‘I wish I could.’
‘Don’t worry so much, Ingrid. You’re one of the good guys, remember.’ He touched her arm affectionately.
She pulled it away, avoiding his eyes.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, seeing her look.
‘It’s not the way you think.’
‘What do you mean?’
Why hadn’t she listened to her better judgement and let him go? He wasn’t like the others. She wanted to take back the last few seconds and tell him to run, run like hell.
But it had gone too far for that. He’d had six drops of the drug, and in a few more seconds it was going to kick in. It was tasteless and odourless and he had no idea what was happening. He smiled, but his eyes were beginning to glaze.
She knew what they were going to do to him. She’d signed his death warrant.
He slipped down from his stool. The strange feeling was spreading fast through him, and he barely had time to register it or fight it. His knee wobbled under his weight. His leg seemed to shoot out in front of him and he felt himself going down as if in slow motion. He hit the floor and watched numbly as his glass shattered beside him.
His vision began to cloud. He looked up at her standing over him. She was talking on the phone. When she spoke into it her voice sounded deep and booming and far away.
‘You can come and get him now,’ Eve said, looking down at him. He was losing consciousness. His head slumped on the floor.
She knelt down beside him and stroked his hair. ‘I’m so very sorry,
Four minutes later, the men came for him. They burst into Eve’s flat, picked him up off the floor and carried him out to the waiting van.
Consciousness returned to Ben in staggered layers. First he was dimly aware of the vibration pulsing through his skull where his head was resting against the hard metal of the wheel arch. His vision was blurry and he felt sick. Suddenly he was aware of being terribly, terribly cold. His body was racked with shivering and his teeth were chattering.
He was sprawled across the floor of a rattling truck. The tin walls around him resonated loudly with the engine and transmission whine. He groaned and shifted, trying to get to his feet. His head was still spinning.
Memories came back to him in fragments. He remembered Ingrid’s flat. Being hit by the car. Before that, the running chase through the streets. Kinski injured.
He remembered now. He’d been drugged.
He grabbed hold of one of the reinforcing braces inside the metal shell and dragged himself upright. The truck was lurching and bouncing and it was hard to stand. There were no windows. He looked at his watch. It was nearly six o’clock. He must have been on the road for over an hour and a half. Where were they taking him?
The rattling, juddering journey lasted another quarter of an hour, the truck slowing as the road got rougher. He staggered across from one wall to the other as it swerved violently into a turning, then stopped. He heard the sound of doors slamming, and at least three different men’s voices, all speaking in rapid, harsh German. He felt the vehicle reverse, and its engine sound was suddenly echoey and reverberating as though the truck was inside a big metal space.
The doors opened and he was dazzled by the lights. Powerful hands gripped him by the arms and hauled him out of the van. He dropped to his hands and knees on cold concrete and looked around him, blinking. Around him were seven, eight, nine men, all armed with either pistols or Heckler & Koch machine carbines. They all had the look of ex-military, serious faces, eyes cold and calm.
The prefabricated building looked like an old air-base hangar, stretching out on all sides like a vast aluminium cathedral. The concrete floor was painted green. The only furnishings were a tubular chair and a metal table. A fire blazed in a glass-fronted stove with a long steel flue that rose to the ceiling.
Standing in the middle of the huge open space, warming his hands over the stove, was a tall man in black. Sandy hair, cropped short.
Ben narrowed his eyes against the bright lights. He knew this man. Who the hell was he?
One of the men with guns got too close and Ben saw a crazy chance. He lashed out with the rigid edge of his hand, fingers curled. The man let out a choking squawk as his throat was crushed, and fell squirming to the floor clutching his neck. The stubby black H&K was spinning in mid-air when Ben snatched it. It was cocked. He flipped off the safety. He was faster than these men, and he could bring them all down before they got him.
Maybe.
The gun clattered from his hands and he fell to the floor along with it, his whole body quaking in a spasm. Curly plastic wires connected the dart in his flesh to the taser gun that one of the guards was holding-the one Ben hadn’t seen, the one who had come out from behind the truck. The strong electric current flowed through him, controlling his muscles, rendering him completely helpless.
‘That’s enough,’ the tall man in black said.
The pulsing shock stopped. Ben gasped for air, lying flat on the concrete. One of the guards had his canvas haversack. The guard walked over to the tall man and handed the bag to him. The man emptied the bag out on a steel table, spilling out Ben’s roll of spare clothes, his first-aid kit, the Para-Ordnance .45.
But the man was more interested in the box-file. He flipped open the lid and thumbed through Oliver’s notes, nodding to himself. This was the stuff. His instructions were clear.
He bunched the notes up in a big fist, opened the stove door and slammed the papers inside. Ben’s head sank to the floor as he watched his friend’s notes burst into yellow flame, curl and blacken. This time, they burned away to nothing. Tatters of ash fluttered up the stove-pipe.
Now the man picked up the rolled-up Mozart letter. He jerked away the ribbon and tossed it over his shoulder. He unfurled the old paper and ran his eyes up and down it cursorily, a look of derision on his face.
For a moment Ben thought he was going to burn it too. But then he rolled it back up and dropped it in a cardboard tube. He set the tube to one side, and started sifting back through the stuff on the table. This time his hand came up clutching the CD case. He nodded to himself, checked the disc was there, then snicked it shut and stuffed it in the side pocket of his combat trousers. He looked satisfied. ‘Bring him over here,’ he said to the guards.
Ben groaned as they picked him up by the arms and half-dragged him across the hangar. A length of heavy chain hung from a steel beam high up in the ceiling, stopping about seven feet above the concrete floor. There was a gun to his head. His arms were jerked outwards and he felt the cold metal bite of cuffs on his wrists. Two pairs of cuffs, one pair for each wrist. They raised his arms up and clipped the other end of the cuffs to the dangling chain. Then they backed off, eight men standing in a wide semicircle around him. Gun-muzzles were trained on him from every direction. He could just about stand, taking the weight on his feet instead of his wrists.
The big man walked up closer. His head was cocked to one side, his face cracked into a smirk. Ben knew what was coming next.
The man planted his feet, curled his meaty right hand into a fist and put his back into it. He was powerful and he’d done this before. The punch was a good one. Ben flexed his abdominal muscles for the blow, but it wasn’t enough. The wind whistled out of him. His knees sagged and he hung from his chained arms.
‘Good to see you again, Hope. Remember me? I
Ben got his breath back and rolled his eyes up to look at him. He remembered now.
Small world. Jack Glass. The psychopathic bastard who’d nearly killed him fifteen years earlier in the Brecon Beacons.
Ben’s mind was struggling to put it together. Why Glass, why here, why this?
Glass grinned, flicked a bead of sweat from his brow and started rolling up his sleeves. ‘It’s been a long time,’ he said.
Ben watched him. He was much heavier than he’d been in SAS selection days, but the extra bulk wasn’t flab. His forearms were thick and muscular, as though he’d been working out with weights for hours every day, year on
