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Paris

It should have been a simple affair. But in his world, things that started out simple often didn’t end up that way. That was how it had always been for him, and he’d long ago stopped questioning why. Some people had a talent for music, others for business. Ben Hope had a talent for trouble. Both attracting it, and fixing it.

Which was the reason he was sitting here now on this chilly, damp November afternoon, parked under a grey sky on this unusually empty street in the middle of this bustling city he both loved and hated, at the wheel of an Alpina BMW twin-turbo coupé that had seen better days, smoking his way through a fresh pack of Gauloises, watching the world go by and the pigeons strutting over the Parisian pavements and the entrance of the little grocery shop across the road, and counting down the minutes before trouble was inevitably about to walk back into his life.

He wouldn’t have to wait much longer. It was thirteen minutes past three o’clock, which meant the deadline for Abdel’s phone call had been and gone exactly thirteen minutes ago. Precisely as Ben had instructed Abdel to allow to happen. If the Romanians anywhere near lived up to the image that was being painted of them, then such an act of open defiance would not be tolerated. They’d be here soon, ready to do business. And Ben would be ready to put the first phase of his plan into action. It might go smoothly, or then again it might not. That all depended entirely on how Dracul decided to play it. Either way, it wasn’t exactly how Ben had planned on spending this brief return visit to Paris.

Naturally, things just couldn’t be that simple.

When Abdel’s broken deadline was twenty-one minutes old and Ben was two-thirds of the way through his next cigarette, the silver Mercedes-Benz turned sharply in out of the traffic and squealed up at the kerb outside the grocery shop, right across the street from where Ben was sitting. Both front doors opened at once. Two men got out, slammed their doors and converged on the pavement, glancing left and right.

Ben followed them with a watchful eye, and knew immediately that he was looking at the Romanians. They were both in their late twenties or early thirties. One was darker in hair and skin, with sharper features that hinted at gypsy ancestry. The other had more Slavic blood, or maybe Hungarian, with a long face and fairer hair. Ethnic variations aside, they could have been clones: big, heavy, hand-picked from the pages of the rent-a-thug catalogue, dressed to intimidate in leather jackets and big stompy boots and putting on a theatrical air of menace as they walked up to the shop entrance and pushed their way inside.

Dracul’s enforcers, come to deliver on their promise of violence, bloodshed and broken bones. They looked more than up to the job. Little wonder they had Abdel and the rest of the neighbourhood spooked.

Ben took a last draw on his Gauloise, crushed the stub into the crowded dashboard ashtray, picked up his bag from the passenger seat and got out of the car.

‘Here we go again,’ he muttered to himself. Then he crossed the street and walked into the shop after them.

It was Ben’s first visit to Paris in well over a year. He hadn’t been planning on coming back any time soon – not out of any kind of deliberate avoidance, but because he had few plans of any kind at all. For some time now, for reasons that he preferred not to dwell on, his had been a rootless, meandering existence that took him wherever chance and circumstance led him: he’d wandered aimlessly around Europe, never lingering long in one place, never quite sure why he’d come or where he was going next. He wasn’t a tourist, being fluent in the core European languages and conversant in most of the others, but he wasn’t a native either, and there seemed to be no place he could settle and feel at home. Sometimes he stayed a day here and there in cheap hotels; sometimes he roughed it in the kinds of solitary wild places he’d always liked to spend time, away from the complexities of life, away from hustle and bustle – most of all, away from trouble.

At least, that was the idea.

Jeff Dekker, Ben’s old friend and former partner, still ran the business they’d built together in Normandy, and still thought that Ben had lost his mind. Back in the day, Jeff had done his stint in the Special Boat Service, the Royal Navy’s equivalent of Ben’s old regiment, 22 SAS. Years later, after Ben had gone to live at the former farm near Valognes, a place called Le Val, he and Jeff had teamed up to carve out a prestigious niche for themselves teaching their specialised skills to military, security, law enforcement and anti-terrorist operatives from across the globe. They’d reached the point in their careers where they could enjoy the fruits of all those years of extreme risk and back-breaking hardship.

That was how it worked in their world. Special Forces was like some kind of super-university where the learning curves were tough, the lifestyle tougher, the possibility of sudden violent death never far away, and the pay on a par with a schoolteacher’s salary. But those who survived the experience ultimately emerged from it as life members of the most exclusive club in the world, with their real careers still ahead of them. Former SAS and SBS guys were in high demand for plum jobs as senior security advisors in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, with earning potential running into hundreds of thousands a year, tax-free, for a fraction of the workload they were used to, and virtually zero risk. Others did what Ben had done for several years after quitting the military, go freelance as what he’d termed a ‘crisis response consultant’, before Le Val had entered his life.

In short, for men of their qualifications it was a world of opportunity. Le Val certainly had paid off on everyone’s expectations. So as far as Jeff was concerned, to have put yourself through the living hell they had, come through it alive and then invested all that hard-won knowledge and experience into the best private tactical training facility in Europe, just to abandon it and go wandering off into the sunset like some kind of half-arsed nomad, was completely nuts. It was an opinion he’d frequently expressed to Ben, in increasingly strong terms as it became increasingly apparent that Ben wasn’t coming back.

Ben respected his old friend’s point of view, and had always felt bad for having left Jeff holding the baby. But he felt he’d had no choice but to walk away from Le Val. Only Ben understood the deep inner restlessness that troubled his soul and drove him to do the things he did.

Lately, though, a growing shadow of doubt had been hanging over him and Jeff’s words were often in his mind. The trouble with walking away from a lucrative little enterprise like Le Val, with no other employment on the horizon, was that unless you were a millionaire it was no kind of an effective long-term financial proposition. And the Lord knew Ben Hope was no millionaire – never had been, never would be, never wanted to be. Technically speaking, he remained part-owner and a sleeping partner in the business, and could therefore be drawing an income from it if he’d so desired. But to Ben’s mind, if he wasn’t doing the work he didn’t deserve to benefit from the profits, and had insisted on not receiving a penny from Le Val since the day he’d quit, choosing instead to support himself independently from his savings. He’d known, of course, that they wouldn’t last forever, and he’d been careful. But the laws of simple economics couldn’t be cheated, and slowly, slowly, his funds had dwindled away until worryingly little remained, leaving him to face some key decisions.

The first of those decisions was that he needed to sell his place in Paris. He’d occasionally toyed with the idea in the past, but now the time had finally come to put it on the market. The one-bedroom apartment had been a gift from a former client, years ago, and for a long time had served Ben as a base while travelling in Europe. He’d called it his safehouse, because it was so tucked away among a cluster of backstreet buildings that you’d never find it if you didn’t know it was there. On more than one occasion, it had lived up to its name when he’d needed a place to lie low. But now it was nothing more than a pointless luxury, and a financial asset he could no longer afford to hang onto. Ben had reckoned he could get it all fixed up himself, without having to spend a fortune. A patch-up repair here, a lick of paint there, and he was confident it could make an ideal pad for a single guy or gal, perhaps even a young couple looking to get into the property market.

And so, with some regret, Ben had come to Paris to do the necessary.

And that was when the trouble had started.