Scott Mariani - The Sacred Sword

Radios would be bursting into full alert. He had about two seconds before the door burst open. He slammed Brown hard against the wall, tightening his tie like a noose around his throat. ‘You harm him and I’ll kill you. Understand?’

The door crashed open and the guards from earlier came storming into the room, pistols drawn.

‘Tell them to back off,’ Ben said. ‘Or else you die first.’

‘Stand down! Lower your weapons!’ Brown shouted. The guards hesitantly obeyed.

‘That was the wise thing to do,’ Ben said. ‘I’d have taken your head off.’ He let go of Brown’s tie and stepped away in disgust. The guards hovered uncertainly in the background.

Brown slackened the knot of his tie and straightened his jacket collar. He was breathing heavily but the glow of victory hadn’t left his face. ‘I know you would, Major Hope,’ he said. ‘That’s what makes you the perfect choice for us.’

Ben paced in a tight circle. His head was suddenly throbbing and his heart was beating in his throat. ‘All right, Brown. What’s the deal?’

‘The terms are simple. You’ll be provided with everything you require to take care of the Trimble Group’s unfinished business. Jude will then be released and returned to you, unharmed. There will be no repercussions of any kind. That will be the end of it. The two of you walk away free men. However, if you refuse to cooperate, you’ll never see Jude again.’ Brown smiled. ‘We know how much he loves the water. The grieving son, driven to distraction after the tragic car crash that claimed his parents. Boats, drugs and alcohol don’t mix. You understand me, I’m sure.’

Ben was silent.

‘As for you, Mr Hope, you’ll spend the rest of your life as a hunted criminal, pursued by every law-enforcement agency on the planet for the murder of a dozen or more government agents. Walk out of that door now, and I guarantee you’ll be entering a very different world from the one you left.’

Penrose Lucas looked up in agitation from his desk as the three loud thumps shook the office door. He stopped his frenzied scribbling, laid down his pen and tore himself away from the rapidly building mountain of paper that was the manuscript-in-progress of his latest future bestseller, Murdering for God.

The antique clock on the sideboard read a quarter to one in the morning. He’d lost all track of time as he’d sat there writing. For the last five straight hours his pen hadn’t stopped scratching, ripping the paper sometimes, the words pouring out of him so urgently that pages of it were illegible, even to him. He was breathless with hate.

Penrose suddenly realised what day it was. December 25th. He ground his teeth together at the thought of all those idiots celebrating the birth of some bearded twit two thousand years ago who’d done nothing but create a lot of harm and confusion.

Thump. Thump. The banging on the door wouldn’t stop.

‘ What!? ’ Penrose stormed over to the door in his bare feet, his open dressing gown billowing behind him as he walked. He slid back the six bolts that secured it, turned the deadlock and opened the door a crack.

Staring in through the gap was the sombre-looking face of Steve Cutter. Behind him stood his remaining men, Terry Grinnall in that leather coat he never seemed to take off, Dave Mills, Suggs, Doyle and Prosser.

‘Ugh, it’s you.’ Penrose said. ‘What do you want, at this time of night?’

Cutter shoved the door open without a word, making Penrose stagger back a step as it swung wide. Entering the room, he could see that Penrose was wearing only a pair of underpants under his monogrammed gown, which was getting grimy and wrinkled, russety spots of dried blood flecked across the gold PL on the breast. His torso looked thin and wasted, as if he hadn’t been bothering to eat.

The office smelled of body odour and gun oil. Cutter spotted Penrose’s gleaming Coonan. 357 lying on the desk, next to the teetering pile of pages covered in furious scrawls. More loose pages lay haphazardly over the floor, along with several pens, heavily chewed, some of them snapped in half.

‘How dare you barge into my office?’ Penrose yelled. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy working on my book?’

‘Came to tell you we’re quitting,’ Cutter said. Just looking around him at the state of the study was confirmation that the job had fallen apart. The team members who weren’t dead or missing as a result of the whole fiasco had nothing to do but kick their heels in the villa’s annexe quarters. The booze supply had dried up. The whores had stopped coming. So had any decent cooked meals. They didn’t much fancy the local restaurants, and the nearest McDonalds was in fucking Naples.

Worst of all, they hadn’t been paid for the last ten days. The six men had spent that evening grumbling their discontentment around the table in the rec room, and decided enough was enough.

Penrose’s rage dwindled rapidly away. ‘But you can’t leave. I need my Praetorian Guard around me,’ he said in a small voice.

‘Listen to this prick,’ Grinnall sneered.

‘Tough shit,’ Cutter said. ‘We’re done, and we want paying off.’

‘But-’

‘We had a fucking deal with you, Lucas. Don’t piss me off, all right?’

Penrose stared at him with a trembling jaw. ‘Fine,’ he said in an injured tone. ‘If that’s the way you want it. Come with me, and I will recompense you.’

Cutter followed as Penrose led the way through from the office to the adjoining bedroom. The air was stale and foul, and discarded clothing littered the floor around the rumpled king-size bed. But what drew Cutter’s notice more than anything was the long, wide streak of dried blood leading from the middle of the floor towards the balcony that overlooked the cliff’s edge. It looked, and smelled, as if something dead had been dragged across the bedroom and dumped over the side of the balcony. He said nothing, but his expression darkened a little more.

‘In here,’ Penrose said curtly, sliding open a mirrored panel to reveal the vast walk-in wardrobe behind it, its own little room all decked out in antique oak. He swept through the racks of finery that he’d ordered from top Italian designers, barely any of it ever worn. The back of the wardrobe was filled with shelving units where Penrose stored his many pairs of brand-new shoes; more compartments overhead were filled with boxes and bags. Lower down was a column of drawers for keeping jewellery and sundry items.

Cutter stood by impatiently as Penrose wrenched open one drawer, rummaged around inside, slammed it shut, tore open another. ‘Here we are,’ he said, taking out a glittering gold watch and holding it out to Cutter. ‘Take it. It’s a Rolex. Isn’t it beautiful? Here, look, I have half a dozen more. All brand new. Hand them out among the men.’

Cutter grimaced and slapped the watch aside. ‘I’m not talking about a bunch of sodding trinkets. Talking about money, pal. Twelve hundred a day per man. Six of us, that comes to more than seventy grand for the last fucking ten days we haven’t been paid. Not to mention the boys who never came back from Cornwall, or Gant’s team. You got widows and families out there to take care of. Say three-fifty, and we’ll call it quits, all right?’

‘But I don’t have three hundred and fifty thousand,’ Penrose protested. ‘I’ve been trying over and over to access the online banking system, and it won’t let me in. The Trimble assets have been frozen.’ That last part was perfectly true. There was no more money, no more jet. No more backing from his sponsors, who’d now turned against their star protege. He knew it was all over — yet his mind felt strangely detached from the situation, as if these things were all just a dream.