How many times had I been asked that, eh? ‘Yes, it really is.’
‘You are named after a mountain?’
‘No, I am named after a race horse. My surname is Nevis, my father had an interest in a business owned by a racehorse owner and got a tip to back a horse called Ben Nevis in the 1980 Grand National and won a fortune. He celebrated by naming me Ben.’
She gave me a last smile. ‘I’ll expect a call.’ And she was gone, leaving behind a whiff of perfume in the air that probably cost more per bottle than my monthly rent.
I studied her business card: not much information there, just the name Eve Rambart and a mobile number.
A million pounds is a lot of money for a hit, and also a lot of time in prison if you get caught. I wouldn’t get caught – I work to a plan, a plan I always stick to. I’ve done some pretty illegal things in my time, all PIs do. Well, not all – some just do the usual ‘follow the wife and see who’s shagging her’ type work for divorce lawyers. Not my scene. I mainly offer protection work for celebs, keeping the fans and paparazzi at arm’s length, or I negotiate with some heavy crime boss for the return of a stolen piece of art on behalf of the insurance company. They’d rather pay a thief a couple of hundred thousand pounds to get it returned than a couple of million to the policy holder if it isn’t.
But I’d never been offered a hit in such an open way. With crime bosses it usually comes from an intermediary of an intermediary of an intermediary, ten steps down the ladder from the boss who orders it so he can go to the funeral and shed crocodile tears as he plots to take over the deceased’s turf. I rang the Gold Digger.
Alison Gold, nickname Gold Digger – I just call her Gold: five foot eight, late thirties, medium build, hair in a fringe to her neck – sometimes she’s blonde, sometimes brunette, sometimes redhead – with natural brown eyes that would change depending on what colour contact lenses she had in. Overall, Alison is a nice attractive-looking lady, but beneath the well-groomed exterior lays another Alison – the Alison who’s parents and siblings had been killed in their Ashkelad home by a rocket fired across the Palestinian border from Gaza into Israel by Hamas; the Alison who had refused to be fostered and formed a bad habit back in her teens of Gold Digging, hitting on wealthy men of a certain age and relieving them not of their sexual urges but of a good proportion of their wealth in cash or expensive gifts in order to live, which is where her nickname came from. She always targeted a married man with a reputation to lose or a ‘celeb name’, so calling in the police once you’d been duped by the Gold Digger wasn’t an option if you wanted to maintain your reputation or fan base; and especially not if the duped one had a wife who might not be very understanding to the situation. Alison had been conscripted into national service with the Israeli Defence Force and found she liked the life. It gave her security and the chance of revenge for her family loss. She was soon noticed as a bit special and moved into Mossad. She was an ideal fit, exactly what they and most elite military squads want, a person with no family ties and the ability to make a cool and measured assessment of a situation. That’s Alison.
We go back to the Afghan war when the N14 unit I was attached to in 2011 went into Pakistan by Chinook to cover a USA special ops SEAL unit that been sent in to kill Osama Bin Laden and then had one of their choppers malfunction. Our emergency brief was to blow up the trapped chopper if it couldn’t get back and totally destroy Bin Laden’s compound – anything of use to an enemy had to be destroyed. We were low on manpower at that time with many operations against Al Qaeda going on and requested help from Mossad to assist in case the Pakistanis got wind of the operation and came to stop it. The Mossad unit we got was their Kidon unit which specialises in assassinations. Originally formed by Golda Meir in 1972 after the Munich Olympic’s Israeli athlete murders to track and kill every one of the PLO Black September group that had carried out those murders. By 1979 that mission had been accomplished and Kidon was reassigned to assassinate Iran nuclear scientists and top military generals of the Iran Revolutionary Guard; the latest one being Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, their top nuclear scientist killed by a machine gun mounted on a truck and operated via a satellite using facial recognition software. It’s a long way from a bullet in the head or a slit throat which were the kill options of choice in my active days.
Anyway, everything went fine at the Bin Laden compound, the USA copter got off the ground and we all fled over the Pakistan border before they could react. At the debriefings Gold and I, as heads of our units, were debriefed together to make sure our stories matched, and then we went our separate ways. I went over the age limit for N14 and was seconded into the Met’s Organised Crime Squad, did a stint there and then moved into the private sector where I am now. Gold ended her association with Kidon as they only use you for three years, and went back to her elite Israeli military group Flotilla 13; finding that didn’t set the adrenalin alight after Kidon, she left and went into personal security in London with a nice sideline by resuming her gold-digging. She
