The Demon Club

Chapter 8

Ben hurtled from Le Val towards Calais, a long drive across northern France whittled down to just over three hours by the insane speeds at which he pushed the high-performance Alpina along the motorway through the dead of night.

He made only two stops along the way. The first was to refuel and buy a ham and cheese half-baguette sandwich, some bottled mineral water and some handi-wipes from the service station shop. The second stop was in search of a quiet spot away from the main road, where he used one of his burner phones to book a crossing on the Eurotunnel Le Shuttle, due to depart at 03.25, in the name of Paul Harris. That done, he ate behind the wheel while rereading the file on Jaden Wolf that Saunders had given him. It revealed nothing of what Wolf had been doing for these people, or why they might want him dead. But Ben could guess. He could guess plenty.

He washed down the sandwich with some water, smoked a Gauloise, then got out of the car and set about taking the necessary precautions to conceal the items he needed to smuggle illegally into Britain. He’d made the same simple modification to several of the cars he’d owned. It had always worked for him in the past and with a bit of luck it would work now.

Ben had made good time from Le Val and it wasn’t yet midnight. He cleaned up his grimy hands with the wipes and the rest of the water, then climbed into the front passenger seat, racked its backrest all the way down, and tried to grab a couple of hours’ sleep. It wasn’t a success. With so many anxious thoughts buzzing through his mind the best he could hope for was to close his eyes and try to let his body relax. A Buddhist monk wouldn’t have been able to find inner peace at a time like this. In the end, he gave up and got out of the car, pacing and smoking to try to burn off his nervous energy. That didn’t work either.

Then it was time to head the last few kilometres to catch his night crossing. Back on the motorway, he soon passed under the overhead TUNNEL SOUS LA MANCHE sign and followed the filter lane for private vehicles. At the other end of a flyover was the automated check-in terminal where a machine fed him his boarding pass to hang on his rear-view mirror. After the French passport control was the security check area, where cars were stopped at random for inspection. Ben had been through that routine before. Some examinations were more thorough than others. The vehicle might be put over a grid with a camera below that scanned the underbody for anything fishy. Sniffer dogs were sometimes let loose to test their uncanny skills in detecting drugs or explosives. A suspect vehicle could be stripped down to the last nut and bolt while its owner sweated in a Border Force holding pen. And now and then, to much triumphant fanfare that belied the fact that any success was almost entirely down to luck, they actually nailed a smuggler.

What Ben was carrying carefully concealed inside his car would have landed him in jail on charges of anything from arms trafficking to suspected terrorism. But his precautions turned out to have been unnecessary as the Alpina sailed through the security control with nobody the wiser about the Browning Hi-Power and thirty-nine rounds of ammunition wrapped in an airtight, heat-resistant package within a secret compartment deep inside the Alpina’s engine bay, coated in heavy grease.

The useful tricks you could learn from a lifetime of dealing with terrorists, thugs and psychopaths. Ben couldn’t help but wonder how many of those would be waltzing unimpeded through the tunnel today, this week, this month, happily avoiding running the gauntlet of airport security. The disparity between the two forms of travel was plain crazy. You were forbidden to take a can of soup or a badminton racket onto a plane for fear that such items would imperil the lives of your fellow passengers; and yet there was little to prevent some enterprising jihadist suicide bomber or other nutcase from packing a car full of PETN high-explosive and letting off a nasty little surprise midway beneath the English Channel. It would almost certainly happen one day.

But it wasn’t Ben’s job to question policy, least of all if his situation could benefit from its slackness. After the security point he presented his fake passport to the British end of the customs check. Then he was being waved through and following the EMBARQUEMENT signs for boarding. A staff member in an orange high-vis jacket directed him onto the train, where vehicles lined up nose-to-tail like cattle being shipped to market. Ben killed his engine, rolled down his windows, and soon the train got rolling. As they hurtled along fifty metres below the sea bed, he sat quietly resisting the urge to smoke while looking once more at Saunders’ file on the target. The video clip of Grace and her intruders was just a tap of the screen away, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at it.

Thirty-five minutes later, at three a.m. local time, Ben rolled the Alpina off the train on the other side of the Channel, in the port town of Folkestone seventy miles from London. The address that Saunders had given him was in the heart of the city, on the cusp between Lambeth and Waterloo not far from the river. In some parallel fantasy universe, Ben might walk into Wolf’s apartment and find him sitting there unawares, sipping a cup of tea while idly planning his getaway sometime in the near future. In the real world, Wolf was somewhere on the far side of the planet and the spooks had already been through every square inch of his place any number of times, days before Saunders had resorted to his alternative plan of extorting Ben to pick up the cold trail.

Ben would soon find out. Somewhere near the rural Kent village of Charing he detoured into the countryside and found a deserted back lane where he could retrieve his pistol and ammunition from their hiding place. Then he was back on the road and speeding towards London with the loaded Browning nestling comfortably in its traditional place behind his right hip. By 4.30 a.m. he was parking the car close to Wolf’s address, ready for whatever he might find there.

The outside of Wolf’s apartment building was surveilled by a CCTV system, but Ben soon found the conveniently disabled camera around the back. Whoever had neatly snipped its feed wire had very likely been the same person who’d picked the lock on a nearby rear entrance to the building. Ben shone his mini-torch on the fresh scratches around the keyhole and thought, Hmm. He wouldn’t have made those scratches himself, because he was a pretty adept lock-picker. Less than a minute later, he was inside the building and making his way up a dark backstair to the top floor.

The same tell-tale scratches were on the lock of Wolf’s apartment door. Ben thought, Hmm again. Not too surprisingly, it looked as though his real-life assessment of the situation had been right. Someone else had been here before him, and done a reasonable, if not perfect, job of covering their tracks. Would Wolf have picked his own lock? Ben didn’t think so.

Another minute later, he was inside the apartment. Gun in hand he stalked from room to room until he’d cleared the whole place and found it empty. Only then did he turn on the lights and survey the extent of the damage. Whoever had surreptitiously entered the apartment had done a thorough job of tearing the place apart. It was either the work of one very busy ransacker, or more likely two or three working in a team. Whatever the case, one thing was for sure: the burglary hadn’t been reported to the police or the apartment would have been sealed with crime scene tape.

Wolf’s home was quite sparsely furnished, but the things he did own were upmarket. He’d clearly been making good money working for Saunders’ people. Ben wondered whether it was money that the ransackers had been looking for. The way they’d torn the place up suggested they’d been interested in more than just finding the man himself. If not money, then perhaps documents? Photographs? Computer drives? In the living room a large modern bookcase had been dragged away from the wall, as though someone wanted to check for a hidey-hole or concealed safe behind it. Pictures had been torn down from the walls or knocked askew on their hooks, presumably for the same reason. An expensive white leather sofa had been slashed to ribbons and half its stuffing ripped out. They’d even been prising up floorboards.

If Wolf had left behind any obvious clue as to his current whereabouts, the searchers would surely have found it days ago, and Ben wouldn’t have been standing here now. Coming here seemed like a hopeless cause – but it was Ben’s only lead. In any case he’d expected to find the place in a mess. He wasn’t going to be fazed by it, because finding clues where there were seemingly none to be found was one of the abilities that had served him well in the past. He stood there in the wreckage of the apartment, mentally absorbing the energy of the place, trying to put himself in his target’s mind.

To catch a wolf, you have to think like a wolf.

Chapter 9

Ben revisited each room of Wolf’s apartment in turn, scanning details, thinking hard. In the bedroom the intruders had rifled through a unit that contained various personal effects including two high-priced Swiss watches, but not taken them. They seemed to have been more interested in disembowelling the bed mattress, which was as badly slashed to pieces as the living room sofa.

It was the same story when he examined the bathroom, where similar havoc had been wrought: cabinet drawers ripped out and upended on the floor, the contents of a small cupboard below the sink scattered everywhere. Ditto the small kitchen, whose top-of-the-line appliances seemed to have seen little use, suggesting their owner either ate out most nights or was seldom at home. The intruders had had a poke around in the empty fridge, leaving the door wide open. There was a small notice-board on the wall next to the cooker with some Post-it notes attached to it, but if Wolf had left a memo there saying ‘Gone to Timbuktu’ the spooks would probably have noticed.

Nothing coming to him yet, Ben walked back into the living room. He paused beside the tall bookcase that the intruders had shunted away from the wall, and spent a moment running his eyes along the shelves. Searching for inspiration. Or maybe he was just running out of hope that he’d find anything. Wolf’s book collection surprised him somewhat, showing eclectic tastes that ranged from classics of fiction to history and religion. There were some works on ancient Chinese philosophy, meditation, Tai Chi and Qi Gong. On reflection, that seemed to fit with what Ben remembered about Wolf’s quiet, contemplative nature. Maybe the place to go looking for him was some remote Daoist temple retreat in the Himalayas.

Two other shelves were reserved for CDs and DVDs. Wolf’s taste in movies was as unusual as his choice of literature. Ben hadn’t known too many Special Forces guys who showed enthusiasm for European arthouse cinema. Wolf’s collection was diverse, with names like Werner Herzog and Andrei Tarkovsky jumping from the shelves that Ben only recognised at all because his ex-fiancée Brooke Marcel had been into that kind of thing and tried to get him to watch some with her. He’d finally drawn the line with Last Year in Marienbad.

By contrast, Wolf’s musical interests seemed far less wide-ranging. In fact, Ben noticed, his large CD collection was exclusively devoted to Spanish Flamenco, not a single rock or jazz album among them. Ben ran his eye along the spines and saw names like Sabicas, Carlos Montoya, Juan Martín and Manitas de Plata that he’d never heard of before. He slid a few down from the shelf and gazed at them. The images on the jewel cases were of swarthy, rugged men clasping guitars and sultry raven-haired dancing ladies in red dresses. You could almost hear the castanets and the stamping feet. Ben had visited Spain a few times during his K&R days, and spent a memorable evening or two in bars watching live Flamenco jam sessions raise the roof with raucous singing and guitar playing so violent it was a wonder they didn’t break the damn things.

It was as Ben replaced the CDs on the shelf and turned away from the bookcase that the pictures on the walls caught his eye more closely. Before, he’d only glanced at them to ascertain that they’d been knocked askew or taken down as the ransackers hunted for the elusive wall safe. Now he was suddenly looking at what they were pictures of.

He could be certain that the intruders hadn’t paid much attention to the pictures themselves, either. What kind of professional hardman gave a crap about fine art? The framed prints were modern in style, to Ben’s eye at least. Cubist, or something. He was no expert himself, though he could appreciate the skill involved, and the tasteful way that Wolf had arranged them on his wall. Four pictures had been hung in a neat row. Each one featuring a Spanish guitar, or a figure playing a guitar, conveyed in a semi-abstract style that you sometimes had to squint at to get what it was depicting. The prints were reproduced from paintings that were all obviously the work of a single artist. Ben looked more closely and saw the signature ‘Juan Gris’ in the bottom corner of each. He’d have bet that Juan Gris wasn’t from Latvia.

Spain, Spain, Spain. Interesting.

Remembering something he’d seen there, Ben walked back into Wolf’s bathroom. He was no longer interested in examining the wreckage the intruders had left in their wake. Hanging askew on the wall opposite the bath and shower unit was another, smaller, framed picture he’d barely glanced at earlier. Now he gave it closer attention. Unlike the prints in the living room, this was an original oil painting of a panoramic rural landscape, done in a more traditional descriptive style than Wolf’s little modernist collection.

It depicted a pretty, centuries-old village nestling against a starkly majestic rocky escarpment backdrop with sparsely vegetated hills in the foreground. The ancient stone buildings were tinged pink, with red terracotta roofs and overhanging balconies sloping in all directions, here and there a castle-like spired tower rising above the narrow medieval streets. The effect was so quintessentially Spanish that just looking at it as he stood here in a wrecked London apartment in the middle of the night, Ben could almost hear the chirping of the crickets and the rasp of Flamenco guitars wafting on the warm mountain breeze, smell the scent of the wild lavender and thyme that grew among the rocks, and feel the radiance of the sun beating down. It was an image you could stand and look at for a long time and lose yourself in. Ben could imagine Wolf doing just that.

The music. The guitar paintings. The landscape. Suddenly it all came together in Ben’s mind, and a memory that he hadn’t thought about in years came flashing back as vivid and sharp as the day it had happened.

Ben’s memory carried him back many years to the remote craggy wastelands of north-west Afghanistan, and a time when his SAS unit had been deployed on a reconnaissance mission to hunt for enclaves of Taliban fighters. The SAS were no strangers to some of the world’s wildest places, but the raw, savage beauty of these mountains seemed almost like another planet. After travelling for three days from the insertion point they had made no contact with the enemy. In fact on this occasion, though they didn’t know it yet, Ben and his men would be returning to base without a shot fired. Which was highly unusual for them; but they were alert and ready for a surprise attack as they made camp on the third night, on high ground overlooking a mountain valley deep inside hostile territory. The dozen-strong unit gathered in a craggy hollow where they could observe any enemy approach for miles around. They sat hunkered down close to their weapons while a pot of coffee bubbled and spluttered on a portable stove. Ben had been famous among his men for his in-the-field coffee-making skills.

While they waited for their tin mugs to be filled with the delicious brew, the twelve weary men chatted quietly among themselves. ‘You know what I bleedin’ hate the most about this job?’ muttered Baz Packham, about whom it was often said that the day he stopped griping about just about everything would be the day they found him dead behind his light machine gun, half-buried in a big pile of spent cartridge cases.

‘No, what’s that?’ Ben asked with a smile as he poured coffee and handed out the steaming tin mugs to each man in turn.

‘The miserable bloody places they send us,’ Packham said, sweeping an arm across the landscape as though to prove his point. ‘I mean, look at it. Rough as a badger’s arse.’

‘Yeah, in hessian knickers,’ said another of the guys, Boney Gallagher, not to be outdone. Liam McVicar joined in the fun with ‘You talking about my Missus again?’ and everyone laughed, all except for Jaden Wolf, who was lounged against a rock as though it were a satin pillow, with his rifle and grenade launcher between his knees. It was normal for Wolf to stay out of it while the rest of the lads bantered and joked around. He was a quiet sort of man who generally kept his thoughts to himself. But now he seemed to have something to say, frowning at Packham as if he’d lost his mind. ‘Something’s wrong with you, Baz. Open your eyes, for Christ’s sake.’

‘My eyes are open. That’s why I keep seeing your ugly mug.’

Wolf shook his head. ‘Breathe the air, man. Listen to the sound of the silence. These mountains are just about the nearest thing a plonker like you is ever going to get to heaven, that’s for sure.’

‘Why don’t you write me a fuckin’ poem about it, Jaws?’ Packham grunted. There was more laughter, but Ben thought he should intervene before the amicable dispute turned more serious. Packham considered himself a hardened dealer of death, and Wolf had never backed down from a fight in his life. Ben defused the tension by saying, ‘You always did have a hankering for the wild places, Jaden. I can resonate with that. I feel the same way.’

Wolf nodded. ‘Yeah, one day I’m going to make enough money that I can bugger off forever and nobody’ll see my heels for the dust. Going to get out. All the way out, and never come back.’

Ben asked, ‘You have a particular place in mind?’

Wolf was silent for a beat, then flashed a glint of gold as a happy memory stirred a smile. ‘My first two-week summer leave after I joined up, I went off backpacking in Europe. Made my way down to Spain, a place called Aragón. Right in the heart of the Pyrenees, Catalonia to the east and Navarra, La Rioja and Castilla y León to the west. There’s this little village next to the Guadalaviar River, sitting there in the hills, prettiest place you ever could imagine. I met a girl there.’

There were some whistles and grins. ‘Now you’re talking,’ McVicar chuckled, and was about to crack some crude joke but Ben signalled to him to let Wolf go on.

‘Her name was Sofia,’ Wolf said. He smiled again at the memory, shook his head wistfully. ‘Sofia Moncayo. I still remember her. It was the sweetest time. I was sorry to have to leave her.’

‘I’ll bet you were,’ Boney Gallagher said, nudging him with an elbow.

‘I don’t suppose she still lives there,’ Wolf said. ‘Most of the younger folks leave in search of better prospects in the cities. But that’s where I’d go back in a heartbeat, if you gave me half a chance. Just to go walking in those hills again, where there’s nobody there but you, and the land, and the sky. If there’s a God, then that’s where you’re going to find him, I reckon.’