House of War

by Scott Mariani

  Ben didn’t know whether to marvel at the cynical ingenuity of Roth and his associates, or just reach across the desk and break his nose in a couple of places. ‘And where is Thierry now? Or was he “removed” once you had what you wanted?’

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry about your little forger buddy. Like I said, quite the talented individual. He’ll be kept plenty busy working for us from now on, with a whole new identity and a pleasant life somewhere far, far away from all the people he pissed off back home.’

  ‘That’s very sweet of you. And as for me, my whole involvement in this was to use me to get Nazim. You knew how dangerous he was, and you didn’t want to risk the lives of your own agents. Correct?’

  ‘Kind of like the old fable about the monkey using the cat’s paw to get a roasting chestnut out of the fire,’ Roth said. ‘It’s all about plausible deniability, my friend. You becoming involved turned out to be a golden opportunity for us. It meant we didn’t have to do anything much except watch from the sidelines. Anything bad happened to you, so much less embarrassment for the company. Plus, as a special bonus, it so happens that you’re better than any of our people. You proved that. You’ve got some useful friends, too. Of course, I did give you a helping hand now and then.’

  ‘Like the spy satellite that was watching the coast and spotted the boat coming ashore at Vaucottes,’ Ben said. ‘That’s the only way you could have known about the attack before the police did.’

  Roth gave a chuckle. ‘Guess I gave myself away there, huh? Anyhow, credit where credit’s due. You did a pretty darn good job, my friend. Maybe you’d consider quitting that deadbeat shooting gallery you call a training school, and coming to work for us, too.’

  ‘That’s the second wonderful job offer I’ve had this week. I think I’d rather go off shooting rebels in Ethiopia for Ken Keegan.’

  ‘Think about it, man. Seriously.’ Roth grinned. ‘Let me tell you what you’re missing, though. See, this was never really about Nazim. He’s out of the picture, whoopee. But the guy was just middle-echelon. Small fry, in the great scheme of things. No, the real target all along was Nazim’s boss.’

  ‘And that would be who?’

  ‘His name is Ibrahim Mohammed al-Rashid. Iraqi, born on a little farm somewhere north of Damascus in 1949. To look at him, you’d think he was a sweet old grandfather. In reality he’s the meanest, most perfidious sonofabitch who ever lived, not to mention the smartest. We’ve been trying to nab him for years. Suspected mastermind of an endless parade of jihadist terror atrocities, but the wily old fox always seemed to be a step ahead of us. Try as we might, we just never could nail him down. Until now.’ Roth looked at his watch with an air of satisfaction. ‘As we speak, our dear Mister al-Rashid is on his way to a secret facility where he’s gonna spend the rest of his miserable life being very useful to us. Thanks to you, and Thierry Chevrolet.’

  It took Ben a moment to understand. ‘The audio track.’

  Roth nodded. ‘Segal was getting cold feet about the whole fentanyl thing. Nazim was worried he was going to screw up, so he mentioned the name al-Rashid to scare the living daylights out of him. That’s all it took to give us the solid connection we’d been trying to establish between the old man and the known bad guys.’

  Ben said, ‘But Nazim already had his threat against Margot to keep Segal in line.’

  ‘Sure, in theory. Only when Nazim had Margot kidnapped he didn’t know that her husband had been wishing her dead for years. Literally. Because Margot was the one with the wealth. Her father made a ton of money in cement when she was little. She was an only child and inherited a few million bucks when he died. Whereas Julien has been squandering cash hand over fist all the time they’ve been unhappily married, and depending on her to keep him in his glory. He spends more than he earns, has run up heavy debts and is technically broke. Margot getting kidnapped by a bunch of murderers was the best thing that could’ve happened for him, because if they’d killed her he’d have gotten rich on her fortune and the life insurance. With her out of the way, he was planning on running off with the new love of his life. Sadly, not to be.’

  Ben blinked. ‘Romy Juneau?’

  ‘You got it. The guy was madly infatuated with her. Our agents found a whole stack of love letters in her apartment. Whether she felt the same way about him, I guess we’ll never know. Personally, I have my doubts. Anyhow, now that Romy’s gone and Margot’s back in the picture, I guess Segal will be the perfect lovey-dovey husband for a while longer.’

  Ben’s head was spinning from all the intrigue. ‘Enough of Julien Segal. What happens to Ibrahim al-Rashid?’

  ‘Use your imagination, man,’ Roth said casually. ‘The usual. What else?’

  ‘Torture?’

  ‘And then some. But we prefer the term “extraordinary rendition”. You should be proud. We never woulda got the bastard without you.’

  Ben pictured a seventy-year-old man being systematically taken apart by CIA spooks in some dingy cellar in a nameless foreign country, and he felt sickened. ‘You’re a real piece of shit, Roth.’

  Roth spread his hands. ‘Yeah, well. You know how it is. But don’t be too rough on us. I mean, we’re buying you a nice new car. The very latest B3 Biturbo model, to replace the one that, needless to say, was never anywhere near the water treatment plant in Alençon.’ He smiled. ‘Least we can do by way of a reward, right?’

  ‘Stick your reward up your arse,’ Ben said. ‘Am I free to go now?’

  ‘Free as a bird. Consider yourself and your two compadres officially off the hook. Actually, you never would’ve gotten onto it, if the cops hadn’t come charging in and fouled everything up. Same old.’

  ‘Good enough,’ Ben said. ‘Just a few loose ends, before I walk out of here and you never see me again. First, Roxane. How is she?’

  ‘Being well cared for and doing just fine,’ Roth said. ‘She kept asking about the good-looking blond hero dude who saved her. Guess she must have imagined it. Shock does funny things to the brain.’

  ‘Then there’s Michel Yassa. Wherever he is now, I need to know they won’t pursue him for the murder of Romy Juneau.’

  ‘That won’t happen. You have my word. Next?’

  ‘Next, there’s the matter of Axel Roux, his cousin and the three farm brothers who I wouldn’t like to think were in any trouble either.’

  ‘Won’t be easy getting past the skipped bail issue. Axel might pull a little jail time there. But I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘You do that.’

  Roth looked amused. ‘This is what I always admired about you, Ben. You’re such a goddamn saint. Always looking out for the little guy. Is there more?’

  ‘No, I think that concludes our business.’

  ‘Don’t forget the job offer. Still on the table, anytime you feel like reconsidering.’

  Ben turned to leave. ‘See you in hell, Tyler.’

  Roth laughed. ‘If I get there first, I’ll be waiting for you, bro. Otherwise, you keep a seat for me.’

  The guards were waiting for Ben outside. They led him to another room where he was given back the rest of his things. Then he was shown out of an exit, and found himself standing alone outside the grand Police Prefecture building on Place Louis Lépine, smack in the middle of Paris, opposite the roofless remains of Notre Dame Cathedral.

  Not quite alone.

  Jeff and Tuesday had been magically released from police custody a little sooner than him, and were waiting on a nearby bench, enjoying what little sunshine the October day had to offer. As they spotted him coming out they stood and came over with big smiles.

  Ben hugged them both. He said he was sorry for what he’d had to put them through.

  ‘We’ve been through worse,’ Jeff said. Which was pretty much the kind of thing Jeff always said.

  ‘So what just happened in there?’ Tuesday asked. ‘It’s not every day you’re handed a “get out of jail free” card.’

  ‘Roth,’ Ben replied, lighting a Ga
uloise.

  Jeff grunted. ‘I knew there was something funny about that bloke.’

  ‘I could tell you,’ Ben said.

  ‘But you’d have to kill us,’ Tuesday finished for him, with a face-splitting megawatt smile you couldn’t look at directly without sunglasses.

  ‘Who gives a shit anyway?’ Jeff said. ‘Let’s go home, eh?’

  Ben smiled, too. ‘Yeah. Let’s go home.’

  Read on for a sneak preview of the next Ben Hope thriller

  The Pretender’s Gold

  Coming May 2020

  Available to pre-order now

  PROLOGUE

  Loch Ardaich

  Scottish Highlands

  ‘Can you believe this crap?’ Ross Campbell muttered to himself as he stared through his rainy van windscreen at the narrow, winding rural road ahead, carving onward for endless miles into the murk. The December cold and rain were showing absolutely no sign of letting up, and he had the prospect of a good soaking to look forward to when he reached his remote destination.

  What a bummer. What a drag. Of course, this job would have to land on him on the dreichest, dreariest and most depressing day imaginable. Today of all days, marking exactly twelve months since Katrina had left him to run off with that rich bastard cosmetic dentist from Inverness.

  Ross strongly felt that he should instead be slouched in his armchair at home, nursing his smouldering resentment in front of the TV with a few bottles of Broughton’s Old Jock at his elbow. Yes, he was still feeling sorry for himself. Yes, he was taking it badly and allowing his chronic anger to get the better of him. And anyone who had a problem with that better keep their opinion to themselves. Got that, pal?

  But however Ross felt he should be spending this miserable winter’s afternoon, his duties as partner in the firm of McCulloch & Campbell, Chartered Building Surveyors, obliged him to be here. His task: to scout and assess the western perimeter of the development site within the Loch Ardaich pine forest, right out in the sticks thirty miles north of Fort William. Like it hadn’t already been scouted and assessed a dozen times already, but what was the point of complaining?

  The closer he got to his destination, the more aggressively the rain lashed his windscreen. The road narrowed to a single-track lane in places as it followed an endless series of S-bends along the forested shores of Loch Ardaich. The heather-covered hills rose high all around, their tops shrouded in mist and cloud. Now and then he passed a lonely cottage or deserted stone bothy. On a clear day you could sometimes spot an osprey circling over the waters of the loch, or even an eagle; and it wasn’t uncommon for a red deer to suddenly burst from cover and leap across the road right in the path of oncoming traffic, scaring the wits out of the inattentive motorist. Ross had lived here all his life, though, and for him the scenery and fauna of the remote western Highlands that drew thousands of visitors each year from all around the world held little wonder or fascination.

  At last, the wire-mesh fence and main gates of the development site appeared ahead. The adverse weather conditions had kept most of the protesters away, but the diehards were still grimly hanging on. Ross gave a groan as he saw the small crowd huddled in their rain gear by the gates, ready to wave their sodden banners and scream abuse at any vehicles entering or leaving the fenced-off construction zone. Ross would have bet money that Geoffrey Watkins was among them. Come up all the way from England to stir up as much trouble as he could, Watkins was the most militant of the lot.

  Ross personally didn’t have a lot of time for the environmental nutters in general, though he had to admit they might have a point on this occasion. It had certainly been one of the more contentious projects his firm had been involved in, and he’d often wished that his senior partner, Ewan, hadn’t agreed to take it on. The plans for an eighteen-hole championship golf course and gated community estate with million-pound homes for wealthy retirees had attracted no small amount of anger from locals. Two hundred acres of ancient pine forest had been earmarked for destruction under the scheme, sparking furious resistance and attempted legal action by one of the larger and more organised ecowarrior groups. The environmentalists had lost their legal case in court months ago, but in spite of the ruling against them were still gamely doing all they could to disrupt the development. Their methods had been creative enough to cause protracted and extremely expensive delays. The company who’d initially landed the contract had been brought to a virtual standstill by the legion of protesters who had invaded the site, chained themselves to trees, lain in the path of bulldozers, harangued the foresters and generally made it impossible to get the excavations underway. When the company had built a scale-proof fence worthy of a prison compound and brought in security personnel to eject the protesters, the ecowarriors had simply sharpened up their game by sabotaging construction vehicles, slashing tyres and setting an awful lot of valuable machinery ablaze, until in the end the company execs had been forced to cut their losses and give up.

  Three more construction firms were now in competition to decide which lucky crew would take their place. All the while, persistent rumours abounded of a lot of dirty money changing hands and palms being greased for the project to be greenlit. If you believed the gossip, certain local officials were going to do well out of the deal – if and when it actually got completed. The situation was a mess.

  Ross was driving his company van, a little white Peugeot Bipper with the chartered surveyor firm’s logo proudly emblazoned on its side, a magnet for trouble. Not much wanting his vehicle to be attacked and pelted with missiles, he slipped away from the main gates and detoured around the site’s western perimeter to a small side entrance the protesters had, mercifully, chosen to leave unguarded today. He parked the van and listened to the rain pounding the roof. The ground was turning to slush out there, appalling even by the normal standards of a Scottish winter. Beyond the fence stood the thick, dark forest, ancient and forbidding. Local folklore held spooky old tales of bogles and sluaghs and other evil spirits and hobgoblins that lurked in the woods, preying on the hapless. What a load of shite, Ross thought, but he still didn’t much fancy having to venture inside.

  He changed into his wellies and tugged on his raincoat before getting out of the van, then took the plunge. Moments later, he’d undone the padlock holding the side gate and let himself through the fence, closing it behind him before setting off at a trudge towards the trees.

  The forest was very dense and hard to walk through, and Ross was certainly no hardened outdoorsman. He tripped and stumbled his way for nearly a quarter of a mile using a GPS navigation device to orient him towards the western boundary. Without the GPS he’d soon have been hopelessly lost, probably doomed to wander forever. Overhead the tall trees swayed in the wind and their branches clacked and clashed like the antlers of fighting stags in the rutting season. Deep, deep in the forest he swore out loud – who the hell could hear him, anyway – as he had to clamber over a slippery, moss-covered fallen trunk that blocked his path with no other way around except through a mass of brambles that would have stopped a tank. He cursed even more vehemently a few metres further on, when he was forced to negotiate a steep downward slope where part of the ground had been washed away by floods of rain, exposing tree roots and a great deal of centuries-old rotted and richly odorous vegetable matter.

  Damn and blast. Why’d this have to happen to me? At least, if it was any consolation, the rain had stopped.

  He was halfway down the slippery incline when he lost his footing. He windmilled his arms to try to regain his balance, to no avail. Next thing he was tumbling and slithering through the gloopy mud, desperately grasping at roots in an attempt to halt his descent but unable to stop himself until he’d rolled and somersaulted all the way to the claggy, squelchy bottom.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ he yelled as he managed to sit upright, caked from head to toe in wet, cloying, dripping, freezing cold filth that dripped from his fingers and matted his hair. ‘I don’t bloody believe it!’ Followed
by a stream of much more profane invective.

  But then his words abruptly died in his mouth as a very strange and unexpected sight caught his eye.

  He reached out and raked in the dirt to uncover the rest of the shiny, glinting object whose corner was peeking up at him from the ground next to him. Something hard and small and thin and round, which he picked up and held up to look at more closely. As he wiped dirt off it, a stray beam of sunlight penetrated through the pine canopy above. It reflected off the object in his fingers, and it was as though someone had shone a golden light in his face. He gasped in astonishment.

  Then, moments later, he was finding more gold coins in the mud. Dirty, but perfect and beautiful. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten of them. The torrential rain flood that had washed away part of the bank must have disturbed them from their hiding place. How long had they lain undiscovered in this remote and little-travelled neck of the woods?

  Suddenly, Ross Campbell’s unlucky tumble and getting clarted up to his oxters in muck had become the best thing that had ever happened to him. As fast as he could stuff the coins into his coat and trouser pockets, more kept appearing all around. Within minutes he’d collected dozens of them. It was so incredible he was laughing and hooting to himself like a kid. When finally he could find no more, he struggled back up the slippery bank with his booty weighing down his pockets. The return journey to the van seemed to take him about half the time. He was so dazed and ecstatic that he barely noticed the brambles and treacherous terrain, and didn’t think for a single moment about his filthy, wet clothes or the fact that under them he was soaked to the bone.

  Back at the van, he piled into the driver’s seat and dug some of the coins from his pocket to re-examine more closely. They were old, really old. He was no expert, but he was certain they must be worth a ton of money. A bloody fortune, lying there in the mud for hundreds of years, just waiting for him to come and find it.