The Demon Club
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In short, life at the compound was just the same as ever. Stepping back into that comforting, familiar environment, Ben might almost have believed that the episode on board the plane earlier that day had been nothing more than some weird dream that he could just shrug off, forget and move on from.
But it hadn’t been a dream. Ben’s predicament was as real as the threat hanging over Grace Kirk, and he could no more afford to ignore it than he could disregard Saunders’ rules. The first of which was tell no one. And that, Ben knew, was going to be his first tough challenge.
As he stepped inside the house and put his head around the kitchen door he was met with the sound of laughter and the aroma of the big pot of beef stew that sat on the range.
‘Dead on time. Welcome home, lover boy,’ was Jeff’s boisterous greeting. The wine had been flowing that evening, judging by the empty bottles on the dinner table and the flush in Jeff’s cheeks. Jeff was in a happier mood these days, after going through the grinder following the collapse of his relationship with a French woman called Chantal. Some months earlier he’d celebrated his rediscovered bachelor status by throwing himself into learning to fly. Since getting his pilot’s licence just weeks ago, he’d spent a chunk of his hard-earned cash on a 1967 Cessna 172 Skyhawk and could talk of little else. A stack of light aircraft magazines, service manuals and pilot licensing literature lay heaped on the sideboard.
‘How was your trip?’ Tuesday asked, grinning his dazzling trademark grin that could light up all but the darkest of spaces. Jeff grabbed a third glass from the cupboard, set it down for Ben in his usual place at the head of the table, and swilled wine into it. ‘Come and have a drink, mate. Plenty of stew left in the pot, too.’
‘I’m not hungry. Think I’ll go and take a shower.’
Jeff peered at him. ‘You all right?’ For Ben to turn down a drink was a rare event; besides which, there wasn’t much you could hide from Jeff Dekker. He liked to laugh and mess around, but beneath the laddish façade was a highly astute and perspicacious mind. You didn’t get to spend over ten years in the Special Boat Service, half of them in command of your own troop, unless you were a pretty smart and capable guy.
‘I’m fine,’ Ben said, with not much conviction.
‘Sure about that?’
‘I’m fine,’ Ben repeated. Leaving them to it, he headed upstairs to dump his bag in his room. His quarters were small and simple, with a single bed, a plain wardrobe, a mirror on the wall and very little else in the way of decor. The only luxury was his ensuite bathroom. He quickly stripped off his things and hit the shower. Sixty seconds exactly, ice cold, grimly relishing the shock of the frigid water that jolted his system and helped to keep his mind sharp and clear. He towelled himself vigorously, returned to his room with a towel around his waist, changed into fresh clothing and set about repacking his bag for another trip. Where that would lead him, he still had no idea – but from the information that Saunders had supplied him he knew that his starting point would be London. And he could afford to waste no time getting there.
After he’d finished repacking his travel items, he unlocked the small security safe bolted to the wall by his bedside. The contents of the safe were the reason he’d come home, rather than heading straight back to London the instant he’d touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport. Inside were two handguns with multiple loaded magazines, two burner phones, ten thousand euros in cash, and a manila envelope containing three fake passports.
It was primarily the passports that Ben was interested in. He spilled them out of the envelope. They were the work of one Thierry Chevrolet, a master forger whose expertise Ben had enlisted back during his wild, dangerous days of hustling around Europe chasing down kidnappers and rescuing the victims they’d taken for ransom. For several years he’d kept them in a bank deposit box in Paris, the city that had served as his main European base of operations. Since getting out of that game and reverting back – at any rate, trying to revert back – to being a normal citizen, he’d no longer had any use for the deposit box and brought everything across to Le Val. There they’d stayed, locked up, unneeded and mostly forgotten.
Until now. Saunders might have got him by the balls, and there might be no option other than comply with the man’s threat, but Ben was damned if he was going to let these bastards pry into his life for another minute or shadow his movements another mile. The fake passports were in the names of three fictitious individuals named Harris, Connors and Palmer. They were equally well-used and covered with visa stamps that read like a scrapbook of Ben’s adventures all over the world. The Palmer passport had expired but the other two still had some life left. Ben decided that he would travel as Paul Harris, with the Connors identity as a fall back. He tossed his real passport and the Palmer one onto the bed and stuffed the two fakes into his bag.
Now the phones. With his personal mobile compromised, it had to be ditched too. He tossed it on the bed next to the discarded passports and grabbed the two burners from the safe. Both anonymously paid for in cash and untraceable to their owner. The only other person in the world who knew their numbers was Jeff Dekker. And that was good enough for Ben.
Next he turned his attention to the handguns, removed them both from the safe and laid them on the bed, too. One was a Springfield XD, polymer-framed, all-singing, all-dancing, state-of-the-art modern combat pistol. The other was the venerable steel Browning 9mm that he’d used for many years in the SAS. With its rugged design and fourteen-shot capacity the model had barely changed since its inception in 1935, because it hadn’t needed to. It was an old friend to him, fitted his hand like a tailor-made glove and had never once let him down.
Ben hesitated over the weapons. No question, he couldn’t go after a man like Jaden Wolf unarmed. But the travel issue was the sticking point. He could take the chance of finding a substitute once he reached his target location, but good, reliable hardware wasn’t always easy to get hold of in the field. On the other hand, smuggling a gun overseas was taking a hell of a chance. An even bigger one, if he was stupid enough to try to bring a firearm onto a civilian passenger plane.
But Ben had already decided that the fastest way to London was by car. And despite the risk, he had his ways and means. Making his choice, he stuck the old Browning and three loaded magazines into his pocket.
Next, he thought about money. His mission expenses were an unknown quantity. The full ten thousand euros was probably more than he needed, but five might be too little. Settling on seven, he bundled six thousand into his bag and kept the remainder aside to carry on his person. As he was slipping the wad of notes into his wallet, something fell out. It was a folded 4x6 photo print. The picture had been taken on a cold, sunny, snowy day back in January, during one of his early return visits to Scotland when he and Grace had gone hiking into the mountains above Loch Ardaich. Pausing to marvel at the scenery, they’d snuggled together while she snapped a selfie shot of them with her phone. On his return to Le Val he’d asked her to email it to him, and printed it out on the office printer. Faintly embarrassed at his own sentimentality, he’d been carrying it with him ever since.
Seeing the picture again now made him think of what he’d brought on her. If he’d been just some ordinary guy with a normal life, this threat would not be hanging over her now. She was in mortal danger because of him. Because she loved him.
He let the picture slip from his fingers. Looked up and saw his own raw, grim expression looking back at him in the mirror. A rush of self-hatred gripped him and he slammed his fist into the glass. Jagged shards fell to the floor. Breathing hard and fighting to contain his emotions, he looked at his hand and the blood oozing from his lacerated knuckles.
Get a grip on yourself. This doesn’t help her.
His hand hurt, but he didn’t care. He wiped the blood on his bed cover, then threw on his leather jacket, slung his bag over his shoulder and headed downstairs.
Chapter 5
Now for the tricky part: getting past Jeff and Tuesday without attracting suspicion. Ben was wondering whether it was better to say goodbye or just disappear. But that choice was made for him when Jeff emerged from the kitchen and collared him in the hallway.
‘What’s up?’ Jeff asked.
‘Nothing’s up.’
But Jeff wasn’t so easily fooled. Eyeing the bag on Ben’s shoulder he grinned and said, ‘Christ almighty, off again so soon? Don’t tell me you’re headed back to Scotland for more. What happened, did she forget to bring the handcuffs?’
Highly tickled by his own joke, Jeff roared with laughter until his face turned purple. Tuesday, who had appeared in the doorway behind him, rolled his eyes in exasperation. ‘Please excuse him, Ben. It’s not his fault. The poor guy’s suffering from a bad case of suspended adolescence.’
The banter was just part of the routine at Le Val, a throwback to their military days. Ben knew that if he told his friends what was really going on, they’d drop the larking around like a red-hot coal and nobody in the world would be more deadly serious about offering their help in any way possible, with no concern whatever for their own skins. But as alone as he felt at this moment, however much he ached to share his problem with them, it was a risk he dreaded to take. If Saunders and his shadowy team of watchers got the slightest inkling that Ben had broken the rules by bringing in outside help, there would be nothing to stop them from carrying out their threat. Grace would die, and Ben could not live knowing he’d caused that to happen.
Stitched up tight.
No way out.
Except to do what he’d been ordered to do.
‘There’s something I have to take care of,’ he said. ‘Please don’t ask me what it is, because I can’t tell you. When it’s over, I promise that I will. But for the moment I need you to cover for me while I go off and deal with this, alone. I hate having to ask you to do that. I hate this whole situation. But that’s just how it is.’
Whatever quantity of wine Jeff might have consumed that evening, the effects of the alcohol seemed to vanish instantly and he was suddenly as sober as a brain surgeon. Both he and Tuesday were frowning and full of questions that they had to work hard to bite back. ‘You know we’re there for you,’ Jeff said after a beat. ‘Anytime, in any way. No matter what. You know that, yeah?’
‘I do know that.’
‘You’re sure this is how it has to be, mate?’
‘I have no other choice.’
‘Whatever you need from us, Ben,’ Tuesday said. ‘We’ve got your back.’
‘I appreciate it,’ Ben replied.
‘Hey, your hand’s bleeding,’ Tuesday said, noticing Ben’s gashed knuckles. ‘Looks like a nasty cut.’
Ben barely glanced at his injured hand. ‘Just a scratch. Must have knocked it.’
‘Hmm. Whatever you say.’
What Ben had to tell them next was too important not to mention, even though he knew it would sound strange. ‘Listen. One more thing. I need you to screen all phone calls to the office line while I’m gone.’
Now Jeff’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. ‘What? Why?’
Ben replied, ‘Because Grace might try to phone. If she does, I don’t want you to pick up. And whatever you do, don’t call her back. Okay?’
Any verbal contact, however innocent, could be construed by the watchers as a breach of the rules. But with no way of knowing that, Jeff and Tuesday were taken aback by Ben’s request. Jeff was staring at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Enough messing around, mate. Level with us. You’ve been acting odd since you got back.’
‘I asked you not to ask,’ Ben said. ‘I don’t know how else to say it.’
Jeff said, ‘Come on, Ben. You can’t leave us in the dark like this.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.’
‘At least tell us where you’re going.’
‘I’m going to London. All right? I have to go now.’
Ben clapped their shoulders, nodded his goodbye and left before they could see the emotions welling up inside him. The lump in his throat was one of gratitude for their trust and comradeship, and guilt for not being open with them. What had he ever done to deserve friends like these? And just when he needed their help the most, he was forbidden from accepting it. That thought only made him despise Saunders even more.
And it formed a new resolve in Ben’s mind. Jaden Wolf wasn’t the only marked man out there. Once that situation was dealt with, Saunders would be next. Nobody would threaten to hurt Grace and get away unpunished. Nobody.
He closed the farmhouse door behind him. Outside in the darkness of the yard, he gave Storm a parting hug. He slipped a Gauloise from a fresh pack, lit it with his Zippo, then clanged the lighter shut and got back in the car. The three-litre, straight-six, triple-turbo engine was still warm from the drive from Paris. It roared into life and Ben stamped on the gas and slewed hard around in the yard and took off again.
One lone wolf going after another. As the hunt began, Ben thought about the man he was being commanded to kill.
Chapter 6
Saunders had said that few people knew Jaden Wolf as well as Ben had. He’d been right. Because there weren’t many experiences in life that could form bonds between people like the shared adversity of extreme danger and war. That was the nature of Ben’s past history with the man who was now his target.
For those who’d never been there, it was easy to scoff at and dismiss as trite the notion of a ‘band of brothers’. But those who had been through the terror and the exhilaration, witnessed the raw brutality of mankind’s most destructive and pitiless endeavour, watched their comrades being maimed and killed and put themselves on the line right along with them, knew that that sense of kinship was the core experience of combat. The willingness to lay down your life to safeguard those of your brothers in arms was, ultimately, a form of love – one that forged some of the most intense and indelible bonds known to the human condition.
Ben was one of the minority of people who understood what that really meant. And so was Jaden Wolf.
Wolf was a few years younger than Ben, who had first met him as an intense, raw-boned twenty-three-year-old still fresh from his ascension from the Royal Marines to the hallowed ranks of UK Special Forces’ most elite unit, 22 SAS. Many young troopers from all throughout the British Army dreamed of wearing the coveted winged dagger badge with its Who Dares Wins motto; few of them dared to pit themselves against the bone-crushingly, soul-destroyingly arduous selection process, and fewer still, far fewer, ever made it through to achieving their goal.
For young Jaden Wolf, the journey to the regiment had been a particularly gruelling one, marked by failure, cruel disappointment and injury. On his first unlucky attempt to pass the notorious endurance phase of the twice-yearly selection course he’d slipped on ice, knocked himself unconscious, almost frozen to death in the mountains of the Brecon Beacons and had to be stretchered out with acute hypothermia, concussion and a badly dislocated shoulder, earning himself an automatic RTU by failing to finish. Though he’d been by no means the only candidate to have to return to his unit with his tail between his legs, he felt the humiliation deeply and spent the next year nursing his injured pride and training like a maniac before trying again.
Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. Wolf’s second attempt, the following winter, came perilously close to repeating the failure of his first when, during a forced march in full kit with a sixty-pound Bergen on his back and torrential rain making it all but impossible to see, he lost his footing in the rocks and tumbled a hundred feet down a gorge. In the fall, his rifle butt smacked him in the face, broke his nose and knocked out half his teeth. But this time the young Marine was not to be deterred, and would sooner die than fail again. By sheer force of will, he managed to drag himself out of the gorge and rejoin the march at double speed. He finished the endurance phase covered in blood and barely able to stand – one of just nineteen men out of over two hundred who’d shown enough grit to make it to the end.
Several months later, having battered his way through the rigours of Jungle Training, Escape and Evasion Training and the euphemistically termed ‘Tactical Questioning’ (military-speak for torture resistance), Wolf was able to stand proud as one of the fully-fledged new regimental members who received the exalted beige beret and winged dagger insignia. The fancy new titanium and gold denture he now sported in place of his missing teeth quickly earned him the nickname ‘Jaws’ among his SAS comrades. Along with the rest of the newcomers he was still on probation, his every move closely watched by the Directing Staff in case he slipped up or showed the slightest weakness. But it seemed that no amount of mental stress or physical hardship could wipe the gleaming golden smile off his face.
The several times Ben had got to work with him, Wolf had proven himself to be a tough and reliable trooper. He was unambitious for his own advancement and yet showed the capacity of a born leader of men, as efficient at fighting the enemy as he was thoughtful and selfless in regard to his peers. Ben had heard the whisperings among the top brass that Wolf might have the makings of a fine commanding officer.
Another quality Ben had liked in him, even though it was a decidedly non-military one, was the caring attitude he showed towards animals. On one occasion, when Ben’s unit entered a remote Iraqi village while hunting renegade Islamist insurgents, the SAS troops had found a tumbledown building that they initially suspected housed a cell of enemy fighters, only to discover that it was being used as stabling for a small herd of horses and mules, all of them badly undernourished and living in filth. He remembered Wolf’s disgust and anger at the appalling condition in which the poor beasts were being kept. After giving their keeper a severe dressing down, the young trooper had personally seen to it that the animals were cleaned up and given food and fresh bedding. When it came time for the unit to move on, Wolf was reluctant to leave the horses behind.
Wolf’s love of animals hadn’t always earned him the admiration of his superiors, however. Eighteen months after the horse incident, Wolf had returned from two weeks’ leave with a leg in plaster, the result of having thrown himself in front of a car to save a dog from being run over. Anyone who loved Man’s best friend that much had to get Ben’s approval – but the SAS top brass were not amused. A critical mission that had been months in the planning very nearly got screwed up as a result of Wolf’s having to be replaced at short notice, and he faced disciplinary action for turning up for duty half crippled. Only when Ben had intervened in the matter to plead his case had Wolf been spared from administrative punishment.
It wasn’t so long after that affair that Ben’s own military days drew to a close. After thirteen long and sometimes difficult years he finally quit the regiment to pursue his solo career, implementing his skills in service of innocent victims of the kidnap and ransom industry. Some time after, he’d heard through the grapevine that Wolf had quit, too, though nobody seemed to know where he’d gone afterwards.
Ben had always wondered where Wolf might have ended up. A lot of ex-SAS guys drifted into high-level security work, getting paid fat tax-free dollars for consulting on oilfield protection in the Persian Gulf or keeping VIPs safe from the bullets of assassins. Others went the less salubrious mercenary route, enabling the rulers of tin-pot nations to overthrow and butcher their neighbours, or sometimes to persecute and oppress their own citizens. A smaller minority became employed by secretive government agencies at home or abroad, doing work that was no less dark and dirty but highly lucrative. Some stayed in contact with their old army pals. But Jaden Wolf seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth.
Now, it seemed that Ben was about to catch up once again with his former comrade.
If only he could find him first.
Chapter 7
Five days earlier
Jaden Wolf knew that from the instant he’d been caught on security camera, he was a marked man and his life as he’d known it was over. That was fine by him. After what he’d witnessed that night, he wanted out. All the way out. And he had no plans ever to return.
He’d encountered no resistance as he made it out of the grounds of Karswell Hall, but he knew that they’d waste no time in coming after him. The clock was ticking. He had to move extremely fast, or all escape routes would be blocked ahead of him and it would be game over. Failure to complete a mission was not an option at the best of times; now that he was a witness to such a dark and terrible secret, there was no way they’d allow him to live. If caught, he would be made to disappear as though no trace of him had ever existed. Reaching the perimeter of the estate he scrambled back over the wall and sprinted to his car. The Audi, like virtually everything else he owned, would have to be abandoned sooner rather than later. He threw himself behind the wheel and took off into the night with a squeal of spinning tyres.
Wolf drove eleven miles in seven minutes before the signs for a village flashed by in his headlights. It was a traditional old place, with a greystone church and cemetery, sleepy timber-framed and flint cottages, a quaint village square and a little stone bridge over a river. He parked the Audi under the shadows of a spreading oak tree, got out and spent a couple of minutes removing its number plates. That would help slow the police’s attempts to ID the abandoned vehicle. They’d soon find that it had no engine or chassis numbers, either. Being traced by the police wasn’t Wolf’s concern, however. More watchful and sinister forces were everywhere. He knew that all too well. He’d been one of their foot soldiers until tonight.
Wolf abandoned the Audi and moved fast and silently through the dark village streets for quarter of a mile until he found what he was looking for. Some of the newest and most hi-tech cars were also the easiest to steal, and Wolf was an expert. The DS 3 Crossback was parked just a few yards from the front door of its owner’s cottage. Wolf took a small electronic device from his pocket that boosted the signal for its keyless central locking while simultaneously relaying it to the key inside the cottage, fooling the system. The locks clunked open. Wolf was inside and away within six seconds.
From there, it was just a thirty-five-mile drive to London. Wolf sped through the night and covered the distance in a little over twenty minutes. He sliced through the city and parked the Crossback on a residential street close to the Imperial War Museum, half a mile from his apartment. He lived on the top floor of a handsome old building overlooking a little park where he often walked and fed crumbs to the pigeons. The apartment wasn’t large, but it was comfortable for a single guy who generally kept himself to himself apart from the occasional short-term lady friend. Wolf wasn’t so attached to the place that it would hurt him never to come back.
He had his pistol in his hand as he climbed the stairs and approached his door. Silently, stealthily, he slipped inside. He paused for an entire minute, until he could be confident that the apartment was empty. He was still ahead of the curve. None of his fellow agents had come for him – yet. But they could turn up at any moment and he intended to get out of here as fast as he could. Keeping the lights off he walked into his bedroom, where he kept a go-bag packed and ready. It contained all the essentials for a fast getaway, including another pistol and a quantity of walking-around money. Wolf snatched the bag and left. He did not return to the stolen car. Southwark underground station was four minutes’ walk away. It was on the Jubilee line, and this was a Friday, which meant the tube would be running around the clock. He donned a NY Yankees baseball cap from his bag and kept his eyes down as he entered the station, letting the long peak of the cap mask his face from the CCTV cameras.