CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Thin drizzle was slanting out of a leaden early-afternoon sky as Ben stepped out onto the tarmac at Heathrow’s private jet terminal. ‘God, this is bloody awful,’ Sinclair muttered at his side, putting up an umbrella.

Entering a country unofficially wasn’t a new experience for Ben. He’d done it all over the world – but even so, the speed with which they breezed through the cursory check-in made him raise an eyebrow. No questions were asked, no passports were needed. A pair of serious-faced men in dark suits joined them, one speaking frequently on a radio, the other remaining silent and sticking very close to Ben. Ben didn’t let it bother him.

When they were through, Jack Brewster handed Ben the leather jacket and green army bag they’d recovered from the Santa Clara, gave him a wry smile and walked away, motioning for the two dark-suited men to follow and leaving him alone with Sinclair.

‘Now,’ Sinclair said with a twinkle. ‘I have a surprise for you.’ He led Ben across an empty VIP lounge, punched a security code to open a door marked STRICTLY NO UNAUTHORISED ENTRY, and up a short corridor to a set of fire doors. ‘Here we are,’ Sinclair said with a flourish, pushing through the panic bar and swinging the doors open onto a covered forecourt at the rear of the building.

The row of parked cars outside made Ben raise his eyebrows a second time:

a Porsche 911 Turbo; an Aston Martin DB7; a Ferrari Maranello; a Bentley Arnage; a TVR Tuscan S, all lined up like something out of a millionaire’s fantasy.

‘Your choice, Major,’ Sinclair said, beaming. ‘If you decide you don’t like the one you picked, you can swap it for another. Just say the word.’

‘That one,’ Ben said, and pointed out the tomato-red Ferrari.

‘That would have been my choice too.’ Sinclair rattled a set of keys and tossed them through the air to Ben. ‘Didn’t I tell you we’d look after you? And here’s a little something extra,’ he added, holding up a credit card. ‘Now these we don’t give out to just anybody. Special expense account. Everything on the house, so to speak. Our little way of expressing our appreciation. I hope you’ll use it to enjoy the remainder of your convalescence.’

‘You bet I will.’ Ben snatched the card from him, climbed into the cockpit of the Ferrari and fired it up. The engine thundered like a twenty-one gun salute. Sinclair grinned a toothy grin, leaned down at the window and was about to say something – but his words were drowned out and he jumped back as smoke poured from the spinning tyres and the Ferrari took off.

Jack Brewster’s goons opened up a gate. Ben roared through and stepped on the gas. Slashing through the traffic, the Ferrari covered the fifteen miles into central London in a ridiculously short time. The V12 was just getting nicely warmed up as Ben screeched to a halt outside the Ritz in Piccadilly, walked up to the desk and asked for a suite. ‘The biggest you have.’

Minutes later, Sinclair’s expense account was down £3,800 and Ben’s sole, decidedly non-designer, piece of luggage was being taken up to the split-level grandeur of the Royal Suite. Ben’s next act was to call up room service and have the kitchen run him up an extremely sumptuous, very late lunch, at an exorbitant premium he was more than happy to pay. The bottle of wine he ordered to go with it cost more than a full tank of fuel for his Ferrari. While he was on the phone he arranged for a hotel lackey to run across the street to Davidoff of St James’s, the cigar merchants, to fetch him a box of Cohiba Esplendidos. He’d been in town less than an hour, and already Sinclair’s expense account was taking a hell of a battering.

After eating his mid-afternoon lunch at the head of the table in his own private dining room overlooking Green Park – antique crystal, finest porcelain and silverware – Ben retreated to a master bedroom that would have made Marie Antoinette blush, flopped on the giant bed and lit up a cigar. When he’d smoked it to the stub he napped for almost three hours, then showered and changed into the last clean clothes that were stuffed in the bottom of his canvas bag.

By now it was after seven-thirty, and the drizzle had cleared into a fresh, pleasant evening. Ben called back down to room service and ordered a limo for the evening. ‘The biggest and most expensive one you can get me,’ he specified. When the sixteen-seater glittering white stretch monstrosity arrived, complete with mirror ceiling, giant TV and fully-stocked bar, Ben had the chauffeur drive him a decadently short distance down St James’s Street to a noisy bar where a single measure of ordinary whisky cost over six pounds.

Several hours passed before he finally emerged, now accompanied by two cackling, high-heeled young women whose names he was fairly sure were Linzi and Bev. He had the waiting chauffeur ferry them back along St James’s Street to the Ritz, where he escorted his noisy companions into the hotel bar, fired up another Cohiba Esplendido and ordered three bottles of the most expensive champagne they had, at £500 a throw.

Sometime after dawn the following morning, a dishevelled, puffy-eyed Linzi and Bev came teetering uncertainly out of the lift and exited the revolving doors of the Ritz lobby under the disapproving gaze of the front desk attendant. Three hours later, after a lavish breakfast, Ben checked out, climbed into the Ferrari and blasted out of London.

He headed north-west on the M40 towards his old stamping-ground, Oxford. Leaving the motorway, he skirted the city and took the familiar A40 west. Cheltenham; Gloucester; Ross-on-Wye; over the Welsh border towards Abergavenny: the road grew emptier and the countryside greener the closer he got to his destination. He stopped off in Brecon to buy some provisions at the local Co-op with his own money, as well as a hefty piece of roasting beef from Mr Evans the butcher.

He was back at the cottage by midday. The grass in the front garden was an inch longer than he’d last seen it, but nothing else had changed by the banks of the burbling River Usk: the events of the wider world didn’t make much of an impact out here.

Shifting down a couple of gears after his time in London, Ben spent most of the afternoon strolling by the river and exploring the surrounding countryside. Beyond the fence at the rear of the cottage, a broad meadow filled with wild flowers led to a stretch of woodland, untouched for centuries and thick with ancient gnarly sycamores, beech and laurel. Ben wandered in there a while, sometimes straying off the public footpath that wound for half a mile through the trees, crouching now and again among the ferns to examine the tracks of foxes and badgers on the moist, leafy forest floor. Twice he met a fellow walker on the footpath, smiled and wished them a good afternoon.

Back at the cottage, a light meal; then he settled in a comfortable armchair by the living room window with a glass or two of Laphroaig and the book he’d been slowly working his way through before leaving for the Caymans, Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics. Just after eleven o’clock, he laid the book down, rubbed his eyes and climbed the stairs to his bedroom for an early night. Seven minutes later, his bedroom light went out and the cottage fell into pitch darkness.

Not long afterwards, they came for him.