Ben slowly set down his case. Reached into his pocket and took out the cigarettes and lighter. Picked out a cigarette, put it to his lips, thumbed the Zippo and lit up. He took his time blowing out the smoke. Then asked, ‘Me and you lot outside? What for?’
‘So that we can express our thanks to you for losing our fucking jobs for us,’ Neville said. Woodcock laughed. Morgan just kept up the sneer. Burton, Powell and Jackson were nodding in agreement.
Ben took another drag on his cigarette and watched the smoke drift up to the ceiling. ‘I don’t think that would be a very wise idea,’ he said. ‘There’s already one of you in the hospital.’
‘Fucking smartarse,’ Neville spat.
‘You can’t smoke in here, shithead,’ Powell said, pointing at the cigarette.
Ben gave him a long, calm look and held it until the guy broke eye contact. He took another pull on the cigarette and savoured the taste of it. Then let out another cloud of smoke.
The alarm went off with a piercing electronic blast.
Ben looked up at it. It was right over the heads of the men. Just a little white plastic disc screwed to the ceiling, no bigger in diameter than an espresso saucer, but the volume of the furious, eardrum-rattling shriek it emitted was wildly, ridiculously disproportionate to its size. It sounded like a squadron of Tornado jet fighters taking off inside the room.
Ben frowned up at the alarm for about half a second, then reached his hand behind his hip. Drew out the kidnappers’ Beretta and brought it up to aim, thumbing off the safety and squeezing the trigger almost simultaneously.
9mm Parabellum is not the biggest, fastest or most potent handgun calibre in the world, but the sound of an unsilenced round going off in an enclosed space is massive and stunning. The harsh bark of the gunshot swallowed the scream of the alarm, and – an indetectably tiny fraction of a second later – the copper-jacketed bullet blew the white disc, the circuit-board and miniature speaker into a million pieces of plastic and silicone and solder. Ben kept firing as fast as his finger could move – BLAM-BLAM-BLAM – so that the blasting shots almost blended into one continuous detonation, like a length of high-explosive demolition cord going off.
By the time he’d stopped firing, Ben had pumped out half the magazine. Plaster dust and pieces of ceiling and the shattered remains of the alarm rained down onto the heads of the team. Morgan was cowering with his hands over his ears. Neville blinked and spluttered, his hair and face white with dust.
Suddenly there was silence in the room, just the ringing in Ben’s ears that made the coughs and yells of the men sound muffled and distant.
‘Cathartic,’ he said. He flung the half-empty pistol on the floor at their feet, snatched up his case and walked out of the building.
Outside, the sun was still warm.
He turned his face up to the sky. ‘Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.’
It didn’t take long to hunt down Dieter and get the key to the Mini from him. Ben walked over to the chateau’s garage block and found his car squeezed up next to the boxy hulk of a brand new Rolls. He hit a button on the wall to open up the steel shutter, got in the Mini and left a long, deep pair of tyre ruts across the gravel. He didn’t glance back once in the rearview mirror as he left the Steiner place behind.
Then it was the long journey home. And he’d thought he was preoccupied on the way out to Switzerland. As he pushed the car on hard and fast, the thoughts swirled furiously round inside his head.
What was wrong with him? Was this some kind of mid-life crisis hitting? Was he losing his edge at last?
Maybe Rupert Shannon had been right. Maybe the best place for him was behind a desk, marking time until he became just another double-chinned, bloodshot-eyed, cigar-chewing businessman with his gut hanging out over his lap, arteries more furred up than a chinchilla coat and a resting heart-rate of a hundred and fifty beats a minute. The well-trodden road to an early death. Perhaps that was all he was good for.
But the thought that was lodged in his head more than any other – spinning round and round like a pinball as the miles flew by, long after he’d passed back over the Swiss border and was heading westwards across France – was of the woman.
Thinking the same thing over and over again. Round and round, getting louder and more bewildering with every passing mile.
It couldn’t be true. And yet …
He gripped the wheel tightly as he drove, as though somehow by holding on he wouldn’t lose his grip on reality. But he was scared that he was.
So scared that he was shaking. So scared, that he could hardly bring himself to dredge up out of the dark corners of his memory the things that had happened all those years ago. The events that had changed his life and shaped his whole destiny.
Sometime after Paris, the first raindrop spattered out of the darkness onto his windscreen. By the time he reached Normandy, around eleven, his headlights were cutting a twin swathe through the hammering rain and the road was slick and shiny.
Rainwater was cascading off the roofs of the buildings at Le Val and streaming across the cobbled yard as Ben pulled up outside the farmhouse. On a normal night, in a normal mood, he might have run to the door to avoid getting soaked by the deluge. Tonight wasn’t a normal night. He didn’t care enough to hurry, and his hair and jacket were dripping wet as he walked inside the door and dumped his case in the hall.
He was about to head for the stairs and the sanctuary of his private apartment when he heard what sounded like a movie playing and noticed the flickering strip of light under the door of the living room down the hall. He walked down the hall, opened the door and stepped inside.
Two faces turned as he walked in. Brooke and Jeff, sitting among heaps of cushions at opposite ends of the three-seater sofa. The lights were off, and the big TV screen threw shadows across the room. Looked like some kind of vampire movie, loud and colourful and bloody. The table in front of Jeff was littered with beer cans. Brooke had a steaming mug of something. Cocoa was her favourite, and she had that homely way of clutching it with both hands.
It was good to see them again.
‘What are you guys watching?’
‘What the hell are
Brooke was staring at him. ‘You’re drenched.’
‘It’s raining,’ Ben said.
Jeff snatched up the remote and paused the DVD. A big open red-fanged mouth was frozen on the screen. ‘Why aren’t you in Switzerland?’
‘Job’s over,’ Ben said.
Jeff made a face. ‘What are you going on about?’
Ben walked over to the sofa and sat down heavily between them. ‘You haven’t heard?’
‘Heard what?’ Brooke said.
‘I’m surprised Shannon’s gunslinger of a lawyer hasn’t called yet. First thing in the morning, I expect we’ll be hearing from him.’
Jeff and Brooke both looked baffled.
‘Remember what I said to Shannon about being sent home in disgrace?’ Ben said. ‘Well, that’s pretty much what’s happened to me.’
He spent the next few minutes explaining the events of that afternoon, with just a few minor omissions. He didn’t tell them about the woman in the woods. He felt guilty about lying to his friends – but there was no way he could admit the whole truth.
As he talked them through it, he could see the deepening frown on Brooke’s face and the darkening flush of anger on Jeff’s.
‘Let me get this right,’ Jeff said. ‘You save the old bugger’s arse, and then he gives you the boot just because you, completely on your own, can’t stop a whole team of armed kidnappers from legging it back to their van? Maybe
