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She shrugged. ‘Sure. And he plays the guitar, too.’
‘He needs a shave.’
‘Believe me, you’re in good hands. He’ll take you wherever you want to go. You’ve got enough gas to take you halfway around Europe and back again.’
‘We’re not going that far,’ Ben said. By his estimate their journey distance was just under 140 nautical miles, a mere hop and a skip for the high-tech turboprop. ‘And you can hang on to Dylan. I won’t be needing him.’
‘Then who’s going to fly the—?’ Ruth blanched. ‘No, no. Please don’t tell me what I think you’re going to say. I like this plane, Ben. Not to mention it’s worth the same as a Lamborghini Reventon.’
‘If I smash it up, you can get your accounts department to invoice me,’ Ben said, stepping towards the plane. ‘I really appreciate this, Ruth.’
‘I must be crazy.’
‘It runs in the family,’ Ben said.
A few moments later, he was seated behind the cockpit controls, running an eye across the panels of dials and read-outs and the extensive array of high-tech computer wizardry as Roberta explored the rear section with its plush eco-friendly non-leather seating for four or five passengers to travel in style. ‘Pretty neat,’ she commented, opening a door and peering at a little bathroom. ‘We’ve got food and drinks on board, too. I’ll admit, I hadn’t expected travelling with you would be this luxurious.’
‘Don’t get too used to it,’ he said.
Outside, Ruth and her companions had retreated to the hangar. A couple of runway attendants in reflective vests and ear-defenders had appeared to shepherd the aircraft as it prepared for take-off. Ben fired up the engines and the twin propellers began to spin with a whine that quickly grew to a roar, muffled inside the well-insulated cabin.
‘I didn’t know you could fly one of these things,’ Roberta said from the rear, strapping herself into a seat by one of the oval porthole windows.
‘Well, I’d be lying if I said I’d ever actually flown one of these before,’ he replied, waiting for the props to get up to speed. This state-of-the-art plane was a different animal by far from the last aircraft he’d piloted – a prehistoric Supermarine Sea Otter loaded with drums of avgas that he’d deliberately crashed onto the deck of a sailing yacht like a flying incendiary bomb, blowing the aircraft, the vessel and its contingent of thugs to kingdom come. He didn’t think Roberta would appreciate those details.
‘You what?’
‘But the basic principle’s the same for all these kinds of things,’ he said. ‘Trust me, it’s like riding a bicycle.’
‘Maybe I should’ve taken my chances with the bad guys,’ Roberta muttered to herself.
The Steiner ST-1 taxied away under the anxious gaze of its owner, picked up speed and left the runway smartly to climb into the hazy afternoon sky. Content that he wasn’t going to drop them down somewhere in the English countryside or into the Channel, Ben levelled the aircraft at 285 knots and a cruise altitude of 24,000 feet, settled back in the pilot’s seat and set his course for Normandy.
After just twenty-five uneventful minutes in the air, Ben checked his bearings, reduced altitude and caught sight of the northernmost tip of the Lower Normandy coast far below. The aircraft overflew the Pointe de Barfleur and the towering Gatteville lighthouse, just a tiny grey needle sticking up from the rocks surrounded by calm blue sea.
Remaining steady on his course for another few minutes as they passed over Saint-Vaast and then the spreading outskirts of Valognes, the nearest town of any size to the Le Val facility, Ben gradually let the plane drop down lower on the approach to his target, the small disused airfield in the countryside a few kilometres outside Carentan. As the small tongue of concrete surrounded by green fields grew larger and details came into view, he was relieved to see that Jeff Dekker had been right about the place not having changed since the last time he’d seen it.
He checked his instruments, made his final adjustments. Flaps; undercarriage; speed; altitude: everything was in order, or as close to it as need be. The Steiner ST-1 swooped in low over the rickety barbed-wire fence, the disused buildings and the graffiti-covered hangar where local kids loitered to smoke dope, and touched down with a yelp of tyres. Ben instantly eased off the throttle and the plane decelerated on the bumpy strip, rolling to a standstill forty yards short of the sunburned grass beyond. The engine whine died away and the prop came to a halt. Ben pulled off his headset, quickly reset his Omega to French time, then pressed the control to activate the hydraulics for the aircraft’s side hatch.
‘Well, I must say, that came in pretty handy,’ Roberta commented as she stepped down to the cracked concrete. ‘Remind me to put one of these gizmos on my Christmas list.’
Ben used a remote button to close the hatch and set the locks and alarms on the aircraft. The late afternoon was warmer than England. The soft breeze smelled of cut grass and was filled with the chirping of crickets. He looked around and quickly saw that Jeff, trustworthy as ever, had delivered on his promise. The dark blue Alpina B7 was sitting on the stubbly yellowed grass a little way from the landing strip.
‘That our ride?’ Roberta asked, walking over, and Ben nodded. ‘No key in it,’ she observed, peering through the driver’s window.
‘Who needs keys?’ Ben stepped up to the door and said the word, ‘Open’. His voice was one of the four programmed into the car’s sophisticated voice recognition locking system. The locks opened with a clunk and Ben popped the boot lid. Underneath the floor of the boot was a special armoured compartment that VIP close protection personnel could use, where necessary, to carry concealed weapons and other sensitive equipment through border checkpoints. Ben quickly removed the Beretta Storm from his bag and stowed it snugly inside the hidden space, then piled their bags on top.
He climbed behind the wheel. It had been a little while since he’d last driven the Alpina, but the familiar whiff of Gauloises was still faintly detectable inside. There was even one of his old John Coltrane CDs nestling in the map compartment. The Le Val high-speed evasion car felt uncomfortably like home.
Ben said, ‘Start’. The Alpina’s tuned engine instantly burbled into life.
Roberta raised an eyebrow. ‘Very cool.’
‘Special privilege,’ Ben replied. ‘Le Val personnel only.’
‘Even though you don’t work there anymore?’ Roberta said. She thought about it for a moment, then added, ‘Figures.’
He looked at her. ‘What figures?’
‘That your friend Jeff didn’t delete your voice signature from the menu. He must’ve reckoned you’d be back before too long.’
Without a reply, Ben put the Alpina into gear and pulled sharply away. Sensing that she’d said the wrong thing, Roberta quickly changed the subject. ‘How far to Paris from here?’ she asked.
‘A little under two hundred miles,’ he said.
‘Three hours?’
‘In this thing, more like two and a half,’ he said, and put his foot down.
‘That figures too,’ Roberta murmured but Ben was too focused to hear.
Chapter Thirteen (#ulink_05215158-6f6e-5f67-9a8d-9ecdfcc7dbbd)
The drive to Paris was even quicker than Ben had estimated, and by evening they were filtering through the western approach into the city. He’d been deep in his own thoughts nearly all the way, and was still silent as he negotiated the hectic evening traffic into the centre. As he took a right off Boulevard des Batignolles, heading southwest down Rue de Clichy, Roberta turned to him and said, ‘Montmartre is the other direction, to the north.’
‘I know where Montmartre is,’ he replied. ‘We’ll take a trip up that way later tonight.’
‘So where are we going?’
‘Somewhere these friends of yours can’t find us,’ he said. ‘You’ve been there before.’
‘I wish you’d quit calling them that,’ she said irritably. ‘Then you still have that old place, huh?’
She was talking about the small, simple apartment she and Ben had used as their refuge for two nights the last time they’d been here together. The ‘safehouse’, as he’d called it, had been a gift from a wealthy client whose child Ben had once rescued from kidnappers. There was no paper trail of ownership linking him to it. It was completely secure and so hard to find, tucked away deep in the architectural honeycomb of central Paris, that virtually nobody even knew it existed.
‘Never quite got around to selling it,’ Ben said. ‘Maybe I was hanging on to some crazy notion that it’d come in handy again one day.’
‘Fancy that,’ she said.
Ben headed up Boulevard Haussmann, hung another right onto Boulevard des Italiens, and soon afterwards the Alpina swung sharply off the road and dropped down a steep ramp into the dark echoing cavern of the underground car park that was the only way into his hidden apartment.
They grabbed their stuff, left the car in the shadows and Ben led Roberta through the parking lot to the concrete passage and up the familiar murky back stairway. Someone had sprayed graffiti on the armoured door since he’d last been here, but there was no way even the most dedicated burglar could have broken through the plate steel or the reinforced wall.
The safehouse was dark, the blinds drawn over what few small windows it had. Roberta looked around her and sniffed the air as he led her inside. ‘Smells kind of … uh, closed up,’ she said.
‘It has been, for a while,’ he replied, switching on lights. The luxuries of home were few: a plain desk, an armchair, a no-frills kitchen and bedroom. No decorations, bare floors, no TV. Once upon a time, the safehouse had played a big part in Ben’s Europe-wide freelance operations as a kidnap and ransom specialist, as he’d moved constantly from one scrape to another and lived pretty much the same kind of stripped-down, comfortless existence he’d grown accustomed to with the SAS. Now it only stood as a painful reminder of old times he’d thought he’d left far, far behind.
‘Hasn’t changed a whole lot since I was last here,’ she commented. ‘Same old neo-Spartan shit pit. But, like you said, it’s safe. At least, it better be.’
He glanced at her. He knew she was thinking the same thing he was, feeling the same weird feeling that the two of them should be back here. Even though their stay together had only been for two days and nights, it had been an eventful time that brought back a lot of memories. Tender moments, like his confiscating her phone, making her sleep on the hard floor, and having to shampoo the blood and brains of a dead man out of her hair after she’d been covered in gore during a gunfight on the banks of the Seine. It was shared experiences like that which had cemented their budding relationship.
‘You want a drink?’ he asked her.
‘I could use a shower first,’ she said.
‘You know where it is,’ he said, motioning down the narrow hall towards the bathroom. ‘There should be some clean towels.’
‘Nothing I should know about? No rats or roaches?’
‘Take the gun in with you, if it makes you feel any safer.’
‘I’ll risk it.’
While Roberta was in the bathroom and he could hear the water pittering and splashing, Ben went into the bedroom, shut the door, sat on the edge of the bed and took out his phone. He turned it on and ran a web search using just the name ‘Tesla’. Within moments he was swamped in a welter of scientific and technical hoo-hah that seemed as grandiose as it did improbable.
He switched from text search results to images, and a few seconds later he found himself staring at the face of the man himself. A pinched, lean, chalky-white face with something of Edgar Allan Poe about him, something perhaps a little bit mad. The hair was oiled and parted in the fashion of the 1920s, the little brush moustache trim and neat. The eyes were sharp and foxy and seemed to bore right out of the screen and into Ben’s.
‘If this is really all about you,’ Ben muttered, ‘you’ve got a lot to answer for, pal.’
He gazed at the image a moment longer, knowing he was only procrastinating. This wasn’t what he’d taken his phone out for.
He swallowed and quickly keyed in Brooke’s number. As he waited for her to reply, he anxiously tried to think of how to express what he wanted to say. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Can’t we just stop? Can’t we just go back to the way things were? Or just I love you. I need you. Let me come home, as soon as this is over.
But there was no simple formula. No backspace key, no erase button. The damage that had been done couldn’t be healed with just a few facile words.
Brooke didn’t even reply. He aborted the call, strangely relieved but dreading when he’d have to try again.
The pain in his body reminded him of the other damage that needed healing, too. Standing up, he painfully unpeeled his jeans far enough down to inspect the large red weal across his left thigh where the Beretta magazine had absorbed the force of the bullet strike earlier that day. Its oblong shape was almost perfectly imprinted on his skin. He touched it and winced. In a day or two it would blossom into a spectacular bruise and a rainbow of colours.
His right side was pretty tender, too, where he’d taken that particularly solid blow from the man now encased several feet deep in concrete. I’m getting too old for this bollocks, he thought as he peeled off his T-shirt to examine his ribs. Another florid, multicolour bruise was on its way there, too, but at least nothing was cracked internally that he could feel.
The bedroom door suddenly opened and he turned to see Roberta standing there.
Chapter Fourteen (#ulink_ea67bca3-a670-53e9-b96c-236c41e6b608)
She was wrapped in a towel that covered her from chest to mid-thigh and her hair was wet. ‘Sorry,’ she blurted. ‘I was looking for a hairbrush. Forgot to pack mine.’
‘I don’t have one,’ Ben said. It was impossible not to notice the gleam of her well-toned flesh, or the way her hair lay across her bare shoulder.
Her eyes flicked downwards for an instant. ‘You’ve got scars that weren’t there before,’ she said.
‘I suppose I do,’ he said, glancing down. His torso read like a map of his exploits over twenty years.
‘Jesus. I thought you said you were lucky with bullets.’
‘That one wasn’t a bullet,’ he said. ‘It was a knife. Those ones are bullets.’
‘Oh.’
‘The drugstore on the corner will have a hairbrush we can buy,’ he said.
‘I guess,’ she replied. ‘Anyway, shower’s free if you want it.’ After an awkward silence, she slipped away and shut the door.
Ben spent three minutes under the shower, letting the hot water blast away his thoughts as best they could. He emerged from the bathroom in fresh clothes and, feeling suddenly ravenous, headed into the safehouse’s tiny kitchen to prepare some dinner. The worktops were lined with dust, and when he opened the fridge door he discovered that a bottle of milk had solidified into something way beyond cheese. He closed it quickly, opened a cupboard and grabbed two of the stacked tins inside, a pack of ground Lavazza coffee and a bottle of cheap red table wine that he’d forgotten he’d had left over from the old days, and was relieved to find. He hunted a can opener and corkscrew out of a drawer.
‘I see you’re still working your way through the same old store of canned cassoulet,’ Roberta observed as she wandered through into the kitchen, slumped on one of the two plain chairs by the small table and watched him empty the contents of the tins into a saucepan over the gas stove. Her hair was towelled dry and frizzy.
‘Lasts as long as tinned corned beef and tastes a lot better,’ he said, stirring the saucepan.
‘Oh sure, lumpy beans and overcooked sausage stewed in goose lard would be anyone’s idea of a treat, come the apocalypse. But as long as I can wash it down with some of that wine, I don’t give a rat’s ass.’
He uncorked the bottle, poured out two brimming glasses and handed her one of them. She gulped half of it down and gasped. ‘Goddamn, I needed that.’
Once the cassoulet was steaming hot, Ben ladled it unceremoniously onto a couple of plates and they sat down to eat it with more wine. ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, forking up some beans, ‘there’s survival food, then there’s gourmet survival food.’
‘Coming from an American,’ he muttered. ‘Get it down you. We’re going to be busy later.’ He ate in silence for a while, then looked up, aware that she was watching him. ‘What?’
‘I hate to say it, but this kind of environment suits you a whole lot better than the vicarage did,’ she said.
‘That’s probably just as well, isn’t it?’ he replied tersely.
‘Sorry. It was just an observation. Maybe it didn’t come out quite right.’
‘So tell me,’ he said, keen to change the subject, ‘How’s life been for you? Apart from getting entangled in God knows what kind of trouble neither of us needed?’
‘Life?’
‘It’s been a long time,’ Ben said. ‘We haven’t been in touch. You must have had some kind of life.’
‘Are you asking about guys?’
He shrugged. ‘Not specifically.’
‘Sure, I had a life. I put my old one behind me, I worked hard at my job, I did some travelling around Canada and the northern states. Then there was Dan. You remember him, I guess? Dan Wright? You saw him, when you came over that one time.’
‘He was your colleague at the university in Ottawa,’ Ben said. ‘You and he were giving a lecture on “effects of weak electromagnetic fields on cell respiration”. I didn’t know what the hell that meant then, either.’
She raised an eyebrow, forkful of food poised in mid-air. ‘My, what a remarkable memory you have, Ben Hope. So you must also recall with perfect clarity what you told me afterwards?’
‘I told you I thought a bloke like that could be good for you,’ Ben said. ‘He seemed like a decent sort. Steady. Dependable. The opposite of me. And I could tell he liked you.’
‘Yeah,’ she said sourly. ‘A few weeks after I last saw you, Dan asked me on a date. I said no. I hadn’t …’ Roberta almost spoke the words that were on the tip of her tongue, ‘hadn’t got over what happened between you and me’, but she managed to cover it up. ‘I hadn’t any interest in relationships at that point. But months passed, he kept asking, and eventually I said yes and we started dating. It lasted about a year. We talked about moving in together.’ She gave a little snort and knocked back the last of her wine. ‘Well, you and I both made the same mistake, Ben. The great, decent, dependable Dr Wright turned out to be Dr Wrong. Dead wrong. One evening I went back to the lab to pick up some notes, and I found the sonofabitch giving an extra-curricular one-to-one Biology class to Xandra Mills, one of his more alluring final-year students. Right there on the desk.’
‘Oh,’ Ben said. ‘What did they do, fire him?’
‘You’re kidding. That would have drawn far too much scandal for the university. He got a speedy transfer to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Or else I don’t know how I could have gone on working with the jerk.’
Ben poured the last of the bottle into their empty glasses. ‘I’m sorry to hear about all that.’
