The Alchemist's Secret (34 page)

Upstairs in his office, Usberti was transfixed with terror as the floor under their feet lurched with the deafening explosion. The shockwave knocked the air out of the room. Ben was up on his feet and rushing at the panicked Italian. But then the guards burst into the room from the smoky corridor, waving their machine pistols. Ben grabbed one of the tubular steel chairs and killed the nearest one with a thrust that drove a leg through his soft palate and into his brain. His Skorpion clattered to the floor. A burst of fire from the second guard shattered the glass top of Usberti’s desk. Ben rolled and threw out his arm for the fallen machine pistol. He fired, slashing 9mm holes across the wall and the guard’s body. The man crumpled, his face contorted.

Usberti was gone. Behind a curtain, a glass fire door was still swinging. Heavy footsteps rattled down the steel fire escape outside.

Ben tore himself away. Roberta was what mattered. He ran out into the corridor and headed for the lift, punching a second number into the phone as he went. As the lift glided downwards to the basement he jumped up and hooked his hands around the steel frame of the hatch in the middle of the ceiling. He hung there for a moment, then flipped up the hatch cover. The small kit-bag he’d left was still there. He dropped down to the floor, opening the bag as the lift juddered to a halt. He stepped out and pressed the call button on the phone. At the other end of the building a smaller charge of
PBX
took out the main fuse. The whole building blacked out.

Ben took the Browning out of the bag, cocked it and switched on the underbarrel
LED
torch. He headed for the cellar, sweeping the light this way and that in the darkened corridors.

It had all happened exactly as Ben Hope had said it would. The simultaneous explosions had been over in an instant. Suddenly they heard a smaller blast, no more than a muffled thump, and the building went dark. Only the orange flicker of flames could be seen from the ground below.

At Simon’s signal the police tactical units emerged from the cover of the wooded grounds and stormed the building. In their black entry vests, hoods and goggles the armed units swarmed through the chaos. A few scattered men fired blindly at them in their panic. The police shooters were much faster, much cooler and much more accurate. They only shot the ones who were an immediate threat. Those who tried to run or threw down their weapons were quickly trussed up on the floor with their wrists and ankles bound together and MP-5 machine carbines pointing at the backs of their heads. Down in the science lab, technicians crawling dazed, blackened and bleeding among the smoky wreckage were jerked to their feet and marched out at gunpoint. In less than five minutes the police had secured the whole place.

Usberti thought his heart was going to give out. Explosions rattled the building and he could hear yelling and the crackle of small-arms fire from inside as he ran around the side of the wall. His chest heaving, breath rasping, he staggered into the grounds. He leaned against a tree, bent double with wheezing, trembling with shock and rage.

Ben Hope had pulled the rug out from under him. For all his appreciation of the man’s skills, and for all his own cunning, he’d managed to underestimate him disastrously. He still couldn’t understand what the hell had just happened.

‘You there,’ said a voice. ‘Put your hands behind your head.’ Usberti rolled his eyes up to see two men in black uniforms standing a few metres away in the darkness pointing guns at him. A radio fizzed. Slowly, he moved away from the tree and lifted his arms.
To be caught, like this…

One of the men reached back to his belt for a set of cuffs.

But then the two officers were lifted off their feet like straw men. They flew into one another and their heads smashed together with a dull, meaty crunch. They dropped to the ground without a noise.

Usberti’s face split into a wide grin of relief as he recognized the tall figure standing over the slumped bodies. ‘Franco! Thank the Lord!’

Bozza drew out his knife and quickly, efficiently, cut the throats of the two men. He picked up one of their radios and a fallen MP-5. With a glance over his shoulder he calmly took his archbishop by the arm and guided him through the trees into darkness.

It was a half a kilometre across the woods to the road. Bozza helped Usberti down the leafy bank to the tarmac. He saw the approaching lights of a car in the distance. Letting go of Usberti’s arm, Bozza stepped out and stood in the middle of the road, bathed in the headlights as the car came closer. As it came near, he pointed the MP-5 at the windscreen. The car squealed to a halt diagonally across the road.

There was a young couple inside. Bozza ripped open the driver’s door and dragged the man out by the hair. He sent him sprawling across to the edge of the road and casually fired a fully automatic burst into his chest. The man crumpled bloodily into the leaves.

Inside the car, the girl was screaming hysterically. Bozza pulled her bodily out through the open window, looked coldly into her face and snapped her neck in a single twisting movement. The Inquisitor dragged their bodies into the ditch and covered them with pieces of shrubbery.

‘Good work, Franco,’ Usberti said. ‘Take me away from here.’

Bozza helped him into the back seat and then they were gone, heading for the airfield.

The last item Ben had packed in his kit-bag earlier that day was a small armour-piercing shape charge. He pressed the connected blobs of plastic explosive against the steel cellar door, stuck in the two electrodes and quickly retreated back down the corridor before thumbing the button on the phone. The percussive detonation ripped the air, and when the smoke cleared the door looked as though a giant mouth had taken a perfectly oval bite out of it. The edges around the hole glowed faintly red. Ben stepped through into the smoky cellar, gun first.

The one cellar guard must have been standing near the door when the charge went off. Ben shone the pistol light on him. He was on his back, blood running from his ears and nostrils. A triangular shard of steel protruded eight inches from his chest. Ben grabbed the ring of keys from his belt and ran down the cellar steps into the huge smoky room. He called her name.

‘Ben!’ Roberta shouted, recognizing his voice through the high ringing in her ears that the sharp explosion had set off. ‘There’s a boy over there.’ She pointed to the next cell along. Ben flashed the light and saw Marc’s drugged, slumped figure. He opened both cage doors. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said quietly, gently avoiding her embrace. He stooped and lifted the stirring boy over his shoulder.

The puzzled officers found Marc Dubois lying in the back of one of the police cars ten minutes later. ‘Where the hell did
he
come from?’ asked one. ‘Beats me,’ said his companion. It was a while before it dawned on them that he was the kid on the Missing Person posters.

Simon watched, deeply satisfied, as his men brought more than thirty coughing, spluttering, smoke-blackened personnel out of the shattered building. Six bodies had been recovered so far, and enough weapons and ammunition to lay serious criminal and terrorism charges against the whole organization.

Speed, Aggression, Surprise.
He’d heard that that was the unofficial motto of a certain British Army regiment. He grinned and shook his head.

Roberta was swinging between wild elation and trembling exhaustion as Ben led her away in the darkness. With one arm around her waist he steered her through the shadowy woods. Back towards the little lane outside the police cordon where he’d hidden the rental car. He was evasive and silent, ignoring the questions she fired at him.

They arrived at the car. He turned sharply at the sound of the foliage rustling behind them. But it was just an owl, disturbed by their passage.

He kept to the backroads, and they sat in silence for a while as he drove. Roberta closed her eyes. Already the details of her imprisonment were beginning to seem hazy and distant in her mind.

After two kilometres of cutting across rough country lanes they came out onto a narrow road.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘I rented a place.’

They passed through a couple of small villages and twenty minutes later they arrived at a country cottage tucked away behind a clump of trees up its own private track. Ben led Roberta up the path, opened the door and flipped on the light. The cottage was bare and functional, but it was safe.

She flopped down in an old armchair, leaning her head back and shutting her eyes. He came and handed her a glass of red wine. She drank it down quickly, and could feel the immediate relaxing effect of it. She watched him as he piled kindling wood and logs and lit a crackling fire in the stone inglenook fireplace. He was strangely quiet, distant.

‘Are you OK, Ben? What’s wrong?’

He said nothing, kneeling in front of the fire with his back to her, stirring up the flames with a poker.

‘Why won’t you talk to me?’

He dropped the iron poker with a clang, got to his feet and turned round to face her. ‘What the hell were you playing at?’ he demanded furiously.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Have you any
idea
how worried I was? I thought you were dead. What possessed you to go wandering off like that?’

‘I-‘

‘Of all the stupid, idiotic…’

She stood up. Her lip was quivering and her hands were shaking.

He softened when he saw her face. ‘Look, don’t cry. I’m sor-‘

He didn’t get to finish the sentence. Her fist flew up and connected with his jaw. He saw lights, and staggered back two steps.

‘Don’t you talk to me like that, Ben Hope!’

They stood facing each other. He rubbed his jaw. Then she threw her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder. She felt him tense up and she backed off, looking at him uncertainly with hot tears in her eyes.

But then his tension broke and something welled powerfully up inside him. He wanted it now, that warmth he’d rejected for so long. He wanted to plunge into it like a diver into a warm ocean lagoon, and never come out again. As he stood looking into her sad, wet, blinking, searching eyes he knew that he loved her more than he’d ever realized.

He reached out for her, grasped her arms and drew her to him. They held one another tight, caressing, gasping, running their fingers through each other’s hair.

‘I was so scared,’ he whispered. ‘I thought I’d lost you.’ He ran his fingers up to her face and wiped away the tears from her laughing cheeks. Their lips drew together and he kissed her, long and longingly, as he’d never kissed anyone in his life before.

She was woken up the next morning by a crowing cockerel in the distance. Her eyelashes fluttered open and after a couple of seconds she remembered where she was. Sunlight was streaming through the bedroom window. A little smile spread across her lips as the memory of last night came back to her. It wasn’t a dream. When she’d told him how much she loved him, he’d said he felt the same way. He’d been so tender with her, a whole new side to him opening up as their passion had mounted.

She rolled on her back and stretched her body out under the sheet, luxuriating in the crisp cotton. Brushing the tousled hair out of her eyes, she stretched out an arm to touch him. Her hand felt an empty pillow. He must have gone downstairs.

For a while she swam in that nebulous, drifting haze between sleep and wakefulness. The horror of her kidnap and imprisonment seemed a faraway memory, as though they belonged in a different life, or a half-forgotten nightmare from long ago. She wondered what it would be like to live in Ireland, by the sea. She’d never lived by the sea…

More awake now, she wondered what he was doing. She couldn’t smell coffee, and couldn’t hear any sounds apart from the singing of the birds in the trees outside. She swung her legs out of the bed, and walked naked across the bedroom to gather up the trail of discarded clothes she’d left from the top of the stairs to the bed. More fresh memories, and she smiled to herself again.

He wasn’t downstairs making breakfast. She searched around the little cottage, calling his name. Where was he?

It was when she saw that the car and his things were gone that she began to worry. She found his note on the kitchen table, and knew what it was going to say even before she unfolded and read it.

Tears gathered in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. She sat at the kitchen table, sank her head into her arms and wept for a long time.

Palavas-les-Flots, Southern France, three days later

Autumn was setting in now. The busy season was coming to an end for the seaside resort, and the only tourists still out there bathing in the sea were Brits and Germans. Ben sat on the beach and gazed out at the blue horizon. He was thinking of Roberta. By now she should be heading back home to safety.

He’d left early after their night of love.
You shouldn’t have let that happen
, he thought. It wasn’t fair on her. He felt terrible that he’d admitted his feelings to her, all the while planning to slip away at first light while she was asleep.

At dawn he’d sat at the kitchen table and written to her. It wasn’t much of a letter and he wished he could have said more, but it would only have made his leaving more painful for both of them. Beside the note, he’d left her enough money to get her safely and quickly back home to America. He’d grabbed his things and been about to head straight out of the door.

But he couldn’t just walk away. He wanted to see her one last time, and he tiptoed back up the creaking stairs, careful not to wake her. He’d stood for a moment or two, watching her sleeping soundly. Her body was rising and falling slowly under the sheet, her hair spread out across the pillow. Very gently, he pulled a curl away from her eye. He’d smiled fondly at the look of complete childlike relaxation on her sleeping face. He’d wanted so badly to take her in his arms, kiss her, make a fuss of her, bring her breakfast in bed. Stay together, live happily.

But none of that was possible. It was like a dream that hovered out of reach. His destiny lay another way. He remembered what Luc Simon had said.
Men like us are like lone wolves. We want to love our women, but we only hurt them.