The Martyr’s Curse (Ben Hope, Book 11)

by Scott Mariani

  Ben jumped up next to him. He looked at the rusty old tool locker bolted down behind the cab. Four feet long, two feet wide. The dead man wasn’t a huge guy. Ben raised the creaky locker lid, propped it up and lifted out the removable compartment full of crusty old spanners, which he shunted to the edge of the flatbed and let fall to the ground. The locker was empty now, except for the coil of old rope and the pair of bolt croppers lying in the bottom. But it wouldn’t be empty long.

  ‘In you go,’ Ben said. If he had to share the truck with a dead man, he’d rather not have the guy stinking up the inside of the cab. Besides, nosy cops had a tendency to spot dead men in the passenger seat quicker than they might check on-board tool lockers. With more heaving and twisting, he manhandled the dead man’s torso into the box, shoulders twisted diagonally, his left arm under him and the right folded across his chest. The guy’s head was up at an angle, as if peering down his body to see what was going on. Ben shoved him down deep inside the box with the heel of his boot. Not a big man, but not a midget either, and his legs wouldn’t fit. They overhung the edge of the locker, no matter which way Ben tried to squeeze them in. Which was easily remedied, by means of three or four judicious bone-crunching stamps to his knees that allowed them to be folded up sideways and crammed into the tight space.

  People talked about having respect for the dead. Ben didn’t like having to break the guy’s legs this way. He’d much rather have done it while he was still alive.

  Once the body was all tucked in, Ben covered him up with the lid and banged it down tight. Then jumped down from the flatbed, quickly fastened up the tonneau cover and climbed back behind the wheel. He crashed the lever out of neutral and into first, pressed down hard on the pedal and the truck lurched forwards with a dieselly rasp.

  He didn’t look back as he steered it across the yard, towards the open gateway. The truck lumbered through the gates. He twisted the wheel to the right, heading in the opposite direction from his route to Briançon the day before. Leaving behind the dead bodies of his friends, and the place he’d called home.

  He didn’t know where the road was going to take him. Not yet.

  At this moment, he knew just one thing. That whoever had done this wanted blood.

  And that blood was what they were going to get.

  Chapter Eighteen

  If she leaned her head close to the window and peered downwards, Hannah Gissel could see the shadow of the Bell 429 flicking and rippling over the picture-perfect pastureland below them as they flew northwards towards their destination. The roar of the rotors was muted in her radio headset. She turned and smiled at Udo Streicher, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder alongside her in the pilot’s seat, and gazed at him for a few seconds with a secret look of admiration. His face was set in an expression of concentration, his eyes hidden behind his aviator shades. He appeared outwardly calm, but Hannah could tell from the way he held himself that there was a bright twinkle behind those dark glasses, and that inside he was bursting with glee and leaping about like a lottery winner, pumping his fists in the air, roaring with laughter. She felt exactly that way herself, though like Udo she was far too restrained to let it show.

  In fact, her heart was thumping almost as fast as the helicopter rotors. They’d done it. They’d damn well done it. Even after the devastating setback of the failed North Korean attempt, she’d never doubted her man’s ability to pull this off. Now they were almost home and dry. Ready for the next phase to begin.

  Then things would really start to get interesting.

  Hannah twisted further around in her seat and looked at the eight white oblong containers secured inside the passenger space behind them. Securely locked, carefully strapped down to prevent them from tumbling about in flight. Their shiny white super-tough plastic shells gleamed in the bright morning sunlight that filled the cabin. The fruit of years of planning and sacrifice. Theirs at last.

  Oh, yes, things were definitely going to start getting interesting from here on.

  Before too long, the chopper overflew the twisting blue river that marked the western boundary of the hundred-acre organic dairy farm. Streicher gave a little smile of satisfaction as they entered what he considered his own airspace. Like all his real estate holdings, he owned this land in a company name that could never be traced back to him personally. It had been the best investment he’d ever made, even though he had absolutely no intention of ever selling it, and even less interest in organic dairy farming. All but a ten-acre chunk of the land had been leased for the last twelve years to a reliable, hard-working couple named Lili and Jens Mosman, who employed enough hands and did a good enough job of the day-to-day running of the farm to turn a reasonable profit. The Mosmans enjoyed a harmonious rapport with their landlord, whom they knew only as ‘Herr Schumann’, and who left them alone to do their thing, never interfering, seldom seen, and then only from afar. The one time they’d actually met face to face was to sign the lease on the farmland, years ago.

  In return for Herr Schumann’s generosity and fairness towards them, the Mosmans never expressed curiosity about, and gave a wide berth to, the ten-acre patch that he kept for himself, circled by trees and securely fenced off from the rest of the spread. As far as they were concerned, it was just a convenient location for their colourful landlord to keep his helicopter and a few other of his possessions.

  Which, as far as that went, was no word of a lie. At the heart of the ten-acre patch was the large hangar that housed the Bell when it wasn’t in use. A private road ran through the trees and between fields along the edge of the farmland; now and again the Mosmans might catch a distant glimpse of Herr Schumann and his wife, to whom they’d never been introduced but whose name they’d been told was Ulrike, zapping off in one of his collection of expensive motor vehicles. It was no longer much of a topic for discussion in the Mosman home. Herr Schumann was obviously wealthy and possibly slightly eccentric in his ways, but hardly nuts enough to warrant much in the way of speculation, let alone gossip. In any case, the Mosmans were not the most imaginative of folks, and generally too busy with the running of the farm to think about much else.

  The chopper rattled over well-kept farm buildings and neatly fenced green pastures dotted with grazing cattle. Jens Mosman’s bright red tractor was cutting across one of the lower fields, looking like a shiny toy from high above. Soon after, Streicher dropped altitude as the circle of pine forest surrounding his personal acreage came into view. At its centre, the big hangar with its wood cladding and pitched roof looked archetypally Swiss. It was surrounded by an apron of concrete, connected to the perimeter fence and high gates by the private road.

  Streicher activated the landing-gear controls. The helicopter sank gently downwards, treetops blotting out the view of farmland all around. It touched neatly down on the concrete apron and taxied towards the huge steel shutter that was the only entrance to the hangar.

  Hannah pointed a small, custom-made remote control. It had a ten-digit keypad, and below it two coloured buttons, red on the right and green on the left. She pressed the green button with a manicured nail and the shutter instantly began to wind open. The rotors slowed from a roar to a lazy whoop-whoop-whoop and the whine of the turbine deepened in pitch. Streicher waited until the shutter was fully elevated, then taxied inside the wide rectangular entrance. Hannah pressed the remote again and the door began to close behind them.

  Lights came on automatically, filling the huge hangar with brightness. The concrete floor was gleaming red. The walls were dazzling white. Parked tight against one wall, taking up less than half its length, was the Volvo articulated lorry that Dominik Baiza had driven back alone. Baiza was one of very few people trusted with access to the hangar. As instructed, before leaving he’d unloaded the Lenco BearCat from the trailer and parked it neatly to one side. Across the hangar were a few of Streicher’s more leisure-orientated vehicles: his classic Benelli six-cylinder motorcycle, his fully dressed Honda Gold Wing Aspencade, his Harley, and the impossibly l
ow, sleek shape of the Pagani Zonda supercar that looked more like a carbon-fibre space fighter than an automobile.

  Streicher finished taxiing the Bell into its designated space, which was marked out in neat white paint lines on the floor. He and Hannah waited a few moments until the rotors had slowed to a standstill, then he disembarked first and stood by the hatch as she carefully passed out the white containers one by one. With equal care, Streicher laid them in a neat row on the carry rack of a specially adapted electric golf buggy. When the eighth container was securely in place, the two of them clambered aboard the open-sided buggy. Streicher pressed the accelerator pedal and the little vehicle whooshed off silently across the shiny floor.

  An intruder peering in through the window would have been baffled by the sight, because there was apparently nowhere inside the hangar for the golf buggy to ferry its cargo to. No storage facilities of any kind, no other visible rooms. It was just a vast open rectangular space, like an enormous garage.

  Until Hannah produced the little remote handset she’d used to open the shutter doors. She entered a six-digit combination code and pressed the red button.

  Nothing happened for a few moments.

  Then the near-invisible hairline seam that traced a ten-metre square in the floor began to widen to the whoosh of hidden hydraulic gears, and the secret trapdoor opened up in front of them.

  Finally, now that he was truly home and dry, Streicher allowed a wide grin of triumph to spread across his face.

  ‘We did it, Udo,’ Hannah said. It was a rare thing for her to show emotion, but at that moment she could have cried.

  ‘We did, didn’t we?’ he replied with a chuckle, and directed the silent vehicle down the ramp into the underground domain below that virtually nobody else in the world knew existed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ben drove aimlessly for fifteen minutes, approximately south-east, just to put distance between himself and the monastery. The unfamiliar road curved and looped around the mountainside, then dropped steeply in altitude and took him down into thick deciduous and coniferous forest, the trees arching over the road in places to make a tunnel. Just one car passed in the opposite direction and his mirrors were empty. The sun was shining. It should have been another beautiful day in paradise.

  He slowed as a narrow forest track appeared on his right, pulled in and drove the Belphégor fifty yards, rocking and lurching over the uneven ground until he came to a clearing, about thirty yards wide and roughly circular. The ground was hard-packed earth, littered with bark chippings and moss and last autumn’s leaves. At the centre stood a wooden picnic table, and at its edge was a block-built toilet facility. If the place had been developed as a travellers’ rest for road-weary tourists, it was too well-hidden to have ever had much use. Today, at any rate, it was completely deserted, and that suited Ben fine.

  He stopped and killed the engine, but he didn’t get out of the truck. The deafened whine in his ears was beginning to wear off. He could hear the birds chirping overhead, the whisper of the breeze in the leaves and the soft hum of forest insects. Sunlight filtered through the foliage and dappled the windscreen. He sat motionless for a long time, staring dead ahead into space over the top of the wheel. Slowly, he was beginning to unwind. His jaw had unclenched, his fists loosened on the wheel and his heart had returned to its normal resting rate of forty-five beats per minute. Before, he’d been upset and angry. Now he was upset, and angry, and focused. Calm. Clear. Cold. And very dangerous.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last.

  He took out the dead man’s phone. It was a cheap pay-as-you-go item, shiny and new with the standard bells and whistles, including a built-in camera. He scrolled over to the screen icon labelled Call Records, and opened up the menu. It was blank. No calls either made or received, unless the dead guy had deleted them all. Ben backtracked to the main menu. Picture files: blank. Calendar: blank. He backtracked again and selected contacts.

  This time, he found something. There were ten numbers in the list, but no names. Over the next few minutes he dialled each one in turn, and each one in turn came back with a generic answerphone recording.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, and slipped the phone back in his pocket. He climbed down from the cab, stretched his sore muscles and walked over to the toilet block. The washroom facilities were basic and neglected, with a grubby sink and a cracked mirror, no soap, no towel, cold water only. He peered into the glass and saw a wild man looking back at him. Hair almost white with dust, red-rimmed eyes staring out of a face that was gaunt and unshaven and streaked with soot and dirt, like a soldier slathered in facial camo cream before going into battle. He spent the next few minutes cleaning himself up as best he could, splashing cold water over his face and brushing the worst of the dust out of his hair. The result wasn’t perfect, but marginally decent enough to frequent human society again.

  He walked back to the Belphégor, restarted the engine and jammed it in gear, and spun the wheel round and round to full lock to U-turn back out of the clearing and down the narrow lane to the road. He pulled out and continued in the same direction, the road twisting and bending through the trees, now and then a break in the overhead canopy offering a glimpse of the mountains against the clear blue sky.

  After another fifteen minutes he saw a sign for a filling station coming up on the right. Fifty yards later, he toed the brake and leaned across the transmission tunnel and the massive gear lever to wind down the far-side window and get a good look at the place as he drove past. The filling station shop was a low, weathered wooden building about forty yards back from the road, attached to an old open-fronted tin-sheet barn that would have had some agricultural use back in its day but now served as a storage shed. Firewood was stacked high in one corner, rows of butane cylinders stood in another. A pair of old-style pumps stood out on the patched concrete in front of the shop, one for gasoline and the other for diesel. A sign over the doorway read GAZ – TABAC – LOTERIE. Parked at the side of the building was a hard-used Peugeot 505 pickup truck with rusty skirts and a taped-up headlamp, the only other vehicle in sight. A bent old guy in a Breton cap, whom Ben took to be the proprietor of both the business and the pickup truck, was pottering slowly about the storage shed, seeming to be doing not much of anything.

  Ben drove on a hundred yards, then flicked his indicator and pulled into the roadside. Leaving the truck running and the driver’s door open, he got out and walked back along the road to check out the filling station more closely. His first impression had been right. It was a useful place for his purposes, selling everything he needed. Best of all, it was a suitably old-fashioned kind of establishment. The kind he favoured most at times like these, which was to say the kind with no security camera keeping tabs on the vehicles that rolled in and out. He walked back to the truck, then reversed the hundred yards back down the road and pulled up on the patched concrete.

  It wasn’t that the Belphégor needed diesel. Ben had another errand on his mind. The bent old man in the cap emerged from the workshop and greeted him with the customary and more formal ‘Bonjour, Monsieur’ that older folks in quiet parts of France still observed. Ben purchased four plastic five-litre petrol cans, a Michelin map of the local area, a roll of absorbent paper towel, and the first pack of Gauloises he’d bought in over seven months. He waited patiently while the old man pumped twenty litres of Eurosuper 98 Sans Plomb into his four cans, then paid cash and smiled a polite goodbye, carried his purchases to the truck and was on his way.

  He pulled the Belphégor around in the road and headed back the way he’d come earlier. Fifteen minutes later, he’d returned to the clearing. The place was just as deserted as before. He parked the truck as close to its centre as he could, next to the picnic table, then shut off the engine for the very last time and climbed down from the cab with his bag, weighed down by the gold bars inside. He carried it to the edge of the clearing and dumped it at the foot of a tree. Returning to the truck, he undid the tonneau cover fastenings once mor
e, then clambered up on to the flatbed and opened the tool locker. Reaching inside with both hands, he grabbed its occupant by the collar and sleeve and yanked him upright.

  It took a few moments to drag the dead man out and lay him on his back on the pitted slats of the flatbed, his broken legs splayed out at odd angles. The guy’s skin had turned a sickly grey-green and rigor mortis was beginning to stiffen him up. Ben took the phone out of his pocket and used its built-in camera to take a mugshot of the corpse.

  He quickly examined the picture on-screen. It wasn’t the most flattering of portraits, but it would serve its purpose perfectly well. Satisfied, he put the phone away and stepped back over the body to the open tool locker. He lifted out the pair of bolt croppers, the only component of the truck’s useless toolkit that he hadn’t discarded earlier.

  ‘This won’t hurt a bit,’ he said to the dead man.

  When the unpleasant part was over, Ben left the bolt croppers lying across the corpse’s chest. Then he unscrewed the top of each of the four plastic fuel cans in turn. Taking care not to get any on himself, he sloshed their contents all over the flatbed, over the corpse, inside the cab, everywhere. The volatile petrol fumes filled the air with their sharp tang and shimmered up like heat ripples in the dappled sunlight as they quickly began to evaporate. Ben left the upturned cans where they lay, then walked away from the truck. He reached in his pocket for the cigarettes he’d bought. Tore open the pack, drew out a Gauloise, put it lightly between his lips. It felt as if it belonged there. He lit it with his old Zippo and took a deep draw of the smoke, letting the acrid taste of it fill his lungs. His first cigarette all year. Unlikely to be his last.