Conspiracy Thriller 4 E-Book Bundle. Scott Mariani
‘You’re not going to get killed,’ Ben said. ‘A few weeks from now you’ll be back at university and getting on with your life.’
Jude shook his head sadly. ‘If I make it through this, I don’t think I’ll be going back there. I’d already kind of decided to quit. Dad and I argued about it a lot. I suppose you’re going to give me a hard time about it too?’
‘Not a bit of it. Quit to do what?’ Ben asked.
‘I don’t really know yet. I always wanted to do something to help the environment. Maybe I’ll join up with Greenpeace, try to get crew work on board one of their ships.’
Ben lit a cigarette and offered him one. Jude waved it away. ‘Don’t smoke.’
‘You mean you don’t smoke tobacco,’ Ben said.
Jude shot him a glance. ‘I don’t smoke anything else either, unlike a lot of the deadheads that hang around Robbie’s folks’ place. Not that it’s any of your business.’ He went quiet for a while, turned his back on the deck rail and gently rubbed his torn knuckles. They looked painful. Ben knew from experience how much it hurt to vent your anger against solid objects, like brick walls and car dashboards.
He knew how other kinds of pain felt, too.
‘If it’s any consolation, I’ve been there myself,’ he said, letting a stream of smoke blow away on the sea breeze. ‘I lost my parents, a long time ago. I was a bit younger than you when it happened. I know exactly what it’s like to be left all alone in the world.’
‘Did they die in an accident?’
Ben shook his head. ‘I almost wish they had. No, my mother killed herself. My father went soon afterwards. He couldn’t go on.’ He could talk about these things now, though it still pained him after so many years.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jude said. ‘So you’ve got no family either.’
‘I didn’t, for a long time. Until I found my sister Ruth.’
‘Found her?’
‘Ruth was kidnapped as a child, during a family holiday in Morocco. For years, everyone assumed she was dead. We all lost hope. It was what tore the rest of the family apart.’ Ben puffed out a cloud of smoke. ‘Except that she wasn’t dead at all.’
‘How come?’
‘That’s a long story,’ Ben said, and immediately heard Brooke’s voice in his mind.
It always is with you, isn’t it?
‘She lives in Switzerland now,’ he went on, ‘running her own mega-corporation. You’d like her. She’s another Greenie, like you.’
‘Crazy shit,’ Jude said, gazing out to sea.
‘I suppose it’s been a crazy life,’ Ben said.
It was 12.30 p.m. local time when the ferry docked at the cold, sleety port of Calais and they disembarked and breezed through customs. ‘Are you sure we’ll make it to Paris in this thing?’ Jude asked uncertainly as Ben fired up the Vauxhall and a cloud of black smoke belched from its exhaust.
Once they were safely away from the watchful security officials at the port, Ben pulled into a side street and got out of the car. Ignoring Jude’s nonstop questions as to what the hell he was doing, he crouched down on the pavement to peer at the filth-crusted underside of the Vauxhall, produced a small clasp knife and slit the winding of duct tape that secured the two-foot-long plastic-wrapped item to one of the rusty chassis tubes.
‘I think I know what that is,’ Jude said suspiciously as Ben detached it from the bottom of the car, glanced quickly up and down the street and then slipped the object into his bag.
‘There,’ Ben said. ‘Now you know why we didn’t take a flight.’
‘You just smuggled a dirty great gun through customs!’
Ben shrugged. ‘Let’s hope the nasty terrorists don’t get the same idea. Now grab your rucksack. This car’s scrap. There’s a Hertz place two minutes’ walk from here.’
They picked up a silver Renault Laguna at the car rental office and quickly left the north coast behind them, cutting down through the Pas de Calais and Picardy towards Paris, three hours’ drive to the south. Ben pressed the Laguna on hard, carving through the motorway traffic and keeping an eye out for police.
Sometime after Amiens, he turned on the radio to escape the monotonous roar of the heater, only to find a classical music station playing Chopin’s Marche Funèbre. As if he needed a reminder that Simeon and Michaela’s funeral could be, for all he knew, taking place at that very moment. He quickly hit the tuner button, scanning through a jumble of music and talk until he landed on a jazz station and turned up the volume.
Nearly four hours had gone by since leaving Calais when Jude stretched, yawned and glanced at a passing road sign for Orléans. ‘My French geography isn’t exactly up to scratch, but as far as I can tell we seem to have passed Paris some time ago.’
‘Well spotted.’
‘Thought you were planning on leaving me there?’
‘That was the plan,’ Ben said. ‘But remember what you said before about me not trusting you?’
‘I remember,’ Jude said warily.
‘You were right. It seems to me that if I leave you in Paris, the moment my back’s turned, you’ll be haring after me across France. Correct?’
Jude threw up his arms in protest, then relented. ‘I’ve as much right to find out what’s going on as you have. They were my parents.’
‘I understand,’ Ben said. ‘But I’m serious. You stick close by me and do exactly what I say. No more messing around, or I’ll truss you up like a Christmas turkey and you can spend the rest of the journey shut in the boot.’
‘You’d do that, wouldn’t you?’
‘Like I said, we handle this my way. Promise?’
‘Promise,’ Jude said reluctantly. ‘Does this military regime extend to stopping anytime soon for a bite to eat? I’m starving.’
Lunch was a cold ham baguette and a bottle of mineral water at a motorway service station. They said little, and listened to the drumming of the freezing rain on the car roof. Ben used the Laguna’s sat nav to check his route southwards: the motorway would carry them straight down past Bourges and Clermont-Ferrand, cutting through the Auvergne region and the Massif Central, then finally into the Midi-Pyrénées.
Meanwhile, wheels were in motion and the powerful information-gathering machine that was the Trimble Group was doing its work, sucking in data from contacts most government agencies could only dream of, processing it at light speed and siphoning it directly through the appropriate channels. The encrypted email landed with a little ping on Rex O’Neill’s screen on his desk in Capri at precisely the moment Ben Hope was using his credit card to pay for the rental car at the Hertz office in the Port of Calais. O’Neill opened it and saw the names Hope and Arundel, together with the details and exact times of their clearing passport control into France.
He had a decision to make. He could either keep this information to himself, refuse to cooperate with the plans of a man he now believed to be a lunatic, or else he could do what his job required him to do and notify his boss that his current number one target had just reappeared on the radar along with a very interesting travelling companion.
O’Neill stared at the screen for a long time, undecided and wishing fervently that he had never been given this assignment. He reached across his desk, picked up the little framed portrait photo of Megan and gazed tenderly at it for a moment, thinking how beautiful she was and how much he longed to be back in London with her instead of stuck in this gilded cage serving the egomaniacal whims of a man like Penrose Lucas.
‘What