The Babylon Idol. Scott Mariani

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       Chapter 1

      So many times in the past, Ben Hope had vowed and declared that his crazy days of running from one adventure to another were over, and that he was going to stay put at home for the foreseeable future. And every time he’d said it, before long some new crisis had come barrelling into his life and whisked him off again – the latest in a sorry, never-ending series of broken promises, to himself, and to others, which had sometimes made him wonder if he was cursed by fate.

      This time, though, he was determined to be true to his word. This was it. Mayhem, violence, war, intrigue, chasing around the world – he was done with the lot of it, once and for all.

      It wasn’t so much that, as his longtime friend and business partner Jeff Dekker sometimes joked, ‘We’re getting too old for this shit.’ In his early forties, Ben had plenty of life left in him and could still outrun, out-train and, if necessary, outfight guys half his age. But he would have been lying if he’d said that the recent African escapade hadn’t taken a lot out of him, physically and emotionally.

      The same went for Jeff, who’d been right there at Ben’s side in what had to be the deadliest, most complex and disturbing rescue mission either man had ever experienced, either during their time in British Special Forces and in the years since. Likewise for Tuesday Fletcher, the young ex-trooper who had not long since joined their small staff at the Le Val Tactical Training Centre in rural Normandy but already proved himself ten times over to be a stalwart asset to the team and forged bonds of comradeship with Ben and Jeff that could never be broken.

      Less than a fortnight had passed since they’d all returned to Le Val, to find a mountain of mail waiting for them. The business was growing by the month, attracting so many bookings from military, law enforcement and private close-protection agencies worldwide looking to refine and extend their tactical skillset that it was hard to keep up with demand. Now that the operation had received a substantial cash injection in the wake of the Africa mission, they were set to grow still further.

      But all of that had been set aside for a week, as an official Le Val holiday was declared.

      Ben had spent that time recuperating. For most people, ‘recuperating’ might have meant lying in bed, or sitting around idle, licking their wounds and feeling sorry for themselves. For Ben it meant getting back into the punishing exercise routines he’d followed for most of his life. Working back up to a thousand push-ups a day, lifting weights, honing his marksmanship skills on Le Val’s pistol and rifle ranges, scaling cliffs and sea-kayaking off the Normandy coast, and going for long runs through the wintry countryside with Storm, his favourite of the pack of German Shepherds that patrolled the compound. The harder Ben trained, the more he emptied his mind and the further he left the horrors of Africa behind him.

      Jeff Dekker was no slouch either, but he’d used his recuperation period differently. His romance with Chantal Mercier, who taught at the École Primaire in the nearby village of Saint-Acaire, had grown more serious over the last months, and he’d spent his time off with her. In all the years Ben had known Jeff, throughout the never-ending sequence of on-off, part-time, short-term girlfriends whose names were too many to remember, he’d never seen him so committed to a relationship. He was happy for his friend, and Jeff seemed happy too. Even Jeff’s French had improved.

      Meanwhile, Tuesday Fletcher had taken advantage of the week’s holiday to fly home to London to see his parents, Rosco and Shekeia, second-generation immigrants from Jamaica. Tuesday was still recovering from a gunshot wound to the arm, sustained during their flight from the Congo. Ben had no doubt that he’d come up with some white lie to conceal from his parents just how close he’d come to being killed. If anyone could make light of a bullet in the arm, it was the ever-cheerful Tuesday.

      The second week since their return, the three of them had started easing themselves back into business-as-usual mode and begun working their way through the backlog of emails, letters, accounts, orders, bookings and the process of hiring new staff to cope with the expanding Le Val operation, and a hundred other matters that had accumulated during their absence.

      That was where Ben found himself at this moment, sitting alone in the prefabricated office building across the yard from the old stone farmhouse. It was an early December morning, and the icy rain that had been drumming on the office roof since dawn was threatening to turn snowy. The fan heater was blasting waves of warm air that engulfed Ben as he sat at the desk sipping from a steaming mug of black coffee. Storm and two more of the guard dogs, Mauser and Luger, appeared to have given themselves the morning off and were curled contentedly at his feet, like a huge hairy black-and-tan rug spread over the floor. Ben didn’t have the heart to kick them out into the cold.

      From where he sat, through the window he could see the parked minibus that had brought the current crop of trainees to Le Val: eight agents from the French SDAT anti-terror unit anxious to up their game in expectation of more of the troubles СКАЧАТЬ