The Babylon Idol

Chapter 8

She turned. Apart from her hairstyle, she hadn’t changed. She was as achingly beautiful as ever. More, even, but maybe that was just because he hadn’t seen her in such a very long time. But there was no smile. Not that he’d expected one from her, even on a better day than today. Her green eyes, vivid even in the dim light of the single side lamp, were moist with tears.

‘I came as soon as I heard,’ she said.

Brooke was officially still on the books as a member of the Le Val team, although she hadn’t worked there lately. Tuesday must have called her earlier that day. Thanks for letting me know, Ben thought.

‘What happened?’ she said. ‘Who did this?’

He shook his head. ‘I wish I knew what to tell you.’ A long mournful silence filled the room. He took a step towards her. ‘It’s good to see you again,’ he said, because he didn’t know what else to say. In any case, it was a lie. Seeing her again, especially now, like this, was indescribably painful.

‘Whatever,’ she murmured.

‘How are you?’ It sounded so lame.

She shrugged. ‘There isn’t much to say, Ben. I’m working. Living in London again. Life goes on. I’m with someone else now.’

Ben said, ‘I hope you’re happy.’

‘Don’t try so hard to sound like you mean it.’ Her voice rose a tone, cracking out at him like a whiplash. Then she paused, softened a little, let out a sigh. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Yes, I’m happy. I think I am. That is, I was, until today, until I heard about Jeff. This is so awful.’

He hesitated, knowing that the question bursting to come out was the wrong thing to say, especially at this moment. But then he thought, Fuck it, and let it out anyway. ‘Please don’t tell me you’re back with that prick Rupert Shannon again.’

She stiffened. ‘Give me some credit, will you?’

‘That’s something, at least. Then who is he?’ Ben asked, knowing very well how badly he was crossing the line. But he’d committed himself now and there was no turning back.

Brooke folded her arms across her chest and gave him a piercing look. ‘What I do and who I see is my business. You took yourself out of my life when you walked away. Your choice, Ben. Live with it.’

He had been living with it, not always successfully. ‘Yeah,’ he muttered. ‘I’m sorry I asked. It was wrong.’

‘Is Jeff going to be okay?’

‘They had to induce a coma.’

Brooke’s face fell. She’d known Jeff for years, going back to when she’d first come to lecture classes at Le Val as a visiting expert on hostage psychology. Dr Brooke Marcel, one of the leaders in her clinical field. One of the great lost loves of Ben’s life. Letting her go the way he had was his biggest regret – it hurt him every day, like an old war wound that could never quite heal.

‘I booked a room at the Manoir in Valognes,’ she said. ‘I’ll drive up to the hospital in the morning, but then I have to rush back to London for work.’

‘Thanks for stopping by.’

‘I don’t know why … I just thought …’ Her voice trailed off, and then she shook her head. ‘God, what a mess. Who could have done this to him? I can’t understand. I mean, Jeff never hurt anybody.’

Ben thought about that. You couldn’t be the high-level military operator Jeff Dekker had once been without hurting anyone, or at least being involved in a good deal of it. Special Forces made enemies around the world and there was no shortage of folks who would go to all kinds of lengths to get back at them if they could. But the shroud of secrecy around the Special Boat Service, Jeff’s old unit, was no different from the impenetrable cloak that protected the identities of operatives within Ben’s own former 22 SAS regiment. Practically nobody on the outside knew who these men were. Targeted revenge attacks against individuals in response for things they had done in the name of their country were pretty much unheard of. Unless someone within their own unit had somehow been turned or manipulated by a third party with an axe to grind, or gone bad themselves. Ben had already worked through a mental list of possible candidates, and crossed their names off one by one until none remained.

‘Whoever it was,’ he said, ‘they’ve just made the biggest mistake of their life.’

She looked at him, understanding from the look in his eyes what he was thinking. Brooke knew him well enough, from long experience, to know exactly how he was liable to respond in this situation.

‘Leave it to the police, Ben. Hasn’t there been enough trouble already?’

‘It seems to me that the shooter isn’t having any trouble at all,’ Ben said. ‘He got in, did his work, and got out. Job done, nice and easy. Now he’s out there somewhere enjoying life with a clear conscience. I can’t let that happen.’

‘So you’re taking it upon yourself to sort things out. As usual.’ Brooke said it with an exaggerated tone of resignation.

‘You haven’t met Inspector Tarrare and his goon squad. They couldn’t catch the flu in the middle of an epidemic. Don’t try to twist this around, Brooke. If that was me lying in that hospital bed, breathing through a machine, Jeff would do the same thing and you know it.’

‘Jeff needs you here.’

‘As in, don’t go running off and getting yourself killed?’ he said. He almost added, ‘Why should you care anyway?’ But he bit his lip. He’d already said too much.

She gave a sour laugh. ‘What am I saying? As if anyone had a chance in hell of stopping you, once your mind’s made up. Running off when people need you around is what you do best, after all.’

That hit below the belt. Ben could have replied, ‘You were the one who broke off the engagement, not me.’ But this was no time for a drawn-out argument. He clenched his teeth and said nothing.

‘I didn’t come here to fight,’ Brooke said sadly after a beat. ‘I’ll go now, before one of us says something we’ll both regret.’

There was no physical contact between them as she was leaving. He wanted to reach out to her, even if he didn’t deserve the comfort of her touch. He stood in the door and watched the tail-lights of the Renault Clio disappear up the track towards the gates, where she’d have to run the gauntlet of zombie reporters clamouring for their story. Then she was gone, and the rainy night closed in behind her.

Ben could have done with some company, but Tuesday had disappeared. He returned to the kitchen and swallowed down some more whisky. Still the best cure ever devised for delayed shock, and other things.

He wandered back outside into the rain. Out of the darkness came a familiar shape, and a wet nose nudged Ben’s hand in greeting. Storm trotted by his side as he crossed the yard, looking up at him curiously. The dog seemed subdued, as if he understood something.

Ben walked over to the dark, silent office building opposite the house. Inside, he flipped on the light. Looked at Jeff’s empty desk. Sat down at his own, and stared into space. It was cold inside the office building, but Ben was too numb to feel the chill. Just like he was too sick to feel hungry, even though his stomach was empty apart from ten-year-old Laphroaig. Maybe he needed to drink some more, because the image of Jeff lying there in the hospital kept coming back to him. He tried to flush it out of his mind’s eye by picturing the unknown shooter. The blank face behind the rifle. Ben wondered what he was doing right this moment, what he was thinking.

‘I’ll find you,’ he said out loud. ‘Don’t ever think I won’t.’

But he wasn’t going to find him tonight. Wherever the shooter had gone, he had a head start that Ben knew he couldn’t hope to make up by going off half-cocked, jumping in his car and tearing off on a revenge mission with not a single clue or lead.

Tomorrow would be another day.

Until then, Ben could only bide his time, lay aside his restless thoughts and try to relax.

As he sat there at the desk, he looked down and saw the unopened letter from the Bollati penitentiary in Milan, lying there exactly where he’d left it that morning when he’d gone to help Jeff with the fallen tree. He’d forgotten all about it until now.

He gazed at it for a moment. He had nothing better to do, and maybe it would help take his mind off things. He picked up the envelope, slipped out the letter. Unfolded it.

And began to read.

Chapter 9

The letter was handwritten on three thin sheets of headed Bollati prison paper. The first thing that caught Ben’s eye was that it was in Italian, a language he spoke less fluently than French but in which he nonetheless could hold his own pretty well. The second thing he noticed was the handwriting itself, a fine flowing italicised script that very few people could produce any more, and which clearly showed its author as being someone of a certain age and education.

At the top of the first page the November date, a few days earlier than the postmark on the envelope, told him that it had been written while he, Jeff and Tuesday were fighting for their lives in Africa. No indication of the writer’s identity, so Ben flicked over to the last page and ran his eye down to the bottom. His eyes narrowed in surprise when he saw the signature.

The letter’s author was one Fabrizio Severini.

A name Ben recognised immediately. It flooded his mind with memories from years back, returning him to a chapter in his life when he’d still been working freelance as what people in that little-known trade called a ‘K&R crisis consultant’. The K and R stood for kidnap and ransom, which had been Ben’s particular area of expertise in those days. When vulnerable, innocent people – many of them children – were taken by ruthless criminals looking to extort money from their loved ones, and when the conventional avenues for getting them back had been tried and failed, it had been Ben’s job to employ his own specialised means to hunt the kidnappers and bring the victims home as unscathed as possible. The kidnappers had rarely come out of it unscathed themselves. It had been a dangerous business for them once Ben was involved.

Dangerous for Ben, too. And the strange mission that had indirectly brought him into contact with Fabrizio Severini had been one of the most hazardous of them all. What had started as the race to save the life of a child had led Ben through some unexpected twists and turns before placing him in conflict with one of the most tenacious, ruthless enemies he’d ever encountered, a man named Massimiliano Usberti.

Usberti was a rogue senior Italian archbishop who controlled a secret and powerful Christian fundamentalist cult called Gladius Domini: Sword of God. Its brainwashed members, branded with a tattoo to show their allegiance, were prepared to kidnap, torture or assassinate anyone who stood in Usberti’s way. One of Usberti’s trusted inner circle had been a psychopathic killer called Franco Bozza. Another had been his close aide and personal secretary, Fabrizio Severini. Ben had worked alongside the only law enforcement officer he’d ever trusted, the intensely cerebral, sharp-witted and fiercely driven Parisian cop Luc Simon to bring down Gladius Domini. In the process, Ben had been shot, almost stabbed, come within a whisker of being crushed by a speeding train, and been very nearly incinerated in a burning mansion. All more or less run-of-the-mill stuff for him. He’d also found love, not lastingly, in the form of the American scientist Roberta Ryder.

During the final shakedown that brought the cult to its knees, Massimiliano Usberti had been arrested while many of his cronies, Severini included, had fled for the hills. But Severini had proved much less wily than his leader: INTERPOL had scooped him up just a few weeks later, while over the next few months – pretty much as Ben had expected might happen – Usberti had used his influence in high places, his power and his wealth, to oil his way out of trouble. In the end Usberti had walked away from the affair a free man – albeit disgraced, broken and barred from ever again regaining his old position in the church.

When the news had broken that the charges against Usberti had been controversially dropped, Ben had already been moving on with his life and becoming involved in the hunt for a missing girl abducted by an international child sex trafficking ring.

For a while afterwards he’d toyed with the idea of going after Usberti to deliver some natural justice where the courts had failed. But he’d reluctantly given up on the plan. If anything untoward had happened to the former archbishop, Luc Simon – by then promoted from the Paris police to a desk at the INTERPOL HQ in Lyon – would have known about it, instantly put two and two together and jumped on Ben with all the force of his new position. Ben had thought about it less and less over time, and eventually let the whole thing fade from his mind. It wasn’t a perfect world. The bad guys sometimes walked: you just had to deal with it.

If there was any consolation, it was that not all of Gladius Domini’s surviving members had got off so lightly. Quite how Usberti had managed to get Severini to take the fall for him, Ben would never know and had long ago stopped caring. But the prison notepaper in his hands was certainly proof, if nothing else, that Severini’s plunge had been a spectacular and enduring one. Ben wondered how many more years the man had left to serve.

That wasn’t all Ben was wondering as he returned to the start of the letter and began reading, translating from Italian as he went. Why on earth was Fabrizio Severini, a man he’d never even seen in the flesh, writing to him after all this time? He was about to find out.

Dear Signor Hope,

It is with a heavy conscience and only after a great deal of soul-searching that I write to you, as well as with the heartfelt wish that you will both forgive this unsolicited and most unorthodox personal communication and treat its content as an expression of my utmost sincerity.

Considering we have never met in person and never shall, you are doubtless wondering why I have chosen to send you this letter. I fully understand that you may not wish to read it and will instead feel impelled to tear it up; but for reasons that will become clear below, I beg you to read on and hear what I must tell you.

In the years since its downfall, I have always remembered you as the man primarily responsible for bringing to an end the insidious organisation in which I once so strongly believed, and whose name I cannot now bring myself to mention. Nor do I find it easy to express the deep shame I continue to endure each and every day, as I sit here in my cell with little to do except think back to those dark times, to the many and terrible sins committed, to which I was so blind, and to the man I once idolised and trusted as though he were my own father. I believed myself at the time to be collaborating with a true visionary, a man of God. Instead, as I later came to realise, I was in fact working in league with the Devil. I allowed myself to become an unwitting instrument of this maniac whose pure evil is matched only by the cunning that has, to this day, enabled him to evade justice.

I was a fool, and I have been rightly punished for my mistakes. I deserved all that befell me: to have lost my cherished family, my home, my position within the Church, and my freedom. It is not to gain sympathy that I tell you of the complete psychological breakdown and the torment of mental illness I suffered for so long following my arrest and incarceration. The experience broke me and, in effect, I went mad. I spent an extended period of time in a facility for the criminally insane, and only after prolonged treatment were my rational faculties slowly restored, permitting my transfer here to the Istituto Penitenziaro Bollati – where in the last two years I have received far more humane and compassionate treatment than I could ever hope to merit.

Though the horrors of my insanity are now largely behind me, the burden of guilt I suffer can never be lifted from my shoulders. Every day I have prayed for God’s forgiveness for my part in the unspeakable crimes Massimiliano Usberti perpetrated in the name of the Catholic faith. I was once a man of God, blessed each day by His love and guidance; but that source of Divine wisdom was lost to me as the Lord turned His back and spoke to me no more, however much I begged Him to reveal Himself to me as He once did. His long silence has in many ways been the hardest punishment for me to bear.

Finally, after all these years of torment, God in His mercy has spoken to me once again. But now that He has taken me back into the favour of His Divine goodness, it pains me deeply to say that He has only confirmed to me what I have always dreaded to be the case.

And this brings me, my dear Signor Hope, to my reason for penning this letter to you – a reason so terrible that the very thought makes me shake with fear as I write. For I am now more utterly certain than ever, in my heart of hearts, that we have not seen the end of this evil maniac Massimiliano Usberti. A man like him does not simply fade into the background. If he has managed to remain in the shadows for so long, it is only because he is hatching some dreadful new plan that eclipses even his monstrous exploits of the past. Moreover, I am convinced that he will return to seek vengeance against those he perceives as having wronged him – those who prevented him from carrying out his pernicious goals and may attempt to do so again when he inevitably rises once more from the darkness.

Signor Hope, I beg you to be vigilant and pray that you will take heed, for I am one of the few people alive who understands the power and depth of the merciless hate that motivates Usberti. I am weak and vulnerable, trapped as I am behind these bars. If his villainous influence can reach me inside prison by the hand of some assassin, so be it; I deserve little better. But you are strong, and free. You must do all you can to guard yourself from him. Not only yourself, but every one of those virtuous, wholly innocent individuals who played a part in his downfall. With all my heart and for their sakes as well as your own, I beseech you not to take this warning lightly.

May God in His infinite glory watch over you and protect you.

Your humble servant,

Fabrizio Severini

Prisoner 56139

Chapter 10

The letter left Ben stunned. He clutched the thin sheets tightly in his hands and read them again, twice, word by word, in case he’d somehow misunderstood or mistranslated.

He hadn’t. The message couldn’t have been clearer. Fabrizio Severini, repentant sinner, acting on a mystical revelation from God, was warning him that his old enemy Massimiliano Usberti was coming back for revenge.

And with those three pages of elegant handwriting, it was as though the planet had suddenly flipped its magnetic polarity, turning everything upside down.

For the thousandth time since that morning, Ben revisualised the awful memory of the shooting. The details were exactly the same, yet everything was completely different. In his mind’s eye he pictured the two of them standing by the fallen tree: Ben cutting, Jeff close by waiting to grab the next section of log and toss it on the pile. Then, like an extreme slow-motion replay: the bullet closing in from nowhere. The blood spray. Jeff falling. The entire nightmare sequence happening a fraction of a second after the gust of wind that had buffeted them with a fresh snow flurry. A gust of wind that could very easily have diverted the trajectory of the bullet just those few critical inches and caused it to hit …

The wrong target.

It seemed so obvious to him now that Ben was furious with himself for not having thought of it before. As a trained sniper himself, it had been drilled into him long ago that even a 10mph gust of sidewind, coming in right-to-left from three o’clock or left-to-right from nine o’clock, could blow a medium to long-range rifle shot far enough off course in either direction to spell the difference between a hit and a miss. Even the most experienced rifleman could be caught out by a sudden change in windspeed and direction. At a range of three hundred yards, the deviation could be a full seven inches left or right depending on which way the gust blew. At five hundred yards the shot could veer off by up to twenty inches or more; and at a thousand yards it could be off by over fifty inches, missing the bullseye by a whole four feet. And that was the data for a ten-mile-an-hour gust. A stronger wind could affect the shot even worse.

The realisation made Ben’s mind reel. Because if Severini’s warning could be believed in any way, it meant that the bullet hadn’t been meant for Jeff at all.

It had been meant for him.

He was clutching the letter so tightly in his hands that the paper ripped. He let the torn pieces fall to the desk as his mind raced and filled with questions. Had the sniper known he’d hit the wrong man? Was it possible that the gust of wind, whipping in a fresh snow flurry between him and his distant target, could have obscured the view through his scope just long enough to mislead him? He pressed the trigger; he saw a man go down; he packed up his kit and hurried from the scene, running back to his hidden vehicle, getting on the phone to report back to base that his mission was accomplished.

Whereupon, the assassin might have gone after the next target on his list.

Ben looked down at the torn letter. You must do all you can to guard yourself from him. Not only yourself, but every one of those virtuous, wholly innocent individuals who played a part in his downfall.

The next question that flashed into Ben’s mind was: what other names were on the hit list?