скачать книгу бесплатно
Then he thought, Middle East. War. Nazim al-Kassar. ISIL.
Hmm again. Tantalising. Not exactly what a detective would consider hard evidence of an actual connection. But enough to make Ben curious to know more.
The website featured a little ‘About Our Founder’ bio of Julien Segal. A small photo showed a man in his early fifties, with a full head of silver hair and a craggily handsome face with striking, penetrative eyes like a hawk’s. He had spent decades travelling the world and been personally responsible for the rescue of countless ancient artifacts that otherwise would have been lost. He supplied museums, private and corporate collections, gave lecture tours and worked closely with international cultural heritage groups such as UNESCO and ECCO, the European Confederation of Conservation Organisations.
Ben dialled the Institute’s number on his burner phone and was put through to a female receptionist. He could tell right away from her tone of voice that the police must already have been in touch. She sounded as if she’d been crying, and might be about to burst into tears again at any moment.
Ben asked to speak to Monsieur Segal. The woman replied, ‘I’m afraid he’s currently out of the country. He travels a great deal. Can I be of any—?’ She’d been about to say ‘assistance’, but before she got that far her emotions got the better of her and she choked up. It took her a few moments to regain her composure. ‘Please forgive me. We’ve just received the most awful news. In fact the Institute is closing early for the day. One of our colleagues was found dead this morning. It’s … it’s just so heartbreaking. Romy was so loved by everyone here. She had only recently returned from a field trip overseas. And now …’ Her voice trailed off with a sigh.
‘That’s shocking. My sincere condolences. I’m so sorry if I called at a bad time.’
She’d sounded at first as though she wanted, or needed, to talk, which Ben was pleased about because the more information he could fish for, the better. But now the woman seemed to compose herself and tighten up, as though suddenly conscious that she was blurting out her heart to a total stranger. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.’
‘Dubois,’ Ben said. ‘Bernard Dubois. And you must be—?’
‘Jeanne.’
‘Of course, that’s right,’ he said, bluffing like hell. Sometimes you could win them over with a little charm. ‘Jeanne, I wonder if you can tell me when Monsieur Segal is expected back in the country?’
‘Not for several more days at least.’
Ben didn’t know whether she was telling the truth or giving him the brush-off. She sounded as though she wanted to get off the phone, so he pressed a little harder. ‘Is there another number I could reach him on? It’s really rather important.’
‘No, I’m sorry, I can’t help you there. It would be better to call back in a few days.’
‘I’ll do that, thanks.’
She sniffed and said, ‘I really must go. Everyone here is very upset.’
‘Just one more question, Jeanne. Was Romy expected at work today?’
She hesitated, obviously finding the question weird. The information would help Ben piece together Romy’s movements that morning, which might come in useful as he learned more. But Jeanne wasn’t taking the bait. ‘I’m sorry, but who exactly are you?’
‘Don’t worry about it. Apologies for having called at this difficult time.’
Ben ended the call before she could say more. So much for winning them over with charm.
He went back to examining Romy’s phone. Address book, call records, texts, emails; he was running out of options and didn’t have much to show for it so far. All that remained for him to check out was the folder containing image files.
Lots of folks went about snapping anything that moved, subscribed heavily to the selfie craze and had thousands of photos crammed into their phones, but Romy wasn’t one of those people. She had only five files stored in the images folder. They were arranged in chronological order. Ben opened the oldest one first, dating back to January.
The image was a self-taken shot of Romy and a young guy about the same age as her, slightly built, who looked like he might be Moroccan or Algerian. Ben wondered if this was Michel, the boyfriend. They were hugging each other and grinning cheesy grins for the camera on a cloudy beach somewhere, maybe the north coast up near Calais. They were dressed for winter, hats and coats and woolly scarves, and the sea breeze was blowing her hair across her face. She looked happy. The young guy, too. It was a sad picture, in retrospect.
The next photo had been taken three months ago, inside what appeared to be a bar. Ben could see tables covered with glassware and bottles, and red vinyl bench seating and other people in the background. Another image taken not long afterwards the same day showed the two of them posing outside the bar, pulling silly faces. Ben could see the faded lettering painted on the bar window that spelled out backwards the words LE GERONIMO.
Ben laid down Romy’s phone for a moment and tried Michel’s number again on his burner. Still no reply.
He returned to her phone. The fourth photo was a blurry shot of an older couple, taken in the dining room in a middle-class family home a couple of months ago. It looked like someone’s birthday, though the older couple didn’t seem to be having a great time. They both bore a faint resemblance to Romy: her parents, he assumed. Her father had the pasty complexion of a chronic cardiac sufferer and her mother looked like an uptight sort. They were centred at the end of a table bearing a cake festooned with candles, the smiling, goofy faces of some other people peering in at the edges of the frame. Romy wasn’t among them, so Ben assumed she’d been behind the camera. Photography hadn’t been her greatest talent in life, that was for sure.
When he tried to open the fifth and most recent picture file, just three days old, he discovered two things about it. First, that it wasn’t a picture file at all but a much larger video clip. Second, that it was encrypted.
A window popped up requesting a PIN number. Beneath that was a prompt asking him ‘Forget your passcode?’ When he tapped it, the phone asked him for a security question. Which could be anything in the world, and after a couple of failed attempts the whole phone might lock itself up. He didn’t even bother trying.
Now why would Romy have encrypted the video file when she hadn’t made any attempt to protect the rest of her phone data? That fact alone singled it out as an item of particular interest, and Ben’s curiosity was piqued. It could be all kinds of things. Something private, obviously. Possibly something very personal that Romy didn’t want anyone to see.
Which left open the possibility that the clip could be something more pertinent to the questions Ben was trying to answer. He needed to get into that video file.
He was no expert on how to access inaccessible digital data. But he knew someone who was.
Chapter 11 (#ulink_e1f04a84-e1d4-5fdb-98f3-653cc338fd1e)
Thierry Chevrolet wasn’t named after a famous American automobile marque. His surname was derived from an old French word meaning a goat farmer. But goat farming wasn’t how Thierry made his living, either.
Back when Ben had operated as a freelance kidnap and hostage rescue specialist, his work had taken him to many different countries and necessitated a number of false identities. Passports, driving licences, ID cards and other official papers all had to be perfect to avoid unnecessary entanglements with the authorities and allow him to slip about under the radar. He’d gone to a couple of dodgy characters in the forgery trade, one in London, one in Amsterdam, before he’d found the then twenty-nine-year-old Thierry working out of a tiny apartment in Paris. He was a nervous, skinny guy with a bush of Afro hair and a reedy moustache, and talked in a whispery voice owing to the fact that he only had one lung. Hardly the archetype of the master criminal. But after seeing a sample of his work Ben had hired him on the spot to produce a variety of false papers. He’d been more than pleased with the results.
Now and then things would get hot and one of Ben’s fake identities would have to be ditched and replaced, so he had been able to offer Thierry a steady stream of work. The pair had got to know each other well. Ben had discovered that in addition to being an excellent forger, Thierry was also a wizard with anything techno-orientated. On a few occasions he’d employed him to hack emails, raid computer files and unlock phones ‘confiscated’ from associates of kidnappers. If Thierry couldn’t hack and crack his way into it, you might as well toss it in the bin.
And now Ben had a new assignment for him.
Last time they’d had dealings was years ago, before Ben had retired from freelance work, moved to France full-time and joined up with Jeff Dekker to set up the tactical training centre at Le Val. He had no idea whether the guy was still active.
Ben levered up the loose floorboard in the safehouse’s bedroom, dug around in the cavity below and pulled out a padded envelope sealed with tape. Inside were a couple of examples of Thierry’s artistry, a British passport in the name Paul Harris, and a French one for the fictitious Vincent Fournier. Each had served him well on a few occasions.
Wrapped up with the fake passports was a dog-eared old notebook in which Ben had kept lists of contacts in those days. Thierry’s number was marked just by the letter T. He dialled it, but there was no answer. Maybe it was a long shot. Thierry could have changed his phone, or emigrated, or gone straight and got a job, or died, or been caught and sent to jail. Any of which possibilities would leave Ben in a tricky situation. The issue wasn’t finding someone else who could unlock the encrypted video file. It was finding someone who wouldn’t ask questions about what Ben was doing with a phone belonging to the victim of an unsolved murder. Petty crooks often greased the wheels of their good fortune by acting as police informants on the side. Thierry, by contrast, was far too honourable a criminal to ever rat on a client.
Ben ruminated on his problem by brewing up another pot of Lavazza. In his experience, solutions often presented themselves just by virtue of drinking more coffee. There was no such thing as too much.
And experience proved right when, halfway through his second cup, the phone buzzed with Thierry’s number on the screen.
Ben answered, expecting to hear the forger’s familiar raspy, whispery tones. But it wasn’t Thierry calling. It was a woman, and she sounded pissed off. Even more so when she heard Ben’s voice.
She said, ‘Shit. I thought it was him.’
‘Thierry?’
‘You a friend of his? Because if you are, tell him Abby wants his fucking junk out of her fucking place, or she’s gonna torch the lot of it. Okay?’
Ben presumed he was talking to Abby. It sounded like Thierry’s life had gone through some changes since Ben had last been in touch. No girlfriend had ever been mentioned before.
Ben said, ‘You don’t know where he is?’
‘No, I fucking don’t know where he is. Who’re you, anyway?’
‘My name’s Ben. I need to find him.’
‘I get the picture. You’re one of them. Well, if you’re gonna fuck him over, just make sure he clears his junk out of my place first, okay? It’s so jam packed in here you can hardly fart.’
Abby was evidently a classy sort of gal. Ben asked, ‘Is Thierry in trouble?’
She paused. ‘Would you be asking me that if you were one of them?’
‘I’m not. Cross my heart and hope to die.’
‘Thierry is trouble,’ she sighed. ‘Story of my life.’
‘What happened?’
‘Same old, same old. Except this time he went too far. I told him, “Thierry, you get in debt to those people, you’ll regret it.” Did he listen to me? Did he ever?’
‘Who did he borrow from?’
Abby made a grumphing sound. ‘The kind of people who break your arms and fuck up your knees up with hammers, if you don’t pay them back pronto, with interest.’
‘How much does he owe?’
‘Enough to piss them off that he hasn’t repaid a cent of it.’
‘So now he’s hiding from them.’
She paused to take a noisy drag on a cigarette, then grumphed again. ‘Skipped out two weeks ago. Not heard from him since. So fucking typical, you know? That’s it this time. We’re finished. You tell him that, if you see him. And I want—’
‘His junk out of your place. I get that. Listen, Abby, I really do need to find him. Maybe I can help him.’
‘I don’t give a shit if you can help him or not. He’s got it coming.’ She sucked on the cigarette again, and seemed about to hang up the call. Then she blew out an exasperated sigh and said, ‘You could try that slimeball Pierrot. They hang out together. He might be lying low there. I don’t want to call, because Pierrot is such a creep. The way he pervs on me makes me want to fucking puke.’
She gave Ben an address for the creepy slimeball. He wrote it down, thanked her and promised to remind Thierry about the junk. She said, ‘Whatever,’ and hung up.
Ben slugged down the last of his coffee, grabbed his car keys, locked up the apartment and was on his way.
Chapter 12 (#ulink_5bad0696-8c46-55a8-90f0-a702f2fd04e3)
Paris is divided up into twenty arrondissements or municipal districts each with its own number, which to the casual visitor seem to be scattered randomly about the city but are actually arranged in a rather quirky helix pattern, spiralling out from the centre to form something like a snail shell within the rough circle of the Boulevard Périphérique, Paris’s ring road. The address that Thierry Chevrolet’s ex-girlfriend had given Ben was situated on the border of the tenth and nineteenth districts, where the helix unwound itself towards its outer edge in the north-east of the city, about one o’clock on the clock face of the circle.
Ben cut across the city in the Alpina and drank in the many changes since his last visit of any duration to the place. He hacked along Boulevard de la Chapelle, following the path of the raised viaduct Métro line, and reached the Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad, where Abby’s directions told him to head further north-east up Avenue de Flandre, parallel with the river. Everywhere beneath the Métro viaduct were migrant camps, spread out like a post-apocalyptic settlement of makeshift tents and shanty dwellings, with garbage choking the pavements, washing lines strung up between trees and signposts, bits of outdoor furniture scattered here and there. Hundreds of Afghans occupied one stretch near the Stalingrad Métro station; further up along the street were the Sudanese and the Somalis, the Eritreans and the Ethiopians, all clustered into their own separate camps. So much for multiculturalism. The scene was about as far from the picture-postcard tourist image of Paris as it was possible to get. The government could send in the troops to clear the place up, as it had done before and no doubt would do again, but the tents would soon return, over and over.
Welcome to the new Europe, Ben thought. These were problems that couldn’t easily be fixed, and he was glad that wasn’t his job.
Thierry Chevrolet seemed to have landed himself with a problem that wouldn’t easily be fixed, either. Ben didn’t know who he’d borrowed money from, or how much, or why, but it didn’t sound good. And if Thierry had been in hiding for two weeks already, there was a decent chance the bone-breakers might catch up with him any time. In which case the job Ben had come here to do might turn suddenly unpleasant, too.
The earlier sunshine had disappeared behind grey clouds. It began to rain as he headed up Avenue de Flandre, passing high-rises and shops, a lot of them with shuttered, grafitti’d windows. After a couple of blocks he spotted the side street where Thierry’s buddy Pierrot lived. He found a parking space for the Alpina and walked the rest of the way to Pierrot’s building, which made Romy Juneau’s place look like the Luxembourg Palace by comparison.
On his way Ben noticed the chunky black Audi SUV parked in front of the building, which looked much newer and shinier than most of the other cars along the kerbside, including his own. He didn’t think it belonged to Pierrot. This could be a bad sign.
He pushed inside the building, checked his notebook for Pierrot’s apartment number and climbed the dirty staircase checking doors as he went. Pierrot’s door was third on the right along a hallway on the second floor. Standing outside it was a definite confirmation of the bad sign parked in the street below.
The two very large men were leaning against the wall either side of the doorway, like two bouncers flanking a nightclub entrance. The one closest to Ben probably tipped the scales at about seventeen stones, which was three stones heavier than he was. From the guy’s shape, it looked like most of that bulk was lean muscle, cultivated through countless hours in the weights room. The one on the right was larger still, but he’d invested his time differently and was as fat and round as a baby orca. Both of them were standing to attention with their thick arms folded across their swollen chests. Both staring at Ben as he walked towards Pierrot’s door. Neither showing any degree of friendliness. They were white, with some kind of Mediterranean ethnicity like Greek or Armenian. Black hair razed to a stubble, dark trench coats, leather gloves, shiny shoes. They looked like a couple of extras auditioning for parts in a new Godfather movie. And their presence outside Pierrot’s door left Ben in little doubt that Thierry’s creditors had indeed already managed to track him down.
Ben didn’t slacken his step as he walked up to them. He stopped, standing about five feet from the door, making a triangle with the muscleman on his right and the baby orca on his left. Each was a couple of inches taller than Ben, who measured just a fraction short of six feet. They stared. He stared back. He would have offered them a nice smile, but they didn’t seem in the mood for pleasantries.
Ben said in French, ‘Salut les gars.’ Hi, guys. Bright and affable. There was no reply. He couldn’t hear any sounds of hideous torture coming from the other side of the door, just some muffled conversational voices. It was hard to say how many of their associates were inside the apartment. He’d find out soon enough.
Ben pointed at the door. ‘I’ve come to see my friend Pierrot. How about stepping out of the way so I can go inside?’
‘Fuck off,’ the muscleman said. Ben hadn’t really expected much more in the way of eloquence.
‘You know, this doesn’t have to go badly,’ he said. ‘Whatever Thierry Chevrolet owes, I’m happy to settle the debt.’ He patted his leather jacket, where his wallet nestled inside. ‘Then we can all go about our separate business like the good-natured gentlemen we are. Now, I’m guessing you two aren’t exactly the heads of the operation. So maybe you should open the door and let me talk with your boss inside. Okay?’
The muscleman exchanged glances with his monstrous pal. The two of them managed a brief grin, then turned the dead-eyed stare back on Ben.
He shrugged, as though he didn’t really care either way, which in truth he didn’t. ‘No? That’s a shame. Then I’ll have to open it myself.’
Ben took a step towards the door. Which put him within reach of either guy, and technically in danger of getting hit. But that much weight, whether composed of muscle or lard, had a lot of inertia to overcome before they could properly start moving. They would be slow, and he was fast. If a punch launched towards him, he could casually take out his cigarettes and light one up before it arrived. And he already knew that it was the muscleman, as the actual or self-declared superior of the pair, who would move first.
It happened exactly as Ben anticipated. As he moved towards the door, the muscleman peeled himself away from the wall and a big knuckly fist flew towards Ben’s chest. A lot of drive behind it, no question. The guy had probably hit a lot of people before now, considering his line of work, and he had some crude understanding of how to inflict significant bodily damage on mostly unsuspecting, untrained victims.
But the rib-cracking blow never landed. Ben watched the big knuckly fist float towards him, then reached up with one hand as though he was catching a tennis ball gently lobbed his way. He caught the guy’s fist smack in his palm and deflected and twisted it at the same time.
It was the most basic of Aikido wrist locks. Ben brought up his other hand to trap the guy’s hand against his own. His fingers flowed over the guy’s wrist like water. It took barely any strength to lever the joint so painfully that the muscleman was forced down on one knee, letting out a grunt of surprise and agony. That was what these bodybuilder types didn’t seem to understand. You can spend a decade pumping your muscles up to the size of wholemeal bread loaves, but behind that suit of armour your sinews, ligaments and joints remain just as fragile and vulnerable to attack as when you were a skinny, pencil-necked fifteen-year-old.
Then Ben stepped casually around to the guy’s right, taking the trapped wrist with him, and drove him all the way down to the floor with his arm levered up behind his back. It would only have taken a couple more pounds of pressure to break the joint. Ben pushed it through all the way until he felt the crackle and snap. At which point the muscleman would have started screaming, if Ben hadn’t already been standing on his neck and crushing his face into the tiled floor.
By then the baby orca was stepping towards Ben, reaching inside his trench coat for what Ben knew was hidden in there. Ben trampled over the fallen muscle guy and put an elbow in the fat one’s solar plexus while sweeping his legs out from under him with a scything kick. The orca hit the floor with a crash that must have shaken the whole building. Ben kicked him in the throat, not hard enough to do any fatal damage, but plenty enough to make him concentrate more on breathing than anything else for the next few minutes. He lay there gasping like a landed fish, clutching at his huge neck, eyes popping. Ben reached down inside the guy’s open trench coat and quickly found the item he’d been about to pull out. It was a 9mm Glock, black and boxy, fitted with a stubby sound suppressor. Not the most elegant weapon, but highly effective. He stuck the pistol in his belt.
The fight, if it could have been called such, had lasted just seconds. Ben could still hear the muffled voices coming from inside Pierrot’s apartment. Someone laughed. However many people were in there, they obviously hadn’t realised what was happening outside.
The bodybuilder was curled up on the floor holding onto his broken arm and moaning in agony. Ben flipped him over, frisked him and found an identical Glock in a concealed shoulder rig under his coat. Fully loaded, fifteen rounds in the mag plus one up the spout. Ben took that one for himself, too, but didn’t stick it through his belt. He was going to need it, because he was about to make his entrance.
Ben grabbed the bodybuilder by his broken arm, levered him savagely up to his feet, propelled him forward and used his head to ram open the apartment door.
Chapter 13 (#ulink_50ad69ab-7fbb-5ad7-83d6-17314685781b)
The door burst inwards with a juddering, splintering crash. Ben stepped through the open doorway, still holding onto the muscleman, who was half unconscious and bloody from the impact.
And now Ben could see the five other men inside the apartment. First and foremost was Thierry Chevrolet, the man Ben hadn’t been alone in hoping to find here. The second was the apartment’s tenant, Pierrot, looking as if he strongly regretted having let his buddy crash at his place. The two chums were sitting side by side on a pair of mismatched chairs, with their wrists tied behind them, their ankles bound to the chair legs, and gags tightly stretched across their mouths. Their faces were pallid with terror, their eyes wide and staring at Ben as he appeared in the doorway. Until just a second ago they’d been looking up at the third, fourth and fifth men in the room, who were standing in a loose semicircle in front of their victims.
The three gangsters simultaneously turned to face the door as Ben appeared. The ones on the left and right were just as large as the pair who’d been posted outside on guard duty, and pretty much carbon copies. Dark hair buzzed close to the scalp, dark trench coats, shiny shoes. The one in the middle was very different, and not because he was the only one not wearing the standard-issue gangster trench coat.
He stood less than five feet in height, but his eyes blazed with a fierce intelligence lacking in any of his much larger accomplices. Ben instantly took him to be the boss man of the operation, about twice as hard-boiled and three times as psychopathic as his underlings, as though all that aggression and violence had been concentrated into a smaller, meaner, undiluted package. If he’d been a dog he’d have been a wiry terrier-cross mongrel ready without hesitation to rip into Rottweilers six times his size. He was wearing a double-breasted suit that would have fitted a twelve-year-old, expensively tailor made. He had no hair at all, and like a lot of bald guys it was hard to pin an age on him. He could have been thirty, or fifty. A sickle-shaped scar distorted his left cheek, from the corner of his mouth to his earlobe, and accentuated the sneer of hatred that he was turning on Ben at this moment.
Ben was more concerned about the curved sabre clenched in the little hard guy’s fist. So, judging by the looks of utter terror on their faces, were Thierry and Pierrot. It seemed that he’d been about to take a swing at one of them when the door had burst open and interrupted him. Presumably, first to get the chop would have been Pierrot, before the little guy decided what to do about Thierry. Which probably depended on Thierry’s ability or otherwise to pay his debts, and whether the little guy considered it worth trying to get him to cough up the money or just make an example of him by slicing and dicing him into small, bloody pieces.
But all that was a secondary consideration now, as the stranger joined the party. The little guy’s scarred face hardened like iron. It took him only a fraction of a second to get over his surprise at Ben’s entrance, and fly into the attack. Being small and light on his feet, he was also exceptionally fast. He came at Ben whirling the sabre, the curved blade whistling as it sliced the air in a downward diagonal, right to left.
Ben propelled the stunned guard forwards to meet the savage strike, like a human shield. The little guy could do little to halt the momentum of the swinging blade, and it chopped into his own man’s left shoulder, sinking deep. Trapezius muscle severed, collar bone cleaved in half, probably a lot of other irreversible damage as well. Blood sprayed from the wound. The guard sprawled to the floor, twitched and lay still. The little guy stared down at him, then back up at Ben, eyes burning with fury.
Meanwhile the two big men either side of him reached into their trench coats and pulled out their guns. Two more identical Glocks, each fitted with the same kind of long silencer. They could have unloaded all thirty-two rounds into Ben and none of the neighbours would have heard a thing.
Ben wasn’t going to let that happen. But he wasn’t going to kill anyone, either. He’d seen enough death today already.
