This eBook novella is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed therein are creations of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Published by Claymore Publishing

An eBook Original 2011

Copyright © Scott Mariani 2011

www.scottmariani.com

Scott Mariani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

ISBN: 978-0-9569226-0-1

Artwork design and layout by Pentacor Plc

All rights reserved. This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

CHAPTER ONE

London

It was a sunny June afternoon as the man walked into Selfridges via the Duke Street entrance and made his way through the bustling crowds to the restaurant and champagne bar overlooking the accessory hall.

If anyone had been paying close attention to him, they would have seen a man somewhere in his thirties or early forties, lean, neatly but unobtrusively dressed in a crisp dark suit. He had the bronzed complexion and jet-black hair of a Middle-Easterner; silk shirt, navy tie, gleaming patent leather shoes. The hand holding the calf-leather briefcase wore a large gold ring, but other than that there was nothing too ostentatious or especially noticeable about him.

It was 1.15 and the restaurant was filled with shoppers, tourists, people on lunch breaks. The man took a seat at the edge of the restaurant and slid his briefcase under the table by his feet. When the waiter came he was warm and friendly. From the lunch menu he ordered crispy baby squid with wild garlic mayonnaise, then for a main course a pan-fried fillet of Scottish salmon with kale and shrimps on the side. As he ate his lunch calmly, washing it down with a half bottle of good white wine, he watched the people come and go. A small group of Japanese tourists settled at a table to his left, surrounded by bulging shopping bags; to his right a young couple with their two small children, speaking French and scouring a London travel guide.

The man watched the little boy and girl. He smiled and went on eating. When he’d finished, he looked at his watch, picked up his case, and paid a visit to the bathroom. He was gone three minutes. When he returned, he settled his lunch bill in cash and then left.

And if anyone had been paying close attention to him, they would have seen that he’d left the gents’ without his briefcase.

The man was on the corner of North Audley Street and Green Street when he took out the mobile phone and dialled in the number that sent an electronic signal to the remote detonator. The case was packed with an expertly-prepared combination of RDX nitroamine high explosive and other substances that together were designed to produce a blast greater than a powerful car bomb.

The initial explosion engulfed the restaurant and champagne bar within one hundredth of a second. At its core, the temperature was high enough to vaporise human tissue on contact. Nothing at all would remain of the Japanese tourists, or the French couple, their little boy and girl, the bar staff or anyone else within a radius of thirty metres.

In the next three hundredths of a second the blast filled the ground floor of the department store, obliterating everything in its path. One hundred and sixty-eight shoppers were reduced to tatters of flesh and clothing; scores more were horribly maimed and burned.

The store’s ground floor windows blew out onto Duke Street and Oxford Street. Passers-by were caught in a storm of flying glass. Vehicles skidded and swerved all over the road. Broadsided by the terrible shockwave, a passing bus mounted the opposite pavement and toppled over on its side, flattening fifteen pedestrians as they stood gaping in frozen horror at the smoke pouring from the shattered department store.

In the immediate aftermath of the blast came the moments of stunned, deathly silence.

Then the mayhem began. But before the first wild screams were heard among the devastation of Oxford Street, and long before the racing convoy of emergency services units came wailing in through the panic, the man in the dark suit was already heading fast towards Grosvenor Square and his two colleagues inside the waiting car.

CHAPTER TWO

Brecon, Wales

Six weeks later, July 23

Whatever deal with God the jazz festival organisers had made to keep the rain off that year, He’d delivered in spades. The night was warm, the stars were bright, and over two thousand people were crowding the open-air gig.

Onstage, the band were delivering too: the bass and drums laid down a thundering groove as the alto saxophonist took up his instrument and blasted out a solo that scorched the air. The sax glittered red, blue, green under the lights. At the searing climax of the solo, the crowd roared its delight.

That was when Ben Hope started making his way towards the beer tent for another drink. Pretty damned impressive, he was thinking. Not quite up there with Coltrane, but pretty damned impressive.

The girl he was with didn’t seem to share his enthusiasm. Ben didn’t know much about her, except that her name was Ally, she was local, she was twenty-two, and she liked rum and Coke – a lot – was onto her fourth already.

But then, she knew even less about him. In his line of work, the less people knew the better.

In the beer tent, pressing to the front of the throng and speaking loudly to be heard, he ordered the drinks: the same sticky sweet shit for her, another whisky for himself. ‘Not that one,’ as the barman went for the blended cheap stuff. ‘The malt. That’s the one. Make it a double. No ice.’ Reaching into the back pocket of his jeans for his wallet, Ben felt the muscles in his right side cramp up and he winced sharply. It took him a second to get his breath back – the kind of pain you know your face has gone pale.

‘Been in the wars?’ the barman asked cheerfully.

‘You could say that,’ Ben replied, laying a fiver on the bar and taking a gulp of his drink. The twelve-year-old scotch burned a warm river down deep inside him. The pain was passing already. It didn’t hurt anything like the way it had when he’d taken his R&R leave three weeks ago. Considering the close-range impact of the AK-47 rifle bullet that had gouged through his side and severely cracked three of his ribs before going on to pass right through a wall, he didn’t think his recovery was going too badly.

‘Got a cigarette?’ Ally yelled over the music when she’d finished her drink. She frowned at the one he handed her. ‘What are these?’

‘They’re Greek,’ Ben said, lighting it for her, then one for himself. Lying about what he did for a living often entailed lying about where his job took him, and it was second nature now. In fact the cigarettes were Jordanian, one of the last of the packs he’d bought a few days before his SAS squadron had been dropped in the Iraqi western desert to seize key airfields.

He hadn’t had much chance to smoke them. A couple of weeks after securing the airfields as forward operating bases and pushing eastwards into the desert, supported by RAF Harriers and unmanned Predator reconnaissance spyplanes as they clashed with retreating Iraqi forces, Ben’s unit had received a report that two undercover SAS soldiers, posing as Arabs to investigate an Iraqi police captain in the Basra area suspected of passing information to Shia militiamen, had been hijacked and abducted by an armed gang. Just a few weeks earlier, six military police had been hacked to death in the same area.

Within hours of the report, an unofficial rescue mission had been greenlit deep within the corridors of Whitehall and two dozen troopers under Ben’s command were kitted up and en route to Basra on a Hercules transport plane.

SAS intelligence sources were sound on the location of the hostages, not quite as sound on the force of men holding them. Assaulting the stronghold under cover of darkness, Ben’s squad had quickly found themselves heavily outnumbered by battle-hardened militants determined not to give up their valuable hostages. In just a few minutes of furious fighting, the floor was littered with spent cartridge cases and dead men. Ben had been first through the door of the hostages’ cell, taking out three of the guards before they could react.

The fourth guard, the one with the AK, had been hiding behind a doorway. Ben hadn’t had time to react as the gunman had come leaping out with a wild scream and let rip with his rifle. The next thing Ben had known, he was waking up in the military hospital, pumped full of painkiller, his side heavily bandaged. It wasn’t the first time a bullet had found him, it wasn’t the worst, and it might not be the last. But at least the hostages had been extracted safely.

‘Are we going soon?’ Ally said. ‘This music’s giving me a headache. Or maybe it was that shitty cigarette.’

Ben shrugged. The next act up was a jazz-rock fusion guitar trio, and that wasn’t so much his thing anyway. ‘Fine,’ he said, and they walked away from the crowd towards the car. The blue BMW Alpina came courtesy of the regiment. Perks of his rank.

Beyond the festival enclosure, the enhanced police and security presence was as noticeable as at any other large-scale event in Britain that summer. Ever since the Selfridges bombing in June, the whole country had been in a state of red alert. And as Ben drove back through the outskirts of Brecon towards Ally’s place, it was no surprise that the news programme that came on the radio headlined with the breaking story that, after a frenzied manhunt, Scotland Yard had finally detained a suspect.

‘… early reports suggest he may have been part of the same extremist Jihadist terror group responsible for the Lisbon Embassy bombing in February, in which seven people died.’

Ben grunted. The antiterrorist boys had had their hands full the last few weeks. And the odds were it wasn’t over yet. Every city in Britain was braced for another attack, security services stretched to breaking point. The tension everywhere was palpable.

‘In another breaking story,’ the presenter went on, ‘Cayman Islands authorities fear that today’s air crash off the island of Little Cayman may have claimed the lives of all twelve passengers and three crew members. It has emerged in the last few minutes that the aircraft’s British pilot and owner of Cayman Islands Charter, Nick Chapman, is thought to have ditched into the sea in a deliberate act of suicide …’

Ben hit the brakes. The BMW slewed to a halt in the middle of the empty road.

‘Hey! Watch it!’ Ally yelped, nursing her shoulder where she’d jolted against her seatbelt.

‘Shush.’ Ben turned up the radio volume.

‘… a Home Office source has revealed that Chapman, a former member of the British armed forces, may have served with the SAS during the 1990s. Police and rescue divers continue to comb a large area of sea, but as yet no survivors have been found in what appears to be the worst air tragedy ever to hit the British territory …’

Ben said nothing more as he drove Ally the rest of the way back to her place on the edge of Brecon.

‘Don’t you want to come in, then?’ she smiled at the door.

‘I have to get back,’ Ben said.

‘When will we see each other again?’ she asked.

Ben hadn’t even heard the question. ‘Thanks, Ally. I had a lovely time,’ he said, and drove away.

CHAPTER THREE

The place Ben had rented during his leave was a little ivied stone cottage right on the River Usk, in wooded countryside a few miles outside the Welsh market town of Brecon. Low ceilings, exposed beams, thatched roof, old-fashioned leaded windows that peeked out through ivy and climbing roses. The stone fireplace was adorned with brass ornaments, and in a nod to tradition a pair of crossed cricket bats hung over the mantelpiece.

Ben didn’t care too much for cricket, but he did care for the peace and quiet of the place, as far as you could get from the boiling white heat and madness of the desert war front line. He could have spent these few weeks at his house near Galway Bay on the western Irish coast, but they didn’t hold annual international jazz festivals there and the gunman who’d almost managed to kill him had kindly done so at just the right time to allow him to catch some acts he’d long wanted to check out.

Jazz was the last thing on his mind that night as he burst inside the cottage and went straight over to flip on the TV. Scanning through the channels in search of a news programme he grabbed a fresh bottle of Laphroaig from the cardboard box that served as his temporary drinks cabinet, ripped off the cap and poured himself out a triple measure.

When he found a news programme he wasn’t surprised to see that the Cayman Islands air crash was one of the headline items. He listened and watched intently: interviews with shocked island airport authorities; grim-faced mourners; aerial footage of Royal Cayman Island Police and Navy rescue craft pulling wreckage from the water. From the air it was clear that the inter-island shuttle aircraft must have come down on a bar of exposed coral reef in the middle of the sea while on a routine crossing from the tiny island of Little Cayman to Grand Cayman, its larger sister seventy-five miles south-west. The plane appeared to have detonated on impact. Judging by the charred state of the bodies so far recovered, nobody had stood a chance of escaping a horrible fiery death.

Ben gulped whisky and went on watching. The three-engined Britten-Norman Trislander being too small a plane to carry a ‘black box’ flight data or cockpit voice recorder, the primary witness on whose testimony the suicide theory hung was the air traffic controller reported to have been in radio contact with the pilot shortly before the crash, struggling to talk him out of bringing the plane down. In the aftermath of the crash, the controller was unavailable for comment.

Four of the dozen passengers aboard the CIC inter-island flight had been British: a holiday couple, their son, and a retired dentist. But the main focus was on the man the media were already branding ‘kamikaze pilot’ and ‘suicide killer’, Nick Chapman. His final words to the air traffic controller, captured on tape moments before the crash, were a distorted, muffled yell over the chaos of the screaming passengers and the roar of the propeller engines. ‘I’m taking her down! I’m taking her down!’

As the dramatic audio clip played, the TV screen flashed up a photo of the man who’d said those words and plunged fourteen people to their deaths along with him. A tanned, lean-faced man of forty-six, smiling warmly for the camera. His hair was greyer than Ben remembered it.

But there was no doubt about it. He was the same Nick Chapman that Ben had served with in 22 SAS, not so many years ago.

CHAPTER FOUR

Five days later, Ben was standing on the edge of the family burial plot in a little churchyard near Bath, where Nick Chapman – or what remains of him the Cayman Islands salvage teams had managed to retrieve from the sea and flown to the UK – was being laid to rest.

Other than the few reporters and photographers who’d tried to get in and been turned away at the gate, only a smattering of people had turned up to pay their last respects to the deceased. Ben looked around for Chapman’s ex-wife, Joan, but there was no sign of her. The only face he recognised was that of Hilary, their daughter. Last time he’d seen her had been a few years earlier, when he’d been one of the twenty or so regimental guys invited to her engagement party. Then, she’d been the happy fiancée, bubbly and full of laughter. Now, even with her face half hidden behind oversized sunglasses and her straggly blond hair, she looked pinched and haggard and aged way beyond her twenty-four years.

It was warm under the sun. The minister read a few words. His manner was somewhat forbidding, somewhat disapproving, a distant echo of the days when suicides hadn’t been allowed church burials. Ben quickly tuned out and stood there watching the coffin being lowered into the grave, lost in his own thoughts and memories of the man inside it. Nick Chapman had done a lot of brave and worthy things in his time. None of them would be remembered now. It was a miserable, deeply saddening end to what should have been an honourable life.

What saddened Ben most of all was the thought that, perhaps, the tragedy of July 23 had been inevitable. Of the troubled soldiers he’d known – and the extreme physical and psychological demands of the life of an SAS soldier took its toll on a few – Nick had been the one most ravaged by depression. After many years in the army, his problems had finally become too crippling a burden for him, and with drug and alcohol dependency mounting, the trauma of his divorce from Joan tearing him apart, he’d finally hit rock bottom. During an SAS operation in Serbia, Nick had barricaded himself into a room with a bottle of gin and threatened to blow his own brains out. Shortly after that incident, in October 1998, he’d been quietly dismissed from Her Majesty’s Armed Forces.

Many months had passed during which Ben had heard nothing from his friend, and often feared the worst. Then, out of the blue, two years ago, a card in the mail: Nick was up on his feet, had qualified as a commercial pilot and had set up a successful little air charter business in the Caribbean. He’d found Paradise, he’d said. He’d sounded truly happy, freed from his demons, as if the dark days had finally been put behind him. Ben had fervently wished it would stay that way.

And now this.

Ben didn’t want to judge Chapman for what he’d done. He was trying not to. Trying hard. He could scarcely bring himself to believe his friend had done this. And yet …

Sensing a presence next to him, Ben looked round and recognised the face of McNeill from B Squadron. He smiled sadly. ‘Hello, Mac. I didn’t expect to see anyone else here.’

‘Almost didn’t come,’ McNeill said dourly. ‘Now I’m here I feel like spitting on the grave.’

Ben said nothing.

Afterwards, he was walking slowly back towards his car when he heard footsteps running up behind him and a woman’s voice calling his name. He stopped.

‘You probably don’t even remember me,’ she said, catching up. Her face was flushed behind the dark glasses, her voice husky from weeping.

‘Of course I remember you, Hilary. My deepest condolences.’

She hung her head. ‘Thanks, Ben. Or should I say Major?’

Ben disliked using his title. ‘Just Ben,’ he said.

Hilary glanced quickly to one side, then the other. He could see something was alarming her. ‘Can I talk to you?’ she said abruptly.

He shrugged. ‘Sure.’

‘Not here. Can we go somewhere?’ She moved towards his BMW. Another glance over her shoulder, as if she thought there was someone else there behind the gravestones and the bushes.

‘What about your car?’ he said.

‘Please, can we just go? I really need to talk to you.’

There was only one road through the village. Quarter of a mile beyond the last house, Ben saw a country pub up ahead on the right. ‘Buy you a drink?’ he said.

She nodded. ‘I could use one.’

The gravelled car park was almost empty. It was quarter to twelve and the lunchtime clientele obviously hadn’t turned up yet. Ben pulled up a chair for Hilary at one of the outside tables.

She shook her head. ‘I’d rather not be outside.’ The sunglasses hid much of her expression, but the tone of her voice was edgy.

‘Whatever you want,’ Ben said. He noticed the way she kept glancing back over her shoulder as he led her into the coolness of the building. She walked straight across to a corner alcove by the window. Laid her handbag on the table and sat with her back to the wall so that she could watch the car park and the road. Ben asked her what she wanted to drink. ‘I don’t care, as long as it’s strong,’ she replied.

He came back with a whisky for himself, a gin and tonic for her. She sipped it gratefully, then took off her shades. Her eyes were raw from crying. She kept glancing nervously at the window to her right. Her hands were curled into tight fists on the table. No wedding ring, Ben noticed.

‘You came alone,’ he said diplomatically.

‘You’re referring to Danny?’ Hilary shook her head ruefully, staring into her drink. ‘That was over a long time ago. I should never have married the arsehole.’

Which was pretty much what Nick had confided to Ben at the time, though he’d kept his mouth shut for fear of hurting his daughter’s feelings.

‘Your dad was a good man,’ Ben said softly. He touched her hand, then withdrew his, not sure it was the right thing. ‘I don’t care what anyone says. Whatever he might have been going through …’

Hilary glanced sharply up at him. ‘It’s all lies, Ben.’

‘What’s all lies?’

‘That dad killed himself. All lies.’

Ben looked at her. He could feel her pain. What could he say to her? That he’d been there himself once, after his mother’s own suicide? That back then, in his teens, he’d have done anything to persuade himself that she hadn’t ended her own life – believed almost anything rather than accept the truth?

‘The cops said they found antidepressants at his house,’ she said, shaking her head vehemently. ‘Uh-uh. No way.’

‘You know, maybe they did,’ Ben ventured. ‘It wouldn’t have been the first time, Hilary. Maybe we just need to accept that.’

She shook her head harder, breathing noisily with emotion. Her face was so tight that the muscles of her jaws were bunched up under the skin. ‘No, Ben,’ she insisted. ‘You don’t realise the hell he went through to get away from all that. And anyway, I just know. I know, all right? Don’t you understand?’

‘I understand that you’re in a lot of pain,’ he said gently. ‘But we all need to try to reconcile ourselves with what’s happened. It’s not going to be easy, but I promise you that, in time, it will get better.’

‘No, Ben, you don’t understand. How could you?’ Hilary paused, as if she was struggling with herself over whether to come out with whatever it was she was clearly desperate to say next. She leaned across the table, lowered her voice and came out with it. ‘I have proof that dad didn’t kill himself.’

Ben stared at her.

‘I know. It sounds crazy. But you’ve got to believe me.’

Ben could see the absolute earnestness in her eyes. ‘What kind of proof?’ he asked.

With another furtive glance at the window, Hilary reached into her handbag and took out a mobile phone. ‘This kind,’ she said.

CHAPTER FIVE

Hilary thumbed the keys of the phone, held it to her ear for a moment and then passed it to Ben. ‘Listen,’ she hissed.

Not knowing what to say, he took the phone from her, put it to his own ear and heard the robotic voice of the Orange answering service. There was a pause; then the message began.

Ben’s brows knitted at the sound of his old friend’s voice, barely audible above a background of crackling and white noise and a roaring screech that was hard to identify. Nick sounded extremely agitated and frightened, clearly fighting to keep his voice calm.

‘Darling, it’s me, it’s dad … Listen to me … Something’s …’

For a few seconds, Nick’s voice was lost in the noise. Ben thought he could hear other voices, a distorted, incomprehensible pandemonium of yelling and screaming. There was no question that something terrible was happening in the background.

‘The plane …’ Nick Chapman shouted over the chaos. ‘It’s …’ He seemed to pause. When he spoke again, his voice sounded strained to breaking point with sadness. ‘Hilary, I love you. Dad loves you. Remem—’

Whatever last words Nick had spoken after that, they were dissolved in a storm of fuzz and static. Then it was the voice of the answer-phone service in Ben’s ear again: ‘To listen to the message again, press one. To save it, press two …’

Ben pressed one and closed his eyes as the message played over again. At the end, he pressed two to save it, then laid the phone on the table. His ribs were burning as if he’d been shot again.

Hilary was staring at him expectantly, her eyes moist with tears. She snatched up the phone with a trembling hand. ‘What did that sound like to you? Like a man who wanted to die? A man about to kill himself? Tell me.’

Ben’s mind swam. None of this made any sense. He remembered the audio recording of Nick’s radio communication with the air traffic controller. ‘I’m taking her down!’

‘Let me hear it again,’ he said.

Her expression hardened. ‘You don’t believe it, do you?’

‘I just want to hear it again.’ He reached out his hand to take the phone from her fingers. ‘Give it here. Please.’

She clasped it tightly to her chest. ‘You still think he killed himself.’ Her face was white with fury.

‘Hilary, I didn’t say that. I just don’t understand what I’m hearing. Who else knows about this message?’

She shook her head. ‘Nobody. I don’t trust anybody.’

‘Something like this, and you don’t report it to the police?’

‘The police!’ she exploded. ‘It was the fucking police who planted the drugs in his house. Don’t you understand? Can’t you see? Cayman Islands police. A British territory? They’re all mixed up in it together.’

‘Hilary, I know this is awful for you, but we need to take this one step at a time. To suggest that there’s some kind of conspiracy going on—’

‘Explain this, then!’ she rasped at him, waving the phone in his face.

Ben couldn’t explain it.

‘I know something’s going on,’ she said. ‘I’m being followed. Someone’s been watching me. I think maybe they’re tracking my car. That’s why I wanted to come in yours.’

‘I’m sorry, Hilary. This all sounds crazy to me. You’re upset, you’re emotional …’

‘Next thing you’ll be saying I’m on antidepressants, too, right?’

‘I’m just trying to make sense of this whole thing. How can you be so sure someone’s following you?’

‘I’m an SAS soldier’s daughter. I’m not stupid. I can tell stuff. And I think they’re tracking my car.’

‘Who?’

‘Them.’

‘What do they look like?’

‘They don’t look like anything. They’re just … there.’

‘What do they want?’

‘They want me, Ben. They know I know the truth.’

Ben was at a loss for words.

Hilary was glowering at him with icy contempt. ‘To think my dad spoke so highly of you. He respected you so much. I thought you might understand. Thought you’d be different. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? Well you know what? I don’t need you to believe me and I don’t need your help.’

‘Hilary—’

‘Go fuck yourself!’ She stood up.

‘Hey, come on.’ Ben reached out to take her arm and guide her gently back into her seat. The last thing he’d ever have done was use force on her, but she tore defensively away from him, lashing out and knocking over her drink. The gin and tonic spilled across the table. The glass rolled to the edge and shattered on the floor.

Ben said, ‘Hilary, please. Where are you going?’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ she spat. ‘I’ll get the fucking bus back.’

He opened his mouth to protest, but she was already storming away towards the door, clutching her phone in her hand. The barman glanced up in alarm from his newspaper as she ran past him and burst outside.

Ben went after her. From the pub doorway, he could see her running across the pub car park towards the empty road, heading in the direction of the village. He took a few strides after her, then stopped and gave up the idea. She was upset. It wasn’t right to force himself on her like that. He turned back towards the pub, went inside and started heading back towards the table. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said to the barman. ‘I’ll pay for the glass.’

‘No problem,’ the barman said, and went off to grab a dustpan and brush.

It was at that moment that Ben heard the harsh rasp of the engine outside. A diesel van engine, approaching at speed.

Something wasn’t right.

He moved towards the window and peered out to see a battered white Transit van approaching. It was the only vehicle in sight, and it was approaching Hilary at speed as she half-jogged, half-ran along the grassy verge in the direction of the village outskirts. She was too preoccupied to notice it coming.

Something was terribly wrong. But by the time Ben felt that crawling icy sensation grip his body, it was already far too late to do anything.

In the final yards before it reached her, the van didn’t slow down. Didn’t indicate left and pull out a few feet from the kerb, the way any normal driver would when passing a pedestrian on a stretch of country road.

Instead it slewed a foot to the left so that its wheels sprayed mud and grass into the air. And bore straight down on Hilary. There was no squeal of brakes, no warning blast of the horn.

She didn’t notice it until the last instant. Ben caught a fleeting glimpse of her face as she turned – the look of shock, the mouth opening to cry out.

The crunching impact of four thousand pounds of fast-moving metal against a hundred and twenty pounds of frail living human flesh and bone was one of the most sickening sounds a person could hear, and Ben heard it distinctly from a hundred and fifty yards off. He yelled ‘No!’

Hilary Chapman’s body hurtled up the steep angle of the van’s bonnet, cannoned off its windscreen and was tossed high in the air. She flew over the roof and landed with a crunch on the road.

Only then did the driver slam on the brakes.

Ben was already outside and sprinting towards the scene. He saw the van skid to a halt in a cloud of dust and smoking rubber. Saw the shattered body of the young woman he’d been talking to just moments earlier lying in a heap. Saw the driver’s door swing open and a guy jump out. Nondescript, thirties, short brown hair, T-shirt and jeans.

The driver saw Ben running towards him, but he didn’t do any of the things a normal guy would have done in the circumstances. He didn’t panic. He didn’t scream out in horror at what he’d done.

Instead he left his engine running and strode quickly over to the bloody body on the road. He dropped down in a crouch and reached a hand out to her neck. Feeling for a pulse.

Ben was seventy yards away and running as hard as he could. The pain in his right side screamed for him to slow down.

The driver had done feeling for a pulse. He unpeeled the fingers of her closed fist, took something from her hand and dropped it in his pocket.

Hilary’s phone.

Ben ran harder. A roar of ‘Hey! Stop!’ exploded from his lungs.

The driver hurried back to the van. He climbed up into the cab. Slammed the door with a clang. Peered past the bloodied web of cracks that the impact had left on his windscreen, engaged gear and accelerated hard away, his wheels throwing up torn grass and mud.

Ben was just feet from the back door. ‘Stop!’ he yelled again, so loudly he tasted blood at the back of his throat. He made a flying leap to grab the rear door handle – and missed, sprawling to the ground with a cry of pain from the yank on his stitches. In less than a second he was back on his feet, but the van was already roaring off up the road. There was nothing more Ben could do.

Not even take its registration number.

Because it had no plates.

He ran over to Hilary. Kneeled down in the spreading pool of her blood and knew instantly that her killer needn’t have bothered checking for a pulse. Her eyes were staring right into his. Seeing nothing. Her neck was broken and her entire ribcage was crumpled inwards.

Ben sank his head down to his chest and his vision blurred with the tears of grief and fury.

CHAPTER SIX

A small crowd of people quickly gathered as villagers came running down the road and a couple of cars stopped. Someone gave Ben a tartan travel blanket, and he used it to cover Hilary’s body. He stayed at her side until the police and ambulance came, when the paramedics took over and he returned to the empty pub.

Still numb, Ben gave his witness statement to one of the uniformed cops, watching out of the window as he watched the paramedic team load Hilary’s broken body into the ambulance and take her away. There was no siren. No hurry.

Until the last minute, he’d been quite prepared to tell the cops the truth and give them an exact account of what had happened. Then he thought about the things Hilary had told him. Don’t trust the police. Her voice echoed in his mind, along with the voice of his conscience that was tormenting him for having failed her so badly. He hadn’t listened. Hadn’t taken her seriously.

And now he was thinking: what if she’d been right?

‘Your name?’ the cop said.

The guy looked like an arsehole anyway. Ben didn’t like his officious manner. ‘Oscar Gillespie,’ he replied. It was the first name that came into his head, an unholy mash-up of two of his favourite musicians.

But it seemed to do just fine. The cop wrote the name down on his form. Obviously not much of a jazz fan. ‘Do you have any ID? Driving licence?’

Ben could see his parked BMW from where he was sitting. ‘I got the train. No ID on me.’

‘Address?’

‘No fixed abode.’

‘Occupation?’

‘None,’ Ben said.

The cop looked at him, then asked, ‘Your relationship to the deceased?’

‘A friend of the family, on her mother’s side,’ Ben said. ‘We’d come from her father’s funeral.’

‘The barman says you were arguing.’

‘She was upset,’ Ben said. ‘Most people would be, if their father had just committed suicide. I was trying to calm her down. She became emotional and ran out into the road. I didn’t see anything until I heard the impact. By the time I got to her, the van driver had already left the scene. I suppose the guy panicked when he saw what he’d done. Maybe he thought there were no witnesses.’

The cop spent a while noting it all down. ‘You didn’t get the registration of the van?’

‘No,’ Ben said. ‘I didn’t get the registration.’

The cop gave him a speech about needing to be contacted if there were any further questions or the possibility of attending an ID parade. Ben said yes to everything, and gave him a false mobile number to call. Then, once the police had left him alone, he bought another drink from the sullen, shocked-looking barman and sat with it a while, replaying the scene in his mind. He’d witnessed a lot of bad things in the last few years, but he knew this one was going to stay with him a long time.

Two options: one, the whole thing had been a terrible accident. A woman who believed she was being followed had just happened to be run down by a van with no registration plates, whose driver had just happened to be the kind of guy who would drive off and steal her phone into the bargain – the phone on which she’d just happened to have received an apparently crucially important message.

The second option couldn’t possibly make any less sense than that. Ben boiled it down: Hilary had been right about being followed, but it hadn’t been her car they’d been tracking. The target had been her phone, and the man sent to kill her had also been under orders to retrieve it. Even ordinary civilians had some inkling that the technology required to triangulate mobile phone signals was a big deal. High-level stuff. The same was true of having people killed when they knew too much – or when someone thought they did.

Ben thought about the message Nick Chapman had left for his daughter. Whatever the hell it meant, somebody out there had been prepared to kill to obtain it.

He finished his drink. Laid the empty glass on the table. He looked at his watch, checked the date.

Eleven days and twenty-one hours still to go before he was due to return to the SAS Regimental Headquarters at Credenhill, Herefordshire, and catch his transport back out to Iraq.

Eleven days and twenty-one hours that he owed to Nick and Hilary Chapman.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The twenty-one hours had already elapsed by the time Ben stepped off the plane at Owen Roberts International Airport on the island of Grand Cayman. A tiny speck on the map, the largest of the trio of islands lost in the vast expanse of ocean between Cuba to the north, Jamaica to the east and the Mexican coast some four hundred miles to the west. Tax haven to some of the world’s most rampant capitalists, centre of pilgrimage for seekers of sunshine and laid-back Caribbean cool, Mecca for thousands whose perfect vacation was to stick on diving gear and come face to face with a brightly-coloured fish. So this was Nick Chapman’s Paradise, all seventy-six square miles of it.

Ben made his way through passport control among a throng of tourists. He was glad it was low season. Stepping outside with his only luggage, a green military haversack, over his shoulder, he breathed in the warm, palm-scented breeze from the Caribbean Sea. Owen Roberts’ runway virtually overhung the beach; beyond the single terminal, which looked more like a tropical country clubhouse than an international airport, the glittering ocean was the purest and clearest crystalline blue.

At the nearby Andy’s car hire, Ben shelled out three hundred Cayman Islands dollars for a week’s rental on a silver Jeep Wrangler and headed into the islands’ capital, George Town, looking for a hotel. The one he chose, painted white like virtually every other building in the capital, was just a hundred yards from the waterfront. His room overlooking the sea was small and utilitarian, and suited him perfectly. He took a shower, changed into a loose-fitting white shirt over jeans and stood on his balcony a while, watching the waves roll in and smoking one of his Jordanian cigarettes while pondering his first move.

Behind him on the bed was the postcard that Nick Chapman had sent him after moving to the island. It was creased and tatty now after spending two years folded up inside the paper jungle of Ben’s wallet. He walked over and picked it up, scanned the handwriting for the thousandth time and wondered what the hell had happened to his friend.

Only a few drops remained in Ben’s whisky flask. ‘Need to do better than that,’ he muttered to himself, surveying the bottles inside the mini-bar. He slipped on his shoes and went downstairs. The hotel lounge was large and airy, done out in a phoney kind of post-Colonial Officers’ Mess style with large fronded plants everywhere and whirring fans on the ceiling. As he was getting his flask filled up with the best scotch available at the bar, Ben ordered a beer and perched on a bar stool to sip it. He’d never really seen the point of beer, other than as a way to cool down on a hot day. If he wanted to get drunk, he wanted to do it in the fastest and most efficient way possible.

It looked as if the group of men in the corner of the hotel lounge were set on doing it the slow, sloppy way, and they’d obviously been at it most of the afternoon. Listening in on their conversation, Ben quickly realised they were the stragglers left over from what must have been a fair army of media invading the place in the aftermath of the suicide plane crash.

‘Hey, guys,’ he said, carrying his drink over to their table and pulling up a chair. ‘Who are you with?’ The opening shop-talk line of roving reporters the world over. Within minutes, the journalists were enjoying a round of fresh beers on their new best buddy. It wasn’t hard to get them talking. ‘Who’re you with?’ asked the oldest of the group, after introducing himself as Ray Doyle of the Miami Herald.

‘I’m on my own,’ Ben said, which seemed to be a good enough reply. Not that anyone cared. The consensus was that, a week after the event, the crash flight story had completely burned itself out and there was nothing left to hang around for. All that remained was the bitter rancour that a lot of people obviously felt for Nick Chapman. Frank Lopez of the Prensa Latina News Agency out of Havana shook his head in disgust at the mention of his name. ‘How anyone let a screw-up like that behind the controls of a fucking aircraft is beyond me.’

Doyle gulped his beer and nodded in agreement. ‘Total wacko,’ he grated. ‘The daughter too. Dope head, what I heard. The moment daddy decides to check out taking a bunch of innocent lives with him, she goes and throws herself under the nearest goddamn car. I mean, that is one fucked-up family.’ Doyle and a couple of the others laughed uproariously at the idea.

Ben’s fist clenched around his beer glass and he glanced downwards to hide the spark of anger in his eyes. After a pause he asked, as casually as possible, ‘Anyone get the name of the air traffic guy who talked to Chapman on the radio?’

Doyle looked blank. Lopez clicked his fingers, trying to remember. The one called Tibbets got there first. ‘Drummond,’ he said. ‘The guy’s name is Bob Drummond.’

‘That’s it,’ Lopez said. ‘But forget it, amigo. He won’t talk to you. Nobody wants to talk about nothing any more. It’s yesterday’s news.’

‘That’s the kind I like best,’ Ben said, and they all found that very amusing too.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Long before the reporters finally staggered away from the hotel bar to start packing their bags for home, Ben was at the wheel of the Wrangler, blasting the two miles south-east back out of George Town towards Owen Roberts International airport, with the top down and the warm tropical breeze in his hair. He passed rows of stately white beachside homes. Yacht clubs and marinas. A colourful-looking bar and grill restaurant with a signpost on its terrace proclaiming ‘RELAX! YOU ARE ON CAYMAN TIME’.

He left the Jeep in the main airport car park and headed for the air traffic control building a little way from the terminal: a squat white tower topped by a dark glass hexagonal observation centre bristling with antennas and dishes. A couple of security guards were hanging around the entrance – one white, portly, middle-aged, the other black with some seriously impressive dreadlocks that looked incongruous with his uniform. They were sharing a joke over a cigarette and leaning against the wire fence with their backs to Ben, so that he slipped through unnoticed. He pushed through a set of glass doors and found himself in a busy reception area where a harried-looking guy of about seventy was manning the desk and talking on two phones at once.

Ben walked up to the desk and asked him if Bob Drummond was working there today. The old guy gave him an exasperated look and pointed down the corridor to Ben’s right. ‘You’ll have to talk to Maud in personnel. It’s the third door. Yeah, Barry? Did you fax through those reports yet? Then where the hell are they?’

Ben left him to his apoplexy and wandered down the corridor. At the third door he paused, knocked and went inside a tiny office dominated by a broad desk and an even broader heavyset woman packed tightly into a swivel chair and wearing a name tag that said ‘Maud Biggs’. The smile he flashed at her met with a leaden stare.

‘Hi, I was wondering if Bob Drummond is working here today?’ he asked. Maud shook her head without a flicker of expression. Ben clicked his tongue. ‘That’s a pity. I’m an old friend of Bob’s and he said that anytime I was on the island I should drop in and see him. But I lost his home address. You couldn’t help me out with that, could you?’

Maud’s face remained immobile, but at the mention of anything to do with clerical files her eyes darted involuntarily towards the filing cabinet to her left. Reflex action, like a dog salivating at the mention of food. Lagging by about half a second, her conscious mind kicked in and she shook her head severely. ‘We don’t give out details of employees to anyone.’

‘All right, I’ll level with you,’ Ben said, beckoning her close. ‘My name’s Jerome Ryerson. I’m with the Lotto,’ he added with a conspiratorial grin, and flashed his tatty old British Armed Forces ID card at her, too fast for her narrow-set eyes to focus on it, and keeping his thumb over the emblem. ‘I’m here to tell Bob that he just won twelve million dollars,’ he went on, and Maud’s eyes opened wide. ‘The only address we have for him is this one and I urgently need him to sign his claim form. I don’t think he’d want to miss out, do you?’

Maud was still gazing at him in heavy-browed stupefaction when another woman appeared in the office doorway. ‘Maud, can you help me? The damn thing’s frozen up again. Do I need to enter that reference code before the sixteen-digit number, or after it?’

Maud levered herself out of her chair and waddled to the rescue, shooting a bewildered look at Ben and muttering at him to wait there. While the two women were hunched over the computer in the office across the corridor, Ben went straight over to the filing cabinet, glided open the drawer labelled ‘PERSONNEL A – M’ and flicked through the index cards to D for Drummond. Finding the one he wanted, he managed to stuff it under his shirt just in time before Maud came waddling back into the room.

‘What was that about twelve million dollars?’ she said, frowning.

Ben waved his mobile phone at her. ‘Sorry, there’s been a mistake. Head office just called. Looks like we do have the address after all. Thanks for your time.’

He waited until he was safely back in the Jeep before he examined Drummond’s file. The photo showed a beefy-looking guy in his late thirties, cropped brown hair, bad skin, droopy moustache. Ben scanned quickly through his resumé. Drummond had joined the Cayman Air Authority Navigation Services Regulation Unit back in ’94 as a general assistant before gaining promotion four years later to the Approach Control team at Owen Roberts. His home address was on Shamrock Road, in the district of Bodden Town, a few miles to the east.

The road skirted the south side of the island and took Ben into a suburban residential neighbourhood where he quickly found Drummond’s nondescript little townhouse just off the street. There was a Ford Taurus parked in the drive, behind a blue van with ‘Bodden Town Cleaning Services’ emblazoned on the side.

Ben pulled up by the kerb and walked over to the house. The front door was ajar, and he heard a woman’s voice from inside. He knocked and pushed the door open a couple more inches to see a tiny grey-haired woman with a severe expression screeching orders at a pair of guys in overalls the same blue as the van. She stopped in mid-command and turned to glare at Ben.

‘Mrs Drummond?’ he asked.

‘You gotta be kidding me – Mrs Drummond,’ she snorted. ‘Who’re you?’

‘I was looking for Bob.’

‘Get in line. You find him, you tell that worthless piece of shit he owes me three months’ back-rent. And he needn’t try coming back to get his stuff. I’ve cleaned the place out.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘Five, six days ago. I was coming over here to see him about the money when I saw him take off with these two guys in a car.’

‘Friends of his?’ Ben said.

‘I never saw them before, but I live across the other side of the island. You one of them debt collectors? Or a cop?’

‘Just a friend,’ Ben said.

Her look softened a little. ‘Listen, son. Don’t waste your time on that jackass. Bob Drummond’s a gambler and a low-life. He ain’t no-one’s friend.’

CHAPTER NINE

It was already late afternoon, and the sun was beginning its long, slow dive towards the shimmering blue ocean horizon, by the time Ben arrived at the Cayman Islands Charter complex on the far side of the island, an area called West End, near Seven Mile Beach.

Seeing his friend’s place of business brought back the sadness as he parked up in the near-empty car park and walked towards the buildings, following a sign that said VISITOR RECEPTION.

The CIC offices were housed in a long, low, glass-fronted modern building. The little stretch of lawn in front was golf-course perfect. Two palm trees flanked the entrance, waving gently in the breeze.

Behind the office buildings, next to the check-in and boarding areas for charter and inter-island shuttle passengers, stood a cluster of aircraft hangars – not the type that Ben was used to, the massive brutish military hangars capable of swallowing a Hercules troop transport. CIC ran a more modest kind of fleet. A white Britten-Norman Trislander sat parked on the concrete, identical to the one Nick Chapman had been piloting the day of the crash, with CAYMAN ISLAND CHARTER in bold black script across its fuselage. A slightly odd-looking design of aircraft, Ben observed, with the lumpy third engine protruding from the tail-fin housing and overhanging the rear of the fuselage like a scorpion’s tail. Renowned for its practicality as a short-range civilian utility aircraft: quiet, manoeuvrable, economical to run.

But not much fun to die in. Ben ran his eye along its fifty-foot length and tried not to imagine what it must have felt like to be trapped inside it as it plummeted towards the sea.

Parked a few yards behind the Trislander, sitting low off the concrete on its clumsy-looking fixed undercarriage, was an aeroplane that Ben doubted very much had ever been used for CIC operations. He’d seen photographs of the old wartime Sea Otter, but never a real example before. The single-engined flying boat had been manufactured by Supermarine, the makers of the legendary Spitfire fighter, and had been the last biplane ever commissioned by the Royal Air Force. Fewer than three hundred had ever been built. The thing was a relic from a bygone era, still sporting the mounting brackets for its three Vickers machine guns and payload of four 250-pound bombs – and yet it looked completely pristine, repainted in gleaming bright golden yellow. Ben stood admiring it for a moment or two, then turned and walked into the main office building.

The reception area was as deserted as the visitors’ car park. Ben guessed that business couldn’t have been exactly thriving in the last week or so. To the left of the reception desk was a door that said STAFF ONLY. He figured that staff only areas were much better places to learn valuable details than public areas. He pushed it open and found himself in a large, neatly-ordered office. There was nobody here either, but he could sense a familiar presence nonetheless.

The instant he walked in, three things told him this had been Nick Chapman’s office. The first was the neatness. Ben hadn’t met an ex-soldier yet whose daily habits hadn’t been permanently imbued by the discipline of military life. Especially SAS life. The second was the framed photograph of Hilary Chapman sitting on the empty desk surrounded by papers, files, tubs full of pens.

The third was the print that hung on the wall above the empty desk chair. Ben even knew the name of the artist: M.C. Escher, famous for the mind-bending optical illusions that he’d designed into his artwork back in the mid twentieth century. Nick had always been into that kind of stuff, sticking postcards up by his bunk wherever they’d happened to be stationed that wasn’t in the middle of some desert or jungle: a flight of stairs that climbed in an infinite loop without ever getting anywhere; paradoxical structures and impossible realities that seemed to defy logic and tricked the eye into seeing what couldn’t be.

The picture hanging on the wall had been one of Nick’s favourites. It showed a symmetrical circular mosaic-like web of interlocked patterns. If you looked at them one way, what you saw were legions of heavenly white winged angels on a dark background. Cock your head a little to the side, narrow your eyes, change your perspective, and the angels suddenly melted away and the background leapt into focus to become a horde of sinister, bat-like black demons against a field of white. Nick had used to say it helped him remember the line between good and evil. Ben had always remembered that.

Another door swung open at the far end of the office and a woman walked in. She was maybe thirty-six, thirty-seven. Tall and straight, tanned, dark-haired, wearing it in a loose ponytail. She was halfway to the desk and reaching out to pick up a file from a stack when she suddenly registered Ben’s presence in the room and froze, looking at him with wide eyes. ‘Who are you?’

‘I was looking for the manager,’ Ben said.

‘I’m Mrs Martínez, Mr Chapman’s personal assistant. I’m acting manager in his … his absence.’ Her voice was strong but the tightness in her throat threatened to overwhelm it at the mention of his name. She covered her emotion, cleared her throat and added firmly, ‘And you can’t come in here. Maybe you didn’t see the sign that says “staff only”?’

‘There’s nobody in reception.’

She rolled her eyes and tutted. ‘Jennifer. That damn temp’s always on a coffee break. I’ll buzz Rachel. She’ll take your booking.’

‘I’m not interested in making a booking.’

‘Right. You want flying lessons? Then you need to see Phil in the blue building behind the hangar area.’

Ben shook his head. ‘I didn’t come here for lessons either.’

She cocked her head to one side and put her hands on her hips. ‘Then may I ask what it is you do want?’

‘I have some questions about your late employer, Nick Chapman. I won’t take up much of your time.’

The PA let out a sigh. ‘I thought you media people were all gone now. Haven’t you had enough?’

Ben was already tired of playing games. He came straight out with the truth, as simple as he could make it. ‘I’m not a reporter. My name’s Ben Hope. I was a friend of Nick’s and I’ve come here to find out what really happened to him.’

Mrs Martínez flinched noticeably at his words. She narrowed her eyes, looking hard at him, seeming to scrutinise every detail of his face. After a long beat she replied slowly and carefully, ‘If you’d been watching the news, you’d know what happened.’

‘I don’t always believe the news,’ Ben said.

‘Listen, everyone here is very upset. We really don’t want to be pestered right now. The press have been flocking around here like goddamned vultures every day.’

‘Just a couple of questions and I’ll be gone.’

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Nobody here wants to answer any questions. Just go away. Leave me alone, okay?’ She considered a moment, then added, ‘I mean, leave us all alone.’ Before she could stop it, tears had welled up in her eyes and were rolling down her face. She wiped them away.

‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ Ben said. ‘I’m very sorry.’ There was a stack of headed compliment slips on a little stand on the desk next to a computer terminal. He grabbed one and picked up a pen that was lying nearby. ‘This is my number,’ he said, writing. ‘Call me if you change your mind.’

Back out in the reception area was a young blonde in a short skirt whom Ben took to be Jennifer, the temp. She was pretty, with blue eyes and an elfin quality about her. She threw Ben a glance, smiled coyly and busied herself arranging some flowers in a vase as he headed for the exit. He didn’t make a big deal of noticing it, but he was aware of the way she watched him through the glass all the way back to his Jeep, the elfin look gone, replaced with an inscrutable expression that Ben couldn’t quite fathom.

CHAPTER TEN

Ben headed back down south towards George Town, on the road running parallel to Seven Mile Beach with the sweep of white sands and the spectacular view across the West Bay to his right. Watching the sun sink closer towards the sea and bathe the whole island in a shimmering copper haze, he could understand what had brought his old friend to this idyllic place.

A couple of miles from the Cayman Islands Charter office, a black SUV was parked in a lay-by off a long empty straight. Ben sped past, then saw in his mirror that the black car was indicating to pull out behind him.

Its driver wasn’t hanging about. By the time the vehicle was filling his rear-view mirror, Ben had started paying more attention to it. A Chevy Blazer four-wheel-drive, big and bulky, dark-tinted windows, bull bars and extra driving lamps on the front. It was sticking too close to his tail. He eased off on the gas, letting the Jeep slow to just over fifty, expecting the Blazer to pass him.

It didn’t. Instead it matched his speed, still sticking much too close. Ben slowed the Jeep down to a crawl. The Blazer slowed down too. Ben hit the gas and roared the Jeep up to seventy. The Blazer followed suit, making no attempt to hide the fact that it was deliberately tailing him.

Ben remembered what Drummond’s landlady had said about her tenant taking off with some men in a big black car. Interesting, he thought, and hit the brakes and slewed hard over to the dusty verge.

It probably wasn’t what a detective would have done. But then, Ben didn’t pretend to be a detective.

He climbed out of the Jeep. The Blazer had stopped twenty yards behind, just sitting there. Ben walked up the verge towards it. The vehicle’s black bonnet was filmed over with dust. Behind the tinted windscreen he could see two men in the front seats. Their eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, but they were fixed right on him.

‘Can I help you?’ Ben said, in a tone that wasn’t friendly, wasn’t hostile.

The men kept staring at him. Neither moved until he was just a few feet from the front of the Blazer – then the driver slammed it into drive, pulled aggressively back out into the road and went speeding off in a cloud of dust.

Ben watched it go, then started walking back towards the Jeep.

Definitely interesting.

* * *

Ben drove back through the falling dusk to the hotel, showered, opened up his holdall and changed into a fresh black T-shirt and black jeans. He never had been too imaginative when it came to his wardrobe. He slipped his wallet into the back pocket of his jeans, then wandered down to the bar and ordered a steak with a green salad and a glass of red wine. He took his meal outside onto the patio and sat watching the colours of the sunset, listened to the breakers crashing in against the rocks.

All his life, he’d loved the sea. The sound relaxed him, helped him think. Taking the folded postcard from his wallet, he spent a while staring at Nick Chapman’s address near Rum Point. It was time to make another visit, one that Ben’s instincts told him was best kept nocturnal. He took his time over a second glass of wine. By now the ocean was dark, just the distant white crests of the waves visible under the moon.

It was sometime after ten when he went up to his room, grabbed his leather jacket and headed out into the night, twirling the Jeep keys thoughtfully around his finger. The warmth of the day was cooling fast in the ocean breeze, and he shrugged on the jacket, wincing a little at the pull on his stitches.

Ben was still a few yards from the Jeep when the group of men appeared out of the shadows and quickly converged on him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

There were four of them, all over six feet, all built on a fairly grand scale – somewhere between eleven and twelve hundred pounds of tattooed muscle and lard ambling up towards him. And judging by the lethal assortment of hardware they’d brought along to play with, it wasn’t to ask the time.

The four stopped, forming a semi-circle cutting Ben off from his Jeep. Nobody spoke. The only sound was the rhythmic meaty thwack as one of them slapped the thick of his aluminium baseball bat against his palm. One of his companions was casually swinging a bolo knife. Maybe fourteen inches of black leaf-shaped blade, just this side of a machete, and Ben guessed every one of those inches was shaving sharp. With a rattling chink-chink, another of the men unravelled a length of heavy steel chain from his fist.

The biggest of the men, standing around six-five in denim and biker boots, seemed to be the leader. In the hierarchy of moronic bruisers, size was always the dominant factor. The survival knife stuck crossways in his belt was some cheap mail-order job with a sawback blade and knuckleduster hilt. His head was shaved and gleaming under the moonlight. A line of tattooed teardrops ran down his cheek from his right eye, disappearing into the thick black beard that hung halfway down his chest, fashioned into twin spikes, rigid with hairspray. Going for the demonic look, Ben guessed.

‘You guys look like you’re auditioning for a part,’ he said. ‘Or did you escape from a freak show somewhere?’

The black beard opened in a grin, showing a glint of a gold tooth. ‘We’re the reception committee, motherfucker,’ he said in a voice that was about half an octave lower than was human.

‘I get it,’ Ben said. ‘You’re what they call the frighteners.’ He smiled. ‘Here to intimidate me.’

‘Smart guy.’

‘I catch on fast. So when does the frightening part begin? I have to be somewhere.’

The baseball bat kept on slap-slapping. The bearded guy fingered the hilt of his survival knife. ‘How do you feel about wiping someone else’s ass, little man?’

‘Excuse me?’ Ben said, genuinely intrigued.

‘See, most folks would find the idea of wiping someone else’s ass is pretty fuckin’ repellent, no?’

The guy waited for Ben to comment. When he realised Ben wasn’t going to, he went on in his bass rumble. ‘Say you had to wipe asses for a livin’, like if you was carin’ for old folks or somethin’. Sure, to start with, every time you had to wipe an ass you’d feel like pukin’ afterwards. Or maybe even while you was doin’ it. But after a while, you’d get used to that shit. Then wipin’ some old fucker’s ass wouldn’t seem like nuthin’. You could wipe a hundred asses before breakfast. Now, see the point I’m makin’ …’

Ben had been waiting for the point.

‘The point I’m makin’ is that in my line of work, it ain’t wipin’ asses. It’s spillin’ blood. You get me? And I’ve been doin’ this shit so long I can’t even remember a time when spatterin’ some fucker’s blood all over the sidewalk made me feel one way or the other. This is what I do. You hear what I’m sayin’, motherfucker? Talking about you. You’re gonna get fucked up permanent, right here, right now.’

Ben’s hand went slowly to his jeans pocket. He took out his cigarettes and lighter. Clanged open his Zippo and lit up. Through a cloud of smoke he said, ‘Well, Beard, that was a pretty good speech. You certainly have a gift for metaphor. Out of curiosity, did you have to look up the word “repellent”?’

Beard’s cocky grin twisted into a scowl and he slipped his fingers inside the knuckleduster hilt of his knife. The slap-slapping behind him stopped.

‘Listen to this asshole,’ muttered the one with the chain.

‘I don’t get to hear speeches like that very often,’ Ben said. ‘In my line of work we don’t generally have time for them.’

‘Your line of work,’ Beard repeated, just a little uncertainly. The grin returned, but there was a touch of nervousness to it now.

‘I appreciate you guys have to make a living too,’ Ben said. ‘But this is one occupational hazard you don’t want to have to deal with. So I think you ought to turn around and head back to the bar you just came from, call your boss and tell him he shouldn’t send you on jobs where you’re so badly out of your depth.’

Two seconds of silence. Then the survival knife was out of Beard’s belt and swinging through the air.

Here we go, Ben thought. The downward slash. Hallmark of the truly amateurish knife fighter, the guy who’s learned all he knows from third-rate movies, has got lucky once or twice while dealing with people even more clueless than him, and is confirmed in his vision of himself as a formidable urban warrior. It would have been much too easy to twist the knife out of Beard’s hand, break three of his fingers in the loop of the hilt and then embed the thick blade right in the top of his skull.

Ben didn’t do that. Instead he twisted it out of Beard’s hand, broke three fingers in the loop of the hilt, used Beard’s ears as handles to drive his face down into his rising knee and then sent the blade whirling with a meaty thunk deep into the right thigh of the guy who was coming up flailing the chain.

With a scream that drowned out Beard’s, the man let go of the chain and clapped his hands in a gibbering panic to where the knuckleduster hilt was protruding from his leg. The chain’s momentum carried it hissing though the air a couple of feet, until it connected with the face of his associate with the bolo knife.

Hard. Ben heard the crack of bone over the thwack of the impact. The bolo dropped to the ground as its owner keeled over like a felled tree, clutching at his shattered nose and cheekbone, either too shocked to make a sound or choked by the broken bits of teeth in his throat.

The fight had lasted about three seconds so far. Ben stepped over the writhing, groaning Beard towards the last of the attackers who was still standing. The guy swung his baseball bat a couple of times, but his heart wasn’t in it. ‘Fuck,’ he muttered in a hollow voice, then turned and ran like hell, still clutching the bat. Ben watched him go. He was a much better sprinter than he was a fighter.

Taking a draw on his cigarette, Ben walked over to Bolo and stamped on his face, twice. A few feet away, his friend Mr Chain was making a high-pitched agonised keening as he tried to yank the knife blade out of his thigh. It had missed the femoral artery by an inch or two but there was still a lot of blood spilling across the concrete. Ben decided he’d had enough of the guy’s noise, and shut him up with a kick to the head that sent him slumping over sideways and bounced his skull off the ground.

Beard was trying groggily to get up, raising his body off the concrete with his left hand, the broken fingers of his right tucked tight between his legs. Ben’s boot swiped his left arm out from under him and rolled him over on his back. Beard stared up at him in terror. His nose was split open and bleeding almost as profusely as Chain’s leg.

Ben crouched down next to him and flicked cigarette ash on the guy’s face. ‘Just you and me now, Beard,’ he said. ‘I reckon as you’re the leader of the gang, that qualifies you as its spokesman too. So speak. Who sent you?’

‘I … I don’t …’ Beard gasped.

‘You’re not really going to give me the “I don’t know” routine, are you?’

‘Listen, mister … I swear …’

‘Fine,’ Ben said. He dug the Zippo back out of his jeans pocket. Flipped open the lid and thumbed the wheel. The spark ignited the fuel inside to produce the warm flickering orange flame and that smell Ben loved.

The flame from Beard’s beard as its rigid spikes went up like a magnesium flare was considerably brighter, and the stink of burning hair and skin far less pleasant.

Beard shrieked in terror. None too gently, Ben used the man’s denim jacket to beat the fire out.

‘Didn’t your mother warn you about using too much hairspray?’ Ben said. ‘That stuff’s flammable.’

‘You crazy sonofabitch!’ Beard screamed.

‘I think I asked you a question,’ Ben said. ‘Not going to ask you a second time.’

Beard’s eyes bulged in his scorched, blackened face. ‘I don’t fucking know! This guy offered us ten grand cash. Gave us your picture. It’s in my pocket.’ He pointed wildly with his good hand.

Ben yanked the photo out. It had been taken from inside a car, and showed him walking towards it. His Jeep was in the background, parked on the side of the stretch of road alongside Seven Mile Beach. Easy enough to figure out who his photographer had been: one of the two men in the black Chevy Blazer.

‘Some guy hired you? That’s all you know? A guy in a bar?’

Beard nodded desperately.

Ben showed him the lighter again. ‘Sure? You still have a bit left on that side. How about I even you up?’

‘No! Yes! I swear!’

Ben nodded. He supposed that a man with a burning beard would always tell the truth. It sounded a little like a Chinese proverb.

‘Get yourself another job, mate,’ he said, and walked to the Jeep.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Cayman Kai was a cove on the wooded north side of the island, close to Rum Point beach. Nick Chapman’s home had been a simple, elegant white bungalow with a broad veranda, surrounded by trees and privately situated at the side of a narrow coastal inlet with its own boat dock.

The place was all in darkness. As Ben got out of the car, he could hear music and laughter wafting across on the breeze from the nearby restaurant on Rum Point. He glanced around him: nobody was about, and the nearest neighbours were a good distance away beyond the whispering trees. He tried the front door, then the back. Finding them both locked, he turned his attention to the window catches: exactly the flimsy low-security kind of affair he’d have expected to find on an island with one of the lowest crime rates on the planet. In moments, he was inside.

The window he’d come through was that of the master bedroom. Ben stood perfectly immobile and utterly silent for a long time in the shadows, listening to the sounds of the house, hearing no sign of movement from anywhere. He reached into his pocket for the mini-Maglite he’d bought earlier in George Town, and cast the strong, thin beam of light around the room.

A mosquito net shrouded the double bed. A vase of dying flowers stood on the bedside table. On one white wall hung a large framed Escher print, the one with the never-ending staircase. On the opposite wall hung a picture of Nick and his team standing grinning next to a Cayman Air Charter Trislander on a grassy airfield. The aircraft had a pearly white new paint job and everyone looked ready to burst with excitement. This must have been CIC’s inaugural launch. Nick himself looked tanned and fit and immensely proud.

Below that one was a photo portrait of Hilary, aged about fifteen, together with another from her graduation day.

Ben felt strange, and a little ashamed, to be breaking into the home of his dead friend. He left the bedroom and moved on through the house, treading quietly and cautiously, darting the torch beam as he went.

The police didn’t seem to have turned the place over too roughly looking for clues. Everything was more or less tidy, down to the perfectly-squared rugs on the tiled floors and the ordered arrangement of cushions on the living room sofa. Most of the walls were covered with photos of the bright golden-yellow Sea Otter and other aircraft, as well as a collection of spectacular aerial shots of the island that showed the depth of Nick’s passion for the place.

Satisfied that he was completely alone, Ben spent some time in Nick’s study, holding the shaft of the mini-Maglite between his teeth to sift through the papers in the drawers of the large antique desk, in the hope that he might find something the cops had missed.

He’d no real idea what he was looking for, but searching made him nervous. There was a lingering anxiety at the back of his mind that no amount of rational denial could completely erase: the fear of uncovering some evidence that Nick had been in the kind of trouble from which only suicide offered a refuge – irredeemable debts, maybe – or signs that the depression had returned.

What if – just what if – Nick really had ended his own life? The thought made Ben’s mind swim. Then what had happened to Hilary? Was her death some bizarre coincidence? Like the fact that someone on this island obviously didn’t like Ben going around asking questions? And if Nick hadn’t killed himself, then what was the alternative? For all the hours Ben had spent going over and over it in his mind, he could think of nothing.

There was nothing in Nick’s desk, either. No demands from the bank, no nasty letters threatening litigation, no doctor’s prescriptions or empty pill bottles, no telltale Prozac capsule rolling loose in the bottom of a drawer. All Ben found among Nick’s business documents were routine bits of paperwork and correspondence that gave the impression that CIC wasn’t just solvent, it was booming. Inside a Manila file were some preliminary architect sketches for a major extension to the office buildings at West End, and a letter giving an estimated completion date in eight months’ time. Ben studied the sketches and shook his head. Did people suffering from chronic depression make plans like this?

The bottom drawer contained Nick’s private papers. Ben went through them guiltily. No sign of a Last Will and Testament. A cheery letter from Hilary, dated six months ago, with a few snaps of her on holiday somewhere with a girlfriend. An assortment of receipts and product guarantees. A handwritten list of forty or so names, headed ‘party guests’.

A man contemplating suicide, planning a big get-together?

Ben put everything back as he’d found it and started going through the address book by the phone. Again, he could find nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing, except for the somewhat cryptic phone number at the back of the book. It had no name next to it, only a capital letter T that had been heavily circled as though it had some special significance.

Ben used his own phone to dial the number, and got straight through to an answering service. He switched off before the message prompt.

That was when he heard the click of a key turning in the front door lock, followed by the padding of tentative footsteps in the hallway outside the study. The beam of a torch swept by, shining under the crack in the door.

Ben turned off his Maglite. He crouched behind the desk, completely still and silent in the darkness.

The footsteps stopped right outside the study. Someone reached out and nudged the door half open. Torchlight shone inside the room.

And from the source of the brilliant white beam, there was the unmistakable metallic click-clunk of a well-oiled revolver mechanism being cocked, ready to fire.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The footsteps moved closer inside the room. The torch beam swept from side to side. Ben tucked himself in tightly behind the desk, but he knew that he had zero chance of remaining hidden for long.

The torch beam flashed across the desk. Ben saw his own shadow appear on the floor. He had a split second to react before the intruder did.

Nobody, not even a trained SAS soldier, really wants to launch themselves, unarmed and blind, at someone holding a cocked and loaded revolver. But under the circumstances, Ben didn’t have a lot of choice. Surprise was his only advantage, and he used it. With a roar he burst out from behind the desk, shining his own torch straight back at the intruder’s face. And hurled himself at the guy in a flying leap.

There was no deafening gunshot while he was in the air. Ben’s shoulder connected with what felt like the intruder’s midriff, driving him violently backwards against the wall. The intruder let out a grunt of pain and shock. The torch beam slashed upwards to point at the ceiling, then fell towards the floor. There was the distinct thump of a chunky revolver landing on the rug.

Pinning the wildly struggling intruder down hard with a knee to the throat, Ben reached for the switch of the side lamp.

And with a shock, recognised the face staring up at him as that of Mrs Martínez, Nick’s PA.

He instantly relaxed the pressure on her neck before she blacked out. She was wheezing and clutching her throat as he hauled her to her feet and set her down in a chair. ‘I wasn’t expecting to meet you again so soon, Mrs Martínez,’ he said.

‘How did you get in here?’ she gasped, rubbing her neck.

Ben stooped to pick up the fallen revolver. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 28, the ‘Highway Patrolman’ version of their large-framed .357 hand cannon. Four inch barrel, blue steel. Enough firepower to stop a Freightliner truck. The US Highway Patrol had used them to stop runaway vehicles by blasting holes in the engine blocks.

‘That’s a lot of handgun for a nice lady like you to be carrying around,’ Ben said. He eased the hammer down. Pushed the knurled catch behind the recoil shield and flipped out the cylinder to see the six bright brass cartridges stamped FEDERAL .357 MAGNUM. He tipped the rounds out into his palm, dropped them in his pocket and laid the unloaded pistol on the desk. He could see her eyeing it. ‘Did I hurt you?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine.’ Her throat and jaw were turning a fine red, but it would fade in an hour or two. He wasn’t so sure the pain in his side would ease as fast. His little altercation with Beard’s boys earlier hadn’t done his healing wound too many favours, and leaping up from behind the desk just now had added an unpleasantly sharp new dimension to the discomfort that had him worrying about busted stitches.

‘You want to know why I broke into Nick’s house, Mrs Martínez, and I’ll level with you,’ Ben said. ‘I’m here because people aren’t answering my questions and I get the feeling my presence on this island is less than welcome in some quarters. I don’t think Nick would have minded me coming to check out his place. Now, you level with me. I’m wondering why someone with a key to the front door would come armed with a flashlight and a Magnum.’

‘What questions?’ she said.

‘Ones that would help me understand the truth of what really happened out there that day.’

She hesitated. ‘I’ll answer your questions if you’ll let me go over to that bookcase.’ She pointed across the other side of the study.

‘What’s that? The old “hidden weapon in the bookcase” trick?’

‘Please. I’m not that stupid.’

‘What’s in the bookcase?’

‘You’ll understand.’

‘Slowly,’ he said.

Avoiding his eye, she crossed the room, stopped at the bookcase and gazed along the rows of titles. Most of Nick’s collection seemed to be aviation-related. She plucked at the spine of a big, thick leather ring-bound book, slid it out and held it tight against her chest.

‘Now set it down on that table and step away from it,’ Ben said.

She did as he said. Ben approached the table and flipped open the leather cover. It was a photo album, nothing more.

‘I need to see something,’ she said. ‘It’s important.’

‘Be my guest,’ Ben said.

Mrs Martínez flipped through a few pages of the album. She stopped, pressed a finger to one of the pages, stooped a little to peer at it more closely, then flipped another page and did the same again. She looked up at Ben, studying his face with the same careful scrutiny he’d noticed that afternoon at the CIC offices. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Now I know for sure.’

‘Know what?’

‘What I came here tonight to find out. I thought I recognised you when you walked into the office today. But I needed to be sure that you were the same Ben Hope Nick used to talk about.’ She spun the album round on the table so he could see the picture. It was a shot taken at Hilary Chapman’s engagement party. Ben was in the background, holding a glass.

‘And here,’ she said, flipping back a page to another shot of some of the men of A Squadron, looking hot and exhausted in filthy fatigues, sitting around a clearing in some tropical hellhole that could have been either of the SAS’s jungle training grounds in Belize or Borneo. There was Ben in the middle, his face partially blacked, in the process of field-stripping an AR-15 rifle. Technically speaking, Nick shouldn’t have even had such potentially compromising photos in his possession, though sneaking the occasional memento home wasn’t uncommon practice.

‘You haven’t changed a lot,’ she said.

‘Thanks. So now you know who I am, Mrs Martínez, will you talk to me?’

‘Call me Tamara,’ she said. ‘And yes, if Nick trusted you as a friend, then that’s good enough for me.’

Ben saw the connection right away. ‘Tamara, as in the large capital T in Nick’s address book, next to a mobile number?’

She nodded. ‘You’ve been straight with me, now it’s my turn. Nick and I were having an affair for the last eighteen months. That’s to say, I was having an affair with him. I was the one that was married with two kids. It was our secret, obviously. A very well-kept one, until now. I even had a secret phone he used to call me on.’ She paused a long time, then added softly, ‘I loved him so much.’

Now Ben understood the depth of pain in her eyes. She hadn’t just lost a work colleague.

‘Why the gun, Tamara?’

‘It’s my husband’s. I don’t normally …’

‘Walk about the island packing a pistol?’

She shook her head. ‘No, this is one of the safest places in the world. But I’m scared. I’m scared to death.’ The tears in her eyes caught the light. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. But the words building up in her throat were too strong to be hemmed in and after a few moments’ hesitation she blurted it out.

‘Nick didn’t kill himself,’ she said.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘I don’t think we should hang around here too long,’ Ben said after a beat.

Tamara sniffed, wiped a tear. ‘We can go back to my place. It’s okay – there’s nobody there right now but me and the maid. You follow me.’

After tidying up behind them and making sure nobody was lurking around outside, they left the villa by the front door. Tamara had parked her Mazda people carrier among the shadows of the trees. Ben watched her climb in and her car lights come on, then got into the Wrangler and followed. They drove eastwards across the island for a few miles, to an area called Omega Bay Estates. The Mazda led the way into what was obviously a prestigious and highly expensive gated community, and pulled up outside a sprawling house set far back from the road.

‘Where’s your husband?’ Ben asked as she led him inside. The tears had dried up now.

‘Dwight? Away on some legal conference. He’ll be gone another ten days. Even if he was here,’ she added with a grimace, ‘he’d be off sailing around the bay on that damn boat of his. And the twins are staying with my mom in Miami.’

Where Nick’s place was unassumingly tasteful and comfortable, the Martínez residence purposefully screamed ‘rich lawyer’ as loudly as it could and shoved its opulence right in your face. Ben got the impression that wasn’t down to Tamara’s influence. He paused to look at a photo of Dwight Martínez on a sideboard, posing with his motor yacht in the background, a sleek white vessel with the name Santa Clara on her bows.

Dwight might have been a fine figure of a man in his youth, but Ben doubted it. He was almost perfectly spherical in shape, all three hundred pounds of him, with thin sandy hair that looked glued on and a smile that was more like a sneer. Ben glanced covertly back at Tamara and muttered ‘Jesus’ under his breath.

‘Let’s get a drink,’ she said, and led him towards the kitchen. In the passage was a reproduction antique display cabinet filled with shotguns – a showy brace of Purdeys, a couple of skeet guns and a short-barrelled Remington semi-auto that looked as if it was kept for home defence. ‘Dwight’s quite the sportsman,’ Ben commented as he followed Tamara into the enormous kitchen.

‘Don’t get me started. Pity any poor creature that crawls or flies when he and his law cronies get together. You want a beer?’

‘I’d sooner have a scotch,’ he said.

‘Sounds good to me.’ Tamara opened a cupboard, fetched out a bottle of Bowmore and two glasses. Ben walked over to the long breakfast bar and pulled out a stool. ‘Mind if I smoke?’

She shook her head as she poured out the drinks. ‘Go ahead. There’s an ashtray on the side.’

‘Want one?’

‘Uh-uh. I quit months ago.’

Ben lit up. Clanged the Zippo shut and blew out smoke. Tamara joined him at the breakfast bar, setting the bottle down between them on the marble top. Handed him his glass and took a long, deep gulp of her own, as if she really needed it. ‘This has been a tough time for me,’ she said in the controlled voice of someone battling their emotions.

Ben didn’t reply. Looking at her he could see a strong-willed woman bravely trying to hold it together, trapped in a nowhere marriage and unable to grieve openly for the man she’d loved. He knew there were times she must veer close to the edge. He understood it. He’d been there in the past, and would certainly find himself there again in the future. Some things didn’t go away.

‘Nick said you didn’t have any family,’ she said. ‘Is that still how it is for you?’

‘That’s still how it is,’ Ben said.

‘I think he told me you’re from Ireland? You don’t sound it.’

‘I wasn’t born there,’ he said. ‘But I love Ireland. My mother was from Galway. I have a home there.’ He pictured it in his mind: a large rambling old house close to the rocky shore where he loved to spend time alone whenever he could, sometimes sitting for hours gazing out to sea. He often missed it.

‘You talk about your mother in the past tense,’ Tamara said.

‘She died a long time ago.’

When Tamara understood he wasn’t going to elaborate, she asked, ‘Do you have any other family?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s just me and Winnie. She was my parents’ housekeeper. She moved with me to Ireland after they died and now she just looks after the place for me when I’m not around. A mad old bat, and it drives her crazy trying to keep me in line,’ he added with a smile, which quickly dropped from his face. ‘She’s the only family I have left now.’

Tamara sensed there was something paining him, something he kept bottled up deep inside and didn’t want to talk about. ‘You want a top-up?’ she asked him.

He nodded, and slid his half-empty glass across for her to refill.

‘Why are you here on Grand Cayman, Ben?’ she said. ‘You don’t believe this bullshit about suicide either, do you?’

‘Let’s start from the beginning,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you know.’

‘I know Ni—’ she started, then broke off. ‘I knew Nick. He told me all about his history – the divorce, the breakdown, his depression, how he’d left the army under a cloud. He didn’t try to hide anything from me. But that was years ago. He wasn’t depressed any more. He was one of the most contented people I’ve ever known. Did you see that yellow plane outside the office?’

‘The Sea Otter.’

‘Nick rescued it from a scrapyard and restored it himself. His pride and joy. He was like a boy with it – any excuse, he was in the air. He had a passion for it that was so infectious, he even got me learning to fly. Nick loved planes, he loved this island, and the new life he’d created here …’ Tamara paused a moment, swallowed and added in a choked voice, ‘And he loved me. That’s why this Cifuentes stuff made no sense to me, no sense at all.’

‘Cifuentes?’

‘Dr Carlos Maria Cifuentes. This psychiatrist in Miami who was allegedly treating Nick for severe bipolar disorder and prescribing antidepressants for about the last nine months. At least that’s what the police report said.’ Tamara shook her head vehemently. ‘But there’s no way Nick would have touched that stuff, let alone go all the way to Miami for it. He swore he’d never go near antidepressant meds again, after all the horrendous side effects he’d had in the past. He wouldn’t even take painkillers for a headache. And most of all, if he’d been suffering, I know he wouldn’t have kept it from me. He’d have reached out to me for help.’ Tamara was working hard to stay composed, but it was a struggle for her and she was knocking back the whisky as she talked.

‘So I called the clinic. Guess what. They’d never heard of a Dr Carlos Maria Cifuentes. The whole thing was fabricated to make people believe that Nick would have done that. Of all the reporters that came swarming over this whole island picking over the bones, wouldn’t you think at least one would have checked it out and seen what was going on? No. Of course not. The bastards.’

Tamara’s voice had risen to a breathless pitch of anger. She stopped suddenly, breathing hard, and collected herself. ‘You know, even if Nick had wanted to die, he’d never had done it in a way that could harm someone else. Mark and Cindy, the co-pilot and flight attendant – they were two of our best friends. And they’d just gotten engaged. And all those poor people – and the children …’ She closed her eyes.

Ben told her about his investigations that day: his visit to Bob Drummond’s place; Drummond’s unexplained and somewhat sudden disappearance; the mysterious black Chevy Blazer; the men outside his hotel.

‘Who were they?’ Tamara said, frowning.

‘Just heavies for hire, local Cayman boys. They didn’t even know who they were working for. But the two in the car – they might have been a different matter.’

Tamara shook her head in bewilderment. ‘So what the hell is going on?’

Both their glasses were empty. Ben reached for the bottle and filled them again. ‘Before, I didn’t know what to think. Now, I think there’s only one possible scenario that makes any sense.’ He looked at her. ‘You’re right. Nick didn’t take that plane down. Someone else did. Maybe some kind of sabotage. Right now, I’d go with a bomb. Whatever it was, Nick was forced to crash-land in the sea. Maybe he hit the reef accidentally – I don’t know. Whether everyone else was killed right away, I don’t know either. But what I do know is that Nick was alive long enough after the crash to call his daughter, to leave her a message to say goodbye. I’m sure he’d have called you, too, if he’d had time. He obviously didn’t. As to what happened next … well, that’s what I intend to find out.’

Tamara said nothing, just stared into her drink.

Ben went on. ‘Whoever’s behind this whole thing must have known that Nick called Hilary. That could mean they were tapping her phone, but I don’t think that’s likely. What I think is more likely is that someone retrieved Nick’s phone from the wreck and was able to trace his call to her. They didn’t know how much he’d been able to tell her about what had happened. So they couldn’t take any chances. She had to be silenced, and all trace of the message had to disappear.’ He paused to take a gulp of whisky. ‘And it could have been avoided, if I hadn’t acted like a jerk. I didn’t listen to her. I let her run out into the road and they mowed her down like a daisy.’

‘Hold on. You mean—?’

‘You hadn’t heard?’

‘I’ve been avoiding the TV, the radio, the newspapers, everything,’ Tamara breathed. She closed her eyes and rested her head in her hands. ‘Oh my God. Oh Christ. I can’t bear this.’

‘And now the moment I land on Grand Cayman and start poking around, someone’s not happy about it,’ Ben said. ‘And they’re going to get a lot more unhappy about it, because I haven’t even started yet.’

She looked at him. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to find the people responsible and kill them all,’ he said.

Tamara’s face had turned pale. ‘Give me one of those cigarettes.’

‘I thought you’d quit.’

‘I just started again.’ Tamara cupped her hand lightly over Ben’s as he lit the cigarette for her. She coughed. ‘These are strong.’

‘They’re Jordanian,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about Dwight. He seems to make a lot of money.’

‘A gross amount. He made partner last year.’

‘Can you be absolutely sure you and Nick kept your relationship secret from everyone?’ Ben asked.

‘Are you saying that Dwight—?’

‘Jealous husbands have been known to do rash things. It takes money and connections to make murder look like an accident and cover your tracks halfway around the world.’

‘Dwight wouldn’t give a shit if I walked out tomorrow. And I was going to. I still am going to. The guy might be an asshole. And believe me, he is an asshole of the first order. But he’s not a killer. He wouldn’t have the guts.’

‘It was just an idea,’ Ben said. ‘We’re going to need more of them if we want to figure this out. Someone out there, someone powerful, wanted Nick out of the way. Why?’

Tamara stared into the middle distance as she smoked. Her brow flickered as a thought seemed to come to her. Her eyes hardened and she nodded slowly to herself. ‘Brigman,’ she said. ‘Shit. Brigman. Why I didn’t think of it before …’

‘Okay, who’s Brigman?’

She turned her gaze on him. ‘Julius T. Brigman. He’s a Texan who settled here about twenty years ago. Owns half the luxury real estate on Grand Cayman, and just about all the yacht charter business. Last October, he decided he wanted to break into air charter as well, and made Nick an offer to buy him out.’

‘I’m guessing that Nick turned him down.’

‘Sure he did. In no uncertain terms. But Brigman’s not the kind who gives up so easily. He kept coming back. The offer went up and up. Nick kept on refusing. Then one evening in November, when Nick was alone at his place, Brigman turned up with two of his gorillas, and laid down a final offer. Nick told him to take a hike. It got a little ugly. Brigman became abusive, and in the end Nick grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and kicked his ass out into the street. Told the gorillas he’d break their arms if they ever came snooping round his house again.’

Ben had to smile.

‘Nick joked about it for months afterwards,’ Tamara said. She stubbed her cigarette out angrily. ‘Damn, how could I have forgotten?’

‘Julius T. Brigman,’ Ben said thoughtfully.

‘There’s someone with the dough to make anything happen,’ Tamara said. ‘Anything he wants. He’s a billionaire, Ben. Number one big shot on the island. And he’s a ruthless sonofabitch who’d stop at nothing to make a buck.’

‘I imagine everyone would know where such a big shot lives?’ Ben said.

‘Cobalt Coast. Up on the North Side. I haven’t been there myself but I knew a woman who worked as one of Brigman’s gardeners for a while. Said the place was a real palace.’

‘Then it looks as if it’s time to pay Mr Brigman a social call,’ Ben said. He drained his whisky and stood up.

‘Right now?’

‘I’m impetuous that way,’ Ben said. ‘Before I go, one small favour.’

‘Name it,’ Tamara said.

‘I don’t think Dwight will mind if I borrow his Smith & Wesson?’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Tamara’s friend’s description of the Brigman residence had been, if anything, understated. Lit up like a space station in the night and throwing a golden glow beyond its high walls and across its own secluded little Cobalt Coast bay, the towering mansion made the average Columbian drug baron’s pad look like a slum shack. Ben rolled the Jeep to a halt under a stand of palms a hundred yards up the coast road, killed his lights and engine, and watched and listened.

It was after midnight, but it sounded as if the party going on within the walls of Julius T. Brigman’s luxury fortress was just getting into its stride. The music was live Dixieland jazz. As Ben sat watching the huge house, a white Lamborghini came growling up the road, slowed on the approach to the gates and drove into the floodlit courtyard; a guy in a tux climbed out and escorted a sequined blonde towards the entrance, where a pair of square-shouldered goons in dark suits lumbered up to check invites and wave them inside. Why did rich people always seem to think that bodybuilders made good guard dogs?

Ben reached inside the Jeep’s glove box and took out the Highway Patrolman. He flipped out the cylinder, then cradling the revolver in his left hand he dug the six .357 Magnum cartridges from his pocket and slipped them one by one into the clean, oiled chambers. He snicked the cylinder shut, stepped out of the Jeep and slipped the revolver into the waistband of his jeans, so that it sat snugly behind his right hip and was covered by the hem of his shirt. He bleeped the Jeep’s locks and started strolling up the road towards the house. As he approached the gate, a swoopy bright orange Panther De Ville glided by and drove inside ahead of him. It parked outside the house and another glammed-up party couple stepped out.

Watching the security goons do their job, Ben wondered if they were the same two gorillas Brigman had taken with him for backup when he’d paid Nick his visit back in November. A slightly superior subspecies of thug, compared to the cut-price specimens who’d been sent to confront Ben outside the hotel. Considering the guy’s obvious wealth, Ben found it a little insulting.

The gorillas went through their paces one more time as Ben approached the entrance. They could have been twins. Identical outfits, identical buzz-cuts; and they obviously both spent the same number of hours working out in the gym. They looked like they’d been practising their scowls in the mirror together. Maybe they injected each other’s backsides with steroids, too.

‘Whoa,’ said one, blocking Ben’s way with his palm. ‘Invite. Let’s have it.’

‘I don’t need an invitation,’ Ben said.

The second security guy grinned evilly and folded his arms across his chest. He could barely touch his hands together in front of him. ‘Yeah? How you figure that?’

‘Because there’s nobody to stop me from walking right in this door. Unless they want their teeth shoved down their throats.’

Ben didn’t have time to hang around waiting for a reaction. He’d taken two steps towards the entrance before the first gorilla made a lunge for him. The musclebound arm was so slow-moving that Ben could have lit a cigarette in the time it took to reach him. He trapped the guy’s porky wrist. Twisted it up and round, hard and fast, into a modified Aikido lock that he knew from personal experience felt like having your arm sheared off at the shoulder with a blunt blade.

The gorilla let out a shrill wail. Ben twisted the arm a little harder, then sent the guy cannoning into his associate and the two of them went crashing to the ground.

‘Lay off the ’roids, boys. Pretty soon you won’t be able to move at all.’ Ben stepped past the floundering bodies and into the entrance. In moments, he was mingling with the party crowd and heading towards an archway that led through to the inner courtyard. On a podium to one side, the Dixieland jazz ensemble was crowing happily away while couples danced. Waitresses dressed like Hugh Hefner playmates circulated, serving champagne from silver trays.

Ben walked into the middle of the courtyard, gaining a few odd glances from people noticing his informal attire. He collared the first fat fuck in a tux who dared to stare at him, and said loudly, ‘I’m looking for Julius Brigman.’

The music faltered. The animated buzz of conversation dropped down several notches and the crowd edged away.

‘I’m Brigman,’ said a Texan drawl behind him. ‘Who the hell are you?’

Ben turned to see a short man pushing his way towards him through the crowd. Brigman was about sixty-five, in a tailored smoking jacket that managed to contain his bulk elegantly. He had white slicked-back hair and a closely-trimmed white beard, and there was a five-inch stump of a Havana clenched between his teeth. The effect was Old Southern Aristocracy. A latter-day Robert E. Lee.

‘Someone who’d like to have a word in private,’ Ben said, letting go of the other man, who quickly moved away, straightening his collar and muttering indignantly, ‘That guy’s nuts.’

Brigman’s eyes bulged. He puffed cigar smoke in Ben’s face. ‘You’ve got one hell of a nerve, walking into my home and demanding to talk to me. You know who I am, son?’

‘Maybe you’d rather have this conversation in front of all these people?’ Ben said.

Brigman stared a moment longer, then he plucked the Havana from his mouth, rolled it between his fingers and smiled. ‘Okay, you bought yourself exactly one minute. Come with me.’

The muttering crowd parted to let them through as Brigman led him down a corridor of archways and into the cool, plant-filled interior of his palace. ‘In here,’ he said, opening a door onto a plush salon.

There was a gasp from inside as a couple who’d strayed from the party straightened themselves up suddenly on a divan and looked round.

‘Clarissa, honey, this gentleman and I have some business to discuss,’ Brigman said.

Clarissa hitched up the strap of her dress and led her red-faced beau away by the hand, her high heels clicking on the marble. On her way out of the room she flicked a look at Ben and gave him a coy little smile.

Brigman shut the door behind her and turned to Ben. ‘I don’t believe I had the pleasure of being introduced to you, sir.’

‘It doesn’t matter who I am,’ Ben said. ‘What matters is what happened to my friend Nick Chapman.’

Brigman’s cigar had gone out. He made a show of relighting it, puffed a great pall of smoke and said, ‘Now, are we talking about the same Nick Chapman who didn’t have the guts to face life, or the decency to check out alone someplace with a quart of Jack and a sixgun?’

Ben slipped his hand up to his right hip and drew the Highway Patrolman out from his waistband. ‘Like this one?’

Brigman’s eyes flicked to the revolver, but he didn’t seem unduly disturbed by its presence. ‘That supposed to scare me?’

‘I have a problem,’ Ben said. ‘Because I don’t believe my friend crashed his own aircraft. I think someone else is responsible for his death, and the deaths of all those people.’

‘And you’ve come here looking for someone to pin it on,’ Brigman said.

‘You could make it easy for yourself,’ Ben said. ‘Tell me how you did it.’

‘Should I call my attorney or the boys downstairs? I just have to click my fingers and they’ll bust your head sure and good.’

‘If you’re talking about Abbot and Costello on the gate, I think you’ll find they’ve already seen enough of me,’ Ben said. ‘As for the rest of the boys, you might want to call the hospital.’

Brigman stared at him, confused. ‘What rest of them? I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, son. None of my people are in hospital. Now, I need to attend to my guests, so if you don’t mind …’

‘That armchair looks comfortable,’ Ben said, motioning with the gun. ‘What is that, Louis XV?’

‘Louis XVI,’ Brigman said suspiciously.

‘Why don’t you take a seat on your nice little velvet throne there and tell me all about how you tried to snap up CIC last year?’ Ben said. ‘And then about how you decided that if you couldn’t have it, you were going to screw it for good and then start setting up your own? What’s the matter, Brigman, it’s not enough to rule the waves, you wanted to rule the sky as well?’

Brigman stared incredulously for a moment, then burst out laughing. ‘Oh boy,’ he said, wiping tears from his face. ‘So that’s what this is all about. You have some balls, I’ll give you that. Especially for an Englishman. You know, my great-great granddaddy was with the Continental Army under Washington in 1781, when we kicked your Brit asses at Yorktown.’

‘Half Irish,’ Ben said. ‘Mine was with the 69th New York Infantry when we helped Lincoln whip the South a few years after.’

Brigman chuckled. ‘All right. You know what, I like your style, son. You want to know about the offer I made Chapman? Sure, last year I’d’ve torched half the island to get hold of a hot tomato like CIC. But if you were a little better informed, my friend, you’d know things have kind of changed for me since then. I ain’t buying any more, I’m selling. This place is the last piece of property I own on Grand Cayman, and it’ll be sold in a week. I’m going back to Dallas and you’ – motioning with the cigar – ‘you just gatecrashed my farewell party.’

Ben said nothing.

Brigman smiled. ‘You want to verify that with my attorney? Go ahead. He’s right outside. Better yet, go talk to Doc Rotella. He’s the one who diagnosed me, right around Christmas time. Lucky if I see another.’

‘Right,’ Ben said.

‘Oh, so you need proof? Step this way.’ Brigman heaved himself up out of the Louis XVI chair and led Ben across the room to a gleaming door set into the walnut panelling. ‘That look like a goddamn multi-gym to you?’ he said, pushing the door open and waving his arm at the machine that took up a large chunk of the room next door.

Ben stared at the machine, all readouts and dials and tubes. Beside it was a chrome-framed hospital bed with crisp white sheets and a satin pillow, encircled by a rail with a curtain drawn to one side. Clustered around like a circle of wagons, six medical gurneys were loaded with surgical equipment and a huge array of drugs and medicines. The room looked like a private clinic.

‘Hemodialysis,’ Brigman said. ‘Twice a day, an evil bitch of a nurse hooks me up to that infernal device and it sucks the shit out of this old carcass of mine. Not that it does me much damn good, after a lifetime pickling my kidneys in scotch and bourbon,’ he added with a grunt.

Ben was lost for words. He suddenly felt like an idiot. A rash, dangerous, violent idiot who’d come storming into a dying man’s home with a loaded weapon and a head full of wild ideas.

‘Precious little point in stopping now,’ Brigman said. He took another puff on his cigar, then plucked it out of his mouth and surveyed it tenderly. ‘You’re looking at a runaway train, son.’ He grinned at Ben. ‘Whatever life’s left to me, I have every intention of enjoying it to the full. If I never make another dime again, I still have about two hundred fifty thousand bucks an hour to live on until I finally drop dead, and that’s plenty good enough for me. You think I’d be interested in corporate takeovers right now, Mr …?’

‘Hope,’ Ben said. ‘The name’s Ben Hope.’

‘Believe me, Mr Hope, I might have done a few things in my time I ain’t too proud of. A guy who comes up from nothing, the way I did, doesn’t make his billion without breaking a few arms. Hell, I can admit that now – what are they gonna do to me? But I ain’t gonna be your whipping boy for whatever you think happened to your friend Chapman. I’d suggest you go look elsewhere. Anything I can do to help, you be sure to let me know.’

‘I made a mistake,’ Ben said. ‘I apologise to you, Mr Brigman.’

Brigman slapped him on the shoulder. ‘No hard feelings, son. I’m a tough old turkey and life’s getting a mite short to hold a grudge. Maybe put that gun away, huh? Then how about you come outside with me and have a drink before you go.’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was after four in the morning by the time Ben got back to his hotel. The strong black instant coffee he made in his room was pretty bad, but it masked the stale taste of bourbon on his lips. It would take a good deal more to wash away the sting of guilt and defeat.

He stood on his balcony and watched the sunrise, then stripped off his clothes and stepped into the shower. Under the cool water he carefully peeled the dressing off his aching ribs and checked his wound. It was livid and inflamed, and there were spots of blood on the dressing that there shouldn’t have been.

So much for R&R, he thought to himself. Something had got torn in there, but the stitches seemed to have held. He patted himself dry, dabbed antiseptic cream on the wound and put on a fresh dressing that he covered with a clean black shirt.

By eight-thirty, the sun was already hot and he was back in the car, cutting northwards up the Seven Mile Beach road towards CIC. He walked into Nick’s old office without knocking and found Tamara sitting alone at the desk.

‘You’re up early,’ she said.

‘I’m up late. And you can forget about Julius T. Brigman.’ He sat on the edge of the desk and told her what he’d found out.

Tamara leaned back in her chair and pursed her lips. ‘It seemed to make such sense. Who sent those guys to beat you up?’

‘Someone else,’ Ben said.

‘Where do we go from here?’

‘Somewhere else,’ Ben said.

‘Will a cup of coffee make you more communicative?’

Ben shook his head. Gently so as not to yank his stitches any more, he reached into his back pocket for his whisky flask.

Tamara wrinkled her nose. ‘Isn’t it a little early in the morning for that?’

‘Hair of the dog that bit me,’ Ben said.

‘You’ll wind up like Brigman.’

He ignored her, unscrewed the little chrome cap and knocked back a slug.

‘I was awake all night thinking,’ she said. ‘Maybe the Brigman connection was too obvious. I had another idea. What if there was some fault with the aircraft and the manufacturers tried to cover it up to save themselves a bunch of lawsuits? Someone with a history of depression would be an easy target to pin it on.’

Ben screwed the cap back on his flask and shook his head. ‘They’d pin it on CIC maintenance personnel, neglectful servicing. And I don’t think they’d be running around murdering their scapegoat’s relatives. A lot easier just to call their insurers.’

‘Then what?’

‘Something else,’ he said. He slid off the edge of the desk and started pacing up and down the office.

‘Does it really help you to pace like a caged tiger?’ Tamara asked him irritably.

A caged tiger was exactly what Ben felt like, but Tamara was right – pacing wasn’t going to help. He stopped, looking around him for inspiration. His gaze locked on to the Escher print on the wall over the desk.

The angels, then the demons. It was impossible to see them both at the same time. When you focused away from one, the other came into view, creating a whole paradigm shift, an altered reality.

Sometimes it wasn’t what was there – it was how you looked at it. You just needed to look with different eyes.

‘We’re approaching this thing from the wrong angle,’ Ben murmured after a long pause.

‘Tell me what you mean,’ Tamara said. ‘And don’t say “another angle”.’

‘You have the passenger list on file?’ he asked.

She tapped the screen in front of her.

‘Let me take a look,’ he said. ‘And maybe I will have that coffee after all.’

Ben spent the next half hour studying the computer with such intensity that, watching over his shoulder, Tamara thought he might melt the screen. With the CIC files in one window and running web searches in another, he systematically checked each of the twelve passengers’ names against local and international news reports, as well as whatever else he could dredge up from the internet.

He started with the four British nationals on the crash flight. Their profiles quickly came together. Colin and Sandra Hartnoll and their son Jamie had been on holiday from their home in Leeds: Colin Hartnoll had taught geography at a sixth-form college, Sandra had been a legal secretary, and Jamie had been taking a year off before University. The fourth Brit was Gordon Love, a retired private dentist who’d emigrated to Little Cayman some years earlier and had been travelling to London to visit his daughter, Helen, and her husband, Clive.

Then there were the De Groots, a family of four from Amsterdam. According to online news sources Ruud De Groot was an ophthalmologist; his wife Ursula was a stay-at-home mother taking care of little Jan, 8, and Carice, 11.

Ben could see nothing here at all. He moved on to the next on his list. Monica Steinhart, 28, originally from Long Island, had been a freelance diving instructor based on Little Cayman. On July 23 she’d been travelling across to Grand Cayman to take a class of novices out to Stingray City off the north point.

The last three passengers to meet their deaths that day had been tourists from Tampa, Florida: Jim Duggan, 22, a postgrad college student and his sister Fay, 19, together with her twenty-year-old boyfriend Terry Bassini, who worked in his father’s motorcycle customising business.

As far as Ben could see, all twelve had been just ordinary people, pursuing their ordinary lives. Whether it had been work or pleasure that had brought them together on board the doomed aircraft that day, there was nothing whatsoever to suggest anything more than just a horrible coincidence for all concerned.

‘What do these figures here mean?’ he asked Tamara, pointing at the six-digit numbers next to each name or group of names.

‘Booking references,’ she replied. ‘Nick always believed in keeping the system simple and easy. When a customer makes a booking, we issue them with a number. All they have to do is show up, quoting it when they give their name, for the flight steward to check against the records. That way there’s no hassle with issuing printed tickets. We also take a phone number and an address on the island, for security reasons. It all goes down together on our records.’

‘Okay,’ Ben murmured, and went on searching the screen.

‘What are you looking for exactly?’ she asked him.

‘I don’t know. But there’s something we’re missing here. I’m sure of it.’ He reached for his coffee. It was cold but he took a slurp anyway. ‘Tell me about the co-pilot, Brady.’

‘Mark? What’s to tell? He joined CIC just a few months after it started up. Before that, he was with a charter outfit in Nassau. He often rode co-pilot with Nick, sometimes the other way round.’

‘What else?’

Tamara sighed. ‘I think I told you already that he and Cindy – that’s Cindy Masterton, the flight attendant – were going to be married in the Fall. Nick was going to be their best man. What are you shooting at?’

‘Ghosts and shadows, so far.’ Ben said. ‘How many Trislanders does CIC have left? Two?’

‘Just one flying. The other’s grounded. Business is that bad.’

‘Who are the crew?’

‘Jack Burgess is the chief pilot, his co is Mort Clegg. Jo Sundermann is the flight attendant. They’ve all been with the company since the beginning. So have the flying school instructors, most of the office staff, even the nice old man who tends the grounds. CIC’s like a little family, Ben. Nothing sinister or corrupt going on. No secrets.’ She paused. ‘Well, just the secret that you already know about.’

There was a soft knock at the door, and a man Ben hadn’t seen before stepped nervously into the office. Mid thirties or thereabouts, thin and weedy, balding with thick glasses and protruding front teeth. He had three ballpoint pens in the breast pocket of his shirt and was clutching a sheaf of papers to his chest.

Tamara said, ‘Ben, this is Grant Singer, the company accountant. Grant, Ben was a good friend of Nick’s.’

Singer gave Ben a handshake like a damp facecloth. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt,’ he said hesitantly. ‘But I was just going through the bank records for the last month and there’s a discrepancy here that I need to run by you.’

Tamara hesitated, then said, ‘All right, I have a minute.’ The accountant spread his sheaf of papers across the far side of the desk and began going through them with her.

Ben got up from the desk, walked aimlessly around the office, thought about a cigarette. His mind was swirling with thoughts and questions, and he was only half-aware of what Singer was saying in his insistent, whining voice.

‘I don’t see anything,’ Tamara said.

‘There on the statement printout,’ Singer whined. ‘The payment reference number. Now look on our own records. How come it’s not there?’

‘Ask Wendy. She does all the data entry.’

‘I already did. She’s no idea what happened here. Without that information, we can’t refund the customer if he was booked on one of the cancelled flights.’

‘It’s only a few dollars, Grant,’ Tamara said. ‘Can’t we deal with this some other time? I’m kind of in the middle of something here. Tell you what, you leave the papers with me and I’ll go through them afterwards.’

‘Only a few dollars,’ the accountant muttered under his breath as he left the office. ‘Sorry about that,’ Tamara said when he’d gone. ‘Grant’s a valued member of the team but he gets a little anal sometimes. What’s up?’ she added, noticing Ben’s expression of puzzlement.

‘Can I have a look at those?’ he asked, walking around the desk to examine the accounts paperwork.

‘Why?’

‘Just a feeling.’

‘I shouldn’t let you see confidential business documents,’ Tamara said. ‘But hey, you’ve already seen everything else, so why not?’

Ben was already studying the anomalous figures that Singer had underlined in ballpoint. The payment in question had been made on July 21, two days before the crash: the sum of eighty-eight Cayman Islands Dollars, paid by credit card by a Mr L. Moss. As Singer had pointed out, there was no mention of an L. Moss on CIC’s own records. No payment, no payment reference, no phone, no address.

‘What flight did this Moss book on?’ Ben asked.

Tamara shrugged. ‘Well, that’s the whole point. There’s no way we can tell that right now.’

‘The information’s lost?’

‘It’s not lost,’ she said irritably. ‘I’m sure it’s just mislaid. Things are a little screwy at the moment, as you can imagine.’

‘Does CIC often mislay booking data?’

‘Of course not. Grant would have a heart attack.’

Ben was silent for a minute, then asked, ‘When did flights start running again after the crash?’

‘Jack and Mort went out again for the first time the day before yesterday,’ Tamara said. ‘They’re out right now, as we speak. But we’re still only firing on one cylinder. We’ve had to make a load of refunds, hundreds of customers either pissed off about losing their flights or scared to get on one of our planes. It’s pretty dire.’

‘But this L. Moss hasn’t come forward for his refund?’

‘There’d be a record of it if he had.’

‘Then maybe Moss was on one of the flights before the crash?’

‘Could have been anytime between the twenty-first and the twenty-third,’ she said, nodding. ‘Or else it could have been in the last couple of days.’

‘Then even if his name and booking details somehow got accidentally wiped off the computer records, the flight steward would still have had a record of him boarding the plane.’

‘Theoretically. Why are you asking all this?’

‘Can you check?’ Ben asked.

‘I can try.’ Tamara glanced at her watch. ‘Jack and Mort will have landed on Little Cayman around now. I don’t think they’ve got more than a couple of passengers. Let me see if I can call the flight attendant direct on her cell.’ She put the desk phone on speaker and hit a speed dial button. ‘Hi, Jo, got a moment? Need to confirm a boarding reference to see if we need to refund this person or not, but I can’t find any record of it at this end. Customer’s name is Moss, Mr L. Moss. If he did fly, it was sometime before we shut down, or sometime since we started up again.’

‘L. Moss?’ a woman’s voice said over the speaker. ‘Nope. Don’t think so. Wouldn’t be any of mine.’

‘You sure you don’t remember him?’

‘Pretty sure. You know me.’

‘Okay, thanks, Jo.’ Tamara ended the call. ‘You know, he could still turn up,’ she said to Ben. ‘He might call anytime, yelling for his money back along with all the others.’

‘I can think of one reason why he wouldn’t do that,’ Ben said.

‘What reason?’

‘We could be looking at the crash flight’s thirteenth passenger.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Tamara stared at him. ‘Moss couldn’t have been on board,’ she protested. ‘They recovered all the bodies … except for Fay Duggan and the little Dutch boy.’

‘In an ocean full of sharks and barracuda, that doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t there,’ Ben said.

Tamara blanched and sat down heavily in the desk chair. ‘But …’ she began, then fell silent and bit her lip in agitation. ‘The security video,’ she said suddenly. ‘That would tell us right away. Everyone boarding an inter-island flight gets filmed on surveillance camera at either end. Nick hated the idea, but the authorities insisted on it after 9/11. Not that anyone ever checks the footage.’

‘Can we view it on here?’ Ben said, pointing at the computer.

Tamara nodded. ‘I can narrow it right down to the date and time.’ While she was clicking keys, Ben got up and went over to the coffee machine for a fresh cup.

‘Christ,’ she said after a few moments.

He turned. ‘Found it?’

‘Hold on.’ She clicked more keys. ‘Shit. I don’t believe this.’

‘What?’

‘It’s not here,’ she said. ‘It’s not giving me anything.’

Ben stepped up behind her chair. ‘Try the previous day.’

Tamara keyed in the date July 22 and hit Enter. Almost instantly, the video footage appeared onscreen: a high-resolution digital image of a line a line of passengers waiting to board. Most of them were wearing shorts and T-shirts, floppy hats, dark glasses, cameras on straps. A little girl was skipping up and down dragging a teddy by the leg.

Tamara stopped the playback. ‘Let me try again,’ she muttered, typing July 23 back in and stabbing the Enter key.

Nothing. Blackness.

She turned to Ben. ‘It’s been deleted,’ she gasped.

‘Who else has had access to the system?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Are you sure?’

Ben walked away from the desk, thinking furiously. In his mind’s eye, he played back his memory of the pretty blonde who’d been arranging flowers in the CIC lobby the day before. He remembered the curious way she’d watched him leave.

Shortly after that, the black Chevy Blazer had seemed to pick up his trail. Almost as if it had been waiting for him. The same black car that might, just might, have picked Bob Drummond up from his place several days before and magicked him away somewhere.

‘What about Jennifer?’ Ben said.

Tamara looked taken aback. ‘Jennifer Pritchard? The temp?’

‘Where is she now?’ he asked.

‘She called in sick first thing this morning.’

‘How long has she worked here?’

‘Only since July 22. She came through an agency.’

‘The day before the crash. CIC had been advertising a vacancy?’

Tamara nodded. ‘Like I said, business had been picking up like crazy. She came with all the right paperwork, Ben. References, qualifications, the works. We knew all about her.’

Ben shook his head. ‘You don’t know anything about her. If you don’t believe me, call her at home, right now.’

‘Now? To say what?’

‘I’ll talk to her,’ he said. ‘Just make the call. Go ahead.’

Tamara got the number from the files and picked up the phone. She dialled. Waited a moment, then looked at Ben. ‘There’s no dial tone.’

‘That’s because the number doesn’t exist,’ Ben said. ‘Call the agency. They’ll tell you they never had a Jennifer Pritchard on their records.’

‘This is insane,’ Tamara said.

She checked. Ben had been right.

‘You’re never going to see her again,’ he said. ‘She was planted here to delete information from your system. Now she’s gone.’

‘But then why was she still here until yesterday?’

‘Because of how suspicious it would’ve looked if she’d upped and vanished right afterwards,’ Ben said. ‘And because it takes a few days for a new story this big to die down to nothing. They might have been worried about somebody like me turning up asking questions. They needed someone to listen at doors, to call in the troops to check out anyone who might still be snooping around.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘That’s simple enough,’ Ben said. ‘The same people who don’t want it known that the crash flight had a thirteenth passenger,’ Ben said. ‘Namely a Mr L. Moss.’

Tamara gaped at him. She shuddered. ‘Oh, my God. What do we do?’

‘First thing, you need to get off this island. It’s dangerous for you here. Go and get your kids from your mother’s place in Miami and take them on a holiday somewhere. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Okay?’

She hesitated, then nodded sullenly. ‘Okay.’

‘Call me when you get there. Don’t use your regular phone, use the secret one you used for calling Nick.’

‘What about you?’ Tamara said, looking at him with big eyes.

‘I need to borrow a couple more things from Dwight,’ Ben said.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The lawyer’s fifty-foot motor yacht, the Santa Clara, was moored at Harbour House Marina a few miles from George Town, off North Sound Bay. Tamara had been quite happy to let Ben have the keys to her husband’s pride and joy, and after returning to his hotel to grab a couple of hours’ sleep and a shower, Ben made his way to Harbour House, strolled out along the jetty where scores of gleaming boats and yachts rocked gently on the swell, and climbed on board.

In the handsome wheelhouse, he quickly familiarised himself with the controls and set the GPS navigation system on a course for Little Cayman. The twin 500-horsepower engines fired up with a throaty burble. He slipped the moorings, the stern and bow thrusters pushed the boat away from its dock, and they were off.

Ben crossed the calm blue waters of North Sound at a steady fifteen knots cruising speed. His course took him through main channel between the northern tip of the island and the jagged outcrop of Fisherman’s Rock, after which he was in open sea. Once Grand Cayman had disappeared entirely over the southern horizon, Ben was able to let the motor yacht more or less steer herself. Now and then he sighted another vessel, mostly smaller boats, apart from the cruise liner that passed by, huge even at more than a mile off.

He’d had two main reasons for wanting to cross over to Little Cayman by sea rather than by air. The first was the advantage of being able to land wherever he wanted on the shores of the smaller island, free from the snooping eyes of anyone who might be watching his movements. The second was that the other items he’d borrowed from Dwight Martínez couldn’t be so easily carried on board a public shuttle flight. The Highway Patrolman revolver was inside Ben’s green canvas bag on the bunk in the main cabin, next to the semi-auto Remington home defence shotgun from the lawyer’s gun cabinet. Dwight was turning out to be a handy supplier.

As to Ben’s reasons for wanting to visit Little Cayman in the first place: he figured that just because the enigmatic Mr Moss had been conveniently deleted from CIC’s computer files, it didn’t mean that all trace of him could be erased from existence. If the guy had boarded the flight on Little Cayman, there’d be a trail, however obscure, leading back from there. All Ben had to do was find it.

For a long time, the Santa Clara burbled on alone across the empty sea. Only the slightest breeze ruffled Ben’s hair as he stood at the deck rail, smoking a cigarette and gazing out across an endless expanse of the most vivid blue water he’d ever seen, so clear that shoals of colourful fish were visible now and then beyond the ripples from the Santa Clara’s hull: thousands of them, moving in one coordinated mass just a few feet below the surface.

Then a dark shape flitted up from the depths and the shoal of fish he was watching scattered in panic.

Tiger shark, all twelve or thirteen feet of him. Ben recognised the wedge-shaped head and dorsal stripes all too well from an uneventful but memorable encounter during joint underwater combat training with New Zealand SAS near Auckland a couple of years earlier. As he watched, the shark’s fin split the water momentarily, disappeared below the surface; and with a flick of his tail he was gone.

Just a reminder not to trail one’s fingers and toes in the lovely refreshing water.

After a few hours, the shores of Little Cayman came into view. As the Santa Clara motored towards a tranquil little cove, Ben reflected on how tiny the island seemed, a cockleshell surrounded by endless ocean. Little Cayman’s highest point was just forty feet above sea level, but the strong likelihood of the entire place being swept clean away in the event of a Tsunami obviously hadn’t been enough to dissuade the 175 or so permanent inhabitants that Ben’s guidebook told him lived and worked there.

One of those was Maurice – or Maureece, as the all-smiling, dreadlocked owner of the car hire place near the bay pronounced it. Maurice’s speciality was banged-up old nails, and for thirty dollars he offered Ben a day’s rental on a Toyota four-wheel-drive that looked as though it might have done service in the Iraqi desert at some stage of its very long life. No paperwork, and Maurice didn’t take any notice of the object, wrapped in a blanket, that Ben had brought with him from the moored yacht and loaded into the back of the Toyota. Ben was liking the guy already.

‘Visiting someone on the island?’ Maurice asked with a beaming smile, pocketing Ben’s cash.

‘Old pal of mine lives here,’ Ben said. ‘We lost touch a while back, but I thought I’d drop by.’

‘I know most folks on this island. What’s his name?’

The list of what that L initial could stand for had been growing in Ben’s head: Lionel, Louis, Lucien, Luther, Luke, Lloyd … ‘We called him “Mossy” in the army. Mossy Moss,’ he said, playing it safe.

Maurice reflected for a moment. ‘Name don’t ring no bells. You sure he lives here? Lot of people come and go.’

‘Maybe he moved away,’ Ben said. ‘No worries. All I want to do is chill out for a while.’

‘You sure come to the right place for that. Nearest thing to Paradise on earth.’

‘That’s good to hear,’ Ben muttered to himself as he drove away in a cloud of dust.

On an island no more than ten miles long by one mile wide, it was only a short drive to the first of the hotels on Ben’s list. There were just three on the island, which made his process of elimination a good bit easier.

His routine was the same in all of them: ‘Hi, I’m looking for a friend of mine, Mr Moss. I think he might have checked out, and wondered if he’d maybe left a forwarding address?’

Three attempts, three blanks, and the day was wearing on. No Mr L. Moss appeared on any of the hotel registers. Once his list was exhausted, Ben climbed back in the beaten-up Toyota and decided to pay a visit to the Little Cayman airport. Maybe he’d find someone there with a memory to jog.

Or maybe that was just a desperate long shot.

At the end of a dusty road flanked by grass-roofed huts, open-air bars and beachside villas, Ben reached the island’s only airfield. Now he could see what had made Nick’s mini-squadron of Trislanders so perfect for their purpose. Few other commercial aircraft could have made use of the short runway, which was no more than a strip of patchy grass, burned into yellow stubble by the sun.

The airport complex looked more like an old-fashioned filling station. A prefabricated building served as a check-in lounge and waiting room. An adjoining lean-to housed an ancient fire engine that probably hadn’t been driven in years. But what could have been a cheerful, laid-back environment was still clouded by the gloomy memory of the CIC air crash. A desultory queue of just seven passengers hung about in the check-in area waiting for the next shuttle flight. Which, the dour woman at the check-in desk informed Ben, was due in twenty minutes’ time.

He was beginning to realise he had a lot to learn about the detective business. What had started out feeling like a rich source of potential information was already crumbling away to nothing, and one look at the woman’s dull face told him there wasn’t much point in probing her with discreet questions. Forget playing the reporter card.

Behind the check-in counter was a small office scattered with the usual computer terminals and screens. He wondered if Jennifer Pritchard, or whatever her real name was, had been able to hack into the Little Cayman end of the computer system and make the footage from the day of the crash disappear from here too.

She probably had.

But it was still worth checking out. Heading casually into the men’s toilets, Ben closed himself in a cubicle. After a moment’s pause for the sake of realism, he worked the flush. While the pipes were groaning and gushing, he quickly stepped up on the toilet lid, reached up to the grimy window overhead and undid the window catch, so that it would be easy to slip through from outside. That part would have to wait until after dark.

There was the whole rest of the day to kill first. Just half a mile from the airport Ben found a little bar called Claude’s, parked the Toyota under some trees and wandered into the lazy atmosphere of the bar-room, where a few drinkers were sitting round playing cards and sweating in the heat. The radio was playing Stevie Ray Vaughan’s cover version of Voodoo Chile. The most active guys in the place were the two workmen who were busy mounting a large mirror on the wall behind the bar.

The barman was a chunky, fleshy white guy of around fifty, in a flowery short open halfway to the waist. He turned away from surveying the workmen and greeted Ben with a surly nod. ‘I’m Claude. What can I get you?’

‘Whisky.’

‘Whisky it is. You want the regular or the expensive?’

‘That one,’ Ben said, spotting the half-full bottle of eighteen-year-old special cask strength Islay malt on the counter.

‘The hard stuff,’ Claude said, reaching for the bottle.

‘Make it a double,’ Ben said. He perched on a stool and laid a twenty dollar note on the bar. When Claude set the glass down in front of him, he drained it down in one gulp. Feeling better already, he lit a cigarette. The ashtray on the bar read ‘Quint’s shark fishing’.

‘I’ll have another double,’ he said to Claude.

Claude looked at him, raised an eyebrow and picked up the bottle again. ‘Go easy with this stuff,’ he said as he poured it out. ‘This ain’t your normal whisky.’

‘Helps me think,’ Ben said.

‘It goes to people’s heads. Makes ’em crazy if they can’t handle it.’

‘First time I’ve heard of a barman telling people not to drink.’

Claude pulled a face. ‘Yeah, well, the last time I had a customer start knocking down too much of this stuff, I ended up with three hundred bucks damage.’ He pointed angrily at the new mirror that the workmen had almost finished mounting to the wall.

‘I’ll have to try not to smash anything,’ Ben said, turning to his drink.

‘Fucking prick,’ Claude muttered.

Ben looked sharply up at him – then realised Claude was still complaining about his troublesome customer. He obviously hadn’t got over it yet. ‘Comes in here bawling everyone out, acting the big shot. Treats Raoul like shit. Then starts flashing cash in here like there’s no tomorrow. No tomorrow. I like that one. That’s funny.’

‘You think so?’ Ben said, thinking about carrying his drink over to one of the empty tables.

Claude grinned. ‘Sure. Cause for him there really was no tomorrow. Raoul took him to the plane. You know, the plane that crashed?’

Now Ben was giving it his attention. ‘Yeah, I get the part about the plane. But I don’t get who Raoul is.’

‘Cab driver. My brother in law. Anyway, this prick hires him to drive him to the airfield. On the way, tells him to stop here so he can tank himself up even more than he is already. Raoul says, he’s not a fucking chauffeur. Guy throws a wad of dough at him. So Raoul waits for him in the car. Guy starts knocking back that same whisky you’re drinking. Pretty soon he’s out of control with it. Carrying on about how he’s flying to London or someplace and how he’s gonna kick ass.’ Claude made a dismissive gesture. ‘Like I was interested. I just wanted this loudmouth sonofabitch out of my place, and I told him so. Now he’s really pissed off. Me and Dave had to sling his ass out of the door, but not before he’d managed to throw his glass through my damn mirror.’

Claude turned and motioned towards its replacement above the bar. ‘I liked that old mirror. Hung there more than fifteen years, and some asshole who can’t hold his liquor goes and smashes it.’ He pointed at Ben’s glass. ‘So all I’m saying is, mister, go easy on that stuff. You’re still thirsty after this one, I’ll pour you a beer. How’s that?’

‘I’ll pass on the beer,’ Ben said. ‘Where can I find Raoul?’

Claude looked at him. ‘What for?’

‘I need a taxi ride,’ Ben said.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

‘Where to, mon?’ Raoul drawled over his shoulder with a Jamaican lilt as Ben climbed in the back of the taxicab outside Claude’s thirty minutes later. The Peugeot 504 made Ben’s rental Toyota look showroom-new. Reggae thumped over the speakers and the tang of cannabis smoke was imbued into the worn-out fabric of the seats.

‘How about a little scenic tour?’ Ben said.

‘Sure,’ Raoul said, lurching away from Claude’s. ‘You wanna go right round the island? It ain’t a big place.’

‘Just as far as it takes for you to answer a few questions,’ Ben said, tossing a thin wad of cash over the backrest of the front passenger seat. Raoul thumbed the money expertly with one hand as he drove, and flashed Ben a dazzling smile in the rear-view mirror. ‘What you wanna know?’

‘Tell me about the guy who smashed up Claude’s place.’

‘You a cop?’ Raoul looked worried for a second, probably thinking about the pot he’d got stashed away in the glove compartment or somewhere. Ben knew that the Cayman laws on ganja-smoking were pretty Draconian.

‘A cop’s the last thing I am,’ Ben told him. ‘Relax. Talk to me about this guy you drove to the airport the day the plane went down.’

‘A real rat’s ass,’ Raoul declared , launching enthusiastically into his story. ‘He was already totally canned when I went to pick him up. By the time we got to Claude’s, the guy’da picked a fight with Mike Tyson.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because of what was on the radio,’ Raoul said simply.

‘He didn’t like your music?’ Ben said.

‘No, mon. He didn’t like the news.’

‘The news?’

Raoul nodded. ‘The news about London. You know, the terrorist thing? Bombs and shit? They were talking about the sisterfucker that did it. This guy, he suddenly goes crazy. Starts yelling at me: “Turn that crap off! Turn it off right now or you can kiss my ass for your money!” So I turned it off. Like I’m gonna lose my fare over what goes on in fuckin’ London, right?’

‘Claude says he got you to drop him off at the bar and wait for him. What happened next?’

‘Drunk fuck. After they threw him out, he gets back in the taxi. I take him to meet the plane, like he wanted.’

‘You saw him get on the plane?’

Raoul shrugged. ‘Sure. He got on the motherfucking plane and it flew away. Then it crashed.’ He shrugged again. ‘Feel sorry for the rest of those folks. Not for Mister A-hole.’

‘You wouldn’t happen to know Mr A-hole’s name?’ Ben said.

Raoul waved towards the glove box. ‘Guess it must be in my book,’ he said.

‘Another ten bucks in it for you if you let me see it,’ Ben said.

‘No problemo.’ Raoul flipped open the glove box, battered about inside, yanked out a tattered and much-thumbed notepad and passed it back over his shoulder for Ben to examine. Raoul had his own special book-keeping system. Ben turned back a few pages, tracing his finger down the date entries scrawled in the grubby left-hand margin until he’d worked his way back to July 23.

And there it was: there in Raoul’s chicken-scratch capitals, the name he was looking for.

‘Moss,’ Ben read out loud. Beside it was the name ‘Palm Tree Lodge’.

‘That’s the guy,’ Raoul said.

‘This address. That’s where you picked him up from?’

‘Uh-huh. So what now, mon?’

Ben had a feeling he wouldn’t be returning to the airfield that day. ‘Scenic tour’s over,’ he said. ‘Take me back to my car. Then you can show me the way to Palm Tree Lodge.’

CHAPTER TWENTY

Palm Tree Lodge was one of a row of little white wooden houses scattered along a deserted stretch of beach. As Raoul’s taxi disappeared into the distance, Ben climbed out of the Toyota and trudged across the soft white sand. Palms rustled overhead, shading him from the late afternoon sun as he walked up to the house. He climbed the three sandy steps to the veranda, knocked on the front door and waited for a response. There was none. After a couple more knocks, he crossed the shady veranda to the nearest window, and peered through.

The place looked empty. Chairs had been stacked up in a corner, as if cleaners had gone through the place. Ben headed back down the steps to the sand.

The next house along the beach was just about visible through the trees. As Ben approached he saw a dusty Renault Scenic parked outside, and a couple of kids’ bicycles propped against the rail of the veranda. He could smell charcoal smoke and grilling sausages. Rounding the side of the property he caught sight of a twenty-something guy in colourful shorts, flip-flops and a Whitesnake T-shirt, tending to a spitting, flaming barbeque. In the background, two young children were diligently helping their mother set the picnic table.

The couple smiled amicably as Ben approached. He apologised for interrupting them, and asked if they knew whether the place next door was vacant – if it was, he told them, he’d be interested in renting it.

‘Can’t help you there,’ the guy said, flipping a sausage away from the flames. ‘We only got here this morning. But we got the number of the agency that rents them out. Babe, can you get the card from inside?’

Armed with the number, Ben thanked them and continued up the beach. He took out his phone as he walked. It was after six, but he hoped there might still be someone in the property agency office. Just as the answer-phone was about to kick in, someone picked up. ‘Is that Sunshine Villas?’ Ben said. ‘I was interested in renting one of your properties. Palm Tree Lodge. Can you tell me if it’s vacant?’

‘Sorry, sir,’ came the reply. ‘That isn’t one of ours. I believe it’s let privately.’

‘Would you know who I could contact about the place?’

‘Afraid not, sir. But if it’s a beach property you’re interested in, we do have a whole selection of—’

Ben cut them off and put the phone back in his pocket. He walked on, following the curve of the beach. From beyond a thick stand of palms up ahead he could hear the offbeat sound of Afro-Cuban jazz drifting towards him on the breeze. As he passed by the palms he caught sight of a little open-air beach bar at the foot of a wooden jetty, shaded under a stripy awning. He headed across the white sand towards it.

Feeling thirsty and maybe influenced by the catchy Cuban rhythms, Ben ordered a daiquiri at the bar. The owner-manager, a cheerful black guy in a Fedora hat, was a pretty useful cocktail maker. White rum, lime juice, not too heavy on the sugar. Ben took his time over his drink, deep in thought. The breeze from the sea was freshening as later afternoon turned into early evening.

‘Nice little place you have here,’ he said when he went to get a refill.

‘Pays my bills, you know?’

Ben pointed at the white wooden house in the distance. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know the guy who lives in Palm Tree Lodge over there, would you? Mr Moss?’

‘Oh, you must mean Larry,’ the barman laughed over the rattle of the cocktail shaker.

‘Yeah, Larry,’ Ben said, like he’d already known.

‘You know him?’

‘Sure, we grew up together in Ireland,’ Ben said.

‘Shit, I never would’ve taken Larry for an Irish guy. Sounded real English to me. You here on vacation, mister?’

Ben nodded. ‘Thought I’d drop in on my old friend. But he’s not at home.’

‘That figures. Haven’t seen him for a week or so. Must have gone, I reckon. Shame. He was one of my best customers the coupla months he was here. Always running out of booze, always needed ol’ Cuban George to sell him a bottle. He was here just ’bout every day.’

‘Did Larry mention anything about a trip to London?’

‘Don’t think he said nuthin’ about that. We talked about sport mostly. Sometimes he didn’t talk at all. But I sure do miss him.’

‘Pity when you lose a good customer.’

‘Oh, there’ll be another,’ Cuban George said, waving in the direction of Palm Tree Lodge. ‘They come and go, you know? Sometimes one guy on his own. Sometimes two at a time. Mostly they keep themselves to themselves.’ He raised an eyebrow meaningfully. ‘Me, I don’t ask. I got an open mind. Questions get a guy into a whole lot of trouble.’

‘You got that right,’ Ben said. ‘So the place is empty right now?’

‘I ain’t seen nobody there for a couple of days. After Larry left, there was a few guys hanging around there. Coupla cars. Then nothing since.’

The place must have been totally cleaned out, Ben thought. ‘Do you remember what day Larry left?’ he asked.

‘Wouldn’t normally, but it was the day that plane went down, man. That’s a day nobody round here’s gonna forget in a hurry.’ Cuban George shook his head mournfully, then suddenly frowned as a thought came to him. ‘Say, you don’t s’pose Larry was on that plane, do you?’

‘I’m sure Larry’s just fine,’ Ben said. ‘Do you know who owns the place? I’m looking to rent something myself. It’d suit me down to the ground.’

‘No idea, man. Like I say, I never ask questions.’

As the sun went down, Ben sipped down his second daiquiri and went over what he knew so far. There couldn’t be much doubt that Larry Moss had been the enigmatic thirteenth passenger on board the fatal CIC flight that day. It seemed that he’d been on his way to London: possibly intending to take a direct flight there from Owen Roberts on Grand Cayman, maybe via Havana, Mexico City or Miami. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that someone hadn’t wanted him to get there. And didn’t want anyone else to know he’d ever boarded the plane.

That was where the facts ran out and the questions resumed: the whos and whys that, right now, were pretty unanswerable. Ben didn’t like dead ends.

‘Say hi to Larry for me if you see him,’ Cuban George called as Ben walked away across the sand.

‘I’ll be sure to do that,’ Ben muttered in reply. As he retraced his steps back down the beach, the glorious reds and golds of the sunset dipped over the sea and silhouetted the palm trees against the sky like something out of a picture postcard. The empty lodge was half-hidden in shadows by the time he got back there. Ben climbed the steps onto the porch, glanced left, glanced right, then kicked the door in with a crump of splintering wood.

The inside was pretty basic, almost Spartan: the walls bare, white-tiled floors throughout. The kitchen had a tiny table and a couple of plain wooden chairs. Microwave, two-ring stove, empty fridge, empty cupboards, bare worktops. The two basic bedrooms were the same, showing no sign of recent habitation. There was fresh linen in the storage drawers under the beds, waiting for the next visitor to arrive – maybe weeks in the future, maybe longer. In the small living room, dust covers had been stretched over the single armchair and the sofa. The TV was unplugged from the wall. The bookshelf was empty, like the coffee table. No books, no magazines, no papers, no sign of Larry Moss to be seen anywhere.

First he’d never been on the plane. Now he’d never been here either.

Ben had the distinct feeling that Little Cayman’s stock of potential leads had just dried up on him. Where to next?

If Moss had had a boat or access to one, he’d have used it to get off the island instead of jumping on a CIC Trislander. Which meant that in order to get here in the first place, he must have travelled via Grand Cayman: where lay Ben’s only chance of picking up the trail again.

How exactly he intended to do that, and what he was even looking for, were things he could figure out on the seventy-five-mile journey back across the sea.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Nightfall brought a rise in the wind, and the sea was choppy as Ben piloted the Santa Clara at a steady pace back towards Grand Cayman, lost in thought, only vaguely aware of the boat’s motion under his feet.

Reckoning by the motor yacht’s GPS, he’d crossed just over fifteen miles of sea from when he saw the lights reflected on the window next to him, and turned to see that there was another vessel tracking along the same course, about half a mile away across the black water. He stepped away from the wheel and walked out on deck, but it was too dark to see what kind of vessel it was. What was certain was that she was coming up fast in his wake, her navigation lights and spotlamps growing larger and brighter with every passing minute.

Returning to the wheelhouse, Ben steered a couple of points to starboard and opened up the throttle by a few revs. He glanced back at the Santa Clara’s foaming, curving wake, white against the dark waves as she peeled gently off her course. The spotlamps of the vessel behind were dazzling now as they drew closer. Behind their strong glare he could just about make out the boat’s silhouette: a large motor launch, taller and wider than the Santa Clara. Maybe a seventy-footer, maybe bigger. And whoever was on board, it was clear from the way the launch was following his course that they were definitely interested in catching up with him.

Being followed at night by an unidentified pursuer wasn’t something that made Ben feel easy. In some parts of the world, commercial and private shipping was still widely preyed upon by pirates – but he was pretty damned sure that the Cayman Islands weren’t one of them. Who, then? Coastguard? Police? He didn’t think so.

Ben gunned the throttle harder; the Santa Clara’s engine note climbed a notch in pitch as her propellers dug her stern deeper into the water, lifted her bows and sent her skipping across the waves.

The big launch kept cleaving through the water after him – Ben could see the bow wave breaking white against the dark hull as the vessel came relentlessly closer and closer. He accelerated to near full throttle and felt the Santa Clara respond, bouncing over the sea at a bracing twenty-five knots. Any other time, the sensation of speed would have been exhilarating, but the knowledge that he was being chased by a much larger, more powerful and certainly more numerously-manned craft blunted his excitement somewhat. He considered his options: they were few. In open waters, there was nowhere to run to except straight ahead, in the hope that he could outrun his pursuers.

And that hope was already fading fast. The launch was in his wake now, just fifty yards behind and still overhauling him. The blaze of the spotlamps was casting deep shadows across the yacht’s deck, so close he almost thought he could feel the white-hot halogen bulbs searing his back. He felt naked and hopelessly exposed in their glare.

Full throttle. The rev counter needle touched the red and kept climbing. The engine note was becoming a shrill howl and he knew he couldn’t keep this up for long without risking damage.

He glanced back again. The launch was getting dangerously close, so close he could hear the heavy diesel rumble over the tortured note of the Santa Clara’s own engine and the crash of the waves on her sides.

Closer still – and for a couple of horrified moments Ben thought the launch’s pilot meant to ram his stern, crushing the yacht’s hull like an eggshell, running her down and sinking her – but then the launch veered hard to port and started cutting up alongside him, just a few feet of white water between the two vessels.

Ben was completely off course by now, but the only thing on his mind was evasion. He steered hard away from the launch, bracing himself against the wheelhouse bulkhead as the motor yacht tilted sharply into the turn and the starboard rail was engulfed in foaming water.

But it was going to take more than the Santa Clara’s agility to shake the launch off. It veered right after him, quickly drawing level again. Though the white spray Ben thought he could make out the figures of men on deck.

A dull report, and something flew across the water. Ben instantly knew what it was – a grappling iron, fired from a hand-held projectile launcher. The black four-clawed hook smashed into the side of the Santa Clara’s wheelhouse, sending splinters of glass flying. It bounced back and its curved claws raked the deck. Ben twisted the wheel as far as it would go to starboard, trying to widen the gap between himself and the launch in the hope that the grappling iron would fall back into the sea. The Santa Clara began to peel off at a sheer angle – then gave a violent judder as her course was checked.

Ben threw a glance out of the shattered wheelhouse window and saw that one of the hook’s claws had gained a grip around his port rail, the steel cable anchoring it to the launch’s deck shrieking taut.

Ripping down the fire axe that was fixed to the wheelhouse bulkhead, Ben left the boat to steer itself and raced out across the slippery, heaving deck. The wind tore at his hair and salt spray soaked him instantly. He swung the axe down hard on the end of the steel cable as it sawed against the Santa Clara’s side. And again. In two blows he’d severed half the strands of the cable.

But just as he was about to deliver a third, another grappling hook was fired from the deck of the launch. Ben didn’t register until a fraction of a second too late that it was flying right at him. Before he could get out of the way, the heavy impact caught him on the arm and shoulder and sent him sprawling on his back, knocking the axe from his hand. The grappling hook burst through the remaining wheelhouse windows and entangled itself around the smashed framework.

By the time Ben had staggered back to his feet, the launch was reeling the Santa Clara in with its powerful winches. He ignored the pain in his side and the blood he could taste on his lips from the fall.

He was about to be boarded.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The vessels touched with a thump as the winches drew them together. The launch pilot closed down his throttle, dragging the Santa Clara to a halt. Ben ran to the wheelhouse and activated the port bow thruster in an attempt to combat the pull of the winches. The narrowing gap of water between the hulls churned furiously, but he knew the little yacht was hopelessly outpowered. At any moment, the engines were going to stall or burn out.

Ben shut everything down. The Santa Clara’s bows settled in the water and she began to rock in the heavy swell, helplessly tethered to the launch’s dark hull.

But Ben wasn’t going to let himself be boarded just like that. Snatching a stubby Maglite torch and a roll of black waterproof repair tape from the equipment rack, he flew down the companionway from the wheelhouse and darted into the main cabin. He could hear and feel the grinding of the launch’s side against the yacht’s, and the yells of the launch crew as they prepared to leap across the gap between the two boats and take him by force.

He picked the Remington shotgun up from where he’d left it on his bunk earlier. Working feverishly fast, he tore off a two-foot length of tape and used it to attach the Maglite to the forend of the weapon, so that it pointed along and under the barrel. He twisted the head of the torch until its beam was focused tight and narrow. Rather cruder than a laser sight, but extremely effective for night work. At close range, whatever the light beam shone on could be blown apart quarter of a second later with a blast of 00-buckshot.

Ben worked the shotgun’s bolt, feeding the first of the eight cartridges from the tube magazine into the breech. He slung the shotgun over his shoulder on its sling. Grabbed the Highway Patrolman revolver from his bag and stuffed it into the back of his jeans. Raced back up the companionway and burst out of the wheelhouse.

The lights of the launch were even more blinding at close range. Through the white glare he could see the shapes of men running across its deck.

And something else. The unmistakable glint of gunmetal under the spotlights, marking the contours of a weapon that Ben had seen so many countless times that even in near-total darkness it was as familiar to him as his own face in the mirror. His unexpected guests were carrying MP5-Ks. The K designation stood for Kurtz, German for short. The stubby compact 9mm machine carbines were the kind of weapon favoured by professional assault teams.

So much for the coastguard.

One of the boarding team leaped across. Then another. Ben felt the thud as they landed on the Santa Clara’s deck and scattered. One crouched behind the tender while another raced up the port side-deck, the two of them quickly joined by another three MP5-toting crew from the launch.

Ben ducked down around the side of the wheelhouse as he heard footsteps thudding towards him. He counted: one – two – three – go. Straightened up and twisted round to point the shotgun, turning on the bright white Maglite beam and shining it right in the guy’s face.

Shoot or be shot. Ben dropped his aim a foot and squeezed the trigger without hesitation. His hearing disappeared in a wall of noise. The recoil of the heavy twelve-gauge load slammed the butt of the Remington hard against his right shoulder, sending a jet of pain through his side.

But it was worse for the other guy. The boarder took the blast in the chest and was lifted clean off his feet by the impact. His weapon flew out of his grip and splashed into the sea.

Before his man was even down, Ben was swivelling the Remington up and across. Another stabbing knife of pain through his ribs as he fired straight into the blinding glare of a spotlamp. Glass showered the deck of the launch. The spotlamp went dark. He was about to fire at another when he spotted a fleeting shape moving low along the deck beyond the wheelhouse. He chased the figure with the torch beam. The shotgun boomed and kicked – but in anticipation of the pain from the recoil he’d jerked the shot a little to the left, missing his mark and blowing a serrated bite out of the Santa Clara’s side.

The percussive rattle of fully-automatic gunfire sounded from the deck of the launch. Ben threw himself backwards as bullets punched into fibreglass all around him. He rolled behind the cover of the buckled wheelhouse, wedged the Remington tightly against its corner and blasted off four rounds as fast as his finger could move, the shotgun’s heavy boom drowning out the chatter of the MP5. There was a yell of pain from the launch and the splash of a body hitting the water.

Eight shots gone. Ben pressed himself tightly against the wheelhouse and started reloading the shotgun with spare cartridges from the ammo holder attached to the stock. He’d slid three rounds into the magazine when he heard the frantic commotion from the water. An instant later, a terrible bubbling wailing scream pierced the air.

The man who’d gone overboard let out another animal howl of terror as he tried frantically to reach the Santa Clara’s side and haul himself out of the water. His body jerked as something hit him hard under the surface. He opened his mouth to scream again, but before the sound could burst from his lungs, a powerful unseen force dragged him under.

For an instant the water boiled and turned red. The man’s bloody head and shoulders erupted from the surface, propelled violently from below. A glimpse of white teeth and an expressionless black eye; then the tiger shark dragged him back down into the churning bloody foam and tore him apart like a terrier shaking a rat.

Ben hadn’t been distracted for more than a second or two, but it was long enough for him to be taken by surprise as a dark shape flew down from the wheelhouse roof. It was the man he’d missed moments before, now leaping at him, knife in hand. With no time to finish loading the shotgun, Ben swung the weapon like a club and felt the whack of solid beechwood on human skull. The guy slumped senseless against the side of the wheelhouse. Ben kicked the fallen knife away.

‘Major Hope?’ said a voice from the shadows.

Ben whipped round, clutching the shotgun – but the pain in his side slowed his reaction time just a fraction of a second too long. There was a curious popping sound, and something hit him with a startling impact high up in the shoulder. His fingers lost their grip on the Remington and an uncontrollable wave of muscle tremors swiped his legs out from under him and sent him crashing to the deck. The sensation was like nothing he’d ever known before, filling his whole body with a terrible tingling agony. He struggled desperately to get up, but his limbs were gripped by spasms and wouldn’t respond to the commands from his brain.

Through a haze Ben saw a tall, thin man walk across the deck towards him. He was holding a taser gun in his hand, the curly wires connected to the dart that was embedded in Ben’s shoulder. With his other hand the man reached inside his jacket and flashed an ID card.

‘Jack Brewster, MI6.’ The voice seemed to echo from some indeterminate place a million miles away. ‘I’m sorry you’re being so uncooperative, Major.’ Another man appeared at Brewster’s side, holding a syringe.

Ben felt a sharp prick in his upper arm as the needle lanced deep into his flesh. He muttered something incomprehensible, then closed his eyes and went limp on the deck.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Ben awoke with a gasp. His arm shot out to grab the fallen shotgun that his senses told him was just a couple of feet away across the deck.

But something was wrong. It wasn’t the solid timbers of the Santa Clara under him, but the soft, dry fabric of a car seat. Shaking his head to clear his blurry vision, he looked up and dimly recognised the figure of Jack Brewster turning round to speak to him from the front passenger seat.

Only then did Ben register the presence of the other two men in the vehicle: the guy wedged up against him in the back, and the driver speeding the car along a dark road.

‘Sorry about the tranquilliser,’ Brewster said. ‘Couldn’t have you taking down any more of my men. The effects will wear off by the time we get you to the plane.’

‘Where are you taking …’ Ben managed to mumble before the drowsiness sucked him back under again. The next time he regained consciousness, he was being hauled out of the back of the car. Two men steadied him by the arms as they walked him across tarmac to a building. He felt himself being shoved through a door and made to sit at a bare table. The two men left the room and locked the door behind them.

It was inside that tiny, stark room that Ben’s senses slowly returned over the next thirty minutes or so. By the time he heard the door being unlocked and the two men came back to collect him, he was fully alert and on his feet.

‘I don’t suppose it would do me any good to ask where we’re going?’ he said as they led him down a corridor.

No reply. One of the men pushed open a door and Ben found himself looking out across a stretch of taxiway at a sleek white Gulfstream jet.

‘I forgot my passport,’ Ben said, stepping out into the night air.

‘Move,’ said the other man.

The jet’s passenger cabin was quite empty, and looked more like a long, narrow luxury conference room than the interior of an aircraft. The moment Ben was on board, his escorts disappeared. A smiling hostess offered him soft drinks, which he turned down, and motioned him towards one of the very few seats, which he grudgingly sat in. He’d given up asking where they were going.

Minutes later, the jet began its taxi towards the main runway. Ben felt the rush as the aircraft soared upwards, and watched the lights of Grand Cayman grow tiny in the porthole by his seat.

Once the plane had levelled off to cruising altitude, a curtain swished aside and Ben’s old friend Jack Brewster appeared. ‘You might like to follow me,’ he said with a lopsided smirk. ‘Someone wants to talk to you.’

Ben wondered whether he could grab Brewster by his belt and collar and pitch him head-first through a window without being sucked out himself as the jet depressurised.

Maybe later on. Right now, he was more interested in knowing what this was all about.

On the other side of the curtain sat a man at a table. He was older than Brewster, early fifties, with a hawk-like face and swept-back dark hair, receding and greying at the temples. On the table at his elbow was a closed file. Calm and smiling, he stood up as Brewster showed Ben inside the screened-off compartment.

‘Leave us, Jack,’ the man said to Brewster, who disappeared back through the curtain. ‘You’re a very capable man, Major Hope,’ he said when they were alone. ‘It’s reassuring to know that you’re on our side. Egerton Sinclair, MI6.’ He offered his hand. Ben just looked at it.

Sinclair withdrew the hand, sighed and sat down at the table. ‘I don’t like to talk business on an empty stomach. One of the disadvantages of my profession is that I very often have to eat at the most unsociable hours, and therefore alone. Would you care to dine with me?’

Ben took the seat opposite him. ‘I’m not hungry. Being hijacked in the middle of the night does funny things to my appetite.’

‘If you’re sure. You won’t object if I carry on?’

‘You won’t object if I smoke,’ Ben said, taking out his cigarettes. ‘And get me a whisky. Single malt.’

The hostess reappeared with a trolley, and placed a selection of covered dishes on the table. ‘Excellent,’ Sinclair said, helping himself to chicken casserole and some sautéed potatoes. ‘Some scotch for our guest,’ he instructed the hostess, who departed without a word and returned a few moments later with a matching Waterford decanter and glass.

Sinclair smacked his lips after a gulp of wine. ‘Excellent,’ he repeated. ‘Now, before we go any further, Major Hope, I must apologise for the very regrettable incident outside your hotel on Grand Cayman. An unfortunate slip that would have been entirely avoided if my subordinates had been properly informed as to who you were. In the event, rather more unfortunate for the men who were hired to go after you.’ Sinclair grinned. ‘I’m also sorry we had to be somewhat forceful with you this evening.’

‘You have a piece of chicken between your teeth,’ Ben said.

Sinclair’s grin dropped and he wiped at his teeth with his napkin.

‘Let’s talk about Larry Moss,’ Ben said. ‘I imagine you know who he is. Or was.’

‘Indeed I do, Major. Indeed I do.’

‘Then perhaps you’d care to enlighten me,’ Ben said. ‘That is the reason I’m here, isn’t it?’

Sinclair chewed thoughtfully on a mouthful of chicken, washed it down with another gulp of wine, then looked earnestly at Ben. ‘The information I’m about to reveal to you is strictly classified.’

‘I wouldn’t have it any other way,’ Ben said.

Sinclair opened the file next to him, slipped out a photograph and laid it down in front of Ben. It showed a nondescript-looking man in his early fifties or so. Chubby-faced, with thinning fair hair and the sallow complexion of someone who’d spent a few too many years living out of a suitcase, raided a few too many hotel mini-bars.

‘Larry Moss was one of our agents,’ Sinclair said. ‘One of the top operatives within a special counter-terror unit whose official name needn’t concern us at the minute. His work took him all over the world, under a variety of guises.’

‘A spook,’ Ben said.

‘To put it bluntly,’ Sinclair said. ‘And Moss was one of our most valuable agents, until while posing as a photographer in Pakistan, ostensibly there to infiltrate a suspected terrorist network, the damn fool fell head over heels in love with a certain young lady by the name of Salima. He thought she was a nurse. Needless to say, she wasn’t.’ Sinclair reached inside his file again and flipped another glossy 6X4 print under Ben’s nose. The Asian woman in the photo was thirty or thirty-two, black-haired and strikingly beautiful.

‘Nice, isn’t she?’ Sinclair said. ‘And extremely dangerous. Salima Chopra, born 1972 in Kashmir. Part of a fundamental Jihadist group called Al-Badr. Needless to say, whatever attentions she paid our man Moss were rather less genuine than he foolishly believed. She and her associates were onto him from the start.’ Sinclair shook his head sadly. ‘It’s the age-old story. God knows what he thought she saw in him, but there you are. Male vanity, perhaps. But I won’t bore you with the details. The facts are clear: after scoring a triumph with 9/11, the enemy were determined to press forward to expand their operations all over the world, hitting us randomly wherever we’d least expect it. For that they needed specialised expertise, and Larry Moss certainly had that. In his military days he’d spent eight years with 321 EOD.’

Ben nodded. 321 Explosive Ordnance Disposal had long been the most prestigious bomb disposal squadron of the British Army, and its most highly-decorated unit.

‘To be able to turn a man like Moss, with his vast knowledge of explosives and demolition, would represent a major coup for a terror group like Al-Badr,’ Sinclair said. He sighed. ‘And I’m afraid that’s precisely what happened. How and when the switch took place, we don’t quite know. But it did. Moss vanished from our radar, to reappear some months later, apparently a fully-fledged convert to the enemy cause. We believe it was thanks to information he divulged to Al-Badr that another of our key agents was taken in Islamabad, and found a week later in a basement, battered to death and half-eaten by rats. Did you want some ice with that scotch?’

‘Keep talking,’ Ben said.

‘Moss was a significant danger to us. This was a man who could take a whiz round your local hardware superstore and fill up a shopping trolley in five minutes with enough assorted goodies to knock you up an improvised car bomb capable of taking down an embassy building.’

Ben could believe it. SAS trained its men to do much the same thing.

‘Three weeks ago,’ Sinclair went on, ‘an Intelligence tip-off led to the acquisition of one of Salima Chopra’s associates in Lahore. During interrogation he revealed the location of their safehouse, which was subsequently assaulted by a US Special Forces team. We captured the lot – Salima included. But no Moss. He’d vanished again. All we were able to extract from the lovely lady and her colleagues was that there was a new terror strike in the offing. Moss’s own idea, apparently. An attack that would make the Selfridges bombing in June, the handiwork of one of Al-Badr’s sister groups, look like a mere opening gambit.’

Sinclair paused for effect. His jaw tightened grimly. ‘This would have been it, the attack everyone has been anticipating for almost two years. The next 9/11. We had every reason to believe that Larry Moss intended to detonate an explosive device in an airliner over London.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Ben had finished his cigarette. He stubbed the butt out on the rim of Sinclair’s empty plate and said nothing. He could see where this was leading, and every muscle in his body was tense. His ribs hurt.

‘The Cayman Islands offered Moss the perfect environment to tuck himself away and construct the bomb,’ Sinclair said. ‘A device concealable enough to fit in a case, yet powerful enough to rip a sizeable aircraft in two. If he’d managed to pull it off, Moss would have been the first white suicide bomber in history. However, his willingness to die for his cause might have had less to do with religious fanaticism, and more to do with the fact that he was a sick man. He’d been treated for cancer eighteen months earlier. We can surmise that, given his raging alcoholism, it may have come back with a vengeance. But whatever his motivation, we can’t escape the fact that if he hadn’t slipped up at almost the last minute, we’d never have even known it was him, or seen this coming.’

‘The credit card payment to Cayman Islands Charter,’ Ben said through clenched teeth.

‘Exactly. Moss had likely been operating on cash given to him by his associates. When the money ran out at just the wrong moment, he used his own credit card to book his flight off Little Cayman.’

‘So Moss couldn’t be allowed to reach Owen Roberts Airport. Is that what you’re going to tell me next?’

Sinclair looked shocked. ‘Good Lord, if you’re suggesting that we had something to do with—’

‘It had crossed my mind.’

Sinclair’s face darkened. ‘Absolutely never, on any account, would we have sanctioned such a thing,’ he said emphatically. ‘We were in position to arrest Moss immediately on landing at Owen Roberts. But he must have been drinking, or he must have made some terrible mistake. We only know that, somehow, the bomb detonated on board the CIC Trislander.’

Ben swallowed the last of the whisky in his glass and poured some more. His heart was beating hard and he could feel that the colour had drained from his face. He made an effort to control the tremor of rage in his voice. ‘One of your dogs slips its leash. You’re scared he’s going to do something terrible. After all, you should know what he’s capable of. I can understand that.’ He paused. ‘What I can’t understand is how you people could justify pinning the blame on a former British soldier who risked his neck and almost lost his mind defending his country.’

Sinclair sighed. ‘Of course. And believe me, I feel terrible about it.’

‘You look as if you do,’ Ben said. ‘Sitting there with sauce on your chin and a bellyful of nice Cabernet Sauvignon.’

‘What choice did we have?’ Sinclair protested. ‘The public couldn’t be allowed to find out that one of our own agents had gone rogue, and that it was only sheer luck that he didn’t succeed in bringing down an airliner over London. Imagine the bloody riot there’d have been. We had a matter of hours, minutes, to come up with a plausible, watertight cover story. It was tragically unfortunate that Chapman happened to be the pilot on that flight, but his past record and history of severe depression provided us with an opportunity we simply couldn’t afford to miss. The man was already dead. There was no bringing him back.’

‘So you decided to destroy his reputation forever,’ Ben said. ‘You had antidepressants planted in his home. You faked the air traffic control radio recording and paid off Bob Drummond’s gambling debts to make him keep his mouth shut and disappear, and then you concocted a phoney shrink to verify the suicide theory.’

‘Disinformation is a key part of the department’s work.’

‘I can think of another word to describe it.’

‘In this business, we’re sometimes forced to make unpleasant decisions,’ Sinclair said.

‘I’ve heard that line before.’

‘It doesn’t mean we don’t bitterly regret the collateral damage those decisions sometimes cause. The harm to a man’s good name. The appalling psychological effect on his family. We were extremely distressed when we heard that Chapman’s daughter had walked out in front of a car. Believe me, we do not take these matters lightly.’

Ben didn’t say anything for a long time. ‘So what now?’ he asked eventually.

Sinclair spread his hands. ‘Well, naturally, if you were a normal everyday member of the public, we would never have taken you into our confidence like this.’

‘No, you’d probably have left me for the sharks,’ Ben said.

Sinclair ignored the comment. ‘Given who you are, and the fact that as one of Her Majesty’s armed forces you’re bound by a raft of non-disclosure agreements …’

‘I keep my mouth shut about this.’

Sinclair nodded. ‘We’ll make it worth your while, I can assure you. You’ll be well looked after.’

‘I can hardly wait,’ Ben said.

‘We know we can trust you, Major.’ Sinclair looked at his watch. ‘My, how the time has flown. We’ll be arriving in London in a few more hours. I’d suggest you get some rest.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Thin drizzle was slanting out of a leaden early-afternoon sky as Ben stepped out onto the tarmac at Heathrow’s private jet terminal. ‘God, this is bloody awful,’ Sinclair muttered at his side, putting up an umbrella.

Entering a country unofficially wasn’t a new experience for Ben. He’d done it all over the world – but even so, the speed with which they breezed through the cursory check-in made him raise an eyebrow. No questions were asked, no passports were needed. A pair of serious-faced men in dark suits joined them, one speaking frequently on a radio, the other remaining silent and sticking very close to Ben. Ben didn’t let it bother him.

When they were through, Jack Brewster handed Ben the leather jacket and green army bag they’d recovered from the Santa Clara, gave him a wry smile and walked away, motioning for the two dark-suited men to follow and leaving him alone with Sinclair.

‘Now,’ Sinclair said with a twinkle. ‘I have a surprise for you.’ He led Ben across an empty VIP lounge, punched a security code to open a door marked STRICTLY NO UNAUTHORISED ENTRY, and up a short corridor to a set of fire doors. ‘Here we are,’ Sinclair said with a flourish, pushing through the panic bar and swinging the doors open onto a covered forecourt at the rear of the building.

The row of parked cars outside made Ben raise his eyebrows a second time:

a Porsche 911 Turbo; an Aston Martin DB7; a Ferrari Maranello; a Bentley Arnage; a TVR Tuscan S, all lined up like something out of a millionaire’s fantasy.

‘Your choice, Major,’ Sinclair said, beaming. ‘If you decide you don’t like the one you picked, you can swap it for another. Just say the word.’

‘That one,’ Ben said, and pointed out the tomato-red Ferrari.

‘That would have been my choice too.’ Sinclair rattled a set of keys and tossed them through the air to Ben. ‘Didn’t I tell you we’d look after you? And here’s a little something extra,’ he added, holding up a credit card. ‘Now these we don’t give out to just anybody. Special expense account. Everything on the house, so to speak. Our little way of expressing our appreciation. I hope you’ll use it to enjoy the remainder of your convalescence.’

‘You bet I will.’ Ben snatched the card from him, climbed into the cockpit of the Ferrari and fired it up. The engine thundered like a twenty-one gun salute. Sinclair grinned a toothy grin, leaned down at the window and was about to say something – but his words were drowned out and he jumped back as smoke poured from the spinning tyres and the Ferrari took off.

Jack Brewster’s goons opened up a gate. Ben roared through and stepped on the gas. Slashing through the traffic, the Ferrari covered the fifteen miles into central London in a ridiculously short time. The V12 was just getting nicely warmed up as Ben screeched to a halt outside the Ritz in Piccadilly, walked up to the desk and asked for a suite. ‘The biggest you have.’

Minutes later, Sinclair’s expense account was down £3,800 and Ben’s sole, decidedly non-designer, piece of luggage was being taken up to the split-level grandeur of the Royal Suite. Ben’s next act was to call up room service and have the kitchen run him up an extremely sumptuous, very late lunch, at an exorbitant premium he was more than happy to pay. The bottle of wine he ordered to go with it cost more than a full tank of fuel for his Ferrari. While he was on the phone he arranged for a hotel lackey to run across the street to Davidoff of St James’s, the cigar merchants, to fetch him a box of Cohiba Esplendidos. He’d been in town less than an hour, and already Sinclair’s expense account was taking a hell of a battering.

After eating his mid-afternoon lunch at the head of the table in his own private dining room overlooking Green Park – antique crystal, finest porcelain and silverware – Ben retreated to a master bedroom that would have made Marie Antoinette blush, flopped on the giant bed and lit up a cigar. When he’d smoked it to the stub he napped for almost three hours, then showered and changed into the last clean clothes that were stuffed in the bottom of his canvas bag.

By now it was after seven-thirty, and the drizzle had cleared into a fresh, pleasant evening. Ben called back down to room service and ordered a limo for the evening. ‘The biggest and most expensive one you can get me,’ he specified. When the sixteen-seater glittering white stretch monstrosity arrived, complete with mirror ceiling, giant TV and fully-stocked bar, Ben had the chauffeur drive him a decadently short distance down St James’s Street to a noisy bar where a single measure of ordinary whisky cost over six pounds.

Several hours passed before he finally emerged, now accompanied by two cackling, high-heeled young women whose names he was fairly sure were Linzi and Bev. He had the waiting chauffeur ferry them back along St James’s Street to the Ritz, where he escorted his noisy companions into the hotel bar, fired up another Cohiba Esplendido and ordered three bottles of the most expensive champagne they had, at £500 a throw.

Sometime after dawn the following morning, a dishevelled, puffy-eyed Linzi and Bev came teetering uncertainly out of the lift and exited the revolving doors of the Ritz lobby under the disapproving gaze of the front desk attendant. Three hours later, after a lavish breakfast, Ben checked out, climbed into the Ferrari and blasted out of London.

He headed north-west on the M40 towards his old stamping-ground, Oxford. Leaving the motorway, he skirted the city and took the familiar A40 west. Cheltenham; Gloucester; Ross-on-Wye; over the Welsh border towards Abergavenny: the road grew emptier and the countryside greener the closer he got to his destination. He stopped off in Brecon to buy some provisions at the local Co-op with his own money, as well as a hefty piece of roasting beef from Mr Evans the butcher.

He was back at the cottage by midday. The grass in the front garden was an inch longer than he’d last seen it, but nothing else had changed by the banks of the burbling River Usk: the events of the wider world didn’t make much of an impact out here.

Shifting down a couple of gears after his time in London, Ben spent most of the afternoon strolling by the river and exploring the surrounding countryside. Beyond the fence at the rear of the cottage, a broad meadow filled with wild flowers led to a stretch of woodland, untouched for centuries and thick with ancient gnarly sycamores, beech and laurel. Ben wandered in there a while, sometimes straying off the public footpath that wound for half a mile through the trees, crouching now and again among the ferns to examine the tracks of foxes and badgers on the moist, leafy forest floor. Twice he met a fellow walker on the footpath, smiled and wished them a good afternoon.

Back at the cottage, a light meal; then he settled in a comfortable armchair by the living room window with a glass or two of Laphroaig and the book he’d been slowly working his way through before leaving for the Caymans, Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics. Just after eleven o’clock, he laid the book down, rubbed his eyes and climbed the stairs to his bedroom for an early night. Seven minutes later, his bedroom light went out and the cottage fell into pitch darkness.

Not long afterwards, they came for him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The team leader waited until the cottage windows had been dark long enough for the target to fall asleep. He carried out a final, silently efficient check of his machine carbine and then muttered the command into his throat mike that his two colleagues hidden among the trees had been waiting to hear.

Without the least sound, not the crack of a twig, the three-man team stalked out into the long grass of the meadow and converged on the cottage, virtually invisible in their black assault vests and ski-masks. The infra-red night vision goggles they wore were the latest military issue. They were professionals at what they did, were thoroughly familiar with the nature of the target and would take no chances – but the observation of his behaviour since re-entering the country showed that he was entirely off his guard. The three men had been watching him earlier that day from leafy cover as he wandered unsuspecting through the woods, and they might have picked him off if it hadn’t been for the proximity of the public footpath and the risk of being seen.

Now, under cover of night, was the time.

The team reached the fence at the rear of the cottage and silently climbed over into the garden. Without a word they split up: the team leader skirted around the stone wall to the front entrance; the second man crept towards the back door, and the third leaped, cat-like, up the grassy bank at the side of the house, where the corner of the thatched roof dipped low enough to jump across to. He landed lightly on the thatch, signalled to his colleagues and made his way stealthily towards the point their careful planning had told them was directly above the target’s bedroom.

The back door snicked open with the barest sound and a black-clad figure stepped inside the hallway. The assassin paused a moment, listening keenly for any sound. The cottage was utterly silent. Through his goggles, its pitch-dark interior was lit up green and as clear as day.

He sniffed the air, caught the scent of tobacco smoke and whisky, and smiled to himself. They’d all seen the way the target had been knocking back the booze that evening. He’d be fast asleep now, dead to the world.

The assassin padded across the hallway towards the stairs. Raised the toe of his combat boot to the bottom tread, gently testing it with his weight in case it creaked. But the staircase was solid oak, soundly built, and didn’t make a squeak. He climbed the next step, then the next. Halfway up the staircase, he could see the bedroom door through the turned oak banister rails. He silently pushed off the safety catch of his weapon with a gloved finger. Climbed another step.

And crashed downwards feet-first through the staircase, letting out a grunt of shock and surprise as it gave way under him with a crackling rending of wood. He dropped his weapon and lashed out with both hands to save himself, but there was nothing he could do to avoid falling straight down into the space below. He landed heavily on his back, whacking his head against something solid. He was in an under-stairs cupboard.

The door was bolted from the outside.

And the cupboard was filled with coils of barbed wire.

* * *

At the sounds of confusion and panic in his radio earpiece, the second assassin reacted instantly without trying to guess what had happened to his team member. That could wait until later. Slashing though the last layer of thatch with his combat dagger he kicked his way through to the inside. His boots connected with the thick bedroom ceiling beam. He leaped quickly down to the floor, and before the huddled shape of the man under the bedclothes ten feet away had had any chance to awaken or make a move, he’d emptied half a magazine of 9mm copper-jacketed bullets into it, filling the bedroom with the muffled chatter of the machine carbine and the tinkle of spent shell cases on the bare floorboards. The bullets ripped through the thin sheets. Blood spattered green in the night-vision goggles.

The sleeper hadn’t stood a chance. Maybe if the silly bastard had laid off the whisky, the killer thought as he stepped quickly through the drifting gunsmoke and whisked away the bedcovers to put a final three-shot burst through Ben Hope’s brain.

In the half-second that it took him to register the large, bleeding lump of raw beef and the cushions arranged under the sheets to look like the shape of a man, the wardrobe door had burst open behind him. The assassin whirled around – straight into the chopping double-handed swing of the cricket bat. It caught him across the temple with a resounding crunch of well-seasoned willow against bone, and he hit the floor in a coma.

Ben tossed the bat away and snatched up the fallen MP5. With a hard stamp of his heel he crushed the assassin’s windpipe. Then he was across the room, through the bedroom door and out on the dark landing. He flew down the stairs, avoiding the gaping hole where he’d half-sawn through the oak treads earlier that day.

The man trapped inside the under-stairs cupboard was struggling furiously and crying out in panic. Ben unbolted the door and shone the tactical light beam of the MP5 in the guy’s face. He was helplessly enmeshed in the barbed wire, thrashing to get free, the black combat clothing lacerated and bloody. Ben flipped the select-fire switch on his weapon to single shots. Put two in the man’s chest and a third between his eyes. The thrashing stopped instantly.

Ben turned away.

If he’d done so a fraction of a second later, he’d have been dead. A line of bullet holes punched through the cupboard door right next to him. Ben felt the sting of splinters and a jarring bullet strike that knocked the machine carbine out of his hand and sent it spinning to the floor.

No time to go after it. Gunfire ripped a line of holes in the wall after him as he dived across the hallway and crashed through into the living room. The third shooter had come in via the front door and now gave chase, flame bursting from the muzzle of his gun. He had the advantage of being able to see almost perfectly in the near-total darkness, but Ben was more familiar with the terrain. Darting into the kitchen he kicked over the sturdy table. Antique pine, knotty and age-hardened and more than two inches thick: Ben hurled himself behind it and felt the high-speed hammering impacts churning up the tabletop as the shooter released another flurry of full-auto fire.

Then, suddenly, the room fell silent – the gunman’s weapon had shot itself empty. Ben didn’t intend to give him time to drop his spent magazine and slam in another from his belt pouch. He leaped out from behind the pockmarked table, reached down to his belt and drew out the slim carving knife he’d taken upstairs earlier that day and hidden in the wardrobe. When you knew you were expecting these kinds of visitors, you wanted to be as prepared as possible. His right hand was tingling violently from where the bullet had impacted against his weapon’s trigger guard, but he could flex his fingers and he knew he hadn’t been hurt.

That could change at any moment, though.

The shooter slung the empty gun behind him and ripped his combat dagger from his leg sheath. The two of them squared up to one other. All Ben could see was a moving patch of deeper black against the darkness of the room.

The black shape suddenly rushed towards him. Ben sensed, rather than saw, the blade come slashing towards his throat, and dodged it at the last instant. The killer advanced two steps, waving his blade this way and that. Ben retreated.

But now Ben had manoeuvred himself into exactly the position he wanted – right beside the double light switch on the wall. He flipped both switches on together.

The sudden glare of light made the assassin’s night-vision goggles wash out and rendered him temporarily blind. Ben darted in, aiming the knife at the gap between the ski-mask and the bullet-proof, stab-proof vest he knew the guy would be wearing under his clothes. The assassin managed to tear off his goggles just in time to evade Ben’s thrust and counter with one of his own. The blades clashed. A brief furious exchange of strikes and blocks, and they backed off. Blood dripped from the assassin’s forearm, but not a lot of blood.

The two men circled one another under the glare of the lights, each trying to anticipate the other’s next move. In a knife fight, cold steel against soft skin and flesh, there was no margin for error. Even a non-lethal cut to a major body part could produce enough of a sudden shock response to incapacitate you for a few critical moments. Then it was all over very quickly.

Ben readied himself. The assassin’s blade came flashing towards him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Knightsbridge, London

The pulsating buzz of the phone on the bedside table dragged Egerton Sinclair up from the depths of a dream that was instantly forgotten as he sat up in bed, fumbling for the lamp. He cursed at the time on the bedside clock.

Sinclair carried three mobiles, and he kept them all close by at all times, whether he was at home in Surrey with his wife or here at the luxury apartment he used when he’d been working late or wanted to entertain a lady friend. Only one person in the world could be calling on the phone that was ringing at this moment. And if it was ringing, that meant there’d been complications. His heart began to beat strongly as he answered the call.

‘We got him,’ said the familiar voice on the other end. ‘It’s done.’

The wave of relief Sinclair felt quickly gave way to irritation. ‘Then proceed according to plan. What are you calling me for at three in the bloody morning?’

A pause. Then: ‘Ah, we have a problem.’

Sinclair kicked his legs out from under the sheet and perched on the edge of the bed, waiting for more.

‘Hope wasn’t working alone,’ the voice said.

That didn’t make any sense. ‘So deal with it,’ Sinclair told him. ‘Fast.’

‘Can’t deal with it. I need to meet you.’

Sinclair trusted his associate, based on a catalogue of jobs that had always gone without a hitch in the past, however sensitive or complex. The man’s edgy tone told him that something was definitely amiss – and it wasn’t the kind of matter they could chat about over the phone, no matter how secure the line. Sinclair cupped his forehead in his hand and screwed his eyes shut. ‘Are Ellis and Nash with you?’ he asked.

‘Ellis and Nash are down,’ the associate replied.

Sinclair sprang up from the bed. ‘Roger that. The usual rendezvous point. Can you make it there in thirty minutes?’

‘Copy.’

Sinclair threw on his clothes and rushed out of the apartment. Three floors below in the private car park, he climbed into his Jaguar Sovereign and took off with a nervous screech of tyres.

Twenty-seven minutes later, Sinclair rolled the Jag to a halt under the arches of a crumbling Victorian bridge in a seedy district mainly frequented by crack dealers, well away from the eye of security cameras that haunted most of London. It was nearly quarter to four in the morning and he felt sick with fatigue and tension as he stepped out of the car and approached the black Audi A8 that was parked a few yards away under the gloom of the arch. His right hand was in his coat pocket, clutching the compact CZ 9mm pistol.

He hardly even sensed the movement behind him before he was being slammed into the rough brickwork of the archway and felt the muzzle of a gun pressing into the base of his neck. A hand dived inside his coat pocket and tore the CZ from his grip.

‘Hope!’

‘I’d crack your skull with this,’ Ben said, grinding the muzzle of the MP5 harder into Sinclair’s neck, ‘but it’d mean having to drag you to the car myself. Get walking.’ He grabbed the MI6 agent by the collar and shoved him roughly towards the assassins’ Audi.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Somewhere nice and peaceful where we can have another of our little chats.’ Ben opened the car boot and motioned at the occupant already inside.

‘I think you two know each other.’

Sinclair stared at the trussed, gagged, struggling hit team leader. The man’s ski mask was crusted with blood from where Ben had smashed his nose before kicking the knife out of his hand. Some hired assassins were too valuable to have combat daggers stuck in them.

‘I told him I’d let him live if he delivered you to me,’ Ben said. ‘He was pretty quick to agree. You can argue about it on the way. In, please.’

‘You’ve got to be joking,’ Sinclair blustered. ‘I’m not—’ But before he could finish, Ben had bundled him into the boot with the other one and slammed the lid down on them.

The Audi felt heavy at the back as Ben took off with his cargo.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

In the dead of night it didn’t take much over forty minutes to cut north-eastwards across the city to the wilds of Epping Forest. Ben steered off the main road onto a rough earth track that wound deep into the woods, and bumped and lurched over ruts for another mile and a half before he eventually stopped the car and killed the engine and lights. He climbed out into the moonlight that streamed down through the dark branches, and popped open the Audi’s boot. Sinclair peered out, looking ashen and more than just a little jostled about.

Ben jerked his thumb. ‘End of the line.’ He kept the CZ pointed at the agent’s head as he scrambled out, then shoved him roughly against the side of the car.

‘You know you have no chance of getting away with this, don’t you?’ the MI6 agent muttered, his eyes glued to the pistol in Ben’s hand.

‘Maybe,’ Ben said. ‘Getting away with things is your department, after all.’ Keeping the gun trained on Sinclair, he reached into the car boot. The trussed-up team leader was grunting and straining against his bonds. Ben ignored him and hauled out the shovel he’d brought from Brecon.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Sinclair said.

Ben turned to face him. ‘You don’t know me, Sinclair. You just thought you did. I hope you all enjoyed the show.’

‘We had a deal. You agreed to go away.’

‘Linzi and Bev – were they on MI6’s payroll too? By the way, I wouldn’t have touched them with yours.’

‘You’re insane, Hope.’

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ Ben said. ‘But one thing I’m not is a fucking idiot. I never believed a word of your bullshit. I knew I could expect a little visit from your wet team the moment I got back to Brecon. I saw them even before they saw me. They left a trail like a rhinoceros.’

‘You have to believe me,’ Sinclair burst out. ‘Whoever was sent to kill you, it’s got nothing to do with us. I’ve never seen that man in my life before.’

‘That’s fine – then we don’t need him,’ Ben said. He pointed the CZ towards the open boot of the car and shot the team leader twice in the chest and once in the head. The gunshots shattered the stillness of the forest.

‘Why did you do that?’ Sinclair raged. ‘You said you’d let him live!’

‘I didn’t say for how long,’ Ben said. ‘Lie to me again and you’ll wish it had been you. Now, let’s go for a walk.’ He prodded Sinclair with the shovel.

An owl hooted somewhere among the trees as Ben marched the MI6 agent deeper into the forest.

‘You’re up Shit Creek without a paddle, Hope,’ Sinclair muttered darkly.

‘And you’re in the middle of six thousand acres of woodland,’ Ben told him. ‘That’s plenty enough room for a man to disappear. Nobody’s going to hear you cry for help, so you’d better tell me the truth this time.’

‘I’ve already told you the truth, you stupid bugger.’

‘Like the part about the bomb capable of taking down a full-size airliner that went off inside a Trislander without blowing it into dust?’

‘But that’s what happened,’ Sinclair protested. ‘You must have seen the footage of the wreckage. It was completely destroyed.’

‘Yes, it was,’ Ben said. ‘But not until a few moments after Nick Chapman had managed to crash-land it in the sea. He had time to call his daughter before he died. His call to her is the reason she was murdered.’

Sinclair stalled mid-stride and glanced back at Ben over his shoulder with a startled look that said very clearly, ‘How did you know that?’

‘I saw it happen,’ Ben replied to his unspoken question. ‘I’m sure you read the witness statement. Oscar Gillespie?’

‘That was you?’ Sinclair eyes flashed in the darkness.

‘Just one or two things I left out of it,’ Ben said. ‘For example, the fact that before she was killed, Hilary let me hear Nick’s last message to her. It doesn’t quite fit with your account, Sinclair. So I’ve decided to be generous and let you have another go in case you remember things differently this time. You can stop there.’ They were deep among the trees, a long way from the car. ‘Now, get talking or get digging.’

‘What the hell do you mean, digging?’

Ben lobbed the shovel on the ground, still pointing the pistol at Sinclair’s head. ‘What do you think I brought this along for, to make mud pies?’

‘You can’t do this.’

‘More and more people are opting for an ecological burial, Sinclair. You’d be doing your bit for the environment.’

‘If you’re going to kill me anyway, why should I talk to you?’

‘I’m not going to kill you, Sinclair. I’m just going to bury you alive and let nature take its course. Unless you tell me everything, right now.’

Sinclair swallowed hard. ‘And if I do? You’ll let me go? No tricks?’

‘That depends on how convincing you are.’

‘All right. All right. I’ll tell you. There was some truth in what I said before. Larry Moss was one of our agents. And the CIC plane did go down because of him. But …’

‘I’m listening.’

‘But I lied about Moss making explosives. It was information that he was taking with him to London, nothing else.’

‘What information?’

‘Oh, Jesus …’

‘What information?’ Ben repeated.

Sinclair swallowed hard. ‘It has to do with what happened in June. The Selfridges bombing.’

Ben frowned. ‘Moss had information about the Selfridges bombing? Information for who? You mean his terrorist girlfriend and her gang carried it out?’

‘You don’t understand. Oh, God, they’ll crucify me …’

‘I’ll do worse if you don’t explain yourself pretty damn quick,’ Ben said.

‘There was no connection between Larry Moss and Al-Badr,’ Sinclair said. It wasn’t Muslim terrorists who blew up the ground floor of Selfridges in June.’

‘Then who did?’

‘We did,’ Sinclair said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Ben recoiled. For a few moments, he couldn’t speak.

‘Now you know what nobody was meant to know,’ Sinclair said miserably.

Realising that the pistol had wavered way off its aim, Ben readjusted his grip and tried to focus his mind. ‘You’re telling me that the British government – that MI6 – set off a bomb in the middle of its own capital city?’ Ben could hardly believe the words from his own mouth.

Sinclair shook his head. ‘Not MI6. They wouldn’t have a clue about that. That’s something else I lied about. I don’t really work for them.’

Ben thumped him roughly across the face with the pistol, beating him to the ground. ‘Who are you? Who do you work for?’

Sinclair got to his knees and wiped the blood from his cheek. ‘Tartarus,’ he mumbled, then let out a hysterical laugh. ‘There. I’ve said it. Now I’m completely fucked. Done for.’

Many years before, in a life that felt more like someone else’s than his own, Ben had studied Theology at Oxford. It hadn’t lasted long, before he’d gone his own way and ended up enlisting in the army. But he still remembered a few things from those days. Tartarus was from classical mythology, and also figured in the Bible’s Book of Enoch: Tartarus, the dark, shady underworld, domain of wicked, fallen angels. ‘Explain,’ he said to Sinclair.

‘Tartarus is a black ops arm of British Secret Intelligence,’ Sinclair said. ‘A department within a department. A ghost. Not even the Chief of MI6 knows about it, let alone the Prime Minister.’

‘What kind of black ops, Sinclair?’ Ben asked in a hard tone.

The agent looked up at him. ‘Put simply, Tartarus stages incidents designed to be perceived by the public as acts of terrorism. Most of its international operations are low-grade exercises, not intended to produce casualties or significant damage, but to impact the media by scapegoating extremist terror groups – generally Muslim groups – and propelling them into the public eye. The unexploded car bombs that are always discovered by police just in time. The suitcase left in the train station that turns out to be full of Semtex. That kind of thing.’

‘A fake terrorist organisation?’ Ben muttered, dazed. He felt as if he were in a dream.

‘It’s not always entirely faked,’ Sinclair said. ‘And it’s not that there are no real terrorists out there. It’s not us setting off pipe bombs in Belfast or Londonderry. We leave the small potatoes to the handful of tin-pot fanatics scattered here and there throughout the world. But sometimes, when a real, existing terror group lacks the means or the funding to orchestrate effective attacks, which they very often do, Tartarus facilitates their ability to carry them out – either by infiltrating the group with trained agents who can pose as allies, or by making use of cultivated assets. It goes without saying that the daft buggers who blow themselves up in street markets in Iraq and Pakistan are only pawns in the game. They’re either drugged-up deadbeats who don’t realise what’s going on, or dedicated fanatics who don’t have the slightest inkling of who’s behind the scenes.’

Ben said nothing. He hadn’t the words.

Sinclair went on. ‘In other cases, the groups blamed for terrorist acts never really existed. We only want the public to think they do. And to keep the illusion real, every so often the need arises to stage something more spectacular than a bomb scare at a racecourse or a few token casualties at a bus station in some place the British public neither know nor care about. Sometimes, it’s necessary to make it feel that bit more real and close to home, to make people sit up and take notice. The Selfridges bombing certainly did that.’

‘Why?’ Ben said. ‘Why?’

‘Why exaggerate the terrorist threat? Why fabricate an enemy? For the same reason it was in the CIA’s interest to perpetuate the myth of Soviet might during the Cold War. National security. Them and us. Keeping our flag waving and our state intact. It’s simple, and it’s been going on for centuries.’

Ben’s teeth ground together so hard he could taste blood in his mouth. He had the pistol aimed right between Sinclair’s eyes and every nerve in his body was telling him to squeeze the trigger. He’d fought and risked his life for this government. Now here was this man telling him that the country’s rulers were capable of inflicting this kind of atrocity on its own people. Ben felt sick. ‘And so Larry Moss was your trigger man,’ he said. ‘Is that what you’re going to tell me?’

‘No. Larry Moss spent thirteen years helping to engineer and carry out Tartarus missions across Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He was the best. But he had nothing to do with the London bombing. In fact, that’s the whole point. Moss really did go rogue on us.’

Ben listened numbly as Sinclair described Moss’s fall from grace. While cultivating contacts in Karachi, the Tartarus agent had fallen ill with a severe fever that had landed him in hospital for two weeks. There he’d met and befriended a Pakistani nurse called Salima – the beautiful young woman whose picture Ben had been shown on the flight from Grand Cayman to London. Sinclair was positive that nothing had happened between her and Moss, although there was a possibility that he’d developed a strong romantic attachment.

On his release from hospital, Moss had continued with his mission, which had culminated some weeks later in the very successful and well-publicised bombing of a nightclub in downtown Karachi. But when the names of the forty-seven dead were released, Moss had seen that his Salima’s name was on the list.

‘It was the first time he’d ever known one of his victims,’ Sinclair said. ‘And it had a profound effect on him that none of us understood at the time. It

was only some weeks later, when Moss was summoned to the private Tartarus committee briefing where the planned London operation was revealed for the first time, that he snapped. It all came pouring out – his guilt over Salima’s death, how it had changed him, how he’d started praying to God for forgiveness and all that.’

‘You mean he’d developed a conscience,’ Ben said.

‘By the time the operation was ready to roll, Moss had been deemed unfit for a job of that scale and been removed from duty. We relocated him to a Tartarus safe house on Little Cayman, in the hope that he’d dry out and come to his senses. It was felt that he could still be a valuable operative, in a diminished role. But unknown to us, while he was on Little Cayman, Moss was plotting to blow the whistle on Tartarus. We intercepted a call to one Simon Shelton, a reporter for The Independent. Thankfully, Moss held back all the details over the phone, only saying that he could offer Shelton the biggest scoop of his life, a story that would bring down the government and change the world forever. He and Moss arranged to meet for coffee at Paddington Station on the afternoon of July 24. Far too public a place for any kind of intervention. Moss was going to tell him everything, everything. Preventing that rendezvous from taking place was given top priority. We were in a state of absolute emergency.’ Sinclair paused uncomfortably. ‘And so, the moment we learned that Moss was getting on the CIC flight off Little Cayman, the order was given.’

‘The order,’ Ben echoed in a strangled voice.

Sinclair nodded. ‘On July 23, two Harrier Gr7s were deployed from a Royal Navy Invincible-class aircraft carrier stationed on Caribbean Patrol duty, ostensibly as part of the ongoing task of protecting the Virgin Islands, Montserrat and other British dependencies from drug traffickers. Their real mission was to intercept and destroy the CIC Trislander. The pilots and their superiors were given the same information as you: namely, that a known terrorist on board was threatening a strike against a major target.’ Sinclair paused, glancing nervously at Ben. ‘There was no warning shot fired. The first rocket blew away the Trislander’s tail. The pilot somehow managed to belly-flop the plane down on the sea without it breaking up, and it grounded on the reef. The Harriers destroyed it outright on the second pass.’

Ben could visualise the horror of the reality behind Sinclair’s matter-of-fact account. The terrorised screams of the passengers and their children. The flames, the smoke, the wail of the plane as it plummeted towards the sea. Nick’s desperate determination to get his passengers down safely, overlaid by his sure knowledge that nobody on board was intended to survive the unthinkable attack. Even in that moment, with the certainty of death just moments away, he’d remained as much in control as humanly possible; and, when most men would have been thinking only of themselves, he’d thought to call his daughter to say goodbye.

‘And when Nick’s phone was retrieved from the scene of the wreck,’ Ben said, ‘you found the message he’d left Hilary and had her killed too.’

‘You make it sound so personal,’ Sinclair snapped. ‘I didn’t have her killed. It’s just politics. We couldn’t have known what Chapman had told his daughter until we had hold of her phone. The message might have ruined everything. And we couldn’t just steal the damn thing from her handbag – if she knew anything at all, it had to be silenced. As it turned out, we needn’t have worried about the bloody message. It would never have stood up in court. But, as you know, you can’t always predict these things.’

Right now, Ben was predicting how many blows from the blunt edge of the shovel it would take to separate Sinclair’s head from his shoulders. ‘You could have had a bullet put in Moss’s head while he was still tucked away on Little Cayman. Nobody would have even known. Instead you ordered the deaths of sixteen innocent people.’

Sinclair shook his head vehemently. ‘Too many people had already come into contact with Moss. If he’d suddenly turned up dead, washed up on a beach with his head blown off, who knows what might have come out? That he was a former secret service agent? That would have been sloppy. Tartarus doesn’t do sloppy. This way, we could to make him disappear completely. It was a perfect opportunity. Until you came along.’

‘Who’s Jennifer Pritchard?’

‘That’s not her real name. She’s one of ours.’

‘And you planted her at CIC to erase all trace of Moss getting on the plane.’

Sinclair nodded.

‘And Shelton?’

‘Eliminated the day afterwards. Carbon Monoxide poisoning. A leaky appliance at his flat in Hammersmith.’ Sinclair shrugged. ‘It happens all the time.’

‘Another perfect opportunity,’ Ben said. He was eyeing the agent closely.

Because something was happening.

When Sinclair had begun his forced confession a few minutes earlier, he’d been pale and shaking with terror. Now, a peculiar change had come over him. He was saying too much, too openly, and too confidently. The fear in his eyes had diminished, gradually returning to the same confident sparkle from when Ben had first met him. ‘Perfect opportunities are what Tartarus specialises in exploiting, Major,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘And though you may not realise it, there’s one developing even as we speak. Its outcome, needless to say, not so favourable for you.’

‘Are you developing a sense of humour, Sinclair? Have you forgotten the situation you’re in?’

‘You don’t quite grasp what you’re dealing with, old chap. There you are, thinking that you’ve brought me to this deserted spot where you could press the truth out of me and get rid of me. Whereas in fact it’s I who allowed you to bring me to the perfect location for us to dispose of you.’ Sinclair laughed. ‘As you said yourself, six thousand acres is plenty enough room for a man to disappear.’

From somewhere among the trees, a twig snapped Ben looked sharply round to see a dark shadow step out of the forest. And a second. And a third. In moments, he was surrounded by armed men.

‘I did tell you that Tartarus doesn’t do sloppy,’ Sinclair said breezily. ‘All our agents are trained to use code to indicate when they’re under duress. Briggs back there told me a lot more on the phone than you imagined. “Ellis and Nash are down?” There are no Ellis and Nash. While I’ve been keeping you talking all this time, our people have been moving into position, using the GPS tracking device from that Audi you so cleverly decided to borrow from my men. Now, I’m afraid you’re in rather more trouble than you’re ever going to get out of.’

‘Drop the weapon – down on your knees!’ commanded a voice as more armed men came stalking out of the forest, approaching from all sides.

Ben sighed and tossed the gun. But if he was going to get shot, he didn’t want the last thing he saw to be the cheesy grin plastered across Sinclair’s face.

‘Fuck it,’ he said. And before anyone could react, the shovel was off the ground and spinning through the air. Its blade caught Sinclair in the mouth. Teeth and blood flew. Sinclair let out a crazed howl and staggered back, cupping his hand over his ruined lips.

‘Something to remember me by,’ Ben said.

Spitting gouts of blood, Sinclair snatched up his fallen CZ and aimed it at Ben. There was the same wild look in his eyes as there’d been in those of the Iraqi gunman in Basra who’d put the rifle bullet though Ben’s ribs. Sinclair’s finger tightened on the trigger and his bloody mouth opened in triumph. There was nowhere for Ben to hide.

The shot cracked loudly in the still night air.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Ben staggered back a step and felt his knees go weak at the sound of the gunshot – but there was no impact, no nerve-jangling sensory alarm as the body registered extreme damage.

Blood spurted from Sinclair’s open mouth. His knees buckled under him, and with a last look of pained confusion he collapsed on his face on the forest floor.

Ben looked down at Sinclair’s corpse and raised his hands as the black-clad gunmen surrounded him, weapons trained on him from all sides. Suddenly they parted to make way for a grizzled, heavyset man in his late sixties, wearing a grey suit and holding a smoking pistol.

Now Ben realised who’d shot Sinclair. The man gazed unemotionally at the body. ‘Idiot,’ he grated in a deep, throaty voice, then turned his impassive, strangely pale eyes towards Ben. ‘I beg you not to compel us to use any further force, Major Hope. There’s been quite enough violence tonight already, don’t you think?’

Ben didn’t reply. The man snapped his fingers and two gunmen stepped up to seize Ben’s arms.

‘I can walk by myself,’ Ben said. At a nod from the man in the suit, they let him go. With two guns in his back they guided him through the trees, lighting the way with powerful flashlights, to where a pair of identical black Range Rovers and a plain, unmarked panel van were parked by the Audi. One gunman opened the back door of the van, another motioned for Ben to get inside. Before the van door was slammed shut, closing him in total darkness, Ben caught a glimpse of the man in the suit climbing awkwardly into the passenger seat of the lead Range Rover.

Instants later, the vehicles took off. Ben sat on the hard inner wheel-arch of the van and braced himself as it bounced over the rutted forest track. After a while they hit smooth road and the bouncing settled to a steady thrumming roar that went on for the best part of an hour before Ben felt the van turn sharply, as if passing through an entrance. He heard men’s voices and the rattle of metal gates.

The van rolled to a halt. The back doors opened, and the light of dawn flooded inside. More guns pointing at him. A harsh order to get out.

Ben stepped down to the cracked, weedy concrete, flexed his stiff legs and looked around him in the early morning haze. The two Range Rovers and the Audi were parked a few yards away, already empty, hot metal ticking as it cooled. Judging by the journey time, he estimated they’d travelled about thirty or forty miles from the northeast edge of London to somewhere rural and secluded – Buckinghamshire, maybe, or Cambridgeshire. Wherever the place was, there was no mistaking the high wire security perimeter, iron gates and neglected-looking prefab buildings of a disused military base.

Ben was hustled indoors by his captors. In a large, neon-lit, otherwise completely empty room with no windows, the man in the suit was sitting on a wooden chair waiting for him. He peered over his spectacles as Ben was shown inside. The door locked, closing them in alone together.

Under the hard glare of the strip-lights, the heavyset old man looked even older. Deep lines creased his brow, and there were grey pouches under his eyes. It seemed to take him an effort to breathe. He gazed at Ben with those pale, unemotional eyes and spoke in his gravelly voice: ‘Major, my name is one you won’t have heard. I am Hayden Roth.’

‘The head of Tartarus,’ Ben said.

Roth nodded. ‘I gather that Egerton Sinclair told you a certain amount about our organisation.’

‘Is it true?’

‘I felt there was no more reason for duplicity. Sinclair’s instructions were that, if you survived the little initiation test we set for you – and I was confident that you would pass with distinction – he was to reveal to you the truth about the nature of Tartarus.’

‘Then that makes you a murderer, Roth.’

No flicker of emotion showed in the man’s eyes. ‘None of us is immaculate. You included, Major. As you have aptly demonstrated, you’re a highly efficient killing machine. One who happens to serve precisely the same masters as I do. We’re all part of the same hypocrisy.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong. I don’t belong to your world.’

‘Dear boy, if you knew how naive you sound. The orders that dispatch men like you all across the world to risk their lives and end those of others may come directly from our elected representatives in Whitehall, but not even they are aware of the larger picture. As a matter of fact, they are kept largely and deliberately ignorant.’ Roth gave a chuckle that was as empty and humourless as his expression. ‘I know what you’re thinking. But it would be pointless to begin debating with me about democracy. If you were in my position, you would understand that democracy, party politics, the electoral process, are no more than a piece of theatre put on to appease the people, to make them believe they hold some power over the course of things. And I’m sure that even some of our worthy elected politicians share that same delusion. The fact is, Benedict – I may call you Benedict? – that irrespective of whichever political party the voters have chosen ostensibly to rule them, the real executive power rests in the hands of individuals whose names and faces are never made public, nor ever will be.’

‘You mean people like you?’

Roth waved a hand. ‘Oh, I’m really just a tiny, inconsequential component of the machine. As, indeed, is Tartarus itself. We fulfil a vital function, to be sure – but of necessity and for reasons you can now appreciate, we remain obscure to all but a precious few.’

Ben just stared at him.

‘I understand this must all come as something of a shock to you, Benedict. You’re a soldier, and as such your world is a relatively simple one. Your only responsibility is to the men under you. You don’t have a country to run. You don’t make the bigger decisions, so there’s never any need for men of your station – should I say your current station – to see the bigger picture. Believe me, if you could, you’d understand only too clearly that the things we do, unpleasant as they may be, are a necessary evil that serve the greater good.’

‘Like blowing up half of Oxford Street,’ Ben said. ‘Innocent men, women and children. Your own people. You’re a piece of terrorist shit.’

Roth shook his head. ‘I’m afraid that for all his efficacy as an agent, Egerton Sinclair had only the crudest understanding of Tartarus’ mission. We are not terrorists. Lord, no. Our role isn’t to create fear for its own sake, but to generate peace and social contentment among our citizenry. Exactly like small children, left to their own devices they will simply run out of control, ignoring their parents’ wishes, all notion of discipline gone by the board. However, it takes only a little fright, a little pervading menace, to make them come running back to clutch at their mother’s skirts for protection. At this moment, the people of London are more bound together by a sense of unity, and more responsive to the control of the state, than they have been in years. They object far less than they might have to the massive police presence on the streets, or to the cameras watching them from every rooftop. For the most part, they’re deeply grateful for what freedom they’re granted. Crime rates have dropped; the voter turnout at the next election will soar. The police haven’t had to deal with a single peace demonstration since the day of the attack. Why? Only thanks to our humble efforts.’

Roth waved his arm. ‘But I ramble on. Let’s get to the point. I mentioned earlier that I had instructed Sinclair to tell you the truth about the department; what I didn’t feel the need to make him aware of were my reasons for doing so. You see, I particularly wanted to have this discussion with you, Benedict. I’ve thoroughly examined your files. Your Oxford background caught my eye. You attended the same college as I did, as it happens.’

‘If you’ve read the file, you know that I dropped out.’

Roth chuckled. ‘No matter. The old boy network still counts for something in this decaying empire of ours. And believe me, it’s considerably harder to get out than it is to get in. Then there’s your superlative military record. Men of your qualities don’t drop into our lap as often as I’d like. I believe you would find a career with us highly stimulating. Indeed, I think you’d be ideal material. In many ways, you remind me of myself, at your age.’

‘That’s nasty,’ Ben said.

‘I understand your reaction,’ Roth said, peering at Ben with an almost affectionate expression. ‘In some small way, I even admire it. But stop. Think. We could make you a very handsome proposition.’

‘You want me to replace the likes of Moss and Sinclair.’

‘You’re thirty-three years old, Benedict. The peak of physical fitness doesn’t last forever. Sadly, I speak from experience. I was once a soldier much like yourself. The successive phases of a man’s career must inevitably yield to change. Where do you see yourself, five, ten, twenty years in the future? Still running around the world’s war zones, dodging bullets?’ Roth motioned at Ben’s injured side. ‘Indeed, not always dodging them. There are other avenues for a man like you to pursue; and I think you ought to consider them carefully and wisely.’

‘You can have my answer right now, if you like.’

‘Don’t be rash, my boy. Ira furor brevis est. That’s Latin for …’

‘I know what it means,’ Ben cut in. ‘“Anger is a brief madness”.’

‘More educated than you give yourself credit for, Benedict. And it would indeed be madness to reject my offer out of mere rage. For your own sake, why don’t you take the time to cool off and reflect objectively about your potential future with us?’ Sinclair jutted out his chin thoughtfully. ‘However, I’m afraid I can’t just allow you to wander about freely during that time, pending an assurance of your commitment. It seems to me that our safehouse on Little Cayman would be the perfect relaxing environment in which to decide on your future.’

‘Palm Tree Lodge?’

‘Of course – you’re already familiar with it. That’s settled, then. I shall arrange for the Gulfstream to fly you to Grand Cayman in the next few hours. From there, my men will accompany you aboard a CIC charter flight to Little Cayman.’

‘That’s a bit rich,’ Ben said. ‘Or maybe there’ll really be a bomb on board this time?’

‘Nothing could be further from the truth. Rest assured you’ll be well looked after. At a prearranged time on the third day, you’ll be picked up by boat and brought out for an interview with the Tartarus committee to discuss the terms of your recruitment. This will take place aboard my sailing yacht, the Hydra. I have a personal fondness for the Caymans and often travel there to attend to financial matters.’

‘I don’t suppose Tartarus uses internet banking,’ Ben said.

‘There will be some further conditions,’ Roth went on gravely. ‘The phone with which you’ll be issued will allow you to communicate with me, and me only. I shall require you to wear an electronic tag preventing you from venturing more than one hundred yards from the safehouse. Any attempt to tamper with it, or to make contact with anyone on the outside, will entail severe repercussions. Do you understand me?’

‘Would you understand me if I told you to stick your offer up your arse, Roth? Or shall I do it for you?’

Roth looked at him. The pale eyes seemed to burn for an instant. ‘That’s a rambling old place you have there in Galway. Your housekeeper, Winifred – perhaps a trifle elderly to be looking after it on her own? You must be aware of the potential risks. Accidents can happen. Fires are terribly common in these older properties. It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?’

Ben said nothing.

‘Three days,’ Roth said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Ben wished they’d picked a more companionable pair of goons to chaperone him. The older, less talkative one was rangy and bandy-legged, with a face pitted and bombed by acne and eyes as dead as a fish on a slab. The other had breath that smelled as if he chewed a pound of raw garlic a day. To make matters worse, he insisted on sticking to Ben’s side the entire time and was sitting next to him as the Gulfstream sped from Heathrow to Grand Cayman. Ben was barely allowed to visit the bathroom on his own. When he came out, the guy was standing there, breathing all over the corridor, waiting to escort him back to his seat.

‘What took you so long?’ the goon said.

‘I was looking to see if they had any industrial strength mouthwash for you, Stinker,’ Ben told him. ‘Maybe gargle with some neat bleach? That’ll do the trick.’

Hemmed into the window seat, he dozed for most of the remainder of the flight. After landing at Grand Cayman just after midday, local time, his escorts steered him away from passport control and walked him under the hot sun to a waiting car that blasted northwards up the Seven Mile Beach road to Cayman Islands Charter.

Neither goon seemed to appreciate the irony as the three of them boarded the CIC Trislander. Ben noticed there were only five other passengers – business didn’t seem to be picking up yet, and the gaunt face of the flight attendant, a dark-haired woman he took to be Jo Sundermann, showed that Nick’s former colleagues were still stunned by his loss.

Sitting beside Stinker in the cramped interior of the Trislander was a good deal worse than aboard the spacious Gulfstream. Bandy Legs folded himself into the seat behind. Ben could feel the dead eyes boring into the back of his head. After the short, bumpy takeoff the flight attendant came round serving drinks. Ben had nothing. Stinker bought a can of Coke, cracked it open and took the occasional slurp.

Fifteen minutes into the flight, ignoring Stinker’s astonished stare, Ben casually slipped his last pack of Jordanian cigarettes from his pocket, took one out and lit up with a flourish. He smiled and leaned back in his seat, watching the smoke drift across the aircraft’s narrow interior.

A few feet away, a woman passenger twitched her nose, gave a little splutter and elbowed her husband as if to say ‘do something’. The guy twisted around in his seat and his face turned purple. ‘Hey. Maybe you can’t read, pal? There’s no smoking in here.’

‘It’s for the smell,’ Ben said, pointing at Stinker. ‘I couldn’t stand it any longer.’

A small argument broke out, during which Ben kept on puffing at the cigarette. It wasn’t long before the flight attendant emerged from the front of the plane. ‘Sir, I need you to put that out right now,’ she said sternly. ‘We operate a strict no smoking policy on board.’

‘You’re right. I’m sorry, everyone.’ Ben dropped the half-smoked cigarette with a sizzle into Stinker’s Coke can. ‘And it’s about time I gave up this disgusting habit. Would you mind disposing of these for me, please, Miss?’ He held out the cigarette packet. The flight attendant looked at it hesitantly, glanced back at Ben and then took it from his hand. ‘I’ll do that for you, sir.’

‘I appreciate it. The name’s Ben.’

‘That’s enough chatting up the women,’ Stinker muttered when she’d headed back towards the front of the plane. ‘Don’t pull any more capers like that again.’

‘I won’t,’ Ben said. ‘That’s a promise.’

On arrival at Little Cayman airport, Ben’s chaperones led him to another car. ‘I guess you know the way,’ he said as they bundled him into the back seat. They did, and a few minutes later he was making his second visit to Palm Tree Lodge. The damage to the door had been repaired and the fresh woodwork painted white. The goons opened the place up, marched Ben inside and made him sit on a chair while his right trouser leg was rolled up, his sock rolled down and the electronic tag clasped around his ankle.

‘Don’t even think about messing with it,’ Bandy Legs warned him when the device was locked into place.

‘Repercussions,’ Ben said. ‘I know the routine.’

‘This is your phone,’ Stinker said, laying a mobile on the sideboard. ‘You can’t make calls with it. Incoming only.’

‘So the Little Cayman Sex Hotline is out?’ Ben said. ‘What I am going to do for entertainment?’

Thirty minutes later, he was alone. Wandering about the house with the tag weighing uncomfortably on his ankle, he found the fridge stocked full of provisions: nothing too fancy, mainly cold chicken legs and salads, but enough to keep him reasonably nourished for the next three days. There was a six-pack of mineral water, cartons of fruit juice and – delight of delights – even a few bottles of Red Stripe Jamaican lager.

Whoever had gone shopping for him had also been busy removing the TV, radio and landline phone and installing the base station for the tag device. The steel box that contained it was securely bolted to the living room floor. A red LED flashed more or less quickly depending on how far away Ben stood from it. He guessed it would trigger a remote alarm the instant he moved more than a hundred yards from that spot: just far enough to allow him to dip his toes at high tide and stroll a short distance up and down the beach. After studying the metal casing for a few minutes he decided there probably wasn’t any way to deactivate either it or the tag without alerting his captors.

With nothing else to do, he grabbed a Red Stripe from the fridge and went to sit on the front steps to drink it. The bottle was small, amber glass, twelve fluid ounces in volume and nicely chilled.

As Ben sipped the cold beer and gazed out across the beach to the gentle blue waves, he pondered what he’d said earlier on about giving up smoking.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Mid-afternoon on the third day, Ben was sitting barefoot on the warm sand in front of Palm Tree Lodge when he felt the tingle of the phone’s silent ringer in his pocket and fished it out to answer.

‘Have you made your decision?’ said Roth’s gravelly voice.

‘I have,’ Ben answered.

‘Then what is it to be, Benedict: are you in or out?’

‘You don’t leave me a lot of choice, Roth. I’m coming on board.’

‘Excellent. The Hydra is at anchor a couple of miles offshore. My colleagues are all looking forward to meeting you.’

‘I’m looking forward to it too,’ Ben said.

‘The boat’s on its way. Twenty minutes.’ Roth hung up.

Ben padded across the sand to the house. Walking into the kitchen he tore two sheets of kitchen roll from the dispenser. When he’d finished with them he poured himself a glass of chilled grapefruit juice and drank it slowly. In the hallway he slipped on his shoes and laced them up, then left the house and walked back down the beach as far as the tag would allow, close to the lapping tide-line. The sea breeze ruffled his shirt and his hair. Shielding his eyes from the bright sun, he scanned the horizon.

Soon afterwards, a tiny white dot appeared on the sea and grew rapidly larger until Ben could make out the splash of foam from the motorboat’s bows and the faces of the two men on board. A few yards from the shore, its pilot cut the motor and let the boat glide to a halt in the shallow water. Ben didn’t recognise him, but the second occupant was familiar enough. Stinker gave a leer as he climbed out and crossed the wet sand towards Ben. The black rubber butt of a 9mm protruded from the holster in his waistband. ‘Been a good little doggy?’ he said.

‘Good as gold,’ Ben told him. ‘You flossed today?’

Stinker’s face reddened. He motioned for Ben to hold out his leg, took a key from his pocket and bent down and roughly undid the ankle tag.

‘Let’s go,’ the pilot said, and fired up the outboard.

Ben splashed over to the boat and climbed in, his leg feeling strangely light after getting used to the lump around his ankle for three days. The pilot steered the burbling boat around and away from the shore. ‘Pickup complete,’ Stinker said into his phone. ‘We’re on our way.’

Ben sat quietly as the motorboat rode over the sea and Little Cayman shrank into the distance behind them. For the first few minutes of the journey, Stinker eyed him with suspicion; then, realising Ben wasn’t going to be any trouble, he grinned smugly to himself and looked away.

That was when Ben slipped his hand in his pocket, took out the small package he’d carefully double-wrapped in kitchen roll, and laid it on the seat next to him. He started unwrapping it.

Before Stinker could take notice of what he was doing or react in any way, Ben had stepped across the boat towards him, drawn back his elbow and punched the pointed end of the four-inch sliver of broken Red Stripe bottle hard into the side of his neck, just below the ear.

Stinker would have let out a scream, but Ben’s hand was over his mouth and once the razor-sharp glass sawing rapidly across his throat had sliced through the gristle of his trachea, he had no air to make a sound. Ben moved out of the way of the blood spray. He let the man’s upper body flop backwards over the side and held onto his belt long enough to grab his phone from his pocket and the pistol from its holster.

The pilot hadn’t heard a thing over the noise of the outboard, but sensing the rock of the boat he turned to see what was happening behind him. Ben shot him twice in the head and heaved his body into the water with Stinker’s. The motorboat’s wake turned frothy red. It wouldn’t be long before the sharks turned up.

Taking over at the wheel, Ben used Stinker’s phone to make a call. ‘It’s me. Everything ready?’

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The beautiful, stately three-masted hundred-metre sailing yacht had cost her present owner just a shade over eight million pounds. She was capable of twenty knots under a full spread of canvas, more if her massive auxiliary engines were brought to bear. At the moment, though, her loose-hanging sails crackled in the soft breeze and cast a welcome shade over the deck as she stood at anchor just out of sight of Little Cayman.

Lounging in that shade, sipping on tall iced drinks, chatting and laughing, most of them casually attired in shorts and sandals and polo tops or florid Hawaii shirts, were nine of the world’s publicly least-known but most influential power-brokers: the senior committee of the organisation known only as Tartarus. Their ages ranged from early fifties to late seventies; between them they possessed over three and a half centuries’ worth of experience at the highest, most secretive level of international politics, and the kind of knowledge that could tear a government down and reduce its country to rubble overnight. With the recent exception of Hayden Roth, not one of them had personally discharged a firearm at a living human being for many years – yet the total of the victims they’d claimed during their careers couldn’t easily be counted.

‘Excuse me one moment, gentlemen,’ said Roth. He carried his clinking gin and tonic over to the chrome rail that lined the deck, and looked at his watch. The boat should arrive soon, he thought. His eyes shaded from the sun by the brim of his Panama hat, he scanned the blue horizon. No sign of it yet. Had there been some delay?

At that moment, his phone rang. He snatched it up. ‘Jenner, where are—?’

‘Jenner’s indisposed at the moment,’ Ben said on the other end of the line.

Roth was too thunderstruck to utter a reply.

‘Look up,’ Ben told him. ‘Due south. You should be able to see me. I’m that little yellow speck in the sky.’ He had to talk loudly over the thrumming rumble of the single radial propeller engine a few feet above him. From where he was sitting behind the Supermarine Sea Otter’s mass of dials and gauges, he could just about make out the majestic sails of the Hydra far below. He eased the joystick, bringing the aircraft down in a shallow dive closer to the waves.

‘Hope? What … y-you were supposed to meet the boat,’ Roth stammered.

‘I did,’ Ben said. ‘But there’s been a slight change of plan.’ He checked his readings: air speed, engine speed, flaps; the altitude gauge spun freely as the Sea Otter dropped another hundred feet, almost skimming the waves. She was so heavily laden that it would take all her power to get her up again. But that wasn’t Ben’s idea.

The Hydra was coming closer with every second. Ben could see the little matchstick figures on the deck. ‘Is that you in the dinky straw hat, Roth?’

‘Hope, what the hell are you doing?’ Roth’s voice growled on the end of the line.

‘I told you I was coming on board,’ Ben said. ‘That’s what I’m doing.’

* * *

Things might have been different if Hayden Roth hadn’t made one mistake: that night at the disused military base, he’d let it slip that it would be a CIC flight taking Ben to Little Cayman.

From there, the new plan had hatched quickly in Ben’s mind. In the bathroom of the Gulfstream he’d used a pick-pocketed ballpoint to write a message to Tamara on the inside of his cigarette packet, asking her to get back to Grand Cayman as quickly as she could, and giving her the coordinates to fly Nick’s Sea Otter to Little Cayman and meet him on the shore outside Palm Tree Lodge. A hastily-scribbled footnote said: ‘BRING DRUMS SPARE AVGAS. MANY AS POSS.’

On the outside edge of the cigarette packet Ben had written in block capitals the words: “FOR TAMARA MARTÍNEZ, FROM BEN HOPE. URGENT!!”, and below them the secret phone number on which she could be contacted. When he’d used his smoking ploy on board the Trislander later that day to get the attention of Jo Sundermann, the CIC flight attendant, he’d held the cigarette packet out in such a way that she was sure to see what was written on it. From the look on her face as she’d taken the packet, he’d been sure that she’d call the number. Tamara would surely realise that the message could only have come from Ben, and once she returned to Grand Cayman and Jo Sundermann showed her the cigarette pack, she’d recognise the unusual brand from the night they’d sat in her kitchen.

As to whether Tamara would respond to his call for help in time – that was something Ben could only hope for.

The first day of his captivity at Palm Tree Lodge had passed without anything happening. As the second day had dragged on, Ben had grown steadily more and more anxious and painfully aware of the far too many weaknesses in his plan: Jo Sundermann might have binned the cigarette pack without calling Tamara; or maybe Tamara hadn’t answered her phone; or maybe she’d been too frightened to help. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Towards sunset on the second day, just as he was starting to become despondent, Ben’s heart had leapt at the rumble of the approaching aircraft and he’d hurried outside to see the bright yellow Sea Otter touch down on the water and taxi towards the shore.

Tamara had come running to meet him on the sand, and hugged him tight as she explained how she’d come rushing back the minute Jo had called her. Ben had returned her embrace with a real surge of affection.

‘What’s happening?’ she’d asked him in alarm when she’d noticed the electronic tag on his ankle.

‘I’ll explain,’ he’d said. ‘Did you bring the fuel?’

‘Just like you said. As many drums of 100LL avgas as I could carry. Even strapped one to the co-pilot’s seat. Why did we need them?’

‘You’d better sit down,’ he’d said. ‘I have a lot to tell you.’

They’d sat on the steps of the Lodge, and as the sun set across the beach he’d told her everything, watching her reaction shift from stunned disbelief to helpless tears to silent rage. When he’d reached the end of his long account, he’d described the idea that had been forming in his mind.

There had been no hesitation on Tamara’s part. ‘It’s what Nick would have done,’ she’d said. ‘Let’s do it.’

‘We can hide the plane beyond those trees,’ he’d said, pointing down the beach past Cuban George’s open-air bar, to where the coastline receded out of sight into a hidden bay. ‘You’ll have to sleep on board and wait for my call tomorrow.’

* * *

Sometimes, the simplest plans worked out the best. Ben smiled to himself as the Sea Otter roared low over the waves towards the Hydra. He patted the drum of fuel strapped to the co-pilot’s seat. 100LL avgas, one of the most highly combustible and explosive forms of petroleum fuel ever devised. The bright yellow Sea Otter, Nick Chapman’s pride and joy, was about to crown its long career by going out in a blaze of glory.

Ben could almost hear Nick laughing.

The magnificent sailing yacht was just two hundred yards away and closing fast. On the sweeping, gleaming deck, tiny figures were scattering in panic: either desperately trying to lower the lifeboats or clambering over the side to take their chances in the water. Hayden Roth stood his ground in the middle of the deck, roaring like a bull into his phone. ‘Hope! I order you to stand down immediately! You are a servant of Her Majesty’s Government!’

‘Not any more. I quit,’ Ben said into the phone, and tossed it out of the window.

The Sea Otter was almost on the Hydra. The ship’s expanse of white canvas sails blotted out the view from the cockpit as the aircraft swooped towards the deck. Ben caught a glimpse of muzzle flashes down below as Tartarus agents opened fire with submachine guns. Bullets raked the Sea Otter’s fuselage and cockpit windows.

But there was nothing they could do to prevent what was about to happen. This one was for Nick, and Hilary, and all the other innocents who’d lost their lives thanks to the men aboard the Hydra.

At the last possible instant, Ben leaped out of the pilot’s seat and dived towards the hatchway, grabbing the small rubber dinghy off the floor as he went. The rushing wind tore the inflatable out of his hands and snatched his breath away as he launched himself into space.

The stunning impact drove him deep underwater. Everything was a tumult of noise and confusion. Bubbles streamed from his mouth as he thrashed wildly to regain the surface.

His head and shoulders burst clear of the water at the same instant the Sea Otter hit the Hydra in a shattering, deafening collision of tangled wreckage and wings and sails and rigging and toppling masts. The explosion hurled Ben several yards back in the water and its heat seared his face as both aircraft and ship were engulfed in a gigantic rolling fireball that mushroomed high up into the sky.

Then the sea was suddenly burning, a slick of blazing avgas spreading rapidly across the water. Ben dived under the surface just before the carpet of flames burned him alive. Debris hit the water like a barrage of mortar shells and spiralled into the depths all around him as he swam like crazy away from the circle of devastation.

When he surfaced again, he turned to see a secondary explosion tear apart the shattered remains of the Hydra. Nobody on board could have had any chance of escape. A column of acrid black smoke towered into the sky. Flakes of ash rained down like black snow. Treading water, Ben watched the blazing wreck sink slowly into the sea. Only when it had slipped beneath the waves did he turn away.

The little dinghy was bobbing on the swell nearby. Ben swam after it, clambered on board and unclipped the folding oar from its side. His ears were ringing badly from the noise of the explosion, and the skin of his face felt tender where the heat of the fireball had scorched it. It would probably take a while for his eyebrows to grow back – but then, he wasn’t going anywhere. Not back to Credenhill RHQ, not back to Iraq – not any more, knowing what he knew. It was a different world for him now.

The burble of an approaching outboard made him look up and catch sight of the motorboat in the distance. Tamara’s black hair caught the wind as she stood behind the wheel and waved at him.

Ben waved back with a smile and started paddling across the water to meet her.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

There can’t be many authors who don’t take the occasional liberty by twisting real-life locations to suit their literary needs, and I will readily plead guilty to having taken a few with the Cayman Islands setting of this story. Care has been taken to keep these deliberate distortions to a minimum; however, my apologies to any Cayman Islanders who feel their wonderful Paradise home has been in any way misrepresented.

The ultra-covert branch of British SIS known as ‘Tartarus’ is entirely a figment of my imagination, and no organisation remotely like it exists in real life … of course it doesn’t …

Thank you for reading Passenger 13. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did writing it. Ben Hope will be back soon for another e-prequel!

Scott Mariani

Also available in the Ben Hope series:

The Alchemist’s Secret

The Mozart Conspiracy

The Doomsday Prophecy

The Heretic’s Treasure

The Shadow Project

The Lost Relic

The Sacred Sword (May 2012)

Table of Contents

Title

Imprint

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Author’s Note