They. They. It sounded crazy.
But it wasn’t crazy. He remembered the old saying: It’s not paranoia if they’re really after you.
‘Simeon, my friend, we’re in deep shit,’ he muttered to himself.
A bus roared by, dimly lit up inside and carrying a smattering of passengers. Wesley watched it go, then pulled the cap down even further to hide his face and set off up the road, case in hand, looking for the nearby station.
Chapter Eighteen
The day after that first meeting with the mysterious Rex O’Neill, Penrose had made sure he was available to make the rendezvous in the bar of the King’s Lodge Hotel in Durham, to be taken to meet the man’s even more mysterious employers.
The October rain had cleared to make way for a sunny autumnal day. Penrose had arrived at the hotel ten minutes early, clutching the unsigned hundred-thousand-pound cheque in his pocket. O’Neill was already waiting for him. He greeted Penrose with a nod and led him to a car. This time, the gleaming black Mercedes – not the same one, Penrose observed – had a driver. The car sped out of the city to an ultra-exclusive country club that Penrose had heard of but never been to. The clubhouse was a magnificent stately home overlooking the golf course.
O’Neill stayed in the car. Severely baffled and intimidated, Penrose was led inside the opulent clubhouse by two very large fellows in dark suits, who silently escorted him to a conference room. There, seated around a long table, five very serious men were waiting for Penrose.
That had been his first encounter with the senior members of the obscure organisation calling itself the Trimble Group. They were all much older than Penrose, mostly well into their sixties. They had been extremely welcoming and full of praise for his excellent, important book. He’d been offered drinks, which he politely refused as he never touched alcohol. Then, over a long and lavish lunch that Penrose was too nervous to do more than peck at, they’d outlined their proposal to him.
As Penrose now discovered, he had been unanimously picked from a very short list of potential candidates. The group’s brief was simple, and it required someone with particular qualities. Motivation was key; as was intelligence, as was secrecy.
As the meeting went on, Penrose had to pinch himself under the table to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. He was bursting with questions, but so excited he could barely voice them. What he was hearing seemed utterly incredible. It seemed even more incredible when they revealed to him the size of the budget allocated to the operation they wanted him – him! – to personally lead and oversee. Penrose had to grip the edge of the table to stop himself from keeling over.
There would be an initial injection of twelve million pounds. The account had in fact already been opened and the funds put on standby, just waiting for his signature on the contract, whereupon the wire transfer would take place instantly, enabling him to access the money however he liked, in cash if desired. The twelve million was, he was assured, just a fraction of what was to come if the operation proved successful.
The deal terms were breathtakingly straightforward. Penrose would have a free hand to run the operation as he saw fit, with Rex O’Neill assigned to him as his assistant, liaising with the Trimble Group and acting as a general aide and campaign manager.
Penrose’s busy academic schedule might be a concern, they warned. Penrose hastily assured them that it wasn’t. He was already mentally drafting his letter of resignation to Durham University. He’d happily relocate to wherever they wanted, he told them. They laughed. ‘You can run your show from wherever you like,’ one of them said, and the others didn’t contradict him. Travel would be no problem. Penrose would have a fleet of cars at his disposal, as well as aircraft, including a Learjet allocated exclusively to him and on permanent standby to fly wherever he pleased.
One other thing, they reminded him gravely. He must never tell a living soul about this meeting or the nature of what had been discussed. To reveal anything of the Trimble Group, he was informed, would cause irreversible complications. This could not be stressed enough. All eyes were on him as the point was pressed home.
Penrose understood and accepted everything. He couldn’t sign on the line fast enough.
When he left the meeting, Penrose’s head was spinning so badly he could barely walk back to the Mercedes.
Yet it was all true: over the next few days everything happened exactly as the Trimble Group had said it would. Inside of a week, Penrose had quit his job, sold his flat, and was moving to his new headquarters. He chose the beautiful island of Capri, off Italy’s Sorrentine Peninsula, once the abode of Roman emperors. With the newfound millions at his disposal he purchased himself the five-acre estate, complete with magnificent clifftop villa and assorted staff quarters, that was to double as his home and operational headquarters.
Nobody tried to stop him. This was really happening. It seemed that he could do whatever he wanted.
Penrose set about his new purpose in life with a ferocious energy that amazed even him. The Trimble Group could not have picked a better man for the job. Penrose Lucas had arrived, and he was damned if he wouldn’t show them what he was made of. Ten years, he thought. Give me ten years and I’ll become the most important man in history.
He’d known exactly where to begin his quest, with a score he’d been itching to settle for quite some time. He issued orders to O’Neill, which were duly passed down the line and carried out with extreme efficiency by his wonderful new friends. Within less than twenty-four hours, the first phone tap was in place and Penrose was ready to start digging up whatever dirt he could find on the Reverend Simeon Arundel.
But when they first began to listen in on the vicar’s secretive conversations with his overseas associates, Penrose realised what he’d accidentally stumbled upon. It was momentous. Earth-shattering. It had to be stopped.
His time had truly come.
Chapter Nineteen
With the sunrise, Ben tried three more times to contact Jude Arundel on his mobile, and three times was put through to the same voicemail service. The first two calls, he left another message asking him to call back, stressing how important it was. The third time, frustrated, he gave up and went back to trying to figure out the pieces of the puzzle.
He put together what he knew so far: Simeon Arundel and Fabrice Lalique had been working together on the sacred sword project, whatever that was. So much was clear, and it explained why they’d been in close contact for a prolonged period of time and appeared to have travelled to Israel together eighteen months ago. It also seemed that a third man had been involved in the project, an American called Wes, who was very probably the ‘expert’ whom Simeon had been to visit in the States. Expert at what?
Three men. Three colleagues. One was running scared after ‘something’ had happened. Another was dead in a suicide that no longer seemed to quite add up. Another had been killed in a car crash involving a mysterious third party and a few too many suspicious circumstances, after which his home had been broken into by heavily armed thieves with a very clear and serious purpose.
Ben thought back to the group photo that had been taken in Israel. If Wes was one of the men in the picture, he was either the burly olive-skinned man on the left or the fit-looking man in his sixties, standing between Simeon and Fabrice Lalique. Ben reckoned on the latter. Then who was the fourth man in the picture? He looked as though he might be Israeli, and was obviously connected to this as well.
And now a fifth player had apparently just entered the game: Martha. Wes had said he was going to her place to make sure the sword was safe, so she was obviously helping them to hide it. There was no woman in the photo, so maybe she wasn’t part of the core group. Or maybe Martha had been the one who took the picture.
Ben paced up and down the length of the living room for a long time, churning