Sacred Sword (Ben Hope 7) (45 page)

Authors: Scott Mariani

BOOK: Sacred Sword (Ben Hope 7)

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As Sam started detailing the plans for the following day, Brooke tuned out and drifted back to the thoughts that preoccupied her so much of the time, with the same mixture of emotions that always came flooding back whenever Ben was on her mind.

She wished he could have been here. He loved Ireland, would have been completely in his element here on the Donegal coast. Maybe she’d been wrong in coming without him – but the fact was she’d been too plain nervous about asking him. The wrong signals, she’d worried. Moving too fast, trying to force things prematurely. Or something like that. She didn’t know any more. For a gifted and highly trained psychologist, it amazed her how little she understood her own feelings.

Ben Hope. What an enigmatic, complex man he was. Even before they’d got together she’d been aware of the ghosts from his past, stuff you could never ask him about and which he kept fiercely private; so closed, yet so open, so warm and tender. Sometimes she felt as if he’d been there all her life; sometimes as if she’d never known him at all.

As she gazed out of the car window at the dark, rocky landscape flashing by, Brooke wondered whether her troubled relationship with Ben would ever recover. It had started so blissfully, only to crash so senselessly on the rocks just when it was beginning to look as though it could last for ever.

The crash had come in September. The autumn months had been a forlorn, empty time, drowning herself in her work; the Christmas holiday without him almost unbearably miserable. Then, slowly, slowly, over the last couple of months had dawned the prospect of a possible reconciliation. The phone conversations between her home in London and his in France were growing longer and more frequent. Sometimes
he
even called her.

It was still fragile, though, still just a tiny candle flame that could snuff out at any time. There were moments when Brooke thought she could sense the tension between them, ready to flare up all over again. In their separate ways, they’d both been equally to blame for the split.
What a couple of hotheads we are
, she thought wryly to herself as she recalled the awful quarrel that had busted them apart. The worst thing was that, in the end, it had all been about nothing. Just a stupid, horrible misunderstanding.

‘The chopper will pick us up at the house and take us over to Derry Airport first thing in the morning,’ Sam was saying to her employer. ‘We should easily be in London by ten-thirty, which gives us plenty of time to get things together before the meeting with Cabeza.’

Forsyte pursed his lips and gave a grunt of assent. Drifting momentarily back to the present, Brooke noticed the way he kept fingering the handle of the attaché case that was secured to his wrist by a steel cuff and a slim chain, and she wondered what was inside that must be so valuable – but her curiosity waned rapidly as she turned back towards the dark window and resumed her own private thoughts.

A flash of white light caught Brooke’s eye. The road behind was no longer empty: the bright headlights of a car were coming up fast. No, she thought, twisting round to peer out of the rear window – not a car, but a van of some kind. Going somewhere in a real hurry, too.

Forsyte glanced back as the van’s main-beam headlights loomed close enough to fill the inside of the Jaguar with their glare. ‘Just some idiot,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘Pull in a little and let him past, will you, Wally?’

Wally shook his head in exasperation, then flipped on his indicator, slowed to just over thirty and steered towards the side of the narrow road to let the van by. The large vehicle noisily overtook them – a plain white Renault Master panel van, scuffed and spattered with road dirt – then cut in tightly at an angle and screeched to a halt, blocking the road.

Wally hit the brakes and the rear passengers were thrown forwards, except for Brooke who’d braced herself against the front passenger seat a fraction of a second before the emergency stop. Sam let out a little cry as her netbook went flying.

‘What the hell—?’ Forsyte shouted.

‘Fucking arsehole!’ Wally thrust the automatic gearbox into Park and left the engine running as he climbed out of the car. ‘What’s your game, you bloody prick?’ he yelled, slamming his door shut and storming up to the stationary van.

The Renault Master’s doors burst open simultaneously. Wally stopped dead in his tracks and his angry voice trailed off as two men jumped out and strode aggressively towards him. They were both wearing black balaclavas, and not because of the biting February wind. Brooke’s blood turned icy when she made out the shapes of the weapons in the men’s hands, a pistol and a compact submachine gun, black and brutal with long tubular silencers attached to their muzzles. She’d seen weapons like those before.

So had Wally Lander, once upon a time, but his nine years out of the army had blunted his senses and all he could do was gape.

‘Oh my God!’ Sam gasped. Forsyte stared in speechless horror, clutching his attaché case.

Neither of the masked men spoke a word. Instead, almost casually, they turned their weapons towards Wally and, in the next instant, white-orange fire spat from the muzzles of the silencers. From inside the heavily insulated car, the gunfire was no more than a rapid string of muffled thumps. Wally’s legs folded under him, then he collapsed lifelessly at the roadside. His blood was bright in the beams of the Jaguar’s headlights.

Sam screamed in panic and clung onto Forsyte. ‘What do they want with us, Roger? Oh Jesus, they’re going to kill us!’

Brooke hesitated, but no more than a second before she launched herself at the gap between the front seats and scrambled in behind the wheel. She wrenched the stick into Drive, stamped the heel of her Italian designer party shoe on the gas and held it all the way down. The Jaguar took off with a roar and a rasp of tyres. Clenching the wheel, Brooke had no choice but to drive grimly over Wally’s dead body with a sickening
bump-bump
. The masked men hurled themselves out of the way. A jarring impact as the car slammed into the angled side of the van; a screech of buckling plastic and metal grinding on metal as she forced through the gap, the Jaguar’s wheels spinning wildly and revs soaring to drown out Sam’s screams and Forsyte’s indistinct roar of fury. Then, suddenly, the way was clear and Brooke could see the open road stretching ahead in the car’s lights. She’d made it.

But then the strobing muzzle flashes lit up the rear-view mirror and she felt the steering wheel go heavy in her hands as a flurry of gunfire blew out the back tyres. There was nothing she could do to prevent the car skidding out of control and veering across the road. Brooke caught a glimpse of a large grey rock flashing towards the front of the car – then a crunching collision and the airbag exploded in her face, dazing her.

Running footsteps. Voices. The next Brooke knew, the Jaguar’s doors were opening and there was a gun at her head. She turned to face her attacker. His eyes were cold and hard in the slits of the balaclava.

‘Get out, bitch,’ he said.

Acknowledgements

They say no man is an island … and it’s true to say that no author is either: so many thanks to my editor Caroline Hogg and all the worthy crew at Avon for their dedication and enthusiasm in helping place this novel into your, the reader’s, hands.

About the Author

Scott Mariani grew up in Scotland and now lives in the wilds of Wales.
The Sacred Sword
is the seventh book in
The Sunday Times
bestselling series featuring ex-SAS hero and former theology scholar Ben Hope, translated into over twenty languages worldwide. Scott is also the author of the Vampire Federation series, featuring novels
Uprising
and
The Cross
. For further information please visit:
www.scottmariani.com

By the same author

BEN HOPE SERIES

The Alchemist’s Secret

The Mozart Conspiracy

The Doomsday Prophecy

The Heretic’s Treasure

The Shadow Project

The Lost Relic

VAMPIRE FEDERATION SERIES

Uprising

The Cross

Copyright

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.

AVON

A division of HarperCollins
Publishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

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

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EPub Edition © May 2012 ISBN: 978 0 00 734281 5

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