just a few minutes ago.’
Sabrina looked at him incredulously.
‘This is something he’s been doing lately. Playing practical jokes. You’re not the first person he’s tricked this way. Last time it was he’d been taken up into an alien spacecraft.’
‘But … it sounded real. He was terrified.’
Adam’s grin widened an inch. ‘He could be an actor one day, that one. Anyway, he called on his mobile to say hi to you and that he’s sorry he missed you. He’s having a great time at tennis camp.’
She scanned his face carefully, trying to read his expression. The smile was steady, but there was something in his eyes that made her wonder. ‘What the hell’s going on, Adam?’
He shrugged. ‘Like I said. Consider yourself Rory’s latest victim.’
‘I don’t know. It doesn’t sound right.’
‘Anyway, listen, I’m all ready to go.’
‘You’re leaving? Now?’
‘I did say I had to go.’
‘But the call—’
‘Don’t worry about it. Trust me.’
She sighed loudly. ‘I still can’t believe you’re leaving me here alone like this.’
‘I’ll make it up to you next time, I promise.’ He put down his bags and hugged her tightly the way he’d done when she’d arrived, and she could feel the tension in his body. It was almost as if he thought he was never going to see her again.
Within twenty-four hours of Rupert Shannon’s admission to hospital, Ben’s idea had become a detailed plan, and the plan had quickly developed into a reality. The two-day training course had been cancelled, and Shannon’s close protection team had returned to London to gather their equipment and be picked up at Heathrow by a private jet belonging to Maximilian Steiner. Meanwhile, Ben was making his own way to Switzerland. He didn’t know when he’d be back.
He hated the idea, but it was the only way to resolve the situation. After his conversation with Jeff, he’d called Shannon’s lawyer in London to suggest the only course of action he could see: to take the injured man’s place as team leader, unpaid, until the damaged arm was healed and Shannon was able to resume his role.
After letting Ben stew a little, the lawyer had called back to say that his client had agreed to the deal, and that the new arrangement had been squared with Steiner’s people. In practice, it meant that the team would arrive in Switzerland a day earlier than planned, giving them time to settle in before meeting their billionaire employer.
So it was done. Ben was on his way to a new job. Jeff had been ready to drive him to the airport at Cherbourg, but he’d wanted to take the Mini Cooper. Sitting on a plane with nothing to do except stare out of the window and brood over his situation wasn’t his idea of a good time. Driving to Switzerland to do a job he didn’t want to do wasn’t much better, but at least it would give him something to occupy his mind.
It was a long drive across France. He left early and stuck to the fast roads, cutting eastwards as directly as he could. By the time he bypassed Paris the traffic was building up, and it stayed busy until he hit the countryside beyond the city. He let the CD player loop the same Stefano Bollani jazz piano album round and round at high volume and kept his foot down at a steady eighty, stopping only for fuel and tolls. The concentration of driving helped, but it didn’t completely silence the voices in his head that asked him over and over again:
When the voices reached a fever pitch he just gritted his teeth, gripped the wheel tightly in his fists and stared fixedly ahead as the white lines in the road zipped towards him and waited for his mind to go numb. It never really did.
Sometime in the afternoon he started seeing the first signs for Switzerland, and a little while after that he passed over the border. Most of the traffic was bound for Bern and Lausanne, and thinned out as he followed the winding route upwards into alpine country. The road carved through rolling valleys and pine forests, green fields criss-crossed with country lanes and dotted with farms and villages. He passed through golden acres of sunflowers under a vivid azure sky. Watched the sunlight glitter off the blue-white mountains that hovered over the landscape like distant mirages. The shimmering reflection of the trees was mirrored in the surface of a vast lake. A wooded island rose up out of the water, the grey stone towers of an old monastery peeping through the foliage.
It was the kind of scenery that could take a person’s breath away. But Ben could leave it until another time to appreciate things like the majestic splendour of nature. He kept moving on hard, following the directions he’d been given, and, as the sun turned from gold to red and sank down to kiss the mountaintops, he found himself approaching the secluded Steiner residence.
The estate wall seemed to go on forever. Then, arriving at a set of high iron gates, Ben was stopped by uniformed guards who questioned him and scrutinised the photo on his ID very carefully before waving him inside.
The gates whirred open to let him pass. Cameras mounted on the gateposts and the pretty stone gatehouse swivelled to watch him as he drove on through. Then there was another mile or so of private road, winding through a wood so neat that it looked as if every tree had been placed there by a designer. Ben came to a second set of gates and more guards with radios who waved him on without a word. He drove through a high stone archway and down a broad gravel path, and the trees parted and he caught his first view of the great Maximilian Steiner’s home.
Even with all the troubles on his mind, he whistled to himself at the sight of it. He’d been in some moneyed environments in his time, but this was the kind of property that mere millionaires could only dream of.
You couldn’t call this a house, nor even a mansion. The alpine chateau was a thing of fantasy. The sun’s dying rays glimmered off towers and turrets, columns and arches. It could have been the home of a Bavarian monarch from three centuries ago, but the gleaming white stonework looked as though it had been built yesterday. Around it, acre after endless acre of sweeping lawns and gardens that looked like they’d need an army of groundskeepers to maintain them. Ben wondered at the size of the staff that Steiner must keep on site.
Now he was one of them.
He ran back through what he knew about his new employer. He’d dug up plenty of information online to explain how the Steiner billions were generated: pharmaceutical companies, oil refineries, heavy industry and aviation, with one of Europe’s largest fleets of corporate jets. By contrast, virtually nothing was revealed about the man himself that could have shed more light on the kidnap threat against him.
But even without knowing the full details, Ben could imagine the scenario pretty well. The kidnap business was just like any other. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, barring the occasional revenge job or sex abductions, it came down to money, pure and simple. And he’d seen enough of that world to know the kind of people who would be drawn to the idea of grabbing a guy of Steiner’s extreme wealth, whisking him away to some dingy basement somewhere nobody could ever find him, keeping him chained and starving with a pair of bolt-croppers on standby in case the family needed persuasion of their serious intentions. A finger in the mail was a highly effective means of getting the ransom paid. Ben had seen it all before. And had kind of hoped he wasn’t going to see it again.
The chateau loomed like a sculpted quartz mountain as he approached, and he felt ridiculously dwarfed by it. He pulled the Mini up on the gravel at the bottom of a flight of polished white stone steps that were maybe not quite wide enough to accommodate the wingspan of a Boeing 747 and climbed out, stretching his legs after the long drive.
Someone was coming down the steps to meet him. A man in a beige suit, around fifty, a little shorter than Ben and lightly built with the delicate frame of a lifelong desk guy. As the man walked closer, Ben could see his eyes were sharp and his face lean, the thin hair neatly parted and combed. He put out his hand and greeted Ben in English, which he spoke with only a trace of an accent. The warmth of his smile seemed genuine.
‘Mr Hope? So pleased to meet you. My name is Heinrich Dorenkamp. I am Herr Steiner’s PA. I trust you had a pleasant journey?’
