Another piece of equipment he’d fielded was a decidedly non-standard item. During the Malayan jungle campaign in the 1950s, one of the tricks employed by Communist guerrillas to evade British Army Ghurkha trackers had been to shoot a poor unsuspecting tiger and use one or more of its severed paws to print pugmarks over their own tracks in soft ground. Ben had obtained the deer’s foot a few days earlier, and was using it in the same painstaking fashion, step by step, to obliterate any tracks he left in the dirt. A true deer spoor couldn’t be replicated exactly that way, but by the time the trackers came, the prints would have been weathered enough by morning dew, rain and even sunlight to confuse them.
Hours passed. Inch by inch, mile by mile, pausing frequently to look and listen, he worked his way around the objective until, eventually, he reached the north-east point overlooking it from the high ground. There he used the cover of thick bushes to lie flat and scan the surrounding area with his night-vision binoculars, examining it in overlapping strips to study every detail.
The old stone house was all in darkness, except for a single light in a window on the first floor. It was a large and imposing property, all the more so for its remoteness, standing completely alone in the midst of the wilderness.
Based on Ben’s knowledge of his target, he didn’t expect the man to have company. That of the female variety, at any rate, could be ruled out with almost complete certainty. He was vociferous in his staunch dislike of women generally, partially resulting from, and partially the cause of, the unhappy endings of his four marriages. As for male company, he had no close friends of his own sex either. He was famously independent, curmudgeonly and unsociable, preferring his own solitary company to that of even a dog, let alone the family he’d never had, and was exactly the sort of person who would be inclined to spend Christmas alone up here in the big, rambling house in the middle of nowhere.
Nor did Ben expect the target to be expecting him. Seven years was a long time. Plenty long enough for guards to be dropped, and for guilty men to convince themselves they’d got away with it.
But Ben was being prudent nonetheless. This wasn’t a man to be taken lightly, not by him, not by anyone.
The target’s name was Liam Falconer. He was fifty-six years old, a career officer with three and a half decades of service. The last time Ben had seen him, six years earlier at his retirement ceremony in Hereford, he’d been slender and fit, sandy hair just beginning to turn silver at the temples. There was no reason to suppose he had changed a great deal physically from that day, when Ben had shaken his hand and thanked him sincerely for all he’d done for him. Soon after that, Falconer had moved to Scotland to live in peace and seclusion on his hundred-acre Highland estate and pursue his interests of grouse shooting and salmon fishing. His nearest neighbours, if indeed they had ever spoken to him, would have no idea of his real identity. Even less of an idea of what his job had been until March 1998, or the secret military world he had presided over for almost sixteen years — a world whose scope and true nature most ordinary people could barely begin to understand.
The reality was that men like Falconer never really retired; they just became more deeply, subtly embedded in the system that had formed them. There were always jobs for those kinds of men. Falconer belonged to that rare breed, possessed of a certain skill set and a certain mentality, who were far too precious to be allowed to spend the final decades of their lives gardening or vegetating in front of television sports. Their minds were their real asset, not their ability to jump out of helicopters and run up a mountain in full pack, or engage the enemy in battle, or stalk up to a sentry in absolute silence and unhesitatingly slit their throat with a razor-sharp killing knife. Those physical skills they might once have excelled at were just the very bottom rung of a ladder that went so high, it disappeared into the clouds. Only those who reached the top ever really knew what went on up there.
And Falconer had reached the top, the very top.
Because, prior to his retirement, Brigadier Liam Falconer CBE had been the head of Ben’s direct chain of command as the British military’s DSF, Director of UK Special Forces.
2
These days, Ben Hope called himself a ‘freelance crisis response consultant’. It was a deliberately vague and euphemistic cover-all term for the kind of work he’d drifted into during the six months since quitting the SAS after too many long and brutal years.
The work he did now wasn’t any less dangerous, but someone had to do it. With the secrets of his past that still haunted him, his military skills, his flair for languages and his talent for undercover detective work, it hadn’t been long before he’d found himself drawn into the world of kidnap and ransom, safeguarding the victims of the billion-dollar business that preyed on innocent people and their loved ones. There was nothing Ben despised more than those who violated and exploited the weak and the defenceless.
Wherever there were people, and wherever those people had money, the kidnap and ransom business flourished. Along with warfare and prostitution, as a trade it was as old as human history itself and showed little sign of ever going away. In the modern age, K&R was expanding at an exponential rate year on year. As a result, his work carried him all over. Europe, North Africa, Central America, the Middle East, all the big hotspots.
Sometimes it didn’t take him so far from home. When the eleven-year-old daughter of a wealthy private cosmetic surgeon had been snatched from an exclusive private girls’ school outside London in early October that year and her parents had despaired of getting the kind of help they needed from the police, Ben had been privately contacted via the word-of-mouth networks. After agreeing to meet the girl’s father at a discreetly-chosen location, he’d jumped on a plane to London and been hired on the spot to sniff out contacts to trace a certain former nanny to the child who, it was suspected, might have colluded with a certain present boyfriend to snatch the girl as a sure-fire ticket to raising a million or two.
It wouldn’t have been the first such case in the world, and it wouldn’t be the last. These things happened all the time.
Chasing up leads, Ben had followed the trail to an all-night joint in one of the less salubrious districts of Peckham, where an old pal of the ex-nanny’s boyfriend was reported to hang out. Ben’s plan was to find him, lean on him a little and find out what he knew, but the guy hadn’t shown up.
Ben had been about to leave when he’d spotted the familiar face among the crowd thronging the bar. And the familiar face had spotted him in return. One of those chance events, just a flash in time, that can lead you to places you never could have guessed.
In retrospect, the seedy club was exactly the kind of place one might have expected to run into Jaco Lennox. The ex-Para had passed SAS selection a couple of years after Ben, in 1993, but Ben hadn’t known him well. The way the regiment operated, frequently working in small teams deployed overseas for months at a time, it was possible for men from different squadrons to cross paths only seldom. In Jaco Lennox’s case, Ben counted it as a blessing that he’d never had to work with the guy. Lennox had a reputation as a rough, brutal troublemaker. It had been said it was hard to tell which he loved most: women, whisky or war. All three had threatened to take him down on numerous occasions. And he was an unmanageable bastard, too. He’d been through more disciplinary scrapes and teetered on the edge of dismissal from the regiment more times than any other trooper Ben knew.
It therefore hadn’t come as much of a surprise to hear through the grapevine that Lennox had quit, just a couple of months after Ben himself had left. The circumstances of Lennox’s departure from the regiment had been shrouded in the usual military bureaucratic secrecy that usually indicated a little overfondness for the bottle, among other vices. The rumour mill had suggested much the same. It was amazing he’d stuck it for so long.