THE TUNNEL: A Ben Hope Story (2 page)

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.

Ben hadn’t intended to stay long in his company that night. He didn’t like the guy any more than he enjoyed talking to a drunk, and Jaco was already slurring his words when they grabbed a corner table away from the music and the crowd. Just a quick drink or two was Ben’s plan, for old times’ sake. Chat, catch up, a few minutes of small talk, nothing too involved: then back to his hotel to work out his next move on the case. But the few minutes became an hour. Then two. By then, Jaco was too drunk to say much more.

Which didn’t matter. Because he’d already said plenty.

It hadn’t taken Ben long that night to realise that Jaco Lennox was a man struggling under the weight of an enormous burden. It wasn’t the drink, the drugs, the STDs or even the debts. He admitted to Ben what Ben could already clearly tell from his bloodshot eyes and pallid, shiny skin: that he hadn’t slept properly in weeks, months, even years, from the nightmares that kept him staring at the ceiling all night and haunted him throughout each day. He was falling apart mentally and emotionally. He was no longer fit for war; whisky no longer helped; and women would no longer touch him, other than those who might do so for cash in the hand – and he could no longer afford those.

Which was telling, in itself. Former SAS men could do very well for themselves in the security industries, especially overseas, where tax-free earnings flowed like water for experts with the right credentials. In terms of admitting its owner to an exclusive and top-paid élite, the winged dagger badge was better than the best first-class Oxford University degree. Even the least distinguished ex-soldier bearing that coveted stamp on his CV could, with a little networking, expect to pull down a handsome paycheque for the rest of his working life. But one look at a broken-down babbling wreck like Jaco Lennox, and prospective employers were shying away. He hadn’t landed a job since quitting the army.

What it was that made Lennox open up the way he did, Ben would never know for sure. It was obvious he was a man wrestling with a secret that was bursting to get out, but Ben wasn’t sure if Lennox’s long and detailed confession was motivated purely by deep-seated shame and the need to talk to someone, or whether it was just the drink loosening his tongue. Either way, it didn’t matter. After years in the SAS, Ben had thought nothing could shock or surprise him any longer.

He was wrong.

The story Jaco Lennox told him was seven years old. It was one everybody in the world already knew. Or thought they did. Very few people would have been willing to even contemplate the reality of the version Lennox revealed to Ben that night. Not even Ben himself.

*

He didn’t really believe it at first. Lennox must be out of his mind, or must have frazzled his brain down to the size of a grape with coke and crystal meth and LSD. Ben worked over a thousand possible explanations, each crazier and more improbable than the last – but he was willing to accept almost anything rather than what Lennox had confessed to him. It was easier to dismiss the whole thing, put it out of his head and get on with the job at hand.

Which was what Ben had duly done, ploughing every ounce of energy he had into tracking the missing girl, following up more leads, kicking down doors and dealing with the situation the only way he knew how, and as only he could.

Two weeks later, the case was happily resolved, the kid was safely back in the arms of her parents, and the ex-nanny who, it turned out, had indeed hatched the plan to kidnap her for ransom had been anonymously delivered into the hands of the police (who hadn’t themselves managed to unravel a single lead). The ex-nanny’s boyfriend had been less fortunate. Which had been his own choice, and his own undoing. His first mistake had been to get involved in the first place. His second mistake had been not to cut and run before Ben got to him. The exact details of his demise would never be known. Nor would his remains ever be found, except, perhaps, by the fish that lived in one of England’s biggest and deepest quarry lakes.

Ben only collected payment for his services from those who could well afford them. With the money in his pocket, no further employment offers to chase up, and the things Jaco Lennox had confessed to him still just an unpleasant question mark in his mind, he’d returned to his rambling home on the windswept west coast of Ireland.

There he’d done what he always did in his downtime: cracked open a fresh bottle of Laphroaig single malt, let himself be fussed and nannied by Winnie, his housekeeper, gone for long lonely walks on the beach and smoked and gazed out at the cold implacable ocean and waited for the next call to rouse him back to action. Sooner or later, usually sooner, there was always another call.

When the call had come, it hadn’t been quite what Ben might have expected.

‘Did ye hear the news, laddie?’ said the familiar gruff voice. No “Hello Ben, how are you doing?” No “It’s been a while; what are you up to these days?” But then, his old regimental pal Boonzie McCulloch had always been known for getting right to the point.

‘What news?’ For all Ben knew, England might have been invaded, or London totally flattened in a nuclear blast. He didn’t watch TV, didn’t buy any newspapers. Life on the Galway coast got a little isolated at times. That was how Ben liked it.

‘Lennox is deid.’ Boonzie had long ago retired to live in Italy, but he would take the Glaswegian accent to his grave.

‘Jaco Lennox?’ As if it could have been anyone else.

‘They found the fucker hangin’ from a tree in Epping Forest. Topped hisself.’

Ben wasn’t entirely surprised to hear it. But he could tell from Boonzie’s tone, and the pregnant pause that followed, that there was going to be more to the story. He could almost visualise the knowing look on the grizzled old wardog’s whiskery face.

‘At least,’ Boonzie added cryptically, ‘that’s what we’re told.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning, there’re certain details left oot. Such as the fact that said stiff managed to cuff his ain haunds behind his back and put two boolits in his heid before he stretched his neck. Looks like our Jaco must’ve made some bad acquaintances. Guid riddance, if ye ask me. He had it comin’ a long time.’

‘Would it be too much to ask how you came by this information, Boonzie?’

Another low chuckle. ‘Och, let’s just say someone in CID owed me a wee favour.’ Which was all Ben would ever get out of Boonzie, and he didn’t press the matter. Soon afterwards, they hung up the phone. Boonzie went back to his peaceful retirement, and Ben went for another walk on the beach.

*

For three days afterwards, Ben struggled to reconcile the news of Lennox’s sorry end with what the dead man had revealed to him that night in Peckham. There were suicides, and there were ‘suicides’. Some more discreet than others. But always for a reason. And when certain people went to certain lengths to make sure certain secrets were kept that way, in Ben’s experience it tended to suggest that those secrets were, however unbelievable, however unthinkable, most probably true.

That was why, at dawn on the fourth day, Ben said ‘Fuck it’ and grabbed his bag and was off again. He couldn’t stand it any longer. He needed to find out for himself.

Yet back then in late October, it had all seemed too impossible, too monstrous. Even to him, the man who couldn’t sleep at night because of the things he’d done in the course of what he had once considered his duty, his profession, his calling. ‘Queen and country’, they called it. He’d often thought about that expression, and had eventually come to decide it was a misnomer, for two reasons. Firstly, Ben very much doubted whether the Queen of England, or for that matter whoever might succeed her, or any modern-day reigning monarch, or for that matter again any ruler figure whose face and name were known to the public, knew half of what really went on in the dirty, bloody world of international politics and the conflicts it gave rise to. Secondly, the unsuspecting public who made up the vast majority of the country knew, or were allowed to know, even less. So, by logical deduction, it was clear that these activities were not carried out either for Queen, or for country, or on their behalf, with their consent or even with their knowledge. They went on purely in order to further the agenda of those few, those invisible and nameless few, who held the only true power – not just on a national level, but a global level.

In his thirty-three years, many of those spent fighting to protect the interests of those powers, Ben had seen enough, learned enough, deduced enough, to know that the only truths worth knowing in this world were those kept carefully hidden behind a smokescreen. Nothing else was real. Not governments, not elected representatives, not nations, not democracy. Everything the public saw, or was allowed to see, was an illusion.

And everything the public heard, or was allowed to hear, was a lie.

These people even lied to their own.

And so, when it came to information of the kind that Jaco Lennox had spilled to him, it was easy to understand the motive of the secret keepers. Easy to understand why they’d do anything, everything in their power to prevent loose tongues from wagging. The alternative was simply not an option.

Ben could understand it, but he couldn’t forgive it. If Lennox’s story was true – if even a quarter of it was true – this one went way too far off the scale for that.

Two months and a lot of miles later, Ben now believed he’d covered as many angles and dug up as much evidence as he needed. He was ninety-five percent certain that what he’d uncovered, however disconcerting, was more than just the booze-addled ramblings of a worthless former soldier on the edge of mental breakdown.

That was the reason why he was here tonight, prepared to do whatever it took to press the final truth from a man he had once admired and respected with all his heart.

And then, if Ben’s worst fears were proven right, he would have no choice but to kill that man.

3

It was late now. The temperature was dropping fast and frost was forming on the heather as Ben lay hidden in his observation point, scanning every inch of the house and buildings through his binoculars. The single light in the upstairs window stayed on, casting a dull glow across the front yard, but he saw no movement from within. Nothing stirred. The only sound was the low whistle of the night wind across the glen. It was chilling him down steadily, beginning to bite through his clothes, and he knew he’d have to get moving before he started going numb. The first serious sign of hypothermia kicking in was a dulling of the mental faculties. That was something Ben couldn’t afford to happen here tonight.