The Lost Relic bh-6

by Scott Mariani

  The Lost Relic

  ( Ben Hope - 6 )

  Scott Mariani

  Ben Hope has a desperate fight on his hands: to uphold justice, evade capture and prove his own innocence. Whilst visiting a former SAS comrade in Italy, Ben Hope almost runs over a young boy -- and unwittingly walks into his deadliest mission yet. Persuaded by the boy's family to attend a valuable gallery exhibition, Ben is witness to a ruthless attack by a gang of criminals seeking to steal a relatively worthless Goya sketch. In the ensuing bloodbath Ben evades the criminals, but tragically, the young boy is killed. Vowing to track down the criminals, Ben is quickly drawn into a world of treachery and danger where nothing is what it seems. Unwittingly caught up in the machinations of secret political forces, Ben finds himself wrongly accused of the murder of an Italian politician and becomes a fugitive, pursued by the combined forces of Europe's police. A super-charged, heart-racing thriller, perfect for fans of Dan Brown, Sam Bourne and Wilbur Smith.

  The Lost Relic

  SCOTT MARIANI

  To Noah Lukeman

  Prologue

  Italy

  October 1986

  The old woman was alone that night, just as she had lived alone in her rambling country house near Cesena for many years. She’d spent the evening in her studio, as she did most evenings, surrounded by her precious paintings and her beautiful things, putting the final touches to a piece of artwork she believed to be the finest she had produced in a long while.

  The work that was to be her last.

  It was just after ten, and the old woman was thinking about going to bed,when she heard the crash of breaking glass and the six armed men stormed into her home. They grabbed her roughly, forced her down into a chair, held guns to her head. Their leader was a big, burly man with a nose that had been broken more than once. He wore a suit and his greying hair was cropped like a brush.

  The last time she had heard an accent like his had been a lifetime ago. She’d been young and beautiful then.

  ‘Where is it?’ he shouted at her, over and over, with his face so close to hers she could feel the heat of his fury when she said she didn’t know, that she didn’t have it. She’d never had it, never even laid eyes on it.

  They let her go then, and she collapsed gasping to the floor. As she lay there shuddering with terror and clutching her racing heart, the six men tore apart her home with a violence she hadn’t seen in all her seventy-eight years.

  By the time the men had realised they wouldn’t find what they’d come so far to obtain, the old woman’s heart had given out and she was dead.

  What they found instead was a cracked old diary that she had kept close to her for over six decades. The leader of the men flipped hungrily through its pages, running his eye down the faded lines of the old woman’s elegant handwriting.

  His long search was only just beginning.

  Chapter One

  Western Georgia

  250 kilometres from the Russian border

  The present day

  A warm September breeze rippled softly through the conifers in the mountain ravine. The air was sweet with the scent of pine, and the late morning sunlight twinkled off the faraway snowy peaks. The mother lynx had come padding down from the forest to quench her thirst from a stream, keeping a watchful eye on her cubs as they played and wrestled in the long grass by the bank.

  As she bent to lap at the cool water, her body went suddenly rigid, her acute senses alerting her to an alien presence. Her tufted ears pricked up at the unrecognisable sound that was coming out of nowhere and rising alarmingly fast. She quickly drew away from the water’s edge while her cubs, sensing their mother’s apprehension, grouped together and scampered behind her.

  The terrifying noise was on them in moments, blasting, roaring, filling their ears. The cats bolted for the safety of the forest as two huge black shapes streaked violently overhead, shattering the tranquillity of the ravine. Then, as suddenly as they’d come hurtling over, the monsters were gone.

  More dangerous predators than big cats were out hunting today.

  Four kilometres across the forest, standing alone on a rocky knoll, was a craggy old stone shack. A century ago, maybe two, it might have been the humble home of a peasant farmer or shepherd. But those days were history, and nobody had lived there for a long time. It had been years since anyone had even set foot in there, until that morning.

  It was cool and shady inside the windowless building. The only furnishings within its walls, spaced out in a row and crudely but securely nailed down to the floorboards, were three wooden chairs. The three occupants of the chairs sat quietly, breathing softly, tuned into their shared silence. They knew each other well, but it was some time since they’d all run out of things to say – and in any case there seemed little point in conversation. Even if they’d been able to free themselves from the ropes that bound each of them tightly to his seat, and remove the hoods that their captors had placed over their heads, they knew that the door was heavily chained. Nobody was going anywhere.

  So they just waited, each of them alone with his thoughts, in the stillness that comes with true resignation to an irreversible fate. The same kinds of thoughts were running through each of their minds. Wistful thoughts of wives and girlfriends they wouldn’t be seeing again. Memories of good times. Each of them knew that he’d had a good run. It tasted bittersweet now, in retrospect, but they’d all known this time would come round eventually, one way or another. They’d all known who they were dealing with. In the world they’d long ago chosen for themselves, it was just the way things were.

  As long as it was over quickly. That was all they could ask for now.

  The pair of identical Kamov Ka-50 Black Shark combat helicopters were closing rapidly in on their target. Behind their mirrored visors, the pilots calmly checked their readouts and readied the weapons systems that bristled across the undersides of their aircraft. Two kilometres away, their automatic laser-guided target tracking systems locked in, and a sharp image of the shack appeared simultaneously on the monitors inside each cockpit, enlarged enough to count the links in the chain that was padlocked to the door. The pilots armed their missiles and prepared to fire.

  There had been no word from base. That meant the operation was a go.

  The pilots hit their triggers, and felt the recoil judder their aircraft as their weapons launched simultaneously. Just under three metres long and weighing forty-five kilos each, the Vikhr anti-tank missiles could travel at six hundred metres a second. The pilots watched them go, hunting down their target with deadly accuracy. Three long seconds as the four white vapour trails snaked and twisted through the blue sky, lancing down towards the trees. They hit in rapid succession, with blinding white flashes as the fragmentation warheads detonated on impact. The shack was instantly blown into pieces of whirling debris.

  The pilots closed in on the smashed target and activated their side-mounted 30mm cannons. It was complete overkill, but this was a demonstration and the boss was watching. The boss wanted it to look good, and if the boss said he wanted a show of firepower, he’d get a show. The machine cannons raked and strafed the ground with hammering shellfire. Billowing clouds of dust were churned into whirling spirals by the downdraft of the rotors as the choppers roared over the devastated scene. As the clouds slowly settled, the plot that the shack had once stood on now looked like a ploughed field.

  Whatever remained of the three men, come nightfall the wild animals would soon claim it.

  Chapter Two

  The man watching from behind the black-tinted, bulletproof windows of his Humvee lowered his binoculars and smiled in satisfaction at the climbing wisp of smoke across the valley. His eyes narrowed against the sun, following the line of the ch
oppers as they banked round to head back to their secret base. Back to where they’d be well hidden from their original owners.

  The man’s name was Grigori Shikov. They called him ‘the Tsar’. He was seventy-four years old, grizzled and tough. For half a century his business ethos had been based on practicality. He liked things kept simple, and he liked loose ends to be tied up. Three of them had just been tied up permanently. That was what happened to men who tried to conflict with Grigori Shikov’s interests.

  Shikov twisted his bulk around to stare at the camcorder operator in the back seat. ‘Did you get that?’

  ‘Got the whole thing, boss.’

  Shikov nodded. His clients were people you didn’t want to disappoint – but not even they could fail to be impressed. He was sure they’d find their own uses for their new toys, once the deal was wrapped and the goods changed hands. The negotiations were in the closing stages. Everything was looking good.

  ‘OK, let’s go,’ Shikov muttered to his driver. At that moment his phone buzzed in his pocket, and he reached for it. He insisted on having a new phone every few days, but disliked this latest piece of tin. It was too small for his fist and his fingers were clumsy on the tiny keys. He answered the call with a grunt. He rarely spoke on phones: people told him what he needed to hear and he listened. His unnerving way of remaining silent was one of the things he was known for. Like never sleeping. Never blinking. Never hesitating. No regrets and no apologies, never once, in a lifetime spent climbing to the top of the hardest business on the planet, and staying there. Challenged, yes, many times. But never defeated and never caught.

  Shikov had been expecting a different call and he was about to hang up impatiently, but he didn’t. The caller was a man named Yuri Maisky, and he was one of Shikov’s closest aides. He also happened to be his nephew, and Shikov kept his family close – or what remained of it since the death of his wife three years earlier.

  So he listened to what Maisky had to say, and he felt his heartbeat lurch up a gear as the importance of what he was hearing sank in.

  ‘You’re sure?’ he rumbled.

  It was not a casual question. Maisky knew all too well that the boss didn’t waste words on idle chat. There was a tinge of a quaver in his voice as he replied, ‘Quite sure. Our contact says it will be there, no question. It is definitely the one.’

  The old man was silent for several seconds, holding the phone away from his ear as he digested this unexpected news.

  It had turned up at last. After all these years waiting, just like that.

  Then he spoke again, quietly and calmly. ‘Where is my son?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Maisky said after a beat. The truthful answer was that Anatoly’s whereabouts could be narrowed down fairly accurately to any one of three places: he’d either be lounging drunk on the deck of his yacht, gambling away more of his father’s fortune in the casino, or making a pig of himself in the bed of some ambitious hottie somewhere. It was wiser to lie.

  Shikov said, ‘Find him. Tell him I have a job for him.’

  Chapter Three

  Italy

  Six days later

  Ben Hope glanced at the roughly drawn map clipped to the dashboard and steered the four-wheel-drive in through the gate. The track ahead traced a winding path through the sun-bleached valley. He couldn’t see the house but guessed it must be beyond the rise about a kilometre away.

  He’d had a feeling that old Boonzie McCulloch could be trusted to pick a spot that was fairly inaccessible, and was glad he’d had the instinct to hire the sturdy Mitsubishi Shogun for the drive out here. Mid-afternoon, and it was hot enough to need all the windows wound down, even up here in the hill country near Campo Basso. Ben gazed around him at the scenery as the car lurched along the rutted, rocky track.

  Beyond a stand of trees, the little farmhouse came into view. It was pretty much exactly what he’d expected, a simple and neat whitewashed block with shutters and a wooden veranda, red terracotta tiles on the roof. Behind the house stood a cluster of well-kept outbuildings, and beyond those was a sweep of fields. Sunlight glittered off a long row of greenhouses in the distance.

  Ben pulled up, killed the engine and stepped down from the dusty Shogun. The chickens scratching about the yard parted hurriedly as a Doberman came trotting over to investigate the visitor. From somewhere round the back, Ben heard a woman’s voice call the dog’s name. It paused a second to eye him up, then seemed to decide he wasn’t a threat and went bounding back towards the house.

  The front door opened, and a tall man in jeans and a loose-fitting khaki shirt stepped out onto the veranda. His gaze landed on Ben and the moustached face cracked into a grin.

  ‘Hello, Boonzie,’ Ben said, and he was transported back nearly seventeen years to the day they’d first met. The day a young soldier had turned up at Hereford with over a hundred other hopefuls dreaming of wearing the coveted winged dagger badge of the most elite outfit in the British army. The wiry Glaswegian sergeant had been one of the stern, grim-faced officers whose job it was to put the fledglings through unimaginable hell. By the time the selection process had done its worst and Ben had been one of just eight tired, bruised survivors, his gruff, granite-faced tormentor had become his mentor, and a friend for life. The Scotsman had been there, grinning like a proud father, when Ben had been awarded his badge. And he’d been there, calm and steady and dependable, when Ben had experienced his first serious battle.

  They’d served together in the field for three years, before Boonzie had moved on to training recruits full-time. Ben had sorely missed him.

  It had been four years after that, Ben now an SAS major stationed in Afghanistan, when he’d heard the unlikely rumours: that mad Scots bastard McCulloch had cracked. Gone soft in the head, found love, quit the army and set up home in the south of Italy, milking goats and growing crops. It had seemed bizarre.

  But now, looking around him and seeing his old friend walking down the steps of the house with a warm grin and the sun on his tanned, creased face, Ben understood perfectly what had drawn Boonzie here.

  The man hadn’t changed a great deal physically over the years. He had to be fifty-eight or fifty-nine now, a little more grizzled but still as lean and wiry as a junkyard hound, with the same work-toughened look of a man who’d spent most of his life doing things the hard way. Something inside had softened, though. Those hard grey eyes had a diamond twinkle to them now.

  ‘It’s grand to see ye again, Ben.’ Boonzie was one of those Scots who could go the rest of his life without ever returning to the old country but would go on wearing his accent proudly like a flag until the day he died.

  ‘You look good, Boonzie. I can see you’re happy here.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have believed this dour auld fucker could find true bliss, would you?’

  ‘When did I ever call you a dour old fucker?’

  Boonzie’s grin widened an inch. ‘What brings you all the way out here, Ben? You didn’t say much on the phone. Just that you wanted to talk to me about something.’

  Ben nodded. He’d wanted this to be face to face. ‘Here, come in out of the sun.’

  The house was as simple inside as it was out, but it was homely and inviting. As Boonzie ushered him through to a sitting room, a door opened and Ben turned to see a deeply tanned Italian woman walking into the room. She stood only chest-high to Boonzie, who put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed her affectionately to his side. The smile she flashed at Ben was broad and generous, like her figure. A mass of curly black hair with just a few silver strands tumbled down onto the shoulders of her blouse.

  ‘This is my wife Mirella,’ Boonzie said, gazing lovingly down at her.

  Ben put out his hand. ‘Piacere, Signora.’

  ‘I am pleased to meet you too,’ Mirella replied in hesitant English. ‘Please call me Mirella. And I must practise my English, as Archibald only speaks Italian to me now that he has learned.’

  Archibald! In all the years in the army toge
ther, Ben had never asked what his real name was. Ben shot a glance at Boonzie, who was staring in horror at his wife, and couldn’t resist breaking out into a grin that quickly threatened to spill over into a laugh. ‘You and Archibald have a beautiful home,’ he said.

  Boonzie soon got over it. While Mirella returned to the kitchen, strictly forbidding any male to enter until dinner was prepared, Ben had a cold bottle of Peroni beer pressed into his hand and was given the tour of the smallholding.

  ‘Nine acres,’ Boonzie said grandly, sweeping an arm across his land. ‘Place was just a rocky wasteland when I found it. Not what you’d call a farm, but it keeps us going. The greenhouses are for basil, the rest of it is my tomato crop.’

  Ben was no farmer. He shrugged and looked blank. ‘Just basil and tomato?’

  ‘That’s our wee business,’ Boonzie explained. ‘Mirella’s one hell of a cook. Her secret recipes for basil pesto and tomato sauce are like you wouldn’t believe, old son. I grow the stuff, she cooks it all up and we bottle it. Once a week I go out in the van and do the rounds of the local restaurant trade. Campo Basso, the whole area. It’ll never make us millionaires, but look at this place. It’s heaven, man.’

  Ben gazed around him and found it hard to disagree. Running his eye across the neat rows of greenhouses, he noticed a gap between them that was just a rectangle of freshly-dug earth marked out with string. A shovel stood propped against a wheelbarrow, beside it a pile of aluminium framing and glass panels wrapped in plastic, some bags of ready-mix cement and a mixer.

  ‘New greenhouse,’ Boonzie explained, slurping beer. ‘Can’t build enough of the damn things. Need to finish putting it up.’

  ‘How about I give you a hand right now?’

  It took a lot of persuading, but Boonzie finally relented and ran back to the house to fetch another shovel and more beer to keep them cool while they worked. Ben didn’t wait for him. He rolled up his sleeves, grabbed the shovel and dug in.