The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10) (26 page)

Back in the olden days, the military brass had occasionally thought it worthwhile to pit small SAS units against superior numbers of regular British troops in tactical exercises, to test the training of both sides and practise covert operations and resistance-to-interrogation skills in realistic conditions. Ben and his team had used those exercises to become highly proficient at sneaking up on regular units in total darkness and in ghostlike silence and magicking one of them away, bound, hooded and utterly bewildered, to some secret location before his comrades had even noticed him gone. After a little roughing up, the thoroughly humiliated and slightly bruised squaddie would be stuffed in a Land Rover and dumped back on his unit, the butt of jokes for the rest of his life. It had all been a bit of innocent fun.

Fun wasn’t what Lars Kurzweil was having as dawn broke over Tulsa. One moment he’d been carrying out his job along with the guys, the next, something had come up behind him out of the shadows and hit him so hard and fast he was down before he could make a sound. He’d felt a hand clamp over his mouth and then a sharp pain as a bent needle stabbed deep into the side of his neck. He’d lost consciousness too quickly to see his attacker’s face or even to feel himself being dragged away into the trees.

As the drug’s effects began to wear off, his eyelids fluttered open and he lifted his chin off his chest. His vision was watery and blurred, but he could tell he was in a darkened room. Something about it made him think it wasn’t a normal room, but he was too fuzzy to figure out what, and so he tried to concentrate on his immediate situation. He was sitting upright on what felt like a wooden chair, unable to move his arms or legs. Slowly, he realised that he wasn’t paralysed, but that he was tightly trussed to the chair with his hands tied behind its back and his ankles bound to its wooden legs. He struggled weakly, tried to speak but couldn’t for the gag around his mouth. His head was pounding and awful nausea was washing over him in waves. He blinked to clear the wetness from his eyes.

The first thing Lars Kurzweil saw when his vision focused was the large black O of the sawn-off shotgun muzzle that was resting very still over the backrest of another chair in front of him, just a couple of feet from his face. His drugged brain was still lagging behind the rest of his senses, so it took a few seconds before he registered it for what it was and his eyes shot wide open.

Pant-wetting fear was a very appropriate reaction for someone awakening to the sight of a twelve-gauge in their face. A moan burst from his gagged mouth and he rocked in the chair, trying to recoil from the business end of the gun. The man pointing it was sitting backwards astride the chair opposite him.

‘Welcome back to the world of the living,’ Ben said. Three hours had passed since he’d carried his inert prisoner through the woods to where he’d hidden the Barracuda, far enough away for the rest of the men not to hear the throaty burble of the V8 Hemi as he made his escape. He could easily have put Kurzweil to sleep simply by compressing his carotid artery, cutting off the oxygen to his brain to knock him out almost instantly – but he’d needed the man to remain unconscious for longer, so he’d pumped about two-thirds of the syringe into him. That had allowed plenty of time to drive back to the Perryman Inn, pick up Erin and bring her and their captive here. The lock-up was proving useful in more ways than one.

The wide-eyed prisoner mumbled something through the gag that might have been, ‘Where the fuck am I?’

‘Where you are is up shit creek, without a paddle. I’m Ben. This is Erin. I think you already knew our names. I heard your buddies calling for you, so I know yours, too, Kurzweil. I know a lot of things, about Ritter and Moon, and your boss McCrory. When I take this gag off, you’re going to be an obliging fellow and fill me in on the rest.’ Gripping the shotgun butt in his right hand, Ben reached forwards with his left and yanked the dirty rag from the man’s face. Kurzweil spat bits of fluff mixed with blood where the gag had chafed the corners of his mouth.

‘Now let’s get down to business,’ Ben said. ‘I don’t need to tell a bad boy gangster like you that nothing says “instant brain death” like a twelve-gauge Brenneke slug at point-blank range. That’s only if you act stupid and don’t tell me what I want to know. Quick, concise answers. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. Or I will carve out a river valley through the middle of your skull. Are we clear?’

‘Fuck you,’ Kurzweil said, even though he looked no less terrified than before.

Ben leaned closer. ‘I didn’t quite catch that, Kurzweil. Do you want to start again and have another go? This time, think about what I just said.’

‘Fuck you to hell,’ Kurzweil quavered. ‘Go right ahead an’ shoot me if that’s what you gotta do.’

Ben gave him a long, hard look. ‘Do you have a death wish?’

‘I talk to you, Ritter and Moon will kill me anyway. I ain’t dyin’ slow and ugly for you, not for nobody.’

Ben sighed. He laid down the shotgun. He’d had no intention of using it anyway. He needed information, and headless men weren’t known for their loquacity. ‘Looks like you have me over a barrel, Kurzweil. Which makes me very unhappy. It brings out my darker side.’

The prisoner was silent. His eyes were liquid and bulging.

Without looking back at her over his shoulder, Ben said, ‘Erin, would you please mind stepping outside? Close the shutter behind you.’

‘I want to stay.’

‘No, you don’t,’ Ben said in a steady tone, not taking his eyes off the prisoner. ‘Trust me.’

Erin hesitated anxiously for a moment, then nodded to herself and walked to the steel shutter. She knelt down, grasped its lower rim and raised it three feet, letting in the rays of the dawn light. The wheels of the Plymouth parked outside were visible through the gap, the wide tyres and arches still speckled with forest dirt. Erin clambered out and used her foot to press the rim of the shutter back down to the concrete, closing Ben and the prisoner inside alone. Ben heard the car door open and shut as she got inside to wait.

There was a silence in the lock-up. Kurzweil just went on staring at Ben, moisture glistening on his forehead.

‘Everybody has a dark side,’ Ben said after a few moments. ‘But mine is so dark, it scares even me.’ He paused. Stood up and walked over to the workbench where all the tools lay. ‘It should scare you too. Because the things I’m capable of doing to you, right here, right now, on this beautiful summer’s morning, are far more inhuman than what Ritter or even Moon will do to you. You want to know where you are, my friend? You’re in my torture chamber. Whether you leave it in one piece or in several, that’s up to you.’

‘I don’t know anything!’ Kurzweil blurted out, finally talking again. ‘I was just doing what I was told!’

Ben turned and grinned at him. ‘I’ve heard that one before. You’ll change your tune. They always do, even tough guys like you. You’ll be crying like a little girl, and that’s before I even get started for real.’

He picked up a ball-peen hammer. It was a tool often used by bad guys to shatter kneecaps, break hands, tap out teeth and depress skulls. He inspected it thoughtfully, then laid it back down to pick up something else. ‘Have you any idea how easily a pair of bolt croppers will shear through human flesh and bone? Let me show you.’

Kurzweil wriggled and cried out as Ben walked around the back of the chair with the bolt croppers. He levered its jaws wide with the long handles. The prisoner had a very clear idea of what was coming, and clenched his fingers into trembling fists. ‘Oh God,’ he moaned.

Ben grabbed the little finger of the man’s left hand, winkled it out straight and fastened the jaws of the bolt croppers around it. ‘After this one comes off, we go to work on the other nine,’ he said.

Erin heard the piercing scream from outside in the car, and closed her eyes.

Things were not going well at the McCrory residence that morning. After his late-night phone call, Finn had been so distracted that he’d managed to wake Angela by turning on the main bedroom light on his way back upstairs. Angela being Angela, that had led to a thousand questions about who he’d been talking to at one in the morning. His attempt to brush them off had only made it worse, prompting all her usual accusations of secretiveness and lying, and then a whole row that had ended up with him slinking off to spend the rest of the night alone in one of the other bedrooms. That wasn’t unusual, either.

Finn had tossed and turned until six twenty, when a splitting headache had forced him to stagger downstairs in his emerald green pyjamas. He was greeted on the landing as usual by the life-sized colour statue of the Virgin, who stood with her back to a high Irish-themed stained glass window. Angela called her a ‘gaudy monstrosity’ but Finn loved to show her off to visitors, along with his Irish Room that sported, among other items, a giant tricolour flag, a beautiful cláirseach harp and Oklahoma’s most comprehensive collection of Waterford crystal.

But Finn took no notice of the Virgin that morning as he stomped down to the kitchen to gulp down a handful of aspirin, which he was strongly tempted to wash down with a medicinal shot or two of Midleton Very Rare whiskey. Just as he’d been nursing his aching skull and thinking it couldn’t get any worse, his mobile had buzzed to prompt him that he had a voicemail message.

Ritter: ‘Call me.’

And so Finn had called him, and received news that had left him winded like a kick in the gonads. The mayor listened, sinking deeper into misery, as Ritter told him of last night’s disastrous failure and Kurzweil’s disappearance.

‘The cabin?’ Finn barely dared to ask.

‘Cabin’s not there any more. Sorry. Was your idea.’

Finn swallowed. The Midleton beckoned yet more en-ticingly. How was he ever going to tell Angela? She loved that cabin.

‘Meet me,’ Finn said. ‘One hour.’ Still reeling, he called Janet Reiss and woke her up to instruct her to cancel his appointments that morning.

‘But you have the thing with the rail union delegates that we’ve already put off twice.’

‘I don’t care. Tell’m I got run over by a train.’

‘That’s not funny, Finn.’

‘Just say I’m feeling sick, okay?’ Which was near enough the truth. By now, he could hear Angela was up early as usual, bustling about upstairs and banging doors in that way that told him he still wasn’t forgiven for last night. Great. The other news he had for her would go down a storm. What the hell was he supposed to say to her?
Don’t be mad, honey. I’ll buy you another one.

Desperate to avoid her, he scurried upstairs while she was in the bathroom, pulled on his clothes in a frenzied rush and managed to get out of the house without a confrontation. Seconds later, he was racing down the long drive of his imposing residence and beating the early-morning traffic on his way to the meeting with Ritter.

Which had been when his phone had rung again.

‘How’s it going, man?’ This time, Xavier sounded as if he was calling from a raucous party or a nightclub, with wild heavy-metal music pounding in the background. It wasn’t yet seven in the morning. The rock’n’roll lifestyle of the Mexicano drug dealer scene.

‘Great! Just great,’ Finn said, his face twisting.

‘Listen, man, we need to move that shipment forward.’

Finn’s jaw sagged and he almost ploughed the Mercedes into a line of parked cars. ‘Okay,’ he said, catching his breath.

‘Yeah. They won’t wait for next week, you know?’

Finn knew that Los Locos weren’t people whose patience you wanted to try. ‘So when they want it?’

‘Two days, max. We cool for that?’ As if loading millions of dollars’ worth of illegal weaponry and munitions onto a convoy of trucks and transporting it more than six hundred miles across two states and over a heavily patrolled border without getting stopped was something to be cool about.

‘Two days! Jesus Christ, you’re killing me.’ Finn’s mind was in turmoil. Two days meant that the delivery would have to hit the road by early tomorrow, at the latest. Which inevitably meant that the job of loading the trucks would have to be done today. He’d barely have enough time, even if he rounded up every available man and got them started right away. And all of it, with Ben Hope still out there breathing down his neck and the Hayes woman running loose.

‘No, man,’ Xavier said, then added jokingly, ‘but they might, if they don’t get the goods.’

Finn knew that wasn’t really a joke.

‘I’ll see you soon,’ Xavier said, and was gone.

When Finn screeched the Mercedes to a halt outside his private hangar, the replacement GMC was there waiting for him and he saw to his intense irritation that Ritter was there, too, along with Moon, who was chewing his damn gum and wearing a T-shirt with the logo ‘100% BANDIT’. If Ritter felt bad about last night’s objective going south, he wasn’t showing it. Finn summoned them inside the Gulfstream 650, told them about the rescheduling of the arms delivery, and then launched straight in with the questions. What had gone wrong up there at the cabin? Why couldn’t they eradicate Hope? Where was the damn woman? Where were the journals?

Ritter frankly didn’t have a lot to say in response. By this time, the mayor was pacing furiously up and down the aircraft’s aisle, his face a glowing shade of puce and his hair all in disarray.

‘He’s a goddamn pussy,’ Moon insisted. ‘Can’t fight a straight fight because he’s too chicken to face us out. He’s gonna try and kill us off one at a time instead.’ He snorted. ‘Fuckin’ Kurzweil. I mean, who
couldn’t
kill that sorry piece of shit? My goddamn grandmother could—’

‘Get your head out your ass,’ Ritter said quietly. ‘He didn’t take Kurzweil away to kill him. He took him away to press him to rat us out.
Then
maybe he’ll kill him.’

‘Kurzweil knows jack.’

‘He knows enough,’ Ritter said. ‘Hope will get it out of him, for sure.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. Because I would.’

‘Okay, so what’f he does?’

‘Jesus Christ, enough yakking!’ Finn screamed at them. ‘I’m trying to think.’ He went on pacing, sweat stains beginning to show through his shirt despite the plane’s cool interior. ‘Damn it, maybe I should’ve just paid him the money.’

Ritter shook his head. ‘Forget about the money, boss. The whole thing was just a set-up. He knew you wouldn’t show. He had our moves figured out from the off. It was all about capturing one of our guys.’

‘He’s smart, all right,’ Finn seethed. ‘He’s very, very smart. But money’s money. For the right price, maybe we can make him go away.’

‘I don’t think he’s interested in your money, boss,’ Ritter said. ‘It’s you he wants. Because of what happened to the girl.’

That made Finn stop dead in his tracks and turned him cold. ‘Then you’ll just have to bury the sonofabitch, won’t you? Maybe you’ll get lucky next time. Or maybe I should just replace your asses. The fucking Mexicans could do a better job.’

‘You don’t mean that, boss,’ Moon said.

Finn looked at him sharply. ‘Don’t I?’

Ritter took off his dark glasses and gave Finn a long look. His face was placid, but there was a cold fire in his eyes that almost made Finn take a step back.

‘No more misses,’ Ritter said. ‘This time, Hope dies. That’s a promise. I’ll personally cut his heart out and bring it to you in a basket while it’s still beating.’

‘I don’t care how you do it,’ Finn said. ‘I don’t care what it takes or how much it costs. Just do it. He can’t stand in my way again.’

‘Hate to piss on your French fries, but there’s just one problem,’ said. Moon ‘We got squat on this guy. We don’t know where he’s hangin’ out, we don’t know what he’s drivin’, we have no idea where the fucker might show up next.’

‘Sure we do,’ Ritter said. ‘If he finds out what I know he’ll find out from Kurzweil, he’ll show up at Big Bear.’

‘He wouldn’t have the balls,’ Moon said.

Ritter cocked his head doubtfully. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure. You ask me, that’s where we’ll see him next. I think we should let him walk right in there. I’ll be waiting for him.’

Finn had pursed his lips and was thinking hard. ‘No, no. You’re wrong, Ritter. The woman –
she’s
the key. Hope knew her name, he knew about the video recording, he knew about Blaylock. He’s hooked up with her somehow. Maybe he was hooked up with her all along. Okay, so maybe we have squat on Hope. We have plenty on her.’

‘I guess we could watch the house,’ Moon suggested, ever hopeful that he’d finally get his hands on the woman in private.

‘Tried that, remember?’ Ritter answered.

‘Yeah, well, maybe if y’all had let me take care of it instead of that dickweed Spicer, she wouldn’t’ve gotten away so easily,’ Moon countered.

‘She’s bound to go back there,’ Finn insisted. ‘So that’s what the two of you are gonna do, get over there and stake the place out. She can’t stay under the radar forever. Meanwhile, I’ll have O’Rourke’s guys scour the whole of Tulsa for the bitch.’

Ritter didn’t like it one bit. Stake-out duty was for the lower orders, not for someone of his experience and seniority. There were more urgent matters to take care of. ‘These trucks ain’t gonna load themselves. I need to be there.’

But Finn was adamant. He shook his head. ‘Meagher and the boys can handle it without you. Make the calls, tell ’em to haul ass right now, this morning. Then shift yourselves to Crosbie Heights and
get me that woman
. We get her, we get Hope.’