in Africa. No indication of the writer’s identity, so Ben flicked over to the last page and ran his eye down to the bottom. His eyes narrowed in surprise when he saw the signature.
The letter’s author was one Fabrizio Severini.
A name Ben recognised immediately. It flooded his mind with memories from years back, returning him to a chapter in his life when he’d still been working freelance as what people in that little-known trade called a ‘K&R crisis consultant’. The K and R stood for kidnap and ransom, which had been Ben’s particular area of expertise in those days. When vulnerable, innocent people – many of them children – were taken by ruthless criminals looking to extort money from their loved ones, and when the conventional avenues for getting them back had been tried and failed, it had been Ben’s job to employ his own specialised means to hunt the kidnappers and bring the victims home as unscathed as possible. The kidnappers had rarely come out of it unscathed themselves. It had been a dangerous business for them once Ben was involved.
Dangerous for Ben, too. And the strange mission that had indirectly brought him into contact with Fabrizio Severini had been one of the most hazardous of them all. What had started as the race to save the life of a child had led Ben through some unexpected twists and turns before placing him in conflict with one of the most tenacious, ruthless enemies he’d ever encountered, a man named Massimiliano Usberti.
Usberti was a rogue senior Italian archbishop who controlled a secret and powerful Christian fundamentalist cult called Gladius Domini: Sword of God. Its brainwashed members, branded with a tattoo to show their allegiance, were prepared to kidnap, torture or assassinate anyone who stood in Usberti’s way. One of Usberti’s trusted inner circle had been a psychopathic killer called Franco Bozza. Another had been his close aide and personal secretary, Fabrizio Severini. Ben had worked alongside the only law enforcement officer he’d ever trusted, the intensely cerebral, sharp-witted and fiercely driven Parisian cop Luc Simon to bring down Gladius Domini. In the process, Ben had been shot, almost stabbed, come within a whisker of being crushed by a speeding train, and been very nearly incinerated in a burning mansion. All more or less run-of-the-mill stuff for him. He’d also found love, not lastingly, in the form of the American scientist Roberta Ryder.
During the final shakedown that brought the cult to its knees, Massimiliano Usberti had been arrested while many of his cronies, Severini included, had fled for the hills. But Severini had proved much less wily than his leader: INTERPOL had scooped him up just a few weeks later, while over the next few months – pretty much as Ben had expected might happen – Usberti had used his influence in high places, his power and his wealth, to oil his way out of trouble. In the end Usberti had walked away from the affair a free man – albeit disgraced, broken and barred from ever again regaining his old position in the church.
When the news had broken that the charges against Usberti had been controversially dropped, Ben had already been moving on with his life and becoming involved in the hunt for a missing girl abducted by an international child sex trafficking ring.
For a while afterwards he’d toyed with the idea of going after Usberti to deliver some natural justice where the courts had failed. But he’d reluctantly given up on the plan. If anything untoward had happened to the former archbishop, Luc Simon – by then promoted from the Paris police to a desk at the INTERPOL HQ in Lyon – would have known about it, instantly put two and two together and jumped on Ben with all the force of his new position. Ben had thought about it less and less over time, and eventually let the whole thing fade from his mind. It wasn’t a perfect world. The bad guys sometimes walked: you just had to deal with it.
If there was any consolation, it was that not all of Gladius Domini’s surviving members had got off so lightly. Quite how Usberti had managed to get Severini to take the fall for him, Ben would never know and had long ago stopped caring. But the prison notepaper in his hands was certainly proof, if nothing else, that Severini’s plunge had been a spectacular and enduring one. Ben wondered how many more years the man had left to serve.
That wasn’t all Ben was wondering as he returned to the start of the letter and began reading, translating from Italian as he went. Why on earth was Fabrizio Severini, a man he’d never even seen in the flesh, writing to him after all this time? He was about to find out.
Dear Signor Hope,
It is with a heavy conscience and only after a great deal of soul-searching that I write to you, as well as with the heartfelt wish that you will both forgive this unsolicited and most unorthodox personal communication and treat its content as an expression of my utmost sincerity.
Considering we have never met in person and never shall, you are doubtless wondering why I have chosen to send you this letter. I fully understand that you may not wish to read it and will instead feel impelled to tear it up; but for reasons that will become clear below, I beg you to read on and hear what I must tell you.
In the years since its downfall, I have always remembered you as the man primarily responsible for bringing to an end the insidious organisation in which I once so strongly believed, and whose name I cannot now bring myself to mention. Nor do I find it easy to express the deep shame I continue to endure each and every day, as I sit here in my cell with little to do except think back to those dark times, to the many and terrible sins committed, to which I was so blind, and to the man I once idolised and trusted as though he were my own father. I believed myself at the time to be collaborating with a true visionary, a man of God. Instead, as I later came to realise, I was in fact working in league with the Devil. I allowed myself to become an unwitting instrument of this maniac whose pure evil is matched only by the cunning that has, to this day, enabled him to evade justice.
I was a fool, and I have been rightly punished for my mistakes. I deserved all that befell me: to have lost my cherished family, my home, my position within the Church, and my freedom. It is not to gain sympathy that I tell you of the complete psychological breakdown and the torment of mental illness I suffered for so long following my arrest and incarceration. The experience broke me and, in effect, I went mad. I spent an extended period of time in a facility for the criminally insane, and only after prolonged treatment were my rational faculties slowly restored, permitting my transfer here to the Istituto Penitenziaro Bollati – where in the last two years I have received far more humane and compassionate treatment than I could ever hope to merit.
Though the horrors of my insanity are now largely behind me, the burden of guilt I suffer can never be lifted from my shoulders. Every day I have prayed for God’s forgiveness for my part in the unspeakable crimes Massimiliano Usberti perpetrated in the name of the Catholic faith. I was once a man of God, blessed each day by His love and guidance; but that source of Divine wisdom was lost to me as the Lord turned His back and spoke to me no more, however much I begged Him to reveal Himself to me as He once did. His long silence has in many ways been the hardest punishment for me to bear.
Finally, after all these years of torment, God in His mercy has spoken to me once again. But now that He has taken me back into the favour of His Divine goodness, it pains me deeply to say that He has only confirmed to me what I have always dreaded to be the case.
And this brings me, my dear Signor Hope, to my reason for penning this letter to you – a reason so terrible that the very thought makes me shake with fear as I write. For I am now more utterly certain than ever, in my heart of hearts, that we have not seen the end of this evil maniac Massimiliano Usberti. A man like him does not simply fade into the background. If he has managed to remain in the shadows for so long, it is only because he is hatching some dreadful new plan that eclipses even his monstrous exploits of the past. Moreover, I am convinced that he will return to seek vengeance against those he perceives as having wronged him – those who prevented him from carrying out his pernicious goals and may attempt to do so again
