Scott Mariani - The Armada Legacy

Had Brooke been here? Ben’s intuition told him so. But his emotions were so badly frayed that he didn’t know if he could trust it. He searched through both rooms for some kind of trace of her. Lying on what was left of the bedroom rug was a scorched piece of clothing of some kind. He picked it up. It wasn’t anything he recognised as Brooke’s. It was the remains of a silky negligee or nightdress, most of the thin material blackened and burned away. Whose had it been? Alicia Serrato had been dead for some time. Had it been intended for some other woman? For Serrato’s captive?

As he let the ruined garment slip from his fingers, Ben felt broken glass crunch under his boot. He knelt down, poked around in the ashes and picked up a sliver of glass. He wiped the soot away carefully with his finger. The piece of glass was printed ‘HANEL’, the C missing. He sniffed it and caught the faint whiff of perfume.

Ben tossed the piece of glass back into the ashes and stood up with death in his heart. He’d come so far, and Brooke was still lost to him. Time was slipping through his fingers like fine sand.

He hurried away from the burnt-out room and tracked back through the corridors in search of Nico. ‘I’m in here,’ the Colombian called through an open doorway. Ben walked in to find him standing at a broad leather-topped antique desk rifling agitatedly through a sprawl of papers and documents. Behind him was the open door of a high-security wall safe.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Guess who left here in too much of a hurry to lock up his safe?’ Nico said, sifting roughly through more papers and tossing them on the floor. ‘For me, this is like being in Satan’s den, man.’

‘We have to move. Brooke’s not here.’

Nico seemed not to have heard him. ‘Thought maybe I could figure out where the sonofabitch’s gone. Instead I found this shit. You know what this is?’ Nico snatched up a glossy transparent folder. Ben saw that inside it was an old manuscript of some kind, heavily ornamented in red and gold and calligraphed in ink, frayed by dampness around the edges but otherwise perfectly preserved.

‘It’s the land grant from the King of Spain,’ Nico said. ‘This is what it’s all about, what the motherfucker’s been working towards all this time. Look at this other stuff. It explains everything.’

Weariness had suddenly gripped hold of Ben’s whole body. He flopped in a chair and let the rifle slip out of his fingers to the floor. He felt too weak and drained even to sink his head in his hands and cry for sheer frustration.

‘See?’ Nico was saying, holding up more papers. ‘Old genealogical records, family trees, going back centuries. Serrato’s been collecting this stuff for years. It’s got the stamp of the National Historical Archives in Madrid, dated seven years ago. You go back to 1588, you see the surname appear for the first time. Serrato, the old Serrato, was a Spanish sympathiser who took care of this Lady Anne Pennick, the wife of the English spy dude, after he’d been executed and she’d run to Spain. Guess the English were still hunting for her, so she entered into this guy’s protection and took his name. She was pregnant with her dead husband’s son. The kid grew up with the name Serrato.’

‘Serrato was the legitimate heir to the land,’ Ben muttered, but his mind was far away.

‘Right. He must have found out that the lost land grant was aboard the Armada ship that sank near Ireland. Been looking out for years hoping someone would find the wreck. Then along comes this guy Forsyte. Here’s all the news clippings that Serrato was keeping. He’d been following the salvage operation right from the start, just waiting to get his hands on the land grant knowing that all he had to do to stake a claim was work on the right government contacts here in Peru. And all the correspondence between his lawyers and some scum-sucking politician called Vargas is right here in this file. But the best part’s this.’

Nico snatched up a sheaf of printouts and held them out with a flourish. ‘Oil test reports, dating back more than four years. This is why he wanted that land so bad. Half a million of acres of worthless jungle? I don’t think so, man. More like half a million acres of the richest untapped oilfields in the whole Amazon lowlands. No wonder Serrato went to so much trouble getting hold of the land grant. It could make him a fucking billionaire ten times over. Nothing was gonna stop him.’

Oil , Ben thought. It did explain everything. Having already learned what lay underneath his ancestral land, Serrato must have been desperate to obtain from Roger Forsyte the only proof in the world that he was the heir to it. When Forsyte turned him down, believing he could score a better deal elsewhere by using the rediscovered documents to unmask a whole list of unsuspected English traitors from the time of the Spanish Armada, Serrato had then sent his people in to work on Simon Butler and find alternative ways of getting what he wanted.

‘Brooke just got in the way,’ Ben said out loud.

‘And she just happened to be a dead ringer for Serrato’s wife,’ Nico replied. ‘Wrong place, wrong time.’ Suddenly he tensed again, half-turned towards the door and then looked sharply at Ben with a frown creasing his brow. ‘You hear that?’

‘I heard it,’ Ben said. Suddenly alert and filled with energy again, he snatched up the rifle and pressed off the safety catch. Nico scooped the Colt Python from the desk. They both moved quickly for the doorway.

Out in the corridor, they heard it again. The distinct sound of voices, whispering furtively in Spanish. Ben and Nico spaced out with their weapons ready and their eyes glued to the corner up ahead from beyond which the voices were getting closer.

Five figures approaching. Ben saw them an instant before Nico did. As he stepped quickly round the corner and levelled the rifle into a close-range aim he could see that he hadn’t run into a squad of Ramon Serrato’s top goons.

Three men, two women. They must have heard the sound of intruders in the near-deserted house and, with all the guards gone, banded together to confront them. Two of the men were wearing white smocks, like chefs, both in their sixties and armed only with a kitchen knife between them. Tagging along behind them was a young kid of about seventeen, with dazed-looking eyes and the bemused grin of a simpleton. The younger of the two women was a tiny cowering thing who let out a shrill gasp when she saw the two intruders appear in the corridor ahead. The only one Ben might have been concerned about was the brute-featured woman in a maid’s uniform. She had hands as meaty and rough as a longshoreman’s, and in them was a small-bore shotgun that she had pointed from the hip.

The corridor was suddenly filled with cries and shouts. Ben and Nico yelled ‘Drop the weapon!’ simultaneously. The hatchet-faced woman might have toyed with the idea of letting blast with her shotgun, but only for an instant as she found herself peering down the muzzles of Ben’s .300 Win Mag and Nico’s Colt, both steadily and unflinchingly trained on the wide gap between her eyes.

She dropped the shotgun and stepped back from it, raising her hands. The cook with the knife did the same. Ben and Nico advanced, keeping their weapons trained on them. ‘In there,’ Ben said, motioning with the rifle barrel towards a doorway. For the first time he noticed that the brute-faced woman had a raised weal on her cheekbone that was turning purple, as if she’d recently been in a fight. With a surly look, she followed the rest of the servants through the door into an unused bedroom. Ben and Nico herded them up against the far wall. Ben bolted the door.

‘We came here for Serrato,’ Nico said in Spanish. ‘You fuckers tell us where he is, you walk out of here alive. Or else—’ He drew his finger across his throat and stuck his tongue out. It had a remarkable effect. The two cooks exchanged frightened glances. The waiflike servant girl was ready to collapse in a faint. Only the simple-minded young guy, who was grinning as though this were all some kind of game, and the brute-featured woman, who was scowling with hatred at Ben and Nico, didn’t look scared.