Valley of Death. Scott Mariani
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slacking on the job. As Phoebe had said, the ticket was ready and waiting for him at the check-in desk. He impatiently whiled away the time before his flight was called, and then he was stretched out on a plush seat in a half-empty first-class section with a glass of single malt scotch, straight, no ice. The benefits of luxury travel. With eight hours ahead of him in which he had nothing much to do except try not to think about meeting Brooke again, the whisky would be the first of several.
After a couple of drinks he ate a light meal from the excellent first-class menu, then had a couple more drinks, then closed his eyes. Still thinking about it. Then again, as long as he was preoccupied with one thing, he couldn’t feel so bad about the other.
He fleetingly wondered where Sandrine was at this moment, and what she was doing. Then he wondered how he’d feel if, say, a couple of years into the future, he heard that Sandrine had married some guy and that he, Ben, was now just a distant and semi-forgotten part of her past. He wasn’t sure how much it would hurt him. Maybe a little. But not the way he was hurting now. Maybe that was how love was measured, he thought: by how brutally it could rip your heart out and feed it through a blender. By that definition, he knew that he must still feel more than he’d realised for Brooke Marcel.
No, not Brooke Marcel, he corrected himself. She’d be Brooke Ray now.
Brooke Ray.
Shit. Time for another drink. Eight hours was plenty of time to sober up.
Eight hours later and fully sober, Ben stepped out into the hazy Delhi sunshine with his bag on his shoulder and began taking in the sights and colours and smells of India. It was mid-morning, local time, and cooler than he’d expected – only about 30°C and rising as he crossed the tarmac towards the arrivals terminal.
Then again, his expectations were a little vague. He’d travelled the whole world several times around, missing only a few spots, but India nonetheless wasn’t a country he knew well. His last visit had been a brief stopover en route to Indonesia, the very same trip that had triggered the end of his relationship with Brooke. It seemed ironic that he was returning here now, under these circumstances.
They say nothing prepares you for the dirt, poverty and chaos of India, but the airport was clean and modern and well organised. Ben passed under a big sign welcoming the new arrivals to the country and was approaching the immigration counter when a well-dressed man with swept-back white hair and a clipped moustache intercepted him with a smile and a handshake, and introduced himself as Vivaan Banerjee of the Indian Foreign Office.
The government man led Ben away from the crowds to a private room, where he made pleasant small talk while checking Ben’s identification papers. ‘This is just a formality,’ he kept insisting as he apologetically asked for signatures on a couple of official documents, and Ben had the strangest feeling of being inducted into some old boys’ club. It was another whiff of the Ray family’s power and influence. Who needs a travel visa, when you have friends in the right places?
With a flourish Banerjee produced an ink stamp and set about vigorously thumping the signed documents as though there were cockroaches lurking under them. Then he grasped Ben’s hand like a long-lost friend and wished him a pleasant stay in India. Ben wondered if Banerjee knew why he was really here, and if that was the reason why the official seemed to be studiously avoiding any mention of the current crisis affecting the Ray family. Maybe now Ben was in the club, the police would be ordered from on high to turn a blind eye if the hunt for Amal got rough.
After he finished with Banerjee, Ben headed for the exit. Phoebe had said there would be a car to pick him up at the airport. As he was walking through the busy lobby, past a life-size statue of two Asiatic elephants penned behind a railing as though they might suddenly rampage and start flattening the public, a young Indian guy picked him out from the crowd and came hurrying over.
‘Mr Hope? Delighted to meet you, sir. My name is Prem Sharma. I work for the Ray family. Please, come this way.’
Prem was about thirty, slender and handsome, with expressive dark eyes and thick black hair. He wore a light grey suit, nicely tailored, silk shirt, expensive watch, quality handmade shoes. His employers clearly paid him well. He carried Ben’s battered canvas bag as diligently as if it had been a Ralph Lauren suitcase and led him outside to a gleaming black Mercedes-Benz S-Class Maybach Pullman limousine longer than some river barges Ben had seen. Yet more evidence of the wealth Brooke had married into.
Prem smiled as he noticed Ben looking at the car. ‘Its previous owner was a former president of India,’ he explained. ‘The most luxurious limousine in all of Delhi, as befits the Ray family’s most important guests. It has a twelve-cylinder biturbo engine producing more than six hundred horsepower. Fully armoured, naturally.’
Ben couldn’t tell if Prem was just bragging, or trying to sell it to him. ‘Naturally. And are we likely to come under attack today?’
Prem replied, ‘I would say that is doubtful. But one can never be too careful. In such an event, we would be protected from any kinds of small arms fire and grenade blasts. The vehicle is also sealed against chemical weapon attacks.’
Ben said, ‘Handy. But what if they shoot the tyres out?’
‘Oh, it will continue to run on four flat tyres for approximately five kilometres,’ Prem replied.
‘Then it looks like we ought to make it to our destination in one piece,’ Ben said. Prem stowed his bag in the vastness of the boot before he smartly walked around to the rear door and held it open for his passenger.
Under different circumstances, Ben might have been faintly amused at being treated like some visiting dignitary. He ignored the offer and opened the front passenger door instead. ‘I prefer to ride up front, thanks.’
‘As you wish,’ Prem replied with a smile, and shut the rear with a soft clunk. Ben settled into the cool, creamy passenger seat, as spacious and comfortable as his first-class armchair on the plane.
So far, it had been an easy trip. The tough part lay just around the corner.
Prem threw himself behind the wheel of the limousine and fired up the engine, as whisper-quiet as an electric motor and totally insulated from the outside world. Then they were off, and within minutes were carving straight into the hustle and bustle of the vast metropolis that made the hubbub of London, Paris and Moscow seem like ghost towns by comparison. The density of the traffic was insane and the muffled honking of horns all around sounded like distant herds of angry elephants as the huge Maybach nosed its way down wide, leafy boulevards crammed nose to tail with vehicles and narrower streets that were so congested it seemed impossible that the traffic could ever get flowing again. Cyclists, mopeds, pedal rickshaws and little green and yellow tuk-tuk three-wheeler vans were everywhere, weaving among the sea of vehicles and darting across lanes with as little regard for the rules of the road as for their own safety.
If anything, the pavements were even more densely packed. They heaved with a thronging morass of people, people, and more people everywhere. To Ben’s eyes it seemed the city’s populace must have recovered at least fivefold from the dark days of Indian government population control in the 1970s, when armed troops rounded up citizens in the streets of Delhi for transportation to forced sterilisation camps, with the open approval of Western leaders. Now, the multitude of crowds and sights and colours was almost overpoweringly rich. In the middle of it all were street vendors selling their wares, beggars sitting on steps, street kids running in hordes in search of things to get up to, feral-looking dogs scavenging around for scraps, a crazy kaleidoscope of buzzing urban diversity that was too much to take in at once. The morning sky was shrouded by grey smog that trapped the visibly intensifying heat haze, but the limo’s luxurious interior was as cool as an April day at Le Val.
Ben would have happily ridden in silence, but Prem wanted to talk. The car was so silent that he barely needed to raise his voice. ‘So you are a friend of the Ray family?’
‘I