The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (42 page)

Bordeaux, France

Earlier that evening

The auditorium was packed and bustling. The lecture was being held at Bordeaux University’s Faculty of Politics and Economics. It was open to the public and people were standing in the aisles. Attendance figures were unprecedented. The organizers couldn’t remember the last time a talk by a rising politician had generated so much intense excitement.

There were police and security everywhere outside under the gentle snow. Barricades had been erected for Philippe Aragon’s motorcade to pass through, and massive crowds had gathered to cheer and wave banners. The police had managed to cordon off the estimated two hundred shaven-headed neo-fascist demonstrators who had come to yell and wave their swastikas in protest. One of them had tried to set fire to an effigy of Aragon before the police had grabbed him and bundled him into a van. A scuffle had broken out, and media crews rushed in to get a shot as three
cops were dragged away bleeding and a dozen more battered protesters were arrested.

Henri Juste, the University Chancellor, smiled for the cameras as he walked out from behind the heavy curtains and made his way across the stage. Behind the podium, Aragon’s Party slogan
L’Europe R
ED
ECO
U
VERTE
stood fifteen feet high on a giant screen. It encapsulated Aragon’s policies perfectly. A new Europe, a rediscovered land. Ecological. Green. Filled with hope and promise. The flags of the united European states were on display. In the wings and the control centre above the auditorium, armed security personnel scrutinized monitors and scanned the crowd.

Now, ranks of officers gathered tensely on standby behind riot shields, batons and tear gas at the ready. Well away from the trouble, television crews and newspaper reporters were out in force and hoping for blood.

Juste reached the podium. He raised his arms and the hum of excited chatter from the packed theatre dwindled. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began. ‘Our speaker tonight needs no introduction. No modern political figure has ever risen to prominence or gathered such overwhelming public support so surely and so quickly. He has been hailed as
the Brussels JFK. A
pioneering environmentalist architect. A philanthropist who has personally donated millions to protect the underprivileged. A tireless campaigner for the improvement of educational standards. At forty-one, the youngest ever candidate for the Vice-Presidency of the European Commission. His audacious policies and progressive vision of a truly integrated Europe, and his
goal to rid Europe of its dependence on nuclear energy, have placed him firmly at the forefront of European politics. Ladies and gentlemen: Philippe Aragon.’

The Chancellor stepped away from the podium and extended his arm as Philippe Aragon walked confidently out onto the stage. A hundred cameras focused. Five hundred people were on their feet. Tall and elegant, the young politician was wearing a well-cut suit and no tie. He waited until the applause had dwindled, and then he began his speech.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for coming here tonight.’ Behind him on the high screen, the big slogan disappeared and the crowd murmured as a new image flashed up. It showed the far-right protesters outside. Shaven heads. Swastikas. Ugly faces frozen in expressions of hatred.

Aragon smiled. ‘And I also want to thank our neo-Nazi friends outside for showing up.’ He let this register for a beat, and then went on. ‘By their very presence here tonight they help me to make my case. Ladies and gentlemen, we are told we already
have
an integrated Europe.’ He paused again as the crowd laughed. His smile was gone now. He swept the audience with his eyes. ‘The truth can be seen all around us,’ he said. ‘Europe is sinking under a tide of nationalistic fear and greed. But we can recover her. Together we can build a united Europe. A clean Europe. A free Europe. A
Peoples
Europe.’

The crowd roared its approval. Behind Aragon, the image of the neo-fascists disappeared and the strident slogan flashed up in its place to mark his words.
L’Europe
RED
ECO
U
VERTE
.
The applause got even louder.

Watching on her monitor backstage in a comfortable reception room, Colette Aragon sipped coffee from a styrofoam cup and smiled at her husband’s perfect control of his audience. Party staff and plain-clothed security personnel milled around her. Across the busy room stood Louis Moreau, the former GIGN counter-terrorist police response unit commander whom she’d appointed as her husband’s private head of security. She didn’t have much faith in the government agents. Moreau took his job extremely seriously. The lights glistened on his shaven head as he stood with his arms folded, scrutinizing the bank of screens that showed the crowd from different angles.

Colette stood behind her husband publicly, every step of the way. He was a good man. But privately, she wished he’d give all this up and go back to architecture. It wasn’t just the mayhem and madness of constant travelling and press interviews. Even Philippe hadn’t been prepared for how fast his political career had taken off. Colette knew that as his popularity grew, he would become more of a target. At public events like this, even the heaviest security presence couldn’t guarantee his safety. They couldn’t frisk everyone at the door. All it took was a fascist fanatic in the audience with a pistol in his pocket.

She shivered. She’d never believed that the incident last January in Cortina had been an accident.

Near Ravenna, Italy

When Leigh woke the next morning, Ben was already into his ninth phone call. The local directory didn’t have a listing for a Professor Arno, so he was having to try each Arno in turn. He’d worked his way down half the list before deciding to give up and pay a personal visit to the music institute where the old scholar had taught.

They ate a rushed breakfast in the
pensione
and drove the Citroën into Ravenna. They parked near the centre and walked through a pedestrian zone over the cobbled streets. It was out of season, and the town was quiet.

Past the Church of St Vitale, the Istituto Monteverdi was a tall and narrow building fronted with white stone columns and a flight of steps. A glass doorway led into a reception foyer. Their footsteps rang off the marble floor and echoed up to a high ceiling. From somewhere above them they could hear a cello playing, and from another room the sound of a woman singing
arpeggios to piano accompaniment. The music mixed together in a discordant swirl that reverberated off the stone walls of the old building.

They approached the desk. The receptionist was a steely-haired woman dressed in black. She scowled at them. ‘Can I help you?’

‘We’re looking for Professor Arno,’ Ben said in Italian.

The woman shook her head. ‘Professore Arno does not teach here any longer. He is retired.’

‘Perhaps you could give me his phone number?’ As Ben asked, he knew he’d be refused.

‘We do not give out numbers.’

‘I understand, but this is very important.’

The woman crossed her arms with a severe look. ‘I am sorry. It is not possible.’

Ben was reaching for his wallet. Bribery was always an option, although this one didn’t look the sort. Leigh stopped him. ‘Let me deal with her,’ she said in English.

The woman was staring at them with a hostile expression. Leigh smiled and spoke in fluent Italian. ‘Signora, please call your Director.’

The woman looked shocked. ‘Why?’

Leigh smiled again. ‘Tell him Leigh Llewellyn is here and would like to speak to him. It’s urgent.’

The mention of Leigh’s name had an immediate, almost magical effect. The hostile receptionist was suddenly all smiles and apologies for not having recognized the famous soprano before. She led them up a flight of stone stairs to the first floor.

Leigh caught Ben’s look. ‘What?’ she whispered.

‘Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. I thought we’d agreed you were to keep a low profile.’

‘Can you think of a better way?’

‘I’m sure I could.’

‘Like putting a gun to her head?’

‘Wouldn’t be a bad idea,’ he muttered.

The receptionist hammered on a door and stuck her head through. She fired a burst of rapid Italian that Ben didn’t follow. A man’s voice replied from inside the room.
‘La Llewellyn? Qui?’

The Director burst out of the office. He was a short man, plump and round in a dark suit. He greeted them with furious pumping handshakes and ordered the receptionist to bring coffee and biscuits. ‘I am Alberto Fabiani,’ he said with a broad smile. He couldn’t take his eyes off Leigh. ‘This is a great honour,
Maestra.
What can I do for you?’

They sat at his desk and Leigh repeated their need to see Professor Arno. Was it possible to be put in contact with him?

Fabiani looked unsure. He breathed in through his teeth.

‘He’s not dead, is he?’ Leigh asked.

‘No, no, he is not dead,’ Fabiani said hastily. ‘Not yet. He lives in the countryside about ten kilometres from here. I will gladly put you in touch with him. But I feel I should warn you…’ The Director paused. ‘Francesco Arno is a good man. In his day, he was thought of as one of the greatest Mozartian scholars of all time. But he is old now. Over the years he has become-how should I say it—
strano.’

‘Strange? How?’ Ben asked.

Fabiani shrugged. ‘His beliefs. His obsession. He became more eccentric as time passed, and he clashed more and more with his peers until, frankly, my old friend and colleague was becoming something of an embarrassment to the Istituto. Even the students came to mock him. They would take a delight in winding him up. Once they got him started he would rant on for hours. His lectures became a farce.’ Fabiani smiled sadly. ‘I have to say that I was not entirely sorry when he announced his retirement.’

‘What were these beliefs of his?’ Ben asked.

Fabiani rolled his eyes. ‘If you speak to him, you will find out soon enough.’

Austria

The same morning

The man was solid and powerful. He was an inch under six and a half feet tall and weighed two hundred and sixty pounds-none of it fat. He walked naked to the edge of the springboard, feeling it flex under his weight, and bounced a couple of times. His strong leg muscles hardened. He took a breath and launched himself.

His body hit the water in a perfect dive, hardly making a splash, and he knifed deep into the pool, then surfaced and swam fast. He forced thirty lengths out of himself, then heaved himself out of the water and walked to the chair, where his clothes were lying neatly folded. He was barely out of breath. Through the windows of the indoor pool, the snow-covered grounds of the estate swept away to the pinewoods in the distance.

The man scraped back his sandy hair. He reached for a towel, and as he dried himself he admired his trim shape. His muscled arms and torso bore the scars of nine bullet wounds and three knife slashes. He remembered
exactly how and where he’d got each of them. Each had its own story. What they all had in common was that none of the people who’d given them to him had lived for more than three minutes afterwards.

The man was forty-three years old. He was a Londoner by birth and a former British Army soldier. His name was Jack Glass.

When he was drunk he would sometimes boast about his exploits in the legendary SAS. He even had the regimental winged dagger emblem tattooed on his upper right arm. He liked people to see it.

The truth was that he’d been rejected for service in the regiment many years before. A psychological evaluation had exposed certain traits that the regimental heads felt would not be an asset. His unsuitability for the Special Air Service had been confirmed when he’d tried to throttle the officer who’d informed him of his failure to make the grade. He’d been returned to his regular unit in disgrace, court-martialled and kicked out of the army.

He’d drifted around after that, run out of money. Like a lot of army leavers he’d been forced to take on menial jobs for a while. With his court-martial record he couldn’t even get security work.

One rainy London night he’d been at the bar of a pub when he’d met an old contact who had offered him paramilitary work in Africa. The money was excellent and the work was perfect for Glass. He’d accepted immediately and was on a flight three days later. He’d never returned to Britain.

In the Congo, Rwanda, Liberia, he’d worked for
whoever paid the most. Suppressed anti-government rebels. Burned schools. Destroyed villages. Executed whole families caught up in bloody tribal wars. He did whatever he was told to do, took the cash and asked no questions.

Liberia was where he’d picked up the scar on his ear. The lobe had been ripped off by a bullet from an AK-47. The person holding the rifle was a black child of nine or ten, a little girl. It was the last round in the magazine of her AK. When she saw him standing there clutching his ear and screaming at her, she dropped the rifle and ran.

Glass had gone after her. He chased the screaming child deep into the bush. Brought her down, knelt on her chest, pinned her arms over her head with one hand. With the other hand he’d drawn out his bayonet, placed the point against her ribs. When he drove the blade slowly deep inside her little body he felt the struggles diminish and saw the life leak out of her eyes.

He could still remember it now. Someday, he’d like to do that again.

After Africa came the Bosnian conflict, where Glass had become involved in gun-running. He quit the battlefields, wore a suit and carried a briefcase instead of an M16. The case was usually filled with banknotes. He discovered you could make more money getting someone else to pull the trigger. Two years later, now a full-blown businessman with a lot of connections and cash rolling in, he’d met and struck up an alliance with an Austrian called Werner Kroll at an arms fair in Berlin.

At the age of thirty-six, Glass had gone to work for
Kroll as a personal secretary and general aide. Glass was used to money by now, but selling Kalashnikovs to warring tribes was nickels and dimes next to the things Kroll was into. He was a little more than just an ordinary businessman. But he took fanatical care to cover his tracks, and only a very select few had any notion of the real scope of his activities.

Glass knew a little about the history of Werner Kroll’s family business. It had been around a long time, and had come a long way since its origins. He also knew that Kroll wouldn’t hesitate to have him, or anyone else, killed if they betrayed him or informed on him. The old Austrian was small and looked harmless. He was a little odd in his ways, and he had the air of an old-world schoolmaster. But he was the most dangerous man Jack Glass had ever met in his life, and he’d met a great many dangerous people.

Glass pictured Kroll’s wrinkled, pinched grey face in his mind. One day, he was going to kill the old bastard and fuck that little whore he kept as his mistress.

He dressed in a white shirt and grey slacks, did his tie up loosely and put on his blazer. In his office he found a sheet waiting for him on the fax machine. It was from London. He studied it up close. This was interesting.

Werner Kroll was sitting in his conservatory breakfast room with Eve. He ate in silence with his back to the window and the ornamental lake with the snowy mountains beyond. Kroll had been eating the exact same breakfast every morning for six years, poached
eggs with slivers of toast cut into precisely the same sizes, arranged the same way on a porcelain plate. No butter. He ate delicately, almost daintily.

Glass came in carrying a folder. Kroll’s fork halted midway between his plate and his mouth. He dabbed his lips with his napkin and glared at him. ‘I’ve told you not to disturb me at breakfast,’ he said in an icy voice. His nose twitched. ‘My God, man, are you chewing gum again?’

Glass smiled to himself and took the gum out of his mouth. He loved to wind the old man up. ‘Forgive me, sir,’ he said. ‘I thought you might like to see this. It just came through.’ He opened the file and handed Kroll a sheet of fax paper.

Kroll put on a pair of half-moon spectacles and peered down his nose at the sheet. It was a copy of the front page of last night’s
Evening Standard.
It showed a grainy photo of Leigh Llewellyn surrounded by fans. Kroll recognized the Oxford landscape, the Sheldonian theatre behind her. To her left stood a man he hadn’t seen before. They were holding hands. The headline read ‘
WHO
’
S
L
EIGH
’
S
L
EADING MAN
?’

Kroll lowered the sheet and looked at Glass over the top of his lenses. ‘Is this the person who killed one of our best men with…what was it?’

‘A skillet, sir,’ Glass said.

Eve picked up the sheet and peered at the man in the photo. She liked the look of him, tall and fit-looking. Glass was watching her face.

‘I would also like to find out who Leigh’s leading man is,’ Kroll said. He glanced at Eve. She’d been
looking at the picture a moment too long. He snatched it away from her.

‘I think I know who he is, sir,’ Glass said.

‘A professional bodyguard?’ asked Kroll.

‘I think he might be a little more than that,’ Glass said. ‘I’ll have to check my contacts. It might take a few days. But I’m certain it’s him.’

Kroll dismissed him and went back to his eggs. They were cold. He pushed them away in disgust.

Eve was heading back to her room after breakfast when she met Glass in the corridor. He was standing at her doorway, leaning casually against the wall with one big hand against the door-frame.

She stopped and looked at him. ‘Aren’t you going to let me through?’

He grinned, eyeing her up and down. She tried to shove past him. His powerful hand gripped her arm and he whirled her around.

‘Get your paws off me,’ she warned him.

Glass pulled her closer and roughly fondled her breasts through her blouse. ‘Nice.’

She tore away from him and slapped him across the face, felt the hardness of his jaw against her hand. Her palm stung.

Glass smiled. ‘I’m watching you,’ he said. ‘I know what you want.’

‘Do you really?’

‘Once a whore, always a whore. You want to fuck a real man for a change?’

‘If I can find one,’ she said.

‘You’ve got one right here.’

‘In your dreams.’

Glass’s smile stretched into a grin. ‘One day, bitch. One day soon.’