The Armada Legacy

Chapter Eleven

It was 8.27 p.m. when Ben and Amal rolled up on the crunching gravel outside Carrick Manor. The huge, imposing house was sequestered in its own sweeping grounds at the end of a long private road. A golden glow of light illuminated the entrance and the cluster of vehicles parked outside it.

As Ben stepped out of the BMW he noticed the same unmarked Garda Vauxhall Vectra that had been at the crime scene earlier that evening. He brushed his fingers along the bonnet as he walked by and felt the warmth from the still-ticking engine.

‘Hanratty,’ he said to Amal.

‘I’d a feeling we hadn’t seen the last of him,’ Amal groaned.

The manor house’s front door wasn’t locked and the huge entrance hall was empty. Ben paused, listening. From an open doorway at the far end of the hall came the distant sound of voices. Crossing the hall, he followed the sound down a long corridor, Amal tagging along behind him. The sound of voices grew louder and finally led them to another door. Ben peered in.

It was a dining room, or had been before it had been turned into a makeshift operations room by the crowd of police personnel and the fifteen or so other people inside. The room was uncomfortably warm and smelled of stale coffee, sweat and fear. The atmosphere was fraught. Everyone was too busy pacing up and down, looking extremely nervous or shouting at one another to notice Ben slip through the door, followed by Amal.

At the centre of the hubbub was a telephone, sitting silently on the gleaming surface of the long dining room table under the fixed eye of half a dozen men and women in suits.

Ben recognised a number of faces from the Neptune Marine Exploration website: the company had clearly flown out most of its chief executives to Ireland. One of them was the big, broad, balding man in the grey suit, Justin Maxwell, who until yesterday had been Sir Roger Forsyte’s second-in-command and now found himself apparently Neptune’s most senior executive, a responsibility that he wore gravely. He was leaning over the table, staring down at the phone as if trying by sheer force of will to make it ring.

Ben ran his eye over the monitoring equipment. An ordinary splitter cable was plugged into the wall socket and hooked up to a digital recording device with headphone outputs so that the police could listen in live to calls. Nearby stood a pair of laptops, one to trace the origin of any call online, whether via the GPS tracking system of a prepaid mobile phone or to a landline, and one to pick up any emails the kidnappers might send, complete with video clips of hooded hostages with guns at their heads. It was a pretty minimal setup, but that wasn’t the problem.

In fact there were two problems Ben could see, which were of a more fundamental nature. One was that, based on their behaviour so far, these kidnappers didn’t seem the kind of people who’d let themselves be so easily traced. Only an idiot nowadays would use a landline to make a ransom demand call, or hold on to a mobile phone they’d used for that purpose. It was just too easy to pinpoint the call’s origin, which was why a common trick kidnappers played was to toss the phone onto the back of a long-distance freight lorry after use, to lead the police far off the trail. Other times, they simply burned them.

The second problem was much more worrying. It had to do with timing. Ben looked at his watch.

It was almost eight-thirty. Not good.

A third laptop stood open on another table, surrounded by a small group of people. Onscreen was the BBC News website, showing the unfolding story in all its colourful drama: images of the bullet-riddled Jaguar; a shot of Castlebane Country Club; of NME’s ship Trident; and of each of the victims in order of newsworthiness – Forsyte’s was the most prominent, then Wally Lander, then Samantha Sheldrake. Brooke’s had now been added to the bottom. The cops had dug up the same photo of her that she’d given Ben to use on the Le Val site. He’d often caught himself gazing at it when they were apart. He couldn’t look at it now.

Hanratty and Kay Lynch were standing on the far side of the room. Neither had seen Ben and Amal come in; their attention was fully occupied by the slightly-built, sandy-haired man who was yelling at them. Ben recognised him as Neptune Marine’s dive team manager, Simon Butler. The man looked completely destroyed from stress – his face pale and moist, eyes rimmed with red, his hair and shirt damp with sweat. His voice was slurred, as if he’d been hitting the sherry. ‘Surely Scotland Yard should have been flown out here by now?’ he was demanding. ‘I mean, what is being done?’

Hanratty was protesting vigorously that it was his job to liaise with the English police, that everything was in hand, that he knew what he was doing. Lynch was saying nothing, looking down at her feet.

‘Ben? Ben Hope?’ said a voice. Ben turned round to see a much-changed but still familiar face peering at him out of the crowd.

‘Hello, Matt.’

Matt Webster had been one of the regulars on the hostage negotiator circuit when Ben had still been active. He obviously hadn’t opted for life behind a desk yet, though he looked as if he should before too long. What little hair he had left had turned grey.

They shook hands, and Ben briefly introduced him to Amal. ‘It’s been a long time,’ Webster said. ‘Six years?’

‘Seven,’ Ben said. ‘Lahore.’

‘Lahore. Christ, who could forget that one?’ Webster shook his head at the memory. Seven years earlier, a wealthy Kent-based private doctor named Shehzad, who had some time before taken out a kidnap and ransom insurance policy with a leading firm, had been violently abducted by an armed gang while visiting family in Pakistan. The ransom demand had been quickly followed up by a severed toe thrown from a passing car; when the toe had been verified as indeed belonging to Dr Shehzad, the insurance underwriters had panicked and sent in a whole team of negotiators. Both Ben and Webster were on it.

The negotiations had been looking reasonably positive until the Pakistani police had managed to trace the phone used by the idiotic kidnappers and taken it upon themselves to storm their hideout in a pre-dawn raid using two armoured personnel carriers. In the ensuing gun battle several officers had been shot to pieces, as well as the entire gang of kidnappers and the doctor himself. The episode had been just one of the instances that had made Ben extremely wary of police involvement in kidnap cases, in any country.

‘So Rochester and Saunders sent you up here,’ Ben said.

Webster motioned across the room to a colleague who had his back turned to them. ‘Me and Dave Hughes there.’ He paused and looked puzzled. ‘So what are you …? I heard you were doing your own thing now.’

Ben nodded. ‘You heard right. My involvement in this is private. I’m here because of Brooke Marcel. She and I …’ He didn’t finish the sentence.

‘God, I had no idea,’ Webster said, blanching. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘What’s the situation, Matt? There’s been no contact, has there?’ Even as he asked the question, he already knew the answer. Just one glance at the haggard faces around the room had told him what he’d come to Carrick Manor to find out.

Webster shook his head. ‘Zilch. Not a squeak.’

Ben could have asked Webster if he was thinking the same thing he was, but there was no need. He could see it in his eyes.

He said nothing. It was eight thirty-two. He glanced across at the silent phone. Justin Maxwell was still staring at it fixedly, barely blinking.

At that moment Detective Inspector Hanratty, managing to get away from the angry Simon Butler, spotted Ben and Amal across the room. ‘Here comes trouble,’ Amal muttered as Hanratty battled his way round the long table and strutted up to them with his fists clenched.

‘Not you again,’ he growled. ‘Did I not tell you to stay out of this, Hope? There’s the door.’

‘Why don’t you fuck off, Hanratty?’ Ben said quietly, looking him directly in the eye.

Hanratty blanched. ‘What did you just say to me?’

‘You heard me,’ Ben said more loudly. ‘You’ve three seconds to get out of my face before I put you through that window.’

Kay Lynch was watching Ben from across the room with an expression that said, ‘See, this is what I meant by you being silly’.

The buzz of noise dropped to a murmur. People looked around. Hanratty’s eyes bulged. Two seconds went by, then three. Hanratty swallowed and took a step back from Ben. Before he could muster up a riposte, Justin Maxwell spoke up.

‘Will someone please tell me who this gentleman is?’

‘I know him,’ Matt Webster cut in. ‘I can totally vouch for him.’

Hanratty exploded in protest.

‘Let me put it this way, pal,’ Webster said, giving him a cold glower. ‘If you were kidnapped, this is the guy you’d want on your side.’

‘With respect, sir,’ Lynch said to Hanratty, ‘I think he can be of some use to us. He’s got more experience in this kind of situation than the rest of us put together.’

‘Then perhaps he should introduce himself,’ Maxwell said, silencing Hanratty’s objections with a raised hand and looking expectantly at Ben.

Ben disliked talking about himself or his background, but there were times when it was to his advantage to reveal a little more than usual. ‘My name’s Ben Hope. I served as a Major in the British Special Air Service before becoming a freelance crisis response consultant. In that capacity I’ve been involved in over a hundred hostage rescue situations. Sometimes as a negotiator, sometimes more directly. I’m here because of Dr Brooke Marcel.’

‘I see,’ Maxwell said. ‘May I ask what is your relationship to Dr Marcel?’

‘That’s none of your business,’ Ben said. ‘What does concern all of us here is that the clock’s ticking. It’s eight thirty-three. Approximately twenty-two and a half hours since the snatch. In my experience, that’s a hell of a long time to wait for first contact.’

‘Meaning what exactly?’

‘Meaning that you people can stand here staring at that phone all you like, but I don’t think it’s going to ring anytime soon, if ever.’

Maxwell looked long and hard at Ben. His eyes were wide-set and penetrating. ‘Couldn’t the delay be a deliberate strategy?’ he asked. ‘The longer we stew, the greater the kidnappers’ psychological advantage over us and the more likely we are to acquiesce to their demands. Although we’d do anything to secure Sir Roger’s and Miss Sheldrake’s release. And that of Dr Marcel, naturally,’ he added quickly.

‘Kidnappers like to play mind games,’ Ben said. ‘That’s true enough. We call it The Wait, and it’s a nightmare for negotiators, victims’ families and everyone concerned except the insurers, who’re happy to hang onto their money for as long as they can. The kidnappers will often go quiet for days, months, sometimes years, to soften you up like putty so that you’ll cave in to whatever terms they throw at you. But not,’ he emphasised, ‘before making that initial contact. It’s crucial to them to approach you and identify themselves as the real kidnappers. This story’s already all over the internet by now – it’s only a question of time before a hundred opportunists start coming out of the woodwork making phoney demands. Kidnappers generally just want money, and they want it as quickly as possible. Especially when there’s an eight-figure sum on the table, you wouldn’t expect them to hang around.’

Maxwell narrowed his eyes. ‘Who said anything about an eight-figure sum?’

‘Let’s not mess about,’ Ben said. ‘I know that your company’s insured for ransom claims of up to twelve million with Rochester and Saunders. And if I know it, rest assured the kidnappers will know it. You’re not dealing with amateurs, that much is clear.’

‘Where did you get that information?’ one of the other Neptune executives demanded.

‘Ronnie Galloway told me,’ Ben said.

The executive shook his head in outrage. ‘That little—’ he began. Maxwell quieted him with a stern gesture.

‘Which strongly suggests to me that the time for a ransom demand has been and gone,’ Ben went on. ‘Believe me, I don’t like it any more than you do.’

Maxwell’s brow furrowed into deep creases. He looked at Simon Butler, then at Matt Webster and his colleague from R&S. Butler was chewing his fingernails in agitation. Webster’s face was taut.

‘Matt will agree with me,’ Ben said.

‘Is that the case, Mr Webster?’

Webster sighed. ‘It’s getting pretty damn late in the day,’ he admitted. ‘I’d have expected to hear something by now. Frankly, I’m more than a little concerned that every passing hour makes it less likely we’ll hear anything at all.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Maxwell said. ‘Where does this leave us? I’d assumed … I mean, if it’s not about ransom … what’s going on?’

‘I think you might need to re-evaluate the whole situation,’ Ben said. ‘You might want to consider other reasons why someone would want to snatch your man.’

‘Such as?’

‘I’d imagine the treasure recovered from the Santa Teresa’s worth a good deal more than twelve million,’ Ben said.

‘You’re suggesting what? That they’d use force against Sir Roger to make him give them access?’

‘Unless he’s in on it,’ Ben said.

There was a shocked silence in the room. After a few seconds, Maxwell said, ‘That’s absolutely out of the question and totally impossible. Besides, not even Roger could have access. Every single item recovered from that vessel is under secure lock and key.’

‘Then maybe there’s something else,’ Ben said. ‘Something we don’t know about, but which Forsyte does.’

‘But that’s just a guess,’ Maxwell said.

‘At this moment, guesswork is pretty much all we have,’ Ben replied. ‘All we know for sure is that while we stand around here staring at that phone, whoever did this is somewhere far away, laughing.’

‘And?’

‘And so it’s going to have to be done the hard way,’ Ben said. ‘They’re going to have to be found, and caught. That was meant to be Hanratty’s job. Whether he’s up to it is another question.’

‘I’m not having some outsider come into this investigation to cause trouble and make wild allegations like this,’ Hanratty burst out, pointing at Ben. ‘And you count yourself lucky, Hope, that I don’t charge you with threatening a police officer and obstructing the course of justice. Sergeant, get him out of my sight.’

Lynch hesitated, but she couldn’t refuse a direct order from her superior. She stepped towards Ben with a veiled look of apology in her eyes.