The Belgians were visibly demoralised and exhausted, and so Jeff spared them the scathing criticisms that were half-hanging off his tongue and contented himself with standing against the wall with his arms folded and a sneer of contempt on his face. After half an hour’s lecture detailing the many missteps that had allowed the team’s target to not only evade capture but turn the tables on them, Ben decided they had suffered enough.
‘Okay, folks, let’s break for the day and get some rest. You’ll need it, because tomorrow we’re going to repeat the exercise all over again and see if we can improve on today’s performance. Any questions?’
There was a chorus of groans. One of the trainees complained, ‘If it’d been for real, we’d have had dogs.’
‘It’s a fair point,’ Ben said. ‘But relying on a K9 unit is a luxury you might not always get to enjoy. Imagine the dogs have copped it. Put out of action by pepper spray, wire traps or a bullet. Now you’re on your own. Depending on your own skills. That’s what’s being tested here.’
‘Yeah, but you were an SAS major,’ moaned another. ‘Not even in the same ballpark as most of the crooks we go after. How many guys like you are we ever going to have to catch, in real life?’
Jeff just glared at them and shook his head. Tuesday was having a hard time not laughing – but then, the young Jamaican ex-soldier had a habit of always seeing the funny side, even when he was being shot at.
Ben shrugged and replied, ‘The Roman army used to train their legionaries with lead swords, three times heavier than their regular sidearms. Why? So that when it came to the thick of battle where the metal meets the meat and a man’s nerve is tested like never before, they felt invincible because their issue weapons were like a feather in their hand. If you don’t believe in your abilities, you’re already the loser. Belief is confidence. I want your team to leave here confident that you can catch not just some ordinary Joe, but anyone. Because you never know who you might be sent to take down.’
‘And nobody likes making a total bollocking fool of themselves, now do they, fellas?’ Jeff added, apparently unable to resist getting in some slight dig.
Ben was about to say something a little more reassuring when the thud of a fast-approaching helicopter suddenly rattled the hut’s windows. The chopper wasn’t passing over, it was coming in to land – and that definitely wasn’t part of the day’s schedule.
‘Hello, what’s this all about?’ Jeff muttered.
They stepped outside to find out.
The afternoon sunlight made little starbursts on the chopper’s shiny red fuselage as it settled down to land in the meadow a little distance from the hut. Ben and Jeff walked out to meet it, both wondering who their unexpected visitor might be. The blast from the spinning rotor blades ruffled their hair and flattened a circle of grass and wildflowers around the landed aircraft. They could see the pilot through the Perspex window, shutting everything down. As the pitch of the turbine began to dwindle and the rotors slowed, a rear hatch swung open and the chopper’s two passengers stepped out.
The first to emerge was an elderly man named Auguste Kaprisky whom Ben and Jeff both knew well, due to the fact that he’d been a client of theirs in the not-so-distant past. Born August Kaprisky in Rottweil, Germany, eighty-two years earlier, he had become a devoted Francophile in his middle age, moved his home and business to Le Mans and suffixed the ‘e’ to his first name to make it sound more Gallic.
Kaprisky might be old, but he was still fit as a fiddle and as mentally sharp as the day he’d wangled his first million, sixty years ago. He was currently ranked fourth on the Forbes list of Europe’s richest billionaires, although aside from his surname and flashy corporate logo painted on the side of the helicopter nothing about his appearance hinted remotely at vast wealth. Tall and stringy in the same tatty old green chequered suit Ben remembered from every time they’d met, he looked more like a hobo clinging on to dignity than one of the continent’s most powerful and influential tycoons.
His co-passenger, awkwardly climbing out of the chopper after him, was a woman a fraction of his age. She appeared expensively groomed and polished, with a mass of long fair hair tied up in an elaborate braid that must have taken a team of top-class beauticians eight hours to perfect. Ben had never seen her before; he wondered fleetingly whether Kaprisky, a widower for many years, might have finally succumbed to the same temptation as so many other fabulously rich old men and got himself a trophy wife.
Whoever she was, Ben noticed as he and Jeff got closer, she looked teary and distraught. The expression on the old man’s face told Ben he wasn’t very happy either. Auguste Kaprisky was known as ‘the man who never laughs’. Come to think of it, Ben had seldom seen even the faintest ghost of a smile bend his lips. Today he looked grimmer than ever. Clearly, this unannounced visit was no social call.
Ben reached him and put out a hand to shake. ‘Auguste, what a surprise,’ he shouted over the diminishing yowl of the turbine. He and his client were in the habit of speaking French to one another, which Ben did fluently. Jeff was still struggling with the language, despite the best efforts of his new fiancée, a local teacher called Chantal.
‘Your staff told me I would find you here,’ Kaprisky shouted back, croaky and throaty. The woman was clutching at her braid to save it from being blasted to pieces by the hurricane. Kaprisky didn’t have much hair left to protect, and probably wouldn’t have cared anyway.
As the four of them moved out of the wind and noise of the helicopter, Kaprisky apologised for turning up so unexpectedly. ‘I hope it’s not inconvenient. I would have called, but—’
‘Not at all,’ Ben replied. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’
Kaprisky’s lined face was as hard as concrete. ‘I need your help.’
Didn’t they all.
‘This isn’t a good place to talk,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s go back to the house.’
They climbed into the Land Rovers – Jeff, Tuesday and the four Belgians riding in the lead vehicle and Ben and the visitors following behind as they went bouncing and roaring over the meadows towards the main compound. Ben’s passengers were silent as he drove. He could feel their tension and wondered what this was about, but said nothing.
The old stone farmhouse, big and blocky and more than two hundred and fifty years old, was the central hub of Le Val, and the farmhouse kitchen was the central hub of the house. While Tuesday escorted the Belgians to the separate building used to accommodate trainees, Ben and Jeff led Auguste Kaprisky and his female companion inside. The kitchen was floored with original time-smoothed flagstones and lined with antique pine cupboards. The wine rack was always full, and there was always something delicious-smelling bubbling on the range courtesy of Marie-Claire, who lived in the nearby village and came in to cook for them. In the middle of the room was the pitted old pine table at which Ben, Jeff, Tuesday and a hundred Le Val trainees had spent countless hours talking, drinking, playing cards, planning strategies and (to Marie-Claire’s vociferous outrage) stripping and cleaning automatic weapons. It was all a far cry from the plush boardrooms out of which Kaprisky ran his multi-billion-euro empire, but the old man seemed too preoccupied to pay any notice to his surroundings.
They all sat around the table. Ben offered coffee, which was politely declined.
‘Now,’ Ben said, getting down