The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10) (31 page)

Ben ducked inside the bedroom. He stood close to the door and listened in the darkness to the footsteps reach the top of the stairs and come padding along the passage. He heard doors being opened and shut, each room being checked the way he’d been doing himself. As each door closed, the footsteps came closer and he could hear them more clearly. He reckoned on four men.

Now they reached the bedroom he was in. The steps paused outside. A ray of torchlight licked along the gap at the bottom of the door. Ben thought he heard the faintest whisper.

The handle began to turn.

Ben stepped back, pointed the shotgun from the hip at the middle of the door and slam-fired three rounds of buckshot into it as fast as he could work the slide while keeping the trigger held back. The muzzle flash lit up the huge ragged hole where the centre panel of the door had been.

Through the ringing in his ears, Ben heard running steps heading back towards the stairs. Just one man. He dropped a slug round straight into the Ithaca’s breech, rammed the pump into battery and swivelled on his feet to chase the runner like a trap shooter chasing a moving clay. With a Brenneke slug, it didn’t matter that there was a wall between him and the target. The gun boomed and kicked hard against his shoulder, and a crater exploded in the wall showering plaster back at him.

Something tumbled down the stairs. Ben rushed for the shattered door and wrenched it open. He jumped over the three splayed-out, piled-up bodies lying on the other side and raced towards the stairs, plucking more buckshot cartridges from his pocket as he went and thumbing them inside the shotgun’s magazine tube. To his right was the huge hole in the wall where his slug had gone through. To his left on the opposite wall was a splat of dark blood. More blood on the stairs. Ben chased down them after his wounded target, reached the first landing and then had to pull back as gunfire sprayed up the stairwell, ripping shreds out of the heavy oak banister. Ben shoved the Ithaca between the stair rails and loosed four buckshot loads in the direction the shots had come from.

The firing went silent. Ben waited, perfectly still in the darkness. He was good at waiting. A minute passed. Then another. No sound from below.

When he was satisfied, he returned up the passage towards the three dead men. There was a lot of blood on the floor and the wall opposite the shattered door. Even in the gloom, he could see that flying splinters had done as much damage as the shotgun blasts. He stepped back over the bodies and walked on.

He checked from room to room until he found the locked door. He twisted the handle. Solid wood. Not the kind of door that could be broken down with a kick or two.

‘Ritter?’ said a voice inside. McCrory’s voice.

When Ben didn’t answer, McCrory opened fire from inside. Three splintered bullet holes opened up in the thick wood.

Ben reeled back from the door. Whatever McCrory was packing in there, he didn’t want any. But his gun was bigger. He popped another Brenneke into the Ithaca’s breech, then rammed the muzzle against the door lock and fired. It was the way military entry teams breached closed doors, and Ben hadn’t seen a lock yet that didn’t burst into pieces under that kind of punishment.

Finn McCrory ducked for cover as the door blew open with such force that it crashed against the wall. By the time he’d straightened up and pointed the .44 Magnum, Ben was already inside the room and right on him. He snatched the big, heavy revolver out of McCrory’s hands and smacked him hard across the face with the butt end. McCrory cried out and staggered back against a desk.

The study was decked out in much the same style as the rest of the ranch house. A traditional brass and green glass banker’s lamp threw out light from the desk. A leather captain’s chair stood between it and a tall fireplace. Above that hung a big rack of antlers mounted on a shield. Resting across the antlers was an old Winchester lever-action hunting rifle that presumably had been responsible for the trophy.

Ben hardly noticed any of it. He saw the beach in Ireland. Kristen running from the men McCrory had sent to kill her. He pictured her in his mind the way Moon and Ritter had left her lying there on the rocks.

‘No,’ McCrory said. His eyes were big and round. He raised his hands as if he thought he could stop a twelve-gauge round from the gun Ben was pointing at his face.

I’m not an executioner
, Ben had told Kurzweil.

But in McCrory’s case, he was willing to make an exception.

He worked the pump on the shotgun, the way he’d done a thousand times before.
Clack
: the rearward movement for the extractor claw to get a grip on the rim of the fired case, draw it back out of the chamber and fling it away as waste material out of the ejector port.
Clack
: the forward movement to chamber the next round as it was pushed up out of the magazine tube.

But something felt wrong. The pump wouldn’t go back forwards. The action wouldn’t close, because something was stopping the round from chambering. The empty had failed to eject.

Classic pump-action stoppage. Every cop and soldier who’d ever received firearms training was schooled in how to fix the jam. It was something talked about in classrooms but which very seldom actually happened in the field. A one in a million chance. Just one of those things, like a flat tyre or a dead battery. Except it was very liable to get you killed.

Ben could either clear the jam by ramming the gun’s butt vertically down against the floor, or he could toss the weapon and bring into play the rifle he’d taken from Moon, which was still slung behind his back. Neither option was something you could do in less than two or three seconds, and two or three seconds was all the time Finn McCrory needed to see that his opponent was in trouble. McCrory looked startled for an instant, then stumbled around the back of the desk, almost fell over the captain’s chair and made a grab for the Winchester hunting rifle that rested on the deer antlers above the fireplace.

McCrory worked the lever. No malfunctions there. Just the unmistakable sound of a well-oiled rifle action chambering a long, high-powered cartridge. It looked as if Big Joe liked to keep his guns loaded.

McCrory grinned and levelled the gun at Ben’s head.

Staring down the wrong end of the Winchester’s octagonal barrel, Ben dropped the shotgun.

‘Long gun too,’ said Finn McCrory.

Ben unslung the M4 and let it fall.

‘And the rest,’ Finn said.

Ben drew the trench knife out of its scabbard and thought about throwing it at McCrory. But of all the knives in the world, none could have been less suited to throwing. The weight of the big steel knuckleduster would pull it completely out of balance as it flew. Whereas McCrory only had to flick a finger and Ben was as dead as the deer who’d donated his antlers for Big Joe’s wall.

Ben dropped the knife.

Finn’s eyes glittered. ‘So you thought you’d come in here and shoot me, did you, dipshit?’

‘You have it coming, McCrory.’

‘You’re talking about the girl, right? Kristen Hall?’

‘Surprised you even remember her name,’ Ben said.

‘You think I wanted that to happen? Think I wanted her dead?’

‘I’m sure she left you no choice,’ Ben said.

‘That’s how I see it. Anyone in my position would’ve done the same thing.’

‘Of course. You’re just a normal guy.’

‘You think I should’ve paid her off? You think she’d have gone away? Forget it. No chance. She’d’ve bled me dry.’

‘She was the one who did all the bleeding,’ Ben said.

‘Everyone has secrets, Hope. Just happens I have more than most people, and your friend knew way too much about them.’ Finn smiled at Ben over the rifle sights. ‘But what am I saying? You do too, don’t you?’

‘It was Kristen who worked most of it out,’ Ben said. ‘All I did was fill in the gaps. I think she picked up on the name McCrory from her history research, and connected it with this up-and-coming US politician she must have read about, who was getting so much mileage out of his grandfather escaping Ireland and becoming a success in America. Good human-interest angle, McCrory. But you should’ve kept your big mouth shut. It was the dates that gave you away.’

Finn chuckled. ‘Is that a fact?’

‘Yes it is, because Kristen dug deeper and found out from the birth records in Glenfell that the real Padraig McCrory, a simple Irish stable hand who worked on the Glenfell Estate, was born in 1809. He’d have been a hundred and seven years old when your father was born. Biologically impossible. It didn’t add up, and Kristen was the kind of journalist who likes to get their facts straight. When she contacted you initially, she just wanted to tidy up the details. She told you about the anomaly with the dates in the parish records. You could have brushed it off so easily. But instead you flipped, because that’s the kind of stupid arsehole you are. That just raised her suspicions and made her dig deeper. By the time she contacted you again, she knew the truth and challenged you with it. By doing that, she made herself a target. Because you had so very much to lose if the truth came out, didn’t you, McCrory?’

Finn’s jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed. His finger twitched on the trigger of the Winchester.

‘That’s how she found out who your real grandfather was,’ Ben said.

‘Really. You know that, do you?’

‘He was born in 1822. That still makes him a very old man when his only son was conceived, but then, your family are a long-lived bunch. His real name was Edgar Stamford.’

Finn cracked another smile and shook his head. ‘I’m impressed, Hope. Truly, I am. You get the cigar. That’s right. Who’d have thought that my granddaddy was a blue-blooded lord?’

‘That’s not all he was, is it?’ Ben said. ‘He was a bully and a coward who enjoyed having people beaten and hanged, who abused his servants and tormented his wife. Then he murdered the real Padraig McCrory and stole his identity, so that he could fake his own death and escape to America before the things he’d done would catch up with him.
That’s
what you’re descended from. Funny how your genetics will catch up with you.’

Finn’s smile didn’t waver. ‘Got me all sussed out, don’t you? That’s what the family legend says, all right. My daddy didn’t know it himself until 1937. My grandmother Charlotte waited sixteen years, ’til he was twenty-one, before she told him what ol’ “Padraig” had told her on his deathbed. His final confession. Or did you know that as well, you limey smartass?’

‘Does the family legend mention what your granddaddy Stamford had been cooking up in his lab with his crony Heneage Fitzwilliam?’ Ben asked. ‘The disease agent that Elizabeth Stamford discovered by accident and wrote about in her journal?
Phytophthora infestans
. They engineered it. Cultivated it. Contaminated the potato crop with it.’

Finn nodded slowly. ‘Oh, sure. That
is
part of the family legend. I don’t mind telling you, seeing as I’m gonna kill you pretty soon anyway. The old bastard spilled the whole story out when he was rat-ass drunk one day. Told me everything. I must’ve been twenty-six, twenty-seven.’

‘It must have come as quite a shock to discover that your grandfather was a cold-blooded mass murderer responsible for implementing a deliberate plan of genocide against the Irish people and causing up to two million deaths,’ Ben said. ‘And that he was a British government spook.’

‘There’s no goddamn proof of that part,’ Finn said, flushing.

‘Wrong,’ Ben said. ‘Kristen hadn’t figured that part out yet. But I did. After Elizabeth Stamford got back on her feet in England, in 1851 she went to consult a London lawyer called Abraham Barnstable. A real high-flyer. I think it was to tell him what her former husband had been involved in, and that she intended to spill the beans. That was her big mistake. She didn’t know that Barnstable was connected with government intelligence. All the way to the top of the pyramid. The only people who could have known that Stamford and Fitzwilliam were secret agents on a mission to wipe out half of Ireland’s population so the English could move in on their land.’

Finn’s eyes had narrowed to slits. He clenched his jaw. ‘You just keep talking, Hope. I’m not in a hurry to blow your goddamn head off.’

‘When they knew what she knew, they didn’t waste any time in orchestrating her murder, which got pinned on some innocent teacher. Three days after Elizabeth was killed, Heneage Fitzwilliam was shot dead in his room in Cambridge. He must’ve managed to warn Stamford before his death, maybe that someone had been following him and they were in danger. Knowing what was coming, Stamford set his plan. He needed a corpse, a big one that could double as his own. The stable hand Padraig McCrory fitted the bill very nicely. Stamford murdered him, dressed him in his clothes and put a family ring on his finger that would identify him. Then he burned down the mansion with the dead man inside, and fled to America with all the money he could carry. He discovered that keeping up the Irish image was good for him in the New World. Or maybe he was just too scared to drop the pretence in case someone cottoned on to who he really was, and the British intelligence guys decided to come knocking on his door to cut the last connection between them and what had happened in Ireland in 1847. Whatever the reason, he kept up the lie until almost the very end of his twisted life.’

‘Smart. Very smart. Finished now?’

‘You were just continuing a family tradition, you and your father before you. After all, the McCrory reputation was built on your phoney Irish heritage. It was too good a thing to let go of, especially for a man of your political ambitions. You had too much to gain from the whole deception, and too much to lose if your future electors found out that their poster boy was not only about as Irish as the Queen of England, but that his ancestor was the guy the British government paid to lay waste to their country and murder millions of their people. Can’t see that going down too well with the Irish-American voters. You said you had no choice but to murder Kristen Hall. You know what, McCrory? I believe you.’

The whole time Ben had been talking, he’d been moving towards McCrory, maintaining eye contact to distract the man with the gun from the barely perceptible shifting of his feet. The desk was between them. Ben was now almost close enough to make a grab for the rifle.

But Ben never had the chance.