The Heretic's Treasure Read Free

track through the woods to the main buildings. The rain had stopped, and the sun was coming out.
    Ben glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better get moving. Brooke’s plane will be coming in.’ It was a twenty-minute drive to the airport. He reached for the Land Rover key in his pocket.
    ‘I can go pick her up, if you want,’ Jeff offered.
    ‘Thanks. But I’ve got to go and fetch some crates of wine on the way back. We’re getting low.’
    Jeff grinned. ‘And we can’t be having that.’
    As the trainees wandered off to get a shower and a change of clothes, Ben left Jeff at the squat block-built office and walked across the cobbled yard to the battered green Land Rover. Storm, his favourite of the guard dogs, came running over from his kennel. Ben opened the back for him, and the big German Shepherd leaped inside, claws scrabbling on the metal floor. Then Ben swung up inside the cab, fired up the engine and steered the Land Rover off down the bumpy track through the gates, turning out onto the main road.
    As he drove down the winding country lanes, he thought about the last few months, and how much they’d changed his life.
    He could barely remember the young man he’d once been, the youth who’d given up his theology studies to join the British army at the age of twenty. He’d had the devil in him in those days. His relentless pursuit of perfect physical and mental fitness, his torturous determination, had seen him qualify for the super-elite 22 SAS regiment while still in his early twenties. He’d seen bloody conflict in theatres of war around the globe. Over the eight years that followed, he’d battled, sweated and bled his way up to the rank of Major.
    But by then he already knew that his time fighting dirty wars for the benefit of shadowy figures in the corridors of power was over. When he’d finally run out of illusions, he walked away from the regiment forever and turned his skills to a higher purpose.
    Crisis response consultant.
That was a neat euphemism for the freelance work he’d become involved in for the next few years. The type of crisis he responded to was the havoc caused by a criminal industry that continued to grow worldwide at an alarming rate. From South America to Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia-wherever there were people and money, the kidnap and ransom business was booming more than ever before.
    Ben hated it. He loathed nothing more than the kind of men who exploited the emotional bonds between innocent people to create suffering and hard cash. He knew their ways and how they thought. He understood the hardness of their hearts, that they regarded human lives as nothing more than a commodity to be traded on.
    And in the modern world, everyone was at risk. The predators out there had their pick, and you didn’t have to be rich and privileged to get the call informing you that your loved one had been taken. The trade was so lucrative and so easy to operate that in many countries it had become bigger than drugs. In some cities, even moderately affluent families were foolish not to take precautions to protect their children from the grasp of the kidnappers. The problem was, the payouts available from insurance companies helped only to fuel the flames. It was a situation spiralling out of control. Everyone knew it, but as long as the kidnappers and the insurance companies kept raking in the money, there was little protection for the people that really mattered-the victims.
    That was where Ben came in. When people went missing and their loved ones despaired of ever getting them back-when ransoms were paid and kidnappers reneged on the deal, or when the police screwed things up as they often did-that was when those people in need had a last line of resistance they could call on. He knew he’d helped a lot of people, saved lives, brought families back together.
    But it hadn’t been an easy life for him. Those years had been a time of sacrifice and pain, driven by the horror of what would happen