The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (83 page)

Joshua yanked his car key from his coat and pressed it into Zoë’s hand. ‘Blue Honda,’ he panted. ‘Just go.
Get out of here. Now.’ He knew they wouldn’t shoot her. He didn’t care about himself, not any more.

Jones stepped forward, his gun held loosely at his side.

Zoë hesitated.

‘Go!’ Joshua yelled at her.

‘There’s nowhere to run, Zoë,’ Jones said calmly as he walked up closer. He was smiling. ‘It’s a wilderness out there. You’re safer here with us.’

Zoë stood frozen in the doorway. She stared helplessly at Joshua, and then at the agents. The woman agent wouldn’t meet her eye.

Then Jones took three more steps and she screamed as his strong fingers gripped her wrist and yanked her hard away from the entrance. He flung her into the hands of the two other men. She fought and kicked, but she was weak. They held her by the arms as Jones turned towards Joshua Greenberg.

‘Don’t hurt him,’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t –’

As the two agents dragged her back up the corridor, she heard the shot and threw her head back over her shoulder to see the blood splatter up the glass door and the doctor slump to the ground at Jones’s feet.

She screamed all the way back up to her room.

Georgia

It was just after 1.30 p.m. when Ben left Cleaver’s house and slipped away through the crowd. A few minor competitions were still in progress, but with the main event over the throng was thinning out. He spotted Miss Vale near the marquee, talking to reporters.

She didn’t notice Ben as he made his way quietly back towards the parking field. He felt bad about slipping away without goodbyes or explanations, but he needed to be alone to think.

He got into the Chrysler and drove aimlessly, heading vaguely west and vaguely south. He crossed over the Altamaha river. Drove through farmland, past tumbledown shacks and corrugated barns, huge open fields where the earth was rich and red under the blazing sun. Past trailer camps where mean-looking white-trash inhabitants stood at the side of the road and gesticulated at his car as he drove by. After about an hour he was lost deep in country with no idea where he was.

He drove feeling numb and defeated. He’d made mistakes in his life before, but this time he’d been completely wrong; as mistaken and off the mark as he could have been, and then a bit more. He’d been so sure that he was on the right track with Clayton Cleaver. All he knew now was that the man was a rogue, a conman and an opportunist. But that didn’t make him a kidnapper or a murderer.

He tried to salvage what he could from the mess inside his head and make sense out of what was left. But he had only questions, lots of questions, swirling around in his mind without a hint of an answer. Was Zoë still alive? Maybe even still on Corfu? Had he come to the States for nothing? He’d taken the truth of Kaplan’s word for granted. Maybe that had been a mistake too.

He thought about the piece of pottery Zoë had discovered and used to blackmail Cleaver. She’d told Skid McClusky that the prophecy would make her rich. What had she discovered? If she really could prove her claim, its impact on Christian theology would be massive. Cleaver had been perfectly right: revisionist scholars had been waiting in the wings for years for the ammunition they needed to shoot the Book of Revelation down as an illegitimate Bible text. But the implications went well beyond simply ruining the career of one obscure Southern Bible-thumper. It could be the biggest event for years – as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Turin Shroud. Maybe even bigger, if it could force a major revision of the Bible itself.

He kept coming up with the same questions. Who else would be threatened by Zoë’s discovery, and so threatened that they would go to such lengths to suppress it? Or was suppression the aim? Perhaps her discovery of ancient pottery tablets had some other intrinsic value – a monetary value that someone was prepared to kill for?

Basically, he was guessing. He was adrift in a sea of possibilities. He needed to act, and act fast. But he didn’t know what to do, or where to go. Back to Greece, hoping to pick up the pieces and not be caught by Stephanides again? Or simply back to Oxford, admitting defeat and facing telling the Bradburys that he’d lost their daughter? It was a disaster.

The sudden sharp blast of a siren jerked him back to the present. A police cruiser filled his rear-view mirror, the light bar on its roof flashing red and blue through the dust on his back window. It gave another screeching burst, and he swore and flipped on the indicator to pull off the road. The car crunched to a halt in the dirt, and the police cruiser pulled in behind him. Dust floated in the air around the two vehicles. He watched in the mirror as the doors opened and two cops jumped out and walked towards him, one either side of the Chrysler.

It wasn’t a routine check or a speeding ticket. The cops had their weapons ready. The one on the left had pulled a revolver from his belt. The one on the right was clutching a short-barrelled pump shotgun. This was serious. The cops were acting on specific information, and whatever they’d been told about him, it was making them jumpy as hell.

Ben sat quietly with his hands on the wheel, watching them, thinking fast. Why was he being picked up? What did they know?

The cop with the revolver stalked round to his window and twirled a finger. Ben rolled the window down and looked at him. He was young, mid-twenties. His eyes were round and nervy.

‘Kill your engine,’ he yelled.

Ben reached out slowly and turned the key. Silence, apart from the chirping of the cicadas all around them.

‘Licence,’ the cop said. ‘Nice and easy.’

Ben moved his hand carefully to his pocket and slipped the licence out. The cop snatched it from him, glanced down it for a brief moment, and nodded to the one with the shotgun as if to say
it’s him, all right
. Now he looked even more scared.

‘Step out of the car,’ he yelled. ‘Hands where I can see them.’

Ben opened the door and stepped slowly out. He kept his hands raised and held the cop’s gaze, sizing him up. The young officer was jumping with adrenalin, his face tense and twitchy. The revolver muzzle was trembling slightly as he pointed it at Ben’s chest.

The gun was two feet away. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 19. There were two ways to fire it. With the action cocked, it took only a light flick of the finger to drop the hammer. The alternative was the double-action mode, simply pulling the trigger to rotate the cylinder and bring the hammer back to fire. But that required a heavy tug, and Ben knew that unless the cop’s pistol had been specially worked
on by a gunsmith, the Model 19 had quite a tough action. More effort meant more time needed to shoot.

The gun wasn’t cocked. What that told Ben was that he had about half a second longer to step in, disable the cop and take his gun away. Then about another half a second to turn it on the one with the shotgun. He wouldn’t hurt them badly, just take them out of circulation for a while.

But that would lead to all kinds of trouble that he didn’t want. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said quietly instead.

The cop flicked his gun at the car. ‘Up against the vehicle. Hands on the hood.’

Ben sighed in exasperation and spread his hands on the warm metal of the Chrysler. The one with the shotgun covered him from three yards away. The other walked back to the police car and started talking into his radio, looking nervous and fidgety.

Ben heard the sound of tyres on the dirt and the low rumble of V8 engines. Keeping his hands planted on the car he craned his neck to look. Two big black muscular Chevrolet SUVs were pulling up behind the police cruiser. Clouds of dust rose and settled. Sunlight reflected off the tinted windows of the vehicles.

The doors opened. Ben counted five people, two men and a woman from one car and two more men from the other. They were all smartly dressed in dark suits. The oldest was the guy stepping forward with the craggy face, slicked-back hair and the dark glasses. He was about fifty, lean and rangy. He was smiling, showing uneven teeth. The youngest was the woman. She might have been about thirty-five, with sharp
features and a scowl on her face. Her auburn hair was tied back, gently ruffled by the warm breeze.

The lead guy flashed a badge at the two cops. ‘Special Agent Jones. We can take it from here, Officers.’

The cops stared at the badge like they’d never seen one before. They lowered their weapons.

Jones motioned to one of the agents, who walked round to Ben’s passenger door, yanked it open and grabbed the canvas bag from the seat. Jones took a pair of surgical rubber gloves from his jacket pocket and slipped them on before taking the bag from the other agent and reaching inside.

‘Well, now, look what we found,’ Jones chuckled as he drew out the .475 Linebaugh. He dropped the bag on the ground at his feet and turned the big revolver over in his gloved hands, admiring it. Flipped open the loading port, spun the cylinder. Then he twirled it around his finger, cowboy-style, and one of the other agents laughed. Jones turned to Ben with a ragged smile. ‘Now that
is
a nice gun.’

Ben didn’t reply. He was thinking hard and fast.

The agents all stepped closer. The woman’s eyes were fixed on Ben, and as he watched her he thought for a second he could sense some kind of doubtful hesitation on her face. The scowl was gone.

Jones took out his phone and dialled. ‘It’s me. Good news. Got your Mr Hope right here. OK.’

Ben frowned. This was weird procedure.

Jones snapped the phone shut and turned to the two cops. ‘I don’t think we’ll be needing you any more, Officers,’ he said, dismissing them with a gesture.

The cops glanced at one another and started walking back to their cruiser. They had their hands on the door handles and were about to climb inside when Jones seemed to have an afterthought and called them. ‘Hold on a minute, Officers. Just one thing.’

The younger cop narrowed his eyes at him. ‘What?’

Jones smiled again, a knowing kind of smile that made his whole face crease up and his eyes become slits. He glanced at the .475 revolver in his hand.

Then he thumbed back the hammer, raised the revolver out to arm’s length and shot the younger guy right through the face from ten feet away.

The Richmond House
Montana

With a whirr of pulleys and thick steel cables, the cable car glided smoothly out across the abyss. The cold mountain wind whistled around it, buffeting the metal capsule and making the floor judder under the feet of the two men inside.

Irving Slater loved it up here. Suspended high over the rocky valley, he could see for miles all around and it gave him a feeling of invulnerability. He felt like an eagle perched on his mountain vantage point. That’s what predators did – take the high ground, survey their territory from a position of complete control. Nobody could touch him up here, and nobody could listen in on sensitive conversations. The howling wind would kill the signal from even the most sophisticated listening device. Slater was fanatical about surveillance and even though he’d had the Richmond House swept for bugs a hundred times and never found a thing, this was the one place he
was truly comfortable when it came to talking serious business.

The cable was five hundred yards long and stretched from the boarding platform near the Richmond House to a landing bay on the other side of the valley. He’d had a remote device rigged up that allowed him to guide the car from inside, move it out as far as he wanted and then let it hang over the thousand-foot drop like the last apple on the tree.

Nobody else ever came here any more. Dirk Richmond, Bud’s father, had installed the cable car system at great cost many years ago, soon after he’d bought the thousand-acre range on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, to allow the family to access the ski slope on the mountain across the valley. But neither Bud’s mother nor the indolent jackass himself had ever shown much interest in healthy outdoor pursuits, and old Dirk had gone to his grave a long time ago now, a vastly wealthy but embittered and disappointed man, largely thanks to his indolent waster of a son.

Slater aimed his remote at the control booth and stabbed the red button in the middle. There was a muted clunk of linkages and pulleys from overhead, and the cable car juddered to a halt. Slater dropped the remote in his coat pocket and stared out through the Perspex window across the valley for a few moments, hands on the rail, letting his body move to the gentle swing of the cable car as the wind whipped all around it.

Then he turned to face his associate, and smiled at
the sweaty anxiety on the man’s face. ‘You should be used to it by now.’

‘This place gives me the creeps.’

Slater’s smile melted abruptly. ‘Progress report,’ he demanded.

The associate gave a nervous shrug. ‘Bradbury isn’t saying much yet. We’re still working on it.’

‘That’s what you said last time. Why are we even keeping her alive? And I don’t suppose you’ve located the lawyer either.’

‘McClusky?’

‘You guys let any other lawyers slip through your fingers who might know where Bradbury hid the evidence and be totally able to sink us?’

‘We’re still looking.’

Slater’s eyes bored into him. ‘You do that. How hard can it be? What about Kaplan and Hudson? Go on, surprise me. Tell me they turned up.’

‘Not yet. And I have a feeling they’re not coming back.’

Slater made a dismissive gesture and frowned out across the mountain valley. ‘So you have nothing whatsoever good to tell me?’ He pulled a chocolate bar out of his pocket and tore the wrapper off. ‘Want some?’

The associate shook his head and coughed nervously. ‘There’s been a development.’ He reached into the briefcase propped between his feet. Handed Slater a slim card folder.

Slater munched and flipped the file open. The first thing his eyes landed on was a blown-up passport photo of a blond-haired man in his thirties. ‘Who is he?’

‘His name’s Hope. Benedict Hope. Englishman. A few days ago our agents reported he was on Corfu, Greek island. He went out there to meet up with Palmer. As you know, Palmer was there –’

‘I don’t need a history lesson,’ Slater snapped. ‘Palmer was there looking for Bradbury, and he talked to some Greek asshole. I know. But I thought it was all taken care of.’

‘We thought so too. The Karapiperis hit and the bombing were dressed up to look like a drug gang reprisal. But this guy Hope got away. We already knew that from Kaplan and Hudson, but we only just found out who he is.’

Slater brushed the photo aside and thumbed quickly through the printed sheets underneath. Military records for Palmer and Hope. He skipped through Palmer’s first, brows tightening as he scanned down the text. Hope’s record was much more extensive, and he took more time over it. By the time he’d finished reading, alarm was building up in his chest. He looked up. ‘Have you read this?’

The associate nodded.

‘Remarkable. The youngest major 22 SAS ever had. Decorations coming out of his ass. He’s either a goddamn hero or he’s a dyed-in-the-wool stone killer. Either way, he’s the kind of man who should have been on my team.’

‘We tried to dig up more about him, from after he left the army,’ the associate said. ‘There isn’t much. He operates as a “crisis response consultant”, moves around a lot, hard to pin down. He’s real careful about
covering his tracks. We don’t even have a home address for him.’

‘Crisis response consultant,’ Slater echoed under his breath. ‘Kind of loose terminology. Covers a lot of ground.’

‘We think he took out Kaplan and Hudson.’

‘That would certainly figure.’ Slater shut the file. ‘What the hell’s going on here? How does a damn archaeology academic come to have two ex-SAS guys on her trail? How is a man like Hope mixed up in this?’

‘We don’t know. Maybe he was working with Bradbury.’

Slater looked up sharply. ‘Then he could know everything. He and Bradbury could be working together in this. Partners, for all we know.’

‘Possible.’

Slater glared. ‘So what you’re telling me is that this already fucked-up situation just got even more fucked up. We have a former Special Forces officer on the loose, who’s taking out our agents and may know everything that Bradbury and McClusky know. In other words, we just went from dealing with a dead-beat ambulance chaser and a frightened little girl to dealing with a trained fucking killing machine who’s at the very least the equal of any soldier ever produced by the US Army. You do realise that, don’t you?’

‘I realise that,’ the associate replied dully.

‘And have we any idea where this bastard might be?’

‘I was coming to that. He’s here.’

‘What do you mean, here?’

‘He passed through US Immigration, Atlanta, two days ago.’

Slater hung his head in frustration. ‘And you’re going to tell me the CIA can’t catch him?’

‘Our people got to the airport late. He slipped out of there.’

Slater stared hard at his associate. Shook his head in disgust.

‘We have to be cautious,’ the associate said. ‘This isn’t exactly official Agency business, Irving. And Hope isn’t exactly an ordinary guy.’

‘I pay you people a lot of money,’ Slater said. ‘He’s one man. One man. You have dozens of people on the payroll, and access to a hundred more at least. Is he really that smart, or are you really that inept?’

The associate’s temper was rising. ‘We’ve done everything you told us to do. We acquired Bradbury. Took care of Karapiperis. Brought in Herzog for the bombing. These things are not easy to do. It’s not like organising a press conference. One slip, we all go down.’

Slater snorted derisively. ‘If I’d known what a bunch of lames you people were, I’d have paid Herzog to do the whole thing.’

‘He’s a mercenary,’ the associate protested. ‘He believes in nothing.’

‘What does it matter what he believes in? The fucker could be a Satanist for all I care.’

‘That’s not what this is about.’

Slater looked at him levelly. ‘Oh, you think this is about doing God’s work? Let me tell you, this is business, first
and last. Herzog gets the job done, and he doesn’t leave tracks that a blind man could follow.’

The associate was about to reply when his phone rang. He turned away from Slater and answered, talking softly. His eyebrows rose. ‘You’re sure?’ he said. ‘OK. You know what to do.’ He shut the phone and turned back to Slater with a grin of triumph.

‘Well?’

‘That was Jones. He got Hope.’

Slater smiled for the first time in the conversation. ‘That’s more like it. Good. Now bring this bastard in, and let’s get him talking.’

‘You know I can’t be there,’ the associate said. ‘I can’t be seen.’

‘No, but I sure as hell will. I want to meet this character.’

‘I’m not sure you do.’

‘Oh, I do,’ Slater insisted. ‘And then I want to finish him.’