The Mozart Conspiracy Read Free

questioning eyes.
    ‘She’ll be all right,’ he said softly.
    The sound of an approaching vehicle made him tense. They were back. The Land Rover was well hidden from their view. So was the pickup truck, which was still sitting half-buried in the hole in the kitchen wall at the back of the house, but they’d find that soon enough.
    Ben climbed into the driver’s seat and listened. He heard voices as one of the three men got out. The creak of the iron gates. The roll and crunch of the Suzuki’s tyres on the gravel. The engine burbling through a shot muffler as it pulled up in front of the house. Car doors opening and slamming. Footsteps and laughter.
    He pulled his door quietly shut and went to twist the key. They’d be out of here before anyone could react. Then Catherine would be back with her family and he’d hand Maria over to the authorities he could still trust.
    His hand stopped halfway to the ignition. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. He saw them again. The images on the TV. Big hands pawing at young flesh. Bad teeth flashing in wide grins. The imploring eyes of the girl on the bed.
    He looked over his shoulder at Maria’s slight body lying slumped in the back. Catherine was frowning at him from the passenger seat.
    Fuck it. He reached down under his seat and drew out his back-up weapon. The shotgun was an Ithaca 12-gauge, black and brutal, less than two feet long from its pistol grip to its sawn-off muzzle. Its tube magazine was loaded up with 00-Buck rounds, the type that would let you into a barricaded room without needing to open the door.
    He swung his legs out of the Land Rover. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he told Catherine.
    The three men were just at the front porch by the time he walked up behind them. Two of them, the fat one and the long-haired one, were joking about something in Turkish. The third guy looked serious, tattoos, slicked-back hair, jangling a bunch of keys. He had a Chinese Colt 1911-A1 copy tucked in his belt, behind the hip, hammer down in amateur fashion.
    When the metallic clack-clunk of the Ithaca slide-action cut the air, all three of them wheeled around with wide eyes. Nobody had time to reach for a gun. A cigarette dropped from an open mouth.
    He stared at them coldly for half a second before he emptied the Ithaca’s magazine into their bodies at point-blank range.

Chapter Three
    Somewhere over France
    Two days later
    Benedict Hope gazed out of the window of the 747 and took another long sip of whisky as he watched the white ocean of cloud drift by below. Ice clinked in his glass. The whisky traced a burning path across his tongue. Airline Scotch, some nameless blended thing, but better than nothing. It was his fourth. Or maybe his fifth. He couldn’t remember any more.
    The seat next to him was empty, as was much of the business-class section of the plane. He turned away from the window, stretched out and closed his eyes.
    Three jobs this year. He’d been busy, and he was tired. It had taken two months in Turkey to track down the men who were holding Catherine Petersen. Two long months of dirt and sweat, following false trails, chasing up dud information, overturning every stone. The girl’s parents had despaired many times of ever seeing her alive again. He never made promises to people. He knew there was always a chance of sending the subject home in a body-bag.
    That had only happened to him once. Mexico City, one of the big kidnap-and-ransom hotspots of the world. It hadn’t been his fault. The kidnappers had slaughtered the child even before the ransom demands. Ben had been the one who found the body. A young boy, just short of his eleventh birthday, stuffed in a barrel. He had no ears and no fingers. Sometimes the kidnappers weren’t even doing it for the money. He still didn’t like to think of it, but the half-repressed memory drove him on.
    He’d persisted in Turkey, just as he always persisted. He’d never given up on anyone, even though there