The Martyr's Curse (16 page)

Human trafficking was the reason Ben had become familiar with the less salubrious districts of Marseille, back in the days when he’d called himself a ‘freelance crisis response consultant’. He didn’t suppose the place was any less of a sanctuary for scumbags than it had been then. In fact, he was fairly certain it was even worse than he remembered, and he had his reasons for thinking that way.

It was well known in certain circles that a fresh team of players had increasingly become established as the new-generation crime bosses of Marseille, and that was what interested him. Walking tall, like lions among the hyenas, the Russian mob now lorded it over the gang scene. Under their rule, the number of bloody turf wars and feud killings and execution-style assassinations had rocketed to unprecedented levels. The Russians had virtually uncontrolled access to a river of illicit weaponry coming out of Eastern Europe, as well as to trained men happy to make use of it. Many of their enforcers were battle-hardened ex-military, tough, beefy, crude and violent men recruited from former Soviet territories like Chechnya and Georgia, for whom the act of murder was so casual and human life so cheap that they scared the crap out of the rest of the Milieu gangs, whose territories they were snapping up one by one.

Nowhere else on Ben’s mental map, within a radius of two hundred and fifty kilometres, a circle ranging one hundred and ninety-six thousand square kilometres in area, would you find anything like such a high concentration of professionally trained and equipped criminals ready to rock ’n’ roll at the drop of a hat. Exactly the kind of people you could expect to carry out a military killing operation against a community of poor innocent monks who just happened to be sitting on a hoard of gold that maybe they didn’t even know about. Exactly the kind of people who might be looking to finance themselves and their organisation through an easy heist against unarmed, defenceless opponents.

Not to mention, exactly the kind of people you might also expect to find smoking Russian cigarettes like the one that had been stubbed out on Père Antoine’s forehead. Ben had tried them once, didn’t much care for them. A particular and distinctive brand that had been manufactured in the Ukraine until 2005, and since then in Russia itself. Considered one of the country’s finer blends, the sophisticated choice of rich Russian society folks, and maybe rich Russian gangsters, too.

All of which made Marseille the top spot on Ben’s mental map. And which was exactly why, at this moment, he was barrelling south-westwards down the motorway towards Marseille in a gleaming dark H1 Hummer. Blasting through the hot afternoon with a cool wind roaring in through the wide-open windows, two hundred thousand euros’ worth of gold weighing down the passenger seat the other side of the massive transmission tunnel, and a couple of automatic rifles plus over five hundred rounds of ammunition stuffed in a holdall in its cavernous rear space. The Hummer was perfect for him. It was fast, it would go absolutely anywhere he wanted it to, and it was big enough to set up a mobile camp in if it came to it. No amount of civilianisation could completely smooth away its military origins. The thing was a battle wagon, aggressively functional in every way, and Ben was grimly at home in it. He settled back inside its armoured shell and kept his foot down and felt as if he was going to war.

The late afternoon was still hot when he came into Marseille. From a distance it was a beautiful city, framed by a backdrop of high country, rock and scrub wilderness that the French called
la garrigue
. Up close, you could see the decay anywhere you chose to spot it. Ben avoided the bustle of the centre and picked his way around the outskirts, navigating from memory to a place he’d been before and hadn’t ever been too eager to revisit. The area he was aiming for was a stretch of districts to the north of the city, a sprawling zone of neglected apartment blocks that had been knocked up cheaply and never knocked down, but should have been a long time ago. Isolated, almost self-contained, the area was like a city in its own right – one where the normal rules no longer applied.

Specifically, Ben was headed for a district called La Castellane. It was a close-knit cluster of estates hastily erected in the early seventies for a population of itinerant blue-collar workers who’d never been meant to stay, until worsening economic conditions and factory closures had made prisoners of them. In the span of not too many years, the place had become the most notorious ghetto in Marseille. It still was. The Hummer rumbled its way through dismal, colour-washed streets that could have belonged in a Mexican barrio. In some places, he could have imagined himself part of a military patrol threading its way through war-torn Baghdad, 2003. There was rubble everywhere, and now and then the shell of a burned-out vehicle. Any intact wall was covered in graffiti and every lower-floor window was barred like a prison block. Sun-blanched grass grew in patches between derelict buildings and stalled construction projects from ten or fifteen years ago, surrounded by dusty vegetation and the incessant chirping of cicadas. Strings of cars were parked along the streets, most of them white or silver or grey, adding to the impression that the colour had been drained out of the place along with any kind of happiness or hope. Feral packs of olive-tanned shirtless youths roved the streets, yelling and fighting among themselves and chucking things at passing cars.

But not at the Hummer. As Ben cruised by he saw the reaction of the kids, and it didn’t surprise him. In the context of a place like Briançon, Omar’s battle wagon was just an overblown, gas-guzzling folly of a car. But in these mean streets, its menacing appearance and black-tinted glass had a whole other meaning that these kids understood very well. The kind of people who drove about the ghetto in such vehicles were the kind who owned it, ruled it, who collected the money and dictated who lived and who died. Even think about throwing a can or a stone at a car like that and you’d better start running before its occupants casually pulled up, stepped out and mowed down everyone in sight with automatic gunfire. Then they’d hunt down your friends, your family, everyone you’d ever known, and kill them all. It was about respect.

Ben felt sorry for the kids. Many, perhaps most, would get caught up in the drugs scene, if they hadn’t done already, looking for ways to gather easy cash and often catching a bullet or a blade in the belly for their efforts. Life expectancy wasn’t high. He rumbled past another wreck of a burned-out car, and thought about what had happened to it. One of the methods the gangs used to dispense with rivals was to shoot them through the windows of their vehicles and then set them alight. It was called ‘barbecuing’. Guns were everywhere. Rule of law was just a faded memory here.

Ben’s prediction had been more than right. The area’s decline since he’d last seen it was worse than he could have imagined. Then it had been a sinkhole of despair. Now it was just lost, irredeemable. Something had rotted the heart out of the place and it needed to be levelled and the whole thing rebuilt afresh. Except you couldn’t change the people who’d brought about the rot, and they would just keep bringing it until there was nothing left. The only way to change them would be to kill them.

The place had indeed changed, but not so much that Ben couldn’t find his way to his particular destination. The building he was looking for was a five-storey apartment block deep inside the La Castellane estates, filthy and neglected and looking like a penitentiary among the unkempt greenery.

He parked in the shadow of the trees fifty yards from the building’s entrance, killed the engine and settled back in his seat. Watched the entrance from behind his tinted glass, and waited for darkness to fall.

Chapter Twenty-Four

It was a long wait, but Ben was very good at waiting. All Special Forces soldiers were, out of ingrained habit after years of hanging around on standby for brief, explosive bursts of action that more often than not were postponed. His body was calm, his breathing and pulse rate just ticking over somewhere above dormant. Mentally, he was coiled like the mainspring of a gun, ready at a fraction of a second’s notice to drop the hammer on a live round and shatter the silence into a thousand pieces.

He watched and smoked, and then kept watching as evening turned to night and the expected events began to unfold, like a strategy developing on a chessboard in a game where Ben was already several moves ahead. He saw the kid in the blue hoodie, faded jeans and white trainers, scrawny, North African, about fifteen, take up position across the street from the building’s entrance. Moments later he saw the three others, ganglier, taller versions of the first, in their late teens or very early twenties and wearing similar outfits, get out of a battered BMW, lope up to the grimy glass double doors and disappear inside. Ben knew they didn’t live there, even if they acted as if they owned the place.

Aside from utter ruthlessness and vaulting greed, one of the things that made the drug gangs such a successful organisation was their strictly observed sense of hierarchy. Entry level for the novice was the job of ‘
guetteur
’, a lookout posted to watch the entrance of a building where deals were going on inside. The potential dangers they looked out for included roving unmarked police cars, although that posed a small risk in the core of the police no-go areas. More likely was the threat of rival gang members busting in on their business, which happened frequently and with bloody results. Any sign of trouble, the lookouts would bolt and phone the guys inside, whereupon the guys inside would scram as fast as their feet could carry them. They were the next level up, known in Marseille gang-speak as the ‘
charbonniers
’. Literally, the coalmen. The shovellers, the drones, the ones who kept the fires burning and the money rolling in. On a good night, the dealers might conduct enough small transactions to rake in 12,000 euros, maybe 15,000, selling anything from cannabis resin to crack. They tended to work the stairs, where they could bolt at a moment’s notice without getting boxed in.

The night was sultry and starless, and there was the smouldering electric smell in the air that hinted a thunderstorm might be on its way before too long. The street lights cast a dim ochre glow over the front of the building and the dealers’ white BMW, giving the colourless scene the look of an old sepia-toned photograph. It was after ten. It wouldn’t be long before the first of the night’s customers would start to turn up. Right now, the street was nearly empty. Ben swung open the door of the Hummer and walked out from under the shadows of the trees with the rifle under his jacket. The buttstock jammed tight under his right armpit, the end of the stubby barrel protruding downwards at his waist. Benefits of a bullpup layout, making a full-bore military assault rifle as concealable as a submachine gun. At first glance, it was invisible. At second glance, it was time to run. But the lookout didn’t get as far as the second glance, because his on-the-job experience didn’t include spotting someone like Ben Hope approaching him through the darkness.

The FAMAS was out of the jacket and the muzzle was in the kid’s face before he could react. Up close in the halo of the street light, he was nearer to sixteen than fifteen, with a bumfluff moustache shading his upper lip. Still a kid, but learning fast. His eyes opened wide at the sight of the gun and the stranger behind it.

Ben held the rifle in one hand and extended the other, palm up, fingers splayed. ‘Phone,’ he said.

The kid narrowed his eyes slightly, then reached for his phone and dumped it in Ben’s hand.

‘And the other one,’ he said, nodding at the oblong lump in the kid’s back pocket. Tricksy, these apprentice gangsters. The kid didn’t move. Ben drew in his outstretched hand, gripped the rifle’s black polymer fore-end to support its weight, quickly moved his trigger hand back from the pistol grip to the receiver and jacked a round of Omar’s standard 5.56x45mm NATO ball ammunition into the chamber. There was nothing like that metallic
shlak-schlunk
to get people motivated. The kid instantly obeyed, whipped out his second phone and held it out for Ben.

‘Now beat it,’ he said. ‘Go home to your mother and don’t come back here.’

The kid took off without a second glance at the building he was guarding. Ben slipped the rifle back under his jacket. Looked right, then left. Nobody was around. The dealers would be in place by now, waiting for their first score. They’d be expecting a visitor any moment, but not the one they were going to get. Ben walked under the lights and shoved open the grimy glass doors. They led into a foyer that smelled like a urinal and doubled back on itself after a few metres, where it met a plain metal railing and the foot of the stairs. Graffiti was the only paint the walls had ever seen. The stairs were bare concrete, stained with piss and beer and blood and vomit and whatever else had been spilled on them for nobody to clean up. The sounds of thudding rock music and rap and a baby crying and a woman’s angry yelling all merged together in a cacophony of noise that funnelled down the stairwell from the flats above.

As Ben had expected, he found the three
charbonniers
hanging about the first landing, guarding a bulging sports bag whose contents were probably worth the value of a brand new Mercedes. The one on the left had glazed eyes and looked as if he’d been smoking his own stash. The one on the right was too obese to move very fast. The one in the middle looked sharp and alert and useful. Ben instantly knew he was the one to watch. And he was watching Ben, as Ben climbed the stairs towards them, reached the landing and walked by, turned and started climbing up the next flight.

Ben walked up three steps before he turned and swung out the rifle. He had the high ground, blocking their escape upwards. No escape downwards either. They’d be thinking he wasn’t alone, that his gang buddies would have the door covered already.

Ben kept the rifle trained on the sharp-looking one in the middle. If anyone was going to try anything, it was him. Not that these small-fry dealers generally went armed with much more than a switchblade. The heavy artillery didn’t make an appearance until the next step up in the hierarchy, the guy to whom these three directly answered. That was the ‘
gérant’
, meaning the manager, who recruited, controlled, and now and then weeded out by means of a bullet or a knife the small guys. Each
gérant
was responsible for his own block, running two or three dealers and up to a dozen sentries at a time. The small fortune each block could generate in a day was spouted up to the next level, the ‘
patron’
or mid-level boss who ran as many buildings as his level of seniority, the size of his balls or the limits of his territory would allow. The
patron
was the first of the big guys on the ladder. The ones Ben was interested in. One in particular. But to get to him, you still had to go through the small guys. Which was one key reason why the small guys needed regular culling, to prevent careless talk and to encourage loyalty. Not the most stable working environment.