The Nemesis Program (Ben Hope) (6 page)

‘It is not hooey,’ she said firmly.

‘I can see you sincerely believe that. But what am I supposed to make of it? What can I do?’

She leaned close to him and replied, ‘Help me.’

‘What makes you think I even could?’

‘You’re Ben Hope. What more is there to say?’ She paused, looking entreatingly into his face. ‘You helped me once. It wasn’t so long ago. Won’t you help me again?’

He didn’t reply.

There was a long silence. The young mother had taken her child away from the swings and was holding his hand as they made their way along the tree-shaded footpath into the distance. The park was empty now, apart from just the two of them sitting on the bench.

‘I shouldn’t have come here,’ Roberta said bitterly. ‘I’m wasting my time.’

‘I’m getting married in three days, Roberta,’ Ben said.

‘Yeah. Married. Thanks for reminding me.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Jesus, I remember it all so well, everything that happened between us. It seems like yesterday. Then that day you came to Canada to find me … I thought …’

‘Do we have to go over this?’ he said. ‘I came to make sure you were all right. And to say goodbye.’

‘I really cared for you. You know that, don’t you? We had something together.’

‘It wouldn’t have worked, Roberta. A guy like me – I don’t know. I was restless then. I just wasn’t ready to settle in one place.’

‘Or with one woman,’ she said. ‘But apparently, you are now.’

‘I told you. I’m different now.’

‘Or maybe you just found the right woman now.’ She let out a long sigh, then tried to smile. ‘That’s fine, Ben. I’m happy for you. I mean it. I can see now that I shouldn’t have troubled you. You’ve made a new life for yourself. Who the hell am I to turn up like this out of no place and disturb it?’

‘You know who you are to me,’ he said.

‘Was,’ she snorted. ‘I guess that’s ancient history too, huh?’ She started plucking at her handbag for her car keys. ‘Let’s go. I’ll drive you back to your domestic bliss. Then I’ll be gone, and I swear I’ll never bother you again.’

‘Hey.’ He reached out a hand.

She flinched away from his touch. ‘Don’t worry about me. I don’t need your help anyway.’ Her eyes had filled with tears again. She wiped them angrily away. ‘
Shit
, where’d I put the goddamned keys?’

Ben’s throat felt tight and he was confused with so many emotions. ‘You look tired, Roberta. Why don’t you stay a night or two at the vicarage? Jude would welcome having a house guest.’

She let out a mirthless laugh. ‘I suppose you’d want me to come to the wedding, too? Act as maid of honour or something? No thanks.’ Finding the keys, she stood up from the bench abruptly.

Ben opened his mouth to say something, but the words were still on his lips when the splinters flew with a sharp
crack
from the backrest of the bench and something smacked hard off the wall behind them.

For a short fraction of a second that seemed like a full minute, he stared at the small bullet hole that had appeared right where Roberta had been sitting just a moment earlier and only a few inches away from him.

Half a second was all the time he had to react before a volley of silenced gunfire erupted from across the park.

Chapter Six

In the same instant that splinters and pieces of tree bark exploded all around them, Ben jack-knifed violently over the back of the bench, grabbing Roberta’s arm and hauling her roughly down to the ground with him.

The gunfire paused for a heartbeat as whoever was shooting at them adjusted their aim. Then another volley of bullets churned up the ground and spat dirt around the base of the bench. A round screamed off the cast-iron leg Ben was pressed hard up against and he felt the hot copper-jacketed lead pass through his hair, millimetres from his skull.

Roberta was curled up in a ball on the ground, crying out in terror. Ben scrambled over to her to cover her body with his. With his face pressed down in the dirt he caught a momentary glimpse of movement among the bushes across the park. Even as he tried desperately to shield Roberta, some detached reptilian part of his mind was busy calculating the enemy’s position and strength.

Range: eighty yards. More than one shooter. Nine-millimetre subsonic ammunition, fully-automatic weapons fitted with sound moderators. This wasn’t local kids larking about with airguns. Conclusion: time to get the hell away from here before they both got shot to pieces.

In seconds, the bench was riddled with holes and offering less and less cover with every passing moment as bullets ripped through the weather-beaten wood and drilled into the ground, ploughed into the trees and threw up spatters of earth left and right. A howling ricochet off something hard and a shower of brick dust suddenly reminded Ben of the low wall behind the bench. In a momentary lull in the shooting as both gunmen reloaded their expended magazines, he sprang up, dragged Roberta bodily to her feet and half-threw, half-pulled her over the wall.

It was a four-foot drop down to the sloping grassy bank on the other side. The two of them hit the soft earth and went tumbling down the slope to the flat ground of the field adjoining the parkland.

Ben was first on his feet. ‘Are you hit?’ he asked urgently as Roberta stood uncertainly. ‘Are you bleeding?’ The shooting had stopped, and for the moment they were out of range of the gunmen. That wouldn’t be the case for long.

‘I don’t think so,’ Roberta answered. Her voice sounded faraway and dazed. Ben quickly inspected her for blood. He’d seen men mortally wounded who hadn’t even known about it for several minutes after getting shot. But Roberta’s only injury seemed to be the small cut to her brow where a flying splinter had broken the skin. ‘You’re okay. Stay there,’ he said, clambered back up the grassy bank and peeped over the wall.

He’d been right about a pair of shooters. He could see them now. The two men had emerged from the cover of the bushes. One was younger, taller, dark-haired, the other older and squatter. They looked fit and strong, and were running across the deserted park towards them with an air of absolute purpose. They were making no attempt to conceal the weapons in their hands. Few men in a vicar’s garb would have been able to make the identification, but Ben instantly knew the stubby black outlines of the Beretta MX4 Storm submachine gun. He’d had half a dozen of their civilian semi-automatic cousins locked up in the armoury at Le Val. The military version was a pure weapon of war. Totally illegal in most countries of the world. Extremely hard to obtain. The choice of professionals.

Who were these men? Ben didn’t have much time to consider the answer, or to yell at Roberta ‘What the hell have you got yourself mixed up in?’. The shooters were halfway across the park already, running fast. Ben slithered back down the bank and rejoined Roberta.

She still appeared stunned from the suddenness and violence of the attack. ‘They’re coming,’ he said. ‘Let’s move.’

‘Where to?’ she gasped, looking around her wide-eyed. Once they left the shelter of the wall, there’d be nothing around them but open field. The nearest cover was the half-built housing estate a hundred and fifty or more yards away, shimmering like a mirage in the heat haze.

Ben had already decided that was the only place they could run to. He could only pray that the gate he could see in the eight-foot wire mesh fence surrounding the building site wasn’t locked. He took her hand tightly in his, and they set off at a sprint towards the distant buildings. The grass was long and lush, and tugged at their ankles as they ran. Roberta stumbled over a rut and went down on one knee. As Ben helped her back to her feet he saw the two men clamber over the wall, spot them across the field and give chase. ‘Move!’ he rasped, yanking her arm.

The chatter of sound-suppressed machine-gun fire sounded from behind. Dirt and shredded grass flew up in Ben and Roberta’s wake.

One thing Ben knew for sure – the gunmen weren’t interested in catching them alive. They were shooting to kill.

He let go of Roberta’s hand and shouted ‘Zigzag!’ She glanced at him in stunned terror for an instant, then understood and began to imitate him as he tore through the long grass in a crazily erratic weave, like a hare trying to evade a chasing lurcher. A desperate strategy. It made them a harder target to hit at this range, but it also gave them further to run than their pursuers.

The wire fence was coming up fast. Signs on posts read DANGER: KEEP OUT and HARD HAT ZONE. Beyond the wire were bare-block buildings, construction skips, cement mixers, enormous mounds of sand, portacabins for the building crews. Ben’s jaw clenched tighter as he saw the heavy chain and padlock looped around the mesh gates. He glanced behind him. In a few seconds the shooters would be close enough to take them down easily.

‘Climb!’ he yelled at Roberta. Without hesitation she hooked her fingers into the wire meshwork and started clambering up the fence. As she reached the top she swung her leg over, scrabbled frantically halfway down and then let go and hit the ground with a soft grunt. Ben was right behind her. He felt dreadfully exposed with his back to the shooters, hanging from the fence like a target on a board.

He heard the muffled bark of shots. A bullet struck sparks off the steel fencepost inches from his right hand as he climbed. He launched himself over the top of the wire and hit the ground the way he’d learned in parachute training, rolling to absorb the impact and leaping straight back to his feet in an instant run.

The buildings were clustered close together, some almost completed and clad in scaffolding, others still in the early stages of construction with bare-block walls just a few feet high. Roberta was already making for the nearest, a shell of a house with no roof and empty holes for doors and windows. She was limping.

More shots. A puff of dust off the wall to Roberta’s left as she staggered inside the building, clutching her leg. Ben was ready to feel a bullet in his back as he sprinted after her, but it didn’t come. He skidded through the doorway.

Roberta was pressed up against the wall, breathing hard, looking at him in alarm. ‘I told you,’ she gasped. ‘
Now
do you believe me? So much for the Paris cops and their bullshit. Serial killer my ass.’

‘What’s wrong with your leg?’ he asked, noticing the way she was holding it.

‘Twisted my ankle jumping from the fence. It’s fine, I can move it,’ she added with a wince of pain.

Ben quickly crouched down and tugged the left leg of her jeans up a few inches. He could see nothing bad, no swelling, no discolouration. ‘You’ll live. If you don’t get shot.’

‘Hell of a thing to say at a time like this,’ she replied anxiously. ‘What do we
do
, Ben?’

His mind was sharp, working fast and smoothly. Trained responses under stress were so deeply conditioned in him that even with adrenaline levels running through his veins that would reduce most men to a panicking jelly, everything appeared in slow motion. He stepped lightly across to the nearest window and peered cautiously out through the glassless hole.

The shooters had reached the fence. As Ben watched, they each aimed their weapons at the padlock on the gate and let off a flurry of gunfire that sounded like a lump hammer clanging against an anvil at impossible speed. The wrecked padlock dropped away, the chain parted and jangled loose. The men kicked the gates open with a metallic clatter and strode into the building site.

‘They’re coming,’ Ben said quietly.

‘Oh, my God. Who
are
they?’

‘We can talk about that later,’ Ben said. ‘For now it’s time to move on. Can you stand?’

She nodded. He took her hand. Put a finger to his lips and then pointed it through the house at the back door. ‘That way,’ he whispered.

Roberta hobbled after him as he exited the building. They skirted a low adjoining wall and crossed a patch of rubble-strewn ground to the house next door, which had its roof A-frames, beams and battens already mounted under a plastic covering that crackled in the soft breeze and darkened the skeletal rooms in shadow.

Ben thrust Roberta into a dim corner with a look that said, ‘Stay there’, and let go of her hand. He trotted to the window. Twenty yards away, the two shooters were stalking through the site with their weapons shouldered and ready, glancing left and right for any movement, any trace of their quarry. Their faces were steely and predatory. The older one signalled to his colleague and they split up out of sight among the buildings and construction machinery.

Ben glanced quickly around him, taking in the layout of their cover. Front door, back door, patio window, garage, other points of entry. Too many possibilities and not enough hiding places. The unfinished home reminded him with sharp discomfort of the dedicated ‘killing house’ that he and his SAS squads had used for live-fire room assault, hostage extraction and anti-terrorist combat drills at the regimental base in Hereford, back in the day. Nothing could escape the killing house without getting drilled full of bullets and buckshot by the Special Forces tactical teams.

If these two guys were even half that proficient at their job, this wasn’t a good place to be. Not a good place at all.

Chapter Seven

‘Ben!’ came a hoarse whisper. Roberta was peering at him worriedly from the shadows. ‘What are we gonna do?’ she hissed.

‘Stay put, for now,’ Ben replied softly. ‘You keep out of sight and keep quiet.’

‘I still know karate,’ she whispered. ‘I can fight.’

Now that the initial shock of the attack had passed, her expression was alert and focused. Ben remembered well enough that Roberta Ryder had always been a lot less squeamish about violence than the average female science academic. During their escapades together in Paris she’d used her Shotokan black belt skills to lethally defend herself against a knife attacker, wrecked cars, been drenched in blood and gore during a gunfight on the banks of the River Seine and later shot a man in the thigh with an automatic pistol. On that occasion she’d saved Ben’s life, not for the first time.