The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (71 page)

Ben frowned. If a former SAS soldier said he was being followed, that was how it was. ‘What about now?’

Charlie shook his head. ‘Pretty sure I lost them. So what do we do? Do we tell the cops what we know? Just hand it over to them?’

‘I don’t like dealing with the police,’ Ben said, ‘unless I absolutely have to.’

‘Then I don’t see any way ahead,’ Charlie said. ‘At least, not for me. This was meant to be a straightforward job. That’s what I told Rhonda.’

The kid with the ball was making another pass through the tables, bouncing it as he went. He ran past the table where the man with the laptop had been. It was empty. The guy had left. The boy suddenly stumbled, and the ball bounced away from him. He ran after it, towards the edge of the pavement. The ball rolled into the road.

Out of the corner of his eye, Ben was suddenly aware of what was happening. There was a van coming down the street. It was green, battered, some kind of delivery vehicle, moving fast, in a hurry to get somewhere. And the boy was chasing his ball right out into its path.

Charlie was talking, but Ben didn’t hear. He turned and looked at the oncoming van. The driver was talking to his passenger, eyes off the road. He hadn’t seen the child.

The ball stopped rolling. The kid crouched to pick it up. Saw the van and froze, wide-eyed. It wasn’t slowing down, and Ben realized with a chill of fear that it couldn’t stop in time to avoid him.

When the mind is working at extreme speed, things seem to happen in ultra-slow motion. Ben burst out of his chair and launched himself into the road. Cleared
the six yards between him and the kid. He bent low as he sprinted, wrapped an arm around the boy’s waist and scooped him off the ground. He heard a grunt of air escape from the kid’s lungs with the impact.

The van was almost on them. Ben dived across its path and hit the ground sliding, using his body as a shield to protect the child from the road surface. The kid was screaming.

The van brakes screeched and the wheels locked up, leaving snakes of rubber on the road. It slewed around and came to a halt at a crazy angle between Ben and the café terrace, rocking on its suspension.

Time restarted. Ben could hear cries and shouts from the tables as people realized what had happened. He could feel where his shoulder had scraped the tarmac, pain beginning to register. Over the bonnet of the van he could see Charlie up on his feet on the café terrace, staring wildly, one hand gripping the back of his chair.

Then the world exploded.

One instant, a café terrace, families and friends sitting having breakfast. The next, a blast of fire engulfed everything, blew everything apart. The shockwave rolled across the pavement and out into the road, tearing down everything in its path. Pieces of tables and chairs and parasols were hurled into the air, tumbled and spun burning in all directions. Flying glass exploded across the street like a giant shotgun blast. The shock lifted the van off its wheels and threw it sideways, its windows bursting outwards.

Ben had been clambering to his feet, still holding on to the child, when the stunning force of the explosion blew him down. He instinctively rolled his body across the boy’s to protect him. Wreckage rained down.

Just as suddenly, and for one eerie moment, everything was completely still. Then the screams began.

Ben’s ears were ringing badly and his head was swimming. His first thought was for the boy. He slowly raised himself up, kneeling in the broken glass. The boy’s eyes met his, wide and terrified. Ben checked for
injury. There was no blood. The kid hadn’t been touched. He was just rigid with shock.

Then Ben thought of Charlie. He staggered to his feet, suddenly aware of terrible pain in his neck and shoulder. His shirt was ripped and wet with blood. He raised his hand up to his neck and his fingers felt something there that they shouldn’t. But he ignored it. He stepped out from behind the burning van and saw the full devastation of the explosion.

It was carnage. Blood-spattered corpses and smouldering body parts were strewn across what used to be the café terrace. People were screaming in horror, others moaning, calling for help, others dying. Some of the wounded were already up on their feet, staggering dazed through the wreckage. Black smoke and the acrid smell of burning filled the air. The street was littered with little fires.

Ben shouted for Charlie. Then he saw him.

Charlie’s hand was still gripping the back of his chair. The hand ended at the wrist. The rest of him was spread across the pavement. Ben looked away and closed his eyes.

It wasn’t long before the screech of sirens drowned out the screams of the survivors and the urgent shouts and chatter of the people flocking to help them. Then all was frantic activity. Paramedics waded in hard and fast, like soldiers through the wreckage. In minutes the street was flooded with emergency vehicles and equipment. Police streamed everywhere, yelling into radios, working fast to cordon off the scene, holding off the
hundreds of onlookers crowding in from neighbouring streets. People were crying and hugging each other, faces contorted in anguish.

Meanwhile the ambulance and coroner’s teams carried out their grim work. The dead were covered with sheets where they lay, waiting to be bagged and loaded. The medics did what they could to patch up the wounded before the ambulances took them away. One by one, vehicles screeched away up the street, fresh ones arriving in a steady flow.

Ben watched the whole thing from across the road. Beside him on the edge of the pavement, the boy sat quietly with his ball between his feet, staring at the scene in front of them. He looked up at Ben with questioning eyes. There was a cut oozing blood above his left eyebrow. Ben patted his shoulder.

Then the boy seemed to see something. He straightened up and then jumped to his feet and ran off before Ben could stop him. He disappeared into the crowd and then was lost in the milling chaos.

After another minute, a paramedic pointed Ben out to his team-mate. They jogged over to him, and he remembered that his shirt was soaked in blood down one side. He hardly felt the pain any more. He was numb all over, and he couldn’t hear properly. He tried to protest as they wrapped a blanket over his shoulders and attended to his wound. He didn’t understand what they were telling him, but they seemed to think the injury was serious. He didn’t have the strength to resist them as they walked him to an ambulance.

He looked over to the terrace. What was left of Charlie
was lying under a bloody sheet. The hand had been removed from the back of the chair. In his daze, Ben wondered where they’d put the hand, and whether they’d found all of him. Then the paramedics got him inside the ambulance and made him lie on a bunk. Doors slammed, an engine revved and the siren started up.

He felt the ambulance accelerate hard up the street. He looked around him. Saw medical equipment, tubes dangling and rattling with the motion of the vehicle. A drip swinging on a stand above him.

He wasn’t alone. Hands were moving over his body, faces peering down at him, the sound of voices somewhere behind the constant ringing in his ears. The distant impressions began to blur. After that, he was drifting, spinning weightlessly into a black space. He dreamed of fire and explosions, saw Charlie’s face smiling at him. Then Charlie’s face was the child’s face, giving him a last look before he ran away into the crowd. Then it became nothing at all.

The twelfth day

Ben woke with a start and sat bolt upright. He blinked and looked around him, disorientated for a second. He was alone in a room. Everything white and clinical. The smell hit him – a sickly combination of disinfectant and hospital food. A trolley clattered past the open door, pushed by an orderly in a blue overall.

As he shifted on the hard bed, Ben winced at the tearing pain in his neck and shoulder. He reached his hand up and felt the big dressing. He remembered now. The moment of the blast. The shards of glass sticking in his neck. The paramedics taking him away.

Then he remembered something else.

Charlie was dead.

His diver’s watch and the wedding ring on its leather thong were on the bedside table. He reached for them gingerly, feeling the pull of the stitches. He stared at the date and time. Nearly twenty-two hours since the explosion. He’d been asleep all day and all night.

He climbed slowly out of bed and walked around
his hospital room, slipping on the watch and hanging the ring around his neck. He found a small private bathroom and wandered in to inspect his dressing in the mirror. He peeled back the edge of it and looked at the wound.

He’d had worse. He couldn’t afford to let a couple of slivers of glass stop him. He pulled the hospital gown off over his head, washed quickly in the sink, then walked back into the room to dress. What was left of his clothes had been folded and left on a chair near the bedside. The ripped, bloody shirt was gone. He stepped into his jeans and shoes.

A nurse came into the room, stared at him and started talking in rapid Greek.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand.’

She gestured towards the bed, trying to shoo him back into it.

He shook his head. ‘I’m getting out of here. But I need a shirt.’

‘You no leave,’ she said, and pointed to his neck. ‘You hurt.’

‘I’m OK,’ he said. ‘I want to leave now.’

‘I call the doctor.’ She turned and went off, shaking her head and muttering to herself. She slammed the door behind her.

He sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, ruffled his hair and waited. After a couple of minutes there was a loud knock at the door. For a second Ben thought it was the doctor come to scold him for wanting to check out too early and to give him the whole bit about complications and infections.

But it wasn’t the doctor. The door swung open and a huge bear of a man walked in. He was several inches taller than Ben, and he had to stoop as he came through the doorway. He stared at Ben with glittering eyes and a wide grin as he strode across the room and grasped his hand in a strong fist. A small dark-skinned woman followed in his wake, beaming at Ben.

The big man shook Ben’s hand vigorously, clinging on as if he never wanted to let go. Tears welled in his eyes. ‘You are a hero,’ he rumbled in heavily accented English.

For a second Ben was bemused. But then he saw the child appear in the doorway. He had a plaster over his left eyebrow and a couple of scratches on his cheek. Ben knew him immediately. The boy with the ball.

‘You are a hero,’ the big man said again, still clutching Ben’s hand. ‘You saved our son.’

‘I didn’t do much,’ Ben replied. ‘He saved me as much as I saved him. If he hadn’t run out into the road, I’d have been blown to pieces.’

‘But if you had not acted, Aris would have been killed.’ A tear ran down the man’s cheek and he sniffed and wiped it away. ‘I am Spiro Thanatos. This is my wife Christina. We own the guesthouse where the bomb exploded.’ His gaze landed on Ben’s neck and bare shoulder. ‘You are hurt.’

‘It’s nothing,’ Ben said. ‘Just a few bits of glass. I’m leaving soon. Just need something to wear.’

Spiro smiled. He immediately started unbuttoning his shirt, revealing a Hotel Thanatos T-shirt underneath. ‘Take mine. No, please. I insist.’

Ben thanked him and slipped it on, wincing a little at the pull on his stitches. The shirt was light blue cotton, a little baggy on him, but it felt cool and crisp.

Spiro talked and talked. He and Christina had been in the kitchen when they’d heard the explosion. They’d thought their boy was surely lost. It was terrible. People dead, maimed, buildings ruined. Drug-dealing murderers on their peaceful island. The world was going to shit. Their business was devastated, but they didn’t care as long as Aris was unharmed. They would do anything, anything to repay their debt to him. Anything he wanted, anything they could do. They’d never forget …

Ben listened and protested, ‘anyone would have done the same.’

‘What hotel are you in?’ Spiro wanted to know.

‘None,’ Ben said. ‘I only just arrived. I wasn’t planning on staying.’

‘But you must stay for a while, and you must be our guest.’

‘I haven’t made my plans yet.’

‘Please,’ Spiro went on. ‘If you stay, you must not book into a hotel.’ He dug in his pocket and dangled a key from his fingers. ‘We have a place on the beach, just outside the town. It is simple, but it is yours until you leave Corfu.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Ben said.

Spiro grasped his wrist in a strong, dry hand and dropped the key in his palm. Attached to it was a small plastic tag with an address. ‘I insist. It is the least we can do for you.’

Spiro and Christina left reluctantly, with more smiles and gratitude. Ben was tucking the borrowed shirt into his jeans when the door swung open again.

He turned, expecting the angry doctor this time. But it was another visitor.

Rhonda Palmer’s face was pale, puffy and streaked with tears as she walked into the room. An older man and a woman came in behind her, watching him grimly. He knew them from the wedding. Her parents.

‘I wanted to see you,’ Rhonda said.

Ben didn’t reply. Didn’t know what to say to her.

‘I wanted to see the man who killed my husband, and tell him how I feel about that.’ There was a quaver in her voice. She reached up and wiped a tear away.

Ben felt suddenly weak at the knees. He wanted to tell her he hadn’t killed Charlie. That he would never have involved him in anything like this if he’d known.

But it seemed so lame, so pointless, to tell her those things. He stayed silent.

Rhonda’s face was twisted in fury and pain. ‘I knew, when you turned up at my wedding, that you would bring trouble into our lives somehow. Major Hope, luring my husband to his death.’

‘I’m not Major Hope any more,’ Ben said quietly.

‘I don’t care what you call yourself,’ she fired back at him. ‘You’ve ruined my life and my family. You took my child’s father away.’

Ben stared at her.

‘I only found out two days ago,’ she sobbed. ‘I was going to tell Charlie when he came back. But now he’s dead. My child will never know its father. Thanks to you.’

Then she broke down, weeping loudly, swaying on her feet. Her father held her, supporting her. She broke free of him. She looked at Ben with hate and disgust in her eyes. ‘
You’re a fucking murderer!
’ she screamed at him. She spat in his face. Slapped him hard across the cheek.

He turned away from her. His cheek was stinging. He looked down at his feet. He could feel all their eyes on him. Two nurses had come running when they heard the raised voices. They stood staring, frozen in alarm.

Rhonda was bent double, racked with sobbing, shoulders heaving. Her mother put her arms around her. ‘Come on, darling. Let’s go.’ They turned to leave. Rhonda’s father shot Ben a last look of venom as he pushed past the nurses.

Her mother hovered in the doorway, clutching her daughter tight in her arms. She turned and looked Ben in the eye. ‘God damn you,’ she said, ‘if you can live with this on your conscience.’