The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (47 page)

Ben drove fast out of Milan, wanting to put as much distance between the city and themselves as possible. He checked his mirror every few minutes. Nobody was following them. Sleet and hail hammered the Fiat’s windscreen for two hours as they headed north-east towards the Austrian border. Beside him, Leigh was bent over the old letter, deep in thought. Signs flashed up for
autostrada
services.

The motorway cafeteria was half-empty. They bought two coffees and headed for a corner table that was far from the other diners and close to an emergency exit. Ben sat facing the room and kept an eye on the entrance.

Neither of them had eaten anything since the night before, but the letter came first. Leigh unrolled and flattened it carefully across the plastic table, using the salt and pepper mills to weigh down the edges and stop it from springing back into a tight curl.

‘This is so precious,’ she said, running her fingers over the aged, faded paper.

‘Fake or no fake, it’s only precious if it can teach us
something.’ Ben took Oliver’s file out of his bag and opened up his notebook. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got. How’s your German?’

‘I can sing it better than I can translate it. How’s yours?’

‘I can speak it better than I can write it.’ He ran his eye over the handwriting. Was this really Mozart’s original hand? It looked authentic enough, but then, what did he know? He studied it up close. The writing was scratchy in places, and it looked as though the letter had been dashed off in the back of a carriage.

The best place to start was from the top.
‘Mein
liebster Freund Gustav
,’ he read. ‘My dearest friend Gustav.’

‘Good start.’

‘That’s the easy bit,’ he said.

They worked for an hour, and the coffee cooled untouched on the table. The translation came together very slowly, piece by piece. Ben glanced over his shoulder around the room every few seconds, checking for any unwelcome company.

‘What’s
Die
Zauberflöte
?’ he asked.

‘That’s easy.
The Magic Flute.
What about this word?’ she said, pointing. ‘I can’t make it out.’ She chewed her pen thoughtfully.

‘It’s
Adler
.’

‘Adler?’

‘Adler is
eagle’
, Ben said, biting his lip. It didn’t mean anything. He filled the word into his patchy translation. Understanding could come later. First, get it all down.

It took another three coffees and several pages of
crossed-out notes before the translation had taken shape. Ben turned the notebook sideways on the table so that they could read it together.

‘What do you make of it?’

‘Let’s talk about it while we eat. I’m ravenous.’

The lasagne was hot, tasty and plentiful. They ate as they talked, with the letter carefully tucked away in Ben’s bag. He had the notebook open in front of him, next to his plate.

Leigh looked disappointed. ‘There’s nothing here that we didn’t already know from Professor Arno. Mozart was warning his Lodge friend about these Ra people who were out to get them. That’s it. It’s a waste of time.’

‘Adler’
, Ben said through a mouthful of pasta. ‘Eagle.’

‘What about it?’

He pointed at the notebook. ‘It looks from this as though “The Eagle” is important, and connected with the Order of Ra.’

‘How, though?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Oliver’s notes mentioned eagles a lot.’

‘Might Eagle be a code for something?’

Ben nodded. ‘Could be. Eagle. Maybe a symbol.’

‘Imperial eagle?’

‘It can’t be that. Read it. The Eagle is something or someone the Emperor paid favours to.’

‘If we knew what the favours were—’

‘But we don’t.’ He scanned the letter again. ‘There’s nothing more.’

‘Basically we’re back where we started.’ Leigh sighed. ‘We’re no closer to knowing what happened to Oliver.’ She let her fork clatter down and rested her head on her hand. ‘Maybe this is all a wild-goose chase. Maybe the letter has nothing to do with any of it. And what if it really is just a fake?’

Ben shook his head. ‘I’d be inclined to agree,’ he said. ‘But there’s one thing that’s puzzling me. The room where the murder took place-do you remember the ram?’

She’d been trying to forget what she’d seen in the video-clip. ‘Ram?’

‘On the wall, up above the altar or whatever it was, there was a gold ram’s head with long horns.’

She hesitated. ‘Rams. Goats. Idols. Horns. You’re talking about devil worship now.’

‘No. Something a lot older than that. Remember I said I studied Theology?’

‘That
was
a surprise, Ben.’

It was a chapter of his life that he didn’t like to talk about, so he moved on quickly. ‘Ra was the sun god of the ancient Egyptians. Arno confirmed it.’

Leigh didn’t see where this was going.

‘He didn’t always go by his name,’ Ben said. ‘He was depicted in symbols too. Usually the sun, but often also as a ram. You see him in Egyptian art as the body of a man with the head of a ram, or sometimes just the head on its own.’

‘Are you sure? Why a ram?’

‘The horns. They symbolized rays of light coming from the sun. It’s an old, old symbol and it became pretty universal through the centuries. The Hebrew word
karan
, meaning rays, is a close match with
keren
, meaning horns.’

She took a moment to digest this, then nodded. ‘Go on.’

‘Something about that gold ram on Olly’s film struck me at the time,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t think what it was, but now I have an idea. You’re going to think this sounds crazy.’

‘Nothing sounds crazy to me any more, believe me.’

‘Try this on. I think the Order of Ra still exists.’

‘That
does
sound crazy.’

‘Yes, but think about it. What did Oliver witness? They cut the guy’s tongue out and then disembowelled him. What did Arno tell us about Lutze? The exact same thing happened to him. Coincidence? I don’t think so.’

She pulled a face. ‘I’m listening.’

‘Now remember what Arno told us before he was shot? He said,
“So it is true”’

‘I remember. So what was true?’

‘He never got a chance to finish. But he was pointing at the ram’s head as he said it. I think he
knew something. Don’t ask me what. But whatever suspicions he had, hearing the news of Oliver’s death must have confirmed them. He got frightened enough of the letter to want to keep it far away. You saw how well he hid it.’

Leigh thought for a while, poking at her food absently. ‘If the letter is so dangerous, why didn’t they come after Dad while he still had it?’

‘Firstly, your dad was more interested in the signature at the bottom, and its historical value,’ Ben said. ‘Oliver was the one who went deeper. Secondly, until Oliver began to investigate it and found what he found, I don’t think anyone cared about the letter at all. It only became important when it led him to them.’

‘But how could it have?’

‘I don’t know that yet,’ he replied.

She was silent for a minute. ‘Say you’re right and these people still exist. Who would they be? Where would you find them?’

He shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t find them, not easily. Remember who they were. This wasn’t just some silly cult of men with funny handshakes. They had links with the secret police. They were deep in the heart of politics, not just in Austria. Those were uncertain times. The powers of the day were so scared of a Europe-wide revolution that they’d have been very happy to encourage them. Think how big they might be now, two centuries later. Not only big, but tight into the establishment.’

‘But this is modern democratic Europe. Surely that kind of repressive organization doesn’t exist any more.’

‘I know you’re not that naïve, Leigh. The new order is built on top of the old. Nothing ever really changes.’

‘I thought Arno was the conspiracy theorist.’

‘Maybe he was right,’ Ben said.

‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

He nodded, paused. ‘I haven’t told you much about things I did in the forces. I don’t talk about it. I don’t
want
to talk about it. But there’s a lot that happens that ordinary people don’t get to hear of. Ever. We fought whole wars that the history books will never mention. We operated far from the main battlefields, and we carried out operations that even we didn’t understand. We had no idea what we were doing. We were just given targets and orders. We destroyed places without ever knowing their names. We were pawns in a game. We were fools. Oliver knew that years ago, but I didn’t have the sense to listen to him. And the men pushing the pieces, the players who actually control things, are people you’ve never heard of. Hardly anyone knows who they are.’

‘So who are we dealing with here?’

Ben shrugged. ‘Who knows? People right inside the infrastructure, hidden behind layers and layers of fronts. People with connections. People who come after you when you show your face, use your passport or credit card, or try to talk to the police. This goes very deep. That’s why we need to tread carefully if we’re going to come out of this. And we’re going to do it my way.’

There was a long silence.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘What do we do now?’

Vienna

Late that night

Markus Kinski sat up in bed, blinking. His mobile was screaming near his ear. He planted his feet on the floor. The clock on his bedside table glowed 1.09 a.m. He snatched up the phone. Was it Clara calling him so late? How could it be? He’d been sure to take her phone away. Panic rushed through him. What was wrong?

It wasn’t Clara. The woman on the other end introduced herself as Leigh Llewellyn. He listened, waking up fast. ‘So where can I meet you?’ he asked her.

Leigh covered the phone with her hand and looked questioningly at Ben.

They’d talked about this. Her idea had been a public place in the heart of Vienna, somewhere that offered the safety of bustling crowds. It was a smart idea, but Ben wanted to put this Kinski to the test. The best way to do that was to set up an initial rendezvous that would offer a good opportunity for an ambush. Ben nodded, and she gave Kinski the reply they’d agreed on.

‘Meet me at the lake,’ she said.

Kinski didn’t need to ask which one she meant. ‘OK. When?’

‘Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock.’

Kinski was there at quarter to. The Mercedes turned off the road and crunched on the thin snow as it lurched towards the lakeside in four-wheel-drive mode. He got out, checked his watch, and walked up and down the edge of the lake for a while. Minutes passed. His breath billowed and he clapped his hands to keep them warm. In the pocket of his heavy greatcoat he had a Thermos of hot black coffee, and he slurped back three scalding cupfuls. This winter was a cold one, colder even than last year, and the lake was fully frozen over now.

He heard a car in the distance and tensed. He shielded his eyes from the low sun. Through the scattered pine trees he could make out bits of the road that swept around the lake, three hundred yards away. There was a bright yellow hatchback moving along it. He watched. It kept going. He looked at his watch again. It was well after nine. Where was she?

He kicked his heels and walked around. This was stupid. She wasn’t going to turn up. He flapped his arms, skimmed some stones across the ice and drank some more coffee, and then he had to go and piss in the bushes. By half past nine he was freezing and the coffee was all gone. By ten he decided to give up.

He went back to the Mercedes, muttering to himself. ‘What the fuck’s the matter with her? OK, fine, if she
doesn’t want to know what I know, I’ve got better fucking things to do with my time…’ He turned the key in the ignition and the heater started blasting cold air. Kinski swore again and turned the blower down.

And froze as he felt the cold steel against the base of his skull. The click of the safety resonated through his head. ‘No sudden moves,’ said a voice from behind him.

Raising himself up onto the back seat, Ben reached forward with his free hand and drew Kinski’s SIG-Sauer out of its holster. Now, at least, he had a pistol with something in it.

He watched Kinski. He was a bear of a man, somewhere shy of fifty, weathered and ruddy, with the features of a prize-fighter and a nose that had been broken more than once. He looked like he could be dangerous, but he was built more for strength than for speed. If he could land a punch it would be over. But Ben was faster.

Kinski snarled. ‘What the fuck do you want from me?’

Ben didn’t reply.

The detective wanted to whirl round in his seat and rip this guy’s head off. ‘If you’re the motherfucker who took my daughter, let me tell you that she’s safe now. You won’t get her again.’

‘Why would I want your daughter?’ Ben asked.

Kinski hesitated. It was a strange question. The gunman’s German was good, but he spoke with a foreign accent. What was it? American? British? He rolled his eyes round as far as he could, trying to get
a glimpse of him. Trying to get a look at his ear. But the guy was careful to keep out of sight. Who was he?

‘Because I know you murdered Llewellyn,’ Kinski replied, probing, testing. Now for the big bluff. ‘And I’m not the only one who knows, so kill me if you like but it won’t end there.’

‘Oliver Llewellyn was my friend,’ Ben said. ‘Someone murdered him, but it wasn’t me. I’m here to find out who did it, and when I find them I’m going to kill them.’ He withdrew the empty .45 and shoved it back in his belt. The police SIG-Sauer 9mm was well cared for and fully loaded. He didn’t think he was going to need to use it.

He’d been there half an hour before Kinski arrived, hiding in the trees. The big cop’s behaviour hadn’t been that of a decoy with hidden cronies waiting to pounce. No man would chuck stones, flap his arms like a kid or take a piss in the open knowing his friends were watching. He would have been glancing around him at their hidden positions, looking hunched and nervous with the anticipation, trying too hard to seem cool. And Kinski’s reaction to the gun at his head inclined Ben to trust him.

Though not too much. It was Ben’s nature to be cautious.

‘You got any coffee left in there?’ he said.

Kinski had felt the pressure of the gun disappear. He turned round slowly and looked at Ben, his heavy brow knitted. His own 9mm was in the intruder’s hand, but only loosely.

‘I’m sorry I had to do that to you, but I needed to
check you out.’ Ben pointed at the Thermos. ‘And I would appreciate some of that coffee.’ The air from the heater was beginning to warm up, but his long wait in the snow had chilled him to the bone.

‘It’s finished.’

‘Then it’ll have to be this,’ Ben said. Keeping one hand on the SIG, he reached for his flask and unscrewed it. He took a swig and then handed it to Kinski.

The cop shook his head. ‘I’m on the wagon,’ he muttered.

‘Good man.’ Ben put the flask away.

Kinski relaxed a little. At least it didn’t look as though he was going to die. Not today, anyway. ‘So what’s your relation to Leigh Llewellyn?’ he asked. ‘Boyfriend? Husband?’

‘Neither. Like I said, a friend of the family.’

‘Do opera stars usually have friends with guns?’

Ben smiled. ‘I was in the army with Oliver.’

Kinski nodded. Ex-military. That made sense, from the way this guy had sneaked up on him so easily. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked tentatively.

‘You can call me Ben.’

‘Markus Kinski.’

‘Good to meet you, Markus. Now perhaps we could drive a while, and you could tell me what you know about Oliver’s death. And then, if I’m satisfied that I can trust you, I’ll take you to meet Leigh.’