Star of Africa (Ben Hope, Book 13) Read Free

where Ben was sitting. Both front doors opened at once. Two men got out, slammed their doors and converged on the pavement, glancing left and right.
    Ben followed them with a watchful eye, and knew immediately that he was looking at the Romanians. They were both in their late twenties or early thirties. One was darker in hair and skin, with sharper features that hinted at gypsy ancestry. The other had more Slavic blood, or maybe Hungarian, with a long face and fairer hair. Ethnic variations aside, they could have been clones: big, heavy, hand-picked from the pages of the rent-a-thug catalogue, dressed to intimidate in leather jackets and big stompy boots and putting on a theatrical air of menace as they walked up to the shop entrance and pushed their way inside.
    Dracul’s enforcers, come to deliver on their promise of violence, bloodshed and broken bones. They looked more than up to the job. Little wonder they had Abdel and the rest of the neighbourhood spooked.
    Ben took a last draw on his Gauloise, crushed the stub into the crowded dashboard ashtray, picked up his bag from the passenger seat and got out of the car.
    ‘Here we go again,’ he muttered to himself. Then he crossed the street and walked into the shop after them.
    It was Ben’s first visit to Paris in well over a year. He hadn’t been planning on coming back any time soon – not out of any kind of deliberate avoidance, but because he had few plans of any kind at all. For some time now, for reasons that he preferred not to dwell on, his had been a rootless, meandering existence that took him wherever chance and circumstance led him: he’d wandered aimlessly around Europe, never lingering long in one place, never quite sure why he’d come or where he was going next. He wasn’t a tourist, being fluent in the core European languages and conversant in most of the others, but he wasn’t a native either, and there seemed to be no place he could settle and feel at home. Sometimes he stayed a day here and there in cheap hotels; sometimes he roughed it in the kinds of solitary wild places he’d always liked to spend time, away from the complexities of life, away from hustle and bustle – most of all, away from trouble.
    At least, that was the idea.
    Jeff Dekker, Ben’s old friend and former partner, still ran the business they’d built together in Normandy, and still thought that Ben had lost his mind. Back in the day, Jeff had done his stint in the Special Boat Service, the Royal Navy’s equivalent of Ben’s old regiment, 22 SAS. Years later, after Ben had gone to live at the former farm near Valognes, a place called Le Val, he and Jeff had teamed up to carve out a prestigious niche for themselves teaching their specialised skills to military, security, law enforcement and anti-terrorist operatives from across the globe. They’d reached the point in their careers where they could enjoy the fruits of all those years of extreme risk and back-breaking hardship.
    That was how it worked in their world. Special Forces was like some kind of super-university where the learning curves were tough, the lifestyle tougher, the possibility of sudden violent death never far away, and the pay on a par with a schoolteacher’s salary. But those who survived the experience ultimately emerged from it as life members of the most exclusive club in the world, with their real careers still ahead of them. Former SAS and SBS guys were in high demand for plum jobs as senior security advisors in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, with earning potential running into hundreds of thousands a year, tax-free, for a fraction of the workload they were used to, and virtually zero risk. Others did what Ben had done for several years after quitting the military, go freelance as what he’d termed a ‘crisis response consultant’, before Le Val had entered his life.
    In short, for men of their qualifications it was a world of opportunity. Le Val certainly had paid off on everyone’s