He reached into his jacket and showed her the photo of him together with her parents. She hadn’t seen them for a long time. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘My name’s Ben, and I’m here to help you. Your family sent me, Catherine. They’re waiting. I’ll take you to them.’
Her cheeks were moist with tears. ‘Are you a policeman?’ she asked in a low voice.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a friend.’
He reached his hand out further, gently, and she let him take her arm to guide her to her feet. Her arm felt wasted under the grubby blouse she was wearing. She didn’t protest as he led her out of the room, and she didn’t react at the sight of the two dead men lying on the kitchen floor.
Back outside, she blinked at the sunlight. It had been a while since she’d last left the confines of the house. She was unsteady on her feet, and Ben carried her to the Land Rover he’d left parked fifty yards from the house, hidden in a clump of bushes. He opened the passenger door and put the girl into the seat. She was shivering. There was a blanket in the back and he covered her with it.
He checked his watch again. Five minutes before the other three men would be back, if they kept to their routine. ‘Let’s go,’ he muttered, and walked round to the driver’s side.
The girl said something in reply, but her voice was weak.
‘What?’ he said.
‘What about Maria?’ she repeated, looking up at him.
His eyes narrowed. ‘Maria?’
Catherine pointed back at the house. ‘She’s still in there.’
‘Is Maria a girl like you? They’re holding her?’
Catherine nodded solemnly.
He made a decision. ‘OK, I need you to stay put for a minute. Can I trust you?’
She nodded again.
‘Where is she?’
In three minutes he’d found where they were keeping Maria. To get there he had to walk through a dingy room where some cameras were set up on tripods around a rumpled single bed, with cheap lighting equipment dumped in a corner and a TV and video sitting on a squat table. The VCR had been left running, the sound off. He paused and looked at the images, then realized what he was seeing. He recognized one of the men he’d shot earlier. The naked, writhing girl in the crudely shot film was no more than eleven or twelve.
Rage flashed through him and he kicked the TV off the table. It hit the floor and imploded in a shower of sparks.
Maria’s door wasn’t locked, and when he went into the squalid room his first thought was that she was dead.
She was the girl in the video. She was still breathing, but heavily doped. A grimy vest and knickers were all that covered her thin body. He lifted her carefully from the bed and carried her back through the house and out to the Land Rover. He gently laid her on the back seat, took off his jacket and placed it over her. Catherine reached out for her hand and looked up at Ben with questioning eyes.
‘She’ll be all right,’ he said softly.
The sound of an approaching vehicle made him tense. They were back. The Land Rover was well hidden from their view. So was the pickup truck, which was still sitting half-buried in the hole in the kitchen wall at the back of the house, but they’d find that soon enough.
Ben climbed into the driver’s seat and listened. He heard voices as one of the three men got out. The creak of the iron gates. The roll and crunch of the Suzuki’s tyres on the gravel. The engine burbling through a shot muffler as it pulled up in front of the house. Car doors opening and slamming. Footsteps and laughter.
He pulled his door quietly shut and went to twist the key. They’d be out of here before anyone could react. Then Catherine would be back with her family and he’d hand Maria over to the authorities he could still trust.
His hand stopped halfway to the ignition. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. He saw them again. The images on the TV. Big hands pawing at young flesh. Bad teeth flashing in wide grins. The imploring eyes of the girl on the bed.
He looked over his shoulder at Maria’s slight body lying slumped in the back. Catherine was frowning at him from the passenger seat.
Fuck it. He reached down under his seat and drew out his back-up weapon. The shotgun was an Ithaca 12-gauge, black and brutal, less than two feet long from its pistol grip to its sawn-off muzzle. Its tube magazine was loaded up with 00-Buck rounds, the type that would let you into a barricaded room without needing to open the door.
He swung his legs out of the Land Rover. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he told Catherine.
The three men were just at the front porch by the time he walked up behind them. Two of them, the fat one and the long-haired one, were joking about something in Turkish. The third guy looked serious, tattoos, slicked-back hair, jangling a bunch of keys. He had a Chinese Colt 1911-A1 copy tucked in his belt, behind the hip, hammer down in amateur fashion.
When the metallic clack-clunk of the Ithaca slide-action cut the air, all three of them wheeled around with wide eyes. Nobody had time to reach for a gun. A cigarette dropped from an open mouth.
He stared at them coldly for half a second before he emptied the Ithaca’s magazine into their bodies at point-blank range.
Somewhere over France
Two days later
Benedict Hope gazed out of the window of the 747 and took another long sip of whisky as he watched the white ocean of cloud drift by below. Ice clinked in his glass. The whisky traced a burning path across his tongue. Airline Scotch, some nameless blended thing, but better than nothing. It was his fourth. Or maybe his fifth. He couldn’t remember any more.
The seat next to him was empty, as was much of the business-class section of the plane. He turned away from the window, stretched out and closed his eyes.
Three jobs this year. He’d been busy, and he was tired. It had taken two months in Turkey to track down the men who were holding Catherine Petersen. Two long months of dirt and sweat, following false trails, chasing up dud information, overturning every stone. The girl’s parents had despaired many times of ever seeing her alive again. He never made promises to people. He knew there was always a chance of sending the subject home in a body-bag.
That had only happened to him once. Mexico City, one of the big kidnap-and-ransom hotspots of the world. It hadn’t been his fault. The kidnappers had slaughtered the child even before the ransom demands. Ben had been the one who found the body. A young boy, just short of his eleventh birthday, stuffed in a barrel. He had no ears and no fingers. Sometimes the kidnappers weren’t even doing it for the money. He still didn’t like to think of it, but the half-repressed memory drove him on.
He’d persisted in Turkey, just as he always persisted. He’d never given up on anyone, even though there were plenty of times when it seemed hopeless. Like with a lot of these jobs, there had been nothing, no leads, just a lot of people too frightened to talk. Then a chance piece of information unlocked the whole thing and led him right to the house. People had died for it. But now Catherine Petersen was back with her parents and little Maria was being looked after until her family could be traced.
Now all Ben wanted to do was go home, back to the sanctuary of the old house on the remote west coast of Ireland. He thought about his private, lonely stretch of beach, the rocky cove where he liked to spend time alone with the waves, the gulls and his thoughts. His plan after the Turkish job had been to rest there quietly for as long