The Babylon Idol

SCOTT MARIANI

The Babylon Idol

Copyright

Published by Avon

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2017

Copyright © Scott Mariani 2017

Cover Design © Henry Steadman 2017

Scott Mariani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007486229

Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780007486410

Version: 2019-12-07

Join the army of fans who LOVE Scott Mariani’s Ben Hope series …

‘Deadly conspiracies, bone-crunching action and a tormented hero with a heart … Scott Mariani packs a real punch’

Andy McDermott, bestselling author of The Revelation Code

‘Slick, serpentine, sharp, and very very entertaining. If you’ve got a pulse, you’ll love Scott Mariani; if you haven’t, then maybe you crossed Ben Hope’

Simon Toyne, bestselling author of the Sanctus series

‘Scott Mariani’s latest page-turning rollercoaster of a thriller takes the sort of conspiracy theory that made Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code an international hit, and gives it an injection of steroids … [Mariani] is a master of edge-of-the-seat suspense. A genuinely gripping thriller that holds the attention of its readers from the first page to the last’

Shots Magazine

‘You know you are rooting for the guy when he does something so cool you do a mental fist punch in the air and have to bite the inside of your mouth not to shout out “YES!” in case you get arrested on the train. Awesome thrilling stuff’

My Favourite Books

‘If you like Dan Brown you will like all of Scott Mariani’s work – but you will like it better. This guy knows exactly how to bait his hook, cast his line and reel you in, nice and slow. The heart-stopping pace and clever, cunning, joyfully serpentine tale will have you frantic to reach the end, but reluctant to finish such a blindingly good read’

The Bookbag

‘[The Cassandra Sanction] is a wonderful action-loaded thriller with a witty and lovely lead in Ben Hope … I am well and truly hooked!’

Northern Crime Reviews

‘Mariani is tipped for the top’

The Bookseller

‘Authentic settings, non-stop action, backstabbing villains and rough justice – this book delivers. It’s a romp of a read, each page like a tasty treat. Enjoy!’

Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author

‘I love the adrenalin rush that you get when reading a Ben Hope story … The Martyr’s Curse is an action-packed read, relentless in its pace. Scott Mariani goes from strength to strength!’

Book Addict Shaun

‘Scott Mariani seems to be like a fine red wine that gets better with maturity!’

Bestselling Crime Thrillers.com

‘Mariani’s novels have consistently delivered on fast-paced action and The Armada Legacy is no different. Short chapters and never-ending twists mean that you can’t put the book down, and the high stakes of the plot make it as brilliant to read as all the previous novels in the series’

Female First

‘Scott Mariani is an awesome writer’

Chris Kuzneski, bestselling author of The Hunters

‘O King, we will not serve your gods, nor worship the image of gold you have set up.’

The Book of Daniel 3:15–18

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Join the Army of Fans Who Love Scott Mariani’s Ben Hope Series …

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Epilogue

The Ben Hope series

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

For all of his sixty-three years Gennaro Tucci had lived in the same small cottage on the edge of the same rural village in Umbria. He had been a carpenter much of his working career, but now spent most of his time pottering about his house and garden, keeping himself to himself with little need for much in the way of a social life, apart from a cat. He was a simple, gentle, kindly man with few needs and no regrets in life, whom it took little to make happy. Every Friday morning, Gennaro would amble up the road to the tiny village church, which was usually empty, sit in the same pew within its craggy whitewashed walls and bow his head and offer a few simple prayers. Then he would amble home again, feed his cat and while away the rest of the morning until lunchtime.

One particular Friday morning, in the summer of what would turn out to be Gennaro’s final year, he arrived in the 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.’

Chapter 1

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 was where Ben found himself at this moment, sitting alone in the prefabricated office building across the yard from the old stone farmhouse. It was an early December morning, and the icy rain that had been drumming on the office roof since dawn was threatening to turn snowy. The fan heater was blasting waves of warm air that engulfed Ben as he sat at the desk sipping from a steaming mug of black coffee. Storm and two more of the guard dogs, Mauser and Luger, appeared to have given themselves the morning off and were curled contentedly at his feet, like a huge hairy black-and-tan rug spread over the floor. Ben didn’t have the heart to kick them out into the cold.

From where he sat, through the window he could see the parked minibus that had brought the current crop of trainees to Le Val: eight agents from the French SDAT anti-terror unit anxious to up their game in expectation of more of the troubles that had been rocking Paris in recent times. Tuesday was currently out with them on the six-hundred-yard range, the group probably all freezing their balls off as he took them through their sniper paces. Trembling hands and numb fingers were no great boon to long-range accuracy. Poor sods. Ben was scheduled to teach a two-hour session that afternoon in the plywood-and-car-tyre walled construction they called the ‘killing house’, covering elements of advanced live-fire CQB, or close-quarter-battle, training that they were unlikely to learn anywhere else. At least they’d be indoors out of the wet. Two more members of the Le Val team who’d be happy to huddle indoors with mugs of coffee were Serge and Adrien, the two ex-French Army guys who manned the new gatehouse – the latest addition to the complex – and controlled people coming in and out.

As for Jeff Dekker, Ben wasn’t quite sure where he was at that moment. He’d said something about checking the perimeter fence for wind damage; the region had been buffeted by one winter gale after another that week. With the kind of arsenal that Le Val kept locked up in its special armoury vault, and the sort of work that went on within the various sections of the compound, government bureaucracy insisted on the property being ultra-secure. Not that Ben had lately noticed any gangs of jihadist terrorists roaming the Normandy countryside in search of military hardware. But rules were rules.

Ben reached for his Gauloises and Zippo lighter, flicked a cigarette from the familiar blue pack, clanged open the lighter and lit up in a cloud of smoke. It suddenly felt even better to be home. Puffing happily away, he reached across the desk for the stack of mail he’d been sifting through. So far it had all been bills, bills, and more bills.

But this letter looked different.

Chapter 2

The letter certainly was unusual. More than the Italian postmark, Ben was surprised to see the ink-stamped legend ISTITUTO PENITENZIARO BOLLATI on the envelope. He’d heard of the Bollati medium-security prison in Milan, but never been there, could think of no connections the place could have to him, and wouldn’t have expected to receive a letter from anyone there.

Yet there was no denying his name and address neatly handwritten on the front of the envelope. Above them, the date on the postmark showed that the letter had left Milan while Ben was struggling to survive somewhere in the middle of the Congo jungle.

‘Hm,’ he said.

At his feet, Storm cocked an ear and glanced up as though to see what the fuss was about, then lost interest and went back to sleep.

Ben took another slurp of scalding coffee and another drag on the Gauloise, then put down his mug, rested the cigarette in the ashtray and picked up the old M4 bayonet that served as a letter-opener in the Le Val office. He carefully slit one end of the envelope, reached inside and was about to draw out the single folded sheet of paper when his phone suddenly came to life and started buzzing on the desk like an upturned bee.

‘Got a problem in Sector Nine.’ Jeff’s voice was barely audible over the crackle of the wind distorting his phone’s mic. Sector Nine was what they called part of the east perimeter fence. ‘That sodding apple tree Marie-Claire wouldn’t ever let me cut down? Well, we won’t need to now. Sorry to drag you out here, mate, but I need your help.’

Ben could imagine what had happened. He’d read the letter later. He grabbed his leather jacket from the back of his chair and slipped it on.

‘You want to come?’ he said to Storm, who instantly sprang to his feet as though it were feeding time. Life was simple if you were a dog.

Outside in the biting wind, the sleet was turning snowier by the minute. Ben pulled up the collar of his jacket and crossed the yard, past the minibus and over to the ancient Land Rover. It was a tool box on wheels, filled with all kinds of junk including a greasy old chainsaw. Storm hopped in the back and found a space for himself while Ben got behind the wheel, and they set off across the yard and down the rutted track that ran between the buildings parallel with the rifle range and led across the fields towards Sector Nine. He heard the muffled boom of a rifle coming from the range, the ear-splitting report and supersonic crack of the bullet in flight muted by the high earth walls that ran parallel from the firing points to the butts at the far end and prevented any ‘flyers’ from escaping the range boundaries. Not that such elementary mistakes could happen under Tuesday’s expert supervision; he could splatter grapes all day long at five hundred yards with his modified Remington 700, and he was one of the best instructors Ben had ever seen.

The old tree had been a bone of contention for years. Marie-Claire, the local woman they’d employed from day one as an occasional cook, swore the particular apples it produced were essential to her mouth-wateringly delicious traditional Normandy apple tart recipe. As popular as her tart was with the parties of hard-worked and hungry trainees at Le Val, Jeff had always griped that the tree was too close to the fence and had argued that they could get perfectly decent apples at the grocer’s in Saint-Acaire or the Carrefour in Valognes. It had been an endless and hard-fought debate, with neither side giving an inch, while the tree kept growing taller and spreading outwards year on year. Now it looked as if the winter wind had settled the argument for them.