The Babylon Idol. Scott Mariani
… I just thought …’ Her voice trailed off, and then she shook her head. ‘God, what a mess. Who could have done this to him? I can’t understand. I mean, Jeff never hurt anybody.’
Ben thought about that. You couldn’t be the high-level military operator Jeff Dekker had once been without hurting anyone, or at least being involved in a good deal of it. Special Forces made enemies around the world and there was no shortage of folks who would go to all kinds of lengths to get back at them if they could. But the shroud of secrecy around the Special Boat Service, Jeff’s old unit, was no different from the impenetrable cloak that protected the identities of operatives within Ben’s own former 22 SAS regiment. Practically nobody on the outside knew who these men were. Targeted revenge attacks against individuals in response for things they had done in the name of their country were pretty much unheard of. Unless someone within their own unit had somehow been turned or manipulated by a third party with an axe to grind, or gone bad themselves. Ben had already worked through a mental list of possible candidates, and crossed their names off one by one until none remained.
‘Whoever it was,’ he said, ‘they’ve just made the biggest mistake of their life.’
She looked at him, understanding from the look in his eyes what he was thinking. Brooke knew him well enough, from long experience, to know exactly how he was liable to respond in this situation.
‘Leave it to the police, Ben. Hasn’t there been enough trouble already?’
‘It seems to me that the shooter isn’t having any trouble at all,’ Ben said. ‘He got in, did his work, and got out. Job done, nice and easy. Now he’s out there somewhere enjoying life with a clear conscience. I can’t let that happen.’
‘So you’re taking it upon yourself to sort things out. As usual.’ Brooke said it with an exaggerated tone of resignation.
‘You haven’t met Inspector Tarrare and his goon squad. They couldn’t catch the flu in the middle of an epidemic. Don’t try to twist this around, Brooke. If that was me lying in that hospital bed, breathing through a machine, Jeff would do the same thing and you know it.’
‘Jeff needs you here.’
‘As in, don’t go running off and getting yourself killed?’ he said. He almost added, ‘Why should you care anyway?’ But he bit his lip. He’d already said too much.
She gave a sour laugh. ‘What am I saying? As if anyone had a chance in hell of stopping you, once your mind’s made up. Running off when people need you around is what you do best, after all.’
That hit below the belt. Ben could have replied, ‘You were the one who broke off the engagement, not me.’ But this was no time for a drawn-out argument. He clenched his teeth and said nothing.
‘I didn’t come here to fight,’ Brooke said sadly after a beat. ‘I’ll go now, before one of us says something we’ll both regret.’
There was no physical contact between them as she was leaving. He wanted to reach out to her, even if he didn’t deserve the comfort of her touch. He stood in the door and watched the tail-lights of the Renault Clio disappear up the track towards the gates, where she’d have to run the gauntlet of zombie reporters clamouring for their story. Then she was gone, and the rainy night closed in behind her.
Ben could have done with some company, but Tuesday had disappeared. He returned to the kitchen and swallowed down some more whisky. Still the best cure ever devised for delayed shock, and other things.
He wandered back outside into the rain. Out of the darkness came a familiar shape, and a wet nose nudged Ben’s hand in greeting. Storm trotted by his side as he crossed the yard, looking up at him curiously. The dog seemed subdued, as if he understood something.
Ben walked over to the dark, silent office building opposite the house. Inside, he flipped on the light. Looked at Jeff’s empty desk. Sat down at his own, and stared into space. It was cold inside the office building, but Ben was too numb to feel the chill. Just like he was too sick to feel hungry, even though his stomach was empty apart from ten-year-old Laphroaig. Maybe he needed to drink some more, because the image of Jeff lying there in the hospital kept coming back to him. He tried to flush it out of his mind’s eye by picturing the unknown shooter. The blank face behind the rifle. Ben wondered what he was doing right this moment, what he was thinking.
‘I’ll find you,’ he said out loud. ‘Don’t ever think I won’t.’
But he wasn’t going to find him tonight. Wherever the shooter had gone, he had a head start that Ben knew he couldn’t hope to make up by going off half-cocked, jumping in his car and tearing off on a revenge mission with not a single clue or lead.
Tomorrow would be another day.
Until then, Ben could only bide his time, lay aside his restless thoughts and try to relax.
As he sat there at the desk, he looked down and saw the unopened letter from the Bollati penitentiary in Milan, lying there exactly where he’d left it that morning when he’d gone to help Jeff with the fallen tree. He’d forgotten all about it until now.
He gazed at it for a moment. He had nothing better to do, and maybe it would help take his mind off things. He picked up the envelope, slipped out the letter. Unfolded it.
And began to read.
The letter was handwritten on three thin sheets of headed Bollati prison paper. The first thing that caught Ben’s eye was that it was in Italian, a language he spoke less fluently than French but in which he nonetheless could hold his own pretty well. The second thing he noticed was the handwriting itself, a fine flowing italicised script that very few people could produce any more, and which clearly showed its author as being someone of a certain age and education.
At the top of the first page the November date, a few days earlier than the postmark on the envelope, told him that it had been written while he, Jeff and Tuesday were fighting for their lives in Africa. No indication of the writer’s identity, so Ben flicked over to the last page and ran his eye down to the bottom. His eyes narrowed in surprise when he saw the signature.
The letter’s author was one Fabrizio Severini.
A name Ben recognised immediately. It flooded his mind with memories from years back, returning him to a chapter in his life when he’d still been working freelance as what people in that little-known trade called a ‘K&R crisis consultant’. The K and R stood for kidnap and ransom, which had been Ben’s particular area of expertise in those days. When vulnerable, innocent people – many of them children – were taken by ruthless criminals looking to extort money from their loved ones, and when the conventional avenues for getting them back had been tried and failed, it had been Ben’s job to employ his own specialised means to hunt the kidnappers and bring the victims home as unscathed as possible. The kidnappers had rarely come out of it unscathed themselves. It had been a dangerous business for them once Ben was involved.
Dangerous for Ben, too. And the strange mission that had indirectly brought him into contact with Fabrizio Severini had been one of the most hazardous of them all. What had started as the race to save the life of a child had led Ben through some unexpected twists and turns before placing him in conflict with one of the most tenacious, ruthless enemies he’d ever encountered, a man named Massimiliano Usberti.
Usberti was a rogue senior Italian archbishop who controlled a secret and powerful Christian fundamentalist cult called Gladius Domini: Sword of God. Its brainwashed members, branded with a tattoo to show their allegiance, were prepared to kidnap, torture or assassinate anyone who stood in Usberti’s way. One of Usberti’s trusted inner circle had been a psychopathic killer called Franco Bozza. Another had been his close aide and personal secretary, Fabrizio Severini. Ben had worked alongside the only law enforcement officer he’d ever trusted, the intensely cerebral, sharp-witted and fiercely driven Parisian cop Luc Simon