Scott Mariani - The Armada Legacy

Neither of them had time to register the blurred object that suddenly came swinging at them out of nowhere. To a dull clang that resonated all through the alley, all four of their feet left the ground together and kicked up high in the air in a sprawl of limbs before they crashed down on their backs against the concrete.

Ben stepped out of the doorway. The length of heavy iron scaffold pole was still quivering in his hands from the impact. Two days’ worth of anguished frustration and pent-up rage had gone into the blow and it had knocked both men out cold. He laid down the pole and picked up the men’s fallen weapons. The machete was of no interest, and he tossed it over a wall. The other was an American Colt Government .45 automatic, badly scuffed with most of the finish worn away. If it had been one of the weapons supplied by the CIA back in the heyday of the Troubles, it had seen a lot of use over the years since. It was fully loaded, seven rounds in the magazine and one up the spout. Ben stuffed it in his belt.

‘So you must be John,’ he said to the gun’s unconscious owner, remembering what Gary had said. He reckoned he had about ten seconds before the others appeared. He dragged the two limp bodies to a nearby iron bollard, propped them sitting up back to back either side of it and used a coil of rusty old barbed wire from the builder’s skip to lash them together. He did a rough, hasty job of it, but they wouldn’t get free without leaving half their flesh on the barbs. Counting down the seconds he ripped strips from their clothing as improvised gags. He dusted his hands and stood over them. ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right back.’

He drew the Colt from his belt, flipped off the safety and trotted towards the head of the alley just as the remaining four men appeared. They skidded to a halt at the sight of the pistol in his hand. The Doberman reared up when it saw him, fangs bared and straining its chain tight.

Ben stood in the middle of the passage with the .45 in a two-handed Weaver stance and the dog square in his sights. ‘You’ll be burying Fido tonight if you let him go,’ he said.

The four men gaped at him. The handler kept hold of the chain. Ben was glad of that. He was very fond of dogs, even ones that wanted to savagely rip him to pieces. He wouldn’t have liked to paint the alley with its brains.

‘Where’s Fergus Doyle?’ he said.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ one of the men blurted.

Ben didn’t think he was going to get a lot out of these guys. If John had had the gun, that meant John was probably the furthest up the hierarchy. And John was currently trussed up ready for interrogation. He’d already wasted enough time on deadbeats and lackeys.

‘Fuck it,’ Ben said to himself, and resorted to the most effective way of clearing the decks. The Colt boomed and kicked in his hands, and again, and again, aiming off first a little to the left, then a little to the right. The fat .45 bullets ricocheted off the walls either side of the men, clouding the alley with masonry dust. They scattered in panic and fled, the dog handler desperately tugging his Doberman along behind him as he ran.

Ben lowered the gun. Through the ringing in his ears he heard their racing footsteps disappear, then a few moments later the screech of spinning tyres as the van took off up the street at high speed. He turned and walked back to his two captives.

They hadn’t gone anywhere. The one called John, who was a slab-faced nondescript guy of about thirty-five, had only just come to. The younger one, a spotty kid of about nineteen, had been awake long enough to start chewing frantically through his gag. They were both struggling against their bonds and rolling their eyes up at him as he stood over them.

He thrust the Colt back in his belt and dropped into a crouch next to his prisoners. ‘Now, if you two want to go home today instead of to the morgue, you’re going to tell me where I can find Fergus Doyle. Who wants to start? How about you, John?’

He was reaching out to rip away the guy’s gag when he felt a sudden pressure against the base of his neck.

The cold, hard touch of a gun muzzle.

Chapter Eighteen

There were two basic possible responses to an unexpected turn of events like this. Ben didn’t consider the first one very long, because whipping round to lash the weapon out of the opponent’s hands wasn’t such a clever idea when he’d just heard the hammer go back with a small, sharp click-click . You couldn’t quite dodge or deflect a handgun bullet the way you could a knife bayonet in the hands of an idiot.

The second response was just to go very still and hope that nothing terminal was about to happen in the next few moments.

Ben went very still.

‘Lose the pistol,’ said a woman’s voice. It was a young voice, and might have been pleasant-sounding if she’d had something different to say. ‘Any tricks, this gun goes off and your frigging head goes off with it.’

Ben slowly moved his hand to his belt, grasped the butt of the Colt between thumb and forefinger, drew it out and tossed it away with a clatter.

‘Now get on your feet. Slowly does it.’

The gun muzzle stayed pressed to his neck as he stood. It still didn’t seem like a good moment for any sudden moves.

‘Now turn round,’ she commanded. The pressure disappeared from his neck as she took a couple of steps backwards.

Ben turned cautiously round to face her. She was as youthful as her voice: not much more than twenty-one or twenty-two, willowy with a pretty face and long black hair, tousled, a little gypsyish. Her dark eyes were watching him unblinking down the barrel of the .357 Magnum revolver she was clutching. The gun looked oversized in her hands. Ben could see the jacketed hollowpoint rounds nestling in the mouths of the cylinder chambers. There was no chance she could miss at this range. The expanding bullet would blow a hole in him that a boxer could poke his fist through, glove and all.

‘Put your frigging hands up,’ she said.

Now that they were face to face there was an edge to her voice that might have been anxiety, and Ben wondered whether she’d ever pointed a loaded gun at anyone before.

‘I know how to use this thing,’ she said.

‘I certainly hope so,’ he said. He put his hands up.

‘You hope so?’ she said. Her brow puckered up in a frown.

‘We wouldn’t want any accidental discharges. The old Model Nineteen has a light single-action trigger.’

‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What do you want with Fergus Doyle?’

‘Like I told those other guys,’ Ben said. ‘I’m looking for something.’

‘Something?’

‘Someone. Someone who’s missing, whom I care about very much. If Doyle has her, I’d like to discuss business with him, man to man.’

She frowned again, scrutinising him intently. ‘What kind of business?’ she said suspiciously.

‘The ransom kind,’ he said. ‘Money. If he can give me back what he took from me, I can offer him something in exchange.’

A few months earlier, Ben had had Le Val valued for insurance purposes and the figure that had come back was a shade over 1.9 million euros. It was everything Ben had in the world. He’d already decided that was a small price to pay for Brooke’s return, and it was what he intended to put on the table.

The young woman made no reply, just stared at him as if slowly digesting what he’d just said. Before she could speak, from somewhere far away beyond the houses came a wailing of sirens, growing rapidly louder. Ben guessed that the Belfast police weren’t so jaded nowadays that they wouldn’t respond to the sound of a forty-five being let off in the street.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.