervously. ‘I was just having a nightcap.’

  Kamal threw open the drinks cabinet doors, grabbed two crystal brandy glasses, twisted the top off a crystal decanter, and poured out two enormous measures of vintage cognac. ‘Sit down, Pierre. Drink with me.’

  Claudel reluctantly accepted the glass Kamal handed him, lowered himself stiffly into a chair and sipped nervously at the brandy. He felt acidity rising in his guts, and it wasn’t just because of mixing drinks. Suddenly the image of Aziz flashed up in his mind.

  Aziz had died in this same chair. Just after Kamal had offered him a drink.

  Claudel’s glass trembled a little in his hand.

  Kamal was leaning back against the wall, watching him closely. ‘Why are you so nervous tonight, my friend?’

  ‘I’m not nervous,’ Claudel laughed shakily. ‘Why would I be?’

  ‘I thought perhaps you had something to tell me.’

  Claudel swallowed. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like you’d found some new lead,’ Kamal said. ‘You do still remember our project, don’t you, Pierre? Our business partnership? The thing we were looking for?’

  ‘I’m very confident we’ll find it soon.’

  ‘So am I,’ Kamal smiled.

  ‘That’s good,’ Claudel replied lamely. A trickle of sweat ran down his brow.

  ‘Don’t you want to know why I’m so confident?’

  Claudel was silent.

  ‘You haven’t asked me what it is I’m celebrating.’

  Claudel frowned. ‘What are you celebrating?’

  Kamal grinned. He wagged his finger reproachfully. ‘Pierre, Pierre.’

  Claudel’s blood was quickly turning to ice.

  Kamal walked up to the mantelpiece, and rested an elbow on it as he took another sip from his drink. He set down the glass and ran his hand down the side of the large antique glass-domed clock that ticked quietly over the fireplace. ‘I’ve always admired this clock very much. What did you say it was?’

  Claudel gulped. ‘It’s a rare chiming skeleton clock made in 1860 by James Condliff. Very valuable,’ he added, watching Kamal stroke it.

  Kamal met Claudel’s eye. He gave another little smile. Then his face contorted into fury as he shoved the clock off the mantelpiece and it smashed into a thousand pieces against the fire surround.

  Claudel jumped to his feet. He gaped in disbelief at the fragments that littered the floor. ‘Why did you do that?’ he roared, beside himself.

  Then his heart stopped. Somewhere among the wreckage of the clock was something that shouldn’t have been there. Something that most certainly hadn’t been put there by the clockmaker in 1860.

  Kamal stooped down casually and picked it up. He tossed it through the air, and Claudel caught it. He stared at the miniature surveillance device in his palm and his legs almost gave way under him.

  ‘There’s what I was celebrating,’ Kamal said. ‘I wanted to drink a toast to the fact that we all know where the treasure is now. You, me, and your new friends.’ He took a step forward. Glass crunched under his boot. ‘Do you remember the deal we made, you and I, that day in the desert when we first met? I told you I was a man of my word. That if you helped me, I would repay you. But that if you betrayed me, it wouldn’t work out so well for you. Do you remember?’

  Claudel started backing away.

  Kamal walked steadily towards him. ‘So imagine my surprise when, on my way home from my business meeting, I discover that you’ve been conspiring against me. You’ve been useless to me from the start, and now this. I think the time has come for me to decide what to do with you. What do you think?’

  ‘Listen, I can explain…’ Claudel stammered, raising his hands in supplication. ‘This Hope person came here with threats. I had no choice.’

  ‘I heard every word of your conversation,’ Kamal said. ‘Here, in the wine cellar, in your study, everywhere. There were a dozen mini-webcams on you the whole time. You think I’m a fucking idiot? You think I’ve come this far by trusting shit like you?’

  Claudel was backing away more quickly now. He glanced over his shoulder at the hallway behind him. Maybe he could make a run for it. If he could make it to the garden he could scream for help, and perhaps someone would hear.

  ‘You’re going to die now, Pierre,’ Kamal said.

  Claudel panicked and ran, his feet slithering on the marble hallway as he raced towards the front entrance. His hand closed on the heavy doorknob and he wrenched the door open.

  Youssef and Emad were standing there in the moonlight, blocking the doorway. Youssef was holding a silenced pistol. Claudel let out a cry of fear, turned and dashed for the stairs.

  Kamal bounded up the stairs after him. He lashed out a hand, caught Claudel by the collar and dragged him down to his knees. Claudel rolled on his back, struggling.

  Kamal slapped him hard across the face, and again with the back of his hand. He kept slapping until his hand was red with blood.

  ‘Please,’ Claudel gurgled through burst lips. ‘Please.’

  Kamal’s eyes were expressionless. He reached down to his belt and Claudel screamed as his hand came up clutching the double-edged combat knife.

  During the next fifty-five seconds, Pierre Claudel’s worst nightmares were realised in a way that even he hadn’t been able to imagine. He died horribly, bloodily and in extreme terror.

  Kamal stood up and wiped blood off his face with his sleeve. His eyes were bright with the triumph of the kill as he turned to Youssef in the hallway below.

  ‘Get everybody together. Get the vehicles and the weapons. We have a train to catch.’

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The Cairo–Aswan night train

  As the train rumbled through the darkness, carving its path between the Nile corridor and the desert, Ben sat pensively on the top bunk of the double sleeper compartment he was sharing with Kirby. He could hear the historian’s soft, rhythmic snores coming from the lower bunk, mingling with the steady clatter of wheels on tracks. He was still fully dressed and, even though his body was crying out for sleep, he just couldn’t turn off his restless mind.

  It was less than an hour since the night express had departed from Cairo, but it felt like weeks. Time was dragging so slowly that it seemed to him almost as if it were being deliberately cruel. Seven days to complete his task, and the third day would soon be dawning. With nothing to do but sit and fret for the next few hours, the gnawing inactivity brought him face to face with his darkest thoughts and fears.

  He reflected on the events of the last couple of days. He’d come a long wa
y, but there was an even longer road ahead of him and no way of knowing what he was going to find at the end of it. Was he getting close now? The fact was, he just couldn’t say. That was the worst thought of all.

  Suddenly galvanised into action, he clambered down the bunk’s ladder, grabbed his wallet and left the compartment. Out in the narrow, neon-lit corridor that ran along the right side of the sleeper car, he passed a uniformed guard and a guy in plain clothes who had the look of a policeman about him. Ben’s eye picked out the shape of the concealed pistol on his hip. There was probably a separate security car at the front of the train with three or four more plainclothes detectives posted to protect the tourist passengers from terrorist attacks.

  A few yards further down the corridor, Ben’s phone vibrated in his pocket and he fished it out.

  It was Paxton, and he got straight to the point. ‘Have you found it?’

  ‘I know where it is,’ Ben replied, keeping his voice low.

  ‘Well done. You’re making good progress. I knew you wouldn’t let me down.’

  ‘If it’s even there,’ Ben added. ‘If it really exists, and if it hasn’t been looted away to nothing by Sudanese militia or Bedouins, or anyone else who might have stumbled on it any time during the last thirty-odd centuries. You’re taking a big gamble on that.’

  ‘You’d better hope you find it,’ Paxton said. ‘You know what’ll happen if you come back empty-handed.’

  ‘What if I do find it? How the hell do you expect me to transport it all by myself? I wouldn’t get halfway back up the Nile.’

  ‘You let me worry about the logistics. Your job is to locate the treasure, make sure it’s safe and bring me proof and co-ordinates. I’ll take care of the rest.’

  ‘You don’t think a truck convoy full of gold is going to draw attention?’

  Paxton chuckled. ‘I have ways of moving things around unnoticed, Benedict. It’s what I do. Leave that part to me.’

  ‘And when I bring you the proof, you’ll release Zara?’

  ‘I’m a man of my word. You honour your end, and I’ll honour mine.’

  ‘A man of scruple. A shining example to us all.’

  The amicable tone dropped from Paxton’s voice. ‘Don’t test me. I expect to hear from you soon, with the news I want. Remember you’re on the clock, Benedict.’ He ended the call.

  Ben put his phone away and walked on down the length of the swaying, juddering train towards the restaurant car. It was closed, but he’d been more interested in the adjoining bar that he knew remained open through the night.

  There had been just a thin smattering of passengers gathered on the station platform in Cairo to board the night train, and so Ben wasn’t surprised to find the bar empty. The white-jacketed attendant had dark circles under his eyes, and served the double Scotch he asked for without a word. He sat there for a while, lost in thoughts that he hoped the drink would help to chase away. He wasn’t sorry when he sensed a movement behind him and turned to see another passenger wander into the bar. He was about thirty-five, dressed in a denim shirt and pressed jeans. He perched himself on one of the fixed stools, glanced amicably at Ben and asked the barman for a beer. He sounded Canadian, maybe from Toronto. Ben remembered him from the railway station where he’d been boarding the train with his wife and young son.

  It wasn’t long before they were engaged in the kind of easy, loose, noncommittal dialogue fellow travellers fall into to pass the time. The man’s name was Jerry Novak, and he was a computer salesman touring Egypt with his wife, Alice, and their boy, Mikey, who was seven. For the purposes of the conversation, Ben was a freelance travel journalist checking out the Cairo-Aswan rail route for a magazine.

  Drinks finished, they bade each other goodnight, and Ben started making his way back to his sleeping compartment. As he walked from carriage to carriage, he sensed that the train had slowed right down to a crawl. Up the corridor from his compartment, he met the guard coming back, accompanied this time by two plainclothes cops.

  ‘Is there a problem with the train?’ Ben asked the guard as he passed them.

  ‘Nothing to worry about, sir. We are experiencing minor engine trouble. Engineers are waiting at the next station, and we hope to be able to resume normal progress presently.’

  Back in the compartment, Kirby was still fast asleep on the bottom bunk. Ben clambered quietly up to the top and lay back on the narrow mattress, frustrated at the slow pace of the journey.

  Time passed, the luminous hands of his watch ticking slowly around. The train seemed to take forever to crawl to the next station and it was a long time before they got moving again. He could hear the voices and clinking tools as workmen fixed the engine problem. Eventually the whine of the diesel started up again, and the carriages gave a jerk as the locomotive took up the slack and moved off. The rumbling clatter grew as the train picked up speed again and Ben lay staring up into the darkness, feeling the vibration of the wheels on the tracks pulsating through the bunks and the thin plywood partition wall next to him.

  Sleep escaped him for a long, long time. Then, as the first fiery streaks of dawn began to light up the sky, he closed his eyes and felt himself drift. His body rocked gently with the motion of the train. His breathing was slow and shallow, his eyes closed. In his dreams, he was far away.

  The air was cool and tangy and the sea sparkled under the sun. He was standing on the polished white wood deck of a yacht. Warmth on his face. The whisper of the blue-green waters lapping at the hull.

  He heard a voice, and turned slowly to see where it was coming from.

  Standing at the end of the deck, the endless expanse of water behind him, was Harry Paxton. He wore a friendly smile, and his old military battledress from Makapela Creek.

  In front of him, her back clasped tightly to his body, was Zara. She was struggling against his grip, eyes full of fear. Against her right temple was the muzzle of the pistol Paxton was holding.

  Ben started running towards them, shouting ‘No! Let her go!’ But his voice was weak and, the faster he ran, the further Paxton and Zara seemed to shrink away from him, until the deck stretched out between him and them for hundreds of yards.

  Then it seemed to slope upwards more and more, so they appeared far above him. He clambered desperately up it, sliding back, struggling onwards, sliding back again, shouting ‘No! No!’ as he saw Paxton’s finger tighten on the trigger.

  The shattering gunshot made Ben jerk upright in his bunk and crack his head on the low ceiling of the sleeper compartment.

  Only a dream.

  But it wasn’t a dream. Kirby was thrashing and yelling in a startled panic on the lower bunk as more shots rang out, followed by a burst of automatic fire. Suddenly a line of holes was punched across the bodywork of the carriage. Thin beams of sunlight streamed in.

  Ben hurled himself down from his bunk. Still dazed from the nightmare, he staggered to the window and ripped up the blind. Out in the dawn light, about sixty yards away from the tracks where the scrub grass met the edge of the desert, four dusty 4x4 vehicles were bouncing and bucking at high speed over the sand, blowing up clouds of dust in their wakes and keeping pace with the train as it sailed along.

  Eight men inside, and they weren’t tourists. The lead vehicle was a black Nissan Patrol with spot lamps and bull bars. Behind it was a rusty Dodge SUV. The other two vehicles were what the army called ‘technicals’-big open-backed off-road pickup trucks with .50-calibre heavy machine guns mounted behind their cabs. Both of the fearsome weapons were manned by gunners wearing masks and dark glasses. Both were swivelled towards the train.

  Ben saw flame spit from their muzzles and threw himself to the floor as they strafed the carriages a second time and bullets punched through the flimsy bodywork, zinging everywhere. Broken glass blew inwards, and suddenly there was a stinging, sand-laden wind roaring through the compartment.

  Kirby was gibbering in horror, pressed flat to the floor. Ben jumped up, grabbed his arm, tore open the sleeper door
and hauled him roughly out into the corridor. They crawled rapidly on their bellies as more bullets chewed the carriage to pieces and debris and shards of metal flew around them.

  Up the corridor and in the next carriage, Ben could see passengers screaming and running in panic. In the heaving, swaying space between carriages one of the plainclothes cops was clutching an MP5 and firing out of a window at the attackers.

  As Ben watched, more gunfire blasted through the train and the cop was thrown back by multiple bullet strikes. Blood hit the wall behind him. His weapon went spinning to the floor as he collapsed.

  Ben ran back inside the compartment to grab the canvas holdall from the luggage rack. Glanced through the shattered window just in time to catch a glimpse of the front passenger inside the black Nissan. For one split second they locked eyes.

  Kamal.

  Then one of the pickups drew up level between Kamal’s vehicle and the train, and Ben lost sight of him. But there was something else to worry about in the back of the wildly swinging, bouncing truck. Ben recognised the familiar shape of the weapon that was swinging around to bear on the train. A Soviet RPG-7 anti-tank weapon, its distinctive conical snout lining up on its target, ready to launch a high-explosive missile straight into its flank.

  Ben ripped open the zipper of the holdall and wrenched out his FN rifle. He raced to load a 40mm grenade into the launcher tube under the stubby barrel, every muscle and nerve in his body screaming move, move. Ignoring the sixty-mile-an-hour sandstorm that was lashing through the broken window, he poked the rifle out through the jagged glass and quickly acquired the weaving, bouncing truck in his sights. Through the scope he could see the gunner’s face screwed up in concentration as he readied himself to fire.

  A broadside duel to the death. It was just a question of who could shoot first. Within a fraction of a second, the FN’s laser rangefinder was sending data to the fire control system computer. Distance to target flickered up on the LCD display. The elevation diode in the sight reticule flashed red. Ben tilted the muzzle up a few degrees and the diode turned green and he fired.