the Gulf of Aden while hauling up some shipwreck or other, and got jumpy in case they were less lucky the next time. Deal was brokered by that greedy bastard Ronnie Galloway.’
‘I don’t know him. What’s the coverage?’
‘Twelve million. That’s pretty much all I can tell you.’
‘It’s plenty. I owe you one, Mike.’
‘Or two. Good luck, mate.’
Ben ended the call. He knew the name Rochester and Saunders well. Operating from a glittering glass tower in central London, they were one of the top players in their field and provided kidnap and ransom insurance services to high-risk corporate employees, VIPs and other potential kidnap targets all over the globe.
As Ben had known all too well for too many years, kidnap and ransom was a booming industry, not just for those who did it but also for those who could claim to offer protection from it. Long before he’d given up active field work to move to France and set up Le Val, he’d now and then been hired as a freelance negotiator by the insurance companies, to maintain contact with kidnappers, obtain the crucial proof of life, smooth along the negotiations and do everything humanly possible to ensure the early release, unharmed, of the hostages.
Occasionally, other ways and means – more or less peaceable, more or less legitimate – became necessary to get them out. In those cases, the insurance companies were no longer involved. Nobody was, not officially. Those contingencies, and the direct action needed to resolve them, had been Ben’s particular area of expertise.
A lot of K&R operatives had come from a military background – some, like Ben, from 22 SAS and other Special Forces units; Mike Starkey had been a twenty-year veteran of the London Met before switching careers. Many of the guys knew each other well, and because their work tended to take them to the world’s concentrated kidnap and ransom hotspots, their paths often crossed, frequently in the seedier bars and nightclubs where criminal informants and other undesirables tended to hang out. Theirs was a strange, closed and often clandestine community, made more so by the fact that in some countries getting paid to help secure the release of kidnap victims was considered tantamount to profiting from the kidnap itself. Some negotiators burned out from the stress, some ended up on the wrong side of the rails completely, or dead, or kidnap targets themselves. Some simply got tired of the life and ended up behind a desk.
Mike Starkey had been one of those. Nowadays he filled a cushy, safe little niche as a broker in London, the world’s K&R capital, acting as middleman between the clients desperate for kidnap protection insurance and the underwriters who collectively raked in over £150 million a year in return and were extremely reluctant ever, ever to part with a penny of it in the not-uncommon event of a claim. Business was soaring year on year and guys like Starkey were happily surfing the wave.
Some critics partly blamed the meteoric rise in the popularity of K&R insurance for the terrifying worldwide growth of the trade in human misery, on the grounds that the insurers were only fuelling potential kidnappers with greater financial incentives than they’d ever enjoyed before. It was a point of view Ben privately couldn’t disagree with.
‘Was that the call you were expecting?’ Amal asked as Ben put the phone away.
Ben nodded. ‘A contact in London.’
Amal waited for more, and when it wasn’t forthcoming he said, ‘Are you always this talkative and open with people?’
‘Yup, I’m a regular chatterbox,’ Ben said, and drove faster.
It was 8.27 p.m. when Ben and Amal rolled up on the crunching gravel outside Carrick Manor. The huge, imposing house was sequestered in its own sweeping grounds at the end of a long private road. A golden glow of light illuminated the entrance and the cluster of vehicles parked outside it.
As Ben stepped out of the BMW he noticed the same unmarked Garda Vauxhall Vectra that had been at the crime scene earlier that evening. He brushed his fingers along the bonnet as he walked by and felt the warmth from the still-ticking engine.
‘Hanratty,’ he said to Amal.
‘I’d a feeling we hadn’t seen the last of him,’ Amal groaned.
The manor house’s front door wasn’t locked and the huge entrance hall was empty. Ben paused, listening. From an open doorway at the far end of the hall came the distant sound of voices. Crossing the hall, he followed the sound down a long corridor, Amal tagging along behind him. The sound of voices grew louder and finally led them to another door. Ben peered in.
It was a dining room, or had been before it had been turned into a makeshift operations room by the crowd of police personnel and the fifteen or so other people inside. The room was uncomfortably warm and smelled of stale coffee, sweat and fear. The atmosphere was fraught. Everyone was too busy pacing up and down, looking extremely nervous or shouting at one another to notice Ben slip through the door, followed by Amal.
At the centre of the hubbub was a telephone, sitting silently on the gleaming surface of the long dining room table under the fixed eye of half a dozen men and women in suits.
Ben recognised a number of faces from the Neptune Marine Exploration website: the company had clearly flown out most of its chief executives to Ireland. One of them was the big, broad, balding man in the grey suit, Justin Maxwell, who until yesterday had been Sir Roger Forsyte’s second-in-command and now found himself apparently Neptune’s most senior executive, a responsibility that he wore gravely. He was leaning over the table, staring down at the phone as if trying by sheer force of will to make it ring.
Ben ran his eye over the monitoring equipment. An ordinary splitter cable was plugged into the wall socket and hooked up to a digital recording device with headphone outputs so that the police could listen in live to calls. Nearby stood a pair of laptops, one to trace the origin of any call online, whether via the GPS tracking system of a prepaid mobile phone or to a landline, and one to pick up any emails the kidnappers might send, complete with video clips of hooded hostages with guns at their heads. It was a pretty minimal setup, but that wasn’t the problem.
In fact there were two problems Ben could see, which were of a more fundamental nature. One was that, based on their behaviour so far, these kidnappers didn’t seem the kind of people who’d let themselves be so easily traced. Only an idiot nowadays would use a landline to make a ransom demand call, or hold on to a mobile phone they’d used for that purpose. It was just too easy to pinpoint the call’s origin, which was why a common trick kidnappers played was to toss the phone onto the back of a long-distance freight lorry after use, to lead the police far off the trail. Other times, they simply burned them.
The second problem was much more worrying. It had to do with timing. Ben looked at his watch.
It was almost eight-thirty. Not good.
A third laptop stood open on another table, surrounded by a small group of people. Onscreen was the BBC News website, showing the unfolding story in all its colourful drama: images of the bullet-riddled Jaguar; a shot of Castlebane Country Club; of NME’s ship Trident; and of each of the victims in order of newsworthiness – Forsyte’s was the most prominent, then Wally Lander, then Samantha Sheldrake. Brooke’s had now been added to the bottom. The cops had dug up the same photo of her that she’d given Ben to use on the Le Val site. He’d often caught
