Scott Mariani - House of War

One thing was for damn well sure: the 2016 intelligence sources proclaiming Nazim al-Kassar’s demise were wrong. Badly wrong. It felt like history repeating itself once again. Ben needed to know how that could have happened, and why the hell a supposed dead man was walking around a European city leaving bodies in his wake.

Ben was deep in thought as he rode the subway train the long way back towards the safehouse. He could think of very few people with the right kinds of connections to help shed light on the questions in his mind. In fact, when he boiled the list right down, it came to just one man. Tyler Roth, the Delta Master Sergeant from Task Force Red.

Through the same grapevine that had fed him the inside track on ISIL activities, Ben happened to know that Roth had gone on to greater glories after Operation Citation. Promoted to captain, he’d served another twelve years with Delta. His long career had hit a peak in October 2013 when, as part of the Juniper Shield operations in North Africa, his undercover team had successfully captured Abu Anas al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda member on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list, in Tripoli. Then a couple of years later, in May 2015, Roth’s unit had carried out a raid on Deir Ezzar in eastern Syria, targeting the financial operations chief of ISIL. The target had been killed in the ensuing firefight, but Roth’s guys had captured his wife along with a cache of ISIL operational records and plans that had proved a goldmine for the intelligence spooks.

Or so Ben had heard, at any rate. Like the SAS, Delta worked so much in the shadows that nobody really knew anything about their activities, or couldn’t talk about them if they did.

One thing Ben was fairly certain of was that the Deir Ezzar job had been Roth’s last hurrah with US Special Ops. Shortly afterwards, having survived a decade and a half at the top of his profession without having taken so much as a scratch, he’d quit. Not to spend the rest of his life golfing in Florida, nor to retire to Italy to grow tomatoes like Ben’s old SAS comrade and mentor Boonzie McCulloch. Instead, Roth had opted for the path that many men of their level of training and expertise took, and slipped into the murky world of PMC. Which was short for Private Military Contractors.

In one word, Roth became a mercenary. Still employed, for the most part, by the same US government he’d served in his previous career, but working for much bigger pay cheques. The real money was in fighting wars so dirty and secret that nations like America and Britain wouldn’t even involve their blackest, most covert SF operators for fear of getting caught in the middle of an international flap.

He had heard nothing of Roth in years. As far as he knew, though, the American was still in the PMC game – if he hadn’t met a bullet in some squalid little conflict nobody was supposed to know about.

Ben picked up some Lavazza coffee beans on the way home, and when he reached the safehouse he threw a handful in the grinder, brewed himself a cup of dark roast, lit a cigarette and got on the phone. His first call was to Jeff Dekker at Le Val, to say something had come up and he’d be delayed getting back. Jeff didn’t ask what, and Ben didn’t need to explain. Jeff was like that. But Ben knew that if he’d asked, his friend would have been ready to drop everything and join him without hesitation.

Jeff was like that, too.

Ben’s second phone call was to a guy he knew in London, with whom he hadn’t spoken in a long, long while. The guy’s name was Ken Keegan, and he was the director of a small but strangely lucrative firm called Simpson Associates Ltd, based in Canary Wharf. Needless to say, no real individual by the name of Simpson was, or had ever been, involved in the business. The company acted like a talent agency, fielding top-dollar PMC assignments and farming them out to the operatives best suited for the job, in return for a hefty commission. Keegan was a wealthy man, and worked eighteen hours a day. For years after Ben left the SAS the guy had constantly been pestering him with offers of lucrative contract work in Sudan or Sierra Leone or whichever high-risk hotspot happened to be attracting soldiers of fortune like sharks to blood that week. Ben had turned them all down, and eventually the phone had stopped ringing.

Keegan answered his direct line in less than two seconds, all eager and raring to go. Ben said, ‘I like to see a man who’s happy in his work.’

‘Fuck me. If it ain’t the one and only Ben Hope.’ Keegan spoke in the piping, breathless voice of the seriously fat. Which he was. Probably the largest man Ben had ever seen, on the one occasion when they’d eaten out together at a pub in London and he’d watched in morbid fascination as the guy consumed a steak and kidney pie the size of a wagon wheel. That was at least ten years ago. Keegan was probably twice as big now.

‘Still not dropped dead of a coronary, then,’ Ben said.

‘Take more than that to stop me, mate. So what brings you sniffing around my door? Let me guess, had enough of the soft life and feel like doing some real work for a change?’

‘I need something from you,’ Ben said.

‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

‘Relax. Just a number, that’s all I’m after.’

Keegan sounded suspicious. ‘Okay, but whose?’

‘You still in touch with Roth?’

Keegan was quiet for a few moments. Ben could hear him thinking. He was waiting for more, but Ben felt no need to offer specifics. Especially not the mention of the name Nazim al-Kassar. Keegan would just think he was nuts.

Keegan said, ‘You’re not the only one who’d like to talk to that fucker.’

‘Why? What did he do?’

‘Fucking went and retired on me, that’s what he did. Just when I had all kinds of plum jobs lined up for the ungrateful sod.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Ben said. ‘I might have had something for him myself.’

‘Anything in it for me?’

‘I guess we’ll never know now, will we?’

Keegan gave a high-pitched wheeze that sounded tubercular. ‘Bastard. Anyway, I thought you were well out of all that, years ago. What’s the sudden interest?’

‘So do you have a number for him, or not?’

‘Come on, mate. Quid pro quo. This ain’t bleeding directory enquiries, is it?’

‘How about as a special favour to an old friend?’

‘How about in return for you taking on a job for me? I’ve got more work coming in than I got guys to delegate it out to. Matter of fact I have one here on my desk that’d suit you down to the ground. Ethiopia. In and out, eight days tops, big money.’

‘Let me think about it,’ Ben lied.

‘Yeah, well, don’t think too long. Client’s breaking my balls something terrible. I need this yesterday.’ Keegan broke into another whistling, hacking cough, like a cat with a hairball in its throat. He went silent for a long moment, and Ben thought maybe he’d slumped dead at his desk. Then Keegan said hoarsely, ‘Okay, I’ll see what I can come up with. Roth’s a right awkward bugger to contact, even at the best of times. Gone all reclusive and paranoid in his old age. Easier to have a conversation with the fuckin’ Duke of Edinburgh.’

‘I appreciate your help, Ken. Really. I don’t care what they say about you.’

‘Who? What?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Fuck you very much too. And don’t keep me waiting on that Ethiopia job, will you? Yes or no. I’m down to the sodding wire on this one, mate.’

What an enchanting character, that Keegan. Ben ended the call, put away his phone and took out the one that had belonged to Romy Juneau. He gazed at it for a moment, getting his thoughts straight.

Somewhere, there had to be some clue as to how and why she’d got herself hooked into the world of the likes of Nazim al-Kassar. It couldn’t be a coincidence that he’d turned up at her place to murder her, much as he enjoyed killing women. And from her nervous behaviour that morning it had been clear she was afraid of something, or someone. It was just as clear that Nazim hadn’t been working alone, but had at least one accomplice, the getaway driver in the silver Merc.