The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET. Scott Mariani
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of times. His strong leg muscles hardened. He took a breath and launched himself.
His body hit the water in a perfect dive, hardly making a splash, and he knifed deep into the pool, then surfaced and swam fast. He forced thirty lengths out of himself, then heaved himself out of the water and walked to the chair, where his clothes were lying neatly folded. He was barely out of breath. Through the windows of the indoor pool, the snow-covered grounds of the estate swept away to the pinewoods in the distance.
The man scraped back his sandy hair. He reached for a towel, and as he dried himself he admired his trim shape. His muscled arms and torso bore the scars of nine bullet wounds and three knife slashes. He remembered exactly how and where he’d got each of them. Each had its own story. What they all had in common was that none of the people who’d given them to him had lived for more than three minutes afterwards.
The man was forty-three years old. He was a Londoner by birth and a former British Army soldier. His name was Jack Glass.
When he was drunk he would sometimes boast about his exploits in the legendary SAS. He even had the regimental winged dagger emblem tattooed on his upper right arm. He liked people to see it.
The truth was that he’d been rejected for service in the regiment many years before. A psychological evaluation had exposed certain traits that the regimental heads felt would not be an asset. His unsuitability for the Special Air Service had been confirmed when he’d tried to throttle the officer who’d informed him of his failure to make the grade. He’d been returned to his regular unit in disgrace, court-martialled and kicked out of the army.
He’d drifted around after that, run out of money. Like a lot of army leavers he’d been forced to take on menial jobs for a while. With his court-martial record he couldn’t even get security work.
One rainy London night he’d been at the bar of a pub when he’d met an old contact who had offered him paramilitary work in Africa. The money was excellent and the work was perfect for Glass. He’d accepted immediately and was on a flight three days later. He’d never returned to Britain.
In the Congo, Rwanda, Liberia, he’d worked for whoever paid the most. Suppressed anti-government rebels. Burned schools. Destroyed villages. Executed whole families caught up in bloody tribal wars. He did whatever he was told to do, took the cash and asked no questions.
Liberia was where he’d picked up the scar on his ear. The lobe had been ripped off by a bullet from an AK-47. The person holding the rifle was a black child of nine or ten, a little girl. It was the last round in the magazine of her AK. When she saw him standing there clutching his ear and screaming at her, she dropped the rifle and ran.
Glass had gone after her. He chased the screaming child deep into the bush. Brought her down, knelt on her chest, pinned her arms over her head with one hand. With the other hand he’d drawn out his bayonet, placed the point against her ribs. When he drove the blade slowly deep inside her little body he felt the struggles diminish and saw the life leak out of her eyes.
He could still remember it now. Someday, he’d like to do that again.
After Africa came the Bosnian conflict, where Glass had become involved in gun-running. He quit the battlefields, wore a suit and carried a briefcase instead of an M16. The case was usually filled with banknotes. He discovered you could make more money getting someone else to pull the trigger. Two years later, now a full-blown businessman with a lot of connections and cash rolling in, he’d met and struck up an alliance with an Austrian called Werner Kroll at an arms fair in Berlin.
At the age of thirty-six, Glass had gone to work for Kroll as a personal secretary and general aide. Glass was used to money by now, but selling Kalashnikovs to warring tribes was nickels and dimes next to the things Kroll was into. He was a little more than just an ordinary businessman. But he took fanatical care to cover his tracks, and only a very select few had any notion of the real scope of his activities.
Glass knew a little about the history of Werner Kroll’s family business. It had been around a long time, and had come a long way since its origins. He also knew that Kroll wouldn’t hesitate to have him, or anyone else, killed if they betrayed him or informed on him. The old Austrian was small and looked harmless. He was a little odd in his ways, and he had the air of an old-world schoolmaster. But he was the most dangerous man Jack Glass had ever met in his life, and he’d met a great many dangerous people.
Glass pictured Kroll’s wrinkled, pinched grey face in his mind. One day, he was going to kill the old bastard and fuck that little whore he kept as his mistress.
He dressed in a white shirt and grey slacks, did his tie up loosely and put on his blazer. In his office he found a sheet waiting for him on the fax machine. It was from London. He studied it up close. This was interesting.
Werner Kroll was sitting in his conservatory breakfast room with Eve. He ate in silence with his back to the window and the ornamental lake with the snowy mountains beyond. Kroll had been eating the exact same breakfast every morning for six years, poached eggs with slivers of toast cut into precisely the same sizes, arranged the same way on a porcelain plate. No butter. He ate delicately, almost daintily.
Glass came in carrying a folder. Kroll’s fork halted midway between his plate and his mouth. He dabbed his lips with his napkin and glared at him. ‘I’ve told you not to disturb me at breakfast,’ he said in an icy voice. His nose twitched. ‘My God, man, are you chewing gum again?’
Glass smiled to himself and took the gum out of his mouth. He loved to wind the old man up. ‘Forgive me, sir,’ he said. ‘I thought you might like to see this. It just came through.’ He opened the file and handed Kroll a sheet of fax paper.
Kroll put on a pair of half-moon spectacles and peered down his nose at the sheet. It was a copy of the front page of last night’s Evening Standard. It showed a grainy photo of Leigh Llewellyn surrounded by fans. Kroll recognized the Oxford landscape, the Sheldonian theatre behind her. To her left stood a man he hadn’t seen before. They were holding hands. The headline read ‘WHO’S LEIGH’S LEADING MAN?’
Kroll lowered the sheet and looked at Glass over the top of his lenses. ‘Is this the person who killed one of our best men with…what was it?’
‘A skillet, sir,’ Glass said.
Eve picked up the sheet and peered at the man in the photo. She liked the look of him, tall and fit-looking. Glass was watching her face.
‘I would also like to find out who Leigh’s leading man is,’ Kroll said. He glanced at Eve. She’d been looking at the picture a moment too long. He snatched it away from her.
‘I think I know who he is, sir,’ Glass said.
‘A professional bodyguard?’ asked Kroll.
‘I think he might be a little more than that,’ Glass said. ‘I’ll have to check my contacts. It might take a few days. But I’m certain it’s him.’
Kroll dismissed him and went back to his eggs. They were cold. He pushed them away in disgust.
Eve was heading back to her room after breakfast when she met Glass in the corridor. He was standing at her doorway, leaning casually against the wall with one big hand against the door-frame.
She stopped and looked at him. ‘Aren’t you going to let me through?’
He grinned, eyeing her up and down. She tried to shove past him. His powerful hand gripped her arm and he whirled her around.
‘Get your paws off me,’ she warned him.
Glass pulled her closer and roughly fondled her breasts through her blouse. ‘Nice.’
She tore away from him and slapped him across the face, felt the hardness of his jaw against her hand. Her palm stung.
Glass smiled. ‘I’m watching you,’ he said. ‘I know what you want.’
‘Do you really?’
‘Once a whore, always a whore. You want to fuck a real man for a change?’