Chapter Forty-Six

Consciousness returned to Ben in staggered layers. First he was dimly aware of the vibration pulsing through his skull where his head was resting against the hard metal of the wheel arch. His vision was blurry and he felt sick. Suddenly he was aware of being terribly, terribly cold. His body was racked with shivering and his teeth were chattering.

He was sprawled across the floor of a rattling truck. The tin walls around him resonated loudly with the engine and transmission whine. He groaned and shifted, trying to get to his feet. His head was still spinning.

Memories came back to him in fragments. He remembered Ingrid’s flat. Being hit by the car. Before that, the running chase through the streets. Kinski injured.

He remembered now. He’d been drugged.

He grabbed hold of one of the reinforcing braces inside the metal shell and dragged himself upright. The truck was lurching and bouncing and it was hard to stand. There were no windows. He looked at his watch. It was nearly six o’clock. He must have been on the road for over an hour and a half. Where were they taking him?

The rattling, juddering journey lasted another quarter of an hour, the truck slowing as the road got rougher. He staggered across from one wall to the other as it swerved violently into a turning, then stopped. He heard the sound of doors slamming, and at least three different men’s voices, all speaking in rapid, harsh German. He felt the vehicle reverse, and its engine sound was suddenly echoey and reverberating as though the truck was inside a big metal space.

The doors opened and he was dazzled by the lights. Powerful hands gripped him by the arms and hauled him out of the van. He dropped to his hands and knees on cold concrete and looked around him, blinking. Around him were seven, eight, nine men, all armed with either pistols or Heckler & Koch machine carbines. They all had the look of ex-military, serious faces, eyes cold and calm.

The prefabricated building looked like an old air-base hangar, stretching out on all sides like a vast aluminium cathedral. The concrete floor was painted green. The only furnishings were a tubular chair and a metal table. A fire blazed in a glass-fronted stove with a long steel flue that rose to the ceiling.

Standing in the middle of the huge open space, warming his hands over the stove, was a tall man in black. Sandy hair, cropped short.

Ben narrowed his eyes against the bright lights. He knew this man. Who the hell was he?

One of the men with guns got too close and Ben saw a crazy chance. He lashed out with the rigid edge of his hand, fingers curled. The man let out a choking squawk as his throat was crushed, and fell squirming to the floor clutching his neck. The stubby black H&K was spinning in mid-air when Ben snatched it. It was cocked. He flipped off the safety. He was faster than these men, and he could bring them all down before they got him.

Maybe.

The gun clattered from his hands and he fell to the floor along with it, his whole body quaking in a spasm. Curly plastic wires connected the dart in his flesh to the taser gun that one of the guards was holding-the one Ben hadn’t seen, the one who had come out from behind the truck. The strong electric current flowed through him, controlling his muscles, rendering him completely helpless.

‘That’s enough,’ the tall man in black said.

The pulsing shock stopped. Ben gasped for air, lying flat on the concrete. One of the guards had his canvas haversack. The guard walked over to the tall man and handed the bag to him. The man emptied the bag out on a steel table, spilling out Ben’s roll of spare clothes, his first-aid kit, the Para-Ordnance .45.

But the man was more interested in the box-file. He flipped open the lid and thumbed through Oliver’s notes, nodding to himself. This was the stuff. His instructions were clear.

He bunched the notes up in a big fist, opened the stove door and slammed the papers inside. Ben’s head sank to the floor as he watched his friend’s notes burst into yellow flame, curl and blacken. This time, they burned away to nothing. Tatters of ash fluttered up the stove-pipe.

Now the man picked up the rolled-up Mozart letter. He jerked away the ribbon and tossed it over his shoulder. He unfurled the old paper and ran his eyes up and down it cursorily, a look of derision on his face.

For a moment Ben thought he was going to burn it too. But then he rolled it back up and dropped it in a cardboard tube. He set the tube to one side, and started sifting back through the stuff on the table. This time his hand came up clutching the CD case. He nodded to himself, checked the disc was there, then snicked it shut and stuffed it in the side pocket of his combat trousers. He looked satisfied. ‘Bring him over here,’ he said to the guards.

Ben groaned as they picked him up by the arms and half-dragged him across the hangar. A length of heavy chain hung from a steel beam high up in the ceiling, stopping about seven feet above the concrete floor. There was a gun to his head. His arms were jerked outwards and he felt the cold metal bite of cuffs on his wrists. Two pairs of cuffs, one pair for each wrist. They raised his arms up and clipped the other end of the cuffs to the dangling chain. Then they backed off, eight men standing in a wide semicircle around him. Gun-muzzles were trained on him from every direction. He could just about stand, taking the weight on his feet instead of his wrists.

The big man walked up closer. His head was cocked to one side, his face cracked into a smirk. Ben knew what was coming next.

The man planted his feet, curled his meaty right hand into a fist and put his back into it. He was powerful and he’d done this before. The punch was a good one. Ben flexed his abdominal muscles for the blow, but it wasn’t enough. The wind whistled out of him. His knees sagged and he hung from his chained arms.

‘Good to see you again, Hope. Remember me? I want you to remember me.’

Ben got his breath back and rolled his eyes up to look at him. He remembered now.

Small world. Jack Glass. The psychopathic bastard who’d nearly killed him fifteen years earlier in the Brecon Beacons.

Ben’s mind was struggling to put it together. Why Glass, why here, why this?

Glass grinned, flicked a bead of sweat from his brow and started rolling up his sleeves. ‘It’s been a long time,’ he said.

Ben watched him. He was much heavier than he’d been in SAS selection days, but the extra bulk wasn’t flab. His forearms were thick and muscular, as though he’d been working out with weights for hours every day, year on year. That wasn’t the only physical change Ben noticed in the man. His right ear was badly scarred, the lobe gone, looking like melted wax.

As Ben stared at that ear, connections flew together in his dazed brain. The video-clip. Clara Kinski’s abductor.

‘What are you doing here, Hope?’ Glass sneered. ‘Come to check up on your girlfriend’s dead brother? He’s dead all right. Trust me, I know.’ He drew back his fist and slammed it hard into Ben’s side.

This time, Ben was ready. He tensed his muscles harder and twisted a little to catch the blow in the middle of his stomach instead of the kidney. But it still hurt, badly. The pain exploded, driving the air back out of him. He wheezed and saw stars.

Glass stepped back, rubbing his fist. ‘You don’t have to answer,’ he said. ‘This isn’t an interrogation. You know what that means.’ He tapped the CD case through the fabric of his pocket. ‘I’ve got everything I need from you. I don’t need you alive, you understand?’

A thought came into Ben’s mind, and it worried him. Why weren’t they asking him about Leigh?

Glass reached over to the table and picked up something dull and metallic. It was a heavy steel knuckle-duster. He held it in his left hand, fanned out his right fingers and slipped the knuckle-duster over them. He clenched it in his big fist, looked Ben in the eye and smiled. ‘I’m going to take my time with you,’ he said. ‘Nice and slow. First I’m going to soften you up. Then—’ He paused and looked round at the other men with a smirk. ‘Well, hey, why don’t I show you?’ He gestured to one of the guards, the short fat one with the grey hair scraped back in an oily ponytail. The guy lowered his MP-5, slung it behind his back, and stepped over to a holdall that was on the floor. He zipped it open.

There was a chainsaw inside. The fat guy primed it with a squirt of petrol in the tiny carburettor. He hooked his fingers around the end of the start cord and jerked it. The chainsaw buzzed angrily into life in the echoey hangar. The guy gunned the throttle.

Glass nodded to him to kill the saw’s motor. The hangar went quiet again. The guard laid the chainsaw down on the table.

Glass turned back to Ben. ‘Like I said, this isn’t an interrogation. So now here comes the fun part.’ He grinned. ‘I’m going to take you apart one bit at a time, and I’m going to enjoy it.’ Glass pressed his face up close to Ben’s. His skin was pallid and sweaty. ‘Just like I enjoyed killing your friend Llewellyn. That’s right. He was easy too.’

Ben blazed at the words. Glass had just marked himself for death.

If he could get out of this. Right now, it wasn’t looking very certain.

He jerked on the chain. It was solid. The ring of guns was centred steadily on his head. No way out.

He looked past Glass at the chainsaw, imagined the blade coming closer, whirring, gnashing. It would only have to touch him lightly to cause irreversible damage. Where would they cut him first? Not the shoulder or the abdomen-major trauma to a vital organ would kill him too quickly. They wanted sport. A leg, maybe. But not too high up. The blade would come at him sideways, below the knee. The first soft pressure would tear through clothing and split the flesh. More pressure and the saw would bite hard into the bone. It would slice through like nothing.

First one leg, then the other. His limbs would drop off him like fruit off a tree. Irreversible, whatever happened afterwards. He’d be swinging from the chain, spinning round and round, screaming, stumps thrashing, blood jetting out all over the concrete. He’d see them laughing at him.

That wasn’t going to happen to him. No way.

He jerked the chain again.

The knuckle-duster caught the light of the overhead neons. Glass swung his fist a couple of times theatrically, grunting. He paused, grinned, then drew it back, eyes scanning Ben’s face for his best mark.

Hanging from the chain, Ben kept his eyes on the steel-clad fist and resigned himself to the brutal blow that was going to break his nose and smash his teeth into his throat. There’d be worse to come. He started to close himself down in readiness.

But you could never be ready for this.