Star of Africa
At least, that was the idea.
Jeff Dekker, Ben’s old friend and former partner, still ran the business they’d built together in Normandy, and still thought that Ben had lost his mind. Back in the day, Jeff had done his stint in the Special Boat Service, the Royal Navy’s equivalent of Ben’s old regiment, 22 SAS. Years later, after Ben had gone to live at the former farm near Valognes, a place called Le Val, he and Jeff had teamed up to carve out a prestigious niche for themselves teaching their specialised skills to military, security, law enforcement and anti-terrorist operatives from across the globe. They’d reached the point in their careers where they could enjoy the fruits of all those years of extreme risk and back-breaking hardship.
That was how it worked in their world. Special Forces was like some kind of super-university where the learning curves were tough, the lifestyle tougher, the possibility of sudden violent death never far away, and the pay on a par with a schoolteacher’s salary. But those who survived the experience ultimately emerged from it as life members of the most exclusive club in the world, with their real careers still ahead of them. Former SAS and SBS guys were in high demand for plum jobs as senior security advisors in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, with earning potential running into hundreds of thousands a year, tax-free, for a fraction of the workload they were used to, and virtually zero risk. Others did what Ben had done for several years after quitting the military, go freelance as what he’d termed a ‘crisis response consultant’, before Le Val had entered his life.
In short, for men of their qualifications it was a world of opportunity. Le Val certainly had paid off on everyone’s expectations. So as far as Jeff was concerned, to have put yourself through the living hell they had, come through it alive and then invested all that hard-won knowledge and experience into the best private tactical training facility in Europe, just to abandon it and go wandering off into the sunset like some kind of half-arsed nomad, was completely nuts. It was an opinion he’d frequently expressed to Ben, in increasingly strong terms as it became increasingly apparent that Ben wasn’t coming back.
Ben respected his old friend’s point of view, and had always felt bad for having left Jeff holding the baby. But he felt he’d had no choice but to walk away from Le Val. Only Ben understood the deep inner restlessness that troubled his soul and drove him to do the things he did.
Lately, though, a growing shadow of doubt had been hanging over him and Jeff’s words were often in his mind. The trouble with walking away from a lucrative little enterprise like Le Val, with no other employment on the horizon, was that unless you were a millionaire it was no kind of an effective long-term financial proposition. And the Lord knew Ben Hope was no millionaire – never had been, never would be, never wanted to be. Technically speaking, he remained part-owner and a sleeping partner in the business, and could therefore be drawing an income from it if he’d so desired. But to Ben’s mind, if he wasn’t doing the work he didn’t deserve to benefit from the profits, and had insisted on not receiving a penny from Le Val since the day he’d quit, choosing instead to support himself independently from his savings. He’d known, of course, that they wouldn’t last forever, and he’d been careful. But the laws of simple economics couldn’t be cheated, and slowly, slowly, his funds had dwindled away until worryingly little remained, leaving him to face some key decisions.
The first of those decisions was that he needed to sell his place in Paris. He’d occasionally toyed with the idea in the past, but now the time had finally come to put it on the market. The one-bedroom apartment had been a gift from a former client, years ago, and for a long time had served Ben as a base while travelling in Europe. He’d called it his safehouse, because it was so tucked away among a cluster of backstreet buildings that you’d never find it if you didn’t know it was there. On more than one occasion, it had lived up to its name when he’d needed a place to lie low. But now it was nothing more than a pointless luxury, and a financial asset he could no longer afford to hang onto. Ben had reckoned he could get it all fixed up himself, without having to spend a fortune. A patch-up repair here, a lick of paint there, and he was confident it could make an ideal pad for a single guy or gal, perhaps even a young couple looking to get into the property market.
And so, with some regret, Ben had come to Paris to do the necessary.
And that was when the trouble had started.
Chapter 2
The first thing Ben had noticed on his return was how rundown the whole neighbourhood looked. Shop fronts that had been scrubbed and spotless last time he’d seen them were now covered in graffiti. A striking number of windows were boarded up where they’d been broken and never repaired, as if the local business community had fallen into some kind of collective apathy. The secondhand bookstore he’d often spent hours browsing in, just up the street from the apartment, was closed down. So was the great little patisserie where he’d always bought his morning croissants. Once bustling with life, the streets seemed weirdly empty. The few people Ben did pass looked furtive and anxious.
The area had never been the most prime location in Paris, by any stretch of the imagination – it wasn’t Avenue Montaigne or the Champs Élysées. But something was different. Not just visibly, but tangibly. Like something in the air, a chill or a shadow, the dropping of a barometer needle signalling a change in pressure and things set to turn stormy. He could sense it like a bad smell. It was the oddest thing, but he put it out of his mind as he made his way from the underground car parking space and up the steps to the familiar old apartment entrance.
Ben had been away from the safehouse long enough to find everything inside covered in a fine layer of dust. Still, it felt like part of him, like a comfortable old shoe, and he hated thinking he’d soon have to part with it. He fired up the heating to get some warmth into the place. Rooting in the kitchen cupboard he found an unopened pack of ground espresso not too far past its sell-by date, brewed up a mug of coffee, strong and black, the way he liked it, and then said to himself, ‘Right. Let’s get to work.’
He’d spent the rest of that first day cleaning up and surveying each room in turn with a critical eye, trying to see it from the perspective of a potential buyer, and making mental lists of what needed doing to bring the place up to scratch. It was fairly spartan and he’d never done much to try to furnish it beyond the absolute basics, but it wasn’t in terrible shape. The most obvious first step was a general freshening-up of the decor, so the morning after his arrival, Ben had gone out to pick up the necessary supplies.
After paying a visit to the local hardware store for some decorating sundries, he’d headed for Abdel’s grocery shop just around the corner from the safehouse to buy in some food provisions for the few days he expected to be around. Ben had known Abdel for years, and liked him a lot. They’d long ago got into the habit of conversing in the Algerian’s native Arabic, which Ben spoke almost as well as he did French. Abdel was a good-natured guy, invariably cheerful, grinning a mile wide and ever ready with a funny anecdote.
Not today. The moment Ben had walked into the shop, he’d sensed the same change he’d been sensing everywhere.
And when he’d quizzed Abdel about what was wrong, it soon began to make sense. At first nervous and reluctant to talk, Abdel told Ben about the Romanian criminal gang who had steadily been taking over the neighbourhood during the last year.
‘I have nothing against immigrants,’ Abdel said. ‘Why should I? My parents came here in ’65. But these people are like animals. They have come here only to take and destroy. They are greedy for anything they can get. Stealing from tourists isn’t enough for them any more.’ He explained how the Romanians’ enterprise had swelled and their confidence grown at such an alarming rate that within a matter of months they’d started leaning on local businesses and extorting protection money out of them, using the threat of vandalism as their incentive. Now Ben understood why he’d been seeing so many broken windows everywhere. The nearby hardware store he’d visited that morning had been no exception. An assistant had been sweeping glass off the floor as Ben had walked in.
Abdel explained how the Romanians had now started stepping up the pressure, bringing in their heavies to enforce the extortion racket with threats of broken legs, beatings and arson. Meanwhile, they were flooding the neighbourhood with cheap drugs and getting deeper into allied rackets like car theft, burglary and prostitution.
‘Everyone is terrified of them. We are hardworking, decent people. We don’t deserve this. Look what’s happening out there. The streets are empty. People are afraid to go out. Hardly anyone comes into my shop any more, because they’re scared of what might happen if the Romanians turned up.’
‘What about the police?’ Ben asked.
Abdel shrugged. ‘What about them? Some of us got together and made an official complaint. We even told them the address where the gang are all living together like a bunch of bandits, making disgusting films and selling women and drugs. We told them the name of the leader, too.’
‘Which is what?’ Ben asked.
‘He calls himself Dracul.’
Dracul. Ben shook his head. How trite. ‘It means “devil” in Romanian,’ he said.
‘Why would he call himself by such a name?’ Abdel asked, frowning.
‘Probably because he thinks it sounds scary,’ Ben said.
‘He is scary. A big, big man, with long black hair and a scar on his face. He’s easy to recognise. We gave the description to the police. They made us fill out a form and said they would be in touch. Nothing happened. Nobody gives a damn about us little guys.’
Ben sighed. You turned your back for a year, and this was the result of it. The neighbourhood falling into the control of a violent criminal gang wasn’t going to do his chances of selling the apartment any favours, either.
There was more. Abdel told Ben that the Romanians wanted two thousand euros from him, a new monthly payment demand Dracul called ‘respect tax’. They’d given Abdel a number to phone to say he was agreeing to cough up the money. If he didn’t call by three o’clock that afternoon, they’d told him they were going to come and break one arm and one leg. That was so he could still work. Generous. He’d still have to pay, of course. Then if the following month’s payment was late, it would be the other arm and the other leg. The next time after that, they’d promised, Dracul was personally going to have his fun with Abdel’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Faridah, before handing her over to the boys to be gang-raped and beaten to a pulp. Or maybe they’d drug her up and make her the starlet in one of the hardcore movie productions they were selling on the side.
Ben was very unhappy to hear that. It made his fists tighten.
‘What am I going to do?’ Abdel said desperately. ‘I have no money to pay them. I can’t protect my own family from these people.’
‘Do nothing,’ Ben said. ‘Don’t call them. Wait for them to come to you.’
‘But I told you what they’ll do.’
‘Everything will be fine,’ Ben assured him.
After which Ben had gone back to the apartment, started stripping wallpaper, smoked some cigarettes and drunk some coffee, eaten a tin of cassoulet for lunch and bided his time until the afternoon.
Just before three, he’d left the apartment again and walked to his car, taking with him a few hardware store items he’d tossed inside his bag. He’d made the short drive and parked across the street from Abdel’s shop to wait for the Romanians to turn up.
And now here they were, bang on schedule.
Chapter 3
As Ben stepped inside the shop, the two big guys were already standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the counter, glaring at Abdel. There wasn’t a customer in the place. The Algerian looked pale. He became even paler when Ben walked in.
At the sound of the tinkling door chime, the Romanians turned in unison to give Ben the dead-eyed warning look that said, ‘Stay out of this if you know what’s good for you.’
And for a second the pair must have thought it had done the trick, because Ben turned around and walked straight back to the door. Except he didn’t walk out of it. Instead, he popped the latch closed and flipped the sign around to say FERMÉ.
Then he turned back around to face them. He smiled. They were giving him their full attention now, arms folded and brows creased with impatience. Ben said in Arabic to Abdel, ‘These two won’t trouble you any more.’
‘Who the fuck are you?’ said the Slavic-looking one.
‘My name’s Ben,’ Ben replied, switching to French. ‘What’s yours?’
‘This is your last chance to get the fuck out of here, fuckhead.’ Cheap gangsters didn’t generally require a very wide vocabulary.
‘You should be careful how you talk to me,’ Ben said.
The Romanians exchanged glances. The darker one was grinning and shaking his head in amused disbelief at the impudence of this guy. The Slavic one didn’t seem quite so confident. Evidently the smarter of the two. ‘Yeah? Why’s that?’ he asked.
‘Because I have a gun,’ Ben said. He unslung his bag from his shoulder and took out the staple gun he’d bought that morning. A pressed-steel box with a spring-loaded squeeze mechanism. Handy for all kinds of jobs around the home. And outside it.
The Romanians stared at him. Ben aimed the stapler at the Slavic one, squeezed the handle with a clack, and the tiny steel staple went pinging through the air to bounce off his big chest.
That was all the provocation the Romanians needed. They both went for him at once.
Four seconds later, both were stretched out side by side on the floor. The dark one was still conscious, but Ben fixed that with a tap to the head with the toecap of his boot.
‘Ya ilahi,’ Abdel gasped, staring down at the inert bodies and wringing his hands. ‘Look what you did.’
Next, Ben took out the big roll of tape, then the scissors, followed by a thick black marker pen. He cut off lengths of tape and used them to bind the Romanians’ wrists, ankles and knees together. When they were securely trussed up and gagged with more tape over their mouths, he asked Abdel for a sheet of paper.
Abdel tore a blank page from a cash book. Ben scissored it into two halves. Using the marker pen he wrote on one half of the paper the greeting SALUT, in big blocky capital letters. On the other he wrote the Romanian gang leader’s name.
Hello, Dracul. A clear enough message, sufficiently simple for even the lowliest kind of thug to comprehend, and opening the way to the next phase of Ben’s plan. The bodies had to be correctly arranged left to right for it to read properly, but that wouldn’t be a problem.
Then Ben used the staple gun to tack each half of the paper in turn to each of the men’s foreheads. The hardened steel staples punched out with enough force to drive into wood or plaster, and had no problem biting into bone. They’d need to be prised out with a screwdriver.
Clack. Clack.
Abdel could hardly look. ‘You can’t do this,’ he said.
‘I just did,’ Ben replied.
‘They’ll come back. It’ll be worse than ever.’
‘Trust me, a bunch of miserable cowards like this will leave you alone after today.’
Ben let himself out of the shop, telling Abdel to lock up after him and go and open up the back. Two minutes later, Ben had driven round to the shop’s rear entrance, reversing up the narrow alleyway where delivery vans did their drop-offs, and found Abdel standing nervously by the back door. Ben went inside, grabbed one of the unconscious thugs by the ankles and dragged him like a sack of potatoes out to the back, then hefted him into the boot of the Alpina. Then he did the same with the other, and slammed the lid shut on them.
‘Now, give me that address and number,’ he said to Abdel.
Five minutes later, he turned down the dingy backstreet, past litter bins overflowing with garbage and crumbling walls daubed with obscene slogans and gang marks, and pulled up outside the two-storey corner building in which Abdel had said Dracul and his crooks were holed up. It certainly looked like their kind of place. The ground floor was a disused copy shop with boards for windows, plastered with flyers advertising the services of call girls. The upper windows were grimy and curtained and there was no sign of movement up there, but someone was home. A black Mercedes was parked at the kerbside below, and behind it a white Range Rover. No matter what kind of scummy ratholes gangsters seemed content to live in, they always kept their cars spick and span.
Ben parked the Alpina on the corner, killed the engine and got out, taking his bag. The only person in sight was a junkie stumbling along at the end of the street. Thudding music was coming from the crummy apartment block opposite, pulsing like a headache. A dog was barking somewhere. The wail of a baby, the angry yells of a man and woman arguing. Those weren’t the only things Ben could hear. By now, the two thugs inside the boot of his car were awake, their muffled yells and struggles plainly audible from a couple of metres away. Which was exactly what Ben had intended.
Ben walked away from the car, leaving it unlocked, and crossed the street to the apartment block’s entrance. He stepped inside just far enough to be half hidden behind the doorway, then leaned against the wall, took out his phone and dialled up the number the Romanians had given Abdel.
The voice that answered after just two rings was deep and gruff. ‘Yeah?’
Ben said, ‘You don’t know who I am, but I know who you are. Take a peep out of your window. I left a present for you outside.’
Chapter 4
Ben cut the call off before the voice could say more. He lit a Gauloise and watched the windows opposite. The flicker of a curtain caught his eye. Behind the dirty pane, a face briefly appeared, scanning the street below. Someone was at home, all right. It wouldn’t be long before they came out.
When they did, Ben knew that what would happen next was going to cause heat for him. He wasn’t planning on being too gentle with these guys, because that was a language they wouldn’t understand. Assuming they could still hold a telephone by the time he was done with them, or get someone else to do it on their behalf, he fully expected them to call the police and start crying victim. And, things being what they were, it was perfectly likely that the grievances of such upstanding citizens could potentially land Ben in more trouble for what he’d done than these guys ever would be for the crimes they were committing every day against the community. It could be a good time to get out of town for a few days. The safehouse was a little too close to the heat. Ben didn’t want the expense of checking into a hotel; but there was another place he could stay until the heat died down.
Still watching the building across the street, Ben dialled the number for Le Val. After two rings, a voice Ben had never heard before replied. Last time he and Jeff had spoken, Jeff had said something about hiring a new guy to man the office. Ben thought he spoke with a slight Jamaican lilt to his accent, but he wasn’t sure.
For brevity’s sake, and because Ben didn’t like having to explain himself on the phone to strangers, and also because even speaking to a stranger in what used to be his home felt odd and uncomfortable to him, he didn’t say who was calling.
‘Jeff there?’
‘He’s on the range with Jude,’ the new guy said casually, obviously assuming from Ben’s tone that he wasn’t a client. ‘Take a message?’
‘That’s okay, I’ll call back,’ Ben said. As he put the phone away, he was frowning. On the range with Jude? What was Jude doing at Le Val? Ben was thrown by the news for a second, wondering what the hell that was all about.
Ben felt suddenly bad that he hadn’t even thought about Jude lately. He knew the young guy was at something of a loose end these days, having decided after a year and a half that a degree in Marine Biology from Portsmouth University was not for him, and jacking in his studies. Ben had no idea what he’d been up to since then.
But he didn’t have long to think about it. At that moment, a door opened across the street and two men stepped out of the building and started walking towards the parked Alpina. One of them was Dracul.
Abdel’s description had been on the understated side. Even from a distance, Ben could see the spectacular scar that looked as if it had been made with a hot poker and stretched from the Romanian’s puckered brow to the corner of his mouth, distorting his left eye. For such an ugly guy, he evidently took good care of his thick mane of curly black locks, which hung over his broad shoulders. He was at least six-three, probably two-fifty. He was clutching a stainless steel Taurus nine-millimetre in his right fist, carrying it in plain view as he and his henchman strode towards Ben’s car. So much for law and order.
Ben retreated a step further back inside the apartment block doorway, where he could peer around the wall without being seen. As he watched, Dracul and his man stopped near the car. Seeing it was empty, they glanced up and down the street. Then, right on cue, they turned back to stare at the car, and Ben knew they must have heard the muffled noise from the boot.
Dracul signalled to his guy to open it while he covered it with the pistol. The boot lid popped open. The two gangsters stared at what was inside, long enough for the hello message stapled to the captives’ foreheads to register.
By that time, Ben had emerged unseen from his doorway and walked up behind them, drawing the shiny new rubber-handled claw hammer from his bag. He didn’t waste time introducing himself. First rule, the man with the gun goes down first. Ben clubbed Dracul in the side of the head. It had to be a well-judged blow, because a claw hammer could too easily kill a man with a single hit, and Ben didn’t want to kill anyone. Not today.
Dracul went down like a felled tree trunk. His henchman was half-turned towards Ben when the hammer caught him across the cheekbone and his knees folded under him. Two for two. They lay slumped on the pavement.
‘Face it, boys,’ Ben said. ‘You just haven’t got the hardware.’
Spectators were starting to appear at the apartment block windows overlooking the street. Ben ignored them. He relieved Dracul of the Taurus, clicked the safety on and slipped it in his belt. It wasn’t that he wanted a gun, but he couldn’t responsibly leave the thing lying around in the street for some kid to pick up and start playing about with. Next he used the hammer to knock out the two men in the boot again, then hauled each one out in turn and dumped them on the pavement next to their boss.
Once that was done, Ben grabbed Dracul’s jacket collar and yanked him into a sitting position against the copy shop wall, and slapped his scarred face a few times until the Romanian’s eyes fluttered open. Dracul blinked and tried to shake his head into focus. He seemed about to say something, then let out a sharp cry as Ben’s boot toecap landed hard and square in his testicles.
‘Consider yourself lucky you get to keep them,’ Ben told him. ‘Normally, depraved losers who want to molest innocent young girls should have them sliced off. But I don’t like to get my hands all blooded up.’ He knelt beside the groaning Dracul. ‘Now listen to me carefully, because you’ll hear it only once. Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to disband your merry men and wrap up your operation, lock, stock and barrel, effective as of today. Then you’re going to return all the money you took, with interest. Then you’ll apologise in person to the people you hurt, begging for their forgiveness. After that, you’re going to get yourself into a better line of work and never bother anyone again. If I hear you didn’t do any of that and decided to play sillybuggers behind my back instead, you won’t see me coming, because you’ll already be dead. Now, what did I just say?’