The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (190 page)
Read The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET Online
Authors: Scott Mariani
Ben dragged Scagnetti’s unconscious body through the classroom, leaving a trail of blood from the guy’s mangled hand all the way to the balcony. He heaved him upright and slung him half over the parapet, so that just a light shove would send him tumbling over the edge. He did the same with the other man, Bellomo, then ran back to the corridor, unravelled more of the fire hose and slashed off a length. Back out on the balcony, he quickly knotted one end of the thick rubber around their ankles. He estimated the drop to the ground below, subtracted three metres and then secured the other end of the hose to the balcony before shoving both men over the edge. They dropped over the side like the world’s calmest bungee jumpers and then were jerked up short by the hose’s elasticity before their brains could be dashed all over the ground.
Ben peered down at the two swinging bodies. They weren’t going anywhere. He slung one of the Steyrs over his shoulder, stripped the magazine from the other and stuck it in his back pocket. Tossed the empty weapon off the balcony together with one of the radios, and moved quickly on.
Glass flew as the butt of Anatoly’s Steyr smashed into the display cabinet that protected the Goya drawing. He used the weapon to knock away the jagged pieces around the edge, then slung it over his shoulder and reached in with both hands to grasp the sides of the plain black wooden frame.
He gave a hard yank and felt something give. The piece of artwork came away easily from the wall, and he lifted it out of the broken cabinet and stepped back.
Nothing happened. No alarms, no slamming down of steel shutters. He grinned to himself. It was his.
And so was the rest of the stuff, as much as he could carry out of here. The old man might be nuts, but he, Anatoly, wasn’t.
Anatoly strolled back into the office, holding the Goya against his chest. Rocco Massi was fiddling with his radio, frowning through the mask. ‘I can’t raise Bellomo and Scagnetti.’
Anatoly ignored him. ‘Thank you for your co-operation, gentlemen,’ he said in Russian to the three gallery owners. ‘That will be all.’ He set the frame down on a filing cabinet, then unslung his Steyr and turned to Corsini. The fat man’s face was covered with sweat. He began to raise his hands, and his eyes widened in horror as he saw the gun muzzle swing his way. Anatoly made a clucking sound with his tongue, stretched a grin and the gun jolted in his hand. Corsini sprawled heavily backwards, tipping up his chair and crashing to the floor. Anatoly swivelled the Steyr towards Silvestri and pulled the trigger.
‘Shit.’ He looked at his gun. ‘Empty.’
Rocco Massi tossed him a spare mag. Anatoly grunted, dumped the empty one, slotted the new one into the receiver and racked the cocking mechanism.
‘You animals,’ Silvestri said. His next words were drowned out by the blast of gunfire that spilled him sideways out of his seat and misted blood up the wall behind him.
Pietro De Crescenzo was curled up in a ball like a trapped animal, shaking with terror as Anatoly turned towards him. A thin wisp of smoke curled out of the barrel of the Steyr. Anatoly blew it away and laughed. He took a step closer to De Crescenzo.
‘Bellomo, Scagnetti, come in. Where the fuck are you? Over,’ Rocco Massi said into his radio.
Ben was walking fast down a corridor when he turned on the radio handset and dialled it back to the frequency the gunmen had been using. He heard the harsh voice crackle out of the speaker.
‘Bellomo, Scagnetti, come in. Where the fuck are you? Over.’
The red plastic rocker switch on the side of the radio was the press and talk button. Ben thumbed it and said, ‘Uh, I’m afraid Antonio and Bruno won’t be joining us. They’re kind of tied up at the moment.’
Stunned silence.
‘I want to talk to the Russian,’ Ben said. ‘Now.’
There was another moment’s silence, then another voice rasped out of the radio. Speaking Italian, but with a heavy accent. The Russian. ‘Who the fuck is this?’
Ben’s Russian wasn’t as fluent as his Italian, but good enough to get his point over. ‘If you’re here to steal artwork, it’s my guess you’re interested in doing business. Correct? Over.’
Pause. ‘Go on,’ the voice rasped.
‘I have a business offer for you,’ Ben said. ‘Here are the terms. The police are on their way. You and your men put down your weapons and surrender to me immediately, and you have my word that eventually you’ll live to be a free man. Not for a couple of decades, maybe, but eventually. And I hear the food’s very good in Italian prisons. Over.’
The pause was longer this time. ‘Interesting. What if I decide to take my chances?’
‘Harm any more of those people down there, and today is the last day of your life.’
‘I see. You must be one of those one-man armies, that right? You’re gonna kick my ass, and the asses of all my friends down here? All on your own.’
‘Scagnetti and Bellomo didn’t take much.’
‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with. I think you’re the one who should surrender to me. I’d like to meet you.’
‘Maybe you will.’
‘Maybe I’ll just go on shooting hostages until you turn yourself in.’
‘Then I’ll withdraw my offer. You and all your men die.’
‘That’s a bold statement.’
‘It’s a promise,’ Ben said. ‘The offer is on the table. Think about it.’ He turned off the radio.
Anatoly tossed away the radio with a snort. He’d forgotten all about Pietro De Crescenzo, who was still cringing in his chair, shaking badly and expecting a bullet at any moment.
‘Who is this bastard?’ Rocco Massi said.
‘How the hell should I know who he is?’
Spartak Gourko had walked into the office, cradling his rifle in his arms. He barely glanced down at the bodies of the woman and the two dead men, or the blood that was pooling all over the floor.
‘He called the Carabinieri?’ Rocco said.
‘Fuck the police,’ Anatoly said, and Gourko let out a short laugh.
‘We should get out of here,’ Rocco said.
Anatoly snatched the Goya. ‘Come with me,’ he muttered, and burst out of the office. The others followed as he strode into the side room where Rykov, Turchin and Garrone were guarding the rest of the hostages. The guests were all much more subdued now, just a quiet sobbing from the young boy as his mother rocked him gently in her arms. A few faces peered up in fear as Anatoly walked in. He stuffed the Goya into its tailor-made case. It fitted perfectly, lying snug against the padding. He zipped it shut, then motioned to Rykov and Turchin. ‘Ilya, Vitaliy, some bastard is loose upstairs and thinks he’s John Wayne. Get him for me.’
‘He could be anywhere in the building,’ Rocco said. ‘You’ve got what you came for. Now let’s go.’
Anatoly gave him a long, hard stare. ‘You too. Get up there now. And you,’ he snapped at Garrone. The four men swapped glances, then headed for the gallery exit.
Now it was just Anatoly and Spartak Gourko left in the room. The fear among the hostages had intensified palpably.
‘Spartak, you stay here and make sure these pieces of shit keep still,’ Anatoly said. ‘Give me your knife.’
Gourko drew the weapon from his belt and tossed it to him. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I came to Italy to have some fun and that’s what I’m going to do.’ Anatoly marched over to the hostages. The teenage girl he’d admired earlier was sitting with her parents, watching his every move and not daring to make a sound. He reached out, grabbed her arm. Her face creased in terror and she whimpered.
‘Let’s find somewhere nice and private we can get better acquainted,’ he said, dragging her to her feet. The girl’s mother began to howl and tried desperately to hang on to her daughter. Gourko knocked her back with a hard stamping kick to the chest, and aimed his gun at her father with a look that said, ‘Go on, make my day.’ The other hostages were silent, apart from Donatella who stared at the two Russians and muttered something under her breath.
‘Maybe when I’m done with this bitch I’ll come back for that one,’ Anatoly chuckled. Gourko’s lips twitched into a faint smile. Anatoly hauled the girl away from the others and dragged her, screaming and writhing, towards the gallery.
While Massi and Garrone headed up a backstairs that doubled as a fire escape, Rykov and Turchin stalked the main stairs to the first floor. On the landing was the body of the old guy who’d died there earlier, his blood soaked into a wide area of carpet. They stepped over him as though he were roadkill and made their way through the maze of corridors. Every door they came to, they kicked open, ready to blast anything the other side of it. They found storage spaces, lecture rooms, classrooms. All empty.
Pushing through a set of fire doors, they came to a short flight of steps and then to what looked like a ceramics department with a couple of large workshops flanking the corridor. One of them had display units filled with clay pots and vases, and long benches covered in materials and tools. The other room contained a row of heavy-duty iron kilns, like gigantic ovens with sturdy deadlocks to seal their doors tightly shut and thick layers of insulating material to protect the wall and nearby surfaces. Fat metal flues disappeared into the heat-discoloured wall.
The Russians took a brief glance around the workshop, just long enough to ascertain that the guy they were looking for wasn’t hiding under a table or in a cupboard. Satisfied, they were just about to turn to leave when they heard the soft voice behind them.
‘Hey.’
The Russians spun around.
Ben had often wondered if you could improvise a silencer out of an empty plastic bottle. He’d never quite got around to experimenting, until now. The litre Pepsi bottle had been left in a waste bin, and he’d used some Sellotape he’d found to fix it to the muzzle of the Steyr. From the doorway of the workshop, he aimed down at the floor and let off a short flurry of muffled shots, sweeping left to right. The two men dropped their weapons and crumpled to the floor, shouting out in agony, clutching their feet.
Ben ripped the burst remains of the Pepsi bottle from his Steyr as he walked over to them. ‘That’s not bad, is it?’ he said, kicking away their fallen guns. The guy on the right let out a stream of obscenities in Russian. Ben silenced him with a kick to the throat and he went straight down on his back. He clubbed the other over the head with the Steyr, and suddenly the room was quiet again.
Crouching beside them, he checked them for hidden weapons and then relieved them of their radios. He stood up and swung open the door of the nearest kiln. It was all blackened inside, with metal grille shelves like those in a domestic oven, only much larger. He pulled out the shelves, tossing them aside with a clatter. There was plenty of space for both men in there, as long as they weren’t expecting comfort. He dragged each one inside in turn, kicked their legs out of the way of the door, then clanged it shut and rolled the heavy deadlock into place.
There was a big red power-on knob and a thermostat control on the bottom panel of the kiln. Of course, he was far too nice a guy to turn it up full blast and roast these bastards like turkeys inside.
Their lucky day.
Unless things went badly and they’d harmed more of those people down there. Then, he’d be back and things would be warming up.
Ben stepped over to the doorway, peered left and right and listened hard for a few seconds, then pressed on, running lightly and silently through the corridor. No sign of the cops yet. Of course. But maybe, just maybe, as long as he could maintain the element of surprise and keep taking down the gunmen two at a time, he could stop this thing.
That plan fell apart within twenty seconds when Ben rounded a corner and almost ran into another pair of masked thugs. One was a giant mastiff of a man. He was clutching an AR-15 military rifle at hip level, two thirty-round magazines taped back to back the way it used to look cool in mercenary movies. The other was lean and tough as rawhide, with a short black shotgun in his hands.
For an instant they all stared at one another. The big guy’s eyes were locked on Ben’s, and in that suspended instant of frozen time Ben noticed that his pupils were different colours, the right one dark brown and the left one hazel. It was a minor anomaly that most people would have missed, but Ben was so practised in taking in the physical details of any situation he found himself in that he spotted it right away.
But he didn’t have time to linger over it, because in the next half second the big guy’s teeth bared in a snarl and his fists tightened around his AR-15. The rifle muzzle lit up with strobing white flame and the deafening roar of automatic gunfire wiped out all thought. By then, Ben was already in mid-air, diving to avoid the high-velocity blast that ripped a snaking trail of devastation just one inch behind him.
One thing Anatoly Shikov valued was his privacy. He could have just flung the crying girl down on the floor of the art gallery and done her there – but not with Spartak Gourko and the others watching. That would just be barbaric. He dragged his struggling trophy out of the gallery, through the glass walkway and out into the old part of the house, looking for somewhere suitable. Across the hallway, a door lay open and the room beyond looked perfect for what he had in mind. Tightening his grip on the girl’s arm, he hauled her inside.
The room was a library or reading room. The walls were lined with high shelves of old books, the furniture was plush and the carpet was soft. There was an elegant marble fireplace, and in the corner was a velvet chaise longue. Anatoly dumped the girl on it. She brushed the tangle of blond curls away from her face and gaped up at him as he stood over her and pulled off his mask. Gourko’s knife dangled loosely in his other hand.
‘My name’s Anatoly,’ he said in his best Italian. ‘What’s yours?’
The world erupted in a wall of noise. Ben hit the floor painfully on his shoulder and rolled twice as the hurricane of bullets and debris whipped all around him. There was no time to return fire. He lashed out with his foot, kicking open a fire door. Scrambling through it, he caught a glimpse of gleaming tiled steps spiralling steeply down below him in a tight square pattern. He realised he was on the landing of a fire escape stairwell.
In the next instant, the two gunmen crashed through the swinging fire door after him. Ben threw himself down the steps. The heavy boom of the shotgun resounded in the stairwell. A window shattered, showering Ben with broken glass as he went tumbling down the tiled steps. The next landing was just a few metres down. He hit it on his back and returned fire upwards, one-handed, feeling the snappy recoil from his Steyr twist his hand up and round. The three-shot burst caught the shotgunner across the chest and his knees buckled.
First kill. Ben hadn’t wanted it that way, but sometimes you didn’t get the choice.
The dead man came tumbling down the fire escape, carried forward by his own momentum, and landed on Ben with an impact that drove the air out of his lungs. The big guy straddled the top of the stairs with his feet apart and aimed the AR-15 down the stairwell. Ben knew all too well that those rifle bullets would punch effortlessly through car doors, toughened glass, even masonry. A human shield wasn’t going to slow them down much. He aimed the Steyr over the shoulder of the corpse and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened.
The whole problem with small automatic weapons was that they tended to shoot themselves dry in a matter of seconds. A twenty-round mag in a fast-cycling action like the Steyr’s didn’t last long at all. Worse, the spare he’d tucked in his jeans pocket had fallen out as he’d rolled down the steps. He could see it lying there halfway between him and the landing. No way to get to it in time.
But it wasn’t just Ben’s gun that had run empty. The big guy swore, released the taped-together mags of his rifle and reinserted them upside down. Before he could release the bolt and hose the stairwell with bullets, Ben had slid out from under the body of his colleague and was leaping down the stairs. He made it to the next bend before the big guy could get him in his sights again. Bullets hammered off the wall where he’d been a second ago. Leaping down the stairs, Ben spotted another landing with two doors leading off it. He made a split-second choice and ripped open one of the doors, praying it wasn’t a broom cupboard.
It wasn’t. A dark corridor opened up in front of him. Before the big guy could see which way he’d gone, Ben had slammed the door shut behind him and was sprinting hard down the corridor. He tore through another door, hit a fork in the corridor and took a right.
As he ran, he was getting his bearings. He was on the ground floor now, and had probably come down the same way the guys he’d locked in the kiln had come up. The second two must have come round the other way, heading him off in a pincer movement.
Moving more slowly and cautiously now that he’d managed to lose his pursuer, Ben wove his way onwards until he found himself in a familiar-looking hallway. To his left was the foot of the main staircase, ahead of him was the entrance to the glass walkway through to the gallery.
He stopped, listened. He could hear no movement from the gallery. Maybe everybody was dead already and the rest of the gunmen had escaped. Or maybe they were all watching him on CCTV, waiting quietly for him to walk in there so they could riddle him with bullets.
It was as he stood there figuring out his next move that he heard the cry from the half-open door on the far side of the hallway.
A woman’s cry. Someone in distress.
A vision of Donatella Strada leaped into Ben’s mind. He raced across the hall and slipped into the room.
Sprawled helplessly on her back across a chaise longue was a young girl of about fifteen or sixteen. A man stood over her with his back to Ben. The first thing Ben noticed about him was the long blond ponytail. He’d removed his mask, and thrown it on the floor together with his gun, a Steyr machine pistol identical to the empty weapon in Ben’s hand. The man’s gun was just a couple of steps out of reach. Careless.
Ben moved a little closer, and recognised the girl as the sullen teenager from the exhibition. Her hair was dishevelled, her face contorted and streaked with tears.
The next thing Ben noticed about the man was the six-inch double-edged combat knife that he was using to cut away the girl’s clothes piece by piece. Her dress was slashed up the middle and hung open. He had the blade up inside her bra and was sawing slowly through the middle of it, talking softly to her as he sliced the flimsy material.
The girl’s eyes opened just a little wider as she saw Ben. The man seemed to tense, sensing a new presence in the room. He turned.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ People tended to revert to their native tongue in moments of surprise. The Russian.
Ben raised the empty Steyr. He took a step closer. ‘Have you forgotten our conversation? I thought we agreed you weren’t going to harm anyone else.’
The Russian blinked. ‘It’s you,’ he said, switching from Russian to English. He spoke it with an American accent. Too many Hollywood movies.
‘Get away from her,’ Ben said, motioning with the gun. ‘I haven’t touched her. See for yourself.’
‘Get away from her.’
The Russian stepped away from the girl, but he kept hold of the knife. The teenager immediately covered herself with the tatters of her dress and curled up tight on the chaise longue, making small sounds and shuddering as though she’d been thrown in icy water.
‘Who are you?’ the man asked, with what sounded like genuine curiosity.
‘My name’s Ben Hope.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m just a tourist,’ Ben said. ‘Came to see some art.’
‘Looks like I picked the wrong gallery.’
‘Looks that way to me, too,’ Ben said, and took another step.
The Russian chuckled. For a man with a machine gun aimed directly at his face, he was a little too composed. ‘You are from England.’
‘I don’t live there any more. And you’re Ukrainian,’ Ben said.
‘Excellent guess. My name is Anatoly Shikov.’ He said it as though it should mean something to Ben. It didn’t, but just the fact that the Russian had told him meant a lot. It meant he was confident Ben wasn’t leaving the room alive. The guy had some kind of angle – what it was, Ben didn’t know yet.
‘I think you should lose the knife, Anatoly,’ Ben said. ‘Things will go better for you that way. Then you can take me to where you’re keeping the hostages. It’s time to give this up.’
Anatoly’s blue eyes twinkled with a glacier light. ‘I disagree. I think you should drop the gun. I think you would have shot me by now. I think I am the only one armed here, yes?’ He waggled the knife loosely in his hand, then pointed the tip of the blade at Ben.
Ben shrugged and tossed away the Steyr. ‘Someone’s going to get hurt, Anatoly, and it’s not going to be me.’
‘Let us find out.’
In the next split second, Ben’s eyes darted to the knife. It was a strange-looking weapon, with a large nub on the top of its hilt that wasn’t a bayonet-fixing lug. The Russian was holding it oddly in his hand, and the way he was pointing it . . .
Almost as if it were a gun . . .
There was a sharp crack and something blurred through the air towards Ben. At the same instant he realised what the weapon was, he was ducking out of the way. Fast, but not quite fast enough to avoid the hurtling blade. It ripped through the left shoulder of his T-shirt, slicing the flesh on its way past before embedding itself with a judder in a bookcase behind him.
Ben had heard of the infamous Spetsnaz ballistic knife, but he’d never seen one in action before. That strange nub was a release catch for the blade, which was propelled faster than a crossbow bolt by the powerful spring inside the hilt. Combat dagger meets flick-knife meets harpoon gun. Very KGB. Very effective. He touched his left shoulder and his fingers came away thick with blood. No pain yet, just a burning tightness. The pain would come, though.
‘Handy little toy,’ Ben said. ‘You should practise more with it.’
Anatoly tossed away the empty hilt and backed off several steps, moving round in a curve towards the fireplace. Groping behind him, he grabbed hold of a heavy cast iron poker and swung it wildly as Ben closed in fast. Ben stepped out of the range of the blow, felt the humming
whoosh
of the poker as it passed an inch from his nose. He moved back in, threw a kick at the Russian’s knee that didn’t connect hard enough to break it. The Russian cried out in pain and rage, bared his teeth in hatred and swung the poker again. Ben ducked. The poker smashed into the mantelpiece, breaking off a big triangular chunk of marble that fell with a crash to the hearth. Ben bent low, scooped it up and hurled it with all his strength at the Russian’s head.
Anatoly saw the lump of marble flying towards him and tried to bat it out of the way like a baseball player. The world’s thinnest bat against the world’s heaviest ball. The poker hummed through the air and connected with nothing. The chunk of marble caught him on the cheekbone with a solid crunch. He dropped the poker and looked dazed for just an instant, then staggered back across the room with blood pouring from the ragged gash below his eye.
‘I told you not to harm these people,’ Ben said. He picked up the poker. ‘You should have listened to me.’
Anatoly staggered across the room to the bookcase in which the Spetsnaz blade had embedded itself. He twisted and ripped it out of the wood. His eyes were filled with maniacal hatred. He screamed and came running at Ben like a wild man, holding the blade high.
He was three metres away when Ben brought the poker down hard and fast and let go. It sailed like an iron spear, and Anatoly ran right into it. Their combined momentum drove it deep into his brain. He went down on his back as if hit by a cannonball and lay still. He was still clutching the blade and his eyes remained fixed on Ben’s, but there was no life in them any more.
Ben could feel the warm wetness of the blood running down his shoulder, making his T-shirt stick to him. A trickle went down his arm and dripped from his elbow. He turned to the girl, went over to the chaise longue where she was still curled up tight, shaking, staring at nothing. He felt her brow. Clammy and cold. She was going into shock.
He was about to say something reassuring, when he heard the front door of the Academia Giordani burst in.