‘You make it sound so personal,’ Sinclair snapped. ‘I didn’t have her killed. It’s just politics. We couldn’t have known what Chapman had told his daughter until we had hold of her phone. The message might have ruined everything. And we couldn’t just steal the damn thing from her handbag — if she knew anything at all, it had to be silenced. As it turned out, we needn’t have worried about the bloody message. It would never have stood up in court. But, as you know, you can’t always predict these things.’
Right now, Ben was predicting how many blows from the blunt edge of the shovel it would take to separate Sinclair’s head from his shoulders. ‘You could have had a bullet put in Moss’s head while he was still tucked away on Little Cayman. Nobody would have even known. Instead you ordered the deaths of sixteen innocent people.’
Sinclair shook his head vehemently. ‘Too many people had already come into contact with Moss. If he’d suddenly turned up dead, washed up on a beach with his head blown off, who knows what might have come out? That he was a former secret service agent? That would have been sloppy. Tartarus doesn’t do sloppy. This way, we could to make him disappear completely. It was a perfect opportunity. Until you came along.’
‘Who’s Jennifer Pritchard?’
‘That’s not her real name. She’s one of ours.’
‘And you planted her at CIC to erase all trace of Moss getting on the plane.’
Sinclair nodded.
‘And Shelton?’
‘Eliminated the day afterwards. Carbon Monoxide poisoning. A leaky appliance at his flat in Hammersmith.’ Sinclair shrugged. ‘It happens all the time.’
‘Another perfect opportunity,’ Ben said. He was eyeing the agent closely.
Because something was happening.
When Sinclair had begun his forced confession a few minutes earlier, he’d been pale and shaking with terror. Now, a peculiar change had come over him. He was saying too much, too openly, and too confidently. The fear in his eyes had diminished, gradually returning to the same confident sparkle from when Ben had first met him. ‘Perfect opportunities are what Tartarus specialises in exploiting, Major,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘And though you may not realise it, there’s one developing even as we speak. Its outcome, needless to say, not so favourable for you.’
‘Are you developing a sense of humour, Sinclair? Have you forgotten the situation you’re in?’
‘You don’t quite grasp what you’re dealing with, old chap. There you are, thinking that you’ve brought me to this deserted spot where you could press the truth out of me and get rid of me. Whereas in fact it’s I who allowed you to bring me to the perfect location for us to dispose of you.’ Sinclair laughed. ‘As you said yourself, six thousand acres is plenty enough room for a man to disappear.’
From somewhere among the trees, a twig snapped Ben looked sharply round to see a dark shadow step out of the forest. And a second. And a third. In moments, he was surrounded by armed men.
‘I did tell you that Tartarus doesn’t do sloppy,’ Sinclair said breezily. ‘All our agents are trained to use code to indicate when they’re under duress. Briggs back there told me a lot more on the phone than you imagined. “Ellis and Nash are down?” There are no Ellis and Nash. While I’ve been keeping you talking all this time, our people have been moving into position, using the GPS tracking device from that Audi you so cleverly decided to borrow from my men. Now, I’m afraid you’re in rather more trouble than you’re ever going to get out of.’
‘Drop the weapon — down on your knees!’ commanded a voice as more armed men came stalking out of the forest, approaching from all sides.
Ben sighed and tossed the gun. But if he was going to get shot, he didn’t want the last thing he saw to be the cheesy grin plastered across Sinclair’s face.
‘Fuck it,’ he said. And before anyone could react, the shovel was off the ground and spinning through the air. Its blade caught Sinclair in the mouth. Teeth and blood flew. Sinclair let out a crazed howl and staggered back, cupping his hand over his ruined lips.
‘Something to remember me by,’ Ben said.
Spitting gouts of blood, Sinclair snatched up his fallen CZ and aimed it at Ben. There was the same wild look in his eyes as there’d been in those of the Iraqi gunman in Basra who’d put the rifle bullet though Ben’s ribs. Sinclair’s finger tightened on the trigger and his bloody mouth opened in triumph. There was nowhere for Ben to hide.
The shot cracked loudly in the still night air.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Ben staggered back a step and felt his knees go weak at the sound of the gunshot — but there was no impact, no nerve-jangling sensory alarm as the body registered extreme damage.
Blood spurted from Sinclair’s open mouth. His knees buckled under him, and with a last look of pained confusion he collapsed on his face on the forest floor.
Ben looked down at Sinclair’s corpse and raised his hands as the black-clad gunmen surrounded him, weapons trained on him from all sides. Suddenly they parted to make way for a grizzled, heavyset man in his late sixties, wearing a grey suit and holding a smoking pistol.
Now Ben realised who’d shot Sinclair. The man gazed unemotionally at the body. ‘Idiot,’ he grated in a deep, throaty voice, then turned his impassive, strangely pale eyes towards Ben. ‘I beg you not to compel us to use any further force, Major Hope. There’s been quite enough violence tonight already, don’t you think?’
Ben didn’t reply. The man snapped his fingers and two gunmen stepped up to seize Ben’s arms.
‘I can walk by myself,’ Ben said. At a nod from the man in the suit, they let him go. With two guns in his back they guided him through the trees, lighting the way with powerful flashlights, to where a pair of identical black Range Rovers and a plain, unmarked panel van were parked by the Audi. One gunman opened the back door of the van, another motioned for Ben to get inside. Before the van door was slammed shut, closing him in total darkness, Ben caught a glimpse of the man in the suit climbing awkwardly into the passenger seat of the lead Range Rover.
Instants later, the vehicles took off. Ben sat on the hard inner wheel-arch of the van and braced himself as it bounced over the rutted forest track. After a while they hit smooth road and the bouncing settled to a steady thrumming roar that went on for the best part of an hour before Ben felt the van turn sharply, as if passing through an entrance. He heard men’s voices and the rattle of metal gates.
The van rolled to a halt. The back doors opened, and the light of dawn flooded inside. More guns pointing at him. A harsh order to get out.
Ben stepped down to the cracked, weedy concrete, flexed his stiff legs and looked around him in the early morning haze. The two Range Rovers and the Audi were parked a few yards away, already empty, hot metal ticking as it cooled. Judging by the journey time, he estimated they’d travelled about thirty or forty miles from the northeast edge of London to somewhere rural and secluded — Buckinghamshire, maybe, or Cambridgeshire. Wherever the place was, there was no mistaking the high wire security perimeter, iron gates and neglected-looking prefab buildings of a disused military base.
Ben was hustled indoors by his captors. In a large, neon-lit, otherwise completely empty room with no windows, the man in the suit was sitting on a wooden chair waiting for him. He peered over his spectacles as Ben was shown inside. The door locked, closing them in alone together.
Under the hard glare of the strip-lights, the heavyset old man looked even older. Deep lines creased his brow, and there were grey pouches under his eyes. It seemed to take him an effort to breathe. He gazed at Ben with those pale, unemotional eyes and spoke in his gravelly voice: ‘Major, my name is one you won’t have heard. I am Hayden Roth.’