church to find that it wasn’t empty – though he took little notice of the well-dressed stranger sitting in one of the pews across the aisle, a man of the same approximate age as he was, with grey hair turning white, and a broad, deeply lined face with penetrating eyes, who had looked at Gennaro fixedly as he came in.
Gennaro never asked himself who the stranger was, whether a newcomer to the village or someone just passing through. He smiled, nodded politely and got on with his habitual prayers, oblivious of the way the stranger kept staring at him. He remained in his pew the same length of time he always did, then left the church and began walking home under the warm sunshine, sniffing flowers and feeling happy at the beauty of the day.
Had Gennaro Tucci’s mind not been fully taken up with such pleasant thoughts, he might have noticed that the mysterious stranger had left the church at the same time, and was following him at a distance, staring at his back with an expression Gennaro might have found unsettling.
And, once he’d reached his little cottage on the edge of the village, had Gennaro happened to look out of the window he’d have noticed the stranger standing there by the front gate, watching as though unable to tear his gaze away.
But Gennaro saw nothing, and after a few minutes the stranger disappeared. The next day came and went, as peacefully as ever; then the next.
The following evening, they came.
Gennaro was upstairs, getting ready for bed, when the lights shone through his windows and he heard the thump of someone crashing through his front door. Frightened, he padded down the stairs, calling, ‘Chi è là?’
When he saw the three intruders, masked and armed, Gennaro almost died of fright. At first he’d thought the men had come to rob him, but that was unthinkable – he had nothing to steal, which was why he’d never locked his door in all these years. But they hadn’t come for valuables. It was him they wanted.
Gennaro struggled and cried out as they grabbed him. One of the men jabbed a hypodermic syringe into his arm, and after that things began to go hazy for the sixty-three-year-old. They dragged his half-unconscious body outside and bundled him into a black van, shut him up in the back and sped off into the night.
Many hours later, some four hundred kilometres north of the home Gennaro would never see again, the van finally stopped and his captors dragged him out. By then the drugs had begun to wear off. Gennaro blinked in the strong sunlight and gaped at his new surroundings, too terrified to ask what was happening to him and why he’d been kidnapped. He was in the grounds of some magnificent house by a lake. Poor Gennaro had never left rural Umbria, and had no recognition of where he’d been brought. But he did faintly recognise the man who stood before him as the three thugs shoved and dragged him inside the big house, then threw him down on his knees on the hard marble floor. The man smiled down at him with an expression that was almost benevolent. Gennaro blinked up at him and struggled to remember where he’d seen him before.
The stranger from the church.
Now that Gennaro saw him more closely, he was even more confused. It was like looking into a mirror. They could have been identical twins.
‘What is your name?’ the man asked.
‘G-Gennaro T-Tucci,’ Gennaro managed to quaver.
‘Gennaro,’ the man said with a broad smile, ‘you are a gift from God.’
So many times in the past, Ben Hope had vowed and declared that his crazy days of running from one adventure to another were over, and that he was going to stay put at home for the foreseeable future. And every time he’d said it, before long some new crisis had come barrelling into his life and whisked him off again – the latest in a sorry, never-ending series of broken promises, to himself, and to others, which had sometimes made him wonder if he was cursed by fate.
This time, though, he was determined to be true to his word. This was it. Mayhem, violence, war, intrigue, chasing around the world – he was done with the lot of it, once and for all.
It wasn’t so much that, as his longtime friend and business partner Jeff Dekker sometimes joked, ‘We’re getting too old for this shit.’ In his early forties, Ben had plenty of life left in him and could still outrun, out-train and, if necessary, outfight guys half his age. But he would have been lying if he’d said that the recent African escapade hadn’t taken a lot out of him, physically and emotionally.
The same went for Jeff, who’d been right there at Ben’s side in what had to be the deadliest, most complex and disturbing rescue mission either man had ever experienced, either during their time in British Special Forces and in the years since. Likewise for Tuesday Fletcher, the young ex-trooper who had not long since joined their small staff at the Le Val Tactical Training Centre in rural Normandy but already proved himself ten times over to be a stalwart asset to the team and forged bonds of comradeship with Ben and Jeff that could never be broken.
Less than a fortnight had passed since they’d all returned to Le Val, to find a mountain of mail waiting for them. The business was growing by the month, attracting so many bookings from military, law enforcement and private close-protection agencies worldwide looking to refine and extend their tactical skillset that it was hard to keep up with demand. Now that the operation had received a substantial cash injection in the wake of the Africa mission, they were set to grow still further.
But all of that had been set aside for a week, as an official Le Val holiday was declared.
Ben had spent that time recuperating. For most people, ‘recuperating’ might have meant lying in bed, or sitting around idle, licking their wounds and feeling sorry for themselves. For Ben it meant getting back into the punishing exercise routines he’d followed for most of his life. Working back up to a thousand push-ups a day, lifting weights, honing his marksmanship skills on Le Val’s pistol and rifle ranges, scaling cliffs and sea-kayaking off the Normandy coast, and going for long runs through the wintry countryside with Storm, his favourite of the pack of German Shepherds that patrolled the compound. The harder Ben trained, the more he emptied his mind and the further he left the horrors of Africa behind him.
Jeff Dekker was no slouch either, but he’d used his recuperation period differently. His romance with Chantal Mercier, who taught at the École Primaire in the nearby village of Saint-Acaire, had grown more serious over the last months, and he’d spent his time off with her. In all the years Ben had known Jeff, throughout the never-ending sequence of on-off, part-time, short-term girlfriends whose names were too many to remember, he’d never seen him so committed to a relationship. He was happy for his friend, and Jeff seemed happy too. Even Jeff’s French had improved.
Meanwhile, Tuesday Fletcher had taken advantage of the week’s holiday to fly home to London to see his parents, Rosco and Shekeia, second-generation immigrants from Jamaica. Tuesday was still recovering from a gunshot wound to the arm, sustained during their flight from the Congo. Ben had no doubt that he’d come up with some white lie to conceal from his parents just how close he’d come to being killed. If anyone could make light of a bullet in the arm, it was the ever-cheerful Tuesday.
The second week since their return, the three of them had started easing themselves back into business-as-usual mode and begun working their way through the backlog of emails, letters, accounts, orders, bookings and the process of hiring new staff to cope with the expanding Le Val operation, and a hundred other matters that had accumulated during their absence.
That
