Copyright

Published by Avon an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2014

This ebook edition published by HarperCollins Publishers 2016

Copyright © Scott Mariani 2014

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com Images

Cover design © Henry Steadman 2016

Scott Mariani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007398461

Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780007398478

Version: 2019-12-06

‘We’ve arranged a global civilisation in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We’ve also arranged things so that no one understands science or technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later, this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.’

Carl Sagan, 1995

‘I could set the earth’s crust into such a state of vibration that it would rise and fall hundreds of feet, throwing rivers out of their beds, wrecking buildings, and practically destroying civilisation. The principle cannot fail.’

Nikola Tesla, 1898

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

The Ben Hope series

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Scott Mariani

About the Publisher

Prologue

The Altai Mountains Bayan-Ölgii Province Western Mongolia

The biting wind was starting to whip flurries of snow across the barren mountainside, high up in the wilderness where not even the most rugged four-wheel-drive vehicle could reach. Soon, Chuluun knew, the winter snowfalls would be here in earnest and it might be a long time before he could venture out this far again in search of food.

The argali herd that the teenager was tracking had led him almost half a mile across bare rock from where he’d tethered his pony further down the mountain. Wolves were an ever-present concern, but the curly-horned wild sheep could sense the roving packs from a great way off, and having paused on their trek to munch contentedly on a scrubby patch of heather, they seemed calm enough to reassure Chuluun that his pony was safe.

There was one predator too smart to let himself be noticed by the argali. Chuluun had been hunting over these mountains for six years, since the age of eleven, when his father had become too infirm to ride long distances any more, and he prided himself on his ability to sneak up on anything that walked or flew. His parents and seven younger brothers and sisters depended almost entirely on him for meat, and in the harsh environment of Mongolia, meat meant survival.

Staying carefully downwind of the grazing sheep and moving with stealthy ease over the rocks, Chuluun stalked up to within a hundred metres of his quarry. He settled himself down at the top of a rise in a vantage point from which his pick of the herd, a large male he estimated stood a good four feet at the shoulder, was nicely presented side-on.

Very slowly, Chuluun slid the ancient Martini-Henry into aiming position and hunkered down behind it. He opened the rifle’s breech, drew one of the big, long cartridges from his bandolier and slipped it silently inside. Closing the breech, he flipped up the tangent rearsight. At this range he knew exactly how much elevation he needed to compensate for gravity’s pull on the trajectory of the heavy bullet.

The argali remained still, munching away, oblivious. Chuluun honoured his prey, as he honoured the spirit of the mountains. He blinked a snowflake from his eyelashes. Gently, purposefully, he curled his finger around the trigger, controlled his breathing and felt his heart slow as his concentration focused on the all-important shot. If he missed, the herd would be off and he couldn’t hope to catch up with them again today, nor this week. But Chuluun wasn’t going to miss. Tonight, his family were going to eat as they hadn’t eaten in a long while.

At the perfect moment, Chuluun squeezed the trigger.

And in that same moment, everything went insane.

The view through the rifle’s sights disappeared in a massive blurred explosion. His first confused thought was that his gun had burst on firing. But it wasn’t the gun.

Chuluun barely had time to cry out as the ground seemed to lurch away from under him and then heave him with terrifying violence into the air. He was spinning, tumbling, sliding down the mountain. His head was filled with a deafening roar. Something hit him a hard blow and he blacked out.

When Chuluun awoke, the sky seemed to have darkened. He blinked and sat up, shivering with cold and beating the snow and dirt from his clothes, then staggered to his feet. His precious rifle lay half-buried in the landslide that had carried him down from the top of the rise. Still half-stunned, he clambered back up the rocky slope and peered, afraid to look, over the edge.

He gasped at the incredible sight below.

Chuluun was standing on the edge of a vast near-perfect circle of utter devastation that stretched as far as his keen young hunter’s eyes could see. Nothing remained of the patch of ground where the argali herd had been quietly grazing. The mountainside was levelled. Gigantic rocks pulverised. The pine forests completely obliterated. All gone, swept away by some unimaginable force.

His face streaked with dirt and tears and contorted into an expression of disbelief, Chuluun gazed up at the strange glow that permeated the sky, like nothing he’d ever seen before. Blades of lightning knifed through the rolling clouds. There was no thunder. Just a heavy, eerie pall of silence.

Suddenly filled with conviction that something unspeakably evil had just happened here, he scrambled away with a terrified moan and started fleeing down the slope towards where he’d left his pony.

Chapter One

Paris Seven months later

The apartment was all in shadow. It wasn’t normal for Claudine Pommier to keep her curtains tightly drawn even on a bright and sunny June afternoon.

But then, it wasn’t normal for someone to be stalking her and trying to kill her, either.

Claudine was tense as she padded barefoot down the gloomy, narrow hallway. She prayed the boards wouldn’t creak and give her away. A moment ago she’d been certain she could hear footsteps outside the triple-locked door. Now she heard them again. Holding her breath, she reached the door and peered through the dirty glass peephole. The aged plasterwork and wrought-iron railing of the old apartment building’s upper landing looked distorted through the fish-eye lens.

Claudine felt a flood of relief as she recognised the tiny figure of her neighbour, Madame Lefort, with whom she shared the top floor. The octogenarian widow locked up her apartment and started heading for the stairs. She was carrying a shopping basket.

Claudine unlatched the security chain, slid back both bolts and the deadlock and rushed out of the door to catch her.

‘Madame Lefort? Hang on – wait!’

The old woman was fit and sprightly from decades of negotiating the five flights of winding stairs each day. She was also as deaf as a tree, and Claudine had to repeat her name three more times before she caught her attention.

‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle Pommier,’ the old woman said with a yellowed smile.

‘Madame Lefort, are you going out?’ Claudine said loudly.

‘To do my shopping. Is something wrong, dear? You don’t look well.’

Claudine hadn’t slept for two nights. ‘Migraine,’ she lied. ‘Bad one. Would you post a couple of letters for me?’

Madame Lefort looked at her tenderly. ‘Of course. You poor dear. Shall I get you some aspirin too?’

‘It’s okay, thanks. Hold on a moment.’ Claudine rushed back into the apartment. The two letters were lying on the table in the salon, sealed and ready but for the stamps. Their contents were identical; their addressees half a world apart. She snatched them up and rushed back to the door to give them to Madame Lefort. ‘This one’s for Canada,’ she explained. ‘This one for Sweden.’

‘Where?’ the old woman asked, screwing up her face.

‘Just show the person at the counter,’ Claudine said as patiently as she could. ‘They’ll know. Tell them the letters have to go registered international mail, express delivery. Have you got that?’

‘Say again?’

‘Registered international mail,’ Claudine repeated more firmly. ‘It’s terribly, terribly important.’

The old woman inspected each letter in turn an inch from her nose. ‘Canada? Sweden?’ she repeated, as though they were addressed to Jupiter and Saturn.

‘That’s right.’ Claudine held out a handful of euros. ‘This should cover the postage. Keep the change. You won’t forget, will you?’

As the old woman headed off down the stairs, Claudine hurried back to her apartment and locked herself in. All she could do now was pray that Madame Lefort wouldn’t forget, or manage to lose the letters halfway to the post office. There was no other way to get word out to the only people she could trust. Two allies she knew would come to her aid.

If it wasn’t too late already.

Claudine ventured to the window. She reached out nervously and pulled the edge of the curtain back a crack. The afternoon sunlight streamed in, making her blink. Five floors below, the traffic was filtering along the narrow street. But that wasn’t what Claudine was watching.

She swallowed. The car was still there, in the same parking space at the kerbside right beneath her windows where it had been sitting since yesterday. She was completely certain it was the same black Audi with dark-tinted glass that had followed her from Fabien’s family country home two days ago.

And, before that, the same car that had tried to run her down in the street and only narrowly missed her. It still made her tremble to think of it.

She quickly drew the curtain shut again, hoping that the men inside the car hadn’t spotted her at the window. She was pretty sure there were three of them. Her instinct told her they were sitting inside it, just waiting.

On her return from Fabien’s place, after the scare and the realisation she was being followed, she hadn’t intended to remain here in the apartment any longer than it took to pack a few things into a bag and get the hell out. But the car had appeared before she’d been able to escape – and now she was trapped.

Were these the men that Daniel had warned her about? If that was the case, they knew everything. Every detail of her research. And if so, they must know what she’d learned about their terrible plans. If they caught her, they wouldn’t let her live. Couldn’t let her live. Not after what she’d uncovered.

Under siege in her own apartment. How long could she hold out? She had enough tinned provisions to last about a week if she rationed her meals. And enough brandy left to stop her terror from driving her crazy.

Claudine spent the next half hour pacing anxiously up and down the darkened room, fretting over whether the old lady had sent her letters. ‘I can’t stand this,’ she said out loud. ‘I need a drink.’

Walking into the tiny kitchen, she grabbed a tumbler and the brandy bottle and sloshed out a stiff measure. She downed it in a couple of gulps and poured another. It wasn’t long before the alcohol had combined with her fatigue to make her head swirl. She wandered back through into the salon, lay on the couch and closed her eyes. Almost instantly, she began to drift.

When Claudine awoke with a start and opened her eyes, the room was completely dark. She must have slept for hours. Something had woken her. A sound. Her heart began to race.

That was when the bright flash from outside lit up the narrow gap between the curtains, followed a moment later by another rumble of thunder. She relaxed. It was just a storm. The howling wind was lashing the rain against the windows.

She got up from the couch and groped for the switch of the table lamp nearby. The light came on with a flicker. The ancient wiring of the apartment building threatened to black the place out every time there was a storm. The clock on the mantelpiece read 10.25. Too late to go and ask Madame Lefort if she’d posted the letters, as the old woman was always in bed by half past nine. It would have to wait until morning.

Claudine stepped back over to the window and peered out of the crack in the curtains. With a gasp she saw that the car was gone.

Gone! Just an empty pool of light, glistening with rainwater, under the streetlamp where it had been parked.

She blinked. Had she just imagined the whole thing? Was nobody following her after all? Had the near-miss in the street two days ago just been a coincidence, some careless asshole not looking where he was going?

The rush of relief she felt was soon overtaken by a feeling of self-blame. If this whole thing had been just her paranoia getting the better of her, then she should never have sent those letters. She’d made a fool of herself.

Suddenly she was hoping that the old woman hadn’t posted them after all.

The storm continued outside. Claudine knew she wouldn’t get any more sleep that night. She wandered into her little bedroom, flipped on the side light and picked up her violin. One of the upsides to sharing the top floor with a deaf old woman was that she could play whenever she liked. Madame Lefort wouldn’t even have heard the thunder.

Thankful that she had something to occupy her mind, Claudine cradled the instrument under her chin, touched the bow to the strings and went into the opening bar of the Bach sonata she’d been trying to master for the last couple of months.

Another bright flash outside and at that moment the lights went out. She cursed and went on playing by the red glow from the neon sign of the hotel across the street.

Then she paused, frowning. There’d been a noise. Before the roll of thunder. Like a thump. It seemed to have come from above. There was nothing above her apartment but the roof. Maybe the wind had knocked something down, she thought, or sent a piece of debris bouncing over the tiles. She went on playing.

But she hadn’t produced more than a few notes before her bow groaned to a dissonant halt on the strings. She’d heard the noise again.

There was someone inside the apartment.

A cold sweat broke out over her brow. Her knees began to shake. She needed to arm herself with something. Thinking of the knife block on the kitchen worktop, she tossed her violin and bow down on the bed and hurried towards the doorway – then skidded to a halt on the bare boards as another violent lightning flash lit up the room and she saw the figure standing in the doorway, blocking her exit.

Too terrified to speak, Claudine retreated into the bedroom.

The intruder stepped into the room after her. She could see him outlined in the red glow from the hotel sign. He was tall, very tall. Shoulders like an ox. Black boots, black trousers, black jacket and gloves. His hair was silver, cropped to a stubble. He had a hard, angular face. Pale eyes narrowed to slits. Around his waist was some kind of utility belt, like builders and carpenters wore.

For one crazy, irrational moment, Claudine thought he was a workman come to carry out the much-needed repairs to the bathroom. But that idea vanished as he drew the claw hammer from his utility belt and came towards her.

She snatched the violin from the bed. Lashing wildly out with it, she caught him across the brow with such force that the instrument broke apart. The splintering wood raked his flesh, drawing blood that looked as dark as treacle in the red light. He barely seemed to have felt the blow. He swung the hammer and knocked the shattered violin from her hand. She cowered away from him. ‘Please—’

He struck out again with the hammer. Claudine’s vision exploded, white and blinding pain flashing through her head. She fell onto the bed, dazed.

The big man stood over her, clutching the hammer in his muscular fist. Strands of bloody hair dangled from the steel claw. Unhurriedly, calmly, he wiped the tool clean on the bedcover and then slipped it back into his utility belt. From another long pouch he drew out a cylindrical tube with some kind of plunger and transparent plastic nozzle attached.

He bent over her. Through the fog of pain, she saw him smile. His eyes and teeth were red in the hotel neon.

The man spoke in English. ‘Now it’s time for that pretty mouth of yours to be plugged up.’

A hoarse cry of terror burst from Claudine’s lips as she realised what he was holding. She tried desperately to wriggle away from him but he reached out with a quick and powerful hand, grabbed her hair and pinned her thrashing head to the bed, ignoring the wild blows she flailed out at his face and arms.

With his other hand he jammed the nozzle of the tube into her screaming mouth. She cried out and bit down on the hard plastic and tried to spit it out, gagging as it was forced deep inside.

The man pressed the plunger. Instantly, something foul-tasting, warm and soft filled her mouth. It was coming out under pressure and there was nothing Claudine could do to stop it flowing down her throat. She tried to cough it out, but all of a sudden no air would come. There was an awful sensation of pressure building up inside her as the substance swelled and expanded, filling every cavity of her throat and nasal passages.

She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream, couldn’t open or shut her jaws a millimetre. She stopped trying to lash out at him, and in a crazed, agonised panic she clamped her hands to her mouth and felt the hardening foam bulging out from between her lips like some grotesque tongue.

The man dropped the empty canister on the bed and used both hands to hold her bucking, convulsing body down. After a minute or so, as her brain was becoming starved of oxygen, her movements began to slacken. The man let her go and stood up.

The darkness was rising fast as Claudine’s vision faded. For a few seconds longer she could still dimly register the man’s shape standing over her in the red-lit room, watching her impassively with his head slightly cocked to one side.

Soon she could see nothing at all.

The man waited a few more moments before he checked her pulse. Once he was satisfied that she was dead, he left the bedroom. He unlocked the apartment door and left it ajar as he made his silent way towards the stairs.

Chapter Two

‘I wish we didn’t have to do this,’ Jude said.

It was a hazy, warm late Saturday morning in the peaceful village of Little Denton in rural Oxfordshire. Fat bumblebees were humming around the flowerbeds, birds were chirruping happily overhead. Once in a while, a car hissed by the gates of the former vicarage.

A sharp-eyed observer might have spotted the signs that the old house nestling among the trees behind the high stone wall was no longer lived in: the unclipped ivy spreading over the windowpanes; the rather unkempt state of the lawn that stretched far down towards the river; the remnants of last winter’s fallen leaves still lying about the grounds; and it wouldn’t have taken much asking around to discover that the local community was still recovering from the shocking deaths, just six months earlier, of the vicar and his wife in a car crash. Simeon and Michaela Arundel had been much loved and were sadly missed by everyone who’d known them.

The vicarage had been in the Arundel family for generations and now it had passed to twenty-year-old Jude. From time to time the young man drove up from Portsmouth, where he was still half-heartedly studying Marine Biology while considering his future options now that his life had changed so dramatically, to get on with the painful, drawn-out task of sorting out Simeon and Michaela’s possessions and take care of the place as best he could.

Today the task at hand had taken Jude right down to the bottom of the long garden, where he was gazing sadly up at an ancient beech tree. He wasn’t alone. The same astute observer might also have noticed the physical similarity between him and the older blond-haired man, about twice Jude’s age, who was standing next to him: a little taller at just under six feet, a little more muscular though still lithe and athletic-looking, and a good deal more battle-scarred.

That man was called Ben Hope. He’d been and done many things in his time, most of them involving danger and secrecy. Danger he could handle – God knew he’d handled enough of it both during his time with the SAS and since – but one secret even he hadn’t known about for many years, and which had hit him like a high-velocity rifle round, was the stunning revelation that Jude was his own son. He was the product of a short-lived romance back in the distant days when Ben, Michaela and Simeon had all been students together in nearby Oxford and Ben had been set on a career in the Church.

The discovery of who his real father was had come as just as big a shock to Jude. It had taken them both months to even begin to get used to the idea.

‘I seriously wish we didn’t have to do this,’ Jude said again, looking up at the old beech tree. ‘Is it such a problem? Couldn’t we just leave it?’

Ben pointed up at the thick, leafless dead branch that overhung the glass roof of the nearby summer house. ‘We could just leave it,’ he said. ‘But come the next high wind, that branch is going to break off and crash straight through that roof. You don’t want anyone to be underneath it when it happens. Or to have to fork out for the glazier’s bill even if no one is.’

At that moment Scruffy, a wiry-haired terrier of uncertain breed who’d once belonged to the Arundels and now had been more or less adopted by Ben and his fiancée Brooke, burst out of the bushes in pursuit of a darting squirrel. The dog raced across the unmown lawn, ploughed destructively through some roses and disappeared at full pelt into the shrubs on the far side.

Jude rolled his eyes in exasperation at the dog’s antics, then turned back to the tree and shrugged. ‘Then it looks like we don’t have much choice.’

Ben had found all he needed for the job in Simeon’s woodshed behind the house. He grabbed the coil of rope, propped the ladder against the tree and shinnied up twenty feet to the level of the branch. Hanging precariously off the side of the ladder as Jude stabilised the bottom, he looped the rope around the branch’s gnarly tip. Once he was confident that it was securely attached to the sound limb above it, he climbed back down and picked up the chainsaw. ‘Now for the fun part,’ he muttered.

‘Aren’t you supposed to wear protective clothing to handle one of those things?’ Jude asked, frowning.

‘Yup,’ Ben said. He primed the carb, applied just enough choke.

‘So aren’t you going to wear any?’

‘Nope.’

‘You’re a mad bastard, you know that?’

‘So people keep telling me.’ Ben yanked the start cord. The noisy snorting buzz of the two-stroke engine shattered the serenity of the morning.

It took some time to remove the large branch in sections, each one carefully secured by the rope so that it didn’t plunge through the glass roof and defeat the purpose of the whole delicate operation. Eventually, all that remained of the offending branch was a pile of pieces on the ground and a big raw circle on the side of the tree.

‘I hate to see it mutilated like that,’ Jude said when Ben had come down and killed the chainsaw engine. ‘This was Dad’s favourite tree. Told me about how he used to climb right up it when he was a kid …’ Jude suddenly went quiet.

Ben could see the discomfort in his expression, more than just sadness. He laid a hand on Jude’s shoulder. ‘It’s okay, you can call him Dad. We’ve talked about this. That’s how you knew him, all your life.’

‘Except that he wasn’t,’ Jude said glumly.

‘Maybe, but he was still a better father to you than I would’ve been,’ Ben replied. Even though he was being completely sincere, his words seemed surreal to him. The truth was still hard to accept after six months. It weighed heavily on his mind that he hadn’t yet drummed up the courage to reveal to Brooke the real identity of the young man she thought was just the son of a close friend. He wanted to tell her, but the ‘right time’ he kept waiting for just never seemed to materialise.

‘Anyway, it’s a shame,’ Jude said, changing the subject and gazing wistfully up at the tree, shielding his eyes from the bright sun.

‘If it’s any consolation to your green sensibilities, once it’s seasoned that’ll make for pretty good firewood,’ Ben said with a smile. ‘Carbon neutral fuel, negligible environmental impact. Let’s gather it up and stick it in the woodshed.’

Once that warm work was taken care of, it was midday and they were both ready for one of the beers that Jude had chilling to wash down a ham sandwich or two. In the airy cool of the kitchen they slouched on chairs at the long pine table, munched and sipped from their bottles. Ben was quiet, as he often was these days, deep in thought. Jude wasn’t the only one whose situation had changed in a big way over the last few months. Sometimes, when Ben thought about the radical steps he’d taken towards a completely new direction in life, it made his heart thump.

‘Are you nervous about it?’ Jude asked suddenly, as if he’d been able to read Ben’s thoughts.

Ben took out his pack of Gauloises cigarettes and Zippo lighter, and lit up as he considered the question. ‘Nervous about which bit? Getting married in three days’ time? Or giving up my whole career and business and going back to college yet again, to study along with a bunch of kids half my age?’

‘Hey, I’m half your age, and we get on okay,’ Jude laughed. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t talking about you taking up your Theology course again after all this time, wanting to become a vicar and all that. No problems there. You’d be great in the Church.’

‘Your mother once told me the same thing,’ Ben said, with a trace of doubt showing in his voice.

‘I meant the wedding,’ Jude said. ‘That’s the part that’d scare the shit out of me.’

Ben had to admit he felt pretty much the same way. Marrying his beautiful soulmate Brooke Marcel was the most exciting and wonderful thing that had happened to him in a very long time – and there’d been a time, not so long ago, when he hadn’t been sure whether she’d ever speak to him again, or whether he’d even see her again. But the wedding plans weren’t exactly what he’d had in mind when he’d proposed to her in a remote Peruvian rainforest village back in February.

‘If it was up to me and Brooke,’ he sighed, watching a curl of blue Gauloise smoke curl and drift in the sunlight from the window, ‘we’d have the quietest wedding ever. No messing around, no fuss: get in there, sign the papers, and get out again.’

Jude chuckled. ‘And then Phoebe came along.’

‘Yeah, and then Phoebe came along,’ Ben said. Brooke’s elder sister was married to a blustering overpaid idiot of a City banker called Marshall Kite, whom she’d persuaded in her interfering way to foot the bill for turning what should have been a small, private ceremony into an overblown great extravaganza. Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford was booked for the lavish wedding itself, the reception was due to take place in the county’s most flamboyantly expensive country hotel, and the last time Ben had dared to check the swelling list of guests and assorted bridesmaids and other apparently indispensible personnel, it had seemed to him that half the world’s population would be in attendance. Jeff Dekker, who’d been second-in-command at the Le Val Tactical Training Centre in Normandy before Ben had passed the business over to him, was going to be best man. Ben fully expected the ex-SBS commando to laugh his pants off when he saw the ludicrous scale of the affair.

In fact, the only part of the whole silly circus Ben was looking forward to with any pleasure was that he’d have a rare chance to see his sister Ruth, who was flying in later today from Switzerland in plenty of time for the full-dress wedding rehearsal that Phoebe had arranged ‘just to make sure’. The rehearsal was scheduled for 2 p.m. tomorrow, exactly forty-eight hours before the big show. Ben was as steeled for it as he could be.

‘Ben?’ Jude said.

‘What?’ Ben smiled absently.

‘I appreciate your coming over to help me out.’

‘Least I can do. I know the last few months have been tough.’ Ben looked at his watch. ‘Brooke said she might be coming over sometime after lunch,’ he said. She’d rushed off to London first thing that morning to hand over the keys of her old Richmond flat to her landlord and arrange for the last of her things to be delivered to the rented house in Oxford’s Jericho district where she and Ben would be living while he finished his studies.

Right now, the house was in complete disorder. Ben had never realised that Brooke had so much stuff. On top of that were all the wedding gifts that had already started arriving: such as the one from Winnie. She’d been a faithful housekeeper to the Hope family for many years. After Ben’s parents had died, she’d moved with him to the remote coastal house in Ireland and tried to mother him as best she could, usually to little avail. When Ben had started up the Le Val Tactical Training Centre in Normandy, rather than move with him to France Winnie had chosen to return to her home county of Lancashire and live with her elder cousin Elspeth. Winnie obviously believed that Ben had reached the age of forty without a knife, fork or plate to his name: the kitchen in Jericho was now filled with a sprawling great dinner service that could cover a banquet table.

Then there were the piled-up cases of wine and whisky from Ben’s old SAS comrade, Boonzie McCulloch, who now lived in Italy with his fiery Neapolitan wife, Mirella. The gift from Commander Darcey Kane of the National Crime Agency had come with a card bearing the message ‘Bastard! Love, D’. When Ben had opened the oblong box he’d found a deluxe .308 rifle cleaning kit inside. Darcey was thoughtful like that. Except that Ben didn’t happen to possess a rifle. Not any more. At this juncture in his life he didn’t expect to have to see one, most of all hear one, ever again.

‘It’ll be good to catch up with Brooke,’ Jude said. ‘I like her a lot.’

‘I’m glad the two of you get on so well.’

‘Oh – I just remembered. I’ve got something for you.’

‘There was no need for you to get us a present,’ Ben protested, hoping it would be nothing too large, and that Jude hadn’t spent too much of his limited funds on it.

‘I didn’t. It’s not, I mean, it’s … what the hell.’ Jude drained his beer and got up. ‘Come and I’ll show you.’

Ben stubbed out his cigarette and followed Jude upstairs to the large, airy bedroom that had once belonged to Simeon and Michaela. He felt a chill as he walked in. He still remembered the awful night they’d died, in that accident which had been anything but.

‘There,’ Jude said, pointing at a row of clothing neatly laid out on the bed.

Ben looked. ‘These were Simeon’s.’

Jude nodded. ‘His vicar uniform. Or whatever you’re meant to call it.’

Ben sadly ran his fingers over the clothes. The black clerical shirt, fitted with its Roman collar, lay folded on top of a pair of sharply-creased matching trousers. Next to it was the long black cassock, then the white linen surplice that Simeon would have put on to conduct morning and evening services.

‘He was about your size,’ Jude said. ‘I reckon they’d fit you. When you get ordained one day, I’d like you to wear them. He’d have wanted it too.’

Ben wasn’t comfortable with the idea. But as he was on the verge of saying no, he saw the look on Jude’s face and bit his tongue. ‘Thank you, Jude. It’s a very kind thought.’

‘Then you’ll wear them?’

‘I’ll wear them. I promise.’

There was a silence. Then Jude said, ‘So are you going to try them on, or what?’

‘Now?’

Jude grinned. ‘While you’re doing that, I’m going to go put the chainsaw and stuff away.’

Left alone in his old friends’ bedroom, Ben spent a few moments gazing sadly at the clothes. He thought about the man Simeon Arundel had been. Thought about himself, and how much he had to live up to. Through the open window he could hear Jude knocking about in the woodshed and the dog barking excitedly at something.

‘Fuck it,’ Ben murmured to himself. Reluctantly, hesitantly, he pulled off his jeans and put on the black trousers, then stripped off his T-shirt and buttoned up the black clerical one. Jude had been right about the fit. Even the shiny patent leather shoes could have been made for him.

Ben stared at his reflection in the full-length mirror by the wardrobe. An Anglican vicar’s garb was one uniform he’d never seen himself wearing before, and to his self-conscious eye he cut an unlikely figure in it.

Reverend Benedict Hope. Could it ever really happen? He’d never turned away from a challenge in his life, but this might just be one of the hardest he’d ever faced. Maybe even harder than the hellish endurance test of qualifying for entry into 22 SAS.

Feeling self-conscious, he was about to start changing back into his own clothes when he heard the front doorbell chime in the hallway downstairs, then again, and again. Who could that be? Brooke, so soon? She wouldn’t ring the bell over and over like that, so insistently.

Ben swore under his breath. He put his head out of the window and called, ‘Jude! Are you going to get that?’ But Jude was now too busy throwing sticks in the garden for Scruffy to take any notice.

Ben was about to snap, ‘For fuck’s sake,’ then caught a glimpse of the swearing vicar in the mirror and shut his mouth. He strode out of the bedroom, thundered down the stairs and across the entrance hall. The doorbell was still ringing relentlessly. ‘All right, I’m coming – I’m coming!’ he yelled.

Ben wrenched open the door.

There was a woman standing on the doorstep. She was slender, about the same age as Brooke. Her hair was longer than it had been when Ben had last seen her, and it had gone back to its natural dark red. She was wearing it loose, ringlets tumbling down over her shoulders.

She looked at Ben in amazement. ‘Holy crap,’ she said. ‘Ben?’

Ben blinked in disbelief. It was her.

It was Roberta Ryder.

Chapter Three

The stunned silence seemed to go on forever as they both stood there staring at one another. He was gaping at her; she was gaping at what he was wearing.

‘Are you—?’ she said at last. ‘You haven’t become a—?’

‘Eh? No, I was just trying them on,’ he muttered, glancing down at himself.

‘Oh, right. That explains it.’

Another few seconds passed, neither of them knowing what to say. ‘Well, aren’t you going to invite me in?’ she asked.

Ben led her through into the living-room, stunned and lost for words. Roberta Ryder, PhD, effortlessly attractive and beguiling, brilliantly intelligent, frequently cantankerous, the most opinionated and headstrong woman he’d ever known: the American scientist had once meant a great deal to him and she was someone he’d always known he would never forget.

The last time they’d been together had been on a bittersweet snowy day in Canada, a long time ago. He’d never expected to see her again. And certainly not like this.

‘What are you … doing here?’ was all he could say.

‘Looking for you,’ she replied. ‘What else would I be doing here?’

Ben noticed how agitated she seemed. Her face was pale and tight. She kept peering nervously through the window at the gravelled driveway and the road beyond. Ben followed her eye and saw the empty blue Vauxhall parked outside the gates.

‘I called your old place in France,’ she said. ‘Someone called Jeff told me where I could find you. Said if you weren’t at the address in Oxford you might be at the vicarage in Little Denton.’

‘You found me,’ he said. ‘But why?’

Roberta turned away from the window to face him. ‘I wouldn’t have come here, Ben. But I didn’t know what else to do. Who else to turn to. Something’s going on. I think I’m in danger. Hell, I know I am. It’s serious.’

She tensed as the living room door suddenly swung open. Jude walked in, took one look at her, stopped in his tracks and broke into a beaming smile. ‘Oh. Hi.’

‘This is Jude,’ Ben told her. ‘He’s my … never mind.’ Turning to Jude, he said, ‘How about making a cup of coffee, Jude?’

Roberta shook her head. ‘I don’t want any coffee.’

‘Then go make one for yourself,’ Ben said, giving Jude a stern look.

‘I don’t really w—’ Jude began, then got the point and turned to leave the room. ‘Nice to meet you, whoever you are,’ he called back over his shoulder.

‘What do you mean, danger?’ Ben asked her when they were closed in the room alone. ‘What kind of danger?’

‘The kind where I’m being followed,’ she said seriously.

He blinked. ‘Followed by who?’

‘All I know is that these people are after me, Ben. That’s why I’m here. I’m scared.’

Ben let out a long sigh. This wouldn’t be the first time Roberta, an incurable maverick with an apparently irresistible penchant for researching into areas of science that were liable to draw all kinds of the wrong attention, had got herself into trouble. And it had been big trouble that had brought her and Ben together in Paris that memorable autumn – a scrape that both of them had been lucky to escape from with their lives.

‘Please don’t tell me it’s alchemy again,’ he said.

‘It’s not alchemy.’

‘Or some other hocus-pocus. Go on, then. What’s it this time?’

Her eyes flashed defensively. ‘Hocus-pocus?’

‘Whatever. It got you into a bit of a mess, if you care to remember.’

‘Yeah, well, this time it’s different. This isn’t even about me.’

‘Then what the bloody hell is it about?’ he demanded.

Her defensive look was undiminished. ‘Wouldn’t folks of your, uh, persuasion consider it blasphemous to say that word when you’re togged up in that outfit?’ she fired at him.

‘Never mind the outfit,’ he said irritably. ‘It’s just …’

‘Fancy dress?’

‘A long story, Roberta. I don’t think you’ve come all this way to hear it.’

Somewhere in the house, the landline phone was ringing. Ben faintly heard Jude pick up and talk to someone.

Roberta nodded, swallowed and then began to talk all in a rush. ‘All right. Listen. It’s about my friend. Her name’s … her name was Claudine, Claudine Pommier. In Paris. She was killed. Murdered. The cops say it was the maniac they’re calling le bricoleur.’

‘The “handyman”?’ Ben said, trying to make sense of her flurry of words.

‘A serial killer,’ Roberta explained agitatedly. ‘He’s claimed four victims in different parts of Paris. The cops say Claudine was his fifth. He’s a sick piece of shit who creeps into women’s homes and murders them.’

‘Slow down. Why do they call him the “handyman”?’ Ben asked.

‘Because of the way he kills them,’ she replied with a grimace. ‘You want me to draw you a picture? Power tools. Nail guns. Hammers and chisels.’

‘I get the idea,’ Ben said, repelled. ‘Go on.’

‘Claudine was found with … Jesus, it’s too awful. With her lungs full of expanding foam, the kind builders use to fill wall cavities and things. She suffocated.’

Ben had seen a good number of people die in a good many unpleasant ways, but this was almost too gruesome to imagine, even for him. He felt disgusted.

‘It happened three days ago,’ Roberta said. ‘I only found out this morning. I’d just flown in from Ottawa to see her.’ She paused to wipe away the tears of grief and rage that had clouded her eyes.

‘I’m very sorry. All I can say is that they’re sure to catch this guy. If there was anything I could do …’

Roberta shook her head vehemently. ‘You’re not understanding me. Let me finish. There’s more to it, a lot more. I—’

At that moment the living room door swung open again and Jude stepped in, interrupting Roberta’s flow. ‘Ben?’ he said. ‘Brooke just called. Says a lorry shed its load on the motorway. Be here as soon as she can.’

‘Fine,’ Ben said, not taking his eyes off Roberta.

‘So, you here for the wedding?’ Jude asked her cheerily, appearing not to have noticed the tense mood in the room.

‘Wedding?’ she said, arching an eyebrow.

‘Listen,’ Ben said quickly. ‘Why don’t we go for a drive? There’s a quiet park on the other side of the village. We can talk in peace there,’ he added, throwing an icy look at Jude, whose face dropped.

Outside, Roberta looked around her. ‘Can we go in your car? My ass aches from driving.’

‘I don’t have one,’ Ben said. ‘I came on the bus.’

‘What about that there?’ she said, pointing at the rusted heap that Jude somehow managed to get about in.

‘We’ll be lucky if we get it out of the gate,’ he said.

‘So you dress like a priest and you travel around by bus,’ she snorted. ‘That doesn’t sound like the Ben Hope I used to know.’

‘Vicar,’ he corrected her. ‘And you’re right. I’m not the same man you used to know.’

Chapter Four

Ben and Roberta left her blue Vauxhall and followed the footpath that skirted the edge of the sunlit park. They’d spoken little during the short drive through the village. Ben could feel the tension emanating from her. Whatever was scaring her, it seemed genuine, but he didn’t know what to say. He waited for her to speak first.

Perhaps because of the unseasonal heat, or perhaps because the new generation of British kids preferred to sit stuffing their mouths at the computer rather than play outdoors any longer, the park was almost deserted. In the distance, a petite young mother was lifting her son of four or five onto one of the swings. An elderly, fragile-looking couple were making their slow way arm-in-arm along the footpath towards Ben and Roberta. As they passed, they both smiled at Ben and greeted him with a reverential ‘Good day to you, Vicar’. Taken aback for an instant, Ben managed to mumble a reply that seemed to please the old folks before they hobbled on.

‘Sure fooled them,’ Roberta said drily. After a pause she added, ‘So if you’re not an ordained minister—’

‘I’m not.’

‘—isn’t it against their rules to wear that outfit? Kind of like impersonating an officer or something?’

‘It was only meant to be … oh, never mind. Just don’t look at me.’

‘That’s hard to do. You have no idea how weird it is for me to see you dressed like that.’

‘That makes two of us,’ Ben replied. ‘But it’s a sight we may all have to get used to.’

‘You’re not kidding, are you?’

‘This is the future I’m set on now, Roberta. It always was, I think. Just took me a long time getting there.’

‘I had no idea there was this side to you.’

‘There are a few things you don’t know about me.’

‘Pretty major life change,’ she said. ‘Especially for you, of all people.’

‘I just want a life of peace,’ he said. ‘I made a vow to Brooke that that’s how things would be from now on. Settle down, try to do something better with my life. No more crazy stuff.’

‘You doing it for yourself, or for her?’ Roberta asked a little too sharply, then immediately made an apologetic gesture. ‘I take that back. None of my business, I guess.’

Ben didn’t reply. The footpath ran alongside an old stone wall, through the trees on the other side of which could be seen the heavy machinery and distant half-erected buildings where a construction company were putting up the new housing estate after the villagers’ protracted protests against expansion had been overruled by the local council. The workmen seemed to be packing up early for the day, vehicles rumbling out of the site’s mesh gates.

‘Let’s sit,’ Ben said a few yards further on, motioning towards a green park bench under the shade of the trees.

Roberta nodded. She sat on the bench beside him and gazed across the park in the direction of the kiddies’ roundabout and swings in the distance. They could hear the child’s gurgling laughter as his mother began to swing him gently back and forth.

Ben said, ‘Start from the beginning.’

‘Claudine and I went back a long way. When I was teaching in Paris years ago, she used to lecture at the Sorbonne. We met through some mutual acquaintance I don’t even remember now. We hit it off, became friends, stayed that way ever since. After I went to live in Canada she used to call me every so often, birthdays, Christmas, and emailed me now and then to keep me updated about her work projects. Some of them were real fascinating. I hadn’t heard from her in a little while, just assumed she must be busy at work or something. Then yesterday, I get this letter from her by registered mail.’ Roberta glanced anxiously at Ben. ‘I thought it was strange that she’d write me that way, instead of the usual email. When I opened it I saw it was more like a note, real short, and you could see it was written in a hurry. She said she was in deep trouble, that she was certain she was being followed and that something bad was going to happen to her. Said not to contact her by email or phone because they’d know. They were watching every move she made.’

‘Who was?’ Ben asked.

‘If she knew, she didn’t say.’

‘Have you got the letter with you? Can I see it?’

She shook her head. ‘The Paris cops have it now.’

‘Did it say any more than that?’

‘She asked me to go to Paris to help her. To hurry before … before it was too late.’ Roberta gave a bitter laugh.

‘No indication what it was about?’

‘No, she said she’d explain everything once I got there. Said I was one of just two people in the world she could turn to.’

‘Why not the police?’

‘Something else was going on, Ben. Something that meant she couldn’t go to the police. The last line she wrote was this rushed scrawl that just said “If something happens”. That was it. Underneath were a bunch of figures. She didn’t even sign her name.’

‘Figures?’ he asked.

Roberta dug a crumpled sheet from her handbag and handed it to him. ‘I copied them out before I passed the letter on to the cops. Still have no idea what they mean, though.’

Ben looked at the paper and studied the three lines of what appeared to be some kind of cipher.

4920N1570E

6982

2715651291

Codes weren’t his favourite things. He stared at the sheet for a few moments, completely baffled, until the two letters in the top line suddenly flew out at him and he realised what they were. They stood for North and East.

‘I don’t know about the rest,’ he said, ‘but the top line’s definitely a set of GPS co-ordinates, scrambled together. If you teased it apart it’d pinpoint a geographical location.’

‘You’re sure? What location?’

‘I’m sure. But that’s something we can come back to afterwards. Keep talking.’

‘What could I do?’ Roberta continued. ‘She was my friend. I cancelled everything. Managed to get on a late flight to Paris. I was so worried, all I could do on the plane was sit there trying to understand what those goddamn numbers meant, but it was no use. I got into Paris just after seven this morning and took a cab straight to Claudine’s apartment in Montmartre. She lived alone on the top floor of this crumbly old building in Rue des Trois Frères. When I arrived, there was a police car and a van parked outside but I didn’t think anything of it at first. Then as I was heading up the stairs, these cops and forensics people were coming down, with the concierge who looks after the building. I asked if everything was okay. They asked me who I was coming to see. I said “Claudine Pommier”. They told me what happened.’

Roberta paused for a moment to compose her emotions. ‘It was her neighbour, Madame Lefort, who found her the morning after she was killed. The door was open, and there she was on the bed. Old lady had to be hospitalised for shock. It’s so … so horrible.’

‘It’s bad,’ Ben said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Roberta sniffed, dabbed away a tear and went on. ‘It happened on the same day as the postmark on the letter. She must have posted it just a few hours before she died.’

‘Did she have family?’ Ben asked.

‘She lived alone. Lost touch with her relatives a long time back. Parents were a couple of religious assholes who disapproved of her career in science … oh, shit, Ben. I didn’t mean—’

‘It’s okay.’ He smiled.

‘The only person in her life was a bum of an ex-boyfriend, Fabien. But he was never around even when they were together. The cops couldn’t trace him, had to get a work colleague to identify the body in the morgue. Thank Christ I didn’t have to do it. You can imagine …’ Roberta shook her head, as if trying to clear the horrific picture from her mind. ‘Meanwhile, they were still combing through her apartment for evidence, DNA. Nothing was stolen, apparently. The cops asked me all these questions, who I was, what I was doing there. I gave them the letter she’d sent me, but they didn’t seem interested that Claudine had known beforehand she was in danger. All they could talk about was this bricoleur. Then I talked to the concierge, Madame Bunuel. Gave her my card and said to call me right away if there were any developments. That was when I noticed him the second time.’

Ben narrowed his eyes. ‘Noticed who?’

‘About thirty, tall, dark hair. I thought he was a plain-clothes detective at first. He was hanging around in the background while I was talking to the other cops. Then while I was talking to the concierge, there he was again. Looking at me kind of strangely. But I didn’t think much about it at the time. I left there soon afterwards and just started walking. I was so badly shaken up about what happened to Claudine, I barely knew where I was, let alone where I was going. Before I know it I’m heading into a metro station. Abbesses, I think. Then I noticed the guy from the apartment building again, following me down the escalator, through the tunnels, hanging back like he didn’t think I’d spotted him and didn’t want me to. I kept walking. Tried to lose myself in the crowd. By the time I got to the platform I couldn’t see him anymore. I was thinking I must have imagined it. But then as the train pulled into the station, there he was again, just a few steps away. Staring at me. It totally freaked me out, Ben.’

‘He didn’t do anything?’

‘Not then,’ she said. ‘He never came any closer, didn’t speak to me. I got on the train and he boarded the same carriage. I didn’t look at him directly but I could see his reflection in the window. Just standing there at a distance, still watching me in this real creepy way. He had his arm up to hang onto the safety strap, and his jacket was hanging open. He had a gun in there, a black handgun, like a Glock or something. I didn’t imagine it.’

Ben felt like pointing out that French plain-clothes detectives routinely carried concealed sidearms in shoulder holsters on, or even sometimes off, duty – but he kept quiet and let her go on talking.

‘I was terrified the carriage would empty and I’d be left alone with him. I waited a couple of stops, then at Saint-Georges I got off. He did the same. Then just as the doors were about to close I pushed through the crowd and jumped back on again – like the trick they do in movies? Worked. I left the sonofabitch standing there on the platform.’

‘And then?’

‘Then nothing. I stayed on the line all the way to Concorde and then ran like hell back up to the street and hailed the next cab I saw.’

Ben was silent for a moment. ‘You mean that’s all that happened?’

Roberta stared at him. ‘What did you want to hear? That he abducted me at gunpoint? Tried to punt me onto the electrified rail in front of all the crowds?’

‘I thought perhaps—’

‘Ben, you weren’t there,’ she said imploringly. ‘It was obvious what was happening. I was so scared. That’s when I had the idea of calling you.’ She paused, blushed a little. ‘I … I’ve looked you up a few times. Maybe more than a few times. So I knew you were in France. At least, I thought you were. When I called, this Jeff person told me you’d moved to England. Gave me an address in Oxford but said you’d been spending a lot of time at this village called Little Denton. Anyway, I didn’t know what else to do except jump on the next Eurostar. Arrived in London a couple of hours ago, rented that car and drove like crazy all the way to Oxford. Took me forever to find your place, then you weren’t home, so I found this place on the map and came out here hoping I’d find you. Ben, please. I’m exhausted and I’m terrified. You’ve got to help me.’

Ben was silent for a minute as he tried to put the breathless rush of details together in his mind. ‘I’m confused about this man who followed you from your friend’s apartment,’ he said. ‘You told me before you thought he was a detective. Now it sounds like you’re trying to imply he’s the murderer.’

‘Maybe he is,’ she said. Her expression was intense.

‘Roberta, think about it,’ he protested. ‘The serial killer? You really believe this “handyman” would linger about the scene of his own crime pretending to be a plain-clothes detective, hoping to knock off his victim’s friends as they came to visit? He might be a maniac, but nobody’s that crazy.’

She shook her head. ‘Uh-uh. That would be a little far-fetched, even for me. That’s why I’m totally certain that this serial killer thing is a blind alley. It wasn’t the “handyman” who killed Claudine. Don’t you see? It’s just been set up to appear that way. Some bullshit story to lead the cops off the track while … Oh, Ben, don’t look at me like that. Like I’m some kind of paranoid conspiracy loon.’

‘I don’t think that about you.’

‘You mean, you don’t want to think it. But you’re thinking it.’

‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t this sicko who killed her, then who did?’

‘How can I know that? Nobody does, that’s the whole idea. They do this kind of thing all the time, when they want to rub someone out who gets in their way.’

‘They do it all the time?’

‘Yes, they,’ she snapped.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Leave that to one side. Next question: who came after you on the metro with the apparent intention of doing you harm?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘Roberta, if you don’t know these things, isn’t it simpler just to accept what the police say?’

‘Since when did you ever take a cop’s word for a single damn thing, Ben Hope?’ she demanded hotly. ‘You trust them even less than I do. Besides, the letter proves it’s not that simple.’

‘The letter we don’t have any more,’ Ben said. ‘And even if we did, it proves nothing.’

‘Hold on. She knew she was in danger. That’s the whole point.’

‘If this murderer hasn’t been caught yet, maybe it’s because he’s careful,’ Ben said. ‘Psychopaths are often extremely cunning and devious. Sick, but smart. They’ve been known to plan their attacks, weeks, months in advance.’

‘So?’

‘So he might have been watching your friend for some time before he struck. But maybe he wasn’t so careful that she didn’t spot him and somehow sensed that something wasn’t right about him. That could easily explain how she knew in advance that something was about to happen. She panicked.’

‘Oh, so you’ve got this whole thing figured out,’ Roberta snapped. ‘Then you tell me who the guy was on the train.’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe your first impression was the right one. He could have been a detective. You know the way their minds work. He might have wanted to ask you more questions. About the letter, perhaps. Or else maybe the whole thing is just …’ Ben checked himself from saying more. He’d already said too much, and could see the fire in her eyes.

‘Just what?’ she said fiercely.

‘All I’m saying, Roberta, is that maybe you need to think again. That maybe, for once in their lives, the police are right about this terrible thing that’s happened to your friend.’

‘And the rest I just cooked up in my imagination. That what you’re saying, Ben?’

‘You told me yourself you felt dazed, disorientated, after you left Claudine’s place. It would be understandable. People can suffer from all kinds of confusion at a time of great emotional stress.’

‘You’re so sure about this, aren’t you? In one way you haven’t changed at all, Ben Hope. You’re still just as much of a pigheaded bastard as when I first met you.’

‘Thanks,’ he muttered. ‘Remember, you came to me. You’re not giving me much of a chance here.’

‘What about the numbers?’ she demanded. ‘The GPS location and whatever else is there? You got a theory for those too? I have. If something happened to her, she intended for me to figure it out. There’s more to this, and I’m going to find out what.’

Ben leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, gazing at the ground between his feet and trying to understand. He knew Roberta well enough to know there was absolutely no point in trying to convince her to go home and wait for the police to do their job. And he couldn’t ignore the voice in his head reminding him of all the times he’d seen the cops botch everything up.

‘All right, then explain it to me,’ he said. ‘Someone murdered your friend, and now they’re coming after you, and it has something to do with this letter and a coded message. Who are they? What’s it about?’

Roberta paused to brush away a strand of dark red hair that had fallen into her eyes. Her brow was creased with strain. ‘Fact is, Ben, I think I know. Something tells me this all has to do with Claudine’s research.’

While they were deeply involved in their conversation, a hundred yards away at the other end of the park, a sleek black Audi saloon purred to a halt next to Roberta’s rental car. Its front doors opened and two men silently got out. Neither of them looked out of the ordinary. The one who’d been driving was in his early-to-mid thirties with nondescript brown hair and sunglasses, the other about ten years older, more heavily built, with a receding stubble of grey and eyes narrowed to slits against the early afternoon glare. They were casually dressed in jeans and lightweight jackets.

Neither spoke. As they both gazed impassively at the blue Vauxhall the older man was receiving instructions via a mobile phone. He listened until his instructions were complete, then gave a short nod to his colleague.

The driver opened the boot. He took out the black holdall from inside. It sagged heavily in his hand.

The two men scanned the near-empty park. Within a few seconds they’d located their target on the green wooden bench in the distance and taken note of the unknown male accompanying her. The men exchanged glances when they saw how the target’s companion was dressed.

It was no ordinary camera that was built into the mobile phone the older of the two men was carrying. He quickly, discreetly, used it to snap the figures on the bench, then redialled a number. ‘She’s not alone,’ he said when the voice replied on the line. ‘She’s talking to a priest.’

Pause. ‘Yeah, that’s what I said. I’m sending the image now. Got it?’

‘I’ve got it,’ said the gruff voice on the other end. ‘I see them. Okay, it’s her last confession. His too. Make it quick and quiet.’

The call was over. The two men divided the contents of the holdall. Then moved unnoticed around the edge of the park to their position.

Chapter Five

The word research, from the lips of Roberta Ryder, held certain negative past associations for Ben. After all, it had been some bizarre experimental research of her own that had first not only brought them together but drawn the attention of ruthless people who’d very nearly succeeded in killing them both.

‘You told me Claudine was a lecturer,’ he said. ‘Lecturer in what?’

‘Physics,’ Roberta replied.

‘It doesn’t sound very dangerous.’

‘But then, what do you know about physics?’

He said nothing. Aside from weapons ballistics, the complexities of calculating long-range rifle bullet trajectories, the cold mathematics of war and destruction that he wanted to forget he’d ever learned, he didn’t know much.

‘That’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘Then I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a guy called Tesla? He was the subject of Claudine’s research, ever since I first knew her.’

‘Of course I’ve heard of him,’ he said defensively. ‘First to experiment with electricity, back in the nineteenth century. Made dead frogs’ legs dance about by passing current through them. I don’t see what—’

‘That was Galvani, Ben,’ Roberta interrupted impatiently. ‘I’m talking about the great Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla, born 1856. Actually I’m not surprised you didn’t know about him,’ she added after a beat. ‘I mean, everyone’s heard of the Marconis and Faradays and Edisons of this world, but Tesla’s the pioneer genius who somehow wound up forgotten. Which is pretty incredible, considering he came up with the principles behind wireless communication, remote control, radar, sonar, robotics, neon and fluorescent light, and foresaw the internet and cell phones as early as 1908. Not to mention his work on—’

‘I get the picture,’ Ben interrupted, knowing she was liable to launch into a whole science lecture if he didn’t break her stream.

‘I don’t know that you do get it,’ she said. She paused a moment. Gazed across the park, where the young mother was still pushing her son to and fro on the swing. The child was howling in delight as the swing’s arc carried him higher and higher.

‘Look at that,’ Roberta said, pointing. ‘That kid’s mother can’t weigh more than a hundred and five pounds soaking wet. She’s even smaller than I am. But see how little force it takes, at just the right moment, to make the swing go up high in the air.’ She looked round at Ben. ‘That’s what Claudine’s research was about.’

‘About shoving a kid back and forth on a swing?’

She tutted. ‘Don’t be so obtuse, Hope. It’s about the principle of resonance, the idea that tiny forces, precisely enough timed and placed, can accumulate to create massive energies.’

‘You’re going to have to be more specific.’

‘Okay, let me put it another way. The Earth’s vibrations have a periodicity of about an hour forty-nine minutes. In other words, if I were to hit something solid against the ground right now, it would send a wave of contraction through the whole planet that would return to the same point one hour forty-nine minutes later in the form of expansion. Follow me?’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ he said.

Missing his sarcasm, she went on: ‘So you see, the Earth, like everything else, is in a constant state of vibration, ever expanding and contracting. Now imagine that at the exact moment when it begins to contract, I detonate a ton of high explosive in the exact same spot. That would accelerate the contraction, so that one hour forty-nine minutes later there would come back a wave of expansion that was equally accelerated. Now, if as that expansion wave began to ebb I set off another ton of explosive, and I kept repeating that pattern again and again … eventually, what do you suppose would happen?’

Ben looked blank.

‘It’s obvious, if you think about it. Given time, Tesla calculated that he could build up enough of an energy wave to split the Earth.’

‘Split the Earth,’ Ben repeated in a flat tone.

She nodded matter-of-factly, as if splitting the Earth were all part and parcel of a scientist’s everyday routine. ‘That’s the idea. See? Small input, big effect. Pretty much all of Tesla’s work was based on those principles, and that’s what Claudine was interested in. She was talking about it when I first met her, and she was still talking about it the last time we had a conversation on the phone, which was about five months ago.’

‘I still don’t understand where this is leading, Roberta.’

‘Let me explain a little more, okay? In the late nineteenth century Tesla invented a small hand-held device called the electro-mechanical oscillator. Based on the same kind of principles, he used it to show that even a subtle vibration, at just the right frequency, could unleash a whole lot of power. I mean enormous, and almost instantaneously. Enough to, say, bring down a building. A house, even a skyscraper.’

‘Sounds more like a bomb to me.’

‘No explosives involved,’ she replied, shaking her head. ‘No noise or smoke, nothing chemical, just some basic mechanical moving parts powered by steam.’

‘Steam? What kind of bollocks contraption is that?’

‘A very simple one. Basically a miniature piston engine, with a small on-board boiler heated by internal combustion. In those days, steam was the only power source that could produce enough energy to operate the mechanicals. The whole thing was supposed to have been about six, seven inches long. You could carry it in your pocket.’

‘And use it to bring down a building.’

She nodded. ‘Sure.’

‘But it can’t split the Earth.’

‘Oh no, you’d need a bigger version to do that kind of damage.’

‘I would have hoped you’d do me more credit than to expect me to believe such utter bloody nonsense,’ he said. ‘I mean, come on.’

‘It really existed, Ben,’ Roberta insisted. ‘According to Tesla’s findings its theoretical potential was limitless.’

Ben was losing patience. ‘Theoretical, as in, it’s never actually been done or proved. This is what your friend was into? And you think this is why someone killed her? To do with some pie-in-the-sky notion that you can vibrate a building to pieces with some daft Heath Robinson device?’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Listen, I spent years in the army learning how to blow stuff up. Nobody can do it as efficiently as we did. Millions are spent developing high-tech explosives and training people like me how to use them without getting themselves blasted to smithereens. And a lot of people have been killed or maimed in the process of gathering that expertise. Don’t you think that if there were an easier way, Special Forces units would’ve latched onto it by now? Vibrations and steam,’ he added with contempt. ‘Splitting the Earth. Next thing you’ll be telling me about science fiction death rays.’

She blinked. ‘You knew about the Tesla death ray?’

Ben could see she was being earnest. ‘Now this is really getting crazy.’

‘Check out the evidence,’ she protested. ‘This is historic fact.’

Now Ben had run out of patience entirely. ‘Yeah, and “historic” is the key word here. It’s hardly the stuff that conspiracies are made of.’

‘You got one right here,’ she said fiercely. ‘You just can’t see it.’

‘What’s there to see?’ he said.

‘My friend’s body lying in the morgue, for a start.’

Ben couldn’t argue with that. ‘Okay. I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry, but you think I’m full of shit.’

He threw up his hands in frustration. ‘I don’t know, Roberta. You come to me saying you’re in trouble, then you start talking about all this stuff, which, frankly, sounds to me like a load of … what do you Americans call it? Hooey. Just like all that alchemical stuff you were fixated on before.’

‘It is not hooey,’ she said firmly.

‘I can see you sincerely believe that. But what am I supposed to make of it? What can I do?’

She leaned close to him and replied, ‘Help me.’

‘What makes you think I even could?’

‘You’re Ben Hope. What more is there to say?’ She paused, looking entreatingly into his face. ‘You helped me once. It wasn’t so long ago. Won’t you help me again?’

He didn’t reply.

There was a long silence. The young mother had taken her child away from the swings and was holding his hand as they made their way along the tree-shaded footpath into the distance. The park was empty now, apart from just the two of them sitting on the bench.

‘I shouldn’t have come here,’ Roberta said bitterly. ‘I’m wasting my time.’

‘I’m getting married in three days, Roberta,’ Ben said.

‘Yeah. Married. Thanks for reminding me.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Jesus, I remember it all so well, everything that happened between us. It seems like yesterday. Then that day you came to Canada to find me … I thought …’

‘Do we have to go over this?’ he said. ‘I came to make sure you were all right. And to say goodbye.’

‘I really cared for you. You know that, don’t you? We had something together.’

‘It wouldn’t have worked, Roberta. A guy like me – I don’t know. I was restless then. I just wasn’t ready to settle in one place.’

‘Or with one woman,’ she said. ‘But apparently, you are now.’

‘I told you. I’m different now.’

‘Or maybe you just found the right woman now.’ She let out a long sigh, then tried to smile. ‘That’s fine, Ben. I’m happy for you. I mean it. I can see now that I shouldn’t have troubled you. You’ve made a new life for yourself. Who the hell am I to turn up like this out of no place and disturb it?’

‘You know who you are to me,’ he said.

‘Was,’ she snorted. ‘I guess that’s ancient history too, huh?’ She started plucking at her handbag for her car keys. ‘Let’s go. I’ll drive you back to your domestic bliss. Then I’ll be gone, and I swear I’ll never bother you again.’

‘Hey.’ He reached out a hand.

She flinched away from his touch. ‘Don’t worry about me. I don’t need your help anyway.’ Her eyes had filled with tears again. She wiped them angrily away. ‘Shit, where’d I put the goddamned keys?’

Ben’s throat felt tight and he was confused with so many emotions. ‘You look tired, Roberta. Why don’t you stay a night or two at the vicarage? Jude would welcome having a house guest.’

She let out a mirthless laugh. ‘I suppose you’d want me to come to the wedding, too? Act as maid of honour or something? No thanks.’ Finding the keys, she stood up from the bench abruptly.

Ben opened his mouth to say something, but the words were still on his lips when the splinters flew with a sharp crack from the backrest of the bench and something smacked hard off the wall behind them.

For a short fraction of a second that seemed like a full minute, he stared at the small bullet hole that had appeared right where Roberta had been sitting just a moment earlier and only a few inches away from him.

Half a second was all the time he had to react before a volley of silenced gunfire erupted from across the park.

Chapter Six

In the same instant that splinters and pieces of tree bark exploded all around them, Ben jack-knifed violently over the back of the bench, grabbing Roberta’s arm and hauling her roughly down to the ground with him.

The gunfire paused for a heartbeat as whoever was shooting at them adjusted their aim. Then another volley of bullets churned up the ground and spat dirt around the base of the bench. A round screamed off the cast-iron leg Ben was pressed hard up against and he felt the hot copper-jacketed lead pass through his hair, millimetres from his skull.

Roberta was curled up in a ball on the ground, crying out in terror. Ben scrambled over to her to cover her body with his. With his face pressed down in the dirt he caught a momentary glimpse of movement among the bushes across the park. Even as he tried desperately to shield Roberta, some detached reptilian part of his mind was busy calculating the enemy’s position and strength.

Range: eighty yards. More than one shooter. Nine-millimetre subsonic ammunition, fully-automatic weapons fitted with sound moderators. This wasn’t local kids larking about with airguns. Conclusion: time to get the hell away from here before they both got shot to pieces.

In seconds, the bench was riddled with holes and offering less and less cover with every passing moment as bullets ripped through the weather-beaten wood and drilled into the ground, ploughed into the trees and threw up spatters of earth left and right. A howling ricochet off something hard and a shower of brick dust suddenly reminded Ben of the low wall behind the bench. In a momentary lull in the shooting as both gunmen reloaded their expended magazines, he sprang up, dragged Roberta bodily to her feet and half-threw, half-pulled her over the wall.

It was a four-foot drop down to the sloping grassy bank on the other side. The two of them hit the soft earth and went tumbling down the slope to the flat ground of the field adjoining the parkland.

Ben was first on his feet. ‘Are you hit?’ he asked urgently as Roberta stood uncertainly. ‘Are you bleeding?’ The shooting had stopped, and for the moment they were out of range of the gunmen. That wouldn’t be the case for long.

‘I don’t think so,’ Roberta answered. Her voice sounded faraway and dazed. Ben quickly inspected her for blood. He’d seen men mortally wounded who hadn’t even known about it for several minutes after getting shot. But Roberta’s only injury seemed to be the small cut to her brow where a flying splinter had broken the skin. ‘You’re okay. Stay there,’ he said, clambered back up the grassy bank and peeped over the wall.

He’d been right about a pair of shooters. He could see them now. The two men had emerged from the cover of the bushes. One was younger, taller, dark-haired, the other older and squatter. They looked fit and strong, and were running across the deserted park towards them with an air of absolute purpose. They were making no attempt to conceal the weapons in their hands. Few men in a vicar’s garb would have been able to make the identification, but Ben instantly knew the stubby black outlines of the Beretta MX4 Storm submachine gun. He’d had half a dozen of their civilian semi-automatic cousins locked up in the armoury at Le Val. The military version was a pure weapon of war. Totally illegal in most countries of the world. Extremely hard to obtain. The choice of professionals.

Who were these men? Ben didn’t have much time to consider the answer, or to yell at Roberta ‘What the hell have you got yourself mixed up in?’. The shooters were halfway across the park already, running fast. Ben slithered back down the bank and rejoined Roberta.

She still appeared stunned from the suddenness and violence of the attack. ‘They’re coming,’ he said. ‘Let’s move.’

‘Where to?’ she gasped, looking around her wide-eyed. Once they left the shelter of the wall, there’d be nothing around them but open field. The nearest cover was the half-built housing estate a hundred and fifty or more yards away, shimmering like a mirage in the heat haze.

Ben had already decided that was the only place they could run to. He could only pray that the gate he could see in the eight-foot wire mesh fence surrounding the building site wasn’t locked. He took her hand tightly in his, and they set off at a sprint towards the distant buildings. The grass was long and lush, and tugged at their ankles as they ran. Roberta stumbled over a rut and went down on one knee. As Ben helped her back to her feet he saw the two men clamber over the wall, spot them across the field and give chase. ‘Move!’ he rasped, yanking her arm.

The chatter of sound-suppressed machine-gun fire sounded from behind. Dirt and shredded grass flew up in Ben and Roberta’s wake.

One thing Ben knew for sure – the gunmen weren’t interested in catching them alive. They were shooting to kill.

He let go of Roberta’s hand and shouted ‘Zigzag!’ She glanced at him in stunned terror for an instant, then understood and began to imitate him as he tore through the long grass in a crazily erratic weave, like a hare trying to evade a chasing lurcher. A desperate strategy. It made them a harder target to hit at this range, but it also gave them further to run than their pursuers.

The wire fence was coming up fast. Signs on posts read DANGER: KEEP OUT and HARD HAT ZONE. Beyond the wire were bare-block buildings, construction skips, cement mixers, enormous mounds of sand, portacabins for the building crews. Ben’s jaw clenched tighter as he saw the heavy chain and padlock looped around the mesh gates. He glanced behind him. In a few seconds the shooters would be close enough to take them down easily.

‘Climb!’ he yelled at Roberta. Without hesitation she hooked her fingers into the wire meshwork and started clambering up the fence. As she reached the top she swung her leg over, scrabbled frantically halfway down and then let go and hit the ground with a soft grunt. Ben was right behind her. He felt dreadfully exposed with his back to the shooters, hanging from the fence like a target on a board.

He heard the muffled bark of shots. A bullet struck sparks off the steel fencepost inches from his right hand as he climbed. He launched himself over the top of the wire and hit the ground the way he’d learned in parachute training, rolling to absorb the impact and leaping straight back to his feet in an instant run.

The buildings were clustered close together, some almost completed and clad in scaffolding, others still in the early stages of construction with bare-block walls just a few feet high. Roberta was already making for the nearest, a shell of a house with no roof and empty holes for doors and windows. She was limping.

More shots. A puff of dust off the wall to Roberta’s left as she staggered inside the building, clutching her leg. Ben was ready to feel a bullet in his back as he sprinted after her, but it didn’t come. He skidded through the doorway.

Roberta was pressed up against the wall, breathing hard, looking at him in alarm. ‘I told you,’ she gasped. ‘Now do you believe me? So much for the Paris cops and their bullshit. Serial killer my ass.’

‘What’s wrong with your leg?’ he asked, noticing the way she was holding it.

‘Twisted my ankle jumping from the fence. It’s fine, I can move it,’ she added with a wince of pain.

Ben quickly crouched down and tugged the left leg of her jeans up a few inches. He could see nothing bad, no swelling, no discolouration. ‘You’ll live. If you don’t get shot.’

‘Hell of a thing to say at a time like this,’ she replied anxiously. ‘What do we do, Ben?’

His mind was sharp, working fast and smoothly. Trained responses under stress were so deeply conditioned in him that even with adrenaline levels running through his veins that would reduce most men to a panicking jelly, everything appeared in slow motion. He stepped lightly across to the nearest window and peered cautiously out through the glassless hole.

The shooters had reached the fence. As Ben watched, they each aimed their weapons at the padlock on the gate and let off a flurry of gunfire that sounded like a lump hammer clanging against an anvil at impossible speed. The wrecked padlock dropped away, the chain parted and jangled loose. The men kicked the gates open with a metallic clatter and strode into the building site.

‘They’re coming,’ Ben said quietly.

‘Oh, my God. Who are they?’

‘We can talk about that later,’ Ben said. ‘For now it’s time to move on. Can you stand?’

She nodded. He took her hand. Put a finger to his lips and then pointed it through the house at the back door. ‘That way,’ he whispered.

Roberta hobbled after him as he exited the building. They skirted a low adjoining wall and crossed a patch of rubble-strewn ground to the house next door, which had its roof A-frames, beams and battens already mounted under a plastic covering that crackled in the soft breeze and darkened the skeletal rooms in shadow.

Ben thrust Roberta into a dim corner with a look that said, ‘Stay there’, and let go of her hand. He trotted to the window. Twenty yards away, the two shooters were stalking through the site with their weapons shouldered and ready, glancing left and right for any movement, any trace of their quarry. Their faces were steely and predatory. The older one signalled to his colleague and they split up out of sight among the buildings and construction machinery.

Ben glanced quickly around him, taking in the layout of their cover. Front door, back door, patio window, garage, other points of entry. Too many possibilities and not enough hiding places. The unfinished home reminded him with sharp discomfort of the dedicated ‘killing house’ that he and his SAS squads had used for live-fire room assault, hostage extraction and anti-terrorist combat drills at the regimental base in Hereford, back in the day. Nothing could escape the killing house without getting drilled full of bullets and buckshot by the Special Forces tactical teams.

If these two guys were even half that proficient at their job, this wasn’t a good place to be. Not a good place at all.

Chapter Seven

‘Ben!’ came a hoarse whisper. Roberta was peering at him worriedly from the shadows. ‘What are we gonna do?’ she hissed.

‘Stay put, for now,’ Ben replied softly. ‘You keep out of sight and keep quiet.’

‘I still know karate,’ she whispered. ‘I can fight.’

Now that the initial shock of the attack had passed, her expression was alert and focused. Ben remembered well enough that Roberta Ryder had always been a lot less squeamish about violence than the average female science academic. During their escapades together in Paris she’d used her Shotokan black belt skills to lethally defend herself against a knife attacker, wrecked cars, been drenched in blood and gore during a gunfight on the banks of the River Seine and later shot a man in the thigh with an automatic pistol. On that occasion she’d saved Ben’s life, not for the first time.

But here, today, they were going to need more than karate moves to evade the two men who were coming after them.

Ben retreated quickly out of sight as a figure edged past the window. It was the younger of the two men. He paused for an instant to squint into the murky building, scanning left and right with the detached, professional air of a rat catcher hunting for vermin. The muzzle of his Beretta was pointing right at Ben, but he couldn’t see him standing there perfectly immobile in the shadows.

Ben didn’t breathe. After what seemed like an agonizingly long time, the man moved on. Ben could hear his steps padding around the side of the house.

The man’s footsteps were treading closer to the door. Ben glanced towards Roberta and saw the flash of her frightened eyes in the dark corner.

Something else was standing half-hidden in the shadows. One of the building crew had left a long-handled shovel propped against a wall. Ben moved silently across to where the shovel was leaning. Careful not to let its blade scrape on the concrete floor, he picked it up. The long wooden shaft was crusty with dried cement. He took a strong two-handed grip on it.

The figure of the man appeared in the doorway, silhouetted against the bright sunlight outside. With his weapon to his shoulder he took a careful step inside, then paused, head slightly cocked to one side as though listening intently for the tiniest movement, blinking to adjust his eyes to the low light.

Nothing stirred inside the building. The only sound was the gentle crackle of the wind on the plastic sheeting stretched over the bare roof beams.

The man took another stealthy step into the house. Then another.

Then the shovel blade swung humming through the air faster than the man could react.

If Ben had hit him with the blade edge-on it would have separated the top of his skull above the eyes, like taking the crown off a boiled egg with a knife. Instead, the flat of the blade caught him just over the bridge of the nose with a resonating clang and laid him on his back. The MX4 spun out of his grip and fell to the ground.

Ben stood over him with the shovel poised in his hands like an axe. The man’s face was a mess of blood. He was moaning incoherently, disorientated and only about half conscious until two swift, harsh kicks to the head knocked him out entirely.

‘Still got the soft touch,’ Roberta muttered from the shadows.

‘He can take it,’ Ben said, snatching up the fallen weapon. The submachine gun was bulky with the big sound suppressor screwed to the end of the barrel. There were still twelve or thirteen rounds in the pistol grip magazine and one in the chamber. Ben set it aside and quickly checked the unconscious man’s pockets. He had no ID, no wallet, no phone, not even loose change. Nothing on him but a car ignition key on a leather fob and, clipped inside a belt pouch, two spare steel thirty-round magazines for the MX4. There wasn’t time to wait for the guy to come round to interrogate him – and Ben’s first priority at this moment was to get Roberta to safety.

He grabbed the two spare mags and the keys and thrust them deep into the left pocket of his borrowed trousers. Picking up the submachine gun, he stepped over the comatose body and checked from the doorway that the coast was clear. He signalled to Roberta. ‘Let’s move,’ he whispered.

Ben wasn’t one of those guys who loved weaponry for its own sake. He’d handled just about every variety of small arms ever made, witnessed with his own eyes the butcher’s-shop carnage they could be used to inflict on the human frame, and at times had wished he’d never see another. Yet there was no denying the deep sense of comfort in going from being totally unarmed and vulnerable to cradling something in your hands that helped even the odds against a dangerous opponent. The Beretta felt like an old friend who’d come to the rescue.

With his finger on the trigger, Ben took a winding path between buildings and pieces of construction plant machinery in the rough direction of the site gates. With any luck, they could be through them and heading back over the field towards the park before the second shooter realised what was up.

Every few steps he glanced behind him to check that Roberta was still following close behind. She was still limping slightly on her twisted ankle, but keeping pace. They cut across a ploughed-up dirt patch that would eventually become a row of neat little back gardens, and then cut through another narrow alley between two scaffold-covered houses. Approaching the corner of the house on the left, the unchained gates came into view just twenty yards across a piece of open ground. Ben slowly, carefully peered around the edge of the wall. To the left he could see only empty buildings and a half-built wall. To the right, nothing moved among the stacks of concrete blocks. The coast seemed to be clear.

‘Let’s go,’ he said to Roberta.

He’d taken half a step out into the open when masonry chips exploded from the wall inches away. A hard impact to the left thigh almost knocked his leg out from under him.

Chapter Eight

Ben staggered backwards under cover of the wall and almost fell over, his whole body jangling with shock as he expected to see the first fountain of blood spurting from a ruptured femoral artery.

Roberta cried out. Ben dropped his weapon and clasped his hands to his leg. It felt numb from hip to knee. He saw the bullet hole through the black fabric of his trousers.

His trembling fingers connected through the material with the Beretta magazines in his pocket. He pulled them out, saw the huge dent and the strike mark in one of them where the bullet had hit it dead on and crushed the pressed steel box almost flat. Nothing had passed through. The magazine had absorbed the full force of the impact. Ben felt something burning hot against his flesh, dug deeper into his pocket and found the jagged, squashed lead and copper disc that was all that remained of the 9mm bullet.

His heart began to beat again as a mixture of relief and ferocity welled up inside him. He tossed the ruined mag away and snatched up his fallen gun.

‘I thought you were hit,’ Roberta gasped.

‘I’ve always been lucky with bullets,’ Ben said. He stepped quickly back to the corner and darted a cautious look round it. The shooter was out there, and he wasn’t far away, maybe twenty or thirty yards, hidden behind cover with his sights trained at his mark and just waiting for Ben to step out again. Where was he? Behind that low wall? Those cement bags, or that stack of bricks?

Ben poked the barrel of the submachine gun around the corner of the house and let off a sustained blast of return fire at his unseen enemy. The row of cement bags burst apart. The tape holding together the stack of bricks parted, and it toppled over in a cascade onto and behind the section of low wall. There was a yell. The shooter scrambled out from behind the wall and started scurrying towards the houses behind him. Ben chased him with a stream of bullets, but then his magazine was suddenly empty. The man darted out of sight.

Ben swore and rammed in his last mag. He scanned the buildings where the man had disappeared. There was no sign of him.

Silence.

Ben’s mind worked fast. Having been caught out once, there was no way he was about to try again to cross the open ground to the gates. But he was just as reluctant to retrace their steps in the direction they’d come, and find out the hard way that the shooter had doubled back on himself to head them off.

Ben had a decision to make. And the wrong choice could kill them in a second.

He chose a third option. If in doubt, head for higher ground. ‘That way,’ he said to Roberta, pointing up at the scaffolding attached to the house. Most of the feeling had returned to his left leg now, and with it the ache from the bullet impact. Ignoring the pain, he guided Roberta to the vertical ladder that led up to the scaffold and stood guard as she clambered up to the first level, then climbed up to join her on the rickety planking. A second ladder led to the next level up, where the builders had been fitting the A-frames for the roof.

Ben led the way as they skirted around towards the back of the house. The scaffold was enclosed with a wire mesh safety barrier. Through it Ben could see where the builders had poured the footings for the neighbouring house. Judging by the slick, shiny surface of the wet concrete, like grey porridge that had been scraped smooth with the back of a knife, it had been their last job of the day.

‘Did I ever tell you how I feel about heights?’ Roberta said, clutching the railing and not looking down.

Ben said nothing. He surveyed the ground below. Thirty feet up, there was a much better view of the building site, but still no sign of their opponent. He moved silently along the planking, his eyes picking out every possible hiding place among the houses and garages and construction equipment. Nothing.

Roberta’s sudden gasp made him wheel round in alarm.

The man hadn’t doubled back to flank them. He’d done exactly the same thing Ben had done, move to higher ground and work his way around the back of the house to creep up on them from behind. He had one arm around Roberta’s throat, his squat, muscular body pressed up against hers to use her as a shield and the fat tube of his MX4’s silencer pressed hard into the side of her neck below the ear.

Ben froze with his gun half-raised.

‘Drop it,’ the man said in a flat voice.

‘Shoot him, Ben!’ Roberta yelled. The man clamped a hand over her mouth and ground his long submachine gun barrel harder into her flesh. She wriggled wildly in his grasp, but it was tight. His expression said clearly, ‘I’m not messing about.’

Ben already knew that. He held his Beretta out at arm’s length, pointing down at the planking. He let it slip from his fingers.

‘Kick it over the edge,’ the man said.

Ben nudged the weapon with his toe. It tipped through the gap between the planks and the safety rail and disappeared. He heard it glance off the scaffolding poles, then clatter to the ground thirty feet below.

‘Nice one, father,’ the man said with a crooked grin.

Ben could see the gun’s fire selector switched to single shot. Could see the man’s finger tightening on the trigger, and the angle of the muzzle that would direct the bullet under her ear and upward through her brain.

‘You pull that trigger, you die,’ he said.

The man’s grizzled features broke into a grin. ‘Better say a prayer.’

His grin evaporated into a look of surprise as Roberta gave a sudden heave that ripped her free of his grasp. With practised speed she raked the heel of her shoe down his shin and onto his foot in a hard stamping kick and simultaneously twisted his gun arm away from her in a painful lock that made him cry out.

The gun went off. The bullet went wide of her body and ricocheted with a howl off the wall behind the scaffold. As Roberta was about to knee him in the groin, still grasping his gun-arm, he head-butted her savagely and she sprawled down to the planking, almost falling through the gap below the safety barrier. With bared teeth the man thrust the gun down at her to shoot point-blank into her face.

But by then Ben had raced along the scaffolding and was on him. He drove the man’s arm violently against the safety barrier, knocking the gun out of his hand. Before it had splashed into the wet concrete thirty feet below, Ben delivered a vicious elbow strike to the man’s throat, then another. The man reeled, but he was tough, and within seconds the two of them were grappling violently against the railing. Roberta was trying to scramble to her feet, but the blow to her face had dazed her.

A powerful fist caught Ben in the ribs. A flash of pain ripped through him, then the greying stubble of the man’s crown was coming hard and fast at his face.

Ben dodged the head-butt and used its momentum to steer the guy’s skull full-force into a scaffold pole with a resonant clang and an impact that made the whole structure judder under their feet. Ben grabbed the man’s beefy head by both ears and smashed it off the pipe again, leaving a smear of blood on the metal, then with all his strength piled a knee into the muscular paunch of his stomach.

The man staggered backwards into the safety railing. The wire mesh buckled. A joint gave way and a whole section of the barrier swung loose from the scaffolding. Ben punched him in the mouth and felt teeth cut into his knuckles.

Streaming blood, arms flailing for balance, the man wobbled on the edge of the planks for an instant and then fell backwards with a cry. But as he went, his grasping hands gripped hold of both of Ben’s sleeves.

Ben felt himself being pulled over the edge. The wet concrete seemed to rush up towards him. Then a violent jarring pain all the way up his right arm to his shoulder as his fist closed on a scaffold pipe, arresting his fall. His legs kicked in empty space as he dangled precariously from one hand, reaching desperately with the other for a grip on something solid. He heard Roberta scream out his name.

The squat man turned a somersault and belly-flopped into the wet concrete. The smooth, gleaming surface erupted in a sludgy grey explosion. For a moment he lay there, stirring weakly as if on a soft bed; then the glutinous morass began to draw him down, legs first. He began screaming and thrashing in panic, reaching for the edge but finding nothing to hold onto as he quickly sank. The concrete sucked at his chest, then at his chin. Then his upturned face disappeared under the surface and his scream died as his mouth filled with concrete. The last thing to go down was the agonised claw of his hand.

‘Ben!’ Roberta screamed again. She scrabbled to the edge of the planking and looked down in horror. Seeing him dangling there by one arm, she reached hers out for him to grab, but it was too far to reach. ‘Ben!’

For an instant, Ben thought his grip on the slippery steel pipe was going to fail. His fingers were at breaking point. He dug deep into his last reserves of strength and groped wildly around with his other hand.

Suddenly he had a grip on a hanging section of the safety railing. With a grunt of pain and effort he hauled himself higher until he was able to kick a leg up to the scaffold and hook a knee over the edge of the planking. Roberta seized his arm and helped him, dragging him away from the edge. They were both breathing hard.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked, sitting up. Her left cheek and jaw were inflamed from where the man had butted her, and his gun muzzle had left an angry red circle on her neck.

‘Sure,’ she said, gingerly touching her face and inspecting her fingertips for blood. ‘It’s just like old times.’

‘Don’t joke about it. Whoever you’ve managed to piss off this time, they’re not kidding around.’

‘That’s what I have you for,’ she said with a bitter smile. ‘Reverend.’

Ben ignored the jibe and got to his feet. His left leg was stiffening up from the bullet impact and there was a lancing pain in his right side from the punch he’d taken in the ribs.

‘Don’t think we’ll be seeing him again,’ Roberta muttered, peering down over the edge. There was no trace of sympathy in her eyes as she watched the surface of the wet concrete smooth itself out, with hardly a ripple left to show for the man’s body under it.

‘Not for a few centuries,’ Ben said. ‘But maybe his friend can tell us what the hell’s going on here.’

Chapter Nine

Ben and Roberta made their way down from the scaffold. The gun he’d tipped over the edge was scuffed from its impact against the ground, but weapons of war could take the odd knock or two. He dusted it off and kept it ready, just in case, as they headed back towards the building where they’d left the younger man lying unconscious.

When they reached the spot, Ben saw with a sinking heart that the worry that had been growing inside him was proved right: the house was empty. All that remained of the gunman was a thin trail of blood where he’d picked himself up and managed to escape. Where he was now was anybody’s guess.

‘It’s my fault he got away,’ Ben muttered in self-reproach as they left the construction site behind and hurried back across the field towards the park. ‘I didn’t hit him hard enough.’

‘Hey, any harder, you’d have killed him,’ Roberta said, then added glumly, ‘Either way, we’d still be back to square one. So what happens next?’

‘You got what you came for,’ Ben said. ‘Me. And I want to know more about all this physics research stuff.’

‘I told you just about all I know.’

‘Then we’ll have to figure it out the hard way,’ he said. ‘Bit by bit, one piece at a time. How’s the ankle?’

‘Hardly hurts anymore.’

‘Good, because we’ve got some travelling to do.’

Reaching the edge of the park, they climbed back over the wall, passed the bullet-riddled bench and walked along the footpath towards the car park. Ben had the MX4 wrapped up in an old cement bag he’d picked up from the building site. The last thing he needed now was ‘MACHINE GUN PHONEY VICAR IN POLICE CHASE’. He already had more to deal with than he even wanted to contemplate.

As they approached the car park, Ben saw the black Audi S6 performance saloon sitting empty next to Roberta’s rental Vauxhall. He reached in his trouser pocket and, gingerly against his bruised thigh, drew out the Audi ignition key he’d taken from the shooter he’d knocked out. He pressed the key’s remote button and wasn’t surprised when its central locking system clunked open with a bleep and a flash of indicators. The gunmen were as well equipped for travel as for killing.

‘Better get your stuff out of there,’ he said, pointing at the back window of the rental, to where Roberta’s small travel bag was sitting on the rear seat. ‘We have to ditch your Vauxhall.’

She frowned. ‘You figure that’s how they tracked me all the way out here?’

‘Did you stop for fuel on the way? Pay by credit card?’ he asked her.

‘I was running on fumes by the time I reached Oxfordshire. Had to stop at the filling station just before the village. Didn’t have any UK currency on me. How was I supposed to know they could follow my movements?’

Ben didn’t reply. The implications were as deeply worrying as they were far-reaching. They were sinking in for Roberta too. ‘What you’re saying, it’d mean—’

He nodded, and finished the sentence for her. ‘That whoever these new friends of yours are, they’re considerably more organised and deeper inside the system than the charming bunch who were trying to kill you before. You certainly pick them.’

‘I didn’t pick anyone. I’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘Someone seems to think otherwise.’

‘But who? Who?’

‘They,’ he said. ‘You said it yourself, they don’t want anyone to know who they are. All I know is, this is going to make last time look like a cakewalk.’

‘You always did have that reassuring way about you,’ she muttered as she unlocked the Vauxhall to get her travel bag.

‘Leave the key in it,’ he told her.

Reluctantly, she tossed the key on the front seat and slammed the door. ‘The rental company will totally blacklist me, not that it matters right now.’

‘Join the club,’ Ben said. He’d long ago stopped keeping count of the number of hire cars that had been crashed, burned or shot to pieces while in his charge. Theologians shouldn’t have these problems. ‘Now, give me your phone, please.’

‘My phone?’ she said guardedly. ‘What do you want it for?’

‘Just give it here,’ he said, holding out a hand. She hesitated, then slipped a BlackBerry out of her pocket and passed it over. Without a word, he dropped it on the concrete at his feet, dashed it to pieces with the heel of his shoe and kicked the plastic fragments into the bushes.

‘You sonofabitch, that’s the second time you’ve done that to me. Now I’ve got no phone!’

‘And now there’s one way fewer of tracking your movements,’ he said.

‘Bullshit. Nobody can track a cellphone without an official warrant.’

‘Ho, ho. You say I’m talking bullshit?’ He walked up to the Audi and yanked open the driver’s door. He wasn’t expecting to find any clues inside the vehicle as to the gunmen’s identities or who they worked for, but the car itself would do to get out of here before whoever they were sent in reinforcements to finish the job. He tossed the wrapped-up gun on the back seat. ‘Let’s move.’

It was almost two o’clock when Ben turned the powerful car in through the vicarage gates and rasped to a halt on the gravel. Roberta had gone very quiet. ‘You all right?’ he said, laying a hand on her arm. Her muscles felt hard and tense. She gave a quick nod. Pointed at the dusty Suzuki four-wheel drive that was parked in front of the vicarage. ‘Someone’s here.’

Ben had already noticed it. The Grand Vitara’s rear hatch was open a foot and tied down with a strap. A huge rolled-up Persian rug was protruding a yard from the gap.

Brooke’s car. Normally the sight of it, and the anticipation of seeing her again, would have made him break into a smile. Now it was different. Now he had to try to figure out what he was going to say to her, and it wasn’t going to be easy for either of them. He swallowed, gripped the steering wheel for a moment, then murmured ‘Fuck it’ and swung open the Audi’s driver’s door.

‘You want me to stay out?’ Roberta asked, seeing the troubled look on his face.

‘I’m not leaving you on your own.’

They crossed the yard to the front door and Ben let them inside. The sound of intense jazz fusion and cheerful conversation were wafting down the hallway from the half-open kitchen doorway, together with the smell of fresh coffee. The track playing was ‘Miles Runs the Voodoo Down’, Jude’s favourite from the Bitches Brew album Ben had introduced him to. The voices were Jude’s and Brooke’s. Ben couldn’t make out what they were talking about.

‘I’ll hang back here,’ Roberta whispered in the hallway, nudging him.

Ben took a deep breath, walked to the kitchen door and stepped silently through it. Neither of the room’s occupants sensed him come in.

Brooke was standing with her back to the door and her auburn hair lit up by the sunshine from the window. She was wearing faded jeans and a light cotton top and holding a mug of coffee in her hand.

‘I didn’t have the heart to tell Amal that a rug that size is never going to fit in the house in Jericho,’ she was saying. ‘It’s large enough for a palace. So sweet of him to get it for us, though.’

‘Those things cost a bomb,’ Jude said. ‘I thought Amal was this struggling writer whose plays nobody wants to see.’

‘He is,’ Brooke laughed. ‘Where all the money comes from is anyone’s—’

She broke off mid-sentence as Ben walked further into the room, and turned towards him with a beaming smile.

‘Ben! I was just telling Jude about the amazing rug that Amal’s bought for us …’ She suddenly interrupted herself. ‘Why are you dressed like that?’

Ben walked over to the CD player on the kitchen surface and turned off the music, plunging the room into sudden silence. ‘Brooke,’ he said. ‘We need to talk.’

She set her mug down on the table and took a step towards him, alarmed by the gravity of his expression. ‘What? Ben – what’s up? You’re scaring me.’

‘Things may have to be put off for a while,’ he told her.

‘Things?’ She groaned. ‘Oh, no. Don’t tell me there’s a problem with your course.’

‘I’m not talking about the course,’ he said.

‘Then what?’ Her eyes suddenly widened. ‘The wedding rehearsal? The booking’s fallen through?’

‘Nothing’s fallen through,’ Ben said. ‘But we have to call it off. And …’

‘What?!’ Jude exploded.

Brooke looked as if she’d been punched. ‘And?’ was all she could blurt out.

Ben said nothing. Hoped that the look in his eyes would tell her what he couldn’t bring himself to come out with.

Her face paled. ‘Surely you don’t mean … you don’t mean the wedding too?’ she said in a low, trembling voice. ‘Call off the wedding?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said. ‘I have to leave. I can’t say when I’ll be back.’

‘What are you on about?’ Jude burst out. ‘Are you taking the piss?’

‘Back from where?’ Brooke asked. She sounded stunned, breathless.

‘I don’t know yet, not exactly,’ he said. ‘I just know I can’t stay here.’

‘But why?’ she pleaded.

Jude had stepped closer to stand at Brooke’s elbow, staring at Ben in dismay with his arms folded.

‘Jude, would you excuse us for a moment?’ Ben said.

‘Excuse you?’ Jude answered.

‘I’d like to be alone with her,’ Ben said. ‘So get out.’

Brooke held up a hand. ‘No. I want Jude to hear this too.’

‘Fuck, yeah,’ Jude said. ‘I’m staying right here. This is my house, remember.’

‘Fine,’ Ben said, trying to stay calm. ‘Let’s all talk.’

‘What’s this about, Ben?’ Brooke asked coldly.

‘I don’t even know what it’s about,’ Ben said. ‘All I know is that something’s cropped up and I have to leave right away. There’s no choice.’

Brooke had her hands on her hips and her face was flushed. ‘No choice!’ she yelled. ‘Ben! Have you gone mad? You made a choice! You chose to marry me – now you’re saying you want to run off again without a word of explanation? What am I going to say to everyone? “Oh, Ben just decided to go off for a few days?”.’

Ben was about to answer when he heard a light, hesitant tap on the kitchen door behind him.

‘Who else is here?’ Brooke said, looking past his shoulder with a frown. Her face went dark as Roberta walked into the kitchen. ‘Ah. Now I think I know what “cropped up”,’ she seethed at Ben, pointing at Roberta. ‘Her. Am I right?’

‘You must be Brooke,’ Roberta said, approaching her with an uncertain smile. ‘I’m Roberta Ryder. Listen, I don’t want to be the cause of any dispute between—’

‘I know who you are,’ Brooke interrupted. ‘Ben doesn’t like to talk about you. Now I’m wondering why.’

‘Roberta needs my help,’ Ben said.

‘And where the hell did she come from all of a sudden?’ Brooke demanded.’

‘Canada,’ Roberta said. ‘By way of Paris. I—’

Brooke rounded on her. ‘Do you mind shutting up for a moment while I speak to my fiancé?’ Then, turning back to face Ben: ‘And so you’re just walking out on me?’

‘It’s not as if I want to.’

‘But you’re going to all the same.’

‘Ben,’ Roberta said, touching his shoulder. ‘It’s okay. I understand. You don’t have to do this.’

‘I’m involved now,’ Ben said, keeping his eyes on Brooke. ‘I can’t just back out.’

Jude was shaking his head in consternation, staring at Ben as if to say ‘what is the matter with you?’.

‘Maybe I was dreaming,’ Brooke said, tight-lipped, ‘Or maybe I was delirious from fever. But I remember very clearly how, that day in the middle of the jungle when you asked me to marry you, you swore to me that there’d be no more of this running off on these insane adventures and scaring the shit out of me all the time, not knowing if you’re going to come back in one piece.’ Her tone began to rise. ‘Didn’t you make that promise to me, Ben? All about how you were going to change your ways? Telling me all you wanted was to be at home with me?’

‘You didn’t dream it,’ he replied. ‘You weren’t delirious either. I did say those things. And I meant every word.’

‘You mean you meant them then. But you don’t mean them now.’

‘Try to understand,’ he reasoned. ‘Roberta’s in danger. Look at me. Look at her. She needs my help.’

‘Well, I’m sorry if Roberta’s in trouble,’ Brooke burst out. ‘We all have our problems. Why does this have to become mine? Why does it have to be you? Is there no other man in the world who can help her?’ She turned furiously to Roberta. ‘What are you doing, you stupid bloody bitch?’ she yelled in a voice close to breaking. ‘Why can’t you stay out of our lives?’

Roberta looked down at the floor and didn’t reply.

‘It’s not her fault,’ Ben said. ‘She’s got mixed up in this thing, and now I’m mixed up in it too. Brooke, please listen to me.’ He looked to Jude for support. ‘Come on, back me up here. Talk to her.’

Jude scowled at him. ‘Hey, Dad, it’s your problem.’

Chapter Ten

There was a long, palpable silence in the room. Brooke and Roberta both stared at Jude, then at Ben.

‘Oh, shit,’ Jude murmured, turning a few shades paler as he realised what he’d let slip.

‘What – did – you – just – say?’ Brooke asked him slowly.

‘Nothing,’ Jude stammered.

Ben’s blood had frozen into ice crystals. He’d forgotten to breathe.

‘Yes, you did, Jude,’ Brooke insisted. ‘You said “Dad”.’

Jude looked as if he wanted to run to the window and jump out. ‘It’s just, you know. A figure of speech. Like “daddyo”. The way he’s dressed. Er, or something.’ At that point Jude decided to clamp his mouth shut.

Brooke turned to Ben. ‘Why did he call you that? Why?’

The ice in Ben’s veins turned into molten lava and he felt his face flush. He took a deep breath and said, ‘He’s my son, Brooke.’

‘I thought there was something,’ Roberta murmured, glancing wryly back and forth at the two men.

Brooke seemed to sag as if the air had been sucked out of her. She moved across to a stool by the breakfast bar and sat down heavily on it. She couldn’t speak.

‘Sorry, guys. It just slipped out,’ Jude mumbled. ‘We only found out about it at Christmas,’ he added for Brooke’s benefit, as if that would help.

It took a few moments before Brooke had got her breath back. ‘Would you mind leaving us alone now, please?’ she said softly, looking up at Roberta. ‘Jude? Ben and I need to talk alone.’

‘That’s what I wanted in the first place,’ Ben muttered, shooting an angry look at Jude. Ashen-faced, the young man left the room without a word. Roberta glanced nervously at Ben, then followed Jude out of the door and closed it softly behind her.

Then Ben and Brooke were alone in the silence of the kitchen. She sank deep into agitated thought, wringing her hands. Her long, slim fingers were shaking.

‘Were you ever going to tell me?’ she asked him at last, just above a whisper.

‘I was trying to find the right moment,’ Ben said. ‘It never seemed to come. This wasn’t it either.’

‘Don’t you trust me? Have you no idea how hurtful this is? To be told something like that, in front of a stranger? You must have had a million opportunities—’

‘I didn’t know how you’d take it,’ Ben said. ‘I’m still trying to come to terms with it myself. I should have told you. I was wrong to hold it back for so long. What can I say? I’m deeply sorry.’

‘Oh, Ben,’ she said, looking at him through teary eyes. She seemed about to burst out weeping again, but then she wiped the tears away and her face tightened. He could see a million thoughts racing through her mind. When she spoke again, the cold, simmering rage had returned to her voice. ‘Let me get this right. First there’s this old girlfriend of yours who suddenly turns up virtually on the eve of our wedding and seems to have the power to mesmerise you away, just like that …’

Ben wanted to protest, but he kept grimly quiet.

‘Now I find out that you had a grown-up son you never told me about,’ she went on. ‘Tell me, Ben. What other secrets do I get to find out about the man I was about to marry?’

‘That’s all there is, I promise.’

‘Huh,’ she snorted. ‘There we go. Another promise waiting to be broken. Are you even going to tell me where you’re going, or is that a secret too?’

‘I haven’t had time to think about that.’

‘Enough time to decide to break off the wedding, though! Didn’t take much to make your mind up about that, did it? I’m sure that part was easy for you.’

‘I’m not breaking off anything, goddamn it,’ he said, feeling frustration and anger welling up inside him. He didn’t want to shout. All he wanted was to hold her. He took a step closer to her, reaching out his arms. ‘Brooke—’

‘Don’t you come near me. Don’t touch me.’

He pulled back. His arms dropped helplessly by his sides. ‘You have to understand,’ he urged her. ‘You have to let me deal with this in my own way. Trust me, Roberta is in danger. Someone’s trying to kill her. They almost managed.’

‘And so you’re going to go off and get yourself killed along with her?’ Brooke burst out. ‘I’m sorry if that sounds harsh. But I don’t even know this woman.’

‘You want me to go and tell her she’s on her own?’ Ben hissed, stabbing a pointing finger towards the closed door. ‘You want me to just leave her to the wolves after she came to me for help? I can’t do that, Brooke. I couldn’t live with myself.’ He paused, trying desperately to calm himself. ‘Listen. I’ll come back to you. You know I will. Soon, before you know it. Then we’ll just pick up where we left off, and things will go back to the way they—’

‘Until the next time you go off again,’ she interrupted. ‘And then the next time after that, and the next, until one day you won’t come back, because you’ll be lying dead somewhere.’ Tears were streaming down her face. ‘You’ve cheated me, Ben. You’ve lied to me.’

‘No. I never lied to you.’

‘You’re lying to yourself too,’ she sobbed angrily. ‘This whole thing, you going back to your Theology, all the future plans you talked about, this whole new life that you say you want so much and want me to share with you. It’s nothing but bullshit. This is who you are, this running off and getting into trouble. Risk, danger. You draw it to you like a magnet; you thrive on it. Can’t you see? You love it, deep down. More than you could ever love me. Or your newfound son, for that matter.’

‘You’re wrong about me,’ he said.

‘Then show me I’m wrong. Prove it to me by dropping this whole awful idea, and staying here with me like you promised.’

He shook his head firmly. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry, but that’s final.’

Brooke took a moment to digest his words. She swallowed, then nodded. ‘Fine,’ she whispered. ‘Go. Go and help your friend. Do whatever you think you have to do. But when it’s done, don’t bother coming back. Because I won’t be here waiting for you.’

He stared at her. ‘What?’

The tears were gone now, and she was looking at him earnestly and levelly. ‘I can’t live like this,’ she said. ‘You walk away now, it’s over between us. Your choice, Ben.’

Chapter Eleven

Roberta had to clutch the passenger door handle as Ben skidded the Audi ferociously out of the vicarage gates and rammed the accelerator to the floor, speeding away through the village. His face was drawn, and his narrowed blue eyes had taken on that steely look she recalled from years ago. He’d changed back into his own clothes, black jeans and T-shirt and the scuffed, well-travelled brown leather jacket that Roberta remembered too. Watching him, it seemed to her that the old Ben Hope she knew so well hadn’t been buried too deeply underneath the new one. The old one felt more real to her, but she sensed he was a man Ben would sooner leave behind. It’s just who you are, she thought. You can’t repress it, and you know it.

He yanked his crumpled Gauloises pack from his pocket, flipped out a cigarette, and without taking his eyes off the road, bathed its tip in the flame of his Zippo lighter. The acrid smoke reached Roberta’s nose and she gave a little cough. Ben shot her an impatient sideways glance, hit the window button and the glass wound down to fill the car with a roar of warm wind, blasting the smoke away.

‘You didn’t have to do this,’ she began.

He held up a hand. ‘Please, Roberta. Don’t say anything.’

‘How can I not say anything? I just watched your life fall apart. I’m not completely insensitive, you know.’

Ben made no reply and drove faster. They quickly left Little Denton behind them, racing along the country roads. After a few minutes Roberta was about to ask where they were going, when a sign flashed by saying ‘EYNSHAM’ and Ben slowed the car to enter a small town. The streets were narrow and lined with Cotswold stone houses, traditional pubs and little shops. Ben pulled into a small square next to a church, parked the Audi between a van and a stone wall and killed the engine.

‘We’re going to church?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said, ‘we’re getting a bus.’ He pointed at the stop across the street, where a line of people were waiting and gazing expectantly up the road at the approaching double-decker. Ben got out of the car, snatched his cement bag bundle from the back seat, waited for Roberta to retrieve her travel holdall and then bleeped the locks before tossing the car key into the nearest drain. As they crossed the street to join the bus queue, he glanced back to make sure the Audi was well tucked away out of sight.

Boarding the bus, Ben led Roberta to the back, from where he could glance now and then out of the dusty rear window in case anyone was following them. Nobody was, and with a loaded machine gun bundled up at his side and his head in his hands he soon settled into a heavy, pensive silence that lasted for the whole twenty-minute trip through the winding country roads into Oxford.

Gazing around her at the bustling city for the second time that day, Roberta didn’t try to make conversation. From the noisy, smoky Gloucester Green station they took a second bus, hot and crowded, out to Jericho in the west of the city. A short walk from the stop in Walton Street, then Ben halted outside a modestly-sized Victorian terraced house with a little garden. He swung open the creaky front gate, took a set of keys from his pocket and showed Roberta into the house. ‘You’ll have to excuse the mess, but we hadn’t finished unpacking.’

‘Nice,’ she said, gazing around her at the clutter that filled the entrance hall. A dining table stood propped up against the wall, swaddled in bubble wrap with the legs removed. Most of the boxes were still sealed with parcel tape, others were open to reveal stacks of books on theology, philosophy and history. Roberta picked one out. ‘Hmm. Augustine: The City of God against the Pagans. A little light bedtime reading for you?

Ben pointed down the long, narrow hall. ‘Kitchen’s that way if you want to get yourself a drink. I’ll be back in a minute.’

Leaving her to her own devices, he ran up the stairs to the bedroom with his bundle under his arm. His pace faltered as he approached the door. Walking into the room, it was as if a dead weight had settled on his shoulders. Everything around him made him think of Brooke – the fine art prints that had hung on her walls in Richmond, her clothes and shoes neatly arrayed inside her wardrobe, the cushions on the bed, the green foliage of her beloved pot plants spilling down the wall from the windowsill, the soft smell of her perfume already imbued into the fabric of the place. He wanted to picture her smile, but all he could see in his mind was the teary look of hurt and anger that had been on her face when he’d turned and walked away.

When would he see her again? Emotions flashed up inside him: sorrow, guilt, anger, resentment against what had happened, against Roberta Ryder for bringing it on him.

No. It wasn’t fair to blame her. He just had to see this through. Everything would be all right, he told himself uncertainly.

He chucked the bundled-up Beretta machine carbine onto the bed. Nearby stood a small antique bookcase that Brooke had been gradually filling from a half-unpacked box. His eye drawn to the row of titles on the shelf, Ben spotted a familiar leather-bound spine among her assorted paperbacks and psychology textbooks. He wistfully paused to take it off the shelf. It was the volume of Milton’s works given to him by Jude’s mother shortly before she and Simeon had been murdered. Inside it had been the fateful letter telling Ben the secret of Jude’s real paternity.

As Ben turned the book over in his hands, it fell open and he found himself staring at the first page of Paradise Lost.

Paradise Lost. He thought about that for a moment, then snapped the book shut and quickly replaced it on the shelf. He walked across to his own wardrobe, wrenched open the door and found his old green canvas army bag where he’d carelessly stuffed it into the back underneath a load of stuff, thinking he’d never need it again. You got that wrong, he thought as he dug it out and tossed it on the bed. The first thing to go inside was the gun, which was compact enough to fit without bits poking incriminatingly out of the green canvas. He began rummaging through drawers and boxes for items of spare clothing.

When he’d done packing, he strapped up the bag, slung it over his shoulder and said a quick, silent goodbye to the room. When he’d be back was anybody’s guess.

Downstairs, he found Roberta wandering around the semi-furnished rooms and looking agitated. ‘You want something to eat?’ he asked her. ‘There isn’t much in the house. We’ve been living on takeaways and eating out until we got settled.’ The last word stabbed him as he said it.

She shook her head with a frown. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Me neither,’ he said.

‘I’ve been thinking. We’re heading back to Paris, right? Makes sense.’

‘That’s where this thing started,’ he said. ‘I aim to get there as quickly as possible.’

‘But how’s that going to work?’ she went on anxiously. ‘If these sons of bitches can pinpoint my exact location in some backwoods Oxfordshire village, just like that out of all the places I could’ve turned up, it means they’ve got access to Christ knows what kind of information. They’ve got to be hooked into every database out there. Which means that the moment I step over the Channel into France, they’ll know right where to find me. There’s no way I can travel unnoticed, is there?’ She eyed the green bag hanging heavily from his shoulder. ‘And if you’ve got what I think you’ve got in there, it’s not something you can exactly sneak by the customs officials.’

‘There are ways we can get across undetected.’

Roberta looked sceptical. ‘If you’re thinking of swimming the Channel, think again. I can’t swim. Or maybe you were planning on stealing a rowboat?’

‘Not exactly,’ he replied, deep in thought. He glanced at his Omega diver’s watch. Its skeletonised hands read 3.17. ‘Might just about do it,’ he murmured, more to himself than to Roberta.

‘Might just about do what?’

Ben didn’t reply. Leaving Roberta looking mystified, he took out his phone and quickly punched in a number that was extremely familiar to him.

Jeff Dekker picked up after two rings. ‘Le Val Tactical Training Centre.’

‘It’s me.’

‘Thought you’d still be rehearsing for your rehearsal about now,’ Jeff replied. Ben could hear the smile in his tone of voice.

‘That’s one reason I’m calling,’ Ben said. ‘Don’t bother coming over to England tomorrow.’

‘Why’s that, mate? You found a better best man to walk you up the aisle?’ The smile was still there. Jeff thought Ben was kidding.

‘I’m serious,’ Ben said. ‘It’s off, Jeff. The whole thing’s off. Long story.’

Jeff seemed about to burst out into the reaction of amazement, stupefaction, outright disbelief or a combination of all three that Ben had been expecting – but something in Ben’s voice made him stop. ‘You want to talk about it, mate?’ he asked quietly.

‘No, I don’t.’ Ben said. He hadn’t called to pour his heart out. The second and more important reason for the call was to ask a question. ‘Listen, Jeff, the old landing strip near Valognes. Driven out that way in the last couple of weeks or so?’ The year before, they’d toyed with buying the disused airfield to convert into a civilian rifle range but then dropped the project as the location was too far from Le Val.

‘I passed there last Tuesday,’ Jeff replied, sounding bemused.

‘So you’d have noticed if anyone had dug it all up or parked a load of artic trailers on it.’

‘Far as I could see, it’s just the way it was. What the fuck d’you want to know for?’

‘One more thing,’ Ben said. ‘If I needed the Alpina for a couple of days, could you get Raoul or Paul to leave it there for me?’ Raoul de la Vega and Paul Bonnard were the two ex-military trainers who worked as assistant tutors at Le Val. The Alpina was a high-performance BMW 7 Series used as a demonstrator for the bodyguard defensive driving courses taught at the facility, called VIP Evasion / Reaction, VIPER for short.

‘Shouldn’t be a problem. But what—?’

‘Thanks, Jeff. I’ll be in touch.’ Before his friend could say anything more, he ended the call.

‘Who’re you phoning now?’ Roberta asked as Ben immediately started stabbing in another number.

‘My sister,’ he replied.

She stared at him. ‘You have a sister?’

‘That’s another long story,’ Ben said. It always seemed so strange to him that Ruth was only a call away. For so many years, she’d seemed to have been lost forever. From child kidnap victim to adopted daughter of a billionaire tycoon – whose business empire she now ran like she’d been doing it all her life – Ruth had walked a strange path, almost as strange as her elder sibling’s.

‘Well, hello, big brother,’ her voice chirped on the line.

‘Where are you?’ Ben asked.

‘Nice,’ she said acerbically. ‘The customary greeting. No “Hi, Ruth, how are things? How’s your life?” All I get is “Where are you?”. As it happens, I’m on my way over to you right now. We’ll be touching down at London Oxford Airport in just under … let’s see, say thirty minutes.’ Her tone changed suddenly as excitement bubbled through. ‘You know, Ben, I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to this. Seeing you and Brooke getting hitched at last—’

‘What plane are you coming on?’ Ben cut in, interrupting her. As CEO of Steiner Industries, the mega-corporation Ruth had inherited from her adoptive father, the Swiss billionaire Maximilian Steiner, she had the pick of one of the biggest corporate fleets of aircraft in Europe.

‘Wow, you are in a chatty mood, bro. Since you ask, I’m using my favourite little runaround, the new Steiner Industries ST-1 turboprop. We do lead the way in promoting eco-friendly aviation, as I may have told you before.’

‘No more than ten or twenty times,’ he said. ‘What’s the LDR for that aircraft?’

‘Landing distance required?’ she replied, sounding perplexed by the question. ‘Uh, minimum eighteen hundred and forty feet.’ Even as a young child, Ruth had always been sharp when it came to numbers, and few things escaped her. ‘But why do you want to know?’

‘Range?’

‘Over seventeen hundred nautical miles all fuelled up, which we were when we left Zurich. Ben, if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re sounding just a little bit weird. Something’s wrong.’

‘I don’t have a lot of time to explain, Ruth, so I’ll make this quick. The wedding’s off. And I need to borrow your plane.’

Chapter Twelve

Forty-three minutes later, Ben and Roberta were walking across the tarmac at Oxford London airport in Kidlington towards a sleek twin-engined light aircraft that sat by a private hangar. The afternoon sun sparkled off the small aircraft’s pearly-white fuselage.

‘Not bad, is she?’ said a familiar voice, and Ben turned to see his sister emerging from the hangar. She was casually dressed and her hair, the same exact shade of blond as his own, was tied back under a baseball cap. Not quite the image of the corporate CEO. She was known for attending high-level conferences in faded jeans and combat boots. Business bosses from New York to Tokyo just had to get used to it.

Ruth patted the plane’s gleaming flank with pride. ‘Prototype design. Under eleven metres from nose to tail, thirteen from wingtip to wingtip, more than twenty per cent more fuel-efficient than anything in her class, with emissions to match and almost totally made of recycled materials.’

‘Still trying to save the world,’ Ben said, embracing her.

‘Beats trying to blow it up,’ she replied, hugging him tightly. In her former radical wild-child days she might have been here to firebomb the aircraft instead of as its corporate owner.

‘I’m sorry you wasted a trip,’ Ben said. ‘But it’s good to see you. You’re looking well, Ruth.’

She took a step away from him, tightly clutching both his hands and eyeing him with concern. ‘Wish I could say the same about you, bro. You look awful. You’ve got to tell me what happened between you and Brooke. Did you two fight?’

‘This is Roberta,’ Ben said, evading the question, and to avoid raising more of them he added, ‘She’s a friend of mine from long ago. Now, listen, I hate to press you, but we really need to get underway.’

Ruth greeted Roberta with a brief, slightly perplexed smile, then turned back to Ben with a jerk of her head that said, ‘Can we have a word in private?’. Leading him a few steps away, she paused under the roar of a departing light passenger jet and then asked Ben straight out: ‘Are you walking out on Brooke for her? Is that what’s going on? Because if it is, I’m not sure how comfortable I am about getting drawn into it like this. Brooke’s a friend to me.’

‘It’s not what you think,’ Ben said, making an effort to hide the pain he was feeling. ‘Like I told you, she’s just a friend. She’s in a bit of trouble, and she needs my help.’

‘And what about Brooke?’

‘Brooke and I will work things out,’ Ben said evenly, sounding far more confident than he really was. ‘Ruth, are you going to let me use the plane or not?’

Ruth paused for a moment, then sighed and waved an arm at the aircraft. ‘Whatever. She’s all yours. Don’t you have any more luggage than that?’

‘Just what you see,’ he said, hoping she wouldn’t start asking questions about what was in his bag.

Waiting at the hangar entrance was a young guy with unkempt hair, a smattering of a beard and a ring in his ear – the kind of eco-hippy type that Steiner Industries employed these days under Ruth’s direction. ‘That handsome fellow there is Dylan,’ she explained. ‘He’s one of the best pilots we have.’

Ben looked at her. ‘Your pilot’s name is Dylan.’

She shrugged. ‘Sure. And he plays the guitar, too.’

‘He needs a shave.’

‘Believe me, you’re in good hands. He’ll take you wherever you want to go. You’ve got enough gas to take you halfway around Europe and back again.’

‘We’re not going that far,’ Ben said. By his estimate their journey distance was just under 140 nautical miles, a mere hop and a skip for the high-tech turboprop. ‘And you can hang on to Dylan. I won’t be needing him.’

‘Then who’s going to fly the—?’ Ruth blanched. ‘No, no. Please don’t tell me what I think you’re going to say. I like this plane, Ben. Not to mention it’s worth the same as a Lamborghini Reventon.’

‘If I smash it up, you can get your accounts department to invoice me,’ Ben said, stepping towards the plane. ‘I really appreciate this, Ruth.’

‘I must be crazy.’

‘It runs in the family,’ Ben said.

A few moments later, he was seated behind the cockpit controls, running an eye across the panels of dials and read-outs and the extensive array of high-tech computer wizardry as Roberta explored the rear section with its plush eco-friendly non-leather seating for four or five passengers to travel in style. ‘Pretty neat,’ she commented, opening a door and peering at a little bathroom. ‘We’ve got food and drinks on board, too. I’ll admit, I hadn’t expected travelling with you would be this luxurious.’

‘Don’t get too used to it,’ he said.

Outside, Ruth and her companions had retreated to the hangar. A couple of runway attendants in reflective vests and ear-defenders had appeared to shepherd the aircraft as it prepared for take-off. Ben fired up the engines and the twin propellers began to spin with a whine that quickly grew to a roar, muffled inside the well-insulated cabin.

‘I didn’t know you could fly one of these things,’ Roberta said from the rear, strapping herself into a seat by one of the oval porthole windows.

‘Well, I’d be lying if I said I’d ever actually flown one of these before,’ he replied, waiting for the props to get up to speed. This state-of-the-art plane was a different animal by far from the last aircraft he’d piloted – a prehistoric Supermarine Sea Otter loaded with drums of avgas that he’d deliberately crashed onto the deck of a sailing yacht like a flying incendiary bomb, blowing the aircraft, the vessel and its contingent of thugs to kingdom come. He didn’t think Roberta would appreciate those details.

‘You what?’

‘But the basic principle’s the same for all these kinds of things,’ he said. ‘Trust me, it’s like riding a bicycle.’

‘Maybe I should’ve taken my chances with the bad guys,’ Roberta muttered to herself.

The Steiner ST-1 taxied away under the anxious gaze of its owner, picked up speed and left the runway smartly to climb into the hazy afternoon sky. Content that he wasn’t going to drop them down somewhere in the English countryside or into the Channel, Ben levelled the aircraft at 285 knots and a cruise altitude of 24,000 feet, settled back in the pilot’s seat and set his course for Normandy.

After just twenty-five uneventful minutes in the air, Ben checked his bearings, reduced altitude and caught sight of the northernmost tip of the Lower Normandy coast far below. The aircraft overflew the Pointe de Barfleur and the towering Gatteville lighthouse, just a tiny grey needle sticking up from the rocks surrounded by calm blue sea.

Remaining steady on his course for another few minutes as they passed over Saint-Vaast and then the spreading outskirts of Valognes, the nearest town of any size to the Le Val facility, Ben gradually let the plane drop down lower on the approach to his target, the small disused airfield in the countryside a few kilometres outside Carentan. As the small tongue of concrete surrounded by green fields grew larger and details came into view, he was relieved to see that Jeff Dekker had been right about the place not having changed since the last time he’d seen it.

He checked his instruments, made his final adjustments. Flaps; undercarriage; speed; altitude: everything was in order, or as close to it as need be. The Steiner ST-1 swooped in low over the rickety barbed-wire fence, the disused buildings and the graffiti-covered hangar where local kids loitered to smoke dope, and touched down with a yelp of tyres. Ben instantly eased off the throttle and the plane decelerated on the bumpy strip, rolling to a standstill forty yards short of the sunburned grass beyond. The engine whine died away and the prop came to a halt. Ben pulled off his headset, quickly reset his Omega to French time, then pressed the control to activate the hydraulics for the aircraft’s side hatch.

‘Well, I must say, that came in pretty handy,’ Roberta commented as she stepped down to the cracked concrete. ‘Remind me to put one of these gizmos on my Christmas list.’

Ben used a remote button to close the hatch and set the locks and alarms on the aircraft. The late afternoon was warmer than England. The soft breeze smelled of cut grass and was filled with the chirping of crickets. He looked around and quickly saw that Jeff, trustworthy as ever, had delivered on his promise. The dark blue Alpina B7 was sitting on the stubbly yellowed grass a little way from the landing strip.

‘That our ride?’ Roberta asked, walking over, and Ben nodded. ‘No key in it,’ she observed, peering through the driver’s window.

‘Who needs keys?’ Ben stepped up to the door and said the word, ‘Open’. His voice was one of the four programmed into the car’s sophisticated voice recognition locking system. The locks opened with a clunk and Ben popped the boot lid. Underneath the floor of the boot was a special armoured compartment that VIP close protection personnel could use, where necessary, to carry concealed weapons and other sensitive equipment through border checkpoints. Ben quickly removed the Beretta Storm from his bag and stowed it snugly inside the hidden space, then piled their bags on top.

He climbed behind the wheel. It had been a little while since he’d last driven the Alpina, but the familiar whiff of Gauloises was still faintly detectable inside. There was even one of his old John Coltrane CDs nestling in the map compartment. The Le Val high-speed evasion car felt uncomfortably like home.

Ben said, ‘Start’. The Alpina’s tuned engine instantly burbled into life.

Roberta raised an eyebrow. ‘Very cool.’

‘Special privilege,’ Ben replied. ‘Le Val personnel only.’

‘Even though you don’t work there anymore?’ Roberta said. She thought about it for a moment, then added, ‘Figures.’

He looked at her. ‘What figures?’

‘That your friend Jeff didn’t delete your voice signature from the menu. He must’ve reckoned you’d be back before too long.’

Without a reply, Ben put the Alpina into gear and pulled sharply away. Sensing that she’d said the wrong thing, Roberta quickly changed the subject. ‘How far to Paris from here?’ she asked.

‘A little under two hundred miles,’ he said.

‘Three hours?’

‘In this thing, more like two and a half,’ he said, and put his foot down.

‘That figures too,’ Roberta murmured but Ben was too focused to hear.

Chapter Thirteen

The drive to Paris was even quicker than Ben had estimated, and by evening they were filtering through the western approach into the city. He’d been deep in his own thoughts nearly all the way, and was still silent as he negotiated the hectic evening traffic into the centre. As he took a right off Boulevard des Batignolles, heading southwest down Rue de Clichy, Roberta turned to him and said, ‘Montmartre is the other direction, to the north.’

‘I know where Montmartre is,’ he replied. ‘We’ll take a trip up that way later tonight.’

‘So where are we going?’

‘Somewhere these friends of yours can’t find us,’ he said. ‘You’ve been there before.’

‘I wish you’d quit calling them that,’ she said irritably. ‘Then you still have that old place, huh?’

She was talking about the small, simple apartment she and Ben had used as their refuge for two nights the last time they’d been here together. The ‘safehouse’, as he’d called it, had been a gift from a wealthy client whose child Ben had once rescued from kidnappers. There was no paper trail of ownership linking him to it. It was completely secure and so hard to find, tucked away deep in the architectural honeycomb of central Paris, that virtually nobody even knew it existed.

‘Never quite got around to selling it,’ Ben said. ‘Maybe I was hanging on to some crazy notion that it’d come in handy again one day.’

‘Fancy that,’ she said.

Ben headed up Boulevard Haussmann, hung another right onto Boulevard des Italiens, and soon afterwards the Alpina swung sharply off the road and dropped down a steep ramp into the dark echoing cavern of the underground car park that was the only way into his hidden apartment.

They grabbed their stuff, left the car in the shadows and Ben led Roberta through the parking lot to the concrete passage and up the familiar murky back stairway. Someone had sprayed graffiti on the armoured door since he’d last been here, but there was no way even the most dedicated burglar could have broken through the plate steel or the reinforced wall.

The safehouse was dark, the blinds drawn over what few small windows it had. Roberta looked around her and sniffed the air as he led her inside. ‘Smells kind of … uh, closed up,’ she said.

‘It has been, for a while,’ he replied, switching on lights. The luxuries of home were few: a plain desk, an armchair, a no-frills kitchen and bedroom. No decorations, bare floors, no TV. Once upon a time, the safehouse had played a big part in Ben’s Europe-wide freelance operations as a kidnap and ransom specialist, as he’d moved constantly from one scrape to another and lived pretty much the same kind of stripped-down, comfortless existence he’d grown accustomed to with the SAS. Now it only stood as a painful reminder of old times he’d thought he’d left far, far behind.

‘Hasn’t changed a whole lot since I was last here,’ she commented. ‘Same old neo-Spartan shit pit. But, like you said, it’s safe. At least, it better be.’

He glanced at her. He knew she was thinking the same thing he was, feeling the same weird feeling that the two of them should be back here. Even though their stay together had only been for two days and nights, it had been an eventful time that brought back a lot of memories. Tender moments, like his confiscating her phone, making her sleep on the hard floor, and having to shampoo the blood and brains of a dead man out of her hair after she’d been covered in gore during a gunfight on the banks of the Seine. It was shared experiences like that which had cemented their budding relationship.

‘You want a drink?’ he asked her.

‘I could use a shower first,’ she said.

‘You know where it is,’ he said, motioning down the narrow hall towards the bathroom. ‘There should be some clean towels.’

‘Nothing I should know about? No rats or roaches?’

‘Take the gun in with you, if it makes you feel any safer.’

‘I’ll risk it.’

While Roberta was in the bathroom and he could hear the water pittering and splashing, Ben went into the bedroom, shut the door, sat on the edge of the bed and took out his phone. He turned it on and ran a web search using just the name ‘Tesla’. Within moments he was swamped in a welter of scientific and technical hoo-hah that seemed as grandiose as it did improbable.

He switched from text search results to images, and a few seconds later he found himself staring at the face of the man himself. A pinched, lean, chalky-white face with something of Edgar Allan Poe about him, something perhaps a little bit mad. The hair was oiled and parted in the fashion of the 1920s, the little brush moustache trim and neat. The eyes were sharp and foxy and seemed to bore right out of the screen and into Ben’s.

‘If this is really all about you,’ Ben muttered, ‘you’ve got a lot to answer for, pal.’

He gazed at the image a moment longer, knowing he was only procrastinating. This wasn’t what he’d taken his phone out for.

He swallowed and quickly keyed in Brooke’s number. As he waited for her to reply, he anxiously tried to think of how to express what he wanted to say. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Can’t we just stop? Can’t we just go back to the way things were? Or just I love you. I need you. Let me come home, as soon as this is over.

But there was no simple formula. No backspace key, no erase button. The damage that had been done couldn’t be healed with just a few facile words.

Brooke didn’t even reply. He aborted the call, strangely relieved but dreading when he’d have to try again.

The pain in his body reminded him of the other damage that needed healing, too. Standing up, he painfully unpeeled his jeans far enough down to inspect the large red weal across his left thigh where the Beretta magazine had absorbed the force of the bullet strike earlier that day. Its oblong shape was almost perfectly imprinted on his skin. He touched it and winced. In a day or two it would blossom into a spectacular bruise and a rainbow of colours.

His right side was pretty tender, too, where he’d taken that particularly solid blow from the man now encased several feet deep in concrete. I’m getting too old for this bollocks, he thought as he peeled off his T-shirt to examine his ribs. Another florid, multicolour bruise was on its way there, too, but at least nothing was cracked internally that he could feel.

The bedroom door suddenly opened and he turned to see Roberta standing there.

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