SCOTT MARIANI
The Martyr’s Curse

Copyright

Published by Avon

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2015

This ebook edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2018

Copyright © Scott Mariani 2015

Cover photographs © FooTToo

Cover photographs © Shutterstock

Cover photographs © Henry Steadman

Cover design © Henry Steadman 2018

Scott Mariani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007486182

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2015 ISBN: 9780007486373

Version: 2018-08-17

Praise

Join the army of fans of Scott Mariani’s Ben Hope series …

1.1 million copies sold in the UK alone – and counting!

‘For those who are yet to meet Ben Hope, beware – he is highly addictive!’

‘Another gripping tale’

‘Just when you think Ben Hope has settled into some kind of normality his life spins apart. Amazing twists and turns … plenty of action. Never a dull moment!’

‘Once again Scott Mariani has hit the bullseye!’

‘Yet again Ben Hope – the man we’d all secretly like to be – triumphs in the end!’

‘Scott Mariani is a storyteller of the highest quality’

‘Thank you, Scott, for keeping me so well entertained and enthralled’

‘Isn’t it about time Mr Mariani lets Ben Hope settle down?… I hope not! I am enjoying the series too much!’

‘Heart-stopping!’

‘Ben Hope is the hero we all need’

‘One of the best thriller series of our time!’

‘Just keeps getting better and better!’

‘Only one word to describe it – AWESOME!’

‘Loved every single page: the style of writing, the detail of plot, history, geography, technical knowledge and romantic tension. Thank you, Scott!’

‘Constant twists and turns urging you to read the next page to reach the final thrilling conclusion’

‘Ben Hope at his best’

‘Five stars are not enough’

‘Full of action and fast-paced thrills, these books are just fantastic’

‘Makes you regret that you read it too fast’

‘Thrills, spills, terror and excitement’

‘Another cracker from Scott Mariani’

‘Once again, Scott Mariani has delivered a superb, action-packed, edge-of-the-seat adventure that leaves you just wanting more. Bring it on!’

‘Probably the best Ben Hope yet!’

‘I read it in one day’

‘Anyone who has not read this series of books should do so straight away!’

‘My heart is still beating furiously’

‘Ben Hope is a thinking Jack Reacher’

‘Fast and furious as ever’

‘Action-packed and forward-thinking suspense and thrills throughout … great for technology, history and action fans and those looking for a comfortable and intelligent read’

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Epilogue

Keep Reading…

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

France

January 1348

The crowd looked on in awed silence as the pall of smoke drifted densely upwards to meet the falling sleet.

Four attempts to light the pyre had finally resulted in a dismal, crackling flame that slowly caught a hold on the pile of damp hay and twigs stacked up around the wooden stake at its centre. So thick was the smoke, the people of the mountain village who’d huddled round in the cold to witness the burning could barely even make out the figure of the man lashed to the stake. But they could clearly hear his frantic cries of protest as he writhed and fought against his bonds.

His struggles were of no use. Iron chains, not ropes, held him tightly to the thick wooden post. Rope would only burn away, and the authorities overseeing the execution wanted to make sure the job was properly carried out – that the corrupted soul of this evil man was well and truly purified in the cleansing flames.

He was a man of indeterminate age, thin, gaunt and known locally as Salvator l’Aveugle – Blind Salvator – because he had only a right eye, the left a black, empty socket. The robed and hooded traveller had first turned up in the village in late November. He’d declared himself to be a Franciscan priest on a lone pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where almost for the first time since its fall to the Muslim forces of Salah al-Din in 1187, Christianity was re-establishing a lasting foothold. Salvator’s mission was to join his fellow Frenchman and Franciscan, Roger Guérin of Aquitaine, who had managed to purchase from the current Mamluk rulers parts of the ancient city, including the hallowed Cenacle on Mount Zion, and was in the process of building a monastery there.

But Salvator’s long journey hadn’t started well. He’d scarcely covered eighty miles from his home in Burgundy before a gang of brigands had beset him on the road, taking his nag and the purse containing what little money he had. Bruised and battered, he’d plodded on his way on foot for a month or more, totally dependent on the goodwill of his fellow men for shelter and sustenance. Finally, fatigue and hunger combined with the growing winter cold and the unrelenting rain had brought on a fever that had nearly ended his pilgrimage before it had properly begun. Some children had come across him lying half-dead by the side of the path that wound up through the mountain pass a mile or so from their village. Seeing from the dirty tatters of his humble robe that he was a holy man, they’d run to fetch help and Salvator had soon been rescued. Men from the village had carried him back on a wagon, he’d been fed and tended to, and fresh straw bedding had been laid down for him in an empty stable that he shared with some chickens.

During the weeks that followed, the priest’s fever had passed and his strength had gradually returned. By then, though, winter was closing in, and he’d decided to delay resuming his journey until the spring. To begin with, most of the villagers hadn’t objected to his remaining with them two or three more months. It was an extra mouth to feed, true; but then, an extra pair of hands was always useful at this hard time of year. During his stay, Salvator had helped clear snow, repair storm damage to the protective wall that circled the village, and tend to the pigs. In his free time, he’d also begun to draw a crowd with his impromptu public sermons, which had grown in frequency and soon become more and more impassioned.

Needless to say, there were those who were unhappy with his presence, and this became more noticeable as time went on. It was a somewhat closed community, somewhat insular, easily given to suspicion and especially where strangers were concerned – even when those strangers were men of God. And most especially when those strangers frightened some people with their odd ways.

The first rumours had begun to circulate about a month after Salvator’s recovery. Just a few passing whispers to begin with, quickly growing to a widespread consensus that the presence of this itinerant priest was cause for deep concern. Increasingly, villagers complained that the content of his sermons was scandalous. He railed against core doctrines of the Church, even attacked the views of the Pope, which he declared to be ignoble and ungodly. But that wasn’t the worst of it. What really worried people were the seizures.

Once while feeding the pigs and again in the middle of delivering one of his sermons, Salvator had been seen suddenly to go rigid, then drop to the ground and begin to thrash about in a way that absolutely terrified those who witnessed it. During these inexplicable convulsions, his limbs would twitch violently and his face would contort in the most horrible way, foam drooling from the corners of his mouth and his one eye rolled up in its socket so that only the white showed. Most alarmingly of all, it was reported that he would babble and croak in a strange, guttural language that none of the villagers had ever heard before.

As the rumours inevitably gathered momentum, so did the growing belief that Salvator was possessed by demons. They’d all heard of such things, though never before seen it with their own eyes. What else could explain these frightful episodes?

It was after the third seizure happened that the village elders convened to discuss the urgent situation. The assembly of greybeards unanimously decided that such evil could not be allowed to remain in their midst. Despite the risks posed by the weather, they all agreed that their best horseman, a young carpenter named Guy, should be dispatched at once to the nearby town to notify the higher church authorities. In the meantime, Salvator should be locked up in a stone barn outside the village walls and guarded day and night, so that whatever sinister forces had taken hold of him could do no further harm.

When, after several worrying days, Guy returned from his trek, he was accompanied by an envoy of the bishop and a small party of officials and soldiers, who rapidly set up court in the village’s tiny stone chapel and summoned the prisoner to be brought before them. Covered in chains, Salvator was forced to prostrate himself in front of the bishop’s envoy, explain himself for preaching such scandalous and profane sermons, and provide evidence to all present that he was not in league with powers of Satan.

The evidence Salvator gave them was all they needed. Right before their eyes, and to their horror and satisfaction in equal measure, he succumbed to yet another bout of convulsions that proved beyond any doubt that some devilish entity had taken possession of this man’s soul. There was no alternative but to purge it out, to banish the demon and cleanse the corrupted fleshly vessel that had been its host.

Death by burning was the only way.

Bit by bit, the sluggish flames gained on the pyre, helped by a chill wind from the mountain that picked up and cleared the smoke. Salvator screamed in agony as the fire began to dance around his feet, then up his legs. Part of his robe burned away, exposing blackened and blistered skin.

‘I curse you!’ he screamed through the heat mist at the church envoy on his high seat, and at the lesser authorities and the soldiers gathered nearby to watch.

‘And you!’ Salvator bellowed at the crowd. ‘Damn your souls, for what you have done today to an innocent man!’

The people shrank away, terrified in their belief that it was the voice of the tormented demon inside him that they were hearing. Children buried their faces in their mothers’ robes; hands were pressed over their ears to protect them from evil.

The flames leaped higher around Salvator, and still he wouldn’t succumb but kept on roaring at them.

‘God sees the shameful sin that has united you all. May His eternal curse be on you all, and your children, and your children’s children after them! May a thousand years of pestilence rot this unholy place and everyone in it!’

One of the soldiers glanced nervously at the bishop’s envoy, ready to raise his bow and fire an arrow into the heart of the flames in order to silence the voice that was rattling the nerves of even the most hardened man present.

But the envoy shook his head. For purification to be effective, no mercy could be allowed. The heretic must burn to death.

And burn to death Salvator did, though it took an unbearably long time. To the villagers, it seemed as if the flaming human torch went on railing at them even as the sizzling flesh peeled from its bones. Then, finally, his cries diminished and he hung limply, no longer resisting, from the blackened chains that held him to the stake. The remnants of his robe burst alight. Then his tonsured hair. By now he could barely be seen for the flames. His one rolling eyeball seemed to peer balefully at them from the scorched ruin of his face.

Long after the carbonised skeleton had fallen into the cinders leaving the chains hanging empty, Salvator’s voice went on ringing inside the heads of the villagers. They would never forget the promise of everlasting pestilence that had been heaped on them and their line.

Within months, Salvator’s words would come true.

The martyr’s curse had begun.

Chapter One

Undisclosed location

North Korea

3 June 2011

Not long after his entry team had penetrated the inner core of the building, Udo Streicher knew it was over.

His information had been first-rate. The materials he’d been looking to acquire were exactly where his sources had said they would be, and he’d come within a hair’s breadth of having them. Millions had been spent on intelligence and equipment. An entire year had been devoted to planning. Twelve-hour days. Sometimes sixteen. Checking every possible detail. Obsessing over the layout of the hidden complex. Analysing the security systems. Evaluating the risk. Assessing their chances of making it out alive.

And for all that meticulous planning, now the raid had gone badly wrong. The mission was blown. The ten-strong group was down to nine. The equipment was lost. They’d ditched everything they’d brought with them, except their weapons.

Behind them in the white-walled, starkly neon-lit corridor, three dead bodies lay sprawled in pools of blood. Two of them belonged to the armed Korean security personnel who’d surprised the intruders just as they were about to make it through the final set of doors that separated them from their objective. The third belonged to an Austrian called Dieter Lenz, a follower of Streicher from the beginning. But Dieter wasn’t important any more. What mattered was getting out of here. Streicher refused to consider the alternatives. He’d rather die by his own bullet than face a lifetime of incarceration in the roach-infested hellhole of a North Korean prison camp.

The nine remaining members of the team ran in tight formation, their clattering footsteps all but drowned out by the shriek and whoop of alarm sirens that were sounding off all through the facility. Hannah Gissel had her pistol drawn and her teeth bared in a kind of animal ferocity. Torben Roth was clutching the Uzi he’d gunned the guards down with. Bringing up the rear were the Canadian, Steve Evers, and Sandro Guidinetti. Guidinetti looked like he was losing it under the pressure.

‘Which way did we come?’ Wolf Schilling yelled as they reached a fork in the corridor. Every door and wall in the lab complex looked the same.

‘This way,’ Streicher said, pointing left. He gripped Hannah’s arm and they raced on. The sirens seemed even louder, a wall of sound that permeated everything. Another door. Another bend in the corridor.

A side entrance swung open, and suddenly the way ahead was blocked off. A four-man security patrol, dressed in khaki paramilitary uniform and wielding Chinese-made assault rifles. Screaming at them in Korean. Streicher knew little of the language but the message was clear: DROP YOUR WEAPONS! SURRENDER OR WE WILL SHOOT!

The stand-off lasted less than two seconds. Torben Roth was the first to open fire, shooting from the hip and hosing nine-millimetre rounds up the corridor. Hannah snapped off three, four, five shots from her Glock. The guards crumpled up and fell. Streicher shot the last one with his own Heckler & Koch. He did it without hesitation or compassion. It wasn’t the first time he’d shot a man.

‘Come on!’ Hannah yelled. Her eyes were flashing with a mixture of aggression and terror and pure adrenalin. She leaped over the heap of dead men. The other eight followed.

Streicher felt a strange surge of pride in his woman. Weeks earlier, he’d decided that in the event of the mission going bad, he would kill her before he took his own life. A wild, untamed spirit like hers didn’t belong in captivity.

They ran faster. The alarms drowned out everything. Every door they passed, Streicher kept expecting to see fly open and hordes of guards swarming through. But so far there was nothing like the level of resistance he’d feared. The North Korean economy was dismal to the point that even a hard-core military dictatorship could be forced to make serious defence cuts. That might be the reason. After all, nobody knew about this facility. Security could have been pared down to the bone, with nobody any the wiser. Maybe the remaining few guards were locked down elsewhere in the building, unwilling to face the armed intruders’ superior numbers. Maybe there were no more guards at all.

All of which was making him begin to wonder if they’d been premature in beating a retreat.

Before he could decide what to do, they’d reached the main entrance. The jungle air enveloped them like a hot, wet cloak as they burst outside. The alarm sirens were even louder out here, their echo bouncing off the buildings, distortion crackling in the team’s ears. The compound was grey concrete, as vast and forbidding as a high-security prison yard, and ringed with a mesh fence supported on steel posts fifteen feet high and topped all the way around with coils of razor wire. The main building was far larger than the rest, white, squat, windowless, like a giant bunker. The smaller buildings clustered around it, mainly storage units and maintenance sheds, were painted in military drab green. The main gate was directly opposite the white building, eighty yards away. From there, a concrete road spanned the patchy open ground surrounding the facility, where the jungle had been roughly cut back to clear room for it.

Officially, this place had never been built. The North Korean rulers firmly denied its existence. US Intelligence had long suspected otherwise, but their satellites had never been able to distinguish the facility from hundreds of others across the country that looked outwardly identical.

The American spies were clever, thorough people. But Udo Streicher was cleverer, and took thoroughness to a level that verged on the pathological. If anyone could find out what was really in there, he could. And he had, though it had cost him a fortune and a lot of hard work.

Needless to say, Streicher and his people hadn’t used the main gate to get inside. The hole they’d cut in the wire was a hundred yards along the perimeter fence, on the east side of the compound where the bushes grew closer and the no-man’s-land was at its narrowest. Beyond, a thicket of trees hid the clearing where the team’s two choppers waited on standby to whisk them and their precious spoils back over the border to the RV point on the coast, from where a motor launch would carry them eastwards to the safety of Japan. A chartered jet from Tokyo back home and dry to Europe, and the mission would have been accomplished.

A successful outcome would then have become the start of the next phase in the plan, one that Streicher had dreamed about for a long, long time.

‘We’re clear,’ Roth said, glancing around them. He seemed to be right. The compound was deserted and empty apart from a parked row of Jeeps in Korean People’s Army colours.

‘We’ve taken them all out, that’s why,’ said Hannah. ‘There’s hardly anyone guarding this place. Which means we need to turn around and go back inside and get the stuff. Right now. Before it’s too late.’

Streicher said nothing. He stood still, his head cocked a little to one side as if he was smelling the air.

‘She’s right, Udo,’ Schilling said. ‘We have time. We can still do this.’

‘It’s what we came here for,’ Hannah said. ‘It’s why we chose this place, remember? That’s what you told us. Our best chance. Our only chance.’

Streicher said nothing.

‘I’m up for it. Or else we came all this way for nothing,’ Roth said.

‘And Dieter died for nothing,’ Schilling said.

Streicher said, ‘There’s no time. It will have to wait.’

‘Wait how long? Months? Years?’

‘As long as it takes.’

‘No. I want to do this,’ Hannah said.

So did Streicher. He wanted it more than anything in the world. But he shook his head. ‘Listen.’

He’d heard it the moment they stepped outside. It had been barely audible over the sirens, but now the sound was growing. It was the growling rumble of vehicles approaching. Hard to tell how many. Enough to be a serious problem. Enough to have made him absolutely right about getting out of here, this minute.

‘Oh, shit,’ Hannah said, as she heard it too.

Then they saw where the sound was coming from, and suddenly things were very much worse.

The line of military vehicles emerged at speed from the jungle, roaring along the road right for the main gate. Six of them, ex-Russian GAZ Vodnik troop carriers, each carrying up to nine men. The column made no attempt to slow for the gate. The first vehicle crashed straight through, steel frame and galvanised wire mesh crumpling and folding underneath its wheels as it stormed inside the compound followed by the rest of the convoy. The vehicles fanned out and skidded to a halt. Their hatches flew open and a mass of men spilled out. More than fifty fully armed troops. Against nine.

‘Fuck them,’ Torben Roth said. He snapped another magazine into his Uzi. Hannah raised her pistol. Gröning and Hinreiner looked at each other, then at Guidinetti.

The clatter of small-arms fire filled the compound. Roth held his ground. A burst to the left; a burst to the right. Then he staggered and dropped his Uzi and blood flew and hit the wall behind him. Streicher ducked down low and ran to the fallen man and saw that his face had been ripped open by a rifle bullet. Streicher grasped him by the arms and began dragging him behind cover, helped by Gröning. Hannah kept on firing. Several of the soldiers were down, but now the Russian GAZ Vodniks were advancing and bringing their on-board heavy machine guns into play. The roar shattered the air; 14.5mm bullets ploughed through the parked Jeeps, gouged craters in the buildings, chewed up the concrete.

Streicher now knew beyond any doubt that he’d been right. Things were bad enough already. If they’d stayed inside the building a minute longer, none of them would have made it this far alive.

‘Help me,’ he yelled, dragging the bleeding, disfigured Roth. Between them, he and Wolf Schilling and Miki Donath managed to manhandle the injured man out of the field of fire and between the buildings while the others did what they could to hold back the soldiers.

The firepower coming at them was overwhelming. Hannah fell back when her pistol was empty. Guidinetti was hit in the shoulder and Evers was supporting him as they made their retreat. How so many of them made it back to the hole in the wire without getting shot to pieces, Streicher would never know. Staggering through the undergrowth towards the trees with Roth’s weight slippery and bloody in his arms, he was praying that the soldiers hadn’t already intercepted the waiting helicopters.

Sixty seconds later and the choppers would have been gone anyway. The pilots had heard the gunfire and were quickly powering up their turbines in desperation to get the hell away from here. Their skids were dancing off the ground and the vegetation was being flattened by the downdraught as the surviving team members clambered on board. Streicher, Hannah, Donath and Schilling and the injured Roth on one; Evers and Guidinetti and Hinreiner and Gröning aboard the other.

The soldiers were coming. Flitting shapes among the trees. Muzzle flashes lighting up the shadows of the thick green forest. Bullets cracked off the Perspex screen of Streicher’s chopper.

‘Take it up! Get us out of here!’ he yelled to the pilot.

As the choppers lifted off, the thicket suddenly crashed aside. Like a great scarred green armour-plated dinosaur scouring the jungle for its prey, a Korean People’s Army VTT-323 armoured personnel carrier lurched through the trees, flattening bushes and saplings and anything else in its path. Its twin machine guns swivelled up towards the escaping aircraft. But those weren’t what Streicher was gaping down at from the cockpit of the rising helicopter. It was the turret-mounted multiple rocket launcher that was angling up at them, tracking its targets and ready to fire at any moment.

‘Higher!’ he bawled over the din of the rotors, thumping the pilot on the shoulder. ‘Higher!’

Two rockets launched simultaneously in a twin jet of flame. They streaked through the trees and hit the second chopper and blew it apart in a blinding flash that gave way to an expanding fireball.

‘NO!’ Streicher howled as he saw it go down.

The burning wreck dropped from the air and crashed down on top of the armoured personnel carrier. A secondary explosion rocked the jungle, and then Streicher saw no more as his pilot spun up and away at full thrust, nose up, tail down.

They flew in numb silence over the forest. The green canopy zipped by below. Wolf and Miki were trying to hold down the bleeding, squirming Torben Roth and pump morphine into him from the first-aid kit. Hannah was lost in a world of her own, her face drawn and grim and spattered with someone else’s blood. She made no attempt to wipe it away.

And Udo Streicher was just beginning to contemplate the scale of the disaster. It would be a long time before he was fully able to calculate his losses, both human and financial.

But he’d be back. This wasn’t over. It would never be over. Not until he’d attained his goal. One way or another, the world would know his name before he was done.

It was, after all, his destiny.

Chapter Two

Hautes-Alpes, France

The present day

When they’d found the stranger, at first they hadn’t known what to do with him.

It was nineteen-year-old Frère Roby, the one they affectionately called simple, who’d first stumbled on the camp high up on the mountainside during one of his long contemplative rambles one morning in early October. Roby would later describe how he’d been following a young chamois, hoping to befriend the animal, when he’d made his strange discovery.

The camp had been made in a natural hollow among the rocks, sheltered from the wind, out of sight and well away from the beaten track, only accessible along a narrow path with a sheer cliff face on one side and a dizzy drop on the other. It was like nothing Roby had ever seen. In the middle of the camp was a shallow fire pit, about two feet deep, over which had been built a short, tapered chimney made of stone and earth. The fire was cold, but the remains of a spit-roasted hare showed that it had been used recently. Nearby, almost invisibly camouflaged behind a carefully built screen of pine branches, was a small and robust tent.

That was where he’d found the stranger, lying on his side in a sleeping bag with his back turned to the entrance. To begin with, Roby had been frightened, thinking the man was dead. As he dared to creep closer, he’d realised the man was breathing, though deeply unconscious. The chamois completely forgotten, Roby had dashed all the way back to the monastery to tell the others.

After some thought, the prior had given his consent, and Roby had led a small party of older men back to the spot. It was mid-afternoon when they reached the camp, to find the stranger still lying unconscious inside his tent.

The men soon realised the cause of the stranger’s condition, from the empty spirits bottles that littered the camp. They’d never seen anybody so comatose from drink before, not even Frère Gaspard that notorious time when he’d broken into the store of beer the monks produced to sell. They wondered who this man was and how long he’d been living here undetected, just three kilometres from the remote monastery that was their home. He didn’t look like a vagrant or a beggar. Perhaps, one of them suggested, he was a hunter who’d lost his way in the wilderness.

But if he was a hunter, he should have a gun. When they delicately searched his pockets and his green military canvas haversack in the hope of finding some identification, all they came across was a knife, a quantity of cash, some French cigarettes and an American lighter, as well as a battered steel flask half-filled with the same spirit that had been in the bottles. They also found a creased photograph of a woman with auburn hair, whose identity was as much a mystery to them as the man’s.

The monks were fascinated by the fire pit. The blackened mouth of the stone-and-earth chimney suggested that the stranger must have been living here for some time, perhaps weeks. The way it was constructed indicated considerable skill. They were men who’d been used to a hard, simple existence close to nature all their lives, dependent through the harsh Alpine winters on the firewood they’d gathered, chopped and seasoned themselves. They understood that the fire pit was the work of someone highly expert in the art of survival. That, as well as the green bag and the tent, made them wonder whether the stranger might at one time have been a soldier. Such things had happened before. A Wehrmacht infantryman had been found frozen to death not far from here in the winter of 1942, hiding in the mountains after apparently deserting his unit. As far as the monks knew, there weren’t any major wars happening at the moment, down there below in the world they’d left behind. The stranger was dressed in civilian clothes – jeans, leather jacket, stout boots – and his blond hair was too long for him to have belonged to the military any time recently.

Whatever clues they could discern as to his past, it was his immediate future that concerned them. Despite their isolated, ascetic lifestyle, the monks were worldly enough to know about such things as alcohol poisoning, and were afraid that the stranger might die if left where he was. The monastic tradition of helping travellers was just one of the many ways in which they were sworn to serve God. The question was, what should they do?

There’d been some debate as to whether to bring him back to the monastery, where the prior would best know how to help him, or whether to call immediately for outside help. It hadn’t been a hard decision finally. None of them possessed a phone on which to dial 15 for the SAMU emergency medical assistance service.

So they gathered up his things and carried him back along the winding, steep and sometimes dangerous mountain paths to their sanctuary, Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux, where the stranger had remained ever since.

That had been over seven months ago.

Chapter Three

Ben Hope’s awakening before dawn was sudden, as it always was these days. He couldn’t remember ever having slept as deeply and restfully in his life before now. The instant he laid his head down and closed his eyes in the utter stillness of his living quarters, he was falling into a soft darkness where no dreams came to haunt him, and he became still to his innermost core. From that profound, total immersion in the void, one hour before daybreak each morning he snapped into a fully alert state of wakefulness, ready to begin each new day with all the energy and enthusiasm of the last.

This was not a familiar experience for Ben. Things hadn’t always been this way.

His life, until the day the monks had found him half-dead on the mountain and brought him here, had been hurtling towards wilful self-destruction. The events leading up to that point were still just a painful blur in his memory. He couldn’t, and didn’t really want to, recall the exact course that his long period of wandering had taken him on.

He remembered a wet day in London last August, marking his return from a crazy journey that had led him from Ireland’s west coast to Madeira and across the Atlantic to the Oklahoman city of Tulsa. He remembered the terrible emptiness and sense of bitter loss that had struck him like a bullet to the head the moment he’d stepped off the plane into the London drizzle and realised that he was now completely directionless. He had nowhere to go, except straight to the nearest bar to get wrecked. No home to return to, and nobody to share it with if he had. Not any more, not since Brooke Marcel had walked out of his life.

Or more correctly, as he knew too well, since he’d walked out of hers. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. He truly hadn’t wanted to hurt her.

But instead, fool that he was, he’d gone his own way, like always. The knowledge that he’d broken the heart of the woman he loved more than anything in the world – that had been just about the worst agony he’d ever had to endure. It had driven him to the very edge. And he’d have let it drive him right over into oblivion.

He couldn’t even remember for how many drunken days he’d hung around in London after getting back from the States. Not long, though. The place held too many memories for him, because it was where Brooke had lived for most of the time he’d known her. He did remember getting thrown out of a couple of pubs – or maybe three – once with blood smeared over his knuckles, stumbling away down the street before the police turned up. It wasn’t his blood. He didn’t know whose it was, or what the fight had been about.

Somewhere along the dotted, meandering trail of bars that followed, one merging into another, people had started talking French at him instead of English. He’d no idea how that had happened, whether he’d crossed over the Channel by ferry or gone under it by rail. Whether he’d drifted back to France because his home for some years had been a former farm in Normandy, a place called Le Val. Or whether he might just as easily have ended up in the Netherlands, Norway or Iceland. None of this entered his mind at the time. All he’d wanted to do was lose himself. Didn’t matter where. Didn’t matter how.

Ben had been a hard drinker for many years, with a preference for single malt scotch when it was available to him. The habit had left its mark on his time in the military, and it had sometimes affected him in the career he’d pursued since. But there was hard drinking, and there was beyond hard; and then there was the kind of wild, insane, hell-bent suicidal self-poisoning where you didn’t even give a damn what you threw down your neck so long as you could keep it coming and it blotted out all thoughts, blotted out everything, slammed down the iron portcullis on the whole world. The more he drank, the more he wanted to escape from himself, the more he needed to get away from other people.

Maybe that was why he’d made his way into the mountains. Or maybe he could have blindly wandered off anywhere. That was what lost souls did, after all.

When he’d woken in his strange new surroundings that evening over seven months ago, reeling and sick from the whisky still in his system, his first impulse had been to escape. If he hadn’t been so dehydrated and weak, he’d have rejected the food and shelter offered by the monks and gone back to trying to kill himself in a new mountain lair – one where this time nobody could ever find him.

That was then. Something in him had changed. He felt strong now. Clean, clear, fit and alive. He hadn’t touched alcohol for one hundred and ninety-three days straight. Today would be the hundred and ninety-fourth, but who was counting?

He wondered where Brooke was right now. Most likely she was still asleep in her bed, with a little while yet to dream whatever dreams were in her mind before her day began. He pictured her lying there. He hoped she was happy, and thinking about her that way made him smile. There’d been so many days when all he could do was think about her and agonise over the love he’d lost and the life he’d walked away from. For the first months he’d been here, the mistakes he’d made still haunted him in the dead stillness of the night, when he’d light his candle and gaze at the photo of her that he’d been carrying for so long in his wallet that it had become frayed and worn. Sometimes it had hurt so much that he couldn’t bear to look at it.

But the rawness of the pain had begun to fade imperceptibly with each day he remained here. He didn’t fully understand why. Just knew that, thanks to this place, he’d slowly begun to discover within himself a strange kind of serenity. A feeling he’d never experienced before. One he’d been chasing all his life and never found. Until coming here.

Yes, he had changed, and he knew that it had been the Carthusian monks of Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux who had guided him on his path. For their friendship, and their trust, he owed them more than he could say.

Ben flipped himself out of his hard, narrow bunk. The stone floor was cold against his bare feet. Without hesitation, he dropped down on to his palms and did five sets of twenty press-ups, pausing a few seconds between sets, savouring the lactic-acid burn, letting the pain build up in his triceps and deltoids until the muscles screamed. Then he hooked his bare toes under the rough wooden edge of the bunk and did another five sets of twenty sit-ups. When he was done with those and his abdominals were cramping satisfactorily, he got to his feet and walked over to the massive stone lintel above the doorway connecting the small bedroom to the rest of his quarters. It had stood strong for a thousand years and could probably have held the weight of an Abrams main battle tank. He didn’t think he was abusing it by using it as a chin-up bar. He jumped up, hung from his fingers with his feet dangling above the floor. Knees slightly bent, he lifted himself up so that his eyes were level with the lintel, then slowly down. He did five slow, painful sets of those before he dropped lightly to his feet and dusted off his hands.

Before the day was done, he’d have repeated the whole routine seven or eight more times. The solitary hours the Carthusian monks devoted each day in their cells to prayer, Ben spent on exercise. The pain of physical endurance was his purification, the endorphin rush his little piece of heaven. He’d never been much good at prayer. Maybe that would change too, with being here. One small step at a time.

Ben slowly washed himself in the stone cubicle that served him as a bathroom. The water was straight from a mountain spring, not much above freezing. It reminded him of the things he’d liked about the army. So did the uniform, although the plain robe of a lay brother was unlike any other garb he’d donned in his life. He was getting pretty used to it now. Something about it seemed to fit. He put it on, tied up the sash belt, stepped into the pair of plain sandals he now wore instead of boots, then left his quarters and went out into the stillness of the monastery to begin another day.

One small step at a time.

He was in no hurry to leave this place.

The magenta glow of the sunrise, shot through with streaks of gold, cast its light through the ancient cloisters as Ben walked the same route he walked each morning to attend to the first of his daily duties. Soon the slow, heavy tolling of the bell would signal Mass, the only sound to break the silence as the arched passages filled with a procession of silent robed figures heading towards the church. Some were young men, still strong and upright. Others were bent and old, on crutches, with long white beards. They must have lived there so long, they’d totally forgotten any other life.

After the first week, Ben had expected the monks to ask him to leave; especially as he’d been so aggressive with them at first, demanding they bring him the remaining bottles from his pack. Their gentle refusal had been like some act of love. They’d gone on serving him his food twice a day, and nobody had said anything about leaving. After two weeks, when he was feeling slightly stronger and the violent craving for alcohol had become more bearable, they’d moved him from the infirmary to a small house just inside the main entrance, which was used as guest quarters. Slowly at first, he’d started to explore the monastery.

Nobody was stopping him from walking out of the gate, but something inside him did. For the first time, he’d felt the power of the place. He’d looked out over the ancient stone wall across the mountainside and the forests down below, and thought there was something special here.

It was so easy to forget that Briançon was just a few miles away, the highest city in Europe, with a population of eleven thousand people. The world beyond, with all its wars and politics and deception and unhappiness, might as well have belonged to another galaxy. It felt to him like an existence he could comfortably leave behind, shut the door on and never return to.

By the fourth week, he’d begun thinking that he couldn’t go on accepting the care of his hosts without giving something back. The winter was setting in by then, and you could smell the snow coming. From his walks about the monastery and its grounds, he could see there was so much work to do. So much he could offer in return, by way of thanks. Nobody had ever asked him, but from that day he’d begun tending to the livestock, the goats and long-horned cattle whose milk the monks drank and used to make butter and cheese. He gathered eggs from the hen houses, chopped firewood, helped out with general manual tasks like carpentry or masonry repairs on the ancient, weathered buildings. The monastery was also home to a small population of cats, employed to keep down less welcome animal visitors. To them, it was permissible to talk, and Ben enjoyed feeding them.

His daily duties brought him into a little more contact with other inhabitants of the monastery. Through looking after the animals, he met Roby, the young man whom he had to thank for being here – for being alive – and each day they spent some time together. Silence was strictly observed even during work hours, but Roby would often have whispered conversations with him. Ben liked him a lot.

Roby wore the short cowl of a first-year novice, over which he put on a black cloak when the community got together. He was nineteen, with a disarming smile and a mental age of perhaps thirteen or fourteen. But what he lacked in quickness of intellect, he more than made up for by his devotion to Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux and everyone and everything in it, and he could speak and read Latin nearly as well as he could French.

As Ben discovered, Roby was a good teacher, too. Under his patient tutelage, Ben became pretty adept in the art of milking goats and cattle without getting butted or trampled to death or spilling milk everywhere. The only occasion when Roby burst out laughing was when Ben fell flat on his face trying to catch a running, flapping chicken that wouldn’t let itself be herded into the hen house. Roby’s mirth was like a child’s, which just made Ben warm to him more. They’d laughed together for about half an hour that time.

Afterwards, Ben had realised that it was the first time he’d laughed in months.

His contact with the monks themselves was more limited. They were men whose stillness and calm fascinated him. Observing their vow of silence, they seldom spoke to one another as they went about their duties, let alone to him. One exception to the rule was the weekly visit Ben received from Père Jacques, the Father Master of Novices, a kindly man Ben put in his late sixties. Ostensibly, the visits were to find out how Ben was, whether he needed anything, how he was recovering. The Father Master of Novices never probed, but Ben could sense the man was curious as to the intentions of this stranger in their midst.

Little by little, the serene daily rhythm of silence, prayer and hard work had seeped into his bones until it felt like part of his life. Every morning at quarter to six, Ben would get up, complete his exercises and then go and see to the livestock. At eight the bell tolled for the first time, and the monks would assemble for Mass. Ben’s morning was spent working, taking care of the gardens and the orchard. Lunch was at noon, a simple dish of vegetables, eggs or fish, eaten alone in his cell. The food was served by a monk pushing a wooden trolley down the corridors, on a tray slid through a hatch – like in prison, except here there were no locks on any door. Wine or beer were permitted in extreme moderation, though Ben avoided both.

The rest of the afternoon was spent working until Vespers at four, then there was a light supper. At seven the bell tolled again for prayer. An hour later was bedtime, but it didn’t last long. The Carthusians believed in a semi-nocturnal life, on the grounds that the stillness of night invited them to more fervent prayer. At eleven-thirty the bell summoned the monks to a session of prayer in their cells; then shortly after midnight the community made their way back through the barely lit cloisters and would sit in the darkness of the church in profound silence before the chanting of Matins began. It wasn’t until deep into the small hours that they returned to their cells, for yet more prayer, before they finally retired to bed for just two or three hours’ rest before the whole routine began again.

There was no TV. No radio, no phones. Secular reading material was strictly limited. Computers and the internet were unknown here. It was a life that had remained fundamentally unchanged since the founding of the Carthusian Order in the early eleventh century. The Order’s motto was Stat crux dum volvitur orbis: The cross stands still while the globe revolves. The existence this place offered was designed to make you lose all interest in the affairs of the outside world, and it was effective in ways Ben couldn’t have imagined.

Finally, one cold midwinter’s evening by the glow of a crackling wood fire, as the snow fell silently outside over the mountains and layered the roofs and walls of the monastery buildings under the silver moonlight, without being asked, Ben had told the Father Master of Novices what was in his heart.

Jeff Dekker, the former SBS commando who had been his business partner and closest friend, would have thought Ben had lost his mind. This was the guy who’d never once turned away from trouble, even when the odds were at their suicidal craziest. Who’d taken down the worst of the worst and protected the innocent as if he’d been born to it. Adventure and risk were in his blood.

But not any more. Those days were now over for good.

Ben had said, ‘I want to stay.’

Chapter Four

It had been after that discussion that Ben had been taken to see the prior. The head of the monastery lived in just the same kind of humble quarters as the other members of the order. His name was Père Antoine. He was over eighty, with a face deeply etched by wrinkles and what would have been a leonine mane of pure white hair if it hadn’t been for the monk’s tonsure shorn into it, symbolising the crown of thorns worn by Christ.

The first thing Ben noticed about Père Antoine was his eyes. They didn’t belong in an old man’s face. They seemed to glow like those of a happy child, as if filled with some kind of inner light that poured out of him. Ben found them mesmerising.

The two men spoke in French, after Ben explained that his was fluent and he had lived in France for a while. The old man smiled at the discovery that ‘Ben’ was short for Benedict, and addressed him by the French version of the name, Benoît. He gently invited him to talk about himself, which was something Ben found difficult. Secrecy was second nature to him, instilled by years of covert military operations and the work he’d done since leaving the army. But that wasn’t the only reason it was difficult for him to speak openly. Here, now, in the presence of the old monk, Ben felt a sense of shame.

‘I’ve done a lot of pretty bad things,’ he confessed.

‘Père Jacques tells me you were once a soldier. For how many years was that your occupation?’

‘Too many.’

‘During those years, Benoît, did you kill many people?’

Ben said nothing.

‘The memory of your past pains you, I see. But you atoned for your sins by leaving that path.’

‘I’m not sure if that counts as atonement, Father.’

‘It depends on the reason why you left.’

‘I didn’t like people telling me what to do.’

‘You have a problem with authority?’

‘It depends on who’s giving the orders. If it’s someone I respect, that’s one thing. If it’s some government stooge with a secret power agenda who expects me to do his dirty work for him on the pretext of protecting the realm, that’s another.’

‘You did not find your realm worth protecting?’

‘Not if it meant taking the lives of innocent people whose countries we invaded simply for reasons of territory and economics. That troubled me then. And it troubles me even more now, when I think about the things I did.’

‘And if your order came from God?’

‘I’m still waiting for that one,’ Ben said. ‘That’s the truth.’

‘Perhaps it has come already, but you do not see it.’

Ben didn’t reply.

The old monk nodded thoughtfully and reflected for a few moments. ‘By choice, I know little about the modern world. But history, I do know. These things you tell me – it was always so. This monastery was built during the time of the First Crusade. It is convenient for us to forget that the Christian forces who established the Holy Kingdom of Jerusalem, in so doing, carried out the wholesale massacre of thousands of innocent Muslim lives. It was not an act of faith, but of pure murder.’

Ben looked at him.

‘The Church’s past is tainted by many sins, and to force good men to do evil in the name of God is but one of them.’ Père Antoine smiled sadly. ‘It surprises you, to hear me speak this way.’

It did.

‘You speak of your shame for the things you did then,’ the monk went on. ‘But the goodness in you prevailed, Benoît. You left that life behind.’

‘I tried to,’ Ben said. ‘I wanted to use what I’d learned to do some good.’ He paused as he tried to find the right words. ‘Things happen in this world. Things you couldn’t even begin to imagine from up here. K and R is just one of them.’

‘You are right. I have no idea what that means.’

‘Kidnap and ransom,’ Ben explained. ‘It’s a business, and a big one. The trade in human misery for money. The men who do it are pure bad, and too often, there’s nobody there to stop them. That was something I wanted to change.’

‘And did you?’

Ben thought of the kidnap victims he’d removed from the clutches of their captors. A long list of names and faces that he’d never forget. Many of them had been children, snatched from their homes, from schools, from cars, so as to extort ransom from their families. He wondered where they all were now. Getting on with their lives, he supposed. He wondered if they too were haunted by old memories.

‘Saving the lives of the innocent is not something of which you should be ashamed,’ Père Antoine said.

‘Yes, I saved people. But to save them, sometimes unpleasant things had to be done.’

‘Violence?’

‘Yes.’

‘Killing?’

Ben shrugged. He nodded. He glanced down as he did it. It was the first time in his life he hadn’t been able to look another man in the eye.

‘I did what I had to do to resolve the situation. Or that was how it seemed to me at the time. Perhaps there might have been another way.’

‘Perhaps. Or perhaps this was the duty that God set in your path. He has many purposes for men of courage and integrity.’

Ben smiled darkly. ‘Next you’ll be telling me that He moves in mysterious ways.’

Père Antoine was silent for a long time, reflecting. ‘We have talked about the past. Now let us talk about the future. You have been here long enough to have seen a little of our life. The institutional framework by which we live is somewhat rigid, some might say uncompromising.’

‘Believe me, Father, I’ve been used to that.’

‘Very well. Then consider our vocation to solitude. It requires a strong will and a balanced judgement. It is not for everyone.’

‘I love this place,’ Ben said. ‘I feel at peace here.’

‘Because of what you have found here, or because of what you believe you have run away from?’

Ben didn’t reply.

The old man smiled. ‘You may wish to dwell a little longer on that question. And ask yourself how truly you would be suited to life here. It takes time to adapt to it, learning to still the mind, quiet the senses and calm the spirit. It is a purely contemplative life, leaving behind all that we have known previously. He who remains in the Charterhouse has felt in the very centre of his soul a call so profound that no words can truly describe it. It is the revelation of the Absolute. But even this is only the beginning of a quest to which one’s entire life, in all its aspects and for however long we may continue in this world, shall be utterly devoted. We seek only God. We live only for God, to whom we surrender body and soul. “You have seduced me, Lord, and I let myself be seduced.”’

‘Jeremiah, chapter twenty, verse seven,’ Ben said. He hadn’t forgotten everything from his past theology studies, even though they’d been scattered across the course of twenty-odd years – a dismal stop-start pattern of failure and indecision. There’d been times in his life when he’d wanted nothing more than to enter the Church, convinced that was the only way he’d find the peace of mind he needed so much. At other times that notion had seemed ridiculous, a crazy and irrelevant pipe dream. In any case, life had always got in the way of his plans and he’d found himself being dragged around the world instead, with people endlessly trying to shoot him, stab him, or blow him up. Routine stuff. You almost got used to it eventually.

If the monk was impressed by Ben’s knowledge of the Bible, he didn’t say or do anything to show it. He went on, ‘Therefore we cast ourselves into the abyss, and cut ourselves off from all that is not God. For our new life to begin, first there must be a kind of death. The death of our old selves.’ He paused, and those glowing eyes seemed to bore into Ben. ‘Are you ready for that, Benoît?’

‘I’ve faced death often enough,’ Ben said. ‘And wished I could leave my old self behind somehow.’

‘It is the reason you tried to lose yourself in wine.’

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Ben said.

‘Can you live without it? The drink?’ For a moment, the monk’s eyes were as sharp as the directness of his question.

Ben paused before he replied. ‘I won’t lie to you, Father. It isn’t an easy thing to give up. But I feel a little stronger every day.’

The old man smiled again and fetched a small bottle from the folds of his robe. ‘Here. It will bring strength, health, and vigour.’

‘What is it?’ Ben said, gazing at the bottle.

‘Just a humble tonic that I make myself, using water from the mountain and some simple ingredients. It contains no alcohol. I have been drinking it for many years. Try it.’

Ben uncapped the bottle, sniffed, sipped. It didn’t smell of anything and had only a faintly bitter taste.

‘A little each day is all you need,’ the old man said, then fell into a state of very still contemplation that seemed to last for ever in the silence of the room.

Finally he said, ‘Very well. I believe you should remain with us a little longer, so that you may decide whether it is truly the path you wish to pursue. There is no hurry. If, after this period of time, you still wish to remain and it is deemed that you are fit and suited for this way of life, you may formally request to be admitted to the order, subject to its rules, to live at God’s disposal alone, in solitude and stillness, in an everlasting prayer and a joyful penitence. The Father Master of Novices will visit you regularly and watch over your training.’

‘Thank you, Father.’

‘Tomorrow you will move to your own monastic quarters, so that you may share the life we live. You will come and see me here once a week from now on, and we will talk.’

On his way out, Ben noticed the chessboard on a table in the shadows.

‘I find that it quietens the mind,’ the old man said. When Ben looked surprised that such things were allowed in the monastery, the prior explained that since the death of the very ancient monk who had been his chess partner, he’d had nobody to play against but himself.

‘It’s a win for white in four moves, maybe five,’ Ben said, gazing at the board.

‘You play? Good. Then when you visit me each week, we shall play together.’

Ben’s cell was more spacious than he’d expected. It was on two floors, with its own carpentry workshop and even a little walled garden outside. He began to understand that a Carthusian monk’s lifestyle of solitary contemplation required just a little elbow room to prevent him from going mad. He had the minimum of simple pine furniture, a small desk at which to read and eat, his bunk, and a lectern for praying on bended knees, where a member of the order would spend much of his day. A small, shuttered window in his main living space overlooked the mountainside and the forested valley below. With the coming of spring, he planted some seeds in his garden and watched the green shoots grow each day. He took some of the prior’s ‘little tonic’ each day, too, after his morning exercises and again at night before bed. It seemed to be working for him. Whether it was that, or the fact that he’d stopped drinking for the first time in his adult life, combined with the simple diet of wholesome home-grown food, goat’s milk and pure spring water, he’d never felt so healthy and full of vitality.

That spring, a new duty he added to his daily routine was helping the monks brew their beer, which they stored in kegs in a vault beneath the monastery and sold to make a little money for the place’s upkeep. A few months ago, it might have bothered him to have been around the beer. Now, he was barely tempted by it.

Besides, he enjoyed the company. He was getting to know them all better now. With the onset of the warmer weather, more time was spent in the neatly tended gardens and the surrounding wildflower meadows where the long-horned cattle roamed and grazed. Away from the monastery buildings, Ben discovered that the rule of silence was far less strictly observed. The monks would sit clustered together on benches during their downtime in the spring sunshine, enjoying the Alpine views, their wrap-around shades and Aviator Ray-Bans a strange contrast to their robes as they shared animated discussions and laughed and joked together, like regular guys.

Now and then a jet plane would fly over, tracking across the pure blue sky above the mountains. It was becoming strange to imagine that there was a whole other world still out there.

This place grew on you, for sure.

Chapter Five

It was just after dawn on a late May morning, and Ben was finishing up the day’s first punishing bout of exercises before going about his duties, when there was an unexpected knock at the door of his cell. He quickly shrugged on his robe, opened the door and saw that his visitor was the Father Master of Novices.

Père Jacques pulled back the hood of his habit to reveal his tonsured scalp, and spoke in his usual hushed, benevolent tone. ‘I have come to ask a service from you, Benoît.’

Ben was getting used to being called that. ‘Whatever I can do, Father.’

In as few words as possible, the monk explained that it was about the beer. Ben already knew that once every few months the store of monastic ale, that had been ageing in barrels in the cellar deep beneath the monastery, needed to be brought up and loaded on the prehistoric flatbed truck that was the monks’ only motor vehicle. He also knew that it was the job of Frère Patrice, one of the lay brothers, to don everyday clothing and drive the laden truck down the winding mountain road into Briançon. There, it was passed on to the wholesaler’s agent who handled the distribution of the quality brew across France. It was a useful source of revenue for the monastery, as well as a proud centuries-old tradition.

But, as the Father Master of Novices explained with a frown, Frère Patrice had twisted his ankle badly a few days earlier after tripping down the refectory steps, and was unable to fulfil his duty today. Would Benoît agree to take his place?

Ben said that he’d be delighted to help in any way he could. He felt pleased and honoured that he’d been asked. It meant that he was trusted. It meant he was starting to be considered one of the community.

Before anything else could happen, though, first the beer barrels had to be brought up from the cellars. Like everything else here, that had to be done the old-fashioned way, which meant the hard way: at least eight hours’ worth of tough physical labour carrying and rolling each forty-gallon iron-banded oak barrel separately all the way up from the bowels of the monastery, to be loaded on the truck ready to be taken down the mountain first thing the following morning, in time for the rendezvous with the distributor in Briançon.

Ben welcomed the task. Soon afterwards, he joined a small gang of lay brothers assigned to cellar duty. Their names were Gilles, Marc and Olivier. After brief, solemn greetings they got started.

Ben had never visited this part of the monastery before, deep below the main buildings. Olivier led the way with a lantern down endless twisting, steeply descending passages. Their steps left a line of prints in the dust as they walked. The little light the swaying lantern threw off glistened against the condensation that trickled from the mildewed stone walls, and every sound echoed deep in the shadows. Ben ran his fingers along the damp rock and could feel the tool marks where this space had been carved out of the solid heart of the mountain a thousand years ago, a feat of unimaginable difficulty. The further they descended, the more it felt like going down into a mineshaft, and he wondered how the hell they were meant to drag the beer barrels all the way up to ground level. It seemed like the kind of punitive exercise the army would delight in inflicting on raw recruits.

He soon found out the answer. A system of ropes and pulleys had been in use for about the last five hundred years – pretty newfangled technology so far as the monks were concerned – to carry the barrels up from the murky cellar. Quite how not installing some proper electric lighting down there was supposed to bring them closer to God, Ben didn’t know and didn’t ask. At least the rope and tackle system helped them avoid the very real possibility of meeting Him all too soon by being crushed to death while hauling their load up the steep, narrow stone steps in the semi-darkness. But to shift them from the cellar’s iron-studded oak doors all the way to the former stable near the main gate where the truck was housed, it was going to be a simple, old-fashioned muscle job. Whatever the monastery earned in the way of revenue from this, Ben and the gang were going to earn it on their behalf today.

After four hours of sweaty work, they’d managed to shift more than half the barrels up to ground level, and the lay brothers looked more than ready for a break. It was agreed that they’d take half an hour to rest their tired arms and backs, then meet up again here to finish the job.

While the others went off to nap, or pray, or however they saw fit to spend the next thirty minutes, Ben wandered the underground passages. He used the flickering lantern to light his way, marvelling at how few people must have been here over the course of so many centuries. Some of the passages went down even deeper; he reckoned he must be a hundred and fifty feet or more below the monastery. The floor was thick with the dust of ages.

He supposed these might have been escape tunnels for the monks during turbulent periods in history, or hiding places in which they could take refuge from marauding enemies. Nobody of a claustrophobic nature would have wanted to venture down here, especially as some of the carved-out stone channels weren’t much more than child-sized. At just a shade under six foot, Ben had to bend right down to be able to explore them. He’d always been fascinated by secret passages, ancient tunnels, hidden places. Maybe Freud would have said he was subconsciously looking for somewhere to escape from the world, hide from life. Maybe Ben would have told the old boy where to shove his psychoanalytic theories.

Just as he was thinking he should start making his way back, Ben saw tracks in the dust. Moments later, he noticed a strange pale glow up ahead, shining on the rough rock wall like the kind of natural phosphorescence he’d seen in caves in the Middle East. He paused, mystified, then curiosity drew him towards the light.

Suddenly the narrow walls seemed to fall away and the echo of his footsteps sounded much deeper. Ben realised that the tunnel had opened up into an underground cavern. Its sides and ceiling were too angular to be natural. He raised the lantern to spread its reach and peered around him, fascinated and wondering what this place was, or had once been.

But he was even more fascinated by the strange glow, which he now realised was shining from the mouth of a secondary passage to the left that led away from the opened-out chamber. Looking down, he saw that the tracks in the dust were leading that way. He followed, having to bow his head in the constricted passage. After a few yards, he found himself advancing on the source of the strange light.

It wasn’t any kind of natural phosphorescence, but very much man-made: a small illuminated rectangle surrounded by a halo of light. It was moving slightly as the person holding it sat crouched against the rock wall, hunched over the tiny screen.

As Ben edged closer, he heard a gasp and the light darted away and went out. He shone the lantern, and instantly recognised the startled face that was gaping at him from the darkness.

‘Roby?’

‘Oh – it’s you, Benoît. You frightened me.’ Their voices reverberated inside the tunnel.

‘What are you doing down here?’ Ben asked. He already knew the answer, and what the novice had whipped out of sight to hide in his robe. ‘Where did you get the mobile phone from, Roby?’

Roby hung his head in embarrassment. ‘I – I – you won’t—’

‘Tell?’ Ben smiled and shook his head. ‘Of course I wouldn’t.’

‘Thierry gave it me,’ Roby said, referring to another of the younger lay brothers whom Ben didn’t know so well. ‘You can go on the internet with it.’

Even here, the lures of modern life managed to curl their tentacles around the impressionable. ‘And you were scared someone would catch you with it,’ Ben said gently. ‘It’s okay, kid. Your secret’s safe with me. Just try to stay off the porn sites. They’re bad for your soul. And I don’t think Père Antoine would be too impressed.’

Roby looked penitent.

‘So this is your little refuge?’ Ben asked, smiling.

Roby nodded. ‘Nobody ever comes down here.’

‘I understand. Just be thankful it was me who caught you and not the Father Master of Novices. Now come on, I think you’d better get back before they miss you.’

Roby reluctantly followed him out of the narrow tunnel. At its mouth, Ben turned again to examine the cavern. ‘What is this place?’ he asked, raising the lantern.

‘Dunno. Maybe they used to keep things in it.’

Ben stepped over to the wall and ran his hand along it, wiping away dust and cobwebs. It was the same thick, craggy stone with countless pick and chisel marks made by the miners, probably monks themselves, who’d carved this space out of solid rock at a time when crusading Christian armies were fighting – and mostly losing – in the Holy Land. He followed the wall, shining the lantern to look for engraved Latin script or anything else that could explain what the place had once been.

He didn’t find any, but he did find something else. The cavern had once been bigger, until at some point, a long, long time ago, a section of it had been bricked up. How big a section was anybody’s guess.

‘I wonder why they did that?’ Ben muttered.

Roby just shrugged absently. He seemed more interested in the clandestine mobile phone he was fingering inside the pocket of his robe.

Ben ran his hand across the dusty brickwork. It looked centuries old, but the mortar had been carefully applied and was still solid. Finding a lump of rock on the ground, he used it to tap against the wall. It made a hollow sound.

‘Something’s behind here,’ he said, mostly to himself. For all he knew, it stretched out cathedral-sized behind that wall. Had part of the chamber become unstable and needed shoring up? Or perhaps the walled-up section marked the mouth of another passage leading deeper into the mountain, perhaps even all the way through to the outside, like a true escape tunnel? If that were the case, it could have been walled up to prevent anyone making their way in from the other end. But then, the monastery was hardly built like an impregnable fortress. If an invading force had wanted to take it, they wouldn’t have had too much trouble breaking down the main gates. They wouldn’t have needed to mess about with tunnels.

Just one of those mysteries of the ancient past. He wasn’t going to learn much by staring at a wall and it was time for him to go back and get on with moving the rest of the beer barrels up from the cellar. The others could be there already, waiting for him.

Ben tossed the lump of rock away. Some unconscious part of his mind expected it to hit the stone floor with an echoing thump. It didn’t. Instead, it landed with a brittle, crackling crunch that caught Ben’s ear and made him frown. Strange.

And familiar. He’d heard that sound before. It didn’t have pleasant associations.

Ben lowered the lantern and saw what the rock had landed on. He crouched down and examined it. Then picked it up and gazed at it.

It was the shattered remains of a human skull.

Chapter Six

That evening before church, Ben sat by candlelight in Père Antoine’s cell. The chess pieces cast flickering shadows across the board as the two of them faced each other, both deeply involved. Their weekly game had become a welcome part of Ben’s routine and he’d felt himself grow closer to the prior, even if the old monk had turned out to be a fiendish player and nearly always beat him. Ben’s black army was in serious trouble again, and he was damned if he could think of a way to thwart those white bishops ganging up on his queen. He pulled her back out of immediate danger, exposing his remaining rook to enemy forces. Nothing he could do to prevent the sacrifice. War is hell.

‘Thank you again for agreeing to drive the truck tomorrow,’ Père Antoine said as he nonchalantly captured the rook and set it down among his growing collection of Ben’s lost men.

Ben shrugged, as if to say it was nothing. He contemplated his losing position for a moment or two, then said, ‘I made an interesting discovery today, Father. One of the passages down below leads into some kind of chamber, but it looks like it’s been walled up.’

The old man’s eyes flicked up from the chessboard, fixed on him for a moment and then lowered again. ‘May I ask what led you down there?’ he asked quietly. His expression was inscrutable.

‘I was just exploring,’ Ben said. He didn’t mention Roby, or the novice’s reason for hiding down there. ‘I wondered what the chamber had been used for, if anyone still knows.’

‘That place has not been used for a long time,’ Père Antoine said.

‘That’s what I thought.’ Ben backed his queen another few steps out of trouble and launched a tenuous offensive against the white king. ‘There’s a lot of dust and cobwebs down there. And other things that I’m sure wouldn’t have been left lying around if it was often visited.’

Père Antoine didn’t ask what other things. Ben wondered if that was because he already had a good idea what they might be.

‘A lot of history in this place,’ Ben said after a long beat of silence.

‘Indeed there is,’ the old man replied, gazing at the board.

‘A whole honeycomb of tunnels. Makes you wonder where they all lead. Maybe there are more chambers you don’t even know about.’

‘No. There is just one.’ Père Antoine looked uncomfortable. He shifted a knight and Ben’s offensive suddenly began to look like another retreat. ‘I would respectfully ask you not to go there again.’

‘In case it’s unsafe? Is that why it was walled up, to prevent a collapse?’

The old man pursed his lips, peering at Ben over the chess battlefield. ‘It is a place we here prefer not to speak of,’ he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

It didn’t seem appropriate to ask why. ‘I didn’t realise. I’m sorry.’

‘You were not to know, my son. Every place has its secrets from the past. Even here, some things remain that ought to be forgotten.’

‘Secrets?’

‘And ghosts. Things that should be left undisturbed.’

‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’

‘Yet they haunt you still,’ the old man said with a faint smile. ‘The ghosts of your past actions.’

‘But God forgives. That’s what you told me.’

‘Yes, He forgives. Even the worst and most shameful acts of man, if we repent fully enough and ask for His mercy.’

It seemed as if the prior was alluding to more than just Ben’s own sordid history. He felt that in bringing up the subject, he’d unearthed something greater, something darker, than a forgotten skull from centuries ago. But it was obvious that the old man had no desire to dwell on the matter any longer. There was a firmness in the monk’s eyes, the closest thing Ben had seen in him to a look of authority. In the gentlest way, it meant ‘this subject is closed’.

‘Check,’ Père Antoine said.

The rain started some time before dawn the next day. Ben watched the spring downpour from the window of his cell as he got ready that morning. Big splashy raindrops burst on the flagstones below and trembled on the leaves of the trees that stood in the courtyard. It felt strange to be putting on his black jeans and denim shirt instead of the robe he’d become accustomed to. The prospect of leaving the monastery and venturing down to civilisation for the first time in six months felt strange, too. Maybe the world down there would be completely different from before. Maybe aliens had landed and taken the place over. From up here, there was no way to know these things.

Ben laced up his boots, shrugged on his scuffed old brown leather jacket and left the sanctuary of his cell, grabbing his green bag on the way out. He walked through the cloisters and out across the high-walled yard to the building where the truck was kept. The tall double doors opened with a creak. The rain was drumming hard on the stable roof and a leak had found its way through the old tiles to drip down to the straw-covered floor. One of the cats, disturbed by his entrance, uncoiled itself from the nest where it had been sleeping, gave him a disgusted look and slunk away.

The truck was parked with its rear end facing the doors. Ben had been too occupied yesterday with the laborious loading process to take a closer look at the vehicle. He circled it, peering critically here and there, pausing to kick the big old knobbly tyres and wondering whether it was still running on the same tankful of diesel as it had been for its last outing several months ago. Diesel didn’t go off as quickly as gasoline. But the state of the fuel wasn’t really his main concern. It was the vehicle itself that troubled him a little. How roadworthy was it? He didn’t even know if it would start.

The truck wasn’t quite as ancient as the monastery, but that didn’t exactly make it modern, either. The long flatbed was made of wooden planks that were crumbling and riddled with wormholes. The dark green paintwork was badly faded with age and the soft tonneau cover lashed in place over the precious cargo of beer barrels had been patched so many times that there wasn’t much left of the original canvas. It was a 1966 eight-ton long-wheelbase Citroën of the type known as a ‘Belphégor’. Ben wondered whether the monks were aware that their only motor vehicle was named after one of the seven princes of Hell, the demon primarily responsible for sloth and laziness and tempting sinners with the lure of fancy new inventions. Maybe that was a deliberate ploy to discourage monks from learning to drive, he thought as he hauled himself up inside the spartan cab.

After so many months spent mimicking the lifestyle of circa 1350, it felt weird to be back inside a motor vehicle. Especially one that officially belonged in a museum. The steering wheel was about the size of a ship’s, positioned almost horizontally above a stamped metal dash fitted with instruments that could have been lifted from a military half-track of fifty years ago. But the old motor cranked into life at the first twist of the key and settled into a steady rumble, dispelling at least some of Ben’s immediate concerns. He depressed the heavy clutch and eased the huge gearstick, a steel bar long enough to lever a wall over, into reverse. There was no grinding, crunching shearing of metal. So far, so good.

‘Here goes,’ he muttered to the truck. ‘Don’t let me down, now.’ He re-engaged the clutch and the scarred old green monster backed rumbling out of the stable building. Ben spun the wheel about a hundred turns to manoeuvre it round to face the tall arched wooden gates, which two monks stood holding open. He found the switch for the windscreen wipers, then lumbered towards the entrance. The monks waved as he passed through.

He waved back, hauled the heavy steering wheel to the left in the direction of Briançon, hit the gas and was on his way.

‘Just you and me now,’ he said to the truck.

If he’d known then what he’d find on his return, he would never have left the place.

Chapter Seven

The articulated Volvo lorry had driven through most of the night, cutting southwards from Switzerland on a careful winding route through the Italian Alps. As morning came, the driver finally arrived at the rendezvous point. The chosen location was a quiet, high-altitude roadside spot a few minutes outside the Alpine town of Torre Pellice, forty-seven kilometres south-west of Torino and just fifteen kilometres from the Italian-French border, in a rocky, dusty plateau between two cliffs. On the right-hand side of the road was a stretch of crushed-stone layby three times the lorry’s length. Eyes on his mirror, the driver eased the big trailer into it, perfectly parallel with the road and out of the way of what little traffic might pass this way. According to the plan, he brought the lorry to a halt in the centre third of the layby, leaving enough space in front and behind. Then he shut down the big diesel, settled back in his cab and drank coffee from a flask while he waited for the next step of the plan to happen.

The driver’s name was Dominik Baiza. He hadn’t been waiting long before three other vehicles arrived at the RV point. Three identical black Range Rovers, dusty from their long drive, travelling in convoy along the empty road. They pulled up in front of the lorry and their occupants got out. Four to a car. Eleven men, plus the female driver of the middle Range Rover, the youngest of the group.

This was no social occasion. Baiza didn’t get out of his cab to meet them, and there was little conversation among the twelve. A couple of them lit cigarettes and stood smoking at the side of the road, while the rest just bided their time, leaning against their vehicles or sitting in the shade of the big lorry trailer. The sunshine was bright and most of them wore dark glasses. They were dressed casually, most in jeans and T-shirts. The woman was wearing a leather jacket and combat boots, and a baseball cap covered her tied-back hair. The men paid her no more attention than they did one another. She was just one of the gang, there for the same purpose as they were. Some, like Torben Roth and Wolf Schilling, were old hands, veterans of the 2011 Korean mission. Roth still bore the scar from that operation, the whole left side of his face creased into a permanent scowl from the rifle bullet that had come close to killing him. Others were relatively new recruits, like Wokalek and Zwart, the Englishman Dexter Nicholls, and the woman herself, whose name was Michelle Faban. New blood, very carefully chosen, with the right background and the right mindset. The boss was careful about such things, as he needed to be.

The rendezvous was complete seventeen minutes later when they heard the thud of the approaching chopper. ‘Here he comes,’ Torben Roth said. Cigarettes were tossed away. Hands pulled out of pockets. Inside the lorry cab, Dominik Baiza quickly finished up his coffee.

The chopper was a Bell 429-WLG. That last part of its designation stood for ‘with landing gear’. As it came in to land, sparkling white against the vivid blue sky, the undercarriage descended like that of a fixed-wing aircraft. The group on the ground backed away from the roaring noise and the hurricane of downdraught that whipped up roadside dust and loose gravel. Michelle Faban held on to her cap as the blast tore at her hair. The chopper came neatly down in the middle of the road, taxied a few feet forwards and to the right, towards the back of the articulated Volvo. Then it halted. The rotors began to power down, and the assembled twelve gathered round in a circle to greet their leader.

The tall, slim figure of Udo Streicher emerged from the cockpit, cool and unruffled from the flight, wearing a loose white shirt and Armani jeans, reflective Ray-Ban Aviator shades shielding his eyes. He was in excellent shape for a man of forty-six. The wind from the slowing rotor blades swept his silver-flecked hair back from his high forehead.

The chopper passenger was Hannah Gissel, Streicher’s long-time girlfriend. Hannah was wearing a black combat jacket. Her long, slender legs were enveloped in skintight black leggings. Her hair, so blond that it was almost white, was spiked and cropped even shorter than she normally wore it. She looked mean and ready for anything. Appearances weren’t deceptive. The newer guys on the team, with the exception of Michelle Faban, had been briefed on the rules when it came to Hannah. You didn’t talk to her. You didn’t even make contact with those pale grey eyes. Not just because she was Streicher’s woman, and Streicher was known for his pathological jealousy. Even if Hannah had been single, it would have been a serious error of judgement for any man to get too familiar with her. A fatal mistake, literally.

Udo Streicher met his people with the cursory nod of a man used to being in command. He walked a few steps to where Dominik Baiza, inside the lorry, could see him clearly in his mirror, and raised his hand. At the signal, Baiza flipped a switch inside the cab. It activated the tailgate, which hinged downwards, supported by two thick hydraulic rams, to act as an access ramp. As it descended, all eyes were on the cavernous interior of the trailer.

Once the ramp was fully lowered, Torben Roth walked up it and disappeared inside, his footsteps ringing with a metallic echo. Moments later, the space filled with the growl of an engine firing up. Streicher and the others watched as the formidable vehicle that was the lorry’s sole cargo reversed slowly down the ramp.

It was Udo Streicher’s latest acquisition. He called it his BATT-mobile, standing for Ballistic Armoured Tactical Transport. The thing was even more robust than it looked. A Lenco BearCat, designed in Pittfield, Massachusetts, for SWAT-team raids and similar contingencies. It wasn’t exactly a civilian vehicle. Its charcoal-grey bodyshell was rated to defeat small-arms fire up to and including .50-calibre M2 and 7.62 NATO armour-piercing rounds. Gun ports, three to a side, allowed its occupants to return fire at assailants. Streicher had toyed with the idea of having the optional roof-mounted machine-gun turret fitted, but decided that as the vehicle was to be used on public roads during the mission, that might draw a little too much attention.

In all other respects it was a full-on assault vehicle. The blast shield under the chassis rendered it impregnable to landmines, while the six-litre V8 turbo-diesel engine could propel it out of trouble very quickly. The finishing touch, and essential to the success of this mission, was the breaching device on the front – a massive steel buffer that looked like the cowcatcher on an old steam train. The BATT-mobile was an exercise in excess. But then, one of Udo Streicher’s many philosophies was that if a thing was worth doing, it was worth overdoing.

‘Pretty cool, huh?’ Hannah said, standing surveying the vehicle with her fists on her hips. Her lips twitched into the merest smile. Coming from her, it was high praise.

Streicher had paid as much attention to the inside of the vehicle as the outside. It was fully kitted out for this mission, carrying a small arsenal of weaponry, as well as breaching munitions and some even more specialised equipment that he’d obtained from another of his illicit contacts. Naturally, such things didn’t come cheap. He was aware of the hit that his financial resources had taken in order to put the mission together, but it wasn’t a significant concern to him. Not under the circumstances, and he remained a very wealthy man. Wealthy enough to carry out whatever plans were necessary to attain the dream that dominated his whole life.

Things would soon begin to happen. They had a few miles to cover, some time to kill, some final preparations and checks to make. Nice and easy. No rush. No moves, until the time was precisely right. If all went according to plan – and Streicher had no reason to believe it wouldn’t – they should have no problems. It was a soft target. A whole different proposition from the 2011 disaster. That had been a lesson learned the hard way.

Nothing was going to stand in his way this time.

Nothing, and nobody.

And all thanks to his genius. His hard work. His penetrating mind, that had put together connections nobody else had or could. That was what made him different from everybody else. That was why he deserved the future he saw for himself.

Baiza reversed the BearCat to the bottom of the ramp. Loose stones pinged and popped under the savage tread of its big tyres as he backed it right away from the lorry to make room for the chopper to taxi up inside the trailer in its place. Silvain Chavanne and Riccardo Cazzitti began unloading the necessary gear from the back of one of the Range Rovers: a special high-pressure spray to cool the rotor assembly, and a set of wrenches to dismantle the blades so that the chopper could fit inside the trailer. It would be Dominik Baiza’s job to mind the lorry until the team’s return. Streicher’s thorough planning had seen to it that he had enough food and water, as well as a nine-millimetre pistol in case of any interference. Streicher had thought of everything.

‘Everyone knows what to do, yes?’ Streicher said, scanning the solemn faces. Several heads nodded. Stepping down from the BearCat, Torben Roth just gave a grunt.

‘Then let’s get rolling,’ Streicher told them.

Chapter Eight

Ben’s route snaked and twisted like a meandering river all the way down the mountain, in places flanked by lush verges bursting with spring wildflowers, in others teetering on the edge of vertiginous drops with little or nothing in the way of safety barriers. He soon discovered that the truck had steering as vague as a politician’s answers, and learned to take it easy on the narrow bits. The brakes left something to be desired, too, which made interesting work of the frequent hairpin bends on a road made slick with rainwater. The heavy load made the suspension sway on every corner, and sometimes it felt as if the thing might tip over. But he felt happy to be doing this for his companions. It gave him a sense of purpose. Of belonging.

After a couple of miles, the rain stopped and the sun beamed out through parting clouds. Ben turned off the clattering wipers, opened the window and smiled as the fresh breeze streamed in. The trepidation he’d felt about leaving the sanctuary of the monastery began to melt away with each passing mile. Life was all right. It really was. He didn’t even miss his cigarettes any more.

The drive took a little over forty minutes. It was the perfect kind of scenic yet challenging Alpine road that a gentleman of a sporting disposition would have relished tackling in something like a Porsche Cayman or a classic Morgan. But Ben took his time, rumbling along sedately, taking care not to overload the tired old brakes on the long, steep downward straights, slowing right down for the bends. As he drove, he drank in the spectacular views across the valley and let the sunshine soak into his soul. Yes, life was okay. By the time the road had wound its way down to Briançon, he was even getting to like the old demon Belphégor.

Approaching the town, Ben reached for the slip of paper he’d been given showing the directions for the rendezvous point. From the historic part of Briançon, which dated back to Roman times as Brigantium, the modern town sprawled south-westwards. The small industrial estate he needed to find was right out on the edge, and his directions allowed him to skirt around town and approach from the east side. The roads weren’t badly congested, which was a relief to Ben as he’d worried about cooking the clutch in stop-start traffic. He guessed that this must be the quietest time of the year, well out of the snowy season when hordes of skiers descended on Briançon and the town’s population tripled. Not that Ben had seen any from his remote sanctuary, not even when the snow lay thick all across the peaks and valleys and every day brought a fresh blizzard.

Filtering west, he passed a hospital, then a spread-out retail park. He saw a big Champion supermarket, some scattered industrial buildings and a tyre services place next to a garage. A little further on, he found the entrance he was looking for, a green steel gate in a mesh fence leading to a large concreted yard, empty apart from a Renault truck and a silver BMW. A short, badly overweight guy with sandy hair was leaning against the car. Three leaner, younger guys were hanging about the truck. Ben pulled up a few yards away, yanked on the handbrake and turned off his ignition. The Belphégor stuttered and fell silent.

Ben jumped down from the cab. It was approaching midday and the sun was hot and bright, making him shield his eyes. He looked around him as the sandy-haired man ambled up. The mountains were visible in the background, away beyond green hills overlooking the town that were dotted with little white houses and chalets sparkling in the sun.

‘You must be Pierrot,’ he said in French to the sandy-haired man. Pierrot was the rep for the distribution company that handled the monastery beer.

‘You’re not the regular guy,’ Pierrot said, eyeing him.

‘Just standing in,’ Ben said. They shook hands and got down to business. Pierrot’s crew of three quickly, efficiently switched the cargo from the Belphégor to the Renault while Pierrot spread a couple of forms out on the bonnet of the Beemer for Ben to read and sign on behalf of the monastery. Ben examined the small print carefully, checked the payment and bank details were correct, then reviewed everything again and found no problems. He signed on the line and handed the forms back to Pierrot. The man grinned, put the forms into a folder and then opened up the boot of his car.

‘Fait une putain de’chaleur, hein?’ he said, squinting up at the bright sun.

Ben nodded and agreed that it was pretty warm. Maybe if Pierrot lost a few pounds he wouldn’t feel it so much, but Ben kept that opinion to himself. Pierrot had other solutions. From a cooler in the back of the car he produced a couple of chilled bottles of Kronenbourg. He offered one to Ben. Ben shook his head and said no, thanks.

Soon afterwards, the crew finished up, swigged down a cold beer each and then piled into the Renault. Ben watched the truck drive off with its load, followed by Pierrot in his car. That was that. His job was done, his responsibility fulfilled, and it was time to go home. He walked back to the Belphégor. Clambered up into the cab, twisted the ignition key … and nothing happened.

He did it again. Again, nothing happened. Completely dead. Either the battery had suffered a total discharge in the time it had taken to transfer the beer to the Renault, or something more complex and sinister had just happened to the truck’s electrics.

Wonderful.

Ben heaved open the bonnet and peered in at the grimy nest of ancient wiring. He was no mechanic. Like other SAS soldiers he’d had some basic training in fixing vehicles, in case of certain emergency situations on hostile ground that involved commandeering – or just plain stealing – civilian transport that might not always be in top condition. But he had a feeling that the SAS would have continued on foot sooner than give the Belphégor a second look. Set fire to it maybe, if they needed to create a diversion.

Bolted to the flatbed behind the cab was a tool locker. Nothing more than a metal box, battered and dented and speckled with rust, about four feet long by about two feet wide. Ben jumped up on to the flatbed and crouched down, hooking eight fingers under the flaky edge of the locker lid to lift it. The hinges were near solid with rust and old paint, and it gave a creak as it opened. He looked inside, and what he saw made his mind up not to bother trying to fix the truck himself. There was a removable compartment containing an assortment of spanners that looked as if they’d spent decades at the bottom of a river. The lower compartment contained no jack, no tyre irons or wheel-nut wrench, only a coil of greasy old rope and a pair of bolt croppers.

All of which was about as useful as having no tools at all.

The other thing Ben didn’t have was a phone. The only items in his pockets were his wallet and the little bottle of Père Antoine’s tonic that he was currently working his way through. However liberating the joyful technology-free monastic lifestyle might feel up there on the mountain, it had its practical shortcomings down here in the big, bad world.

Remembering the garage he’d passed a little way back down the road, he began walking.

Within five minutes, he was standing on the forecourt talking to a jovial guy in a grease-stained overall, explaining his situation. Within ten, he was riding back in a tow-truck to where he’d left the stricken Belphégor. The mechanic hooked it up and they towed it the short distance to the garage where more guys in overalls came to stare and grin as if they’d never seen anything like it before. Which, Ben realised, they probably hadn’t. After a quick inspection, the mechanic in charge gave Ben the prognosis on the electrical system. The word he used was ‘foutu’. Not exactly a technical term. Not a very encouraging one, either, until the mechanic pointed to a rusted heap in the corner of the yard and told Ben that he should be able to cannibalise some parts from it.

Four hours, he assured Ben. Four hours tops, and the old Belphégor would be back in action.

Until then, there wasn’t a lot Ben could do. Even if he’d had a phone, he couldn’t call the monastery to tell them he’d be late coming back and not to worry. Not that they worried unduly about much, generally. They would have said it was in God’s hands. For all practical purposes that was the only way Ben could see it, too.

So, there it was. Four hours to kill. It wasn’t the end of the world.

He took a note of the garage’s number and set out on foot towards town. The walk took him thirty minutes, by the end of which lunchtime had been and gone and he was hungry and thirsty. A few sips of Père Antoine’s tonic did a little to quell the thirst. Ben still didn’t know what it contained. He put the bottle back in his pocket and checked the contents of his wallet for the first time in months. In all that time he’d spent not a single penny, so there was still plenty of cash inside. Now to find a place to eat.

Briançon was a pretty place. Parts of the old town had once been heavily fortified, to defend the region from an attacking Austrian army. However many centuries ago that had been, Ben didn’t know for sure – but when you lived in a medieval monastery, everything seemed recent and modern by comparison. He walked through narrow, winding grey-stone streets and up steep paths and steps, looking for a bistro or a sandwich bar. The streets were busy. Lots of colour, lots of noise and life. He wasn’t used to it any more. It was a rhythm you had to get readjusted to, in the same way he’d often had to get back in synch with normal life after spending long periods away on military operations in jungles or deserts, back in the day.

Rounding a corner, Ben saw parasols and tables out on the street. This was the kind of bistro he’d been looking for, where he could get a snack like a croque-monsieur and a Perrier water. It looked like a welcoming place. A waiter with a tray was weaving efficiently among the tables. One table was occupied by an animated white-haired group who looked like a tourist party. At another was a middle-aged professional guy in suit and tie, maybe a local businessman or a bank manager, reading a newspaper. At another sat a couple, not old, not young, in their thirties. They were clasping hands across the table and obviously in love. The guy was heavily built, in jeans and a polo shirt. The woman was wearing a light sleeveless top and shorts and sandals, and had her back to Ben.

There was another table nearby that was empty. He walked towards it. His plan was to stay a while, watch the world go by, bide his time while the mechanics were doing their bit and then slowly wander back to the garage to pick up the truck. There was no hurry. No pressure. He felt relaxed and easy about the whole thing. The monastery had taught him to feel that way.

As Ben approached the café terrace, he did a double-take at the woman sitting with her back to him and suddenly halted dead in his tracks as if he’d been shot. He felt himself go very cold. He stood there, staring.

Her auburn hair was thick and loose, falling down in curls between her shoulder blades and moving nicely when she did. Her shoulders were slightly burned, a touch too much sun on her fair redhead’s skin. Everything about her was stunningly familiar. He was certain he recognised the curve of her slim back. Her elegant posture, the way she had her ankles crossed under the chair as she leaned forward talking about something and gesticulating with her free hand. The fingers were tapered and delicate. She wore no rings.

A million emotions suddenly flooded through Ben’s mind, stinging him like electric shocks. His hands began to shake. He blinked. It was her. He couldn’t believe it.

She was oblivious of his presence, but as Ben went on staring, the guy she was with began to take notice of him.

Ben walked a few steps closer. His legs felt wobbly. He reached out to touch her shoulder. The guy she was with narrowed his eyes and looked to be about to say something, but Ben spoke first.

‘Brooke?’

Chapter Nine

Ben couldn’t help himself. He put his hand on her shoulder. Her skin was warm and soft and dry against his fingers. She flinched a little in surprise and let go of her companion’s hand, breaking off from whatever she’d been saying to him in mid-sentence.

‘Brooke?’ Ben said again. He was positively amazed, amazed, to see his ex-fiancée here. It was like something out of a dream, the dream he’d had so many times.

She turned. Her mouth opened. Her eyes locked on to his, as blue as a summer sky.

Blue. Not green. Brooke had eyes the colour of emeralds.

It wasn’t her. This woman was a couple of years younger than Brooke. Her mouth was thinner, her cheekbones higher, her features sharper. Especially with the hostile look she was giving him.

The millisecond that Ben realised his mistake, he withdrew his hand and stepped back. ‘Please forgive me, Madame. I mistook you for someone else.’

Her blue eyes flared. ‘It’s Mademoiselle,’ she snapped, as though calling her ‘Madame’ was a far worse crime than laying your hands in a familiar way on a total stranger. So much for the neo-post-feminist political-correctness movement in France.

Ben went on apologising, but it was too late. Now the guy with her was getting involved, standing up abruptly and scraping his chair across the terrace with the backs of his legs. He had to step away from the table to avoid butting the parasol, because he was a big guy. At least three inches taller than Ben and about a foot broader across the chest. The mild irritation in the woman’s eyes was eclipsed by the fury in his. Ben couldn’t entirely blame him. It was a normal thing. A male thing. Like a rutting stag wanting to win his mate by scoring over the potential competition, this guy obviously felt he had to put on a show. Naturally, he was going to make a big thing of wanting to protect her.

Too big a thing. Right away, Ben could see the signs of a situation about to turn ugly. He wasn’t the only one. The businessman was watching over the top of his newspaper. The white-haired group had stopped talking and were throwing anxious glances at them.

‘Hey, I said I was sorry,’ Ben said, keeping his tone light and his body language unthreatening. ‘Let me buy you a drink, okay? No hard feelings.’

‘Get your fucking hands off her,’ the guy raged.

‘I did,’ Ben said. He’d backed off two long steps and now couldn’t have touched her if he’d wanted to.

‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’

‘I’m from the monastery,’ Ben said.

The big guy sneered. ‘Joker, eh?’ He came around the table, brushed past his girlfriend and moved towards Ben with his fists clenched and raised.

‘Let’s not take this too far,’ Ben said. ‘It was a mistake. I apologised.’

The woman was saying nothing. There was a gleam in her eye. Maybe she was enjoying this. Maybe the idea of being fought over was making her day. Ben couldn’t be sure, but in any case he was too busy watching her beau to take too much notice. The guy stepped closer, within punching distance. Which, with arms the length of his, was a fair stretch. ‘I’m going to knock your damn head off, asshole.’ Then the punch was on its way. Ben could have sat down, eaten his croque-monsieur, drunk his Perrier and maybe taken a little nap in the time it took coming. He stepped out of the way of the swinging fist. The guy’s momentum carried him forwards, past Ben.

‘You don’t want to do this,’ Ben said. ‘Why spoil a beautiful afternoon?’

But now it was even more too late. This wasn’t about the woman any longer. His face mottled with humiliation, the guy gathered himself up for a second punch. It was faster than the first, though not much. Ben had time to say, ‘You’re an idiot,’ before he caught the fist that was flying towards his face. He twisted it. Just a little twist. Nothing too aggressive. Certainly not vicious. But once he had the guy’s arm trapped, he wasn’t going to let go either. A lucky hit from this opponent could break his nose, smash his teeth. Ben didn’t much feel like returning to the monastery all banged up and bloody. He was fairly certain they had disciplinary rules against lay brothers who brawled in bars in their spare time. Père Antoine might just show him the door, and Ben wasn’t ready to leave.

So as Ben saw it, he really had no choice. He twisted the guy’s thick arm all the way around behind his back and used the painful leverage to dump him on his face. He hit the ground hard.

‘Stay down,’ Ben warned him. ‘It’s finished. You made your point. You’re a hero.’

But the hero wouldn’t stay down, which was a bigger mistake than the one Ben had made in touching his girlfriend’s shoulder. He swayed up to his feet and came on again. Blood was leaking from his nose and spotting all down the front of his polo shirt. Ben stepped in between the flailing arms and hit him in the solar plexus. Minimum force. It didn’t feel to Ben like much more than a tap, but the guy went sprawling backwards as if a horse had kicked him. He crashed into the table at which Ben would have been quietly enjoying his lunch now, if this hadn’t happened. The table capsized, spilling the big man back to the ground. Bloody-faced and wheezing and clutching at his stomach, this time he didn’t seem inclined to get up again. At that moment the waiter came bursting out of the bistro, along with a couple more guys. One of them pointed at Ben and yelled: ‘J’appelle les flics!’

‘No need for the police,’ Ben told them, spreading his hands. ‘I’m sorry for the trouble,’ he said to the staring auburn-haired woman, then turned and began walking away.

‘Wait!’ she called after him. ‘What’s your name?’

That just beat everything. Ben could hear the commotion as he made his retreat, but didn’t look back. Turning the corner, he broke into a jog. His nerves were jangling badly. Not because of the fight. It was as if some huge, gaping wound inside him, which he’d thought had healed, had been ripped back open again even worse than before and his whole being was gushing out of it, draining him right down to the marrow.

A hundred yards up the twisting narrow street, he settled back down to a fast walk. The jangling wasn’t wearing off, but becoming more intense. His thoughts and emotions were flying around inside him in so many directions at once that he could hardly even see where he was going. All he could see was Brooke’s face. He kept going. Crossed the street without looking, heard the urgent blast of a car horn and ignored it. He wouldn’t have cared if a bus had mown him down. Let it.

Four minutes later, he was inside another bistro. He walked straight up to the bar.

‘What’ll it be, monsieur?’ the barman asked.

‘Scotch,’ Ben said.

‘Which one?’ the barman said, motioning at a row of bottles.

‘I don’t care. You choose.’

‘Water?’

‘As it comes.’

The barman poured out a glass. It was empty almost the moment it touched the bar.

‘Leave the bottle,’ Ben said.

It was going to be a long day and an even longer night. But nothing in comparison to what would come later.

Chapter Ten

The first thing Ben saw on awakening was the stained Artexed ceiling above him. With some effort, he shifted his gaze to look down the length of his body and saw that he was lying in a bed. He closed his eyes. For a few disorientated moments, it seemed to him that he was tucked up in his bunk in the safe haven of the monastery. That the discomfiting fragments of memory playing at the edges of his mind were all just a bad dream.

Except that they weren’t. He opened his eyes and realised that he wasn’t dreaming about the sour taste in his mouth or the thudding headache of a serious whisky hangover. Wedging himself up in the bed to peer at his surroundings, it also occurred to him that his cell at the Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux wasn’t decorated with peeling posters of naked women and filled with bodybuilding equipment. A long bar resting on a flat weight bench was sagging with enough iron to make Ben’s muscles hurt just looking at it.

Nor did his cell contain a wall-mounted rack full of guns. Confusing.

Ben’s watch said it was 7.47 a.m. He climbed out of the rumpled bed and felt the full force of the hangover wash over him. He was still fully dressed. The bed was beside a small window. While his cell looked out over a sweeping eagle’s-view vista, all that could be seen from here was the bare brick wall of a neighbouring building. He peered down and saw an alleyway, empty but for a couple of wheelie bins.

He threaded his way between the bench press set-up and stacks of weights over to the gun rack. They weren’t replicas. He took one down. AK-47. Romanian, with a folding stock and unloaded thirty-round curved steel magazine. Old, but well looked after, the metal parts covered in a light sheen of oil.

Ben thought, Hmm.

He replaced the weapon on the rack and looked at the one below it. It was a FAMAS rifle, service weapon of the French army for the last thirty years or more. FAMAS stood for Fusil d’Assaut de la Manufacture d’Armes de Saint-Étienne. It was a strange-looking contraption, built on the design concept the military designated ‘bullpup’, with the receiver placed behind the pistol grip and trigger unit instead of in front of it. It was a way of creating an automatic weapon that was short and handy without sacrificing too much in the way of barrel length. Some hated it, some loved it. To Ben’s eye the thing looked ungainly, but he knew it did the job it was built to do. This one was standard military issue with the twenty-five-round straight magazine, even fitted with the regulation bayonet.

The real question was what one of these was doing in the room with him. Ben was beginning to wonder now if he’d fallen down a cosmic wormhole and woken up in a parallel universe.

He tentatively left the room and found himself at the end of a narrow passage he was certain he’d never seen before. He followed the beat of rock music and the scent of fresh coffee to a door at the other end, and swung it open.

The other side of the door was a small kitchen. Seated alone at a scarred pine table, listening to a radio and holding a mug that said ULTIMATE WARRIOR, his host in this strange place flashed him a brilliant smile. Suddenly, Ben’s fragmented memory was beginning to slot miserably back together.

‘Hey, big man,’ his host chuckled in French, rising to greet his guest. Maybe he was being modest. Six-six at the very least, with skin the colour of burnished ebony, he wasn’t the smallest Nigerian guy Ben had ever seen. He made the muscle-bound oaf Ben had beaten up the day before look like a dwarf. He was somewhere in his late forties, his hair grizzled at the temples. A tattered Gold’s Gym T-shirt showed off his weightlifter’s shoulders and powerful, vein-laced arms.

Ben stared at him, struggling to recall the name. ‘Omar,’ he said at last.

The dazzling grin widened. ‘Brother, I’m surprised you remember a fucking thing.’

Ben slumped in a wooden chair. ‘That’s about all I do remember.’ But the rest was slowly coming back. He wasn’t sure he wanted it to.

Omar filled in the missing pieces with obvious amusement. How he and his bar-room buddies had found a new drinking companion the previous evening when this already toasted English guy had wandered into their regular haunt clutching the remains of a bottle of scotch. It had turned into quite a night.

‘Did I say anything?’

‘Just kept rambling on about some woman. You got it bad, my friend. I know how that goes, believe me.’

‘Nobody got hit, did they?’ Ben dared to ask. He looked at his knuckles. No sign of fresh bruising, and they didn’t hurt. Still, that didn’t prove anything.

‘Didn’t get that far,’ Omar told him with a booming laugh. ‘Not quite. Shit, I never saw anyone put away that much whisky before. Me and the boys were taking bets on when you’d drop, man. Incredible.’

‘Yeah, it’s a real talent,’ Ben muttered. ‘I hope you won your bet.’

Omar shook his head, still beaming. ‘Nah. You cost me big time.’

‘Sorry to hear it. Did you bring me back here?’

‘Wasn’t going to leave you lying in the gutter for the cops to scrape up, now was I?’

‘I appreciate that, Omar.’

‘Hey, no worries. How’d you like the room?’

‘Interesting,’ Ben said, rubbing his eyes. ‘Especially the wall decorations. I don’t mean the posters.’

‘Oh, that,’ Omar replied dismissively. ‘Just a few souvenirs.’

‘That’s a G2 FAMAS. You won’t exactly find one in the local gun shop.’

The bright grin again. Ben was going to need sunglasses for the glare. Omar said, ‘That one came home with me from a little spree called Opération Daguet.’

‘You fought with the French Army in the Gulf?’

Omar shrugged it off. ‘Long time ago.’

‘1991,’ Ben said. ‘Around the time I joined up.’

‘I knew there was something about you.’

‘British Army. Special Air Service. Long time ago, too.’

‘Want a coffee, bro? Look like you could do with it.’

‘And a favour,’ Ben said, nodding and then wincing at the pain the movement cost him. ‘I need a lift. Have you got a car?’

Omar looked at him. ‘Shit. Have I got a car?’

Chapter Eleven

Omar’s pride and joy was a H1 Hummer, the civilian version of the M998 US Army Humvee, the nickname that was the nearest anyone could pronounce to HMMWV or High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle.

The last time Ben had been inside a real one had been on a classified SAS mission in the Middle East. The demilitarised version might not have been bristling with heavy armament, but it was still a monster of a truck that dominated the road by sheer force of intimidation. Painted a deep, gleaming metallic gunmetal that was halfway between charcoal grey and black and all tricked out with mirror-tinted glass and oversized wheels and crash bars and enough auxiliary lighting to fry an egg at thirty paces, it could have been custom-built to suit Omar’s own huge frame.

‘Won it in a poker game,’ he explained loudly over the roar as they muscled their way across Briançon with all the noise and presence of a tank battalion, scattering lesser traffic into the verges. ‘I can hardly afford the insurance, but what the hell, I like it.’ Ben might have appreciated it more if every jolt of the off-road suspension hadn’t sent another arrow of pain through the middle of his skull.

The garage opened for business at 8.30. As the Hummer roared up on to the forecourt, Ben saw the Belphégor truck sitting waiting there for him.

‘Thought you weren’t coming back,’ the mechanic said. ‘Had her all fixed up and ready for you yesterday afternoon.’

‘Don’t ask,’ Ben replied.

The mechanic tossed him the keys. ‘Wouldn’t take her on a grand tour of Europe, but treat her kind and she’ll do fine.’

Ben waved a final thanks to Omar, and the Hummer took off with a large hand extended in a goodbye wave from the window. Ben watched it roar away. Now he just wanted to get out of Briançon as fast as possible and try and put this shameful episode behind him. He paid the repair bill from his own money, and clambered into the truck. It rumbled into life at the first twist of the key. As long as it got him back, that was all he could ask.

It was coming on for 8.45 as Ben set off. His thoughts were dark and brooding on the drive back to the monastery. It was another bright and sunny morning, but he was too swallowed up in self-loathing and penitence to take much notice. He’d let himself down, and not just himself. He’d turned his back on the monastery for just a few hours, and look at the result. This relapse meant there was a lot more work to do.

His stomach felt queasy and his blood alcohol level was probably still too high for him to be driving. He swigged down an extra-large emergency dose of Père Antoine’s tonic en route, thinking it might somehow purge the toxins from his system, or at least help clear his head. It did neither, but was a small comfort to him nonetheless. The greater comfort was knowing he’d be home soon.

Home. It really was beginning to feel like that to him. Secure, closeted. A safe zone. He yearned to be there.

He drove doggedly on. The mountain road lifted him up and up, until the pine forests were far below and he could taste the pure mountain air that whistled in through his window. The closer he got to the monastery, the more the darkness in his mind seemed to lift. When at last the walls came into view, he felt a surge of optimism.

But as he neared the gates, he sensed something that unsettled him. Because the gates were normally shut, and now they were open. Maybe the monks had been anxious about his return after all, and had left them open as a gentle hint to God to speed him safely home. Or because everyone was at prayer. Or maybe not. It wasn’t that. There was something wrong.

Then he got closer to the gates and he saw what was wrong. The gates themselves, for a start. They’d been built to open outwards, but now they were hanging open inwards. Ben saw shattered wood. Buckled hinges. One of the gates was listing at an angle where its mountings had been ripped from the stone pillar.

Ben stopped the truck. He stared at the smashed entrance. Something had happened here while he’d been away. Something significant and irreversible and not good.

Those gates had withstood centuries of weathering. The steel-banded oak was eight inches thick, age-hardened, tough as slabs of slate and locked from the inside by an iron deadbolt you could have hung a battleship from. To smash them open would require an immense force. An extremely violent impact from a very heavy object moving at quite some speed. Like a seriously large and powerful battering ram.

Ben drove through the broken gates and rolled the Belphégor inside the yard. Then he stopped again.

And stared.

Chapter Twelve

He stopped, because of what he saw in front of him.

The crow that had been pecking at the body spread its wings and flapped away. There was blood on the pale cloth of the monk’s robe. Blood spread across the ground underneath him. He was sprawled face down in the dirt with his arms out to his sides and one leg crooked, as if he’d been trying to crawl forward on hands and knees before his limbs had given way under him.

Ben’s stomach clenched like a fist and he shut off the truck engine, ripped the key from the ignition and booted open the door and jumped down from the cab. His first illogical thought was that the monk had suffered a heart attack or a stroke. He ran towards the body, then abruptly halted a few yards short of it. He looked around him, and blinked, and his stomach clenched even more tightly when he saw that there were other bodies in the yard.

They were everywhere.

He could see five, six, seven of them from where he stood gaping in disbelief. Then an eighth, spread-eagled face-up in the shadow of the store building. Then a ninth, hanging out of the low arch of the cloister wall as if trying to clamber through it. More blood. Blood all over the place. Spatters of it on the stonework. Pools and spots and trails of it on the ground, congealing and going dark and sticky in the morning sun. There was a hum of buzzing flies in the air, dark clouds of them swirling and hovering over and around the bodies.

Ben hurried towards the nearest body and felt something small and hard under the sole of his boot. Even through thick rubber, he could tell right away that the object wasn’t a stone. He crouched and picked it up. A dull brass cartridge case. Its circular base was concentrically stamped in small lettering WIN 9mm LUGER.

It might have been an incongruous sight here in Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux, but it was an extremely familiar one to Ben’s eyes. Standard nine-millimetre ammunition, the casing manufactured by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company under licence to Browning Arms of Morgan, Utah. A relatively diminutive cartridge, but famously effective. High-pressure, high-velocity, beloved of practically every military force on the planet since its invention in 1902, making it the world’s most popular combat handgun and submachine gun round. It also lent itself very well to being downloaded to subsonic velocity levels, eliminating the ear-splitting crack that a bullet makes when breaking the sound barrier, and allowing the report to be further subdued by a sound suppressor. In layman’s terms, it was easily silenced. Which made it a natural for any kind of covert work, or the kind of criminal operation where a lot of shots would have to be fired without drawing unwanted attention.

Ben turned the spent cartridge over in his fingers and sniffed at the blackened case mouth. The whiff of cordite told him it had been recently fired. No surprises.

And it was no surprise either to see plenty more of the cases lying about the ground. Random patterns and clusters of them all over the place, scattered little yellow sparkles catching the sunlight.

Ben tossed the case away and clenched his jaw and assessed what he was seeing. One gunman hadn’t done this: that much was fairly obvious to him. It was the work of a team. How many strong, Ben couldn’t say. To carry out an orchestrated attack of this scale, he’d have estimated the need for upward of six, maybe eight shooters. That left the question why. And that was a question he couldn’t even begin to answer.

He crouched by the body. The man’s white tonsured hair was matted with blood that was dried almost black. Where the crow had been pecking at the blood-soaked cloth of his robe, there was a bullet-hole between his shoulder blades. A trail of blood led back a few paces. He’d been shot in the back, probably while fleeing. He’d fallen on his face and then managed to crawl a little way before his killer had stepped up close and fired a second shot to the back of the head.

Ben reached out and grasped the monk’s shoulder to roll him over. His skin was cool. There was little point in checking for a pulse as the body was stiffened up like a board with the onset of rigor mortis. The point-blank headshot had exited the middle of the monk’s forehead, an exit wound big enough to drop a golf ball into. It had made a mess of his face, but Ben was able to recognise him. It was old Frère Robert, who’d helped him rebuild part of the frost-damaged outer wall in the wintertime. Ben had liked him. He’d liked them all.

He stood up and stepped across to another body, then another. Then a fourth, and a fifth. Same result. All dead, all cooling, all stiff, all shot with what looked like nine-millimetre expanding hollowpoints. Small entry hole, tapering out to a big exit hole. Very lethal, and very messy. And expertly executed. From the quantity of brass on the deck and the way that every victim had been double-tapped, one to the chest and one to the head, Ben could tell that the killers had been armed with pistols. They’d done their work the same way he had been taught to do it in the army: the first shot snapped off centre-of-mass to bring the target down, the second aimed more closely to finish the job. Brutal and effective. No quarter given, no survivors left behind.

The trail of death led him from the yard to the store building to the church. Everywhere he went, he kept finding more of them. There was Frère Patrice, slumped in a sitting position against the low wall of the little garden that surrounded the church, still wearing the support bandage on his twisted ankle, his walking stick on the ground next to him, blood spattered across the stonework from the through-and-through headshot that had taken away part of his skull. Then a few yards on there was the lay brother Olivier, who’d been on the work detail carrying up the beer from the cellar. Then there was Frère Gaspard, the greedy one. Shot in the belly and the throat, as if the killers had been starting to get bored by the time they got to him and were experimenting with variations.

Ben walked on. His head was spinning and he wanted to wake up from the nightmare.

It was beyond imagining. Who had done this? What had happened here?

Ben wasn’t a pathologist. But he’d seen a lot of death in his time. Enough to know that a human body loses approximately 1.5° centigrade per hour after death until it reaches the ambient temperature around it. The colder the environment, the faster the cooling. It was a pleasantly warm morning for the time of year, by Alpine standards, maybe eighteen degrees. Living human body temperature was nearly twenty degrees warmer, at thirty-seven point five. Which would mean a rough maximum of thirteen hours for the corpses’ temperature to drop to the same level as the air. Allowing for the lower temperature of the early morning and therefore a faster rate of cooling, probably less than that. Say, ten hours. But the bodies felt a little warmer than ambient temperature. They were still cooling, not yet stabilised. Without a thermometer it was impossible to gauge accurately, but Ben estimated that the attack had taken place about five hours ago. That gave plenty of time for rigor mortis to set in, which generally happened sometime after the first couple of hours.

Ben looked at his watch. It was coming on for 9.30 a.m. At an educated guess, the slaughter had happened around half past four in the morning. Just before dawn. A time when the monks had wrapped up their final night-time prayers and would be slowly returning to their cells to take some rest before the day began again.

I should have been here, he was thinking over and over.

If he hadn’t been delayed, he would have been. If he hadn’t been drinking himself stupid in some bar with a bunch of strangers. The truck would have been ready for him to collect and drive home. He’d have got back yesterday afternoon. He’d have been here, with his friends, when the attack happened. He might have been able to do something to stop this.

But he hadn’t. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to change that sorry fact.

He spent the next twenty minutes checking inside each and every one of the monks’ cells. Most were empty. Some weren’t. He found no survivors. Then he checked the Father Master of Novices’ quarters, and the prior’s. The two monks were nowhere to be found.

Until Ben moved on and ran to the church.

A thin white-haired body lay sprawled on the church steps. His robe had ridden up his legs as he’d fallen. The blood pool had trickled down three of the stone steps before it had begun to congeal.

Ben recognised him and said, ‘Oh, no.’

It was Père Jacques, the Father Master of Novices. The palm of one outflung hand blown through by a gunshot; the same shot that had hit him above the left eyebrow as he’d tried to shield himself from the bullet. The nine-millimetre round had exited the crown of his skull and made all the usual ugly ravages on its way out. Ben didn’t want to have to look too closely, but then something drew his eye and made him bend to scrutinise the gruesome mess in more detail.

Among all the blood, something appeared to be sticking out of the centre of the monk’s forehead. It took him a moment or two to understand what he was seeing; then he reached down and gently grasped the small foreign object between finger and thumb. It came away easily, because it was only lightly stuck to the skin by a crust of dried blood that had formed around it. It was just over an inch long, cylindrical, maybe quarter of an inch thick. It shone the same colour as the spent cartridge cases that littered the ground, but it was softer than brass between his fingertips, and weighed almost nothing.

It was a cigarette butt. A very particular and distinct type, a brand Ben had come across before. The shiny foil filter was emblazoned with a minuscule Russian imperial eagle, emblem of the Czars. The filter was pinched and crumpled from the pressure of stubbing it out. The smoked end was blackened, crushed and trailing bits of unburned tobacco soaked with blood. Ben flicked the thing away in disgust. It had left a small circular burn mark on the dead monk’s brow.

To shoot a defenceless man in the head was one thing. To stub your cigarette out on him when he was down, that was another. The ultimate insult added to the ultimate injury.

Bastards.

Ben made himself remain calm. He stepped around the blood and walked inside the open door of the church. The cool interior smelled of incense and death. The mosaic stone floor laid centuries ago by master masons was smeared with more blood.

There were thirteen bodies inside the church. Either they must have congregated in here when the shooting began or they’d still been at prayer when the attackers hit.

One of the bodies was Père Antoine’s.

The old prior was as dead as the rest. The final expression frozen on the octogenarian’s face was one of serene calm. He looked almost beatific. As if he’d met his end in the quiet certainty that he was going to meet his maker, that this life was just one small stage in the journey and there was nothing to fear in leaving it behind.

That didn’t make it any easier for Ben to deal with. He crouched over the prior for a long moment, remembering their conversations and their chess games and the old man’s kindness to him.

He said out loud, ‘I’m going to find who did this.’

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Ben was pretty certain that would have been Père Antoine’s reply. Or words to that effect. He’d have counselled Ben to leave it be. To find within himself the strength to walk away and resist the growing urge that was firing up his veins and making his hands shake and his heart pound and his breathing heave with anger. To go with God, walk the path of peace. Or as Jesus had said, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.

Ben wished he had that strength. He wasn’t the man Père Antoine had been. He wasn’t Jesus either. Not by a long shot. And the path of peace was no longer his to walk.

He stood up and left the church. Headed slowly back down the bloody steps. He made his way through the arch that led into the shady cloister and found three more bodies spread out on the stone floor.

Including one in particular who shouldn’t have been there at all.

Chapter Thirteen

The man was no monk, that was for sure. He was from the outside, but he was no ordinary outsider either. It seemed strange to see anyone here not clad in monastic garb, and even stranger to see a man in black combat trousers, black high-leg military boots, black multi-pocket tactical vest, black ski mask, shooters’ gloves and utility belt. Then again, under the circumstances, maybe not so strange.

The dead man had been packing some sort of semi-automatic pistol before someone had disarmed him and left him with an empty holster. Presumably, the same somebody who had shot him twice in the head with the same nine-millimetre ammunition that had been used to dispatch the other victims. The empty shell cases were lying nearby. His eyes were open and glazed in the holes of the ski mask.

Ben touched three fingers to the guy’s neck and held them there for a moment before he whipped off the ski mask and looked at his face. The guy was somewhere in his mid-thirties, white, dark-haired, not ugly, not handsome, not a memorable face, but one Ben wouldn’t be forgetting for a long time. It wasn’t a monk who’d shot him. Aside from the obvious reason why that couldn’t be the case, Ben could think of an even more compelling one. This guy had been alive much more recently than any of the monastery’s dead residents. He wasn’t quite warm to the touch, but he was in a considerably fresher state than they were. Ben grabbed the black-clad right arm and wagged it from side to side and up and down and then let it flop limply to the guy’s side. No sign of rigor mortis yet. The shoulder and elbow joints were loose and flexible. The blood on his face and all down the front of his combat vest was still wet, barely tacky. He’d been dead for well under two hours. Maybe even less than one.

Which told Ben two things. Firstly, unless something extremely bizarre had taken place involving two rival armed gangs happening to choose this spot for a shoot-out and managing to hit almost nobody except bystanders, this fellow had been killed by his own team. The precision of the gunshot wounds in his head made it impossible that he could have accidentally taken a stray bullet intended for one of the monks. This had been deliberate. Ben had absolutely no idea why.

Second, it told him that the perpetrators hadn’t long since left the monastery. If he’d turned up even just an hour earlier he might not have missed them. In turn, if he was right that the attack had happened at around 4.30 in the morning, it meant they’d lingered here quite some time. After killing everyone and securing the place for themselves, they’d then hung around for the next four or so hours.

Doing what? He had no idea about that either. What had they wanted? What could have kept them busy for so long?

Ben kneeled by the body and removed both gloves to examine the dead guy’s fingers for nicotine stains, wanting to know if this was the bastard who’d stubbed the cigarette out on Père Jacques. No stains. He let the hands flop in the dead guy’s lap and next frisked him for any kind of ID. No big surprise to find none, but he did find a phone. He slipped it into his own pocket with a view to checking through it later, and then turned his attention to the small black zippered haversack the guy had slung over his left shoulder. It felt unnaturally heavy, for all the size of it. The black nylon strap was dragging on the man’s clothing, weighing him down. At first Ben thought of spare armament, extra magazines, boxes of ammunition.

But then he unzipped it and looked inside, and frowned.

Now he was really confused.

There were two items inside the bag, both identical in size and shape, both cool and smooth and hard. Between them, they accounted for the unusual weight. They weren’t boxes of ammo or backup weapons.

Ben lifted one out with each hand and stared at them.

The gold bars glittered in the sunshine.

Chapter Fourteen

Ben remained kneeling, the dead man half forgotten, blinking in amazement at the items in his hands.

The last one of these he’d been this close to, years ago, had been part of an old cache of Nazi gold, marked with a German imperial eagle perched atop a swastika. That had made it pretty easy to identify, as well as to take an educated guess that it had been manufactured sometime between 1933 and 1945. He hadn’t known if it had been minted or cast or whether the highly recognisable emblem had been stamped or moulded on to it. Only that it was shiny yellow and damned heavy, damned valuable and had some major history behind it.

These two were shiny yellow and damned heavy as well. They were bright and smooth, each about twelve inches long and about four inches wide by three inches high. Solid, dense lumps of metal. Each weighed somewhere between six and eight kilos, making him straighten up and pivot his body weight slightly backwards to counter the tug on his arms. He put one of the bars down on the ground, rested the other on his knee as he reached into his pocket for the truck ignition key. Gripping the shaft of the key tightly, he dug its tip at an angle into the top of the bar. Steel was much harder than gold. The tip of the key easily left a jagged score mark as long as his thumb and maybe a millimetre deep.

Ben examined the scratch very closely. He was looking for dark grey underneath the gold. He’d heard of solid lead ingots, melted and moulded into the right shape out of wheel weights or roofing lead, being painted or even plated to fool the unwary.

But this was no lead ingot dressed up, and when he tested the second bar he got the same result. Apparently, they were the real thing. Which he had to presume meant they were pretty seriously valuable. At this moment, that was the absolute limit of his knowledge. Neither bar had any visible markings on it anywhere. Nothing to indicate their provenance, their age, or what the hell they were doing here.

That was just one more thing he was going to have to figure out.

Ben laid the two bars side by side in the dead man’s lap and covered them with the bag. He didn’t think the guy would be going anywhere with them. He stood up and walked on down the cloistered passage.

Soon afterwards, he picked up the blood trail. It started out of nowhere, the way blood trails so often did. Its source was marked with a splatter against a wall and a nearby spent nine-millimetre shell case. From there, a heavy line of spots, each the size of a large coin and serrated like a circular saw around its circumference where it had splashed to the ground, led through archways and down steps and along paved aisles for about fifty yards, until it disappeared through an open doorway. There was a russet-coloured partial palm print on the door from where the injured person had stumbled into it with their hand extended in front of them, crashing through in a hurry.

Ben meant to find out where it led. He might find another dead monk at the end of the trail, or he might find a second shooter. Preferably one who wasn’t yet expired, so that he could milk some information out of them before they were. Or before he made them that way.

But Ben knew he had to hurry. Whoever it was, they’d been losing a lot of blood.

The doorway was the one leading down to the cellars, along the same route Ben had travelled back and forth two days earlier with the work party bringing up the beer. He walked in and smelled the faintly musty odours that came up from below. It was full of shadows down here and his eyes were adjusted to the bright sunshine, but he could make out the regular spots of blood that dotted the way ahead. If anything, they were becoming more frequent. As if the bleeding had been getting worse, or the person had been slowing down, or both at once.

The trail led downwards into the maze of passages beneath the monastery. More handprints and smears, the colour of autumn leaves, appeared on the bare stone walls. Ben blinked to make his eyes reset themselves to the growing darkness. His footsteps began to echo more deeply around him as he ventured further underground. He wished he’d had a torch, then remembered that he had the dead man’s phone in his pocket. He paused to turn it on. It had a built-in light that he used as a torch, sweeping the weak beam ahead of him left and right as he made his way onwards.

Without the light there to guide him, he might have tripped over the heavy object that was lying in his path. He nudged it with his foot, then crouched down to examine it. It was another gold bar, apparently identical to the two he’d found on the dead man. He picked it up. Same weight. He brushed it all over with his fingertips. No markings, just plain smooth cool metal.

Ben laid the bar back down and moved on. Down, and down. Then the passage levelled out. He’d been here only once before, but he knew exactly where he was. The place seemed familiar to him, yet different. It wasn’t just the blood trail that hadn’t been here before. It was all the tracks in the dust. Lots of them, adding considerably to those that the work party had made trekking to and fro to shift the beer up from the cellars. It looked as if a whole procession of people had come this way, and back again. Perhaps several times, judging by the confusion of prints. One thing was for sure, these prints hadn’t been made by monks. Monks didn’t wear deep-tread combat boots.

He kept moving urgently forward. The light flicked this way and that, casting shadows on the rough walls and picking out more splashes of blood. And more. The dark passage curved left, then right, carving into the mountain like a mole tunnel. Ben moved quickly but cautiously, one eye on the ground. Any time soon, he’d be approaching the place where the walls opened up into the man-made cavern he’d discovered two days earlier. That seemed to be where both the blood trail and the multiple tracks were leading him.

Now he came to a fork in the path as the blood trail and the tracks diverged. The tracks kept moving straight ahead towards the cavern, while the blood trail veered off to the left, into the craggy entrance of the secondary passage Ben remembered from before. That was the direction he opted for, bowing his head to avoid the low, rough ceiling. The tracks could wait. This might not.

Just a few yards on, he came to the end of the trail.

Ben had thought he would find a dead monk there, or maybe a live bad guy. He found neither.

Chapter Fifteen

Up ahead in the tight passage, the blood spots terminated in a pool that had spread and gathered in the recesses of the uneven floor. Ben’s light flicked from side to side and settled on what looked like a heap of old sack-cloth dumped against the rough stone wall.

The heap moved. Only very slightly, but it moved.

Ben hurried forward, shining his light. He’d realised who it was.

He said, ‘Roby.’

Falling to his knees next to the slumped figure, he saw he was right. Roby’s eyes were shut and his face was ghastly white and slick with sweat. A fringe of dark hair was plastered across his brow.

Ben understood what the boy was doing here. Pure animal instinct. When any creature, small or large, was frightened or hurt, it was nature’s way for it to return to the burrow. This had been Roby’s little hideaway out of habit, the place he knew his fellow monks wouldn’t come looking. Except that on this occasion, he hadn’t come here to get away from the monks. He’d come here to get away from the men who’d shot him.

Ben shone his phone light over the boy’s robe. The blood was soaked everywhere, the thick material saturated with it. It was a stomach wound. One of the cruellest and slowest and most painful ways to die from a bullet.

Roby stirred. His eyes flickered open, then closed again, then reopened. They were dull, bloodshot and unfocused. He seemed to sense the presence next to him and tried to move his head, but didn’t have the strength. He whispered, ‘Benoît?’ His voice was just a shadow of a breath.

‘It’s me, Roby. I’m right here with you.’

The tiniest of smiles curled the corner of the boy’s mouth and then it drooped, as if even that effort was too much. His energy was almost gone.

‘I knew you’d come back,’ Roby breathed. He tried to reach out his hand. His fingers were thick with blood, some of it dried, most of it fresh.

Ben swallowed. ‘Stay still. You’re going to be okay.’ Which he knew was a lie. Roby was not going to be okay at all. He was going to die. It was a miracle he’d lasted this long. Or maybe it was just a cruel prolongation of his agony. Ben knew he couldn’t move him and that nothing could save him. They could have been within yards of a hospital, and the outcome would still have been the same.

But Roby was fighting it. He hadn’t had sixty years of serene devotional meditation to help him calmly accept, even embrace, death. He was as terrified as most other people would have been. With a supreme effort that must have used up nearly all his fading reserves, he gripped Ben’s hand in his bloodstained fingers. The movement shot a bolt of pain through him that sent a ripple of shock across his face. The agony was awful, Ben could see that. Roby gasped and a stream of garbled words hissed out of him. Ben strained to listen and caught none of it.

‘What happened here, Roby?’ He kept his voice gentle and soothing, fighting his emotions.

Roby’s eyes rolled back and the lids fluttered. His head lolled, and for a bad second Ben thought he’d lost him. But then the boy fought his eyes back open and mouthed more words, almost soundlessly. ‘They came … it was before dawn … I was …’ The whisper trailed off to nothing.

‘Who? Who did this?’

The effort was killing Roby. But he had nothing to lose any more. His breath was coming in gasps and his hand was trembling in Ben’s. Sweat beaded all over his pallid face and pooled in the hollow of his throat. His eyes opened a little wider, and the terror in them flashed brightly for an instant, a gleam that caught the light from the phone Ben was shining over him.

‘Benoît … I saw … I saw demons.’

Ben looked at him. The young man was raving, that was all. His brain was closing down. Random neurochemical impulses firing off as the nerve endings died and the mist of darkness rose up to take him away. People at the very point of death often talked gibberish or seemed to experience hallucinations, for the same reason. ‘It’s all right, Roby,’ was all Ben could say.

But whatever it was that Roby was trying to say, he was desperate to get it out. ‘No … not demons. Ghosts. I saw … they were … all white …’

And then the boy could say no more. His chest heaved with his last breath. His spine arched. A juddering spasm, and then Ben felt the life go out of him and his body go rigid and then relax and become limp.

Ben closed his eyes and held Roby for a few seconds. Then he let go of the dead boy’s hand and let his body slump gently to the floor. He stood up, said a silent goodbye and moved on.

From the mouth of the secondary passage he turned left again, in the direction of the tracks. It was virtually a thoroughfare along here. Twice, he kneeled down to inspect footprints that hadn’t been obliterated by others overlaid on top of them. One set of prints was distinctly smaller than the rest. Which was clear enough evidence that the tracks had been made by at least two people, as opposed to one person doubling back and forth many times. The smaller print had the same kind of large tread as the others, indicating some kind of standardisation of their footwear. Ben thought about the combat boots the dead shooter in the cloister had on. They’d come down here. Why? He thought of the two gold bars in the dead guy’s bag, and of the third one he’d nearly tripped over in the passage. Had there been a treasure buried beneath the monastery? Had the killers come here to raid it?

That would have explained the hours they’d hung around after the killings. Any kind of a sizeable haul of gold would take as long to lug up to ground level as a truckload of beer. Maybe even longer, depending on how much of it there was to shift. Maybe there’d been so much gold that one bar dropped here or there didn’t make any difference.

Maybe so much of it that the killers had begun to argue among themselves. Hence the dead guy in the cloister. There wasn’t always honour among thieves.

Ben moved on a few more yards towards the carved-out cavern he’d visited two days ago with Roby. Two days ago wasn’t a long time for someone who tended to notice small details the way Ben did. And while he could have sworn that the passage walls and ceiling had been smooth and undamaged before, now he was noticing a widespread lacework of cracks and fissures, some only hairline, others wide enough to stick his thumb into, on both sides and above his head. The dust underfoot was deeper and his boots crunched on small pieces of stone that had been dislodged from gaps that hadn’t been there before. Ben might have been worried about it, if he hadn’t had worse things to worry about.

Now the passage opened out into the cavern that had been dug out of the rock. The place Père Antoine hadn’t wanted to talk about. Where Ben had found the skull, and the section of brickwork that walled off the way ahead. The skull was still there, crushed from the rock Ben had dumped on it. It lay half-buried in fresh dust, from the cracks that had opened up everywhere. Next to it lay a fourth gold bar, apparently dropped in the same careless way as the last, gleaming dully in the light from Ben’s torch-phone. But he paid it only a moment’s attention, because he was distracted by a far bigger discovery.

The partition wall blocking off the cavern wasn’t there any more. It had been blown away.

Chapter Sixteen

Ben held his light up at eye level and examined the hole where the brickwork had been. It was almost perfectly circular, about five feet in diameter, a circumference of just under sixteen feet as neatly blasted away as anything he had ever seen. The rubble lay scattered about on both sides of the hole. It looked as though a giant bullet had punched right through the wall.

Now Ben understood the cause of the cracks he’d noticed in the walls and ceiling of the passage leading up to it. Only one kind of munitions could have produced such a perfect hole. A shaped charge. Plastic explosive, wired in place and remotely detonated. That wasn’t exactly the kind of hardware you could get via mail order. And whoever had rigged it was some kind of artist. It must have been a delicate operation. A fraction too much charge, and he could have brought the whole mountain down on top of himself and his team. Ben could still smell the faint tang of cordite from the explosion.

The tracks in the dust headed right through the hole. Evidently, whatever they’d come for lay beyond. Ben ducked and clambered over the rubble and followed the tracks into the blackness.

The first thing that hit him was the smell. The air had been trapped in here for who knew how many centuries, but that alone couldn’t explain the sickening rankness of the stench that made Ben want to gag almost at the first breath. He pulled up the hem of his shirt and clamped it tightly over his nose and mouth as a rudimentary filter. It helped, but only slightly. He took a few more steps inside and cast the light around him. Its glow didn’t reach the sides, and there was no telling how big the space around him was. The ground sloped away gently, rough and stony. He advanced one cautious step at a time, feeling his way. He could have done with a brighter light, and was certain that the intruders had come a little better equipped than he was. Head-torches, maybe, or six-cell Maglites enhanced with LED bulbs that could slice through the murk as well as a car headlamp. His light was beginning to dim as the phone’s battery faded. Now and then it gave a little flicker, and its colour was yellowing. He might have ten more minutes before it gave out entirely, or he might have five. Either way, it wasn’t reassuring. He could smell and hear better than he could see.

What he could hear was the echo of his footsteps resonating inside the dark space, and something else. A scuttling sound, furtive and intermittent. He raised the light higher and ventured forward a few more steps. His right foot made contact with something soft and mushy. It felt like stepping into a pile of rotten fruit. He shone the light downward, saw the glutinous yuck he’d stepped in and smelled its awful stench through the material of his shirt. It was the decomposing flesh of something furry, half-eaten and extremely dead. Now he understood the cause of the stink in here, and he understood the scuttling noises that echoed all around him.

The place was full of rats. Hundreds of them, or thousands, everywhere. He saw their dark shapes flitting from shadow to shadow as they scattered and hid, disturbed by his presence. The chamber was strewn with their carcasses and bones. A few yards away lay the body of the biggest rat Ben had ever seen. It had to be two foot long from nose to tail, but what struck him more than its size was that it was deformed, twisted and apparently eyeless. They must have been living down here in the darkness for so many generations that they’d lost their sight.

Ben had no great love for rats, but they possessed certain qualities it was hard not to admire in a morbid kind of way. When it came to survival skills, rats left humans far behind, simply because of their sheer adaptability. They could thrive in the very worst conditions, drink water that would poison most other creatures, devour things that not even a starving dog would go near. If required, cannibalism was not an issue for them. And that was how Ben realised they must have been living down here, subsisting off the flesh of their own kind. Which perhaps accounted for the deformities. Maybe eventually they would die out, given enough time, but they seemed to have managed to keep going for a few thousand generations at least. There must have been enough moisture in the dirt to keep them hydrated, just enough oxygen filtering in through minute cracks in the mountain to prevent asphyxiation. Millions of them, being born and surviving and dying and giving sustenance to their fellows, while the sorry saga of human history rolled meaninglessly onwards through the ages, above them and below them and all around them.

Ben lifted his boot from the stinking ooze he’d stepped in and moved deeper into the cavern, straining his eyes to see in the slowly, steadily dimming light.

Then he stopped and stood still and gazed at the sight that greeted him a little way further from the entrance.

A wide section of the cavern floor was covered with human bones. Mounds of them, several feet deep in places. Ribcages and fibias and tibias and sticks of spine and skulls, all piled and tangled up. It was impossible to tell how many skeletons were strewn among the rocks and the dust, because so few of them were still intact. They’d fallen apart with age, or been picked apart by rats. Many of the bones were partially eaten away. There was no telling how many must have been gnawed into calcium-rich dust by generations of sharp little rodent teeth. Maybe they were too ancient now to offer any nutritional value to the rats. Ben didn’t know. All he knew was that he was looking at the remains of an awful lot of people.

He stepped closer and shone his light down at the grisly boneyard. He knew how to tell a female skeleton from a male by the shape and relative width of the pelvic bone, and he could see female remains among the piled mass. Children’s bones were easier to tell apart, and he saw those, too. Then he looked more closely and saw more. Lengths of iron chain, red and pitted with corrosion, lay twisted and coiled among the human remains. Iron shackles were riveted at intervals along their length, still tightly clamped around the skeletal wrists and ankles of men, women and children alike. Iron plates bolted into the rock, with iron rings holding the chains securely to the floor. These people had been bound up like galley slaves.

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