Ben took a last draw on his Gauloise, crushed the stub into the crowded dashboard ashtray, picked up his bag from the passenger seat and got out of the car.
‘Here we go again,’ he muttered to himself. Then he crossed the street and walked into the shop after them.
It was Ben’s first visit to Paris in well over a year. He hadn’t been planning on coming back any time soon – not out of any kind of deliberate avoidance, but because he had few plans of any kind at all. For some time now, for reasons that he preferred not to dwell on, his had been a rootless, meandering existence that took him wherever chance and circumstance led him: he’d wandered aimlessly around Europe, never lingering long in one place, never quite sure why he’d come or where he was going next. He wasn’t a tourist, being fluent in the core European languages and conversant in most of the others, but he wasn’t a native either, and there seemed to be no place he could settle and feel at home. Sometimes he stayed a day here and there in cheap hotels; sometimes he roughed it in the kinds of solitary wild places he’d always liked to spend time, away from the complexities of life, away from hustle and bustle – most of all, away from trouble.
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.
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