Scott Mariani - The Armada Legacy

Ben frowned. ‘Hold on. Did you just say that Forsyte was poisoned with the venom from a stingray?’

‘As strange as it sounds, yup. I phoned them just now to double-check, talked to the lab guy who did the tests. Thank God for chemistry nerds. He’s been working on this for eight straight hours, and he’s never seen anything like it either. But he’s one hundred per cent certain that’s the source. And not just any old stingray, either. He reckons the venom was extracted from a unique freshwater species that only lives in South America. Amazonia, to be precise. That’s been checked out with the zoology department at Trinity College, Dublin.’

‘Amazonia,’ Ben echoed, narrowing his eyes.

‘It’s weird. I mean, this is Ireland, for Christ’s sake,’ Lynch said. ‘And there’s something else, too. The forensic examiner also found a small metal key inside Forsyte’s stomach. It hadn’t been there long, and lacerations inside his throat suggest that he might have swallowed it down in a hurry sometime not long before his death. We think he did it after the kidnappers struck, while the victims were in transit.’

‘What kind of key?’

‘Examination shows that it’s the key to a set of handcuffs. Not the universal type key you can use to open just about any make of cuffs. Looks like it’s some kind of special custom job. We don’t know what to make of it.’

Ben’s mind was working so furiously hard that he was going to crash the BMW if he didn’t pull in. He rolled to a halt on the verge and killed the engine.

Cutting off Forsyte’s hands hadn’t been a reprisal at all, neither by a former IRA man sworn to revenge, nor by anyone else.

‘He had something cuffed to his wrist,’ he said. ‘A briefcase, maybe. That’s what the kidnappers were after, and Forsyte knew it. Must have swallowed the key to try to stop them getting it from him. He obviously didn’t reckon on what they were capable of doing to get the cuff off his arm.’

Lynch sounded doubtful. ‘That was my initial thought too. But then why chop off both hands, not just the one holding the case or whatever it was?’

The obvious answer was as simple as it was callous. ‘To throw us off the mark,’ Ben told her. Like ransom extortionists tossing their phones onto the back of a long-distance lorry to lead the cops astray, the ploy had worked beautifully.

‘It’s highly speculative,’ Lynch said. ‘For a start, we don’t know that Forsyte was carrying anything.’

‘If he had it cuffed to him when he left the country club, someone must have noticed.’

‘Officers already talked to all the staff who were on duty that night.’

‘Every single one?’

‘Yes, everyone, and nobody saw Forsyte leave. He must have gone out a back way to avoid the photographers. Secondly, even if we did know he was carrying, say, a briefcase, we’d still be no closer to knowing who did this.’

‘Not unless we knew what was inside,’ Ben said. ‘If it was something worth killing for, it could lead us back to the killers. And maybe to Brooke.’

Lynch must have heard something in his tone. ‘You and I had a deal,’ she reminded him a little more severely. ‘I agreed to keep you in the loop if you agreed to stay out of this. That’s a condition I need you to respect. You are staying out of this, aren’t you, Ben?’

‘I’m a law-abiding citizen, Detective Sergeant.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Look, the fact that we have these fresh leads now takes us a step closer to finding her. You need to trust that. Promise me you’ll go home.’

‘I will go home,’ he said.

But he never said when. The instant the call was over he restarted the BMW and slewed it violently round in the road to point back the way he’d come.

‘Sorry, Kay,’ he said out loud.

Chapter Twenty-Two

South America?

It took a while for the initial shock to pass. Once Brooke’s mind had settled enough for her to think more clearly and the lingering effects of the tranquillisers had worn off, she paced the luxurious suite of rooms – her gilded cage – and tried to understand what in the world was happening to her. One minute on a couple of days’ break in Donegal, the next whisked halfway round the world for no reason she could imagine.

It was hard to shut out of her mind what those people had done to Roger Forsyte; even harder to stop replaying the sickening memory of what had happened to poor Sam. Her eyes wouldn’t stop clouding with tears every time she thought about her dead friend.

Clearly, Forsyte had been the target, for some reason connected to whatever was inside that briefcase attached to his wrist. Sam and Brooke had both been in the wrong place at the wrong time, Sam because of her job and Brooke just from sheer wild chance.

Then why was she here now? Why had these men who’d murdered her friend brought her here to this villa, or whatever the hell it was?

The clothes she’d been wearing when she was kidnapped had disappeared; the only possession she had left, apart from her own skin, was the little gold chain. She slipped it back around her neck. It made her think of Ben: what he was doing at this moment, where he was, how he was going to react when he heard the news she was missing.

Peeping furtively through the bars of the window whose blind she’d smashed away, she observed her surroundings. Her quarters seemed to be on the first, maybe the second, floor of what was obviously a very large house, almost like a fortress in size. It was hard to tell whether there were any more floors above hers. Outside her barred windows was what looked like a rooftop garden, tastefully laid out with pots of flowers everywhere and surrounded by a stone balustrade. Beyond that she could see the figures of men down below among the complex of buildings that stood clustered around the house.

Even if she’d been able to open the sealed window pane or yell loudly enough to be heard through the thick glass, she quickly realised there was little point in calling to anyone down there for help. The automatic weapons the men wore on their belts or slung round their shoulders as they came and went in twos and threes, attending to their mysterious duties, were enough proof of that. She was being well guarded.

Unable to do much else, Brooke spent a while watching the movements down below and trying to count the number of guards. They were all Hispanic, mostly in their twenties and thirties as far as she could tell from this distance. All were armed, whether with a handgun or a high-capacity military rifle, or both. The men wore no kind of uniforms, but it wasn’t hard to see that the place was run with careful organisation and discipline. It made her think of an army base.

Twice she saw a vehicle appear from what she now realised was the main hangar or garage building, making billows of dust as it approached the barred gateway in the wall that seemed to be the only way in and out of the complex. The first vehicle was an open Jeep carrying three men, the second an olive-green military truck with a canvas top. Each time the armed guards opened up the gates, waved the vehicle through and then locked them shut again. Brooke caught only a brief glimpse of what lay beyond the gates – a winding dusty road that soon disappeared into the depths of the dark green forest.

Her head-count of the guards had reached eighteen when she heard a noise outside the door and whirled away from the window. There was the tinkle of a key in the lock, and the sound of a deadbolt being slid back. Brooke held her breath as the handle turned and the door began to open, fully expecting a host of armed men to come swarming into the room. What would happen next was something she didn’t want to think about. Her heart began to pound. She looked about her for somewhere to hide. It was too late.